Over at Salon, Heather Havrilesky's latest "I Like to Watch" reads out the sentence of death. The prisoner will eat a hearty meal.
Yes, I've been in graduate school a decade, yes, my Committee members are goggle-eyed at the deadlines I fail and fail to meet. Really, truly, if I don't finish this odious manuscript more than half a lifetime's work and a home-mortgage-sized mountain of student loan debt will all crash to the ground annihiliating the terrain for miles around with nothing in all the world to show for it as these things are normally reckoned, no signposts will remain to explain what on earth all of this was for... Disaster is waiting in the wings, peril abounds...
But come what may I will be watching "America's Next Top Model" this Wednesday night. Eric and I will order pizza and munch away basking in the radioactive awfulness of "American Idol," even when it surreally dilates over a succession of evenings with scarcely enough actual content to fill the human interest segment of a local news broadcast.
Heather helps explain what it's all about.
You know, I seem dimly to recall an argument in some coffee-table book or other by Baudrillard, in which he proposed that the presence of Disneyland, and Sea World, and the whole odd archipelago of amusement parks that surround Los Angeles like a bored invading army, are somehow able by radiating their own unreality so palpably to materialize the immateriality that is Los Angeles itself, to buttress that phantasmagoria of endless wanting into a real live place by bravura willpower alone, a special effect of stark contrast. These amusement parks were like veritable reality engines, Baudrillard said, conferring solidity on that dreamscape where the tar pits begin precisely where the rain of funny money ends. Like a Mama's warm "there, there," in the face of no there there.
It's hard not to see the function of the shows helmed by Miss. Misdemeanor, Tyra Banks, Paula Abdul as comparable in a way -- consolidating their own more real stardom in contrast with the humiliations their attendant wannabees slop through like blank-eyed otherwise comely pigs in a trough. Who knows what humiliations paved their own starbound hells like good intentions, they all evaporate in the relentless spectacle of sycophancy and cluelessness against which the stars rather vampirically glory like Olympians.
From the fact that the contestants are always even at their best second-rate copies of celebrities already grown stale in the original (look, another Whitney! another Justin!) we know that these contests are not roads to stardom in the least, that for these starry eyed tired-meat prostitute-types the road is already the destination -- the celebrity, such as it is, will almost certainly not outlast the contest itself. All eyes, no prize.
The prospective talents are scarcely more talented than (after all, sometimes talented) cruise-ship entertainers or show-queens belting out "Happy Anniversary" at Stucky's. And the hairball of pseudo-celebrity coughed up by the PR departments of these shows, a guest-spot on a UPN sitcom or straight-to-DVD crap-movie and then a straight shot to "The Surreal Life" and "Where Are They Now?" is only negligibly distinguishable from the "celebrity" of any random contestant spinning the Big Wheel on "The Price is Right," or for that matter every goddam shopper at Wal-Mart panned and scanned by surveillance cameras or any schmo who gets googled first by a stranger before arriving at a blind date.
The pleasure of these shows is akin I guess to the dark enjoyment the spectacle of the asshole who slips on a banana peal affords the mean lowdown abject id inside. But the deeper reality of the superficial reality signalled by these mediated celebrity-hunts is that privacy and publicity do not mean what once they did.
These dumb sad ferocious often blandly fuckable egomaniacs in these shows are too self-seduced and rampagingly sociopathic to have noticed that the protocols of real celebrity have changed, and that it is not their special genius that they are revealing to the world but something more quintessentially American, the farthest thing from singularity or creativity, but the endless re-conjuration of the audience itself...
The American, the consumer, the mass-audience, lord of the earth... a creature once described by William Gibson as "best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
Monday, February 28, 2005
Saturday, February 26, 2005
Healthcare and Private Perfections
In his Confessions St. Augustine, contemplating the excesses and indiscretions of his youth famously pronounced the verdict, “O Lord, how crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous was I.” From Paul to the present, the Church has expressed especial hostility to the pleasures and meanings aroused in the free play of human bodies and brains in the world, and preached mortification of the flesh and faithful obedience as routes to the presumably deeper, more spiritual satisfactions the Church offers instead. But the Church’s real and ongoing commitment to the address and redress of suffering on earth, to good works as an incomparable path to redemption, constantly and forcefully re-embodies this quest for spiritual fulfillment and confronts the best, most righteous reformers of the Church with quandaries with which their worldview is finally deeply incapable of dealing. It is a hard thing, after all, to try to hold hope and hostility together in a single vision.
A case in point is the claim of Vatican officials last week to decry “what they called a ‘religion of health’ in affluent societies" and then "h[o]ld out… Pope John Paul's stoic suffering as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all.”
To the extent that the Pope is “stoically suffering” rather than straightforwardly dead a dozen times over by now only because he has made repeated recourse to the most technologically sophisticated medical treatments in human history suggests that the term “health” is functioning at any rate ambivalently in this Vatican statement.
This becomes clearer still when Maurizio Faggioni from the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life makes the sensible point that “[w]hile millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires."
He goes on to expand his point, to say, “[t]he medicine of desires, egged on by the health-care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness."
"Health" is used in two different registers here, one demanded the other decried. On the one hand there is a commitment to the provision of “health care” to ameliorate unnecessary suffering, but on the other hand there is an almost hysterical hostility directed at what the Vatican decries, portentiously enough, as an unrealistic, superficial, and endlessly distracting “religion of health.”
The key move that distinguishes the two registers is of course Faggioni’s conjuration of a “reasonableness” that seems to translate pretty much into "moderation" appealing attractively to intuitions about fairness, and (to me) rather less attractively to "Puritanism" and an unquestioning faith in conservative social conventions. Faggioni’s move will of course be familiar to bioethicists who often like to deploy the distinction between “therapy” and “enhancement” to work their way through quandaries like these.
The problem is that distinctions like the one between "therapy" and "enhancement" are ultimately moonshine.
At the heart of the distinction of therapy from enhancement is always a fantasy of the normatively healthy body -- or even the normatively optimally healthy body -- a norm which will inevitably be saturated with parochial cultural and moralistic assumptions mistaken for factual descriptions. And consequently any effort to provide “health” according to these normative ideals will finally be as prescriptive as it is remedial.
But more to the point, every effort to use such a distinction to inform practice will set in motion forces that inevitably undermine the terms of the distinction itself. It isn’t possible to provide “health” according to any normative ideal without likewise empowering the provision of capacities incompatible with those normative assumptions and thereupon shifting what constitutes the “normative” in the first place.
Even the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the ultimate goals of medical science and treatment, a Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and fulsome intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far, this still would set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.
Already, today, the fresh susceptibility of organisms to prosthetic and pharmacological intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as benchmarks against which to leverage intuitions about the proper scope of healthcare practice. So too neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent.
Even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care, and ever more so according to how universally it is provided, will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of.
The Vatican insists that all people should have access to "basic health care" but that there is a fantasy of “perfect health” in the developed world that is driven by “unfulfillable desires” and so is “unmanageable.”
It is impossible not to see the force of their point, but it is notoriously difficult to mainstain any such distinction between “basic” and “perfect” health that will hold up for long to scrutiny. None of us is in any kind of position to say definitively now just what will be “fulfillable” or not through the therapeutic address of medicine over the course of our lifetimes.
And, frankly, it seems to me the Church is one of the last places on earth one should look for any kind of “reasonableness” in working through quandaries of this kind. What are we to make of the way the word “desire” enters repeatedly into the Church’s discussion of medical practices they denigrate, for example? There seems to me, as it happens, to be a conspicuous continuity between “queer” practices and prosthetic practices, among them the epochal feminist embrace of reproductive technologies, a field of freedom and emancipation on which the Church has been perhaps the single most significant and consistent opponent of any kind of progress at all.
It is of course true that savage differences in the level of health care available to people in the world both expresses and horribly exacerbates the deep and deepening injustices in the contemporary distribution of wealth – both within so-called developed societies, and incomparably more terribly, forcefully demarcating the developed from the developing world.
But at what point will what the Church means by “manageable” healthcare goals nudge them from a useful and progressive analysis of the instabilities and calamities inhering in this kind of injustice, instead into more straightforward strategies to maintain their own pernicious hold on authority in a secularizing world? It seems very interesting in this connection to notice again that the Vatican describes “healthcare” in the terms of a rival “religion of health” when they want to condemn particular healthcare practices and goals as dangerous.
For me, emerging medical technologies enable and demand the universal provision of basic health care, at least the provision of adequate nutrition and basic hygiene and the therapeutic address of treatable diseases, all as a foundational social recognition that the unnecessary suffering of people anywhere on earth diminishes us all while securing basic capacities for everyone on earth unleashes intelligence, creativity, peace, and pleasure for which we are all of us conspicuous beneficiaries.
But I also embrace the inevitable individual recourse to these emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive technologies in prosthetic practices of self-creation and personal perfection.
These are in my view equally indispensable registers of moral and ethical prosthetic practice. They are, as it were, the public and private faces of progressive health care practice. And far from being incompatible, they are to my eyes absolutely interdependent.
Medicine becomes primarily a technique for maintaining and consolidating the control of established authorities whenever it is embraced only to the extent that it provides and imposes a normative standard of “health” just as those established authorities define it, all the while policing and repudiating the occasion for deeply destabilizing, subversive practices of personal self-creation that inevitably arise with the emergence of any new technological capacities.
It is an obscenity that big Pharma devotes millions to marketing competing treatments for erectile dysfunction to the developed world while millions die of cheaply treatable diseases in the developing world. But it would also be an obscenity for social and religious bio-conservatives to deny individuals the transformative recourse to emerging consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine. Remember that there is nothing in the least normal or natural about the historically unprecedented level of control human beings have come to take for granted in the present day over their sexual and reproductive capacities. The emerging neuroceutical address of our moods and memories provides the next conspicuous terrain for such fraught individual re-invention.
We can and in fact I insist we must value both the public and private faces of health care practice. Certainly we should not fall for corporate propaganda that would privilege the private over the public, or pretend that only the denigration of public healthcare provision enables desirable prosthetic pursuits of private perfection. But neither should we be bamboozled into a denigration of prosthetic practices of personal self-creation by cynically sanctimonious arguments from social and religious conservative authorities jealous of their power and sensitive to the precariousness of their position in a more secular world.
When a doctor in the Church intones that it is “[p]recisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can... perceive the truth of life in a clearer way,” you can be sure this is not so much the voice of wisdom and modesty and fairness one is hearing, but yet another echo of that immemorial priestly hostility to the life that is lived in bodies. We must hold instead in a single vision an awareness of frailty and suffering as an address that impels us to action, and a grown-up celebration of the pleasures and promises and dangers of new fleshly humanities that have outgrown the old tired and tyrannical crucifixations.
A case in point is the claim of Vatican officials last week to decry “what they called a ‘religion of health’ in affluent societies" and then "h[o]ld out… Pope John Paul's stoic suffering as an antidote to the mentality that modern medicine must cure all.”
To the extent that the Pope is “stoically suffering” rather than straightforwardly dead a dozen times over by now only because he has made repeated recourse to the most technologically sophisticated medical treatments in human history suggests that the term “health” is functioning at any rate ambivalently in this Vatican statement.
This becomes clearer still when Maurizio Faggioni from the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life makes the sensible point that “[w]hile millions of people in the world struggle to survive hunger and disease, lacking even minimal health care, in rich countries the concept of health as well-being figures in creating unrealistic expectations about the possibility of medicine to respond to all needs and desires."
He goes on to expand his point, to say, “[t]he medicine of desires, egged on by the health-care market, increases the request for pharmaceutical and medical-surgical services, soaks up public resources beyond all reasonableness."
"Health" is used in two different registers here, one demanded the other decried. On the one hand there is a commitment to the provision of “health care” to ameliorate unnecessary suffering, but on the other hand there is an almost hysterical hostility directed at what the Vatican decries, portentiously enough, as an unrealistic, superficial, and endlessly distracting “religion of health.”
The key move that distinguishes the two registers is of course Faggioni’s conjuration of a “reasonableness” that seems to translate pretty much into "moderation" appealing attractively to intuitions about fairness, and (to me) rather less attractively to "Puritanism" and an unquestioning faith in conservative social conventions. Faggioni’s move will of course be familiar to bioethicists who often like to deploy the distinction between “therapy” and “enhancement” to work their way through quandaries like these.
The problem is that distinctions like the one between "therapy" and "enhancement" are ultimately moonshine.
At the heart of the distinction of therapy from enhancement is always a fantasy of the normatively healthy body -- or even the normatively optimally healthy body -- a norm which will inevitably be saturated with parochial cultural and moralistic assumptions mistaken for factual descriptions. And consequently any effort to provide “health” according to these normative ideals will finally be as prescriptive as it is remedial.
But more to the point, every effort to use such a distinction to inform practice will set in motion forces that inevitably undermine the terms of the distinction itself. It isn’t possible to provide “health” according to any normative ideal without likewise empowering the provision of capacities incompatible with those normative assumptions and thereupon shifting what constitutes the “normative” in the first place.
Even the most conservatively therapeutic understanding of the ultimate goals of medical science and treatment, a Hayfleckian utopia in which everybody on earth enjoys the robust health and fulsome intellectual capacity of the healthiest among us today as we presently perceive them, as well as lifespans prolonged for all to the extent of the century or so available only to the luckiest among us so far, this still would set in motion a trajectory of scientific and technological development that would provoke unimaginable perplexities into the status of profound biological experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging and death.
Already, today, the fresh susceptibility of organisms to prosthetic and pharmacological intervention has transformed the status of "viability," "therapy," "normality," as stable measures of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as benchmarks against which to leverage intuitions about the proper scope of healthcare practice. So too neuroceutical interventions into memory, mood, and motivation trouble our received intuitions about what enables and constitutes proper consent.
Even the most modest provision of basic and decent health care, and ever more so according to how universally it is provided, will transform, quite possibly beyond recognition, what will count as “basic,” “decent,” and “normal” in the way of our expectations about what bodies properly are and what they are capable of.
The Vatican insists that all people should have access to "basic health care" but that there is a fantasy of “perfect health” in the developed world that is driven by “unfulfillable desires” and so is “unmanageable.”
It is impossible not to see the force of their point, but it is notoriously difficult to mainstain any such distinction between “basic” and “perfect” health that will hold up for long to scrutiny. None of us is in any kind of position to say definitively now just what will be “fulfillable” or not through the therapeutic address of medicine over the course of our lifetimes.
And, frankly, it seems to me the Church is one of the last places on earth one should look for any kind of “reasonableness” in working through quandaries of this kind. What are we to make of the way the word “desire” enters repeatedly into the Church’s discussion of medical practices they denigrate, for example? There seems to me, as it happens, to be a conspicuous continuity between “queer” practices and prosthetic practices, among them the epochal feminist embrace of reproductive technologies, a field of freedom and emancipation on which the Church has been perhaps the single most significant and consistent opponent of any kind of progress at all.
It is of course true that savage differences in the level of health care available to people in the world both expresses and horribly exacerbates the deep and deepening injustices in the contemporary distribution of wealth – both within so-called developed societies, and incomparably more terribly, forcefully demarcating the developed from the developing world.
But at what point will what the Church means by “manageable” healthcare goals nudge them from a useful and progressive analysis of the instabilities and calamities inhering in this kind of injustice, instead into more straightforward strategies to maintain their own pernicious hold on authority in a secularizing world? It seems very interesting in this connection to notice again that the Vatican describes “healthcare” in the terms of a rival “religion of health” when they want to condemn particular healthcare practices and goals as dangerous.
For me, emerging medical technologies enable and demand the universal provision of basic health care, at least the provision of adequate nutrition and basic hygiene and the therapeutic address of treatable diseases, all as a foundational social recognition that the unnecessary suffering of people anywhere on earth diminishes us all while securing basic capacities for everyone on earth unleashes intelligence, creativity, peace, and pleasure for which we are all of us conspicuous beneficiaries.
But I also embrace the inevitable individual recourse to these emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive technologies in prosthetic practices of self-creation and personal perfection.
These are in my view equally indispensable registers of moral and ethical prosthetic practice. They are, as it were, the public and private faces of progressive health care practice. And far from being incompatible, they are to my eyes absolutely interdependent.
Medicine becomes primarily a technique for maintaining and consolidating the control of established authorities whenever it is embraced only to the extent that it provides and imposes a normative standard of “health” just as those established authorities define it, all the while policing and repudiating the occasion for deeply destabilizing, subversive practices of personal self-creation that inevitably arise with the emergence of any new technological capacities.
It is an obscenity that big Pharma devotes millions to marketing competing treatments for erectile dysfunction to the developed world while millions die of cheaply treatable diseases in the developing world. But it would also be an obscenity for social and religious bio-conservatives to deny individuals the transformative recourse to emerging consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine. Remember that there is nothing in the least normal or natural about the historically unprecedented level of control human beings have come to take for granted in the present day over their sexual and reproductive capacities. The emerging neuroceutical address of our moods and memories provides the next conspicuous terrain for such fraught individual re-invention.
We can and in fact I insist we must value both the public and private faces of health care practice. Certainly we should not fall for corporate propaganda that would privilege the private over the public, or pretend that only the denigration of public healthcare provision enables desirable prosthetic pursuits of private perfection. But neither should we be bamboozled into a denigration of prosthetic practices of personal self-creation by cynically sanctimonious arguments from social and religious conservative authorities jealous of their power and sensitive to the precariousness of their position in a more secular world.
When a doctor in the Church intones that it is “[p]recisely in the handicap, in the disease, in the pain, in old age, in dying and death one can... perceive the truth of life in a clearer way,” you can be sure this is not so much the voice of wisdom and modesty and fairness one is hearing, but yet another echo of that immemorial priestly hostility to the life that is lived in bodies. We must hold instead in a single vision an awareness of frailty and suffering as an address that impels us to action, and a grown-up celebration of the pleasures and promises and dangers of new fleshly humanities that have outgrown the old tired and tyrannical crucifixations.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
"More Than Human"
Bioconservatives like Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama express horror and rage at the prospect that people will use technology to become “more than human,” while some radical technophiles seem ardently to desire precisely that.
I recently overheard a conversation among some self-identified “transhumanist” technophiles who, casting about for a nice tee-shirt slogan, cheerfully proposed the phrase, "Being human is not enough."
I have to admit the sensibility expressed either fearfully or hopefully in this sort of slogan is utterly incomprehensible to me.
"Not enough people are treated humanely" is a statement that makes powerful sense to me, but "human is not enough"?
Not enough for what?
It seems to me precisely an expression of our humanity (such as it is) that we would want to re-write ourselves in the image of our aspirations -- through experience, through education, through our cultural and now our prosthetic practices.
What exactly do people expect to happen, whether they dread or desire this outcome, that will make some of them "more than human"?
There is surely a difference between incarnating different-from-normatively-human life-ways (which is true of indefinitely many people already) and imagining you incarnate something "more-than-human" (which seems simply a way of mistaking difference for superiority -- something too many people already do as well).
To the extent that bioconservatives claim to be defending the value of “human dignity,” they really need to quit constantly handwaving in panic about superlative technological states like immortality, superbabies, and clone armies -- none of which are sufficiently proximate developmentally to illuminate deliberation about technology policy here and now -- and explain just how restricting women’s reproductive freedoms and clamping down on medical research to cure and ameliorate suffering from treatable diseases has anything to do with “human dignity” in the first place.
To the extent that trans- and post- humanisms still presumably emerge out of humanism as an ethical project, these "movements" really should be demanding that the category of "the human" be rendered as capacious as possible to better accommodate the consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of humans now and in the futures we will share.
And as a matter of unsolicited, possibly unwelcome, practical advice to my technophile friends, a "slogan" is largely intended to pithily communicate your worldview to people who do not share it (but some of whom you presumably would want to). I think you should worry that the phrase “being human is not enough” expresses or will widely seem to express little but a disdain for humanity, or at any rate a disdain for those who choose not to embark on paths of prosthetic modification so radical as your own.
Isn’t it human to want to be healthy and happy? Isn’t it human to want to express yourself, to make your mark in the world? Isn’t it human to want to make the world a better place? Isn’t it human to want to better yourself?
This slogan, and the many variations on it that are commonplaces in so-called "transhumanist" discursive spaces, seem to me more like expressions of hostility than of hope. In a slogan from radical technophiles I would personally like to see something more like an invitation to the dance than yet another declaration of war.
I recently overheard a conversation among some self-identified “transhumanist” technophiles who, casting about for a nice tee-shirt slogan, cheerfully proposed the phrase, "Being human is not enough."
I have to admit the sensibility expressed either fearfully or hopefully in this sort of slogan is utterly incomprehensible to me.
"Not enough people are treated humanely" is a statement that makes powerful sense to me, but "human is not enough"?
Not enough for what?
It seems to me precisely an expression of our humanity (such as it is) that we would want to re-write ourselves in the image of our aspirations -- through experience, through education, through our cultural and now our prosthetic practices.
What exactly do people expect to happen, whether they dread or desire this outcome, that will make some of them "more than human"?
There is surely a difference between incarnating different-from-normatively-human life-ways (which is true of indefinitely many people already) and imagining you incarnate something "more-than-human" (which seems simply a way of mistaking difference for superiority -- something too many people already do as well).
To the extent that bioconservatives claim to be defending the value of “human dignity,” they really need to quit constantly handwaving in panic about superlative technological states like immortality, superbabies, and clone armies -- none of which are sufficiently proximate developmentally to illuminate deliberation about technology policy here and now -- and explain just how restricting women’s reproductive freedoms and clamping down on medical research to cure and ameliorate suffering from treatable diseases has anything to do with “human dignity” in the first place.
To the extent that trans- and post- humanisms still presumably emerge out of humanism as an ethical project, these "movements" really should be demanding that the category of "the human" be rendered as capacious as possible to better accommodate the consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of humans now and in the futures we will share.
And as a matter of unsolicited, possibly unwelcome, practical advice to my technophile friends, a "slogan" is largely intended to pithily communicate your worldview to people who do not share it (but some of whom you presumably would want to). I think you should worry that the phrase “being human is not enough” expresses or will widely seem to express little but a disdain for humanity, or at any rate a disdain for those who choose not to embark on paths of prosthetic modification so radical as your own.
Isn’t it human to want to be healthy and happy? Isn’t it human to want to express yourself, to make your mark in the world? Isn’t it human to want to make the world a better place? Isn’t it human to want to better yourself?
This slogan, and the many variations on it that are commonplaces in so-called "transhumanist" discursive spaces, seem to me more like expressions of hostility than of hope. In a slogan from radical technophiles I would personally like to see something more like an invitation to the dance than yet another declaration of war.
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