And Now, a Few Words About Democracy

Democracy is a host of social formations all of which can be taken to be implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.

This ideal is expressed in a number of familiar formulations and slogans, "we the people, in order to… etc., etc., ordain and establish," "governments... deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed," "no taxation without representation," "nothing about us without us," etc. -- all of which are clearly related but have importantly different institutional entailments.

In my view, governments should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to (a broad construal) of democratic governance. Democracies should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to human rights norms. Human rights regimes should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world through the work they do to secure the public scene of informed non-duressed consent on which human dignity depends in large part for its maintenance and legibility. Also, I agree with the pragmatic idea that democracy in its essence seeks to provide nonviolent institutional recourse for the adjudication of disputes.

Since the point of departure for rational political thinking (as opposed to, say, rational scientific, moral, or ethical thinking) is that there is and will always be an ineradicable plurality of values and ends among the peers who share social worlds governed by civic institutions, this implies that the ongoing work of reconciling aspirations nonviolently is constantly renewed and never-ending. It also implies that there will be an ongoing balancing act between the particular provisional compromise formations that effect this reconciliation from moment to moment historically and the more universal or general or stable or meta-contextual language and architectural constraints that enable this work of reconciliation to take place at all. All this, in turn, implies a certain dynamism, openness, and experimentalism across the layers of democratic culture, from mediation of concrete disputes, all the way through to reformism at the level of actual democratic institutions themselves.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me, then, that there is something inherently radical and revolutionary about even the most quotidian and mainstream democratic conception of politics -- as opposed to, say, conventional conservative politics.

Now, we live (and have done, ever more so, since the classical or Revolutionary era) in what Foucauldians would call disciplinary and bio-political regimes, which is to say in an era in which governments legitimate themselves and function through social administration -- the regulative norms for which tend to be things like, say, "productivity," "general welfare," "risk" and "stress management," etc. -- articulated for the most part through normalization and atomization operations in the context of multilateral social, civic, and international institutions.

A large part of what democratic regimes will do in a disciplinary/bio-political era is provide for nonviolent adjudication of disputes through a pre-emptive amelioration of social problems that would tend to engender such conflict (plague, hunger, homelessness, addiction, illiteracy, intolerance, inassimilable wealth disparity or inequity, corruption, etc.) or to secure the scene of legible informed nonduressed public consent by maintaining the material social conditions of reliable information, equity, diversity, security and such on which it relies.

These democratic values might well be satisfied through different means in an era that was not defined by bio-politics and modern disciplinarity -- eg, the aristocratic Greek era, the Republican Roman era, the agrarian Jeffersonian era, possibly a post-bio-political era of morphological freedom in the context of a culture of consent or a post-disciplinary era of peer-to-peer democracy, what have you. (By the way, I am not convinced that these latter ideas truly are post-biopolitical or post-disciplinary, but that is a vast digression for another time.)

Anyway, the work of social administration in this disciplinary/bio-political era of North Atlantic democracy in the era post-colonial military-corporate globalization usually doesn't seem particularly revolutionary at the day to day level of application and routine, but all this is crucial to an understanding of the way democracy works in the world in which we live today.

It is for this reason that I am content to describe myself as a social democrat for the most part. Understanding how this gray quotidian level of administration connects to the maintenance of the scene of consent, however, yields a fairly radical (in the sense of fundamental) understanding of the democratic project, but also tends to yield attitudes on particular political questions of the day that will land one in the camp of "radicals" as often as not.

(Wonks with any kind of concrete knowledge of policy and practice conjoined to the most rudamentary systemic analysis of institutional interdependies and even a modest commitment to mainstream progressive democratic aspirations will regularly discover as a matter of course that they are advocating positions on sustainablility, on reforms of election protection and campaign finance, on health, education, and welfare entitlement, even basic income guarantees and universal single-payer healthcare, and such, that are, from the perspective of the mainstream discourse -– extruded through the sausage factory of corporate media and the bought-and-paid corporate-militarist noise machines –- "extreme left" positions.)

But I do also describe myself as a radical democrat in moments when I want to call attention to the ways in which the language of normativity at the root of so much social administration can often work against the grain of the deeper democratic commitments to openness, diversity, and experimentalism, or when I want to call attention to the ways in which a stealthy conservatism colonizes the organizations themselves that do the otherwise worthy work of administration, or whenever it seems important to break the crust of convention to remember the antagonisms, vulnerability, unpredictability, novelty, chance at the heart of the political world as such.

The Politics Are Prior to the Toypile

I believe that much of what people really mean when they either praise or excoriate something they call, in some general way, "technology" is to speak instead about the political values and concrete practices that drive technodevelopmental social struggle from moment to moment on the ground.

The very same corporate-militarism in America that has devastated independent media, co-opted our elections, debauched our representatives, fueled the drumbeat of deregulation without end that presided over the vast looting of our supportive infrastructure, and dismantled our civil liberties is of course the very same corporate-militarism that would enclose the creative and now, too, the genetic commons, that bolsters primitive extractive petrochemical industries while constraining the emergence and implementation of networked renewable alternatives, fights a puritanical war on re-creational drugs by means of corporate-approved drugs of docility and distraction, arms the diabolical machineries that drench the world in blood and violence.

In the hands of elites and in the service of elite agendas technologies too often exacerbate inequity and exploitation. While in more democratic societies, technologies have the best hope of serving emancipatory ends instead: Regulated by legitimate democratic authorities to ensure they are as safe as may be. And regulated as well to best ensure that their costs, risks, and benefits are shared by all of their stakeholders. And all of this in the context of a culture of informed nonduressed consent -- that is, with open access to consensus scientific knowledge and in the absence of the duress of physical force, financial ruin, or conspicuous humiliation.

Current democratic formations have demonstrated their extreme vulnerability to the depredations of corporate-militarism, as have the world's most vulnerable people by the millions. We must take up emerging peer-to-peer digital networked media and social software to reclaim and reshape our democracies just as we must take up emerging renewable technologies to lighten the human bootprint on our earth even as we welcome ever more human minds and lives into the community of full democratic citizenship. Both of these efforts are indispensable to any realizable globalization of the promise of democracy as well as any serious effort to turn the global anti-democratic corporate-military tide.

Further, I believe we must facilitate the fuller flowering of diversity and freedom made possible when the resources of culture expand to encompass the informed, nonduressed, consensual genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human lifeways in the image of our diverse values.

Without democratic accountability, answerability, responsibility corporate-military technodevelopment will leave the earth a charred cinder, but so too without the emerging tools of peer-to-peer digital networks, sustainable energy technologies, better-than-well medicine (and, one hopes, soon enough, replicative nanoscale manufacturing), the social formations of democratic governance progressives and technoprogressives advocate will little likely command the material and rhetorical resources to fight the vast established interests that drive corporate-militarism today, nor to mobilize humanity imaginatively today and tomorrow to establish a global democratic, sustainable order and culture of universal informed, nonduressed consent in an open future.

That's what I mean when I say technology needs democracy and democracy needs technology. I eagerly welcome questions, comments, and criticisms.

Sometimes, Democracy Is Like That

A while back I posted a brief, perplexed comment here about the fact that I am often accused of exhibiting a sort of “negativity” in my writing that is off-putting and counterproductive. In my dissertation, for example, there are extended close readings of texts by “Cypherpunks” Eric Hughes and Tim May (in chapter two), David Brin (in chapter three), and David Friedman (in chapter four) that some seemed to regard as unfair and even as derogatory. More recently, I have received a spate of comparable complaints in response to my reading of a short text by John Smart I posted here on Amor Mundi a week or so ago.

This time around, I think I am in a better position to say what is afoot when at least some folks respond negatively to what they call my “negativity,” and why I think such responses are for the most part symptomatic distractions highlighting why I am on the right track when I am being what they call “negative.” But before I get to that I think it is time to say first a little bit about what it is I think I am up to when I read a text, and what I think such reading is good for.

I’m a critic, I criticize. My mode of critique is one I call, quite simply, “reading,” but it is clear that by reading here I do not mean to describe exactly that commonplace activity that goes by the name reading when one is superficially reading People Magazine on the bus on the way to work in the morning.

When I read expository, argumentative, even polemical writings, I try to read them closely, and in this I read them in much the same way that I read works of fiction or films closely. That is to say, I look in argumentative writing for the logical entailments among its explicit and implicit propositions (scouting for key contradictions, warrants, substantiations, assumptions, etc.), of course, but I tend to focus even more on the argumentative work done through their imagery and their figures, for the effects they achieve through their citation of generic and topical conventions, for various significant symptomatic omissions, aporias, and stylistic idiosyncracies, all sorts of things. Often the elements of a work that strike me as most interesting and as the ones that do the most compelling argumentative work do so against the grain of the ones you would highlight in a straightforward propositional analysis.

I happen to think many technophiles in this particular historical and cultural moment of advocacy and enthusiasm are often caught up in and even entrapped by certain recurring argumentative gestures: claims about “inevitability,” claims about "development" construed in a monolithic way to which a single “definitive” characteristic is then attributed, like, accelerating, disrupting, converging, superhumanizing, subhumanizing, etc. Furthermore, many technophiles seem to share a set of compelling metaphors that have come to assume the status of a kind of orthodoxy among them: evolutionary metaphors, for one, the figure of “spontaneous order” for another, and what Jeron Lanier has sometimes referred to as "cybernetic totalism" for yet another. And part of the work I try to do is to highlight the ways in which these assumptions, gestures, and metaphors play out in various concrete pieces of writing. In highlighting these dimensions of the culture of technology advocacy in this historical moment, through readings of exemplary texts like David Brin’s or Tim May’s or John Smart’s, my point isn't to "expose" some nefarious plot or impugn the motives of people I don't know and have every reason to expect are perfectly intelligent and conscientious as far as that goes. What I see myself as doing is trying to delineate a kind of larger language of technology-talk in this historical moment, the broader culture of customary framing in which particular arguments tend to be embedded just now, and which delineate the shared bounds within which even contrary technodevelopmental arguments and values are staked out.

Further, I happen to think the assumptions that drive much contemporary technology advocacy are reductionist (for one example, they might try to impose the proper standards for warranted assertibility in consensus science onto improper contexts, such as in the assertion of moral, ethical, political, or esthetic beliefs) and anti-democratic (either, for example, in the service of particular elite agendas, or in a way that undermines the openness of ongoing stakeholder politics more generally) and hence contrary to my own commitments to a humanistic -- or maybe humanely post-humanistic would be a better way of putting it -- and deeply democratic technoscientific culture.

But the truth is, of course, that those who deploy these assumptions in making their various cases for the technodevelopmental outcomes they prefer often are just competently making use of the language and culture of the day as it is ready to hand. If I try to expose the limitations of this culture through the texts that exemplify it, it is key to realize that I am often pitching my critique at a level that does not necessarily make any claims whatsoever about whether or not the authors of such exemplary texts themselves explicitly or consciously affirm all the entailments I discern in them myself.

In fact, given my larger beliefs about the radical openness of language and the way the rhetorical content of a text radically depends on the context in which it circulates, the last thing in the world I would ever assume is that the force of an argument is entirely under the conscious control of its "author" in the way I think my critics have to mean when they personalize my critiques and assume I am attributing malign motives to the writers of the texts I read critically.

Since the points I am making in my readings seem to be odd and unfamiliar to the audiences at which I am aiming them it becomes especially difficult to always lodge them in a second meta-critique that would make all these added complexities always explicit all the time. I actually do go out of my way to try to gesture at these interrelations here and there at least, just so that readers are occasionally reminded of the sort of critique I am making. Frankly, I happen to think that one of the reasons that contemporary literary and critical theory is often derided among popular technoscience enthusiasts (with whom I otherwise have some measure of affinity, at least when their politics lean left) for its “unreadability” and “fashionable nonsensicality” is that theory in this mode incessantly tries to register all these complexities in anticipation of all-too-familiar objections, and that this is a very difficult, if not impossible, business to articulate in a legible and also compelling way.

Here on Amor Mundi I devote quite a lot of my time to critiques of what I consider the reactionary nostalgia and anti-democratic moralism of the bioconservative politics of “nature.” But be assured that I consider technophilia an uncritical, or at best superficially critical attitude toward technological change as well. To the extent that technophiles denigrate popular technodevelopmental deliberation as “impractical” this perspective is exactly as reactionary, elitist, and anti-democratic as bioconservatism is. To the extent that technophilia affirms historically contingent market protocols as “spontaneous orders,” or affirms sexist, racist, heterosexist, class privileges through the figure of “evolution” this perspective is exactly as nostalgic, moralistic, and perniciously “naturalist” as bioconservatism is.

I happen to know that there are plenty of people who think my own attitude is too technophiliac. My own writings about the possibilities for emancipatory and democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle sometimes have been read by others rather like the way I have read those who presently protest my unfairness and negativity toward them. But, look, disagreement isn't always comfortable. It seems to me a sure sign of unexamined privilege more than anything else to imagine one is somehow entitled to coddling even by those who honestly think one's views facilitate truly negative outcomes and then offer up reasons to justify their views. My critics don't have to know my intimate heart or read everything I have ever written to be in a position to identify as best they can the logical entailments or generic conventions cited by a particular text of mine and then to discuss the argumentative work they think my text is doing as it circulates legibly in a world of comparable texts.

Of course, I hate to think intelligent, politically righteous critics of my work might decide that a text of mine is naïve, or morally pernicious, or might undermine justice in a way they think I personally approve of. Who doesn’t feel distress in such scenes? But the fact is that these misunderstandings are usually overcome readily enough in conversation, and there is nothing about a harsh close reading that forecloses such conversation. I personally regard close reading as a sign of seriousness and hence a gesture of respect, even when I consider a particular reading mistaken or misguided. I take serious critics quite seriously, and feel defamed by not a single one of them, even when they are harsh with me.

It is fine for the objects of my critiques (and their partisans) to disagree with my assessments of their texts or to disapprove of my methods of reading texts in general, but it is hard to square the discomfort and pique with which some folks respond to my readings with a real commitment to the agon of a truly democratic culture of criticism that duly and seriously registers the actual perspectives of the actual diversity of stakeholders to technodevelopment in the world, a cultural outcome I personally welcome and even demand.

As for me, I am uninterested in the kindness of strangers but quite eager to benefit from their criticisms. I do not need to know whether or not an author affirms a commitment to democratic politics in whatever construal, to highlight rhetorical forces afoot in their writings that are more trouble than they are worth if what is wanted is to do the work of deepening democracy in an era of global technodevelopmental transformation. If critics discern such antidemocratic propositions, figures, and gestures at work in my own writing you better believe I want to hear about it -- precisely because I want to do the work of democracy as best I can. I wouldn't take such a reading as personal defamation (unless it was explicitly defamatory, of course), however uncomfortable it made me, but as contribution to a conversation among peers collaborating in the work of democracy in a serious way.

I think that for reasons related (among others) to the ones Snow delineated ages ago in his "Two Cultures" argument, recent generations of science and technology enthusiasts have rarely been forced to take seriously modes of argument and critique like the ones I tend to produce. Perhaps these modes of argument have sometimes seemed technoscientifically rather illiterate or have seemed uncritically technophobic in ways that my own certainly are not, and so possibly dismissing them altogether might not have seemed so devastating a loss after all. But as NBIC technologies become ever more proximate -- with all their destabilization, problems, and promises in tow -- this splendid isolation seem ever more unworkable and nudges ever more of those who seek smugly to maintain it to near irrelevence. Technoscientific deliberation is going to become very interesting and unpredictable indeed for all of us as more and more of the actual stakeholders to technodevelopment take their places at the table and testify to their experiences and to their righteous hopes and fears. I for one am looking forward to this outcome, and am pleased to have a hand in facilitating it where I can. Bruises are sure to accompany the thrills of pleasure and flashes of insight to come as we struggle to figure out how we use the same familiar languages to say and do extraordinarily unfamiliar things in matters of passionately shared concern, as we convulsively collaborate in the making of shared futural worlds. Sometimes, democracy is like that.

Politics: Two Points of Departure

[1] I think the point of departure for a political understanding of the world is that there will always be a plurality of stakeholders in any social formation whose ends will differ in ways that cannot be reconciled without contestation and compromise.

[2] I think the point of departure for a democratic understanding of the world is that we should create, maintain, and improve (through experimentation and reform) spaces that provide nonviolent alternatives for the adjudication of disputes arising from this political plurality and which provide all these stakeholders with as much and ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

Does Technophilia Incline Right?

It is a matter of ongoing perplexity and frustration to me that technodevelopmental discourse in an affirmative mode seems so readily to drift into a project of accommodation to or consolation for established elites or to take up the contours of ring-wing ideology, and how even explicit left-identified progressive technodevelopmental discourse often seems (at least to me) far more supportive and generous of arguments and figures coming out of the right than one would one would normally expect from the left.

Let me grant in advance that I may simply be wrong about all this as a straightforward empirical matter. Maybe I am wrong to discern an overall rightward technophiliac skew. Also, maybe I am simply oversensitive to any manifestations of such a skew among my colleagues, rubbed raw my whole adult life through in the debased era of conservative ascendancy from Reagan through Clinton (possibly the greatest Republican President of the Twentieth Century) through Gingrich through to the terminally awful gun-toting criminal clown college that is the Bush Administration.

But if I do happen to be the least bit right about this rightward technophiliac skew, it seems to me worthwhile to try to puzzle through some of the conditions that may have engendered it. And so, let me propose a couple of initial candidates, and then we can see where we can go on to from here:

First: Technoscientific research and development is a matter of material cultures, with actual people occupying legible sociocultural positions in it, engaging in material institutional and ritual lives. It matters, then, that research and development is driven almost exclusively by the urgencies of corporate-militarism in a market globalist developmental order.

Second: It also matters that warranted consensus scientific beliefs converge onto best descriptions according to shared protocols and shared values, while warranted political beliefs in a democratic mode strive for a kind of peaceful productive dissensus. That is to say, democratic politics would see a convergence or stabilization of public belief as a sign of tyranny, not success. There are, then, rather deep differences in the ways belief and value operate in the modes of reasonable technoscientific versus reasonable political life and belief.

I sometimes think there is a cultural and temperamental strain that resists or quails at the exactions of democratic stakeholder politics right at the very heart of technoscientific practice in an important sense (even if, as I have written elsewhere, I also think consensus science is a more democratic than authoritarian accomplishment, too -- just in a different way than stakeholder politics is).

Anyway, taken together, this temperamental tendency in addition to the historical context of a technoscientific development driven by the exigencies of corporate-militarism both contribute to an almost irresistable drift to the right in contemporary technology discourse and political practice.

The left and especially the technoprogressive left need to understand this far better than they seem to do and need to compensate with a greater scrupulousness and care around their formulations, sympathies, and alliances.

Under the present structural circumstances it seems to me technoprogressive discourses, however necessary and marvellous, are actually deeply vulnerable to appropriation by right-wing ideologies in a number of variations -- human-racist eugenicism, "free trade" global coporate-militarism, transcendentalizing techno-sublime consolation for religious fundamentalisms, etc.

Technoprogressives need to be clearer about the stakes here, about the structural conditions and historical forces that constitute the context in which we are acting, and about what these stakes and conditions tell us about who are friends are.

A Dose of the New Medical Reality

Schiavo as Symptom

On Thursday morning, March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died quietly in a Florida hospice. The person who Terri Schiavo had been ceased to exist 15 years before, according to the testimony of her husband and many who knew her, as well as the best determination of credible doctors and scientists. The memory of Schiavo will make its home in the lives of the people who actually knew her for years to come. And no doubt the public figure of Schiavo will likewise continue to resonate into the future, condensing into a few flashes of ineradicable imagery what are in fact the endlessly complex and emotionally fraught quandaries of bodies and lives rendered newly questionable in their limits, capacities and social intelligibility by ongoing and emerging technological developments.

So long as medicine is conceived primarily as a remedial enterprise its recommendations are driven most conspicuously by the straightforward instrumental rationality of what consensus science takes to be relevant causes and effects. What “health” consists of in the first place and what is desirable about the maintenance of that state are to an important extent simply treated as if they are "givens." But as our prosthetic practices proliferate the ways in which people can live "livable" lives, we look less and less to medicine to remedy the ways in which our bodies deviate into pathological difference and more and more to deliver us into differences we desire.

Of course, the goal of producing and maintaining a "healthy body" through medical and hygienic practice has never in fact been the instrumentally neutral ideal painted in such a picture. Our diagnoses of disease, infirmity, fitness, and illness have always been ineradicably freighted with cultural and moral significance. But what I mean to call attention to here is that the scope and force of ongoing and palpably upcoming medical intervention is deranging our sense of the standards against which we would strive to measure the distance of the variety of actually living human bodies from the "normative" body we would traditionally impose and maintain through recourse to that medicine. Already, we cannot be quite sure what we are capable of or what we can rightly expect or demand of our newly queer, prostheticized bodily selves.

Medicine is taking humanity on an unprecedented path from remedy to self-creation. But our assumptions and our language have not yet managed to keep up with this emerging state of affairs. Meanwhile, our hopes and desires and sometimes our demands for medicine often seem to range hyperbolically forward past our present capacities.

The heartbreaking and hysterical public spectacle of the dead but surreally lively prostheticized body of Schiavo attests to our perplexity and our present distress. There are many such spectacles to come.

Human-Racism and the “Bright Line” Between Life and Death

In an influential editorial prompted by the Schiavo case, David Brooks claimed at the time to discern as the main difference between conservative and progressive bioethical discourse that only conservative bioethics is properly moral in its concerns while progressives are somewhat blind to the "values" dimension of policy.

This is, of course, just the sort of dismissive or oblivious attitude we have come to expect public conservative figures to take whenever they encounter values with which they disagree. (One recalls, for example, in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophic 2004 Presidential Election the conjuration by many conservative pundits of a so-called "Values-Voter," which seemed to describe as "moral" only that segment of the American population that hated gay people enough to be mobilized by their pathological homophobia to vote for a second term of America’s most disastrous Administration, quite palpably against their own stated interests on many other social questions.)

But it is worthwhile to set aside our reasonable annoyance at the tired dishonesty and craven partisanship evident in his rhetoric, because Brooks' discussion of the differences in the ways many conservatives and progressives talk about the dilemmas of a case such as Schiavo's does in fact highlight important moral, cultural, temperamental distinctions that illuminate what I have called the emerging terrain of bioconservative and technoprogressive positions on technodevelopmental social struggle as well.

Brooks claims that "[t]he core belief that social conservatives [have]... is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult." Against the social conservatives, he suggests that progressives hold as their own "core belief that... quality of life is a fundamental human value." Progressives don't, Brooks accuses, "emphasize the bright line between life and death; they describe a continuum between a fully lived life and a life that, by the sort of incapacity Terri Schiavo has suffered, is mere existence."

To the extent that this emphasis on the “bright line between life and death” seems not to nudge conservatism into a nonhuman animal rights position, and to the extent that it explicitly refuses elaboration through a discussion of quality of life (which apparently is somehow “relativist” compared to the bright brute line of “life and death” or just plain “liberal” and hence inherently questionable in some unspecified way), it is clear that the foundational gesture of bioconservatism is a straightforward human-racist emphasis on the presumably “intrinsic value” of the process of metabolism when it is incarnated in representatives of only the human species, even if that process itself is indistinguishable, as a process, from the life incarnated in indefinitely many living species.

Of course, there is in fact a progressive moral value quite as luminous as anything he would attribute to conservative human-racist moralists that is rumbling in the background of Brooks’ discussion here, a value he seeks to trivialize through the comparably anemic phrasing of “quality of life.” This value is widely and passionately affirmed, and the recent track record of conservatives in the defense of this value, and of the more “fully-lived” lives that depend on it, is troubling indeed, whatever their occasional lip-service to the contrary.

That value? Consent.

Denigrating Lives by Denigrating Consent

One has to wonder just why it is that conservatives proud to "err on the side of life" seem so regularly impelled in so doing to denigrate consciousness and violate consent.

For progressives, there is indeed a texture in personal life beyond the "mere existence" we share with shrimp and snails, and which demands broad affirmation on its own terms. Personal lives are uniquely lived in the webs of meaning and thought and conversation woven by public beings, lives that reverberate with choices, with desires, with injuries, with deeds.

All the while the armies of the conservative so-called "culture of life" seem to defend life only in some more vegetable or mineral mode always best exemplified by organisms that have not yet arrived among the community of poets and peers, or of those who have already departed from the scene.

Brooks proposes that "[t]he central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste."

But to denigrate the morality of consent as "the relativism of mere taste" is to confess a complete moral blindness to the way in which we actually want to do morality here in democratic civilizations these days. And it follows as the night does the day that those who denigrate consent will go on then to denigrate the dignity of actual democratic citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Notice how often "erring on the side of life" seems to conservatives to require a violation of the terms in which citizens with whom they disagree actually choose to live their own lives.

I think it is fair in fact to agree with Brooks when he goes on to declare that for the conservatives in Bush's America "[t]he life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult."

That is to say, not very much.

Conservatives really do seem to adore claiming to speak for nonpersons (especially fetal not-quite-yet persons and stubbornly vegetative no-longer-quite persons) who cannot speak for themselves. How dearly they seem to love to put words into the mouths of those who are in no position to protest the imposition. What better way, after all, of multiplying their own voices in a world where sprawling majorities of actual people simply disagree with them, than to claim that their own overpowered voices stand in fact for countless voiceless voices as well as their own?

When conservatives seek to extend the dignity and status of the citizen to nonpersons they inevitably impoverish the exercise of that status for actually-existing citizens. This, of course, is the point of the exercise. Given the contours of Brooks’ argument, what is paradoxical is that in ascribing "dignity" so broadly it is the social conservatives themselves who stretch morality as thin as the skin of a soap bubble -- the better to puncture its fragile skin.

And it matters little to conservatives that their own morality is finally so thin since ultimately they seem to prefer to turn for their moral guidance to the dictates of authorities claiming to speak for God, or Tradition, or Homeland when all is said and done, than to the more contingent contentious verdicts of their own best worldly and reasonable deliberation.

Now, consent is indeed a notoriously thorny value to implement since its exercise, to be legible, demands that it be competent, informed, and nonduressed.

In the absence of competence, adequate and trusted information, and freedom from duress the “scene of consent” is apt to be a scene of violation in which the vulnerable rather than the violators are treated as guilty perpetrators of the violations they themselves suffer: As if a child has somehow “consented” to sexual abuse from a trusted authority figure. As if a consumer has somehow “consented” to the risks of a toxic, addictive product if its makers and marketers have fraudulently declared it healthful and nonaddictive. As if an impoverished or dependent wage-earner freely “consents” to exploitation at the hands of a wealthy or independent employer.

But the difficulty and danger is that securing a scene of legible consent for all citizens requires the formulation and application of the standards through which competence, knowledge, and freedom from duress are recognized as such. And this indispensable project inevitably risks mistaken formulations and misapplications that might actually violate particular performances of consent in their extraordinarily overabundant diversity and dynamic proliferation.

What Brooks mistakes as the “relativism of mere taste” is in fact the fraught and demanding dignity of diversity, the morality of self-creation, and the project of interminable criticism and self-criticism. Progressives know that they must accept a costly measure of abiding doubt and vigilance as the fair price that would help assure that our standards protect the changing life of consent rather than policing difference into conformity in the name of a “dignity” that always speaks in the voice of established authorities or in the easy, nostalgic, but stultifying voice of the past. Since conservatism is at heart a preference for obedience over critical autonomy it is scarcely surprising that conservatives would denigrate consensual self-creation as “mere taste” or mistake confident critical uncertainty as “relativism,” but it is a curiously delusive spectacle when they go on to peddle their obedience as independence, their complacency as dynamism, their faith as knowledge, and their humiliation as dignity.

From “Disability” to Diversity

Technoprogressives maintain that technological development is becoming not just a disruptive but, potentially, a genuinely revolutionary force. Technodevelopmental transformation undercuts the normative weight of claims made in the name of the "natural" in ways that, conjoined to a deepening of democracy and extension of fairness, technoprogressives insist can be made to be ultimately emancipatory for all.

For technoprogressives, the ongoing revolution in reproductive medicine and emerging genetic and neuroceutical medicine opens up consensual prosthetic practices of self-creation that will be this generation's historical contribution to the ongoing conversation of humankind.

I use the term "morphological freedom" to describe the ways in which consensual prosthetic practices are enlarging the scope of personal freedom, even while they derange our expectations, demand new responsibilities, and introduce unprecedented possibilities for injustice, violation and harm against which we must struggle interminably.

Along with many other progressives I felt disgust at the public figures who so loudly and cynically attached themselves to the distress of the family of Schiavo in bids for personal attention. I worried together with other techno-progressives about the widespread American anti-scientific benightedness that blistered yet again to the surface of public discourse in the midst of the media circus, connecting up in the most ominous imaginable ways with conservative hostility to evolutionary science via the rhetoric of "intelligent design," hostility to environmental science via the rhetoric of climate-change denial, hostility to social science via the rhetoric of "abstinence-only education," and hostility to economic science via the rhetoric of market fundamentalism. And of course I shared the concerns of other liberals about legislative efforts to bypass the courts, insinuations of martial law, and all the rest.

But I also share the concerns of many "disability" advocates who found themselves at odds with some of the progressive and most of the technoprogressive consensus in this cultural moment and who worry that there is something quite pernicious in the conventional liberal discourse that claims that if only Schiavo had a real "chance at recovery" then liberals, too, along with social conservatives, would be demanding that her "life" be protected and preserved.

These advocates for the differently enabled are rightly suspicious that the idea of "recovery" in such arguments mobilizes what amounts in fact to a highly restrictive normative concept of the sort of lives that are ultimately "lives worth living." Too often the notion of a properly "livable life" is a concept that denigrates many differently enabled people who, whatever their struggles or sorrows, live lives suffused with dignity, joy and value worth affirming and supporting the same as anyone else's.

Now, I strongly agree with the clinicians and experts whose thorough and repeated examination of the evidence located Schiavo's body in particular decisively with the dead rather than with the disabled. And in any case, I would insist like most progressives do on the absolute moral necessity to respect her own decisions and attitudes in a case like this, however these have been best ascertained by a number of courts, where matters of the care of her own body are concerned.

But it is clear nevertheless that the figure of disability was circulating in the Schiavo case in ways that matter to advocates for the differently enabled as well as to advocates and scholars of morphological freedom.

There are many "disabled" people who will seem superficially similar to Schiavo to an untrained eye, after all, and whose lives are routinely dismissed as "not worth living" in consequence. Advocates for the differently enabled fight heartbreaking, exhilarating battles to champion the rights and standing of these people every single day.

What it must mean to respect the differently enabled as the actually fully real people they are is to respect them and support them in their differences whenever they affirm the value of these differences on their own terms, just as it must likewise require the best provision of prosthetic avenues for rewriting their bodies and lives in the image of their own desires, also on their own terms, to the extent that this is possible and wanted by them.

Consensual Prosthetic Practices

The process of "life" in medical technocultures is one of ongoing practices of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification in pursuit of personal meanings, responsibilities, and pleasures that are bound to strain against the imposition of normative conceptions of "wellness," however construed.

From the perspective of morphological freedom it seems to me the standard of "recovery" is always therefore worrisomely conservative, naturalizing some contingent standard of proper health as more desirable than indefinitely many alternate possibilities. Morphological freedom is never properly a matter of any coercive imposition of a normative body in the name of a moral standard of "health," but is an embrace of genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification practices in the name of a proliferation of ways of being properly and meaningfully in the world.

To the extent that the rhetoric of "recovery" impels us to misrecognize some manifestations of diversity as "disability," technoprogressives seem to me well rid of it. And to the extent that technoprogressives will sometimes affirm the desirability of "better than well" healthcare provision this would seem to encourage a repudiation of the discourse of "recovery" as well.

It is especially interesting for me to note the extent to which so many of the differently enabled depend on ongoing cyborgization and prosthetic practices to find their ways to more enriching lives on their own terms: communicating through computer interfaces, locomoting in motorized conveyances, and engaged in sometimes lifelong medical procedures of extraordinary intimacy and profundity.

Now, these considerations do not nudge us into any kind of blanket morphological relativism, since we will still prefer and testify to our own personal paths of self-determination on the basis of reasons at least intelligible enough to satisfy the conditions of informed, competent, and nonduressed consent. And in any case the proper public provision of the resources that enable prosthetic practices of self-creation also demands the maintenance of intelligible standards to ensure democratic accountability, fairness, security and meaningful deliberation in that provision.

Morphological freedom prevails to the extent to which discernible differences among peers arise from consensual prosthetic practices of self-determination or self-creation, rather than being imposed or unduly duressed by conditions of exploitation, violence or ignorance (any of which might broadly mobilize responsible intervention). What will be key for a properly technoprogressive bioethics that affirms morphological freedom will be a shift in focus from a moral(istic) concern with parochial standards of health, beauty or custom into an ethical concern with the meaningful consent of peers with whom one may or may not identify morally in the slightest.

This essay is a revised and edited version of a column published April 1, 2005 -- the day after Terri Schiavo died -- on Betterhumans.com. That column contained material from a number of shorter texts that I had already published on this blog during the height of the discussion of Schiavo case. All of that material should be accessible through the archives here.

Nature As Resignification, Nature As Resignation (and Other Topics)

Promoted and adapted from the comments.

Despite the fact that I've been too busy with teaching to devote too much time to the blog I've been lucky to get some really provocative comments to the rather random blog-posts I've managed to craft this last couple of weeks. At the close of a comment appended to the recent Zizek discussion, "DanT" -- a newcomer to Amor Mundi as far as I can remember -- asked this question: "So, how do theories of representation deal with the 'natural,' (i.e that which surprises, which exceeds representation) and how do we have a post-structuralist approach to issues of livelihood?"

This could scarcely help but set me to thinking... I replied:

I am very interested in your description of the "natural" as "that which surprises, which exceeds representation" -- since for me the "natural" tends to denote instead something more dire and drear; namely, the customary. For me the "natural" tends to signify a nostalgic and anti-democratic political impulse, while your more sublime construal of the "natural" seems to signify the emancipatory dimension at the heart of resignifiability. You see resignification, say, where I see resignation... Of course, neither of us is "right" or "wrong" so much, it's just that interesting differences will ensue from our emphases.

This reminds me very much of the difficulties of discussing the relations between the literal and figurative dimensions of language. To be a competent speaker of a language is always to be able to discern when one is speaking a language as opposed to translating it, for one thing, but competence also demands we know how to mobilize nonstandard usage in still-meaningful ways. It is interesting to me that accounts of figurative language will tend either, I., to attribute a special vitality, a viscerality, an endlessly generative catechretic power to the figurative dimension of language (as against the dying into literal usage that happens when a metaphor grows dim through customary usage), or, II., they will tend to attribute such force (in terms of correspondence, if they're naive, or pragmatic goodness, if they are a bit more sensible about it) to literality while consigning figurative language to the register of decorative effects or triggers of affect. When I teach the distinction to my students I am always careful to stress the traffic between these conceptions rather than a preference for one over the other.

Now, I've loved too much Wilde for too long and I've loathed too many bioconservatives for too long to affirm your own more sublime characterization of the natural over my own characterization of the natural as always a nostalgic clinging to custom -- but it is plain that there is much to be said for the useful traffic between these two conceptions as well, and for much the same reasons...

I know that comment of yours was hardly the one to which you would expect or want me to respond. It just happens to have provoked some enjoyable speculation is all.

As for your other points [and for these I recommend readers dip into the comments themselves if they are interested], I agree that the global politics of climate change and sustainability are a prime candidate for incubating global solidarity. The complementary politics of catastrophic and existential risks should incubate global solidarity as well.

Of course, I would like to think peer-to-peer models of policy deliberation, collaboration, technodevelopmental assessment, representation, criticism, and accountability could also have a hand in this -- but I am well aware of the dangers of neoliberal/neoconservative accommodationism inhering in such a hope. Certainly, those of us who know better (as Michel Bauwens seems to be, among others) need to be quite relentless about disarticulating peer-to-peer formulations from facile libertarian appropriations, whether in market-anarchist, neoliberal, neoconservative, coporate-militarist, or even in "deep" ecological versions.

I personally think that democratic world federalism (through reform of the UN or through other means), and a global basic income guarantee are also likely sources for global radical/social democratic mobilization. Finally, I suspect that genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive medicine will either inspire a global social democratic federalist polity or these developments will preside over a class struggle rewritten in the dreadful image of speciation.

I notice that lately I have seemed to put more and more weight on the idea of consent -- competent, informed, nonduressed consent -- as a key value that adjudicates the progressive agon between autonomy and diversity, and that provides for a thick "positive" construal of freedom that lends itself to appropriation from a number of broad stakeholder positions. No doubt, the difficulty is to avoid the amplification of "consent" into something like a Habermasian "ideal speech situation," on the one hand, while avoiding its easy reduction into an apologia for facile market contractarianism, on the other.

And this takes me back to the dual worries I oscillated between in my little fantasia on Zizekian themes in the first place -- between a real concern with market accommodationism for one thing, and then for another an equally real concern with the kind of radicalism that demands violence of a kind that is simply out of the question in our own technodevelopmental era and hence invites a despair that is ultimately indistinguishable from the very accommodationism it would explicitly repudiate.

Alone With Our Thoughts

Here is an abstract for a talk I will be giving at the Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights Conference at Stanford University, this May. The conference will take place from the 26th through the 28th. My talk is entitled, "Alone With My Thoughts: Private and Public Faces of Cognitive Self-Determination."

Concerns with "recent inventions," "mechanical devices," new photographic processes and mass circulation newspapers preoccupied Warren and Brandeis’ canonical 1890 essay “The Right to Privacy,” just as quandaries with new forms electronic surveillance bedeviled privacy cases like Olmstead and then Katz. The pattern reiterates itself again and again, from the privacy debates that raged around cases securing personal autonomy in matters of contraception and abortion, through to contemporary debates about assistive reproductive technologies (ARTs), proliferating surveillance cameras and profiling software. Throughout its career, the notion of a right to privacy has been a unique and even primary location in culture in which we have negotiated our sense of personal autonomy and dignity in the face of ongoing technodevelopmental change. And in these debates, the notion of “privacy” itself has taken on many different forms and entailments.

Given this background, my first claim is quite simply that it is inevitable that competing conceptions of privacy will be central in legal, policy, and popular discourses we take up to cope with emerging neuroethical dilemmas. And my second claim is that we will want to be especially careful to foreground just those dimensions in privacy that speak to our particular concerns.

For me, the concept of informed consent is crucial as we struggle to balance demands of personal autonomy with demands of public welfare in the matters of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification that preoccupy our conference. And so, in my talk I will highlight those aspects in the history and concept of privacy that best facilitate legible performances of informed consent to procedures of medical modification. I will emphasize the ways in which privacy has articulated the notion of secure intimate associations (as between doctors and their patients, for example) and downplay the ways in which privacy has sometimes facilitated the disruption or dismantlement of public spaces.

For me, informed consent is not a “natural capacity” that we must recognize and defend but a kind of public “scene” that is constructed and maintained in our ongoing negotiation of the legal, normative, fiscal, institutional/architectural “lines” between the public and the private. To the extent that “consenting” is conceived itself as a kind of cognitive act the demand to secure the scene of its legible performance in matters of cognitive modification will bring into special relief, and possibly bring into crisis, the dilemmas that attach more generally to the defense of morphological freedom, defined as the defense of consensual practices of genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive self-creation and self-determination.

Differently Enabled

Occasionally advocates for the “disabled” will find themselves making arguments in which they seem to suggest that there might be something somehow "genocidal" about a woman’s choice to end a pregnancy that might eventuate in a differently enabled child. Rarely, but sometimes, this is literally the -- to me, dreadfully misguided -- claim the advocate is actually making. But more usually when they are talking this way I think “disability” advocates are trying to get at a much more fraught and painful point that is simply terribly difficult to convey:

All too often cultural commonsense radically skews the proportion of women who might come to view as unwanted and so choose to end some pregnancies that they might otherwise have wanted and continued if only they had better information and more realistic expectations about differently enabled people, or could feel, as certainly they should be able to feel in democratic societies, more assured of social support and tolerance once they brought their pregnancies to term. And so, sometimes the choice of some women to end some pregnancies can clearly symptomize the irrational and illiberal attitudes of society to some of its citizens here and now.

It is undeniable that some embryos/fetuses that exhibit traits that are marked as "disabilities" will sometimes be construed as inherently "nonviable" in consequence of this fact even when the truth is that many countless individuals presently live perfectly legible and viable lives while incarnating these traits. (This is not to deny that some such traits really do register nonviability.) The exhibition of “disability” in any measure or morphology in the womb too typically comes to be freighted with not necessarily realistic prophetic conjurations of difficulty, disappointment, and tragedy. But the fact is that there is no such thing as a perfect child just as every child is extraordinary, that raising children is always difficult and heartbreaking just as it is rewarding, that every human life will be marked by tragedy and suffering just as it will be with triumphs and pleasures. Too often, no doubt, prejudices about the differently enabled skew our sense of what reasonable expectations about parenthood, childhood, humanity, and life really should be.

For "disability critics" these skewed expectations subsequently play into the ongoing stigmatization of differently enabled citizens alive here and now, and facilitate their exploitation and the irrational discrimination they face. The social and cultural contexts in which pregnancies come to be constructed as wanted or unwanted are one and the same as the social and cultural contexts in which the differently enabled must then struggle to cope, to testify to their joys and their sorrows in the world they share with us as peers, and to demand their rightful standing as peers.

Needless to say, trying to convey these already difficult truths in the midst of debates about abortion rights of all things isn’t exactly the easiest or the most clarifying thing in the world. And I do feel that introducing this level of nuance and critique into a discussion of abortion at an historical moment when abortion rights are under assault by a menacing activist conservative movement demands that I make a few things clear right here and right now: I believe that every woman always makes the right choice and the choice she has a right to make whenever she makes the best decision she can on her own terms and on the basis of whatever information she has at her disposal over the biological processes that take place in her own body. My own feminist version of technoprogressive politics always and in every case without exception champions any woman's right either to facilitate wanted pregnancies through ARTs or to end unwanted pregnancies through safe and legal and universally available abortion. And for me both of these commitments are aspects of precisely the same technoprogressive advocacy of morphological freedom.

Also, I think I should take a moment to say that when I put quotation marks around the term “disability” this is not to deny nor to trivialize the real facts of suffering that inhere in the reality of morphological variety and differently enabled embodiments in social worlds as they actually exist. And part of the way I would want to get it why I do scare-quote that word “disability” is to say a bit about why I also use a term that almost nobody else does when talking through these issues: differently enabled.

In a nutshell, “disability critics” rightly point out that a term like “disability” introduces immediate and sometimes insuperable barriers in the way of talking about questions of morphological variety that almost always pathologize and disqualify some variations, and so some citizens, over others. A common intervention, then, is to substitute for the inherently normative term “disability” here, a more “neutral” designation like “differently abled.”

But I worry that the neutrality evoked in this substitution likewise tends to facilitate a nostalgic politics of the “natural” that is far more trouble than it is worth, and conspicuously so in discussions of what are proper and democratizing medical interventions into customary biological norms. For me, then, a more powerful term to facilitate specifically technoprogressive rhetoric on these questions is "differently enabled." The term comes from neuroethicist Zack Lynch. His term is like "differently abled" in that it tries to drain some of the inherent stigma of a term like "disabled." But Lynch's substitution of the term "differently enabled" over "differently abled" also manages, I think, to usefully denaturalize these discussions.

It helps us foreground the extent to which science has contributed to the increased standing of people living with Down's Syndrome and other conditions in the present, while it helps us call attention to the incredibly intimate prostheticization of so many valuable embodied lives in this historical moment (people locomoting by means of motorized conveyances, communicating via digital networked interfaces, etc.), all the while providing an avenue through which to think of the genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive proliferation of human embodiment that is well on its way.

Make no mistake, the way we deal with the social problems of respecting our differently enabled peers today will deeply influence the ways in which we come to cope with the technoconstituted variety of humanity in an era of morphological freedom.

When the differently enabled demand "nothing about us without us" this is the quintessentially democratic demand and technoprogressives would be benighted misguided fools not to heed them in this demand, because soon enough we are all going to be them (not to mention the fact that some of us already most certainly are). Everyone is going to be disabled soon enough vis-a-vis the specific empowerments available via different paths of modification undertaken by some others, just as they too will be rendered relatively disempowered via-a-vis some of our own modifications.

I think technoprogressive champions of medical research and of the rights of democratic citizens to make informed consensual recourse to emerging modification and longevity medicine need to take special care to understand and then to frame the case they are making in terms of “modification” rather than “enhancement.” We should talk about modification in terms of difference, variation, and proliferation rather than drifting into curiously chauvinistic talk of “objective improvements,” “better humans,” or of becoming somehow “more than human.” We should stress universal access and informed consent rather than the imposition of universal norms and a conformity we designate too-blandly and too-uncritically as simply, “health.”

There is no question that part of the special difficulty of this developmentally transitional moment for technoprogressives is that the differential distribution of basic healthcare around the world both expresses and facilitates the most brutal forms of injustice. And there is no question that we must invoke universal standards to combat this injustice, to provide basic healthcare for all, to regulate development to render it safe, transparent, and accountable, to distribute the costs, risks, and benefits of medical and other technoscientific developments as fairly as possible to all the stakeholders to these developments.

And yet we must recognize, likewise, that the inevitable and necessary reliance on these universal standards becomes dangerously susceptible all too quickly to a kind of normative technocratic hygenicism that looks for all the world like the worst kind of eugenicist nightmare.

To the extent that basic needs are met, to the extent that human beings around the globe are emancipated through technodevelopmental social struggle from deprivation and then take up their rightful places as informed, consensual citizens and peers in a democratized secular technoscientific world then, and always only precisely to that extent, technoprogressives must shift from the universalizing language of the ethical face of social justice to the individualizing language of justice’s moral face.

As a first approximation of my own resolution of this quandary, let me propose that we will finally say that basic human needs are met and maintained whenever the scene of consent is truly an informed one and when consent is offered up in that scene without any threat of violence, deprivation, or humiliation to duress it. These conditions seem to me to demand the global institution of a basic income guarantee, universal basic healthcare, lifelong recourse to education, retraining, and therapy, sustainable and deliberative development, world federalist alternatives to the military adjudication of disputes, and a radical democratization via peer-to-peer networks of governance, security, and social administration. But once the struggle for social justice secures this scene of consent, what justice demands then is the widest possible affirmation of the creative proliferation of consensual practices of self-creation that will arise out of that scene.

Morphological freedom is proliferative, not convergent. It is the farthest imaginable thing from a trajectory into some bland “superhuman” conformity.

Technology will save the wretched of the earth. But then technology will make queers of us all.

(By “technology,” here I mean to say technodevelopmental social struggle –- but it really doesn’t make for a nice slogan, does it?)

As a queer, I know all too well that had I been unlucky enough to be born just a couple of generations ago my perfectly healthy and rather conventional desires would surely have been pathologized as part of the commonsense of my society (including the "common sense" of most of the well-meaning and knowledgeable people to whom I might have turned myself or been referred to had my desires and practices become known). And so, I am very skeptical of some of the rhetoric I encounter though which people strive to articulate the ways in which variously differently enabled people suffer for their differences in our society. I can never forget just how easy it is to mistake the suffering caused by stigmatization and discrimination with suffering "inherent" in a bodily condition itself.

Even as we struggle to facilitate morphological freedom for everybody, including our variously differently enabled peers today, we have to be very careful not to pretend we know in advance what forms of modification will be the “right” ones for all, nor to imply that consensual paths of modification different from our own will be, because of their differences, stigmatized as unliveable, unintelligible, pathological, or abject.

What on earth is the point of all this technological abundance and empowerment and modification technophiliacs keep crowing about if they just end up wanting to police everybody into crabbed conformity like Puritanical conservatives grubbing around in some muddy starving plague-ridden New England hamlet? It makes no sense to me at all! With each passing day we manage to facilitate technoprogressive outcomes it seems to me we should celebrate diversity more and more and share our abundance more and more.

Also, and by way of a conclusion here, I have begun to hear debates on these sorts of questions getting framed as though they represented conflicts between “transhumanists” on the one hand, and “disability activists” on the other. As is well known, I don't personally care about whether or not some minority viewpoint called "transhumanism" prevails in "sweeping the world," whatever that's supposed to mean, but I do care quite a lot whether or not emerging genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive therapies are developed and rendered safe as quickly as possible and that their costs, risks, and benefits are all distributed as fairly and as widely as possible to empower and emancipate humanity and deepen democracy. And this requires, it seems to me, that technoprogressive folks (in all their own marvelous irreconcilable variety) participate in struggles like those around autism rights, as well as other "disability" rights movements, in terms that emphasize the extent to which there are no "natural" capacities to champion here, that technologies are never inherently just or unjust but demand democracy to faciliate progressive outcomes. Taking up the mantle of some tribal identification and then assigning the status of enemy tribe to another in a moment like this looks to me like a human, all-too-human, distraction from the important work that needs doing here and now.

Technology and Terror

Social discontent provoked by the experience of injustice is a primary trigger of violence and unrest. But we are fast approaching -— if we're not already there -— the extraordinary moment when technologies of abundance, intelligently administered, could provide new means to alleviate at last the sources of such discontent. Meanwhile, these same technologies will also provide new and relatively cheap means to express discontent with unprecedented destructive impact.

I worry that while both of these points are understood well enough on their own, they are rarely discussed together. This matters because what is potentially emancipatory about new technologies is inseparable from what is potentially devastating about them. And so: The very same digital networks that facilitate global communication, collaboration, and trade peer-to-peer render us vulnerable to global attacks from viruses, scams and spam. The very same science and technology that could revolutionize medicine could revolutionize biowarfare. The very same hypothesized capacity for nanoscale self-replication that could eliminate poverty and heal the biosphere also inspires panicky visions of a world reduced to goo.

But the connection I have in mind here goes deeper than the simple recognition that new technologies bring both new powers and new risks.

I believe that the power of emerging technologies to redress the sources of legitimate social discontent -— to end global poverty, to promote universal health and education and to develop abiding, genuinely representative and accountable public institutions -— provides the only way to manage the lethal power of emerging weapons of mass destruction, as well as the relative ease with which they could find their way into the hands of those who would express or exploit such discontent.

Contemplating Insane Destructiveness

New technologies will be unprecedented in their creative and their destructive power, as well as in their ubiquity, and this changes everything.

Two short essays, one by Lawrence Lessig in the April edition of Wired magazine and the other by Richard Rorty in the April 1 issue of the London Review of Books, address this in interestingly similar terms.

These essays look at the problem of the likely near-term development and proliferation of relatively cheap and massively destructive new technologies such as bioengineered pathogens (Lessig) and suitcase nukes (Rorty).

"Key technologies of the future -— in particular, genetic engineering, nanotech, and robotics (or GNR) because they are self-replicating and increasingly easier to craft —- would be radically more dangerous than technologies of the past," writes Lessig in terms that evoke an earlier essay by Bill Joy, but the technophobic conclusions of which Lessig significantly rejects. "It is impossibly hard to build an atomic bomb; when you build one, you've built just one. But the equivalent evil implanted in a malevolent virus will become easier to build, and if built, could become self-replicating. This is P2P (peer-to-peer) meets WMD (weapons of mass destruction), producing IDDs (insanely destructive devices)."

Rorty writes in a similar vein that "[w]ithin a year or two, suitcase-sized nuclear weapons (crafted in Pakistan or North Korea) may be commercially available. Eager customers will include not only rich playboys like Osama bin Laden but also the leaders of various irredentist movements that have metamorphosed into well-financed criminal gangs. Once such weapons are used in Europe, whatever measures the interior ministers have previously agreed to propose will seem inadequate."

It is probably inevitable that discussions of the threat of weaponized emerging technologies will reflect the distress of the so-called contemporary "War on Terror." But it is important to recognize that present-day terrorism, however devastating, is a timid anticipation of the dangers and dilemmas to come. The March 11, 2004 Madrid attacks made use of conventional explosives, and the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States involved the crude hijacking and repurposing of fuel-fat jets as missiles.

To the extent that these attacks have provoked as a response (or worse, have provided a pretext for) "preemptive" and essentially unilateral military adventures abroad, and assaults on civil liberties at home, it is increasingly difficult to maintain much hope that we are mature enough as a civilization to cope with the forces we have ourselves set in motion.

Regulation Between Relinquishment and Resignation

Both Lessig and Rorty anticipate that when confronted with the horrifying reality or even simply the prospect of new technological threats the first impulse of the North Atlantic democracies is almost certain to be misguided compensatory expansions of state surveillance and control.

Both essays point to the likely futility of such efforts to perfectly police the creation and traffic of unprecedented technologies. In the worst case, with Lessig's designer pathogen or with the goo bestiary that preoccupies the nightmares of nanotech Cassandras (and don't forget the actual story: Cassandra was right!), we are confronted with the prospect of new massively destructive technologies that might be cooked up in obscure laboratories at comparably modest costs, using easily obtainable materials, employing techniques in the public domain, and distributed via stealthy networks.

In the Bill Joy essay that inspired Lessig's piece, the epic scale of the threats posed by emerging technologies prompted Joy to recommend banning their development altogether. The typical rejoinder to Joy's own proposal of "relinquishment," of a principled (or panic-stricken) pre-emptive ban on these unprecedentedly destructive technological capacities is that it is absolutely unenforceable, and hence would too likely shift the development and use of such technologies to precisely the least scrupulous people and least regulated conditions. And all of this would, of course, exacerbate the very risks any such well-meaning but misguided ban would have been enacted to reduce in the first place.

Definitely I agree with this rejoinder, but it's important not to misapply its insights. The fact that laws prohibiting murder don't perfectly eliminate the crime scarcely recommends we should strike these laws off the books. If Joy's technological relinquishment was the best or only hope for humanity's survival, then we would of course be obliged to pursue it whatever the challenges.

But surely the stronger reason to question relinquishment is simply that it would deny us the extraordinary benefits of emerging technologies -— spectacularly safe, strong, cheap materials and manufactured goods; abundant foodstuffs; new renewable energy technologies; and incomparably effective medical interventions.

Technophiles often seem altogether too eager to claim that technological regulation is unenforceable, or that developmental outcomes they happen to desire themselves are "inevitable." But of course the shape that development will take —- its pace, distribution, and deployments -— is anything but inevitable in fact. And all technological development is obviously and absolutely susceptible to regulation, for good or ill, by laws, norms, market forces and structural limits.

Market libertarian technophiles such as Ronald Bailey sometimes seem to suggest that any effort to regulate technological development at all is tantamount to Joy's desire to ban it altogether. Bailey counters both Joy's relinquishment thesis and Lessig's more modest proposals with a faith that "robust" science on its own is best able to defend against the threats science itself unleashes. This is an argument and even a profession I largely share with him, but only to the extent that we recognize just how much of what makes science "robust" is produced and maintained in the context of well-supported research traditions, stable institutions, steady funding and rigorous oversight, most of which look quite like the "regulation" that negative libertarians otherwise rail against. For me, robust scientific culture looks like the fragile attainment of democratic civilization, not some "spontaneous order."

So too "deregulation" is a tactic that is obviously occasionally useful within the context of a broader commitment to reform and good regulation. But treated as an end in itself the interminable market fundamentalist drumbeat of "deregulation" -— so prevalent among especially American technophiles —- amounts to an advocacy of lawlessness. Does this really seem the best time to call for lawlessness? Market libertarian ideologues often promote a policy of "market-naturalist" resignation that seems to me exactly as disastrous in its consequences as Joy's recommendation of relinquishment.

In fact, the consequence of both policies seems precisely the same —- to abandon technological development to the least scrupulous, least deliberative, least accountable forces on offer. My point is not to demonize commerce, of course, but simply to recognize that good governance encourages good and discourages antisocial business practices, while a healthy business climate is likewise the best buttress to good democratic governance.

While I am quite happy to leave the question of just which toothbrush consumers prefer to market forces, it seems to me a kind of lunacy to suggest that the answer to coping with emerging existential technological threats is, "Let the market decide." What we need is neither resignation nor relinquishment, but critical deliberation and reasonable regulation. What we need is Regulation between Relinquishment and Resignation (RRR).

Resources for Hope?

Lessig and Rorty make different but complementary recommendations in the face of the dreadful quandaries of cheap and ubiquitous, massively destructive emerging technologies. Taken together, these recommendations provide what looks to me like the basis for a more reasonable and hopeful strategy.

Rorty insists, first and foremost, that citizens in the North Atlantic democracies must challenge what he describes as "the culture of government secrecy":

"Demands for government openness should start in the areas of nuclear weaponry and of intelligence-gathering," which are, he points out, "the places where the post-World War Two obsession with secrecy began." More specifically, we must demand that our governments "publish the facts about their stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction [and] make public the details of two sets of planned responses: one to the use of such weapons by other governments, and another for their use by criminal gangs such as al-Qaida."

He goes on to point out that "[i]f Western governments were made to disclose and discuss what they plan to do in various sorts of emergency, it would at least be slightly harder for demagogic leaders to argue that the most recent attack justifies them in doing whatever they like. Crises are less likely to produce institutional change, and to have unpredictable results, if they have been foreseen and publicly discussed."

Never has the need for global collaboration been more conspicuous. Never has the need to unleash the collective, creative, critical intelligence of humanity been more urgent. And yet the contemporary culture of the "War on Terror" has seemed downright hostile to intelligence in all its forms. Efforts to understand the social conditions that promote terror are regularly dismissed as "appeasement." Critical thinking about our response to terror is routinely denigrated as "treason." Authorities strive to insulate their conduct from criticism and scrutiny behind veils of secrecy in the name of "security." (And all of this is depressingly of a piece, of course, with the current Bush Administration's assaults on consensus environmental science, genetic research, effective sex education, and all the rest.)

It is no wonder so many of us fear the "War on Terror" quite as much as we fear terrorism itself. But how much more damaging than the self-defeating and authoritarian responses to conventional terrorism can we expect the response to the emerging threats of Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices" to be?

When devastating technologies become cheap and ubiquitous we must redress the social discontent that makes their misuse seem justifiable to more people than we can ever hope to manage or police. Since we cannot hope to halt the development of all the cheap, disastrously weaponizable technologies on the horizon, nor can we hope to perfectly control their every use, Lessig suggests that "perhaps the rational response is to reduce the incentives to attack... maybe we should focus on ways to eliminate the reasons to annihilate us." Fantasies of an absolute control over these technologies, or of an absolute control through technology (SDI, TIA, and its epigones, anyone?), are sure to exacerbate the very discontent that will make their misuse more widespread.

Anticipating the inevitable objection, Lessig is quick to point out that "[c]razies, of course, can't be reasoned with. But we can reduce the incentives to become a crazy. We could reduce the reasonableness -— from a certain perspective -— for finding ways to destroy us." Criminals, fanatics and madmen are in fact a manageable minority in any culture. (Racist know-nothing slogans to the contrary about a so-called epic and epochal "Clash of Civilizations" deserve our utter contempt.) Although there is no question that Lessig's "Insanely Destructive Devices" could still do irreparable occasional harm in their hands, it is profoundly misleading to focus on the threats posed by crazy and criminal minorities when it is as often as not the exploitation of legitimate social discontent that makes it possible for lone gunmen to recruit armies to their "causes."

Lessig concludes that "[t]here's a logic to p2p threats that we as a society don't yet get. Like the record companies against the Internet, our first response is war. But like the record companies, that response will be either futile or self-destructive. If you can't control the supply of IDDs, then the right response is to reduce the demand for IDDs. [Instead, America's] present course of unilateral cowboyism will continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us."

For generations, progressives have sought to ameliorate the suffering of the wretched of the Earth. We have struggled to diminish poverty, widen the franchise, and ensure through education and shared prosperity that more and more people (though still obscenely too few people) have a personal stake as citizens in their societies. We have fought for these things because we have been moved by the tragedy of avoidable suffering, and by the unspeakable waste of intelligence, creativity and pleasure that is denied us all when any human being is oppressed into silence by poverty or tyranny.

The emerging threat of cheap and ubiquitous, massively destructive technologies provides a new reason to redress social injustice and the discontent it inspires (for those among you who really need another reason): The existence of injustice anywhere might soon threaten you quite literally, and needlessly, with destruction.

This piece is a slightly edited version of a column that appeared at BetterHumans, April 28, 2004.

Keep Your Laws Off My Body

I first heard the slogan, "Keep your laws off my body!" as an activist well over a decade ago, when I was still in my 20s. But I cannot remember if it was in a rally decrying the sodomy laws that were still on the books in Georgia, where I lived at the time, or in a march to defend a woman's "right to choose" against conservative legal assaults.

For me, the slogan, and the feminist politics of "Choice," have always described more than an attitude about reproductive freedom. They've described a much broader, much more radical sensibility. In fact, I tend to think the conventional word "choice" is altogether too anemic to capture what is at stake in this broader sensibility. At the heart of the politics of bodily self-determination, or "choice," is much more than the "right" of docile liberal consumers to select options from some menu created and maintained by others.

Bodily self-determination is a project to expand the sphere of bodies and of embodied lives that are taken as socially legible, as lives worth living, as lives with standing. It is a demand for freedom construed as a responsibility enabled by responsiveness, as a self-creation enabled by collaboration, as an autonomy enabled by interdependence, as an informed consent enabled by the permanent possibility of forgiveness.

Too often "choice" amounts to little more than a sad stand-in for and domestication of the freedom that is at stake in that joyous and righteous demand for bodily self-determination: Keep Your Laws Off My Body!

And so, I use the term "morphological freedom," which I have appropriated from an essay by Anders Sandberg, to name this broader conception of the culture and politics of bodily self-determination and "choice." I use it especially to connect up the cultural politics of responsible embodied self-creation with the problems and promises inhering in the emerging technologically constituted proliferation of techniques available for the genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification of human bodies and embodied human lives today and in the near-term futures we can reasonably anticipate.

The feminist politics of bodily self-determination have sometimes already connected the defense of reproductive decisions to other political struggles -- for example, to the politics around queer forms of family and affiliation, transgender rights, end of life issues, resisting the disastrous contemporary War on Drugs, and so on. I think that the feminist politics of bodily self-determination should be expanded further still, to accommodate an affirmative politics of genetic medicine, the support of increased scientific research and education, and the facilitation of multiplying therapeutic options.

Ignorance Has Its Uses

On November 5, 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the so-called "partial birth" abortion ban. The moment of the signing was captured in an image that is perfectly emblematic of the larger historical stakes in play for women in this moment. The President is seated at his desk, document and pen before him, staring a bit blankly into space. Behind him are a host of grinning and enthusiastically applauding men. Looming behind them are a host of American flags.

There are no women present at all.

For the bodies of women, you must turn to the text of the document itself, for the bodies of women are treated as texts on which these men are presuming to write.

I have described this law as the "so-called" partial birth abortion ban because, as it happens, no such medical procedure exists. Medical literature contains no references at all to this occasionally banned and vilified procedure. "Partial birth abortion" is a public relations creation of the anti-choice (so-called "pro-life") conservative Right, designed to conjure up a scene of profound grisly violation that can, for the lack of any clear reference in reality, attach in the popular imagination and subsequently in the applications of law to an ever-broadening range of legitimate and affirmed medical procedures.

As technology continues to blur established biological lines, such obfuscation will only get worse.

The trajectory of technological development has introduced real perplexities into the status of profound embodied life-experiences such as pregnancy, sexual maturation, illness, aging, and death. Already, the susceptibility of organisms to prosthetic and pharmacological intervention has transformed the status of "viability" as a stable measure of just when lives can properly be said to begin or to end, or as a benchmark against which to leverage intuitions about the proper scope of such intervention.

Consider the impact of the emotional investments sometimes occasioned by early-term ultrasound imaging of fetuses in the womb, or the sometimes disturbingly agile machine-assisted afterlives of the brain-dead or irretrievably comatose. These technological spectacles delineate a crisis in traditional meaning that is exacerbated by contemporary technological developments now on an almost day to day basis.

The appalling effectiveness of the rhetoric of "partial-birth" abortion and similar anti-choice interventions lies in their exploitation of ignorance about specific procedures and capacities, as well as in their exploitation of a deep uneasiness provoked by such technological development about the biological as well as cultural limits of recognizable and hence meaningful human lives more generally.

Socially conservative and bioconservative bioethicists such as Leon Kass, retired chair of the influential United States President's Council on Bioethics, eagerly deploy this kind of uneasiness like a cudgel in support of their anti-choice agendas. Kass, for instance, has notoriously urged that there is a "wisdom" we should heed in the involuntary shudders of repugnance that seem to accompany for him and some others practically any confrontation with new genetic medical technologies.

Like a divine intervention, this admonitory shuddering seizes Kass himself whenever he contemplates abortion, physician-assisted suicide, in-vitro fertilization, the radical amelioration of the diseases of aging, embryonic stem-cell research, or the merest suggestion of cloning. Since a shudder of repugnance need offer no reasons in support of itself for its decisive force to be felt, one has to wonder (even if you find his particular sympathies and antipathies personally congenial) just how Kass would distinguish his own instinctive recoils from those occasioned in his predecessors in generations past by the contemplation of anesthesia, interracial marriage, or consensual sodomy.

Family Resemblance

There is a decisive family resemblance between conventional anti-choice politics that try to hijack the concept of "life" and the recent effort of many bioconservative bioethicists to hijack the concept of human "dignity" in the service of projects to ban and restrict therapeutic choices and avenues of medical research just to better reflect their own parochial interests and tastes (and very often it is literally the same people who are making these parallel arguments).

Bioconservative technophobic politics take amazingly diverse forms, but the broad contours will seem suspiciously familiar to feminists long-used to conservative arguments against abortion rights. Last year, for example, I read about an Illinois bill to restrict surgically splitting the tongue lengthwise to produce the appearance of a snake- or lizard-like forking. Shannon Larratt, a Canadian who had his tongue split in 1996 for esthetic reasons, argued that it "can be a dangerous procedure. Now they'll force people who want this -- and there are a lot of people who want this -- into untrained hands."

Sound familiar?

But where should technoprogressives look to find allies in the struggle to articulate and support our morphological freedom? To the usual facile market libertarian technophiles for whom the demands of freedom require little more than signing on to a contract, however prevailing conditions might duress its terms? I judge the conceptual and strategic resources available to the feminist culture of bodily self-determination or "choice" far more relevant and more robust to the delineation and defense of what I am calling morphological freedom than, say, the comparably anemic "negative liberty" of the market libertarian. When feminism embraces the technologies and therapies through which a desired but otherwise unavailable pregnancy is initiated, or through which an unwanted pregnancy is terminated, these reproductive freedoms provide more than a simple defense of a woman's liberty, but represent instead moments in a profoundly emancipatory technologically mediated struggle for equality and self-determination inconceivable in any "state of nature."

Already feminist sensibilities contribute indispensable perspectives to the negotiation of complex bioethical dilemmas that a "negative libertarian" framework will hopelessly oversimplify. Should growth hormone be administered by a parent to confer a positional advantage on an otherwise developmentally "normal" child? Does plastic surgery consolidate or subvert arbitrary and in fact damaging standards of bodily attractiveness? Will preimplantation genetic diagnosis diminish valuable human diversity even as it certainly diminishes human suffering? Is the advocacy of physician-assisted suicide a way of defending individual autonomy or does it amount instead to encouraging valuable human beings to leave the scene rather than spending the resources in health care and social support that would help many who are suicidal feel their lives are worth living? And so on.

Morphological Freedom Fighters

While adding a welter of new technological quandaries to the politics of "Choice" may seem to risk an evacuation of the real urgency of conventional "pro-choice" politics in the specificity of their reproductive applications at a time when women's rights to bodily self-determination are under attack as never before. But I think and hope that emphasizing the range of affinity and connection to other vital struggles for responsible embodied self-creation is just as likely to strengthen feminist politics in that specificity even as it illuminates those other struggles.

By embracing the technological forces that would expand the reach of reasonable self-determination over once-definitive biological limits, a hopeful radical responsible feminist politics of self-creation can seize the initiative away from the conservative and bioconservative politics of fear in this most intimate collision of technologies with individual human bodies. This more hopeful politics of technological possibility is necessary to turn the tide against recent conservative successes that limit our access to contraceptive procedures and reproductive technologies as well as to reasonable and life-saving sex education practices and a whole host of related issues.

It would also put us in a more credible position to resist a few developmental pathways that really are too dangerous by objective measures (reproductive cloning, at least for now, is such an example), to protect our right and capacity to decide ourselves and in private secure consultation with trusted authorities the ways in which technological transformation will impinge on our own narratives of personal meaningfulness, as well as to plausibly regulate technological development to ensure that its costs and risks as well as its benefits are all distributed fairly among all the stakeholders to that development.

Human dignity, surely, is not diminished by the proliferation of the decisions we can make, nor by the spectacle of the ongoing play of human self-determination in all its promising, forgiving, coping, pleasure, suffering, standing. Dignity, it seems to me, demands freedom above all.

This piece is a slightly edited and expanded version of a column that appeared at BetterHumans, March 22, 2004. That column was adapted itself from a paper delivered on March 11, 2004 at the 13th Annual Boundaries in Question Conference, "Feminists Face the Future: New Feminist Perspectives on Biotechnology and Bioethics," held at the University of California at Berkeley.