Science and its Applications: Negotiating Human Enhancement across Media

Organizers: Julia Gatermann (University of Bremen), Martin Butler and Michael Fuchs (University of Oldenburg), Sina Farzin (Bundeswehr University Munich)

The field of human enhancement and augmentation illustrates how basic science, technology, and their sociological contexts intersect. Here, the promise of a ‘better life,’ on the one hand, and breakthroughs in areas such as medicine, biology and engineering, on the other, create a mutually reinforcing dynamic that contributes to an ever-increasing entanglement between research, technological developments and societal discourse. Challenging the very nature of what we conceive of as “nature” or “human”, developments in this field have also regularly fueled (and been fueled by) the technoscientific imaginary articulated in different medial formats, ranging from literary renderings of bodily enhancement to virtual augmentation of reality.

 The complex connections and contradictions between science and its applications are particularly visible in the field of human enhancement and augumentation. The field both informs and is informed by a variety of collective imaginaries in which it is the nodal point for discourses on scientific and technological progress as well as on the social responsibility that comes with it. Research in the field responds to the impulses and demands from society at the same time that it provokes our fears and anxieties in a dynamic and sometimes volatile way, confronting us with the question of how we conceive of ourselves as humans: Some consider recent scientific explorations of bodily modifications that seem to transcend the limitations of human embodiment promising contributions to the ongoing optimization of society, others observe these developments with skepticism.

In this workshop we explore cultural forms of negotiating human enhancement--including the roles of science and technology--and their projections of “the human” into the future.

3.30pm | Opening

3.35pm | Session 1 | Chair: Martin Butler

Martin Willis: "Reading Technologies for Better Sleeping"

Contemporary technologies to improve sleep are now commonplace and multiple. Personal sleep apps, downloaded to personal mobile devices, aim to generate improved sleep patterns and increase relaxation leading to sleep. Corporate sleep pods provide professional workers with options for daytime sleeping to increase wellbeing. In what ways do these sleep technologies enhance sleeping and in turn physical and mental health? What other functions do they offer for users and providers? In my short video presentation I will develop an opening argument about the role of technologies for enhanced sleep that regards sleeping as another commodifiable segment of human biology which is increasingly shifting our present day somnoculture towards production through inaction.

Peter Weingart, David Chartrand, Paul Hamann, and Lucy Hernandez: "The Eugenic and 'Human Enhancement' Narratives"

Two narratives have evolved in parallel: that of so-called negative eugenics focused on the elimination of hereditary diseases, and the narrative of positive eugenics oriented toward the 'breeding' of a 'higher' or improved human race which has found its successor in the discourse on 'human enhancement'.
The paradox is evident: To the degree that the possibilities of an effective intervention into the human genotype have been increased, the narrative of enhancement has been contained by ethical concerns. Whenever progress in molecular biology leads closer to the prospect of a positive/active eugenics or a demand-oriented eugenics, the narrative is pushed back and the ethically more unobjectionable medically focused narrative is given more weight. The dividing line between ethically unproblematic medical indications (hereditary diseases) and ethically more questionable optimizations which have dramatic societal implications becomes increasingly diffuse. Accordingly, the suitable forms of an adequate control become ever more important but also more fragile.
In this project, we track the development of the two narratives as a reaction to scientific discourse in mass media (newspaper), literary fiction, and movies.

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4.35pm | Break

4.45pm | Session 2 | Chair: Michael Fuchs

Anton Kirchhofer: "Re-Historicizing and De-Historicizing the Human: Human Enhancement Scenarios across Discourses and Media"

My contribution will make some points about the notions of historicity of the human as implied in different contemporary theoretical approaches including post- and transhumanism. It will seek to position the concept of human enhancement in the context of these debates, and will go on to discuss materials from contemporary fiction and contemporary TV series, including Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) and Netflix's Altered Carbon (2018/2020), in the relation to these positions.

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Julia Gatermann: "'Model for the Future': Post-Disability and Non-Normative Female Embodiment"

Michael Davidson states that "the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted" (4), highlighting how disability can function as a lens through which the relationship between the body and the technology that interacts with it becomes refracted and readable in new ways. Through prosthetization, bodies have been mediated, as Cassandra Crawford notes in an "always relational process of technologization-in-the-making" (6). Taking into account the wide spectrum of different lived, embodied experiences of and attitudes towards disability, interdisciplinary approaches combining fields from the natural sciences and humanities work towards a reconceptualization of prosthetics that create a notion of post-disability and human enhancement that may challenge the boundaries of what we conceive of as 'human'. As Despina Kakoudaki argues, however, the designed and produced object itself "holds little cultural sway without the literary and cultural context that would make its performance meaningful or attractive" (12). In an analysis of how technological innovation can be translated into mainstream culture, my contribution looks at at two such real-life figures who have come to embody such futuristic notions of the posthuman – Aimee Mullins and Viktoria Modesta.

For anyone who's interested in taking a look at the full-length music video I'm talking about in my presentation, click here.

2pm | Session 3 | Chair: Sina Farzin

Alena Cicholewski: "(Com)Modified Bodies in Stephanie Saulter's Gemsigns (2013)"

In Stephanie Saulter's 2013 debut novel Gemsigns, a pandemic known as "the Syndrome" has wiped out most of humanity. While scientists failed to cure the Syndrome, their efforts towards the creation of humans immune to its effects resulted in extensive genetic engineering to ensure the survival of humanity. However, once they accomplished the creation of babies immune to the Syndrome, the bioengineers did not stop there. Encouraged by profit-oriented corporations that aimed to increase productivity in spite of the Syndrome-induced lack of human resources, bioengineering companies started to develop customized genetically modified workers (the so-called "gems"), at first only for the handling of menial work, later for more specialized tasks. These developments occur within and are representative of existing unequal power structures, as Nicola Hunte explains: "The economic crisis produced by the Syndrome justifies the familiar capitalist arrangement in which certain bodies [i.e. the bodies of people of color] become commodities to be sourced, engineered and exploited" (143). In my presentation, I will read Gemsigns as a warning against how bioengineering can be employed to reaffirm and consolidate racialized hierarchies. In Gemsigns, the enslavement of genetically modified workers does not merely replace older forms of the economic exploitation of oppressed groups but is firmly rooted in real-world power structures thereby addressing the exceptional vulnerability of marginalized people to be commodified by technological progress instead of profiting from it.

Stephan-Alexander Ditze: "Gene-Rich vs. Gene-Poor: The New Genetic Underclass in Biotechnology Fiction"

Since the rise of eugenics, human and social enhancement have been closely intertwined objectives. After all, what goal could the betterment of human nature serve other than the improvement of society as a whole? In contrast to the utopian, or rather eutopian, assumption that the genetic enhancement of the human species will lead to a perfect society, a dystopian response has emerged which extrapolates the social impact of eugenics by trying to understand the potentially cataclysmic consequences that any tempering with human nature and its genome might entail for the brittle fabric of social cohesion. My video presentation is devoted to the analysis of selected literary and filmic manifestations of biotechnological dystopias that extrapolate current scientific trends, thus highlighting the socially disruptive potential arising from scientific innovation. Andrew Niccol's film Gattaca (1997), Jonathan Trigell's novel Genus (2011) and Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) will serve as source materials to examine narrative scenarios of how scientifically engineered human enhancement may result in socio-spatial segregation and genetic apartheid rather than in greater societal cohesion.

3pm | Break

3.10pm | Session 4 | Chair: Julia Gatermann

Galena Hashhozheva: "Richard Powers's Sublime Visions of Human Enhancement"

I start off from the assumption that what we now call human enhancement can be seen as the most recent chapter in the history of an old quest — one that has always cut across science, technology, art, and philosophy — to overcome the limitations of the human condition. While I grant that we use the current term in a very specific technical way, I will show that there are continuities between the new and the old ways of augmenting and transcending the human. In particular, I will focus on the relevance of the sublime, a time-honored aesthetic mode, to the mechanisms and the gains of human enhancement as explored in literary fiction. In two standard accounts of the sublime, those of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, the sublime experience is characterized by a transition from impotence to empowerment, an oscillation between delight and repulsion, and a leap over the limits of one's sensory and mental capacities propelled by the very recognition of those limits. Classic theories of the sublime thus provide a paradigm within which we can critique both the appeal and the nightmare of human enhancement in its contemporary fictional representations. My examples will be provided by two novels by Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement and The Overstory, in which the prospect of enhancing humanity is framed in two different modalities of the sublime: the religious and the natural.
The enhancement of the human in Generosity is an intra-species project consisting in the discovery and future biotechnological promotion of a rarely expressed human gene for happiness and optimism. The plot revolves around an exceptional, chronically happy woman from whom the supposed gene will be harvested for further study and use in outright utopian schemes that could potentially affect all humanity. This is where the sublime comes into play, because once alerted to the existence of such an individual, the wider public — unlike the scientific community with its predominantly utilitarian mindset — begins to project on "Miss Generosity" a myriad of sensibilities derived from the domain of religion, which (alongside nature) is one of the traditional repositories of sublimity and transcendence. In the quasi-religious hysteria that grips the popular imagination, "Miss Generosity" is pushed into the role of a medieval saint, mystic, and messiah, whose charisma is sublime in that it awes, exalts, repels, and threatens all at once.
In The Overstory, the underlying premise is that if humanity is to survive a global ecological collapse, it would have to make itself into something new by aligning its ways and capacities with those of other species: some of them with histories reaching deep into the evolutionary past (e.g. trees), others now on the rise and likely to hold the future (e.g. AI). Despite the substantial presence of biology and computer technology in the novel, Powers emphasizes the spiritual rather than the scientific-and-technological level of this inter-species enhancement of the human. Key to its success are empathy and communication. In particular, Powers makes trees — in all their majesty and natural sublimity — take the center stage in the enhanced communication between humans and non-humans. As seen from The Overstory's treetops, enhancement (via French enhauncer from Latin in- + altus 'high') becomes properly an elevation (Erhabenheit), a raising of lowly humanity to the upper floors of existence.

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Katalina Kopka: "Who Wants to Live Forever? Pop Culture Responses to the Transhumanist Project of Digital Immortality"

According to Google's engineering director Ray Kurzweil, digital immortality is no longer science fiction but the logical – and possible – next step of human evolution (How to Create a Mind 276). Each year, the tech industry invests heavily into research that explores potential routes towards mind uploading, i.e. the transfer of human minds onto non-organic substrates like computers. Set at the intersection of human enhancement, neurobiology, computer science, and philosophical transhumanism, the technology of uploading is highly controversial. Even though techno-optimists promise digital immortality (Moravec 1988; More 2013), a substantial part of the scientific community views uploading critically and questions its feasibility (Shanahan 2015; Tegmark 2017). Moreover, scholars point out significant ethical concerns (Bancroft 2012; Sandberg 2014; Schneider 2019) as well as the incalculable risks of this technology (Bostrom 2014; Russell 2019).
Popular culture reflects these current scientific discourses. In recent years, the English-speaking world saw a surge of films and TV shows that evaluate potential dangers and benefits of technological mind transfers. This talk takes a closer look at two recent screen portrayals of uploading: Jennifer Phang's science fiction film Advantageous (2015) and Owen Harris' "Be Right Back" (2013), a standalone episode of the anthology series Black Mirror. I examine how these fictional accounts assess the complex entanglements of technological enhancement, identity, bereavement, and death in the context of digital immortality. Specifically, this contribution takes a closer look at the ethical challenges of uploading. Since both narratives feature protagonists who grapple with technology-based replicas of loved ones, they offer insightful meditations on the value of human lives in late capitalist societies and the unique nature of the human condition. Ultimately, both stories make significant contributions to the larger conversation about human enhancement in the digital age.

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