Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
One understanding of its purpose seeks freedom and social justice for all
human beings, with people regarded as being fundamentally equal.
During the past two centuries, thinkers who began from that standpoint
saw the key challenge as that of justifying and working to realize the
social, economic, and political conditions that would foster human lib-
eration. Always key to these efforts was the elimination of oppressive
institutions and the creation of better ones. Approaches of this kind are
to be found in the writings of a host of reformers and revolutionaries
from the eighteenth century to the present day—such as Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Thomas Jefferson, the utopian socialists, Marx, John Dewey,
and the like.
A quite different path for radicalism, however—one characteristic of
some nineteenth-century romantic visionaries, twentieth-century sci-fi
novelists, and today's prophets of posthumanism—is one that aspires
to the transcendence of the human shell in quest of more exquisite ways
of being. The possibility that fascinates many here, is that a vastly
improved person, a Nietzschean
Übermensch
or other superior creature,
is an accomplishment well worth seeking. Hence, the focus of revolu-
tionary aspirations no longer rests on cumbersome institutions so
notoriously difficult to change, but rather on the physical composition
of the body one inhabits. The recent shift in social theory away from
concerns about justice and the retailoring of human institutions
toward narcissistic concerns about achieving a revolution in the body
points to a definite weariness about the strategies for change advocated
in earlier decades—organizing unions and resistance movements, for
example. In its place is a renewed willingness to affirm the transforma-
tive powers of science and technology while overlooking the sometimes
unsavory workings of the complex of institutions recently dubbed
technoscience.
Whether they intend to or not, social theorists fascinated with hybrids
and cyborgs could end up playing a significant role in upcoming debates
about practical initiatives to achieve posthuman dreams in tangible form.
More eloquently than the scientists who have embraced posthumanist
projects, they express a weariness about identifying oneself as merely
human at all. That label and all it implies seems to many thinkers so
badly outmoded or so badly stained by histories of violence and injus-
tice that it would be just as well to renounce it altogether. Rather than
