Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
one dollar a day that their bodies, abilities, and identities have been
superseded by new products, new hybrids, produced in European and
U.S. high-tech labs and social theory seminars.
In the decades ahead, a climate of opinion centering on posthuman-
ism could well emerge to inform debates about crucial points of depar-
ture in public policy. Within this mood, initiatives of bioengineering will
be regarded as perfectly normal and endlessly fascinating. By the same
token, any resistance to innovations in human reproductive cloning and
human germ line modification could appear regressive, reactionary,
and outmoded. Within this “forward-looking,” “progressive” climate
of opinion, one might still debate which specific models of cyborgs,
posthumans, transhumans, and the like should be engineered. These are
the matters that we can “interrogate,”—matters that are still wonder-
fully “contestable.” But to deny that any such projects should be
launched at all will likely be rejected as simply out of touch with con-
temporary trends. For you see, dear friends, the boundaries have already
been breached, the precedents established, the work of innovation set in
motion, and the “promising monsters” all introduced at the cyborg-
feminist/science studies debutante ball. What fascinates us now is the
lovely and, oh, so wonderfully frightening dance of “transgressions”
performed to the currently fashionable “ethnographic fugue.”
Hence, as we look forward to pending discussions on the posthuman
prospect, contemporary social theorists may have something conse-
quential to add. For those who propose that it would be a grand idea to
erase biological boundaries and embark on a wide range of radical and
untested adventures in the reengineering of humankind, scholars in “the
humanities” can happily say, “Haven't you heard? It's already well under
way!”
Notes
1. Jacques Ellul,
The Technological Society
, trans. John Wilkinson (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 428, 431.
2. Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine: The Pentagon of Power
(New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), 435.
3. Gregory Stock,
Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a
Global Superorganism
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 150, 152, 164,
168.
