In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" _Star Trek_-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In _How We Became Posthuman,_ N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an information age. Hayles relates three interwoven stories: how information lost (...) its body, that is, how it came to be conceptualized as an entity separate from the material forms that carry it; the cultural and technological construction of the cyborg; and the dismantling of the liberal humanist "subject" in cybernetic discourse, along with the emergence of the "posthuman." Ranging widely across the history of technology, cultural studies, and literary criticism, Hayles shows what had to be erased, forgotten, and elided to conceive of information as a disembodied entity. Thus she moves from the post-World War II Macy Conferences on cybernetics to the 1952 novel _Limbo_ by cybernetics aficionado Bernard Wolfe; from the concept of self-making to Philip K. Dick's literary explorations of hallucination and reality; and from artificial life to postmodern novels exploring the implications of seeing humans as cybernetic systems. Although becoming posthuman can be nightmarish, Hayles shows how it can also be liberating. From the birth of cybernetics to artificial life, _How We Became Posthuman_ provides an indispensable account of how we arrived in our virtual age, and of where we might go from here. (shrink)

This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for (...) contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'. (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

by MICHEL FOUCAULT Everyone knows that in France there are few logicians but many historians of science; and that in the 'philosophical establishment' - whether teaching or research oriented - they have occupied a considerable position. But do we know precisely the importance that, in the course of these past fifteen or twenty years, up to the very frontiers of the establishment, a 'work' like that of Georges Canguilhem can have had for those very people who were separ ated from, (...) or challenged, the establishment? Yes, I know, there have been noisier theatres: psychoanalysis, Marxism, linguistics, ethnology. But let us not forget this fact which depends, as you will, on the sociology of French intellectual environments, the functioning of our university institutions or our system of cultural values: in all the political or scientific discussions of these strange sixty years past, the role of the 'philosophers' - I simply mean those who had received their university training in philosophy department- has been important: perhaps too important for the liking of certain people. And, directly or indirectly, all or almost all these philosophers have had to 'come to terms with' the teaching and books of Georges Canguilhem. From this, a paradox: this man, whose work is austere, intentionally and carefully limited to a particular domain in the history of science, which in any case does not pass for a spectacular discipline, has somehow found him self present in discussions where he himself took care never to figure. (shrink)

In this essay I follow one argument strand from Linda Singer's Erotic Welfare. How can we have a forward-looking and affirmative ideal of sexual freedom when the AIDS panic has altered the sexual landscape and instigated new justifications for oppressive sexual disciplines? How can we be sexual subjects when processes of commodification and disciplinary practices have constrained sexual expression while proliferating sexual fetishes? These are some of the questions this book formulates, without answering.

Historically, male sexual fitness was framed by a patriarchal politics of life centred on regeneration, population and nation. In the later 20th century, as successful ageing became promoted by the lifestyle practices of an idealized healthy and active senior citizenry, traditional gerontocratic power over the sexual risks of youth gave way to a medical sexology concerned with sexual functionality across the lifecourse; in particular, erectility. Recently, erectile dysfunction has expanded to become a population-wide health problem with increasingly refined diagnoses based (...) on `phases', `early warning signs' and preventative regimes, especially as Viagra has become so widely available. This article explores a new bodily configuration in the making; arising, on the one hand, from the pharmacological and scientific technologization of male sexuality, and, on the other, from a contemporary politics of life that both contests the late-life ageism of the past and fosters a mid-life ageism in the present. (shrink)

Psyche and Soma is a multi-disciplinary exploration of the history of understanding of the human mind or soul and its relationship to the body, through the course of more than two thousand years. Thirteen specially commissioned chapters, each written by a recognized expert, discuss such figures as the doctors Hippocrates and Galen, the theologians St Paul, Augustine, and Aquinas, and philosophers from Plato to Leibniz.

In recent years a debate has developed over whether Aristotle's theory of the psuchê is properly characterized as having been "functionalist" in the sense that contemporary computational cognitive scientists claim to be adherents of that position. It is argued here that there are indeed some similarities between Aristotle's theory and that of contemporary functionalists, but that the differences between them make it misleading, at best, for functionalists to look to Aristotle for ancient support. In particular, it is argued that Aristotle (...) would not have -- indeed, specifically did not -- support the claim, central to functionalism, that the mind can, in principle, be transported from one body to another simply by instantiating in the new body some set of organizational properties that were instantiated in the old. (shrink)

The Visible Human Project examines how the VHP provides visual access to every organ of the body, viewable from every angle and capable of being manipulated to simulate living processes like respiration.

This collection of his later essays discusses the role played by ideological factors in determining the direction, if not the results, of scientific work.

A trenchant critique of sexuality in an age of discipline, where bodies and pleasures have become sites of regulatory power.

This article addresses the relations between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (and those characteristics associated with ‘the natural’ and ‘the cultural’) in the context of the debates about Prozac. Following Marilyn Strathern, I focus specifically on the contested issue of enablement - that is, on what Prozac does or does not enable, and on the relation between enablement and enhancement, normality and pathology. I argue that the implications of the model of the brain that accompanies explanations of Prozac are such that commentators (...) are obliged to address not only the nature of normality but also the nature of nature itself. Through a close analysis of these debates, I suggest that critiques of Prozac should be understood not as objections to reductionism - to a biology that closes things down - but rather to one that opens things up: that opens up the relations between nature, culture, biology and the individual, relations that are now cross-cut and thrown about by artificiality. Objections to Prozac, then, might be characterized as an attempt to put these concepts back into their ‘proper’ positions, to re-establish the relationality between them. In conclusion, I argue that the biology put forward by proponents of psychopharmacology, regardless of the desirability of the latter, challenges not only the frequent assumptions that are made about the claims of materialist science, but also some of the terms and concepts that are commonly deployed in the social sciences. (shrink)