What is it about?
This is a paper discussing the problem of the transformation of our body through the technologies of enhancement. In various fields of research, the enhancement of our bodily capacity has become an acute problem, shown in such problems as doping in sports, medical excesses and the practice of neurosurgery for improved memory. In this paper, I have taken up two distinctive areas, namely the international elite sports and the memory controversy, so as to compare the different ways of understanding enhancement in each area as well as the different ways of such efforts for enhancement are defined and assessed. Two different types of controversy, namely one on the issues in sports related to such topics as the legitimacy of the artificial legs of Oscar Pistorius, and the swimsuits from Speedo Ltd, and the other on the socio-cultural meaning of memory enhancement by Lifelog and its limit, are compared in terms of different "regimes", which consists of the domain of defining enhancement, the institutional apparatus, and the underlying value system that affords such enhancement.
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Why is it important?
Although arguments on the body and enhancement technology are in currency in recent years,researchers have drawn diverse cases from different sources without clarifying the theoretical foundation for possible comparison. In this paper, I have tried to formulate such a ground for comparison in the form of proposing the concept of regime where such enhancement is both defined and executed in socio-technical manner. In addition, I have also shown that in each regime, there are different ways of defining the proper body-technology relations, and that in some cases oft-criticized simplistic model of body (model 1 in this paper) may fit better with the very regime that we focus on, such as that of international sports. The point of this paper is that the triangular relation among the body, technology and enhancement cannot be clearly understood with simply juxtaposing all these elements, but should be discussed in more systematic manner.This also require a sort of self-reflexive analysis on the reason why we problematize this and that of enhancement while let go others just like our attention to memory but not to forgetting.
Perspectives
This paper is intended to be a step towards developing the concept of regime, not only in relation to the issue of enhancement, but also to the general issue of socio-technical entities beyond the concept like infrastructure that are in vogue in recent years. This concern is related to another paper of mine, Value Oscillation in Knowledge Infrastructure, where one of the missed elements of such currency of discussion, namely the elements that are controlled by such infrastructural entities, are discussed.
Professor Masato Fukushima
the University of Tokyo
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Blade Runner and Memory Devices: Reconsidering the Interrelations between the Body, Technology, and Enhancement, East Asian Science Technology and Society An International Journal, September 2015, Duke University Press,
DOI: 10.1215/18752160-3326527.
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Resources
Corpus mysticum digitale (mystical body digital)?: on the concept of two bodies in the era of digital technology
This article analyses the theoretical connotation of the idea of our digital body surviving the death of our natural body, advocated by such evangelists of digital afterlife as Bell and Gemmel. I will explore the seminal notion of ‘two bodies in one’ by Ernst Kantorowicz in his The King’s Two Bodies for the body in the digital era, with reference to the concept of diarchy in traditional authority by Rodney Needham, and Toyo Ito’s concept of the natural and digital body originating from his peculiar view of contemporary architecture. I will discuss the limitation of Bell and Gemmell’s concept of an everlasting digital body, and the intrinsic lack of institutionality upon which the very notion of the two bodies of the king relies. Finally, I will introduce the concept of the corpus mysticum digitale, a figure, which, in the time of the decline of the power of ritual, legitimises the dead as a collective entity that lives eternally, but anonymously.
Sick Bodies and the Political Body: The Political Theology of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Cemetery of Splendor
Taking its cue from the famous early modern concept of the king’s two bodies—the body natural and the body politic—this essay discusses Cemetery of Splendour, the work of filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul as “medical realism,” blending a medical approach to his subject with a sharp eye for social predicaments. When this stance is taken up on social authority, the filmic gaze “inevitably conveys an atmosphere of radical criticism.”
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