Recently, posthumanism has been used to describe new cultures of technology (Hayles, 1999; Badmington, 2003; Fukuyama, 2003), where social and moral norms are contested on the basis of the imagined ethical issues they present. This paper aims to further understand the characteristics of posthumanism by exploring the intersecting philosophical and cultural discussions surrounding it. Specifically, it pursues the relationship between posthumanism and emerging medical technology, claiming that posthumanism is framed by medical or therapeutic/enhancing parameters. However, in contrast with other theoretical representations of posthumanism, it is argued that the concept’s significance relies more on the ideological issues it presents, rather than the technological developments it describes. To this extent, posthumanism can be understood as a process of ‘perpetual becoming’, where this implies trying to utilise broad moral discourses to re-construct grand narratives in the wake of postmodernism. Thus, specific instances of medical technology are not posthuman, but their propensity to give political credibility to new definitions of humanness is. Posthumanism also constitutes a theoretical turn towards problematising the ‘spectacle’ (Kellner, 2003) of high-technology, which is informed by the media and cultural politics of public, moral debates on science (egs. human genome project, human cloning, saviour siblings, and stem cell research). In this context, the paper concludes by considering whether (and in what form) posthuman medicine should give rise to a ‘posthuman bioethics’ (Kember, 2003) and how this relates to methodological debates in medical ethics about emerging medical technologies.

References

Badmington, N. (2003). "Theorizing Posthumanism." Cultural Critique 53(Winter): 11-27.

Fukuyama, F. (2002). Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. London, Profile Books.

Hayles, N. K. (1999). How we became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. London, University of Chicago Press

Kellner, D. (2003). Media Spectacle. London and New York, Routledge.

Kember, S. (2003). Cyberfeminism and Artificial Life. London and New York, Routledge.