The meaning and significance of prostheses: the posthuman future of embodiment
In the postmodern era, the interface of bodies, biologies and technologies increasingly challenges not only normative embodiment, but also the very understanding of what counts as human. The deployment of prostheses, both inorganic and more significantly organic, is one major area which demonstrates how embodiment can be varied such that the usual markers of human being – bounded bodies, unique DNA, an enduring sense of self – can no longer be taken for granted. Existing studies have already explored prosthetic technologies in relation to their utilisation by people with disabilities, and by those undergoing organ transplantation who may also experience mechanical implants prior to obtaining an organic prosthesis. In addition, research in the biological sciences indicates that each of us carries a variety of non-self, effectively prosthetic, cells from multiple sources. Where prostheses once simply marked rehabilitation to normative practice or appearance, they now indicate transformative possibilities that both limit and extend the nature of the embodied self. My research looks at the challenge to the western understanding of the human that comes from those bodies that should be understood not as irregular forms of normative embodiment, but as limit cases of a common experience. I use recent continental philosophy and feminist theory to open up the significance of prostheses in revaluing multiple variant forms and in thinking transcorporeality as the very condition of life.
Final report
The Meaning and Significance of Prostheses: Biotechnologies and the Posthuman Future of Embodiment
My overall purpose has been to bring together 3 very different forms of prostheses in the respective areas of disability, microchimerism and transplantation to suggest ways in which insights from each can combine to shed light on the philosophical and cultural meanings and significances of prosthetic embodiment. What is urgently needed In our contemporary postEnlightenment period is a thorough reconfiguration of the bioethics, epistemology and ontology of what has hitherto been understood as ’proper’ human embodiment. In the postmodern era, the purity of strictly ‘human’ embodiment is highly contested and it is necessary to think a different future that does not take for granted the wholeness, separation and independence of the body. I have endeavoured to gain a deeper understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of the prosthetic experience, which are fundamentally about the relation between self and otherness, and I have suggested ways forward in the task of welcoming prostheticised embodiment, whether in the context of disability, donated body parts, or microchimerism. There have been no major changes in the project categories since my original proposal but it has become clear that my primary focus – and the originality of the project - centres on visceral prostheses: that is, those ones that are incorporated into, or are inherent to, the biology of the body. That has meant less emphasis on the status of things like robots that are external to the body (and therefore no need to spend any extended time visiting a robotics lab), although an in-depth exploration of the significance of prostheses in disability scenarios remains. As a result of the shift in focus, I have spent more time exploring the bioscientific understanding of embodiment, and have been engaging intensively with visual artists – particularly those associated with a previous heart transplant project, and also with bioartists, such as the SOLU group in Helsinki.
The project was always intended to be highly interdisciplinary and that has had a profound effect on how I have approached the issues in hand. I have talked extensively not only to colleagues in philosophy, critical disability and cultural studies, but to health care professionals, immunologists, cardiologists, and performance and visual artists to list but a few. In tracking the transition from the conventional body of modernist thought toward the becoming body of posthumanist speculation, I focused on the substantive areas of disability (both physically or cognitively marked); organ and tissue transplantation; and the understanding of the immune self as a defensive system protecting against otherness. Each area was addressed through the notion of prostheses to uncover the extent to which embodiment is already reliant on both organic and non-organic augmentation and supplementation, and in the case of supposed immunity already shot through with microchimeric non-self internal components at a cellular level. The following specific approaches were pursued: 1. The grounding empirical work on which the project has been based is mainly in the field of transplantation and disability and I did not need to repeat my previous research but rather to critically interpret it along new pathways; 2. I developed some innovative theoretical pathways by rethinking and applying the insights of of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze) and applying it to my own materials; and 3. I speculated on potential substantive outcomes. In reality there are no hard and fast distinctions to be made between the categories, and I did not intend or expect to arrive at a stable outcome. The postconventional theoretical context in which the research is situated is highly fluid and my aim has been as much to generate new questions – about the status of human embodiment, for example, as to provide any answers.
I can report that the project has reached a satisfactory – albeit interim - end point and has generated a great deal of interest worldwide. Perhaps the most significant achievement has undoubtedly been my success in getting the issues at the heart of my project talked about more widely and beyond my own basis in biophilosophy. During the pre-Covid part of the project I gave multiple keynotes and presentations – some academic, some public - setting out the novel ideas at the heart of the research, and learned much from a range of interlocutors; post-Covid I have led or joined many Zoom events with the same aims. (A list appear in the Comments section).There have also been some podcast interviews and video shorts associated with the project that I hope have engaged a wider lay public as well as academics. During the project I was co-organiser of a highly successful 3 day workshop/exhibition – Reimagining Transplantation - in Copenhagen which brought together practitioners, artists, transplant recipients and theorists. As a direct result, I co-edited a Special Issue on transplantation for BMJ Medical Humanities which included some of my own RJ funded research. I had eagerly anticipated a further workshop/exhibition relating to heart transplantation at the Science Museum in London, but that was cancelled as a result of Covid. There have been numerous publications associated with the project, but the one with the most significance - and the third important outcome - is my paper ‘(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death’, in Australian Feminist Studies (2019) 34:99. It takes the thinking of the posthuman into new directions and has garnered a lot of attention.
Serious engagement with the posthuman future of embodiment has grown enormously over the last couple of years, and there has been an upsurge of interest particularly from emerging scholars. Through my research on the microbiome and microchimerism I have been able to make valuable links with environmental scholars, while at the same time there have been some promising links with bioscientists who are interested in thinking about the socio-cultural and ethical implications of their lab work. The conjunction of humanistic and scientific perspectives has been very rewarding and has opened up some fascinating new fields of knowledge production. The implications for future practices in the substantive fields of transplantation, disability, surrogacy and dementia - to name just a few relevant areas - are profound, while in more abstract and speculative arenas, the need to rethink just what is meant by the term 'human being' is becoming ever more urgent. I feel there are innumerable new avenues to explore directly in the field of prosthesis – my own substantive areas of interest were chosen fairly unsystematically – and beyond that narrow focus the issue of what constitutes human life is open to extensive further analysis. Posing the question of human biology alongside the progressive humanities and artistic practice indicates that the former should no longer be ignored or classed as essentialist and therefore of little critical interest. The project’s international dimensions speak to an opening up of possibilities for future collaborations, and I remain in contact with cardiologists and immunologists in Canada, epidemiologists in Denmark, gynaecologists in Norway and anatomists and immunologists in Ireland. The specific RJ project has now concluded, but it has already generated other spin-offs. The question of what it means to be alive (or dead) has been a developing issue for the biophilosophical side of the research and I intend to explore this further in a new loosely related Finnish-based research collaboration on gifting.
My overall purpose has been to bring together 3 very different forms of prostheses in the respective areas of disability, microchimerism and transplantation to suggest ways in which insights from each can combine to shed light on the philosophical and cultural meanings and significances of prosthetic embodiment. What is urgently needed In our contemporary postEnlightenment period is a thorough reconfiguration of the bioethics, epistemology and ontology of what has hitherto been understood as ’proper’ human embodiment. In the postmodern era, the purity of strictly ‘human’ embodiment is highly contested and it is necessary to think a different future that does not take for granted the wholeness, separation and independence of the body. I have endeavoured to gain a deeper understanding of the conceptual underpinnings of the prosthetic experience, which are fundamentally about the relation between self and otherness, and I have suggested ways forward in the task of welcoming prostheticised embodiment, whether in the context of disability, donated body parts, or microchimerism. There have been no major changes in the project categories since my original proposal but it has become clear that my primary focus – and the originality of the project - centres on visceral prostheses: that is, those ones that are incorporated into, or are inherent to, the biology of the body. That has meant less emphasis on the status of things like robots that are external to the body (and therefore no need to spend any extended time visiting a robotics lab), although an in-depth exploration of the significance of prostheses in disability scenarios remains. As a result of the shift in focus, I have spent more time exploring the bioscientific understanding of embodiment, and have been engaging intensively with visual artists – particularly those associated with a previous heart transplant project, and also with bioartists, such as the SOLU group in Helsinki.
The project was always intended to be highly interdisciplinary and that has had a profound effect on how I have approached the issues in hand. I have talked extensively not only to colleagues in philosophy, critical disability and cultural studies, but to health care professionals, immunologists, cardiologists, and performance and visual artists to list but a few. In tracking the transition from the conventional body of modernist thought toward the becoming body of posthumanist speculation, I focused on the substantive areas of disability (both physically or cognitively marked); organ and tissue transplantation; and the understanding of the immune self as a defensive system protecting against otherness. Each area was addressed through the notion of prostheses to uncover the extent to which embodiment is already reliant on both organic and non-organic augmentation and supplementation, and in the case of supposed immunity already shot through with microchimeric non-self internal components at a cellular level. The following specific approaches were pursued: 1. The grounding empirical work on which the project has been based is mainly in the field of transplantation and disability and I did not need to repeat my previous research but rather to critically interpret it along new pathways; 2. I developed some innovative theoretical pathways by rethinking and applying the insights of of phenomenology (from Merleau-Ponty to Deleuze) and applying it to my own materials; and 3. I speculated on potential substantive outcomes. In reality there are no hard and fast distinctions to be made between the categories, and I did not intend or expect to arrive at a stable outcome. The postconventional theoretical context in which the research is situated is highly fluid and my aim has been as much to generate new questions – about the status of human embodiment, for example, as to provide any answers.
I can report that the project has reached a satisfactory – albeit interim - end point and has generated a great deal of interest worldwide. Perhaps the most significant achievement has undoubtedly been my success in getting the issues at the heart of my project talked about more widely and beyond my own basis in biophilosophy. During the pre-Covid part of the project I gave multiple keynotes and presentations – some academic, some public - setting out the novel ideas at the heart of the research, and learned much from a range of interlocutors; post-Covid I have led or joined many Zoom events with the same aims. (A list appear in the Comments section).There have also been some podcast interviews and video shorts associated with the project that I hope have engaged a wider lay public as well as academics. During the project I was co-organiser of a highly successful 3 day workshop/exhibition – Reimagining Transplantation - in Copenhagen which brought together practitioners, artists, transplant recipients and theorists. As a direct result, I co-edited a Special Issue on transplantation for BMJ Medical Humanities which included some of my own RJ funded research. I had eagerly anticipated a further workshop/exhibition relating to heart transplantation at the Science Museum in London, but that was cancelled as a result of Covid. There have been numerous publications associated with the project, but the one with the most significance - and the third important outcome - is my paper ‘(Micro)chimerism, Immunity and Temporality: Rethinking the Ecology of Life and Death’, in Australian Feminist Studies (2019) 34:99. It takes the thinking of the posthuman into new directions and has garnered a lot of attention.
Serious engagement with the posthuman future of embodiment has grown enormously over the last couple of years, and there has been an upsurge of interest particularly from emerging scholars. Through my research on the microbiome and microchimerism I have been able to make valuable links with environmental scholars, while at the same time there have been some promising links with bioscientists who are interested in thinking about the socio-cultural and ethical implications of their lab work. The conjunction of humanistic and scientific perspectives has been very rewarding and has opened up some fascinating new fields of knowledge production. The implications for future practices in the substantive fields of transplantation, disability, surrogacy and dementia - to name just a few relevant areas - are profound, while in more abstract and speculative arenas, the need to rethink just what is meant by the term 'human being' is becoming ever more urgent. I feel there are innumerable new avenues to explore directly in the field of prosthesis – my own substantive areas of interest were chosen fairly unsystematically – and beyond that narrow focus the issue of what constitutes human life is open to extensive further analysis. Posing the question of human biology alongside the progressive humanities and artistic practice indicates that the former should no longer be ignored or classed as essentialist and therefore of little critical interest. The project’s international dimensions speak to an opening up of possibilities for future collaborations, and I remain in contact with cardiologists and immunologists in Canada, epidemiologists in Denmark, gynaecologists in Norway and anatomists and immunologists in Ireland. The specific RJ project has now concluded, but it has already generated other spin-offs. The question of what it means to be alive (or dead) has been a developing issue for the biophilosophical side of the research and I intend to explore this further in a new loosely related Finnish-based research collaboration on gifting.