Unsettling Conditions? Motility, human division and (post)human imperatives

Latimer, Joanna Elizabeth 2013. Unsettling Conditions? Motility, human division and (post)human imperatives. Presented at: Australian Anthropology Association's Annual Conference: The Human in the World, the world in the human., Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, 6-8 November 2013.

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Abstract

My aim in this paper is to explore how two contrasting debates on the posthuman open up different challenges to contemporary understandings of the human. This aim is twofold. First, I unpick the different sets of conditions of possibility offered by these radically diverse theories on the posthuman. Secondly, drawing on my ethnographies of medicine, genetics and science, I go on to illustrate how their different trajectories create very different imperatives for us in conducting our institutions as well as our everyday lives. The first trajectory of the posthuman debate focuses on the revolution in technology, and entails two utopian visions – cyborgism and transhumanism - that dream of extending people’s powers to carve out their own futures. I suggest how these visions of extension run up against a lineage going back to Heidegger and Foucault – one that unpicks notions of the discrete, self-contained and autonomous individual, but nonetheless views the fall or disappearance of the human as dangerous and even dystopian. Drawing on my ethnographies of the politics of health care organization and practice at the end of the 20th century I illustrate how and when extension with technology can be anything but utopian. Specifically, with Strathern, I attend to how technology works us as much as we work it. What we find inside health care is a proliferation of technologies, managerial as well as medical, including the materials of an audit culture directed at managing how care is conducted. Rather than these technologies enhancing people’s power, we find them turned on practitioners and patients alike, in ways that work on the precarity of identity and belonging, and intensify the individuation of responsibility. The second facet of the posthumanism debate concerns the revolution in biology after DNA and the mapping of the genome. Debates here stress substance in common, creating possibilities for new biosocialities, including connection rather than division, and the potential to undo the worst of humanism’s binaries. Specifically, post-genomic biology appears to erode the dividing practices that hold human exceptionalism in place and changes the conditions of possibility for the production and reproduction of humanism’s central figure: the discrete, self-contained and autonomous individual capable of living the ethical life. Drawing on my ethnographies of genetic science and medicine, I hold the discourses, processes and practices that make up these worlds against both humanist and posthumanist imperatives and show that any totalizing narrative here is too simplistic. Instead, we find cultural performances of the clinic and the laboratory that are adept at shifting their grounds across both human and posthuman imaginaries. What comes into view in my work then, is motility, the imperative to continuously switch extensions, and shift the world, the condition of never being allowed to settle.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Keynote)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HM Sociology H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	30 March 2016
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2016 03:52
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/68025

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