The prosthetic body, from the transhuman to the parahuman
An underlying theme of very strong impact
German philosopher Karin Harrasser's book Körper 2.0. Über die technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen, about to be released in an Italian edition (ed. goWare), opens with a quote from the Austrian writer, Nobel prize winner for literature, Elfride Jelinek: “Today what remains to be said about the imperfect body is that it is the fault of whoever owns it”. In fact, there are many options for technically and functionally improving the human body. The availability of highly technological prostheses or wearable devices, such as Google Glass, has led to a change in the very idea of corporality. The interventions for the improvement of and on the body are no longer understood as the necessary compensation for a disability, but rather as optimisation, strengthening and growth of the body's performance in its physical and cognitive capacities.
This is a very topical issue in its scientific, technological and ethical aspects and the essay by Harrasser, who is working on a cultural and theoretical history of prostheses, addresses the possible passage of the protestant body from the transhuman to the posthuman of Niccian memory. Below are some excerpts from the introduction by Brunella Casalini and Federico Zappino to the Italian edition of Harasser's book:
The anthropology of disability
In You have to change your life, Peter Sloterdijk tells how in the philosophical discourse of the early twentieth century a reflection on man develops starting from the premises of an "anthropology of disability", which he also defines as "existentialism of obstinacy" and of the "despite ”, in which it is the will to triumph over all adversity. An emblematic figure of this "virtuosity of existence" is Carl Hemann Unthan: born without upper limbs, Unthan learned to play the violin with his feet thanks to extreme perseverance and constant exercise, managing to obtain a huge success with the public on the occasion of his numerous exhibitions around the world, recounted at the end of his life in an autobiography entitled Pediscript – text written with a nib held between the toes and typed on the typewriter. The anthropology of disability that Unthan epitomizes is an anthropology of the optimism of the will, in which humanity manifests itself and distinguishes itself – as Sloterdijk again observes – not so much by the ability of human beings to walk upright as by the tension towards verticality, due to the propensity to work on oneself in view of one's own improvement.
The stories of some contemporary Paralympic athletes, such as Aimee Mullins or Oscar Pistorius, are moreover inscribed in this same narrative of the cult of proactivity, resilience and constant exercise on oneself as the key to success, but with an important variant: the enhancing one's performance takes place more through the possibility of "having to be operated on", literally, than of "operating on oneself" - a variant which, in Sloterdijk's vision, is read in terms of loss and degeneration with respect to the "past".
The body 2.0
In Korper 2.0. Über die technische Erweiterbarkeit des Menschen, the German philosopher Karin Harrasser devotes ample space precisely to the figures of the Paralympic athletes and starts, for her analysis, from a critical approach both with respect to Sloterdijk's position and with respect to the optimistic visions of the technique that they see the current age as that of a “2.0” body, i.e. a technically enhanced version of the human body. Harrasser's discourse seems to move on two fronts: on the one hand, from a radically anti-ableist political perspective, he distances himself from the conception of disability as a "lack" or "deficit" which presupposes, and in turn incessantly establishes, an easily traceable between able-bodied and disabled bodies; on the other, you underline the need to look critically at the prosthetic transformations of the body within the neoliberal biopolitical context, also considering them as a product of a neo-capitalist logic, understood here as one of the main culprits of the injunctions to self-optimization.
It happens that disabled people are not all supported by the large and listed Olympic sports clubs, but statistically they fall within the poorest segments of the population. From this point of view, the discourse on disability within neoliberal societies therefore allows us to illuminate some very important aspects, from a theoretical-political point of view, both of the condition of disabled bodies and that of bodies - temporarily, contingently - able .
The boundary that has always been blurred and uncertain between these two conditions, in fact, today finds itself integrated by a new distinction: the social inclusion of "diversity", whether bodily, sexual or racial, occurs on condition that those who are bearers show an interest and a propensity to invest in their physical and cognitive potential, so as to be able to enter the race of competition and competition. Bodies thus come to be distinguished not only into capable bodies and disabled bodies - a distinction which, we repeat, remains significant in both cultural and socio-economic terms -, but also into bodies that can be "strengthened" and "improved", and therefore worthy of social recognition , and "dispensable", "disposable" bodies which, as Judith Butler would say, are not worthy of mourning, and which are therefore more than others exposed to injury, poverty, loneliness, and therefore socially expendable, and actually sacrificed. The control over one's body, the investment in it, its performance capacity and the maintenance of a fiction of sovereignty therefore becomes the element of distinction above all between the disabled bodies themselves, which Harrasser defines here as "flexible normalism".
The evolution towards the transhuman
Unlike early twentieth-century anthropology, in the rhetoric that permeates the figures and stories of contemporary Paralympic athletes, their disability does not play the role of a reminder of a common and unavoidable ontological vulnerability of the body, i.e. that vulnerability for which no body could survive, thrive or move in the absence of relational, social, economic and technological supports; upon closer inspection, rhetorical foreclosures such as these play a leading role precisely in maximizing the vulnerability of disabled bodies, so as to confirm that although the vulnerability of bodies may be ontological, and therefore common to all bodies, it is however be differentially maximized according to the norms governing its cultural perception and social organization.
Yet, not unlike what happened in the anthropology of disability of the early twentieth century, the deficient condition of which we must all become aware, starting from the examples of the Paralympic athletes, should push us in the direction of a vertical movement of self-perfection which is now, however, supported by technology in the direction of an infinite evolution towards the transhuman. As Karin Harrasser observes, the body of the disabled athlete rises to a sort of laboratory, and becomes the prosthetic body par excellence, the most upgradeable and adaptable to technological supports, the most suitable for a technical improvement that allows to amplify its evolutionary possibilities.
Looking critically at the contradictions of technology, as well as at the power relations of the present, does not necessarily coincide with a condemnation of technology itself, especially when it is found to be tied in a double knot to such complex issues as disability. It seems to us that Harrasser's text confirms this. In fact, the author tries to preserve the universalizing meaning of disability by declining it in an opposite direction to that traced by the Nietzschean anthropology of disability referred to by Sloterdijk, through recourse to the figure of the cyborg – cyb(ernetic) + org( anism) – theorized by Donna Haraway.
Harrasser tries to recover the critical figure of the cyborg in the framework of a reflection in which technology is applied to a disabled body, and not just to a capable body. This is not a simple operation, given that the relationship between technology and disabled bodies has always been a complex one: whether external or internal, prostheses, in the history of disability, have mainly performed the function of normalizing and correcting the disabled body, to rehabilitate and cure it.
From this point of view, the risk often denounced by studies on disability is that of reinforcing, through the figure of the cyborg, the medical-individual model of disability, and therefore of perpetuating the idea that the disabled body is a missing and deficient body , which needs to be fixed. For Harrasser, the problem seems to consist rather in the fact that in the contemporary imagination the disabled body (of the athlete), and its prosthetic integration, are implicated in the domain of human enhancement techniques, which, in his hypothesis, would fuel a somatophobic vision individualistic and competitive.
This little book by Karin Harrasser seems to prefigure the possibility of redefining the body in order to include much of what has historically been excluded from it, including first of all prostheses as para-human co-agents, whose action arises as a condition of possibility of this that can a body. From the subject in tension towards verticality, Harrasser thus goes on to delineate a subject that is horizontally caught in a world of human and non-human agents that acts and interacts with him, that changes and evolves together with him, towards which he is held to a response-ability - understood as the ability to respond, and to be responsible, an ability to answer the question of the human and non-human other, as well as knowing how to recognize the response that one's action receives from the human and non-human world -human on which it depends. Transforming the perception of this unavoidable dependence, according to Harrasser, is the challenge of the prosthetic body to the hierarchical and excluding fantasy of independence.
