The increasing integration of the human body with technology is a topic that has been attracting significant attention of late (for comprehensive reviews, see the works of Fortunati, 1995, 1998, and Maldonado, 1992, 1997, 1998;see also Brooks, 2002; Hayles, 1999; Katz, 2003; Kurzweil, 2000; Moravec, 1999). Scholars, social critics, lay people, and the press have weighed in on it. The topic also receives repeated attention from the world’s religious, business, and political leaders. Indeed, it is likely to be one of the most significant social issues of the 21st century (Kelly, 1995).
Clearly the amazing progress in the integration of the human body with technological devices increases the anxiety of many, and the delight of others (Katz, 2003). But no matter what one’s attitude toward the desirability of these developments, virtually no one regards them without passion.
Whether the subject is genetic manipulation, plastic surgery, portable communication technology, intelligent household appliances, medical manipulation of the body, or moreradical applications in the technologies of war, terror, and torture, all these issues require attention on both a practical and a political level. It follows that this subject should also be an issue of scholarly interest, which it is, and an impressive output on the topic has accumulated.
However, much of this scholarly work neglects the direct effects on the human body of technology’s everyday advances. The perspectives include literary analysis, historical comparisons, analytical reports, and speculative interpretations. The purpose of all these efforts is to improve our understanding of the experience of body as it is mediated among competing forces and intellectual domains.
Moreover, throughout the chapters runs a strand that takes up the question of what future lies in store for the body that has served humankind so well for so many millennia. As technology progresses, some fear that the body will become at best a mere appendix to the machine, at worst the machine’s obliterated victim.
This fear is not out of place, because the body is increasingly running the risk of becoming an appendix to the machine, despite there being, as Nietzsche wrote (1973/1883–1885, pp. 34–35), more reason in the body than in our best wisdom. Technology, goes this line of argument, instead of being an instrument in the hands of human beings, is in danger of becoming (if it has not already become) its end, producing the inversion (and confusion) of the relative virtues of quantity and quality that, as Galimberti underlined (1999), Hegel had already described in his Logic.
As the illuminating analyses of Marx and then Simmel remind us, the first cause of these transformations of quantity into quality is money, which has become the dominant consideration in directing technological development. If in fact money serves as the force through which goods are produced and hence needs satisfied, it changes from being a means into an end.
To attain it, we do not hesitate to sacrifice, when necessary, the production of goods (even going so far as to destroy products rather than see them sold or given away) and therefore reduce the satisfaction of needs. Technology has suffered the same fate as money, even if it remains subordinated to it.
From being a means, an instrument, it has become an end, to which even ethics and politics must bow in reverence. Ethics, which used to be where ends were described and elaborated, has become conditioned by technology, which obliges it to take positions on a reality that technology itself produces (bio-ethics) (Galimberti, 2000).
Politics, from being a place where technology was assigned its specific ends, now adapts passively to technology. The result is that politics is less and less able to control or shape technology and therefore increasingly frequently acts only as a guarantee for it.
At this point, politics runs the risk of assisting in the development of a society for technology and not with technology. The body, however, as Heidegger (1959) suggested, seems to be fleeing from itself, because activity—the production of objects by the body—is a way for the body to possess itself in things, on the one hand, and to reveal the latent possibilities of things, on the other.
For this reason, there is much of our bodies in technology, just as there is much technology in our bodies. So the body is an entity with a high natural and cultural dynamics. And yet, in a world in which the artificial is extending its dominion over the natural, apparently without check, the body at the same time represents the maximum level of “naturalness” that is possible at a given historical moment.
This double dynamics is even deeper than it seems if we look at the body in yet another way, that is, as a product, the result of a work process. The machine may be a “fille née sans mère,” as Francis Picacia wrote, but human bodies have a mother (today even two). Bodies in fact are produced by women in the domestic sphere.
But, although bodies continue to be represented as natural products, they conceal an ever higher degree of artificiality. The sphere of reproduction indeed has not yet attained social visibility as the sphere of production of value, and there is not therefore a strong enough awareness of its central position as production.
The domestic sphere, despite being where the continuous valorization of women’s labor, and therefore of women themselves, is inscribed, is still a place of naturalness. Bodies as products of women in the domestic sphere seem therefore to be a natural product, which makes them socially quite defenseless and excludes them from clear and formal negotiation.
The human body, because it is placed outside the rationale of value, is seen as something whose value is so incommensurable and therefore immeasurable that it ultimately does not cost anything and so is socially devalued. As nonvalue, it therefore always costs less than technology (this is the reason for the slowing down of robotics).
Given these premises, the human body continues to be the place where the watershed between value and nonvalue exists as social differentiation, making the body increasingly impotent. And this is why technology is invading it more and more aggressively. The human body is undergoing the same processes today that nature once underwent. In fact, whereas initially technology turned to nature, today it has become very interested in the human body and is developing into technology of the body. There is one difference, however.
Technology applied to nature served to reduce the expenditure of energy and human fatigue; its cost was thus absorbed by the industrial system, which was very keen to take advantage of technology’s portentous applications. Technology applie It is individuals themselves who pay for turning to technology and they pay dearly. Processes that involve aesthetic or domestic technologies are almost exclusively individual or family processes, whereas those connected with health or communication also involve moments of collective negotiation, inside which the state becomes a strong decision maker.
This process of technologization of the body is generally depicted as a linear process, outside a social dynamics of conflict and political subjectivity. In reality it is a crucial political process that nevertheless finds it difficult to reveal itself for what it really is, for the precise reason that it involves those strategic places of social representation that misrepresent as natural what has not been that for a long time.
The body as natural technology has been falsely replaced today by technological innovation, which, as innovation, always presents itself as being better than what it replaces. If the same logic is followed with the relationship with the body of “right or inevitable progress,” which is found in the development of technology, the body will be seen as something to eliminate.
We must say with some bitterness that the limit, but also the fortune, of the body, at least for the time being, is that it does not cost anything and so is competitive with the cost of technological products. In the light of what has been said so far, a different political strategy seems to be becoming necessary around these processes. In this perspective, a fundamental role can be played by women as bearers of another technological vision.
If we look at the Greek myth of Prometheus (in the version by Aeschylus), the gift of fire to humans (“pyrotechnics” or, literally, “fire know-how”) was received not only by metallurgical man but also by woman, who, for example, transformed food from raw to cooked (Lévi-Strauss, 1964).
If, in our semiparodic interpretation of the past, fire was used by metallurgically inclined “man” to forge arms for hunting and war (in the rationale of violence and domination), it was at the same time used by ceramically inclined “woman” as the technology of warmth, nutrition, and care, as recounted in the cult of the goddess Hestia (Bolen, 1984).
Therefore the path to follow is not only technological, but also and above all political. If, as Bacon wrote, knowledge is power (“Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est”), this power should be addressed in a new way, in the awareness that—to refer to the myth of Prometheus again—technology is accompanied by “blind promises”: The great power of technology is not always accompanied by equally great visions.
This is precisely why technology must be governed. We cannot go back, that is certain, but we must keep on moving in a different direction. This vague invocation is in its own way semiparodic too. But the urgency of addressing the issue becomes a clarion call when one considers the growing potential of hydraheaded biochemical and nuclear terror and war, on the one hand, and well-intentioned bodily invasions and subordinations from health and personal safety to performance enhancement and personal convenience, on the other.
Indeed, the sophisticated insights and understandings offered by our authors suggest that humankind will be up to the task of dealing with these problems, that is, the metaphorical war, even as it also loses some important battles along the way.
In most places and at most times, people have enjoyed finding ways to blur the human body’s physical boundaries. Clothing is the most prominent example, but jewelry, tattoos, and body modifications such as lip and neck extenders and foot compressors have all been used in disparate places and times.
This blurring of boundaries seems even more prevalent today, owing to the complex merging of the artificial and the natural, and the confusion between “drug-free” states of being and states influenced pharmacologically (tranquilizers, mood elevators, and by-products of other medications, as well as regular stimulants and intoxicants); presence and absence are brought about by small personal technologies (Katz & Aakhus, 2002) and a profound alienation between mind and body.
And of course there are the enormously popular techniques of plastic surgery. Communication technologies have extended the boundaries of the body, increasing the capacity to transmit information. Technology has progressively grown closer to our bodies, approaching through first clothing, then synthetic clothing fibers, and finally “smart fabrics,” wearable computers, and communicative machines embedded into jewelry, clothing, and even the body.
The more prosaic technology of the 21st century includes mobile phones and laptops, which many over the age of 30 remember as being breakthrough concepts and machines in the 1980s but which are now relegated to the humdrum wallpaper of everyday life.
Initially these technologies only approached the body; today’s technology has fully invaded the body. This transition has set up a conflict not only with society’s social and ethical perception of the body itself, but also with the aesthetics of clothing.
Fashion is an extension of both the physical and the aesthetic body—and is one of the first ways that technology began to enter the physical body’s “space.” Although today technology is usually thought of in terms of computers and cell phones, clothes and their material are also becoming “intelligent”.
Human characteristics, such as intelligence, are attributed to objects such as clothing in order to make the environment more similar to humans. The application of “intelligence” in fashion evokes the same questions as the application of intelligence in communicative machines: Can an intelligent object exist that does not need to convey the passing of time with an increased need for beauty?
Human ideals of beauty expressed through fashion inevitably influence technological design. Today, communication technologies that reside near the body also embody taste and fashion. Indeed, fashion becomes central as the technology moves from being portable to being wearable (Calefato, 1996; Fortunati, 1998, 1999).
Personal instruments of communication must be not only modern but beautiful. Communication technology and fashion aesthetics have recently come together to address this belief—fashion designers and telecommunications operators are increasingly combining their overall visions of aesthetics. Various research laboratories are developing clothing that will integrate communication, therapeutic, and cosmetic technologies.
Before the fashion industry was formed, society had long been accustomed to technologies of bodily modification, beauty, and medicine that manipulate and invade the body. Historically, nearly every society altered the body using the rationale of religion then medicine. In the West, modifications on religious grounds tended to diminish even as the medical rationales expanded.
Lately, technologies that had already been used for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes are being expanded in order to explore and interfere with the body, invading it from both inside and out. Experimentation has already begun on ideas such as subcutaneous microchips to control domestic appliances and other electronically activated machines.
The next steps are surely for expanded control over machinery, physical access to secure areas, personal identification, and location monitoring. “Qualityof-life engineering” creeps into everyday life through “intelligent house” technologies and artistic applications, as illustrated by Stelarc, the first artistic cyborg to use medical instruments, prostheses, robotics, virtual-reality systems, and the Internet to explore and increase the parameters of the body (Drey, 1997).
These technological “advances” result in an often welcomed assault on the human body, which is penetrated and manipulated for a wide variety of reasons. Increasingly, cosmetic surgery aims not simply to repair damage, to reverse signs of aging, or even to correct perceived aesthetic flaws in one’s appearance.
Rather, an element of creativity and fun has been introduced to allow for expressive modifications, such as strange or “unnatural” features. As Longo has noted (1998, 2001), technology has recently developed even more quickly than science. The use of technological instruments is no longer subject to adequate testing and training, which were supposed to protect against mistakes in treatment.
Putting technology into practice “without reflection,” Longo stated, must be seen within the framework of technology’s increasing distancing from argumentative thought caused by the complex (and therefore costly) field of scientific verification of the effects of technological innovation. It is no surprise that Gershenfeld (1999) openly admitted that the enormous social and industrial implications in research emerge more from the comprehension of what has already been implemented than from attempts to conceptualize it beforehand.
Therefore, the effects of technology are discovered only years after their implementation. We see this, for instance, in the potential and real health and safety consequences of mobile phones and the social impact on the quality of social relationships (Katz & Aakhus, 2002).
One element of the body that must besafeguarded isrespect,which is closely connected to the identity of the individual. Ensuring that the body lives in harmony with the mind is part of this respect. Reactionary thought is always behind contempt for the body or its devaluation, as Maldonado quite rightly states.
If one generation leaves behind a humiliated and profaned body, that generation becomes an accomplice to destructive processes. The knowledge that has grown around these problems of technology and the body is currently quite advanced, but research and study often proceed in fits and starts.
Segmented disciplines and elitist and noncommunicating rivulets develop, when the complexity of developments in this field require, if not exactly unified visions, at least convergence, confrontation, and discussion.
The purpose of the international conference held at the Triennale of Milan on January 11 and 12, 2001, was to try to understand the meaning of these processes. In particular, the aim was to understand the trends in communication technologies, fashion, design, and art and their impact on the body; what people gain and/or lose from this technological invasion of the body; what the possible risks are (anomie, loss of identity, strategies of social and individual control); and, finally, what the body itself is communicating.
In this spirit, scholars from different areas and disciplines—from artificial intelligence to the history of art, from semiotics to bio-technology, from anthropology to mathematics, from sociology to industrial design, and so on, many (seemingly) distant from one another—were invited to join in the debate.
This meeting and confrontation of so many different opinions has taken on a greater urgency in the wake of world events. After the conference, and while the chapters were being prepared, the terrible assault on the United States was carried out by Islamicist terrorists. As this example shows, bodies become not only victims of war and other kinds of violence, but also weapons of war.
Related examples can be seen in the Middle East, where suicide bombers use their bodies as the weapon casing. All these horrific events related to the use of the body cannot help but bring about even more profound thinking, research, and study along the lines reflected in this collection (and obviously many other lines as well).
The main goal is for the many-voiced exposition of research results in different fields (epistemology, aesthetics, sociology, medicine, industrial design, and fashion) to trigger various kinds of connections and cross-fertilization. The problem is finding the correct balance between making use of the prosthetic body, which is in any case the result of an act of faith in the human body, and abandoning the idea that the elimination of the human body is an inevitable stage in the development of science and technology.
Technology has come so close to the body that it has become technology to “wear”, especially wearable computers. If technology is becoming wearable, this is also because fabrics themselves have become technological; that is, they enclose electronic parts and chemical substances.
Communication and fashion are obviously the areas that come to the forefront, both on a profound level, as well as from the perspective of social perception of anxieties that pass, rebound, and are manipulated by the media. Comfort, well-being, and health are terms that have taken on increasingly rich and sophisticated meanings.
Comfort today can no longer be seen only as the result of efficient services and environments; well-being and health no longer correspond only to the absence of problems or freedom from illness. Rather, all these concepts include a vast range of attributes in which the material and cultural, the physiological and anthropometric, and the medical and psychological elements are strongly interwoven.
The human body is obviously the protagonist and recipient of this network of performances, with an increasingly pervasive role being played by technology. As has been observed several times, past generations have developed the belief that health, well-being, and quality of life are primary rights of human beings and as such they must be socially pursued and guaranteed.
It is also increasingly the attitude that elevated standards of comfort, health, and well-being should be guaranteed by a higher standard of efficiency of technological service—and this is independent of the environment and the technical context in which services are distributed or requested (hospital, home, car, virtual reality, and even spaceships).
Although accepting these assumptions in principle, it is not possible to avoid certain basic questions that arise from the complex nature of the established relationship not only between technology and the body, but even more so between the technological and social systems. What is the space that public and private ethics can carve out for itself in the case of genetic manipulation? What are the risks of loss of identity in the direct conflict with ever more refined and powerful technology? What is the boundary between a reasonable amount of automation in the home and the illusion that total liberation from domestic work will become possible in that way?