Analysis #9 - The Postmortal Society

When going about our daily lives, the majority of us rarely sit down to think about something so bleak and unpleasant as death. Many of us shudder and cringe at even the slightest mention of the word whose meaning has, for the most part, remained unchanged throughout time. The word "death" carries with it a mysterious, depressing, and terrifying aura filled with unimaginable pains, horrors, and darkness. We would much rather talk about life and all of the bright opportunities we are given, the joys we experience, and the wonders of human achievement and valor we witness. Our emphasis on the importance of living has consequently created in us a fear and unwelcoming attitude towards death, which is seen as an antithesis of life itself. Biomedicine and technological advances have provided us with the tools and knowledge necessary to fight infectious diseases and thus live longer healthier lives, but they have also embedded in us the notion that we should not just want to live longer, but that we should want to live forever. Any doubts we may have on our ability to "freeze eternity" (Lafontaine, 306) and live forever young are immediately bludgeoned by society's reassurance that not only is immortality possible, but that it is our right and responsibility to conquer death.

Above is an image taken from a website on the evolution of technology (http://www.swictech.com/artificial-intelligence-and-inkling.html). The image shows a half-woman/half-robot hybrid whose missing midriff exposes lose ends of metal wires and gizmos. The "woman" in the picture is a classic example of what one might typically imagine if man were to meet machine - the birth of a human robot. The image of a human robot (better yet, the idea itself of the possibility of a human robot) was unimaginable and seemingly impossible for past generations, yet today, it is easily accepted as feasible and for some, an expected outcome of our continually advancing technoscience. Newly obtained scientific (or shall we say pseudo-scientific?) knowledge of the possibility of prolonging life by eliminating death has absorbed the minds of many individuals within society. Mortality, which was once seen as an unwelcomed yet inevitable natural process in life, has now become the "motivation to find a biomedical arsenal to fight death and extend life" (Lafontaine, 299). Unlike past generations, modern societies have "[deconstructed] death into a series of physiological stages" (Lafontaine, 299) that can be separated into differentiated forms of death - that is, functional death (loss of function in one or more organs), clinical death (loss of function in the entire body), and elementary death (loss of function in cells of all tissues). This deconstruction of death holds implications for the shifting meaning of not only bodily health, but of identity and self as well. As we frantically chase after the idea of reengineering our bodies to fit in the technology-obsessed world in which we live, we fail to realize that biopolitics, implemented as "a new form of social control" (Lafontaine, 300), has been manipulating our minds and bodies to change and control the power we have (or used to have) over our own identities.

The life extension movement that we have become so absorbed in reveals much about our peceptions of human perfectibility. As Celine Lafontaine states in her reading titled "The Postmortal Conditon", "postmodern society is characterized by the belief in perfectibility itself" (Lafontaine, 301). According to science, aging and death are seen as accidental effects of natural selection (Lafontaine, 300) and must thus be reversed or buffered. Health would consequently need to be promoted and delivered in order to help people prolong life and ultimately cheat death. This growing emphasis on the need to optimize human capacities through the eradication of aging has led many to fear the dangerously thin line between "necessary care and performance-based medicine" (Lafontaine, 302). This concern however does not seem to have any effect on technoscience and nanomedicine, which reassures the public that "the much-awaited technological revolution will be a salvation, since it carries the hope of an existence spared at long last from illness and death" (Lafontaine, 305). The decision of whether or not such a revolution is truly a "salvation" should not be up to those who have created its existence in the first place. The meaning and value of life begin to change as attitudes and approaches to death begin to shift towards a more clinical and medicalized understanding of again within the body. According to biotechnology, an individual undergoing aging is seen to represent a "temporarily depotentialized life, awaiting its future resuscitation" (Cooper, 8).

The field of regenerative medicine claims that its goal is to "protect the old and promote growth" (Cooper, 9), but how will the old be protected if current science is using this sort of technology to put an end to the process of aging? Growth is desired, yet continued growth is what leads to aging and eventually death. Promoting growth while shunning aging and death seems to be an ironic gesture since once cannot exist without the absence of the other. Our quest for infinite longevity and obsession with fighting death have blinded us from realizing how we have become puppets in the hands of bioeconomics. We as individuals have "become consumers called upon to make financial investments in extending [our] own lives" (Lafontaine, 309) without even knowing it. As Cooper states, "as the life sciences and their cutting-edge biotechnologies become ever more integrated into the circuits of capital accumulation, it is clear that no appeal to the lost sanctity of human life will protect us from the incursions of the market" (Cooper, 16). This sad, yet undeniable fact is evidence of our inability to better understand the possible consequences of our choices before it is too late. We have allowed ourselves to fall victim to the demands of the market by hastily accepting what science tells us and claims to be true. As technology continues to become more advanced and human knowledge more abundant, I fear for mankind. As I sit here reading articles discussing the pitfalls of biomedicine and technoscience, I cannot help but feel a little grateful that I was not born in an era in which I would have to witness this scientific exploitation at work.


Works Cited:

Cooper, Melinda. 2006. “Resuscitations: Stem Cells and the Crisis of Old Age”. Body and Society 12(1): 1-23.

Lafontaine, Celine. 2009. “The Postmortal Condition: From the Biomedical Deconstruction of Death to the Extension of Longevity”. Science as Culture 18(3): 297-312.

Analysis #8 - Of Living & Dying, Growing & Aging

As living, breathing organisms all humans experience life and death through biological and physiological development and growth as well as physical and mental deterioration associated with the aging process. In modern times, the onset of technological advances and medical knowledge has allowed for us to extend our life expectancies, living beyond the age limits of what previously was understood to be the maximum lifespan possible for humans. As Sharon R. Kaufman states in her piece on "Dementia-Near-Death and "Life Itself"", "prevention, enhancement, and intervention are possible, even into advanced age. We can choose, and it is our responsibility to choose, because biomedical technique has extended choice to every aspect of existence, including the timing of death" (Kaufman, 28). Not all may agree with Kaufman's use of the word "responsibility" within the context of choice. Some may view our ability to prolong or speed up death as a necessary choice and human right, while others may find it to be a crude insult and disturbance to the natural processes of life and death. It is our changing understandings and perceptions of identity, life, and health that are influencing our outlook on the definition of death - both of the body and of the self or being.

Above is an image taken from an anti-aging resource site (http://resveratrolformula.com/). The image is an advertisement for Resveratrol, the so-called "anti-aging breakthrough of the decade", which can "slow down the aging process, increase healthy lifespan, fight free radical damage, support cardiovascular health, improve cognitive function, and much much more". At the very bottom of the ad are the words: "turn on your anti-aging gene" accompanied by a link to a video clip on how Resveratrol apparently works. The above image is signifiicant in several ways - first, it acknowledges our growing concerns of aging and our desperate attempts at either reversing or stopping it in its track. Second, the advertisement implies that women are more prone to the distresses of aging by including a picture of a woman (as opposed to a man or both woman and man) looking concerned about the toll that age is taking on her once-beautiful and once-flawless skin. By attaching the word "gene" to "anti-aging", the advertisement attempts to lure in its audience (or shall we say victims?) into viewing the anti-aging formula as scientific, one that can be easily placed within the biomedicine or clinical context. Of course, there is no such thing as an anti-aging "gene", but target audiences can easily be duped into thinking that it does exist because people "are not willing to seriously confront the question of the body physical with anything other than current scientific wisdom" (or in this case, what appears to be the "facts" of science" (Lock, 331).

Views of aging and reactions to death vary widely across cultures and are thus, important in studying our perceptions of what it means to live or to be alive and how our lives or deaths define who we are - that is, how we choose to identify ourselves and how others may identify with us. As mentioned earlier, Kaufman's piece on aging focuses on dementia towards what appears to be the onset of death and how dementia, "as a mutable category of knowledge and cultural form, obscures the distinction between life and death" (Kaufman, 23). Our views on aging and dementia cannot be isolated from the role culture has in shaping our understandings of the importance of "memory, control, and reason" as well as the "existing order of things" in our lives. Anything that disrupts our abilities to maintain normal consciousness, cognition, and expressive capacity is considered to reflect pathological medical conditions that must be distinguished from "normal senile degeneration" (Kaufman, 25). Social scientists and clinicians encounter difficulty when evaluating age-related behaviors and claim that "dementia occurs when aging changes exceed a particular limit" (Kaufman, 27). But what are the implied limits? Who gets to define what these limitations are and what they entail? Is it even our right to debate over the value of another person's life through evaluating their "quality of life"? (Kaufman, 27). By either allowing or ceasing the use of feeding tubes to patients, are we not placing certain values on the meaning of life by claiming our "right" to determine which lives are worth saving and which are better off letting go? In Kaufman's article, Alzheimer's was explained to be a disease that is "like a prism of that refracts death into a spectrum of its parts: death of autonomy, death of memory, death of self-consciousness, death of personality, death of the body" (Kaufman, 30). Humans are complicated beings and it makes perfect sense that we view death in terms of its various components. However, this separation of the components makes it all the more difficult to assign the right or "appropriate" time to guide a dementia patient along the path towards death. Out of the 5 types of death mentioned above, which one is the correct indicator of declining life and which one reflects the point at which aging becomes no longer normal and instead becomes pathological and thus a burden on the patient, patient's family, and society as a whole?

Just like senility has been medicalized, so too has the body itself. In her piece on "The Politics of Mid-Life and Menopause", Margaret Lock discusses North America's obsessive focus on menopause and what it may imply about the "loss, failure, and decreptitude" (Lock, 333) or middle-aged post-menopausal women. Older women, compared to younger women as well as their male counterparts, are deemed as "a liability to society in their latter years" (Lock, 334) due to their economic costs to society in regards to their increased longevity and post-menopausal state, which is considered "[going] against nature" (Lock, 334). The problem with viewing older women as a burden to society stems from the emphasis on the "body chemistry prior to middle age", which is used "as a standard measure of what is "normal" (Lock, 336). In this sense, aging is seen as pathological and women are the main target for much of the blame of this "deficiency disease" (Lock, 343) that debilitates and makes women dependent on hormone replacement therapy. Why are only women being targeted for their reduced reproductive capacities when men too exhibit similar deteriorating signs of aging (i.e. reduced sperm count and motility)? Our views on aging and death reveal much about our culture and the various values we place on members of society as well as their worth to society through their contributions. Death was once seen as an uncontrollable natural process which takes it own course, regardless of our hopes or efforts to slow it down. In modern times, death (along with life) has now become almost a sort of luxury in the sense that we are given the option to manage our deaths and time them according to our needs and the needs of our families. Such "opportunities" were unimagineable in past times and perhaps it is this unimaginative, yet now possible medical intervention that is the source of our inability to handle our newfound power over life and death.



Works Cited:

Lock, Margaret. 1993. “The Politics of Mid-Life and Menopause: Ideologies for the Second Sex in North America and Japan”. In Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine in Everyday Life. Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock, eds, Pp. 330-363. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kaufman, Sharon R. 2006. “Dementia-Near-Death and ‘Life Itself’”. In Thinking about Dementia: Culture, Loss, and the Anthropology of Senility. Annette Leibing and Lawrence Cohen, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pp. 23-42.