Why does it so often seem
that those who would "err on
the side of life" in so
doing are impelled to
denigrate consciousness and
violate consent? It
sometimes seems as if the
advocates of "choice" are
the only real defenders of
personal
lives.



People live lives different
from the lives of snails.
Personal lives are uniquely
lived in the webs of meaning
and thought and conversation
woven by public beings,
lives that reverberate with
choices, with desires, with
injuries, with deeds.



All the while the dread
armies of the conservative
so-called "culture of life"
seem to defend life in some
more vegetable or mineral
mode, always best
exemplified by organisms who
have not yet arrived among
the community of poets and
peers, or of those who have
already departed from the
scene.



Technoprogressives maintain
that technological
development has become a
revolutionary force, that it
undercuts the normative
weight of claims made in the
name of the "natural," and
that especially genetic and
cognitive modification are
prosthetic practices of
self-creation that are this
generation's contribution to
the ongoing conversation of
humankind.



I use the term
"morphological freedom" to
describe the ways in which
consensual prosthetic
practices are enlarging the
scope of freedom, even while
they derange our
expectations, demand new
responsibilties, and
introduce unprecedented
possibilties as well of
injustice, violation, and
harm.



There is quite alot in the
ongoing hysteria provoked by
the long-dead but
occasionally still-agile
body of Terri Schiavo that
troubles me (apart from the
obvious disgust with
conservative hypocrisies it
has mobilized, worries about
American anti-scientific
benightedness, concerns
about greedy politicians
usurping the rule of law, et
cetera), but I want to think
out loud a bit more about
how the prejudices being
aired so passionately at the
moment are occasioned by the
sense of an emerging
technoconstituted
morphological freedom
weaving its way into our
cultural life, making new
demands, holding out new
hopes, and altogether
confusing our sense of what
we properly have a right to
expect from human
experience.



It is well-known that many
bioconservatives claim to
fear that new technologies
will "rob" us of our
humanity. But it has always
seemed to me that the
"essence" of our humanity,
such as it is, is simply our
capacity to explore together
what it
means
to be human in the first
place. Surely no sect, no
tribe, no system of belief
owns what it means to be
human. Humanity can be
denied by violence, degraded
by poverty, diminished by
tyranny, but it cannot be
robbed because nobody owns
it.



Since I believe that
consensual prosthetic
practices of self-creation
are indispensable
contributions to the
conversation we are having
about what humanity is
capable of, it can come as
no surprise to discover that
I likewise believe it is the
ones who would freeze that
conversation in the image of
their pet platitudes that
look the most like thieves
today.



I share the concerns of many
"disability" activists that
there is something quite
pernicious in the liberal
discourse that claims that
if Terri Schiavo had a real
"chance at recovery" they,
too, would demand her "life"
be preserved. These
activists are rightly
suspicious that the idea of
"recovery" in such arguments
mobilizes what is in fact a
highly restrictive normative
concept of the sort of lives
that are "lives worth
living" a concept that
denigrates many
differently-enabled people
who, whatever their
struggles or sorrows, have
lives with dignity, joy, and
value worth affirming and
supporting the same as
anyone else.



I strongly agree with the
clinicians who thorough
examination of the evidence
locates Schiavo's body with
the dead rather than the
disabled, and in any case I
affirm the necessity to
respect her own decisions as
these have been best
ascertained by a number of
courts where matters of the
care of her own body is
concerned. But it is clear
nevertheless that the
figure of disability
is circulating here in ways
that would have to matter to
disability activists as well
as to advocates and scholars
of morphological freedom.



There are many disabled
people who will seem
superficially similar to
Schiavo to an untrained eye,
after all, and whose lives
are routinely dismissed as
"not worth living."
Disability activists fight
fraught heartbreaking
battles to champion the
rights and standing of such
people. As I have written
before, it is especially
interesting for me to note
the extent to which so many
of the differently-enabled
depend on ongoing
cyborgization and prosthetic
practices to find their ways
to more enriching lives on
their own terms:
communicating through
computer interfaces,
locomoting in motorized
conveyances, and engaged in
sometimes lifelong
bioremedial procedures of
extraordinary intimacy and
profundity.



From the perspective of
morphological freedom it
seems to me the standard of
"recovery" is always
worrisomely conservative,
naturalizing some contingent
standard of proper health as
more desirable than
indefinitely many alternate
possibilities. Morphological
freedom is precisely never a
matter of any coercive
imposition of a normative
body in the name of a moral
standard of "health," but is
an embrace of genetic,
prosthetic, and cognitive
modification practices in
the name of a proliferation
of ways of being properly
and meaningfully in the
world.



What it must mean to respect
the differently-enabled as
the actually fully-real
people they are is to
respect them and support
them in their differences
whenever they affirm the
value of these differences
on their own terms,
just as it must likewise
require the best provision
of prosthetic avenues for
rewriting their bodies and
lives in the image of their
own desires, also on their
own terms.



To take up a different
example that concerns some
radical technophiles, even
from the standpoint of
resuscitating vitrified
wards awaiting advanced
medical treatments the issue
may not usefully be thought
of in terms of a "recovery"
of information, memory, or
function, but the
constitution to the contrary
of adequate (in both the
subjective and objective
senses) narrative continuity
in a subject to support her
ongoing personal practices
of informed, competent,
intelligibile,
self-determinative consent
as well as the public scene
on which those practices
depend.



The process of "life" in
bioremedial technocultures
is one of ongoing practices
of genetic, prosthetic, and
cognitive modification in
pursuit of personal
meanings, responsibilties,
and pleasures that are quite
as likely to strain against
the imposition of a
normative conceptions of
"wellness" as anything else.



To the extent that the
rhetoric of "recovery"
impels us to misrecognize
some manifestations of
diversity as disability
technoprogressives would
seem well rid of it. And to
the extent that
technoprogressives will
sometimes affirm the
desirability of "better than
well" healthcare provision
this would seem to encourage
a repudiation of the
discourse of "recovery" as
well. The distinction of
therapy from enhancement on
which so much contemporary
bioethical discourse
depends, is rendered either
altogether obsolete or at
any rate radically
historically contingent in
such technoprogressive
bioethics.



This is not a recommendation
of morphological relativism,
since for one thing one can
still prefer one's own path
of self-determination for
communicable reasons. And to
an important extent the
public provision of the
resources that enable
prosthetic practices of
self-creation also demands
the maintenance of
intelligible standards to
ensure democratic
accountability and
deliberation in that
provision.



The key for me is a shift in
the focus for such standards
from a moral(istic) concern
with
health/beauty/righteousness
into an ethical concern with
the meaningful consent of
peers with whom one may or
may not identify morally in
the slightest.



Morphological freedom
prevails to the extent to
which discernible
differences among peers
arise from consensual
prosthetic practices of
self-determination or
self-creation, rather than
being imposed or unduly
durressed by conditions of
exploitation, violence, or
ignorance (any of which
might broadly mobilize
responsibile intervention).



Medicine is taking us on a
path from recovery to
creation, with all its
pleasure and danger, but our
language has not yet managed
to keep up. The
heartbreaking and hysterical
public spectacle of the dead
prostheticized body of Terri
Schiavo attests to our
perplexity and our present
distress. There are many
such spectacles to come.