Extreme Makeover and the Limits of Self-fashioning

Transcription

1 Extreme Makeover and the Limits of Self-fashioning Dr. Dennis M. Weiss Professor of Philosophy English and Humanities Department York College of Pennsylvania York, PA I d like to share with you a little fantasy of mine concerning the collision of popular and academic culture. Being a fan of such shows as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, I Want a Famous Face, and Nip/Tuck, I was understandably excited following the July announcement that the executive producers of Extreme Makeovers would be at the local mall interviewing potential makeover-participants. So I printed out the thirteen page application form (available online, 48 questions, three pages of small print) and headed down to the mall, joining thousands of other hopeful makeover mavens. While the competition for a coveted spot on the show was sure to be intense, I figured I was a shoein: a middle-aged college professor, daily surrounded by youth and beauty, whose puffy eyes, aging skin, and somewhat large proboscis could use a little work. More than the obvious surface appeal (or lack thereof), I figured it was high-time to take Extreme Makeover to the next level, be more extreme than extreme as it were. After all, following its third season, the narrative arcs of the show were wearing a little thin and the rather rote transformations make the final reveal seem just a tad anticlimactic. Moreover, where once the show seemed to be cutting edge (forgive the pun), today it is just one of a number of shows devoted to the scalpel and F/X and MTV are quickly gaining in cultural

2 currency. So Extreme Makeover could use a little injection of scandal and I thought I had the perfect plan. I d probably be featured in a sweeps week show, maybe even one devoted solely to my makeover. With much anticipation I put together my makeover plan. Section II of the application, Family and Lifestyle, asked why I should be chosen to receive an Extreme Makeover, what I would like to have altered, what parts of my body I was most unhappy with, how my physical appearance affected my life, in what ways my life would be altered were I to receive The Extreme Makeover. Having always been rather conventionally plain looking, I never really stood out much among my peers. As a college professor used to standing in front of youthful and attractive audiences with short attention spans, I thought I could benefit from a more arresting look. But when philosophers think about a famous face, their thoughts tend to run the gamut from Socrates to Sartre rather than Brad and Kate, and as a discipline, philosophy is perhaps suspicious of the conventionally beautiful. I also suspect that those glamorous makeovers take a lot of maintenance and between lectures, research, and writing, I don t have time to devote to a beauty regimen. So taking my cues from MTV s I Want a Famous Face, I planned on pursuing the un-makeover. Make me ugly in the service of my discipline. Give me a look that required no maintenance, put me in the company of my beloved philosophical predecessors, and really made me arresting, attention-getting. Perhaps I d leave the details up to Sam Saboura, the Extreme Team style expert. But I wasn t willing to stop with the mere surface transformation. Having studied and occasionally written about transhumans, posthumans, cyborgs, and other postmodern chimera, I figured I understood the real impact of biotechnology on the human being, and Extreme Makeovers only scratched the surface. During my long weeks of recovery I knew I could wax philosophical about our projects of transformation and self-fashioning. I took seriously Andy Clark s claim in Natural Born Cyborgs, that we were fast becoming hybrid beings. I thought I understood Donna Haraway s deconstruction of nature in her cyborg manifesto, and Kevin Warwick s observation that being born human is an accident of time and place that technology will soon permit us to fix. And I was intrigued by N. Katherine Hayles celebration of becoming a posthuman collective, an I 2

3 transformed into a decentered and distributed We of subjectivity. If Extreme Makeovers was to remain on the cutting edge, I figured it was time for it to embrace what the technology permitted. As an over-worked professor of philosophy, I thought I would benefit from having a third ear, a hemispheric commissuratomy and cranial chip implants. The Australian performance artist Stelarc has long argued that the organic body is obsolete in today s technological environment and is in need of upgrading. He has already put up on his web site detailed plans for a third ear and it struck me as a good idea. I wouldn t miss a thing in class after that. And Derek Parfit s work on personal identity had convinced me of the wisdom of creating two selves in one body by disconnecting the two hemispheres of my brain. A decentered self could distribute work among its constituents selves and maybe even write two papers at the same time. Just think about how much work I would be able to accomplish if there were two of me to do it. That promotion to full professor would be guaranteed. And Kevin Warwick s research on cyborgs led me to enthusiastically embrace the possibilities of overcoming the biological limits of my tired and aging brain with cranial chip implants. With application form in hand, I waited patiently in the very long line for my chance to be interviewed, confident that I would be one of the lucky few selected for an extreme makeover. As I sat down with the casting director, almost immediately I sensed something had gone wrong. As she reviewed my application (Question 16: Have you ever been arrested? Question 37: Have you ever been treated for any serious physical or mental illnesses?), she began slowly inching her chair back, furtively glancing first at me and then at the nearby security guard. As she motioned for the guard, she politely inquired if I was either sick or deranged. Having truthfully addressed those issues on the relevant parts of the application, I wasn t quite sure what she was getting at. Well, it seems that even in the case of extreme makeovers, some makeovers are just too extreme. I had apparently pushed the limits of a television show that itself was supposedly trying to push the limits. My application for an extreme makeover had somehow gone beyond the pale. I was puzzled, a little bit disappointed, and, like all good academics, determined to get a published essay out of my experience. So I began to wonder, how might one make sense 3

4 of this rejection? Could one make sense this rejection? Had I in fact crossed some moral or merely medically risky line? Were there some non-arbitrary limits to human selfmodification? This is the conundrum facing Extreme Makeover, premised as it is on something of an implicit tension. On the one hand, the very existence of Extreme Makeover seems to argue for the absence of limits. One might even argue that we have witnessed the gradual transformation of a now common television genre that has lead us from less extreme to more extreme makeovers and that to draw a line at some point on that continuum is to insist on arbitrary distinctions. Shows like Extreme Makeover, existing as they do in a broader cultural context of the de-naturalization of the human being, seem to be an implicit argument against such limits and line-drawing. While critics of such makeover shows often implicitly seem to suggest that they exist in a vacuum, even a cursory glance at magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and television news shows suggest that there is something going on in terms of the radical ways various technologies are remaking our image of what it means to be human. In more academic venues, it has been de rigueur for close to half a century to claim that the notion of human nature is outmoded. On the other hand, it s fairly clear that the extreme makeovers on Extreme Makeover really aren t that extreme and that the show is merely reflecting, if not perpetuating, a number of already common cultural practices. After all, most of the participants are women, most have stories or narratives that don t in any way challenge or transgress traditional cultural narratives, and most are receiving what have now become standard cosmetic procedures, including brow lifts, tummy tucks, breast implants, and liposuction. While questioning the supposed naturalness and fixity of the human body, Extreme Makeovers simultaneously incorporates norms of naturalness and fixity, the limits beyond which we ought not to go. And yet these limits lie in the background, doing the work of the show, without ever really being questioned. What was behind the casting director s wariness and anxiety? Ought we to take her concerns seriously? Should they be dismissed as the anxieties of an unreconstructed humanist? When are worries appropriate in this context? It is in this moment of conflict between popular culture and philosophy where critical reflection begins to do its work. Part of that work entails clearing and firming up the complicated 4

5 conceptual ground these questions raise. In reflecting on these questions about limits to human self-fashioning we immediately face still further difficulties. Permit me to suggest how by briefly exploring two frameworks in terms of which we might address these issues. The first is a framework suggested by the work of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama, both of whom have extensively critiqued bio-technology and bio-engineering. The second is a framework suggested by Gregory Stock in his book Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. Reflecting on Extreme Makeover actually serves to bring out the weaknesses in these two frameworks and points us in the direction of a superior alternative. Perhaps in perusing my Extreme Makeover application, our poor casting director felt there was something repugnant in the wish for a third ear, a split brain, and a borg -ified existence, maybe experiencing this as a violation of natural limits or natural laws, an assault on human dignity or the sanctity of human life. This is the line of reasoning suggested in the work of Kass and Fukuyama, both of whom draw on substantive notions of nature or human nature to justify limits on human self-fashioning. In his oft-cited essay The Wisdom of Repugnance, Kass argues that having become enchanted and enslaved by technology, we have lost our awe and wonder before the deep mysteries of nature and of life. Intent upon denying our rootedness to nature and tradition, we pursue our narcissistic projects of self-re-creation in a vain attempt to control our futures and transcend our biology. Our repugnance in response to these projects is, as Kass puts it, the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason s power fully to articulate it. Kass suggests that we intuit and feel, immediately and without argument, the violation of things that we rightfully hold dear. Francis Fukuyama s Our Posthuman Future offers a similar response to biotechnology, suggesting that human beings have deeply rooted instincts and a human nature which ought to have a special role in defining for us what is right and wrong (7). Nature, Fukuyama suggests, imposes limits (38) and can serve as a ground for morality (115). While his argument is detailed and spelled out over several chapters of Our Posthuman Future, the basic outlines of Fukuyama s position do not differ substantially from rather standardized notions of human nature in liberal political thought. Stripping away the historically and culturally contingent, we are left with some 5

6 human essence, the basic meaning of what it means to be human, which is unique, distinctive, and universal to all human beings, gives us a dignity and moral status higher than any other living creature, and defines a set of characteristics and behaviors, including emotions and feelings, fundamental to our humanness and which serve as a foundation for human values. Returning to our original conundrum, we were led to wonder whether there are any limits to human self-modification. Kass and Fukuyama provide a clear basis for thinking that indeed limits can be found in a substantive notion of human nature and that my application for an extreme makeover likely violated those limits. But just how persuasive is this response? There are a number of reasons for thinking not very. Briefly and most obviously, the kind of universal and ahistorical view of human nature underlying Kass and Fukuyama s frameworks has come under what from some quarters is withering critique for embodying an implicit and illegitimate normative dimension, often reflective of a particular time and locale. While their view of human nature is meant to capture a universal, timeless essence, the prescriptions they derive from it seem to reflect the particular views of a time and place. We see this clearly in Fukuyama s defense of liberal capitalist democracies, whose success he attributes to grounding in assumptions about human nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors (106). As Fukuyama notes, Contemporary capitalist liberal democratic institutions have been successful because they are grounded in assumptions about human nature that are far more realistic than those of their competitors (106). We see it as well in Kass insistence that male and female are normatively complementary and generatively significant and in his defense of stable, monogamous marriage as the ideal home for procreation. While aspiring to strip away the contingent and focus on the essential, these views of human nature often reflect instead the cultural and political biases of their proponents. There is also a religious dimension behind these frameworks as well as a suspicion of technology. They would clearly like to stem the tide against a particular post-darwinian view of human nature but are wary of simply falling back on Aristotelian and traditional notions of the soul, so something has to stand in its place. They need telos, function, and norm, and where once that could be easily found in the human soul, ala Aristotle or 6

7 perhaps Thomas Aquinas, that option has largely been foreclosed upon by materialistic, neo-darwinian thought. Both Kass and Fukuyama are opposed to the scientific view of the human being which they deem overly reductionistic, materialistic, and deterministic. Science, Kass suggests, leads to the erosion of man as noble, dignified, precious, godlike. So Kass and Fukuyama have recourse to Factor X, or the human essence and simple repugnance, substituting these for the concept of the soul and so hoping to stem the tide against human self-modification. But these concepts of telos, essence, function themselves embody normative values which may not be universal, ahistorical, or essential to the human being. Their so-called objective framework suggests that there is some morally neutral standpoint unmarked by existing social relations and yet implicit in many of Kass and Fukuyama s recommendations are the values of a particular time and place. Kass routinely suggests that technology disrupts our norms and our selfconceptions, suggesting that he speaks on behalf of timeless and agreed-upon norms. Fukuyama faces the additional problem that his own account of human nature draws on a sociobiological framework which locates human nature in specific genes. By human nature he means the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors (130). Fukuyama is in essence a sociobiologist but one who wants to preserve the human genome. But as Peter Lawler argues in The Rise and Fall of Sociobiology, sociobiology is true until we know it is true. Once we understand how human nature works, we stand armed and ready to try to change or improve it. Lawler suggests that biotechnology is simply a far more plausible form of social constructionism and that if we can actually change our natures all bets are off about what human beings are and how we will act. There are many other reasons for doubting the efficacy of this approach to the question of limits on human self-modification. But for the purposes of this essay, permit me to concentrate on just one other. For it seems to me that the biggest failing of the approach typical to Kass and Fukuyama is that it simply doesn t help us understand our problem. With its insistence on a previously unalterable human nature, its demonizing of science and technology, and its emotional cry of the heart (which, Kass reminds us, has its reason that reason cannot entirely know), this framework simply misses the fundamental point 7

8 about the whole TV genre of makeovers: namely that human beings change, they change their looks, change their style, change their selves. We like to change and we delight in other people s change. Makeovers are, in some respect, central to what it means to be human. After all, we ve been making ourselves over for centuries, from Renaissance selffashioning to Nietzsche s ubermensch to Foucault s celebration of Baudelaire s dandy. Perhaps it s not completely out of line to suggest that the original makeover, the Ur-text of makeovers, is Eve s makeover at the hands of the serpent who, after all, has not at times thought of Rikki Lake or Oprah Winfrey as analogous to a serpent. And let us recall Pico della Mirandola s Oration on the Dignity of Man, in which he imagines God speaking to man, that creature of indeterminate image: We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer (7). Now it s true that God suggests we might descend to the lower, brutish forms of life, just as easily as we might rise to the superior orders whose life is divine. Nonetheless, it s human nature to fashion one s nature and this is a point Kass and Fukuyama remain oblivious to. Rather than portraying the participants of Extreme Makeovers as narcissistic dupes enchanted and enslaved by the glamour of technology, we might more charitably understand their actions in the context of a long history of human makeovers. This is the approach taken by Stock in Redesigning Humans, indeed Stock elevates it to the very essence of human nature. As he notes, A key aspect of human nature is our ability to manipulate the world. We are now reaching the point at which we may be able to transform ourselves into something other. To turn away from germline selection and modification without even exploring them would be to deny our essential nature and perhaps our destiny (170). While Stock doesn t address how precisely we could have a destiny given that malleability is our essential nature, the important point he fixes on, if not fixates on, is our capacity to remake ourselves. Remaking ourselves is the ultimate expression and realization of our humanity (197). Biology, Stock argues is malleable and bio-technology, more specifically germinal choice technology, is ultimately continuous with all the other forms of human self-modification we have pursued; it s a short step, he reasons, from popping expensive vitamin boosters to undergoing cosmetic 8

9 surgery to opting for germinal choice technology. As he notes: if biological manipulation is indeed a slippery slope, then we are already sliding down that slope now and may as well enjoy the ride (151). In the growing interest in the posthuman, one can find many parallels to Stock s emphasis on human malleability. The French performance artist Orlan s work, The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, is premised upon the denial of nature: Are we still convinced that we must bend ourselves to the decisions of Nature, this lottery of genes distributed by chance? My work is a struggle against the innate, the inexorable, the programmed, Nature, DNA (which is our direct rival as far as artists of representation are concerned), and God! The Australian performance artist Stelarc would concur. As I mentioned earlier, he questions the viability of the human form in a technological age: In this age of information overload, what is significant is no longer freedom of ideas but rather freedom of form freedom to modify, freedom to mutate your body (Fractal Flesh). For cybernetics researcher Kevin Warwick, stripping away the contingent a la Fukuyama means stripping away the human. As he notes in his Wired essay Cyborg 1.0: I was born human. But this was an accident of fate a condition merely of time and place. I believe it s something we have the power to change. Somewhat less hyperbolically, philosopher Andy Clark argues that recent work in neural constructivism points to the inherent plasticity in the human brain and that this plasticity undermines any notion of a universal, historically fixed human nature. As he notes in his essay Natural Born Cyborgs : Perhaps then it is a mistake to posit a biologically fixed human nature with a simple wraparound of tools and culture. For the tools and culture are indeed as much determiners of our nature as products of it. In both popular and the academic accounts of human nature, there is a growing emphasis on our malleability and plasticity. Now there is something I find appealing in these discussions of human malleability. They help us avoid the overly simple, stagnant and fixed metaphysical views of human nature such as Kass and Fukuyama s, the more pernicious normative consequences of which are troubling. Furthermore, and as I suggested earlier, they help us understand and make sense of a feature of Extreme Makeover, the delight we human beings take in selffashioning and self-modification. Nonetheless, I think as a framework for resolving some 9

10 of our initial difficulties, it too misses the mark. I think we can see how if we once again return to the subject of Extreme Makeover. For all the discussion of human malleability and the emphasis in accounts of the posthuman of the coming chimera we are all likely to be, it is remarkable just how ordinary are the makeovers on Extreme Makeover. As I suggested earlier, there really is very little that is extreme about this show. It incorporates rather ordinary notions of beauty and well-being that themselves are never questioned or reflected upon. Given our plasticity, our freedom from nature to fashion ourselves, we choose to fashion ourselves in pretty mundane ways. One sees an interesting parallel to this in the cyberculture. In the world s online chat rooms, its virtual spaces of MUDs and MOOs, where freedom and anonymity reign, everyone looks like Barbie and Ken, perhaps underscoring Cindy Jackson s own surgical efforts at remaking herself to look like her childhood idol. What are we to make of this? Stock himself provides a clear indication of what is going wrong here. By focusing on this one dimension of human nature, our plasticity and malleability, he denies us any basis on which to make decisions regarding how we ought to change. Indeed, Stock suggests that in the face of human malleability, philosophy and ethics are largely impotent. For all the differences between Stock and Fukuyama, both end up treating the historical and social dimensions of human life as contingent factors that need not influence our deliberations over norms. Our projects of self-fashioning are completely self-directed: We and our children increasingly will be reflections of our personal philosophies and values (195). But what goes into one s personal philosophies and values? What few guidelines Stock offers revolve solely around cost, risk, and other market-driven factors: Whatever people s philosophies of human enhancement, their decisions about using specific procedures often hinge on cost, safety, and efficacy rather than political or social consequences (159). Having described the human being as little more than pure potentiality, the individual agent is left with little to fall back on other than popular stereotypes and cultural norms. As Robert Bellah notes in a slightly different context, these views of the human being leave us with a completely unencumbered self with no basis on which to act other than what it is popular. Values turn out to be the incomprehensible, rationally indefensible thing that the individual chooses when he or 10

11 she has thrown off the last vestige of external influence and reached pure, contentless freedom. The ideal self in its absolute freedom is completely unencumbered, (80). Susan Bordo offers a similar analysis, examining the claim commonly made by participants in makeover shows, I am doing it for me. As Bordo writes, when we say I am doing it for me, we imagine this me as a pure and precious inner space, an authentic and personal reference point untouched by external values and demands. A place where we live free and won t be pushed around (32). Indeed, Bordo points out how paradoxically advertising itself has appropriated this message of self-empowerment to mass market conventional notions of beauty. But as both Bellah and Bordo observes and shows such Extreme Makeover and I Want a Famous Face substantiate, an absolutely autonomous self and a self determined completely by the social situation do not turn out to be opposites. Where then does this leave us? Returning to our original question, can one find nonarbitrary limits to human self-modification? If so, what is the nature of these limits? The two frameworks we have been exploring each attempt to address these issues in the context of a discussion of human nature. Both recognize that at its heart, this is a debate over what it means to be human. Stock suggests that at a fundamental level, the current discussion about human enhancement is about philosophy and religion. It is about what it means to be human, about our vision of the human future (155). Kass agrees: Human nature itself lies on the operating table, ready for alteration, for eugenic and psychic enhancement, for wholesale re-design ( Preventing ). Here I would agree. And yet neither framework really helps us understand what is happening in the cultural moment represented by Extreme Makeover and other similar shows. Rather than bringing some understanding to our dilemma, both frameworks simply endorse one element of it either the anxiety produced by extreme makeovers in the case of Kass and Fukuyama, or the obvious pleasure in the freedom to self-fashion in the case of Stock. Furthermore, for all the differences between Stock, Kass, and Fukuyama, we might note that both refer to the wisdom of market-driven capitalism and both treat the historical and social as contingent factors that need not influence our deliberations over norms. And like Fukuyama, though more surreptitiously, Stock ultimately has reference to a fixed notion of human nature: 11

12 The importance we attach to matters such as sex, beauty, status, power, and the success of our children comes from deep within us. We do not have to act upon these urges, but we cannot escape from them (118). All three ultimately share the assumption as well that human beings are driven by the same motivating factors and that when given the choice, we all naturally do want the same things: better bodies, brawn, and brains. But there is little discussion regarding what constitutes better in these cases. What has gone wrong in both cases is the overly simplistic manner in which human nature is treated in these two frameworks. I would agree that Kass and Fukuyama s concerns over human dignity are well founded. Too, Stock s discussion of human malleability seems to capture something intrinsic to human beings. In both frameworks, however, these characteristics are completely unmoored from any other discussion of human capacities or characteristics, any structure of needs and wants. Both frameworks share the belief that debates over extreme makeovers, bio-technology, and other recent technological developments, are debates over the meaning of human nature. There is much truth to this observation. It is difficult to find any entrant in these debates that doesn t in one way or another presuppose and implicitly assume some theory of human nature. Discussions of what is natural or unnatural, policies regarding appropriate treatments or limits to enhancement, technologies that permit us to re-make or manipulate ourselves, all raise questions about what it means to be human. And yet critics over the past several decades have been right to point out the myriad ways in which notions of human nature have been abused. As Mary Midgley points out in The Myths We Live By : the notion of human nature has so often been misused for political purposes by people wanting to resist reform. The whole idea has been well pummeled during the Enlightenment. But that doesn t mean we can do without it (107). With their simplistic views of human nature and yes-or-no, all-or-nothing logic, these particular views of human nature are completely inadequate. The problem isn t essentially with theories of human nature but with inadequate theories. The corrective is a theory of human nature which recognizes our complexity and gives credence to central aspects of our nature: that we are creative but that the creativity always takes place in a cultural, social, and historical context. 12

13 It is precisely the human being that never appears in these discussions: by stripping away the cultural, social, historical, the contingent these frameworks don t provide us with any context in which to assess the show or the factors that might go into participating on it. What we have masquerading for human nature in these frameworks is little more than a cipher. In both, that human beings are gendered, that we are always located in specific cultural and historical contexts, that we are, as Susan Bordo suggests, historically and politically inscribed and shaped, these aspects of what it means to be human are completely effaced. This leaves them, as I have suggested, incapable of providing us with an adequate account of our Extreme Makeover situation. Neither of the frameworks we have been exploring help us understand such important issues as why human beings pursue such makeovers, how we understand our sense of embodiment and how we have come to be so alienated from our bodies that we subject them to such measures, how norms of youthfulness and beauty shape our experiences of the aging body, the relationship between individual self-conception and the cultural and historical context of which we are all a part, the sense of freedom I experience as I contemplate my anticipated makeover. With their overly simple accounts of human nature, these frameworks leave us little space in which to raise and consider these significant and legitimate issues. Fortunately, there is an alternative. In fact there are some very reasonable discussions of human nature out there that are responsive to these issues, social and historical conceptions of human nature that steer clear of both stagnant metaphysical views of the human being and views which reduce the human being to plastic to be molded at will. Such views have been developed by feminist theorists such as Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, ethologically informed philosophers such as Mary Midgley, and, in the German tradition, philosophical anthropologists such as Michael Landmann. They have their philosophical precursors in Marx s and John Dewey s conceptions of human nature. Fred Dallmayr offers a succinct characterization of the human being from this perspective: Man appears as the product and the questioning counterpart of nature. Although embedded in a physical habitat, he is not simply a finished or preordained segment of the natural order; nor is he a rootless adventurer or an 13

14 arbitrary design (52). Recognizing that human nature changes, social and historical conceptions neither deny nor privilege biology or culture, individual or society, creativity or culturality. As Landmann notes, these are intertwined, fundamental aspects of the human being. As significant for man as the ability to produce culture is the obverse ability of receiving formerly created culture, moving within its channels and being stamped by it Creativity and culturality, shaping the future and depending on the past, being open to the new and shaped by tradition, freedom and determinacy: these are the two fundamental anthropina (129). Mary Midgley makes a similar point in Beast and Man when she suggests that human beings have an underlying structure which culture is designed to both complete and express (xiv).from such a social and historical perspective on human nature, one cannot characterize the human being in terms of some single, isolable property which serves to define our essence or our dignity. Rather, one must have a recourse to what Midgley refers to as a rich and complex arrangement of powers and qualities (207). This of course means that there can be no easy answer to the question of norms and limits to human self-modification. But why should we ever expect otherwise? We human beings are a complex lot, as the stories on Extreme Makeover amply demonstrates. And while that might suggest that norms and limits cannot be read off our nature directly and transparently, it doesn t mean that our nature cannot provide some indirect or practical guidance. It suggests that we should be wary of claims such as Kass or Fukuyama s that a previously unalterable human nature can supply a standard or norm for human self-improvement. It suggests as well, contra Stock, that human beings are not simply malleable stuff to be engineered and remade at will. It further suggests that as social and historical beings, we must remain sensitive to the ways we are multiply constructed in and by culture and cognizant of the concrete social and political context of our schemes for self-fashioning. It suggests, too, that we reject the overly instrumentalist and atomistic approach characteristic of Stock. We become human only in the context of other humans, living, as Charles Taylor recognizes in The Ethics of Authenticity, in dialogical conditions. Our choices, our plans for self-modification, only make sense in a broader cultural and social context. Returning one final time to Extreme Makeover, the producers recognize this on some level, having built into the show the final coming out, the re-introduction of the makeover participant to her family and friends. Makeovers, the 14

15 producers implicitly recognize, only make sense in the context of others, they are never pursued merely as an end-in-themselves. We make ourselves over not only for ourselves but for others as well. But the friends and family of our participants in Extreme Makeover are only brought in at the end to validate and affirm the choices already made and technologically realized. I began this presentation with a little fantasy. We might imagine an alternative fantasy in which our participants for extreme makeovers are encouraged to sit down with their friends and family and critically evaluate and assess their proposed makeover plan. What do they hope to accomplish? Are their goals and expectations reasonable and realistic? Are these the best means to accomplish their goals? Have cultural norms and stereotypes influenced their makeover plans? How are the institutions of mass media, medicine, and bio-technology converging to shape those plans? Perhaps to our team of doctors we could add a doctor of philosophy, brought in to help our participants make some critical sense of these complicated issues. Imagine in fact what would happen were we to recognize that the ultimate extreme makeover isn t a physical one at all, but a metaphysical one, a makeover of one s philosophical framework. I suspect that such a show wouldn t gain the attention that Extreme Makeover has. But for all that, I think it would be a more human show. And isn t that ultimately more important? Works Cited Bellah, Robert et al. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: U of California P, Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight. Berkeley: U of California P, Twilight Zones Berkeley: U of California P, Dallmayr, Fred. Plessner s Philosophical Anthropology. Inquiry 17 (1974): 52. Clark, Andy. Natural Born Cyborgs? Edge 80. January della Mirandola, Pico. Oration on the Dignity of Man. Trans. A. Robert Caponigri. Washington: Regnery Gateway,

16 Fukuyama, Francis Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Picador, Hayle, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: The U of Chicago P,1999. Jaggar, Alison. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. New Jersey: Rowman and Allanheld, Kass, Leon. The Wisdom of Repugnance. The Human Life Review. 23.3, Summer true&db=aph&an= &loginpage=login.asp&site=ehost&scope=site Preventing a Brave New World. The Human Life Review. Summer (27.3). Landmann, Michael. Fundamental Anthropology. Trans. David Parent. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Lawler, Peter Augustine. The Rise and Fall of Sociobiology. The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society, No. 1, Spring 2003, pp Midgley, Mary. Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature. Rev. Ed. London: Routledge, The Myths We Live By. London: Routledge, Parfit, Derek. Reason and Persons. Oxford UP, Stelarc. "From Psycho-Body to Cyber-Systems: Images as Post-human Entities." In Virtual Futures. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J. Cassidy, eds. London: Routledge, Stock, Gregory. Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. New York: Houghton Mifflin, Taylor, Charles The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, Warwick, Kevin. Cyborg 1.0. Wired February 2000 (8.02):