Literature has not played a substantial role in debates on nonhuman agency, although (as attested with the lively development of health humanities in the West and beyond) literary scholarship has much to contribute to philosophy and the application of medical technologies – and vice versa. Fiction, curiously, precedes diagnostics in several pathologies (e.g. locked-in syndrome) and technologies (in-vitro fertilization), serves as a source of diagnostic terms (Quasimodo syndrome), and offers complex reflection on new medical treatments and ethical caregiving. Most importantly, it can provide a fruitful ground to reconsider the choices we make regarding already-existing and near-future technologies. These choices profoundly affect our conceptions of what it means to be human and need to be substantiated with thorough arguments that can bear criticism across the disciplines.
For these reasons, our session is composed of two papers by literary and medical humanities scholars as well as a paper by a philosopher who conducts neurotechnological experiments with human subjects and evaluates the care and treatment of clinical patients. Each talk is allotted 15-18 minutes, including brief presentations of the speakers, which leaves more than 20 minutes for discussion during the final part of the session.
Elena Fratto will open the session with her paper on endocrine glands in the Anthropocene, focusing on the example of metabolic storytelling in Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1925 novel Heart of a Dog through the lens of thing theory, posthuman studies, and narratology. Fratto notes that the activity of the pituitary gland not only affects bodily functions, but also dictates narrative time and raises questions of narrative agency. Sincethe wake of fin-de-siècle discoveries in endocrinology, bodily glands, alongside the hormones they produce, were featured prominently in the literary works, visual arts, and popular culture of early twentieth-century Europe. Phenomena of all kinds began to be associated with hormone production in causal links—from bodily rhythms to behavioral patterns; from the pace of history to the trajectory of nations (e.g. eugenics movements across the West). Bulgakov’s exemplary novel further attests the connection between the nonhuman agency of the glands and experimental surgery with gland transplantation and grafting, which hold promise of rejuvenation and intellectual vitality.
Posthuman neurotechnologies, likewise, promise of rejuvenation and rebirth, yet often result negatively in changes of autonomy and sometimes also basic identity. Continuing the timeline and moving Westward, Nina Begus’s contribution focuses on short stories; Roald Dahl’s ‘William and Mary’ (1959) and James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon)’s ‘The Girl Who Was Plugged In’ (1974), which fall under the pygmalionesque scheme. These stories join the popular argument of pygmalionism that views the beloved entity as a completely paralyzed human being. In this paper, discrimination of the paralyzed cyborgis paralleled with memoirs written by patients with locked-in syndrome(Bauby, Vigande, and others). All textsreveal, first, that issues of agency and autonomy clutter around the convoluted means of communication with the world as well as with the technology in use and, second, that the lack of agency quickly disparages humans in the realm of barely human. The talk reconsiders the ethical ways of handling co-agency of neurotechnologies, particularly those that allow for manipulation by another human being.
Addressing issues of co-agency from a clinical as well as philosophical standpoint, Sara Goering’s talk on acting with ‘smart’ brain-computer interfaces introduces upcoming semi-autonomous neurotechnologies (many of which were initially speculated about in fiction) that will inevitably change the concept of autonomy and agency. These devices, produced to help individuals with motor impairments or psychiatric disabilities enhance their agency, use machine learning and artificial intelligence while embedded in a human. The ‘smarter’ the device, the more it becomes a kind of agent in its own right and, in this way, may sometimes be perceived to be a kind of ‘third party’ in the brain – the place of Cartesian consciousness and identity. Framed under feminist relational identity and autonomy theory, this paper investigates how we might think of human agents interacting with their ‘smart’ devices as in a kind of relational co-agency and compares them to human/human relational interactions that enable agency. Goering argues for a relational and individualized approach to performing agency while maintaining outside safeguards to protect against undue influence or manipulation.
Approaching nonhuman agency from different angles (naturally in the body in the first talk, as a technology outside the body in the second, and implanted in the body in the third), our panel hopes to enlighten the way agency and co-agency can be misrepresented, misused, and manipulated. We also emphasize the value of complexity that literary works, alongside actual experiments and clinical cases, bring to the discussion on nonhuman agency and human body. Addressing the main theme of the convention, Being Human, our panel outlines the blurry borders between what is considered human enough and what is considered less than human.