Protheses and Enhancement

At first glance, the difference appears to be simple and clear: a prosthesis replaces a lost human body part, while enhancement aims to increase human performance beyond the normal. Typically a prosthesis is a replacement according to the bodily specifications of the lost biological part, if sufficient technological solutions are available at all: Crutches, for example, work as useful makeshifts but remain so incomparable to a human leg that they are often not considered prostheses.

But what happens if, when technology offers solutions beyond substitution, that perform partially differently than the biological model? And what if the technical replacement is used to overcome the natural limitations of human organs? This is already an old question, polished lenses can be used to correct visual defects or to build microscopes. Todays world is full of technical things with which human life takes place in completely different ways than by nature. - Accordingly, Sigmund Freud had spoken in his cultural theory of man being "a kind of prosthetic god, so to speak," "quite magnificent when he puts on all his auxiliary organs."

The history of prosthetics goes back much longer, than the modern dependence on technology might suppose. This points to the fact that in medicine, practice always comes first, because concrete suffering urgently requires a technical solution, even before a problem has been scientifically explored. One of the most famous characters in world literature wearing a prosthesis is Captain Ahab from Melville's Moby Dick, whose leg was bitten off by a white whale, inciting him to seek revenge. What is believed to be an adventure novel for young people turns out to be a brilliant fundamental debate on nature and culture, technical innovation and human civilization, which continues to inspire media theoretical interpretations. Speculative-critical commentaries on each chapter have been published continuously in the Neue Rundschau. Cornelius Borck was part of the commentary group and discussed the chapters 62, 75, 77, 100 and 125.

Periods of prothetic innovation often correlate with times of an artificially increased demand, such as during war, when masses of injured bodies have to be cared for and a mutilation cannot simply be dismissed as fate - the movable hand for Götz von Berlichingen, the development of usable leg prostheses during the American Civil War, Ferdinand Sauerbruch's work on a grasping hand during the First World War. This cynical logic called critics to the scene, first and foremost the pacifists among the Berlin Dadaists. They sketched soldiers as puppets and the commanders as emotionless machines. Raoul Hausmann praised the Sauerbruch arm, saying that even shots passed painlessly through the prosthesis. A little later, the communists dreamed of the New Man, who was to be created by media technology - and on whom Raoul Hausmann had already worked with his Optophone, which was to revolutionize the human sensory perception by blending sound and vision. In everyday life by contrast, prostheses often failed for comparatively banal reasons, for example because an association for the blind wanted to promote the Braille alphabet and therefore did not want to support a type-to-sound transducer.

At the end of the millennium, cyborgs drove the imagination, when digitization made new forms of communication possible. Donna Haraway and others drew attention to the figure's origins in Cold War space exploration and located there an opportunity for critical appropriation. History of science, cultural studies and STS can not only trace extensive genealogies but also offer resources for ongoing sociopolitical discussion on enhancement and self-optimization.