Resistence is never futile: Cognitive Enhancement and Crisis of the Ecology of Mind

Resistance is never futile: enhancement and the crisis of the ecology ofmind

Machines and Time Workshop. Université de Paris VII, 13March 2014Darian Meacham, UWE, Bristol Philosophy

1. Introduction to Anthropotech Project2. Title and Outline of the Paper3. ‘Don’t worry, everything is enhancement…there may be

a few contingent concerns’ – Alan Buchanan and theliberal approach to enhancement

4. The relevance of the concept of resistance5. World Alienation6. Machinic life and time after nature 7. The delicate ecology of mind

1. Brief introduction to the ‘Anthropotech’ project.

It may be helpful for me to begin by providing a littlebackground to what I am going to speak to you abouttoday. In late 2012, I came together with researchersfrom the University of Bristol with the idea that we weredissatisfied with the treatment that the problemssurrounding what can very generally be called ‘humanenhancement’ were getting in mainstream English speakingphilosophy and bioethics. I will say something more aboutthis treatment in a moment, but very briefly two centralissue came up: 1. That there was often a superficialtreatment of the central philosophical stakes of thedebate – concepts like subject, world, normality, etc.and 2. This treatment is (I think) in large part informedand limited to a rather narrow liberal paradigm where theconcern for subjective autonomy/sovereignty and thedevelopment of subjective capacities elaborated withminimal consideration for the actual emergence ofsubjectivity in the relations between a living system and

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its milieu loom largest on the horizon of conceptualconcerns – often at the expense other important issues.

Against this backdrop our collaboration aimed atexamining what resources might be available in otherareas of philosophy for interrogating the questionslinked to the enhancement project: namely phenomenologyand French epistemology (Canguilhem), but also some ofthe sources from which both those currents of thoughtdraw, specifically the organismic holism of KurtGoldstein. The neologism ‘anthropotech’, a term developedby the French philosopher Jerôme Goffette as analternative to the bifurcated concepts of treatment andenhancement, was chosen as an appropriate name for theproject. As a side note: we organized a conference inJanuary 2013 on ‘Cognitive Enhancement and OtherTechnologies of the Mind’. Today, I will draw on someinsights from Canguilhem, Goldstein and thephenomenological tradition, but also and perhaps mostimportantly Hannah Arendt, whose approach is perhaps bestdescribed as a phenomenological anthropology.

2. Title and outline of the talk

This is the background context from which this talkdevelops. I think it may also be helpful if I explainbriefly the title of my talk, Resistance is never futile:enhancement and the crisis of the ecology of mind. I am going to talkspecifically today about certain types of what isgenerally referred to as ‘cognitive enhancement’ – theimprovement of certain cognitive capacities and/or thefunctions underpinning them or the creation of newcognitive capacities1 – to this I would add a clause thatis usually left out of the standard definitions and whichI will come back to several times in the talk: ‘inrelation to certain challenges or requirements posed bythe environment’.2 This is of course important because the

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adequacy of a capacity, and its manifestation in generalis at the very least conditioned by environmentaldemands. It does not make sense to talk about themanifestation of a capacity outside of its being summonedforth by the environment which puts certain stresses onthe organism demanding. Another caveat, while my talk ina way centres around the idea of improvement, I willleave aside the question of whether ‘improvement’, inorder to constitute enhancement, should be measuredagainst the metric of a individual or population norm.That question is not irrelevant to this talk, as Ibelieve it has something to do with the idea of ‘commonsense’ that Arendt introduces, but it is not the centralconcern.

The capacities approach to enhancement allows us to getaround a conceptual issue with the idea of enhancementitself. If enhancement were to apply to a person as awhole or a person’s or a population groups’ overall lifeand well-being then the question of whether to enhance ornot is rendered non-sensical: enhancement is improvementand improvement is by definition good, end of argument.Thus the capacities approach allows for the nuance ofsaying at least that the enhancement of certaincapacities may have the effect of worsening our overallwell-being. This already hints at what I will call laterthe ecological approach to mind and enhancement: thehyperactivity of a particular, say, cognitive capacity,may offset other relations in a way that is detrimentalto the flourishing or even survival of the organism. Thisis well documented in the literature with the frequentand relatively banal example that an improved memory isnot an enhancement when we want to forget something. Wewill return to this in the next section, but hopefully itis helpful to already clarify how I am using the termenhancement. The concept of enhancement and cognitive

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enhancement in particular then forms something of thehinge in the set of concerns indicated by the title.

Looking then at the first part of the title: ‘resistanceis never futile’. I knew this line came from somewhere;it wasn’t until after I sent the title to Pierre that Irealized it was from Star Trek, but the way that I am usingit does not have much to do with assimilation into theBorg collective (I’m hoping that at a workshop onmachines and time you needn’t feel too much shame uponmentioning Star Trek or the Borg). My use of the termresistance stems rather from its use in thephenomenological tradition. I think that the centralityof this term to phenomenology and to phenomenology ofembodiment in particular can be traced back to Maine deBiran who characterized the feeling of effort throughwhich we feel our own existence as the will encounteringthe resistance of the body in movement. Maine de Biran’sphilosophy of embodiment, which can probably be calledthe first phenomenology of embodiment stemmed in largepart from his own experience of his afflicted body asoffering great resistance and being the object of greatfrustration to the philosopher; this is documentedwonderfully in his Journal Intime and also in Thomas Huxley’sexcellent long essay on Maine de Biran. Self-consciousness understood thus is the sensation of effort(sensation d’effort) in the will’s encounter with resistancein and from the world. Self-consciousness thus becomesdependent on the feeling of effort and reciprocally theresistance of the world which engenders the sense ofeffort – were the will to encounter no resistence fromthe body there would be no sensation of effort and noself-consciousness. This idea of resistance or‘adversity’ is further developed by Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Sartre dismissed Maine de Biran’s account of the‘feeling of feeling’, but gave what he (followingBachelard) called the ‘coefficient of the adversity of

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things’ a central role in his account of embodiment andfreedom.3 Things resist the (practical) advances ofconsciousness into the world, and in so doing make theworld manifest: Finding my way through a dark room, thereis nothing there for me until an object resists mymovement. The specific concept of resistance that I amreferring to here belongs more to Hannah Arendt, who, inThe Human Condition, connects the idea of resistance to aGerman word for object Gegenständ and further to thefabricated world constituted by human activity, what shecalls the ‘human artifice’. It is the quality of thedurability of the world. Resistance is precisely the qualityof this world that withstands (but must be maintainedagainst) the natural processes of decay and regeneration.The resistance of the world stands in direct oppositionto the futility of human mortality: the world built byhuman work will withstand and outlive any and all of theparticular mortals who participated in its construction(hence the ‘resistance is never futile’).4

One of Arendt’s major concerns in The Human Condition is thebreakdown of the resistance or durability (of the world)in consumer capitalist society. She phrases this in termsof the durability of the world, its Gegenständlichkeit beingsubsumed into an unremitting process of production andconsumption akin to the metabolic processes which bindshuman beings to necessity in natural life. Hence Arendt(in her disdain for anything smelling of nature and thecountryside) counter-intuitively argues that the literalconsumption of the durability of the world and themechanized processes of production by which it isreproduced do not estrange us from nature, but ratherassimilates us to it (nature for Arendt being the sphereof necessity and ultimately slavery).5 The result is whatshe variably calls the ‘withering’ away of the world or‘world-alienation’ (which she opposes to Marx’s object,self, and species-alienation).6

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It is interesting to point out that this concept of worldalienation is not at all unlike Goldstein’s understandingof the norms of a pathological life: ‘those that obligethe organism to live henceforth in a “shrunken” milieuwhich differs qualitatively, structurally, from itsformer milieu of life.7 What does this have to do withenhancement? I will try to argue that the goal of much ofwhat is discussed as cognitive enhancement entails alessoning of the resistance of the world to the cognitiveefforts of the subject. Moreover, I will try to arguethat this lessening of resistance risks precisely thekind of world-alienation that Ardent and Goldstein referto. Thus at least certain types of enhancement riskopening us up the threat of world-alienation or living ina shrunken milieu.

This brings us to the idea of an ‘ecology of mind’ andits being thrown into crisis. The ‘crisis of the ecologyof the mind’ is a phrase that I borrow from GregoryBateson. It is the title of the last part of his famousbook Steps Toward an Ecology of Mind. The idea of an ecology ofmind, that is, that mind is the product of a delicateecology of the organism and its milieu, is very helpfulin addressing a common retort that one finds in the pro-enhancement or ‘anti anti-enhancement’ (as Buchanan callshis position) literature, namely that everything that hasplayed a positive role in human development is a form oftechnological enhancement. This includes caffeine,numeracy, written language and the domestication ofanimals. This position has many merits; I think thatthere are good reason to hold that the development ofvarious conceptual apparatus function precisely on themanner of a technological enhancement, facilitated by acertain set of environmental relations between pre-historical humans and their milieus. What this positionhowever allows its adherents to argue is that objections

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to technological enhancements that are not lodged inparticular practical concerns are most often guilty of‘biomedical exceptionalism’8, i.e. the idea that there issomething novel and novelly threatening about biomedicalor biotechnical enhancement that intervenes directly inor on the human body and in human biological processes.The anti-anti-enhancement thinkers are probably right inarguing that these technologies go not representsomething different in kind from previous technologiesand that previous forms of enhancement (language anddomestication of animals for example) also had an impacton both human genotypic and phenotypic makeup anddevelopment. What the idea of an ecology of mind allowsus to do is something similar to what the idea of a‘natural ecology’ allows: to try to specify the tippingpoints and accelerating factors that would contribute tothe dysfunction and perhaps ultimate demise of theecosystem without having to make claims about theradically novelty of this or that type of intervention inthe dynamics of the ecology. Another way of putting thiswould be that the idea of ecology allows us to test theboundaries and inclusion/exclusion conditions of aconceptual set that includes mind and world.

You might be forgiven, after listening to my very longintroduction, for asking if I have wandered into thewrong workshop (and simply politely stayed); what doesany of this have to do with ‘machines and time’? I thinkthat there is a connection – and hopefully I am notstraining too far. The Arendtian critique ofmechanization and automation that I referred to a momentago refers of course not to human cognitive enhancementin the sense I am thinking of here, but rather tomachines and the mechanization of all forms offabrication in the modern period. Her critique drawsheavily from but also tries to go beyond Marx’s analysisof machines and labour in the Grundrisse. In a sense, she

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thinks herself willing to think machines and machiniclife in a way that Marx certainly alluded to but neverexpanded upon: i.e. that the machine ceases to be anextension of human power and the human productive dynamicand instead incorporates humans into its own properdynamic.9 It is ultimately this, which Arendt thinks leadsto the withering away of the world and ‘worldalienation’. The question I would like to pose in theremainder of the paper is if Marx’s and Arendt’s analysesof machines are helpful in addressing the question ofenhancement and the ecology of mind: namely do certainforms of cognitive enhancement threaten to destabilizethe ecology of mind?

There is also a temporal dimension to this question. Itmakes sense to think temporality in terms of ecologies.Temporalities relevant to scale and to the dynamics of anecology. This links temporality to both thefunctions/capacities and environmental demands of anecology. A transformation of environmental demandsinvariably leads to an alteration of response in theperformance of function and capacity – this may, but neednot lead to a shift in the temporality proper to specificecological relationships. In Arendt’s analysis thetemporality proper to the human ecology of mind with itsnecessitating of a resistant and durable world of humanartifice is ‘history’. What Arendt envisioned and warnedof with the ‘alienation of the world’ was precisely theend of history as the mode of temporality proper to thedurability of the human artifice. Though the temporalitythat she feared loomed on the horizon bore a greatresemblance to the rhythm and flow of natural timecharacterized by unending process, it does not make senseto refer to it as natural time as the metabolic processthat characterizes the temporality of nature for Arendthas been replaced with a cycle of unceasing production

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and consumption: it is a time after nature10 – neither naturalnor historical, but something new.

In the rest of this talk I will try to expand upon thesepoints. First I will look (quite) briefly at the accountof enhancement offered by Alan Buchanan. I am drawing onhis two recent books on the topic Beyond Humanity and Betterthan Human. Next I will examine the idea of resistance inrelation to cognitive enhancement. I will then turn toMarx’s account of machine and labour in the Grundrisse andArendt’s linking of machinic life to a ‘withering away ofthe world’ and ‘world-alienation’. Finally, I will lookat how enhancement conceived by its proponents andanalysed through Marx and Arendt might impact upon theecology of mind and the temporality of that ecology.

3. ‘Don’t worry, everything is enhancement…there may bea few practical concerns’ – Alan Buchanan and the liberalapproach to enhancement

The harshest criticisms of biomedicalenhancements appear to apply toenhancements per se, whether biomedical ornot. […] if we accept that view, we wouldnot only have to reject cognitiveenhancement drugs, but must also regardliteracy, institutions, and the agrarianrevolution in a highly unfavourable lightas well.

- Buchanan, BeyondHumanity, p. 26

Before launching into the critique of mechanizationoffered by Marx and Arendt, it will be helpful toestablish the basic conceptual landscape of theanglophone anti-anti-enhancement position. I am going torefer exclusively to Alan Buchanan here for the simple

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reason that I think his arguments are somewhat morenuanced than what we find in other others and he resistsbeing Pollyannish about the practical concernssurrounding what is otherwise an endorsement of theenhancement enterprise.

The first point to make is a general one aboutenhancement. Buchanan understands enhancement as anexpansion and augmentation of human capabilities. It isthis very broad definition that allows numeracy,conceptual thinking, the agrarian revolution, and poppingyour narcoleptic cousin’s modafinil to be brought underthe same umbrella, as can what Buchanan rather vaguelycalls ‘institutions’. As a political philosopher he takesa suitably broad view on what an institution is,including ‘the market’, ‘the state’ and things likenational health services (to ascend a ladder ofincreasing concreteness). But an institution is roughlydescribed as an ordering of sense, a conceptual set orframework which opens further potential avenues of sense-development. It is in this way that institutions cancreate capacities that did not previously exist

Enhancement writ large can be separated into non-deliberate and deliberate developments. This has to dowith the genesis of the enhancement qua enhancement.Buchanan further specifies a biomedical enhancement bycalling it a ‘deliberate intervention, applyingbiomedical science, which aims to improve an existingcapacity that most or all human beings typically have, orto create a new capacity, by acting directly on the bodyor brain’.11 But he emphasizes the continuity between non-biomedical and biomedical enhancement.

With regard to our area of interest, cognitiveenhancements, Buchanan places particular emphasis on‘increasing productivity’. Productivity he says should

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not be limited to economic productivity, but must beunderstood in a broader sense of ‘how good we are at usingexisting resources to create things that we value’.12

While the capacity approach to enhancement has certainmerits and it certainly preferable to a much coarsernotion of enhancement as simple general improvement, itstill has shortcomings. Most significantly, I think, isthat the idea of capacity that is deployed here isseemingly entirely subject-centred. Capacities are seenalmost as essential properties of a subject. The approachof Goldstein and Canguilhem is different and I thinkpreferable. Capacities should be understood in terms ofperformances of the organism in response to demands fromthe environment. So what capacities an organism exhibitshas everything to do with what its environment demands orrequires. This is of course related to the emphasis onproductivity. Increased productivity must be a demand ofthe relevant environment is indeed an enhancement can beso called because it increases productivity. This isanother example of trying to deploy the ecologicalapproach in thinking about the relation between capacity,enhancement and demands of the environment.

It’s worth mentioning that while Buchanan rejects theparing down of human productivity to economicproductivity, the examples that he gives largely relateto economic productivity, even pointing out that lostkeys amount in the loss of 500 million pounds a year. Butultimately the circularity of the argument seems to restin the fact that what we value, and so the aim ofproductivity is productivity itself – and this is indeedmost often expressed in terms of economic productivity. Ipresent this as a thesis that what is valued in late-modern liberal capitalist society is productivity, and sothe aim of productivity is to increase productivity, toself-augment, with the assumed side effect that this will

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also improve well-being. There is something at the veryleast constraining about substituting the idea ofproductivity, which is undoubtedly borrowed if notdirectly appropriated from the realm of fabrication andeconomic calculation, for what should be a concept offlourishing – the only proper aim of enhancement. Thissubstitution may however be in accordance with thedemands of certain institutional environments orecologies. In other words, from an uncriticalperspective, the substitution is not entirelyillegitimate. By introducing the idea of institutionalenvironment we can see the formation of a feedbacksystems within the ecology of mind. An institution, orordering of sense, can be understood as a response to anenvironmental demand. The institution can then be seen asan enhancement if indeed it augments the capacitiesnecessary to respond to the requirements of theenvironment. The institutional enhancement – and Buchananspecifically uses ‘the market’ as his example – thenfeeds back into the demands that the ecology places uponthe organism. In this sense enhancements can be seen as adimension of niche construction whereby responses of theorganism to the demands of the environment feed back intothe subsequent demands of the environment upon theorganism.

4. The Concept of Resistance

Central to the idea of productivity is precisely the ideaof reducing the ‘resistance’ of the world to productiveprocess. Resistance can emerge at any point within theproduction process, but our particular concern here iswith cognitive productivity. Resistance to the cognitiveprocess must be understood as distinct to resistance inthought. The encounter and prolonged interrogation of theobject which confronts thought as its other and resistsbeing subsumed into it, resists thought’s grasp is

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precisely the lifeblood of thought. Arendt provides ahelpful description of art at the transformation (she mayhave been better off using the term transubstantiation ofaffect into a sensually manifest thought, but affect inthis sense can be thought of precisely as the response ofthe embodied mind to the resistance of the world. Put inother terms: the co-efficient of adversity is manifest inaffect. Cognition on the other hand seeks the smoothpassage over resistance in the transformation of theworld’s durability into a means to an end (which forArendt is immediately transformed into another means).The cognitive process can be measured in its product, itsresults which have use-value only as means to furthercognition or can be applied to other aspects of theproduction process – a cognition in this sense isproperly a product that can be removed from its initialcontext and applied elsewhere in a process.13

Productivity in this sense is not directly enhanced bythought. To the contrary, thought in its most propermanifest form, the work of art, is what resists entirelythe concept of productivity of a smooth transformationfrom end product into a means for further expansion ordevelopment – the work of art is a definitiveinterruption in the productivity of the artist, if westill insist on talking about the work of art in thissense.

Thus the aim of a cognitive enhancement, which is anaugmentation of a performance in response to the demandof productivity is the overcoming of resistance that thedurability of the world presents to productive process.This is evident even in the relatively crude forms of‘cognitive enhancement’ available today, which areprimarily various forms of psychostimulant allowing forincreased focus and attention over increased periods oftime. The aim of these chemical interventions into

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cognitive processes is precisely a narrowing of themilieu (sensual and mental) to allow for more specifiedfunctioning – one of the reasons they aid with impulsecontrol.14 A cognitive enhancement either allows for themitigation of the resistance of the body in itsexhaustion or perceptual distraction or a lessoning ofthe resistance of the world insofar as the object doesnot give itself to recall in memory or does this yield tothe cognitive process that instrumentalises it.

The threat that Arendt presents is that the yielding ofthe world to cognitive power, which is in our contextanother manner of saying the yielding to productivityerodes precisely the thingly resistant quality of theworld. In other words the world is dependent upon itsresistance to cognition, and in so resisting it makesitself available to thought. In this sense a world ofenhanced cognition risks ceasing to be a world at all butis rendered purely in terms of process: a cycle ofcognitive means and ends that serves the acceleratedproductive cycle of production and consumption.

But the emphasis on an ecological model of mind entailsinsisting on the other side of this as well. Anexaggerated coefficient of adversity or resistance as wefind in illness (and here the phenomenological accountsof illness are very helpful) has the same consequence ofwithering the world, or restricting the field ofpossibilities that are opened up in an organism’sinteraction with its environment. Canguilhem describeshealth as the capacity for multiple norms, such thathumans are healthy when then are more than normal.Another way of putting this would be to say that healthentails an expansion or opening up of the number ofpotential movements or actions an organism can take inresponse to requirements from its environment. Thisinevitably entails the negotiation of nodes of resistance

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in the world and it is precisely this negociation thatopens up new pathways insofar as the nodes of resistanceappear to the organism as object of possible negotiation– simply put resistance engenders an expansion of theworld. In this way, what I want to say is that certaintypes of enhancement, those that aim to reduce resistanceto productive processes and specifically cognitiveprocesses come to resemble certain types of pathologywhich can be characterized phenomenologically in terms ofa withering of the world, or in Arendt’s terms: worldalienation.

5. Machinic life and time after nature

There are I think two specific forms of temporality thatcan be correlated to the idea of the world as resistant.The first is a subjective temporality that is modulatedprecisely by the resistance of objects in the world:subjective time is an emergent property of the embodiedsubject’s negotiation of resistance in the world (maybeone reason for the differing modes of subjectivetemporality in sleep, hallucination and wakefulness). Thesecond mode which is the focus of Arendt’s analysis isthe correlate of the human artifice as a whole – theworld. The subject does not encounter the resistance ofthe human artifice only in the material fabrication ofhomo faber, but also in institutions, or structures ofsense. The ancient garden wall (typically Englishexample) is not just a physical obstacle to be climbed,but an index of a temporality which not only outlasts butpervades any immediate experience of it. Itsinstitutional sense (present in my remarking of what anEnglish example this is) is not only co-present in iscorporeal resistance to my rambling but also offersanother dimension of resistance to the brute materialresistance of the wall that I can touch and feel.

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Resistance is then a fundamental dimension of temporality– or we could say that it gives dimension to temporality.

The productive process is precisely about thetransformation of resistance into a means. This is ofcourse present in the construction of the wall in thefirst place. What characterizes productivity forproductivity’s sake is the immediate conversion of allends back into means (precisely why conservationists aresuch an annoyance to progress – they fetishize an indexof resistance that has no sense from the standpoint ofproduction).

We might turn to Marx’s analyses of machines and labor inthe Grundrisse here, substituting the idea of machine forthe more abstract idea of productivity:

Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ,scattered among the individual living workers atnumerous points in the mechanical [productive]system; subsumed under the total process of themachinery [production] itself, as itself only a linkin the system, whose unity exists not in the livingworkers, but rather in the living active machinery[process of production], which confronts hisindividual, insignificant doings as a mightyorganism.15

For Arendt this conversion to machinic life, shorthandfor the reduction of all ends to means in a productiveprocess entails a kind of stripping of resistance fromthe world, but this stripping of resistance is preciselya de-worlding of the world. In so far as the world is notnatural, i.e. it stands in stark opposition to thenecessity of the metabolic cycle which also demands thesmoothing of all resistance, production resembles nature

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without being nature. The time of production is not anatural process, but process after nature, so to speak.

The environing milieu of an organism seen from the eyesof productivity comes to resemble not a world in thesense of Gegenständlichkeit, but something akin to a factoryas Marx (citing Ure) describes in the Grundrisse: ‘In itsmost rigorous sense the term [factory] conveys the ideaof a vast automation, composed of numerous mechanical andintellectual organs operating in concert and withoutinterruption, toward one and the same aim, all theseorgans being subordinated to a motive force which movesitself.’16 (This also not so far from the world as seen bya narrowly understood notion of embodied cognition).

The enhancement of cognition is certainly not inherentlyproblematic so long as it is not taken as an aim initself. A world the resists human endeavor to no end is asconstricting as one where all resistance is leveled –this is precisely Goldstein’s understanding of disease.But as with any ecology the ecology of mind whichcollapses without resistance of the world has tippingpoints. My only concern here is that we pay those tippingpoints some of our fleeting attention.

Grundrisse:

(690) In its most rigorous sense the term [factory]conveys the idea of a vast automation, composed ofnumerous mechanical and intellectual organs operating in concertand without interruption, toward one and the same aim,all these organs being subordinated to a motive forcewhich moves itself.

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(692) Once adopted into the production process ofcapital, the means of labor passes through differentmetamorphoses whose culmination is the machine, or ratheran automatic system of machinery (system of machinery:the automatic one is merely its most complete, mostadequate form, and alone transforms machinery into asystem), set in motion by an automaton, a moving powerthat moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerousmechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workersthemselves are merely cast as its conscious linkages.

(693) Not as with the instrument, which the workeranimates and makes into his organ with his skill andstrength, and whose handling therefore depends on hisvirtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possess skilland strength in the place of the worker, it itself thevirtuoso, with a soul of the mechanical laws actingthrough it […] the workers’ activity, reduced to a mereabstraction of activity is determined and regulated onall sides by the movement of the machinery, and not theopposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbsof the machinery, by their construction, to actpurposefully, does not exist in the workers’consciousness, but rather acts upon him through themachine as an alien power, as the power of the machineitself.

(693) Labour appears, rather, merely as a consciousorgan, scattered among the individual living workers atnumerous points in the mechanical system; subsumed underthe total process of the machinery itself, as itself onlya link in the system, whose unity exists not in theliving workers, but rather in the living activemachinery, which confronts his individual, insignificantdoings as a mighty organism.

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(694) In machinery objectified labour itself appears notonly in the form of product or of the product employed asmeans of labour, but in the form of the force ofproduction itself. The development of the means of labourinto machinery is not an accidental moment of capital,but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditionalinherited means of labour into a form adequate tocapital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, ofthe general productive forces of the social brain, isthus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour andhence appears as an attribute of capital, and morespecifically of fixed capital insofar as it enters theproduction process as a means of production proper.

(706) ‘Capital itself is the moving contradiction inthat it presses to reduce labour time [decreaseresistence increase productivity], while it posits labourtime as the sole measure and source of wealth’

(706) [still thinks the machine in terms of organs ofhuman power]: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives,railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc.These are products of human industry; natural materialtransformed into organs of the human will over nature, orof human participation in nature. They are organs of thehuman brain created by the human hand

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1 See, Buchanan, A. Beyond Humanity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 23 forthis definition. I am leaving out the question of whether ‘enhancement’ properly speaking necessitates augmentation of a capacity beyond ‘normal’ or ‘population typical’ levels. But the concept of norm is very important here and I think a minimal criteria of enhancement is that it augments a capacity beyond at least an individual norm. If I rehydrate myself following a period of incapacitating dehydration and hence function at a higher level that is not enhancement. We will leave the difficulties of these questions aside for now.

2 My phrasing here reflects a Goldsteinian approach to the relations betweenorganism and environment: ‘we can only state that the structure of an organism isas such that it makes possible performances that are fulfilments of therequirements of its environment’ (Goldstein, The Organism, p. 99). This capacitiesrelative approach is also taken by Buchanan in relation to enhancement:‘enhancement is an improvement of some particular capacity’ (Buchanan, A. Better thanHuman. The Promise and Perils of Enhancing Ourselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2011, p. 6)

3 Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness. H. Barnes (trans). New York: Routledge, 2005, pp.388-49

4 ‘If the animal laborans needs the help of homo faber to ease his labour and remove his pain, and if mortals need his help to erect a home on earth, acting and speaking men need the help of homo faber in his highest capacity, that is the help of the artist, of poets, of historiographers, of momument builders or writers, because without them the only product of their activity, the story they enact and tell, would not survive at all.’ (Arendt, H. The Human Condition. Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1958, 173) 5 ‘The Danger of future automation is less the deplored mechanism and artificialisation of human life that that, artificiality notwithstanding, all humanproductivity would be sucked into an ernourmously intensified life process and would follow automatically, without pain or effort, its ever recurrent natural cyctle’ (Arendt, Human Condition, p. 132)

6 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 209

7 See, Canguilhem, G. Knowledge of Life. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008, p. 132

8 See Buchanan, Better Than Human, p. 10

9 ‘The question is therefor not so much whether we are the masters or slaves of ourmachines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy world and things.’ (Arendt, Human Condition, p. 151)

10 I am grateful to my colleague Iain Hamilton Grant for the gift of this expression.

11 Buchanan, Beyond Humanity, p. 23

12 Buchanan, Beyond Humanity, p. 44

13 Arendt, Human Condition, p. 170-71

14 The symptoms of ADHD seem to represent a similar issue with resistance. The patient is precisely unable to latch onto the world this is manifest in an incapacity to focus or ‘pay attention’. 15 Marx, K. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Classics, 1973, p. 693

16 Marx, Grundrisse, p. 690