Critical Annotated Webliography

2. “From Frankenstein to the Visible Human Project (VHP), the body is continually reinterpreted as a limit to what it means to be human.” Discuss critically.

If the body is the means for measuring human capability then the greater the precision of the measure, the more we can learn about our capabilities. The advancement of technology and the transition from fictional bodily possibilities like Frankenstein’s monster to the digitalised bodily reality that is the VHP, has forced the reinterpretation of our bodily capabilities and their complexity.

In Catherine Waldby’s article “The body and the digital archive: the Visible Human Project and the computerisation of medicine”, (published in the second issue of Health: an Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine) she examines the textualisation of the body through the VHP and the resulting “material reorganisation of bodies that reveals a biopolitical hierarchy of more and less valuable bodies within the context of highly technological medicine practices”[1]. Within the framework of my thesis this article as an early record of the awareness of the potential of the VHP for both positive and negative readings of the human body is a good starting point for drawing contrast between the digital (re)incarnation of Joseph Paul Jernigan and the disparate body comprising Frankenstein’s monster.

From here I would like to pursue the idea of the body as property, and whether the sale of digitalised or transplanted body parts ought to affect our perception of the body as a single physical entity with the potential for only a single-lived experience (by this I am extrapolating the ‘living-on’ of other bodies through transplantation and digitalisation – undeniably Jernigan’s bodily form lives on in the digital form). As a means to draw out this discussion, I have found Alexandra George’s article on “Marketing Humanity – Should we allow the sale of human body parts?” published in the University of Technology, Sydney Law Review very informative and detailed. The article, structured as a law review, details step by step the legal arguments for and against the process of human body part sale along with the associated philosophies governing current ideas about the practice.

From the opposite end of the life cycle now, I would like to use Isabel Karpin’s article “The Uncanny Embryos: Legal Limits to the Human and Reproduction Without Women” to spur a discussion about the life of the embryo and importance of it (in particular in the light of much recent debate over the past several decades in relation to abortion and embryonic rights) in relation to conceiving the body in every form as fundamentally human, just as Frankenstein’s monster and Jernigan’s text encoded body are innately human. Karpin’s article is also from the Sydney Law Review, a “peer review journal of high repute, with wide readership both in Australia and internationally.”[2]

The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies has an amazing array of blogs, podcasts and publications relating to critical thinking in all fields of study. For use in this essay I found an article "Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary" by George Dvorsky and James Hughes very interesting as a source for up to date thinking about the future of the human gender binary. They provide a good deal of scientific data about the issues at hand along with a range of philosophical viewpoints from scholarly texts. Primarily, their focus on the genuine potential for a complete rewrite of human gender theory serves as a basis for adding another form of a thoroughly human-, but boundary-pushing-body for consideration as part of my thesis.

In a final question of the meaning possessed and conveyed by the physical human body, I intend to make a brief expose of the Amazing Human Body Exhibition, a travelling science/medical exhibit that comprises real cadavers that have been specially treated and preserved. A large number of newspaper and opinion articles have been written or posted online about the issue since it the show toured areas of Australia in 2006. The article on the Melbourne Indymedia site (aka Melbourne Independent Media Centre – a participatory news service that ended all production in March 2008) is perhaps one of the most outraged and proves a good deal of context and research relating to the history of the exhibition and the author, Simon Willlace’s concerns about it. Here the issue is of the right to use bodies as commercial items (since they are not yet historical artefacts) and the morality of such a move. This relates directly to the sale of body parts discussion earlier in the essay and is further complicated by the concerns of the Falun Gong movement that the bodies in the exhibition, despite being meticulously (and expensively) preserved cannot be otherwise identified and may have even been executed before being handed over for preservation.

In conclusion, we can clearly see how technological advancement is producing vastly different versions and ideas of the body, ways of viewing and storing, means of interpreting and methods for restoring, transforming and enhancing. Accordingly, accompanying each new discovery of more invasive or destructive means of understanding the body is another set of concerns about the morality of the process, focussed on the sacredness of the physical body in both living embodied and non-living forms and on the right of the individual to determine the fate and future of their own body. From an ontological point of view, the physical body remains the limitation of our understanding of self and of our identity.

Word Count: 994

[1] Catherine Waldby (4 July 1997) “The body and the digital archive: the Visible Human Project and the computerisation of medicine.” http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/body.html (accessed: 28 August 2008)

[2] University of Sydney, Sydney Law School, Sydney Law Review http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/slr/ (accessed: 28 August 2008)

Bibliography

Dvorksy, George, and Hughes, James (March 2008) “Postgenderism: Beyond the Gender Binary” Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies http://ieet.org/archive/IEET-03-PostGender.pdf (accessed: 28 August 2008)

George, Alexandra (1 July 2006) “Marketing Humanity – Should we allow the sale of human body parts?” Australian Legal Information Institute http://austlii.law.uts.edu.au/au/journals/UTSLRev/2005/2.html (accessed: 28 August 2008)

Karpin, Isabel (December 2006) “The Uncanny Embryos: Legal Limits to the Human and Reproduction Without Women” The University of Sydney, Sydney Law School, Sydney Law Review http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/slr/slr28_4/Karpin.pdf (accessed: 28 August 2008)

Waldby, Catherine (4 July 1997) “The body and the digital archive: the Visible Human Project and the computerisation of medicine.” Murdoch University of WA http://wwwmcc.murdoch.edu.au/ReadingRoom/VID/body.html (accessed: 28 August 2008)

Willace, Simon (11 May 2006) “The Amazing (freak show) human body exhibition” Melbourne Indymedia http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/05/112158.php (accessed: 28 August 2008)