The Technocene: Reflections on Bodies, Minds, and Markets

By Hermínio Martins

Hermínio Martins was one of the key pioneers of the sociology of science and technology. He published extensively in Portuguese and was recognized for his academic contributions with an honorary doctorate at Lisbon (2006) and two Portuguese Medals of Honour. Following his retirement from the University of Oxford, he wrote prolifically in English on a wide range of topics that examined the ethical and societal consequences of the commoditization of the human body and mind. These essays are deep philosophical reflections on our contemporary world, and draw extensively and eclectically upon a wide range of theoretical influences including continental philosophy, history and psychology, to name but a few disciplines. ‘The Technocene’ is a selection of some of these insightful essays, made available to a global audience for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783088348

Book preview

The Technocene

The Technocene

Reflections on Bodies, Minds and Markets

Hermínio Martins

Edited by S. Ravi Rajan

with

Danielle Crawford

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018

by ANTHEM PRESS

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© 2018 S. Hermínio Martins and S. Ravi Rajan

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Martins, Hermínio, author. | Rajan, S. Ravi, editor. | Crawford, Danielle, editor.

Title: The technocene : reflections on bodies, minds, and markets / Bb Herminio Martins.

Description: New York: Anthem Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018038541 | ISBN 9781783088324 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences – Philosophy. | Technology – Social aspects. | Science – Social aspects.

Classification: LCC H61.M29 2018 | DDC 300.1–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038541

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-832-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78308-832-X (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

To Margaret,

and all the decent, upright academics I have known.

Contents

Preface

Editor’s Introduction: Hermínio Martins and the Technocene

References

Index

Preface

Professor Hermínio Martins (1934–2015) was a leading light in British sociology and worked on a wide range of topics, including sociological theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, the sociology of science, the philosophy and sociology of technology and the historical sociology of Portugal and Brazil. He was widely feted and decorated. The Portuguese government conferred upon him the titles of Grande Oficial da Ordem do Infante Dom Henrique, Portugal (Grand Officer of the Order of Prince Henry the Navigator), and Grande Oficial da Ordem de Santiago e Espada, Portugal (Grand Officer of the Order of St. James), in investitures presided by the presidents of the Portuguese Republic at that time. He also received the Medalha de Mérito Cultural da Câmara Municipal de Cascais (Cultural Merit Medal from the Municipality of Cascais), near Lisbon, and in 2006, the University of Lisbon awarded him an honorary doctorate.

During Hilary term, 1990, while a graduate student at Oxford, I was privileged to attend a lecture series taught by Professor Martins. It was entitled, ‘The Theme of Technology in Philosophical Sociology’. It was a survey course, but it encompassed texts, people and ideas that were then, and even now, largely unknown and untaught. The lectures were sparsely attended and, if memory serves me right, only one other student, besides me, came regularly. However, Martins came to every session of the class formally attired in subfusc and, in his thick Portuguese accent, lectured as though there were a roomful of students. The classes were simply an intellectual feast and, without doubt, they formed the highlight of my experience as a graduate student at Oxford.

In the years since, I repeatedly asked Professor Martins about those lectures, and whether he would make the notes available. He always replied that he was working on writing them up as a book. He retired in 2001. We kept in touch casually, and I presented a paper to one of the conferences that produced festschrifts in his honour. However, it was not until mid-2014 that I received, via e-mail, a set of bulky attachments, along with a list of works he had written during the past decade. These papers were not his Oxford lectures, but the contents were gripping. I asked him what he was going to do with them, and it became evident that he simply did not have the strength, in his later years, to see them through to publication as a book. I therefore volunteered to help, and the result is the present volume.

I met and interviewed Professor Martins three times from December 2014 to March 2015. The biographical introduction is a result of these interviews. In editing the manuscript, I made a set of changes after consulting with him. Chapter 1 is a radically altered version of a paper he wrote, exploring the technocene through the human life cycle chronologically. As for other changes, the editorial work has largely been in the nature of clarifying things and, for the most part, I did so in consultation with him. I should add here that this volume is by no means a comprehensive collection of all his works since retirement, or even all his unpublished works. There are other critical essays, in English and Portuguese, on a wide range of topics from art and science to religion. Professor Martins however approved of my selection and was looking forward to seeing the book in print when, without warning, he was taken away from us. Hopefully, in time, a way will be found to make his other writings available to the scholarly audience.¹

I did the substantial editorial work, but I am indebted to Danielle Crawford, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who carefully cross checked references and cleaned up the manuscript. I am also grateful to Helena Jerónimo and José Luís Garcia for their many insights and inputs. Last, but by no means the least, I am particularly indebted to Anthem Press for their patience and encouragement, and to three excellent anonymous reviewers. Although I did not agree with all their observations, I have incorporated many of their suggestions.

S. Ravi Rajan

Santa Cruz, California

April 2018

Note

1 As things stand there are efforts by Professor Martins’s colleagues and students in Portugal to collect them in a website dedicated to his works. See footnote 1, on page xvi, for details.

Editor’s Introduction: Hermínio Martins and the Technocene

Hermínio Martins was born in Lourenço Marques (now Maputo) in Mozambique in 1934. He was a second-generation Mozambican, in that both his parents were born there as well. Hermínio attended the Liceu Nacional in Maputo, which was then a small city of about 20,000, with blacks, Chinese, Indians, Italians and Germans in a multiracial pot. For a small city, it had a lively intellectual life, with several visiting scientists and artists from around the world giving lectures and concerts. Martins grew up in a household with books. His aunt and uncle, with whom he lived after the passing of his mother, were voracious readers and imported books in Portuguese from Portugal and Brazil, in French from the Continent and in English from a bookshop in Johannesburg, South Africa.

When Hermínio completed secondary school, his family hoped he would attend college somewhere nearby. Geography dictated South Africa, but the young 17-year-old disapproved of the aparthied system there and decided to travel to England, where he knew nobody. He subsequently studied at the London School of Economics (LSE) where, in 1957, he earned a BSc (Econ.), an interdisciplinary degree akin to Oxford’s PPE, before doing graduate research under the supervision of Ernest Gellner during 1957 to 1959.² Amongst the many highlights of his career at LSE were classes in the philosophy of science with Karl Popper and a deep friendship with Imre Lakatos who apparently claimed that Martins was ‘the only sane sociologist he knew!’³ Martins’s time at LSE were the golden years of the discipline of philosophy of science, and these influences were to prompt him to write a classic essay on Thomas Kuhn (Martins 1972).

Martins’s first job was at the University of Leeds, where he worked from 1959 to 1964. He taught in the social studies department, with colleagues from the disciplines of sociology, anthropology and political science and, worked, amongst others, with John Rex and Bryan Wilson.⁴ Martins recalls several seminars that influenced him while at Leeds. These included what became Piyo Rattansi and James E. McGuire’s classic paper on Newton (Rattansi and McGuire 2007) and lectures given by the effervescent genius, Jerome Ravetz. Martins then moved to the University of Essex (1964–71), where he co-founded the Department of Sociology and the School of Comparative Studies. In 1971, Martins moved to the University of Oxford, where he was lecturer of sociology and fellow of St. Antony’s College until 2001, when he retired. He was selected especially to teach the sociology of Latin America and remained there before retiring in 2001, when he was elected emeritus fellow of St Antony’s College. It might also be worth mentioning here that for a considerable time after the 1974 Carnation Revolution, Martins was a stateless person, in exile in the United Kingdom.

During the course of a distinguished academic career, Martins also held visiting appointments at Harvard University (1966–67) and the University of Pennsylvania (1967–68). He was also widely sought after in the Portuguese-speaking world and was appointed Investigador Coordenador (Research Professor) at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, in 2000–2005 and, since then, an Investigador Honorário (Honorary Research Fellow) of the institute. He also held appointments for shorter periods at various universities in Brazil (UNICAMP, UNESP–Marilia) and in Portugal (Coimbra).

In addition to these formal academic appointments, Martins served as founder-member of the Society for Latin American Studies (UK). During the 1970s, he was convenor of the Theoretical Sociology Group of the British Sociological Association; co-founder of the British Society for Durkheimian Studies; founder-member of the editorial board of the Sociology of Sciences Yearbook; founder-member of the Associação Portuguesa de Ciência Política (Portuguese Political Science Association); and member of the Consultative Council of the Associação Portuguesa de Sociologia (Portuguese Sociological Association). In addition, he served on the editorial board of the journal History of the Human Sciences and Configurações – Revista de Sociologia.

By the time Martins moved from Essex to take up his Oxford position, he sensed that the discipline of philosophy of science was ‘not going anywhere’ in the sense that there was ‘no great movement’, only technical innovations. The sociology of science was by then a thriving new field, driven by radical constructivism that, he felt, was partially a response to the philosophy of science. Martins was, however, dissatisfied with the emergent sociology of science, which he felt was akin to sociological solipsism. The term sociological solipsism, Martins claims, was coined by Talcott Parsons in his discussion of Durkheim (1950), but Martins felt it was equally applicable to the new field of the sociology of science.⁵ It was, he held, a doctrine that we cannot know anything beyond society and, in particular, that humanity cannot know nature. This concern, as we will see later, became an important theme in his later work. It might be worth mentioning here that Martins was never a great fan of extremes of radical dichotomies and he disavowed the commonly held idea that two of the great founders of modern sociology, Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, were two parts of the positivist/interpretive divide. Indeed, he went on to edit books on both (Pickering and Martins 1994; Lassman, Velody and Martins 1989).

At Oxford, Martins made two decisions. First, he decided to particularly study modern Brazil, following up on some early research there, starting in 1971. During subsequent years, he travelled extensively there and wrote and published in the Portuguese language on topics related to contemporary Brazilian society. In particular, he explored the authoritarianism implicit in Portuguese–Brazilian relations. He also took on a number of Brazilian students and mentored many young academics, especially from the Global South. Second, his disenchantment with the sociology of science led him to pursue studies in the sociology of technology, in which he became a pioneer. He appreciated the work of the philosopher, Rom Harre; was impressed by the work of two social anthropologists, Edwin Ardener and Rodney Needham; and valued his interactions with Lawrence Whitehead, a scholar of the politics of Latin America; but no one else at Oxford caught his attention. He, however, read voraciously and widely across the disciplines. He carefully studied the Bronisław Malinowski and Evans Pritchard traditions in anthropology, and invested in close readings of the works of Talcott Parsons, Edmond Husserl, Jacques Ellul, Hans Jonas, Mark Bloc and Hannah Arendt. During his time at the University of Pennsylvania, he met Stanley Milgrim, who, notwithstanding the notoriety associated with his infamous experiment, ‘seemed like a nice fellow’!⁶ Martins wrote prolifically on emerging technological systems, such as information technology, biotechnology and robotics. Martins’s first publication in the philosophy of technology was a paper on Ernst Kapp, under the title, ‘Hegel, Texas’ (Martins 1993).⁷ Over the years, he asked probing questions about technology and ethics. He was particularly interested in the question of what technology was a proxy for, and the more classically driven questions, such as ‘What is it to be human in the age of modern technology?’, and in particular: ‘What is it to define ourselves via technologies?’ Martins also took note of the wider geopolitical and socio-economic backdrop. By the end of the twentieth century, the social democratic project had largely collapsed and markets had pervaded virtually everything. Thus, his inquiries into technology widened to encompass the interactions between markets and technologies.

Moreover, responding to the trend in the United Kingdom, he began to systematically analyse the marketization of universities and, more generally, of higher education. He believed that members of his own tribe were intrinsically involved in the transformation of an institution he held dear. He pointed out, as an example, that a former sociology colleague went on to become a vice chancellor at a university, only to gain notoriety by cutting social-science jobs and slashing academic salaries. Evidently, the underlying argument for the latter was that a worker’s total income ought to be the sum of physical money and psychic income; and because academics performed work that was intrinsically enjoyable, they had a surfeit of psychic income, thereby necessitating the cut in physical income!⁸ Martins’s research also included sociological studies of risk and uncertainty, on human experimentation and eugenics as well as on calamities, drawing upon the work of Sorokin (2010) and on acceleration principles in the social sciences.

Martins thus has an impressive oeuvre in the sociology of technology, published in the Portuguese language, and he is widely recognized as a leader in this field in the Portuguese-speaking world.

After retiring from Oxford, Martins also wrote prolifically in the English language. The papers, more than a dozen in number, were substantial, with an average length of more than 25,000 words each, and encompassing a wide range of topics, including the body, mind, information technologies and the cyberworld, in the context of the emergent world of commodities, universities, markets and capitalism. The essays are deep philosophical reflections on our contemporary world and draw extensively and eclectically upon a wide range of theoretical influences including continental philosophy, history and psychology, to name but a few disciplines.

The purpose of the present volume is to publish a selection of these insightful essays. Some of the included papers have been published previously, but either in an abridged form or in the Portuguese language (see acknowledgments).¹ Others had remained unpublished. This book makes these texts available to an English-speaking audience for the first time. Given that I inherited drafts, for the most part, I did have to use some editorial discretion. I have corrected some of the references cited to render them bibliographically accurate and have modified some of the sentence formulations so that they are more accessible – without sacrificing Martins’s essential style and, especially, his humour. I did not add new bibliographical references, opting instead to retain the integrity of the original texts. It should be stated that I did manage to discuss my editorial strategy with Martins while he was alive and that he approved of my approach. In particular, we agreed that although Martins’s range of writing was broad, encompassing a wide range of ideas and topics, it was important for any particular book to focus on a specific subject. Given that my own expertise is in the area of science, technology and the environment, I decided to focus on essays on these subjects and selected those I believed would provoke considerable thought and debate. I understand that others are working on compiling his other writings and that a comprehensive website is planned.

The works included here all apply theoretical insights, from philosophical sociology to understanding the human condition today. The term philosophical sociology is used here in the sense in which Martins intended. It is an attempt at understanding trends in contemporary society through the theoretical lens of continental European speculative philosophy. It is, therefore, a genre that is reflective, evaluative and, in a manner of speaking, normative about rights, wrongs and ethics more broadly. As such, it is quite different from social theory, or the sociology of science or technology or, indeed, science and technology studies. The first essay, which is the only piece I substantially modified, is a painstaking examination of the human life cycle. It explores the various stages of human life, from birth to death, and in the process, examines the intersections between technology and markets in the reconfiguring of gametes, genes, viscera and other body parts. Likewise, it analyses the transformations underway in critical social institutions, including schools and universities, companies and firms, the church, the state, armies and police. Throughout, he ponders the question of what it means to talk about technological agency. The underlying theme is the idea that the ‘life trajectories of the human species have been transformed by the concurrent and often interdependent, mutually supportive, technification and marketization of crucial phases of our life trajectories’. The purpose of the first chapter is to examine these interactions between technologies and markets and, in doing so, characterize the key dimensions of what it is to be human at the start of the third millennium, in the age of what he calls the technocene. It is thus a deeply engaging reflection on how the emerging world is totally different from anything that preceded it.

The subsequent essays carry forward these philosophical investigations. Chapters 2 to 4 carefully analyse various implications of the emergent biotechnologies. Chapter 2 examines modern bio and information technologies and emergent ideas about the relationships between the mind, brain and the body. Engaging in a thought experiment, Martins argues that it is conceivable that, in a few decades, technologies might be possible to scan the brain and transfer, without loss, to another vehicle, a process that Martins describes as ‘the final technological human discarnation’. This process might well enable the consummation of human ‘disenfleshment’, and create a neo-biological civilization of androids and the like based on potentially immortal, superintelligent or ultra-intelligent software. However, he argues, such transformations will evoke big, ethical questions. Moreover, the ‘decisive questions of real choice’ will not lie in the future, but ‘right now, if not yesterday’. Along the way, Martins returns to the point at which he departed from the sociology of science, the view of ‘the radical social constructivist’, according to which ‘the body is nothing but social constructs and there are no pan-human universals’. This is a position Martins eschews in favour of one in which he urges us to stake positions on the basis of ontological standpoints – and argue for them.

Chapter 3 is about enhancement technologies, eugenics movements and other pathways to the post-human. Here, among many other subtle arguments, Martins implores us to imagine what is at stake in such transformations. He argues that it would shatter the unity of humankind, in both religious and Enlightenment traditions, in the unity of human and nonhuman life and in the human bond with the biosphere. He concedes that humanity has been ‘the most predatory and destructive species on Earth’. Yet, he asks us to pause and reflect, warning that ‘many vanguards, sometimes wearing the specious mantle of reason and science, of knowledge and power, engaged in a messianic, perfectionist, redemptive mission, have come and gone in the last two centuries or so, their salvific promises exhausted. Not, however, without causing immense damage’.

Chapter 4 continues this discussion but, here, Martins explicitly enters into an argument with approaches to bioethics derived from contemporary analytical philosophy. He offers a pointed critique of conventional bioethics as well as a call to draw moral lines and stake strict metaphysical boundaries. The critique of bioethics is essentially that it ‘has lost all capacity to surprise’, by becoming a ‘a game with preset constraints’ in which, with slight qualifications, every biotechnological project is ratified as acceptable. Martins writes that, ethically speaking, this is a deeply flawed and irresponsible approach, arguing that ‘a Martian […] would have no sense that Earthlings have been experiencing a series of moral, theological, metaphysical earthquakes owing to the novel, rapid, unsettling character of biotechnological change’. He argues further that humanity has a clear choice to make: either let what he terms the ‘Principle of Technological Plenitude’ dictate terms, or make a serious attempt to draw boundaries, however arbitrary some boundaries might seem. In particular, his is an argument for the importance of a metaphysics for morals. It would be foolish, he argues, to see the debates about emergent biotechnologies as the clash of two camps ‘for science and against science, the enlightened and the obscurantist, the rational and the irrational (fearful, anxious, gloomy, much too ready to predict perverse outcomes and dangerous political utilizations of sound technologies)’. Instead, drawing upon the philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, he argues: ‘[T]‌he mark of a civilized person is to stand unflinchingly for and by some distinctions and boundaries, in issues that he or she cares deeply about, however precarious and challengeable, even if he or she expects to be defeated, if only to bear witness’.

Last, but by no means least, Chapter 5 is a sharp and pointed analysis of the marketization of universities. Alluding to Wittgenstein’s idea that to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life, Martins explores the languages, or more broadly, the culture and character of emergent modern universities. He asks: What are the implications of academic capitalism for the forms of life of students? What is the nature of the academic life that they, as well as their teachers, will be participating in? In a wide-ranging discussion of trends and their deeper philosophical implications, Martins examines, amongst other things, the implications for the humanities and the social sciences of what he describes as ‘knowledge-as-commodity/knowledge-as-capital industry and the celebrity industry’.

In essence, Hermínio Martins’s essays on the technocene engage the points of view and the forms of life underlying the confluence of markets and technologies in the late twentieth century and beyond. This confluence, he forcefully argues, is a giant transformation in the history of both the human species and of the planet. In making his argument, Martins draws upon the entire Western philosophical corpus to address pressing philosophical issues about what it is to be human, where we are headed as a species, and how we need to think, act and be. It is a discussion of the future, but with a deep engagement with traditions of philosophical and religious thought. It is also as strong an argument as one can get for the relevance of philosophical and humanistic reasoning. It is in this emphasis on ethics and spiritual thinking that Martins’s contributions to the literature on the technocene is particularly distinctive and important. The purpose of the body of work in this volume is not only to witness and elucidate but to provoke reflective ethical thinking in keeping with Martins’s conviction that the social sciences ought to engage in a deep philosophical interrogation of the human condition. This sensibility is excellently captured by one of the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript and, in conclusion, I would like to quote in full a passage from their review, for it does a more eloquent job than I could in explaining the essence of the essays to come:

This book might be of interest to people who believe that the amazing fantasies about engineering biological and artificial life that have been presented over the past few decades will result in a complete redefinition of what it means to be human. Its focus is on the possible ethical and sociological consequences of an extensive blurring of boundaries between biological and technological aspects of human life. This is a popular field for speculation and imagination, bordering on science fiction. The book might thus appeal to the people who envisage that technological change will overtake biological evolution through biogenetic and technological engineering of humans as well as humanization of machines. People who read science fiction not merely for entertainment, but as a source of visions of the future, are liable to take these scenarios seriously.

Notes

1 Some of Martins’s work in Portuguese have been published in two anthologies, Martins, H. (2011), Experimentum Humanum, Civilização Tecnológica e Condição Humana [Experimentum Humanum, Technological Civilisation and Human Condition], Lisboa: Relógio D’Água Editores; Martins, H. (2012), Experimentum Humanum, Civilização Tecnológica e Condição Humana, [Experimentum Humanum, Technological Civilisation and Human Condition], Belo Horizonte: Fino Traço. There have also been two memorial works, Castro, José Esteban, Bridget Fowler, & Luís Gomes (eds.) (2018), Time, Science and the Critique of Technological Reason: Essays in Honour of Hermínio Martins, Palgrave Macmillan, and J. Príncipe, Évora Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science: In Memoriam Hermínio Martins, Casal de Cambra: Caleidoscópio, 2015.

2 Ernest André Gellner (1925–95) was a famous British philosopher and social anthropologist of Czech descent.

3 The LSE Philosophy of Science department at that time had some of the leading scholars in the field, including Popper, Lakatos, Joseph Agassi and J. O. Wisdom.

4 John Rex (1925–2011) was a British sociologist, of South African descent, who specialized in sociological theory and race studies. Bryan Wilson (1926–2004) was a sociologist of religion, who later taught at Oxford.

5 Talcott Parsons (1902–79) was a leading American sociologist. Martins refers to Parsons’s presidential address to the American Sociological Society in 1949 to support this view.

6 Stanley Milgrim (1933–84) was an American social psychologist who, ostensibly influenced by the events of the Holocaust and the trial of Adolf Eichmann, conducted research on obedience. In the infamous experiment, participants were asked to perform onerous acts that conflicted with their own beliefs and conscience.

7 Kapp was a German philosopher of technology and geographer, who was prosecuted for sedition in the late 1840s for publishing an article and subsequently emigrated to central Texas. He developed a philosophy of technology wherein tools were identified as ‘organ projections’.

8 During the interview, Martins brushed aside a request for names, stating that his point was not to name and shame an individual but to highlight a trend.

Chapter One

The Technocene: On Bodies, Minds and Markets

Introduction

Our geological epoch since the 1750s, with the large-scale increase in the use of fossil fuels and thus CO2 emissions into the atmosphere, has been called the Anthropocene by some scientists, including the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, Paul Crutzen. It could also be called the Technocene, inasmuch as the reasons for that denomination, which are because of the impact on the atmosphere of carbon dioxide emissions since the mid-eighteenth century, have more to do proximately with technological agency than with the psychophysiological make-up of Homo sapiens sapiens. Besides, while it is not clear whether Homo sapiens will survive, there is far more confidence in some circles that technology, in post-human vehicles, will outlive us. Thus, the Anthropocene (in the sense defined) may well represent simply a subset of the Technocene, overlapping for perhaps three centuries or so.

What does it mean to talk about technological agency? Our starting point is the idea that during the past three to four decades, the life trajectories of our species have been transformed by the concurrent, and often interdependent, mutually supportive technification and marketization of crucial phases of our life trajectories, and of most of the key dimensions of what it is to be human. The purpose of this chapter is to examine these interactions between technologies and markets and, in doing so, characterize the Technocene. The chapter has two substantial parts. The first describes the great transconfigurations underway as regards the physical body. The second is an examination of the changes in the social institutions that educate, employ, control, regulate and order our lives.

The Body

Birth

We will be born, with ever-increasing frequency, in a hospital or clinic run as a firm (if not in an ambulance of a private enterprise). The medicalization and hospitalization of childbirth has been pretty-well achieved completely, despite fluctuations according to movements of opinion over the last decades, and even longer. Even before birth, we will owe a lot to firms that may deal with our conception in the cases of in vitro fertilization (IVF) – in general under medical control – of uterine insemination and of gestation. With comprehensive medicalization, pregnancy, birth and after-birth care are at the point of being monitored as if they were some kind of pathology. Sexual reproduction is easy and normally absolutely free (one might say market-less and technology-free). However, sex without reproduction is now increasing in the Western world (with an ever-expanding demand for sex toys on the part of both men and women in recent years, not to mention online sex and, eventually, sex with robots), apart from occasional and mostly aborted lapses. With ever-lower fertility rates, the general tendency is for population decline, apart from immigration. On the contrary, reproduction without sex, which is increasing in most Western countries, certainly in the richest, only works with the new reproductive technologies, and the costs in time and money for the parents, biological or other, involved in such dealings can be considerable. The techniques are still quite imperfect, decades after the first successful IVF birth; many cycles of treatment may be needed, and the costs to the would-be parents or to taxpayers have multiplied. Nevertheless, the number of births of this reproduction modality has been increasing steadily in all Western countries and represents an ever-greater proportion of the national total of live births. Fertile couples reduce natural procreation to lower and lower levels (reduced even more by legal or illegal abortions, though legal abortions in hospitals and clinics are now much the greater proportion). In a number of European countries, fertility rates have been below replacement over the last few decades, resulting in declining populations in those countries without immigration, while in ever greater numbers infertile heterosexual couples or homosexual couples resort eagerly to artificial reproduction (medically assisted reproduction).

We may remark parenthetically that the question is more complicated than the mere distinction between fertility and infertility, and not only for medical reasons. There are young, healthy women, between the ages of 18 and 25, the optimal age cohorts for natural procreation, who prefer artificial insemination, turning to sites offering sperm, free or not, by individuals or agencies, because, being economically and professionally independent, they want to have children with the maximum freedom, whenever they want, without sex, without partners, without love, without the vexations of personal relationships. As in many, many other cases, the mere availability of a technology originally designed – or so the scientists involved declared at the time – solely for quite other circumstances (for example the plight of infertile married heterosexual couples) may incentivize the search for and the choice of other options than the normal ones in this area, of sexual love or even mere heterosexual encounters, impersonal and clinical options. The invention of IVF technology was justified at the time, against religious or nonreligious concerns of ‘tampering’ with the innate human patrimony, as nothing more than a humanitarian response of biomedicine to the anguish and despair of many infertile couples. Infertility affects about 10 to 15 per cent of the population, but the infertile – formerly a silent and ashamed minority – became a vocal minority, exerting constant pressure for the development of technologies and markets answering their needs. But today IVF technology and kindred others also serve single women and even some healthy and fertile couples, free of genetic diseases, who prefer this mode of reproduction – and this may be a rising trend. There are social, cultural, economic and psychological factors at work besides the merely biomedical ones in these options, which are normally ignored or downplayed in the propaganda of beneficent technologies. That the demand for IVF and other new reproductive technologies could arise from factors other than natural infertility and the distress this may cause, was not apparently foreseen, and certainly not publicly affirmed as an additional good (or secondary bad), by the biologists and physicians who developed the technologies in question.

A feminist scholar wrote recently that after the struggle for abortion rights in the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the next great struggle of women in the area of reproduction will be for the expansion of access to medically assisted procreation, to the ‘fertility industry’ or the ‘fertility market’ (Mundy 2007). That implies the industrialization/commercialization of human reproduction on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, it may be that Western societies are evolving towards an unprecedented mode of reproduction, what has been called by another feminist scholar ‘the biomedical mode of reproduction’ (Thompson 2005). It is not clear whether much of what used to be called ‘natural’ reproduction, or reproduction tout court, will continue, and perhaps only as a small and diminishing proportion of the total. This is occurring not only owing to the increase in the volume of artificial reproduction (and the selection of embryos prior to implantation via screening for any number of genetic traits according to parental preferences) but also to the increasingly advertised technological possibilities of the ‘quality control’ of natural reproduction through prenatal genetic screening of the foetus, made ever more sophisticated. Thousands of genetic illnesses can now be screened for and, therefore, the respective genes may be selected against. Some governments have already mandated genetic screening of newborns, doubtless with the best intentions.

Ectogenesis, in the strict or strong sense, with the entire reproductive process of conception, gestation and birth all taking place outside the human body, via artificial wombs, as prophesied in 1923 by the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, may take some time yet, although it is expected to take no more than a few decades to accomplish.¹ The outsourcing of human reproduction to loci outside the human body, indeed outside any biological body, would involve a societal mutation of sorts, especially if generalized on hygienic/eugenic/emancipatory grounds. ‘Emancipatory’ at least in the sense of freeing women entirely from reproductive labour (if not yet from child-rearing), and thus contributing significantly to the generalized emancipation of women from the biosocial, physical and normative constraints to which they have been subject in the history of the species. This refers not just to procreative freedom, but freedom from procreation altogether, at any time, for all, permanently, a necessary if not sufficient condition for ensuring a level playing field in competing with males, according to some techno-feminists. The very language used by physicians and other reproductive technologists in these contexts – ‘the manufacture of babies’, babies as ‘products’, surely not merely some cryptomnesiac reminiscence of Brave New World – is symptomatic of the industrialization in question. As the rate of natural fertility decreases, the investments of parents and firms in artificial fertilization increase, as do even public expenditures when and insofar as the state subsidizes, directly or indirectly, medically assisted reproduction, which it certainly does to some extent already. The public accounts of human reproduction are a singularly neglected area of research, although with the process of marketization of the process of human reproduction it surely should be registered in the national output/income/expenditure statistics, as with other industries. The ‘baby market’, the ‘baby business’ as a whole, IVF, the sub-markets such as the market for gametes (sperm and eggs, the latter increasingly flourishing), the hire of wombs for gestation (a truly transnational market now), the selectionof extracorporeal embryos via preimplantation diagnostics, and so forth, the project of something like ‘designer babies’ or the search for the ‘perfect baby’, are likely to have a great future.² Of course, opportunities for non-market transactions may occur, as in the donation of spare embryos as a result of IVF, for this technology typically results in an excess of embryos. However, most embryos arising from this technology never find homes, as it were. We have created a new kind of limbo with this technology, whether or not we classify human embryos as non-persons, though human, or simply