Medical Technics by Don Idhe (review)

Don Idhe’s little book of some 94 pages is his contribution to the University of Minnesota Press’s Forerunners: Ideas First series. Describing the series as “Short Books of thought-in-process scholarship where intense analysis, questioning and speculation take the lead,” Medical Technics has a rather eerie sense of the past. Idhe reprises his theoretical framework of postphenomenology and reflects on his medical experiences as he has gotten older.

Postphenomenology, in his words, “joins the now widespread notion that human knowledge is perspectival, bodily located, and multisensory, or as I put it, praxis perceptual” (p. 10). This frames much of the account of his technical medical treatment as an accommodation of the failing body with technical devices—stents, joints and diagnostic sensors that shift the boundary between human and machine. This recasting of the body (his body) as a semitechnical object is matched by the skills of the operators (clinicians), whose prelearning with computer-based games in childhood has seamlessly joined them up with an interface between clinician and patient that is partially “nonhuman.” Idhe uses a phenomenological approach to unravel the contract between the ailing body and the artificial to dismantle what he regards as over-inflated claims for the future of the human body as a posthuman/transhuman cyborg. He describes in some detail how the various technical interventions he has experienced have come at a price. For example, his joint implants may be made of the sort of solid material that we trust forever, but, like the bone that they replace, they wear out, become problematic for the body and need replacing. Each replacement, he tells us, means that more bone is removed so that there are limits on how many times one’s mobility can be restored with an artificial joint. However, more important for his case against the hyperinflated claims made for technological solutions is that all medical technics reduce bodily capacity and affordances, which can be sensed through first-person reflections. As always, Idhe has a firm hand on the tiller of reason in a tumultuous sea of the wild speculation, vaporware and the gesture rhetoric that discussions of technology seem to tolerate. This is more than a struggle for the history of the future. At stake in the promotion of this kind of loose talk claiming a fashionable modernity is the degradation of human values: See, for example, the vogue for articles on artificial intelligence that naturalize the conflation of learning and intelligence into a single concept. This may seem to be a convenient discursive short cut but on the way it reconfigures the human into organs of capacity and productivity. Smart zombies with software.

Clarity about technology and its relationship to us is what we have come to expect from Idhe over the years. Perhaps less usual is the literary style of this short book. Mostly written in the first person, it has the voice and detail of a casual conversation with a stranger over a long night in a hospital waiting room. There is much thoughtful introspection and also much personal detail, which at times feels a bit uncomfortable, and some medical detail that is not for the squeamish. Nonetheless, it is to be commended, since Idhe is putting his weight behind an ever-growing challenge to the routines and conventions of academic writing that have built up around the academic journal over 400 years. This style, it is argued, has silenced important voices and masked important discursive forms, like gossip and introspection. Post-phenomenological approaches are made for this kind of literary adventure, but first-person accounts and deep internal reflection are not to be confused with unstructured streams of ideas—the textual selfie and the late-night blog. Fictions require skill and aesthetic judgment, and personal stories are as demanding (if not more so) as any other kind of text. It is not sufficient to be very detailed and personal. If, as many now begin to argue, academic writing, biography, autobiography, even...