Using Arendt and Heidegger to Consider Feminist Thinking on Women and Reproductive/ Infertility Technologies

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of recent developments in reproductive and infertility technologies and ultimately to arrive at a deeper understanding of technology, modern society, and their relationship to women and reproduction. Recent developments in reproductive and infertility technologies do not represent a new direction but rather the logical culmination and quintessential expression of modern technology. Though they have appeared during the latter stages of modern technology, they are actually anticipated in its very aims and nature. 1 will argue that recent developments in infertility and reproductive technologies reveal an underlying misogyny implicit, though less apparent, in modem technology as a general category. I believe that modern reproductive and infertility technologies pose significant dangers to women and challenge us forth to develop responses that will move us closer to a feminist revolution in human relationships.

Modern technology and gender relations are deeply intertwined. I, therefore, propose that a feminist critique of philosophies of technology in the context of a feminist understanding of infertility and reproductive technologies will bring us closer to the point where we, as women and as feminists, can accurately evaluate the character of our relationship to these technologies and determine whether they can enrich and enlarge our lives as women or whether in accepting and abetting these technologies we are, in fact, serving a false and misogynist ideal of freedom.

In the first part of this essay I will sketch some of the positions articulated by the popular media in their coverage of the debate on reproductive and infertility technologies. I will also highlight parts of the growing body of feminist literature that takes a critical look at the deeper social issues raised and the values promoted by these technologies. I will summarize some conclusions emerging from an initial survey of this impressive body of feminist literature and present a series of questions emerging from this literature. Following this, I will turn to the work of Martin Heidegger and, especially, Hannah Arendt—two political theorists who lie outside the feminist tradition but whose profound questioning of modern technology contributes new insights to the concerns currently being raised by feminist critiques of reproductive and infertility technologies. In the last part of this essay I will reconsider the question of reproductive and infertility technologies in light of the contributions of Heidegger and Arendt. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how the feminist debate on these issues can be enriched through a deeper consideration of the nature of modern technology and its relationship to women.

I

In recent years much discussion and debate has centered around the research and use of reproductive and infertility technologies.¹ One side of the debate—including the legal and medical establishments, as well as an assortment of liberals and liberal feminists—relies on the language of individual rights, progress, and freedom of choice to frame its arguments. The research and utilization of these technologies is embraced as the humane and longed-for solution to the problems of couples and women who suffer from infertility. In training their focus exclusively on the benefits to maternal and fetal/infant health, the prevention of unnecessary suffering, and the reduction of the risk, chance, and uncertainty factors of reproduction, this side of the debate represents these technological developments as wholly positive and desirable.

Another side of the debate—whose composition paradoxically includes both feminists and neo-conservatives—is highly critical of the reproductive/infertility technologies and seeks to argue that these technologies are oppressive and immoral. While neo-conservatives construct their arguments around the categories of the fetus and the traditional nuclear family, feminists standing on this side of the debate use as their analytic categories women and children. These feminists reject the language and goals of liberal individualism and typically construct their analyses from perspectives that incorporate a sensitivity and awareness of the different implications which arise from these technologies depending on one's sexual orientation, physical ability, and one's racial, class, and gender identity.

A closer inspection reveals, however, that the lines of battle are not nearly as clear and distinct as I have drawn them here. My brief summary of the debate appears to lead to the following misperception: that if one supports some of the reproductive/infertility technologies, one supports these technologies in general. This is not the case. A neo-conservative, for instance, might applaud the use of technologies that assist, control, and monitor a pregnancy which is already in progress. At the same time this person might condemn the use of a technology that permits the removal of an embryo from one woman and places it in the womb of another woman who would then serve as the so-called surrogate mother. Viewed from the principle of commitment to the stability of the traditional family, this neo-conservative position is internally consistent.

Similarly, a liberal feminist might welcome the development of an artificial womb which both allows her to raise a child who carries her genes and enables her to circumvent the economic, physical and, potentially, emotional ordeal of pregnancy and labor. At the same time, she might feel ambivalent about the use of technologies that accord to the fetus the status of personhood by constructing it as a patient that is separate and independent from the pregnant woman (thereby leaving the way open to violations of women's rights by the legal and medical establishments' defense of the “rights” of the fetus).² This combination of stances is likewise internally consistent insofar as it is the logical outgrowth of the liberal principles of freedom of choice and the right to full and equal economic participation for women.

What is missing in both of these examples is an analysis that addresses the common issues raised by these various technologies. Consequently, the common denominator or issue in question is conceptualized not as reproductive technology but rather, in these instances, as concern for the traditional family or freedom of choice.

Groups which one would ordinarily expect to find on opposing sides of a debate are frequently found arguing for or against the same technology—although their reasons for doing so, their values, and their social visions are radically different or even opposed. One indication of the complexity and difficulty involved in thinking about these issues is the degree to which there is a lack of cohesion and consistency even within each political grouping. Labels such as liberal, conservative, liberal feminist, radical feminist, and socialist-feminist are of limited help in sorting out loyalties and assessing arguments and positions.

Without a theoretical grounding, the arguments for and against particular technologies are both limited and unsatisfying. The absence of a consistent understanding and analysis of the issues which underlie and frame the utilization and development of modern technology seems to be one factor responsible for this confusing state of affairs.³

With the exception of a few contemporary thinkers, technology—as a concept whose nature is not exhausted by its particular manifestations but which, on the contrary, requires a deeper level of investigation to reveal its workings—has not been the subject of philosophical enquiry. This poverty of theory and investigation has led to a reliance on categories, methodologies, and analyses that, while they have contributed to the development and elaboration of critical social theory in the past, are not adequate to the task of laying the groundwork for an insightful and penetrating analysis of the role and nature of reproductive/infertility technologies as a whole.

The Initial Exploration

Feminists who write critically about the research and utilization of reproductive technologies have typically focused their attention on genetic engineering, amniocentesis, and the infertility technologies of in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and the artificial womb. These feminists have written extensively and insightfully on how particular reproductive/infertility technologies affect women's lives, and they have critically explored the role of reproductive technology at the level of ideology. Feminists contributing to this growing body of literature have identified many dangers that these technologies pose to women—dangers which are only exacerbated by the capitalist-patriarchal relations within which they operate. In addition, this literature reveals that the reproductive and infertility technologies share a number of functional and practical characteristics. I have enumerated the common qualities explored by feminists in this new body of critical literature in order to establish a context and background for the remainder of this essay. Concerning modern reproductive/infertility technologies: (1) The genetic/biological aspect of parenting—which is relatively unimportant in terms of the development of the child—is focused upon and given priority. This encourages a distorted conception of parenting and serves to distract available resources from what would be a more illuminating focus upon the social context of parenting. Ultimately, it devalues the much more crucial aspect of parenting, which is care-taking.⁴ (2) Focusing on individual responsibility for children and individualizing the suffering due to infertility hides the socially-constructed/created problems of child-rearing and infertility. Women are saddled with the burden of responsibility while at the same time we are isolated from one another and from the resources to create our own supportive structures.⁵ (3) The separation and counterposing of embryo and fetal “rights” to those of women has the effect of making women invisible and increases the power of the medical and legal establishments at the expense of women's integrity and against our interests.⁶ (4) The technologies are controlled by the male medical and, increasingly, legal establishments—both of which have extensive documented histories of abuses against women.⁷ (5) The technologies and research aimed at treating infertility and identifying genetically inherited diseases share a profound classist, racist, heterosexist and eugenicist character and affirm structural prejudice and discrimination against people with disabilities.⁸

Before continuing, it should be noted that the cause-and-effect language of the foregoing conclusions is somewhat misleading, though difficult to avoid. In particular, while emphasis on the biological and individualized aspects of reproduction is reinforced by these technologies, it is not actually “caused” by them. We can interpret this reinforcement as a reflection of modern society's dominant attitude and approach toward reproductive problems and issues. It is important to keep in mind, however, that in reflecting this social attitude the technologies also function to validate and affirm this approach and hence to build an ever-stronger foundation for it. Beyond this impact at the level of ideology, however, it is important to consider the repercussions resulting from the concomitant diversion of available resources and funds into research that is specifically committed to technocentric solutions to the problems of reproduction and infertility. I would argue that this diversion of resources functions to foreclose, or at minimum diminish, any commitment to efforts aimed at the development of alternative, non-technology-intensive approaches to the problems currently being addressed exclusively by these technologies.

Important questions emerging from this new body of feminist literature can be framed as follows: What alternative efforts aimed at addressing the problems of parenting and the suffering of women who desire to bear children but cannot—for any variety and combination of economic, social, and physical reasons—do the research and utilization of reproductive/infertility technologies foreclose? Are these technologies addressing the needs of women? Do they function to enhance women's control over their lives or do they function instead to further control women? How do these technologies affect the relationship between women and reproduction or between women and their children? Do these technologies expand the range of choice and personal liberty available to women? If so, which women?—and what are they being liberated from, i.e., what is the character or nature of this liberation? At what cost and at whose expense is this liberation to be achieved? Are the efforts of the medical establishment to alleviate the infertility of some women the humanitarian effort they claim to be?—or is there a hidden agenda? Would these technologies take on a different character and have a significantly different impact in society if the decisions regarding their utilization and development were in the hands of women?

Although it is crucial that feminists continue to raise these questions and to identify the role and implications of reproductive/infertility technologies as a profound cause of concern for women, such analyses could be strengthened if they rested upon a broader theoretical framework or perspective on modern technology as a whole.⁹ Such a perspective would enable feminist theorists to better situate, understand, and explore the particular aspect of modem technology manifest in reproductive/ infertility technologies. With this stronger framework, we could better address ourselves to a fuller response to the previous questions.

The questions that feminists have not fully explored in the context of reproductive/infertility technologies are questions that seek to ascertain the inherent qualities and essence of both technology and modernity. These questions can be framed as follows: What is the relationship and/or difference between the technique operative within modem technology and previous forms of technique? Is modem technology a neutral force whose significance is transformed and whose meaning is rendered according to the social relations and discourses that construct and apply it in particular situations? Is technology either inherently liberating or inherently dominating? Is technology characterized by the production of unintended consequences and hence immune to control?

II

The previous section was intended as an introduction to the debate surrounding these technologies and the profound concerns that they raise. The shared qualities delineated above reveal aspects of the reproductive/infertility technologies as they currently function in modem, capitalist society but do not, I believe, disclose a deeper level of the technological reality.

As one of the first philosophical thinkers to direct his efforts toward a thorough and strenuous examination of modern technology, Heidegger provides a rich contrast to one dominant strain in modem political theory that glorifies the values embraced by rationality and technology. He makes three challenging claims that are of interest to us. He argues that (1) modem technology is not a neutral force but one which in its very essence poses a threat to human beings, (2) the essence of modern technology is distinct from that of the ancient Greek techne, and (3) the mode of thought or knowledge particular to modem human beings gives rise to the essence of modem technology.¹⁰

Heidegger's central insights in “The Question Concerning Technology” enable us to draw the following conclusions: (1) modern reproductive/infertility technologies pose a danger to women regardless of the relations of production in which they function and the people who control them; and (2) it is not in the particular apparatuses and technologies that the threat posed by modem technology first originates but, loosely speaking, in the ways in which we as human beings approach the world and nature and the ways in which we identify our problems and develop solutions. The danger lies in the kind of knowledge we have developed and the way this modem form of knowledge operates in modern technology. Let us first look at Heidegger's analysis of modern technology, then turn to a specific problem of reproductive/infertility technologies.

Heidegger begins “The Question Concerning Technology” by vehemently rejecting the notion of technological neutrality. He warns that such a conception “makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology” (1977, 288). He considers and then rejects both the instrumental and anthropological definitions of technology. The instrumental definition says that technology is a means to an end, while the anthropological approach understands technology as human activity (1977, 288). Heidegger argues that while these definitions may be correct, they do not uncover the essence of modern technology. “For that reason,” writes Heidegger, “the merely correct is not yet the true (1977, 289). Heidegger understands truth not as correct representation but in terms of revealing (1977, 293-294). Human beings not only enable truth to appear in the world, but actually introduce into the world the concept of truth. Human beings are therefore revealers. One way in which they reveal is through techne. Understood in its most original sense, techne is therefore not just a human activity but, more importantly, a bringing forth into presencing. Presencing involves the relationship between human beings and other beings. Beings present themselves to people. Techne is thus the way in which human beings bring beings into the world. Correctness, in contrast to truth, is a quality of reasoning done in techne and the sciences that underlie it.

Heidegger claims that the essence of modem technology, like that of ancient technology (i.e. techne), lies in its quality of revealing rather than it its quality of functioning as the means to an end or as a sort of human activity. That is to say, the essence is found in truth, not in correctness. Heidegger acknowledges that if looked at as means, i.e., instrumentally, ancient and modern technology seem to be of the same character or essence. It is when we allow our attention to rest on the shared fundamental characteristic of revealing, however, that we are able to ascertain what is present in modem technology that was not operative in techne. For techne is not a means to an end but a way of disclosing. Modem technology is different from the ancient in its particular way of disclosing. Heidegger argues that if we fail to recognize this difference we will also fail to understand that modem technology demands of us a different response and a new thinking if we are to respond adequately to its danger.

What then is the distinction between ancient and modern technology? According to Heidegger, although both ancient and modern technique embrace the correct way of doing things, ancient technique works with nature and the material, allowing beings to come forth at any given time, while modem technique strives to order, confine, control, and then to “challenge” nature to produce.¹¹ The revealing belonging to modern technology thus does not bring forth in a way that works in concert with the material but rather brings beings to presence through a challenging setting-upon nature, a regulating and securing of natural resources, in the form of standing-reserve.

Heidegger uses the term “standing-reserve” to explain the human relationship to the presencing of modern technology such that “whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object” (1977, 298). The standing-reserve is grounded in an inclusive rubric that orders everything into a storehouse of potential use wherein nothing has autonomous status or individual meaning. Everything exists only as a part of a complex series of interlocking paths that never comes to an end, but continuously regroups and recycles (1977, 298). Hence, even the means-ends relationship of rational calculated planning is obscured.

Heidegger's questioning of the essence of modem technology uses the ancient Greek understanding of techne as a point of comparison. Not only does modern technology essentially differ from techne, but so, too, does the character of modern thinking. Although we know more, i.e., have more information or capabilities, truth as revealing has been overshadowed by truth as correctness. Disclosing nature yields to the priority of conquering and controlling it. Human beings no longer serve as creators and revealers, but as researchers caught in an unending cycle of technological advances. This leads Heidegger to pronounce the gravest danger posed by these radical changes: “As soon as what is unconcealed no longer concerns man even as object, but exclusively as standing-reserve, and man in the midst of objectlessness is nothing but the orderer of the standing-reserve, then he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall, that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve” (1977, 308, emphasis mine). With both this outline of modem technology and the danger it poses in mind, Heidegger presents a place from which to criticize an area of modern technology of particular concern to feminists.

Take as an example the technique of “surrogate motherhood.” Women have been forced for centuries by servitude, slavery, economic necessity, and basic sexual exploitation to nurture and birth babies for ruling class men and their women. We need look no further than the Bible for the story of Hagar, the “surrogate mother” of Ishmael, who was raised as the son of Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 16: 1-16). There are significant similarities in the biblical account of surrogacy and its modem day reality. In both instances, for example, we are talking about a patriarchal, hierarchically-structured society in which ruling class men thoroughly exploit non-ruling (and ruling) class women—be it by the system of slavery and ownership or by capitalism and our modem legal/judicial system. Yet while the similarities are both surprising and instructive given the thousands of years that have elapsed between the ancient story of Hagar and its modem equivalent in the person of Mary Beth Whitehead, we are focusing in this paper on the differences.

Unlike most of the popular reproductive/infertility technologies, “surrogate motherhood” has been around for thousands of years. It effectively illustrates, therefore, that modern technology need not be distinguished from ancient techne by the level of sophistication and the amount of information required to perform/apply the technique. That which distinguishes Old Testament from modern “surrogate motherhood” in an essential way is not any new development or improvement in the specific technique, but the character of technology itself in the modern age—the way of bringing all the factors to bear on a certain problem. It is the form, not the extent, of human knowledge that distinguishes modern “surrogate motherhood” from biblical.

Today, an entire industry has grown up around the technique of “surrogate motherhood”—and this is not incidental to the modern form of knowledge. Although one critic has argued that “surrogate motherhood” is not a technology but the application of artificial insemination to a social arrangement—a reproductive deal—the point I am seeking to make (using Heidegger) is that the way in which information is applied to a social arrangement is in fact part of the technology. Women respond to advertisements placed by agencies recruiting potential “surrogate mothers” for their potential parent customers. The natural ability to bear children becomes part of the standing-reserve. Genotypes are examined and matched. Contracts are signed that sell the rights to babies who have not even been conceived—babies who, like the potential surrogate mothers, are relegated to the standing-reserve. Everything is secured in advance, carefully controlled and regulated. The medical and business establishments form interlocking partnerships that move buyers (infertile couples) and sellers (potential surrogate mothers) from one to the other. Equally enmeshed is the legal-judicial system which, if called upon, enforces and upholds the interlocking systems. Measures are taken to prevent any woman's attempt, once she has entered into the network, to reject her status as surrogate mother, that is, as standing-reserve. Thus Mary Beth Whitehead's attempt to fight her status as standing-reserve and claim full personhood and, in this instance, motherhood, was blocked by the legal-judicial system of the state of New Jersey.

Perhaps it seems as though what distinguishes the experience of Hagar from that of Mary Beth Whitehead is not modern technology so much as it is the system of capitalism wherein everything (especially women and their reproductive capabilities) becomes a commodity to be bought and sold. Certainly, the system of capitalism and the character of modern technology seem to overlap in many ways so that it becomes difficult to disentangle one from the other. This is true, however, because capitalism itself has grown out of modern technology, i.e., the system of capitalism is a modern technological apparatus. So too, however, is the economic system upon which socialism is grounded.

Consider this question: would the controlling, regulating, interlocking, challenging aspects of modern technology be eliminated in Cuba, Sweden, or any other socialist country? Women could form “Surrogate Mothers Cooperatives” and actually own, control, and reap the benefits of their own labor—but would they be able to avoid setting themselves up as standing-reserve? Is it not true that, on the contrary, these women would already be claimed by the relations brought into play by modern technology? For neither the particular technique nor the relations of production determines the character of modern technology. Modern technology is defined by a form of knowledge that approaches a problem with a readiness to challenge, order, regulate, and set up as standing-reserve in a system constantly regenerating itself in a cycle of repetition.

Modern technology can do nothing other than organize as standing-reserve because the entire web of relations within which modern human beings operate as revealers is characterized by this impulse to set upon, to challenge and to order. Heidegger argues that: “When man, investigating, observing, pursues nature as an area of his own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into the objectlessness of standing-reserve (1977, 300). We do not have the option of choosing or rejecting this orientation toward the world. We cannot escape the essence of modern technology because it is the very fabric of our lives—it has become our cultural inheritance.

Heidegger emphasizes that the threat modern technology poses to human beings “does not come, in the first instance from the potentially lethal machines and apparatus of technology. The actual threat has already afflicted man in his essence (1977, 309). Modern technological apparatuses are simply the congealed form of our modern mode of knowledge. Modern technology is, therefore, a design that extends inward as well as outward.

What then, is the substance of this threat? The danger lies in the failure of human beings to recognize that ordering as standing-reserve is only one among many possible modes of revealing. Modern human beings, caught up in the thriving and magnificence of modern technology, misinterpret the essence of technology. Because we perceive technology only instrumentally and anthropologically and strive only after correct determinations of how nature presents itself “as a calculable complex of the effects of forces,” modern human beings are faced with the prospect that “in the midst of all that is correct the true will withdraw” (1977, 308). In other words, modern technology poses a threat to human beings because we do not realize that the criterion of correctness which it embodies—a correctness which insists that only that which can be challenged forth and ordered into standing-reserve is meaningful and real—annihilates all other forms of revealing and conceals its own hegemony. When the standards embodied in modern technology hold sway, human beings themselves enter the realm of standing-reserve as un-autonomous, orderable things.

Whether it were to exist within socialist relations of production or in the hands of women, modern technology as a mode of revealing remains the same. Feminists and socialists can set a new agenda of ends, employ technology to realize these ends, and in so doing change the appearance of technology insofar as it is used to achieve specific ends. But feminists and socialists alike are already claimed by an approach to the world characterized by an insistence that everything be identifiable, orderable, and transformable through careful calculation and correct determinations.

At this point it begins to seem as though the possibility of developing a technology whose mode of revealing is not characterized by the challenging setting'upon definitive of modernity could only emerge within the context of a different sort of knowledge. Since it is human beings who bring into play the knowledge that works in techne, it is in the human attitude toward the world that the beginnings of a new form of techne will first appear. Human beings must undergo some transformation at an essential level before this change in character can become manifest in a new technology.

Heidegger argues that the first step toward moving beyond the hegemony of modern technology's mode of revealing lies in recognizing its essence and pondering the danger it poses. This step happens, above all, “through our catching sight of what comes to presence in technology, instead of merely gaping at the technological” (1977,314). If, in refusing to gape at the wonders of reproductive/infertility technologies we look instead at the suffering they create, exacerbate, and leave untouched—if we notice that their mode of revealing misstates the essential problems, then we are certainly moving in the right direction and breaking the stranglehold of technological thinking.

III

We turn now to an exploration of Arendt's insights into technology and modern society. We will arrive at a deeper understanding of the role of technology in modern society when we are able to situate it within the context of(l) the displacement of work and action by labor;¹² (2) the significance and implications of the goals and values pertaining to modern society; and (3) the relation between women, reproduction, and laboring. Arendt's analysis directly addresses the first two concerns, but her insights also will enable us to draw inferences and make claims regarding the third.

The perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures, but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality. The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes of life in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals “The easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life (Arendt 1958, 120).

The statement quoted above eloquently illustrates the perspective from which Arendt articulates her critique of modem society and technology. Arendt's analysis of labor and her insights into the implications of the collapsing of work into labor serve as the groundwork upon which she constructs the whole of her theory and against which she measures the alternative contributions of action. The real significance and uniqueness of Arendt's theorizing is most fully illuminated in her conception of what she terms “the human condition.” A brief consideration of this discussion will thus help suggest to us the perspective from which she approaches modernity and the questions and concerns that are foremost in her mind.

The Prologue to The Human Condition opens with a discussion of Sputnik and the splitting of the atom—two events which for Arendt symbolize the character of the modern world. What is it about these events and their public acceptance that strikes Arendt as so bewildering and paradoxical? She suggests that they reveal the modern age's “desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth” and that this desire to rebel “against human existence as it has been given” and exchange it for something that is completely man-made is a desire to escape from the human condition itself (1958, 2). “The earth,” according to Arendt, “is the very quintessence of the human condition.… The most radical change in the human condition we can imagine would be an emigration of men from the earth to some other planet” (1958, 2, 10). The human condition thus is not only created, but is also given: life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—each of these conditions plays a crucial role in being human.¹³

The Earth, in addition, is “the mother of all living things” (1958, 2). Thus Arendt at the outset incorporates into her analysis an awareness of the connection between the Earth, woman as mother, and reproduction. Already we can begin to anticipate the link which is forming between modern humanity's desire to escape from the Earth, its desire to escape from reproduction and, by inference, its desire to escape from woman and all that she symbolizes.¹⁴

These human conditions, the environment and the material substance with which we work and within which we labor, cannot be done away with or exchanged without radically transforming human existence such that we become, so to speak, an altogether different sort of creature. Given this, how are we to understand the modern age's desire to escape the actual universe, which is our home, and to escape the human world and history itself—the only context within which a human existence is possible? Why does this present itself as a plausible alternative? What is it about the earth and the human life it supports that allows us to conceive of it as a prison instead of as that which occasions, brings forth, and sustains the form of existence we desire? And, to orient the enquiry to the specific concerns of this essay, what is it about modern human existence that permits us to conceive of the womb as a prison and a danger to the life of the fetus—as an imperfect vessel characterized not by nurturance and protection but rather by inferiority and constraint?¹⁵ What is it that has led scientists, social critics, and even feminists to view women's ability to bring forth and nurture life as an obstacle to liberation rather than as powerful evidence of women's greater connection to, and understanding of, the human condition and human potential?

These are the questions which Arendt moves us to ask in the Prologue. The remainder of her work, while it does not specifically address these modern phenomena or science and technology as such, resonates with the issues of modern alienation so clearly expressed and “encapsulated” in Sputnik. The beginning of Arendt's answer to the challenges posed is anticipated when she highlights the important role played by the Earth Mother in setting the conditions of human existence. The earth is, literally, the embodiment of these conditions. As the symbol of the bodily and—though Arendt never develops this point—woman, it is tied to the endless repetition of labor required to sustain and reproduce life. Its cycles are like the cycles of the human body—without beginning and without end. Its existence, like that of modern laboring society, aims at nothing more than its own continuance. There is no individual but rather species existence and as such this existence is ahistorical and produces no stories worth telling, no actions worth remembering.¹⁶ Labor, as endless reproduction and consumption, is bound up in the earth and its natural cycles of growth and decay. The desire to emigrate from the earth thus represents modern laboring society's disaffection with its own mode of existence. It further represents, I would argue, modern society's rejection of woman and her primary ties to the quintessence of cyclical labor—the labor of reproduction, birth, and nurturance.

The reasons we no longer feel emotionally tied and committed to the earth are threefold. First, modern laboring societies no longer engender in human beings the confidence that their individual stories might be worth telling—hence the escape from history and a context in which remembrance is even conceivable is not perceived as a fundamental alteration of the present state of human existence. Secondly, modern consumer societies (the flip side of the coin) no longer guarantee the permanence and durability of a world through the fabrication of use objects which, as they are used, familiarize us with the world and its customs and habits of intercourse, between human beings and things as well as between people. It is only with the rise of a fully consumerist society that we are actually confronted with the very real possibility of an actual absence of sentimental attachment to the places of earthly human dwelling that are becoming both thingless and worldless.

Finally, the invasion of the public realm¹⁷ by the private has eliminated the possibility of the revealing and disclosing of individuals to one another that serves as the foundation of plurality and draws citizens together in a common pursuit and interest. It should be noted that this invasion is inevitable whenever the laboring activity assumes the primary role in a society, since laboring is, by Arendtian definition, a private activity bound up in the bodily and merely reproductive, and incapable of pointing beyond itself to any human good not concerned specifically with the alleviation of labor or the provision of consumables. An easier and longer life is the implicit goal of a laboring society. As such, animal laborans is unpolitical and will judge public activities only in terms of their usefulness to this ideal.

Arendt effectively addresses all three of these developments when she notes that,

What Arendt describes is a laboring society that has sought to rid itself of the fragility and unpredictability embraced in speech, action, and the public realm, and has substituted in its stead the uncertainty of an unchecked, misunderstood technological development that falsely proclaims its ability to control and direct human development in the interests of human freedom.

Arendt would criticize this ideal on two fronts and her argument is convincing: not only are the effects of technology impossible to adequately predict or control (it shares this alone with action), but the notion of freedom through control and sovereignty is a fundamentally misguided and flawed idea—it is, in fact, internally contradictory. Freedom is what happens when possibilities are allowed to unfold, not what happens when a plan is properly conceived and efficiently executed. Arendt celebrates the plurality that characterizes human existence and the uniqueness introduced through the birth of each individual. Technology attempts to eliminate plurality and uniqueness by reducing everyone to his or her common denominators, developing the science of behaviorism, and seeking to order and control.

In examining society's threefold disaffection with itself we must keep in mind at all times the co-development of an absolute deification of technology and its ever-increasing power and scope. Only a laboring society could give rise to a technology whose stated purpose is both the increase of abundance and wealth, and the reduction of labor and easing of the demands it makes on die human body.

It is at this point that we are able to perceive the futility of the modern project. The substitution of labor for both work and action has resulted in the worldlessness from which we seek to escape. Technology, though it can transport us to another world or, failing that, eliminate the harsher demands of labor, can never create a world in which we can disclose to others who we are and share with them a connectedness to a world of human fabrication, i.e., a world that is neither disposable nor consumable. Moreover, technology—no matter how sophisticated it becomes—can never sever us from our biological matter and its connectedness to the endlessness of production and consumption. We can leave the earth and reduce the hours spent laboring, but we can never escape our own biological makeup—its connectedness to the cyclical functioning of the earth will persist even when we have left the earth far behind.

Yet another paradox emerges if we examine the trends of modern technological society. Arendt observes that the modern age's theoretical glorification of labor and the resultant transformation of the whole of society into a laboring society has made possible the fulfillment of a wish which, “like the fulfillment of wishes in fairy tales, comes at a moment when it can only be self-defeating” (1958, 5). The wish is, of course, the liberation of laborers from the fetters of labor. The imminent self-defeat is revealed by the fact that “this society does no longer know of those higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won” (1958, 5). Hence the wish-come-true is in fact the nightmare-become-reality. The tragedy is compounded, however, when we observe that the reality of this wish-come-true cannot satisfy even the limited goals of the animal laborans. The liberation which is sought is the sensation corresponding to the release of pain rather than its absence (1958, 113).¹⁸ A laborless society can achieve the latter, but not the former. The equation of the two guides the worldless vision of laboring society—a vision whose realization can never solve the problems which are rooted instead in the pathological imbalance between the activities of labor, work and action.

In the preceding pages we have examined the problematic pertaining to modern society's collapsing of work into labor and its co-extensive elimination of a public realm within which speech and action can unfold. It is clear that far from seeking to eliminate, degrade, or glorify labor, Arendt concerns herself instead with seeking to understand the character of labor and through this understanding to construct a perspective from which she is able not only to affirm the value and contributions of labor, but to set forth its limitations.

These limitations are not in themselves a cause for concern. They take on this character, however, when work and action are eliminated from their proper positions in society and prohibited from contributing what labor, and technology as labor's instrument, cannot. Labor sustains through production and consumption. Work builds a world in which human beings can come together in a plurality that separates and allows differentiation instead of a mass that equates and makes the same. Action, because it occurs in a public web of human relationships, makes possible the creation of stories, the striving after remembrance, and the realization of individuality through disclosure. Beyond difference, action occasions distinction. All three activities are needed and each in its proper sphere because while it is true that labor sustains life and fabrication (work) builds a world, “this same world becomes as worthless as the employed material, a mere means for further ends, if the standards which governed its coming into being are permitted to rule it after establishment” (1958, 156).

What Arendt is arguing for most fundamentally is the need for a world and a public realm wherein action can unfold. She mounts a strong argument in favor of the contributions of work and action. The crux of Arendt's criticism of Marx—that “neither abundance of goods nor the shortening of the time actually spent laboring are likely to result in the establishment of a common world” (1958, 117)—must be understood from the perspective of her insightful and eloquent articulation and exploration of concerns. Arendt argues that when Marx refers to labor as a world-building activity he is asserting the impossible—for labor aims only at its own reproduction and not at the production of worldly things. By thus conflating work and labor, Marx is able to conceive of the transition from capitalism to communism as a transition from alienated labor to world-oriented labor. Because he interprets the products of labor, the laboring activity itself, and the technology employed by laboring society to realize its aims as variable and dependent on the social relations of production, he does not view as problematic his own assertion that labor will become a qualitatively different phenomenon under communism and technology will become an instrument of liberation.

Arendt's criticism of Marx is very persuasive. Arendt acknowledges though rejects Marx's vision of a communist society in which free time is channeled into “higher activities.” Arendt argues instead that a society of laborers can produce in its leisure time only a worldless society of consumers. It never can produce a world that draws human beings together in a way that differentiates and allows for distinction and disclosure. The withering away of the public realm that Marx anticipates in communist society may well signify the elimination of the state as an instrument of oppression, but it also signifies the completion of the trend toward worldlessness which is operative in modem society.

Arendt states that “if nature and the earth generally constitute the condition of human life, then the world and the things of the world constitute the condition under which this specifically human life can be at home on earth” (1958, 134). The danger of future automation is that human beings would consume endlessly and automatically, without pain or effort, in their ever-recurrent natural cycle. Nothing would remain to testify to the human existence on earth; everything would be consumed immediately upon production. There could be no experience of liberation because there would be no tension—no pain and release from pain—only an absence of challenge and resistance, a constant neutrality. Arendt cautions that “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity” (1958, 121). As labor is eased and reduced we are confronted with the possibility that human beings may not remember that we are bound to labor. Without this remembrance we will not strive, through work and action; to overcome labor's futility and limitations. Or, we may imagine that we can escape our laboring condition through emigration to a new galaxy. The suggestion Arendt leaves us with is that the ideal, technologically advanced, consumer society—the product of laboring society—may not, at bottom, be so different from emigration to another planet. In neither situation can we live as human beings.

IV

Arendt constructs a very powerful argument centering around the need to reexamine the categories of labor, work, and action and to think about what has been lost through the conflation of the three into the hegemony of the one. Implicit within Arendt's general argument is the notion that a certain tension between human beings and their environment not only is a condition of human existence, but is necessary and desirable if we are to fully live the range of experiences available to humankind. Technology aims at the elimination of labor. Labor represents the bodily component of human existence. Thus, the strivings of technology to completely eliminate human labor must also be grasped as the striving to eliminate the bodily foundation of the human condition. The hegemony of the goals and values of animal laborans in modern society represents the rejection of the human condition insofar as modern technology aims at the elimination of the human conditions of labor, necessity, pain, pleasure, unpredictability, and openness to possibilities. The flourishing of modern technology at the expense of all other modes of human activity is the congealed form of this tendency toward alienation from the body.

Arendtian action is fundamentally anti-technological because it defies the technological values of efficiency, control, regulation, calculation, and reduction. Action is open-ended and requires human plurality in order to unfold. Technology seeks closure and the elimination of the individual, the unique, and the exceptional. Arendt argues that in an idealized laboring society, action would become “an unnecessary luxury, a capricious interference with general laws of behavior” (1958, 9). Action could not unfold where humans are “endlessly reducible repetitions of the same model whose nature or essence was the same for all and as predictable as the nature or essence of any other thing” (1958, 9). Yet this is precisely what infertility and reproductive technologies represent in the highest sense. Genetic screening and research into genetic engineering, for example, seek to transform human individuality and the uncertainty, unpredictability, and openness of human reproduction into a predetermined, controlled, and regulated assembly line that churns out high-quality, genetically perfect models of human beings. It is this same sort of mentality that leads politicians and scientists (both social and physical) to focus on supposed innate and genetic inadequacies to explain problems which should correctly be understood in terms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and discrimination against people with disabilities.

It is significant that the human condition of natality sustains, for Arendt, the closest ties to action. Modern society's aversion to action is manifest in its growing aversion to the openness embraced in human reproduction. Laboring society seeks not only to control and regulate gestation and birth itself, but to disengage conception from the body and transfer it to the test-tube so that all variables can be controlled and all uncertainty eliminated. Arendt argues that the desire to escape to another planet reflects laboring society's rejection of labor and, by inference, its mode of existence. It should be apparent by now, however, that at an even more fundamental level, this represents the desire to escape from the bodily and reproductive content of existence. These aspects of the human condition are symbolized by the Earth Mother. But while it is true that the earth symbolizes laboring, the body, and reproduction, the significance and meaning of these conditions is to be found, in the first instance, in women.

It is women who not only symbolize, but in every respect actually embody laboring and reproduction. Thus I would argue that the desire to replace women's role in reproduction with the artificial womb and thus to establish absolute control over human reproduction represents a rejection not only of the bodily and laboring content of human existence, but, more fundamentally, of woman herself. Contractual surrogacy—the product of legal and medical techniques—is the present-day version of the artificial womb. In a gender, race, and class stratified society, it is the bodies of the least powerful women who will be used to fulfill the goals of infertility technologies. Removing the activity of conception, gestation, labor, and birth to the realm where white, middle and upper class men never tread is, for such men, akin to having access to the as yet undeveloped artificial womb. No personal involvement or responsibility is necessary. In seeking to master reproduction, the desire to master and dominate women reveals itself.

Modern technology aims at the elimination of labor. Gestation and childbirth are the quintessential models of human labor. Thus, modern society's concern with the development of infertility and reproductive technologies can be seen as the culmination of the labor-elimination aim embraced in modern technology. The artificial womb poignantly illustrates Arendt's assertion that escape from the human condition of laboring is escape from the conditions that make human living possible. If the desire to escape from the human world—a world which is us in a fundamental way and which is without a doubt our home—demonstrates the implications of the loss of the realms of work and action, then the desire to replace bodily reproduction with genetic engineering and the artificial womb demonstrates the culmination of this trend toward worldlessness. Modern human beings are so removed from affirming a connection and commitment to the human artifice and the relations which operate between individuals in society that the most basic bond or tie imaginable—that between human life and human birth—is now being questioned, challenged, and found to be the obstacle to liberation rather than the basis of human connection.

While technology can be utilized efficiently or inefficiently, it can never—no matter how it is employed—encourage the development of meaningful and creative relationships between individuals. Surrogate contracts do not, as is frequently argued, increase the variety of human bonds possible, but rather reduce human beings and human relationships to commodities to be bought and sold, simultaneously stripping them of their essence—openness and possibility.

Arendt's insights complement Heidegger's presentation of modern technology's mode of revealing as a challenging-forth into standing-reserve. The reproductive/infertility technologies are a culmination of the tendency to make human beings over into standing-reserve. Embryos are frozen and stored for implantation or use at a later date. “Surrogate motherhood” transforms women into wombs standing-by until called upon to gestate embryos conceived in test-tubes and stored for future use. Human embryos are set upon and challenged forth into presencing by ordering, regulating and securing. Human beings in embryonic form attain status only as standing-reserve. Ultimately, genetic engineering and artificial wombs will enable human engineers to preconstruct, predetermine, and bring forth the human beings which they design. At that point we will truly be able to debate the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the production process of the “new and improved” line of human beings.

Arendt's major insight is that the unhappiness experienced by modern laboring society cannot be resolved by seeking to eliminate the bodily and laboring content of existence. We are always and forever tied to our bodies. Hence, the claim that reproductive and infertility technologies free and liberate women reflects a misguided and partial understanding of the conditions that oppress modern women. Women may be freed from their reproductive roles, but modern society requires more than technology to infuse human life with the conditions necessary for the revealing and disclosing of the uniqueness of individuals which is exemplified in both action and natality. As women, it is not our bodies that stand between us and freedom but a reorientation of the values, aims, and activities that are embraced and encouraged within modern society. Our task is greater and more complex than a technological solution can fully conceive of or address. We must engage ourselves in the task of remaking and reconceiving human relationships and the social institutions that both reflect and enforce them.

Conclusion

The criticisms I have put forth in this paper go beyond already articulated objections to the commodification of human beings and reproduction and the development and marketing of women as baby-making machines, capitalism's final frontier. Nor is it the aim of this critique to explore or to convince you of the sexist, racist, heterosexist, classist, and ableist character of the development and utilization of these techniques: the question of who uses them and who gets used by them. Each of these aspects has already been identified and thoroughly critiqued by key feminist contributors in the ongoing debate. This discourse thus serves as the background and touchstone of my analysis. But such discourse alone does not succeed in disclosing the full range of the threat posed by developments in reproductive/infertility technologies. As Heidegger cautions, we must look not at the arsenal of technologies, but at the character of the human knowledge or techne that gathers together to bring forth such technologies. What is revealed by this bringing-forth? Where are we going with these technologies?

In short, we are bringing forth the realization of a particular conception of liberation. Its character is revealed most fully and achieves its ultimate expression in the research and development of modern reproduction/infertility technologies —our window to an understanding of the misogynist, exclusive, and closed character of a liberation grounded in a rejection of the body and laboring. Ironically, modern technology itself embodies the goal of disembodiment.

Reproductive/infertility technologies aim at the elimination of the bodily content of existence—the necessary, endless, and cyclical character of laboring. They attempt to substitute control, regulation, order, and definitiveness for the openness, plurality, and physical necessity of the human condition. This liberation through transcendence is in fact a liberation achieved by overcoming and denying the body, labor, and necessity.

Dualistic thinking informs such conceptions of liberation. Mind and body, freedom and necessity, culture and nature, and male and female are posed in contra-distinctive, dualistic pairs. The male half of the equation is, of course, accorded greater value and authority. And as history bears out time and again, the affirmation of the male-identified side carries with it the denial and repression of the female-identified side. Liberation achieved through transcendence of the body has revealed itself to be a liberation sought at the expense of women. It is a misogynist and pathologically imbalanced vision of freedom.

The research and utilization of reproductive/infertility technologies is an issue that feminists must grapple with not only because it involves the use of women's bodies, but because it affirms a vision that is destructive to the human condition as a whole. Feminists have sought to overcome the distortions and fragmentations of dualistic thinking and to integrate the body and the activity of laboring into liberatory theories and practice. As feminists, we must continue to challenge the assumption that these technologies offer meaningful solutions to the problems we face trying to live lives that integrate all aspects of ourselves.

I would argue that an acceptable solution to the problems of infertility and the desire to parent cannot be found in infertility/reproductive technologies. While we need as a society to acknowledge and address the profound suffering of women who desire but are unable to conceive and bear children, as feminists we cannot give in to the pressure to individualize, medicalize, and technologize these issues. Feminists must not accept a technological solution that diminishes the vision of life we seek and for which we have fought. Passive acceptance of these technologies effectively eliminates the realization of a vision of liberation that rests upon an acceptance of the human condition as a balanced whole, a vision that insists that all people be allowed to realize this balance in their lives.

A healthy human society grows out of the tension between labor, work and action in each individual. It cannot emerge out of the rejection and repression of labor and bodily existence or its banishment to one segment of the human population. Women embody the creative tension between labor, work, and action. In their relationships to one another each activity contributes to the creation and maintenance of a richly developed human society—a society that in turn affirms and values the contributions of each activity. The hegemony of the laboring mentality gives rise to a technology that is anti-body, anti-woman, anti-work, and anti-action. As feminists we need to question the character of the human fabric out of which this technology arises and begin to weave into this fabric a new pattern that, in turn, will give rise to a techne born of a different sort of knowledge—a knowledge that balances the needs of labor, work, and action and in so doing affirms all aspects of the human condition. Feminists must insist that every woman be empowered to live this tension creatively—to labor, work, and act according to her own leaning.

Notes

For her thoughtful comments and assistance in editing and revising this paper, and for her strong support and encxiuragement throughout all stages, I am grateful to Jennifer Ho. Thanks and appreciation also go to the Hypatia readers for their comments on an earlier draft.