Limitless? Imaginaries of cognitive enhancement and the labouring body

Abstract

This article seeks to situate pharmacological cognitive enhancement as part of a broader relationship between cultural understandings of the body-brain and the political economy. It is the body of the worker that forms the intersection of this relationship and through which it comes to be enacted and experienced. In this article, we investigate the imaginaries that both inform and are reproduced by representations of pharmacological cognitive enhancement, drawing on cultural sources such as newspaper articles and films, policy documents, and pharmaceutical marketing material to illustrate our argument. Through analysis of these diverse cultural sources, we argue that the use of pharmaceuticals has come to be seen not only as a way to manage our brains, but through this as a means to manage our productive selves, and thereby to better manage the economy. We develop three analytical themes. First, we consider the cultural representations of the brain in connection with the idea of plasticity – captured most graphically in images of morphing – and the representation of enhancement as a desirable, inevitable, and almost painless process in which the mind-brain realizes its full potential and asserts its will over matter. Following this, we explore the social value accorded to productive employment and the contemporary (biopolitical) ethos of working on or managing oneself, particularly in respect of improving one’s productive performance through cognitive enhancement. Developing this, we elaborate a third theme by looking at the moulding of the worker’s productive body-brain in relation to the demands of the economic system.

‘The intelligent and the rest’: British Mensa and the contested status of high intelligence

“…56 Similarly, debates about parenting strategies for optimal brain development (see Broer, Pickersgill, and Cunningham-Burley, 2020; Nadesan, 2002: 411–14; Pickersgill, 2013: 329–30) cannot be disconnected from past discussions about high intelligence in children. Not coincidentally, imaginaries of cognitive enhancement and ‘smart drugs’ envision merit and distinction in one’s private and professional life through the optimized use of the mind and the brain (Bloomfield and Dale, 2020). In this respect, the challenge to understand statements about brainpower and their role in the creation and contestation of differences persists.…”