Body &

Article Society
2020, Vol. 26(1) 55–81
ª The Author(s) 2019
The Biopolitical Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Embodiment of Work DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19876967
journals.sagepub.com/home/bod

in the Era of Human

Enhancement

Nicolas Le Dévédec
HEC Montréal

Abstract
Human enhancement or the use of technoscientific and biomedical advances to
improve human performance is a social phenomenon that has become increasingly
significant in Western societies over the last 15 years or so, notably in the
workplace. By focusing on the non-medical use of psychostimulants, and from a
perspective that is both critical and exploratory, this article aims to show that
human enhancement practices prefigure new forms of embodiment and inter-
iorization of work that are contributing to a significant reconfiguration of bio-
power. By allowing individuals to technically push back their physical and mental
limits, beyond what is considered ‘normal’, human enhancement is enabling a form
of biopower that is focused on the individual and on the possibility of reconfiguring
biological norms in themselves. Far from participating in workers’ emancipation,
this biopolitical model of enhancement markedly points to the issues of intensifying
work conditions and increased employee self-discipline.

Keywords
adaptability, biopower, embodiment, human enhancement, performance, self-
discipline, workplace

24/7 markets and a global infrastructure for continuous work and

consumption have been in place for some time, but now a human
subject is in the making to coincide with these more intensively.
Jonathan Crary (2013: 3–4)

Corresponding author: Nicolas Le Dévédec. Email: nicolas.le-devedec@hec.ca

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
56 Body & Society 26(1)

Human enhancement or the use of technoscientific and biomedical

advances to improve human performance – be it physical, intellectual
or even emotional – is a social phenomenon that has become increas-
ingly significant in Western societies over the last 15 years or so (e.g.
Bostrom and Savulescu, 2009; Roco and Bainbridge, 2002). Cover-
ing a wide range of existing or developing practices, human enhance-
ment is an ‘umbrella term’ (Coenen et al., 2009) that can point to
very diverse interventions, such as

neuroimplants that provide replacement sight or other artificial

senses, drugs that boost brain power, human germline engineering
and existing reproductive technologies, nutritional supplements, new
brain stimulation technologies to alleviate suffering and control
mood, gene doping in sports, cosmetic surgery, growth hormones for
children of short stature, anti-ageing medication, and highly sophis-
ticated prosthetic applications that may provide specialized sensory
input or mechanical output. (Coenen et al., 2009: 6)

No matter how different they are, these technological interventions

all share the common goal of pushing back the limits of the human
body, outside what is typically considered the traditional medical–
therapeutic field (Hogle, 2005). This blurring of lines between ther-
apy and improvement and this willingness to alter and act upon the
human body with biomedicine and bioengineering in order to opti-
mize performance are what define human enhancement. As Clarke
et al. point out, ‘In bioethics the term ‘human enhancement’ refers to
any kind of genetic, biomedical, or pharmaceutical intervention
aimed at improving human dispositions, capacities, and well-being,
even when there is no pathology to be treated’ (Clarke et al., 2016: 1).
For over a decade, human enhancement has been triggering
debate, notably in the fields of bioethics and philosophy (i.e. Clarke
et al., 2016; Le Dévédec, 2018; Mehlman, 2009; Parens, 2000). In the
field of body studies, attention to human enhancement has caused
debate in various fields including regenerative medicine (Lafontaine,
2009; Neilson, 2012); sports and, notably, the link between technol-
ogy and Paralympic culture (Tamari, 2017); and the military, with
the quest for cybersoldiers (Gray, 2003). Yet, its implications in the
workplace have received little attention to date, other than a few, rare
exceptions (Bloomfield and Dale, 2015; Pustovrh et al., 2018). As
highlighted by the British report Human Enhancement and the
Le Dévédec 57

Future of Work, the workplace is nevertheless at the front line of

these contemporary technoscientific and biomedical transformations
of the body (Academy of Medical Sciences (AMS), 2012).1 Body
enhancement practices and especially the use of psychostimulants to
enhance concentration, attention or wakefulness in today’s work-
places (Garasic and Lavazza, 2015; Nicholson et al., 2015; Pustovrh
et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2013) are an emerging trend that illus-
trates the very specific way the body and vital capacities are mobi-
lized in today’s workplace. Aiming to overcome the current limits of
one’s human body in the contemporary workplace, these practices
raise a number of social issues. What relationships to work do they
manifest specifically? Is the augmented body an expression of a
liberated body and of greater worker empowerment? Or rather, does
it not signify the emergence of a body and a worker that is first and
foremost adapted to the growing intensification of work conditions
and of the pressures to perform and be productive that characterize
advanced capitalist societies?
Given that the human body provides an especially rich analytical
approach with which to question social transformations in the capi-
talist workplace (Valentine, 2002), the goal of this article is to help
shed light on the social and political issues raised by the technolo-
gical and biomedical enhancement of the body in the workplace. But
this article also seeks to contribute more generally to shedding new
light on current debates on the transformation of biopower and of
relationships to the body in advanced capitalist societies. Nikolas
Rose (2001, 2007) and others have fully demonstrated the rise of a
new kind of biopower at the turn of the 20th century, one that is
centred on the possibility technological and biomedical advances
offer to transform life on an individual and molecular level. Decisive
research by Sunder Rajan (2006), Melinda Cooper and Catherine
Waldby (Cooper, 2008; Cooper and Waldby, 2014) has also aptly
illustrated how this molecularization of life and bodies conceals new
forms of appropriation, exploitation and capitalist commodification
of the body and its multiple parts (organs, tissues, cells, etc.). Little
research, however, has highlighted the very new ways in which this
form of biopower in advanced capitalist societies also mobilizes
individuals’ vitality and bodies in the workplace and the new forms
of exploitation and alienation it produces. At a time when many
researchers are emphasizing the advent of a cognitive capitalism or
58 Body & Society 26(1)

an immaterial labour (Moulier-Boutang, 2012; Hardt and Negri,

2004), these new material and bodily forms of the capitalist exploita-
tion of workers seem to go unnoticed; they constitute in many ways a
blind spot of contemporary research on biopower and critical studies
on the body.2
By focusing on the non-medical use of psychostimulants which is
currently the most salient workplace enhancement practice, and from
a perspective that is both critical and exploratory, this article aims to
demonstrate that the spread of enhancement practices in the work-
place is evidence of a significant reconfiguration and extension of
biopower – one that calls for serious critical scrutiny. Using the
concept of ‘biocracy’ (Fleming, 2012), we will show, in particular,
just how this form of biopower is part of the contemporary redefini-
tion of the boundaries and ‘the materiality of bodies, both psychic
and morphological’ (Blackman, 2010: 1; see also Jain, 1999), con-
tributing to the solicitation of workers’ vital capacities that is very
much more intensified than the classic biopolitical and Taylorian
incarnations ever could be and, as such, to the development of new
forms of exploitation. Since they focus on the individual and on the
possibility of altering and optimizing biological norms in themselves,
human enhancement practices are far from participating in workers’
emancipation. On the contrary, they foster greater adaptability in
workers to more intense working conditions and they intensify the
internalization of the neoliberal norms of self-surpassment and per-
formance. By inciting individuals to technically push back their
physical and mental limits, beyond what is considered ‘normal’,
human enhancement is encouraging employees’ biomedical transfor-
mation and compliance, rather than contributing to the questioning of
capitalist organization models of work.
After looking at the non-medical uses of technoscientific and bio-
medical advances in the areas of the army and sports, which are the
areas that currently exemplify the desire to biomedically modify and
optimize human performance, the article shows how these uses are
now spreading well beyond these two areas and are affecting a num-
ber of work environments, particularly with regard to the misuse of
psychostimulants for performance enhancement purposes. Through
the concept of biocracy, we then see how the diffusion of human
enhancement practices in the workplace is contributing to the emer-
gence of a form of biopower that differs from the Taylorist model by
Le Dévédec 59

being exerted on the bodies and vitality of people, at an individual,

molecular level. Finally, we show how this new kind of biopower
fuels an increase in employee adaptability to more intense working
conditions, at the expense of a re-examination of the capitalist model
of work organization.

Superathletes and Supersoldiers: The Examples of Sports

and the Military
It is essential to look at the technoscientific transformations taking
place in sports and the military to understand the current spread of
human enhancement practices to other work areas. From a socio-
logical point of view, the sports and military fields emblematically
illustrate the development of experiments to transcend human per-
formance through technoscientific and biomedical means. These two
fields may be considered particularly ‘extreme’, as they test the
limits of the human body. This makes them conducive environments
for the development of human enhancement practices. The world of
professional sports, which is constantly beset by doping controver-
sies and is especially impacted by the incitement to ever-increasing
performance and self-surpassing, has acted as a laboratory for human
enhancement for a number of years now. In this area, the culture of
performance and the use of substances to transcend limits and to go
beyond sporting achievements are not new. However, in the last
several decades, doping has become a structural phenomenon in
professional sports, linking athletes, teams, doctors and pharmaceu-
tical suppliers (Møller et al., 2017; Waddington and Smith, 2000).
Moving through amphetamines to steroids, growth hormones, corti-
sone and erythropoietin – a hormone that stimulates red blood cell
production – the quest for improved athletic performance has fol-
lowed pharmacological progress throughout the 20th century.
‘There’s an arms-race quality to performance-enhancing technolo-
gies in sport’, says Thomas Murray, former president of the Hastings
Center (Murray, as quoted by Thompson, 2012: 287).
A new dimension of doping in sports has opened up thanks to gene
therapy. The possibility of modifying athletes’ genes to optimize their
athletic abilities has been a topic of much discussion in recent years
(Miah, 2017; President’s Council on Bioethics, 2003). The World
Anti-Doping Agency defines genetic doping as ‘the non-therapeutic
60 Body & Society 26(1)

use of genes, genetic elements and/or cells that have the capacity to
enhance athletic performance’ (Fallahi et al., 2011). In addition to
biotechnical progress, advances in prosthetics have also led to the
increased technologization of Paralympic sports (Howe, 2011). As
Helen Thompson points out, ‘surgery and, ultimately, technological
augmentations could help athletes towards the podium’ (Thompson,
2012: 289). A case in point is South African runner Oscar Pistorius. He
was the first double amputee, with two carbon-fibre prostheses, to
compete with non-disabled athletes at the 2012 Olympic Games
(Swartz and Watermeyer, 2008). Like Aimee Mullins, a former
Parolympian and now fashion model, Pistorius enacts the image of a
body empowered by prosthetics (Tamari, 2017). Advances in
nanotechnology, though still experimental, also open up new oppor-
tunities to enhance sport performance: ‘There is a lot of discussion
about the possibility of biologically infused nanodevices that could
perpetually maintain certain thresholds of performance’ (Miah quoted
in Thompson, 2012: 489).
Although the world of professional sports plays a central role in
experiments to enhance humans, it is not the only area where human
enhancement has a strong presence. Using technoscientific and bio-
medical advances to surpass the limits of the human body, beyond
what is considered ‘normal’, has been central in the 20th-century
history of the military. A noteworthy illustration is the use of phar-
macology and, more specifically, psychostimulants like methamphe-
tamine to dope soldiers’ performance – inhibiting fear and/or
countering the effects of sleepiness (see Kamienski, 2016; Rasmus-
sen, 2008). These ‘go pills’ were used during World War II by all
mobilized countries to help soldiers adapt to extreme conditions by
neutralizing emotional and subjective reactions:
During the Second World War, states such as Germany, Great Britain,
Japan, United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) enacted measures in support of their war efforts that impacted
civilians as well as military personnel. The stimulant methampheta-
mine was supplied to German and Japanese forces during the war in
order to enhance their performance. The British and US military too
investigated and deployed the use of amphetamine in combat, princi-
pally for its morale boosting properties and in spite of accumulating
evidence regarding the potential deleterious effects. (Bloomfield and
Dale, 2015: 556)
Le Dévédec 61

In recent times, the quest to optimize soldiers’ performance has

experienced significant developments, especially in the United
States. Given that soldiers are now considered the weak link in an
army characterized by the robotization and increased technical
sophistication of weapons and defence systems, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has implemented
an ‘enhanced soldier’ program3 (DARPA, 2014). More specifically,
DARPA is working to increase the physical performance of US
soldiers by deploying a number of projects on ‘metabolic engineer-
ing, increased wakefulness, blood-loss resistance and gene therapy
(for instance to eliminate pain)’ (Puscas, 2017: 3; our translation).
DARPA is also exploring countering the physiological impacts of
lack of sleep and nutritional deprivation to create ‘soldiers with a
superior metabolism’. In addition to improving soldiers’ physical
performance, the agency is also conducting research to optimize their
intellectual abilities. Working in partnership with the BRAIN Initia-
tive, launched by the Obama administration in 2013, DARPA
leverages neuroscientific advances and explores neurostimulation,
which ‘consists of stimulating soldiers’ brains with electricity to
facilitate decision-making, risk-taking and the ability to lie – useful
for prisoners being interrogated by the enemy’ (Puscas, 2017: 3; our
translation).
As we can see, the desire to technologically improve human per-
formance in sports and the military has become a significant trend in
recent years. The desire to push back the limits of the human body in
these two fields is not inconsequential. In these fields, individuals are
confronted with extreme conditions that intensively test the human
body and its limits. Sports and the military can be considered
‘extreme work’. As highlighted by researchers Brian Bloomfield and
Karen Dale, ‘Extreme work (or “extreme jobs”) might be described
as that carried out in dangerous, high-pressure, unpredictable, risky
situations’ (Bloomfield and Dale, 2015: 555). Human enhancement
techniques aim precisely to respond to such extreme contexts by
allowing athletes and soldiers to adapt. As we will now see, it is
significant that body enhancement practices are spreading to more
everyday work settings. The desire to push back the limits of the
human body is indeed a deep-rooted trend that is now affecting many
of the most common work environments. This indicates that sports
and the army are perhaps no longer the only so-called extreme areas
62 Body & Society 26(1)

and that extreme conditions specific to these environments are

increasingly normalized and widespread in the contemporary
workplace.

Pushing the Body’s Limits at Work: Toward Enhanced

Employees?
Human enhancement practices have moved well beyond sports and
the military and into the workplace more broadly. As highlighted by
the British report Human Enhancement and the Future of Work:
Advances in a range of areas in science and engineering such as
neuroscience, regenerative medicine and bionics are already enhan-
cing, or could in the next decade enhance, the physical and cognitive
capacity of individuals in the workplace, to take them beyond the
general ‘norm’. (AMS, 2012: 53)

The practices that aim to push back the body’s physical limits can
take on various forms. For instance, sociologist Anthony Elliott
observes a considerable rise in the use of surgery in many countries
to combat age discrimination in the workplace. ‘Cosmetic surgeons are
receiving increasing requests for various procedures – from collagen
fillers to face-lifts – from senior managers, lawyers, airline pilots,
estate agents and many others’ (Elliott, 2008). The desire to use tech-
nology to push back the limits of aging is in fact a fundamental issue of
the workplace in advanced capitalism or ‘24/7 capitalism’ as Crary
(2013) calls it. Cosmetic surgery is a significant phenomenon, but
there are also other human enhancement practices that could reconfi-
gure the workplace with regard to aging. Notable among these is the
biomedical quest to reverse menopause, in the goal of enabling
postmenopausal women to become pregnant well into their 60s (Cutas
and Smajdor, 2015), or the possibility of freezing oocytes so that
young female employees may temporarily delay motherhood and not
interrupt their career (Petropanagos et al., 2015). The foundations for
this have already been laid by several companies that have, in recent
years, adopted new policies on procreation. Thus, Facebook, Google
and Apple have recently been offering their employees
health insurance that covers the costs of oocytes freezing. As a head-
line on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek proclaimed: ‘Freeze
your eggs, Free your career’ (see Lesnes, 2014). ‘Apple cares deeply
Le Dévédec 63

about our employees and their families, and we are always looking at
new ways our health programs can meet their needs’, the company
justifies.
We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended
maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation, and egg storage
as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments . . . We want
to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they
care for loved ones and raise their families. (As quoted by Tran, 2014)

However, the human enhancement practice that now most strongly

illustrates the desire to act biomedically on human performance in
the workplace is undeniably the nontherapeutic use (i.e. outside the
framework of a known pathology) of drugs like psychostimulants,
which are normally used to treat attention disorders (amphetamines)
or narcolepsy (modafinil). Psychostimulants – often called ‘smart
drugs’ by the media – are used for the purposes of improving cog-
nitive abilities, like memory, attention or concentration (Ter Meulen
et al., 2017). Despite the fact that, on a purely scientific basis, the
effectiveness of such a usage is debated (Linssen et al., 2014), psy-
chostimulant use is currently on the rise, particularly by students.
Numerous studies have been published on psychostimulant use by
university students to improve their academic performance, optimize
concentration and increase productivity, especially during exam peri-
ods (see Levinson and McKinney, 2013; Maturo, 2012; Robitaille
and Collin, 2016).
Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking
deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin –
not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their
fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity
for learning. (Greely et al., 2008: 702)

Affecting more than one in three students on many North American

campuses, non-medical psychostimulant use allegedly rises to
nearly 43% for US students in especially competitive fields (Kaye and
Darke, 2012). But this phenomenon does not only impact students.
Several studies indicate that the non-therapeutic use of psychosti-
mulants is being used by an increasing number of workers, in a wide
range of sectors (Garasic and Lavazza, 2015; Nicholson et al., 2015;
Pustovrh et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2013). In healthcare, a recent
64 Body & Society 26(1)

German study measured the prevalence of psychostimulant use in

over 1,000 surgeons (Franke et al., 2013). The researchers show that
the phenomenon of using psychostimulants to remain alert and vig-
ilant is underreported:
The use of illicit and prescription drugs for CE [cognitive enhance-
ment] or ME [mood enhancement] is an underestimated phenomenon
among surgeons. The present results indicate that about 15% to 20%
of surgeons have used drugs for CE or ME at least once during their
lifetimes. (Franke et al., 2013: 8)

Smart-drug use is also found in the field of transportation, for

instance among airline pilots and truck drivers and particularly
long-distance transport workers, who use stimulants such as amphe-
tamines (Girotto et al., 2013; Mayhew and Quinlan, 2006). This is
shown in a study by Claire Mayhew and Michael Quinlan on finan-
cial pressure and work health and safety, involving 300 Australian
truck drivers: ‘While interviewees were not asked questions about
illicit drugs’, they report ‘23 drivers volunteered statements about
personal use, or use by other drivers, with Amphetamines (or speed)
the most commonly cited substance’ (Mayhew and Quinlan, 2006:
223). Several other professional fields may be affected by this phe-
nomenon, including university professional staff and the worlds of
finance and management (Cederström, 2016; Dietz et al., 2016).
A Financial Times article indicated that smart drugs ‘are becoming
popular among City lawyers, bankers and other professionals keen to
gain a competitive advantage over colleagues’ (Plimmer, 2015).
Thus, in 2008, modafinil was called the ‘entrepreneur’s drug of
choice’ by the information site TechCrunch. Even the use of tiny
hits of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known as acid, to
enhance cognitive function, perception and creativity has been listed
within Silicon Valley (Solon, 2016). The diversity of this array of
technoscientific and biomedical enhancement practices raises the
topicality of the notion of biopower.

Body Enhancement and the Reconfiguration of Biopower

in the Workplace
The mobilization and harnessing of bodies and vital elements in the
workplace are not new. In the 19th century, the metaphor of the
Le Dévédec 65

human engine was used to describe the human body, which was
thereafter associated with pure productive force whose performance
was to be maximized and whose energy was to be channelled. This is
at the heart of modern industrial capitalism, as highlighted by histor-
ian Anson Rabinbach (1992). From the same perspective, philoso-
pher Michel Foucault, through the notion of biopower, clearly
showed the extent to which modern power mechanisms have
attached themselves to the bodies and vitality of individuals and
population: ‘Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power
establishes its dominion’ (Foucault, 1976: 138; our translation). A
constituting element of modern civilization, biopower has more par-
ticularly been a central component in the advent of industrial capit-
alism and the enlistment of workers to the productivist machine:

[ . . . ] biopower was without question an indispensable element in the

development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible
without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of pro-
duction and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to eco-
nomic processes. (Foucault, 1976: 185; our translation)

It was notably through the training and disciplining of bodies that

industrial capitalism subjected workers to the imperatives of modern
productivity. We know, for instance, how corporal discipline was
central to the scientific organization of work developed by Frederick
Taylor in the late 19th century (see Bahnisch, 2000).
Human enhancement practices must undeniably be reinserted into
the framework of this long modern biopolitical history of capitalism.
But they also stand out on key points that embody the rise of a
specific form of biopower. The concept of biocracy (Fleming,
2012) may prove relevant to understanding the novelty of these
changes in workplaces. As notably demonstrated by researcher Peter
Fleming, contemporary work environments are affected by a form of
biopower that is much more encompassing and diffuse than the one
analysed by Foucault (Fleming, 2012, 2014a). The biopolitical model
of the industrial era, which revolved around the body and the factory,
is now supplanted by a more encompassing one, which Fleming
qualifies as biocratic:

We might use the term of biocracy to qualify this new kind of bio-
politics at stake at the organisational level: I define biocracy as the
66 Body & Society 26(1)

instrumentalization of life attributes that were previously considered

exogenous, irrelevant or detrimental to formal organizational produc-
tivity. (Fleming, 2014a: 885)

Indeed, according to Fleming, biopower now concerns the entirety

of the individual’s social life, relative to the new spirit of capitalism,
and more specifically its neoliberal redefinition:

The arrival of so-called Liberation Management and market rational-

ism seem to have partially displaced this division between work and
‘life.’ [ . . . ] During the mid-1990s, management ideology suddenly
encourages the ‘whole person’ in the workplace, with individual dif-
ference, diversity, and ‘life’ more generally becoming key organiza-
tional motifs. (Fleming, 2014a: 878)

It is now the social life of employees that is called upon, modelled

after the model of the ‘enterprise of the self’ that Foucault considered
to be the ideological core of neoliberal governmentality (see Fou-
cault, 2004). While Fleming does not explicitly talk about human
enhancement practices, it seems relevant here to show that human
enhancement also participates in redefining and substantially broad-
ening contemporary biopower according to this biocratic model,
which reaches beyond the classical Taylorian model.
The extension of biopower to the life itself of salaried workers –
what Fleming calls biocracy – does not just affect their social life. It
is also a new way of seeing employees’ bodies and vital capacities,
which are understood and utilized differently than in the classic
biopolitical model. In this model, the body was indeed subject to
control, but this control remained external, that is, exercised via a
social organization. This was the prevailing disciplinary model, as
clarified by Moore and Robinson: ‘The core technique of Taylorism
is the external regulation of working bodies through cost accounting,
time-motion measurement and record-keeping’ (Moore and Robin-
son, 2016: 8). Von Osten describes it as the ‘rationalization of
body-machine-management relations’ (Von Osten, 2011: 135). In
this perspective, the body was controlled, channelled and standar-
dized through a set of managerial measures. Even if the bodies were
transformed, conforming to the capitalist machine, as Marx (1995
[1867]) clearly showed, this transformation was an effect and a result
of working conditions rather than a goal in of itself. The human body
Le Dévédec 67

could be incited, pushed and made to comply with the requirements

and productivity norms, and thereby profoundly altered, but in no
way could it be remodelled, remade and redesigned in itself via
bioengineering. As Mark Bahnisch so clearly describes:

the achievement of Taylorism was to contain and discipline the work-

ing subject, separating the consciousness of the labor process and its
embodiment in labor. From Taylor’s time onwards, the fundamental
managerial control strategy was to constitute management as the
thinking subject, leaving workers as a bodily residue who would
perform the gestures of production without autonomy. (Bahnisch,
2000: 64)

What human enhancement now specifically makes possible is

different. Emulating athletes who dope and cybersoldiers, human
enhancement paves the way for enhanced workers, that is to say,
workers who are able to act upon themselves and even on their
body, through biomedicine, to push back the body’s limits. In
other words, what is now possible is no longer just the socio-
technical and external control of the body via social organization,
which characterized the Taylorist disciplinary model, but the
internal bioengineering of bodies and subjectivities (i.e. through
the technoscientific optimization or modulation of working bodies
and subjectivities by the individuals themselves). This biopolitical
model of enhancement is about pushing individuals to act on their
own biological norms. As Fleming says, ‘As such, the disciplin-
ary tropes of spatial confinement and docile bodies are less
important in this biopolitical context. Life is accelerated rather
than restricted, harnessed rather than coercively shaped anew’
(Fleming, 2014b: 28). Indeed, whether this involves pharmacolo-
gically optimizing intellectual faculties, such as focus, memory or
creativity, better controlling emotions or technologically pushing
back age-related physical limits, human enhancement encourages
individuals – individually and at a molecular level – to continu-
ously surpass their physical and intellectual limits beyond what is
considered ‘normal’. Here, the body is no longer understood as an
immutable given like in Taylorism. It becomes wholly plastic,
malleable and perfectible: ‘almost any capacity of the human
body or soul – strength, endurance, attention, intelligence and the
lifespan itself – seems potentially open to improvement by
68 Body & Society 26(1)

technological intervention’ (Rose, 2007: 20). The instrumentali-

zation of life that Fleming brings out thus concerns not just
employees’ social life but also this molecular conception of the
body and the ‘growing capacities to control, manage, engineer,
reshape, and modulate the very vital capacities of human beings
as living creatures’ (Rose, 2007: 3).
Precisely because enhancement practices seem to distance
themselves from the past’s disciplinary and deterministic biopo-
litical mechanisms, they are considered by many observers as
having emancipatory potential, notably by making it possible to
counter the growing intensification of work. For instance, the
experts who wrote the British report on the future of work in
the human enhancement era indicate that ‘enhancement could
benefit employee efficiency and even work-life balance’ (AMS,
2012: 6) and thereby, more broadly, contribute ‘to “humanizing”
the workplace (improving the work environment for more effec-
tive working for shorter periods) [ . . . ]’ (AMS, 2012: 53). On the
use of psychostimulants in the workplace, Carl Cederström also
states that

smart drugs could be used to alleviate stress while also making us

more productive. In theory, we could work shorter hours in a more
focused and productive manner, rather than long hours in an unfo-
cused and unproductive way. [ . . . ] You could then use the rest of
your time differently, spending it with family, volunteering, or taking
part in a leisure activity. (Cederström, 2016)

While the argument of more humanized work should not be dis-

carded, it tends to significantly gloss over the social and biopolitical
capitalist context. As Gillies, Edwards and Horsley point out: ‘A non-
deterministic commitment to opportunity rather than destiny has
been broadly welcomed, with little consideration of the negative
consequences this standpoint could unleash’ (Gillies et al., 2016:
230). As we will now see, this extension of biopower to individual
vital capacities actually opens up intensified forms of exploitation.
By making it possible to act on employees’ physical and intellectual
capacities, the biopolitical model of enhancement promotes employ-
ees’ greater adaptability to and conformity with the capitalist
machine of production.
Le Dévédec 69

Enhanced Bodies, Intensified Work and Increased

Self-discipline
Technoscientific and biomedical advances to enhance human beings
are anything but neutral: they fit into the capitalist context of unlim-
ited growth, productivity and perpetual acceleration4 (see Rosa et al.,
2017). In this context, body enhancement practices do not free up
time or humanize work; rather, they fuel the increased acceleration
and intensification of work by extending work hours and increasing
the amount of effort made. Far from releasing the grip of the work-
place or humanizing it further, the biopolitical model of human
enhancement opens the door to capitalism having a greater hold on
workers’ bodies and subjectivities. By inciting employees to con-
tinuously exceed their physical and intellectual capacities beyond
what is considered ‘normal’, at the expense of reassessing social
models of the organization of work, the biopolitical model of
enhancement in fact leads to employees becoming more adaptable
to extreme working conditions, as in the case of sports and the mil-
itary. The contemporary spread of enhancement to work environ-
ments shows that the sports and military fields seem to be
becoming the norm. Human enhancement practices are a way to
adapt to the current generalized intensification of work conditions.
As pointed out by the researchers Brian Bloomfield and Karen Dale,

Enhancement technologies in the specific context of work can be

understood as a matter of modifying the body so as to enable a corre-
spondence between its capabilities and the demands of the task at
hand. In other words, through enhancement technologies, workers can
be fitted to more extreme jobs. (Bloomfield and Dale, 2015: 560)

The above-mentioned works on psychostimulant use in the work-

place clearly demonstrate this. In the case of surgeons, studies high-
light the fact that smart-drug use does not alleviate the pace of work
but, on the contrary, aims at making it possible to endure an ever-
growing volume of work (Franke et al., 2013: 8). As for the use of
smart drugs in healthcare, the authors of the article say it ‘may be
attributed to high workload and perceived work-related and private
stress’ and that its goal is ‘to counteract fatigue and loss of concen-
tration’ (Franke et al., 2013: 8). In other words, smart drugs enable
greater adaptability and subjection to extreme work conditions. The
70 Body & Society 26(1)

same can be said of truck drivers who use pharmacological products

‘to stay alert, work longer hours, and drive longer distances. Many of
these drivers condoned illicit drug use on the grounds it reduced the
risk of fatigue-related smashes’ (Mayhew and Quinlan, 2006: 223).
The same conclusion has been reached in the area of finance: ‘Some
investment bankers use modafinil to help them to work long hours on
big deals. In extreme cases they use high doses to work through a
number of days and nights without sleep’ (Dean, 2013). Even the
moral obligation to use these drugs is now being raised, particularly
in jobs where others’ lives are at stake: ‘If a surgeon is experiencing
fatigue due to overwork, do they have a moral obligation to take a
cognitive enhancing drug in order to minimize the risk of fatigue-
related errors in future patient care?’ (Goold and Maslen, 2014).5 As
we can see, human enhancement is a means of coping with the
demands of work – for instance being able to stay awake or to work
longer – rather than a desire for an enhanced body per se. Human
enhancement practices do not deliver workers from work or from
increasingly intense work conditions. On the contrary, they provide a
way to submit to them more intensely, or, in other words, to become
more alienated.
This is all the more the case since the pressure on employees to
perform and surpass themselves is not solely dependent on compa-
nies and on the requirements imposed by employers. It also depends
on the employees themselves. Indeed, one of the main characteristics
of contemporary biopower is precisely that it conveys and values a
biologized understanding of our human identity, under which it is not
only acceptable but, even more so, desirable to seek to improve
oneself biologically (Rose, 2007). By influencing the way in which
each individual is led to perceive work and to perceive themselves at
work, human enhancement paves the way to even more interiorizing
of the norms of self-surpassment and performance, which are build-
ing blocks in the contemporary biopolitical imaginary. Following the
model of doping in professional sports and the further internalization
of the norms of competition and performance, human enhancement
practices sustain the increased self-discipline of workers by fostering
the emergence of new forms of self-regulation:

The more we define ourselves through the conceptual categories

offered by the new enhancement technologies – for example, the self,
Le Dévédec 71

its capacities and limits conceived in terms of brain chemistry – the

more we open ourselves to new modalities of inspection and inter-
vention while concomitantly being invited to discipline ourselves
through the new technology so as to become aligned with the pre-
ferred subjectivities of the workplace and society beyond. (Bloom-
field and Dale, 2015: 554)

This interiorization and standardization of self-surpassment by

means of new technologies is all the more concerning in a neoliberal
regime that continuously enjoins every individual to become the
entrepreneur of their own self and their own body (see Dardot and
Laval, 2013; Foucault, 2004).
Sociological surveys on the use of psychostimulants for non-
medical uses are once again instructive in this regard. Referring
to the famous analysis of marijuana smokers in the book Out-
siders by sociologist Howard Becker, the sociologists Johanne
Collin and Marcelo Otero created the very enlightening notion
of insiders to sociologically decrypt the phenomenon of smart-
drug use in student environments (Collin and Otero, 2016). They
point out that insiders are different from outsiders particularly
because they adhere to the dominant norms: ‘By all accounts,
insiders do not seek to escape, by evading their “societal
responsibilities,” nor, even less, to rebel by suggesting new forms
of alternative social organization’ (Collin and Otero, 2016: 172;
our translation). The use of psychostimulants by insiders is not
based on a desire to escape or flee the world and the social norms.
On the contrary, it presupposes a strong adherence to performance
norms and, even more so, demonstrates a desire to ‘perform well’.
This is Cederström’s finding as well: ‘They use these drugs not to
escape work and avoid responsibility, but to be able to work more
and better’ (Cederström, 2016). By pushing people toward rigor-
ous self-work in order to constantly be bettering their perfor-
mance, this biopolitical model of enhancement finally
encourages the expansion of phenomena like workaholism, that
is, forms of work addiction that are currently experiencing tre-
mendous growth (Fleming, 2016; Griffiths, 2011), and even more
so, exhaustion and burnout. Indeed, workers’ vitality cannot be
exploited indefinitely without ultimately coming up against the
limits of the human body.
72 Body & Society 26(1)

Conclusion
The spread of human enhancement practices in a number of contem-
porary work environments is an emerging social reality that needs
further investigation in the social sciences and notably in the field of
body studies. From an exploratory and critical perspective, the aim of
this article was to show that these body enhancement practices, and
more particularly, the non-medical use of psychostimulants to
improve physical and intellectual performance, give rise to the figure
of an employee who is biomedically adapted for more extreme work
conditions, modelled after the sports and military fields. By opening
up the possibility of modifying the physical and intellectual faculties
of employees, human enhancement significantly expands capital-
ism’s biopolitical hold on bodies and lives. Through the concept of
biocracy, we saw that this form of biopower solicits employees’
bodies and lives in ways that are new and different from the Taylor-
ian biopolitical model; indeed, it insidiously encourages employees
to see their own body and all their physical or mental abilities as
resources to optimize in order to adapt to intensified work environ-
ments. These material and bodily forms of the capitalist exploitation
of workers spurred by technological and biomedical advances should
be studied more extensively, especially given that they curiously
seem to constitute a blind spot in research on today’s transformations
of biopower. Capitalist exploitation is nevertheless first and foremost
exercised over the bodies and lives of workers – that’s what Marx
aptly pointed out in his time, and it seems to have only been strength-
ened with technoscientific and biomedical progress.

Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank the editor and the four reviewers for
their helpful and constructive comments and recommendations.

ORCID iD
Nicolas Le Dévédec https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3835-5483

Notes
1. As highlighted by the British report Human Enhancement and the
Future of Work: ‘Work will evolve over the next decade, with
Le Dévédec 73

enhancement technologies potentially making a significant contribu-

tion. Widespread use of enhancements might influence an individual’s
ability to learn or perform tasks and perhaps even to enter a profession;
influence motivation; enable people to work in more extreme conditions
or into old age, reduce work-related illness; or facilitate earlier return to
work after illness’ (AMS, 2012: 5).
2. Today, this crucial work is mainly being conducted around the use of
self-quantification and performance technologies (see Lupton, 2016;
Sanders, 2017). Indeed, the work on the quantified self in the workplace
highlights the way in which employees are increasingly governed and
controlled by technical metrics systems, which quantify their slightest
physical performance. This contributes to disciplining workers and to
instituting new forms of surveillance and control (Moore, 2017; Moore,
2018; Moore and Robinson, 2016).
3. It is no accident that one of the experts recruited by Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency in 2012 was engineer Ray Kurzweil, co-
founder of Singularity University and a central figure in the transhuma-
nist movement.
4. In his work on social acceleration, sociologist and philosopher Hartmut
Rosa (2014) demonstrates that, although contemporary technoscientific
advances should free us from constraints and help us free up time, in
reality, they do everything but increase individuals’ leisure time. What
dominates is rather the impression of always being short on time and
running late. According to Rosa, this paradox can be explained by the
fact that in a society based on the capitalist imperative of unlimited
growth and productivity, technological progress tends to lead to oppor-
tunities to benefit from greater productivity, rather than to free up time.
‘Since we can produce faster, we produce more’, says Rosa, who uses
email and automobiles as illustrations. ‘Writing an email is twice as fast
as writing a letter. While writing ten letters used to take two hours,
writing ten emails only takes one. But instead of gaining an hour, we
take two hours and write twenty emails. [ . . . ] The same goes for auto-
mobiles: they allow us to go faster than walking, but we travel greater
distances and we spend as much time in the car as we did walking in the
past’ (Rosa, 2014: 30; translation). Far from enabling a reassessment of
the growth society and of performance norms, Rosa says, these new
technologies do the opposite: they exacerbate the principle, precipitating
social life into an overall acceleration.
5. The British report on human enhancement also indicates that this question
will soon be raised in the field of transportation: ‘Recent examples of traffic
accidents involving passenger coaches draw attention to the drivers of
these vehicles as another potential target for such demands’ (AMS, 2012).
74 Body & Society 26(1)

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Le Dévédec 81

Nicolas Le Dévédec is an assistant professor of sociology at the Depart-

ment of Management at HEC Montréal. He holds a PhD in sociology and in
political science from the University of Montréal (Quebec, Canada) and the
University of Rennes 1 (France). His research looks at the ethical, social
and political aspects of transhumanism and human enhancement technol-
ogies. He is the author of La socie´te´ de l’ame´lioration. La perfectibilite´
humaine, des Lumie`res au transhumanisme (Montréal, Éditions Liber,
2015).