Upgradekultur

Enhancement, prostheses, body upgrades - in recent times, we have come to observe a technological penetration of the body that must be conceived of as a symptom of a far-reaching social, economic and cultural transformation towards a culture of optimization and upgrading.
Why should the increasingly generalized imperatives towards optimization not apply to the body? In the context of a growing technological reproducibility of the body, the individual seems to be liberated from the limits of their natural constitution: regardless of medical indications, medicinal and surgical possibilities of optimization are being used just as actively as technological enhancement or digitized concepts of performance and health. Dierk Spreen reconstructs the context in which the transformation of values resulting in this culture of upgrade took place, and discusses possibilities for theoretical responses in sociology.