Neither Licit nor Illicit: A Discursive Analysis of Cognition Enhancers

Cognition enhancers—drugs used to enhance cognition in healthy people—have generated a substantial amount of debate in the academic literature. In these debates, cognition enhancers are considered to promise (or threaten) to drastically change society. Cognition enhancers, as a “new breed of drugs,” are significant as they disrupt the licit–illicit binary maintained in the moral logic of pharmaceutical legitimacy. Cognition enhancers, despite putatively going beyond the legitimate purpose of restoring health, are not considered illicit. Their specificity positions them differently from medical, recreational, and other enhancement or “lifestyle” drugs, such that they elicit different rationales of governance. Utilizing a discursive analysis of the debates concerning cognition enhancers, I demonstrate how cognition enhancers cannot be determined by fixed properties either internal or external to themselves, but are rendered (reasonably) coherent through the problematizations that they produce. Questions of the boundaries of treatment and enhancement, equality and fairness, authenticity and autonomy, are bound up with concerns over the nature of being human. The discourse on cognition enhancers is underpinned by the assumption that these drugs do not repair a disorder but rather enhance an already “healthy” subject to an idealized subject, a construct underpinned by conceptions of a “normal” subject that is White, heteromasculine, and nondisabled. This presumption exists in the hinterlands that constitute these drugs as “cognition enhancers.