Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
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Sharon RustonDepartment of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
Alice JenkinsSchool of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK
Catherine BellingFeinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting new series that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in literary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics as well as established ones.
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Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK
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Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
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Justin Omar Johnston
Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels
Justin Omar JohnstonStony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-030-26256-3e-ISBN 978-3-030-26257-0
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
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Acknowledgements
There are so many colleagues, comrades, and friends to thank for helping me develop Posthuman Capital during my years at both Stony Brook University (SBU) and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. It is impossible to thank them all by name. Still I want to give special thanks to Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon for their generosity and guidance. Thank you, Anne, for helping me crystallize my intuitions, for teaching me to begin by getting one thing right, and for showing me how to dig, map, and fly. Most of all, thank you for reminding me to create my own confidence. I am also forever grateful to Susan Friedman, Caroline Levine, Rebecca Walkowitz, and Tomislav Longinovic for introducing me to some of the foundational texts in the book and teaching me how to read them and make them my own. Because the University of Wisconsin was a dramatic target of austerity and union busting during my time there, I’d also like to thank the cohort of friends and graduate students shaped by this extended period of protest, strike, care, conversation, loss, and strategy. It taught me a lot.
Since joining the faculty at Stony Brook University, I have been very fortunate to work with so many supportive friends and colleagues. I want to thank Celia Marshik, the chair of the English Department, for, among other things, nominating me for the SBU Faculty Research Fellowship. This award gifted me time, which is paramount. I am also deeply grateful to Mike Rubenstein for the feedback he provided on my manuscript and for his good humour during this bleak historical moment. Indeed, the entire Environmental Humanities working group at Stony Brook has been an important source of inspiration for me. Ann Kaplan, Jeffrey Santa Ana, Michael Tondre, and Heidi Hutner have all shaped my thinking about the role of the humanities in relation to energy, sexuality, race, migration, and genre. I am also very thankful for Gene Hammond’s support and assistance both on and off the basketball court. Additionally, I’ve had the good fortune to work with so many incredible graduate students who have provided me with insights and material support, including Caity Swanson, Sara Santos, Caitlin Duffy, Nate Doherty, Eleftherios Mastronikolas, Ashley Barry, Greg Clinton, and many more.
I’ve also had the very good fortune, over the past few years, to present selections of my book at The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), The Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA), The Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), and The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). Additionally, a different version of Chap. 4 appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature , Vol. 62:2. pp. 119–144, 2016.
Finally, thank you Mom and Dad, for teaching me how to dream, travel, listen, and think. Thank you for your worldly idealism. Mantissa and I cherish it. Thank you, David and Reta, for your kind-hearted support. While writing this book, I’ve had two kids of my own. Helena, thank you for sneaking me chocolates and bravery, and thank you for being my favourite reading partner. And Finley, thank you for your curiosity, my sunshine. Katy, thank you, love, for all of the inspiration and imagination you’ve infused into this book and into my life. Without your conversation, edits, time, and love, none of it would have been possible.
Contents
1 Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre
From the “Biotech Century” to “Biology Is Technology”
Be More Human and Human Capital Theory
Genres of Futurity
Bibliography
2 Clones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
The Disciplinary Fence
Species of Discipline
The Open Fence
The Service Station
Affect and Climate Change in “England, Late 1990s”
The Litter-ary Fence
Becoming Posthuman Again
Bibliography
3 Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
The Tree of Life: Species, Evolution, and Patents
ChickieNobs: Repugnance and Neoliberal Families
Corporate Domesticity: Animals in Heat
Corporate Domesticity: Reproduction, Maternity, and Escape
Corporate Dom
esticity: Videos, Bodies, and the Domestic Treehouse
Oryx and Genre
Bibliography
4 Toxic Bodies: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
Neoliberalism, Environmental Technologies, and Human Capital
In the Shadow of Human Rights
Tragic Accidents and Human Extras
The Human Element
Ambivalence: Humanism and “Something Different”
Bibliography
5 Cyborgs: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
The Stone Gods: Planet Orbus and Planet Blue
Unlimited Finitude and Cyborg Feminism
Unexceptional Exceptions and Easter Island
The Biopolitics of Evolutionary Time
Bibliography
6 Coda: Genres of Futurity
Genre and Bewilderment
Bibliography
Index
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Magazine covers that evoke Christian imagery to imagine the power of biotechnology, Time magazine (January 11, 1999) and The Economist (June 14, 2007)
Fig. 3.1 The tree of life becoming the tree of man. Plates II, III, and IV from Paolo Mantegazza’s Physiognomy and Expression, (1904: 312–314)
Fig. 4.1 Framing individuality, recognition, and surveillance in Dow Chemical Company ad. Fortune , March 17, 2008: 5–6. Print
Fig. 5.1 Uncanny images of earth from outer space. NASA’s “Blue Marble” from Apollo 17, December 7, 1972
Fig. 6.1 The collapsing fourth wall and Victoria Skillane’s bewilderment in “White Bear,” Black Mirror : Season 2, Episode 2 (2013)
Fig. 6.2 Nudging and performance in White Bear Justice Park. “White Bear,” Black Mirror : Season 2, Episode 2 (2013)
© The Author(s) 2019
J. O. JohnstonPosthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary NovelsPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0_1
1. Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre
Justin Omar Johnston1
(1)Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Justin Omar Johnston
The twenty-first century has been widely hailed as the biotech century by scientists such as Ian Wilmut, E.O. Wilson, and Craig Venter; by historians such as Francis Fukuyama; by journalists in cover stories for Time and The Economist, and by investors speculating on breakthroughs in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, and CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering. Posthuman Capital addresses several distinctive literary figurations of so-called posthuman embodiment—the human clone, the animal-human hybrid, the toxic body, and the digital-human—that have proliferated across a range of internationally acclaimed novels during the biotech century. By probing the potentials and limitations of biotechnology, these novels draw attention to the entanglement of bodies within particular environments, economic networks, and ecological settings. Moving beyond the fear and excitement elicited by new developments in biotechnology, these works not only recall biotechnology’s roots in twentieth-century biopolitics, but they also anticipate still emergent forms of posthuman and transhuman embodiment. While the major novels my book examines (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods) represent a range of contemporary authors with unique literary projects, these novels all locate fleshy bodies as critical meeting places for technology and social subjectivity. Taken together, these works depict a prosthetic society where technological changes in reproduction, labour, mobility, kinship, surveillance, and ecological stability transform traditional humanist institutions.
In other words, the novels I examine all anticipate a pointedly contemporary problem: the sticky merging of flesh and technology combined with our increasing dependence on technologically based networks for the reproduction of social identities. If Michel Foucault diagnosed human individuality as a symptom of disciplinary institutions where architectural enclosures (such as prisons, hospitals, and schools) constructed fixed subject positions, then these contemporary novels figure biotech as a form of mobile discipline on-the-go that expands beyond institutional walls and across diverse, but technologically connected, urban landscapes. In the novels I examine, small mobile technologies (such as cell phones, debit cards, and Viagra pills) become “wet prosthetics” which not only travel intimately alongside bodies, but also link these bodies to dispersed technological networks capable of programming new forms of hybrid subjectivity.
While calling these emerging figures “posthuman” helps us mark an historical shift away from disciplinary humanism and its dominant definitions of modern man, I contend that “posthuman” is ultimately an imperfect and misleading term for describing many of the hybrid bodies that appear in contemporary literature. Rather, in this book, I seek to foreground the role that human capital theory has played in the formulation of neoliberal subjects as “never-human-enough.” I argue that neoliberal rationalities reimagine human belonging as an aspirational category always and structurally just out of reach. Posthuman Capital, therefore, highlights a series of characters who are highly motivated to “be more human,” to quote Reebok’s latest advertising campaign (2015–). In the context of neoliberalism, this directive to become “more human” is a call to appreciate one’s human capital or to upgrade one’s body through various biotechnical self-investments. Critically, however, if one can always become “more human,” then one can never, finally, become human enough or fully human.
Finally, Posthuman Capital not only investigates the prosthetic entanglement of various bodies and technological networks within the novels I examine; it also explores how these novels connect readers to speculative and emerging futures. Rather than emphasizing aesthetic reflection or synthetic integration, these novels offer prosthetic narratives that link together two irreducible and interdependent genres of futurity: the dystopian and the post-apocalyptic. Many contemporary dystopian narratives, I argue, posit new surveillance technologies as an organizing node around which the centripetal forces of political control and social inequality develop. Alternatively, post-apocalyptic narratives often hinge on the fatal inability of institutions and networks to effectively manage the centrifugal threats posed by non-human forces, particularly viruses, toxins, and climates. Drawing on the Greek prefix “pros,” meaning “toward and in addition to,” prosthetic novels orient readers “toward” futures framed as extensions or “additions to” the recognizable present. These works show how fears of apocalyptic disorder become alibis for dystopian control, while also illustrating how this control precipitates planetary and social disasters. By not subsuming one genre to the other, these prosthetic novels reveal and interrupt the mutual dependencies which allow these two genres of futurity to function in tandem like an engine that drives cultural attitudes and expectations about the unwelcome future.
Divided into three sections, this introduction begins by exploring the scientific, political, and legal narratives that have helped frame the twenty-first century as the biotech century, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Although many of these narratives have shifted in response to major developments in bioscience, the story of a biotech future has increasingly located the human figure as standing behind or emerging after biotechnological interventions. Whether it is E.O. Wilson’s vision of a “New Enlightenment” (2015), Ray Kurzweil’s view that being human means transcending biology (2005), or the Pentagon’s assertion that “Biology is Technology” (Jackson 2015), it is clear that western humanism—with all of its many exclusions—has gradually embraced a transhumanist perception of the future, a radically libertarian future predicated on economic competition. For this reason, the second section of the introduction investigates the historical role that human capital theory has played in developing neoliberal definitions of the human as never-human-enough. I argue that the directive to “be more [than] human” sits
comfortably at the intersection of neoliberal and transhumanist models of the human. In the final section of this introduction, I preview how the literary works I discuss in this book engage narratives of a biotech future. While these novels recognize the biotechnological and economic accounts that reimagine human belonging in the twenty-first century, they also reveal and interrupt the linkages between apocalyptic fear and dystopian depression, genres that shape and limit our collective capacity to imagine an alternative, posthuman, or utopian future.
Inherently interdisciplinary, novels, at their best, trace the historical forces that condition their composition and allow these multiple discourses to develop according to their own interactive logic. Whereas scientific experimentation seeks to isolate single elements by controlling for other variables, literary works are much more interested in following the expansive interaction between many variables by understanding the changing composition of formal and historical relationships. In other words, it is not just that literary analysis offers a virtual environment for reflecting on the myriad historical forces that have brought it into being, but it can also play out these forces, redirecting them in new way.
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