This dark terrain, uneven and barricaded, is difficult to traverse. Unlike the smooth surface and mechanical speeds of the motorway, the “impenetrable thicket” is “soft” with mud that sticks to their feet as they climb over the fence into a cow field. “The wind here was really powerful, and just pulled at me so hard, I had to reach for the fence post” (2005: 274). If, from the outside, the fence poses an obstacle, from the inside it becomes a crutch to hold Kathy upright. Indeed, from every angle the fence works to situate and describe their bodies. In relation to the fence and the manure-rich territory the fence inscribes, Kathy and Tommy’s bodies become increasingly encumbered: “I tried to run after him, but the mud sucked my feet down. The mud was impeding him too.” As Tommy shouted, he was “flinging his fists and kicking out … [and] … when he kicked out, he slipped and fell out of view into the darkness” (2005: 274). There is a comic physicality to this scene, two bodies clutching and falling under the moonlight, mired in cow shit. Notably, the fence here proscribes an animal space that is also experienced as a sort of over-embodiment. The material body is heavy with all that actually sticks to it, all the dark matter that breaches boundaries between species, gets under fingernails or into stomachs via hamburgers served up at “super cafés” along the motorway. These cows are ghostly figures who, like the clones, scream and shit until their bodies are milked, slaughtered, and reprocessed for the pit-stop eatery or the local hospital. This fence, therefore, assembles a conjunction between the clones’ bodies in the health care system, the cows’ bodies in an industrial food system, and the dark, sticky aesthetic of abject materiality that cloaks both systems in darkness.
Eventually Kathy manages to grab hold of Tommy; he stops screaming, and they embrace for a moment. Along with their emotional attachment, there is a substrate of manure that also, literally, attaches them, not only to each other, but also to the uncanny symbiosis of a cow’s four stomachs filled with billions of microorganisms. As if to sever the frightening over-attachment of the “soft mud,” Kathy teases Tommy, “you stink of cow poo,” clearly marking that it is “you” (not me, not we) who “stink” like a ruminant animal, like shit (2005: 274). Tellingly, Kathy’s friendly jab mirrors the rejection of the clones as soulless, animal life, even though human clones are, by definition, positively the same as humans. They pose a difference that is not one, as Luce Irigaray might put it.
This scene in the cow field illustrates one of the novel’s overarching contradictions: although the clones’ organs are surgically implanted into other human bodies—ostensibly suggesting an acceptance of bodily hybridity—the clones are nevertheless sidelined by a political system reserved exclusively for more-human, less-stinky, persons. Despite presenting readers with ever more sites of material attachment, Never Let Me Go dramatizes the violent disavowal of these embedded attachments. Even as the “big glittering motorways” and brightly lit super cafés promise new speeds of mobility and exchange, they also cast dark shadows over the less-than-human backroads that fuel this promise. In this way, Ishiguro uses the clone, especially the narrator, Kathy, to portray a form of neohumanist subjectivity: instead of recognizing and rebelling against their treatment as abject livestock, the clones entertain aspirational fantasies about becoming more human through cultural recognition of their creativity and hard work. This aspiration mirrors the failed attempt by teachers at Hailsham boarding school to use their clone-students’ artwork as evidence of their humanity, or, rather, to show the clones’ capacity to become more human. Ultimately, the fantasy of becoming more human not only perpetuates and conceals the structural exclusion of targeted populations, but also fuels entrepreneurial dreams and a specifically neoliberal brand of humanism built upon the unequal distribution and accumulation of human capital.
Posthumanism and posthumanist philosophy are often predicated on the supposed historical decline of modern humanism. For example, in her book The Posthuman, Rosi Braidotti argues that “the posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism” (2013: 37). Likewise, Cary Wolfe, in What Is Posthumanism? claims that “posthumanism names … a new mode of thought that comes after the cultural repressions and fantasies … of humanism as a historically specific phenomenon” (2010: xvi). However, the posthuman bodies that appear in Never Let Me Go are not merely positioned “after the cultural repressions and fantasies” of a hegemonic humanism. Indeed, after the “students” leave Hailsham—a liberal arts institution on the verge of bankruptcy—they are channelled into a sprawling network of biomedical facilities that regard them as a less-than-human source of surplus organs for more-human patients. In this way, Never Let Me Go does not simply trace a transition from humanist institutions to posthuman assemblages; more troublingly, the novel details the reactionary alignment of two models of humanism (liberal and neoliberal), two architectures of power (disciplinary and prosthetic), and two genres of storytelling (bildungsroman and dystopia).
Put differently, my reading of Never Let Me Go engages a body of literary criticism that focuses on the novel’s political economy. In agreement with Bruce Robbins’ often-cited essay “Cruelty Is Bad: Banality and Proximity in Never Let Me Go,” I interpret the Hailsham sections of the novel as “an attempt to hold up and examine … a welfare-state vision of [human] life: a vision centered on that bittersweet compromise between social justice and the injustice enforced by capitalist competition” (2007: 295). However, although I agree that a “bittersweet compromise” characterizes Hailsham’s efforts to balance “social justice” and “injustice,” my interpretation of the novel foregrounds Hailsham’s bankruptcy and the historical erosion of welfare programs in the neoliberal era. On this issue, I agree with Sarah Brouillette, “contra Robbins, … the novel’s unseen government is more akin to the neoliberal state” (2014: 204). Or rather, I interpret Never Let Me Go as an allegorical exploration of the historical transition between these two political-economic systems, paying special attention to the shifting attitudes about human belonging that emerged during this period. In this way, as in Jane Elliott’s “Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain,” I am compelled by Never Let Me Go’s deliberate positioning “as a counterfactual history of the period from the 1970s through the 1990s” (2013: 95). Unlike Elliott, however, I do not see this historical framing as “less an allegory for the present than a distraction from it” (2013: 95). On the contrary, the novel’s historical frame, I contend, occasions an allegorical reading that not only captures the recent past but also anticipates a still emerging future.
To narrate this shift in the historical construction of human belonging, Ishiguro returns again and again to the fence as a motif for biopolitical power. While the fence around the cow field organizes a set of key conjunctions within the novel, it is neither the first nor the final fence to arrange bodily subjectivities in Never Let Me Go. As a boundary, enclosure, path, or filter, the fence becomes an image for diagramming spatial arrangements that dictate who moves where (inside or outside) and epistemological categories (what counts for what). These fences figure organizational powers that can distribute, care, protect, jail, and guide bodies according to different regimes of knowledge. Additionally, these fences function as signposts that ground the novel in the thematic territories it seeks to traverse. At each fence the reader confronts the liminal edge of the novel’s structure. These are fences to climb on, peer over, and sometimes cut. The fence motif invites comparative analysis: it is always a similar fence, but always a different fence. By emphasizing the contextual differences between fences, I foreground the changing significance of the clones’ bodies as they move from their childhood boarding school to their post-adolescent lives as “carers” and “donors” within the diffuse health care system. This change in setting, I argue, allows readers to recognize the emergence of a neohumanist subjectivity that becomes visible in the novel’s transition from disciplinary institutions to networks of prosthetic control.
The
Disciplinary Fence
The Hailsham school in Never Let Me Go recalls nineteenth-century literary representations of English boarding schools, orphanages, and governesses1—Lowood in Jane Eyre, the workhouse in Oliver Twist, the Bly manor in Turn of the Screw, or the girl’s institute in Villette, to name only a few. After all, Hailsham is a gloomy institution located in the remote English countryside; it rears parentless students and is run by an all-female staff of unmarried, ambivalent “guardians.” Indeed, in a nod to these works, Ishiguro’s narrator, Kathy, informs Miss Emily that she’s chosen “Victorian Novels” as the topic for her postgraduation essay assignment. And while Miss Emily gives Kathy one of her perplexed “searching stares,” it is entirely understandable why Bronte, Eliot, and Dickens’ preoccupation with orphans and disciplinary institutions would “absorb [Kathy] properly for … up to two years” (Ishiguro 2005: 113). Indeed, like the orphans in many Victorian bildungsromans, the clones in Never Let Me Go dream of overcoming their abject status by discovering their true parents (“models”) and positions within civil society. But in Never Let Me Go, this inheritance is foreclosed. Unlike many nineteenth-century bildungsromans, wherein a student-orphan eventually becomes a property-owing adult with a surname, Ishiguro gives us a twenty-first-century dystopian bildungsroman. As the student-clones mature, they exhibit all the ambition and suffering of the human condition; however, in a world where one can always become more human, the characters can never become human enough to gain recognition as fully-human humans.
Like many bildungsromans, Never Let Me Go foregrounds its protagonist’s time at school, the stage of life where one supposedly encounters an institutionalized expression of society’s expectations. Michel Foucault argues that beginning in the nineteenth century, schools (along with factories, hospitals, and prisons) became disciplinary institutions; they transformed students into recognizable and productive individuals by training them to internalize various social norms. For Foucault, “there are two images … of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution [and] … at the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism” (1995: 209). The discipline-blockade refers to an architecture of enclosure that makes masses of people visible as individuals through the dispersal of their bodies within a partitioned space. This blockade begins, therefore, with the “specification of a place heterogeneous to all others and closed in upon itself,” an institutional wall that can be further divided to define internal spaces (1995: 141). In contrast, the “discipline-mechanism,” for Foucault, captures the social and psychological effects of living amid multiple disciplinary institutions. When the school, factory, hospital, military and prison all judge “individuals” by “assessing their acts with precision,” then the disciplinary practices of ritualized surveillance and classification become embedded in the skeletons, muscles, and language of workers, students, soldiers, and patients. In other words, the “discipline-mechanism” is a “society of discipline” that emerges when the subject “inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles [as the omnipotent judge and the exposed inmate]; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (1995: 202–203). Ishiguro’s anachronistic depiction of Hailsham as an orphanage and/or boarding school captures both the architectural and subjectifying elements of a disciplinary institution.
Although already isolated in a remote countryside, Hailsham’s territory is enclosed by a fence, a perimeter that maps the students’ emotional and intellectual boundaries. The “horror stories” that circulate between students about the fence are illustrative of a discipline-blockade’s multivalent powers (Ishiguro 2005: 50). One boy, who had “run off beyond the Hailsham boundaries,” was found “two days later … tied to a tree with [his] hands and feet chopped off,” while a young girl who “climbed over a fence just to see what it was like outside … wasn’t allowed” to reenter (2005: 50). The lesson here is clear: the fence protects your bodily integrity and ensures the recognition of your individuality. Only within this disciplinary space can your body and identity remain safely intact. And the rumour, of course, is truer than the students understand; when the students eventually leave Hailsham, they will, indeed, become anonymous clones and their bodies will be chopped up. So like an enveloping mirror, the fence reflects and protects the body image of all those interred.
Furthermore, the custodial power of the school’s boundary helps organizes the students in relation to forms of classificatory knowledge. When the fence surfaces again during a literature lesson, it is clear that this physical enclosure also produces representational dichotomies:We’d been looking at some poetry, but had somehow drifted onto talking about soldiers in World War Two being kept in prison camps. One boy asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified … [then] Laura… did a hysterical impersonation of someone reaching out and getting electrified. For a moment things got riotous, with everyone shouting and mimicking touching electric fences. (2005: 78)
Here the students enact a relationship with imprisoned soldiers without really knowing or reflecting on Hailsham as a kind of encampment. They seem to know or express what is yet unthinkable to them. Laura, for example, manifests the students’ intensive knowledge of bodies at the threshold of suicide or riotous rebellion. The voltaic power of these imprisoned bodies can be felt, if not represented, across the institutional field.
Significantly, however, their teacher and guardian, Miss Lucy, is troubled by her students’ reaction, and softly says, “it’s just as well the fences at Hailsham aren’t electrified. You get terrible accidents sometimes” (2005: 78). By virtue of the classroom’s structural design, Miss Lucy can see the “whole class in front of her”—she can classify, analogize, and represent what is, at a phenomenological level, unknowable to her. Namely, she can think the political analogy between the prison camp and Hailsham. From her position in this disciplinary architecture, peering above and beyond the fence, the students’ relation to the outside world is visible; Hailsham’s participation in the Organ Donation Programme as a clone-rearing facility is knowable, and its analogical fit to the harshest of disciplinary institutions is representable.
But the perimeter of the Hailsham plot is only one part of the disciplinary-blockade. The enclosure must be multiplied and internalized if it is to produce unique subjectivities. The students’ pent-up energies must be sequestered, normalized, and productively redirected. Therefore, Hailsham’s physical containment inscribes a whole table of epistemological and psychological boundaries. Again and again, Kathy comes up against a representational line or territory that threatens to destabilize her institutional identity. For instance, when the students become curious about where Madame takes their artwork, they immediately sense that “to probe any further … would get us into territory we weren’t ready for” (2005: 37, emphasis added). Similarly, when they wonder why it is strictly prohibited for them to smoke, they still “knew just enough to make [them] wary of that whole territory” (2005: 69, emphasis added). The students sense “how beyond that line, there [is] something harder and darker,” that they “were near territory [they] didn’t want to enter, and the arguments would fizzle out” (2005: 55, 139, emphasis added). Hailsham’s territorial fence reproduces itself by mapping knowledge into representable and unrepresentable spaces. In this way, visibility, movement, knowledge, and identity become powerfully linked within the bounded logic of a disciplinary fence. Just as the younger clones repeated “horror stories” about the fence that kept them from physically escaping, the older clones express paranoia about the dangers outside knowledge might wreck on their identities. At some level, their bodies register what they cannot yet consider—that when they leave Hailsham they will cease being students, and their organs will be harvested.
At Hailsham, the logic of discipline also appears through a series of institutional regulations that survey and partition the student body. Space and time are cordoned and monitored according to sex and age. Among other so
cial effects, this arrangement of bodies limits sexual intercourse between students, even if it is not officially prohibited:We couldn’t visit the boy’s dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially ‘out of bounds’ in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields … because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching … [with] binoculars. (2005: 95)
By locking down various internal spaces, the guardians force the students’ desires into a field of visibility, where there is always an “audience watching.” In turn, this spectre of surveillance produces a form of semi-public sexuality that can be measured against a normative arch. Just as Foucault describes in the “repressive hypothesis,” the students at Hailsham talk about sex profusely, even as the act is indirectly regulated: “If everyone who claimed to be doing it really had been, then that’s all you’d have seen when you walked around Hailsham—couples going at it left, right and centre” (2005: 97). The persistent and normalizing discourse around sex, then, can be understood as the beginning of a disciplinary-mechanism or an instance of disciplinary architecture spreading its reach into the language, practices, and subjectivities of its inmates.
Still, nowhere is the image of a disciplinary subjectivity more evident than in Hailsham’s emphasis on, and standardization of, “creativity” through the Exchange program. That is, “How you were regarded at Hailsham, how much you were liked and respected, had to do with how good you were at ‘creating’” (2005: 16). Artworks of all kinds, “paintings, drawings, pottery” and poetry were collected, evaluated, and exchanged for tokens. “For each thing you put in, you were paid in Exchange Tokens—the guardians decided how many tokens your particular masterpiece merited” (2005: 16). In micro-economies of “awards and debits,” such as this one, there “operates a differentiation that is not one of acts, but of individuals themselves, of their nature, their potentialities, their level or their value” (Focault 1995: 181). The Exchange program gives the guardians a panoptic view over the students so they can envision, all at once, each individual soul as well as the population as a whole. The artwork, which is created under classroom supervision, is then evaluated according to a set of institutional norms that are economically reinforced, and, in due course, the students internalize this standardizing gaze. It becomes the normative and unquestioned backbone of their social interactions. They even learn to police themselves by developing a “keen eye for pricing up anything [they] produced,” so the guardian’s “pricing eye” becomes part of the student’s priced “I” (2005: 38). And because, within this economy, the students “decorate … [and] personalise” their dorm rooms with token artworks, they begin to demand and desire a form of regularity expressed in the name of originality (2005: 38).
Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels Page 6