The Service Station
For most of the clones’ working lives they are employed as “carers,” tasked with soothing the emotional distress experienced by older clones who have begun the organ “donation” process. Carer clones thus perform a kind of affective labour that is often associated with post-industrial service jobs. Not quite a career, carers spend most of their days and nights on the road, daydreaming, driving from clinic to clinic, pacifying donor anxieties, until, without warning, carers are themselves called on to donate. Despite Kathy’s insistence that “carers aren’t machines,” Ishiguro characterizes them as cyborg-like figures who are attached their cars, car-ers, so to speak (Ishiguro 2005: 4). As a carer “you’re always in a rush … you spend hour after hour, on your own, driving across the country, centre to centre, hospital to hospital, sleeping in overnights” (2005: 207). Although Kathy travels between and beyond institutional boundaries, this mobility does not provide her with more freedom. Instead, mobility functions as a coercive force that keeps her circulating within a network that excavates bodies to extract their vitality. Once again, Ishiguro uses the images of mobility to diagram the biopolitical distribution of vitality (or fuel) in a post-industrial or networked setting.
Moreover, the network of motorways that connect clinics and hospitals are neither empty nor free; they are saturated with micro-institutions of prosthetic power to go. Lined with drug stores, fast-food franchises, coffee shops, and gas pumps, these motorways offer convenient forms of consumption that speed Kathy’s resumption to work. Much like the clinics and hospitals, the service stations in Never Let Me Go are sites of bodily reanimation and anesthetized thought. Repeatedly, Kathy recounts “having coffee in a service station, staring at the motorway through the big windows” (2005: 116); “more and more these days … drinking [her] coffee in front of a huge window in a motorway service station (2005: 45); and “go[ing] over it … while sitting at quiet tables in service-station cafés” (2005: 252). At these stations, Kathy encounters a potent mixture of caffeine and gasoline that protracts the horizon of travel and induces internal states of transfixed contemplation. Together, the car and the carer metabolize chemical transfusions that transform them, respectively, from the inside out.
Furthermore, Ishiguro accentuates such biochemical interactions to capture and frame the metamorphic consequences of carers’ mobility. Unlike fixed and docile disciplinary subjects, carers resemble addicts fuelled and exhausted by their biochemical drives. When “walking along the windswept car park of the service station” Kathy spots “Laura, sitting behind the wheel of one of the parked cars, looking vacantly towards the motorway” (2005: 208). This is a moment of recognition in a drive-through landscape. But Laura, like Kathy, doesn’t appreciate being “bumped out of [her] daydream” (2005: 209). Carers, after all, are “too exhausted to have a proper conversation … the long hours, the traveling, the broken sleep have all crept into [their] being and become part of [them], so everyone can see it in [their] posture, [their] gaze the way [they] move and talk” (2005: 207–208). Unlike the students at Hailsham who are subjected to disciplinary power through focused external attention, these bodies are broken open and “crept into” from the inside out. Indeed, as Kathy notes, carers experience a metamorphic transformation that “become[s] part of you” from the inside out (2005: 208). In a manifesto on post-disciplinary power, Paul B. Preciado describes these new subjects as “pornographic subjects … defined by the substance (or substances) that dominate their metabolism” (2008: 108). But where Preciado focuses on designed bodies (“silicon subjects”), the clones’ bodies are the substance for the redesign of other bodies. In a folding over of the prosthetic logic, the clones are not only infused with the substances of a “pornographic” life, but they are also interpenetrated to become the pornographic substance itself, the substance to be metabolized.
Affect and Climate Change in “England, Late 1990s”
The relationship between the clones’ increased mobility and their exhausting work as carers effectively outlines the novel’s biopolitics: life-enhancing networks of mobility enable prosthetic connections that distribute vitality in multiple ways—including the redistribution of vitality according to a hierarchical understanding of humans as human capital. The clones in Never Let Me Go, therefore, represent a posthuman figure that is essentially human, minus the promise of universal equality symbolized by a human soul. In this way, Ishiguro’s clones mirror the dystopian emergence of posthuman existence within a political system that sees human belonging through the lens of economic competition. If one can always be more human, one is never fully human.
But just as the dystopian biopolitics of the novel take recognizable shape, the novel’s first-person perspective deliberately limits readers’ apprehension of the organ donation program. For example, while readers might reasonably assume that carer clones are monitored as they travel across England, Kathy never refers directly to any tracking systems. Indeed, rather than a stereotypical depiction of a surveillance society, replete with CCTV cameras and data centres, Ishiguro instead adopts “the climate” as a metaphor for imagining the medium through which political power is expressed in England, late 1990s. For example, take Miss Emily’s anticlimactic explanation about how Hailsham failed:That awful television series, for instance. All these things contributed, contributed to the turning of the tide … So long as the climate was in our favor, so long as a corporation or a politician could see the benefit in supporting us, then we were able to keep afloat … after the climate changed, we had no chance. (Ishiguro 2005: 264, emphasis added)
She continues later:There was a certain climate and now it’s gone. You have to accept that sometimes that’s how things happen in this world. People’s opinions, their feelings, they go one way, then the other. It just so happens you grew up during a certain point in the process. (2005: 266, emphasis added)
Miss Emily’s repeated references to the “climate” and “tide” of popular opinion unnervingly cloud the history of Hailsham’s demise. Even concrete events like the airing of a particular television show are glossed over as “contributing” factors in a more diffuse and unpredictable fluctuation of social attitudes. However, Miss Emily’s description of the zigzagging affects that “go one way, then the other” clash with her more programmatic claim that the clones “grew up during a certain point in the [historical] process.” Interestingly, this description of the political climate echoes a familiar dilemma faced by climatologists: the perilous and uniform trajectory of planetary warming is not (yet) clearly reflected in public opinion, which shows a relatively disorganized picture of affective responses. That is, while “the process” of warming proceeds in a frighteningly “certain” direction, individual efforts to stay “afloat” by making the “climate [work] in [their] favor” still represent the dominant entrepreneurial or opportunistic posture. Indeed, Miss Emily explains that efforts to keep Hailsham afloat depended entirely on lobbying individual “politicians” and “corporations,” who would offer “support” to Hailsham in exchange for “benefits” of some kind. In other words, Hailsham’s enterprise relied on wealthy sponsors to uphold its Enlightenment vision of human equality, further indebting itself to an entrepreneurial vision of human inequality and precariousness.
Following Miss Emily’s advice to “try and see it historically” (2005: 262), it matters that Never Let Me Go is set in “England, late 1990s,” about twelve to fifteen years after Kathy graduates from the soon-to-be bankrupt Hailsham (2005: 2). Therefore, the “climate change” that precipitates Hailsham’s demise occurs in England, mid-1980s. This period in the UK is often framed by Margaret Thatcher’s term as prime minister and her sweeping implementation of neoliberal policies, including the privatization of key public utilities (oil, water, ports, telecom) and the attempted reduction of welfare programs (housing, unemployment, education, health). The ethos of the so-called Thatcher revolution is captured in her signature contention that “there is no such thing as
society … only individual men and women” (Margaret Thatcher Foundation 1987). Thatcher’s assertion of neoliberal dogma foreclosed collective belonging or collective action unless it emerged as the momentary expression of self-interestedness. Indeed, Miss Emily reflects on the historical subordination of social welfare to individual interests when she explains that most people’s “overwhelming concern was with their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends,” and they “did their best to not think about you” (2005: 265).
By 1991, after more than a decade of neoliberal policy in the UK and elsewhere, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze observed that western capitalist countries were experiencing a “generalized crisis in relation to all environments of enclosure,” which, according to Deleuze, meant that disciplinary institutions (like Hailsham) were being displaced by new forms of biopolitical management. For Deleuze, advances in computing, biotech, marketing, and finance were “replacing disciplinary societies” with more flexible forms of data-surveillance and control (1997: 4). While Deleuze notes a transition from industrial factories to post-industrial corporations, he never directly connects his sketch of post-disciplinary power to the political economy of neoliberalism. Nevertheless, neoliberalism’s attacks on the welfare state clearly intersect with a profound mutation in disciplinary power and subject formation. Ishiguro, for his part, does link Hailsham’s failure as a disciplinary institution with the Thatcherite fantasy of individuals exiting the confines of civil society, thus mapping a powerful, if unsurprising, coincidence between post-disciplinary and neoliberal thought.2
Drawing on environmental imagery, Michel Foucault also intimates in his lectures that neoliberalism participates in an alteration of disciplinary power. If neoliberalism “considers everyone as a player” in an open field of competition, then biopolitical power is exercised by “intervening on [the] environment in which [the player] is able to play” (2008: 261). Not unlike Miss Emily’s description of “the climate,” Foucault coins the term “environmental technology” to conceptualize how managers of biocapital modulate (especially through debt and nudges) the incentives and cost-benefit structures that shape individuals’ supposedly free decisions3. Although Foucault died before developing his concept further, “environmental technology” remains a provocative term for describing a style of power that is, at once, post-disciplinary and neoliberal. The term richly implies that subjects (or “players”) inhabit networked spaces (the economy) where the feelings informing individual’s choices can be modulated by the availability of cheap credit, for example, or the algorithmic pattern of one’s social media feed. In this way, people’s attitudes become increasingly attuned to the appreciation or depreciation of their human capital or the economic meaning and social risk of every small decision. Therefore, Miss Emily’s evocation of a sudden shift in “people’s opinions, their feelings” not only alludes to the neoliberal transformation of England’s economy during the 1980s, but it also refers to Hailsham’s demise as a welfare program, and subjects’ increased exposure to network signals that reflect human capital or economic value. In other words, by setting the novel in the recent past, Ishiguro effectively uses his clones to explore the biopolitical transformation of human subjectivity emerging from the post-industrial period.
The Litter-ary Fence
The last quarter of Never Let Me Go is brimming with images of trash as the clones begin to reimagine their bodies as tossed off packaging, containing perhaps three or four consumable organs. Indeed, the novel ends with a lengthy meditation on litter and life, as Kathy encounters the novel’s final, litter-ary fence:I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things breaking the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on a sea-shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles before finally coming up against … these two lines of wire. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyes and imaged this was the spot where everything I’d ever lost since my childhood had washed up … and if I waited long enough, a tiny figure would appear on the horizon across the field, and gradually get larger until I’d see it was Tommy … The fantasy never got beyond that—I didn’t let it—and though the tears rolled down my face, I wasn’t sobbing or out of control. I just waited a bit, then turned back to the car, to drive off to wherever it was I was supposed to be. (Ishiguro 2005: 288)
This third fence—after the fence around Hailsham and the dilapidated fence in the marsh—marks a new limit inscribed by the novel’s crushing neohumanist turn. Unlike previous fences, this fence does not inscribe an interior space nor does it melt away into the environment; instead it stands steadily and arbitrarily on a totally smooth and flattened plane. The two wires function as a net to snag fleshy trash that flies too speedily across the biopolitical boundary of life and death. Here the posthuman body emerges as the posthumous body, an abject composite of mobile materiality. Even Kathy’s repressed grief is emptied out in the last sentence as she leaves to “wherever it was I was supposed to be,” imbuing the materiality of life, the it-ness of her I-ness, with a tremendous sadness (2005: 288, emphasis added). The carer, Kathy, turns “back to the car,” and the novel ends with a nameless call that supposes her to be somewhere else, to keep moving, driving, working, and waiting for the moment when she’ll be “caught and tangled” by this final biopolitical fence, this filter.
Disagreements about how to interpret the end of Ishiguro’s novel have centred on the clones’ apparently stoic acceptance of their social status. As Keith McDonald points out, “some readers … will undoubtedly find heroism in [Kathy’s] ability to recount her experiences in a world that goes so far as to disenfranchise her from the human mass, where she is reduced to a cog in a bioconsumerist culture” (2007: 81). Ishiguro himself seems to endorse something like this tragic-heroism in an interview with Michael Silverblatt:Even if the answer is a bad one, it might be better to ask certain questions … [to] think carefully about who you are…and maybe you get a sense of dignity from answering these questions … They [Tommy and Kathy] do ask these questions that the rest of the clones don’t ask … they find out a little bit more than everybody else and it doesn’t get them any further in any practical terms … except they have this knowledge…they at least they found out a little bit about who they were … Maybe that’s of some intrinsic value for human beings. (Silverblatt 2005)
According to Ishiguro, then, even as Kathy comes to recognize the utter materiality of her life, she supposedly transcends this truth and becomes “a little bit more” human through the “intrinsic value” of that very recognition. Or as Earl Ingersoll puts it, the clones seem “intent on serving with distinction … because they believed that if death is inevitable they could certify the value of their lives by dying with dignity and thereby demonstrating their superiority to other animals” (2007: 53). Yet such tragic-heroic humanism, however moving, is complicit with the justification used for killing clones: even though the clones do “a little bit more” to “certify” their human belonging, they can never become human enough for those whose humanness (human capital) depends on “demonstrating their superiority” to clones. Interestingly, in this reading, it is only through the passive acceptance of their own slaughter that the clones finally produce the properly “dignified” poetics of human suffering. Giorgio Agamben, in his book The Open, calls this form of negative-humanism the “anthropological machine.” The anthropological machine “defines the human not through any nota characteristica [or positive characteristic], but rather through his self-knowledge [so that] … man is the being which recognizes itself as such, that man is the animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (2003: 26). Howe
ver, because humans lack any defining characteristic, the so-called self-recognition that marks human superiority is entirely devoid of content. It is based, first of all, on the recognition of one’s animality; this recognition, in turn, predicates a tragic and self-congratulatory assertion of one’s human superiority because at least humans can recognize they’re animals. One reading of Never Let Me Go, therefore, treats the novel as an anthropological machine: a document that certifies the aesthetic quality of the clones’ self-conscious suffering, while neglecting the novel’s historical and structural critique of various humanisms.
However, because the anthropological machine is driven by specious reasoning, I contend that a biopolitical and historical analysis of human belonging remains absolutely critical to a reading of Never Let Me Go, particularly because the novel is so focused on the education and working lives of human clones in the late 1990s. The figure of the clone is important here because it is generic, open, derivative, and in need of being filled-in or substituted. Like the orphan-figure, clones contain an easily activated search engine to seek their “origins” or the “original” humans from whom they were cloned. Where these origins are foreclosed (and they always are), this engine becomes paranoid, exciting multiple clues and proliferating analogical possibilities. The analogical clone, then, has a sticky body image—linking, as it were, the analogical and the anatomical. In the novel, human-clone encounters are scanned for possible matches. And since Ishiguro’s clones are situated in the recognizable social field of “England, late 1990s,” these analogical referents come into sharp and fragmented focus as bits of overlapping social code. Indeed, the clones in Never Let Me Go refer to their suspected originals as “possibles,” highlighting a field of multiple, partial identifications.
Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels Page 8