Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels
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Moreover, echoing her reading of the pornographic magazines, Kathy’s misinterpretation of the song “Never Let Me Go” both evokes and resists a psychoanalytic analysis of the tape as fetish:I didn’t used to listen properly to the words … And what I’d imagine was a woman who’d been told she couldn’t have babies, who’d really wanted them all her life. Then there’s this sort of miracle and she has a baby … She’s so afraid something will happen, that the baby will be taken away from her. (2005: 70)
One interpretation of Kathy’s misreading might treat the tape and the song as a “stand-in” for a psychological lack or wound. In classical psychoanalytic terms the image of the baby and tape would function, as Freud suggests, as a sort of female phallus, compensatory and full of neurotic suspension. Apart from the facile phallocentrism of such a reading, this Freudian understanding of fetishism also insufferably posits a structural loss at the heart of all desire. For Freud, the fetish is always an imperfect compensation, always less-than the “real” or “original” loss. Indeed, Freud’s understanding of prosthesis is also severely limited by this tragic view of originary loss: “man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times” (1961: 44). No matter how “magnificent,” Freud still sees prostheses as “auxiliary” apparel that has “not grown on to him,” not become a part of him. For Freud, these prostheses “give him much trouble” because they are ill-fitting disguises man has “put on” to hide his underlying wound, which stems from the family drama of a forgotten childhood.
In the context of Never Let Me Go, however, the clones’ fetishistic relation to mass-produced objects cannot be viewed as merely compensatory or negative. Instead, there is an element of positive identification and non-displaced sexuality at work. The ghost of a long-lost phallus need not triangulate the baby and tape, when the phallus itself belongs to an entirely different mode of reproduction. Indeed, the “miracle” of the baby already suggests an alternative source of fecundity. It emerges, like Kathy and the tape, asexually.
Likewise, Tommy’s drawings stand out as a site of minor resistance within an otherwise dystopian plot. Flipping through the pages of Never Let Me Go, the reader will spot, every few pages, a small hieroglyphic drawing of a hybrid creature. These are the robot-animals Tommy began drawing after leaving Hailsham. When he first shows them to Kathy, she is “taken aback by how densely detailed each one was. In fact, it took a moment to see that they were animals at all. The first impression was like one you’d get if you took off a radio set: tiny canals, weaving tendons, miniature screws and wheels were all drawn with obsessive precision” (2005: 187). For Kathy, these pictures appear, at first glance, like the guts of some “densely detailed” technological object, and then, a moment later, they resolve into focus as animal-cyborg bodies. This two-step process is important because it foregrounds the “obsessive precision” with which Tommy designs his image of posthuman life. They are not merely representations of posthuman embodiment; they are diagrams, instructions about where the “wheels” and “screws” must go to build a new litter of kin, a new mode of belonging.
In this way, the miniature drawings take up the multiple meanings of litter and the literary. While they appear every few pages in the novel to pace Kathy’s narration, they also produce small, seemingly pointless interruptions to her story; they litter the textual field of Kathy’s own memories and mark out all that she passes over. Strange, unnerving creatures, Kathy finds them to be “so different than anything the guardians had taught us at Hailsham” (2005: 187). Tommy’s art, after all, was considered worthless at Hailsham’s exchanges. And yet, these figures stir Kathy’s empathic imagination. “For all of their busy, metallic features,” Kathy finds, “there was something sweet, even vulnerable about them” (2005: 188). She begins to wonder “how they’d protect themselves or be able to reach and fetch things” (2005: 188). As she sees herself in these creatures, she is moved. Briefly, she sees herself as part a vulnerable and sweet litter of creatures that need protection, and not merely as an individual struggling to become more human. Kathy is “genuinely drawn to these fantastical creatures,” just as she was attracted to “aisles displaying bright plastic toys” (2005: 188, 157). In moments like these, when Kathy is “drawn to” the drawings, Ishiguro tentatively sketches an alternative community of posthuman belonging. It is a nascent and vulnerable posthumanism that must struggle for power against the dominant dystopian networks of biocapitalism that reconnect us to processes of endless humanization.
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Elliott, Carl. 2014. The Best-Selling, Billion-Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People. https://medium.com/matter/did-big-pharma-test-your-meds-on-homeless-people-a6d8d3fc7dfe. Accessed 25 Aug 2016.
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Footnotes
1For a more detailed investigation of Lowood as a disciplinary form, see the Introduction to Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Levine reads “Lowood School as a thoughtful investigation of how disciplinary forms can unfold in intricate interrelation, their patterning of experience capable of crossing back and forth between fiction and the social world” (2015: 20).
2See Steven Shaviro’s essay “The ‘Bitter Necessity of Debt’: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control” for a similar and sustained articulation of the relationship between postdisciplinary and neoliberal thought (2011).
3Behaviour economists now call this “choice architecture,” which might be productively compared with disciplinary architecture.
4To be clear, biomedical companies usually outsource the recruitment and screening of test subjects to businesses such as Quintiles, CRI Worldwide, and South Coast Clinical Trials, which specialize in rounding up this type of labour.
5While investigating homeless shelters in Philadelphia, Dr Carl Elliott learned that “drug study recruiters often park outside the shelter and approach residents on the sidewalk” (Elliott 2014).
6This also comes across in Ishiguro’s use of initials instead of surnames for the clones (for example, Kathy H.).
© 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_3
3. Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Justin Omar Johnston1
(1)Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Justin Omar Johnston
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2004) opens on a beach soon after the near-extinction of humans from earth, but many large sections of the novel flashback to a dystopian, pre-apocalyptic world dominated by corporate biotechnology and social control. The novel, thus, oscillates between a “last-man” survivalist story—full of lyrical contemplations about hunger, pain, and nature—and a biting political satire focused on economic inequity and ecological degradation. Likewise, its protagonist’s identity is divided between the pre-apocalyptic “Jimmy,” a white middle-class boy from the suburbs, and “Snowman,” the name Jimmy gives himself after the “Great Rearrangement.” This “Great Rearrangement” is not only Snowman’s euphemism for the death of his species, but is also a great melodramatic tear in history, by which Atwood rearranges the novel’s setting and choreographs a rhythmic pattern of flashbacks, juxtapositions, and tonal shifts. Indeed, this rhythmic pattern is already thrumming in the novel’s opening lines: “Snowman wakes before dawn. He lies unmoving, listening to the tide coming in, wave after wave sloshing over the various barricades, wish-wash, wish-wash, the rhythm of a heartbeat” (2004: 3). As the heat from an imminent sunrise looms, Atwood hints that the vulnerable Snowman is not long for this world. Like the rest of his species, he too will melt into the waves that appear to have a vitality or “heartbeat” of their own. The waves, then, are both an image of life’s dissolution and of life’s capacity to traverse the “barricades” of speciation. The wave is extinction. The wave is evolution. Even the “wish-wash” of the wave posits a desire, project, or “wish” that breaks even against the neutrality of a “wash,” death, or evolution.
More importantly, though, the image of the water “sloshing over the various barricades” in this opening passage anticipates the images of walled segregation that pervade the dystopian portions of the novel. Indeed, nearly all the dystopian chapters of Oryx and Crake take place within suburban compounds controlled by biotech corporations. These gated communities have their own private infrastructure, education system, water supply, food production, and police forces, but they are primarily defined by their exclusion of the poor “pleeblanders” who live in the decaying urban centres beyond the compound walls. Ultimately, this apartheid produces a key contradiction that drives the novel’s preoccupation with biocapitalism: on the one hand, contemporary biotechnology relies on the porousness of cellular life and the interoperability of the genetic code to produce novel forms of hybrid life that surpass species boundaries. On the other hand, in order to profit from their creations, these new hybrids must be patented and secured as both species and intellectual property. They must be prevented from undergoing any further promiscuous mixing. Oryx and Crake, therefore, explores how biocapitalism draws on different models of evolution and domesticity to manage the contradiction between the porous cell and the impenetrable compounds.
The Tree of Life: Species, Evolution, and Patents
The image of an evolutionary tree of life portrays how various species ostensibly emerge from an organic process of individuation. The tree locates difference through speciation as branching, and therefore truncated. At one end, life is conceived as an organic whole, part of a unified tree trunk that ties all difference to a single arboreal origin. From this vital core, life expands outwardly into increasingly individuated branches, portraying discreet, non-overlapping differences. Difference, thus, becomes a natural process of bodies individualizing above and against other species. All lines of interconnection between species run distinctly “backwards” and away from the implicit call to individuate through a process of purification and isolation from other species. And so, the tree grows upward, outward, and forward, imparting an image that is at once hierarchical, universal, and teleological.
Alongside Darwin’s more rudimentary drawings, the German biologist and writer Ernst Haeckel illustrated many evolutionary trees and popularized the image throughout Europe during the late nineteenth century. In addition to purportedly coining the term “ecology,” Haeckel is known for his social Darwinist views and his claim that “politics is applied biology.” Indeed, reflecting on Haeckel’s historical influence, Stephen Jay Gould concludes that “[Haeckel’s] belief that harsh, inexorable laws of evolution ruled human civilization and nature alike, confer[red] upon favored races the right to dominate others … [and] contributed to the rise of Nazism” (1985: 77–78). The arboreal shape of Haeckel’s racism is clearly visible in his discussion of Homo mediterraneus, for example, where he imagines a “Caucasian branch” positioned above or “at the head of all races of men” (1887: 321). This branch, according to Haeckel, has “attained a degree of civilization that … seems to raise man above the rest of nature,” suggesting, at once, that European man, or Homo mediterraneus, is both an ideal extension of, and escape from, evolutionary processes (1887: 321).
Of course, Haeckel’s naturalization of white supremacy via an arboreal model of evolution was all too common during this period of European imperialism; it was a crucial ideological component of the so-called civilizing mission. From Robert Knox’s Races of Men (1850) to Count Gobineau’s notorious Essay on the Inequality of the Races (1855) to Paolo Mantegazza’s Physiognomy and Expression (1887), scientific racism in nineteenth-century Europe became, as Robert Young puts it, “the fundamental determinant of human culture and history” (1995: 88). And the arboreal symbol of evolutionary time became the key secular image for making “global history consum[able]—at a glance—in a single spectacle from the point of privileged invisibility” (McClintock 1995: 37). Indeed, as Anne McClintock argues, the evolutionary tree functioned as the “visual paradigm” to “display evolutionary progress” and “mediate between nature and culture” (1995: 37) (Fig. 3.1).
Fig. 3.1The tree of life becoming the tree of man. Plates II, III, and IV from Paolo Mantegazza’s Physiognomy and Expression, (1904: 312–314)
Only too conveniently the evolutionary tree of life functioned as a template for mapping a “tree of man” or “family of man,” a way of camouflaging the violence of colonization behind the supposed
organic will of nature. Following the branching logic of the tree, speciation implies a general principle of competitive selection that has been strategically redeployed for the biopolitical organization of all “human” difference according to race, sex, class, sexuality, and ability. In this way, the arboreal model locks up difference, drains it of its power, and depoliticizes it by rooting inequality in a more-than-human natural history.