Granted, Deleuze’s account of successive epistemological epochs is compressed and overly schematic, but his description of unlimited finitude does underscore the changing structure of knowledge in the biological and computer sciences and the effects this has on conceptions of the human. Indeed, charting a similar history of thought, Giorgio Agamben also argues that “already … with the end of the First World War” and definitively by the end of WWII, “anyone … not in absolutely bad faith” would agree “there are no longer historical tasks that can be taken on by, or even assigned to, men” (2003: 76). For Agamben the “nineteenth-century nation-states’ last great [historical] tasks: nationalism and imperialism” have slowly given way to a still emerging biopolitical task, the task of managing “the very factical existence of peoples” (2003: 76). Significantly, then, in a key passage, Agamben argues:the only task that still seems to retain some seriousness is the assumption of the burden—and the ‘total management’—of biological life, that is, of the very animality of man. Genome, global economy and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seem to take on its physiology as its last, impolitical mandate. (2003: 77)
Both Deleuze and Agamben describe an emerging superhuman subject who is “in charge of” and must “manage” life and labour on a planetary scale. In other words, this superhuman subject is a biopolitical manager or programmer of unlimited finitudes; they have “access to tools” that make them godlike, but they are also “burdened” by a responsibility for the earth’s finitude.
An alternative way to approach these descriptions of the superhuman subject is through the Anthropocene, or the declaration among a growing number of academics that the earth has entered a new geological epoch. Coined by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, the Anthropocene names a significant geochemical change in the earth’s composition starting near the end of the eighteenth century and accelerating after WWII. These two historical markers roughly coincide with the rise of European industrialization and with the onset of post-war consumer culture, which also happen to be key moments in the expansion of capitalism and its growing dependence on fossil fuels for production, transportation, and trade. Examining the earth’s upper crust, its atmosphere, and its oceans, geologists have found increasingly vast settlements of radioactive material from nuclear bomb tests; new layers of plastic and aluminium particles from decomposed consumer goods; new strata of nitrogens and phosphates from agricultural runoff; and new deposits of carbon dioxide from the continued burning of fossil fuels.
This new Age of Man not only points to the overwhelming evidence that human beings have manifestly altered the earth; the Anthropocene also implies that earth is an unlimited finitude. To the extent that the earth’s finite ecological components have been reorganized by human actions, they might also be reorganized in a less destructive manner. With humanity’s newfound awareness of its role as geotechnological force, the superhuman figure of the Anthropocene must henceforth assume biopolitical responsibility for the deadly trade-offs of each new arrangement. But who are the superhuman figures that must redesign life and death in the Anthropocene?
In many ways, the Anthropocene lends itself to a crisis-driven style of management that subordinates questions of structural inequality to the exigencies of immediate action. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, for example, acknowledges that “one could legitimately argue that the [climate] crisis must be met in a way that addresses … uneven responsibility,” but, Chakrabarty explains, if we properly “consider the problem we face, … one does not know when the world will be just. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calendar for global action is short and finite” (2017: 39). That is, the Anthropocene represents a state of emergency that demands our collective existential attention, even if, by necessity, immediate global action must be enacted by the already existing political order. In this sincere and technocratic approach to the Anthropocene, we can hear the echo, some thirty years later, of Stewart Brand’s argument that “we are as gods and might as well get used to it” as soon as possible (1968: 2).
Under the banner of the Anthropocene and the crises it names, though, Brand’s vision of The Whole Earth has been co-opted, in part, by a tiny group of decision-makers who have “access to [the] tools” of geoengineering, fracking permits, oil contracts, Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, carbon capture and storage, albedo modification, and sea-wall construction. Along these lines, Philip Mirowski warns that an alarming number of influential American think tanks have recently embraced geoengineering as the ultimate, profitable, solution to climate change: “The American Enterprise Institute has a full-time geoengineering project, and a number of other neoliberal think tanks, such as Cato, the Hoover Institution, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, have produced studies. Chicago School SuperFreakonomics has come out in hearty open endorsement” (2013: 340). The reasoning of these institutions is legible in Newt Gingrich’s letter to his supporters in 2012: “geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming … Instead of penalizing ordinary Americans, we would have an option to address global warming by rewarding scientific innovation” (Funk 2014: 267). Rather than curtailing carbon emissions, this neoliberal solution privileges the interests of wealthy oil producers and technology companies that will use, hypothetically, solar radiation management (SRM) to cool the earth’s temperature by mimicking volcano clouds. Never mind that computer models predict that a “shield of sulfur” in the Arctic would “create a belt of abnormal precipitations patterns in the poorest parts of the world,” even if it “promised to return preindustrial temperatures and rainfall to most of North America, [and] most of Europe” (Funk 2014: 280).
Tellingly, those humans “in charge” of businesses and/or governments are also increasingly investing in privatized forms infrastructure and insurance, including gated communities with special access to water, energy, police, and education.2 The Anthropocene, therefore, is a story about humanity’s supposed “godlike” powers, but it is being told during a period omnipresent global inequality. As Rob Nixon pointedly asks, “what does it mean that the Anthropocene has gained credence … during a time when, in society after society, we are seeing a widening chasm between the ultrarich and the uberpoor, between resource capture at the top and resource depletion at the bottom?” (2017: 44). The wealthiest nations on earth are most responsible for global warming; they are also the most sheltered from its effects. The image of earth from outer space may present our small planet as an unlimited finitude, but the biopolitical power to program life and labour remains in relatively few hands. Rather than associating the Anthropocene with emerging godlike or superhuman images of heroic humanity, the novelist Jeanette Winterson seeks to develop a much-needed posthuman narrative of the Anthropocene in her novel The Stone Gods.
The Stone Gods: Planet Orbus and Planet Blue
The Stone Gods tells the story of a reoccurring relationship between Billie (Billy) and Spike (Spikkers) as they are reborn during three different eras of ecological crisis, separated by aeons of time. The first third of The Stone Gods takes place sixty-five million years ago on the red planet Orbus where dust storms, global warming, and energy wars threaten human survival; yet, the novel begins with a press conference announcing the discovery of a new more hospitable planet, Planet Blue, otherwise known as earth. Soon after the press conference,the first pictures of Planet Blue … [begin] to appear on the smart-skins of the buildings. It’s as though we are driving straight towards it. There it is, pristine, diamond-cut, and the zooms show miles and miles of empty beauty. Everyone on the highway is watching. It doesn’t matter: magnetic rebuff stops anyone driving into anyone else. We just stay in line and get there someday. (2007: 13)
Like Apollo 17s 1972 photo “Blue Marble,” Winterson’s Planet Blue is a spellbinding source of hope and melancholy for its global audience. The commuters on Orbus imagine earth as a rare and unt
arnished object: “There it is, pristine [and] diamond-cut.” This polished marble is framed by the photograph like a jewel displayed in a storefront window. This “there-it-is” quality of the image not only externalizes the terrestrial environment as something to behold, but it also reveals the opposite, the inescapable, closed horizon of terrestrial life on earth. Indeed, the planet’s shocking finitude makes it seem downright tiny and altogether claustrophobic. But from the uncanny perspective of the camera, the romantic sublimity of the world is replaced with the postmodern cuteness of the planet’s finitude. That is, the world is reduced to the size of a planet. Nevertheless, as the camera zooms-in (a la Google Earth) to examine Planet Blue more closely, “everyone on the highway” is transfixed by its “miles and miles of empty beauty.” There is something expansive and unlimited about this finitude. In contrast to the congested “line” of traffic on the Orbus highway, earth’s vast “emptiness” represents a blank surface of potential mobility and composition. While these “miles and miles of empty beauty” are different from the sublime “everlasting universe of things” that Percy Shelley confronted at “Mount Blanc,” the motorists on Orbus are nevertheless inspired by the possibility of starting over, of movement without “magnetic rebuff.” They fantasize about the technical possibilities like real estate prospectors upon an empty lot.
When the planet becomes a reconfigurable and finite object, the form of human subjectivity is also affected. In disciplinary regimes, the modern or worldly man is both a knowing subject and the knowable object of the human sciences. In the context of unlimited finitude, however, humans are increasingly entangled within technological environments that demand the puzzling together of interdisciplinary information about the planet as a biopolitical system. Given this situation, it is important to guard against both the organicism offered by deep ecology as well as transhumanist fantasies of biotechnological mastery. Deep ecology too easily loses track of human life in the connection of all things within an organic whole. An alternative view of the planet might focus instead on how power (both potestas and potentia) composes different habitats or biopolitical arrangements. This attention to the distribution of political power and energy is also critical for preventing the consolidation of power within a transhumanist planetary assemblage. The transhumanist arrangement is not only dystopian, but it tragically overestimates the sovereignty of humans within a messy environment. Indeed, Winterson’s novel ultimately argues that such attempts to master the totality of earth backfire and bring about extinctions, genocides, or the slow death caused by systematic inequality. To survive this unlimited finitude, Winterson suggests, earthly communities must humbly and creatively attend to the prosthetization of life: the feeding on and feeding off of biopower in the factory called ecology. To function ethically, this machinery must be run by a posthuman collective with shared and differently positioned relationships to the planet.
Without such a posthuman vision of shared governance, Winterson shows how the Anthropocene might become an alibi for determining who counts as human and for deciding who should be rescued from the dying world. Indeed, this is the problem facing the people of Orbus, who believe that their human ingenuity will allow them to escape planetary collapse. During the opening press conference in Stone Gods a reporter asks the narrator, Billie Crusoe (an Enhancement Services spokeswoman), to “tell viewers how the new planet will affect their lives” (2007: 4). Billie responds:The new planet offers us the opportunity to do things differently. We’ve had a lot of brilliant successes here on Orbus—well, we are the success story of the universe, aren’t we? I mean to say, no other planet hosts human life.
The interviewer nods and smiles vigorously.
But we have taken a few wrong turnings. Made a few mistakes. We have limited natural resources at our disposal, and a rising population that is by no means in agreement as to how our world as a whole should share out these remaining resources. Conflict is likely. (2007: 4)
Between Billie’s presentation of earth as an “opportunity to do things differently” and her admission that “we have … made a few mistakes,” Billie anxiously assures the viewing audience that Orbus is the “success story of the universe.” Principally, Orbus’ success lies in being anthropocentrically defined as the only “planet [to] host human life.” That is, Billie praises Orbus for being hospitable to human life only to the extent that the planet is also “at our disposal” or simply disposable. Still, with “limited natural resources” and “a rising population,” Orbus is, in fact, quickly becoming indisposed to human life. At some point Orbus can no longer merely reflect a narcissistic image of human success. When the imaginary gap between culture and nature squeezes tight, touch—rather than sight—becomes an increasingly important node of analysis. Yet the people on Orbus ignore the approaching “conflict” because, in part, they can visualize an escape from their planet. So, they “nod and smile vigorously” at their own extra-terrestrial ingenuity. Unconsciously, however, they doubt their story of superiority: “aren’t we” a “success story”? And who, exactly, will have the “opportunity to do things differently”? Who is indispensable on a disposable planet?
Unlimited Finitude and Cyborg Feminism
Throughout her novel Winterson juxtaposes ecological crises with a critique of the sex-gender system, which she sees as critical to determining who counts as fully human in a patriarchal and capitalist society. In this way, human belonging functions as a biopolitical tool for distributing or withholding life changes across precarious environments. Indeed, following the press conference, Billie is tasked with interviewing two people seeking dispensations from her employer, Enhancement Services. First, Billie must meet with Mary “Pink” McMurphy, “a woman who wants to be genetically reversed to twelve years old to stop her husband running after schoolgirls” (Winterson 2007: 12). Billie’s second interview is with a “Robo Sapien” named Spike who has just returned from a mission on Planet Blue and is scheduled to be killed. As Billie explains, “all information-sensitive robots are dismantled after mission, so that their data cannot be accessed by hostile forces” (2007: 6). Significantly, both Mary’s and Spike’s bodies are products of “‘The DNA Dynasty’ [or] … the first generations of humans” to recode genetic life.
The conditions of thought behind the likes of the DNA Dynasty are taken up by Paul Rabinow in his essay “Artificiality and Enlightenment,” where he points out that genetic technology is “the best example of [the] ‘unlimited-finite’ ” because “an infinity of beings can and has arisen from the four bases out of which DNA is constituted” (1996: 91–92). In other words, Rabinow finds, in agreement with Haraway and Fancious Dagognet, that “nature’s malleability offers an ‘invitation’ to the artificial. Nature is a blind bricoleur, an elementary logic of combinations, yielding an infinity of potential differences” (1996: 108). For Rabinow, “unlimited-finite” invites an interoperable stitching together of nature and technology for the production of “potential differences,” just as for Haraway it produces “joint kinship … and partial identities” (1991: 154). Haraway, however, emphasizes how our shared genetic code reveals kinship structures that surpass species labels. In this sense, Haraway argues that the logic of unlimited finitude draws humans, animals, and machines into a webbed relationship that can only be governed ethically (or even logically) by relinquishing any absolute or sovereign notion of human mastery.
Still, The Stone Gods is not only interested in biotechnology’s underlying kinship relations; it is also deeply concerned with how biotechnology manages to hide these kinship relations in order to reinforce anthropocentric social norms. Billie, for example, becomes increasingly concerned that contemporary biotechnology is making “the future of women … uncertain. We don’t breed in the womb any more, and if we aren’t wanted for sex, …” what then? (2007: 22). In patriarchal societies where women are already defined as either mothers or objects of male desire, the transplantation of the womb’s reproductive power to laboratories might put
more pressure on women as sexualized beings. Rather than revealing a “joint kinship with animals and machines,” this form of biotechnological control marks the “appropriation of women’s bodies” as prosthetic objects of male consumption (Haraway 1991: 154). If motherhood and the cultural expectations of self-sacrifice associated with that role no longer help organize domestic relations because reproduction has become dissociated from sexuality, then, according to Winterson, the existing patriarchal sex/gender system will assert ever more exaggerated forms of heteronormative control.
For example, Winterson gives us Mary “Pink” McMurphy, who wants to reverse her body back into its prepubescent form in a desperate attempt to gain the sexual attention of her philandering husband. “My husband likes girls,” Mary explains, and “I don’t want to lose him” (2007: 17). Yet when Billie asks, “why not?” Mary “seems baffled by the question” (17). Mary’s inability to imagine why she might want a life without her husband derives from both her isolation at home and the saturation of her house with holographic images of sexual objectification. When Billie enters Mary’s home she notes that the “sitting room … is faked out like a teenager’s bedroom, and stuffed with celebrity holograms” (16). Mary explains, “I love celebrit[ies] … but they need dusting. Even holograms attract dust” (16). Of course, these are no ordinary celebrities. Now that everyone living in Orbus’ Tech City is “young and beautiful,” having genetically fixed their ages, celebrities have to “stay ahead of the game” by having “their body parts bio-enhanced … Their boobs swell like beach balls and their dicks go up and down like beach umbrellas” (16). With her husband out at a “pervert’s bar” called “Peccadillo,” Mary is left at home with the ghostly image of beach bodies that she cannot touch (19). Pointing to a hologram, Mary says, “I want to look like … Little Senorita,” who Billie recognizes as “a twelve-year-old pop star [who] has Fixed herself rather than lose her fame” (16). These celebrity phantoms represent a techno-culture of porno-paternalism, where the sexual infantilization of women connects porn sites, pop stars, and the hyper-mediated environments of western domesticity. Mary is made to live inside a holographic world, where she is starved for touch and blinded by a dusty vision of male desire. What Mary wants is for her husband (or anybody) to touch her again: “we don’t have sex anymore. He says I’m too old” (17). Like the ubiquitous televisual experience of contemporary domesticity, Mary’s need for social belonging and affection is only intensified the haunting presence of celebrity figures that fill her with aspiration and insecurity.
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