Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  In this passage, Wilson speculates that the century of biology will eventually give way to the epoch of the humanities, but only after every “civilized culture” and “subculture” has been “pervasively” reorganized by the “immense size” of techno-science. This is a dream of imperial dimensions. While the humanities may “infinitely” “diversify,” they must first be conditioned by a universal sameness—the “same everywhere,” the “same information.” Indeed, what counts as “civilized culture” is here made synonymous with techno-scientific reforms that are supposedly neutral expressions of human rationality, never mind the historical and economic inequalities that make techno-science qualitatively different in the United States (where corporations own millions of techno-scientific patents) and Zimbabwe (where corporations have mined minerals essential to western science since at least 1895 when Cecil Rhodes of the British South African Company named the country Rhodesia, initiated white rule, and justified his actions as “promoting the best interest of humanity”). Wilson names this utopian world order “The New Enlightenment,” framing it as the completion, four centuries later, of Francis Bacon’s “empire of man” (2015: 70). Strangely, then, the humanities serve as both the alibi for and the promise of biotechnological change9.

  Although Wilson rejects “genetically improved intelligence” and other bio-enhancements, he does posit a worldwide unification of technological environments, which he describes as a civilizing process. But because the humanities (history, political science, literature) are initially sidelined in this process—busy telling stories by the fire and waiting for their time to shine—it remains unclear what human life will look like after the “unimaginable complexity” of this techno-scientific system has taken hold. How fully integrated with, or alienated from, this system would humans already be? Could the humanities really keep the “campfire burning” in a world suffocated by networks? Ironically, Wilson’s “New Enlightenment” overlaps with transhumanism, an ideology that enthusiastically embraces biotechnology in the name of enlightenment, evolution, and radical libertarian individuality. Nick Bostrom, a transhumanist philosopher, defines transhumanism as “the intellectual and cultural movement that affirms the possibility and desirability of fundamentally improving the human condition through applied reason,” particularly with bio-enhancements that forestall ageing, improve intelligence, and increase physical capabilities (2003: 4, emphasis added). Likewise, Ray Kurzweil, a popular transhumanist thinker, argues that “being human means being part of a civilization that seeks to extend its boundaries,” thus defining his vision of “transcending biology” as a quintessential humanist enterprise (2005: 374).

  What Wilson and these transhumanists point to is an increasing willingness to see biotechnology less as a threat to the cultural authority of Euro-North American humanism, and more as a tool for re-conceptualizing the human (and human belonging) as an aspirational category that can be approached through (or after) technological advances. Universal human enlightenment will come, but only after techno-science has (once again) colonized and “civilized” the globe. In this vein, it worth noting the Pentagon’s recent massive investment in biotechnological science. In 2015, the US Military’s research wing, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), announced the opening of the Biological Technologies Office (BTO). Under the slogan “Biology is Technology,” the BTO held star-studded TED-talk-like conferences in New York and San Francisco, where they brought scientists and private investors together to hear their pitch: “the technologies we relied on in the 20th century … have passed their apogee. And as we move through the 21st century we’re suddenly facing all of these challenges for which we have no technological solutions. We need a new technology vector. Biology is technology” (Jackson 2015). But if biology is technology, then what is the human? And if the human is also a technology, then what happens to political rights that are supposedly rooted in universal human belonging rather than utility?10 Among other things, this represents the transformation of the human (at the level of ideology) into a target, a goal, a score.11 This is the human always in need of an upgrade: new skills, new capabilities, new ways of competing. This is the human that is always becoming human and is therefore never fully human. This is the human as human capital.

  Be More Human and Human Capital Theory

  Are we weirdos? Can we be obsessive, fanatical, extreme? Ok, maybe just a little. But maybe you have to be crazy to want to spend every day beaten and muddy and sore. And for what? Why do we do it? We’re not out here flipping tires to be better tire flippers. We’re doing it to be better, period. Better leaders. Better parents. Better, stronger, more determined, humans. Capable of anything. To honor our bodies and sharpen our minds. To be more human!—from Reebok’s “Be More Human: Freak Show” commercial (2015).

  In 2013 the marketing firms Hill Holiday and Lippincott teamed up to release a manifesto-like report entitled Welcome to the Human Era wherein the consultancies observed that “trust in traditional institutions has been precipitously eroding” and that humanness is emerging as central feature of brand success: “At the core of the Human Era is the realization that the expectation of meaningful connection—the search for trust—extends to organizations and brands as well as people” (Marshall 2013: 8). In other words, corporations should humanize their brands because consumers are desperate to humanize themselves; the institutions that formerly secured human belonging are crumbling and advertisers can step into this void. The consultancies’ insights are reflected in a wave of contemporary advertisements that centre on the image of humanness. Microsoft’s newest Windows 10 ads, for example, show children playing alongside the tagline “a more human way to do,” a phrase that both recognizes users’ humanness and offers users a technology for becoming even “more human” (2016). Similarly, Chevron promises us “Human Energy” (2009–2013), Cisco asks us to join “The Human Network” (2005–2010), Nike links us to the “Human Chain” (2010), Samsung’s Galaxy S3 is “Designed for Humans” (2012), Apple recites Maya Angelou’s poem the “Human Family” (2016), and Dow Chemical discovers us in “The Human Element” (2006–).

  But of the myriad marketing campaigns that participate in this trend, Reebok’s “Be More Human” (2015–) campaign epitomizes the paradoxical meaning of “human” and humanization evoked by these ads. On the one hand, in Reebok’s ad(vice), to be more human means stripping away the technological prostheses that weigh down consumers’ bodies and psyches, thus revealing a powerful, athletic, and natural human body underneath. In this sense, to be more human is to free oneself from the social and financial networks that dictate the rhythms of the work day and make us less autonomous or less human. But, interestingly, Reebok’s stripped bodies are also drained; they “spend every day beaten and muddy and sore,” pushing themselves past the point of exhaustion (2015). Nevertheless, these gritty bodies continue to perform because they are “obsessive,” “fanatical,” “extreme,” and “determined” to become “better. Period.” Reebok’s depiction of human liberation, therefore, blurs the lines between masochistic self-improvement, continued competition, and the imperative to become “capable of anything.” Echoing Nike’s famous “Just do it” slogan, Reebok asks the existential question, “Why do we do it?” Tellingly, Reebok’s answer to this question returns us to the world of social responsibility and labour. We do it to be “better leaders” and “better parents.” At this point in the television commercial, we see a young man remove his dishwashing apron as he walks out the backdoor of a restaurant into an alleyway where he grabs a bar overhead and begins a set of pull-ups. We see a woman teaching an exercise class and then cut to her at home, playing with her daughter. We see a man sprinting through the forest at night and then cut to him in a firefighter’s uniform, running into a burning house. In this way, being more human is a call to embrace the self-training required to obtain the skills and stamina necessary to compete in the economy. Training to be a better worker is replaced with training to be a bette
r human—an ideological substitution that is central to human capital theory and neoliberalism as a governing rationality.

  By foregrounding the economic meaning of all individual activities (exercising, socializing, reading, eating, or sleeping), human capital theory has increasingly blurred distinctions between consumption and production, life and labour. Even back in 1961, when the concept was first being developed at the Chicago School of Economics, Theodore Schultz observed that “the use of leisure time to improve skills and knowledge is widespread and … much of what we call consumption constitutes investment in human capital” (1961: 1).12 Indeed, human capital theory understands all acts of consumption and leisure as opportunities to grow or invest in one’s human capital, or one’s embodied capability to derive future income, satisfaction, and/or personal security. Self-training, education, and exercise, therefore, can all be understood as investments in one’s human capital. So can parenting: parenting is an investment in the child’s human capital (their ability to earn a future income), but it also provides what Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, calls a “psychic income” for the parents.13 Accordingly, if every activity is potentially intelligible in economic terms, then individuals must assume ever more responsibility for how they invest (rather than spend) their “free-time.” The discipline of market competition—which is different from the localized forms of discipline associated with institutional training—dictates that individuals be more productive (“obsessive,” “fanatical,” “extreme”) if they hope to compete against other human capitals. Furthermore, data surveillance, which produces profiles about individuals and populations via overlapping financial and social networks, has intensified and reinforced the extension of economic logic (and economic fantasy) into the minutia of daily life. This proliferation of data profiles perpetuates the fantasy that yes, indeed, every activity is visible and measurable within an invisible, all-encompassing marketplace.14

  Helpfully, in his paper “Economic Growth and Human Capital,” the economist Jacob Mincer sums up the importance of human capital theory: “the contribution of human capital theory to economics does not lie in a reformulation of economic theory, but in pushing back the boundaries of economics beyond the sphere of market transactions” (1981: 2). After all, Mincer adds, “non-market activities are not necessarily extra-economic” (2). By moving “beyond” the previous “boundaries” of “market transactions” capitalism can now openly mobilize domains of life that were previously excluded from economic productivity, even though many of these extra-economic spheres were formerly considered essential to the conception of human individuals as ends in themselves or rights-bearing citizens.15 “Far from Adam Smith’s creature propelled by the natural urge to ‘truck, barter, and exchange,’ ” Wendy Brown argues, “today’s homo oeconomicus is an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of its endeavors and venues” (2015: 10). Moreover, to “construct and govern” in this manner, people don’t actually have to fully accept that their every activity is wholly reducible to its economic value. Most people still reject such a myopic and perverse transvaluation of their feelings, thoughts, and experiences. But human capital theory only needs to make one’s activities intelligible as economically consequential to interpellate subjects as entrepreneurs in a competitive game that drives workers apart. In other words, human capital promotes a low-level form of economic awareness that seems like “realism” because it precludes class-consciousness by replacing the concept of labour with an anodyne notion of activities, the equivalent of strategic moves within a game-like environment.

  In the fragmentary notes that accompany his lectures on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault offers an apt sketch of neoliberalism as an “environmental technology” or a networked space wherein the players are controlled by “modifying the terms [or rules] of the game” or by modulating incentives (2008: 260). According to Foucault, this game-like environment emerges alongside the “massive withdrawal [of power from the] normative-disciplinary system” whose expensive and standardized routines of institutionalized training produced fixed human subjectivities suitable for industrial labour. Gilles Deleuze, Donna Haraway, Antonio Negri, Paul Preciado, Jasbir Puar, and many others16 have since expanded on Foucault’s incomplete glimpse in 1978 of an emerging post-industrial and post-disciplinary mode of governance. And the supposed “withdrawal” or demise of discipline now appears overstated and oversimplified.17 Nevertheless, Foucault’s premise that neoliberalism constructs technological environments—with the help of states, military, and police—within which player-entrepreneurs compete as if in a game—remains analytically useful. It not only helps us think critically about behavioural economics’ role in “priming,” “prompting,” and “nudging” targeted populations, it anticipates the intersection of human capital theory with finance capitalism and biotechnology.

  In the twenty-first century, the logic of human capital theory has evolved to incorporate the speculative dynamics of financial capitalism. As Michel Feher puts it, “a strategic shift in governance to human capital” has taken place (2009: 27). Unlike earlier versions of human capital theory, which relied on an income to justify and substantiate their economic calculus, the metrics of human capital increasingly mirror financial markets, which are “concerned less with optimizing returns on investment over time than with maximizing the distribution of dividends in the short run. Accordingly, its major preoccupation is capital growth or appreciation rather than income” (2009: 27). Like a stock that fluctuates due to multiple factors, including systemic bubbles and crashes, neoliberal subjects increasingly manage their human capital not only for the income it might (or might not) eventually produce, but also for the attention, confidence, and appreciation it might cultivate (to borrow against) in the never-ending meantime. As Feher explains, “insofar as our condition is that of human capital in a neoliberal environment, our main purpose is not so much to profit from our accumulated potential as to constantly value or appreciate ourselves—or at least prevent our own depreciation” (2009: 27). For instance, the value of computer programming as a skill depends, in part, on the demand for that skill, but it also depends on sentiments and speculation about the future appreciation or depreciation of computer programming. Because the acquisition of skills is increasingly financed through debt, significant portions of any future income are diverted to outside investors. It is, therefore, the appreciation or depreciation of a skill’s perceived future value (and the debt it can finance) that determines the dividends someone might derive from their partial stake in the human capital attached to their body.

  Of course, because our human capital is tied to our embodied life, it is not really a form of capital we can own per se. We cannot sell high, relinquish our stake in our body, and live quietly off the profits. At the same time, as Jasbir Puar points out, “neoliberal regimes of biocapital produce the body as never healthy enough, and thus always in a debilitated state in relation to what one’s bodily capacity is imagined to be” (2009: 167). Additionally, the never healthy enough body is also never “human enough,” particularly since health is a classic metric for human capital. In this context, the transhumanist promise of regenerating one’s bodily capacities with the aid of biotechnology is deeply seductive, especially for the ultra-rich and consumer classes. Transhumanism, therefore, functions as a sci-fi, techno-powered rebranding of neoliberal humanism. Even the transhumanist logo, H+, crystalizes the “be more [than] human” logic of contemporary human capital theory. But transhumanism also promises to cement and securitize social inequality by rehabilitating and enhancing the lives and egos of those who can afford expensive bio-enhancements, beginning, of course, with the lives and egos of the libertarian billionaires who increasingly drive the movement.18 In fact, transhumanists are evidently aware that their approach to biotechnology exacerbates the massive inequality in the wo
rld today. Nick Bostrom, for example, openly admits that the “greatest advantages will go those who have the resources” and that “such advantages … [will] serve to increase social inequalities,” but rest assured, he concludes, enhancements will “become cheaper as time goes by” (2003: 20). Once again, politics is suspended, democracy is displaced, and equality is postponed to a future date. First technology, then humanity, “The New Enlightenment,” the “Singularity.”

  Genres of Futurity

  A decade before predictions of a biotech century took hold, the initial rise of biotech corporations in the early 1980s coincided with the remaking of the rich Euro-North Atlantic economies following the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. Alongside this were increasing scientific concerns about dwindling natural resources—spelt out in the 1972 Club of Rome report’s warnings about unsustainable population growth. Influenced by neoliberal think-tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Heritage Foundation, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan responded to the problem of “stagflation” by promoting higher interest rates, cutting social welfare programmes, privatizing publicly owned land and utilities, deregulating financial markets, increasing military spending, and reimagining the economy as a postindustrial utopia: a shining “city teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity” (Reagan 1989). Significantly, the “humming” vitality of Reagan’s mythical city upon a hill does not emanate from the engines of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industrial production; instead, in this postindustrial metropolis, the “teeming” movement of people and “commerce” through “free ports” represents the “harmonious” cooperation between “creativity” and capital, both of which rely upon speculation.