Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels
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Such descriptions of a postindustrial economy promulgated the impression and promise of economic growth beyond the environmental constraints that had sapped industrialists’ profits during the 1970s (Cooper 2008: 17). Industrial production would continue, but, as Melinda Cooper notes, it would be displaced, “either literally, by moving it offshore, or legally, by fight for deregulation” and de-unionization (2008: 24). Put differently, this new economic order was predicated on strategically shifting attention away from the ecological strains of production and towards speculation about the future. Creative speculators would design and patent intellectual property that could be cheaply manufactured under weakened labour and environmental laws, and financial speculators would help mediate how such inventions were brought to market through licences, short-term labour contracts, and other techniques for outsourcing the capital risks associated with material production. One of many Reagan-era policies that afforded this transition was the 1980 Patent and Trademark Amendments (otherwise known as the Bayh-Dole Act), which allowed and incentivized scientists at publicly funded universities to patent and then license their discoveries to private entities that could attract more investors and arrange for outsourced labour. Indeed, many oil-shocked petrochemical and pharmaceutical giants spawned the biotech industry by investing, licensing, or otherwise “reinvent[ing] themselves—at least prospectively—as purveyors of the new, clean life science technologies” (2008: 22).19 If nothing else, this new image attracted investors looking for ways to escape the environmental and labour costs haunting industrial production.
However, from a narratological point of view, the speculative practices that link the deregulation of financial markets to the rise of biotech also degrade the future as a horizon of historical change. While “industrial production depletes the earth’s reserves of past organic life (carbon-based fossil fuels),” Melinda Cooper observes, “postindustrial bioproduction … [seeks to] depotentialize the future possibilities of life” (2008: 25). Financial speculation, in this regard, diminishes future possibilities because it requires, first and foremost, that those possibilities take the form of property. Derivative securities, hedges, and other forms of financial risk management are designed to stabilize the riotous future and make it a site of recognizable capitalist ownership. In the world of biotech, this means that living beings or their reproductive capacities must be owned (or patented) in advance of their birth. Moreover, speculative investors not only own shares of a life that may not yet exist, but they also consume aspects of that future life in the present through the appreciation of their shares. When that life is finally born, it will already be depleted or half-dead, so to speak. This is already legible in biological patents that permit companies like Monsanto, for example, to genetically (and legally) control the reproduction of their patented soybean seeds. On the one hand, the seed’s reproductive capacity is a source of living labour, which allows Monsanto to clone millions of cheap new seeds. But, on the other hand, this prolific new species can only reproduce with Monsanto’s aid—that is, only within the corporate laboratory and not accidentally out on windy plains. While this example is limited to agri-business, Monsanto justifies its model of reproductive dependence as a tool for managing the future of seven billion hungry humans. Hugh Grant, the CEO of Monsanto, often highlights the problem of feeding “a rapidly growing population that is expected to reach nearly 9.5 billion by 2050” (2011). While he notes that food shortages will require “cooperation between all sectors,” he also claims that “helping farmers feed people is at the heart of what we do at Monsanto” (2011). In other words, Monsanto and their patented seeds are uniquely positioned to control the reproductive capacities of crops that, in turn, are needed to support (or not) the reproductive capacities of humans.
From this perspective, the biotech century represents a future that is both stabilized and constrained by neoliberal speculation. Accordingly, the biotech century supports Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, and Mark Fisher’s observation that it is now “easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This often-cited slogan has elicited various interpretations, in part, because it implies a dynamic relationship between several genres of representation. On the one hand, as Mark Fisher claims, this maxim describes a form of “capitalist realism” that monopolizes the imagination and rejects utopian thinking as naive. Fisher defines capitalist realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (2009: 2). The pervasive sense of no real alternatives is not a particularly inspiring ideology; it does not, for example, call upon its subjects to collectively bring about the end of history. Instead, neoliberalism is already stationed at the end of history. It understands itself as the imperfect, but most realistic and practical destination of historical progress. Although journalists and investors regularly describe the biotech century in revolutionary terms, this is not because it posits an alternative political economy. On the contrary, ostensibly it is revolutionary because it promises to cement the logic of human capital in the very reproduction of life and the distribution of life chances.
Accordingly, capitalist realism is often portrayed in film and literature as a dystopian extension or addition to the present. Such works not only offer cautionary warnings about the trajectory of neoliberalism, but they foreground the speculative mode through which neoliberalism stabilizes and depletes the future. If the capacity of small mobile devices to surveil and nudge bodies through coercive economic networks seems likely to intensify, that is because this future is already posited as the prosthetic extension that neoliberalism requires to stabilize itself. Significantly, the dystopian character of neoliberal speculation has its counterpart in the “easier to imagine” apocalyptic narratives that often figure the “end of the world” as coming from non-human threats, such as viruses, toxins, aliens, and climates. Indeed, the dystopian constraints of neoliberalism justify themselves as bulwarks against the violent chaos of large-scale catastrophes or apocalypse. In other words, these two popular genres of futurity—dystopic and apocalyptic narratives—often work together to hasten each other’s arrival. Disaster narratives about climate change, for example, are not only often co-opted to justify various techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage, albedo modification, and fracking20; these dystopian techno-fixes only intensify the scale and scope of environmental destruction.
In various ways, the novels I examine in this book foreground the centripetal pull that biotechnical and financial networks place on characters and communities attempting to survive in worlds beset by the centrifugal forces of ecological degradation. They are intimately attached to cruel systems of power that promise recognition and belonging but are designed to discount subjects as never human enough. One might describe these figures as posthuman: clones, animal-human hybrids, toxic bodies, cyborgs. However, in What Is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe explains 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). Likewise, Rosi Braidotti, in The Posthuman, claims that “the posthumanist perspective rests on the assumption of the historical decline of Humanism” (2013: 37). While still affirming the invaluable work these critics have done to describe non-anthropocentric forms of agency, I analyse how these novels emphasize the renewed importance of critiquing a specific type of humanism that has not, in fact, declined. Indeed, as I have already noted, a virulent new strain of humanism metastasizes at the ideological core of neoliberalism. Human capital is not only a pivotal concept in the development of neoliberal economic theory. It has also become a representational technique by quantifying the net “human-ness” of subjects’ activities using an algorithmic logic reinforced in the twenty-first century by data mining and mobile surveillance. As such, many of the characters in the novels I analyse are uncomfortably torqued: while their bodies are posthuman, they
still find themselves competing for recognition of their human belonging.
Framed by the recurring image of fences in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Chap. 2 tracks an historical shift from traditionally humanist institutions to “open” networks governed by mobile, prosthetic technologies. I argue that this historical transition has fundamentally altered “what counts as human” in contemporary techno-scientific cultures. Rather than fixing human subjectivities through disciplinary architectures of enclosure, Never Let Me Go traces a movement away from Michel Foucault’s formulation of modern man. As the narrator, Kathy H., and her classmates leave the disciplinary architecture of the boarding school, with its emphasis on human creativity, they discover they’re clones whose internal organs will someday be harvested. Waiting for her “donations” to begin, Kathy works as a “carer,” travelling England’s expressways from clinic to clinic, caring for clones and reflecting on her childhood. This new biomedical network reveals a form of mobile discipline that keeps Kathy and others moving along their pre-programmed paths, often exhausted by the caffeine and gasoline propelling them forward. In this way, the clones not only offer us a new language for understanding biotechnological labour, but they also foreground a slippage between workers’ bodies and the circulation of products under neoliberal regimes of human capital. Kathy’s transition from being a student to becoming an object of prosthetic circulation dramatizes the slower historical trend away from humanist institutions towards a prosthetic society of mobile surveillance and programmable identities. Finally, I highlight how images of “trash” and global warming both interrupt and intensify this historical transition.
In Chap. 3, I interrogate Margaret Atwood’s double vision of biotechnology’s future in Oryx and Crake (2004). Here Atwood’s dystopian vision of corporate biotech stems from a neoliberal ordering of species similar to the organic image of Darwin’s tree of life. Biotech companies employ this arboreal model of upward, outward expansion, and pure individuation to justify patenting new species and to help manage consumers’ bodies. Atwood, however, uses the figure of hybrid-species to radically disrupt the dystopia of what I call “corporate domesticity.” For Atwood, evolution can no longer be read as a process of species divergence, but, instead, must account for prosthetic webs of lateral-gene-transfer and interspecies kinship. Echoing the microbiological work of Lynn Margulis, Atwood posits a symbiogenetic model of evolution that resists the commodification of species. In so doing, however, Atwood posits a post-apocalyptic event that not only complicates her vision of “post-humanism,” but also uncomfortably shuttles between discourses of evolution, revolution, and genocide.
In Chap. 4, I examine Indra Sinha’s fictionalized account of the 1984 toxic chemical spill in Bhopal, India, Animal’s People (2007), to critique Union Carbide and Dow Chemical’s evocation of humanity in a series of ad campaigns, paying special attention to Dow’s massive rebranding effort, “The Human Element” (2006–2012). When toxic chemicals enter the narrator’s body his spine is twisted forward, and he adopts the name “Animal.” Walking on his hands and feet, Animal offers up an often overlooked perspective on non-human relations as he empathically converses with dogs, trees, and others. Not only does Animal refuse to be recognized by western definitions of what constitutes the human, he also helps transform a community of local activists by broadening their coalition to include non-human subjects, a growing collectivity he calls the “people of the apocalypse.” In this chapter, I also link the neoliberal call to “be more human” by acquiring more human capital with nineteenth-century imperialist discourses, which called on colonized subjects to “be more civilized.” Here, I emphasize the cruel optimism that links a neoliberal brand of humanism to the civilizing mission of European imperialism, where colonized others were figured as never-civilized-enough.
In Chap. 5, I analyse Jeanette Winterson’s recursive novel The Stone Gods (2007) in relation to the Anthropocene as an emerging reformulation of humanity as a geological force. Following the relationship between Billie and her “Robo-Sapien” lover, Spike, I trace this couple’s affair as they fall in love, die, and meet again on a different planet, billions of years later. The novel’s recursive narrative structure, I argue, is crystalized by the iconic picture of Earth as seen from outer space, an image that orbits the novel. First captured by Apollo 17 in 1972, Earth’s closed horizon illustrates the concept of “unlimited finitude” or a notion of re-programmability that has informed both contemporary biotechnology and parts of the environmentalist movement. Winterson deploys a spiralling narrative structure to critique both linear, dystopian visions of biotechnological mastery and apocalyptic discourses of extinction. Moreover, I argue, this narrative of repetition and difference invigorates a feminist version of evolutionary change, which emphasizes the radical potential of nature to change and unseat culturally entrenched structures of capitalist patriarchy.
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