Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  Indeed, later in life, when Kathy reflects on the socializing power of Hailsham, she can finally see how “the Exchanges had a more subtle effect on us all … being dependent on each other to produce stuff that might become your private treasures—that’s bound to do things to your relationships” (2005: 16). By collecting “private treasures” one constructs a private-self that is also recognized by others (and oneself) as an expression of individuality. Significantly, this individuality is possible only because the students are disciplined to conform; they are “dependent on each other to produce stuff” that the guardians deem worthy of tokens. The “subtle” effect of becoming a recognizable subject through the internalization of cultural norms is also an enduring one. And although Kathy and her mates do finally leave the architectural organization of power at Hailsham, they struggle to reorganize their subjectivities. They have been systematically educated to seek recognition and pursue enfranchisement in humanity through the performance of normative culture. Thrust into a health care system that refigures the value of the human, Kathy “heroically” never lets go of her humanist upbringing, even as humanist institutions let go of her.

  Species of Discipline

  In addition to elaborating its formal features, Foucault argues that discipline is historically joined to the rise of the human sciences and a “genealogy … of the modern soul” (1995: 29). Because disciplinary architecture opens fixed bodies to discourses of “psyche, subjectivity, personality [and] consciousness”—not to mention the libido, masculinity, and femininity—discipline’s real power comes from its ability to measure, name, and judge an internal, unique, and fixed kernel within each individual (1995: 29). In other words, disciplinary power comes from the production of knowledge about humans-as-individuals. Here each soul becomes a buried object carved out by the bright light of human science and made, finally visible, against a topography of species “norms.” Man, then, “is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A ‘soul’ inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body” (1995: 30). In this way, discipline is the basic operating mechanism for reproducing a form of humanist knowledge that continually trains and reaffirms a normalized image of the unique, undivided human soul. Discipline, in this regard, is a species-test.

  Hailsham’s Exchange program explicitly connects the disciplinary soul to human belonging. As Miss Emily explains near the end of the novel, “we took away your art [to show to the general public] because we thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all” (Ishiguro 2005: 260). The evidence of a soul is the crux of Hailsham’s argument that clones be treated more “humanely.” Therefore, the soul marks a form of interiority that is both the sign of the human and the sign of discipline.

  Throughout the novel, Hailsham guardians are keen to remind their students that they, unlike other clones, are exceptional for being reared “as if” they were proper humans. These statements of exception persist, even late in the novel, when Kathy and Tommy visit Miss Emily to seek a deferral of their organ donations. Despite Hailsham having long since closed, Kathy and Tommy are reminded that “all around the country … [clones are] reared in deplorable conditions, conditions … Hailsham students could hardly imagine” (2005: 261). Indeed, Hailsham was the first clone-raising facility that, as Miss Emily puts it, “challenged the entire way the donations programme was being run … an example of how we might move to a more humane and better way of doing things” (2005: 260, 258). The “humane” treatment of clones brings together the “conditions” of a clean and healthy environment with a liberal arts curriculum. The “humane,” like discipline, begins with a basic management of the body by controlling the “conditions” of confinement, which, in turn, makes possible the celebration of expressive interiorities: creativity, individuality, and originality. The “humane,” then, is revealed to be a process of humanization and not necessarily an end in itself. Miss Emily illustrates this point when she explains how Hailsham meant to “demonstrate to the world that if students [clones] were reared in humane, cultivated environments, it was possible for them to grow to be as sensitive and intelligent as any ordinary human being” (2005: 260). Within this disciplinary apparatus, the “humane” is organized around the normative “ordinary human being.” That is, ordinary humans simply possess what must be actively cultivated elsewhere; they are the gold standard around which a “humane” politics is formulated.

  From a posthumanist perspective, Cary Wolfe critiques precisely this type of anthropocentrism as it appears in the mainstream animal rights movement. In the “animal rights philosophy of Peter Singer and Tom Regan,” for instance, “our responsibility to the animal other is grounded … in the fact that it exhibits in diminished form qualities, potentials or abilities that are realized to their fullest in human beings” (2003: 53). For Wolfe, this is a poor method for confronting the “question of the animal” because it continues to map forms of life within a great chain of being. This anthropocentric ordering produces a political ontology of sameness that measures all forms of life according to their likeness to an idealized, normative human. Tellingly, this form of animal liberation treats animals as poorly copied human clones, basically human but without the same level of development. Not only does this anthropocentrism erode real species differences by positioning all species in relation to a single and unquestioned “human” value, but it also qualifies and contains the “rights” of various human others. Wolfe persuasively argues that anthropocentric models of human-animal gradation function to co-opt the importance of other differences and predetermine the signification of difference more generally. Any difference, even and especially differences between humans, are subject to a species positioning within humanist discourse and can therefore be hierarchically graphed as a symptom of abnormality, animality, or soullessness. The “question of the animal,” then, is fundamentally a social question, where the social must include but cannot be exhausted by human relations.

  Indeed, Ishiguro poses an “animal-question” of this kind early in Never Let Me Go when Ruth suggests that Kathy and their friends surprise one of Hailsham’s administrators, Madame, to see if she’s “scared” of the students. Even as Hailsham is bent on determining the students’ “humanity,” the students plan their own inquiry of Hailsham’s human authorities. It is well known that Madame regularly visits the school to inspect and collect the students’ best artwork, as judged by Hailsham’s guardians.The plan we’d come up with to test Ruth’s theory was very simple: we—the six of us in on it—would lie in wait for Madame somewhere, then ‘swarm-out’ all around her, all at once. We’d all remain perfectly civilised and just go on our way, but if we timed it right…we’d see—Ruth insisted—that she really was afraid. (2005: 34)

  Already in the planning stage, there is a tension between “swarming” and remaining “perfectly civilized.” The “swarm” recalls an animal collectivity. Bees and flies swarm. There is no uniform individual subjectivity in the swarm, but rather, like Gilles Deleuze’s description of a pack of wolves, there is “an intensity, a band of intensity, a threshold of intensity” (1987: 31). In contrast, to be “civilized” requires individuals to replicate standardized practices: in other words, manners. The “swarm” is a flash of intensity meant to excite Madame’s unpractised response, even as it is immediately concealed by civilized behaviour. The students’ test depends upon perceiving something undisciplined in Madame. They are not interested in Madame’s assured outward performance, nor are they even interested in her exoskeletal composure. Instead, they seek a relay from her liquid body—her pulse, her nerves, her adrenaline. To test Madame’s reaction is to seek a bodily disturbance, a modulation or interruption amid her organs. It is to excite the swarm of animals in her.

  And this works; Madame is scared of them: “She didn’t shriek, or even let out a gasp. But we were all keenly tuned into picking up he
r response … [and] the shudder she seemed to be suppressing” (2005: 35). Kathy and her friends are shocked not only because they find that “Madame was afraid of [them],” but because of the unusual fear they seem to arouse. “She was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of a spider. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we might feel, being seen like that, being the spider” (2005: 35).

  Why is the spider used here to describe a fear of clones? On the one hand, the spider’s supposed lack of subjectivity, its radical difference, serves as a justification for violently killing it. An arachnid’s life is hardly a life at all. This justification, however, elides a deeper fear that, although spiders present a radically different form of life, they are nevertheless, in some unimaginable way, “thinking” nevertheless. The spider’s web, for example, is at once inhuman and inhumanly intelligent. The spider exhibits a complexity that cannot be reduced to a great chain of being or any linear organization of life where man stands fixed at one or another pole. The compulsive killing of spiders preempts a confrontation of the human and their decentred relation to spiders, making the ability to quickly kill a spider proof enough of one’s metaphysical superiority. In horror movies, spiders often “attack” when someone is sleeping or unconscious; the fear is that the spider will crawl unnaturally close to the human, perhaps even enter (or merge with) the human, that the creature will find an opening (perhaps the mouth) in the territorial boundary between human life and animal existence, that the human will be caught in a web of unusual connections.

  For Madame, the clones’ bodies are caught precisely in this web of animal life, and she seeks, through discipline, to reorganize the clones’ kinship within a humanist chain of being. But as posthuman bodies, the clones do, indeed, represent a new trans-species kinship web. Like the OncoMouse and Dolly, the clones “belong to a new order of animate, trans-viable, existence that is defined by being designed and made, or grown and built, rather than born and bred” (Franklin 2007: 28). In the old model of kinship through sexual heredity, these clones are indeed orphans, but when somatic cell nuclear transfer becomes the “technique to transfer genetic traits nongeneologically,” a new webbing of kinship emerges between sheep, mice, humans, cows, and the transgenetic, trans-species code which connects them all (Franklin 2007: 28). In one sense, Never Let Me Go can be read as the story of Hailsham’s failure to restore an image of human autonomy in the face of such new, entangled, genealogies of life. And posthumanism, for its part, reveals new ethical horizons by simply recognizing that biological, ecological, and technological systems have always collectively shaped material life, despite the illusory enclosures of disciplinary knowledge. Nevertheless, Never Let Me Go does not narrate the flourishing of posthuman ethics as a byproduct of disciplinary decline. In fact, after leaving Hailsham, the students enter a different political economy that alters the coordinates through which the vitality of human life is measured.

  The Open Fence

  After Kathy and her classmates leave Hailsham, the school bankrupts and closes, permanently preventing the clones from ever returning home while stirring a deep-seated desire in them to do so. Indeed, “never let me go” can be read as an expression of the students’ longing to remain at Hailsham and preserve the sense of belonging it afforded them. Indeed, according to Kathy and her fellow students, “it definitely felt like Hailsham’s going away had shifted everything around us,” suggesting that Hailsham’s failure is metonymically tied to a major shift in the novel’s development (Ishiguro 2005: 213). Likewise, Madame also links Hailsham’s demise to the emergence of “a new world coming rapidly. More scientific, efficient, yes…But a harsh, cruel world” (2005: 272). While actual historical change is uneven and filled with retrograde movements, the historical narrative embedded in the structure of Never Let Me Go is plotted and punctuated by image patterns and setting changes. My critical approach, therefore, follows Miss Emily’s parting advice to Kathy and Tommy to “try and see it historically” or to situate Hailsham’s symbolic failure within the changes experienced by the student-clones during their brief lifetimes (2005: 262).

  In this context, it is absolutely critical to analyse the clones’ newfound mobility when they arrive at the cottages and their bodies are no longer consolidated by the walls of an institutional plot. In other words, they can move: “If you’d told me … that within a year, I’d not only develop the habit of taking long solitary walks, but that I’d start learning to drive a car, I’d have thought you were mad” (2005: 118). Tellingly, Kathy admits that the idea of her body in motion used to mark the limits of thought; mobility was madness. But with the introduction of cars into an environment seemingly without boundaries, her subjectivity is no longer predicated on remaining more or less observably fixed. Moreover, once the clones leave the cottages to become “carers,” they travel constantly between hospitals, clinics, and centres all across the country; and once the clones finally become “donors,” their internal organs are removed from their bodies and are made to circulate as objects of consumption and exchange, representing an even more extreme bodily rift and threshold of mobility.

  Central to my interpretation of the clones’ new (im)mobility after Hailsham is a scene where Kathy takes Tommy and Ruth into the woods, past a torn fence, to see an old marooned boat. Here, they “came to a barbed wire fence, which was tilted and rusted, the wire itself yanked all over the place” (2005: 222–223). Chemically transformed by oxidation and loosened by the soggy ground, this fence, which once posed as an impediment, now reaches out “all over the place” for balance. And while its dilapidation is resounded by the “cracking … and crumbling” boat, which Tommy imagines “is what Hailsham looks like now,” these images of corrosion should not be read only as signs of institutional decay (2005: 224). Indeed, the fence has not vanished; on the contrary, it has been “yanked all over the place,” extending its reach to prescribe pathways rather than perimeters.

  Once the clones pass through this fence’s opening they encounter a new zone of ecology at work, a sunken place suddenly flooded by environmental change:Not long ago, the woods must have extended further … ghostly trunks poking out of the soil … when we started to move toward the boat, you could hear the squelch under our shoes. Before long I noticed my feet sinking beneath the tufts of grass. (2005: 224)

  This unsettled and unsettling margin represents a new form of immobility that is intensifying due to rising sea levels and global warming. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “the rapid increase in ghost forests [around the world] represents a dramatic visual picture of environmental change along coastal plains located at or near sea level” (NOAA 2018). Indeed, in the context of a novel that strongly associates mobility with car travel, it is important to interpret the encroaching ghost forest in Never Let Me Go as both the limit to and extension of mobility’s carbon footprint.

  Weary from travel and nostalgic for the refuge of their childhood residence, the image of the rising sea clearly unnerves the clones. Tommy wonders if “maybe this [marshland] is what Hailsham looks like now?” (2005: 225). In response, Ruth recalls her dream of being safely trapped in Hailsham during a massive flood, “rubbish floating by under [her] window, empty drink cartons, everything” (2005: 225). This dream of refuge is undercut by the fact that Hailsham has long since closed its doors to students. Like the abandoned boat now “crumbling away,” Hailsham no longer functions as a figure of escape. Indeed, the marooned boat contrasts with the sailing “drink cartoons” in Ruth’s dream, offering readers a darker image of scattered refuse to replace their fantasy of secure refuge.

  The vision of decay that engulfs the fence, boat, trees, and now Hailsham in this scene appears to foreclose the possibility of a “pastoral escape” from the novel’s networks of power. Within the novel, there is nowhere specific for the clones to retreat; only acceleration seems to offer a sense of exodus and a “deferral” of death. It is fitting, then, th
at as the clones prepare to leave the ghost forest Kathy and Ruth notice an airplane overhead, apparently presenting them with a new threshold of escape through mobility: “At first I thought she was staring at the boat, but then I saw her gaze was on the vapour trail of a plane in the far distance, climbing slowly in the sky” (2005: 225). They gaze at both the plane’s flight and the trace of fuel it leaves behind. This image of “vaporized” fossil fuels and soaring mobility is contiguous with the ghost forest and the sinking fossilization of the boat, fence, and clones. And while the plane appears distant, the “vapour trail” traces the clones’ own sense of mobility to their new role as a reprocessed fuel for the extension of another’s life. Whether “sinking” into the soil or “climbing slowly in the sky,” these images of (im)mobility link the promise of escape to the finitude of earthly fuels and the political economy of their distribution. As the clones constantly circulate through the cities, they fuel the lives of more-human humans. And even as organ consumers adopt less-than-human body parts, their social status is not degraded by this hybridization. On the contrary, as I elaborate later in this chapter, the logic of human capital ensures that the consumer class is only further humanized through their acts of biotechnological consumption.