Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  Unlike the anthropological machine, this analogical search engine moves only where it can within the novel’s social milieu, finding “possibles” in the manoeuvrable passageways of a stratified social terrain. And, because these clones are placed in the historical setting of “England, late 1990s,” the power of analogy is narrowed and intensified. As the clones’ struggle to apprehend how and where their “difference” is apparent, they partially awaken to their social position across multiple oppositional categories. Here the novel traces the discursive coding of the clones’ bodies as non-human materiality (soul/body, human/animal); as exhibiting a non-sexually-reproductive sexuality (hetero/queer); as performing affective labour as carers or sacrificial reproduction as donors (male/female); as unofficial labourers without recourse to political rights (citizen/immigrant). These divisions are neither abstract nor symmetrical. Instead they are symptoms of what Sarah Franklin calls the “pejorative associations” of clones, where the term is used “to refer to illegitimate sexuality based on narcissistic identification (gay clones) and slavery (either as ‘slavish imitation,’ or in the association of clones with a worker class of slaves or drones)” (2007: 27). If, in the end, the clones do somehow precariously attach themselves to the family of man, it is on the outskirts of the human, where subjects are treated as less-than-fully-human.

  Desperate to secure a sense of human belonging, the clones become obsessed with finding their “possibles.” Kathy explains, “since each of us was copied at some point from a normal person, there must be, for each of us, somewhere out there, a model getting on with his or her life” (2005: 139). At the cottages the clones speculate intensely about where these “normal” people might be or what might be the significance of locating one. Despite deep uncertainty, “we all of us, to varying degrees, believed that when you saw the person you were copied from, you’d get some insight into who you were deep down” (2005: 140). And for this reason, “when you were out there yourself—in towns, shopping centres, transport cafes—you kept an eye out for ‘possibles’—the people who might have been models for you and your friends” (2005: 139). Impossibly, then, the clones are compelled to find their “deep down” identity as it appears on the surface of a social milieu, in “shopping centres” and “transport cafes.” The implied promise of discovering one’s “possible” is not really based on finding one’s genetic identity, but rather on recognizing oneself as human within a social order.

  Consider, for example, Kathy’s attempt to find her “possible” in porn magazines. Because Kathy interprets her pubescent sexual desires as symptoms of an exceptionally strong libido, she searches for her model in a population that she believes likely to share her proclivities. She “moved through the pages quickly not wanting to be distracted by any buzz of sex coming off those pages. In fact, [Kathy] hardly saw the contorted bodies because [she] was focusing on the faces” (2005: 134). Ostensibly, Kathy is reading against the pornographic effect. She is focused on faces, not bodies, despite Tommy’s estimation that “it doesn’t really work if you go that fast” (2005: 136). And yet, the searching of various faces for an intensive identification is an alternative form of pornographic reading. Kathy believes that finding her pornographic double will “explain why I am the way I am” (2005: 181). In other words, she is very much interested in satisfying her sexual urges by sharing them with or displacing them onto someone else, which is precisely how imaginary identifications function in masturbatory readings. The performer subdues the spectator’s desire by both coaxing and codifying the viewer’s bodily urges. In this way, Kathy’s search for her pornographic possible is both misguided and insightful. Her confusion exposes pornography’s power to coordinate strange bodily sensations with an array of socially recognized sexual practices, situations, qualities, and identities.

  Ultimately, however, Kathy’s pornographic search fails because she cannot discharge her desire for social belonging within this catalogue of imagined identities. Kathy, after all, is looking at the actresses’ identities, not the imagined identities that their performances represent. Kathy naively assumes that porn stars have stronger libidos than other people. Whether or not this is the case, Kathy appears blind to the fact that pornography is a business and that the recruitment of young women into this male-dominated industry is notoriously driven by economic need rather than biological drives. But once again, Ishiguro uses Kathy’s blindness to orient readers towards a social, rather than biological, interpretation of the clones’ identity. To the extent that porn actresses’ bodily labour serve viewers who see them as less-human objects of consumption, then these actresses do mirror, in part, the clones’ socially abject status.

  Ishiguro further develops the implications of the clones’ material and social abjection through the story of Ruth’s failed attempt to find her possible. On a walk along the outskirts of a small town, Kathy recalls seeing Ruth “engrossed by something by her feet” (2005: 144).I thought it was some poor creature dead in the frost, but when I came up, I saw it was a colour magazine—not one of “Steve’s [porn] magazines,” but one of those bright cheerful things that come free with the newspapers. It had fallen open at this glossy double page advert, and though the paper had gone soggy and there was mud at one corner, you could see it well enough. It showed this beautifully modern open-plan office with three or four people who worked in it … The place looked sparkling and so did the people. (2005: 144)

  Like the porno magazines that Kathy flips through in search of her possible, this “glossy” and “soggy” magazine seems to offer an image of human belonging. Indeed, in subsequent weeks, Ruth talks “about the sort of office she’d ideally work in,” and not long after, a roommate claims to have spotted her model at a windowed office on High Street (2005: 144). Tellingly, this magazine is initially confused for a “poor creature” and then as a piece of discarded trash. That is, Ruth’s “possible” identity is located at the intersection of animal life and useless materiality. Litter, thus, functions as a key term for simultaneously describing the clones’ non-human reproduction and the status of their life as the disposable packaging for delivering consumable organs.

  In an emotionally fraught scene, after discovering that the lady working on High Street “isn’t Ruth,” Ruth angrily asserts that the clones are the born from socially abject populations or materially abject waste:We all of us know it, so why don’t we face it. We’re not modelled from that sort…We all know it. We’re modelled from trash. Junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps …That’s what we come from. We all know it, so why don’t we say it? … If you want to look for possibles, if you want to do it properly, then you look in the gutter. You look in the rubbish bins. Look down the toilet, that’s where you’ll find where we all came from. (2005: 166)

  Ruth’s speech begins by locating the clones’ origins in the socially abject (“the junkies”) and ends by connecting the clones to the materially abject (“the toilet”). At this point in the novel, Kathy and her friends fall into despair over the prospect of living their lives without a (disciplinary) soul, a despair that, according to some readings, becomes the very certificate of the clones’ soulfulness. But before locating a tragic or redemptive form of humanism in this despair we should consider fully the humans with whom the clones at least partially identify.

  The “junkies, prostitutes, winos, [and] tramps” with whom Ruth identifies represent a population of marginalized poor people frequently targeted as paid test subjects by biomedical companies conducting drug trials or seeking tissues.4 Although Ruth’s speculation about the clones’ biological origins is rooted in a recognition of their socially abject status, her realization also lays bare the critical role poor and uninsured bodies play in contemporary biotechnology. Indeed, as Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby point out, after “civil rights legislation in the 1970s and 1980s introduced new protections into prisons,” which limited the “pharmaceutical industry’s access” to confined bodies, biomedical corporations quickly “developed more t
ransactional ways to recruit” underprivileged populations for trials, experiments, and other forms of clinical labour5 (Cooper and Waldby 2014: 222–223). Many poor and abject populations, therefore, are already prototypically situated like the clones in relation to clinical labour, as an economically coercible supply of surplus human bodies. Once again, Ishiguro has purposefully blocked any revelation about the clones’ genealogical connection to the family of man6; instead, he reveals a constellation of socially abject populations whose exclusion is rationalized by their supposed lack of human capital.

  Indeed, Never Let Me Go’s interest in biotechnology (cloning) and biomedicine (organ transplants) is inseparable from the impact of human capital theory on these fields. Not only was human capital first theorized “in direct reference to new or imagined markets in blood, solid organs, and surrogacy services,” but also the short-term contracts initially designed for clinical labour have been redeployed to outsource “other kinds of casualized personal service labor … framed by the terms of human capital” (Cooper and Waldby 2014: 19, 228). Simply put, human capital theory asserts that every activity an individual performs has economic meaning or consequences: it either increases or decreases that individual’s human capital, which is a speculative measurement of that individual’s future income, health, satisfaction, and social security. This insertion of economic logic into the minutia of daily life is central to the now-familiar neoliberal dogma that “non-market activities are not necessarily extra-economic” (Mincer 1981: 2). This does not mean, of course, that the full material or affective meaning of reading, sleeping, moving, arguing, eating, touching, or listening can be accounted for as units of human capital. They cannot be. And yet, at every turn, human capital assumes that such activities are comprehensible as investments of and investments in the humanness of one’s life. At its heart, therefore, human capital is not only a pivotal concept in the development of neoliberal economic theory; it is also a way of making subjects intelligible by supposedly quantifying the net “human-ness” of their activities.

  Biomedicine and biotechnology figure prominently in human capital theory for many reasons, not the least of which is the power these technologies have to regenerate the human capital of bodies otherwise depreciating due to the normal wear and tear of work and aging. Significantly, for the consumer classes (like those who receive organs from the clones in Never Let Me Go) the regenerative body is never, finally, vital enough. Indeed, as Miss Emily points out, once the clones’ organs became available, “there was no going back” (2005: 263). The biopolitical mandate to “make live” alongside the neoliberal mandate to optimize oneself through self-investments is everywhere reinforced by constant fear of depreciation and feelings of debilitation. Indeed, 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). The never healthy enough body produced by biocapital is also never human enough, particularly since health is a classic measurement of human capital. Human capital, therefore, produces fearful consumers that require “less-human,” abject, bodies to fuel their dreams of becoming more human. After all, the ability of consumers to defer their deaths with new organs blocks Kathy and Tommy’s ability defer their donations. Or, as Miss Emily frames it, “here was a world requiring students to donate. While that remained the case, there would always be a barrier against seeing you as properly human” (2005: 263).

  To argue that the clones in Never Let Me Go are, in the end, humanized through their stoic submission to death ignores how humanization has been reimagined by discourses of human capital. Ishiguro’s implication that Kathy and Tommy are humanized because they show more initiative, ask more questions, and, therefore, obtain more human dignity than the other clones also suggests that Kathy and Tommy’s lives are more valuable and respectable because they’re more enterprising and educated than the other clones. The fact that, in the end, Kathy and the rest of the clones are considered not-human-enough to be protected by civil society from the meat-grinder of biocapitalism does not mean they are posthuman or that we, the readers, are now posthuman. Rather, the dominant ideology of human capital theory, a theory that emerges with the decline of disciplinary institutions, insists that no player in the game is ever human enough.

  Becoming Posthuman Again

  So far I have argued that Never Let Me Go embeds an allegorical narrative about the changing biopolitics of human belonging in the west over the past thirty-five years. The transition from a disciplinary to a neoliberal-style of humanism is legible along multiple axes (mobility, labour, climate, welfare), but it is perhaps most clearly epitomized by the disturbing transformation of the protagonists’ identities from students to clones. If these clones are posthuman figures, they’d rather not be. Theirs is not a liberatory form of posthumanism that smashes anthropocentric dogmas by exposing the material and ethical imbrication of biological, technological, and ecological systems. Instead, it is an example of posthuman life emerging from within economic systems that insist everyone can become more human by growing their human capital. This is neohumanism: if one can always be more human, one can never truly be human enough.

  By way of comparison, Donna Haraway’s ironic figure of posthuman embodiment, the cyborg, foregrounds kinship relations that connect animals, machines, and environments (1991). For Haraway, these vital relationships condition and reproduce partial, shared subjectivities that expose old fictions of human autonomy and mastery. In this light, Ishiguro’s clones represent a conjuncture of cyborgian relations that include the power of economic systems to produce posthuman life. While the diverse web relations often associated with cyborg bodies are ostensibly antithetical to the mass reproduction associated with clones, the clones do point to a vector of kinship with commercially reproduced objects, which are produced asexually.

  In fact, the clones from Never Let Me Go show great enthusiasm for mass-produced objects and images, and, after they leave Hailsham, these items take on strong fetishistic attributes. Kathy reports, “even now, I like … a large store with lots of aisles displaying bright plastic toys, greeting cards, loads of cosmetics, maybe even a photo booth” (2005: 157). Readers are invited, therefore, to compare these commercial objects to the clones’ bodies, both of which are reproduced asexually and designed for consumption. Moreover, the products Kathy evokes in this passage all share a glossy coating of thin plasticity that produces flexible and fleshy membranes. Even as Kathy’s intense interest in these objects suggests a form of commodity fetishism—so that the object takes on a surplus of subjective qualities, and the subject, likewise, becomes objectified—it also points to a convergence of materiality at work. “Cosmetics” are merely an artful melting of the “bright plastic toy” onto the face. And the photo booth strips a small and flat slice of “brightness” from the fleshy plastic visage, a thin membrane of prosthetic flesh. This is fetishism in the age of sticky objects: the commodity becomes a wet-prosthetic and its chemical membranes drip with connectivity.

  Whereas Marx and Freud saw the fetish as a form of psychological displacement—be it a compensatory displacement of symbolic castration or an ideological displacement of one’s “real” relation to modes of production—the clones discover a new liveliness in mass-produced objects. For them, mass reproduction becomes a genealogical node around which a vision of posthuman kinship might yet be articulated. Because such posthuman attachments disrupt the human/non-human division that Marx and Freud use to disentangle fetishistic relationships, a contradiction emerges between these two forms of materialism. The extension or reproduction of life is often intertwined with the commercial reproduction of prosthesis, just as the materiality that constitutes a living human body involves the vitality of non-human prosthesis. From new prosthetic limbs to fertility and erection technologies to smartphones and watches that pulse and purr on our skin, fetishes often emerge as a feeling of attachment towards that whic
h reproduces your life or is reproduced like you, as part of you. This sense of attachment should not be dismissed as mere fantasy. The sensual experience of interdependency between prosthetic life and living prosthetics in this novel deserves recognition and analysis. This fragile kinship, though, as I’ve already argued, is vulnerable to neohumanist ideologies, which treat all such prosthetic attachments as participating in the singular project of becoming more human.

  Against this dystopian reading, Never Let Me Go does occasionally confront the ambiguity and irreducible relationality between subjects and objects. One of the major subplots in Never Let Me Go, for example, follows Kathy’s relationship to a cassette tape, and, specifically, track number three (“Never Let Me Go”) of Judy Bridgewater’s Songs After Dark. From the outset, the tape’s material reproduction is stressed: “I suppose it was originally an LP—the recording date’s 1956—but what I had was the cassette, and the corner picture was what must have been a scaled down version of the record sleeve” (2005: 67). Although Songs After Dark has been commercially reproduced since 1956, its form has “evolved” from record to cassette, imbuing Kathy’s tape with a sense of adaptive vitality. The cassette is mobile, transferable, and, like the clone’s organs, it unspools deep inside the player in which it is placed. Kathy observes that even though she owned the tape a “few years before Walkmans started appearing,” the tape’s dimensions still afforded her privacy at Hailsham. The tape fit into the “portable cassette player” in her dorm room, allowing her to avoid the “big machine in the billiards room” (2005: 70). Kathy is “secretive about the tape,” in part, because its cover shows Judy Bridgewater smoking a cigarette, which is taboo at Hailsham. But the cassette’s dimensions also hint at a more private mode of consumption: the album has been “scaled-down” to fit in one’s hand, “wound to just that spot” (2005: 70) to produce a “private nook … out of thin air” (2005: 74). The logic of the tape’s stealth and mobility implies an increasingly intimate and sticky interface with living bodies.