But just as Atwood’s ChickieNob wraps one of its tentacles around the neoconservative politics of repugnance, it also pins these views against a neoliberal backdrop that characterizes the corporate compounds within which much of the novel is set. Surveying the product-lines coming out of the biotech compounds during the twenty-year stretch just prior to the apocalypse is instructive. At “OrganInc Farms,” where Jimmy spends the first-half of his childhood, the primary research project was medical: “the goal of the pigoon project was to grow … human-tissue organs in a transgenetic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection” (2004: 23). However, when Jimmy’s family moves to the HelthWyzer Compound, his father is hired to work on a product called “Nooskins,” whose function is primarily cosmetic. Then, during his college years, when Jimmy visits Crake at “Watson and Crick University,” he encounters a new line of bioengineered products in development, including “NeoGeologicals,” “Décor Botanicals,” and, most strikingly, in the “NeoAgricultures” division, “ChickieNobs” (2004: 202–203). Moving from organ transplants to cosmetics, wallpaper, rocks, and food, the trajectory of corporate biotech shifts from specialized sectors of the economy towards the mass reproduction of everyday domesticity. Moreover, the patented species, like the ChickieNob, increasingly function as living machines whose vital processes are designed to provide automatic labour. The real horror of the ChickieNob is not the intermixing of genes from different species, it is the economic subsumption of every aspect of its life into calculable reproductive labour: “you get chicken breasts in two weeks—that’s a three-week improvement on the most efficient low-light, high-density chicken farming operation so far devised” (2004: 203). No matter how biologically hybrid, the ChickieNob is a trademarked species whose genetic purity is policed by biotech corporations deeply invested in individualized patented species. While the biotech corporations apparently celebrate the dynamic potential of interspecies reproduction, they also disavow the implications of this webbed interconnection. In fact, when it comes to intellectual property and proprietary control, the companies reintroduce a modified model of species separation. Illustratively, with its “sea-anemone body plan,” the ChickieNob helps us picture how the biotech companies dramatically prune the evolutionary tree (202). Rather than imagining a series of genealogical branches linking the vital trunk and individualized bodies at the crown, so to speak, the ChickieNob diagrams a more simplified, radial form of biopolitical control5.
Simply put, the ChickieNob reflects the historical conjunction of neoconservative and neoliberal thought, especially concerning the organization of family life. As I’ve argued, for neoconservatives, the ChickieNob embodies the “repugnant” radical sexual politics supposedly responsible for attacking “core” humanity or heteronormative domesticity. At the same time, the ChickieNob also represents, somewhat satirically, the enterprise of neoliberal innovation and its view of limitless economic competition. For instance, Crake explains that at “EduCompounds,” like the “Watson-Crick Institute, … the students … got half the royalties from anything they invented,” thus producing a “fierce incentive” to invent biocommercial commodities on the University’s behalf (2004: 203). Successful inventions like ChickieNob have “investors lining up around the block,” Crake explains, because they can “undercut the price of everyone else” by dramatically decreasing the cost of labour (2004: 203). As one student-scientist puts it, “the high growth rate is built-in,” which is just another ways of saying that the product’s biology has been rebuilt to perform labour disguised as “growth.” Human capital theory implies the same point: every aspect of one’s daily life, both corporate and domestic, is calculable in economic terms. Thus, reproductive activities that cultivate personal “growth” (think hiking, reading, sleeping) are not external to economic competition; they are variables in the appreciation or depreciation of one’s human capital. Education is one such domain of activity that has been redescribed and rebuilt by the calculus of economic reasoning. The students in the novel, for example, are not only looking to appreciate their human capital through a degree that they can exchange for future employment, but, heightening the exploitation, they are also charged tuition to work on the corporation’s behalf. That is, the students are paying for the opportunity to retain a portion of the royalties on inventions whose patents will be owned by the EduCompound. Furthermore, this system of “fierce incentives” also cultivates fierce competition between the students as they work tirelessly to create new species of automated workers, never realizing how much they already resemble a new class of bioengineered entrepreneurs.
And it is this hidden labour—often performed by assistants, students, child-care providers, mothers—disguised as a devotion to work that ties neoliberalism back to the neoconservative focus on domesticity. Despite neoliberalism’s vocal celebration of individual autonomy, Wendy Brown points out, “familism is an essential requirement, rather than an incidental feature of the neoliberal privatization of public goods and services” (2015: 105–106). Where neoliberal policies have sought to eliminate or privatize critical welfare programmes, the low-paying or unpaid labour of caring for dependent people has fallen primarily on women and others historically associated with an ostensibly biological impulse to be nurturing. In other words, whereas neoliberalism has sought to make all individuals responsible for the management and growth of their own human capital, “‘responsibilization’ in the context of privatizing public goods uniquely penalizes women to the extent that they remain disproportionately responsible for those who cannot be responsible for themselves” (2015: 106). This gender subordination is not merely a residual afterimage of the Fordist family structure; it is an actively cultivated arrangement advocated loudly by neoconservatives and more quietly (but no less consistently) by neoliberals. “It would be a mistake,” Melinda Cooper warns, “to think that neoliberalism is any less invested in the value of the family than are social conservatives” (2017: 8–9).
Consider, for example, Gary Becker’s A Treatise on the Family where he suggests:men and women have intrinsically different comparative advantages not only in the production of children, but also in their contribution to child care and possibly to other activities. Such intrinsic differences in productivity determine the direction of the sexual division by tasks and hence sexual differences in the accumulation of specific human capital that reinforce the intrinsic differences. (1993: 62)
In this passage, Becker is not really interested in analysing the historical representations and political dimensions of sexual difference; rather, the simple reduction of “women” to the “production of children” is enough for Becker to “determine the direction” of the “sexual division” of labour and, in effect, any discrepancies in the “accumulation” of capital. Ultimately, Becker believes an “intrinsic” division of sexed “tasks” will reemerge and be “reinforced” by the free market once the distorting effects of the welfare state are removed. Indeed, Becker claims, the two main reasons driving divorce rates up and fertility rates down are the growth of women’s earnings power and the support welfare programmes provide single mothers: “welfare is the poor woman’s alimony” (1993: 357). According to Becker, “the growth of public programs [has] … weakened the ties of family members by further eroding the traditional role of the family in protecting members against hazards” (357). Therefore, Becker argues, if welfare programmes are diminished, the “traditional” patriarchal family will stabilize its cultural authority because women will be economically coerced into performing more maternalistic activities that don’t count as labour but, nevertheless, subsidize the social cost of capitalist competition.
In her careful study of the historical development of neoliberal ideology and social conservatism, Melinda Cooper summarizes the relationship this way:Neoliberals such as [Milton] Friedman begin with the self-evidence of individual responsibility but end up affirming the necessity of familial obligations when confronted with the social cos
ts of unwaged dependents. Social conservatives begin with the foundational importance of the family and derive the liberty of the individual from here. Both, however, seize upon the necessity of family responsibility as the ideal source of economic security and an effective counterforce to the demoralizing powers of the welfare state. (2017: 71–72)
In the context of Oryx and Crake, it is worth comparing Cooper’s argument concerning the shift from individuality to family obligation with a parallel shift within the biotech compounds from hybrid life to patented life. In both cases, capitalism employs new modes of production that seemingly disrupt traditional social structures, but, in a second movement, these social structures are reimposed in order to organize the unequal distribution of property. Neoliberal capitalism promises to recognize subjects as individuals apart from their genealogical origins, but, in reality, it is “compelled to reassert the reproductive institutions of race … nation … [and] family as the elementary legal form of private wealth accumulation” (2017: 16). Tacitly, this reassertion of “reproductive institutions” betrays a socially conservative investment in “traditional family values.” Similarly, while hybrid animals may expose the fallacy of the nineteenth-century evolutionary tree of life, once these animals become trademarked commodities within the “reproductive institution” of OrganInc, their capacity to explore new relations is severely prohibited. In this way, the ChickieNob sits at the intersection of neoliberal and neoconservative thought and points to the emergence of “corporate domesticity” as an important resurfacing of social conservatism within neoliberal regimes.
Corporate Domesticity: Animals in Heat
Prior to the “Great Rearrangement,” Atwood depicts an infrastructure meant to police the movement and meaning of bodies, families, and species. At the centre of this dystopian arrangement is the walled division between the wealthy suburban corporate Compounds and the poor, densely populated, Pleeblands. Atwood stresses that “compound people didn’t go to the cities unless they had to,” and pleeblanders were kept out of the compounds by many layers of security (2004: 27). These two zones of sociality are further organized by what I call “corporate domesticity,” a term that characterizes social norms within the biotech compounds and identifies how those norms are exported to the global pleeblands through life-science products. Outside the context of the novel, “corporate domesticity” points to the neoconservative family structures that are strategically reproduced by cutting the social safety-net and privatizing access to basic needs, including health care, education, and dependent-care.
In the novel, the juxtaposition of hybrid life with the rigorously defined boundary that separates the suburban laboratories from the outside world eventually dissolves when Crake surreptitiously releases a deadly disease designed to rapidly infect human bodies beyond borders. That is, ultimately, the novel does suggest that the contradiction between porous cells and impenetrable compounds is unsustainable—however radically overdetermined the resolution offered by the “great rearrangement” is, a subject I will discuss at the end of this chapter. Yet, prior to this supposed resolution, Atwood offers an insightful portrait of the management strategies used to uphold a hegemonic regime for multiple generations. Atwood goes to great lengths to detail an increasingly paranoid domestic space that continually hides and subdues the radical possibilities of biotechnology.
Consider, for example, Jimmy’s earliest childhood memory: “the smell of charred flesh [and] … burning hair” overwhelms him as he attends a massive bonfire where an “enormous pile of [transgenetic] cows and sheep and pigs” are incinerated at the OrganInc compound (2004: 16). Like the burning of cows and sheep during England’s 2001 foot-and-mouth-disease scare, the OrganInc animals are culled because of hidden alien life lurking within them. It is worth recalling that “foot and mouth has never posed a risk to human or animal health” and might be best understood as an “ovine version of the common cold” (2007: 173). As Sarah Franklin points out, “foot and mouth is only lethal to domestic animals because it is economically intolerable to humans … [T]he world market for sheep, milk and cattle products is divided between countries where foot and mouth is endemic and those officially designated as disease free”—a designation that has everything to do with securing trade agreements and practically nothing to do with the actual harmfulness of the disease (2007: 174). Likewise, according to Jimmy’s mother, the animals at OrganInc Farms are burned because of “a disease” that she describes as “like when you have a cough” (2004: 19). Aside from this passing reference to a common cough, the disease is repeatedly linked to economic causes and consequences (“bribery,” “bank transfers,” “prices,” money “fork[ed] out” to guards), reframing the animal-disease as a threat to the health of the human-marketplace (2004: 18–20).
Despite being “sealed up like a drum” and vigilantly defended by a private security force called the “CorpSeCorps,” there is little tangible sense of bodily or economic security within OrganInc (2004: 18). For instance, during the bonfire, Jimmy recalls his father’s colleague suggesting that a rival biotech firm must have “brought in [the infection] on purpose” to “drive up the prices” and “make a killing on their own stuff” (18). Echoing phrases like “creative destruction,” “hostile takeover,” “corporate raider,” and “conquering markets,” the metaphors of economic competition here are associated with the production of violence. In other words, “making a killing” is how you make a living. But, while death is undeniably in the air, the spectacular violence of this scene is directed at animal bodies. This purification ritual—“luminous” like “a Christmas tree on fire”—functions as a purging of the contaminated brand, OrganInc, whose identity is meant to reemerge from the fire as a symbol of unadulterated rebirth. Ultimately, however, this ceremony does little to quell the underlying fear of workers who are increasingly asked to associate their own survival with the brand’s safety and health. Indeed, looming corporate rivals and contaminants make OrganInc a terribly paranoid place, obsessed with “the other side, or the other sides … other companies, other countries, various factions and plotters” (2004: 27). And it is not just outsiders that one has to worry about. The military police hired to protect suburbia don’t merely patrol the perimeter of the compounds; they also surveil the domestic spaces within, looking for subversives and freaks.
Indeed, the public burning of “freaky” transgenetic animals signals an intention to eradicate resistant strains of animalized otherness already present inside the suburban space. Therefore, when Jimmy’s parents explain that the animals were burned because they were diseased, and Jimmy’s mother adds that “a disease is like when you have a cough,” Jimmy worriedly asks, “If I have a cough, will I be burned up?” (2004: 19). With comic paranoia, Jimmy’s father jokes, “most likely” (19). The joke is meant to remind Jimmy that, as a human, he is responsible for mastering the vicissitudes of his own body lest he be extinguished like an animal outsider. However, because the young Jimmy had a “cough the week before,” he is forcibly confronted with a lack of control over his body in relation to other species, which, in this context, also represents an animalization of his young body: “He could see his hair on fire … He didn’t want to be put in a heap with the cows and pigs. He began to cry” (19). For Jimmy, his father’s joke is terrifying.6
Angered by her husband’s flippant response, Jimmy’s mother immediately pulls Jimmy aside to provide him with an alternative explanation of his body’s relation to other species. She claims, “you [are] all made up of tiny cells, working together to make sure you stay alive,” adding that “a disease … rearranged you, cell by cell, and that made the cells sick” (2004: 21). Because his body “is made up of tiny cells” that are permeable, Jimmy’s mother believes he is always already available to “invisible” and “small” microbes that can “fly through the air or hide in the water” (20). Although Jimmy resists his mother’s explanation of embodied vulnerability until she becomes “discouraged,” he secretly “wanted
her to be brave with him, to hammer away at the wall he’d put up against her, to keep on going” (2004: 21, emphasis added). If Jimmy’s father understands disease to result from a personal failure to police the internal walls of one’s human body, then his mother poses a more materialistic explanation that emphasizes the non-personal, non-human power at work in the production and destruction of interdependent bodies. Fed up with her husband’s paranoid sense of control, Jimmy’s mother tells him that “[Jimmy] doesn’t understand those kinds of jokes” (2004: 20). Jimmy’s father responds by coercing his son’s allegiance: “Sure he does. Don’t you Jimmy?” (20). And while Jimmy secretly shares his mother’s understanding of embodiment, he is shamed by the naked messiness of her position, however true or compelling. Vested in inheriting his father’s privileged and protected position within the patriarchal compounds, Jimmy stops crying and tells his father “Yes,” he understands the joke.
Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels Page 12
