Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  Moreover, Animal’s posture allows Indra Sinha to approach the Bhopal disaster from a different line of sight, one lowly and inverted. As Animal points out, “the world of humans is meant to be viewed from eye level [but] … Lift my head I’m staring into someone’s crotch” (2007a: 2). Animal “knows which one hasn’t washed his balls, [and] can smell pissy gussets and shitty backsides whose faint stenches don’t carry to your nose” (2). Even as Animal’s posture helps represent the physical afflictions of overlooked Bhopalies, it also gives Animal access to the smells of abject materiality that cannot be viewed from eye level or from the perspective of the “human world.” Animal’s synesthetic descriptions accentuate the bodily processes of digestion and genital sexuality, but in so doing, this synesthesia knocks up against the “world of humans” as it is “meant to be seen.” In other words, the visual logic that frames the chemical spill as “the same story” of “that night” is held in place by a “world of humans” that can only see, and be seen, from “eye level.” The size, shape, and meaning of material violence is therefore limited by a “world” system that prescribes what is “meant to be seen” as human and what is meant to be ignored as non-human.3

  Provocatively, Animal’s stance here evokes Sigmund Freud’s ([1930] 1961) famous footnote on “organic repression” from Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud proposes a theory to link posture to civilization and humanity. For Freud, “with the assumption of an erect posture by man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his anal eroticism which threatened to fall victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality” (1961: 62). Just as the bipedal body opens up a new distance between the human nose and genitalia, it also lifts the head upward, directing the human gaze outward into the world and away from the abdomen. This vertical alignment of body parts, in turn, degenitalizes the human sensorium just enough for civilization to take hold and keep the species standing. Furthermore, according to Freud, “the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defense of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal existence” (1961: 62). That is, not only is civilization here biologically linked to a species-specific body-type, but for Freud, humans’ erect gait is also meant to “defend” the “achievement” of civilization against the threat of animal devolution. This teleology paradoxically suggests that human beings stood upright to defend a system that, in any case, arose from the fact of humans standing upright.

  By posing as a twenty-first-century-postcolonial parody of Freud’s formulation, Animal not only challenges the knotted logic that ties species to posture and civilization, but he also exposes the legacy of racial and cultural discrimination that continues to haunt a universalist conception of humanity. Granting Freud’s premise, Animal accedes “whole nother world it’s, below the waist,” and, therefore, allows that he cannot see the “world of humans” as it is “meant to be viewed” (2007a: 2). That is, to see humans properly, one must see them eye-to-eye, from an already-human point of view. It is no surprise, then, given the postcolonial context of the novel, that humanism’s limitations are here associated with a specific site of sight. As Edward Said points out, Freud’s perception of civilized humanity was situated within a late nineteenth-century imperialist context and, therefore, projected a “Eurocentric view of culture … particularly [in its] humanistic and scientific assumptions” (2003: 16, 13–14). Despite his discontents with civilization’s repressive character, Freud still sees civilization as emerging from a natural or organic form of repression. For Freud, “organic repression” is not just a repression of organic substance, but it is also, paradoxically, a form of repression organic to humans as such. In this way, Freud naturalizes a Eurocentric view of humanity, where western forms of civilization become a social phenotype or biological marker for scientifically determining what counts as human. So, when Freud writes of a “high-water mark … [that] has been reached in our Western European civilization” or of “primitive human types living at the present,” he effectively divides the species between civilized westerners and colonized “human types” (1961: 60, 73). That is, the organic repression that is constitutive of human beings is inextricably tied to the political repression that is constitutive of western imperialism as a hegemonic system.

  Alternatively, for Sinha, the “whole nother world” that Animal experiences “below the waist” connects the nether world of abject materiality with another world, a place not “meant to be seen” as part of the “world of humans.” Here, various prosthetic networks link the vast and fast investments of transnational corporations to the small and slow biochemical interiors of politically marginalized people, animals, and environments.4 This zone of contestation is a “nother world” of political struggle, filled with communities of assemblage and networks of domination, but on the whole, these material struggles are filtered, disguised, and suppressed by a global system that uses the human to determine the size and scope of what is “meant to be seen.”

  Neoliberalism, Environmental Technologies, and Human Capital

  As Rob Nixon points out, Indra Sinha’s larger project in Animal’s People is to “probe the underbelly of neoliberal globalization” by throwing “into relief a political violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate” (2011: 46). For Sinha, these small, slow, vast, and fast sites of technological interconnection operate behind, below, beside, and above the standardized “eye to eye”-sized visual framing of human individuality. For instance, to great effect, Sinha metatextually describes the transformation of Animal’s fictional narration into a real-world Booker Prize-nominated book, thereby encoding the multiple settings of time and space that structure the novel. Even as the narrative takes place in a local, underrepresented Indian community, this local narrative is framed by multiple paratextual markers, including an Editor’s Note that unselfconsciously asserts: “apart from translating to English, nothing [of Animal’s account] has been changed.” This, of course, implies that the publishing company has changed every sentence by translating it from Hindi into English. In this way, Sinha subtly captures the invisible touch of non-local hands on the text, including the powerful grip of corporate editors and translators. Likewise, in an intertextual gambit, Sinha has constructed a website for the local, fictional city of Khaufpur (www.​khaufpur.​com). Written entirely in English and primarily focused on tourism, the site also features several self-referential articles that report on the novel’s real-world nomination for a Booker Prize in Literature. At khaufpur.​com, one can read a fictional Indian chief minister’s condemnation of the book as a “filthy and vile poison … [that] should be banned for depicting Khaufpuri politicians as cynical and corrupt personages” (Sinha 2007b). But if the local Chief Minster wants to silence Animal by banning his book, the Booker Prize committee also attempts to erase Animal from the site of self-representation. Animal explains in his online op-ed article, “Katie Price v. Animal Spice,” “the story is all in my words but that bugger Sinha has got his name all over the book. I am not even mentioned on the cover as the real author” (2007b).

  Sinha stages this subaltern double-bind by encoding different, overlapping, local, and transnational responses to the novel. While the Indian Chief Minster affirms Animal’s authorial status, he repudiates the novel’s political critique of local corruption, and while the Editor and Booker Prize Committee celebrate the novel’s content, they displace Animal as the book’s real author. Heather Snell, in her essay “Assessing the Limitations of Laughter in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” argues that Sinha’s paratextual devices “serve as a playful reminder of the very real material, and often exploitive, relations of production through which an oral account may be turned into a book without crediting the author of the original tale” (Snell 2008: 3). While Snell’s analysis is rightly focused on the exploita
tion of oral authors in the production of global literature, her critique also recalls the “exploitive relations of production” that characterize Union Carbide and Dow Chemical’s practices in the subcontinent. That is, the subaltern drama that paratextually surrounds the production of Animal’s People, must also be read as a synecdochical figuration of the “very real material … relations of production” that conditioned the Bhopal spill in the first place.

  In an effort to affirm the ahuman dimensions of a “nother world” where chemical violence intersects with transnational relations of production, Sinha avoids the eye-to-eye structure of many humanitarian pleas. Through Animal, Sinha shows great scepticism for humanitarian efforts that force marginalized peoples to petition for their enfranchisement into the lower rungs of a hegemonic humanity that is supposedly universal, classless, and inalienable. Indeed, all too often, the recognition of marginalized people is made contingent on a notion of subjectivity that limits the scale and scope of representable experiences. For example, even though nearly all new international trade agreements contain human rights provisos, these inclusions are often non-binding rhetorical feints that individualize the scale and scope of human rights claims, coordinating such rights with the economic imperatives of free trade capitalism. Consider the “Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures” put forth in the 1994 Uruguay WTO Agreement. Article five, section five begins:With the objective of achieving consistency in the application of the concept of appropriate level of sanitary or phytosanitary protection against risks to human life or health …each Member shall avoid … unjustifiable distinctions in the levels it considers to be appropriate in different situations, if such distinctions result in discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade. (WTO 1994)

  The provision goes on to state that “In developing the guidelines, the Committee shall take into account all relevant factors, including the exceptional character of human health risks to which people voluntarily expose themselves.” Not only does this provision limit the “different situations” of human health to those that do not “result in … restriction on international trade,” but it also carves out the “exceptional” status of so-called voluntary health risks. Indeed, the capacity of an individual to “voluntarily” assume personal responsibility for systematic risks is the neoliberal definition of human freedom, par excellence. That is, Animal’s People critiques neoliberal humanism because of its refusal to confront the systematic effects of what Michel Foucault calls “environmental technologies.” In the name of humanism, these documents of neoliberal policy obscure the scale and scope of neoliberalism’s technological power.

  Consider, for example, methyl isocyanate (MIC), the toxic chemical that continues to poison Bhopal’s water supply. As a vital compound in the production of many popular pesticides (as well as rubbers and adhesives), MIC embodies the legacy of the “Green Revolution” and the US attempt to revamp India’s economy via hi-tech agriculture, corporate investment, and local debt. This familiar client-state model, whereby western corporations sell expensive new technologies to ever more indebted and dependent Indian farmers, has only intensified in the twenty-first century, particularly since the 1995 World Trade Organization’s “Agreement on Agriculture” left Indian farmers to compete with heavily subsidized agri-businesses from the United States and European Union. Consequently, according to reports by Palagummi Sainath, between 1995 and 2007, 182,936 Indian farmers have committed suicide, unable to repay the loans used to invest in agro-tech from US corporations such as water-intensive genetically modified seeds from Monsanto and toxic pesticides like Dursban (illegal in the United States) from Dow Chemical (Sainath 2009).5 In his work on the contemporary Indian novel in English and environmentalism, Upamanyu Mukherjee argues that nearly all of these farmers killed themselves by “drinking … pesticide, registering both a cry of rage and a naming of the forces that pushed them from life to death” (2010: 2).

  Indeed, a current of suicidal rage also flows through Sinha’s novel; after (false) reports that Zafar has starved himself to death, a “factory riot” breaks out and more poisonous chemicals are released upon Kahufpur (2007a: 356); Nisha feels “so much anger it’s going to blow [her] head off” or she’ll “take a knife and carve out [her] womb” (2007a: 332). Animal, filled with anger and self-loathing, attempts to kill himself by ingesting poisonous pills: “I was right to eat the pills. I deserve to die,” he thinks (338). And Ma Franci martyrs herself, in a dramatic scene, by walking “into that cloud of death” (273). The return of this “cloud of death” in Animal’s People is chemical, but it billows forth from the character’s anger and sense of abandonment. In other words, poisonous chemicals, like MIC, have not only coated the economic environment that reproduces food and debt in parts of India, they have also left behind a sticky residue that traces the historical investment in, and abandonment of, people as cheap labour or inexpensive human capital.

  In The Birth of Biopolitcs, Michel Foucault argues that under a neoliberal regime, “environmental technologies” are used to manipulate the “cost-benefit” framework that produces human capital (2008: 259, 261). According to Foucault, neoliberalism’s understanding of humanity as “human capital” is “not a conception of labor power; it is a conception of capability…so that the worker himself appears as a sort of enterprise for himself” (2008: 225). This vision of enterprise humanity radically redistributes the risks of capitalism onto individuals’ private decisions, even as various incentives, debts, hedges, advertisements, and zones of abandonment manipulate the decision-making environment. While not an exhaustive definition of humanism as such, human capital has become a dominant conceptualization of contemporary humanism in that it figures a subject recognizable in the political economy of neoliberal governance. In the case of the Bhopal chemical spill, Union Carbide and Dow Chemical have repeatedly blamed the leak on decisions made by individual workers within the factory at the time. Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide, stated, “Our safety standards in the U.S. are identical to those in India … Compliance with these procedures is the responsibility of plant operators” (Everest 1986: 18–19). The corporation’s defence, therefore, relied on a linkage between human-error and diminished human capital. Much of the US press, which appeared to support Union Carbide’s claims, reported that “unskilled, unsupervised workers” who “might have added some substance into the tank” were on duty the night of the spill (McFadden 1984: 10 December). In effect, Union Carbide argued that local Indian workers possessed diminished capacities, implying that the spill was caused by an absence of individual enterprise at the plant. Indeed, three years prior to the Bhopal spill, when a worker died after inhaling phosgene at the factory, “Union Carbide blamed the dead worker for removing his gas mask,” even though “no one had warned [him that phosgene was present] before he went on cleaning duties” (Mukherjee 2010: 141). Here, the worker, as an enterprise, assumes personal responsibility for decisions he or she makes in risk-environments that have been stretched by transnational capitalism and shrunk by the presence of poisonous molecules. Just months prior to the Bhopal spill, Union Carbide froze spending on safety procedures, cut “permanent employment [at their Indian plant] … from 850 to 642,” and fired half of staff in the MIC production unit. Although these decisions directly conditioned workers’ capacity to maintain the plant, such “environmental technologies” fell outside the eye-to-eye scope of human responsibility, according to Union Carbide lawyers.

  If the redistribution of environmental risk onto individuals is bound up in the dominant neoliberal understanding of humanity as human capital, then it is no surprise that Animal’s refusal to be named “human” is interpreted by many as an abdication of personal freedom and responsibility. Animal’s friend Farouq, for instance, argues that Animal only “pretend[s] to be an animal so [he] can escape the responsibility of being human,” and “to be accepted as a human being, you must behave like one” (2007a: 209). Animal is asked not only to act in accordance wit
h accepted norms, but also to assume inflated individual risk for the maintenance of those norms. Farouq goes on to explain that “the more human you act, the more human you’ll be,” suggesting that being human is an enterprise measured by one’s capacity to risk, in every action, becoming more or less human. This form of humanism is tantamount to joining a union without the possibility of collective action or collective bargaining. Later in the novel, Animal’s friend Nisha claims, “Animal, you are a free human being, you are free to make your own decisions. Nobody will stop you or say you shouldn’t.” Animal is perplexed by Nisha’s explanation and its negative definition of freedom. He thinks to himself, “So? … I am not a human being, plus I don’t need anyone’s permission to be free” (2007a: 194). Once again, humanity is presented to Animal as a community that, first and foremost, lacks community. The freedom “to make your own decisions” does not, in Animal’s mind, require membership or permission. Rather, Animal is interested in the possible of a community that promises some measure of collective or partial agency.

  In the Shadow of Human Rights

  If Animal poses a “nother world” of synesthetic experiences to interrupt his reader’s desire to see the chemical spill as a completed event, and if Sinha critiques a vision of humanism that forces individuals to assume full responsibility for systemic risks, then where, in this mix of substitutions, can political rights and legal justice be found? For his part, Animal is determined to expose the way humanist discourses have so far failed to provide his “nother” community a workable notion of “rights, law justice” (2007a: 3). This failure becomes apparent when an Australian journalist seeks to interview Animal, and Animal points out thatmany books have been written about this place, [but] no one has changed anything for the better, how will yours be different? You will bleat like all the rest. You’ll talk of rights, law, justice. Those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours but they don’t mean the same … such words are like shadows the moon makes in the Kampani’s factory, always changing shape. On that night it was poison, now it’s words that are choking us. (3)