Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  Despite repeated evocations of human rights, the rule of law, and swift justice, for over thirty years toxic chemicals have continued to seep from the factory into Bhopal’s ground water; medical facilities still lack adequate resources; and the people of Bhopal have been denied the right to sue Union Carbide or Dow Chemical directly. In fact, shortly after the initial spill, in 1985, the Indian government passed the Bhopal Gas Leak Disaster Act. Herein, the statutory right to represent all the victims of the deadliest industrial incident in history was seized by the Indian government: “The government constituted itself as the sole representative of the victims, with full authority to litigate on their behalf and to settle their claims” (Eckerman 2005: 34). And while the government initially sought $3.3 billion in damages, in February of 1989, the case was suddenly settled out of court for $470 million, fifteen per cent of the $3.3 billion claim (2005: 34). Under appeal, this astonishingly inadequate settlement has been upheld in both US and Indian courts, effectively foreclosing any legal recognition of Bhopalies’ human rights in civil court.

  Drawing on such experiences, Animal is understandably sceptical that the universality of concepts like “rights, law, justice” can function as anything more than shadows cast by corporate behemoths. After all, in 2002, Dow Chemical’s spokesperson, Kathy Hunt, defended Union Carbide’s settlement by claiming, “you can’t really do more than that, can you? $500 is plenty good for an Indian” (Ravisankar 2015). Rhetorically, Dow’s position here is represented by the pronoun “you,” which not only situates the listener in Dow’s shoes, but also suggests that neither “you”—nor anyone else—could “really do more than” what Dow and Union Carbide have already done. If the “you” here pretends to address a generic audience of rational individuals, then it also clearly excludes Indians from this imagined community. What is “plenty good for an Indian,” as opposed to a non-Indian, produces a division that allows Hunt to construct “you” as someone capable of measuring the difference. Here, the neoliberal cost-benefit analysis of India’s diminished human capital meets the Freudian construction of civilized humans in opposition to “human types.” Accordingly, to be “you” or to be a legitimate judge of rights, law, and justice, you must first recognize that Indians are less-than-you. Or rather, as Upamanyu Mukherjee puts it, “the legal wrangle over accountability and compensation revealed that the idea … of the ‘human’ carried radically different meanings in the ‘global north’ of Euro-north America and the ‘global south’ of the postcolonial nations” (2010: 134). It is not simply, therefore, that Dow calls on you as a Euro-north American to validate their double-standard for Indians, which is plenty bad for a multinational corporation, but, moreover, Dow only recognizes you as a rightful interlocutor belatedly, after “you can’t really do more,” after the question of justice has already been legally settled according to the logic and legacy of this foundational division.

  Because of this very old imperial, and very new neoliberal, problem with actually existing humanism, Animal expresses real concern that “you will bleat like the rest,” and merely reproduce a universal notion of rights, law, and justice. Because these words are like shadows that are “always changing shape,” the equality they promise, for Animal, is elusive if not illusionary. Rather than providing Animal’s people with the standing to make legal and political claims against multinational corporations, the discourse of “rights, law, justice” has been used by the Indian government, Dow Chemical, and the legal system to deny that the people have any legal right to appeal the justice of an already settled case. As Animal points out, “those words sound the same in my mouth as in yours, but they don’t mean the same” (2007a: 3). Their meaning is distorted, in part, because the slow violence of the ongoing chemical spill continues to produce new victims who are born into a world where their civil rights have already been exhausted. In other words, rather than providing the framework for a political community yet-to-come, the discursive promise of universal human rights, for Animal, only stands in the way of constructing a future political community that can match the environmental technologies of neoliberal globalization.

  Furthermore, where justice is affirmed by the legal application of human rights, the question of who counts as a human person becomes the key determination. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the preamble to Union Carbide’s manifesto on “Corporate Safety” begins without irony: “Human beings are our most precious asset … and their health and safety are therefore our number one priority” (Lapierre and Moro 2002: 145). Understood as an “asset,” “human beings” are here defined as the subject of Union Carbide’s “number one priority.” That is, the health and safety of human beings only becomes the “number one priority” if human beings are a priori defined as human capital, a profitable “asset” for Union Carbide. According to Mukherjee, this definition constitutes the “scandal that lurks behind the tragedy of Bhopal: if there are those who, by dint of their underprivileged location in the hierarchy of the ‘new world order’, cannot access the minimum of the rights … that are said to define ‘humanity’, what can they be called?” (2010: 144–145). Living in a state of legal exhaustion, where the question of rights has already been asked and answered, the language of humanity is little more than a painful and silencing abstraction for this community. As Animal surmises, “on that night it was poison” that choked the community; “now it’s words we’re choking on.”

  Tragic Accidents and Human Extras

  Just as Animal suspects the journalist will “bleat like the rest” about “rights, law, justice,” he is equally concerned that the journalist will represent the spill as a tragic accident, ignoring the ongoing struggles that animate Animal’s community. According to Animal, while repeated representations of the chemical spill have allowed “strangers in far off countries” to “marvel there’s so much pain in the world,” these stories have failed to analyse the role played by multinational corporations in conditioning and distributing much of this pain (2007a: 5). Too often, reports of a “far off … marvel” read as human-interest stories that cathartically affirm the reader’s belief in humanity’s tragic fragility and heroic survival: Man versus Nature, Man versus Technology, Man versus Man.6 Represented as a “marvel,” the spill figures as both exceptionally visual and as a visual exception that maps the “far off” margin of human experience at the periphery of the western world. The marvel, therefore, is made accessible in only the most abstract terms, reduced, as it were, to the aggregate and undifferentiated “pain in the world.” Such reportage is unlikely to contextualize the spill alongside other toxic leaks like Monsanto’s spread of DDT, the Exon Valdez oil spill, the Deepwater Horizon explosion (BP), the Fukushima radiation leak (TEPCO & GE), or the many other environmental disasters linked to multinational corporations. Instead, in such stories, the spill is framed as an ahistorical accident and the existential product of human’s tragic folly.

  A snapshot of US reportage following the Bhopal spill only confirms Animal’s fears about western journalism. Consider, for example, William Broad’s New York Times article “Risks and Benefits,” published on December 7, 1984, four days after the Bhopal disaster. It begins, “an accident causing great loss of life in the third world has reached the consciousness of the industrialized world. Unlike other disasters, this one seems to speak to an amorphous dread that is the price humanity sometimes pays for the bounty of technology” (1984). Framed as an “accident,” this article uses the sacrificial cost of humanity’s technological progress as the metanarrative through which the “industrialized world” becomes “conscious” of “third world … loss of life.” Even though Union Carbide operated unsafe factories in many countries, including both India and the United States, the grand narrative of humanity’s progress is the only way offered to connect the implicitly disconnected industrialized and third worlds. Stating, without irony, that “the tragedy in India has to be seen in its wider context,” the article goes on to offer History of Technology professor Dr Melvin Kr
anzberg’s assessment that “of those people killed, half would not have been alive today if it weren’t for that plant and the modern health standards made possible by wide use of pesticides” (1984). Not only does Kranzberg recuperate the deadliest industrial disaster in history by putting it in the “wider context” of universal human progress and modernization, but he also questions, within this context, whether postcolonial deaths fully count as deaths at all. Apparently, from the vantage point of the industrialized world, where humanity can be measured with mathematical precision, precisely “half” of those killed at Bhopal would not have been alive anyway, if it were not for the life-giving powers of Union Carbide’s pesticides.

  In a scene featuring a dinner conversation between two doctors, Animal’s People critiques this very same pseudo-scientific treatment of postcolonial death as a sacrificial cost in the larger scheme of human progress. Over dinner at his house, a wealthy, unnamed Indian doctor advises his young American colleague, Elli Barber, to “‘forget about the disaster.’” Conceding that “maybe there are some people in the slums that want to keep the agitation going,” the Indian doctor explains that “the rest of us, citizens, city council, chamber of commerce, everyone, we all want to move on” (2007a: 152–153). Revealingly, the wealthy doctor substitutes “the rest of us” not living in the slums with “citizens” and then “everyone.” For this doctor, the desire to “move on” and leave the spill in the past is not merely a sentiment shared by some corners of civil society; no, the desire to “forget about the disaster” and move forward is the prerequisite that constitutes the whole of society or at least “everyone” that counts as a member. Indeed, the doctor goes on to explain that “those poor people never had a chance. If it had not been the factory it would have been cholera, TB, exhaustion, hunger. They would have died anyway” (153). When Elli pushes back against the harsh calculus used to subtract the slums from society, the old doctor responds by stating that he is just “facing facts” (153). Like the New York Times article, this wealthy doctor here promotes an image of shared humanity premised on reducing the mass death of poor people to a tragic fact. Such facts are derived from a concept of human capital that subjects humanity to cost-benefit analysis and weighs the value of individual deaths differently depending on the deceased’s riskiness or level of modernity. According to a neoliberal formulation of humanity, because the victims of the spill “would have died anyway,” their suffering is a small cost to human capital when compared to the “chamber of commerce’s” desire to “move on.” Using a neoliberal notion of humanity to bridge the gap between the “far off marvel” and the “rest of us,” the spill’s significance is foreclosed by the tragic fact that “those poor people never had a chance.”

  Animal senses this foreclosure of meaning during his meeting with the journalist. Sizing up the journalist’s intentions, Animal describes the journalist’s “gaze … as if [his] eyes were buttons and mine were buttonholes” (2007a: 4). To be sure, this is not an image of empathic journalism; the journalist does not want to see the world through Animal’s eyes, but, rather, seeks to insert his own eyes, his own way of seeing, into Animal’s body, which is figured as a piece of clothing designed for fastening. For Animal, the journalist’s power is not merely representational, not simply the ideological imposition of a tragic narrative onto his body. Rather, Animal believes that the journalist wants to take hold of his body from the inside out, just like the factory’s poisons have done. Animal knows full well that the journalist has employed a local guide to help seek out “the really savage things, the worst cases,” and that Animal was selected for interview because he was a boy who “lost everything on that night” (4). In other words, the journalist wants to find the most abject marvels of impoverishment and abnormality, the bodies most orphaned by toxic chemicals. Having “lost everything on that night,” these bodies can hold nothing back, the journalist believes. By “buttoning” his eyeballs into Animal’s body, Animal will be forced to see himself as a tragic fact and to feel shame from his body and for his body. Furthermore, by cloaking himself in Animal’s skin, the journalist can use Animal’s body to self-servingly reflect his heroic compassion. Ultimately, Animal not only resists this transplantation of the journalist’s eyes and shame, but also argues that “we are not really people” in the journalist’s eyes, “we don’t have names. We flit in crowds at the corner of his eye. Extras we’re, in his movie” (9). Pushed back into the liminal “corner of [the journalist’s cinematic] eye,” Animal knows that his community is only a marvellous prop in the journalist’s heroic disaster movie. Indeed, as “extras” in this epic visualization of humanity, Animal’s people are indispensably dispensable; they are the “not really people” who “would have died anyway,” representing the risk and shame of man’s accidental existence. Against the tragedy suffered by extras, the indefatigable overcoming of risk through private enterprise and individual responsibility constitutes the narrative of universal human progress.

  The Human Element

  Perhaps nowhere is the neoliberal image of humanity more visually stunning than in Dow Chemical’s global, multimedia, rebranding campaign based on a new logo and catchphrase: “HU, The Human Element.” First launched in 2006, the $100 million blitz is premised on Dow’s epiphanic discovery of the Human Element, which is meant to convey Dow’s newfound investment in human progress through the technological overcoming of global warming, starvation, and pollution. According to the ad developer, John Claxton, “including the Human Element on the Periodic Table of the Elements changed the way Dow looked at the world and the way the world looked at Dow” (Grbic 2010). For his part, Indra Sinha has repeatedly denounced Dow’s rebranding campaign as a “glossy falsehood,” arguing that “telling lies beautifully does not make them true” (Sinha 2008). In the gap between beautiful branding and truth, Dow’s ads picture an at-risk humanity whose future depends on a massive investment in private enterprise and new environmental technologies7 (Fig. 4.1).

  Fig. 4.1Framing individuality, recognition, and surveillance in Dow Chemical Company ad. Fortune, March 17, 2008: 5–6. Print

  For Dow, the so-called bond between chemistry and humanity opens up “a new way of seeing that gives [Dow] a new way of touching” (2008). Significantly, the ads’ prominent thematics of recognition and surveillance ultimately yield a new technology of touching and prosthetic bonding. While the Human Element is held out as exceptional because it serves as a lens through which Dow can survey the world “for the first time, quite clearly,” the Human Element also presents humanity as a reconfigurable compound that only exists in combination with other elements on the periodic table. Indeed, the power to “touch … [the] health, shelter, food and water” of a given population is a form of biotechnology that “knows no borders,” neither national, natural, nor biological—all of which have proven pliable to Dow’s global and chemical reach. In other words, Dow seeks to assemble privately owned networks of biological dependence so that clean water, plentiful food, and bodily health rely evermore on the prosthetic touch of Dow’s life-supporting technologies.

  Nevertheless, this borderless technology of touch is visually represented by the emphatic presentation of a border within the frame, the neatly boxed logo of human life, “Hu.” Like the other elements on the periodic table, the “Hu” in Dow’s ads includes the element’s atomic number atomic mass “7E+09,” which is meant to tally the seven billion humans living on earth. Moreover, Dow regularly pairs its atomic logo for Human with the expressive face of a non-western or non-white child. For example, in the ad above, the close-up image of a single pensive schoolboy is mirrored by the equally large symbol for the Human Element. This atomistic and fetishistic focus on the schoolboy is reflected by the atomic weight of humanity. Each of the seven billion individual humans on living on Earth is at once absolutely unique and absolutely exchangeable. The Human Element glowingly affirms the individual as the basic unit for all humanity, thus ensuring that individual difference is atomi
cally isolated and contained within a rigid rubric of underlying standardization.

  Never mind the transnational and biochemical scale and scope of Dow’s operations, Dow envisions the autonomous individual as the indivisible source of creativity and enterprise. Indeed, Dow’s formulation of “Issues. Ambitions. Lives” only punctuates Dow’s strategic alignment of public “issues” with private “ambitions” and touchable “lives.” If public “issues,” like global warming, have produced “human problems,” then we should look to “ambitious” individuals, like the enterprising schoolboy, to discover “new thinking and new solutions.” Here, Dow’s technologies of touch are figured as merely tools, and, caveat emptor, the risk and responsibility of their use must belong to individual wielders. Even if Dow broadly intervenes in the “health, shelter, food and water” of a given population to make “lives” dependent on its prosthetic technologies, such networks disappear when you “look at life” through the particular lens of the Human Element. Put differently, Dow’s power of surveillance is also its power to not be seen.