In the novel’s closing pages, Animal receives a letter from Elli telling him that “money has been found” to perform an operation that would straighten his back. Animal explains his decision not to have the surgery by evoking the emergence of a posthuman community: “we are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us” (2007a: 366). The people of the “apokalis,” Animal’s people, do not accept the narratives of development common to colonialism, the Green Revolution, and neoliberalism that frame postcolonial communities as trapped in the past. Rather, they inhabit and are inhabited by the expanding zones of apocalyptic capitalism that mark out a more likely futurity for many, for most. Neither universal nor individualistic, neither celebratory nor merely dystopian, tomorrow’s “more of us” is an undead community forged in toxic heat of this “nother world.”
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Footnotes
1Kim Fortun highlights the shocking discrepancy of various estimates: “The Indian government counted 1754 dead and 200,000 injured. Indian newspapers counted 2500 dead and 200,000–300,000 injured. United States newspapers counted the dead as 2000+ and the injured as 200,000. Voluntary organizations counted 3000–10,000 dead and 300,000 injured. The Delhi Science Forum, one of the groups I worked with, listed 5000 dead and 250,000 injured. Eyewitness interviews claim 6000–15,000 dead and 300,000 injured” (2001: 15). Lapierre and Moro add that “in the absence of official death certificates, large numbers of corpses were incinerated or buried anonymously” (2002: epilogue).
2A summary of the fourteen recent studies conducted by different research groups on Bhopal’s water supply can be downloaded here: https://www.bhopal.net/wp-content/uploads/Reports/Contamination/Summary-of-Contamination-Studies-Bhopal.pdf.
3Two other scenes that foreground Animal’s synesthetic narration are the Yar-yilaqi fire walking scene in Tape 14 and the Holi scene in Tape 15. In both cases Animal’s narration is infused with the voices and sensory experience of those surrounding him, disorienting the reader, and complicating any simple stable understanding of the novel as a first-person narration.
4The use of the term “prosthetic” here builds on Elizabeth Grosz’s definition in “Prosthetic Objects” where she highlights “material … relations of incorporation,” concluding that “it remains ambiguous … whether it is the nonliving, the inhuman which functions as prosthetic for living beings, or whether, on the contrary, living beings are the prosthetic augmentations of inert matter, matter’s most elaborate invention and self-reflection” (2005: 145, 152). Grosz rejects a normative (white, heteronormative, ableist) definition of prosthesis that seeks to recuperate an organic vision of the human. Instead, prosthetic is an accounting for and an exploration of relations between bodies-objects that look to systematic effects and new potentialities. This term, then, also clearly echoes Stacy Alaimo’s concept of “trans-corporeality,” especially as Alaimo uses Grosz and Karen Barad to consider the posthuman consequences of trans-corporeality in the final chapter of her book Bodily Natures (2010). Mel Chen’s concept of “Animacy” also highlights similar concerns. For instance, Chen describes how—during episodes of involuntary intoxication due to Mercury poisoning—leathers, perfumes, cars, couches, and girlfriends all provoke deeply intimate and unfamiliar affects. Here Chen finds it nearly impossible to distinguish between “living and lifely things,” especially since these affects result from molecular interpenetrations and bodily absorptions (2012: 202).
5There has been some controversy about the meaning and significance of Sainath’s reporting. For instance, Ian Plewis (2014) concludes his review of the suicide data: “the Indian farmer suicide story has become received wisdom for some anti-GM campaigners. In fact, we find that the suicide rate for male Indian
farmers is slightly lower than for non-farmers” (2014: 18). Meanwhile, a London School of Economics review by Srijit Mishra (2014) points to some unusual factors in the collection of data during certain sub-periods and from specific regions. Mirsha clarifies: “At the all India level, suicide rate for male farmers is lower than that of the male non-farmers [only] in the first (1995–1997) and the last (2010–2012) sub-periods. This turnaround in the last sub-period is largely on account of a sudden decline in the reporting of farmers’ suicides in Chhattisgarh and non-reporting in West Bengal, which we will elaborate later” (5). Furthermore, Mishra adds, “It is a matter of concern when suicide rate for farmers will be relatively higher than that for non-farmers. This happens to be so for all the six sub-periods in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Maharashtra, the national capital region of Delhi and the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli” (2014: 5). Additionally, Mishra notes that in the Chhattisgarh region “There seems to be an implicit change in defining professions after 2009. The reported data indicate a near absence of farmers’ suicides (zero in 2011 and four in 2012) while at the same time there has been an increase in the suicide of the professions ‘self-employed (others)’ and ‘others’” (2014: 7). And even more disturbingly, “Farmers’ suicides data for West Bengal in 2012 is missing from the reported annual publication by NCRB … West Bengal constituted nearly 6% of male farmers’ suicides in India in the years prior to 2012. This is a concern because the aggregate suicides for the state have been reported” (2014: 7). While it is wise to approach the “seeds of suicide” narrative with some healthy scepticism, it is critically important to see how the counter argument, which discounts the significance of these farmers’ suicides, relies on tailored data.
6In her essay “‘The Poor Remain’: A Posthumanist Rethinking of Literary Humanitarianism in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People,” Jennifer Rickel brilliantly explores this topic (2012). For Rickel, Animal’s People is “posthuman” because, in large part, it resists a mode of “literary humanism” that treats the reader’s recognition of others suffering as in itself a resolution to that suffering. Rickel’s reading is especially helpful for thinking about how traumatic testimonies do or do not open up space for political analysis.
7Although Dow has been associated with a long list of environmental and health fiascos, including the production of Napalm during the Vietnam War, and the continued production of Dursban in India (outlawed as toxic in the United States), Dow’s 2001 acquisition of the Union Carbide Corporation proved especially controversial. Even though Warren Anderson, the CEO of Union Carbide, still faced outstanding criminal charges in India, Dow failed to disclose any Bhopal-related liabilities in their filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Sue Breach, a Dow spokesperson, responded to the apparent omission by denying any continued liability whatsoever, asserting “the matter was legally resolved in India with respect to Union Carbide Corporation and its subsidiaries” (Kumar Sen 2000). “Dow’s Indian subsidiary” followed up on this assertion by petitioning “the High Court [in India] … to get a stay on the summons issued against Dow USA,” which, in effect, sheltered Warren Anderson from long-standing criminal charges. As with the civil lawsuit, criminal litigation against Anderson, UCC, and Dow has been stymied, leaving the people of Bhopal without any legal recourse for justice.
8Jesse Oak Taylor’s essay “Powers of Zero: Aggregation, Negation and the Dimensions of Scale in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People” traces the meaning of Zafar’s concept, “the power of nothing,” from its initial meaning as “having nothing left to lose” to its ultimate meaning as “the power of negation … a weapon in [the struggle for justice] as Zafar … embarks on a hunger strike” (2013: 188). Echoing some of Taylor’s key concepts, I read Zafar’s fast as a moment of transformation or metamorphosis. At a physical level his body undergoes a chemical change that brings him, perhaps only ritualistically, closer to the community he hopes to represent; it is a community that has been defined (at least from the outside) as the negative or abject populace against which “civilized humans” have been historically defined. In this sense, Taylor is quite correct when he argues that “the potential for community resilience … is rendered palpable in the energy that crackles through Animal’s People” (2013: 195).
© The Author(s) 2019
J. O. JohnstonPosthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary NovelsPalgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicinehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0_5
5. Cyborgs: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
Justin Omar Johnston1
(1)Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA
Justin Omar Johnston
NASA’s photos of earth from outer space are some of the most widely circulated images in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. They have been reproduced on countless consumer products, T-shirts, iPhone wallpapers, and advertisements, and have been adopted as the logo for many humanitarian and environmentalist groups. One of the early reproductions of NASA’s 1967 satellite photo was made by Steward Brand who launched The Whole Earth Catalog (1968) with the image on the cover, alongside the phrase “access to tools.”1 For Brand the photo perfectly demonstrated his thesis that “we [humans] are as gods and might as well get used to it” (1968: 2). And yet, at the same time, Brand admits that he was motivated by Buckminster Fuller’s claim that “people perceived the earth as flat and infinite, and that that was the root of their misbehavior” (1976). In other words, Brand understood the photo as a paradoxical symbol of both humanity’s godlike powers and its material constraints. The photo is an expression of humans’ technological mastery over earth’s terrestrial limitations (“we are now as gods”). But equally so, the appearance of earth’s edge reveals humans’ absolute dependence on this small planet, which is no longer perceived as “flat and infinite” but instead, curved and finite (Fig. 5.1).
Fig. 5.1Uncanny images of earth from outer space. NASA’s “Blue Marble” from Apollo 17, December 7, 1972
These conflicting interpretations highlight the image’s enduring power as an optical illusion that depicts both the transcendent perspective of the photographer and the objective finitude of planetary life. Discussing NASA’s famous 1972 “blue marble” photo, Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacy argue that “the panoptic lens of space photography both extends and restricts the possibilities of what it is to be human; it establishes a space of visualisation without horizon, a space which Gilles Deleuze describes as unlimited finitude” (Franklin et al. 2000: 28). Interestingly, the photo “establishes a space of visualization without horizon” not only because it opens up an extra-terrestrial perspective, but also because it reveals earth to be a circular, horizonless enclosure. This is an unlimited finitude because, internally, the circumscribed earth is teeming with interminable possibilities.
Significantly, Franklin, Lury, and Stacy borrow the term “unlimited finitude” from Gilles Deleuze’s short essay “On the Death of Man and Superman,” where Deleuze sketches three successive periods of western thought when the epistemological meaning of “man” changed: the classical, the disciplinary, and the emergent. “In the classical historical formation,” Deleuze argues, “the forces within man [imagination, memory, desire] enter into a relation with forces from the outside in such a way that the compound is a God-form, and not at all a Man-form” (1988: 125). According to Deleuze, this is because seventeenth-century philosophers such as Spinoza and Liebniz conceived of man within metaphysical continuums or great chains of being that were always “raised to infinity,” thus carrying the human towards a God-form. In the nineteenth century, or the disciplinary period, “fractures [in] the [infinite] continuum” introduced “forces of finitude.” In the field of biology, for example, this allows for the “co-ordination and subordination of characteristics in a plant or animal … [and] impose[s] a division of organisms which can no longer be aligned [toward infinity in a great chain of being] but tend to develo
p each on its own” (1988: 127). This branching off and specialization gives rise to the human sciences and our modern conception of the “human” as both the subject and object of discipline-specific knowledge. Finally, towards the end of the essay, Deleuze introduces an emerging reorganization of “man” shaped by unlimited finitudes. Deleuze defines an “unlimited finitude” as “every situation of force in which a finite number of components yields to a practically unlimited diversity of combinations” (1988: 131). DNA, for example, is an “unlimited finitude” because its finite components can yield a virtually unlimited number of lively combinations. Likewise, computers offer a seemingly unlimited number of software applications for different working environments—from factory and agricultural production to transportation and logistics, research and entertainment, or trade and capital exchange. To the extent that life and labour are increasingly understood via such unlimited finitudes, Deleuze suggests, the Man-form of disciplinary knowledge gives way to a “superman” form: a figure “in charge of the animals [genetics] … in charge of … inorganic matter (the domain of silicon), and a figure who “tends to free life [and] labor … within himself” (1988: 132). Deleuze’s description of a superman here notably echoes Stewart Brand’s declaration that “we are as gods and might as well get used to it.”
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