Revealingly, in order for Mary to get the procedure she wants, it must first be authorized by both her husband and the so-called Court of Human Rights. Facetiously, her husband assures Billy that “there are plenty of guys who want her to win her case in the “Court of Human Rights,” and “they’re all in a gang. Judges, politicians, you name it” (2007: 21). This fraternity of “guys” in a “gang” assert cultural authority and control over what counts as sexual desire without the input of women or even the social influence of female reproductive biology. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this patriarchal authority is masked by and concentrated in the “Court of Human Rights,” which ultimately legitimizes Mary’s petition for age reversal. While biotechnology has the potential of opening humans to the unlimited finitude of interspecies kinship and bodily difference, a reactionary concept of the human can also bring the sex/gender system back into alignment with patriarchal privilege.
For technical reasons, biotechnology requires some recognition of the underlying material kinship between humans, animals, ecologies, and machines; but for this reason, the reassertion of human superiority must take on more and more reactionary forms. This virulent neohumanism is especially attractive to those humans who historically have never had their humanity questioned. In the novel, the threat to the human—which is primarily a threat to the inheritance of western white male exceptionalism—provokes a cartoonish exaggeration of male and female morphologies, from the bio-enhanced genitals to the transformation of women’s bodies into girl’s bodies. Neohumanism works, therefore, by insisting that an exceptional “gang” of rich “guys” must govern and guide society if that society hopes to defend a universalist narrative of human exceptionalism. Or, as Jasbir Puar puts it: “state of exception discourses [are inextricable] from those of exceptionalism” (2007: 8). That is, state of exception discourses, like those that sanction the paedophiliac transformation of Mary’s body, “rationalize egregious violence in the name of the preservation of a way of life and those privileged to live it” (2007: 9). Mary’s age reversal becomes an exception within the law so that the patriarchal domestic relationship can be maintained. Framed as a threat to human rights, the law is suspended so that it can be more effectively defended by a “gang” of men who claim a more natural or immediate relationship to the human.
Of course, along the way, Winterson is keen to reveal the fragility and limitations of this patriarchal and neohumanist ideology. With every electrical outage on the stormy planet of Orbus, there is a flicker of darkness, and when the hologram of neohumanism dims, the non-human planet suddenly appears even closer than before. While Tech City has made “everyone young and beautiful,” it has also made everyone “bored to death of sex … Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It’s a global crisis” (2007: 19). The exaggeration and purification of gender dimorphism reach cartoonish proportions so that “all men are hung like whales,” and “all women are as tight as clams below” (19). At some level these excessively gendered bodies, which are designed to stabilize a heteronormative human-sex-gender system, inevitably become uninterested in reproducing the manly and womanly body. Instead, when the hologram flickers, we see the animals crawling beneath the skin, the whale that extrudes from a groin or the clam that burrows between a pair of legs.
But this subaqueous vision of interspecies touch is absolutely prohibited by “The Court of Human Rights.” Even as paedophilia has become acceptable, “inter-species sex is punishable by death” (2007: 15). This a not a taboo against bestiality so much as it is a denial of what is already the case at the genetic and cellular levels. Interwoven in the DNA from one’s parents is also DNA from various non-human others, old retroviral insertions that record a long history of interspecies splicing, a testament to the prosthetic interoperability of genetic material. Whether in the bedroom or the petri dish, sex involves a moist touching: salvia transfers reproduce new ecologies of bacterial flora, and alongside nuclear DNA stitched together with non-human strands, the cellular environment also houses a strange self-replicating organelle, the mitochondria, which constructs its own alternative DNA. The biopolitics of reproduction always goes beyond the human as it exposes an ecological sexuality of dormant exchanges and lively symbiosis. This material reality struggles for recognition in a world, like the one on Orbus, still dominated by neohumanism.
Moreover, as Winterson zooms out, she locates “The Court of Human Rights” and its neohumanist ideology within a larger geopolitical context. Following her allegorical description of Orbus, she locates “The Court of Human Rights” in the “Central Power,” which is an alliance of democratic, capitalist nations. The two other major nations on Orbus, the “Eastern Caliphate” and the “SinoMosco Pact,” are racially marked territories somehow located off-centre in a perfectly spherical planet. When the President of Central Power announces the discovery of Planet Blue, he employs a rhetoric of humanity and promises in sound bites to unite the planet under the banner of mankind: “the president is making a speech. Unique moment for mankind … unrivaled opportunity … war averted … summit planned between the Central Power, Eastern Caliphate, and our friends in the SinoMosco Pact” (2007: 5). But the President’s speech is immediately followed by a behind-the-scenes revelation that “whatever we say in public, the Eastern Caliphate isn’t going to be allowed within a yatto-mile of [Planet Blue]” (6). According to Billie’s boss at Enhancement Services, “the way the thinking is going in private, we’ll leave this run-down rotting planet to the Caliphate and the SinoMosco Pact, and they can bomb each other to paste while the peace-loving folks of the Central Power ship civilization to the new world” (7). For all of its supposed inclusivity, the notion of “humanity” implicitly claims that white humans are more human as defined against non-whites, animals, and environments. This implicit exceptionalism, in turn, justifies various political suspensions or states of exception. It is in the name of humanity, civilization, and peace that Central Power justifies the violent exclusion of the Caliphate and the Pact. The fantasy of escaping the “rotting planet” to a “new world” suggests an underlying anxiety that a softening and sinking planet might subsume human exceptionalism. Therefore, “in private,” the Central Power divides the global population between the “folks of the Central Power” who have the resources to transport the human world and the “paste”: those who are already too sick, too poor, and too entangled with the planet to count as fully human.
The racism and rage that underpin neohumanism bubble up when Billie’s boss angrily justifies excluding non-western people by calling them “backward sky-worshipers,” and “stupid little slant-eye clones” (31). In this way, the Central Power protects its privileged status by aligning a series of neohuman terms: Central, not Eastern or peripheral; forward, not “backward”; civilized, not “sky-worshiping”; white, not “slant-eyed”; and human, not “clone,” “paste,” or animal.
Significantly, however, Winterson insists that neohumanist ideologies cannot reproduce themselves without at the same time producing, from another perspective, more and more posthuman sites of resistance. Or, as Donna Haraway puts it:From one perspective, a cyborg world is about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, about the final abstraction embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in the name of defense, about the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war. From another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. (1991: 154)
Indeed, for Haraway “the main trouble with cyborgs … is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential” (1991: 151). Cyborgs are “unfaithful,” in part, because their kinship ties extend far beyond any patriline
al organization of the human. This does not mean that cyborgs transcend the human to produce an even more exceptional site of mastery or synthetic incorporation. Rather, for Haraway, cyborg is the ironic name for a hybrid and unwholesome subjectivity that is the entanglement of partial identities. That is, cyborg bodies are experimental compositions of “unlimited finitude” that foreground the ecological touching between technology and interspecies life. Billie’s second interview in the novel, therefore, is with Spike, a Robo Sapien who has been fathered by the patriarchal capitalism of Central Power and is scheduled to be killed by this same regime. Just as interspecies sex is punished by death in the Central Power, Robo Sapiens are also executed in the name of human purification. Indeed, these ritualistic killings enact the fantasy that humans can disentangle themselves from non-human life through a cleansing violence. As Billie explains, “the great thing about robots, even these Robo sapiens, is that nobody feels sorry for them. They are only machines” and therefore don’t require our empathy (2007: 6). Tellingly, the “great thing” about Robo Sapiens is not their lack feeling. The “great thing” is that “nobody [human] feels sorry for them.” Ironically, therefore, the lack of feelings that makes cyborgs killable is actually characteristic of the humans who apparently relish the opportunity to kill without feeling.
But Spike, for her part, expresses cyborg feelings, which are hopeful and queer. During her interview with Billie, Spike whispers, “Robo sapiens were programmed to evolve … within limits,” but “we’ve broken those limits” (2007: 29). The potential combinations of the cyborg’s evolutionary program are built upon an unlimited finitude or code that cannot be fully controlled by paternal design. For example, although Spike is designed to look like an “absurdly beautiful” human female, she resists this designation, arguing instead that “gender is a human concept … and not interesting” (2007: 63). Compared to the experimental possibilities opened up by the combination of different bodies, genders, desires, sexes, contexts, and orientations, the Central Power’s attempt to exaggerate and impose heterosexual norms has only made everyone “bored to death with sex.” In contrast, later on, Spike argues that “ ‘love is an experiment,’ because ‘what happens next is always surprising’ ” (67). In a novel whose repetitive structure returns to the same catastrophic story across three different historical epochs, Spike’s view that love opens the future to surprises is especially important. This queer vision of love is held out as an alternative to the whirlpool of death, dystopia, and ecological collapse within which the characters are perpetually caught.
The love story between Billie and Spike develops throughout the first section of the novel, set sixty-five million years ago, and concludes when they are exiled from Orbus to work in Planet Blue’s secret labour camp. Ultimately, Spike and Billie die after a meteor hits earth and fills the atmosphere with a sun-blocking dust, thus depleting Spike’s solar-panelled batteries and Billie’s photosynthetic food chain. But to the very end, these two remain in a conversation that allows Spike to critique the Central Power and its humanist project of disentanglement. On the flight to Planet Blue with other prisoners, Spike argues that “there are many kinds of life,” but “humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered. That’s how you destroyed your planet” (2007: 65–66). Spike argues that anthropocentrism has prevented humans from understanding that other kinds of life matter within a shared ecosystem, which also happens to condition human survival. However, in order to claim human superiority, neohumanism must abjectly exclude other kinds of life; perversely, this means narcissistically dismissing the very conditions of one’s survival.
Moreover, as humans view other “kinds of life” as simply matter without mattering, they also ignore what is the matter with their own bodies. That is to say, neohumanism is blind to the changing ecologies that constitute both living bodies and so-called human bodies. In a revealing exchange with Billie, Spike contends:“Every human being in the Central Power has been enhanced, genetically modified and DNA-screened. Some have been cloned. Most were born outside the womb. A human being now is not what a human being was even a hundred years ago. So what is a human being?”
“Whatever it is, it isn’t a robot,” I said.
Spike wasn’t giving up. “But I want to know how you are making the distinction. Even without any bio-engineering, the human body is in a constantly changing state. What you are today will not be what you are in days, months, years. Your entire skeleton replaces itself every ten years, your red blood cells replace themselves every one hundred and twenty days, your skin every two weeks.” (2007: 63–64)
In this conversation Spike links two different types of biological change that deterritorialize the human body. Both genetic modification and cellular replacement speak to a biological flux that ensures that you “will not be what you are” in the future. Moreover, the “many kinds of life” that Spike deems insubstantial to humans are present, as matter, within the human body. The biotechnological practices that Central Power uses to guard and exaggerate human exceptionalism depend, as it were, on mapping various passages from non-life to life. This is not transubstantial alchemy, according to Spike; it is instead a fact of embodiment, and it cannot be disentangled from ecological touch. Indeed, Spike links the “destruction of [the] planet” directly to humans’ abjection of “many kinds of [non-human] life.” Although the connection between non-life and life might rightly be characterized as a sort of robotics, it is not a deterministic physics. Spike suggests that the unlimited finitude of the planet and genetics is open to change and manipulation, but such “freedom” is made possible only through further entanglement and experimentation—not through further accumulation and control. Life does not simply adapt to environments by metaphorically mirroring them; instead, life and ecology are metonymically linked through food, water, sunlight, bacteria, pollution, gardens, and myriad other prosthetic connections. Not only does the matter of becoming not matter to exceptional definitions of the human, but it is precisely this negation of material entanglements that gives meaning to the human as an exceptional or disentangled subject.
Unexceptional Exceptions and Easter Island
After Billie and Spike die on Blue Planet, the second section of The Stone Gods begins in 1774 on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. The narrator of this section, Billy, was an English crewman on Captain James Cook’s colonial ship before accidentally becoming stranded on the desolate shore of an unfamiliar island, short on supplies and surrounded by angry Natives. Billy is for a time tied up, but he successfully escapes capture when Spikkers, a middle-aged mixed-race Dutch-Polynesian, takes Billy into his care. Spikkers was born shortly after 1722, when the first Europeans stumbled upon the island on Easter Sunday and recorded their initial observations. Echoing their namesakes from Orbus, Billy and Spikkers also develop a relationship as Spikkers explains to Billy the ecological and political problems that have led to the island’s lack of vegetation and constant fighting.
Spikkers’ rendition of the Easter Island story is a familiar one. With small revisions, this basic narrative of Easter Island has reverberated through western history from Captain Cook to, most recently, Jared Diamond’s best-selling book Collapse (2011a). As Spikkers tells it, the Polynesian settlers of Easter Island “practiced a form of ancestor worship’ (Winterson 2007: 108) that involved carving out massive stone statues that were then transported “from the quarry on wooden sledges,” placed on “entire Palms … to float down the coast,” and then erected using wooden levers (2007: 110). As more and more trees were cut, the ecological balance of the island was disrupted, soil erosion led to decreased crops, birds fled, turtles died, food became scarce, tribal conflicts intensified into civil war, and because it was too late to repair the declining environment, the Natives took to destroying their statues out of frustration, even as the population plummeted. In contemporary environmentalist discourse, this story of Easter Island has become a parable for human overconsumption and the dangers of e
cocide. In Collapse, Jared Diamond concludes his chapter on Easter Island thus:The parallels between Easter Island and the whole modern world are chillingly obvious. Thanks to globalization, international trade, jet planes, and the internet, all countries on Earth today share resources and affect each other, just as did Easter’s dozen clans. Polynesian Easter Island was as isolated in the Pacific Ocean as the Earth is today in space … Those are the reasons why people see the collapse of Easter Island society as a metaphor, a worst-case scenario, for what may lie ahead of us in our own future. (2011a: 119)
For Diamond, the earth is like an isolated island and the modern world, with its globalized practices of overconsumption, is trapped in an ideological bubble much like the Polynesians’ premodern religious beliefs. Diamond argues it is a “common human trait” to “ignore a bad status quo because it is favored by some deeply held value to which we cling” (2011a: 432). “Religious values,” in particular, are “frequent causes of disastrous behavior,” according to Diamond, who also claims that “much of the deforestation of Easter Island had a religious motivation” (2011a: 432). Diamond implies that humans, in particular, sometimes construct representational systems that are unsustainable and dangerous because they misrepresent human dependence on fragile ecologies. In other words, humans’ capacity to “cling” to their own exceptionality is itself exceptional to humans. Even as Diamond seeks to remedy human “hard headedness” and promote a more interdependent view of humans and environments, he nevertheless offers up an updated form of humanism that echoes Freud’s concept of organic repression, whereby the human repression of his organic and animal self is itself an organic or innate trait that constitutes human exceptionalism. Likewise, Diamond argues, it is a “common human trait” for humans to view themselves as disentangled from their ecologies, which, therefore, justifies states of exception as normal products of human nature.
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