Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  But establishing human exceptionalism as an entirely unexceptional “trait” of human beings is what allows Diamond to treat the premodern events on Easter Island as a metaphor for the postmodern crises of contemporary overconsumption. Indeed, in response to a critique of his work, Diamond reasserts his belief that “the islanders did inadvertently destroy the environmental underpinnings of their society. They did so, not because they were especially evil or deprived of foresight, but because they were ordinary people, living in a fragile environment, and subject to the usual human problems” (Diamond 2011b). In other words, the degradation of the “environmental underpinnings of society” is an all too human outcome when perfectly “ordinary people” are subject to the “usual human problems.” Billy echoes this sentiment when he claims that “the waste of [the native’s] enterprise seems hardly to have struck them, but I admit that my countrymen do the same in their warring and burning. Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself” (2007: 109). To be fair, Diamond does believe that humans can learn to manage their environments to prevent ecocide, but this requires an even more exceptional state of affairs, one that must correct for humans’ “ordinary,” “common,” and entirely natural tendency to view themselves as exceptional and/or exceptionally destructive.

  Part of the problem here is a literary one. At the end of the Easter Island section of The Stone Gods, Billy realizes “that one thing should stand for another is no harm, until the thing itself loses any meaning of its own. The island trees and all of this good land were sacrificed to a meaning that has now become meaningless. To build the Stone Gods, the island has been destroyed, and now the Stone Gods are themselves destroyed” (2007: 113). On the one hand, Billy diagnoses what he perceives to be the problem with the islanders’ religion. They destroyed their island because their representations of God failed to account for the necessary conditions of representation; they failed to see that representation is a material thing and therefore has a “meaning of its own” that is subject to the finitude of the island and not to the will of God or the humans who believed in him. But Billy’s insight also illuminates how readers might interpret this section of the novel. To see Easter Island as merely a metaphor for contemporary society is also to have “one thing … stand for another,” and threatens to sacrifice Easter Island “to a meaning” of human exceptionalism that is also a form of “meaningless” universality. If Easter Island is only a metaphor for contemporary forms of human exceptionalism, the very idea of human exceptionalism becomes dehistoricized.

  In their book The Statues That Walked, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo challenge Diamond’s metaphorical reading of Easter Island. Rather than suffering ecocide because of religious ideology, Hunt and Lipo argue that the Rapanui population decline can be traced back to multiple moments of colonization: first, “after the Polynesian colonialists arrived on the island … the rats they brought with them gorged themselves on … [the nuts] of giant palm trees,” leading to a spike in the rat population and endemic deforestation (2011: 29). Additionally, Hunt and Lipo find that “the first European visitors introduced diseases that initiated hideous and devastating germ warfare upon the island” (2011: 156). In other words, this familiar story of human ecocide should not be reduced to a cautionary tale or metaphor designed to encourage humans to exert even more mastery over the environment. It is important to remember that even when humans do destroy the environment, this destruction should not be reduced to a narrative of human exceptionalism, of mastery and control over the environment. Below such metaphors of exceptional power, rats often scurry and gnaw. Indeed, Billy sees several rats on Easter Island, noting that “it was the rats that had eaten the nuts of the Palm and harmed its generation,” but Billy then attributes this rat problem to the failure of the natives to “manage their land with broad sense” (2007: 110). That is, for Billy, as for Diamond, it is really not enough for humans to disentangle themselves from nature; instead, to be truly human, you must also “manage” nature “with broad sense.” In other words, behind the metaphoric comparison of Easter Island and contemporary globalization is the call for humans to not behave like animals, like rats, and instead to take up their rightful mantle as rational managers of the environment, unlike the Polynesians.

  Overlooked in Diamond’s and Billy’s metaphors, however, is the role European explorers and contagious disease played in Easter’s “collapse.” Ultimately, Easter Island cannot stand in metaphorically for planet earth because it is already a part of planet earth. A synecdochic reading of Easter Island, on the other hand, suggests a different understanding altogether. What happened on Easter Island is relevant to what is happening in the contemporary world but not because it represents a structural substitution. Instead, the relation is established by tracing an incomplete set of historical forces from one context to the other. That is, one cannot compare Easter Island to contemporary society without first accounting for the intermediary effects of slavery, European imperialism, western industrialization, global warming, and neoliberal capitalism. Mark Lynas, drawing on Hunt and Lipo’s work, begins to open up such a reading:Whilst the conventional narrative blames the islanders for committing a kind of collective ecological and social suicide (hence the term “ecocide”) this reading of history is almost certainly perpetuating a monumental injustice. For the Easter Islanders were indeed subject to a genocide—but it did not come from within. Instead, visiting ships brought epidemics of new diseases which wiped out the majority of the population—with most of the remnants later carted off in slave raids. (Lynas 2011)

  My point here is not to adjudicate an archaeological debate about the ultimate cause of ecological death on Easter Island in the late 1700s. Over a period of time small pox, slave raids, rat infestation, civil war, starvation, and deforestation all undoubtedly caused deaths on the island. Arguably, Winterson’s retelling of the story of Easter Island can be read as both a metaphoric and a synecdochic interpretation of ecological death, but there remain compelling reasons not to treat Easter Island as an exceptional space, somehow cut off from the finitude of the planet of which it is a part. Indeed, the mixed-race Spikkers embodies the ongoing entanglement between earthly cultures. Like Spike on Orbus, Spikkers on Easter Island underscores Winterson’s awareness of living bodies as sites of mixture that affect and are affected by the long strands of historical continuity.

  The Biopolitics of Evolutionary Time

  The final third of The Stone Gods takes place sometime during the middle of the twenty-first century, a period known as “Post-3War.” Here, the narrator, Billie, lives in a London that has been renamed “Tech City” and reconstructed by the MORE corporation. After England and the United States initiated what the Prime Minster called “a peaceful war [to] liberate our fellow citizens across the world,” Iran, Pakistan, and China retaliated by bombing the Anglo-American alliance (Winterson 2007: 130). Out of the rubble of this war, Billie explains, the “MORE corporation turned an emergency … into a new kind of economy … In Post-3War economics, Capitalism has gone back to its roots in paternalism, and forward into its destiny—complete control of everything and everyone, and with our consent. This is the new world. This is Tech City” (2007: 139). Yet Tech City is also the name for the old extinct world, the prehistoric capital of Central Power on Orbus. Just as the Billie who lived in the Tech City on Orbus worked for Enhancement Services, the Billie on earth works for MORE Futures, where it is her job to “teach” a Robo Sapien named Spike “to understand what it means to be human” (135). The repetitions between the two Tech Cities, separated by sixty-five million years, structure and align the first and final sections of the novel, suggesting a recursive and potentially fatalistic vision of history. Indeed, when Billie finds a manuscript on a subway train entitled The Stone Gods, she describes the book to Spike as a story about “a repeating world” (146).

  Early in the novel, Winterson embeds an interpr
etation of historical repetition in a parable that Captain Handsome tells as he transports Billie and Spike from Orbus to the labour camps on earth. In this story, one night, “a young man” who “drank more than he should, and spent more than he could,” gets “into a fight outside a bar, and kill[s] a man” (2007: 54). Filled with remorse, he retreats to an attic to commit suicide and declares, “if I had known that all that I have done would bring me to this, I would have led a very different life,” at which point the boy’s “good angel … intercede[s] on his behalf” and allows the boy “another chance” to “begin again” (2007: 54). Although the boy remains “sober, upright, true, and thrifty” for a period of time, “one night he passes a bar” and impulsively decides to go in, where he drinks and borrows and gambles until “he spent all he could” (54). Confronted by his creditors, he gets into a “brawl with the bar owner” and shoots the man dead. Once again the boy becomes suicidal, and the angel intercedes: “bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again. Bar, bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again … angel, bar, ball, bullets” (55). This closed circuit of debt, violence, remorse, and false redemption leaves many dead bodies in its wake. Even after pledging to reform himself, the boy’s addictions to alcohol and gambling assure that the story ends the same way—at the beginning. At some point the boy must realize that he is trapped in a tortuous cycle of debt and death and that this narrative of spiritual intervention is actually sealed off from any real intervention. His desire to live is continually leveraged into debt, which he defaults on. However, as the story is compressed into a finite set of signifiers—“bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again”—new permutations enter the equation. The word “bar” appears in the second sequence and “ball” in the third. Despite the crushing repetition, even in this story of total recurrence, difference cannot be fully suppressed: the linear “bar” morphs into a circular “ball” that rolls along a slightly different path.

  In the aftermath of the massive default on housing debts and the bailout of banking debts in 2008, Slavoj Žižek delivered a speech to the Occupy Wall Street protesters in New York City on October 9, 2011, thanking the movement for beginning to invent a “language to articulate our non-freedom” (Žižek 2011). As Žižek and others have argued for some time now, “it’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism” (2011). This failure to imagine a world beyond the repetitions of a boom-bust cycle can be linked to capitalism’s hegemonic control over biopolitical technologies—or those technologies that help make birth, health, shelter, nutrition, and reproduction amenable to the economic logics of capitalism. In a key passage from The History of Sexuality Vol. One, Foucault explains the relation between capitalism and biopolitics this way:bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. (1990: 140–141)

  Capitalism, therefore, requires a complicated investment in biopower. It must encourage “growth” of populations, but it must also “optimize … life in general” so that it conforms to a very specific “machinery of production.” This means capitalist societies constantly monitor the riskiness of unassimilated, immigrant, poor, queer, activist, and otherwise marginalized populations if it hopes to ensure the production of a predictably docile generation of consumers and labourers. In other words, capitalist biopolitics reproduces biopower by limiting and withholding life chances from unassimilated populations. If capitalism works to “adjust the phenomena of population to economic processes,” then it must distribute life chances to those, like the boy from Winterson’s parable, who are addicted to consumption and debt. But also like this boy, life itself becomes an addiction for many consumers, a desire for a vitality that is always diminishing and always being borrowed against.

  Despite capitalism’s boom-bust cycles, it remains difficult to imagine its end, in part, because a small number of well-protected impersonal corporations control and finance an assortment of technologies that make life feel minimally secure. Billie goes so far as to claim that “Capitalism is like Japanese Knotweed: nothing kills it off” (2007: 136). For this reason, as I’ve argued earlier, the end of capitalism is often expressed in post-apocalyptic terms with bands of survivors rebuilding their own systems of security and health from the ground up. Winterson, like Atwood, offers one such vision when Billie and Spike wander to the outskirts of Tech City and enter a place called Wreck City. Wreck City is described as “a No Zone—no insurance, no assistance, no welfare, no police … You’re on your own” (151). The anarchist/libertarians living in Wreck City have managed to occupy a bombed out area of London that the MORE corporation has yet to annex. The city consists of “twenty five alternative communities ranging from the 1960s Free Love and Cadillacs, to a group of women-only Vegans looking for the next cruelty-free planet” (174). While visiting with some of the residents, a member of the Cadillacs (a group of lesbians who wear white leather and drink lots of champagne) tells Billie that they “are founding an alternative community” (173). But as the conversation continues, it becomes clear that this alternative is difficult to describe beyond what one Cadillac claims is a general agreement that “the key to happiness … is tolerance of those who do not do as you do” (175). Wreck City is thus an excluded space that seeks to become an alternative site of inclusion, a congregation of castaways who are tolerant of difference. But Winterson only offers a brief glimpse into this alternative and precarious social structure. And by the end of the novel, MORE stages a military raid of Wreck City that kills many, including the narrator Billie.

  Significantly, therefore, those who seek refuge in Wreck City are subject to a form of violence that is distinctly necropolitical. They are not just left to die on their own through neglect, but rather they are actively gunned down by MORE’s private army. This spasm of killing at the end of the novel exposes a hidden violence, a necropolitical drive that persists within the MORE corporation’s biopolitical mandate to optimize life. Precipitating the raid, a “Japanese Peace Delegation” is dispatched to perform a “humanitarian survey of conditions” in Wreck City. The delegation quickly determines that the enclave is inhabited by “people displaced by War and unable to live a normal life,” and, in the name of humanitarianism, they announce their intention to submit a “Full Report [to] recommend Aid” and “sanitation” to the residents. Only “seconds later, fifteen bikers” arrive on the scene and set fire to one of the delegation’s vehicles (2007: 155). Instantly, the “displaced people” of Wreck City are relabelled as terrorists, and the MORE corporation declares a “State of Emergency” to justify the exceptionally violent actions it then takes (177).

  On the one hand, MORE seeks to optimize Wreck City for economic processes by “surveying the conditions” and, where possible, “recommending aid” to improve and integrate human life. Where life is too different and cannot be assimilated or optimized towards economic ends, it is left to die, but not necessarily killed, at least not initially. Human capital theory, for example, represents not only the adjustment of humans to capitalist processes, but also a capitalist reproduction of life as a humanist project. It is, after all, the assimilation of one’s life to capitalist processes that makes one a more valuable human, or simply more human, according to human capital theory. For this reason, the Peace delegation from Tech City arrives at Wreck City on a “humanitarian” mission, which is a mission to normalize its “unsanitary” inhabitants and adjust the population towards economic processes. But Wreck City is more than just another site of abandonment to be enfr
anchised by a capitalist brand of humanitarian relief. As one inhabitant points out, refugees “from Tech City” are “coming in droves … so what do you think this [raid] is all about—this Japanese stuff?” (2007: 157). Wreck City is growing! It can neither be abandoned to die nor incorporated by Tech City, so MORE is forced to take exceptional measures. By compelling the MORE corporation to shed its biopolitical facade, Wreck City reveals the hidden killing machine that has always been operational in Tech City.