Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

by Justin Omar Johnston

  In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault emphasizes the active but purposefully hidden role of death in biopolitical regimes: here “death [is] no longer something that suddenly swoop[s] down on life, as in an epidemic. Death [is] now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it” (Foucault 2003: 244). Death comes alive in biopolitical regimes, just as the young boy in Winterson’s parable becomes a figure for the living dead who is forced to live even after suicide. Likewise, the droves of refugees fleeing Tech City to Wreck City are also fleeing the living dead quality of neohumanism, if only to find a space where they can die in peace.

  Still, lost in the opposition between Tech City and Wreck City is the unlimited finitude of a posthuman or cyborg politics. The cyborg stands in contrast to a Wreck City where “you’re on your own”—the planet is too small and filled with touch for this sort of individualism. Likewise, the cyborg cannot support a neohumanist biopolitics—human life is too entangled within and dependent upon a mesh of ecology and technology to be anthropocentrically extracted as an exceptional form of life (2007: 157). Beyond Tech City and Wreck City, Winterson points to a “Red Zone” that is also called the “Unknown” and the “Dead Forrest” (2007: 159, 161, 170). A bartender warns Billie that this radioactive woodland contains “wild animals,” including humans. This is where life is “re-evolving,” according to the barman. “It’s Life after Humans, whatever that is” (159). When Billie reaches this area, she finds “a petrified forest of blackened and shocked trees” whose “bark had a coating—like a laminate” (161). Further in, Billie “could see that the trees were glowing,” and “underfoot was soggy … like walking on pulped meat” (161). This is a space of toxic mutation and sticky laminates. It is the “glowing,” “soggy,” fleshy ecology of prosthetic touch and evolutionary experimentation. Billie learns that both the Wreck City and Tech City fear this space because “the incurables and freaks are all in there, … the mutants” (171). Seen differently, however, this Unknown space is alive with evolutionary becomings and filled with vitality that cannot deny its sticky kinship with the chemical ecology. To be clear, Winterson is not championing a toxic form of biopolitics. Rather, the messy materiality of evolution is an “Unknown” space that opens biopolitics to a myriad of non-human forces. In this way, evolution is a posthuman biopolitics oriented towards future becomings that cannot be mastered because it emerges from the unwholesome hybridity of unlimited finitude.

  Such an understanding of evolution is explored by Elizabeth Grosz in her book Time Travels, where she articulates a strategic alliance between Darwinian evolution, posthumanism, and feminist politics. Evolution, after all, asserts the radical proposition that nature changes, and this underappreciated insight means that biopolitical regimes predicated on the natural stability of the human are necessarily weak and over-reliant on states of exception. Grosz frames the issue this way:One of the most challenging issues facing any future feminism is precisely how to articulate a future in which futurity itself has a feminine form, in which the female subject can see itself projected beyond its present position as other to the one. Which may, ironically, mean that this future feminine may render itself obsolete or the object of profound and even inhuman … becomings rather than rest itself on the forms of femininity as they have been represented … within patriarchy as it has existed up to now. (2005: 177)

  Due to the historical and imaginary limitations cast by systems of patriarchy, capitalism, and humanism, Winterson and other contemporary writers struggle to “articulate a futurity” that draws on new forms of life: clones, Robo Sapiens, toxic mutants. These new subjectivities are not simply the dystopian byproducts of present-day neohumanism; they are also a projection of life “beyond its present position” within humanist biopolitics. They are the unknown hybrid creatures we are becoming, and they uncomfortably remind us of the unknown hybridity we already are.

  Bibliography

  Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

  Brand, Stewart. 1968. Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools. http://​www.​wholeearth.​com/​index.​php. Accessed 24 May 2018.

  ———. 1976. ‘Whole Earth’ Origin… Stewart Brand’s Blog. http://​sb.​longnow.​org/​SB_​homepage/​WholeEarth_​buton.​html. Accessed 15 Oct 2017.

  Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2017. Anthropocene 1. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman et al., 39–42. New York: Fordham UP.

  Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Trans. Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Diamond, Jared. 2011a. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin.

  ———. 2011b. The Myth of Easter Island’s Ecocide. http://​www.​marklynas.​org/​2011/​09/​the-myth-of-easter-islands-ecocide/​. Accessed 8 May 2013.

  Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

  ———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976. Trans. David Macy. New York: Picador.

  Franklin, Sarah, Celia Lury, and Jackie Stacy. 2000. Global Nature, Global Culture. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd.

  Funk, McKenzie. 2014. Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming. New York: Penguin Press.

  Grosz, Elizabeth. 2005. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

  Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.

  Hunt, Terry, and Carl Lipo. 2011. The Statues That Walked: Unraveling the Mystery of Easter Island. New York: Simon and Schuster.

  Mirowski, Phillip. 2013. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Global Meltdown. New York: Verso.

  Nixon, Rob. 2017. Anthropocene 2. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman et al., 39–42. New York: Fordham UP.

  Osnos, Evan. 2017. Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich. The New Yorker, January 22.

  Puar, Jasbir K. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

  Rabinow, Paul. 1996. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  Thiel, Peter. 2009. The Education of a Libertarian. Cato Unbound. https://​www.​cato-unbound.​org/​2009/​04/​13/​peter-thiel/​education-libertarian. Accessed 18 Dec 2016.

  Winterson, Jeanette. 2007. The Stone Gods. London: Hamish Hamilton Press and Penguin Books.

  Žižek, Slavoj. 2011. Žižek at Occupy Wall Street, Part 1/3, smabiner. https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​32ShKRjLN3M. Accessed 6 July 2016.

  Footnotes

  1Before NASA released the photo, Brand and his fellow “merry prankster” had spent years campaigning for NASA to release it. Brand toured US colleges and handed out buttons that read: “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?” (Brand 1976).

  2This trend is especially evident in the transhumanist community: Larry Ellison, Dmitry Itskov, Peter Theil, and Sergey Brin are high-profile examples of billionaire investors in transhumanism. See also Peter Theil’s “The Education of a Libertarian” (2009), and Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich” (2017), wherein the linkage between transhumanism and prepper culture are made explicit.

  © 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_6

  6. Coda: Genres of Futurity

  Justin Omar Johnston1

  (1)Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

  Justin Omar Johnston

  Posthuman Capital is guided by the representation of posthuman bodies (clones, animal-human hybrids, toxic bodies, and cyborgs) as they appear within a number of acclaimed contemporary novels: Kazuo Ishiguro�
��s Never Let Me Go, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. And while each of these novels develops its own unique arguments, they all also feature characters excluded from human belonging. Such exclusions are, of course, as old as the very category of the “human.” Indeed, human exceptionalism has been historically constructed as a negative space by the abject exclusion of animals, environments, machines, and other humans who have been animalized, naturalized, and objectified. It is within this long history of human exclusion that these novels point to human capital theory as an ideological tool for representing human belonging since the 1980s. Human capital theory—the central conceptual innovation of neoliberalism—posits that the meaning and value of everyday activities are legible as measurements of the economic consequences they have for individuals. In other words, in a ubiquitous economic network, every action is intelligible as an increase or decrease to one’s human capital. While this economic logic effectively nudges enterprising subjects to become ostensibly more human by increasing their human capital, it also assures that these same exhausted subjects can never become human enough. In this way, we can identify an economic posthuman figure who emerges from within neoliberalism or the neohumanism of human capital theory.

  This is not to say that older versions of liberal or Enlightenment humanism, which supposedly endowed people with universal human belonging at birth, were any more inclusive. They were not. Indeed, despite its rhetoric of formal equality, liberal humanism has relied on multiple structural exclusions based on race, class, (dis)ability, gender, and sexuality. For example, European colonialism was predicated, in large part, on promising universal human belonging to colonized people if, and only if, they submitted to England or France’s “civilizing mission.” In practice, however, European norms (and European economic interests) ensured that colonized peoples would always be judged as less-than-fully civilized by disingenuous European arbiters. The dystopian vision of neoliberal humanism presented in Posthuman Capital is in no way nostalgic for colonial (or even Keynesian) humanisms, particularly since the same exclusions persist as the disavowed purpose of neoliberal humanism. Certainly, in the novels I examine, workers’ and consumers’ desires to be more human drive their aspirations for human capital and biotechnical enhancements (transhumanism), but these novels also make visible non-anthropocentric forms of belonging which include animals, ecologies, and objects (posthumanism). Such assemblages of posthuman belonging are ethically potent, and yet, in these novels, the political potential of a posthuman ethics is often neutralized by economies organized around the recognition of human individuality.

  This conflict between societies that nudge workers to be more human and alternative forms of non-anthropocentric belonging is captured, in part, through genre. Genre analysis is vitally important because, as Theodore Martin puts it, “genres remain identifiable even as they change, … genres provide a powerful social tool for making sense of what is emergent and unfamiliar about our contemporary moment” (2017: 7). The power of genre analysis to register historical change is critical for considering how two interconnected genres of discourse—the dystopian and apocalyptic—have together constructed the near future as a place dominated by both continuous control and ecological fragility. Similar to Lauren Berlant’s description of the present as an “impasse,” I use the term “bewilderment” to express readers’ and characters’ confusion about a future that is formulated generically as simultaneously dystopian and apocalyptic. For Berlant:the impasse is a stretch of time in which one moves around with a sense that the world is at once intensely present and enigmatic, such that the activity of living demands both a wandering absorptive awareness and a hypervigilance that collects material that might help to clarify things, maintain one’s sea legs, and coordinate the standard melodramatic crises with those processes that have not yet found their genre of event. (2011: 4)

  In contrast to this “enigmatic” sense of a present that has “not yet found” a “genre of event,” bewilderment points to the experience of cognitive dissonance in relation to a future (as a “genre of event”) that has been overdetermined as both dystopian and apocalyptic, securitized and catastrophic.

  In part, this bewilderment stems from contemporary cultural texts and news reports that depict the near future as inevitably dystopian, often emphasizing new technologies of surveillance and data collection. Alongside the small mobile technologies that monitor consumer-citizens’ movements, affects, and communications, an unseen infrastructure of data centres modulates these components of everyday life. The scale and scope of these operations are mind-bogglingly large and depressingly familiar. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) new data centre in Utah, for instance, is housed in a million-square-foot compound, boasts exabytes of data storage, and is thought to be only one of several processing centres for the PRISM surveillance program. Equally impressive, the Acxiom Corporation, based in Little Rock, Arkansas, has now collected over 1500 data points on over 500 million people, providing what executives call a “360-degree” view of consumer behaviour. As Frank Pasquale points out in his book Black Box Society, “surveillance cameras, data brokers, sensor networks, and ‘supercookies’ [not only] record how fast we drive, what pills we take, [and] what websites we visit,” but they also use algorithms to bypass medical and legal confidentiality, probabilistically disclosing users’ most privately held secrets (2015: 3). Indeed, in the next phase of surveillance capitalism, Shoshanna Zuboff predicts, “it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us,” promising to usher in all new techniques of behavioural modification (2019: 26). In other words, the digital screens and sensors that make the operations of daily life possible have now also become tiny, opaque windows into the machinery of an increasingly dystopian governmentality.

  But even as this techno-dystopian future suffuses popular movies such as Minority Report (2002), Wall-E (2008), In Time (2011), The Hunger Games (2012), and The Circle (2017), there is an equally salient post-apocalyptic image of the future that is predicated, in large part, on precisely the breakdown of systems of surveillance and biopolitical control. In his book The Fragility of Things, William Connolly argues that the “subjective grip of neoliberalism” has blinded many critics to the fact that “economic markets operate in a larger world of multiple, self-organizing [non-human] systems,” including the climate (2013: 25). This interaction with non-human externalities makes markets and other infrastructures much more vulnerable “than the advocates of neoliberalism pretend” (2013: 25). In this way, post-apocalyptic depictions of the future often dramatize the capacity of non-human actors, such as toxins, viruses, and climates, to interrupt techno-dystopian fantasies of state and corporate control. Think of, for example, films such as 28 Days Later (2002), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Happening (2008), The Road (2009), Contagion (2011), or 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). This genre of speculation, therefore, tracks a thanatological vector as it quickly expands to overwhelm the biopolitical injunction to optimize and sustain productive life.

  Of course, these two genres of futurity are unfolding together in ways that are both mutually reinforcing and irreconcilable. Leerom Medovoi, for example, argues that “if a certain disavowal has animated ecocriticism’s ahistorical relation to its own categories, it has to do with an inability to relinquish its apocalyptic claims” (2010: 136). According to Medovoi, a more historical reading of the genre would reveal that “at every single step in the history of biopolitics, … the motif of eco-catastrophe facilitates some kind of regulatory transition between accumulation regimes” (2010: 136). In this way Medovoi suggests that eco-apocalyptic discourses can serve as alibis for the renewal of capitalist modes of production and a securitization of biopolitical control. Alternatively, Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction evokes a different kind of natural history that is “neither strictly uniformitarian nor catastrophist” (2014: 265). For Kolbert, “there have been
very long uneventful stretches and very, very occasionally ‘revolutions on the surface of the earth,’ ” or extinctions events that cannot easily be averted, especially since the current one is already well underway (2014: 265). The sixth extinction, according to Kolbert, will “determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust,” suggesting that eco-apocalyptic discourses merely reflect climate change’s real, immanent, and existential threat to all human history (2014: 269). Rather than adjudicating between these persuasive but different visions of the future, it is worth pausing and recognizing that many people, but especially poor people, increasingly view the future both centripetally as a zone of continued oppressive control and centrifugally as a space of chaotic unravelling and abandonment. Bewilderment, then, is a symptom that emerges from the entanglement of these two dominant discourses about the future.

  In this way, Posthuman Capital is not only interested in the prosthetic attachments that link bodies to the economic networks that distribute life chances, but it is also concerned with the bewildering futures that these fragile networks produce. As the prefix pros- suggests, the prosthetic novels I examine are oriented “towards” the future as “additions to” the recognizable present. They not only show how fears of apocalyptic disorder become alibis for dystopian control, they also illustrate how this control precipitates planetary disasters. In Never Let Me Go the dystopian biomedical system within which the clones are trapped is littered with images of garbage, spent-fuel, and the encroaching effects of global warming. More overtly, in Oryx and Crake, the dystopian biotechnological system that Jimmy lives in as a boy is dramatically overturned by a spasm of apocalyptic violence that is at once revolutionary, evolutionary, and genocidal. Alternatively, Animal’s People looks forward to a future of non-human solidarity, as the “People of the Apokalis” emerge globally from those places that neoliberalism abandons. And in The Stone Gods, Winterson explicitly represents the generic struggle between dystopia and apocalypse as a cycle that continually repeats itself, leaving open the possibility for historical change, but not necessarily representing it. Together, Posthuman Capital reveals how these two popular genres of futurity work together to hasten each other’s realization. For example, important narratives about planetary disasters due to climate change, such as those represented in Oryx and Crake and The Stone Gods, are often co-opted to serve as justifications for various dystopian techno-fixes like carbon capture and storage, albedo modification, and fracking. These dystopian techno-fixes, in turn, only intensify the scale and scope of environmental change, which is legible in Never Let Me Go and Animal’s People. Indeed, by not allowing one genre to subsume the other, the works I analyse expose an interdependent relationship between these two genres of futurity.