Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

Justin Omar Johnston

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783030262563
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030262570
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This book examines several distinctive literary figurations of posthuman embodiment as they proliferate across a range of internationally acclaimed contemporary novels: clones in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, animal-human hybrids in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, toxic bodies in Indra Sinha's Animal's People, and cyborgs in Jeanette Winterson's The Stone Gods. While these works explore the transformational power of the "biotech century," they also foreground the key role human capital theory has played in framing human belonging as an aspirational category that is always and structurally just out of reach, making contemporary subjects never-human-enough. In these novels, the dystopian character of human capital theory is linked to fantasies of apocalyptic release. As such, these novels help expose how two interconnected genres of futurity (the dystopian and the apocalyptic) work in tandem to propel each other forward so that fears of global disaster become alibis for dystopian control, which, in turn, becomes the predicate for intensifying catastrophes. In analyzing these novels, Justin Omar Johnston draws attention to the entanglement of bodies in technological environments, economic networks, and deteriorating ecological settings. 

© 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_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre

Justin Omar Johnston¹

(1)

Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

End Abstract

The twenty-first century has been widely hailed as the biotech century by scientists such as Ian Wilmut, E.O. Wilson, and Craig Venter; by historians such as Francis Fukuyama; by journalists in cover stories for Time and The Economist, and by investors speculating on breakthroughs in somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), regenerative medicine, synthetic biology, and CRISPR-Cas9 genetic engineering. Posthuman Capital addresses several distinctive literary figurations of so-called posthuman embodiment—the human clone, the animal-human hybrid, the toxic body, and the digital-human—that have proliferated across a range of internationally acclaimed novels during the biotech century. By probing the potentials and limitations of biotechnology, these novels draw attention to the entanglement of bodies within particular environments, economic networks, and ecological settings. Moving beyond the fear and excitement elicited by new developments in biotechnology, these works not only recall biotechnology’s roots in twentieth-century biopolitics, but they also anticipate still emergent forms of posthuman and transhuman embodiment. While the major novels my book examines (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) represent a range of contemporary authors with unique literary projects, these novels all locate fleshy bodies as critical meeting places for technology and social subjectivity. Taken together, these works depict a prosthetic society where technological changes in reproduction, labour, mobility, kinship, surveillance, and ecological stability transform traditional humanist institutions.

In other words, the novels I examine all anticipate a pointedly contemporary problem: the sticky merging of flesh and technology combined with our increasing dependence on technologically based networks for the reproduction of social identities. If Michel Foucault diagnosed human individuality as a symptom of disciplinary institutions where architectural enclosures (such as prisons, hospitals, and schools) constructed fixed subject positions, then these contemporary novels figure biotech as a form of mobile discipline on-the-go that expands beyond institutional walls and across diverse, but technologically connected, urban landscapes. In the novels I examine, small mobile technologies (such as cell phones, debit cards, and Viagra pills) become “wet prosthetics” which not only travel intimately alongside bodies, but also link these bodies to dispersed technological networks capable of programming new forms of hybrid subjectivity.

While calling these emerging figures “posthuman” helps us mark an historical shift away from disciplinary humanism and its dominant definitions of modern man, I contend that “posthuman” is ultimately an imperfect and misleading term for describing many of the hybrid bodies that appear in contemporary literature. Rather, in this book, I seek to foreground the role that human capital theory has played in the formulation of neoliberal subjects as “never-human-enough.” I argue that neoliberal rationalities reimagine human belonging as an aspirational category always and structurally just out of reach. Posthuman Capital, therefore, highlights a series of characters who are highly motivated to “be more human,” to quote Reebok’s latest advertising campaign (2015–). In the context of neoliberalism, this directive to become “more human” is a call to appreciate one’s human capital or to upgrade one’s body through various biotechnical self-investments. Critically, however, if one can always become “more human,” then one can never, finally, become human enough or fully human.

Finally, Posthuman Capital not only investigates the prosthetic entanglement of various bodies and technological networks within the novels I examine; it also explores how these novels connect readers to speculative and emerging futures. Rather than emphasizing aesthetic reflection or synthetic integration, these novels offer prosthetic narratives that link together two irreducible and interdependent genres of futurity: the dystopian and the post-apocalyptic. Many contemporary dystopian narratives, I argue, posit new surveillance technologies as an organizing node around which the centripetal forces of political control and social inequality develop. Alternatively, post-apocalyptic narratives often hinge on the fatal inability of institutions and networks to effectively manage the centrifugal threats posed by non-human forces, particularly viruses, toxins, and climates. Drawing on the Greek prefix “pros,” meaning “toward and in addition to,” prosthetic novels orient readers “toward” futures framed as extensions or “additions to” the recognizable present. These works show how fears of apocalyptic disorder become alibis for dystopian control, while also illustrating how this control precipitates planetary and social disasters. By not subsuming one genre to the other, these prosthetic novels reveal and interrupt the mutual dependencies which allow these two genres of futurity to function in tandem like an engine that drives cultural attitudes and expectations about the unwelcome future.

Divided into three sections, this introduction begins by exploring the scientific, political, and legal narratives that have helped frame the twenty-first century as the biotech century, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. Although many of these narratives have shifted in response to major developments in bioscience, the story of a biotech future has increasingly located the human figure as standing behind or emerging after biotechnological interventions. Whether it is E.O. Wilson’s vision of a “New Enlightenment” (2015), Ray Kurzweil’s view that being human means transcending biology (2005), or the Pentagon’s assertion that “Biology is Technology” (Jackson 2015), it is clear that western humanism—with all of its many exclusions—has gradually embraced a transhumanist perception of the future, a radically libertarian future predicated on economic competition. For this reason, the second section of the introduction investigates the historical role that human capital theory has played in developing neoliberal definitions of the human as never-human-enough. I argue that the directive to “be more [than] human” sits comfortably at the intersection of neoliberal and transhumanist models of the human. In the final section of this introduction, I preview how the literary works I discuss in this book engage narratives of a biotech future. While these novels recognize the biotechnological and economic accounts that reimagine human belonging in the twenty-first century, they also reveal and interrupt the linkages between apocalyptic fear and dystopian depression, genres that shape and limit our collective capacity to imagine an alternative, posthuman, or utopian future.

Inherently interdisciplinary, novels, at their best, trace the historical forces that condition their composition and allow these multiple discourses to develop according to their own interactive logic. Whereas scientific experimentation seeks to isolate single elements by controlling for other variables, literary works are much more interested in following the expansive interaction between many variables by understanding the changing composition of formal and historical relationships. In other words, it is not just that literary analysis offers a virtual environment for reflecting on the myriad historical forces that have brought it into being, but it can also play out these forces, redirecting them in new way.

From the “Biotech Century” to “Biology Is Technology”

The phrase “biotech century” can be readily traced to Jeremy Rifkin’s 1999 bestselling cautionary book by the same name. As Rifkin points out, his book was part of an ongoing conversation, “on the eve of what many in the scientific and business community [were] calling the ‘Biotech Century’” (xv). Much of that conversation began two years earlier when a cloned Finnish Dorset named “Dolly” was suddenly thrust onto the global stage, a “trigger event” that “put the whole world into synchrony over biotechnology for the first time” (Bauer et al. 2002: 15). And while a sympathetic image of Dolly’s sheepish face regularly accompanied media coverage of her birth, the Dorset quickly became a symbol for an unwelcome biotechnological future driven by human cloning.

In response to Dolly’s birth, Bill Clinton spoke from the White House Rose Garden to propose a legislative ban on all forms of human cloning, arguing that “nothing makes … [our] moral obligation more clear than the troubling possibility that these new animal-cloning techniques could be used to create a child.” At stake, for Clinton, was nothing less than “our most cherished belief about the miracle of human life and the God-given individuality each person possesses” (1997). Despite his affirmation of human exceptionalism, Clinton conceded that Dolly’s birth reconfirmed the underlying shared biomateriality of human and animal life or, in other words, the applicability of “animal-cloning techniques” to the creation of a human “child.” Seen as a threat to both liberal humanism’s conception of “individuality” and religious beliefs about the “miracle of human life,” somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) initially provoked reactionary responses. Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, legislatures around the globe hotly debated human cloning. The United Nations, for example, took up the issue between 2001 and 2005. Ultimately, however, widespread dissension about what counted as “the human” doomed most of these legal prohibitions, even as some informal agreements were reached.

At the heart of the debate was the question of whether or not therapeutic cloning of human stem cells was the same as the reproductive cloning of human beings. Most scientists and investors believed these were two very different procedures; however, the religious right, especially in the United States, whose rhetoric of “family values” dominated public discourse at the time,¹ insisted on lumping together therapeutic and reproductive cloning. Thus, in this early twenty-first-century context, stem cell research became locked in the “culture wars” along with Christian conservatives’ opposition to abortion, birth control, feminism, evolution, multiculturalism, and homosexuality. Indeed, in George W. Bush’s first primetime address to the nation, he appealed to his conservative base by announcing an executive order that stopped funding for the use of new human embryonic stem cells in public research, professing that “human life is a sacred gift from our Creator” (2001). On this front, then, the biotech century was off to a slow start.

In stark contrast, during this same period, the Human Genome Project (HGP) was greeted with celebratory images of human exploration, national triumph, and entrepreneurial success. During their joint press conference to announce the near-completion of the project, both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair evoked Francis Crick and Jim Watson’s discovery of DNA as an example of an ongoing “Anglo-American partnership” in bioscience (2000). Clinton’s opening remarks likened the HGP to Lewis and Clark’s expedition to the “American Frontier … a map that … forever expanded … our continent,” thereby perpetuating the settler colonial ideology of Manifest Destiny. While repeatedly claiming the HGP would serve “the common good of all humankind,” both leaders emphasized that American and British “biotechnology companies are absolutely essential in this endeavor.” After all, they argued, the HGP was the product of “healthy competition” and “enhanced public-private cooperation” between “academia and their colleagues in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.” In other words, unlike stem cell research, which uncomfortably challenged both Christian and liberal humanist views of man’s sovereignty and superiority above other animals, the gene-centred research of the HGP easily upheld narratives of national expansion, Euro-centric humanism, and capitalist growth.

But then, in 2003, the HGP released its results, and, to the shock of many, it turned out that humans possess a relatively small genome. Totalling just about 21,000 genes, the human genome was “half the size of the rice plant,” and only two-thirds the size of a “humble water flea” (Collen 2015: 8).² This was not the encyclopaedic “book of l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre
• 2. Clones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
• 3. Animal-Human Hybrids: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
• 4. Toxic Bodies: Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People
• 5. Cyborgs: Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods
• 6. Coda: Genres of Futurity
• Back Matter