The Prosthetic Novel and Posthuman Bodies
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The Prosthetic Novel and Posthuman Bodies: Biotechnology and Literature in the 21st Century By Justin Omar Johnston A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English) at the UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON 2012 Date of final oral examination: April 19, 2012 The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Anne McClintock, Professor, English Susan S. Friedman, Professor, English Robert Nixon, Professor, English Jon McKenzie, Associate Professor, English Tomislav Longinovic, Professor, Slavic Languages i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOLWEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………...ii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………...iii INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………………...1 The Biopolitical Context…………………………………………………………………..6 Prosthetic Humans and Posthuman Bodies………………………………………………14 A FEELING OF ATTACHMENT: THE POSTHUMAN POLITICS OF FENCES IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S NEVER LET ME GO……………………………………………………………..21 Hailsham: The Disciplinary Fence………………………………………………………28 The Open Fence………………………………………………………………………….41 The Service-Station, Chemical-Substances and Subjectivity……………………………44 Wet Prosthetics and Vital Objects……………………………………………………….48 Affect, Agency, and “England, late-1990’s”…………………………………………….52 The Litterary Fence and Two Visions of Posthuman Politics…………………………...60 Counterpuntal Posthumanism…………………………………………………………....68 SPECIES TROUBLE IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S ORYX AND CRAKE……………………71 Corporate Domesticity…………………………………………………………………...82 Oryx and Difference……………………………………………………………………104 Evolution and Extinction……………………………………………………………….110 THE HUMAN AILMENT: A NOTHER WORLD IN INDRA SINHA’S ANIMAL’S PEOPLE...........................................121 Neoliberalism, Environmental Technologies, and Human Capital………………….....126 In the Shadow of Human Rights…..……………………………………………………133 “It’s a new way of seeing that gives us a new way of touching,”……………………....140 Ambivalence: Humanism and “Something Different”…………………………………145 ECOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENTS: CYBORGS, HUMANS, AND BIOPOLITICS IN JEANETTE WINTERSON’S THE STONE GODS……………………………………………154 Unlimited Finitude and Cyborg Feminism……………………………………………..159 Unexceptional Exceptions, Easter Island, and Metaphor vs. Synecdoche……………..169 The Biopolitics of Evolutionary Time………………………………………………….174 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..183 ii Acknowledgements First, I would like to register my great appreciation to my dissertation committee: Anne McClintock, Robert Nixon, Susan S. Friedman, Jon McKenzie, and Tomislav Longinivic. Throughout my graduate career, each of these professors has encouraged my intellectual growth, helped me cultivate my own critical voice, and shown great patience as I completed my dissertation. Anne McClintock, my dissertation chair, deserves special thanks for her generosity and insight. From the outset, Anne trusted the intuitions that motivated my research and challenged me to crystalize my analysis into a coherent argument. Over the years, I have been impressed by her understanding of cultural change and inspired by her commitment to shaping that change. Thank you, Anne, for your encouragement and vision. Finally, I’d like to thank Katy Johnston for engaging in a continuous conversation with me, for sharpening my ideas and writing, and for knowing how and when to interrupt the dissertation with laughter and love. iii Abstract The Prosthetic Novel and Posthuman Bodies: Literature and Biotechnology in 21st Century The human clone, the animal-human hybrid, the toxic body, the human-machine hybrid: these biotechnologically transformed bodies proliferate in the novels of many contemporary, Anglophone writers. Like the biologists (Ian Wilmut, E.O. Wilson, Craig Venter), academics (Francis Fukuyama) and journalists (The Economist and Time) who’ve labeled the 21st century “the biotech century,” several celebrated contemporary writers have also underscored biotech’s influence in their novels. Moving beyond the fear and excitement elicited by new developments in embryology, stem cell research and regenerative medicine, these novelists not only expose biotech’s roots in 20th century biopolitics (Foucault, Agamben) but they also anticipate still emergent forms of biotechnological subjectivity. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) all focus on the prosthetic quality of biotech to imagine four very different posthuman bodies. While these writers represent a range of Anglophone novelists with very different literary projects, they all locate the fleshly body as the prosthetic meeting place for biotechnology and political subjectivities. Taken together, I claim, these novels describe a prosthetic society where humanist institutions are challenged by new technologies of reproduction, mobility, kinship, and ecology. iv In the first chapter of my dissertation, “A Feeling of Attachment: Biopolitics and Fences in Never Let Me Go,” I analyze the novel’s passage from a tightly regulated English boarding school to an open network of clinics, motels, and expressways. As the narrator, Kathy H., and her friends leave the disciplinary architecture of the boarding school, with its emphasis on human creativity, they discover they’re clones whose internal organs will, someday, be harvested. Kathy travels England’s expressways, clinic to clinic, caring for clones and waiting for her “donations” to begin. This biomedical network produces a form of mobile discipline. Indeed, Kathy’s transition from being human to becoming an object of prosthetic circulation, helps map a slow historical trend away from humanist institutions toward a prosthetic society of mobile surveillance and posthuman identities. Chapter two, “Species Trouble in Oryx and Crake,” builds on this argument by reading Atwood’s double vision of biotech’s future. Her dystopian vision of corporate biotech, I argue, stems from a late-capitalist ordering of species according to the prosthetic image of the tree of life. Biotech companies employ this upward, outward metaphor of pure individuation to patent new species and manage their consumer’s bodies. In an apocalyptic turn, Atwood levels this dystopian world and offers readers a symbiogentic model of evolution, revealing the possibility of horizontal, interspecies forms of prosthetic kinship. Chapter three, “The Human Aliment: A ‘Nother World in Animal’s People,” reads Indra Sinha’s fictionalized account of Union Carbide’s toxic chemical spill in Bhopal, India, to frame the limitations of humanist postcolonial discourse in face of environmental devastation and corporate colonialism. Reading Dow Chemical’s ad campaign, “The Human Element,” alongside the narrator’s critique of human right’s discourse, I argue that humanism obscures the extra-legal forms of prosthetic touch that radically transform bodies in neocolonial environments. In Chapter four, “Ecological Entanglements and Biopolitics in The Stone Gods,” I trace a “robo-sapien’s” v adventures in the neo-liberal “Tech City” and the anarchist “Wreck City,” to summarize my dissertation’s contention that just as prosthetic techniques increasingly manage the formation of social subjectivities, these techniques can also be queered or hacked to compose alternative prosthetic assemblages. 1 Introduction: Prosthesis, Posthumanism, and the Biopolitical Context “Michael Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field” - Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto” (150) “We are facing a new kind of capitalism that is hot, psychotropic and punk. These recent transformations indicate new micro-prosthetic mechanisms of control emergent from advanced bio-molecular techniques and media networks. ” - Beatriz Preciado, 107 “Pharmaco- pornographic Politics: Toward a New Gender Ecology” The twenty-first century has widely been hailed as the biotech century. My dissertation, The Prosthetic Novel and Posthuman Bodies, explores how four distinctive literary figurations of posthuman embodiment—the human clone, the animal-human hybrid, the toxic body, and the digital-human—have come to proliferate across a range of internationally acclaimed Anglophone novels published between 2003 and 2008. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) all focus on the prosthetic potentials and limits of biotechnology to explore the human animal’s entanglement within technological environments. Moving beyond the fear and excitement elicited by new developments in embryology, stem cell research, and regenerative medicine, these novelists not only expose biotechnology’s roots in twentieth century biopolitics, but they also anticipate still emergent forms of biotechnological subjectivity. While these writers represent a range of Anglophone novelists with unique literary projects, they all locate the fleshy body as the prosthetic meeting place for technology and social subjectivity. Taken together, I argue, these novels portray a prosthetic society where humanist institutions are challenged by technological changes to reproduction, mobility, kinship, and ecology. 2 In the background of this dissertation is the proclamation made by various scientists, historians, and journalists, that the twenty-first century will be the biotech century. Time Magazine’s first issue in 1999, for instance, was a “special issue” dedicated