Cyborgs and Clones: Production and Reproduction of Posthuman Figures in Contemporary British Literature
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CYBORGS AND CLONES: PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION OF POSTHUMAN FIGURES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATURE A dissertation presented by Michele Braun to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Literature Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts May 2010 2 CYBORGS AND CLONES: PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION OF POSTHUMAN FIGURES IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH LITERATURE by Michele Braun ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Northeastern University, May, 2010 3 As a replacement for, or supplement to, the human, the posthuman produces figures that highlight the socially constructed nature of human identity. This dissertation undertakes to demonstrate how several British novelists have used the concept as a supplement or replacement for the human in order to re-imagine the experience of the outsider. It argues that the importance of the posthuman is not its portrayal of a potential utopian or dystopian future or change for the human, but in how the posthuman draws our attention back to how we define ourselves as “human.” Fictional posthuman figures differ from the human both in degree (like clones, whose origins differ from the ordinary) and in kind (like cyborgs, whose prosthetics often mark them as radically different from ordinary humans). Yet these posthumans often act in ways indistinguishable from everyday humans, suggesting that the idea of a natural human is a social construction. This dissertation argues that there are three antinomies that inform these posthuman narratives: the organic and the mechanical, the body and human consciousness, and genetic determinism and cosmopolitan multiplicity. Through these antinomies, posthuman figures function as metaphors or allegories for colonial and racial tensions. More often than not, the posthuman other is marginalized, inviting figurative comparisons with more traditional marginalized groups, so that the narratives of conflict with, or oppression by, a dominant group can act to represent the conflicts over multiculturalism and belonging that continue to plague post-imperial Britain in the twenty-first century. The dissertation applies the three antimonies to texts by Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Ken MacLeod, Amitav Ghosh and Justina Robson, exploring how those antinomies play out in diverse genres such as science fiction, realist fiction and magical realism to suggest that the posthuman can find expression in a wide range of literatures. 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank and acknowledge the people who have made it possible for me to complete this dissertation. I would like to thank my committee, Kathleen Kelly, Laura Green and Patrick Mullen for supporting the project, and acknowledge the patience that my committee displayed in accommodating the long distance writing and editing of the project. I would especially like to thank Kathleen Kelly for guiding the progress of the project from its inception and for taking the time to meet with me when I needed it even if it meant our meeting took place on a park bench, and Laura Green for her detailed and insightful comments throughout the writing of the dissertation. I’d also like to thank Elizabeth Shea for her valuable suggestion of texts and approaches to some of the material included in this dissertation project. I could not have completed this work without the support of my family and friends. Those who have helped me know who they are, but I would like to especially thank my husband, Dwayne Kowalchuk for his support. Dwayne, thank you for your love and support and for believing in my ability to finish this project even when my own confidence faltered. Thank you also for your patience with my repeated absences, both the physical and the occasional mental ones. Thanks also to my daughters, Sandy, Stephanie, and Angela Burk, for understanding when mom needed to work and when she was available, and for being my cheerleaders throughout the process. I would also like to thank all the graduate students at Northeastern who provided an excellent support network, in particular, Amy Kaufman and Kurt Moellering. Your advice, and our conversations, inspired me right from the very beginning of this journey. Thank you. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 3 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction: Producing and Representing Posthumans 7 Three Posthuman Antinomies The Metaphorical Posthuman A Taxonomy of Posthuman Literatures Tracing Posthuman Figures from the Mundane to the Fantastical Chapter 1 Genetically-Determined Posthumans 33 The Genetic Roots of the Iqbals, Joneses and Chalfens Genetic Determinism in White Teeth Historical Determinism in White Teeth Cosmopolitan Geographies in Bodies and Cities Chapter 2 Biotechnologically-Determined Posthumans 64 Biotechnologically-Defined Identities in Never Let Me Go Marginalized “Clone”ials Origins and Belonging Enslaved versus Universal Cosmopolitan Bodies 6 Chapter 3 Prosthetic Posthuman Bodies 95 Modernity, Progress and Biotechnology Genetic Determinism in Saturday The Cosmopolitan City, Bodies, and Technologies Mechanical and Organic Prosthetics in Saturday Chapter 4 Magical and Metamorphosing Posthumans 130 Making Space for the Cultural Posthuman The Satanic Transformations The Production of Posthuman Knowledge in Grimus Magic, Science, Technology and the Stone Rose Chapter 5 Science Fictional Representations of Posthumans 166 A Social Science Fiction(al) Novel Reproducing Posthumans in Social Science Fiction Artificial Minds and Bodies in The Stone Canal Posthuman Thought Experiments Chapter 6 A Natural History of Posthuman Science and Technology 203 The Unnatural History of Natural History ‘Old Monkeys’ in Natural History Body Modification and the Unevolved Humans in Natural History Engineering Forged Bodies and Minds The Forged Doctrine of Form and Function Making Mistakes: Degraded Human Forms Works Cited List 224 7 INTRODUCTION: Producing and Representing Posthumans Why, you might ask, should we care how other people think and feel about stories? Why do we talk about them in this language of value? One answer is just that it is part of being human. People tell stories and discuss them in every culture, and we know they have done so back as far as the record goes…. We wouldn’t recognize a community as human if it had no stories, if its people had no narrative imagination. Kwame Anthony Appiah Cosmopolitanism Words, languages, laws, sciences, and the fine arts have come, and by them finally the rough diamond of our mind has been polished. Man has been trained in the same way as animals. He has become an author, as they have become beasts of burden. Julien Offray de La Mettrie Man A Machine To declare that human beings tell stories seems banal. Yet in the context of debates and discourses about the posthuman, it may be useful to consider the role of storytelling and narrative in the social construction of human communities. Narrative imagination allows authors to consider how a community of humans might not only be distinguished from animals as Julien La Mettrie suggests, but also from the posthuman. Posthuman figures, beings commonly characterized as a “union of the human with the intelligent machine” (Hayles How We Became Posthuman 2), are always differentiated from the human, sometimes in degree and sometimes in kind, and narrative becomes a means of defining and constructing the posthuman as well as 8 redefining the human. Because the production and reproduction of posthuman figures is predicated on their distinction from the human, narratives of the posthuman require a re- evaluation of the human as well. In The Inhuman: Reflections on Time (1991), Jean François Lyotard suggests that “any material system is technological if it filters information useful to its survival, if it memorizes and processes that information and makes inferences based on the regulating effect of behavior, that is, if it intervenes on and impacts its environment so as to assure its perpetuation at least” (12). Imagining the human body as one of these technological material systems, as visions of posthuman futures often do, puts the human on a continuum with any other similar material systems that interacts with their environment – including cyborgs and robots.1 Lyotard’s examination of the “inhuman” suggests that the inhuman may be constructed as an opposition to the human; however, this opposition is also challenged by Lyotard’s suggestion that humans might survive the death of the solar system because the human and inhuman interact with their environment in similar ways, with similar drives to survive. This potential common drive for survival shared by the human and the inhuman (or the human and posthuman) threatens to decenter the human subject in narratives of future technological developments. To maintain a distinction between human and inhuman would require constructing an opposition between the artificiality of the cyborg, robot, or genetically-altered human (clone), and the natural, organic, and thus “original,” human. The notion that the human is natural and the cyborg or clone artificial runs through commonsense definitions of the two categories that Lyotard labels the 1 The cyborg is a shortened form of “cybernetic organism,” and cybernetics is “the theory or study of communication and control in living organisms or machines” (OED). Cybernetics, which is a communication theory at heart, has refined the interaction of the elements within the set (organism or combination of organism-elements) such that they disrupt existing structures. The robot is “a machine (sometimes resembling a human being in appearance) designed to function in place of a living agent” whose etymology can be traced to the Czech word robota, meaning forced labor, first used by Karel Kapek in his play R.U.R. (‘Rossum's Universal Robots’) (1920) (OED). 9 human and the inhuman. But this opposition becomes troubled when contemplating twenty-first century biotechnologies because of the way in which many of the technologies that manipulate the human body mimic natural processes of that body.