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Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre

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Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine ((PLSM))

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Abstract

This introduction begins by exploring the scientific, political, and legal narratives that have framed the twenty-first century as the biotech century. While these narratives have responded to major developments in bioscience, the story of a biotech future has increasingly relocated “the human” as standing behind or emerging after biotechnological interventions. This is due, in part, to the key role 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 human belonging. I then preview how contemporary novels engage the biotech future. While these works recognize biotechnological and economic accounts of human belonging in the twenty-first century, they also expose 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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For further analysis of “family values” as an ideological construction, see Melinda Cooper’s Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism.

  2. 2.

    By “genes,” I am referring to protein-coding DNA. This has been the traditional way of identifying functional genes within larger sequences, but this methodology is currently under some scrutiny. About 95 per cent of humans’ DNA sequence has been considered “Junk DNA” or “the dark matter of the genome.” The research consortium ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) has recently found that at least some of this non-coding DNA is functional. According to ENCODE, some ncDNA helps regulate the transcription, timing, placement, and coordination of coding genes and proteins—pointing to a possible shift from what Evelyn Fox Keller calls the “pregenomic genome” to the “postgenomic genome.” Keller’s essay “The Postgenomic Genome” in Sarah Richardson’s collection Postgenomics is an accessible introduction to this still developing subject (2015).

  3. 3.

    Of course not all postgenomic research has turned away from gene mapping as such. Data science concerning whole genomes has certainly flourished during this period, including population studies like the Genome Wide Association Study (GWS). Moreover, in her book Race Decoded, Catherine Bliss tracks the renewed importance of racial categories in whole genome research. Here, “technologies like haplotype mapping and principal components analysis … shape how scientists define populations, compare their classifications with self-reported identities, and create new avenues for identity formation” (2012: 19). One key cultural dimension of this rapidly developing trend is the commercialization and popularity of ancestry mapping. And while Bliss addresses multiple issues concerning race in genomic research, she powerfully points out that “DNA-based identities … fashion an activism that often neglects the core causes of racial injustice, such as institutional racism and structural inequality” (2012: 17).

  4. 4.

    For instance, the CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing—hailed as a major breakthrough in genetic engineering—was developed by mimicking the gene-snipping immune systems of certain bacteria.

  5. 5.

    Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a technique whereby the nucleus of an embryological stem cell (egg cell) is replaced with the nucleus (DNA) from a different cell, even from a different body. Suppose, for example, I remove the nucleus from a random skin cell scraped off my arm and place it inside an embryological stem cell. The DNA from that skin cell can then become pluripotent or regenerated. This new cell might now become a liver cell or a blood cell. Or, as was the case with Dolly, this new stem cell could become a clone of me.

  6. 6.

    Undoubtedly, the improved capacity to perform stem cell research without relying on embryological stem cells (egg cells) has helped blunt the political opposition from the religious right. Nevertheless, many ethical questions remain and pose potential sites of contestation, including the presupposed status of human individuality, the blurry boundary between human and animal life, and the relationship between a living organism and intellectual property (patents).

  7. 7.

    This is a relatively static vision of the human that many scholars in the humanities, myself included, would roundly reject.

  8. 8.

    To be clear, eusociality is a formal condition or genre of life. It is not tied to the evolution of a particular species but is instead “scattered across insects, marine crustaceans, and subterranean rodents” (2015: 27). At least twenty species (probably more) exhibit behaviours that meet Wilson’s eusocial criteria—making it by no means unique to humans. Nevertheless, Wilson does posit a singularly human expression of eusociality: the campsite.

  9. 9.

    Of course, the novels I analyse in this book critique the colonizing influence of techno-scientific economies. And they do so not in the name of preserving humanity or human nature, but in opposition to the violence of humanization as an economic and technological process.

  10. 10.

    I do not mean to suggest that liberal humanism ever actually came close to recognizing universal belonging. Indeed, its universal rhetoric disguised the systematic exclusions upon which it depended. As Lisa Lowe puts it in The Intimacy of Four Continents, “social relations in the colonized Americas, Asia, and Africa were the condition of possibility for Western liberalism to think the universality of human freedom, however much freedoms for slaves, colonized, and indigenous peoples were precisely exempted by that philosophy” (2015: 16). I am arguing, rather, that neoliberalism reproduces these exclusions through a revised discourse of human belonging, one that is expressed most clearly in human capital theory.

  11. 11.

    It is critically important to see the repetition between this aspirational form of humanism and the aspirational forms of “civilization” that European colonialists imposed on colonized people. One lesson to be learned from this history is that once one is considered less than fully human, no matter how much one then masters the supposed metrics of human civilization, one will never be fully considered human. Homi Bhabha explores this process in “Of Mimicry and Man” wherein he points out: “The success of colonial appropriation depends on a proliferation of inappropriate objects that ensure its strategic failure, so that mimicry is at once resemblance and menace” (127).

  12. 12.

    In her excellent review of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, “Becoming Non-Economic,” Annie McClanahan points out that Frank Knight and Allan Fisher used the term “human capital” before the end of WWII in an effort to increase state and military investments in higher education. McClanahan’s argument is that human capital was initially conceived alongside the GI Bill as way to modernize the US economy through a remaking of the university (2017). She contends that this early evocation of human capital has gone under-noticed because it has been occluded by a nostalgic vision of the university as non-economic (an idealism conditioned by mid-century economic growth). According to McClanahan, the rise of human capital theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is an anxious reassertion of higher education’s continued economic importance at the very moment when students are deriving much less economic value from their educations, especially due to automation and student loan debt. While McClanahan provides an important corrective, her review is focused specifically on higher education as the source of human capital appreciation. Arguably, however, the (ideological) novelty of human capital theory under neoliberalism has been the expansion of what counts as economic activity, making education just one activity of many in the life of the neoliberal subject. In other words, human capital theory doesn’t just work to economize higher education; it also nudges people to perform all sorts of entrepreneurial activities whose value, one imagines, is surveilled and calculated within the obscure networks of a mystical marketplace. The modes of production that underpin human capital theory must be exposed, and the ideological power of human capital theory must be critiqued as well.

  13. 13.

    Gary Becker notes that investment in human capital “applies independently of the division of real earnings into monetary and psychic components. Thus the analysis applies to health, which has a large psychic component, as well as to on-the-job training, which has a large monetary component” (1993: 18). In many cases, psychic income is described as the monetary value of some expensive pleasure like the ability to appreciate art or the joy one takes in seeing one’s child happy and healthy. In other words, psychic income is an important way in which human capital theory seeks to make human psychology intelligible in strictly economic terms.

  14. 14.

    Interestingly, Friedrich Hayek, the forefather of neoliberal economics, argued, “it is more than a metaphor to describe the price system as a kind of machinery … or a system of telecommunications which enables individual producers to… adjust their activities” (“The Use of Knowledge in Society”). For an extensive analysis of Hayek’s view of markets as information processing machines see Philip Mirowski’s Machine Dreams and The Road from Mont Pelerin (2002).

  15. 15.

    This analysis of neoliberalism’s redefinition of “the human” should by no means evoke nostalgia for older Fordist or colonialist definitions of the term, both of which were predicated on the exclusion of various populations, including non-whites, women, the poor, immigrants, queers, the disabled, and others who were deemed less-than fully human or fully civilized. In multiple ways these exclusions continue unabated under neoliberalism, even as they are effectuated through new technologies and techniques of historical forgetting.

  16. 16.

    In response to Foucault’s earlier descriptions of biopolitics and disciplinary enclosures, Donna Haraway claims that “Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field” (1991: 150). Likewise, Gilles Deleuze, in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” argues that “we are in a generalized crisis in relation to … environments of enclosure” and that “societies of control … are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies,” thus marking an historical transition away from Foucault’s model of modern civil society (1997: 3–4). Consequently, for Deleuze, disciplined individuals—recognizable by their “signature and rank”—are transformed into “dividuals”—coded selves or passwords that can be technologically reprogramed. Additionally, in 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri embraced the idea that in “capitalist society biopolitics is what is most important,” but they are quick to add, “Foucault fails to grasp … the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society” (2000: 27–28). Then again, Paul Preciado, in his 2008 manifesto, “Pharmaco-pornographic Politics,” points out that although Foucault’s formulation of “biopower … is critically sharp, … it is also true that the valuable insights he offers begin to blur the closer the analysis comes to contemporary societies” (2008: 109).

  17. 17.

    Borrowing Raymond Williams’ distinction between dominant, residual, and emergent forms of culture, I read discipline as a residual form of culture that “formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (1977: 122). The prison industrial complex, for example, remains a key component of hegemonic power in the United States, but at the same time, mega-prisons are now supplemented by other forms of control, including the increased distribution of prescription medications, like the antipsychotic Seroquel.

  18. 18.

    Larry Ellison, Dmitry Itskov, Peter Theil, and Sergey Brin are high-profile examples of these billionaire investors. Bill Gates and Elon Musk have also expressed sympathy for transhumanist enhancements over the years as a way to compete with artificial intelligence. See also Peter Theil’s “The Education of a Libertarian” (2009), Evan Osnos’ “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich” (2017), and Max More’s admission, in “The Philosophy of Transhumanism” that “many and perhaps most trans-humanists evinced a broadly libertarian politics” (2013: 13).

  19. 19.

    Indeed, “by the early 1980s,” Cooper notes, “all the major chemical and pharmaceutical companies had invested in the new genetic technologies, either through licensing agreements with biotech start-ups or by developing their own in-house research units” (22).

  20. 20.

    To learn more about how oil companies and other corporations compose climate disaster narratives to model investment opportunities, see Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming by McKenzie Funk (2014).

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  1. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    Justin Omar Johnston

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Johnston, J.O. (2019). Introduction: The Biotech Century, Human Capital, and Genre. In: Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0_1

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