Living in Technical Legality by Kieran Tranter

Author:Kieran Tranter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Living Well as a Technical Legal Subject

To live well in the present involves responsibility for becoming. This is a possibility created by the totality of technology in the modern West. As was seen in the narrative that unfolded in Battlestar Galactica, responsibility for becoming can happen because of the demise of essentialism, of hard nature, and also of metaphysical guarantees through the unfolding of technology. In Heidegger’s questioning of technology, but also in Butler’s projection of natureculture, technicity discloses a world without limit – a freedom to make the world that for Heidegger is a doom, but for Haraway is a statement of possibilities.

However, Xenogenesis shows that with regard to the embodied location of the little monster that was formally known as the human, the technical legal subject who is a node within the networks that are making and remaking the world, talk of freedom is partial. A world of Enframing may ultimately be a plastic, limitless world, but at specific embodied locations there is rigid fluidity. Some of the networks that intersect at a node are open to technical manipulation, while others constrain and dictate.91

So, having established Xenogenesis as a biopower, naturecultural text elaborating the technical legal subject, the critical question remains: How is this partial agency within the networks of the present to be exercised? In a world of total technicity, where the embodied agent is an ever-changing node, can there be an ethics? The possibility seems immediately paradoxical. The whole narrative of the totality of technology is the demise of the transcendent or natural that could have measured, evaluated, or judged being-in-the-world. The best that is sometimes suggested is the techno-economic standard of efficiency. However, Xenogenesis suggests something else.

Efficiency is not at play in Xenogenesis. The Oankali are patient, the humans irrational, and the constructs precocious. An over-arching motif may be trade, but the market is absent; the Oankali monopoly over power and resources, coupled with the resisters’ inability to be rational enough to form a cross-village social contract, means that Akin cannot grasp the concept of money.92 Even the social Darwinist argument of the efficiency of the survival of the fitness93 has been blown away in the humans’ nuclear war. Life on Earth is changing in a big way, but that change is due to the exercise of biopower by the Oankali. Competition and hierarchical behaviour are clearly coded by Butler as a one-way street to oblivion. There are no invisible hands of the market or natural selection in Xenogenesis; there are the much more visible sunflower-like ‘sensory hands’ of the ooloi mixing and manipulating individuals, gene-pools, and biospheres.94 The everydayness of the narratives, unlike the sometimes heavy-handed concept-as-storyline in Battlestar Galactica, means that Xenogenesis does not animate such abstractions. But what it does show is life.

For all the representation of natureculture in Xenogenesis, there is a recurring image of life.95 Butler suggests that there is always an excess, a something more, happening with this life. The biometrics and biomechanics of lived things may be the Oankali’s domain, but they are never shown to possess complete technical mastery.

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