Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels by Justin Omar Johnston

Author:Justin Omar Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9783030262570
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Snowman’s description of the body’s liberation from the soul and mind makes sense, in part, because biotechnologies can modify behaviours not only through discursive norms, but also materially or prosthetically. This supposed liberation of the real or natural body from culture is actually the subsumption of life to design or representation. The body need not be “sublimated” by civil institutions or cultural authorities when it can be nudged, redesigned, or tethered to life-giving techno-ideologies. For example, when Snowman imagines “the body” taking “off for the topless bar,” this obviously isn’t the natural body as such, finally stripped of cultural norms (2004: 85). On the contrary, this body is the consumer’s body, the male body, the white and hetero-body, the body rich enough to pay the cover and become a drunken, entertained body. If “the body,” as such, went to a topless bar, who or what would be topless? In the biopolitical context, there is no question about the body or the real, only questions about which bodies count as real bodies.

We should not, therefore, interpret these genres of the real existing in and by representation as transgressions against the suburban world the boys live in. Rather, they are just renaturalizations of corporate domestic values, much in the same way as Gary Becker imagines neoliberalism as renaturalizing “family values.” Indeed, the rebuilt body that Jimmy sees “ditching” culture is not only aggressively masculine. It cynically finds other bodies to be simulations (bodies supported by welfare) or fetishized fantasies made flesh (poor, disposable, and racialized bodies). For this reason, Preciado warns against two “narrative traps” that plague the “theatrical relationship between pornography, snuff, and politics.” First, there is “the messianic temptation: someone will come to save us—some unique religious or technical force”—and secondly, “there is the apocalyptic temptation: nothing can be done, and the disappearance of the species is imminent” (2017: 346–347). Oryx and Crake demonstrates how these two narrative traps reinforce one another. From within the dystopia of corporate domesticity, the “messianic” and “apocalyptic temptations” become fused together. After all, Crake is trying to save the world by, in many ways, destroying it.

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