Abstract
Remakes of popular novels and films indicate how animals have become a primary means of representing not only the rapid development and proliferation of genetically modified organisms in plant form but also the interplay of aesthetics and scientific technologies in the post-Darwinian emphasis on species as a social form. Where vivisection worked in the 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau as a scientific mechanism for social dominance, ensuing versions of the story over the past 100 years have come to position eugenic breeding and, most recently, transgenic splicing as the trope for playing out the central cultural work of ordering species in the distinction of human species being. But the contradictions of representing animals also open up other possibilities for genetic aesthetics. Especially in the 1996 film remake, the isolation of the successful transgenic animal (akin to what artist Eduardo Kac calls “the beautiful chimera”) and her alignment with the human become the conditions of possibility for a theriocentric (nonhuman animal centered) community of animal transgenics that emerges in opposition to the human genetic aesthetic. Animals remain the medium in which these struggles are (re)enacted, but their transgenic forms enable an investigation of how and why the human is increasingly defined as genetically 0.1% removed from the animal.
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Notes
I acknowledge that this use of “transgenic organism” throughout to refer to genetically modified agricultural food products is itself controversial, as illustrated by Haraway’s treatment of one of the earliest of such products to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration: “Although [its patent owner] Calgene has claimed the Flavr Savr [a GM tomato variety] is not a transgenic organism, since the gene normally responsible for decay is genetically engineered to be reversed and so nonfunctional in the new product, I consider Flavr Savr strictly transgenic because it bears a gene for a bacterial enzyme inserted to act as a marker [in what has become a common practice] to verify successful insertion of the altered functional gene of intent.” Haraway’s assertion that this tomato is transgenic tactically revisits the strategic positioning of products that are at once appealing to knowledge of existing taxonomic categories (Flavr Savr as a kind of tomato) and “blasting” conventional notions of species distinctions (a tomato as a patented product of genetic lab science) (Haraway 1997, p. 56). This distinction has become all the more contested with genetic modifications to plants to make them internally manufacture Bacillus thuringiensis, a bacterial toxin commonly referred to as Bt, which also is topically applied as an organic insecticide.
The Committee on Environmental Impacts acknowledges that Flavr Savr was a commercial failure but points to the “rapid and broad use of Bt-expressing cotton and corn” as subsequent evidence of “the commercial success” of transgenic crops more generally (2002, 221), in spite of the problems that stem from lack of knowledge about the natural ecology of this bacterium (162).
Mitchell (1998, p. 221), relating especially the large, carnivorous dinosaur to modern historical patterns as an enduring image of “the spectacle of consumption itself”, argues that the attraction of this narrative concerns its “redemption of big patriarchal capital” (225). In contrast, Watkins (1995, p. 191) reads it as primarily concerned with “the thematics of postmodern ‘downsizing”’ by positioning the dinosaur as “a kind of symptomatic monitor” of global economic patterns; Watkins relates how the fast, smallish velociraptors figure a shift in public perceptions of dinosaur life to the stripped-down corporate model of mobile capital rising in popularity in the 1990s, a reading that gains an eerie resonance in fallen corporate giant Enron’s use of the name Raptor for an offshore (and allegedly money-laundering) subsidiary designed for this very purpose. Reading the animals as clones, Turner (2002, p. 903). argues compellingly that because of their “circulation as commodities within the same mass culture that maintains the ideology of DNA as a consumable object” the Jurassic narratives themselves fail “to carry out an unimplicated critique of the bioinformatics economy [...] Jurassic Park the novel is made into Jurassic Park the movie, with the inevitable book and movie sequels duly following”.
For instance, identification with animal forms justifies the continuing imposition of an “evolutionary tree” model on systems that have evolved not simply through linear/hierarchic but also lateral/horizontal gene transfer (Venter 2003, p. 52), obscuring not only these emerging methods of communicating and influencing development across species lines but also the basic conditions of transgenic crop commercialization, which proceeds rapidly in spite of the fact that little is known about the long-term effects on consumers, ecosystems, or even the plants themselves. Venter’s (2003, p. 52) conclusion is enigmatic: “The concern is that [lateral gene transfer] might be very extensive in the plant world, which has a lot of implications in terms of biotechnology in plants”. The Committee on Environmental Impacts Associated with Commercialization of Transgenic Plants (2002) suggests that these concerns are further muddled by agricultural implementations of horizontal gene manipulations in crop plants, which may have previously obliterated “the line between conventional crop breeding and the creation of transgenic crops” (48).
Controversies surrounding studies of wild-breeding transgenics complicate this situation further. Editors of the premiere science journal Nature published and in a rare move quickly retracted one such study, in which Quist and Chapela (2001) claimed to detect the markers of altered genes moving across generations within native corn and its uncultivated relatives in the Mexican state, Oaxaca, a region that as Dalton (2001, p. 413) elaborates is part of the presumed ancestral origin of this plant and the “global center” of its genetic diversity. Quist and Chapela (2001, p. 542) conclude their article with a call for long-term studies that similarly trace “the gene flow from hybrids to traditional landraces in the centers of origin and diversity of crop plants” but the scandal surrounding Nature’s retraction makes this kind of work less viable. At issue is how to trace the environmental impact of altered genes and their possible mutations, a situation in which the illegal planting of transgenic seeds already contaminates possible scientific controls. Indicating that such “empirical inference” about this level of transgenic pollution is now noncontroversial, Metz and Fütterer (2002, p. 601) cite studies that document it through illegally grown transgenic soy and cotton, respectively in Brazil and India even as they refute Quist and Chapela’s findings. This controversy illustrates how ideas of ownership, power, and science converge to bracket off the agency of transgenic organisms.
Reading Moreau’s creatures as “animals artificially elevated to ‘human’ status,” McCarthy (1986, p. 27) concedes nonetheless the complexity of their “case, one that almost completely blurs the line between man and beast”. McCarthy’s development of this novel’s overlap with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) gains significance with Marlon Brando’s depiction of Moreau in the 1996 film version, where the actor who famously portrayed the Kurtz figure in Apocalypse Now (1979) again is swathed in white, surrounded by modern military gear, and presented as both insane in his excesses as well as symptomatic of empire.
Analyzing the political response of animal rights activists to patenting organisms—“the ultimate manipulation of being ‘made-into”’—Sabloff (2001, p. 141) points out that strategies premised on a “flight into the human realm” underscore the overarching assumption that even these “quasi-human” animals exist outside of human history (132), an assumption that I hope here to challenge by revisiting the notion of species being.
Schwab (qtd. in Sabloff 2001, p. 127) uses this vivid phrase to call attention to the hormone, antibiotic, and other drug use endemic to factory farming. But I think that it resonates with the uses of GM life forms to produce pharmaceuticals for humans as well as factory-farmed animals because this approach to microbial life has already become standard practice. Pharmaceutical giant Monsanto became “the biotech frontrunner” in the 1990s by aggressively developing agricultural GMOs, creatures like bacteria that produce bovine somatropin (BST), the first bovine growth hormone to be marketed, as well as acquiring companies with the rights to them, such as Calgene (Haraway 1997, p. 291, n. 64).
For Noske (1997, pp. 15–16), the “genetic engineering” of animals as “specialized workers”—such as the featherless chickens recently developed by Israeli researchers to withstand the high heat of confinement facilities in the desert—demonstrates not only how genetic science extends a Taylorist division of “animal ‘skills’ and bodies” but also, in the ways in which such genetic interventions enable animals to be “deprived of their own society” and even human company, how such practices relocate the “species alienation” that Marx diagnosed in human workers into nonhuman bodies (20).
See Haraway (1997, p. 79), who develops this point about the irreducibility of the facts and fictions surrounding OncoMouse, which is not only “the first patented animal in the world” but also a figure that enables people metaphorically and materially to “inhabit the multibillion-dollar quest narrative of the search for the ‘cure for cancer”’.
Ringel (1989, p. 64) points to this fixation on “the boundaries between the animal and the human” as she accounts for why in the 1980s there were more objections to “research in recombinant DNA than [... to] all the atomic research of the 40s and 50s”. In the 1990s, species crossings continue to be the focus of critical attention. According to Schaal (2002, pp. 110–111), “The greatest area of concern at this time remains direct genetic modification—the insertion of a gene from one species into the genome of another—that is, genetic engineering or the production of GMOs”. She points to anxieties about species boundaries to account for why public debate about biotechnology in agriculture is “extremely active and visible,” “international in scope,” and “often exceedingly bitter” (109).
Recent discussions of Heidegger’s focus on the Geschlect or species being of humanity call into question whether such distinctions inevitably reinforce a humanist teleology, endlessly deferring questions of animal subjectivity. Derrida (1989, p. 56) argues that such a conflation “has remained up till now [...] the price to be paid in the ethico-political denunciation of biologism, racism, naturalism, etc.”, leaving open the possibility of distinguishing human being from anthropocentrism, a separation of the discourse of species from the institution of speciesism that Wolfe suggests Derrida pursued (if never quite accomplished) “all along” (Wolfe 2003, p. 216, n. 24). The question remains whether it is the humanist insistence on being or the deconstructive focus on language—what is more, the inherent contradictions within language or human perceptions of them—that endlessly defers such a project.
Though not referring directly to Derrida, Agamben contends that the use of language “to isolate the nonhuman within the human” gets in the way of understanding how it works in the service of an “anthropological machine” to produce the human as a site of endless negotiation over such divisions (Agamben 2004, pp. 37–38). Pointing to the influence of zoologist von Uexküll’s “unreserved abandonment of every anthropocentric perspective in the life sciences” on Heidegger’s as well as Deleuze’s work (39), Agamben shows how Uexküll’s distinction of species members through their Umwelt or perceptual worlds defers the possibility of any absolute distinction between man and animal. Agamben refuses the absolute division within language and instead posits an ongoing negotiation at the site of the human so, for him, Heidegger’s insistence on the distinctiveness of human species being in terms of the possibility of meta-perception of animal perceptual worlds not only points the way to the conclusion of metaphysics but also anticipates a new purpose that has emerged for (and at the same time closes down) this sense of being: “Genome, global economy, and humanitarian ideology are the three united faces of this process in which posthistorical humanity seems to take on its own physiology as its last, impolitical mandate” (77).
According to Showalter (1992, p. 80), “The all-male community [...] raises disturbing possibilities and fantasies of homosexuality and bestiality that add to its unpleasantness for readers” but I see the connection as far less “subtle”.
See Foucault’s (1978, p. 43) discussion of the discursive transformation of the homosexual into a “species” at the beginning of the twentieth century, a form of clinical sexual agency which involves a precarious transcoding between medical and animal science.
Especially in the gaze of the Leopard Man, the first of the Beast People to revert to killing and to be killed for it, Wells’s Prendick intuits “the fact of its humanity” though he admits that he “cannot explain the fact” (Wells 1988, p. 147), a perception that as (he calls himself) a scientific man he assumes will not convince the reader any more than his scientific human companions. Structurally, such narratorial insistence on transcendent humanity as a fundamental difference may bookend Moreau’s insistence that the creatures are all failures but Prendick’s reliability in making these claims in turn is surrounded by doubt. The many layers of reference to cannibalism in the framing of the story invite the dismissal of Prendick’s narrative altogether, as Showalter (1992, p. 81) argues, “as a hysterical hallucination”, but this interpretation precludes the significance of the novel’s elaborate deferral of the vivisected chimera’s human status. What I want to develop here instead is how, as Fried (1994, p. 204, n. 19) indicates, Moreau’s approach to vivisection is deconstructive avant la lettre: “When Moreau concludes that he might just as well have made sheep into llamas or llamas into sheep, he is in effect expressing a commitment to difference (or say representation) within beasthood itself”.
Vacillating across beast fable, scientific romance, castaway thriller, and the sort of “techno-novel” popularized generations later by Crichton, Wells’s text exhibits characteristics of multiple novelistic genres without finally establishing one as its dominant model (Krumm 1999, p. 51). Sherman (1995, p. 869) contends that this categorical difficulty, though one of the distinguishing features of The Island of Dr. Moreau, also in part accounts for why it is the “least widely read and taught” of Wells’s popular scientific romances.
Although European stories of the people who captured animals were highly romanticized, Rothfels (2002, p. 68) shows how they became part of the larger historical narrative of empire, for “in most cases this business had a ruthless side in its dealings with animals, people, and environments which was almost a necessary component of the trade”.
As Varela writing together with Maturana elaborates, this “ongoing descriptive recursion which we call the ‘I’’’ is produced through the interface of human bodies and language: “the self, the ‘I’, arises as the social singularity defined by the operational intersection in the human body of the recursive linguistic distinctions in which it is distinguished” (Maturana and Varela 1992, p. 231). The ambiguous status of language that emerges here is central to Wolfe’s deconstructive argument about animal subjectivity more generally; to him, Varela and Maturana’s “processive, recursive, antirepresentational account of the relation between material technicities, linguistic domains, and the emergence of subjectivities” becomes a means of evading altogether “the blind alleys of ‘intention’ or ‘consciousness’ (or what amounts to the same thing on methodological terrain in the sciences, ‘anthropomorphism’)” that trouble prior accounts of animal in relation to human subjectivity (Wolfe 2003, p. 87). The limitations of language, however, seem to weigh on this argument, for as Wolfe notes Varela and Maturana refute the characterization of bee communication as a “language” and insist instead that “it is a largely fixed system of interactions whose stability depends on the genetic stability of the species and not on the cultural stability of the social system in which they take place” (2003, p. 218). In this context, it is all the more curious that Varela later returns to social insects as a model of the selfless or virtual self.
Moreau’s transgenic children offer a stark delineation of how any animal can “be treated in all three ways” distinguished by Deleuze and Guattari: the beautiful chimera, kept in Moreau’s house and most frequently referred to as his daughter is akin to the “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedipal animals, each with its own petty history”; this cat-woman later fights to the death with members of the largely un-individuated crew who kill him, who are “more demonic animals, pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity”; and, in the ruins of Moreau’s experiment, all who remain appear to be “animals with characteristics or attributes” in this case of genetic modification moving beyond the realm of human control, “archetypes or models” of genetic aesthetics in defiance of the Law of their shared father (Deleuze 1987, pp. 240–41).
Foucault (1978, p. 139) develops this term to distinguish the “anatamo-politics” or production of the individual human body and identity through disciplinary structures from “bio-politics,” the mechanisms by which populations are configured through “biopower”. On the connections of biopower with globalization and empire, see Hardt and Negri (2000, xv).
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McHugh, S. The call of the other 0.1%: genetic aesthetics and the new Moreaus. AI & Soc 20, 63–81 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-005-0007-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-005-0007-4