Biofictions

Literary and Visual Imagination in the Age of Biotechnology

Lejla Kucukalic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000441574
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Biofictions introduces three novel concepts: 'biofiction, ' 'bioimagination, ' and 'biodiscourse' to talk about intersections of literary and visual texts and biotechnology. The book proposes a new interdisciplinary area of research that correlates processes of genetics and literature, based on two critical approaches. One, drawing parallels between the genetic codes, human language, formal (binary) language, and posthuman communication and the role of meaning and imagination in these forms of communication. Two, by defining 'biofictions' as a critical scientific-artistic concept and as a corpus of texts that engage ideas and developments in molecular biology. Syncretic connection between biotechnology and literature is especially evident in an open science movement and the literary artistic genre of biopunk, discussed across chapters. The study includes well-known contemporary texts, such as David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, that are recontextualized as biofiction; it offers a rereading of important but neglected novels such as Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration (1967); and it analyzes new visual texts such as the TV series Altered Carbon and Ghost in the Shell films. Based on these wide-ranging examples and new critical concepts, the book argues that coming up with possible alterations for the genetic code or intended traits for the organism is a discursive practice that brings into being bionarratives that are both organic and literary.

Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 Introduction

Biofictions

DOI: 10.4324/9781003132325-1

The Scope of This Book

This book seeks to define a corpus of literature that can be usefully classified as ‘biofictions.’ Biofictions (not to be confused with ‘biographical fictions,’ sometimes shortened to ‘biofictions’) include a range of literary and visual texts related to biotechnology and especially genetics. Biofictions encompass a novel imaginative process, rendered in natural (human) and molecular language, that entails creation of novel biological entities in both literary/fictional and scientific labs. Proto-biofictional books might include H.G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), whose titular character produces, through his agonizing vivisection experiments, new forms of being, as Wells blurs the biological and ethical boundaries between humans and animals; Aldous Huxley’s much discussed Brave New World (1932); and James Blish’s collection of novellas, The Seedling Stars (1952), which deals with the biological alteration of human beings to make them suitable for life on other planets. Thus, biofictions include hybrid biological entities – genetically edited organisms and cells – produced by science, as well as new entities imagined by art. William S. Burroughs’s The Soft Machine (1961) is an example of early biofiction, where language is cut up and folded in in a manner similar to the genetic engineering of biomolecules (as discussed in Chapter 2). And an example of a biofictional organism is Alba, the GFP (green fluorescent protein) albino bunny designed by genetic researcher Louis-Marie Houdebine and artist Eduardo Kac.

Aside from the parallels between biological and artistic language and meaning, the larger context for Biofictions is a nature–culture codification, the understanding that codes exist in culture and biology, as illustrated by Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene and viral meme concepts, where “memes resemble the early replicating molecules, floating chaotically in the primeval soup” and compete for survival (196). Explaining the importance of the evolution of cultural codes, Dawkins advises, “We should not seek immortality in reproduction” because “cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission” (199; 189). Rather, for Dawkins, it is the encoded, self-perpetuating ideas that physically affect us (Dawkins, 198). Dawkins might have found inspiration in Burroughs’s “language as a virus” idea, articulated most extensively in his The Electronic Revolution (1970), suggesting that language has possessed human beings and that it infects and controls us. The present book, however, does not approach language, whether that of biomolecules or of humans, as a self-replicating virus. Rather, it observes human interventions in those languages, examining the limits of representation and our agency as extended into molecular and natural (linguistic) language, which this study observes as a creative medium.

The goal of this study is not the application of concepts and metaphors from biological theory to narrative analysis; scholarship such as Darwinian literary studies already applies evolutionary theory to interpret the novel and other kinds of texts. Rather, the intention is to bring together the methods and thinking of two separate disciplines into a dialogue and a more expansive field of inquiry. Because biomolecules are literally reordered to achieve new interactions or expressions of the genes and because molecular and human languages function in an analogous way, this book proposes the corresponding existence of biofictional organisms in genetics and in literature. Biofictions argues that understanding genetics and literature as products of languages with parallel syntactic and semiotic features is the most productive way to approach human rights and posthuman subject formation in the Age of Biology (1953–present). This age is punctuated by two important milestones: (1) the 1953 discovery of the double helix, followed by the 1957 ‘Central Dogma’ of molecular genetics, stating that genetic information always flows in the direction from DNA to RNA and into proteins; (2) the integration of bio and digital approaches to genetics, which started in the early 1970s and developed more fully in the early 21st century.

The broadest goal of Biofictions is to expand the interdisciplinary dialogue between molecular biology and literature. The parallels between the narrative articulation of biotechnology and our ‘hacking’ of the human ‘narrative’ through genetic editing are formulated as biofictions: new bioforms recorded in textual form and the newly produced sequences of organic and synthetic biomolecules. Geneticists can find critical and visionary models of possible worlds, resulting from their research, embodied in biofictional literature; literary scholars can further explore the formal possibilities revealed by the concept of ‘biofictions.’ Both disciplines can continue to recognize the creation of new kinds of hybrid language. Posthuman discourse is being written and rewritten through biological fictions that include both semiotic and genetic re-inscription. Important questions to consider in this context are: who is controlling the writing of DNA, the posthuman body? What is the role of the imagination in this process? And, what will be the ultimate form of the new language? Such intercrossing inevitably includes formal and computer languages; however, this cybernetic, digital aspect of biofictions receives, out of necessity of focus and space limitation, least attention in this study.

This book focuses on literary and molecular aspects of language, meaning, and bioimagination. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of biofictions and their importance for the discourse of human rights and vulnerabilities in the Age of Biology. It also examines the role of imagination and fantasy in techno-science and art, arguing for the necessity of unco-opted, ‘transcendent imagination’ as central to more egalitarian approaches to biotechnology. Chapter 2 shows how the literature and science of biopunk together play an important role in the endeavor to make biotechnology more accessible to everyone. The chapter explores biopunk stories and examples of biopunk science and the need for a collaborative, syncretic approach to molecular biology. Chapter 3 discusses William S. Burroughs’s and Brian Gysin’s methods of cut-ups and fold-ins and their correspondences with genetic cutting, editing, and folding. Burroughs is identified as an early biopunk owing to his iconoclastic and all-inclusive experimental methods. Chapter 4 examines in detail the parallels between human and molecular language, especially as studied by the discipline of molecular linguistics, and then demonstrates variants of meaning evident in biomolecular processes such as gene expression. The chapter suggests new concepts of individuality and identity that support the notion of ‘biofictions’ as a valid interdisciplinary term that can be applied to both literary and genetic ‘narratives.’ Chapter 5 discusses examples of contemporary literary biofictions, including novels by Margaret Atwood, Taiyo Fujii, Paul Bacigalupi, Ted Kosmatka, Edward Ashton, Michael Crichton, and others, and Chapter 6 takes a look at representations of a female bioborg in animated and feature films, examining biotechnological and cultural interventions into the female body and underlining the conflicts inherent in creation of biofictions. Artistic visions and genetic research discussed in this book bring to the forefront difficult decisions about procedures that represent progress but also pose serious risks. One way to assess these tensions is through developing a fuller understanding of the productions and interactions of natural, molecular, and formal languages and the future of these interactions. This is the main aim of Biofictions.

Human Vulnerability and Rights in the Age of Biology

Episode 3 of the TV series Altered Carbon (2018), adapted from Richard K. Morgan’s biotech noir novel of the same title (2002), features an ostentatious party at the opulent palace of the politically powerful businessman Laurens Bancroft. Its central event is a brutal physical clash between a married couple. The two professional fighters participate in the “Extreme Organic Damage Event” where, in order for the winner to get an upgraded new body or ‘sleeve’ – as Morgan refers to bodies – the spouses have to fight to their ‘sleeve death.’ (The personality/consciousness in Altered Carbon’s narrative is preserved in ‘stacks’: disk-like devices made with materials of alien origin.) Because Altered Carbon visualizes how different personalities inhabit bodies foreign to them, it draws attention to the tenuous relationship between the body and the mind, both underscoring and challenging the mind–body dualism. The body and the self are further cleaved apart by technology that allows for changing, cloning, and 3D printing of bodies. But the improvements and the trauma from changes to the body affect both the mental and the physical self; the two cannot be separated in human experience without suffering, even when this literally happens, as in the series.

As will be shown here, individuality may be the emergent property of matter, organized in networks, processes, or entities. But in Altered Carbon, the creator of the series, Laeta Kalogridis, compellingly translates Morgan’s language and vision to reveal the pathos of human and body-centered biological reality, evinced by our ability to change biosynthesizing instructions in our cells. Altered Carbon depicts fragility in its human and posthuman actors that reflects one of the most prominent principles in biomedical ethics: human vulnerability.¹ Whether the vulnerability is ontological, i.e., an inherent human condition, or a situational one (when we are exposed to biopolitical systems that govern life), vulnerability elicits responses and emotions that are often marginalized in bioethical analytical approaches (Rogers, 61). Fiction, both visual and written, helps us consider not only the causes, but also the experiences and emotions of such vulnerability in the Age of Biology.²

In Altered Carbon’s high-tech world of interchangeable bodies, cloning devices, and VR implants, the vulnerability of identity and the body, the affective self, is exposed to exploitation and harm, slavery, violence, grief, and disorientation. Characters are challenged by a world where the disenfranchised and poor are vulnerable to the market system of bodies sold, bought, confiscated, and safeguarded by various entities, with lives put on hold or revived according to the arcane whims of powerful businessmen, criminals, or the corrupt police and security systems. Altered Carbon extrapolates concepts inherent in the Age of Biology: productizing (human and other) living organisms and applying profit-driven biotechnology to them, resulting in the loss of agency, a systemic loss of power and rights. Although focused on the murder case of one of Laurens Bancroft’s many clones, the series shows that a society where biotechnology has been commercialized in myriad corporations, products, and services, where bodies are increasingly processed and possessed on the level of cells and molecules, produces a new order of classes based on one’s ability to access and utilize biotechnology.

The Episode 3 combat scene illustrates that radically transformative technologies such as biotechnology – while needed and deeply influential in (post)human society – call for radically transformative (bio)ethics and multidimensional levels of understanding and dialogue. The scene is shot to show the expendability of the lower-class body, which is neither reproduced nor self-owned, and therefore the vulnerability of those disempowered under the biotech elitism. The battling spouses, who – as Bancroft slyly notes – “love each other,” fight in order to gain better bodies and “provide for the kids,” as they explain to the police officer Kristin Ortega and a former mercenary Takeshi Kovach, himself ‘re-sleeved’ by Bancroft and attending the event. The couple combats in a low-gravity arena in Bancroft’s home, to the delight of the wealthy, spectating immortals, or Meths, a class of people who can afford endless new physical sleeves and personality backups via satellites. As the husband is about to kill his wife’s body, Kovach – moved perhaps by an atavistic altruistic impulse – tries to intervene but is himself thrown into the arena by Bancroft, who promises the couple “an upgrade for both” if they can take Takeshi out. As the couple follows the incentive and attacks Kovach, Officer Ortega manages to stop the fight. Her power, however, is limited, as Bancroft reminds her that Takeshi “of course, is legally my property” (27:30). The first operating principle shown at work in Altered Carbon is that the posthuman society, while radically altered by new technologies that transform the body and identity, has not transcended the economic and political inequities thriving in human history.

As authors such as Hardt and Negri have shown, biocapitalism erases the difference between production and reproduction, as the political control is “distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens,” the sites of power having moved into the body (Lemke, 65; Hardt and Negri, 24). Altered Carbon illustrates the thesis that “brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects” are indistinguishable from labor as the couple’s job is literally fighting for their upgraded bodies (Hardt and Negri, 26). Human rights and agency nowadays are violated owing to systemic biopolitical and biocapitalist mistreatments that have in the past included eugenics, forced sterilizations, and unauthorized experiments and patenting of human cells. As S. Benatar points out, biotechnology is being developed in a world of inherent disparity and marginalization:

Against the background of power abuse in this century, it can be justifiably concluded that human rights declarations, despite their best intentions, have not achieved as much as desired to guarantee widespread access to even the most basic requirements for a decent human existence. It therefore becomes necessary to question whether in the era of biotechnology the language of rights alone can enable achievement of the respect we desire for all individuals, or whether the moral goods to which we aspire require a richer moral language and greater emphasis on social justice?

(3)

Today, the 4,300 human genes patented by individuals and corporations with the US government (until 2013, when the process was reversed for naturally occurring DNA by the Supreme Court’s decision against Myriad Genetics) are a good example of the problematic biocapitalist incursions extrapolated in the series.

Expressing biotech-related concepts in a manner that transgresses the purely scientific realm and discourse becomes a crucial practice. At the time when science denial has become rampant, and science communication both inside and outside the scientific arena is encountering infrastructural challenges in the way information is aggregated and distributed, configuring scientific ideas and their impact through imaginative practices helps broaden their reach. Discussing the art forms that could successfully integrate scientific information, artist and scholar Roy Ascott notes that “as we move into the twenty-first century we shall need to create new metaphors to house the complex interacting systems of biological, technological, and social life which we are developing” (438). These systems are “telematic networks,” created through a blend of interactive technologies and art and providing new kinds of syncretism and “semiotic multiplicity.”³ The synergy of biology, technology, and society is also central to the argument presented by the literary critics Lennard Davis and David Morris who suggest, in their “Biocultures Manifesto,” that sciences and humanities must work together: “the biological without the cultural, or the cultural without the biological, is doomed to be reductionist at best and inaccurate at worst” (411). Although they acknowledge that re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Biofictions
• 2 Biopunk Now
• 3 Burroughs Was a Biopunk
• 4 Molecular and Literary Language
• 5 Contemporary Bioliterature
• 6 Female Bioborgs
• Index