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120
Sean McQueen
Biocapitalism and Schizophrenia: Rethinking the Frankenstein
Barrier
N. Katherine Hayles considers the demise of the liberal-humanist subject, and
the subsequent instantiation of the posthuman, as an opportunity to return to
postmodernism the flesh that continues to be erased (5). Yet the posthuman
can only be understood in relation to the human, and Julie Clarkes
deconstruction in The Paradox of the Posthuman (2009) suggests that the
posthuman extrapolates beyond but nevertheless endorses humanism. If the
posthuman is bound to slip back into the values of humanism and to conflate
humanism with modernism (Latour 13), then it might prove useful to
emphasize for posthuman discourses the values denied in its origin. That is,
we need a posthumanism founded on that which humanism and modernism
actively negate; this requires the introduction of the nonhuman animal
according to Cary Wolfe, who argues that posthumanist posthumanism has
to do with understandingand understanding the consequences ofthe very
redefinition of what humanistic knowledge is, a redefintion that has to do
with questioning the accuracy of a discourse of humanism that, in Derridas
phrase, the human that it gives to itself (126). Although he mentions them
on the next page, Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari are not included in
Wolfes theoretical mapping (which includes, among others, Latour and
Haraway) of posthumanist posthumanism (125-26). Like Wolfe, Deleuze and
Guattari oppose the anthropological dogma (Wolfe xiv-xv) of humanism, a
dogma that insists on the repression of the animal (the term nonhuman animal
highlighting the animality of the human), and emphasize material existence.
The central contention of this essay is that Deleuze and Guattaris
becomings-animal are particularly useful for rethinking George Slussers
Frankenstein barrier. In Shelleys tale (1818), Victor Frankenstein denies
the monsters demand for a companion and thus the means to procreate. Citing
Frankenstein as the foundational sf text, Slusser takes this action as
emblematic of the point at which, more broadly, the future possibilities of sf
creation and the story in general fold back upon one another through the
denial of futurity, accompanied, as we shall see, by regression into Oedipal
relations. While the denial of futurity is Frankensteins as much as the
monsters, the barrier is nevertheless anthropocentric, for Victor seeks
through reason to transform animal nature, [and] that same animality ... stands
as a thing unmoving in the path of not only Frankensteins but all our dreams
of the future (Slusser 51). For Slusser, the Frankenstein barrier is the logic
that informs sf, and he sees in cyberpunk the means to overcome it (52). By
analyzing and contrasting Mary Shelleys myth for modernity, Frankenstein
(1818) and Vincenzo Natalis Splice (2009), I argue that attention to the
nonhuman animal provides another way to conceptualize this barrier in the
121
122
though one does not in reality become animal (Thousand 273). They suppose
that we
know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what
its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other
affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be
destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with
it in composing a more powerful body. (Thousand 257)
123
124
125
The old-time theologians drew a clear distinction between two kinds of curses
against sexuality. The first concerns sexuality as a process of filiation
transmitting the original sin. But the second concerns it as a power of alliance
inspiring illicit unions or abominable loves. This differs significantly from the
first in that it tends to prevent procreation; since the demon does not himself
have the ability to procreate, he must adopt indirect means. (Thousand 246)
126
127
role, since Elsa, like Shelley, is both Drens creator and also in some way the
creation itself, since Drens human DNA is derived from Elsas.
Splices narrative is informed by the directives of biocapitalism intelligible
through contemporary science-as-industry.5 This biocapitalistic imperative is
postmodern rather than modern with regard to the hybrid, because it
ideologically grants and materially invests in a world in which species
boundaries can be radically crossed in the genetic and aesthetic pursuit of
new markets (Shukin 11). Clive and Elsas customer, Newstead Pharma, sees
no immediate profit in the project to splice human and nonhuman DNA, and
wishes to extract the CD356 protein from the nonhuman hybrids and rush it
to market. Elsa, dismissing ethical questions, objects: if we dont use human
DNA now, someone else will. Joan (Simona Maicanescu), the CEO of
Newstead, replies: you put a viable product for livestock on the table, then
we will talk about a twenty-year plan to save the world. As Vint suggests,
we have now entered an era in which biology has become a discourse of
information, and the value established through the biotech industry is largely
a value based on market projections (Science 165). Dren is for Newstead
Pharma first and foremost a commodity, reducible to a protein that can be
reproduced in genetic code. At this intersection of technoscientific innovation
and familial relations in Clive and Elsas parentage of Dren, the usefulness of
Deleuze and Guattaris becoming-animal emerges. Simply put, it is because
of these technoscientific conditions that Dren can be understood as Deleuze
and Guattaris demonic animal (Thousand 241), the becoming-animal par
excellence. Such becoming-animal can be understood through its affects and
resistance to Oedipal signification, and it becomes apparent that these affects
are available to Dren only because of technoscientific conditions.6 To become
animaland this will be important for Drenis to participate in a movement,
to stake out the path of escape in all its positivity, to cross a threshold, to
reach a continuum of intensities that are valuable only in themselves, to find
a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the
significations, signifiers, and signifieds (Deleuze and Guattari Kafka 13).
The significance of becoming-animal is that this animal is a schizophrenic,
in Deleuze and Guattaris sense of materialist schizoanalysis as opposed to
representational psychoanalysis. Drens becoming-animal is further
distinguishable from the Oedipal animal of the Frankenstein barrier because
in Splice there is a becoming-woman. In their influential reading of
Frankenstein, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that Frankensteins
male monster may really be a female in disguise (237) and psychobiographers frequently adduce the links among Shelley, Frankenstein, and the
monster. The Oedipal father/son relationship is, nevertheless, the dominant
one. For Deleuze and Guattari, all becomings, including becomings-animal,
pass through becoming-woman (Thousand 277). This is more pronounced
in Splice than it is in Frankenstein, since Dren acquires a womanly
resemblance, but this is not becoming-woman. Deleuze and Guattaris use of
the word woman is strategic, best understood as opposite to man, the
molar entity par excellence, the majority, or rather the standard upon
128
which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational, etc. (Thousand
292). This is the universal man postmodern theory has, by and large, sought
to decenter, which is why there are no becomings-man. Deleuze and Guattaris
movement through woman to nonhuman animals is problematic and,
historically, the two concepts have been linked in scientific and cultural
discourses to their mutual detriment (see Birke). Deleuze and Guattari are not
referring, however, to a sexed or gendered body, any more than to a speciesspecific nonhuman animal: In the same way that we avoided defining a body
by its organs and functions, we will avoid defining it by Species or Genus
characteristics; instead we will seek to count its affects (Thousand 257).
Drens body is a constantly metamorphosing body-without-organs, the body
of immanent potential opposed to organisation of the organs (Message 33);
for example, what appear to be tumor-riddled lungs enable Dren to breath
under water.7 There are objections to and varying interpretations of
becomings-woman, and in my reading I take it to refe[r] to every discourse
that is not anthropocentric, and is thus coded by all economic, social, cultural,
organic, and political circuits as minority (Colman 101).8
The technoscientific and cultural conditions in Splice further distinguish it
from Frankenstein. Dren is an example of transbiology, a biology that is not
only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born (Franklin 171).
She is genetically engineered, a product of recombinant DNA technology,
which involves combining DNA from two different species (in this case
human and unspecified nonhuman animals), and a clone, a new individual
generated from a single cell, circumventing sexual reproduction (Kirby 193).
It is significant that Dren is also cybrid, produced by the implantation of a
human cell nucleus into an enucleated animal egg (Haddow et al. 4).
Hybrids, as Latour finds them in the modern constitution, are artificial notions
of disconnection that result from our ideological work to separate nature and
culture. Cybridization is the inverse, since it actively seeks to collapse the
binaries that Latour deems characteristic of modernism, while emphasizing his
industrial conception of technoscience. While most hybrids constitute a
barrier threat, cybrids, in ways never realized by Frankensteins monster,
constitute a creation threat in two senses: in the distinction between what
is human and what is animal (Latour 5) that Elsa exploits by claiming that
although Human cloning is illegal. This wont be human, not entirely; and
in the threat posed by Drens potential to reproduce and create more hybrid
beings.
Thus, Drens becoming-animal is contingent upon technoscientific
discourse, which provides the necessary conditions of its becoming, and it is
this becoming-animal of the nonhuman-animal-hybrid that begins to rework the
Frankenstein barrier. Dren is a clone, and in the clone we find psychoanalytical dilemmas, especially incest, the figure of the Doppelgnger, and
bestiality. In Frankenstein we see the Oedipalization of the becoming-animal
that both erects and maintains the Frankenstein barrier. Here we can observe
that becoming-animal can be measured in terms of affect and asignification.
Dren, realizing Frankensteins fear that a female monster might turn to the
129
superior beauty of man (165), has consensual sex with Clive, and later forces
what appears to be a masculinized body upon Elsa. Both cases, arguably, are
incestuous sex acts between parent and child. Given that Drens physiological
and psychosexual development is neither relative to humans nor speciesspecific, this could also be considered sexual assault perpetrated by both Clive
and Elsa, since Dren might be too young (by human standards) to consent. In
the first act, as a clone, Dren is genetically linked to Clives partner, Elsa; in
the second act, because Dren is Elsas clone, the act might be read as a kind
of (in)voluntary (mutual) masturbation. In any event, Drens becoming-animal
is asignificatory and irreconcilable with molar forms, since a clone resolves
all oedipal sexuality (Baudrillard, Simulacra 96) at a semantic level.
Just as Deleuze and Guattari reproach Freud for turning the unconscious
into a representational theatre (Anti-Oedipus 24), Jean Baudrillard writes of the
de-representational effects of cloning technoscience: we may see in cloning
the resurgence of our fascination with an archaic form of incest with the
original twin (Vital 12). Through cloning, incest becomes interconnected and
confused with the Doppelgnger. Cloning de-metaphorizes the Doppelgnger,
resulting in the materialization of the double by genetic means, that is to say
the abolition of all alterity and of any imaginary (Baudrillard, Simulacra 97).
Although he considers this the realization of the death drive and a return to
pre-individual asexuality (Freuds polymorphous perversity), this is surely
both the death of the Lacanian imaginary and the liquidation of psychoanalytical, and thus Oedipal, signification.9 We recall that in Frankenstein the
monster assumes the role of Frankensteins Doppelgnger, his murder of
Elizabeth a recapitulation of the interpreted violence of the primal scene. The
primal scene in Splice is rather different: it is Clive who bears the brunt of the
sexual confusion since Dren is, genetically, Clives partner Elsa and, in
Oedipal triangulation, Drens father. The sex act that occurs between Clive
and Dren is presaged when Dren retires to bed, fondling the blonde hair of a
doll in the soft light of a childs bedroom and, in the following scene, Clive
and Elsa have sex. As Elsa straddles Clive, he looks over her shoulder to see
Dren lurking behind a gossamer curtain, inclining her head with a childs
naive curiosity as she watches her parents. In a series of shot-reverse-shots
that establish both Clive and Dren as equally inquisitive, Clive orgasms while
fondling Elsas blonde hair, gesturing to Elsa and Drens shared genetics, but
also prefiguring Drens desire for Elsa. Here, as for Deleuze and Guattari,
Oedipal filiations are prepersonal intensive states that could just as well
extend to other persons, retrospective categories that do not exist prior to
the prohibitions that constitute them as such (Anti-Oedipus 161, 160). On the
loss of alterity, Baudrillard is very clearly wrong, as the becomings-animal in
Splice demonstrate: the imaginary power and wealth of the doublethe one
in which the strangeness and at the same time the intimacy of the subject to
itself are played out (heimlich/unheimlich)rests on its immateriality, on the
fact that it is and remains a phantasm (Simulacra 95). Baudrillard is prone
to hyperbole, but on this point he is correct in that in post-biological and postevolutionary Western culture, these concepts are technoscientifically contingent
130
131
Thousand 293). They are in-between things: major/minor, identity/nonidentity, rhizomatic/arborscent, molar/molecular. In other words, becomings
are always unfinished. This is why Deleuze and Guattari say that when a text
deals essentially with a becoming-animal, it cannot be developed into a novel
(Kafka 38)or, in this case, a film.
A caveat provided by Baudrillard highlights the place of the nonhuman
animal hybrid in biocapitalism, further distinguishing how the Frankenstein
barrier has been significantly changed, and how it can be reconceptualized in
twenty-first century scientific practice. In The Animals: Territory and
Metamorphoses, Baudrillard notes parenthetically of Deleuze and Guattari
that it is paradoxical to take the animal as model of deterritorialization
when he is the territorial being par excellence (Simulacra 137). He calls
becomings-animal liberatory phantasmagoria and asserts [t]hat animals
wander is a myth, and the current representation of the unconscious and of
desire as erratic and nomadic belongs to the same order (Simulacra 140).
Deleuze and Guattaris becomings-animal are, for Baudrillard, anticipations
of capital rather than oppositions to it, because they dream of total
deterritorialization where the system never imposes anything but what is
relative: the demand for liberty is never anything but going further than the
system, but in the same direction (Simulacra 141).10 This is evident in
Splices conclusion. Drens corpse is excavated for its genetic codeswell
be filing patents for years, says Joanand pregnant Elsa elects to keep the
child, selling both it and herself to Newstead Pharma for a large sum. Hybrid
transgression becomes not only naturalized by capitalist ideology, but also
essential to its continued existence. Becomings-animal are not the sublime
concepts to which Haraway objects; rather, they are material and thus can be
folded into the logic of biocapitalism.
Returning to Latour, we note his suggestion that those who think the most
about hybrids circumscribe them as much as possible, whereas those who
choose to ignore them by insulating them from any dangerous consequences
develop them to the utmost (41). As Simon During has pointed out, the
hybrid is easily understood as an institutionalized and ideologically necessary
transgression (7) and this is not dissimilar to Cary Wolfes assertion that
humanism is adept at a pluralism that incorporates the previously
marginalized in ways that leave itself unaffected, and, indeed, more influential
(99). Gary K. Wolfe has observed that in sf, [i]deally, the monster is not
simply annihilated, it is appropriated; its defeat serves to broaden the
dominion of human knowledge and power (200). This movement towards
appropriation hold true in Splice, and Drens death will provide a host of new
technoscientific possibilities that can be exploited. Frankenstein is thus no
longer synonymous with the misapplication of Western science, or with
modernism; rather, science, capital, and ideology implode and endorse hybrid
transgressions, only to accommodate them and thereby extend their influence.
Splice erects a very different barrier to that maintained in Frankenstein: one
that demands the future. The Frankenstein barrier is still informed by
psychoanalytical valences, but the emphasis on the promise of the future
132
133
either for the Lacanian Real or, in the case of Pets, for the Symbolic making him,
according to Wolfe, humanist and anthropocentric in his inability to rethink the
distribution of subjectivity across species lines (125).
10. Baudrillard also asserts this in an interview, Forget Baudrillard, in Forget
Foucault. While he expresses enthusiasm for metamorphoses, he suggests that
Deleuzes becomings-animal and becomings-woman are nothing more than
entwinements of mythology and metaphor (75). Baudrillards concept of seduction,
however, entailing the becoming-woman-object, wavers between essentialism and a
non-fixity not entirely dissimilar to Deleuze and Guattaris becoming-woman (96). See
also Baudrillards Seduction (1990). A similar, albeit more sustained, critique of
Deleuzes relationship with capitalism is ieks Organs Without Bodies (2004).
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ABSTRACT
Deleuze and Guattaris becomings-animal are particularly useful in rethinking George
Slussers Frankenstein barrier: the point at which the sf story folds back upon itself
through the denial of futurity, which is accompanied by a regression into Oedipal
relations. By analyzing and contrasting Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and Vincenzo
Natalis Splice, this essay argues that while the denial of futurity is Victor
Frankensteins as much as the monsters, the barrier is nevertheless an anthropocentric
one. The essay examines the possibilities opened up by the becoming-animal of the
nonhuman, and explores how this reworks the Frankenstein barrier in twenty-first
century technoscientific biocapitalism.