Life As Technology: The Rise of Informational Biology and Genetics in Literature from 1950-2006

Fictional representations of human cloning, in light of the redefinition of scientific and socio-cultural structures prompted by cloning technology, then become significant in defining the ramifications of reproductive technology. In Chapter One of this project, I analyze how William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed suggests a biodeterminist theory of human behavior that runs counter to the psychoanalytic model popular at that time. I argue that Rhoda Penmark and her mother Christine Penmark represent, as a pair, both the “age of anxiety and violence” (March 29) but also represent an early version of what Kaushik Sunder Rajan defines as biocapital. The novel, in its take on heredity and determinism, redefines the role of environment, responsibility, and the natural while also emphasizing the relationships between bio-technology, reproduction, and capital. In Chapter Two, I analyze the representation of reproduction and technology in Octavia Butler’s 1987 novel Dawn. I argue that the figure of the ooloi, the third sex the alien Oankali species capable of genetic engineering, redefines the biological as technological, and the relationship between the Oankali and the humans is representative of the relationship between humans and IVF at the novel’s publication. I suggest that Butler uses these figures to define the concerns that these developments might be a new avenue for the perpetuation and reinforcement of inequality and the abuse of human life. They are also representative of the instrumentalization and informationalization of the human body that results from the Human Genome Project, which began shortly after the novel’s publication. In Chapter Three, I analyze Kazuo Ishiguro’s employment of human cloning in Never Let Me Go. I suggest that the cloned children are symbolic of the main anxieties of cloning as the instrumentalization of human life, the conversion of the body into a subject of consumption, and the creation of a new system of valuation that prioritizes certain human bodies over the bodies of others. Ishiguro’s novel depicts an informational system that complicates the valuation of human life and depicts the attempted mechanization of the concept of the human soul in ways that suggest the dehumanization that accompanies the informationalization of the body. From the work of March to Ishiguro, this project examines the evolution of regulation and responsibility as technoscientific advancement increasingly redefines these concepts. Each work represents an attempt to re-stabilize definitions of the natural, the human, and of responsibility in a system that resists stabilization.Bachelor of Art