By:
Derrick King
Abstract:
This
essay explores the Utopian political possibilities of biogenetic seed
production through a reading of two critical dystopian works by Paolo
Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl and “The
Calorie Man.” These texts are set in a dystopian future in which food production
is completely controlled by a handful of global corporations who have
successfully genetically engineered seeds to be unfertile. While extrapolating
tendencies of the present overlap between neoliberal global capital and the
development of patented genetically modified (GM) food production, Bacigalupi’s
work also reveals fissures between the nation-state and global capitalism in
the latter’s quest for unfettered circulation of profits. This essay tracks
Bacigalupi’s representation of biogenetics across time and space, exploring how
seeds and other genetic material can become a terrain of struggle between
nation states and multinational capital and not simply a commodity through
which value flows from the nation to global corporations. This essay argues
that Bacigalupi’s work educates our desire for an alternative to the current
configuration of biogenetic engineering—not in the service of a nostalgic
rejection of bioengineering, but instead a future-oriented transformation of
the conditions in which bioengineering is used and a movement toward a utopian
future.
Keywords: biogenetics, critical dystopia, globalization,
bioengineering, transformation
Following the successful production of recombinant DNA—the ability to
construct original DNA sequences in a laboratory—the first “genetically
modified organism” (GMO) was created by Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen in
1973. In retrospect, 1973 would prove an important year for a number of other
reasons as well. As Joshua Clover (2014) explains, 1973 marked a major “shift
from industrial to finance capital” because of the publication of the
derivative pricing formula known as Black-Scholes[1]
as well as
the first in a massive series of ‘oil shocks’; the
final collapse of the Breton Woods agreements setting the stage for increasing
global trade and current account imbalances; the secular decline in industrial
profitability and the departure from the Fordist mode of production” (p. 11).
Finally,
1973 was also the inaugural year of the politico-economic formation known as
neoliberalism: following the U.S.-backed coup beginning on September 11, 1973,
Milton Freedman and his “Chicago School” assisted the military dictator
Augustus Pinochet in restructuring Chile’s economy according to neoliberal
principles (Klein, 2007, p. 8). These principles, which included corporate
deregulation, resource privatization, and the slashing of social welfare
programs, were quickly imported back into United States, solidifying
neoliberalism as a global “political
project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore
the power of economic elites” (Harvey, 2005, p. 19, emphasis in original).
While the simultaneity of these scientific, economic, and political
shifts is largely a calendrical coincidence, the form in which biogenetics
developed is tightly bound up with these post-1973 economic transformations and
the rise of neoliberalism. For instance, Melinda Cooper (2008) argues that
biogenetics was quickly taken up by the petrochemical and pharmaceutical
industries as a response to the impact of the oil shocks in the early 1970s (pp.
22-23). Neoliberalism’s drive toward privatization can also be seen in the
passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which had wide-ranging effects on
scientific research. Cooper (2008) explains that, as a result of the Bayh-Dole
act, “publically-funded science institutions would not only be authorized but
well-nigh obligated to patent the results of their research,” allowing this
publically funded research to be “privately exploited by the patent holders,
who might choose to issue exclusive licenses to large private companies, enter
into joint ventures, or to create their own start-up companies” (p. 27). This
act also captures the central operation of neoliberalism, in which the
privatization of public goods—or the increasing enclosure of the commons—is
achieved through state intervention. Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006) uses the
phrase “biocapital” to describe this conjunction of the life sciences and
neoliberal capitalism, reminding us that the life sciences are always
“overdetermined” by the “political economic systems in which they emerge” (p.
6).
Paolo Bacigalupi’s (2009) award winning science fiction (SF) novel The Windup Girl delves into precisely
this conjunction of economics, geopolitics, and biogenetics by imagining a
dystopian future in which food production is completely controlled by a handful
of global “calorie companies” who have successfully genetically engineered
seeds to be non-fertile. Meanwhile, environmental catastrophe and food-borne
diseases such as “cibiscosis” and “blister rust” threaten the world’s remaining
population. However, Thailand, where the novel is set, has achieved a degree of
autonomy from global capital due to its possession of a large “unmodified”
seedbank. While extrapolating key tendencies of the present overlap between
neoliberal global capital and the development of patented GM food production,
Bacigalupi’s novel also reveals fissures between the nation-state and global
capitalism in the latter’s quest for unfettered circulation of profits. This
essay tracks The Windup Girl’s
representation of biogenetics across time and space, exploring how seeds and
other genetic material can become a terrain of struggle for the nation state
and multinational capital—not simply a commodity through which value flows from
the nation to global corporations. Both The
Windup Girl and Bacigalupi’s earlier short story “The Calorie Man” (2008)—set
in the same world as The Windup Girl—also
engage utopian alternatives to biocapital and insist that other futures are
possible. In Windup Girl, these
alternatives take the form of this productive friction between the nation state
and global capital in response to biopiracy. “The Calorie Man” extends this
critique, ending with an authentically utopian moment in which genetically
engineered (GE) seeds can become a part of the global common. Bacigalupi’s
fiction thus uses the dystopian form to imagine the possibilities for an
alternative, post-capitalist future for biogenetics.
SF is a key site for cultural narratives about biogenetics to take
shape because biogenetics itself is centrally concerned with the possibilities
of the future. As Cooper (2008) explains, biocapital production can be understood
as a break with traditional industrial production in that it reverses the flow
of commodification from the past to the future:
While industrial production depletes the earth’s
reserves of past organic life (carbon-based fossil fuels), postindustrial
production needs to depotentialize the future possibilities of life, even while
it puts them to work. This counterlogic is perhaps most visible in the use of
patented sterilization technologies, where a plant’s capacity to reproduce
itself is both mobilized as a source of labor and deliberately curtailed, thus
ensuring that it never reproduces ‘for free.’ (p. 25)
Yet its
depotentialization of future resources is not the only way in which biocapital
is engaged in the management of the future. As Rajan (2006) explains, the
“grammar of biocapital” is essentially “speculative” and concerned with the
production of futures: because investment in biotech startups is always
predicated on what might be produced,
“hype” becomes speculative capitalism’s mode (pp. 110-111). Within this
speculative mode, “the future [is] always being called in to account for the
present” (Rajan, 2006, p. 116). For financialized biocapital, the “future” thus
becomes a resource, or something to be used up to advance the goals of capital
accumulation in the present.
Biocapital thus depends on the neoliberal ideological climate that Mark
Fischer (2009) calls “capitalist realism,” or “the widespread sense that not
only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it
is now impossible to imagine a
coherent alternative to it” (p. 2). Indeed, Rajan (2006) notes that his term
“biocapital” attempts to capture the sense that biogenetic innovations are
occurring within a socio-political framework (neoliberalism) in which capitalism
is “considered the ‘natural’ political economic formation, not just of our time
but of all times” (p. 3). It is here that SF can play a crucial role in
questioning the inevitability of (bio)capitalist realism and—while it cannot
provide a direct image of an alternative to capitalism—educate our desire for
another kind of future.
At first glance, Bacigalupi’s dystopian world might seem to acquiesce
to such a dark vision of capitalist realism by presenting the likely
consequences of our current path. However, I argue that we need to read
Bacigalupi’s work within the SF subgenre Tom Moylan (2000) names the critical dystopia, which is constructed
to reveal both a bleak future and a hopeful alternative. The critical dystopia
resists the ideological enclosure of capitalist realism and “reaches toward
utopia not by delineation of fully detailed better places, but by dropping in
on decidedly worse places” (Moylan, 2000, p. 106). If the classical dystopia
suggests resistance will only end up making things worse, Fredric Jameson
(2005) reminds us the critical dystopian text is in fact “a negative cousin of
the Utopia proper, for it is in the light of some positive conception of human
social possibilities that its effects are generated and from Utopian ideals its
politically enabling stance derives” (p. 198). The addition of a desire for
utopia, as well as an inkling that such an alternative is possible,
distinguishes the critical dystopia from the anti-utopian defeatism of the
classical dystopia. The critical dystopia thus keeps alive a radical systemic
critique of the status-quo that serves as a warning against inaction or mere
reformism.
It is through his dystopian vision of the future that Bacigalupi gives
us both an estranged image of our present and the possibility of radical change. Kanya, a central character in The Windup Girl, provides an overview of
its geopolitical setting:
[The Thai Kingdom is] alive when whole kingdoms and
countries are gone. When Malaya is a morass of killing. When Kowloon is
underwater. When China is split and the Vietnamese are broken and Burma is
nothing but starvation. The empire of America is no more. The Union of the
Europeans is splintered and factionalized” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 214).
Thailand,
however, is in the grip of a crisis, which primarily plays itself out through
the conflicts between two government organizations: the pro-globalization Trade
Ministry and the nationalist Environmental Ministry. Meanwhile, the calorie
companies continue to gain a foothold in Thailand, looking to reestablish
global trade and force the Thai Kingdom into their global hegemony.
Bacigalupi’s work is thus centered
on the global. This global focus is not surprising for a work of contemporary
science fiction; as Phillip E. Wegner (2014) notes, a “crucial desire of
contemporary science fiction is to think the global” (p. xv). Indeed,
Bacigalupi allegorizes our contemporary global system through its figuration of
a new global “expansion.” The events of Windup
Girl occur at a crucial juncture in Bacigalupi’s fictional world: while our
own period of globalization—or what the novel calls the “old expansion…when
petroleum was cheap and men and women crossed the globe in a matter of hours” (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 16)—has ended due to ecological and biogenetic disaster, a “new
expansion” is underway. For the Calorie Companies, the new expansion means “the
return to truly global trade. Supply lines that circle the world” (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 63). For the Thai Kingdom, however, the new expansion means the return
of the “calorie companies and their plagues and their patented grains” (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 27). The novel’s representation of biogenetics is centered on this
tension between the nation and multinational corporations. What is ultimately
at stake is not so much the autonomy of Thailand itself, however, but rather
the ownership of the Thai seed bank. Indeed, the existence of the seed bank is
the only reason the Thai Kingdom has been able to resist the Calorie Companies.
The novel is an attempt to bring into focus these tensions between the nation
state and global capital, particularly as these tensions intersect with the
ownership of genetic material such as seeds.
In The Windup Girl, the Thai Kingdom also functions as a way of
imagining nationalist resistance to global capital. Anderson Lake, who works
for one of the world’s major calorie companies (AgriGen), describes the
significance of the Thai seed bank:
Somewhere in the country a seedbank is hidden.
Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of carefully preserved seeds, a
treasure trove of biological diversity. Infinite chains of DNA, each with their
own potential uses. And from this gold mine, the Thais are extracting answers
to their knottiest challenges of survival. With access to the Thai seedbank,
[the AgriGen labs in] Des Moines could mine genetic code for generations, beat
back plague mutations. (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 86)
Even
Minister Akkarat, head of the Trade ministry and sympathetic to globalized
trade, refuses Anderson’s request to “sample” the seedbank, telling him that
“the seedbank has kept us independent of your kind[…] When India and Burma and
Vietnam fell to you, we stood strong” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 151). The novel
offers a complex portrait of the intersections between globalization and
biogenetics: while biopiracy and the patenting of genetic material are ways in
which multinational corporations extract surplus value from the world’s populations—and,
as in the novel, this extraction overwhelmingly flows from the global south to
corporations centered in the global north—genetic materials (cells, plant life,
DNA) are also a point of resistance through which a nation-state might
establish a temporary degree of autonomy from multinationals. The primary task
of The Windup Girl is to imagine
these productive disjunctures between the nation state and globalized capital and
interrogate how these disjunctures might open up onto political alternatives.
However, while the novel uses the
nation state to undercut the seamless power of global capital, it not simply
advocating nationalism as a solution to the problems of globalization. At the
same time it demonstrates the friction between the nation state and global
capital, the novel also points towards the limitations of any nationalist-based
conception of politics. Bacigalupi primarily accomplishes his critique of
nationalism by co-articulating the Thai Kingdom’s nationalist resistance with a
racist cultural nationalism in which immigrant workers and “windups,” or
genetically engineered human-robot hybrids used as soldiers or slaves, are treated
as second class citizens—if they are allowed into the country at all. Immigrant
workers—most of whom are from Malaysia, which is beset with religious violence—are
pejoratively referred to as “yellow cards” and unable to find legal work. As
Anderson explains, “Thai workers for Thai jobs. Yellow card refugees from
Malaya are starving in the streets, but [factory owners] can’t hire them” (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 16). These immigrants primarily live in a large slum area precariously
located by a seawall so that “if the seawall gave way, the entire slum would
drown” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 69). This flooding becomes a very real possibility
when Richard Carlyle, an employee of a calorie company, holds up a shipment of
equipment for the city’s levees (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 97). The potentially
utopian autonomy achieved by the Kingdom thus slides into a disturbing
isolationism. Hock Seng, an immigrant factory worker, refers to the Thai
Kingdom as a “sealed city” once the conflict between the Trade and
Environmental Ministries turns violent, which results in the borders all being
closed (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 226). The novel ends with the city flooding,
turning this isolationism into a death sentence for much of the Kingdom, but
especially for the immigrant poor living in the slums.
Rather than advocating for one side
in the conflict between the Thai Kingdom and the calorie companies, the novel
is best read as an attempt to keep these two terms—allegorically, the nation
and globalization—within a constant tension. While the nation remains a
potential point of resistance which can never be fully subsumed under global
capital, the ease in which it can be co-opted by capital prevents it from ever
solidifying into a permanent alternative. In reading the novel, we should seek
to keep this tension alive through a dialectical double negation in which the
nation is used to critique globalization while the larger globalized system
points to the inadequacy of an isolated nationalism. The goal in such a reading
is to open the space for a neutral—or neither/nor—position that prefigures a
global, utopian solution. As Jameson (2005) argues, the utopian solution to any
ideological opposition lies in its neutralization, or the attempt to “retain
two negative [positions…] along with their mutual negation of each other” (p. 180). In an ideological neutralization,
the oppositions must
neither be combined in some
humanist organic synthesis nor effaced and abandoned altogether, but made more
virulent, their incompatibility and indeed their incommensurability a scandal
for the mind, but a scandal that remains vivid and alive, and that cannot be
thought away […] the biblical stumbling block, which gives Utopia its savor and
its bitter freshness when the thought of Utopias is still possible. (Jameson,
2005, p. 180)
Since the
opposition between the nation and capital in Windup Girl and “The Calorie Man” revolves around patented
biogenetic food production, I will ultimately suggest that the utopian solution
in Bacigalupi’s SF world lies in the common, or a new form of unfettered, free
growing and unpatented food crops.
Through this double negation of the
nation and globalized capital, Bacigalupi allows us to imagine productive
tensions around biogenetics that hold open the possibility of a utopian future.
This tension is figured in the novel by the character Kanya, who is torn
between her loyalties to both Akkarat from the Trade Ministry and Jaidee, the
head of the Environmental Ministry. Indeed, her torn loyalty generates the
larger ideological opposition between these two Ministries, allowing us to see
how the globalization/nationalism conflict takes shape within the nation state itself. As I will argue, however, the
infighting between these two ministries is always already framed within the
flows of globalized capital. So while the opposition between the Trade and
Environmental Ministries that plays itself out in the novel allows us to grasp
the fissures or gaps between the nation state and global corporations, this
struggle itself is already overdetermined by the larger economic structures of
capitalism. Thus the utopian solution cannot lie in either the Trade Ministry’s
position or the Environmental Ministry’s position, but must instead be a
negation of both positons.
The novel’s action takes place
during a moment of shifting hegemony in which the Environmental Ministry’s
influence is giving way to the Trade Ministry’s pro-globalization stance. Jaide
observes that in the ten years he has worked in the Environmental Ministry,
their “budget shrinks yearly while that of Trade increases” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p.
122). Minister Akkarat of the Trade Ministry becomes increasingly hostile to
the Environmental Ministry, especially to Jaidee and his group of loyal
supporters called the “white shirts.” Unlike most of the Thai Kingdom’s
government, Jaidee and his white shirts refuse bribes from the calorie
companies to import unapproved equipment and genetic material. For example,
early in the novel, Jaidee and his supporters destroy a shipment of equipment
and nutrient cultures imported by Anderson’s company, despite the fact that
Anderson has paid the customs agents to let the shipment pass (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 52). Jaidee takes it as his mission to protect the borders of the Thai
Kingdom from dangerous genetic material, which poses a problem for Akkarat, who
desires the money and political influence the calorie companies can provide.
The power of Akkarat and the calorie companies grows as the novel progresses,
leading to the public humiliation of Jaidee and his eventual death. Kanya,
Jaidee’s second in command, is then promoted to head of the Environmental
Ministry, an act which ostensibly secures Akkarat’s victory since Kanya has
been secretly working for him as a double agent. This victory is not absolute,
however: after Jaidee’s death, his ghost begins appearing to Kanya in visions,
leading to her final act of loyalty to Jaidee in the novel’s conclusion.
While the figure of Jaidee—both
alive and as a specter haunting Kanya—represents a nationalist point of
resistance to the multinational calorie companies, it is important to
understand the ways in which the conflict between the Trade and Environmental
Ministries is also overdetermined by the forces of globalization. It is not
until the final moments of the novel that a true rupture becomes possible;
prior to this moment, the calorie companies hold a great deal more power than
even Minister Akkarat realizes, allowing the novel to demonstrate the
limitations of national autonomy in an era of globalization. These limitations
are revealed early in the novel when we learn that Anderson’s company Spring
Life—a front for his work for Agrigen—pays the Thai Kingdom “handsomely” to use
part of their global “carbon budget” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 10). While the novel
does not reveal the means by which a global carbon budget is enforced, it seems
to be modeled on contemporary “cap and trade” policies which turn carbon use
amounts into a speculative commodity. Here, the deal between Anderson and the
Thai governments reveals the limits of the latter’s autonomy and how the Thai
Kingdom is already enmeshed within the flows of global capital.
The limitations of the Thai
Kingdom’s national autonomy become more overt later in the novel when Carlyle
reveals his plan to hold up a shipment of equipment used to keep the Thai
Kingdom from flooding. By “holding the city hostage” to ensure Akkarat deals
with the calorie companies, Carlyle demonstrates once again that the Thai
Kingdom is already globalized (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 97). He tells Anderson “the
white shirts seem to have forgotten they need outsiders. We’re in the middle of
a new expansion and every string is connected to every other string, and yet
they’re still thinking like a contraction Ministry” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 97).
In these passages, Bacigalupi works through the limitations of a strong
nationalism under globalization. In a world in which complete national autonomy
is impossible, no form of nationalism can become a permanent solution to the
threat posed by multinational capital. Such a critique is reinforced by
Bacigalupi’s setting: by situating the novel’s action during a second expansion—or
a “repetition” of our moment of globalization—Windup Girl suggestions that any kind of contraction caused by
ecological or biogenetic crisis would only be temporary. The novel reminds us
that, for better or worse, we are struck in an era of globalization and that
any form of politics we imagine must deal with this reality.
While the novel rejects a simplistic
retreat to national autonomy, the ending also demonstrates that the forces of
global capital can never fully subsume nationalist resistance, either. The
novel concludes with the apparent victory of the calorie companies: sterile
seeds are being introduced to the country and Akkarat has promised AgriGen
access to the Thai Seedbank (Bacigalupi, 2009, pp. 342, 348). As she is
overseeing the transfer of the Thai Seedbank to the AgriGen scientists,
however, Kanya is visited by Jaidee’s ghost. His appeal to her is explicitly
nationalist, referencing the conclusion to the Burmese-Siamese War of 1767
which ended the Ayutthaya Kingdom: “would you not prefer to be remembered as a
villager of Bang Rajan who fought when all was lost, and held the Burmese at
bay for a little while, than as one of the cowardly courtiers of Ayutthaya who
sacrificed a kingdom?” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 351). Jaidee’s ghost also
metaphorically associates the seedbank with Thai culture, telling Kanya it is
more important to preserve the seedbank than the city (which will be flooded if
they refuse to comply with the calorie companies): “…it is our people who carry
the lifeblood of our country, not this city…it is our people who are
everything. And it is this seedbank that sustains us” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p.
351). The kind of nationalist resistance Jaidee is proposing here is thus very
different from the territorial, geographically-based state nationalism of the
Thai Kingdom at the beginning of the novel. With Jaidee’s encouragement, Kanya
kills the AgriGen representatives and sends the seedbank away with a group of
monks bound for “a secret place, far from calorie company reach, watched over
by Phra Seub and all the spirits of the nation” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 353). As
the city floods, Kanya, along with a new group of “white shirts,” leads the
city’s population away from the flood, keeping the possibility of resistance
alive.
The radical possibility embedded
within Kanya’s actions also reaches toward a global, potentially utopian
future. Kanya’s execution of the AgriGen representatives and measures taken to
keep the seeds safe also allows for the possibility of a utopian solution to
take shape later in the future. As Wegner (2014) argues in his reading of these
final moments of the novel, “The Windup
Girl presents us with a striking refusal to let history, the concrete
possibility for things to be otherwise, to come to an end” (p. 101). This
refusal of historical closure is also figured in the appearance of Jaidee’s
ghost, which should not be understood as simply a reflection of the past, but
rather an opening up onto the new. Here we might remember Derrida’s (1994)
reading of the specter in the opening sentence of The Manifesto of the
Communist Party: the “specter of communism” invoked by Marx and Engels is
only frightening for the bourgeoisie because it is “to come;” because “the
specter is the future” (pp. 47-48). Ghosts are then never only about the past,
but also the way in which the past causes us to act in order to bring about a
different future.
Indeed, while Kanya’s actions might
seem to “resolve” the tension I have observed in the novel between the nation
and global capital, it is significant that she only acts in the interests of
nationalism after global capitalism
has seemingly won. Prior to the moment of AgriGen’s victory, she was keeping
the two sides in tension within herself. Once the victor has been decided, she
chooses to strategically align herself with the loser—not to resolve the
tension between the two sides, but to keep it alive. By refusing to give
AgriGen access to the seed bank and leading a new army of white shirts away
from the city, she ensures the possibility of future struggles against their
global hegemony. Kanya’s actions are nationalism as negation: a strategic use
of nationalist violence in service of a revolutionary movement against global
capitalism. It is important that her actions are not based on the creation or
maintenance of a strong nation state; they are simply the opening up of
unimaginable future possibilities. As a negation of the forces of global
capitalism, her actions also have a global dimension.
Such a distinction between Kanya’s
nationalism at the novel’s conclusion and the Thai Kingdom earlier in the novel
is important because the Thai Kingdom’s nationalism is co-articulated with an
anti-immigrant racism against both Malaysian workers and windups. Indeed, there
are tense scenes in the novel in which Hock Seng (a Malaysian immigrant working
for Anderson) and Emiko (a windup used as a sexual slave who, it later turns
out, also has military software implanted within her) must both “pass” for Thai
around groups of white shirts (Bacigalupi, 2009, pp. 204, 253). The case of the
windups is especially important as it brings in issues of posthumanism and a
critique of naturalist essentialism that will have a bearing on the representations
of biogenetic seed technologies in Bacigalupi’s fiction. Indeed, Windup Girl rejects the conservative
position opposed to biogenetic engineering because it is “unnatural.”
Politically, this is a crucial move: not only does such a conservative position
suppress the important issues revolving around global capitalism, but it also
puts forth a nostalgic, essentialist imaginary of an “unspoiled” nature that is
ahistorical and deploys homophobic and racist tropes. Precisely this sort of
rhetoric is being deployed by the Thai Kingdom in The Windup Girl: as Emiko
observes, she is considered by many “a transgression against niche and nature”
(Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 106). The novel’s critique of nationalist racism thus
also extends to the kind of genetic normativity that reifies a conception of
the natural. The utopian openings in both The
Windup Girl and “The Calorie Man” reject such nostalgic positions, instead
suggesting a repurposed biogenetic engineering pressed into the service of a
new vision of the common.
While it is only in “The Calorie
Man” that Bacigalupi makes explicit such a utopian possibility for seed
production—although Kanya’s refusal to hand over the seedbank to AgriGen keeps
such a possibility alive—The Windup Girl’s
ending does imagine a post-human collectivity prefiguring a new world for the
oppressed windups. After the city floods, Emiko is able to survive in the city’s
ruins without interference—there are plenty of animals to catch for food and
the water is helpful because she overheats easily. She soon comes across an old
man named Gi Bu Sen (or Gibbons), a generipper kept prisoner by the Thai
Kingdom to deal with cases of foodborne illness. When Emiko angrily confronts
him about her programing and her sterility (since generippers are this world’s
version of bioengineers, scientists like Gibbons were responsible for creating
windups), he tells her he can help overcome the design limitations of the
windups, which he calls “New People.” Gibbons tells her that while he cannot
change her physically, he can produce a different kind of New Person from
Emiko’s genetic material: “a strand of your hair will do. You cannot be
changed, but your children—in genetic terms, if not physical ones—they can be
made fertile, a part of the natural world” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 358). Gibbons
imagines a new “natural world” in which Emiko and her children will be able to
live freely; by removing programing forcing them to be obedient, they will no
longer serve as slaves to humans. Early in the novel, Emiko is comforted by a
utopian vision of a village of free windups living in the north without owners
(Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 46). The novel’s final passages suggest that such a
utopian vision can become real.
The alliance between Gibbons and Emiko
in the final moments of the novel also rebukes the nostalgic imaginary of the
White Shirts and the Thai Kingdom. In a tense meeting between Kanya and Gibbons
earlier in the novel, he refuses her dichotomy of natural and unnatural:
“nature…we are nature. Our every
tinkering is nature, our every biological striving” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 243,
emphasis in original). Gibbons is a complex character, however, and certainly
not entirely sympathetic. For instance, his statement that “the world is ours.
We are its gods” (Bacigalupi, 2009, p. 243) problematically places humans
outside of nature and thus provides an excuse for its continued domination.
Gibbons also reasserts a hierarchical vison among humans, replacing his
collective vision of human gods with a telling singular one: “If you would just
let me, I could be your god and shape you to the Eden that beckons us” (Bacigalupi,
2009, p. 243). It would therefore be unwise to read Gibbons and the post-human
utopia suggested by The Windup Girl’s
final moments as an unambiguous representation of the text’s vision of utopia;
rather, Gibbons is necessary as an ideological negation of the white shirts and
Kanya.
The two utopian figurations of the novel—the new band of white shirts
lead by Kanya and the post-human alliance of Gibbons and Emiko—thus continues
the ideological tension I have argued runs throughout the novel. Gibbons points
toward the problematic essentialism undergirding Kanya’s version of nationalism
while Kanya serves as a check on Gibbons’ aggressive post-human experimentation
that, as the novel’s setting demonstrates, is quite amenable to global
capitalist control (indeed, prior to being held captive by the Thai Kingdom,
Gibbons worked for one of the calorie companies). Not only does this final double
negation continue the novel’s unbudging opposition between globalization and
nationalism, it also suggests a way of thinking through biogenetic seed
technologies. Both Kanya’s and Gibbons’ positions are deeply problematic when
it comes to addressing bioengineering: Kanya’s nostalgic essentialism is
clearly inadequate to the complexities of the world, but Gibbons’ hierarchical
vision and unwillingness to consider the implications of his research for the
rest of the world places him in precisely the position of the calorie
companies. What is needed is a double negation of these positions that turns
their utopian impulses—Kanya’s opposition to global capitalism and Gibbons’
opposition to biogenetic essentialism—into an anti-capitalist, global vision of
equal access to the technologies of food production.
Such a utopian vision is closely related to the recent revitalization
of the concept of the common on a global scale by Hardt and Negri (2009).
Indeed, as a negation of neoliberalism’s ever-encroaching privatization, the
common is a crucial element in the struggle over genetically modified seeds.
Following the work of Hardt and Negri (2009), we need to understand the common
as an open signifier: not only does it include the classical conception of the
“commonwealth of the material world”; but, perhaps even more importantly, it
also includes “knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so
forth” that “are necessary for social interaction and further production” (p.
viii). The common therefore should not only be conceived as the “relatively
inert, traditional notion that generally involves natural resources,” but also
as “dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future
production” (Hardt and Negri, 2009, p. 139). This dual conception of the common
is especially important for an analysis of genetically modified seeds, for
which both kinds of common are relevant. Indeed, by imagining the common as Hardt and Negri (2009) do, we can also prevent it
from being deployed as a nostalgic attempt to return to the pre-capitalist past
preceding what Marx (1867/1976) calls “the enclosure of the commons” (p.
885). This anti-nostalgia also critiques the conservative position seeking a
return to an “unspoiled” nature. Indeed, as a utopian project of imagination,
the goal of the “common” is to negate the present—not as a way of returning to
the past, but rather as a way of opening up the horizon of the future.
While such
a vision of the common remains a repressed potentiality in The Windup Girl, it is given expression in Bacigalupi’s earlier Windup Girl-world story “The Calorie
Man,” which is also his most straightforwardly utopian work. While published
before The Windup Girl, “The Calorie
Man” seems to take place after the events in the novel: the story’s final
moments suggest a utopian future that would completely transform Bacigalupi’s
dystopian world. The story takes place in the United States, home of the
calorie companies, among the “lush sprawl of SoyPRO and HiGro” grown and
shipped down to New Orleans to meet the calorie needs of the world (Bacigalupi,
2008, p. 93). A small-time smuggler named Lalji is hired to take Charles
Bowman, a genetic engineer wanted by the calorie companies, down the
Mississippi River so that he can escape the country. Lalji and his crew run
aground of an Intellectual Property (IP) patrol while transporting Bowman.
Bowman is killed in the skirmish along with the IP officers, which allows Lalji
to escape along with Tazi, a young girl who Bowman has been protecting. In the
story’s final moments, Tazi reveals that she has a bagful of seeds Bowman has
designed and asks for Lalji’s help planting them.
Bowman, a
former employee of the calorie companies, has developed a new strain of seeds
that, unlike the patented ones owned by corporations, will breed on their own,
thereby transforming all food production into an un-patentable common. Earlier
in the story Bowman explains that his seeds will mix with and transform the
sterile calories produced by the calorie companies:
What
would happen if we passed SoyPRO a different trait […] what if someone were to
drop bastardizing pollens amongst these crown jewels that surround us? [...] Resistant
to weevil and leafcurl, yes. High Calorie, yes, of course. Genetically distinct
and therefore unpatentable? [...] Perhaps. But best of all fecund. Unbelievably
fecund. Ripe, fat with breeding potential […] Seeds distributed across the
world by the very cuckolds who have always clutched them so tight, all of those
seeds lusting to breed, lusting to produce their own fine offspring full of the
same pollens […] (Bacigalupi, 2008, pp. 115-116)
These seeds created by Bowman share some similarities
with the utopian potential of seeds we have seen in The Windup Girl: because they are fertile and unpatented, they
offer a way of imagining an alternative future in opposition to the monolithic
vision of biocapitalism.
There are
some important differences between “The Calorie Man” and Bacigalupi’s novel,
however: while the seeds in The Windup
Girl carry with them a nostalgic connotation or an attachment to the past,
Bowman’s seeds—no less genetically modified than the sterile calorie company
ones—are unabashedly new and symbolic of the future. In “The Calorie Man,”
Bacigalupi cuts through the opposition between natural and unnatural that
undergirded The Windup Girl’s
competing utopian impulses. “The Calorie Man” imagines scientific innovation
pressed into the service of a collective future rather than a capitalist one.
This story is thus an important intervention into discourses of biocapital, in
which a key ideological assumption is that capitalism is “considered the ‘natural’ political economic formation,
not just of our time but of all times” (Rajan, 2006, p. 3, my emphasis).
Biocapitalism—like much of the discourse surrounding globalization—implies that
innovation must be irrevocably tied up with the expansion of capitalism.
Bacigalupi reminds us that other futures are possible by rejecting both senses
of “natural”: the nostalgic associations of the term and the reification of
capitalist realism.
The story
concludes with an image of a new kind of globalization tied to the reinvention
of the common—not a return to a pre-capitalist past, but an unnatural outbreak
of a new common. After Bowman’s death and Lalji’s realization that he still has
the GE seeds designed to breed with sterile ones, Lalji smiles and imagines the
seeds’ global pathway: “around [the river], the crowding hulks of the grain
barges loomed, all of them flowing south through the fertile heartland toward
the gateway of New Orleans; all of them flowing steadily toward the vast wide
world” (Bacigalupi, 2008, p. 121). This final image is a figuration of a new
globalization being actively produced by Bowman’s engineered and fertile seeds.
This utopian figuration is an important leap forward from the safeguarding of
seeds found in The Windup Girl. As
Hardt and Negri (2009) argue in their work on the common, it is crucial to
understand the distinction between the traditional use of the “commons” as a pre-capitalist
formation and what they call the “biopolitical conception of the common”: the
struggles over the latter are not merely about “preserving” the common, but
instead “struggling over the conditions of producing it, as well as selecting
among its qualities, promoting its beneficial forms, and fleeing its
detrimental corrupt forms” (p. 171). Bowman’s GE seeds are precisely such an
intervention into the ongoing production of the common: they are not a
preservation of what currently exists, but a radical creation of the new.
With this
short story, Bacigalupi provides a positive utopian vision to complement the
utopian negations structuring The Windup
Girl. The futurity unlocked by Bowman’s seeds extends the possibility of
the common embedded within the seedbank in Windup
Girl. This representation of seed fertility becomes a powerful figuration
for radical change. Within the context of biocapitalism—or the conjunction of
bioengineering with the ideology that only capitalism can spur these scientific
innovations—Bacigalupi’s works are powerful reminders that other futures are
still possible. Positing the common as a utopian demand worth struggling for,
these texts educate our desire for an alternative to the current configuration
of biogenetic engineering—not in the service of a nostalgic rejection of
bioengineering and return to the pre-capitalist past, but a future-oriented
transformation of the conditions in which bioengineering is used and a movement
toward a utopian future.
References
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Bacigalupi, P. (2009). The Windup Girl. San Francisco: Night
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[1] Briefly, Black-Scholes allows
for a “perfectly hedged portfolio that would earn a “riskless rate of interest”
by exploiting mispriced assets (called “arbitrage”) (Clover, 2014, p. 11).
Unlike previous pricing models, Black-Scholes ostensibly allows for “mathematically
rational option pricing, independent of guesswork about future turns of the
market” (Clover, 2014, p. 11).