Reading science fiction like it matters since 1989.
The emergent fields of animal studies and posthumanism have provoked a radical rethinking of the boundary between the human and the animal in recent philosophy and in the humanities more generally. As these discourses have come to question the adequacy of the liberal humanist theory of the Subject, the boundary between human and animal has become destabilized, now recognized as based simply on the assertion of an absolute gap between the two, rather than on the study of animals to examine minutely what, if anything, distinguished the two. At one end of this spectrum, we find Donna Haraway’s polemic pronouncement in “A Cyborg Manifesto”:
The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behavior, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. (151–52)
At the other end of this continuum of challenge, we find Jacques Derrida’s critique of the violence done by the word “animal,” which conflates into a single category life forms with distinct capacities from earthworms to primates while at the same time installing an absolute division between any species on this side of the line and humanity. What is required instead, Derrida suggests, is a careful analysis of the complex terrain “once the frontier no longer forms a single indivisible line but more than one internally divided line” (The Animal 31).
Both Haraway and Derrida address their theoretical interventions to a context in which human exploitation of animals is achieving new and unprecedented levels not merely in terms of the number of animals regularly slaughtered for human needs but also in terms of the abject conditions visited upon objectified animal bodies in agribusiness, which reduces their bodies to abstract machines, confined and tweaked to maximize productivity with no thought to the living being behind the commodity. At the same time, the climate crisis and other environmental catastrophes—from ongoing pollution to oil spills—daily damages animal habitats even while other projects reduce available space not already colonized by humans. Further, new biogenetic creations such as knock-out gene mice, the most famous of which is the original OncoMouse, create new, chimerical creatures that trouble the boundaries of subject and object in their existence as both living, born beings and created tools that would not exist without the invention of human researchers. Thus, we exist in a moment of profound paradox in which we simultaneously learn more about animal sentience, emotion, and culture, while at the same time treat with less compassion and respect.
The discussion here considers what science fiction might have to say to and from this cultural moment, framed with a particular focus on what role biotechnology might play in animal liberation, the basis for the workshop in 2010 that initiated these discussions. Animals have an ambiguous and often negative relationship with technology, which has largely figured in their exploitation from domestication to hunting to medical research. At the same time, however, biotechnology does not inherently mandate these ends and indeed has often if inadvertently served to improve animal lives, such as advances in veterinary care resultant from the fact that many medical therapies are pioneered on animal models, the development of many nonanimal sources of food from tofu to rice milk, and work using IVF techniques to help restore populations of species on the verge of extinction. The purpose of our discussion is to consider some of these more hopeful possibilities for the intersection of animals and biotechnology as they have been imagined in sf and also to reflect upon these possibilities to consider not only whether they are scientifically feasible, but further and more importantly to ask whether they are ethically valuable avenues of research.
Derrida asks us to contemplate the current crises of extinctions and biotech animal-objects as a vision of a world without animals, a world in which animals are no longer other to humans but are merely products of our technology, and asks what the human would be without the animal as its Other:
This spectacle can develop only as the symptom of a desire or phantasm: the tableau of a world after animality, after a sort of holocaust, a world from which animality, at first present to man, would have one day disappeared: destroyed or annihilated by man, either purely and simply—something that seems almost impossible even if one feels we are heading down the path toward such a world without animals—or by means of a devitalizing or disanimalizing treatment, what others would call the denaturing of animality, the production of figures of animality that are so new that they appear monstrous enough to call for a change of name. This science fiction is more and more credible, having begun with taming and domestication, dressage, neutering, and acculturation, and is being pursued with medico-industrial exploitation, overwhelming interventions upon animal milieu and reproduction, genetic transplants, cloning, etc. (The Animal 80)
This is a negative vision of technology’s interventions into the animal, but sf has also imagined more positive interventions that “denature” animality by deconstructing the human/animal boundary, by conceiving of and perhaps creating animals that are more like humans. The blurring of this boundary is often represented as monstrous in the ways Derrida suggests, such as H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the eponymous scientist torturously experiments on animal bodies in a doomed effort to compel them to imitate the human form. These monstrous Beast People inevitably fall back into their natural, animal behavior, suggesting that what is monstrous is not the gap between human and animal but rather the attempt to deny or transcend it. Yet in the novel’s simultaneous preoccupation with the specter of devolution, it further implies that humans as well are subject to baser, so-called “animal” instincts.
Human, Posthuman
The first question we will address is the discourse of humanism and its critique or revision in posthumanism. Where one stands on this matter shapes one’s perception regarding the entire discourse of animal liberation. So we’ll each stake out our positions:
Sherryl: Most of my work has been influenced by posthumanism from my earlier work on bodies and subjectivity to my more recent work on animals and sf. I find posthumanism to be a valuable discourse because I think that the discourse of liberal humanism, although it has been usefully deployed politically through the construct of human rights, is nonetheless fundamentally flawed. I want to stress that I am in no way critiquing the value of the achievements of this discourse for outlining a certain relationship between the state and the individual subject that demarcates some limits for the kind of abusive treatment that can be visited upon the human.
Yet these same political ends might have been achieved by other means, and the philosophical baggage that comes with the liberal humanist subject seems to me to challenge its continued utility. First, this subject is rooted fundamentally in notions of property and thus is unwittingly complicit with capital in ways effectively outlined by C.B. MacPherson in his concept of “possessive individualism.”
Second, in its abstractions of a timeless and universal human “essence,” liberal humanism has not only historically excluded a number of groups (women, nonwhites, the working classes) in various times, but it thereby reveals that it is inevitably founded on a flawed notion of the human. The history of liberalism shows that these excluded groups have successfully fought for their right to be included in the category “human” and that a more just political system has been produced as a result. Yet the structure of an inside and an outside to the Subject, the necessity that someone is always excluded and lacks the protections of rights, remains in place and unchallenged.
Certain advocates of animal rights, especially Tom Regan and Peter Singer, have followed in a version of this model to argue for the extension of the protections of the Subject to animals, arguments that have (rightfully, in my view) been critiqued for their failure to acknowledge the differences among various human and various animal beings. The right to vote, for example, does not seem valuable to a nonhuman nor do political systems make much sense if conceived of in this way. On the other hand, the “right” to live in bodily comfort and freedom from confinement as an end for oneself rather than as an end for others seems to be a goal equally valuable and applicable to all living beings (and indeed many humans do not enjoy this “right” any more than do animals).
“Rights” strikes me as the wrong framework through which to promote goals of social justice, and instead we need to rethink the nature of being—human and otherwise—through another history, another philosophical mode as Derrida suggests in the interview “Eating Well.” He argues that rethinking subjectivity outside of the human/animal boundary is the urgent task for philosophy and one that requires a rethinking of our ethical systems as well. Engaging in this project seems to me to be necessary not only to acknowledge new information regarding animal lives but also to address a contemporary political situation in which many Homo sapiens find themselves—as political refugees and other displaced persons in the situation in which they are living beings yet not “fully” human because they lack a state to acknowledge their citizenship and thus certify them as bearers of state-protected human rights.
Ken: Staking out my position, I’ll start by calling into question the moral and theoretical basis of this discussion. I reject the ideas of animal “liberation” and animal “rights” and affirm the uniqueness and moral centrality of human consciousness.
The human subject cannot, in my view, be conflated with the “liberal humanist subject,” and recognizing that human subjectivity is historically constituted and conditioned does not at all necessarily imply a rejection of its uniqueness. It’s somewhat ironic that this rejection has come to be associated with the left, given that what was historically the strongest intellectual basis for the left was predicated on that very uniqueness. The centrality of human consciousness to historical materialism is often overlooked but was far from marginal in the work of its founders and their most consequent successors.
For example, every Soviet textbook of Marxism from Kuusinen et al. (1961) to Spirkin (1990) has a chapter on consciousness in which consciousness is ascribed solely to human beings, though of course seen as arising out of animal mentality. Likewise, it is argued, human labor arose out of animal activity and language out of animal communication with elements of evolutionary continuity in no way lessening the sharp discontinuity that is as evident in everyday observation as it is in archaeological, anthropological, and zoological investigation. I say this not, of course, to cite these texts as authoritative but to draw attention to the recent existence of a globally influential school of thought that posed the question of human and animal natures in a quite different way from that of the discourses current in advanced capitalism, the production in universities of critical theory very much included.
Two further points seem to me relevant to the theoretical issue. First, the Soviet Marxist theory of consciousness founded by Vygotsky gave rise to a significant school of psychology and to a remarkably successful and humane body of educational and therapeutic practice. Second, the present invisibility of that theory in discussions such as this one is not due to any theoretical inadequacies it may have but to the collapse of the Soviet bloc—in other words, not to argument but to force.
It’s this historical context of counterrevolution—and the closely related eclipse of the labor movement and of class consciousness generally—that in my opinion has brought overtly misanthropic and antihuman movements such as environmentalism and animal liberation into the mainstream. Of course, such movements and ideas preceded the counter-revolution, and to a degree prepared it—what is new is not the presence of these discourses but the absence in the mainstream of a confident, human-centric rebuttal—such works as Helene Guldberg’s Just Another Ape? remaining marginal.
With regard to morality, again I would argue that there are systems of ethical thought in which the concept of animal rights and/or liberation is quite meaningless, or indeed unethical. For example, Spinoza, in Ethics, IV, Appendix, XXVI (Wikiquote) :
Besides men, we know of no particular thing in nature in whose mind we may rejoice, and whom we can associate with ourselves in friendship or any sort of fellowship; therefore, whatsoever there be in nature besides man, a regard for our advantage does not call on us to preserve, but to preserve or destroy according to its various capabilities, and to adapt to our use as best we may.
Spinoza’s rather harsh view, I would suggest, has a strong resonance with that dramatized by sf. I have claimed elsewhere (cf. “The Indifference Engine”) that the central relationship explored in sf is that between humanity and nonhuman nature rather than (as in literary fiction and most other genres) relationships between human beings. While theistic and deistic worldviews are present in sf, the predominant assumption of at least a high proportion of sf texts is that humanity exists in an overwhelmingly hostile universe within which it emerged by chance and in which its continued existence is by no means guaranteed. In that universe, it is conceivable—and of course often conceived—that we may encounter other things in nature in whose minds we may rejoice: aliens, “uplifted” animal species, or artificial intelligences. These too would or in principle could become part of our fellowship and therefore come within the embrace of our moral concern: our own advantage would call upon us to preserve them.
By the same token the production of creatures—and they are literally creatures—such as knock-out gene mice for the humane medical purpose indicated by the name “OncoMouse” poses (on this view) no ethical or ontological problems. On the same view, the creation of conscious beings from nonhuman animals through genetic or other intervention would indeed pose ethical problems.
The Human-Animal Boundary
In its ability to portray beings that are chimeras of human and animal being, sf has a unique capacity to narrate the voice of the animal (although we must always remember, as imagined by the human author) in its alternative worlds. In sf ontologies, the abyss between human and animal might be greatly reduced. Yet often we see fictions exploring this gap in terms of risk rather than reward in such blurring. Thus, our next topic is to consider the active erasure of the human/animal boundary enacted by some sf and the question of whether this promises animal liberation.
Sherryl: Three fictions I’ve found productive to think about in this context are Pat Murphy’s “Rachel in Love,” Leigh Kennedy’s “Her Furry Face,” and Kij Johnson’s “The Evolution of Trickster Stories among the Dogs of North Park, after the Change.” All seem to me to remind us that, although we have a fantasy of communicating with other species and reducing the human/animal gap, such a fantasy projected onto the animals may actually do them a disservice. We may be refusing to recognize and respect their alterity, refusing to truly enter into some kind of communication with them that does more than simply reverse the binary so that, where once we imagined them as our absolute Other and enemies, now we imagine them as our mirror selves and allies.
Neither of these positions really sees the animal in its own specificity. In Murphy’s story, a young chimpanzee is imprinted with the neural network of the researcher’s dead child, producing a being that belongs in neither the human nor animal world. She potentially suggests a new future as she finds her way outside of the human/animal boundary at the end, but the degree to which she has been “humanized” by the experiments has limited her as much as it has opened her to new possibilities. Similarly, the protagonist’s love for the intelligent ape in “Her Furry Face” is revealed to be about his own desire to be reflected in her acceptance rather than about openness to what the ape might want out of a relationship with humans.
Johnson’s story is the most pointed, directly stating that although we fantasize about communicating with animal others, when they suddenly could talk, “we found that, really, we prefer our slaves mute.” Yet the title of Johnson’s story also reminds sf readers of Joanna Russ’s story “When It Changed,” which is about the possibilities for women to experience full human subjectivity once they are able to live outside the strictures of patriarchy. So perhaps what we need instead of fantasies of animals being or becoming more like humans is a way of conceiving the human and animal relationship outside the ubiquitous assumptions of anthropocentrism.
Ken: The two of these stories that I have read—Murphy’s and Johnson’s—are moving and thought-provoking. I find it interesting that in each case the decisive “humanizing” alteration is the acquisition of language. It is possible to imagine oneself into the thought-world of a nonhuman animal without anthropomorphizing—witness Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter—but in these stories anthropomorphizing is the point. They confirm rather than erase the human/non-human gap and imaginatively illustrate the argument that consciousness is human and inextricable from language (as distinct and emergent from signaling systems). They do not pretend to answer Nagel’s classic philosophical question: “What is it like to be a bat?”
Uplift
The most central way in which we might consider biotechnology to contribute to the project of animal liberation is through uplift, which would reduce the gap between human and animal being. This is also a frequent image in sf, including Ken’s Engines of Light series (comprising Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, and Engine City), which includes a Saurian race uplifted to the level of interstellar travel. After Wells’s Moreau perhaps the best-known sf example of this theme, indeed the source of the term “uplift,” is David Brin’s Uplift series, which imagines a complete interstellar society that is enmeshed in complex relationships of fealty and obligation as certain races uplift others, and these uplifted others eventually achieve the status of patrons and uplift other “inferior” species in their turn. In this world, Brin imagines uplifted dolphins and chimpanzees as the “client” species of the originally superior humans, but he also plays with sf’s capacity to challenge the category of the human by inserting this human/animal relationship into a larger chain of relationships among various alien species. In this way, Brin’s work reminds us of how the alien in sf can help us think about the category of the animal: the genre is populated both by aliens that clearly stand in for other people and aliens that stand in for the otherness of animals. So, is uplift a feasible biotechnological goal, and more importantly, is it an ethically valid line of enquiry?
Sherryl: I have written elsewhere about Brin’s work (cf. “Animals and Animality”), and so I won’t repeat those arguments here other than to say that I think his fiction remains more interested in the human characters than the uplifted animals, and the way this idea is deployed in his work doesn’t seem to me to be helpful for animal liberation.
What I find more interesting is the network of obligation that he constructs among the various uplifted species whereby the uplifted species owes so many years of service to the one doing the uplifting. Uplifted species are never consulted about whether or not they want this supposedly more elevated status, and indeed they are not able to understand the nature of this “debt” until after it has already been incurred. This suggests interesting parallels between some unexamined assumptions in Brin’s work and what I take to be a more thoughtful exploration of some of these ideas in Cordwainer Smith’s various stories about the Underpeople. Underpeople in Smith’s future are also uplifted animals, and in his work it is clear that they are uplifted in order to serve better as labor for the humans whose technology has modified these animals. Like other exploited subjects who have failed to fully occupy the liberal humanist category such as enslaved Africans, the Underpeople are enhanced to better serve but are explicitly denied the status of people.
Apartheid and discrimination are themes frequently explored in Smith’s work, and one of the key stories in the cycle, “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” revisits a historical—and, interestingly, failed—moment of Underpeople revolution, a social transformation that is only fully realized later in the novel Norstrilia. I have also argued elsewhere1 that the Underpeople help us to conceptualize important parallels between our exploitation of animals who are reduced to commodities under capitalism and its simultaneous exploitation of people reduced to the object labor-power. I think the story raises important questions about the motivation for uplift, which is more likely, I think, to better have animals serve us than to better enhance their lives for themselves.
Yet I also think Smith’s work in its evident concern for the suffering of the Underpeople and its concern for their subjectivity as animals also points to one of the reasons that I find the posthuman project of reconceptualizing subjectivity valuable. Instead of lamenting that people are treated “like animals” when reduced to labor-power or other exploitative social relations, I think we should be asking why we retain this category of “like animals” as a valid site for reducing the Other to a project for our ends.
Ian Watson’s remarkable novel The Jonah Kit is also relevant here: it isn’t really an uplift tale, but it is about a hybrid sort of subjectivity when human neural patterns are mapped onto the brain of a whale, producing a species that mediates between human and whale perception. What strikes me as innovative in Watson’s treatment is the way he is able to convey that the whale as much as the human has a complex epistemology and language but one that is utterly different from the human because it is differently embodied. Of all the texts we’ve discussed, I think this novel best captures what I find promising about the posthuman in its ability to convey to the reader how the world is otherwise for other species and how we too might make another world by adjusting our perceptual and conceptual experiences.
This is a posthumanism that involves changing our concept of the human—and of the human/animal boundary—rather than a posthumanism that requires a biotechnology change to human and/or animal. At root, I see more possibility in the philosophical changes and the power of sf to offer us concrete examples of such other worlds rather than in the idea of materially changing animal being through biotechnology. If we aren’t going to change our concept of the human/animal hierarchy, then uplift seems either a cruel prank or a potential disaster as Rupert Wyatt’s recent contribution to the Planet of the Apes series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, suggests.
Ken: The question of the feasibility of uplift depends what you mean by “feasible.” If it’s “possible in principle within the next thousand years,” then perhaps it is. Given that chimps are so closely related to us and given the speed at which our understanding of the function of genes is developing, we can imagine within a century or so being able to “uplift” chimps or in the longer term perhaps even recreate extinct hominid species. Whether that would be ethical is another question. If it meant merely producing one or a few individuals, I think it would be very unethical. Creating a viable breeding population might be a different matter, but then the choice might seem to be placing them in some kind of reserve, which would, I think, be cruel, or integrating them into human society—a situation I’ve gestured to in other stories but which it’s difficult to see the point of.
If I remember correctly, The Jonah Kit makes the interesting point that the whale’s language is profoundly different from the human in that, because whales use sonar to perceive objects, their “words” are sounds that are literally shaped like the objects they refer to—whereas in human language the “sign” is with few exceptions “arbitrary,” as I think de Saussure was the first to point out. Watson—again, if I recall correctly—connects this abstract nature of human language with Engels’s account of “The Part Played by Labor in the Transition from Ape to Man.” Because whales don’t have hands but do have a sonic awareness of their surroundings, they don’t form abstractions in the same way. Their symbols, their “glyphs,” have shapes related to the shapes their sonic sense directly perceives, echoes of these echoes.
This does bring an important insight into the notion of uplift: that even if animals had language and consciousness in the human sense imposed upon them, it would be shaped by the kind of animals they are, just as ours is by our being apes. Another interesting avenue for exploring this is imagining different evolutionary pathways whether in the history of other planets or in alternate histories of our own. In Harry Harrison’s West of Eden series, he imagines a world where the asteroid didn’t hit, and an intelligent species developed from dinosaurs—while an isolated New World primate population gave rise to a species like ours. Harrison’s speculations on dinosaur language, consciousness, and culture are serious and intriguing.
The notion of an animal species acquiring speech features in my own novel, Learning the World, in a slightly different way. Humanity has been expanding for millennia through a cosmos devoid of life other than bacteria and algae. One of the world ships enters a solar system with an Earthlike planet inhabited by a bat-like, intelligent species whose technological level is roughly similar to our nineteenth century. The human explorers—at first unaware that their ship has been identified—discover that the “bat people” exploit a related species, which they call “trudges,” as close in evolutionary terms to them as (say) chimps are to us. As part of a remote intervention in the bat people’s affairs, a faction of the humans uses viral genetic engineering to uplift the trudges by giving some of them a linguistic capacity. The trudges that thus become conscious immediately rebel against their condition. What is completely unexpected by the humans is that the bat people, as soon as they become aware that some of the trudges are conscious, accept them as equals. This leads the narrator to conclude that the bat people are a better and kinder species than humanity and to speculate on the evolutionary reasons why this might be so—which, ironically, include the very fact that the bat people have all along had a nonconscious, nonlinguistic, but physically strong and dexterous species to exploit.
With regard to possible political uses of these reimagined subjectivities, I am more skeptical than Sherryl. It seems to me that a far more common lament or protest against exploitation is not to say that people are treated “like animals” but that people are treated like machines, in fact, according to Marx, reduced to “an appendage of the machine.” This point may remind us that for almost a century now the principal signifier for labor and for the working class and the principal site of displaced or disavowed anxiety about that class in sf is not the beast but the robot. In Capek’s origin text R.U.R., for example, it’s quite clear that the robot revolt is modeled on the ancient (or not so ancient, when we think of Haiti) fear or hope of a slave uprising and also on the then and there (Prague, 1921) very immediate fear or hope of a proletarian uprising—the robots, for example, issue a manifesto to all the robots of the world, in what is almost certainly an allusion to the internationalist proclamations of the Bolsheviks.
Likewise, the inclusion within “humanity” of robots (or androids) that have attained consciousness or their forcible or prejudiced exclusion from human dignities is a persistent theme in sf, notably in the work of Philip K. Dick, widely popularized in the now cult film, Blade Runner. Interestingly, as the working class has disappeared as a political force and the machine-operating industrial working class has been offshored to the former Third World, the site of anxiety over rebellion of the West’s lower orders has shifted from robots to zombies, who in the recent Romero films characteristically enter the scene as mindless consumers besieging shopping malls; while Rise of the Planet of the Apes—with its AK-47-firing, helicopter-downing insurgent chimps—may signify the same anxiety projected on restive populations in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
In Vitro Meat
One of the chief ways that animals and humans interact in Western culture is through what is essentially a disavowed relationship, the animal products regularly eaten by humans. This is the source of much of the ongoing exploitation of animals and suffering in animal lives, both in confinements (such as cages for laying hens) and in the loss of animal lives in the massive slaughter required to sustain current levels of meat consumption. The resistance to animal exploitation and the social activism around animal welfare is also perhaps most visible in the public discourse about people’s eating habits, the increasing number of vegetarians and vegans—and increasing ease for finding such options—and in concern for “free range” animal products that shows some ethical concern about the source of these foods. Yet, at the same time, we also find a reaction against these changes and a reaffirmation of meat-eating in works such as Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma or the slow food movement, which engages politically with human exploitation in harvesting food and environmental pollution in its cultivation and transport. Clearly, people have become concerned about the ethics of consumption, but this concern does not inevitably lead to a rejection of a carnivorous diet. One of the visions of sf that has yet to be successfully realized in material culture is of an artificial substitute for meat, in vitro meat that would enable one to consume flesh without exploiting a suffering animal body. Is this a way biotechnology could serve animal liberation?
Sherryl: I’m not sure whether I find a lot of hope in the idea of in vitro meat. It seems doomed from the start to be a technology that pleases no one. Those invested in the taste and texture made possible by the consumption of “real” flesh seem untroubled by the need to slaughter animals in order to obtain this flesh and thus would likely prefer the cheaper alternative of animal slaughter to laboratory manufacture, and those interested in animal welfare have already accommodated themselves to a diet of nonanimal proteins derived from soy and other sources. I see a lot more hope in the proliferation of various tofu substitutes—tofu bacon and the like—than I do in the idea of in vitro meat.
There might be something to be said, however, for the role of in vitro meat in efforts to minimize the environmental damage caused by meat production and consumption. The urgency of this site of activism (the environmental costs of farmed meat) is certainly a point that Donna Haraway makes in the conclusion to When Species Meet. She suggests—much to the horror of many vegans—that it is more ethical to consume the flesh of feral hogs hunted (we are told) to minimize their damage to the ecosystem into which they have been artificially introduced, than it is ethical to consume other protein sources whose cultivation might involve other forms of labor exploitation and habitat destruction. Given that Monsanto genetically modified (GM) soy is one of the main strains of soybeans grown in North America, and given Monsanto’s well-documented history of damage to people and ecosystems, this argument demands attention.
Haraway also raises the question of what the end of meat would mean for the continued existence of animal species cultivated only for their meat: would they be allowed to reproduce and live independent lives, or would these species simply cease to exist once they were no longer bred for consumption? This question has similarly outraged vegans, and it is one that intersects most readily, I think, with examples of artificial meat we see in sf. Although sometimes we see an assumption that the consumption of “real” flesh is somehow barbaric and will cease at some point in the enlightened future, more often when we see a concrete image of in vitro meat, it seems monstrous rather than promissory. For example, the huge pulsating flesh of Chicken Little in The Space Merchants (Pohl and Kornbluth) seems an image of the cancer of overproduction and overconsumption critiqued through the novel, a horror of something living without being. Similarly, the affectless protein tubes dubbed Chickie Nobs in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake provoke disgust rather than revelation.
It may well be worth asking further why some people find it less horrifying to kill and eat a sentient animal than to eat some kind of nonsentient protein mass. Perhaps sf should challenge itself to provide more positive images of artificial meat, which could be a way biotechnology could serve animal liberation. As things stand now, however, I fear that any in vitro meat sources will simply reinforce an attitude that sees animals as objects there to serve our ends, separating their function from their living being, much as knock-out gene mice have become tools one can order by the dozen.
Ken: I think in vitro meat is a dead end and that fully synthetic edible products—some resembling and replacing meats and vegetables, some perhaps with new flavors and textures as yet unimagined—built from molecules designed from scratch or perhaps built up from algae, is a more hopeful long-term vision. With the significant exception of CO2 emission, industry is far less environmentally and ecologically disruptive than agriculture, and replacement of agriculture by industry would allow vast areas to return to wilderness—if that’s what we wanted. A consequence, of course, is that the fate of nearly all currently domesticated animals would become what is the fate of most wild animals—to be eaten alive by other animals.
I see no reason why animal varieties like Holstein cattle, whose lives depend on continuous human intervention, should continue to be reproduced indefinitely after the need for their food products ends.
De-Domestication
The work of animal studies scholars to uncover the history of human-animal interactions as they have changed across time and space has made clear that many of the animals we interact with today cannot be understood strictly as “natural” beings. Rather, many species are the products of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of cohabitation with humans and of selective breeding that has changed these species into something other than they were without human intervention. Simultaneously, however, humans have been changed by their cohabitation with animals as well, not only in the ways that animal labor-power enabled various kinds of industrial and agricultural revolutions but also on the level of the body through shared microbes and immunities and occasional outbreaks of catastrophic zoönoses.
The recent panics over avian and swine flus demonstrate how entwined we remain with our animal others and, should we care to read the signs, how easily our confinement of them in crowded conditions or our displacement of them from historical habitats puts our own health at risk. Steven Soderbergh’s recent film Contagion traces some of these networks of displaced animals, confined feedlots, and carnivorous consumption which lead to disease. In When Species Meet, Donna Haraway uses the term “companion species” to refer equally to humans and nonhumans to capture something of this mutually constitutive evolution and embodiment. Just as we have used the tools of selective breeding and, increasingly, genomics to modify animals to better suit our need for their bodies as labor-power and commodities, we might also use these same tools to reverse the effects of domestication and restore some of these species to a less human-centric environment. Does the use of biotechnology to these ends seem promising?
Sherryl: This is one area where I struggle to think of sf examples exploring this idea. We have quite a few examples of a kind of posthumanism where human bodies are modified to become what we might call more animal-like, usually to enable them to survive in environments not suited to human embodiment as we know it. Thus, we have characters such as China Miéville’s Remade in the Bas-Lag novels, some of whom, such as Tanner in The Scar, can work in underwater environments because they have gills and tentacles, or we have the Shaper posthumans of Bruce Sterling’s work, who can orient themselves in any direction for work in the weightless environment of space because their “feet” are grafted instead with a second pair of hands, approximately the bodily achievements of nonhuman primates who can grasp equally with hands and feet. In all of these cases, I think we see less a prospect for liberation and more a remodeling of the body the better to exploit it for certain labor tasks: the Remade, for example, are so configured as punishment in the legal system and have a social status somewhere between indentured servants and slaves.
We also at times see images of the recreation of earlier hominids through some kind of genetic reversal, such as in Brian Aldiss’s Moreau’s Other Island or Paul McAuley’s White Devils, and again the project seems to be about exploitation rather than emancipation: earlier hominids are imagined as super-soldiers or a docile workforce. I agree that often the processes of domestication have been terrible for animals, especially in the agribusiness era which has given us chickens unable to stand because of the excessive weight of their distorted breasts or cows continually on antibiotics because of infections associated with excessive milk production and extraction. Yet I wonder if de-domestication through reverse engineering is a viable project rather than, say, simply ending the genetic lines of these abject bodies.
Ken: In another of Paul McAuley’s novels, The Secret of Life, we see in passing a clade of “future primitives” who have genetically modified themselves to live as wolf-like predators in the wild—which raises the interesting possibility of giving some technological bite to the anarcho-primitivist project of de-domesticating humanity. I can’t help wishing on such people precisely what they wish for, perhaps in the rewilded regions that the replacement of agriculture by synthetic biology might some day allow.
Above, I’ve disparaged the idea of recreating earlier hominids, but in fairness one has to admit that the dream of meeting again our fellow human species is haunting. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by seeing a Neanderthal, or an australopithecine, or an Indonesian “hobbit”? I’ve never had a bigger surprise at any scientific announcement than that of the hobbits. That they lived so recently is tantalizing as well as staggering. I have to admit to the faint hope that some of them may still survive.
Cloning
A similar project to that of de-domestication is that of cloning, which has been successfully done with animals, most famously Dolly, the cloned sheep. Although this technology, too, opens up the specter of animal bodies endlessly produced for some kind of exploitation, it also suggests more promising possibilities such as assisting in the reproduction of species on the verge of extinction or perhaps even returning to existence those genetic lines already wiped out by hunting, habitat destruction, or climate change. Cloning might present a better route for the project of returning animals to a state closer to what they were before human interventions than the path of rebreeding successive lines for de-domestication, allowing us to skip the intervening generations of types still shaped toward human ends. The best-known example of this is, of course, Jurassic Park and its fantasy—and nightmare—of restoring dinosaurs to existence for a theme park. Must such experiments inevitably end in disaster, or is there a more positive application for this biotechnology?
Sherryl: The most ubiquitous example of animal cloning in popular culture is the promise of cloning one’s pet, allowing bereaved owners the fantasy that they might never be without their most cherished companion. This commercial service has been marketed and indeed used by the privileged few. I find this material example of cloning to be detrimental for our understanding of animals and the possibilities of their liberation. First, it is premised on a complete misunderstanding of the structuring role of genes, suggesting that a genetic clone of a pet will produce the exact same creature, not allowing for the role of environment in shaping personality and further of its role in activating (or not) which genes express themselves. A genetic code is nothing like a blueprint that can produce the same entity time and again. Further, this attitude toward cloning one’s pet suggests a failure to see animals as distinct individuals—even if not the same as human individuals—and thus seems to me to reinforce rather than challenge the human/animal boundary. Would we find it liberating or monstrous to clone a dead child or a dead friend? And why do we, as I suspect, have different standards for this when it comes to animals? Finally, the commercial costs of such cloning projects are substantial and seem wasteful when simultaneously millions of domestic animals are slaughtered each year for lack of resources to care for them.
Although I can see more promise in the idea that cloning can help recover extinct species and thus biotechnology can be used to reverse the damage to species diversity that has been caused by human activity, I nonetheless question the feasibility of this project in the absence of radical changes to the way we conceptualize the human/animal boundary and the place of animals in our cultures. The ongoing extinction of polar bears, a charismatic megafauna if there ever was one, comes to mind. Despite their cuteness, despite people’s emotional investment in them, we nonetheless do nothing to halt the climate change that has decimated their habitat and food supply and do little to ameliorate their starvation and other suffering. We could conceivably use biotechnology to aid in the reproduction of polar bears in captivity, but is this really an example of biotechnology assisting in animal liberation?
Ken: Jurassic Park follows the classic, not to say time-worn, trope of “hubris clobbered by nemesis” (as Brian Aldiss put it in Trillian Year Spree [30]). Michael Crichton used this plot for most of his technothrillers. That genre can be distinguished from sf by its structural requirement that the consequences of the scientific or conceptual breakthrough are confined or rolled back: in the end, the genie must be put back in the bottle, the laboratory must burn. The priest or some secular equivalent must intone, “There are things that man was not meant know.” If we speculate instead in the spirit of sf—which spits on all of that—we might envision the reconstruction of entire extinct biomes, perhaps in gigantic space habitats, out of mere scientific curiosity.
On a more modest scale, de-domestication by rebreeding has had at least partial success in recreating the European wild auroch, and further work with better genomic understanding is being considered and advocated. It’s an intriguing possibility that what we consider a “natural” ecosystem is already impoverished by the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna, and in the long run it would be wonderful to have these lost giants back. More immediately and urgently, we don’t need to recreate any extinct species to bring the oceans back to an abundance of life beyond what we can easily imagine but which once existed. We just have to end industrial fishing and possibly reduce bulk transport by sea—easier said than done, but again I think synthetic biology holds out some hope, in terms of new food and fuel sources.
Cloning pets seems a bit decadent as well as silly, but if people are willing to pay for it then the commercial costs are covered by those getting the (dubious) benefits, such as they are. However, I think preserving genetic material from extinct or endangered species in the hope of recreating them at a later time is not at all futile. It’s better than nothing. But dealing with habitat loss and climate change are far more urgent and aren’t at all simple matters. By and large, though, the most urgent problem facing humanity is poverty, and the solution to poverty is economic growth. With enough wealth, a lot of environmental and ecological problems become affordable to solve or don’t arise in the first place: people with electricity don’t need to cut down trees and bushes for firewood; people with reliable meat supplies and refrigeration don’t need to hunt for bush meat; and so on.
Conclusion
We return to the question: What role might biotechnology play in the service of animal liberation? As our discussion has suggested, the answer might ultimately have less to do with biotechnology in and of itself and more to do with larger issues of social change and how (or if) one feels positive social change might be achieved. As most of our exchange has stressed, whether or not biotechnology is helpful for animal liberation has little to do with biotechnology itself and much to do with the aims to which it is deployed, chiefly with the cultural attitude about the human/animal boundary that shapes not only the use of this technology but the role of animals in human cultures. SF, often concerned with imagining the future or imagining the world otherwise, is a genre interested in social change. Images from the genre have at times served to galvanize new attitudes or new ways of looking at human identity or social orders, perhaps even to promote new actions based on these new insights. In this final exchange, we offer our thoughts on the role of sf in imagining animal liberation through biotechnology.
Sherryl: Paradoxically, although most of my comments about how animals have been represented in intersection with biotechnology in sf have been negative, I do have some optimism that social change is possible and that sf has a role to play in this change. As I think I’ve said already, the possibilities for such change have much more to do with a kind of posthumanism made possible by new kinds of epistemes that challenge how we think about the human, the animal, and the social rather than by new technological interventions. It is not that I find the technology irrelevant—indeed, I think it useful in reconfiguring how we think about the human/animal boundary precisely because biotechnology reveals it to be so porous. My point, rather, is that new biotechnological creatures inserted into the same old conceptual categories seem more likely to be further victims of ongoing exploitation than emblems of a new future.
Yet I think sf has much to offer to the project of animal liberation because, as I’ve argued elsewhere (cf. Animal Alterity), the genre shares a number of conceptual frameworks with scholarship in animal studies and thus gives us tools to begin this work of social and epistemological reorganization. Both sf and animal studies are interested in exploring and revising our relationship to alterity, in granting subjectivity and voice to the nonhuman, and in encouraging readers to see the given world and its “people” otherwise.
Thus, I would suggest, biotechnology as informed by the progressive sf imagination (noting that its imagination need not be progressive) can be a tool for animal liberation, but the important work must be done with cultural and conceptual shifts, not merely technological ones. Finally, I would say that although Ken and I have a number of differences in our convictions about these issues, one thing we share is a sense that anticapitalist critique should be central to any projects for a better future. For me, one of the key sites of exploring this issue is through the conflation of human and animal bodies in their joint exploitation by capital, its willingness to turn both into commodified body parts (animals who are eaten; cell lines that are patented), and its desire to strip both of full lives of species-being to the diminished life of service-to-capital. Thus it remains my conviction that projects of animal liberation, conceived of through the posthumanism I described above, create sites of resistance to the exploitation of both human and animal bodies that is characteristic of neoliberal, biopolitical regimes.
Ken: While I acknowledge and appreciate the attempt to find common ground, I would insist that only with reservations could I share Sherryl’s conviction of the centrality of an anti-capitalist critique to any projects for a better future. Take, for example, the patenting of cell lines and other biological material and the commodification of genetic engineering techniques, “biobricks” (biologically active molecules classified as “off-the-shelf components” in the emergent field of synthetic biology), etc. The anticapitalist reflex is to condemn such developments out of hand and to lobby against the relevant laws. The problem is that this means choking off any developments in these fields, which it is difficult not to see (and is often enough avowed) as the intention.
Anticapitalism in the absence of any social agency and any viable project for a postcapitalist order risks destroying what has already been gained. The precondition of the emergence of such an agency and project is rather the critique not of capitalism but of most contemporary forms of anticapitalism (including much that passes for Marxism). Whether a renewed push for positive social change would be anticapitalist is, I think, still an open question. Further, an anticapitalist critique that implicitly disclaims responsibility for recently and currently existing socialism is unlikely to win credibility. I read just such an implicit disclaimer in the statement that animal bodies are exploited by capital. After all, animals were exploited before capitalism and after it too. Indeed a common (and justified) complaint against Soviet and East European socialism was that it didn’t exploit animals enough—there was never enough meat in the shops. As for currently existing socialism, increased meat consumption is a measure of progress in China and one I find hard to begrudge.
Ken MacLeod lives in West Lothian, Scotland. Sherryl Vint is a professor at University of California-Riverside.
Works Cited
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1 In my work on Smith, I also address Marx’s human-centric theories of labor, mentioned earlier in this exchange. See “Species and Species Being: Alienated Subjectivity and the Commodification of Animals.”
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