Terminal men: Biotechnological experimentation and the reshaping of "the human" in medical thrillers

New Literary History

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 161-185

  Pethes, Nicolas ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BONN   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33751112811     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2005.0036     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. William S. Burroughs, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, New Dawn, no. 37 (1996)
2. Michael Crichton, The Terminal Man (1972; New York: Ballantine, 1988), 187 (hereafter cited in text as TM)
3. In the sense of continental philosophy, these are " anthropological" concepts, implying everything that belongs to the "image" of man in a given time, that is, besides physiology, psychology, and social life, his relation towards other humans, nature, animals, and technique. These aspects form the realm of physical anthropology as a study of man, whereas in the English-speaking world the notion of cultural anthropology takes an ethnological approach. See for this shift in semantics Raymond Williams, "Anthropology," in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, ed. Williams, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 38-40
4. N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), calls "anthropological" categories "conceptions of the human" (286). Contrary to Crichton's pessimistic view, Hayles emphasizes the "pleasure" one can take in the end of certain " humanisms" when "emergence replaces teleology; reflexive epistemology replaces objectivism; distributed cognition replaces autonomous will; embodiment replaces a body seen as a support system for the mind; and a dynamic partnership between humans and intelligent machines replaces the liberal humanist subject's manifest destiny to dominate and control nature" (289)
5. Susan E. Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)
6. Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee, eds., The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: Freeman, 1995)
7. Colin Tudge, The Engineer in the Garden: Genes and Genetics: From the Idea of Heredity to the Creation of Life (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993)
8. The unequivocality of these distinctions, if used in the sense of a category with a "clearly defined, unambiguous antithesis" (Sander Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999], 23), has lately been questioned by such authors as Donna Haraway and Katherine Hayles, who claims that it is in fact the ambiguity of categories that is responsible for the success of discourses on humans. Hayles points to the "shift from presence/absence to pattern/ randomness" in the structure of distinctions (How We Became Posthuman, 285). Although this ambiguity is indeed the core of the discursive strategies of conceptualizing humans, I am going to focus here on the effect of unambiguity as generated in popular discourses on humanity, resulting in standardized representations, such as humans being "free" or "determined," "individuals" or ''part of mass society."
9. On this deconstructive theory of justice that is maintained only in deferring the unjust decision, see Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 11 CAKDOZO LAW REVIEW, 5-6 (1990). Here, as throughout the whole essay, I am very much obliged to discussions with Gabriele Schabacher and her valuable suggestions
10. See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)
11. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 235
12. See Niklas Luhmann, Art as a Social System (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), sec. 2
13. For the construction of a "technological or scientific imaginary," see Ann Cranny-Francis, "The "Science' of Science Fiction: A Sociocultural Analysis," in J. R. Martin and Robert Veel, eds, Reading Science: Critical and Functional Perspectives on Discourses of Science (London: Routledge, 1998), 77
14. Stefan Rieger, Die Individualität der Medien: Eine Geschichte der Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001)
15. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 203: "But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behavior, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects."
16. See Timothy Lenoir, "Practice, Reason, Context: The Dialogue between Theory and Experiment," Science in Context 2, no. 1 (1988): 3-22
17. John A. Schuster and Graeme Watchirs, "Natural Philosophy, Experiment and Discourse: Beyond the Kuhn/Bachelard Problematic, " in Experimental Inquiries: Historical, Philosophical and Social Studies of Experimentation in Science, ed. Homer E. Le Grand (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1990), 1-47
18. For the reconfiguration of concepts of nature in the laboratories of molecular biology, see Karin Knorr-Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1999), 138-58
19. Charles Bazerman, "Reporting the Experiment: The Changing Account of Scientific Doings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665-1800," in Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science, ed. Bazerman (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 59
20. This, of course, is the heart of the discussion on the relation between literature and science. For critical reviews, see Gillian Beer, Open. Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996)
21. and Daniel Cordle, Postmodern Postures: Literature, Science and the Two Cultures Debate (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 1999)
22. I have tried to elaborate on this experimental connecting-communication between science and literature in my, "Wissen/Poetik: Konzeptionen eines problematischen Transfers," in Romantische Wissenspoetik, ed. Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 2004), 341-72
23. For the formal connection between literature and science in the area of an experimental testing of knowledge, see Walter Moser, "Experiment and Fiction," in Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed. Frederick Armine (Dordrecht: Kl uwer, 1989), 61-80
24. For the thematic focus on human experimentation, see Lawrence Rothlield, Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992)
25. Emile Zola, "The Experimental Novel," in The Experimental Novel and Other Writings (New York: Haskell House, 1963)
26. See also Rothfield, Vital Signs, 123-29
27. See Murdo William McRae, ed., The Literature of Science: Perspectives on Popular Scientific Writing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 10-11. McRae emphasizes that the distinction between (popular) literature and science is invalid in the face of the general cultural and hermeneutical contexts of the representation of science
28. Achim Barsch, "Masseumediale Uuterhaltungsliteratur und soziale Wirklichkeitskonstruktion: Zum Menschenbild in der Gartenlaube am Beispiel der Romane von E. Marlitt," in Menschenbilde: Zur Pluralisierung der Vorstellung von der menschlichen Natur (1850-1914), ed. Achim Barsch and Peter M. Hejl (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000), 3/6-422
29. See Jon Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps: Science, Genetics and Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 111, for the prevalence of these "collective messages" in popular fiction on biology. The notion of "collective" is difficult
30. It is only introduced here to stress that the significance of science outside of the sciences themselves materializes into certain images, prejudices, fears, and hopes shared collectively by the members of social communication. For the production of clichés of psychology and madness by popular media, see Ulrike Hoffmann-Richter, Psychiatrie in der Zeitung: Urteile und Vorurteile (Bonn: Psychiatrie Verlag, 2000)
31. Nelkin and Lindee, The DNA Mystique, 16
32. Turney, Frankenstein 's Footsteps, 215
33. Turney's history of how Frankenstein was received also focuses on films and comics, all of which I anr leaving out here in order to analyze narration and semantics. Still, the complete insight in biotechnical humanism would, of course, have to take into account the large number of movies that deal with human engineering. Moreover, the connection between science, literature, and popular writing can be traced back even earlier than the nineteenth century. See Walter Schatzberg, Scientific Themes in Popular Literature and the Poetry of the German Enlightenment, 1720-1760 (Berne: Lang, 1973)
34. This implies a shift from the traditional pretension of art as a medium for truth toward the notion of it as a mere part of everyday life and entertainment, drus moving art away from the competing role with the sciences it had maintained throughout the nineteenth century. See Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics: Living Beauty, Rethinking Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 169-200
35. for the return of the body in the realm of (trivial) art, see Thomas Hecken, "Der Reiz des Trivialen: Idealistische Ästhetik, Trivialliteraturforschung, Geschmackssoziologie und die Aufnahme populärer Kultur," in Der Reiz des Trivialen, ed. Hecken (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), 13-48
36. For the emergence of a popular science that articulates the hopes and fears connected to "official science" and the magical notion of technology, see Oscar Handlin, "Science and Technology in Popular Culture," in Science and Culture: A Study of Cohesive and Disjunctive Forces, ed. Gerald Holton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 184-98
37. See also G. Basalla, "Pop Science: The Depiction of Science in Popular Culture," in Science and its Public: The Changing Relationship, ed. Gerald Holton and W. Blanpied (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1976), 261-78
38. and H. Parker, Biological Themes in Modern Science Fiction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984)
39. See also Urs Stäheli, "Das Populäre zwischen Cultural Studies und Systemtheorie," in Politik des Vergnügens: Zur Diskussion der Populärkultur in den Cultural Studies, ed. Udo Göttlich and Rainer Winter (Köln: Von Halem, 1999)
40. See http://spaa.simplenet.com/crichton/noteonpsychomotorepilepsy.shtml (accessed December 19, 2001)
41. For example, Crichton makes reference to D. L. Slotnick, 'The Fastest Computer" (Scientific American 224 [1971]: 76-87), in Terminal Man, 268
42. Peter Schräg, Mind Control (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 173
43. See Turney, Frankenstein's Footsteps, 96-120, for examples
44. James Scott Bell, The Nephilim Seed (Nashville, TN: Brodmann & Holmann, 2001), 306 (hereafter cited in text as NS)
45. The name is obviously an amalgam of David Bentley, who in 1996 had demanded that "genomic sequence information should be released immediately and freely in the public domain" ["Genomic Sequence Information Should Be Released Immediately and Freely in the Public Domain," Science25 (October 1996): 533-34]
46. and Bernard Davis, professor of bacteriology at Harvard and author of The Genetic Revolution: Scientific Prospects and Human Perceptions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)
47. See John Darnton, The Experiment (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2000), 245 (herafter cited in text as EX)
48. John Case, The Genesis Code (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 447
49. Charles Wilson, Embryo (New York: St. Martin's, 1999), 18 (hereafter cited in text as EM)
50. J. B. S. Haldane, Daedalus: or Science and the Future (London: Kegan Paul, 1924), 64
51. James David, Fragments (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1997), 110, a book about the creation of the supermind Frankie (from "Frankenstein") out of the brain waves of five savants with the goal "to explain God" (132)
52. See Leon Kass, Towards a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs (New York: The Free Press, 1985)
53. and Jürgen Habermas, Die Zukunft der menschlichen Natur: Auf dem Wege zur liberalen. Eugenik? (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2001)
54. See, as an example, Tony Chiu, Positive Match (New York: Bantam, 1997)
55. Francis Galton, Inquiry into Human Faculty and its Development (New York: D. Appleton, 1883), 24: "We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognizance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea; it is at least a neater word and a more generalized one than viriculture, which I once ventured to use."
56. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper, 1965), 4
57. See Tom Cohen, "Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man and Secret Agency in the 'Aesthetic State,'" in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, ed. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 114-52, for an analysis of thrillers that present the threat to the humanistic sphere of an "aesthetic state" by the material inscriptions of sabotage. Cohen states that even if the narratives of Hitchcock movies showed the restoration of this sphere, thrillers show its inaccessibility and expose the humanistic and aesthetic as mere allegories
58. See Luhmann, Art as a Social System, 96: "Art makes visible possibilities of order that would otherwise remain invisible."
59. See James E. Sheehan and Morton Sosna, eds., The Boundaries of Humanity: Humans, Animals, Machines (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991)
60. Peter Sloterdijk, Regeln für den. Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999), 45 (my translation)
61. Peter Sloterdijk, Das Menschentreibhaus: Stichworte zur historische und. prophetischen Anthropologie (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 2001 ), 47, 69 (my translation)
62. Robin Cook, Chromosome 6 (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1997), 430, 446
63. See M. Bauer, ed., Resistance to New Technology: Nuclear Power, Information Technology and. Biotechnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)
64. See Tina Bartz and Torsten Hahn, "Homo conspirons: Zur Evolution 'der Paranoia' und 'des Menschen' in Zeiten seiner Exkommunikation," in Mediale Anatomien: Menschenbilder ah Medienprojektionen, ed. Annette Keck and Nicolas Pethes (Bielefeld: transcript 2001), 373-402
65. István Csicsery-Ronay, "Notes on Mutopia," Postmodern. Culture 8, no. 1 (1997). I am grateful to Katherine Hayles for this reference