Real artificial: Tissue-cultured meat, genetically modified farm animals, and fictions

Configurations

Volumn 18, Issue 1-2, 2010, Pages 181-197

  McHugh, Susan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 80051610955     PISSN: 10631801     EISSN: 10806520     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/con.2010.0006     Document Type: Note

References (48)

1. George Orwell, Coming Up for Air (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1999), pp. 27-28.
2. Steve Baker identifies the aesthetics of "botched taxidermy," in which the "botchedness or gone-wrongedness" characteristic of contemporary fine-art images of animals does not signal artistic failure so much as a more complicated set of engagements with animal form, each of which is "deliberate, and has its own integrity".
3. Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion, 2000), p. 156.
4. While walking around a Wild Oats grocery store in the United States, I was shocked to learn from Annie Potts and Philip Armstrong, co-directors of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, that a powerful meat-industry lobby ensures that such products are banned from import to their country.
5. But even this model is, of course, exceeded by Derrida's theory "of the trace, of iterability, of difference," the "possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language" and that "are themselves not only human," which is most clearly articulated in his "Eating Well, or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida," in Who Comes after the Subject? trans.
6. Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 116.
7. On the possibility of an "aesthetics of livingness" as a counter to the relentlessly reductive logic of sacrifice, see Jonathan Burt, "The Aesthetics of Livingness," Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture 5 (2008): 8.
8. Traci Warkentin, "Dis/integrating Animals: Ethical Dimensions of the Genetic Engineering of Animals for Human Consumption," in Genetic Technologies and Animals, ed. Carol Gigliotti (special issue of AI & Society 20:1 [2006]), p. 94;
9. Helen Tiffin, "Pigs, Pigoons, and People," in Knowing Animals, ed. Laurence Simons and Philip Armstrong (Boston: Brill, 2007), p. 260.
10. Jovian Parry, "Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat," Society & Animals 17 (2009).
11. Here I take the point, but disagree with the conclusions, of Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, who focus on the human characters to argue more broadly that "Atwood's novel emerges by default as a feminist, environmentalist, and, not least, a humanist text," because it elaborates how "age-old practices of physical domination and oppression are now being revisited on what social theorists have increasingly taken to describing as a 'post-bodied and post-human' modern world".
12. Huggan and Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment (New York: Routledge, 2010), p. 211.
13. Ursula Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 206.
14. Diagnosing the representational challenges of climate-change stories, Heise seems skeptical more generally of how the apocalyptic "narrative architecture" might be used "to bridge precisely the gap between stories of individuals and accounts of global transformations" (p. 208).
15. Richard Kerridge, "Narratives of Resignation: Environmentalism in Recent Fiction," in The Environmental Tradition in English Literature, ed. John Parham (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), p. 87. I thank Sally Borrell for directing me to this article.
16. Amy M. Patrick, "Apocalyptic or Precautionary? Revisioning Texts in Environmental Literature," in Coming into Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice, ed. Annie Merrill Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel J. Philippon, and Adam W. Sweeting (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), p. 145.
17. Sally Borrell, "Challenging Humanism: Human-Animal Relations in Recent Postcolonial Novels" (Ph.D. diss., Middlesex University, 2010).
18. Henning Steinfeld, Pierre Gerber, Tom Wassenaar, Vincent Castel, Mauricio Rosales, and Cees de Haan, Livestock's Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options (Rome: UN Food and Agriculture Organization, 2006), p. 272. I thank Jennifer Wolch for directing me to this book.
19. These descriptions are from the promotional website of New Harvest, which is the brainchild of Jason Matheny, then a graduate student in utilitarian philosophy. http://www.new-harvest.org.
20. Oron Catts, "The Art of the Semi-Living," in Live: Art and Performance, ed. Adrian Heathfield and Hugo Glendinning (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 154.
21. Catts notes that while J. M. J. Jolly invented a technique for sustaining tissues from complex organisms in 1903, it was perfected in 1910 by Alexis Carrel, who coined the term "tissue culture" (p. 159n25). Eighty years later, the collaboration of surgeon Joseph Vacanti and material scientist Robert Langar led to the degradable scaffolding technique that allows cell clusters to be grown in three dimensions-"emblematized by one of the most important icons of the late twentieth century: the mouse with a human ear growing on its back"-which is the key development that revolutionized biomedicine with the prospect of tissue engineering (pp. 154-155). I thank Ionat Zurr for sending this reference, along with several others that follow in this essay.
22. "Real artificial meat" is the preferred phrasing of Marianne Heselmans, "The Dutch Cultivate Minced Meat in a Petri Dish," NRC Handelsblad, September 10, 2005. www.new-harvest.org.
23. Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, "Towards a New Class of Being: The Extended Body," Intelligent agent 6:2 (2006). http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol6_No2_transvergence_cattszurr.htm.
24. Patrick D. Hopkins and Austin Dacey, "Vegetarian Meat: Could Technology Save Animals and Satisfy Meat Eaters?" Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21:6 (2008): 595.
25. These quotations are from the New Harvest website. http://www.new-harvest.org.
26. P. D. Edelman, D. C. McFarland, V. A. Mironov, and J. G. Matheny, in "In-Vitro Cultured Meat Production" (Tissue Engineering 11 [2005]: 659), observe that the greatest quantities of cells have been produced in the shortest periods of time through experiments with goldfish skeletal-muscle tissue grown with large amounts of fetal bovine serum.
27. Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts, "The Ethical Claims of Bio Art: Killing the Other or Self- Cannibalism?" Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art & Ethics 4-5:2-1 (2003-04): 167-188. http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/publication/TheEthicalClaimsofBioart.pdf.
28. Catts and Zurr, "Towards a New Class" (above, n. 16).
29. By redeploying biotechnology in the realm of art in order to critique scientific classification, Catts and Zurr contribute another example to "Dispute biology's claim that life only emerges in cells and organisms," according to Lauren Seiler in "What Are We? The Social Construction of the Human Biological Self," Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 37 (2007): 266.
30. Catts and Zurr, "Towards a New Class" (above, n. 16).
31. Adele Senior, "In the Face of the Victim: Confronting the Other in the Tissue Culture and Art Project," in SK-INTERFACES: Exploring Borders in Art, Science and Technology, ed. Jens Hauser (Liverpool: FACT/Liverpool University Press, 2008), p. 82.
32. Deborah P. Dixon, "The Blade and the Claw: Science, Art and the Creation of the Lab-borne Monster," Social & Cultural Geography 9:6 (2008): 685.
33. Jens Hauser, "Biotechnology as Mediality: Strategies of Organic Media Art," Performance Research 11 (2006): 133.
34. Zurr and Catts, "Ethical Claims of Bio Art" (above, n. 20).
35. Catts and Zurr, "Towards a New Class" (above, n. 16).
36. Carol Gigliotti, "Leonardo's Choice: The Ethics of Artists Working with Genetic Technologies," in Leonardo's Choice: Genetic Technologies and Animals, ed. Carol Gigliotti (New York: Springer, 2009), p. 72.
37. Lauren Seiler, "What Are We? The Social Construction of the Human Biological Self," Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior 37 (2007): 266.
38. Winston Churchill, "Fifty Years Hence," in Thoughts and Adventures (London: Macmillan, 1943), p. 234.
39. Commenting on The Space Merchants as an example of a dystopic food fiction, Warren Belasco notes: "The idea [of self-regenerating meat] was not quite new, as Winston Churchill had heralded almost this exact wonder back in 1932";
40. Belasco, Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 132.
41. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 56.
42. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001), p. 22.
43. Ibid., pp. 222-223.
44. Ibid., p. 187.
45. On the literary history of animals as feral agents, see Philip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fictions of Modernity (New York: Routledge, 2008).
46. Atwood, Oryx and Crake (above, n. 32), p. 292.
47. Ann Bruce, "GM Animals-Another GM Crops?" Genomics, Society and Policy 3:3 (2006): 4.
48. I learned about this pig from Jonathan L. Clark, whose dissertation on Enviropig ™ as a "regulatory-friendly" organism explains the significance of this creature in terms of a special kind of biotech fix, one that conceptualizes the body not as a sink, but as a source of environmental toxins.