Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

6 Genetics, Material Agency, and the Evolution of Posthuman Environmental Ethics in Science Fiction

Genetics, agency, and ethics | 141 six Genetics, Material Agency, and the Evolution of Posthuman Environmental Ethics in Science Fiction Something pops out of our genes and makes monster babies . . . with a single huge ovary? . . . [W]hat in hell? —Greg Bear, Darwin’s Radio [T]here is no time or place in which genetics ends and environment begins. —Donna Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto Wired magazine’s cover story featured “Craig Venter’s Epic Voyage to Redefine the Origin of Species”: “He wanted to play God, so he cracked the human genome . Now he wants to play Darwin and collect the DNA of everything on the planet.” Venter is portrayed as an intrepid explorer who having already “conquered the human genome” (Shreve 112) is now traveling the world to master the “bottom of the food chain,” described as “a vast undiscovered world, the dark matter of life” (109). This comforting story of heroic individualism, scientific progress, and the mastery of nonhuman nature travels along familiar paths worn 142 | Bodily Natures by sexism, racism, and colonialism. Unlike monster movies that reveal a terrifying truth—humans are made of the same genetic stuff as other creatures (as the mad scientist in the horror movie Carnosaur puts it, we’re all “in the mix”)—this account presents a reassuring gulf between the human and the “undiscovered . . . dark matter of life.”1 I would like to turn from this passive matter, which seemingly sits “out there” waiting to be “hunted,” collected, and “smash[ed] . . . to bits” (Shreve 112) by Venter and his high-tech arsenal that converts stuff to codes, toward a different sort of matter, portrayed by the science fiction of Greg Bear and the science studies of Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, and others. I will argue for a posthuman environmental ethics in which the flows, interchanges, and interrelations between human corporeality and the more-than-human world resist the ideological forces of disconnection. I contend that a profound reconsideration of matter needs to be at the root of a posthumanist environmental ethics. Matter is not a passive resource for human manipulation and consumption, nor a deterministic force of biological reductionism, nor a library of codes, objects, and things to be collected and codified. As Barad puts it, “Matter, like meaning, is not an individually articulated or static entity. Matter is not little bits of nature, or a blank slate, surface , or site passively awaiting signification; nor is it an uncontested ground for scientific, feminist, or Marxist theories” (Meeting the Universe Halfway 150–151). Instead, as discussed earlier, she argues, “matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing, but a doing, a congealing of agency” (151; emphasis in original). This conception of matter as “intra-active becoming” may infuse a posthumanist environmentalist ethics that refuses to see the delineated shape of the human as distinct from the background of nature, and instead focuses on interfaces, interchanges, and transformative material/discursive practices. Greg Bear’s novels Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children combine classic and more recent science fiction figures: the mad scientist, the monstrous mother, the horrific progeny, and the killer virus. The premise is that something—radiation from Chernobyl, stress, widespread environmental degradation, perhaps—has activated an endogenous retrovirus.2 The particular retrovirus in this novel, named SHEVA, appropriately enough, runs the following course: women contract a flu-like illness, become pregnant (without insemination), miscarry that first pregnancy, and then bear a new species of child, one with flashing “squid cheeks” who can say “hello” after drawing her first breaths. Although fear of this new species of humans sparks widespread riots, mass executions, and the imprisonment of the new species in internment camps, a brave few accept their progeny, including the heroine of the tale, Kaye Lange, a biologist who eagerly sets about “becoming her own laboratory,” giving birth to one of the first live members of the new species. These novels, like many monster movies, seem to fan the fear of nature, evolution, reproduction, and the female body. The premise of this se- Genetics, agency, and ethics | 143 ries, however, in which something ancient within human DNA sparks another species that threatens to supersede the human, raises potent questions about the interface between nature and culture, the agency of nature, the constitution of the category of the human, and the nature of matter itself. Through a series of parallel “enfoldings,” the novel reconfigures commonsensical landscapes of figure...