Author: sfrarev

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Silicon Valley as Cult? Mystifying and Demystifying Surveillance Capitalism in Alex Garland’s Devs (2020)

Miguel Sebastián-Martín

In an old essay that speaks very directly to the purposes of this panel, [1] sf writer and critic Joanna Russ warned us:

Hiding greyly behind that sexy rock star, technology is a much more sinister and powerful figure. It is the entire social system that surrounds us, hence the sense of being at the mercy of an all-encompassing, autonomous process which we cannot control. If you add the monster’s location in time (during and after the industrial revolution), I think you can see what is being discussed when most people say technology. They are politically mystifying a much bigger monster: capitalism in its advanced industrial phase. … It is because technology is a mystification for something else that it becomes a kind of autonomous deity which can promise both salvation and damnation. (246-47)

Russ was clear enough about the mystifying potential of technology –insisting that we avoid its fetishism so as to re-consider it critically. But to what extent do sf creators and critics remember this in the so-called age of surveillance capitalism? To what extent do we keep mystifying, and to what extent do we keep a critical distance from contemporary technologies? In this paper, I propose the ideological and aesthetic ambivalence of Alex Garland’s Devs (2020), an sf series which both demystifies and re-mystifies the world of Silicon Valley. But what is that world? What is surveillance capitalism, the central object of cognitive estrangement in Devs?

If that concept is now so popular, it is in a large part because of Shoshana Zuboff’s bestseller critique The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), which theorises and historicises a new phase of capitalism based on the commodification of behavioural data. Although this lengthy study is “somewhat Marxish” in Rob Lucas’s words (132)—in the sense that it presents itself as a moderately anti-capitalist critique of the “rogue capitalism” of digital platforms—it seems that is as much a critique as it is a symptom of the hegemony of surveillance capitalism.  As elaborated in Cory Doctorow’s heretic sequel How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2021), Zuboff’s critique in many ways conforms to a common-sense “technological exceptionalism” which hinders a full demystification of this mode of capitalism. [2] In fact, in Zuboff’s monograph, one can observe an unjustified lenience—and sometimes reverence—towards Apple, [3] as well as, perhaps more importantly, an overestimation of the manipulative influence of these kinds of corporations. Under the hegemony of technological exceptionalism, even expert critics seem to share one core belief with surveillance capitalist corporations: the belief that, as Doctorow ironically puts it, “if you collect enough data, you will be able to perform sorcerous acts of mind control” (n.p.). Extrapolating from that belief, many claim that we are on the verge of a threatening singularity, even speculating that free will shall be forever lost once corporations develop the technology to predict and predetermine individual decisions. [4] Therefore, if this critical discourse can be called anti-capitalist at all, it is perhaps only so in an extremely deterministic, mechanistic manner—anti-capitalist in a manner that rules out the possibility of resistance against almighty capitalist technologies supposedly capable of infiltrating our minds. Even though these ideas raise critical questions and fuel antagonism towards the surveillance capitalist god, they seem to imply that, in the end, we cannot escape from under the new god’s omniscience and omnipotence: that it would be futile to “seize the means of computation,” as Doctorow invites us to do (n.p.). In these ways, much of the discourse on surveillance capitalism in fact re-mystifies as much as it demystifies, since it is overestimating and even deifying the power of the system. But what is the relevance of these polemics for Alex Garland’s series? My argument is that the show both exposes and deepens these ambivalences, illustrating how, as Joel Dinerstein says, “technology is the American theology” (569).

Against the discursive background on surveillance capitalism, plot-wise Devs focuses upon a top-secret R&D group of Amaya, a fictional San Franciscan corporation. It characterises that group as a tech-fetishistic, cult-like community that is building a supercomputer capable of predicting in all directions of time-space, a project aptly named DEVS—Latin for God. Narrated primarily from the perspective of Lily (Sonoya Mizuno), a mathematician at Amaya whose boyfriend was killed after an attempted leak of information about DEVS, the series follows her trying to infiltrate and sabotage the project. In so doing, her goal is to get the justice that she couldn’t get against such a powerful company, one with massive resources and close ties to the state apparatus. [5] In these ways at least, the series positions itself as a classic dystopian narrative, focused on the futile rebellion of a powerless individual against an almighty socio-technological apparatus—but does Lily’s anti-capitalist struggle mean that the series on the whole functions as an allegorical anti-capitalist critique? A priori, it would seem that Garland’s show is (potentially) the locus of a critique of “capitalism as religion,” à la Walter Benjamin, since it imagines a surveillance capitalist corporation as “a pure religious cult” where “everything only has meaning in direct relation to the cult: it knows no special dogma nor theology” (Benjamin 259). 

Obsessed as Amaya’s developers are with engineering a computer God, this cult-like, top-secret group shows absolute devotion towards their creation. Especially once it seems to function, they all begin to believe that the universe must be predetermined, necessarily conforming to the computer’s data-driven extrapolations and audio-visual recreations. Fascinated by these recreations in particular—and notably, by reconstructed images of Christ’s crucifixion—these developers are turned from god-like creators into the passive spectators of their creation. They, and especially CEO Forest (Nick Offerman), often behave like fanatical believers, willing to protect their sacred object at whatever cost. As Marx might have said, these people (if not all of us under capitalism) are now unknowingly ruled by their own creations, since they fetishize the computer as a godlike entity, totally independent of human will. Moreover, the series masterfully highlights the characters’ devotion towards the computer with lengthy contemplative shots of their “sacred” facility, and this beautiful cinematography is accompanied by a haunting, quasi-religious musical score—all of which invites viewers to understand and even share the characters’ enthrallment. In these ways, surveillance capitalism is blatantly exposed as the fanatical cult of a sublime technological power and, at the same time, its technological apparatus is re-mystified as an object of adoration and admiration. This is why I would classify this narrative as a paradigmatic example of what I have elsewhere called “the beautification of dystopias”—deeply ambivalent dystopias in which the object of critique and the object of pleasure are one and the same (cf. Sebastián-Martín). [6]

On another front, reading Devs as an anti-capitalist critique (even if an ambivalent one), would give us a convincing counter-argument against a very common objection raised about its supposed “flaws.” Against the claim that the series’ philosophical discourse is logically unsound, and hence not “proper” sf from a hard definition, [7] we could suggest that Devs’s characters are voicing a profoundly contradictory version of philosophical determinism because theirs is rather the pseudo-deterministic ideology of surveillance capitalism. In other words, theirs is not an attempt at theorising any form of determinism, but rather a sign of their commitment to the project of rendering the world controllable through data collection. In this sense, my assumption is that the series is both criticising and extrapolating from the counterfactual-but-popular belief that data-driven prediction can eventually become predetermination—a belief that obscures both the responsibilities of the minority in power and the potential agency of everyone else. As one developer tells the CEO character, “if DEVS works, determinism precludes free will; if it doesn’t, then you’re guilty [of murder and many other crimes]” (episode 5). And ultimately, the series seems to favour the conclusion that the world is not predetermined, but full of divergent potentialities, since the DEVS machine only works properly once it is re-coded upon a many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, a controversial theory that assumes that all possible measurements of quantum states are simultaneously real or true in some parallel universe. [8] Nonetheless, despite the fact that the DEVS computer works upon a many-world hypothesis, it continues to enforce one single predetermined future, which far from being a logical plot hole could be read as an illustration of how surveillance capitalist technologies are not designed to predict, but primarily to dominate by predetermination. Thus, even if surveillance capitalism (and its technologies) have to operate with an awareness of the diverging potentialities of time-space, they nonetheless operate as a repressive totalising force that disavows those alternative futures. [9]

Taking such an interpretive path could at least make us suspect that Devs’s seemingly contradictory treatment of quantum physics is probably not a mere plot hole, or maybe even convince us of the de-mystifying intent of the series, given how it apparently exposes surveillance capitalism as a corporate environment inherently bent towards total techno-domination –or at least, in a more modest conclusion, towards a more entrenched monopoly power. But does the series really favour this critical, demystifying conclusion, shifting blame away from mystified techno-divine powers and placing the focus on the politics of surveillance capitalist corporations? By way of conclusion, we should observe how the series’ ending re-introduces a set of ambiguities, especially through its re-evocation of religious iconography and symbolism, and its character-centric individualistic narrative. In the finale, Lily dies after falling into the facility’s security vacuum, and Amaya’s CEO, Forest, dies of asphyxia with her. Here, the crucial detail is that Lily, willingly and knowingly, contradicts the computer’s prediction of that moment—and this could suggest that individual agency can after all subvert technological power; that surveillance capitalism’s data-driven domination can never be total. However much distorted and disempowered, free will and individual power is thus shown to persist, but there is further ambivalence in the narrative denouement. 

After death, Lily and Forest are uploaded into a virtual simulacrum of reality run by the DEVS supercomputer: an alternate reality where they can reunite with their deceased relatives and partners. Leaving aside the myriad readings of this world as a digital or postmodern simulacrum, my assumption is that this re-opens the field of interpretation, and perhaps can serve as the starting point of further debate. According to Walter Benjamin’s reading of capitalism as a religion, Löwy explains that it would appear “the only salvation consists in the intensification of the system, in capitalist expansion, in the accumulation of more and more commodities [or, in this case, data]; but this remedy results only in the aggravation of despair” (68). From this perspective, we could ask: Is Devs suggesting, in a critical way, that surveillance capitalists (like Forest) are false prophets that re-appropriate religious anxieties for purposes of domination, or is Devs also suggesting, in a re-mystifying way, that technology will nonetheless, in divine, mysterious ways, eventually deliver us a digital utopia? And more generally, we could also ask: Does Devs function as a critical dystopia that rekindles transformative hopes for the present historical moment, or does it function as an anti-utopia that reinforces what we could call “surveillance-capitalist realism”? Personally, I believe that the series’ ideological ambivalence merits a deeper analysis than what could be sketched in this paper. Indeed, Amaya’s CEO Forest may be clearly exposed as a high-tech false prophet, but he is nonetheless a successful entrepreneur who, despite his fanatical immorality, ultimately manages to construct a heavenly virtual afterlife that compensates for the valley of tears that can be life under capitalism. But of course, the series ends showing another character’s concerned gesture while watching the simulacrum from the DEVS computer screen. Thus, considering that gesture, we may also ask ourselves: Will this really prove to be a digital utopia, or will it merely be surveillance capitalism’s gilded cage? De-mystification, or so it appears, is in Devs inseparable from re-mystification.

NOTES

[1] This paper, with added explanatory footnotes and slightly adapted in response to questions raised by the audience at the SFRA 2021 Conference, was originally delivered within the panel “Technologies and Capitalism,” on June 19, 2021.

[2] Doctorow uses the term “technological exceptionalism” to refer to the over-estimation of surveillance capitalist technological power: an implicit ideological assumption that the dynamics of surveillance capitalism are essentially derived from technological innovations, whereas, in fact, many dynamics cohere with neoliberal and capitalist tendencies which are autonomous of technological developments. Using one of Doctorow’s clever puns, the growth of Big Tech is inseparable from “the growth of Big Inequality” (n.p.)

[3] Zuboff is lenient towards Apple because the company does not incorporate advertising in its platforms in the ways that other companies do (which is central in her critique of and indignation towards surveillance capitalism), but we should remember that this does not exonerate Apple’s monopolistic and exploitative practices, which are arguably much more harmful and serious than being eye-bombarded with unwanted ads.

[4] Of course, assuming that predetermination is technologically possible is entirely counterfactual, but “Big Tech has been so good at marketing its own supposed superpowers” that many (including critics) are led to overestimate their capacities if they take their marketing literature and patent filings at face value (cf. Doctorow).

[5] In an allegorically obvious manner, Amaya clearly stands as a (potentially) critical analogue of real surveillance capitalist corporations (the so-called FAANG oligopoly), since it illustrates how tolerance towards monopolistic practices and government-industry revolving doors generate hypertrophied companies like Amaya that feel entitled to act beyond justice.

[6] It is important to clarify that, in proposing the notion of “beautified dystopias,” my intention is neither to reject the ideologically ambiguous character of such dystopias nor to dismiss them as pure re-mystifications, but to theorise them dialectically. Even though “beautified dystopias can (unwittingly or not, in excess to authorial intention or not) present sociopolitical dystopian scenarios under a positive, consolatory light,” they also “seem capable of self-consciously thematizing Benjamin’s maxim that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’ (1969, 256)” (Sebastián-Martín 290). My assumption here is therefore that Devs should be not rejected for its ideological ambivalence, but rather valued for thematising such ambivalence in a non-Manichean manner.

[7] Taking IMDB user reviews as a sample, one can find claims that “this is not science fiction” because it is “full of logical holes” (griper), that it is a “Failed attempt at deep sci fi” (pandrews2104), or that is an “Anemic quasi-philosophical let down that looked promising” (martin-tosterud).

[8] Cf. the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a general-interest definition of the theory.

[9] For these discussions of quantum physics (which are an addition to the paper originally read at the conference) I am indebted to Steven Shaviro’s thoughtful questions during the panel, who encouraged me to speculate upon the significance of Devs’s references to the many-world interpretation of quantum mechanics within the context of Devs’s (and other texts’) critiques of the capitalist drive towards totalisation and/or (in Marxist terms) real subsumption.

WORKS CITED

Benjamin, Walter. “Capitalism as Religion.” The Frankfurt School on Religion, edited by Eduardo Mendieta, Routledge, 2005, pp. 259–62.

Bukatman, Scott. “The Artificial Infinite: On Special Effects and the Sublime.” Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, edited by Annette Kuhn, Verso, 1999, pp. 249–75.

“Devs (TV Mini Series 2020) – Devs (TV Mini Series 2020) – User Reviews – IMDb.” Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/reviews?ref_=tt_urv.

Dinerstein, Joel. “Technology and Its Discontents.” American Quarterly, vol. 58, no. 3, 2006, pp. 569–95.

Doctorow, Cory. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Medium Editions, 2021. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59.

Löwy, Michael. “Capitalism as Religion: Walter Benjamin and Max Weber.” Historical Materialism, vol. 17, no. 1, 2009, pp. 60–73.

Lucas, Rob. “The Surveillance Business.” New Left Review, vol. 121, 2020, pp. 132–41.

“Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Published Mar 24, 2002; revised Jan 17, 2014. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/ 

Russ, Joanna. “SF and Technology as Mystification.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 1978, pp. 250–60.

Sebastián-Martín, Miguel. “The Beautification of Dystopias across Media: Aesthetic Ambivalence from We to Black Mirror.” Utopian Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, 2021, pp. 277-95.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.

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The Quiet Structures of Violence in Mennonite Science Fiction

Selena Middleton

Introduction to Mennonite Science Fiction

While Mennonite literature is well-established in Canadian literary studies—where it is known as a subgenre of wide prairie landscapes, diasporic narratives, and quiet challenges to oppressive politics—Mennonite speculative fiction is new. In a recent issue of The Center for Mennonite Writing Journal, editor Jeff Gundy outlines the sparsely populated history of Mennonite speculative writing, which is comprised of Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow (1955) and the works of A.E. van Vogt, “who hid his Mennonite roots carefully” (n.p.).  Increasingly, however, contemporary Mennonite writers are turning to speculative fiction to counter the cultural suppression of ideas and identities that conflict with the Mennonite status quo. As a Historic Peace Church known for nonresistance and conscientious objection, Mennonites can be seen as isolationists ill-suited to the imaginative expanses of science fiction. Andrew Swartley, however, counters this idea when he states that “Mennonites avoid conflict better than most, to the point of actively, viciously silencing ‘fringe’ voices in both public and private forums . . . [so] we need stories that defy our habits of silence and conflict avoidance. We need stories that start conversations” (n.p.). New voices are emerging now to challenge Mennonite silence. This is done not with malice, but with a deep love of Mennonite traditions. One such writer is Sofia Samatar, whose father is a Somali scholar and mother a Swiss-German Mennonite from whom Samatar takes her religious affiliation. Samatar’s generation ship story, “Fallow,” is the focus of this brief study as its treatment of silence and the violence of conflict avoidance is exemplary of some of the major movements of an emerging subgenre. These themes are increasingly important as we interrogate what it means to make a home—and fight for it—in the context of the deepening climate crisis.

Exodus, Survival, and Silence

Before delving into Sofia Samatar’s “Fallow” and the land relationships in that story, it is important to contextualize Mennonite silence, which stems from pacifist nonresistance. The Mennonite relationships to nonresistance and pacifism are a response to The Sermon on the Mount, in which the blessed are described as meek, persecuted, and as peacemakers (New Revised Standard Version, Matt. 5.1-10). Further, “the Anabaptist vision was the ethic of love and non-resistance . . . applied to all human relationships. The Brethren understood this to mean complete abandonment of all warfare, strife, and violence, and of the taking of human life” (Bender 21). Religious ideals, however, often come into conflict with social norms and individual human experience. The Mennonite cultural relationship to silence is linked to a history of religious persecution which included torture, martyrdom, and an exodus which forced the community across continents in search of religious freedom. Mennonite poet and scholar Di Brandt links the Mennonite separatist impulse to this traumatic persecution and how that persecution has been preserved in the culture. She says: “The founding events of Mennonite culture were told and retold to us as children. They were also memorialized in . . . The Martyr’s Mirror, which came complete with graphic illustrations and inspiring death scene testimonials by the condemned” (“je jelieda” 108). The hymns still sung by Mennonites also feature stories of martyrdom, enforcing a sense that the community is “surrounded by a host of great martyrs and of living in an atmosphere of witnessing” (Stauffer, qtd. in Redekop 17). Magdalene Redekop connects the prevailing presence of the martyr experience to contemporary Mennonite silence, stating that “torture was frequently directed at the mouth” (17), the site of religious speech which the Mennonites refused to give up. In refusing to be silent about their religious beliefs and in becoming refugees for these convictions, a paradoxical tension came into Mennonite culture that resulted in a kind of silence that is markedly different from that demanded by a religious adherence to tenets of humility and peace. In 1985 Dyck wrote that “the motif of suffering has become a major ingredient in Mennonite identity” (qtd. in Redekop) and Redekop qualifies this when she says that the “‘tension between martyrdom and survival’ may be at least as important in Mennonite writing as the theology of martyrdom itself” (Redekop 13). Perhaps a parallel can be drawn between the way Western societies venerate the sacrifices of soldiers, a veneration used in military recruiting material, and the spiritual honours bestowed upon Mennonite martyrs. Early Mennonites died in tongue screws and Brandt explains that the venerated suffering passed to future generations manifests as a quiet but persistent violence turned inward (So this 3). Given the closeness many Mennonite communities feel to the land through both their agricultural practice and their isolationism, it should not be a surprise that the land sometimes becomes the recipient of internalized violence.

Silence and the Land

Scholar of diaspora, Robin Cohen, writes that diasporic communities are marked by their “break event” (qtd. in Zacharias 187) and so the persecution of Mennonites is imprinted on their culture. Mennonite nonresistance becomes intertwined with horrors that Redekop argues were “experienced . . . as unspeakable” (18). But given that the original persecution also includes removal from original homelands, and many Mennonites experienced further exodus in the face of continuing persecution, the “break event” that is inscribed on the community also necessarily influences an attitude to the land. Brandt states that Mennonites demonstrate no desire to return to their homeland even though “the ancestral lands . . . are still so much part of [Mennonite] cultural imagination” (“je jelieda” 125). Despite the continuance of a community that remains connected to the land through agriculture, that land is theologically less relationship than resource.  Writing about growing up in rural Manitoba, Brandt stresses that “not once did [she] hear a single [preacher] talk about the land, except to pronounce gleefully that we ‘shall have dominion over it’” (So this 7). Brandt’s work contends with the pacifist ideal’s conflict with the reality of Mennonite farms as part of the Canadian colonial project (2). Even Mennonite nonresistance during wartime is marked with colonial violence: Mennonites cut timber in conscientious objector camps, both harvesting resources and opening up Indigenous land to further exploitation. Thus nonresistance on this land is a quiet complicity in the violence of colonization. This same quiet complicity in acts of violence shapes Sofia Samatar’s colonization narrative in “Fallow.”

Sofia Samatar’s Exo-planetary Diaspora

“Fallow” uses science fictional tropes to examine Mennonite exile, and to interrogate settler culture and the ways that homesteads can remain separate from a sense of community or belonging. When Mennonites are given their own world in a text, the characters’ internal attitudes rather than external corruption guarantee continued violence and, as Daniel Shank Cruz puts it, through this story, Samatar “makes the argument that [Mennonites] should interact with the world to make it a better place instead of shunning it” (221). The novella addresses this moment of cultural recovery and what a struggle for reconnection, however painful, could look like in individual characters—and, perhaps, how individual accounts when recorded and submitted to the community archive, could signal communal change.Samatar’s “Fallow” is divided into three parts, each focusing on a character that defies the strict structures of the community and bears the consequences. Each section includes a short epigraph, which I use to frame a discussion of the story’s quiet violences and how they relate to the lands of Fallow and the Earth these characters left behind.

Miss Snowfall and the Peaceable Kingdom

The story opens with Miss Snowfall the schoolteacher and her epigraph, which marks Fallow and perhaps specifically Miss Snowfall’s classroom and external life as an example of “the peaceable kingdom” (Samatar 206). The children of Fallow love their schoolteacher, who teaches through experience and narrative and shapes her lessons to her students’ curiosity and passion. Agar, the story’s narrator, calls her method “idiosyncratic” and “associative” (211) but points out in light of Miss Snowfall’s suicide that she taught “the proper curriculum” (212). It is Miss Snowfall who teaches the children about themselves and about the Ark generation ship on which their ancestors travelled to Fallow. The story of leaving Earth teaches the children about conflicts among their people too—conflicts so embedded that they resurface on Fallow, even though the people had to put aside their differences to gain a spot on the ship. Miss Snowfall teaches that there were sects within their religion that “practiced seclusion” (213). Of these sects, those who boarded the Ark decided to “accept a life dependent on advanced technology, rather than a life of war or a stillness amounting to suicide” (213). Out of those who stayed behind on a beleaguered Earth “on burnt farms, [and] among the cattle who were dying in the dust” some “shook out their sheets and curtains for the last time and went to bed, resolved not to rise until Judgment Day” (213). Perhaps Miss Snowfall recognizes herself in the histories she shares. Her experience parallels the isolated struggles of the Mennonite community on Earth and the way she labours at both teaching and keeping a peace which is referred to as “yieldedness” (226). Miss Snowfall’s story begins with the announcement that “here is the peaceable kingdom” (206), and so over the course of this first section, the reader learns that a peaceable kingdom on Fallow is one where creativity is quashed, where curiosity yields to rigid structure, where peace dies quietly at the end of a rope. If members of this community are given names based on their attributes or function in society, the reader questions whether Miss Snowfall is named after the purity of the landscape after a winter storm, or for the way the community covers that which is unwanted with a cold blanket that smothers undesirable elements.

Brother Lookout and the Earthmen

The second section, titled for Brother Lookout, underscores the paradox of the narrator Agar’s past and present positions in her community, first as a powerless child discovering truths about her people, and then as a writer who documents those truths and seeks to archive them for posterity. Agar’s paradox is underscored, too, by Brother Lookout’s name and epigraph. Brother Lookout is named for the thick glasses he wears, an irony that highlights an unfulfilled potential, the juxtaposition of desired insight with culturally enforced myopia. Brother Lookout is the community’s only psychiatrist, but later, when psychiatry is banned, he is the man Agar knows as “the shambling village street sweeper” (230), demonstrating a focal shift, perhaps, from the psyche of the community to how that community relates to the land as he takes up a humble form of service to put that relationship to rights. Most importantly, Brother Lookout is the character who reveals Fallow as a concept—that this exo-terran space is not a true home, but a holding place where the community waits out the death of humankind back on Earth, to return once “peace” has been restored. The cause of the anguish with which Brother Lookout entreats Brother Pin to relate the revelation of Fallow’s origin is apparent in Pin’s use of both Biblical allusion and natural imagery:

Like the priest and the Levite, we have passed by the dying man in the road. Unlike true Christians, we have given no thought to our neighbors. We have not considered those who have perished since we departed Earth long ago, their souls crying out for peace. How many have been born since our departure who, had they only been alive at that time, would have joined the trek? Are they to be punished simply for being born too late? How can we receive Gabriel’s reports so complacently? Every quarter century produces a catalogue of horrors, yet we sit here . . . like the carrion birds, the eagle and the ossifrage, waiting for others to die so that we might inherit the Earth. (236)

At Brother Lookout’s urging, Brother Pin reveals that travellers from Earth have periodically arrived at Fallow and been kept separate from the community while they are schooled in religion. These refugees are shunned if they refuse to accept community beliefs. On Fallow, exile outside of the careful technological management of the planet’s atmosphere means death. Thus the community quietly accepts death on two fronts, allowing the land to maintain their borders without admitting that they are a part of those systems. Samatar’s careful use of both Biblical and animal references in this section underscores the two fronts on which the inhabitants of Fallow have strayed from relationship and suggests an intimate connection between human and non-human relationship which have not been maintained away from Earth.

Temar’s World Is Not a Home

The conditions that force the narrator’s sister Temar to escape from Fallow are revealed as Agar comes to terms with the planet as a place that facilitates the greatest Mennonite experiment in separatist violence. The epigraph for Temar’s section—“This world is not my home”—underscores a relation which makes a parallel of Fallow and Earth and Earth and Heaven; the former places both temporary residences for the religious adherent whose faith attests that believers will eventually gain a true home elsewhere. But Temar knows Fallow in a way that other members of her family do not. Through her work at the castle—the mysterious hub which houses the technology which makes Fallow habitable, the machinery that the low-tech agrarian residents ignore—the mythologies that sustain others are revealed to Temar as hollow or even hypocritical. Following the “Rule of Mary” (249) so as to not reveal the mystery by which they live, the community maintains the guise of a simple lifestyle that Temar knows does not reflect the truth of life on Fallow. 

It’s unclear what happens to Temar after she rescues the Earthman from the castle and leaves Fallow with him. Temar’s family grieve her transgression and hold a funeral for her, an action which could be interpreted as an act of shunning the severity of which matches the gravity of Temar’s behaviour, interpreted by the community as anti-social. Holding a funeral for a family member who may not be dead indicates that the community remains locked into social structures that do not respond to the human lives that exist within those structures. But Temar’s flight is also a kind of resurrection which works to dispel the quiet but violent illusion of Fallow, leaving Agar with the knowledge that she lives in perpetual exile ensured by the harmful silences of her community. As Agar says at the end of the story, “There is a land flowing with milk and honey . . . and we will never go there” (261). This final statement reconnects the Biblical paradise with Earth and in so doing removes Fallow from the spiritual relationship the Mennonites assumed would follow them to another planet. But the questions of Temar’s survival and continued resistance, and Agar’s efforts to document the horrors of Fallow and therefore force her people to reckon with them remain unanswered points of generative possibility.

Conclusion

Why is an examination of Mennonite culture and the speculative fiction that critiques that culture important to non-Mennonites? Those of us who value peace and resistance as political positions and are concerned about settler attitudes to the land in a time of immense ecological change can look to the ways both pacifism and resistance become internalized and institutionalized. But Mennonite speculative fiction also offers a way forward from that somewhat static position through works like Samatar’s “Fallow,” works which use speculative forms to interrogate the connections between social structures and the human beings that live within them and in the space find a way toward resistance, resiliency, and growth.

WORKS CITED

Bender, Harold S. “The Anabaptist Vision.” Church History, vol. 13, no. 1, 1944, pp. 3–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3161001.

The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, National Council of the Churches of Christ, 1989.

Brackett, Leigh. The Long Tomorrow. Ace, 1962.

Brandt, Di. “je jelieda, je vechieda: Canadian Mennonite Alteridentification.” Canada in the Sign of Migration and Trans-Culturalism, edited by Klaus-Dieter Ertler and Martin Lösching, Lang, 2004, pp. 153–82.

—. So this is the world & here I am in it. NeWest Press, 2007.

Gundy, Jeff. “Introduction: SF Special Issue.” CMW Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019. https://mennonitewriting.org/journal/11/1/introduction-sf-special-issue/.

Redekop, Magdalene. “Escape from the Bloody Theatre: The Making of Mennonite Stories.” Journal of Mennonite Studies, vol. 11, 1993, pp. 9–22.

Samatar, Sofia. “Fallow.” Tender, Small Beer Press, 2017, pp. 206–61.

—. Tender. Small Beer Press, 2017.

Shank Cruz, Daniel. “Mennonite Speculative Fiction as Political Theology.” Political Theology, vol. 22, no. 3, 2021, pp. 211–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2021.1905332.

Swartley, André. “A Case for Mennonite Horror.” CMW Journal, vol. 11, no. 1, 2019. https://mennonitewriting.org/journal/11/1/case-mennonite-horror/.Zacharias, Robert. “‘What else have we to remember?’: Mennonite Canadian Literature and the Strains of Diaspora.” Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transcultural Perspective, edited by Eugenia Sojka and Tomasz Sikora, Wydawnictwo Adam Marszałek, 2010, pp. 186–209.

Selena Middleton earned her PhD in English from McMaster University, where she works as a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Humanities. Her doctoral project, entitled “Green Cosmic Dreams: Utopia and Ecological Exile in Women’s Exoplanetary Science Fiction” examined the development of the concept of exile in ecologically focused women’s science fiction from 1960. Her research has appeared in Foundation, Quaker Theology, and in collections published by McFarland and Palgrave. She is also publisher and editor-in-chief at Stelliform Press, which she started in 2020 as an extension of her doctoral research, seeking to publish climate fiction focused on culture over technology. Stelliform Press has since published four critically acclaimed titles, two of which were nominated for awards, with five more titles planned. Under the name Eileen Gunnell Lee, Middleton has published short science fiction, fantasy, and horror stories in Nightmare Magazine, Reckoning, and Escape Pod, among others. She welcomes inquiries for collaborations both academic and creative in nature, and can be found on Twitter @eileenglee.

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Human and Animal Futurity: Survival, Flourishing, and Care in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and Bong Joon-ho’s Okja

Monica Sousa

Introduction

When humans generally think about the future, their thoughts are often primarily concerned with what the future will be for themselves. Animals are easily excluded from their thoughts regarding the future. As Claire Colebrook asks in Death of the PostHuman, “How is it that humanity defines itself as that being that inevitably chooses life, and yet has done so by saving only its own life?” (204). Colebrook asks this in her discussion of human extinction, yet the question also suggests a focus on a wider range of human destruction towards nonhumans. While humans literally kill animals for their own preservation (for food, medicine, research, clothing, etc.), the act of excluding nonhumans from thoughts of ensuring the future acts as a metaphorical killing. These recurring literal and metaphorical killings acted out by humans in the present implies a future of inequality, where humans remain at the top of the hierarchy of moral and ethical concern. How can we, as humans, move beyond this oppressive mindset? One of the places we can begin to look to reevaluate the enforced inequality between beings of different species is the genre of science fiction. Many works of science fiction stand as influential tools teaching or reminding us that to move beyond a future of inequality, we must first recognize the ways we too often treat animal life as below ours, and then begin to practice care responses. 

Yet, we should not simply think that an animal’s permission for survival and keeping them alive is equal to them having a sufficient quality of life. Animals, including genetically engineered animals that were originally created for human consumption, should also be empowered to flourish. In demonstrating this argument, this paper examines the representation of genetically engineered pigs and their relationships with humans in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy—Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood (2007), and MaddAddam (2013)—and Bong Joon-ho’s film Okja (2017). Atwood’s post-apocalyptic trilogy contains many genetically engineered creatures, including the humanoid Crakers, as well as many nonhuman animals. For this paper, I choose to focus on the pigoons, the transgenic pig hosts carrying fool-proof human organs for future transplants. In Joon-ho’s film, the “super pigs” are excessively large pigs genetically engineered for future meat consumption. Okja follows a young girl named Mija and her relationship with Okja, her “super pig” companion animal. When Okja is crowned as the best pig, she is taken away from her home in South Korea and brought to New York for the public revealing ceremony, and then to be slaughtered afterwards. Mija embarks on a journey to save her super pig. In contemporary Western culture, pigs are, indeed, commonly eaten and are often considered the best candidate for xenotransplantation. Both Atwood’s and Joon-ho’s works are culturally relevant to contemporary Western society and human attitudes towards pigs. Yet, these works also demonstrate the ways we can see genetically engineered animals less as products, and more as subjects who are worthy recipients of care. 

Through an animal ethics of care lens, this paper explores the imagined possibilities in these works on how we can relate to genetically engineered animals that were originally created for sustaining and extending human life. How would care practices consider not only the animal’s survival, but also their ability to flourish? Martha Nussbaum states that the ethical treatment of human and animal subjects revolves around how our actions enable or impede their flourishing: “to shape the human-animal relationship . . . no sentient animal should be cut off from the chance of a flourishing life, a life with the type of dignity relevant to that species” (351). In proving my argument, this paper will first analyze the decision in creating these engineered pigs and the lack of care towards them, and then consider the cooperative, trusting, and/or fulfilling relationships between the humans (or posthumans) and the pigs.

Ethics of care believes that moral actions focus on the relationships we have with others, and emphasizes actions such as care, attention, and benevolence as virtues, as well as the importance of emotional compassionate responses such as empathy and sympathy. Ethics of care asks for flexibility and careful attention to individual situations, rather than emphasizing absolutes or a set of rules. Joan Tronto defines care as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life sustaining web” (142). Some scholars in animal ethics approach animal welfare by connecting ethics of care with animal ethics to form an animal ethics of care. Their goal is to focus on the personal relationships that humans have with animals. As Daniel Engster states, care ethics opposes animal suffering “not because we wish to maximize utility or consistently apply our rights theory across species, but because we have relations with animals and care about them” (521).

A Lack of Care

In Atwood’s trilogy and Joon-ho’s film, the oppressive systems that created the genetically engineered pigs are clearly lacking in care responses. In their works, genetic engineering technologies are practiced in a society that lacks appropriate care ethics. In Oryx and Crake, the first installment of Atwood’s trilogy, we learn about the pigoons, who are genetically engineered to serve as hosts growing human-tissue organs for future transplant. They are spliced with a “rapid maturity gene” so they could “grow five or sex kidneys at a time.” Atwood writes, “[s]uch a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys; then, rather than being destroyed, it could keep on living and grow more organs” (27–28). In Okja, the Mirando Corporation genetically engineers twenty-six “super pigs” to be sent to farmers around the world, and then crowns the best pig ten years later. Lucy, the CEO, explains their goal for the super pigs: they will be “designed to leave a minimal footprint on the environment, consuming less feed and forage, producing less excretions. But most importantly . . . They’ll need to taste fucking good” (00:05:03). As the audience later learns, it is this last point that is truly the most, if not the only, important aspect in the eyes of the corporation. After this point in the film, members of the Mirando Corporation show no signs that they are truly concerned with their environmental footprint. Rather, the super pigs (as well as the pigoons in Atwood’s trilogy) are defined solely as bodies and reduced to what Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer calls “bare life,” a social system that actively separates political citizens and individuals from beings that are regarded as mere bodies, and thus, killable. While Agamben’s “bare life” does not explicitly include animals, human beings that are stripped of citizenship (prisoners or people in refugee camps, for example) are treated as if they are reduced to the status of animal. Laura Hudson explains that “[a]s the representation and embodiment of nature, the animal becomes the marker of bare life” (1664). Indeed, the genetically engineered animal is especially a marker for this category. While companion animals can be seen with sentimentality and as more than mere bodies, too often the genetically engineered animal is defined by its body and what its body can do. 

Also, the genetically engineered pigs in the MaddAddam trilogy and Okja are developed under the assumption that people’s concerns and motivations are purely self-serving and individualist, rather than caring and relational. The creators of the pigoons and  super pigs do not assume that people could form bonds with these creations. While I would not argue that a strong, intimate bond is portrayed between a human and a pigoon in the MaddAddam trilogy, Okja and Mija in Joon-ho’s film certainly convey a strong, intimate bond. Regardless, the Mirando Corporation does not care about intimate bonds between humans and super pigs. Rather, they care about how they can portray it to the media. The Mirando Corporation takes advantage of their bond by paying for Mija to come to New York City and be reunited with Okja in a public event because they want to minimize public relations damage to the company.

To Be Granted Survival

While the lack of care is certainly evident in Atwood’s and Joon-ho’s works, the potential for care ethics is also embedded throughout. Before we examine this potential for care ethics, let us first consider how and why, by the end of Atwood’s and Joon-ho’s works, the pigoons and Okja—and another super pig—are granted survival. The pigoons and the two super pigs become survivors of the capitalistic systems that created them for human consumption, either in the form of sustaining or extending human life. In MaddAddam, when a violent group of humans called the Painballers are after the human survivors and start regularly eating pigoon piglets, the pigoons want revenge and turn to the humans and the Crakers for help (269). In asking for help, the pigoons are aware that they require care from the humans in order to ensure their survival from the excess and the hyper-consumption which the Painballers symbolize. In exchange, the pigoons will agree to a truce, stop eating the humans’ crops, and strive to co-exist harmoniously. 

Near the end of Joon-ho’s film, an economic exchange ensures Okja’s survival. Mija, however, refuses to see Okja in terms of economic value until the moment she is forced to do so by an uncaring system so she can save Okja’s life. When Okja is about to be slaughtered, Mija offers a pig figurine made from solid gold to Nancy, the new CEO of the corporation. Mija states, “I want to buy Okja. Alive” (01:45:13). It is this act that saves Okja from the slaughterhouse. Nancy remarks that the figurine is “worth a lot of money” (01:46:04), then congratulates Mija on her purchase. While typically it would not be viewed as caring to treat Okja in terms of economic exchange, the conditions in which Mija is operating forces her to be flexible and to consider the fact that in order to care about and care for Okja, she must start thinking in terms of economic exchange. 

Yet, while Okja’s survival is approved, almost all the other super pigs at the slaughterhouse do not receive this privilege. Near the film’s end, when Mija leaves with Okja after the economic exchange, hundreds of super pigs watch them through a feedlot fence. Two of these super pigs then engineer the escape of a piglet (presumably their baby), pushing the piglet through the fence. As Mija and Okja leave the feedlot (while Okja hides the piglet), they—and the audience—hear the cries of the hundreds of the super-pigs left behind. Sherryl Vint states that “[i]f we are to learn to see animals as others who can make ethical appeals upon us . . . humans have to accept that much of what animals may want to communicate to humanity is not what we might want to hear” (86). What we hear echoed back to us with the sound of their cries is human guilt—for our mistreatment of animals, and for the fact that we may not be doing enough to save them. Yet, we must also not forget that Mija, a young child, is certainly in no position where she can save and care for all the super pigs. It is also important to acknowledge that her decision to save the one piglet demonstrates caring about and reveals her compassion towards the rest of the super pigs.

Caring-for, Caring-about, and Flourishing

What we also see here in these examples of how the pigoons, Okja, and the piglet are able to survive is a difference between caring-for and caring-about. As Nel Noddings explains, “Caring-for describes an encounter or set of encounters characterized by direct attention and response. It requires the establishment of a caring relation, person-to-person contact of some sort. Caring-about expresses some concern but does not guarantee a response to one who needs care” (xiv). Noddings acknowledges that it is impossible for us to provide care for everyone in the world; even if we care about animals, we are limited by time, resources, and space. Mija is only in the position to care for two of the super pigs. Nonetheless, Mija has gained awareness of the mistreatment of animals through her exposure to the cruel system that created and abused Okja. Caring-about, then, also aligns with Josephine Donovan’s assertion that animal care ethics requires attention: “Attention to the individual suffering animal but also . . . attention to the political and economic systems that cause the suffering” (3). In contrast, while the humans do provide care for the pigoons by helping them and honoring their truce, it remains ambiguous at the end of MaddAddam whether the humans are doing this because they care about the pigoons, or if they mostly care about peaceful co-existence. 

In comparison to the ending of MaddAddam, a scene in Oryx and Crake shows Jimmy caring-about the pigoons, but he cannot, at the time, care for them. As a child, Jimmy feels distress when the men at his father’s work make jokes about the pigoons being in the meals: “he [Jimmy] didn’t want to eat a pigoon, because he thought of the pigoons as creatures much like himself. Neither he nor they had a lot of say in what was going on” (24). Jimmy cares about the suffering of the pigoons, sees them as “creatures much like himself,” and can recognize their inability to speak against their own oppression. While the use of the pigoon for medical reasons is accepted by the general public, there are many objections to eating the pigoons. Their objection is not because of any compassion towards the creatures, but because human DNA exists in them. While the public are only opposed to eating pigoons because they are concerned with the disgrace of the human (through the consumption of pigoons), Jimmy cares about the pigoons’ wellbeing. 

While it would be ideal for caring-for and caring-about to always work in conjunction, it is caring-for that allows the genetically engineered pigs the widest opportunity for flourishing. In MaddAddam, years after the battle with the Painballers, the humans and pigoons are still respecting their truce. The final pages of the novel show us that the pigoons are living happily in forests, untroubled by the human survivors. They are able to live this untroubled life because the humans, after helping them with the Painballers, allow them the space to live their lives undisturbed and as they wish. Yet, this form of caring would not have been possible without the Crakers first caring-about the pigoons. It is the Crakers who inform the humans that the pigoons need help, through their form of telepathy. It is the fact that the Crakers, this group of humanoid posthumans created by Crake, initially care about the pigoons and then express this caring to the humans which allows the humans to then care for the pigoons. Lars Schmeink notes that it is through the Crakers where “Atwood . . . introduces compassion for the pigoons” (93). Compassion, which is a sympathetic concern for the suffering or misfortunes of others,  implicitly indicates a caring-about. Throughout the trilogy, the Crakers are characterized as benevolent and nurturing. The fact that they are the ones who can easily feel compassion towards the pigoons and show their caring-about them by voicing their concern to the humans suggests a vision for a future of posthumanity: what comes after human-centric mindsets. Caring-about other species, even ones that were originally created for human consumption agendas, is a frame of mind that can be cultivated and practiced. 

In The Year of the Flood, Toby (a protagonist in the novel and a member of an environmental religious group) often treats the pigoons as abject nuisances. She shoots one of them to protect the food supply in her garden, and when witnessing them having a funeral for the boar she calls it “truly frightening” (328). Yet, in MaddAddam, her mindset shifts, and she even accepts that the pigoons have a culture. As Nussbaum writes, “[p]art of respect for other species is a willingness to look and study, learning the internal rhythms of an animal community and the sense of value the way of life expresses” (372). Toby also shows the potential for care and multispecies cooperation. When Jimmy wonders if the pigoons are leading them astray to ambush and then eat them, Toby responds: “I’d say the odds are against it. They’ve already had the opportunity” (348). In the face of uncertainty, Toby chooses to believe in the intellect and potentially compassionate capacities of the pigoons. She recognizes the fact that the pigoons are able to think about themselves as well as the humans and the Crakers—and that humans should adopt that same empathetic practice.

In Joon-ho’s film, Okja is given the chance to have a flourishing life. When Johnny the zoologist, in awe of how well Okja was raised, asks Mija’s grandfather what his methods were, the grandfather responds: “I just let her run around” (24:54). Indeed, Okja is given lots of space outside to run, play, and carry out the life of a regular pig. While it is true that she needs to be raised well to eventually carry on her super-pig duty (to be slaughtered for meat), by the end of the film Okja and the other piglet are running around outside, this time without the oncoming threat of slaughter. Okja also flourishes by having a compassionate caregiver. While one does not necessarily have to truly care about someone in order to be in the position of caregiver, Mija does indeed care about in addition to caring for Okja. Even before Okja is taken away, Mija shows compassion in many ways, ranging from removing burrs from Okja’s paws, and treating her body for injuries when Okja hurts herself. These moments are shown early in the film, which allows the viewer to recognize early that care requires work as well. Near the beginning of the film, Mija also shows compassion by showing great distress when Okja falls off the cliff that she saves Mija from falling off. As the two of them embrace, the camera captures Okja’s eye, and the gaze exchanged between her and Mija. By showing Mija whispering in Okja’s ear and the close-up of Okja’s eye, we can recall Jacques Derrida and his cat in The Animal that Therefore I Am. When Derrida looks at his cat, and sees her looking back, he is not looking at Cat as a representative of the entire species or as a metaphor or an allegory, but at an individual cat (6). The first step in connecting with the Other is to recognize it is not simply a placeholder of a group or a symbol. By showing Mija whispering in Okja’s ear and the close-up of Okja’s eye, the audience sees how Mija is looking at an individual super pig—not just an animal bred for productive purposes. In these moments of touch, gaze, and senses meeting, we see interspecies communication. Donna Haraway explains that “touch ramifies and shapes accountability” and emphasizes the importance of “accountability, caring for, being affected, and entering into responsibility” (36). When species meet—as Haraway would put it—we see a moment of encounter that can arouse care and empathy.

On the Question of Autonomy

Donovan asks, “how does one generalize beyond the individual particular instance of caring or compassion to include all creatures within an ethic of care?” (184). One important critique of ethics of care is the idea that it is more well-suited for individual animals that have been domesticated and that people have personal, close encounter relationships with, and not as useful when talking about wild animals or other animals that people typically do not have intimate relationships with. Grace Clement shares this concern and argues that when considering wild animals, ethics of care should still be present, but it should also be willing to incorporate elements of what care ethicist Carol Gilligan refers to as justice-based ethics, which is a type of ethics that encourages moral choices based on a measurement of rights. Factors such as autonomy and respect are key ideas in justice-based ethics, and Clement argues that animal ethics also needs to also incorporate these factors. As she points out, “an ethic of care which does not value autonomy tends to result in forms of ‘caring’ which are oppressive to either the caregiver or the recipient of care” (309). In MaddAddam, the pigoons want to be able to live their lives in the wild unbothered, with respect, and separated from humans. In respecting their wishes, the humans care for them by allowing them their autonomy. In comparison, Okja spends a lot of time outside, but I claim that she is more domesticated than the pigoons. While domestic animals certainly rely on human support more in comparison to wild animals, there is a fine line between caring for a domesticated animal and limiting their autonomy. 

Ultimately, an animal ethics of care needs to also be attentive to this justice-based tenant of autonomy.  I would argue that ethics of care already hints at recognizing this through its assertion that a proper ethics of care, as Adams and Donovan explains, is attentive to the political systems that shape certain oppressions (3). As I previously mentioned, Mija is undoubtedly affected by her experience seeing Okja and the hundreds of other super pigs in the slaughter factory, even though she only comes home with two of them. While she is only in the position to allow the autonomy of those two super pigs, Mija is certainly aware that the hundreds of other super pigs are denied their autonomy. Mija’s discovery of where Okja came from and the larger group of which she is a part demonstrates how an ethics of care needs to recognize that the individual is never entirely separate from the collective of which they are a part—nor should they be.

Conclusion

While some may worry that animal ethics of care is anthropocentric in how it draws attention to the humans performing the care, animal ethics of care does try to jettison this implied anthropocentrism and instead foreground other significant elements that this ethics emphasizes, such as interconnectedness and responsibility. Furthermore, an element of ethics of care is reciprocity; this reciprocity does not imply that there needs to be an equal trade between both participants, but instead implies reciprocation in the sense that when the caregiver gives, the care recipient will have a response to that care. It is up to the caregiver to pay attention to the care recipient and how they respond to the care. By using what partial knowledge they possess to interpret their response, they should then re-evaluate, if need be, or learn more about how to provide that care for that individual. This willingness to learn, evolve, and transform can allow for posthumanism and care ethics to compliment each other. This reciprocity is suggested in Atwood’s and Joon-ho’s works. In MaddAddam, the pigoons can flourish by living a life undisturbed in the forests, with the humans and Crakers separated but close enough, respecting them and their wishes. In Joon-ho’s film, Okja and the piglet can flourish not only by living a life with the freedom to roam, but also through their compassionate relationship with Mija. The pigoons and the super pigs desire different types of care, which demonstrates their role as active participants in their care relations with humans.

In this paper, I examined Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Joon-ho’s Okja to argue for human care towards the flourishing of genetically engineered animals originally created for human use. These works of science fiction demonstrate how the genre is not only a useful vehicle for showing us different ways of being, but also for emphasizing a multi-species interconnection or kinship. Yet, why genetically engineered animals? Why specifically care about their flourishing? Genetically engineered animals are created/altered through biotechnology. Both animals and machines are traditionally seen as separate from humanist constructions regarding the human condition, and so connecting the two may lead to feelings of abject horror. Since genetically engineered animals are discoursed in this unfair way and have no say in what is done to their bodies, humans especially have a sense of responsibility and especially owe them possible opportunities for flourishing. 

As Nussbaum writes, “[t]he purpose of social cooperation, by analogy and extension, ought to be to live decently together in a world in which many species try to flourish” (351). To heighten our chances of moving beyond a future of inequality, we should foster mindsets and practices that encourage both caring-for and caring-about. What is ultimately at stake in not doing so is not only the lives of nonhumans, but a future notion of humanity that is caring, empathetic, cooperative, and considers the livelihoods of both humans nonhumans.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Carol and Josephine Donovan, editors. The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Atwood, Margaret. MaddAddam. Knopf Canada, 2014. 

—. Oryx and Crake. Knopf Doubleday Publishing, 2004. 

—. The Year of the Flood. Knopf Canada, 2010. 

Clement, Grace. “The Ethic of Care and the Problem of Wild Animals.” The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics. Columbia University Press, 2007.

Colebrook, Claire. Death of the PostHuman: Essays on Extinction. Open Humanities Press, 2015.

Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Luise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2008.

Engster, Daniel. “Care Ethics and Animal Welfare.” Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 37, no.4, 2006, pp. 521-536.

Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Hudson, Laura. “A Species of Thought: Bare Life and Animal Being.” Antipode, vol. 43, no. 5, 2011, pp. 1659-1678.

Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. University of California Press, 1986.

Nussbaum, Martha. Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Okja. Directed by Bong Joon-ho, Plan B Entertainment, 2017. Netflix. 

Schmeink, Lars. Biopunk Dystopias: Genetic Engineering, Society, and Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2016.

Tronto, Joan. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York University Press, 2013.Vint, Sheryll. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2012.

Monica Sousa received her BA and her MA from Brock University. She is currently a PhD candidate in the department of English at York University. Monica specializes in contemporary literature, and her research focuses on animal studies, posthumanism, and biotechnology in contemporary science fiction. Her dissertation explores human and nonhuman animal relations in contemporary science fiction, with a focus on biotechnologically engineered animals (including genetically modified animals or animals with cybernetic/robotic enhancements). She is interested in care responses and in the ethics regarding how we treat these animals and care for and about them after they have been created. In 2021, Monica contributed a chapter to Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals (2021), published by Springer Nature, and to Transhumanism and Posthumanism in Twenty-First Century Narrative (2021), published by Routledge (on Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Borne). In 2020, she contributed a chapter to Critical Insights: Life of Pi (2020), published by Salem Press. She has presented conference papers at many conferences, including WorldCon, the International Conference on Contemporary Narratives in English, the European Association for Critical Animal Studies, the Academic Conference on Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the Science Fiction Research Association. 

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Economics of Poverty Between the Posthuman and the Other in Ancillary Sword

Amanda Pavani Fernandes

Narratives about cyborgs, artificial intelligences, and genetically modified beings have contributed to criticism regarding previously closed definitions about humanity, about sentience, and especially about gender. Ann Leckie’s literature, notably her award-winning Imperial Radch trilogy, has been particularly relevant to all these areas of study. However, research about her writing has not considered as profoundly the intersection between posthumanism and economic structures of inequality. While there is much scholarship regarding the tension between corporeal and virtual experiences for posthuman characters on the one side, and solid arguments for Leckie’s colonial criticism and political debate, these perspectives have rarely intersected. In this paper, I propose a discussion focused precisely on the liminal figure of Breq, Leckie’s protagonist. 

Counterintuitively, Breq’s previous experiences as a being with reduced agency and subjectivity have led her to a position in which her actions foster communal empathy and even subvert economies of poverty. When I use the term “economies of poverty,” I refer to all systems whose function depends on fabricating and maintaining poverty—that is, capitalist and colonialist societies in fictional environments. For this analysis, I focus on Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, published in 2014, the second instalment in her Radch series. This study centres around Breq, former ancillary and current Fleet Captain, from two main perspectives in relation to her actions in the plot of the novel: as a multiple entity that must deal with a sudden and cruel individuality, and as an empire representative. I propose that her inner conflict resulting from the loss of her ship and multiple bodies unravels a sequence of events that results in the exposure of a slave trade in one of the empire’s systems, provoking a strike amongst the oppressed peoples and realignment between governance and colonial values. To accompany my thesis, I consider David Le Breton’s remarks about corporeality in cyberpunk and cyberspace in L’Adieu au corps [1] for my first section on Breq’s conflict as a newly found individual, Kathi Weeks’s feminist and Marxist analysis in The Problem with Work on the association between value and work, as it creates positions of hierarchy, and Dillon and Dillon’s links between sovereignty and governance in Leckie’s first novel. I propose that Breq escapes common artificial intelligence tropes, and that her unique set of experiences—as a Ship, as an ancillary, as a Fleet Captain for the Radch—puts her in a position to challenge the supposed unity of the sovereign, as she aligns herself, through governance power, with the oppressed ethnicities in the Athoek system.

In the first part of this paper, I look specifically at Breq’s subjective trajectory. In Ancillary Sword, the character makes it explicit that she was born a “normal” person—that is, a common human with an individual body—but that around the age of seventeen she was kidnapped, her mind emptied of the person she used to be, and later transformed into in ancillary. In Leckie’s universe, ancillaries are human-born enhanced series of servants, or, as Breq puts it, “part of the Ship. There was, often, a vague, paradoxical sense that each decade [each series of ancillaries] had its own almost-identity, but that existed alongside the knowledge that every ancillary was just one part of the larger thing, just hands and feet—and a voice—for Ship” (Sword 57). Ancillaries, then, are humans implanted with a technology that grants them inhuman strength but, more importantly, a near-immediate constant experiential connection with other ancillaries of their series, known as their “decade” in the novels, and with their ship. The first novel in that series, Ancillary Justice (2013), focuses on her previous experiences as the Ship Justice of Toren and subsequently as the isolated ancillary, One Esk. Although the first instinct would be to read Breq, through all her subjective perspectives, as a typical cyborg whose existence is largely virtual, clad with enhancements, or even with a longing for her lost human identity, the protagonist is actually marked by her several experiences of body, her “corporealities,” even.

In Le Breton’s L’Adieu au corps, the thinker approaches at large the issue of body and mind in classical cyberpunk, highlighting the trend of abandoning the body as obsolete in order to transcend towards more evolved or elevated experiences. In Sword, however, Leckie gives her readership a cyborg-like creature for whom bodies and their experience are central to existence. While Le Breton claims that, “connected to cyberspace, bodies dissolve. . . . The infosphere traveller no longer feels imprisoned in a physical body” (124, my translation); for Breq, her experience as Justice of Toren and One Esk consisted of navigating the empirical world through multiple bodies. She had always been able to tap into whichever ancillary was looking and experiencing without thinking about it: her subjectivity, thus, is rooted on bodies and on sharing their experiences. 

In Ancillary Sword, however, the reader watches her grapple with being an individual, even if a partially connected one. As Fleet Captain, she can monitor her crew through the Ship, but now she is not integral to the artificial intelligence behind it all; she becomes a commander and passes as human. Roosa Töyrylä, in her master’s dissertation, observes that Breq can now “perceive the world via other people’s senses, but she does not perceive it via their knowledge, emotions, or ideologies” (25). Therefore, while cyberspace stories tend to focus on the dissolution of bodies, Leckie’s ancillaries highlight the shared experience of having multiple bodies, instead, which brings a new perspective for cyborgs, automatons, and artificial intelligences. While the latter tend to be similarly omnipresent, they are rarely corporeal. In addition to that, Leckie’s narration includes the many ruptures and instances of trauma involved in going from being a human person to a Ship, to an ancillary, to an enhanced individual passing for human again. 

Breq explicitly mentions her trauma when confronting another recently emptied human. Upon revealing that her Lieutenant Tisarwat was in fact an empty vessel for Anaander Mianaai to spy on her, she tells her, “I was the same age when it happened to me” (Sword 55).  Moreover, Breq is an individual profoundly marked by isolation and by the experience of being reified into an ancillary, despite not remembering her original self. That is one of the factors that enables her to become an agent of economic and social change in the Athoek system as a Fleet Captain for the Radch Empire. Her experiences make her, ancillary or not, rooted in collective experiences, but these experiences would not resolve by themselves: the events in Sword make her question her trajectory. The novel opens with a conversation she has with one version of Anaander Mianaai. The emperor says, “I’ll miss you, you know . . . few have the . . . similarity of background you and I have,” hinting at the fact they are both multiple and yet separated from their former parts. However, Breq does not consider that an equal position. Her inner monologue comments, “Because I had once been a ship. An AI controlling an enormous troop carrier and thousands of ancillaries, human bodies, part of myself. At the time I had not thought of myself as a slave, but I had been a weapon of conquest, the possession of Annander Mianaai, herself occupying thousands of bodies spread throughout Radch space” (4). Her collective-oriented character results both from trauma and from reflection about her condition. 

Throughout the novel, as she navigates political forces and corruption around inequality, she is also grappling with a loneliness that is unique to her: she misses being connected, not merely virtually, but in terms of body. She does not miss sex, but the lack of bodily and mental connection affects her deeply. Seivarden, the only lieutenant who knows her true identity, speculates about the effects of her trauma, saying, “it must be like having parts of your body cut off. And never replaced” (46), but Breq refuses to elaborate on it. Later, when describing decade quarters, she comments on the enclosed space, restless for human officers, but somewhat comforting for ancillaries (27). Breq, then, is a cyborg that is in conflict with the bodily experience; Leckie’s protagonist is evidence that virtual and enhanced intelligences may be more than an escape from supposed limitations of the flesh, but to expand on how one perceives the world materially. Le Breton’s view, then, of the body as prison, is subverted: the body, in Leckie’s series, comforts and empowers. That materiality, added to her conscience about slavery, instrumentalises her to act towards change in Athoek.

That perspective provides a window into the second section of this argument: Breq the Fleet Captain. Sarah Dillon and Michael Dillon, in their chapter for AI Narratives (2020), look into the structures of sovereignty and governance in Leckie’s universe. In Ancillary Sword, Breq represents governance, or the “changing contingent and particular circumstances” (334), that is, as the administrative labour enforcing the rules dictated by the sovereign, the multiple-bodied Anaander Minaai. However, that sovereign is also multiple, incongruent, and at war with herself through (at least) three factions. While the sovereign, in its figure, must be a symbol of unity, its breakage provides an opening from which governance, that is, the instrumental staff in the Mercy of Kalr, does not take over, but manages based on partial empirical ideology. By partial empirical ideology, I mean that their management is based on the image of empire values they have and the experiences they have retained about Mianaai—which is, incidentally, at times as broken as the subject of the sovereign herself. As Dillon and Dillon emphasize, governance is inherently heterogeneous (335), in its negotiation between regulations and enforcement in practice. In Ancillary Sword, Breq does not hide that she is operating under the order of Anaander Mianaai nor that the sovereign has been fractured for more than a thousand years. Some characters question her authority under that knowledge, at which Breq only replies simply, “But I really do have orders” (Sword 122). That response is often successful to the extent that these other characters recognise her as a powerful subject, as well. It also functions by reminding them that no action there is autonomous, recalling the image of the sovereign (while thinly reshaping what the image of the sovereign may be) and its supposed unity.

Of course, Breq is not entirely disinterested in her choice of location to intervene. Athoek is the birthplace of former Lieutenant Awn, her superior when she was Justice of Toren. While seeking to compensate for Awn’s demise to her living sister by making her Breq’s heir, the Fleet Captain discovers an economics of poverty that had been feeding off citizen bodies like they were ancillaries. Other colonialist practices of fabricating poverty include, for example, indentured work and exorbitant systems of debt upon wages, added to a fetishization of luxury products such as hand-picked tea leaves. 

Athoek, the narrator establishes early on, is a planet whose economy revolves around the production of tea leaves. Several ethnicities seem to compose its population, each with its own economically assigned role and subsequent stereotypes. Athoeki are, according to the people in power, mainly the Xhai; the Samirend are described as a people who were colonised “successfully” and who achieved certain level of success; the Ychana and the Valskaayan, on the other hand, are described as uncivilised and “good for nothing.” The richest tea farmer describes them as lazy, echoing typical coloniser discourse on people who refuse to be assimilated: 

They have plenty of opportunity to become civilised. Why, look at the Samirend! . . . The Valskaayans have every opportunity, but do they take advantage of it? I don’t know if you saw their residence—a very nice guesthouse, fully as nice as the house I live in myself, but it’s practically a ruin. They can’t be bothered to keep their surroundings nice. But they go quite extravagantly into debt over a musical instrument, or a new handheld. (213, emphasis in original)

Fosif Denche, said tea farmer, criticises his [2] workers for using their wages (and more) to acquire consumer products, ignoring that he is the one providing and setting the prices for these products. Sisix, the Ychana character who accompanies Breq, reveals the true side of that subordinate relationship, saying,

There are generally some garden plots if they want to grow vegetables, but they have to buy seeds and tools and it’s time out from picking tea. They’re houseless, so they don’t have family to give them the things they need, they have to buy them. They can’t any of them get travel permits, so they can’t go very far to buy anything. They can’t order things because they don’t have any money at all, they’re too heavily in debt to get credit, so Fosif sells them things—handhelds, access to entertainments, better food, whatever—at whatever price she wants. (199)

As Kathi Weeks notes in The Problem with Work, “waged work remains today the centerpiece of late capitalist economic systems” (6); as such, Leckie’s tea farmer exploits the people picking tea by following the rules whilst bending them through a monopoly of entertainment, sustenance, and general survival. Such a practice of isolation and indentured work has many examples in the many years of class struggle—a notable one, for example, is the Massacre of Eldorado dos Carajás, in 1996, in the Brazilian state of Pará, when workers revolted by invading a farm. Later, they gathered over four thousand people to march to Belém protesting for land rights; on the way, they were brutally shot at by the state’s military police; nineteen people died, and many were injured. [3]

Weeks also observes the discursive practice of making work individual and private, not structural and collective. According to her, “this effort to make work at once public and political is, then, one way to counter the forces that would naturalize, privatize, individualize, ontologize and also, thereby, depoliticize it” (7). She also adds that the analysis of work relations of subordination and domination are at the root of wage contracts—a notable phenomenon in the economic and social system at Athoek.

Considering the system’s configurations, there are both Fleet Captain Breq and the longstanding economy of poverty in Athoek. Upon her arrival at the Station, she takes residence at Undergarden, an abandoned section of the old station, inhabited by many Ychana, among others. When there is an accusation of vandalism in that territory, she does not assume that Fosif’s daughter was innocent simply from her house name. Called an “uncomfortable company” by the governor (Sword 75), Breq mediates the conflict towards the resolution of the novel, revealing on top of the exploitation and alienation imposed upon the colonised peoples in Athoek an ancient structure of sexual abuse and slave traffic. Although Breq justifies her intervention through Radch ideology (“if there’s injustice here, it is only because the Lord of the Radch isn’t sufficiently present” [231]), she simultaneously and purposefully ignores that the Lord of the Radch has not been one for a long time and, therefore, that the ideology of assimilating peoples, providing them with citizenship, right of passage, and fair work, remains a part of the sovereign. 

Governance power, originally meant to reinforce political power, exposes an economy of poverty that leads the Valskaayan to exert for the first time their refusal of work. However, that chain of events is unlocked as a result of Breq processing her own corporeal trauma, becoming capable of identifying similar systems of inequality and oppression around her, and using her position of governance to enact change. As the novel is concluded, the Valskaayans strike and begin bargaining for labour rights. Breq’s unique position, which lets her visualise structural flaws (her broken identity and previous multiple bodies) pushes her to act upon them at the same time, enabling a reform in economic and societal norms.

NOTES

[1] In this paper, I refer to the Brazilian Portuguese version, translated by Marina Appenzeller (2003).

[2] Editor’s Note: We do not know the biological sex nor the gender of Denche nor of most of the other characters in the series.

[3] There are not many sources in English; one of them is Amnesty International’s website <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2016/04/the-eldorado-dos-carajas-massacre-20-years-of-impunity-and-violence-in-brazil/>. Other sources in Brazilian Portuguese include <https://mst.org.br/2021/04/16/25-anos-do-massacre-de-eldorado-dos-carajas-marca-a-luta-internacional-camponesa/> and <https://reporterbrasil.org.br/2021/04/massacre-de-eldorado-dos-carajas-25-feridos-nunca-foram-indenizados-diz-associacao/>. All pages were accessed on Aug. 18, 2021.

WORKS CITED

Dillon, Sarah; Dillon, Michael. “Artificial Intelligence and the Sovereign-Governance Game.” AI Narratives: A History of Imaginative Thinking about Intelligent Machines, edited by Stephen Cave, Kanta Dihal, and Sarah Dillon, Oxford UP, 2020, pp. 333–56.

Le Breton, David. Adeus ao corpo: Antropologia e Sociedade. Translated by Marina Appenzeller. Papirus, 2003.

Leckie, Ann. Ancillary Justice. Orbit, 2013.

—. Ancillary Sword. Orbit, 2014.

Töyrylä, Roosa. “I might as well be human. But I’m not:” Focalization and Narration in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch Trilogy. 2020. University of Helsinki, Master’s thesis. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke UP, 2011.

Amanda Pavani Fernandes has a doctorate in Literatures in English and a master’s degree from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. Currently she is a professor of English Language and Literature at the State University of Mato Grosso (UNEMAT). She is a co-founder of research group NEUFIC, based in Minas Gerais, focusing on science fiction and utopianisms. Her research interests include sf, artificial intelligences, the simulacrum, utopia and education, amongst other topics. Contact: mandiepavani@gmail.com.

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