The Transgenic Imagination

September 24, 2017 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 25, Number 1, September 2014

Megan Fernandes (bio)
Lafayette College

Abstract

This essay examines how transgenic paradigms of recombination and mutation have influenced contemporary lyrical poetry. These paradigms offer poetic strategies that highlight a growing uncertainty about the future of biodiversity and the curious anticipation of the evolutionary unknown. The central poetic question becomes one of survival. Can the transgenic survive? How has the transgenic become a symbol for the unnatural, the inorganic, the monstrous? Is a transgenic population, and therefore an unnatural population, a vision of the future? And if so, how will the human fit into such vision? For a discourse that has historically equated poetry with the human, this signals a new future that expands the parameters of poetry’s engagement with biopolitical formations on account of science’s continuing renegotiations with human bodies and human consciousness.

Transgenic Poetics

In this essay, I focus on what I call transgenic poetics, examining how molecular culture has shaped contemporary poetry. In the past ten years, theories from the molecular sciences developed by scholars such as Colin Milburn (“molecular erotics”[i]) and Nikolas Rose (“the molecularization of vitality”[ii]) have given us a foundation to investigate an emerging transgenic paradigm based on the evolutionary potential of mutation. The transgenic imagination has transformed the way we conceive of poetry’s engagement with subjectivity by borrowing a complex nonhuman agency from a scientific culture centered around customization and mutation.
 
I make two arguments here about transgenic poetics. The first is that the transgenic imagination has morphed away from disciplinary boundaries within medicine and agricultural policy and is reorienting our aesthetic categories in light of debates about artistic freedom, pleasure, and comfort. This shift in how we understand the transgenic underpins certain feminist and queer materialist critiques of the ways that new understandings of scientific matter transgress and exceed the biological body. It is not coincidental that scholars invested in marginal identity politics now consider the care, ethics, and ontologies of objects, matter, and animals as worthy of serious inquiry.[iii] The new wave of scientific materialist criticism has claimed an interest in exploring non-identitarian agency that nevertheless remains deeply rooted in a feminist and queer ethics of critical empathy and care.
 
Secondly, I explore how contemporary poetry by Matthea Harvey and Eleni Sikélianòs has co-opted recombinant discourses from transgenic culture by examining the phenomena of “crossing” and “surrogacy,” two ways of imagining genetic taboos that often render unpredictable results. Crossing and surrogacy become poetic tropes for thinking about the hybridity of different scientific forms of matter (as well as their origins and reproduction), and the central poetic question becomes one of survival. Can the transgenic survive? How has the transgenic become a symbol for the unnatural, the inorganic, the monstrous? Is a transgenic population, and therefore an unnatural population, a vision of the future? And if so, how will the human fit into such vision?
 
My argument addresses two examples of contemporary poetry collections of poetry, Harvey’s Modern Life (2007) and Sikélianòs’s Body Clock (2008), that are committed to the lyrical examination of transgenic culture. My goal is not to define the transgenic instrumentally as a pheno- or genotypically altered creature with mixed genomes, but rather to consider the ways that the making of new creatures and objects allows us to focus on epistemological rather than ontological poetic practices. The transgenic mediates the lyric and emancipates poetics from mere self-expression; instead, the paradigm of mutation pushes towards a more dynamic, ecological model of distributed agency. I will examine how lyrical practices of syntax, voice, and imagery produce such a model. For the discourse that has historically equated poetry with the human, this signals a new future that expands the parameters of poetry’s engagement with biopolitical formations on account of science’s continuing renegotiations with human bodies and human consciousness. The poetic texts investigated in this paper all engage in a kind of eco/techno-materialism. They are about crossed-matter: recombined creatures, unnaturally merging landscapes, metal flesh, robot wombs—a wild gathering of dissociative idioms. Therefore, the poetic fascination with the transgenic is a fascination not only with the molecule as an agent of mutation, but also with that curious (even pleasurable) anticipation of the evolutionary unknown.

Crossing: Becoming Creaturely

“At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes” – Matthea Harvey

Modern Life, Harvey’s collection of mostly prose poems, gives a remarkably thorough, atmospheric, and tender account of a post-9/11 world. The text is about the survival (in both a mundane and an apocalyptic sense) of a crossed population. Harvey describes translucent bodies in a dystopic society in which a Robo-Boy pines over metal flesh used for the construction of Ferris wheels, in which electricity has cheeks and shoulders, in which yolks slip out of umbrellas and gazelles raise young boys, in which everything is grown in grey, and in which the ruler, a generalissimo, darkly states while cutting his steak, “there’s an intimacy to invasion” (11). The terror-driven futurity of Harvey’s poems is uncannily darling, whipping helpless little creatures into depictions of botched surgery, puppies on meat hooks, and other cute, mutilated characters. More importantly, the entire speculative world of Harvey’s poetry is made possible by, as the generalissimo states, a certain kind of technological invasion; it can survive only by crossing. In her poem “How we learned to hold hands,” Harvey states,
 

We halved them because we could. It turned out anything with four  legs could wobble along on two, anything with two could hop along on one. Leopards, Horses, Kangaroos. Front, back, it didn’t matter. Mostly it was teenagers with their parents’ Christmas knives who did the cutting. (4)

The speaker, with sick and sculptural pleasure, describes here the physically mutated creatures’ ability to survive despite drastic alteration: “We halved them because we could.”
 
These lines express a militant, ritualistic fascination with creating hybrid creatures. On the one hand, they challenge species determinism by appropriating the future of genomic diversity under a specific population’s vigilante control, but they also highlight the familiarity (“intimacy”) of hybrid creatures in a single ecological landscape. Within such intimate space emerges a language of crossing. In the critical field of new materialism, scholars have dedicated attention to this eco-genetic language of recombination and what this means in the making of new bodies. For example, Donna Haraway, in her book When Species Meet, discusses speciesism as a heterogeneous concept according to which organisms more than just co-evolve in symbiotic relationships: they are actually mise-en-abyme entities, encountering genomic diversity even within their so-called self-contained bodies. As an example, Haraway uses the mixotricha paradoxa, a protist that lives in the hindquarters of Australian wombats and contains five genomes, four of which are from bacterial microbes. Haraway cites this as an example of “companion species nourished in the crevices, and intergigitations of gestation, ingestion, and digestion” (286). She goes on to argue that “sex, infection, and eating” are part of this intra-acting ecology, which is also opportunistic and social. Certain gender and queer theorists have also used a new materialist focus to consider the affective or bodily expressions of vital matter at the molecular, rather than the species, level. Mel Chen uses “animacy” in his work Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect to interrogate the transgressive spectrum of liveliness, that unstable dividing line separating the animate and inanimate. Chen uses anecdotal and cultural research on toxins to explore that space between vigor and weakness. Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality” is a site “where corporeal theories, environmental theories, and science studies meet and mingle in productive ways” (3). Alaimo uses trans-corporeality to explore the ways that complex phenomena become entangled in both material and discursive modes. Karen Barad’s work on “entanglement,” a term she lifts from quantum physics, conceives a state that presents the fully agentic, always “becoming” complexity of matter (Barad 247-352). Barad develops her concept of entanglement with those of agential realism and intra-action, concepts that focus on the ontological inseparability of matter and meaning.
 
For these theorists within the philosophy of the sciences, animacy, trans-corporeality, and entanglement offer ways to reimagine the gap between the language and the phenomena of scientific matter. Similarly, this focus on finding a material and spatial language of liminality is central to Harvey’s project of hybridity, which explores phenomena of crossing that I am going to call “becoming creaturely.” Becoming creaturely is part of the transgenic turn. The phrase hails from animal studies, but it is not just about animals; rather, it is about an uncertain vitalism that articulates new ontologies of genomic diversity. Becoming creaturely suggests a realm whose potentialities are open-ended, where certain figures are set in motion but not fully realized, and where the transgenic can be seen as the intellectual history of crossing.
 
What does it mean to cross? Among a variety of uses, the term is used in euphemize the transition to an afterlife (“he crossed to the other side”), as a way of performing and inverting gender hierarchies (“cross-dressing”), as a method of recombination during meiosis (“crossing alleles”), as a way to intimidate another (“don’t cross me”) and as a political platform to reaffirm nation statehood and (non)citizenship (“crossing the border”). In these examples, crossing requires a spectral fearlessness and audacity, but moreover, it invokes the unpredictable. Who knows what is one the other side of the border or the afterlife? What will actually happen if you cross the person who told you not to? What does cross-dressing teach us about our own desires and performance of gender? How will the gene express itself after recombination? Becoming creaturely speaks to that sense of leaping into uncertainty. The term itself reflects on a certain preciousness of the immanent turn in materialist theories around “becoming,” and while creaturely suggests a budding agency, but it is an ambiguous agency, a gesture at an undetermined figuration.
 
Harvey, who cites in an interview a lifelong fascination with hybrid creatures of all kinds, begins her book with a poem called “Implications of Modern Life.”[iv] In the poem, a defensive speaker claims to “deny all connection with the ham flowers,” a peculiar image described as having “veins” and whose “each petal [is] a little meat sunset” (3). The speaker states that she will “gather the seeds and burn them” and then turns her attention to a still (possibly dead) horse whom she tries, without success, to wake. In the prose poem written in the second person, “Museum of the Middle,” the speaker walks down the middle of the road when the road suddenly begins to sink: “Each white stripe gets successively softer, like strips of gum left out in the sun. You pass daffodils, coffins, and fossils until you are at the earth’s core” (29). The museum of the middle, unapologetically ironized, displays a tapestry charting “the rise and fall of the middle class,” a gallery of “middle management––almost all white men,” a special exhibit of “Hermes and Other Intermediaries,” and a dissected worm, mounted and framed with the tongue-in-cheek caption “They say a worm can live if you cut it in half but not if you extract its exact middle” (29). In the poem “The Empty Pet Factory,” the speaker tells us of her lover who works the night shift at an empty pet factory; his uniform has a sewn label of the Empty Pet logo––“an outline of an indeterminate mammal.” She states: “I’ve only been there once and I still have nightmares about the heartless hamster he had me hold in my hand, the rooms of inside-out Chihuahuas drying on racks” (27).  The factory has recently perfected a breed of “Unrequited Love Puppies.” The couple’s house is full of factory-rejected parrots (“couldn’t learn to keep quiet the things they’ve been told”). When the speaker is alone, she turns the light on and lets them “squawk the test secrets they’ve been fed in the laboratory, a glorious cacophony of I hate your mother, Your best friend made a pass at me, I never liked your nose…. You don’t understand me. You never have” (27).
 
These poems are just a few examples of how Harvey investigates not only the phenotypic descriptions of genetically crossed and manipulated creatures and objects, but also their uncanny behaviors and affects. The indeterminate mammal on the pet factory logo is a formless, in-between, and to-be-decided organism, the figure of potentiality that haunts the speaker. All kinds of new modes of agency are granted in this world. Matter bends and sinks, infrastructure becomes fluid and mobile, flowers grow mammalian veins and provide protein, and species are bred to be unheard and essentially lifeless. Later in another poem entitled “Strawberry on the Drawbridge,” Harvey describes the becoming of a strawberry and a drawbridge, likening it to “recombinant DNA” that takes on a new form as either “strawbridge” or “drawberry” (81). The creatureliness of Harvey’s poetry poses questions about the future of genomic diversity; can the creature cross, will it survive, can it be commodified, and, most importantly, what is it made of? What is the matter of these objects? Moreover, Harvey’s poetry invests becoming creaturely with a politics of queerness. By “queer” here, I mean to conjure what Chen has figured as “queer animality”: a violation of proper boundaries of interaction and a “commitment to queer, untraceable, animal futurities, morphing time and raciality” (122). Chen’s “queer animality” concerns a distributed mode of subjectivity whose relational intimacy between human, animal, and object is often “ambivalently cross-species” (114).  Queer animality is also situated in a materialist genealogy focused on the performative. Amidst the non-essentialist and non-identitarian postures of queer politics that often place “queer” as the peripheral activity in relation to a normative center, Chen’s queer animacy emphasizes the kinship between different hierarchies of nonhuman agency. Following Lee Edelman’s work on futurity and queer theory, I call these forms of kinship “queer” because they are often deemed teleological failures.[v] If the transgenic gestures towards an evolutionary unknown, then becoming creaturely is not a teleological becoming that trends towards something distinct. It is neither a move towards subjectivity, nor an in-between subject formation, but neither is it regressive. In fact, becoming creaturely demonstrates the imaginative void of an evolution that does not push towards anything, but only interacts, often at the expense of survival itself.
 
For Harvey, creatureliness and crossing are ways into thinking more critically about the boundaries of the human and nonhuman in the context of neoliberalism. Harvey’s ridicule of factories, management, products, brands, and logos exaggerates the power differences between the creatures in the world and those who manage or produce them.[vi] As the creatures escape normative signification, the poems undermine a consumer aesthetic based on the governance and manipulation of nonhuman bodies. Harvey’s collection, like Stein’s Tender Buttons, is a laboratory of in-between objects without their familiar contexts and referents. Consider, for example, the poem “New Friends”:

Plant me
just below
the potatoes.
I won’t complain
if their root patterns
don’t exactly
match my synapses—
chances are they’ll be
closer than lightning
or anything else
I’ve found
aboveground. (78)[vii]

In this poem, the speaker connects by “synapse” to the root patterns of a potato. The speaker, who desires a shared intelligence and feeling with the vegetable, expresses a lack of empathy with anything “found aboveground.” The speaker also uses the word “match” in a clinical sense, meaning that even if there is an incongruence in the data or mechanics of fusing synapses to roots, the fit is “closer than lightning.” The figure fretting between the cosmos and the subterranean world occurs often in Harvey’s poems, which rely just as much on planetary imagery (there is a poem in which a waitress has moons as regular customers) as they do on genomic language. The poems are, again, also cute, if not precious. They pose the question of how we domesticate other life forms, render them harmless, controllable, knowable. As Sianne Ngai has argued in her essay, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” “[T]he pleasure offered by cute things lies in part in their capacity to withstand rough handling” (829). The darling affect of Harvey’s poems is underwritten by dark and often violent impulses. Creatures are cut, sawed, or sutured carelessly. One title that exemplifies this tendency is “If scissors aren’t the answer, what’s a doll to do?” (6). The poems are overly attentive to body-making, growing, ingesting, and all the metabolic dynamics that go with becoming in a scientific (or even technohuman) sense. But the cuteness of Harvey’s images draws critical attention to the lack of power and stable meaning in this new world. A shared vulnerability of landscape and creature permeates this not-quite-dystopia that continuously evolves through the ritual of crossing.
 
What is this relationship among humans, animals, and cute creatures? Ngai’s cuteness is an aesthetic experience of simultaneous vulnerability and violence that has become a commercial expression of warped anthropomorphism. In fact, Ngai argues that a spectrum of anthropomorphism is central to cuteness, since small, helpless, nonhuman cute objects often provoke feelings of aggression in the human subject. In Harvey’s work, this aggression towards the cast of feeble puppies and dead horses demonstrates the threat of a crossed population in a post-9/11 context.[viii] Harvey’s work responds to anxiety about bioengineering in the terrorist age. Consider, for example, our contemporary fears and debates about bio-weaponization. Media coverage has focused on the transmission and evolving mutations of the avian flu, as well as on the eerie story of an art professor, John Kurtz, in Buffalo, NY, who was thought to have killed his wife by experimenting with hazardous biological materials for an art installation. This was later proven not to be the case, and the authorities were criticized as grossly “misdirecting post-Sept. 11 investigative zeal and in the process, trampling First Amendment rights to artistic expression” (Staba).  Kurtz belonged to a collaboration of artists called the “Critical Art Ensemble,” a group of tactical media practitioners whose mission is to bridge art practice and technology, critical theory and activism. The group’s parodic and controversial projects include “mock newspaper ads touting fictional biotech companies, and shows in which the audience has the chance to drink beer containing human DNA” (Staba). Similarly, a company in Syracuse, NY called “Transgenic Pets” was met with outrage over their plans to create an allergen-free cat. The feline protein responsible for causing allergies in humans, Fel d1, keeps feline skin moist. Scientists announced that they were able to replace this protein with a defective copy and then fuse it with egg cells through a gene deletion program often used with mice. The plans were protested in San Diego outside the biotechnology industry’s convention. Participants of the protest said they remained unconvinced about the ethical stakes of such bioengineering undertakings and the precedents they established with other life forms. Similarly, California banned the sales of genetically engineered zebra fish, branded GloFish, that glow in the dark. The commissioner of the Fish and Game Association, Sam Schumchat, commented that, “For me it’s a question of values, it’s not a question of science…. Welcome to the future. Here we are, playing around with the genetic bases of life. At the end of the day, I just don’t think it’s right to produce a new organism just to be a pet. To me, this seems like an abuse of the power we have over life, and I’m not prepared to go there today” (Thompson). It is telling that the commissioner specifically objects to bioengineering organisms for recreational pleasure or aesthetic value. The GloFish, advertised as a wondrous and exciting companion still has uncertain environmental consequences. Harvey’s creatures tread on this anxiety about an unstable future in the transgenic age where the virility of a post-9/11 nation is questioned by seemingly helpless, cute nonhuman creatures. What then is the relationship between politics and the nonhuman? If our understanding of sovereignty has so long relied upon the human subject, what can the exploration of nonhuman subjectivity offer to a new politics of representation?
 
In her work, Harvey imagines a creature engineered for recreational purposes, a character named Robo-Boy. The Robo-Boy poems present an image of a hybrid creature that fluctuates between a transgenic figure and a cyborg. The Robo-Boy is the product of different copyrighted programs that help him grow up, develop an emotional life, play music, maintain reflexes, and avoid magnets. In the series of seven poems about Robo-Boy, Harvey builds a short but impressive bildungsroman of this creature’s humiliation, relationship with parental figures, and understanding of his own metal body. In an interview Harvey explains, “Robo-Boy’s struggle is part of the whole book’s concern with being in the middle of things—cat/goat, poetry/prose…. I liked writing about him because of his different perspective on the human, especially those things we take for granted, such as fingerprints and experiencing the full palette of emotions” (Gailey). This is explored in one poem entitled “Wac-A-Mole RealismTM”:
 

At the carnival, Robo-Boy sees only things he recognizes. The Ferris Wheel is an overgrown version of his own bells and whistle eyes. His Flashers, his mother calls them. The Tilt-A-Whirl is the angle his head tilts when the Flirt Program goes into effect, usually in the vicinity of a Cindy or a Carrie, though once he found himself tilting at the school librarian which caused him to wheel in reverse into the Civil War section knocking over a cart of books that were waiting to be shelved under B. There’s a dangerously low stratosphere of pink cotton-candy clouds being carried around by the children. If Robo-Boy goes near them, the alarms will go off. It’s the kind of sticky that would cause joint-lock for sure. In a darker, safer corner Robo-Boy finds the Whack-A-Mole game. He pays a dollar and starts whacking the plastic moles on their heads each time they pop up from the much-dented log. He wins bear after bear. It’s only when he’s lugging them home, the largest one skidding face-down along the sidewalk getting dirt on its white nose and light blue belly, that he remembers the program: Wac-A-Mole RealismTM––the disc on the installer’s desk. Suddenly it all fits together: the way a deliciously strange thought will start wafting out of his unconscious––and then WHAM, it disappears. (39)[ix]

In this poem, Robo-Boy sees himself in the machine matter. He recognizes his face in the Ferris wheel and his gestures in the Tilt-A-Whirl. He comes to understand slowly what makes not just his body, but also his ticks and habits, and the environmental factors, such as the sticky stratosphere and the school librarian, that threaten his mobility and equilibrium. Robo-Boy’s epiphany at the end of this poem is similar to what happens in the other poems; he comes to understand his own techno-genetic determinism, yet strangely feels, even for a moment, beyond it. We come to know in later poems that Robo-Boy (like most robots) was adopted and fast-forwarded through his early years. His parents (notably human) were instructed by a “Special Children” manual to give him role models. Robo-Boy sleeps next to “silver-framed portraits of Mr. Peanut, the Michelin Man and Mrs. Buttersworth” (40), confused about their meaning, facial expressions, and how he has somehow become equated with these creatures of late capitalism. His mother keeps a can of “SkinSpray #439”3on her bedside table for his touchups when his silver paint gets scuffed. Robo-Boy remembers when “[o]nce she broke a bottle of foundation in her bag and when he looked inside it seem lined with her skin” (42). Robo-Boy’s constant speculative visions of his techno-materialist body appearing ubiquitously in other machinery is countered by the shock of discovering his own mother’s mortality and bodily decomposition in a purse.
 
At the DMV, Robo-Boy mourns his lack of fingerprints, and stares curiously at the dandruff on the DMV employee’s shoulders and at all the objects that surround her desk, covered in human fingerprints. Robo-Boy can summon the data of his childhood if he wants; an early painful memory comes to him of one parent whispering to the other, “Honey, should we know how to turn him off, just in case?” (43). One day, Robo-Boy’s magnet-protection program goes awry during band practice. All of a sudden, the brass instruments come flying towards him. Luckily he is equipped with Thinkfast and Reflex programs to protect himself, though they are not entirely successful. “At home, locked in his room, Robo-Boy is spitting out paperclips, covering his ears so he won’t hear the sound of the pots and pans rattling downstairs in the kitchen” (44). Robo-Boy’s own matter attacking him leaves him with a bitter sense of betrayal and confusion. The kinship between him and the brass instruments, the paper-clips, and the pots and pans leaves the reader with a dark sense of foreshadowing that Robo-Boy’s natural instinct is to condense into something that is not him at all, something that will evolve into another creature.
 
In the last poem marking Robo-Boy’s development, entitled “Moving Day,” he has just learned a word in English class: subjectivity. Subjectivity is defined to Robo-Boy as “proceeding from or taking place in a person’s mind rather than the outside world” (45). Robo-Boy can’t entirely understand until his friend tells him, “It’s like wearing tinted glasses on the inside” (45). Because he has only five emotions (happy, sad, angry, confused, and content), which sound like a car shifting from gear to gear when they change, Robo-Boy sets out to make his own tinted glasses from sheets.
 

For MELANCHOLY TINGED WITH SWEETNESS he soaks the sheet in gloopy gray paint, pastes on ripped photographs of factories and sprays the mess with Chanel No. 5. For TEARS TURNING TO LAUGHTER he sprinkles the top half of the sheet with glitter and paints a baseline of blue. Tomorrow he will go on a walk with the sheets stowed in his backpack. He’ll sit on a fence and look at the clouds, through exhilaration, hysteria, delight, despair. (45)[x]

Robo-Boy’s accrual of complex affects through artistic means allows him a broader sensory mode of experience. But his mode of understanding is to observe the composition of bodies and their habits (fingerprints, dandruff, flirting, tone of voice, etc.). In particular, when he sees his mother’s foundation makeup spill into her purse, he sees something that he is not quite sure is phenotypic. The relationship of the foundation to his mother’s body—its color, texture, and function—seems altogether disembodied for Robo-Boy, who enjoys the idea of his mother’s face poured out into another (notably nonhuman) vessel. The section ends with Robo-Boy speculating on the imagined sensations of a more complex emotional life that includes extremes such as hysteria and despair. Robo-Boy’s focus on composition at the end of his series is telling. He comes to understand that the consciousness that has been customized for him is not enough to fully engage with all the sensory, emotional, and philosophical dimensions of experience. Something additional must be designed or engineered to mimic what he has only begun to process as subjectivity.
 
The transgenic imagination is fascinated by this customization of new creatures, and in turn emphasizes not only the agency of, but also a new experimental epistemology of nonhuman entities. As science historian Hans-Jorg Rhenberger writes in An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth Century Histories of Life, modern research in the sciences has been focused on uncertain phenomena and concepts, thereby rendering epistemologies of the imprecise. Rhenberger argues that this imprecision is methodologically productive; it asks us to think about knowledge production in the sciences, and to understand how seemingly uncontested concepts such as “gene” or “muton” are just as much products of failed research as they are of celebrated milestones in science (Rheinberger 153-170). The transgenic is part of this history of the epistemologically imprecise; it has co-evolved with an experimental aesthetics that is equally interested in mutated bodies, customized genes, missing continents, laboratory failures, etc. Harvey’s work investigates the space of that imprecision as Modern Life portrays the ongoing failures of crossed bodies barely surviving their habits of twenty-first-century consumption.

Foreign Matter and Surrogacy

“what does a chromosome worry” – Eleni Sikélianòs

Thus far, I have discussed transgenic poetics in terms of its figuration of hybrid creatures and in terms of the biopolitical culture of terror and cuteness that it entails. But transgenic poetics also needs to be probed as a poetics that deterritorializes the lyrical mode and integrates science’s production of new narratives of origin and reproduction.  As the twentieth-century poet and physician Lewis Thomas states:
 

Language is simply alive, like an organism…. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. (102)

 
Reproduction in transgenic cultures speaks to the potentialities of a posthuman biodiversity, and calls into question how we imagine naturalness in relation to the female body. The important work on plurality and multiplicity associated with reproductive discourses from 1970s feminist language theory (Kristeva, Cixous) is still relevant here, as is the political legacy of language poetry from the same era that emphasizes the materiality over the meaning of language. The tenets of language writing from these scholars and artists insist that, unlike the cohesive male rational subject, capable of linear poetic address and organized formal lyric, language writing is decentered and fragmented as it consistently thwarts the relation between signifier and signified. Often this type of writing is called feminist writing because the female body is considered capable of a multiplicity through reproduction, multiple erogenous zones, etc. In this section, I investigate a contemporary poetics of reproduction influenced by a transgenic understanding of growth, nurture, and surrogacy. The site of the transgenic here concerns not only bodies within bodies, but also the taboo of foreign matter growing where it should not.
 
I want to begin with an anecdote from Haraway’s entertaining tale of her job talk at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haraway remembers a dinner in which a whole host of faculty and graduate students discussed the eating of placenta (mixed with onions) from a recent birth of a mutual colleague. Haraway reflects on the event as a moment in which the posthuman body became practice and not just theory. She notes how the participants began to “explore the obligations of emergent worlds where untidy species meet” (294) and the primal importance of ingesting and eating as a bio-social ritual. From stomach to stomach, the placenta becomes more than just an encounter with foreignness; it becomes an encounter with the epistemic nature of crossing within a body, not in a petri dish. Haraway’s example suggests the way different forms of human matter challenge our notions of how bodies are constructed, enveloped, and nurtured, and also, what is deemed natural about these processes. Moreover, she calls attention to emergent worlds of unregulated interaction and our accountability in exploring them.
 
Such a world is conjured in Eleni Sikélianòs’s book of poems, Body Clock, an unusual account of her pregnancy. The text, which consists of syntactically broken fragments, drawings, charts, and handwriting scratches, looks more like the laboratory notebook of a scientist than a collection of poems. Body Clock concerns a new set of materializations that come together as body within body. Sikélianòs’s language is neither linear nor explicative; rather, it engages scientific language with figurative language so that the “superconductivity in vowels” and “stars in centrifugal spin” (66) become the landscapes and backdrops for what is happening and growing in her self-described “robot womb” (67). Sikélianòs’s poetics, which has none of the uncanny cuteness of Harvey’s work, is instead tirelessly elegant, with lines and pencil marks that gracefully (and almost self-consciously) make their way across a page. In an appendix, the poet states that, “In this strange new condition, the outside body was acting like a clock, engaged in a timed performance out of which a product would emerge” (149).  She describes an interest in the “language residue” (149) of the experiment she calls the book/experience. The book begins with two definitions of growth by the early twentieth-century morphologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson: “of spatial magnitude, or of the extension of a body in the several dimensions of space.” Growth becomes one of the poet’s obsessions throughout the book, along with anxieties and fetishes about ingestion, body parts, and scientific understandings of the human. In one poem entitled “A Radiant Countess of What’s It,” the speaker describes the pleasure of women ingesting ribbon and rabbits. Women are the center of “several utopias” in which “the body melts back into shadow”:
 

I love it
when women eat sweet ribbon, sweet
 
rabbit, sweet meat, when women

are the scene
of several utopias

when the body melts back into shadow
 
beginning with the feet (51)

 
The word “melts” here is indicative of a movement in Body Clock that occurs on almost every page, that of the liminal language (most often verbs) that carries and connects objects uncertainly. Throughout the text, the reader becomes acquainted with the language of an in-between realm and the matter that grows there. The compositional becomes a body through words such as “floating,” “unfolds,” “fade,” “slipped,” “weaving,” “drift,” “unfreezing,” “stitched,” “spinning,” “fluttering,” “tumbling,” and “stretched,” which litter the text, suggesting the processes of consolidation, accumulation, breaking, pulverizing, and compartmentalizing.
 
For Sikélianòs, the body becomes the performative site for renegotiating boundaries and kinship not just between species, but also between words. Sikélianòs moves between descriptions of the foreign body within her as the “true human monster” (23) to countless meditations on what marks the human: “sign and seal / of the human: more body, more tooth, more / apple, more thought” (68). In one section, the speaker states, “The poem can be as risky as the body,” (107) and then engages in a thoughtful account of how the baby is assembled in terms of race and gender (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. From Body Clock (p. 107). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.

Perhaps the most provocative line in the poem is “Identity travels with the milk,” implying that a creature’s identity is related to what it ingests (a kind of encoded energy source). The use of the word “travels” demonstrates a disembodied, self-organizing, unmappable non-identity. This poetic gesture, which critiques human development and subjectivity, illustrates the way that scientific cultures of heredity and survival surface in our aesthetic discourses. Poetics, for example, as Judith Roof argues in her book The Poetics of DNA (2007), is crucially important for understanding the way that transgenic culture circulates widely beyond its scientific disciplines and is fictionalized, reinvented, aestheticized:
 

Instead of reflecting what actually might happen in, say, molecular biology, these popular renditions of science present biological phenomena through the same formulaic narrative that pervades Western culture…. DNA operates as a causal and masking agent, betokening simultaneously science and myth, perpetuation and transformation, the molecular and the gross, fear and salvation. (21-4)

Roof explores our cultural obsession with genes-as-code, and their powerful ability to explain our behavior and explain away our insecurities about heredity and reproduction. DNA for too long has served as the mascot for the particle and molecular sciences; the gene, in fact, is a macrocosm that has become misunderstood as the agent of change, and, within certain Darwinian discourses such as that of the survival of the fittest, also as an agent of selfishness, futurity, and tribal mentality.
 
The modern transgenic paradigm arguably emerges from Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA and the subsequent culture of gene studies, exemplified most famously the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s. This period in molecular biology brought us the notions of coding, cloning, and comparative genomics; our classifications of organic and inorganic tissue; as well as the business of biotechnology and bioengineering. But the transgenic finds its history in virtually every culture and time period, from the figure of the centaur in classical mythology to Mendel’s crossing alleles to a wide range of examples in contemporary popular imagination, such as Harry Potter, Star Trek, and Futurama. In some of these constructions, the transgenic is a deterministic state, often one where creatures are marginalized. In others, the transgenic becomes something like a skill, often desired, even more often feared. The transgenic has little to do with the technicalities of genetic manipulation (which are only novel in a very modern sense), and is more woven into cultural anxieties about the origin and futurity of foreign, nonhuman agency.
 
Sikélianòs’s scientific language in such lines as “through the dark halls of cryptography, / nanotechnologists of the celled night” (17), from her poem “The Sweet City,” invents new idioms for thinking about a foreign body. This means that the language of nutrition, encasement, boundary, and progeny also becomes reconceptualized (and re-aestheticized) in the process, as with the “gleeful spermatoza” (100) in her poem “First Hour’s Residue.” In the title poem, “Body Clock,” the baby is thought to “come out innominate / with many parts otherwise unnamed; as, the innominate artery, a great branch of the arch of the aorta; the innominate vein, a great branch of the superior vena cava” (29). The emphasis on the baby’s unnameable interiority suggests not just the anxieties of new parenthood, but also a focus on a representational conflict. We see a paradoxically innomate naming of compartmental organs and pathways of the body. Sikélianòs’s new language for this foreign body and for herself as its surrogate resembles a visualization technology. In “I would out-night you,” the poet describes “glowing cartilage,” “skin through penumbra,” a “jellied minute,” “ligaments in arabesque,” and “(a corpuscle a drop of time)” (46) radically new poetic figurations of the body wholly influenced by the biotechnologies of fluorescence, gel, and surface patterning. Several times throughout the collection, the speaker obsesses about symmetry, at one point even stating: “I do not suffer / symmetrophobia” (100). From a section in the book called “Doubleblind,” the speaker meditates on symmetry, particularly on the language of growth symmetry in crystals and minerals (see Fig. 2).
 

Fig. 2 from Body Clock (p. 136). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.

Suddenly, “crystal livers,” as a hybrid figure of the organic and inorganic, takes on a new figurative agency. Collagen and mineral luxuriate in a “ray of light decomposing,” the poetic technologies of o-ray and e-ray (which resurface in the collection) are invented, and “calcite crystal” (127-47) provides a kind of double-vision magic. In Sikélianòs’s drawings, the body cavity becomes a clock in which the creature inside grows toward a certain hour (see Fig. 3).
 

Fig. 3 from Body Clock (p. 136). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.

In “Third Hour Residue,” the poet draws what resembles a chromosomal karyotype, a visualization of the chromosomes from a eukaryotic cell. Karyotypes, often risky to obtain, can give crucial information about possible genetic disorders. For example, late in life pregnancy karyotypes can predict Down syndrome. Sikélianòs draws the alleles of the chromosomes like stick figures, and one resembles a daguerreotype of an actual child. The residual language tells the reader that “There were several shapes to edit,” and that the genes looked “like loose squiggles of time” (106). The speaker ponders “what does a chromosome worry” and looks at the chromosomes as “22 pairs of evidence…like genotype stomping on phenotype” (106). The poem-drawing performs an emerging aesthetic about the anxiety of genetic transparency and manipulation. Personifying the chromosome as a callous figure invokes it as a unit of materialism that is at once agentic and emotionally indifferent. The violent image of genotype stomping on phenotype brings to attention debates about genetic determinism and screening that have to do with biopower and its related discourses. But more importantly, the drawing takes the image of a karyotype, an image that within genetic culture is associated with anxieties about defects and the compositional makeup of the human body, and re-aestheticizes it so that “calf” (137) and “wing” (93) and “petals” (106) become part of the transgenic body’s new idiom (see Fig. 4).
 

Fig. 4 from Body Clock (p. 106). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.

This idiom reasserts the potential of crossing, mixing, and the performance of becoming creaturely. In two of the sections about the animal body, Sikélianòs imagines the categorization of both animal and human kingdoms. The focus on animal affect and movement (“instinct,” “creeps,” “grizzled”[28]) , the language of growth and nutrition (“sinewing,” “bottom feeder and forager,” “transforms” [28]) and, again, the language of surrogacy or encasement (“embedded in the body,” “even now [doubleblind] the two or three animals inside”[140]) detail the site where foreign bodies become ingested, dissected, and taxonomized (see Figs. 5 and 6).
 

Fig. 5 from Body Clock (p. 140). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.
 

Fig. 6 from Body Clock (p. 28). © Coffee House Press. Used by permission.

But the poetics does more than complicate our notions of bodies and species; it disrupts the lyrical mode of the personal, it invents new ways for images and creatures to emerge, and it treats the collection of language as an epistemic gathering. The text imagines a strange constellation of ghosts who are alive, reverse tears, “sea urchins like miniature sea machines” (90), a “baby wrapped in an orange hour” (75) and a leopard that “creeps out of a word” (28). Body Clock emerges as a residual account of the way we define the human, and therefore, the way we define the lyric.

Transgenic Art and Critical Anthropomorphism

What is the future of transgenic art? Transgenic art became a well-documented discourse during Edward Kac’s plea for the freedom of Alba, the transgenic bunny.[xi] Kac states, “Transgenic art offers a concept of aesthetics that emphasizes the social rather than the formal aspects of biodiversity [and that] reconciles forms of social intervention with semantic openness and systemic complexity” (GFP 98-99). Kac’s emphasis on Alba’s social behavior and argument for a more intersubjective space with “shared spheres of perception, cognition and agency in which two or more sentient beings can negotiate their experience” (GFP 99) demonstrate ontological, agential, and biopolitical concerns. What happens when the transgenic has become normalized as part of everyday life? It will be something much stranger than just avant-garde poetry and art; it will become transhuman fashion. There might be (and probably already are) transgenic styles, transgenic ways of life, and do-it-yourself genetic kits.

Kac has now moved into what he calls “poetry in vivo,” a poetics that uses biotechnology and living organisms to “synthesize DNA according to invented codes to write words using combinations of amino acids” (“Biopoetry”). Kac chooses the following quote from the King James Bible: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). He then translates this quote into Morse Code (quite arbitrarily) and converts the Morse Code into one of the four DNA molecular bases: (Dash = thymine [T], Dot = cytosine [C], Word Space = adenine [A], and Letter Space = guanine [G]) (“Biopoetry”). Kac named this the “artist’s gene,” had it multiplied at a DNA synthesis lab, and then injected it into a bacteria under a UV lamp. In an effort to perform a global transgenic experiment, Kac put the installation online and made it interactive; participants could turn off and on the UV lights at different speeds so as “disrupt the sequence and accelerate its mutation rate” (“Biopoetry”).

But Kac’s experiment in transgenic intermediality and his utopian dream of alternate expression of code-meaning are full of domineering gestures both in theory and methodology. The molecule is not a shared unit of species here, but one of dominance and manipulation. Kac has found support in both artistic and academic spheres from scholars such as Steven Tomasula. Tomasula suggests that Kac’s use of organisms for decadence and ornamentality is criticized mainly because the organisms are not being used for scientific or product research. However, this point does not address the uncritical practices of bioengineering undertaken in these projects. Kac’s plea for the liberating symbolic gesture of changing meaning by interfering with code (which he seems to take as semiotically transparent) is unconvincing; it feeds not only a nostalgic origin of life mythology, but also a desire for governance and species-centrism. As Sarah Kember argues, in a discussion echoing Haraway’s reaction to Kac’s work:
 

Human(ist) self and species identity is thus recuperated in both the art and industry of transgenesis (a truly—conservatively—metamorphic praxis) and Kac’s sentimental gestures towards kinship with his green dog/bunny—centering as they do on the “domestication and social integration of transgenic animals” (1999: 292)—are both hollow and an inadequate response to the increasing instrumentalization of life in the burgeoning transgenic industry of “pharming.” (165)

What philosophers interested in the nonhuman and in non-representational politics have taught us at the intersection of aesthetics and bioengineering is that we need to adopt a critical anthropomorphism. In Kari Weil’s essay on the animal turn, Weil discusses the way that a critical anthropomorphism can challenge humans to think beyond their own modes of being and subjecthood and imagine the ways that the lives of animals and other nonhuman agents might be experienced. This critical anthropomorphism is an ethics of care urgently needed as transgenic culture uses a language of confused ideological codes within ongoing social and ethical debates. And because the transgenic is a science in progress that has much cachet in mass culture because of its emphasis on visual/phenotypic notions of genetic manipulation, the transgenic has become a discourse that is both popular and specialized, rigid and unfixed. What is at stake in applying a critical anthropomorphism is maintaining that vast project of difference in the experience of others as well as an openness to imagining a biodiversity where the human is no longer central.

Footnotes

[i] In Nanovision, Milburn discusses molecular erotics as the “ethics of the interface” (108), a site of contact where the haptic bodies of the subperceptual world are made visible by new nanotechnologies that allow a novel visceral intimacy with tiny matter.


[ii] In The Politics of Life Itself, Rose discusses molecularity as a mode or practice, a way of imagining a new vitality and permeability between bodies that now is open to aesthetic-political analysis. This vitality, Rose argues, is related to the new mobility of vital elements, the ways in which “Molecularization strips tissues, proteins, molecules and drugs of their specific affinities . . . and enables them to be regarded, in many respects, as manipulable, and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized—moved from place to place, from organism to organism, from disease to disease, from person to person” (15). Rose suggests molecularity as a style of thought, a new intelligibility and transparency about the compositional makeup of bodies.
 
[iii] Here, I am thinking of Kari Weil’s essay entitled “A Report on the Animal Turn,” in which she discusses Jill Bennett’s notion of “critical empathy” from trauma theory. Critical empathy is imagined as a “conjunction of affect and critical awareness” (16), an ability to feel for something inaccessible instead of crudely over-identifying with an experience one cannot possibly know.
 
[iv] In an interview in Poetry Magazine, Harvey states:
 
I think many cultures are interested in post-apocalyptic landscapes and human-robot hybrids—we’re always projecting ourselves into the future, aren’t we? The post-apocalyptic world of “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” arose in the writing. My interest in hybrids may go back to the centaurs in Greek mythology and, in The Chronicles of Narnia, the mermaids. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in hybrids.
 
[v] Chen explains the animacy hierarchy in terms of ontological categories:
 

In other words, within terms of animacy hierarchies, might we have a way to think about queer animality as a genre of queer animacy, as a modulation of life force? It is my contention that animacy can itself be queer, for animacy can work to blur the tenuous hierarchy of human-animal-vegetable-mineral with which it is associated. Recentering on animality (or the animals who face humans) tugs at the ontological cohesion of “the human,” stretching it out and revealing the contingent striations in its springy taffy: it is then that entities as variant as disability, womanhood, sexuality, emotion, the vegetal, and the inanimate become more salient, more palpable as having been rendered proximate to the human, though they have always subtended the human by propping it up. (98)

 
[vi] Becoming creaturely should be differentiated from Eric Santner’s recent work, On Creaturely Life (2006), in which creatureliness is developed within German-Jewish thought as a salvific, mythic-philosophical narrative related to the state of exception, a “specifically human way of finding oneself caught in the midst of antagonisms in and of the political field” (xix). While my concept of creatureliness focuses more on a definition related to scientific materialism and embedded corporeality, Santner’s attention to psychoanalytical theory, mood, and the poetics of Rilke and Benjamin constructs a compelling argument about the “creaturely expressivity” [page number?] of a homo sacer “neighbor” figure, or the uncanny affectivity of this figure that exists outside sociosexual categorization.
 
[vii] “New Friends” from Modern Life. Copyright © 2007 by Matthea Harvey. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the author and Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
 
[viii] In “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Sianne Ngai articulates the relationship between cuteness and power or domination:
 

To use an everyday, ready-at-hand object as an example of commercially produced cuteness, this small and compact knickknack, a frog-shaped bath sponge shows how much the aesthetic depends on a softness that invites physical touching–or, to use a more provocative verb, fondling. It also demonstrates the centrality of anthropomorphism to cuteness. Yet while the object has been given a face and exaggerated gaze, what is striking is how stylistically simplified and even unformed its face is, as if cuteness were a sort of primitivism in its own right. Realist verisimilitude and precision are excluded in the making of cute objects, which have simple contours and little or no ornamentation or detail. The smaller and less formally articulated or more bloblike the object, the cuter it becomes–in part because smallness and blobbishness suggest greater malleability and thus a greater capacity for being handled. The bath sponge makes this especially clear because its purpose is explicitly to be pressed against the body and squished. (815)


[ix] “Wac-A-Mole Realism” from Modern Life. Copyright © 2007 by Matthea Harvey. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the author and Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
 
[x] “Moving Day” from Modern Life. Copyright © 2007 by Matthea Harvey. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of the author and Graywolf Press, www.graywolfpress.org.
 
[xi] For more on the Alba project, see the “GFP Bunny” page on Kac’s personal website.

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