… or The Work of Art in the Age of Genetic Replication
In both Michael Bay’s The Island and Curarón’s Children of Men, a painting by Pablo Picasso is shown. In The Island we see Femme Assise (Jacqueline) in the office of Dr. Merrick while in Children of Men we see Picasso’s heartfelt depiction of Franco’s fascist crimes against Guernica reduced to mere dining room wallpaper. The use of Picasso’s paintings act as cultural tags, markers, that confirm the viewer’s suspicion that he is dealing with some sort of Brave New World-ish utopia that will turn out to be quite its contrary. In other words, Guernica and Femme Assise, implicitly describe a political context for us.
To Dr. Merrick clones are product. They are to be harvested for their organs and prodigy. According to him they lack feelings or emotions, in short: humanity. The Picasso in his office is what makes this belief work for him. He knows very well the clones are human, in fact all too human. Through the painting he can keep a save distance from their humanity, but more importantly, from his own inhumanity.
What separates the clones from the likes of Merrick i.e the humans, is not simply their love of art. It is their capacity as human beings to appreciate art in the first place. A capacity clones must necessarily lack and which as Merrick clearly shows in a short dialogue with Mr. Laurent – the mercenary hired to retrieve the escaped clones but instead helps them ‘liberate’ themselves – is suspect to be absent in other ‘lesser’ people i.e Mr. Laurent. What art marks here, what is tagged, is that art points to the affirmation/negation of humanity.
An interesting contrast to this line of thought can be found in Kazuo Ishigiro’s most Kafkaian novel so far Never Let Me Go. The story is told by Kathy, a clone, and unfolds in a late nineties Britain of the previous century. Cloning has become common and as in The Island clones are mined for body parts or offspring. They have been reduced to what Heidegger said man’s primary condition in the Gestell is: Rohstoff. Man is literally a human resource and the clones in Ishiguro’s novel know it. The book tells the stories of the clones, euphemistically called students or donors, growing up at Hailsham, a boarding school. Of particular interest is that they are stimulated, even required, to create art. Every now and then the best artworks are picked out by the mysterious Madame and taken away. At the start of the book nobody knows why. Only much later is it revealed that the art and Hailsham in general was an experiment setup to show the humanity of the clones. Their art was taken away ‘because we [teachers at Hailsham] thought it would reveal your souls. Or to put it more finely, we did it to prove you had souls at all.’
Why was it necessary to show the humanity of the clones? Because as is explained to the students: ‘How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away the cure, to go back to the dark days? […] So for a long time you [the students] were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. In other words: “How can you ask a world that has come to regard capitalism as the cure for everything, to leave capitalism behind. As long as we keep deluding ourselves through defensive disavowal we can avoid this aporia.” (It is no accident that this ‘logic’ is quite similar to Mark’s observation about Theo’s friend in Battersea (Children of Men) who when asked ‘how all of this [the art] can matter if there’s no one to see it?’ answers ‘I try not think about it’.)
So, the point here is that the clones need to be kept in dark, meaning they need to be kept oblivious about their humanity in order to perpetuate their status as replicated gene pools. Their humanity is kept from them which is why the mysterious Madame had to sneak away their art. It was too revealing in a sense. By keeping the clones unaware, by keeping them from properly assessing their own art, this seemingly allowed the non-clones, i.e. the cloned ones to maintain their fantasy that they were not doing something inhuman. ‘Art is a mirror’, Kafka wrote and thus a reflective medium and hence brings about reflection. By keeping the clones from the means to reflection it was hoped they did not attain, if you like, their proper class consciousness.
So what does art signal in Never Let Me Go? I venture to propose it marks the loss of humanity. By defensively disavowing and blocking the path to reflexivity, and thus emancipation, humanity is lost. The more pressing question is: whose humanity? Ironically, it is not the social class that is seemingly kept unreflexive that has lost their humanity, in fact they find it. The clone class, thought in this way, can be seen as a literal ‘living negation of capitalism’.
If we look only at the (re)production of humans or human tissue in the three mentioned examples (The Island, Never Let Me Go, Children of Men) we can start to discern a schema: in Children of Men man cannot procreate, in The Island procreation is delegated as is in Never Let Me Go (also Atwood’s Handman’s Tale comes to mind). A third element can be added to this schema by taking out or rather suspending the need for procreation completely as is done by Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island.
Houellebecq’s grand project is to eradicate the source of all human suffering i.e. desire which in his Dickian-Lovecraftian world can be wholly reduced to senseless sex, lethal lethargy and buffonic boredom. Sex as commodity is the materialisation of all suffering, a ‘system of differentiation completely independent of money’ which is closely linked to man’s obsession to overcome his own finite existence and thus the instinctive drive for reproduction. In order to escape the everexpanding domain of constant struggle as the title of one of Houellebecq books suggests (Extension de domaine de la lutte) man must break the evolutionary chain of being i.e man must abandon sexual reproduction for the sake of reaching nirvana through a kind of innerwordly asceticism sans protestant ethic. This is the story of The Possibility of an Island where the practice of cloning is reformatted in an eternal-return-of-the-same messianic cosmo-ontology: we travel with protagonist Daniel through his various self-cloned reincarnations while he awaits the return of the Supreme Sister and The Future Ones.
While awaiting the future Daniels read the life account of the original Daniel, a radical comedian who spent a lifetime venting his islamophobia and eventually commits suicide after a life haunted by the search for the possibility of love.
Daniel’s self-imposed solipsicism is occasionally lifted by communicating with other clones via ‘email’ (the digital or virtual world in The Possibility of an Island is not pixelperfectly photorealistic but rather coarsely pixelated and text based.) Daniel writes poems which he leaves at an ip address; his only means of communicating with other clones. This is how art appears in TPI: as poetry. The ‘original’ Daniel (Daniel1), the comedian who in the end will take his own life, only starts to write poetry after he’s met Esther, one of the two women in his life narrative. When the other woman, Isabelle commits suicide, this does not provoke the need for poetic catharsis. Instead after the death of Fox, his dog, about whom Iggy Pop aptly sings that he is ‘a machine for loving’, does Daniel write poetry again and strangely, perhaps absurdly, it is dedicated to Esther. The last poem Daniel writes, just before he takes his own life is not a Daniel1 chapter but rather is relayed to us by Daniel25, the last clone of Daniel:
Et l’amour où tout est facile,
Où tout est donné dans l’instant;
Il existe au milieu du temps
La possibilité d’une île
The official English translation of the last stanza is a bit different from the Dutch one. First the English:
And love, where all is easy,
Where all is given in the instant;
There exists in the midst of time
The possibility of an island.
This is a quite literal translation. Here’s the Dutch translation retranslated into English:
And love, happiness without strife,
Where all is given instantly;
There exists a possibility
Of an island within time.
Why did the Dutch translator opt for translating using the word ‘happiness’. It does not appear in the French. But I think its import is correct. What makes love easy? Love that does not require struggle, which thus does not require strife or battle to obtain and maintain. In other words, this is love which cannot possibly exist, not in Houellebecq’s universe at least. The possibility pointed to then does not refer to as one reviewer put it ‘the impossibility of being an island’ but rather to the impossibility of the possibility an-sich. (Perhaps Houellebecq’s utopia is best described as an antitopia: a place which resists being a place in the first place?).
There can be no mistake about the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister: it will not be. It cannot really be expected. It is abundantly obvious that the myth of their return is a fabrication, something which Daniel is all too aware of. In this way, it is a ‘messianique sans messianisme’: a qualitative experience of the non-present in which the present is both always already past and always arriving at the same time, which is to say that it is haunted. The Shakespearian out-of-jointness of time means that time is never present with or to itself. However much Houellebecq relegates Derrida to the domain of nonsense (as well as Foucault, Deleuze and Lacan), the messianism in the form of a messianicity structured in the return of the Future Ones and the Supreme Sister (i.e a messiah that has not existed and will not exist) can be thought of exactly as the kind of messianism Derrida had in mind. Daniel25′s wait for the Supreme Sister is in a way quite similar to Derrida’s messianic wait. Drifting in the ocean, towards what Caputo calls an ‘the futural possiblity of impossibility’ he is, as Derrida writes: ‘[A]waiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer’.
Some concluding remarks (or rather a conclusion without conclusion). Derrida “shun[s] the word ‘utopia’”. Instead messianicity is a ‘universal structure of experience which … is anything but utopian’. However he also claims that “one could not so much as account for the possibility of utopia in general without reference to what I call messianicity”. In The Possibility of an Island art shows this reference. It brings out messianicity and with it a pure hope (Ernst Bloch), which for lack of better word can be named utopia. I’m hoping to develop this a bit better in a later post. For now you can have a look at a very promising paper on Derrida’s Spectres and Bloch’s Principles and the idea of utopia here.