Abstract
Framed by the recurring image of fences in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, this chapter traces an historical transition from traditional humanist institutions to posthuman networks, governed by mobile, prosthetic technologies. Once the narrator, Kathy H., and her classmates leave their disciplinary boarding school, they realize that they’re clones whose internal organs will someday be harvested. Waiting for her “donations” to begin, Kathy works as a “carer,” travelling England’s expressways from clinic to clinic, caring for clones and reflecting on her childhood. This new biomedical network reveals a form of mobile discipline that keeps Kathy and others moving along their pre-programmed paths, often exhausted by the caffeine and gasoline propelling them forward. In this way, the clones not only offer us a new language for understanding biotechnological labour, but they also foreground a slippage between workers’ bodies and the circulation of products under neoliberal regimes of human capital.
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Notes
- 1.
For a more detailed investigation of Lowood as a disciplinary form, see the Introduction to Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Levine reads “Lowood School as a thoughtful investigation of how disciplinary forms can unfold in intricate interrelation, their patterning of experience capable of crossing back and forth between fiction and the social world” (2015: 20).
- 2.
See Steven Shaviro’s essay “The ‘Bitter Necessity of Debt’: Neoliberal Finance and the Society of Control” for a similar and sustained articulation of the relationship between postdisciplinary and neoliberal thought (2011).
- 3.
Behaviour economists now call this “choice architecture,” which might be productively compared with disciplinary architecture.
- 4.
To be clear, biomedical companies usually outsource the recruitment and screening of test subjects to businesses such as Quintiles, CRI Worldwide, and South Coast Clinical Trials, which specialize in rounding up this type of labour.
- 5.
While investigating homeless shelters in Philadelphia, Dr Carl Elliott learned that “drug study recruiters often park outside the shelter and approach residents on the sidewalk” (Elliott 2014).
- 6.
This also comes across in Ishiguro’s use of initials instead of surnames for the clones (for example, Kathy H.).
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Johnston, J.O. (2019). Clones: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. In: Posthuman Capital and Biotechnology in Contemporary Novels. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26257-0_2
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