Science Fiction as Critique of Science

Science as Culture, Fiction as Critique

From a philosophical and anthropological standpoint, the body as we know it is a cultural phenomenon, historically specific and politically contested. It serves as a zone of indeterminacy that organizes experience for the individual; all that is experienced, is experienced through the body, and consciousness is inextricably intertwined within the world and with the body (Mauss, 1985; Merleau-Ponty, 2002). Yet such an understanding of the body as physical coordinates of personhood often finds contradiction with scientific treatment of the body in organ transplantation.

Medical practices map the body topologically, and, through organ transplantation, define the dissectible body as not only disintegrable but reorganizable. Doing so invokes Cartesian understandings of body and self as “distinct, mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive substances” (Grosz, 1994, p. 3). This is evidenced in the medical language of transplantation, which treats organs as objects to be harvested from brain-dead cadavers, in contradiction to the language of donation, which treats organs as personal gifts to be given (Sharp, 1995).

Yet in this production of knowledge, practitioners of science often view themselves as acultural, free of subjective bias. Science comes to define laws and limits of nature, its values and practices reified in our collective conscience, emblazoned by the positivism of ostensibly value-free experts. As the interdisciplinary field of science studies has shown us, however, science is a culture to be studied like any other, its products, practices, and ideologies no different than other socially situated cultural phenomena.

In “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Adorno (2000) distinguishes between two types of criticisms of cultural phenomena. The transcendent critic views their critique as independent of the society that produced the phenomenon being critiqued. The immanent critic practices criticism from within. Where the former is ideological, speaking “as if he represented either unadulterated nature or a higher historical state” (p. 196), the latter is simultaneously a piece of and separate from the culture he critiques. In taking such a dual stance, both inside and outside of culture, the immanent critic explores “social physiognomy,” revealing cultural phenomena, as indirect expressions of the human condition, to be inherently contradictory.

Applying Adorno, I argue that science fiction critiques the culture of medical science for its reluctance to operate outside of its own ideological stance, a reluctance which results in the production of what Adorno calls “topological” knowledge of the body, and which, in turn, posits the body as objectifiable, and, therefore, commodifiable. This criticism in science fiction runs parallel to and is provoked by historical developments in organ transplantation. Science fiction becomes the immanent critic of science, existing alongside actual science in “a relationship of ongoing and productive mutual modification” (Milburn, 2010, p. 568), both within and outside of science culture.

In taking such an approach, it must be noted that scientific discourses are, as Donna Haraway points out, “lumpy,” ripe with “condensed contestations for meanings and practices” (Haraway, 1999, p. 204). The object of analysis here, that which I claim is critiqued by science fiction, is not a monolithic understanding of medical practice, but rather a science culture which includes such discourses and practices as constitutive parts. Such sociocultural constructions, while difficult to pin down in their heterogeneous nature, must be acknowledged as constitutive of objects and bodies, as well as ordering of experiences. In critiquing science culture, science fiction explores the permeability of boundaries between scientific and nonscientific discourses, not only offering insight into science as a cultural phenomenon but also, ultimately, to the cultural phenomenon of the body as an expression of our collective understandings of selfhood.

Early Organ Transplantation in Science and Fiction: The 1960s and 1970s

Though with earlier predecessors, science fiction as a recognizable genre has only existed in the past 100 years (Milburn, 2010). Applying Le Guin’s observation of the future as metaphor for the present, the science fiction of most interest to an exploration of organ transplantation really begins in the mid-20th century.

The first successful whole organ transplant, a kidney, occurred in 1954, followed in 1967 by the much-publicized transplant of a human heart, performed by Dr. Christiaan Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa. Though Dr. Barnard’s patient lived only 18 days following surgery, the progress in the science of organ transplantation sparked public interest. A year later in 1968, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA), intended to align public policy with developments in medical science, was passed in the United States, governing the gifting of human organs following death. That same year, death was redefined by a Harvard Ad Hoc Committee to mean brain death. This redefinition of death had monumental effect on the procurement of organs as well as public perceptions of organ donation. Organs could now be harvested from “brain-dead cadavers” who appeared to still be alive: breath still filling their lungs, hearts beating in their chests thanks to artificial assistance, and fluids and nourishment still pumped into them as with any living patient. For many, seeing such seemingly alive patients as dead would prove difficult. As Linda Hogle (1999) put it: “he is ‘dead,’ but he has not ‘died.’” These shifts in our understanding of death, as well as the anxieties provoked by such scientific changes, found expression in the pages of science fiction.

The same year as the redefinition of death and passing of UAGA, Larry Niven published the second novel in what would become his Known Space Universe. Consisting of about a dozen novels and short story collections, Niven’s exploration of future history and the colonization of our and nearby solar systems became known for propagation of the concept of “organlegging,” or the black market sale of human organs for transplantation. In multiple books, including the 1973 classic, The Defenseless Dead, where a UN decree allows the harvesting of organs from the cryogenically suspended poor, Niven (1973) explored the recurring theme that the possibility of organ transplantation would inevitably lead to donor shortages and an increase in exploitative practices of colonization in the search for adequate organ supplies. Nowhere are such colonial themes more present, however, than in A Gift From Earth (Niven, 1968), a work that not only shares the same year of publication as UAGA but also the prominent inclusion of the word “gift” in the title. Niven’s treatment of organ “gifting,” however, would paint a very different picture than that painted by UAGA.

In A Gift From Earth, humans establish a space colony in an atmospheric environment that allows for limited inhabitable space. The crew of the pilgrim ship comes to establish dominion over their passengers, or colonists, who were brought to the colony in suspended animation (seemingly “dead” but not having yet “died”), a state which allows all the more easily for their domination. Organ transplantation becomes the only method of medical treatment, even for cosmetic inconveniences like baldness. As the crew establishes governance, all crimes become punishable by death and involuntary organ donation. The colonists, however, are the only ones arrested, and crewmembers are the only ones eligible to receive the gift of organs.

The body, in Niven’s work, is presented as that which runs risk of conquering, particularly along colonial lines of domination. Instead of focusing on the lifesaving potential of organ transplantation, as did much of the medical community at the time (Fox & Swazey, 1974), Niven focused on the body of the donor, reflecting a social fear not so much of incorporation of other selfhoods with the receipt of organs (Sharp, 1995), but the decorporation of self in redefinitions of death. Meanwhile, more extrapolative explorations of the potentials of organ transplantation made by the medical community, such as the famous Harper’s Magazine article by psychiatrist and medical ethicist Willard Gaylin (1974), painted more optimistic pictures of a future in which the redefinition of death and the advancement of organ transplantation would lead to more reliable, sustainable, and even catalogue-able supplies of living organs.

As Sharp (2006) points out, in focusing on transplant as a marvel of medical advancement, focus is drawn from the reality that organ procurement relies on the potential suffering and ultimate death of donors. It is fear of the latter that occupied the fiction of Larry Niven, a fear of colonization along lines of bourgeois domination. Such fears were perhaps not unwarranted, as such exploitative practices, lacking consent of those unable consent, were seen in the questionable harvesting of organs from executed prisoners in China and elsewhere throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Hillman, 2001). The “gifting” of human organs is presented in the late 1960s and early 1970s by medicolegal proponents as an advancement in life improvement for recipients, yet is criticized in science fiction as opening up potential for “gifts” not freely given.

The Topology of Body as Precondition to Domination of Self

The medical culture critiqued by Niven takes the body as its object of study, and, in producing knowledge of the body as disintegrable, becomes “topological knowledge, which knows the place of every phenomenon but the essence of none” (Adorno, 2000, p. 209). The body becomes the subject of division and colonization through discursive construction not just within medical science, but in the larger culture influenced by medical science, a process of transformation pushed by the “demythologization” of the world so characteristic of modern scientific endeavor (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002). The body becomes the gendered body, the racial body, the disabled body. Under capitalism, the body becomes fetishized as commodity. In politics, the female body becomes colonized as reproductive organs. Body fragments become commoditized as objects of desire (endocannibalism, penis snatching, etc.). All the while, science continues to divide the body down further and further into increasingly compartmentalized components, down to the very genome (Sharp, 2000).

Niven’s work suggests that this repetitious vivisection only aids in the dominability of the body, and specific bodies at that. To map the body topologically, as a connection of separable pieces, is to overlook the phenomenological experience of the body as self. The topological knowledge of Adorno’s (2000) transcendent critic, “with the aid of mechanically functioning categories,” divides the world “into black and white,” making it “ready for the very domination against which concepts were conceived” (p. 209). In rendering the body disintegrable in an attempt to defy our own mortality, science also renders the body commodifiable (Sharp, 2000).

Flipping Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1980) “body without organs,” Rosi Braidotti (1994) speaks of “organs without bodies.” Where Deleuze viewed the body without organs as a call to active experimentation with the virtual potentials of oneself, beyond a world of surfaces, Braidotti examines ways in which postmodernism has reduced embodiment to “pure surface, exteriority without depth, a moveable theatre of the self” (p. 51). Far from freeing marginalized subjects, the body is reduced to a collection of separate organs (both theoretically, in Braidotti’s analysis, and literally in organ transplant ideology) that come to define value in an equally oppressive paradigm.

Such a displacement of organs from lived experience not only echoes warnings of colonialism in Niven’s work, but finds critique in feminist science fiction, such as Marge Piercy’s (1976) Woman on the Edge of Time. Piercy’s protagonist is presented with her pivotal role in deciding the course of the future as either a progression toward utopia (where many of the goals of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s are met) or toward a dystopian future in which “richies” continually draw from the walking organ banks of “duds,” or poor people who are forced to live on an otherwise undesirably inhabitable planetary surface. In Piercy’s dystopian world, women are valued solely for their role as sexual objects, their physical attributes enhanced accordingly. As future feminist philosophers such as Braidotti would examine, Piercy’s fictional female characters are reduced to a series of “organs without bodies,” their personhood denied in the pursuits of those holding the power to do so, those who, in Piercy’s treatment, are moneyed (and male).

Again, as with Niven, the possibility of organ transplantation for Piercy results in the reduction of the body to an assemblage of denatured parts. Lacking sovereignty, the body becomes a territory open to invasion. Historical views of the body have treated it as coterminous with the nation-state, having a strict division between body and external world. As internal divisions multiply and organs take on existences as alienable objects, separate from the body and self that houses them, boundaries between body and world become increasingly more fluid. Where it was once felt that the “maintenance of the purity of the self within the borders of the body is seen as tantamount to the maintenance of self” (Martin, 1992, p. 126), such a mantra no longer finds ready applicability in a world so heavily influenced by the scientific culture of organ transplantation.

Just as organ transplantation was starting to gain a foothold as medically possible, we see the simultaneous emergence of a fear of colonialism in science fiction literature. While scientific proponents of organ transplantation, such as Gaylin, promote such medical advancements as part of what Nikolas Rose (2007) calls a “political economy of hope,” fictionists question to whom the privilege of hope belongs. “Hope,” in this sense, presents itself along distinctly defined lines of domination and the valuation of variously identified lives and selves. As organs become exchangeable, fictionists fear that the direction of exchange will become one way and that, in defining the Self, those with the privilege to do so will utilize the bodiless organs of the Other. Fear is expressed that the construction of Self from disassembled and differently valued Other, through negation of the embodiment and personhood of the Other, will fall along deeply colonial lines, and that “socially expendable categories of persons” will be “ironically transformed into valued objects” (Sharp, 2000). The realization of this fear would later be seen in the growth of medical tourism and differing valuations placed on the disassembled bodies of variously raced, sexed, and classed people, worth more dead than alive (Budiani-Saberi & Delmonico, 2008). Science fiction critiques the topological treatment of the body as a precondition for the colonial domination of the selves of the Other. The biological differentiation between self and nonself at the center of such “immune system discourse” (Haraway, 1999) in organ transplantation (a discourse which would only become more prominent with the development of immunosuppression) serves as guide for distinguishing between Self and Other in colonial treatments of bodies.

What began as a “gift of life” is critiqued by science fiction as opening up potentials for exploitation along colonial lines. In offering such a critique, however, Niven’s and Piercy’s works situate themselves both within cultural understandings of the body as autonomous, phenomenological self, while simultaneously exploring the potentials of organ transplantation; Niven’s crew did benefit from the organ “donation,” after all. Their work reveals, and immanently embraces, the very contradictory nature of life, death, selves, and science at this point in medical history, a contradictory nature to be further addressed by medical, legal, and fictional developments in the 1980s.

Changing Selves, Changing Bodies: The 1980s and 1990s

Following earlier developments, the 1980s would see major scientific, and medicolegal, progress in organ transplantation. In 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act codified into law the definition of death as brain death. The year 1987 saw the revision of UAGA to further streamline organ gifting. Most prominently, however, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984 sought to address many of the fears of organ transplantation that surfaced in the prior decade, particularly those of colonialism and exploitation of the powerless. NOTA formally outlawed the sale, purchase, or brokering of human organs in the United States. The fears expressed in the science fiction of the late 1960s and 1970s, literary fears that served as “as expression of society,” were here addressed in public policy.

In addition to outlawing the sale of human organs, NOTA also paved the way for organ procurement activities, intended to increase the number of available organs by encouraging donation both from donors and their kin (in the case of brain death). NOTA created the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, currently administered, since 1986, by the nonprofit the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS). The use of the term “sharing” in the title of UNOS curiously speaks to earlier fears of “theft,” as that which is shared, similar to that which is gifted, benefits both parties, not just one.

The science of organ transplantation also saw much advancement with the Federal Drug Administration’s approval of the immunosuppressant cyclosporine in 1983, the use of which dramatically reduced organ rejection and increased the number of successful organ transplantations from 12,618 in 1988 to 21,255 just a decade later in 1998 (UNOS, 2015). This success of immunosuppressants in improving the viability of organ transplants further promoted medical views of the body as disintegrable. The chemical suppression of recipients’ biological functioning, a necessity in organ transplantation because, as Joralemon (1995) points out, “the boundary between ‘self’ and ‘nonself’ is, from an organic view, nonnegotiable and indelible” (p. 337), became not only possible but acceptable. It becomes medically, socially, and personally acceptable to suppress the body’s natural immunoreactions in order to realize a notion of the body as fragmentary. This is made possible through the use of immunosuppressants as a sort of “tricking mechanism,” providing the body with an illusion of coherency in order to pursue sociocultural notions of the body as divisible. Echoing fears of earlier fictionists such as Niven and Piercy, the repetitious vivisection of the body is pursued at all costs.

As with earlier advancements in the scientific and medicolegal history of organ transplantation, the developments of the 1980s were also met by critique in science fiction, though of a somewhat different nature. With organ transplantation becoming medically possible at ever increasing rates, with the legal atmosphere addressing earlier fears of exploitation, and with advances in immunosuppression overcoming the organically “nonnegotiable” separation between “self and nonself,” science fiction in the 1980s sought to address changing definitions of the human and collective “anxieties about maintaining the sanctity of the body” (Abbott, 2006). The critiques of earlier literary science fiction were expanded upon greatly through the use of more visual media. Films that utilized special effects make up to literally rupture the boundaries of the body most prominently accomplished this through reliance on the visceral, surface level, and percussive properties of cinema, allowing for a different kind of body exploration, one of growing moral significance. As the human became harder to define, films such as Altered States (Gottfried, Melnick, & Baird, 1980), The Thing (Foster, Turman, Stark, & Cohen, 1982), Videodrome (Heroux, 1983), Re-Animator (Yuzna, 1985), The Fly (Cornfeld, 1986), and Society (Walley, 1989) explored the transformation of the body through “body horror.” Fictionists explored our increasing anxieties not just over exploitation of the body as nation-state, but the complete redefinition of humanness and identity made possible by such body transformations (Bukatman, 1993).

At the same time, science fiction also saw the rise of cyborg narratives, with salvation (or total destruction) pursued through the technological, and not the potentially exploitative harvesting of organic material. Instead of replacing the biological with the biological, which necessitates removal from one body to another, many fictionists opted to look to the synthetic (Melehy, 2004). Doing so avoids the theft of humanity in exploitative practices of organic material harvesting, but the fear then becomes humanity’s willing forfeiture in the inorganic. Science fiction of the cyborg variety, similar to body horror films, equally raised questions of defining the human under circumstances in which the entire circuitry could be changed, organically or synthetically. Such redefinitions were prompted by scientific developments of the time, in organ transplantation (and, arguably, regenerative medicine) that for the first time made other configurations of the human a possible reality.

The prominence of films, as opposed to print media, in such social explorations speaks to the degree of transformation in our understandings of body and body boundaries. Images of the body on the screen solidify the spectator’s view of the body as fragmentary, its parts alienable. The close-up in film isolates body parts with a precision that embodied vision rarely accomplishes. The kino-eye, as Slavoj Zizek (2004) describes it, comes to act as stand-in for embodied subjectivity, the camera, as eye, autonomous of any physical body, and “the subject emerges out of the person as the product of the violent reduction of the person’s body to a partial object” (p. 175). This is true, according to Zizek, of all cinema.

Body horror and cyborg films, however, relied not just on the alienability of body parts through close-up, or on the “percussive effect on the spectator” (Benjamin, 2002, p. 119) of cinema in general, but on special effects and the visualization of graphic body rupture. The epidermal boundaries of the body are not only permeated but are, through special effects, redefined, and “the end of the body” (Martin, 1992) is explored through visceral spectacle on the silver screen. Such an exploration could only happen through a cinematic medium.

Here, in pure externality, the audience encounters itself; its own reality is revealed in the fragmented sequence of splendid sense impressions. Were this reality to remain hidden from the viewers, they could neither attack nor change it; its discourse in distraction is therefore of moral significance. (Kracauer, 2005, p. 326)

The specific medium of film plays a crucial role in collective moral explorations, such as those of body and self, prompted by changes in the science of organ transplantation during the 1980s and 1990s. This is done not only through the percussive nature of the cinematic medium, but through the use of special effects to capitalize on the very surface-level impressions that cinema relies on.

While perhaps not overtly about organ transplantation, body horror and cyborg films serve to highlight transforming anxieties over the body and selfhood during a time in which organ transplantation was not only becoming ever more possible but also ever more normalized. By the time UAGA was to be revised for a third time, in 2006, science fiction would shift its focus back to more overt examinations of organ transplantation, this time with a focus on reaffirming the humanity of donors.

Science Fiction Today

As the science of organ transplantation has continued to progress and procurement activities have increased the number of organs available, the number of transplants performed has also grown. In 2014, 29,532 whole organ transplants were performed in the United States alone. Yet as the number of transplants has grown, so too has the number of waiting-list candidates, which, as of June 19, 2015, stood at 122,939, more than four times as high as the number of transplants actually performed in the previous year (UNOS, 2015). This growing gulf between needed and available organs has prompted some proponents of transplantation to reconsider the commoditization of human organs as addressed by NOTA in 1984, suggesting they be viewed instead as personal property which the owner may trade on the free market at will (Sharp, 1995, 2000). Yet as of this writing, the law (with most medical professionals in agreement) still prohibits the sale of human organs. These renewed and developing discussions have found expression in science fiction, more overtly focused on organ transplantation than the body horror and cyborg films of the 1980s and 1990s.

Much of this recent fiction has sought to reaffirm the humanity of donors. In a similar vein as Niven and Piercy, a common focus has been on the exploitation of donors as a natural resource to be mined by those with the power to do so. In the novel-turned-film Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro, 2005), questions arise about the lives and self-definition of organ donors in a dystopian future. Children, kept in a boarding school, are encouraged to pursue artistic goals and the maintenance of their health, all the while learning no useful life skills. As the story progresses, it is revealed that the students are actually clones to be utilized as a source of “donations” for “normal” people until “completion” (the use of the term “completion” sending a strong message about the purpose of those lives deemed Other). The school was an experiment in how to treat clones, so as to ensure that at least the first half of their lives were enjoyable. The children’s artwork, collected in the “Gallery,” was an attempt to demonstrate the humanity of clones to the “normal” world that saw them merely as objects to be used by those with the capital to do so.

In this futuristic world, society has readily accepted the existence of some lives, an entire class of people defined as “other” because of the nature of their introduction to the world, as sources of raw materials in the construction of the bourgeois body. The narrative draws into question definitions of what constitutes life and what lives can be said to have selfhoods, as well as the maintenance of subjectivity in a future where scientific advancements have rendered bodily degeneration negotiable for those with means. The overt focus on the capitalist nature of such exchanges, and the exploitation of those deemed Other in the use of science to improve the Self, always defined as the bourgeois self, extrapolates upon themes brought up by Piercy three decades prior, and speaks to cultural conversations regarding the possibility of free market organ trade happening at this point in time. Never Let Me Go forces the viewer to face donors as that which practices in the narrative deny them: humans with subjective experiences and concepts of selfhood.

In their final book on organ transplantation, sociologists Renee Fox and Judith Swazey (1992) spoke of how the “degifting” of organs, treating transplantation as more of a market transaction on biological hardware, would have dire consequences for our understandings of life and self. After decades of research, Fox and Swazey left this field of study precisely because they feared this process of “degifting” was taking hold in current practices. As if emerging out of Fox and Swazey’s fears, Repo! The Genetic Opera (Burg, Koules, & Mazzocone, 2008) explores a dystopian future in which epidemic organ failure is met by scientific advancement in organ transplantation.

Through stylized musical depiction of a future in which Willard Gaylin’s dream of “bioemporiums” is taken so far as to display the stockpiling of human organs in warehouses, so far denatured and removed from the subjectivity of their donors that the source of such organic materials is never even addressed in the film, Repo! illustrates the progression of an organ failure epidemic and its subsequent solution:

Industrialization has crippled the globe. Nature failed as technology spread. And in this wake a market erected. An entire city built on top of the dead. And you can finance your bones and your kidneys. For every market a submarket grows. But best you be punctual with making your payments. Lest it be you on the concrete below. (Burget al., 2008)

In the film, organ recipients who have fallen behind on payments are met by “repo men” who are sent to repossess the financed property of GeneCo, the corporation leading the organ transplant market. “Say you once bought a heart or new corneas, but somehow never managed to square away your debt. He won’t bother to write or to phone you. He’ll just rip the still beating heart from your chest” (Burg et al., 2008). Here, Fox and Swazey’s (1992) concept of the “tyranny of the gift,” wherein an organ recipient feels indebted to the donor or their kin, becomes an actual relationship of debtor–creditor, one in which the transactional value of the exchange outweighs the human value of life. In repossessing human organs that borrowers have failed to make payments on, the repo man does not do so with the intent of being able to resell the organ; he rips “the still beating heart from your chest,” making the organ nonviable for future transplantation. Thus, the object of value is not the life-giving organ, or even life itself, but rather the capitalist exchange and tyranny of debt involved.

The capitalistic exploitation of biomedicine is laid bare in a depiction of a world in which the transplant of organs is practiced in the same vein as cosmetic surgery. If such a comparison seems to trivialize the very serious nature of lifesaving organ transplantations, the film would seem to do precisely that, pushing the argument to such absurdity that the audience is forced, through parody, to face the nature of transplantation in a dystopian capital-driven future. Repo! Culminates in the Genetic Opera, a televised event in which organ recipients are encouraged to “testify,” telling their story of how GeneCo changed their life. Even necessary biological transplants are treated as “an affordable organ makeover,” as one woman describes how a kidney transplant helped her look “smashing on live TV” (Burg et al., 2008).

Throughout the progression of descent in Repo! the story is narrated by an unnamed Graverobber, who makes a living off of a black market street drug that mimics the drug used by GeneCo to prepare transplant recipients for surgery. While other characters question the ethical choices made within the narrative, the Graverobber provokes larger consideration from the audience. “So why care for these petty obsessions? Your designer heart still beats with common blood. And what if you could have genetic perfection? Would you change who you are if you could?” (Burg et al., 2008). As the Graverobber is drawn into the narrative, willingly feeding the questionable obsessions of his drug- and surgery-addicted clientele, he also presents the audience with a metaquestioning that links subjectivity, “who you are,” to the choices made in the pursuit of “genetic perfection.” The film blends together a milieu of organ transplantation both for purposes of biological survival and for genetic vanity, treating the former in the same vein as we currently treat the latter.

Furthermore, the motivations for transplantation in Repo! are always framed through a capital-driven lens of privilege and ownership over both the human body, and, through the body’s construction, selfhood. Where earlier works such as Niven and Piercy focused on the owned nature of donors and the organs taken from them, Repo! takes such themes of colonization and blends them with the body/self-transformation seen in the body horror films of the 1980s, examining the colonization not of others, but of self. This is done from the perspective of the recipient, whose selfhood is equally owned, and defined, both by the image of perfection in the bourgeois body and, literally, by the financiers who have monetized such practices. Through the campy style of the film, the extremity of such practices are openly displayed for audiences, such as in the case of one character who changes his face so often that it must be held on with visible snaps, for easy replacement.

While the use of science to meet the failure of the biological is presented as a means of avoiding the acknowledgment of our own mortality, the tyranny of the body is replaced with the “tyranny of the gift.” Early science fiction works expressed fears that this “political economy of hope” in the possibility of organ transplantation would result in the “privilege of hope” and the further subjugation of those lacking privilege. More recent science fiction, such as Repo! demonstrates a more overarching form of subjugation occurring, as even those with the means to afford organ transplants become enslaved by the demands of bourgeois perfection. Colonization may not even require the overt deaths that Niven feared. We may not have to murder the subjugated, but we have yet to find a way to unsubjugate them.

Adorno’s Successful Work of Art

Culture, Adorno (2000) argues, is inherently critical, and the successful work of art becomes that which fails to live up to its own pretense, thus revealing the contradictions inherent to our social truths. The successful work of art “is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its inner-most structure” (p. 208). In order to reveal the true meaning of cultural phenomena, immanent criticism is needed to demonstrate the ways in which cultural phenomena fail to fulfill their own aims. The immanent critic embraces such contradictions, whereas the transcendent critic tries to reconcile them.

Science culture, in its reluctance to recognize itself as a cultural consumer (Milburn, 2010), attempts to synthesize the body/self-contradictions of organ transplantation ideology (Sharp, 1995). It falls short precisely because, as the dialectical criticism by science fiction reveals, the contradictory portrayal of the body as both fragmentary and organically whole is part and parcel of our cultural ideations of body and self. Where science attempts to transcend and resolve this dialectic, “like cyclosporine for the social conscience” (Joralemon, 1995, p. 340), science fiction embraces it and, in doing so, reveals us to be simultaneously organically whole and disintegrable, both human and posthuman.

In the science fiction works examined here, organ transplantation is presented as both lifesaving and life-subjugating. Perhaps none of the works examined, however, fail to reconcile such contractions as readily as does Repo! which, in the same breath, paints alienable pieces of the body as commodities to be financed and crucial elements in the construction selfhoods, all through campy, highly stylized, musical presentation. Even the naming of the film as a genetic “opera” feeds the film’s purposive inability to live up to its own pretense. The term opera could be read as referencing the pejorative “science fiction opera,” a melodramatic soap opera set in the future wherein the focus of the narrative is often optimistic and based around a tale of heroics. Such an interpretation fits the narrative. It could also be read literally as referencing a high-brow form of musical theater, one which Repo! mimics in form, all the while casting accomplished operatic performers like Sarah Brightman alongside celebrity socialites like Paris Hilton. Whichever interpretation is used, the film does not attempt to reconcile or apologize for its contradictions, but rather embodies them, “pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.” In doing so, Repo! lays bare the very contradictory nature of our relationship to body, self, and science and makes a literal display of discussions around organ transplantation I have here historicized, drawn to, perhaps, absurdist conclusions. The absurdity of such conclusions, however, is left for the audience to ponder.

Conclusion

Science fiction works, such as those examined here, become, then, Adorno’s critical work of art. The scientific culture of organ transplantation is critiqued for operating under an ideological and transcendent stance that aids in the commodification of the body and the subjugation of the self, along deeply colonial lines, fed through the deployment of objectifying, “topological” knowledge. As a means of exploring collective hopes, anxieties, and often deeply seated ambivalences toward scientific advancement in organ transplantation, this critique in science fiction runs parallel to historical developments in science as well as the cultural influence of those advancements. Through future as metaphor for the present, these works of science fiction position themselves both within and outside of the science culture they critique, allowing for the revelation of cultural phenomena, as indirect expressions of the human condition, to be inherently contradictory.

Donald Joralemon (1995) concludes his article “Organ Wars” by suggesting that “some combination of supporting ideologies” is needed “in suppressing the cultural rejection of a disembodied self” (p. 348), much like the combination therapy of immunosuppressants and steroids to decrease organ rejection following transplantation. As Joralemon himself points out, however, immunosuppressants (even in combination therapy) suppress but never eliminate the “nonnegotiable and indelible” organic boundary between “self and nonself.” Such a reconciliation of contradictions is the goal of the transcendent critic, the results of which, much like the use of immunosuppressants, is never permanently resolved. The science fiction examined here, instead, does not attempt to rectify the contradictions it reveals, but rather, embodies them in its revelation. In doing so, science fiction, as analyzed through the lens of Adorno’s critical work of art, reveals the inherently contradictory nature of social truths regarding our relationship to body, self, and the science thereof.