Between Words, Numbers, and Things: Transgenics and Other Objects of Life in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddams

Abstract

In her MaddAddam trilogy, Canadian author Margaret Atwood profoundly critiques humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism by focusing on the instrumentalization of life in transgenics and critical theological and ecological discourses. Atwood, I contend, writes speculative fictions that challenge speculative capital's monetization of the elements of life. Speculative fictions envision unrealized future scenarios; in this regard, they share a similar strategy to speculative capital, the very forces whose fictions have become our realities. I argue that Atwood opposes life becoming rendered into an algorithmic game, a complex calculation that generates automated reasoning, and instrumentalizes attention to control life. Next, I elucidate how Atwood problematizes claims of resistance to instrumentalization and power by religious and ecological discourses by demonstrating that nature, God, and bodies become tools for enfiguring complex processes that exceed the limits of human knowledge. Atwood proposes thinking life ontologically as morphogenesis, thereby frustrating life's instrumentalization by the biotechs.