Servile Life: Subjectivity, Biopolitics, and the Labor of the Dividual in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go

Abstract

Servile LifeSubjectivity, Biopolitics, and the Labor of the Dividual in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go Roberto del Valle Alcalá (bio) Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go opens with an insider's appreciation of the labor performed by carers in the dystopian world of clones and enforced organ extractions (or "donations") described by the novel. Kathy H., age thirty-one and approaching the end of her protracted service as a carer (and, consequently, the beginning of the series of donations that will eventually have her die or "complete," in the eerie terminology of the book), proudly explains how donors under her responsibility "have always tended to do much better than expected" (Ishiguro 2005, 3). She is particularly emphatic about the way in which she has consistently managed to prevent them from getting "agitated." In her own words: "it means a lot to me, being able to do my work well, especially that bit about my donors staying 'calm'" (3). The implied equation here, one that will provide an interpretative key to the entire novel, is established between Kathy's sense of accomplishment, of work well done, and her fellow clones' acceptance of their fate. Thus, according to Kathy, what makes a good, successful carer is her ability to secure a state of docile passivity and acquiescence among her donors. Of all the problems posed by the novel, this is arguably the main one: what are we to make of this complicit investment by subjects who are themselves doomed to destruction in the bidirectional labor (of care and donation) enabling and leading to such destruction? Or, in other words, what are the processes and mechanisms whereby the brutal reality of enforced organ donation and eventual "completion" by genetically engineered semihumans is buried under a technical discourse of good work? It is precisely to such questions that I will try to provide an answer in this essay. [End Page 37] What is immediately striking about Kathy's sinister role within this social system of human harvesting is her insistence on the affective dimension of interpersonal relations (with her donors, friends, and peers) and on the construction or production of her own subjectivity. I will try to show how this is not merely a strategy of ideological obfuscation deployed by somebody who is heavily invested in a system of predatory extractivism but, more subtly and importantly, a basic component of the procedural logic on which the latter is based. Indeed, as a number of critics have pointed out, affect plays a determining role in this novel as the specific content of a rather sui generis immaterial labor.1 It is nevertheless essential to situate this turn toward affect in the new ostensive definitions of work available in the late twentieth century (namely in the fictionalized 1990s in which the narrative is set) within a precise analysis of the forms of production and accumulation of value developed by postmodern capitalism. Such an analysis will allow us to understand Ishiguro's novel and the ethico-political paradoxes it rehearses as a historically specific and still relevant case study. When Kathy suggests that, after so many years of care work, she has "developed a kind of instinct around donors" (3) that allows her to read their moods, to evaluate and identify peaks of enthusiasm and troughs of depression, she is actually uncovering a modulating capacity in care work to produce a certain kind of amenable subjectivity and even a transsubjective complex (an assemblage of carer and donor, we could say) that will ultimately maximize the cost-efficiency of the entire cycle of donations. For, after all, the fact that some donors manage to reach a fourth donation before they complete is implicitly related to the quality of the care they receive. Affect in this context is both the raw material and the resulting product, an intangible outcome of this expansive labor process without breaks or alternatives in which the capacity to feel and to endure through feeling is directly proportional to the success of the whole system. Yet, first and foremost, affect plays a central role in securing the carer's complicity, in creating that psychological environment in which her labor can be...