ed, and then, perversely, the abstract form is made to stand in as the originary point; the multiplicity and complexity of the world is hence understood, as Hayles puts it, as 'fuzzing up' of an reality (1999, 12). If in the Enlightenment project the distortion of this reality, the monster, was understood as the colonial/racial/ sexual/class other, what is the fuzzing up of the essential reality in this new construction of the human? In the Enlightenment narratives that Shelley investigates in her novel, the other is excised, but in this new biotech story the non-human is entirely co-opted. The process of domination through assimilation is complete as the other is tamed. Pig valves in transplant patients or tissues grown with the aid of a cow egg or hamster eggs fertilized with sperm to test fertility or pigs spliced with genes are all acceptable in the construction of the new post-Enlightenment body of science because, in the process of the assimilation of the non-human, the hierarchical divide between it and humanity is sustained. The owning, controlling, patenting, and manipulation of what is understood as (as excluding humanity but in its service) is left unchallenged; the boundary between the monster and is secured; the notion of the as a well-defined category distinct and autonomous from the nonhuman is left unquestioned even as the production of the is enabled by the nonhuman. Unlike these acclaimed hybrids of modern science, however, the cow/human embryo does not allow us to imagine a world where disembodied entities are refashioned, manipulated, and mastered, which is why the experiment became such a high-profile event. On the contrary, this particular fusion, in its escape from the lab, forces us to confront the economic and social systems that are at play and that produce us-it forces us to see ourselves not as autonomous and masters of the universe but as interconnected in the web of the world. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 129 This is the place where Frankenstein and the monster start to mirror one another. The cow/human embryo is disturbing because it taps into a deep anxiety about capitalism's production of since modernity-the cow is a perfect example of nature as a product to be used, controlled, and sold. Fleshy, docile, domesticated, enslaved, injected with growth hormones and antibiotics, the cow is and it is only through a strict policing of the imagined boundaries between and humanity that we can return to abstract dreams of the perfection of humanity in the laboratory and, more aptly, away from own troubling creation-not the cow/human embryo-but as product and us, increasingly even if resistantly, as that nature.6 Yet, the very questions that are raised by the creation of the possible human-bovine entity are effectively shut down in the unwillingness to acknowledge the interconnectedness of life forms that allow for the use of animals in medical research. The desire to establish the immortal and absolute of man, be it through the soul, reason, or DNA, underwrites, as we have seen, the feudal, humanist, and posthumanist narratives. Humans must, in this logic, always work to free themselves and distance themselves from the animal, the body, the inhuman; and yet the more vigorous the attempt, it seems, the more thoroughly we become, like Frankenstein becoming the monster and the monster becoming Frankenstein, entangled with them. Godwin, forecasting West's attempts to immortalize the through therapeutic cloning technologies, wrote in 1798: men ... will probably cease to propagate.... The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years (1992, 871). This welcome state will come about, according to Godwin, as reason, in its triumph over the body, soon learn[s] to despise the mere animal function. The experiments that West's companies have carried out suggest reason's mastery of matter and the body and the possibility of immortality: now that we have these technologies in hands, like the ability to program an old cell back to the beginning of life, applying them to medicine is simple (West 2000, 3). But in West's lab, at the very moment of triumph, the animal produces the human embryo, betraying Godwin's hope of getting beyond the animal. In the logic of progress, there is a move away from nature, and yet just as we This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 130 | TERESA HEFFERNAN master it we find ourselves more thoroughly implicated in it and more inseparable from it than ever. West proceeds on the basis that he has cracked the code of life and that the applications of this new knowledge are straightforward: it's simply a matter of (2000). However, this process is never simple as Frankenstein discovers as he faces the repercussions of engineering the corpses' body parts. Frankenstein says that if father had taken the pains to explain to me, that the principles of Agrippa had been entirely exploded, and that a modern system of science had been introduced, which produced much greater powers than the ancient, because the powers of the latter were chimerical, while those of the former were real and practical; under such circumstances, I should certainly have thrown Agrippa aside, and, with my imagination warmed as it was, should have applied myself to the more rational theory of chemistry which has resulted from modern discovery (68; emphasis mine). But the chemistry teacher, who lectures, brilliantly, on the connection as opposed to the disjunction between the ancients and the moderns (cited earlier), perhaps makes a more accurate point. The chimera, the imaginary hybrid creature, is always the potential outcome of scientific inquiry as nature and the human are radically altered in the very act of experimentation. The hybrid of the lab forces us to acknowledge not only that as we know and write in terms we are being written by nature, but also that something is lost in the translation. Arthur B. Cody writes about the things we don't know about the genome, like why the number of chromosomes differs inexplicably among species-why the genome has three billion base pairs and the tiger lily has one hundred billion, and why the zebra fish has genes in number and type very similar to humans. Moreover, he continues, the current metaphors of building blocks, blueprints, and computers fail to capture the workings of the genome that seems to operate quite mindlessly. As Cody concludes in his discussion of the genome, everything truly about the process is utterly and even radically incomprehensible (2000, 22). When I asked my ten-year-old niece what she thought of the possibility of a bovine-human, she said that was fine as long as it wasn't used to harvest organ parts, and first-year students in my university composition course immediately expressed concern for this creation, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.17 on Thu, 01 Sep 2016 06:20:22 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms BOVINE ANXIETIES, VIRGIN BIRTHS, SECRET OF LIFE | 131 worrying about the fact that it might face life under a microscope and a life of ridicule. And one, imagining it as a potential classmate, wondered how we could continue to eat beef-asking, you wouldn't eat part of your friend would you? Unlike the newspaper editorials, Clinton, and the biotechnology companies, which replay the paradox of Frankenstein in drawing the impossible and absolute divide between the and nonhuman, these respondents implicitly seem to have understood the play between the terms. This then, simply put, is the difference in the understanding of hybridity. The biotech companies mobilize hybridity as if humans were safeguarded from it; hence is merely an instrument designed for our disposal in the pursuit of immortality. Critical posthumanists recognize that this violent differentiation between humans and paradoxically produces us as increasingly hybrid, as increasingly part of and produced by that other.