Atwood’s trilogy is set in a not-so-distant future that depicts a familiar Western country in transition, following an apocalyptic pandemic and ecological crisis, to new forms of species cohabitation in a post-pandemic world. The distinctiveness of the narrative arises from its rejection of normative conceptions of nature and the presentation of posthuman possibilities, including those that threaten the continuation of human life (Bergthaller,
2010). This includes pre-apocalyptic consequences of a capitalist culture “that sees nature, animals and humans as resources to be exploited by any means in order to sustain the current way of living” (Eriksen & Gjerris,
2017, p. 240), including through factory farming and biotechnological innovation.
Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy offers a discursive device that allows current reality to be problematized and offers insights into more affirmative and sustainable ways of relating to animal and ‘earth’ others. This possibility hinges on the way the novels challenge normative conceptualisations of ‘human’, ‘animal’, and ‘nature’, thereby displacing self/Other human/nature binaries (Ciobanu,
2014). While the trilogy presents an array of humanist, feminist and posthumanist characters, here we focus on a lead female character named Toby. We read Toby as an ethically empowering figuration who is “defined by…[her] relationality and outward-bound interconnections” (Lau,
2018, p. 347). Toby engages in processes of becoming
with other human and nonhuman animals (including insects), and ecologies to form a trans-species community in a post-pandemic landscape. Toby is placed in situations where she must determine how to act in response to ecological and social changes to make her, and the community’s, future more sustainable and ensure their survival. This involves choices related to consumption, including whether to consume other living beings, some of which are genetically engineered.
We begin the next section with an overview of the novels, followed by analysis of three selected ‘movements’ from Toby’s story. We define movements as dramatized events or moments in the narrative that involve engagement with ethical issues through interactions between human and nonhuman characters. We show how these movements enable imaginative thinking about human-animal relations.
The MaddAddam Trilogy and Corporate Cannibalism
The first book in Atwood’s trilogy,
Oryx and Crake (
2013), opens in a post-apocalyptic world that has been ravaged by a global pandemic, leaving few human survivors. The immediate cause of this catastrophe is the release of a ‘hot bioform’ (virus) by the disaffected scientist, Crake, whose plan is to wipe out humankind in a ‘Waterless Flood’ and replace them with a new-and-improved bioengineered humanoid species, the Crakers,
6 who are genetically altered to be vegetarian and cause less ecological harm.
The Year of the Flood (
2009) revisits these same events but from the perspective of an eco-religious cult and resistance group, the God’s Gardeners, whose members attempt to survive Crake’s Waterless Flood. The final book,
MaddAddam (
2013), explores the aftermath of the pandemic, where some remnants of humanity engage in tentative forms of interspecies cooperation in order to survive.
While the Waterless Flood is a catalyst for events in the story, in Atwood’s pre-pandemic world humanity has already arrived at a point of ecological collapse and mass-species extinction. In this dystopian vision of the near future, Atwood employs the trope of corporate cannibalism
7 in a satirical take on a familiar Western capitalist culture characterised by unsustainable business practices, deregulation and increasing privatisation, a growing rich-poor gap and rampant consumerism. As one character puts it: “We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone” (Atwood,
2009, p. 285). It is a world like our own where human, vegetable and animal life, including seeds, plants, animals and bacteria, are “caught in the spinning machine of the global economy” (Braidotti,
2013, p. 7), and genetic code is a source of capital. The novels introduce an array of strange new animal splices that disrupt traditional metaphysical distinctions between humans and other species, most notably, the pigoons. OrganInc Farms is the corporate architect of the pigoon project, the purpose of which is “to grow an assortment of fool-proof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and bacteria of which there were strains every year… The pigoon organs could be customized, using cells from individual human donors” (Atwood,
2013, p. 25).
Biogenetic developments are justified as the solution to climate change and harm to animals by elite scientists and businesspeople in Atwood’s narrative. Examples include the growth of monstrous animal-like bodies as a source of human food, like the ChickieNob: “vat grown meat that is a monstrous head-like orifice (without eyes or beak, and allegedly without the ability to feel pain) atop multiple bodies that grow only breast or only drumstick” (Canavan,
2012, p. 142, citing Atwood,
2013, pp. 202–203). Another innovation is the Happicuppa product, made from coffee beans grown on newly deforested swathes of land from “gen-mod, sun-grown, sprayed with poisons” bushes and using machinery which “kills birds” and “ruins peasants” (Atwood,
2009, p.221). The cannibalistic system accelerates, perpetuating “familiar patterns of exclusion, exploitation and oppression” (Braidotti,
2013, p. 96), despite awareness of its destructive ecological impacts. As one character explains, there are:
…more plagues, more famines, more floods, more insect or microbe or small-mammal outbreaks, more droughts, more chickenshit boy-soldier wars in distant countries. Why was everything so much like itself? (Atwood,
2013, p. 298)
Life-threatening connections between the industrial-scientific-military-food complex and the looming apocalypse become increasingly common as the story progresses. As natural resources become scarce, the corporate elite and those who work for them lock themselves away in Compounds, “gated communities…under the protection of the CorpSeCorps, a ruthless and totalitarian private corporate security firm and police force” Bouson,
2011, p. 11). The “non-affluent masses” are restricted to the pleeblands, slum-like areas that are over-populated and dominated by corporate-sponsored criminal activity (p. 11). Bodies are routinely disposed of in the pleeblands by local street gangs that organise kidnappings and assassinations and arrange corpse disposals, harvesting human organs for transplant.
The theme of bodily consumption is reinforced by “the secret of SecretBurgers [which] was that no one knew what sort of animal protein was actually in them” although this is rumoured to involve “running the gutted carcasses” of disposed humans “through the SecretBurgers grinders” (Atwood,
2009, pp. 39–40). Toby is a waitress at a SecretBurgers establishment, where she is subject to the extreme sexual and physical violence of her sadistic boss, Blanco, who sees women as possessions to be used and discarded at will. In her former life, Toby had a degree of class privilege, but after her parents’ death, in debt to the corporations they spent their lives working for, she is forced to ‘disappear’ into the pleeblands. As a result, Toby exists in an increasingly precarious position in a capitalist economy that renders her a disposable body.
Connections are drawn in the narrative between the consumption of meat, violence against animals and sexual violence against women, suggesting they are structurally related (Adams,
2000 [1990]). An example is provided by the Scalies, trapeze artists sheathed entirely in a body suit of shiny green scales who work at the club, Scales and Tails—where men from the “top Corps” go to drink, take drugs and pay to have sex with women who are dressed as fish or other animals. Mordis, the pimp who runs the club refers to Scalies as a “valuable asset” (Atwood,
2009, p.9); Toby’s sadistic boss, Blanco, refers to them as “[a] sex toy you can eat” (Atwood,
2009, p. 500). The disposable bodies of Toby and the Scalies are contrasted with the privileged “virile male adult [who is positioned] as a transcendent subject” (Desmond,
2010, p. 238).
The narrative thus describes a culture not unlike our own where “the use and abuse of animals is… deeply ingrained in the construction of human, particularly male, subjectivity… where man is taken to be superior to woman and animal, adults to children, where some animals are killed and eaten with impunity”, and some humans are accorded a status close to these animals (Desmond,
2010, p. 240). Human and animal bodies who signify difference are rendered disposable commodities in this economy through “being reduced to the use value of one’s body—to a source of labor power or sexual gratification or, in the end, to mere animal flesh” (Ciobanu,
2014, p. 155). This disposability is predicated on ‘sex-species’ hierarchies that privilege male domination and engender a “misplaced sense of superiority” over others (Braidotti,
2013, p. 77). As Braidotti (
2013) explains, “[t]he dialectics of otherness is the inner engine of humanist Man’s power, who assigns difference on a hierarchical scale as a tool of governance” (p. 68). Sexualised, racialised and naturalised bodies of those who do not ‘fit’ or can only aspire to the classical image of the knowing (white, male) subject, are relegated to a position of relative inferiority (Braidotti,
2013). Disposal thereby removes diverse others from ethical consideration.
Movement from Equality Towards In-Disposability
A possible solution to the interconnected issues of disposability and inequality is presented in the form of the God’s Gardeners, an eco-religious group with roots in deep ecology
8 and animal rights
9 movements. Difference, in their form of humanism, is a problem to be solved by granting moral and legal equality to those marked as ‘other,’ including animals (Braidotti,
2013). Hence, the Gardeners have strict rules about not eating meat; members take the Vegivows, foregoing the eating of animal flesh. The ethic of sameness which bans the eating of meat of others is evident when Adam One (a leader of the Gardeners) rescues Toby from Blanco and her life as a SecretBurger worker:
Toby was working the morning shift when a strange procession approached along the street… The procession drew up in front of the SecretBurgers booth… “My friends,” said the leader... “My name is Adam One. I too was once a materialistic, atheistic meat eater. Like you, I thought Man was the measure of all things! Yes – I was a scientist. I studied epidemics, I counted diseased and dying animals… But then, one day, when I was standing right where you are standing, devouring – yes! – devouring a SecretBurger, and revelling in the fat thereof, I saw a great light. I heard a great Voice…. It said, Spare your fellow Creatures! Do not eat anything with a face! Do not kill your own soul!... (Atwood,
2009, p. 48).
Adam One’s ethical rationale for not eating meat is based on human-animal kinship, a move which challenges the antagonistic and possessive relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ that informs structurally violent and exploitative practices of individuals and corporations that take for granted free access to the bodies of others and ecologies. Humankind’s unchecked destruction of everything good (e.g. nature) is a propelling force for the Gardeners’ actions: “We have betrayed the trust of the Animals, and defiled our sacred task of stewardship” (Atwood,
2009, p. 63). Consequently, their vision of the future is premised on restoring an idyllic Edenic state of harmonious co-existence between species and positions humans as responsible for the protection and care of the natural world.
Much like the myth of human exceptionalism that positions ‘Man’ at the centre of the universe, Adam One’s inversion of advanced capitalism’s promises (growth and progress) is still reliant on the binary division of nature (Animals, insects, ecologies) from culture and society (Humans, technology, knowledge). Any advance in scientific knowledge or technology is a sign of humanity’s ongoing deterioration. As Adam One reminds his followers, “The Fall was ongoing, but its trajectory led ever downward” (Atwood,
2009, p. 224). This ethical philosophy precludes the possibility of imagining alternative modes of engagement with the posthuman present, including the cultivation of affirmative ethical relations with those subjects who are neither entirely natural nor technological. For example, when confronted with the newly developed “hybrid bee,” a genetic splice with “micro-mechanical” insertions, the Gardeners’ label it an “abomination” and an “ethical problem” the resolution of which—and hence the bee’s right to care and protection—is contingent on determining whether or not it is “a true Creature of God or something else entirely?” (Atwood,
2009, p. 329).
While grateful for the Gardeners’ protection, Toby is ambivalent regarding their views, “She didn’t really believe in their creed, but she no longer disbelieved” (p. 116). Her experiences as a disposable body make her sensitive towards power hierarchies and inform her decisions, which are sometimes in opposition to the humanist logic of the male leaders of the God’s Gardeners. This comes to a head after the initial chaos of the pandemic, when Zeb, Toby’s partner and a leader of the Gardeners, decides the priority is to find and rescue Adam One and any others who might be with him. Toby disagrees and instead proposes to save Amanda, a former Gardener woman who has been taken captive by Blanco
10 and the Painballers and is being raped and tortured to death by them. Zeb argues that “we have to understand that it’s an either/or choice. Amanda’s just one person and Adam One and the Gardeners are many; and if it was Amanda, she’d decide the same thing” (Atwood,
2009, p. 399). Zeb’s statement invokes utilitarian ethics—defining what is morally right as that which produces the greatest good for the greatest number (of humans). While at first appearing reasonable, Zeb’s argument is based on a judgement about the relative worth of Adam One, who represents universalist ideals as a normalised masculine leader, even though he has no idea where Adam One is or whether he is even alive. In contrast, Amanda is positioned as a more disposable subject, even though her whereabouts is known and nearby. Toby’s gendered experiences as a disposable subject make her resistant to Zeb’s logic which renders Amanda less valuable than Adam One in the project of reconstructing humankind after the pandemic. Toby refuses the implicit hierarchical dichotomies underpinning Zeb’s universalist notion of sameness and sets out to rescue Amanda. This act of resistance cuts two ways: “it means both ‘I do not want this’ and ‘I desire otherwise’” (Braidotti,
2019a, p. 166). Toby thereby personifies an expanded, affective subjectivity that is more closely attuned to the posthuman by including what has gone missing—that which is treated as ‘other’ and disposable. For Toby, this means actualising her desire for a future where those marked as disposable do not go missing, a move which rests on an expanded understanding of affect that includes nonhuman life.
Movement from Individualism Towards Affect
Toby’s interactions with bees illustrate the move from “self-centred individualism” to an “enlarged sense of interconnection between self and others” (Braidotti,
2013, p. 50) that foregrounds an ethics of becoming animated by affect. Haunted by the trauma she has experienced at the hands of Blanco, when Toby is first taken in by the Gardeners she closes herself off and takes no responsibility for others. Noticing her fear, an older Gardener woman named Pilar invites Toby to learn about the bees.
Toby liked Pilar, who seemed kind, and had a serenity she envied; so she said yes. “Good,” said Pilar. “You can always tell the bees your troubles” … Pilar took her to visit the beehives, and introduced her to the bees by name. “They need to know you’re a friend,” she said. “They can smell you. Just move slowly,” she cautioned as the bees coated Toby’s bare arm like golden fur. “They’ll know you next time” … (Atwood,
2009, p. 199)
Pilar’s way of interacting with the bees acknowledges their ability to affect and be affected in turn. Instead of treating the bees purely as a resource for making honey, Pilar recognises their relationship as one of mutual reciprocity and interdependence; an activation of “two ‘becomings-with’” (Haraway,
2016, p. 25). Becoming-with signals the reciprocal co-shaping of a “new metaphysics of subjectivity” (Vint,
2012, p. 44) which does not necessitate the objectification or negation of the other. Without the lover of bees (the beekeeper), the knowledge and expertise of both species, their distribution of tasks and recognition of potential risks, what would remain would be bees, but not as messengers or companion species, as Toby begins to imagine them. This approach denotes a radical form of relationality that is attuned to what others, including the bees, can do. It suggests relational capacities are not confined to the human but are a form of mutual entanglement wherein each interaction is constitutive of the identity of each. Which is to say, every encounter “hybridizes, shifts and alters the ‘nature’ of each one” (Braidotti,
2006, p. 108). This re-configures the human–animal bond as grounded in affectivity and reciprocity, rather than the dominance and separatism that arises from positioning (hu)man over nature.
Affect emerges from relations with others, which for Braidotti (
2011) “means openness to others, in the positive sense of affecting and being affected by others” (p. 304). Insects like bees are radically other and thus productively destabilise us, if we let them (Braidotti,
2011). When Pilar dies, Toby communicates the loss, in words, feelings, and in the salt of her tears, which the bees respond to:
Several bees flew around her head, golden in their fur. Three lit on her face, tasting her. “Bees,” she said. “I bring news. You must tell your Queen. Were they listening? Perhaps. They were nibbling gently at the edges of her dried tears. For the salt, a scientist would say.
The bees on her face hesitated: maybe they could feel her trembling. But they could tell grief from fear, because they didn’t sting. After a moment they lifted up and flew away, blending with the circling multitudes above the hives. (Atwood,
2009, pp. 215-216)
As Toby and the bees interact, their bodily boundaries are blurred (they climb into Toby’s nose), through their mutual sense-making (smells and touch), and through their verbal (buzzing and humming) and non-verbal (collective flying) communication. For a moment, where the bees end and Toby begins is an open question. Toby is, ultimately, illiterate in the language of the bees, and her attempts to articulate in human language her inter-relations with the bees is, she realises, almost impossible:
They touch her lips, gather her words, fly away with the message, disappear into the dark. Pass through the membrane that separates this world from the unseen world that lies just underneath it. …Now, Toby, she tells herself. Talking pigs, communicative dead people, and the Underworld in a Styrofoam beer cooler. You’re not on drugs, you’re not even sick. You really have no excuse. (p. 336)
What matters is Toby’s recognition of her own interdependency with the bees as a relation with nonhuman others and the affects this generates, “on subjects and the world” (Braidotti,
2019a, p. 168). Affirmative ethical encounters like this one accentuate
potentia to resist and transform
potestas. Toby’s relations with Pilar and the bees enhance her
potentia and enable her to reimagine her own selfhood. These affirmative affects are not a “‘feel-good’ sort of sentimentality” on the part of the individual, “but rather a rigorous composition of forces and relations” that increases one’s “ability to take in and sustain connectedness to others” (Braidotti,
2011, p. 95). Toby’s becoming an ethical subject thereby involves “cultivating the kind of relations that compose and empower positive passions” (Braidotti,
2011, p. 95), especially those which increase her ability to connect with multiple others, including animals.
Toby’s encounters with other animals, however, are characterised by negativity in the form of an “arrest and blockage that ensue[s] as a result of a blow, a shock, an act of violence, betrayal, a trauma” (Braidotti,
2019a, p. 167). This can be seen in her initial interactions with pigoons, when she shoots one to deter them from accessing and destroying her garden. Toby’s intention is to protect her only reliable source of food, which is grown in the garden, in the aftermath of the pandemic but she is also tempted to eat the pigoon. However, affirmative ethics suggests “the subject’s ethical core should not be defined in terms of intentionality, but as its forces and affects” (Braidotti,
2019a, p. 136). Given that all subjects – human, animal and hybrid – are part of and entangled with the material world, any harm Toby does to others is immediately reflected in the harm she does to herself (Braidotti,
2018). Toby’s act of violence engenders negative effects not only for the pigoons, whose survival is put at risk as their numbers decrease, but also for Toby and her community, whose capacity to relate to this new hybrid species is diminished as a consequence.
Confronted with the task of survival in a post-pandemic landscape, Toby and the other human and nonhuman members of the community gradually forge links across species. The God’s Gardener doctrine that advocates the restoration of human beings to their purportedly natural role as caretakers and protectors of animals and ecologies is inadequate to this task. Not only does it reinforce the binary distinction between humans and animals, but it fails to acknowledge that “[l]ife lives on regardless of human pretensions and expectations” (Braidotti,
2019a, p. 182). This includes new forms of life that are neither entirely natural nor technological, such as the pigoons and the Crakers. Toby becomes aware of these complexities as she attempts to chronicle the community’s daily struggles in her journal: “She could go further, and record the ways and sayings of the God’s Gardeners for the future; for generations yet unborn…If there is anyone in the future, that is…[but] Maybe acting as if she believes in such a future will help to create it” (Atwood,
2013, p. 166).
Following Amanda’s rescue by Toby and Ren, the two remaining Painballers manage to escape, mistakenly freed by the Crakers, who are both non-violent and sensitive to the suffering of others, and so cannot understand why the humans want to restrain them. The community is also threatened by the pigoons who raid their garden in retaliation for the humans shooting and eating them. With their spliced human brain tissue, the pigoons possess a degree of intelligence and cunning that unsettles the humans. “‘Ever since we turned a couple of them into bacon,’ said Manatee. ‘Frankenbacon, considering they’re splices. I still feel kind of weird about eating them’” (Atwood,
2013, p. 28). The possibility of more generative forms of posthuman relationality, however, cannot be achieved by simply humanising the pigoons (or the Crakers) and granting them ‘rights’ on human terms. Rather this posthuman relationality is contingent on an expanded notion of interdependence with multiple others and the living ecological systems of which they are part (Braidotti,
2019a).
Because the human-pigoon relationship is characterised by harmful events and experiences (
potestas) there can be no return to Edenic innocence. For Toby, overcoming the pain of past encounters begins with reimagining her relationship to the pigoons, thinking of them not as objects or food (‘spare-ribs’ and ‘bacon’), but as subjects who possess agency. This openness to animal-others foregrounds a middle-space between humans and nonhumans and creates possibilities for new relations and values to emerge through embodied interaction (Braidotti,
2013). This takes the form of an alliance between the pigoons, humans and Crakers, who begin to work together to overcome the destructive threat of the remaining Painballers.
Toby’s community, which now consists of several species, is cautiously burgeoning. There is an inter-species pregnancy (human-Craker), alternative forms of communication (telepathy) between Crakers and pigoons, humans agree not to eat pigoons, and there is a possibility Crakers will learn to read. What might emerge as part of this new milieu of diverse posthuman subjects and changing bodies is neither self-evident nor pre-given. Instead it is an ongoing experiment shaped by immanent interconnections and the creation of narratives that recognise difference. “‘I am writing the story,’ she [Toby] says. ‘The story of you, and me, and the Pigoons, and everyone.’” (Atwood,
2013, p. 456). By the end of the trilogy, Toby’s writing has begun to intermingle with that of Blackbeard, her Cracker protégé whom she has taught to read and write. Toby initially worries that the effect of these technologies on the Crakers could result in “Rules, dogmas, laws… How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten to interpret?” (Atwood,
2013, p. 250). Yet language also functions as a tool of the creative imagination, a “thing of hope” (Atwood,
2013, p. 474) for the community. There is no Utopian ending; the group’s survival is tentative at best. As Blackbeard explains, “
Hope is when you want something very much but you do not know if that thing you want will really happen” (p. 355).
The ‘Book of Toby,’ so named by the Crakers, enfolds within it the possibility of a sustainable future that is characterised by multispecies flourishing. Ciobanu (
2014) identifies exactly this ethical component in the novels, stating: “[t]his, then, is the posthuman that Atwood offers. The posthuman is a new way of inhabiting our humanity rather than a new-and-improved version of the human” (p. 160). By weaving together different voices and stories—Craker, human, pigoon, bees, and soon-to-be human-Craker hybrids—Toby’s story denotes an ethical subject that is ceasing to be the conflict-driven, normatively individuated, detached human being and is instead in an immanent and continual process of becoming
with animal, insect, machine and earth others in what is ‘our’ shared territory (Braidotti,
2013). This ethical view emphasizes the role of the imagination in envisaging and enacting new cross-species relations.
The three movements presented above illustrate how posthuman affirmative ethics is enacted in posthuman contexts. They show how figurations can be used to imagine affirmative responses to the precarious posthuman present by breaking with traditional notions of the separate and sovereign human subject. In the discussion that follows, we further clarify the contribution of affirmative ethics by explaining how it enables revision of notions of equality in business ethics.