Genetic Engineering and the Fate of the "Social Factory"

     In the following scene from Andrew Niccol’s 1997 Gattaca, Vincent Freeman’s parents are looking to conceive their second child with the aid of genetic engineering.  Having forewent this when conceiving Vincent, his life expectancy was determined at birth to be 30.2 years, and his blood alone told the doctors he was ninety-nine percent likely to develop a congenital heart condition among other deleterious mental and physical dispositions.

            I first viewed this film several years after it was released, and I was more incredulous at the technology itself than with the ethics of the technology.  When it first came out, I was eleven years old and busy trying to change my nature to suit society’s dictates all on my own. By the time I encountered Gattaca, I was struck by the futility of my own and Vincent’s efforts to circumvent nature.  I did not consider the possibility that both Vincent and I were already perfectly ourselves.  Now, a decade later, and with the help of other thinkers who encourage the challenging of these ossified beliefs, I can’t help but reconsider the social, economic, and political conditions behind this fictional account, and more importantly, behind my own experience.

            Nick Witheford’s “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism” is an excellent foundation for reconsidering this film.  He begins by defining the Autonomist Marxian term, the “social factory,” as extending “class conflict [to] include not only waged labor but also all the unwaged workers, such as housewives, students, and the unemployed” (197).  With this premise, no one in society (either my own or the “futuristic” one Vincent inhabits) is free from participating in the capitalist system of oppression—we are capitalists, laborers, and/or reproducers of laborers.  Witheford goes on to explain that one way “capital” retains control of the people is through their physical bodies, and in particular, through “the biopolitics of reproducing labor power” (215).  Specifically, he writes, “Although genetic engineering is generally publicized a means of curing hereditary diseases, its main achievements are currently neither therapeutic nor even diagnostic but predictive … it offers a way, not of healing, but of targeting subjects with an alleged predisposition to costly disease” (Witheford  215). 

The film takes this hidden motive of capital’s development of technology and presents it as an overt and socially accepted means for ensuring individual greatness.  What this raises, and what Witheford so articulately exposes, is the question of what this technology really means in the lives of actual people.  For Vincent, his parents had the means and the choice to produce a genetically engineered child, and they chose not to for moral reasons.  They learned from that “mistake” and endeavored to have a more wholesome child the second time around.  So Vincent is portrayed almost as a tragedy, being born with social, physical, and mental “handicaps.”  But he is not alone, there is a whole segment of the population without the wherewithal to avail themselves of genetic engineering, so in being more and more likely to reproduce the physical and mental traits that relegate them to a lower class, they reproduce themselves as a class.  The economics of technology supports social and political oppression, and this is how the social factory works. 

Although contemporary capitalist society has not quite reached this degree of technological oppression, we are quite close, and the closer we come to believing that this is the path toward greatness and “freedom” from limitations, the farther we go from being whole people.  This, in turn, will only make it easier to further segment and separate us, pitting laborer against laborer, social being against social being, effectively precluding any unified retaliatory effort.

Witheford, Nick. “Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism.” Cutting

Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism and Social Revolution.  Ed. Jim

Davis, et al.  London: Verso, 1997.  195-242.  Print.