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Your Loss Is Their Gain: The Corporate Body and the Corporeal Body in Richard Powers's Gain

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 54; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00111619.2010.537398

1939-9138

Ralph Clare,

Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics

Abstract This essay explores the inverse relationship between the corporate body and the corporeal body in Richard Powers's Gain. The novel's careful anatomy of corporate and American history demonstrates that as the corporation (considered a “person” by law) gains rights, the individual is stripped of them. Notwithstanding the novel's fantasy of a sovereign subject able to resist this biopolitical incorporation, Gain makes it clear that in the neoliberal age the corporate body has narrowed its “responsibility” to increasing shareholders' profits, while the subject's responsibility for her newly “privatized” body has expanded with troubling implications. Keywords: postmodernismRichard Powersneoliberalismmultinationalscorporate historybiopower Notes 1Admittedly, establishing some kind of evolutionary chart—from human to posthuman—risks reproducing a similarly racist, or in this case “speciest,” system of classification of “mankind” such as arose in nineteenth-century European pseudo-scientific discourse. This is surely the warning Philip K. Dick registers in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in which he suggests a similarity of the rogue androids' position in postapocalyptic Earth to that of nineteenth-century slaves in America. 2Norris, of course, describes the Trust as an octopus, a Leviathan, and a Colossus in The Octopus. Justice Louis Brandeis, in a 1933 Supreme Court decision, called corporations “Frankenstein monsters” (qtd. in Bakan 19). Surely, Atlas could be added to this list, as Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged suggests that creative entrepreneurs are akin to the mythical Titan holding up the world (which in a capitalist society they surely are). From corporeal beings-entrepreneurs, CEOs, etc.—to the corporate body in which they function, and without which their abilities would be severely limited in today's world (whether a Bill Gates or a Ken Lay), it is not too much of a stretch to see such figures in metonymic relationship to corporations. 3It would not be too far out of Nantucket to suggest that Melville's Moby-Dick, that most famous of Leviathan novels, finds its true Leviathan in another boat, the Pequod itself, which, as earlier twentieth-century critics have pointed out, can be seen as a microcosm of America in all its multifarious parts (or an ideological construction of early American nationhood, as clearly issues of race, ethnicity, and gender prove these critics' microcosm to be drastically shortsighted). The Pequod, however, is also a kind of corporation in this respect, from its initial economic launching as a player in the whaling industry, to its owners and investors, CEO and executive officers, to its middle management and even “janitorial” staff. Its risk-taking CEO, Ahab, drives his “ship” to ends even the ship's owners (board members) and investors would balk at. The capitalist crash, like Ahab's fate, can and cannot be avoided. Of course, Moby-Dick predates the limited liability corporation, instead being concurrent with its forerunner, the joint-stock company. For an excellent cultural-materialist reading of labor, capital, and the marketplace as it relates to Melville's use of language in the novel, see Paul Royster's essay “Melville's Economy of Language” in Ideology and Classic American Literature. 4The recent “sub-prime” mortgage crisis underscores the perpetuation of the “ideology” of home ownership (Harvey, “Interview” 38–39). As an ideology, such a vision of owning one's home involves predatory lending practices and the capitalist myth that “owning” a home is an investment that will always pay off in the future (and is always better than renting): either you have your “own” home or you can sell it for profit later. Thus, in our current short-term-profit–oriented system, “flipping” houses has become immensely popular. The housing market is just that, a market, and thus is rife with an ideology that taps into America's collective imagination of home ownership that arose post-World War II, when a new suburbia, GI bill, and postwar economic boom led to a record number of home owners in the U.S. As Kim McQuaid writes, “[i]n the 1930s, only about 45 percent of U.S. families owned their homes, a percentage almost unchanged since the 1890s […]. Not until the late 1940s did over half of all American families become home owners. By 1960, that number had risen to 60 percent; and from 1970 to 1993, to about two-thirds” (80). With such visions and desires to “own” assets and investments, people are easily given credit where credit, in stauncher financial times, would not be due. In short, the cliché “home is where the heart is” might be better subscribed to than the belief that “home is where the investment is.” More and more, “homes” have become “houses,” and houses are strictly commodities. Or, as David Harvey puts it, “it turns out that housing finance is not that safe—it was destined to run into trouble” (“Interview” 40). 5Horizontal integration, companies merging with or swallowing up other companies, leads most obviously to monopoly—the state all corporations, despite their espousal of the “free market,” aspire to. However, government trust-busting is a danger, and vertical integration (the commanding commodity chains leading to what a company produces) is a way of keeping costs and prices down and controlling the market without “monopolizing” in the horizontal sense. Clare's vertical integration is mentioned by Powers (219). 6Corporations, after gaining the rights of the individual under the Fourteenth Amendment, have benefited from legal decisions mainly between 1880 and 1900—the so-called Gilded Age—or since the late 1970s, when transnational corporations sowed their oats across the globe and cemented their constitutional equivalence to individuals. Legal scholar Carl Meyer explained, in the March 1990 Hastings Law Journal, “Twenty years ago the corporation had not deployed the Bill of Rights provisions successfully […] as an historical matter, the Supreme Court only recently conferred Bill of Rights guarantees on corporations.” (Court 29)