Not only does the denial of access to culturally embedded culinary practices cause a “slippage of subjectivity” into something else, but the food itself does not seem like food at all, eliminating a bodily need that was constitutive of individual identity and destabilizing the donor identity as it interrupts its biological processes. More than forcing different cultural standards on the Prakesh family’s consumption habits, Ginny has seen to it that they receive only nourishment that has been so mitigated by technology that it no longer resembles food in any “natural” sense at all. Rather than rice, fish, or potatoes, their kitchen is stocked with “multi-colored pellets” and a specialized “cooking device.” The kitchen itself, as a space highly productive of identities marked by difference, has been “dismantled.” Concerning this food-stuff Detsi-Diamanti writes, “Being constantly monitored and fattened like the proverbial lamb before the slaughter, the characters begin to lead antiseptic lives, eating multicolored pills instead of food, avoiding human contact for fear of contamination” (italics mine, 115), of which one should note the animal comparison. In this fashion, Ginny does not merely invest in her donor population, but rather erases their own domestic identity, and replaces it with the sterilized version suitable to her commodification of their bodies and organs, as she has ordered that the guard “cleans and swabs the entire area.” Similarly, in factory farm environments, animals are removed from any “natural” feed cycles and sources that they enjoyed in the wild or as domesticated animals on smaller family farms. Factory farm feed is usually nutritionally thin, being comprised often of all corn or some such cheaply acquired grain, a far cry from the hay and grain mixes or wild foraging—including insects for poultry—customarily comprising animal’s diets on small farms or in wilderness areas (Mason and Finelli 162). The grain itself is technologically altered as it is usually the product of genetically modified and/or pesticide treated agricultural practices (Mason and Finelli 166). The food is usually called feed, which is reminiscent of the term “fuels” used above for Om and his family to reduce the subject to a body that is more machine than human. This feed is usually heavy on protein, and supplemented with the practice of growth hormone injections, to allow for muscle tissue growth at an abnormally fast rate, in order to reach the proper weight for transfer to the slaughterhouse for meat rather than production (of eggs etc.) animals (Mason and Finelli 162). We find again that the Prakesh household seems to be subjected to similar designs. The fuel pellets that sustain them have caused rapid weight gain for Ma, for as Ginny says: “I can see the food’s suiting you, huh? You’re putting on weight!” (37). The gleeful tone of her voice, although she has no intentions we are aware of to harvest organs from Ma, indicates the insistence of the text that we observe their environment has been altered so that it may be conducive to the amplification of their bodies at the expense of their identities1. Further reducing the identities and bodies—two entities which seem to be more entangled the further this investigation of Harvest goes—of this unit of the donor population is the level of surveillance afforded to Ginny over her commodities by the “contact module” which has been installed the same day as the kitchen transformation. The identity of these third world subjects have been reduced via the uniformity of their food ways, amongst other things, erasing the cultural difference which traditional Indian cuisine, however bad Jaya’s cooking, allowed them access to in their isolation from the larger national population. Cohen’s observation that the introduction of cyclosporine in the 1980s leads to “disabling of the recognition apparatus so that operability and not sameness/difference becomes the criterion of the match” (11) is echoed in the “antiseptic” food supply we see provided to both these fictive donors and factory farmed animals regardless of species or individual preference. The technological-medical metaphor here can bridge the connection between food and immunosuppressant used for transplantation. In enforcing the consumption of undifferentiated food supplies, the receiver mirrors the process by which this latest drug erases difference as a means to commodity donor bodies for consumption. In doing so, “[d]ifference is selectively suppressed, allowing specific subpopulations to become ‘same enough’ for their members to be surgically disaggregated and their parts incorporated” (Cohen 12). The bodies are therefore reduced not physically but substantively none the less to the very bare life of a body, any body, when stripped of identity and difference, laying it bare as only a vessel or machine which contains organs commodified in this way for first world receiver to consume through eventual transplant.
The donors’ feeding habits are policed through the contact module where Ginny may appear at any time (and indeed it turns out has been surveilling them at all times we learn later) in order to enforce their adherence to the bodily regimens she has prescribed. One day the family eats lunch slightly past the assigned time and when Ginny appears she cries, “that’s too late for lunch!” to which Om replies, “it’s only ten minutes” (37). “You must eat at regular hours” (37), Ginny exhorts in response. Even incremental exertions of individual choice are met with disapproval. Attempts to exercise even the minutest amounts of autonomy over one’s own body will not be tolerated within this system where the body is not part and parcel of the individual life, but is divided from the whole self and commodified for consumption by another.
Animals, too, experience the reduction of their autonomous selves to commodified bodies and disposable identities under erasure in the factory farm model. The panopticon of the factory farm is designed so that no part of the creatures’ lives are private or left to individual agency. Michel Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, while not intended for animal spheres of life, has uncanny applications to the factory farm structure. He writes that, “the prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into the disciplinary power to observe” (213). By invoking Bentham’s model of an essentially self-policing prison, Foucault is attempting to demonstrate modern structures of power in which physical constraint and surveillance “corrective technology” are not necessary to remove the self-determination of free subjects, which can be done via disciplinary structures (“power to observe”). By this logic the Prakesh family’s bodies are transformed from integrated human beings into packages of organ-objects not by the physical force of their removal by the InterPlanta guards for example, but more by the surveillance of the contact module which enforces their compliance and erases their autonomy without ever touching them. Similarly it is not the physical abuse in a positivist sense which erases animal autonomy reducing them to meat or egg machines, but the industrial enclosure in which they are housed which severs their access to spaces where they are free to act on their own biological imperatives.
Never allowed to leave their crates, they spend their whole lives, often, from birth to death fed only by the feed pellets, water, and medicinal injections which those running the facility provide to them (Mason and Finelli 161). Although I am not here to argue that individual animals possess identity in the same way that humans do, it is not up for debate whether certain species can be considered to possess certain biological and behavioral traits such as their group dynamics, breeding and rearing habits, and the ways and types of food they prefer, for healthy functioning of their bodies leading to longevity and good quality of life, as well as the drive to carry out certain neurologically encoded behaviors, all of which is thwarted by the confinement and control of food supplies in the factories (Mason and Finelli 161). Although in the play we watch the process of bodily commodification play out, the economic realities of the livestock markets assume their existence as objects of bare life and perpetuate that notion through the perpetuation of the factory farming system. I would be fair to say that to look at factory farming in most “developed” countries now or for the last 75 years, is a look into the future of the organ trade for third world subjects. This, I believe, is one of the reasons the factory farm structure bleeds through or is evoked so perfectly in Harvest, because the manifestation of Padmanabhan’s warning about the future of third world bodies can be seen today in factory farms everywhere, but especially in America, which pointedly, is where (“North America” (4) she notes she has positioned the receivers). Because animals’ past under late capitalist globalization is humanity’s future, we would do well to pay close attention to the bare life of the animal subject in our culture, for their sake and for ours.
Thus far, our exploration of factory farming together with Harvest has focused mostly on the life of the subject whose body is commodified for direct consumption. Om, but really Jeetu, is a representation of the third world body commodified in an organ trade system which is really an industrial organ factory populated by human bodies-as-objects. Dismantled or appropriated whole, butchered into the choicest cuts of meat or skinned alive, Jeetu, Om, and all the animals of the meat industry suffer through erasure or dismemberment. Jaya’s situation and the role she comes to play, in the most science fictional element of the play, can be seen as coterminous with that of the production animal, always female, on the assembly line of the factory farm. Detsi-Diamanti claims that “In the play, the female body is constructed as the paradigmatic locus of colonial/patriarchal power. It is Jaya’s body which becomes the site of the East-West cultural battle, the site for countering the challenge posed by ‘globalization,’ by ‘Westernization” (125). And more than a gendered or cultural struggle, posthumanist scholar Maneesha Deckha explains that there is a connection between “people of color, colonized peoples, and nature,” in which all are linked with gender and animality through a process of “Othering” (533). This link between gender and the animal is most prominent or visual, Deckha adds, in factory farms because of the “gendered reproductive labor of female animals” which industry “covets, appropriates, and commodifies” (532). More than “simply” dismembered and destroyed, animals which breed new crops of livestock or produce the many animal by-products people enjoy suffer longer and in a more complex way than their male counterparts in the factory farming system. Dairy cows and laying hens are the centerpiece of this facet of the market, and it is the later, given Om’s repeated identification with chickens, which bares the most weight for our discussion here. As the play comes to a close, Jeetu is taken on his return from the “dirty” streets and Virgil (Ginny’s “true” self) is housed within Jeetu’s body after first acquiring his eyes (his mind is vaguely housed in some sort of virtual container somewhere else). Om has run back to the slaughterhouse thoroughly convinced he has somehow missed out on his due by not being dismembered for parts, and Ma has permanently enclosed herself in the videocouch where she has merged, mind and body, to a virtual reality until the self-appointed time of her death. Jaya, alone, and prevented from escape by a barred door which will soon have InterPlanta guards banging to get in, discovers in her encounter with virtual Virgil2, that her body all along, and not Jeetu’s or Om’s, has been the most fetishized commodity of all3. As Ayesha Ramachandran points out, “the organ market . . . is as much about sexual possession as it is about economic exchange” hence, in the end, “Virgil, reveals [that] the ultimate desire of the receivers is to impregnate Donor-women and perpetuate their own race” (167). Virgil, appearing in Jeetu’s body, presents Jaya with an offer to copulate “with” Jeetu’s body, now animated by Virgil. The intercourse, however, would be more or less inter than sex usually appears depending on how you look at it.
Rather than between their two bodies, the consummation will proceed via a device, more technological intervention into formerly biologically sacrosanct processes. Jaya reaches out to touch his image in response to his offer, and Virgil responds, “Ah-ah! Can’t touch! [Explaining,] The guards will make the child possible, Zhaya. It’s just a formality, a device . . . You know, an implant . . . I’d love to travel to be with you but I can’t . . . I’ll take you through the procedure . . . [to which Jaya retorts] I want real hands touching me. I want to feel a real weight upon me . . . There is no closeness without risk!” (88-9). In this penultimate scene, we see that the receiver’s main goal has been less a transplantation, and more a usurpation of the third world body, not merely of an organ severed from the body, already commodified, but the commodification of the very life process itself. The technological intervention here is not merely to control the body reducing it to commodity, but to control the reproductive capacity of the third world body, the last thing remaining to Jaya, her sexuality.
The connection brought to light here, by the final intervention by the receiver into sexuality places bare life more than ever at the center of this play. Agamben that given our increasing distance from the literal camp, the “modern avatars”