“If you are me, then who am I?”: The Human Clone as the Familiar, Destabilizing and Troubling Other

“Mightn't even you, in your heart of hearts, quite like to be cloned?”

- Richard Dawkins

"What's Wrong with Cloning?" Clones and Clones: Facts and Fantasies about Human Cloning

Attempts to foresee and gauge the future are about as old as humanity itself, with science fiction operating as a genre responsible for the proliferation of modern myths in our technological culture. A genre that, one could argue, has its foundation since the beginning of an ancient human culture and since the origins of recorded history. As a professor of 19th-century literature, Adam Rogers, has famously proposed, this is a genre that “begins with the voyages extraordinaire of the Ancient Greeks” (Roberts 7). Roberts has even gone as far as to suggest that the origins of science fiction might even go back about a millennium into the past to Sumerians myths of creation, “with the [ancient and] supreme god Marduk “cloning” mankind from the blood and bone of god Kingu” (Roberts 7). A genre that joins both literary themes grounded in realism and the everchanging developments of scientific discovery, science fiction sheds light on the relevance, role, and perks of contemporary and future automation and machinery while presenting ideas that have the power to influence the public opinion. Nevertheless, there are few scientific undertakings that have aroused so much debate and captured the imagination of so many as the possibility of human cloning. The triumph of scientists who successfully achieved animal cloning, culminating in the largely exhibited and over-exposed birth of the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell - Dolly the Sheep, fostered doubts and nervousness about the looming probability and ramifications of human cloning. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the cloned human is slowly, but surely, taking place as the contemporary “other” of our generation. Nevertheless, when it comes to the human clone and the double, the terribly binary definition of the “other” is a highly dubious and underperforming one. In order to maintain a strong and lasting sense of self, the proliferation of the “other” has been enforced through the course of history; be that as it may, the cloned human is unique in its capacity to crumble the foundations of selfhood and identity which the human relies so heavily on upon. 

The Industrial Revolution is believed to be the most significant event which brought about modern science fiction since the genre is so often seen as a response to ongoing technological and scientific developments. The 1800’s rapidly evolved processes of manufacturing and the production of material goods, which were once traditionally handcrafted, could now be produced by machinery - marking the early stages of semi-automation and along with it humanity’s (now familiar) dependence on technologies and scientific processes. Influenced by the Enlightenment mentality, these products of modernity and technological advancements represented “the spirit of adventure, innovation, and colonial expansion and the dominant ideology of it. As a result, science fiction became one of the most creative literary genres since then”. (Lu, 703). Nevertheless, more contemporary works influenced by developments in the 21st century, dominated by technology and machines, brought about more pessimistic attitudes on the future of human beings. “The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the dystopian turn of it in the West, and soon it has become a new trend internationally” (Lu, 704). Science now stands on the brink of unsettling definitions of selfhood and identity; thus re-creating the human. 

What would ensue when scientific development and technologies come dangerously close to bridging the gap between fantasy and fact? 1996 marked the year Dolly was born, and with her birth long gone where the days when one could read classics of fantastic literature such as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, or “Brave New World” as allegories about the double nature of one’s self or even as harmless tales about genetic replication. Dolly the Sheep brought about the start of a media frenzy that sparked the imagination of scientists, politicians, and scholars alike. Dolly’s introduction to the public eye was the onset of what would be a long debate concerning cloning, and most specifically, the possibility of human cloning; raising questions such as “is it possible to create medically viable human clones? Are there good reasons for cloning humans? Who would be in control of the cloning process, and who would be disenfranchised?” (Kuhlman, 81). The genre of science fiction has a long history of portraying artificially produced organisms. Works such as Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” or Ira Levin's “The Boys from Brazil”, or even television programs such as The X-Files have “envisioned societies confronting the “other” in the form of organisms that are not of woman born” (Klein, 137). These “other” often take many forms, be it cyborgs, androids, or, more close to this essay, clones; nevertheless, they never fail to disturb the harmony of their societies - wreaking disruptions and (more often than not) irreparable damages which thus allows for scorn between groups and misunderstandings. Much like Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, these works can be interpreted as “cautionary tales about the excess of technological hubris in the face of modernity” (Klein, 137). 

Cover for TIME Magazine. Notice the text on the bottom right-hand side corner. An interesting insight into the anxieties surrounding the possibility of human cloning.  

However, reconciling the figure of the clone as “other” is a task that requires utmost effort. Due to its identical similarity with the “original”, the clone goes further into the psyche and threatens to disrupt its selfhood. But, before one can recognize an “other”, or sub-human, one must ask: what is it that defines the human? One can trace modern designations of the human being back to the famed senator Boethius and Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas and their concepts (philosophically centered) of the person “individual substantia rationalis naturae”, aptly summarised by Laura Palazzini: “… all human beings are persons, or moral subjects (worthy of being respected), and subjects of law (worthy of safeguarding, in the strong sense, or having the right to life)” (Palazzani, 52). Categorically campaigning for the right to life of all humans, this theory was inevitably destabilized by Charles Darwins’s theory of natural selection, which earnestly challenged previously established doctrines on what it meant to be human. No longer could the world and the human simply be defined as one of God’s many creations. “Natural selection destabilized the traditional integrity of the species and remade it according to the immediate, situational logic of adaptation to the environment” (Dryden, 41). Faith and religion were challenged by this school of thought, alongside a fundamental understanding of the physicality of humanity. These major changes in defining the human are emblematic of much larger preoccupations and worries surrounding 19th-century changes in classifications of humanity and identity. Representations of subhuman or humanoid creatures/monsters in gothic literature and science fiction novels of the time (most notably, Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein) echo the very palpable, societal anxieties and understanding that the self was being radically challenged; and not just by a new type of “other”, but by an “other” who displayed an alarming similarity with the self.  

These fears and anxieties surrounding the changing selfhood of the 19th century are developed even further by the concept of the uncanny - a term oftentimes misused. “The German word “unheimlich” is obviously the opposite of the “heimlich” [thus] we are tempted to conclude that what is “uncanny” is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (Wagner, 546). How could the familiar possibly be frightening? The Heimlich conjures the homely, safety, familiarity, a sense of order, the bosom of the family. On the other hand, the Unheimlich encompasses the opposite; nevertheless, they are closely related. They exist within each other and are impossible to separate; something has to be added to the familiar (Heimlich) to make it uncanny (unheimlich); thus the unknown is contained within the homely. Freud famously begins his thinking about the uncanny with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story, “The Sandman”, as a model to explain his theory and examine uses of the double or doppelgänger’s. Hoffman’s short story, as pointed out by Freud, features a number of doubles such as Olimpia and Clara, most notably. But then, why are we so disturbed? What is it about the human psyche that reacts so negatively to certain kinds of replicas? There exist many explanations and theories yet, for the purpose of my essay, I will concentrate specifically on ideas surrounding identity and individualism and how the copy is a threat to human ideas of “unique personhood”. 

Clones call into question binaries concerning “othering” and the “us vs. them” mentality and, as mentioned above, complicate our ability to reconcile the other within the familiar. There exists a dichotomy within what is unheimlich because it encompasses both the homely and the alien in one body or place. Michelle Kennedy demonstrates this best by using Bram Stoker’s infamous figure, Count Dracula, as an example. “Count Dracula most frequently appears in the form of a human being. Jonathan Harker’s first description of Dracula as “a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long moustache,” represents Dracula as a non-threatening human (Stoker 47). These vestiges of humanity are crucial: in order to rid themselves of the other, Van Helsing and the other human characters in Dracula must kill a being that is, in many ways, indistinguishable from themselves” (Kennedy 117). Dracula’s human form “forges an identity whose correlation to the self is so strong that it can no longer be defined as other, but rather as pseudo-self” (Kennedy 118). The “other” mimics the nature of the self as a way of gaining both approval and assimilation into a more traditional human society, all thanks to the “pseudo-self”, which strains the conventional and long-established oppositions between self and other. I argue that this theory of the “pseudo-self”, proposed by Kennedy, is also applicable to the clone. Van Helsing finds it hard to kill Lucy Westenra in her sleep because she looks so human. She might not be a human clone exactly, but Kennedy’s example serves as a way of understanding the psychological break which clones produce. An insidious chain reaction is commenced when “original” is confronted with “copy”, thus initiating an identity crisis which is best described by Edmond Ortigues: “my other is my fellow and my fellow is my other” (Lemaire, 81). Throughout the course of history, humanity has long exploited the figure of the “other” in order to affirm a strong and secure sense of self; however, the cloned human is a unique threat with the capability to thwart traditional Western human sense of personhood, identity, and selfhood. 

These fears coerced with the tumbling of the confines between the self and other are not simply circumscribed to the 18th and 19th centuries. These are anxieties that we have carried with us all the way into the 20th and 21st centuries, as these threats to our sense of identity have remained a perpetual anguish. President Bush's speech on Senate to back his human cloning ban alongside the 2002 Council on Bioethics report on cloning is particularly aware of the threat the human clone poses on personhood, identity, and the self, stating that human cloning threatens humanity with “problems of identity and individuality” and that “advances in biomedical technology must never come at the expense of human conscience” (Bush). Algerian-French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, highlighted “the instability of the notion of ‘identity’”, stating that “no so-called identity is, or should take itself to be, ‘homogenous’ or ‘self-identical’” (Caputo, 113). Dolly the Sheep and the absurd technological advancement of the 21st century have continually anticipated the possibility of human cloning, which in turn has destabilized long-established definitions of humanity and the self. “Once again, a scientific discourse has disrupted the traditional Western view of what it is to be human, challenging people to accept, if only in a theoretical sense, artificially created beings and clones as humans” (Kennedy, 119 - 120). Be that as it may, artificially created beings, clones, and genetic replicas confront conventional perceptions of humanity, making their hypothetical acceptance into society as humans are all the more precarious. 

Actor Gary Oldman as Dracula in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie adaptation. Notice how, even though he is “other” by virtue of being a vampire, he appears human and thus blends in with the crowd. 

These figures, like Dracula, instigate feelings of alarm and consternation because they are the unfamiliar, foreign, and unexplained other, yet, a simulacrum of the self in every other possible way. “Should a clone come into being, he or she would closely resemble, or look exactly like, another human being. In a very real sense, the clone appears as the pseudo-self, an “other” whose inherent correlation to the self is so strong that the boundaries between self and other can no longer be delineated” (Kennedy 120 - 121). Despite being separated from this other, deep inside the knowledge that one and other are the same remains. It is precisely this lack of originality that complicates the preservation of a sense of self since the human clone acts as a direct hit to one of the basic conditions for qualifying as a person. Genetic replication in itself is a direct attack on the notion that one has an essential personal identity; additionally, the possibility to create numerous replicas of the same person serves as a dilution and fragmentation of a grounded sense of an original self - this is what Kennedy refers to in her work as the “pseudo-self”. As Freud puts it: “there is a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self” (Freud 940). These ideas proposed by Freud encourage the juxtaposition with the human clone; demanding humans to turn the attention inward and ask the question: “if you are me, then who am I?” (Kennedy 120). 

Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction film, Blade Runner - based on Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? - is possibly another perfect example of Kennedy’s “pseudo-self” hypothesis, and presents audiences with a subtle commentary on themes of how modern societies define humanity. The movie takes place in the year 2019 in Los Angeles, Earth has now become tremendously contaminated, polluted, and overpopulated. Living in off-world colonies, Replicants (artificial humans created by various corporations), perform daily tasks which prove to be too degrading and low-grade for the modern human. These replicants are physically similar to humans yet with a limited display of emotions, and can only be differentiated from one with a Voight-Kampff test which measures emotional responses. It is precisely this failure to differentiate from human and replicant which perfectly captures the “pseudo-self”, a blurring between the human and the non-human, the artificial and the natural. These boundaries which past generations were so diligent in establishing have now crumbled under the great of science and technology, which in turn raises another fear - if we are incapable of trusting ourselves from defining, knowing, and capturing selfhood, then how could we ever possibly know who or what we truly are? Possibly, through a sense of community. 

Late British philosopher, David Braine, suggests that humans have “roots in a community; proximately, the community of human beings, and, underlying this, the community constituted as a whole” (Braine 60). This has never been more clear than in the current century, where one of the main elements through which humans define their sense of selfhood and identity as we become more interconnected is through their place in society and their community. Even though the world of Blade Runner was faced with the issue of humans’ inability to differentiate replicants from themselves, efforts were made to maintain humans and replicants apart; thus, avoiding further confusion. The challenge which human cloning poses is a direct risk towards the destabilization of community roots. As Jacques Derrida points out: “if a community is too welcoming, it loses its identity” (Caputo 113). There exists a balance that humans will have to learn to navigate between welcoming the human clone or protecting identity and self. “If humans can be cloned, how will society and the community be constituted? How can the human be defined and how will traditional theories of self and other be applied?” (Kennedy 129). Nevertheless, community as a way to avoid the “pseudo-self” and perpetuate the othering of human clones has never been better presented than in Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. In a world where human cloning is indeed a reality, institutions like the borderline panoptic Hailsham (the stereotypical and idyllic English boarding school-like establishment where Ishiguro’s characters come of age) serve as physical sites where clones can be raised amongst other clones - kept apart from their “originals” and blinded from the cruelties that await them once they leave Hailsham and onto the equally separate Cottages. Ishiguro’s novel is an example that thoroughly depicts how the human clone is not a direct threat to the community, self,  and identity if, and only if, human clones are in part kept in a separate and submissive community of their own, incapable of forming an identity of their own. 

What does it mean to be human? This is a question that pervades Never Let Me Go. Ishiguro’s novel depicts a dystopian civil society through clones’ eyes; where they themselves greatly struggle to assimilate and comprehend the significance and magnitude of their own defined personhood. Never Let Me Go introduces an England which has been shaped and advanced by the eugenic fantasies of a post-Nazi-era. Hailsham “provides precisely such a shadowy territory beyond the admissible political life of the realm it inhabits and enables” (Black 789). As Black suggests, Hailsham constitutes a space that robs its students of their plea’s to any type of citizenship, political identity, or shared culture - these clones embody a way of life which (beyond their unusual creation) objects to traditional definitions of humanity. Ishiguro examines the use of science and technology of a society, yet he does not condemn them outright. Instead, Ishiguro immerses the reader in a society that embraces advances in scientific fields while shoving to the side other social issues - particularly the clones’ inclination towards art and creativity as a depiction of their undeniable humanity and selfhood. “While order may be necessary to a certain extent in society, personal expression, be it through art, literature, or even the love of another person through social bonds, make us uniquely human and become necessary for us to retain our humanity” (Klein 140). This is apparent to some characters in the novel, particularly Madame and Miss Emily. Later in the novel, through a conversation between the two ex-Hailsham educators and Kathy and Tommy, it is revealed that Hailsham was a special school in that it was a social experiment in raising more humane conditions for clones. The art the students were forced to produce was later displayed around the country as a way to subvert expectations of clones as inhumane. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this social experiment finally fails because the public, far from being impressed by the artistic expressions and achievements of the clones, begins to feel vulnerable and threatened by their extraordinary capabilities. Eventually, Hailsham and all institutions belonging to this social experiment are forced to shut down. 

“The design for the Vintage International paperback cover of the novel reinforces this vision of identity, featuring a close-up photograph of a young and attractive white woman whose face seems extraordinarily realistic but also glassily artificial” (Black 799).

Never Let Me Go “thus calls for what seems like a contradiction in terms: an empathetic inhuman aesthetics that embraces the mechanical, commodified, and replicated elements of personhood” (Black 786). While the “other”, the inhuman, and the clone are oftentimes used as an equivalent for the cruel or the unethical, Ishiguro is suggesting the exact opposite in this novel. Are we closer to the inhuman now? Is the “natural” inhuman? Is the “Normal” the new “Inhuman”?. The author’s view of this late-twentieth-century society plagued by a culture of mechanics echos Donna Haraway’s words in her seminal work, A Cyborg Manifesto: "we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs" (150). In the scientifically superior yet bleak world of Never Let Me Go, where human cloning goes beyond being a simple fantasy, to be remarkably human is to inevitably admit that oneself is inhuman. 

To conclude, diligently defined constructions of both selfhood and the otherhood, are, in many ways, depressingly positioned on a claim of artificiality which human cloning inevitably exposes. The human clone shows us how the self and the other are indistinguishable and not the binary opposites which we naively believe them to be. Human cloning would thus be the onset of a scary movement where the self would be entirely culpable for essentially altering its own essence. Suddenly, there would exist a new physical stage in which both manmade and theoretically based constructions of the self and the other (which were once long debated, discussed, and established) would be placed. The human would hence, in the words of Jacques Lacan, “shape themselves through their autonomous choices” (1289); thus facing a deep identity crisis. This identity crisis has within it the alarming likelihood to crumble traditional power structures that in turn spark a modern and complicated debate on the very definitions of humanity and the human. “The question of opening oneself to difference, to the other, will always come back to the gift, to trumping greed with generosity, to breaking the self-gathering circle of the same with the affirmation of the other” (Caputo 116). Jacques Derrida’s words leave behind an interesting question pertaining to this issue: are human societies both prepared and capable of accepting the human clone into society without losing sight of their original community and identity? There are many feasible answers to this question; nevertheless, it is increasingly and eerily clear that the human clone would create one of the excellent threats to human identity.