Bollinger's Farm Essay: Duality Between Cooperation And Competition

My paper analyzes the concept of a duality between cooperation and competition and how it fails to apply to “Rogue Farm.” My motive in this paper is: how can Bollinger’s two-sided notion of selfhood be modified to apply to the characters in “Rogue Farm” who belong on a spectrum rather than a duality between cooperation versus competition, symbiogenesis versus Darwinism, and feminine versus masculine? This is my motive because I find it intriguing that there is no distinct line between humans and posthumans, and I hope to stress the importance of the gray area between the two by looking at the farm and Maddie in the story. My tentative thesis (which is still highly open to revision) is: By looking at the spectrum of posthuman characters in “Rogue Farm” through Bollinger’s idea of cooperation versus competition, we can see that dualities may fail to adequately explain a nuanced world of post and transhumanism; this necessitates a new understanding of characters in science fiction literature in terms of a spectrum from
To establish what I refer to when I mention posthumanism or transhumanism, I use evidence from Ferrando’s article on the different schools of thought in posthumanism. Regarding “Rogue Farm,” I specifically note how the farm is viewed by Joe, in order to show that it is an example of the Other, whereas Maddie is treated like an ordinary human, even though her existence has been enhanced by the technology that lets her upload and download her consciousness. I use these examples to show that neither Maddie nor the farm, and most certainly not the combination of the two, can fit into the dichotomy that Bollinger creates. To supplement my argument, I bring in evidence from Margulis’s text, since it is the original source of Bollinger’s