Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture

Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Essi Varis, Sanna Karkulehto, Aino-Kaisa Koistinen, Essi Varis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429516191
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire et nature

The time has come for human cultures to seriously think, to severely conceptualize, and to earnestly fabulate about all the nonhuman critters we share our world with, and to consider how to strive for more ethical cohabitation. Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture tackles this severe matter within the framework of literary and cultural studies. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the various ways actual and fictional nonhumans are reconfigured in contemporary culture – although, as long as the domain of nonhumanity is carved in the negative space of humanity, addressing these issues will inevitably clamor for the reconfiguration of the human as well.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/reconfiguring-human-nonhuman-posthuman-literature-culture-sanna-karkulehto-aino-kaisa-koistinen-essi-varis/e/10.4324/9780429243042, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Part 1

Toward Posthumanist Literature and Posthumanist Reading

1 On the Possibility of a Posthuman/ist Literature(s)

Carole Guesse

After a 2015 conference speech entitled “Posthumanist Literature?” Stefan Herbrechter, author of several articles and monographs on posthumanism and the posthuman, was asked to name a novel that was, according to him, posthuman. He answered that he had not found any posthumanist literature yet, that “it would be literature written by stones […] or based on animal traces”. This answer epitomizes some of the main issues regarding the scholarship on posthumanism and the posthuman: on the one hand, “posthumanism” and the “posthuman” are sometimes confused and used interchangeably;¹ on the other hand, such understanding of the posthuman as a biological other (stones, animals) is incomplete. In their Post- and Transhumansim: An Introduction, Ranisch and Sorgner (2014, 8) indeed insist upon the plurality of this figure: “there is no commonly shared conception of what posthumans are, and visions range from the posthuman as a new biological species, a cybernetic organism, or even a digital, disembodied entity”. Acknowledging this plurality is the only way to cope with the variety of (sometimes contradictory) writings dedicated to posthumanism and the posthuman.

Clearly, the issue of posthuman and posthumanist literatures remains debatable. This chapter reassesses the possibility of such literatures with, on the one hand, a clarification of the concepts of posthumanism and the posthuman, and, on the other hand, a methodology based upon literary and communication theories. Precisely, this study dissects the concept of “literature” basing itself on Paul Ricœur’s understanding of Roman Jakobson’s communication theory and then discusses the possibility for these various aspects of literature to be posthuman or posthumanist. As an illustration, it also uses The Possibility of an Island (2005) by Michel Houellebecq, a novel in which genetically enhanced clones live secluded lives, spend their time reading and commenting on their ancestors’ autobiography, and sometimes, consequently, tell a bit of their own story. By contemplating the possibility of posthuman and posthumanist literatures, this chapter considers whether posthumanism and the posthuman can serve as efficient and meaningful analytical tools for literary analysis, and vice versa: namely, whether a literary perspective can provide new insights on posthumanism and the posthuman.

Posthuman(s) and Posthumanism(s)

Intuitively, the posthuman is a figure born from the concerns over what might happen to humankind now that technology provides ways of modifying, enhancing, or even wiping out humans. Economic, social, environmental, and technological upheavals have given humans reasons to anticipate – whether hopefully or fearfully – times when humankind would no longer be what it used to be. While the possibility of modifying and enhancing the human body has been conceivable since the advent of genetics in the early twentieth century, the launch of the first atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 forced most thinkers to contemplate the possible destruction of humankind. The posthuman epitomizes those hopes and fears, and has prompted several discourses over the last few decades that are optimistic, pessimistic, or critical toward the use of technology on the human body.

Transhumanists are a group of scholars and scientists who adopt an optimistic attitude toward technology since “[t]ranshumanism affirms the use of techniques to increase the likelihood of bringing about the posthuman” (Sorgner 2014, 30).² The technophobics (or “techno-conservatives”), for their part, do not form a group as established as the transhumanists, although Francis Fukuyama is often considered one of their most famous representatives, with his book defending the human nature (Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution 2002) and his article defining “Transhumanism” (2004) as one of the world’s most dangerous ideas. Lastly, between these two ideologically opposed discourses stands posthumanism, a critical movement as plural as the posthuman itself.

In the fields of philosophy and cultural theory, posthuman characters have often leaned toward the abstract and the metaphorical, such as in Donna Haraway’s 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto”, in which she uses a posthuman character – the “cyborg” – partly to discuss women’s condition in the late twentieth century. Many scholars consider Haraway’s writings to be the cradle of the sociological and philosophical trend labeled “posthumanism”,³ especially with the following quotation: “Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines” (Haraway 2004, 11). This overcoming of traditional distinctions is precisely the focus of Stefan Lorenz Sorgner (2014, 32) when he defines posthumanism:

Posthumanism represents the attempt to get rid of categorical dualities within any type of judgment, as it is being regarded as most plausible that thereby the complexity of the world is grasped best within propositional form.

Posthumanists therefore have a different understanding of “posthuman”, especially since Katherine Hayles’s (1999, 291) famous “we’ve always been posthuman”, which Sorgner (2014, 33) reformulates as “we have always been dependent on technologies and there is no clear cut categorical distinction between nature and culture, genetic and environmental influences or nature and technology”. This chapter, however, considers that the posthuman is primarily and more generally a figure, a character whose interpretation changes according to the discourses (transhumanism and posthumanism, amongst others) that use it.

Simultaneously, other scholars, including Rosi Braidotti, situate the origin of posthumanism in the French anti-humanism of the 1960s, promoted by Michel Foucault and his “Death of Man”, which was theorized in The Order of Things (1966). Braidotti (2013, 23) explains that anti-humanists reject “the implicit Humanism of Marxism, more specifically the humanistic arrogance of continuing to place Man at the centre of world history”. To posthumanists, the outdated concept is humanism and anthropocentrism, that is to say humankind’s exceptionalism and central position in a system of values that is criticized for being exclusively Western rather than universal. According to Braidotti, posthumanist theory can develop in two directions: posthumanism and post-anthropocentrism. These currents undermine the supremacy of Man, respectively, as “white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit and a full citizen of a recognized polity” and as a “hierarchical, hegemonic and generally violent species”. This supremacy is held, in the first case, against “sexualized and racialized others”, that is, women and non-whites, and in the second, “naturalized others”, such as “animals, insects, plants and the environment” (Ibid. 65–66).

However, the overwhelming majority of posthumanist writings actually discuss issues related to Braidotti’s so-called “post-anthropocentrism”, which somehow questions the relevance of her categorization. Moreover, as Ranisch and Sorgner (2014, 8) explain, such attitude of deconstruction was already part of postmodernism; posthumanism indeed perpetuates this critical movement, yet with “a specific focus on (emerging) technologies”. This chapter retains this emphasis on technology for posthumanism as well as the posthuman; a posthuman can therefore be a (bio)technologically enhanced being but not an actual organic nonhuman species such as animals and plants. One must acknowledge, however, that the posthuman is not necessarily a futuristic speculative figure such as a cyborg, a mutant, or a robot. Many thinkers indeed consider that some of the already-existing (bio)technologies – for example, surgical transplants, prostheses, neuropharmacology, or the ubiquitous devices connecting us to the Internet – are already turning humans into posthumans.

Literature and Its Constituents

Such a terminological clarification is the first step in this investigation on the possibility of posthuman/ist literature(s). The next step is the definition – and in this case the dissection – of the concept of “literature” itself, which has never ceased to prompt interrogations and theories since the Antiquity, resulting in an unfathomable amount of writing to cover, should one aim for exhaustiveness. For the sake of conciseness, this chapter bases its reflection on Jakobson’s “constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication” (1960, 353), which were schematized as follows (Figure 1.1).

Paul Ricœur has noted that this model could not fully apply to literature since it is an indirect mode of communication (Vultur 2011, 247). The “addresser” and the “addressee” are not in physical contact and thus do not share the same socio-historical context, which results in the duplication of contexts, the author’s and the reader’s, which creates a discrepancy in the understanding of the “message”. Moreover, literature features “various possible enunciative agents”: the “addresser” is not only the empirical author but also the narrator, who can be the implied author, an omniscient narrator, or a character. Similarly, the “addressee” is not only the empirical reader but also the narratee, who can be an implied reader or a character (Hébert 2011).⁴ The “message” is, in this literary context, the narrative but also the story that this narrative features,⁵ while the “code” is traditionally written language, even though many works feature other “codes” – for example, images or, in the case of digital literature, videos. Similarly, the “contact” is likely to be a book, but not in all cases, as demonstrated below. While Jakobson used his model to explore the relationship between the “message” and each of the six categories, this study uses its literary version to explore the validity of each factor when modified with the adjectives “posthuman” or “posthumanist”.

In “Posthumanist Literature?” Herbrechter considers modalities to the realization of posthumanist literature: on the one hand, it should go beyond the limits of language, “a primary constituent of human nature” (Garber qtd. in Herbrechter 2015, 2), which makes literature deprived of human language and human agency quite unlikely. On the other hand, literature is declining in favor of a “new media and virtual reality technology and might therefore be no longer at the forefront of cultural change and innovation” which renders “the phrase ‘posthumanist literature’” contradictory (Herbrechter 2015, 5–6). While Herbrechter (2015, 8) considers posthuman literature as purely thematic – the posthuman only being able to influence, according to the framework developed earlier, the factor of the story – he apprehends posthumanist literature according to several factors – language, context, and book – but eventually acknowledges the impossibility for the concept to exist. His understanding of posthumanism implies that the human cannot play any part in the process of creating posthumanist literature, which turns this concept into a theoretical dead-end based on an apparently unsolvable contradiction. The purpose of this chapter is to overcome this dead-end by reconsidering posthumanist and posthuman literatures based upon a clearer and stronger theoretical and literary background.

Figure 1.1 Jakobson’s “constitutive factors” in speech events and any acts of verbal communication (Jakobson 1960, 353).

Production and Reception Contexts

As mentioned, literature is an indirect mode of communication; this indirectness implies that the context of writing and the context of reading differ in terms of both time and place. The Possibility of an Island creates a mise en abyme of this indirectness: Daniel, a late-twentieth or early twenty-first-century stand-up comedian, writes his autobiography, each chapter of which is followed by a comment from Daniel’s clone (first Daniel24, then, when the latter dies, Daniel25), who reads this autobiography centuries later. The discrepancy between Daniel’s context and that of his clones – a post-cataclysmic future where humankind is on the verge of extinction – is, of course, central to the plot: Daniel was asked to write his autobiography in order to pass his memories on to his successive clones, but the 24th and 25th clones’ context of reading is so different from Daniel’s that they hardly understand and sympathize with their ancestor. The remaining humans have indeed returned to a primitive, inarticulate, and tribal state of life, thus preventing understanding between them and the clones, who almost regard them as animals:

I simply consider them to be slightly more intelligent monkeys, and, for this reason, more dangerous. There are times when I unlock the fence to rescue a rabbit, or a stray dog; but never to bring help to a human.

(Houellebecq 2005, 17)

Moreover, the clones live alone and secluded in their homes, with the Internet as their only means of communication with other clones, which makes this 2005 novel rather visionary in the way it echoes the current importance of social networks. Houellebecq’s context of writing was already highly technological – he was himself a computer engineer – and the role of technology in life and society is only likely to increase over the next decades. As mentioned, technology and its achievements are precisely the focus of the theories on posthumanism, and even more so those on the posthuman. Whether the author or the reader of a literary work is situated in a posthuman context depends on how enthusiastic and optimistic one is about current technologies. Some may indeed consider that the current ubiquity of technology is a sign that we nowadays live in a posthuman context. In parallel, given the increasing questioning of human exceptionalism that the last three decades have featured, there is no doubt that they can be qualified as posthumanist.

Speculating about posthuman and posthumanist contexts of literary production and reception is hardly possible without alluding to the people living in this context: a posthuman or posthumanist context of writing would be a context in which writers are, respectively, posthuman or posthumanist. Similarly, the possibility of such a context of reading entails discussing the ...