Animal Remains

Sarah Bezan, Robert McKay, Sarah Bezan, Robert McKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000506488
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria y naturaleza

The dream of humanism is to cleanly discard of humanity's animal remains along with its ecological embeddings, evolutionary heritages and futures, ontogenies and phylogenies, sexualities and sensualities, vulnerabilities and mortalities. But, as the contributors to this volume demonstrate, animal remains are everywhere and so animals remain everywhere. Animal remains are food, medicine, and clothing; extractive resources and traces of animals' lifeworlds and ecologies; they are sites of political conflict and ontological fear, fetishized visual signs and objects of trade, veneration, and memory; they are biotechnological innovations and spill-over viruses.

To make sense of the material afterlives of animals, this book draws together multispecies perspectives from literary criticism and theory, cultural studies, anthropology and ethnography, photographic and film history, and contemporary art practice to offer the first synoptic account of animal remains. Interpreting them in all their ubiquity, diversity, and persistence, Animal Remains reveals posthuman relations between human and non-human communities of the living and the dead, on timescales of decades, centuries, and millennia.

Part I Fossil Figurations

1 J.G. Ballard’s Fossil Imaginaries Apocalypse, Deep Time, and Deathly Life

Peter Sands

DOI: 10.4324/9781003129806-3

For Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, contemporary biopolitics is marked by a “culture of life” summed up by two broad assumptions: “life’s intelligibility” and life’s “ultimate and uncontestable desirability.”¹ Showcasing an “inability to think ethics and politics outside of life,” such a culture, in valuing above all the affirmation of this universalising principle, renders detractors of this impulse absurd (and even perverse): “We realise,” they note, “that to propose … that we might be better off being against life invites the accusation of being intractable or impractical.”² It is in response to such an accusation that J.G. Ballard, in an interview published in 1984, rallies against the perception that his fiction is “defeatist, pessimistic, entropic,” and allied ultimately to death.³ “It’s a misreading,” Ballard notes, “to assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty nightclubs, deserted airfields and the like, I am celebrating the run-down of a previous psychological and social order.”⁴ Rather, these images of the end of life harbour a sense of affirmation for Ballard, whose comments culminate in an optimistic proclamation: “Death as the end of self, yes!”⁵

Whether or not Ballard’s fiction can be said to be “against life” is a question this chapter poses in relation to the early novels and short stories linked in their depictions of the “end of the world.” Ballard’s visions of apocalypse—always enacted through “natural” forces, both unpredictable and inhuman—invoke questions now commonly discussed within discourses surrounding the Anthropocene: how can the human comprehend itself as an actor on a geological scale? How can we imagine a geological subjectivity that reconciles the impersonal, unknowable, and inhuman with the idea of the human? Instead of viewing Ballard’s fiction exclusively through this lens, however, I want to suggest that his work sets out an alternative imaginary for the human’s geological condition obscured by the terms of the Anthropocene. While the human is central to Ballard’s visions of apocalypse, the ethical stakes of this “event” do not concern the maintenance, reconstruction, or redemption of life. Rather, by characterising the end of the world with a sense of affirmative potential, Ballard throws into question the terms by which the concept of life is rendered meaningful (and for whom). Apocalypse, in this narrative mode, functions as a revelatory unveiling of the drives and desires that gesture beyond the world of the human from within.

Throughout the narratives under examination here, a recurring figure of this process is that of the fossil. Tied to the unveiling of life’s untold stories, fossils usually signify the logics of classification and order associated with the history of life. For Ballard, however, the fossil functions as an agent of transformation, enveloping the human within the vast evolutionary temporalities of its own prehistory. Presenting a reappearance of the human’s primordial animal origins, the fossil enacts an ostensibly decentring force, untethering the human from the civilising confines of the ego and enacting what Ballard envisions as the “end of self.” And yet, far from antithetical to the fossil’s ordering of life’s narrative, this decentring impulse defines the very terms by which life is given form.⁶ By staging the fossil encounter as a confrontation with the human’s own geological being, Ballard writes the human as occupying the threshold between life and death, itself embodying the animal remains of a paleontological history for which the human marks but a single moment. While this recontextualisation of human life offers a way to rethink the stability of the human/animal binary from the vantage of a paleontological (as well as geological) turn, it also functions for Ballard as a means for depicting a power that crosses from the biological into a manipulation of geological matter and mattering. In addition to tying together the human’s beginnings and endings, Ballard’s animal remains speak to an undulating discourse of species that bridges the boundary between bio- and geological worlds.

Inhuman Intimacies: Theorising the Ballardian Fossil

As markers of the intersection between geology and the history of life, fossils have received growing attention of late as emblems of anthropogenic catastrophe. Most recently, in his book Footprints, David Farrier performs a cultural history of an increasingly pressing figure within the Anthropocene imagination pertinent to Ballard’s apocalyptic vision: the future fossil. As a mode of diagnosing how the human’s presence has been written into the earth’s fabric, perceiving future fossils is a speculative process that involves imagining the human’s lived, material present as a “trace fossil” legible “to our most distant successors.”⁷ From the concrete masses of urban centres to the inexhaustible temporalities of nuclear waste, Farrier argues that the human, as it currently inhabits the planet, will be readable to a future observer, “written into the earth like speech marks around a lost quotation.”⁸ In one sense, the process of speculating such an observer encapsulates the project of the Anthropocene. This epochal designation itself conjures a geological lexicon within which the totality of present humanity is legible, its collective actions inscribed deep into the textual fabric of geological history. Of course, such a project obscures for any future observer the biopolitical formations and capitalist hierarchies that dictate the uneven levels of geomorphic force exerted by the supposedly universal anthropos.⁹ But Farrier’s powerful simile avoids this universalising impulse precisely through its alignment (however paradoxically) of the “legible” with the unknowable. The trace fossil, he writes, is an “accidental memory,” signalling a reality that is always necessarily “beyond our knowing.”¹⁰

Farrier’s point illuminates a central aspect of paleontological memory reflected in Ballard’s writing of the fossil. This is, namely, the conditional nature of the fossil’s claim to an epistemology of life. Far from unmediated artefacts, fossils—whether remnants of the deep past or echoes of catastrophic futures—reflect the conditions of their own emergence, providing an outline that must be filled in by their observer. In this sense, rather than solidifying a false consistency applied to the human species, the fossil often functions as a generative figure for thinking through the inconsistencies that come along with the memorialisation of life in the geological archive. For Jussi Parikka, fossils, as “the data that geology processes,” offer “only a fragmented part of a totality that cannot be discovered.”¹¹ Much akin to the effects of technologies of speed on our perceptions of space and time, fossils bring about a “disappearance of distances,” producing smooth and linear narratives of life across unthinkable time scales.¹² As objects that conjure temporalities that resist the boundaries of thought, fossils, for Timothy Morton, are hyperobjects, supplanting “forever” with the notion of the “very large finitude” that displaces the human’s perception of itself in space and time.¹³ Elizabeth A. Povinelli, in conversation with Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of the “arche-fossil,” shifts the power of the fossil away from the “thing” itself into a more affective register: the fossil is “something that feels like it existed before us and is (thus) indifferent to us.”¹⁴

Across these theoretical accounts, the fossil appears as a trace of a totality that eludes representation. As Povinelli suggests, such radical indifference to human processes of meaning-making can tell us something about matter broadly conceived: receiving its epistemological status only via the touch of its contemporary observer, the fossil marks simply “the latest object-event in an entire series of object-events.”¹⁵ Povinelli’s point allows for both the ancient and future fossil to be thought together as “things” which, to echo Jane Bennett, act independently from their human observers, moving across the categories applied to them by virtue of their own inhuman agency.¹⁶ One such category central to Ballard’s fossil imaginaries is that of waste. As Rachele Dini argues, “waste” describes a classification of a thing defined by its place in time: rather than a fundamental characteristic, waste is “a stage in the lifecycle of a thing, which is also to say, a stage that can pass.”¹⁷ In addition to emphasising waste’s temporal fluidity, Dini reads Ballard’s fiction as imbuing waste with a “disruptive” agency, returning always to unsettle “the totalising system(s) from which it has been expelled.”¹⁸ Building on Dini’s point, I want to suggest that the Ballardian fossil exerts a similar disorderly agency. Constituting both the inheritance of life’s history (the ancient fossil) and the possibility of catastrophic futures (the future fossil), Ballard’s fossils decentre the human insofar as they orient it towards both of these temporal locations simultaneously. The fossil aids Ballard in figuring not the human’s place in time nor power over time, but rather the human as time.

Rather than universalising the presence of the human across temporal locations, my intention here is to show how Ballard’s depiction of human fossildom produces a dynamic and multidirectional subjectivity, constituted between different temporalities and different ontological categories. Put differently, the fossil allows Ballard to depict a human subject caught between an animal past and an ultra-human future. Animality, in this view, is a central feature of human identity that both enables and is obscured by the human’s existence as a future-oriented being. Not only a figure of animality, however, the fossil also speaks to what Katherine Yusoff has suggested is the necessary centrality of geology to the ways in which we understand the biopolitical. In addition to representing periods of time, Yusoff argues that we should recognise geological strata “as planes of social production that both constrain and are expressive of relations.”¹⁹ Considering fossilisation as impacting this social field, Yusoff suggests the term “geologic life” as an expansion of the death/life binary assumed by normative accounts of the fossil, locating the space between life and nonlife as a zone in which subjectivities come into being.²⁰ Inhabiting this space, the Ballardian human is depicted as paradoxically indebted to its animal past as a measure of the possible expression of its futures.

Read thus, it is possible to interpret Ballard’s use of animal remains as cementing the human’s position as harbinger of environmental catastrophe, both product and producer of inevitable extinction events. While attending to this aspect of Ballard’s work, my emphasis is on the geological—and its language of inanimation, stratification, and death—as a discursive and mobilisable category. In doing so, I borrow Mel Y. Chen’s term “deathly life” to signify the application of the geological as a mode of subjugation and subjectification in Ballard’s fiction. Concomitant with the deathly status that Chen locates in the discourse of toxicity, Ballard’s fossil imaginaries mediate the human’s own inhuman nature through an application of the inhuman against those declared as falling outside the human frame.

“Unlimited Pleasure”: Eroding the Human in The Drought, “Now Wakes the Sea,” and The Drow...