The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies, Volume II

P. Cefalu, G. Kuchar, B. Reynolds, P. Cefalu, G. Kuchar, B. Reynolds

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137351043
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137351050
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This companion volume to The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive exemplifies the new directions in which the field is going as well as the value of crossing disciplinary boundaries within and beyond the humanities. Topics studied include posthumanism, ecological studies, and historical phenomenology.

Part I
Posthumanism

1

“Hello Everything”: Renaissance/Post/Human

Julian Yates

Before the act or the word, the telephone. In the beginning was the telephone. We can hear the telephone constantly ringing, the coup de téléphone which ... sets going within itself this yes ... the telephonic yes ... marking, simply, that we are here, present, listening, on the end of the line, ready to respond but not for the moment responding with anything other than the preparation to respond (hello, yes: I’m listening, I can hear that you are there, ready to speak just when I am ready to speak to you).

Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone” (1984)¹

There is no off switch to the technological. REMEMBER: When you’re on the telephone, there is always an electronic flow, even when that flow is unmarked ... To the extent that you are always on call, you have already learned to endure interruption and the ... click.

Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book (1989)²

My aim in this essay is to say “yes” to the posthuman, “yes,” that is, to whatever live wire or stimulus may be said to animate its call, a call that comes through on all frequencies, that floods all channels, with news and noise of the crowded commons of being and the revelation of emptiness at the constitutive (non-) core of the human. This revelation, though it hardly comes as a surprise, might be said to describe the trajectory that the title to this volume of essays invites readers to trace: from metaphysics to biophysics. Though that trajectory might be understood already to constitute a Mobius Strip in which questions of metaphysics as they have traditionally been posed within the humanities turn out, all along, to have been a reduced form of inquiry into a general physis that knows no stable boundaries between kinds of beings: animal, plant, fungus; or between differing states of animation; organic and inorganic; the living and the dead. Likewise, questions that play out in the life sciences turn out to have within them moral philosophical and metaphysical scripts, blatant or concealed, that continue to shape our encounters with the world.

In saying “yes” I agree to be answerable to the posthuman. I take the call and accept the accompanying charges that we do not yet know how to calculate. But, in doing so, I find myself miming the quasi-automatic responsiveness with which we habitually answer the telephone: “hello, yes: I’m listening, I can hear that you are there, ready to speak just when I am ready to speak to you.”³ The problem is that the volume of calls that the posthuman places and the difficulty in parsing out the status of the speakers means that I have to keep saying “yes,” “yes” to everything that comes calling. In this respect, the posthuman places us in an almost impossible predicament. Its call appears to originate from everywhere, all at once, and takes the form of a “posting” or messaging that induces a telephonic overload or panic as all the dropped calls from other forms of being, from the living and the dead, from the animate and the machine, suddenly overwhelm the line, revealing to us potential polities, partners, citizens, that swarm among and through and between us. I find myself reduced to some bobble-headed telephonic “yes” man or answering machine, forced to register the way the posthuman manifests as a peculiar form of prosopopeia (the trope that means to give face or voice to things).

Granted, such a modeling of the posthuman requires a constitutive mishearing or misconstrual of the word “post,” processing it as a question of media rather than temporality. But this misconstrual registers the uncertain positionality to the prepositional “posting” of the human that the word entails. It also provides a caution against the apparent novelty of the term and remains entirely skeptical of the idea that the posthuman designates a viable, non-contradictory category or historical condition, such as transhumanism, that might refer, less problematically, to the animals that were formally designated as human.⁴ This dual insistence seems necessary, and especially so, when the word posthuman finds itself conjoined with another word that refers (so poorly) to an historical field keyed (so readily) to narratives of the emergence or birthing of this or that phenomenon, whose serial announcements tend to forget the questions of repetition and revival that give us the word “renaissance.”⁵

In what follows, I begin by describing the advent of the posthuman and its telephonic effects in order to understand how the word alters the function of prosopopeia in our discourses as it is indexed to questions of witnessing. I then offer a partial outline of responses to the call and the way these responses refigure our relation to the archive and archivability – an issue of particular concern to fields of study that have primarily defined themselves in terms of historical period and national boundaries (Renaissance studies). I end by dialing up a salutary model of operator assistance from the seventeenth century that speaks to the difficulty we face.

Going post/al

The arrival, dissemination, and now normalization of the words posthuman and posthumanism in literary, historical, philosophical, and cultural studies marks the addition of a new “actor” or “actant” to the assemblage of persons, machines, and the various parading of animal and plant remains employed to disseminate stories about the textual traces we name “past.” The posthuman posits a new unit of analysis that alters or interferes with the perceived integrity to the “human.” But what order of proposition or tropic operation is this “post-” or “post-ing” of the human, this figural turning of the “human” after or outside itself? What is the nature of its call? What does the term activate?

Obviously there are difficulties, not least of which, as Katherine Hayles remarks is that “post, with its dual connotation of superseding the human and coming after it, hints that the days of the “human” may be numbered.”⁶ The term seems to sponsor fantasies of escaping embodiment in some transcendent upload or translation. Indeed, no matter how many brilliant, vital, anti-teleological protestations there are to the contrary; that, as Bruno Latour writes, “we have never been modern;” that, as Hayles has it, “we have never been human” but have always been “embodied;” that we have always, as Andy Clark puts it, been “natural-born cyborgs;” or any other reiteration of the same syntax; the pull to mere chronology in the preposition “post” threatens to posit the “posthuman” as what comes next, nominalizing the term, and so sloughing it off as a category, a type of being, an ontology, even an anthropology, and so a valid reference.⁷

Against this pull to linearization, the posthuman stages an ontological slide that upends the stability of categories (animal, plant, person, machine, fungus, etc.) and their enabling narratives to focus instead on the ligatures, connections, or vinculae, between differently animated entities that constitute ways of being.⁸ The term deterritorializes being, making visible what Jacques Derrida once called the arche, “general” or “generative text,” the set of programs or infrastructure that writes/constitutes the world. It is worth recalling here that Derrida’s staging of “the history of life ... [or] differrance” as the “history of the grammè” aims to make visible modes of cognition, historical consciousness, and forms of personhood that do not respect the ratio of the line or the linearization of the world that occurs in a phonetic writing system. The story, as you remember, begins with the observation lethal to any metaphysics of presence that life begins with the writing event of “genetic inscription” and “short programmatic chains regulating the behavior of the amoeba or the annelid up to the passage beyond alphabetic writing to the orders of the logos and of a certain homo sapiens.”⁹ The project of metaphysics has been to construct a shelter from the technologizing of being as writing and being written by boxing up this program or inscription as an untranslatable origin – call it Nature – and so holding at bay the insight that there exists a history of technology, of the machine and the animal, that is simultaneously, necessarily a history of human life.

The word posthuman seeks to do more, however, than detonate this shelter, it strives to alter the text, to transform it, to rewire its relays or switchboard so as to imagine alternate futures. The posthuman is a type of writing, then, sponsoring a total re-description of terms and landmarks, a passage to other regimes of description and other forms of narrative emplotment, a re-articulation of ethics and politics. As a writing event or trope, the posthuman trips up the “human,” closing it off, placing the “human” in a parenthesis, and so marking a passage beyond. But this passage “beyond” or “after” obeys no linear chronology so much as it seeks to stage the “human” now as a site of exposure, effecting a pause, and so figuring a hiatus or fitting of the “human” as a category. It marks instead what Rosi Braidotti calls “a qualitative shift in our thinking about what is exactly the basic unit of reference for our species, our polity, and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet.”¹⁰ It demands that we begin again, from the beginning, with an entirely altered regime of description.

Rhetorically, the posthuman accomplishes this task by placing a potentially deadly, overwhelming call to the putatively human dasein, a call that cannot be refused, that comes in on all frequencies, and that simply overwhelms or overwrites existing codes. The human is forced to idle, forced to listen or try to listen to the figurative chatter, songs, or screams of the countless non-human actors whose manufactured declensions fund the networks that wrote the “human” as self-identical being. If the “human” is judged now to be the product or precipitate of a catastrophic way of modeling the relations between differently animated beings whose mode of existence, once upon a time, posed no ethical or political questions of use, then, the posthuman fractures forever that certainty. It brings the figure of the outside or the exterior inside the oikos or collective, remarking that the figure of the outside, that is of all the beings confined there and not granted citizenship, is a structural fault in the collective and its concept. Everything, now, so it seems, has or can make a claim to being, to dasein.¹¹

As my two epigraphs indicate, the tele/trauma of the posthuman can hardly be described as novel, then, even as it comes primed or amped up by an emerging ecological catastrophe, by global warming, mass extinctions, the ir/rational technology of industrialized food production, or the negative feedback we receive from the world at large. “Before the act or the word, the telephone,” writes Derrida, “in the beginning was the telephone.”¹² And a change in terminology will not allow us to go back or get off this phone. No hope at all, never any hope, of getting off the hook, of reversing the hard-wired, technologized, automatic flavor to being, of getting clean, or being judged to have truly lived well. The telephonic spacing of our lives, the processing of voice/s (phone) at a distance, delay or remove (tele), stitches the problem of the dropped or missed call into the constitutive fabric of the world (for us) even as that world may be posited as unreduced. “There is no off switch to the technological,” as Avital Ronell puts it, even if that leaves us feeling as if we have to say “yes” or “hello” to everything and so own up to a generalized answerability.¹³ Such gestures aside, still there will be static, noise, error, errancy, for such death and decay proves constitutive of those negentropic eddies that we seek to formalize, rendering the world habitable to and for us.¹⁴ No new and improved order of description will solve things even as it remains an imperative for us to d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction Paul Cefalu, Gary Kuchar, and Bryan Reynolds
• Part I Posthumanism
• Part II Ecocriticism
• Part III Historical Phenomenology
• Part IV Historicism Now
• Selected Bibliography
• Index