Literature and Posthumanism

Literature and Posthumanism

Jeff Wallace*University of Glamorgan

Abstract

This article examines some current developments in the field of relations between literary studiesand posthumanism, with particular reference to changing forms and conceptions of the literary. Asan index of these changes, it begins by surveying the changing position of literature in the workof N. Katherine Hayles, as this has been shaped by the successive concepts of embodiment, mate-riality and intermediation. Hayles’ work exemplifies current debates about the rise of digital orcomputational literature and its challenge to interlinked conceptions of print culture and humanis-tic subjectivity. Placing these debates in the context of critical posthumanism, with an emphasison anti-Cartesian critique, cyborg theory, distributed cognition and the recent work of Donna J.Haraway on companion species, the article highlights a continuing critical dialogue around ques-tions of literary and humanistic value vis-a-vis print and digital forms, and ends with speculationsupon two areas of potential development in the field of literature and posthumanism.

Over the last two decades, the concept of posthumanism has grown in significance withinthe humanities and, in particular, within literary production and literary studies. What dowe mean by posthumanism? In one of several recent special issues of humanities journalsdevoted to the subject of posthumanism, Bart Simon insists on the importance of a dis-tinction between ‘popular posthumanism’ and ‘critical posthumanism.’1 The former, typi-fied perhaps by Francis Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the BiotechnologyRevolution (2002), presents the posthuman as a condition of threat posed by allegedlyinvasive new technologies to the integrity of human nature. From this generally reaction-ary position, the outlines of which may well be familiar to us, posthuman denotes a newpostlapsarianism, a contemporary version of the Fall in which the sciences of genetics,neurology, cybernetics and informatics are seen to interfere with an otherwise pristinestate of human nature and freedom. When Fukuyama wants a reference point for thedangers of a posthuman future, which can only be averted, he argues, through the regula-tory actions of Western liberal governments, he turns to Aldous Huxley’s dystopian satireBrave New World (1932), (itself referencing the ironic Renaissance futurism of Shake-speare’s The Tempest), in which totalitarian social and biological control has been achievedby the uncoupling of reproduction from human sexuality and by the pervasive influenceof chemically induced states of ease and pleasure.

By contrast, ‘critical posthumanism’ must be seen as a way of thinking the human, or as‘implicated in the ongoing critique of what it means to be human’ (Simon 8). It is thisconception, drawing extensively from contemporary philosophy and critical theory, whichis my primary concern in this article, insofar as it has been at the heart of changingconceptions of the humanities, and has begun to reconfigure the landscape of literary stud-ies. Posthumanism is here defined as a critique, both of an essentializing conception ofhuman nature, and of human exceptionalism, and is generally characterized by discourses ofthe dissolution or blurring of the boundaries of the human, whether conceptual andphilosophical (as in the ‘decentring’ of the human in 20th-century structuralist and

Literature Compass 7/8 (2010): 692–701, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2010.00723.x

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poststructuralist thought) or scientific and technological (as in biotechnologies, geneticsand cybernetics).

Much of this conceptual work in the humanities can be traced back to the impact ofDonna Haraway’s radical appropriation of the term ‘cyborg’ in the 1985 ‘Cyborg Mani-festo’ (Haraway 1991), signalling a potential and politically emancipatory condition of‘kinship’ between the organic and the inorganic, which has opened out into developingbodies of thought on the complex relations between humans and machines, andbetween humans and animals. The philosophical cornerstone of this posthumanism, stillfrequently touched upon in contemporary debate, tends to be its anti-Cartesianism, orcritique of the dualistic thought of Rene Descartes (1596–1650), symbolized by theformula of the cogito (‘I think, therefore I am’) through which Descartes defined humanexceptionalism in terms of the possession of reflexive consciousness, suggesting a dichot-omy both of mind and body, and of humans and the relative automata of animals andmachines.

Critical posthumanism has been concerned to expose the historical parameters andpolitical implications of Cartesian humanism. Katherine Hayles for example characterizeshumanistic humans, ‘autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agencyand choice,’ as the products of ‘that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power,and leisure to conceptualize themselves’ as such (Hayles 1999, 286). In other words,under the rubric of an implicit universalism, humanism can be a narrowly Western ver-sion of liberal-humanist individualism, sanctioning through its human exceptionalism arelation of domination and subjugation to its externalized others – animals, machines, nat-ure, the environment, nonindividualistic cultures and – in the case of the ambiguouslygeneric ‘man’ – women. In similar terms, Amit Chaudhuri, arguing for a surprisinglyposthumanistic dimension to the poetry of D.H. Lawrence, writes that ‘the humanistconsciousness has to inhabit a fixed vantage point, from which it comprehends the world,and even tries accommodatingly to ‘‘understand’’ objects and cultures different from itself’– yet, he adds, while doing so, it ‘clings to its own centre, a plenitude it takes to be natu-ral, spontaneous, automatically self-evident, and self-cognitive, but which is actually theoutcome of history’ (Chaudhuri 128). The history inferred in each of these accounts istherefore a relatively Western and belated one, famously illustrated in Michel Foucault’sobservation that the figure of man is ‘an invention of recent date’ and ‘neither the oldestnor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge’ (Foucaultxxiii, 386), and now increasingly contextualized by the rise of postcolonial theory, as forexample in Iain Chambers’ Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (2001).

Far from simply suggesting that the emergence of the posthuman is a contemporaryevent, therefore, critical posthumanist accounts can combine their awareness of interme-diation and materiality in the present with a sense that posthumanism might be read backinto history as a more tenacious and meaningful idea of the human itself – thus Hayles,following the lead of historian of science Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern(1993), argues that ‘we have always been posthuman’ (Hayles 1999, 291). Cyborg theoryhas been of relevance to this argument, as has the concept of distributed cognition, foundfor example in the work of anthropologist and early systems theorist Gregory Bateson(1904–1980), who argued that consciousness is not ‘bounded by the skin’ but composedof ‘ensembles’ of events and objects in a total cognitive environment. Distributed cogni-tion, now more fully elaborated in neuroscience and informatics, suggests that the exten-sion or franchising-out of consciousness is not simply a property of computer systemswith highly developed faculties of memory and simulation, but has characterized humanendeavour at least since the origins of toolmaking and agriculture.

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‘Literature’ may seem to possess a self-explanatory status in comparison to the com-plexities of posthumanist debate. Yet it is important to identify in the definition of litera-ture a historical legacy which associates it with the defence of humanistic conceptions ofhuman integrity – a legacy at work, perhaps, in Fukuyama’s invocation of Huxley andShakespeare. In exploring further developments in the field of relations between literatureand posthumanism, I want to take as a keynote the work of the critic N. KatherineHayles, and to trace the existence of a tension between humanistic and posthumanisticconceptions of the literary within those developments. Toward the end of the criticalstudy My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts (2005), Hayles con-fesses to a ‘reluctant fascination’ with the work of Australian novelist Greg Egan (Hayles2005, 214). Her particular interest is in a trilogy of novels, Quarantine (1992), PermutationCity (1994) and Distress (1995), in which Egan speculatively explores the relationshipbetween human beings, computers and their unity within an overarching conception of a‘Computational Universe.’ ‘I would like,’ Hayles declares, ‘not to like the Greg Egan’sfiction.’ Hayles explains this intriguing moment of self-conscious ambivalence in twoways. First, Egan appears to ‘espouse’ in the novels an extreme version of what Hayles,in her earlier work How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature andInformatics (1999), had described as ‘the story of how information lost its body,’ andwhich she had condemned in that work as a misguided and undesirable posthumanfuture: namely, the possibility that human consciousness might be uploaded into acomputer, and that humans might thenceforth be able to opt either to retain the materialsubstrate of the body or to become fully postbiological, incorporeal. Second, Hayles notes‘literary deficiencies’ in the novels: Egan is or was an inexperienced writer, and ‘many ofhis works lack rich character development,’ a quality which she sees as ‘sacrificed’ for thesake of the ideas he wishes to explore. Nevertheless, Hayles admires and is attracted tothe novels, ‘almost in spite of myself’ (2005,214).

I begin with this moment from the latest major work by Hayles, a leading light in thefield for at least two decades, because in its critical hesitancy it seems to highlight the per-sistence of a faultline. As a literary critic, Hayles worries about the literary value of Egan’swork, yet as a scientific thinker she cannot fail to be passionately interested in, or wantto argue with, the ideas about a posthuman future for which the novels act as a vehicle.In the long history of the writing we call Science Fiction, it has been common tofind the question of literary value subordinated by critics to the fascination of ideas aboutthe potential human encounter with alien forms of life, or about the potential forhumans, although the life-changing developments of science and technology, to becomeposthuman, or alien to, themselves. By the early 21st century, however, and as promptedby Alan Liu, a reader of the first draft of My Mother Was a Computer, it has becomenecessary for Hayles to reflect on the fact that literature itself occupies ‘an increasinglymarginal position in mainstream culture’, jostling for position with blockbuster moviesand computer games, and thus for her to undertake a rethinking of ‘the role of literaturein creating the contemporary cultural Imaginary’ (Hayles 2005, 5). Among the manyfactors that might have contributed to this de- or re-valuation of the literary, the expan-sion of the concept of posthumanism within the humanities – indeed, the emergence ofa ‘posthumanities’, as signalled by a monograph series of that name published by theUniversity of Minnesota Press since 2007 – is highly significant.

The changing position of the literary in Hayles’ own trilogy of works on posthuman-ism since 1999 is indexical of certain broader developments in the field. Woven into thedetailed three-wave history of cybernetics and the information age in postwar America inthe landmark work How We Became Posthuman is an analysis of science-fictional texts –

694 Literature and Posthumanism


Bernard Wolfe’s cult novel Limbo (1952), Philip Dick’s ‘android’ novels of the 1960s,William S. Burroughs’ fictions, especially The Ticket That Exploded (1967), and more con-temporary novels such as Greg Bear’s Blood Music (1985), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash(1992), Cole Perriman’s Terminal Games (1994) and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2 (1995)– which are mobilized to support Hayles’ thesis that we must always choose to make theinevitably posthuman future one of complex embodiment. Literary value is inferred both inthe constitution of a dialogical space which explores rather than determines positions andin the familiar sense of giving access to a fully material condition of mind and body,thought and feeling.

In the third volume of the trilogy, My Mother Was a Computer, Hayles discerns some-thing of this value in Egan’s fiction: if Hayles resists Egan’s conviction in a postbiologicalhuman future, she also finds that resistance consistently inscribed in the texts themselves,compelling her to acknowledge in Egan a ‘refusal to make things easy for himself,... thatmight well be called by such names as ‘‘honesty’’ and ‘‘integrity’’’ (Hayles 2005, 239).However, the greater caution evident in Hayles’ use of literature in this volume – figuredboth in the personal note of ambivalence around Egan, and in the intriguing distancingfrom a traditional humanistic vocabulary of ‘honesty’ and ‘integrity’ – is intimately linkedto the displacement of embodiment by intermediation as a central organizing concept.Hayles is now concerned with the relationship between language and code, and arguesthat the rapid proliferation of code-making computational technologies in all areas of lifesince the late 1990s renders even more untenable than before the subject-object divideseparating those technologies from embodied human subjects. This argument resonateswith a growing body of thought around biotechnologies, where code appears as a deci-sive factor in the blurring of boundaries between semiotic and material life, for examplein Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia (2004) and The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics andCulture (2005), in which Thacker argues that the simultaneous existence of DNA as asubstance in a test-tube and as a code stored in a computer program obliges us to revisethe whole concept of biological ‘life itself.’

Hayles conducts a comparative analysis of three literary texts – Henry James’s ‘In theCage’ (1898), Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Edritch (1966) and ‘The GirlWho Was Plugged In’ (1973) by James J. Tiptree – as changing historical instances of the‘dream of information,’ from the emancipatory prospect of the telegraph network for thegirl in James’s story, to the way in which subjectivity might be constructed by technologyin Tiptree’s story. In the sustained analysis of two more contemporary texts, however,Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (2002) and Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995),literature’s sense of aesthetic or diagnostic distance, as a medium existing on the outsideof its subject matter, can no longer be assumed. Instead, with coding as the centralconcern of each, the way in which Stephenson’s novel of prewar cryptographic intrigueand Jackson’s computational hypertext enact a complex relationship between literary andinformatics codes and technologies becomes, in effect, the subject matter of each.

This overt shift toward the changing role of the literary in a new posthuman culturalImaginary may be seen to be precipitated by Writing Machines (2001), the quite distinctivemiddle volume in Hayles’ trilogy. Forming part of the Mediawork Pamphlets series pub-lished by MIT press, this shorter and more stylized work celebrates the emergence ofnew computerized forms of imaginative textuality. Here, the discipline of literary studiesis the object of Hayles’ often pointed polemic, it having allegedly been ‘lulled into som-nolence’ by a largely unexamined dependence upon 500 years of print culture. This isnot to be mistaken for populistic ‘end-of-the-book’ism; rather, Hayles argues that the riseof digital media is allowing us to begin to understand ‘how deeply literary theory and



criticism have been imbued with assumptions specific to print’ (33), which might lead inturn to a richer appreciation of the material consequences, for cognition, of the literarybook within print culture. Echoing Jacques Derrida’s account of the privileging of speechand its attendant metaphysics of presence over the autonomous functions of writing andtextuality, Hayles maintains that we have tended to see printed texts as ‘not having abody, only a speaking mind’ – the writer has thoughts, and they come to us directly viathe apparently immaterial medium of print. While Derrida’s work and the essays ofRoland Barthes (for example, ‘The Death of the Author’ [1968] and ‘From Work toText’ [1971]) prepared a thorough poststructuralist critique of this position some 40 yearsago, it is only, Hayles argues, with the emergence of interactive forms of computer-basedliterary text – hypertext, technotext, artists’ books, for example – that we see the fullconsequences of materiality. Mark Poster had anticipated this concept, punningly, in hisWhat’s the Matter with the Internet? (2001), which underpins Hayles’ thesis by associatingprint culture with the rise of analogue subjectivity or a conception of the individual as‘interior consciousness, which could then be externalized first in manuscript, then inprint’ (Poster 89).

In pursuit of the central concept of materiality, the tone of Writing Machines betrays acertain polemical insistence. The key tenet of materiality in general, that ‘the physical formof the literary artefact always affects what the words (and other semiotic components) mean’ (25), isoverlaid in digital literature, Hayles asserts, by a further ontological implication: when ahuman subject enters or participates in a textual digital environment and submits to thecomplex re-codings that are required or to the often highly sensitive and unstable natureof the text, as in Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia for example, they are ‘transformed...into hybrid entities that cannot be thought without the digital inscription apparatus thatproduces them’ (49). Across the range of texts examined, and the varied combinations ofdigital and print codes they enact – Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia, Tom Phillips’ artist’sbook A Humument, Mark Z. Danielewski’s cult, multilayered novel House of Leaves –Hayles continually reasserts the conclusion that the human subject ceases to pre-exist thetext and instead enters into a symbiosis in which the boundary line between technologyand flesh is decisively blurred.

Both explicitly and implicitly, therefore, the drift of Hayles’ work is toward the ques-tion of literary value vis-a-vis what Roger Luckhurst has called ‘the move... from closedoffline literary objects to the open system of the network’ (Luckhurst 794). While theliterature, or more accurately literatures, of posthumanism still embrace a range of formsthat are about the posthuman, from the broad generic categories Science Fiction andcyberpunk to more precise sub-genres such as those of the medical thriller (see for exam-ple Pethes, and Hahn) and nanotech ⁄ splatter fiction (see Milburn’s excellent essay), themost radical mutation is toward new forms of textuality that demonstrate how we mightbe posthuman. This apparent challenge to print literature in turn raises the interlinkedquestions of how exactly in Poster’s terms print culture and humanism might be interde-pendent, of how far literature and literary studies are tied to a legacy of humanisticthought, and of how and why a critique of this legacy might be mounted in the name ofthe posthuman.

While Hayles’ work has consistently applied cyborg theory to the relations betweenhumans and machines (computers and their codes), Donna J. Haraway and others havepursued the dissolution of boundaries along human-animal lines. Haraway’s work contin-ues to lead the field in the posthumanistic approach to the inorganicism of the creaturelyas this is counterbalanced with the increasing vitality of the machine, a field alsopopulated by Deleuze and Guattari, by an essay such as Jacques Derrida’s ‘And Say the



Animal Responded?’ (in Wolfe ed., 2003), the recently reissued monograph The Parasiteby Michel Serres (1980; 2007), and by the work of Cary Wolfe (2003). In her pamphletThe Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness (2003) and in hermost recent major work When Species Meet (2008), Haraway has courageously placed herown experience as a dog agility trainer with her beloved ‘companion’ Cayenne Pepperat the centre of a posthuman philosophical excursus on the relations between humansand other species. This is no organic alternative to the posthumanism of technocultures,but directly continuous with the Cyborg manifesto of 1985: Haraway maintains that ‘themachinic and the textual are internal to the organic and vice versa in irreversible ways,’and revels in the idea that ‘multidirectional gene flow has always been the name of thegame of life on earth’ (2003, 15; 9). Drawing on A.N. Whitehead’s process philosophy,which has been noticeably revived in the recent work of Isabelle Stengers and others,Haraway therefore makes no prior assumptions about essential species-differencesbetween dogs and humans, but insists that being is brought into existence by relation:we exist in subtle companionship with others, ‘To be one is always to become with many’(2008, 4).

Haraway’s hybrid and often sensual writing figures a loving relationship with compan-ion species, and highlights figuration itself not just as a representational technique but as aprocess in which biology and literature merge ‘with all the force of lived reality’(Haraway 2008, 4). At the same time, her work is acutely vigilant about the multipleways in which modes of anthropomorphism might smuggle humanism into the posthu-man companion relationship. Haraway is, for example, extremely guarded about senti-mentalism toward animals, yet intensely critical of the misogyny and ageism implicit inDeleuze and Guattari’s antagonism toward the domesticated creature in their influentialtheory of ‘becoming animal.’ If Haraway effectively writes in an unprecedented way onbehalf of the animal (because ‘humanist doctrine’ insists that only humans are ‘true sub-jects with real histories’ [2008, 66]), this is in direct opposition to the discourses of animalrights, which threaten, she asserts, to become a form of ‘transcendental’ humanism intheir attribution of pre-existent rights as an abstract concept. Even a version of distributedcognition is arraigned, where it implies that ‘man makes himself’ through tools that mightinclude domestic animals, as a form of ‘humanist technophiliac narcissism’ (2003, 33).Finally, the central dialectical twist of this work concerns the anthropomorphic elementlodged in the refusal of anthropomorphism: Haraway dismisses as a ‘philosophical and lit-erary conceit’ the idea that ‘all we have is representations and no access to what animalsthink and feel,’ because dog agility trainers could not work without the assumption that‘they can communicate meaningfully with their partners’ (2008, 226). A theory of com-plete alterity, although fashionable perhaps from an ethical perspective, would deny theformation of being through responsive, entangled relationship in what Haraway calls ‘theopen,’ and would obstruct the complex formative sense that there is, in the phrase of pri-matologist Barbara Smuts, ‘someone home’ in the animal.

The critical subtlety of Haraway’s arguments confirms Bart Simon’s sense that the bestcurrent work in critical posthumanism offers itself neither as a transcendence nor as arejection of humanism, but as part of an ongoing critique of ‘what it means to behuman.’ Nevertheless, as we have seen, ‘human’ is not synonymous with ‘humanist’, anda range of efforts to locate and assess the residual significance of humanism continues tocharacterize the field, often with the question of literary value and its historically human-istic associations in close proximity. Hayles’ warnings of ‘the grafting of the posthumanonto a liberal humanist view of the self’(1999, 286–7) in postwar American techno-cultures seem pertinent to several readings of William Gibson’s classic cyberpunk novel



Neuromancer (1984), where beneath the surface of a radical future in which humanconsciousness is spliced with the technologies of a globalized virtual marketplace, criticshave discerned the remythologized plenitude of the heroic-individualist, free-willedcowboy or pirate, with minor characters consigned to the lesser prize of a decentred post-humanist subjectivity (see Stockton and Sponsler). Laura Bartlett and Thomas B. Byershave mounted a comparable argument about the ‘recuperative’ humanism of an otherwisethoroughly posthumanist scenario in the film The Matrix. Neil Badmington’s Alien Chic:Posthumanism and the Other Within (2004), an enquiry into contemporary representationsof alien life forms in a wide variety of cultural phenomena, from collectable objects toTV shows, film and novels, concludes that, despite the decline of the ‘confident human-ism of the past’ and the ubiquitous blurring of the once-‘absolute’ dichotomy betweenhuman and alien, our preoccupation with the alien is not a rejection of humanism but a‘re-inscription of it as ‘alien chic’ – in effect, ‘I love E.T., therefore I am’ (Badmington,2004, 86, 89). Here and elsewhere Badmington reveals Cartesian humanism deconstruct-ing itself, in a close reading which shows how Descartes’ determination of the human interms of the possession of a certain critical mass of organs effectively undoes any absolutedistinction between living and unliving, human and other. Conversely, also invoked isJacques Derrida’s general proposition that deconstruction always and of necessity revealsthe dogged persistence of a constitutive humanist metaphysics which it is the work ofdeconstruction to patiently re-write. This acknowledgement of the constitutive role ofhumanist thinking is not, however, incompatible in Badmington’s case with a surprisinglypronounced rhetorical position, in which humanism, however, patiently encountered,remains a ‘traumatic’ and ‘unpleasant’ incubus whose ‘haunting’ of posthumanism onecan only, eventually, hope to expel: ‘posthumans are far more exciting, far sexier thanhumans,’ yet ‘someone has to do the dirty work’ of dealing deconstructively withhumanism (2003, 11). Despite the fact that humanism is shown by Badmington to bealways-already other than itself, it remains nominally undialectical in relation to posthu-manism, as Mousley and Halliwell have pointed out in pursuit of an alternative ‘criticalhumanism’ (190).

In one of her most recent essays, Katherine Hayles alerts us to a similar, continuingsense of contestation in the field of literature and posthumanism. ‘The belletristic traditionthat has on occasion envisioned computers as the soulless other to the humanistic expres-sivity of literature could not be more mistaken,’ she writes: ‘Contemporary literature iscomputational’ (2007, 122). The excitement generated by this field, now and in the fore-seeable future, stems precisely from the attempts of Hayles and many others to assess therapid and irrevocable emergence of new technologies of language and textuality whichare in turn re-shaping human subjectivity. It is also inevitable that print literature, andthe kind of literary-critical culture to which it has given rise, will continue to make itspresence felt in such debates. In an essay surveying the literature of new digital environ-ments, Roger Luckhurst identifies the ‘heightened rhetoric’ of much writing on techno-cultures and the digital revolution, often communicating an ambiguity of tone, such that,for example in the case of Scott Bukatman’s pioneering work Terminal Identity: The Vir-tual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993), Luckhurst claims an inability to discernwhether the declared end of the divide between technology and the human was ‘to bemourned or embraced’ (Luckhurst 787, 790). While giving an excellent condensedaccount of key hypertext fictions (Michael Joyce’s an afternoon, 1987, and Geoff Ryman’s253: The Print Remix, 1996), open-source web novels such as Douglas Rushkoff’s ExitStrategy and the genre of ‘fanfic’, Luckhurst remains ‘strongly sceptical’ of claims or impli-cations that the blending of writer and reader in technotexts necessarily constitutes a new



form of participatory democracy, or that such developments are the only way forward forliterature in the 21st century.

Here, in effect then, Hayles’ proposition that ‘Contemporary literature is computa-tional’ is met by the questions of literary value that had troubled her in 2005. The riseand reach of the computational text has not (yet?) cancelled the possibility that such textscan and might be evaluatively compared to the kind of things that can be done in theImaginary of print literature. Jerome McGann’s Radiant Textuality: Literature After theWorld Wide Web (2001) provides a sustained defence of the superior ‘richness’ and ‘com-plexity’ of print over digital literature, and receives a detailed riposte in Hayles’ MyMother Was A Computer. Jonathan Culler, in a commentary on Hayles’ 2007 essay, ven-tures the views that electronic texts might ‘trivialize’ the capacity for literature always tosurprise its readers, and that they might ‘end up’ being about the construction of mean-ing, and thus about themselves, as much as literature tout court. The latter argument isopen to interpretation in more ways than one. One might, for example, maintain thatthe relative weakness of Writing Machines in Hayles’ trilogy is precisely that it can onlyaccount for the success of its subject texts in terms of what their forms infer or demon-strate about digital textuality – a version, as Luckhurst puts it, of technological determin-ism, in which readers face the paradox of ‘old-fashioned print descriptions of thetechnological wizardry of anti-linear, de-hierarchizing hypertext’ (801), and a version ofthe literary which de-emphasizes a broader spectrum of narrative and textual sources ofinterest.

If the latter draws our attention, contra Culler, to the ways in which print literaturemight cling to a distinctive kind of ‘aboutness’, we may conclude with two speculationson literature’s continuing engagement with the posthuman. First, in the critical domain,if ‘we have always been posthuman’, then the potential to deploy the posthuman thinkingof the human as a means of rereading the literary tradition still seems relatively unrealized.Current approaches seem constrained to the selection of authors whose work appearsamenable to a philosophy of posthumanism – the lauded William Blake Archive, forexample, a digital source which seems perfectly appropriate to the complex materiality ofBlake’s work, or the studies of D.H. Lawrence by Chaudhuri and Wallace – leavingmore opportunities for the application of posthumanism as a heuristic device to the widerliterary field. Second, what might we expect from the domain of imaginative print litera-ture itself? Recently, both Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway have reflected on theurgent cultural need to address the reality of cloning. Baudrillard (2000) asked whether aspecies that synthesized its own immortality could still be called ‘human’, while Haraway,impatient of the questions posed by bioethics (because cloning already happens in‘emergent naturecultures’ – Haraway makes no distinction between natural and artificialselection, for example), demands to know ‘what is the probable lived experience ofcloned and cloning human subjects?’ (2008, 137). The novels Atomised (1999) by MichelHouellebecq and Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishiguro are told from the perspec-tive of human clones, but Ishiguro’s in particular, with its sustained, curiously flat andrecursive focalization through Kathy H, raises all the questions of interiority, variety andauthenticity of experience that we would expect to ask of the human clone. It subtlysuggests yet withholds from the reader the easy conclusions, either that Kathy is humanlike us, or that she is ineradicably other; the humanism of the ‘kind old world,’ embodiedin the guardians’ intense pity for Kathy’s fate, is found wanting, as cliche-ridden andethically inadequate to the new life-form of the clone. Ishiguro revitalizes the print novel,precisely in the testing-out of its humanistic legacy and assumptions. In each of the abovekinds of development in the literary field, posthumanism is seen to be reducible neither



to a dystopian trend of futuristic thought that might be humanistically circumvented norto the development of digital textualities alone.

Short Biography

Jeff Wallace is currently working on a study of the concept of abstraction in modernliterature, visual art and critical theory. His research broadly covers the areas of scienceand literature from the nineteenth century to the present, modernism, D.H. Lawrencestudies, and contemporary writing, with a recent emphasis on theories of the posthuman.He is the author of D.H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman (2005), and the coeditor ofGothic Modernisms (2001, with Andrew Smith), Raymond Williams Now: Knowledge, Limitsand the Future (1997, with Rod Jones and Sophie Nield), and Charles Darwin’s Origin ofSpecies: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1995, with David Amigoni). Beginning Modernism isforthcoming from Manchester University Press in 2010. He taught at the Universities ofKent, Indiana, and at the Open University and Liverpool Polyetchnic, before joining theUniversity of Glamorgan, where he is Professor of Literature and Cultural History and,currently, Head of the Department of Humanities and Languages. He is also a codirectorof the Research Centre for Science, Literature and the Arts, at Glamorgan.

Notes

* Correspondence: University of Glamorgan, Treforest, Pontypridd CF371DL, UK. Email: [email protected].

1 See, for example, Cultural Critique 53: (Winter 2003). ‘Posthumanism’, and New Literary History 36:2 (Spring2005). ‘Essays Probing the Boundaries of the Human in Science and Science Fiction.’

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Literature and Posthumanism