Epic Themes and Novel Forms: a Brief Comparison of Cuarón’s 'Gravity' and Nolan's 'Interstellar'

            The recent science fiction film Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, depicts the epic adventure of a group of astronauts as they travel, via wormhole, to distant sectors of the universe in order to discover new habitable worlds.  In the midst of this three-plus hour narrative, Anne Hathaway’s character, Brand, delivers the following explanation for the phenomenon of gravity, which has set their quest in motion:

Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. (Interstellar)

Love is the explanation for the physical phenomenon known as gravity.  Love is a transcendental, ultra-dimensional force that influences the material phenomena of the known universe.  And this turns out to be the case, since the ghostly hauntings that Murph experiences in her room as a child turn out to be her father, in the future, giving her all the clues she needs to solve the puzzle and thereby save the human race.

            One year prior to Nolan’s science fiction adventure narrative, Alfonso Cuarón’s space disaster film, Gravity, opened in theaters.  Cuarón’s film, unlike Nolan’s, features no theoretical or hypothetical wormhole travel and no cross-dimensional communication.  It depicts the harrowing experiences of an astronaut stranded between various spacecrafts in the upper atmosphere after a military strike leaves waves of debris orbiting the earth and wreaking havoc on the satellites and stations in its path.  In Gravity, the eponymous physical force that plays such a central role in Interstellar is barely mentioned; instead, it permeates the screen, the space, the vacuum, dictating the orbit of objects.  Gravity constantly works upon the characters and objects of the film, despite its virtual absence from any dialogue.

            One significant difference marks these two films.  Interstellar imagines gravity not as a contingent phenomenon of the universe – an effect of material bodies and things; it explains gravity as a result of human action and intervention.  Gravity is the product of love.  Gravity, on the other hand, feels no need to explain the force after which it’s named; because for Cuarón’s film, space is an emphatically inhuman and anti-human place, a sheer vacuum that doesn’t care about the fragility of humans.  Gravity, while still an anthropocentric film, is not an anthropomorphic film.  In other words, Gravity imagines human resilience in the face of brutal physics – a physics that cannot be reduced to human emotion.  Interstellar is an anthropomorphic film because it envisions physics as the effects of human behavior on a higher dimensional plane.  At some point, in Interstellar’s cosmogony, the phenomena of the universe find their origin in human thought and action.

            In Interstellar the universe actually looks human; but in Gravity, it looks unyieldingly nonhuman, inhuman, even antihuman.

            This is not to discount the effects or cinematic experience of either film; I think most people would agree that both films construct an overwhelming experience for the viewer, and both films pack (at times) quite an emotional punch.  However, Interstellar’s empathetic aspect derives from the human desire to be taken care of; the film is not so much a question of survival as it is of salvation.  The film imagines a kind of science-fictional realm for God and replaces Him with the agency of a future humanity.  Even before Cooper leaves earth, his actions are being controlled to some extent by himself, in the future, intervening into the course of events.  Interstellar retains the space of the divine but merely replaces the figure of the divine with an advanced version of human knowledge/existence.

            Gravity, on the other hand, is about survival, through and through.  There is no alternative space beyond the material universe, and the material universe (unlike the Christian God) is unforgiving.  The film depicts a human astronaut’s attempts to reenter earth’s lower atmosphere safely before the universe grinds all manmade machinery to dust.  The film may be unrealistic, and even inaccurate in many ways; but it is not eschatological.  Nolan’s film involves itself in a quasi-theological narrative by imagining two timelines, one of which is the future guarantor of the other.  The end is in the beginning.  Cuarón’s film, in contrast, does not guarantee its ending (beyond any popular cultural expectations of a mass filmgoing audience).  If Gravity’s lack of realism tells us anything, it is the imbalance between human survival and the sheer weight of a brutal physics.  Interstellar is not realistic in a generic sense (i.e. it does not fall into the category of “realism”), but it recovers the unlikelihood of its plot by framing it all within the grace of benign descendants.  Like Greek epic, or Biblical narrative, its conclusion is foregone; and in this way, Interstellar actually seems to resist modern narrative, despite its provocative experimentation.

            In his formative thesis on the novel, Georg Lukács sets it in stark contrast to the epic.  “The immanence of meaning,” Lukács writes, “which the form of the novel requires lies in the hero’s finding out through experience that a mere glimpse of meaning is the highest that life has to offer, and that this glimpse is the only thing worth the commitment of an entire life, the only thing by which the struggle will have been justified” (200).  Is this not the very sentiment echoed in Stone’s final lines before dangerously reentering earth’s atmosphere?  As the craft begins to heat up from reentry, she speaks to a hypothetical ground control at Houston, although it is unclear if anyone is even listening to her.  Stone admits that it makes no difference whether she dies or not, because either way, “it’ll be one hell of a ride” (Cuarón).  Stone can do no more than find meaning in the smallest attempt at survival, at the miniscule human effort to overcome the odds.  There is no greater meaning in Stone’s survival; she must make her own meaning, construct her own sense of things.

            Interstellar, on the other hand, follows the course of epic, meaning that it totalizes its own meaning from within: “the infinity of purely epic matter,” Lukács argues, “is an inner, organic one, it is itself a carrier of value, it puts emphasis on value, it sets its own limits for itself and from within itself, and the outward infinity of its range is almost immaterial to it – only a consequence and, at most, a symptom” (200).  The figurative correspondence of Lukács’s words is almost uncanny; the physical infinity of the cosmos is echoed in Interstellar by the total infinity of value and meaning – an infinity that is imbued with meaning, meaning generated by human agents.  The difference, for Lukács, between the epic and the novel is the difference between a pre-modern and modern worldview.  In the time of epic, the world was seen as conforming to the values of a culture; for the ancient Greeks, the cosmos conformed to Greek culture and law, and epic confirmed this conformity.  The (modern) novel, by contrast, understands some kind of external reality but does not guarantee the totality of its values from within; in fact, it makes room for skepticism.  There is no way for the Trojans to triumph in Homer’s Iliad, just as there is no way for the Rutulians to triumph in Vergil’s Aeneid, just as there is no way for Lucifer to triumph in Paradise Lost (despite the Romanticist subversion of Milton’s heroism).

            The structure of epic entails its own limits and establishes its value system as the producer of those limits: culture, value, defines the material world.  At its inception, the novel may not yet be ready to abandon the prospect of a rule-governed (or God-governed) universe (even if the 20^th-century novel makes this leap); but it is ready to abandon the formal structure that firmly establishes and dictates this governing from within.  The structure of the novel thus acknowledges the incapacity of its values to approximate the material world.  Like Sandra Bullock’s Stone, of Gravity, the hero of the novel can only take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.  Matthew McConaughey’s Cooper, on the other hand, is certain of his fate and salvation even if he does not know it; between his various instantiations – the Cooper of earth and the Cooper of Nolan’s disorienting multiverse – Cooper traverses the distance between human meaning and material universe.  He actualizes meaning in the form of gravity.

            Interstellar may of course be forgiven somewhat for its postmodern narrative experimentation; but this experimentation is more an effect of its subject matter than its theoretical concerns.  In fact, its experimentation fails to serve the intended purpose of most postmodern texts.  In other words, Interstellar is not attempting to undermine narrative through its formal play; rather, it salvages meaning by recuperating physical force back under the sign of love, of human empathy.  Like the epics of old, Interstellar sinks its ideological talons into the fabric of the universe and finds meaning everywhere.  Gravity does not seek to be so bold; for Cuarón’s impressive, if flawed, film, it is enough to merely acknowledge that the universe is a cold, dark, and unimaginably brutal expanse.

            But maybe – just maybe – we can survive in it.

Works Cited

Gravity. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.

Interstellar. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Syncopy, 2014.

Lukács, Georg. “The Theory of the Novel: a Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of           Great Epic Literature.” Theory of the Novel: a Historical Approach. Ed. Michael          McKeon. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. 185-218.

The Perpetual Train: Allegory and Revolution in Bong Joo-ho's _Snowpiercer_

*The following is an attempted affirmation of the critical legitimacy of the recent movie Snowpiercer.  Please be advised that this post contains spoilers for the film, and also discusses certain aspects of the film that assume a level of familiarity from the readers.

The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.

~Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

            Last year, Bong Joo-ho’s Snowpiercer was released internationally (it did not arrive in the United States until June 27, 2014) to tremendous, if not somewhat surprising, critical and popular acclaim.  The film depicts a futuristic scenario in which a very small remainder of humanity has been driven from the surface of the earth by climate change and forced to live out its existence within the walls of a perpetual-motion train, which makes an entire revolution around the earth every 365 days.  However, class regulations have restricted the poorest of civilization to the rear of the train, while the wealthiest live in the front.  The film follows a group of insurrectionists who attempt to take control of the engine, thereby (purportedly) improving their station within the train.

            Allegorically, the film offers a smorgasbord of figurative interpretations, a number of which are even corroborated by characters’ dialogue (class warfare, environmentalism, imperialism, etc.).  However, the train-image fails in many respects to capture the full complexity of these interpretations – an accusation that can be leveled at any metaphor, since figurative language necessarily engages in abstraction regarding its subject matter. This raises an interesting question in the case of Snowpiercer: as a figurative image that fails on multiple levels, might it not be the case that this distinct failure registers a more profound concern within the film, that being the problem of abstraction itself?  The train, as one character prominently notes, is the world; but, as viewers (and some characters) learn at the film’s conclusion, the train is most certainly not the world.  This might appear as a simple case of gnostic unveiling or revelation, but I want to suggest that the conclusion of the film does not present a discovery of absolute truth, but the realization that truth is always conditioned by the imposition of frames of meaning.  Truth can only appear by abstracting human perspectives into a totality.  Snowpiercer acknowledges the failure of this process.

            If abstraction fails for the purposes of representation, then we also must carry the consequences of this failure through to other various scenarios.  Here, the Marx of Grundrisse provides some clarification through commentary on the notion of abstract labor: “This example of labour shows strikingly how even the most abstract categories, despite their validity – precisely because of their abstractness – for all epochs, are nevertheless, in the specific character of this abstraction, themselves likewise a product of historic relations, and possess their full validity only for and within these relations” (Marx 105).  Abstraction provides necessary and helpful means of comprehending certain dynamics of historical reality, but only within a limited framework.  Beyond these limitations, we must shift our perspective and our abstract models.  The development of Snowpiercer only masquerades as progress – up through the train, car by car, striving for the head – before it reveals itself as purposeless; but it is in this purposeless that its power lies.  Curtis and the others may choose to revolt, or they may choose not to.  Should they revolt, a change in power occurs, or the train meets its demise.  Should they do nothing, the power structure remains and the train goes on.  No matter which course they pursue, a polar bear still walks in the snow beyond.

            The mistake to make in reacting to Snowpiercer is to read it as suggesting the impotence of revolution.  Despite its bleak ending, Snowpiercer portrays revolution as successful for the very reason that it explodes the boundaries of abstraction within the train: the train-as-world, individuals as cogs in the machine, everything in its proper place, etc.  The film is thus about the failure of allegory.  The film has not actually constructed the allegory of the train; the characters who rule the train, Wilford and Minister Mason, the educational and political institutions, impose and perpetuate the allegory.  It is their allegory, not the filmmakers’.  The film presents allegory as cultural myth.  Revolution, then, is not a part of this allegory.  Revolution, on the other hand, destroys allegory.  Here we encounter Fredric Jameson’s dictum on the power of science fiction: “the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision of future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same time that its novelistic expression demands some such ending” (148).  In Snowpiercer, the train marks the boundary, or limit, beyond which the thought of its inhabitants cannot go.  The allegory, or totality, of the train, performs the function not of form, but of content.  The revolutionary kernel of the film derives from the fact that it literally blows up its own content.

            In 2004, between the release of Snowpiercer and its source text, the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige (1982), China Miéville published the final installment of his Bas-Lag Trilogy, Iron Council; a fantasy novel that also dramatizes revolutionary potential around the central image of a perpetual train.  Eerily similar to Joo-ho’s adaptation of Le Transperceneige, Miéville’s fictional train is constructed by Weather Wrightby (the engineer in Snowpiercer is named Wilford), a monomaniacal capitalist and imperialist who is also driven by notions that his project is sanctioned by divine will.  On Joo-ho’s apocalyptic train, a cult of personality has even developed around Wilford, who is practically revered by many of those on board.  In both texts – Iron Council and Snowpiercer – the train appears as a mythological and religious bastion, a world-in-itself, providing solidarity and totality for fantasies of imperialist dominion.  While Miéville’s text presents a more nuanced and thoughtful consideration of revolution, novel and film both insist upon the ultimate purposelessness of revolution.  Revolution cannot be circumscribed by allegory because revolution’s very instinct is to resist allegory, and to destroy it if possible.  Thus, beyond the train there can be no absolute justification of human existence, ethics, or meaning.

            The purposelessness of revolution in Snowpiercer manifests in the locked but mute gazes of Yona and the polar bear.  In Iron Council, the purposelessness of revolution is summed up by insurrectionist leader Ann-Hari: “‘We were something real, and we came in our time, and we made our decision, and it was not yours.  Whether we were right or wrong, it was our history’” (552).  Any absolute purpose, in both Iron Council and Snowpiercer, exists only within the context of the train, in the abstraction of allegory.  As Ann-Hari tells Judah Low, right and wrong make no difference, and there can be no ethical imperative beyond the immanent demand of the present.  The revolutionary leader Curtis registers a similar notion in Snowpiercer in his revelatory concluding speech: “‘You know what I hate about myself?  I know what people taste like.  I know that babies taste best.’”  This is why, in the heat of pitched battle, Curtis does not return to save a threatened friend, but leaves him to be slaughtered by the enemy.  To return is to forsake the moment of revolution for the ethics of comradery; but revolution can abide no absolute ethics.

            This anti-ethical approach may seem difficult to accept when viewers, along with Curtis, learn the fate of the missing children, who have been taken from the rear of the train to play an integral role in keeping the train moving.  Of course, Curtis must feel an ethical obligation to save the child; and indeed, within the context of the train, it makes sense to remove the child – a fundamental component of the train’s perpetual motion – from his debased station amidst the gears.  But it makes no sense whatsoever to do so outside the confines of the train, amidst the cold wastes of the wider world.  Any apparently absolute justification for revolution, whether it be ethics, personal morality, equality, etc. dissolves once the characters step foot beyond the train.  The revolutionary impetus finds no rationale in reality, no justification or purpose.

            The imperative of revolution can only be to demand something else, to demand the impossible; in the words of Arthur C. Clarke, the “only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”  For Curtis, as for the insurrectionists in Iron Council, the train presents the limits of the possible, but simultaneously provides the impetus for pushing beyond into the impossible.  There is no absolute purpose to this impetus except within the train; there is no absolute purpose to revolution except within the abstraction that is also its making.  The very movement of revolution is to destroy the possibility of its own absolute purpose.

            Snowpiercer concludes prior to the resurrection of human societal forms because to represent these forms would be to reinstate the abstract order of allegory – the new Eden on Ice, a utopian fantasy in the snow.  The film concludes with the ambiguous gaze between (as far as we know) the only adult survivor and a polar bear because here we encounter a profound depth of inaccessibility: the animal other.  The bear, although it proves that life has survived beyond the train, offers no consolation or guarantee.  It only stares, in apparent indifference, at what has been for humans a historical event, but the bear does not see history in the making.  The bear sees only another animal.

            Revolution, as we learn in the film’s conclusion, is the ultimate sacrificial narrative because it sacrifices its own existence as narrative.  It evacuates itself of its own meaning, its drive is to destroy the purpose of its existence.  Like the train, revolution is propelled internally, but it seeks to disassemble the means of propulsion.  Its mind is beyond the walls, occupying the impossible aether, aware that it thrives on only a momentary purpose.  True revolution, if it is successful, enjoys no holidays of remembrance.  True revolution, if it is successful, forgets that it ever happened.  The possibility of this radical success remains, to this day, purely speculative; the achievement of great science fiction has been attempting to capture the envisioned reality of this speculation.

“‘The interstices of intervening substances’”: the Limits of Time and Narrative in Wells’s The Time Machine

“In the last resort, what has left its mark on the development of thought must be the history of the earth we live on and its relation to the sun.”

~Freud

            At the conclusion of the Time Traveller’s story in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, the internal narrator attempts to describe his journey to incredibly late moments in the future of the planet.  Tentacled creatures inhabit this world, although haplessly, “hopping fitfully about” (71).  The planet sinks in near-darkness beneath a dying sun, and everything appears drenched in a dull redness: the sun is only a “red-hot bow in the sky,” the surrounding water “blood-red” (70-71).  Everything appears near death or extinction as the world smolders under a mostly ineffective star.  Wells takes his readers to the limits of observable time on earth; but he also takes us somewhere potentially even more terrifying: the limits of narrative.

            Early in the text, the Time Traveller expresses the difficulty of describing the sensations of time travel.  After agreeing to tell his story, he admits that he “‘cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling’” (16).  He continues the only way he can conceive to: by using figurative language: “‘They are excessively unpleasant.  There is a feeling exactly like that one has upon a switchback – of a helpless headlong motion!  I felt the same horrible anticipation, too, of an imminent smash’” (16).  Spatial terminology and sensations serve to illuminate what the Time Traveller experiences as he hurtles into the future; in many ways, his description registers the effect of passengers on the railway, as recorded by Wolfgang Schivelbusch: “repeatedly, the train was described as a projectile […] The traveler who sat inside that projectile ceased to be a traveler and became, as noted in a popular metaphor of the century, a mere parcel” (53-54).  Although never using the term “parcel,” the Time Traveller insists upon the contingent materiality of his body during transportation – a materiality that is rendered passive by the conditions of time travel:

“I was, so to speak, attenuated – was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of intervening substances!  But to come to a stop involved the jamming of myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way: meant bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle that a profound chemical reaction […] would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all possible dimensions – into the Unknown.” (17)

Like the terrified passengers of Schivelbusch’s railroad, the Time Traveller appeals to the danger and terror of moving at a high velocity through space in order to express the traversal of time.

            The spatiality of time travel, as described in Wells’s short novel, gives time a material quality.  The time machine functions as an apparatus that realizes time as a material substrate, something that can be traveled along; and this materialization forces the reader to consider time as something strange.  Time becomes estranging, echoing the formula put forth by SF critic Darko Suvin in his 1979 book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, in which he describes science fiction as “the literature of cognitive estrangement.”  The Time Traveller’s appeal to spatial imagery conveys the limitations of describing unfamiliar temporal motion.  Our conscious perceptions do not permit the capacity to describe temporal motion as anything but linear.  Time and consciousness are bound to each other: “‘There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it’” (4).  The intervention of the time machine – an apparatus that mediates the relationship between concrete conscious bodies and (for lack of a better word) change – reifies material change into Time, into something separate from consciousness.  However, time is not only a narrative category in Wells’s text; it is also a constitutive component of narrative.  The text introduces the apparatus of the time machine only in part to investigate the hypothetical prospect of time travel; more comprehensively, The Time Machine functions as a meditation on narrative itself.

            The radical dynamics of The Time Machine emerge not from its science-fictional subject matter, but from its internalization of formal paradox at the level of content.  In The Theory of the Novel, Lukács argues for the fundamental function of time in the novel-form:

“Only in the novel, whose very matter is seeking and failing to find the essence, is time posited together with the form: time is the resistance of the organic – which possesses a mere semblance of life – to the present meaning, the will of life to remain within its own completely enclosed immanence […] we might almost say that the entire inner action of the novel is nothing but a struggle against the power of time” (217).

Building upon Lukács’s argument, Fredric Jameson brings his own narrative theory to bear on the genre of science fiction: “the narrative ending is the mark of that boundary or limit beyond which thought cannot go. The merit of SF is to dramatize this contradiction on the level of plot itself, since the vision of future history cannot know any punctual ending of this kind, at the same time that its novelistic expression demands some such ending” (148).^[1]  The Time Machine serves as an archetypal image of Jameson’s argument for science fiction; beyond reveling in the paradoxes of time travel, Wells’s fiction realizes these paradoxes in the form of novelistic discourse and recreates them in its subject matter.

            The ramifications of time travel thus indicate the very formal limitations of narrative itself, and Wells’s text registers these limits.  The Time Traveller is not the text’s primary narrator; he is an internal one.  The primary narrator remains vague and unnamed, a member of the party to whom the Traveller reveals his invention.  This technique is known as embedded narrative, and it enjoys company in the nineteenth century: famous examples include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (to name a few).  Embedded narrative allows the author to construct a frame within the novel itself, to impose limits within the diegesis.  Often such constructions evoke a sense of skepticism in readers, and lead us to question the authenticity of our narrator(s); however, in Wells’s story the embedded narrative also allows the author to explore the ramifications and difficulties of a narrative that, in its very subject matter, defies one of the constitutive components of narrative.

            Many 19^th-century models of history pursue a teleological aim, deriving primarily from Hegel’s philosophy of history.  Despite Marx’s “inversion” of Hegel, his project yet remains teleological, and Marxist politics function importantly in The Time Machine, infiltrating many aspects of the narrative.  Upon witnessing the idyllic lifestyle of the Eloi, the Traveller gasps “Communism” (24), and understands his vision in 19^th-century political terms: “There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor economical struggle.  The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone.  It was natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a social paradise” (27).  The Traveller alters his interpretation of the future in later pages, but the influence of Marxism remains, and the concept of historical progress entailing future improvement is clear in many of his statements: “The whole world will be intelligent, educated, and co-operating; things will move fast and fast towards the subjugation of Nature.  In the end, wisely and carefully we shall readjust the balance of animal and vegetable life to suit our human needs” (26).  The Traveller espouses progress and development that will eventually arrive at benevolent mastery.

            However, Wells deflates this teleological tendency by undermining the narrative process.  As the Traveller moves further into the future, he watches the planet and sun slowly die before disappearing from the novel entirely.  Furthermore, not only does he encounter denotative problems in his recounting of the adventure; but his telling fails.  His listeners do not believe him, except for our primary anonymous narrator, who tells us that the Traveller “vanished three years ago.  And, as everybody knows now, he has never returned” (75).  Wells embeds the secondary narrative of the Time Traveller in the primary narrative of the text; and this primary narrative recounts the Time Traveller’s ultimate failure: his own disappearance.  Time travel undermines its own ability to pronounce arbitrary demarcations such as beginnings and ends; such boundaries rely on normative, linear conceptions of time, which break down in the process of time travel.  The Traveller himself can never effectively communicate his story because it must fixate itself in the bonds of linear narrative.^[2]

            The only way for Wells to reconcile the paradox of his hero’s journey – the unknowability or definition of his temporal odyssey – is for the hero to vanish from narrative time entirely.  The primary narrator, despite his belief in the Time Traveller’s story, cannot know the extent of this story in any linear sense.  The materiality of the time machine thrusts the Traveller out of linear time entirely, suggesting that our normative approaches to time (i.e. understanding it linearly, or in a narrative way) fall short of apprehending what “Time” really is.  The Traveller drops out of narrative time.  He exists (to invoke Bakhtin’s chronotope) in “time-time”; that is, in the fissure between the content of the primary narrative and its constitutive form (if not out of form entirely).  The reified realm of Time itself, as materialized by the time machine; the hero must literally slip, as he has already told us, into the “interstices of intervening substances.”

            These interstices reveal to the Traveller (as far as we are allowed to see) a startling glimpse not of teleological or directed history, but of contingent moments.  Beyond the ideology of linear time, the world appears startling and strange, resulting in the terrifying creatures discussed above.  Here, Wells challenges the linearity of Darwinian evolutionary motion, which claims that “as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection” (Origin II:305).  Instead, in the conclusion of the Traveller’s narrative (or, rather, what appears to us as a conclusion), we find gigantic insects and monstrous tentacled things; not the hopeful prospects of “Excelsior” biology (Wells “Zoological Retrogression”).  As Stephen Jay Gould has put it more recently, the “vaunted progress of life is really random motion away from simple beginnings, not directed impetus toward inherently advantageous complexity” (Life's Grandeur 173).  As we can see in the final scene of the Traveller’s journey, life appears to be slinking back toward its simple beginnings.

            The narrative barrier that the Traveller thus encounters is the ultimate destruction of cognition itself, since narrative requires a conscious construction of points constellated together to form a cohesive (or not-so-cohesive) whole.  The paradoxical breakdown of the narrative effect arrives with the appearance of a dying sun; the heat death of the universe.  We can have some fun with this by looking briefly (and in conclusion) at Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction:

Everything is dead already.  Solar death is catastrophic because it vitiates ontological temporality as configured in terms of philosophical questioning’s constitutive horizontal relationship to the future.  But far from lying in wait for us in the far distant future, on the other side of the terrestrial horizon, the solar catastrophe needs to be grasped a something that has already happened; as the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death. (233)

What Brassier is concerned with is the possibility of thinking the death of thought.  Any attempt is circumscribed by life and thought, and thus immediately negates itself; we can think of death conceptually, but we cannot occupy it, cannot identify with it.  The death of thought, however – signified by heat death, solar death – cannot be grasped conceptually, because not only is it yet circumscribed by life, but is yet circumscribed by thought.  The concept of the death-of-thought is non-conceptual.

            As a non-concept, the thought drives toward its own demise.  Narratively speaking, it must fall out of itself; it encounters its own death.  The Traveller, narrating his tale in The Time Machine (if he is indeed to continue travelling), must also narrate beyond the borders of life and thought.  As a narrative concept, he becomes non-conceptual.  Wells’s intention for the Traveller’s disappearance likely finds its source in the genre of the adventure tale, of which The Time Machine must be included as an example.  Our best guess may be that the Traveller met his demise in some battle in a distant time, or that he fell in love and chose to remain with his bride.  However, the circumscription of the Traveller’s narrative within that of the primary narrator forces us to consider the formal problems that Wells is dealing with.

            As a formal institution dealing with conceptual content, the novel relies on time and cognition in order to present itself to readers.  Even if the content is estranging or unfamiliar, readers must have some basis of communication with the text.  The Time Machine presents its readers with a paradox: not that of time travel per se, but that of a concept that removes the apparatus through which we can conceptualize it.  Approaching the borders of thought in the decimation of the earth through solar death, Wells constructs a narrative that un-narrates itself, or narrates itself out of narration entirely.  All that remains are the two shriveled flowers, succumbed at last to the slow passage of the only time available for narrative and cognitive representation.

---

[1] This quote is taken from Jameson’s essay “Progress versus Utopia: or, Can We Imagine the Future?” in Science Fiction Studies, 9.2 (1982): 147-158, print.

[2] Or, we might say that this is the somewhat nascent comment that Wells is making.  It is certainly debatable (and I would be one of the first to say so) that more (post)modern and contemporary works of literature have successfully countered the linear narrative in innovative and compelling ways.  Wells, however, is combating linear narrative in a novel manner; through applications of scientific thought and consequences, contributing significantly to the genre of science fiction.

Aliens Among Us: a Casual Stroll through Harvard's Natural History Museum

            It’s incredible that we (well, some of us, I suppose) are so intrigued and excited by the prospect of extraterrestrial life and intelligence that we fail to notice the aliens all around us.

            I recently went to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, and, probably needless to say, I really got my nerd on.  Beginning in the Earth Sciences section, I read about the accretion of materials that led to the formation of our planet and walked around an impressive collection of elements, gemstones, amethysts, and rocks collected from various places across the globe as well as a few from meteorites.  As I moved through the institution, the exhibits gradually shifted away from inorganic compounds and toward discussions of climate change and finally onto biological specimens ranging from deep-sea Pompeii Worms (an extremophile found only in hydrothermal vents) to Siberian Tigers, and even a few fossilized remains of dinosaurs and other creatures from the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous.  Finally, the institution also features the interesting Peabody Museum, which houses artifacts from Pre-Columbian American cultures as well as small-scale recreations of temples and murals.

            As I toured the exhibits, I once again was floored by the sheer difference that separated me from what I was looking at.  The interesting, albeit brief, exhibit on evolution offers a bit of clarification for those unsure on the tenets of natural selection (which, as far as I’m concerned, is the closest thing to fact that we’ve yet discovered about the development and emergence of species); but it is a whole other matter to stand beneath this…

 (Fin Whale)

…and marvel at the aliens our planet already has in store for us.

            Some might object to calling creatures such as the Fin Whale “alien,” but I actually intend it in the politest way possible.  Only by really trying to acknowledge the diversification already present among the ecosystems of our planet can we then begin to perceive ourselves as part of this diversification, rather than some pinnacle or omega point at the top of it, straining toward divine transcendence.  Toss us in the middle of the ocean without a boat or paddle, and I guarantee you that all of the sudden we won’t find ourselves at the top of the food chain any longer (hell, throw me in with a boat and paddle – give me a cruise liner – I’ll still probably succumb to the elements).  What I found in the Natural History Museum at Harvard reawakened me to the truth that even I find it difficult to maintain occasionally: that evolutionarily, we are far from the “best,” and that if we seek the alien other, not only are we already among it – we are it.

            I don’t bother memorizing all the transitional epochs and eons during which our planet formed (Hadean, Achaean, Proterozoic, etc.); I can look them up on the internet whenever I need to.  But I am still in awe at the sheer weight of time, even within the scheme of the age of the universe (the accretion of the Earth is believed to have occurred about 4.56 billion years ago, while the universe is believed to be about 13.5 billion years old[1]); and modern human beings – in an anatomical sense – occupy approximately 0.00004% of the entire age of the Earth.  Prior to that time, we can trace the evolution of what we call “humans” back to increasingly more and more alien forms:

Evolution of the human skull (apologies, my camera couldn’t fit all the distinct examples)

Where do we draw the line?  Modern science chooses an entirely arbitrary point, which makes sense in hindsight once we’ve applied the schematics of biological classification.  We see some semblance creeping along the diverging lines, one strand that ends with us; but if we follow this strand back far enough, we will likely stare in disgust at our supposed ancestors.

            The other divergent lines offer glimpses into such unique forms of life that we can’t help but feel as aliens on our own planet:

Ground Pangolin

Right Whale 

Sperm Whale

Tapir 

I could spend hours walking around Harvard’s Natural History Museum; actually, I did.  The exhibit of glass flowers is as breathtaking as their collection of elements and animals.  Finally, what I found most exhilarating wasn’t any one exhibit in particular, but my own body – my own limbs, gait, brain, and the fact that I was part of a culture that put things in museums.  We privilege our eyes; sight is our dominant sense.  We need to see things in order to understand them.  Museums are an institution of seeing…

(don’t ask me exactly what this thing is)

…but we must remember that whatever we look at looks back at us.

            In Arthur C. Clarke’s iconic 1953 science fiction novel, Childhood’s End, the character Jan Rodricks is taken on a tour through an alien museum and witnesses an exhibit that causes immediate terror, and then gradual wonderment:

It was lifeless, of course – not, as he had thought in that first moment of panic, consciously staring up at him.  It filled almost all that great circular space, and the ruby light gleamed and shifted in its crystal depths.

It was a single giant eye. (Clarke 214)[2]

Jan explains that he feels panic, at first, because the situation was unexpected; but the details of expectance are never clarified.  Is Jan afraid because of the size of the exhibit, the reorientation of frame and perspective… or is he afraid because suddenly, in an institution of seeing, he feels that he has become the sight.  Those who know their Foucault may recall the succinct summary of his panopticon writings from Discipline & Punish: “Visibility is a trap.”[3]  As we walk through a museum, we are under the impression that nothing looks back at us – but the museum is not Foucault’s panopticon.[4]  We are not disguised in the central tower.  When we walk through zoos, we are fully aware that animals look back at us; we are not invisible.

Stanley Kubrick, “How People Look to Monkeys,” 1946

It is foolish to believe that simply because the exhibits in a museum are not living, breathing organisms, they do not look back at us.  We are (most of us) unaware of the deep cultural affect that permeates the museum environment.  We separate the museum out, believe it to be an objective space that distinguishes each exhibit, and us from the exhibits; but we do not consider the fact that, amidst the diversity of expunged life, we are the purest exhibit.  Our fascination with other creatures signals the greater imperative: our fascination with what we are, where we fit in the exhibition.

            We need not invoke the technologically advanced aliens of Clarke’s Childhood’s End in order to conceive of this fascination.  All we need to do is reorient ourselves with respect to our fellow terrestrial organisms.  Dismiss for a moment the museum as a “book of nature,” with ourselves as the author, and consider that what we take to be our authorship is actually a reflexive effort to comprehend ourselves.[5]

            Despite the reflexivity inherent in the instance of exhibition, we can still find ourselves in awe of the creatures before us, particularly when all we have left are the bones:

Triceratops skull

Edaphosaurus

Contemplating these strange looking things in turn raises questions about our ability to contemplate other animals at all.  Observing living animals in their habitat, as is the business of biologists and other scholars of the life sciences, certainly assists in the matter; but we must acknowledge, at some point, a barrier in what we can hope to understand.  Dinosaurs, unfortunately, have left us only their bones.  We don’t have any cave paintings, photographs, or home videos, despite our fond memories of this adorable bunch:

(I’m the baby!)

It helps to anthropomorphize things, but as any good scholar will tell you, this doesn’t get us any closer to understanding the thing-in-itself (in Kantian terms).  So we attempt to separate, to classify, and to organize in an effort to achieve the most objective, neutral knowledge possible of the things around us; but turning to Foucault one last time, no matter how complex our instruments or how specific our naming system, the utter alien-ness of the creature will evade our best attempts.[6]

            This is not an admission of futility or a concession to the inestimable forces of the inhuman world (which, let’s face it, is the world we live in; it makes no sense to think of it as “ours”).  The further science pushes its boundaries, the more discoveries we will continue to make, and the more (hopefully) we will understand, at the very least, about the consequences and effects of our existence in the world.  By continuing to pursue and discover we will not only continue to develop our knowledge, even if it will always remain imperfect; we will also inaugurate and catalyze the ever-shifting relationship of humanity to the world, culturally, economically, ethically, etc.  As we continue to make new discoveries we must also continue to reassess our economic and political foundations, because whether we consciously choose to or not, we will change.  It will not be for better or for worse – it will just happen.

            And, eventually, we will likely be as bewildering to something else as this is to us:

Kronosaurus

Kronosaurus (I’m glad I’m not swimming with this thing still in the water)

---

[1] Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, Trans. Ray Brassier, New York: Continuum, 2011, p. 9.  This is also very common knowledge, and can be found easily on the internet.  I think Wikipedia even has the correct figures.

[2] There is also some speculation that the final “starchild” sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey portrays the protagonist, David Bowman, walking through some kind of celestial museum, but unaware of his spectators…

[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish, New York: Vintage, 1995, p. 200.

[4] In Discipline & Punish, Foucault writes that the Panopticon is “a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen” (Discipline 202).  The architectural model of the panopticon was designed by Jeremy Bentham for use in prisons.

[5] For more on the museum as a kind of “book,” see Laura Rigal’s fascinating study on excavation, exhibition, and expansion, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic, Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998, p. 96-97.

[6] See Michel Foucault, “Classifying,” The Order of Things, New York: Vintage, 1994, p. 125-165.

A Posthuman Manifesto

            My interest in the posthuman provokes a variety of responses, but more often than not I get questioned on what exactly the posthuman is, and how exactly it is useful (i.e. practical).  The posthuman, of course, is not simply a study of what might come after humanity; in fact, it more specifically signals an interest in what exactly the human is.  Taking a posthuman stance means not taking the human, and anything we associate with the human, for granted.  It means making no assumptions on what human beings are or do, even on a general level.  It means trying to assess every situation from not only the human perspective, but from (potentially) all perspectives.  Ultimately, we are all entrenched in our own method of thought and knowing, our own observational strategies and informational paradigms – down to the very way in which our senses perceive the world, we are embodied in a way that conditions our interaction with external reality, what Immanuel Kant labeled the noumenal.  A skeptic of posthuman irrationality (which is what it can often appear as) will likely say: Yes, and that embodiment is as a human body.

            But what really is this body that we so presumptuously call “human”?  What do we really know about it?  Perhaps the assumptions we make about the body are not indicative of the way the body really is, but are only our perceptions of the body.  But then, our perceptions are certainly part of the body since they are generated (to an extent) by it; that is, our perceptivity would not be possible without a body to act as a perceiving agent.  We arrive here at the notion of reflexivity, and it is defined in the following way by N. Katherine Hayles in the first chapter of her book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics: “Reflexivity is the movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (Hayles 8).  Our own sensory perceptions allow us to generate a system of the body – to systematize the body, to organize it according to a field of knowledge; but those same perceptions are also a part of the system of the body that they have allowed us to create.  Pursuing this tangent, we can lose ourselves down the proverbial rabbit hole, continually halving our frame of reference, only asymptotically nearing zero-level – Zeno’s Achilles chasing the tortoise.  As Hayles puts it less than a page later: “Reflexivity tends notoriously toward infinite regress” (9).

            The impracticality of this conundrum rings too loud for some.  Humans do in fact engage with their world, often successfully, and they do in fact interact with their surroundings in certain ways.  Can we not then admit that it is practical to make certain assumptions about what the human is and about how it behaves?  For the sake of survival and immediate action, I would agree with the previous rhetorical question.  The danger arrives when we expand our assumptions into universalizations; when we become so entrenched in our assumptions that they become absolute.  I call attention to the posthuman, and to its concerns, because I want to remain vigilant on an expansive, general level.  I want to protect us from ourselves – the selves we take to be so human.  It may be practical, at our moment in history, to view ourselves in a constitutive way, to accept as given the manifest image of humanity, in Wilfred Sellars’s terms.  But practicality can change with the wind, and it can be extremely difficult to alter our cultural attitude toward ourselves and our environment when what conditions this attitude becomes universal.

            In this post, I want to cite Hayles’s opening assumptions regarding the posthuman, and offer them (with some explication) as a kind of posthuman manifesto.  There are four total:

1.      “First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life” (2).

This first assumption is a bit misleading considering Hayles goes on to challenge the subordination of material embodiment: “It is this materiality/information separation that I want to contest […] My strategy is to complicate the leap from embodied reality to abstract information” (12).  We must understand Hayles to be constructing a heuristic relationship between information and materiality, rather than allowing information to subsist in an idealistic fashion.  Hayles specifies what she means later in the text, in the chapter titled “The Materiality of Informatics”: “Since the body and embodiment, inscription and incorporation, are in constant interaction, the distinctions forming these polarities are heuristic rather than absolute.  They nevertheless play an important role in understanding the connections between an ideology of immateriality and the material conditions that produce the ideology” (193).  An emphasis on immateriality and information is only possible through specific material conditions, including the instantiation of information in a material body.  Thus, rather than pursue information as a kind of Platonic form subsisting beyond materiality, Hayles seeks to ground the ideal within the material.

2.      “Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow” (2-3).

As some of my readers may know, this is a topic that has been on my radar for a while now.  As usual, I turn to my homeboy Peter Watts: “Do you want to know what consciousness is for?  Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves?  Training wheels.  You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other.  That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality” (Watts 302).  Watts, of course, is a flagrant anti-humanist.  I don’t get quite the same impression from Hayles, or from most literary critics for that matter.  Despite the dawning revelation that we’re little more than chemicals and electricity (Watts’s own description), there still remains the undeniable fact that something rather miraculous happens when we truly try and think about our consciousness.  Even if it is a minor sideshow, it’s a pretty impressive one.  When we begin to consider the historical implications of consciousness – its contingency, its reflexivity – which is also what Hayles is interested in, tangentially (that is, how consciousness can arise from matter), we begin to notice how splendidly incredible it is.  If in my writings I seem to sideline consciousness, to subordinate it to matter, then I apologize, for I am being misunderstood.  I’m more interested in reveling in the utter unlikelihood of consciousness.  From inside the Cartesian theater, it appears as though consciousness must have been preordained, as though life had to evolve this way.  But Watts reminds us that evolution “has no foresight” (303).  It didn’t have to happen.  It was an evolutionary accident.  Whether or not one believes in a divine being, a creator, or not, we can’t deny the truth of the matter: that consciousness as an accident is the true miracle.  This is what, if we’re going to adopt a posthumanist position, we have to come to terms with.  This doesn’t necessitate an anti-humanist position, although there are some (including Watts) who tend in that direction.  Rather, we simply have to consider that consciousness is not the only way for life – even intelligent life – to exist.

3.      “Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born” (Hayles 3).

I am always struck when people lament or condemn the prospect of technological implants, the use of enhancing drugs, or the swelling of urbanization while at the same time praising artificial limbs or organs, medical marijuana, or the building of a well in Africa.  Hayles’s third assumption allows us to see how part of what the posthuman view allows us to do is to see how “the human” is never exactly what we think it is.  The divide between the natural and the artificial is more prevalent than ever, and one only needs to look as far as advertising to find countless products purporting to be more “natural.”  This divide, however, can be placed right back into the system itself, per Hayles’s invocation of reflexivity: the divide between natural and artificial takes place within the external environment.  Put more explicitly: the division between the natural and the artificial is itself artificial, and must be done away with.

            Life arose from natural inorganic matter, and human beings evolved naturally.  It makes little sense to draw an arbitrary, artificial line in the sand that marks where humanity suddenly started becoming artificial.  Everything we do and make – our earpiece phones, our ADHD medication, our skyscrapers, as well as our prosthetic limbs, life-saving drugs, and water distribution facilities – is just as natural as the first humans that transported wood on a wheel, or struck fire from stone, or used language to communicate.  In this very important sense, we have always been posthuman.  The human is not something static, something that stays the same; it evolves, it reacts, and it absorbs.  John Gray has evocatively written that “considering our bodies as natural and of our technologies as artificial gives too much importance to the accident of our origins,” and that if “we are replaced by machines, it will be in an evolutionary shift no different from that when bacteria combined to create our earliest ancestors” (Gray 16).  What we might think of as the posthuman imaginary – cyborgs, cyberspace, and technological singularities – is little more than the natural development of what we call “the human.”  This is what I take Hayles to mean when she claims that the bodily absorption or replacement of new prostheses, according to the posthuman view, is part of a process that has been going on not simply before we were born, but even before the advent of civilized humanity.

4.      “Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines.  In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals” (Hayles 3).

In the work of Nick Land – which must be some of the most intriguing of recent decades, something between poetry and prose, fiction and philosophy, speculative exploration at its best – we get a glimpse of what machinic posthumanity might look like:

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off.  Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.  As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of globe-wars.  Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.  Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace. (“Meltdown” 441)

Land’s apocalyptic writings are at times enticing and attractive, and at times terrifying, but always riveting.  What readers find in his texts are elements of a posthuman technocracy where the act of authorial creation itself becomes absorbed into the system it describes, thus following the theme of reflexivity.  Land purports to compose what he calls hyperstitions: “semiotic productions that make themselves real” (“Origins” 579).  One of the important aspects of hyperstitions is that their creators do not know they are hyperstitions at the moment of their creation; they appear as merely fictions.  Only in retrospect can they be revealed as hyperstitions.  It is important to note that the term is coined in one of Land’s most obviously fictional texts; that is, the term is coined as a fictional term.  Reflexivity works here in the most convoluted way; a fictional term, coined in a fictional text, but describing fictions that become reality.  In a purely representational way, the term – and the text – merely describes a certain system.  Only through a retrospective feedback loop can the term and text appear as part of the system they purport to describe.  We have to view Land’s work as fiction.  No rational person would claim that his texts accurately describe reality.  But we find within them the description of the system by which they become real.  So now we wait.

            In the aftermath, we will not be able to accurately draw the line between fiction and hyperstition.  There is no telling when the fictional becomes real, or when the text is absorbed into the system that it describes.  In much the same way, there can be no final division between the organic and the cybernetic, or between the human and the artificial – a conflation that appears as the subject matter of Land’s own speculative work.  Humanity, which has striven for so long to distance itself from its technologies, to keep them at arm’s length, to claim control and dominance over them, reorients itself in the posthuman.  It no longer sees its technologies and informatics as something separate, but as something at once constituted and constitutive: we, our environment and historical conditions, constitute the technologies that we create, but these technologies in turn constitute what we are as humans, and what it means to be human.  If we do control them, then they control us just as much.

            We can claim that there is something objective about the way human beings are born into the world.  We do not emerge with prosthetic limbs, or cell phones, or computers, or hammers, or even language.  We absorb and take up these things as we develop.  This we can be most certain of; but we can also be certain that this “state of nature,” in a Hobbesian sense, which we so often privilege and take to be pure, is not better or more valuable than any other later developed state.  If our bodies become poisoned (and this word should conjure an intense ambiguity for those familiar with Derrida’s fantastic long essay, “Plato’s Pharmacy”), or less pure as they mature and develop, this is no less natural than the entirely insufficient and helpless child that exits the womb.

            We are slowly embracing the posthuman, even if while doing so we continue to comfort ourselves with hymns to the ideology of the eternal human soul.  We are slowly embracing the posthuman not because a majority of us are actively pursuing this line of thought, but because the continual development of technology is forcing us to do so of its own accord.  Apocalyptic narratives that envision evil robots or technology run amok are merely examples of the popular imagination attempting to reinforce the bastions of the myth of Man (drenched in all its Western, white, European male self-glory) against the inevitable reality that we are just as contingent as the things we create, the things which create us.  It may be that, right up until the end (whatever this “end” may be), we continue to rebel against the tyranny of technology, to scream against the onslaught of an evolutionary motion that does not care about us, mistakenly believing that we had a destined right to soil, planet, and universe.

            Or, it may be that we come to see ourselves not as the creators of technology, but as its inheritors.  It may be that, through enough willing, reconsideration, and repositioning, we can see ourselves as creature and creator, not as part of a destiny that was designed, but as part of a process that is contingent.  The posthuman is not a philosophy of the end of humanity, or a politics that seeks an end of humanity; it is a way of thinking that allows us to understand ourselves in new ways, that allows us to coexist with the impure and the artificial, and that dethrones us from the pinnacle of evolution not to replace us with something more valuable, but to expose the reality that nothing is more or less valuable.  Perhaps, once we come to see ourselves this way, once we shed the rigid and ridiculous notion of the survival of that reified thing we call “the human,” we may actually find that we can continue to survive in new ways, in different ways, and, perhaps, even in more efficient ways.

Works Cited

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Print.

Land, Nick. “Meltdown.” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Eds. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 441-459. Print.

-. “Origins of the Cthulhu Club.” Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007. Robin MacKay and Ray Brassier. New York: Sequence Press, 2011. 573-581. Print.

Watts, Peter. Blindsight. New York: Tor Books, 2006. Print.