ABSTRACT
My credit card called me today. It wanted to remind me – in that annoyingly impersonal, unflappable, slightly condescending human voice it has – that I needed to pay it. It gave me precise instructions, which in order to placate it, I dutifully followed to the best of my ability, pushing the button required at the moment indicated, through three or four levels, before it gave up on me and abruptly terminated the conversation by instructing me to call it back at a given number and then hanging up. When I returned its call, I eventually worked my way out of the automated maze, and after a short wait was put through to a courteous operator who spoke clear and articulate English with an inflection that struck my untrained ear as vaguely Pakistani. We conducted our transaction, with him pleasantly (but insistently) offering me products and services; and I, straining to match his courtesy, just as insistently declining these offers. Throughout the transaction, my refusals were strengthened by my irritated awareness that anything purchased would not be purchased from the kindly, precise, efficient fellow now making the offer, but from the hypocritical, overly pleasant machine who had first called me. I tend to be slow to anger when speaking with people, but I notice that I get irritated much more rapidly when conversing with machines. That last sentence I wrote is the kind I grew up reading in sci-fi narratives of
fifty years ago, but today it pops up on my monitor as a straightforward narrative of a widely held, non-idiosyncratic observation of affect in contemporary culture. In fact, if one Googles “anger automated voice,” one will get not only the expected news stories documenting how widespread this new source of irritation is, one will also get citations to the burgeoning literature on how to build
anger-detection protocols into the automated voice caller, to make it more responsive to the anger being generated. I begin this chapter with this moment of machine-provoked affective response
to underline what was intended to be my opening comment: N. Katherine Hayles’s influential text, How We Became Posthuman, is already a decade old. When it first appeared, that title seasoned its implicit argument with a dash of audacity: posthumanism was not the brave new territory to be explored by the coming generation, it was the fait accompli whose history now demanded to be written. And the ubiquity of the term in literary-critical studies during the past decade, as well as our increasingly techno-mediated culture, testify to the accuracy of that title choice. (As I write this, the online MLA International Bibliography lists 170 publications that include the word “posthuman” in the title, none published before 1991, and all but a dozen published in the past decade. However, using the hyphenated “post-human,” the MLA International Bibliography generates fewer than twenty-five titles. I also note in passing that while “posthuman” proliferates in titles all around me, when I attempt to use the word in this text, my word processor silently separates it into two words – “post human” – and I have to take care to override manually my cyber-supplemented lexicographic superego.) In a world where “social networking” is more likely to refer to an activity conducted alone in a room with a computer than at a cocktail party or some other collective gathering; where “friending” is a verb form that requires a specific software application; and where twitterers tweet quotidian events like unreflective Prufrocks, our posthuman condition seems clearly established, and its currency in the fields of literary and cultural criticism fully comprehensible. An important corollary question – particularly important for the next genera-
tion of literary critics – is demanded by that reconfiguration: what will be the new role of literary criticism in particular and cultural criticism more generally in the redefined academy? Literary studies developed into a core discipline of the humanities, but do universities need a posthumanities, and if so, what role does literary study play within such a reconfigured academy? That is no idle question, as liberal arts universities increasingly tilt their budgets and their priorities away from a traditional balance of “arts and sciences” and toward a new partnership of science and business. As the “new corporate university” expands away from the traditional humanities, it may be adapting to a new posthuman condition, but it will therefore become all the more important for literary studies to articulate its relevance to a posthumanities university, and to defend against the counterclaim that as we continue becoming posthuman, the discipline that long defined itself as central to the humanities now continues in becoming more peripheral. For such a long time, a strong feature of disciplinary self-definition was inevi-
tably to some degree traditional, preserving in a curatorial fashion a body of texts that expressed traits and doctrines that were deemed to have particular cultural value in establishing “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well
expressed,” particularly with respect to those features of the human condition that were deemed to be essential. The last half-century (that period during which Hayles notes we became posthuman) has witnessed a dramatic change in disciplinary self-definition, moving away from the preservation of a narrowly defined core set of canonical texts that express an essential humanity to emphasize instead a set of interpretive practices and theoretical commitments, a critical toolkit that can be used productively to examine a range of texts and their constitutive role in cultural formations. What has, I believe, been rather slower in development – but will ultimately be of even greater significance to the fundamental reorganization of humanities within the academy – is the development of a revised attention to ecological criticism. Where traditional humanism defined culture around the privileged category of the human, the era of the posthuman coincides with an intellectual reorientation to a world in which we are responsive agents within nature-culture networks. The paradigm of dominion, in which the world was a resource at the disposal of the human, is giving way to a paradigm of responsive interaction and mutual interdependencies; and our critical practices need to reflect and respond to that altered orientation. It is in this context that recent attention to animality and animal studies offers dramatic potential for expanding and altering critical practice. The title figure in the most canonical novel in American literature is a whale.
That is a simple statement, almost ludicrous in its naïveté, which makes it all the more marvelous to consider the critical history of Moby Dick, which managed so successfully, for so long, to develop complex valuable interpretive arguments in which the non-human animal at the center of that narrative was read as so many things other than a whale. That the author went out of his way to intrude on conventional fictional narrative in order to educate his reader about whales and whaling has long been a subject of critical interest, much of it not terribly concerned with cetology itself. My point here is not to digress into the critical history of Melville’s major novel, but to point out that a simple alteration in focus can produce dramatically revisionist accounts of familiar texts, even when remaining within familiar methodological paradigms (the MLA informs me that two recently defended dissertations appear to take up this particular challenge). That whales mattered to Melville, and that, therefore, how whales mattered to Melville can matter significantly to his readers, is a simple, straightforward, but not necessarily simplistic work of critical revision. This is the indirect impact of how a more ecologically alert revision of a
humanist tradition requires us to revise our framing of questions in literary and cultural history. Opportunities here abound, and can lead in a variety of rewarding directions. For a generation, historians have been influenced by the important work of Harriet Ritvo, Joan Thirsk, and by Keith Thomas’s ambitious Man and the Natural World. In books like his influential Horse and Man in Early Modern England and more recent The Horse Trade of Tudor and Stuart England, Peter Edwards has broken important new ground in economic history by
recovering a fuller appreciation for the role companion species play in human historical development. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton’s discussion of the traffic in horses and equestrian art in Global Interests: Renaissance art between East and West locates the same species in the context of a revisionist art history that expands consideration of cross-species interactions to their commercial and diplomatic engagement with international traffic, a theme that receives considerably fuller treatment in Donna Landry’s Noble Brutes: how eastern horses transformed English culture. My momentary focus on the horse (which could be extended to include a
significant body of recent critical literature) is not simply a function of my own current research agenda, but a choice intended to highlight how recent critical work has begun two important moves. The first is to differentiate meaningfully between different disparate manifestations of non-human animal life (rather than simply speaking of “the animal” as an undifferentiated “other” to the human). The second is to illustrate how, as this work develops, it expands both our awareness of the long-standing web of cross-species relating that has constituted an important, largely ignored (and often only sparsely recorded) component of a historical development explicitly tagged as “human” history, and at the same time how this work is distributed over a range of sub-disciplinary interests that coalesce in cultural studies: literary, economic, diplomatic, aesthetic, transnational, etc. With her contribution to the important collection edited by Nigel Rothfels, Representing Animals, and in her own Perceiving Animals: humans and beasts in early modern English culture, Erica Fudge offers an engaging and accessible modeling of the case for a cultural history that considers seriously the transspecies nature of cultural formation. Within the history of science, Anita Guerrini’s Experimenting with Humans and Animals pursues a similar vein by examining how the human-animal barrier (a special case of species boundary) constitutes a special frontier in the history of experimental medicine, and its historical reliance on human and animal experimentation. Her work is explicitly historical, choosing to articulate what has been the history of a fraught aspect of human-animal relations that inform current ethical debates, rather than enter into those debates directly. But these ethical debates do, of course, constitute a significant component of recent work in animal studies. As fields or areas of inquiry emerge as a meeting ground for common aca-
demic study, there is often a period during which nomenclature and terminology sorts itself out somewhat unevenly, and debate, division, and discord frequently accompany the process, quite often productively. Such a moment seems now to be in play around the question of whether one identifies one’s intellectual work as better labeled as “animal studies” or “animality.” In a rough-and-ready parsing of these terms, the former is more typically claimed by those whose interest in the topic is grounded squarely in animal-rights discourse and activism, while the latter term is more typically invoked by those who identify their interests with posthumanist efforts to theorize the non-human subject. Clearly, those are
not so much opposing positions as overlapping commitments with differing emphases. One of the most rigorously sustained and influential discussions of the relation between these different emphases in addressing the ethical dimension of the theoretical problems posed by “the question of the animal” has been Cary Wolfe’s Animal Rites. While clearly sympathetic to the aims and methods of such projects as the Great Ape Project, or revisions of the U.S. Animal Welfare Act, or a variety of arguments that seek to extend rights to animals by expanding the notion of personhood on which rights discourse depends, Wolfe is at the same time acutely aware of the degree to which such efforts remain grounded in the same ideological bedrock that was the foundation for the centuries of humanist philosophy that denied those rights on the basis of an unquestioned articulation of human exceptionalism:
