Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Part of rethinking the human–animal boundary, then, is recognizing the embodied nature of human existence, that Homo sapiens is a creature of the same biological origin as the plethora of species we label “animal” and that we have greater or lesser degrees of kinship and common experience with them. Equally important, however, is recognizing that the beings we call “animals” are also inevitably caught up in human social systems and the language we use to create and give meaning to the world. On both a material level—what habitat remains, whether they spend their lives in captivity or “wild,” and if “captive” whether as laboratory tools or pampered pets—and a discursive one—whether they are companions or pests, fellow beings or packaged meat, “noble” sign of a threatened wilderness or ‘foreign” species invading a human-designated boundary of indigenous locale—animal lives are complexly interrelated with human culture. How we think about animals affects how we live with them, and how we live with them determines who they are, socially and biologically. Thus, in thinking about the ability of literature to convey new insight into animal being and potentially to reconfigure human–animal social relations, we must “acknowledge the limitations of our own perspective, but simultaneously accept that what we can achieve with those limitations is important and worthwhile” (Fudge, Animal 159). In so doing, it is essential that we remain cognisant of the fact that “our perception is based upon our limitations” and animal lives “exceed our abilities to think about them” (Fudge, Animal 160). In examining sf representations of animals, then, my focus will be twofold: on the one hand, such representations can provide insight into the way the discourse of species informs other ideologies at work, often opening the texts up to new meanings not evident when they are read without the insights of HAS; on the other, some sf texts themselves perform the work of HAS, striving to gesture beyond normative conceptions of animal and human being and thereby to glimpse, however imperfectly, something of their lives beyond the potentialities currently available to them in Western social relations.

  Both Elizabeth Costello and Derrida are also interested in common vulnerability as one of the ways that humans and animals share embodied being. For Derrida, this critique is part of his deconstruction of the Cartesian cogito as model for human subjectivity, in a move in which Descartes

  abstract[s] from the “I am” his own living body, which, in a way, he objectivizes as a machine or corpse (these are his words); so much so that his “I am” can apprehend and present itself only from the perspective of this potential cadaverization, that is to say, from the perspective of an “I am mortal,” or “already dead,” or “destined to die,” indeed “toward death.” (The Animal 72)

  Similarly, Costello argues,

  The knowledge we have is not abstract—“all human beings are mortal, I am a human being, therefore I am mortal”—but embodied. For a moment we are that knowledge. We live the impossible: we live beyond our death, look back on it, yet look back as only a dead self can. (Coetzee 77)

  Thinking about alterity, ethics and literature through the perspective of HAS, then, has wider implications than merely a new way of thinking about animal being—although this too is an important site of ethical intervention for many working in the field. Thinking about our relationships with animals—social, conceptual, material—equally forces us to rethink our understanding of what it means to be human and the social world that we make based on such conceptions. In reconnecting with animals, we are also reconnecting with our embodied being, what might be thought of as our animal nature: this new way of conceptualizing human subjectivity and our relation with the rest of the living world thus has important affinities with scholarship on posthumanism.

  In an essay that has become central to the discipline of HAS, “Why Look at Animals?,” John Berger argues that industrial capitalism has radically transformed human’s relationship with the natural world. When animals and humans look at one another, Berger suggests, it is across a gap of non-comprehension and thus when “man” is “being seen by the animal, he is being seen as his surroundings are seen by him”; that is, humans recognize that animals have a point of view regarding us, just as we see them as part of our surroundings. In pre-industrial times, Berger argues, humans acknowledged the mutuality of this gaze, grasping animals as both familiar and distinct, as having “a power . . . comparable with human power but never coinciding with it” (3). As animals were gradually removed from our day-to-day experience through urbanization, industrialism and other changes to the landscape wrought by capitalism which has eroded animal habitats and populations, we no longer encounter animals as fellow creatures who return our gaze. Instead, we see them in spaces that emphasise the radical disproportion in human–animal social relations: spaces such as zoos where animals are compelled to be visible in circumstances in which everything that would enable them to appear as fellow beings with their own perspective on the world and on us—freedom of movement, the opportunity to interact with other species, the habitat which is part of their lifeworld—has been stripped away. In such circumstances, humans are compelled to be like the philosophers critiqued by Derrida, able to look at the animal but not to be seen by it. Thus Berger concludes that the zoo is not a site of human–animal interaction, but rather “a monument to the impossibility of such encounters” (19).

  For Berger, capitalism has irredeemably isolated man, who can no longer share an exchange of mutual looks with other species, whom he has marginalized or destroyed. Derrida begins his own reflections on philosophy and animals with an attempt to return to this site of exchange, reflecting upon the look of his cat, which he is careful to stress is “this irreplaceable living being” and not “the exemplar of a species called ‘cat’, even less so of an ‘animal’ genus or kingdom” (The Animal 9). To understand being from the point of view of mutual exchange of gazes, Derrida insists, one must take as axiomatic that the cat is fully as individuated, as much both part of her species and a being of “unsubstitutable singularity” (9) as is Derrida himself. He acknowledges that the cat “has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute other, and nothing will have ever given me more food for thinking through this absolute alterity” (11) than encounters which enable him not only to see his cat, but also to see himself being seen by the cat. Such encounters facilitate an ability to see “the abyssal limit of the human: the inhuman or the ahuman, the ends of man, that is to say, the bordercrossing from which vantage man dares to announce himself to himself, thereby calling himself by the name that he believes he gives himself” (12). In other words, thinking through the concept of “the animal” as well as through our relationships with material animals is indispensable for grasping what it means to be human, first because the concept “animal” has always been the ground for production of “the human,” and second because in examining the real, material, complex existences of other species—as well as our own—we can also begin to see the ends of a certain historical concept of the human, as Foucault described in The Order of Things. But Derrida’s critique is more radical yet, for he also incorporates knowledge of the observed capacities of animals instead of relying solely on philosophical abstractions, and comes to the conclusion that not only are humans not alone in possessing the capacities thereby deemed “proper” to humankind, but in fact for the most part humans do not achieve the qualities they ascribe to themselves with the name “human.”

  Derrida uses the human–animal boundary to ask questions about subjectivity that are very similar to those raised by critics such as N. Katherine Hayles under the rubric of posthumanism. Just as Hayles found in sf a tool for thinking through questions of embodiment, subjectivity and ethics in concrete ways, so too might HAS turn to sf to explore the issues raised by Berger and Derrida. In sf we can once again find ourselves confronted by the gaze of “absolute alterity,” an other who looks back at us from its own point of view and often one whom we must acknowledge as having power comparable if not identical to our own. The dialectic between simi
larity and difference that humans experience as we come face-to-face with animals is part of what Berger feels has been lost with industrial capitalism which has transformed them from fellow subjects into objects of consumption. This process has dramatically intensified in the past twenty-five years with genetic manipulation producing patented living beings that from one point of view cannot be regarded as other than objects. Animals modified for medical research, for pharming production, to survive the extremely restrictive conditions of factory farming without injury or for use in xenotransplantation research are patented creations of human culture that would not exist in nature and often cannot survive outside the artificially controlled conditions for which they are made.

  Animals in sf can return to us a face-to-face encounter with another being whom we regard as a fellow subject. For example, Roger Zelazny’s Eye of Cat (1982) is told in part from the point of view of a telepathic, polymorphic being called Cat. Cat has been imprisoned in a zoo by animal-trapper William Blackhorse Singer, who supplies the exotic zoos of this future with animals from many planets. Like most of the sf I will discuss, Zelazny’s novel uses the tropes of sf in ways that simultaneously draw attention to our social relations with the “real” aliens with whom we share this planet (i.e., other species) and at the same time betrays in other ways some of the as-yet-unexamined assumptions about species and other difference that inform the human–animal boundary. The novel sets up a problematic equation, for example, between Cat as the last of his species (his planet has been destroyed since his capture) and Singer as the last Navajo, an authentic practitioner of the old ways who has made it into the twenty-first century through a combination of longevity treatments and the time-dilation effects of FTL travel. This parallel reinforces a colonialist history of seeing native peoples, like animals, as insufficiently possessing the land which then justifies its appropriation and also their treatment as less-than-fully-human subjects. Yet at the same time Zelazny interweaves traditional Navajo tales within his futuristic text, showing a respect for Navajo cultural traditions in the resemblance he demonstrates between them and sf as two ways of explaining the world through story. The Navajo tales also reveal the quite different way in which human–animal relations are conceptualized within native traditions, a mutual respect that resembles the ideal Berger describes.5 Further, Eye of Cat both offers Cat as an exception to the normalized incarceration of animals in zoos—Singer apologizes and offers reparations once he works out that Cat is sentient and thus not “really” an animal—yet at the same times challenges our ability to know and judge sentience and thus to “correctly” make decisions about which beings might “ethically” be put in zoos. Further, news clips inserted in the text gesture toward a world in which significant changes have restructured the human–animal boundary in this future: dolphins are settling a lawsuit with a canning firm, and a composition by a humpback whale will premiere at the New York Philharmonic, but whooping crane populations will be culled. Eye of Cat complicates and makes multiple what we now take to be a simple binary division between all humans and all animals. Finally, the novel makes an effort to convey that Cat’s consciousness is sentient but different from our own through sections of text expressing Cat’s point of view that are fragmented streams of consciousness without clear word divisions, similar to ee cummings’ poetry.

  Eye of Cat successfully captures the dialectic of the human–animal relation that Berger feels has been lost with the rise of industrial capitalism that doomed humans to isolation in the universe. The emergence of sf during this same period might thus be understood as at least in part a desire to re-establish a world shared with other beings. Animals thus “haunt”6 sf, always there in the shadows behind the alien or the android with whom we fantasize exchange. Another specter, anthropomorphism, also lingers about HAS and sf. Precisely how like or unlike us are animals, and what barriers does this pose to our ability to have an exchange across the border of alterity? This question has troubled animal-rights activists and defenders of anthropocentrism alike, and is one of the most contentious in the field of HAS. Although anthropocentrism has consistently been vilified since the rise of a culture of science, it nonetheless has proven impossible to stamp out, from the plethora of humanized animals in children’s literature, to a consumer culture of pet ownership which interpellates them into such human practices as birthday celebrations and babysitting, and even to research such as Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s work on communication in primates that is attempting to establish a shared human-bonobo culture. As Derrida’s interrogation of philosophy further points out, at issue in discussions of anthropocentrism is not merely whether or not it is acceptable to attribute some “human” characteristic—such as consciousness or language or emotion—to animals, but rather the more far-reaching question of the validity of the grounds upon which humans attribute certain capacities to themselves. Daston and Mitman credit the waning of anthropomorphic understandings of the world to the rise of the modern culture of science,7 but further point out that “despite the official ban on anthropomorphism in science, thinking with animals permeated practice in the field and the lab” (8).

  Thus, the “fallacy” of anthropomorphism is an alibi for human behavior. We construct animals as radically unlike ourselves in order to justify our behavior toward them: they do not feel pain but merely respond to stimuli as do automatons, says Descartes; they do not experience personal attachment and thus do not suffer when separated from their young, says the dairy industry; they have no capacity for consciousness and hence cannot experience boredom, say the factory farm and research industries. The challenge, then, is to pay attention to the actual lives of animals, to observe carefully the times at which it is appropriate to attribute to them motivations for behavior that are similar to our motivations for similar behavior, and times when their differences of embodiment, sensory organs and other capacities make such attributions unlikely.8 Although there is a risk of what Frans de Waal has called anthropodenial in our refusal to see the ways in which fellow primates and fellow mammals in particular are similar to humans, at the same time we need to be careful that in the rush to embrace similarity we do not erase specificity.

  If literature in general, and sf in particular, are to offer us something of the animal’s experience and thus enable us to recover an encounter of mutual exchange of gazes, we must be attuned to resisting the two fallacies of too inclusive an anthropomorphism and too constant an anthropodenial. Beyond the rationale that anthropodenial provides for our continued exploitation of animals, resistance to anthropomorphism is also motivated by a concern about the historical ways in which the discourse of species has been used similarly to exploit other humans animalized through this discourse, the two most significant historical examples being American enslavement of those of African descent and German extermination of Jews and others. Just as we must avoid extremes of both anthropomorphism and anthropodenial in trying to work through the place of animals in our ethical and social milieu, so too must we be sensitive to specificity in thinking through the similar, but not identical, exploitation of animalized humans and animals themselves. Often the desire to include animals within the circle of those to whom we owe an ethical duty is seen as a way of humanizing these animals, which seems then to imply a shadow double of animalizing some humans, particularly given that we live in a world in which many humans continue to be exploited and denigrated by others.9

  Thomas Nagel’s essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat” (1974) has become a touchstone in HAS considerations of this problem. In contrast to Coetzee, who suggests that the literary imagination would enable us to capture something of an other’s experience, Nagel cautions us to remember the difference between “what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves” (439) and what it would be like really to be in the way that a bat has being because, although bats have something in common with us, they are also differently embodied, have a different range of activity and a different sensory apparatus, which means that an encount
er with them is essentially one with “a fundamentally alien form of life” (438). Nagel further stresses the serendipitous correspondence between the sf imagination and the sort of problematic he is developing by observing that “in contemplating the bats we are in much the same position that intelligent bats or Martians would occupy if they tried to form a conception of what it was like to be us” (440). The challenge of how to understand the alien, how to convey experience from a non-anthropocentric view, is similarly faced by sf. In Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Fredric Jameson connects this struggle to the difficulty of conceiving utopian possibility without allowing it to collapse into a necessarily reductive programme: how to achieve the delicate balance of enough familiarity such that the alien can be comprehensible to the human readers, but yet still incorporate enough alterity in the text such that the alien also pushes us to conceive of the world and ourselves otherwise. Even in sf’s failure, then, to fully characterize the alien without reference to the human—a kind of anthropocentrism—Jameson finds a trace of hope, asking, “What, then, if the alien body were little more than a distorted expression of Utopian possibilities? If its otherness were unknowable because it signified a radical otherness latent in human history and human praxis, rather than the not-I of a physical nature?” (118).