Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  There are parallels to literary representations of animals, all the more so when these representations are within the genre of sf and thus the limits of current human–animal relations can be transcended by imagining the world otherwise, a utopian desire for a world as it might appear had we not founded our subjectivity on the ideal of a radical separation of human from animal, and thus inherited many of the dualisms that structure Western thought: culture over nature, man over woman, colonizer over colonized, capital over labor. Nagel’s insistence on the difference between behaving as a bat and experiencing being as one seems, on one level, to reestablish a radical separation between humans and animals—or at the very least a separation between the specific nature of being among all individual species. At the same time, however, he takes as axiomatic that at least some animals, like humans, do have conscious experience and thus can experience a mental state of being, a connection between human and animal denied by much of the philosophical tradition. Further, as Erica Fudge points out, Nagel “challenges humanist assumptions about the power of humans to construct and know the world . . . we can see that there are animals—many of them living in our homes—who share our world and who escape our understanding” (Pets 46), thus moving us closer toward the mutual exchange of gazes which Berger suggests once constructed less damaging human–animal social relations and prevented humans from feeling isolated as a species.

  I want to suggest that sf literature is a particularly productive site for exercizing Costello’s sympathetic imagination, striving to put ourselves in the place of the animal other and experience the world from an estranged point of view. Ralph Acampora advocates what he calls symphysis (common understanding based on shared embodied experience)—rather than sympathy (common understanding based on shared feelings)—as the basis for beginning to understand what it is like to be another species. He argues,

  to gain ontological access to the varied life-modes of different animals, one must enter environments not wholly of human making. This means beginning without making the assumption that there is just one world, permitting the possibility of other Umwelten—foreign, yet potentially familiar, forms of worldhood. Indeed, starting out this way may itself contribute to the revelation (or even constitution) of other animal worlds. (Corporal Compassion 12)

  In contrast to Nagel, Acampora argues there is no need for thought experiments in being another species: “it will suffice ‘merely’ to arrive at some comprehension of what it means to be-with other individuals of different yet related species, because the experience of ‘being-with’ gives us all the mileage we need for tracking cross-species community” (Corporal Compassion 27).

  This technique will no doubt seem very familiar to readers of sf. Much of the energy of the genre comes from the idea of “foreign, yet potentially familiar” worlds, from working through in detail how the world might be otherwise if some condition were changed. Examples include changing one’s gender at will, as in the works of John Varley; humanity retreating from the material realm to civilizations within digital networks, as in Greg Egan’s Diaspora; or having all necessary yet unfulfilling work done by non-sentient drones, as in Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, or by genetically modified animal serfs, as in Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople stories. It is important, for two reasons, to look at the specificity of sf worldbuilding whose estranged perspective is that of an animal. First, animals have been the other of human identity at least since there has been recorded human history, and perhaps even before as is suggested by the animal subjects of the Lascaux cave paintings. Thus, remembering the specificity of this history of human-animal relations broadens our sense of sf’s particular confrontation with alterity when this alterity is represented by an animal, connecting its motifs with a certain symbol of human history.10 Second, it is important to remember that any alien animals or aliens who have animal-like qualities are both aliens and animals: we are currently in a time of ecological crisis and sf’s animal representations are one of the places where we struggle to think our way through it. There is now general agreement11 that we are living through a mass-extinction event, brought about by climate change (itself the result of human activity), the destruction of habitat by human industry and urbanization and the continued slaughter of animals for sport or food (a human practice that began causing animal extinctions as early as the period when Cro-Magnon replaced Neanderthal,12 and has accelerated rapidly since 1500).13 To understand how sf engages the history of animals in human social and intellectual life, and more importantly how recent sf intervenes in the ongoing struggle to reconfigure human subjectivity, often in ways that transform our destructive relationship with the rest of the natural world, it is important to remember that the alien and futuristic animals in sf draw on this historical and material context. If our readings of such texts forget or minimize their animal being—transforming them into analogues of robots or images of technoscience or “just” aliens who might share some features with animals—then we foreclose the texts’ radically other utopian impulses. If we understand sf from the post-WWII period to have been haunted by the specter of our own extinction through nuclear annihilation, we can similarly see late twentieth and early twenty-first-century sf as shadowed by the impending threat of even more animal extinctions and perhaps the collapse of our entire ecosystem.

  From this perspective, we might understand our relationship with other species as an expression of the current governance model of biopolitics, which Foucault has characterized as a change in the power of sovereignty: the old right to “take life or let live” is now complemented and at the same time transformed by the new power “to make live and to let die” (Society 241). This formulation is useful for understanding human sovereignty over other species on the planet: some we make live in zoos or factory farms or specially breed as laboratory tools and designer pets; others we let die through habitat erosion, euthanasia of unwanted domestic animals or the exclusion of rodents from the US Animal Welfare legislation (in order to control costs for pharmaceutical companies). Knowledge about animals which takes them only as objects might be understood in Foucault’s terms as a disciplinary norm that is used to reinforce the species boundary through a policing of what is “proper” to humankind alone and the construction of institutions and practices that work not only to reinforce this boundary but further to prevent us from gaining any knowledge of the animal as subject, knowledge which might challenge our investment in this norm. HAS, then, might be understood as a subjugated knowledge that revisits and interrogates this split, which has implications not only for our ability to see animals as subjects but further for our ways of conceptualizing what it means to be human once this ground of species difference has been destabilized. Akira Lippit points out:

  it is interesting to note that the invention of the idea of humanity, its appearance in the human sciences, was accompanied by an intensive investigation of the animal in those very sciences. At precisely the moment when the bond between humanity and animal came to be seen as broken, humanity became a subject and the animal its reflection. (19)

  Interrogating the species boundary thus has important implications for ethics, not restricted to the question of our ethical duty to other species; rather it relates more broadly to the philosophical foundations of ethical discourse as a whole, as well as to the political implications of biopolitics, which thinkers such as Foucault, Agamben, and Hardt and Negri have defined as a shift from governing humans as legal or civil subjects toward governing the biological life of the species. One of the premises of this book is that resistance to the biopolitical regime of neo-liberal capitalism requires acknowledging the degree to which species difference has been foundational in structuring the liberal institutions that one might wish to contest. In this way, looking at HAS and sf is a continuation of my earlier work on posthumanism and its critique of disembodied metaphysics of subjectivity. A necessary supplement, in Derrida’s sense, to this project of returning to a sense of embodied subjectivity connected to the m
aterial world is an understanding of humans as merely one species among many with whom we are in obligatory, symbiotic, complex, contradictory and confusing exchange. This is a pressing political question of our times, for as Rosi Braidotti observes in Transpositions:

  What “returns” with the return of Life and of “real bodies” at the end of postmodernism, under the impact of advanced technologies, is not only the others of the classical subject of modernity: woman/native/nature. What returns now is the “other” of the living body in its humanistic definition: the other face of bios, that is to say zoe, the generative vitality of non- or pre-human or animal life. Accordingly, we are witnessing a proliferation of discourses that take “Life” as a subject and not as the object of social and discursive practices. (37)

  Foucault understands these shifts to create a specifically new form of war within the twentieth century, one which is “the splitting of a single race into a superrace and a subrace” rather than an understanding of racial difference and war as “a clash between two distinct races,” one of which “came from elsewhere” (Society 61). Now, the discourse of power becomes

  the discourse of a battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against whose who pose a threat to biological heritage. (Society 61)

  In The Open, Agamben traces this split to the species boundary between man and animal, suggesting that religious visions of everlasting peace imply not only harmony among humans but also between humans and other species. Thus, the first biological split within the species is that of humans from their animal being, leading Agamben to conclude that “man . . . can be human only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous [man-producing] animal which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation, he is capable of mastering and eventually destroying his own animality” (12). Agamben is here following the work of Heidegger, who insists upon separating the Being of humans, the Dasein, from the being of other species, who live but do not have being “as such.” Heidegger defines humans as world-having in that their Being is both part of the world and apart from it: humans “have” the world in the way of standing apart from it, able to abstractly conceptualize it rather than be captivated by materiality. Animals, in his view, are poor-in-world in that they are living and motile, able to react to their environment, but not able to conceive of themselves as set apart, separate from the world. A crucial part of Heidegger’s distinction is the relationship to technology, which he describes as an “unconcealing” of nature: animals, in their captivated and limited relationship to the world are closed off from the realm of technology.

  Technology, however, is something that humans must master. It is a way of encountering the world as a possibility of tools and resources, a way of bringing forth, but at the same time technology is a way of revealing the world that shapes our understanding and limits our possibilities. Technology makes nature into a standing-reserve, and given their inability to access the realm of technology, animals become part of this standing reserve. Heidegger argues that “instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology” (12), and modern technology poses a particular problem for Heidegger as it is “an ordered revealing” that “gathers man into ordering” (19). He refers to the “essence” of modern technology as “Enframing” and argues that it “starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve” (24), a process so ubiquitous that humans are susceptible to being compelled to see the world in this way, thereby losing the world “as such” and being reduced to a captivated and limited relation to the world, that is, to animal being: “he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall; that is, he comes to the point where he himself will have to be taken as standing-reserve” (27). Thus Enframing “conceals that revealing which, in the sense of poiçsis, lets what presences come forth into appearance,” that is, it “not only conceals a former way of revealing, bringing-forth, but it conceals revealing itself” (27). Heidegger is thus continually concerned with finding ways of retaining the human’s separation from animal being, in order to preserve what he sees as uniquely valuable about human Being, spirit and freedom.

  Yet as Agamben makes clear, the task of separating human life from all other life is not easily achieved. As Judith Butler has suggested in another context regarding the “naturalness” of gender identity, the anxious and constant reiteration of “normal” performance betrays the lack of ontological grounding for difference. It must be continually reiterated to exist. Similarly, Agamben suggests that the difficulty in trying to separate anatomical or biological life (zoe) from consciousness or human life (bios) is that humans possess both; the gap between human and animal is always already internal to human existence. Thus, the real question of humanism is not to think of humans as a conjunction of body and soul; instead we need to “think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation” (Agamben, The Open 16). Humanism thus becomes an “anthropological machine” (29) that attempts to define what is “proper” to humans, which proves precarious work since humans are neither properly divine nor fully animal, suspended between celestial and terrestrial states and forever at risk of degenerating into animal being. The discourse of speciesism in science, philosophy and culture is an expression of this machine’s continual work to distinguish human from animal. Yet because this division between human and animal is always-already internal to humanity, there is constant risk. From the animal welfare perspective, we might be concerned about the ethical exclusion of at-least some animal species from the domain of ethics; one of Derrida’s key arguments in his writing on this topic is the philosophical bankruptcy of the term “animal” to refer to a plethora of nonhuman species, the differences among which are often greater than the difference between humans and some species in this category. He argues that rather than defining a single boundary between human and animal, “it is rather a matter of taking into account a multiplicity of heterogeneous structures and limits: among nonhumans, and separate from nonhumans, there is an immense multiplicity of other living things that cannot in any way be homogenized, except by means of violence and wilful ignorance” (The Animal 48).

  Yet there is a further risk, pertinent even to those who have no concern for animal welfare. As both Foucault and Agamben make clear, the human–animal division is both external and internal to human being, and thus the anthropological machine’s work of including and excluding can—and has—put some Homo sapiens in the category “animal”; that is, the category of those who can be killed but not murdered because their lives and deaths are not included within the scope of our ethical discourse. Agamben argues that “In our culture, the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin Western politics is also biopolitics” (The Open 80). In addition to these questions of ethics, an important aspect of biopolitics is the degree to which life becomes managed as a calculation, a governance of people that sees them in terms of the statistical norms decided for the population, as Foucault makes clear in Security, Territory and Population. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault elaborates this analysis and connects its particular mode of governance to neo-liberalism, which involves a shift toward competition as the primary image through which we understand social relations. Neo-liberalism involves a shift, also, in the object of governance such that price stability—rather than other aims such as full employment—becomes the goal, and further “the idea as not, given the state of things, how can we find the economic system that will be able to take account of the basic facts . . . [but rather] how can we modify these facts, this framework so that the market economy can come into play?” (Birt
h 141). In the realm of technoculture and biopolitics, one of the ways such a world has been materialized is through what Melinda Cooper calls the biotech revolution, “the result of a whole series of legislative and regulatory measures designed to relocate economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation” (19). This shift means the extraction of surplus value is enacted on bodies on the biological level, resulting in the massive suffering of animals in locations such as factory farms, where they are reduced to machinic components of an industrial productive system whose ethos admits only efficiency as a value. From the point of view of Heidegger’s argument concerning technology, however, we must also recognize that humans—conceived of as the population, the object of governance—have similarly become a standing-reserve of surplus value from the perspective of neo-liberalism.