2020 Book ThePalgraveHandbookOfTwentieth

The Palgrave Handbook
of Twentieth and
Twenty-First Century
Literature and Science
Edited by
The Triangle Collective
Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science
Series Editor
Howard Marchitello
Department of English
Rutgers University–Camden
Camden, NJ, USA
This series of handbooks is devoted to the study of the rich and complex his-
tory of the relationship between literature and science, from medieval times
to the present moment. While this is a topic not unknown to literary criti-
cism (especially in the middle years of the 20th century), the work assembled
in these five volumes represents a fundamentally new approach to the vital
story of the interconnectedness of literature and science, an approach that is
grounded firmly upon an understanding of the status of both literature and
science as discourses dedicated to the production of knowledge.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15721
Neel Ahuja · Monique Allewaert ·
Lindsey Andrews · Gerry Canavan ·
Rebecca Evans · Nihad M.  Farooq ·
Erica Fretwell · Nicholas Gaskill ·
Patrick Jagoda · Erin Gentry Lamb ·
Jennifer Rhee · Britt Rusert ·
Matthew A.  Taylor · Aarthi Vadde ·
Priscilla Wald · Rebecca Walsh
Editors
The Palgrave Handbook

of Twentieth
and Twenty-First
Century Literature
and Science
Editors
See next page
Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science

ISBN 978-3-030-48243-5 ISBN 978-3-030-48244-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2020, corrected publication 2022
Chapter 19 is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license
information in the chapter.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Editors
Neel Ahuja Monique Allewaert
University of California, Santa Cruz University of Wisconsin–Madison
Santa Cruz, CA, USA Madison, WI, USA
Lindsey Andrews Gerry Canavan

North Carolina State University Marquette University
Raleigh, NC, USA Milwaukee, WI, USA
Rebecca Evans Nihad M. Farooq

Southwestern University Georgia Institute of Technology
Georgetown, TX, USA Atlanta, GA, USA
Erica Fretwell Nicholas Gaskill

University at Albany, State University University of Oxford
of New York Oxford, UK
Albany, NY, USA
Erin Gentry Lamb
Patrick Jagoda Case Western Reserve University
University of Chicago Cleveland, OH, USA
Chicago, IL, USA
Britt Rusert
Jennifer Rhee University of Massachusetts Amherst
Virginia Commonwealth University Amherst, MA, USA
Richmond, VA, USA
Aarthi Vadde
Matthew A. Taylor Duke University
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Durham, NC, USA
Chapel Hill, NC, USA
Rebecca Walsh
Priscilla Wald North Carolina State University
Duke University Raleigh, NC, USA
Durham, NC, USA
We dedicate this work to the many whose lives have been adversely affected by
the pandemic that has swept across the globe while this work came to fruition,
revealing at every turn the inextricable links among science, politics, and society,
the inequities of our global society, and the paramount importance of careful
and critical acts of reading, responding, and caring for one another, in every
field and in every encounter. We acknowledge both the hopeful role and the
limits of knowledge communities as we move into a future in a world that gives
privileged voice and access to some, while denying the very right to breathe for a
great many more.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Ben Doyle and Howard Marchitello for their eager
and open-minded support of having a collective edit this volume as well as
for their encouragement and sage editorial counsel along with that of Shaun
Vigil and Allie Troyanos. We are grateful for Rachel Jacobe’s excellent (and
patient) editorial assistance as we edged across the finish line.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [203109/Z/16/Z].
ix
Praise for The Palgrave Handbook
of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century
Literature and Science
“This is an eclectic collection in the very best of ways: wide-ranging in genre,

method, and conceptualisation. Most valuably it reveals a democratising
impulse that speaks directly to the contemporary politics of literature and
science, illuminating the field’s strength in bringing together scholars in a
united effort of understanding.”
—Martin Willis, Professor of English, Cardiff University, UK, and Editor,
Journal of Literature and Science
“This superb collection finally puts to rest the myth of ‘the two cultures’ by
comprehensively showing how, over 120 years of accelerating transforma-
tions, literature and science have become inseparable. The volume will be at
the forefront of debates about the interconnectivity of twentieth and twen-
ty-first century thought, culture, and practice.”
—Martin Halliwell, Head of the School of Arts and Professor of American
Studies, University of Leicester, UK, and author of American Health Crisis:
100 Years of Panic, Planning and Politics (forthcoming)
“This exciting collection is an excellent contribution to the field of litera-

ture and science. It is ideally suited for class adoption for courses in this and
related areas such as science and technology studies, literature and med-
icine, and literature and technology. The section on ‘Ethics and Politics’ is
an especially welcome exploration of the issues that the editors bring up in
their introduction, wherein the positionality of one’s own discipline and insti-
tutional setting is, far from being ignored in the analysis, very much included
as a part of it. Highly recommended for humanities scholars and others inter-
ested in interdisciplinary methodologies and inquires.”
—N. Katherine Hayles, author of Postprint: Books and Becoming
Computational (2020)
xi
Contents
1 Introduction 1
Part I Epistemologies
2 Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission 29

Kurt Beals
3 Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam

Shalamov and Primo Levi 47
Anindita Banerjee
4 The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil 63

Brent Ryan Bellamy
5 Literature and Energy 79

Jordan B. Kinder and Imre Szeman
6 Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by

Computing Machines 97
Yves Citton
7 Behaviorism and Literary Culture 117

Scott Selisker
xiii
xiv CONTENTS
8 I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy

of Withdrawal 129
Dana Seitler
9 Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination 145

Bishnupriya Ghosh
10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science

of Language 163
Emily Coit
Part II Methods and Approaches
11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific

Charity, and the Matter of Evidence 183
Todd Carmody
12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute

to Science Policy? The Case of Henrietta Lacks 201
Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King
13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia:

Futurist Practices in Contemporary Science Fiction 221
Rebecca Wilbanks
14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature 243

Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth
15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation

in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17 263
Joseph Fitzpatrick
16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana,

Varela, Cervantes 283
Avery Slater
17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories

and the Biology of Emergence 309
Robert Peckham
18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern

Physics, and the Poetry of Jay Wright 325
Steven Meyer
CONTENTS xv
19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry 345

Lara Choksey
Part III Ethics and Politics
20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics

Before the Atomic Bomb 363
Jenni G. Halpin
21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres

of Future Life 375
Coleman Nye
22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science

and Fiction 397
Sherryl Vint
23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals

in White Noise and The Corrections 415
Natalie Roxburgh
24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary

Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century 433
Kyla Schuller
25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration

in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Alternate Futures 449
Everett Hamner
26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short

Stories 469
Chris Pak
27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance

of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy 483
Sofia Ahlberg
28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer,

Consumers, and Corporations in Richard Powers’s Gain 495
Jeffrey Gonzalez
xvi CONTENTS
Part IV Forms and Genres
29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion,

and Early Twentieth-Century American Theatre 511
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles

Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen at Mid-Century 525
Sarah Daw
31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel 541

Josie Gill
32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q.,

Afropessimism, Genre 559
Michael Collins
33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge

and the Manhattan Project in Comic Books 577
Lindsey Michael Banco
34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X

and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis 597
Lorenzo Servitje
35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic

Sphere in Sinophone Cinema 621
Nathaniel Isaacson
36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia 637

Carlos Rojas
37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief

History of Seven Killings 653
Lindsay Thomas
Correction to: Writing the Elements at the End of the World:

Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi C1
Anindita Banerjee
Index 669
Notes on Contributors
Sofia Ahlberg is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala

University, Sweden, with a special focus on the importance of energy human-
ities in educating citizens of the future. Her publications explore ecofiction,
climate change, pedagogy, as well as the intersection of narrative and informa-
tion in contemporary fiction.
Neel Ahuja is an Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Cruz. He is the
author of Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of
Species (2016) and Planetary Specters: Race, Migration, and Climate Change
in the Twenty-First Century (2021).
Monique Allewaert is an Associate Professor of English at UW-Madison.
She works on American literature, colonialism, and environmental criticism.
Her first book Ariel’s Ecology drew on a range of colonial American texts
to theorize a “parahumanity” whereby human beings understood themselves
as being composed by and in relation to their material surround. Her book
in progress, Cut Up, focuses on the small and the particulate as key aes-
thetic and scientific problems of the colonial era. It argues that we can draw
on this eighteenth-century’s micro-scene to develop a counterpoint to the
Anthropocene.
Lindsey Andrews is a Lecturer at North Carolina State University where she
teaches classes on the relationships among science, medicine, and literature.
Her writing has appeared in Catalyst, American Literature, Configurations,
Lute & Drum, and The Edinburgh Companion for the Critical Medical
Humanities.
xvii
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Lindsey Michael Banco is a Professor of American Literature and Culture

at the University of Saskatchewan and has interests in nuclear culture, con-
spiracy theory, and gothic/horror literature. He is the author of two books:
Travel and Drugs in Twentieth-Century Literature (Routledge, 2009) and
The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer (University of Iowa Press, 2016).
Anindita Banerjee is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and
the Chair of Humanities in the Environment and Sustainability Program at
Cornell University. She is the author and editor of four books on science fic-
tion and technocultural studies, environmental humanities, migration studies,
and media studies across Eurasia and the Americas.
Kurt Beals is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages
and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses
on twentieth-century and contemporary German literature, specifically avant-
garde and experimental literature, and media theory. His book Wireless Dada:
Telegraphic Poetics in the Avant-Garde was published in 2019.
Brent Ryan Bellamy is an Instructor at Trent University. Bellamy co-edited
An Ecotopian Lexicon (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Materialism
and the Critique of Energy (MCM’ Publication, 2018). He has recently been
published in Open Library of the Humanities, The Cambridge History of
Science Fiction, Science Fiction Studies, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal.
Gerry Canavan is an Associate Professor in the English department at
Marquette University, teaching twentieth- and twenty-first-century litera-
ture. He is the co-editor of Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014),
The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015), and The
Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), as well as the co-editor of the
academic journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television. His
first book, Octavia E. Butler, was published in the Modern Masters of Science
Fiction series at University of Illinois Press in 2016.
Todd Carmody received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania
and has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard, UC Berkeley, Rutgers, the
Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Freie Universität Berlin. He
is presently an NEH Fellow at the Newberry Library. His first book, Work
Requirements: Race, Disability, and Reform in Progressive America, is forth-
coming from Duke University Press.
Dr. Amy C. Chambers is a Senior Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan
University, working in the fields of science communication and screen studies.
Her research examines the intersection of science and entertainment media
with specific focus on religion, the presentation of women’s scientific exper-
tise, and the public understanding of science in science fiction film/TV and
medical-themed horror.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix
Dr. Lara Choksey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Wellcome

Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter.
Her first monograph, Narrative in the Age of the Genome: Genetic Worlds
(Bloomsbury, 2020), considers how new descriptions of life and biological
value introduced through practices of genomic sequencing registered a cri-
sis in narrative form, involving the rearrangement and disappearance of realist
sites of transformation from the late 1970s. She has had articles and chapters
published in the Journal of Literature and Science, Sanglap, Ethical Futures
and Global Science Fiction (Palgrave, 2020), and Media Diversified.
Yves Citton is Professor in Literature and Media at the Université Paris 8
Vincennes-Saint Denis and Director of the EUR ArTeC. He is co-editor of
the journal Multitudes. He recently published Mediarchy (Polity Press, 2019),
Générations collapsonautes (Seuil, 2020), Contre-courants politiques (Fayard,
2018), The Ecology of Attention (Polity Press, 2016), Gestes d’humanités
(Armand Colin, 2012), and Renverser l’insoutenable (Seuil, 2012).
Jay Clayton is William R. Kenan Professor of English and Director of the
Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University.
Author or editor of five books and numerous articles, he has received fellow-
ships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned
Societies, the NIH, and elsewhere.
Emily Coit is a Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. She has
just finished her first book, American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal
Culture, and the Genteel Tradition (Edinburgh, 2021), and is co-editing a
volume of short stories for the Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of
Henry James.
Michael Collins is a Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century American
Literature and Culture at King’s College, London. His first monograph, The
Drama of the American Short Story, was published by Michigan in 2016, and
his second, Exoteric Modernisms: Progressive Era Literature and the Aesthetic
of Everyday Life, is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press in 2021.
Dr. Sarah Daw is Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow in Environmental Humanities
at the University of Bristol. She has held Postdoctoral and Visiting Research
Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities,
University of Edinburgh, and she is the author of Writing Nature in Cold
War American Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018).
Rebecca Evans is an Assistant Professor of English at Southwestern
University, where she researches and teaches American literature and culture
and the environmental humanities. Her writing has appeared or is forthcom-
ing in venues including American Literature, ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction
Studies, Resilience, Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Cambridge History of
Science Fiction, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
xx NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Nihad M. Farooq is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the

School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute
of Technology. Her research moves between literary studies, American and
Atlantic Studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies of science and eth-
nography. She is the author of Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and
Personhood in the Americas, 1830–1940 (NYU, 2016).
Joseph Fitzpatrick is an Assistant Professor of the Practice in Letters and
an Assistant Professor of the Practice, Russian, East European, and Eurasian
Studies at Wesleyan University.
Erica Fretwell is an Assistant Professor of English at the University at
Albany (SUNY). She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race,
and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke UP, 2020). Her essays have appeared in
the journals American Literary History and J19, and in the volumes Timelines
of American Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food,
and The New Walt Whitman Studies.
Dr. Lisa Garforth is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University.
She has published extensively on environmental utopianism, including her
2017 monograph with Polity, Green Utopias. Her current research focuses
more broadly on science fictionality and social futures with a particular
emphasis on readerly practices and pleasures.
Nicholas Gaskill is an Associate Professor of American Literature at the
University of Oxford and Tutorial Fellow at Oriel College. He is the author
of Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization of Color and
an editor of The Lure of Whitehead.
Bishnupriya Ghosh teaches global media studies at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. After the monographs, When Borne Across (2004)
and Global Icons (2011), she has turned to media and risk in the co-edited
The Routledge Companion to Media and Risk (Routledge, 2020) and The
Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media (work in progress).
Josie Gill is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of
Bristol. She is the author of Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary
Novel (Bloomsbury, 2020).
Jeffrey Gonzalez is an Assistant Professor of English at Montclair State
University. He writes and teaches on contemporary US literature’s relation-
ship to neoliberal life, and he has published articles in Critique, Mosaic, and
College Literature.
Jenni G. Halpin is the author of Contemporary Physics Plays and editor of
the Newsletter of the British Society for Literature and Science. An Associate
Professor of English at Savannah State University, her publications include
“Godly Mass Extinction and Representing Science that Isn’t: Harvest as
Science Fiction Theatre.”
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxi
Everett Hamner is Professor of English at Western Illinois University. His

recent work includes Editing the Soul: Science and Fiction in the Genome Age
(Penn State, 2017) and essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books and Science
Fiction Film and Television.
Nathaniel Isaacson is an Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature
in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at North Carolina
State University. His research interests include literary and visual culture. His
book, Celestial Empire: The Emergence of Chinese Science Fiction, examines the
emergence of sf in late Qing China.
Patrick Jagoda is Professor of English and Cinema & Media Studies at the
University of Chicago and a game designer. He is Executive Editor of Critical
Inquiry and director of the Weston Game Lab. His books include Network
Aesthetics (2016), The Game Worlds of Jason Rohrer (2016), and Experimental
Games: Critique, Play, and Design in the Age of Gamification (2020).
Jordan B. Kinder is SSHRC-FRQSC Postdoctoral Fellow in the
Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University.
His recent work includes a co-edited issue of MediaTropes entitled Oil and
Media, Oil as Media and a chapter on oil sands reclamation in Energy Culture.
Claire Sisco King is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and
Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Washed
in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (2011), as well as numer-
ous articles, and has recently completed a book manuscript on celebrity cul-
ture, networks, and metonymy.
Erin Gentry Lamb is a Visiting Associate Professor of Bioethics and Faculty
Lead of the Humanities Pathway at the Case Western Reserve University
School of Medicine. Her research interests include aging, death and dying,
disability, bioethics, and health care and social justice. She co-edited Research
Methods in the Health Humanities (Oxford, 2019) and her work appears
in such forums as The Journal of Medical Humanities, The Health and
Humanities Reader, The Disability Bioethics Reader, and the Encyclopaedia of
Health Humanities.
Steven Meyer teaches English and American literature and modern intel-
lectual history at Washington University in St. Louis, where he specializes
in interrelations among twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry, philos-
ophy, and science. He is the author of Irresistible Dictation: Gertrude Stein
and the Correlations of Writing and Science (Stanford, 2001) and editor of
The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science (2018). Currently com-
pleting Cadences of an African American Culture, a study of the poetry of Jay
Wright from the 1960s to the present, he was the 2019–2020 Franke Visiting
Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center.
xxii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s

Studies at Simon Fraser University. Nye is the co-author of the graphic novel
Lissa: A Story of Friendship, Medical Promise, and Revolution (University of
Toronto Press, 2017). Her current book project Biological Property: Race,
Gender, Genetics examines the mutual constitution of genetic understandings
of relation and property-based models of inheritance. Nye’s work on science,
medicine, and performance has also been published in such journals as Social
Text, TDR: The Drama Review, Women and Performance, Global Public
Health, and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.
Chris Pak is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures at
Swansea University, UK. His research focuses on ecology, the environment,
and human-animal relations in science fiction (sf). His book, Terraforming
(Liverpool University Press, 2016), details the history of planetary adaptation
in sf. His website is https://chrispak.wixsite.com/chrispak.
Robert Peckham is MB Lee Professor of the Humanities and Medicine
at the University of Hong Kong, where he is concurrently Chair of the
Department of History and Director of the Centre for the Humanities
and Medicine. He is the author of Epidemics in Modern Asia (Cambridge
University Press, 2016).
Jennifer Rhee is an Associate Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth
University. Her research and teaching examine connections across contempo-
rary science and technology, literature, and art. She is the author of All Too
Human: Labor and Dehumanization in the Robotic Imaginary (University of
Minnesota Press, 2018). She is working on a new book on counting technolo-
gies, from the emergence of statistics to big data.
Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and
Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. He is
the author, editor, and translator of numerous books, including Homesickness:
Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation in Modern China.
Natalie Roxburgh (Ph.D. Rutgers 2011) is a Lecturer and Research Fellow
in English Literary Studies at the University of Siegen in Germany. She is
author of Representing Public Credit: Credible Commitment, Fiction, and
the Rise of the Financial Subject (Routledge, 2016). Her work can be read
in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Mosaic, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of the
2020 Palgrave volume, Psychopharmacology in British Literature and Culture,
1780–1900.
Britt Rusert is an Associate Professor in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department
of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She
is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African
American Culture (New York University Press, 2017) and co-editor of
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Princeton
Architectural Press, 2018).
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxiii
Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality

Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of The
Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke
UP, 2018) and co-editor of special issues of American Quarterly (2019) and
Social Text (2020).
Dana Seitler is Professor of English and Director of the Bonham Centre for
Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests
include late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and
culture, queer theory and sexuality studies, feminist theory, science studies,
and visual culture. She is the author of Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of
Science in American Modernity (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and
Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction
(Fordham University Press, 2019). Her current project, Narcopoetics: A
Queer History of Addiction, focuses on the politics and aesthetics of the opi-
oid crisis at the intersections of race and sexuality in the USA. She has pub-
lished articles in American Quarterly, American Literature, Genre, Cultural
Critique, GL/Q, and Criticism.
Scott Selisker is Associate Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
He is the author of Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and
American Unfreedom (University of Minnesota Press, 2016) and of articles
in journals including American Literature, NOVEL, Science Fiction Studies,
American Literary History, and New Literary History.
Lorenzo Servitje is Assistant Professor of Literature and Medicine, a dual
appointment in the Department of English and the Health, Medicine, and
Society Program at Lehigh University. His monograph, Medicine Is War:
The Martial Metaphor in Victorian Literature and Culture (SUNY 2021),
traces the metaphorical militarization of medicine in the nineteenth century.
His articles have appeared in Literature and Medicine, Journal of Medical
Humanities, Science Fiction Studies, among other journals. He has co-edited
three collections: The Walking Med: Zombies and the Medical Image (Penn
State Press 2016), Endemic: Essays in Contagion Theory (Palgrave 2016), and
Syphilis and Subjectivity: From the Victorians to the Present (Palgrave 2017).
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at
the University of Oxford and a fellow of St Catherine’s College. Her books
include Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen (2006), Theatre
and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett (2015), Modern Drama: A Very Short
Introduction (2016), and The Cambridge Companion to Theatre and Science
(2020).
Avery Slater is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s Department
of English and an inaugural Faculty Fellow at the Schwartz Reisman Institute
for Technology and Society. Her research focuses on contemporary questions
emerging at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the humanities, with
xxiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
an emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics in a global context.

Her work has recently appeared in Critical Inquiry, Symplokē, Cultural Critique,
American Literature, and other journals.
Imre Szeman is University Research Chair of Environmental Communication
at the University of Waterloo. He is author (most recently) of Petrocultures:
Globalization, Culture, and Energy (2019) and is currently working on Energy
Impasse: Scenes from a Resource Interregnum (with Mark Simpson).
Matthew A. Taylor is an Associate Professor at the University of North
Carolina-Chapel Hill, where he works on the intersections among nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century science, literature, and philosophy in a trans-
atlantic context. His first book, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies
in American Literature, was published by the University of Minnesota Press,
and he currently is finishing his second book, which examines depictions of
life-as-such from Lamarck to Watson and Crick. With Priscilla Wald, he is the
co-editor of the journal American Literature.
Lindsay Thomas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Miami. Her research and teaching interests include the digital humanities
and contemporary US literary and cultural studies. Her book, Training for
Catastrophe: Fictions of National Security After 9/11, is forthcoming from the
University of Minnesota Press.
Aarthi Vadde is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated faculty in the
Computational Media, Arts, and Culture program at Duke University. She is
the author of Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism beyond Europe,
1914–2016 (Columbia UP, 2016), which won the American Comparative
Literature Association’s 2018 Harry Levin Prize. She is the co-editor of The
Critic as Amateur (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the open-access “Web 2.0 and
Literary Criticism” (Post45, 2019). With the support of an NHC fellowship,
she is completing a second monograph tentatively titled: “We the Platform:
Contemporary Literature after Web 2.0.” Her essays have appeared in such
journals as Modernism/Modernity, New Literary History, NOVEL, Cambridge
Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and Public Books.
Sherryl Vint is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
California, Riverside, where she directs the Speculative Fictions and Cultures
of Science program. Her books include Bodies of Tomorrow, Animal Alterity,
Science Fiction: A Guide to the Perplexed, and Science Fiction: The Essential
Knowledge. She is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and the book series
Science and Popular Culture. She has edited several books, most recently
After the Human: Theory, Culture and Criticism in the 21st Century. Her cur-
rent research, The Living Capital: Speculative Futures and Biopolitics, explores
the exchanges between speculative imagination and material practice in
biotech.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xxv
Priscilla Wald is R. Florence Brinkley Distinguished Professor of English

and Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University.
She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative
Form (1995) and Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
(2008). She is co-editor, with Michael Elliott, of volume six of The Oxford
History of the Novel in English: The American Novel 1870–1940 and, with
Matthew Taylor, of the journal American Literature. She is currently at work
on a book-length monograph, Human Being After Genocide.
Rebecca Walsh is an Associate Professor of English and the Program in
Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media at North Carolina State
University. Her book, The Geopoetics of Modernism (UP of Florida, 2015),
examines the intersections between environmental determinist academic
geography, the National Geographic Magazine, and the transnational poli-
tics of space in modernist American poetry. She has also published in edited
collections, in PMLA (as a co-author), and has guest edited a special issue,
“Global Diasporas,” of Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial
Studies. Current projects examine the Anthropocene in the modernist and
contemporary periods, and African American and Indian transnational net-
works of resistance in the 1930s -1950s.
Rebecca Wilbanks received her Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Program in
Modern Thought and Literature, and was a Hecht-Levi Postdoctoral Fellow
in Bioethics and the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her
work draws on literary studies and science and technology studies to address
the intersection of science and culture. Her current book project is entitled
Life’s Imagined Futures: The Speculative Science and Speculative Fiction of
Synthetic Biology. More information can be found at rrwilbanks.com.
List of Figures
Fig. 6.1 First diagram of triangulation 104

Fig. 6.2 Second diagram of triangulation 107
Fig. 6.3 Third diagram of triangulation 110
Fig. 9.1 Women dressed as handmaids protest against
US Vice President Mike Pence in Philadelphia,
23 July 2018 (Screenshot: The Hill 07/23/18) 159
Fig. 12.1 Data visualization by K.H. Oliver, with data provided
by J.W. Hazel from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar 206
Fig. 12.2 Data visualization by E.W. Clayton from GetPreCiSe
Research Seminar 209
Fig. 21.1 Google Burger tasting, Cultured Beef and Google (2013) 379
Fig. 21.2 In-vitro frog leg tasting, SymbioticA (2003) 379
Fig. 21.3 BiteLabs.org 382
Fig. 21.4 CulturedBeef.net 382
Fig. 21.5 Descriptions of James Franco-Furters and Kanye Salami
on BiteLabs.org 385
Fig. 21.6 Celebrity cubes on the menu of Next Nature’s
“In-Vitro Bistro” 388
Fig. 33.1 Robert Oppenheimer in Picture News, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 8 579
Fig. 33.2 Trinity test site in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard,
and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, end-papers 584
Fig. 33.3 Countdown, Trinity, p. 69 587
Fig. 33.4 Atomic bomb detonation in Trinity, pp. 70–71 588
Fig. 33.5 Milliseconds into the first atomic detonation, Trinity,
pp. 72–73 589
Fig. 33.6 Prior to the Trinity test, Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal
of J. Robert Oppenheimer, n.p. Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild,
co-creators, David Miller and Rudy Vasquez, artists 590
Fig. 33.7 Hiroshima bombing, Trinity, pp. 126–127 592
Fig. 34.1 Chapter 1 601
xxvii
xxviii LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 37.1 Detail from the social network of A Brief History
of Seven Killings 656
Fig. 37.2 The strength of the adjacent edges for each node
with a strength value greater than 10 in the social network
for A Brief History of Seven Killings 659
Fig. 37.3 Strength values for the top 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes
in each network 660
List of Tables
Table 37.1 The sample set; word counts are from electronic editions,
and page counts are from U.S. hardcover editions 655
Table 37.2 Social network metrics 658
xxix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In his oft-referenced 1959 Cambridge lecture on “The Two Cultures,”

British novelist, physicist, and civil servant C.P. Snow famously resurrected an
erstwhile lament about a presumed and growing “gulf” between the arts and
the sciences in which the sciences are unduly disregarded by the “traditional”
intellectual pursuit of the arts. Snow’s scientific evangelism registers a per-
sistent tension in Western cultural history, which we can track from Thomas
Henry Huxley and Matthew Arnold’s late-nineteenth-century debates on
whether the natural sciences should finally be included alongside literature in
college curricula to Bruno Latour’s post-9/11 suggestion that a new form of
generative critical “gathering” is needed, one that does not pit scientific pur-
suits against cultural critique, but treats all constructed objects and ideas with
caution and care (Snow 2012; Huxley 1880; Arnold 1882; Latour 2004).
Indeed, this manufactured “two cultures” paradigm is now so fully
ingrained in our contemporary era that shocked post-2016 liberals were
prepared to march for the abstract concept of science as the incontroverti-
ble panacea to the post-truth era of Trump, an era of dangerous relativism
inaugurated, some would argue, by art and theory’s post-structuralist insist-
ence on the relativity of truth and reality. Once the perceived gatekeepers of
intellectual endeavor, the humanities meanwhile find themselves on the other
side of the “two cultures” coin, labeled as an esoteric and impractical field of
knowledge that has also unwittingly sowed the seeds for a war against facts
from which only science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
fields can save us.
T. T. Collective (*) 
Durham, NC, USA
© The Author(s) 2020 1

N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First
Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks of Literature
and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_1
2 T. T. COLLECTIVE
Yet however counterintuitive it may seem in our current moment—which

has witnessed the alliance of scientific research and global capital, as well as
the facile opposition of useful scientific “know-how” (useful to whom and for
what?) against the supposedly rarefied humanities—literature and science have
been and continue to be domains of knowledge that are, far from monolithic,
perpetually in flux and intertwining. For example, in the vibrant fields of fem-
inist science studies and the history of science and medicine, many scholars
have documented the capacious meanings and practices of science and liter-
ature in earlier centuries. Initially, “science” referred to knowledge as such.
Yet with the rise of empiricist paradigms in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries (following Francis Bacon’s articulation of the scientific method) up
through the technological developments brought by the industrial revolu-
tion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, definitions of science began
to narrow. And as the modern research university emerged in the late eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries, as academic disciplines began to coag-
ulate—though they had not yet calcified—into distinct research programs,
science increasingly specified a particular kind of knowledge, one derived from
empirical procedures and tightly focused on the study of the natural world.
Nonetheless, science in this earlier moment was not viewed as inherently
oppositional to the more imaginative, speculative knowledge that literature
represented. More often than not, the two worked together.
Up through the nineteenth century, in other words, science and litera-
ture did not even name distinct fields of study. Embryology, for instance,
arose around 1800 as a science that sought to explain how living organ-
isms continually change while still being able to organize themselves inde-
pendently; it gave rise to the concept of rhythm, which became “a new
way of imagining that played a critical role in the consolidation of the
new science of biology” that cut across aesthetics, poetics, and philosophy
(Wellmann 2017, 17). In another notable example, as Amanda Jo Goldstein
(2017) argues, Romantic writers such as Blake, Shelley, and Goethe devel-
oped a “sweet Science” that deployed classical philosopher Lucretius’s
poetic materialism—the idea that tropes have physical substance and phys-
ical things are capable of figurative activity—to challenge the reorgani-
zation of knowledge spurred by the modern university, which invalidated
poetry as a way of knowing the natural and social worlds. While the natural
sciences were turning toward the problem of organic life, Romantic writ-
ers and thinkers redeployed Lucretian materialism in order to bolster poet-
ry’s claim upon the real. Thus, the gap between the epistemic communities
of the natural sciences (biology, geology, astronomy, physics, and chemis-
try) and “human science” (the humanities and social sciences) widened not
simply along a methodological fault line (inductive versus deductive logic)
but, Goldstein points out, along a linguistic one as well: prose the dominant
medium for describing the natural and social world “as it is,” and poetry the
medium for describing the “immaterial reaches of subjectivity,” including
1 INTRODUCTION 3
emotion and memory (Goldstein 2017, 7). Using figuration and verse to
remake empirical procedures, these literary experiments sutured scientific
and aesthetic knowing.
These particular examples of the cooperation of science and literature illus-
trate that in many pre-twentieth-century contexts the literary—contingent,
figurative, subjective—was widely understood not to supplement empirical
knowledge of the world but, rather, to arrive immanently within it. Not yet
fully professionalized, science was a capacious mode of inquiry “legitimately
claimed by a surprisingly broad range of practitioners and practiced in a num-
ber of nonacademic and noninstitutional spaces, from the parlor to the work-
shop, the church to the park,” Britt Rusert (2017) points out (5). Indeed,
as she shows, in the early-nineteenth-century United States a set of “fugitive
sciences” emerged that saw free and enslaved African-Americans repurpose
ethnology, astronomy, and botany in the name of freedom. Excluded from
most if not all institutions of learning, these “amateur” scientists fused empir-
ical procedures with speculative thinking, as their investigations of the natural
world became the basis for broader meditations on kinship, being, and the
category of the human.
Speculation frequently plays the foil to the practical applications of knowl-
edge codified by Bacon’s scientific method, yet even amid the dominance of
the empiricist paradigm from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, it
remained central to the kind of undertaking science was understood to be.
Speculation, in some ways, serves as the hinge upon which literature and sci-
ence have pivoted for so long: a form of thought that is fundamentally con-
cerned with querying “abstract” notions (of being, of beauty), and a form of
thought that unfolds in the subjunctive grammar of potentiality, the future
possibilities of the could be or might be. However much it emphasized special-
ization by the end of the nineteenth century, science “remained a discipline
that was not one,” as Nihad Farooq (2016) writes, offering “as much in the
way of philosophy, literature, travel narrative, cultural study, and social theory
as it did in the way of ‘pure’ science” (11).
The focus of this handbook is the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,
even as both the editors and the contributors resist the popular tendency
to view earlier scientific practices through an arguably twentieth-century
lens of hierarchy and fixity. While phrenology, taxonomy, eugenics, and the
general depiction of racially based traits as unyielding markers of inferiority
or superiority are all certainly woeful narratives that plagued science in the
nineteenth century, the actual science that came to fruition in this period
proved quite the opposite: that all organic processes are, in fact, in constant
flux, transforming and transformative, adapting, changing, mobile, and most
importantly, that human beings are not biologically separable by any kind of
discrete racial markers. To this end, we approach science and literature in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries as interactive modes of knowledge that
carry forward historical practices of speculation, fugitivity, and amateurism.
4 T. T. COLLECTIVE
However, the distribution of scientific expertise beyond disciplinary modes

of knowledge production becomes harder to sustain in the twentieth cen-
tury. Literature and science remain co-evolving speculative forms even while
significant differences arise in their material conditions and methodological
identities as they become institutionalized within the university. Nowhere is
the division between the humanities and the sciences more obvious than in
the study of language in the early twentieth century. As philology split into
the distinct paths of literary criticism and linguistics, hermeneutics became
the basis of close reading (think F.R. Leavis) and logical positivism domi-
nated the philosophy of language (think Bertrand Russell). One critic, I.A.
Richards, actually crossed this chasm, and yet these two sides of his profes-
sional career―an interpretive literary critic on the one hand and the co-de-
signer of an artificial language called Basic English on the other—have largely
remained isolated from one another. As those in the field of literary studies
start to remember the more positivist endeavors of its leading lights, it is pos-
sible that literary methods will become more computational (as we see in
the rise of quantitative methods in the digital humanities), but it is unlikely
that computation will displace hermeneutics as the core of disciplinary
identity.
If logical positivism turned the study of language toward computation,
then the development of the digital computer turned science ever more
firmly, if problematically, toward the language of code. Although DNA
was discovered in 1869, it wasn’t until the 1950s, shaped as they were by
cybernetics, information theory, and wartime and Cold War cryptography,
that sciences such as molecular biology reimagined DNA as the “code of
life.” With the growth of computer power, neuroscience and genomic sci-
ence have increasingly relied on computational methods and processing that
require considerable funding for research.1 Representative here is the Human
Genome Project (HGP), which set out to sequence and map the entirety
of the human genome, spanning from 1990 to 2003 and representing the
efforts of multiple institutions across the globe.
Indeed, during the postwar era of “Big Science,” scientific projects
expanded significantly in size and required considerable funding. Much of
this work has been conducted in the laboratories of universities and private
companies and is beholden to the funding bodies, both public and private,
that enable this work. This financial structure, in turn, opens up scientific
research to the objectives of the funding organization, whether noble or oth-
erwise, such as the goals of for-profit commercialization (e.g., the extension
of the HGP into DNA testing kits or proprietary pharmaceutical formulas)
or social control through the continuation of racist and eugenic narratives
(again, DNA testing kits)—even as the tests have also sometimes proved use-
ful to others as a way to probe complex questions of cosmopolitan identity
in the present and to correct lies and omissions in the historical record. Or
consider the case of US university-based robotics and artificial intelligence
1 INTRODUCTION 5
research in the mid- to late-twentieth century, much of which was funded by

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the name of mili-
tarization and strategic defense.
And yet, Snow’s two cultures diagnosis does not hold in the contempo-
rary era any more than it did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as
the practice of science does not stand in isolation from the larger political
and cultural milieus its practitioners inhabit. Rather, science, like all forms
of knowledge production, is co-evolutionarily constituted by and with these
milieus. Katherine Hayles makes this point in her 1990 study of the concept
of chaos across postmodern literature, critical theory, and sciences including
mathematics, thermodynamics, and epidemiology; she notes that the connec-
tions she identifies across these fields emerge because “writers, critics, and sci-
entists, however specialized or esoteric their work, all share certain kinds of
everyday experiences” (Hayles 1990, 4). In other words, literature and sci-
ence are decidedly worlded practices that unfurl and unfold each other.
Working in the shadow of Big Science, scholars in feminist science stud-
ies have been essential to undercutting the “two cultures” claims. Donna
Haraway’s (1988) feminist objectivity emphasizes that knowing is ever situ-
ated, or shaped by the specific position of the one seeking to know, and thus
ever partial. Similarly, feminist theorist and theoretical physicist Karen Barad
(2007) describes scientific observation as informed by the scientific observer
and the techniques and technologies deployed in observation. Thus, science,
which is often characterized by authoritative claims of neutrality and disem-
bodied objectivity (indeed, an impossible subject position!), is in fact shaped
by specific worldviews, positions, and epistemological assumptions and tools.
Science shares this quality with literature, as well as with other cultural prac-
tices that seek to know something of the world. To understand science as
such is not to prescribe a slippery, untethered relativism, but rather to insist
that a rigorous scientific account acknowledges that what we know of the
world is shaped by how we come to know it, a methodological claim familiar
to many working in the humanities.
It is important to note, of course, the political and intellectual significance
of inquiry in the humanities in its work to debunk the “fake news” most
often proffered historically by pseudo-scientific narratives―i.e., the “science”
of races as separate species; the “science” of hysteria as a “female disease”; the
“science” of same-sex desire as pathological; and so forth. The intent of the
arts, and of critical theory specifically, as Latour (2004) defends in his own
contemporary lament, “was never to get away from facts but closer to them”
(231, emphasis in original), by examining and challenging the conditions of
certain historical moments that have allowed blatant falsehoods and discrimi-
natory logic to be delivered as facts or truths.
It is, then, not surprising that the emerging field of literature and sci-
ence coincided with the increasing attention to problems of social inequal-
ity, power, and violence and efforts to make scholarship relevant in part by
6 T. T. COLLECTIVE
enabling the possibility of envisioning more just and life-sustaining worlds.

Analyses of how literature might inform a more socially just science, as well as
how science frames discourses and material practices relating to colonialism,
race, sex, labor, and state formation, are at the heart of the field of litera-
ture and science, which, in turn, is well-situated to articulate a critical view of
problems including inequality, exploitation, overconsumption, and ecological
crisis.
While literature and science has largely remained a subfield of literary stud-
ies, many scholars of literature and science have found academic homes in
related interdisciplinary fields such as science and technology studies (STS)
and health/medical humanities where they position their work explicitly in
relation to social justice. Scholars working in STS see social justice as deeply
implicated in the questions they raise, from access concerns about where and
how people encounter science and technology to how scientific and tech-
nological innovations are imagined and funded, for whom the end results
are intended, whom they ignore, and who the researchers and research
participants are. Research in STS often pushes for increased equity across

all of these measures and has resulted in, for example, the inclusion of more
women, people of color, disabled people, and older people within research
studies. As another example, scholars working in the health humanities have
claimed “a shared commitment to social justice” as the unifying value of the
field, which is evinced in an emphasis on translational research that seeks to
“[involve] outside stakeholders in the research and [transmit] the findings
of that research back to the groups or participants being studied” (Klugman
and Lamb 2019, 5, 7). In essence, participation in this field requires liter-
ary scholars unabashedly to apply their training, bringing methods of critique
from the humanities to interrogate questions of identity and power in relation
to lived experience. At the same time, such work is often presented by pun-
dits, politicians, and college administrators as undertaken in the “service” of
other fields or institutions (such as STEM education, community organiza-
tions, or medical schools), a point that has led to the criticism that instead of
seeking radical change, “medical humanities seeks to improve the status quo”
(Herndl 2005, 595).
Such critiques point to tensions between the justice-oriented goals of
scholars in literature and science and the institutional contexts for the inte-
gration of the humanities with science, medicine, and technology in the con-
temporary university. The development of programs of study in these areas at
times depends on the growing influence of donor-driven university finance
and shrinking public outlays for university education, reflected for example
in the proliferation in tuition-generating Masters of Arts programs in the
Medical Humanities. Thus the intersection of literature and science is itself
a site of contestation for those advocating for a more socially just university,
suggesting that scholars in this area still have room to productively aid social
justice efforts by contributing knowledge and resources to efforts to expand
1 INTRODUCTION 7
marginalized segments of the curriculum (ethnic studies, feminist and queer

studies, poverty and labor studies, disability studies, among others); to use
the university to reduce inequalities in access to technologies; and to push
back against state efforts to reproduce militarism and policing through tech-
nology and communications research.
Another way to trace the emphasis on social justice within literature and
science is to move away from the academy and toward the field of culture
itself, examining literature rather than literary studies or humanistic fields.
Indeed, within those literary subfields most explicitly intertwined with sci-
ence and scientific developments, the long twentieth century has witnessed an
emergent and growing engagement with social justice.
Science fiction, for instance, is a literary genre that has since its inception
been preoccupied with science, and particularly with scientific futures. Over
the course of the long twentieth century, the genre took a number of turns:
early developments included the fin de siècle scientific romances of H.G.
Wells, Jules Verne, and others, the pulp era of popular magazines such as the
Hugo Gernsback-published Amazing Stories during the 1920s and 1930s,
and the largely techno-utopian fantasies of the “Golden Age” during the
1940s and 1950s. In the 1960s, however, with the emergence of the “New
Wave” of science fiction, the genre began to evince not only more diversity
among its canonized authors, but also more critical engagements with science
and more explicit investments in the social. Whereas the Golden Age tended
to endorse narratives of technological progress, New Wave writers explored
the ways in which scientific development was sometimes unlinked from and
sometimes at odds with social justice, often centering power-based estrange-
ments from the social sciences rather than the imagined feats of engineering.
From the rise of the pointedly techno-dystopian visions of cyberpunk in
the 1980s to the current explosive interest in Afrofuturism, science fiction
has not only engaged social questions in its representations and imaginations
of science, but has indeed attended specifically to highly differentiated access
to scientific “progress” and to forms of violence Western science has inflicted
on marginalized groups. In this way, science fiction in the late twentieth and
early twenty-first centuries is something of a return to the original form from
the nineteenth century: arguably, the literary genre has always been defined
by its critical interest in how social relations and structures of power interact
with technoscience.
Similarly, environmental literature—another literary subfield defined by
its engagement with the sciences—follows a trajectory of increasing recogni-
tion that science and social justice cannot be disentangled, especially since the
1960s. Just as the preservationist and conservationist movements of the early
twentieth century are largely overshadowed in contemporary environmental-
ism by the environmental and climate justice movements, so too has “nature
writing” valorizing a “pristine” wilderness given way to literary works that
engage embodiment and social vulnerability in their representations of the
8 T. T. COLLECTIVE
nonhuman. Since the emergence of the modern environmental movement

in the 1960s, and especially with the rapid growth of the environmental jus-
tice movement following the activism surrounding the dumping of PCBs in
Warren County, NC, environmental literature has increasingly engaged global
and local contexts of colonialism, racism, masculinism, hetero- and cis-sexism,
ableism, and classism. In contemporary environmental literature, including
climate fiction (sometimes called cli-fi), power and social difference are not
banished to the human realm of the political, but properly identified as cen-
tral to scientific and other engagements with the nonhuman.
The trends in environmental literature, science fiction, and literary stud-
ies in developing critical approaches to race, sex, empire, and militarism were
deeply influenced by the geopolitics of the Cold War and the assertion of the
New Left and decolonization movements that developed transnational calls for
social change in the 1960s. While the Cold War tension and nuclear standoff
between the United States and the Soviet Union produced dystopian, specu-
lative narratives and images of potential nuclear catastrophe, the challenge to
the twin US and Soviet imperialisms by the Non-Aligned Movement, decol-
onization movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and movements for
racial and gender justice across continents emerged as central concerns among
authors responding to the social contests over the militarism of the Vietnam
War, forms of racial segregation, and the expansion of capitalist inequalities
with the onset of economic globalization. A variety of science fiction and envi-
ronmentalist authors integrated such concerns into both visions of dystopian
violence and imaginings of creative resistance, such as in Octavia E. Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy. In these novels, the post-apocalyptic environment of
nuclear disaster produces widespread social violence, which is challenged by
the protagonist, Lilith, as she encounters an alien species that upends humans’
organizations of racial and gender difference.
There are, of course, differences in how authors and scholars handled such
themes, and certain writers and traditions within these literary subfields rec-
ognized the centrality of social justice to scientific culture even before the
“turns” toward the social identified above as occurring roughly in the 1960s.
Still, these fields help to show that social justice is integral, not just to the
study of literature and science in the long twentieth century, but also to cul-
tural production within literary fields defined by their engagements with
science.
A brief consideration of these conditions demonstrates how the intersec-
tions between literary studies and science influence every level of thought
and production at the universities. To offer some context, the editorial col-
lective began the work on this handbook in late Spring 2015. Some of us had
studied together directly, while others had connected through geographical
proximity in North Carolina. Most of us emerged from English or Literature
programs, but many of us had also been trained in science studies and consid-
ered our disciplinary home to be in the nascent field of literature and science.
1 INTRODUCTION 9
In the preceding years, interdisciplinary collaboration between literary stud-

ies and the sciences had flourished, conferences and journal issues convened
around the topic, and the Modern Language Association (MLA) job post-
ings began to include faculty positions for scholars working at the intersection
of literature and science. The idea of putting together a primer that would
help solidify the field was exciting to all of us, as was working as an editorial
collective.
Editing a collection together would, we fantasized, be a gesture toward the
democratization of knowledge that could allow us to share labor and simulta-
neously help to advance the field. At the outset, if we considered our political
and professional goals as connected to our objects of study, it was perhaps
in somewhat theoretical and even utopian terms: could published humani-
ties scholarship reflect the same level of authorial and editorial collaboration
as the sciences? Could such a collection—inspired by the ethics of both cit-
izen science and models of co-authorship in the sciences—make accessible
the often seemingly abstruse connections between aesthetics and empiricism?
But these theoretical questions, as our field teaches us, cannot be separated
from our working conditions and situations. Since the Great Recession, and
accelerated with the emergence of COVID-19, full-time, tenure-track posi-
tions in the humanities have been in decline, replaced by part-time, short-
term adjunct positions. Those of us involved in the collective were in a range
of positions, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to postdocs and lecturers,
working in a range of institutions, although primarily R1s and SLACs.
It took three years from the initial proposal to getting the official go-ahead
for the project from the publisher, and another two years to collect, edit,
and revise the chapters submitted by scholars whose work we admired and
had solicited for inclusion in the volume. In those five years, the university
changed, and so did our positions and locations within the institution, as did
those of the contributors. By 2020, it was impossible to ignore that our ini-
tial political and professional goals were not merely connected to, but more
explicitly, constituted part of our object of study. We were a living, breathing
example of the very thing we aimed to study: the cultural and material impli-
cations of the charged rhetoric around science and the humanities. We cannot
ignore how our relative positions within the university are tied to the topic
we have sought to analyze, and that our training has something to say about
the ongoing crises (of the humanities, of adjunctification, and others) in the
neoliberal university we are living through.
We have experienced and also bear witness to intensified adjunctification,
a decline in full-time and tenured positions, the continued rhetorical pitting
of STEM against the humanities as a justification for differential funding, a
decline in humanities majors and undergraduate degrees awarded, an increase
in discussion of “alternative academic” (altac) careers, the underfunding of
humanities departments, and the rise of the austerity university. While the
majority of chapters in this collection do not take the university as their
10 T. T. COLLECTIVE
object, they do lay out various histories and representational strategies that
lend to this auto-critique. Our own lives, the lives of the writers whose work
is collected herein, and the nature of the fields in which we have been trained
necessitate a brief foray into what we now see as the urgent mapping of the
institutional contexts we occupy.
During the period within which we have been editing this volume, the
humanities responded in multiple directions to the financial pressures and
changing landscape of the university. One major way was through the forma-
tion of institutional alliances with the sciences, one sign of which has been the
increased application of the scientific lab model to the infrastructure of the
humanities. Examples of humanities “labs” include the Health Humanities
Lab at Duke University, the Health Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Venue
for Exploration (HHIVE) Lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill, Game Changer Chicago Design Lab at the University of Chicago,
Experimental Humanities Lab at Indiana University, and Humanities Lab
at Arizona State University, all of which pursue applied and practice-based
work, seeking to demonstrate the value of humanities inquiry and methods
(e.g., cultural analysis and narrative-based methods) to problems in STEM
fields, and to bring humanities-oriented values (e.g., an attention to structural
inequality and social justice) into scientific conversations. They bring together
work between the humanities and the sciences, often in interdisciplinary fields
such as the medical humanities, digital humanities, experimental humanities,
and media arts and design. Although the content of such spaces often touches
upon science and technology, building on a longer humanistic interest in
STS, the form of the science lab itself has also changed the way some humani-
ties scholars work together and with colleagues in other disciplines. Given the
reliance of such labs on ongoing institutional or grant funding, some of the
challenges are those faced by all collaborations, including our own. Whether
innovative or opportunistic, these labs suggest changes within the institu-
tional relationship between the humanities and sciences.
Since the organizational, disciplinary, and financial shifts within the univer-
sity have made starkly visible the conditions under which we labor, they also
offer opportunities for transforming those conditions. The structural reor-
ganization of the academy today―and our own experience of that restruc-
turing―presents opportunities for imagining alternative genealogies and
new periodizations of science and the humanities across the twentieth cen-
tury. Crises are turning points (the word comes from medicine), and they are
also opportunities for transformation, especially if we attend to the memo-
ries flashing up at this moment of danger. We might, then, consider the les-
sons of earlier moments of institutional crisis and reorganization, including
how non-institutional practices and collectives historically refused the disci-
plinary divides that have defined the sciences and humanities within the acad-
emy, how marginalized subjects have challenged the bifurcations of literature
and science within and without the academy, and even the history of adjunct
1 INTRODUCTION 11
labor―in both the humanities and the sciences―in earlier historical periods.
We might use this crisis to examine how we attend to new modes of dispos-
session and precaritization while understanding that the university has always
been a site of exclusion and immiserating violence for historically disenfran-
chised populations in the United States and for colonized populations abroad.
In more positive terms, the interdisciplinary and collaborative nature of
STS scholarship, including our own here, potentially strains against models
of collectivity as they are practiced and co-opted in the sciences, especially in
lab settings. If humanities lab settings offer one site of the perils and promises
of networking in the sciences and humanities today, the science lab remains a
particularly vexed site, as a space and form that brings together what is most
utopian about scientific praxis (intensive collaboration, dialogue, and exper-
imentation) with its dystopian underbelly (epistemological and other forms
of secrecy, transfer of public resources and knowledge to the private sphere,
deeply hierarchical structures under PIs, and the hidden cultures of sexual
harassment and assault, in labs as throughout the university system, that our
institutions are only beginning to address). This may be a moment when
STS scholarship and humanities scholarship more generally―including digi-
tal humanities―need to untether from models of collaboration poached from
the sciences in favor of ethical models of collaboration that are developed
with explicit attention to differential access to resources, time, and institu-
tional power among collaborators within a group. Furthermore, while STS
scholars have at times found models for their own collaboration within the
sciences, the natural sciences might productively turn (back) to the human-
ities for tools, models, and even as predictive models for their own likely
future. Capital, as Walter Benjamin so famously pointed out, can only pro-
ceed through the production of crises, which is why in the current reorgan-
ization of the economy and its institutions, natural sciences are experiencing
their own crisis and full-scale reorganization, facing the extension and deep-
ening of already existing inequalities and divisions, such as are evident in
huge funding gaps between designer fields like bioengineering and the basic
sciences, as well as the expectation that Ph.D.s in the sciences will spend
years relocating for multiple postdocs or remain dependent on grant cycles
and the “soft money” of grants that always run out and thus keep research-
ers trapped within a cycle of financial precariousness and movement among
institutions.
This project has made us acutely aware of the tensions of our contempo-
rary moment, but also of the possibilities for the productive engagement that
grows out of scholarly work that crosses fields and disciplines to address issues
that are of broad historical and contemporary concern. The exciting range of
work collected in this handbook attests to the generative potential of scholar-
ship at the intersection of literature and science.
12 T. T. COLLECTIVE
Chapter Outline
The work on the intersection of literature and science is contributing sig-
nificantly to the changing terrain of literary studies in a variety of ways. Any
new focus brings novel works to light, and this turn in literary studies is no
exception. But perhaps the most exciting consequence involves the emer-
gence of new epistemological and methodological questions moving in both
directions: literary studies and scientific inquiry. The contributions to this vol-
ume represent a range of areas of inquiry and approaches that consider how
the integrated study of literature and science generates new insights into the
underpinnings in both fields. The contributors show how a focus on litera-
ture and science draws out new ways of conceiving how literary works pro-
duce and circulate knowledge about the world: how, for example, novels can
reveal the infrastructure shaped by fossil fuels; how the relationship of image
and word in graphic novels illustrates a peculiarly effective way to address
atomic fallout; or how humans imagine the ideas of “nature” or “illness.”
Conversely, literary and literary critical approaches to scientific works broaden
our understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry, emphasizing the role of
narrative or image in conceptual shifts: how, for example, the affective charge
of words and images influences scientific models and uses of new technolo-
gies; how language can shape ways of imagining life itself; or how linguistic
figures can be translated into computational ones.
The chapters solicited for this collection represent a wide range of scientific
fields, including epidemiology and global health, genomics and biotechnol-
ogy, environmental and energy sciences, behaviorism and psychology, phys-
ics, and computational and surveillance technologies. They consider how
literary works register and often facilitate epistemological shifts and how they
are in turn affected by those changes. Many of these chapters address how
fiction across media uniquely explores the consequences—imaginative, social,
economic, and/or geopolitical—of scientific developments, whether past,
present, or future. Chapters examine such issues as how the prevalence of
concepts like networks or microbes has affected literary form; how contem-
porary novels have turned, in light of cognitive science, to the brain in place
of the mind; how more sophisticated computers have made literary works
more sensitive to the ways information circulates through language, images,
and stories; and how literary works can sensitize us to the slow violence of
environmental disaster and other forms of destruction. Given the increasing
speed of such developments from the second half of the twentieth century to
the present, it is not surprising that analyses of speculative fiction in particular
are well-represented in this volume, as the genre has become an increasingly
mainstream avenue through which to explore the blurring of science fiction
and scientific fact in the contemporary world. Most broadly, these chapters
share an interest both in how the fields of literature and science know and
make the world and in how the intersection of literature and science reveals
the ways concepts change and new concepts emerge. While this focus on how
1 INTRODUCTION 13
literary works register conceptual shifts is not new, the work on the intersec-
tion of literature and science has certainly augmented it. Several of the chap-
ters focus directly on that intensification. The authors represent a wide range
of fields and cross-disciplinary specializations as well as a range of professional
levels, affiliations, and approaches, but all are making significant contributions
to the burgeoning field of literature and science.
Given the focus of this volume on the twentieth and twenty-first centu-
ries, we have found it necessary and invigorating to think expansively about
the category of “literature,” especially as it intersects with newer media forms
such as film and digital writing. Our contributors consider long-standing lit-
erary genres such as the novel, poetry, and memoir alongside film, comics,
new media narratives, and other aesthetic forms that have increasingly made
their way onto the syllabi of scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
literature and science. We note, moreover, that this expansion is not histor-
ically unique even if it is technologically specific. In some ways, we see our
contemporary use of the term “literature” as deriving from much older defi-
nitions of “literature” or “letters” that encompass fictional and nonfictional
works of the creative imagination.
We have divided the volume into four units, an organization of the work
assembled here that reflects and represents the cutting-edge scholarship
across the field: epistemologies; techniques and methods; ethics and politics;
and forms and genres. But while we intend these heuristic clusters to show
how the chapters begin to suggest emergent conversations within the field,
the richness of the chapters often made the decision of where to place them
difficult; the chapters consistently spoke to each other across our divides. Just
as this volume refuses the boundaries placed between the fields of literature
and science, we encourage readers to listen for the conversations that emerge
throughout the handbook as they challenge the volume’s own categorizing
system.
Epistemologies
The chapters in this unit address the knowledge that emerges at the inter-
section of literature and science, focusing on how the intersection produces,
in a Kuhnian sense, a conceptual shift, a new way of thinking about familiar
problems, or, more broadly, a new understanding of the world. Neither “lit-
erature” nor “science” has a clear definition; both describe creative processes,
although they differ in the ways they engage the world. As we noted in the
opening of the introduction, the stark distinction between them—if indeed
there is one—is a relatively recent development; the difference between a sci-
entific and literary imagination would have made little sense in centuries past.
Their convergence is the subject of the chapters in this section, which explore
both the insights each gains from the other and the brave new world that
emerges through their joint perspectives.
14 T. T. COLLECTIVE
The production and orientation of affect figures centrally in the sorts

of knowledges produced at the intersections of literature and science.
Humankind’s reaching for the moon long precedes any disciplinary inquiry;
Kurt Beal brings that longing into the mid-twentieth century through
his exploration of a multimedia project inspired by the 1969 Apollo 11
moon landing. Chapter 2 chronicles how stories shaped the human expe-
rience of the moon even as they gave expression to that longing. Kriwet’s
work, Beal contends, helps us understand how knowledge of the world
is mediated by the imagination, how we are motivated by our longings,
and how we therefore dwell, as Emily Dickinson might say, in poetry and
possibility.
If human wonder inspires Beal’s chapter, the writers Anindita Banerjee
considers in Chapter 3 were motivated by their effort to make sense of the
horror of the Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. Seeking to
capture the unimaginable led these writers to scientific language, which,
though challenging literary language, offered an alternative view of catastro-
phe “as a web of relations between matter and energy.” Following the
insights of these works into imperceptible human and nonhuman relations,
Banerjee muses on the connections between the camps and nuclear catastro-
phes (Hiroshima, Chernobyl) and on the changing coordinates of time and
space that disclose the history of human destruction and the uncertain future
of human imagination.
Like Banerjee, Brent Ryan Bellamy is intrigued by the intersection of liter-
ary and scientific texture as well as textuality. In Chapter 4, he draws on liter-
ary and visual depictions of oil landscapes to show the often invisible impact
of oil on the landscape as well as the human imagination. Where Banerjee
traces a particulate path through the elements of devastation, Bellamy jour-
neys through the infrastructure of petroculture, but both are pilgrimages
through disaster with the at least implicit hope of revelation.
If Beal, Banerjee, Bellamy turn attention to the affects―wonder, horror,
hope―to which literary and scientific modes of expression give expression,
another line of chapters in this section investigates the ways that structures of
power shape what is known, and how one knows, in addition to the affects
that follow on knowledge. For instance, Jordan Kinder and Imre Szeman’s
engagement with petroculture stresses the impossibility of understanding
the contemporary moment without perceiving humanity’s thorough sat-
uration in the infrastructure and economy of oil. All contemporary literary
works, they maintain, register that saturation, and if, as a number of contem-
porary critics have noted, authors have not always cognized that fact, their
works are important in displaying—to the critical eye—the ways in which oil
and its manifestations hide in plain sight. In Chapter 5, they chronicle the
dawning awareness of how the contemporary imagination has been shaped by
the relationships among energy, aesthetics, and culture both in the emerging
1 INTRODUCTION 15
academic field of energy humanities and in the increasing number of literary

works that have begun to treat energy—specifically, oil—as a topic.
The problem of how contemporary organizations of power shape knowl-
edge also drives Yves Citton’s analysis of how the added complexity of the
computing machine has recast traditional dichotomies between literature and
science, showing both new convergences and new divergences between lit-
erature and science. In Chapter 6, he takes us into the programmed world
we have always inhabited but not recognized as such to introduce us not to
the horror of the matrix, but to the everyday mediation of refracted experi-
ence as well as the shifting relations between literature and science as techno-
logical and political structures reconfigure over the course of twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. In closing his anatomy of shifting knowledge struc-
tures that follow on the changing relation between literature, science, and
computing, Citton returns to Vilém Flusser’s sanguine proclamation of how
the advent of mechanized computing has liberated numbers from letters and
unleashed a “visionary power” through which “science presents itself as an
art form and art as a source of scientific knowledge” with cautious optimism.
Caution because the near half-century that has elapsed since Flusser’s obser-
vation has not fully liberated the imagination from the deadening machine
of financial capitalism, but optimism because the human imagination, mani-
fested variously in such figures as artists, scientists, and hackers, rebels against
“the pre-programmed ends of financial profit” and seeks instead its ends in
life itself.
The ways that contemporary organizations of power are shaped by the
literary and scientific methodologies also inform Scott Selisker’s argument
that behaviorism—a psychology of the mind—was an especially powerful
illustration of that contemplation. “Behaviorism and Literary Culture” chron-
icles how the sciences of behaviorism influenced literary culture in two often
competing ways: in its influence on the quest for a scientific literary criti-
cism, which found its most influential expression in the methodology of close
reading, and in its adoption by speculative fiction in the form of the domi-
nant theme of mind control. Selisker’s Chapter 7 illustrates the intertwined
influences of science, literature, and literary criticism on how as well as what
we read.
Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics arguably represents the con-
summate epistemological conjunction between science and literature in the
narrative harnessing of life itself through which it constellates a popula-
tion and facilitates certain forms of governance. If there is a literary aspect
to biopolitics, then literary works might offer particular insight into its con-
stitution. That assumption informs Dana Seitler’s Chapter 8. Noting the
structural inequities implicit in biopolitics, Seitler considers the variable expe-
riences not only of biopolitics but of life in her reading of the treatment of
suicide as allegory and critique in novels at the beginning and end of the
twentieth century. Arguing against the pathologizing and medicalizing of
16 T. T. COLLECTIVE
suicide in these novels, she reads it as an imaginative act—a fundamentally

distinct epistemology—that challenges the conceptions of life emanating from
the narrative of biopolitics.
The investigation of how power in our own cultural moment—
petroculture, computing, biopolitics—shapes scientific and literary knowl-
edge production doesn’t only delineate how power operates through knowl-
edge. Each also explores ethical responses that might reroute contemporary
organizations of power. Lamenting, with Latour, the consequences of the
hardening of disciplinary boundaries since at least the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, Bishnupriya Ghosh returns to Mary Shelley for her insight into the dan-
ger of pursuing science in the absence of philosophy. In Chapter 9, she traces
Shelley’s legacy in the emerging academic fields and subfields that are har-
nessing the conjoined imaginative power of science and literature. Drawing
on Margaret Atwood’s speculative fiction as an example, she concludes with a
reminder of the importance of attending to how readily today’s fiction bleeds
into tomorrow’s reality.
In Chapter 10, Emily Coit traces the fall of the protagonist, a microscopist
who gains fame through a satire of popular science, in “The Descent of Man”
to show the convergence of literature and science in the power of the word.
Coit considers Edith Wharton in the context of a group of prominent intel-
lectuals of the moment—many her friends—who were grappling with what
the lessons of biology and linguistics were revealing about the past and what,
in turn, they predicted about the fate of civilization.
Methods and Approaches
The chapters in this section focus on how the intersection of science and lit-
erature produces new methods or approaches either to the history of science,
to literary and cultural criticism, or to both. While methods and approaches
suggest epistemology—hence there is considerable overlap with the chapters
in the epistemologies section—these chapters focus more specifically on how
one side of the science and literature equation might challenge the discipli-
nary practices or categories of the other as well as how literature and science
variously impact the world.
The rise of the research university at the turn of the twentieth century
derived from as it contributed to the rising prestige of science and the scien-
tific method. Todd Carmody documents the influence of that turn on literary
criticism, itself an emerging discipline, in Chapter 11, showing how literary
critics turned to science as a model for how they might establish their exper-
tise and prestige. But that turn, he suggests, had surprising consequences,
notably the emergence of the third branch: social science. Thereby establish-
ing an important but overlooked corollary between reading texts and read-
ing the world, he offers a new framework through which to understand such
1 INTRODUCTION 17
institutional events as the culture wars and the contemporary challenge to the
importance of humanities scholarship.
While that challenge has received considerable attention since the turn
of the twenty-first century, the previous three decades have also witnessed
a growing awareness among scientists and policy analysts of the important
contribution literary and cultural critical works and the approaches they
inspire can make to the study of science as well as to science policy and eth-
ics. Several of the chapters in this section explore that turn. In Chapter 12,
Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King chronicle their participation in a
multi-disciplinary policy initiative concerning genetic policy funded by the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). Showing how recent changes in the
way health policy is formulated have opened new opportunities for humani-
ties scholars, they describe how they used literary and cultural works and the
methods of literary and cultural criticism to demonstrate the human—and
communal—dimensions entailed in decisions concerning genetic research and
personal privacy.
Science fiction in particular lends itself to these efforts because of its emer-
gence as an engagement with the impact of science and technology on social
and geopolitical relations. As SF critics have noted, it is an intrinsically crit-
ical genre. Rebecca Wilbanks documents the long-standing demand for sci-
ence fiction “to do rather than teach…to bring about or ward off real-world
states of affairs” in Chapter 13. She calls the works explicitly responding to
this mandate “incantatory” because of their authors’ faith in the power of
literature—of science fiction in particular—to impact the world. Tracing this
faith to “an evolving relationship between SF and the tradition of foresight
practices or futurology that dates back to the mid-twentieth century”—when,
in fact, science fiction emerged as a mass-produced genre—she shows how
incantatory fictions restore some of the techno-scientific optimism of an ear-
lier moment while, at the same time, they are tempered by the darker, more
critical turn the genre took after its Golden Age. Wilbanks herself expresses
faith in the salutary effect this sub-genre can have both on the genre as a
whole and on the culture in which it is being summoned to intervene.
For Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth, that impact comes from readers’
engagement with SF. While literary critics are among the readers they con-
sider in Chapter 14, Chambers and Garforth are interested in the wide array
of approaches to fiction—in particular, to science fiction—for what it can
reveal about the power of the genre and, conversely, about the readers them-
selves. The genre allows readers to consider both the strange world science
fiction readers encounter and the ways that experience helps them recognize
and negotiate the strangeness of their own worlds. In the way science fiction
stages the encounter between science and literature, it offers readers a useful
way of making sense of the changes that attend rapid developments of sci-
ence and technology and of the world it is registering as well as the one it is
helping to create.
18 T. T. COLLECTIVE
If literary works can facilitate the process of negotiating the strangeness of a

rapidly transforming world, it is in part because they can offer insight into scien-
tific methods and approaches—perhaps, in the process, opening up new areas of
inquiry. That is the focus of three of the chapters in this section. In Chapter 15,
Joseph Fitzpatrick explores the attraction of linguistic theories—in particular, of
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language structures human thought and experi-
ence—for science fiction. Although he is interested, in this chapter, in why that
thesis has such purchase for science fiction, his focus is on what science fiction
contributes to a largely discredited linguistic theory. Drawing mainly on Babel-
17, he shows both why the subject of language—and translatability—appeals to
authors exploring strange alien encounters and the power and urgency of com-
munication, and how science fiction gives material form and cultural context to
linguistic theory, thereby drawing out the insightful creativity and the ideologi-
cal underpinnings of the hypothesis.
Mutual borrowings between science and literary criticism are also the sub-
ject of Avery Slater’s chapter, in which she documents the journey of the
term “autopoiesis”—the process by which a system reproduces and main-
tains itself—from its emergence in theoretical biology in 1970 through sys-
tems theory to literary theory and cultural criticism. Chapter 16 considers the
appeal of that concept but also the wonderful irony, as Slater puts it, that the
literary and cultural critics are not so much borrowing the term as “borrow-
ing it back.” In her analysis of the strange history of the term and concept—
which, she contends, began in a philosophical treatment of Don Quixote,
mutated in its adoption by scientists, and returned to open new modes of
inquiry in literary and cultural criticism―Slater illustrates the methodologi-
cal similarities and differences between literary critical and scientific inquiry,
but also the ways in which through their borrowings and reborrowings, they
anatomize and expand each other.
Such borrowings make sense, according to Robert Peckham, because of
the literariness of science, although that literariness is typically obscured by
scientific claims to authority. In Chapter 17, Peckham shows how the use
of sound in three works focusing on pandemics and biological containment
offers insight into how our senses—in particular, visual and sonic—constitute
our experience of the world. With his focus on the sonic, Peckham demon-
strates the intrinsic politics of these ways of knowing. But he is interested
as well in how the sonic can challenge the visual authority of epidemiology,
and science generally, showing, for example, how it exacerbates the social
and geopolitical inequities pandemics inevitably underscore. The literariness
of these fiction and non-fiction works demands a reading of the “critical dis-
sonances” produced by the scientific approach to these problems and offers
insight into possibilities for a multi-factorial approach to pandemics that can
potentially address them more effectively and reduce their augmentation of
inequities.
1 INTRODUCTION 19
The final two chapters in this section focus on two poets’ treatment of sci-
ence and medicine as ways of making them more accessible to a broader read-
ership, as a way of exploring their complexity (Jay Wright) or offering a critique
of their assumptions (Max Ritvo). In Chapter 18, Steven Meyer chronicles the
parallel development of experimental ideas pertaining to science and poetry. Jay
Wright’s engagement with philosophy and physics, he contends, finds expres-
sion in poetic experimentation that juxtaposes “multiple symbolic discourses,”
including physics, to simulate “a pluralistic cosmos.” This experiential poetics
allows readers to grapple with complex scientific concepts.
Where Wright is interested in how these scientific ideas open the world to
a more engaged inspection for a public unfamiliar with and perhaps intimi-
dated by the complexity of the ideas, Max Ritvo’s interest was in publicizing
his experience of genetics and scientific medicine for what it revealed about
assumptions he sought to challenge. In Chapter 19, Lara Choksey shows how
Ritvo turns his medical diagnosis, his treatment, and his dying into a poetic
meditation that explores assumptions about the discrete and unique—and
isolated―body that at once determine and are reinforced by scientific med-
icine. Considering how Ritvo’s poetry dissects as it engages with the con-
temporary concept of precision medicine, Choksey shows how Ritvo thereby
offers an account of the human condition—and the value of the human com-
munity―that challenges the very premise of contemporary medicine.
Ethics and Politics
The chapters in this section are concerned with the ways in which literary
works address the ethical and political questions that arise out of scientific
research. They are interested in how literary works speculate about the broad
implications of the social and cultural changes wrought by new sciences and
technologies as well as in the difficulty of responding adequately to uncom-
fortable or politically inconvenient scientific knowledge. Taken together,
these chapters offer insight into the nature of literary works, their differences
from other forms of inquiry, and the various ways these works circulate in and
intervene against the social realities in which they were produced.
Jenni G. Halpin takes up the quintessential literary template for think-
ing through the relationship between scientific discovery and social con-
sequences, the Faust myth, in Chapter 20. In 1932, before the Manhattan
Project provided the ultimate case study for scientific ethics, friends and
students of Niels Bohr produced a play, written by Max Delbrück, called
“The Blegdamsvej Faust” as part of a variety show traditionally held at an
annual Copenhagen conference. The play reimagines the debates between
Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli over the existence of the neutrino as the conflict
between the Lord and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. Halpin navigates
the Blegdamsvej Faust along two parallel axes, simultaneously understanding
it as a student roast of the habits and mannerisms of their teachers but also as
20 T. T. COLLECTIVE
a sublimated articulation of the tensions fracturing the physics community at

that time—in the process presaging all the joys and terrors twentieth-century
atomic science would unleash.
In Chapter 21, Coleman Nye considers a contemporary Faust-style bar-
gain between science and social progress in a study of in vitro flesh, which
would allow for widespread meat consumption without requiring the rais-
ing or slaughtering of livestock. Artificial meat has been variously served
as a marker of utopian futurity (as with the cruelty-free replicators of Star
Trek: The Next Generation) as well as dystopian possibility and hypercapital-
ist global impoverishment (as in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy).
Nye’s study explores multiple vectors of fictionality and journalistic reportage
to explore how the concept of a future of in vitro meat is being “sold” to
customers in the present by activating existing circuits of racial and social cap-
ital. In these transactions/exchanges, the power of agrocapitalist megacorpor-
ations extends to an entirely new market that will give them even more direct
control over everything we consume.
Sherryl Vint’s Chapter 22 similarly explores the extraction of value from
life itself through her reading of contemporary science fictions about biocap-
italism and biotechnology. Her reading of Carrola Dibbel’s The Only Ones
(2015) and Ben H. Winter’s Underground Airlines (2016) shows how liter-
ary works can register and agitate against the massive social changes produced
by scientific discovery, in this case the way biocapital’s ecstatic promises of life
extension and genetic perfection obscure the more sinister intensification of
corporate wealth and social control. Science, we see in these novels, is never
science by itself, but is always imbricated in existing networks of power—a
reality that literature can help us understand and strategically assess/address.
Natalie Roxburgh explores a similar circuit between science, capitalism,
and the consumer in her study of late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-
century American literary “neuronovels” about psychopharmacology.
Chapter 23 interrogates the way Don DeLillo and Jonathan Franzen frame
psychiatry as a potentially suspect pseudoscience whose trademark drugs
threaten to flatten individual subjectivity into homogenized, universalized
brain chemistry. “Pharmaceuticals offer useful fodder for contemporary fic-
tion,” Roxburgh says, “because they are somewhere between science and
technology, substances for treating an ailment and products manufactured
according to a market demand resulting from the transformation of patients
into consumers”—which the novels problematize through their figuration of
psychopharmaceuticals as potentially fraudulent, potentially addictive, poten-
tially harmful, and potentially life-saving. The novels pit neoliberal market
imperatives against medical ethics and find both compromised when it comes
to the pharmaceutical industry.
In Chapter 24, Kyla Schuller explores a historical instance of a political
crisis caused by science and registered by literary history: the promulgation
of racist and eugenic ideals by some of Anglo-American literature’s most
1 INTRODUCTION 21
revered and celebrated writers. Here we find literature working not against
science, as some heroic exemplar of “resistance,” but rather extending the
most pernicious version of what circulated as knowledge. Schuller finds this
“eugenic aesthetics” in literature not simply in the content of these works,
but in their very form, which sought to “improve” its own readers toward
some pseudo-evolutionary reproductive ideal. And the way these writers
aligned their own reception with the health of the social organism is no mere
historical oddity; as Schuller shows in her conclusion, it has an unhappy par-
allel in contemporary defenses of the humanities that insist on the power
of high-prestige artistic objects from the Western tradition as an allegedly
“civilizing force.”
Everett Hamner’s Chapter 25 reads three of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent
novels—New York 2140 (2017), 2312 (2012), and especially Aurora (2015)—as
meditations on the crisis of political optimism in an era of mass extinction and
climate disaster. Robinson’s well-known utopian thinking is here tempered by
a Gramscian pessimism of the intellect, growing angry without also becoming
despondent, and calling for long-term, intergenerational action to remediate the
ecological crises caused by technoscience in the twentieth century. Hamner uses
Robinson’s science fiction to link difficult political action in the present to the
prospect of a better future, albeit one that can fully never escape the mistakes of
the past (or, for that matter, cannot avoid making its own, new mistakes).
Chris Pak’s Chapter 26 offers an extended reading of oil and energy infra-
structure systems in the science fiction genre, focusing on twentieth- and
twenty-first-century figurations of petrocapitalism. In a time when the work-
ings of oil capitalism are so ubiquitous as to seem nearly invisible, almost syn-
onymous with modernity as such, how has literature attempted to register
its presence and its consequences, as well as the ongoing geopolitical disrup-
tions caused by the bottomless need to extract more oil from the ground?
Pak discusses stories from as early as 1933 and as late as 2011, which fig-
ure oil simultaneously as incredible resource and enormous vulnerability, a
diagnosis that only becomes more frantic and severe as the Western world’s
reliance on oil grows both more unshakable and more precarious. As Pak
shows, the cultural anxiety around oil ultimately turns this mode of storytell-
ing to representations of oil as possessing its own agency, almost as a sinister
Lovecraftian God, intruding on the human world—a figuration which helps
us recognize the true enormity of petroculture’s radical break with the pre-
oil, pre-carbon past.
In Chapter 27, Sofia Ahlberg similarly turns to the emerging genre of the
“New Weird,” linking Jeff VanderMeer’s fantasy of a toxified exclusion zone,
abandoned by and dangerous to humans, to the radical transformations of
real-life ecologies produced by global warming and by industrial catastro-
phes like the Deepwater Horizon spill. Ahlberg argues that it is VanderMeer’s
consideration of permeable boundaries and liminal spaces—metaphorized in
the novel by skin—that helps the reader of the Area X books to push past an
22 T. T. COLLECTIVE
overly rationalist, anthropocentric approach to the environment that assumes

the exceptionality of human beings in favor of ways of knowing that fore-
ground the interconnectedness of life. Skin, Ahlberg argues, is the point of
contact between us and a world that is both us and not-us, an assemblage of
connections between inside and outside that can reorient our thinking, not
only in VanderMeer’s storyworld but in our larger time of crisis.
Finally, Jeff Gonzalez’s Chapter 28 uses Richard Powers’ Gain as the
occasion to cognitively map the complex relationships among illness, mascu-
linity, the environment, and biocapitalism. As Gonzalez notes, the frequent
rhetorical attribution to cancer of a sort of malicious agential consciousness
has a parallel in conspiratorial narratives about evil corporations—and lets us
rethink the role of the consumer-citizen in resistance to both of these hostile
alien agents. Powers thus ultimately suggests that we must think about the
relationship between humans and megacorporations the way Ahlberg argued
we must think about ecosystems, with the same sort of polyvalent, promiscu-
ous mixing between insides and outsides that makes it hard to know where
one begins and the other ends.
Forms and Genres
The chapters in this final cluster concern how science has changed literary
forms and genres as well as, conversely, the ways in which literary works have
challenged scientific categories and classifications. While these challenges
certainly produce epistemological transformation, lead to new techniques or
methods of analysis, and/or address ethical and political concerns, the focus
of these chapters is on how the literary critical vocabularies of form and genre
make boundary-crossing itself more visible. These chapters explore how ways
in which the ongoing, multi-generational dialogue between science and liter-
ature is constantly producing new innovations in both fields of inquiry.
In Chapter 29, Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr considers how scientific and
medical science structured two American plays of the progressive era in
the early twentieth century. Susan Glaspell’s Inheritors (1921) and Sidney
Howard’s Yellow Jack (1934) consider genetics and epidemiology, respec-
tively; considered from the perspective of a century hence, the two plays
together show how robust our habits of dramatizing scientific discovery still
are, as well as how assumptions about science and gender shape historical
narratives.
S.H. Daw’s Chapter 30 examines Muriel Rukeyser’s manifesto The Art
of Poetry in light of the development of quantum physics, showing how
she seeks to “forge a new poetics responsive to this new scientific field.”
Rukeyser’s combination of cutting-edge science with a reach back to the
Transcendentalists of the mid-nineteenth century creates a new field for poet-
ics appropriate to the governing epistemology of the twentieth century, an
achievement for which Rukeyser has not received sufficient appreciation due
to appropriative erasure of her work by some of her male contemporaries.
1 INTRODUCTION 23
A different sort of look back at the nineteenth century can be found in

Josie Gill’s Chapter 31, which seeks to understand how neo-Victorian novels
(contemporary novels that are set in the Victorian period or which seek to
reimagine or reinterpret classic Victorian literature) deal with the horrifically
out-of-date racial presumptions of the era. The neo-Victorian novels seek
to emphasize the poisonous nature of race thinking in science. While these
neo-Victorian dramas seek to challenge the Victorians as well as the eugenic,
pseudo-scientific “race realism” that was emerging in that time, the require-
ments of Victorianism as a historical genre made it difficult for these novels
to ever fully break away from the racist presumptions of that period (or our
own).
In Chapter 32, Michael Collins looks at the intertwined history of race,
anti-racist activism, and IQ, showing how W.E.B. Du Bois deployed IQ
testing as part of his larger project of education and enlightenment, in the
name “of black survival within a racist world.” Du Bois, Collins argues, was
no more able to speak back to “scientific authority” than any of us, and so
was forced to maneuver within the epistemic terrain defined by the state’s
embrace of IQ rather than refusing or transcending it. Posed and validated
by the proper authorities, “I.Q. becomes an intractable and sprawling ‘fact’
everywhere that thought occurs”—forcing even Du Bois to accept its author-
ity if he wants to be heard by the cultural elite of his moment.
Lindsay Michael Banco, in Chapter 33, considers the representation of
the atomic bomb in comic books, exploring the ways nonfictional and his-
torical comics try to represent the history of nuclear science. In particular
Banco explores the antinuclear politics of such graphic narratives—always
inflected by the retrospective, post-Hiroshima knowledge of the bomb as an
epoch-defining horror—against the more complex history of the actually exist-
ing Manhattan Project. Because comics is an art form that always foregrounds
its own artificiality and constructedness, Banco argues, they help us to see the
constructedness of scientific narratives, as well as create an intervention point
from which the possibility of other, nonnuclear worlds might emerge.
Lorenzo Servitje’s Chapter 34 uses comics in a similar fashion to explore
a potential future of antibiotic-resistant microbes, serving as both warning
and education about a science-fictional nightmare that is rapidly becoming
our actual present. Servtje’s interdisciplinary approach foregrounds the dif-
ficulty in accepting the enormity of antibiotic resistance, even as it becomes
an increasingly important part of contemporary medical practices. The comic
strip deploys an aesthetic of cognitive estrangement to help readers under-
stand both the enormous threat posed by such antibiotic resistant microbes
as well as the historical and political-economic forces of austerity and
impoverishment that are facilitating their rise.
Nathaniel Isaacson’s Chapter 35 explores the usefulness of this volume’s
union to area studies, considering the use of robots and other artificial life-
forms in recent Chinese-language film. Isaacson’s study explores how the
24 T. T. COLLECTIVE
local use of robots in post-socialist Sinophone nations intersects with global

concerns about automation, technoscience, and global capitalism.
In Chapter 36, Carlos Rojas introduces the “sick man of Asia” trope in
Chinese literature, which uses medical discourse to diagnose social anxieties
in China’s relation to the West. Analyzing the Taiwanese narrator of Luo
Yijun’s novel Superman Kuong, Rojas argues that the sick man trope can
be generative of identity and nationalist feeling, in this case as Luo’s novel
explores Taipei’s contemporary relationship to multiple imperial formations.
Finally, Lindsay Thomas’s Chapter 37 uses quantitative analysis to model
the connections between characters in extremely lengthy prose narratives,
attempting to merge scientific and literary heuristics to produce a new sort
of criticism. Thomas playfully refers to her chapter as an experiment leading
to the development of a hypothesis, which is that character co-occurrence
(“the average number of times any given character name appears with another
character name in a 1,000-word slice of the novel”) can serve as a proxy for
the length and complexity of a novel. In its articulation of a tendency across
novels as well as its discovery of an interesting outlier (Marlon James’s
2014 novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, which contains an unusually
high co-occurrence index for a novel of its size), Thomas’s method models
how quantitative, data science-oriented approaches to literature can help us
uncover new literary truths.
***
In view of Latour’s timely reminder that arts and theory should bring us
closer to the facts, the critical project of Arnold’s “belles lettres” remains very
much the same, and very much coincident with contemporary scientific prac-
tice. For, as Latour (2004) insists, and as this collection shows, the cultural
critic “is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles… not the
one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers, but the one
who offers the participants arenas in which to gather” (246). A manufactured
culture war between the arts and sciences is certainly not to blame for today’s
ugly post-truth moment, but their continued coalition is the essential arsenal
needed in the wake of our growing global crises, including climate change,
structural racism, rapidly expanding income inequality, and the COVID-19
pandemic that is ongoing at the time of this publication. It is just such a col-
laborative gathering space that our volume has assembled.
Note
1. For an account of mid-twentieth-century molecular biology and its develop-
ment alongside emerging computation technologies and information theory, see
Lily Kay, Who Wrote the Book of Life?: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford
University Press, 2000). Notably, Kay challenges the metaphor of gene as code
because, among other things, “technically speaking it is not a code” (6).
1 INTRODUCTION 25
References
Arnold, Matthew. 1882. Literature and Science. Nineteenth Century XII (August):
216–230.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Farooq, Nihad. 2016. Undisciplined: Science, Ethnography, and Personhood in the
Americas, 1830–1940. New York: New York University Press.
Goldstein, Amanda Jo. 2017. Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics
of Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and
the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3): 575–599.
Hayles, Katherine. 1990. Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature
and Science. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Herndl, Diane Price. 2005. Disease versus Disability: The Medical Humanities and
Disability Studies. PMLA 120 (2): 593–598.
Huxley, T. H. (1880) 1893. Science and Culture. In Science and Education: Essays,
140. New York: D. Appleton and Company.
Klugman, Craig, and Erin Gentry Lamb. 2019. Introduction: Raising the Health
Humanities. In Research Methods in Health Humanities, ed. Craig Klugman and
Erin Gentry Lamb, 1–11. New York: Oxford University Press.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–248.
Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Freedom and Empiricism in Early African
American Culture. New York: NY University Press.
Snow, C.P. (1959) 2012. The Two Cultures. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wellmann, Janina. 2017. The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epistemology of
Rhythm, 1760–1830. New York: Zone Books.
PART I
Epistemologies
CHAPTER 2
Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s

Apollo Mission
Kurt Beals
One of the central questions addressed in scholarship on literature and

science concerns the two fields’ respective claims to knowledge—particularly
the (coequal? complementary? critical? dependent? parasitic? reciprocal?) rela-
tionship of literary to scientific knowledge.1 In recent decades, German schol-
ars such as Joseph Vogl and Jochen Hörisch have argued for a “poetology
of knowledge” or a “knowledge of literature.”2 The former focuses on the
function of (literary and other modes of) representation in the production
of (scientific and other forms of) knowledge. The latter examines the various
ways in which literature not only receives and reflects upon scientific devel-
opments, but also constitutes its own form of knowledge—one that is not
always separated by clearly defined boundaries from the forms of knowledge
associated with science. Vogl builds on Gilles Deleuze’s assertion in his work
on Michel Foucault—“Science and poetry are equal forms of knowledge”
(Deleuze 1988, 20)—and thus distinguishes between a “history of knowl-
edge” (“Geschichte des Wissens”) and a “history of science” (“Geschichte
der Wissenschaft”), arguing that “knowledge is transmitted via various
forms and modes of expression and appears in equal measure, for instance,
in a literary text, in a scientific experiment, in a prescription or in an every-
day sentence” (Vogl 1999, 10–14).3 From this perspective, the processes and
products of modern science appear as one form of knowledge among others,
rather than as a privileged or paradigmatic locus of knowledge as such. To
be sure, these claims have not been without their critics4; nevertheless, they
K. Beals (*) 
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

30 K. BEALS
have been instrumental in the development of approaches to literary study

that consider how literature participates in cultures and practices of knowl-
edge that overlap or intersect with those of the natural sciences.
The present chapter draws on these developments to examine the inter-
section of scientific and literary/artistic forms of knowledge with respect to
twentieth-century lunar exploration. The example of the moon is particularly
revealing because it illustrates the complex and interdependent relationships
between literature and science. Indeed, the history of knowledge(s) of the
moon is illuminating in part because it demonstrates precisely how difficult
it can be at times to distinguish between literary and scientific knowledge;
decisive events in the history of human knowledge of the moon frequently
occur along the boundary between the two.5 As the German literary scholar
Hans Krah has argued, theoretical advances in the early twentieth century
not only brought rocket-based space travel within the realm of technological
possibility, but also and consequently transformed space travel from an object
of literary imagination into one of mathematical calculation: “Something
becomes science which was previously (already) literary utopia” (Krah 2002,
113–117).6 As this example demonstrates, a given object may cross or bridge
the divide between literary and scientific forms of knowledge, and develop-
ments within one of these disciplines may have consequences in the other.
On the one hand, space exploration was a staple of literature long before it
became a reality, and some literary fantasies proved so compelling that they
were even cited in support of scientific proposals; in these moments, literature
took the lead (Krah 2002, 120). On the other hand, once scientists began to
speculate in earnest about the possibility of space travel, and to take decisive
steps toward its realization, literary representations of the moon and of lunar
travel inevitably adapted to this new reality. Given that the moon had enjoyed
a prominent position in literature long before the advent of space travel, it is
hardly surprising that the prospect and eventual realization of a manned mis-
sion to the lunar surface profoundly impacted subsequent literary representa-
tions of the moon, influencing what stories could be told and what symbolic
value this heavenly body would henceforth hold.
But literature is not the only field of knowledge that spins its objects into
stories and symbols; science tells its own stories, and these narratives become
all the more important when the aims of science are bound up with those of
high-stakes geopolitics. If twentieth-century technological innovations trans-
formed the exploration of space, and of the moon in particular, from a lit-
erary fantasy into a scientific reality, that reality was in turn (and continues
to be) woven into literary, scientific, and political story lines about human
potential, global unity, and/or national (Soviet, American, or more recently
Chinese7) superiority. Even as the advent of real lunar exploration altered
the symbolic value of the moon in literary texts, the literary reception of this
event offered an alternative view of these scientific developments, showing
how the moon landing could be reassessed from the standpoint of aesthetic
tradition.
2 MEDIATING THE MOON: FERDINAND KRIWET’S APOLLO MISSION 31
Needless to say, the history of knowledge(s) of the moon—ranging from

Romantic poetry to twentieth-century science-fiction novels and films, and
from ancient mythology, religion, and astrology to modern lunar missions—is
far too extensive to even outline in a brief chapter. A great deal of work has
been done on the literature and science of the moon in earlier eras, which
this chapter. can only address in passing. In particular, the pioneering work of
Marjorie Hope Nicolson in the mid-twentieth century demonstrated clearly
the impact of early modern astronomy on literature, laying the foundation
for much subsequent work in the field of science and literature, and showing
that the rapid and dramatic transformations in the scientific understanding of
the moon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exerted a particularly
pronounced effect on literature: “there is an awareness, both in prose and
poetry, of the new moon of science – an awareness which grows gradually
through a more realistic description reflecting the scientific discoveries of the
day” (Nicolson 1936, 11).8 But whereas Nicolson’s work describes a primar-
ily unidirectional influence of science upon literature, finding the “real source
of a new literary genre” in “the ‘new astronomy’ of the early seventeenth cen-
tury,” my aim will be to show how the lunar landing takes on a different sig-
nificance when it is viewed within the framework of literary knowledge, and
specifically as part of a history of mediation (Nicolson 1948, 22). This article
will also bring the focus closer to the present, considering how lunar explo-
ration was imagined, and later reflected, in a few representative works from
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to the trans-
formations that took place in literature as lunar travel became first a realistic
possibility, and then a reality. Beginning with Goethe’s poem “To the Rising
Full Moon,” I will argue that the literary trope of the moon as an object of
unrequited longing is replaced in the twentieth century by representations of
the moon as an object that can be reached, but only by means of technolog-
ical mediation. If the scientific aspiration to reach the moon was inspired at
least in part by a long tradition of literary longing, the achievement of that
goal would in turn be reflected in literature. But rather than a conclusive ful-
fillment of longing, the literary and artistic representations considered here
replace the distance of miles with the distance of mediation, showing the
moon as an object that remains just out of reach.
After considering literary representations of the moon from the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jules Verne, and
Italo Calvino, this chapter will concentrate on a multimedia project by the
German poet and artist Ferdinand Kriwet concerned with the 1969 Apollo 11
moon landing. While the earlier depictions considered here present the moon
as an object of longing accessible only through mediation, the first manned
moon landing was frequently touted as the overcoming of mediation, the final
arrival of human explorers at their longed-for destination. Kriwet, however,
subverts this narrative by representing the moon landing as a quintessentially
mediated experience for readers, listeners, and viewers back on earth. In doing
so, he implicitly invokes timeworn literary tropes to challenge the images of
32 K. BEALS
scientific and geopolitical triumph that accompanied media coverage of the

event. Kriwet’s multimedia project thus engages simultaneously with scien-
tific and literary forms of knowledge, placing them in conversation with one
another, while implying that the moon’s literary status as an object of longing
may not be exhausted by its scientific conquest, after all.
Since Ferdinand Kriwet largely faded into obscurity after abandoning the
art scene in 1975, and has only recently enjoyed renewed attention, a brief
overview of his life and work may provide useful background for the discus-
sion of his works below. Born in Düsseldorf in 1942, Kriwet was something
of a prodigy; he published his first poems by the age of 14, and took a par-
ticular interest in modernist writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein,
and Samuel Beckett. By the time he was 18, Kriwet had either met or cor-
responded with some of the most innovative German-language poets of his
day, including Paul Celan, Max Bense, Helmut Heißenbüttel, and Franz
Mon. Kriwet’s early poems clearly reflect the influence of these writers, and
particularly of the Concrete poets.9 But his work is especially notable for
the wide range of media that it employs. Inspired by the media theories of
Walter Benjamin, Marshall McLuhan, and others, Kriwet sought new modes
of literary and artistic production that went beyond the limits of the conven-
tional printed book. Working across media, he produced vinyl records, radio
Hörtexte (audio texts, a term that Kriwet preferred to Hörspiel, or radio play),
films, and text-based art designed for display in galleries and public spaces,
such as Rundscheiben (poems in circular form) and a lesewald (a “forest” of
text, inspired by Litfaßsäulen, the poster-covered pillars common in German
cities). A central feature of many of these works was Kriwet’s interest in media
as such, diverse semiotic systems, and the materiality of signifiers.
In 1969, Kriwet had the opportunity to apply his mixed media program
to one of the largest media events of the century: the Apollo 11 moon land-
ing. Klaus Schöning, the director of the Hörspielstudio (radio play studio)
at the radio station WDR3, commissioned a project for radio from Kriwet,
and also put him in touch with Suhrkamp Verlag, which would publish the
book Apollo Amerika. In order to realize his multimedia project, Kriwet trav-
eled to New York, where he collected print materials and made recordings
of American radio and television broadcasts. Aside from the fact that West
Germany at the time did not offer the same variety or the same sheer num-
ber of radio and television stations as the United States, Kriwet’s visit allowed
him to record the triumphant, patriotic rhetoric of the first country to place a
man on the moon, and to investigate the function of the moon mission in the
context of American media culture. As Helmut Heißenbüttel later observed,
“Kriwet himself said that for him America speaks with the voice of its televi-
sion” (Heißenbüttel 1983, 115). While the actual Apollo 11 mission can be
seen as a quest for immediacy—for physical contact with the distant moon—
Kriwet’s Apollo works focus their attention instead on the heavily mediated
nature of the event. Kriwet’s project casts the moon in a new light: rather
than an object of longing, or even of scientific knowledge, Kriwet’s moon

is the subject of a media obsession, a spectacle that nearly eclipses the moon
itself.
The Moon from Afar: From Goethe to Verne

Let us begin with longing. Among the many symbolic attributes that have
accrued to the moon in the Western literary tradition is a recurrent, though
not always flattering, association with (generally female) love objects.10 As
Michael Ferber writes, “Virginity or chastity is frequently attributed to the
moon, partly through its connection with virgin goddesses and partly because
its light is cold. […] The moon’s continually changing phases led to its asso-
ciation with mutability, metamorphosis, inconstancy, or fickleness” (2007).
While these attributes are equivocal at best, they nonetheless demonstrate a
clear parallel between the unattainable moon—“comfortingly familiar yet
achingly distant,” as David Cressy has recently put it—and more mundane,
human objects of desire (2016, 45).
Indeed, in many works the moon either explicitly embodies the love
object, or provides a visual link to the far-off beloved—or sometimes both.
One instance of this association of the moon with love and longing surfaces
in the classical era of German literature, in Goethe’s 1828 poem “To the
Rising Full Moon” (“Dem aufgehenden Vollmonde”):
Wouldst thou make such haste to leave me?

Even now thou wast so near!
Massing clouds surround, enwreathe thee,
’Til no trace of thee is here.
Shouldst thou see me, though, so gloomy,
Up thy light would climb, a star!
Proof that I am loved yet, truly,
Though that love remain afar.
Onward, then! grow bright and brighter!
Shine with all thy glorious light!
Let my aching heart beat lighter,
Oh, how blessed is the night.11
The moon in Goethe’s poem is the object that links the poet to his far-off
beloved; gazing at the moon, the poet is reminded that she still loves him
despite their distance. But the moon is also identified with or even as the
beloved—the poet addresses the moon itself with the informal “thou” (“du”)
and reproaches it for its hasty withdrawal. The line “Proof that I am loved
yet, truly” (“Zeugest mir, daß ich geliebt bin”)—literally, “[You] show me
that I am loved”—notably leaves the agent position unoccupied, allowing it
to be filled either by the beloved or by the moon. Like the beloved, the moon
34 K. BEALS
is characterized in this poem above all by its distance from the poet, and by
the poet’s desire to replace its absence with presence; indeed, it is far from
clear that the beloved is anything other than the moon itself. Goethe’s poem
thus presents the moon as an object of desire, but one that is defined by its
distance, by the impossibility of contact.
Of course, the distant, unreachable moon was an empirical fact of the early
nineteenth century, but as the prospect of lunar exploration came closer to
reality, the symbolic position occupied by the moon in literature began to
shift as well. Steps in this direction can be observed in Jules Verne’s novels
From the Earth to the Moon (De la Terre à la Lune, 1865) and Around the
Moon (Autour de la Lune, 1870).12 These two books exemplify the transi-
tion that Krah describes with respect to space travel in general: rather than a
permanently unbridgeable ontological distinction, the distance that separates
the earth and the moon is treated in these novels as a mere engineering prob-
lem. While Verne was hardly the first author to explore the possibility of a
lunar voyage—Lucian, for one, had done so in the second century CE, while
Cyrano de Bergerac, Francis Godwin, Johannes Kepler, and John Wilkins,
among others, had followed suit in the first half of the seventeenth cen-
tury13—the extensive technical descriptions in Verne’s novels of the prepara-
tions for the journey support Krah’s argument for a qualitative change in such
fictions around this time, bringing practical problems to the fore.
In From the Earth to the Moon, a man named Impey Barbicane, president
of the Baltimore Gun Club, proposes that the superfluous production capac-
ity remaining after the end of the American Civil War be applied to the con-
struction of a cannon capable of firing a manned projectile all the way to the
moon. Barbicane specifically cites the desire for unmediated contact with this
unmistakably gendered object:
‘The moon, gentlemen, has been carefully studied,’ continued Barbicane; ‘her
mass, density, and weight; her constitution, motions, distance, as well as her
place in the solar system, have all been exactly determined. […] Photography
has given us proofs of the incomparable beauty of our satellite; in short, all is
known regarding the moon which mathematical science, astronomy, geology,
and optics can learn about her. But up to the present moment no direct com-
munication has been established with her. (Verne 1874, 12)
As this passage indicates, the desire to supplement or supplant the scientific

observations made from earth by making immediate contact with the moon
itself is central to these two novels. Indeed, the first book contains extensive
descriptions of the technologies devised to decrease, either virtually or actu-
ally, the distance between the moon and its human observers: the telescopes
that make the moon appear closer, and the cannon that will fire a projectile to
(hopefully) carry men to the moon. This desire is further exaggerated when
a second participant in the mission, the French poet and dilettante Michel
Ardan, hyperbolically expresses the wish to conquer not only the distance
between the earth and the moon, but distance as such:
‘Distance is but a relative expression, and must end by being reduced to zero.’
[…] ‘Distance is but an empty name; distance does not really exist!’ And over-
come by the energy of his movements, he nearly fell from the platform to the
ground. He just escaped a severe fall, which would have proved to him that dis-
tance was by no means an empty name. (Verne 1874, 94–95)
The literary problem of the moon’s vast distance from the earth is reima-
gined here as a scientific or technological problem; Ardan’s ardent hope is
that advances in science and technology will allow the inhabitants of the earth
to experience “the incomparable beauty of our satellite” close at hand. But
as the narrator’s ironic commentary suggests, this definitive overcoming of
distance is precisely what does not happen in the novel. Despite the book’s
title, at the end of From the Earth to the Moon the lunar capsule has only
recently been launched into space; the fate of this journey still hangs in the
balance.
Even in the sequel, Around the Moon, the voyagers circle the moon but
never set foot upon it. Here, too, technologies of mediation play a strikingly
prominent role. As the voyagers near the moon, Verne writes: “The dis-
tance which then separated the projectile from the satellite was estimated at
about two hundred leagues. Under these conditions, as regards the visibility
of the details of the disc, the travellers were farther from the moon than are
the inhabitants of earth with their powerful telescopes” (Verne 1874, 228).
But then they draw even closer:
Could they close their eyes when so near this new world? No! All their feelings
were concentrated in one single thought:— See! Representatives of the earth,
of humanity, past and present, all centred in them! It is through their eyes that
the human race look at these lunar regions, and penetrate the secrets of their
satellite! A strange emotion filled their hearts as they went from one window to
the other.
Their observations, reproduced by Barbicane, were rigidly determined. To
take them, they had glasses; to correct them, maps. (Verne 1874, 230)
This passage plunges the reader into a maelstrom of mediation. The voyagers
are closer to the moon than any human has ever been, yet still far enough
that optical instruments are required to view its surface with precision, and
their observations are subsequently corrected by reference to maps drawn
based on previous, earthbound observations. Still more striking, at this
moment the voyagers themselves become optical instruments: “It is through
their eyes that the human race look at these lunar regions.” Rather than the
satisfaction of a human foot stepping onto the lunar surface, this scene fore-
grounds and intensifies the act of looking, the fixation on the moon as an
object of visual fascination that remains out of reach. What we do not see in
either of Verne’s novels is the fulfillment of the desires expressed by Barbicane
or Ardan for “direct communication” with the moon, or distance “reduced
36 K. BEALS
to zero.” Indeed, this might be understood as the implicit thesis of the two
books: efforts to bridge distance must necessarily employ forms of mediation
that do not disappear when they have served their purpose; mediation itself is
the true content of any longing for the distant and unattainable.
The Moon Up Close: Kriwet’s Apollo Project

A century later, the reality on the ground, and in the sky, looked rather differ-
ent. After the Soviet Union succeeded in landing the Luna 2 on the moon on
September 13, 1959, and the United States followed suit with the less than
fully successful Ranger 4 in 1962, John F. Kennedy made explicit America’s
mission to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Against
this background, the Italian author Italo Calvino published his 1965 story
“The Distance of the Moon,” in which he imagined that the moon had
once been so close to the earth that it could be reached by a flying leap from
the top of a ladder, but had gradually begun to drift away. One character in
Calvino’s story, a young man, falls in love with the moon, while another, a
woman who loves him, chooses to stay on the moon as it recedes from the
earth, so that the young man will forever identify her with the true object of
his desire. Here Calvino performs a clever inversion of the identification of
the moon with the beloved in works like Goethe’s. The moon becomes the
unambiguous object of desire, whereas the woman is loved only by associ-
ation. But there is also a space-age twist to Calvino’s lunar fantasy: whereas
Goethe’s moon, and even Verne’s, can only be seen at a distance, Calvino’s
moon is one that has been experienced up close (even if it has subsequently
moved away). Although Calvino’s story is set in an imaginary past, its rework-
ing of classic literary tropes reflects the changing realities of the 1960s in its
depiction of a moon that is not eternally, absolutely unreachable.
Like Calvino, the German author and multimedia artist Ferdinand Kriwet
recognized that lunar exploration had fundamentally altered the symbolic
significance of the moon; once contact had been made, the moon could
no longer represent the irredeemably distant, the forever unattainable. For
Kriwet, however, what the first manned moon landing offered was not the
immediacy of direct contact, but rather a new form of mediation: in this case,
the mediation of the moon landing itself, which dominated the news cycle
both in America and around the world, allowing billions of people to expe-
rience the moon up close—albeit vicariously. Thus in the summer of 1969,
as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin approached the moon in the Apollo 11
spacecraft, Kriwet embarked on an Apollo mission of his own, traveling to the
United States to collect media documentation of the event. What Kriwet was
there to document was not the moon landing itself, but rather its representa-
tion in American mass media.
Kriwet was hardly the only one to remark on the hypermediated charac-
ter of the moon landing; even mainstream news outlets were well aware
that the landing was a spectacle that the media themselves were helping
to produce. The New Yorker, for instance, reported on July 26, 1969, that
“twelve hundred people had gathered at the intersection of Sixth Avenue
and Fiftieth Street” to see “the thing everyone was trying to watch—a
fifteen-by-fifteen-foot screen, on the west side of the intersection, on which
N.B.C.’s coverage of the moon landing was being shown in color,” thus
acknowledging that the screen, rather than the moon itself, was the object of
the crowd’s attention (“The Moon Hours”). But Kriwet drew dramatic con-
sequences from this mediation by taking it a step further, transforming media
coverage into the source material for his multimedia project.
That project consisted of three components—a book and an audio mon-
tage for radio, both called Apollo Amerika, and a film montage for tele-
vision, Apollovision—all of which offer critical perspectives on this media
frenzy, while also drawing attention to social and political tensions that were
drowned out by the lunar lovefest. All three works consist primarily of found
materials, collected from mass media sources and assembled into a collage or
montage; since the three works share certain structural principles, my discus-
sion will begin with an examination of the book, before considering how the
same principles are applied in audio and video formats. The organization of
the book Apollo Amerika is unusual for the fact that it can be read in both
directions—either right-side-up from front to back, or upside-down from
back to front. Read in the conventional direction, the book proceeds chrono-
logically, covering a period of nine days from July 16 to July 24, 1969—from
the day the Apollo 11 took off to the day it splashed down, with the moon
landing taking place in the middle, on July 20. Eighteen pages are devoted
to each day, containing newspaper clippings, quotes, radio transcripts, sports
scores, advertisements, and more. Read upside down and from back to
front, the book proceeds alphabetically, with 6 pages devoted to each letter,
from A to Z.
Although the moon landing plays a key role in both directions, the alpha-
betical half of the book incorporates a wider range of non-lunar materials.
Most notable are the critical passages that slip in and challenge the domi-
nance of the moon in mainstream media. The six pages devoted to the let-
ter “B,” for instance, spell out the word “BLACK,” one letter per page, in
large white letters on a black background, and then list quotes attributed to
Harlem residents: for instance, “Sure it’s a great achievement — but what
about Harlem” and “The moon? They ought to clean up this garbage around
here” (Kriwet 1969a, B1–5).14 Racial inequality is not the only social or
political issue to disrupt the lunar focus of Kriwet’s book. The “G” section
begins with two advertisements promoting gay rights; “K” features news
of Teddy Kennedy’s accident at Chappaquiddick, and mentions of Vietnam
appear throughout the book, including newspaper clippings that list the latest
war casualties. In short, while Apollo Amerika is a study of the media spec-
tacle surrounding the moon landing, it also draws attention to everything
38 K. BEALS
that the Apollo mission overshadowed—the tensions and tragedies of 1960s

America, from which the moon landing offered a distraction. Kriwet’s mon-
tage techniques challenge the centrality of the moon landing in the mass
media, juxtaposing it to other, “peripheral” stories, many of which reveal
political instability, dissent, and discontent. By employing two different sys-
tems of organization, Kriwet implies the arbitrariness of both systems and,
by extension, of the media hierarchies in which the moon landing was given
pride of place. In the process, he sheds light on the character of the moon
landing as a media event above all.
This point is made remarkably clear by several texts that Kriwet includes
in his book. In one of these, a proclamation issued by Richard Nixon on July
16, the president presents the moon landing as pure spectacle, announcing
that the Apollo 11
carries the hopes and prayers of hundreds of millions of people here on earth,
for whom the first footfall on the moon will be a moment of transcendent
drama. Never before has man embarked on so epic an adventure. […] In past
ages, exploration was a lonely enterprise. But today, the miracles of space travel
are matched by miracles of space communication; even across the vast lunar dis-
tance, television brings the moment of discovery into our homes and makes all
of us participants.” (Kriwet 1969a, Wednesday 13)
The president, speaking the language of advertising, encourages employers

and public officials to give their workers time off so that they can “share in
the significant events” of the day. A few pages later, an advertisement from
LIFE magazine invites readers to attend a “Moonathon” at Rockefeller
Center, where they can not only watch NBC’s live coverage of the moon
landing, but also visit models of the lunar module and the Saturn V rocket
that provide more immediate, less vicarious enjoyment (Kriwet 1969a,
Saturday 14). Kriwet’s selection and arrangement of these details shifts atten-
tion away from the moon landing itself, and onto the unprecedented scale of
the media event surrounding it.
Similar themes run through the 22-minute radio version of Apollo
Amerika. As Kriwet wrote: “The theme of my audio text is the electronic
publication of [the Apollo] project with the media of telecommunication,
and not [the Apollo] project in its technological and scientific aspects and
details themselves” (Kriwet 2007, 1). Like the book, this text is composed
of found material, but the focus is narrower, rarely deviating from the moon
mission. However, the role of repetition is even stronger; various announc-
ers’ voices are cut together, repeating phrases such as “on the moon” (Kriwet
2007, 1:41–1:55). This repetition has an alienating effect, redirecting atten-
tion away from the moon—the subject of these broadcasts—and toward the
broadcasts themselves, the particular tone of the announcers’ voices, the
material and sensual qualities of language rather than its referential func-
tion. Here again, as in the book, Kriwet focuses his critical attention on the
commercial and political functions of the lunar spectacle. His clearest cri-
tique is reserved for the contradiction between the ostensible message of
peace underlying the moon mission and its actual political function in a Cold
War context, clearly expressed in the juxtaposition of voices speaking phrases
such as “a trip in quest of peace” or “for all mankind” with “Flag-waving has
reached historic proportions” or “How do you feel about the fact that we got
there ahead of the Russians?” (Kriwet 2007, 4:47–4:52, 18:52–19:12). The
message of these juxtapositions is clear: even more than the book, the radio
version of Apollo Amerika presents the moon landing as a spectacle manu-
factured for geopolitical purposes. The actual contact with the moon is less
important than what the moon landing signifies, and how it is received, on
earth.
Finally, Kriwet’s 22-minute film Apollovision, made for Westdeutsches
Fernsehen, re-uses many of the materials employed in the book and the radio
version, but shifts the focus decidedly toward the medium of television: the
film is filled with shots of TV screens, often displaying TV channel logos. In
this work, as in the book, Kriwet combines material drawn from media cover-
age of the Apollo mission with reminders of the social and political issues that
this coverage omits; in one section of the film, words flash on the screen one
at a time—“SDS BERKELEY GAS PEOPLE LSD PIG KILL LOVE OUT
LAW IN ORDER RIGHT VIET FUCK”—while a voice greets attendees
at a state dinner in the astronauts’ honor (Kriwet 1969b, 2:48–3:11). But
the overall focus is on the moon landing as a televised event—an event ide-
ally suited to the structure of television narratives, and to marketing tie-ins.
One montage combines moon landing footage with clips of Superman, ads
for “the first three-dimensional photograph actually taken on the moon,”
Goodyear blimps, and a Gulf Oil logo, among others images—most of them
filmed directly from a TV screen, as evidenced by the flicker of the images
and the occasional visibility of the screen’s edges (Kriwet 1969b, 7:10–7:53).
By turning his camera on the television that displays these images—reshoot-
ing the moon, so to speak—Kriwet makes it clear that the event he is doc-
umenting is not the moon landing itself, but rather the TV spectacle that
surrounds it. The fantasy of immediacy implicit in the idea of putting a man
on the moon gives way to pure mediation—an event that is experienced
only through media channels. As Egon Netenjacob wrote in 1974, “Kriwet,
born in 1942, is a representative of a generation for whom […] mediated
experience, second-hand experience, has grown more and more important
in comparison to primary experience, experience through immediate con-
tacts” (Schöning 1983, 240). Rather than gazing up at the sky to see the
moon where Armstrong and Aldrin walked, the spectators who gathered
at Rockefeller Center for LIFE magazine’s “Moonathon” gazed at a giant
screen. The mediated moon became an object of greater fascination than the
physical moon in the sky above.
40 K. BEALS
One page of Kriwet’s book perfectly captures this shift in the moon’s sym-
bolic significance, which is implicit throughout all three components of the
Apollo project. This page is an altered version of an ad for the Honeywell cor-
poration that shows a picture of the moon in a nighttime landscape, beneath
the text: “Once, it belonged to poets and lovers.” The ad continues, “Then it
became a dream of man. And what man dares to dream, he achieves. His path
now etches the face of the moon….” (Kriwet 1969a, L5). For Honeywell,
the moon that once belonged to poets and lovers now belongs to scientists,
astronauts, or perhaps, to use the rhetoric of the time, “to all mankind.” For
Kriwet, though, if the moon no longer belongs to poets and lovers as it did
in Goethe’s time, it now belongs to newspapers and broadcasters—to radio,
and especially to television. Thus Kriwet inserts an ironic commentary into
the Honeywell ad, placing an image of his own face in the landscape, as if
reflected in the water. This is not just a deadpan riff on the advertiser’s rhet-
oric about “the face of the moon”; rather, it also suggests that a change in
the medium of representation—in this case, a change in the printed photo-
graph—is just as significant as a change in the represented object itself. The
narrative that Kriwet challenges is one in which the moon, formerly a sym-
bol of longing and insurmountable distance, is brought within human reach,
made into an object of immediate experience. In place of this narrative,
Kriwet portrays the moon landing as a transition from one form of medi-
ation to another, from real distance to virtual presence. The immediacy of
contact with the moon’s surface gives way to the many forms of mediation
through which this event is experienced on earth. Kriwet’s project reveals
the media-oriented nature of the entire Apollo mission, a mission not only
covered by, but to a great extent choreographed for these media outlets.
In this context, an unmediated encounter is unthinkable. While even main-
stream publications understood that mediation was fundamental to the logic
of the Apollo 11 mission, Kriwet’s achievement in his own Apollo project was
to make this mediation visible. Lest this moment of triumph for science and
technology be mistaken for the resolution of the age-old lunar longings of
literature, Kriwet reminds the viewers of his film that the moon remains a
mediated object of knowledge, even after the Apollo 11 landing.
Conclusions
Of course, Kriwet was not the only artist to see the moon landing as a media
phenomenon first and foremost. As Ina Blom writes, the pioneering video
artist Nam June Paik
often conflated the vaguely circular form of the light-screen with the light-globe
of the moon itself. This conflation was made quite explicit in a 1965 installation
of 12 prepared television sets called The Moon Is the Oldest TV. […] Paik presented
the more specific image of an electronic touch reaching all the way to the moon in
the video/film Electronic Moon No. 2, which started out showing a moonlike disc
on a TV screen, against which a finger is pressed. (Blom 2001, 214)
As in Kriwet’s work, this foregrounding of mediation functions to under-

cut the narrative of lunar exploration as the abolition of distance, the final
achievement of longed-for contact; the finger touches not the moon, but the
medium.
From the standpoint provided by Kriwet’s and Paik’s works, we can rec-
ognize hints of a similar perspective in the early days of modern astronomy.
In his foreword to the German edition of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius, Hans
Blumenberg writes: “by putting the telescope to use in order to produce
visibility, [Galileo] breaks with the astronomical tradition’s postulate of vis-
ibility [Sichtbarkeitspostulat] and makes room for the inescapable suspicion
that technologically mediated visibility, no matter how far it may be taken, is
always a contingent fact, dependent upon conditions unrelated to the object
itself” (Blumenberg 2002, 21). In other words, Galileo’s employment of
the telescope revealed that rather than being the ultimate arbiter of visibil-
ity, human vision was subject to physical limitations, and could be drastically
extended through the assistance of technological prostheses, but in the pro-
cess, Galileo also transformed astronomy into a field defined by mediation
rather than unmediated experience. Building on Blumenberg’s work, Joseph
Vogl writes that Galileo’s decision to turn his telescope from earthly to heav-
enly objects represented a transformation of the device “from an instrument
into a medium” (Vogl 2001, 115).
What’s more, any subsequent discoveries that the telescope and its succes-
sor technologies made possible could only be understood, historically speak-
ing, as the product of this technologically mediated process. Such a process
held no prospect of transcendence, no promise that mediation would lead
beyond itself to a new experience of immediacy; rather, astronomy was trans-
formed into a fundamentally mediated practice. Thus the same medium that
brings us “closer” to far-off objects also embeds mediation as an inextrica-
ble component of this encounter. As Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris have
recently argued, “For Kepler and Galileo, empirical investigation was no
longer a direct engagement with nature, but an essentially mediated behav-
ior” (2010, 122). For Kriwet, too, the various media that depicted the moon
landing—newspapers and magazines, radio and TV broadcasts—offered not
an unmediated experience of the moon, but rather an intensified experience
of mediation. The moon landing did not represent an epochal transformation
in which the distance between man and moon was finally abolished; rather, it
revealed the inescapable nature of mediation, and the inevitable failure that
awaited any fantasy of immediacy.
A fitting coda to these reflections can be found in the recent documentary
Earthrise, which tells the story of the eponymous photograph of the earth
emerging above the horizon of the moon—a photograph taken on the Apollo
8 mission, which circled, but did not touch down on, the moon (Vaughan-
Lee 2018). Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman’s reflection—“What they
should have sent was poets, because I don’t think we captured, in its entirety,
the grandeur of what we had seen”—suggests that the iconic photograph
42 K. BEALS
taken by his fellow astronaut William Anders somehow failed to convey the
experience of presence to viewers at home, and that literature could have pro-
vided a sort of knowledge of the moon that a photograph could not offer.
Blumenberg, by contrast, cites this same photograph as the most revealing
image produced by all of the moon missions; however, he complicates this
observation: “One could almost say that it would not have been worthwhile
to send man to the Moon if we could have brought only his words back with
him, though, on the other hand, perhaps it would not have been necessary
to send people to the Moon at all if what was to be brought back was, above
all, pictures” (Blumenberg 2000, 676). Language, Blumenberg’s account
suggests, is too indirect a medium; it would fall too far short of the ideal of
unmediated experience. Why bother with a voyage to the moon at all, if there
will be nothing to show for it but a poem? Pictures, by contrast, offer an illu-
sion of immediacy; yet this semblance of presence renders the actual presence
of a man on the moon almost unnecessary. Why bother with a voyage to the
moon at all, if pictures sent to earth by satellite could save us the trip?
As Blumenberg’s considerations suggest, these mediated representations
(whether linguistic or visual) inevitably give rise to contradictions, because
they aim at the one thing they cannot offer: the experience of immediacy
itself. If the moon once “belonged to poets and lovers,” as the Honeywell
ad claims, Kriwet’s works imply that it was not wholly torn from their grasp
by the arrival of astronauts on the lunar surface. Even when men walked on
the moon, it remained a mediated affair for those who watched the landing
on TV from back on earth. The longing for contact with the moon, which
began as a literary fantasy before becoming a scientific reality, could not be
fulfilled by technological feats of mediation, no matter how dazzling. As
Kriwet’s works indicate, the actual moon landing and its technological repro-
duction and dissemination in print, audio, and visual media could only excite,
but never fully satisfy, the desire for an impossible immediacy that the moon
had meant for centuries of poets and lovers. Kriwet’s project resituates the
moon landing in a literary and artistic history of mediation and longed-for
immediacy, depicting the Apollo 11 mission not as a giant leap that fulfilled
centuries of desire, but as one small step along a path of infinite mediation.
The lunar landing is thus cast not as a grand achievement of science and
technology, but as an event in the histories of overlapping fields of knowl-
edge—scientific, literary, and artistic—that each in their own way express an
impossible longing for immediate contact with the distant moon.
Notes
1.
Recent perspectives on this question are outlined in the introduction to
an earlier volume in this series: Howard Marchitello and Evelyn Tribble,
“Introduction,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern Literature
and Science (2017). See also Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann,
“Vorstellung eines Forschungsprojekts: ‘Literatur und Wissen(schaften) in der
Frühen Moderne’” (2002) and Roland Borgards et al., “Vorwort” (2013, 1).
2. See, e.g., Joseph Vogl, Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen
Menschen (2011, 12–16); Jochen Hörisch, Das Wissen der Literatur (2007,
7–14). For a concise overview of these approaches, including bibliographies of
relevant works, see Yvonne Wübben, “Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen
nach 1945” (2013) and Armin Schäfer, “Poetologie des Wissens” (2013).
3. This translation and all others from the German are mine unless otherwise
noted.
4. See, e.g., Gideon Stiening, “Am ‘Ungrund’ oder: Was sind und zu welchem
Ende studiert man ‘Poetologien des Wissens’?” (2007).
5. See the discussion of Galileo below.
6. Nicolson advances a similar claim about an earlier period, arguing that “the bal-
loon ascents of the Montgolfiers brought to an end the period of fantasy and
romance associated with the belief in flight to the moon and planets; although
these themes continue after 1784, the implications are different” (1936, iv).
7. See Sarah Pruitt, “China Makes Historic Landing on ‘Dark Side’ of the
Moon.”
8. For more recent surveys of the history of the moon as an object of both sci-
entific and literary analysis and imagination, see Joachim Kalka, Der Mond
(2016), and Scott L. Montgomery, The Moon and the Western Imagination
(2001).
9. The American Concrete poet Mary Ellen Solt also responded to the moon
landing in her wordless “Moonshot Sonnet.” See the discussion of this
poem in Craig Saper, “Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia
Performance, Publishing, and Pop Appeal” (2015).
10. Numerous examples are cited in Kalka, Der Mond (2016), esp. 38ff.
11. My translation. The original appears in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1966,
109). “Willst du mich sogleich verlassen? / Warst im Augenblick so nah! /
Dich umfinstern Wolkenmassen, / Und nun bist du gar nicht da. // Doch du
fühlst, wie ich betrübt bin, / Blickt dein Rand herauf als Stern! / Zeugest mir,
daß ich geliebt bin, / Sei das Liebchen noch so fern. // So hinan denn! hell
und heller, / Reiner Bahn, in voller Pracht! / Schlägt mein Herz auch schmer-
zlich schneller, / Überselig ist die Nacht.”
12. The quotations here are drawn from an 1874 translation that combines the two
books in a single volume: Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon Direct in
Ninety-Seven Hours and Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It (1874).
13. On seventeenth- and eighteenth-century works, primarily by English authors,
that envisioned the possibility of travel to the moon, see Cressy, “Early
Modern Space Travel” (2016); Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon (1948);
Nicolson, A World in the Moon (1936).
14. The page numbers given here reflect the book’s unconventional pagination.
Works Cited
Blom, Ina. 2001. The Touch Through Time: Raoul Hausmann, Nam June Paik and
the Transmission Technologies of the Avant-Garde. Leonardo 34 (3) (June 1):
209–215.
Blumenberg, Hans. 2000. The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert M.
Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
44 K. BEALS
———. 2002. Das Fernrohr und die Ohnmacht der Wahrheit. In Sidereus Nuncius:
Nachricht von neuen Sternen, Galileo Galilei, 7–75. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Borgards, Roland, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben. 2013.
Vorwort. In Literatur und Wissen: ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland
Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben, 1–2. Stuttgart:
Metzler.
Cressy, David. 2016. Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon.
In Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery: From Copernicus to Flamsteed, ed.
Judy A. Hayden, 45–73. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Foucault. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ferber, Michael. 2007. Moon. In A Dictionary of Literary Symbols. Credo Reference.
New York: Cambridge University Press. http://www.credoreference.com/entry/
litsymb/moon.
Gal, Ofer, and Raz Chen-Morris. 2010. Empiricism Without the Senses: How the
Instrument Replaced the Eye. In The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge:
Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 25. New York: Springer.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1966. Gedichte. Nachlese und Nachlass. Vol. 2.
Berliner Ausgabe. Berlin: Aufbau.
Heißenbüttel, Helmut. 1983. Was sollen wir senden? (1–4) Zu vier medienkritischen
Hörstücken von: Helmut Heißenbüttel, Dieter Schnebel, Ferdinand Kriwet
und Mauricio Kagel. In Hörspielmacher: Autorenporträts und Essays, ed. Klaus
Schöning, 105–122. Königstein/Ts: Athenäum.
Hörisch, Jochen. 2007. Das Wissen der Literatur. Munich: Wilhelm Fink.
Kalka, Joachim. 2016. Der Mond. Berlin: Berenberg.
Krah, Hans. 2002. ‘Der Weg zu den Planetenräumen’. Die Vorstellung der Raumfahrt
in Theorie und Literatur der Frühen Moderne. In Literatur und Wissen(schaften)
1890-1935, ed. Christine Maillard and Michael Titzmann, 111–164. Stuttgart: J.
B. Metzler.
Kriwet, Ferdinand. 1969a. Apollo Amerika. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1969b. Apollovision. Westdeutsches Fernsehen.
———. 2007. Hörtexte - Radiotexts. Berlin: Edition RZ.
Maillard, Christine, and Michael Titzmann. 2002. Vorstellung eines
Forschungsprojekts: ‘Literatur und Wissen(schaften) in der Frühen Moderne’. In
Literatur und Wissen(schaften) 1890–1935, ed. Christine Maillard and Michael
Titzmann, 7–37. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
Marchitello, Howard, and Evelyn Tribble. 2017. Introduction. In The Palgrave
Handbook of Early Modern Literature and Science, ed. Howard Marchitello and
Evelyn Tribble, xxv–xlvi. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Montgomery, Scott L. 2001. The Moon and the Western Imagination. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. 1936. A World in the Moon; a Study of the Changing
Attitude Toward the Moon in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
Northampton, MA: Departments of Modern Languages of Smith College.
———. 1948. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan.
Pruitt, Sarah. China Makes Historic Landing on ‘Dark Side’ of the Moon.
HISTORY. Accessed January 11, 2019. https://www.history.com/news/
china-plans-historic-landing-on-dark-side-of-the-moon.
Saper, Craig. 2015. Concrete Poetry in America: A Story of Intermedia Performance,

Publishing, and Pop Appeal. Coldfront, October 26, 2015. http://coldfrontmag.
com/concrete-poetry-in-america/.
Schäfer, Armin. 2013. Poetologie des Wissens. In Literatur und Wissen: ein interd-
isziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards, Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes,
and Yvonne Wübben, 36–41. Stuttgart: Metzler.
Schöning, Klaus (ed.). 1983. Hörspielmacher: Autorenporträts und Essays. Athenäum:
Königstein/Ts.
Stiening, Gideon. 2007. Am ‘Ungrund’ oder: Was sind und zu welchem Ende studiert
man ‘Poetologien des Wissens’? KulturPoetik 7 (2): 234–248.
“The Moon Hours.” The New Yorker, July 26, 1969. https://www.newyorker.com/
magazine/1969/07/26/comment-5238.
Vaughan-Lee, Emmanuel. 2018. Earthrise. https://www.earthrisefilm.com/.
Verne, Jules. 1874. From the Earth to the Moon Direct in Ninety-Seven Hours and
Twenty Minutes: And a Trip Round It, trans. Louis Mercier and Eleanor E. King.
New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Company.
Vogl, Joseph. 1999. Einleitung. In Poetologien des Wissens um 1800, ed. Joseph Vogl,
7–16. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag.
———. 2001. Medien‐Werden: Galileis Fernrohr. In Mediale Historiographien, ed.
Lorenz Engell and Joseph Vogl, 115–123. Weimar: Universitätsverlag.
———. 2011. Kalkül und Leidenschaft: Poetik des ökonomischen Menschen. Zurich:
Diaphanes.
Wübben, Yvonne. 2013. Forschungsskizze: Literatur und Wissen nach 1945. In
Literatur und Wissen: ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, ed. Roland Borgards,
Harald Neumeyer, Nicolas Pethes, and Yvonne Wübben, 5–16. Stuttgart: Metzler.
CHAPTER 3
Writing the Elements at the End of the World:

Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi
Anindita Banerjee
States of Suspension
2005 was a year of overlapping anniversaries. Marking a half century after the
liberation of Auschwitz and the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, it was also
the threshold of the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident
of 1986—an explosion in a civilian reactor in the former Soviet republic of
Ukraine which released about forty times as much radioactive matter as the
first atom bomb and resulted in the displacement of more than a million
people. This conjunctural year presents a test case for what the renowned
historian Dipesh Chakrabarty would soon thereafter call “the climate of
history.” The phrase encapsulates a radical reconceptualization of time and
space in an era of catastrophic environmental change. Challenging the foun-
dational assumption that human intentions and actions alone defined the
past and would prove to be the sole determinants of the future, Chakrabarty
called for a kind of writing which would both recognize and account for the
active role that the non-human elements of the planet play in shaping soci-
ety, politics, and culture. The climate of history recalibrates chronology and
cartography according to the shifts and scales of the geophysical matter that
constitutes our world (2009: 197–198).
The original version of this chapter was revised: A note was added on page 53. The
correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_38
A. Banerjee (*) 
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
© The Author(s) 2020, corrected publication 2022 47

48 A. BANERJEE
Decades before the publication of the historian’s manifesto, the two

authors juxtaposed in this chapter attempted precisely such an experiment in
reckoning with the horrors of their shared twentieth century. Turning to the
states and scales of the elements to account for human atrocities and tech-
nological catastrophes together, Primo Levi and Varlam Shalamov developed
an inimitable mode of storytelling as science in the climate of history. Levi
(1919–1987), an Italian chemist from Turin who spent eleven months in
Auschwitz, and Varlam Shalamov (1907–1982), a Russian writer who toiled
for seventeen years in Kolyma—a vast network of extraction sites in which
inmates of the Soviet Gulag extracted gold, uranium, and other rare earth
minerals in the harshest conditions of the Siberian Arctic—were contemporar-
ies who did not personally know or read each other. Yet their writings merit
comparison, not by the usual literary-historical standards of contact and influ-
ence but by the non-human metrics of their scientific language.
Appropriately enough, it is a particular geophysical environment rather
than a personal or literary encounter that serves as the ground for reading the
two authors separately and together. In the conjunctural year of 2005, a day
after commemoration ceremonies were held at the site of the Auschwitz death
camp, a pair of filmmakers from Italy and the United States began to retrace
the path Levi took after his liberation. Their intention was to follow the trajec-
tory of a book called La Tregua, published in 1963 and translated into English
as The Truce, which appeared almost twenty years after Se questo è un uomo (If
This Is A Man)—Levi’s iconic testimony of the Holocaust penned soon after
his return in 1946. Starting from the defining moment when “four young
men, Russian soldiers on horseback,” arrived at the barbed-wire fence to her-
ald “the coalescing of a nucleus from nothingness” (12), La Tregua covers a
nine-month-long period that would take the author even farther from home.
Levi was rescued from the hospital block of Auschwitz along with a remain-
ing group of inmates deemed too old or too infirm to retreat westward in
the face of the advancing Red Army. Instead of heading south toward Italy,
however, he was transported again, this time in a northeasterly direction. On
a meandering network of trains and trucks across Poland and Galicia, the liber-
ated prisoner would eventually arrive at a displaced persons’ camp called Starye
Dorogi (Old Roads) on the borderlands straddling Ukraine and Belarus—the
same catchment area of the Pripyat River that would later be dedicated to the
Chernobyl nuclear power complex.1 Despite the hardships following a war in
which the Soviet Union suffered enormous losses, Levi’s vignettes of Pripyat—
an environment of elemental liminality suspended between land and water,
with grassy meadows, coniferous forests, and sprawling marshes teeming with
colorful animal and human life—seem idyllic at first glance.
Just like its natural elements, however, Pripyat in Levi’s testimony exists
in a state of suspension, and not merely because of the indeterminancy of the
travelers’ trajectories or the author’s anxiety about his ultimate destination.
The Italian phrase La Tregua, as Sam Magavern reminds us, conveys not so
much the finality of the English term “truce” (113)—a state of harmony
3 WRITING THE ELEMENTS AT THE END OF THE WORLD … 49
between the self and the world that Levi’s character in the book defines as
an eternally elusive “parenthesis of unlimited availability” (Levi 1964: 220)—
as a ceasefire, a temporary suspension of hostilities that could be arbitrarily
terminated by calling combatants back to the battlefield. Indeed, despite the
distance that separates the German and Soviet camps, Auschwitz reaches out
across space and time to infiltrate every element of the chemist’s journey
through a typographic act of suspension. The account of life after liberation
is preceded by a poem from 1946, hanging unframed on a blank page in lieu
of an epigraph, while the final sentence of the book returns to the last word
of the poem, “the dawn command, a foreign word, feared and expected:
‘Wstawàch’” (Levi 1964: 223). Returning to resonate among the natural ele-
ments and human settlements of postwar Ukraine, the reveille, rendered and
remembered in the language of the Polish guards at Auschwitz, insinuates
itself into the present much as Chernobyl’s radionuclides would transform the
very molecules of Pripyat’s natural elements. Far from fostering a renewed
state of lucidity after the madness of the past has been left behind, both the
unfolding present and the foreseeable future appear to the chemist as a semi-
opaque “gelid state of suspension” (Levi 1964: 12).
From the perception of freedom as the formation of a nucleus to the con-
tamination of homecoming with inassimilable residues of the past, Levi’s
scientific lexicon poses a serious challenge to literary language. Science, how-
ever, contributes far more than a set of metaphors for the kind of trauma
that Cathy Caruth describes as “stand[ing] outside representation” (17). On
the contrary, atomic structures of the “nucleus” and elemental interfaces in
the “gelid suspension” shift the very ontology of the unthinkable away from
the realm of human experience and expression alone. Subjected to crystallo-
graphic imaging in the laboratory, catastrophe reveals itself instead as a web
of relations between matter and energy, a mutually constitutive field of colli-
sions and convergences between human and non-human entities on the face
of the planet.
By the same logic of elementary particles and elemental suspensions,
Pripyat’s liminality provides the perfect staging ground for remembering
Auschwitz not just in the shadow of Hiroshima but also as a foreshadow-
ing of Chernobyl. Looking back from 1963, the height of the nuclear arms
race between Levi’s erstwhile liberators and their geopolitical rival across
the Atlantic, the chemist positioned his sojourn in northwestern Ukraine
“between Hiroshima and the ill-omened name of the Cold War” (Levi 1964:
59). In the cinematic reconstruction of his journey, this observation takes
another quantum leap across futures past to confront Pripyat’s reincarnation
as a nuclear wasteland, still outwardly peaceful yet saturated with lethal radi-
onuclides. The moving camera translates “the invisible poison of Auschwitz
coursing through the veins of all returnees” (Levi 1964: 220) into vast assem-
blages of natural and built environments: quarantine zones for contaminated
machinery and mass graves for livestock, pine forests that have turned red,
and marshes devoid of microbial life.
50 A. BANERJEE
Pripyat also serves as the crucial crossroads at which Levi’s all-too-fragile

truce converged with the sites and semiotics of Shalamov’s own rendition of
the unthinkable. “Siberia,” the metonymic shorthand for penal colonies in
the Arctic such as Kolyma, registered its presence on Levi’s writing as indeli-
bly as the radioactive cloud stretching from Hiroshima to Chernobyl. Implicit
or explicit threats of being “sent off to dig ditches in Siberia” (Levi 1964:
93, 107, 130) were accompanied by physical embodiments of the camps as a
further reminder of its looming presence beyond the eastern horizon. Starye
Dorogi, where Levi waited in limbo, also served as a railroad hub for German
POWs who fell through the cracks of postwar exchanges, their apathetic
bodies “indistinguishable from the pile of logs” (Levi 1964: 120) on flatbed
cars. Contingents of Ukrainian and Belarusian women and children, repatri-
ated from formerly occupied territories on accusations of conspiring with the
enemy, went by as Levi and his companions looked on, fearing a similar fate
(Levi 1964: 121, 124, 125, 154, 155).
Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and the Gulag, each of these words, straining the
limits of language in isolation, confers meaning on each other in Shalamov’s
prose as they do in Levi’s: not as singular instantiations of inhuman atrocity
but as intimately related elements in a comprehensive report on the climate
of history. Eschewing the narrative conventions of camp literature and doc-
umentary testimony, which continue to baffle literary scholars to this day,
both writers turned to the physical sciences in a world that had irrevocably
transformed not only the concept of the human but also the boundaries
between life and non-life. Although a story from Shalamov’s iconic Kolyma
Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy) constitutes the principal case study of this chapter,
it draws upon Levi as a powerful counterpoint for identifying and theoriz-
ing the two writers’ startlingly similar experiments in literary form and sci-
entific language.2 Such a contrapuntal reading—which Edward Said famously
defined as an awareness of “overlapping and intertwined conditions of lan-
guage in the very places where there seems to be only one” (18)—puts
Shalamov’s work in a different light from that of an exceptional testimony
to an unthinkable state of exception. Reading the chronicler of Kolyma from
Primo Levi’s Pripyat situates his Gulag stories in a global dialogue, not just
about the future of art but also the fate of the planet: a scientific literature,
avant la lettre, for the coming consciousness of the Anthropocene.
Scales of Representation
The repeated invocations of Auschwitz in Shalamov’s writing provided
the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym with a powerful framework for reading
Kolyma Tales through Theodore Adorno’s famous declaration about the
impossibility of literature after the Holocaust (342). In order to illustrate
Shalamov’s “paradox,” Boym turned to the preliminary notes for an essay
titled “About my Prose” (“O moei proze”) published long after he was
released in 1971:
In the new prose – after Hiroshima, after Auschwitz and Kolyma, after wars
and revolutions – everything didactic is to be rejected. Art does not have a
right to preach. Art neither improves nor ennobles people. Art is a way of life
[sposob zhit’], not a way of understanding life [poznaniia zhizni]. (cit. and trans.
Boym 342)
Addressing only the two latter elements of Shalamov’s catastrophic triad,

Boym acknowledges the author’s rejection of literature’s traditional functions
yet focuses her inquiry on mimetic representation. The vexed question of
whether his short prose pieces in Kolyma Tales should be called “documents”
or fiction (Boym 344) justifiably remains central in a cultural context that, as
Alexander Etkind puts it, remains suspended in a state of “warped mourning”
over the legacy of the Gulag more than half a century after Stalin’s demise
and a quarter century after the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In order
to resolve the Shalamov paradox, Boym returns to the enduring friction
between “the individual and the state” in Russian and Soviet history, con-
cluding that the author substitutes mimesis with mimicry of official language
to recuperate a form of “humanism via negativa” (344).
Once Kolyma moves from the framework of its singularity to the overlap-
ping force fields of Hiroshima and Auschwitz, however, Shalamov’s writing
presents a further challenge to this redemptive aspiration—a quality Boym
herself acknowledged as “something radically unassimilable” (342) and
“inhuman” (344), and other critics characterized as a peculiar “scientific
detachment” in the face of the same suffering that produced Solzhenitsyn’s
evocative landscapes and deeply developed characters reminiscent of
Tolstoy (Hosking 164). Far from conveying a kind of Chekhovian clarity as
Shalamov’s translator John Glad suggests in his foreword to Kolyma Tales
(xvi), it is precisely this inassimilable turn away from the human that pro-
vides a key to Shalamov’s repudiation of “literature as a way of understanding
life [poznanie zhizni]” (Boym 342). It is what aligns him not just with his
contemporary Primo Levi, but also with a future generation of writers and
thinkers struggling with the sheer scale of what Amitav Ghosh called “the
great derangement” of the Anthropocene (2016).
Shalamov’s counter-human turn is signaled through the very term
poznanie that Boym singles out in her analysis. While the critic interprets the
term as merely “didactic” (Boym 342), poznanie means cognition, the onto-
logical foundation of the modern concept of the human. René Descartes in
1634 named cognition the defining criterion by which subjects endowed with
a rational soul superseded all other living and non-living entities in the world.
It was cognition that granted humanity not just the capacity for mimetic
representation, manifested in painting and poetry, but also the unique power
to transcend the limits of the body by manipulating the environment. Ghosh,
following Bruno Latour, approaches the contemporary crisis of the imagina-
tion in the face of planetary catastrophe as a direct legacy of the “partition-
ing” function of cognition, which excluded the elements of nature from the
52 A. BANERJEE
narrative of culture and today separates the expressive arts from the knowl-
edge and practice of the sciences (7). Shalamov voiced a very similar criticism:
It seems to me that the human being of the second half of the twentieth
century—survivor of wars, revolutions, the conflagrations of Hiroshima, the
atom bomb, and above all, the betrayal—the shame of Kolyma and the gas
chambers of Auschwitz, this human […]—having survived the scientific revolu-
tion of Descartes and Newton—simply cannot approach the questions of art in
the same way as before. (“O proze” 148)
If the Cartesian revolution stands as the common denominator of the

twentieth century’s continuum of catastrophe, then poznanie, cognition, is
at once the myth of its origins, the roots of its “betrayals,” and the key to
forging a different form and function of art for the future. Shalamov’s version
of Levi’s question, If This Is a Human, therefore starts by interrogating not
just the primacy of cognition but also its fate in the face of the unthinkable.
Long before composing his critical commentary on the future of litera-
ture, Shalamov attempted to lay out a new approach to the aforementioned
“questions of art” in an impassioned correspondence. In 1953, soon after
his release from the penal zone, he approached Boris Pasternak, who at the
time was drafting his novel Dr. Zhivago and undergoing a similar crisis of the
imagination. Among the letters in which Shalamov provided his reactions
to Pasternak’s developing manuscript, which would go on to win the Nobel
Prize following its clandestine publication in Italy in 1957, was this note
about his own ongoing struggle:
If every atom in all matter holds within itself the explosive power of annihila-
tion, then that is the measure of cruelty contained in the world, a world whose
tenderness and beauty—flowers, lavender bushes—can never look the same
again. (“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 39)
Palpable in this brief passage are the tropological resonances with Levi’s
chilling inversions in The Truce: logs becoming emaciated POWs headed to
Siberia and “nature in flower” transformed into the “gelid state” in which the
future perpetually rubs up against the past (222). Shalamov’s letter, however,
also invokes the twentieth-century legacy of the second “scientific revolu-
tion” associated with the name of Isaac Newton: the insight that elementary
particles constitute all living and non-living matter and serve as the source as
well as the conduit of energy. Taking the “measure of cruelty contained in the
world,” unleashed by humans yet confounding humanity’s vaunted capacities
of cognition and representation, requires the equal and opposite reaction of
stripping down the scale of that measurement. Unimaginably large systems,
be they labor camps or nuclear weaponry, can only be approached through
the smallest unit of the elements.
This attention to scale not only reveals Shalamov’s consanguinity with con-
temporary environmental thought, but also explains why the splitting of the
atom would become the foundational template for a new art to be forged
by the “survivors” of the dual scientific revolutions.3 Reclaiming the future
would consist of a new mode of writing catastrophe, not in discrete catego-
ries of human, natural, and technological disasters separated by context and
causality but rather as a continuing state of suspension. The author’s proposal
strikingly anticipates Timothy Morton’s theorization of radiation as a “hyper-
object.” Notoriously difficult to represent yet registering its presence across
all forms of living and non-living matter, it typifies the challenges thrown up
by the Anthropocene to both scientific and literary imaginations. Like climate
change, fallout cannot be contained within geographical locations and his-
torical periods, making it impossible to separate Trinity from Hiroshima
and Chernobyl from Fukushima (169).
As the following sections demonstrate, it is in the unlikely place of
everyday life in the camp, on the pages of the Kolyma Tales, that the hyper-
object of radiation emerges as the “measure” of humanity’s reduction to what
I call hyposubjects: human forms that are presumed to lack or have been for-
cibly denied the Cartesian privileges of cognition and agency. It is the inter-
face between the hyposubject and the physical environment of the Siberian
Arctic that translates Kolyma into Shalamov’s “inhuman” (Boym 344) dic-
tion. In his correspondence with Pasternak, the author himself re-inscribed
what Giorgio Agamben would famously theorize as “bare life” into this much
more fundamental equation of elemental life:
We may pressure nature, but nature presses back: this is a truth long known to
poets, but science is just beginning to confirm it. … And maybe the splitting
of the atom is the revenge of the elements against the lies and betrayal of man.
(“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 40)
In this ethos of dialogic interpenetration, Shalamov similarly anticipates

contemporary environmental theory’s new attention to material objects and
states of matter, not as passive backgrounds of human thought and action but
rather as active participants in the shaping of humanity itself. The following
description deploys precisely such an ontic reversal to subvert the euphemism
“conquerors of the North,” a phrase that was frequently used to reintroduce
former Gulag inmates to the mainstream (Bruno 268):
All of two months ago, lost in a winter that couldn’t care less what else existed in
it, a winter that did not want anything to do with people who, in turn, wanted at
all costs to wrench from it whatever nooks of warmth they could among the ines-
capable stone and wood … . (“Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom” 27)
In the extraction zone that was Kolyma, moreover, the “agential” (151)
elements of nature, to use the philosopher of science Karen Barad’s terms,
54 A. BANERJEE
entered into a remarkably “intra-active” (139) relationship with the

scientific, physio-chemical concept of the elements—a concept, codified in
alphanumeric abstractions, that would also give form to Levi’s remarkable
memoir The Periodic Table, published twelve years after The Truce in 1975. In
a perverted reflection of the confluence of natural and human resources that
served as the raison d’être of the labor camp, elements at both the largest and
the smallest scales inscribe a lively continuum in Shalamov’s and Levi’s works
alike. They function as the measure of both life and non-life and are assigned
divergent scales of value. Just like atoms in the periodic table, consequently,
the multidirectional entanglements of elemental life in Kolyma develop iso-
topic variations, split to release energy, metamorphose into each other, or
combine to form entirely new entities in the Arctic’s ecology of extremes.
All That Is Solid (Does Not) Melt into Air

While the harshness of Kolyma’s geophysical environment is a truth
universally acknowledged, Shalamov’s poetics of the elements have not been
considered in humanistic analyses of his Gulag writing. Alexander Etkind,
for instance, approaches the lingering traces of the camp in late and post-So-
viet culture through a series of performative encounters with the past—a
past which, unlike the Holocaust, remains largely shrouded from public view
and is yet to be widely acknowledged as an object of individual and collec-
tive reckoning. In dialogue with Jacques Derrida’s hauntology, he takes
Walter Benjamin’s theory of the trauerspiel or mourning play as a model for
Shalamov’s many sketches of Kolyma (38–40). In Etkind’s analysis, the camp
is a repository of the “undead” who keep demanding recognition, only to
be thwarted by the very insubstantiality of their material beings; whether
alive or dead in the physiological sense, the untold ranks of the “unburied”
are neither identified nor put to rest in the earth in full acknowledgment of
their predicament (196–219). As the journalists Masha Gessen and Misha
Friedman recently reported from the places where the Kolyma camps once
stood, the spectralization of the Gulag continues to this day. Literally absent
from the discursive practices of local residents, they are not marked by any
physical signs.
In recording the encounters between death and life in Kolyma, Shalamov,
in contrast, offered an all-too-material counter-model to this politics of
disembodiment. Though couched in a performative mode similar to those
explored by Etkind, a “camp mystery play” (Kolyma Tales 280) unfolding on
a steep hillside on the left bank of the Kolyma River illustrates the crucial role
of the elements in inscribing the necropolitics of the north:
A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses
from 1938, was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.
In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps
secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our
loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death,
sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years. There
were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. …
Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no “assignment,” no
“norm” calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was
easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy
waters where they mined gold – the “basic unit of production,” the “first of all
metals.” …
The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the
corpses into its bowels. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storehouse,
for they contained not just gold and lead, uranium and tungsten, but also
undecaying human bodies. These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps
attempting to arise. (KT 280–281)
The category of the “undecayed”—netlennyi, also translatable as

“imperishable”—stands in radical contrast to the phantoms that haunt
the world of the living but cannot be identified by their material remains.
Explicitly framed as an inversion of Christ rising from a stone tomb, they
offer no prospect of redemption or salvation to the witnesses. In keeping with
Shalamov’s skepticism toward both the Orthodox tradition in which he was
raised and the scientific worldview that dominated his world in adulthood,
the undecayed challenge both the spiritual potential for forgiveness and the
rational faculty of cognition.
Unlike the undead, the corpses are not defined by the loss of the body
(telo) through the soil’s chemical and biological processes that turn humans
into humus—or, as Shalamov underscores in his implicit reference to
Auschwitz, by industrial means devised to accelerate the vaporization of
flesh. On the contrary, they are the product of the elements’ perverse refusal
to perform their assigned roles. Consigned to the ground by fellow prison-
ers yet failing to decompose, the imperishables demand recognition not
merely for themselves but for all the non-human components of the Arctic
that came to define their terrifying state of suspension between life and non-
life: the hardest forms of earth and water, the heaviest elements of gold and
uranium, and a cliff face strewn with “iron logs” from “three-hundred-year-
old larches” that had until recently been cleared by the “brittle shoulders” of
fellow convicts (KT 279).
In the sheer solidity of “twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were
reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and
the eyes burning with a hungry gleam” (KT 282), the undecayed mirror the
recalcitrance of Kolyma’s physical environment. Far from being mistaken
as manifestations of the uncanny, each of them is perfectly recognizable to
the spectators of the mystery play as “our loved ones” (KT 281), connected
through their very fleshliness with the ranks of the living: “I and my compan-
ions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in
this … house-warming for dead men” (KT 282). Their power of interpella-
tion and interrogation, consequently, derives not from the moral imperatives
56 A. BANERJEE
of remembrance and reconstruction but from an elemental logic that lay at

the very foundation of the penal colony. Disgorged from “the storehouse of
the north,” the undecayed offer an insistently material perspective on “the
secret of Kolyma” (KT 280–281).
The camp’s enduring notoriety was indeed shaped by a well-defined
exchange between the human element and the elements of nature. As has
been widely documented, separating gold—symbolized by the first two let-
ters of the Latin word aurum, meaning radiant dawn, on the periodic table—
from a formidably hostile terrain had made Shalamov’s ironically cited “first
of all metals” (KT 281) synonymous with forced labor and political exile
since the nineteenth century. Initially established to boost the imperial treas-
ury, the euphemistically named “conquest of the north” took on a much
more expanded role in the solvency of the Soviet state under Stalin—so much
so that the country became the second largest producer of gold in the world
by the middle of the twentieth century (Glad x). The above-cited scene, from
a story titled “Lend-Lease” (Po lendlizu), marks a particularly significant
point of stress in Kolyma’s alchemy of geology and biology.
Like the undecayed, the force that releases them from the hillside is
suspended between living and non-living matter. An alien entity “crawling
out of the Bering Sea” to leave its “tracks visible on the marshes” (KT 275) is
the cause of the simultaneous disruption in the Arctic’s crust and the history
of the camp. The “prehistoric beast” (KT 275) that brings victims from 1938
face to face with the no less brutalized ranks of the living in 1941 is a part of
the eponymous program called Lend-Lease that was inaugurated by Franklin
D. Roosevelt to provide material support to allies of the United States in
World War II. “The foreign word called bulldozer” (KT 276)—which, unlike
the primitive wood-fired trucks of Kolyma, runs on “light aviation fuel” (KT
276) and possesses blades so shiny as to reawaken dreams of shaving among
the convicts—brings global conflict into the isolated enclosure of Kolyma,
but is not employed as a military instrument. It is immediately recruited to
the same labor of extraction as the human bodies consigned to the mines.
The bulldozer’s “first assignment on Russian soil” (KT 280), however,
fails to fulfill even this role. What the sublime machine catalyzes instead is an
inverted spectacle of the Soviet ideal of Cartesian humanity and Promethean
modernity on the face of the cliff. Far from unveiling a tableau featuring a
harmonized collective of workers overcoming the elements, stikhiia, to usher
in the radiant future of communism, “a cascade of thousands upon thousands
of the undecayed” (KT 282) greets the onlookers gathered to witness the tri-
umph of technology over nature. The brigade of imperishables “attempting
to arise” (KT 282) similarly mocks the pinnacle of Soviet corporeality epit-
omized by Stalin himself: an indomitable alloy of flesh and metal immune
to the elemental processes of degeneration and death (Hellebust). Defying
the hierarchies of solidity and evanescence, this human substratum of the
Arctic erects a tangible threshold where flesh and metal behave contrary to
the laws of physical chemistry. The elements of nature become the registers
of domestic terror and international conflict, while “the predatory leap that
leaves the area without trees for three hundred years” (KT 379)—an invo-
cation of the proverbial great leaps forward of five-year plans that laid vast
swathes of people and ecosystems to waste—is unexpectedly halted by stone
and frozen earth pressing back.
Shalamov wrote in 1969 that “every poet is an anthropomorphist; it’s a
basic element of art. My formula is a lot more complex: it unifies the concept
of fate with the concept of natural elements” (“Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh”
107). Musing on how his experience in the camps might inform a poetics
“oriented towards the future,” he noted:
Communing with nature has taught me that there is nothing in our affairs that
has not already been inscribed in the elements. … I have long tried to trans-
late the language of wind, stone, water, spoken not for humankind but for their
own sake. I am convinced that stone has its own language. (“Koe-chto o moikh
stikhakh” 108–109)
Translated back into the language of the elements, the undecayed tell a
“much more complex” story than what the two dates of 1938 and 1941
might signify in macrohistorical terms. 1938, encoded by Shalamov as the
era when “digging graves was easier” than panning gold (KT 281), con-
stituted a well-known turning point for the penal colonies of the Arctic. It
marked the deadly convergence of Stalin’s Great Purge with the handover of
the Far Northern Trust, the company which oversaw the shipping of con-
victs via ports on the Sea of Okhotsk and managed the resource economy
of the camps. 1938 was the year when Kolyma was given over to a geno-
cidal bureaucracy after the leader allegedly accused the Northern Trust
management of “coddling” the convicts (Glad xii). While 1941—when
“fourteen-hour-days, assignments, and quotas” in Shalamov’s telling (KT
281) were imposed as part of the war effort, “our response to Lend-Lease”
(KT 279)—marks yet another spike in the camps’ chronology of death, the
geological disruption triggered by the alien technological artifact signals a
profound shift in the economy and ecology of its elemental life.
This change is inscribed in stone, the very matter that created the imper-
ishables, and the air into which they refused to disappear. It is also reflected
in the transgenic bulldozer, whose blades remain miraculously “mirror-like”
(KT 283) at the end of the operation. Rather than gold, whose retrieval
from “icy water” (KT 280) marked Kolyma’s iconic form of labor, the hard
surfaces of rock and steel that collide on the cliff direct the gaze toward
another kind of intra-action between the human form and the sources of
radiance embedded in the “storehouse of the north (KT 283).” To be sure,
both aurum and uranium are heavy metals that seamlessly transfigure from
solid matter to the abstractions of currency and energy. But whereas Kolyma’s
traditional output of gold itself remains impervious and separate from
the body, uranium and carboniferous biomatter, both prone to decay and
58 A. BANERJEE
dispersal, are not only similar in their properties but also capable of interpen-
etration. Living bodies share with radioactive elements the capacity to regis-
ter their presence in the ambient environment by releasing isotopes, albeit of
different masses such as C-14 and U-235, and are expected to melt away at
the end of their vastly divergent spans of existence. As Levi reminds us in the
last chapter of the Periodic Table, carbon, the constituent element of all life, is
capable of forming long chains, which enables it to fix and carry energy and
act as both food and fuel. Carbon is also the only element that flows freely
between life and non-life in the processes of photosynthesis and decomposi-
tion, between solid matter and atmospheric traces. It emplaces rocks, plants,
animals, and human bodies in a single elemental continuum (225).
While gold remains the most visible measure of cruelty in the historiog-
raphy of Kolyma, Shalamov’s undecayed serve as an unprecedented index
for a far less documented interface between matter and energy, carbon and
uranium, which was no less significant. Their intra-action thrust the elemen-
tal life of the camp deep into the emergence of atomic energy as a princi-
pal arbiter of the world to come. Lend-Lease, not coincidentally, overlapped
with Stalin’s approval of the program that historian Paul Josephson calls “red
atom,” earmarking the production of nuclear power as a priority for fulfill-
ing the country’s geopolitical and energy aspirations. It was in 1941 that the
Soviet Union’s first atomic weapons development program started under the
leadership of Ivan Kurchatov, founding member of the renowned Kharkov
Physical Institute. The heightened demand for uranium, correspondingly,
put great pressure on what Josephson euphemistically dubs the “difficult
and distant sources” (17) from which it was shipped to the various process-
ing facilities scattered across the nation. Along with uranium’s daughter
element, lead—which appears side by side with the undecayed in Shalamov’s
story and was necessary for both transporting the ore and lining the reactors
themselves—the new “first metal” of nuclear fuel was principally mined in the
Arctic.
Like the gold sifters of 1938, pictured knee-deep in frozen rivers wear-
ing nothing but galoshes on their frostbitten bare feet, convicts in the ura-
nium mines of Kolyma extracted the prized resource without any protective
equipment, resulting in a lethal contact between carbon and uranium.
Butugychag camp in the Kolyma zone became the most notorious exam-
ple of this exchange of elements when it was shut down in 1955 because of
unsustainable rates of radiation mortality. As Kate Brown has documented,
convict labor was instrumental for building the infrastructures of weap-
ons development facilities at the end of the war (83–86). Shalamov’s writ-
ing, however, demonstrates that the very foundations of the Soviet nuclear
program were also inextricably linked with the elemental intra-action of car-
boniferous bodies and radioactive rock. Both literally and figuratively, there-
fore, Kolyma’s undecayed represent as much a geological haunting as a call
to memory-work in the conventional sense. They constitute a stratigraphic
record of the transition from the pre-war economy of flesh and metal to a
new equation of radiance and its remnants.
The tragicomic opening of “Lend-Lease” and an uncharacteristic set of
speculative reflections at the end of Shalamov’s mystery play provide powerful
bookends for the entanglement of carbon and uranium within the unimagi-
nable spans of geological periods and unthinkable arcs of history. Ironically,
it is the bodies of the living that set the stage for the spectacle of the unde-
cayed. Convicts lap up “tears” dripping from cliffs of limestone (KT 273),
“stone that was once a soft oily creature” (KT 275). In doing so, the inmates
of Kolyma literally ingest sedimentary rock, comprised mainly of calcium car-
bonate, which simultaneously serves as a repository of lost time and a source
of future energy. While they dig up uranium and lead alongside gold, the
starving inmates recklessly ingest fossil fuel by-products that accompany the
bulldozer from the other side of the Bering Sea; machine grease and glycerin
are promptly sold off in the camp’s black market as “American butter” and
“American honey” (KT 273). While their hardened intestines don’t decay
from this transversal convergence of carbon, their encounter with uranium
provokes an altogether different reckoning after the same bulldozer carries off
the corpses to a new grave in soft soil.
From the cliff face, the narrator’s eye travels upward to suddenly reveal
Moscow’s skyline, illuminated by an ominous glow, as a searing replica of the
Gulag. The towering buildings of the capital city reign over the horizon like
the infamous guard posts, vyshki, which in Kolyma were made out of the same
“three-hundred-year-old forest” (KT 282) whose remnants on the cliff are
indistinguishable from the imperishables. This terrifying vista of the nation as
a vast penal extraction zone, bathed in the afterglow of an unseen source of
energy, thereafter extends over the entire surface of the planet to reveal a no
less apocalyptic configuration of the elements. Kolyma’s uranium mines, in
which radioactive decay literally ate away human matter, serve as Shalamov’s
templates for a world created by what Elizabeth Povinelli has recently termed
“geontopower”: new regimes of regulating life operating in conjunction with
radical disruptions of the earth’s elemental systems (6–9). Shalamov’s story
concludes with a picture of the world remade by the unique geontopower of
the Soviet Arctic:
I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that
twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking
for uranium or a mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in
the folds of the mountains. (KT 282)
It follows that the human mind alone cannot serve as a reliable repository of
revelation, recognition, or commemoration for Shalamov. Instead, the only
possible archive of Kolyma emerges from the point where carbon meets ura-
nium, indelibly imprinted by radioisotopes on living matter yet sharing the
same proclivity for decay. This web of mineral, vegetal, and animal elements
60 A. BANERJEE
constitutes a material form of remembering that would survive the fragility

of the human frame and the limitations of its capacity for confronting and
writing the unthinkable:
And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossom-
ing of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any
deed of man … And if I forget, the grass may forget. But the stone and the per-
mafrost will not forget. (KT 283)
This is a crystallograph of the world to come, transformed at once into a

penal colony, extraction zone, and nuclear wasteland seared with the signa-
tures of its human and non-human elements. It encapsulates both Shalamov
and Levi’s striving for an art that refuses the reduction of not just the planet
but catastrophe itself into what Hannah Arendt called a “small, compre-
hensible icon” (134). Suspended between the largest and smallest scales of
matter and energy, their elemental poetics offer not a pathway for cognition,
poznanie, but a “way of life,” sposob zhizni, grounded in a politics of recog-
nition. This politics may be discerned not in the clarity of sight that liber-
ates the Cartesian subject from the material confines of the body and grants
it the power to transform its environment. Rather, recognition emerges from
the resonances between Shalamov’s imperishables and Levi’s late poem, “The
Little Girl of Pompeii,” in which Anne Frank’s shadow on the wall of her
hiding place becomes indistinguishable from the silhouettes of vaporized
bodies left on the surfaces of the city of Hiroshima.
The scales and states of matter and narrative that constitute such a climate
of history—one in which Auschwitz and Kolyma exist in an unbroken contin-
uum with Hiroshima and Chernobyl—put great pressure on the cartographic
and chronological partitioning that enables us, to colloquize the Cartesian
model of cognition, to “wrap our heads around” the unthinkable. The
aporia haunts humanistic and scientific approaches alike to the catastrophes
that defined the twentieth century and continue to shape our proleptic imag-
inations of the unfolding present and imminent future on an increasingly
threatened planet. Breaking through the categorical distinctions between sub-
jects of literature and objects of scientific inquiry, Shalamov and Levi’s dis-
tinctive poetics may open the way not just for a new mode of engaging with
the Anthropocene, but perhaps also a lexicon for its as-yet-unseen elements.
Notes
1. Here I wish to acknowledge “Traumatic Ecology,” a wonderful talk I attended
while working on this chapter, in which Avery Slater traced Levi’s journey
home from Auschwitz through what would become the Chernobyl landscape,
and his poetic rendering of the traumatic command, “wstawać”. The talk was
part of a Cornell University conference “Listening to Trauma: A Conference in
Celebration of the 20th Anniversary of Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience”
(April 27–29, 2017).
2. All citations from Kolyma Tales (KT) are from John Glad’s 1996 translation. All
unattributed translations from other sources in Russian are mine.
3. For a rich exploration of nuclear fission in Shalamov’s poetry and poetics, see
K. Maya Larson, “To Rasshcheplennoe Iadro: From Lucretian Swerve to Sundered
Core in Shalamov’s Atomnaia poema,” MA Thesis, University of Oregon, 2015.
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Boym, Svetlana. 2008. Banality of Evil, Mimicry, and the Soviet Subject: Varlam
Shalamov and Hannah Arendt. Slavic Review 67 (2): 342–363.
Bruno, Andy. 2016. The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Buell, Lawrence. 1998. Toxic Discourse. Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–665.
Caruth, Cathy. 2010. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry
35: 197–222.
Etkind, Alexander. 2013. Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the
Unburied. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gessen, Masha, and Misha Friedman. 2018. Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s
Gulag in Putin’s Russia. New York, NY: Columbia Global Reports.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Chicago,IL: University of Chicago Press.
Hellebust, Rolf. 2003. Flesh to Metal: Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hosking, Geoffrey. 1980. The Ultimate Circle of the Stalinist Inferno. New
Universities Quarterly 34 (2): 161–168.
Josephson, Paul. 2005. Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Program from Stalin to Today.
Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press.
Levi, Primo. 1959. If This Is a Man, trans. Stuart Woolf. New York, NY: Orion.
———. 1964. The Truce, trans. Stuart Woolf. London: Bodley Head.
———. 1984. The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal. New York, NY:
Schocken.
Magavern, Sam. 2009. Primo Levi’s Universe: A Writer’s Journey. London: Palgrave.
Morton, Timothy. 2016. Radiation as Hyperobject. In The Nuclear Culture
Sourcebook, ed. Ele Carpenter, 169–173. London: Black Dog Publishing.
Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2016. Geontologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York, NY: Knopf.
Shalamov, Varlam. 1934. Nauka i khudozhestvennaia literatura. Front nauki i tekhniki
12: 84–91.
———. 1994. Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad. London: Penguin.
———. 2013. Koe-chto o moikh stikhakh. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina
Sirotinskaia, 5: 95–111. Moscow: Terra.
62 A. BANERJEE
———. 2013. O proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia, 5:

114–156. Moscow: Terra.
———. 2013. O novoi proze. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed. Irina Sirotinskaia,
5: 157–159. Moscow: Terra.
———. 2013. Perepiska s B. L. Pasternakom. In Sobranie sochinenii v 6 tomakh, ed.
Irina Sirotinskaia, 6: 7–76. Moscow: Terra.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. 2003. The Gulag Archipelago. London: Harvill.
CHAPTER 4
The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil
Brent Ryan Bellamy
In the photography series Oil (1999–2010), Edward Burtynsky captures images

of oil’s industrial extraction, refinement, and use in Canada, China, Azerbaijan,
and the United States.1 Literary scholar Sofia Ahlberg describes Burtynsky’s oil
photography as taking on a “god-like perspective,” arguing that the “compo-
sitional frame stages his vision of something that is literally impossible to see
at once” in that his photographs “depict localised large-scale signs of processes
that, being global, cannot be comprehended within any finite visual frame”
(Ahlberg , 78, 85). On the account of Ahlberg and other critics, Burtynsky’s
work enables something like extra-sensory perception for mere mortals, allow-
ing viewers to realize their embeddedness in the built world of oil and mean-
while, perversely, minimize their sense that they can do anything to affect such
wide-angle, satellite-rendered spaces. The historian of photography Catherine
Zuromskis describes this conceptual problem as “a world that cannot compre-
hend itself without the comforts of that same industry and the culture it creates”
(Barrett and Worden, Oil Culture, 292). Though there can be no critique of oil
without the fossil economy, the revelatory work of photographic images such
as Burtynsky’s consists in its capacity to show that no one alone can observe or
know the whole picture. As Co-editor of Petrocultures Adam Carlson elaborates,
there’s no singular subject who can know the whole…there are only fragments
of experience, expertise, action, and thoughts to be apprehended and assembled
in new and revolutionary ways. The material and infrastructural unconscious
that constitutes these petroscapes is precisely the field for these new politics, and
this is precisely why we need to understand oil to understand everything else.
(Wilson et al., 410)
B. R. Bellamy (*) 
Trent University, Peterborough, ON, Canada

64 B. R. BELLAMY
Alongside these other petrocritics, Carlson reveals something crucial here

vis-à-vis Burtynsky and the photographic image: the role of the petrocritic
looms large in the political work of mapping fossil fuel infrastructure, policy,
and relations. In perverse ways, oil’s energic boon literally empowers petro-
critics to argue for an energy transition away from such carbon-rich resources.
In this chapter, I take up this knot of representation and knowledge under
the heading of the aesthetic textuality of oil.
The aesthetic textuality of oil names both oil’s impact on cultural produc-
tion and the development of particularly oil-bound social formations and
habits. My apprehension of oil’s material and aesthetic impact originates in
Living Oil (2014) where Stephanie LeMenager establishes the ground-
work for the aesthetics of petroleum (66–101). Drawing on media theo-
rist Friedrich Kittler and discussing Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, LeMenager
answers the question “Why is oil so bad?” (70; emphasis original). The first
answer is that oil supports and produces multiple, layered media environ-
ments to which “there is no apparent ‘outside’ that might be materialized
through imagination and affect as palpable hope” (70). By focusing on the
circulation of Sinclair’s book, LeMenager illustrates oil’s saturation of envi-
ronments, both living and media. The first edition could not have traveled
the distance books travel today to reach its audience. LeMenager estimates
that today books travel approximately 12.5 million miles in containers on
ships, trains, and trucks. But the rabbit hole goes deeper. LeMenager’s 2007
copy of Oil relied on oil for more than transportation. The inks are made of
petroleum-based resins, the paper it was printed on was shipped from a man-
ufacturer to the printer, and the press that printed it runs on electric energy as
do the buildings housing it. After its production, the book would be housed
in a warehouse, retail store, library, or home. If it were to be thrown away, it
would need to be carted to a landfill, and we would need to add one more
diesel bill and carbon plume to the expense report. Ultimately, then, “To step
outside of petromodernity would require a step outside of media, including
the modern printed book” (70–71).2 LeMenager deepens the bind of oil’s
aesthetic textuality.
Petrocriticism vivifies the total, unbreakable hold of fossil fuels on media at
every level: production, distribution, consumption, and waste. LeMenager’s
work goes farther than this observation though. The oil-printed book is capa-
ble of generating “an immersive, virtual environment,” yet LeMenager calls
this “petroleum language” (71; emphasis mine). Cultural life with oil is not
different in degree but in kind. Here, LeMenager’s description of the aes-
thetics of petroleum takes on a decidedly textual emphasis. Oil’s aesthetics
are not limited to the representation of oil, nor do they solely seek to express
the interconnected systems of fossil fuel-powered circulation and distribution
of aesthetic objects, nor do they solely name the writing upon and within
the earth of millions of miles of gas and oil pipelines. Oil’s aesthetic textu-
ality encompasses all of these things: mimesis, artistic production, and the
4 THE AESTHETIC TEXTUALITY OF OIL 65
infrastructural rewriting of the Earth’s surface. Fossil fuels provide the basis
for the aesthetics of human artistic production, even as they reproduce sys-
tems of economic production.
The writing of oil landscapes can take the form of a removal or subtraction.
In a provocative piece titled “Improvement and Overburden,” postcolonial
theory and decolonization studies scholar Jennifer Wenzel describes resource
extraction as a rewriting of landscape from the standpoint of oil extraction.
Wenzel writes, “The profitable and the beautiful are brought into alignment,
envisioned as one and the same.” She explains that overburden is “everything
lying on top of the buried resource (or underground infrastructure, like pipe-
lines or tunnels), as well as the pressure exerted by that everything on what’s
beneath it. Overburden is topsoil, sand, and clay; sedimentary rock; surface
water and groundwater. Everything in the way of paydirt.” The rewriting of
topsoil, muskeg, flora, and fauna as “overburden” enables the rewriting of
landscapes in the image of fossil fuel infrastructures and petrocultures. Land
becomes palimpsestic yet reveals little of its former configurations. Writing
that captures these changes might preserve a descriptive image of what once
was, but little can be done to put things back as they were previously.
This chapter begins with an overview of literary and filmic approaches to
making the world of oil apparent. Yet, such texts tend to offer only a p artial
sense of oil relations. They do not quite achieve the leap from text to matter
one might hope for given the urgency of climatic deterioration and ongo-
ing intensification of fossil fuel extraction. In its back half, this chapter turns
to James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 travelogue The Oil Road,
which offers a compelling way of mapping the relation of oil to literature.
The Oil Road struggles with the limits to representing oil’s grip on cultural,
economic, and social systems. By tracking fossil fuel infrastructure, The Oil
Road is able to consider both history and geography; it describes produced
landscapes and their origins. In this way, The Oil Road offers an entry point
for activists, artists, and researchers to map the spatial, historical, and social
and economic relations created by oil. Its travelers move with the barrels,
tankers, trains, trucks, pipelines, refineries, petrol pumps, and carbon plumes
and among communities, workers, service industries, and institutions. The Oil
Road ruminates on this information, meanwhile keeping one eye on history
and another on the present. This exemplar of the aesthetic textuality of oil
names landscapes, infrastructures, social forms, cultural forms, and resources
in mediated relation to one another. It seeks to hold up the relationship
between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century infrastructures and cul-
tures as one bound with and indelibly imprinted upon by the ongoing social
use of fossil fuels. Oil is historically central here, and dominant, specifically
because any future one seeks to imagine in its wake will necessarily be shaped
by the flourishing of the highly mobile, eminently wasteful commodity cul-
ture it made possible. Critique, even when raised to the impressive level of
LeMenager’s or Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s projects, never gets outside of
66 B. R. BELLAMY
the oil relation. Instead, it does its work internally to the aesthetic textual-
ity of oil. Central to these projects’ mapping of greater-than human relations
(i.e., infrastructural and planetary) is the mediation of those relations from
the vantage of the petrocritic within petroculture. Whether in the imperial
core or on the periphery, fossil fuels shape the lived realities of daily life.
Archiving Oil Texts

Many literary texts and films help us understand the history of narratives fea-
turing the discovery, extraction, use, and control of oil. Since its 1858 North
American discovery just south of what is now Petrolia, ON, and its successive
1859 drilling in Titusville, PA, oil has had a dramatic impact on the North
American landscape.3 Frank Norris’ The Octopus (first published in 1901),
Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (first published in 1927), John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. tril-
ogy (first published in 1938), and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (first
published in 1939) tell of the discovery and extraction of oil, the rampant
escalation of its use, and the incredible impact petroleum had on the reor-
ganization of agriculture and the agrarian class in the early-twentieth-century
United States. These texts act as touchstones for the transition to oil’s domi-
nance and the development of the contemporary archive of oil-focused liter-
ary texts.4 This oil-bound North American landscape exists in relation to oil
exploration and extraction elsewhere, for instance, in the Arabian Peninsula
or off the coast of Scotland and, later, Newfoundland. Oil encounters in the
long twentieth century result in reshaped landscapes and social relations.
Communities are destroyed, founded, and transformed in Abel Rahman
Munif’s novel Cities of Salt (first published in 1989)—the first in a quintet
of novels about the mid-twentieth-century development of extractive indus-
tries in what is now the United Arab Emirates. Following the arrival of for-
eign figures and then the development of a sea-side community Harran, the
novel depicts the fate of a community of Bedouin Wadi al-Uyoun. The novel
tracks developing reactions to the implanting of capitalist labor practices, the
development of oil infrastructure, and the introduction of modern conveni-
ences. Indian writer Amitav Ghosh praises Munif’s novel as one of the few
books to elaborate the oil encounter from the perspective of collective nar-
ration, creating the moniker “petrofiction” in the process (see Ghosh 1992),
while John Updike critiques the novel for lacking the standard by which he
measures narrative success: “individual moral adventure” (Updike, 117).5
The fractures of the oil encounter reproduce themselves in Updike’s com-
mentary, which reveals much more about his anti-immigrant sentiments than
about Munif’s novel. Cities of Salt builds its critique and lament of fossil-en-
ergy transition with care. For instance, the emerging city of Harran is divided
early on, with an Arab Harran built around the old city and an American
Harran built away from the city center. Whole urban spaces are shaped in oil’s
imperialist-inflected image. The workers build Harran house-by-house: “…in
less than a month the nucleus of a large and well-ordered city had appeared
and sped toward completion” with “hard streets, some wide and others nar-
row, all perfectly straight, rolled smooth by the accursed heavy machines
and coated with a gleaming black substance” (Munif, 207). The city is both
divided and united by the roadways of the internal combustion engine, here
represented as strange and blasphemous.
Moving to Scotland and dramatic form, John McGrath’s play The Cheviot,
the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (first published in 1973) imagines the oil
encounter as one more in a long history of colonial extractive enterprises
undertaken by the British in the Scottish Highlands. The play takes up Bertolt
Brecht’s approach to drama in general and could even be considered in dia-
logue with Brecht’s (1977) suggestive statement that “petroleum resists the
five-act form” (29). The Cheviot confirms Brecht’s claim in more ways than
one.6 The play tells the story of three rounds of enclosure that divorced the
highlanders from their lands. These three moments are named in the title of
the play: first sheep replaced highlanders, then the great hunt took more land,
and finally, at the time of the play’s composition, offshore oil development
was looming on Scotland’s political horizon. Structurally, The Cheviot devel-
ops without clearly demarcated acts or scenes. The cast often breaks the fourth
wall to describe the significance of events on stage. Oil itself is not the major
focus of the play either; only the ultimate scene raises the question of what
to do about the newly discovered offshore reserves—a question that rever-
berates across historical and the as yet unbroken ground of future extraction
zones. Through this historical scope, the play suggests that the Scottish people
endured enough hardship to know that they are most likely to succeed when
they stand together. Here, the long history of clearances blends with oil’s ener-
gic promise to present a clearly imagined future: the question the play closes
on is not whether or not to drill, but who will be in control of the drilling?
Moving from the collective impact of fossil fuel extraction to the way a
single family is impacted by the resource economy, Lisa Moore’s February
(2009) follows the Newfoundlander Helen O’Mara after she loses her partner
on the Ocean Ranger, which sank several hundred kilometers off the coast of
Newfoundland in 1982. Her husband Cal was aboard the semi-submersible,
mobile, offshore oil drilling platform. She fixates on the technical books
that describe platform operations, coming to realize that the men on duty, if
they’d had the training, if they’d had the manual aboard, could have stopped
the rig from capsizing. O’Mara speculates: “She is thinking again about the
portal. It had a metal deadlight that could be lowered and secured over the
two panes of glass, but nobody had lowered the deadlight. If that metal dead-
light had been lowered, the water wouldn’t have gotten over the control
panel” (293). O’Mara imagines what may have happened to cause the rig to
list, to take on water, to capsize, to drown the men. She receives a settlement
from the oil company for the loss of Cal’s wages, which brings home the fact
that the company has only ever seen Cal as a number on a page. Despite its
focus on one family, such imagined experiences are not singular: there were
eighty-four other men lost to the waves. Because St. John’s is such a small,
68 B. R. BELLAMY
tight-knit community (approximately 150,000 people lived there in the mid-

1980s), it’s unlikely that anyone avoided losing someone on the rig. February
narrates the multiple temporalities of dangerous work, the long wake of crisis,
and the way living with these realities shapes character. Rather than focusing
on the environmental impacts of fossil fuel use, it describes the pain of prox-
imity to sites of extraction through loss. The risk undertaken in the name of
extraction writes itself more deeply on some lives than on others.
Literature is not the only medium in which oil becomes a central driver
of narrative; film has been used to capture the impacts of fossil fuel extrac-
tion and use. Writing on oil documentaries in general, Imre Szeman claims
that such “documentaries both reflect and are a source of the social narra-
tives through which we describe oil to ourselves” (Barrett and Worden, Oil
Culture, 424). Though many documentaries have been made about the
impact of fossil fuels on modern life, perhaps most interesting for involving
viewer interaction are two video-game-like documentaries.7 David Dufresne’s
Fort McMoney (2013), part documentary, part video game, constitutes a devi-
ation from strict realism and offers a variation on the standard documentary
as the viewer is immersed into a northern Alberta oil boomtown. As an agent
who can explore the city for themselves, viewers engage in interviews with
real Fort McMurray residents, attend town meetings, and vote in referen-
dums. The film offers a form of critical, documentary tourism and introduces
viewers to an oil space that they would not properly be able to explore oth-
erwise. Looking at extraction zones in a similar mode, Brenda Longfellow’s
interactive documentary Offshore (2015) allows viewers to explore a con-
structed, virtual rig.8 These interactive documentaries allow viewers to travel
to sites of oil extraction they could otherwise not go, introducing real people
who are empowered to tell their own stories through the formal innovation
of a gamified documentary.
Warren Cariou and Neil McArthur’s 2009 documentary Land of Oil and
Water offers a view of oil’s impact on indigenous communities. It focuses
on the northern Saskatchewan Cree and Dene community of La Loche, the
Metis community of Buffalo Narrows, and the northern Albertan aboriginal
communities of Fort Mackay and Fort Chipewyan. In this way, the documen-
tary offers community members in La Loche and Buffalo Narrows an oppor-
tunity to describe their hopes for resources development, while community
members in Fort Mackay and Fort Chipewyan have a chance to respond
with their experiences of extractive industries, from hopes for jobs and other
opportunities to anxieties about emissions and tailings ponds. The film stages
a conversation between the four communities, and the resulting documentary
tours the spaces most impacted, and set to be impacted, by the development
of the bituminous tar sands found in the traditional and current territory
of Cree, Dunneza, and Chipewyan peoples and currently part of Treaty 8
territory.
These texts provide the starting point for a robust account of literary and
filmic encounters with fossil fuels. Geographically and culturally diverse, these
texts show that there is no singular way to narrate the impact and promise of
fossil fuels, yet the decisions made in how to represent and narrate the worlds
of petroculture have a profound impact on how readers and viewers might
come to understand their own connections to fossil fuels and one another.
These pieces show that the impact of fossil fuels on culture is immense and
ongoing. The final example of the aesthetic textuality of oil that I will offer
here takes a specifically political approach to mediating the role of oil in the
art world and the Middle East.
Case Study: The Oil Road

James Marriot and Mika Minio-Paluello’s 2013 critical travelogue The Oil
Road takes the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline as the backbone of its plot,
which, at the same time, determines the terrain of its story. This focus has
the formal effect of creating a travelogue that is at once historically deep and
politically focused—the book aims its targeting apparatus on the energy com-
pany now known as BP. Marriot and Minio-Paluello move along the same
route as the crude pumped from the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield—a
complex of oil fields buried beneath the Caspian Sea situated between the
Caucasus Mountains to the east and the broad steppe to the west. They pause
to recount major shifts in regional power, from an era of Soviet dominance
in the early-twentieth century to the present multinational control. They
attempt to know about oil, in both a cognitive and physical sense, by depict-
ing the complexity of its infrastructures. They make the clear point that the
way to stop oil’s dominance is by ceasing to engineer, build, and expand its
platforms, pump jacks, pipelines, tanker routes, refineries, and pumping sta-
tions. My aim in this case study is to propose that the pipeline of The Oil
Road is an infrastructural innovation of petroculture and to examine the
effects it produces as a narrative tool in travelogue.
Marriot and Minio-Paluello work very carefully to undo the assumed
“smoothness” of oil transport, by calling attention to the bumps, snags, cor-
rosions, and ruptures that occur along the way. As they eloquently put it,
“This global oil trade does not just flow by itself”; rather, “Every day, close
to 100 million barrels of crude are collected from zones of extraction and
delivered to points of consumption…. The mass relocation of great vol-

umes of fossil fuels requires constant coordination of logistical and financial
resources” (250). Oil cannot move on its own. In a review of The Oil Road,
Doreen Massey (2013) incisively claims that the book depicts a “space full of
obstacles,” listing “the Caucasus, the sea, the Alps” as geographies that the
pipelines have to overcome. Massey continues,
every kilometre along the pipeline route there is a metal stake, with a yellow hat
and numbers on, to mark where it is buried, itself a vast earthmoving exercise.
Every few kilometres there is a block valve, where the oil can be shut off in an
emergency, surrounded by steel and concrete. There are pumping stations, to
70 B. R. BELLAMY
force the oil on and on up gradients and through mountain ranges. The oil only
flows because of all this material effort - grinding, tough, often slow, often bit-
terly contested, heavy. (130)
Rather than describing the immense undertaking that is the shipment of fossil
fuels outright, Marriot and Minio-Paluello show the reader each painstaking
step in the construction and maintenance of the oil road. They create an itin-
erary of their journey and of petrol’s journey. As they construct this itinerary,
they produce a conceptual map of BP’s legal, economic, and cultural dealings.
As members of Platform London—a collective that combines research,
artistic practice, and activism—Marriot and Minio-Paluello have the experi-
ence, contacts, and resources to undertake the more than five-thousand-kilo-
meter-long journey along the path of oil. Reviewer Terry Macalister points
out that they “know the industry from a decade of campaigning against it.”
A part of these resources means that they have been able to work to devise a
theoretical map to match the infrastructural one traced in the book. In the
prologue, they describe this map, writing,
Our experience, gained over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a
massive project is not carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network
of bodies, which we have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil cor-
poration are gathered institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These
include public and private banks, government ministries and military bodies,
engineering companies and legal firms, universities and environmental consult-
ants, non-governmental organizations, and cultural institutions. All of these
make up the Carbon Web that drives forward the extraction, transportation, and
consumption of fossil fuels. (6)
The Carbon Web designed by Platform London and charted in The Oil
Road reveals the connections of London-Based International Oil and
Gas Companies (BP & Shell) to five sectors of political economic signif-
icance, which are subdivided and itemized. The chart shows Law (Law
Firms, Arbitration Tribunals, International Legal Bodies), Government
(US Government, Host Government, European Union, UK Government),
External Affairs (Lobby Groups, Cultural Institutions, NGOs, PR Firms,
Media), Industry (Environmental Consultants, Oil Services, Exploration
Companies, Business Affairs, University and Research Institutes), and
Finance (Institutional Investors, Banks, Analysts, International Financial
Institutions).9 Seen as a list, or even as the diagram available on Platform
London’s website (http://platformlondon.org/about-us/platform-the-car-
bon-web/), the carbon web overwhelms. The relations are not mediated by
more than a straight line connecting one entity to another. Moreover, the
ways that one branch might influence another are left undivulged by the list
and the image. But, the image of the carbon web is not a starting point. It is
the product of a much longer journey. The Oil Road itself offers readers the
historical, geographical, technical, and political knowledge necessary to make

sense of the carbon web. It trains readers in the aesthetic textuality of oil.
The Oil Road describes the struggle over the way oil moves, both as sub-
stance and as fuel. The authors enumerate the juridical battles fought over
the development and construction of the pipeline. In “Without Having to
Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around Them by Using a Treaty,”
they outline the legal massaging that BP had to carry out across three coun-
tries—Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey—from two other legal contexts—the
United Kingdom and the United States. These “Agreements” circumvent
local laws by “overriding all existing and future domestic law apart from
the constitutions of the states in question” (144). Furthermore, a new tax
structure was put in place to exempt the energy companies and construction
companies that worked on the pipeline. Any disputes arising would be set-
tled by international tribunals in Stockholm, Geneva, or London. Authorized
adjustments to state law, made on behalf of energy transport, define the legal
maneuvering in the struggle over the energy future. In a passage headed with
the title “Burnaz, Turkey,” Marriot and Minio-Paluello write that “People
have learned from the nearby experience of BTC and the Isken coal plant that
battles must be fought early on. New projects need to be challenged before
they are approved, financed, and planned…in far-off capitals” (239). The
importance of these insights into the infrastructure of post-industrial energy
systems seems worth emphasizing here: the development of energy infrastruc-
ture displays economic, engineering, industrial, and political effort on a mas-
sive scale. The only way to get ahead of it is to do so literally: to be ready
beforehand and to map before the mappers.
Travelogue can tell multiple stories at once. Succinctly “plot”-able on the
map (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey), the itinerary of the trip remains linear
even as the authors delve into the history of region. For instance, the drama
of the text arrives from it fulfilling a promise it makes early on: that the jour-
ney along the oil road will pass “through the crucibles of Bolshevism and
fascism, Futurism and social democracy, through the furnaces of an indus-
trial continent” (9). The descriptions of the pipe’s visibility—sometimes it
is buried, sometimes it runs through private property, sometimes it is under
heavy guard—are supplemented by other layers of the text. As Marriot and
Minio-Paluello recount stories of their previous visits to the region, they

describe the development of the pipeline as technology and offer a political
history of the area from its soviet days through to its corporate present. In
one particular instance, they describe the seizure of Rijeka, a port city with a
large refinery, in 1919 by the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio who arrived
“triumphantly in a red sports car at the head of a column of 297 black-shirted
Arditi followers” (265), while, in another, they turn to the “outbreak of World
War II,” when Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil, and BP, then Anglo-Persian,
“shared 57.8% of the German market,” and “all three companies provided fuel
to the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialized, and established its structure
72 B. R. BELLAMY
of terror” (301), and, they note, BP’s web-published history passes over the
years spanning 1932 and 1948 in silence. These strata of description in The
Oil Road tellingly reveal the difficulty of knowing about energy infrastructure.
Traveling the route of oil offers a place to start, but the book also suggests
that more time is needed to grasp the magnitude of energy extraction and
transport.
The Oil Road makes available the years missing from BP’s timeline just
as it describes the multiple unfolding struggles over oil transport. It accom-
plishes both tasks through its own familiarity with the oil archive. The book
makes use of other oil texts such as industry journals, promo materials, inves-
tor updates, and so on. This effort tells us about the genres of writing that
oil both traffics in—engineering tracts, investor opinion, public promotion,
CEO biographies—and the types of approach that a materialist critique of
energy must navigate in order to register as mapping at all. It uses the aes-
thetic textuality of oil history and infrastructure as the basis for its own narra-
tive unfolding.
A crucial part of this mediation is that at times the text must operate on a
speculative register. Along their journey, the authors encounter barriers, such
as fences or seas. Before leaving Baku, they note that
The Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield is not shown on maps of Azerbaijan. There

is no trace of the institutions and flares as we search on Google Earth. We have
less than thirty photographs of it on our laptop, and all of these are promotional
images published by BP…the wells lie in a forbidden zone to which only our
imaginations can travel…the route we are following is obscure. It is described
only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government
memos. (16)
In this way, Marriot and Minio-Paluello attend to the mediated nature of

every moment of their journey. They write, further down the page, “if we
were to sail…” and then describe the winds, the current, and the looming
platform, extending the terrain the travelogue could cover through hypo-
thetical assumption and descriptive speculation. Later, when they find their
travel plans blocked at the other end of the pipeline, they perform a simi-
lar imaginative and descriptive journey from Yumurtalik, Turkey, to Muggia,
Italy. They had planned to board a tanker and make the journey by sea, but
instead they settle for tracking the oil tanker Dugi Otok through marinetraffic.
com and shipping forecasts. As such, the whole journey must be described
imaginatively. Marriot and Minio-Paluello note various weather events and
passing ships, describing the geography of the region and using their knowl-
edge of marine history to fill in this leg of the journey.10 They describe those
silent seafaring tankers as “the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of
the industrial age” (250). Imagined moments such as these are no less real
than when the authors are able to reach out and touch the pipeline itself, and
moments that seem all too real are no less mediated. The Oil Road teaches
readers that the assessment of the aesthetic textuality of oil requires interpre-
tation as much as it requires knowledge: narrative and emplotment are critical
tools for comprehending the built world of fossil fuels, the economics under-
pinning it, and the institutions ruling over it.
Like LeMenager’s Living Oil, The Oil Road seems to move a step beyond
the limits inherent to representing oil. As slippery as oil can be, by taking it
as the structuring force of its plot and the ground of its story, The Oil Road
effectively begins to figure the larger structure lurking in the background—
that other, much more difficult to grasp totality: the mode of production
itself. The carbon web bears a striking resemblance to Marxist descriptions
of the economic base and the cultural, juridical, and political superstruc-
ture. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson revises the classic
base-superstructure schema: the base, which encompasses labor and infra-

structure, is understood as underlying or absent cause of social relations;
meanwhile, culture, ideology, the juridical, the political, and the economic
forces branch off from it as the superstructure. For Jameson, narrowly eco-
nomic entities (i.e., “the forces of production, the labor process, technical
development, or relations of production” [36]) are not segregated as the
base, as they form their own elements within a larger totality of the mode of
production. The mode of production is “nowhere present as an element,” is
“not a part of the whole or one of the levels,” but is rather “the entire system
of relationships among those levels” (36; emphasis original). Turning back to
fossil capital, I would argue that the oil rigs, pump jacks, pipelines, oil tank-
ers, refineries, shipping trucks, petrol stations, and so on are not directly iden-
tifiable as part of the base; within Jameson’s schema, I would situate them
within the superstructure. This distinction should be understood as central to
what I have been describing as the aesthetic textuality of oil. Certainly, there
are crucial differences between an oil drum and a travelogue: these are rep-
resentative elements of different branches of the superstructure. The power,
then, of The Oil Road and the carbon web it describes is in making vivid the
social relations that animate fossil capital.
The Oil Road mediates the relationship between the fossil-fueled mode
of production and culture, ideology, the juridical, the political, and the eco-
nomic forces that shape and are shaped by it. It intervenes in a world where
the aesthetics of oil might only be understood as urban infrastructure that
fades into the background or as the name adorning the wing of an art gal-
lery (i.e., British Petroleum). Marriot and Minio-Paluello develop the mate-
rial spatial and temporal connections that are not entirely evident or legible
in the world of culture, outlining the absent cause of fossil capital. As with
LeMenager’s meditation on the materiality of the book in Living Oil, Marriot
and Minio-Paluello push for an understanding of oil that identifies super-
structural elements as full participants in a larger whole. Yet, simply because
they are connected within the totality, one should not mistake that for their
identity. As The Oil Road makes clear, there are some places one cannot go.
74 B. R. BELLAMY
There are others where political intervention will make more of a differ-
ence in disrupting the smooth flow of oil. The carbon web they offer is one
attempt to map such institutional connections; the travelogue itself provides
the map to one route that oil takes from extraction to refinement.
Oil’s aesthetic textuality inheres within the relations of fossil capital. In
light of these considerations, The Oil Road thus offers the start of a map-
ping of the mode of production from the standpoint of energy. This map
includes not only the physical structures, whether buried or running above
ground, not only the tankers hauling crude, not only the refineries, and not
only the petrol pumps. It also includes the communities bisected by pipelines,
the workers at each point, the service industries that spring up to support
oil-sector laborers, and the institutions that benefit from the massive amount
of wealth and work generated by extraction projects. What is astounding
about The Oil Road is that it manages all of this information without losing
sight of history or of the present as a moment subject to change.
Sarah Brouillette has argued against “simply mapping the mapmakers,”
outlining that merely emphasizing “capitalism’s mysteriousness and intrac-
tability, […] our incapacity in the face of it, [or] our anxiety about our
incapacity, and so forth” are paths to nothing. To avoid such traps for the
jaded, Brouillette implores critics to foreground “the importance of a given
map’s relationship to struggle” (emphasis mine).11 Claire Westall makes a sim-
ilar point: “What must come with this new [energetic] materialist perspec-
tive, though, is a systemic and relational conception of capitalism and culture,
and a commitment to a ‘worlded’ mode of reading capable of grasping this
systemic and uneven relationality” (269). This level of mapping, not only of
the what and the where, but also of the how, is precisely what The Oil Road
accomplishes. The practicality of Marriot and Minio-Paluello’s map lies in its
dialectic between infrastructure and form. The oil pipeline presents a through
line for the travelogue’s recounted plot. Each entry in the book is marked by
progress (or regress in one case) along the oil road. This tale of the oil road
enables the story of the carbon web. In this sense, the text’s careful develop-
ment of BP’s connections as a totality is central to its political usefulness. The
labor and the maintenance of such roads comprised of pumps, steel tubes,
security fences, security personnel, spouts, gauges, monitoring devices, tanker
ships, refineries, more steel tubes, more spouts, more security personnel,
delivery trucks, gas pumps, and on and on, are a very real, ongoing kind of
work. Marriot and Minio-Paluello show us this work, which in a way helps
us to understand the scope of the task at hand and to locate crucial starting
places to begin to dismantle the oil road and the carbon web it weaves.
Acknowledgements This chapter grows out of research I conducted as a Social

Sciences and Humanities postdoctoral research fellow at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland under the supervision of Danine Farquharson. My thanks go to Danine,
as well as to Fiona Polack, Jennifer Lokash, Andrew Loman, and Christopher Lockett.
Special thanks are due to Neel Ahuja, a most gracious and insightful editor, and to
Monique Allewaert, a thoughtful reader. Priscilla Wald deserves my thanks as well for
inviting my contribution. Adam Carlson and I talked about the text as I was composing
it, and it was on his suggestions that I read The Oil Road to begin with. I presented an
early version of this work at the American Comparative Literature Association held in
Seattle in 2015 in a seminar titled Infrastructure and Form organized by Joseph Jeon
and Kate Marshall. They also have my thanks. Finally, I would like to thank the students
of ENGL 487: Energy/Literature (Fall 2017) who read many of the texts mentioned
here for their enthusiasm and insight about energy humanities.
Notes
1. There are others besides Burtynsky whose work is worth thinking about and
with. See Peeples for artists that engage with the relations of extraction, pollu-
tion, and landscape (376).
2. Many representational approaches could prove instructive in the endeavor to
track oil’s formal impacts on artistic production. Recent critical works that
address the cultural dimensions of oil range from descriptions of the compo-
nents of artworks to comparative assessments of oil and thought. Oil occu-
pies a crucial position in the history of modern art, especially in the form of
oil-based paints and then in the form of acrylics. Early forms of cinema were
underway well before petrochemicals reorganized film technologies early in
the twentieth century, but the reproducibility and shelf-life of mid-century
films would have been impossible without cinema’s technological incorpora-
tion of oil (see Bozak). From the polymers used in film stock, to the electricity
powering cameras and lighting rigs, Hollywood has long been mired in the
thick materiality of fossil fuels. This transformation has also been attempted in
reverse, as Stephanie LeMenager informs readers: “in recent years, polyester or
PET film stock has been experimentally recycled into fuel” (Living Oil, 100).
The mutual development of culture and fossil fuel use are so entwined that it
makes little sense to consider them separately.
3. Petrolia and Titusville vie for historical relevance as the first sight of the extrac-
tion of crude oil (and this is despite the fact that people have been using fossil
fuels around the world for millennia). We might simply consider them contem-
porary discoveries. For more on Petrolia, see visual artist Andreas Rutkauskas’s
Petrolia project here www.andreasrutkauskas.com/petrolia.
4. For an account of for Oil! see Hitchcock “Oil in an American Imaginary,” for
the USA Trilogy see Whalan “Oil Was Trumps,” and for The Grapes of Wrath
and The Octopus, see Diamanti “From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value.”
5. Ghosh returns to this point in his recent book The Great Derangement (2016).
6. The play itself was composed in the spirit of the ceilidh, featuring a small cast, musi-
cal interludes, and collective storytelling. The centerpiece prop was a large painted
book made of heavy cardboard that acted as the backdrop. Its pages held vari-
ous scenes of the highlands and could be easily manipulated during performance,
packed after shows, and transported from town to town. See Graeme Macdonald’s
excellent critical edition of the play for an in-depth framing and analysis.
7. See Basil Gelpke and Ray McCormack’s A Crude Awakening (2006), Joe
Berlinger’s Crude: The Real Price of Oil (2009), and Shannon Walsh’s H2Oil
(2009) and for a list of oil documentaries, see http://greenplanetfilms.org/
blog/a-list-of-films-about-oil-and-fracking/. For criticism on oil documenta-
ries, see Szeman “Crude Aesthetics” and “Art Against Oil.”
76 B. R. BELLAMY
8. The creators have further supplied a study guide for classroom use, which is
available here: http://offshore-interactive.com/collateral/Offshore_Study_
Guide_03.pdf.
9. See “The Carbon Web.”
10. I decided to locate the Dugi Otok at marinetraffic.com and found it still actively
shipping crude: as of February 8, 2018, it has nearly reached its destination
Skagen, Denmark, having shipped from Rotterdam, Netherlands, on January
30, 2018. Its gross tonnage is 59315.
11. Brouillette’s salient point here was made as part of a conversation on the
publishing platform e-flux under the heading of “Paranoid Subjectivity and
Cognitive Mapping.” The conversation included Brouillette, Martin John
Callanan, Alberto Toscano, and Tom Eyers.
Works Cited
Ahlberg, Sofia. 2017. Goodbye Crude World: The Aesthetics of Environmental
Catastrophe in Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things and Edward
Burtynsky’s Oil Photographs. The Comparatist 41: 78–92. https://doi.
org/10.1353/com.2017.0005.
Barrett, Ross, and Daniel Worden (eds.). 2014. Oil Culture. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Bozak, Nadine. 2012. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Brecht, Bertolt. 1977. Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willet. New York: Hill and
Wang.
Brouillette, Sarah. 2015. Paranoid Subjectivity. https://conversations.e-flux.com/t/
paranoid-subjectivity-and-the-challenges-of-cognitive-mapping-how-is-capital-
ism-to-be-represented/1080/9. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
The Carbon Web. n.d. Platform: Arts, Activism, Education, Research. http://plat-
formlondon.org/about-us/platform-the-carbon-web/. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
Diamanti, Jeff. 2017. From Fields of Wheat to Fields of Value: The Energy
Unconscious of the Octopus. Western American Literature 54 (4): 391–407.
Ghosh, Amitav. 1992. Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel. In Incendiary
Circumstances, 131–151. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
———. 2016. The Great Derangement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hitchcock, Peter. 2010. Oil in an American Imaginary. New Formations 69: 81–97.
Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic
Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum in the American Century. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Macalister, Terry. 2012. The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of
London by James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello—Review. https://www.the-
guardian.com/books/2012/dec/14/oil-road-james-marriott-mika-minio-paluel-
lo-review. Accessed 8 Feb 2018.
Marriot, James, and Mika Minio-Paluello. 2013. The Oil Road: Journeys from the
Caspian Sea to the City of London. New York: Verso.
Massey, Doreen. 2013. Mapping the Carbon Web. Soundings 54: 127–130.
Munif, Abdelrahman.1989. Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux. New York: Vintage
International.
McGrath, John. 2015. The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, ed. Graeme
Macdonald. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama.
Moore, Lisa. 2009. February. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Peeples, Jennifer. 2011. Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes.
Environmental Communication 5 (4): 373–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/1752
4032.2011.616516.
Rutkauskas, Andreas. 2011. Petrolia. https://www.andreasrutkauskas.com/petrolia.
Accessed 8 May 2019.
Szeman, Imre. 2012. Crude Aesthetics: The Politics of Oil Documentaries. Journal of
American Studies 46 (2): 423–439.
———. 2015. Art Against Oil: Offshore and Other Experiments in Eco-
Representation. Point of View Magazine 97: 28–31.
Updike, John. 1988. Satan’s Work and Silted Cisterns. The New Yorker, October 17,
pp. 117–121.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2016. Improvement and Overburden. Postmodern Culture 26: 2.
https://doi.org/10.1353/pmc.2016.0003.
Westall, Claire. 2017. World-Literary Resources and Energetic Materialism. Journal of
Post-Colonial Writing 53 (3): 265–276.
Whalan, Mark. 2017. “Oil Was Trumps”: John Dos Passos’ U.S.A., World War I,
and the Growth of the Petromodern State. American Literary History 29 (3):
474–498.
Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman (eds.). 2017. Petrocultures: Oil,
Politics, Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
CHAPTER 5
Literature and Energy
Jordan B. Kinder and Imre Szeman
Introduction
In the fossil fuel era, energy has come to be associated with transnational cor-
porate intrigue, machinations of statecraft, exertions of geopolitical power,
environmental destruction, and (more recently) the advent of wondrous tech-
no-scientific developments (such as electric cars and solar panels). It’s easy to
see why this might be the case. The importance of fossil fuel energy to the
ongoing operations of the global capitalist economy and the fact that pools
of oil and gas are located in specific global regions have fundamentally shaped
the character of international politics; at the same time, growing awareness
of the environmental consequences of fossil fuel use at its current level (in
2017, 98 million barrels of oil per day or nearly 36 billion barrels per year
globally1) has generated a concerted attempt to fashion new technologies
to harness cleaner forms of energy that might allow capitalism to continue
along in a greener fashion. The daily struggles being waged over access to
and control over energy include everything from demonstrations to block the
Dakota Access Pipeline to attempts to instantiate versions of Germany’s cele-
brated Energiewende (energy transition) in other countries, and from media
excitement over Elon Musk’s battery-powered automobiles to the ongoing
(if slow) expansion of renewable energy worldwide. Energy matters to how
power and privilege circulate in the world, to the location of sites of conflict,
and to the environmental direction of the planet.
J. B. Kinder 
McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada
I. Szeman (*) 
University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

80 J. B. KINDER AND I. SZEMAN
What could be characterized as the world-historical import of energy

might seem distant from the concerns of literature or literary criticism, except
perhaps as topics for politically and environmentally concerned fictions.
Indeed, the energy historian Vaclav Smil (2004, 55) has written that “timeless
artistic expressions show no correlation with levels or kinds of energy con-
sumption.” However, recent critical work on energy and culture has begun
to identify just how much energy matters for art, literature, and other forms
of cultural expression.2 The intervention of this critical work has shown that,
far from being timeless, cultural and aesthetic expressions are deeply marked
by the shape and character of the energy systems in which they were created.
The arts of a world powered by horses and the labor of bodies cannot help
but be distinct from the expanded time, space, and power of our own pet-
ro-modernity: the production and consumption of cultural artifacts, including
literature, are bound to their historical and material energic contexts.
Offering the term “fossil fuel fiction” as a critical category through which
to approach the cultural and aesthetic dynamics of our warming present,
ecological historian Andreas Malm argues that “global warming changes
everything, including the reading of literature” (Malm 2017, 125). Malm’s
provocation draws attention to an important methodological dynamic this
chapter develops in relation to energy: all literature of the Anthropocene
needs to be thought of as fiction of the age of petroleum. The growing social
and cultural presence of global warming, our awareness of and alertness to
the significance of the human impact on planetary systems, cannot help but
reframe critical approaches to literature, and in a deeper and more critically
significant manner than through attention to those texts that more promi-
nently feature the environment than others (as in climate fiction or ecocritical
texts). By focusing on the energic contexts of literary and cultural produc-
tion, the energy humanities establish a material basis for the critical analysis
of literary and cultural production in a warming world, thereby opening up a
way of tracing our conscious and unconscious energy imaginaries.
There are two main challenges involved in making sense of the relation-
ship of energy (and distinct energy regimes) to literary and cultural produc-
tion. First, there is no simple, easy, or direct way of forging a relationship
between dominant modes of energy use in a given period and literary form
or theme. Typical divisions of literary style, form, or genre that have been
used to develop a periodizing relationship between literature and historical
shifts and developments (as carried out, for instance, in the work of Fredric
Jameson) do not easily map onto the mid-nineteenth-century shift from
coal to oil, or even the rapid expansion of energy use following World War
II. Postmodernism is not the outcome of the 1973 Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil crisis, nor is modernism the
result of the decision by the British Navy to switch to oil from coal in the
years prior to World War I, a move some critics have identified as central to
the decline of British hegemony. The links of energy to developments in liter-
ary history are deeper and more difficult to parse out.
5 LITERATURE AND ENERGY 81
This difficulty results in large part from a second challenge involved in dis-
cussing the significance of energy for literature. For much of history, includ-
ing a modernity soaked in oil, energy has managed to hide in plain sight—an
obviously important force in shaping geopolitics and culture, yet seldom fore-
grounded in literature, including the fiction of the period that has come to be
known as the Great Acceleration.3 This astonishing absence of oil in the liter-
ature of a lifeworld deeply shaped by the substance was first noted by writer
and critic Amitav Ghosh, who attempted to account for the failure of con-
temporary US literature to name a key site of American power: the Middle
East. The belated recognition of this absence and its aesthetic implications
has comprised much of the literary-critical work on energy to date. This chap-
ter begins with a survey of the origins of and contemporary developments in
the energy humanities,4 offering a historical and conceptual account of how
energy has become a site of inquiry for the humanities and social sciences.
It then offers an account of some of the ways in which literary criticism and
contemporary petro-literature have attempted to account for the absence of
energy in twentieth-century and twenty-first-century literature. This critical
work is only now beginning. The absence of energy from literature mirrors
a larger cultural gap with respect to energy: as long as there were ever grow-
ing levels of energy, it was treated as a small part of the bigger picture of
technological or sociopolitical progress, including narratives of literary histor-
ical change and development. For this reason, the reintroduction of energy
to literary study needs to create new explanatory models to account for the
cultural force of energy, rather than adopting older critical models that were
unattuned to the import of energy. The literary periods and styles of modern-
ism and postmodernism, for instance, have been narrated in the context of a
world emptied of energy. A commitment to think about energy in relation to
literature demands a reconsideration of the adequacy of these older catego-
ries in understanding the sociocultural significance of energy and the critical
capacity of the literary to actively speak to the environmental challenges faced
by the planet. Speaking to and addressing these environmental challenges
involves challenging conventional modes and categories of literary analysis in
a way that attends to the limitations of earlier approaches.
From Energy Infrastructures to Energy Superstructures

and Cultures
The literary and cultural study of energy remains a niche venture, with its
origins hidden in the scattered pages of political economists and anthro-
pologists. While energy figured in the work of political economists in the
nineteenth century, it rarely, if ever, played a role in their understanding of
society beyond that of a relatively insignificant input.5 To date, energy has
been understood primarily as a force of production that narrowly deter-
mines broader economic relations. The technical fields of natural sciences and
economics—fields that both took their respective shapes as we understand

them today in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—became the
sole domains through which to study energy. Energy in the nineteenth
century became decoupled from the realm of the social and cultural, iso-
lated as an object to be studied primarily by scientists (Debeir et al. 1991,
xii–xiii). As this section demonstrates, the social and cultural significance of
energy has only recently been taken seriously by understanding the dialecti-
cal relationship between energy infrastructures and energy superstructures—a
relationship that is central to the project of the energy humanities. As we
argue throughout this chapter, the dominant ways energy is viewed as a tech-
nological or economic relation has contributed to the failure of literary and
cultural production to adequately address the energy question; the reasons for
this failure are foregrounded by the past and present theoretical accounts of
energy with which this section engages.
The effort to conceptually position energy in relation to society, and so
challenge dominant assumptions about energy’s irrelevance to culture,
would not begin until the mid-twentieth century with anthropologist Leslie
White’s 1943 essay “Energy and the Evolution of Culture.” The anthropolo-
gist Dominic Boyer calls White “a maverick who granted energy a prominent
place in his efforts to resurrect evolutionary theory in anthropology,” explain-
ing that for him energy “was the conceptual key to understanding everything
about human life and history” (Boyer 2014, 310; emphasis added). White’s
work constitutes an understanding of energy as a force that makes possible
the conditions for specific kinds of social relations. As Boyer observes, White
put forward “the notion that modern capitalist society was a fuel society to
its core” (Boyer 2014, 311). In White’s formulations, energy is a singularly
crucial component to the “evolution” of culture and society. In this way, his
work established cultural anthropology and, in turn, the social sciences and
humanities, as disciplines well-equipped to examine the complex role energy
has played in the shaping of society.
Even with such compelling assertions of the centrality of energy in both
the history of humanity and the experiences of everyday life, the social and
cultural study of energy and society continued to be uneven in its devel-
opment. Fred Cottrell’s work in Energy and Society (1955) picks up where
White’s left off, historicizing the dominant energy sources and develop-
ing the concept of “energy surplus,” “the energy available to man in excess
of that expended to make more energy available” (Cottrell 1955, 11–12).
While Cottrell argues that the history of civilization or society as such can be
understood in terms of developing energy surplus, he also provides an early
energy-based criticism of capitalism resulting from its need for high-energy
yields and encouragement of the centralization of political power. Although
their views of the ways energy influences society are inflected with a kind of
determinism some consider problematic, White and Cottrell helped lay the
groundwork from which the humanities and social sciences would approach
energy a half century later.
It was arguably not until Jean-Claude Debeir, Jean-Paul Deléage, and

Daniel Hémery’s In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization Through
the Ages (1986) that the study of energy as an economic, political, and social
relation was renewed, rearticulated, and refashioned with vigor. Written in
the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, Debeir, Déleage, and Hémery’s exhaus-
tive account of historically dominant forms of energy and major energy shifts
throughout history crystallizes the trace arguments found in White and
Cottrell, while also unraveling some of their more heavy-handed determin-
ism. Their aim in writing In the Servitude of Power was to get past what they
perceived as the restrictions of earlier technical approaches. Debeir, Déleage,
and Hémery historicize energy through the notion of “energy systems,”
defined as the totality of the ways energy functions economically, socially, eco-
logically, and politically in a given historical moment or epoch. They argue
that while “there is a powerful energy determination at work in all societies,”
it is important to grasp how “the energy determination is itself determined: it
is the result of the interplay of economic, demographic, psychological, intel-
lectual, social and political parameters operating in the various human soci-
eties” (Debeir et al. 1991, 13). In the formulation developed by Debeir,
Déleage, and Hémery, “energy infrastructures” and “energy superstructures”
form a dialectical pairing, each shaping the other so deeply that it is difficult
to separate one from the other.
It would take the better part of two more decades for the project of the
energy humanities to begin its full realization. The recent work of Andreas
Malm has done much to solidify important connections between the physical
infrastructures and sociocultural superstructures of what he terms the “fos-
sil economy,” particularly in the ways that steam power reconfigured labor
and, in turn, broader social relations. The fossil economy names the energic
underpinnings of capitalist economies, systematically outlining the role fos-
sil fuels have played in capitalism’s development in a way that accounts for
the class antagonism that underpinned the transition to fossil fuels. In Fossil
Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (2016),
Malm develops a historical materialist analysis of the transition from water
power to steam power—or, as he frames it, from “flow” to “stock”—dur-
ing the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Contrary to many accounts that see
in this transition the harnessing of cheaper, more efficient forms of energy
for the betterment of humanity, Malm sees a calculated move of class war-
fare. Coal, he points out, was not adopted because it was a cheaper source of
fuel than water (it was not), but because it was, among other things, more
mobile, which allowed for factories to concentrate in urban areas away from
the flow of water and to exploit a class of unspecialized laborers. Steam thus
“arose as a form of power exercised by some people against others” (Malm
2016, 36). It is within this context that Malm inverts Marx’s famous energic
formula, declaring “steam begets capital—not the other way around” (Malm
2016, 33).
Throughout Fossil Capital, Malm addresses the veiled ways in which fossil
fuels function in and shape society. His insights help explain the absence of
fossil fuels in literary and cultural production by drawing attention to how
they figured into the Victorian cultural imaginary at the time of transition.
In the Victorian cultural imaginary, coal was conceptualized as a mystified
abstraction experienced in the effects of steam power and the rotative engine,
establishing “steam fetishism.” Steam fetishism names an ideology through
which “the British bourgeoisie gathered its family of cherished ideals—pro-
gress, science, mechanical ingenuity, accumulation of wealth, the rights of pri-
vate property, [and] freedom” (Malm 2016, 194). In this way, coal was seen
not as a thing, but as an abstraction, a legacy that persists into the age of oil as
well.
The energy humanities have begun to develop a literary-critical approach
to energy responsive to the social and cultural implications of energy super-
structures as they register in literary production. In so doing, they extend the
critical capacities of work such as Matt Huber’s (2013) or Malm’s into the
literary sphere. The relationships that have been developed between energy
and broader social practices can be examined through literature, especially lit-
erature that probes the social significance of energy, often with a desire to
challenge the quotidian belief in fossil fuel modernity as the only imaginable
mode of subjectivity.
However, there is a bigger claim that undergirds the energy humanities
regarding the concatenation of literature and energy: that all literary pro-
duction is shaped by its energic context. As Patricia Yaeger puts it, “thinking
about literature through the lens of energy, especially the fuel basis of econ-
omies, means getting serious about modes of production as a force field for
culture” (Yaeger et al. 2011, 308). Yaeger’s provocation calls for a re-evalua-
tion of what constitutes “energy literature” in the twentieth and twenty-first
century. This has led critics like Graeme Macdonald to declare that “all mod-
ern writing is premised on both the promise and the hidden costs and benefits
of hydrocarbon culture” (Macdonald 2012, 31)—that is, that all writing in
the fossil fuel era is in many ways made possible by the surpluses afforded by
fossil fuels, even if energy’s presence is absent in a given text. There certainly
is a subfield of contemporary literary production that might confidently be
referred to as “energy literature” that includes texts such as Rachel Kushner’s
Flamethrowers (2013) and Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015), both of
which explicitly identify the cultural import of energy and the sociocultural
mechanisms that have worked to make energy less significant than it might
otherwise be. Kushner’s novel connects the apparently endless energies of
postwar car culture to revolutionary artistic and political imaginaries, both
of which fail to see their dependence on and commitments to fossil fuels. In
McCarthy’s text, the “corporate anthropologist” tasked with making sense of
the deep character of contemporary culture quickly identifies oil as key to the
era’s Grand Narrative, even if he struggles to wrangle energy into the story,
lacking the right concepts and theories to do so. In expanding what consti-
tutes “energy literature” as such, Yaeger, Macdonald, and other prominent
critics that foreground energy (such as Stephanie LeMenager and Jennifer
Wenzel) insist that reading literature through energy and energy through lit-
erature, particularly in the fossil fuel era, demands a re-reading of all liter-
ary production. If energy runs through the social from top to bottom, it also
runs through the literature, whether or not any particular literary object fore-
grounds energy.
Literature, Energy, and Aesthetics

There is a tricky balancing act being played out in the theoretical attempt to
bring energy and literature together. The critical opening to think about the
relationship between literature and energy emerges from a recognition that,
in general, literary texts have failed to attend to the pervasive sociocultural
significance of energy noted in the work above. This is especially true with
respect to the culture of modernity, which has been shaped by the ever-in-
creasing use of (and dependence on) petrochemical energy year after year
since its introduction in the mid-nineteenth century. This movement between
absence and presence might suggest a critical confusion or lack of clar-
ity about the object of critique. However, in the still early stages of energy
humanities, both critical gestures constitute an important way of mapping the
significance of energy for literature and are necessary for developing a broader
understanding of the sociocultural functioning of energy.
The foundational insight into the relationship between literature and
energy concerns the failure of literature to provide an account of energy in
society. Amitav Ghosh made one of the earliest explicit links between energy
and literature in his influential 1992 essay, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter
and the Novel.” Ghosh offers a broader critique of this failure of literary fic-
tion to address what he names the “oil encounter”: the intertwining of the
fates of Americans and those living in the Middle East around this commod-
ity, a connection that continues to have far-reaching economic, cultural, and
political reverberations. The politics of the United States in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries are deeply wrapped up in the pursuit of foreign oil in
the Middle East; even so, Ghosh finds no example of literary texts that attend
to the sociocultural repercussions of this persistent geopolitical drama.
It is not only with respect to this specific geopolitical oil encounter Ghosh
identifies that literature has seemed to miss the mark. Although there are a
number of novels that, for instance, have contended with the importance of
oil to modernity—from Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927) to more recent work
such as Helon Habila’s Oil on Water (2011) and Fred Stenson’s Who By Fire
(2015)—there remains an absence of literature that fully engages with fos-
sil fuels as a social relation. Ghosh’s insight has resonated with critics who
have explored the representational challenges presented by energy and fossil
fuels. The slow emergence of energy in the examination of culture and soci-
ety traced above is evident in the specific history of literature, too—even, it
seems, within the textual imaginaries or unconscious of twentieth-century
and twenty-first-century texts from which critics have been so adept at uncov-
ering other subjects or issues (most prominently, the often hidden dynamics
of class, gender, and race).
Ghosh has continued to raise questions about the lack of literary attention
to fossil fuels as well as to one of the principal consequences of its use: global
warming. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable
(2016) constitutes an extended and expanded analysis of the novel’s failure to
take on the oil encounter. That failure, in turn, raises the question of why the
novel has failed to make climate change central to its depictions of contem-
porary reality. After all, 2015—the year prior to the publication of Ghosh’s
book—was the hottest year on record. “Few indeed were the quarters that
remained unperturbed,” he remarks, “but literary fiction and the arts appear
to have been among them: short lists for prizes, reviews, and so on, betray
no signs of a heightened engagement with climate change” (Ghosh 2016,
150). For Ghosh, the limits of literary fiction, and specifically of the novel,
with respect to climate and energy lie in its origins as a genre, in “the grid of
literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination
in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere
was rewriting the destiny of the earth” (Ghosh 2016, 7). The forms and
conventions to which he draws attention are, in part, ones the novel shares
with narratives that undergird the humanities, sciences, and social sciences—
the production of a “modern” worldview in which Nature is “moderate and
orderly” and the individual is championed over the collective, in both liberal
philosophy and the novel’s “individualizing imaginary” (Ghosh 2016, 22,
135). Here Ghosh underscores the key problem that the inherently collective
characteristics of a fossil fuel society and climate change are formally resisted
by the individualizing tendencies of the novel. In this way, the representa-
tional limits Ghosh identified twenty-five years earlier in the incapacities of
US fiction to figure the Middle East are in The Great Derangement extended
to an indictment of modern literature as such, which he sees not just as
unwilling but also unable to narrate energy and environmental crises.
Ghosh’s strong argument about the limits of contemporary fiction in rela-
tion to energy might seem to constitute the opposite of Macdonald’s insist-
ence that all modern writing is organized around the costs and benefits of
hydrocarbon. In fact, both critics are making a similar intervention. They
offer an invitation to scholars to take up the critical labor of understanding
the complex coordinates of fossil fuel modernity, whether to grapple with
how and why the novel fails to properly account for energy and global warm-
ing (Ghosh) or to employ an awareness of the import of energy to social form
to produce new readings of literature (Macdonald). Ghosh’s insistence on the
limits of the genre of literary realism to represent climate change leads him
to suggest that only speculative fiction and poetry might offer insights into
our fossil fuel imaginaries. By contrast, in “Research Note: The Resources

of Fiction,” Macdonald (2013) argues that critics can interrogate fiction as
a way of grappling with the entwined histories of energy and culture. For
Macdonald, “fiction, in its various modes, genres, and histories, offers a sig-
nificant (and relatively untapped) repository for the energy aware scholar to
demonstrate how, through successive epochs, particularly embedded kinds of
energy create a predominant (and oftentimes alternative) culture of being and
imagining in the world; organizing and enabling a prevalent mode of living,
thinking, moving, dwelling and working” (Macdonald 2013, 4). His insight
unfolds the implications of what fossil fuels have meant not only for living
in a fossil fuel society, but also for the fictional forms that have developed in
relation to a world shot through with “narrative energetics” and “psycho-so-
cial dynamics” linked to oil’s force and power (Macdonald 2013, 4).
Even in the short history of energy humanities, it has already become all-
too common for critics interested in literature and energy simply to focus
on those fictions that deal with energy—texts from the obvious (Pablo
Neruda’s poem “Standard Oil Co.” [1940] and Italo Calvino’s “The Petrol
Pump” [1974]) to the more obscure (the recent collections of poems such
as Stephen Collis’ Once in Blockadia [2016] or Garth Martens’ Prologue for
the Age of Consequence [2014], the first about pipeline blockades and the sec-
ond about the experience of working in Canada’s oil sands). Other critics,
however, have moved beyond this gesture by being more attentive to the the-
oretical and conceptual challenges—and possibilities—energy poses for liter-
ature in terms of genre, setting, and form, particularly in relation to realism.
Sharpening the general literary category of “magic realism,” Jennifer Wenzel
argues that the “political ecology” of Nigerian literature is better described as
“petro-magic-realism,” which she defines as “a literary mode that combines
the transmogrifying creatures and liminal space of the forest in Yoruba nar-
rative tradition with the monstrous-but-mundane violence of oil exploration
and extraction, the state violence that supports it, and the environmental
degradation that it causes” (Wenzel 2006, 456). Brent Bellamy identifies a
new genre he calls “petrorealism,” which looks at the multiple ways in which
it is possible through fiction to “elaborate the near omnipresence of oil in
everyday life in an attempt to defamiliarize or to make strange our petrosub-
jectivity” (Bellamy 2017, 260). None of the five categories of petrorealism
Bellamy identifies addresses fictions set in oil fields or in the corporate bor-
ders of oil companies; rather, they include texts that offer maps of our energy
present without explicitly and didactically foregrounding energy, as well as
science fiction energy futures such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy
(1992, 1995, 1996). These realisms and genre fictions offer formal and rep-
resentational challenges to the individualizing tendencies of the conventional
novel that, following Ghosh, contribute to the failure of literature to account
for energy and climate. In conjunction with Michael O’Driscoll and Mark
Simpson, Bellamy has expanded on the concept of petrorealism through the
introduction of “resource aesthetics,” an aesthetics that emerges from the
logic of resource culture and that names “the ways in which we do or do not
see, feel, and act in response to the abidingly material power of resources: not
merely inputs, but forces, relations, and practices that fundamentally shape or
indeed render culture and society” (Bellamy et al. 2016, n.p.).
An increasing number of literary works are also attempting to fill in the
gap in our imaginaries to which Ghosh pointed through formal experimenta
tion that foregrounds the problem of energy in complex ways. The sharpest
of these works are those attuned to how literature is deeply constituted by
fossil fuels. One of the most distinctive is Reza Negarestani’s theory-fiction
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008). In this book, oil
possesses qualities well beyond those we normally assign to it: it is a “satanic
sentience” that “possesses tendencies for mass intoxication on pandemic
scales (different from but corresponding to capitalism’s voodoo economy
and other types of global possession systems)” (Negarestani 2008, 17). The
petro-geopolitics being enacted on the surface of the planet nurtures the
liquid energy in its bowels; Negarestani suggests that through our actions,
we are, whether we know it or not, making sacrifices to a demon that thrives
on struggle. “Oil is the undercurrent of all narrations, not only the political
but also that of the ethics of life on Earth,” writes Negarestani (2008, 19).
Cyclonopedia is simultaneously a political manifesto, demonology, theological
treatise, and science fiction, a new genre intended to help us to really and
truly comprehend the depths of our commitments to the dominant energy
form of the modern era. In his writing, Negarestani attends to both the total
absence of energy from our sensibilities and its unmistakable presence in our
lives, a mode of being that allows us to continue to use it without worry at a
self-destructive scale and at a rate that condemns us to its consequences for
millennia.
Contemporary poet Adam Dickinson pushes us to recognize the degree to
which our culture is suffused with our dominant form of energy. He config-
ures the poems in The Polymers (2013) around the chemical shape of the pol-
ymers at the heart of the plastics that have become an index of modernity. His
poem “Hail” offers a taxonomy of the plastics that now exist within all living
systems, including human beings. We unwillingly ingest plastics into our bod-
ies throughout our lives, passing them on to subsequent generations at birth
through the milk infants ingest from the bodies of their mothers:
Hello from six-pack rings

and chokeholds,
from breast milk
and cord blood,
from microfibres
rinsed through yoga pants
and polyester fleece,
biomagnifying predators
strafing the treatment plants. (Dickinson 2013, 7, ll. 28–36)
Today, we don’t just depend on oil for energy; by converting it into plastics,
and by ingesting those plastics even without noticing it, many of us spend
our lives becoming petroleum. Dickinson’s most recent collection, Anatomic
(2018), extends this investigation of the depths of our oil subjectivity, explor-
ing the relationship between the inside and outside of our bodies via a poetic
“chemical autobiography” that traces the full range of chemicals (including
petrochemicals) to which humans are exposed. “I want to know the story of
these chemicals, metals, and organisms that compose me,” Dickinson writes.
“I am an event, a site within which the industrial powers and evolutionary
pressures of my time come to write” (Dickinson 2018, 9). Contemporary
literature is written by subjects materially constituted by fossil fuels and the
chemical regimes of modernity: we are petrosubjects whether we know it or
not, which shapes daily life as well as aesthetic practice.
While the oil encounter remains largely elusive in literatures from across
the globe, there is a difference in its treatment in literatures of the Global
South and the Global North. The examples in this section thus far have
largely been from literatures produced in the Global North. However, litera-
tures of the Global South have a tradition of engaging oil that challenges the
broader elusiveness of the oil encounter, resulting from the ways these liter-
atures address oil’s deleterious effects on colonial and postcolonial societies
through experiential and affective registers that articulate the consequences of
oil extraction on communities, environments, and peoples. Postcolonial liter-
ary criticism that has engaged with energy has drawn insightful attention to
the stark differences of how energy is experienced around the world. In the
concluding sentences to his foreword to Oil Fictions (forthcoming), Ghosh
argues, for instance, that a key reason for the persistent elusiveness of the oil
encounter is largely the result of a focus on only one domain of the encoun-
ter—the Western encounter. Another essay in Oil Fictions compellingly chal-
lenges the perceived invisibility of oil and its infrastructures through a reading
of two short stories by Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor that make
tangible the putrid smells of petroleum pervading the Niger Delta (Walters,
forthcoming). Oil is far from absent at the sites of its extraction, even if there,
too, the deeper cultural and social significance of resources quickly disappears
into the fabric of the everyday.
Ogaga Ifowodo’s 2005 collection of poems The Oil Lamp concretizes
oil, displacing it as global abstraction by localizing the social and ecological
effects of oil production in the Niger Delta. Consistent among these exam-
ples that articulate the antinomies of the oil encounter—that is, antinomies of
the experience of oil as a commodity or as a destructive substance—is prox-
imity to oil and its infrastructures. Such proximities and the struggles that
emerge from them, however, are not only relegated to the Global South.
Indeed, Indigenous North American communities face similar consequences
from the production and transportation of oil. Indigenous and postcolo-
nial treatments of literature and energy, such as Thomas King’s 2014 novel
The Back of the Turtle, provide some of the most compelling accounts of the
social, cultural, and ecological dimensions of oil by subverting the universal-

izing tendencies of the Western oil encounter and offering a vision of a future
that moves beyond the colonizing inertia of the petrocultural present.
The critical and aesthetic practices described here draw attention to the
degree to which contemporary culture and society are constituted by the
energy we use and, in particular, by the infrastructures and superstructures
that have developed in conjunction with our use of fossil fuels. As evidence of
global warming begins to transform from an indistinct “hyperobject”—Tim-
othy Morton’s term for the sublime invisibility of climate and other equally
expansive “things”6—to a reality experienced daily through weather crises,
sea level rise, crop failures, climate migrants, and more, the need to figure
our relationship to fossil fuels and to map resource aesthetics will no doubt
expand, whether in literature or in other forms of cultural expression.
Energy and Periodization Beyond the Oil Encounter

In developing analyses of the relationships among energy, aesthetics, and cul-
ture, one of the most prevalent critical tools that have emerged in the energy
humanities is energy periodization. The argument that the energy we use fun-
damentally shapes culture and society has prompted the question of whether
it might make sense to map specific moments of literature in relation to the
developments in energy history of which we provided an account earlier in
this chapter, building on the common ways of organizing the historical devel-
opment of the arts into aesthetic movements or periods, such as Romanticism
and Victorianism or modernism and postmodernism.7 One could, for exam-
ple, read modernism in relation to the acceleration that is part of the history
of fossil fuel use, identifying literary-cultural resonances in the key dates of
1870 and 1890 (the first being the moment when more energy begins to be
extracted from fossil fuels than from photosynthesis; the second, the year in
which more than half of global energy comes from fossil fuels). Alternatively,
one might consider postmodernism in relation to the OPEC crisis, a moment
in which narratives of petromodern futures and US hegemony were deeply
unnerved, and so, too, the self-certainties of narrative and the Western sub-
ject. It might also be possible to read the far lower levels of energy use in
much of the world in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries
as important to the constitution of colonial and postcolonial culture, for
instance, by providing an account of the vast disparity in energy access in the
Global North and South and the relationship of this disparity to development
and underdevelopment.
Periodizing literary and cultural production in terms of dominant energy
sources attunes critical reading to the sociocultural causes and effects of
“energy deepening” in the fossil fuel era, a task made all the more urgent in
a warming world. In “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field
of Postindustrial Philosophy,” Jeff Diamanti proposes that energy deepening
“provides the infrastructural link between what in an older vocabulary would
have been the base (postindustrialism) and superstructure (postmodernism)

of our current era” (Diamanti 2016, n.p.). Diamanti’s underscoring of the
relation between the postindustrial base, the postmodern superstructure,
and their energic foundations echoes our own points above—energy perme-
ates both infrastructure and culture. While he makes this argument to probe
postindustrial philosophies grouped under the heading of Object-Oriented
Ontology (OOO), this line of argument has important implications for the
study of energy and literature. The term “energy deepening” draws attention
to the importance of the intensification of energy use over time; the specific
form of energy involved—say, oil instead of coal—matters less to Diamanti.
The link between energy regimes and aesthetics turns energy periodization
into a critical tool. If, for instance, postmodernism as the cultural logic of late
capitalism (in the terms outlined by Jameson) is linked to an energy surplus
provided in large part through oil, all literary and cultural production from
this period demands to be re-read with this recognition at the forefront. A
now-classic example of a literary energy unconscious is in Jack Kerouac’s 1957
book On the Road, a novel narratologically propelled by road trips across the
United States. Yet considerations of petroleum are virtually absent, save for
a dramatic episode when Sal Paradise’s car stalls and he winds up at an aban-
doned gas station (Yaeger et al. 2011, 306). The material or narratological
absence of energy in a book about travelling in automobiles fuelled by petro-
leum suggests its fundamental ubiquity and ease-of-access. The condition of
surplus in large part produces the general representational absence of fossil
fuels in much of the literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries.
In her discussion of On the Road’s energy unconscious, Yaeger asks if her
question as to whether or not Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise “worry about
how much fuel they’re using or the price of oil … is a question for the twen-
ty-first century” (Yeager et al. 2011, 306). It very well might be, but Yaeger’s
own anxiety in posing a question for the past generated from the conditions
of the present is arguably misplaced. This critical trajectory is precisely where
the strength of arguments developing out of periodization is located. If, as
Malm argues, “[t]he thermometer can be legitimately suspected as a barom-
eter of the rolling invasion of the past into the present” (Malm 2016, 10),
then approaching literatures of the recent past through the present knowledge
of global warming is one way of reading the cultural barometer of the fossil
fuel era. Turning to past literary imaginaries as a means to trace the cultural
and material origins of the Great Acceleration offers important insight into
the social and cultural dimensions of energy and, it follows, climate change.
Periodizing literature in relation to historically dominant energy systems is one
way to begin grappling fully with the causes and consequences of the still-lim-
ited response to climate change in our era—an age that continues to produce
and consume increasing amounts of fossil fuels as it positions global warming
as a problem to be solved in the future, despite warnings to the contrary.8
Other texts of the period in the United States, which saw oil consumption
overtake coal, are marked by a similar absence. Thomas Pynchon’s short story
“Entropy,” like On the Road, indirectly foregrounds energic relations, but

avoids directly confronting them. Written at some point between 1958 and
1964, the story is set in two apartments during the 40th hour of Meatball
Mulligan’s “lease-breaking party” (Pynchon 1985, 81), as it descends into
chaos. While the story is pervaded at the levels of both form and content
by energic and other metabolic relations, including explicit and implicit ref-
erences to the Laws of Thermodynamics, weather (rain, snow), and climate
(“for three days now, despite the changeful weather, the mercury had stayed
at 37 degrees” [Pynchon 1985, 85]), energy remains abstract, except for a
reference to the wattage of a speaker playing music, and fossil fuels are absent.
This abstraction is significant when considering our earlier arguments that the
mystification of energy has in part contributed to its absence in the broader
cultural imaginary.
Pynchon’s story, like Kerouac’s novel, takes a new shape when re-read in
the wake of global warming fuelled by the entrenchment of fossil fuels in
everyday life. Scientific certainty about the realities of global warming would
take until the early 1990s, but the biophysical processes at its core occurred
long before. Malm reminds us that “the process [of global warming] as such
had been underway since the nineteenth century, when Britain first developed
the fossil economy” (Malm 2017, 127). Read in this context, the paranoiac
obsession with weather, stasis, and equilibrium foregrounded in “Entropy”
is unsettling. Its conclusion sees one of the story’s main characters, Callisto,
“[turn] to face the man on the bed and wait with him until the moment of
equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both
outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their
separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of
all motion” (Pynchon 1985, 98). The lease-breaking party, complete with
“a litter of empty champagne fifths” (Pynchon 1985, 81)—that is, complete
with surplus—parallels the energic abundance of 1950s that critics such as
Cottrell foreground.9 Its conclusion offers a projection of a contradictory,
fantasy future world where the temperature remains the same and all motion
is absent. Kerouac and Pynchon express a carefree affect, but the latter regis-
ters a looming anxiety around the conditions of the future perceived through
the experience of weather, an experience that finds contemporary reverbera-
tions in relation to “eco-anxiety.”
Periodizing literature in relation to energy certainly expands the possibili-
ties of literary and cultural analysis by forcing us to recognize the significance
of fossil fuels in shaping modernity. But merely adding dominant energy
forms to already existing literary periods is not enough to help us better
understand either energy or literature. The question of energy determinism
looms over this exercise and is, in part, what troubles the conceptual and ana-
lytic possibilities of periodization: reconfigurations of energy did not produce
modernism, nor did they create postmodern style. Even if these reconfigura-
tions did not play a completely insignificant role, critical accounts of energy
and literature that mobilize periodization as a central analytic framework must
move beyond it. As energy begins to be more frequently figured into liter-
ary and cultural analysis, the challenge is to know how to explain the pre-
cise social impact of a force that, for much of the culture produced over an
extended period, was not explicitly figured in literary–cultural production.
Other modes of investigating the concatenation of energy and literature are
still unfolding, such as those that look to energy futures imagined in specu-
lative and science fiction to think through the dynamics of our fossil-fuelled
present. The emergent genre of solarpunk, for instance, exemplifies produc-
tive and inspiring imaginings of futures beyond fossil fuels. A form of spec-
ulative fiction “typically set in futures where solar energy takes center stage,”
solarpunk “prioritizes hope and resilience in the face of the climate crisis”
(Williams 2018, n.p.). In using the speculative mode, solarpunk offers the
promise of possibilities at a time when the future seems determined to be an
intensified version of the present or, indeed, something worse.
Conclusion
Critical and literary practice of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has
largely failed to account for the social significance of energy. In part, this is
attributable to a gap that originated in political economy’s absence of atten-
tion to energy that carried over into other domains of cultural production
and persisted.10 As dependence on energy deepened, and dominant energy
forms became all the more “invisible” (i.e., in the shift from the dirt and
smog of coal to underground pipelines infrastructures that move gas and
oil), critical and literary efforts followed suit by reproducing this absence.
However, the recent effort of critics and writers to close this gap, and so
make visible a hitherto largely invisible social force in literary and cultural
production, has been an important first step in putting energy into the pic-
ture of literary and cultural analysis.
The critical work of this first step has opened up the promise of still further
work in literary and cultural studies in relation to energy. The first stage of
intervention into the social and cultural dimensions of energy, especially fossil
fuels, is driven by a desire to enliven our critical epistemologies by drawing
attention to the ubiquitous presence of energy in our lives. The next stage is
a more difficult and radical one. At its core, the demand made by the energy
humanities is not only for attention to energy as a theme within literary stud-
ies, whether energy appears in texts directly or symptomatically, but also for a
refashioning of literary or cultural theory. Theory (writ large) as a mechanism
through which to conceptualize and understand texts also developed with-
out attention to the material significance of energy. In contemporary theory,
modern subjectivity is not deeply and indelibly shaped by access to energy,
nor is the apparatus of governmentality defined by the growing presence of
energy for its operation and continuation (to take but two sites of work in
theory). The problems we raise here about simple mappings of energy type
to literary period point to deeper redefinitions of the forces shaping literature
prompted by a recognition of energy’s material and historical importance.

Still in its early stages, this critical work is essential for grappling with climate
change. For only by understanding the degree to which we have been defined
by cheap and readily available fossil fuels will we have the capacity to engage
in the forms of sociocultural transition needed to become different kinds of
subjects, living different forms of life.
Notes
1. For recent statistics on worldwide energy consumption and production, see the
June 2018 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, available at
https://www.bp.com/content/dam/bp/en/corporate/pdf/energy-econom-
ics/statistical-review/bp-stats-review-2018-full-report.pdf.
2. See, for instance, LeMenager (2014), Macdonald (2014), and Lord (2014).
3. On the Great Acceleration, see McNeill and Engelke (2016). In terms of the
dominance of the geopolitical perspective in discussing energy and climate,
Matt Huber (2013, xi) notes that “the story of oil is almost always told from
the perspective of ‘big’ forces … Yet the problem with these big stories of oil
is they ignore the fact that oil is also incredibly ordinary because it is embed-
ded in everyday patterns of life.” Literary and cultural production has generally
been complicit in this framing.
4. The “energy humanities” explores the significance of energy in shaping cultural
and social practices. It is especially concerned with assessing the complex ways
in which access to an ever-expanding amount of fossil fuel energy over the past
two centuries has impacted all aspects of subjectivity and sociality, including
those related to literary and cultural production. Building on work such as
Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization (1934), E.J. Schumacher’s Small
Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered (1973), and Ivan
Illich’s Energy and Equity (1974), energy humanities attends not only to vis-
ible energy practices (e.g., modern values of mobility and personal autonomy
linked to automobile use) and their immediate impacts, but also to the man-
ner in which energy shapes the unconscious aspects of subjectivity as expressed
in literary and cultural production. Due to the impact of fossil fuel use on
environmental systems, energy humanities is also concerned with investigat-
ing the mechanisms of cultural and social transition that would help propel a
shift from fossil fuels to other, more sustainable forms of energy. See Baptista
(2017), Szeman and Boyer (2017), and Wenzel (2016).
5. Karl Marx’s (1847, 92; emphasis added) observation in The Poverty of
Philosophy that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-
mill, society with the industrial capitalist” is a well-known example of such
viewpoints.
6. See Morton (2013).
7. This is the guiding idea of Yaeger et al. (2011).
8. See Wallace-Wells (2019).
9. Annual petroleum consumption in the United States increased from 6 quadril-
lion BTUs in 1950 to 19.9 quadrillion BTUs in 1960 (EIA 2011).
10. On the absence of energy in political economy and its effects on the discipline,
see Beaudreau (2008).
References
Baptista, Karina. 2017. Petrocultures. In Global South Studies. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia. https://globalsouthstudies.as.virginia.edu/key-concepts/
petrocultures.
Beaudreau, Bernard C. 2008. Energy and the Rise and Fall of Political Economy.
Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.
Bellamy, Brent Ryan. 2017. Petrorealism. In Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy
and Environment, ed. Imre Szeman, Jennifer Wenzel, and Patricia Yaeger, 259–
262. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Bellamy, Brent Ryan, Michael O’Driscoll, and Mark Simpson. 2016. Introduction:
Toward a Theory of Resource Aesthetics. Postmodern Culture 26 (2): n.p. https://
muse.jhu.edu/article/635537.
Boyer, Dominic. 2014. Energopower: An Introduction. Anthropological Quarterly 87
(2): 309–333.
Calvino, Italo. 1996. The Petrol Pump. In Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories,
170–175. New York, NY: Vintage.
Collis, Stephen. 2016. Once in Blockadia. Vancouver, BC: Talonbooks.
Cottrell, Fred. 1955. Energy & Society: The Relation Between Energy, Social Change,
and Economic Development. Toronto, ON: Authorhouse.
Debeir, Jean-Claude, Jean-Paul Deléage, and Daniel Hémery. 1991. In the Servitude
of Power: Energy and Civilisation Through the Ages. London: Zed Books.
Diamanti, Jeff. 2016. “Energyscapes, Architecture, and the Expanded Field of
Postindustrial Philosophy.” Postmodern Culture 26 (2). https://muse.jhu.edu/
article/635541.
Dickinson, Adam. 2013. The Polymers. Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.
———. 2018. Anatomic. Toronto, ON: Coach House Books.
EIA. 2011. History of Energy Consumption in the United States, 1775–2009—Today in
Energy—U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). U.S. Energy Information
Administration. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=10.
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. Forthcoming. Foreword. In Oil Fictions, ed. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi
Nandi. State College, PA: Penn State University Press.
Habila, Helon. 2011. Oil on Water: A Novel. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
Huber, Matt. 2013. Lifeblood: Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Ifowodo, Ogaga. 2005. The Oil Lamp. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press.
Illich, Ivan. 1974. Energy and Equity. London: Calder & Boyars.
King, Thomas. 2014. The Back of the Turtle. New York, NY: HarperCollins.
Kushner, Rachel. 2013. The Flamethrowers. New York, NY: Scribner.
LeMenager, Stephanie. 2014. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Lord, Barry. 2014. Art & Energy: How Culture Changes. Washington, DC: The AAM
Press.
Macdonald, Graeme. 2012. Oil and World Literature. American Book Review 33 (3):
7–31.
———. 2013. Research Note: The Resources of Fiction. Reviews in Cultural Theory 4
(2): 1–24.
———. 2014. Improbability Drives: The Energy of SF. Paradoxa 26: 111–144.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global
Warming. New York, NY: Verso.
———. 2017. ‘This Is the Hell That I Have Heard of’: Some Dialectical Images in
Fossil Fuel Fiction. Forum for Modern Language Studies 3 (2): 121–141.
Marx, Karl. 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy. London: Martin Lawrence Limited.
McCarthy, Tom. 2015. Satin Island. London: Jonathan Cape.
McNeill, J.R., and Peter Engelke. 2016. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental
History of the Anthropocene Since 1945. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the
World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Mumford, Lewis. 2010 [1934]. Technics and Civilization. Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Melbourne: re.press.
Neruda, Pablo. 2011 [1940]. Standard Oil Co. In Canto General, 176–77. Oakland,
CA: University of California Press.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1985. Slow Learner: Early Stories. New York, NY: Little, Brown.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 1992. Red Mars. London: Harper Collins.
———. 1995. Green Mars. London: Harper Collins.
———. 1996. Blue Mars. London: Harper Collins.
Schumacher, E.J. 2010 [1973]. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People
Mattered. New York, NY: Perennial.
Sinclair, Upton. 1927. Oil! New York, NY: Grosset & Dunlap.
Smil, Vaclav. 2004. World History and Energy. In Encyclopedia of Energy, vol. 2, ed.
Cleveland Vutler, 549–561. New York, NY: Elsevier.
Stenson, Fred. 2015. Who By Fire. New York, NY: Anchor.
Szeman, Imre, and Dominic Boyer. 2017. Introduction: On the Energy Humanities.
In Energy Humanities: An Anthology, ed. Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, 1–13.
Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Wallace-Wells, David. 2019. The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York,
NY: Tim Duggan Books.
Walters, Wendy W. Forthcoming. “We Are Pipeline People”: Nnedi Okorafor’s
Ecofeminist Speculations. In Oil Fiction, ed. Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi.
State College, PA: Penn State University Press.
Wenzel, Jennifer. 2006. Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian
Literature. Postcolonial Studies 9 (4): 449–464.
———. 2016. Taking Stock of the Energy Humanities. Reviews in Cultural Theory 6
(3): 30–34.
Williams, Rhys. 2018. Solarpunk: Against a Shitty Future. Los Angeles Review of Books,
March 10. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/solarpunk-against-a-shitty-future/#!.
Yaeger, Patricia, et al. 2011. Editor’s Column: Literature in the Ages of Wood, Tallow,
Coal, Whale Oil, Gasoline, Atomic Power, and Other Energy Sources. PMLA 126
(2): 305–310.
CHAPTER 6
Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences

Mediated by Computing Machines
Yves Citton
For centuries, the emergence of “literature” and the emergence of “science”

have run a parallel course, oppositional, symmetrical, but also intertwined,
entangled around a functional solidarity. The (in)famous “two cultures”
needed each other to define themselves—often repetitively, and pointlessly.1
Something, however, has thrown a wrench into this well-rehearsed debate
since the 1940s: let’s call it “computing machines.” They write and they
think, don’t they? Just like literary folks, although not quite. They calculate
and test and verify, don’t they? Just like scientists, although differently. Since
the advent of “deep learning,” a.k.a. “machine learning,” they even gener-
ate hypotheses (belying Newton [1713, 482], who pretended not to: hypoth-
eses non fingo), and mimicking fiction writers and theorists, who thought
they were so quintessentially human. The (rather slow) emergence of com-
puting machines upsets the traditional boundaries between literature and the
sciences: it reveals deeper solidarities between them, as well as new contrasts.
This article suggests that we may gain a better understanding and a firmer
grasp on their present and future developments if we move from a cultural
logic based on the binary opposition between two modes of knowledge (sci-
entific vs. literary) to one that emerges from the triangulation of three forms
of intelligence (scientific, literary, computational).
A couple of preliminary remarks about the status of what will be addressed
as “Literature” in the following pages may prevent misunderstandings. Even
if I have been “teaching literature” for more than three decades, on both
Y. Citton (*) 
Université Paris 8 & EUR ArTeC, Saint-Denis, France

98 Y. CITTON
sides of the Atlantic, I feel increasingly unable to define what the word “liter-
ature” may mean nowadays. Nor do I even know whether it ought to be used
at all. I start my “Introduction to Literary Studies” undergraduate course by
sharing my discomfort with my students: I ask them what they enjoy reading,
viewing, practicing, or listening to, and I tell them that whatever they will
bring to class as enjoyable will be considered “literature” by my standards.
This is the only literary way to teach literature I have been able to come up
with. While I am confident that I might defend theoretically such an unor-
thodox (non-)definition of “literature,” I understand the reader may find it
unsettling, as we are about to set off for an assessment of the relative virtues
and domains of the sciences, computation, and literature. My point will be
that it is of the essence of “literature” to question the meanings of the signs it
uses, including those it needs to define itself and its function.
Three implications follow, however, which need to be acknowledged
upfront. First, I will include literary studies (and not only literary creations)
within the category of “literature,” as one of its possible forms of experience.
Second, I tend to treat the disciplinary specificity of “literature” as providing
a platform of in(ter)disciplinary cross-pollination, and I tend to consider the
“humanities” as reflexive modes of interpretation—which leads to a constant
overlapping (and potential convergence) between literature and the humani-
ties at large (see Citton 2010). Third, and more disturbingly, since scientific
discourse or experiments, as well as computational adventures, can be claimed
as enjoyable by my students—binding me to integrate them into my rather
generous definition of “literature”—all the dichotomies discussed below
between science, computation, and literature will be provisional at best.
I hope to show that even such an initial chaos of utmost confusion can result
in an operational reconfiguration of our intellectual endeavors, once we
reconsider it under the triangulation provided by computing machines.
The Great Divide

Let us start with a quick glimpse of the good reasons that led the previous
decades (and centuries) to draw a foundational opposition between “the
sciences,” on one side, and “literature,” on the other. I will briefly survey
these dichotomies—ignoring their complex origins to envisage them mainly
as they have been incorporated into our common sense. From the point of
view of their content, the sciences have been identified as referential, insofar
as they pretend to account for the ways our actual world presents itself to us,
while much of literature has been seen as devoted to fictional entities. Science
emanates from observers, literature and the arts from imaginers. Scientific
inquiry provides a descriptive approach of the world we live in, while a major-
ity of literary writings stage narrative trajectories within actual or possible
worlds. Not only the natural sciences, but psychology too, are outer-oriented,
insofar as they consider their objects of description from an external point
6 TRIANGULATE: LITERATURE AND THE SCIENCES MEDIATED … 99
of view, whereas literary inquiries can often be inner-oriented, accounting for

perceptions and sentiments from within the worldview that is described.
As far as their operational agents are concerned, the modern sciences are
reputed to progress through collective endeavors, teamwork, and multi-authored
articles, while modern literature is largely seen as an individualist activity. The
former rely heavily on technologically equipped procedures, while the latter, per-
ceived as artfully crafted, can always be minimally practiced with paper and a pen.
As a consequence, scientific activity tends to be expensive, in order to pay for the
equipment or staff it requires, while literary practices can come as cheap as the
cheapest forms of food and lodging available.
From the point of view of their methods, the sciences ought to deal with
the quantifiable, while literature revels in dealing with the unquantifiable.
The former rely on refutable assumptions and procedures, while the latter
is happy to rest on undecidable hypotheses. The former are expected to be
disciplined and standardized in their operations, while the latter is valorized
insofar as it is creative in the forms and procedures it mobilizes along its way.
The scientific methods claim to be objective, insofar as they attempt to erase
any personal interference generated by the singularity of their agents, while
literary writing has no qualm about being subjective, insofar as it acknowl-
edges the inescapable dependence of the results on the singular personality of
the agent. As a consequence, the former have some legitimacy in pretending
to reach some form of universal necessity, while the latter is limited to assert-
ing contingent singularities.
More important for our present purpose, than their content, their oper-
ational agents, or their methods, the sciences can be opposed to literature
in terms of their modes of abstraction. In the vocabulary popularized by Tim
Ingold (2007), the sciences do their best to construct an “above perspective,”
whereby they consider facts and behaviors with distance and superiority, as if
bending over a colony of ants. Literature, instead, tends to adopt an “along
perspective,” whereby the reader follows a certain path of life along the way
experienced by the narrator-wayfarer. The benefits of the superior position
reached by scientific abstraction come with a heavy price tag, however: they
can only consider the workings of the ant colony one relevant parameter at
a time. In a novel, conversely, a jealous passion can be mentioned alongside
a certain financial interest, a change in the weather, a calumnious rumor, an
unpleasant smell. While the scientific approach would start by dissecting the
co-occurrence of these multifarious phenomena into different fields of inves-
tigation, each ruled by its specific method and discipline, literary narration
or poetry confront us to their agglomeration into one single block of real-
ity. Contrary to the sciences, literature performs analytic abstraction without
enslaving itself to it.
This enslavement of the scientific approach to the fragmentation of the
reality it studies will appear more clearly in another contrast raised by their
respective mode of abstraction. Even if they often fail fully to reach their
100 Y. CITTON
ideal, the sciences attempt to maintain a level of explicitness that formalizes

their measures and relevant parameters in non-ambiguous terms, whereas
implicitness, polysemy, and equivocity play a crucial role in our so-called
natural languages, allowing literary writing to mobilize the potentialities
of ambiguous expressions in order to help new perceptions and reflections
emerge from our ever-changing relations with our environment. In other
words: scientific investigation constrains itself to the (impossible) task of mak-
ing fully explicit and unambiguous all the terms it uses to refer to the world
(generally devising a systematically formalized language in order to do so
more rigorously), while literary writing not only tolerates, but exploits as a
vital resource the variable amount of implicitness, ambiguity, and equivocity
inherent to our natural languages.
To wrap up (provisionally) this rough opposition between literature and
the sciences, one can refer to Roland Barthes’s famous 1987 depiction of the
odd structure of literary communication. While a play by Racine or a novel by
Richardson seems to be making a series of positive assertions about the char-
acters and situations they present to us, it is more accurate to read them as
raising questions under the guise of providing answers. Hence a final contrast
between the sciences and literature: whereas the goal of scientific inquiry is to
provide reliable answers, the goal shared by literary writing and the humani-
ties is to help us formulate relevant questions—i.e., public problems.
Should one look more closely at any of these massive traditional dichoto-
mies, one would easily find exceptions, borderline cases, and hybrid practices
that blur such neat distinctions. As a matter of fact, rather than taking these
terms of opposition as satisfactory criteria to separate scientific from literary
activities, it would be much more interesting to hone in on these cracks and
flaws, which is where “real” science and “real” literature actually take place,
far from the clichés into which one tends to corner them. Taken as a whole
and considered from a safe distance, however, this set of dichotomies can suf-
fice to account for our common intuitions, as well as for the apparent odd-
ity of witnessing, at different periods of our literary history (the 1880s and
the 1970s, in the case of France), a “science of literature” emerge among the
disciplines, while several forms of “scientific literature” have been around for
quite a long time.
Computing as Ubiquitous Writing

The point I would like to make is that the emergence of computing
machines, over the last seventy years, should lead us to acknowledge the col-
lapse of some of the dichotomies evoked in the previous section, and the rad-
ical reconfiguration of others. Let us run the list quickly a second time, to
see how often computers introduce a wedge into these traditional dichoto-
mies. In the following pages, I will use the word “computer” to refer to what
Alan Kay defined as a meta-medium, i.e., an electronic apparatus (potentially
connected to sensors and networks) processing digitalized information with

the capacity to simulate any other medium (Kay and Goldberg 1977, 32–33;
see also Manovich 2013).
The oppositions of content—between, on one side, a referential effort,
performed by mere observers attempting to produce an outer-oriented
description of an exterior reality and, on the other side, fictional imaginers
generating inner-oriented narrative events—find themselves deeply upset by
the workings of our computers. As Vilém Flusser (1985) realized many dec-
ades ago, a radically new ontogenesis entered our world with the advent of
what he then called “telematics” (i.e., the capacity to digitalize every type of
information into binary bits, to store, compute, recombine, and send them
at will). The indexical nature of the chemical photographic image—which, as
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown (2010), played such a crucial
role in the definition of scientific objectivity—is nowadays merely “simulated”
by digital metamedia which rely on binary symbolic codes and software ficta
(i.e., modelized and modelizing fictions) in order to detect, monitor, record,
and transmit “objective” facta.
In our digital world, a referential photography is no less reconfigured than
the dinosaurs resuscitated in the Jurassic Park film series: it too results from
one possible Photoshop setting among many others. Whereas the analog
camera, once it had been built, was bound to document the input in an
indexical fashion, the computing metamedium is only simulating an indexi-
cal mode of representation, as one of its many possible settings (see Mitchell
1992). The same hardware could equally well be programmed to selectively
erase certain forms, or substitute certain colors or sounds for other. As soon
as they use the mediation of digital devices, observers can only see through
the eyes (i.e., screens) of imaginers, inescapably introducing the fictional (i.e.,
a modelization) into the heart of the referential.
The apparatuses that (re)launched the adventure of scientific objectiv-
ity in the nineteenth and twentieth century (cameras, microphones) drew
their epistemological power from their ability to bypass human subjectivity
and human intervention (see Kittler 1986). A purely physico-chemical pro-
cess generated an imprint from the exposure of a certain portion of reality
to a sensitive medium. This analog imprint was reputed and bound to be
iconic-indexical, to recombine two of Peirce’s famous categories. It consisted
both in an imaginary resemblance (like all icons) and in forensic evidence
(like all indexes): something had actually been there, in front of the camera
or the microphone, and it looked or sounded like that. Today’s computing
apparatuses, by contrast, unavoidably reintroduce the filter of human inter-
vention and human subjectivity, since the programs that run the machines
have been devised and designed by social and historical subjects (software
programmers, who have been moved by sexual drives, motivated by ideologi-
cal agendas or salaried by capital).
Or, to state this in a vocabulary more obviously relevant to discussing
the relations between literature and the sciences: scientific equipment (in
102 Y. CITTON
its apparatuses as well as in its epistemology) ingeniously attempted to have

Nature write itself through the sensitive (but ideally “neutral”) intermedi-
ary devices presented to her; computers can simulate such a neutral inter-
mediation, with unprecedented degrees of accuracy and fidelity, but they
necessarily (re)introduce human writing at the very core of the process of
documentation (recording, monitoring, transmitting). During two centu-
ries, the sciences have done their best to repress human (“subjective”) writing
in order to let us hear and see matter express itself: mechanical objectivity
has written rules and generated devices capable of neutralizing the deforma-
tions inherent to the human activity of reading and writing. As a reaction to
this victorious trend, literature, from Mallarmé to Woolf, and from Joyce to
Rushdie, has staged the unchained freedom of human writing in its multifari-
ous capacity to permeate matter with human meaning.
With the advent of ubiquitous computing, it becomes clear that writing
intermediates all of our relations to our world—and, soon, to ourselves. This
ubiquitous writing is both intensely human and never-merely-human, since it
is massively machinic, automatized, inhumane, and sometimes de-humanizing
(Kittler 1986). Literature—as the art of writing and of paying attention to the
art of writing—is, quite literally, everyware (Greenfield 2006), even though it
is indeed increasingly difficult to find it in its traditional human-centric guises.
Arts of Programming
In our common imaginaries, there is certainly a great distance between the
Romantic poet drafting love verses under a tree, the devoted scientist mulling
over data in her high-tech campus lab, and the software-designer (poorly)
paid to devise new algorithms giving capitalism a firmer grip on our minds
and behaviors. And yet, all of them are in the business of programming—a
term considered here in accordance with its etymology: to “write ahead,” to
“write in advance,” to “pre-scribe.” The poet, the scientist, and the software
designer all write (today) what will be done and thought (tomorrow) by their
fellow humans. What they are in the business of writing are not mere state-
ments (matters of fact or matters of concern), nor even rules, as legislators
do—but rather protocols.
As we learned from Alexander Galloway’s classic book (2004), protocols—
illustrated by the TCP-IP standards that operate our access to the Internet—
leave us free to receive and send any content as long as we respect certain
formal and functional rules of syntax, playing a similar role to that of gram-
mar in our common languages. The message conveyed by your sentence
can be anarchist or royalist, but it will need to respect the formal rules of
word positions and agreement in order to reach the understanding of your
addressee.
What we learned from (French) theory in the 1960s and onward is that
literature does not merely produce messages: it reshapes the very protocols
through which we communicate with each other. Similarly, science does not
merely tell us whether our health is determined by our DNA or by our intes-
tinal microbiote: it provides us with protocols helping us to investigate ques-
tions in order to reach reliable conclusions. Science, literature, and coding: all
three program us insofar as they constantly write the grammar through which
we are led to account for our experiences, orient ourselves in them, react to
them, and share our reactions with others. Galloway (2004) suggested that
protocols are the way power imposes itself after decentralization. We could
add that protocols and programs—i.e., written procedures which write ahead
of time how we will write each other’s fate—are what remains after the Great
Divide between literature and science has been reconfigured into a triangula-
tion with computation.
A suggestive polysemy positions the word matrix to encapsulate simulta-
neously the mathematical root, economic productivity, and the social effects
of protocols. A matrix is a computational device, a rectangular array of num-
bers arranged in rows and columns, widely used in computer graphics. Its ety-
mological root (mater, “mother”) points to its cross-generative properties. As
an abstract structure, a matrix can not only generate a wide variety of objects,
depending on the data introduced in it: a matrix can also be multiplied by
another matrix, combining two operations (a horizontal displacement and a
folding upon itself) into one compounded transformation. It certainly is more
than a coincidence if The Matrix (1999) provides the title for one of our most
popular cinematic anxieties about the all-encompassing and totalitarian power
of ubiquitous computing machines. The matrix literally appears as the com-
putational womb out of which our relations with reality are generated, modu-
lated, and controlled through algorithmic recombination.
Our (perception of the) environment is structured as well as populated
by forms of writing which are forms of matricing. The storyteller does not
merely tell us about a sequence of events: she instills inside of us a narrative
pattern (a matrix) which will prime our future expectations. A discoverer does
not merely uncover a certain portion of reality: with each major discovery,
she provides us with a new paradigm (a matrix) which alters and renews the
way we understand, explain, and experience reality. Much like the program-
mer does, the storyteller and the discoverer write formal protocols—matri-
ces—which condition us a long way beyond the punctual content of what they
write. This content still matters, of course. But computation helps us relo-
cate agency at a higher level—that of matricing—which happens to be equally
decisive for literature as for the sciences, but directly rooted in computing
operations.
The operational agents, when viewed under the light of such arts of pro-
gramming, can be neither fully individual, since a grammar and a protocol
gain traction only insofar as they are shared, nor merely collective, since the
emergence of new forms of writing always sprouts from singular encoun-
ters and insistent idiosyncrasies. As Pierre Lévy (1992) and Anthony Masure
(2017) have eloquently shown, the fine art of writing software brings
together the reputedly contradictory characteristics of being technologically
104 Y. CITTON
Fig. 6.1 First diagram

of triangulation
equipped (like the sciences) and artfully crafted (like literature). As for the
methods involved in the arts of programming, they need to be both highly
disciplined, since one small error in syntax can suffice to paralyze a giant
machine, and highly creative, since a truly “elegant” solution to a strictly
localized problem can pave the way for an unforeseeable range of unsuspected
applications. Nowhere else than in the arts of programming mobilized by
and around computing machines can one observe such a tight articulation
between, on one side, the (supposedly scientific) universal necessity of purely
logical relations set into motion to generate a perfectly understandable course
of action and, on the other side, the (supposedly literary) contingent writing
of all-too-human individuals, who can be brilliantly or poorly inspired on the
day they wrote any particular line of code (Fig. 6.1).
What lesson can we draw from this first foray into the triangulation? The
arts of programming developed by computation can be positioned as a third
term which reveals the protocological nature of the work performed in the
sciences as well as in literature. The content, the operational agents, and the
methods which were used to oppose both sides of the Great Divide seem
overdetermined—and, up to a certain point, neutralized—by computation,
insofar as ubiquitous computation immerses us in a world of ubiquitous writ-
ing, which hybridizes the supposedly incompatible features considered to be
specific to each side, and exclusive of the other. In this version of the triangle,
computing “absorbs” and rearticulates what the sciences and literature used
to do separately. This first diagram of triangulation foregrounds the impor-
tance of the “meta-” level of writing illustrated by matrices and protocols: a
writing which writes ahead (“pro-grams”) how it will be (im)possible to write
in the future.
Powers of Abstraction, Dangers of Extraction

This first diagram of triangulation discussed issues of content, operational
agents, and methods, but it left aside the contrast based on different modes
of abstraction. Addressing these will generate a second diagram, significantly
different from the previous one. The triumph of everyware computing is the
triumph of abstraction. Everything, at any moment—we are told—is (about
to be) digitalized and computed by algorithms. This digitalization is a form
of abstraction. My shopping habits, my blood pressure, my communications
with my friends, my cat’s wanderings around my garden: all of these highly
complex forms of material and mental behaviors are translated into sequences
of 0 and 1, into data formatted by computing machines in order to be pro-
cessed by computing machines. This massive enterprise of digitalization and
computation continues, accelerates, and industrializes a gesture that has been
performed for half a millennium, on the artisanal level, by scientists in their
laboratories—the gesture of extraction resulting in what we call abstraction.
Since Galileo, Newton, and Lavoisier, the sciences have progressed by extract-
ing ever more precise relevant figures from their environmental grounds.
These figures consisted both in objects of knowledge (a constellation, a
chemical element, a bacterium) and in quantitative data (the speed of light,
the frequency of a given sound wave).
This extraction of (quantifiable) figures from what previously appeared as
a mere background gave Western modernity a truly amazing traction on the
physical, biological, and social world. The development of the technosciences,
rooted in and fueled by this power of abstraction, has provided the cogni-
tive means which, through the industrial revolution, have allowed Western
nations and empires radically to reconfigure (and ravage) our physical, bio-
logical, and social environments, pushing humankind into the Anthropocene.
The sciences, literature, and early forms of computation (like financial
accounting) have each played their part in this progressive triumph of abstrac-
tion, which has both dramatically expanded human control over “nature”
and folded it back on itself in countless highly threatening and uncontrollable
feedback loops.
Anthropologists like Anna Tsing (2015), political thinkers like Julie
Graham and Katherine Gibson (2006), and environmental activists like
Frédéric Neyrat (2018) jointly denounce the dangers and calamities gener-
ated by the extractivist attitude which has been the flip side of this triumph
of abstraction. Western industrialists, in striking similarity to Western scien-
tists, have (mis)treated our world as a mere supply of resources, reducing its
entangled complexity to quantifiable figures (assets) that could be extracted
from insignificant backgrounds. Extractivism mines our natural as well as
social environments in search of profitable assets, which it extracts without
bothering to ask how these resources were generated, nor how they can be
renewed in a sustainable manner. Extractivism extracts the profitable figure
without caring for the ground, hence undermining our perspectives of future
well-being.
What does all this have to do with our triangulation between sciences,
literature, and computation? Here again, as it was the case with writing and
protocoling, computation brings in full light the far-reaching implications of
the process of abstraction which was already at work within the operations
performed by literature and the sciences. What is a poem, an essay, or a novel
if not an extraction of meaningful figures from the (otherwise meaningless)
background of a certain experience? What is scientific formula, spelled out
after years of trials and errors in order to account for a certain physical, bio-
logical, or social phenomenon, if not an extraction of meaningful figures from
106 Y. CITTON
the puzzling backgrounds of nature and society? Both appear as a sequence

of symbols (letters, numbers)—very similar and reducible to a sequence of 0s
and 1s—abstracted from the multifarious entanglement of an infinitely com-
plex relational situation, encapsulated into a matrix allowing us to understand
and modulate future outcomes.
As we saw in the first section, however, there are a few crucial differences
between the modes of abstraction practiced by literature and by the sciences.
They are most strikingly expressed in Gilbert Simondon’s 1958 book On the
Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. In the last part of the book, Simondon
presents the social function of the religious and of the aesthetic experiences as
connecting us to the ground out of which the technosciences have extracted
their figures. Call it God, Allah, or Nature: all religions invite us to care for
what remains after the profitable asset has been cleverly extracted, profitably
exploited, and individually enjoyed. Something lingers behind this punctual
enjoyment, a background which is very difficult to identify, to name, to figure
out—precisely because it consists in what is left behind what we can figure
out of it. When Timothy Morton (2013) attempted to illustrate the category
of “hyperobjects”—which, too, demand from us to identify a presence which
is not perceptible as an isolable object—he did not turn to religions but to
art works and aesthetic experiences. The basic problem was similar, however:
how does one establish a (caring) relation with the ground itself (the envi-
ronment), when the inner structure of our perceptual habits obfuscates this
ground, by focusing our attention on the extracted figures which blind us to
what remains left behind?
This is where the difference between the modes of abstraction developed
by literature and by the sciences become relevant. Abstracting from an above
position, as the sciences attempt to do, or from an along position, as literature
and the arts usually do, induces a significantly different attitude toward the
environment. The wayfarer feels and touches the ground, while the balloon
flyer merely maps it. The literary mode of abstraction generally acknowledges
that it is situated within a sensory world of entangled relations, while the
scientific mode of abstraction tries hard to extract itself from its living back-
ground (in the name of “objectivation”).
A Fundamentalist Universe of Information, or a Livable

World of Meanings?
More importantly, and more directly linked to the third player of the triangu-
lation, the ideal of univocity which guides scientific discourse as well as ana-
lytic philosophy can be seen as a form of figural fundamentalism: only that
which manages unambiguously to detach itself from its living background
will be accepted in the purified microcosm ruled by rigorous demonstration,
formal proof, and experimental refutability. Only pure figures can enter the
debate, to confirm or refute other pure figures. The imperative of explicitness
presupposes that “objects” can only be properly identified if they are une-
quivocally isolated—extracted—from their milieu. Here again, computing
machines help us realize the full scope of such an imperative, both in the tre-
mendous power of abstraction that it unleashes, and in the disquieting dan-
gers of extraction that it materializes. The “artificial intelligence” developed
in computing machines is both amazingly powerful, when it comes to sorting
out billions of data in a millisecond, and pathetically dumb, when it comes to
do something as basic as walking up a staircase. A verb as semantically simple
a “to walk” makes sense to any human being, even if none of us is capable of
explicitly delineating what it exactly entails to walk up a staircase. It is because
their “natural” languages ignore figural fundamentalism that human intelli-
gences manage to communicate with each other on a practical basis, i.e., in
our lived world of objects undetachable from their background.
One error message commonly encountered in programming emblema-
tizes the gap between these two modes of abstraction: object reference not set
to an instance of an object. In literature and in the arts, as in our lived world,
objects may be extracted from their original environment, but they remain
connected to entanglements of entities which pre-exist any explicit definition
we may attempt to provide about them. In the world of computing machines,
one has to set an object as an instance of an object (in a procedure bound to
obey a certain protocol) before a reference can be made to that object. Here
is the epitome of figural fundamentalism: whatever has not been explicitly
pro-grammed to be an instance of an object has no existence whatsoever. The
computing world both functionalizes and radicalizes the ideal of explicitness
that the sciences professed, but were never (and will never be) capable of fully
enforcing (Fig. 6.2).
Our second diagram of triangulation looks quite different from the first
one. Instead of computation bringing forth the commonalities between liter-
ature and the sciences, it now reveals a limit of the scientific endeavor (both
in the sense of an asymptote and of a limitation), as well as a virtue of liter-
ary activities (both in the sense of a merit and of a power). The triumph of
the computing abstraction projects us in an unlivable world, since this world
requires objects to be explicitly pre-defined and programmed before they can
be referred to. Symmetrically, this second triangulation sheds light on the
importance of being ambiguous (much more than of being earnest): implic-
itness and equivocity are a pre-condition for relating to the world in a livable
Fig. 6.2 Second diagram of triangulation

108 Y. CITTON
(i.e., in a non-fundamentalist) manner. We need literature and the arts, liter-

ary studies and the humanities, to make our world of ubiquitous computing
livable, thanks to the flexibility introduced, maintained, and nurtured by an
art of writing that takes polysemy as a challenge, an ally, an opportunity, and
a source of inspiration, rather than as an enemy to eradicate. As Tega Brain
(2018) recently put it, “the environment is not a system”—and we need
something else than systemic computation to live in our environments.
In order to tie together two claims made separately in the previous par-
agraphs, one could suggest that the care for the background attributed by
Simondon to religious and aesthetic approaches constitutes the other side of
the tolerance and inclination toward equivocity. Ambiguous statements need
contextual reference in order to make sense: their figures maintain a certain
dependency toward the environment and the background out of which they
were abstracted. Literary enunciation simultaneously abstracts itself from its
contextual origins (contrary to non-literary statements like “You owe me ten
bucks”) and assumes its anchorage within situated and situating backgrounds.
Literary enunciation acknowledges that one always says more (implicitly) than
one knows (explicitly). It is this exceeding of what is tacitly conveyed over
what is explicitly intended that connects our statements, as well as our knowl-
edge, to our social and natural surroundings.
Retrospectively, the mechanical demands of computational programming
reveal the extremism of the (dominant) scientific epistemology (and its twin
brother, analytical philosophy). One way to account for this extremist prox-
imity between computing machines and the sciences would be to project
the gap that separates them from the literary attitude on a polarity oppos-
ing a universe of information to a world of meanings. Computing machines
allow us to redefine information as that support of knowledge (data) which
can circulate (be stored, transmitted, processed) within electromagnetic cir-
cuitry. Our computers, servers, hard drives, and usb keys are full of informa-
tion, which algorithms can sort out and recombine in countless manners,
according to countless goals. Information technology, in the digital era, is
only a matter of electricity—strictly physical. Information is only endowed
with meaning once some form of human attention invests its bodily (analog)
energy into it. It takes flesh for information to make sense.
Beyond the piles of books and articles devoted analytically to distinguish
“meaning” from “sense,” I use both terms indifferently within the scope of
this article, insofar as both presuppose something more than mere informa-
tion. Namely: the capacity pragmatically to apply and adjust a set of instruc-
tions and data to a singular environment of action, as an affective response
to a socially constructed but individually felt situation. Such a definition of
meaning/sense is not to be limited to the “propositional content” or “mes-
sage” of intentional act of communication between humans. My caresses
probably have meaning and sense for my cat. The greater part of our liter-
ary experiences is carried under, above, or beyond what an author may
have intentionally meant to convey to her readers, under, above, or beyond
what our explicit reasons can identify as the purpose(s) of our actions. It
takes flesh for information to make sense, because it takes a living body for
affects to process and express a “felt reality of relation” (Massumi 2002, 16).
Compared to the intents, goals, and purposes we can be aware of, mean-
ing is fundamentally open-ended, insofar as a feeling comes prior to the
reaction a relation may generate in us. Meaning and sense are rich with the
“pre-acceleration” that emerges in (animal) moving bodies before they even
start to move, from the simple fact that they always-already belong to cer-
tain relations (see Manning 2009). Computing machines concretely display
the fully achieved abstraction of information reduced to purely electric dif-
ferentials (0s and 1s), thus accomplishing the ideal of objectivity, necessity,
explicitness, and universality the sciences have dreamed about over the last
four centuries. Conversely, the dumbness and senseless nature of computing
machines reveal the extent and importance of the fleshing out of information
into meaning, performed every time an animal body makes a physical or men-
tal movement. By doing so, computing machines set the parameters for what
ought to be the most extensive ground of action opened for literature by the
advent of ubiquitous computing: there is room (and there is need) for literary
work to be done each time information is in want of meaning and sense. (Hence
my apparently mad claim that anything undergraduate students can consider
as enjoyable will be considered literary by my standards.)
Writing Programs Against the Programs

Coming from a professor in literature, this second diagram of triangula-
tion—which portrays literature as a potential savior against the dangers of an
extractivist attitude pushed to a fundamentalist extremism by scientists and
computers alike—can legitimately be suspected to reek of shameful corpo-
ratism. It would obviously be ridiculous to fall back on the worn-out cliché
opposing a soulless technoscience to a humanist conscience. Biologists and
climate scientists are much more active, visible, and efficient than poets and
novelists at the forefront of our current ecological struggles. Hackers2 have
denounced and fought against totalitarian computation much more inspir-
ingly than literary scholars. We therefore need to complement our triangula-
tion with a third diagram, in order to show how literature, the sciences, and
the arts of programming can converge and set up new alliances in overcoming
the dangers of our digital age (Fig. 6.3).
Practitioners of literature (and, more generally, artists), scientists, as well as
hackers, can indeed all be enrolled under a common banner, whenever they
operate as writers of programs that paradoxically attempt to overcome the lim-
itations inherent to (pre-existing forms of) programing. Adopting such a view
would suggest, however, that the sciences may be on the verge of experienc-
ing a split that has affected the literary domain for quite a while. One has
long ago ceased to expect novelists, poets, playwrights, and literary critics
to provide us with answers to the burning questions of the day: their role is
110 Y. CITTON
Fig. 6.3 Third diagram

of triangulation
rather to question our current responses and solutions, not to provide better
or definitive ones. Scientists, by contrast, are still often expected to function
as authoritative sources of answers to tackle the problems faced by our soci-
eties. This expectation may wane in the decades ahead, just like it progres-
sively waned for literary writers and critics during the twentieth century. As
the figure of the “information processor”—once devoted to the clerc and the
lettré, then delegated to the savant and the scientist—tends to be mechanized
and automatized in our computing machines, the function of the scientist will
have to redefine itself along displaced lines. And this process is likely to bring
about new parallels between artists, scientists, and hackers.
All three categories deserve to be resituated and reconsidered within the
new mode of algorithmic governance identified for half a century with the
rise of cybernetics. The Cyberneticist—i.e., the expert in information science
capable of writing programs likely to provide trustable answers by sorting out
relevant data and developing relevant algorithms—becomes the default figure
of dominant knowledge, enthroned at the summit of our triangle. Positioned
in contradistinction to the cyberneticist, artists, scientists, and hackers can
find new common grounds. Just like artistic writing attempts to throw a
gestural wrench into the automatic course of programmed perceptions and
values, just like hackers attempt to free the flows of information where they
are unduly enclosed by exploitative rules of property or by oppressive sur-
veillance, in a similar way, scientific research, in the age of self-learning algo-
rithms, is called upon to supplement the automated processes of programmed
investigation with a surplus value proper to human imagination and judg-
ment (Huyghe 2017; Montani 2018). Artists play the nuances and engage-
ment of human gestures against the rigidities of the programs (Citton 2015);
hackers exploit network vulnerabilities to resist the hegemonic modalities of

social control (Galloway and Thacker 2007); scientists amend and improve
the workings of computing machines thanks to the dephasing, rescaling, and
reorienting allowed by human reflection.
Within this third diagram, the common cause shared by the three cate-
gories of operators consists in writing programs and protocols which help our
living gestures push the boundaries of the programs and protocols they run into.
In resistance to—while not necessarily in open conflict against—the cyber-
neticist’s ceaseless attempt to “optimize” programs and protocols, artists,
scientists, and hackers tend to develop improvisational skills and creolizing
tastes. Improvisation, as its etymology suggests, puts us in a position where
what was programmed—pre-scribed, pre-dicted, pre-meditated, pre-medi-
ated (fore-seen: pro-visum)—does not suffice fully to determine how one is to
behave. A weak conception of improvisation claims that we improvise all the
time (I usually start a sentence without having a fully clear idea of how I will
end it). A more demanding, and more interesting, conception of improvisa-
tion hones in on procedures whereby one establishes “enabling constraints”
(Manning and Massumi 2014, 92–97) that will push us creatively to imagine
or generate the unimaginable. Along a parallel line of thought, Edouard
Glissant has defined creolization—by contrast with “hybridization,” wherein
a mix of previously separated elements bring about a predictable outcome—as
the purposeful or chance-driven coming together of bits and pieces originated
from different traditions, insofar as it leads to the “emergence of something
new and totally unforeseeable” (Glissant 1997; see also Nova and Vacheron
2015). The creolization currently taking place between machinic and human
improvisations calls for the emergence of a new discipline, according to Iyad
Rahwan et al. (2019, 477), “the scientific study of intelligent machines, not
as engineering artefacts, but as a class of actors with particular behavioural
patterns and ecology.” The main result of our triangulation may be to help us
identify improvisation and creolization as key features of a common endeavor
to write programs against the programs shared—an endeavor shared by art-
ists, scientists, and hackers alike.
Open Ends
Such a reconfiguration of the intellectual landscape was strikingly anticipated,
as early as the 1970s, by the nomadic media theorist Vilém Flusser (1920–
1991). Across his publications, he presents the constitutive tension between
embodied gestures and automated programming as the crucial dynamic
likely to animate the development of the arts and the sciences in the future.
Flusser’s analysis of the evolution of writing characterizes the progressively
unleashed power of printing as leading to the current hegemony of typing,
understood as “the production of types.” As direct heirs to the writers of the
Gutenberg era, IT specialists pursue the job of “unfurling the typifying mode
112 Y. CITTON
of thought in all areas of culture. This consists in finding types suited to dis-
tinctive features of the world, in continually improving them, and in then
impressing them on the world” (Flusser 1987, 52). In other words, more
familiar to what the previous sections of this article have suggested, our com-
mercially run computational world is based on the extraction of typified fig-
ures, which impose models to our senses and practices, often at the cost of
what remains ignored in the background from which such modelizing figures
have been abstracted (see also Abram 1996).
As we have seen, we can no longer escape the hard truth that this “vic-
tory of typifying thought” comes with a heavy price tag: “for progress—of
science, technology, economics and politics—from the concrete objects to
an abstract type is slowly but surely revealing itself to be destructive mad-
ness, for example, in Auschwitz, in thermonuclear armaments, in environ-
mental pollution, in short in the apparatuses that typify and universalize
everything” (Flusser 1987, 52). The ubiquitous medialization brought about
by the printing press, telegraph, telephone, cinema, radio, television, and the
Internet has immersed us in a world where media (to be understood in their
etymological root of “means”) function through us, at least as much as for
us: “decision-making centers have become automated. They intersect with
one another in complex ways and the decisions can no longer be grasped
politically; rather they function on the basis of other functions of apparatus”
(ibid., 115). As a consequence, “the means have become so clever that they
make the ends superfluous. They become their own purpose. Means becom-
ing their own ends and ends becoming superfluous: this is what is meant
by ‘media culture’” (ibid., 131). Types blind us to both nuances and back-
grounds, entrapping us in (self-)destructive modes of extraction bound to fol-
low what has been programmed (as means for profit), instead of developing
our attention to potential opportunities of more desirable ends.
In the cyberneticist’s world ruled through and through by the “victory of
typifying thought,” traditional forms of critique lose their traction—a partial
explanation for the loss of prestige and agency enjoyed by literary studies and the
humanities at large. According to Flusser, this waning of critique is due to the
obsolete enduring of linear modes of causal explanation and to the understand-
ing of critique as geared toward the substitution of old (inappropriate) types with
new (improved) types. We must realize instead that our digital world, bathed in
technical images and sounds, is ruled by post-linear forms of causality, as much
as it is in need of post-typifying gestures. It is revealing that Flusser would situ-
ate the invention of this new (“post-critical,” “post-historical”) mode of research
at the meta-level characteristic of protocological valuation and writing: “A
completely different critical method is required, one that is only approximately
named by the concept of ‘system analysis’” (ibid., 152).
Contemporary artists, hackers, and scientists alike share a common func-
tion in our “media culture” geared by the cyberneticist governance toward
the automated growth of purposeless means. All three labor in a form of
“system analysis,” insofar as they attempt to introduce meaningful vari-

ations into the mechanical reproduction of “types.” All three challenge the
flows and the management of information by raising questions of meaning
and sense, and not only of optimization. All three work on points of tension
between the gestural body, immersed in the media culture, and the comput-
ing machines that surround and permeate our world with their unleashed
power of (re)calculation: “Now that numbers are beginning to liberate them-
selves from the pressure of letters, and computing is being mechanized, their
visionary power can unfold: […] science presents itself as an art form and art
as a source of scientific knowledge” (ibid., 28–29).
This article, which is now reaching its conclusion, can be read as an expli-
cation de texte of this last quote. The (by now rather common) claim that
“science presents itself as an art form and art as a source of scientific knowl-
edge” cannot be understood in its wider anthropological stakes outside of
the triangulation operated between the arts and the sciences by the rise of
computing machines. Flusser’s philosophy—alongside the works of Friedrich
Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, Siegfried Zielinski, Jussi Parikka, Thierry Bardini,
and other practitioners of media archaeology (see Parikka 2012; Citton
2019)—provides us with a most inspiring way to conceive such a triangula-
tion, in its multiple possible diagrams. The fact that it emerged almost half a
century ago should makes us wary of any claim of absolute novelty accompa-
nying this reconfiguration of the relations between literature and the sciences.
Judging from the dramatic shrinkage of job offers in the humanities on
both sides of the Atlantic, literary studies may seem desperate to devise a
renewed agenda, and the type of new transdisciplinary articulation sketched
by this triangulation fits the needs too closely not to sound suspect. Beyond
a corporatist pro domo argument for the survival of the humanities, the per-
spective promoted in the preceding pages may also be of interest for scien-
tists potentially worried by the commercial pressures which, under the guise
of “disruption,” tend to ensconce scientific research in the deceptive com-
fort of business-as-usual—while it becomes increasingly clear that the capi-
talist business-as-usual will not be capable of optimizing itself out of its
current ecocidal and egocidal trajectory. The call for triangulation will not
be resorbed by a (hypothetical and improbable) revival of the academic insti-
tutions which have so far supported the teaching and practice of literature.
Telling students that whatever brings them enjoyment will pass for a literary
experience is a shorthand for a much broader claim.
In a fundamentalist universe of information saturated with ceaselessly opti-
mized means, the sheer emergence of an autotelic activity—an activity that
finds its end (telos) nowhere else than in its own accomplishment—may con-
stitute the most radical, as well as the most innocent and contagious swerve
away from the business-as-usual of financial capitalism. Human practices draw
their intelligence from the rudder provided by their sensitivity to pains and
pleasures. The most advanced AI remains as dumb as a rock as long as it is
114 Y. CITTON
not irrigated by the drives of human hopes and fears. Endowed with the
amazing power of computing devices ruled by the no-less-amazing power of
the capitalist machine, artists, hackers, and scientists are equally threatened to
see their desires and their anxieties trapped within the pre-programmed ends
of financial profit. Our deepest challenge is to devise “complex emergent pro-
cesses rather than programmed organizations” (Manning and Massumi 2014,
93). Our ends need to be significantly more open than what is currently tol-
erated by the current regime of financial capitalism. Our environments will
continue to provide us with a livable world of meanings only insofar as we
reflect and act upon the emergence of ends located in life itself—rather than
in its exploitation.
Notes
1. Many thanks to Monique Allewaert for her commentaries, suggestions, and
input in the writing of this paper. The writing of this paper has been made
possible thanks to the support of the EUR ArTeC (funded by the French PIA
Programs).
2. What I will call hackers in the following pages refers not only to code-breakers
but, more widely, to all “abstracters of new worlds” (Wark 2004‚ §002) who
develop a tactical use of digital media, defined as “those phenomena that are
able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control,
not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to
people’s real desires” (Galloway 2004‚ 176).
Bibliography
Abram, David. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-
Than-Human World. New York: Vintage.
Barthes, Roland. 1987. Criticism and Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Brain, Tega. 2018. The Environment Is Not a System. A Peer Reviewed Journal
About. https://www.aprja.net/the-environment-is-not-a-system/?pdf=3569.
Citton, Yves. 2010. L’avenir des humanités. Économie de la connaissance ou sociétés de
l’interprétation? Paris: La Découverte.
———. 2015 [2013]. Reading Literature and the Political Ecology of Gestures in the
Age of Semiocapitalism. New Literary History 44 (2): 285–308.
———. 2019. Mediarchy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2010. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books.
Flusser, Vilém. 1985 [2011]. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Minneapolis:
———. 1987 [2011]. Does Writing Have a Future? Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Galloway, Alexander. 2004. Protocols: How Control Exists After Decentralization.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gibson-Graham, Jodie-Katherine. 2006. A Post-Capitalist Politics. Minneapolis:

Glissant, Edouard. 1997. Traité du tout-monde. Paris: Gallimard.
Greenfield, Adam. 2006. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. New
York: New Riders.
Huyghe, Pierre-Damien. 2017. Contre-temps. De la recherche et de ses enjeux. Arts,
Architecture, Design. Paris: B42.
Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge.
Kay, Alan, and Adele Goldberg. 1977. Personal Dynamic Media. Computer 10 (3):
31–41.
Kittler, Friedrich. 1986 [1999]. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Lévy, Pierre. 1992. De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux-arts. Paris: La
Découverte.
Manning, Erin. 2009. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. 2014. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology
of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2013. Software Takes Command. New York: Bloomsbury.
Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham:
Duke University Press.
Masure, Anthony. 2017. Design and humanités numériques. Paris: B52.
Mitchell, William J. 1992. The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic
Era. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Montani, Pietro. 2018. Tre forme di creatività: tecnica, arte, politica. Napoli:
Cronopio.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the
World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Newton, Isaac. 1713. Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica, 2nd ed.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Neyrat, Frédéric. 2018. The Unconstructable Earth. New York: Fordham University
Press.
Nova, Nicolas, and Joël Vacheron. 2015. Dadabot: An Introduction to Machinic
Creolization. Morges: IdPure Editions.
Parikka, Jussi. 2012. What Is Media Archaeology? Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rahwan, Iyad, et al. 2019. Machine Behaviour. Nature 568 (April): 477–486.
Simondon, Gilbert. 1958 [2017]. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects.
Minneapolis: Univocal.
Tsing, Anna. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
CHAPTER 7
Behaviorism and Literary Culture
Scott Selisker
In this chapter, I outline two strands of influence that behaviorism has had
on twentieth-century literary culture, largely in the Anglo-American contexts
where the theory originated. First, I describe a behaviorist orientation
of thought in psychology and later philosophy that has had an appreciable
influence and presence within modernist literature, the New Criticism, and
subsequent theoretical debates in literary criticism. In this sphere of influence,
behaviorism added to a set of conversations about how we understand the
mind, the limitations of our access to the minds and intentions of others, and
our conceptions of causality and will. The second strand describes the trajec-
tory of behaviorist conditioning in popular literary works, which have focused
on the societal potentials of behaviorist social programming. Behaviorism
has offered a scientific underpinning for science-fictional extrapolations on
various kinds of mind control, and as such marks a major part of dystopian
literature. Often imagining somewhat reductive versions of behaviorist con-
ditioning, these authors looked to understand the political consequences
of the ability to condition or influence a populace against its will. As such,
literary extrapolations of behaviorist techniques are also frequently
meditations on broader questions about the potentials of science and

technology, of technocracy, and the limits of freedom. Although they overlap,
this second strand corresponds with what we can call psychological behavio-
rism, the practical and political concern with the programmability of behavior.
The first strand corresponds with what has been called logical behaviorism, a
philosophical concern with the limits of our knowledge about the mind.
S. Selisker (*) 
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

118 S. SELISKER
Behaviorism was established as a program in psychology by John

B. Watson’s 1913 lecture and 1914 article, “Psychology as the Behaviorist
Views It.” Watson insisted that psychology, in order to become fully scien-
tific, needed to isolate its object of inquiry and to become fully objective. It
could not rely on subjective characterizations of consciousness, which Watson
associated with leading figures such as William James, Wilhelm Wundt,
and Sigmund Freud, whose work Watson characterized as often speculative,
impressionistic, and marred by religious values (Watson 1957, 4–5). The
orientation of psychology under Watson’s guidance became a more fully
experimental one, and one that focused on studying human learning and
behavior objectively. This move toward objectivity occurred in a historical
moment when, as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, the phys-
ical sciences were cultivating new kinds of mechanical objectivity, and such
objectivity became an ideal across the sciences, an “epistemic virtue” (Daston
and Galison 2007, 39–42, 121). Watson would insist that the object of
inquiry in a scientific psychology could not be the mind itself, but rather
observable and measurable behaviors. With this focus, behaviorism estab-
lished psychology as a discipline based on experimental data.
Let us recall two well-known experiments that can illustrate the research
programs of early behaviorism. In his early 1890s experiments on dogs, in
which they were taught to correlate meal time with a bell, the physiologist
Ivan Pavlov precisely measured the amount of saliva each dog produced.
Pavlov focused on the conditioning of a reflex that was both involuntary
and precisely measurable, an experimental approach that strongly influenced
Watson’s outlook (Buckley 1989, 87). Such conditioning of involuntary
reflexes is possible for humans, as well: we can, for instance, in a matter of
minutes, train our pupils to contract in response to a particular sound and
a light stimulus (which makes our pupils contract ordinarily), and then use
just the sound (Baker 1938). Pavlov’s work in physiology would prove
a major influence on Watson and especially his followers who worked with
animals; Pavlov’s experiments offered the promise that conditioning of other
kinds might also be achieved and studied precisely. One of Watson’s exper-
iments from 1919, often known as “Little Albert,” marked one beginning
to this phase, as Watson and his assistant attempted to condition emotional
responses in a nine-month-old baby. Watson’s conditioning in this experi-
ment, a set of fear responses to white fur, was necessarily less precise than
Pavlov’s work on involuntary reflexes, but Watson’s experiment also tried to
be broader in its implications. Rather than treating emotions as the expres-
sions of instincts or as manifestations of earlier events (as a follower of Freud
might), Watson’s experiment treated them as conditioned responses, and as
learned habits (Buckley 1989, 121).
With funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, behaviorism would
become a dominant force in research universities from the 1920s through
the 1960s (Lemov 2005, 4). Watson’s classical behaviorism is grounded in
“the objective study of behavior,” and it was followed in the 1930s by Clark
7 BEHAVIORISM AND LITERARY CULTURE 119
Hull’s and others’ research, often called “neobehaviorism,” which expanded

a program of animal research into areas such as learning and problem-solv-
ing (Mills 1998, 4). By the mid-century, the “radical behaviorism“ of
B.F. Skinner and his circle returned to questions about human behavior,
social life, and language (Staddon 1993, 78). Although many of behavio-
rism’s methodological and experimental principles remain in place today, it
has largely fallen behind cognitive science as a frontier in psychology. (Noam
Chomsky’s highly critical review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior [1959] is
frequently cited as the first glimmer of the “cognitive revolution” across the
sciences that would displace the dominance of behaviorism [Staddon 1993,
108].) John A. Mills puts the limitations of the behaviorist project in his-
torical perspective by noting that, for Skinner and other behaviorists, “the
person was treated as the physical locus of a set of abstract but operation-
ally definable attributes whose sole function was to promote adaptation to
immediate social circumstances” (Mills 1998, 8). The pragmatic foundations
of behaviorism thus limited, in Mills’s view, its social applicability, since its
approach to the psychology of values, rights, and personal relationships was
understood in terms dominated by “immediate gratification” (Mills 1998, 8).
As Omri Moses has pointed out, this shortcoming became immaterial for
the new research programs of experimental social psychology in the 1960s
and 1970s; famous experiments in obedience by Stanley Milgram, Philip
Zimbardo, and others, for instance, took a socially oriented approach to
experimental design to address similar questions (Moses 2014, 38).
While Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud, experts on the complexities of
creativity and desire, respectively, were perhaps more prominent direct influ-
ences on literature in the early twentieth century, the broader intellectual
program of behaviorism would nonetheless play an important role in literary
criticism. As Joshua Gang has shown, Watson’s program helped to inspire the
notion of a scientific literary criticism, through the influential work of I.A.
Richards. Richards had a complex relationship with behaviorism, but as Gang
demonstrates, the new science’s “cognitive dispositions came to be embedded
in close reading’s theoretical assumptions, techniques, and rhetoric” (Gang
2011, 1). Richards’s approach to close reading, which also influenced Cleanth
Brooks and William K. Wimsatt, “would treat literary texts as behaviors [that
is] as external phenomena without reference to internal mental states” and
“would record how the stimuli of poems affected readers physiologically and
use these results to ground analyses of meaning and form” (Gang 2011, 1).
To make literary criticism scientific and systematic, it was necessary to do
away with internal mental states, such as the author’s intention independent
of the text itself.
The early-to-mid-twentieth century also saw a related rise of this kind of
methodological behaviorism in philosophy of mind, in the work of Gilbert
Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W.V.O. Quine. Ryle, in the influential The
Concept of Mind (1949), urges philosophers not to suppose that a “mind”
can be profitably discussed as separate from an individual’s behavior, and
120 S. SELISKER
that doing so can be classified as a “category-mistake” (Ryle 2002, 17).

Ryle credits psychological behaviorism as a “source of the suspicion that the
two-worlds theory”—Cartesian dualism—”is a myth,” although he demurs
at being “stigmatised as behaviorist” himself (Ryle 2002, 327, 328). The
methodological limitations he imposes on philosophy of mind are quite sim-
ilar to those of the New Critics and psychological behaviorists, in that they
set aside intention, consciousness, and the mental state of an individual in
their analyses. B.F. Skinner, in Beyond Freedom and Dignity (1971), per-
haps went furthest in applying behaviorist principles to social problems in
a philosophical vein. The behaviorism in this work hews close to a philo-
sophical pragmatism that sees less value in the invisible abstraction of “free-
dom” than in treating a general calculus of freedom in terms of the kinds of
“aversive stimuli” in use among individuals to coerce them to do different
things (Skinner 1971, 28–29).
A behaviorist approach to knowledge, and to reading, also took root in
sociology, through the “microsociology” of Erving Goffman. Across his
oeuvre, Goffman reads the micro-movements of social gesture with scru-
pulous exteriority, from the eye movements of people passing on the street
to differences of behavior when one occupies private as opposed to public
spaces (Goffman 1971, 375, qtd in Love 2010, 379; 1959, 112). In liter-
ary studies, Heather K. Love has recently invoked Goffman’s work as a
model for a mode of “surface reading” (Love 2010, 379, 383). Love uses
the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where she reveals a coun-
terintuitive “documentary aesthetic” in the novel’s depiction of Beloved’s
murder, where the narration is insistently exterior (Love 2010, 386). Love
suggests that the achievement of Beloved is not, as other critics have sug-
gested, that of restoring “interiority to the disenfranchised” so much as
it is Morrison’s “accounting [of] the facts of dehumanization [and draw-
ing] attention to what is irrecuperable in the historical record” (Love
2010, 383). Relatedly, Love considers Goffman’s sociology, and liter-
ary criticism with it, as less as an act of “unveiling” than of “redescription”
(Love 2010, 381).
In parallel with these disciplinary repercussions, many modernist and
mid-twentieth-century literary authors vocally embraced, or else forcefully
rejected, the central ideas of behaviorism in their work. While it makes sense
to associate literary modernism with interiority—and with the stream-of-con-
sciousness style of narration especially—there is also a significant countervailing
trend toward exteriority and flatness. The modernist author who dealt most
directly with psychological behaviorism, Wyndham Lewis, railed against and
satirized it as an avatar of the worst tendencies of Western industrial and sci-
entific modernity. In the nonfiction book The Art of Being Ruled (1926), for
instance, Lewis describes behaviorism as a “so-called ‘laboratory’ where the
word is actually being annihilated, or where the ‘mind,’ the ‘intellect,’ is being
drilled out of it” (Lewis 1989, 339). Similar descriptions in Time and Western
Man (1927) rail against the behaviorist goal of “‘human engineering,’” a term
he picks out from the work of Watson’s associate R.M. Yerkes (Gaedtke 2017,
52). Andrew Gaedtke has argued that Lewis’s 1928 novel, The Childermass,
“a satirical reductio ad absurdum of the doctrines of behaviorism, psychoanal-
ysis, and Bertrand Russell’s monist philosophy of mind—rendering a world
in which action and agency are virtually impossible” (Gaedtke 2017, 37). For
Lewis, fiction becomes a medium in which the behaviorist’s notions about the
individual mind and character can be examined. Accordingly, his Snooty Baronet
(1932), an even more pointed satire of behaviorism featuring a fictional disciple
of Watson’s, “explores the internal contradictions of a behaviorist rhetoric that
aspires to both detached, objective description and instrumentalizing control”
(Gaedtke 2017, 63).
A noteworthy missed connection between modernist literature and behav-
iorism took place between Gertrude Stein and Skinner, with Skinner’s
1938 article, “Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?” In it, Skinner connects psy-
chological research Stein conducted as an undergraduate, “Normal Motor
Automatism,” carried out with Leon Solomons, with Stein’s style, claim-
ing that her prose, and especially her non-narrative prose, was the product
of automatic writing.1 Stein bristled against this accusation, which carried
the implication that her writing was a sort of gimmick. Tim Armstrong has
noted the irony in Skinner’s accusation, noting that, “What Skinner fears
[in Stein’s writing] is something which his own work might seem to make
an obvious subject: writing as pure behavior, considered apart from a con-
cept of mind” (Armstrong 1998, 204). The author could be considered as a
bundle of behaviors just as characters could, and the nouveau roman in France
and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in the United States both sought to
divorce interiority from fictional character and poetic persona, respectively.2
So far I have traced behaviorism’s influence on how we read literary
emotion, authorial intention, character, and the gestures of the m odernist
movement. There is a second side to the story of behaviorism, one of its
circulation through popular culture and political culture, particularly in the
United States. As Kerry F. Buckley has argued, John B. Watson, in his insist-
ence on the practical applicability of behaviorism and its insights, was an early
and important player in the social sciences’ more prominent roles in pol-
icymaking in the mid-twentieth century (Buckley 1989, 99). Psychologists,
Watson wrote early on, “should be able to guide society as to the ways in
which the environment may be modified to suit the group… or, when
the environment cannot be modified, to show how the individual may
be molded (forced to put on new habits) to fit the environment” (Watson
1917, 329; qtd in Buckley 1989, 96–97). Fiction, for its part, has depicted
behaviorists as a means of asking how even benevolent projects of soci-
etal guidance and behavioral molding might be catastrophic for democratic
societies.
Watson’s contribution both to a program of scientific psychology and his
advocacy for its governmental utility thus influenced, directly and indirectly,
the ways that American and British stories about utopia and dystopia would
122 S. SELISKER
be told. Skinner himself wrote a famous utopia about the potentials of behav-
iorism, his Walden Two (1948), pitched as an explicit sequel to Henry David
Thoreau’s Walden (1854). In a second-edition preface written in 1969,
Skinner introduces Walden Two by revisiting Thoreau’s insights, namely that
life may be lived in one’s own way, simply, and apart from the political tur-
moil of society at large. Skinner sets out to preserve these, but on a scale that
accommodates a small, economically self-sufficient society rather than just
one man. Skinner adds to Walden, then, principles of trust, of ethical sanc-
tions rather than police force, effective (and behaviorist) childcare and edu-
cational models, rational (if traditionally gendered) working arrangements,
and a willingness to experiment as conditions and dynamics change (Skinner
1969, vii–viii). If Thoreau’s Walden had solved some of the problems of
economy and of the well-examined life, then Walden Two, as the communi-
ty’s guru Frazier puts it early on, solves the “psychological problems of group
living … with available principles of ‘behavioral engineering’” (Skinner 1969,
10). In this utopian plot, as Fredric Jameson has noted, Skinner’s focus on
group psychology generally sidelines the economic questions that would pre-
occupy many other utopian authors, such as Edward Bellamy (Jameson 2005,
50). And Skinner’s is notably the only widely known utopian fiction of the
possibilities of behaviorism.
Indeed, the far larger body of literature that features behaviorism empha-
sizes the opposite scenario from Walden Two’s benevolent rule by commit-
tee: What harm might come from a small group having the power to control
and manipulate the behavior of others against their wills? Aldous Huxley’s
Brave New World (1932) had a broadly engineered societal arrangements,
with touches such as the “hypnopaedia,” an unsuccessful device for teach-
ing children, through audio recordings, while they sleep (Huxley 2006, 25).
While the leaders of that novel seem to have been well-intentioned, the dys-
topian element in Brave New World is that such a program would infantilize
individual citizens, leading them not to fulfill their potentials, but rather to
remain as child-like consumer subjects. As David Seed has traced, behavio-
rist techniques were also mentioned in the 1920s and 1930s science fiction,
alongside other purported techniques of manipulation such as hypnosis.
John Wyndham’s Exiles on Asperus (1933) and Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under
England (1935), for instance, both mention the possible psychic condition-
ing of populations under dictatorial control (Seed 2004, xxii).
Hannah Arendt would write in the second edition of The Origins of
Totalitarianism that the “model ‘citizen’” of the totalitarian state was the
“Pavlov’s dog, the human specimen reduced to the most elementary actions”
(Arendt 1968, 587). As Timothy Wientzen has argued, the novelist and
nonfiction writer Rebecca West, particularly in her Yugoslavia travelogue
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), anticipates this argument of Arendt’s,
and in a fashion more thoroughly inspired by behaviorism and the reflexol-
ogy of Pavlov. According to Wientzen, West grounds a fully developed theory
of fascism upon the physiological basis of habits: “urbanization put people
physically (and thus physiologically) out of touch with the everyday world
of craft labor and folk knowledge [giving rise to what West] calls a ‘mind-
less, traditionless, possessionless section of the urban proletariat’ upon whose
backs people like Mussolini and Hitler rose to power” (Wientzen 2015, 63).
West would be one of the few women and minority authors who would take
interest in behaviorism; we might speculate that, while behaviorism offers a
vocabulary for authors to pose questions about technocratic control over a
society, it offers little leverage for feminist, anti-racist, or anti-colonial pro-
jects, which need not resort to speculation to imagine forms of intolerable
subjugation.
Orwell’s 1984 (1949), published the year following Walden Two, remains
the best-known dystopia with explicitly behaviorist principles, and it is per-
haps single-handedly responsible for behaviorism’s reputation in literary texts
as a kind of synecdoche for the roles of technocratic management in totalitar-
ian states. The novel catalogs a progression of propaganda techniques, each
more invasive: the misinformation of the newspaper for which Winston Smith
works; the negative emotion evinced by the cinema in the “two minutes’
hate,” the linguistic technology of NewSpeak, and finally the torture cham-
ber of Room 101.3 In Room 101, behaviorist conditioning and torture work
together to break the wills of the state’s most stubborn dissidents, including
both Winston and his lover Julia. Orwell’s famous scene, in which caged rats
are placed in front of Winston’s face, threatening to eat him, seem in fact to
combine Watson’s “Infant Albert” experiment with the rats from the maze-
based reinforcement learning and cognitive mapping experiments of Clark L.
Hull and Edward Tolman in the 1930s (Orwell 1950, 286).
Orwell imagines, then, a near future in which a system of propaganda
combined with conditioning could be perfected in order to quash all resist-
ance against a totalitarian state. Most other texts take a more hopeful view,
however. As I’ve argued elsewhere, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film about
the brainwashing of Korean War POWs, The Manchurian Candidate, traces
the narratives of a behaviorist subject and a Freudian one (Selisker 2016,
56–67). Raymond Shaw can be programmed to do anything, including kill-
ing his loved ones; Bennet Marco, on the other hand, resists the program-
ming in his dreams, and his unconscious resistance help him to resist the
Communists and solve the mystery of Shaw’s brainwashing. The mystery
of whether individual characters might resist or succumb to brainwash-
ing or conditioning provides a durable source of suspense for brainwashing
narratives.
Moreover, scenes of behaviorist conditioning offered a flexible fictional
device for contesting the core values of humanity. Anthony Burgess
notably turned a fear of behaviorism’s anti-humanism in a socially conserva-
tive direction in A Clockwork Orange, published in 1962.4 The novel’s hero,
Alex, is cured of his violent tendencies by the “Ludovico technique,” a form
of aversion therapy that memorably involves the watching of violent films
with his eyes held open, with Beethoven playing in the background. Burgess
124 S. SELISKER
includes in his novel an author, F. Alexander, who rails against “the attempt
to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness … laws
and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation” (Burgess 2011, 17–18).
Rather than resist the conditioning, however, Alex devolves into the victim
of a well-intentioned but ultimately dehumanizing postwar welfare state.
Conditioned to feel nausea at the thought of violence, Alex becomes, in
F. Alexander’s words, “committed to socially acceptable acts, a little machine
capable only of good” (Burgess 2011, 100). For Orwell, Frankenheimer, and
Burgess, the programmable subject of behaviorism lacks, in different ways,
the dignity and autonomy of a human being.
When a version of Little Albert experiment appears a decade later in
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), it becomes the stuff of satire
and playfully posed questions about causation and free will. Written during
the decline of behaviorist psychology’s influence, but set during its heydey,
Gravity’s Rainbow features a conditioned reflex in its opening conceit. The
protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, had been part of an experiment, as “the
famous Infant Tyrone,” where a Dr. Jamf had conditioned erection responses
in the baby with a “mystery stimulus,” “x,” later thought to be “some loud
noise” (Pynchon 1973, 84, 85). The noise appears to be something like that
of the V-2 rocket, whose supersonic arrival famously precedes the sound of its
approach. Decades later, during World War II, the adult Slothrop’s erections
work as a predictor for the V-2 attacks, so that a map of Slothrop’s sexual
dalliances matches that of rocket hits in London, with Slothrop escaping just
in time before each one (Pynchon 1973, 85, 49). The inversion of causal-
ity here—the intimation that there might be an “extrasensory” intuition on
Slothrop’s part—is both fanciful and open to interpretation. When Slothrop
discovers these experiments as an adult, as Steven C. Weisenburger and Luc
Herman note, he “recognizes that all he has experienced in his life as exer-
cises of free will may in fact have been subject to apparatuses of surveillance,
manipulation, and domination” (Herman and Weisenburger 2013, 2).
As the mid-century height of behaviorism receded further into the past,
fictional narrative often cast it in a campy light, embracing the commonplaces
of genre fiction and mid-century technologies. A subplot in the third season
of the hit television show LOST, for instance, recasts the theater-based aver-
sion therapy from A Clockwork Orange as part of the retro aesthetic of the
“Dharma Initiative” and its 1970s-era social science experiments; Ben pun-
ishes his daughter’s boyfriend by placing him into the locked conditioning
chamber “Room 23” (“Lost: Season 3” 2007). Likewise, Paul Beatty’s Man-
Booker-Prize-winning satirical novel The Sellout (2015) features a protagonist
whose idealistic African American father had been a behaviorist scientist. As
a child, the narrator was subjected to a battery of experiments, including: a
version of the “Little Albert” experiment, but instilling fears of racist objects;
a variation on Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s experiment with Caucasian and
African American dolls (which was cited in the majority decision in Brown v.
Board of Education); and finally, an aversion therapy that forbade him from
being sexually attracted to white women (Beatty 2015, 29, 34).5 The narra-
tor’s father, though, is cast as a relic from another time, an idealist (and mem-
ber of the Dum Dum Donuts Intellectual Club) whose faith in scientific and
rational solutions to the problems facing African Americans Beatty lampoons
as hopelessly misplaced (Beatty 2015, 42).
Although behaviorism proper is often now treated in the camp fashion
often reserved for obsolete technology, literary texts often now bring up simi-
lar questions about scientific knowledge and human being through narratives
devised around robots, artificial intelligence (AI), and androids. This genre
overlaps significantly with the history of behaviorism, so Isaac Asimov’s robot
stories of the 1940s, including “Evidence” (1946) and “Reason” (1941) fall
under this category, in addition to novels such as Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). But stories, films, and television continue to
take up the questions of behaviorism, such as Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of
Software Objects” (2010), Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica (2004–),
Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), and
HBO’s Westworld (2016–). A related trend depicts human minds that can be
programmed through computer interfaces, as they are in Neal Stephenson’s
Snow Crash (1991), Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (2002) and sequels, and
Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse (2009–10). While behaviorism can now be considered
largely a historical phenomenon in its influence on literature, its questions about
programmable behavior, and about the scientific modeling of learning and hab-
its live on in these genres. Narratives can use the devices of the robot and AI to
ask again and again about the differences between a human being and a bundle
of programmed behaviors.
The two directions behaviorist influence on culture took ultimately stand
in a complex but instructive tension with one another. The first, the logical
behaviorist tendency toward rigor, reserve, and exteriority when speaking of
the mind, is one that encourages literary critics, philosophers, and sociologists
to be keenly aware of the limits of their knowledge about other minds. This
sort of “surface” treatment of other minds leaves room for an equalizing and
ultimately ethical understanding of others in the world, one that leaves room,
pace Skinner, for an equally shared dignity. The dystopian thread in literature
imagines the equal and opposite position of scientists or technocrats: that
they might reduce individuals to their programmable behaviors and use their
expertise in manipulating behavior to manage them in violent ways. In both
kinds of behaviorism, scientific theories about the mind become crucial levers
for how we define, understand, and relate to humanity.
Notes
1. See (Armstrong 1998, 188–97) for a longer account of automatism and
“secondary personality” theories of the nineteenth century. See also (Moses
2014, 118–25) for an account of how Stein’s writing aligns vitalist rather than
behaviorist accounts of character.
126 S. SELISKER
2. Joshua Gang, in “Mindless Modernism,” has described Beckett’s Murphy

(1936) as a behaviorist text; Simon Kemp describes a strand of behaviorism in
French modernism from André Gide to a leader of the nouveau roman move-
ment, Nathalie Sarraute.
3. I discuss NewSpeak and behaviorist conceptions of language and habit at length
in (Selisker 2016, 42–46).
4. Lorenzo Servitje offers a reading that also links the novel to the coming sea
change in psychiatric treatment and its turn to psychopharmacology in the
1960s (Servitje 2018).
5. An additional dimension of these experiments in Beatty’s work, and also of the
absence of behaviorism in African American literature more broadly, is the his-
tory, detailed in Harriet A. Washington’s Medical Apartheid and other work, of
African Americans’ subjection to many kinds of violent and harmful medical and
scientific experiments.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. 1968. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World.
Armstrong, Tim. 1998. Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study.
Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Baker, Lynn. 1938. The Pupillary Response Conditioned to Subliminal Auditory
Stimuli. Psychological Monographs 50 (January): 32.
Beatty, Paul. 2015. The Sellout. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Buckley, Kerry W. 1989. Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of
Behaviorism. New York: Guilford Press.
Burgess, Anthony. 2011. A Clockwork Orange: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and
Contexts, Criticism, 1st ed. Norton Critical ed. New York: W. W. Norton.
Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Skinner: Verbal Behavior (Book Review). Language 35
(January): 26.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.
Gaedtke, Andrew. 2017. Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis,
Technology, and Narrative Worlds. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Gang, Joshua. 2011. Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading. ELH 78 (1):
1–25.
Gang, Joshua. 2013. Mindless Modernism. Novel 46 (1): 116–32.
Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. In Doubleday Anchor
Books; A174. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
———. 1971. Relations in Public; Microstudies of the Public Order. New York: Basic
Books.
Herman, Luc, and Steven Weisenburger. 2013. Gravity’s Rainbow, Domination, and
Freedom. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press.
Huxley, Aldous. 2006. Brave New World, Reprint ed. New York: Harper Perennial.
Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions. New York: Verso.
Kemp, Simon. 2014. Stimulus and Response: Behaviorism, Tropisms, and
Twentieth-Century French Thought and Literature. Romanic Review 105 (3/4):
341–60.
Lemov, Rebecca M. 2005. World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and
Men, 1st ed. New York: Hill and Wang.
Lewis, Wyndham. 1989. The Art of Being Ruled. In Dasenbrock, ed. Reed Way. Santa
Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press.
Lost: Season 3. 2007. Burbank, CA: Buena Vista Home Entertainment.
Love, Heather. 2010. Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.
New Literary History 41 (2): 371–91. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2010.0007.
Mills, John A. 1998. Control: A History of Behavioral Psychology. New York: New York
University Press.
Moses, Omri. 2014. Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Orwell, George. 1950. 1984. New York: Signet Classics.
Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking Press.
Ryle, Gilbert. 2002. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Seed, David. 2004. Brainwashing the Fictions of Mind Control: A Study of Novels and
Films Since World War II. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press.
Selisker, Scott. 2016. Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and
American Unfreedom. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Servitje, Lorenzo. 2018. Of Drugs and Droogs: Cultural Dynamics, Psychopharmacology,
and Neuroscience in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. Literature and
Medicine 36 (1): 101–23.
Skinner, B.F. 1934. Has Gertrude Stein a Secret? Atlantic 153: 50.
Skinner, B.F. 1969. Walden Two. London: Collier-Macmillan.
———. 1971. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, 1st ed. New York: Knopf.
Staddon, J.E.R. 1993. Behaviorism: Mind, Mechanism and Society. London: Duckworth.
Watson, John B. 1917. An Attempted Formulation of the Scope of Behavior
Psychology. Psychological Review 24 (5): 329–53.
Watson, John B. 1957. Behaviorism, Rev ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Washington, Harriet A. 2006. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. New York:
Doubleday.
Wientzen, Timothy. 2015. An Epic of Atmosphere: Rebecca West, Black Lamb, and
Reflex. Journal of Modern Literature 38 (4): 57–73.
CHAPTER 8
I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots,

and the Ecstasy of Withdrawal
Dana Seitler
I’m dying to! It’s an expression that initiates a contradiction—I want to

do this thing so badly that it feels like I’m dying!—and makes manifest a
performative psychology—the best way to express an intense feeling for
something is to mimic the process of death. When we make use of this col-
loquialism, the wish for death that it houses is not a call for the actual sus-
pension of life but the expression of an unbearable want, a perhaps orgasmic
enactment of desire beyond the limits of need. What I am calling death, in
other words, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman in Sex, or The Unbearable,
call sex—“a relation that both overwhelms and anchors us” (Berlant and
Edelman 2013, vii). In their sense, we might understand this expression—I’m
dying to!—as performing our capacity to bear the unbearable, and even,
in fact, to derive some perverse form of pleasure from it. Long before Leo
Bersani’s conception of the self-shattering jouissance of sexuality, “I die!” has
been the most obvious of metaphors for orgasmic release. Thus, Benedick to
Beatrice in Much Ado about Nothing: “I will live in thy heart /Die in thy lap”;
thus Romeo to Juliet: “I must be gone and live, or stay and die.” Wink, wink.
But if there is a literary history in which sex is like death is there also a literary
history in which death is like sex?
Michel Foucault outlines a perceptible shift in the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries to an “anatomo-politics of the human body” and a
“biopolitics of the population” through which bodies became privileged dis-
ciplinary objects of governance and state control hinged on the production
D. Seitler (*) 
University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

130 D. SEITLER
and management of the discourses of life (Foucault 1990, 139).1 In the lit-
erary fiction of this period we can, indeed, see the uptake of the regulatory
concept of life as a delimiting discourse. But there exist equally powerful nar-
rative refusals of the medical and state mandates for the extension of life in
the form of the suicide plot. In such texts as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening
(1899), Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (1905) Charles Chesnutt’s “Dave’s
Neckliss” (1889) and “The Sherriff’s Children” (1888), Pauline Hopkins’s
Of One Blood (1903), and others, we are privy to stories that help us to think
about how suicide functions as both a sustaining fantasy and a narrative strat-
egy. In each, the main character’s engagement with suicide is not limiting but
productive: it creates a space of protection for otherwise damaged individu-
als, allowing them to imagine an alternative configuration as/at the end of
their world. I will thus make the counterintuitive claim that the suicide plot,
in particular historical circumstances, can be read non-tragically. The histor-
ically diverse texts that I take as my objects here—Edith Wharton’s Ethan
Frome (1911) and Lynda Barry’s Cruddy (1999)—span the length of the
twentieth century and thus act as genealogical nodes through which we might
view the twenty-first century’s inheritance of biopolitics. Each text responds
to this discourse by re-imagining self-annihilation as a challenge to the slow
violence of the present, suggesting that we understand the function of suicide
in them not as the result of individual mental decline or depressive pathology,
but as giving voice to an overarching, pressing question: How can one wrest
a mode of living from the negations of contemporary life? My key question is
how we might understand these plots as critical experiments in narrative form
disobedient to both liberal and neoliberal models of personhood by trying to
imagine pleasure and ecstasy in the context of the unbearable.
Biopolitical Economies
In Foucault’s sketch of the relationships among life, death, power, and,
briefly, suicide, he writes, “It is not surprising that suicide became in the
course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the
sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right
to die, at the borders and interstices of power that was exercised over life”
(Foucault 1990, 138–39). In their Marxist treatise on contemporary life,
Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw on Foucault’s prem-
ise to press the question: if political power assigns itself the task of adminis-
tering life, is suicide a way to usurp the power of death from the sovereign?
Accordingly, they argue that sovereign power perpetuates itself not sim-
ply by exercising its authority to kill its subjects or spare their lives but by
actively producing and sustaining life. Even wars, they maintain, “must not
only bring death. More important than the negative technologies of annihi-
lation and torture […] is the constructive character of biopower” (Hardt and
Negri 2004, 20). As with Foucault, Hardt and Negri understand sovereignty
8 I’M DYING TO!: BIOPOLITICS, SUICIDE PLOTS … 131
as predicated on the engineering of a populace’s well-being. Power over life

includes the capacity to prolong it. For Hardt and Negri, herein lies one of
the contradictions of sovereign power: “Even this seemingly absolute power
is radically thrown into question by practices that refuse the control over life”
(Hardt and Negri 2004, 332). They continue, “When life itself is negated
in the struggle to challenge sovereignty, the power over life and death that
the sovereign exercises becomes useless. The absolute weapons against bod-
ies are neutralized by the voluntary and absolute negation of the body” for
“without the subjects the sovereign rules not over a society but an empty
wasteland” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 332–33). Their point is that once we
understand that sovereignty is not an autonomous or absolute force, we can
see the ruled as endowed with the power of resistance in the form of a refusal
of life: “to refuse their position of servitude and subtract themselves from the
relationship” (Hardt and Negri 2004, 333).
Hardt and Negri’s notion of the exodus from life is borrowed from Paolo
Virno, who argues that the right of the worker is the right of exiting the
system of labor and the social relations of production it maintains through
strikes, boycotts, and the like. On this basis, Virno theorizes the possibility of
a mass defection from the State:
It is neither exiting on tiptoe through the back door nor a search for shelter-
ing hideaways. Quite the contrary: what I mean by Exodus is a full-fledged
model of action, capable of confronting the challenges of modern politics.
Exodus is the foundation of a Republic. The very idea of ‘republic,’ however,
requires a taking leave of State judicature: if Republic, then no longer State.
The political action of the Exodus consists, therefore, in an engaged withdrawal.
(Virno 2006, 197)
Where Hardt and Negri argue for a crisis constituted by the loss of human
bodies, albeit as less a real than a fantastic way to imagine the collapse or fra-
gility of the sovereign, Virno sees a world-making possibility, where a new
political formation (a “republic”) can emerge once a collective engages in a
mass exit from existing forms of governance.
However, both treatments of exit and exodus, as many critics have pointed
out, fail to account for the different ways subjects are racialized, sexualized,
and gendered under neoliberal capital, in effect leaving the biopolitical dif-
ferentials in the models of exit they provide unaccounted for. As Lisa Cacho
has argued, racialized populations in the USA are “already dead” insofar as
they constitute populations that are denied, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the
right to have rights.” For Cacho, “The bodies and localities of poor, crimi-
nalized people of colour are signifiers of those who are ineligible for person-
hood”; they are “legally illegible because they engender populations not just
racialized, but rightless, living nonbeings” (Cacho 2012, 6). Racialized pop-
ulations, in other words, always live under the command of death: the con-
stant and perilous exposure of their lives to material and physical injury, but
132 D. SEITLER
also more generally to a condition of life alienated from life. This alienation,
for Cacho, is neither only affective nor in sole relation to material economy;
rather, it is the condition of racialized bodies refused a just relation to state
forms and identities.
Exploring this condition of alienation in its contemporary incarnation,
Michelle Murphy details a shift in US history from a concentration on the
biopolitics of population through projects like eugenics in the early twenti-
eth century to the project of “the economization of life” in the twenty-first
century. Where once the aim was the regulation of populations, now it’s a
project of state and global economy, what Murphy describes specifically as
“the practices that differentially value and govern life in terms of their abil-
ity to foster the macroeconomy of the nation-state” that work to divide
life into categories “more and less worthy of living” (Murphy 2017, 6). In
other words, population as an organizing category no longer holds as much
sway for contemporary capitalist flows as does that of the economy, which
itself relies heavily on what Achille Mbembe describes as the necropolitics of
neoliberal capital—an unprecedented form of the politics of death in which
necropower, or the technologies of control through which life is strategically
subjugated to the power of death, emerges as one of the fundamental aspects
of biopolitics in the contemporary neoliberal era of normalized insecurity and
terror.
Building on Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” life stripped of political rep-
resentation and socially viable forms of living, Mbembe specifies a contem-
porary necropolitics of racialized terror through which certain lives, and not
others, are in a constant state of subjugation to the power of death. In this
concatenation, where the categories of terror, power, freedom, and resist-
ance are blurred, death may be an agency and thus freedom, a negation
(Mbembe 2003). Jasbir Puar adds queer texture to this understanding when
she describes “the queer temporal interruption” of the suicide bomber. “As
a queer assemblage […] race and sexuality are denaturalized through the
impermanence, the transience of the suicide bomber, the fleeting identity
replayed backward through its dissolution” (Puar 2007). If suicide bomb-
ing, as an act, is condemnable, Mbembe and Puar consider how it nonethe-
less operates as an anti-economy in excess of the state’s instrumentalization of
death and the rationalizing project of modernity—the mandate for reason in
the public sphere—upon which this instrumentalization relies.
Thus, in ways related to Cacho and Murphy, Puar’s work on the dis-
courses that surround queer suicide insists that we move our perspective away
from the tragic and toward an emphasis on how instances of queer suicide
“offer a different temporality of relating to living and dying” in which we
shift from a characterization of individualized pathology to questions of social
and structural forms of debility, disability, and precarity (Puar 2010, 1). For
Puar, this means addressing the uneven distributions of capacity and liveli-
ness across sexualized, raced, and gendered bodies and the extent to which
states of debility—that is, various forms of bodily difficulty and incapacity—

are produced and maintained as a practice of regulation and management for
specific populations at the service of particular macroeconomies. What Puar’s
work helps to illuminate is how the event of suicide in specific instances marks
not the end of or exit from life but that which one has never been allowed to
become in life in the first place, an undoing and unbecoming of what minor-
itized subjects already are not allowed to be or become.
I move through these accounts of the biopolitical, to ask a specific ques-
tion: What happens if we enlist the work of Cacho, Murphy, Puar, Mbembe
and related arguments concerning the histories and practices of biopolitical
economy to develop suicide as a more nuanced critical concept for literary
studies? If we take as axiomatic the equally relative values of science and lit-
erature as cultural discourses, what role can literary critics play in addressing
the unequal, always racialized and sexualized, distributions of the concept of
life? In turn, what role does imaginative literature play in both examining the
workings of our social institutions and ideological formations and shaping
how we perceive and enact alternatives?
Answering these questions entails accounting for the different ways struc-
tural inequality affects different bodies, and, as a direct consequence, thinking
about the cultural work narratives of suicide perform over time and at differ-
ent times either to bolster or challenge those structures. This means examin-
ing how acts of suicide are staged in novels, films, or short stories, and what
work that staging performs (Seitler 2019). Reading the fiction of suicide as an
allegorical structure, I suggest, usefully disaggregates the individual act or sui-
cidal event from its ideation, and thus lets us consider what is at work when
suicide is viewed as a scene of fantasy. The wager of this chapter is, indeed,
that literary fiction, a space specifically poised as a form of ideation and
imagination, can tell a story about the suicide plot as an experiment in the
expansion of the concept of life and living.
One of the reasons I find Foucault, Virno, and Hardt and Negri’s charac-
terizations of suicide, exodus, and biopower partially unsatisfying is a result
of the principles of universality embedded in their theories (to which Cacho,
Mbeme, Puar, and Murphy point). The problem of over-generalizing that
accompanies those principles relies on an idea of collective consciousness of
“the ruled” in ways that really don’t account for the vastly different formal,
historical, allegorical, or psychic dimensions of suicidal ideation. I think the
difficulty here might be that Virno, Hardt and Negri, and assuredly Foucault,
are bad literary critics. I say this not (only) because it’s funny, but because
it pinpoints why their characterizations of suicide as a practice, event, or act
at times collapse into political non-specificity and, at others, unwittingly val-
orize an enlightenment humanist ideal of self-sovereignty where the sub-
ject is seen to hold control over their own relations to life or death separate
from the regulatory forces managing those relations (despite their insist-
ence on biopolitical analysis). All of a sudden, there is a subject capable of
134 D. SEITLER
exiting the structures that contain them by opting out of the system. Instead
of grounding my analysis in an inadvertent hope for self-sovereignty, I want
to ask what it might mean to more actively engage the forms and structures
of allegory, fantasy, and genre that mediate both subjects and sovereignty
as uptakes for or disobedient responses to the ever-increasing, networked
domain of the biopolitical economies of racialized, gendered, and sexualized
violence that saturate everyday life at both micro- and macro-levels. What can
we learn by thinking about acts and events of self-harm and annihilation not
as evidence for agency but as narrative forms?
This is a tricky line of questioning because it threatens to lessen, or some-
how mitigate, the very real suffering involved in acts of suicide. But I raise
it here, in fact, to try and understand these acts, and this suffering, better—
away from the pathologizing, criminalizing, and racially and sexually inflected
tendencies of medical and juridical discourse, as well as the sentimentaliz-
ing inclinations of cultural production. If we understand “life” as, at once, a
biopolitical object (deeply entangled in the medical-industrial complex), an
object of economy (harnessed to global capitalist designations of value), and
a genre (thoroughly mediated by narratives that constitute what counts as a
life), what other genres for living might the plot of death imagine?
Suicidology
Historically, beginning with late eighteenth-century US fiction, the sui-
cide plot tended to take its cue from a discourse of the sovereign individual
in a fight against the state, acting at the service of the ideology of the early
republic. Patrick Henry’s famous proclamation is a case in point: “Give me
liberty or give me death!” was infused into the suicide plot such that it, too,
emerged as a form of self-determination, functioning to reinforce popular
political arguments about self-sovereignty. The suicidal hero of The Power
of Sympathy (1789), for instance, “had chosen to escape tyranny and flee to
another world” (Brown 1972, 152). This new form of voluntarism came
to epitomize the principle that life was something to be actively chosen or
rejected and, therefore, always a potential resource, literally and figuratively,
for revolutionary self-determination (Gaudet 2012). By the nineteenth cen-
tury, however, suicide had begun to be treated as a medical problem, an act
that came as a direct result of the experience of melancholy. Suicide as the
personal choice of the self-sovereign subject was now challenged by new
medical notions of the insufficiency of personal resolve against the over-
whelming external forces of structural violence, social transformation, and
chance (MacDonald 1992; Rush 1830). As a result, suicide became freighted
with a double discourse—the earlier republican ideology of self-determina-
tion, on the one hand, and medicalized notions of helplessness and despair,
on the other. Two definitions of suicide thus co-mingled—as an act per-
formed by those who were seen as consciously ending their lives through
a deliberate and agential self-harming act and those who died as a result of
the pathological deterioration of their will to live. Emile Durkheim’s late
nineteenth-century definition is apropos in this regard: “The term suicide
is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive
or negative act of the victim himself, which he [sic] knows will produce this
result” (Durkheim 2002, 44).
By the turn of the twentieth century, the medicalized notion of suicide
began to hold greater sway. Processes both of secularization and medical-
ization amplified the view that suicide was fueled by unwanted feelings of
depression that required treatment by medical specialists. By the mid-twenti-
eth century, this view was codified by medical and psychological treatises on
suicide such as psychiatrist Beulah Chamberlain Bosselman’s Self-Destruction:
A Study of the Suicidal Impulse (1958), which presents a series of case studies
to argue for the internal “motivating drives” of self-destruction. The science
of suicidology continued to emerge as a full-fledged psychiatric theory and
practice in the USA when Edwin Schneidman coined suicidology as a field
committed to the study of suicide as a psychological disorder in 1968. For
Schneidman, suicide was an individual act motivated by profound isolation
and could be characterized by an uncontrollable desire to escape emotional
anguish, what he called “a drama of the mind” (Schneidman 1996, 4, 6–7).
By 1994, suicide—as both an event and an ideation—entered the DSM IV
and was characterized there as a major depressive disorder. Thus, by the
beginning of the twenty-first-century suicide had already enjoyed a long his-
tory as a biopolitical term, emerging over time in medical domains as a con-
cern over the loss of life, where life functioned as the locus of an abstract
value that must be preserved. The practice of care, as Foucault argues, is
always intimately entwined in the disciplinary governance of life. It is, there-
fore, not just the securitizing of “life itself” that is at stake here, but also the
concomitant attempt to securitize anything out of sync with both established
social norms for living and life as an economic value (Rose 2016).
This longue durée of the prominent conceptualizations of suicide in the
USA underscores the co-relevant strains of political, medical, social, and cul-
tural patterns that came to shape and inform it—and were in turn shaped and
informed by it. Through this historical overview, we can begin to glimpse
the formation of biological citizenship in the USA (Rabinow 1999; Rusert
2017; Tompkins 2017). Not only is human life governed by medical con-
ceptions of either normal or pathological calculations of risk, but it is also the
securitized locus for the possibilities of extending and enhancing economic
growth, social and racial stability, and the episteme of the family—limited, as
always, to privileged individuals, rich nations, and other fetishistic products of
biocapitalism.
136 D. SEITLER
Death Drives
In what follows, I focus on Ethan Frome and Cruddy as exemplary of a strain
in which the suicide plot makes both an aesthetic and a social demand on the
pressure of living that refuses the medicalized linkage of suicide with sadness
and pathology, offering instead ecstatic forms of pleasure as an alternative
angle from which to view the narrative uptakes of the suicide plot from the
twentieth to the twenty-first centuries. As significant work in the field of liter-
ature and science by authors such as Priscilla Wald, Devin Griffiths, and Sari
Altschuler demonstrates, cultural forms like literature are not only engaged
with conversations generated by the sciences but can also function as alterna-
tive arrangements of scientific and medical knowledge (Wald 2007; Griffiths
2016; Altschuler 2018). As such, these forms become important pieces in the
history of biopower.
Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome narrates the doomed affair of Ethan and
Mattie Silver, who fall in love while Mattie stays in Ethan’s home to care for
his sick and cruel wife. Inherent in the story’s structure is a deep understand-
ing, and critique, of the white heterofamily as the site for the reproduction
of a healthy social body, what Foucault describes as the set of relations that
wrench specific biological functions of the human species (like birth rate) into
a political strategy for governing an entire population. Key to the function-
ing of political power, in other words, is the self-management of the family
rooted in the white heterosexual couple form, itself laden with the biopolit-
ical sorting and valuation of racialized and colonized populations. As a pri-
mary site through which bodies became located in hierarchies of race, the
white heterosexual couple form ensures that whiteness emerges as both the
site of the evolutionary accumulation of proper impression (Schuller 2017)
and monogamy as a biological model that can reproduce whiteness as a ideal
of “civilization” (Willey 2016). Indeed, coeval with the discourse of repro-
ductive monogamy was the attendant fear of “race suicide”—where death
rate was predicted to exceed birth rate resulting in the gradual extinction of
a population—aggressively re-incarnated in the twenty-first century as “white
genocide.”
Coined by US sociologist Edward A. Ross, the alarmist discourse of “race
suicide” and its pseudo-scientific counterpart, eugenics, became widespread at
the turn-of-the-twentieth-century, highlighted in texts such as Race Culture;
or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn, as well as a number of presidential
speeches given by Theodore Roosevelt, in which Roosevelt begins to shift the
focus of blame for “race suicide” from immigrants to women (Ross 1901;
Rentoul 1906). He famously claimed, for example, that a woman who is
childless by choice “merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the sol-
dier who runs away in battle” (Roosevelt 1901, 280). Thus, the biopolitics of
reproduction powerfully came to take the form of a biological imperative that
positioned white women as the central site for the reproduction of national
health (Seitler 2008). There is no space within this biopolitical frame for
adultery, divorce, or unconstrained desire, whether in the context of an extra-

marital affair in Wharton’s story or interracial and same-sex desire in others.
The modern regime of sexuality ushers in the legitimate couple form, and,
even in the context of Ethan’s wife’s apparent infertility or refusal to repro-
duce (the text, interestingly enough, doesn’t specify), the form continues to
assert itself throughout the story as an insistent moralizing force.
When Ethan and Mattie realize their affair is impossible, and Mattie is
subsequently banished from their home, they decide to take a sleigh ride
together: “The sled started with a bound, and they flew on through the dusk,
gathering smoothness and speed as they went, with the hollow night opening
up below them and the air singing by like an organ.” Mattie “sat perfectly
still” and “Ethan cried exultantly as they flew down the second slope […]
the speed began to slacken, he heard her give a little laugh of glee” (Wharton
2001, 88). So Ethan and Mattie took a sleigh ride or they had sex. “Her
breath against his neck set him shuddering again. He leaned backed and drew
her mouth to his. Half-way down there was a sudden drop, then a rise, and
after that another long delirious descent” (Wharton 2001, 91). This gives
Mattie an idea: they can go down the hillside in the sled one more time, but
this time instead of just missing the deadly elm tree that lies in their path,
they can crash into it and die in each others’ arms. Ethan agrees and they go
down again, accompanied by much of the same ecstatic language. The great
misfortune of this event is not that it ends in suicide but that it doesn’t. They
fail to “fetch” the tree that was to bring the end of their suffering and are
catapulted into a life of debility instead: Ethan is permanently crippled, Mattie
has what in contemporary terms we would call a traumatic brain injury, and
Ethan’s cruel wife must now care for them both. Pointedly, in the story it
is the constraint of desire in the advent of the modern regime of biopower
that produces the white family as a site of dysfunction. But suicide would not
have been Mattie and Ethan’s agential escape as espoused by early republican
ideology, nor would it have been the effect of morbid depression as described
by the contemporaneous medical discourse. Suicide would have been their
ecstasy. And that ecstasy stands not so much against as alongside the biopolit-
ical management of life, emerging as another trajectory within the networks
of biopower that Ethan and Mattie find themselves so deeply entangled.
For this reason, Wharton’s narrative frames their survival as the real trag-
edy of the text. Surviving, in fact, delivers them into a now heightened con-
dition of economic and physical precarity and emotional suffering than they
had already been in. But just for a moment, in the scene of their accident,
sex finds dramatic expression. And it’s the novella’s formal management of
suicide as a sex act that I am so interested in here. For the most challeng-
ing (because both perversely pleasurable and ultimately painful) critical cli-
max in the story has to do with the fact that suicide emerges in the text as a
sexual exercise. Standing in for sex itself, suicide exceeds its definition as act
or event precisely because of its allegorical value, its literariness: it emerges
138 D. SEITLER
in the story as a formal practice through which erotic gratification is sought

and experienced. In turn, sex, through suicide, exceeds the biopolitical man-
dates for how and when to have it. Keep in mind: neither Ethan nor Mattie
have a future to lose. Their illicit love is trapped in the constraints of the
hetero-narrative ideology of monogamy and white familial obligation; that is,
a narrative form, or biopolitical genre, organized around and by the cultural
assumptions of white heterosexual marriage. Quite literally, there is no way
out for them, no narrative form or discursive context that would enable a sex-
ual exchange that would simultaneously be seen as a just and moral one (at
least not until Wharton would write, quite scandalously, about divorce in The
Age of Innocence nearly a decade later and, of course, not even then). They
are, or rather their desire is, already dead (disallowed, blocked, unalloyed to
social legitimacy). In a certain sense, then, suicide also stands in as an empha-
sis of that deadness as opposed to its enactment. That it is simultaneously and,
I would argue, more significantly an ecstatic relation is what interests me.
In the chapter “Take Ecstasy with Me” from Cruising Utopia, Jose
Muñoz describes ecstasy as an affective transport that enables a moment of
self-abandonment, “of being outside of oneself in time” (Muñoz 2009, 189).
When he asks that we take ecstasy with him, he invites us to “step out of
the here and now of straight time” and enter not so much another space or
time but another domain of feeling: “It is an invitation to desire differently,
to desire more, to desire better” (Muñoz 2009, 189). And, really, that is
all Mattie and Ethan want. To be undone by a sleigh ride, by its economy of
danger, its capacity to produce a heightened sensory experience akin to the
wish for death; or, in Muñoz’s sense, the ingestion of a drug, to accept this
risk, is not to resign oneself to one’s conditions of being, nor is it to willfully
enact an escape from it, but rather to attempt to whittle out a habitable notch
from within those conditions, and to thus disobey the normative relation of
bodies, acts, and consequences by making that relation ecstatic.
Bodies and Pleasures
Lynda Barry’s Cruddy (1999) pushes the stakes of this relation even farther
and begins to outline the inheritance of this discourse on the cusp of the
twenty-first century. Her novel is a harrowing critique of the forms of vio-
lence that structure and modulate everyday life. We first meet its anti-hero,
16-year-old Roberta Rohbeson, when she is 11 and begins to recount an
unrelentingly abusive home life. The story proceeds from her perspective in
the form of a diary in which the teenage Roberta details, with an unnerving
calm, a lurid cross-country road trip with “the father.” This man may or may
not be her actual father; Roberta is never quite sure. He’s a butcher by trade
and carries with him at all times a set of knives, leaving a litter of bodies in
his wake only to be killed, eventually, by Roberta herself with a knife called
“little Debbie” that he had given her from his collection. These traumatizing
events and the psychological battering Roberta receives throughout the nar-
rative, and their potentially paralyzing effects, are countered by the drugged-
out intimacies she shares with the friends she develops along the way: Vicky,
Turtle, the Great Wesley, and, finally, Vicki’s brother The Stick. Roberta
slowly recounts her past to them and, as she does, they decide to retrace the
journey she had taken with “the father” five years earlier in the hope they
might find the hidden suitcases of money he had been trying to locate in
the original journey. Roberta remembers the way, so, off they go, high on
Ecstasy, LSD, pot, and pills the entire time. Through this drugged haze, we
learn about Roberta’s joyful attachment to trains. She writes:
It is a form of tripping to stand on the railroad tracks […] to wait in the

pitch-blackness with your eyes closed for as long as you can stand as the roaring
gets closer and crashes all around you. The groaning vibrations and the metal
screeches and the ting, ting, ting. To stay on the tracks with your eyes closed
after the twisting bright headlight hits your face […] it will be any second, any
second, the mighty engine blasting and its shocking sharp ray of blinding light
and then the whistle screaming and you jump, flying to the side, rolling in the
sticker weeds and laying flat while the black wind rushes over you. This is what I
used to do in the good old days. (Barry 1999, 109)
Somewhat later, Roberta gives a similar account, but now in the form of full-
blown suicidal ideation:
Train vibrations are strong. Vibrations moving through the rails cool and
very smooth under my hand. The rocking motion and the rolling engine and
the hypnotic shine of the headlamp. The night train. The night train. If I do
it just right, he’ll never see me, he won’t blow the whistle, maybe he’ll feel it
and think a deer or a dog, maybe he won’t think anything. Here comes the
freight train, here comes the freight train […] here it comes here it comes here
it comes NOW. (Barry 1999, 181)
As with the euphoric language of Ethan and Mattie’s sleigh ride with its
references to mobility, speed, motion, and through each, intense pleasure,
Roberta’s autoerotic narrations of suicide by train depict a girl in the throes
of ecstasy. Hers is the experience of a drama of extremity in which she seeks
to feel something that belongs to her alone, is caused and imagined by
her, but in such a way as to abdicate control over that feeling. This is the
quasi-autonomy of placing oneself in the position of risk that forces one to
accede to the possibility of nonsovereignty. Roberta’s version of suicidal ide-
ation extends the sexual ecstasy we observe in Ethan Frome into a form of
being by being undone. She wants to disturb herself in a way that does not
reproduce the pain and difficulty of her childhood abuse but that enables the
flows of her own inventiveness, her own desire, in order to shift the relations
of the irreparability of that abuse.
140 D. SEITLER
The extended metaphor or sexual allegory of Roberta’s train relations

might be called “phallic,” but only in the sense that the train is her phallus to
play with and use, more vibrator (“train vibrations are strong”) than a mas-
culinist anatomical manifestation. Sexual feeling here is pointedly rooted in
an autoerotic model of movement and sensation (rocking and rolling) and
intoxication (tripping), which works to redistribute available models of sexual
experience, but also to generate more labile forms of living. Roberta wants to
inhabit the extreme feeling of losing oneself as the means to feel more herself
and this entails both a move away from the biopolitics of the couple form and
the epistemic ideal of the white middle-class family.
This asks that we understand Roberta’s eventual suicide at the end of
the narrative (yes, by train) in more complicated terms than many of the
available understandings and analyses of suicidal acts: either an analysis of
self-determination and self-sovereignty, the sole effect of social structure,
or the medicalized construction of depression as I have discussed. Roberta
informs us at both the beginning and the end of the novel, “If you are hold-
ing this book right now, it means that everything came out just the way I
wanted it to. I got my happily ever after” (Barry 1999, i, 305). Marking her
suicide as a narrative strategy, a form of closure that defies the tragic but just
as strongly refuses the happily ever after of the marriage plot, neatly summa-
rizes the suicide plot’s double meaning here—it is both a wish for death and
a demand for another form of life. The suicide plot in both Ethan Frome and
Cruddy, then, is not an end in itself, but the means by which other plots may
become available, ones that disrupt neoliberal scripts of self-becoming or uto-
pian Marxist investments in somehow willfully exiting the system.
The disruption enacted by both Ethan Frome and Cruddy is thus related
to but also unlike Paolo Virno’s concept of “engaged withdrawal” with which
I began. For Virno, the term designates a collective exodus from post-Fordist
capitalist political economy and emerges from the rising consciousness of
the laborer. Instead, in Ethan Frome and Cruddy, we have what we could
call “the ecstasy of withdrawal,” a withdrawal into an erotics of loss and
risk that pushes back against what we were never allowed to be in the first
place, a withdrawal that does not require explicit political consciousness to
nonetheless function, narratively, as a political demand. The suicide plot, as
one such instantiation of the ecstasy of withdrawal, can thus be considered
a co-present, competing discourse to biopower by making use of the very
thing biopower hinges on: the regulation and modification of desire. One of
the key insights of Foucault’s work on biopower and biopolitics, of course, is
that inherent to its ambitions to make bodies and persons the direct object of
political power, is the imperative to invent bodies that are, as forms of alter-
ity, new political resources for management. Hence biopower always, in part,
produces (by naming and managing) those alterities, those perversions and
irruptive practices. But if we could say that biopolitical structures of power
invent perversions in order to control them, we could also say that inherent
to biopower is a pleasure that matters.
If this comes across as an easy utopian celebration of suicidal ideation, let

me clarify: if what we need is the articulation of new plots for living, these
narratives point a way toward imagining existence beyond the limits of exist-
ence as mandated by specific social and biopolitical structures. In them,
suicide allegorizes ecstasy in the space of the unbearable. As literary critics,
might it not be an ethical responsibility to point to the difficult pleasures of
a text that, excruciatingly, undauntingly, stage a demand for living otherwise,
and, in doing so, demonstrate how, historically, discursively, this otherwise,
can, in fact, exist, has existed, if only in our thoughts, if only in the creative
manifestations of our desires, if only in the fleeting sensory experiences of a
fateful sleigh ride? By separating the tragedy of the act from the ecstasy of the
ideation, Ethan Frome and Cruddy make use of the suicide plot as a narrative
experiment in the expansion of the concept of life and living. This expansion
entails not so much a politics of agency over death, and thus power over the
sovereign in a re-imagined self-sovereignty. Rather, it uncouples both suicidal
ideation and suicide acts from their medicalization as depression, conjuring in
its stead a more ecstatic, and thus less governable, relation. Beyond the indi-
vidualized moment of ecstasy in each, these texts ask that we re-value geneal-
ogies of the discourse on life alternative to the biopolitical and its gendered,
racializing logics. This reading of the suicide plot doesn’t only intervene in
the medical discourse of suicidology; it also points us toward a coexisting aes-
thetic discourse where ecstasy as a hermeneutic extends new relational and
representational modes of modern life.
Note
1. In fact, in the February 11, 1976 lecture collected in Society Must Be Defended,
Foucault points to the mid-eighteenth century as the beginning of this shift in
power, but he goes on to underscore, in the lecture of March 17, how one of
the primary signatures of the nineteenth century was the advent of biopower:
“What I mean is the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living
being, that the biological came under State control, that there was at least a cer-
tain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biologi-
cal” (Foucault, 203, 240). Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures
at the College De France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003). Thus, we can
make a distinction between origins and perceptibility, which is to say the nine-
teenth and early twentieth century is when biopolitical governance becomes
naturalized enough to be taken up as a central disciplinary discourse—literary,
juridical, medical, and otherwise.
References
Altschuler, Sari. 2018. The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early
United States. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Barry, Lynda. 1999. Cruddy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. 2013. Sex, or the Unbearable. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
142 D. SEITLER
Brown, William. 1972. The Power of Sympathy. Boston, MA: Rowman & Littlefield.
Cacho, Lisa. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of
the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press.
Durkheim, Émile. 2002. Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and
George Simpson. New York and London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, vol. I. New York: Vintage.
———. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76.
New York: Picador.
Gaudet, Katherine. 2012. Liberty and Death: Fictions of Suicide in the New Republic.
Early American Literature 47 (3): 591–622.
Griffiths, Devin. 2016. The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature Between the
Darwins. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire. New York: Penguin.
Leo Bersani. 2009. Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
MacDonald, Michael. 1992. The Medicalization of Suicide in England: Laymen,
Physicians, and Cultural Change, 1500–1870. In Framing Disease: Studies in
Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg and Janet Golden, 85–103. New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40.
Muñoz, Jose. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New
York: New York University Press.
Murphy, Michelle. 2017. The Economization of Life. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Puar, Jasbir. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2010. Ecologies of Sex, Sensation, and Slow Death. Social Text.
https://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/ecologies_of_sex_sensation_
and_slow_death/.
Rabinow, Paul. 1999. French DNA: Trouble in Purgatory. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Rentoul, Robert Reid. 1906. Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? A Plea for the Unborn.
New York: Walter Scott Publishing.
Roosevelt, Theodore. (1901) 1970. The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses. St. Clair
Shores, MI: Scholarly Press.
Rose, Nikolas. 2016. The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in
the Twenty-First Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ross, Edward A. 1901. The Causes of Racial Superiority. Annals of the AAPSS 18
(July): 67–74.
Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African
American Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Rush, Benjamin. 1830. Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the
Mind. Philadelphia: Grigg.
Schneidman, Edwin. 1996. The Suicidal Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Schuller, Kyla. 2017. The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth
Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Seitler, Dana. 2008. Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American
Modernity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2019. Suicidal Tendencies: Notes Toward a Queer Narratology. GLQ 25 (3):
199–216.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2017. ‘You Make Me Feel Right Quare’: Promiscuous
Reading, Minoritarian Critique, and White Sovereign Entrepreneurial Terror.
Social Text 35 (4): 53–86.
Virno, Paolo. 2006. Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of Exodus. In
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt,
195–215. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wald, Priscilla. 2007. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Wharton, Edith. 2001. Ethan Frome. New York: Modern Library.
Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of
Biology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
William Shakespeare. 2004. Much Ado About Nothing, 220. New York: Washington
Square Press.
William Shakespeare. 2004. Romeo and Juliet, 186. New York: Simon and Schuster.
CHAPTER 9
Science, Literature, and the Work of the

Imagination
Bishnupriya Ghosh
My imagination rose, unbidden, possessed, and guided me, gifting successive

images that arose in the mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bonds of
reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—, I saw a pale student of
the unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.
Mary Shelley, “Preface” to Frankenstein (1831)1
One of the most famous passages in English literary studies, Mary Shelley’s invo-
cation of the imagination as a creative force spurred reflections on modern scien-
tific and literary projects for centuries to come. Against the backdrop of present
biotechnological enterprise, the philosophical questions posed in the novel
have only gathered more steam, fire, and fury since the novel’s initial publica-
tion in 1818. There are shelves and servers brimming with criticism on Shelley’s
engagement with the scientific research of her day. Most directly, Frankenstein
is regarded as an inquiry into the human cost of extending Luigi Galvani’s
research (popularized by Giovanni Aldini, his nephew, in England at the time)
and Erasmus Darwin’s philosophies (published in The Temple of Nature, or the
Origin of the Society, 1803)2 on human subjects. Victor Frankenstein’s anguished
report to Roger Walton articulates this inquiry directly: “Whence, I often asked
myself, did the principles of life proceed?” More broadly, the ethical questions the
novel poses regarding Erasmus Darwin’s “principle of life” are bundled together
with larger planetary matters, atmospheric to geological—especially striking given
the novel’s publication exactly when the biological sciences were emerging as
B. Ghosh (*) 
University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

146 B. GHOSH
disciplines in their own right. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in

the previous year was largely responsible for the changing weather patterns that
Shelley records as the “wet, ungenial summer” of 1816.3 Popularly known as
“the year without a summer,” as early as 1816, the inescapable planetary con-
nectivity of natural forces had become clear. The fortunes of the blue planet were
universal, and therefore, scientific inquiries took on a global dimension. Hence,
the period also saw geological expeditions based on the scientific hypothesis that
an ice-free ocean surrounded the North Pole; in England, the British geographer,
John Barrow financed several Arctic voyages from 1810 throughout the rest of
the nineteenth century. Popular interest in this hypothesis grew with the pub-
lication of Benjamin Bragg and Edward Thomas Paris’ A Voyage to the North
Pole in 1817, just a year before Frankenstein (1818). The voyages materialize in
Victor Frankenstein’s doppelganger Roger Walton’s intrepid expedition to the
Arctic. In all these ways, Frankenstein engages not just with the history of science
but also with scientific enterprise—some personal and secretive, some publicly
funded and collective—in the decades when “modern science” sought to remake
the biospheric, geologic, and atmospheric foundations of a godless blue planet.
Would science ensure the survival of the “modern Prometheus”? Or would scien-
tific enterprise and emergent technologies herald humankind’s destruction? This
chapter explores the varying methods through which the “literary” and “scien-
tific” enterprises approach common concerns, arguing that, despite their differ-
ences, both are invested in mobilizing the imagination as a creative force.
In the century that followed, the boundaries between the sciences, and
between the sciences and humanistic disciplines, would harden. Bruno Latour
(1991) sees this separation of discursive formations as constitutive of modern
knowledge: we live with the implications of such boundary-making every day
in the twentieth century. Looking up at the ozone layer, the impulse to leave
its repair to the scientists alone is precisely why it may never disperse. In this
chapter on the established and emergent conjugations between literature and
science, it is instructive to hearken back to the start of these separations. As
scholars have noted, the early 1800s are the decades when biology, arguably the
main scientific preoccupation of Frankenstein, emerged as a discipline from the
natural philosophies that preceded it, and, as late as the mid-twentieth century,
the struggle between biology and physics over definitions of life would erupt in
physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s landmark essay, “What is Life?” (1944).4
In this context, we can see Shelley speculating on the epistemological
effects produced by the modern silos of knowledge that were emergent in
her lifetime. Could “life” be understood as strictly biological existence sep-
arated from all social unfoldings? Was biological or geological survival possi-
ble without the human social structures of family and friendship, education
and the law? Shelley’s novel engages in the muddling, entangling, and roil-
ing of the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, entanglements which
are especially instructive for the multi-leveled complexities of planetary disre-
pair with which we are faced in the twenty-first century. Frankenstein stages
the potential reach of modern western science as global and planetary: the
9 SCIENCE, LITERATURE, AND THE WORK OF THE IMAGINATION 147
Arctic, India, and Turkey are the geographic coordinates at which European
science materializes as a global project with planetary implications. If Victor
Frankenstein and Roger Walton push the horizons of scientific discov-
ery into the body and out to the poles, the gentle Henry Clerval receives
a lesson in social responsibility from his career in the East. Through these
characters’ varied fortunes, Shelley reflects on a particular history of the
European modern sciences and their increasingly global impacts. Of course,
the fact that Islamic scientific advances flourished well before the European
Renaissance—the golden age in astronomy, mathematics, and medicine,
among other disciplines, dates from 800 to 1250 A.D.E.—has been well
established in contemporary scholarship.5 Yet those scientific revolutions did
not come to stand for the “universal” good in the same way that western sci-
entific advances and technological developments did. For, as Shelley suggests,
the history of western science is also that of European expansionism. We
know the hoary histories of modernizing projects that brought science, rea-
son, and progress to environs well beyond the Old World. Hence, Shelley’s
preoccupation with what constitutes the universal good, and what differences
govern the distributions of that good, interrogate the historical situation of
the scientific enterprise. In Frankenstein, how we narrate the unfolding of
scientific inquiries within and beyond the laboratory has everything to do
with what appear as self-evident natural processes and objects.6 In short,
Shelley alerts us to modern science as “an epistemology of the concrete,” as
Hans-Jorg Rheinberger (2006) later christened it. As historical subject, the
scientist approaches the object of inquiry—the creature that awakens Victor
Frankenstein with a gaze from “yellow, watery eyes”—and encodes it accord-
ing to the social values of his time. With such valuation comes the baggage of
unassailable difference, perceptible and deeply inscribed, embodied in crea-
turely life. The novel unfolds around the consequent self-conscious struggle
to reconcile (racial and sexual) perceptions of biological difference: What vio-
lence lies in turning the other into an abstract object of scientific inquiry? It
is not surprising, then, that Frankenstein is situated as another kind of origin
altogether—this time in literary studies. The novel is widely regarded as early
feminist sci-fi, a genre that has inspired and motivated crucial and canonical
critical engagements with literature and science in the last forty years. For all
these reasons, Frankenstein serves as this chapter’s starting point.
Most importantly, Shelley identifies the imagination as that which compels
scientific thought. A creative and self-reflexive faculty, the imagination gen-
erates the mental activities of thinking, remembering, and fantasizing. This
implies that the imagination maps what is not actually present to the senses
and brings it into being through mediation. The artist or the scientist must
conceptualize and draft the model before it materializes. In its reliance on
mediation, the imagination joins literary and scientific endeavor: both mate-
rialize speculative worlds through media technologies (which were mainly
print technologies in Shelley’s time). The litany of books we encounter in
148 B. GHOSH
Frankenstein (as well as where and how they are accessed) point readers to
media technologies that play a role in the story of modern science. Books
train the imagination, instilling ethical limits and social constraints; with-
out them, Shelley suggests, the imagination is an uncontrollable force,
rising “unbidden” and unchecked in the writer and scientist who will cre-
ate “hideous progeny.” Shelley’s protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, narrates
the strength of this force as dazzling, blinding the scientist to the effects of
his creation: “I doubted at first whether I should attempt the creation of
a being like myself or one of simpler organization; but my imagination by
my first success to permit me to doubt of my ability to give life to an ani-
mal as complex and wonderful as man.” The reverberation between literary
and scientific authorship, then, conjures the link between them. The human
urge to create is a natural force that must, like all such planetary forces, be
administered responsibly, with reserve and caution. Paradoxically, it is also the
force that has, time and again, propelled scientific discovery: all those “rev-
olutions” that, as Thomas Kuhn (1962) notes, push beyond what is not yet
present, questioning established protocols, often uncaring about the impact
of the new. The “discoveries” featured in Frankenstein, from the creation of
synthetic life to polar exploration, would mature into massive scientific enter-
prises in the next two centuries. Shelley’s speculative fiction thus captures the
excitement of revolutionary epistemological change.
Beyond speculation, another tenet of the imagination is reflection—or,
more accurately, self-reflection. The Latin root of the term, imaginary, means
to “picture oneself,” a sense present in Shelley’s “acute mental vision” of
the “pale student of the unhallowed arts kneeling by the thing he had put
together.” The imagination not only mediates what is not yet present to the
senses, but also reflects on what one becomes in the act of speculation. Put
differently, the imagination makes new through linkages to the recognizable
“self.” Thus, what one makes is historically located in a place and time:
Victor Frankenstein’s creation, like all scientific innovation, materializes
from its particular historical situation. What this self-reflexive dimension
of the imagination implies for the scientist is epitomized in the story of
Victor Frankenstein, the man who sought distance from his historical situ-
ation; locking himself away with his experiments as the revolutions raged
outside, he nonetheless fell prey to all its social prescriptions. Meanwhile,
this “making new” distances the “self” (“a being like myself”) from the crea-
tion (“the hideous progeny”). This distance is an experiential rupture: Victor
Frankenstein sees his creature as not-quite-human. In science fiction, the
rupture between the speculative (what is to come) and the reflexive (what is
now present) constitutes a cognitive estrangement that assumes literary form.
The work of the imagination is speculative and critical; it compels us to think,
remember, and fantasize.
One approach to the relations between literature and science is to
ask: What is the role of the imagination? In what follows, I trace those
relations as they have emerged, morphed, or settled in the last forty years. I am
concerned less with literary texts or scientific advances than with critics who
have theorized the fold between literary studies and science studies. My chapter
does not offer a comprehensive overview but etches disciplinary, interdiscipli-
nary, and multidisciplinary relations in three short sections and through a selec-
tion of exemplary works. On a broader level, the three sections return to the
questions that never left Mary Shelley: At what (human or non-human) cost do
we pursue modern science? What are the dangers of the modern sciences’ sepa-
ration from philosophical questions or social thought? What is the relationship
between modern sciences and modern literatures?
Epistemologies: Modes, Methods, Paradigms

The many histories of science written throughout the twentieth century
establish the historicity of scientific objects and processes, protocols and
techniques‚ in no uncertain terms. An object such as the “gene,” for instance,
notes Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-
Century Histories of Life (2006), is a fuzzy concept as it migrates across the
biological sciences: it signifies differently within the discursive domains of
microbiology, evolutionary biology, and molecular biology. Even within these
domains, multiple experts, and sometimes, non-experts debate the nature
of the scientific object. If objects (the gene, the virus, the cell) evolve over
time in scientific epistemologies, then twentieth-century histories of science
offer insights into the contexts within which scientific facts emerge.7 Early
twentieth-century theories of quantum mechanics embraced the uncertainty
principle, thus spurring the turn away from the positivist certainties of the
nineteenth century and propelling historical epistemologies that underscored
the historicity of science. Ludwig Fleck’s 1935 The Genesis and Development
of Scientific Fact—a notable treatise on the fabrication of scientific fact which
preceded Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions8—argues
that there is ongoing feedback between concepts and evidence, terms which
mutually define each other and regularly marginalize whatever appears to
contradict or overly complicate the standardized definitions. Analyzing
syphilis as a multi-symptom syndrome, Fleck notes the slippages around
the disease concept ever since its first emergence in the fifteenth century.
At that point, the condition’s causes and treatments were part mystical-
ethical (resulting from the movement of stars or from carnal excess) and part
empirical-therapeutic (treatable with mercury). The debate regarding whether
or not one could characterize the syndrome that included sores, dementia,
and progressive paralysis as a disease entity raged for centuries before nine-
teenth-century germ theory established spirochaeta pallida as a single caus-
ative agent. The protocols of the early twentieth-century Wasserman test
were critical to the agent’s materialization: clinical symptoms now told the
story of microbial proliferation based on pathological evidence (Fleck’s
150 B. GHOSH
“changes in blood”). Even as systemized vademecum sciences (for general

experts) followed linear disease causalities, the difficulties of identifying one
particular form of this parasite livened discussions in journal science (for
researchers). Fleck’s greater point in tracking the debates is to suggest that
what appears as “scientific fact” in fact emerges from protracted negotiations
between multiple “thought communities,” expert and non-expert. Closer to
our time, the well-documented histories of the AIDS clinical trials have only
underscored the salience of Fleck’s thought communities to the construction
of diseases.
Enter literature, and the question of what roles literary thought commu-
nities, including science fiction writers, play in defining scientific facts. One
point of entry into this impossibly large question is through critical think-
ers who have pursued direct links between literary and scientific imaginar-
ies as they “picture” scientific phenomena. Sarah Franklin’s Dolly Mixtures:
The Remaking of Genealogy (2007), for instance, examines Dolly, the famous
lamb clone that Scotland’s Roslin Institute created in 1997. Franklin tracks
the sneakily simple concept of “sheep” in recombinant histories of British
agriculture and reproductive medicine and shows Dolly to be a complex crea-
ture: a product of scientific creativity, but also, in the context of Britain’s rural
heritage and the new fact of synthetic reproduction, a redefinition of abiding
cultural concepts such as sex, nation, and kin. Franklin’s laborious tracing of
discursive shifts around “sheep” after Dolly establishes a method for tracking
the relations between science and literature. “Literature,” here, is one part
of a larger cultural domain; its significance lies in the capacity to represent
previously unknown phenomena. In short, it is the speculative dimension of
literary texts that make them particularly efficacious for charting the futures
of experimental science; literature whets the imagination to make worlds with
synthetic creaturely life. Biotech sci-fi explicitly speculates on the anthropo-
centric encoding of synthetic creatures that effectively turn them into com-
modities to be used and discarded at will: Kazuo Ishiguro’s dystopian Never
Let Me Go (2005), for one, follows children who come of age only to realize
they are clones whose organs belong to anonymous elites. The coming-of-
age genre destabilizes the reader, who might expect more about the techni-
cal processes of cloning; instead, readers grapple with the attachments that
are foundational to making kin. Both Never Let Me Go and Dolly Mixtures
ask: What kind of kin are synthetic creatures? What genealogies link “us”
with “them”? In Franklin’s book, genealogy is both theoretical concept and
method: following Michel Foucault, genealogical thinking eschews direct lin-
eages for complex, often fragmented, often dispersed, linkages. Genetic codes
flash in Dolly much like blue eyes surface from a forgotten branch of a family
tree. Dolly Mixtures foregrounds the knotty discursive terrains within which
scientific objects come to be known.
The larger cultural imaginaries that frame scientific thought are Priscilla
Wald’s concern in Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative
(2007), a book devoted to mapping the presence of scientific concepts in pop-

ular science. Popular science includes literary texts and journalistic writings,
policy papers and science communication. Exploring the literary conventions
of outbreak narratives, Wald unearths what is shared across these domains:
for instance, desires for the origins of disease events such as the HIV/AIDS
pandemic. Ever since the famous Emerging Infectious Disease conference in
Washington, DC, 1989, we know that disease events are better understood
as “emergences,” multi-leveled multi-causal phenomena untraceable to a
single origin,9 and yet time and again, epidemiological accounts attempt to
narrow the “source” to a patient zero. Wald points to Gaetan Dugas, the
French-Canadian flight attendant, and Typhoid Mary, the Irish-American
cook, who were the racialized and gendered points of origin for HIV/AIDS
and typhoid transmission in North America, and discredits the mytholo-
gies that surround them: while the Dugas case has been roundly disputed,
Mary Mallon’s forcible isolation between 1907 and 1938 has been criticized
as cruel and unusual punishment inflicted upon a socially vulnerable sub-
ject (Broverman 2018). The facts of both cases demonstrate all the ways in
which literary and scientific narratives emerge from shared social imaginaries
of health and illness, racially and sexually coded imaginaries that testify to the
social values of their time. Wald shows how medical communities and popular
science journalism, confronted by bewildering symptoms and alarming rates
of infection, participated in narrating these origin stories. The formal charac-
teristics of shared narrative conventions in science communication on diverse
platforms provide evidence of a deep structure: the political unconscious of
epidemiological outbreaks. A litany of contagion narratives explores this
unconscious as it unfolds across epidemics. Alejandro Morales’ sweeping The
Rag Doll Plagues (1991), for one, moves from colonial Mexico to AIDS-riven
Southern California to a twenty-first-century future. Everywhere, there is the
same logic of segregation and sequestration; everywhere, there is the messy
interdependence of worlds, new and old, California and Mexico, present and
future. Wald’s analysis of contagion’s structuring modes is especially perti-
nent in the context of such fictions, which show that the will to separate, to
scapegoat, to distance, to dispose, is intrinsic to the management of large-scale
human tragedies.
Finally, a third direct way to approach the relations between science and
literature is to consider their joint contributions to historical knowledge para-
digms. This is Colin Milburn’s project in Nanovision: Engineering the Future
(2008), a book that straddles scientific and literary imaginations concerning
nanotechnology. Throughout, Milburn examines the speculative roots of
nanotechnology. For instance, before the new technology was realized, sci-
entific visions—such as molecular engineer and futurologist Eric Drexler’s
armies of small robots and carbon nanotube discoverer Richard Smalley’s
elevator of nanotubes stretching from the earth into space—were the stuff
of science fiction, a speculative reaching toward potentialities yet to come.
152 B. GHOSH
One of Milburn’s stories concerns the “origins” of nanotech discourse that is

classically attributed to Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture (“There’s Plenty of
Room at the Bottom”). Milburn shows how Robert Heinlein’s short story,
“Waldo” (1942), is a source text for imagining the world at ever-smaller
scales until one can manipulate matter at molecular levels. If Feynman spoke
of remote-control hands that make smaller and smaller sets of hands, the
incomparable Waldo’s delightful ever-smaller waldoes that can perform sur-
gery at sub-cellular scales is Fenyman’s font of inspiration for the technology
to come.
Such connections between literary and scientific imaginations are not just
fortuitous. Rather, they involve a paradigmatic way of seeing the world and
its futures, which Milburn names “nanovision.” To “see” beyond the limited
paradigms of the present involves a rupture in time, a jump ahead estranged
from the present. Such cognitive estrangement is the founding temporality
of science fiction, and Milburn locates such temporality in the speculative
science of nanotechnology: “Nanotechnology entails a way of seeing, a
perspectival orientation to the world, that operates through a productive
dynamic of blindness and insight. It produces a blind spot, a wall, a veil, a
black hole, or a barrier and therein discovers a scission—between present and
future, between human and posthuman, between science and science fiction.
But at the same time, even in breaching its own blindness, it sees through
it toward the beyond. It breaches the wall, breaks the barrier, lifts the veil,
and voyages into the black hole. It is a way of seeing that lyses the mem-
brane between the technological present and the nanotechnological future”
(13). The speculative embrace of the radically unknown is the imaginative
great leap forward that has brought us nanotechnology. The imagination
is indisputably a creative force; it dallies with the unknown and courts dan-
ger, sometimes to the cost of the human good. But then, as we have learned
the hard way in the late twentieth century, an exclusive focus on the human
good is precisely the problem. Milburn’s work exemplifies the turn to think-
ing human-animal-machinic relations in technoculture studies, one of the first
interdisciplinary fields that addressed literature and science together within
the academy. In the last forty years, those fields have flourished, diversify-
ing in stable configurations that address specific knowledge paradigms: they
explore how we should “know” about the world in order to remake it.
The critical works discussed above that directly address the imagination
speak to the mutual constitution of the literary and the scientific: intellec-
tual histories, cultural imaginaries, and linguistic etymologies yield evidence
of the thoroughfare between the two. All three scholars variously span inter-
disciplinary formations such as science-and-technology studies (STS), history
of science, cultural studies, techno-culture studies, and new media studies. As
the preliminary list of these relatively new sub-fields suggests, the bounda-
ries between the literary and the scientific are increasingly nebulous and
fraught. Priscilla Wald’s exploration of science communication in popular
science journalism, for instance, shores up shared fictions that bleed into
literary works and scientific research. Colin Milburn articulates a shared way
of seeing through his conception of “nanovision,” while Sarah Franklin tracks
large discursive formations that are constitutive of both scientific and liter-
ary paradigms. Their varying methods raise disciplinary questions about the
differences or distances between literary and scientific domains. In the s ection
below, I pause on other exemplary instances of scholarship that demarcate
these domains, pursuing interdisciplinary scholarship, as critical thinkers
parley abiding and emergent reasons as to why the literary and scientific are
never too far from each other.
Constitutions: Humans, Animals, Machines

The increasingly strong engagements between literature and sciences have
visible institutional presence: there are professional organizations (such as
the Society for the Literature, Science, and the Arts) and research programs
(such as History of Science, Science and Technology, and the Environmental
Humanities) devoted to developing and sustaining relations between the
two disciplines. One approach to those relations is to track interdisciplinary
research that follows homologous lines of inquiry while recognizing the
separate domains of each discipline. A striking instance is Philip Thurtle’s
The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and Information in the
American Biological Sciences, 1870–1920 (2007), a book that examines the
enmeshment of the biological sciences in a larger epistemic shift toward
genetic thinking that begins with the nineteenth-century fin de siècle. Thurtle
argues that new conceptions in biology must be thought in relation to large-
scale technological, cultural, and economic transformations, including the
rise of managerial capitalism and new information processing technologies.
In other words, changes in political economy and new technologies created
the conditions that made genetic thinking possible and desirable. Literary
works play a role in debates over the proper relation between biological
hereditary traits and social inheritance, which raged through the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. Turning to Edith Wharton’s famous
portrait of America’s Gilded Age in The Age of Innocence (1920), for example,
Thurtle argues that a dinner table conversation over breeding trotting horses
through which Wharton stages a conflict between the old moneyed New York
elites and the brash newly wealthy is equally a contribution to contempora-
neous conversations regarding the social value of hereditary traits. Thurtle
offers evidence not only in the fact that breeding trotters was a very popular
leisure activity among rich industrialists such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland
Stanford, John D. Rockefeller, and E. H. Harriman, but also in a remark by
the head of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for Eugenics, Charles B.
Davenport, that much social progress would be achieved if human matings
were to simulate practices of horse breeding based on preserving superior
154 B. GHOSH
biological traits.10 For Thurtle, literary (the inheritance narrative in the

novel), scientific (experiments on hereditary traits), and social (horse breed-
ing practices) inquiries are homologous: that is, they pursue similar lines of crit-
ical inquiry into how hereditary traits constitute the human, both biologically
and socially. Hence, this encyclopedic work is truly interdisciplinary. He gives
us prehistories of what becomes commonplace in the mid-twentieth century,
from the interdependence of the tools that process information and animate
life to the gradual enmeshing of information processing in corporate indus-
trial cultures.
The latter is the concern of the digital humanities, an interdisciplinary field
that conjugates literary studies with computer science. In literature depart-
ments, computational tools and methods have opened up new arenas of
research, hermeneutic and archival; digital platforms and formats have fur-
ther nudged digital humanities to engage more fully with “new media” that
ranges from information culture to bioinformatic studies. On the one hand,
new media theorists and digital humanities engage the textualities that are
the bread and butter of literary studies, studying everything from new episto-
lary cultures of text messaging to the global dominance of new post-alphabet
languages. On the other, the foundational object of scrutiny is coding and
its discontents, a preeminent literary object since the linguistic turn of the
late twentieth century. It would be virtually impossible to characterize all the
ways in which literature is now embedded in the study of the information
sciences, but one could begin to delineate this embedding through one land-
mark book: Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit: A Theory
of Networks (2007), which attempted to conceptualize information systems
and networks, nodes and pathways, firewalls and vulnerabilities. One of the
contributions of the book was to cybernetic histories, especially industrial/
corporate and military armatures, salient to the study of literature. To make
their point, Galloway and Thacker engage with information exchange as a
foundational activity that structures natural and social networks. They offer
microbial networks as models for uncontrollable divergences and mutations
that can express radical disturbances in the existing state of things, theorizing
constant emergence as the unpredictable feature of networks. If organisms are
not complex machines but aggregates of large populations of simple machines
whose variable actions are calculable, then what can the biosphere teach us
about cyber-worlds? The analogical relation between scientific research on
microbial networks and cultural/social research on cyber networks shows,
argue Galloway and Thacker, that both kinds of networks are constantly
emerging, but are also always subject to new regulation and control. Control
can manifest as a large social body (like the state) fighting bottom-up prolif-
erating networks (made of terror cells) or as “networks fighting networks.”
The latter is most effective, they maintain, in critical infrastructure such as
Disease Surveillance Networks (DSN) tailored to track “viral chatter,” or
in military intelligence units (under as the US Defence Advanced Research
Project Agency or DARPA) that exhort trainees to “think like a virus.”

Here, science (as microbial culture) and literature (as information culture)
are placed in modular relation to each other: the one serves as a blueprint
for constructing the other. Of course, modular preoccupations do not obtain
across the digital humanities; I highlight Galloway and Thacker’s text because
it exemplifies interdisciplinary conjugations of literary studies (as it articu-
lates with cultural studies) and computer science (as it intersects with larger
information sciences). Their conjugations find resonance in literary fiction on
viruses, in particular Neal Stephenson’s acclaimed Snow Crash (1992), which
staged a faceoff between a computer virus from the Metaverse and a hacker
in the real world who must defang its attacks. Like Galloway and Thacker,
Stephenson theorizes the virus behavior to think about the collective actions
of micro-machines that can substantially alter present equilibria.
A final instance of two well-demarcated disciplines that remain distinct
within their new shared ecologies is the interdisciplinary field of litera-
ture and neuroscience. A seminal work is Antonio Damasio’s Self Comes to
Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (2010), in which Damasio explores
the biological processes constitutive of “consciousness”—a construct that
was traditionally the concern of literary and philosophical study. The “self,”
argues Damasio, is the reflexive sense of neural maps, and is therefore deeply
embodied; myriad neural connections enable learning, remembering, and
recognizing past and future selves. Conversely, cultural encounters regu-
late neural networks, an evolutionary perspective. In short, with Damasio,
“mind studies” established a feedback between neurological and cultural
changes. Neuroscientists rushed to study the effects of culture (reading, fol-
lowing narratives, wordplay) on body-brain networks, while literary schol-
ars turned to cognitive processes beyond the cerebral or deliberative. Affect
studies, neuroaesthetics, and trauma studies—to mention just a few intellec-
tual trajectories—all feel the impact of these emergent theories of the mind.
The connections between literature and neuroscience have now given rise
to “neuro-novels” that engage brain biology (injury, degeneration, altera-
tions) to explore human actions and behaviors. Sebastian Faulk’s A Possible
Life (2012), for instance, fictionalizes a neuro-nexus of self-awareness—
Glockner’s Isthmus—that is “discovered” to be the basis of the self. Yet as the
story proceeds, the major protagonist who is a neuroscientist grows increas-
ingly uncomfortable with her findings; once more, we find a questioning of
biological determinism in the constitution of the self. Here, as elsewhere,
there is no fusion of neuroscience and literary studies, but their relevance to
each other’s preoccupations is eminently clear.
The examples in this section have highlighted interdisciplinary research
clusters that see humans, animals, and machines as mutually constitu-
tive. Whether it is Phillip Thurtle’s socially significant horse-breeding prac-
tices or Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s microbial information
exchange, interdisciplinary inquiries cross and re-cross established boundaries.
156 B. GHOSH
Taken together, what these works suggest is that if human consciousness

and its effects are to be radically rethought, literary and scientific studies
must draw on each other’s histories and genealogies, integrating each other’s
insights and discoveries.
Fields: Inquiries, Impacts, Actions

In this last section, I turn to institutionally established sub-fields that take
interdisciplinary research a step further: to common projects, coordinated
or collaborative, tuned to the quest for socially responsible scientific and
technological progress. My focus is on “multi” disciplinary endeavors that
arise from a keen sense of historical urgency: a sense of common enterprise
that has impelled new public-facing academic work in the humanities and
the sciences. Three widely recognized subfields—the medical humanities,
environmental studies, and animal/multispecies studies—once more serve as
exemplary instances, and I elaborate the forms and genres, the platforms and
spaces of collaborative research within them.
The idea of the medical humanities is not new. Doctors and patients
have always negotiated the terms on which health emerges as a horizon.
But changes in information access and the intensifying patient activism of
the last forty years have had lasting impacts on the medical production of
health and illness. Institutional knowledge is regularly assessed and eval-
uated in the context of a deluge of information across media platforms;
hence, medical decisions are based on contingent collaborations among
doctors, patients, state officials, drug companies, hospital administrators,
clinicians, public health workers, caregivers, activists, counselors, and some-
times self-constituted affected communities (with the “support group” as
its post-industrial organizational form). Patients hyper-attuned to their vital
states actively seek, collate, and organize data into information, actively par-
ticipating in emergent “bioscapes” (as Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit
name shared ethical plateaus).11 In this context, patient narratives or “auto-
pathographies” have assumed new significance. The interest in autopathog-
raphies—everything from memoirs to journals and diaries—suggests both
medical investments in understandings of bodily changes, lifespans, and dis-
ease events and literary engagements with the significance and value of bio-
medical advances. An early investigation of the broader societal implications
of biomedical advances is Susan Merrill Squier’s Liminal Lives: Imagining
the Human at the Frontiers of Biomedicine (2004), a book in which she
argues that literature, including pulp fiction as well as literary novels, is at
the front and center of social and ethical questions pertaining to new distri-
butions of “human” matter. Like Milburn, Squier suggests that science fic-
tion paved the way for consenting to everything from embryo adoptions
to intra- and interspecies organ transplantation. Thus, both the fabulation
of fiction and the realism of autopathographies are salient to increasingly
technologized medical practices and their accompanying bioscapes.
Both literature and medical science invest heavily, and often together, in a
common project: multidisciplinary explorations of what health should be and
what counts as the human.
A second expanding multidisciplinary enterprise is environmental stud-
ies, a field with its own internal boundaries: programs and research clusters
in environmental justice studies, the environmental humanities, and the envi-
ronmental sciences mushroom across institutional divisions in universities.
While the individual fields in the environmental humanities (ecological liter-
ary criticism, environmental history, eco-theology, and so forth) have been
in existence for decades now—in some cases dating back to the 1960s with
works such as Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) and Roderick
Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind (1964)—it has only been in recent
years that “environmental humanities” has begun to consolidate expertise
in the interpretative sciences as crucial to the study of the environment. The
main thrust of this sub-field pushes beyond the mere acknowledgment that
environmental media is important to intervening in ecological devastation
or sustaining environmental growth. The environmental humanities address
the histories, methods, concepts, and archives that animate mediations of
the environment. Several books represent this multidisciplinary enterprise:
Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2010),
arising from postcolonial optics, and Stacey Alaimo’s Bodily Natures: Science,
Environment, and the Material Self (2010), based in feminist and queer the-
ory, are exemplary instances that foreground literature as a social force in
environmental repair. Nixon criticizes the public habits of consuming sensa-
tional violence, habits which, he argues, obscure the slow violence of envi-
ronmental impacts. Multi-generational toxicities such as the Chernobyl or
Bhopal disasters become business as usual unless literary articulations bring
them to the surface as human experience. Nixon explores journalist Indra
Sinha’s memorable character, Animal (in Animal’s People, 2007), a young boy
permanently damaged in a fictionalized version of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak.
The novel’s scorn of the legal dog-and-pony show around the ineffective dis-
aster compensations cogently elaborates Nixon’s larger argument about polit-
ical spectacles; if anything, the real repair work is in Animal’s growing ability
to make a fable of catastrophe. In a different kind of move, Alaimo names
the entanglement of human matter within the environment as “transcorpo-
real” movement, moving from creative to philosophical writings as she shows
how everything from X-rays to genes have contributed to the sense of dis-
tributed subjectivity with which we live today. The history of thought attunes
us to the social and physical consequences of an anthropocentric separation
of the human from non-human matter, animate or inanimate. For both writ-
ers, questions of social justice that challenge the universal category of “the
human”—a category that enacts violence on those who are disposable in the
long fight against environmental harm–are at the forefront of public-facing
humanities. Such scholarship provides foundational arguments for collabo-
rative projects—among scientists, policy wonks, activists, journalists, artists,
158 B. GHOSH
state officials, and NGO actors—to harvest necessary expertise in local “solu-
tions” to planetary problems.
Finally, one of the strongest multidisciplinary subfields to enmesh the lit-
erary and the scientific is animal and multispecies studies. Donna Haraway’s
When Species Meet (2007) was a landmark text in claiming the centrality of
the animal in the constitution of the human, carving a space for what is now
institutionally entrenched as animal studies. The field has a diverse array of
thinkers, ranging from those who study the ethical parameters of human-an-
imal relations (pace Derrida) to those who do historical research on animal
husbandry, hunting, or animal rights societies. Building on animal stud-
ies, in recent years, multispecies research has emerged at the intersection of
interdisciplinary fields such as environmental studies and science and tech-
nology studies as well as animal studies. Multispecies ethnographers bring
non-charismatic animals, non-useful plants, and under-studied organisms
such as insects, fungi, and microbes into the purview of anthropological
study. The volume The Multispecies Salon (2014) brings together a range
of writings in natural and cultural history that demonstrate the experience
of otherness—anthropology’s raison d’être. Only this time‚ “nature” itself is
the unfamiliar exotic culture. In this collaborative venture, artistic accounts
are of cultural significance because they mediate present and future processes
and events that are not readily discernible: microscalar interactions and slow
geological or evolutionary time become legible and palpable in the reflexive
mode. Physical and virtual “salons” are the spaces of multidisciplinary “col-
laboration” (the buzzword in multispecies research). In such effects, both
literary and scientific imaginations surface as part and parcel of multispecies
coexistence. These multidisciplinary endeavors not only orchestrate literary
and scientific conjugation, but also insist that the two imaginations are struc-
turally necessary to each other. Through them, scientific epistemologies of
the concrete become modes of everyday life.
Coda
Flash forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century (Fig. 9.1). The
literary imagination materializes on the street as women fight over the gov-
ernance of their bodies. What was once a speculative future immortalized in
Margaret Atwood’s work of apocryphal science fiction, The Handmaid’s Tale
(1985), becomes a possible present. As we know, Atwood’s novel opened
into a dystopian future in which young disposable women had lost all con-
trol over their reproductive capacities; against the backdrop of the Trump
administration’s renewed war against abortion rights, the novel was televised
in a 2017 series. I close with Atwood because unmasking political desires
behind technoscientific futures has been her life’s work. Science appears as
a regime of truth, dangerous in its objectivity. “Falling in love,” she says in
Oryx and Crake (2003), “although it resulted in altered body chemistry and
was therefore real, was a hormonally induced delusional state, according to
Fig. 9.1 Women dressed as handmaids protest against US Vice President Mike

Pence in Philadelphia, 23 July 2018 (Screenshot: The Hill 07/23/18)
him. In addition, it was humiliating, because it put you at a disadvantage, it

gave the love object too much power. As for sex per se, it lacked both chal-
lenge and novelty, and was on the whole a deeply imperfect solution to the
problem of intergenerational genetic transfer.” Her prophecies force us to
not only confront scientific truths as historical epistemologies but also as the
powerful occult work of the imagination.
Notes
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/42324/42324-h/42324-h.htm.
2. In the first additional note to a didactic poem written in 1802 and posthu-
mously published in 1803, Darwin discussed spontaneous vitality, describing
the experiments of Ellis, Reamur, Buffon and others. He believed that, under
certain circumstances, microscopic life could arise from non-living matter in a
very short span of time.
3. The explosion of Mount Tambora in Indonesia spewed 2 million tons of
debris, particles, and sulfur into the earth’s atmosphere, and subsequently
influenced weather patterns for years.
4. The botanist, physician, and zoologist, Carl Linnaeus’ refers to the Latin
“biologi” in his Bibliotheca Botanica (1735), a book that proposed a mas-
sive classification of plant genera and species in the known world. A century
later, by 1838, biologists established the cell as the basic unit of life, and the-
orized principles governing life from this perspective. Over the course of the
nineteenth century, biology evolved into different branches, physiology to
microbiology; by the early twentieth century, not only was biology gradually
160 B. GHOSH
differentiated from physics, but the “life sciences” also underwent internal dif-
ferentiations (physiology, genetics, zoology, botany, and so forth). Indeed, by
the twentieth century, biology was a many-sided and multiform discipline con-
cerned with the study of life and living organisms.
5. See, for instance, George Saliba and Jed Z. Buchenwald, 2011. Islamic Science
and the Making of the European Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
6. The points have been variously established in histories of science such as
Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); Bruno Latour
and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Fact (1979);
Steven Shapin, The Social History of Truth (1994); Karin Knorr Cetina,
Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (1999).
7. The historicity of science preoccupied several philosophically minded biolo-
gists. As early as 1872, German physiologist, Emil du Bois-Reymond, deliv-
ering one of the first lectures on the history of science at the Academy of
Sciences in Berlin, would insist “we teach science and its history at the same
time.” Historical epistemologists such as Gaston Bachelard (Essai sur la conais-
sance approchée, 1922), Edmund Husserl (The Crisis of the European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1934–1937), Ludwik Fleck (Genesis
and Structure of Scientific Fact, 1935/1979) and George Canguilhem (The
Knowledge of Life, 1973) would suggest science was a collective project sus-
tained and driven by its open-ended, provisional nature—it always sought to
surpass its own past.
8. The time lag is in part attributed to the rise of Nazi Germany: Fleck’s research
was disrupted when he was imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald; he sur-
vived the war and returned to the question of historical epistemology in the
postwar years.
9. Emergence (from the Latin emegere, “to appear”) is a capacious term for mul-
ti-leveled occurrences across scales of action, human and non-human that
resists linear causality and is therefore difficult to predict. The term was first
used in the ecological context by French-born American microbiologist,
René Dubos, in his 1959 classic, The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and
Biological Change (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). New
conjunctions between cybernetics and molecular biology have revived the
classical concept of emergence. Manuel De Landa (2011)‚ for instance‚ con-
ceptualizes emergence on a synthetic-biologic continuum‚ arguing for the
ontological irreducibility that we find in all emergences. 
10. Phillip Thurtle, “‘Beaufort’s Bastards’: Horses and the Institutional Inheritance
of Gilded Age Capitalism,” http://stanford.edu/dept/HPS/thurtle.html.
11. Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, 2008. “Indeterminate Lives,
Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes,” in Biomedicine as Culture:
Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life, eds.
Regula Valérie Burri and Joseph Dumit, 223–228. London: Routledge. As
uncertainties—about genetic testing, about high-tech knowledge, about cor-
porate medical and scientific infrastructures, to name just a few—accumulate
even as numerous, often consecutive, decisions must be made, the medical sit-
uation is increasingly stratified. The ensuing uneven terrain, an “ethical pla-
teau” as Michael Fischer (2003) names it, means that what health is, could be,
or should be is no longer a unilateral decision made by one medical authority.
Works Cited
Alaimo, Stacey. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self.
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Broverman, Neal. 2018. ‘Patient Zero.’ hivplusmag.com, May 15. https://www.
hivplusmag.com/stigma/2018/5/14/patient-zero-correcting-record-media-
made-gay-aids-villain.
Burri, Regula Valérie, and Joseph Dumit. 2008. Indeterminate Lives, Demands,
Relations: Emergent Bioscapes. In Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices,
Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life, ed. Regula Valérie Burri and
Joseph Dumit, 223–228. London: Routledge.
Cetina, Karin Knorr. 1999. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
De Landa, Manuel. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Scientific
Reason. London: Continuum Press.
Dubos, René. [1959] 1987. The Mirage of Health: Utopias, Progress, and Biological
Change. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Fleck, Ludwig. [1935] 1981. The Genesis and Development of Scientific Fact. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Franklin, Sarah. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks.
Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Kirskey, Eben, et al. 2014. The Multispecies Salon. Durham: Duke University Press.
Kuhn, Thomas. [1962] 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago:
University of Chicago.
Latour, Bruno. 1991. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.
Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. [1979] 1986. Laboratory Life: The Construction of
Scientific Fact. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Milburn, Colin. 2008. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Nixon, Rob. 2010. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2006. An Epistemology of the Concrete: Twentieth-Century
Histories of Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Saliba, George, and Jed Z. Buchenwald. 2011. Islamic Science and the Making of the
European Renaissance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shapin, Steven. 1995. The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth
Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shelley, Mary. [1831] 1994. Frankenstein. New York: Dover Publications.
Thurtle, Phillip. 2007. The Emergence of Genetic Rationality: Space, Time, and
Information in the American Biological Sciences, 1870–1920. Washington:
University of Washington Press.
Wald, Priscilla. 2007. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative.
Durham: Duke University Press.
CHAPTER 10
Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science

of Language
Emily Coit
Literature and science are both contested, inconstant categories, and their
histories overlap more significantly than their current configuration may
suggest: students of modern disciplinary history know well that in its form-
ative years during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the
discipline that would consolidate itself as English was made up partly of phi-
lologists who called their work “science.” Literature and science also interre-
late during this period because both language and literature are understood
to be racial phenomena. That understanding makes language and literature
a body of hard evidence useful to scientists studying race; it also makes the
study of language and literature itself an investigation of the racial qualities
that inhere in words, grammars, and texts. In the English departments of
the period, these assumptions informed the work of not just philologists but
also their “generalist” colleagues. The understanding of literature and culture
that generalists took from Matthew Arnold (and others) was itself crucially
informed by comparative philology and its arguments about race and nation.
Such interrelations between the mobile categories of literature and sci-
ence on the expansive terrain of nineteenth-century philology help to account
for certain strangenesses in Edith Wharton’s “Descent of Man” (1904).
“Descent” is a short story about science and a scientist. Its plot, however,
concerns words, readers, and reading. Wharton refers to evolutionary science
in her title, makes her protagonist a “microscopist,” and then offers a tale
that turns on the operation of language. Her microscopist writes a satire of
E. Coit (*) 
University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

164 E. COIT
the popular science writing he despises, but when his satire is marketed and
then read avidly as a sincere expression, he earns fame and dollars; snared in
the trap of that tawdry success, he neglects the true science he initially sought
to defend. The descent of this particular man is, we gather, a degeneration
rather than a progressive evolution.
Taking Wharton’s story as a clue and a provocation, this chapter examines
links between the study of language and the study of evolutionary science around
the turn of the century. In order to make these links more readily visible, it casts
glances at a wide range of thinkers, including Charles Darwin, the Oxford lin-
guist Friedrich Max Müller, and two of Wharton’s own friends with particular
interests in the English language: Henry James and Harvard Professor of English
Barrett Wendell. Together, this array of thinkers reminds us of a shared intellec-
tual history that is easily forgotten but enormously significant: the pasts of lit-
erary study and scientific study converge in the history thinking about race. In
“Descent” and in her writing about how to transmit the precious inheritance of
the English tongue, Wharton works from within that convergence: she thinks
about the evolution of species and of language. That she does this thinking
in fiction places her work within a larger pattern: as Will Abberley has shown,
“Victorian and Edwardian scientific visions of the evolution of language emerged
symbiotically with popular fiction about the subject” (Abberley 2015, 2). 
Wharton’s interest in Darwin, Spencer, and the broader body of p opular
evolutionary science writing is well known, and the role of race science in her
thought has been brilliantly treated by Jennie Kassanoff.1 Although Kassanoff
shows that language is central to Wharton’s thinking about race, she doesn’t
discuss philology as the terrain on which these interests merge. Keeping phi-
lology in mind as we reexamine those interests shows that even as biological
and linguistic anti-essentialisms inform her perspectives, Wharton’s conserv-
atism manifests in a distaste for the instabilities that such anti-essentialisms
imply. As the professionalized study of language increasingly takes a syn-
chronic approach that seeks to understand how a word operates in the pres-
ent, Wharton favors the diachronic, genealogical methods of comparative
philology and evolutionary science, which comport with her sense that a rev-
erence for the past is crucial to order in the present.
Wharton was well acquainted with the sprawling body of thought that was
nineteenth-century philology. In what remains of her library, we find a num-
ber of works by writers whom historians of philology identify as key thinkers in
the discourse, including one volume of a two-volume 1884 edition of Arthur
de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines (1854), an 1876 edi-
tion of Ernst Haeckel’s History of Creation (1868); and a number of works by
Hippolyte Taine and Ernest Renan (Ramsden 1999, 48, 55, 102, 122).2 Renan
expresses the remarkable expansiveness and ambition of nineteenth-century
philology when he defines it in L’Avenir de la science (1848) as “the exact
10 EDITH WHARTON’S MICROSCOPIST AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE 165
science of the productions of the human intellect” and affirms “the founders of the
modern spirit are the philologists” (qtd. Harpham 2011, 51).3
But Wharton did not have to read philological texts to encounter phil-
ological ideas: she also would have encountered these ideas in her study of
evolutionary science. As Stephen G. Alter has shown, the analogy between
the development of language and the development of species plays an impor-
tant role in the study of both language and evolution. Comparative philology
offered Darwin and other thinkers a useful genealogical model of change over
time; evolutionary science, in turn, gave philologists ways to imagine and
describe the process by which languages develop and die out (Alter 1999).
Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s account of philology’s role in the history of the
humanities emphasizes this mutually constitutive reciprocity: “The effect of
this collaboration,” he observes, “was to create the appearance of a power-
ful scientific consensus around the proposition that the deepest mysteries of
language and species were capable of being solved through the application
of genealogy.” Pointing to a “dialogue” between Darwin and philologi-
cal writers, Harpham suggests that “linguistics and biology came to identify
themselves as joint partners in a shared enterprise” (Harpham 2011, 60–61).
This dialogue is explicit, direct, and well documented in letters and published
writing.
As the dialogue between philology and evolutionary science began,
Harpham notes, “philology was by far the more advanced and prestigious sci-
ence” (Harpham 2011, 56). Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) thus gained
force and authority from analogies that grounded its arguments in the estab-
lished truths of philology. Origin, in turn, helped philologists to talk about
a specific kind of mechanism for change, one in which the agents of change
operate without consciousness or intention. We can observe this sort of “col-
laboration” in an exchange between Darwin and Müller. In an 1870 review,
Müller notes August Schleicher’s use of Origin and his comparison of the
extinction of languages to the extinction of races. Having quoted Schleicher
quoting Darwin’s phrase “struggle for life,” Müller then suggests using
Darwin’s ideas slightly differently: “a much more striking analogy… than
the struggle for life among separate languages, is the struggle for words and
grammatical forms which is constantly going on in each language. Here the
better, the shorter, the easier forms are constantly gaining the upper hand”
(Müller 1870, 257).
Soon thereafter, Darwin himself quotes this comment by Müller in an
extended discussion of language in Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex (1871). Calling Müller’s observation “well remarked,” Darwin affirms:
“The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for
existence is Natural Selection.” Making reference to a range of philological
texts and thinkers, Darwin works from the observation that the “formation of
166 E. COIT
different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been
developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel” (Darwin 1992,
21:95, 21:94). Although he quotes Müller approvingly, he also disparages
him in a footnote and offers praise for the Yale philologist William Dwight
Whitney, who would be Müller’s longstanding opponent (Darwin 1992,
21:90n53, 21:93n63). Darwin notably makes his observations about the
“interesting parallelism between the development of species and languages”
with reference to the work of Charles Lyell; like biologists studying change in
species over time, philologists studying change in language over time adopted
from geological science the uniformitarian principles articulated by Lyell
(Darwin 1992, 21:94n67, 21:95; Turner 2014, 243).
Wharton’s reading exposed her to such interrelated applications of evo-
lutionary logic, and also to philological work more narrowly focused on the
history of words and grammar: Emelyn Washburn, an intellectual friend of
her youth, seems to have given her an 1873 edition of The Philology of the
English Tongue (1871) by the Oxford philologist John Earle (Ramsden 1999,
37). Reading that volume, Wharton would have encountered the character-
istic statement, “Philology may be described as a science of language based
upon the comparison of languages” (Earle 1873, iii). Earle repeatedly cites
his more famous colleague Müller, who popularized philological knowledge
in his lectures of the early 1860s.
Especially after the turn of the century, the term “philology” referred spe-
cifically to linguistics or the study of words. Paradoxically, this usage sought
to distinguish these “scientific” practices from precisely the supposedly less
scientific set of practices that “philology” had previously denoted, includ-
ing the study of literary form and literary history (Turner 2014, 272–273).
Philologists at American institutions of higher education would affirm repeat-
edly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century that philology was the
“science” of language. As Michael Warner notes, the Modern Language
Association began as a body dedicated to “a scientific model”: “The MLA…
was not primarily, either in intent or in membership, a literary organization,”
and its members “thought of literary texts as pedagogical tools” (Warner
1985, 2, 4). Gerald Graff, building on Warner’s account of professionali-
zation, notes that philologists repeatedly insisted that their work must be
grounded in “scientific methods”: one professor declared at the MLA’s inau-
gural meeting in 1883, “our department is a science” (qtd. Graff 1987, 68).
Such claims sought to consolidate a prestigiously rigorous disciplinary iden-
tity, but they were not as presumptuous or wishful as they may sound. To
our ears today, “science” means specifically the physical or natural sciences,
but up until the turn of the century, “science” referred to “rigorous, system-
atic knowledge”—as, for example, when Müller in 1870 mentioned the natu-
ral sciences as the counterpart of the historical sciences in order to insist that
the study of language belonged to the former (Turner 2014, 249, 268–269;
Müller 1870, 257).
The science pursued in American English departments had significant

interests in race. The object of scientific study in those departments was often
the Anglo-Saxon language, which witnessed a surge of interest after the Civil
War. Thomas Gossett notes in his history of American racism that in the last
decade of the nineteenth century, “strong racial reasons were… given why
the students in this country should learn Anglo-Saxon” (Gossett 1997, 129).
Even the generalists who did not presume to be scientists worked from phil-
ological knowledge in their approaches to literature, which they too under-
stood as a product and expression of race. The liberal culture inculcated in
generalists’ classrooms drew importantly from Taine and from Arnold, who
drew in turn from Renan, all three of whom were deeply interested in race
and nation. In their polite, gentlemanly fashion, generalists tended to under-
stand their work with English literature as a national project for the English-
speaking race.4
Shortly before the turn of the century, Wharton became friendly with
one of the most influential generalists in the discipline, Harvard’s Barrett
Wendell, who helped to shape the practices and assumptions of English com-
position and American literary history. Wendell opens his Literary History
of America (1900), one of the foundational texts in the genre, by observ-
ing: “literature is of all the fine arts the most ineradicably national. […]
Nationality is generally conceived to be a question of race, of descent, of
blood; and yet in human experience there is a circumstance perhaps more
potent in binding men together than any physical tie.” That binding cir-
cumstance is “these languages which we speak,” which “grow more deeply
than anything else to be a part of our mental habit who use them”; “each
language,” Wendell explains, “grows to associate itself with the ideals and
the aspirations and the fate of those peoples with whose life it is inextricably
intermingled” (Wendell 1900, 3). Wendell names race, descent, and blood
as “physical” properties, implying that they are biological and essential.
Language, his comment suggests, is otherwise: non-essential, acquired. That
it can be acquired makes it a force for assimilation and domination. Wendell
subscribes to the idea that the language of “the English-speaking race,” or
the “Anglo-Saxons,” has unique colonizing capacities: like Anglo-Saxon race
that speaks and sings it, English excels at conquest (Wendell 1900, 152–153;
Gossett 1997, 135–136). Wendell sees his own Harvard classroom as a site
for such assimilation: there, he writes, young men become “not Frenchmen
or Italians, Irishmen or Germans or Jews. They are rather Yankees like their
native Yankee teacher. Unwittingly, almost unobserved, they have become
Americans” (Wendell 1906, 10).
In making these remarks, Wendell wades casually into complicated ques-
tions. His reference to “physical” qualities speaks to tensions between essen-
tialism and anti-essentialism in both philology and the science of race and
evolution. Historians of race science (including its philological elements) tend
168 E. COIT
to identify in the late eighteenth century a shift toward biologism or biolog-

ical materialism, along with a corresponding turn to biological racisms that
understand race as essential and physically embodied.5 Philology participated
in this shift. As the middle of the nineteenth century approached, essential-
ist arguments mustered philological evidence: “the ambiguities of philolog-
ical data, which had previously seemed to unite human beings, could now
be used to separate them” (Abberley 2011, 48). But this shift played out in
complex ways. Recent studies emphasize the “ideological open-endedness of
biologism”: considering a wide range of discursive contexts, this scholarship
shows that materialist understandings of race, along with monogenist argu-
ments about evolution, could serve a variety of perspectives and agendas
(Ellis 2018, 4).6
Darwin and Müller shared an anti-essentialist logic in their emphasis on
mutation. But Darwin’s application of this logic pointed to a continuity
between humans and animals, while Müller’s affirmed the distinction between
them. “Müller’s philology,” Abberley observes, “attacked racial essentialism
to protect species essentialism” (Abberley 2011, 50). Influenced significantly
by Kant, Müller described a universal, eternal human spirit or nature for
which language was the marker. He famously declares: “the one great barrier
between the brute and man is Language. Man speaks, and no brute has ever
uttered a word. Language is our Rubicon, and no brute will dare to cross
it” (Müller 1994, 1:340). Darwin’s arguments suggest that daring is not the
issue, and that these waters form a boundary that’s entirely permeable. But
for Müller, language remains the distinct and unique sign of a unified human-
ity: “No process of natural section,” he insists, “will ever distill significant
words out of the notes of birds or the cries of beasts” (Müller 1994, 1:340).7
While Wendell confidently sets language apart from the physical stuff
of race and blood, Müller in the early 1860s compares language to the
organic, the physical, and the bodily: “Language is something more palpa-
ble than a fold of the brain, or an angle of the scull” (Müller 1994, 1:340).
He also goes beyond comparison to make language itself a fleshly thing: “not
a single drop of foreign blood has entered into the organic system of the
English language. The grammar, the blood and soul of the language, is as
pure and unmixed in English as spoken in the British Isles, as it was when
spoken on the shores of the German ocean by the Angles, Saxons, and Juts
of the continent” (Müller 1994, 1:70). Müller’s arguments about an original
race of Aryan people and the pure blood of the English language now carry
profoundly sinister connotations. He himself, however, rejected the idea of
Aryan racial superiority with increasing force as the century advanced. During
the 1880s, dismayed at crudely racist interpretations and applications of his
ideas—especially in the US—he disavowed the idea that race and language
were one. While his earlier rhetoric made language something as physical as
blood, his writing from this later period seeks to disambiguate language from
the body, and define it as much more significant than mere flesh. He states
with frustration: “I have declared again and again that if I say Aryans, I mean
neither blood nor bones nor hair nor skull; I mean simply those who speak
an Aryan language” (Gossett 1997, 124–126; Harpham 2011, 64–63). For
the body is not what matters: “Language is surely more of the essence of man
than his skin, or his color, or his skull, or his hair. Blood, flesh, and bones are
not of our true essence” (Müller 1895, 49). That true essence, Müller argues,
lies in language.
Müller’s resistance against racist applications of his ideas might seem to
find an echo in Wendell’s distinction between blood that is physical and lan-
guage that is not, as well as his claim that language binds more powerfully
than race. But Wendell in fact espoused the sort of American racism that
Müller assailed. The same influential Literary History that declares litera-
ture the most national of all the arts also casually questions the humanity of
Black people; if Wendell partakes of Müller’s species essentialism, he does so
in a profoundly racist way. And indeed, though more recent scholarship on
Wendell does not discuss these tendencies, Gossett describes him plainly and
accurately as “an extreme conservative as well as an extreme racist” (Gossett
1997, 134). Racist thought, Gossett notes, found a particularly secure home
in English departments. By the 1890s, most historians regarded as disproven
the Teutonic origins theory that located the origins of and capacity for mod-
ern democracy in the Anglo-Saxon race; for historians, that theory could be
disproven because it was “a fairly specific thing,” a set of distinct claims that
evidence had contradicted. But, Gossett explains, “in English departments
the theory of Anglo-Saxon superiority was not tied to anything so definite…
Among the literary scholars, racism was vaguer and therefore harder to dis-
prove” (Gossett 1997, 138).
Professor Wendell was not the only one of Wharton’s friends with an
interest in language and nation. Theodore Roosevelt repeatedly emphasized
the importance of the English language in assimilation and “Americanism.”
Though Roosevelt and Henry James diverged significantly on the question
of assimilation, James too expressed profound concern about how Americans
talked. Roosevelt worried that people in the US were not speaking English;
James worried that they were not speaking English well.8 James objects to
Americans’ “vocal habits as a nation,” which, he observes, make speech a
“mere helpless slobber of disconnected vowel noises.” James pleads for enun-
ciation and distinction, pointing to “the forms and shades of our language.”
Language, he explains, is made up of “innumerable differentiated, discrimi-
nated units of sound and sense that lend themselves to audible production, to
enunciation, to intonation; those innumerable units that have, each, an iden-
tity, a quality, an outline, a shape, a clearness, a fineness, a sweetness, a rich-
ness, that have, in a word, a value, which it is open to us… to preserve or to
destroy” (James 1999, 48, 49, 47). These comments come from the writing
elicited by James’s visit to the US in 1904–1905; in these writings, he repeat-
edly advocates an aesthetic of form, distinction, discrimination, enclosure,
170 E. COIT
delimitation, color, texture, and enunciation, contrasting this against the pre-
dominant ugliness of the US, which he characterizes as uniform, flat, border-
less, slurred, blankly whitewashed, and wide open.
Wharton gives voice to this aesthetic of distinction in 1927, when she
observes the US “inheriting an old social organization which provided for
nicely shaded degrees of culture and conduct,” and destroying that inher-
itance, opting instead for the “impoverishment” of simplification and uni-
formity; like James, she praises qualities that “differentiate” and “give special
color,” hailing “traditional society,” with its “exclusions” and “delicate shades
of language and behavior” (Wharton 1996, 154, 155). Wharton had in fact
described the American tendency to “impoverish” language and expressed
this aesthetic of distinction over two decades earlier, several years before
James developed it in his writing about the US. In a 1901 letter to the editor,
she bemoans the loss of “shades of speech,” noting that “hundreds of useful
distinctions have been lost—not the pedantic shades of meaning with which
speech has no time to reckon, but the kind of distinction that helps the aver-
age man to express his meaning more quickly and precisely.” These changes,
Wharton warns, “weaken and blur the language.” They also move it farther
from its heritage: “the American language, is, in fact, rapidly differentiating
itself from the English, and not always to the profit of the younger branch”
(Wharton 1996, 61–63‚ 61). The genealogical tree that Wharton’s “branch”
refers to is a key figure in evolutionary science that has origins in philology:
Schleicher is pleased to see his Stammbaum affirmed in Darwin’s “great Tree
of Life.”9
Like James, Wharton sees in the US a dissolution and a neglect of fixed
forms: instead of seeking stability and preservation, Americans lazily slur and
let meanings slide. She observes in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919)
that although the US has a vestigial “European heritage,” there are “whole
stretches of this heritage that have been too long allowed to run to waste:
our language, our literature” (Wharton 1997, 37–38). Like James, Wharton
believes that language is “ours to preserve or to destroy.” Americans, she
feels, are opting unthinkingly for the latter. Wharton pushes back against a
growing consensus among philologists when she implies (as does James)
that individuals should feel some sense of responsibility—and thus power—
as keepers of a language; by deliberately knowing and using a language well,
she suggests, a person might prevent it from changing in impoverishing ways.
But, as Linda Dowling points out, one of the chief insights of late Victorian
philology is that language operates autonomously: it is always evolving, and
its evolution is steered by its speakers, but that steering cannot result from
those speakers’ conscious will, much less any one speaker’s. This account
of change over time without individual agency is what philology articulates
in cooperation with evolutionary science. Noting the potentially troubling
nature of these ideas, Dowling argues that the “spectre of autonomous
language—language as a system blindly obeying impersonal phonological
rules in isolation from any world of human values and experience… was to
eat corrosively away at the hidden foundations of a high Victorian ideal of
civilization” (Dowling 1986, xii).10
For Wharton, the preservation of civilization is one of the chief reasons
for preserving language. Thus, she despairs that “it is not uncommon now-
adays, especially in America, to sneer at any deliberate attempts to stabi-
lise language.” The US’s European heritage includes “the magnificent, the
matchless inheritance of English speech and English letters,” but Americans
disrespectfully neglect this inheritance, exposing it carelessly to corruption
and dilapidation. Wharton asserts that if the US had “a more mature sense
of the value of tradition and the strength of continuity she would have kept
a more reverent hold upon this treasure… She would have preserved the lan-
guage instead of debasing and impoverishing it; she would have learned the
historic meaning of its words instead of wasting her time inventing short-cuts
in spelling them.” For Wharton, such learning is a way to “preserve” or “sta-
bilise” language, which is in turn a way of preserving and stabilizing society
itself. If the Americans did these things properly, they would “cultivate the
sense of continuity” by remaining in contact with “the world’s great stabi-
lising traditions of art and poetry and knowledge.” For Wharton, language
itself is a device for conservatism: when preserved, it serves as a force for pres-
ervation, a protection from change (Wharton 1997, 49, 96, 97).
James and Wharton worry in particular about what happens to English in
the US that contains (as James puts it) “such a prodigious amalgam, such
a hotch-potch of racial ingredients.” Observing the immigrants who acquire
English after arriving in the US, James writes that they treat the language
as they would “so many yards of freely figured oilcloth, from the shop, that
they are preparing to lay down, for convenience, on the kitchen floor or
kitchen staircase” (James 1994, 92; 1999, 55). Wharton echoes these com-
ments when she bemoans the state of English in the US, noting “what that
rich language has shrunk to on the lips, and in the literature, of the heter-
ogeneous hundred millions of American citizens who, without uniformity
of tradition or recognized guidance, are being suffered to work their many
wills upon it” (Wharton 1997, 50). She later extends this commentary in
her memoir, where she remembers James’s image: her parents, she recalls,
taught her that “you could do what you liked with the language if you did it
consciously, and for a given purpose—but if you went shuffling along, trail-
ing it after you like a rag in the dust, tramping over it, as Henry James said,
like the emigrant tramping over his kitchen oil-cloth—that was unpardonable,
there deterioration and corruption lurked” (Wharton 1998, 51).
For Wharton, such lurking deterioration portends the dissolution of
civilization itself. “It is not difficult to discover,” she notes in French Ways,
“what becomes of a language left to itself, without accepted standards
or restrictions; instances may be found among any savage tribes without
fixed standards of speech. Their language speedily ceases to be one, and
172 E. COIT
deteriorates into a muddle of unstable dialects” (Wharton 1997, 49–50). In

making linguistic decline the means and signal of civilization’s decline into
savagery, Wharton drew from well-established tropes and arguments in the
larger nineteenth-century discourse of philology. Dowling draws attention
to this pattern and gives as an example a Victorian writer of popular philol-
ogy drawing from an earlier generation of philological thought by quoting
Schlegel’s warning that “a nation whose language becomes rude and barba-
rous must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation
which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of her
intellectual independence and testifies her willingness to cease to exist.” As
Dowling notes, Victorians’ ideas about linguistic ruin were shaped partly
by imperialism, and the barbarism they imagine is often a contamination or
an infiltration of the civilized by barbarousness. She points to another echo
of Schlegel in the late 1880s: “There is no surer or more fatal sign of the
decay of a language than in the interpolation of barbarous terms and foreign
words… [A] corrupt and decaying language is an infallible sign of a corrupt
and decaying civilization. It is one of the gates by which barbarism may invade
and overpower the traditions of a great race” (Dowling 1982, 162, 171).11
Wharton expresses concerns about civilization and savagery in an undated
manuscript titled “The Bitter End” to which Kassanoff draws attention. The
story describes a magazine editor, Sheraton—his name notably drawn from
the idiom of the Colonial Revival, with its kin affinities for antique furniture
and Anglo-Saxon lineage. Sheraton wishes to defend “Pure English” from its
sad fate in “our poor polyglot country.” This polyglot character arises from
the diversity of races that populate the US due to immigration; Wharton’s
“Pure English” recalls Müller’s comments about the total absence of “foreign
blood” in the “pure and unmixed” grammar of English, linked directly to its
ancient antecedents; there Müller is pointing to a continuity over time, and
continuity is precisely what Wharton sees threatened in the US. Her editor
Sheraton demands that everyone associated with his new publication “speak
& pronounce the English language as if it were English & not Choctaw.” He
defends this policy:
People talk about the conservatives turning English into a “dead language,”
because they respect usage & are aware of etymology. But if fluidity is what you
want, say savage dialect is fluid, & stability is the essence of any speech that
has a great historie [sic] and intellectual past. A language made over every six
months by emigrants & drummers can never provide the material for great lit-
erature—or even for civilized human intercourse. (qtd. Kassanoff 2004, 28)12
In this passage, Wharton characteristically merges the modern phenomena

of the US’s immigrants and consumer culture with savagery (including, spe-
cifically, the savagery of Native Americans) and describes all of these things
as destructive of a civilization that is dependent on continuity, order, and
preservation. Quite self-consciously, she fell among the “conservatives”
mentioned by her fictional editor: her complaint, like Sheraton’s, was that
American speakers of English had not “learned the historic meaning of its
words” and did not “preserve” and “stabilise” the language. In failing to do
those things, she felt, Americans failed to achieve the continuity and stability
that foster and perpetuate civilization.
Although Wharton suggested that language that is always rapidly changing
is the language of savages, she did not argue that language and its meanings
should be perfectly static, nor did she make any suggestion that the mean-
ings of words are natural, integral, and fixed. Unsurprisingly, given her wide
reading in philology and evolutionary science, she was too savvy to advocate a
crude linguistic essentialism. But the implications of linguistic a nti-essentialism
did not necessarily please her. In her 1901 letter, she acknowledges explic-
itly that language changes; but, there as in her story about Sheraton, she
deplores the actual nature of present changes in the contemporary US: “It is
inevitable,” she writes, “that time and altered surroundings should modify the
language, and such changes that enrich it are welcome, whatever their source.
Unfortunately, however, the tendency of American speech (and not only that
of the uneducated) is to impoverish rather than enrich the mother tongue”
(Wharton 1996, 61). In 1901 and in 1919 alike, Wharton’s comments on the
richness or poverty of language as it changes correlate with the visions of evo-
lution and degeneration that are embedded in thinking about race. Her savage
dialects change without developing, whereas carefully maintained language can
evolve in a progressive rather than degenerative manner.
In suggesting that such maintenance includes learning “the historic mean-
ing of words” and staying “aware of etymology,” Wharton touches upon live
issues within philological discourse. Nineteenth-century comparative philol-
ogy emphasized that one must study the history of a language to understand
it: this diachronic perspective found meaning in genealogies and etymolo-
gies. But in the early twentieth century, this diachronic approach was super-
seded by the synchronic approach most famously articulated in Ferdinand
de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique général (1916). Saussure drew from
Whitney, who, although his own work investigated history, pointed out that
such investigations are not necessary in explaining how a language works in
the present. Noting that Whitney had a brother who was a geologist, Turner
observes that his “view of language mirrored contemporary uniformitarian
geology. To understand why earth is as it is, you needed to uncover the slow
workings of geological change over time. But the earth is as it is, and you
do not need to know its geological history to farm it, mine it, sail its seas.”
Whitney was drawing not just from contemporary geology but also from the
eighteenth-century philosophers who had asserted “that language is arbi-
trary and conventional.” The idea that the relationship between the signifier
and the signified is contingent and mutable was not a new one, but Saussure
made this idea part of an approach that treated language as “a formal system
of arbitrary elements,” ushering in the structural linguistics of the twentieth
century (Turner 2014, 250, 248, 250).
174 E. COIT
Saussure emphasized that the relation between the signifier and the signi-
fied is arbitrary, contingent, and subject to change. These are qualities that
Wharton disliked. Her abiding preference for preservation, secure order, and
stable hierarchies would seem to have extended into a preference for a signifier
securely fixed to the signified. For Wharton, the modern democratic American
affinities for speed and easy money produce an approach to language that
embraces change, novelty, ease, and profit. Both in speech and in social mat-
ters, she tended to dislike what was uppity and what fostered rupture or rapid
change. As an informed thinker interested in science and language, she saw
that languages, like species, are subject to change over time. But as a conserv-
ative thinker who prized the preservation of standards, forms, and traditions,
she deplored slidings and shifts of meaning, perceiving them as impoverish-
ment and decline: rather than a progressive evolution, they manifested an
alarming degeneration.
Wharton sharply expressed her distaste for rupture and change in her
statements against literary modernism. As Frederick Wegener and Kassanoff
have shown, her anti-modernist arguments about language and literature
were inextricably connected to her political thought about race and nation
(Wegener 1999, Kassanoff 2004). The error of new fiction, Wharton writes in
“Tendencies in Modern Fiction” (1934), is that it mistakenly believes “that the
past is not the soil of the future”: it cuts itself off from that past in its “determi-
nation to be different.” This severing is fatal, for “the accumulated leaf-mould
of tradition is essential to the nurture of new growths of art,” which depends
on “natural processes” and “fecundating soil.” Several years before, Wharton
had pointed to “the depth of the soil” that nourished the great art of Balzac
and Austen (Wharton 1996, 173, 170, 154). These metaphors had also served
Müller: he refers to “the slow accumulation of the humus of language” (Müller
1870, 256). In the organic imagery that Wharton repeatedly uses to argue
against modernism’s (and modernity’s) affinity for rupture, we can see traces
of an account of gradual development drawn from philological thinking about
language, race, and civilization.
Wharton would seem to draw even more conspicuously from philology
when she derides contemporary fiction as “amorphous and agglutinative”
(Wharton 1996, 172). In addition to its sticky generic meaning, the latter
term also has a specific meaning in linguistics: agglutination is “the mor-
phological process of successively adding affixes to a root in order to form
a compound, contrasted as a mode of word-formation or of the expression
of complex ideas with inflection or the use of isolated elements”; it is “a par-
ticular characteristic of certain non-Indo-European languages, including (for
example) Hungarian, Nahuatl, Korean, Japanese, and Turkish” (“aggluti-
nation”). Müller had affirmed that the “structure of the agglutinative lan-
guages” prevented speakers such as Turks from producing “great works of
art in literature,” because “all expressive elements are carefully glued one to
the other”; whereas “more highly developed” languages (such as Sanskrit,
German, Greek, or Latin) could carry speakers to higher thoughts (qtd.
Turner 2014, 246). Once again, philological knowledge and its ideas about
development seem to haunt Wharton’s argument that literary modernism

threatens art and civilization.
Wharton’s “Descent of Man,” brings together her interests in language,
science, literature, degeneration, and Darwin in a remarkably neat package. A
witty tale for the readers of Scribner’s, “Descent” tells the story of one Professor
Linyard. “Known chiefly as a microscopist,” Linyard specializes in beetles: “on
the structure and habits of a certain class of coleoptera he was the most distin-
guished living authority.” This “distinguished microscopist,” an “eminent biol-
ogist,” writes a parody of popular science writing, ironically emulating its vapid
religiosity and floral clichés in a work titled “The Vital Thing” (Wharton 2001,
404, 409, 403). But when he submits it for publication, his friend the publisher
Harviss, an educated man, fails to see its irony: he takes “The Vital Thing” as
a sincere statement—and, with sharp professional acumen, he recognizes it as a
hot commodity. Promising profits, he persuades the Professor to let him mar-
ket it as a sincere rather than a satirical book. “The Vital Thing” is an explosive
success: the idiot women-and-clergy mass-market readership adore its vapidities,
which they, like the publisher, read as sincere rather than ironic statements. The
Professor, now a booming author, becomes a commodity like his text: his face
sells soap and chocolates. When he tries to return to writing true science, he
finds himself trapped in the role of popular writer: the promise of more profit
leads him to commit to a sequel to “The Vital Thing.” The thrust of the story
is that literature and science have a common enemy in the feminine consumer
culture that would commodify and vulgarize them both.
“Descent” is not about philology, but it evokes it. Its repeated description of
the Professor as a “microscopist” recalls negative accounts of philologists’ myopi-
cally narrow expertise in their dryly scientific approach to language. More specifi-
cally, microsopes and microscopy had been associated with the study of language
(Abberley 2015, 1–3). Although the Professor’s sad tale is a story about a scien-
tist and science, its plot is about reading, words, and a crucial literary skill: the
ability to distinguish the sincere from the satirical. Wharton’s title alludes directly
to the work in which Darwin, drawing from philology, explicitly compares the
evolution of species with the evolution of languages. And in this story as in the
other texts by Wharton that we’ve considered, she responds to an anti-essen-
tialist argument about evolution by pointing to the prospect of degeneration.
“Descent” shows literature and the scientist alike degenerate into trashiness.
The story’s plot is a kind of nightmare dramatization of anti-essentialism:
it turns on the instability of the signifier. One “infinitely small” set of read-
ers will take a set of words to say one thing; another set, the vast consumer
public, will take the same set of words to mean something completely dif-
ferent (Wharton 2001, 402). This contingency of meaning seems to depend
significantly on the relative intelligence of readers. The readers of lesser
intelligence in the story are mostly women. “Descent” thus refers not just
to Descent’s comments about the evolution of language but also its affirma-
tion of the intellectual inferiority of the female human.13 Though the story
makes linguistic anti-essentialism the nightmare that drives its plot, that same
176 E. COIT
plot leans on a certain essentialism when it comes to sexual differentiation.In

“Descent,” it is women who fail to maintain language, keep up the standards
of literature, and understand words well. They are responsible for the degen-
erate slide of signification that propels the plot. Professor Linyard’s voiceless
beetles will never cross Müller’s Rubicon, but his loquacious lady readers do
nothing to glorify the speaking side of that divide.
The alarmingly uncontrolled slide of the Professor’s meanings evokes a
larger instability. We might hear a travesty of Kant’s Ding an sich in “The Vital
Thing,” especially given Wharton’s play with the word “thing” during the awk-
ward exchange in which Harviss learns the manuscript that he wants to buy was
in fact written as a satire, and the Professor learns that Harviss has read his sat-
ire as a sincere “confession of faith.” Referring to his book, the Professor asks
in bewilderment, “What in heaven do you think this thing is?” Harviss pleads:
“If you’ll let me handle this book as a genuine thing I’ll guarantee to make it
go.” “A genuine thing?,” the Professor replies. His friend assures him: “You’ve
got hold of a big thing.” Asking for permission to market the book as he likes,
Harviss insists: “I wouldn’t let you alter a word of it.” And they agree: “not a
word of the book was to be altered.” But “The Vital Thing” made up of these
words is not actually any one fixed “thing” at all: the exact same set of words
will be a different book to different readers (Wharton 2001, 400, 402, 403).
Wharton’s knowledge of philology made her richly aware that a word’s
relationship to its meaning was arbitrary and conventional, but she often
deplored departures from convention. Against the synchronic perspective that
considers only the systems operative in the present, she pleaded throughout
her career for respectful awareness of the past and argued that language could
become art only when its writers and speakers knew the history of the words
they used. Like many other nineteenth-century practices favored by Wharton,
the diachronic, genealogical approach to the study of language would be
superseded. Her story nods at Darwin and portrays a biologist, but it is a
story about words: that the study of words and the study of biology mutually
informed each other explains why her tale should portray a microscopist who
can’t control the signification of his signs. For Wharton, that instability and
that disconnect from historical meaning prevent the development of civiliza-
tion, and lead instead to decline and degeneration.
Notes
1. Kassanoff (2004); on Wharton and Darwin see Bender (1996, 314–321),
Liming (2016, 137–160), Ohler (2006).
2. For histories of philology, see Turner (2014), Harpham (2011), and Dowling
(1986). Abberley (2015) shows how Victorian and Edwardian fiction and
science together imagine the evolution of language, identifying “language
progressivism” and “language vitalism” as key tendencies in this symbiosis.
“Descent” plays conspicuously with both of these tendencies. Harvey (2015)
examines the perceived relationship between language and race in the con-
text of the English colonies and the early US, showing that philological study
of Native American languages played an important role in colonialism. Hui

(2017) offers a helpful account of philology that extends into the present. Lee
(2008) discusses Wharton’s reading of Taine and other philological thinkers;
on Wharton and Renan see Singley (2003).
3. Harpham quotes an 1891 American edition, The Future of Science (1891);
emphasis in original.
4. See Graff (1987, 69–72); on the role of study of English language and liter-
ature in the history of American racism, see Gossett (1997, 123–143). On
the (related and overlapping) nationalist functions of American literature and
literary history in the US, see Renker (2007), Shumway (1994), and Stokes
(2006).
5. For discussions of this shift as it applies in philology, see Harpham (2011, 54);
and Abberley (2011, 47–48).
6. See also, e.g., Schuller 2018, 11–12; and Lecourt 2018, 33–42, 63. Abberley
and Harpham similarly push back against simplifying accounts of philolo-
gists’ thinking about race; see Abberley (2011, 50–52); and Harpham (2011,
63–64, 68–70).
7. Turner notes that the disagreement between Darwin and Müller “got nasty,”
observing that Müller “appears not to have grasped well Darwin’s theory of
evolution, which furthered misunderstanding” (Turner 2014, 244–245).
8. These concerns, and Wharton’s, participate in wider anxiety about American
speech. See Cmiel (1990) and Daniels (1983).
9. On Darwin’s tree and Schleicher’s Stammbaum, see Harpham (2011, 57–59)
and Turner (2014, 242–243).
10. Ferguson (2006) revises Dowling’s argument, contending that these ideas from
philology also yielded more positive thinking.
11. The first of these quotations comes from Archbishop Richard Chenevix
Trench; Wharton owned his Proverbs and Their Lessons (Ramsden 1999, 130).
12. Kassanoff shows that Wharton’s “Pure English maintains political-linguistic
order by insisting that ethnically fluid Americans conduct themselves according
to the best usage. It is a linguistic sanctuary for the educated few, a refuge for
those who share Wharton’s distaste for the culture of Indians, immigrants and
peddlers that has overtaken modern America” (Kassanoff 2004, 29).
13. Schriber (1980) discusses these women readers. On Darwin and the intelli-
gence of women, see Russett (1995) and Hamlin (2015). On the important
interrelation of ideas about sexual differentiation, race, and “development” see
Bederman (1995) and Schuller 2018.
Works Cited
“agglutination, n.”. OED Online, June 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www.
oed.com/view/Entry/3903. Accessed 3 Sept 2019.
Abberley, Will. 2011. Race and Species Essentialism in Nineteenth-Century Philology.
Critical Quarterly 53 (4): 45–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2011.
02021.x.
Abberley, Will. 2015. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914.
Alter, Stephen G. 1999. Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and
Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century. London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
178 E. COIT
Bederman, Gail. 1995. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and
Race in the United States, 1880–1917. London: University of Chicago Press.
Bender, Bert. 1996. The Descent of Love: Darwin and the Theory of Sexual Selection in
American Fiction, 1871–1926. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cmiel, Kenneth. 1990. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in
Nineteenth-Century America. New York: William Morrow.
Daniels, Harvey. 1983. Famous Last Words: The American Language Crisis
Reconsidered. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Darwin, Charles. 1992. The Works of Charles Darwin, Vol. 21, ed. P.H. Barrett and
R.B. Freeman. London: Routledge. Oxford Scholarly Editions Online, 2017.
https://doi.org/10.1093/actrade/9781851964017.book.1.
Dowling, Linda C. 1982. Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language. PMLA 97:
160–178.
———. 1986. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Earle, John. 1873. The Philology of the English Tongue. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ellis, Cristin. 2018. Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth
Century. New York: Fordham University. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1xzh0z9.
Ferguson, Christine. 2006. Language, Science and Popular Fiction in the Victorian
Fin-de-Siècle: The Brutal Tongue. Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Gossett, Thomas F. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America, 2nd ed. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Graff, Gerald. 1987. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago:
Hamlin, Kimberly A. 2015. From Eve to Evolution: Darwin, Science, and Women’s
Rights in Gilded Age America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. 2011. The Humanities and the Dream of America. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2013. https://doi.
org/10.7208/chicago/9780226317014.001.0001.
Harvey, Sean P. 2015. Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the
Reservation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hui, Andrew. 2017. The Many Returns of Philology: A State of the Field Report.
Journal of the History of Ideas 78: 137–156. https://doi.org/10.1353/
jhi.2017.0006.
James, Henry. 1994. The American Scene. New York: Penguin.
———. 1999. The Question of Our Speech. In Henry James on Culture: Collected
Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Kassanoff, Jennie A. 2004. Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Lecourt, Sebastian. 2018. Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics,
and the Secular Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Oxford Scholarship
Online, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812494.001.0001.
Lee, Hermione. 2008. Edith Wharton. New York: Knopf.
Liming, Sheila. 2016. ‘It’s Painful to See Them Think’ Wharton, Fin de Siècle Science,
and the Authentication of Female Intelligence. Journal of the Midwest Modern
Language Association 49: 137–160. https://doi.org/10.1353/mml.2016.0045.
Müller, Max. 1870. The Science of Language. Nature 1: 257–259.
———. 1895. Three Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd ed. Chicago: Open
Court. http://archive.org/details/threelecturesons00mulliala.
———. 1994. Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. London: Routledge.
Ohler, Paul. 2006. Edith Wharton’s “Evolutionary Conception”: Darwinian Allegory in
Her Major Novels. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Ramsden, George. 1999. Edith Wharton’s Library. Settrington: Stone Trough Books.
Renker, Elizabeth. 2007. The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1995. Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of
Womanhood. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Schriber, Marysue. 1980. Darwin, Wharton, and ‘The Descent of Man’: Blueprints of
American Society. Studies in Short Fiction 17: 31–38.
Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shumway, David. 1994. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American
Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Singley, Carol J. 2003. Race, Culture, Nation: Edith Wharton and Ernest Renan.
Twentieth Century Literature 49: 32–45.
Stokes, Claudia. 2006. Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History,
1875–1910. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Turner, James. 2014. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Warner, Michael. 1985. Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature: 1875–
1900. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 27: 1–28.
Wegener, Frederick. 1999. Form, “Selection”, and Ideology in Edith Wharton’s
Antimodernist Aesthetic. In A Forward Glance: New Essays on Edith Wharton,
ed. Clare Colquitt, Susan Goodman, and Candace Waid, 116–138. London:
Associated University Presses.
Wendell, Barrett. 1900. A Literary History of America. New York: Scribner’s.
———. 1906. Liberty Union and Democracy: The National Ideals of America. New
York: Scribner’s.
Wharton, Edith. 1996. The Uncollected Critical Writings, ed. Frederick Wegener.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
———. 1997. French Ways and Their Meaning. Lee, MA: Berkshire House Publishers.
———. 1998. A Backward Glance. New York: Touchstone.
———. 2001. The Descent of Man. In Collected Stories 1891–1910, 394–413. New
York: Library of America.
PART II
Methods and Approaches

CHAPTER 11
Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism,

Scientific Charity, and the Matter
of Evidence
Todd Carmody
Is literary studies a science? Can literary scholarship, or the academic study

of literature in a university classroom, be called scientific—and in what sense?
Questions like these can seem by turns open-and-shut and by turns all but
unanswerable. If we would want at times to insist that studying literature
offers us absolutely unique insights into human life, at other times we might
find ourselves arguing that the very complexity of these insights demands the
empirically rigorous methods of analysis more typically associated with the
natural and physical sciences. The plot only thickens when we realize that
empiricism denotes a theory of knowledge derived from the senses. Is not
the knowledge produced by the study of literary texts—which are colloqui-
ally understood as repositories of sensory experience—thus by its very nature
empirical? Questions like these, opening as they do onto further complica-
tions and entanglements the moment we pose them, may seem merely rhe-
torical. But the seemingly unanswerable issue of whether literary studies is a
science—and what kind—is in fact foundational to the history of literary stud-
ies as a modern academic discipline. As such, any examination of the complex
and shifting relations between literature and science in the twentieth century,
the aim of this volume, would be incomplete without an understanding of
the institutional and social contexts in which these relations are inevitably
enmeshed.
T. Carmody (*) 
Bates College, Lewiston, ME, USA

184 T. CARMODY
In its contemporary form, the question of whether and how literary studies
is scientific first became pressing in the late nineteenth century, when a new
generation of literature professors struggled to find a place in the emerging
research university. Whereas scholars in the natural and physical sciences had
little trouble cordoning off a specialized domain of expertise, their colleagues
in literature fared less well in the growing competition for institutional legit-
imacy and prestige. Their best bet, many literature professors thought, lay in
a provocative neologism: scientific criticism. With this term, literary schol-
ars meant to signal a decisive shift away from the practices of their forebears,
who often valued literature not as an object of research in its own right but
as a tool for fostering students’ moral character and for teaching grammar,
rhetoric, and elocution. Scientific criticism, on the other hand, endeavored
to follow the example of the natural and physical sciences, which by the early
twentieth century were dominated by positivist empiricism. “Science” as such
was synonymous not only with technical knowledge and the culture of exper-
tise more broadly, but also with the belief in a unified set of practices—of
observation, inductive experiment, and comparative analysis—that could be
used to study biological or physical phenomena of any kind (Andrews 2015,
8–9).1 This latter notion was popularly associated with John Dewey, whose
writings on high school and higher education influentially distinguished
between science as a method of inquiry and as a body of content, generally
championing method over content (Rudolph 2014, 1059). At base, Dewey’s
“scientific method” consisted of five steps: “(i) a felt difficulty; (ii) its loca-
tion and definition; (iii) suggestion of possible solutions; (iv) development
by reasoning of the bearings of suggestion; and (v) further observation and
experimentation leading to its acceptance or rejection” (Rudolph 2005, 344).
Heralding a development they believed was as inevitable as it was necessary,
literary scholars declared that scientific criticism was but the extension of the
scientific method into the study of literature.
Not everyone, of course, greeted this extension of the scientific method
with enthusiasm. Economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen, for one,
objected to how science in the modern research university had become
“a word to conjure with. So much so that the name and mannerisms, at least,
if nothing more of science, have invaded all fields of learning” (Veblen 1906,
606). There were now “‘sciences’ of theology, law and medicine,” but also a
science of literature. Veblen’s point was not that scientific approaches do not
produce interesting and fruitful literary analyses, but that the cultural author-
ity of positivist science threatened to crowd out a host of competing and
complementary methods. At greatest jeopardy for Veblen was the “cultivated
sense of literary form and literary feeling that must always remain the chief
end of literary training” (Veblen 1906, 606–7). Some fifty years after Veblen,
the English novelist and chemist C.P. Snow famously distinguished between
“literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists” along similar lines. But Snow
ultimately concluded that the former should simply learn to think more like
11 READING GENEROUSLY: SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM, SCIENTIFIC CHARITY … 185
the latter (Snow 1959, 4).2 Today, the legacy of Snow’s “two-culture” para-
digm persists whenever scientific rigor is popularly opposed to fuzzy human-
ism. But rejoinders are no less common, at least among literary scholars eager
to oppose binaristic oppositions with inter- and even anti-disciplinary inquiry.
Indeed, whether exploring how epigenetic models beget cultural metaphors
or how neurodiversity shapes narrative, literary critics now create complex
networks and alliances with the natural and physical sciences as a matter of
course (Markley 2018, 260–61).3 Back of these efforts, however, may lurk
the same professional anxieties that prompted the rise of “scientific criticism”
in the late nineteenth century, updated now to address the austerity condi-
tions of the corporate university. As an influential scholar described his own
experiences bringing structuralist anthropology to bear on literature, mak-
ing literary studies more recognizably “scientific” can only help “justify it
as a mode of knowledge and allow us to defend it with fewer reservations”
(Culler 2002, xiv).
This chapter returns to the emergence of scientific criticism in the modern
US research university at the end of the nineteenth century, though not to
document the lasting institutional impact of the natural and physical sciences
on literary studies. The chapter posits rather that scholarly attention to these
continuities has occluded the perhaps less likely but no less consequential
influence of another upstart field on literary studies—the social sciences.
Readers familiar with the latter disciplinary history may accuse me of wanting
to tell the same story twice. The social sciences, after all, experienced their
own crisis of institutional legitimacy in the early twentieth century, and like
literary scholars many social scientists sought to follow the model established
by the natural and physical sciences. But another history linking literary stud-
ies and the social sciences comes into view when we stress the roots of social
science in late nineteenth-century charity reform projects and particularly in
the reformist doctrine of “scientific charity.” This latter agenda was grounded
not only in the positivist empiricism enshrined in the scientific method, but
also in the affective experience of “social facts.” Charity reformers and later
social workers were taught not only to document all aspects of their clients’
lives, but also to interpret the information thus gathered from a sympathetic
vantage that necessarily encompassed their own subjectivity.
This peculiarly scientific practice of reading the social world finds an
equally unlikely correlate in the practices of literary analysis of certain
turn-of-the-century scientific critics. Explored here through the writings of
literary scholar Richard Green Moulton and reformer Mary Richmond, the
nexus of scientific criticism and scientific charity thus offers a new geneal-
ogy of responses to the institutional hegemony of the scientific method at
the turn of the twentieth century. If this tradition anticipates recent femi-
nist sciences studies scholarship about the “epistemological inseparability of
observer and observed,” the mutual becoming scientific of literary studies
and charity work also resonates with contemporary interest in the sociology
of literature (Barad 2007, 33).4
186 T. CARMODY
From Classical Curriculum to Scientific Criticism

The landscape of US higher education underwent a radical shift at the end
of the nineteenth century, as the ideal of the classical college was gradually
supplanted by the priorities of the research university. For centuries, the
bedrock of the classical curriculum had been two to four years of Greek and
Latin, accompanied by additional coursework in math, history, logic, theol-
ogy, and natural science. Before graduating, seniors also took a capstone sem-
inar in moral philosophy that was commonly taught by the college president
and often called Evidences of Christianity (Graff 1987, 22). This course was
intended to synthesize the disparate insights of the classical curriculum into
a transportable body of moral and religious guidance. After the Civil War,
curricular coherence on this order was harder to come by, threatened by the
forces of secularization and professionalization sweeping through the broader
culture. For their part, secular reformers argued that higher education should
be concerned less with discovering fixed verities than with exploring how ide-
als develop in a cultural context (Marsden 1994, 104). This approach meant
deemphasizing moral uplift and expanding the classical curriculum beyond
Greek and Latin to include an ever-growing list of new academic fields. With
these new fields in turn came the drive to professionalize the largely ama-
teur professoriate. Whereas for many years personal morality and an inclina-
tion to teach had been the only real prerequisites for the job, professors were
soon expected to become experts in narrowly defined fields of inquiry and to
produce rigorous scholarship modeled on the empiricism of the natural and
physical sciences. “Pure research” as guided by the ideals that would later be
codified as the scientific method became one of the main goals of the modern
university, the mark of both professional achievement and disciplinary legiti-
macy (Veysey 1965).
From the beginning, literary studies had a difficult time shoring up its sci-
entific bona fides, in large measure because of how literature had first entered
the antebellum curriculum. In most colleges, literature was treated as belles
lettres and valued less for its intrinsic merit than for what it could teach stu-
dents—grammar, civic ideals, or elocution. In classrooms dominated by the
drudgery of recitation, students grappled with Paradise Lost not to study
Milton’s craft but to cultivate social polish and good character (Turner 2015,
147–48). “Literature” did not become a distinct scholarly field until the early
nineteenth century, when the genteel critics who had long championed the
literary arts in polite society began taking up academic posts. These urbane
advocates valued literature for its power to edify, and they taught students to
read with near-spiritual devotion (Reuben 1996, 6–7). They also produced
scholarship on the model of the popular book review and placed a premium
on aesthetic judgments of good and bad. In both the classroom and as a
critical discourse, this reverential approach to literature found favor among
advocates of what Harvard president Charles Eliot and others called “liberal
culture” (Menand 2010, 31). But with the mounting authority of positivist
empirical science, it was soon clear that literary studies would only claim its
place in the research university by abandoning these increasingly outmoded
commitments. As Princeton’s Theodore Hunt noted in 1885, professional
scholars had first to disprove the popular opinion “that English literature is a
subject for the desultory reader in his leisure hours rather than an intellectual
study for serious workers” (Hunt 1885, 126).
At the turn of the century, literary studies was thus under enormous pres-
sure from university administrators but also from more established disci-
plines to become more “rigorous” and more demonstrably evidence-based.
To many scholars—chief among them the growing number of young men
returning from abroad with doctorates awarded in Göttingen and Berlin—
German philology seemed the most expedient means of making literary
studies scientific. An historicist method born of etymology and what we
would today call linguistics, the philological study of literature was com-
paratist in orientation and driven by inductive argument (De Man 1986,
22). Only by grasping the historical origins of a text and the course of its
cultural circulation, philologists believed, could a work of literature truly be
understood. In its most orthodox form, philological literary study involved
scrutinizing texts, weighing the importance of variants, and tracking trans-
mission (Warner 1985, 14). Even where these methods were haphazardly
adopted—or where philology was invoked rather than practiced—philologi-
cal ideals still profoundly changed how US scholars understood the work of
interpretation. No longer a matter of personal judgment, a literary interpre-
tation was an inductive hypothesis based on “facts” that could be precisely
confirmed, whether through by-the-book philology or analogue practices of
close observation, analysis, and categorization. Soon known as “scientific crit-
icism,” this model of interpretation also required the creation of a scientific
community that could corroborate an increasingly rarified body of scholarship
(Warner 1985, 14). At first, there were few barriers to joining this interpre-
tative cum scientific community. But before long, and especially after the rise
of Ph.D.-granting graduate schools, only appropriately credentialed scholars
could produce properly scientific criticism.
Some seventy years after the fact, René Wellek gave voice to what is now
received wisdom about the naïve and even embarrassing origins of literary
studies in early twentieth-century scientific criticism. “The useless antiquari-
anism,” Wellek noted, “the dreary factualism, the pseudo-science combined
with anarchical skepticism and a lack of critical taste characteristic of this
scholarship must be apparent to almost everyone today” (Wellek 1973, 299).
It is true that contemporary literary scholars rarely declare explicitly scien-
tific ambitions, as we have seen, even if their aim is to create new patterns
of interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration across the humanities and the
natural and physical sciences. But in making such a blanket rejection, Wellek
characterizes as uniformly misguided a dynamic and improvisatory set of crit-
ical practices that coalesced at best contingently around the idea of “science”
188 T. CARMODY
and more particularly around popular understandings of the scientific method

later codified by Dewey and his followers. In fact, the writings of many
self-avowed practitioners of scientific criticism suggest that the “dreary factu-
alism” Wellek denigrates is far from straight forward. The influential work of
Richard Green Moulton, to which we now turn, is a case in point. Not only
does Moulton’s scholarship trouble any easy distinction between the objective
analysis of literary texts and the aesthetic impressions they make. But he also
insists that literary scholars grapple with the vagaries and varieties of readerly
experiences in ways that are easily lost on more recent critics eager to cast
turn-of-the-century scientific criticism as a regrettable if colorful prehistory to
the real work of literary studies.
Richard Moulton and Literary Facts

Trained at the University of London and Cambridge, Moulton played a
prominent role in England’s University Extension Movement before earning
a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1890 and becoming a Professor
of English at the University of Chicago. Moulton dedicated his career to
transforming the “miscellaneous and unorganized” field of literary stud-
ies into a methodologically coherent discipline (Moulton 1915, vii). His
first foray in this direction was Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A Popular
Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism (1885), which laid out
the critical methods he would later extend to treatments of classical drama
and the Bible before returning to questions of method in The Modern Study
of Literature (1915). Beginning with the “Plea for an Inductive Science of
Literary Criticism” that prefaces Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, Moulton
argued that literary studies should aspire to the positivism ascribed to the
hard sciences. “As botany deals inductively with the phenomena of vegetable
life and traces the laws underlying them,” Moulton noted, and “as economy
reviews and systematizes on inductive principles the facts of commerce,
so there is a criticism not less inductive in character which has for its mat-
ter literature” (Moulton 1888, 1). All inductive sciences “occupy themselves
directly with facts, that is, with phenomena translated by observation into the
forms of facts.” It follows that literary criticism should likewise approach the
“matter” of literature as so many facts.
At first glance, Moulton’s emphasis on literary facts would seem consistent
with the empirical methods favored by philologically trained literary scholars.
And like these other advocates of scientific criticism, Moulton held that inter-
pretation “is of the nature of a scientific hypothesis,” not based on the crit-
ic’s regard for a particular text but “founded on the positive observation of
details” (Moulton 1893a, 4). But unlike his philological colleagues, the facts
that mattered to Moulton were not discovered by meticulous attention to
cultural transmission or textual variants, but by close formal analysis alone. In
this regard, Moulton anticipated the central tenets of New Criticism. Born of
his experience teaching extension students who generally lacked prior train-
ing, Moulton’s method was to reduce the “subject-matter” of literature “to
the form of fact” and interpret “with strict reference to the details of the lit-
erary works as they actually stand” (Moulton 1888, 39). Not the imposition
of an externally derived methodology, however, for Moulton scientific crit-
icism issued from the essentially experimental nature of literature itself. In
this regard, literature was much like the natural sciences as popularly under-
stood at the turn of the twentieth century and institutionalized in the modern
research university. Literature, in other words, involves the “observation of
material expressly arranged for observation.” Both the natural scientist and
the novelist, Moulton argues, “have arbitrary freedom as to what data they
may choose to bring together,” and neither controls what happens next: they
are “helpless reporter[s] of the reaction that ensues” (Moulton 1895, 100).
Literature, though, was for Moulton ultimately “a more powerful weapon
of research for human life” (Moulton 1917, 100). Literary experiments, he
argued, are not bound by practical constraints, but only by the limits of a
writer’s talent. As such, the inductive scholar is tasked with analyzing the
experimental design inherent in each work of literature. The goal is to learn
how that text produces both semantic meaning and the affective experience
that Moulton called “literary effect.” The latter is related to but distinct from
the literary facts gleaned from empirical analysis. As Moulton writes, “it is not
the objective details but the subjective impressions they produce that make
literary effect” (Moulton 1888, 24).
In drawing on the evidence of both literary facts and literary effects,
Moulton thus elaborates a rather idiosyncratic theory of objectivity. He is less
concerned with sidelining the individual psychology of the investigator than
with understanding the relay between empirical detail and readerly impres-
sion. Moulton clarifies his approach most clearly when distinguishing between
sympathetic and subjective criticism. The scholarship produced by the urbane
critics who first entered the US academy falls into the subjective category.
These so-called judicial critics make pronouncements on the relative qual-
ity of a literary work with reference only to their own tastes. While there is
no reason not to make such judgments—“the science of Zoölogy does not
interfere with our having favorites and the reverse in the animal world”—for
Moulton these preferences tell us less about the object at hand than about
the person doing the preferring (Moulton 1893a, 11). Works of judicial crit-
icism “thus have value not as fragments of literary sciences but as fragments
of Addison, Jeffrey, or Macaulay” (Moulton 1888, 22). The subjective fal-
lacy of judicial criticism contrasts with the sympathetic ethos of inductive
criticism, which for Moulton is not a matter of fellow feeling but a state of
formal receptivity in which readers suspend their personal tastes and habits
of sense-making. “It is a foundation principle in art-culture,” he notes, “as
well as in human intercourse, that sympathy is the grand interpreter: secrets
of beauty will unfold themselves to the sunshine of sympathy, while thy
190 T. CARMODY
wrap themselves all the closer against the tempest of sceptical questionings”
(Moulton 1888, 7). Only by engaging openly with the formal details of the
literary text can one hope to achieve an accurate understanding of that text.
“[I]t is not by hardening his heart that the young student will be initiated
into the deep beauties of art,” but by learning to read sympathetically.
In many regards, Moulton’s “Plea For an Inductive Science of Literary
Criticism” anticipates contemporary work in science studies that explores the
sympathetic relationship between object and observer in their co-creation.5
In Moulton’s own day, by contrast, responses to his particular elaboration of
scientific criticism split along the methodological fault line separating research
scholars from reverential critics. But even Moulton’s defenders worried
whether his evidence base—literary facts and literary effects—could be used
to construct literary interpretations on the model of the inductive hypoth-
esis. As one skeptic wrote, wouldn’t sympathetic readers be better off sim-
ply “plung[ing] in among the crude facts once more” instead of speculating
about what these facts might prove in the aggregate? (Quoted in Lawrie
2014, 99). Didn’t scientific criticism tend in any case toward interpretations
that were irreducibly personal? Moulton met these objections head on. If sci-
ence deals only with “ascertained facts,” he conceded, the facts that concern
literature and art might seem to belong to a different category altogether:
“They can leave conflicting impressions on different observers, impressions
both subjective and variable in themselves, and open to all manner of distract-
ing influences, not excepting that of interpretation” (Moulton 1888, 23).
Drawing again on his experience in the Extension classroom, Moulton turned
to the literary seminar in order to work out a practical rebuttal. His sylla-
bus for a course on “Literary Criticism and Theory of Interpretation” at the
University of Chicago contains the following note:
Difficulty: That in literature and art details cannot be positively observed, but
make different impressions on different observers.
— Answer: a) That literature differs in this degree from other subjects of sci-
entific method only in degree. b) that as in science, so in literature, such dif-
ferences must be settled by a fresh appeal to the details. c) in the absence of
settlement it must be remembered that all results in inductive science are only
provisional – at the most, the uncertainty of inductive criticism is far less than
any other system. (Moulton 1893b, 7)
The different impressions that literary and artistic facts make on readers and
viewers are for Moulton but a point of departure, the first step in making pos-
itive, verifiable observations. Sympathetic reading is thus a laboratory practice
of repetition and corroboration by means of which provisional observations
gradually give way to agreed-upon certainties. In this regard, inductive liter-
ary criticism is no different from the natural sciences: it requires the testing
and refining of provisional hypotheses in the interest of ultimately landing on
an accurate interpretation. Idiosyncratic impressions, in other words, are in

due time and with ample corroboration sufficiently corrected.
The fantasy of accuracy that seems to have underwritten Moulton’s peda-
gogy, probably more of a teaching tool than an infallible doctrine, was tem-
pered in Moulton’s critical writings by a more nuanced, if no less heuristic,
model of interpretation. Here Moulton was less interested in eliminating the
variability of readerly impressions than in understanding how that variability
works. As he notes in Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist, the inductive scholar
understands that interpretation is less a matter of determining which subjec-
tive impression is right than a question of how “the objective details are the
limit on the variability of the subjective impressions” (Moulton 1888, 24).
In other words, the task of scientific criticism is twofold. On the one hand,
sympathetic readers are to enter the literary encounter without allowing the
subjective impulse of judicial criticism to diminish their receptivity to the for-
mal complexity of the literary text under study. On the other hand, after an
experimental process of corroboration that seeks to minimize differences in
readerly impressions with reference to the formal particularities of the text,
the inductive critic explores how those details create a finite range of sub-
jective responses. In this regard, the literary facts specific to a given work of
literature produce a variable range of literary effects that the inductive critic
must in turn read sympathetically. To the critic who objected that Moulton
would have us read Shakespeare the same way we read the “post-office direc-
tory,” we can thus answer “yes and no” (Quoted in Lawrie 2014, 100). One
could read both Hamlet and the directory with a sympathetic eye for the for-
mal details of each. But just as the facts gathered in each case would vary dra-
matically, so too would the range of readerly impressions produced by these
two very different texts.
Mary Richmond and Social Evidence

Moulton’s should not be taken as the definitive account of early
twentieth-century scientific criticism. Although his methods of inductive
scholarship were indeed influential, literary scholars never agreed on a stand-
ardized practice. Scientific criticism, we might say, remained inchoate until
it became outmoded. Moulton’s methods do make clear, however, that
objectivity meant different things to different critics and that a commitment
to literary facts did not preclude a commitment to readerly experience, or
what Moulton called literary effect. A similar dynamic was at play at much
the same cultural moment in the realm of social science, the wide-ranging
reformist project that paid particular attention to rationalizing a patchwork
system of social welfare provision at the end of the nineteenth century. Like
scientific criticism, scientific charity intended a break with past practices. And
like research-minded literary scholars, charity reformers sought to trans-
form an unabashedly amateur and subjective undertaking into an empiricist
192 T. CARMODY
methodology suitable for the research university. But just as Moulton sug-
gested sympathy rather than objectivity as the antidote to judicial criticism,
reformers like Mary Richmond argued that objective facts only become
meaningful through individual interpretation. Collating the only ostensibly
disparate histories of scientific criticism and scientific charity brings into focus
two allied projects of reading that understand the literary text and the social
world as objects of analysis ultimately inseparable from the experiences of the
analyst.
Optimistic in spirit and promiscuous of approach, US social science began
with a diffuse enthusiasm for European social philosophy and led to the
founding of the American Social Science Association in 1865. The organi-
zation’s Constitution laid out a suitably broad mandate: “[T]o aid the devel-
opment of social science, and to guide the public mind to the best practical
means of promoting the amendment of laws, the advancement of education,
the prevention and repression of crime, the reformation of criminals, and
the progress of public morality” (Sanborn 1876, 25). This sweeping agenda
was rooted in the Spencerian idea that society—an organism like any other—
could be rationally understood through rigorous analysis (Breslau 2007, 45).
Once the rules governing society’s ideal operation were established, dysfunc-
tion could be easily eliminated. Initially, the practical aims of social science
complemented a sophisticated theoretical agenda that aimed to conceptual-
ize society with ever greater sophistication. But before long these two pro-
jects took divergent courses, inaugurating the intellectual labor that produced
sociology and social work as distinct disciplines. Of the two, sociology had
an easier time finding a place in the modern university. Sociologists, after all,
could point to a sizeable body of specialized research to justify their entry.
Social workers, by contrast, struggled to reconcile their field’s practical ambi-
tions with the academy’s emphasis on pure research. The challenge issued by
Abraham Flexner at the conference of the National Conference of Charities
and Corrections in 1915 was but the latest articulation of a much older set
of anxieties. For social work to be recognized as a profession, Flexner argued,
it would have to possess “a technique capable of communication through an
orderly and highly specialized educational discipline” (Austin 1983, 368).
Did social work have a methodology of its own?
The earliest efforts to answer the spirit of Flexner’s challenge gave rise to
the late nineteenth-century charity organization society (COS) movement.
Originating in England and soon arriving in the USA, the COS movement
was a reformist project that sought to eliminate “indiscriminate almsgiv-
ing” in all its forms. “The simple, old-fashioned ways of charity,” one activ-
ist remarked, “will no longer work” (Paine 1883, 1). Whether handed out
to distressed “beggars” or disbursed by public organizations, “[g]ratuitous
relief fosters thriftlessness, indolence, and blamable inefficiency.” Most donors
probably were inspired by genuine feelings of pity and generosity. But back of
such compassion, reformers argued, was a desire for emotional gratification
that brought little benefit to those in need. “Relief is easy to give. Permanent
improvement is slow and hard” (Paine 1883, 2). Progress would be made
only if haphazard giving was replaced by a resolutely scientific approach. As
reformer Josephine Shaw Lowell wrote in the first US statement on the COS
philosophy: “the task of dealing with the poor and degraded has become a
science, and has its well defined principles, recognized and conformed to,
more or less closely, by all who really give time and thought to the subject”
(Lowell 1884, n.p.). Not only was each applicant to be scrutinized by expert
investigators, but increasingly sophisticated methods of record-keeping prom-
ised an impartial evaluation of need. The science in scientific charity was thus
above all a commitment to observation and documentation in the service of
objective decision-making. In this regard, the advent of scientific charity not
only mirrored the so-called managerial revolution of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, which made rigorous bureaucratic documentation part of every corpo-
rate entity, but also anticipated the consolidation of scientific objectivity in
the twentieth century.6 As Theodore Porter has written, although the scale
and applicability of science advanced tremendously after 1900, scientists gen-
erally “preferred the detached objectivity of service to bureaucratic experts
over the cultivation of an engaged public” (Porter 2009, 292).
Initially, organized charity was neither as novel nor as objective as its
boosters declared (Katz 1986, 59). In the first charity organization societies,
in fact, investigatory work was done not by credentialed experts but by
socially minded middle-class women. Volunteering to go “friendly visiting”
among the poor, the latter did conduct interviews and gather information,
but their primary goal was to pressure clients to become more convention-
ally respectable.7 In time, however, friendly visitors stopped thinking of
themselves as sisters to the less fortunate and sought to cultivate the obser-
vational practices proper to the scientist (Abel 1998, 34). The quest for facts
also gradually became rooted less in a shallow moralism that blamed poverty
on individual failings than on an increasingly dynamic conception of human
behavior (Lubove 1965, 20).8 The result was a standardization of the inno-
vative but haphazard practices of scientific charity into the modern methods
of social casework. As first defined by Mary Richmond, social casework was “a
comprehensive method of inquiry and treatment” that began with the gath-
ering of evidence. Of relevance were “all facts as to personal or family history
which, taken together, indicate the nature of a given client’s social difficul-
ties and the means to their solution” (Richmond 1917, 50). After assessing
material gathered from clients, their acquaintances, and municipal agencies,
caseworkers determined the correct “social diagnosis” and drew up the most
appropriate plan of “social treatment.” These plans varied from client to cli-
ent. Because no two cases were the same, it was only by means of diligent
casework and well-managed intervention that the needs of a given individual
could adequately be met.
194 T. CARMODY
Social casework thus emerged as the culmination of earlier efforts to

make charity scientific. For Richmond, social work was above all a means of
reading the social world that relied not just on the objective registration of
facts but also on the irreducibly personal interpretation of those facts. Such
was the nature of what Richmond theorized as “social evidence” and differ-
entiated from the kinds of facts consulted in other scientific. Perhaps most
clearly, Richmond writes, “social evidence is distinguished from that used
in natural sciences by an actual difference in subject matter.” But social evi-
dence also differs from the kind of evidence on which legal cases are decided.
Unlike legal evidence, social evidence “can include facts of slight probity”
(Richmond 1917, 39, 43).
Without this advantage social casework would not be possible, since the prob-
lem of the orientation of a family or individual is far more complex than the
single question as to whether or not a litigant or a defendant is to be penal-
ized. Moreover, facts having a subjective bearing, like that of delayed speech
just instanced, are especially characterized by their cumulative significance….
Evidence of this cumulative sort, therefore, is essential wherever, as in social
work decisions rest upon intimate understanding of character. (Richmond 1917,
39–40)
Whereas legal facts must be conclusive and irrefutable, social workers rely
on evidence that is often only “imperfectly relevant” or even hearsay. Social
evidence is compiled with the understanding that more is better—more
records, observations, interviews, and intuitions—and that the social worker
is the final interpreter of this material. Social evidence draws on an “intimate
understanding” of what Richmond glosses only as the “character” of both
the situation and client at hand. This interpretative process was of necessity
provisional and personal. “The absence of any generally accepted tests of the
reliability of such evidence,” Richmond argued, “still keeps this new demand
itself ill defined and unstandardized.” As such, social work has “much to
learn from law, history, logic, and psychology” (Richmond 1917, 48–50).
Such disciplinary modesty notwithstanding, Richmond also noted that the
social worker’s use of social evidence created “ways of thinking and doing
that prove useful in quite other fields. The fact that law, medicine, history,
and psychology, in their effort to break new ground, have been opening the
same vein of truth, shows a growing demand for the kind of data that social
practitioners gather” (Richmond 1917, 48).
The particular contribution that social work could make, Richmond
argued, follows directly from the interpretative demands that social evidence
places on “social practitioners.” Social evidence, to be sure, is grounded in
facts, but not in any strictly determinative sense. Rather, social workers draw
on their experience and intuition to weigh the ambiguous and competing
claims made by different data sets, all with the ultimate goal of arriving at
a scientific interpretation on which a decision about the case at hand can be
based. Not the objectivity of the natural sciences or the callous denunciation
of indiscriminate almsgiving earlier reformers had called for, the interpretative
methods of social work has far more in common with the tenets of scien-
tific criticism laid out by Moulton and other literary scholars. Like Moulton,
Richmond was committed to understanding facts not in isolation from but
in relation to the impressions these facts made on investigators. And in aban-
doning the moralism of earlier reformers who reduced social problems to
personal failures, Richmond also followed Moulton in embracing a more
complex notion of causality. What began as a movement to make charity
scientific thus led to an interpretative practice that questioned conventional
notions of objectivity, much as Moulton’s inductive method had done for lit-
erary criticism. In both contexts, reading scientifically reveals that facts only
become meaningful in and as affective experience.
The Science of Critique and the Sociology of Literature

René Wellek’s evisceration of turn-of-the-century scientific criticism finds a
striking parallel in recent assessments of literary studies. To many contem-
porary scholars, the discipline has once again become mechanistic and pre-
dictable, rendered insensible to the textured specificity of its object by a
sedimented commitment to methodological rigor. Evidently bearing out
the fears that Veblen first raised about the rise of scientific criticism, to some
observers literary studies has simply run “out of steam.”9 There are many
explanations for this state of affairs, depending on whose account one fol-
lows. But rare is the observer who suggests that literary studies remains
beguiled by the natural and physical sciences. Many critics instead fault the
rise of ideology critique or what the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur called
the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur 1970). These practices of read-
ing and interpretation invite the critic to expose hidden truths and politi-
cal complicities and to elaborate unflattering and counterintuitive meanings
that are not obvious to lay readers. As literary scholar Rita Felski observes,
such methods—now often identified simply as “critique”—became a touch-
stone because they usefully shored up the discipline’s claim to legitimacy at
a moment of waning public and institutional support. Critique, Felski writes,
was for a generation of literary scholars a bulwark against “all those sins we’ve
been warned against since we were bright-eyed neophytes: naïve reading, sen-
timental effusion, impressionistic judgment, fuzzy-headed amateurism, and
mere ‘chatter about Shelley’” (Felski 2015, 151). In other words, contempo-
rary literary scholars found in critique the same institutional and disciplinary
legitimacy that turn-of-the-century literary scholars sought when confronted
with the research university’s demands for objective and verifiable knowledge
production.
But as in Moulton’s early-twentieth-century elaboration of inductive
scholarship, it is not always clear today that effusion, judgment, or even
196 T. CARMODY
fuzzy-headed amateurism should not play a part in literary studies. And just
as Moulton’s scientific criticism shared an affinity with the reading prac-
tices born of scientific charity, so too have contemporary scholars looked to
the social sciences to articulate a mode of analysis attentive to the interplay
between “literary facts” and “literary feelings.” In a growing body of schol-
arship known as the sociology of literature, the concept of “affordance”
imported from the discipline of psychology has proven especially useful in
this regard. Affordance was first coined by James J. Gibson to explain how
animals interact with their environment, such that certain elements of the
environment offer or “afford” the animal the possibility of a certain action
(Gibson 1986). A chair, for instance, “is for” or affords support. Importantly,
for Gibson an affordance “is neither an objective property nor a subjective
property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of
subjective-objective and helps us understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact
of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical,
yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the
observer” (Gibson 1986, 129).
When taken up as a theory of literary interpretation, the idea of affor-
dances returns questions of readerly experience—often eclipsed by the imper-
ative of critique—to the center of literary studies. As C. Namwali Serpell has
argued, just as Gibson’s chair “is for” support, so too do works of literature
have properties that afford certain uses and options for moving through them
(Serpell 2014, 9). And though literary affordances may vary more widely than
environmental affordances, the possibilities for action are nonetheless finite,
bound as they are to the particular formal qualities of the individual text at
hand. As such, the concept of affordances developed in the social sciences
becomes for literary scholars a mode of “scientific criticism” attentive not
only to the empirically observable details of the individual work of litera-
ture, but also to the affective experience of reading. Affordance, in Serpell’s
phrase, captures the tension between “measurable form and experiential
dynamism” (Serpell 2014, 22). For Moulton, writing more than a century
earlier, this tension obtained between “literary facts” and “literary feeling.”
For Richmond, it named the analytical work demanded of social evidence.
Contemporary interest in the sociology of literature, it would thus seem,
extends a much older project of making literary studies scientific and as such
takes up the legacy of “reading generously” launched at the intersection of
scientific criticism and scientific charity around 1900.
Notes
1. As Theodore Porter writes, it was not until the twentieth century that science
came to be regarded as primarily technical in nature. Technicality in this sense
means not just having appropriately difficult subject matter but “relying on con-
cepts and vocabulary that matter only to specialists” (Porter 2009, 292).
2. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith notes, Snow reduces a divergent but equally estima-
ble set of practices into two categories—superior and inferior (Smith 2005, 21).
3. See Squier (2017) and Bérubé (2016).

4. On feminist standpoint theories that elaborate “stronger standards for objectivity”
which challenge the standard “view from nowhere,” see Harding (1992, 438).
5. Relevant here is Barad’s notion of “agential realism,” an epistemological, onto-
logical, and ethical framework in which the “primary ontological unit is not
independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties
but rather what [Neils] Bohr terms ‘phenomena.’ In my agential realist elabo-
ration, phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of
observer and observed, or the results of measurements; rather phenomena are the
ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting proponents” (Barad 2007, 33).
6. On the managerial revolution in US business, see Chandler (1977). On the
changes in internal communication that arose as a consequence of the manage-
rial revolution, see Yates (1989).
7. The friendly visitor was qualified not by virtue of technical training or scientific
understanding of human behavior, but rather by moral insight (Lubove 1965,
12–13).
8. The nature of social casework would, of course, evolve over time. Gradually, as
the trajectory of Richmond’s own writings show, what Lubove calls “the quest
for facts” would give way to a psychological emphasis on “personality” in social
casework. As Richmond wrote in What Is Social Case Work? (1922). The social
caseworker’s task was to determine what material changes might be made in a
client’s life to facilitate self-realization. “Social case work,” Richmond concluded,
“consists of those processes which develop personality through adjustments consciously
effected, individual by individual, between men and their social environment”
(Richmond 1922, 90, 98–99). Emphasis in original.
9. See, for instance, Latour (2004) and Marcus et al. (2016).
References
Abel, Emily K. 1998. Valuing Care: Turn-of-the-Century Conflicts Between Charity
Workers and Women Clients. Journal of Women’s History 10 (3): 32–52.
Andrews, Lindsey. 2015. Black Feminism’s Minor Empiricism: Hurston, Combahee,
and the Experience of Evidence. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1 (1):
1–38.
Austin, David M. 1983. The Flexner Myth and the History of Social Work. Social
Service Review; Chicago 57 (3): 357–77.
Barad, Karen Michelle. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bérubé, Michael. 2016. The Secret Life of Stories: From Don Quixote to Harry Potter,
How Understanding Intellectual Disability Transforms the Way We Read. New
Breslau, Daniel. 2007. The American Spencerians: Theorizing a New Science. In
Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig J. Calhoun, 39–62. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Chandler, Alfred D. 1977. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Culler, Jonathan D. 2002. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the
Study of Literature. London: Routledge.
198 T. CARMODY
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Gibson, James Jerome. 1986. The Theory of Affordances. In The Ecological Approach
to Visual Perception, 127–37. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Graff, Gerald. 1987. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago:
Harding, Sandra. 1992. Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong
Objectivity?’. The Centennial Review 36 (3): 437–70.
Hunt, Th.W. 1885. The Place of English in the College Curriculum. Transactions of
the Modern Language Association of America 1: 118–32.
Katz, Michael B. 1986. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in
America. New York: Basic Books.
Latour, Bruno. 2004. Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry 30 (2): 225–48.
Lawrie, Alexandra. 2014. The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study,
1885–1910. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, NY: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Lowell, Josephine Shaw. 1884. Public Relief and Private Charity. New York:
G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
Lubove, Roy. 1965. The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a
Career, 1880–1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
De Man, Paul. 1986. The Return to Philology. In The Resistance to Theory, 21–26.
Marcus, Sharon, Heather Love, and Stephen Best. 2016. Building a Better
Description. Representations 135 (1): 1–21.
Markley, Robert. 2018. As if: The Alternative Histories of Literature and Science.
Configurations 26 (3): 259–68.
Marsden, George M. 1994. The Soul of the American University: From Protestant
Establishment to Established Nonbelief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Menand, Louis. 2010. The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the
American University. New York: W. W. Norton.
Moulton, Richard Green. 1888. Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist; a Popular
Illustration of the Principles of Scientific Criticism. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.
———. 1893a. Literary Criticism and Theory of Interpretation: Syllabus of a Course of
Six Lectures. New York: D.C. Heath.
———. 1893b. Literary Criticism and Theory of Interpretation: Syllabus of a Course
of Six Lecture-Studies. Chicago: University Press of Chicago, D.C. Heath & Co.,
directors.
———. 1895. Four Years of Novel Reading: An Account of an Experiment in
Popularizing the Study of Fiction. Boston: D.C. Heath.
———. 1915. The Modern Study of Literature: An Introduction to Literary Theory and
Interpretation. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 1917. The Study of Literature and the Integration of Knowledge. University
Record 3 (2): 89–104.
Paine, Robert Treat. 1883. How to Repress Pauperism and Street Begging. New York:
Charity Organization Society.
Porter, Theodore M. 2009. How Science Became Technical. Isis 100 (2): 292–309.
Reuben, Julie A. 1996. The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual
Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Richmond, Mary Ellen. 1917. Social Diagnosis. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
———. 1922. What Is Social Case Work? An Introductory Description. New York:
Russell Sage Foundation.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Rudolph, John L. 2005. Epistemology for the Masses: The Origins of ‘The Scientific
Method’ in American Schools. History of Education Quarterly 45 (3): 341–76.
———. 2014. Dewey’s ‘Science as Method’ a Century Later: Reviving Science
Education for Civic Ends. American Educational Research Journal 51 (6):
1056–83.
Sanborn, F.B. 1876. The Work of Social Science Past and Present. Journal of Social
Science 8 (May): 23–39.
Serpell, C. Namwali. 2014. Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. 2005. Figuring and Reconfiguring the Humanities and the
Sciences. Profession 2005 (1): 18–27.
Snow, C.P. 1959. Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Squier, Susan Merrill. 2017. Epigenetic Landscapes: Drawing as Metaphor. Durham:
Turner, James. 2015. Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Veblen, Thorstein. 1906. The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. American
Journal of Sociology 11 (5): 585–609.
Veysey, Laurence R. 1965. The Emergence of the American University. Chicago:
Warner, Michael. 1985. Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature:
1875–1900. Criticism 27 (1): 1–28.
Wellek, René. 1973. American Literary Scholarship. In Concepts of Criticism, ed.
Stephen J. Nichols, Jr., 296–315. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Yates, JoAnne. 1989. Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in
American Management. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
CHAPTER 12
How Can Literary and Film Studies

Contribute to Science Policy? The Case
of Henrietta Lacks
Jay Clayton and Claire Sisco King
Literature and film have served an important role in producing larger pub-
lic narratives about science—narratives that often inform public policy. The
prominence of cultural narratives about science offers an opening for special-
ists in literature and film studies to engage in policy work, but few of us in
the humanities are aware that this opportunity exists or understand how to
translate our expertise into effective interventions in the public policy sphere.
The authors of this study have had an opportunity to learn about the policy
world by participating in a large, transdisciplinary research project focused on
genetic privacy. We have chosen the case of Henrietta Lacks, popularized by
Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 bestseller The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, as a
way to illustrate several of the ways that literary and film studies can contrib-
ute to the development of science policy.
Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks chronicles the
story of Henrietta Lacks, an economically insecure African American woman
receiving treatment for cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University Hospital
in the 1950s. Lacks’s cells were harvested without her informed consent while
she was undergoing treatment for cervical cancer and were subsequently devel-
oped into the most important cell line in the history of biomedical science.
Labeled “HeLa,” these cells have enabled scientific research and discovery for
over half a century, while also raising thorny questions about the ownership
and use of private genetic material. A film adaptation of the book directed by
J. Clayton (*) · C. S. King 
Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

202 J. CLAYTON AND C. S. KING
George C. Wolfe and starring Oprah Winfrey first aired on HBO on April 22,
2017. Skloot’s book mixes science, history, and social commentary on race
and medical ethics with the autobiographical story of the journalist’s quest to
uncover the mystery of the woman behind the HeLa cells. The film brings
out a more melodramatic account of the Lacks family, with a primary emphasis
on Henrietta Lacks’s children, especially her daughter Deborah. Winfrey, who
was also executive producer on the film, plays Deborah as a woman physically
and emotionally traumatized by her struggles to understand what happened
to her mother. Both works depict Deborah and her siblings as distrustful of
medical institutions and as largely uncertain about how or why their mother’s
cells have been deployed by medical science.
The book and film also both emphasize the ethical problems and eventual
controversy surrounding the acquisition and use of Lacks’s cells without her
knowledge. Although “informed consent” did not become a professional norm
until after Lacks’s death—meaning that her physicians were neither legally
required nor typically expected to gain her permission to use her cellular mate-
rial—both the book and film adaptation question the ethics of the way HeLa
cells were acquired and used, particularly by those entities that have profited
from research and development tied to this material. The book and film con-
textualize these ethical questions by focusing on the reactions of Lacks family
members who have expressed dissatisfaction with the treatment of their mother
and distrust of the medical institutions involved. The texts further overlay these
concerns with attention to Skloot’s attitudes about the case and her attention
to the intersecting dynamics of race and class at work in the case.
As much as Skloot’s book and its film adaptation address ethical concerns
about the treatment of Lacks by Hopkins and the medical establishment
more generally, the texts themselves have also incited controversy and critique.
Some members of the Lacks family have been unhappy with both the book
and the film, which they have accused “variously of misrepresentation,
exploitation, and fraud” (Hendrix 2017). One of Lacks’s grandsons not
only criticizes the texts for offering stereotypical and reductive portrayals of
the family but also expresses resentment at the considerable profit Skloot and
Winfrey have made from Lacks’s story. Another family member has suggested
that Skloot’s and Winfrey’s actions are comparable to those of Johns Hopkins,
stating in a press release about the film, “It’s bad enough Johns Hopkins took
advantage of us. Now Oprah, Rebecca and HBO are doing the same thing.
They’re no better than the people they say they hate” (Zurawik 2017). Such
a response suggests that the commodification and circulation of the Lackses’
story without the entire family’s approval replicates the exploitative practice
of harvesting Lacks’s cells without her informed consent. Adding to this com-
plex critique is the fact that Skloot is a white woman whose efforts to tell the
Lacks’ story may be considered a form of “appropriation of black women’s
experiences” that reinforces white privilege (Vogt-William 2017, 141).
These are important issues, which would need careful treatment in a
critical reading of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, but our purpose is
not to examine or compare Skloot’s book and the film adaptation. Rather
12 HOW CAN LITERARY AND FILM STUDIES CONTRIBUTE … 203
we explore the cultural narratives these works promulgate and their result-
ing impact on public policy. Our goal is to model ways that literary and film
studies can contribute to larger, transdisciplinary research projects focused
on aiding the development of science policy. Because of changes over the last
several decades in how public policy is formulated, humanities scholarship has
new opportunities to make a difference in the real world. In our participa-
tion in a major policy initiative funded by the National Institutes of Health
(NIH)1 and in publications over the last decade, we have been demonstrating
how humanities scholars can begin to do policy work (J Clayton 2007, 2009,
2016). This chapter illustrates what we have learned about collaboration with
the sciences and social sciences, while using the cultural narratives surround-
ing Henrietta Lacks to gauge the adequacy of existing bioethical research on
one of the central concerns raised by her case, genetic privacy.
Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film may have victimized the Lacks family all
over again, but concerns about that possible injustice are not the chief impact
these texts have had on society. Quite the contrary. Skloot’s book has been
received by the public and by the scientific community with extraordinary
acclaim (Shavlik 2011), and its influence on public policy can be documented
clearly, as we discuss below. Named one of the best books of 2010 by more
than 60 publications, it was reviewed widely in scientific and medical journals,
and received prizes from the American Association for the Advancement of
Science, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and
the Wellcome Trust. An instant popular success, it spent over 75 weeks on the
New York Times bestseller list and has sold over 2.5 million copies. The film
adaptation, though less of a phenomenon than Skloot’s book, received mostly
positive reviews from media critics and was nominated for the Primetime
Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie in 2017.
In bracketing our critical reservations about these texts, our approach
has affinities with that of “surface reading” and some “postcritical” meth-
ods (Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2015). We share with surface reading the
impulse to describe rather than deconstruct our texts because we think it is
important to register their explicit lessons, which are connecting with audi-
ences in profoundly emotional ways and are shaping people’s opinions about
biomedical research. We share with postcritical methods the understanding
that interpretation is only the first stage in a two-step process, the second of
which, in our case, is an effort to propose recommendations that address a
larger ethical, legal, and social problem.
Finally, this chapter models a transdisciplinary approach to The Immortal
Life of Henrietta Lacks, offering new ways for literary scholars to collab-
orate with researchers in science, medicine, and the social sciences on pub-
lic policy issues. Our work reflects a problem-based approach, in which
researchers from a variety of disciplines focus on a single issue—genetic pri-
vacy—from diverse perspectives. Thus, our interpretation of both versions of
the Henrietta Lacks narrative is guided by its bearing on a shared problem
and pressing social concern, rather than by a logic internal to either text. As
linked cultural phenomena, the book and film provide valuable data for social
science approaches to studying the influence of culture on genetics; as a pow-

erful account of the intersection of race and genetics, these works are of inter-
est to genomic scientists; and as complex narratives, these texts are well-suited
to humanities approaches that study the role of story, image, and symbol in
shaping cultural attitudes toward medicine and science.
This chapter proceeds in three parts. First, we explain what genetic privacy
is and why so many people care about it; next we outline the methods and
results of a systematic review our team conducted of scientific literature related
to the subject of genetic privacy; finally, we offer an analysis of the book and
film versions of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks to illustrate what literary
studies has to offer to the larger policy debate about genetic privacy.
Genetic Privacy
From the earliest days of widespread genetic testing in the mid-1960s, fears
about potential violations of individual privacy shadowed research on the
human genome. Commentators have worried about how disclosure of
genetic information could make it more difficult to acquire health insurance
or employment; lead to discrimination against racial groups or people with
disabilities; stigmatize people with genetically based medical conditions; rein-
force pernicious stereotypes about ethnic, racial, sexual, or gender traits; pro-
mote eugenic policies; and more. For many people, these fears seemed justified
by egregious violations of patients’ rights in the past, such as the notorious
Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which studied the course of untreated syphilis in over
400 African American men without telling them that they had the disease or
treating them for it, even after penicillin was found to be an effective therapy.
Adding to such fears are the frequent news reports of data breaches not
only in the medical realm but also in businesses, credit agencies, technology
companies, the government, and elsewhere. The nearly constant stream of
narratives about data hacking in popular fiction, film, television, comics, video
games, and social media compound concerns over genetic privacy. Breaking
into encrypted databanks constitutes a staple plot twist in many of the larg-
est entertainment genres—from action movies such as the Jason Bourne films
(2002–16), to TV science fiction series like Orphan Black (2013–17), to
superhero films like the X-Men series (2000–14), to horror films like Jurassic
Park and its sequels (1993–2018), and even to movies “based on real events”
like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Genetics plays a prominent role
in all these examples; but movies having nothing to do with genetics, like
Citizenfour (2014) or Snowden (2016), with their depiction of ubiquitous
surveillance by the NSA, contribute to the general climate of concern about
the vulnerability of one’s personal data. Such stories all too often portray the
act of breaking into secure databanks as something an accomplished hacker
can pull off in a few frenzied minutes at a keyboard.
By the early twenty-first century, the speed and reduced cost of genome
sequencing enabled the collection of genomic information on a massive scale.
Today, genomic data is gathered and stored in an unnerving array of locations:
electronic medical records (EMRs), research biobanks, direct-to-consumer

genetic testing companies, patient advocacy groups, ancestry services, volun-
tary open-access repositories, and non-voluntary depositories of genomic sam-
ples collected by the police, military, and other state agencies.
The laws protecting this genomic data are often piecemeal or incom-
plete and reflect significant trade-offs between accepting a degree of risk
to individuals and fostering perceived public goods (e.g., aiding research
or relieving burdens on industry). The most important US laws governing
genetic privacy include the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability
Act (HIPAA), which protects individuals’ medical records and other per-
sonal health information; the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which
prohibits discrimination against people with a range of disabilities; and the
Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). These laws, however,
incorporate numerous exceptions that permit the sharing of genomic data for
research and other purposes as long as identifiers are removed. More trou-
bling, both accidental and intentional (i.e., criminal) breaches of privacy
occur regularly in other areas of the healthcare system.2
In addition to the unintended disclosure of genomic information, many
people freely give away genetic information to organizations with a wide
variety of privacy policies (or none at all), such as direct-to-consumer testing
companies like 23andMe, patient support groups working to find cures for
particular diseases such as breast cancer, muscular dystrophy, and cystic fibro-
sis, or non-profits like the Personal Genome Project, which links individuals’
genome sequences with their medical records and other personal information,
and then openly shares them for the betterment of science. Although volun-
tary, such donations often carry privacy risks that extend beyond the individ-
ual who makes the donation, since genomic data can provide information
about family members, who might not want such information made public.
With the publicity surrounding the apprehension of a suspect in the Golden
State Killings through the use of GEDmatch’s database of voluntarily shared,
publicly accessible genetic information, many people were surprised to learn
of the several, perfectly legal ways in which such repositories could be put to
use by police and other government agencies.3
Despite this recent attention, many people are still unaware of the diverse
types of services offered by direct-to-consumer genetic information companies.
Of the 90 companies providing genomic testing, 34 offer ancestry and gene-
alogy services, 24 offer lifestyle and wellness services, and 54 offer what might
euphemistically be called family relationship services, which includes paternity
and infidelity testing companies, with such colorful names as She Cheated, Test
Infidelity, and PaternityDepot.4 Twenty-seven of the 90 companies encourage
surreptitious submissions of genetic samples from a child or spouse, a practice
that appears to be legal in nearly half the states.5 While many companies posted
policies regarding the sharing of genetic data with third parties, the quantity
and quality of that information varied greatly (see Fig. 12.1).
Judging from consumers’ actions, one might speculate that the users of for-
profit genetic testing companies are either unaware or else unconcerned about
Fig. 12.1 Data visualization by K.H. Oliver, with data provided by J.W. Hazel from
GetPreCiSe Research Seminar
the issue of privacy. Or it may be that consumers are engaging in trade-offs

between a service they want—genetic testing—and a risk they are willing to haz-
ard. However we resolve such questions, another factor needs to be considered:
the individual is not the only person put at risk by threats to genetic privacy.
The choice to share one’s genomic information with an unregulated company
(which may or may not have a privacy policy and which can, in any case, change
that policy without permission) entails consequences for many other people.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks demonstrates that the violation of a
patient’s privacy can have devastating and far-reaching effects beyond the indi-
vidual. It can affect relatives down through the generations; touch a larger
circle of neighbors and friends; and influence attitudes of a still-wider commu-
nity—in this case, African Americans in Baltimore, Virginia, and beyond, many
of whom saw what happened to Henrietta Lacks as another confirmation of
long-held suspicions about the medical world’s exploitation of minority popu-
lations. Cultural phenomena like Rebecca Skloot’s book and Oprah Winfrey’s
movie do not just affect public attitudes; they can also play a direct role in
shaping science policy and industry practices. For example, The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks was featured prominently in an article in Nature announc-
ing a precedent-setting agreement between the NIH and the descendants
of Henrietta Lacks stipulating the conditions under which her genomic data
would be published.6 In addition, many high schools, universities, and medical
schools have used the book and/or film as teaching tools for their students and
outreach programs for the general public, often including Skloot or members
of the Lacks family as featured speakers (Berry 2014, 226); and the healthcare
consulting firm Rabin Martin has used the book to guide discussions among its
employees about the ethics of informed consent. Understanding the influence
of cultural sensations such as The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on public
attitudes and policy debates is a goal of our transdisciplinary research project
and an example of how others in the humanities could contribute to public
policy debates. One of the ways we are working toward our goal is to ask how
the compelling issues raised by this book and movie correlate with the type of
concerns emphasized by policy researchers to date. Do these literary and cin-
ematic treatments reinforce existing policy concerns, raise new topics for our
consideration, or complicate current assumptions about genetic privacy?
Systematic Review of Research on Genetic Privacy

In the sciences, systematic reviews deploy highly structured methods of
assessing the state of current knowledge on a given topic. They differ greatly
from the reviews of prior criticism that were once required of dissertations in
the humanities and sometimes still serve as assignments to beginning gradu-
ate students. Instead of asking an individual scholar to search a disciplinary
database for what he or she deems relevant and then “follow the footnote
trail” to determine which articles and books look most promising, systematic
reviews assemble a team of content experts, who agree on a predefined set of
search terms, a comprehensive list of the relevant databases, fixed criteria for
inclusion, and measures for assessing the quality of each study.7
Investigators in our research group reviewed the research addressing
genetic privacy to identify what is already known about the views of patients,
researchers, and other stakeholders. They began by searching scientific, med-
ical, social science, and humanities databases, including PubMed, Web of
Knowledge (Science Citation Index and Social Sciences Index), Applied
Social Sciences Index, PsycInfo, ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore, MLA,
and Sociological Abstracts from January 1990 to November 2016. The team
used a combination of controlled vocabulary and key terms related to genet-
ics, privacy, and perception, and they supplemented it with hand-searched
citations from recent articles. This initial search identified 6985 articles of
potential relevance. They used a computer algorithm to eliminate non-em-
pirical studies. Three investigators from our team then reviewed the titles and
abstracts of the remaining 2464 articles to determine which ones appeared to
provide empirical evidence of views about genetic privacy. The same investiga-
tors then read the full text of those abstracts that were found to be promising,
retaining only those that provided substantial evidence. These articles were
assessed for quality, using the method of Garrison et al. (2016); the major-
ity were classified as only “fair.” This culling procedure was supplemented by
hand searching of citations and updating searches until July 2017, resulting
in the inclusion of 53 articles for detailed analysis. Taken together, these 53
articles represent the most accurate current state of knowledge concerning
public attitudes toward genetic privacy. We use the analysis of this secondary
literature to guide the questions we ask in the discussion of the book and film
versions of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks below. This approach aims
to assess whether the concerns charted across empirical studies of genetic pri-
vacy have affinity with the concerns raised by Skloot’s book and its filmed
adaptation.
The systematic review revealed a range of concepts that recur in studies
of genetic privacy and a tendency to conflate privacy with related concepts
such as confidentiality, data security, anonymity, and identifiability. One influ-
ential definition of privacy comes from an article by Samuel Warren and Louis
Brandeis in 1890, where they defined it simply as “the right to be let alone”
(193). Privacy, at times, also refers to anonymity, or the wish not to be identi-
fied or otherwise made known to be a member of a group or class of persons.
A related concept that is frequently conflated with privacy is confidentiality,
whereby a person can share information without making it widely available if
the recipients, such as primary care physicians or psychotherapists, are legally
or ethically obligated to keep secret what they have learned.
In total, the systematic review identified nearly twenty analytically distinct
concerns about privacy. To make sense of the diverse set of issues lumped
together under the broad category of genetic privacy, the authors of the sys-
tematic review created a typology of the major concerns identified in the sec-
ondary literature. The chart below lays out the typology in schematic form.
Fig. 12.2 Data visualization by E.W. Clayton from GetPreCiSe Research Seminar
Concerns in the blue column involve the confidentiality and identifiability of

one’s genetic data and are subdivided into concerns about whether one’s EMR
is truly safe, whether one can be identified or reidentified from that data, and
whether the research or medical providers’ guarantees of confidentiality can be
trusted. The green column includes concerns that arise around who controls
one’s genetic data and encompasses the vast literature on informed consent,
as well as issues surrounding ownership of genetic data and the kind of pro-
tections safeguarding those data. Concerns about the adequacy of privacy pol-
icies, computer security, and anonymization all fall under this heading. The red
column assesses concerns about what end-users—researchers, drug companies,
government agencies, etc.—could do with genetic data about a person.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

What this chart fails to capture are the far-reaching collateral damages that
can be caused by a privacy violation and the depth of psychic harms that can
befall a family and community, especially for those living in poverty and sub-
ject to racial discrimination. Such intersectional harms have proven difficult
to capture in existing survey-based literature, but the increased burden of
this privacy violation on an African American family and community comes
through with extraordinary power in Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film. In

this section, we focus on literary and filmic elements in the Henrietta Lacks
story—features like genre, characterization, affect, imagery, temporal struc-
ture, and dramatic impact—to show how humanities approaches can deepen
and extend the insights obtained by quantitative and qualitative assessments
of genetic privacy, and reveal new, intersectional harms.
The story recounted in the book has three beginnings, one in 1988, when
the investigator first learns of Henrietta Lacks’s unwitting contribution to
modern medicine and science. Reading the Prologue, the reader might be
excused for thinking the book will be a first-person account of a reporter’s
efforts to get to the bottom of the injustice done to a poor, uneducated black
woman in the 1950s. The story of Skloot’s efforts is handled with mild irony
at her own expense, as it captures the eagerness and missteps of a neophyte
investigator. But her efforts are beset with difficulties too. She will face dis-
couragement; doors will close in her face; skeptics will tell her that it’s not
worth the trouble, that the trail is cold; others will ask what difference does
it make now that someone who died in 1951 had her cells used for research
without permission. Skloot recounts people telling her not to upset the
apple cart because she might set back science immeasurably. Whatever ethi-
cal mistakes were made back then, other people argue to Skloot, things have
changed now—we know better today. And besides, they say, think of the sci-
entific discoveries resulting from research on HeLa cells. If an injustice was
done back then, surely the balance is now firmly on the side of the benefit to
humanity rather than the harm done to a long-dead woman.
With Chapter 1, however, the book begins again, shifting away from
the autobiography of a cub reporter and toward the biography of an African
American woman from backwoods Virginia, supporting a family of her own
(and taking care of many neighborhood children as well), on the day she
learns from a doctor at Johns Hopkins that she has cervical cancer. This story
will turn out to be a drama of one woman’s suffering, a personal drama that
quickly morphs into a family melodrama full of misunderstandings and con-
flicts spanning three generations. Inevitably, Henrietta Lacks’s story is inter-
twined with an account of misdeeds by the researchers and doctors that she
encountered, actions that although legal, even routine, back in the 1950s,
would be illegal today. Indeed, regardless of their legality, many of the deci-
sions made about Henrietta Lacks’s cells seem highly unethical by contem-
porary standards. If Skloot’s autobiographical story adds a personal note to
the quest to get to the bottom of what happened, the biographical narrative
humanizes “Henrietta,” as she is called throughout the book, as a vibrant
young woman whose life was tragically cut short by cancer. By bringing
Henrietta Lacks alive on the page, this second story helps readers respond to
what we today would see as ethical lapses in an intensely personal way.8
Three chapters later, Skloot introduces a final compositional layer, in the
first of many chapters dedicated to popular science. In an abrupt shift, the
chapter titled “The Birth of HeLa” takes us into the world of Dr. George
Gey and his chief lab assistant, Mary Kubicek, who were the researchers that
achieved the surprising feat of culturing an “immortal” cell line from cervi-
cal tissue discarded from Henrietta Lacks’s biopsy. Later chapters reference
other episodes of popular science less closely related to the Lacks case, includ-
ing a history of the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, the legal debates over who
owned a patent on drugs made from John Moore’s spleen, and a gruesome
experiment by a virologist named Chester Southam, who injected cancerous
HeLa cells into more than 600 patients without their knowledge in a quest to
find a vaccine for cancer.
Wolfe’s film also combines multiple compositional layers. The film opens
with a montage that combines fictionalized and found footage of the discov-
ery of HeLa and its profound impact on the biomedical industry, noting the
cells’ impact on research and development related to a wide range of medical
issues from polio to AIDS to Parkinson’s disease. The film then cuts abruptly
to images of a rural home with close-ups on family photographs and keep-
sakes. Oprah Winfrey speaks in a voiceover narration as Deborah, describ-
ing the hardship of not knowing what happened to her mother, before it
becomes clear that the images shown to the film’s viewers are memories from
her childhood, shown in flashback. Next, the film cuts to a scene set decades
later in which Skloot, played by Rose Byrne, begins her investigative work
into the Lacks case; as she speaks to the family’s physician about the case and
the racial politics involved, the film presents shots of present-day Deborah
taking medications.
Through the interaction of these compositional layers, Skloot’s book and
Wolfe’s flim register virtually every concern about personal privacy uncovered
in the systematic review. Look again at the blue column in Fig. 12.2. The
simple desire to be let alone motivates a number of Lacks family members.
Some of the first words we hear from Deborah in the book is that she “can’t
never get away” from people asking about her mother’s cells.9 Other family
members resent that doctors violated their professional duty of confidentiality
by publishing Henrietta Lacks’s name. Initially, Henrietta Lacks’s cells were
labeled only with letters drawn from her first and last names, HeLa—and the
source of the initials misidentified for many years as “Helen Lane” and “Helen
Larson”—but the true identity of the cell’s “donor” was eventually exposed
by researchers at Johns Hopkins in 1971, ironically in a tribute to George Gey,
not Henrietta Lacks, published in Obstetrics and Gynecology (Skloot 2010,
172). Later, the renowned Johns Hopkins geneticist, Victor McKusick, pub-
lished a photograph of Lacks in what became a standard textbook, Medical
Genetics (Skloot 2010, 188). Over the years, this picture was reprinted in
countless magazines and textbooks. A culminating indignity was the publi-
cation of much of Henrietta’s medical record, including excruciating details
of her suffering and death, in a book of popular science by Michael Gold
called A Conspiracy of Cells (Skloot 2010, 209). Skloot treats these breaches
of privacy with dramatic power, and Wolfe’s film displays many of these same
breaches in the opening montage. So much for the desire to be let alone.
Turn to the middle column of the chart in green. Every concern about
personal consent and control of one’s data listed there is traduced in the case
of Henrietta Lacks. No one asked Henrietta Lacks if they could use her cells
for medical research. “Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated
those cells,” Lacks’s daughter-in-law Barbara protests. “She didn’t donate
nothing. They took them and didn’t ask” (Skloot 2010, 169). No one got
Henrietta’s permission to share those cells with researchers at pharmaceutical
companies and other universities, not only in the USA but abroad. No one
even explained the basic facts about her medical care, such as that her radia-
tion treatments would make her infertile (Skloot 2010, 46). Lacks’s husband
puts it starkly: “‘I didn’t sign no papers,’ he said. ‘I just told them they could
do a topsy [autopsy]. Nothin else. Them doctors never said nuthin about
keepin her alive in no tubes or growin no cells’” (Skloot 2010, 164). Family
members had different opinions about how they would have answered the
question of consent if they had been consulted. Some said they just wanted to
be asked—if a doctor had come to them for permission, they said, they would
have been glad to say yes. Others disagreed. Henrietta and her cells, they
stated, should be left to rest in peace. But in either case, it was the family’s
helplessness, their utter lack of control, that rankled.
Finally, look at the column on the right in red. This column concerns
“downstream” uses of genetic data by third parties—researchers, employ-
ers, healthcare institutions, governments (here and abroad), and commercial
entities. One of the things the Lacks family resented most was that people
were making money off of their relative’s cells. Her son Lawrence was the
most outspoken about this grievance. “‘Hopkins say they gave them cells
away,’ Lawrence yelled, ‘but they made millions! It’s not fair! She’s the most
important person in the world and her family living in poverty. If our mother
so important to science, why can’t we get health insurance?’” (Skloot 2010,
168). They all had the feeling that they’d been taken advantage of, and this
fed a pre-existing distrust of all kinds of people and institutions—hospitals,
research universities, drug companies, insurers, tax collectors, attorneys,
journalists, and more. Skloot describes Deborah Lacks’s occasional paranoia
about Johns Hopkins Medical Center: “It was like all those terrifying stories
she’d heard about Hopkins her whole life were suddenly true, and happening
to her. If they’re doing research on Henrietta, she thought, it’s only a matter
of time before they come for Henrietta’s children, and maybe her grandchil-
dren” (Skloot 2010, 180). Wolfe’s film captures these concerns vividly, often
quoting dialogue from the book verbatim. Oprah Winfrey is palpably shak-
ing as she utters Deborah’s words about Hopkins coming for her and her
children.
Where the Henrietta Lacks story goes beyond the concerns captured by
the systematic review, however, is in registering the intersectional impact
of family, race, gender, and class on how individuals and communities
respond to the loss of genetic privacy. With the publication of Henrietta
Lacks’s name, Skloot comments, “Henrietta’s doctor and his colleagues

forever linked Henrietta, Lawrence, Sonny, Deborah, Zakariyya, their chil-
dren, and all future generations of Lackses to the HeLa cells, and the DNA
inside them” (Skloot 2010, 173). Sometimes the linkage resulted in direct
exploitation. Researchers from Johns Hopkins contacted Lacks’s children and
collected samples from them years later, without telling them why. Victor
McKusick went further—he and a colleague published a table in Science
that “mapped forty-three different genetic markers present in DNA from
[Henrietta’s husband] and two of the Lacks children,” using those markers
to produce a genetic profile of HeLa. “Today,” Skloot comments, “no sci-
entist would dream of publishing a person’s name with any of their genetic
information, because we know how much can be deduced from DNA,
including the risks of developing certain diseases” (Skloot 2010, 197–98).
Skloot does not mention, although she certainly knows, that mapping a fam-
ily’s DNA will reveal privileged health information not only about the named
family members but about their children, their children’s children, and even
more distant relatives.
The family data published in dry scientific tables intersect with racial and
class dynamics throughout the book and film. While anyone may feel some
degree of vulnerability regarding genetic privacy, those people who have been
subjected to structural and systemic forms of oppression often experience even
greater senses of precarity and distrust. The systematic review notes that “in
almost all studies reporting differences in perspectives by race or ethnicity, Non-
White individuals had greater concerns about privacy, including more desire for
control over use of their data” (E Clayton et al. 2018, 12).
Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s film go beyond the empirical studies surveyed in
the systematic review, however, by situating the Lacks family’s attitude toward
Johns Hopkins and the widespread use of HeLa cells by medical researchers
in the context of their experiences of anti-black racism in the United States.
Family, race, gender, and class intermingle in this living-room colloquy Skloot
overhears, amplifying their suspicion of the medical world
“Well what do you expect from Hopkins?” Bobbette yelled from the kitchen,
where she sat watching a soap opera. “I wouldn’t even go there to get my toe-
nails cut.”
“Mmm hmm,” Day yelled back, thumping his silver cane on the floor like an
exclamation point.
“Back then they did things,” Sonny said. “Especially to black folks. John
Hopkins was known for experimentin on black folks. They’d snatch em off the
street…”
“That’s right!” Bobbette said, appearing in the kitchen door with her coffee.
“Everybody knows that.”
“They just snatch em off the street,” Sonny said.
“Snatchin people!” Bobbette yelled, her voice growing louder.
“Experimentin on them!” Sonny yelled.
“You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I

was a girl,” Bobbette said, shaking her head. “I’m telling you, I lived here in the
fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near
Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or
Hopkins might get us.” (Skloot 2010, 165)
Skloot follows this scene with a section about nineteenth-century doctors

paying grave robbers for cadavers from African American cemeteries. The
genre-switch from family melodrama to popular science effectively sutures
“black oral history,” as Skloot describes it, “filled with tales of ‘night doc-
tors’ who kidnapped black people for research” (Skloot 2010, 165) with the
history of racial oppression in America. This narrative juxtaposition allows
Skloot to invoke historical abuses without having to prove that the Lacks
family knew about this history or that their distrust of medical institutions
was motivated by actual historical events. To be clear, we regard this narrative
suturing as legitimate and valuable. We emphasize the literary sleight-of-hand
to underline what narrative can accomplish more effectively than statistics.
Preeminently, in this case, the intersection of race, family, and community
shapes the Lacks family’s attitudes toward the medical establishment.
Both the book and the film rely heavily on such juxtapositions aimed at
generating emotional responses, encouraging identifications with and affec-
tive investments in the figures of Skloot, Henrietta Lacks, and Deborah
Lacks. Such temporal and spatial shifts not only add variety to the narratives
but also invite unexpected insights and articulations. The conventionalization
of such juxtapositions in narrative and cinematic montage helps legitimize
connections that an academic researcher would have to justify with evidence
and argument. So, for example, when Skloot’s book links a historical episode
like the Tuskegee Syphilis study to the Lacks family, this strategy encourages
readers to accept such associations as logically related. They are related, of
course, but as a cultural legacy stemming from the structural violence of rac-
ism, not as documented historical links. The most dramatic example of such
literary juxtapositions occurs in the book’s epigraph, where a quotation from
Elie Wiesel in The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code contextualizes the
story to come against the backdrop of the Holocaust.10 Epigraphs don’t
make an argument, but they can make an impact. Skloot is generally careful
to point out the ways in which the Lacks case differs from murderous medical
atrocities, but the power of narrative juxtaposition remains, reinforcing the
sense of injustice that radiates outward, beyond an individual to encompass
the wrongs done to her family and community, even the historical wrongs
inflicted on entire populations.
The activist critic bell hooks has indicted Skloot for the kind of scene we
analyzed above, pointing out how such depictions echo sentimental black
stereotypes. Other scenes of Henrietta Lacks caring for her large family turn
her into the “stereotypical strong black woman” (hooks 2013, 84), while
dramatic moments between Skloot and Deborah Lacks cast the latter both
as a “crazy black woman bitch” (hooks, 86) and a “caring black mammy”
(hooks 2013, 87). These stereotypes undoubtedly contribute to the seamless
acceptance of Skloot’s narrative by a majority white readership, but they also
redirect attention away from a radical critique of racism and sexual violence,
which haunt the margins of this text (hooks 2013, 86–91). Although hooks’s
intervention is powerful and persuasive, textual criticism alone is not likely to
reach beyond the literary and race studies readerships who largely share her
perspectives already. We also need approaches that address the groups that
shape policy in this area. Analyses that identify shortcomings in current policy
research are more likely to result in recommendations, and even regulations,
that can change how disempowered individuals and communities are treated
in the medical and research domains.
As an audiovisual text, Wolfe’s film has its own affordances for generating
affective responses that differ from the juxtapositions that structure Skloot’s
book. In the movie, the scene in the Lacks family’s living room is preceded
by Skloot’s ride in Sonny’s car to meet Henrietta’s husband for the first time.
As Sonny drives, the camera focuses attention on the economically insecure
neighborhood in Baltimore where the family lives, featuring shots of boarded
up buildings and abandoned homes. In the background, the song “Living
in the Alley” by Miss Tony plays, its lyrics recounting the levels of poverty
and homelessness often experienced by communities of color in Baltimore.
This framing encourages viewers not only to have emotional responses to the
Lackses and their family’s loss but also to consider their experiences in the
context of systemic racism and its intersection with socioeconomic precarity.
When Skloot talks with the family in the living room, shaky, handheld cine-
matography combines with close-up shots of the home and its inhabitants to
create a sense of realism with melodramatic affects, heightening the impact
and rhetorical force of the characters’ words.
Taken together, both Skloot’s book and Wolfe’s filmic adaptation of it
remind researchers that individuals do not make decisions about genetic pri-
vacy in insolation from other people, nor do they do so outside of histori-
cal or cultural contexts. These texts also serve as reminders that people do
not come to understand issues related to genetic privacy on purely rational or
factual grounds. Their memories, beliefs, and emotions matter—as do their
encounters with literary and media texts. This fact is one that Skloot’s and
Wolfe’s texts strikingly illustrate. Both texts include a scene in which Deborah
Lacks, trying to show how hard she has worked to understand her mother’s
case, dumps out on a bed a bag full of her research materials, which consist
of tabloid clippings, scientific articles, a genetics textbook, and a VHS copy
of the film Jurassic Park. Researchers interested in understanding why people
make particular choices regarding genetic privacy—or other medical issues—
should be careful to attend to discourses and representations circulating in
popular literature and media which may play a constitutive role in shaping
public knowledge about and opinions of science and medicine.
Conclusion
Since a major goal of our research project is attempting to understand the
social and cultural factors that help shape people’s attitudes toward genetic
privacy, we have worked in this paper and others to construct a holistic model
of the multiple factors at work. Evidence from literature, film, and tele-
vision—as well as other forms of popular culture like journalism and social
media—can play a significant role in helping us understand how diverse causal
factors intersect. The high levels of correspondence between the concerns
identified in the systematic review of secondary literature on genetic pri-
vacy and the concerns expressed in both the book and film versions of The
Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks reveal the extent to which literary and media
texts may not only reflect prevailing beliefs on medical and scientific subjects
but may generate those concerns as well.
The familial, community, and generational concerns that are not captured
in existing policy research testify to the greater power of literature and film
to convey intersectional harms. Priscilla Wald, discussing the discipline of
American Studies and its century-long mission to understand the full social
context of great national controversies, makes a kindred point about how we
should approach the case of Henrietta Lacks. Wald argues for expanding our
lens beyond specific scientific missteps or ethical failures to encompass the
“persistent inequities of nations and networks” (Wald 2012, 202). “The sto-
ries about Lacks and her cells illustrate the inextricability of medical scien-
tific research from social existence as well as cultural production, economics,
law, religious beliefs and practices, geopolitics, and pretty much any other
aspect of human experience we can think of” (Wald 2012, 186). That is why
humanities-based approaches to cultural narratives can form such a vital com-
plement to existing policy research.
Our discussion of the cultural narratives developed in Rebecca Skloot’s
book and Wolfe’s film have led us to some preliminary conclusions that
should be of interest to the public policy community. First, breeches of
genetic privacy affect families and communities, not just individuals; and
communities, in turn, shape individual attitudes in multiple, interlocking
ways. Policy recommendations should take into account intersectional harms
touching relatives and other community members, not just affected individu-
als. This means not simply relying on metrics that assess how individuals want
their genetic information to be treated but also attending to cultural markers
that can signal how wider communities perceive genetic harms.
Second, the affective dimension of a person’s response to genetic infor-
mation is not superfluous but fundamental to any research into public atti-
tudes. While concerns about objectivity are essential for ethical and effective
policies, researchers and policy makers should attend to the fact that people
make sense of and respond to policy decisions in ways that exceed, and even
challenge, norms of objectivity and rationality. To acknowledge the affective
and emotional dimensions of people’s responses to policies—particularly as
they relate to complex issues like genetic privacy—is not to critique those
individuals but to acknowledge that no human behaviors remain untouched
by feelings.
Finally, researchers need to attend to the intersectional nature of the
forces shaping the public’s encounter with genetic information and threats to
genetic privacy. Such intersections include not only overlapping oppressions
or conditions of precarity, such as racism, sexism, class inequities, or disabil-
ity, but also the intersections among their personal, familial, religious, and
communal lives. Although the findings of a systematic review on literature
regarding genetic privacy can be charted and categorized neatly, researchers
and policy makers will benefit from remembering that individuals and com-
munities cannot.
Notes
1. Funded by a $4-million grant from the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications
(ELSI) program of the NIH, our project, “Genetic privacy and Identity in
Community Settings” (GetPreCiSe, #5RM1HG009034-02), has five main
goals: (1) to understand what influences US public attitudes toward genetic
privacy; (2) to identify the actual risks to privacy faced by individuals and com-
munities in genomic data; (3) to study the effectiveness of institutional, legal,
and community-based measures to protect genetic privacy; (4) to develop
models for quantifying the likelihood of harm resulting from the illicit acqui-
sition of genomic data; and (5) to develop policy solutions that may prevent
intrusions on privacy and the misuse of genomic data.
2. The list of privacy violations that HIPAA publishes on its website (colloquially
known as the “HIPAA Wall of Shame”) testifies to how often such breaches
occur. https://ocrportal.hhs.gov/ocr/breach/breach_report.jsf.
3. Our research group has a study underway to assess whether attitudes toward
giving one’s data away to direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies have
changed since news broke of the police’s use of GEDmatch to track down a
suspect in the Golden State Killer case.
4. The data in this paragraph and the accompanying chart are drawn from a pub-
lication by two members of our research group, James Hazel and Christopher
Slobogin, “Who Knows What, and When?: A Survey of the Privacy Policies
Proffered by U.S. Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Companies.” The fig-
ures add up to more than n = 90 because many companies offer more than
one genetic testing service.
5. In “The Law of Genetic privacy”, Ellen Wright Clayton and other members of
our research team describe the legal status of surreptitious testing as follows:
“The frequency with which surreptitious testing appears to occur might not be
surprising in light of the paucity of relevant federal and state law on the subject
and the limited scope of the laws that do exist. Despite repeated calls from
legal scholars and government advisory committees for increased oversight
of surreptitious testing and stricter laws governing nonconsensual collection
and analysis of the genetic material of others, no comprehensive federal laws
currently prohibit the practice…. Instead, the United States relies on a patch-
work of state laws that place varying restrictions on the practice depending on
the purpose of the testing or the context in which it is performed” (2019, 32).
6. See https://www.nature.com/news/nih-director-explains-hela-agreement-
1.13521#/ref-link-2.
7. For a discussion of how “systematic reviews have transformed medicine,” see
Sutherland and Wordley (2018, 364).
8. Berry comments on the power—as well as potential drawbacks—of nonfiction
narratives’ capability to effect social change. “Nonfiction narratives expose
social injustice and individual suffering, … in which readers become involved
with protagonists and are able to feel a narrative experience like a real expe-
rience, a process that has been statistically proven to arouse readers’ empathy
and influence their attitudes. Ultimately, telling the intimate stories of vul-
nerable people can spur prosocial behaviors among readers with social power.
Along with this positive potential for narratives, however, is the opposite
potential: narratives that explicitly attempt to educate readers about the effects
of inequality may have a greater potential to replicate and reenact the ine-
qualities between privileged readers and the vulnerable subjects of narratives”
(2014, 225).
9. One controversial feature of Skloot’s book is her use of dialect. Skloot defends
this decision as follows: “I’ve done my best to capture the language with
which each person spoke and wrote: dialogue appears in native dialects; pas-
sages from diaries and other personal writings are quoted exactly as written. As
one of Henrietta’s relatives said to me, ‘If you pretty up how people spoke and
change the things they said, that’s dishonest. It’s taking away their lives, their
experiences, and their selves.’” (Skloot ix). For bell hooks, this explanation is
not satisfactory. “Skloot consistently portrays the black folks she interviews in
a sentimental manner, one that tends to evoke a folksy image of down-home
black folks with no cares in the world, what I call ‘the happy darky syndrome.’
Paradoxically, she merely states that Henrietta Lacks suffered from venereal
disease yet she in no way places the exploitation of Lacks’s black female body
in the context of child abuse, racism, sexism, and class exploitation” (hooks
2013, 84).
10. The epigraph reads: “We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we
must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures,
with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph” (Wiesel
1992, ix).
Works Cited
Berry, Sarah L. 2014. Paradoxical Worsening of Empathy: Ambassadorial Science
Journalism and the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. In Rethinking Empathy
Through Literature, ed. Meghan Marie Hammond and Sue J. Kim, 225–37.
Mla-Ib. New York, NY: Routledge.
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. Surface Reading: An Introduction.
Representations 108: 1–21.
Callaway, Ewen. 2013. NIH Director Explains Hela Agreement: Descendants of
Henrietta Lacks Endorse Controlled Access to Cell Line Genome after Meetings
with Francis Collins. Nature. Retrieved from https://www.nature.com/news/

nih-director-explains-hela-agreement-1.13521#/ref-link-2.
Clayton, Ellen Wright, Colin M. Halverson, Nila A. Sathe, and Bradley A. Malin. 2018.
A Systematic Literature Review of Individuals’ Perspectives on Privacy and Genetic
Information in the United States. PLoS One 13 (10). #5RM1HG009034-02.
Clayton, Ellen Wright, Barbara J. Evans, James W. Hazel, and Mark A. Rothstein. 2019.
The Law of Genetic Privacy: Applications, Implications, and Limitations. Journal of
Law and the Biosciences 1–36. Advance Access Publication. #5RM1HG009034-02.
Clayton, Jay. 2007. Victorian Chimeras, or, What Literature Can Contribute to
Genetics Policy Today. New Literary History 38. Special Issue: Biocultures. Ed.
Lennard J. Davis and David B. Morris, 569–92.
———. 2009. Literature and Science Policy: A New Project for the Humanities.
PMLA 124: 947–49.
———. 2016. The Modern Synthesis: Genetics and Dystopia in the Huxley Circle.
Modernism/Modernity 23 (4): 875–96.
Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garrison NA, et al. 2016. A Systematic Literature Review of Individuals’ Perspectives
on Broad Consent and Data Sharing in the United States. Genetics in Medicine.
Hazel, James, and Christopher Slobogin. 2018. Who Knows What, and When? A
Survey of the Privacy Policies Proffered by U.S. Direct-to-Consumer Genetic
Testing Companies. Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy 28 (1): 35–66.
#5RM1HG009034-02.
Hendrix, Steve. 2017. On the Eve of an Oprah Movie About Henrietta Lacks, an
Ugly Feud Consumes the Family. The Washington Post, March 29.
hooks, bell. 2013. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York:
Routledge.
Shavlik, Melissa Ann. 2011. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: How a Best-Seller
Diffused Online. Dissertation, Portland State University.
Skloot, Rebecca. 2010. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Crown
Publishers.
Sutherland, W.J., and C.F.R. Wordley. 2018. A Fresh Approach to Evidence Synthesis.
Nature 558 (7710): 364–66.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. 2017. Dir., George C. Wolfe. Films, HBO.
Vogt-William, Christine. 2017. Hela and the Help: Justice and African-American
Women in White Women’s Narratives. In Postcolonial Justice, ed. Anke Bartels,
Lars Eckstein, Nicole Waller, and Dirk Wiemann, 141–75. Amsterdam: Brill/
Rodopi.
Wald, Priscilla. 2012. American Studies and the Politics of Life. American Quarterly
64 (2): 185–204.
Warren, Samuel D., and Louis D. Brandeis. 1890. The Right to Privacy. Harvard Law
Review 4 (5): 193–220.
Wiesel, Elie. 1992. Forward. In The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code: Human
Rights in Human Experimentation, ed. George J. Annas and Michael A. Grodin.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Zurawik, David. 2017. Son of Henrietta Lacks Says Oprah, HBO Exploiting His
Mother’s Memory. The Baltimore Sun, March 20.
CHAPTER 13
Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age

Nostalgia: Futurist Practices in Contemporary
Science Fiction
Rebecca Wilbanks
Science fiction (SF) author Neal Stephenson’s 2011 article “Innovation

Starvation” self-consciously laments the loss of a future seemingly promised
him as a boy in mid-twentieth-century America: “I have followed the dwin-
dling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-
shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars?” Although Stephenson
acknowledges that some may have little sympathy “that an affluent, mid-
dle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled,”
he goes on to argue that the decline of the space program is symptomatic of
a broader problem in the United States: an “inability as a society to execute
on the big stuff.” Stephenson correlates changes in the slowdown of innova-
tion with changes in the SF genre, which became “darker, more skeptical, and
ambiguous” in tone beginning in the 1970s. With collaborators from Arizona
State University, Stephenson produced a response: the short story collection
Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2013), meant to serve as a
“conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.”
Hieroglyph is one of a number of recent fictional interventions that are
incantatory: Their formal qualities stem from the fact that they are meant to
produce effects in the real world. I borrow this term from a 1979 essay by
literary critic Charles Elkins but narrow its meaning. Whereas Elkins uses it to
make the philosophically pragmatist point that all literature presents scenarios
R. Wilbanks (*) 
Department of English, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

222 R. WILBANKS
that inspire thought and feeling, shape action, and thereby change the pres-
ent, I use incantatory to describe a recent body of work whose conditions of
production are defined by an intention for the work to have tangible impact
beyond the literary sphere. Writers and critics have long argued that SF is
a didactic genre (Russ 1975), but increasingly it is being asked to do rather
than teach, that is, to bring about or ward off real-world states of affairs.
These incantatory fictions are the result of an evolving relationship between
SF and the tradition of foresight practices or futurology that dates back to the
mid-twentieth century. The theory of science, fiction, and social change artic-
ulated by Stephenson and embedded in the structure of Project Hieroglyph
stems from this tradition and from its situation within a community of prac-
tice that includes Silicon Valley technologists and futurists.
Yet Stephenson’s articulation of how science fiction inspires action does
not adequately account for the ways that the stories in this edited collection
actually function. Stephenson’s model of incantatory fiction presents a rela-
tively direct model of incantation, in which the SF author originates a vision
of the future that others work to realize. The univocal nature of this model
stands in contrast to the diversity of standpoints that defines SF since the
1970s. Moreover, Stephenson’s retro-futurism does not substantially address
the critiques that more recent cohorts of authors have made of Golden Age
SF, including its lack of environmental awareness and its assumption of a
largely white and male audience. However, other incantatory fictions within
Project Hieroglyph and beyond suggest more pluralistic ways of relating fic-
tion to science and technology, in part by altering the formal structure and
the mode of production of the SF story. They suggest other models of incan-
tation in which fiction does not present a blueprint to be realized, but a stim-
ulus to think, feel, and act differently.
SF and Futurism: From Predicting to Making the Future

In the post-World War II period, the future emerged as an object of con-
cern for governments, corporations, and other institutions. Forecasting
methods rooted in computing technologies and theoretical models used dur-
ing the war were developed into a generalized approach to prediction at the
military think tank RAND Corporation and other groups supported by the
US security apparatus (including the Departments of Defense and State) in
the 1950s and 1960s (Andersson 2012, 1413). SF authors and those with
a professional interest in forecasting or regulating future trends displayed
both mutual suspicion and interest in each other’s work. Frederik Pohl writes,
“When the World Future Society began a few decades ago, I have to admit
that I regarded it with a certain amount of professional jealousy” due to a
feeling that he had some “seniority” in the business of writing about the
future (1996, 237). In contrast, Ursula Le Guin writes in the introduction
to The Left Hand of Darkness, “Oh, it’s lovely to be invited to participate in
13 INCANTATORY FICTIONS AND GOLDEN AGE NOSTALGIA … 223
Futurological Congresses where Systems Science displays its grand apoca-

lyptic graphs, to be asked to tell the newspapers what America will be like
in 2001, and all that, but it’s a terrible mistake. I write science fiction, and
science fiction isn’t about the future” ([1969] 2016, xxvi). Their differing
attitudes are indicative of differing tendencies within SF; critics have made
a rough distinction between extrapolative, “hard” SF with a strong com-
mitment to rationalist explanations of the world, and analogical approaches
directed at understanding and critiquing present society, although many texts
contain elements of both (Suvin 1972, 379).
By the time Le Guin declined to become a futurologist, futurology was
already moving away from claims that it could scientifically calculate “the
future,” toward methods such as scenario studies that emphasized narrative
and the plurality of alternate possible futures (Williams 2016).1 Herman
Kahn, a leading figure at the RAND Corporation, was an avid reader of SF
and interacted with authors such as Robert Heinlein, who did take up the
invitation to attend futurological congresses (Ghamari-Tabrizi 2005, 76;
Patterson 2014, 267). However, Kahn drew on particular formal techniques
to distinguish his scenarios from most SF. His scenarios are brief (2–3 pages),
written in the present tense, and employ grammatical constructions that
emphasize conditionality (Williams 2016, 522). Kahn sometimes used SF as
a foil against which he defined his method, which he clothed “in quantitative
garb” in order to command the authority of science (Ghamari-Tabrizi 76,
132). Although some futurists in the 1970s did embrace SF, and there was a
good deal of informal “amiable symbiosis” (Pohl 1996, 237), futurists more
often held SF at arm’s length in an effort to establish their field as a scientifi-
cally legitimate area of inquiry.
Observing the situation in 1979, literary critic Charles Elkins argued that
those futurists who did take an interest in SF were misguided. SF, he insisted,
does not predict the future. Instead, he argued, it is fundamentally incanta-
tory: “a mode of and goad to action” (25). Dramatic presentations of the
future in SF are meant to “guide us” and to “organize” present action, rather
than strive for an impossible mimesis. In fact, futurists’ attitudes toward SF
were more nuanced that Elkins makes out. While some futurists turned to SF
as a source of material to analyze “in the absence of data” on the future itself
(Livingston 1971, 255), Alvin Toffler denied that futurism was about predict-
ing the future, writing instead that it “has immense value as a mind-stretching
force for the creation of the habit of anticipation” ([1972] 1984, 425).2
Nevertheless, Elkins is correct that Toffler draws SF into an approach to the
future that is largely “mimetic,” one in which the ultimate goal is to discover
what can be known about the future in order to best prepare for it in the
present.
The following decades would see changes that brought futurism and SF
closer together. The method of scenario studies continued to grow in pop-
ularity and spread into the business world in the 1980s through Kahn’s
224 R. WILBANKS
corporate consulting and through the work of Pierre Wack, a Shell oil exec-
utive and Harvard Business School senior lecturer. Military analysts and SF
writers continued to mingle in the following decades, participating in vision-
ing activities inherited from RAND.3 In the 1980s, SF also took on a dif-
ferent resonance as the relationship between science and technology shifted.
Whereas in the 1970s even major theorists of technology understood it as
a secondary effect of advances in science, in popular and academic dis-
courses during the 1980s technology began to take precedence, increasingly
seen as the higher-prestige activity and as a driver of science rather than the
other way around (Forman 2007, 50–51). The 1980s and the following dec-
ades saw the emergence of fields of study in which knowing is a secondary
effect of making: biotechnology, nanoscience, and synthetic biology. These
postmodern sciences, as some described them, raise anxieties “not about
whether we have seized the real right but about whether we are instead
making the right real” (Daston and Galison 2007, 415). As calls for “public
engagement” with science and technology grew, SF’s ability to make alternate
hypothetical worlds accessible to a wide audience was increasingly attractive—
some called it “technology assessment for the rest of us” (Miller and Bennett
2008, 598).
As the twenty-first century progressed, futurists seized on SF less as a means
of attaining knowledge about a future that was bearing down too quickly, and
more as a way of revitalizing futurity itself, which was presented as endan-
gered. In other words, they adopted Elkins’s basic premise that SF is “incan-
tatory.” Following a line of argument from economists such as Tyler Cowen
that the rate of new inventions had slowed since the 1970s, Stephenson’s
“Innovation Starvation” essay appeared the same year (2011) that tech mogul
Peter Thiel published a manifesto summed up in the (ironically Twitter-
friendly) slogan: “we were promised flying cars and we got 140 characters”
(https://foundersfund.com/the-future/). According to these commenta-
tors, the future was no longer rushing to meet us, as Toffler had described in
Future Shock; rather, it seemed to have stalled. Thiel’s venture capital firm’s
website refers nostalgically to Star Trek and Arthur C. Clarke; diagnosing a
recent cultural sickness, it displays a graph of the rising popularity of dystopian
fiction (https://foundersfund.com/2016/06/thought-thoughts-future/).
In the context of calls to make rather than predict the future, SF has
become a more accepted tool for futurists. For example, Brian David
Johnson, a former futurist at Intel and collaborator on several projects at
ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination, does not shy away from the
term “SF” in the 2011 manual SF Prototyping: Designing the Future with SF.
However, in what may be seen as a residue of mimesis, he adds the term
“prototype” to define a smaller set of works he describes as more closely
rooted in real-world developments in science and technology (what many
would describe as “hard SF”).4 Unlike Kahn’s scenarios, Johnson’s “SF pro-
totypes” are formally indistinguishable from works of SF. Johnson writes,
“it is really impossible and useless to try and predict the future” (4), and
states that “creating SF prototypes, writing stories, making movies and draw-
ing comics about the future are one of those things that people can do to
actually change the future… Your future is truly in your hands” (5).
Project Hieroglyph follows this same model. In a talk about Hieroglyph at
Google, editor Kathryn Cramer explains, “While as editors, Ed and I want you
to have the best possible reading experience, Hieroglyph is not so much aimed at
how you feel as what you DO” (2014). Project Hieroglyph is one of the earliest
and most influential of a recent crop of incantatory fictions that have involved
many of the best-known SF authors writing today. It is the first of a number
of volumes produced by the Center for Science and the Imagination on topics
such as solar technology, space exploration, the stratosphere, and climate change.
Other examples of incantatory fictions include Infectious Futures (2015), com-
missioned by the UK “innovation foundation” NESTA; Bio-Punk: Stories from
the Far Side of Research (2012), supported by the Wellcome Trust; the Bio:
Fiction film festival sponsored by Biofaction, an Austrian “research and science
communication company” (biofaction.com); the multimedia Better Worlds col-
lection from Vox media site The Verge (2018); The Tomorrow Project from
Intel (which also involved collaboration with ASU’s Center for Science and the
Imagination) (2011); the online story collections Current Futures (2019) and
Seat 14C (2017) commissioned by the X Prize Foundation, in the latter case
together with All Nippon Airways; and Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories
from Social Justice Movements (2015), a crowd-funded collection of speculative
fiction by activists edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha and
supported by the Institute for Anarchist Studies (Octavia’s Brood representing
something of an outlier on this list, a point I will return to by the end).5
While varied, these projects generally share the following elements: (1)
They involve experts who are not SF authors who collaborate, consult, pro-
duce their own speculative narratives, and/or respond to the fiction. (2)
Scientific accuracy is prioritized. (3) Authors are encouraged to move away
from dystopia and apocalypse, and in many cases are specifically asked to pro-
duce positive visions. (4) The futures are near-term in order to emphasize
the connection with the present. In addition, many of these projects include
an invitation to the public to participate in the visioning process, for exam-
ple by including open contests for story submissions or through associated
workshops or pedagogical tools. They may also include extra-diegetic mate-
rials, such as scientific sources, charts and graphs, and responses by technical
experts. Each of these characteristics flows from the raison d’être of incanta-
tory fiction: to inspire real-world innovation and action.
Because Neal Stephenson was one of the first to articulate these ideas to a
broader audience, serving as a link between the SF community and the tech
industry, and because he is cited by a number of incantatory fictions that have
come after Project Hieroglyph, I focus on the original Hieroglyph anthology in
order to examine Stephenson’s vision, how it relates to the SF tradition, and
how SF authors have responded to his call. While Stephenson’s retro-futurism
226 R. WILBANKS
seeks to reinvest the technological object with the optimism of Golden Age
fiction, it does not adequately address the reasons why this affective economy
ceased to predominate within SF. Stephenson’s hieroglyph theory offers a
direct mode of incantation, in which the SF story presents a blueprint to be
realized. Assuming a background of shared meaning, this model of incanta-
tion breaks down in the face of pluralistic understandings of technology’s rela-
tionship to the social good. The problem is particularly acute in Stephenson’s
fictional contribution to the volume, which draws on a reactionary formu-
lation of American greatness that fails to address the exclusionary politics of
American exceptionalism, in both US history and the history of SF.
The Hieroglyph Theory of Incantation

Hieroglyph theory emerges from the intersection of the hard SF tradition
and Silicon Valley. Stephenson traces the origins of Project Hieroglyph and
the Center for Science and the Imagination to a 2011 Future Tense event
sponsored by Arizona State University, Slate, and New America, and hosted
by Google’s Washington, DC offices. At that meeting, Stephenson, ASU
President Michael Crow, and audience members discussed the predomi-
nance of dystopian SF as both symbol and contributing cause of the failure
to innovate. Stephenson theorizes the connection between SF and innova-
tion through the idea of the “hieroglyph,” which he credits to Jim Karkanias,
formerly of Microsoft research. SF builds an imagined world around a tech-
nology, and the technological object comes to serve as a shorthand for the
world. These imagined technologies, such as “Asimov’s robots, Heinlein’s
rocket ships, or Gibson’s cyberspace,” are “simple, recognizable symbols
whose significance everyone agrees on” (2014b). Project Hieroglyph embod-
ies the tech industry’s call to think big, describing a desire to identify “moon-
shot ideas.” Mirroring a definition put forward by X (a company spun off of
Google in 2010 that describes itself as the “moonshot factory”), Hieroglyph’s
introduction describes a moonshot as the intersection of “a huge problem, a
breakthrough discovery and a radical solution” (Finn and Cramer 2014).
In many respects, Hieroglyph represents an intensification of tenden-
cies within the tradition of hard SF. Gary Westfahl describes hard SF as “an
especially heightened concern for, and an especially heightened connection
to, science” (2005, 187). The collection is edited by Ed Finn of Arizona
State University and Kathryn Cramer, and the introduction touts Cramer’s
“expertise in hard SF”; in addition to editing the Year’s Best SF annuals,
she edited the hard SF volumes Ascent of Wonder (1997) and The Hard SF
Renaissance (2002). Hieroglyph could be seen as a continuation of what
Cramer describes as the “hard SF Renaissance” of the 90s. It also bears sim-
ilarities to Geoff Ryman’s call for “Mundane SF,” focusing on near-term
futures and sticking close to contemporary science. (Ryman’s edited volume
When it Changed [2009] also pairs SF authors with scientists who contribute
responding essays.) Likewise, Hieroglyph emphasizes scientific and technical
plausibility, relatively near-term futures, and optimism (“Introduction”).

Extra-narratively, “recognition by one’s peers”; “a degree or profession in sci-
ence or technology, publication of scientific papers, and even an explanation
of the homework and sources involved” are all features that have been associ-
ated with hard SF, as has an association with the “hard” sciences (Samuelson
2009, 497). Several of Hieroglyph’s contributors are established authors of
hard SF. Four authors hold doctoral degrees in physics and one in mathemat-
ics; this is not counting the foreword and afterword, which are both written
by physicists. In addition, a number of other authors identify as futurists, and
two hold master’s degrees in Strategic Foresight and Innovation. Hieroglyph
was noticed by the futurist community; the Association of Professional
Futurists named it a Most Significant Futures Work in 2015.
Hieroglyph opens with Stephenson’s “Atmosphaera Incognita,” which
puts Hieroglyph theory into practice. “Atmosphaera Incognita” is an earnest
throwback to Golden Age SF. It describes the construction of a 20-kilome-
ter-high tower, brainchild of a billionaire name Carl, from securing the land
to stabilizing a structure that will cut through the jet stream. The engineer-
ing challenges and design features of the tower are described in great detail
from the perspective of Emma, a childhood friend of Carl’s who is recruited
to work on the tower and manages the project from its conception through
Carl’s death. A final, shorter section harkens back to magazine stories edited
by John Campbell involving problem-solving in space as Emma travels to
the top of the tower to spread Carl’s ashes, and is confronted by a previously
unknown upper-atmospheric electrical phenomenon that damages the tower
and endangers the small party that has gathered on that evening.
Like every story in the volume, the Hieroglyph website provides an
author’s note and links to responses and related resources. In this case, the
extra-diegetic material demonstrates the Hieroglyph ideal: The narrative
is inspired by scientific research, the acknowledgments effectively loop in a
small cadre of people with the expertise and resources to undertake this kind
of project in real life, and the story in turn generates further research and
collaboration. The notes for the story explain that the design of the tower
is based on papers by Geoffrey Landis and Vincent Denis, both of whom
work in space science (Landis is also a SF author). Stephenson also credits
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos with “the idea of using engines to push back
against jet stream events” (2014a, 37). (Stephenson worked for Jeff Bezos’s
space company Blue Origin in the early 2000s.) The design of the tower was
further developed through conversations with Keith Hjelmstad of Arizona
State University. Hjelmstad contributes a response to the story in which he
is appropriately inspired, writing, “This journey to wrap my mind around
the possibility of the tall tower has caused me to recalibrate nearly everything
I have ever thought about building tall…it is an idea big enough to drive
new thought” (2014). The preface to the book cites Stephenson’s story as an
example of how the ideas within the volume have “launched new avenues of
research,” presumably through Hjelmstad’s research.
228 R. WILBANKS
Winged Towers, Golden Age Nostalgia, and the Problem

of Inspiration
Despite the fact that the collaboration opened up new research questions for
Hjelmstad, at a literary level the story does not provide a plausible or con-
vincing account of why the tower is inspiring: How it emotionally resonates
with people, and why such a massive undertaking is worthwhile. This lack
of motivation is inherent to hieroglyph theory as Stephenson articulates it.
The theory identifies a perceived social problem (society has lost the will to
execute on the “big stuff”), but locates the solution in a renewed empha-
sis on the technological object (i.e., the hieroglyph itself, such as “Asimov’s
robots,” and in Stephenson’s story, the tall tower) without addressing the
reasons why these symbols of modern technology have lost social buy-in
today. The hieroglyph as an incantatory symbol recalls Leo Marx’s use of the
theory of commodity fetishism to explain why technology itself is a “hazard-
ous” concept. Marx writes,
In contemporary discourse, private and public, technologies are habitually rep-

resented by “things”—by their most conspicuous artifactual embodiments:
transportation technology by automobiles, airplanes, and railroads; nuclear
technology by reactors, power plants, and bombs; information technology by
computers, mobile telephones, and television; and so on. By consigning tech-
nologies to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts
attention from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which
largely determine who uses them and for what purposes. (Marx 2010, 576)
Marx explains that although the term technology evolved to fill the “seman-
tic void” created by large sociotechnical systems such as the railway, the
term nevertheless reifies the sociotechnical system and all the social rela-
tionships with which it is bound up by collapsing them onto their most
“iconic” elements, to which it attributes extraordinary powers. Likewise,
“Atmosphaera Incognita” attributes to the tower a power to inspire and
motivate which the story does not adequately demonstrate, either through
emotional tone or through an elaboration of how the tower is bound up in a
new and more hopeful configuration of social relations, or an improvement in
people’s lived experience.
While the story invokes the Golden Age tradition, it doesn’t acknowledge
why, from the perspective of subsequent SF movements, that tradition failed
to provide a viable vision for the later decades. The techno-optimism of the
Golden Age (1950s-era) itself harkens back to the pulp era initiated by Hugo
Gernsback in the 1920 and 1930s. Like Stephenson, Gernsback argued that
SF predicted the future by inspiring it; his own stories were vehicles for show-
casing the wondrous inventions he imagined, and at one point, he suggested
that authors should be able to patent their imagined devices (Gernsback
1926, 579). He promoted a boundlessly positive vision of scientific advance
encapsulated in the idea that “progress in science is as infinite as time, it is

inconceivable how either would stop” (1916). Golden Age stories under the
stewardship of editor John Campbell continued to convey optimism and a
sense of wonder about technology and the vistas opened up by science.
William Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum” (1981) demonstrates how
subsequent SF authors reflected back on this era. Gibson’s story portrays SF’s
past as a “semiotic ghost” in America’s subconscious, emblematized in the
futuristic architecture of the 1930s and recycled in the 1950s mass media.
The story is narrated by an architectural photographer assigned to photo-
graph examples of this style, described as “superfluous central towers ringed
with those strange radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style,
and made them look as though they might generate potential bursts of
raw technological enthusiasm, if you could only find the switch that turned
them on” (1987, 27). The “burnished aluminum wings” (20) and “stream-
lined airfoils” (33) of Stephenson’s tall tower recall the futuristic architecture
that Gibson’s story centers on, but without any hint of the sheen of h orror
and shabbiness that the buildings have accumulated in the intervening years
in “The Gernsback Continuum.” In Gibson’s hallucinatory vision, the city’s
architecture and its shiny inhabitants are both “tacky” and “sinister,” suggest-
ing a totalitarian drive to technological perfection that the story implicates
in the darkest currents of the twentieth century, including war,
eugenics, and environmental degradation. Gernsback’s vision of infinite pos-
sibility is recast in this retro-future as “a dream logic that knew nothing of
pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuels, or foreign wars it was possible to
lose” (32).
While Stephenson has said that the turn in which SF becomes “inward
looking, kind of postmodern, introspective, focused more on social stuff” was
“a good and healthy thing to have done,” the story largely implies that such
critical reflection can be left in the past (2012). “Atmosphaera Incognita”
gestures at some of the concerns raised by feminist, New Wave, cyberpunk,
environmental, and postcolonial interventions in the genre since the 1970s
but ultimately dismisses them. This attitude is most evident in how the story
handles the environment, and in its embrace of the frontier topos. Climate
change is acknowledged but doesn’t affect the building of the tower in any
way. Although environmentalists oppose the tower, the story attributes their
concerns either to rich yuppies who don’t want their view to be spoiled, or
to activists with “bogus” claims who have been manipulated into serving as
puppets for shadowy unspecified interests (12). Environmental considerations
are not described as affecting the building of the tower in any way, despite the
inclusion of many technical passages dealing with the project’s planning and
execution.
The story also resurrects the lone hero archetype associated with fron-
tier tales, as well as the mythology of American exceptionalism. Presenting
his tower as a place for rugged individualists, Carl takes aim at the phrase
230 R. WILBANKS
“shirtsleeves environment,” arguing: “The Cape of Good Hope is not a shirt-

sleeves environment. Neither was the American West. The moon. The peo-
ple who go to such places have an intrepid spirit we ought to respect” (24).
By referring to the people who go to such places, it is clear that he is talking
about colonial expeditions, overlooking indigenous peoples whose home was
the American West or the Cape of Good Hope. In the end, the tower is con-
structed in “between an Indian reservation and a decommissioned military
bombing range” (12); the scenery to one side of the tower is enlivened by
“grazing bison and the occasional horse-riding Indian” (16). The use of the
generic “Indian” harkens back to the Western genre, strengthening the asso-
ciation of the tower with the frontier. However, there is no indication of how
the local tribe felt about such a massive development in their backyard. Carl’s
obliviousness to the language of social justice (he refuses to consider building
the tower in a “third world hell-hole”) is portrayed as evidence of pragmatism
and a bracing lack of political correctness, rather than a flaw (6).
As Matthew Snyder observes, both “Atmosphaera Incognita” and Gregory
Benford’s contribution to Hieroglyph “promulgate the John Galt myth
— the right-libertarian fantasy that if we only had the right kind of Starry-
eyed Executive or C.E.O., the First World and its woeful comrades from the
‘developing world’ could be built back to the glorious possibilities we had
in the past” (2014). “Atmosphaera Incognita” promotes a narrative of tech-
nological progress driven by competition between superpowers (“China was
kicking the crap out of us” (4)), celebrating a return to American technologi-
cal and political dominance. Although the story was published before Donald
Trump announced his campaign for the presidency, the worshipful attitude
toward “job creators,” the promise of revitalizing American power by bring-
ing back traditional blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and steel production, a
disdain for “political correctness,” and the nostalgia for a past when America
was great—manifesting in an obsession with “bigness”—unmistakably taps
into the political current that Trump rode into office. Carl is portrayed as the
fabulously wealthy, self-made man of the people that Trump presents himself
to be. The story thus celebrates the myth of American exceptionalism rather
than grappling with the reasons that American workers have fared poorly in
recent decades and presenting an alternative (i.e., explaining how Carl is able
to finance the tower and provide the genuinely attractive, stable jobs that are
increasingly rare due to automation, outsourcing, and the decline of unions).
Ultimately, “Atmosphaera Incognita” suggests that a benevolent billionaire
with a big dream could bypass the structural constraints that have defined the
economy and produced staggering inequality over the past several decades.
Thiel’s support for Trump demonstrates how technological nostalgia can
dovetail with reactionary politics, and SF had its own reckoning with the
alt-right in the form of the Sad Puppies episode—an anti-diversity campaign
that called for a return to “traditional SF” while attempting to influence the
Hugo Awards voting process. Trump and the Sad Puppies both demonstrate
how calls to return America and SF, respectively, to past greatness can serve
as appeals for a retrenchment of white supremacy.6 Stephenson has no con-
nection to this movement, and Project Hieroglyph includes work that is
politically diverse and includes a number of women authors (though few
non-white authors). However, hieroglyph theory as articulated and expressed
in Stephenson’s writing is hampered by its appeal to a past in which women
and non-white authors were largely excluded. Most significantly, this weak-
ness manifests in an assumption of shared meaning that falters when a more
diverse audience is taken into consideration. Although Stephenson describes a
hieroglyph as a symbol “whose meaning everyone can agree on,” the mean-
ing of the tower is assumed rather than established in the story; the story suc-
ceeds at explaining “how,” but not “why.”
Tellingly, the technical paper by Landis and Denis that Stephenson cites
opens by stating that existing buildings have topped out at around 1km not
because of technical limitations, but because of the “lack of a compelling
application for higher towers.” Landis and Denis present an application by
suggesting that a tower reaching high into the earth’s atmosphere would have
utility in launching objects into space, an idea that Stephenson’s story also
seizes on. Yet going to space is not an endeavor whose value is self-evident.
During the Apollo mission to the moon, the Poor People’s Campaign ini-
tiated by Martin Luther King Jr. protested the governments’ choice to
fund the space program over domestic priorities. For the Black Panthers,
the space race represented a continuation of white imperialism (Kreiss 73).
Stephenson’s story acknowledges to a degree that motivation is an open
question. At one point well into the planning, Carl says, “What I haven’t fig-
ured out yet is—” and Emma interrupts, “Why it makes sense?” Carl jokingly
replies “Ah, I knew there was a reason I hired you” (3); however, he doesn’t
elaborate further. Carl remains opaque as a character, and it’s never clear
whether or how Emma signs onto Carl’s vision. She joins the project largely
by happenstance, after a chance encounter with Carl; lured by the prospect
of a sizable commission, she simply states, “I ended up becoming one of the
advocates for this thing…” (8).
There are brief moments in which the tower is shown to open up new
viewpoints: a different perspective on technology or the opportunity to wit-
ness novel and beautiful natural phenomena. These moments hint at the
technological sublime and sense of wonder associated with Golden Age SF.
However, the text’s doggedly realist tone has the effect of muting these
moments. For example, watching a thunderstorm from above is an intrigu-
ing novelty, but due to the risk of radiation, the characters are reminded to
put on their space suits, a procedure that is as familiar to them as a “life vest
drill” on a cruise ship (25). “The earth is an alien world,” a scientist remarks
at one point (27). But the writing style has the opposite effect, normalizing
and domesticating rather than estranging. It presents the tower as a nascent
beginning for the space tourism industry, which is to say you could ride to
232 R. WILBANKS
the top of the tower, look at the curvature of the earth, and have a drink
at the bar while listening to a guy next to you make a sequence of “you’ll
never guess where I’m calling from” phone calls (24). Eschewing the pulpier
aspects of the Campbellian adventure story, the narrative risks veering too far
into the territory of real estate development and workplace safety, in perhaps
an overly literal performance of “mundane SF.” Ultimately, “Atmosphaera
Incognita” fails to show how the tower transcends one man’s personal quest
to become something that could produce new kinds of social connections,
and that a community could become invested in. It is not clear what problem
the tower is meant to solve, except for the symbolic problem of lack of inspi-
ration. Given that the technology for the tower already exists, according to
the Landis and Denis paper, so that the problem must be social rather than
technical, it is unclear why emphasizing technical realism above all else would
solve the problem of inspiration. With its wings spread beyond the atmos-
phere, the tower hardly lacks symbolism, but in a circular way, it simply stands
for technological achievement itself.
At the same time, the story is likely to work well for those who are already
inspired by the challenge of building a tower into space. Hard SF author
Ben Bova explains, “My audience consists partly of SF fans, but mostly of
people in technical fields. It’s a technically educated audience, people who
are interested in realistic stories about how you get from here to there”
(Hartwell and Cramer 2002, 253). If we understand hard SF as the result of
historically situated “communities of practice” (Rieder 2017, 29), the missing
motivation can be filled in by shared values and assumptions within the com-
munity. Understanding hard SF as a community of practice with a particular
“moral economy” is in fact the only way to make sense of the fact that hard
SF is defined not only by the presence of detailed scientific explanations but
also by an attitude of optimism expressed in repeated narrative demonstration
that “one can solve problems through the application of knowledge of sci-
ence and technology”; this tradition “expresses, represents, and confirms faith
in science and reason” (Hartwell 1997, 11). If we situate Stephenson within
this tradition, and within a contemporary community of practice that includes
scientists and engineers in Silicon Valley, space exploration and practical prob-
lem-solving with a technically audacious twist is motivation enough. Writing
from within this context, Stephenson presents a relatively direct model of
incantatory fiction, closely linking inspiration to a technological image that
scientists and engineers can work to realize. It thereby assigns a high degree
of significance to the SF author as the architect of this vision. Despite
acknowledging multiple contributors to the tall tower concept, the extent to
which the visionary function is understood to be the product of a single mind
is evident in the way in which, within the text, the tower is a sui generis ema-
nation of Carl’s vision. If Carl can be understood as a stand-in for the author,
the incantatory fictions I focus on in the following section are more humble
in their understanding of what any individual SF vision can achieve.
Analogical and Ecological Approaches

To Stephenson’s credit, and to the credit of Hieroglyph’s editors, the contri-
butions from other authors go beyond Hieroglyph theory as he articulates it.
Rather than taking the meaning of technology for granted, Karl Schroeder
imagines a sociotechnical innovation that attempts to build shared meaning
in the context of seemingly intractable differences in “Degrees of Freedom.”
Other stories leave realism behind, further demonstrating that the hard SF
tradition has as much to do with shared values as with scientific content.
David Brin, an established author of hard SF, departs from its conventions in
favor of a parable that exhorts the reader to keep the techno-optimistic faith.
Brin presents a future world of humans who have the incredible but some-
times painful ability to fly (the biomechanics of this power are completely
unexplained). The story plays with reader expectations, opening with a disaf-
fected white-collar worker leaping out of his office window in what only ini-
tially appears to be suicide. Whereas Stephenson’s story makes an impressive
engineering feat mundane in order to convince the reader of its achievability,
Brin pivots from the mundane to the techno-sublime in order to suggest that
the present is not a dystopia but is incandescent with human and technolog-
ical potential. However, by ignoring the present’s most pressing problems
in order to insist that this world is already on the trajectory to be the best
of all possible worlds, it offers a conservative kind of techno-optimism. Like
Stephenson’s story, it ignores the substantive questions posed by critical SF
since the Golden Age.
In contrast, Bruce Sterling’s “Tall Tower” uses non-realist techniques to
address the ideology of techno-optimism in a more critical (which is to say
probing rather than arguing against) way. “Tall Tower” uses the technique of
cognitive estrangement to comment directly on Stephenson’s text, by project-
ing its underlying dream of human transcendence through technology onto a
horse who becomes “superequine.” Sterling—a cyberpunk author who wrote
in the 1980s, “not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the
Hoover Dam, the Empire State building, the nuclear power plant” (1988,
xiii)—deflates the grandiosity of tower-builders while still acknowledging the
beauty of their striving, a beauty that is not exceptional but continuous with
other life on earth even as it takes its own peculiar, unique and sometimes
“wicked” forms. Despite their differences, by presenting fictional scenarios
that figuratively refract aspects of the present rather than an extrapolation of
the present that could be interpreted as a future to strive toward, Brin and
Sterling both depart from the hieroglyph theory of incantation.
Whereas “Tall Tower” operates in a dream-time outside history in order to
play with the mythical, quasi-religious underpinnings of the hard SF tradition,
Vandana Singh’s contribution takes up the challenge of writing optimistic
fiction that directly addresses climate change. While hewing more closely to
the parameters set out by Project Hieroglyph, Singh’s “Entanglement” offers
234 R. WILBANKS
a different model of incantation than Stephenson. Rejecting the moonshot

mentality, her story does not (or does not only) offer a technological blue-
print, suggesting instead that the problem of climate change requires a way of
thinking about human relations to each other and to the environment that is
better suited to the complexities of interconnected social and ecological sys-
tems. The story models the attempt to grapple with this “entanglement” at
a formal level by presenting five vignettes, each one connected to another at
a single moment in time. The first four vignettes follow people in different
parts of the globe who are dealing with the effects of climate change. The
final vignette reveals the novum that underlies the connections between each
of the others, describing the invention of a new social network that connects
people to strangers around the globe when they are particularly in need of
support.
“Entanglement” operates in a realist mode, heeding Hieroglyph’s call for
plausible, near-future scenarios. (That is, while one could “play the game”
of hard SF by quibbling about how realistic her imagined technologies are,
the story clearly differs from the texts by Sterling and Brin by anchoring its
fictional technologies to contemporary science and technology and providing
explanations for them.) The vignettes present various imagined interventions
that could help fight climate change. For example, “brollies” are autonomous
vehicles supported by artificial intelligence that monitor biogeochemical con-
ditions in the Arctic and sometimes intervene to nudge them in ways that
slow warming processes. The brollies monitor and feed methanotroph bac-
teria in the ocean, on the theory that supporting the methanotroph colonies
could reduce the amount of methane released into the atmosphere. However,
none of these imaginary applications are presented as a silver bullet. Instead,
the orange bracelets worn by each character, providing the hardware for the
social network that connects them to each other, model a different way of
thinking about the future, one that attempts to bring into consciousness the
way in which each person’s actions ramify globally.
“Entanglement” is based on the theory of complex systems, in which a
system’s behavior is understood as the summation of many emergent parts
interacting locally without central control. As Singh develops it, this way of
thinking suggests both despair and hope. One character, an ecologist working
to restore the Amazon rainforest, thinks:
The trouble with repairing the forest was that it would never be enough, with-
out a million other things happening too, like the work at the polar icecaps, and
social movements, ordinary people pledging to make lifestyle changes, and gov-
ernments passing laws so that children and grandchildren could have a future.
(2014, 369)
The theory can lend itself to despair, because one individual’s actions can
never have enough impact to make a difference by themselves. However, it
also offers hope, because many small actions together are the only thing that
can create significant change. Moreover, through the well-known trope of the
“butterfly effect,” a small action can, given the right conditions, tip a system
into a different behavioral pattern.
Elsewhere, Singh has made explicit the connections among complex sys-
tems theory, climate change, and narrative form. She suggests that part of
the inability to adequately confront climate change—including authors’ ten-
dency to lapse into apocalyptic scenarios that fantasize about wiping the slate
of civilization clean and starting over—stems from a difficulty in dealing with
complex systems. Singh connects the trope of the lone hero to reductionist
thinking, writing: “Imagine the impossibility of such a hero solving a problem
like global warming” (Singh 2008). The character of Dorothy Cartwright,
the subject of “Entanglement’s” fourth vignette, serves as a kind of anti-
hero who models the role of “ordinary people” in addressing climate change.
Dorothy is a widow in an assisted living facility in Texas who finds herself
drawn into a small group of “aging hippies” engaged in environmental activ-
ism. Despite her dead husband’s negative voice in her head and feelings of
worthlessness, she takes one small step, and then another, into the world of
political action—haltingly but with increasing conviction—upon prompting
from her peers. In a farcical turn of events, she is struck by a bulldozer while
holding a tray of cupcakes at a protest against a new oil pipeline and ends
up on TV, to the astonishment and delight of her grandchildren. Unwitting
practitioner of civil disobedience, she finds her voice and helps to inspire a
movement of retirees that the media dubs the “Suspender Revolution”
(2014, 387).
Singh’s use of farce celebrates the small actions of ordinary people in
opposition to heroic moonshots, a “technology of foolishness” (Singh 2008)
in which one acts out of love without knowing exactly where one will end
up or what difference one’s action will make. While the narrative structure
argues against looking to technological solutions to serve as the “One True
Hero” in the climate crisis, Singh does not reject technological approaches.
Nor does she take a stance in the debate over whether SF should be “more
cheerful and less gloomy…reflecting reality or making change.” Instead, she
writes, we need every tool in the toolkit to mobilize both the “technological”
and the “sociological imagination” (2008). Her writing suggests a different
and fuller kind of realism than the realism of technical plausibility promoted
by Stephenson and futurists such as Johnson because, without breaking
from the conventions of hard SF, it also strives for environmental and social
realism. As Kim Stanley Robinson argues in the introduction to Everything
Change (an anthology produced by ASU that followed Project Hieroglyph),
near-future SF must grapple with the effects of climate change as part of its
“fidelity to the real” because “climate change is already happening, and has
become an unavoidable dominating element in the coming century” (x).
In an effort to piece together how social, environmental, and technological
change are interlinked, Singh consulted with engineers, anthropologists, geo-
chemists, and geographers during the writing of “Entanglement” (396–397).
236 R. WILBANKS
Singh’s call for a change in literary form inspired by theories of complex

systems and collective action mirrors the “emergent strategy” embedded in
the production of the Octavia’s Brood anthology (brown 2015, 280–281).
adrienne maree brown writes, “One of the ways we perpetuate individualism
is by ideating alone, literally coming up with ideas in solitude and then com-
peting to bring them to life” (281). In contrast, brown’s workshops promote
collective world-building. In the process, within the fictional text, the lone
protagonist is often replaced by “pairs or groups of lead characters to dis-
rupt the solitary hero narrative” (281). Compared to other recent incanta-
tory fictions, Octavia’s Brood is something of an outlier as it does not display
the same preoccupation with scientific realism as many other recent projects,
drawing instead on a tradition of feminist “fabulation” (Barr 2005) and Black
activism. This tradition suggests an alternate understanding of literature’s
incantatory power, one in which affect plays an acknowledged role: The vol-
ume’s forward quotes Toni Cade Bambara’s statement that the role of art is
to “make the revolution irresistible” (Thomas 2015, 2).
By claiming the name of SF, Octavia’s Brood chooses to continue the
genre’s diversification and expansion rather than reject a tradition that in its
mainstream forms “often reinforces dominant narratives of power” (Imarisha
2015, 4). Imarisha writes, “All organizing is SF” (3), echoing remarks by
Cory Doctorow in SF Prototyping in which he states, “every activist has to
be a bit of a SF writer, and most SF ends up being pretty activist” (Johnson
2011, 45). By drawing on the expertise of activists rather than scientists and
engineers, Octavia’s Brood annexes SF’s heritage as the literature of change
to an intensive exploration of the dynamics of social movements, declining
to see that change as technologically determined. Like “Entanglement,” it
challenges Project Hieroglyph’s underlying assumption that creating a bet-
ter future requires a technological “moonshot” originating in the mind of a
brilliant and visionary individual. Yet read alongside Project Hieroglyph and
similar initiatives in Silicon Valley and beyond, Octavia’s Brood demonstrates
that worries about the prevalence of apocalyptic narratives and calls to revital-
ize the SF imagination in order to change the future can be found across the
political spectrum.
Conclusion
The recent wave of incantatory fictions suggests a new model of patronage
supporting SF production that may shape the genre according to the evolving
practices and methods of futurology. Because many incantatory projects tend
to value scientific plausibility—particularly when they are produced by sci-
entific institutions—they provide a countervailing tendency against the blur-
ring of boundaries between SF and other genres such as fantasy, horror, and
the thriller: What Gary Wolfe calls the “evaporation” of genre (Wolfe 2011). In
addition, the tradition of scenario studies that helps inspire these projects lends
itself to short explorations of a single idea. The brevity of these works and their
mandate, in many cases, to foreground contemporary developments in science

and technology may encourage pieces that edge into design fiction. Design fic-
tion can serve as a way to imagine alternate pathways for material culture, fore-
grounding values other than usefulness (Bleecker 2009). At the same time, its
focus on prototypes may in some cases implicitly support an ideology of tech-
nological determinism. As I have argued, hieroglyph theory as articulated by
Stephenson collapses the future onto the technological object as the key locus
of change. By promoting realism as the best way for SF writers to create change,
hieroglyph theory suggests a fairly literal method of inspiration, in which the
plausible, near-future blueprints of SF serve to direct and orient those who will
make the future (implied to be members of the tech community, particularly
those who have the resources to initiate “moonshot” projects) toward a com-
mon goal. In fact, there are many examples of SF-tech industry symbiosis that
support the idea that SF can be inspirational in this way (Bassett et al. 2013). In
my own research on synthetic biology, I found that those involved with the field
often looked to SF as a guide to the future, and sometimes borrowed and built
directly on a work’s imagined inventions (Wilbanks 2017).
As my analysis of “Atmosphaera Incognita” demonstrates, these more lit-
eral models of incantation tend to assume a shared background of values.
Project Hieroglyph and other incantatory projects can be seen as arising
out of a community of practice that includes a subset of SF authors—many
of whom, like Stephenson, work or consult in the tech industry—together
with futurists and members of the tech community. For example, Google’s
resources and ideas about moonshots played a role in the origins of the pro-
ject, and Google constitutes an audience for Project Hieroglyph’s reception.
Yet as other stories in Project Hieroglyph remind us, it is crucial to keep in
mind SF’s analogical as well as extrapolative capacities: its ability to ask the
“why” questions, nourish the “sociological imagination,” and offer alternate
ways of looking at the world. Often, SF authors jettison the reality effect to
explore these questions, as, for example, Sterling does in his tale of equine
ascension. SF scholars and feminist SF authors have long pointed out that the
constraints of plausibility can foreclose social possibilities. Luckily, scenarios
are meant to be read in the plural, and incantatory projects use a range of
different literary techniques to present a dazzling variety of alternate futures.
Contributions such as Singh’s “Entanglement” and other projects such as
Octavia’s Brood suggest that incantatory fictions need not offer a blueprint
for the future, but can instead model alternate ways of thinking, feeling, and
imagining.
Incantatory fictions can be understood in the context of broader devel-
opments in the relationship among science, technology, and society. Even as
the increasing orientation of scientific research toward the market since the
1980s exposes it to capture by elite interests, sociologists of science describe
a “countervailing” process of “epistemic modernization” in which scientific
research agendas, methods, and concepts are increasingly subject to influence
by social movements and opened up to input and critique from groups with
238 R. WILBANKS
diverse social standpoints (Moore et al. 2011, 520–521). As public engage-

ment becomes a “key, legitimating idiom of institutions across the spectrum
of society” (Kelty and Panofsky 2), organizations from NASA to Intel see SF
as a tool to engage the public and promote social buy-in of their imagined
futures. Yet SF has undergone its own epistemic modernization since the
1960s, such that the Golden Age tradition that once made up the entirety
of the SF subculture now stands as one community of practice among many
(Rieder 2017, 161–170). By engaging the full spectrum of contemporary SF
rather than narrowing the scope to a nostalgic retro-futurism, incantatory fic-
tions have the potential to enrich both the SF genre and real-world practices
at which they are directed.
Acknowledgement My thanks to Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich for helpful feedback on
a draft of this chapter.
Notes
1. It was also riven by division between approaches inherited by American military
researchers and by Europeans who initiated “future studies” as an inheritor of
the Blochian tradition of critical utopianism (Andersson 2012, 1425), in some
ways mirroring the division within SF between extrapolative and analogical
approaches.
2. This perspective bears resemblance to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s more recent
argument that SF cultivates particular “habits of mind” (2008, 2).
3. See Gannon (2005) on SF authors’ contribution to defense policies in the Reagan
administration (197–198). The Highlands Forum, a think tank created in 1995
by senior military officials, is another venue for exchange, soliciting participation
from authors including Bruce Sterling and David Brin (O’Neill 2001, 6, 15).
4. This distinction does not hold up over the course of his discussion. For exam-
ple, he describes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as “more metaphysical than sci-
entific” because it does not describe the “nuts and bolts” of the creature’s
fabrication (35). However, the discussion with Cory Doctorow makes clear that
Isaac Asimov’s robot stories, which Johnson describes as “some of the first SF
prototypes” (36), are driven by metaphysical questions such as “what it means
to be human and what rules should govern us” (39), and do not make any
attempt to describe the construction or function of the robots’ “positronic”
brains.
5. SF has also been used in a number of venues where the focus is more on the
process than the product, e.g., convening focus groups in which members of the
public develop stories about nanotechnology. There are also design fiction firms
and consulting groups, including Sci-Futures and the Sigma Group, connecting
SF authors to business, NGO, and public sector clients (including NATO); the
fiction produced for these purposes is often kept internal (Romeo 2017).
6. Brad Torgersen, one of the campaign’s organizers, writes, “The book has a space-
ship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and
pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploita-
tion, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?” (https://bradrtorgersen.word-
press.com/2015/02/04/sad-puppies-3-the-unraveling-of-an-unreliable-field/).
Works Cited
Andersson, Jenny. 2012. The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World.
The American Historical Review 117 (5): 1411–1430.
Barr, Marleen S. 2005. Feminist Fabulation. In A Companion to SF, 142–55. Wiley.
https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997055.ch10.
Bassett, Caroline, Ed Steinmueller, and George Voss. 2013. Better Made Up: The
Mutual Influence of SF and Innovation. Nesta Working Paper 7. http://www.aca-
demia.edu/download/31044405/bettermadeup.pdf.
Bleecker, Julian. 2009. Design Fiction. Near Future Laboratory.
brown, adrienne maree. 2015. Outro. In Octavia’s Brood: SF Stories from Social Justice
Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Cramer, Kathryn. 2014. Kathryn Cramer at Google: Why Hieroglyph Is a
Verb. Hieroglyph, September 11. https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/09/
kathryn-cramer-at-google-why-hieroglyph-is-a-verb/.
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, Jr. 2008. The Seven Beauties of SF, Kindle ed. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Elkins, Charles. 1979. SF Versus Futurology: Dramatic Versus Rational Models
(Science-Fiction/Futurologie: Modèles de Théâtralisation et de Rationalisation).
Science Fiction Studies 6 (1): 20–31.
Finn, Ed, and Kathryn Cramer. 2014. Introduction: A Blueprint for Better Dreams. In
Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer,
489–515. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.
Forman, Paul. 2007. The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in
Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology. History and
Technology 23 (1–2): 1–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/07341510601092191.
Gannon, Charles E. 2005. Rumors of War and Infernal Machines: Technomilitary
Agenda-Setting in American and British Speculative Fiction. Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Gernsback, Hugo. 1916. Imagination Versus Facts. In The Perversity of Things: Hugo
Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction, ed. Grant Whythoff, vol. 3.
———. 1926. Imagination and Reality. Amazing Stories 1 (7): 579.
Ghamari-Tabrizi, Sharon. 2005. The Worlds of Herman Kahn: The Intuitive Science of
Thermonuclear War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gibson, William. 1987. The Gernsback Continuum. In Burning Chrome, 23–35. New
York: Ace Books.
Hartwell, David G. 1997. The SF Century. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.
Hartwell, David G., and Kathryn Cramer. 2002. The Hard SF Renaissance. New York:
Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
Hjelmstad, Keith. 2014. Structural Design of the Tall Tower. Hieroglyph, August 22.
https://hieroglyph.asu.edu/2014/08/structural-design-of-the-tall-tower/.
Imarisha, Walidah. 2015. Introduction. In Octavia’s Brood: SF Stories from Social Justice
Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Johnson, Brian David. 2011. SF Prototyping: Designing the Future with Science Fiction.
Synthesis Lectures on Computer Science 3. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.
Kelty, Christopher, and Aaron Panofsky. 2014. Disentangling Public Participation
in Science and Biomedicine. Genome Medicine 6 (8). https://genomemedicine.
biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/gm525.
240 R. WILBANKS
Kreiss, Daniel. 2017. Appropriating the Master’s Tools: Sun Ra, the Black Panthers,
and Black Consciousness, 1952–1973. In Music and Ideology, 1st ed., ed. Mark
Carroll, 405–29. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315090979-17.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 2016. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, NY: Penguin.
Livingston, Dennis. 1971. Science Fiction Models of Future World Order Systems.
International Organization 25 (2): 254–270.
Marx, Leo. 2010. Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept. Technology
and Culture 51 (3): 561–77. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2010.0009.
Miller, Clark A., and Ira Bennett. 2008. Thinking Longer Term About Technology:
Is There Value in SF-Inspired Approaches to Constructing Futures? Science and
Public Policy 35 (8): 597–606. https://doi.org/10.3152/030234208X370666.
Moore, Kelly, Daniel Lee Kleinman, David Hess, and Scott Frickel. 2011. Science and
Neoliberal Globalization: A Political Sociological Approach. Theory and Society 40
(5): 505–32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-011-9147-3.
O’Neill, Richard P. 2001. The Highlands Forum Process. Harvard University Center
for Information Policy Research, April 5. http://www.pirp.harvard.edu/pubs_
pdf/o’neill/o’neill-i01-3.pdf.
Patterson, William H. 2014. Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century: Volume
2, 1948–1988 The Man Who Learned Better. New York, NY: A Tom Doherty
Associates Book.
Pohl, Frederik. 1996. Thinking About the Future. In Futurevision: Ideas, Insights, and
Strategies, ed. Howard F. Didsbury. Bethesda, MD: World Futures Society.
Rieder, John. 2017. SF and the Mass Cultural Genre System. Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
Romeo, Nick. 2017. Better Business Through Sci-Fi. New Yorker, July 30. https://
www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/better-business-through-sci-fi.
Russ, Joanna. 1975. Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 2
(2): 112–119.
Ryman, Geoff. 2013. The Mundane Manifesto. SFGenics: Notes on Science, Fiction,
and SF (blog), July 4, 2013. https://sfgenics.wordpress.com/2013/07/04/
geoff-ryman-et-al-the-mundane-manifesto/.
Samuelson, David N. 2009. HARD SF. The Routledge Companion to SF, March 30,
2009. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203871317-63.
Singh, Vandana. 2008. SF and the End of the World. Borne Central
(blog), October 12. http://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/10/11/
science-fiction-and-the-end-of-the-world/.
———. 2014. Entanglement. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed.
Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 352–98. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers.
Snyder, Matthew. 2014. Saving Spaceship Earth. Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014 .
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/saving-spaceship-earth/.
Stephenson, Neal. 2011. Innovation Starvation. Wired.com, October 27.
______. 2012. Neal Stephenson on Getting Big Stuff Done. Presented at the
We Solve for X, X, the Moonshot Factory. https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM.
———. 2014a. Atmosphaera Incognita. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better
Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 1–37. New York: William Morrow, an
Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
———. 2014b. Preface: Innovation Starvation. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for
a Better Future, ed. Ed Finn and Kathryn Cramer. New York: William Morrow, an
Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers.
Sterling, Bruce. 1988. Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. New York: Ace Books.
———. 2014. Tall Tower. In Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, ed. Ed
Finn and Kathryn Cramer, 489–515. New York: William Morrow, an Imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers.
Suvin, Darko. 1972. On the Poetics of the SF Genre. College English 34 (3): 372.
https://doi.org/10.2307/375141.
Thomas, Sheree Renée. 2015. Foreward: Birth of a Revolution. In Octavia’s Brood:
Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, ed. Walidah Imarisha and
Adrienne Maree Brown. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Toffler, Alvin. 1984. Future Shock. New York: Bantam Books.
Westfahl, Gary. 2005. Hard SF. In A Companion to SF, ed. David Seed, 185–201.
Oxford, UK: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470997055.ch13.
Williams, John R. 2016. World Futures. Critical Inquiry 42 (3): 473–546.
Wilbanks, Rebecca. 2017. Synthetic Biology and Life’s Imagined Futures. PhD diss.,
Stanford University.
Wolfe, G. K. 2011. Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature. Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press.
CHAPTER 14
Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature
Amy C. Chambers and Lisa Garforth
Introduction
One of the most interesting places where literature and science meet is
science fiction (SF), a popular genre with a rich history, a diverse archive of
texts, a powerful and distinctive tradition of literary-critical and cultural analy-
sis, and a very large and active audience. In this chapter, we suggest that SF as
a genre is particularly important to exploring contemporary popular engage-
ments with science and the probable and possible futures it generates. We also
argue that to understand how SF works as a meeting point for science and lit-
erature, critics and analysts need to understand more than just texts. We need
to get to grips with the act of reading SF and the responses and situations
of SF readers. We use this chapter, then, to pull together some theoretical,
epistemological, and methodological resources for thinking about fiction and
technoscience that are not just about textual exegesis or the interpretations
of the critic or the ideal or “implied reader” (Iser 1978). We explore how we
might put SF readers, their agency, biographies, and practices firmly at the
center of contemporary studies of science and literature.
SF has been called “the literature of technoscientific societies” and is rou-
tinely credited with a distinctive capacity to speculate about human and more
than human futures in rapidly changing worlds (Csicsery-Ronay 2008, 1).1 For
over one hundred years SF has been engaging creatively with scientific ideas
and technological change. SF has imagined worlds fundamentally transformed
A. C. Chambers 
Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK
L. Garforth (*) 
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

244 A. C. CHAMBERS AND L. GARFORTH
by technoscientific developments. It has responded to the hopes and fears for

the future opened up by modernity’s incessant change, and it has articulated
and explored the human and social consequences of scientific developments.
SF, then, is a product of the expansive and intensive presence of scientific
rationalities and technological networks and objects in the structures and
everyday life of modernity (Luckhurst 2005, 1, 3). But SF has never been a
mere reflection or celebration of scientific cultures. SF acts with and acts back
on science, critically responding to its confident pronouncements, elaborating
and complicating its narratives. SF can thus be read as a method for histori-
cally tracing and locating popular constructions of science’s stories about our
collective futures. It can help us to explore how readerly pleasures and social
practices inform interpretations of and expectations of futures and future tech-
nologies. And it can function as a way of understanding how publics critically
engage with scientific ideas through narrative.
In the first half of this chapter, we unpack some key aspects of SF’s techno-
futurism, focusing on literature and examining the powerful role that is often
claimed for the technological imaginary in SF critical scholarship. We begin
by looking at arguments suggesting that SF, more than any other genre,
has generated distinctive symbolic resources and critical epistemologies for
reflecting on and navigating modern and postmodern life. For many critics,
there is something about the cultural history or the formal features of genre
SF that offers its readers a particularly powerful way of intervening in the
co-production of science and the social (Jasanoff 2004). SF literary criticism
has focused on what is unique about the SF narrative and the act or experi-
ence of reading it, drawing on and echoing arguments from broader literary
accounts of the phenomenology of reading and reader-response theory. As
in these approaches, however, arguments about the distinctive effects of SF
texts have too often relied on abstracted accounts of the reading act. Without
explicit attention to the experiences and sense-making practices of embodied,
empirical readers, their contextual uses of literature, and their diverse engage-
ments with texts and ideas, these approaches tend to reproduce an “ideal
reader” or universalize the critic’s reading (Felski 2008; Long 2003).
What is at stake here, then, is a nuanced and socially situated sense of what
multiple SF readers do with science and its futures through critical, creative
reading—both in their individual interpretations and through the collective
practices of sense-making that are increasingly enabled by the proliferation of
online and face-to-face fan communities and spaces. In relation to SF in par-
ticular, this means thinking about the specific ways in which people are intro-
duced to genre fiction, often by parental or other mentor figures, and how
this shapes and guides their reading choices and fictional pleasures. It means
thinking in creative ways about what it means to empathize and identify with
fictional characters in social and technological worlds that do not, have never,
and probably will not ever exist. It means exploring how these relations of
identity and difference open up spaces for readers to engage evaluatively and
14 READING SCIENCE: SF AND THE USES OF LITERATURE 245
ethically with alien social structures, future technological affordances and sci-
entific challenges. It means understanding how readers use texts for pleasur-
able affects—wonder, fear, creepiness, hope—and for resonances with their
own lives while at the same time speculating about how they might survive in
technologically transformed futures.
In the second half of the chapter we explore arguments and approaches
that can help us to think sociologically about how readers (plural and particu-
lar), rather than “the reader” (singular and abstract), engage with the science
in SF. We aim to both supplement and challenge the tendency of studies of
science and literature to focus on the science in literature by considering ways
of understanding how readers navigate narrative and science together through
the socially shaped and situated act of reading. We focus on studies that
start with readers rather than texts, and which understand reading as a social
practice rather than a purely cognitive or critical act. We take our cues from
empirical studies of readers and reading in sociology and cultural studies, and
from media studies explorations of audiences, reception, and reader-response
that offer new ways of understanding readers as active and creative. As we
show, these approaches can help us to understand science/fiction in terms
of active readers who bring texts to life in relation to their experiences, their
biographies and their socially situated ways of knowing.
Science and Science Fiction: Literature, Modernity

and Technoscientific Imaginaries
Amanda Rees and Iwan Rhys Morus note that science studies has recently
become interested in “the intellectual significance of fiction, literature and the
imaginary” (2019, 1). But until this recent turn, historians and sociologists of
science have “largely ignored” both science fiction and the well-established field
of science fiction studies (Rees and Morus 2019, 9). This oversight means that
scholars have failed to notice how SF might be understood as “a form of STS
[science and technology studies] in action,” one that predates science studies in
exploring equivalences between human and nonhuman actors and imagining
radically hybrid, fragmented and temporally complex forms of agency, and one
that has “been far more effective in engaging the public imagination than has
the history of science” (Rees and Morus 2019, 14).2
A significant element of STS’ recent interest in SF has come via Sheila
Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim’s influential call to examine the “sociotechni-
cal imaginaries” that contextualize and inflect scientific cultures, research
programs and national funding agendas (Jasanoff, “Future Imperfect” 2015,
1). Sociotechnical imaginaries are visions of progress characteristic of moder-
nity which circulate in the wider (national) culture and which carry (usually
implicit) ideas and ideals about collective futures and the common good.
Science fiction, Jasanoff suggests, is an important “repository” of the soci-
otechnical imaginary, offering visions that “integrate futures of growing
knowledge and technological mastery with normative assessments of what

such futures could and should mean” (Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented
Worlds” 2015, 338). Stories allow us not only to map different futures but to
enter politically into the very emergence of the future; through narrative we
can change the story (Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented Worlds” 2015, 338).
SF is a particularly important space for working out and interrogating the dif-
ferent values and desires associated with different future possibilities. Jasanoff
and Kim mention some well-known examples of SF texts to exemplify their
case. Beyond this, however, they have little to say about the genre of SF: its
history, its formal and aesthetic qualities, its textual functions, its reading
protocols and pleasures.
To understand why SF should have a privileged place in understand-
ing Jasanoff and Kim’s “dreamscapes of modernity” (and postmodernity),
we need to turn to SF literary criticism. SF scholars emphasize that it was
the first and most important literary genre to “devote its imagination to the
future and to the ceaseless revolutions of knowledge and desire that attend
the application of scientific and technical knowledge to social life” (Csicsery-
Ronay 2008, 1). SF literature is a product of technoscientific modernity;
the “literature of technologically saturated societies” (Luckhurst 2005, 1).
Its emergence depends on the embedding of scientific epistemologies across
social institutions; the visible impact of technologies on everyday life, espe-
cially work; the extension of both reading and scientific literacy in the late
nineteenth century; and the emergence of new forms of popular literature
and modes of cultural and technological reproduction and circulation, par-
ticularly mass-market magazines (Luckhurst 2005, 1; Vint 2014, 17–18).
From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) to Jules Verne’s Journey to the
Center of the Earth (1864) and H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898), SF
emerged as a literary genre in the nineteenth century as scientists and science
fiction writers “exchanged ideas” and “established knowledge and specula-
tion” over new technologies and possible science futures (Fayter 1997, 257).
SF is defined by Darko Suvin in terms of its “interest in strange newness”
that creatively extrapolates “the variable and future bearing elements” of con-
temporary science and technologies that are shaped by “human curiosity,
fear, and hope” (Suvin 1972, 373, 375, 381). Suvin sought to present the SF
genre as a literary form worthy of critical and serious debate rather than one
that might be understood as fantasy or fairytale—Suvin considered the turn
away from science to space opera (adventure stories that happen to be set in
space, e.g., Star Wars) in the 1970s as “creative suicide” as it veered away
from the genre’s potential for serious critical engagement with science and
society (Suvin 1972, 375). As self-styled High Culture in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries turned away from technology or “Mechanism”
to focus on the transcendent and civilized sphere of art and human experi-
ence, SF avidly got to work on the possibilities and threats of an ascendant
science and technology (Luckhurst 2005, 3). As Sherryl Vint notes, the genre
distinguished itself formally by rejecting the conventions of realist fiction and
“[the] novel of bourgeois interiority” (Vint 2014, 22). It devised instead new
narrative modes for exploring material worlds and social patterns, systems and
dynamics; for articulating perspectives beyond the human; and for narrating
stories with spectacularly extended or compressed timescales (Vint 2014, 1).
But if SF literature ever was simply a product or epiphenomenon of tech-
nological modernity, it seems that it has now decisively escaped the bounds of
the book or popular magazine to work more actively and more ubiquitously
in contemporary cultures. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, for example, insists that to
understand SF now we need to look beyond texts and even genre to a cultur-
ally widespread quality of “science fictionality.” In part, the idea of science fic-
tionality speaks to the ways in which SF now furnishes contemporary culture
and media with a distinctive “thesaurus” of images, symbols, and narratives, a
stock of tropes for making sense of technological change and the future: the
time traveler, the generation spaceship, the alien invasion, the singularity, and
the cyborg (2008, 3). Broderick has similarly suggested that over the years SF
has accumulated into a “mutually imbricated megatext,” a densely intertex-
tual and always-evolving assemblage of images, codes, grammars, stories, and
protocols for making narrative sense of the new (Broderick 1995, 59). For
Csicsery-Ronay, SF has given us more than a body of texts and an accompa-
nying megatext. It has injected into modern cultures a “mood or attitude,”
“a kind of awareness” that is alert to the strange, to the other, to shifts in the
fabric of reality (2008, 2, 3). Science fictionality here is a mode of perception
that holds open to question new technological things and scientific ideas. For
Csicsery-Ronay, then, one does not have to be a fan or a close and critical
reader of literary science fiction to access the science-fictional imaginary. It
is always-already part of our cultural equipment and sensibility; SF simply is
how modern subjects make sense of a society.
As the “myth form” of an industrial and increasingly post-industrial and
globalized age, SF has often been celebratory, voicing awe and wonder in the
face of technological possibilities (Broderick 1995, 8). It has sought to inter-
pellate its readers as narrow scientific positivists or pragmatic and instrumental
engineers of the future. But SF has also been the critical, doubting shadow of
this techno-optimism. It has allowed readers insights into the will to power
of modern science and textual spaces to explore its destructive capacities.
Luckhurst characterizes SF’s generic attitude toward science and technology,
then, as something like ambivalence, a working through of complex disrup-
tive ideas and material objects, a creative embrace, and a critical examination
(2005, 5, emphasis in original). For Csicsery-Ronay, science fiction opens up
a “hesitation” around technoscientific novelties, creating a space for r eflection
on emergent scientific and technological developments, both in terms of
their plausible development and in terms of their ethical, social, and political
consequences (2008, 3).
In much SF criticism, as we show below, that hesitation is framed as either
an individual cognitive response or a broader cultural space for dealing with
the onrush of scientific and technological change. But SF has proliferated
and fragmented since its supposed Golden Age and the dominance of white
male technofuturists (Vint 2014, 66–67). We have seen the emergence of
the so-called New Wave in the mid-1960s and the development of “soft”
or social science fiction through the 1970s and 1980s (Vint 2014, 75–76;
Nicholls 2011). There has been a blurring or even “evaporation” of science
fiction into a wider hybridization of speculative genres in recent years (Wolfe
2010). There has also been multiplying diversity and contestation in the gen-
re’s writers, perspectives, and concerns, as well as in scholarship and fandom.
We have seen the rise to prominence of feminist voices (Vint 2014, 113–
121). There have been struggles for prestige and awards between socially
conservative advocates of hard SF and social justice advocates (Oleszczuk
2017). And there is increasing openness in the genre to post-colonial cri-
tique, indigeneities and queer expression and representation. The genre is
now characterized by both formal and social difference, both aesthetic and
identity politics, in ways that have created not just a single space but multiple
overlapping spaces for the social critique of science and technology.
Never prediction or prophecy, SF calls up altered worlds and futures as
creative spaces of exploration, speculation, and negotiation about and with
science. This iterative “scatter” of “possible futures or alternative lifeworlds”
functions, as Vint notes, as a constant provocation to reflect on technological
change in relation to human action and social structure as they are and as
they might be (Broderick 1995, 54; Vint 2014, 22–23). SF’s futures have a
strangely paradoxical relation to history and temporality. In one sense, as we
have seen, SF is an unusually historically specific fictional form. It is intimately
linked to the structures and lived realities of late modern, technoscientific
societies. SF belongs to worlds in states of constant, heterogeneous, plu-
ral and intense transformations linked to new knowledges, and it articulates
both recurring cultural or epistemological crises and the everyday experience
of mundane technological change; as Damien Broderick writes, “our social
being is founded in rapid, virtually uncontrollable cognitive change, princi-
pally driven by science and technology” and provoking “a unique epistemic
crisis,” or, as Roger Luckhurst puts it, “in the messy, experiential world…
ambivalence towards technologies is often the presiding spirit of engage-
ment” (Broderick 1995, xi; Luckhurst 2005, 5). It is also a kind of historical
fiction. As the SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson argues, any SF novel “will
be placed in a future of ours, and you can run a track from this moment to
that moment”—even if SF “is always portraying histories that we can never
know” (Heise and Robinson 2016, 24–25). At the same time, SF is, as Vivian
Sobchack has observed, peculiarly “unfixed in its dependence on actual time
and/or place” for sense-making—unlike other genres, which are linked, how-
ever playfully, to a particular (albeit often imagined) historical period (the
Western, the gangster film) (1987, 66). Formal criticism of SF has focused
extensively on why this quality of SF texts matters and what it tells us about
the reading practices and protocols of the genre. It is to these arguments that
we now turn.
Fiction and Science Fiction: Reading,

Poetics, and Protocols
Cultural historians insist that SF as a genre, megatext, or sensibility has
escaped texts to become part of everyone’s cultural equipment for making
sense of technoscientific societies. A different strand of SF analysis has focused
more closely on specific texts and their capacities to enact socio-political cri-
tique. A formal and Marxist approach to SF, starting with the work of Darko
Suvin and continuing through the influential theories of Fredric Jameson
(1982 inter alia), Tom Moylan (1986), Carl Freedman (2000) and others,
sees it as the literature of cognitive estrangement and explores its particular
powers to distance us from dominant social and political arrangements. Here,
SF is a fiction of critique with a distinctive capacity to penetrate the ideolog-
ical surfaces of capitalist technomodernity and make a transformative inter-
vention in the consciousness of its readers. SF has less to do with representing
alternative futures than it does with changing how we see our present. For
Suvin, the SF novel draws readers into a text that works to estrange or alienate
us from our everyday reality and to apprehend how our social worlds might
be otherwise (1972). Jameson relatedly insists that SF is not really about the
future. Rather, through repeated attempts to imagine difference it repeat-
edly shows us the power of ideological closure to truly conceive of something
other than what we have: specifically, (post) modern capitalism (1982).3
In this reading, SF puts the science in literature in order to work through
forms of critique and political intervention that are both necessary in and dis-
tinctive to technoscientific societies. For Suvin, the definitive feature of SF is
the text’s introduction of a “novum,” a wholly new “cognitive” thing (tech-
nological object or scientific idea) with the capacity to transform the lived-in
world (1979, 63). In the SF novel, the novum functions formally to disrupt
the text and the reading experience. The novum forces language to articulate
the new. Words and sentence structures are stretched and challenged as they
wrap themselves around the novel thing. The reader works to make sense of
a world in which, to borrow well-known examples of first sentences from SF
literature:
It was a bright day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (George
Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four)
They set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his phero-
mones and the color of his hair. (William Gibson, Count Zero)
I slipped into my first metamorphosis so quietly that no one noticed. (Octavia

Butler, Imago)
An intense engagement with textual otherness provokes the reader to recog-

nize that the conventional ways in which representation and social order are
made to make sense are contingent and subject to change. When we read SF,
we learn to become estranged from our taken-for-granted world and to read
everyday experience from a critical distance. For Suvin, alienation is SF litera-
ture’s distinctive “poetics”: its formal appeal and aesthetic effect (1972, 374–
375). SF here is more than a generic mode for reflecting on the relationship
between technoscience and society. It is a privileged form of textual critique
that can generate new critical and political awareness.
These approaches to SF focus on text and semiotics as much as content
and genre. They also suggest the critical (as in necessary, as in deconstructive,
analytical, curious) function of reading SF. They help us approach the genre
less in terms of its representation of technoscience, and more in terms of its
capacity to engage us to think it in new ways. SF criticism has had much to
say about how the genre produces creative readers who learn, navigate, and
deploy what the SF author and critic Samuel R. Delany calls its “protocols.”
These protocols, for Delany, are located in the “interpretive space” around a
text and include “specific conventions, unique focuses, areas of interest and
excellent…particular ways of making sense out of language” (Delany 1980,
188; Gunn 2006, 142). All genres have reading protocols. But they are per-
haps particularly important in SF because of the referential unfixedness that
Sobchack notes. The speculative character of SF, its ontological challenge,
generates textual surfaces that “seem bizarrely under-determined,” replete
with neologisms and rhetorical strangeness (Broderick 1995, 63). SF writing,
as Delany puts it, is worldbuilding, line by line (1980, 178). The words do
not invite the reader to recognize a pre-existing reality, but rather to partic-
ipate in the making of a new or altered one as they go along—and, as James
Gunn notes, to actually anticipate and enjoy this mode of active and creative
reading.
In these approaches, the full richness of the SF’s text’s “semiotic density”
is only available to “native speakers”—trained readers who have apprenticed
themselves in the genre (Broderick 1995, 63). SF’s megatext or intertextual
qualities are particularly important—but so are skilled and active SF readers.
Being able to make sense of SF depends on first learning its protocols from
reading SF novels and then applying them to new texts in an iterative process.
SF is a difficult literature that demands real intensity of care and engagement
from its readers (Gunn 2006, 141–148). But it also offers intense pleasures—
active, co-constructive, knowledgeable, critical. Analyses of the poetics and
protocols of SF then remind us that a narrow focus on SF texts and content
misses some of the most important work that genre literature does on and
with science and futures. This strand of literary criticism asks us to attend to
the capacity of long-form narrative fiction to mobilize critical orientations
toward existing social forms, and the skilled practices of readers who work
cognitively, intellectually, and affectively with science and its futures. In this
sense, we might see creative and active SF readers as partners in the genre’s
work of envisioning and exploring social scientific alternatives.
These formalist approaches to SF can certainly be challenged as “pre-

scriptive and judgemental,” as Roger Luckhurst has argued (2005, 7). They
tend to focus on and reproduce a small canon of politically and aesthetically
approved texts (Luckhurst 2005, 7). Only disruptive, challenging, estranging
texts are valued, and a respectable literary strand of SF is separated off from
the unruly, cliched, popular wilds of the genre (Roberts 2006, 11–12).4
These critiques have merit. Yet, as we will suggest in the remainder of this
chapter, such approaches have made room for analyzing reading in SF in
a way that more inclusive cultural histories of the genre, for all their refer-
ences to “communities of practice” and fervent but all-too-brief appreciations
of fans and fan studies, typically do not (Vint 2014, 93; Luckhurst 2005,
10–11). SF criticism has also been more interested in readers and readerly
pleasures and minds than literary criticism in general, which, as Rita Felski
notes, has been sorely lacking in “rich… accounts of how selves interact with
texts” (2008, 11).
Science Fiction Studies then has given us two ways of thinking about sci-
ence and literature beyond the analysis of textual content as somehow repre-
senting scientific ideas or technological change. Cultural histories suggest that
the genre has been a popular and at times populist response to challenges of
technoscience, whose sprawling megatext and ubiquitous attitude of ambiv-
alence (wonder vs. rejection) infuses all of our responses to science and its
futures. Formalist accounts of the genre present us with a much narrower
but perhaps more penetrating account of the kind of reading experience that
some kinds of SF offer, their capacity to challenge and critique social realities
and estrange readers.
Readers and Reading: Reception, Phenomenology,

and Social Practices
What is missing in even the most sophisticated formal and cultural accounts
of SF, however, is both an empirical sense of how readers make sense of texts,
and the contextual and biographical ways in which reading science and lit-
erature is shaped. As in mainstream literary criticism, SF theorists have paid
attention to the phenomenology of reading or the reading “act,” theorizing
rich and complex relationships between mind and the text (Ricoeur 1991,
45; Iser 1989, 7). But they have “generally not considered the variety and
complexity of reading as a cultural practice, all too often assuming that their
readings can stand for everyone else’s, or that there is a homology between
literary quality and worthwhile reading experiences” (Long 2003, 221).
This is perhaps not surprising in a genre in which roles are blurred, slip-
pery, and multiple. Readers are fans are editors are critics. Even more than
other literary genres, SF is notable for its participatory audiences who con-
struct meaning and remix and reimagine worlds via communal discus-
sion through their knowledge and experience of the SF megatext—now
predominately online. SF has always been “explicitly and recursively theorised

by its practitioners” who are “highly articulate about their positions as writ-
ers and readers” (Broderick 1995, xii). Thus while SF criticism has been par-
ticularly interested in the act of reading and the effects of texts, it has also
been particularly prone to write the critic’s experience and interpretation as
the general one, with all the limits and blind spots that this entails. SF lit-
erature and criticism has of course lately become more expressive of wom-
en’s voices, queer voices, non-cis, and non-white voices; more attentive to
post-colonial and non-Western experiences. Previously underrepresented
writers have explored alternative, independent, and self-publishing options
to reach a broader audience. The genre has increasingly (though not always
easily) been opened up beyond the cliché of the white male fan. But even
this diversification neglects the fullest dimension of readers as individuals and
communities—socially situated, embodied, affective; classed, gendered, aged,
and raced; unique, thoughtful, and irreducibly complicated (Fuller and Sedo
2013, 37).
If we want to work with SF as a way of understanding the cultural cir-
culation of technoscience, we need to enrich textual analysis and accounts
of reading as a rather “bloodless and disembodied” hermeneutic practice or
“text-reader transaction” with sociological, historical, and ethnographic stud-
ies of readers and reading (Fuller and Sedo 2013, 39). Despite the existence
of a rich field of reader-response theory in literary studies and audience stud-
ies in fields of culture and media, James Procter and Bethan Benwell note that
attention to reading as a social practice “has been comparatively neglected”
(2015, 214). They identify a limited tradition of sociological and cultural
studies explorations of readers and reading (none focused specifically on SF),
highlighting in particular an influential early wave of feminist empirical stud-
ies focused on book groups (2015, 1–2). Its key theorists broke new ground
in understanding reading not as a solitary or abstracted act but as a funda-
mentally social practice.5 They brought home the ways in which reading takes
place in specific social and spatial settings, depends on ingrained but variable
cultural scripts and habits, and is maintained by relatively stable institutions
and organizations.
Ethnographic and discursive studies of small-scale book (reading) groups
have recently been extended and complemented by studies of larger “Mass
Reading Events,” and by a growing understanding of the complex ways in
which fiction reading is becoming part of a wider media culture.6 All these
approaches offer resources for exploring science and literature beyond read-
ing science in the text and toward a model that opens up how social read-
ings and diverse readers actively navigate science and narrative together. They
challenge “the primacy of the literary text as an object of study” and “the
imagined and ideal readers who are often constructed from or ‘read off’ the
text within the discipline of literary studies” (Fuller and Sedo 2013, 37).
These studies reposition reading as active, social, biographical, and situated.
They are particularly interested in the differences between professional-critical
and lay reading. The former is usually distanced, skeptical and deconstruc-
tive; lay reading, by contrast, is more often immersive, connected, and
constructive.7
Making sense of science and literature, then, might mean acknowledg-
ing that our own critical readings are only one part of the story of reception.
Felski calls for us to “engage seriously with ordinary motives for reading,”
to attend to its multiple and diverse purposes and pleasures in everyday con-
texts (2008, 14). This means reflecting on the intimate entanglement of fic-
tion reading with desires for knowledge, longings for escape, and possibilities
of recognition and fantasy that she suggests have been ignored or unvalued
in literary criticism in the name of political critique. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
offers the idea of “reparative” reading as different from (but not necessarily
separate from or in opposition to) the “paranoid” stance of the professional
critic (2001, 150–151). Reparative reading speaks to what we do with fiction
in the name of escape, self-care, and love. Sedgwick opens up the range of
affects, desires, and epistemologies that the reader might bring to the genre
and the “many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting
sustenance from the objects of a culture,” especially selves and communities
whom that culture has not always seen (2001, 150–151).
Sedgwick’s work resonates with empirical studies that emphasize read-
erly pleasure and reveal multiple “uses”—of “literature,” in Felski’s title,
and of “reading,” in Long’s. The predominately middle-class female book
club members in Long’s ethnographic study, for example, “are stubbornly
attached to reading as ‘equipment for living’” (2003, 220; see also Long
2003, 131). Like de Certeau’s textual poachers, Long’s readers are greedily
“raid[ing] books for what they find interesting” and using what they find to
do creative identity work, both individual and collective (Long 2003, 220).8
They read to find new versions of themselves and to understand their social
and political worlds. They prefer texts that invite open-ended and multiple
takes, books that allow them to move between their own social experience
and the situations and characters they encounter (Long 2003, 145–149).
Long’s and Sedgwick’s accounts of social or reparative reading suggest a
mode of textual engagement that is both more decadent and more instru-
mental than the methods of “schooled readers” (Long 2003, 220). Reading
is done for enjoyment, involving immersion, and escape; but it is also put to
practical use in making sense, collectively and individually, of social life as we
experience it, desire it, imagine it (Long 2003, 201).
Meeting Readers: Online Encounters, Ethnographies,

and Interviews
In this last section of our chapter, we come to the practical and methodo-
logical dimensions of adding reading practices and pleasures into accounts
of science and literature. Previous waves of qualitative sociological and cul-
tural studies research have not for the most part focused on SF readings and
readers (with the notable exception of Penley’s fan study/cultural history

NASA/TREK9). More recent work on the online lives of fans and readers
offers crucial clues to where and how we might meet SF readers as they make
sense of science fiction and the science fictional. Here we draw on some of
that literature in relation to our own ongoing sociological research with
SF readers to return to the questions and issues that we have raised in the
preceding sections in relation to the empirical challenges and dilemmas of
working with readers. Our own concerns focus on a cluster of related issues.
We are interested in how reading and engagement are framed biographically:
Where and from whom, for example, do young readers discover and learn to
enjoy non-mainstream fiction? How might sharing the pleasure of a some-
times overlooked genre with a parent or teacher (or discovering it alone)
shape interpretive practices? We want to know about the particular pleasures
of playing in alternate technoscientific worlds, the affective as well as the cog-
nitive encounters with transformed worlds and people. We are exploring the
insights and ideas that readers bring back to their lives and their reflections
on contemporary science, society, history, and culture from their reading
encounters. We are interested in how readers make sense of texts individually
in the social contexts and experiences of their own lives, and we are interested
in how readers come together to interrogate SF texts and expand their read-
ings collectively.
Virtual and real-world sites of readerly activity, which have been multi-
plying in recent years, present us with a plethora of places for encountering
active SF readers. With the increasing “digitisation of social life” readings
can travel further; dispersed readers can meet and share their ideas; and the
very idea of book groups becomes more complex (Recuber 2017, 47). Even
face-to-face social groups are now often organized and enhanced with vir-
tual discussions on platforms including Facebook and constructed through
online organizing tools like Meetup. Readers are now more likely to engage
with other readers on sprawling multi-member book discussions sites, such
as Goodreads, than in the traditional book clubs that are discussed in the
core texts concerning the sociology of reading groups.10 This discourse also
occurs online in blogs, podcasts, Wikis, Tumblrs, BookTube videos (YouTube
curated book clubs), and via Twitter. When readers meet in person to make
sense of fiction together, this is as likely to be at book festivals, SF conven-
tions, and mass reading events as in intimate reading groups.
Working with readers in the early twenty-first century, then, offers new
promises for the researcher—but also new challenges. Meeting readers in
person can become more difficult as readers and reading discussions dis-
perse and even fragment across a spectrum of readerly spaces both on and
offline. Participation in discussions of texts can occur simultaneously across a
variety of platforms, with readers/users potentially engaging in multiple con-
versations. For example, a live chat on YouTube can be accompanied by dis-
cussions on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and in the video’s comments.11
In our own work, we have discovered that while fan conventions are sites
of collective activity and interpretation, they are also spaces in which read-
ers vociferously disagree about genre definitions, take up and contest they
ways in which academics might identify them as fans, and mobilize together
to defend the value of their reading pleasures against literary criticism. We
have found that online SF groups can be very intimate spaces in which small
groups of friends and intellectual kindred spirits come together regularly to
interrogate a chosen book in depth, build a collective negotiated reading,
and use fictional texts to open up journeys into wider theoretical and phil-
osophical debates. Such groups might use a variety of online media (Skype,
discussion boards, blogs) to proliferate modes of communication within
a self-selecting and relatively bounded group. We have also seen, however,
how online book groups such as those on Goodreads can be text-only spaces
that are open to more distanced, occasional and ad hoc contributions from
globally dispersed participants, who might read a text like Parable of the Sower
both in relation to national political histories and individual prospects for
survival in the dystopic future world of broken infrastructure, environmental
racism, and climate collapse that Octavia Butler’s text depicts.12
Social and reading interactions multiply and challenge SF scholars to make
sociological sense of the huge volume of unsorted data that can be gleaned
from virtual spaces. This data requires new methodologies, as researchers are
predominately observers who harvest (rather than generate) data in collabo-
ration with readers. There are also ethical considerations when contemplat-
ing consent and navigating public versus private settings for collecting and
using material posted to openly accessible virtual spaces, including videos and
podcasts as well as comments and forum discussions (Recuber 2017, 48).
Researchers must consider the lived experience of online interactions, rather
than assuming that online personas and confessions are equivalent to real-
world interpersonal discussions of science and literature. More conventional
qualitative methods—interviews and participation observation—thus remain
extremely valuable for exploring biographical and personal dimensions of fic-
tional reading experiences with individuals. At the same time, digital social
interactions must be considered as part of everyday life, as identities are
formed and performed in ways that might have been, as Steve Jones suggests,
“limited in physical space” (1999, xxii).
Contemporary readers can reveal as much or as little about themselves as
they wish online and respond to fiction via multiple personae and roles (critic,
commenter, fan, etc.) Virtual spaces offer a certain anonymity in which
boundaries of age, race, gender, class, disability, geography, and expected
expertise are blurred. Online book groups “tend to be ephemeral, imagined,
and geographically distributed” (Gruzd and Sedo 2012). This openness and
potentially radical anonymity can facilitate discussions of issues that may not
be covered by books selected by face-to-face book groups, both social and
commercial. Readers can use these spaces to resist or disrupt stereotypes
concerning race, gender, sexuality, and expertise about SF readers—and

also to promote and engage with texts and authors who do not align with
or appear within the traditional SF literary canon. For example, Nnedi
Okorafor’s Binti trilogy (2015, 2017, 2018), Becky Chambers’ The Long Way
to a Small, Angry Planet (2014), and Larissa Lai’s, Salt Fish Girl (2002) fea-
ture as increasingly popular choices for reading groups as they offer raced,
queer and other underrepresented viewpoints. For even in the most feminist
moments of the SF genre’s history, it is still so often the white male writer
who dominates. Therefore in order to break through the canon alternative
methods of reaching readers (self-publishing, crowd-funding, and direct
online engagement) have been employed. SF offers a potentially radical space
for intersectional, indigenous voices with new technologies, modes, and vir-
tual spaces allowing them to gain traction and popularity.13 As Danielle Fuller
and DeNel Sedo argue, “[the] urge for people to be social through their
reading has not died in the face of technological change” (2014, 15). Rather,
virtual spaces offer new opportunities to discuss texts with an intimacy that
is not constrained by local or global barriers. Virtual spaces have allowed
for communities of readers to build around specific genres, subgenres, and
interests, making the exchange of ideas and experiences almost instantane-
ous compared to the slower (but equally social) SF fan practices earlier in the
twentieth century, including correspondence with fanzines and newsletters
and the search for fellow readers.
Finally, we want to emphasize that the proliferation of SF reading prac-
tices online does not translate straightforwardly into access to those readers
for researchers. If we are going to include readers in our understanding of sci-
ence and literature, our challenge is to work with them, not on them, and to
find ways of engaging in a genuine two-way dialogue. Above all, this means
approaching SF readers as skillful readers of science and culture who are
reflexive about their pleasures and interests. They are not objects of study, but
co-constructors of knowledge about reading science in science fiction. At the
same time, SF readers often have strong personal definitions of the genre and
a powerful sense of the place and value of science within the texts they enjoy.
SF readers are particularly quick, as we have found in our own research,
to identify and respond to the labels that well-meaning but inadequately
informed researchers may place on them. The readers we observed and inter-
viewed often resisted being characterized as experts, for example, and skep-
tically examine their identification as fans. Expertise, for many SF readers, is
a hard-earned claim about scientific knowledge, not about readerly skills of
interpretation and critical revelation. Some SF readers are fans, but not all
fans are SF readers. They may engage with the megatext, but not be active
fans in the sense of creating and occupying literary storyworlds. Negotiating
and unpacking these categories and characterizations with SF readers is one
way of entering into their reading worlds and starting to read science in fic-
tion from the inside out.
Conclusion
Studies of reading can help us to understand it as a “transitive” act, linking
literature and personal experience in an iterative and under-determined way
(Long 2003, 29). In empirical research with SF readers, we find that reading
is critical and transformative—an ethical engagement, a political act. But it
does not (only) operate in the mode of radical cognitive estrangement that
Suvin suggests. Its powers are more everyday and mundane than that, more
rooted in biography, personal experience, and reading contexts. Literary crit-
ics, as Felski remarks, “love to assign exceptional powers to the texts they
read,” to identify texts’ capacity to mobilize social change or shift subjectiv-
ities (2008, 18). But Radway reminds us pointedly that textual meaning is
not a linear process, emanating in the creativity of the author and communi-
cated via the book to the reader (in Long 2003, 21).14 Reception or reading
is not an end point; it can be a starting point for new acts of creative and
critical imagination. Reading experiences are replete with multiple pleasures
and opportunities for new modes of understanding and insight, which are
inseparable from specific reader biographies, social and historical situations,
and reading formations.
Engaging with readers and reading acts is not intended to displace criti-
cal scholarly readings of science and/in literature, but to also ask how they
can be complemented by an understanding of lay modes of reading. From
this point of view, understanding SF and science and literature more generally
cannot be reduced to critical readings of specific scientific texts or projections
of ideal and implied readers. It can also involve working with all sorts of read-
ers sociologically, both as objects of study and resources for understanding
the complex ways by which readers make sense of technoscientific societies
through narrative.
Notes
1. See for a recent example Andrew Dincher, “On the origins of solarpunk.”
2. See also Joanna Radin’s recent reading of Michael Crichton’s science fiction
techno-thriller’s as a form of STS in “The Speculative Present: How Michael
Crichton Colonized the Future of Science and Technology.”
3. Jameson first made these arguments in the article “Progress Versus Utopia, or,
Can We Imagine the Future,” which was included in Jameson’s Archaeologies
of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
4. Roberts refers to Broderick, Reading by Starlight.
5. See Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular
Literature, and Long, Book Clubs.
6. On mass reading events, see Fuller and Sedo, Reading Beyond the Book. On
the wider story of proliferating entanglements between traditional fictional
forms and more recent forms of media and digital culture, see Henry Jenkins,
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.
7. See John Guillory, “The Ethics of Reading,” in Marjorie Garber et al. (eds.),
The Turn to Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Felski, Uses of Literature;
and Procter and Benwell, Reading Across Worlds.
8. Long refers to the concept of textual poaching, first developed in Michel de
Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (e.g., 166), and popularized by Henry
Jenkins, who defines “textual poaching” as “an impertinent raid on the literary
preserve where fans take away only those things that are useful or pleasurable”
(2013, 9).
9. NASA/TREK is study of gender, fandom, and desire in science and technology
explored through non-traditional/academic, fanfiction-inspired prose. Penley
argues that in American culture the NASA space program is shorthand and
focus for public interest in science and technology and that fiction is used to
supplement the disappointments of real-world science. NASA and Star Trek
are inextricably linked in the US public imagination and its negotiation of the
role and place of science and technologies in our day-to-day lives (1997).
10. See: Radway, Reading the Romance; Long, “Women, Reading, and Cultural
Authority: Some Implications of the Audience Perspective in Cultural
Studies,” “Reading Groups and the Postmodern Crisis of Cultural Authority,”
“Textual Interpretation as Collective Action,” and Book Clubs; and Jenny
Hartley, Reading Groups.
11. For example, the Vaginal Fantasy Book Club (2012–2018, http://vaginal-
fantasy.com/), hosted by actress and web series creator Felicia Day, used the
Google/YouTube Hangouts on Air to livestream their book club, consist-
ing of a discussion among the host, Veronica Belmont, Bonnie Burton, and
Kiala Kazebee. Viewers/readers/users were encouraged to read the book in
advance of viewing the video and could comment on the video, respond to
and make comments on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, and join and partici-
pate in the associated Goodreads forum, which had over 16,000 followers, and
attend real-world local meet-ups organized by individuals through Goodreads.
Discussions have included science-based texts, including: Fortune’s Pawn
(Rachel Bach 2013); In the Black (Sheryl Nantus 2014); and Binti (Nnedi
Okorafor 2015).
12. This paragraph discusses research with readers conducted by the authors as part
of the project Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narratives, and Future
Histories (2016–2018, AH/M005534/1)—see www.unsettlingscientificsto-
ries.co.uk. Research with online reading groups in the second phase of that
project was led by Miranda Iossifidis. For more on the reading groups men-
tioned here see Iossifidis (2018) “Uses of science fiction,” paper presented
in the Visual Cultures Public Programme, Goldsmiths College London,
November 15, 2018.
13. adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha’s (2015) short story anthol-
ogy Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements was
originally crowd-funded and intended to be self-published (it was eventually
published by the AK Press). The collection was written and workshopped by
activist-writers. It explores “the connections between radical speculative fic-
tion and movements for social change” (AK Press description, https://www.
akpress.org/octavia-s-brood.html). Joan Haran uses the compound term
“imaginactivism” in her discussion of this text to explore how people can be

inspired by the “possibility of creating a new cultural intervention” and the
radical potential of the science fiction genre to offer creative spaces for those
who have been historically mis- and underrepresented (2017).
14. See also Radway, “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the
Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor.”
Bibliography
Broderick, Damien. 1995. Reading by Starlight: Post-Modern Science Fiction. London:
Routledge.
brown, adrienne maree, and Walidah Imarisha (eds.). 2015. Octavia’s Brood: Science
Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown:
Wesleyan University Press.
de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Delany, Samuel R. 1980. Generic Protocols: Science Fiction and Mundane. In The
Technological Imagination: Theories and Fiction, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas
Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward, 175–193. Madison, WI: Coda Press.
Dincher, Andrew. 2017. On the Origins of Solarpunk. In Sunvault: Stories of
Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, ed. Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher
Wieland, 7–9. Nashville, TN: Upper Rubber Boot Press.
Fayter, Paul. 1997. Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science
and Science Fiction. In Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman, 256–
280. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Felski, Rita. 2008. Uses of Literature. Oxford: Blackwell.
Freedman, Carl. 2000. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Fuller, Danielle, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2013. Reading Beyond the Book: The Social
Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture. London: Routledge.
———. 2014. “And Then We Went to the Brewery”: Reading as a Social Activity in a
Digital Era. World Literature Today 88 (3–4): 14–18.
Gruzd, Anatoly, and DeNel Rehberg Sedo. 2012. #1b1t: Investigating Reading
Practices at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. Mémoires du livre/Studies in
Book Culture 3 (2): n.p. http://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1009347ar. Accessed
28 July 2018.
Guillory, John. 2000. The Ethical Practice of Reading: The Example of Modernity. In
The Turn to Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber, Beatrice Hanssen, and Rebecca Walkowitz,
29–46. New York: Routledge.
Gunn, James. 2006. The Protocols of Science Fiction. In Inside Science Fiction, ed.
James Gunn, 141–148. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press.
Haran, Joan. 2017. Instantiating Imaginactivism: Le Guin’s The Dispossessed as
Inspiration. Ada: A Journal of Media, New Media, and Technology 12: n.p.
https://adanewmedia.org/2017/10/issue12-haran/. Accessed 20 July 2019.
Hartley, Jenny. 2001. Reading Groups. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heise, Ursula, and Kim Stanley Robinson. 2016. Realism, Modernism and the Future:
An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson. ASAP/Journal 1 (1): 17–33.
Iossifidis, Miranda. 2018. Uses of Science Fiction. Paper presented in the Visual
Cultures Public Programme, Goldsmiths College, London, November 15.
Iser, Wolfgang. 1978. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction
from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
———. 1989. Prospecting: From the Reader Response to Literary Anthropology.
Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1982. Progress Versus Utopia, or, Can We Imagine the Future.
Science Fiction Studies 9 (2): 147–158.
———. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science
Fictions. London: Verso.
Jasanoff, Sheila. 2004. States of Knowledge: The Co-production of Science and the Social
Order. London: Routledge.
———. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imaginations of
Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the
Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago:
———. 2015. Imagined and Invented Worlds. In Dreamscapes of Modernity:
Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and
Sang-Hyun Kim, 321–342. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jenkins, Henry. 2008. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New
———. 2013. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. London:
Routledge.
Jones, Steve. 1999. Doing Internet Research: Critical Issues and Methods for
Examining the Net. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Long, Elizabeth. 1986. Women, Reading, and Cultural Authority: Some Implications
of the Audience Perspective in Cultural Studies. American Quarterly 38: 591–612.
———. 1987. Reading Groups and the Postmodern Crisis of Cultural Authority.
Cultural Studies 1: 306–327.
———. 1992. Textual Interpretation as Collective Action. In The Ethnography of
Reading, ed. Jonathan Boyarin, 180–211. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2003. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago:
Chicago University Press.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge: Polity.
Moylan, Tom. 1986. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian
Imagination. New York: Methuen.
Nicholls, Peter. 2011. Soft SF. In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute,
David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. London: Gollancz. Updated
December 20. http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/soft_sf. Accessed 18 July
2019.
Oleszczuk, Anna. 2017. Sad and Rabid Puppies: Politicization of the Hugo Award
Nomination Procedure. New Horizons in English Studies 2 (1): 127–135.
Penley, Constance. 1997. NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America.
London: Verso.
Proctor, James, and Bethan Benwell. 2015. Reading Across Worlds: Transnational
Book Groups and the Reception of Difference. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Radin, Joanna. 2019. The Speculative Present: How Michael Crichton Colonized the
Future of Science and Technology. OSIRIS 34 (2019): 297–315.
Radway, Janice. 1984. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular
Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
———. 1986. Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical,
Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor. Book Research
Quarterly 2: 7–29.
Recuber, Timothy. 2017. Digital Discourse Analysis: Finding Meaning in Small
Online Spaces. In Jessie Daniels, Karen Gregory, and Tressie McMillan Cottom, ed.
Digital Sociologies, 47–60. London: Policy Press.
Rees, Amanda, and Iwan Rhys Morus. 2019. Introduction: Presenting Futures Past:
Science Fiction and the History of Science. OSIRIS 34: 1–15.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1991. What Is a Text? Explanation and Understanding. In A Ricoeur
Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdés, 43–64. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.
Roberts, Adam. 2006. Science Fiction. London: Routledge.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2001. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.
Sobchack, Vivian. 1987. Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. New
York: The Ungar Publishing Company.
Suvin, Darko. 1972. On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre. College English 34
(3): 372–382.
———. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a
Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Narratives, and Future Histories (AHRC
2016–2018). Online at: unsettlingscientificstories.co.uk. Accessed 10 Sept 2019.
Vint, Sherryl. 2014. Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury.
Wolfe, Gary K. 2010. The Evaporating Genres: Essays on Fantastic Literature and
Sightings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
CHAPTER 15
Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic

Translation in Samuel Delany’s Babel-17
Joseph Fitzpatrick
What can the science of linguistics contribute to the writing and reading
of science fiction? This question serves as a starting point for Mark Bould’s
entry on “Language and Linguistics” in The Routledge Companion to Science
Fiction, which begins by noting a gap between “the wealth of language
problems in science fiction and the poverty of linguistic explanation” (Bould
2009, 225).1 The “problems” are obvious enough, from learning alien lan-
guages to managing galactic empires to representing this alterity in a largely
linguistic medium. These problems aren’t the product of any scientific the-
ory, and neither the writers nor the interpreters of sf texts have consistently
employed linguistic theory to make sense of them. Bould discusses Saussure
and Bakhtin, who have been almost infinitely productive for literary critics
thinking about language; but they give him little traction in explaining the
sf texts. The only linguistic theory that has inspired a significant number of
sf plots and themes is the somewhat obscure Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis—the
idea that the language we speak structures our thoughts and perceptions, an
sf staple from George Orwell’s 1984 to the recent Hollywood film Arrival.
Searching for something beyond this one linguistic theory, Bould finally turns
to a 1971 essay by Samuel Delany that “introduced sf to the ‘linguistic turn’
in critical theory” by arguing that the field of sf cannot be delimited accord-
ing to texts’ content, but only by their representational mode, with sf defined
as texts with a “subjunctive” relationship to reality (ibid., 231–2). While this
J. Fitzpatrick (*) 
Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA

264 J. FITZPATRICK
subjunctivity doesn’t answer or explain much, the turn to Delany is a smart

one: if linguistics has so little to say about the content of sf texts, perhaps an
sf author with Delany’s theoretical sophistication can show us what sf is doing
in, through, and to language.
While Bould doesn’t attempt to explain away the gap between sf writing
and linguistic explanation, his essay offers helpful starting points for think-
ing about it. To begin with, we need a clearer sense of why the Sapir–Whorf
Hypothesis has fascinated sf writers. Based somewhat loosely on the writings
of Benjamin Lee Whorf, this theory came together in the early 1950s, in the
same “technocultural conjuncture” (Luckhurst 2005, ch. 4) that transformed
science fiction into a widely read and finally respectable popular genre. Rather
than a coherent scientific hypothesis, it is better understood as a messy and
discontinuous conglomeration of anthropological research, popular science,
and philosophical supposition, all filtered through the tendentious interpre-
tive practices of the widely interdisciplinary and wildly ambitious postwar
American social sciences. Unlike Einstein’s relativity (on which it was mod-
eled), Whorf’s linguistic relativity thesis was not an accepted scientific theory
that inspired sf as a secondary effect. From its beginning, it was already a mix-
ture of science and speculation, perhaps not different enough from sf to offer
much explanatory purchase.
In parsing this origin story, we’ll have to look at a second linguistic theory
that emerged from the same conjuncture, a rival or complement to the Sapir–
Whorf Hypothesis. The postwar academy was awash with interdisciplinary
work in cybernetics, information theory, and cryptography—none of which
are specifically linguistic fields. But in Warren Weaver’s revolutionary idea
that digital computers could translate texts between human languages, these
fields converged in a view of language as simply one form of information,
with translation becoming no more complicated than coding and transmis-
sion. This unlimited translatability contrasted with the common interpre-
tations of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis as a radical relativism that imagined
speakers of different languages as trapped in their separate and incommen-
surable thought worlds—that is, as a theory of untranslatability. When we
approach the question of linguistics in sf in terms of translation, we begin to
see it as a struggle between two (equally strange and vexed) theories rather
than the simple domination of one.
With these theories in mind, we will turn to Samuel Delany’s 1966 novel,
Babel-17. Rather than treating Delany as a homegrown linguistic theorist of
sf, I want to approach Babel-17 itself as a perceptive working through of the
relationship between the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis and Weaver’s ideas about
language, information, and translation. By entangling these theories in an sf
plot, Delany had to attend to aspects of them that were rarely addressed by
academic critics working within and talking across scholarly disciplines. The
novel’s insights come not only from Delany’s theoretical acumen, but also
from his need to think about these theories in terms of character motivation,
thematic coherence, and narrative closure.
15 LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY AND CRYPTOGRAPHIC TRANSLATION … 265
Untranslatability and the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis

Why has linguistic relativity so often provided the basis for sf representations
of language? The theory became popular through the 50s and 60s. By 1975,
George Steiner could treat it as central to a discussion of relativist vs. univer-
salist approaches to language; a few years later, linguistic historian Geoffrey
Sampson (1980, 81) described it as having “held a perennial fascination for
linguists of diverse schools.” But this fascination was not always positive, and
the academic success of cognitivism brought Whorf’s theories into disre-
pute. In the 1990s, Deborah Cameron (1999, 153) noted that linguists had
come to regard Whorf’s ideas as “that which must be refuted at all costs,”
and Steven Pinker (2007, 124) has since boasted that his 1994 The Language
Instinct “gave [Whorfianism] its obituary.” Perhaps inevitably, cognitiv-
ists themselves have recently returned to Whorf, with “neo-Whorfians” and
their opponents quarreling via pop science books on language, thought, and
perception (Deutscher 2010; McWhorter 2014; see also Evans 2014). This
back-and-forth game of fascination and renunciation has been played at and
across the boundaries of linguistics as a scientific field—sometimes separat-
ing linguists from cognitive psychologists, other times defining linguistics or
cognitive science from within, and almost always figuring into how linguistic
theory is represented in intellectual histories, introductory surveys, and pop-
ularizing trade books. To make sense of this Whorfian theory, we need to
begin by recognizing how tellingly overdetermined it is: as Cameron astutely
observed, “If Whorf had not existed it would have been necessary to invent
him, and some would say we have done precisely that” (1999, 154). What,
then, are the origins of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis?
Benjamin Lee Whorf’s life and work blur the boundaries separating aca-
demic disciplines from each other and from non-academic intellectual cul-
ture (Schultz 1990). Whorf’s only academic degree was a BS in Chemical
Engineering from MIT, and his primary employment was as a fire prevention
engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance Company. His avocational inter-
ests in Biblical exegesis and deciphering Mayan hieroglyphs led him to taking
graduate courses in American Indian Linguistics at Yale with Edward Sapir,
publishing several papers in scholarly journals, and briefly teaching at Yale
when Sapir was on sabbatical (Darnell 1990, 375–82). While his ideas about
linguistic relativity were set out rigorously in an essay written for a 1941 fest-
schrift in honor of Sapir, they were more widely known through three essays
written for The Technology Review, a popular science journal published by
MIT. Whorf’s writings were collected in 1956 in Language, Thought, and
Reality, a collection edited by John B. Carroll that also included Whorf’s ear-
lier linguistics papers, various unpublished writings, and an essay written for
the Theosophical society in Madras, India.
As a marginal academic contributing to a recently professionalized field,
Whorf was eclectic in both his audiences and his intellectual forebears. His
biographers tend to impose a teleology on his thought by emphasizing
266 J. FITZPATRICK
beginnings and endings, from his early fascination with French Theosophist
Antoine Fabre d’Olivet’s linguistic hermeneutics to his essay for the
Theosophical society journal, his last published work (Rollins 1980; Whorf
1956, Introduction). For them, Whorf combines the idiosyncrasies of an
autodidact with the rigorous training of a student of Sapir’s. Linguistic his-
torian John E. Joseph (2002, ch. 4) has taken a different approach, depicting
Whorf as skillfully combining two academically entrenched but rhetorically
incongruous approaches to language and culture, the “metaphysical garbage”
and “magic key” views. The former, which Joseph traces through logical pos-
itivism and early analytic philosophy, worried that aspects of logic traditionally
regarded as universal and necessary (e.g., the idea that there are substances,
which have attributes) are actually by-products of the grammatical contingen-
cies of a particular group of languages (here, subject-predicate sentence struc-
ture). Whorf emphasized this line of argument in his Technology Review essays
on science and logic: “when anyone, as a natural logician, is talking about
reason, logic, and the laws of correct thinking, he is apt to be simply march-
ing in step with purely grammatical facts that have somewhat of a background
character in his own language or family of languages” (1956, 211). The other
tradition, the “magic key” approach descended from the anthropological the-
ories of Herder and Humboldt, treats language as formative of a culture’s
Weltanschauung, and thus as a crucial tool for understanding that culture.
This comes through most clearly in Whorf’s more ethnographically oriented
writings: “the problem of thought and thinking in the native community […]
is largely a matter of one especially cohesive aggregate of cultural phenomena
that we call a language” (ibid., 65). For Whorf, these two approaches to the
language-and-thought relationship were clearly complementary. We should
study languages such as Hopi and Shawnee both to gain insight into those
cultures and to discover which elements of our own metaphysics are contin-
gent (because different in other languages)—and thus also to learn new ways
of seeing the world.
Whorf’s work on linguistic relativity entered into academic debates
largely through the efforts of another Sapir student, Harry Hoijer. Hoijer
co-organized an interdisciplinary conference on “Language in Culture” at the
University of Chicago in 1953, the proceedings of which were published as
a special issue of The American Anthropologist. In addition to continuing the
work that Whorf (who died from cancer in 1941 at the age of forty-four) had
begun, Hoijer had two goals of his own: to situate Whorf’s theories within a
respectable scholarly framework by emphasizing their connection to Sapir, and
to extrapolate from them a hypothesis that could instigate empirical research
programs across various social science disciplines. This is especially clear in his
coining of the name “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” and framing the debate
as “a stimulus, and perhaps even a directive, to future and more productive
research” (Hoijer 1954, ix). This move toward hypothesis testing was already
a marked break from Whorf’s writings. In his essay for the Sapir festschrift,
Whorf stated explicitly what kind of link he saw between language and culture:
“There are connections but not correlations or diagnostic correspondences
between cultural norms and linguistic patterns” (1956, 159).
Throughout the “Language in Culture” conference, Hoijer’s efforts to
extract a testable hypothesis from Whorf were resisted by the participants
closest to his (and Whorf’s) disciplinary background of linguistic anthro-
pology. Fellow Sapir student Charles F. Hockett described Whorf’s the-
ory as “a thematic analysis” that had nothing to do with hypothesis testing:
“Themes are the bases for analogies, often conflicting, in terms of which the
actual behavior conforms in this, that, and the other context” (Hoijer 1954,
236). The anthropologist Alfred Kroeber saw in Whorf “imagination” and “a
touch of genius,” admiring his ability to identify—via “some gift of percep-
tion […], possibly aesthetic”—“a set of superpatterns” running throughout
Hopi language and culture, the connections among which (Kroeber con-
cluded) “will be very hard to prove” (ibid., 231–2). These appeals to the-
matic analysis, analogy making, and aesthetic sensibility make Whorf sound
a bit like an sf novelist. This might offer a clue as to why sf writers have been
inspired by Whorf’s theory, and it certainly suggests an intriguing “analogy”
between Whorf’s theory and the pervasive linguistic themes in the sf writings
of Kroeber’s daughter, Ursula K. Le Guin.
By contrast, the psychologists and philosophers participating in the confer-
ence read Whorf as making falsifiable (and largely false) claims about perception
and cognition. The terms of this reading are set out in psychologist Franklin
Fearing’s paper and developed in several of the discussion sessions. While
Fearing treats Whorf’s texts sympathetically and at length, he distorts them
by trying to translate them into terms from his own discipline. In the narrow
sense, this meant treating Whorf as a theorist not of culture, but of perception.
More broadly, it meant treating Whorf as a type of radical relativist “with which
social scientists are already familiar” (Hoijer 1954, 49). Fearing repeatedly sum-
marizes Whorf as claiming that “The linguistic pattern of each language or fam-
ily of languages determines the course of thought” (ibid., 50). The key term
here is “determine,” which Fearing repeats throughout the essay and includes
prominently in his introductory paragraph’s summary of Whorf’s views (ibid.,
47). This claim that language determines a person’s perception and “course
of thought” entails that language sets strict limits on that person’s cognitive
agency, trapping them within a particular “world view.” This reading of Whorf
follows one published a year earlier by the sociologist Lewis Feuer (quoted
in passing by Fearing), which had concluded that “Linguistic relativity is the
doctrine of untranslatability in modern guise” since it argues that a language
“defines for its users a unique cultural universe,” with different languages’ “cul-
tural universes” being, by definition, incommensurable (Feuer 1953, 94–5).
While Fearing did not mention untranslatability explicitly in his essay, it
came up in the discussion sessions. In his own paper, Hoijer had been explicit
in reading Whorf as not making this argument: “The languages of human
beings do not so much determine the perceptual and other faculties of their
268 J. FITZPATRICK
speakers vis-à-vis experience as they influence and direct these faculties into
prescribed channels. Intercultural communication, however wide the differ-
ence between cultures may be, is not impossible. It is simply more or less
difficult, depending on the degree of difference between the cultures con-
cerned” (Hoijer 1954, 94; see also Leavitt 2011, 146–7). In one of the dis-
cussion sessions, the philosopher Abraham Kaplan expressed his surprise
at this reading, saying that he had “misread” Whorf “in the same way that
Fearing did” to be arguing “that you do not translate thought-worlds one
into another” (Hoijer 1954, 173). Both Kaplan and Fearing seemed willing
enough to defer to the linguistic anthropologists on this point, letting Hoijer
have the last word on the matter: “Whorf, it seems to me, is not insisting
on the impossibility of translation or on the uniqueness of thought-worlds.
Rather, he is admitting the possibility that you can talk in English about the
Hopi thought-world and make it, to a very high degree, understandable”
(ibid., 174).
But while Hoijer got the last word, it’s not clear that everyone regarded
Fearing’s summary as a misreading. One participant, the psychologist Eric
Lenneberg, published an essay shortly afterward that claimed Whorf disputed
the “mutual translatability among languages” (Brown and Lenneberg 1954,
454), a view that soon became the standard reading of Whorf. In a 1959
essay on translation and linguistics, Roman Jakobson quotes from Whorf
as an example of “the dogma of untranslatability” (1959, 234). Jakobson’s
strategy for refuting this dogma is worth noting: he points out that the
“metalinguistic” faculty that is integral to human speech “permits revision
and redefinition of the vocabulary used,” giving any would-be translator the
tools necessary to expand their own language to accommodate any lexical or
grammatical oddities in the foreign language (ibid., 234–6). For Hoijer and
others, Whorf’s entire intellectual project was itself an attempt at “metalin-
guistic” analysis, making languages such as Hopi understandable in English in
order to demonstrate their strangeness to English readers.
If Whorf’s writings from the 1930s were compelling thanks to their deft
intermingling of the anthropologists’ “magic key” and the philosophers’
“metaphysical garbage” approaches to language, it might be helpful to think
of the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis constructed in the 1950s as a similarly evoc-
ative hybrid: an aesthetic vision linking thematic superstructures of language
and culture, but also a relativist paradox positing a gap between the kinds
of translation that we regularly perform and an unachievable ideal of trans-
latability. The 1953 conference demonstrated the difficulty of incorporating
this hypothesis into disciplinary research programs, where the untranslatabil-
ity paradox would have to be dealt with directly. But on the margins of dis-
ciplines, the margins of the academy, and especially in works of fiction, the
tension between thematic unity and paradoxical untranslatability proved irre-
sistible. In a 1960 issue of Scientific American, the sociologist James Cooke
Brown proposed a test of “the Whorfian thesis of linguistic determinism” by
the creation of a new language, Loglan, that would advance the Leibnizian
project of creating a “universal symbolism” for the guiding of rational
thought (53; see also Eco 1995). Jack Vance’s 1958 novel The Languages
of Pao transformed the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis into a science fiction plot:
the people of Pao exhibit a homogeneity and passivity corresponding to their
world’s verbless and perfectly regular language, until their leaders invent
three new languages that train their speakers to be scholars, merchants, and
warriors (respectively). Both Brown and Vance appeal to some combination
of American liberal pluralism and an insistence (like Jakobson) on the human
metalinguistic capacity to bridge different languages: Loglan draws vocabu-
lary from the world’s eight most widely spoken languages, combining them
with logical notations in an attempt to purge language of its metaphysical
garbage, and Pao’s languages converge into a pidgin form used by the lin-
guists who created the artificial languages. The fantasy is the same in both
cases: most languages trap their speakers into deterministic thought worlds,
but a language can be created that will enable its speakers to rise above these
differences and become fully human—culturally diverse in Vance’s case,
properly rational in Brown’s.
Translation and Information
Studies of linguistics in sf see the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis everywhere
they look. Bould (2009, 229), for instance, mentions Babel-17 and Neal
Stephenson’s Snow Crash together as “paranoid versions of linguistic deter-
minism” following a Whorfian model. While this isn’t wrong, it obscures
the fact that both novels put Whorfian relativism into conversation with
a very different theory of language. This is most explicit in Stephenson’s
novel, which cites George Steiner’s (1975) distinction between relativist
(i.e., Whorfian) and universalist linguistic theories. The novel’s plot follows
the universalist position that all languages “share certain traits that have their
roots in the ‘deep structures’ of the human brain”— building on an analogy
between the brain’s language faculty and the machine languages of computers
(Stephenson 1992, 276–8). While the languages we normally speak (English,
French) place us in separate worlds, there exists a language that goes below
them, communicating directly with the brain’s language center; a person who
can write this language becomes a “neurolinguistic hacker,” able to trans-
mit instructions directly into certain people’s brains without passing through
their consciousness. The “Snow Crash” of the novel’s title exists at three dis-
tinct analogical levels: as a somatic virus that affects human bodies; as a com-
puter virus that affects people’s virtual avatars; and as a neurolinguistic virus,
a nam-shub (or curse) written in the Sumerian language that communicates
directly with auditors’ brains. Clearly, we are a long way from the Sapir–Whorf
Hypothesis. Stephenson’s characters explain this analogical system by referring
(via Steiner) to Chomskian “deep structure,” but in a way that bears almost
270 J. FITZPATRICK
no resemblance to Chomsky’s actual theories (see Joseph 2002, 181–96, as

well as Martin-Nielsen 2012). The ideas explored in the novel are neither
Whorfian nor Chomskian; they draw on another theoretical framework that
exerted substantial influence on sf writing in the late twentieth century, one
we can think of as a kind of counterpart to the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis.
While this theory isn’t associated with any one writer the way that linguis-
tic relativity is with Whorf, it can largely be traced back to a pair of essays
written in 1949 by Warren Weaver. Like Whorf, Weaver’s most influential
work was done outside of the academy—though this did not make him mar-
ginal in quite the same sense. As the director of the Rockefeller Foundation’s
Natural Sciences Division from 1932 to 1959, Weaver funded groundbreak-
ing research in genetics, agriculture, and molecular biology. During World
War II he joined the Office of Scientific Research and Development at the
invitation of Vannevar Bush, working with Norbert Wiener on the fire con-
trol mechanisms that inspired the cybernetic theory of feedback, with John
von Neumann on the conceptual design of digital computers, and with
Claude Shannon on cryptographic problems that led to the development of
information theory. Weaver’s work as a science administrator placed him at
the intersection of various academic disciplines and interdisciplinary research
programs, giving him a perspective (and a soapbox) that contributed to his
success as a popularizer and a scholarly instigator.
As a popularizer, Weaver is best known for his introductory overview of
Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Shannon’s theory laid the ground-
work for what came to be known as the Information Age, coining the term
“bit” (from “binary digit”) and demonstrating that the information car-
ried by a message could be quantified by the same formula used to calcu-
late the entropy of a physical system (see Soni and Goodman 2017; Gleick
2011; Kline 2015). Weaver’s essay offered a lucid, largely non-mathematical
explanation of the technical details of Shannon’s theory. More importantly,
it situated the theory within a framework of the study of human communi-
cation, defining a structured hierarchy of three “problems” of communica-
tion (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 95–8). The most basic was the “technical
problem” of accurately transmitting a message from sender to receiver—the
problem that Shannon’s theory quantified and explained. Above this techni-
cal problem, Weaver stacked two others: the “semantic problem” (what the
transmitted message means) and the “effectiveness problem” (what we accom-
plish by transmitting this meaningful message). The three levels were structur-
ally related, with success at each level predicated on success at all of the lower
levels: effective communication depends on successfully conveying meaning,
which in turn depends on successfully transmitting messages.
Throughout his explanation of the technical problem, Weaver emphasizes
the narrow scope of the term “information” in Shannon’s theory. Measuring
a message’s statistical rather than semantic properties, information “has noth-
ing to do with meaning” (1955, 116). Yet Weaver concludes his paper with
a speculative attempt at extending Shannon’s quantitative “technical” the-

ory upward to address the semantic and effectiveness problems through a
series of analogies—wherein, for instance, signal noise becomes “semantic
noise” (ibid., 114–7). Weaver offers no evidence that such analogies could
be valid or productive, relying instead on the persuasiveness of a repeated
metaphor. Weaver assures his reader that Shannon’s seemingly “superficial”
technical theory in fact has a mysterious “deep significance” (ibid., 97), con-
cluding that the theory of the technical level is “fundamental in the prob-
lems it treats” and “deep enough” to be “dealing with the real inner core
of the communication problem” (ibid., 114–5). Through a subtle catachre-
sis, a colloquial metaphor representing valuable or useful insights as “deep”
underwrites Weaver’s claim that the technical theory of communication is the
foundation for and even the essence of the semantic and effectiveness problems.
This metaphorics of depth is crucial to Weaver’s other 1949 text, a widely
distributed memo proposing the use of digital computers to translate natu-
ral languages, usually cited as the origin of machine translation research in
the United States. Weaver begins this memo with a wartime anecdote about
cryptography, in which a cryptanalyst successfully decodes a string of num-
bers into a message in Turkish—despite not knowing Turkish or even that the
original had been written in Turkish. Concluding from this that languages
with “wide superficial differences” (e.g., English and Turkish) must have sta-
tistically significant “invariant properties” discernible through cryptographic
analysis, Weaver speculates about a possible “logical structure” common to
all languages, a vague notion that he again supports with nothing more than
a metaphor of depth (ibid., 15–17). In a parable of translation, he asks the
reader to imagine speakers of different languages as inhabitants of a series
of towers spaced far enough apart to make shouting between them nearly
impossible, and to further imagine that the inhabitants could descend to “a
great open basement, common to all the towers,” where communication
would be easy (ibid., 23). Languages dissimilar on the surface share a com-
mon foundation, a logical structure buried deep below. While this wouldn’t
help in translating poetry, where surface structures such as rhyme are consti-
tutive of meaning, Weaver argues that “technical writing” (scientific prose)
is simply “an expression of logical character,” a surface manifestation of a
universal logical structure (ibid., 20, 22). Translation of such texts should
simply be a matter of descending into the linguistic basement. Echoing his
speculations in the Shannon summary, Weaver imagines the “technical”
problem—which can be modeled statistically—as the foundation for prob-
lems of meaning and use, a foundation to which these trickier problems
might be reduced. Like cracking the Turkish code, “technical” translation
could be accomplished through statistical analysis, even by someone unfamil-
iar with the (surface) languages involved. Weaver dubs this “the cryptograph-
ic-translation idea” and regards it as an extension of a commonsense approach
to practical problems of translation: “When I look at an article in Russian,
272 J. FITZPATRICK
I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange
symbols. I will now proceed to decode’” (ibid., 18). Given the success of
the Colossus computer at breaking Japanese codes during the war, Weaver
proposed that computers could be similarly helpful in translating technical
documents.
Weaver’s idea was taken up immediately, with the first public demonstra-
tion of machine translation coming just five years after the memo was written.
While many linguists were skeptical that a computer could handle the com-
plexities of translation, some were eager to join the faddish and well-funded
machine translation research that flourished from 1954 to 1966—which
failed to realize the sci-fi fantasy of a translation machine, but succeeded in
academic terms by producing the new scholarly field of computational lin-
guistics (Gordin 2015, chs. 8–9). Even among linguists uninterested in
computers, Weaver’s use of information theory as a foundation for com-
munication research became an important theoretical framework thanks to
the efforts of Roman Jakobson. Lily Kay (2000, ch. 7) has discussed how
Jakobson, at Weaver’s urging, incorporated terms from Shannon’s theory into
a Saussurian linguistic model (e.g., replacing langue and parole with “code”
and “message”) and promoted an integrated theory of communication
through editing the “Studies in Communication” series on the MIT Press.
Jakobson, who had been so wary of Whorf, eagerly joined Weaver’s efforts to
reimagine code systems as disparate as DNA and natural languages through a
single, unified informational-semiotic theory.
Outside the academy, Weaver’s idea was easily assimilated to Norbert
Wiener’s popularization of cybernetics. Wiener (1950, 91) envisioned some-
thing like Weaver’s reduction of communication problems to information
theory, considering it “theoretically not impossible to develop the statistics of
the semantic and behavioral languages to such a level that we may get a fair
measure of the amount of information in each system.” The language here is
cautious rather than speculative. Weaver’s memo on machine translation had
included excerpts from an epistolary exchange with Wiener in which Wiener
dismissed as impractical the idea of actually using computers to translate. In
the realm of theory, though, he was much more ambitious. For instance,
Wiener (1950) goes on to claim that it would be “theoretically possible” to
translate the “pattern” (109) of a human being into a binary code that could
be transmitted via telegraph—but insists that he discusses this possibility only
to illustrate the importance of the concept of transmission, “not because I
want to write a science fiction story concerning itself with the possibility of
telegraphing a man” (ibid., 111). Wiener keeps his speculations “theoretical,”
realizing that this theory already borders on science fiction in its conflating
of statistical information theory, language, and the structures of the human
body and mind.
With the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis as a relativist theory of untranslata-
bility, Weaver’s cryptographic-translation idea can serve as its universalist
opposite: a theory of unbounded translatability. If machine translation is pos-

sible, it’s because down in its depths, human language is just information,
and the technical problem of information can be solved by digital comput-
ers. By this logic, translatability extends far beyond the traditional boundaries
of language, since anything that is information—languages, human bodies,
any pattern at all—can be translated into any other form of information. If
a human body can be translated into dots and dashes and sent through a
telegraph cable, then the words of an ancient Sumerian curse can be trans-
lated into a computer file or protein sequence that will wreak similar havoc
on human bodies or their avatars. Where Sapir–Whorf forbids speakers from
rising out of their thought worlds into the realm of metalanguage, Weaver’s
theory proudly leads its information processors down into the basement of
logical structure. To call either theory scientific—or linguistic in the nar-
row, disciplinary sense—would be a stretch. They come from the margins,
as much a product of casual misreadings and popularizing flights of fancy as
of the cross-disciplinary brainstorming that made them seem plausible. But,
taken together, they outline a set of possibilities for thinking about the rela-
tionships that connect human beings to each other and to the world through
languages. Some of these possibilities seem to have been clearer to sf writers
than to professional academics, which is what makes Babel-17 so interesting.
Babel-17
Delany’s novel begins by addressing Weaver’s “cryptographic-translation
idea” head-on. We are introduced to General Forester, carrying transcripts
of radio signals intercepted moments before several catastrophic acts of mil-
itary sabotage, written in some sort of code that Military Cryptography has
been unable to crack and has dubbed “Babel-17.” Forester is meeting Rydra
Wong, the galaxy’s most famous poet and most accomplished cryptanalyst.
In a bit of expository dialogue, Rydra explains to Forester that Babel-17 is
not a code, but a language. With codes, “once you find the key, you just plug
it in and out come logical sentences. A language, however, has its own inter-
nal logic, its own grammar, its own way of putting thoughts together with
words that span various spectra of meaning” (Delany 2001, 7).2 Translation,
then, is not simply cryptography. But Weaver isn’t entirely wrong: “logic”
here is both the test of successful decryption (the right key yields “logical sen-
tences”) and the defining characteristic of a language’s grammar. As Rydra
explains the difference to Forester, she also explains her talent for both cryp-
tography and poetry. A childhood brain disease had left her with an inex-
plicable “knack” that enables her to break codes purely through intuition:
“I guess it was knowing something about language that did it, being more
facile at recognizing patterns—like distinguishing grammatical order from
random rearrangement by feel” (10). Despite her own caveat about conflat-
ing languages and codes, Rydra here uses the terminology of Weaver and
274 J. FITZPATRICK
Wiener: information is a quantification of “pattern,” defined as whatever is

non-random. This theoretical shift is obscured by the vagueness of Rydra’s
“knack.” The fact that she works “by feel” implies that her work could not be
done by a computer, and she even implies that this “knack” is what makes her
a great poet, since poetry is patterned language. The “knack” enables Delany
to play both sides of the fence: language is both reducible to pure informa-
tion and also something more than just a code, and perhaps ineffably human.
Thanks to her knack, Rydra quickly picks up Babel-17, which begins influ-
encing her thoughts in Whorfian fashion. In the first clear example of this,
Delany both captures the spirit of Whorf’s own writings and develops the less
plausible readings of Whorf in a fascinatingly Weaverian direction. When a
technological failure leaves her ship unable to determine its position in Earth
orbit, Rydra devises a practical solution based on the fact that great circles
on a sphere always intersect. While other crew members had the geomet-
ric knowledge to arrive at this solution, Rydra got there first by thinking in
Babel-17, in which the word for “great circle” contains a morpheme that
signifies “intersecting.” As Rydra explains: “It carries the information right
in the word. Just like bus stop or foxhole carry information in English that la
gare or le terrier—comparable words in French—lack. ‘Great Circle’ carries
some information with it, but not the right information to get us out of the
jam we’re in. We have to go to another language in order to think about the
problem clearly without going through all sorts of roundabout paths for the
proper aspects of what we want to deal with” (69). Rydra’s point here is that
Babel-17 provides a more direct “path” for certain thoughts than English,
making certain thoughts easier or more obvious—a perspicacious reading
of Whorf. But she had broached this same idea earlier in the novel in more
radical terms. Talking to her confidante, she explained, “most textbooks say
language is a mechanism for expressing thought, Mocky. But language is
thought. Thought is information given form. The form is language” (23).
For language to provide a shorter or longer path for thought is one thing,
but if language is thought, then we’ve arrived at the blunt determinism of
Whorf’s critics. More importantly, in both passages Rydra explains linguistic
relativity using the word “information.”
Despite this nod to linguistic determinism, the novel doesn’t subscribe
to the “dogma of untranslatability.” Rydra learns Babel-17 and can trans-
late into and out of it. But translation here works strangely. For instance, the
novel features “discorporate” characters (basically ghosts) whose appearance,
actions, and words are quickly and mysteriously forgotten by any corporate
(living) person who interacts with them. Rydra circumvents this problem by
mentally translating the discorporate characters’ words into Basque: when
the original words disappear from her memory, the translation remains. The
choice of Basque hints that not just any language would work. As the world’s
most famous language isolate, Basque seems to be used here as a kind of lin-
guistic quarantine: not separated from an Anglophone thought world in the
Sapir–Whorf sense, but cordoned off enough to protect it from the oblivion
afflicting the original memories and (presumably) those translated into too
similar a language.
But this linguistic quarantine is anomalous in the novel’s early part, where
the idea of language as information guarantees a universal translatability—at
least for Rydra, with her knack. In the opening chapter, she surprises General
Forester by responding to his unspoken thoughts. Recounting this later to
Mocky, Rydra explains that each phrase Forester was thinking was reflected
in a slight gesture or expression that she was able to perceive and decode.
This clearly requires a lossless transmission of information, in which some
pattern of muscular twitches corresponds exactly to a pattern of “semantic
information” (borrowing a term from Weaver) that Rydra can recover ver-
batim. Even Mocky is skeptical, calling her translation “too exact” (20). The
chapter ends with a memory in which Rydra had been terrified by a talking
myna bird that had been conditioned via earthworm rewards to make banal
comments about the weather, and we later discover that Rydra, through her
knack, had instinctively translated the utterance into its meaning as perceived
by the myna bird: a mechanism for getting an earthworm treat, which Rydra
envisioned coming toward her own mouth (156).
Rydra understands this myna incident only after she tries translating her
muscle-reading perceptions into Babel-17, curious what the language’s “com-
pactness” will make apparent to her. At this point, the novel’s text splits in
two. Small rectangles of text, two per page, offer a blandly objective account
of what is happening, giving few details while noting that Rydra herself “was
aware of so much more” (140). Around this textual archipelago, Rydra’s
Babel-17 perceptions flow in one long third-person stream-of-consciousness
run-on sentence in which other characters’ thoughts and intentions are
laid bare. The juxtaposition drives home the novel’s point that the logical
structure of Babel-17 delves deeply into the nature of reality: “Thinking in
Babel-17 was like suddenly seeing all the way down through water to the bot-
tom of a well that a moment ago you’d thought was only a few feet deep”
(113). While her knack on its own gives Rydra access to the same semantic
content that a spoken sentence of English would, its translation into Babel-17
reveals to her the Weaverian depths of a preverbal stream-of-consciousness.
It’s clear that Rydra is being drawn in by Babel-17, the logic of which
seems to be the logic of reality itself. But she eventually realizes that the lan-
guage is a trap. Immediately before her translation experiment, Rydra meets a
character named the Butcher, with a criminal past and a strange aphasia: per-
sonal pronouns are missing from his vocabulary. Without personal pronouns,
the Butcher lacks any sense of a self. After some prodding, Rydra learns that
the Butcher’s aphasia is linked to amnesia. At some point in the past he had
committed a rash of robberies and murders, seemingly under hypnosis, and
had previously spoken some other language, now forgotten, that conditioned
his current aphasia: “your speech patterns now must be based on your old
276 J. FITZPATRICK
language or you would have learned about I and you just from picking up
new words” (150). After various feints and false leads that extend the nov-
el’s plot enough to keep it interesting, Rydra puts everything together. The
Butcher’s previous language was Babel-17, a sophisticated weapon that brain-
washes its speakers through a method that brilliantly combines Whorfian
and Weaverian theories. Comparing Babel-17 to computer programming
languages, Rydra explains that “[t]he lack of an ‘I’ precludes any self-critical
process,” making it impossible to resist the “preset program” contained in
the language’s semantics; thus, “While thinking in Babel-17 it becomes per-
fectly logical to try and destroy your own ship and then blot out the fact
with self-hypnosis so you won’t discover what you’re doing and try and stop
yourself” (214–5). This last point connects back to the Sapir–Whorf logic of
linguistic isolation, hinted at in Rydra’s use of Basque, and developed here
into a partitioning of the mind into linguistic zones cordoned off from one
another. Babel-17 “‘programs’ a self-contained schizoid personality into the
mind of whoever learns it, reinforced by self-hypnosis—which seems the sen-
sible thing to do since everything else in the language is ‘right,’ whereas any
other tongue seems so clumsy” (215–6). Rydra temporarily resists this split-
ting thanks to her linguistic knack and figures out how to free the Butcher
and herself from the schizoid Babel-17 personality. Without “any self-critical
process,” the Babel-17 mind is unable to cope with the sorts of self-referential
logical paradoxes described by Bertrand Russell, since it is incapable of think-
ing “I can’t solve the problem” (209). Not only are linguistic personalities
imprisoned in their own sections of the brain, they are also stuck within the
linguistic code itself, deprived of the metalinguistic faculty that would let
them identify the problematic terms and revise them—as Russell’s theory of
types had proposed.3 Rydra has found these problematic terms in Babel-17
and communicates them to her colleagues, who feed paradoxes to the Babel-
17 portions of her mind and the Butcher’s, causing them to run in loops until
they burn out and relinquish control.
Conclusion
In concocting this wonderfully arcane scenario, Delany offers a new per-
spective on Whorf and Weaver. For Jakobson, the thesis of untranslatabil-
ity was easily refuted by pointing to the metalinguistic faculty that is part of
the human linguistic capacity. Delany short circuits this refutation with his
own Russellian twist: supposing that language determines thought, we can
imagine a language that would determine it in such a way as to counteract or
deactivate the metalinguistic faculty. Such a language might be learnable and
even translatable into English, but there would be no guarantee of translat-
ability, meaning that it could become (under just the wrong circumstances)
exactly the kind of linguistic prison predicted by Sapir–Whorf. With their
metalinguistic faculties disrupted, Rydra and the Butcher no longer seem
human: Rydra’s solution to the problem transforms her and the Butcher into
malfunctioning computers stuck on a poorly written piece of code. Given the
novel’s careful intertwining of Whorf and Weaver, this obvious limitation of
computers is worth examining. Weaver’s cryptographic-translation idea was
predicated on treating syntax as a logical system—the same project that had
been originally been disrupted by Russell’s metalinguistic paradoxes. So, does
the metalinguistic faculty cause problems for Weaver too? In a sense, it does.
Shannon’s information theory assumes the existence of a code that has been
defined explicitly in some metalanguage. For instance, “One if by land, and
two if by sea” uses the metalanguage of English to define a code in the object
language of lanterns—a code with only two possible messages. Because the
object-language code is well-defined at the technical level, questions of mean-
ing are entirely deferred to the metalinguistic code: meaning appears only in
English, not in lanterns. When we try to extend Shannon’s theory to nat-
ural languages, we immediately run into a problem: for a native speaker of
(say) English, the linguistic code is defined by no metalanguage other than
itself. Any meanings that will be conveyed must, therefore, be conveyed in
the object-language itself—something obviously impossible in the lantern
language that has only two possible messages, and similarly unlikely in the
simple binary codes described by Shannon. According to Jakobson, the meta-
linguistic capacity refutes any thesis of untranslatability; here, the absence of
a separate metalanguage to which we can defer questions of meaning should
mitigate any hope that statistical manipulation at the technical level could
solve any problem for which meaning is central—including problems of
translation.
For Delany, though, and for the novel, these details are less important than
the obviously dehumanizing effects of Babel-17, especially on the Butcher.
Sf—like its literary cousin, the gothic—has always opened itself to psychol-
ogizing readings. Shelley’s Frankenstein isn’t just about a monster, or even
about the hubris of its creator: it has always revealed fantasies and anxieties,
about its author, its historical moment, and the cultures fascinated by it. We
don’t expect science fiction texts to reveal such things about whatever sci-
entific theories they use in their plot construction, but this is exactly what
Babel-17 does. Looking back at the mid-twentieth century, it’s easy to see the
pressure new linguistic theories were placing on traditional humanist notions
of rationality, selfhood, and agency. Whorf argued that language is not a tool
used by already-formed subjects to express themselves, but rather a thing that
constitutes subjectivity, always exceeding or subverting intentions, always par-
tially external and in some sense alien to its users. In other words, his theory
is not just an extension of Humboldt and Herder, but also part of the cri-
tique of language and self we can see so clearly in Freud and Heidegger—
and subsequently in Lacan, Benveniste, Foucault, and others. The pressure
from Weaver’s theory is even easier to see. The emergence of algorithmic
models of logic and rationality had already begun to undermine the idea that
278 J. FITZPATRICK
reason was a uniquely human faculty. Weaver’s speculations, along with Alan
Turing’s 1950 thought experiment of a computer playing the imitation game,
cast similar doubt on the uniqueness of the human faculty of language. If the
ability to use language separates humans from machines, then reducing lan-
guage to a cryptographic puzzle presents a radical challenge to our sense of
exceptionalism.
In Delany’s novel, the combination of Whorf and Weaver adds up to this
threat of lost humanity: Babel-17 transforms Rydra and the Butcher into
machines. The novel has a fairytale happy ending: the Butcher recovers his
personal pronouns and his identity, and Rydra “corrects” (218) Babel-17’s
grammatical traps to transform it into Babel-18, a language of pure logic—
like a perfected Loglan. Selfhood and sovereignty are restored, language is
once again a tool. The catch, subtle enough for the reader to miss, is that this
happy ending is only possible by virtue of Rydra’s unexplained knack. The
product of a neurological illness, this knack gives Rydra her mind reading
abilities, lets her learn Babel-17 from a set of audio recordings, and eventu-
ally enables her to resist, outsmart, and domesticate the language. On the
one hand, then, it is an impossible super power, a pure wish fulfillment that
re-establishes human beings as masters of language—a deus ex machina in the
guise of non-mechanistic human exceptionalism.
But Rydra’s knack is also motivated within the text: as the novel mentions
repeatedly, it is what makes her a great poet. For the scholars we’ve exam-
ined, poetry is always exceptional. Jakobson regarded poetry as a paradigm
for the small class of utterances that genuinely are untranslatable; Kroeber
treated Whorf’s thesis as an “aesthetic” one, granting that Whorf had a
“touch of genius”; Weaver limited his cryptographic-translation idea to tech-
nical texts, excluding “poetry” as too non-logical for a computer. In the
1950s, poetry was an easy metonym for naming whatever spark of creativ-
ity separated—and must always separate—human beings from the machines
and algorithms that were increasingly thought capable of imitating human
thought. More broadly, Jamie Cohen-Cole (2014) has pointed to the impor-
tance for American social sciences during the Cold War of the notion of an
“open mind”: a flexible and creative quality of mind that was both constitu-
tive of human cognition (especially language use) and something that could
be cultivated as a defense against the deadening conformity and bureauc-
ratization that lurked in the American social order (and already defined the
Soviet one). Commitment to this ideal of an open mind and to the liberal
subject it sought to buttress helps to explain why psychologists like Fearing
and Lenneberg were so quick to dismiss Whorf and why Norbert Wiener
was hesitant to fully embrace Weaver (for the latter, see Hayles 1999, ch. 4).
The radically antihumanist implications of these theories could be kept at
bay: Whorf’s theory would be true for computers, but not for humans who
have this additional capacity of metalinguistic creativity; Weaver’s theory
could work for sufficiently simple texts, but it will falter as the texts’ semantic
ambiguity approaches that of poetry.
In a sense, then, the relationship between Delany’s Babel-17 and the lin-
guistic theories that inspired it turns out to be surprisingly reciprocal. The
theories themselves—produced on the academy’s margins, debated in inter-
disciplinary contexts with few overlapping conceptual frameworks, pursued
more for their future promise than for any empirically verifiable plausibility—
were already closer to science fiction than to science. Their scholarly articu-
lations focus on a series of relationships among abstract entities (language,
thought worlds, information, probability, translatability) that become the
material for Delany’s novel. The novel, in turn, reorganizes these abstractions
around psychologizing structures of character and action, and in doing so
helps to reveal the ideological hopes and fears that the theories had largely
succeeded in repressing.
Notes
1. This phrase is quoted from Meyers (1980).
2. This 2001 edition was slightly revised from the 1966 first edition to better
reflect Delany’s intentions. While some of the wording and formatting discussed
here are unique to the later edition, the overall argument holds for the 1966
text. All citations of Babel-17 refer to the later edition.
3. Quine (1962) offers a lucid and thorough explanation of how certain paradoxes
can be resolved by careful metalinguistic bookkeeping along lines devised by
Russell, in which the semantic range of words such as “true” is constrained so
as to prevent them from applying to the sentence that contains them. Strangely,
the barber paradox mentioned in Babel-17 doesn’t actually require such book-
keeping. Quine points out that the proposition claiming “there exists a barber
who shaves only those men who do not shave themselves” is simply false: since
the predicate is impossible, the barber must not exist.
Bibliography
Bould, Mark. 2009. Language and Linguistics. In The Routledge Companion to Science
Fiction, ed. Mark Bould et al., 225–235. London: Routledge.
Brown, James Cook. 1960. Loglan. Scientific American 202 (6) (June): 53–63.
Brown, Roger W., and Eric H. Lenneberg. 1954. A Study in Language and
Cognition. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49 (3): 454–462.
Cameron, Deborah. 1999. Linguistic Relativity: Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Return
of the Repressed. Critical Quarterly 41 (2): 153–156.
Cohen-Cole, Jamie. 2014. The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of
Human Nature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Darnell, Regna. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist, Humanist. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Delany, Samuel L. 2001. Babel-17. New York, NY: Vintage.
Deutscher, Guy. 2010. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in
Other Languages. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt and Co.
Eco, Umberto. 1995. The Search for the Perfect Language, trans. James Fentress.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
280 J. FITZPATRICK
Evans, Vyvyan. 2014. The Language Myth: Why Language Is Not an Instinct.
Feuer, Lewis S. 1953. Sociological Aspects of the Relation Between Language and
Philosophy. Philosophy of Science 20: 85–100.
Gleick, James. 2011. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. New York, NY:
Pantheon Books.
Gordin., M.D. 2015. Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global
English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayles, N.Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hoijer, Harry, ed. 1954. Language in Culture: Proceedings of a Conference on
the Interrelations of Language and Other Aspects of Culture. Special Issue, The
American Anthropological Association 56 (6, part 2) (December).
Jakobson, Roman. 1959. On Linguistic Aspects of Translation. In On Translation, ed.
Reuben A. Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Joseph, John E. 2002. From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American
Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Kay, Lily E. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Kline, Ronald R. 2015. The Cybernetic Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the
Information Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Leavitt, John. 2011. Linguistic Relativities: Language Diversity and Modern Thought.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2005. Science Fiction. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Martin-Nielsen, Janet. 2012. “It Was All Connected”: Computers and Linguistics in
Early Cold War America. In Cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal
Democracy, and Human Nature, ed. Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, 63–78.
New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan.
Meyers, Walter Earl. 1980. Aliens and Linguists: Language Study and Science Fiction.
Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
McWhorter, John H. 2014. The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any
Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct. New York: NY: William Morrow and
Co.
———. 2007. The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. NY:
Viking.
Quine, W. V. 1962. Paradox. Scientific American 206 (4) (April): 84–99.
Rollins, Peter C. 1980. Benjamin Lee Whorf: Lost Generation Theories of Mind,
Language, and Religion. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International.
Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. Schools of Linguistics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Schultz, Emily A. 1990. Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf‚ Bakhtin‚ and Linguistic
Relativity. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of
Communication. Urbana: The University of Illinois Press.
Soni, Jimmy, and Rob Goodman. 2017. A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon
Invented the Information Age. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Stephenson, Neal. 1992. Snow Crash. New York, NY: Bantam Books.
Steiner, George. 1975. After Babel. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Turing, Alan. 1950. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind 49: 433–460.
Vance, Jack. 1958. The Languages of Pao. New York: Avalon Books.
Weaver, Warren. 1955. Translation. In Machine Translation of Languages: Fourteen
Essays, ed. William N. Locke and A. Donald Booth, 15–23. Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press.
Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1952. Collected Papers on Metalinguistics. Washington, DC:
Department of State Foreign Service Institute.
———. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee
Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of MIT.
Wiener, Norbert. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin.
CHAPTER 16
Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science:

Maturana, Varela, Cervantes
Avery Slater
The term “autopoiesis” was introduced to the academic world in the 1970s
by the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Since
then it has spread far beyond its discipline of origin in theoretical biology,
diffusing widely across the humanities and social sciences, and continuing to
find traction today. Why has this term been so useful? Maturana and Varela’s
tenet of autopoiesis was designed to describe the process of self-generation
and self-maintenance in living cellular organisms. The most irreducible cel-
lular property, Maturana and Varela argue, is the cell’s ability to manufacture
any of the components from which they are composed through processes
conducted solely within their interiors.1 In this, they hoped to dwell on
the nature of life’s autonomy, “the self-asserting capacity of living systems
to maintain their identity through the active compensation of deforma-
tions,” which, while seemingly self-evident of cellular organisms, nonethe-
less presented “the most elusive of their properties” (Maturana and Varela
1980: 73). One attraction, then, across disciplines has been that autopoiesis
offers a general model for systemic persistence, inertia, and survival.
What is the organic and biological meaning of an organism’s persistence
in its sameness? The importance of the cell’s purposeful maintenance of iden-
tity across time, Maturana and Varela felt, had been obscured for scientists by
Aristotle, whose metaphysics “endow[ed] living systems with a non-material
purposeful driving component” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 74). Maturana
A. Slater (*) 
Department of English, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

284 A. SLATER
argues that “notions of purpose, function or goal are unnecessary and mis-
leading” in examining the structure of cells (Maturana 1980: xix). Autopoiesis
would make available this unique property of organisms as designers of their
own autonomy. “We maintain that living systems are machines,” Maturana
and Varela write—and yet this is to be understood in a non-animistic, non-in-
strumental sense (1980: 76). Unlike tools, machines, or factories, they write,
“living systems, as physical autopoietic machines, are purposeless systems”
(1980: 86).
It was primarily Niklas Luhmann’s work in systems theory in the 1980s
and 1990s that helped the “purposeless” autonomy of autopoiesis tran-
sition from being a purely scientific concept to finding popularity in the
social sciences and then the humanities. From this bio-theoretical concept,
Luhmann crafted a portable methodology for thinking about systems at
their most abstract levels of interaction (see especially Luhmann 1984, 1990,
1995). For Luhmann, autopoiesis allowed the social-scientific discipline of sys-
tems theory to shift from its “interest in design and control to an interest
in autonomy and environmental sensitivity, from planning to evolution, from
structural stability to dynamic stability” (1984 [1995]: 10). With autopoie-
sis, Luhmann hoped to imbue systems theory with “a theory of the organ-
ism” that derived from computer science, cybernetics, and other experimental
sciences (1984 [1995]: 10–11). After Luhmann, literary theorist Cary Wolfe
has been among the most influential advocates for using autopoiesis within
literary criticism (2008, 2010). Inspired and energized by these methods,
recent studies have used the concept of autopoiesis to examine literary works
from e. e. cummings to Kafka and Samuel Beckett (Moe 2011; Schmid 2016;
de Vos 2018), with the concept of autopoiesis finding many applications in
lyric studies. Regarding literature autopoietically means, among other things,
seeing “literature as an experiment in which language is constituted… as
organon and as model of composition” (Homann, 187).2 Renate Homann
has proposed a “heautonomic autopoietic” approach to modern lyric, empha-
sizing lyric’s distinctive capacity to “self-organize,”3 and Marjorie Levinson
(2018) makes use of autopoiesis to examine Romantic poetry in compel-
ling new ways.4 In theater and performance studies, Erika Fischer-Lichte
(2008) uses autopoiesis to plumb the aesthetic sphere’s phenomenological
power, revealing the performative use of “autopoietic feedback loops”
in contemporary theater. Autopoiesis as methodological trope has informed
recent work in disciplines as diverse as phenomenology and cognitive science
(Di Paolo 2005), critical legal studies (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2014),
and critical accounting studies (Gårseth-Nesbakk 2011). How can the wide-
ranging influence of this concept best be understood?
This chapter traces the literary-scientific genealogy of the term a
utopoiesis,
emphasizing the irreducible importance of literary studies to the birth of
this scientific concept. Previous studies have illuminated how this term’s
interdisciplinary portability arose from the specific concerns of post-
war cybernetics (Medina 2011), information theory (Paulson 1988), and,
16 AUTOPOIESIS BETWEEN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE … 285
crucially, the mutating nature of disciplinarity itself during this period

(Wellbery 2009; see also Clarke 2019). In discussing these developments,
this present study of autopoiesis will also factor in a crucial and, until now,
neglected detail concerning literature’s own, foundational influence on the
creation of this scientific paradigm. Indeed, as this chapter will show, even
while literary critics now appear to “borrow” the term autopoiesis from the
methods of the biological sciences, in fact they are borrowing it back. When
biologist Humberto Maturana narrates the origins of this term, his story
begins with an illuminating encounter: with early modern Spanish author
Miguel de Cervantes and his novel Don Quixote.
Why Autopoiesis?
Luhmann once related the following story for how and why this term
autopoiesis arose in the biological sciences:
Why ‘autopoiesis?’ Maturana once told me how this expression came to his
mind. Initially he had worked with circular structures, with the concept of a
circular reproduction of the cell. The word ‘circular’ is a common one that does
not create further terminological problems, but for Maturana it lacked pre-
cision. Then a philosopher, on the occasion of a dinner or some other social
event, gave him a little private lecture on Aristotle. The philosopher explained
to him the difference between ‘praxis’ and ‘poiesis.’ ‘Praxis’ is an action
that includes its purpose in itself as an action. […] ‘Poiesis’ was explained to
Maturana as something that produces something external to itself—namely, a
product. […] Maturana then found the bridge between the two concepts and
spoke of ‘autopoiesis,’ of a poiesis as its own product—and he intentionally
emphasized the notion of a ‘product.’ […] what is meant here is a system that is
its own product. (2009: 151)
While Luhmann’s anecdote follows Maturana and Varela’s own accounts,

it unfortunately does not record one of the most crucial details from this
moment between Maturana and (here unnamed) philosopher. In Maturana’s
separate description, this conversation took place in the context of his student
Varela’s returned to Chile after time spent in research at Harvard University.
Maturana speculated with Varela on the necessity for biologists to retheorize
the nature of living organisms from a new perspective:
Shortly after that long conversation [with Varela] I went to visit a friend, José
María Bulnes, who was both a historian and a philosopher. He was writing an
essay about the dilemma of Don Quixote de la Mancha who had to decide for
himself whether to become a wandering knight or a writer of novels of knight-
hood. Don Quixote decided to become a wandering knight, and, as my friend
put it, he chose the praxis of being a knight over the “poiesis” of writing.
At that moment I said aloud: “That is the word I need; that is the word I was
looking for.” […] Next day I told Francisco that I had found the word that
286 A. SLATER
I needed to refer to what made living systems autonomous entities…

I continued: “If we want to formalize what happens in living beings, we need
first to write a full description of the processes that we claim are taking place
in them such that the result is that we see living systems appearing in front of
us.” And then I added: “I invite you to write this with me.” The result of this
endeavor is what we published as the little book, De Máquinas y Seres Vivos
[On Machines and Living Beings]. (2012: 160)
Maturana elsewhere relates of this revelation from Don Quixote, “I under-

stood for the first time the power of the word ‘poiesis’ and invented the word
that we needed: autopoiesis” (1980: xvii).5 In his excitement for this new
word derived through Don Quixote’s inspiration, Maturana enthuses, “This
was a word without a history, a word that could directly mean what takes
place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to living systems” (1980: xvii,
emphasis added). This eureka in conversation with philosopher Bulnes led
directly to Maturana’s seminal essay on autopoiesis, co-written in 1972 with
his scientific collaborator Varela.
While Maturana bases this “word without a history” on a very spe-
cific reading of Don Quixote, one might question whether one can take for
granted that the protagonist pseudo-knight is (truly) deciding between the
path of reflective poiesis (the textual world of simulacral chivalry) and the
alternative path of praxis (practicing, performing, and being a knight of chiv-
alry). In another reading, the binary alternatives represented here may con-
stitute precisely the central ruse of this infamous novel: a meta-fictional work
concerned with fictional performativity—with the performing of fiction.
Again and again across the book, follies result from characters’ naive attempts
to differentiate between text and action. In Maturana’s description, the char-
acter of Don Quixote chooses the path of praxis over poiesis, performing
knightly deeds rather than simply reading about them. Yet, in its truest sense,
the term autopoiesis represents the blurred, non-separable aspects of textual
performativity: autopoiesis as a self-assembling praxis.
To properly describe the self-maintaining, self-organizing energies of
cellular organisms, Maturana takes the best word to be “autopoiesis…self-cre-
ation,” since “the product of the autopoietic organization of a system is that
very system itself” (2004: 97). As Maturana rephrases this in a later interview,
“The cell—an autopoietic system of the first order—is a factory that is its own
product” (2004: 98). The question of what “assembles” whom lies firmly
at the comedic center of Don Quixote—and its readers may be reminded of
the novel’s own (farcical) “factory” episode in which Don Quixote stumbles
upon a printshop in the act of printing the very book the reader is reading. In
this episode, we read how Don Quixote reads the story of Don Quixote (and
offers some corrections).6 Does Don Quixote stand inside or outside his own
eponymous story?
Certainly, this reflexivity has an analogue in the referential hall of mirrors
that constitutes Don Quixote’s plot. Yet as autopoiesis describes a peculiar
conflation of making and being, this concept also describes the very predic-
ament—the aporia, the failure—explored at every level of Don Quixote. The
more the “knight” Don Quixote chooses to “self-assemble,” the more ludi-
crously he lapses into impossibilities and (hilarious) contradictions. It can be
argued that precisely his delusions of self-fashioning form the central dramas
of the novel Don Quixote. Here, the world of the living and the world of
language are shown as irreconcilably at odds, their outcomes distinctive, and
their divergence comical. Other possibilities for reading Don Quixote’s liter-
ary “self-fashioning” will be raised toward the end of this chapter. For now,
seeing as Don Quixote occupies such an originary location in the development
of biological and cybernetic autopoiesis, we should explore how and why this
book could have seemed such an excellent text for analyzing living organisms
as being (informational/textual) “cells” that amount to their “own factory.”
Maturana and Varela hoped that by emphasizing factory-like production of
the self, autopoiesis would offer an entirely new view of an organism’s “pur-
pose”—rewriting the ways in which biology comprehended teleology among
living forms. Rather than regarding life’s ultimate telos as being reproduction,
recombination, and species-survival, this view of autopoiesis focuses on life’s
monadic power of “self-assembling,” the simple effort of being, in itself and
for itself. Autopoiesis thus redirected the life sciences’ earlier focus—from evo-
lution to existence. Autopoiesis, in this sense, offered a highly portable, trans-
latable concept to rapidly changing disciplinary understandings of social and
environmental systems, assemblages, and collectives in the second half of the
twentieth century. It also aligned well with emerging notions of agency/con-
trol promoted by influential postwar cyberneticians.
Cybernetics held as its primary analytic goal to be the study, theorization,
and design of self-regulating machines. From the common rheostat to the
lifelike bumbling of W. Grey Walter’s robotic tortoises (1950), the bound-
aries separating living organisms and machines were thoroughly (and often
exuberantly) blurred. Norbert Wiener, the movement’s founder, ascribes
cybernetics’ ascendance to its use of cross-disciplinary metaphors traded
among like-minded scientists, as “the vocabulary of the engineers soon
became contaminated with the terms of the neurophysiologist and the psy-
chologist” (15). In postwar cybernetics, Enlightenment-era philosophies of
mechanism combined with nineteenth-century vitalism, giving birth to fig-
ures such as the “cyborg.” These transformations in turn created demand for
languages better suited to this ascendant techno-ethos. Cybernetics created
its own set of keywords, as Ronald Kline (2006) and other historians of sci-
ence have shown. While the term cybernetics now seems dated, obsolete, or
unfamiliar, the interdisciplinary argot established by postwar cyberneticians
contributed some of the most enduring keywords and paradigms through
which we continue to articulate the digital and “post-human” era. Terms like
“information technology” can be traced directly to cybernetics, as Kline has
shown how “the marriage of computers and communications” along with
288 A. SLATER
cybernetics’ popularity laid the groundwork “to combine information… with

technology, a much older keyword that had only recently acquired the mean-
ing of a powerful social force” (2006: 514).7
Meanwhile, researchers in fields outside the hard sciences were also eager
to relate their own work to new developments in mathematics, computation,
information theory, and communications. Cybernetics’ interest in “negen-
tropy,” or the construction of stable order out of chaos, promised an opti-
mistic antidote to pre-war, modernist obsessions with entropy, a concept itself
derived from Victorian sciences. In the postwar, post-Fordist years, new tech-
nologies demanded new metaphors. Modernist “metanarratives” that had
pitted the eternal forces of dissolution and degeneration against domination,
will, and totalitarianism were swept aside for new models of “self-fashioning,”
“self-regulation,” and “homeostasis.” As political philosopher Karl Deutsch
advocates in the first issue of Synthese in 1949: “These new [cybernetic] mod-
els offer suggestive analogies for such relationships as ‘purpose,’ ‘learning,’
‘free will,’ ‘consciousness,’ and ‘social cohesion,’” suggesting future investi-
gations in these traditionally philosophic domains should “seek data for their
treatment in quantitative terms” rather than qualitative (512).8
Beginning from commendations such as this, autopoiesis and later systems
theory translated, updated, and kept in circulation many of the earliest cyber-
netic metaphors, helping these tropes survive to the present day. Alexander
Galloway and Eugene Thacker have shown how the rampant blending of
cybernetic discourses surrounding code and information created “forms of
communicability” working as transdisciplinary units mobilized from among
the tool-kits of often incongruous disciplines (26). With specific interest in
this term’s recent literary uses, my present inquiry into the intellectual his-
tory of autopoiesis tracks its disciplinarily optimized “communicability” to
some surprising places, tracing autopoiesis not only through its uses as origi-
nally designed but also the uses to which it has been put. The first half of this
literary-scientific genealogy presents applications, models, and methods that
have emerged from the biological concept of autopoiesis as promulgated by
Maturana and Varela, as Allende-era theoretical biologists in Chile.9
To return to the scientific borrowing of the term autopoiesis from a philoso-
pher’s reading of Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote’s theory of “self-fashioning”
could be viewed as a quintessential text concerned with the futility, the
absurdity of “self-fashioning.” Indeed, Don Quixote inspires in us nothing if
not a heightened awareness of those contingent social forces through which
we are fashioned—those texts, codes, and contexts lying outside us, unlike us,
even in the very likenesses we have learned to covet. Cervantes’s novel offers
a two-volume mockery of how messages elude us, how the masks that we
fashion expose us. The prodigal return of autopoiesis to its home in literary
studies reveals a compound nexus of literature and science, of fiction and the
problem of knowing. Nonetheless, by resituating autopoiesis, this chapter also
explores how new transmissions and permutations from this term’s sojourn in
the experimental sciences raise new sets of problems for literary critics today.
Before we arrive at the occulted relation between autopoiesis and Cervantes,
a better understanding is needed of the relation between cybernetics and the
quasi-philosophical concerns that lie behind this scientific trope.
Cybernetics Before Autopoiesis

In 1947, Georges Canguilhem, philosopher of science and teacher of
Foucault, gave a lecture on “Machine and Organism.” He began by address-
ing the transit of the philosophical term “organism” into the realm of the
biological sciences, resulting in the appearance today that “philosophy does
not have its own domain, that it is but speculation’s poor relation, obliged
to dress in clothes worn out and abandoned by scientists” (75). Canguilhem
goes on to argue that a theory of the organism is “philosophically more
important than its reduction to a matter of doctrine and method in biol-
ogy” (75). Yet, interestingly, one footnote later added to the “Machine and
Organism” lecture before its publication may imply that in the meantime
Canguilhem came across Maturana’s 1959 study “What the Frog’s Eye Tells
the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al. 1959). Canguilhem contextualizes this study
within the new Anglo-American science of cybernetics he calls bionics:
Bionics… born in the United States ten years ago, studies biological structures
and systems that can be used by technology as models or analogues, in particu-
lar, in the construction of devices for detection, orientation, or equilibration to
be used in airplane or missile equipment. Bionics is the art—very scientific—of
information that draws knowledge from living nature. The frog, with its selec-
tive eye for instantly usable information… [has] supplied a new species of engi-
neers with models. (175n68)
As Canguilhem implies, this “science” (or, “art—very scientific”) was a tem-

porary formation, a congeries of disciplines and methodologies all inspired by
a similar need to reconceptualize their objects of study in light of information
theory and other mathematical advances.
As Canguilhem also implies, this “science” was in the business of model
extraction. What, for example, might the model of the frog’s “selective eye”
have to say to “missile equipment”?10 Cybernetics was the science of following
and biologizing recent wartime applications of the mathematical sciences (cryp-
tography, computation, information theory). Within only a decade of cyber-
netic ferment, statistical mechanics had become the science of information
(Shannon and Weaver 1949), and the science of information had become a
new model for the science of life (Crick et al. 1957). These closely intertwined
developments in the organic and mathematical sciences stressed the impor-
tance of information, computation, and communications to understand the
functioning of organisms and their group relations. What biologists like J. S.
Haldane began to call “ethological cybernetics” (Haraway 1981–1982: 259)
290 A. SLATER
was a method for articulating the link between organisms and environments,
between equilibrium and survival.
But as many historians of science since have noted, the politics of cyber-
netic analogies cannot be overlooked. Cybernetics, since its founding con-
ference in 1946, was riddled with wartime motivations—such as Norbert
Wiener’s mathematical derivations of “homeostasis” from his work in auto-
mating anti-aircraft artillery.11 Donna Haraway has studied how these mar-
tial analogies shaped evolutionary biology in the postwar years, noting that
biologist E. O. Wilson’s work on ant behavior makes use of metaphors drawn
from “artillery analysis” and “naval gunnery strategies” (1981–1982: 260).
Haraway concludes that, in Wilson’s work, as with all cybernetically inspired
scientific inquiry, “The line between metaphor…and basic concept in science
is a tortured one, and the issue is important”; here, as elsewhere, these sci-
entists’ “metaphors… cannot be fundamentally distinguished” (1981–1982:
260). What imaginary did these indistinguishable metaphors enable? Haraway
relates how postwar sociobiology adopted a
theory of the machine-organism as command-control-communication system.

Coding and copying, communication and replication are the key concepts. […]
It is in relation to the concept of the cybernetic animal machine that the mod-
ern principle of natural selection must be understood… a discourse on physio-
logical organisms, ordered by the hierarchical sexual division of labor and the
principle of homeostasis, to a discourse on cybernetic technological systems,
ordered by communications engineering principles…. (1981–1982: 245)
The term “cyborg,” itself popularized by Haraway, provides an excellent

example of the unstable valences of terms, keywords, and interdisciplinary
metaphors surviving the cybernetic moment. First coined by Manfred E.
Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in their 1960 article “Cyborgs and Space” on
the exigencies of long-duration space-travel, this term describes a functional
“homeostasis” between astronaut and spacecraft allowing for both life sup-
port and navigation. Kept in tandem with the functioning of the machine that
carried them, the astronaut’s extended bodies would constitute “cyborgs”
[cybernetic organisms], capable of extraterrestrial travel. In one section of the
article entitled “Cyborg—Frees Man to Explore,” we are told “the devices
necessary for creating self-regulating man-machine systems” will be designed
to “function without the benefit of consciousness” with “the exogenously
extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic
system….” (27).
Ian Hacking later diagnoses a “persistent Cartesianism” in the Clynes/
Kline cyborg, noting how as cybernetic discourse “spins away from life on
earth,” it still preserves “a curious simulacrum of the original position, of
Descartes, God and the animal-machine” (213). The best-known critique
of these critiques originates with Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Manifesto for
Cyborgs,” published in the Socialist Register and subsequently reprinted in
many different outlets. Having already produced exhaustive scholarly histories

of cybernetics’ impact on scientific subfields such as primatology (Haraway
1983) and information theory (Haraway 1981–1982), Haraway took a dif-
ferent tack, encouraging readers to ironize cybernetics’ outsized, futuristic
totalizations. Haraway’s “Manifesto” promoted using cybernetic and cyborg
discourse against their usual grain, toward an anti-patriarchal, anti-racist,
socialist, ecofeminist politics.12 The problematic nature of the military-indus-
trial, cis-het-patriarchal dimensions lying behind the cyborg’s origin and pop-
ularity is made explicit in this manifesto:
Late-twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the differ-

ence between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and exter-
nally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and
machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly
inert. (5)
This has led to a situation in which “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us
our politics” (2). Yet, defying any totalizing worldview where environment
and organisms co-adjust in a closed system, Haraway asserts, “We do not
need a totality in order to work well” (28). She suggests, “Perhaps, ironi-
cally, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to
be Man, the embodiment of Western logos” (28, emphasis added). This
cyborgification of the radical (feminist) subject is, however, non-utopian and
“outside salvation history” (3). Haraway insists that even as “the certainty of
what counts as nature … is undermined, […] the alternative is not cynicism
or faithlessness” (5). Instead, she urges us to see that “who cyborgs will be is
a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and
artifacts have politics, so why shouldn’t we?” (5).13
What politics can be excavated, traced, pursued, or performed through the
ways that metaphors travel? How much noise enters in with each successive
shift in epistemic domain? Philosopher Michel Serres, in an early meditation on
the postwar sciences, notes that the popular cybernetic discourse on entropy
and thermodynamic systems “has the same form and function, let us say the
same syntax” drawn from their home disciplines, even after having “changed
domains. Instead of addressing the direct questions of matter and life, from
which, precisely, this language had developed, it brought that language within
the domain of the social sciences, language, and texts. Why?” (114). Serres’s
1960s investigation remains as important today, if not more so. One of cyber-
netics’ most important discursive shifts—from “homeostasis” (self-governed
equilibrium) toward autopoiesis (self-governed assemblage)—would bring its
“syntax” of autonomy and self-fashioning to a whole new chapter of sciences
and the humanities. “An organism is a system,” Serres concedes, but then
he qualifies this assertion, “The notion of system changes through history; it
occupies different positions within the encyclopedia” (113). What position will
autopoiesis occupy in future encyclopedias of literary theory?
292 A. SLATER
Serres notes the ease with which humanistic categories like “discourse,
writing, language, societal and psychic phenomena,” all became “acts which
one can describe as communication acts. It immediately became obvious, or
was taken as such, that a store of information transcribed on any given mem-
ory, a painting or a page, should drift by itself from difference to disorder….”
(115). In the same year as Serres, Michel Foucault would assert a qualifica-
tion to this zeitgeist-view of language’s “drift.” In his Order of Things, he
writes, “In the modern age, literature is that which compensates for (and
not that which confirms) the signifying function of language” (1970: 44).
Language has come under scrutiny in a new way: What kind of “system” can
this offer? Foucault traces the genealogy of language’s encounter with tech-
nology, such that after the Renaissance,
we no longer have that primary, that absolutely initial, word upon which the
infinite movement of discourse was founded… henceforth, language was to
grow with no point of departure [va croître sans depart], no end, and no prom-
ise. It is the traversal of this futile yet fundamental space that the text of litera-
ture traces…. (1966: 59, 1970: 44)
Even as linguistic structuralism stood poised at the threshold of poststructur-

alism’s new methods, Foucault turns to the literary example of none other
than Don Quixote: “[Don Quixote’s] adventures will be a deciphering of the
world… Each exploit must be a proof… an attempt to transform reality into
a sign” (47). In this, it seems, Don Quixote resembles the cyborg, the auto-
poietic organism, and the reader in the age of cybernetics, all in one. Is this
cyborg knight to be inside or outside “salvation history”? How will literary
studies inherit the politics and syntax of this autopoietic metaphor-machine?
The Uses of Autopoiesis

“…como yo soy aficionado a leer aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles”
[…since I’m always reading, even scraps of paper I find in the street.]
—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
(1999: 51; 2004: 85)
As discussed above, interest in metaphorical uses for cybernetic con-

cepts began almost immediately. In the Anglophone context, literary critic
Elizabeth Sewell was among the first to import the language of thermody-
namics to discuss the structure of poetry. Her 1951 book The Structure of
Poetry alludes to an information-theoretically described literary struggle
between internal order and external disorder, guiding poetry’s organism to
“turn language from an open system to a closed one” (62). In the Italian
context, Umberto Eco also popularized cybernetic thinking in his 1962 book
Open Work: Form and Indeterminacy in Contemporary Poetics. Practicing art-
ists of all kinds rethought their practice along cybernetic lines; as Rebecca
Gaydos has argued, “cybernetics, as an analogical style of thought, resonated

with postwar poets… interested in exploring the isomorphy between nonliv-
ing configurations…and living systems such as the live environment or the
poet’s body” (171).14
While cybernetics’ thermodynamically inflected language held early inter-
est for poet-critics like Muriel Rukeyser in her 1949 Life of Poetry and nov-
elists like Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man (1952),15 by the 1970s, perhaps
owing to its increased association with military defense spending (Edwards
1996), the political ethos associated with what Lily E. Kay terms “the war-
born fields of cybernetics” had altered (593).16 At this stage the radically
destabilizing valences of cybernetics that had initially caught the interest of
racialized (Ellison), queer (Rukeyser), and feminist (Sewell) thinkers under-
went a sort of white male interregnum: as Jasper Bernes (2017) glosses this
later moment, “If you were a white man and interested in experimentation in
prose fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, then you were probably writing about
machines, entropy, and information.” Literary critic David Porush (1985)
was among the first to diagnose the agonistic alliances between postmodern
literary forms and cybernetics.17 His subsequent work, showing the imprint
of ideas of autopoiesis, argues that textuality after cybernetics constitutes a
“biosocial phenomenon,” one among myriad “dissipative structures” in the
physical world, as “literary discourse becomes a model” for the universe’s
“complex unpredictability” (1991: 62, 80).18 In a renewed vogue for cyber-
netics, cybernetic readings of literature have been performed retroactively on
T.S. Eliot19 and Ezra Pound, looking at how modernists “attune” their audi-
ences to “cybernetic ways of reading” avant la lettre which can help readers
navigate the “data-saturated spaces of modernity” (Love 2016: 90).
As cybernetic science has given way to other forms of analysis, systems-the-
ory metaphors drawn from cybernetic biology gained new traction through
the term autopoiesis. As Luhmann, non-scientific popularizer of the term
explains, systems theory “always proceeds from a difference between system
and environment” (2009: 152). Luhmann states that autopoiesis uses “‘poie-
sis’ in a Greek or traditional and strict sense of production, the manufactur-
ing of a product, combined with ‘auto,’ which is to say that the system is its
own product”—“Maturana invented it. Varela took it over” (152). There is a
seeming circularity or tautology to the argument—one that Luhmann takes
as axiomatic: “The structures depend on operations because the operations
depend on structures” (149).20 For Luhmann, self-organization is “a circular
process: The structures can be formed only by its own operations because its
own structures in turn determine the operations” (149).21 Robot-tortoises all
the way down?
What bears most on this discussion of literary autopoiesis is that, while
language is an exemplary autopoietic system for Luhmann, for his think-
ing it remains the case that individual artworks—including linguistic ones—
are not autopoietic systems. Instead, artworks (taken individually) play with
294 A. SLATER
“codes,” the materials from which the “art-system” (in Luhmann’s terms)
has been made up. Luhmann draws an interesting parallel between artworks
and computers, stating neither can be considered autopoietic, since “auto-
poietic systems produce their own structures and are capable of specifying
their operations via these structures” (1995 [2000]: 185). Beginning from
Luhmann, critical models based on autopoiesis made a deep impact on the
discourse of the social sciences (Mingers 1995, 2014). Alan Wolfe, writing on
the vogue for autopoietic theories of justice following Luhmann, explains that
such “postmodern approaches to legal regulation” rework a line of thinking
drawn from “cybernetics, information theory, economics, population ecology,
quantum physics… artificial intelligence, DNA, and chaos theory” (365).
Nonetheless, even as autopoiesis grew more and more interdisciplinarily capa-
cious, debates persisted around the explanatory power of “autopoiesis” within
its home discipline of biology.22
Chemist Pier Luigi Luisi (2016) has traced the history of the term auto-
poiesis across a number of academic disciplines, noting that although
Maturana and Varela initially had trouble publishing their work outside
Chile, books on biological autopoiesis began to appear early in the 1980s
(e.g., Zelený 1980) with renowned biologist Lynn Margulis later adopting
autopoiesis as a fundamental tenet in her description of biological life.23 For
Margulis and her son Dorion Sagan, “Planetary physiology… is the autopoie-
sis of the cell writ large” (54). While autopoiesis is now better known, Luisi
explains that, because the social sciences began using the term “not always in
a very rigorous way,” experts in the hard sciences feel the term has become
“tainted by a new-age flavor” through its use by, for example, the Gaia move-
ment (2016: 125).24
As literary critic and historian of science Bruce Clarke explains of autopoie-
sis in its trajectory across the years, “its multifarious cultural history, itinerant
discursive career, and contrarian stance” have made it generative and intrigu-
ing to thinkers far outside the hard sciences, with its “countercultural vogue”
deriving precisely from the term’s “outsider status” in relation to mainstream
science (2012: 58). “From its inception in 1971 as a cybernetic theory of bio-
logical form, to its current presence on research fronts extending from immu-
nology to Earth system science to…a range of literary and cultural theories,”
Clarke writes, “the concept of autopoiesis has developed on the margins, not
in the strongholds, of mainstream Anglo-American science” (2012: 58). As
with the Gaia hypothesis, this contrarian stance at the margins has some-
times been in the service of ecological thinking. Political theorist William E.
Connelly espouses an autopoietic perspective as embracing the view that “the
planet, and indeed the cosmos, is replete with self-organizing, spatiotemporal
systems flowing at different speeds,” where planetary systems are “more frag-
ile, interdependent, and volatile than their fervent supporters imagine” (82).
Complicating this sanguine view of ecological and social autopoie-
sis is the ambivalence of one of its founders, biologist Francisco Varela, to
the cross-disciplinary use of this term. At a 1988 symposium in Italy, Varela
criticized the rigor of the Gaia theory, and he expressed his discomfort at
social applications of “autopoiesis,” pointing out the dangers in rethinking
society as totalizable in the manner of organisms (Clarke 2012).25 Others
have diagnosed a persistence of Romantic vision across the many discipli-
nary translations and rebrandings of autopoiesis, cybernetics, and vitalism. As
social theorist Patricia Clough (2008) has argued, the age of the “biomed-
iated body” with its new posthumanist theorizations has rendered obsolete
what she feels is a nineteenth-century urge to designate autopoiesis as indis-
pensable to life.26 William Paulson, too, maintains, “Nothing really justifies
calling the literary text a living organism,” noting that the Romantic fragment
was in fact a move in away from “the poem-as-organism fallacy” (136).
Yet other theorists such as writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter have taken
a renewed look at the discourse of autopoiesis. Wynter describes every human
order as an “autopoietic, autonomously functioning, languaging, living system”
(32, emphasis in original), making use of the neologistic term “languaging”
from Maturana and Varela’s later work on social being. Here, they theorize
that, “as a phenomenon of languaging in the network of social and linguistic
coupling, the mind is not something that is within my brain. Consciousness
and mind belong to the realm of social coupling. That is the locus of their
dynamics” (Maturana and Varela 1987: 234). Wynter casts culture as “genre-
specific orders of truth” that “motivate, semantically-neurochemically, […]
the ensemble of individual and collective behaviors needed to dynamically
enact and stably replicate each such fictively made eusocial human order” (32,
emphasis in original). Wynter asserts that “when we speak in Western terms
about cultures, we are also talking about… that principle’s always already cos-
mogonically chartered sociogenic replicator code of symbolic life/death that
each culture auto-institutes itself as a genre-specific autopoietic field” (30,
emphasis in original).
In this, she parallels what we might call the posthuman humanism of
Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova’s (2000) critique of the term autopoiesis
as offering a euphemistic meme that disguises the truth of “control societies”
(in the Deleuzian sense).27 As Parisi and Terranova stress, “It is important
not to confuse a body with the organism,” since “a body is not pre-given,”
rather, it “emerges within a process of relations (including relations of power)
which defines its singularity” (n.p.). For Wynter, thinking autopoietically
means thinking both ecologically and socially within a historically contin-
gent environment, a critical method or a praxis that can help us “relativize
being human” (30, emphasis in original). We must keep this “relativization of
human-being” in mind as we move forward into the past—of the many bor-
rowings and re-borrowings of autopoiesis across disciplines, time, and texts.
As historian of science Evelyn Fox Keller highlights in her own intellec-
tual history of the rise of cybernetic metaphors in science, a 1958 formu-
lation by Francis Crick is allegorically relevant: “Once ‘information’ has
passed into protein, it cannot get out again” (cited in Keller 164n30). But
in this seemingly one-way communication channel, code and transcription,
296 A. SLATER
Crick was alluding to a more complex process: the fact that the regulation
of DNA information is exerted not at the level of the code but at the level of
the RNA: modification, splicing, translation—occurrences called “posttrans-
lational events” (Keller 164n30).28 With Parisi, Terranova, and Wynter, we
should remember that to confuse the body with the organism would make
us miss the “posttranslational events” performed by the body and upon the
body, whether as organism or as social being. This gives rise to the question:
Who is this self, or, where is the locus of this (embodied) self, living through
and dwelling by means of this “auto”-poiesis? Further to this, when does it
become necessary to ask: Who or where is the allo-, the “other” to this body?
Autopoiesis: Return to a “A Word Without a History”

Luhmann’s systems theory draws on many diverse intellectual predeces-
sors and sees itself as extending the structural functionalism drawn from the
sociological theory of Talcott Parsons in particular (1949, 1991). As
Luhmann explains, the impetus for systems theory did not come from within
sociology, rather, “from thermodynamics and biology as a theory of the
organism, later from neurophysiology, histology, computer science, and fur-
ther, of course, from interdisciplinary amalgamations like information the-
ory and cybernetics” (1984 [1995]: 10–11). Importing autopoiesis as a term
from Maturana and Varela’s theoretical biology, “If we abstract from life
and define autopoiesis as a general form of system building using self-refer-
ential closure, we would have to admit that there are nonliving autopoietic
systems…in other modes of circularity and self-reproduction,” Luhmann
believes (1990: 2).29 Clarke carries these implications to their furthest extent,
writing: “Both psychic and social systems are higher-order natural systems
self-producing their metabiotic forms only within the medium of living sys-
tems. The autopoietic ‘selves’ of psychic and social systems are not organic
but systemic—co-emergent, co-evolving, functionally bounded differen-
tial forms of virtual autopoiesis spun off from the literal metabolic looping
of living systems” (2012: 74).
Maturana, working as a university lecturer in Chile in the 1960s, was
already searching for a way to explain to students “the invariant feature of
living systems” (1980: xiii). He remembers speaking for the first time in 1969
of living systems as deriving their unities from the “basic circularity of their
production of their components” (1980: xiv). Cellular invariance seemed to
have the structure of a tautology, a seemingly nonsensical yet fundamental
quality of life. Maturana needed to express life’s autonomy without getting
caught in describing its functions; he experienced this as a linguistic prob-
lem: “one can only say with a given language what the language permits.
I had to stop looking at living systems as open systems defined in an envi-
ronment, and I needed a language that… retained autonomy as a feature of
the system” (1980: xiii). Maturana, a co-author on Lettvin et al.’s important
neurophysiological paper during his time at Harvard in the 1950s, had

learned that this new approach “required us to treat seriously the activity
of the nervous system as determined by the nervous system itself, and not
by the external world” (1980: xv). This study found of the four perception
bundles of nerves in a frog’s eye, that “the language in which they are best
described is the language of complex abstractions from the visual image”
(Lettvin et al., p. 1951). In other words, sensation was already abstraction,
already specified in an ongoing evolutionary conversation with survival and
environment. This study had contributed to Maturana’s realization that “one
had to close off the nervous system to account for its operation, and that per-
ception should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality, but rather
as the specification of one, because no distinction was possible between per-
ception and hallucination” (1980: xv). Maturana began to think about cog-
nition itself as a biological problem. This problem, however, would be one
of abstractions, patterns flowing in material parts and not the makeup of the
parts themselves.30
When Maturana and his student Varela developed their theory of autopoie-
sis, they insisted on seeing living systems as machines, since “the organiza-
tion of a machine is independent of the properties of its components” (1980:
77). For their theory, abstract machinic unity rather than material contin-
gency must take priority in the analysis in cellular organization. This machinic
unity may be best understood along the lines expressed by Canguilhem: “A
mechanism is a configuration of solids in motion such that the motion does
not abolish the configuration” (76–77). Maturana and Varela similarly define
their autopoietic machines with attention to sequential function:
Such machines are homeostatic machines and all feedback is internal to them.
[…] An autopoietic machine is a machine organized… as a network of processes of
production… of components that produces the components which… constitute it (the
machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they (the components) exist….”.
(Maturana and Varela 1980: 78–79, emphasis in original)
Emphasizing that an autopoietic entity is one that “specifies the topological

domain of its realization,” Maturana and Varela maintain the importance of a
concrete boundary within which living self-production occurs.31
Maturana, Varela, and cybernetician Ricardo B. Uribe later stress the
boundary of the living organism as they summarize the necessary condi-
tions for determining whether a given unity is autopoietic: (1) Has identifi-
able boundaries, (2) Its unity is of describable components (otherwise it is
a non-autopoietic “unanalyzable whole”), (3) Has mechanistic unity across
component interactions, (4) Boundary is created by “preferential neigh-
borhood relations and interactions between themselves”—i.e., not creating
a separate boundary, (5) All components of entity’s boundary are self-pro-
duced, and (6) Entity components are produced by interactions of its own
components (1974: 192–93). Autopoiesis is realized only when the network
298 A. SLATER
systemic units have entirely produced themselves inside the space of the self.
“Thus, the cell as a physical unity, topographically and operationally separate
from the background” is undergoing a “permanent turnover of material”
(188). While “[a]n autopoietic system uses its components as elements of
self-creation,” (Maturana 2004: 99), it cannot help but to unfold this cease-
less self-building process within the irreversible dimension of time. Yet this
time, Maturana notes, was mercifully free of epistemological requisites for
“transcendence” such as species-reproduction, evolution, or other teleologies
of more spiritual form: “We were living a very particular time in biology and
philosophy. For the first time in history, it was possible to talk about living
beings…without having to invent some transcendental explanatory princi-
ples” (2012: 160). Living things could simply live. Is this true in the same
way of language and languaging? Maturana has called this faculty “the most
basic mystery of our human life: language and cognition as biological phe-
nomena” (2012: 159). Yet, in a final question, then, for whether autopoiesis
as offers us a “word without a history”: if autopoiesis describes the process
of living bodies immersed within time, can this term abjure any reference to
these bodies’ history? If autopoiesis describes the cell’s being in time/across
time, does “languaging” cross time in exactly the same way? If not, in what
ways will life and language diverge?
Self-Assembly in Don Quixote

“…los libros autores del daño.”
[“…the books, true authors of the damage.”]
(Cervantes 1999: 34; 2004: 60)
Don Quixote is a novel about a man created by the texts he reads. Yet, as
Foucault notes of Don Quixote’s predicament, “all those extravagant
romances are, quite literally, unparalleled: no one in the world ever did resem-
ble them; their infinite language [leur langage infini] remains suspended,
unfulfilled by any similitude; they could all be burned in their entirety and
the form [figure] of the world would not be changed” (1966: 60–61; 1970:
46–47).32 These texts never seem to add up to a whole: In fact, the novel
stages several, memorable, meta-narrational interruptions of its own tale. This
novel, in which literary reflexivity arguably is the subject matter, famously hits
a diegetic aporia as its plotline moves between Chapters 8 and 9. Chapter 8
abruptly breaks off mid-battle between Don Quixote and a Basque man. True
to Don Quixote’s “illness” of imitating literature, this battle has been pro-
voked by his acting out a story about a knight who fights using an oak-tree
branch as a lance (a story which arose in Don Quixote’s mind following his
famous failure of lance-battling with windmills at the chapter’s beginning).
Cervantes suddenly breaks off with the novel’s fabula, writing: “the trouble
with all this is that, at this exact point, at these exact words, the original author
of this history left the battle suspended” (49).33 Cervantes (as original author)
attributes to a fictious original author this interruption of the narrative—blam-
ing a lack of sources. Just as Don Quixote found himself at the chapter’s open-
ing being hauled up and dashed down from the windmill-sails he ran his lance
at, so here at chapter’s end Don Quixote’s own plotline is seized, held aloft,
suspended [pendiente] by a fictional machinery feigning the practices of histor-
ical documentation. In Georg Lukács’s analysis of Don Quixote, “the subject,
too, becomes a fragment; only the ‘I’ continues to exist, but its existence is
then lost in the insubstantiality of its self-created world of ruins” (53).
Chapter 9 picks up again—but not where Don Quixote’s battle left off,
rather, where the author had left off—searching the city’s markets for the rest
of the fragmented “history.” Of course, as readers we understand that the
novel Don Quixote has not been interrupted, even if its plotline has. Meta-
narrational and meta-fictional devices are so prevalent in Don Quixote that
Lukács calls its composition “the paradoxical fusion of heterogeneous and
discrete components into an organic whole which is then abolished over and
over again” (84).34 Indeed, in the spirit of such a reading, to understand the
novel Don Quixote as inspiring the theory of cellular autopoiesis—a prop-
erty by which organisms produce and maintain themselves within their own
boundaries, from their own materials—counter-intuitive. Autopoiesis’s tenet
of self-creating autonomy is one that the writer Cervantes is only too happy
to confound at every stage of his “knightly” hero’s escapades. In Jacques
Lezra’s analysis of Cervantes, any desire for meaning’s wholeness produces
double-binds, since Cervantes “both requires that the relation between tex-
tual and historical events be read as an allegory and makes it impossible to
understand this allegory as representing, relying upon, or producing the con-
sonance of part and totality” (156).
Don Quixote’s quest would make the world into a book, only to find
it annulled or diverging from the expected plotline time and again. For
Foucault, this novel abolishes a whole prior realm of textual hermeneutics, as
the premodern text of resemblance and fidelity (in his analysis) is left behind
by the modern text of disjuncture and regress. Foucault writes, “Don Quixote
is the first modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of
identities and differences make endless sport [se jouer à l’infini] of signs and
similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship [parenté] with
things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in
its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resem-
blance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one
of irrationality [déraison] and imagination” (1966: 62; 1970: 48–49).35 The
book he would become keeps breaking. Lukács sees a modernist parable in
Don Quixote’s ideational mirages, sustained even when strongly disproven by
“the real nature of the existing world, the self-maintaining, organic life that is
alien to all ideas” (100).
300 A. SLATER
Cervantes writes of the damages Don Quixote sustains by presuming liter-

ature faithfully represents a viable system
Indeed, his mind was so tattered and torn that, finally, it produced the strangest
notion any madman ever conceived, and then considered it not just appropriate
but inevitable. As much for the sake of his own greater honor as for his duty to
the nation, he decided to turn himself into a knight errant. (15)
Consumed by his system of romances, Don Quixote certainly models “a

closed domain of relations specified only with respect to the autopoietic
organization that these relations constitute”—and clearly he lives in a world
where the “space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and can-
not be described by using dimensions that define another space” (Maturana
and Varela 1980: 88, 89). Immediately in the next chapter, “his determina-
tion wavered, he fairly staggered under these realizations” that not himself
but someone else was required to dub him a knight errant (Cervantes 1999:
17).
From our perspective, Don Quixote’s so-called “madness” is an allegory
for Don Quixote’s made-ness: his relation to an allo-poietic machine beyond
his grasp, (the machine he is in: called literature). William Paulson’s reimag-
ining of autopoiesis for literary studies brilliantly poses the literary text as “an
artificially autonomous object,” one which “can be said to… contain the fic-
tion of its own autonomy as one of its central organizational principles” (131,
135). The predicament of the “artificially autonomous object” certainly char-
acterizes the problems literature encounters in the world of Cervantes’ Don
Quixote. This novel is a satiric enactment of the fiction of its own autonomy.
Ironically enough, or, fittingly enough, then, we find Don Quixote to have
served as Urtext for the concept of autopoiesis. What now would it mean for
literary scholars to borrow back this term in such a way as to acknowledge
these nested aporias?
Such straying of a term from its original context in no way invalidates and
in fact affirms the many interdisciplinary lessons of autopoiesis. Instead, we
might say, it authenticates them. Luhmann describes art’s work of “self-pro-
gramming” through the following example: “as when a play is staged within
a play or when a novel illustrates how Don Quixote or Emma Bovary cre-
ates his or her own destiny through a self-inspiring reading” (1995 [2000]:
206). I would modify this slightly so as to say that if “destiny” is what Don
Quixote’s reading creates for him, its telos could only be understood as an
infinite detour, a knight’s (destin)errancy (Derrida, 91). We might see auto-
poiesis as Foucault sees Don Quixote, “like a sign, a long, thin graphism, a
letter that has just escaped from the open pages of a book” (46). Don Quixote
reveals the truth of literature’s ungrounded self, its allopoiesis grounded in
otherness, “all the way down.”
Notes
1. The condition of a cell boundary is thus also crucial: “Whether a given system
is capable of making its own boundary is the most discriminating criterion by
which we recognize an autopoietic system” (Luisi, 128).
2. “Literatur als ein Experiment zu begreifen, in dem Sprache… als Organon und
Modell von Verfassung—konstituiert wird” (187), my translation.
3. Renate Homann’s concept of heautonomy derives from Kant’s formulation of
this concept as a capacity of reflective judgment. Lyric, for her, becomes the
avant-garde of heautonomic self-rule-giving in the modern period.
4. Levinson memorably links autopoiesis to Spinoza’s conatus and to a
Wordsworthian ethos of “quiet being.”
5. Varela’s account of the term’s origin: “In May of 1971, the term autopoie-
sis appears in my notes as the result of the inspiration of our friend José M.
Bulnes, who had just published a thesis on the Quixote in which he made
use of the distinction between praxis and poiesis” (2009: 70), see also Varela
(1994).
6. This episode occurs in Part II, Chapter 62. While Don Quixote now includes
both parts in a single volume, Cervantes published Part II ten years after Part I
(1605) in 1615. In the intervening decade, a false Part II to Don Quixote had
been published by another author. This printshop scene stages this encoun-
ter as Don Quixote the character coming across a falsified tale of his exploits
by this other, real-world author. For further explication of this scene, see
Scheunemann (1994).
7. These themes are explored in more depth in his recent monograph on the
movement (Kline 2015).
8. As Deutsch justifies this change, “Modern studies of communications engineer-
ing suggest that the behavior of human organizations, peoples, and societies
has important relations in common with manmade communications networks,
such as servomechanisms, switchboards, and calculating machinery, as well as
with the behavior of the human nervous system and the human mind” (511).
9. For a groundbreaking historical analysis uniting Allende’s revolutionary politics
with cybernetic futurism, see Medina (2006, 2011).
10. The details of the frog’s neurological optical wiring, primed to recognize cer-
tain shapes that help it track its flying prey, can be found in the classic study
Lettvin et al. (1959).
11. This vicissitude of Wiener’s research inspires Peter Galison’s canonical essay,
“The Ontology of the Enemy.” Galison writes, “What we have seen in
Wiener’s cybernetics is the establishment of a field of meanings grounded…
explicitly in the experiences of war,” and concluding with a trenchant ques-
tion, “Would cybernetics, information theory, and ‘systems thinking’ have
proved such a central and enduring metaphor… without the seduction of vic-
torious military power? I doubt it” (263).
12. In recent years, it should be noted, Haraway has retheorized Maturana and
Varela’s autopoiesis as sympoiesis: “Nothing makes itself; nothing is really auto-
poietic or self-organizing… word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, sit-
uated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis
enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (2016: 58).
302 A. SLATER
13. Haraway is alluding here to Langdon Winner’s influential essay “Do Artifacts

have Politics?” (1980).
14. For a groundbreaking analysis of how postmodern poets in this context revived
Romantic immanentism, countering Symbolism’s influence on modernism, see
Altieri (1973).
15. For a reading of Ellison’s use of cybernetic tropes, see Wilcox (2007).
16. As Kay describes it, “a technoepistemic transformation across the disciplinary
landscape and the culture at large” worked to produce “a new, postindustrial
episteme: an emergent technoculture of communication, control, and simula-
tion,” in which “life and society were recast as relays of signals and as informa-
tion systems” (593).
17. See Porush, The Soft Machine. See also LeClair, In the Loop.
18. For the theory of dissipative structures in chemistry to which Porush refers, see
Nicolis and Prigogine (1977). Prigogine’s later book, The End of Certainty,
co-authored with Isabelle Stengers (1996 [1997]), popularized Prigogine’s
nonlinear thermodynamics.
19. As Crawford explains, “the cybernetically developed computer systems of post-
modernity allow us to comprehend better the poetry of literary modernism”
(2001: 190).
20. “We are dealing… first, with ‘self-organization’ in the sense of a creation of a
structure by means of a system’s own operations, and, second, with ‘autopoie-
sis’ in the sense of the determination of a state that makes further operations
possible by means of the operations of the same system” (Luhmann 2009:
143–44). Luhmann argues “Self-organization and autopoiesis are two distinct
concepts that I deliberately keep apart,” while both depend on what he calls
“operational closure,” since, for Luhmann, these constitute two separate sys-
tems-moments (2009: 143).
21. “Autopoiesis means, in Maturana’s definition, that a system can generate its
own operations only through the network of its own operations” (Luhmann
2009: 150).
22. For a contemporary description of the epistemological challenge raised by
Varela and Maturana to the theory of Darwinian evolution, see Escobar
(2012). Marcel Schmid has recently outlined this concept’s exportation
from biology to literary theory by way of systems theory in Schmid (2016),
Chapter 3. For an innovative new modeling of these theories, wherein a
hypothesized “adaptive practopoiesis” uses an additional level of cybernetic
steering to synthesize an organism’s present experience with its longer-term
knowledge, see Nikolić (2015).
23. Astrophysicist and systems theorist Erich Jantsch (1980) similarly reread auto-
poiesis through nonliving dissipative structures to the metabiotic system of
“Gaia.”
24. Here, I refer to the “Gaia Hypothesis” associated with Lynn Margulis and
James Lovelock. In Margulis and Sagan’s terms, “The biosphere as a whole
is autopoietic in the sense that it maintains itself…. As an autopoietic sys-
tem, Gaia therefore shares an essential quality with individual living systems”
(20). For an intellectual history of this transition from autopoiesis to Gaia, see
Clarke (2012).
25. See also Varela (1980).
26. Another important posthumanist, abiotic concept of autopoiesis which is

beyond the scope of my argument here is its use in the A-life, or “Artificial
Life” community of researchers who build computational simulations of liv-
ing beings. See Langton (1984, 1992). For critical discussions of A-life’s larger
research implications, see Johnston (2008) and McMullin (2004). Varela also
worked on cellular automata as early as the 1970s. In 1991, Varela co-organ-
ized with Paul Bourgine the first European conference on A-Life.
27. N. Katherine Hayles gives an equally trenchant diagnosis of the political econ-
omy of cultural interest in cybernetics and autopoiesis as models for life: “As
first-world culture moves from an industrial base to an information society,
presence/absence is displaced by pattern/randomness as a generative dialectic
for cultural forms” (1998: 209).
28. Keller, “Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor,” 164n30.
29. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, noting that Luhmann’s work made biologists
Maturana and Varela famous outside their scientific community, finds
“Luhmann’s intellectual bet” in using biological parlance to have allowed him
“to develop his systemic thought under strict avoidance of notions such as
‘subject,’ ‘subjecthood,’ or ‘agency’” (23).
30. “[O]ur problem is the living organization and therefore our interest will not be
in properties of components, but in processes and relations between processes
realized through components” (Maturana and Varela 1980: 75).
31. Maturana and Varela’s instance on a physical barrier for the living organism has
been an epistemological stumbling block to those who would outline much
vaster autopoietic organisms. Artificial Life theorists Paul Bourgine and John
Stewart state “we require a renewed definition of autopoiesis that does not
depend on an excessively reified definition of ‘membrane’ or ‘boundary,’”
replacing this instead with a “network of processes” (337).
32. Translation modified.
33. “Pero está el daño de todo esto, que en este punto y término, deja pendiente
el autor de esta historia esta batalla, disculpándose que no halló más escrito de
estas hazañas de don Quijote…” (2004: 83).
34. For a detailed study of Lukács’s work with Don Quixote, see Schmidt (2011).
35. Translation modified.
Bibliography
Altieri, Charles. 1973. From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of
Postmodern American Poetics. boundary 2, 1 (3) (Spring): 605–642.
Bernes, Jasper. 2017. The Poetry of Feedback. E-flux 82 (May). https://www.e-flux.
com/journal/82/127862/the-poetry-of-feedback/.
Bourgine, Paul, and John Stewart. 2004. Autopoiesis and Cognition. Artificial Life
10 (3): 327–345.
Canguilhem, Georges. (1952) 2008. Machine and Organism (1947). In The
Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg, ed. Paola
Marrati and Todd Meyers, 75–97. New York: Fordham University Press.
Cervantes, Miguel de. 1999. Don Quijote: A Norton Critical Edition, trans. Burton
Raffel, ed. Diana de Armas Wilson. New York: W.W. Norton.
———. 2004. Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico. Madrid: Santillana; Real
Academia Española Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española.
304 A. SLATER
Clarke, Bruce. 2012. Autopoiesis and the Planet. In Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory
in the Era of Climate Change, ed. Henry Sussman, 58–75. Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press.
———. 2019. Finding Cybernetics. World Futures 75 (1–2): 17–28.
Clough, Patricia. 2008. The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies.
Theory, Culture & Society 25 (1): 1–22.
Clynes, Manfred E., and Nathan S. Kline. 1960. Cyborgs and Space. Astronautics 5
(9) (September): 26–27, 74–76.
Connelly, William E. 2013. The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes,
Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Crawford, Robert. 2001. Modernist Cybernetics and the Poetry of Knowledge. In The
Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge Since the 1750s, 170–222. Oxford:
Crick, Francis H., John S. Griffith, and Leslie E. Orgel. 1957. Codes Without
Commas. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America 43: 416–421.
de Vos, Laurens. 2018. The Observer Observed. The Promise of the Posthuman:
Homeostasis, Autopoiesis and Virtuality in Samuel Beckett. Journal of Beckett
Studies 27 (2) (September): 245–260.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. On an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,
trans. John P. Leavey. Semeia 23: 63–97.
Deutsch, Karl W. 1948–1949. Some Notes on Research on the Role of Models in the
Natural and Social Sciences. Synthese 1: 506–533.
Di Paolo, Ezequiel A. 2005. Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 4 (4) (December): 429–452.
Edwards, Paul N. 1996. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in
Cold War. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible Man. New York: Penguin Random House.
Escobar, Jorge M. 2012. Autopoiesis and Darwinism. Synthese 185 (1) (March):
53–72.
Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New
Aesthetics. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des science humaines..
Paris: Gallimard.
———. 1970. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Galison, Peter. 1994. The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the
Cybernetic Vision. Critical Inquiry 21 (1) (Autumn): 228–266.
Galloway, Alexander, and Eugene Thacker. 2006. Language, Life, Code (Software).
Architectural Design 76 (5): 26–29.
Gårseth-Nesbakk, Levi. 2011. Accrual Accounting Representations in the Public
Sector—A Case of Autopoiesis. Critical Perspectives on Accounting 22 (3):
247–258.
Gaydos, Rebecca. 2014. Bio-Writing: Cybernetics, Open Form, and Larry Eigner’s
Lifework. Journal of Modern Literature 38 (1) (Fall): 166–182.
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich; with Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela inter-
viewed by Bernhard Poerksen. 2006. Maturana and Varela on Science and the
Humanities: The Poerksen Interviews. The Journal of Aesthetic Education 40 (1)
(Spring): 22–53.
Hacking, Ian. 1998. Canguilhem Amid the Cyborgs. Economy and Society 27 (2/3)
(May): 202–216.
Haraway, Donna. 1981–1982. The High Cost of Information in Post-World
War II Evolutionary Biology: Ergonomics, Semiotics, and the Sociobiology
of Communication Systems. Philosophical Forum 13 (2/3) (Winter–Spring):
244–278.
———. 1983. Signs of Dominance: From a Physiology to a Cybernetics of Primate
Society, C.R. Carpenter, 1930–1970. Studies in the History of Biology 6: 129–219.
———. 1985. A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism
in the 1980s. Australian Feminist Studies 4 (Autumn 1987): 1–42.
———. 2016. Sympoiesis: Symbiogenesis and the Lively Arts of Staying with the
Trouble. In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 58–98.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1998. Artificial Life and Literary Culture. In Cyberspace
Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan, 205–
223. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Homann, Renate. 1999. Theorie der Lyrik. Heautonome Autopoiesis als Paradigma der
Moderne. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp.
Jantsch, Erich. 1980. The Self-Organizing Universe: Scientific and Human
Implications of the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution. New York: Pergamom Press.
Johnston, John. 2008. Vital Cells: Cellular Automata, Artificial Life, Autopoiesis. In
The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and the New AI, 165–213.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Kay, Lily E. 2001. From Logical Neurons to Poetic Embodiments of Mind: Warren S.
McCulloch’s Project in Neuroscience. Science in Context 14 (4): 591–614.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 2002. Taming the Cybernetic Metaphor. In Making Sense of Life:
Explaining Biological Development with Models, Metaphors, and Machines, 148–172.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kline, Ronald R. 2006. Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy:
The Emergence of ‘Information Technology’ as a Keyword, 1948–1985.
Technology and Culture 47 (3) (July): 513–535.
———. 2015. The Cybernetics Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Langton, Christopher G. 1984. Self-Reproduction in Cellular Automata. Physica D:
Nonlinear Phenomena 10 (1–2): 135–144.
———. 1992. Artificial Life II. ed. Christopher G. Langton et al., 41–91. Redwood
City, CA: Addison-Wesley.
LeClair, Tom. 1987. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana:
University of Illinois Press.
Lettvin, Jerome Y., Humberto R. Maturana, Warren S. McCulloch, and Walter J.
Pitts. 1959. What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain. Proceedings of the IRE 47
(11) (November): 1940–1951.
Levinson, Marjorie. 2018. Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lezra, Jacques. 1997. Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event in Early
Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Love, Heather A. 2016. Cybernetic Modernism and the Feedback Loop: Ezra
Pound’s Poetics of Transmission. Modernism/modernity 23 (1) (January): 89–111.
306 A. SLATER
Luhmann, Niklas. (1984) 1995. Social Systems [Soziale Systeme], trans. John Bednarz,
Jr. and Dirk Baecker. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 1990. The Autopoiesis of Social Systems. In Essays on Self-Reference, 1–20.
New York: Columbia University Press.
———. (1995) 2000. Self-Organization: Coding and Programming. In Art as
a Social System [Die Kunst der Gesellschaft], 185–210, trans. Eva M. Knodt.
Stanford: Stanford University Press..
———. 2009. Self-Organization and Autopoiesis. In Emergence and Embodiment:
New Essays in Second-Order Systems Theory, 143–156, trans. Hans-Georg Moeller
with Bruce Clarke, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen. Durham: Duke
University.
Luisi, Pier Luigi. 2016. Autopoiesis: The Invariant Property. In The Emergence of
Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology, 119–156. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lukács, Georg. 1989. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms
of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Margulis, Lynn, and Dorion Sagan. (1995) 2000. What Is Life? Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Maturana, Humberto R. 1980. Introduction to Autopoiesis and Cognition. In
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, xi–xxx. Boston: D. Reidel
Publishing Company.
———. 2004. Autopoiesis is Living. Interview with Bernhard Poerksen. From Being
to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition, 93–103. Heidelberg: Carl Auer
Verlag.
———. 2012. Reflections on My Collaboration with Francisco Varela. Biology of
Cognition 7 (3): 155–164.
Maturana, Humberto R., and Francisco J. Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis: The
Organization of the Living. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living, 73–134. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co.
———. 1987. Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.
Boston, MA: Shambhala.
Maturana, Humberto R., Ricardo B. Uribe, and Francisco J. Varela. 1974.
Autopoiesis: The Organization of Living Systems, Its Characterization and a
Model. BioSystems 5: 187–196.
McMullin, Barry. 2004. Thirty Years of Computational Autopoiesis. Artificial Life 10
(3) (Summer): 277–295.
Medina, Eden. 2006. Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics
in Allende’s Chile. Journal of Latin American Studies 38: 571–606.
———. 2011. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Mingers, John. 1995. Self-Producing Systems: Implications and Applications of
Autopoiesis. New York: Plenum Press.
———. 2014. Systems Thinking, Critical Realism, and Philosophy: A Confluence of
Ideas. London: Routledge.
Moe, Aaron M. 2011. Autopoiesis and cummings’ cat. Rupkatha Journal on
Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities 3 (1) (April): 110–120.
Nicolis, Gregoire, and Ilya Prigogine. 1977. Self-Organization in Nonequilibrium
Systems: From Dissipative Structures to Order Through Fluctuations. New York:
Wiley.
Nikolić, Danko. 2015. Practopoiesis: Or How Life Fosters a Mind. Journal of

Theoretical Biology 373: 40–61.
Parisi, Luciana, and Tiziana Terranova. 2000. Heat-Death, Emergence, and Control
in Genetic Engineering and Artificial Life. C-Theory, October 5. https://journals.
uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14604/5455.
Parsons, Talcott. 1949. Essays in Sociological Theory, Pure and Applied. Glencoe, IL:
Free Press.
———. (1951) 1991. The Social System, 15th ed. London: Routledge.
Paulson, William R. 1988. The Noise of Culture: Literary Texts in a World of
Information. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas. 2014. Critical Autopoiesis and the Materiality
of Law. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law—Revue internationale de
Sémiotique juridique 27 (2) (June): 389–418.
Porush, David. 1985. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York: Methuen.
———. 1991. Fictions as Dissipative Structures: Prigogine’s Theory and
Postmodernism’s Roadshow. In Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature
and Science, ed. N. Katherine Hayles, 54–84. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Prigogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. (1996) 1997. The End of Certainty: Time,
Chaos, and the New Laws of Nature. New York: Free Press.
Rukeyser, Muriel. (1949) 1996. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press.
Schmid, Marcel. 2016. Autopoiesis und Literatur. Die kurze Geschichte eines endlosen
Verfahrens [Autopoiesis and Literature: The Brief History of an Endless Process].
Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag.
Schmidt, Rachel. 2011. Forms of Modernity: Don Quixote and Modern Theories of the
Novel. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Serres, Michel. (1966) 1982. The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory
and Thermodynamics. Oxford Literary Review 5 (1/2): 113–124.
Sewell, Elizabeth. (1951) 1952. The Structure of Poetry. New York: Scribner.
Shannon, Claude, and Warren Weaver. 1949. The Mathematical Theory of
Communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Scheunemann, Dietrich. 1994. The Problem of the Book: Don Quixote in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction. In Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of
Influence, ed. Edwin Williamson, 135–148. London: Tamesis.
Varela, Francisco J. 1980. Describing the Logic of the Living: The Adequacy and
Limitations of the Idea of Autopoiesis. In Autopoiesis: A Theory of the Living
Organization, ed. Milan Zelený, 36–48. New York: Elsevier North-Holland.
———. 1994. Prefacio de Francisco J. Varela García a la segunda edición [Francisco J.
Varela’s Preface to the Second Edition]. In De máquinas y seres vivos: Autopoiesis—
la organización de lo vivo [On Machines and Living Beings: Autopoiesis—The
Organization of the Living]. Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela,
34–60. 7th ed. Inscripción No. 89.535. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria.
———. 2009. The Early Days of Autopoiesis. In Emergence and Embodiment: New
Essays on Second-Order Systems Theory, ed. Bruce Clarke and Mark B. N. Hansen,
62–76. Durham: Duke University Press.
Walter, W. Grey. 1950. An Imitation of Life. Scientific American 182 (5) (May):
42–45.
Wellbery, David E. 2009. The General Enters the Library: A Note on Disciplines and
Complexity. Critical Inquiry 35 (4) (Summer): 982–994.
308 A. SLATER
Wiener, Norbert. (1948) 1961. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the

Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Wilcox, Johnnie. 2007. Black Power: Minstrelsy and Electricity in Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man. Callaloo 30 (4): 987–1009.
Winner, Langdon. 1980. Do Artifacts Have Politics? Daedalus 109 (1) (Winter):
121–136.
Wolfe, Alan. 1992. Algorithmic Justice. Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed.
Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, 361–386. New York:
Routledge.
Wolfe, Cary. 2008. The Idea of Observation at Key West, or, Systems Theory, Poetry,
and Form beyond Formalism. New Literary History 39 (2) (Spring): 259–276.
———. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2015. Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give
Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. Interview with Katherine
McKittrick. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick,
9–89. Durham: Duke University Press.
Zelený, Milan. 1980. Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, and Spontaneous Social Orders.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
CHAPTER 17
Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories

and the Biology of Emergence
Robert Peckham
In the midst of a pandemic and at great risk to his personal safety, a researcher
retrieves a sample of tissue from an infected body. He races back to a
makeshift laboratory where, hunched over the microscope, the offending
microorganism is identified: “And there, fluttering delicately on the slide,
was a germ” (Matheson 2007, 75). In this plotline of disease identification,
biology is staged as a struggle between blindness and sight, invisibility and dis-
closure. The disease’s origins can be confirmed because the causal pathogen
can be seen. It is there, discernible as an object under the microscope.
Implicitly, it can also be heard. The verb “fluttering” employed to describe
the germ denotes both a visible pulsation and the fluctuation of a pitch. The
word points to the specimen’s sonic identity, even as it suggests the extent to
which sight and sound intermingle in practices of scientific knowledge mak-
ing. The “vampiris bacillus” must be seen and heard to be studied (Matheson
2007, 76).
This chapter maps the presence of sound across three popular twenti-
eth-century science narratives concerned with biological contamination and
epidemics: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), Michael Crichton’s
The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (1994).
These texts are taken as “sampling devices” for exploring continuities and
shifts in how scientific practices have been popularly understood from Cold
War contamination fears in the 1950s to the early 1990s when, in the wake
of HIV/AIDS, global health concerns began to pivot on the threat posed to
R. Peckham (*) 
University of Hong Kong, Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong

310 R. PECKHAM
human populations by lethal emerging and reemerging hemorrhagic diseases

(Rosenberg 1992, xxiii).
Interconnections between sound and vision are central to the different sci-
entific worlds these texts evoke. Sound can function as a means of challeng-
ing the fixed authority of sight, opening up an affective space that the visual
forecloses. However, like vision, listening is linked to particular forms of
masculine and quasi-colonial control. Seeing and hearing do not only
comprise ways of knowing and experiencing the world, they are also
inherently political and provide models for its organization.
Albeit in different ways, each of the three narratives considered in this
chapter invites the reader to reimagine twentieth-century scientific visuality—
science as a “scopic regime”—through the problematizing prism of sound.
The texts point to the ways in which visual and auditory epistemologies con-
verge and diverge to create critical dissonances. Sounds implode upon the
visual, disclosing visuality to be “a contested terrain, rather than a harmoni-
ously integrated complex of visual theories and practices” (Jay 1988, 4).
In contending that fiction can furnish an archive for exploring science and
its assumptions, the chapter draws on the insights of scholars such as Leo
Marx and Rosalind Williams, among others, who have long argued for the
tight imbrication of technology and culture. Rather than understanding sci-
ence as an applied knowledge or repertoire of practices, it can be understood
as a discursive field in a manner analogous to Marx’s technological world
(Marx 1964; Williams 1990). Fictional works reflect and are constitutive of
a scientific world. In Williams’s formulation, they are “cognitive acts” and as
such provide the ground for exploring prevalent ideas that characterize the
broader scientific culture (Williams 1993, 399).
Sound and the Primacy of Vision

Histories of Western science have tended to emphasize the primacy of
vision. “The sixteenth century did not see first,” writes Lucien Febvre, “it
heard and smelled, it sniffed the air and caught sounds.” It was only at the
turn of the seventeenth century that “vision was unleashed in the world of
science” (1982, 432, emphasis in original). New optical instruments, nota-
bly the telescope and the microscope, progressively curtailed the role of the
other senses (Snyder 2015). The rise of print culture and the circulation of
books extended the sphere of experimental science, enabling the reader to
become an “absent witness” to scientific knowledge making (Johns 1998,
506). As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, scientific atlases
and photography were crucial to the rise of scientific objectivity as an
“epistemic ideal” from the early nineteenth century (2008).
This foregrounding of the visual in histories of science has meant that
sound and practices of listening have often been neglected (Crary 1990).
Increasingly, however, scholars are reassessing science’s auditory dimen-
sions. Steven Connor has gone as far as to suggest that “an observational,
17 LISTENING TO PANDEMICS: SONIC HISTORIES AND THE BIOLOGY … 311
calculative scientific culture organised around the sequestering powers of the

eye began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to produce new forms
of technology, especially communicative technology, which themselves pro-
moted a reconfiguring of the sensorium in terms of the ear rather than the
eye” (Connor 2002, 17).
New acoustic technologies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies sought to pick up hitherto inaudible sounds—“the roar on the other side
of silence” (Eliot 1871, 351; see also Picker 2003, 4). Theories of vibration and
electromagnetic waves suggested affinities between light and sound, seeing and
listening (Enns and Trower 2013). Technologies for recording, amplifying, and
disseminating sound—and packaging it as consumer commodity—propelled a
preoccupation with the auditory and the cultivation of “sonic skills” (Bijsterveld
2019). These technological and scientific efforts to capture and describe
extra-sensory frequencies were compelled by an urge to fix and categorize a
fluctuating auditory universe. The management of sound was analogized with
the teeming microbial world revealed by the microscope. As one commentator
noted in 1878: “The microphone is an instrument which acts towards the ear as
the microscope does to the eye. It will render evident to us sounds that are oth-
erwise absolutely inaudible” (W. H. Preece in Picker 2003, 3).
In the early twenty-first century, visualization and sonification remain
closely connected in science: not only in the conversion of scientific data into
“auditory information” but, as Cyrus Mody has shown in his study of US
probe microscopists, in scientific practices predicated on collecting and inter-
preting data through a process of “synesthetic conversion” between seeing
and listening activities (Supper 2012; Mody 2012).
The narratives discussed in this chapter appropriate a scientific language in
ways that highlight perceptual, epistemological, and methodological ambi-
guities between sight and sound, and vision and voice that are embedded in
modern science. For example, the stealthy pathogen is sometimes conceived
in these texts as an ominously noiseless foe, just as the exposure of a truth
that is hidden—apocalypse, from the Greek for uncovering—is linked to the
revelatory perception of a noise (Bull 1999). The laboratory as an environ-
ment purposively regulated to make pathogens visible may also, particularly
in high biosafety-level facilities, be understood as a space where voices are
hushed and extraneous sounds suppressed. If it is a place of intense seeing, as
a micro-sphere of silence, it is equally a place of concentrated listening (Mody
2005).
The Tortured Silence of Science

Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend was published in 1954 during the
height of the Cold War Red Scare, when concerns about a Communist infes-
tation in the United States conflated with anxieties about radioactive fallout.
Metaphors of epidemic disease were central to the Truman Doctrine with its
emphasis on total security in the face of “infectious” threats to the nation
312 R. PECKHAM
(Ivie 1999). The 1950s also witnessed increasing public disquiet about the
anthropogenic impact on the natural environment of air and water pollution,
radiation, waste disposal, and pesticides.
These political and environmental concerns provide a contextual backdrop
to I Am Legend, where the protagonist, Robert Neville, finds himself the lone
survivor of a plague that has devastated the planet, transforming humans into
vampires. This is a drama played out in part as an auditory conflict. The year
is 1976. Sequestered inside his house as dusk falls, Neville is haunted by the
violent sounds that the vampires make as they swarm outside. He attempts to
drown out the brutish din by playing classical music at full volume through
loudspeakers, jamming in earplugs so he is engulfed by “a great silence,”
before finally soundproofing the building (Matheson, 11).
In Matheson’s post-war tale of societal and environmental collapse, noise
and its subjection feature as critical motifs. Disease in the narrative is the
result of a catastrophic environmental transformation, since it transpires that
the plague is spread by mosquitoes and dust storms that follow in the wake of
war. The howls of the storms and the cries of the vampires are pitted against
other salutary sounds that impinge upon the dead landscape and intimate the
possibility of its reanimation.
At the same time, disease and the threat of infection are often foreshad-
owed by an ominous stillness—an unhealthy cessation of noise in deathly
silence. In a passage of the novel that anticipates Rachel Carson’s celebrated
account of the detrimental impact of synthetic pesticides on wildlife in Silent
Spring, published eight years later in 1962, Neville remarks:
Morning. A SUN-BRIGHT hush broken only by the chorus of birds in the

trees. No breeze to stir the vivid blossoms around the houses, the bushes, the
dark-leaved hedges. A cloud of silent heat was suspended over everything on
Cimarron Street. (Matheson, 57)
Compare this to Carson’s description of an ominously muted nature:
It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with
the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird
voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and
marsh. (Carson 2002, 2)
Evocations of nature in Matheson and Carson draw on a tradition of

American nature writing concerned with the ways in which the “noisy world”
of mechanized modernity has encroached upon the “slumberous peace” of
the countryside (Hawthorne in Marx 1964, 23–24). For environmentalists in
the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, silence was an indicator that something was
wrong; it was a symptom of a world out of balance.
In Matheson’s fiction, the destruction of nature by humans has resulted
in their own regression to animals—a slide from language and music back
to brute noise. It is this primal world that threatens Neville’s survival and
challenges his faith in the humanizing force of culture. Much of Matheson’s
narrative hangs on the protagonist’s ultimately futile effort to prevent the
vampires from invading his house. While he attempts to suppress the cacoph-
onous noise outside, Neville recognizes a darkness that already resides within.
From this perspective, culture—embodied in the “deathly still” of the dusty
Los Angeles Public Library that he visits in his quest for scientific expla-
nations for the plague—is not opposed to the zombie world beyond the
sanctuary, but may in fact be implicated in its devastation. The “gray-stoned”
library is described as a mausoleum housing “the literature of a world’s dead”
(Matheson, 66). The darkness in culture is suggested, too, by the strains of
Arnold Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899), which Neville
blasts through the speakers. This is a music inspired by Richard Dehmel’s
poem of the same title that, for all its celebration of transfiguration, involves
a dark secret and begins with the brooding image of a man and a woman
“walking through a bare, cold wood” (Frisch 1993, 112).
Ironically, the silence that Neville cultivates as an antidote to the noise
outside provides an imaginative space for the vampires to regroup.
Pathogenic sounds—“auditory hallucinations” (Matheson, 66) as he calls
them—reemerge in the silence that Neville has worked so hard to produce:
He lay there on the bed and took deep breaths of the darkness, hoping for
sleep. But the silence didn’t really help. He could still see them out there, the
white-faced men prowling around his house, looking ceaselessly for a way to get
in at him. (Matheson, 10)
Science figures in the novel chiefly in Neville’s scientific quest to understand

the origins and cause of the disease and its means of transmission. In his resolve
to find “a rational answer” through “careful research,” he visits the “Science
Room” of the Public Library, trawling through tomes in the medical section
on physiology and blood (66). The narrative traces Neville’s progressive scien-
tific expertise as he acquires and learns to use a microscope, honing his skills at
mounting specimens on slides and finding a place for the accoutrements of his
improvised laboratory: “Glass slips, cover glasses, pipettes, cells, forceps, Petri
dishes, needles, chemicals—all were placed in systematic locations” (75).
As Mathias Clasen has noted, “Matheson goes to great lengths to
rationalize or naturalize the vampire myth, transplanting the monster from
the otherworldly realms of folklore and Victorian supernaturalism to the test
tube of medical inquiry and rational causation” (Clasen 2010‚ 323). While
he conducts experiments using his microscope, he corroborates his findings
with his readings and concludes, among other things, that the cause of the
disease is likely a strain of bacteria (Matheson, 66–73). He also discovers that
vampires can be killed by exposing them to direct sunlight or inflicting large
wounds on their bodies that enable the bacteria to transform into deadly
aerobic parasites.
314 R. PECKHAM
There is an implicitly violent and gendered dimension to the protago-

nist’s improvised scientific experimentation and to the dynamics of silence
and sound, vision and voice that the plot dramatizes. As the lone survivor
of a bacterial apocalypse, Neville fills his silent days with perverse visions of
sex with the female vampires. Early on in the novel he performs a scientific
experiment on an infected woman, whom he binds to a chair. “Why do you
always experiment on women?” he asks himself (Matheson, 49–51). Neville’s
homespun research constitutes, in effect, a form of torture. Science is con-
strued here as a masculine practice predicated on forcing its biological objects
to speak. It is a pursuit that entails the subjection of dangerously reproductive
specimens that are coded as female.
Carson’s was an essentially restorative conceptualization of science: Its
aim was to quantify the toxicity of silence as a step toward reinstating healthy
sound. For Matheson, however, Neville’s scientific research is riven with a
more disturbing contradiction: It is implicated in the violence of the world it
seeks to understand.
Silence and the Machismo of Techno-Science

Macho science and its involvement in the spread of a disease it is predicated
on destroying is a major theme in Michael Crichton’s (1969) techno-thriller
The Andromeda Strain, which focuses on “the five-day history of a major
American scientific crisis” (Crichton, 3). Scientific research in the novel
is imagined largely as a process of information management and a matter
of professional expertise. The narrative centers on scientific and technical
procedures that culminate in a series of experimental tests carried out by a
scientific team on a biological sample under an electron microscope. An array
of technological devices are mobilized to fight the extraterrestrial pathogen,
even as it turns out that new space technology is responsible for bringing the
threat to earth in the first place. The tension in the narrative derives from the
ways in which the seamlessness and efficacy of a modern, automated techno-
science, is repeatedly undercut.
Remnants of a crashed satellite, which are suspected of harboring a highly
transmissible pathogen, are transported for analysis from the crash site in
Arizona to a top-security underground laboratory called Wildfire close to
the fictional town of Flatrock, Nevada. The masculine dimension of sight is
emphasized in the first sentences of the book: “A man with binoculars. That
is how it began: with a man standing by the side of the road, on a crest over-
looking a small Arizona town, on a winter night.” In Crichton’s narrative,
it is the male scientists who invariably do the talking (and the watching).
Women’s voices are pre-recorded announcements or fleeting interruptions
to male dialogues (Power 2014). The object of male scientific concern—
the rapidly mutating extraterrestrial microbe—is gendered as female. In
Greek myth, Andromeda is a princess who is stripped and chained naked
to a rock by her father, King Cepheus, as a sacrifice to the god Poseidon.
Crichton’s pathogen is analogized as a victim of violence, manhandled to

reveal her secrets. She is also implicitly a threat to male authority, her name
in Greek signifying “ruler of men.” As in I Am Legend, the male scientists’
pursuit of the pathogenic agent is implicitly likened to the torture of a female
body. In The Andromeda Strain, the scientists’ increasingly desperate meas-
ures are aimed at coercing her to yield up her identity as a precondition to
her neutralization. In contrast to Matheson’s narrative, however, this scien-
tific torture moves from an improvised, one-to-one encounter into a team
management process that involves the integration of modern technologies.
Sound—muted female voices, torture to force the female body to speak—
reinforces and extends the male gaze.
A violently gendered plotline is thus mapped onto a scientific world where
vision overlaps with but sometimes collides with sound. Inside the Wildfire
installation, the scientific team works to identify and understand the myste-
rious disease agent by summoning an armamentarium of visual instruments:
X-rays, an electron microscope, an assortment of high-magnification viewers,
movie cameras, time-lapse cameras, televisions, CCTVs, and visual link-ups.
At several points in the narrative airplanes are scrambled for aerial recon-
naissance missions. The satellite itself, of course, is a technology designed
for orbital surveillance. A quotation from the fictional biologist R.A. Janek
affixed to the front of the book underscores the visual theme: “Increasing
vision is increasingly expensive” (Crichton, 230). Vision and its limitations
are repeatedly stressed. The narrative begins with a soldier looking down
at the crash site through binoculars—a pointless exercise we are told, since
humanity is facing a microscopic threat (9). In a characteristic move, the
power of vision is invoked only to be immediately negated.
On the one hand, modern science is imagined in Crichton’s novel p rimarily
as a practice of seeing—with illustrative graphs, electron density and out-
put maps, scanner printouts, and sketches integrated into the narrative. On
the other hand, this optimization of sight is accompanied by a soundtrack of
hissing doors, crackling radios, ringing telephones and bells, clattering print-
ers, humming air-conditioning units, microphones, clicking loudspeakers, and
tape recordings. Sight is frequently prefigured and overshadowed by sound:
The military is dispatched to Piedmont when, having reached an altitude
of five miles, the Scoop satellite’s electronic beepers begin to emit an emer-
gency signal (11). The Wildfire installation is conceived as a vast subterranean
space of regulated sound, just as the country itself is conjured as a network of
humming trunk lines and cables (35).
When the pathologist Charles Burton and the bacteriologist Jeremy Stone
enter Piedmont to investigate the mysterious deaths of the town’s inhabitants,
they are struck by the “deathly silence”: “But there was no sound—no reas-
suring rumble of an automobile engine, no barking dog, no shouting chil-
dren. Silence” (70). The struggle to contain the spread of the lethal pathogen
becomes a struggle to discern clues in “apparently garbled, random sound.”
Early on in the novel we are introduced to Major Arthur Manchek’s “audio
316 R. PECKHAM
screen,” a computerized means of sifting through unintelligible sound to pick

up hidden meanings (21). The process of filtering confused sound antici-
pates the twenty-first-century notion of “viral chatter,” wherein the pinging of
mutating viruses is rendered intelligible to scientists who listen in on the genetic
traffic between species, just as “the National Security Agency scour the Internet,
listening for clues of impending terrorist attacks” (Specter 2010).
This auditory drama, which intermeshes with the visual, is more than
an incidental dimension of Crichton’s narrative; more, that is, than back-
ground noise. On the contrary, the novel’s narrative hinges on sound and its
absence. While the scientists volubly discuss the progress of their research, the
germ remains tenaciously silent. Much of the novel is written in the form of
dialogue between the different protagonists: fighter pilots, command control
personnel, and the scientists who pore over computer printouts of the lab tests.
Science, the novel suggests, requires more than an expertise in seeing; its oper-
ations depend on voices, on interpreting what has been said, on searching for
speech in silences, and teasing out meanings from mangled sounds. Reliance
on sight can be dangerous, too: One of the protagonists, the clinical microbi-
ologist Peter Leavitt, suffers an epileptic fit that is triggered by flashing lights
(Crichton, 260–262). The narrative’s incessant dialogue and the mechanical
noises of the automated lab serve to foreground the menacing muteness—the
“eerie silence” in the words of the physicist and popular science writer Paul
Davies—of the very object that is generating the commotion: the disease agent,
codenamed Andromeda (Davies 2010). This is the silence of space, from which
the extraterrestrial organism has come.
Monet in Africa: Sound in the Picture of Disease

In thrillers such as The Andromeda Strain, the disease threats are made
visible, but they are rarely heard. What we hear instead are the panicky trills
of telephones and the cries of the sick. We hear the repeatedly frustrated
efforts to make the pathogen heard. In Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone, a
bestselling account of hemorrhagic viruses published in 1994, the reader is
introduced to the pulsating natural environment from which virulent disease
agents emerge to infect human populations. The Hot Zone is the precursor
of a genre of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-centuries pandemic thriller
that centers on sudden spillover events: crisis moments when, without warn-
ing, highly pathogenic diseases cross over from animal to human populations.
Viruses, in such works, are commonly visualized as latent but invisible
presences that lurk in the places of their origins, such as the dense rainforests
of Central Africa—the location of the Ebola River that gave its name to the
disease. Expanding visual scales—magnified microscopic organisms, diseased
bodies, and susceptible geographies—are the topoi of the pandemic thriller
and of global public health as it is projected in the media (Farmer 2006).
Preston has been one of the most influential writers in shaping these pop-
ular perceptions of “hot” viruses, particularly hemorrhagic diseases such as
Marburg and Ebola that originated in Africa. The Hot Zone was published in
the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, just as emerging viruses were becom-
ing the focus of new research in microbiology, and an “emerging diseases
worldview” was being articulated in a public health literature that increasingly
stressed the imperative for preparedness (King 2002).
The narrative opens with the description of a trip by a Frenchman working
for the Nzoia Sugar Factory “in the shadow of Mount Elgon” on Kenya’s
border with Uganda. The penumbra of the extinct volcano echoes the nar-
rator’s description of HIV/AIDS, which from the late 1970s had “fallen like
a shadow over the population” (Preston 1995, 4). On a visit to the Kitum
Cave one Christmas in the company of a local woman, he contracts a lethal
viral disease (5–6). From the outset, Preston immerses the reader in a visually
thick description of the East African environment. Significantly, his protag-
onist, who is “an amateur naturalist,” is named Charles Monet, suggesting
a connection between the lush landscape descriptions in the novel and the
work of the French impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) famous for his
plein-air paintings of poppy-strewn fields and the Water Lilies series inspired
by the artist’s garden at Giverny. If Monet’s art reflects an interest in percep-
tual processes, Preston’s narrative and particularly the opening scenes revel in
the luxuriance of the African environment and the challenges it poses to the
human senses.
Nature’s superabundance in The Hot Zone obscures sinister intent. Even a
description of Monet stargazing on New Year’s Eve, unsteady after drinking
champagne, echoes the commonplace assertion that there are “more viruses
than there are stars in the universe” (Zimmer 2013). The narrative dwells
on sounds and silences. We are told of Monet’s predilection for spending
“most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased him to
watch and listen to machines doing their work” (Preston, 4). The noise of
the machinery pumping water from the River Nzoia anticipates the quasi-in-
dustrial replication of the pathogens inside Monet. Viruses are exploitative
micro-machines, working the body to death. As the narrator notes: “Viruses
may seem alive when they multiply but in another sense they are obviously
dead, are only machines, subtle ones to be sure, but strictly mechanical, no
more alive than a jackhammer” (85).
In the African wilderness, as imagined in the novel, the background drone
of mechanized modernity gives way to a complex layering of natural sounds:
“the scuffle of monkeys feeding in the trees, a hum of insects, an occasional
low huh-huh call of a monkey,” or elephants “making cracking sounds as they
peeled bark and broke limbs from trees” (Preston, 9 and 10–11). The den-
sity of this auditory landscape recalls real-life descriptions by viral hunters; for
example, the microbiologist Peter Piot’s account of his 1976 trip to Zaire (now
the Democratic Republic of the Congo), where he was part of the team that
first identified—and named—the Ebola virus: “The forest erupted with noise
like a living thing as we hurtled and lurched our way along the well-trodden
paths” (Piot 2012, 44; on “auditory landscapes”, see Corbin 1998).
318 R. PECKHAM
The overlapping and competing noises that make up this acoustic habitat
hint at the potential for viral spillovers. Inside Kitum Cave, Preston’s narra-
tor tells us: “Waves of bat sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back
and forth, a dry, squeaky sound, like many small doors being opened on
dry hinges” (Preston, 12). The disease’s likely vectors—the virus’s natural
reservoir—are imagined in terms of the classic horror plotline: the creaking
door that signals the entrance of an invisible killer. Sounds—squeaking bats,
jabbering monkeys, and the insidious whine of feeding mosquitoes—are
auditory portals into the mysteriously inaudible and invisible place from
which the disease has emerged.
The constant background hum of the African landscape is juxtaposed in
The Hot Zone with enclaves of silence. Monet, by now transferred for treat-
ment in Nairobi and converted into a “virus bomb,” sits in the casualty
department of the hospital by a sign that reads “PLEASE MAINTAIN
SILENCE” (Preston, 22). And later, an unnerving silence characterizes the
heavy glass-rimmed space of the containment lab in Washington‚ DC, where
scientists don biohazard space suits. Like deep space, this is a strangely muf-
fled environment. As the narrator remarks of one of the scientists, Nancy
Jaax: “All she could hear was the noise of the air blowing inside her suit. It
filled her suit with a roar like a subway train coming through a tunnel” (83).
Inside the anechoic (sound-absorbing) chamber there is no absolute silence
(Cage 1973, 13). In one corner of the lab monkeys hoot and grunt, making
“high-pitched squeals,” while the infected monkeys in another bank of cages
remain “silent, passive, and withdrawn” (Preston, 77).
The narrator construes virology, not only as a struggle to visualize the
pathogenic agent, but also as a struggle to hear it. As he suggests, viruses
make sounds: They “can bud through a cell wall, like drips coming out of
a faucet—drip, drip, drip, drip, copy, copy, copy, copy—that’s the way the
AIDS virus works” (84). Indeed, viral silence is understood as a ploy; it is a
cunning strategy for overcoming unsuspecting prey:
It is a characteristic of a predator to become invisible to its prey during the quiet

and sometimes lengthy stalk that precedes an explosive attack. The savanna
grass ripples on the plains, and the only sound in the air is the sound of African
doves calling from acacia trees, a pulse that goes on through the heat of the
day and never slows and never ends. In the distance, in the flickering heat, in
the immense distance, a herd of zebra grazes. Suddenly from the grass comes
a streak of movement, and a lion is among them and hangs on a zebra’s throat.
The zebra gives out a barking cry choked off, and the two interlocked beings,
the predator and the prey, spin around in a dance, until you lose sight of the
action in a billow of dust, and the next day the bones have a surface of flies.
(Preston, 136)
The extended analogy in this passage links invisibility and violence to silence.
The stealthy predator takes cover behind lulling reverberations: swishing grass
and cooing doves. The overt metaphoric construction of the virus-as-predator
is progressively broken down as the writing slips into a literal description of

the hunt. Like a spectator on safari, the imagined onlooker loses sight of the
predator and prey behind a “billow of dust.” Here, the polarity of silence and
sound reflected in the opposing cages of squealing and silent monkeys in the
lab gives way to equivocation as lion and zebra become “interlocked beings.”
In the final description of the abandoned “monkey house” in Washington,
the narrative relies almost entirely on an auditory drama to tell the story.
“The place was deserted and as quiet as a tomb,” we are told. The narrator’s
feet rustle “through shreds of plastic in the grass.” He can hear the sound
of “a boy dribbling a basketball on a playground. The ball cast rubbery ech-
oes off the former monkey house.” Children’s shouts are audible through the
trees. Space is visualized as a dispersal of sounds that reverberate and drift. In
the accumulation of these everyday noises, the reader is repeatedly brought
back to the ominous hum of the rainforest: to the place from which the Ebola
virus first emerged, the shadowy underworld from which it continues to whis-
per (“the shades of the dead continued to whisper”) (Preston, 410–411).
Like the preceding description of the wind moving through the savanna
grass, sound provides a cover for the stalking predator.
Africa in Preston’s novel is a place of relentless sound but also of sinis-
ter silence. As the narrator notes of the Ebola virus that was identified
in Central Africa in 1976: “It seemed to emerge out of the stillness of an
implacable force brooding on an inscrutable intention” (100). Of the Bumba
Zone district in northern Zaire that was quarantined during the outbreak, he
writes: “Bumba had dropped off the face of the earth into the silent heart
of darkness” (113). These direct borrowings from Joseph Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness (1899) are indicative, as are other less overt allusions to the
novella.1 As Conrad’s narrator Marlow tells his story, it becomes evident that
silence is racialized and becomes a correlate of darkness. The “violent babble
of uncouth sounds” that the abject natives emit—“weird, appealing, sugges-
tive, and wild”—serve to frame “the great silence” of the enveloping forest
that submerses the narrator, closing over him “as the sea closes over a diver”
(Conrad 2012, 21, 22, and 37).
As Crichton remarks in The Andromeda Strain: “Every crisis [whether bio-
logical or political] has its beginning long before the actual onset.” Quoting
from the work of the fictional scholar Alfred Pockran, he adds, “A cri-
sis is the sum of intuition and blind spots, a blend of facts noted and facts
ignored. Yet underlying the uniqueness of each crisis is a disturbing same-
ness” (Crichton, 18–19). This sense of prehistory is repeatedly stressed by the
narrator in Preston’s work. His description of the CDC field exploration team
that pushes up the Ebola River into “the heart of Africa” is reminiscent of
the “Eldorado Expedition” up the Congo River—a “mighty big river,” which
Conrad’s narrator describes as “resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with
its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail
lost in the depths of the land” (8). Preston’s African wilderness, too, con-
tains the traces of a violent past. On the slopes of Mount Elgon, Monet and
320 R. PECKHAM
his girlfriend pass “old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind
lines of blue-gum trees” (7). The virus hunter lives in the shadow of past
expeditions and the land he depicts resonates with “the continued vibration”
or “spillovers” of past voices.
An auditory reading of Preston’s The Hot Zone suggests the extent to
which a viral soundscape is connected to an imperial imaginary. The places
identified as hot spots of viral chatter in his novel have also been sites of colo-
nial violence. And the postcolonial virus hunter lives on at the heart of a pub-
lic health imaginary concerned with the hot spots of disease emergence in
the Global South. Africa is figured as a continent defined by its o verpowering
noises and crushing silences. Popular science reproduces tropical tropes,
drawing on scientific and literary antecedents wherein Africa is construed as
a place of auditory extremes: of incomprehensible noise and disequilibrating
stillness that threaten to overwhelm the colonial order.
Acoustic Debris
Today, viruses have become familiar as visual objects incorporated into
movie montage sequences, documentaries, and public health messages:
the string-like silhouette of Ebola, for example, or the crown-like receptors
that characterize the coronaviruses responsible for Severe Acute Respiratory
Syndrome (SARS)‚ Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)‚ and
COVID-19. We have become familiar, too, with the disturbing pathologies
that viruses may produce, particularly those that cause hemorrhagic illnesses.
This chapter has sought to challenge an emphasis on the visual in the
outbreak narrative by examining pervasive auditory motifs in three popular
texts that focus on biological contamination and disease emergence. Science
is imagined in these works as a technology and practice of listening, not just
of seeing. Moreover, the unintelligibility of sound can sometimes undermine
the authority of the visual. In different ways, the narratives encourage us to
reflect on the assumptions that structure scientific ways of seeing and listen-
ing. Sonic experience, like visual experience, is shaped by multiple, interacting
factors: physiological, cultural, institutional, and technological (Chion 2016).
Seeing and listening, for all their claims to be neutral, are political acts, cen-
tral to the business of imposing order on the world.
The narratives under discussion have much to teach us about the
techno-scientific milieus that characterize three twentieth-century moments:
experimental science conducted in a Cold War wasteland; a professionalized
techno-science, encompassing space exploration and automation, embedded
in a military complex geared to security; and an emerging disease worldview
from the late 1980s and early 1990s, in which a colonial world order is recast
as a global health regime designed to manage the viral threats that emanate
from the “blank spaces of the earth” (Conrad, 8).
Although their scientific outlooks are different, each of these narratives
suggests that diseases are complex entanglements of the social, biological,
technological, and environmental. Tracing the shifting register of these narra-

tives as they move between ekphrastic, literal, and metaphorical renderings of
sound and sight underscores the ways in which the language and conceptual
frames of modern science are embedded in a broader cultural world.
The historian Nancy Rose Hunt has argued that attentiveness to hear-
ing serves “to problematize and disaggregate the visual” (Hunt 2013, 43).
Hunt is concerned with retrieving “acoustic debris” and “rewriting the
conventional atrocity narrative” that links the violence of the present, often
unproblematically, to that of the past. An acoustic reading of the archive,
and sensitivity to auditory traces, becomes a way to “avoid repeating the
tenacity of the visual and the sense of shock that it reproduces”—of mov-
ing beyond stock images of trauma that “reify a maimed, disfigured, individ-
ualized body” (Hunt, 41 and 58). In a similar way, this chapter has followed
the repetitions between science and fiction, history and the present, focusing
not on the spectacular iterations of emergence, but on the sound of resonant
continuities.
Note
1. As Marlow puts it in Heart of Darkness, “this stillness of life did not in the least
resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention” (Conrad 2012, 38).
Bibliography
Bijsterveld, Karin. 2019. Sonic Skills: Listening for Knowledge in Science, Medicine and
Engineering (1920s-Present). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bull, Malcolm. 1999. Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision and Totality. London
and New York: Verso.
Cage, John. [1961] 1973. Silence: Lectures and Writings. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Carson, Rachel. [1962] 2002. Silent Spring. Boston and New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
Chion, Michel. [1986] 2016. Sound: An Acoulogical Treatise, trans. James A.
Steintrager. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Clasen, Mathias. 2010. Vampire Apocalypse: A Biocultural Critique of Richard
Matheson’s I Am Legend. Philosophy and Literature 34 (2): 313–328.
Connor, Steven. 2002. Voice, Technology and the Victorian Ear. In Transactions and
Encounters: Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Roger Luckhurst
and Josephine McDonagh, 16–29. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Conrad, Joseph. [1899] 2012. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin.
Corbin, Alain. 1998. Village Bells: The Culture of the Senses in the Nineteenth-Century
French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom. New York: Columbia University Press.
Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crichton, Michael. 1969. The Andromeda Strain. New York: Vintage Books.
322 R. PECKHAM
Davies, Paul. 2010. The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Eliot, George. 1871. Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life. Edinburgh and
London: William Blackwood and Sons.
Enns, Anthony, and Shelley Trower (eds.). 2013. Vibratory Modernism. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Farmer, Paul. 2006. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, 2nd ed.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Febvre, Lucien. 1982. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion
of Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frisch, Walter. 1993. The Early Works of Arnold Schoenberg, 1893–1908. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Hunt, Nancy Rose. 2013. An Acoustic Register: Rape and Repetition in Congo. In
Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination, ed. Ann Laura Stoler, 39–66. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Ivie, Robert L. 1999. Fire, Flood, and Red Fever: Motivating Metaphors of Global
Emergency in the Truman Doctrine Speech. Presidential Studies Quarterly 29 (3):
570–591.
Jay, Martin. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal
Foster, 3–23. Seattle: Bay Press.
Johns, Adrian. 1998. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
King, Nicholas B. 2002. Security, Disease, Commerce: Ideologies of Postcolonial
Global Health. Social Studies of Science 32 (5–6): 763–789.
Marx, Leo. 1964. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Matheson, Richard. [1954] 2007. I Am Legend. New York: Tor.
Mody, Cyrus C.M. 2005. The Sounds of Science: Listening to Laboratory Practice.
Science, Technology, and Human Values 30 (2): 175–198.
———. 2012. Conversions: Sound and Sight, Military and Civilian. In Oxford
Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, 224–248. Oxford:
Picker, John M. 2003. Victorian Soundscapes. Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press.
Piot, Peter (with Ruth Marshall). 2012. No Time To Lose: A Life in Pursuit of Deadly
Viruses. New York: W. W. Norton.
Power, Nina. 2014. Soft Coercion, the City, and the Recorded Female Voice. In The
Acoustic City, ed. Matthew Gandy and B.J. Nilsen, 23–26. Berlin: Jovis Publishers.
Preston, Richard. [1994] 1995. The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story. New York:
Anchor Books.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1992. Introduction—Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and
History. In Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, ed. Charles E. Rosenberg
and Janet Golden, xiii–xxvi. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Snyder, Laura S. 2015. Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek,
and the Reinvention of Seeing. New York: W. W. Norton.
Specter, Michael. 2010. Letter from Cameroon—The Doomsday Strain: Can Nathan
Wolfe Thwart the Next AIDS Before It Spreads? New Yorker (December 20 and
27). Retrieved from: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/
the-doomsday-strain.
Supper, Alexandra. 2012. The Search for the ‘Killer Application’: Drawing the
Boundaries around the Sonification of Scientific Data. In Oxford Handbook of
Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld, 249–270. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Williams, Rosalind. 1990. Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society,
and the Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———. 1993. Cultural Origins and Environmental Implications of Large
Technological Systems. Science in Context 6 (2): 377–403.
Zimmer, Carl. 2013. An Infinity of Viruses. National Geographic (February 20).
Retrieved from: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/02/20/an-
infinity-of-viruses/.
CHAPTER 18
To Feel an Equation: Physiological

Aesthetics, Modern Physics,
and the Poetry of Jay Wright
Steven Meyer
a ground/state that moves without/an absolute space. (Wright 2007a: 25)
For much of the twentieth century, physics was first in the pecking order
among the sciences, as evidenced in the massive project to reduce the life
sciences to the physical sciences. Molecular biology offered one such pathway.
More recently, the life sciences have undergone a striking transformation,
and it can reasonably be argued that, having pulled even with the physical
sciences, they have begun to pull ahead. Less apparent has been the longer-
term tendency of the biologization of physics replacing physicized biology,
already prominent in the opening decades of the century yet largely ignored
in the shadow of much-bruited developments in the physical sciences.
Initially, William James (although he had little to say about physics), and then
in the interwar years Alfred North Whitehead (a highly original theoretical
physicist1 and applied mathematician, as well as groundbreaking meta-logi-
cian and speculative philosopher), cleared the way for understanding the
increased importance of biological thinking in the sciences generally.2 Now
that we are well into the next century, it is incumbent upon us to follow their
lead in grasping the scope of what has occurred—and protect against a not
unlikely regression.3
Consider Stuart Kauffman’s recent A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence
and Evolution of Life (2019). Like the contemporary poet Jay Wright,
Kauffman is a MacArthur Award-winner (in 1986 and 1987, respectively) and
Wright has read previous works of his with great interest. Kauffman’s main
argument in A World Beyond Physics is that evolution and emergence, properly
S. Meyer (*) 
Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA

326 S. MEYER
understood, are impossible to account for in strictly physical terms—that is

to say, they “cannot be reduced to physics,” at least classical physics, for in
some important sense they are “beyond law” (14, 125). Instead, something
like the biologization of physics is required, operating on several levels. In
the first place, the complexity of “the universe – and especially the biosphere
–” is such that “a non-equilibrium companion of the famous second law” of
thermodynamics is required. This principle is needed to “help explain how
the biosphere today can be far more complex than it was 4 billion years ago”
when life appeared on earth, instead of “disorder … increas[ing],” as the sec-
ond law would have it (4–5).
Kauffman certainly isn’t calling for the biologization of physics if that is
understood as a matter of turning physics into a subset of biology, symmetri-
cal to the reduction of biology to physics (physicizing biology), only with the
arrow of reduction reversed. Instead, he proposes that ultimately biology can-
not be physicized and therefore the entire physicization agenda is misguided.
And that leads in turn to a further question. Is biology beyond physics, as
Kauffman suggests—in addressing phenomena which for various reasons are
destined to remain beyond the reach of physical theory—or do the features
he emphasizes of the universe (and biosphere), such as complexity and emer-
gence, demand a biologization of physics in a different sense? Supposing the
latter, developments in physical research may have to line up increasingly
closely with phenomena more characteristic of biology than classical physics
(physics without quantum theory).
Now, such concerns do not begin with Kauffman. In A World Beyond
Physics he alludes to Ilya Prigogine, the Russian-Belgian physical chemist
awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on dissipative struc-
tures and non-classical far-from-equilibrium dynamical systems (and co-au-
thor with Isabelle Stengers of the best-selling Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New
Dialogue with Nature [1984]), as well as to the Harvard paleontologist and
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. In his posthumously published
manifesto, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap
between Science and the Humanities (2003), Gould persuasively argues for
the centrality of emergence and historical contingency to the life sciences by
contrast with the physical sciences.4 And long before Prigogine and Gould,
in Science and the Modern World (1925) Whitehead proposed putting physics
and biology on a common basis of what he termed “organism” in place of the
more physics-centered “matter.” Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen-
tury developments in physics almost routinely called oversimplified materialis-
tic accounts into question. Even as “organism” was consequently generalized
far beyond the life sciences, physics had to be reconceptualized on the model
of biological processes.
It is not simply our understanding of the sciences that is at stake. In
the present chapter, I sketch the lineaments of a parallel poetization of the
sciences. Ultimately these are equivalent phenomena: A robust biologiza-
tion of the physical sciences could not occur except in a context in which the
18 TO FEEL AN EQUATION … 327
sciences were being poetized (and so reorganized) as well. The equivalence

can be demonstrated by following out James’s and Whitehead’s arguments, as
I seek to do in a much larger study, still in progress. I propose here that the
shape of these developments can also be discerned in an ongoing conversa-
tion between Jay Wright and the leading (if too infrequently acknowledged)
mid-twentieth-century investigator of physiological aesthetics, US philoso-
pher Susanne K. Langer.5
Partial Analysis of an Unpublished Lecture

Late on a Tuesday morning in October 1972, Wright—then in his mid-thir-
ties and with his first volume of poetry, The Homecoming Singer, just out
the previous year—delivered the inaugural lecture of the Joseph Compton
Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of Dundee.6 The lecture would
prove the second in a series of four interlocking works of prose that together
provide a rich account of his developing poetics in the 1970s and 1980s.7
Although it remains unpublished, Wright signaled the importance of “Feeling
and Some Related Problems for Poetry” by referring several times to it in
the latest of these pieces, an interview prepared for the 1983 special issue of
Callaloo devoted to his writing. In the pages that follow I take the opportu-
nity afforded by the present consideration of the role of physics in Wright’s
poetry to describe the argument of the Compton lecture in considerable
detail and to indicate where it stands in relation to the other works.
The lecture is divided into six fairly discrete parts. After introductory
remarks characterizing “a crisis in the state of poetry” and signaling his inten-
tion “to investigate [a] wider definition of feeling,” Wright cycles through
discussions of (1) modern physics, (2) parallels within the so-called two cul-
tures, (3) the significance of logic for linguistic analysis, (4) the function of
myth, and (5) the mechanisms of visual perception, before finally taking up
(6) “the poet’s primary province, feeling.” The initial set of topics (1–3)
fills out the analysis of the current crisis, offering a few hints as to how to
address it, while the second set (4–6) provides interrelated solutions to several
problems that arise concurrently. Viewed more generally, the lecture’s signif-
icance—both in broadly analytic terms and with regard to the particulars of
Wright’s career—lies in its direct engagement with modern physics, a topic
that is wholly absent from the other three works despite serving as the jump-
ing-off point for the Dundee presentation. (In this light, I will limit my dis-
cussion to Parts 1, 2, and 6.)
“Imagine,” Wright proposes, “that you are a contemporary poet of some
curiosity [and] you are confronted by this: ‘The validity of the physical con-
cept does not rest upon its content of real elements of existence, such as can be
directly pointed out, but upon the strictness of connection, which it makes pos-
sible. …’” The sentence cited here is part of a longer excerpt drawn from Ernst
Cassirer’s important account of late nineteenth-century physics, Substance and
Function, dating from 1910. (The translation used by Wright came out in
328 S. MEYER
1923 in a volume that also contained Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, published

by Cassirer in the original German two years earlier.) From the same excerpt:
“It is the fundamental error of Baconian empiricism that it does not grasp this
correlation”—between “possess[ing] the ‘facts’ only by virtue of the totality of
concepts” and “conceiv[ing] the concepts only with reference to the totality
of possible experience”—and chooses instead to regard “the ‘facts’ as isolated
entities existing for themselves, which our thought has only to copy as faithfully
as possible” (Cassirer 1923: 146–147).
In the Callaloo interview a decade later, Wright would similarly observe
that it is “one of my basic assumptions [that] naked perception (just seeing
something), directly expressed, is misprision in the highest degree. Every per-
ception requires explication and interpretation. … A simple report of expe-
rience, if you could make such a thing, isn’t good enough” (1983: 87–88).
Again, a few years after this, in the middle of several citations from Langer,
Wright included the claim: “And the triumph of empiricism is jeopardized by
the surprising truth that our sense data are primarily symbols” (Langer 1954:
16; Wright 2000: 475).8 In Langer this statement is immediately preceded by
the proposition that “[t]he problem of observation” traditionally associated
with empiricism “is all but eclipsed by the problem of meaning” insofar as
sense data actually function symbolically—therefore requiring, as Wright puts
it, “explication and interpretation.”
Cassirer’s (and Langer’s) criticisms of traditional scientific empiricism,
which purports to start, for instance, from simple reports comprised of sense
data, would hardly seem to pose a problem directed specifically at the mod-
ern poet; yet insofar as poetry deals in perceptions too, our poet would prob-
ably do well to attend to philosophies of science like Langer’s and Cassirer’s.
The problem for poetry extends even more broadly, for, as Wright puts it,
“the crisis that we have assumed [to afflict poetry “at present”] is as much
the result of the poets’ neglect of disciplines other than poetry, or, if that
seems too strong, of the poets’ incomprehension or uneasy assimilation of
art and thought other than their own.” Removed from its immediate con-
text, Wright’s claim may seem to mirror C.P. Snow’s argument a dozen years
earlier regarding the mutual incomprehension of modern scientists and lit-
erary intellectuals. Yet where Snow somehow managed to turn an argument
framed in terms of reciprocal incomprehension into a diatribe against one of
the parties, Wright turns the tables on the popular novelist and technocrat by
emphasizing instead a parallel between modern science and modern litera-
ture that Snow’s own incomprehension prevented him from grasping. (Where
from Snow’s vantage most literary intellectuals fail to demonstrate an ade-
quate understanding of thermodynamics, scientists like him are quite familiar
with Shakespeare, thank you very much.)
Referring to a paper by Gary Gutting published just half a year prior to
the Compton lecture—“in which the public controversy between philos-
ophers of science and historians of science is discussed[,] a controversy
that seems to revolve around the issue of the non-empirical but publically
discussable and objective considerations in scientific work, in Einstein’s in

particular”—Wright points to “equally astonishing, and not so astonishing,
events occurring [in] another area of intellectual life.” “For it seems to be
an accepted fact,” he continues, “that what we call modernism in literature
was also becoming a publically discussable and objective consideration in its
own right.” Then comes the recognition that so sharply distinguishes his
perspective from Snow’s: “It is difficult not to feel that there is some corre-
lation between the rapidly developed discussion of issues in science and the
equally absorbing discussion of literary issues during the same period.” As a
well-known example of the latter, Wright cites Ezra Pound’s 1913 definition
of the poetic image (“that which presents an intellectual and emotional com-
plex in an instant of time”) and further observes of several qualifying remarks
by Pound that “[i]t is as though he were at once quarreling with and accept-
ing some faint voices only half-heard, but nevertheless attractive.” “Pound
was no Valéry,” Wright adds, “– few people are – but I am sure that he had
some idea of what was in the air.”
What was in the air. “We need not argue for a one-to-one correlation,”
Wright has just insisted—the only kind Snow would recognize—but
“[i]f we look carefully at some of the sentences in Cassirer’s passage,” we find
that they only “require very slight shifts [in phrasing] to bring us up against
language used to formulate problems in other disciplines.” It is to some of
these problems that Wright then turns, treating them as problems for the com-
position and experience of poetry as well as for the disciplines in which they
were initially formulated. The only obligation for cross-disciplinary investi-
gations like Wright’s of “what may possibly have been in the air [and] may, in
fact, still be haunting us” is that one not assume the sort of strict dichotomy
between scientific and literary concerns promoted by Snow. Indeed, in predi-
cating his influential account of the two cultures on a shallow distaste for mod-
ernist writing in general, and D.H. Lawrence in particular, Snow consistently
displayed the same ignorance he so cavalierly attributed to literary intellectu-
als. By contrast, Wright—paradigmatic literary intellectual—asks his listeners
“to take the world and its knowledge into [their] counsel.” “I shall only say
here what I often say to my various creative writing students: a poet should
be at least as knowledgeable about and attuned to the world and its histor-
ical events as his readers”—clearly anticipating readers attentive to modern
science, among other things.
Navigating Absences
Transfigurations, published in 2000, collected Wright’s first seven volumes
of poetry (1971–1991) and added an eighth, Transformations, consisting of
thirty-three highly intricate works composed in traditional verse formats rang-
ing from a Keats ode to seguidillas and zejels and an anti-fabliau along with
a Provençal retroencha and dansa Provençal. “Where will I find the message,
if not there,/inscribed in a forest [of cottonwoods] grown dense and
330 S. MEYER
strange?/or in the density and interchange/of heat and force that mark
the fairy stone,/the carbon trace that whispers of frail bone?/or in a
ring of cloud, where I prepare/a protostar, for the creative thrust/of the
stellar wind?” So begins the second section—of four—of the Keats ode,
“The Navigation of Absences: An Ode on Method,” which serves as
the volume’s opening poem. Explicit use of the terminology of modern
physics, as in the astrophysics alluded to here, enters Wright’s compositions
with Transfigurations (and Transformations). “For me,” as he explained
almost two decades earlier in the Callaloo interview, “multi-cultural is the
fundamental process of human history” (1983: 97). Manifestly, that includes
literary and scientific cultures.
Immediately preceding this assertion of methodological multiculturalism,
Wright also expresses his “convic[tion] that human history will continue to
reveal more and more of the fundamental interrelations of people, things,
and other creatures of the universe” (1983: 97). In describing interrelations
as fundamental, he subscribes to an understanding of the composition of the
world and of experience consistent with the expanded empiricism of James
and Whitehead. A “radical empiricism” capable of grasping “a pluralistic
universe,” in James’s terms9: No less critical than Cassirer was of “Baconian
empiricism” (the view that “‘facts’ [are limited to] isolated entities existing
for themselves”) but from the perspective of a more robust empiricism rather
than from Cassirer’s neo-Kantian idealist perspective. The challenge, then,
that Wright sets himself and his readers is to portray these interrelations so
they retain their experiential priority to the often-more-concrete-seeming
entities they bring together (“people, things”). For a critic of poetry like
Wright’s the challenge is similar: How to render “publically discussable”—
to use Wright’s own language in the Compton lecture—the forms that his
pluralistic “multi-cultural possessions” take, while retaining a strong sense of
their dynamism (1983: 98). The phrase navigation of absences suffices to make
clear why data-driven methodologies are unsuitable to such investigation and
its objects (impressions of absence, or emptiness, or silence, along with the
accordingly “enlarged realm of experience” the navigation elicits [1983: 92]).
“What interests us here,” Wright proposed that autumn morning in Dundee,
is what Professor Langer and others, including su servidor, mean by feeling.

Recently, she has written, “Feeling is like the dynamic and rhythmic structures
created by artists; artistic form is always the form of felt life, whether of impres-
sion, emotion, overt action, thought, dream or even obscure organic processes
rising to a high level and going into psychical phase, perhaps acutely, perhaps
barely and vaguely. It is the way acts and impacts feel that makes them impor-
tant in art”. (1967: 64)
This is, Wright admits, “a rather strange way to begin, to try to define human
feeling through art. Can we? Or can we at least begin there? Let us push a
little further.”
So he cites Langer again: “human feeling,” she contended in a 1958 lecture,10
is a fabric, not a vague mass. It has an intricate dynamic pattern, possible com-
binations and new emergent phenomena. It is a pattern of organically inter-
dependent and interdetermined tensions and resolutions, a pattern of almost
infinitely complex activation and cadence. To it belongs the whole gamut of our
sensibility. (2009: 84)
(A dozen years later Wright would title the opening poem in Explications/
Interpretations, “Tensions and Resolutions.”) “It is, I think, this dynamic
pattern,” Langer continued, “that finds its formal expression in the arts. The
expressiveness of art is like that of a symbol, not that of an emotional symp-
tom” (84). Consequently, Wright concludes, “[w]hat we should be asking is
what a symbol is.” The precise nature of the problem that Langer’s account
confronts Wright with should now be clear: The challenge is not so much to
grasp the “wider definition of feeling” (“anything that may be felt”11) as to
bring together the symbolic and affective dimensions of poetry analyzed on
separate tracks by Langer. For example, in seeking to combine propositions
like these: that “feeling is like the dynamic and rhythmic structures created by
artists” and “the expressiveness of art is like that of a symbol.”
The complicated relation between Langer’s thought and that of
Whitehead—her “great Teacher and Friend,” to cite the dedication of
Philosophy in a New Key (1954: v)—greatly illuminates the pairing of feeling
and physics that frames the Dundee lecture. When Whitehead arrived at
Harvard in the fall of 1924, he assumed the direction of Langer’s disserta-
tion and six years later wrote a prefatory note to her first book, The Practice
of Philosophy. She continued to teach at Radcliffe till 1941, the year before
Philosophy in a New Key came out, and also the year Cassirer emigrated to
the USA. Although much of Langer’s brilliant analysis of feeling in its phys-
iological, psychical, and aesthetic dimensions offers an intricate rendering
of aspects of Whitehead’s still highly controversial account, she was herself
unprepared to follow him in some of the more controversial aspects: perhaps
most notably his further generalization of feeling (as “prehension” or “pos-
itive prehension”) to permit the application of the reconstructed concept to
physical and not just biological phenomena. That is presumably why, despite
the dedication in Philosophy in a New Key, she had so little actually to say
about him. In an unpublished essay12 Langer is very clear about her ration-
ale: “Whitehead’s identification of ‘positive prehension,’ a cosmic principle of
process as such, with ‘feeling’ seems to me unfortunate, for it precludes any
detailed study of that most interesting phenomenon which distinguishes psy-
chology from physiology, just as the phenomena of organic functioning dis-
tinguish physiology from chemistry and physics (the boundaries between the
sciences being always somewhat fluid)” (cited in Dryden 1997: 78, emphasis
added). She knew perfectly well that what she characterized as feeling “in its
widest possible sense” was still considerably narrower than Whitehead’s own
entry; however, she regarded his concept as incapable of establishing distinc-
tions she believed essential.
332 S. MEYER
By the same token, Langer would probably have disputed my speaking of

her as an “investigator of physiological aesthetics” in her writings on symbol-
ization, art, biology, and mind (since, as the passage just provided indicates,
she tended to regard physiology as operating at a different level than psychical
phases of vital processes). Yet from James’s and Whitehead’s perspectives that
is what she was, within the frameworks of their still more expansive empir-
icisms. No doubt when the Victorian novelist and evolutionist Grant Allen
coined the phrase physiological aesthetics, it carried strongly reductionist impli-
cations, quite antithetical to Langer’s own perspective. Following James, I am
using the phrase very differently than Allen did or scholars of Victorian cul-
ture typically do.13 In the Compton lecture Wright alludes to an invocation
by Langer of “the great neurologist, Wilder Penfield,” as she calls Penfield in
“The Process of Feeling” (2009: 9). In that essay she goes on to propose that
“if, instead of ‘converted into thought’”—from a remark of Penfield’s regard-
ing “how a nerve impulse can be converted into thought”—“we say, ‘felt as
thought,’ the investigation of mental function is shifted from the realm of
mysterious transubstantiation to that of physiological processes, where we
face problems of complexity and degree, which are difficult, but not unassail-
able in principle” (9–10).14
Langer continues: “‘Feeling’ in the broad sense here employed seems to be
the generic basis of all mental experience – sensation, emotion, imagination,
recollection, and reasoning, to mention only the main categories. Felt experi-
ence is elaborated in the course of high organic development, intellectualized
as brain functions are corticalized, and socialized with the evolution of speech
and the growth of its communicative functions.” Then follows an important
qualification, fully consistent with my brief here for a physiological aesthet-
ics like Wright’s that neither reduces aesthetics (and psychology) to physiol-
ogy nor too sharply distinguishes them: “On the other hand, the mechanisms
of felt activity are heightened forms of unfelt vital rhythms, responses, and
interactions; a psychology oriented by this concept of feeling runs smoothly
downward into physiology without the danger of being reduced to physiol-
ogy and therewith losing its own identity. Even if it should ultimately appear
as a branch of physiology, the area of its branching is likely to remain quite
visible, though without a sharp dividing line (there are very few such sharp
lines in nature): it is the area where vital (probably neural) processes begin to
have psychical phases, i.e., to be felt” (10).
Donald Dryen also cites a complementary (and more complimentary)
observation of Langer’s from the same essay. Whitehead, she admitted, “pro-
posed or pointed out so many things that hold true for terrestrial life and
especially for human feeling, that even a person who finds his metaphysical
use of these ideas fantastic may have recourse to his books again and again for
the ideas themselves, because of their applicability within biological and psy-
chological contexts” (Dryden 1997: 75). To that Whitehead probably would
have replied: Exactly! Only to add: Then why leave physics out of your pic-
ture, particularly given the astonishing reconstructions required of physical
concepts not just since Einstein but since Maxwell before him (about whom
Whitehead had written his fellowship dissertation at Cambridge)? Especially if
“the boundaries between the sciences [are] always somewhat fluid” anyway!15
After all, in devising his post-Darwinian, post-Jamesian, post-Einsteinian
cosmology, Whitehead sought to rid modern thought of its reliance on what
he famously designated the “bifurcation of nature”16—not just into primary
and secondary qualities, or objectivity and subjectivity, or psychology and
physics, or even literature and science, but also into the ultimately untenable
division between the life sciences and the physical sciences.
As Wright explains near the end of the Dundee lecture, “the artist has a
human frame in which to discover and to explore the complexity of feelings,
in the widened sense we have given them, that any man may have and find
within himself as a living, historical and feeling being.” “Poetry has no modest
task in being part of that search,” Wright remarks. “[Y]ou may feel that the
burdens that we have placed on poetry are, to paraphrase Ralph Ellison,
enough to give poetry the blues”—even so, “the world and the word dance
about and with each other, learning new figures, and it is often difficult to tell
whose need is greater.” Here, in the lecture’s concluding lines, Wright refers
back to an allusion he made just as he was turning to the discussion of “the
poet’s primary province, feeling,” when he invoked “the world which [the
poet] might call upon to create that need for poetry, as Valéry has put it.”
Clearly, there is a good deal more involved in such novel figuration than
what Samuel Johnson, in his famous dismissal of “metaphysical poetry,”
termed “the most heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together”
(Hardy 1971: 12). Wright is concerned instead to “discover and explore”
cosmic possibilities of design—he speaks in one poem of “[t]he mask of
cosmic design/danc[ing] alone” (2007a: 43)—as these are exhibited within
“the complexity of feelings.” To accomplish that he yokes together discourses
which, from the perspective of any one of them—and certainly from the view-
point of proponents of the two cultures dichotomy—may seem without any
overlap at all.
Johnson was right to attend to the internal heterogeneity of such figures but
wrong to dismiss it. In summarizing his earlier critique in the Compton lec-
ture of logic’s central role in twentieth-century linguistics, Wright proposes in
“Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance” that “[i]f the poets have been divested
of the magic power of naming” by Ferdinand de Saussure’s argument that
“language is no more than a system of signs,” this loss has been more than
compensated for by “an even greater power.” That is “the ability to create an
awareness of differing and seemingly incompatible relationships.” Wright then
continues:
This truly becomes a challenging power. Poiesis is not exhausted in the relatively
subordinate act of giving a name to some thing. It goes beyond that into real
power, that of transformation and action. [Kenneth] Burke clarifies this when he
says, “There is a sense in which language is not just ‘natural,’ but really does add
334 S. MEYER
a ‘new dimension’ to the things of nature (an observation that would be the
logological equivalent of the theological statement that grace perfects nature)”.
(Wright 1987: 19; Burke 1961: 8)
I spoke earlier of the challenge Wright located in Langer as a matter of bringing

together the symbolic and affective registers both of the “active” word and “the
transformative and transformed world,” as he has characterized the “larger world
of feeling”—“the world that poetry inhabits” (1970: 350; 1972, 1987: 27). On
the one hand, symbolic, hence abstract; on the other, affective and concrete. The
challenge, again, entails combining seeming incompatibles.
Amplified by a Silence

We can now return to the propositions laid out at the beginning of this
chapter. In referring to the poetization of the sciences, I had in mind some-
thing like Wright’s assertion that feeling is the province of poetry. Inasmuch
as one widens the concept of feeling as Langer does, but no more, one
remains fully within the domain of the life sciences. With Whitehead’s
further albeit prior expansion of the concept, not only does one extend the
reach of feeling to more strictly physical conceptualization, but the physical
universe is construed as fundamentally poetic. That leads directly to the poet-
ization of the sciences. The consequences of such conceptual reconstruction
are complex and obviously far beyond the scope of the present chapter to
spell out. Yet, attending to relevant aspects of the poem which opens Wright’s
2013 collection Disorientations: Groundings—quite possibly the single most
important volume of American poetry in the first decades of this Gaian cen-
tury—should provide a sense of what is involved. (Since the appearance of
Transfigurations in 2000, Wright has published seven additional volumes of
poetry through The Prime Anniversary in mid-2019. Most of these cluster
around 2007–2008, following his receipt of the 2005 Bollingen Prize, as the
first African-American honored with the major US award for lifetime achieve-
ment in poetry.)
Let us start with a couple of examples of what it is like to feel an equation,
the sort of thing that according to T.S. Eliot has typically proved beyond the
reach of modern poets: “feel[ing] their thought,” the prophet of the “disso-
ciation of sensibility” memorably remarked a century ago, “as immediately
as the odour of a rose” (1988: 64). Poets may find themselves defeated in
the endeavor; those who compose with mathematical equations not so much.
The first anecdote, supplied by Bertrand Russell, concerns Whitehead. One
afternoon Russell and an acquaintance stopped by to visit the mathematician.
They found him in the garden, and stood near as he wrote out equation after
equation. Finally they left—he never ceased, never acknowledged them. In
this instance one may readily say, with Wright, that “the voice feels braced/by
its own fluidity” (2007a: 55).
The experience of writing out equations is quite different in our sec-

ond example. This anecdote concerns the physicist Niels Bohr, who is cen-
tral to Wright’s poem. Bohr was presenting “a fundamental report on the
current difficulties of atomic theory” at a conference he had organized in
Copenhagen. “I do not remember the content,” C.F. von Weizsäcker recalled
half a century later, “but I do remember the frustration of the participants
about the well-known unintelligibility of his talk. With an expression of suffer-
ing, his head held to one side, he stumbled over incomplete sentences. Even
the language that he used varied: it fluctuated between German, English,
and Danish, and when the topic became quite important he mumbled with
his hands in front of his face. … That day for a time he had a chalk in his
right hand and a sponge in his left; he would write down equations with the
right hand and wipe them off almost at once with the left. Suddenly there
sounded the forceful voice of his old friend Paul Ehrenfest: ‘Bohr! Give me
the sponge!’ With a rather pained smile Bohr handed the sponge to Ehrenfest,
who kept it on his lap during the rest of the lecture” (1985: 186–187).
“Why does the Dane think his design/a complement to Being?” Wright’s
three-page poem begins. Had I not already mentioned Bohr, most read-
ers, possessing the same level of familiarity with Shakespeare that C.P. Snow
accorded to scientists, would probably hear Hamlet in “the Dane,” particu-
larly in close proximity to the theme of Being. Indeed for English-language
speakers Wright could not have erased the association even had he wanted to
(“This is I, Hamlet the Dane” [The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,
5.1.242]). So in the present context “the Dane” combines two references,
to Bohr and to Hamlet, and which comes first depends on the extent of the
reader’s familiarity with Bohr. In this poem, the reference to Bohr is the dom-
inant, and one does not need to be especially familiar with the great physicist
to recognize that. Bohr is probably best known for two things: the so-called
Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics (registered in “the Dane”)
and his account of what he termed “complementarity” (“a complement to
Being”).
Then follows: “Would Èsù sustain him?” An experienced reader of
Wright’s work—experienced therefore in navigating absences or non
sequiturs of the sort occurring here in the abrupt passage from Dane to
Èsù—would probably catch the reference. So would anyone acquainted with
the spread of African mythology in the Americas or at the very least with The
Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988),
the classic study by Wright’s colleague at Yale in the late 1970s, Henry
Louis Gates Jr.—the opening chapter of which is titled “A Myth of Origins:
Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey.” The juxtaposition of Bohr with
the Yoruba trickster figure might well have annoyed Samuel Johnson
(or Snow), but in the broadly American context of Wright’s “enlarged realm
of experience,” it fits right in. Given that Èsù functions in Yoruba mythol-
ogy as the messenger of the gods and as such their interpreter to humans,
336 S. MEYER
the juxtaposition is in fact much smoother than it might initially seem. In

modern physics, as Weizsäcker’s little narrative suggests, Bohr himself
frequently functions as the mythic interpreter of “fundamental … atomic
theory” and its “difficulties.”
Half a dozen lines later, Wright invokes Bohr again:
Let me awaken a definition of suffering.

Our task is not to penetrate into the essence of things. (2013: 1)
Wright’s principal source regarding Bohr’s thought was Dugald Murdoch’s

important 1987 study Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics, but the mate-
rial rendered in these lines is not to be found there. Years before compos-
ing Disorientations: Groundings, however, he had read The Whole Shebang,
the much acclaimed account of late twentieth-century cosmology by science
writer Timothy Ferris; and Ferris’s juxtaposition of Weizsäcker commenting,
on another occasion, about Bohr’s intellectual suffering alongside a pair of
oft-repeated statements by Bohr, including the one cited here (from a 1935
letter), perhaps lingered in the back of Wright’s mind (1997: 274–275).17
Near the midpoint of the poem we read the following:
Physics concerns only what we have learned to say.

I have a perfect cadence,
a lover and lady,
     a record
of what I have learned to sing.
I am neither Jew nor Greek.
What does that have to do with a Wednesday
in Bastrop, Texas,
where an atom chooses a summery frock
and goes calling from door
     to door? (2013: 4)
Wright’s query continues the train of thought initiated with the opening
question directed at Bohr. Here, then, is how Murdoch describes Bohr’s
stance in a characterization Wright builds on when he asks why “the Dane
think[s] his design/a complement to Being.” Bohr “does not doubt that our
experience is of an independently existing world … We construct theories of
the microstructure of the physical world in order better to comprehend the
world in which we move and have our being – the macroscopic world. …
[T]he primary aim of physics, in Bohr’s view, is to make sense of our per-
ceptual experience and the description of microphysical reality is merely a
means to that end, not an end in itself” (1987: 221, 225). That leads directly
to what Jan Faye calls “the pragmatic nature of Bohr’s view on ontological
issues” (2014: 8). Throughout Wright’s lines, as I read them, there is a gentle
critique of Bohr’s hard and fast distinction between epistemological questions

pertaining to quantum mechanics, which he felt he could at least attempt to
answer, and ontological ones, somehow beyond him.
The critique of Bohr’s stance may be gentle—Wright fully recognizes
the suffering it expresses—but the situation addressed in these lines is
anything but. Again Wright addresses himself to Bohr in adapting the first
of the quotes artfully combined by Ferris. “Physics concerns what we can
say about nature” (as reported by Aage Petersen [1963: 12]) now becomes
“Physics concerns what we have learned to say.” Wright then invokes the
parallel between physics and poetry so important to his 1972 lecture, in the
course of which he alludes both to a Provençal “lover and lady” and to Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s post-Civil War verse tragedy Judas Maccabaeus with
the line “I am neither Jew nor Greek”—uttered in Longfellow’s play by the
Hellenized Jew, Jason, and adapted here by Wright to very different circum-
stances. These are suggested by the reference to Bastrop, Texas (near Austin),
where throughout September 2011 the most destructive wildfire recorded in
the state raged, ultimately destroying 1673 homes. Like the conflagrations
coursing through California as I write these sentences, human fingerprints
were all over it, beginning with an initial spark due to some failure in the elec-
trical grid and extending to broader transformations in planetary conditions.
It is within this Gaian context that Wright asks his question, entertaining
Bohr’s “correspondence rule” between classical and quantum physics: that
the pragmatic interest of subatomic phenomena lies in their capacity to help
us understand the many puzzling experiences that occur at the macroscopic,
human level. How exactly this operates remains, in Wright’s poem, a problem
still to be addressed—as do the connections which such physical phenomena
possess to the lines’ other notable references.
At the close of the poem, Wright turns from Niels Bohr to the Nile. The
parallels between modern poetry and physics of so much concern to Wright
as well as the present chapter are, needless to say, for Wright only part of the
story, one thread in the grand tapestry he is at once weaving and uncovering.
“Speak now,” he instructs—in the last lines of the volume’s inaugural poem—
     of the difficult eucalyptus,

the agapanthi,
the absolute density that has never appeared.
And I hear there will be a baptism on the Nile this afternoon,
stirring an Etruscan envy, a Roman insecurity. (2013: 5)
I won’t even begin to interpret these lines, other than to provide a brief
gloss: that, aside from the association of the infant Moses with the Nile,
“agapanthi” derives from the Greek agape (love) and anthos (flower); that
some species of agapanthi are known as “lily of the Nile”; that they are also
referred to as the African lily despite not being lilies. With these lines Wright
338 S. MEYER
brings his reader, and his imaginative rendering of Bohr, back to Africa,
juxtaposing African knowledge practices with modern physics, among other
threads. Disorientations: Groundings is in fact organized in several parts, each
of which is aligned with one of the four degrees of knowledge imparted in
the initiation rites which served as the basis for Wright’s 1980 volume, The
Double Invention of Komo. Because he starts with a reference to Bohr, it is
entirely appropriate to begin one’s consideration of the volume with the role
played by physics in the formulation of Wright’s poetics across his career—yet
it is only one beginning, and there are multiple entry points.
Up to now I have neglected to mention the pair of alternative references
built into the phrase the poetization of science: first, taking the genitive
construction objectively, poetry that directly engages with science;
second, taking it subjectively, science that itself operates within a broader
poetic canvas (a poetic universe, as it were). In the present instance, Wright’s
poetry, and its engagement with Bohr, serves as a clear example of the former;
Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics in terms of complementarity
may exemplify the latter. However, when Wright speaks of Bohr’s “design” as
“a complement to Being,” he is not using complementarity in Bohr’s sense.
That is implicit, to be sure, in the design itself, which takes the form of Bohr’s
complementarity-based interpretation of quantum mechanics—that is to say,
with kinetic (spatio-temporal) and dynamic (causal) properties of phenomena
“depend[ing] on mutually exclusive measurements” (Faye 2002). Yet in refer-
ring to one thing as a complement to another, Wright employs what is effec-
tively a different, if related, term. According to the Oxford English Dictionary,
the principal sense of “complement” is “that which completes or makes per-
fect; the completion, perfection, consummation”—in a strictly grammatical
sense, “one or more words joined to another to complete the sense”—from
the Latin complēmentum, “that which fills up or completes.”
As for “complementary,” it splits the difference. The O.E.D. indicates that
the term has been utilized to mean both “forming a complement” and, “of
two (or more) things[,] mutually complementing or completing each other’s
deficiencies” (emphasis added). Needless to say, the latter usage fails to con-
vey the experience of perfection-as-completion frequently invoked by Wright,
whether in the subsequent reference to “a perfect cadence” (“Physics con-
cerns only what we have learned to say./I have a perfect cadence,/a lover
and lady …”) or in the citation from Kenneth Burke in the Compton lecture:
“the logological equivalent of the theological statement that grace perfects
nature.” Similarly, in the present example Bohr’s design is conceived as com-
pleting Being while leaving it substantively unaffected.
Let us conclude, then, with the slightly more than double handful of lines
leading to the final quintet (“Speak now …”):
I speak as though the mechanics involved

had been decided,
as though our common syntax,
lacking the weight of inquiry,

had made our exchange efficiently honest,
a perfect symmetry binding a thought to its word.
This argues no struggle,
though I know there will be no way to measure my path,
or the probable constraint
that keeps me, insatiable, attuned to my element.
That might be love,
or a thirst for blood, or a first
ontological absolute amplified by a silence. (2013: 5)
Instead of speaking mechanically, beholden to an ideal of “perfect symmetry

binding a thought to its word,” against which he argued so compellingly in
the Compton lecture—and which, for Bohr, remained a temptation despite
being unrealizable in “direct verbal expressions,” by contrast with the tre-
mendous achievement exhibited in the “mathematical symbolism” of quan-
tum mechanics (2011: 16, 18)—Wright takes guidance from the situation he
sums up here in half a dozen lines. “Struggle,” whether in the form of love
or battle or thought, renders his path irreducible to the efficiencies of meas-
urement. How so? Insofar as struggles such as these are premised on mutual
attunement of speaker and multifarious environment (“attuned to my ele-
ment”)—regardless of the specificity of any particular “constraint,” so long as
it prepares the speaker to attend to the suggestive amplifications of silence as
well as the presence or absence of the additional constraints—a viable alterna-
tive exists to unidimensional experiences like the struggle for existence con-
ceived solely in terms of battle.
With such considerations in mind, we can return to a question that con-
cerned Bohr greatly, one already raised at the beginning of the present
chapter—namely the apparent dichotomy between physical and biologi-
cal phenomena, and the concomitant insufficiency of strict causal analysis to
explain biological developments. In his important 1932 lecture, “Light and
Life” (delivered the same month he presented the “report on the current
difficulties in atomic theory” witnessed by Weizsäcker), Bohr even proposed
that the new quantum theory might be viewed as intermediary between
biology and classical physics. No more had it proven possible where quan-
tum mechanics was concerned than in the case of biology to establish “an
unambiguous causal description of the phenomena” in question (1933: 458).
Unlike Kauffman, however, Bohr continued to portray biological phenomena
in traditional, ultimately Aristotelian, terms, as teleologically driven—organ-
ized on the basis of purposes or final causes—rather than grounded in more
contingent functions like those emphasized by Kauffman.18
Just what is it, one may wonder, that enables Wright to free himself from
the model of one-to-one correspondence “binding a thought to its word,”
so as to advance from the scientistic image of speech he objects to at the out-
set of these lines to the quite different portrayal encountered in the poem’s
340 S. MEYER
closing lines? “Speak now,” the poet will instruct himself—and speak differ-
ently. In part this admonition, together with the lines that follow it, comes
from Wright’s careful attention to “the weight of inquiry” instantiated in the
set of instructions implicit in the preceding lines and the situation they por-
tray. The larger part of his accomplishment, though, derives from the speech
act itself, the pair of sentences that complete the poem. The second of these
might appear simply to continue the first, as if they comprised a single sen-
tence (“And …”). Nonetheless, every reader will experience some degree of
uncertainty as to how exactly one is to get from “Speak now of the difficult
eucalyptus,/the agapanthi,/the absolute density that has never appeared” to
“And I hear there will be a baptism on the Nile this afternoon,/stirring an
Etruscan envy, a Roman insecurity.” It may help to know that the eucalyptus,
for instance, is native to Australia, where the genus makes up three-quarters
of all forested land, and that over the past two centuries it has been widely
imported across the temperate world, from Berkeley, California to Timbuktu,
Mali. Yet whatever one may choose to emphasize in these lines, their sugges-
tiveness and resonance—that is to say, their poetic quality—is due chiefly to
the non sequitur at the core. As Wright observed to his audience in Dundee,
almost half a century ago, “the ability to create an awareness of differing and
seemingly incompatible relationships” is the source of the “truly … challeng-
ing power” possessed by poetry.
Bohr too sought to create an awareness of differing and seemingly incom-
patible relationships with his complementarity-based interpretation of quan-
tum mechanics. Yet Wright encourages us to ask whether Bohr felt sufficiently
challenged by his solution insofar as he continued to treat ontological ques-
tions, as I have already put it, as somehow beyond him—beyond “the rela-
tively objective domain of physics,” he observed in 1931, “where emotional
elements are so largely relegated to the background.” “[I]t is obviously a
quite open question,” he noted on the same occasion, “whether the infor-
mation we have acquired of the laws describing atomic phenomena pro-
vides us with a sufficient basis for tackling the problem of living organisms,
or whether, hidden behind the riddle of life, there lie yet unexplored aspects
of epistemology” (2011: 21). The concept of feeling investigated variously
by Langer and Wright, James and Whitehead, offers an alternative basis that
rejects the self-enforced limitation to epistemological matters—and traditional
dichotomies of objectivity and emotion—in order to address the contours of
an “enlarged realm of experience.” As for the navigation of absences and the
amplification provided by silence: These are affective procedures which, in
poetry like Wright’s, permit the discovery and exploration of a pluralistic cos-
mos through the juxtaposition of multiple symbolic discourses, modern phys-
ics among them.
Notes
1. See Desmet (2007, 2010, 2011); also Meyer (2015).
2. See Meyer (2018a). The central work in the current renaissance in “thinking
with Whitehead” is undoubtedly Isabelle Stengers’ brilliant analysis of three of
his major works of the 1920s—The Concept of Nature, Science and the Modern
World and Process and Reality.
3. See Stengers (2018).
4. “Darwin realized that a causal consequence … of no selective significance in
the current environment might become of use in a different environment and
so be selected. With that a new function would come to exist in the biosphere.
These are very common and are called Darwinian preadaptations, with no hint
of foresight on the part of evolution. S.J. Gould renamed these Darwinian
exaptations” (Kauffman 2019: 116).
5. Particularly in the margins of the suite of works extending from Philosophy in a
New Key (1942; 2nd ed. 1951)—by far the best-selling work of academic US
philosophy in the twentieth century—to Feeling and Form (1953) and Langer’s
three-volume summa, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (1967, 1974, 1984).
6. “Feeling and Some Related Problems for Poetry” (delivered October 17,
1972) has never been published. All citations are made with the gracious per-
mission of the author.
7. The other works are “Myth and Discovery” (1970), “Desire’s Design, Vision’s
Resonance: Black Poetry’s Ritual and Historical Voice” (1987), and “‘The
Unraveling of the Egg’: An Interview with Jay Wright” (1983). Though not
published until 1987, in Callaloo, “Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance” was
in fact written around 1980. At the time of the 1983 interview Wright still
expected it to appear in “an MLA anthology that John O’Reilly and Robert
Stepto are editing” (91).
8. Wright deliberately misquotes Langer here. What she actually wrote was “the tri-
umph of empiricism in science” (emphasis added). See Meyer (2018b), where
Wright’s variant in Elaine’s Book serves as the epigraph to the volume and is fur-
ther discussed in Meyer (2018a). I return to these citations below. For analysis in a
related vein, see Gitelman (2013). Recently the Morgan Library acquired and exhib-
ited the manuscript of Elaine’s Book (1988; reprinted in Transfigurations [2000]).
9. See James’s classic accounts, A Pluralistic Universe (1909) and Essays in
Radical Empiricism (1912).
10. Wright attributes the lines that follow to Philosophy in a New Key; they actually
come from a lecture Langer delivered in Syracuse, “The Cultural Importance
of Art,” which she included in her 1962 collection, Philosophical Sketches. I
have silently returned “organically” to the text, inadvertently dropped in the
typescript.
11. Langer used this phrasing in the opening chapter of Philosophical Sketches,
“The Process of Feeling,” to characterize feeling “in its widest possible sense”
(1962: 7). Wright does not refer to the chapter in his lecture, but he does ref-
erence the volume.
12. Titled “On Whitehead,” it is included in the Susanne K. Langer Papers at
Harvard’s Houghton Library (Dryden 1997: 75).
13. See, for example, Smith (2004)—and with regard to James, his 1877 review of
Allen’s volume.
342 S. MEYER
14. Langer’s reference here is to Penfield’s “famous address to the American

Philosophical Society in 1954, ‘Some Observations on the Functional
Organization of the Human Brain’ (1967: 18). By the early 1950s, Penfield
had systematically mapped the physiological basis of the cortex; see Shepherd
(2010: 141–142).
15. One of Langer’s few discussions of physics may be found in 1967: 271–274.
16. See “Theories of the Bifurcation of Nature” in Whitehead (2016). I am
stretching his more technical use of the phrase, while retaining its spirit.
17. In a longer version of the present chapter I examine Weizsäcker’s fairly hazy
alignment of Bohr with William James in light of James’s truly transformative
role in the development of Bohr’s physical speculations; see Cadences of an
African American Culture, forthcoming.
18. See Bohr (1933: 458; 2011: 23). This difference partly explains the following
remark by Kauffman: “Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory alter
some of the basic deterministic aspects of classical physics but not the view of
reality as an enormous ‘machine’” (2019: 1). See Kauffman (2016) for a more
extensive consideration of quantum mechanics, especially Part II.
References
Allen, Grant. 1877. Physiological Aesthetics. London: Henry S. King.
Bohr, Niels. 1933. Light and Life. Nature 131 (421–423): 457–459.
———. 2011 [1934]. Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Burke, Kenneth. 1961. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Boston: Beacon
Press.
Cassirier, Ernst. 1923 [1910, 1921]. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of
Relativity, trans. W. and M. Swabey. Chicago: Open Court.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 2011. Course in General Linguistics, ed. Perry Meisel and
Haun Saussy, trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Columbia UP.
Desmet, Ronny. 2007. Whitehead and the British Reception of Einstein’s Relativity:
An Addendum to Victor Lowe’s Whitehead Biography. Process Studies Supplement
11: 1–44.
———. 2010. The Minkowskian Background of Whitehead’s Theory of Gravitation.
In Space, Time, and Spacetime, ed. V. Petkov, 3–24. Berlin: Springer.
———. 2011. Putting Whitehead’s Theory of Gravitation in Its Historical Context.
Logique & Analyse 214: 287–315.
Dryden, Donald. 1997. Whitehead’s Influence on Susanne Langer’s Conception of
Living Form. Process Studies 26 (1–2): 62–85.
Eliot, T.S. 1988 [1975]. Selected Prose, ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Faye, Jan. 2002 [revised, 2014]. Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.
In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), ed. Edward N.
Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/qm-copenhagen.
Accessed 22 Oct 2019.
Ferris, Timothy. 1997. The Whole Shebang: A State-of-the-Universe(s) Report. New
York: Simon & Schuster.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 2014 [1988]. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African
American Literary Criticism, 25th-Anniversary ed. New York: Oxford UP.
Gitelman, Lisa (ed.). 2013. Raw Data Is an Oxymoron. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 2003. The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the
Gap Between Science and the Humanities. New York: Three Rivers Press.
Gutting, Gary. 1972. Einstein’s Discovery of Special Relativity. Philosophy of Science 38
(1): 51–68.
Hardy, J.P. 1971. Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: A Selection. Oxford: Oxford UP.
James, William. 1877. Unsigned Review of Physiological Aesthetics, by Grant Allen.
Nation 25: 186.
———. 1976 [1912]. Essays in Radical Empiricism, ed. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K.
Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard UP.
———. 1977 [1909]. A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Fredson Bowers. Cambridge:
Harvard UP.
Kauffman, Stuart A. 2016. Humanity in a Creative Universe. New York: Oxford UP.
———. 2019. A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life. New
York: Oxford UP.
Langer, Susanne K. 1930. The Practice of Philosophy. New York: Henry Holt.
———. 1953. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner.
———. 1954 [1942; 1st ed., 1941]. Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the
Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art. New York: New American Library.
———. 1967. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (vol. 1). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP.
UP.
UP.
———. 2009 [1962]. Philosophical Sketches. New York: Barnes & Noble.
Meyer, Steven. 2015. Principles of Relativity: Whitehead v. Russell. In 1922:
Literature, Culture, Politics, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté, 235–247. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
———. 2018a. Futures Past and Present: Literature and Science in an Age of
Whitehead. In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science, 255–274.
New York: Cambridge UP.
——— (ed.). 2018b. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science. New York:
Cambridge UP.
Murdoch, Dugald. 1989 [1987]. Niels Bohr’s Philosophy of Physics. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Penfield, Wilder. 1954 [2009]. Some Observations on the Functional Organization
of the Human Brain. In Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 98:
293–297.
Petersen, Aage. 1963. The Philosophy of Niels Bohr. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
19: 8–14.
Pound, Ezra. 1913. A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste. Poetry 1 (6): 198–206.
Priogine, Ilya, and Isabelle Stengers. 2017 [1984]. Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New
Dialogue with Nature. London: Verso.
Shepherd, Gordon M. 2010. Creating Modern Neuroscience: The Revolutionary 1950s.
New York: Oxford UP.
344 S. MEYER
Smith, Jonathan. 2004. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Dissemination
of Darwin’s Botany. In Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in
Nineteenth-Century Periodicals, ed. Geoffrey Cantor and Sally Shuttleworth, 285–
305. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Snow, C.P. 2012 [1959]. The Two Cultures, ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2011. Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Ideas.
Cambridge: Harvard UP.
———. 2018. Another Science Is Possible: A Manifesto for Slow Science. Cambridge:
Polity.
von Weizsäcker, C.F. 1985. A Reminiscence from 1932. In Niels Bohr: A Centenary
Volume, ed. P.J. Kennedy and Anthony French, 183–190. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1979 [corrected ed.; 1st ed., 1929]. Process and Reality, ed.
David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.
———. 1997 [1925]. Science and the Modern World. New York: Free Press.
———. 2016 [1920]. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Wright, Jay. 1970. Myth and Discovery. In The Rarer Action: Essays in Honor of
Francis Fergusson, ed. Alan Cheuse and Richard Koffler, 340–352. New Brunswick:
Rutgers UP.
———. 1972. “Feeling and Some Related Problems for Poetry: Inaugural Lecture
for Joseph Compton Creative Writing Fellowship.” University of Dundee.
Unpublished.
———. 1983. “The Unraveling of the Egg”: An Interview with Jay Wright. Callaloo
6 (3): 3–15.
———. 1987. Desire’s Design, Vision’s Resonance: Black Poetry’s Ritual and
Historical Voice. Callaloo 10 (1): 13–28.
———. 2000. Transfigurations: Collected Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP.
———. 2007a. Music’s Mask and Measure. Chicago: Flood Editions.
———. 2007b. The Guide Signs: Book One and Book Two. Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State UP.
———. 2008a. The Presentable Art of Reading Absence. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive
Press.
———. 2008b. Polynomials and Pollen: Parables, Proverbs, Paradigms and Praise for
Lois. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press.
———. 2013. Disorientations: Groundings. Chicago: Flood Editions.
———. 2019. The Prime Anniversary. Chicago: Flood Editions.
CHAPTER 19
Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry
Lara Choksey
Radiation treatment has a very ‘just for you’ feeling to it. They make a mold
of your body that you lie in during every treatment, so you literally notch your
ribcage into the machine. Two or three attendants lay sheets over you, and
position your body lovingly every time. And the beam-gun is hooked up to this
enormous garage door frame and hulking masses of metal whir around to get
this little blue cylinder pointed exactly Goldilocks at your tumor. But the most
heartbreakingly beautiful just-for-you thing is the sound the machine makes
when the beam is emitted. Sarah, it sound s like a tiny man with a tremor is
opening up a can of soup inside the gun. (Ritvo and Ruhl 2018, 152)
How to be precise about dying? “I’ve been dying a long time,” Max Ritvo
said in July 2016, one month before he died at twenty-five (Ritvo and Harris
2016). He did not mean he had been “dying a long time” in the banal way,
all of us sharing the certainty of death. Ritvo was diagnosed with a rare form
of cancer called Ewing’s Sarcoma when he was sixteen. His dying was marked
by living with the harm it caused him and those around him. The hurt of
his body flowed out: “everyone I love, I’m causing pain to.” This dying was
marked by a grammatical and temporal imprecision—the gerund, “dying,” a
verb-made-noun, extending across two verbs before “I” comes to find it—“to
have” and “to be.” His experience of “dying a long time” was intercepted by
courses of precision care, of the kind described in the passage above, where
medical interventions were tailored to Ritvo’s particular needs, in the hope of
finding a cure for his disease.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [203109/Z/16/Z].
L. Choksey (*) 
University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

346 L. CHOKSEY
Ritvo’s construction of a patient-consumer avatar in his poetry reflects his

position at a biomedical frontier: “I’m living at the time where if I hang on
another few years, cancer might be a chronic illness like diabetes instead of
a guaranteed terminal killer” (Ritvo and Ruhl, 122). This is the flipside of
precision medicine: the accumulation of vast tracts of data about individual
patients that might amass to some kind of general cure, at some later date,
less the hyper-individuation of care than a temporary zooming-in for the
sake of oncological futures. At this frontier, Ritvo became an experimental
test subject. The choreography of mechanized procedure in some of his
poems rehearses what Laura Salisbury has described as “industrialized time
regimes in which human duration could be rendered expendable in rela-
tion to the time tabled according to the needs of industry and modernity”
(2019). Ritvo’s construction of himself as biomedical subject registers this
regime, in which he can only be positioned as waiting for (Salisbury 2019)—
waiting for a cure or waiting to die—while metaphor offers a space to turn
this experience of duration in other directions.
Here, I read Ritvo’s poems “The Curve” and “Poem To My Litter” through
a chronology of precision: imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. Ritvo explores a
tension between dying as an extended and uncertain process, suspended over
promises and failures of long-term treatment, and the action-oriented grammar
of precision, with its full stops and fresh stanzas. Poetic form allows a common-
ality to be drawn between the body as written form—a code to be deciphered
for the sake of treatment—and the metaphors, images, silences, and harm
that accompany “dying a long time” in a context of personalized healthcare.
Precision medicine relies on a logic of surrogates—body for disease, image for
body, test subject for patient, experiment for cure—while its applicability and
effectiveness are often uncertain, depending on bodies it targets, as much as on
continued investment and interpreting extracted data. In these poems, Ritvo
places uncertainty and surrogacy in a strange fellowship, his body at odds with
the speculative procedures it undergoes, substituting and substituted for, besides
itself.
Precision and Poetry
As a genetic mutation wrote its way through cells, tissue, and bone, Ritvo
made analogy carry the difference, meandering in and out of a bodily time
determined by treatments and side effects, and the everyday, mundane
difficulty of sustaining the body. In his poems, a subject wanders through
this experience in a mode of uneven contiguity, between analogy and mat-
ter, adjacent to the temporality of “dying a long time.” In an essay, “Mortal
Kombat,” published in January 2016, he talks about his love of the compos-
ite metaphors used by his psychologists, all Jewish men (like him) above the
age of fifty, whom he called his “Freudian fathers.” These fathers would draw
out analogies as far as they could go in “clear metaphors with a few elegant
bridges between the Real we were considering and the Imaginary World we
19 MAX RITVO’S PRECISION POETRY 347
were pulling from” (Ritvo 2016b). For Ritvo, these composite m etaphors
“make me feel like every world is a map for another,” and that apparently
disparate worlds “could perfectly account for one another” (2016b).
Metaphor becomes a site of refuge where things make sense, where stock can
be taken, where one thing can stand in for another: poetry as the work of
precision.
But metaphor cannot hold still in the enforced mediation between body
and world. When his mother drank coffee in the mornings, Ritvo watched
how it brought forth her voice, and from this she could “pull the entire day
out of thin air” (Ritvo 2015). Each morning, a blank space was summoned
into a fully functioning person by a chemical stimulant: “I never saw my
mother actually drink the coffee … I would just see tired Mom and a full
cup of coffee, and then an empty cup of coffee and a changed Mom” (Ritvo
2015). He writes about assuming that chemotherapy would work the same
way: an ingestion of energy-giving chemicals that would change him without
his really noticing, like a clock’s hands turning invisibly through the day,
“a green super villain potion instead of an earth-colour shaman elixir” (Ritvo
2015). In 2007, soon after the tumors were first found, he had four rounds
of chemo in three-week cycles, followed by radiation therapy, surgical inter-
ventions, and drugs. One of these drugs—ifosfamide—caused hallucinations,
and Ritvo worried that it was affecting his memory; writing poetry became a
way “to preserve the memories that he feared were breaking down” (Ledford
610). While analogy offers a certain comparative comfort in bridging
different experiences, poetic form becomes more a means of infrastructural
safeguarding for experiences lost to a chemical fog.
Precision medicine developed out of the optimism in the early 2000s
around new futures for human health that accompanied the first draft
sequence of the human genome. It quickly became part of a speculative
biotechnology market fueled by fantasies of tailored consumer experiences.
Scientists could, in theory, now read genetic alterations of an individual
patient, and develop or recommend therapies on a case-by-case basis: “the
right treatment for the right patient at the right time” (Garay and Gray 2012,
129). Charles Kowalski and Adam Mrdjenovich identify a one-for-one logic
of substitution in precision medicine, describing it as a “monument to neolib-
eralism,” a product of science entering the domain of free-market economic
growth rather than public good, organized around individual consumer s
opting into a range of choices (2017, 77). Moreover, they write‚ “the bio-
tech model of commodification has tended to favor reductionist approaches
in biology so as to produce discrete objects of ownership” (77). Kaushik
Sunder Rajan argues that the coproduction of neoliberalism and genomics
has resulted in particular grammatical conceptions of human lives as “those
whose futures we can calculate in terms of probabilities of certain disease
events happening” (2006, 14). In this “shifting grammar of life, towards
a future tense,” the body can be known, but at great personal cost—both
financial and psychological (Rajan, 14). Mike Fortun has characterized this
348 L. CHOKSEY
shift as part of the speculative logic of genomics, which enforces a mono-di-

rectional temporality at high speed, hitched to the back of a swelling biotech
market that can hold off delivering on its promises as long as it can continue
to thread imaginaries of revolutionary healthcare into its infrastructures of
capital (2008). It gives patients a sense of choice and autonomy over their
health, while steering this market into consumer-driven services offered at
competitive rates.
The passage at the beginning of the chapter is from a letter Ritvo wrote
to Sarah Ruhl just over a year before he died. The description of radiation
therapy sounds like a virtual experience, a simulated hyperreality, his body
becoming part of a post-human future where machine s sustain human life
indefinitely. The passage is anchored in a technology of targeting: a beam-
gun that can vaporize tumors by honing in on them, like lasers for killing
androids and aliens. The body is connected to a machine that knows it bet-
ter than it knows itself, at least when it comes to blasting away deleterious
matter. This treatment is not directed toward a general human body, but
designed around a Max-shaped mold. The passage is suffused with a sense of
euphoria, where an affect of care—“lovingly… heartbreakingly beautiful”—
is extended through each part of the process. But despite its precision, the
process relies on a network of avatars, substitutions, and third-party labor.
It sounds like a scene of death, the mold into which he fits himself akin to
a sarcophagus, attendants draping sheets as if over a dead body, and a gun
pointed at one of the most vulnerable parts of him. It is a scene of depend-
ency, shaped by the defenselessness of the body undergoing treatment, and
an unspoken necessity to suspend disbelief that this is not, in fact, a scene of
annihilation.
Imaging, Substitution, and Proximity

Hell starts on Monday: it’ll be three days of pretty constant scanning (and I’m
a little afraid of MRI machines) and that’ll transition immediately into surgery.
Then I’ll get to rest and probably lose some weight. (Ritvo and Ruhl, 67)
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a way of producing images of the

body through magnetic fields and radio waves. The patient, awake, lies down
on a moving bed and is drawn into a large cylindrical tube, where strong
magnets read the body. Some scans take a few minutes; others, an hour-and-
a-half, during which time the patient must remain relatively still. They can
talk to the radiographer through an intercom, who remains in another room.
Radiography in the hospital’s MRI room is one of the more science-fictional
scenes of modern medical dramas: a human body disappears into a tube, as if
into a pale, plastic coffin, or into another dimension. It is a scene of transcrip-
tion, where a person becomes known as a medical subject, identified by out-
of-place matter that may signify abnormality in the body. “Imaging” makes a
verb out of a noun, but it is not the same as photography; MRI makes images
inside the body by negotiating its borders with waves and fields, not with
invasive instruments.
MRI scans are part of a wider set of practices made possible by new tech-
niques of reading images of body parts as evidence, which Thomas Keenan
and Eyal Weizman have theorized as “forensic aesthetics.” They argue, “The
making of facts … depends on a delicate balance, on new images made pos-
sible by new technologies, not only changing in front of our very eyes, but
changing our very eyes—affecting the way that we can see and comprehend
things” (2012, 24). The example they consult is the identification of a skull
found in Brazil in 1985 as the skull of Josef Mengele, through a process of
imaging bones. What was at stake was a decision first, about whether the skull
belonged to Mengele, and second, by extension, whether he was alive or
dead: was this an “open” or “closed investigation” (2012, 24)? Open (alive)
would imply the possibility of bringing Mengele’s crimes to justice; closed
(dead) would, conversely, mean the openness of non-closure, attended by and
with collective trauma. A promise of precision hangs over forensic aesthet-
ics, suggesting a seamless movement between different levels of determina-
tion: technology and law, vision and justice—the calculation of probability
entwined with aesthetic judgment (Keenan and Weizman 2012, 24).
Writing on CT scans (which work through X-rays), Barry Saunders
observes that these images “substitute for bodies,” and while similarities
between body and image might be identified, “a patient would probably not
recognize himself” (2008, 14). But the body also becomes surrogate to the
images, an object that affirms a trained biomedical gaze. These images have
the potential to legislate the body, to subject it to moral and medical econ-
omies of health intervention, to inform decisions made around it, or enable
generalizations about larger groups that are in turn made surrogate to the
similarities certain images draw between different bodies. They are a tech-
nique of estrangement, detaching the subject from the particularities of their
history, and arranging them instead into biomedical ways of seeing and modes
of analysis, in which the subject is not necessarily trained (Saunders, 27).
As a method of judgment, forensics requires not just an object and
mediator, but also a forum, in which “claims and counterclaims on behalf of
objects can be presented and contested” (Keenan and Weizman 2012, 29).
The kind of precision made possible by imaging offers a spectacle of judg-
ment, “entangled performances” of decision-making around disputed or
ambiguous objects (29). The patient’s body is made surrogate to another
object—a scan, which is in turn surrogate to a particular set of diagnostic
optics utilized by a biomedical forum of radiographers and oncologists. In
this process of surrogacy, where the body becomes coded into object to make
it legible to specific gazes, metaphor slips between object and interpreter, a
constitutive element of the forum, and a condition of judgment—facilitating
the process by which consensus is reached. “Explain it in general terms” is an
invitation to analogize. The analogizing of biomedical ontology both deviates
350 L. CHOKSEY
from the promise of precision while, conversely, ensuring a consensus which

is taken to stand in for precision, in a prosaic sense—the judgment of experts,
rather than an individual or machine.
Ritvo interrupts this process by retrieving his body from the procedure
of surrogacy, stressing instead the fallibility of the interpreting gaze, and the
limits of professional disembodiment. A poem called “Scan” from 2012 shows
this process at breaking point, where Max-as-experimental-test-subject inserts
himself into the procedure, finding an ally in a voice without a body:
Lie flat,
comes the command,
from a voice unsinging;
the voice starts to weep
and I blow it kisses.
Ritvo rarely talks about specific doctors or technicians or radiographers;

he starts with the procedure, working the technical process through his
experience of it, trying out metaphors and forms as he is constructed as a
test subject. Here, the contrast between the disembodied punctuation of
the first three lines and the enjambment of the last two creates a sense of
intimacy between the voice and “I.” Being commanded to lie flat is joined
to another context: the instruction of a lover, someone to whom one might
want to blow kisses. This lover is joyless, “unsinging,” a tone to match the
“flat” of the first line, but the kisses come as a kind of reassurance after this
unsinging voice breaks, over a line and a semicolon, into weeping. The voice
is not unsinging because it does not care; it is trying not to fall apart. The
poem reads as a sonnet with most of its lines left out, but the rhythm of its
volta toward hope lingers: a declaration of love from patient to voice. But
is this the voice of a person, or a machine? The voice arrives as a command
from a biopolitical regime of protection, surveillance, and intervention. This
“command” feels either militaristic or robotic in its incorporeal arrival, the
emphasis placed on the bodily vulnerability of the first sentence.
The contrast between this vulnerability (conveyed rather than expressed),
and the precision of the biotechnological operation, indicates an irresolvable
but codependent tension between embodiment and treatment. In Promising
Genomics, Fortun organizes his study of deCODE Genetics around the
figure of chiasmus (X)—the inversion of clauses accompanied by a shift in
terminology, “a couplet of terms that are conventionally taken as distinct
or even opposed, but which in fact depend on each other, provoke each
other, or contribute to each other” (2008, 13–14). For Fortun, this invokes
the rhetorical register necessary for grasping the aporia of genomics, its
future-oriented economy reliant on shifting meanings, rather than finite ones.
The body located within this regime is placed on uncertain terrain, in terms
of the changing significations attached to its embodied processes.
Ritvo’s “The Curve” also starts with X: “Something, call it X, wanted

a body.” The line makes the body subject to the desire of an alien entity
immediately, teasing a mathematical equation before collapsing this into a
wish in need of fulfillment. How can this unknown entity-quantity, a “thing,”
be capable of desire? The sentence brackets the poem in an unquantifi-
able value (“desire”), as if preparing for a fall. “X,” in turn, is subsumed by
language through a failed transmutation: the poem continues, “Our bodies”—
and there is no sense, yet, of what or who this “we” refers to—“weren’t right
for it—,” “it” being X. The em-dash here is placed in lieu of “because of”:
gum around the bones,

a rash of gold or black,
eyes like blisters,
leaking fondness.
Not being “right for” X creates an imprecision, even aesthetic estrangement:

bodies that grow awkwardly and bear irregular marks of contamination,
wounding, and abrasion—rashes and blisters, which are porous and pervious
to external bumps and shocks, and whose internality is marked by imperfect
layerings of different tissues—skin, gum, and bone.
“X” loses its force to the thing it invents to supplement this failing of
bodies, “all animal bodies.” Language, which necessarily refuses balance:
Language forced X into the body

like carbonation into a soda.
Language here performs a takeover; it “forces” a transformation of prop-

erties, the body going from still water to something fizzing and bubbling.
X and the body fused to form a new chemical compound. The violence of
this fusion rehearses the violence of the genetic adaptation he carries and
the specific rearrangement of genes that has formed a deadly fusion. Ewing’s
Sarcoma shows up in the bones, taking the form of a small round-cell tumor.
It develops through the rearrangement of two genes between two chromo-
somes in a process called “translocation”: parts of each chromosome move to
the other, creating what is called a fusion gene. It is the protein coded by this
gene, and little else, that is found in Ewing’s Sarcoma tumors, and also a kind
of chiasmus.
Genetic alterations can be named and even measured through linguistic
schemas. Grammar has long offered a way of conceptualizing genetics: in the
case of Ewing’s Sarcoma, clauses rearranging, moving elsewhere, and fusing,
that change the constitution of the body. Lily Kay discusses the develop-
ment of molecular biology through the metaphor of information during the
1950s and 1960s. Following the publication of the double helix, she writes,
“a molecular vision of life supplemented by an informational gaze” replaced
the idea of life as “purely material or energetic” (2000, xv). Biologists
352 L. CHOKSEY
used information as a metaphor to refer to biological specificity, coding as

the body’s syntax. This syntactical model alienates matter by obscuring
what is not coded, or what cannot be read. In this model, the concept of
the gene is “part physicist’s atom and part Platonic soul” (Keller 1995, 17).
If the information metaphor has a material referent, it is not the code itself
or the body it is supposed to stand for, but the technologies that facilitate
the translation of matter into code, and by extension, into a forensic object
that can be agreed upon in the forum of the laboratory; information means
the establishment of scientific consensus. Genetic syntax offers a precise way
of translating mutation, giving physical suffering a set of iconic referents, and
setting the parameters for describing bodily matter: in “The Curve,” a trans-
lucent rock that takes over the screen, the product of a rare fusion.
The next stanza moves from simile to the conjuring powers of particular
words, obliterating the gap between image and body:
When I hear the word rock,

a translucent lump
shimmers in front of the world.
This image is not still; it moves the fizzing of carbonated water to an image
of iridescence that takes up the frame of the speaker’s perception. Bodies
in this poem cannot see properly: the eyes are blisters, smaller translucent
lumps, while this larger lump forms a moving horizon. Sarcoma arrives
in modern Latin from the Greek word for “sarx” (flesh), through the
accusative “sarkoun” (to/toward flesh), to “sarkōma” (flesh-process). The
word transforms over grammar from a fixed description of an object, to a
process of becoming flesh: a shimmering translucent lump that becomes flesh
on MRI scans, shaded areas signifying a process of language made flesh—a
combination of code that produces shaded areas on images of the body. The
body becomes reorganized around the topography laid out by this secularized
account of the word becoming flesh. The metaphor takes over the scene,
leaving no gap between vision and matter.
This collapse of metaphor into the body is intercepted by the word at the
beginning of the next stanza, “images,” a bolt from the real world that breaks
up the nightmarish takeover, reminding the speaker of the opening between
body and representations. It brings the things gathered on the horizon into
an indeterminate context of multiple images, which “vary exhaustingly and
troublingly.” This variation is a reminder that these are negotiations between
“I” and reality: moments of technological seeing accompanied by methods
of interpretation, not of finite horizons taken up by inanimate matter. These
variations are not necessarily comforting. The stanza continues as if someone
is struggling to breathe, hastily drawn breaths lurking at the edges of the lines:
Though the images

vary exhaustingly and troublingly,
I always remember
the spoke of earth
cutting into ocean
we saw from above, on a bicycle ride,
These lines sound like someone recalling the past to someone they love at a
great physical cost. The forensic precision of images is not a site of certainty,
but produces exhaustion and a feeling of trouble—the opposite of what care
is supposed to do. It is the memory itself, encased in “always,” which offers
solidarity (“we”) and certainty (“saw”) in this moment, not what is subject to
interpretation on a screen.
The spoke of the bicycle wheel is displaced onto the earth’s contours;
the memory fragments and extends the structure of the bicycle to the
description of the landscape. A spoke of earth that cuts becomes an instru-
ment to penetrate an unmeasured expanse, a tool of exploration heavy
with colonial-extractive symbolism. The technological probing of earth
into sea substitutes the explorations that the speaker’s body has under-
gone through imaging. This “I” is extended into “we,” enjoying a leisurely
activity, watching the implicit violence of this scene, rather than implicated
within it. This distancing, of image from memory, of precision from care,
and of the speaking “I” of memory from the “I” that conjures a terrifying
horizon, allows the speaker to suspend his consciousness across the uncertain
multiplicity of the present, toward an “always” that holds proof of a past.
This reprieve is temporary:
the sheen of the bicycles

spreading over the earth
distinct from the ocean’s sheen.
The sheens alarmingly similar to one another
to be so close together—like two bodies making love.
Bicycles and ocean share sheens, almost indistinguishable from—

“alarmingly similar to”—one another. The adverb “alarmingly” of the penul-
timate line of the stanza echoes the ones in the second, “exhaustingly” and
“troublingly”; it is a reminder of danger in the incalculability of proximity
(“similar to”) and variation (“vary”). This alarm also reads as the alarm at
the possible disappearance of two sheens, from two different temporal realms,
into each other: ocean and bicycle. The horizon implied by the spread of
sheen into sheen brings back the “shimmering” of the translucent lump, the
alarm registering as a moment of vertigo at realizing the proximity of “we”
to that illegible mass of water. This moment holds a temporal disjunction,
between the passing sheen of the bicycles as they pass along the edge of the
water, and the enduring sheen of the ocean. The full stop and line break of
“distinct from the ocean’s sheen. / The sheens alarmingly similar” do not
trace a collapse into paradox, but gesture to the uncanny proximity of two
354 L. CHOKSEY
disparate objects. It is another chiasmus: measures of difference bookending

repetitions of the object in question—sheen. Sheen: a mirage of another
substance on top of another, immaterial, caused by refractions of light on a
surface. It inverts the relation of feeling and surface: the act of making love is
“like” these proximate sheens, not the other way round.
The poem ends by coming back to the body of the speaker: “Skinny,
hairy-chested, / made of pellets of rice,” these pellets also visual similes
for how lumps appear on scans. The rhythm of the last stanza mirrors
the breathlessness of the earlier one, a self-portrait of “I” experiencing them-
selves as a lover, “cheeping in a way that’s / endearing and inappropriate”—a
small enthusiastic bird “confused, surprised at the confusion, / surprised at
the surprise,” getting lost among the expectations of two lovers: the speaker
declares themselves, “your lover and X’s.” Loving offers a link between
the body and its imprecision, its incapacity to fit X, but its attempts—“very
tiringly”—to meet it nonetheless. The body is un-imageable, despite the
probes of the poem, throwing X off with diversions and distractions. The
poem questions the reliability and truthfulness of imaging in terms of what
it can tell us about the body, and how other kinds of images might come to
matter. It exposes it as a practice that is, itself, bound up with the logic of
metaphor, which is required to forget its fiction to make truth claims.
By contrasting the collapse of analogy into experience (the rock that takes
up the whole horizon) with the particular, untruthful associations of memory
(the sheens of bicycle and sea), the poem suspends the grammar of forensics.
It resists the “forcing” of grammar into the body, loosening the collapse of
analogy into matter, in images that are proximate but not reducible to each
other—a kind of love-making, without the promise of reproduction. At the
center of the poem is a snapshot of late afternoon, a dream conjured as the
body struggles to breathe, without the hope of passing on a legacy.
Legacy, Love, and Harm

I hope I have a daughter. And that she’s like you—wanting to do good, always,
with no fear or panic motivating it, just with the dogged certainty that love is
worth investing in. (Ritvo and Ruhl, 282)
Ritvo frequently considers the difficulty of describing love outside an

economy of investment, salvation, and sacrifice: it seems to swing back, like
a boomerang, into narratives of living well, and dying a good death. The
ongoing search for a cure makes him complicit in a bioinformatic industrial
complex that sacrifices other lives as it attempts to monetize its salvation. He
identifies as Jewish, “the son of poor, Rabbinical stock dispersed by pogrom
and Holocaust … raised out of penury” (“From One White Guy” 2014),
descended from a history in which Jewish lives are not only less valuable, but
have been subjects of experimentation and genocide for the sake of prolong-
ing and promoting the supremacy of white Protestant lineages. Importantly,
this descent (“stock”) is not defined by biological characteristics but by

historical experience. Now he, too, is complicit in that economy of prolon-
gation, and in the eugenic arrangement of life into a taxonomic hierarchy.
This is a chiasmus of love (as faith in salvation) and harm (as its cost). “Poem
To My Litter” (2016) brings out this history of forced surrogacy through a
deliberation on experimentation, and the complicity of the suffering human
in a biomedical economy fixated on finding specific (precise) cures to sell to a
general public. The “Max” of this poem moves between experimental subject
and agent of violence, descendent of a history of genocide who is also, now,
the subject who benefits from modern frameworks of scientific innovation.1
Ritvo’s tumors returned while he was doing his B.A. in English at Yale.
He underwent twelve more rounds of chemotherapy on the East Coast: two
weeks of side effects followed by a week of respite. He refused to take ifosfa-
mide, the drug that had caused hallucinations and memory loss the first time
around, and began trying experimental treatments through doctors’ recom-
mendations. Three years later, in 2015, he and his mother, Ariella Ritvo, sent
his cells to a company that would implant them in mice, “seeding” tumors
in them on which they would then test drugs. In Heidi Ledford’s words,
“The mice would stand in as avatars for Max” (611). Ritvo began to think of
the mice as his children. In July 2016, asked in an interview whether he felt
“attached to them,” he said yes and, echoing the poem,
They have my genes in them. I don’t have any kids, you know. This is in a
strange, really paradoxical way the closest I’ve come to having children. You
think about them [the mice] as just these things that are dying for you and that
are suffering for you. (Harris and Ritvo 2016)
This is the story of “Poem To My Litter,” which unfolds first as a description

of the experimental treatments the researchers carried out with the mice as
substitutes for Ritvo, before turning into an address from him to the mice.
“I want my mice to be just like me. I don’t have any children,” and he has
named them all “Max”:
First they were Max 1, Max 2,

but now they’re all just Max. No playing favorites.
They don’t know they’re named, of course.
They’re like children you’ve traumatized
and tortured so they won’t let you visit.
Fatherhood, property, and the possibility of a cure run close together

through the poem, as the speaker attempts to articulate the total violence
of the situation. The repetition of “my”—my genes, my litter, my mice, my
doctors, my tumors—runs the logic of individual property into the ground.
The laboratory practices he details explode the fantasy of harmonious,
356 L. CHOKSEY
reciprocal ecological co-habitation, getting at the violence of “the neces-

sity to go through others in order to be what you are,” in Isabelle Stengers’
words (Jensen and Thorsen 2019). Max’s chances of survival are invested in
the way the bodies of other creatures respond to “his” genes; “he” passes
through others in molecular form, so that their bodies might produce knowl-
edge about the way his own might be preserved. These are not really “his”
genes, these are not really “his” mice, and “my doctors” is shorthand for
scientist-provider and patient-consumer. The language of property frames
these exchanges, instead, in the context of a finance economy that outsources
its extractive logic to invisibilized locations, in which mice are commodities in
a market of model organisms (others famous ones being C. elegans, a worm,
and Drosophila, a fly).
Nikolas Rose considers the challenges of solidarity in the context of
precision medicine. The focus on individualized care promotes a moral econ-
omy around genomic health that could bear on whether a patient-consumer
would be prepared to pay for, “let alone care about, the health of others who
are not related to me” (350). Humans and mice share 97 percent of the same
DNA; in a literal sense, mice are used as genetic surrogates for humans. But
humans and mice cannot interbreed: a human cannot give birth to a mouse.
How, then, to conceive of the transmission of genetic material outside
genealogy? How to think through the kind of trans-species solidarity Max is
suggesting? Here, inheritance figures as contamination:
My doctors split my tumours up and scattered them

into the bones of twelve mice. We give
the mice poisons I might, in the future, want
for myself. We watch each mouse like a crystal ball.
I wish it was perfect, but sometimes the death we see
Doesn’t happen when we try it again in my body.
The experiment carries a New Testament legacy: twelve mice lining up with
twelve apostles, and Max breaking his body to feed them with it. The met-
aphor of bread-as-body is made literal by the conditions of the experiment,
biomatter split from its origin and scattered among believers as an act of faith.
The “we” of “we watch,” it is implied, is Max and “his” doctors, but Max
does not know the same things that they do; he is looking for something else.
It is not just the mice that are “like crystal balls”; in this environment, his
body is also a subject of divination.
While the tumors have spread, through space and over time, across Max’s
body—“in my flank a decade ago. // Then they went down to my lungs, and
down my femurs, and into the hives in my throat that hatch white cells”—
in the mice they are contained, like undeveloped zygotes, expressing but not
developing:
Their tumours have never grown up. Uprooted

and moved. Learned to sleep in any bed
the vast body turns down.
There is a contrast in syntax here which articulates the differentiation

between Max and the mice’s experience of the tumors: in Max’s body, the
tumors flow past a full stop and a stanza break, connected by the temporal
signifier, “then,” as if in a badly written children’s story, where the topog-
raphy of the body is a landscape of drops (“down”) and crevices (“into”).
The mice’s tumors are defined by their not behaving like Max’s: they have
not “Uprooted // and moved,” as if leaving home for the first time, and they
have not adapted to the different resting places the body makes available. The
short, disconnected fragments of sentences, stripped of pronouns, personal-
ize the tumors rather than the mice, and keep the workings of Max’s body
central as a point of comparison.
To underscore this further: “we give the mice AIDS so they’ll harbor
my genes peacefully.” Up to this point, the mice are abject vehicles for the
transmission of biological degeneration, to share Max’s own. “Harbour”
suggests carrying a load, but also a docking place—a site to bridge water and
land, through which cargo is shuffled along sea networks. Again, the poem
constructs these experiments as part of a longer history of colonial-capitalist
extraction where immunodeficiency becomes a biopolitical border: part of a
system for shoring up bodies worthy of saving, while also becoming a bioin-
formatic commodity for mapping futures free from disease.
The genocidal implications of injecting a group positioned lower down
in species/racial hierarchies reverberate through the history of eugenic
programs in the Euro-US. The deliberate transmission of AIDS for scientific
research conjures the Black men of the Tuskegee Syphilis study. Ritvo is not
invoking these practices for literary effect; it is in the muscle memory of
biomedical experimentation. This is fatherhood in a biopolitical production
line: creating living forms that will sacrifice their lives for you, or that—more
accurately—you will destroy and make suffer “for you.” The mice have no
choice; Ritvo is ridiculing the narcissistic parent who wants their child to be
“just like me,” who cannot allow their offspring to deviate from the model
of existence laid out for them by their inheritance. In this case, that model is
based on housing deathly material until some kind of answer can be divined
from them. Molecular life is figured as intellectual property, a possible patent
for a future cure, while the bodies that contain it are sacrificial surrogates.
This is characteristic of the one-for-one substitutions of precision medicine,
and the reduction of bodies to their biological code.
The rhythm of the final four stanzas does not alter considerably from the
rest of the poem, but there is the sense that the speaker has taken a breath.
He turns to address the mice directly, and the tone becomes one of reassur-
ance and comfort. The mice will not let him share space with them; there
358 L. CHOKSEY
is some more fundamental remoteness between Max and them formed by a

longer history of violence. The only thing that Max really knows about them
is the identity they have been forced to take on: his own molecular surrogate,
a fused protein. This is where the poem starts to be addressed to the mice:
I hope, Maxes, some good of you is of me.

Even my suffering is good, in part. Sure I swell
with rage, fear—the stuff that makes you see your tail
as a bar on the cage. But then the feelings pass.
The first sentence is marked by a compression at odds with the explicit

confessions of the poem up to this point, as if the speaker is trying to remain
calm in front of the “traumatized and tortured” children of the previous
stanza, having been granted some kind of audience—or writing a letter to
them that he hopes they will one day read. The chord of parental narcissism
resounds through it: a sadistic father who hopes, at the end of his life, to
have left a legacy that might produce something “good.” Then‚ the mean-
ing of “good” shifts in the next sentence from an unspecific, generic hope of
patrilineal influence, to a consideration of what might be “good” about life
marked by suffering—“rage, fear”—rather than faith.
Up to this point, the poem has premised a molecular correspondence
between men and mice that will benefit the former, at the cost of the latter.
The second stanza here departs from this instrumentalism. Max moves closer
to the mice, marking his similarity to them, rather than exploiting theirs to
his: “you see your tail / as a bar on the cage.” This is more than just an
analogy for their respective imprisonment (the mice in real laboratory cages,
him in the cage of his body); it is also a reference to their shared evolu-
tionary history, and to the disappeared tails at the base of the human spine.
Things get lost in evolutionary time: they fall out of images and stories.
Entire species disappear. The inevitability of losing body parts (tails, legs, fur)
becomes the bedside story of evolutionary history:
And since I do absolutely nothing (my pride, like my fur,

all gone) nothing happens to me. And if a whole lot
of nothing happens to you, Maxes, that’s peace.
Which is what we want. Trust me.
“I” is decentered in these final lines by compound connectors: “and …

and…” “of … which.” “Nothing” becomes the poem’s final subject, a pause
in the procedure which links Max and the mice. This is not a father who
wants to imprint his heroic deeds on his children. There will be nothing to
take forward. In reality, Max cannot imprint his own desires onto the mice,
and neither can he gain their trust. And because of their incompatibility, the
metaphor, “I swell // with rage, fear,” only works in his body, and not theirs.
The stanza break severs him from the possibility of sharing this with them.
This tracing of species difference is an analogy for the more general
difficulty of solidarity in the context of precision medicine. But the poem
does not invest hope in a politics of individuated uniqueness, wherein Max’s
dying is reified into something distinct from others (human or nonhuman).
Rather, Ritvo suggests encountering time in the gerund. The final two
stanzas suggest a temporary truce with time, in which Ritvo does nothing
to shift it—“since I do absolutely nothing”; and because of this, time does
not act on him: “nothing happens to me.” Through this address that cannot
happen—a communication between men and mice— Ritvo moves toward
the reader, now also made into “Maxes,” where this biomedical avatar is
shared out during a pause in procedure, rather than in locating a cure. The
suggestion of tyranny in the final line—“Which is what we want. Trust me”—
is undercut by the fragmentation of these final two stanzas, chopped across
parentheses and line breaks, delivered from somewhere close to an end: a final
truce between surrogates.
Ritvo’s mode of auto-poetry interrupts bioinformatic grammars, calling
attention to the body lying prostrate, struggling for breath, and the lacunae
created by transcribing this body through, and as, machine. In precision
medicine, the body-as-test-subject is substituted by images, while also made
into a surrogate for a biomedical gaze. This logic of surrogacy is part of the
economy of precision medicine, which relies on devices and techniques of
comparison in order to pursue possible cures. Solidarity is not only difficult
in this context; it is based on an understanding of sacrifice that falls u
nevenly
across distinctions and taxonomies of living matter. Ritvo breaks up this
legacy of reading others and the self as surrogates in medicalized encoun-
ters with death by reading dying as gerund, eventually attending to spaces
in which “nothing happens”: a frozen memory, a body that does not adapt.
While the particular rhythms of biocapital on which his survival depends
capitalize on uncertainty, these moments of nothing happening allow for
proximity, rather than reduction, to form an intervention in scenes of waiting.
Note
1. In my reading, I refer to the poetic subject of “Poem To My Litter” as Max, as
opposed to Ritvo, the poet.
Works Cited
Fortun, Mike. 2008. Promising Genomics: Iceland and deCODE Genetics in a World of
Speculation. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Garay, Joseph P., and Joe W. Gray. 2012. Omics and Therapy: A Basis for Precision
Medicine. Molecular Oncology 6: 128–139.
360 L. CHOKSEY
Harris, Mary, and Max Ritvo. 2016. The Prank Your Body Plays on Life. Only
Human Podcast, July 12. https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/max-ritvo.
Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Line Marie Thorsen. 2019. Reclaiming Imagination:
Speculative SF as an Art of Consequences. NatureCulture 5. https://www.natcult.
net/interviews/reclaiming-imagination-speculative-sf-as-an-art-of-consequences/.
Kay, Lily. 2000. Who Wrote the Book of Life? A History of the Genetic Code. Stanford:
Keenan, Thomas, and Eyal Weizman. 2012. Mengele’s Skull: The Advent of Forensic
Aesthetics. Berlin: Sternberg Press/Porticus.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1995. Reconfiguring Life: Metaphors of Twentieth Century Biology.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Kowalski, Charles Joseph, and Adam Joel Mrdjenovich. 2017. Personalized Medicine,
Genomics and Enhancement: Monuments to Neoliberalism. American Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Medicine 5 (3): 75–92.
Ledford, Heidi. 2017. Cancer’s Cruel Chimaeras. Nature 543: 608–611.
Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life.
Ritvo, Max. 2014. From One White Guy to Another: An Open Letter About Our
Privileges. Huffpost.
Ritvo, Max. 2015. Poets Online Talking About Coffee. Queen Mobs.
——— 2016a. Four Reincarnations. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
——— 2016b. Mortal Kombat. Berfrois.
Ritvo, Max and Sarah Ruhl. 2018. Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship.
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Rose, Nikolas. 2013. Personalised Medicine: Promises, Problems and Perils of a New
Paradigm for Healthcare. Procedia: Social and Behavioural Sciences 77: 341–352.
Salisbury, Laura. 2019. Between-Time Stories: Waiting, War, and the Temporalities of
Care. Lecture, University of Exeter, June 5, Exeter.
Saunders, Barry. 2008. CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive
Cutting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in
any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s)
and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if
changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the
material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and
your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted
use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
PART III
Ethics and Politics

CHAPTER 20
New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains

in Physics Before the Atomic Bomb
Jenni G. Halpin
In 1932, as had become his custom, Niels Bohr invited a group of physicists
(his peers and their students) to his institute in Copenhagen, to spend the
Easter holiday week together, arguing over the cutting edge of the emerg-
ing and unsettled science that was becoming quantum physics (Segré 2007).
Not only at formal conferences but especially in social settings such as this
hybrid seminar and summer camp, quantum physics was developing as a com-
pelling disruption to classical understandings of physical reality. A tradition
had arisen of including some homemade entertainment—a skit or variety
show—as a part of the conference. Because 1932 was both the tenth anni-
versary of the founding of Bohr’s institute and the hundredth anniversary of
Goethe’s death, a young physicist in attendance, Max Delbrück, probably
with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker’s help, wrote a send-up of Faust centered
amid the debates the group of physicists had been involved in over Wolfgang
Pauli’s proposed neutrino (Segré 2007).1 This little-known play is variously
called “The Blegdamsvej Faust” (for the street on which Bohr’s institute was
located) or “The Copenhagen Faust.”
In 1931 atoms had been thought to be built of electrons—small and neg-
atively charged—and protons—larger and positively charged. Physicists were
beginning to understand radioactive decay by the emission of alpha particles
and gamma rays. Beta-particle emissions were still a rather perplexing variety
of phenomena. By 1932 Bohr, a fatherly figure among the physics commu-
nity, and Wolfgang Pauli, an acerbic wit, were both giving some attention to
J. G. Halpin (*) 
Savannah State University, Savannah, GA, USA

364 J. G. HALPIN
the problem. Bohr’s idea presumed that the theory of conservation of energy
did not apply to beta emission (a proposal which fit with the facts thus far
known), while Pauli took a contradictory approach which tried to retain con-
servation of energy by proposing the existence of the neutrino to balance
things: a subatomic particle with no charge and no mass (both the chargeless-
ness and the masslessness of his hypothetical particle were remarkably bizarre,
as James Chadwick had not yet demonstrated the presence of the charge-
less neutron in atomic nuclei). These irreconcilable proposals of Bohr’s and
Pauli’s are attached in “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to the conflict between the
Lord and Mephistopheles for the soul (and commitment) of Faust.
Very little literary-critical attention has been paid to this brief parodic play
despite its incisive expression of the power of scientific discovery to inflect social
and political practice. The only published version is an awkward English transla-
tion included as an appendix to George Gamow’s overview of the rise of quan-
tum physics, Thirty Years that Shook Physics. The difficulty of accessing it explains
much of the critical silence. Too much of what has been written can be traced
back to partial (and partially accurate) representations made in Robert Jungk’s
Brighter than a Thousand Suns (a book now more notorious for its role in incit-
ing Bohr’s unhappy letter to Heisenberg contesting the latter’s representation
of the meeting Michael Frayn would place at the center of his Copenhagen).
More positively, Gino Segré has used the play as an excuse for his reflections
on the interwar physics community (Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the
Soul of Physics). Theodore Ziolkowski includes it briefly in his consideration of
“Americanization of Faust” in The Sin of Knowledge. Ziolkowski rightly notes
the anachronism inherent in considering the bomb in connection with this play
but nonetheless connects “The Blegdamsvej Faust” with frequent postwar refer-
ences to J. Robert Oppenheimer (and others involved in the Manhattan Project)
as a Faustian figure (see Ziolkowski 2000).
John Canaday’s is by far the most developed and insightful literary reading
of the play, teasing out the various threads of disruption and dissent running
throughout the play as manifestations of the group’s struggles to reconcile
their disparate scientific world views, with a particular emphasis on the meta-
phors of nuclear and quantum physics. In a still more narrowly more focused
approach, Paul Halpern thoughtfully examines the play among other exam-
ples of “Quantum Humor.” Likewise, Luisa Bonolis offers the play as a stra-
tegic representation of the character of the international physic community
in her thoughtful history, “International Scientific Cooperation During the
1930s. Bruno Rossi and the Development of the Status of Cosmic Rays into
a Branch of Physics.” Helge Kragh and Wolfgang Lueckel each include brief
reference to the play as it touches on their archives of Niels Bohr’s theories
of stellar energy and of nuclear age German fiction respectively. The largest
body of scholarly response to the play, following Panagiotis Pantidos et al.,
has more recently come to consider “The Blegdamsvej Faust” in the context
of theatricality and poetics as tools for the teaching of scientific ideas.
20 NEW PHYSICS, NEW FAUST: FAUSTIAN BARGAINS … 365
Yet one of the charms of this edition—as well as of the German

anuscript—is the inclusion of illustrations by Gamow, who was something
m
of a prankster‚ as well as the author and illustrator of several layman’s works
on the sciences in addition to his work in physics. Some of these illustrations
are caricatures of the play’s characters. And “The Blegdamsvej Faust” was in
part a roast: its caricatures were inside jokes which functioned as reminders to
the audience that they had been working together long enough and closely
enough to send one another up so accurately. Thus the youngest generation,
students of Bohr’s students, portray their teachers and their teachers’ teachers
in roles adapted from Goethe’s Faust, putting Bohr’s beneficent catchphrase
“I say this not to criticize, but rather just to learn” into the mouth of the
Lord and pointedly presenting a Mephistopheles who echoes the argumen-
tative Wolfgang Pauli’s mannerisms (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966).
Lise Meitner, Paul Ehrenfest, and Albert Einstein were contemporaries of
Bohr. Their students include Werner Heisenberg and Paul Dirac along with
Pauli, and the up and coming students present at the meeting (and perform-
ing in the play) included Delbrück, von Weizsäker, and Felix Bloch.
Yet, also at issue, and increasingly destructive of the friendships among
the group, was the relevance of classical physics to the quantum arena. Both
the hypotheses describing the quantum universe (including the opposing
suggestions of beta emission disobeying conservation of energy and of the
existence of neutrinos) and the metaphysical interpretations being attached to
these descriptions increasingly abandoned the foundations of classical phys-
ics. Though the play is unswervingly comedic, it is, as John Canaday notes,
both dramatically and socially a conflict; looked at as a play, Faust fields
the challenges of the Lord and Mephistopheles; seen socially, it lands amid
ongoing arguments among the physicists as to what quantum physics even is
(Canaday 2000). The play’s inability to present a coherent and sensible quan-
tum mechanical physics is indicative of the fracturing of the relationships on
which its comedy is based: 1932 was not a moment of smooth and consen-
sual revision of the physicists’ view of the universe. They were aware of the
developing revolution in both physics and the institutional structures within
which they were operating. Still, they risked asking whether quantum physics
was a revision and elaboration which could be meaningfully placed in rela-
tion to classical (and even relativistic) physics or a radically new thing which
required both conceptual and methodological breaks from the old ways of
doing physics.
The ultimately high stakes of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” carry an echo of a
major trend in science drama: what Shepherd-Barr has noted as “a distrust of
science” (2006). Since at least Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, scien-
tific curiosity has regularly been presented on stage as a dangerous, and there-
fore unethical, characteristic. Indeed, even before Marlowe’s dramatization,
the first Faustbook marked a similar change in the representation of the magi-
cian or sorcerer, in its emphasis on the curious mind, the human desire for
366 J. G. HALPIN
knowledge, what Elizabeth Butler has called “the eternally unsatisfied spirit of
scientific enquiry, the incurable thirst for knowledge which drives its victims
to transgress human limitations” (1979). Dramatic scientists are rarely worthy
of trust, specifically because of the drive that makes them scientists.
The early quantum physicists wanted to know the fundamental struc-
ture of the atom; in the mid-twentieth century, physicists would develop
atomic bombs powered by tearing that structure apart. In this regard, “The
Blegdamsvej Faust” presages the science drama after (and about) the bomb:
its scientists are inevitably caught up in questions concerning the ethical
responsibility of those who hold or seek knowledge, particularly the ten-
sion between a responsibility to one’s abilities and a responsibility to society.
(However‚ the play is noteworthy for the extent to which it avoids q uestions
of nationalism.) These questions of responsibility are clearest in “The
Blegdamsvej Faust’s” dramatization of a carnival of dangers theoretical phys-
icists were unleashing on themselves, a carnival all the more interesting for
being the product of those same physicists’ imaginations.
A Faustian Tradition
As both a roast of the senior physicists and a parody of Goethe’s play, “The
Blegdamsvej Faust” is heavily reliant on Faust’s theology and epistemology.
Though Faust has no inherent connection to the early twentieth-century
attempt to understand atomic structure, it does present the scientist’s pur-
suit of knowledge as the means by which Mephistopheles believes he can lead
Faust away from his already confused service of the Lord. Goethe’s play is
motivated by a pair of wagers: the Lord’s bet with Mephistopheles that Faust
will ultimately seek “the right road” and Faust’s with Mephistopheles that
Faust will never cease seeking more knowledge (von Goethe 1963). These
entwined wagers underscore the centrality of knowledge: Faust’s ongoing
striving for it suggests the appropriate lure for Mephistopheles to use to draw
him off of that “right road.” This prioritization of knowledge will be drawn
out in “The Blegdamsvej Faust” in a heightening of the interpersonal ten-
sions rising from competing theorizations of physical matter. When the par-
ody play takes up Faust’s concern with knowledge, this raises the stakes of its
characters’ disagreements. Goethe’s Faust sweetens the pot by making it the
gauge for his own wager with Mephistopheles.
The Lord.    Though now he serves me but confusedly,

   I shall soon lead him where the vapor clears. […].
Mephisto. What will you bet? You’ll lose him yet to me,
   If you will graciously connive
   That I may lead him carefully.
The Lord. As long as he may be alive,
   So long you shall not be prevented.
   Man errs as long as he will strive.    (von Goethe 1963)
Faust serves “confusedly,” and in his confusion both the Lord and
Mephistopheles consider him open to being led, though each has a differ-
ent path in mind. The frame established in the Prologue further includes the
Lord’s justification of his willingness to risk Faust in this Job-like test:
A good man in his darkling aspiration

Remembers the right road throughout his quest.
[…].
He [Faust] soon prefers uninterrupted rest;
To give him this companion hence seems best
Who roils and must as Devil help create.    (von Goethe 1963)
The Lord exhibits his faith that though Faust’s researches are part of a “dar-
kling aspiration,” the doctor will soon tire of them—perhaps all the sooner if
exposed to Mephistopheles’ “roiling”—and return to the “right road” in the
end. Mephistopheles is equally confident in his own ability to keep him on
the road to knowledge, already reconstrued as a road toward evil in the play’s
“Prologue in Heaven.”
As for Faust’s reasons for embarking on his journey with Mephistopheles,
he tells us that he is weary, that all of his conventional learning has given him
“neither money nor treasures, / Nor worldly honors or earthly pleasures,”
that he is dismayed that with all his knowledge—and he believes himself the
smartest person around—he “Do[es] not fancy that [he] know[s] anything
right, / Do[es] not fancy that [he] could teach or assert / What would bet-
ter mankind” (von Goethe 1963). Like his valuation of knowledge, Faust’s
arrogance gives another fertile ground for “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to jab
at the flaws and foibles of the greatly esteemed physicists of the day. Though
knowing his own brilliance, Faust’s assessment of all he has learned is strik-
ingly similar to the Lord’s: a “darkling aspiration” which has not brought him
closer to what would be best. Instead of remembering “the right road,” how-
ever, Faust embarks upon an entirely new branch of knowledge: magic.
In doing so, Faust seizes upon the opportunity to exchange his labor after
death (an existence in which he does not quite believe) for Mephistopheles’
service during his life. Fairly radically disavowing potential consequences,
Faust later offers Mephistopheles permission to destroy him if he ever rests
from his labors (I.1692–8). He even compares such a disengagement from
interest in the world to enslavement. Faust makes clear that his only inter-
est is in an unending striving to understand the material world: if he were
ever satisfied that he had figured it out, he would get bored and might as
well die. Hyperbolic, admittedly, but suitably in accord with the tone of
Mephistopheles’ wager with the Lord. Where the Lord sees the “roiling”
of interest in the world as a distraction from the “right road” to himself,
Faust readily succumbs to Mephistopheles in the juxtaposition of the live-
liness of being posed a difficulty to solve against the deathly stasis of hav-
ing figured everything out. It is the pursuit of knowledge Faust embraces,
368 J. G. HALPIN
seeming to make himself responsible only for working to learn and expe-
rience everything. Framing it all as personal curiosity or a new step in
self-improvement sets Faust’s deal at a distance from the consequences his
decision will deliver to others around him: Faust, in his self-regard, consid-
ers his own pleasure in learning of such superior worth as to suggest his own
immediate death if he ever were to want to stop and rest rather than go on.
“The Blegdamsvej Faust”

Following the structure of Goethe’s play in the main part, “The Blegdamsvej
Faust” is nonetheless more comedic, more chaotic, and more personal. The
Lord recognizably becomes Bohr; Mephisto takes on Pauli’s mannerisms; and
Faust is associated with Paul Ehrenfest, an old friend and colleague of both
Bohr and Pauli, placed in between them not to fall to Mephisto’s temptation
or rise to the Lord’s salvation but to choose which of them is right in tak-
ing the next steps to develop quantum physics. Ehrenfest’s judgment, by also
judging how paradigm-breaking quantum physics might be, had the poten-
tial to make or break the careers of the younger physicists who wrote and
performed in the play (by validating or excoriating their work and its poten-
tial) as well as to establish the terms under which the older physicists’ legacies
would be burnished.
While showing off both his connection to Bohr’s elite group of physicists
(by writing about them for their entertainment) and a familiarity with the
literary work of Goethe, Delbrück is not shy about building up representa-
tions of cluelessness within his own community, sacrificing the standing of
the physicists to emphasize the sheer difficulty of developing an accurate
and comprehensible quantum physics. During the opening prologue, set
“Between Heaven and Hell,” three Archangels discuss recent happenings in
astronomy. These Archangels are the British astronomers Eddington, Jeans,
and Milne. Given the tenuous practical connections between quantum physics
and astronomy, these figures are apparently chosen primarily as an echo of
the heavenly spheres. This prologue, set geographically lower than Goethe’s
“Prologue in Heaven,” also takes a lower tone. Many lines of the Gamow
translation are more lively than their German originals, especially where the
original German text is closest to Goethe’s. Nonetheless, where the German
original of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” does diverge from Goethe’s Faust, its
tone, too, often diverts into frivolity. These Archangels look to the burning
of the stars and chant “This vision fills us with elation / (Though none of us
can understand). / As on the Day of Publication / The brilliant Works are
strange and grand” (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). Here three fairly
significant astronomers admit to ignorance of the details of a cutting-edge
theoretical physics which informs their particular field. The playwrights’ cast-
ing of their colleagues under the shadow of mockery disparages those who
do not already understand quantum physics—these astronomers may be
world-class, but “none of them can understand.” The play’s audience of a few
dozen physicists would have recognized the dig at themselves as well: they
were, after all, just concluding yet another week of debates among the field’s
best and brightest, without having yet resolved many of the crucial difficul-
ties presented by a quantum model of reality. This audience was full of phys-
icists, many of whom would become Nobel Laureates, who knew that they
did not know everything they needed to know about quantum theory. As a
field, it was still incoherent. But the play’s mockery also marks the emerging
field as beyond ordinary capacities: if even these “bright stars” of science can-
not follow it, perhaps quantum mechanics requires a godlike capacity. As the
play elevates Niels Bohr and Wolfgang Pauli to superhuman roles—the Lord
and Mephisto[pheles], respectively—this positioning further ambiguates the
sharpness of the jibe Delbrück directed against himself and the others: per-
haps it is not so bad that the astronomers and the majority of the audience
are still uncertain about many details of quantum physics, as comprehending
the discipline calls for at least the superlative character of Bohr’s and Pauli’s
attempts.
In this context, the first part of “The Blegdamsvej Faust” opens in Faust’s
study with a close paraphrase of Goethe’s Faust’s monologue describing the
many fields he has mastered, serving to establish Faust’s credentials in this
emerging and baffling scientific undertaking. When Mephisto arrives to tempt
him, it is to musical accompaniment: a canon of the names of eminent phys-
icists of the day whom Mephisto suggests agree with him. Faust rejects all of
their ideas, until Mephisto puts forth the idea of his neutrino, who appears,
singing, as Gretchen, the love interest in Goethe’s play. An interlude at an
American pub allows several American physicists to appear in the playlet, and
this scene primarily allows a discussion of Einstein’s theories. It’s a funny bit
of banter, but underlying it is a recognition that Einstein was increasingly
unwilling to accept quantum mechanics and the work of its theorists.
In the second part, Faust awakens from a pleasant dream and meets a
Master of Ceremonies (M.C.) who offers two separate Walpurgis nights;
where Goethe’s single Walpurgis night is a Beltane Eve (30 April) of uncanny
events, “The Blegdamsveg Faust” presents two nights, one modeled on clas-
sical physics and the other modeled on quantum theory. Again, this juxta-
position underscores the difficulties quantum physicists faced in fitting their
work into relationship with that of the physicists who had gone before them.
Faust finds the Classical Walpurgis Night dull. When he finally convinces the
M.C. to skip past it and unleash the Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis Night,
what comes forward is a dangerous disorder in which elements from quantum
theory appear as monsters. For example, quantum physics uses the difficult
mathematics of group theory, and “The Group Dragon” appears on stage.
Faust is not the only one called to choose between the Lord and
Mephisto—he, like the Archangel-Astronomers, represents the play’s audience
to itself. In discussing characterization, Segré works to show the interpersonal
370 J. G. HALPIN
stakes and notes that the group of physicists may well have expected to have
to make these personal Faustian bargains—to negotiate their own desires for
stature and friendship among their colleagues. Segré continues, however, and
asserts that they would never (in the years before the Manhattan Project) have
anticipated being called upon to make such a bargain in regard to their sci-
ence (Segre 2007). The Ehrenfest/Faust character, then, struggles through-
out “The Blegdamsvej Faust” to find a position from which to consider the
opposing proposals of his friends; this struggle becomes more visible when he
attempts in the second act to enact the differing time scales of classical and
quantum theoretical models, by the representation of what a Walpurgis Night
in each would entail. Whereas Goethe wrote the “Walpurgis Night” and
“Walpurgis Night’s Dream” scenes, Delbrück stages the contrast between
“The Classical Walpurgis Night” and “The Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis
Night.” The M.C., played by Delbrück, first introduces the Classical:
M.C.    The Classical—a potpourri!

Faust.     (He leans forward, expecting. A long pause indicates that nothing is
happening)
But nothing’s happening!
M.C.                                             Just wait and see!
Faust.     (He waits. Another long pause and again nothing happens)
See here now, Delbrück! . . .
M.C.                                              Faust, you must expect
That with the Classical there’s no effect
Upon the audience.      (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966)
Here the M.C. underscores one of the strangenesses of the new quantum
physics: observation matters. In this case Delbrück undertakes an inversion
in saying that classical elements have “no effect / Upon the audience” rather
than that an audience has no effect on classical physics. Faust, along with the
audience, is bored by the absence of anything of note in the classical schema,
echoing the idea that the exciting scientific discoveries of the mid-twentieth
century would be in the new physics rather than the classical. (In the German
text, the classical is presented almost entirely by stage directions describing
the lack of effect. Accompanying this description, the German text provides
an illustration: a large, empty rectangle.) The M.C. then denies Faust permis-
sion to simply dismiss the boring Classical, so Faust retorts, “I then propose
the Classical be moved / Much farther back in time and place” (Institute for
Theoretical Physics 1966). Not being allowed to set classical physics entirely
aside, Faust invokes a change in the geometry of space-time: if the classi-
cal must be allowed to run its course, let it do so far away and let it begin
so much earlier so that it will end the sooner. And the M.C. approves this
proposal.
With quantum theory comes carnival: the many strange elements intro-
duced in the physicists’ efforts to describe a quantum mechanical universe
come to life. In the shift from the classical to the quantum, danger appears.
The M.C. even posts a literal “Warning” sign as he pushes away the space-time
of classical mechanics (Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966). In fact, as
Canaday has written, “the play threatens to fall apart. The audience witnesses
a dizzying sequence of miniature spoofs of the various offspring of quantum
mechanics” (Canaday 2000). He highlights a number of the dangers and dis-
orders arising from the quantum theoretical context. The key aspect of this
Quantum Theoretical Walpurgis Night is the universal danger and disorder it
brings. Dangerous holes (Dirac holes) appear in the path of two monopoles
attempting to reach one another. The Group Dragon is slain by the personi-
fication of another peculiarity arising in quantum theory: anti-symmetry (but
even this triumph over a threat is presented as a surprising success [203]).
The false sign is there to confuse matters—in this play it is a trickster figure,
and in mathematical calculations it is the common and difficult-to-locate
error of using a plus instead of a minus (or vice versa). Two tumblers stage
the exchange relation, illustrating a peculiarity of the relation between position
and momentum which is central to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Finally,
each personifying a different difficulty of quantum mechanics, the Four Gray
Women appear. Nothing of quantum physics that is being materialized on the
stage is appearing as a safe form. These personifications of key concepts and
difficulties in theoretical physics take the stage and effect a shift in the scene.
Poor Faust, who has watched this circus, now gladly succumbs to the in-rush
of the press, and, echoing Goethe’s Faust’s egoism, says:
To this fair moment let me say:

“You are so beautiful—Oh, stay!”
A trace of me will linger ‘mongst the Great,
Within the annals of The Fourth Estate.
Anticipating fortune so benign,
I now enjoy the moment that is mine!
(Institute for Theoretical Physics 1966)
All the play gives him is his dying moment and a hope that he will receive good
press attention. Unlike Goethe’s Faust, this Faust dies of the excitement of
being part of the spectacle and is not carried up to heaven afterward. For all the
parody and frivolity in which this play engages, it seems it plays “for keeps.” The
dangers of quantum physics to the community developing it are multifarious
and real, from the undermining of longstanding principles of classical physics to
the contestation among great personalities over its newest discoveries, from the
cliquishness of Bohr’s invitation list to the losses of friendships, positions, and
even lives in the developing arguments over quantum physics’ properties.
Goethe’s Faust is a remarkable figure for the innovators of early
twentieth-century physics. Far from being poised to drudge away at filling
in details suggested by a complete set of theorems which well describe the
universe, in the wake of Einstein’s theories of relativity and the revolutionary
372 J. G. HALPIN
opening years of quantum physics, a new discipline—theoretical phys-

ics—sprang up rich with knotty problems in which to entangle themselves.
Relativity and quantum physics may have seemed to provide what Goethe’s
Faust called new “joys […] from this earth” to “delight” them (von Goethe
1963). In deciding to fool about with time—to push away “classical” time
and let loose a quantum temporality, “The Blegdamsvej Faust” opens its
characters up to a strange and dangerous context. They are baffled and each
new element—however potentially useful—is also a danger. And Faust/
Ehrenfest’s fate does not suggest these dangers are surmountable. As the cho-
rus concludes the play, “Das Ewig-Neutrale / Zieht uns hinan!” (Institute for
Theoretical Physics 1932). The eternal-neutral pulls us upwards. (Except that
Goethe’s chorus refers not to the eternal-neutral but to the eternal-feminine,
both plays close with the same two lines.) Even in the remaining characters’
acceptance that Pauli’s neutrino may be a constituent part of matter, neutral-
ity itself is undermined: it now pulls. What the drama offers is a way to pull
back: the social network of performance groups together the subjects of this
eternal-neutral’s pull, proffering a hope, however charged with self-mockery,
that the pursuit of physics will remain a collective one, founded in community
rather than egoism.
Notes
1.
My thanks are due to Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Colin N. Milburn, and many
members of the British Society for Literature and Science who have informed
my thinking on this project and so much else.
In the initial publication George Gamow credits his wife Barbara with the trans-
lation of the play into English and leaves the authors “anonymous, except for
J. W. von Goethe,” claiming to have been unable to discover who they were, and
giving “Thanks […] to Professor Max Delbrück for his kind help in the inter-
pretation of certain parts of the play” (Gamow 1966). Segré, however, credits
both Gamows as translators and identifies Delbrück—rather than “The Task
Force of the ‘Institute for Theoretical Physics,’ Copenhagen”—as the text’s
primary author (Segre 2007).
Bibliography
Aaserud, Finn. 2007. The Theatre of Quantum Physics. Nature 448 (7156): 869–870.
Beller, Mara. 1999. Quantum Dialogue: The Making of a Revolution. Chicago, IL and
London: University of Chicago Press.
Bonolis, Luisa. 2014. International Scientific Cooperation During the 1930s: Bruno
Rossi and the Development of the Status of Cosmic Rays into a Branch of Physics.
Annals of Science 71 (3): 355–409.
Butler, Elizabeth M. 1979. The Fortunes of Faust: Magic in History. Cambridge:
Canaday, John. 2000. The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic
Bombs. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gamow, George. 1966. Thirty Years that Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory.
New York, NY: Doubleday, Reprinted 1985. New York, NY: Dover.
Halpern, Paul. 2012. Quantum Humor: The Playful Side of Physics at Bohr’s
Institute for Theoretical Physics. Physics in Perspective 14 (3): 279–299.
Haynes, Roslynn D. 1994. From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist
in Western Literature. Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University
Press.
Hendry, John. 1984. The Creation of Quantum Mechanics and the Bohr-Pauli
Dialogue. In Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol. 14, ed. Robert S. Cohen,
Erwin N. Hiebert, and Everett I. Mendelsohn. Boston, MA: D. Reidel.
Ibsen, Henrik. 1981. An Enemy of the People: Four Great Plays by Henrik Ibsen, trans.
R. Farquharson Sharp, 129–215. Toronto, ON: Bantam.
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen. 1932. The Task Force of the 1966.In
The Blegdamsvej Faust, trans. Barbara Gamow. Thirty Years That Shook Physics. New
York: Doubleday, 1966, ed. George Gamow, 165–218. New York, NY: Dover.
Institute for Theoretical Physics, Copenhagen. 1932. Parody of “Faust”. Unpublished
TS. Microfilm. Sources for the History of Quantum Physics 6: 23 pages.
Jungk, Robert. 1956 [1986]. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of
the Atomic Scientists, trans. James Kleugh. New York, NY: Harvest.
Kragh, Helge. 2017. Let the Stars Shine in Peace! Niels Bohr and Stellar Energy,
1929–1934. Annals of Science 74 (2): 126–148.
Lueckel, Wolfgang. 2016. From Zero Hour to Eleventh Hour? German Fiction of the
Nuclear Age Between 1945 and 1663. Monatschefte 107 (1): 84–107.
Marlowe, Christopher. 2005. Doctor Faustus: Doctor Faustus with The English Faust
Book, ed. David Wootton, 1–66. Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge: Hackett.
Pantidos, Panagiotis, Kalliopi Spathi, and Evagelos Vitoratos. 2001. The Use of
Drama in Science Education: The Case of ‘Blegdamsvej Faust, Science & Education
10 (1–2): 107–117.
Pantidos, Panagiotis, Konstantinos Ravanis, Kostas Valakis, and Evangelos Vitoratos.
2014. Incorporating Poeticality into the Teaching of Physics. Science & Education
23 (3): 621–642.
Segré, Gino. 2007. Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics. New York,
NY: Viking.
Shattuck, Roger. 1996. Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography. New
York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to Copenhagen.
Princeton, NJ & Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Toonders, Winnie, Roald P. Verhoeft, and Hub Zwart. 2016. Performing the Future:
On the Use of Drama in Philosophy Courses for Science Students. Science &
Education 25 (7/8): 869–895.
Tselfes, Vasilis, and Antigoni Paroussi. 2009. Science and Theatre Education: A Cross-
Disciplinary Approach of Scientific Ideas Addressed to Student Teachers of Early
Childhood Education. Science & Education 18 (9): 1115–1134.
“uncertainty.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, www.oed.com.
von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. 1963. Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York, NY:
Doubleday.
Ziolkowski, Theodore. 2000. The Sin of Knowledge: Ancient Themes and Modern
Variations. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
CHAPTER 21
The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative

Genres of Future Life
Coleman Nye
“Everyone stop everything. What is this?” So opens a 2014 Slate article

(Newman 2014). With a blend of amusement and trepidation, the article
describes BiteLabs, an apparent biotech start-up debuting a gourmet product:
celebrity meat (bitelabs.org). BiteLabs claims to be culturing in-vitro meat
from celebrity tissue samples, which are painlessly extracted, cultivated in a
bioreactor, ground up, seasoned, and encased as artisanal salami. According
to its site, BiteLabs offers an environmentally friendly and victimless alterna-
tive to conventional meat. Consumers can now dine on meat in good con-
science, and enjoy the added perk of meeting and eating (meating?) their
favorite celebrities in the flesh.
The website set off a veritable media feeding frenzy, as numerous blogs,
magazines, and twitter accounts speculated about whether the site is a legit-
imate marketing platform for a burgeoning company, an animal rights activ-
ist ploy, or a parody of Silicon Valley. As Brian Merchant from Motherboard
wrote, “So this is either a startup looking to gin up some cheap PR to pave
its way into the lab-grown meat market, an activist group like PETA carry-
ing out a spoof campaign, or a satirist very committed to his prank” (2014).
In many ways, BiteLabs is all three. It is at the nexus of these precise activi-
ties and interests—biotechnological speculation, environmental activism, and
artistic fabulation—that the emergent terrain of “naturally artificial” meat has
taken shape.
C. Nye (*) 
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

376 C. NYE
In the years preceding BiteLabs’ 2014 debut, Google co-founder Sergey

Brin, motivated by concerns about the ethical and environmental unsustain-
ability of industrial meat production, funded Dutch scientist Mark Post and
his team to grow an in-vitro beef burger as “proof of concept.” Around the
same time, US-based animal rights group PETA offered one million dollars to
any company able to produce commercially viable quantities of in-vitro meat.
A year after PETA’s competition expired and six months before BiteLabs
emerged, the world’s first lab-grown beef burger, dubbed the “Google
Burger,” was consumed on live television in the UK. In reference to his back-
ing of this “victimless meat” initiative, Brin noted, “Some people think this is
science fiction. It’s not real; it’s somewhere out there. I actually think that’s
a good thing. If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science
fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough” (“Google Burger” 2013).
In-vitro meat was science fiction before it became a scientific reality. In
a 1932 essay widely cited by cultured meat researchers, Winston Churchill
anticipates a future in which we grow chicken parts in-vitro instead of har-
vesting animals. In a more dystopian 2003 vision of lab-grown meat futures,
Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake imagines “ChickieNobs”—meat
sourced from bioengineered chicken-like bodies without heads. In the same
year—a decade before the Google burger’s debut—the speculative bioart col-
lective SymbioticA cultivated the first in-vitro meat prototype in a gallery in
France. Speculation is central to experimental economies of technoscience.1
Experimental systems in the sciences, as in the arts, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger
explains, are “future-generating machines” that produce the conditions
through which to bring forth something as-yet-unknown, “something which
does not exist in the form in which it is going to be produced” (1997, 319).
Within contemporary formations of technoscience, these future-generating
processes involve both techno-cultural frontier-making (Haraway 1989;
Helmreich 2000; Roosth 2017) and financial market-making (Rajan 2006;
Cooper 2008). From the entanglements between SymbioticA’s 2003 bio-
art installation and the 2013 Google-funded in-vitro beef prototype to
the subsequent uptake of BiteLabs’ human meat imaginary by the Dutch
techno-cultural think tank Next Nature, this chapter explores how forms of
speculative fiction and financial speculation have played critical roles in mate-
rializing “naturally artificial” meat.
While genres of speculative art and finance have helped to shape the
coming-into-being of cultured meat, genres of biological and social classification
such as race, species, relation—in short, genus—have also been key resources
in the creation of in-vitro meat (IVM). In the second part of this chapter, I
employ the analytic of genre/genus to explore how specific conceptualizations
of “life” shape IVM research—from the industrial underpinnings of the idea
that life can be maintained outside of the body (in vitro means in a glass) to
the race and gender dynamics at play in categorizations of food, environment,
or humanness. In many ways, the case of in-vitro meat exemplifies feminist and
21 THE MATTER OF IN-VITRO MEAT: SPECULATIVE GENRES OF FUTURE LIFE 377
postcolonial science studies scholars’ claims that artistic imaginaries, social histo-
ries, and economic systems are all part of, rather than apart from, scientific prac-
tice (Haraway 1989‚ 2008; Wynter 2003). What we know is inextricable from
how we come to know it—the questions we ask, the categories and conventions
we use, the stories we tell.
If the worlds we come to know and make in the sciences are inextrica-
ble from the stories we tell—from genres of speculation to modes of clas-
sification—then it is critical that we attend to which stories shape our
scientific designs on future life. IVM researchers often draw on Churchill’s
techno-utopian vision of a “post-animal bioeconomy” (Datar 2015): they
proffer meat technology as a simple solution to complex problems and frame
life as separable from bodies and environments. Atwood, BiteLabs, and oth-
ers complicate the neat division between technology and environment, living
being and lab instrument, eater and eaten: their speculations on the matter
of in-vitro meat attend to the complex entanglements and ethical dynamics
at play in techno-ecologies of consumption. Taking a cue from these alter-
nate approaches, the chapter concludes by asking how scientists and artists
can co-materialize different technoscientific futures of “life” by turning to
genres of thought that center complexity and reciprocity in the making of our
more-than-human relations.
The Future Birth of Real Artificial Meat

Roughly a decade before the Google burger made its way into the mouths
of a select few in London, the Australia-based art lab collective SymbioticA
installed a project entitled “Disembodied Cuisine” in a gallery in Nantes,
France. This collaborative project between artists and biological scientists
was an exploration of the techno-utopic concept of “victimless meat.”
Frog leg muscle stem cells were placed in a nutrient media in a bioreactor
alongside an aquarium containing the living frogs from which the tissues
were collected and a bourgeois dining room where people ate the cultured
frog legs. The piece was designed to explore the ethical, ontological, and
financial stakes of the emerging concept of “extreme Nouvelle Cuisine”
(Catts and Zurr 2006, 7), which wasn’t terribly tasty (portions were small
and the texture was gelatinous), was expensive to develop (it cost $650 to
make one gram of in-vitro frog steak), and was only available to an elite few
(Zurr 2009).
The experimental movement toward knowing and making novel “epistemic
things” in the sciences and arts is marked by a thrall to “continuously pro-
duce surplus that is beyond what we may have wanted, beyond what we might
have imagined” (Rheinberger 1997, 23). SymbioticA asked how IVM futures
might generate surplus life and/as surplus value: they opened up space to con-
sider who might, in the future, be able to afford to occupy the ethical position
of eating meat without killing and how this so-called victimless food product
378 C. NYE
might result in the production of new and newly exploitable “semi-living

beings” (Zurr 2009). By situating lab-grown meat in relation to modes of eat-
ing and killing on the factory farm and in the laboratory sciences, SymbioticA
sought to account for the entanglements of eater and eaten, and to explore
our responsibilities to our fellow living and semi-living beings (Zurr and Catts
2004). In this way, “Disembodied Cuisine” prompted a consideration of how
in-vitro meat risks extending, rather than unmaking, unequal regimes of vital-
ity that have long animated modes of capitalist production in industry and
agriculture (Waldby 2000; Haraway 2008; Franklin 2007).
At the same time, SymbioticA laid the groundwork for competing IVM
imaginaries to take shape by creating the techno-material conditions to make
cultured meat. In ensuing years, components of the installation were incor-
porated piecemeal into the broader enterprise of cultured meat production
and promotion. Researchers in the growing field of cellular agriculture cite
SymbioticA as the first laboratory to produce meat in-vitro (Heselmans 2005)
and credit it with successfully developing a now-widely used scaffolding tech-
nique for cultured meat production (Edelman et al. 2005). In addition to
its technical contributions to the future birth of IVM, select dimensions of
the collective’s ethico-aesthetic frame were also echoed by IVM researchers.
In a 2010 interview in Nature, Mark Post, who is credited with developing
the “Google burger,” said he hoped to “make a single palatable sausage of
ground pork, showcased next to the living pig that donated its starter cells”
(Jones 2010, 752).
Post’s desire to stage the living pig alongside the meat developed from its
cells resonates with the ethical framing not only of SymbioticA, but also of
his funders such as Google’s Sergey Brin and the organization New Harvest,
which describes itself as a “(r)evolutionary” cellular agriculture research insti-
tute. New Harvest conjures a future “post-animal bioeconomy” in which tis-
sue engineering and synthetic biology promise to bypass the negative impacts
of industrial agriculture on environment, public health, and animal well-
being (“Meat/Culture” 2013) through the creation of “animal products
without animals” (Datar 2015). As Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr of SymbioticA
remark, “The irony sometimes seems to be lost too easily, as now the discourse
about a victimless society is being used by a university spin-off company [New
Harvest] that attempts to secure funding for tissue-engineered meat” (2006, 7)
(Figs. 21.1 and 21.2).
While saving animals becomes a site of moral and financial investment in
the promissory narrative of IVM, this investment takes the shape of engineer-
ing animals out of the equation entirely. In this way, the organism itself and its
web of relations become extraneous to models of biopolitical and bioeconomic
flourishing (Metcalf 2013) and cultured meat becomes a form of “ethical
biocapital” (Franklin 2003), as the promise to solve social and environmen-
tal problems through biotechnological innovation is itself a mechanism for
value generation. This promissory framing of post-animal technofutures takes
Fig. 21.1 Google Burger tasting, Cultured Beef and Google (2013)
Fig. 21.2 In-vitro frog leg tasting, SymbioticA (2003)

380 C. NYE
up Winston Churchill’s anticipation of the full instrumentalization and frag-

mentation of animals into what Donna Haraway describes as “organs without
organisms” (2008, 268): “Fifty years hence, we shall escape the absurdity of
growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these
parts separately under a suitable medium” (Churchill 1932).
The Churchill quotation begins to situate the concept of meat w ithout
animals within a deeper genealogy of disarticulating life from the living body.
Cultured meat is part of an assemblage of cellular technologies developed in
the past century that are focused on the manipulation of life processes. In
1907, American embryologist Ross Harrison separated amphibian embryonic
tissue from the body and managed to keep the isolated tissue alive for weeks
in small glass enclosures (Landecker 2007, 15). In 1912, Franco-American
surgeon Alexis Carrel claimed to have created immortal life in-vitro by
culturing embryonic chicken heart tissue. Although the “immortality” of
Carrel’s chicken heart has been disputed, this model of cultivating life outside
of the organismic body for indefinite periods of time has reshaped biolog-
ical approaches to time and embodiment. The move from experimentation
on animals in vivo (within the living body) to in vitro (in a glass) in early
twentieth-century cellular biology marked a shift in the conceptualization and
study of life, as it effectively “loosened cells from bodies, human tissue from
persons, and biological things from the given time of lifespans and other bio-
logical cycles” (19).
The role of lab and farm animals in this history of making life into a dis-
embodied technology also connects to ongoing agricultural attempts to
render animals into living factories through the mechanization of their life
processes (Haraway 2008). Animal domestication, selective breeding, and
the industrialization of livestock are intimately connected to reproductive and
cellular biology at conceptual and material scales (Franklin 2007). A legacy
of approaching animals as living technologies and as livestock (living invest-
ments) attests to a conception of life as extractable and exchangeable. The
human infrastructures that have emerged around the management of ani-
mal life have enabled a wider scope for scientific research and biotechnologi-
cal innovation by providing animals and animal parts as the raw materials.
Genetically engineered lab mice like Oncomouse® are patented laboratory
instruments, urine collected from pregnant mares in factory farms provides
estrogen for hormone therapy drugs, and the combination of agricultural and
scientific designs on animal life have provided the breeding ground for new
reproductive technologies from in-vitro fertilization to cloning.
While the concept of life as separable from living organisms shapes tissue
culture imaginaries, Atwood’s post-apocalyptic novel Oryx and Crake “stays
with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) of life’s biocultural messiness. Engineered
as “animal-protein tubers,” Atwood’s ChickieNobs are meaty biomasses
without heads, organs, or legs covered in “whitish-yellow skin” that gener-
ate chicken meat without chickens (2003, 202). ChickieNobs are part of a
larger class of fleshy beings designed in the service of human survival. This
new subclass of beings also includes “pigoons”—pigs that have been infused
with human genetic materials and bred to donate organs to humans. In

Atwood’s story, in-vitro meat emerges as part of a deeply worrying and com-
plicated set of worldings in which creatures have been engineered to care for
humans in a unidirectional way and in which humans pay dearly for their fail-
ure to account for reciprocal forms of care and nonhuman modes of agency.
Creatures exceed their designers’ intentions with catastrophic consequences
for humans: microbes decimate the human population in the form of a viru-
lent pathogen and liberated human–pig hybrids roam feral, hunting humans.
These unanticipated outcomes of bioengineering violently disrupt the anthro-
pocentric frames that imagine nonhuman entities as inert lab instruments
rather than agential beings in complex, shifting earthly relations of living and
dying. In this way, Atwood’s science fiction challenges tissue culture imag-
inaries that conjure beneficent, seamless disarticulations of flesh from body
in a post-animal bioeconomy. Oryx and Crake attends to the epistemic and
ethical violence at play in biotechnological models that frame life as separa-
ble from bodies and lives as unconnected to other life forms, showing instead
how we are utterly enmeshed.
Far from operating in a post-animal environment, cellular cultures rely
heavily on the organismic qualities of farm animals: the serum used to feed
cell cultures in IVM technologies is currently derived from the blood of
fetuses extracted from slaughtered pregnant cows. And more broadly, the
everyday lab technologies, including latex gloves, petri dishes, plastic scaf-
folding, and disciplinary histories—agricultural science, cellular biology,
reproductive science—are inextricable from global extractive, colonial, and
chemical regimes of predatory value (Byrd et al. 2018). By eliding these deep
interdependencies through narratives of victimless food and technological
salvation, IVM progenitors risk reproducing the ethical and environmen-
tal harms of industrial agriculture and political inequality that they aim to
reduce.
Eat Celebrity Meat?

If IVM seeks to symbolically and materially evacuate the animal from meat
in a Churchillian post-animal bioeconomy, BiteLabs takes up this anthropo-
centric and atomistic eating imaginary, exposing its unspoken assumptions
and material contradictions. BiteLabs (Fig. 21.3) mimics many of the specu-
lative dimensions of Mark Post and New Harvest’s cultured beef (Fig. 21.4)
with one crucial difference: BiteLabs is claiming to culture meat harvested
from human celebrity stem cells. By literally putting people on the menu,
BiteLabs manifests some of the ways agricultural and biological technologies
are caught up in a historically freighted biopolitical topography of what (or
who) may be eaten, and what modes of contact, kinship, and violence eating
might enact.
Eating, as numerous food scholars have argued, is a highly charged act.
The visceral practice of distinguishing the edible from inedible, body from
flesh, consuming subject from consumed object, is one of the key areas in
382 C. NYE
Fig. 21.3 BiteLabs.org
Fig. 21.4 CulturedBeef.net
which material-symbolic boundaries are drawn in our social worlds (Douglas

2002). Alimentary acts of determining who eats and with whom, who is
eaten and by whom, co-articulate with orders of difference and operations
of power within political economies that feed on fictions of race, gender, and
sexuality in profoundly material ways (Roy 2010; Tompkins 2012). Meat,

within this matrix, emerges as a uniquely potent biomoral substance.
Working from within an anthropocentric alimentary frame that figures the
human as exceptionally inedible, the animal rights organization PETA has
been pushing to change the old adage “You are what you eat” to “You are
who you eat.” While all acts of consumption and production within indus-
trial agriculture—from strawberries to steaks—are tied to forms of death and
degradation (cf. Holmes 2013), PETA’s strategy encourages the visual and
affective conflation of human and animal flesh in an attempt to inspire
moral approbation at the cannibalistic nature of consuming meat. The
organization’s tactics have included wrapping naked white women in cel-
lophane much like meat at a grocery store and drafting a will in which the
organization’s director Ingrid Newkirk details her desire to have her body
parts barbequed, turned to leather, mounted, and displayed after her death
(Smith 2011). In 2006, this same logic led Newkirk into the world of in-vitro
meat, as she offered her own living muscle tissue to SymbioticA when they
were toying with the idea of growing a “semi-living steak out of an adult
consenting human” (Zurr and Catts 2004).
PETA’s activist strategies attempt to reorder the categories that compose
what Mel Chen has described as the “animacy hierarchy”—a semiotic system
that arranges life along a hierarchical ladder of sentience and agency (2012,
24). The above examples show how the animal rights organization tries to
move nonhuman animals up the animacy ladder by strategically aligning them
with the white liberal subject. In so doing, PETA reproduces what Sylvia
Wynter calls the “coloniality of Being” that overrepresents the Western bour-
geois subject within the genre of the human. Wynter argues that the prevail-
ing understanding of the human, or “referent-we” in Western social, political,
and scientific life‚ relies on a biological and hierarchical narrative of humanity.
This “descriptive statement of the human,” she suggests, is a powerful fiction
that has been developed by and for a EuroWestern bourgeois Christian eth-
noclass of “Man” who overrepresents himself—his body, his beliefs, and his
worldview—as the ideal model of the human, and devalues “Man’s human
Others” who are deemed evolutionarily and culturally inferior (Wynter
2003). In this framework, while all humans are defined as biologically equiv-
alent, not all humans are designated as equal (Wynter and McKittrick 2015).
In other campaigns, PETA attempts to elevate animals by simultaneously
degrading the animacy status of “Man’s human Others.” In these instances,
PETA renders racialized and gendered subjects as less fully human than the
ethnoclass of Man by implying their biological equivalence with animals. This
strategy is exemplified in PETA’s instrumentalization of a Canadian farmer’s
confession to murdering nearly 50 Indigenous women. PETA coopted these
women’s horrific deaths, which went largely uninvestigated by the police for
years, in a full-page ad that compared the women’s murders to the deaths
of farm animals. Under a series of dehumanizing media snapshots detailing
384 C. NYE
how Robert Pickton murdered the women and fed their bodies to his pigs,
PETA writes, “If this leaves a bad taste in your mouth, become a vegetarian.”
In a press release responding to political backlash about the ad from some
of the women’s family members, PETA insisted, “People who are appalled
by Pickton’s alleged acts think nothing of sitting down to a dinner featuring
the cut-up bits of a tormented animal’s body” (“Animal Rights Campaign”
2002). In appropriating these women’s deaths to elevate the animacy status
of animals through a discourse of cannibalism—one in which the animals are
made to matter through and against a human conduit—PETA reproduces
the colonial-patriarchal violence of hierarchically ordering life by normaliz-
ing persistent, deadly acts of gendered violence against Indigenous women in
Canada.
As the above examples make clear, the relations between Man and human,
human and animal are not given, but are instead operationalized to meet con-
tradictory and at times violent political ends. Biological equivalence does not
necessarily lend itself to feelings of affinity or kinship across genres of life.
Furthermore, in a biotechnological age, it is because of the conjunction of
biological equivalence and social inequality that some bodies are reduced to
living labor or raw material “to aid in the intensification of vitality for other
living beings” (Waldby 2000, 19) within global medical, agricultural, and
scientific markets. Simply calling someone or something “human” is insuf-
ficient to disrupt these deeply embedded patterns of rapacious appetite that
devour flesh, as the very category of “human” as the ethnoclass of Man is
composed in and through the biopolitical exclusion and expropriation of his
non/human Others.
BiteLabs adds a compelling layer to the question of human and
other-than-human relations in the IVM landscape. Far from trying to move
animals into humanity and away from edibility within a Western animacy
hierarchy, BiteLabs unsettles the assumed universality of the category of the
human by exposing its contradictory logics. BiteLabs’ human meat campaign
calls up the very ordinariness of cannibalistic processes of commodifying
life within unequal regimes of biocapital. In this start-up, the consumption
of human meat is presented as not only possible and actual, but as a poten-
tially desirable and ethical practice of “victimless cannibalism” since eat-
ing a human will no longer necessitate the death of that human (Dilworth
and McGregor 2015). Glibly glossing over the ethical stakes of eating peo-
ple in its many guises, they push the social obfuscation and financial incen-
tivization so characteristic of the IVM industry to its absurd (yet feasible)
limit by reimagining human steaks as an eco-friendly meat alternative for the
conscientious consumer. The celebrity meat source marketed by BiteLabs
emerges as a primal site for playing out American consumers’ carnal fanta-
sies of “eating the other” (hooks 1992) and incorporating them into the self.
Yet, rather than covering over this thrall to devour, they strategically center it.
In so doing, BiteLabs deftly sutures the bourgeois “commodity citizen” who
“substitute[s] a hypervigilant digestive life for critical engagement with polit-

ical and economic processes” (Tompkins 2012, 11) to the “consumer can-
nibal” who desires to make intimate contact with the commodified body of
the other (hooks 1992: 39). This gesture flips the conventional script of can-
nibalism on its head—if cannibalism has historically been mobilized as a way
to mark racialized others as expendable and exploitable (in other words, con-
sumable) through the colonial mythology of the “Other’s” irredeemable and
voracious appetites for human flesh, then BiteLabs brings cannibalism home
to roost by rendering Western imperialist appetites as the provenance of can-
nibal culture (Fig. 21.5).
Following IVM proponents, BiteLabs glamorizes the selective demystifi-
cation of the commodity chain: in the cultured meat business, meat has its
own history, and this history cannot be divorced from the substance itself, the
conditions of its production, or the act of eating. Yet, if the ethical biocapital
of in-vitro animal meat is that the animal is eradicated from the process, the
commodity value of celebrity meat resides in the resplendent specificity of the
human source. By staging the carnal fantasy of incorporation in its jubilant
call to “eat celebrity meat,” BiteLabs makes visible how acts of consumption
are never divorced from modes of production and how the consuming sub-
ject never succeeds in fully assimilating or dominating the consumed. Indeed,
for BiteLabs, eating is a site of connection and kin-making: it holds out the
promise that in taking a bite of Kanye, he will become part of you.
The conditions for techno-cannibalism in this case depend upon the dual
premise that (1) the body doesn’t end at the skin,2 and (2) bodies are bio/
Fig. 21.5 Descriptions of James Franco-Furters and Kanye Salami on BiteLabs.org

386 C. NYE
necro-politically imbued with different perceived properties that shape the

conditions of access to personhood even and especially in their transformation
into food/thing. Although BiteLabs gestures toward the simultaneous hyper-
valuation and denigration of different “genres of the human” through the
lens of cannibalism, it becomes clear that those lives do not necessarily come
to matter as lived or living in the frame of the project. Just as in-vitro tech-
nologies enable life to be sustained beyond the conventional boundaries of
the body (Landecker 2007, 15), the celebrity-as-commodity can, and neces-
sarily does, live without or beyond the fleshy body of the celebrity-as-person.
Conversely, other socially marginalized subjects come to matter through their
biological deaths, as is most readily exemplified in the case of PETA’s Pickton
pig farm campaign. In this way, both celebrity and marginality come into ten-
sion as equally amenable, but unequally subjected, to the instrumentalization
of life. The uneasy links between Bite Labs’ and PETA’s renderings of genres
of the human raise a series of questions: Does this digital project really bring
cannibalism home to roost, so to speak, or does it reinstantiate racializing
and gendered structures of reductive biologization, divided enfleshment, and
uneven consumption through its glib techno-fetishism? Does it call up other
forms of kin beyond the “human” by staging consumption as a kin-making
practice? Or does it simply normalize the violence of carnality—of the kinship
borne of consumption, of the specular economies of flesh that render flesh
differently consumable, differently akin to self or other?
A generous reading of BiteLabs would suggest that the work calls atten-
tion to how processes of defining and consuming biological substance are
animated by deeply racialized and gendered approaches to the body. In
opening up this space, they also make room for—but never articulate—the
possibility that, through consumption, one is always vulnerable to non-
innocent and nonconsensual modes of connection. Rather than saying “we’re
all human,” they invite people to consider how we are all differently related
through acts of ingestion. A less generous reading of BiteLabs might con-
sider it within, rather than against, IVM models of biological reductionism
and ethical biocapital. BiteLabs certainly invites consideration of the biomoral
tangle of lab-grown meat, but the project itself deploys the same conventions
as mainstream biotech. In some ways, this mirroring draws attention to the
ideologies undergirding start-up culture. In other ways, it simply reproduces
them within the frame of “critical design,” a critical theory-informed method
of designing objects that demand contemplation (Dunne 2008). BiteLabs’
design is slick and professional, its content buzz-generating. Generating hype
is central to the promissory economies of biotech, and culture—in the form
of controversy, critique, or morality—is a key form of capital: just ask Sergey
Brin.
Google’s algorithms reward controversial content in ways that reproduce
social inequalities in order to drum up advertising dollars (Noble 2018),
and the tech company’s policies around privacy, information, and consent
oftentimes conceal coercion through the appearance of transparency and dis-

empower users through a script of freedom. Similarly, modes of feel-good
consumption from cause-based marketing to branding ethical sourcing are
highly profitable practices that link consumption with an ethos of self-making
that is often evacuated of political critique (King 2006; Richey and Ponte
2011; Cabrera and Williams 2012). And finally, when political critique is
mobilized, it is increasingly deployed in biotech marketing and advertising as
a design concept, rather than a substantive intervention. Google Burger sci-
entist Mark Post acknowledges as much in an interview, when he agrees that,
although “described as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘groundbreaking,’ in-vitro meat is
actually a clever repackaging of existing technologies: the cell-culture equiv-
alent of an iPhone” (Van Mensvoort et al. 2014, 48). Such “non-disruptive
disruptions” (Goldstein 2018) masquerade as radically transformative—as
technologies that can solve global food shortages and climate change in the
case of IVM or as critical interventions that expose a problem or contradic-
tion in the case of BiteLabs—while masking, maintaining, or exploiting the
problem they claim to address. In this way “culture” and “critique” can just
as easily become forms of capital in an industry that approaches radicality as
a selling point: “If what you’re doing is not seen by some people as science
fiction, it’s probably not transformative enough.”
Within a year of BiteLabs’ debut, celebrity meat cubes surfaced on the dig-
ital “In-Vitro Bistro.” The website is an initiative of NextNature, a design
network supported by New Harvest, which includes Mark Post as an “ambas-
sador.” Designed as the “first in-vitro meat restaurant,” this work of specula-
tive design claims to explore the “creative prospects” of cultured meats and
to “visualize the wide range of possible new dishes and food cultures to help
decide what future we actually want!” (Van Mensvoort 2014, 6–7). The line
between BiteLabs and NextNature is a fine and shifting one, and the clearest
distinction between the two creative initiatives is framing: BiteLabs doesn’t
outwardly claim to be art, while the In-Vitro Bistro does. Yet, claiming to be
art is key to the caché of speculative art-science initiatives like NextNature:
much like Brin’s claim that new technologies should be science fiction,
NextNature claims that speculative design can help us imagine, innovate,
explore, and create our “next nature,” which they describe as “the nature
caused by people” (Fig. 21.6).
In their vision statement, the organization draws on natural–cultural
frameworks from the field of Science and Technology Studies to argue that
“People aren’t separate from nature; we’re part of it” and “we shouldn’t
be obsessed with unspoilt nature” (“Philosophy” 2019). These important
claims signal the limits of Enlightenment-based frameworks that seek to par-
tition nature from culture, technology from biology, human from nonhuman.
And yet, rather than working through what that might mean in terms of
more complex and ethical practices of technoscience as Atwood does in her
speculative fiction, NextNature deploys these ideas in order to “design our
388 C. NYE
Fig. 21.6 Celebrity cubes on the menu of Next Nature’s “In-Vitro Bistro”
environment” in a narrowly anthropocentric, technophilic, and biocapitalist

frame. A sampling of their design projects includes developing eco-currency
that translates environmental protection into economic value, “Twitter
implants” to monitor your health for early interventions and discounts from
your insurance company, and “dust pills” to improve gut health by intro-
ducing microbes usually found in soil and vegetables (“Projects”). Each of
these “next natures” offers a technological, market- or state-based solution to
natural–cultural issues related to environment, industry, social media, health-
care, biometrics, and agriculture. In NextNature’s “Nano Supermarket,”
the connections across these patterns of ecological degradation, faltering
microbial-human-plant healthscapes, unsustainable food economies, and
media architectures of control disappear into a speculative world that looks
very much like already-existing biotech markets. Yet, isn’t this, too, the
nature caused by people?
If there is one thing NextNature and the broader terrain of in-vitro
meat make clear, it is that cultural resources are critical to technoscientific
world-making activities—from social categories and critical theory to sci-
ence fiction and political infrastructure. As Donna Haraway reminds us,
“scientific practice is above all a storytelling practice,” one that draws from
and participates in complex modalities of culture, creation, materialization,
and figuration (Haraway 1989, 4). The assumptions and values that under-
gird our research get built into our technologies and theories and profoundly
shape future knowledge trajectories. Stories, in this sense, are powerful for-
mations of matter and meaning through which we make and unmake our
worlds. It therefore matters what genres of fiction, of the human, and of life
we draw from in our speculative scientific pursuits.
The Matter of Genre in Designs on Future Life

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what sto-
ries we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what
thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds,
what worlds make stories.
—Donna Haraway, “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String
Figures, So Far”
Human beings are magical. Bios and logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone
animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystal-
lize our actualities … And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again,
in undared forms.
—Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, The King of Castile a
Madman”
In a 2015 interview with Katherine McKittrick, Sylvia Wynter calls for a

new science beyond disciplinary divisions, one that attends to the entangle-
ments between bios (genetics, flesh, physiology) and mythio (sociality, sto-
ries, semiotics) and takes seriously how words can make and unmake worlds
(17–18). Wynter draws on the work of Aimé Césaire, who argues that the
natural sciences are “poor and half-starved” because they seek to separate
out the social, material, and relational dynamics of knowing and being from
their study. Against this reductive impulse, Césaire called for a new science in
which the “‘study of the Word’ will condition the ‘study of nature’” (Césaire
1982, 25). In Wynter’s rendering, this new science thinks bios and mythoi, or
science and storytelling, together in order to revise prevailing scientific genres
of knowledge and the human in the West, which conceptualize life within a
biological and hierarchical framework. By turning to science stories of human-
ness and relation composed by thinkers who have found themselves perpetu-
ally excluded from these genres of life, Wynter’s science of the Wor(l)d asks
“how we might give humanness a different future?” (Wynter and McKittrick
2015, 9).3
In 2017, MIT Media Lab Director Joichi Ito published a collaboratively
written manifesto “Resisting Reduction,” which reads as the beginning of
a response to Wynter’s call. In the form and content of the piece, Ito and
numerous contributors develop a critique of the Singularity, which they
describe as the new religion of Silicon Valley. The Singularity “promises the
390 C. NYE
transcendence of our current human condition through advances in technol-

ogy” and is shaped by a belief that “the world is ‘knowable’” and that “com-
puters will be able to process the messiness of the real world” (2017). Against
Singularity and its reductionist market-based thinking, Ito and his collabora-
tors extol the need to “embrace the unknowability – the irreducibility – of the
real world that artists, biologists, and those who work in the messy world of
liberal arts and humanities are familiar with.” While the authors note that this
shift would require that we work at “every layer of the system” to develop a
new sensibility that prioritizes mutual care over consumption and complexity
over reduction, they single out the “cultural layer” as that with “the most
potential for a correction away from the self-destructive path that we are
currently on” (ibid).
In a series of essays responding to the manifesto, one contribution stands
out in its attention to what this “cultural layer” is—whose cultures, values,
beliefs, and practices are being drawn on or occluded in imagining modes of
flourishing and futurity. The essay “Making Kin with Machines” is composed
by Cherokee, Hawaiian, and Samoan digital media poet, artist, and software
designer Jason Edward Lewis and Oglála Lakota visual artist Suzanne Kite,
both of Concordia University Initiative for Indigenous Futures, along with
Hawaiian historian Noelani Arista and Cree new media artist Archer Pechawis.
While the authors applaud Ito’s attempts to rethink scientific designs on life,
they point to the “stubborn Enlightenment conceit” of human-centrism that
threads its way through the manifesto (2017). Citing practices of coloniza-
tion and enslavement that have been enacted in the name of the life of the
human as Man, they express wariness of the “Western rationalist, neoliberal,
and Christianity-infused assumptions” that are at play in many approaches to
designing future life that “seek to harness the ability, aptitude, creative power,
and mana of AI [Artificial Intelligence] to benefit their tribe first and fore-
most.” “Our communities,” they write, “know well what it means to have
one’s ways of thinking, knowing, and engaging with the world disparaged,
suppressed, excluded, and erased from a conversation of what it means to be
human. What is more, we know what it is like to be declared nonhuman by
scientist and preacher alike. We have a history that attests to the […] way such
a mindset debases every human relation it touches” (ibid).
Against Ito’s anthropocentric call to prioritize human thriving, Lewis,
Kite, Arista, and Pechawis foreground Indigenous epistemologies that topple
the primacy of the human and center non-reductive modes of approaching
non/human relations. Instead of circumscribing the concept of irreduction
within Western frameworks of humanism and hierarchy, the authors draw on
their respective Hawaiian, Cree, and Lakota cultural knowledge practices that
recognize nonhumans as relations with interiority and agency. These beings—
including exploited resources such as minerals, as well as animals, elements,
and spirits—are all animate and are all kin that must be approached as part
of a mutually respectful “extended circle of relationships” in any science we
practice. Beginning their designs on life from these modes of knowing in rela-
tion, the authors show, leads to a different way of imagining what future lives
might be possible, “as we flourish only when all of our kin flourish.” This
Indigenous futurist critique of Ito’s science-design futures enacts Wynter’s
new science: the authors explicate the limited genre-specific narrative of the
human as Man that shapes scientific inquiry to often deleterious effect, and
they proffer a different genre of the human beyond the coloniality of Being,
one that is nonhierarchical, mutable, and forged through relation.
In Césaire’s 1946 essay from which Wynter develops a science of the
Wor(l)d, he quotes Aldous Huxley at length:
We all think we know what a lion is. A lion is a desert-colored animal with a
mane and claws and an expression like Garibaldi’s. But it is also, in Africa, all the
neighboring antelopes and zebras, and therefore, indirectly, all the neighboring
grass… If there were no antelopes and zebras there would be no lion. When
the supply of game runs low, the king of beasts grows thin and mangy; it ceases
altogether, and he dies.
“It is just the same with knowledge,” Césaire insists. “Scientific knowledge
is a lion without antelopes and without zebras. It is gnawed from within.
Gnawed by hunger of feeling, hunger of life” (18). This quotation cuts to
the heart of the genre/genus analytic. The Enlightenment habit of separating
into orders of sameness and difference—in short, the genre of genus—names
a lion as a singular type, defined by characteristics of appearance and appetite,
formed through exclusion. A lion is a cat is a carnivore is not a zebra is not
grass is not soil. For Césaire, this formation of scientific knowledge “offers
a view of the world, but a summary and superficial view [that] enumerates,
measures, classifies, and kills” (17). If science is a lion without antelopes, it
is science’s failure to see the antelopes as connected to itself—not as part of a
food chain that feeds it, but as a living relation that makes its life possible—
that slowly kills the lion, makes it grow thin and mangy, gnawed by hunger.
A science of the Word, in contradistinction, does not kill through classifi-
cation, hierarchization, separation; it is instead “pregnant with the world”
(24). “Everything is summoned,” writes Césaire. “Within us, all humankind.
Within us animal, vegetable, mineral. [Hum]ankind is not only [hu]mankind.
It is universe” (23). Lion is zebra is grass is science is knowledge is fiction
is fact. To make this claim is not to suggest that these relations are fixed or
that the sciences can know or contain the world; it is to insist on the pos-
sibility of giving humanness a different future by recognizing interdepend-
encies between ways of knowing (genres/mythoi) and objects of knowledge
(genus/bios), and starting from a recognition of the mutual and ongoing
relations unfolding between all beings (living and nonliving).
The concept of in-vitro meat has emerged within a context in
which scientists and start-ups are scrambling to respond to the prob-
lem of eating in the midst of climate change, food insecurity, infectious
392 C. NYE
disease, and environmental devastation. Yet, much of the work of con-

juring food futures has looked to science/fictions that reproduce stub-
born and starved models of the wor(l)d. Looking to a new science,
a science of the Word, offers up compelling frameworks to engage in
world-making projects that begin from different genres of life and knowl-
edge. This new science does not ask what or even who one should eat,
nor does it ask how to eat without others—all questions that begin from
separation between self and other, consumer and consumed, human
and nonhuman. It instead asks, to borrow from Derrida, “what is
eating?” and how “to eat well?” (1991).
Notes
1. In his ethnography of Artificial Life, Stefan Helmreich observes how consist-
ently US-based researchers draw on Western Judeo-Christian cosmologies and
on mainstream science fiction literature to design artificial life. This observation
leads him to conclude that “constructions of life-as-it-could-be are built from
culturally specific visions of life-as-we-know-it” (2000, 13).
2. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway famously asked, “Why should the
body end at the skin?” (1990, 220).
3. In many ways, Wynter’s call for a new science aligns with the central tenet of
feminist standpoint theory. As outlined by Sandra Harding (1991) and Donna
Haraway (1991), standpoint theory contends that knowledge production is
more robust, responsible, and rigorous when it is undertaken from multiple
viewpoints. Accounting for multiple perspectives enables a kind of “double
vision” that reveals “both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from a
single standpoint” (Haraway 1991, 154). Crucially, such inquiry should begin
from the most marginal spaces because those who occupy the margins are “val-
uable strangers” to the dominant social order who can identify perspectives and
approaches that might otherwise have been overlooked or actively suppressed
(Harding 2008).
References
“Animal Rights Campaign Compares Murdered Women to Meat.” 2002. CBC News.
November 13. Available at https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/animal-rights-cam-
paign-compares-murdered-women-to-meat-1.345737. Accessed 12 Feb 2019.
Atwood, Margaret. 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday.
Byrd, Jodi, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy. 2018. Predatory
Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities. Social Text 36
(2/135): 1–18.
Cabrera, Sergio A., and Christine L. Williams. 2012. Consuming for the Social Good:
Marketing, Consumer Citizenship, and the Possibilities of Ethical Consumption.
Critical Sociology 40 (3): 349–367.
Catts, Oron‚ and Ionat Zurr. 2006. Towards a New Class of Being—The Extended
Body. Artnodes: Intersections Between Arts, Sciences, and Technologies 6 (2): 1–9.
Césaire, Aimé. 1982 [1946]. Poetry and Knowledge. Sulfur 5: 17–32.
Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 24.
Churchill, Winston. 1932. Fifty Years Hence. Popular Mechanics 57 (March):
390–397.
Cooper, Melinda. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal
Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Datar, Isha. 2015. “Food of the Future—The Post-Animal Bioeconomy.” SXSWECO
Keynote Address. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj2LQ5W_
MgU. Accessed 6 Oct 2015.
Derrida, Jacques. 1991. ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida. In Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. E. Cadava, P. Connor,
and J.-L. Nancy. New York and London: Routledge.
Dilworth, Tasmin, and Andrew McGregor. 2015. Moral Steaks? Ethical Discourses
of In Vitro Meat in Academia and Australia. Journal of Agricultural and
Environmental Ethics 28 (1): 85–107.
Douglas, Mary. [1966] 2002. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo. New York: Routledge.
Dunne, Anthony. 2008. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and
Critical Design. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Edelman, P.D., D.C. McFarland, V.A. Mironov, and J.G. Matheny. 2005. In-Vitro
Cultured Meat Production. Tissue Engineering 11 (5–6): 659–662.
Franklin, Sarah. 2003. Ethical Biocapital: New Strategies of Cell Culture. In
Remaking Life and Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biosciences, ed. Sarah
Franklin and Margaret Lock, pp. 97–128. Santa Fe: New Mexico School of
American Research Press.
———. 2007. Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Goldstein, Jesse. 2018. Planetary Improvement: Cleantech Entrepreneurship and the
Contradictions of Green Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press.
“Google Burger: Sergey Brin Explains Why He Funded World’s First Lab-Grown Beef
Hamburger.” 2013. The Guardian, online, August 5.
Haraway, Donna. 1989. Primate Visions: Race, Gender, and Nature in the World of
Modern Science. New York: Routledge.
———. 1990. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in
the 1980s. In Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson, pp. 190–233. New
York: Routledge.
———. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London:
Free Association Books.
———. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham:
Harding, Sandra. 1991. Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s
Lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
———. 2008. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities.
Helmreich, Stefan. 2000. Silicon Second Nature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of Chicago Press.
Heselmans, Marianne. 2005. Cultivated Meat (NRC). New Harvest, September 10.
394 C. NYE
Holmes, Seth. 2013. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the U.S.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
hooks, bell. 1992. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Cambridge, MA: South End
Press.
Ito, Joichi. 2017. Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto. JoDS: Journal of Design and
Science. MIT Media Lab. Available at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/resist-
ing-reduction. Accessed 12 Feb 2019.
Jones, Nicola. 2010. A Taste of Things to Come? Nature 468 (9 December): 752.
King, Samantha. 2006. Pink Ribbons Inc: Breast Cancer and the Politics of
Philanthropy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Landecker, Hannah. 2007. Culturing Life. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, Jason Edward, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. 2017.
Making Kin with Machines. JoDS: Journal of Design and Science. MIT Media
Lab. Available at https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/lewis-arista-pechawis-kite.
Accessed 12 Feb 2019.
“Meat/Culture.” 2013. New Harvest. November 2. https://www.new-harvest.org/
meat_culture. Accessed 25 Jan 2019.
Merchant, Brian. 2014. The Guy Who Wants to Sell Lab-Grown Salami Made from
Kanye West Is 100% Serious. Motherboard (Vice), February 26.
Metcalf, Jacob. 2013. Meet Shmeat: Food System Ethics, Biotechnology and
Re-Worlding Technoscience. Parallax 19 (1): 74–87.
“NANO Supermarket: 50 Products from the Future.” Next Nature. https://www.
nextnature.net/projects/nanosupermarket/. Accessed 29 June 2019.
Newman, Lily Hay. 2014. Everyone Stop Everything: What Is This? Slate Magazine,
February 26.
Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
New York: New York University Press.
“Philosophy.” Next Nature. Available at https://www.nextnature.net/philosophy/?g-
clid=EAIaIQobChMI6Li-vMGS4wIVICCtBh1C7wrfEAAYASABEgJaY_D_BwE.
Accessed 29 June 2019.
“Projects.” Next Nature. https://www.nextnature.net/projects/. Accessed 29 June
2019.
Post, Mark. 2014. Cultured Beef: Medical Technology to Produce Food. Journal of
the Science of Food and Agriculture 94: 1039–1041.
Rajan, Kaushik Sunder. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing
Protein in Test Tubes. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Richey, Lisa Ann, and Stephano Ponte. 2011. Brand Aid: Shopping Well to Save the
Roosth, Sophia. 2017. Synthetic: How Life Got Made. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Roy, Parama. 2010. Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial.
Smith, Charlie. 2011. Photos: Nearly Naked PETA Activists Put a Human Face on
Eating Flesh. The Georgia Straight, online, August 5.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. 2012. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century.
New York: New York University Press.
Van Mensvoort, Koert. 2014. Foreword. In The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, ed. Koert
Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink, pp. 6–7. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Van Mensvoort, Koert, Alessia Andreotti, and Allison Guy. 2014. No Future for
Traditional Meat: Interview with Mark Post. The In Vitro Meat Cookbook, ed. Koert
Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Waldby, Catherine. 2000. The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and
Posthuman Medicine. New York: Routledge.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom:
Towards the Human, after Man. CR: The New Centennial Review 3(3): 257–237,
328.
Wynter, Sylvia, and Katherine McKittrick. 2015. Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our
Species?: Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations. In Sylvia
Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick, pp. 9–89. Durham
and London: Duke University Press.
Zurr, Ionat. 2009. Growing Semi-Living Art. PhD thesis, University of Western
Australia.
Zurr, Ionat, and Oron Catts. 2004. The Ethical Claims of Bioart: Killing the Other or
Self-Cannibalism? Australia and New Zealand Journal of Art: Art and Ethics 5 (1):
167–188.
CHAPTER 22
Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life

in Science and Fiction
Sherryl Vint
In Dreamscapes of Modernity, Sheila Jasanoff argues that science and technol-

ogy studies (STS) requires a robust understanding of the role of the socio-
technical imaginary, which she defines as “collectively held, institutionally
stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated
by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable
through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology” (Jasanoff,
“Future Imperfect” 4). She goes on to note that fiction, particularly spec-
ulative fiction, often plays a role in shaping this sociotechnical imaginary.
Understanding the stories we tell about science is one way to channel soci-
otechnical change. Such stories are how desirable futures become sites of
affective investment and material action, and the essays Jasanoff’s book col-
lects seek to understand how the imagination informed histories of scientific
development.
Jasanoff depicts the politics of scientific history as a kind of storytelling
practice, cautioning STS scholars to be more attentive to the role the imag-
ination plays in how technologies emerge. Her definition, however, does not
sufficiently foreground ideological struggles at the cultural level that precede
the emergence of “collectively held” visions of desirable futures, nor does it
offer space for thinking about those who never become part of this consen-
sus. The dialogic capacities of literary storytelling enable this more complex
vision of how it is that certain forms of “social life and social order” are sta-
bilized as hegemonic. As I will argue below, the genre of speculative fiction,
S. Vint (*) 
University of California, Riverside, Riverside, CA, USA

398 S. VINT
with its long history of examining the impact of science and technology on
human social life, can play a more substantive role than Jasanoff suggests: it
is not only a space for articulating futures that might inspire science, but also
serves to question whether “advances in science and technology” are always
on the side of a more desirable future. This chapter examines the relationship
between science and the imagination from the opposite point of departure,
to argue that telling stories can be a political practice that helps us reflect on
these collectively held visions of desirable futures in a more nuanced and dia-
lectical way. Whereas Jasanoff links her notion of the sociotechnical imagi-
nary to an implicit narrative of ongoing progress, I suggest that speculative
fiction enables us to interrogate what we consider an advance, and for whom.
Speculative fiction tells stories about worlds estranged from our quotidian
one, often resulting from differences in science and technology. By telling a
compelling story about complex characters, speculative fiction’s imaginary
complicates visions of sociotechnical change that circulate in industry.1
While the sociotechnical imaginary might focus on a narrower perspective,
such as how the world might be changed (improved) via the new medical
therapies promised by synthetic biology, speculative fiction puts these visions
into dialogue with a larger material world, prompting us to consider what else
might be changed in familial, social, economic, and other norms were this
new technology to become widespread. Speculative fiction can be, but is not
necessarily, “supportive of” the improvements science and technology prom-
ise: even when invested in promulgating visions of a desirable future, it never
loses sight of the fact that  a better world is “attainable through” social as well
as scientific change. The genre helps us think more capaciously about socio-
technical change, interrogating how new technologies converge with pre-ex-
isting cultural ideals and biases, and thinking through how they might have
philosophical implications beyond their intended effect. By exaggerating the
impact of a new technology or accelerating it into a more distant future, spec-
ulative fiction makes visible sites of inequality in the present, issues that may
be minor and yet portend more consequential exclusions if not examined and
checked. This is the political practice of speculative storytelling about science,
work that helps us more consciously take note of who has a voice in these
“collectively held” visions of a better future as they become “institutionally
stabilized.”
Two recent novels—Carola Dibbel’s The Only One and Ben H. Winter’s
Underground Airlines—exemplify the role speculative fiction plays in helping
us to understand the implications of shifts in our imaginary around biotech-
nology and labor. Biotechnology is a topic that is proliferating in speculative
fiction, engaging a range of topics that include global pharmacy (Annalee
Newitz’s Autonomous), reproductive technologies (Anna Charnock’s Dreams
Before the Start of Time), transplantation (Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit),
genetic engineering (Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl), life-extension
22 BODIES MADE AND OWNED: REWRITING LIFE IN SCIENCE AND FICTION 399
technologies (Rachel Heng’s The Suicide Club), and synthetic biology (Rose
Montero’s Tears in Rain). Dibbel’s and Winters’s novels draw attention to
new practices of biological labor emerging in biotech industries and connect
these practices to longer histories of racialized exploitation that shape the
ways these technologies are deployed in these imagined futures. The novels
thus encourage us to think capaciously about the “social” context of socio-
technical imaginaries, to recognize how crucial it is to think about techno-
logical change as it is bound up with existing relations of social power and
the inequalities that they have historically stabilized. Both novels respond
to a context that Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby theorize as the
emergence of what they call Clinical Labor. Cooper and Waldby argue that
post-Fordist capitalism puts life itself to work, in sites such as surrogate
pregnancies, sales of gametes and participation in clinical trials. They insist
on considering such practices as biological labour—not voluntary work or
donation of biological materials or services—because often such activities
constitute the only form of income for certain vulnerable populations, even
if this is income in-kind (such as the provision of shelter or access to health-
care). These clinical practices exemplify new and troubling ways to extract
surplus value from people who thus come to the market less as a source of
labor-power and more as mere biological “raw materials” for the ongoing
production of value.
By extrapolating into the future of such practices, The Only One and
Underground Airlines make visible how the regime of clinical labor conflates
some human bodies—specifically, those marked by race and gender—with
mere things. In these futures, the bodies that exist legally as wholly owned
commodities are those of manufactured beings (clones; human-animal chi-
mera), yet they are depicted as complex human beings, excluded from human
status by a mere technicality of origin. In both cases, the novels explicitly link
their marginalized protagonists to material histories in which specific human
bodies were commodified and dehumanized: control of women-of-colour’s
reproduction in The Only One and racialized chattel slavery in Underground
Airlines. The sociotechnical imaginary fostered by these novels helps us to
extrapolate from the exploitation manifest in a specific regime of clinical labor
to the wider implications of how biotechnical processes can become complicit
in dehumanizing segments of the population. Understanding the potential
futures of clinical labor in juxtaposition with a past of racial and gender injus-
tice enables us to think about the positive potential of new biomedical thera-
pies in conjunction with the new kinds of labor—and potentially new sites of
discrimination—that are simultaneously brought into being. In this way, spec-
ulative fiction functions as critique, not only as inspiration, in the sociotechni-
cal imaginary, drawing our attention to how existing power relationships are
always imbricated in the emergence of new technologies.
400 S. VINT
“You Can’t Sell Life, Without a License”: The Only Ones

The Only Ones is set in a dystopian future starkly split between enclaves of
the privileged, who live in biologically secured domes, and a vast 99% of the
population who live among the ruins of failing infrastructure outside them,
where public utilities and transportation only sometimes work, and the risk
of exposure to virulent and deadly infection is common. Numerous pan-
demics have ravaged this future, their origins perhaps in biological weapons
research run amok, and myriad viral strains endlessly recombine to create
new strains. Most mammals are extinct and what reproduction remains is
assisted by IVF techniques, often requiring SCNT (somatic cell nuclear trans-
fer), that is, cloning from somatic cells, to produce new offspring. Fertility
has been compromised by “antiPatho spray” (68) that rendered mammalian
sperm—including human sperm—inert. Rapacious life industry corporations
sell everything from eggs to embryos to “virgin cures”—intercourse with
under-aged girls, putatively virgins, believed to convey immunity to plagues
transmitted via sexual contact, a reference, perhaps, to one of the circulating
myths in the early years of HIV infection about how to cure the virus.
The line between the legality and criminality of various life industry practices
wavers, leading to the paradoxical logic of the quotation in my subtitle: sell-
ing life is illegal—unless one is properly licensed.
The narrative is in the first-person voice of Inez Fardo, a young woman
whom we first meet as she delivers a biological specimen, which turns out to
be her own ovary, ruptured as a result of abusive doses of hormones she was
given by “New Life Labs” (39) to induce super-ovulation and produce a large
crop of matured eggs for harvesting, destroying her future fertility along with
her ovary. The clinic contracted to supply biological materials for research
sends the damaged ovary to its client in the hope its value as biological matter
might secure some profit from the nullified transition, with Inez serving as
courier of her mutilated body part in case the client needs additional samples.
This macabre opening aptly captures the paradoxical way in which life is both
precious and devalued: as a commodity, biological material, especially repro-
ductive material, is priceless; yet “life itself” embodied by the full living sub-
ject Inez is all but worthless, except perhaps for “additional samples.” Inez
recounts the various ways she has made a living since the death of her step-
mother—as prostitute, as test subject for vaccines, as cleaner of biologically
contaminated sites, and through the sale of body parts from blood to eggs to
teeth to bone marrow. The novel questions what happens to our concept of
the value of life within a context in which human tissues and biological capac-
ities have become part of a market economy. What, it asks, happens to the
value of life within an economy of precarity that leaves many with no option
but to offer their biological capacities on the market?
Inez addresses her narration to the many cloned “daughters” born from
embryos grown from her somatic cells, although we learn the identity of her
interlocutor only near the novel’s end. Explaining her choice to participate
in the life industries, she refuses the easy moral arithmetic that makes any
commodification of life inherently wrong and explains the economic circum-
stances that shaped her choices. Her address to these distant daughters is fil-
tered through the story of one clone in particular, Ani, whom Inez raised
from an infant. Inez is determined that the clones not regard themselves as
less-than-human (contra many popular narratives about clones, including
an in-text television series Ani watches with horror), but she is equally com-
mitted to ensuring that Ani does not face the same economic hardships that
forced Inez to destroy her normative reproductive futurity through unscru-
pulous life industry practices. Inez’s refrain becomes the “different life” she
will ensure Ani has despite their genetic identity, a different life that is secured
not by different biology but by more secure economic circumstances. The
novel warns against the commodification of life by biotechnological practice
but also makes clear that the difficulty is not with the technology itself or the
idea of cloning, but rather with a surrounding cultural and economic system
that devalues some (kinds of) lives.
Many of the depredations of the life industries come from their under-
ground status, procedures or beings obtained by the extremely wealthy on a
black market that relies on the economically precarious for biological materi-
als. The strict segregation of the world into zones of privilege and abjection,
rather than their ontological difference, creates the risk for the clones. Ani
and Inez need to take care that they are never genetically scanned in prox-
imity to one another, for example, for this would reveal their illegal status,
but this difficulty is analogous to being an undocumented immigrant, where
paperwork and citizenship status potentially categorize one as less-than
human. This analogy based on the importance of papers that validate one’s
status alludes as well to a reality in which those from the global South and
those within the US who are marginalized by their race are more likely to
become organ donors (see Scheper-Hughes, Sharp). The material history of
the transplant industry, then, inculcates an imaginary in which some people
are regarded as “spare parts” as thematized by the fictional image of clones:
moreover, Inez and Ani’s daily challenges as undocumented subjects reminds
us that the precarity they share with undocumented people operates on both
biological and social levels.
Dibbell simultaneously updates our understanding of the clone on a bio-
logical level—no less human than a twin and thus unlikely to have identical
thoughts and personality. The novel draws our attention to the economic
hierarchies that unevenly distribute health and precarity, a topic frequently
emblematized by fiction about clones such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never
Let Me Go (2005) or Duncan Jones’ film Moon (2009), among others. Yet
The Only Ones detaches dehumanization from mode of birth, removing the
rationalization that dystopian societies in such fiction typically offer to create
some distance between analogy and material work. Dibbell’s novel, in con-
trast, encourages us to see the parallels between its projections and the status
402 S. VINT
of marginalized people in the material world of the reader, largely through

Inez’s experiences of sexual and other forms of exploitation. Inez is a “real”
human who does not face any barriers to her mobility until Ani’s identical
genetic profile puts them both at risk. Yet in her life before the experiment
that resulted in Ani’s birth, Inez was already regarded as mere flesh, a young
woman without education, independent wealth, or a guardian to protect her,
with only her body’s capacities to bring to market. Inez experiences far more
brutalization within the biomedical industry than Ani ever does, although
Inez is the original human, born rather than cloned.
Inez is special because she is discovered to be a “Sylvain hardy,” someone
whose DNA conveys immunity from seemingly all biological threats, and this
trait is passed on to the clones. Inez is the daughter of a Latina solider who
was subjected to multiple experimental vaccine protocols by the US military,
presumably the source of her immunity. Her mother’s backstory suggests
many vectors of discrimination that inform protocols of scientific research and
yet are not determined by the science itself: the historical legacy of systemic
racism in the US that disproportionately places people of color on the lower
socioeconomic rungs; military recruitment strategies that target these disen-
franchised populations, and a history of military funding of scientific research.
Here, the capacity of fiction to help us think through long-term and unpre-
dictable consequences is evident in the way research intended to protect sol-
diers ironically created a child whose early years are spent being a test subject
for “seal room” protocols—one of the ways Inez earned her living—in which
test subjects are exposed to viruses to see what happens. This test is one of
the novel’s pithy images of the new metrics of life: Inez is (economically, bio-
logically) valued for this capacity of her body even as her life is simultaneously
judged worthless on a human scale, her potential death treated as simply
another data point the test may produce.
Thus the central irony is that the commodification of life is propelled by
research devoted to furthering it, whether this be IVF and other fertility ser-
vices, or stem cell and other molecular research that draws upon patented
DNA and commodified living cell lines. In Life Support, an ethnography of
surrogacy clinics in India, Kalindi Vora describes how:
The female human body also gets figured as empty space through biomedi-
cal instrumentalization and objectification of female reproductive processes,
organs, and gametes. At the same time, the product of reproduction is organ-
ized socially as the property of “he” (the commissioning couple’s position
as gendered by the contract) whose legal intention was to produce a child,
rather than she whose empty organs and raw biology were used to produce it.
(Loc 2113–2116)
Surrogacy contracts for gestation are one of the ways that the life industries
create less-than-human bodies that intersect (via these industries) with the fully
human purchasers of their services: the Indian women imaginatively become
incubators for children envisioned as products. The title of Vora’s book points
to the ways such industries are transferring vitality from communities in the
global South to those in the global North.
Such commodification of life and its processes—egg and sperm sales, ges-
tational services, procuration of fluids such as blood—exist in continuum
with living technologies, such as in vitro tissues and cell lines, that are both
“living and machines in the sense that they can be cultured outside the body
and form part of the technical composition of science” (Landecker 12).
Waldby and Cooper, like Vora, demonstrate that becoming either test sub-
jects or consumers of medicine maps to the distinction between privilege and
precarity:
Today, contract research organizations habitually recruit Phase 1 research sub-

jects from among the underemployed, day laborers, exprisoners, and undoc-
umented migrants, precisely those classes of worker who routinely endure
the most hazardous and contingent of labor conditions. Later-phase trials are
increasingly dependent on the growing numbers of underinsured, chronically ill
patients who can access medicines only if they also agree to engage in clinical
trial. (17)
By extending these practices into a more extreme future, The Only Ones reori-
ents our discussion regarding life industry practices—away from locating their
import in relation to metrics such as natural vs. technological and toward
thinking through how the economics that underpin these technologies chan-
nel them toward beneficent or malign ends.
As Inez tells her story we see her sense of herself as a being with value
transform: experiences of deprivation and marginalization taught her to
regard herself and her body as mere commodities. As new contexts introduce
her to people who treat her as a human subject rather than mere biological
matter, she becomes capable of viewing herself as creative and competent,
someone who can choose life industries and through them a new mode of
kinship. When she delivers her damaged ovary and meets Rauden, a respon-
sible scientist who will become her partner, he queries her about New Life
Labs, the corporation that destroyed her ovary. A cynical Inez refuses to
answer, explaining to readers, “You’re asking for trouble, even talking about
Life, let alone sales. You cannot sell Life. Unless you got a license. I just
told the guy I didn’t know” (29). Yet later, challenged to confront why she
worked with Rauden on his SCNT experiments, Inez admits that curiosity to
learn, as much as money, motivated her, and the transaction is more than sell-
ing a biological thing. Producing a viable clone is not merely an issue of tech-
nical skill but requires a complex fusion of technological and social factors.
The clones are gestated in artificial wombs lined with cell cultures grown from
what remains of Inez’s ovary, and she becomes part of a biological feedback
loop with the first set of clones, sitting by the tank, letting the embryos hear
404 S. VINT
her heartbeat and exchanging hormonal messages as their placental blood

circulates through her body, and vice versa.
A particularly telling passage in Inez’s education comes when Ani is in
middle school and asked to diagram a sentence: to examine a sentence and
“say who the subject is,” something Inez feels she knows better than any-
one. Readers, of course, are attuned to the irony that Inez has learned this
term not as part of grammar but as part of experimental protocol in which
she is the subject: the “subject of an experiment” is the “object” in grammar.
When an angry Ani corrects her mother to explain “the Subject is who does
it,” Inez comments, “That used to be the Tech. It happens to the Object.
That used to be the Subject” (259). Readers are reminded of Inez’s first
interactions with Rauden, who talked with his current partner as if she could
not hear them. When Rauden asks her about running “pure code” on her
genome without further context, Inez responds, “So I’m like, why would I
mind? A Subject like myself? I run pure code all the time. Like I got any idea
what it is” (14). Later when they are stunned by her immunological profile,
and consider what to do next, she proposes that they do a seal room test, and
reports their astonishment: “So I say back to them, ‘Seal Room test. S-E-
A-L.’ Then they’re like, dude. It did. The sofa talked” (45). Although Inez
entered the life industry as an object, its subject, her desires for life and learn-
ing, for the new, sustain her through harsh conditions such that she is able to
find a different kind of family, first with Ani, and later with the clones.
I have been referring to Inez by her full name for reasons of clarity, but she
is usually addressed by only her first initial, I. Yet it is only near the end of the
novel that she begins to think of herself as an “I” in the grammatical sense,
an agent of choice, as she embraces her kinship with and responsibility for
Ani and, in a different way, the other clones. Vora’s research reveals that, like
Inez, surrogate mothers have complex and uneven relationships with the chil-
dren they bear in their bodies, even when these children do not have genetic
connections to them. Vora notes that surrogate mothers often want a contin-
uing relationship with the child and that child’s family, but not as a parent.
Rather, they seek a more diffuse sense of community and obligation across
cultures and borders, a connection that exceeds and perhaps even coun-
ters the mere cash nexus of surrogacy as a life industry. Inez admits to the
clones that they might exist “because it is somebody’s business Opportunity”
but argues that the reason for their origin does not inherently dehumanize
them or make them different from their non-clone peers: naturally conceived
children might exist for the equally uninspiring reason that someone “had
unprotected sex” (353).
Being made is not equivalent to being owned in the future Inez seeks
to cultivate, and the ethical issues with biotechnology and cloning do not
emerge from the ontology of the beings thus created. Rather, ethical quan-
daries are bound up with the socioeconomic conditions that structure the
familial and kinship connections, ties that such industries enable or deny.
Through the bond Inez has not only with Ani but also with Rauden and oth-
ers in his lab who seek to counter predatory elements of the life industries,
the novel offers us a model of a new kind of family. Thinking of their com-
munity in the context of Vora’s research encourages us to resist the dehu-
manization that is already a part of biomedical regimes of clinical labor and
life support, to recognize new sites of privilege and of deprivation these
industries may create if practitioners and consumers both are not attentive to
the research subject as someone whose life matters on the level of individual
agency and subjectivity. If we fail to recognize this truth, human participants
in surrogacy or drug trials or other modes of clinical labor are imaginatively
reduced to beings valued only as biological matter. Just as the novel teaches
us to regard Inez as more than a biological subject—as she appears to be
when she enters the narrative—the parallels the novel maps between its grim
future and material sites of exploitation (transplantation, surrogacy, clinical
drug trials) cautions us against allowing an imaginary to take root that lets us
disavow or ignore the human costs for those interpellated into these practices
as clinical labor, not as life industry clients.
“Every Day Is Two Worlds; Every Day We Are Split

into Two”: Underground Airlines
Underground Airlines similarly imagines a dystopian future extrapolated from

contemporary biotechnological practice, extended in a way that draws atten-
tion to the risk that such technologies could reproduce or exacerbate histor-
ical structures of inequality, unless this possibility is deliberately confronted
and resisted. The novel explores a nexus of commodified life, new regimes
of transnational labor exploitation, and colonial histories that are re-inscribed
by some of these practices. Set in an alternative present in which US chattel
slavery never ended, much of the novel is about envisioning predatory condi-
tions of labor as a kind of ongoing slavery, in which workers are compelled to
sell more than their labor-power and are dehumanized as a consequence. The
final pages turn to biotechnology as characters within the novel anticipate
a future in which slavery is no longer tolerated, and yet disposable labor is
still needed to maintain profitability. The slaves in this alternative world work
not on cotton plantations but at strip mining sites, on agribusiness industrial
farms, in textile factories, or on oil refineries. Linking slavery to these indus-
tries is one of the ways Underground Airlines tries to shape our imagination
so that we do not see slavery as only a historical institution but also as rel-
evant to contemporary conditions of dehumanizing labor. One cannot too
easily equate slavery with other exploitative conditions of employment, of
course; this equation may seem to erase the violent history of systemic racism
that was used to justify slavery and that continues to shape America. I do not
want to gloss over this difficulty but nonetheless also want to suggest that
the parallel effectively makes visible the degree to which some sociotechnical
406 S. VINT
imaginaries about the commodification of biology participate in and perhaps

even normalize a new kind of dehumanization.
The novel follows the experiences of an African American man who is
indentured and compelled to work in undercover operations that track down
and return fugitive slaves. Underground Airlines draws our attention to how
non-enslaved laborers share some of the constraints that define existence
for the enslaved, thereby offering a way to connect the novel’s critique of
exploitative labor to structures in our world. An overseer at a factory, whose
indebtedness means that he has almost as little freedom as do the slaves, is
shown to have more in common with them than with the management class
of employees, despite his conviction otherwise. He takes pride in his freedom
occasionally to leave the plantation—“I just gotta sign out” (290)—but the
degree of surveillance he is subject to and his financial precarity show readers
that the line between free workers and the enslaved is thin. The enslaved, of
course, suffer physical abuse rationalized  by their legally less-than-human sta-
tus, but the novel’s vision of slavery resembles the exploitation of imprisoned
laborers, who are disproportionately people of colour in the US, more than it
resembles historical chattel slavery. The enslaved are confined and compelled
to work specific hours, just as privatized US prisons sell inmates’ labor to cor-
porations or set up their own industries. The disproportionate incarceration
of people of colour in the United States, especially African Americans, further
connects such prison industries to the history of chattel slavery and its reduc-
tion of African Americans to dehumanized labor power. Indeed, Dennis Wise
argues in Slaves of the State that the prison system functions as an unacknowl-
edged perpetuation of chattel slavery.
In Winters’s novel, antebellum icons of slavery such as whips and dogs are
replaced by tasers and overt logics about efficient production. The enslaved
have no freedom but are offered some distractions of entertainment, their
living conditions reminiscent of 1930s depictions of company towns that
trapped their workers through ongoing debt indenture. Although these
inmates lack autonomy and self-determination, the facility believes itself to
house its inmates humanely: “Four thousand head in those buildings right
there. We got a rec center in there, gymnasium equipment that every one of
our team members is not just encouraged but also required to use” (258).
Such descriptions echo the way corporations speak about caring for their
workforce through employee benefits such as fitness programs and the like,
here bluntly revealed to be simply ways of ensuring that the asset of labor-
power remains viable for the next day’s work. Thus, we might also extend the
parallels with incarcerated labor to waged labor more generally, especially the
way the expansion of debt since the 1980s has made workers less able to leave
undesirable jobs. In the novel, especially in its spatialization between the free
North and the enslaved South, readers are also encouraged to see connec-
tions as well to supply chain relationships between Global North and Global
South, to the all-but-hidden costs of the cheaply available consumer goods
that privilege Western peoples have become dependent upon to a degree that
we frequently do not want to enquire about the conditions of their produc-
tion and distribution, neither the factory in Shenzhen nor the Amazon ware-
house in a poor US town. These analogies put a sinister spin on the economic
language of human capital.
The management of the slaves as labor-power easily blurs into managing
their bodies as another kind of capital owned by the corporation. This high-
lights how the commodification of biology creates a crisis in the protections
afforded to the human subject by liberalism. Jasanoff argues that “periods of
significant change in the life sciences and technologies should be seen as con-
stitutional or, more precisely, bioconstitutional in their consequences,” and
thus rights discourse needs to be reframed to acknowledge how the definition
of the human has been changed by technology, to redefine “the obligations
of the state in relation to lives in its care” (Reframing Rights 3, emphasis in
original). Jasanoff is talking about entities such as research cell lines derived
from human tissues, zygotes produced through IVF that are frozen but never
implanted, and chimerical entities containing human DNA, such as the trans-
genic pigs produced for organ transplantation research. Such beings compli-
cate the idea that humans are uniquely exempt from being owned, now that
chattel slavery has been outlawed. While I am not arguing that we should
conflate the worth of commodified human beings under conditions of slav-
ery with the worth of these products of biotechnology, I am suggesting that
Winters’s speculative setting draws attention to the larger political and eth-
ical implications of commodified biology and the dehumanization of work-
ers. The slaves can be understood to index why our sociotechnical imaginary
needs to be attentive to the consequences of conflating persons with things
via the commodification of biology.
The protagonist mainly goes by the name Jim, but takes on other names in
different contexts.2 He is an African American born into slavery, who escaped
as an adolescent; when he was recaptured, he was compelled to work as an
undercover agent for the US Marshals, investigating and shutting down abo-
litionist routes, rather than being returned to the South. Like Inez, Jim has a
damaged sense of self and feels that to sustain his life he has been compelled
to do things that have made him something less than human. As the novel
opens, he muses, “it was my practice at the beginning of a new job to think
of myself as having no name at all. As being not really a person at all”; rather,
he is simply a tool wielded by others, “a manifestation of will. I was a mecha-
nism—a device. That’s all I was” (16). This metaphor—that he is a machine,
the work, an embodiment of a job—is repeated multiple times, a pattern of
imagery that reminds us that labor may be dehumanizing both in terms of
how the laborer is viewed (just another tool) and in terms of how its alienat-
ing effects destroy a human sense of self. Although Jim actively resists facing
his complicity in perpetuating what he knows is a brutal system, this vision of
himself as a machine is also part of an entire apparatus that continually denies
408 S. VINT
the humanity of African American people, enslaved or freed. This disavowal

haunts him, and he suffers from fugue states whenever his carefully controlled
emotions rise to the surface, generally alongside memories of his own enslave-
ment and of his brother’s death.
Slaves are referred to as PBs, persons bound to labor, the ubiquity of the
acronym erasing the fact that “persons” are thereby described. Jim is inter-
polated into work practices that continually reinforce the objectified status
of people of African descent, such as a numerical chart to denote skin tones
for identificatory purposes, which Jim subtly criticizes by insisting on using
descriptive adjectives—midnight, coffee, honey—alongside the abstract
numerals. The colour chart represents the normalization of language typically
used to describe things being applied to people, thus repeatedly eroding the
sense that there is a meaningful distinction between the two. Responding to a
woman he meets while undercover, Jim has to forcibly resist the tendency to
reduce her to a quantifiable resource:
Her skin was coffee, light-toned, in the number 120 range. I did this evalua-
tion by reflex, then found that just doing that quick calculation, for some rea-
son, made me sick. My stomach rolled. This here was a free woman, after all, a
northern woman, a vested citizen. What right had I to look at her that way, to
size her up, mark her down for a Gaithersburg file? (92)
Jim struggles with how his job requires him to think of fugitives as mere cogs
in a larger system he serves, with his own inclination to imagine their human
experience of this system. Describing one fugitive, he strives to “imagin[e]
Jackdaw as a blue dot moving east and not as a man, folded up inside a forty-
five-foot trailer, dying from having to piss, his delicate face wilting and sweat-
soaked, his eyes big in the darkness of whatever box or pallet he was crated up
in” (100). The novel maps the shocking metaphor of slavery and its violence
onto a more familiar structure of regarding workers as human capital, fungi-
ble resources, conceived in terms of the objectives they serve, ignoring the
human costs of these industries.
PBs stand-in for the abjected state of the precariously employed in our
own world, as is clear from a description of a Freedman Town populated by
the manumitted:
I had long since stopped feeling it, that feeling you get coming into Freedman
Town the first time, the surreal astonishment that such a place can exist. A not
inconsiderable swath of a major city, in a wealthy industrialized country, in
the twenty-first century, in such a grievous state of disrepair. An invisible city,
floating like a dead island, in the wide water of civilization. … Freedman Town
serves a good purpose—not for the people who live there, Lord knows; people
stuck there by poverty, by prejudice, by laws that keep them from moving or
working. Freedman Town’s purpose is for the rest of the world. (138, 140)
The novel frequently uses the image of two worlds mapped onto one another,
our world a palimpsest that shows through beneath the description of this
alternative present. This imagery reinforces the parallels, showing that its
depiction of ongoing enslavement demonstrates how existing exploita-
tive labor practices dehumanize workers. In the final section, this tech-
nique of suggesting another world lies just out of view, a palimpsest beneath
what is visible, functions as a kind of utopian promise that the world can be
changed, can be made more equitable, contingent on the characters’ choices
to acquiesce or resist: “Every day is two worlds; every day we are split into
two” (322), the protagonist tells us at the end, as he stops working for the
Marshalls and becomes part of the underground.
Abolitionist characters make public the fact that shell companies are used
to frustrate laws forbidding the sale of slave-produced items in Northern
states, a revelation intended to “show northerners who liked to believe, who
needed to believe, that they were not personally touched by the cruel hand of
slavery that they were in fact touched by it every day. Were wearing it on their
feet, were lining up for it the day after Thanksgiving” (192). Like our own
complicity in globalized trade and the purchase of items produced in con-
ditions not that different from enslavement,3 consumers prefer ignorance to
higher prices. An entire legal apparatus exists to monitor how PBs are treated,
through the Department of Labour Affairs, further reinforcing the idea that
precarious employment produces a kind of indebted dependency that has par-
allels with chattel slavery. Most of the plot is about Jim’s pursuit of a fugitive
named Jackdaw—reported to have killed two nurses in his escape—who turns
out to be the free-born college student Kevin, on an undercover abolition-
ist mission in the South to smuggle out information about how the “Clean
Hands” laws are being thwarted. The chief violator, Townes Stores, is a clear
stand-in for Walmart.
Yet even as he uncovers this conspiracy and learns the truth, Jim realizes
that the degree of resistance he encountered was out of scope with the risks
to profit that these revelations would have. If uncovered, Townes Stores
would “pay a big fine, and they’d have a bad quarter” but “people would
go back to Townes, because their shit is pretty cheap, wherever it’s coming
from. It’s pretty cheap, and it’s pretty good. Nothing would change. People
shaking their heads, shrugging their shoulders, slaves suffering somewhere
far away” (194). This is where the novel’s themes about the precarious state
of a globalized working-class intersect with the biotechnological issues of
labo r theorized by Waldby and Cooper. Describing the failed industrial city
Indianapolis, “a used-to-be publishing industry, a used-to-be rail hub, a used-
to-be powerhouse in coal and steel” (79), Jim notes that what remains are
service industries, most prominently “lots and lots of health care. Drug com-
panies and medical device companies, ophthalmology centers and optometry
centers and cancer centers” (80). As cited above, Waldby and Cooper explore
in detail how for-profit medicine, and especially the pharmaceutical industry,
410 S. VINT
rely on clinical trial subjects they recruit from among the most marginalized,
from places where other choices for employment have disappeared.
Jackdaw/Kevin is not such a clinical subject, but he escapes slavery in a
version of the Henry Box Brown escape that is updated to reflect this con-
text.4 While Henry Box Brown gained his moniker from exploiting an emer-
gent shipping industry to have himself mailed to freedom in the North, Kevin
makes the trip disguised as medical waste:
Turns out one thing that doesn’t get opened up for a final check after it’s
packed is medical waste. So what about a man-size rubber bladder fitted with
a thin reed, like the one a scuba diver wears, so a person could survive in there,
down in all that waste? What about you get a man to the infirmary, make it look
like he burst loose and leaped out a window when really he’s coming out in a
barrel? (241)
The equivalency between exploited labor-power and the biological bodies of

these laborers as mere matter, from the point of view of capital, is made star-
tlingly clear in this image of Kevin’s escape. Yet the question remains as to
why there is so much medical waste coming from a factory staffed by slave
labor. Anticipating that moral opposition to slavery will soon make the prac-
tice unprofitable, slave states have turned to biotechnology to create entities
that will give them all of the economic benefit of slavery, without, so they
claim, its moral hazards. The real conspiracy is an attempt to manufacture
slaves as living tools: eggs are harvested from enslaved women, the human
DNA nucleus is removed, and then “new material, not new, but taken from
other subjects” (311) is added. Here the explanation falters under the weight
of the final revelation, an attempt to make people in all but name—or rather,
in all but genetic identity. This puts Underground Airlines in dialogue with
many SF works about manufactured people, exploited as labor and otherwise,
most famously with the original text of this tradition, Karel Čapek’s R.U.R.
(2001), a play about an uprising of manufactured people. This play gives us
the English word robot, derived from a Czech word for indentured laborer,
and although its staging produced a sociotechnical imaginary in which we
understand robots to be metallic, mechanical entities, Čapek’s originals, like
Blade Runner’s Replicants, are better understood as creations of synthetic
biology.
Jim is not shocked by this revelation when he finally learns the truth. He
is told “if the population held in bondage, if they were—not technically …
people any longer. Certain constitutional issues, certain political issues …
would be resolved” (312, ellipse in original). Jim quickly recognizes this as
the inevitable endpoint of a logic of dehumanization via harsh conditions of
labor, “people with no bloodline, people with no past and no future, peo-
ple with no claim to freedom” (312). In this turn toward speculative bio-
technology, the importance of the motif of continued slavery becomes clear
as a way to startle readers into paying sufficient attention to the risks of the
commodification of life and the creation of living entities that are fully owned
by the corporations that make them. Although at present, any such entities
that exist are judged to be merely animals and thus not subject to the same
standards of ethical concerns that most would attach to human beings, many
do contain human DNA, however minutely. Moreover, the growing field of
synthetic biology has already produced a living creature that is wholly made—
thus owned: the microbe mycoplasma laboratorium. Such a tiny entity may
not seem of concern, and we are far from the world of creating artificial lab-
orers as imagined by Čapek, and recently updated by the series Westworld.
Nonetheless, the sociotechnical imaginary we establish for thinking about
synthetic life, clinical labor, and commodified biology now will set the terms
for what we shall collectively imagine as desirable futures as this science pro-
gresses—and indeed for who is part of this collective we.
Speculative fiction such as Underground Airlines and The Only Ones help
us imagine how easily new biotech may fall into old biases and patterns of
exploitation. Both demonstrate how speculative fiction is an important part of
the sociotechnical imaginary: such fictions do not necessarily offer images of
plausible or even desirable futures, but rather function as a mode of thinking
through how science and the social intersect. By extrapolating new futures
made possible by developments in science and technology, they enable us
critically and thoughtfully to animate new forms of social life they make pos-
sible. These two novels interrogate the new kinds of social relations made
possible by biotechnology and its commodification of biology, each with a
distinctive set of concerns about how the value of life is potentially remade
in the life industries. While The Only Ones cautions us against the dehumani-
zation already shaping regimes of clinical labor in which people intersect with
the medical system as research subjects rather than as patients, Underground
Airlines focuses on exploitative regimes of labor and draws on the socio-
technical imaginary of manufactured biological beings to reveal the degree
to which disenfranchised, generally racialized labor is similarly regarded as
less-than-human. Considered together, the two novels also draw attention
to the implications that thinking about life cultivated in the life industries
via biotechnology—that is, their sociotechnical imaginaries—can have for
social life in wider frames, shaping how life “itself” can come to be valued or
disregarded.
Speculative fiction has gained increasing prominence in the twenty-first
century, as novels respond to the ways science and technology have remade
daily life—from climate change to the Internet of Things, biotechnology
to AI assistants and self-driving cars. Jasanoff is surely correct that a robust
understanding of how the stories we tell about such changes have the power
to shape the futures we imagine as desirable or conceive of as possible, and
how it is that science will unfold as specific futures materialize. Yet fiction
does more than simply prepare us for the inevitability of scientific “progress”:
it raises questions about unpredicted consequences, it voices perspectives
412 S. VINT
from the margins of hegemonic “shared understandings.” Perhaps most cru-

cially, it brings into visibility conjunctions of science and society that por-
tent large social changes. These two novels are joined by a plethora of other
works—Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last (2015) that addresses organ
transplantation, Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017)
about assisted reproduction technologies, Don DeLillo’s Zero K (2016)
about cryopreservation, Thomas King’s Back of the Turtle (2014) about
chemical agriculture, Rose Montero’s Tears in Rain (2011) about manufac-
tured laborers, Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017) about global pharmacy,
to name only a few—all of which tell us that the sociotechnical imaginary is
conceptualizing life in new and consequential ways, requiring nuanced reflec-
tions aimed at shaping the futures we will collectively inhabit.
Notes
1. As an example of industry-centric speculative design, see Dunne and Raby,
Speculative Everything.
2. Chiefly Victor, the name he uses with his employer, and at the end Brother, the
name given him as a slave.
3. See Virginia Mantouvalou, “Servitude and Forced Labor in the 21st Century:
The Human Rights of Domestic Workers.” Industrial Law Journal 35.4
(Dec 2006): 395–414 and Julia O’Connell Davidson, “Troubling Freedom:
Migration, Debt and Modern Slavery.” Migration Studies 1.2 (July 2013):
176–195.
4. For information on Henry Box Brown’s escape from slavery and later celeb-
rity, see http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/
stories-freedom/henry-box-brown/.
Works Cited
Čapek, Karel. 2001. R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, trans. Paul Selver and Nigel
Playfair. Mineola: Dover Publications.
Childs, Denis. 2015. Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the
Penitentiary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cooper, Melinda, and Catherine Waldby. 2014. Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and
Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. Durham: Duke University Press.
Dibbell, Carola. 2015. The Only Ones. Columbus: Two Dollar Radio.
Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction and
Social Dreaming. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Jasanoff, Sheila (ed.). 2011. Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic
Age. Cambridge: MIT Press.
———. 2015. Future Imperfect: Science, Technology, and the Imagination of
Modernity. In Dreamscapes of Modernity: Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the
Fabrication of Power, ed. Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim, 1–33. Chicago:
Landecker, Hannah. 2009. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Harvard:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 2002. Bodies for Sale—Whole or in Parts. In Commodifying

Bodies, ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 1–8. New York: Sage.
———. 2002. Commodity Fetishism in Organs Trafficking. In Commodifying Bodies,
ed. Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Loic Wacquant, 31–62. New York: Sage.
Sharp, Lesley A. 2006. Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the
Transformed Self. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Vora, Kalindi. 2015. Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kindle.
Winter, Ben H. 2016. Underground Airlines. New York: Mulholland Books.
CHAPTER 23
The Sciences of Mind and Fictional

Pharmaceuticals in White Noise
and The Corrections
Natalie Roxburgh
Within twentieth-century American fiction, drug use is a beloved theme.

From the romantic exploration of substances in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
(1957) to Hubert Selby Jr.’s bleak Requiem for a Dream (1978), many of
these representations can be seen as valuing individual freedom and experi-
ence, but also as exploring the risk of addiction and its consequences. The
end of the twentieth century witnessed a change in emphasis on drug use:
from substances promising liberation or threatening the trap of addiction
to pharmaceuticals associated with the medical sciences, including scientific
drug trials and the treatment of mental disorders within the field of psychi-
atry. In what follows, I will explore the way fictional psychopharmaceuticals
serve as vehicles for exploring psychiatry’s relationship to the market at the
end of the twentieth century, focusing on Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984–
1985) and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (2001), novels which use
fictional drugs (which are also “meds”) to question the scientificity of psy-
chiatry. These novels use the fictional pharmaceuticals Dylar and Correktall,
respectively, to explore the growing cultural authority of the sciences of mind
from the 1980s onwards. The novels both turn from the subjectivity of
the characters to what Elizabeth Freudenthal has called “biomedical anti-
interiority” (Freudenthal 2010, 192). A focus on the physical structure
of the brain replaces individual experience—a tendency Marco Roth and
others have discussed through the rise of the “neuronovel” (Roth 2013,
N. Roxburgh (*) 
University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

416 N. ROXBURGH
n.p.)—prompting characters to deny their own subjectivity. Reading these

novels together, and attending to the way drugs may be medicine-driven,
market-driven, or both, sheds light on the development of the cultural
authority of the sciences of mind as well as the literary turn away from post-
modernism. A lack of clear distinction between drugs versus medications (or
“meds”) marks a problem that is taken seriously rather than treated cynically,
the latter being a usual marker of postmodern literary discourse.
One characteristic of many novels of this period has to do with a great
economic shift: they explore the expansion of consumerism in a globalized
and financialized world, inaugurated to a large degree with the political pol-
icies of the US and the UK beginning in the late 1970s. Most critics—for
example, Rachel Greenwald Smith (Smith 2015, 1)—understand this as a
function of neoliberalism, often defined as the doctrine that market activity
is inherently ethical.1 Freudenthal’s notion of biomedical anti-interiority fits
within this history and helps one to explore how the medical sciences have
changed in conjunction with new technologies available for consumption as
well as new forms of cultural authority that govern and regulate their use.
White Noise and The Corrections present cases in which natural human afflic-
tions (such as fear, confusion, or death) are medicalized in a way that might
be market-driven rather than truly scientific, and they expose this process as
stemming from deregulation in the 1980s and 90s. Pharmaceuticals offer
useful fodder for contemporary fiction because they are somewhere between
science and technology, substances for treating an ailment and products man-
ufactured according to a market demand resulting from the transformation of
patients into consumers.
From a chemical point of view, there is no difference between drugs and
medications; the distinction is blurred in contemporary Anglophone dis-
course—as in drug ads on television, and media references to pharmaceuti-
cal companies as drug companies. Medications are meant to be therapeutic,
restoring a subject to normalcy or health. By contrast, drugs are taken in
order to enhance a normal state. For example, morphine intended to allevi-
ate the pain of cancer is a medication; taken for pleasure, it is a drug. While
in the United States the terms are often interchangeable within medical dis-
course, the distinction is clearer in other countries.2 What counts as medicinal
use and what counts as drug use is subject to an array of regulatory forces,
also dependent on cultural attitudes that patrol the boundary. This distinction
matters because meds carry a notion of correct usage whereas drugs do not.
One of the aforementioned regulatory forces is the Psychiatric
Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders),
a set of criteria for classifying psychiatric disorders. Since its inception in
1952, revisions to this manual indicate that while some human states (such
as homosexuality) have been demedicalized, others have been medicalized.
Recent examples include excoriation (Skin-Picking) Disorder, Hoarding
Disorder, and Internet Gaming Disorder, which were all included in the
23 THE SCIENCES OF MIND AND FICTIONAL PHARMACEUTICALS … 417
DSM-5, published in May of 2013.3 Through medicalization, what was

once regarded as a social aberration is transformed into a disorder. While
the DSM itself does not provide guidelines for treatment, each disorder has
specified treatment options, and treatment often entails the prescription of
pharmaceuticals. Despite the changing diagnostic rubrics over time, practi-
tioners of psychiatry often see the categories as hypotheses for the way the
world really “is”—if categories change over time, they say, it is not because
of changing norms or values but rather because science is driving us closer to
the truth.4
Another regulatory agent is the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). In
1997, new regulations allowed the promotion of off-label usage for medica-
tions and treatments, an act that also transformed the definition and catego-
rization of medications. Increasingly, patients became consumers, called upon
in advertisements to “ask their doctors if such-and-such a drug is right for
them” (Conrad 2005, 5–6). The transformation of patients into consumers
through a notion that market-based solutions provide the best outcomes is a
mainstay of neoliberal thought.
The drugs-meds split is indistinct in the history of psychiatry.
Developments in the 1980s and 90s reflect a changing notion of suffering
patients and the role chemical substances play in treating them. The term psy-
chopharmacology was coined in 1920 by the American pharmacologist David
Macht, but it was not until the middle of the century that psychiatry began
testing the possibility of using various mind-altering substances as a means for
treating perceived mental illnesses.5 The development of Thorazine (chlor-
promazine) was a milestone in this history. Synthesized in France in the early
1950s, the FDA approved its therapeutic use in March of 1954. Backed by an
extensive marketing campaign, Thorazine was the first medication marketed
as an antidote for a psychiatric disorder, but it was also advertised for a wide
variety of other purposes, such as treating nausea, alleviating distress from
cancer, controlling the unruly elderly, and subduing upset mental patients.
Because it was not thought to treat a specific chemical imbalance per se,
Thorazine promised relief for symptoms people not classified as mentally ill
(or not diagnosed with a particular psychiatric disorder) might experience. It
was experimental—and also profit-driven—before a more rigid classification
system of knowledge emerged.
After a time, however, the marketing campaign dropped the varied usage
possibilities for the drug as the disorders it was used to treat (schizophrenia
and bipolar disorder) became more clearly defined as chemical imbalances
requiring chemical correction, corresponding with what practitioners call the
rise of New Psychiatry in the early 1980s. The New Psychiatry saw itself as
better wedded to the more empirically oriented sciences of mind.6 In this
period, other medications, such as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs)
and tricyclic antidepressants, were also developed. By 1988, the first of the
“second-generation” psychiatric medications, Prozac, was introduced to treat
418 N. ROXBURGH
depression. As the DSM evolved under a notion that psychiatry—by using

brain-affecting medication as a form of treatment—was more scientific than
its more psycho-dynamically oriented predecessors, a more defined usage for
each medication was recommended. The concept of the chemical imbalance
came from the authority of the neurosciences in order to suggest that mala-
dies of mind were, in fact, disorders of the inherent structures of the brain.7
From the New Psychiatry onwards, therefore, the field adopted a biomedical
anti-interiority model, and it incorporated a system of knowledge, the DSM,
that took precedence over patient narratives. While psychodynamic models
handled individuals through a system of reading their personal narratives, the
New Psychiatry emphasized a reading of what their brains might be like.
While psychiatry might have the greatest tendency to medicalize, it proba-
bly also has the greatest need to do so. Unlike other fields of medicine, it can-
not always rely on physical evidence of symptoms (at least not yet), and this
lack of a visible or biological marker has meant that it requires self-reported
descriptions from patients.8 This creates a conundrum that critics of psychi-
atry all seem to grapple with: If psychiatry relies on the self-reported inner
states of patients, which come from the mind rather than the brain—and are
ultimately tied to human language—how do we know a chemical correction
is the best means of treatment? We do not observe a physical malady in the
brain (at least not yet) when we diagnose a disorder, and yet we assume that
a physical entity—a chemical or a neurotransmitter—is lacking or overabun-
dant. In other words, the interior mind that is the means for forming a diag-
nosis fails to map onto the physical brain that the medications are meant to
treat following the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness. And yet, at
least according to the drug trials, these medications work.
Historically, novels have been more interested in exploring the mind
(through its traditional building-blocks, such as character, perspective, nar-
rative focalization) rather than the brain. The more recent interest in the
sciences of mind, however, has led to new types of fiction, such as the neu-
ronovel, which explores the value of storytelling alongside what cogni-
tive science tells us about how the brain works. Perhaps because of the
rising (and widely publicized) use of antidepressants in what became known
as the “Prozac Nation,” the mid-1990s is an obvious time to examine the
representation of the sciences of mind and pharmaceuticals in Anglophone
fiction. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), a complex novelistic
account of addiction, provides insights into the role psychiatric medication
plays in daily life. Infinite Jest focuses on a missing film, mysteriously called
“the Entertainment.” This video is so entertaining that the viewer loses his
desire to do anything else besides viewing it. Outside of this primary story, a
complex world develops, one with loose ties to the missing “Entertainment.”
The novel, whose working title was “Infinite Jest: A Failed Entertainment,”
interrogates the relationships among addiction, entertainment, and consumer
society, including tennis, drugs, psychiatric medication, and support groups
in such a way that the novel itself questions the distinction between enter-
tainment and addiction.9 Infinite Jest also illuminates an underlying belief sys-
tem that supports the chemical imbalance theory of mental illness, which is
why Freudenthal argues that the novel exemplifies biomedical anti-interiority.
Rather than explore the inside of the subject’s mind, Infinite Jest examines
another type of inner subject—the inside of the protagonist’s physical brain,
as a material or physical apparatus that responds to other material or physical
apparatuses; it posits a material failure as the explanation for a psychological
affliction. Importantly, Freudenthal links biomedical anti-interiority to con-
sumer society because the other material or physical apparatuses that abound
within the fictional world of Infinite Jest are also technological products that
can be consumed by the subject.10 This link between attention to the brain
(over the mind) and a consumer society made possible through neoliberal-
ism is critiqued in both White Noise and The Corrections. While Infinite Jest
participates in a consensus on biomedical anti-interiority, White Noise and
The Corrections connect biomedical anti-interiority to neoliberal consumer-
ism even while they remain invested in questions of medicine’s fundamental
imperatives.
White Noise, which was published in the mid-1980s (coincident with
“second-generation” antidepressants), explores the consumption of a medi-
cation called Dylar. Franzen’s The Corrections, published well after the boom
of the psychopharmacology industry in the 1990s, links the use of psychop-
harmaceuticals to other domains: financial, political, and even institutional.
Focusing on the brain rather than the mind is analogous to—and even ena-
bled by—abstract flows of capital rather than particular experiences of peo-
ple. This focus parallels the shift to a deregulated and decentralized economy
and also anticipates even more recent developments, as Will Davies contends
in The Happiness Industry (2015): “Questions of mood, which were once
deemed ‘subjective,’ are now answered using objective data. At the same
time, this science of well-being has become tangled up with economic and
medical expertise” (Davies 2015, 5). This notion of entanglement shows
how the value of individual experience is already intertwined with systems of
knowledge. People’s accounts of experiences of mind are wrapped up with
what they believe about how their brains work. The novels, through their
emphasis on biomedical anti-interiority, illustrate the difficultly of distinguish-
ing between mind and brain, subjective experience and system and model,
drug and medication.
White Noise: Symptom or Drug Effect?

DeLillo’s White Noise examines the difference between (and deep confla-
tion of) reality and simulation and, for this reason, is often referred to as a
postmodern novel. This epistemological problem is better described through
the problem alluded to above: that of the intertwinedness of systems of
420 N. ROXBURGH
knowledge and experience. The novel uses psychiatry—which requires both

the reporting of individual experience and the incorporation of that experi-
ence into a diagnostic framework—to ask to what degree belief in the system
of knowledge transforms what a subject experiences.
The novel offers an early non-medical example of the tension between
belief in systems of knowledge and experience. The protagonist, “Professor of
Hitler Studies” Jack Gladney, and his fourteen-year-old son, Heinrich, engage
in a conversation about whether or not it is raining. While Jack sees rain fall-
ing, Heinrich argues that it could not be possible in the daytime since “the
radio said tonight” (DeLillo 1984, 22). Jack quips, “[j]ust because it’s on the
radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”
And Heinrich retorts, “Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often
than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know
about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past,
present or future outside our own mind” (DeLillo 1984, 22–23). This early
conversation reveals an extreme version of belief in a system of knowledge
over direct experience, and what follows will show what happens to individual
experience within a system that produces expectations.
DeLillo wrote White Noise against the backdrop of the emergence of
the New Psychiatry, with its emphasis on the brain rather than the mind.
Heinrich’s reliance on the system of knowledge rather than his experience
produces a false result; the fact he reports, produced within the logic of its
own system, is empirically false, at least from the perspective provided by the
narrative focalization. One could say that such systems of knowledge are the
very essence of modern (and not only postmodern) scientific process. For
example, it is difficult to balance one’s checkbook without a notion of a zero
balance—that one owes nothing and one is owed nothing in return—and
yet one may never have a checking account in this exact state. The system,
however, allows us to engage with others in the world—to agree on a real-
ity. By contrast, direct experience does not require a system of knowledge:
if it is raining, it is raining. But some experiences may differ from person
to person, for in direct experience, there is no gesture toward consensus:
Perhaps we each have a different concept of rain, for example. White Noise
points to this philosophical issue in order to explore how the symptom is pro-
duced under medicalization: The symptom comes from an authoritative sys-
tem of knowledge, but it can only be reported as a direct experience. This
creates an important tension because the information about experience comes
from a subjective account that is already embroiled within a system of knowl-
edge from the outset. It is therefore difficult to know if the symptom is felt or
if it is a product of the knowledge system.
The experience of the mind reported through the model of the brain has
important consequences for the subject who reports having symptoms. Jean
Baudrillard spells out some of the implications in Simulacra and Simulation
(1981):
Is the simulator sick or not, given that he produces ‘true’ symptoms?

Objectively, one cannot treat him as being either ill or not ill. Psychology and
medicine stop at this point, forestalled by the illness’s henceforth undiscoverable
truth. For if any symptom can be ‘produced,’ and can no longer be taken as a
fact of nature, then every illness can be considered as simulatable and simulated,
and medicine loses its meaning since it only knows how to treat ‘real’ illnesses
according to their objective causes. (Baudrillard 1994, 3)
Ralph Clare, who reads Simulacra and Simulation next to White Noise, shows
how “medicine falters in the face of simulation, which separates the symptom
from its referent. Diagnosis is endlessly deferred, and therefore we are always
already patients” (Clare 2010, 242). Medicine, in other words, is one way
all subjects can be guaranteed to keep consuming if the treatment plan is
market-driven—we are “permanent patients, like it or not,” Dr. Chakravarty
tells Jack explicitly in the novel (DeLillo 1984, 260). What I would add to
Clare’s reading is an insight into the role biomedical anti-interiority and the
cultural authority of the sciences of mind play in the process, as the shift to the
brain is what provides the cultural authority for subjects to report their symp-
toms in a way that fits an extra-experiential framework, one that is given by
a system of knowledge—shown to be market-driven—rather than the exper-
tise of an individual practitioner. From the perspective of the individual, uncer-
tainty with regard to the authenticity of the affliction under this paradigm leads
consumers to attempt to self-diagnose, which is enabled by pharmaceutical
marketing.
White Noise reveals a cultural tendency to doubt our minds when it
becomes possible to model the brain. The prominent discourse in the novel
is taken from the sciences of mind. Heinrich’s theories are put to the test. If
we can be reduced to the sum of our brain chemicals, how do we even know
what we feel? For example, Heinrich, skeptical of a friend who sits in a cage
full of snakes for the purpose of setting a world record, says: “He thinks he’s
happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much or too
little stimulation” (DeLillo 1984, 182). This problem surfaces in the novel
with regard to the efficacy of Dylar, which is considered medically legitimate
because of a theory that helps us believe diseased brains can be reduced fun-
damentally to their materiality in order to be treated; material diseases have
material cures.
Early in the novel, Jack’s wife, Babette, manifests certain symptoms.
She is more forgetful than usual, which compels her family to seek out the
cause. Jack and his stepdaughter, Denise, discover Babette has secretly
been taking Dylar, which is not yet listed in drug indexes—hence it is not
regulated. Jack initially retorts, “I don’t want to make too much of this.
Everybody takes some kind of medication, everybody forgets things occa-
sionally” (DeLillo 1984, 62). Jack, for example, takes “[b]lood pressure
pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin,” all of which are “[r]un of the mill”
(DeLillo 1984, 62). Introducing the reader to medications that are already
422 N. ROXBURGH
part of the typical American regimen complements DeLillo’s description

of the “airborne toxic event” at the center of the novel and the ubiquity of
other technological mechanisms, such as radio, television, the microwave
oven, power lines, the radar speed-trap, and so on, allowing him to illustrate
the over-determinedness of the symptom and show that it cannot be purely
reduced to the brain (DeLillo 1984, 174).
The proliferation of technology is closely connected to the fact that Jack
and Babette are both terrified of dying. The two repeatedly ask each other
who will die first (DeLillo 1984, 15). Conventional wisdom tells us death is
a natural human event, one to be experienced by everyone; it is a part of life.
The novel complicates this notion by suggesting that even death is not nat-
ural but rather produced by the technological advances that preoccupy the
novel. Jack and his family encounter an “airborne toxic event,” which, they
learn, has been born in the laboratory: “This was a death made in the lab-
oratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a sim-
ple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood
or tornado, something not subject to control” (DeLillo 1984, 127). Indeed,
Jack’s colleague, Murray, corroborates this perspective when he discusses the
way death has changed. Murray says: “This is the nature of modern death
[…]. We know it intimately. But it continues to grow, to acquire breadth and
scope, new outlets, new passages and means. The more we learn, the more
it grows. Is this some law of physics? Every advance in knowledge and tech-
nique is matched by a new kind of death, a new strain. Death adapts, like a
viral agent” (DeLillo 1984, 150). Babette likewise believes death has changed
in conjunction with modern technological developments, complaining,
“[e]very advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more
scared” (DeLillo 1984, 161). Paradoxically turning to drugs because of that
fear, she illustrates the medicalization of the fear of death, a point that is
underscored when she seeks out a solution from Mr. Gray, who researches the
parts of the brain responsible for producing this particular type of fear.
When Jack is finally able to confront Babette about her secret use of Dylar,
she tells him that the people at Gray Research “isolated the fear-of-death part
of the brain” and that “Dylar speeds relief to that sector.” She uses a biomed-
ical anti-interior approach for describing the way Dylar works: “Heinrich’s
brain theories. They’re all true. We’re the sum of our chemical impulses”
(DeLillo 1984, 200). But, given the novel’s preoccupation with the way the
natural has been converted into an effect of technology, the novel’s various
perspectives fail to square, painting a picture of a significant inconsistency. If
we are merely the sum of our chemical impulses, what is then the relation-
ship between the development of technology and the medicalization of fear-
ing death? In other words, if the fear of death correlates with technological
development, how can we say that our individual chemistry is solely to blame?
Indeed, the novel seems to suggest that modern technologies exacerbate a
fear built into our biochemical—and also experiential—bodies and minds.
And if it is our chemistry that is solely the problem, should not a drug that
compensates for a particular chemical imbalance work properly? Finally, if the
symptoms of psychiatric disorders—if that is what Babette is afflicted with—
take place at the level of our feelings and affect, but we cannot trust our feel-
ings over a system of knowledge (i.e., if Heinrich’s brain theories are true),
how do we know they need medical treatment?
White Noise drives home its critique of the medicalization of the fear of
death in its third section, “Dylarama.” The scientific precision of the med-
ication, which researcher Winnie Richards even goes so far as to say makes
her “proud to be an American” because America “lead[s] the world in stim-
uli,” is challenged when it fails to produce its expected result (DeLillo 1984,
189). The symptom the medication is designed to correct is still present:
Babette still fears death. What is more, there are side effects. Babette’s belief
in the system of knowledge is evident in her trusting in the drug’s develop-
er’s explanation that the side effects (i.e., the memory loss) were not to the
drug, but to the fear of death itself: “It wasn’t a side effect of the drug. It was
a side effect of the condition. Mr. Gray said my loss of memory is a desper-
ate attempt to counteract my fear of death. It’s like a war of neurons. I am
able to forget many things but I fail when it comes to death” (DeLillo 1984,
202). The drug may have side effects or it may not, and the drug fails to treat
the symptom—it could even be the culprit. Jack later suggests that the drug
may be working because of the power of suggestion: “It may not matter how
strong or weak Dylar is. If I think it will help me, it will help me” (DeLillo
1984, 251). Whether the drug works or does not work is called into ques-
tion, and whether the drug works because of the power of suggestion (what
is called the placebo effect) is also proposed as a possibility. The fictional drug’s
intended effects and its side effects (both of which comprise its drug action),
in the end, are difficult to demarcate, which is in turn registered in the way
characters experience the drug, and how they seem to suffer from not being
quite sure whether the drug is treating a symptom or doing something else
entirely.
One of the more significant side effects of Dylar is an inability to distin-
guish between words and things, which its inventor, Mr. Gray, experiences
when he overdoses (DeLillo 1984, 309). This suggestion that language,
too, is a technology nudges the reader toward the question of whether the
drug effects are real or simulated—the power of suggestion is literally con-
flated with the physical world: “The drug not only caused the user to confuse
words with the things they referred to; it made [Mr. Gray] act in a some-
what stylized way” (DeLillo 1984, 310). In this scene, Mr. Gray experiences
materially what is suggested verbally. The drug, the “benign counterpart of
the Nyodene menace,” what Jack calls “technology with a human face,” thus
embodies the postmodern predicament by leaving ambiguous what is natu-
ral and what is artificial, what is a correction for a problem and what is an
instigator (DeLillo 1984, 212).11 This ambiguity is important for suggesting
424 N. ROXBURGH
that the cultural authority of the sciences of mind have played a role in how
we understand what we experience through the brain, fully fleshing out the
implications of biomedical anti-interiority on postmodern subjectivity.
White Noise seems to suggest that with the waning of medical gatekeep-
ing and the transition from patients to permanent medical consumers, a new
kind of gatekeeping has emerged. Rather than trusting doctors as authority
figures, consumers trust the authority of the way the sciences of mind model
the material brain, and this is represented cynically—in line with postmodern
style. This novel asks science to consider its experiential roots rather than rely
on systems of knowledge in an uncritical way. Systems of knowledge are not
the same thing as material realities, and they have become entangled in sub-
jective experience to a degree that undermines medicine’s mandate to do no
harm.
The Corrections: Drug or Medication?

By contrast to White Noise, The Corrections has been read as leaving behind
many of the stylistic investments of postmodernism, particularly its cyni-
cism, while embracing a more realist style.12 However, at the same time, it
borrows from the narrative foundations of White Noise.13 Stephen J. Burn
argues that The Corrections explores the way family members relate to each
other more than it does the technological and cultural world.14 Like White
Noise, however, it uses fictional drugs/medication to comment on the way
the cultural authority of the sciences of mind has kept people who need med-
ical help from getting it. More so than White Noise, The Corrections considers
how the predicament of not being certain about what one experiences poses
a larger problem for treating legitimate medical problems. The fictional sub-
stance, Corecktall, is something the family members have in common, and
each interprets its effects a different way—sometimes as a drug, other times as
a medication.
For some critics, the exploration of psychopharmacology was its weak-
est point. David Gates, for example, shows how Franzen’s exploration of
medication is nothing new to either the novel or critiques of psychiatry:
“Psychotropic drugs and their supposedly problematic effects on human
autonomy and identity is a topic as old as ‘Brave New World’” (Gates 2001,
n.p.). Part of the problem of this critique is that it gives up trying to under-
stand the complicated relationship between the various drugs and medica-
tions in the novel, a relationship that is not only about medicine, but also
about a neoliberal economic logic that places profit above everything else.
The Corrections asks what happens when medications are seen as consumer
products like any other, when the distinction between drugs and medica-
tions becomes fundamentally blurred. In a sense, it incorporates the posi-
tion that White Noise offers as one of many, which is further facilitated by
its heterodiegetic narration, another stylistic aspect that pulls it away from its
postmodern predecessor. The novel endorses the authority of science against
a neoliberal economic logic by exposing the effect of the drugs/medication

entanglement as a problem the medical sciences need to address in order to
do no harm. And it does this through the proliferation of perspectives that is
characteristic of realism rather than postmodernism.
Market-originated corrections in general never seem able to fix the chroni-
cally dysfunctional Lambert family, comprising Enid and Alfred and their chil-
dren, Chip, Gary, and Denise. The novel offers the possibility that psychiatric
medication might have a place alongside other cultural practices of neoliberal
America and thus a categorical dismissal of it could be detrimental to those
displaying symptoms or needing medical treatment. It does this by referring
to medications and drugs actually on the market in the real world, such as
Xanax (or alprazolam, used to treat anxiety), antidepressants, and street
drugs, but also to fictional substances: Corecktall seems to be a “magic bul-
let,” a pharmaceutical reputed to treat certain illnesses, including Parkinson’s,
and Aslan, a “personality optimizer.” The various family members have differ-
ent interpretations of the drug and its effects, as well as conflicting accounts
of identity (Burn 2008, 115). Gary’s materialist account, for example, con-
flicts with Caroline’s world of self-help psychology.15 “Franzen’s attitude
toward neuroscience in his novels is evidently marked by division [among
character’s views]” (Burn 2008, 122), argues Burn, who also views the novel
as concluding with a conventional closure, signaling its break from postmod-
ernism.16 But I would argue there is a further break: By putting together the
characters’ different views, the novel distances itself from postmodernism’s
overall cynicism about science. Examining the perspectives together, the
reader finds the novel does not simply distrust science; rather, it presents a
critical view of the drugs-meds split, and exposes a profit-motive underlying
the pharmaceutical industry. Chip takes Mexican A to party and have sex with
his student, Melissa. Later, we find out this is the same substance Enid is pre-
scribed by Dr. Hibbard on a cruise, a drug upon which she becomes seri-
ously dependent (Franzen 2001, 371). Enid (possibly like Babette) has no
medical symptoms until she is put on Aslan. By contrast to these other exam-
ples, Gary, despite deep depression, resists getting treated because he needs
to reject a strict biological deterministic view of his afflictions: He needs to
reject the system of knowledge because he cannot confront his resemblance
to his father. Because of this extreme rejection of the science, he suffers. This
is in contrast to White Noise, as Gary is certain he is depressed but denies the
efficacity of treatment (whereas Babette, for example, never seems to know
whether she was truly ill to begin with).
Chip, a humanities academic, distrusts psychiatry and has misgivings about
its medicalizing practices, which he ties directly to a consumer economy. His
relationship with his girlfriend, Julia, is waning because, while she accuses him
of using sex as a sort of medication, he abhors her use of psychiatric pharma-
ceuticals. Julia takes pills that “make her unbelievably obtuse, and the obtuse-
ness then defines itself as mental health! It’s like blindness defining itself as
vision” (Franzen 2001, 35). He tells his sister:
426 N. ROXBURGH
I’m saying the structure of the entire culture is flawed. […] I’m saying the
bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of the mind as “dis-
eased.” A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that
requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in
other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which
means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures.
The very definition of mental “health” is the ability to participate in the con-
sumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying. And
I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medi-
calized, totalitarian modernity right at this instant. (Franzen 2001, 35f.)
Here, Chip criticizes medicalization as having a direct connection to the

economy. The critical theorist in him denies psychiatry’s capacity to give
depression the status of disease. However, this mental-illness-denying outlook
does not have the last word in Franzen’s novel. For one, the reader wonders
if Chip’s distress comes from the fact that Julia’s libido wanes when she is
medicated, thus depriving a man who feels entitled to sex of a “drug” that
does not require him to spend money. Another factor that complicates Chip’s
critique is Gary’s perspective.
Gary suffers from a mental health problem, which expresses itself in a pro-
found anhedonia (a key symptom of clinical depression) and possibly alco-
holism (Gary self-medicates with alcohol regularly). Gary’s wife, Caroline,
attempts to get him to take medication for his depression, but he resists
despite his suffering. At the same time, he “was less than thrilled to be given
responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain
people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility”
(Franzen 2001, 159). The reader comes to understand that his resistance
has to do with a similar outlook of biomedical anti-interiority—in this case,
a genetic inheritance of traits: “[H]is entire life was set up as a correction of
his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clini-
cally depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and
to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resist-
ing ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have
fun” (Franzen 2001, 207). Gary, who “had been worrying a lot about his
mental health,” therefore experiences a malady that is left untreated because
of his own rejection of the family history and a more reductive genetic
understanding of depression (Franzen 2001, 159). Gary’s self-destructive
refusal to seek help for his depression signals the novel’s refusal to endorse
Chip’s social-constructionist dismissal of medicalizing mental health and its
treatment.
The Corrections satirizes psychiatry when Enid and Alfred go on a cruise.
Enid seeks out the ship’s doctor to help Alfred, who is having trouble with
his Parkinson’s. Dr. Hibbard assumes that it is she who needs help. She
attempts to call him on his mistake, and he assumes she has a psychiatric con-
dition. He says: “In fact a crippling fear of asking for Aslan is the condition
for which Aslan is most commonly indicated. The drug exerts a remarkable
blocking effect on ‘deep’ or ‘morbid’ shame” (Franzen 2001, 366). The
scene parodies the depression checklist and the dispensing of samples—he
barely listens to Enid’s self-reported answers, even repeatedly getting her
name incorrect as they discuss her supposed symptoms. Dr. Hibbard offers
her “eight SampLpaks of Aslan ‘Cruiser,’” saying she can then “afterward fol-
low the recommend thirty-twenty-ten step-down program” (Franzen 2001,
367). (This is clearly a hard drug with profoundly addictive qualities.) She
takes his sample for free, but then must pay him a fee. Dr. Hibbard tells her:
Professional ethics prevent me from selling the drugs I prescribe, so I’m con-
fined to dispensing free samples […]. Regrettably, since Aslan has [not received]
full American regulatory approval, and since most of our cruisers are American,
and since Aslan’s designer and maker, Farmacopea S.A., therefore has no incen-
tive to provide me with complimentary samples sufficient to the extraordi-
nary demand, I do find it necessary to purchase the complimentary samples in
bulk. Hence my consulting fee, which might otherwise strike one as inflated.
(Franzen 2001, 369)
The drug/med is not even legal in the United States, but it seems to sell
itself. Further, when Enid asks how she could get a refill once she is back
from her cruise, Dr. Hibbard tells her to seek out a street drug, Mexican A
(Franzen 2001, 371). The drug/medication boundary has collapsed, and this
works through the cultural authority of the sciences of mind and the biomed-
ical anti-interiority that comes with it. While Gary dismisses the sciences of
mind despite his own firm belief in his depression, the system of knowledge
Dr. Hibbard uses to describe the drug action of Aslan makes it difficult for
Enid to understand her own experience.
What is key to this passage is the way Dr. Hibbard radically denies Enid
her subjective self-understanding—it is, after all, not Enid who needs help—
when he provides her with a scientific explanation for why she should take
the drug: “Aslan optimizes in sixteen chemical dimensions,” he says. “Mainly
that it switches your anxiety to the Off position” (Franzen 2001, 370).
“Chemicals in your brain, Elaine. […] What else can it be but chemicals?
What’s memory? A chemical change!” (Franzen 2001, 371). Enid has qualms
because “her church taught her otherwise,” but Dr. Hibbard assures her,
“[w]e all have irrational attachments to the particular chemical coordinates of
our character and temperament” (Franzen 2001, 371). She gives in, as she no
longer trusts her own subjective experience.
Psychopharmacology is only one of many forms of correction that stem
from the financialized economy in general, with its corporate players, stock
markets, and consumers alike. This economy is satirized from the outset,
when the reader finds Enid going through medical bills. She finds the “Third
Notice from a medical lab that demanded immediate payment of $0.22 while
simultaneously showing an account balance of $0.00 carried forward and
428 N. ROXBURGH
thus indicating that she owed nothing and in any case offering no address
to which remittance might be made” (Franzen 2001, 6). This seeming non-
event in the novel heralds what is to come. Even the accounting ledger
(which I use above as an example of the simulation important for under-
standing the scientific model) is an agent of absurdity. One imperfection
must be corrected, and the very instrument that is meant to fix it undermines
the possibility of correcting it. Or, as we read through Enid’s perspective
on child-rearing later in the novel: “What made the correction possible also
doomed it” (Franzen 2001, 323). Like the bill Enid receives at the begin-
ning, the effort it takes to correct something often turns a non-problem into
a real problem. But, at the same time, it shows how Gary’s awareness of his
own real medical problem never leads to his getting help. In White Noise and
The Corrections, psychopharmaceuticals often have the capacity of turning a
brain that may never have been chemically imbalanced, like Enid’s, into one
that is, like Enid’s. However, as we glean from Gary’s complicated, internally
felt experience of being depressed, The Corrections is no simple anti-psychiatry
polemic: It offers a space for disentangling the needs of medicine from the
needs of the market.
Tellingly, The Corrections features a mega-corporation, the Axon
Corporation, which offers insight into the other side of the political econ-
omy of medicalization. The reader is introduced to this corporation because
Axon wishes to buy a patent of Alfred’s, one that, ironically, will allow them
to perfect the other drug/medication at the center of the novel, Corecktall.
Gary, the financially savvy son, puts pressure on Alfred to sell his patent (on
a process of electropolymerization) for the highest price possible. Gary looks
into the Axon Corporation and finds that a process they have developed, the
Eberle Process, was recently approved by the FDA for producing a drug and
is worth forty million dollars annually (Franzen 2001, 195). The spokesper-
son at the road show, an on-screen virtual figure of Eberle (the man behind
the process) explains the medicinal effects of the promising drug through a
biomedical anti-interior model, discussing its drug action and helping Gary
to understand how important Alfred’s patent is to the drug’s development.
Corecktall promises to be “a cure not only of these terrible degenerative
afflictions but also of a host of ailments typically considered psychiatric or
even psychological” (Franzen 2001, 217).17 Like early Thorazine, Corecktall
seems to have too many uses to be the correction for a specific mental (or
even physical) disease—hence the name, which satirizes the process by which
drugs become meds to treat specific disorders. Researchers have designed the
drug to “make any action the patient is performing easier and more enjoyable
to repeat and to sustain” (Franzen 2001, 277).18 Sometimes the presenta-
tion explicitly uses economic metaphors: “[A]n idle corner of the brain may
be the Devil’s work-shop, […] but every idle neural pathway gets ignored
by the Corecktall process. Wherever there is action, though, Corecktall is
there to make it stronger! To help the rich get richer!” (Franzen 2001, 225).
(This is not the first time the novel makes the connection between brain
chemistry and the economy. Earlier, when Gary is ruminating over his possi-
ble depression, he muses: “What this stagnating economy needs […] is a mas-
sive infusion of Bombay Sapphire gin” [Franzen 2001, 186].) This time, the
medication does not seem to be used as a treatment for the ailing—rather, it
seems like an enhancer, like a street drug. This connects back to the optimiz-
ing promises of the drug Enid is put on. If one is not enjoying oneself, one
has a medical disorder. And this is a slippery slope for medicine, at least from
Gary’s perspective, which only exacerbates his cynicism.19
In The Corrections, biomedical anti-interiority is not just in the science that
serves as the cultural authority for medicine, but it also resembles the econ-
omy. And the reader wonders if the pharmaceuticals, and the definitions of
sickness and health that accompany them, are not only products of the mar-
ket but also social imperatives—of being efficient, of having energy, of seem-
ing to enjoy oneself. Drugs and meds serve the financialized economy (in
more ways than one) and are for this reason so lucrative that the personal
finances of the Lambert family are tied up in the success of these psychop-
harmacological products. The problem is, however, that an ethics that comes
from neoliberalism conflicts with medicine’s fundamental imperative of doing
no harm.
**********
Reading White Noise through the framework of the cultural authority of the
sciences of mind, postmodernism might be viewed as a sort of prediction
about the emergent neoliberal economy’s conversion of disinterested science
into interested, market-driven technology, and it suggests the crisis of belief
takes place at the level of individual experience. In the case of psychiatry, the
novel points to an anxiety about medicalization and the way medicine might
be transforming what it means to be human along lines that have less to do
with health and more to do with profit. The Corrections incorporates this
cynical perspective as one of many, namely, through Chip. And the prolifer-
ation of perspectives gives the reader a broader set of beliefs about science.
Through a proliferation of perspectives, however, it leaves behind the inter-
pretation of postmodern style that emphasizes cynicism even while it takes on
board similar epistemological concerns.
White Noise and The Corrections ask readers to think about the relation-
ship between biomedical anti-interiority in a way that overlaps with a genre
that critics have begun to call the “neuronovel,” including works such as
Richard Power’s Galatea 2.2 (1995), The Echo-Maker (2006), and Generosity:
An Enhancement (2009), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), and David
Lodge’s Thinks… (2001), all of which ask the question of what happens
when interest in the mind—the traditional stuff of literature—gets replaced
by scientific models of the human brain. In addition, from all over the liter-
ary marketplace we see a growing awareness and exploration of the impact
430 N. ROXBURGH
of recent psychopharmacological science on human culture. These works of

“pharmacological fiction” include Walter Kirn’s Thumbsucker (1999), Alan
Glynn’s The Dark Fields (2001), Gerard Donovan’s Doctor Salt (2005),
Dirk Wittenborn’s Pharmakon (2008), Richard Powers’s Generosity: An
Enhancement (2009), Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder (2011), Christopher
Herz’s Pharmacology (2011), and Ken MacLeod’s Intrusion (2012). Unlike
more recent works, which incorporate—and take seriously—developments
from the sciences of mind, Franzen’s and DeLillo’s novels seem less certain
about how the human brain functions. Rather, they proceed from a notion
that the way we have come to collectively understand the brain has been
pre-configured by a market-driven, rather than a scientific, starting point.
When (or if) we find a way to reduce the mind to the brain, however, these
novels suggest it may be important to remember the ambiguities inherent in
their fictional pharmacological substances, as they remind us that the prolif-
eration of categories, technologies, models, and information means that we
take on an increased burden to correct what is correctable and also to identify
what should and what should not be corrected. In the realm of medicine, the
sciences of mind have helped us to hone this process in ways that have trans-
formed our very notion of subjectivity. These novels suggest a newer burden,
our next dilemma when we cannot always trust the financialized economy to
provide us with a medical-ethical model. This entails a recognition that one
cannot assume that, by solely relying on abstract systems of knowledge, we
have a tighter grasp on human health and happiness.
Notes
1. See Harvey (2005, 3).
2. For example, in Germany, the words die Droge and das Medikament are not to
be confused with one another.
3. See American Psychiatry Association (2013).
4. See Lewis (2006, 66).
5. See Ban (2007, 3, 495).
6. See Lewis (2006, 3).
7. What is often referred to as the ‘chemical imbalance theory of mental illness’
came under fire by researchers, including academics, psychiatrists, and inves-
tigative journalists. These works include Bradley Lewis’s Moving Beyond
Prozac, The DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth of Postpsychiatry (2006),
Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric
Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America (2010), Daniel
Carlat’s Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor’s Revelations About
a Profession in Crisis (2010), Irving Kirsch’s The Emperor’s New Drugs:
Exploding the Antidepressant Myth (2009), and Ethan Watters’s Crazy Like
Us: The Globalization of the Western Mind (2011). These texts, which only
represent a small sample of a fairly large body of literature, call for a rethink-
ing of the way we imagine the relationship between physical brains and the
inner experience of the people attached to them. Since the publication of the
DSM 5, many media outlets have also been critical of the manual’s 15 new
diagnoses (McHugh 2013; Wieczner 2013; Brooks 2013; Belluck and Carey
2013). However, rather than putting pressure on the reductive nature of these
categories, many of these critiques call for psychiatry to be even more ‘empiri-
cal,’ and to be more like neuroscience in modeling the brain.
8. For example, psychiatry often relies on categorizing the self-reports of patients
(through rubrics such as the Beck Depression Checklist [BDI] and the Major
Depression Inventory [MDI]) to diagnose clinical depression.
9. See Lipsky (2008, n.p.).
10. See Freudenthal (2010, 192, 195).
11. In fact, the reader never learns what the “D” in Nyodene D stands for: DeLillo
potentially relates this chemical substance to the one that potentially cures the
fear of death, Dylar.
12. See Doherty (2015, 97).
13. See Burn (2008, 98).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 115.
16. Ibid., 128.
17. Ibid., 217.
18. Ibid., 277.
19. This last point gets reiterated with another use for Corecktall, one that allows
Franzen to play with another of the various meanings the term ‘corrections’
can take: that of the penitentiary. Corecktall, we find, will be used to reform
criminals. “[W]hen it comes to social disease, the brain of the criminal,
there’s no other option on the horizon. It’s Corecktall or prison” (Franzen
2001, 238). The drug will “reprogram the repeat offender to enjoy pushing a
broom” (Franzen 2001, 239). This questions whether contemporary pharma-
cology, with its new emphasis on optimization and enhancement, is medicinal
or merely an agent of social control.
References
American Psychiatry Association. 2013. DSM 5 Development. http://www.dsm5.
org/Pages/Default.aspx.
Ban, Thomas A. 2007. Fifty Years Chlorpromazine: A Historical Prospective.
Neuropsychiatric Disease and Treatment 3: 495–500.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994. Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Belluck, Pam, and Benedict Carey. 2013. Psychiatry’s New Guide Falls Short, Experts
Say. The New York Times, May 6.
Brooks, David. 2013. Heroes of Uncertainty. Op. Ed. The New York Times, May 28.
Burn, Stephen J. 2008. Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism. London and
New York: Continuum.
Clare, Ralph Elliot. 2010. Fictions Ltd.: Representations of Corporations in Post-
World War II American Fiction and Film. Dissertation. New York: Stony Brook
University.
Conrad, Peter. 2005. The Shifting Engines of Medicalization. Journal of Health and
Social Behavior 46: 3–14.
432 N. ROXBURGH
Davies, William. 2015. The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business
Sold Us Well-Being. London and New York: Verso.
DeLillo, Don. 1984. White Noise. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club.
Doherty, Margaret. 2015. State-Funded Fiction: Minimalism, National Memory, and
the Return to Realism in the Post-Postmodern Age. American Literary History 27:
79–101.
Franzen, Jonathan. 2001. The Corrections. New York: Harper Perennial.
Freudenthal, Elizabeth. 2010. Anti-interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and
Identity in Infinite Jest. New Literary History 41: 191–211.
Gates, David. 2001. ‘The Corrections’: Jonathan Franzen’s American Gothic. Review
of The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. New York Times Sunday Book Review,
September 9. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/09/books/review/09GAT-
ESTW.html?pagewanted=all.
Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Kirsch, Irving. 2009. The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth,
Kindle Edition. London: Bodley Head.
Lewis, Bradley. 2006. Moving Beyond Prozac, DSM, and the New Psychiatry: The Birth
of Postpsychiatry. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Lipsky, David. 2008. The Last Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace.
Rolling Stone, October 30. http://web.archive.org/web/20090503094120/
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/stor y/23638511/the_lost_years__
last_days_of_david_foster_wallace/6.
McHugh, Paul. 2013. A Manuel Run Amok. The Wall Street Journal, May 17.
Roth, Marco. 2013. The Rise of the Neuronovel. N + 1. https://nplusonemag.com/
issue-8/essays/the-rise-of-the-neuronovel/.
Smith, Rachel Greenwald. 2015. Affect and American Literature in the Age of
Neoliberalism. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wallace, David Foster. 1996. Infinite Jest. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
Whitaker, Robert. 2010. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs,
and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. New York: Broadway.
Wieczner, Jan. 2013. Drug Companies Look to Profit from DSM-5. The Wall Street
Journal Market Watch, June 5. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/new-psych-
manual-could-create-drug-windfalls-2013-06-05?siteid=yhoof2.
CHAPTER 24
Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary

Instrument in the Early Twentieth Century
Kyla Schuller
A virulent state-sponsored racism plagued the early twentieth century.

Theodore Roosevelt thundered about “race suicide” from his presidential bully
pulpit and his fears resonated throughout the nation’s white population: whites
were allegedly having too few children, and immigrants and native-born peo-
ple of color far too many. Thousands of copies of racist tracts, which lamented
the pollution of allegedly superior white stock by inferior physical and men-
tal types, flew off the shelves. Several decades earlier, Sir Francis Galton had
given a name to the now-popular goal of regulating a nation’s reproduction:
eugenics, meaning “well born.” The eugenics movement sprang up during
Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909) to encourage higher rates of reproduction
among wealthier, whiter, and more able-bodied citizens, and to discourage or
prevent “unfit” members of society from procreating. To stimulate what sup-
porters called “better breeding,” states forcibly sterilized tens of thousands of
poor women and state fairs promoted “fitter family” contests encouraging its
so-called better class of citizens to reproduce. The movement persisted for dec-
ades, with disastrous effects for reproductive justice.1 In the realm of fiction,
authors as politically varied as William Faulkner, Edith Wharton, W.E.B. Du
Bois, John Steinbeck, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Nella Larsen portrayed
eugenic breeding to be necessary for progress. Yet eugenic tactics far exceeded
these well-known efforts to control the birth rate.
What’s at stake in early twentieth-century eugenics movements is not
only the wide-reaching fight over which women should be allowed to bear
K. Schuller (*) 
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, USA

434 K. SCHULLER
children and which should have their fertility curtailed. Eugenics emerged as
a site of struggle over the very definition and delineation of nature and nur-
ture. In this chapter, I argue that literature and other cultural production was
itself often understood to play a direct role in upwardly evolving the pop-
ulation in the early twentieth century. I call this phenomenon eugenic aes-
thetics. Eugenic aesthetics not only advocates for “better breeding” through
representation on the page. Eugenic aesthetics describes the goal of improv-
ing the biological material of readers, in the flesh, via characters, plots, and
the didactic mode, as well as encompasses theories of the physiological effects
of aesthetic experience. I show how literature could be thought to affect the
evolutionary development of its authors and audience by situating literary
reading in its early twentieth-century scientific context. I focus particularly on
the Lamarckian-influenced social sciences, which understood habitual behav-
iors to create modifications to the mind and body that would be transmit-
ted to descendants, such that reading could evolve the civilized races over
time. Eugenics not only sought to regulate fertility. It also sought to regulate
experience as a method of improving the nation’s hereditary material.
Eugenic aesthetics emerged within a larger debate about the relative
impact of “nature and nurture,” a less-attributed but arguably even more
consequential coinage by Sir Francis Galton (Subramaniam 2014, 52).
Eugenics reformers played an important role in negotiating biology’s shifting
meanings at the dawn of the twentieth century from a Lamarckian framework
that blended social experience and heritable traits to a Mendelian notion of
hard heredity that rigidly distinguished between nature and nurture. Situating
eugenics within early twentieth-century debates about heredity and evolution
throws open the very categories of biology, reproduction, and “life itself” that
we often take for granted in scholarship on biopower. At the same time, sit-
uating eugenics within the broader phenomenon of biopower expands our
framework for recognizing eugenic tactics and illuminates new aspects of the
political work of eugenic narratives. Michel Foucault described biopower as
the modern form of governance that takes organic life to be the chief domain
of the political (Foucault 2003).2 Beginning in the eighteenth century and
accelerating rapidly at the dawn of the twentieth, power in the west became
increasingly oriented around “life itself.” The physiological capacities of the
species became the key targets and fields of politics. Yet this familiar summa-
tion glosses over a pivotal shift: biopower consolidated in part through the
invention of the very notions of “species” and “biology” over the course of
the nineteenth century, ideas that were renegotiated dramatically at the start
of the twentieth as Mendelian genetics took hold. Biopower invents the very
notion of the biological itself, draws its domain, and stages a debate about the
degree to which civilization can influence its workings, a debate that raged in
the early twentieth century.
Eugenic aesthetics did significant epistemic work in conceiving of biology
and culture as mutually permeable. Eugenics was not strictly a movement
24 EUGENIC AESTHETICS: LITERATURE AS EVOLUTIONARY INSTRUMENT … 435
to regulate the relative birth rate of the allegedly “fit” and “unfit”; it was a
broad-based strategy for improving the hereditary material of the nation
through any means available, means that in the early twentieth century
included sensory experience. This framework lost power as the twentieth cen-
tury progressed, rendering invisible the hoped-for outcome that exposure to
eugenic literature would itself upwardly evolve the nation’s racial stock. More
broadly, eugenic aesthetics reveal that biopower does not merely transform
the biological into the substance and source of power. Biopower defines the
realms of the biological and cultural, the scientific and the literary, in the first
place and seeks to regulate their interaction.
Life Itself: A Shifting Political Target

Theories of biopower posit that the biological qualities of existence have
become the cornerstone of modern political life. Philosopher Giorgio
Agamben, for example, describes the ultimate power of the state as its ability
to banish members from all measures of political recognition and legitimacy,
stripping them of any social claims to personhood and thereby leaving them
in the state of “bare life” (Agamben 1998, 6). Agamben argues that such
individuals are reduced to a mere biological existence. They’re consigned to a
state of exception outside the law that, at the same time, the state depends on
to define the horizon of legibility. His concept of bare life, of which the con-
centration camp serves as his paradigmatic example, has been much debated
(Berlant 2011, 95–120). Does this process of stripping away the social to
expose the raw biological life underneath happen equally across differently
positioned members of a population? What of race and gender, dynamic
processes that unevenly distribute the burdens of embodiment onto men of
color and all women? Is there even a state of biological existence that can be
said to preexist the social, or does social life always mediate organic devel-
opment—a process that begins well before fetal development in the womb?
(Weheliye 2014, 33–45). In addition to these crucial questions, I submit that
there is another problem with the “bare life” concept, a shortcoming that it
shares with some other theories of biopower: epistemic ambiguity. What is life
“itself,” and has the notion of what counts as biology—in its double sense as
both organic existence and its study—been stable over time?3
Biopower doesn’t merely enlist the biological, but rather invents the con-
cept altogether as an object of a specific type of disciplinary knowledge, as
Foucault elaborated (Foucault 1994; Haines 2019). Biopolitical regimes
elevate scientific knowledge, the branch of thought devoted to the organic
world, to the level of master discourse, the most authoritative and powerful
mode of knowing. They also collapse apparent distinctions between strate-
gies of knowing and the objects they generate. In both respects, the idea of
bare life and “life itself” are fertile products of the contemporary biopolitical
imagination. “Biology” is an object conjured by the early nineteenth-century
436 K. SCHULLER
development of biology as a field of knowledge; our use of the term biology

today frequently conflates organic existence with the discipline (Willey 2016).
Given that the concept of biological existence—our organic, animal selves—
has been identified as core to our modern forms of government and of power
more generally, the very notion of embodiment and the strategies of know-
ing it shift according to different historical moments and political exigencies.
Bare life is a construction of late twentieth-century biological knowledge that
reflects a commitment to rigidly divide the realms of the biological from the
cultural. But biopower consolidated in the midst of rapidly shifting notions of
the very concept of organic existence and its relationship to other aspects of
human life.
Use of the term biology to denote the study of life appeared around 1802
in the midst of an emergent world view in which individual organisms were
newly linked together over the time of generations. The French naturalist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who is most commonly credited with
the neologism, proposed that habitual behaviors create physical and mental
modifications in animals. Repeated movements enlarge the relevant areas of
the body; lack of muscle use causes corresponding atrophy. This is a famil-
iar concept, but Lamarck went further: these changes are then transmitted
to an organism’s descendants, becoming permanent. The now-classic illustra-
tion of the Lamarckian principle is his proposition that the singularly long
necks of the giraffe evolved from generation upon generation of the animals’
strenuous stretching to reach foliage in tall trees. Such effort makes a physi-
cal impression on muscles of the neck, and in response nervous fluid rushes
into the area, temporarily enlarging it. If repeated habitually, this enlarge-
ment modifies the species over evolutionary time. “According to ‘Lamarck’s
plot,’” literary critic Lynn Wardley explains, “it is not the form of an ani-
mal that dictates its manner of life, but the manner of life that determines its
form” (Wardley 2016, 248–249).
In the nineteenth century, both the individual organism and the species
were broadly understood to be formed as a result of the larger environmental
and social processes in which they were immersed. The 1830s saw the debut
of both the term species and the idea of a discrete biological substance called
heredity that is transmitted from one generation to the next. Heredity was
understood to be innate, but not immutable. It emerged within a Lamarckian
context in which it was a malleable organic substance that was shaped by the
organism’s repeated sensory impressions. In the late 1860s, Darwin brought
together the idea of inherent yet pliable hereditary material with theories of
species change. For Darwin, all cells of the body cast off small particles called
gemmules, particles whose qualities would change depending on recent cell
experience. Gemmules were mutable and heritable, and formed the substrate
of the next generation. Lamarckian–Darwinian theories of heredity under-
stood habitual behavior to shape the hereditary substance of the individual
and, over time, the population. The new notion of biological heredity was
key to the development of biopolitical governance, for it both provided

a means to track differences within a population and further located the
“truth” of human relation in a physical substance controlled by natural law
(Müller-Wille and Rheinberger 2007, 16–18).
A central task of biopolitics is to define the parameters of the biological
itself, and in the nineteenth century those parameters included the effects
of habit. Social experience, in the Lamarckian model, precipitates as bio-
logical fact over the time of species. As literary critic Sharon Kim observes,
“Lamarckism could thus take a spiritual or cultural trait, or even a politi-
cal ideology, and render it material, biological, and heritable. This form of
Lamarckism pervaded the late nineteenth century” (Kim 2006, 191). The
realm of “life itself,” in today’s parlance, would have been indistinguishable
from the habitual social behaviors of the organism and the species they pro-
liferate. Anthropologists and other evolutionary theorists classified human
groups into distinct stages of advancement according to seven key traits that
included Christianity, monogamous marriage, cultivated agriculture, capital-
ist accumulation, representative democracy, and a tradition of arts and letters
(Morgan 1985). These key traits were thought to impress the young with
the habits of civilization, such that civilization created increasingly superior
racial types. A wide range of reformers thus sought to manipulate the expe-
riences, and the hereditary material, of youth as a tactic for shaping the evo-
lution of the nation, a phenomenon I have elsewhere termed biophilanthropy
(Schuller 2018, 134–171).4 Social models of species growth led, we shall see,
to an evolutionary notion of aesthetics in which culture takes an active role
in shaping human development over time. From there, it is a short distance
to travel to the idea that cultural production can itself enact a eugenic plot:
simultaneously representing and manifesting the improvement of the nation’s
hereditary material.
Physiological Aesthetics
Evolutionary theorists understood culture to be both a cause and effect of the
status of the groups that consumed it. They arranged cultural production on
a racist, teleological scale from primitive to civilized in which lesser works of
art created and indexed a race’s lesser cultural evolution. For Victorian writ-
ers Grant Allen and Proudfoot Begg, appreciation of aesthetic genres directly
reflects stages of evolutionary advance. “The development of taste,” in Begg’s
phrase, accumulates over evolutionary time starting from the primitive igno-
rance of the beauty of nature in which “lower savage nations of to-day” see in
nature only “food, or shelter, or defence” (Begg 1887, 9). Savages, for Begg,
are of nature rather than in it, and thus lack the distance and sophistication
required for aesthetic judgment. Over time, civilizations develop an appreci-
ation for the beautiful and the ambivalent mix of ecstasy and fear that marks
the sublime, having been liberated by industrial advance from the base terrors
438 K. SCHULLER
that allegedly grip the savage (Begg 1887, 7–12). In the words of literary
critic Benjamin Morgan, the temporal scale of the scene of reading shifted
dramatically in the late nineteenth century from the duration of the individ-
ual’s attention to that of the growth of the species. In this new evolutionary
timescale, “the reader’s own taste becomes legible as an expression of both
individual development and species history within deep time” (Morgan 2017,
110). Civilized consumers and the books they read were both imagined to be
products of millennia. Their actions, in turn, shaped the racial progress, or
decline, of future generations. Reading was an evolutionary act.
Cultural evolutionary models were complemented by new physiological
notions of aesthetics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
transactional models of aesthetics dominated in which readers and viewers
were cast as organisms interacting with objects in their environment (Mao
2010; Morgan 2017; Gaskill 2018). As opposed to immersive or transport-
ing models of aesthetic experience in which art lifts the reader out of their
humdrum daily world, these models understood aesthetics to be akin to other
life experiences in which bodies accumulate the effects of their stimulations
and surroundings over time. Pragmatist philosopher John Dewey explained
that his goal was “recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with nor-
mal processes of living… Life goes on in an environment; not merely in it but
because of it, through interaction with it” (Dewey 1934, 9, 14).5 Morgan
claims that physiological aesthetics gave “a particular kind of inflection to a
notion common within aesthetic philosophy: that aesthetic experience exer-
cises an educative effect. Rescaling aesthetic response shifts this effect from
the training of mental faculties to a direct shaping of the nervous system or
the body” (Morgan 2017, 89). Via sensory impressions, literary texts here
have direct access to the nervous system itself, free of mediating conscious-
ness. The reader, in other words, is an organism, and like all others, is stim-
ulated and shaped by its environment. These transactional models imagined
effects that extended far beyond individual mental or cognitive stimulation,
into the longue duree of evolutionary time. In the Lamarckian context of
the era, mass novels’ influence foretold effects that would materialize over
generations.
Aesthetics, by this physiological logic, could also be deliberately deployed
as an active evolutionary agent. The idea that aesthetic products would cre-
ate sensory impressions that would cultivate the viewer and reader particularly
appealed to reformers. Aesthetic theorists frequently made the racist claim
that savage peoples loved bright color and extravagant ornamentation, design
characteristics ranked at the bottom of the taste hierarchy. These primitive
pleasures were cited as evidence that their aesthetic development was imma-
ture, frozen in the time of the past. But for Victorian essayist Grant Allen, the
primitive love of color presented an opportunity. He interjected:
I am often struck by the extraordinary folly of missionaries who habitually

preach down the love of ornament on the part of savages or of emancipated
slaves (especially the women), when in reality this love is the first step in aes-
thetic progress, and the one possible civilising element in their otherwise purely
animal lives. It ought rather to be used as a lever, by first making them take a
pride in their dress, and then passing on the feeling so acquired to their chil-
dren, their huts, their gardens, and their other belongings. (Allen 1880, 453)
Aesthetics were deemed both an origin and result of civilizational status that
accumulated over racial and species time. In the early twentieth century,
minds and the bodies that housed them were widely understood to be in
interactionist feedback loops with their environments. Aesthetics thus could
be interpreted as a tool of evolutionary advance that could contour a people’s
development. In the Lamarckian biopolitical context, design, arts, and letters
could all upwardly or downwardly evolve the impressible subjects with whom
they came into contact. Could such physiological aesthetics also be explicitly
eugenic, deployed to manipulate the hereditary quality of the nation?
Eugenics Before Genetics

My specific claim in this chapter is that literature and other cultural forms
in the period were understood to impact the mental development and social
inheritance of their consumers and could be thus tuned toward eugenic
aims. The Lamarckian context gave rise to the belief that aesthetic practices
could affect heritable qualities and larger evolutionary outcomes. I stress that
eugenics denotes the science and policy of manipulating the quality of her-
itable material within a population. Its founders did not restrict its tactics to
genetics or the relative birth rate of different members of the population.
Galton defined eugenics as “the science which deals with all influences that
improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to
utmost advantage” (Paul 1995, 3). Similarly, the influential paleontologist and
organizer Henry Fairfield Osborn defined eugenics as the practice of repro-
ducing the “best spiritual, moral, intellectual, and physical forces of heredity”
(Osborn 1916, ix). Eugenic strategies and tactics for optimizing hereditary
material are multiple. They can encompass both Lamarckian notions of muta-
ble heredity forged by experience, and/or a Mendelian idea of innate heredity
that transmits unaltered from one generation to the next. Attempts to regu-
late and transform the experiences of youth, women, and other impressible
subjects in order to improve their hereditary material through education,
design, or literary entertainments thus form important examples of eugenics.
Yet scholars haven’t tended to see Lamarckian-influenced reform or aes-
thetic projects as part of, or even immediate precursors to, eugenics move-
ments. Scholars often restrict U.S. eugenics to the science and practice of
440 K. SCHULLER
improving elements of a gene pool, framing eugenics to be synonymous

with racist applications of Mendelian genetics specifically, rather than the
mobilization of the sciences of heredity more generally.6 This is partly due
to a parochialism on the part of U.S. historians of eugenics, a region where
Mendelian models dominated. From the perspective of Mendelism, eugen-
ics equals controlling the birth rate. Gregor Mendel had derived the laws of
inheritance from experimenting on pea plants in the 1860s, but the work
was not known until it was rediscovered by three different scientists in 1900.
The science of genetics emerged over the next decade and a half. Genetics
gradually dictated a new paradigm within biology: heredity is an immutable
substance impervious to the experiences of the organism. In this new model,
eugenic movements’ attempts to apply the science of heredity to regulating
human reproduction frequently targeted childbirth, rather than child-rearing.
Preventing “unfit” women from becoming pregnant, rather than removing
children from their parents and environments, became a nefarious goal. Yet
the two tactics of state racism are both eugenic.
In fact, the genetic paradigm was far from solidified during the heyday of
eugenics in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Lamarckian mod-
els of heredity in which acquired characteristics were transmissible continued
to have influence. The historian of anthropology George Stocking, Jr. argues
that Lamarckian ideas had a major role in U.S. social science all the way until
the start of World War I, largely in the form of beliefs that racial difference
evolved over time through the accumulation of social and environmental
effects (Stocking 1982, 244–245). In 1911, English statistician and leading
eugenicist Karl Pearson clarified that eugenic science was itself the study of
the relative effects of environment and heredity, rather than the exclusive
investigation of immutable hereditary taints. “[W]e are not a priori refusing
to consider how far nature and environment affect physical or mental char-
acters,” he explained. “On the contrary, we assert that the relative intensity
of nature and nurture with regard to both physical and mental qualities is
directly prescribed in our definition as part of the study of eugenics” (Turda
2010, 71). In Latin America and other areas heavily influenced by the French
sciences, however, Lamarckian models of eugenics that emphasized the role
of environment in shaping heredity persisted into the mid-twentieth century
(Stepan 1991).
Where could state power effectively regulate the hereditary substrate of
the nation—only in the case of the fertilized egg, or also in the cases of the
nursing infant and maturing child? Eugenicists were far from settled on the
answer in the early twentieth century. For many reformers, all three instances
influenced the quality of the nation’s hereditary material and thus were tar-
gets ripe for intervention. Eugenic breeding could take multiple forms that
far exceeded regulating women’s birth rates.
Eugenic Plots
Writers, artists, and reformers were particularly keen to hold onto Lamarckian
ideas of heredity, for it gave culture the power to shape evolution. And even
within mainstream eugenics movements, many held onto the promise of envi-
ronmental conditioning even as they embraced rigid policies that regulated
people’s reproductive lives on the basis of the alleged quality of their genetics.
In other words, cultural and environmental approaches to so-called “better
breeding” flourished throughout the early twentieth century, though they
have received less attention from scholars than have the Mendelian modes.
Two of the turn-of-the-century writers whose plots most famously explore
the effects of environment in molding the minds and bodies of their inhab-
itants over time were also engaged themselves in creating domestic envi-
ronments. Both Edith Wharton and Charlotte Perkins Gilman were well
educated in material aesthetics: Wharton co-authored one of the nation’s first
interior design manuals, The Decoration of Houses (1897), and Gilman was a
graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design. The applied arts gave practi-
tioners an opportunity to play a direct hand in shaping the impressions of the
U.S. middle class through constructing the environments that would provoke
their daily sensory repertoire. I focus here on Gilman. Literary critic Nicholas
Gaskill argues that “design reform discourse provided Gilman with a model
for combining her sociological work with her artistic interests; it taught her
to see aesthetics… as a practical intervention into the conditions of sensory
experience, a technique for reconstructing the organism-environment transac-
tions that define the historical conditions of social and individual life” (Gaskill
2018, 99). Her goal was to orchestrate the environments, and thus the
evolutionary development, of white middle classes and especially the women.
Gilman endorsed the social evolutionary view expounded by social theo-
rist Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, and
others that aesthetic progress—as with mental progress more generally—
meant moving from the detailed to the abstract. The generalizable and the
structural, rather than the specific and superficial, marked the superior mind
and its artistic tastes. This cultivation could be trained through sensitivity to
color, especially via domestic spaces, which had particular efficacy for one of
Gilman’s central political goals: to move the mass of mothers away from the
expression of an instinctual maternal feeling and toward a refined mother-love
that emanated from the heart as well as the brain (Gaskill 2018). For Gilman,
white women were saddled with too many of the traits of primitivity, par-
ticularly the love of bright color and excessive ornamentation. Women must
shed their primitive tastes and trappings in order to reach full intellectual
and political equality, and the home and its unceasing food preparation and
child care labors was a central laboratory for this transformation. Throughout
her diverse ventures, Gaskill underscores, Gilman “wanted to change envi-
ronments and the impressions they made, not simply record them” (Gaskill
2018, 82). Those environments included the scenes her narrative fiction
442 K. SCHULLER
brought to life. Her prolific textual output attests to the power she saw in
writing and reading, not only design, to directly mold impressible flesh over
the generations: Gilman published nearly 200 short stories, nine novels, and
three volumes of poetry, along with nearly a dozen non-fiction books and
several dozen essays. One might even understand one of her favored genres,
didactic literature, as a modern aesthetic free of ornamentation, synthesized
to its bare structural features. It is a genre keyed toward producing active
agents who go forth into the world, rather than giving rise to passive con-
sumers of drawing room literature. Didactic literature embodies the eugenic
aesthetic: it seeks to create new impressions as directly as possible, free from
the mediating effects of allegory or irony. The results of these new impres-
sions for both writers and readers over time would be further progress up the
ladder of civilization.
The tone of Gilman’s screeds shows clear continuity between her critique
of how bourgeois households infantilize women and eugenic rhetoric seek-
ing to improve the “quality” of the race. She raged: “Who, in the name of
all common sense, raises our huge and growing crop of idiots, imbeciles,
cripples, defectives, and degenerates; the vicious and the criminal; as well
as all the vast mass of slow-minded, prejudiced, ordinary people who clog
the wheels of progress?” (Gilman 1903, 59). Mothers do, Gilman replied,
because they were denied access to the realms of government and busi-
ness, and leadership in education and religion. Restricted to the domestic
sphere, women reared children in ignorance, producing future generations
that threatened the nation’s flourishing. More significantly than her rhetori-
cal choices, however, the Lamarckian notion of heredity Gilman shared with
many of her reform contemporaries rendered permeable the line between
individual habit and heritable material. In The Home, Its Work and Influence
Gilman explains: “Our physical environment we share with all animals. Our
social environment is what modifies heredity and develops human charac-
ter” (Gilman 1903, 59). Within the notion of biology and biological material
that helped forge early twentieth-century biopolitical governance, social and
cultural experience could shape both the minds and bodies of youth.
Yet paradigms were shifting by the second decade of the twentieth century
as Mendelian genetics gained influence. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915
eugenic dystopia/utopia Herland stages precisely this debate: what models
of heredity, and of life itself, hold sway in the new era? The novel recounts
the success of an isolated all-women colony descended from “Aryan stock”
(Gilman 1979, 54). Initially a two-sex white society that enslaved a labor-
ing population, the slaves rebelled in armed resistance, eliminating the col-
ony’s white men (55). The remaining 150 white women crushed the slave
rebellion and in its ashes, set themselves to “founding a new race” through
refining and elevating “Mother-love” to the status of governance (57). Over
generations, the women evolved the capacity of parthenogenesis, or single-sex
reproduction. In this feminist eugenic vision, maternal powers of creation
align with the racial-nationalist goal of population purification. The narrator

explains: “they devoted their combined intelligence to that problem—how to
make the best kind of people. First this was merely the hope of bearing better
ones, and then they recognized that however the children differed at birth,
the real growth lay later—through education” (59). Education improves the
mind and body in Herland, and these effects transmit to future generations,
as the women explain to three male explorers who stumble upon the island.
Gilman renders eugenic debates on the page through her character devel-
opment, in which individual protagonists propound distinct theories of
heredity. “But acquired traits are not transmissible,” the explorer Terry
objects. “Weissman has proved that” (78). August Weismann had conducted
a series of experiments in the 1880s showing that snipping the tails of five
generations of white mice did not produce progeny without tails. His evi-
dence added strength to the genetics paradigm of immutable hereditary
material that emerged in the early twentieth century. In Gilman’s novel,
the women respond to Terry’s opposition by explaining their mixture of
Lamarckian and Mendelian eugenic paradigms. “When we began—even with
the start of one particularly noble mother—we inherited the characteristics
of a long race-record behind her,” they recount (82). Race here figures in
the Lamarckian mode of accumulated memory. At the same time, the women
of Herland assure their visitors that they “have, of course, made it our first
business to train out, to breed out, when possible, the lowest types,” which
entails that some must “renounce motherhood” altogether, including both
the birthing and rearing of children (82). In these decades of fluctuat-
ing models of biological material, distinct paradigms of heredity overlapped
within the visions of individual reformers. Literary production was one place
where the meaning of biological reproduction and the laws of inheritance
were being worked out. For many reformers like Gilman, cultural production
was a powerful place to insist that experience affected hereditary material:
thus the women of her eugenic “utopia” embrace the role of aesthetics in
eugenics.
Herland sketches a detailed picture of what women-led civilization could
look like: an advanced culture that includes “attractive architecture,” orderly
gardens, durable clothing dyes, women’s clothes with pockets, and “land in
a perfect state of cultivation” (11). These check marks on the list of civilized
accomplishment are direct results of their attention to cultivating the race.
“That the children might be most nobly born, and reared in an environment
calculated to allow the richest, freest growth, they had deliberately remod-
eled and improved the whole state,” the narrator relates (102). A Lamarckian
orientation to child-rearing is constituted as the grounds of governance.
According to its own logic, the novel’s vision of the eugenic consequences of
culture extend off the page and into the hands of the reader herself. Within
the biopolitical frame of the novel, Herland has two modes of eugenic aes-
thetics: representing a fictional universe that hinges on eugenic decisions and
444 K. SCHULLER
creating an aesthetic object that could transform through the mental impres-
sions it stimulates in its readers. Herland women rear their young “to pro-
vide such amount and variety of impressions as seem most welcome to each
child” (105), and by this manner of judicious exposure, creating “succeed-
ing and improving generations … showing stronger clearer minds, sweeter
dispositions, [and] higher capacities” (105–106) over time. Eugenic reform-
ers committed to Lamarckian methods seized the conceptual links between
aesthetic experience and species growth in which crafting impressions was
a race-building act. The eugenic novel, in its double sense as both aesthetic
genre and source of sensory stimulation, could be construed as an instrument
of biopolitical governance.
The promise of aesthetic and sensory tradition accumulating in the racial
body over time particularly appealed to progressive reformers like Gilman,
for it gave evolution a lever and placed it in the hands of cultural produc-
ers. Gilman’s eugenic aims were tuned toward improving the lot of white
women. But other reformers similarly turned to eugenics as a means of race
building, including in efforts to combat white supremacy. Scholars have been
torn over whether to consider W.E.B. Du Bois’s investment in improving the
quality of African American births—including his publications in Margaret
Sanger’s journal The Birth Control Review, which promoted eugenic prin-
ciples—eugenic. This debate often rests upon a narrow notion of eugen-
ics, restricted to Mendelian-inspired efforts to control the gene pool. The
Lamarckian approach illuminates how Du Bois’s broad efforts to improve
African American reproduction in the 1910s and 1920s—including advo-
cating selective birth control, promoting high IQ black children, advocating
adoption by black middle-class families, and even writing romantic fiction
featuring exceptional race leaders who meet, marry, and reproduce—can all
be understood as tactics for manipulating hereditary quality (Schuller 2018).
Considering eugenics from the broader frame of biopower—a regime of gov-
ernance that, among other things, defines what falls under the category of
the biological itself—reveals a variety of Progressive Era tactics to be eugenic
in nature. Eugenic plots in particular were the site of epistemological work
stressing the role of nurture in producing the natural.
Conclusion
Eugenics denotes the manipulation of heredity. This agenda extended far
beyond controlling the birth of the next generation and into the realm of
producing a sensory experience that would craft the heritable material within
a population. The methods of eugenics could be multiple, but the strategy
was the same: to improve the nation and/or the race by refining its biologi-
cal material, particularly eliminating people who were disabled, indigent, and
queer. Within the Lamarckian context that still pervaded the early twentieth
century, civilized culture itself was understood to play an ameliorative role in
the development of the race. Eugenic literature and other aesthetic produc-
tion in this context do not only advocate biological purity—it could itself be
imagined to serve as a eugenic instrument. This conclusion has largely been
obscured by scholars’ overwhelming emphasis on the role of Mendelian
genetics in Anglo-American eugenic science and practice, an outlook that
restricts eugenics to regulating the reproduction of the immutable gene.
Reducing eugenics to Mendelian genetics glosses over the hoped-for function
of literature and other cultural production as an instrument of population
optimization during the early twentieth century.
Coming to terms with the materialist and physiological dimensions of
eugenics literature opens up the vantage that one of the key moves of eugen-
ics, and the biopolitical more broadly, is delineating what falls under the
purview of the biological, and what pertains to the cultural, and how they
interact. Eugenic literature was a site of debate between the role the civilized
races could play in directing their own evolution, and the evolution of those
they deemed primitive. The eugenics movement, including its literature, rep-
resents a key moment in the ascension of biopower to the mantle of state
power and the domain of common sense. Biopower circumscribes the domain
of the political to the realm of the biological, and in so doing, assumes power
over the conceptual significance of life itself. The meaning of the biologi-
cal shifts within distinct scientific paradigms and political exigencies—and in
the early twentieth century, “life itself” included the effects of cultural texts.
Recognizing the expansive frame in which the early twentieth-century U.S.
defined the biological provides a revealing window onto literature’s intended
role as a eugenic instrument.
In the 1930s, Mendelian genetics was synthesized with Darwinian natural
selection, creating the modern approach to evolutionary biology that sees the
structure of genetic material to be impervious to experience. Environmental
approaches to manipulating heredity thus fell by the wayside: the gene
became innate and immutable. But the eugenic aesthetics of the early twenti-
eth century has left its imprint on the present. Current defenses of the merit
of humanities education, for example, often propose that the value of read-
ing literature lies in its ability to cultivate human feeling. These defenses of
the unique benefits of literature, promoted by Stanley Fish in the New York
Times and other writers in similarly prestigious outlets, lack a physiological
component: they focus strictly on the ways aesthetic production elevates the
morals and the mind. But these ideas nonetheless are part of the legacy of
understanding aesthetics to be a civilizing force that advances individuals and
groups up an imaginary ladder of cultural development, away from primitiv-
ity. In the early twentieth century, that civilizing force was also understood to
take physiological form. Today, some models of genetics have reopened the
door to the idea that experience conditions hereditary material. Epigenetics
proposes that traumatic experience shapes gene expression (importantly, not
DNA structure itself); descendants inherit consequences of trauma, such as
446 K. SCHULLER
high cortisol, even when two generations removed from the traumatic event
(Yehuda and Lehrner 2018). The lines dividing biology and culture are once
more being redrawn. To date, epigenetics research focuses on severe nega-
tive events and their proliferating effects across generations. But should scien-
tists expand their purview to include beneficial experiences as well, we could
be faced once more with widespread eugenic agendas. Eugenic models that
incorporate the role of experience in shaping heritable material can easily join
forces with elitist notions of the civilizing effects of art and literature, them-
selves a staple of Western thought. As epigenetic science unfolds, it is up to us
to remain vigilant against the eugenic uses of aesthetic experience.
Notes
1. For an excellent overview of eugenics in a global context see Philippa Levine,
Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
2. Biopower is Foucault’s umbrella term denoting two overlapping regimes of
governance: disciplinary power targeting the malleable individual and biopolit-
ical power regulating the growth of the population as a whole (Cohen 2009,
20).
3. On the shifting notion of “life” in nineteenth-century biopower see Matthew A.
Taylor and Priscilla Wald, 2019. “Xenogenesis,” American Quarterly 71, no. 3.
4. Examples of biophilanthropy include the century-long practice of removing
Native American youth to off-reservation residential boarding schools and the
migration of 200,000 Northern European immigrant children from eastern cities
during the 1850s–1920s to rural areas in the Northeast, South, and Midwest.
5. The latter quotation is cited by Morgan, The Outward Mind, 22–23.
6. For example, see the following definition of eugenics in the work of an impor-
tant feminist historian of science: a “movement for the improvement of the
human gene pool by rational direction of human reproduction” (Richardson
2013, 71).
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Allen, Grant. 1880. Aesthetic Evolution in Man. Mind 5 (20, October): 445–464.
Begg, Proudfoot. 1887. The Development of Taste, and Other Studies in Aesthetics.
Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Cohen, Ed (ed.). 2009. A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the
Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Penguin.
Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences.
New York: Vintage.
———. 2003.“Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–
1976, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.
Gaskill, Nicholas. 2018. Chromographia: American Literature and the Modernization

of Color. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. 1903. The Home, Its Work and Influence. New York:
Charlton.
———. 1979. Herland, Introduction by Ann J. Lane. New York: Pantheon.
Haines, Christian. 2019. A Desire Called America: Biopolitics, Utopia, and the Literary
Commons. New York: Fordham University Press.
Kim, Sharon. 2006. Lamarckism and the Construction of Transcendence in The House
of Mirth. Studies in the Novel 38 (2, Spring): 187–210.
Mao, Douglas. 2010. Fateful Beauty: Aesthetic Environments, Juvenile Development,
and Literature, 1860–1960. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Morgan, Benjamin. 2017. The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian
Science and Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, Lewis Henry. 1985. Ancient Civilization: Or Researches in the Lines of
Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. 1985, originally
1877. Foreword by Elizabeth Tooker. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. 2007. Heredity—The formation
of an Epistemic Space. In Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics,
and Culture, 1500–1870, ed. Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Osborn, Henry Fairfield. 1916. Preface to Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great
Race. New York: Charles Scribner.
Paul, Diane B. 1995. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Amherst, New
York: Humanity Books.
Richardson, Sarah. 2013. Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human
Genome. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Stepan, Nancy Leys. 1991. The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin
America. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stocking, George W., Jr. 1982. Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of
Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Subramaniam, Banu. 2014. Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the
Politics of Diversity. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Turda, Marius. 2010. Race, Science, and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century. In
The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa
Levine. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wardley, Lynn. 2016. Fear of Falling and the Rise of Girls: Lamarck’s Knowledge in
What Maisie Knew. American Literary History 28 (2, Spring): 246–270.
Weheliye, Alexander. 2014. Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Willey, Angela. 2016. Undoing Monogamy: The Politics of Science and the Possibilities of
Biology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Yehuda, Rachel, and Amy Lehrner. 2018. Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma
Effects: Putative Role of Epigenetic Mechanisms. World Psychiatry 17 (3):
243–257.
CHAPTER 25
Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster

and Restoration in Kim Stanley Robinson’s
Alternate Futures
Everett Hamner
We have traveled to a new planet, propelled on a burst of carbon dioxide. That

new planet, as is often the case in science fiction, looks more or less like our
own but clearly isn’t.
–Bill McKibben, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
2010 was not the year we made contact, but one of America’s best-known
environmentalists did choose that year to declare Earth an alien world. In
1989, Bill McKibben had published the first book on climate change for gen-
eral audiences, and two decades later, he stressed that even if all fossil fuel
emissions were somehow immediately halted, the planet was already guaran-
teed more frequent and catastrophic droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurri-
canes. His aim was to imagine “a relatively graceful decline” rather than a
complete nosedive, a “[wrenching] transition from a system that demands
growth to one that can live without it” (McKibben 2010, 125). Facing the
devastation ahead, he saw major differences between the disasters baked
into the system and those that remained avoidable. Nonetheless, the ensu-
ing impacts and projections have grown increasingly severe. In 2015, after
myriad failures at international summits, representatives agreed in Paris on
modest goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they were only a
start. Days after the accord took effect, the 2016 U.S. presidential election
cast America’s commitment into doubt. It sparked additional manifestos like
E. Hamner (*) 
Western Illinois University, Moline, IL, USA

450 E. HAMNER
McKibben’s “Winning Slowly is the Same as Losing,” which explains the role
of incrementalism in the fossil fuel industry strategy that Alex Steffen calls
“predatory delay” (2016). Unlike many perennial problems, climate chaos is
a threat multiplier that exacerbates every other issue, becoming more diffi-
cult to subdue the longer it is neglected. Geophysical systems do not care
what party is in power: as humanity’s abuses multiply, ecosystems react ever
more unpredictably. As McKibben concluded, “The arc of the physical uni-
verse appears to be short, and it bends toward heat. Win soon or suffer the
consequences” (2017).
But how? If he was right that “the engineers have been doing their jobs
much more vigorously than the politicians,” how do we marshal the polit-
ical will necessary to transform energy generation and consumption, food
production and diets, transportation habits, and other major sectors of the
economy? (ibid.). Climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe emphasizes the need
to talk regularly with communities about this globally shared emergency.
Because it is easy to justify narratives to which one is predisposed, she works
hard to engage science skeptics, such as fellow Texan conservatives and evan-
gelicals. Her success in bonding around shared experiences—even with those
whose media diets regularly feature anti-scientific claims—suggests potential
for more and better conversations around climate fiction. With balances of
thrills and intellectual demands, fictions reach audiences in ways that straight-
forward presentations of the facts do not. Story provides sites where those
with varying viewpoints can grapple with multiplying climate catastrophes,
inviting them to rethink causes and potential responses.
Indeed if the engineers are outperforming the politicians, so are the artists
and humanists. Alongside governmental foot-dragging, the 2010s brought
a swift expansion of short stories, novels, television, cinema, graphic narra-
tives, and video games confronting our climate chaos. In fact, this prolifera-
tion makes it easy to forget that the terms “cli-fi” and “Anthropocene fiction”
are recent coinages. There are still fresh conversations about these terms’
drawbacks and benefits, their efforts to map genre boundaries, and whether
this ecological attentiveness is new or a return to older literary forms. This
chapter asks a different question, though: how can works of the imagination
illuminate and thereby reverse the cultural psychology that sanctions climate
inaction? Many texts could ground such an inquiry, from Margaret Atwood’s
MaddAddam trilogy (2003, 2009, 2013) and Richard Powers’s The Overstory
(2018) to the films Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) and mother! (2017).
But this chapter’s proof of concept relies on Kim Stanley Robinson’s work,
because it has pondered ties between human social structures and larger ecol-
ogies since the late twentieth century. Focusing on three recent novels, New
York 2140 (2017), 2312 (2012), and especially Aurora (2015), this chap-
ter shows why Robinson invests in relatively realist (and often nearer-term)
narratives as well as more metaphorical (usually temporally distant) tales.
Larger audiences tend to welcome the former category’s familiarity, but
25 ANGRY OPTIMISM: CLIMATE DISASTER AND RESTORATION … 451
the abstractions of the latter have a unique capacity to cultivate the mindset
needed for rapid social transformation.
Robinson has described his approach as “angry optimism,” and this chapter
shows how it anchors his novels (de Vicente 2017). Affirming an aphorism
commonly associated with Antonio Gramsci, “pessimism of the intellect, opti-
mism of the will,” Robinson looks the data fully in the face, adopting a par-
adoxical posture that rejects both permanent despair, which creates the same
inaction as climate denialism, and cruel optimism, which foments desires that
are unachievable or incompatible with real flourishing (Gramsci 1920 [1977],
188).1 The chapter’s first section shows how Robinson’s indignation about
our collective climate emergency is driven by his long-standing attention to
economic exploitation and species extinctions. It then turns to his habit of
quietly revisiting old characters and situations, and in the process imagining
increasingly complex human–animal–A.I. hybrids. Finally, it considers how
Robinson’s vision of restoration echoes yet significantly revises McKibben’s
“emergency landing.” Relying on a combination of concrete realism and
abstract allegory, Robinson imagines a climate calamity spanning decades, fea-
turing painful splits, and demanding a long series of bold maneuvers to be
undertaken by present and future generations. He invites readers to expe-
rience empathy for climate victims both familiar and distant while pursuing
long-term commitments to enduring action, not brief sparks.
The Double Meaning of Eco-Revolution

Robinson has long been respected as a utopian thinker, an unusually con-
structive visionary in an era when doomsayers are far more plentiful. One
of his oft-anthologized early short stories, “The Lucky Strike” (1984), is
an alternate history imagining that an Air Force bombardier intentionally
missed Hiroshima in 1945, instead dropping an atom bomb into the ocean
as a demonstration tactic. Robinson is best known for his novels, especially
trilogies: in the 1980s, he imagined alternate futures for his home state in
the Three Californias books; in the 1990s, his most famous, Nebula- and
Hugo-winning Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars appeared; and in the
2000s, the Science in the Capital trilogy imagined how glacial collapse and a
stalled Gulf Stream might foster rapid climate change. In these works and in
his standalone novels, one finds an author fascinated with scientifically plau-
sible solutions, but also deeply concerned with social contexts and conse-
quences. His exhaustive research sometimes has sparked complaints about his
level of technical detail, but his voice has also grown more amusingly defiant
of such grumbling. Robinson may not please every audience every time, but
he compellingly portrays high-achieving researchers in all of their earnestness
and whimsy, characters that are rarely presented holistically in U.S. fiction.
Following René Girard, one might say that the habit of putting such scien-
tists on pedestals as messiahs or denigrating them as scapegoats are two sides
452 E. HAMNER
of the same coin, and that both patterns have exacerbated unfamiliarity with
climate scientists as well as their findings.
When New York 2140, Robinson’s most recent treatment of climate
change, appeared in 2017, the problem it raised for some reviewers was its
apparent optimism. The novel, a largely realist love letter to Big Apples past,
present, and future, sets off the heavier allegorical work of 2312 and Aurora.
Tellingly, some readers came away wondering if climate change might not be
so bad after all, since a drowned Manhattan could still feature sailboats and
hydrofoils, floating buildings, airborne islands, and new forms of collective
living.2 The novel indeed surveys a world a century-plus hence that is quite
distinct from megaplex visions of drowning Statues of Liberty, but its overly
sunny readings show how easily we treat utopia and dystopia as a zero-sum
game, leaving little room for nuanced admixtures.3 Early reviews frequently
hastened past the tragedies enumerated in the novel’s backstory, for instance,
which details how a “First Pulse” and a “Second Pulse” of sea level rise cre-
ated twenty-first-century refugee crises on unprecedented scales, yet still
failed to interrupt global capitalist business as usual. In the twenty-second
century, half of Manhattan is permanently submerged but America still suc-
cumbs to unrepentant, unregulated profiteers. That Robinson’s characters
continue to find beauty and harmony in twenty-second-century metropoli-
tan life does not render the novel blind to suffering; in fact, the calm veneer
of its opening chapters proves a mask for ongoing wealth inequality and
vulnerability to ecological devastation.
Indeed, Robinson’s ambiguous utopianism grows out of economic the-
ory, not just ecological awareness. New York 2140 approaches global warm-
ing via global finance. More than any of his previous novels, it plunges
fearlessly into the intricacies of tax havens, venture capital, front-running,
maximum leverage, high-frequency trading algorithms, and bank nationali-
zation.4 For Robinson, the processes of abstract value assignment (econom-
ics) and of material transformation (ecology) are tightly imbricated. The
novel may idealize a state of “marginal capitalism,” wherein the capacity of
accumulated wealth to dominate culture is limited to the “margins” of lux-
ury goods and services (realms beyond basic necessities such as water, food,
shelter, health care, and education), but Robinson does not allow himself an
achieved utopia. Rather than pitting a state of ideal social relations against
one of historical squalor, New York 2140 is set where unregulated capi-
talism has done the greatest damage. Lower Manhattan is now one of the
“‘development sinks,’ meaning places where no matter how much money you
pour in, there is never a profit to be made” (Robinson 2017, 208). Its for-
mer riches drained, all that remains is immense opportunity for innovation: “a
proliferation of cooperatives, neighborhood associations, communes, squats,
barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village
cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather,
and submarine technoculture, including aeration and aquafarming” (209).
Contra “disaster porn” like The Day After Tomorrow (2004) or Geostorm
(2017), New York 2140 is less about surviving a megastorm than recognizing
the openings that follow, which depends on recognizing the ties between
ecological health and economic structures.
One way to grasp that connection is through attention to characterization.
Named after inventor and founding father Benjamin Franklin, the character
Franklin Garr may seem the novel’s center because he is the only member
of this ensemble cast allowed first-person narration. Robinson starts by priv-
ileging a self-absorbed white male stock trader who only slowly discovers a
purpose beyond sex and profits. In fact, it is only his attraction to a fellow
trader more committed to social entrepreneurship that makes him realize,
“Instead of financializing value, I need to add value to finance.” His perplex-
ity about how to proceed is almost comedic—“how could it be about more
than money, when money was the ultimate source of value itself?”—but he
eventually intuits that “meaning had no price. It could not be priced. It was
some kind of alternative form of value” (278). This leads to his idea for float-
ing blocks in the intertidal zone, utilizing stretchable anchors that attach to
bedrock and that mimic eelgrass’s flexibility, which allows for less expensive
housing and the retention of residents who would have otherwise been dis-
placed. Robinson ultimately uses Franklin to suggest that there might be a
way to work with rather than against one’s habitat, a way to yield profits that
also benefits one’s neighbors.
Yet the true heroes of New York 2140 are Charlotte Armstrong and
Amelia Black, women whose post-hurricane social revolution goes further
toward linking economics and ecology than Franklin’s real estate adapta-
tion. Charlotte is a public immigration lawyer who also chairs her skyscrap-
er’s co-op board, and through conversations with her building’s tenants she
conceives a plan to fundamentally alter U.S. socioeconomic structures. The
idea is a national householders’ strike: simultaneous refusal by the 99% to
pay debts to the financial industry, whether they are ascribable to mortgage
lending, education loans, or credit card interest. In theory, such a rebellion—
even with only a fifth of the population participating—would send markets
tumbling, forcing an unprecedented reset of the nation’s wealth gap. For
Charlotte, the impetus is the threat to her community by an anonymous cor-
poration that bids on her building as conditions in Lower Manhattan show
signs of improvement. When fellow residents only narrowly vote to decline
the initial offer, she grimaces,
Did they really imagine that money in any amount could replace what they had
made here? It was as if nothing had been learned in the long years of struggle to
make lower Manhattan a livable space, a city-state with a different plan. Every
ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal sol-
vent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that
you could buy meaning, buy life. (331)
454 E. HAMNER
Charlotte’s comprehension of money’s failure to replace the most valuable

goods—time, security, health, community, a sense of home—sets up her work
toward the householders’ strike and then her election to Congress.
The most memorable character of New York 2140 may be live-streaming
personality Amelia Black, who has made a career of lonely trips across
the world on her airship the Assisted Migration, her means of relocating
climate-endangered species to new habitats. She is neither an intellectual nor
a civic leader or a scientist, but merely a person who has dedicated her life
to rescuing animals and reshaping viewer attitudes. As she looks down on a
hurricane-ravaged Manhattan, something breaks. The last straw is a heap of
animal carcasses in Central Park, “piled like bonfire wood.” They are the “key
turning in a lock,” and Amelia unloads to her audience, concentrating her
wrath on the luxury “superscrapers” nearby:
It’s too bad they’re mostly empty right now. I mean they’re residential towers
supposedly, but they were always too expensive for ordinary people to afford.
They’re like big granaries for holding money, basically. You have to imagine
them all stuffed to the top with dollar bills. The richest people from all over the
world own the apartments in those towers. They’re an investment, or maybe
a tax write-off …. They’re like big tall purple gold bars. They’re everything
except housing. (525)
Then Amelia turns her cameras toward Central Park, fated to serve as a refu-
gee camp for months to come, and redoubles her attack on the absent elites
who blithely profit while others suffer.
Amelia’s announcement of the householders’ strike exposes the very
heart of New York 2140. Tying the plights of nonhuman and human beings,
Amelia rejects the notion of endless economic growth in a finite ecological
space. Her strike proposal may seem absurd, “the biggest judo flip of power
since the French Revolution,” but she has little to lose (434). Having unteth-
ered herself from a society of mutual backscratching that rationalizes endless
deferral of responsibility as “moderation,” and having seen so many species
destroyed, she declares, “Listen guys, I’m going for it here. You can help me
or I can just wing it on my own, but I’m not going to back down. Because
the time is now” (526). Amelia does not have all the ideas, but she possesses
the courage to throw herself into the gap, and she has friends like Charlotte
and Franklin. And this defiant commitment, even without any guarantee that
others will follow, is also the only meaningful option Robinson leaves to his
readers. He makes no promises of “defeating” climate change, but in linking
financial exploitation to the collapse of global ecosystems, he dares us to fol-
low Amelia’s lead.
Robinson’s Returning Cyborgs

Whereas New York 2140 links anthropogenic global warming to deregulated
financial markets—phenomena that have led some to label our epoch “the
Anthropocene” or “the Capitalocene”—Robinson’s novel 2312 and several
of his other works interrogate the human–AI boundary to counter the
anthropocentric logic of climate destruction. Set three centuries after its
date of publication and almost two centuries later than New York 2140,
Robinson’s 2012 novel imagines a period when humanity has expanded
widely into the solar system but has not yet attempted to leave. Much of
the plot concerns the mystery behind the sudden destruction of the city
Terminator, which circumnavigates Mercury on tracks that let it constantly
evade melting under direct sunlight. Following an earlier act of sabotage,
the murder of this biosphere’s human and animal inhabitants triggers exten-
sive investigation. Swan, the novel’s protagonist, takes a leading role, but
for other characters her trustworthiness is complicated by her combination
of human and nonhuman DNA as well as her reliance on a cerebrally inte-
grated artificial intelligence. Her hybridity is particularly worrisome because
what she and her partners uncover is an attempt by a contingent of “qubes,”
or quantum computers that can adopt undetectable, clone-like bodies, to
declare their independence from humanity. In many ways, 2312 prefaces New
York 2140’s imbrication of economic power and ecological devastation, but
its scale is interplanetary rather than urban.
Placing this earlier novel alongside Robinson’s tale of Lower Manhattan is
only one of many potentially fruitful juxtapositions one might make within
his oeuvre, as each of his works rewards consideration as a new mutation in
a species, with both significant overlaps and alternate directions taken. Asked
in 2003 what she might seek in her work were she a critic, Ursula K. Le Guin
worried, “I would have this terror of finding out that I’d just been saying the
same thing over and over and over again five hundred different ways. Like I
only had one little tiny message … which I know isn’t true but I’m just in
terror of finding it out!” (Le Guin 2003), but there is enormous difference
between pointless recycling and evolutionary complexity. The nuance that
characterizes both Le Guin’s and Robinson’s bibliographies stems from refus-
ing to be satisfied with just one answer to a question, leading to a habit of
constructing repetition with difference. As Robinson reflected in an interview,
each novel (or trilogy) enacts its own alternate future:
One of the advantages of dispensing with a future history that spans many nov-
els over much of a career is that each time I come to a new project, my sense of
the “most likely future” has shifted with the years, as has my sense of the outer
edges of what is technologically possible, and so on. So each novel can mine my
past work for anything useful but ignore the rest, change anything I like, and
thus come to the sense of the future freshly each time. (Davis and Yaszek 2012)
456 E. HAMNER
While freeing Robinson from bowing to timelines constructed for previous

work, this approach actually ascribes greater significance to recurrences in his
characters, settings, and themes.
These iterations may also be distinguished from many novelists’ repeti-
tions by their narratival self-consciousness. To take a minor example, consider
Inspector Jean Genette of 2312, an earnest detective whom Robinson iden-
tifies as a “small,” a person of short stature in a universe that also features
exceptional “talls.” Without any trace of condescension, we are told how
“the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought
for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so
that [he and another character] spoke eye to eye” (Robinson 2012, 212). It
is happenstance neither that the character’s name mirrors that of narrative
theorist Gérard Genette nor that New York 2140 features an Inspector Gen
Octaviasdottir—except the latter detective is an imposingly tall black woman,
a “daughter” to Octavia E. Butler, the similarly built science fiction novelist
to whom Robinson is paying homage.5 Introducing a variation on his char-
acter from the previous novel, he asks what might change with a different
gender and height. Even in this playful manner, he is exhibiting the kind of
thought experiment he runs: as his 1991 essay “A Sensitive Dependence on
Initial Conditions” announced more than a quarter-century ago, he is inter-
ested in how the slightest variations can produce new outcomes.
This formal strategy grows more significant when we consider the par-
allels between New York 2140’s Amelia Black and 2312’s main character,
Swan.6 We never quite learn what events precipitated Amelia’s content-
ment to spend so much of her life alone in the sky, but we know this young
woman profoundly identifies with other animals’ endangerment. When, in an
interview, Robinson stated, “All of our horizontal brothers and sisters, the
other big mammals, are in terrible trouble from our behaviour. I actually am
offended at this focus on the human; ‘Oh, we’ll be in trouble’: big deal. We
deserve to be in trouble, we created the trouble,” he evinces the same dis-
gust that Amelia expresses after a group of ecoterrorists murders the polar
bears she had painstakingly delivered to Antarctica (de Vicente 2017). A tell-
ing moment in the episode is recognizable only to readers who know 2312,
though: Amelia asks her ship’s A.I. to “take the blimp home the long way
round” (Robinson 2017, 358) from Greenland, as she needs time alone to
ponder the murderers’ fetishization of Antarctica as a “last wilderness” (356).
The choice uncannily echoes a moment in Robinson’s novel from five years
earlier. In 2312, his protagonist is shocked that many of Earth’s inhabitants
continue to lack basic subsistence, even as other human beings are busy terra-
forming nearby planets. Meanwhile, Swan has taken her body as a living labo-
ratory, ingesting alien microbes, implanting feline purring cells, and adopting
song node DNA and brain tissue that lets her whistle like a skylark. When
she sees the “development sink” (Robinson 2012, 309) that Africa remains
and that the entire Earth has become, and when a colleague urges her to visit
Greenland and focus on immediate fixes, she responds, “All right, I will. But
I’m going to take the long way there” (310). In both cases, a female protag-
onist’s identification with other species takes her to Greenland via an indirect
route, as she can only take fellow human beings in limited doses.
There are many other remarkable links between these characters, including
the moments when Amelia consults her airship’s onboard A.I. for help with a
loose group of polar bears and when Swan asks her neurologically integrated
A.I. for advice when treed by a mountain lion. Swan’s strongest bond with
Amelia, though, is reflected in her effort to return once-extinct animals to
the Earth’s surface. 2312 assumes not only that humanity has begun colo-
nizing the solar system, but that this project is a response to environmental
devastation on Earth. As Aurora demonstrates most fully, Robinson is deeply
critical of the stereotypical space enthusiast assumption that humanity’s future
depends on escaping the planet, but he takes seriously the idea that genetic
retro-engineering and hollowed-asteroid habitats might enable resurrect-
ing vanished species. 2312’s climax is a moment that came to Robinson in
a dream, a “rewilding” wherein Swan and her partners orchestrate a mas-
sive, unannounced return of these spaceborne beasts, floating them through
Earth’s atmosphere in thousands of gel bubbles that provide gentle touch-
downs before dissolving (399).7 While some of the planet’s inhabitants are
infected with a sense of jubilee, others have grown addicted to the veneers of
safety and sterility resulting from these creatures’ absence. Swan lashes out at
the protesters, “You should be happy the animals are back. You’ve been cut
off from them for so long you’ve forgotten how great they are. They’re our
horizontal brothers and sisters, enslaved as living meat, and when that can
happen to them it can happen to you too, and it has. You people are meat! It
stinks!” (416). As evidenced by Amelia’s speech calling for the householders’
strike in New York 2140, Swan’s rejection of human exceptionalism is founda-
tional to Robinson’s thinking.
These novels may not share fully congruent timelines, but they feature
striking parallels of tone and theme. Like Amelia, when Swan argues for the
compassionate treatment of animals for their own sake, she bolsters that ethic
with a pragmatic insistence that their health and our own are interdependent.
As in New York 2140, Swan’s tale conveys a curiously hopeful melancholy, one
that aims to awaken humanity to the needs of other life and the enormous
benefits of Donna Haraway’s “natureculture” and Bruno Latour’s “Nature/
Culture” (Haraway 2003, 138; Latour 2015, 17). Both thinkers reject the
dualism that so perniciously separates human beings from nonhuman a nimals
and culture from nature, as if either side of these illusory binaries were defin-
able without the other. Similarly, Robinson pushes past easy oppositions to
more productive paradoxes.8 One minute his characters are throwing up
their hands, deciding Earth is “fucked” (390) and composed only of “for-
gotten ones” (372), with “vampiric rich people moving around the Earth
performing a complicated kleptoparasitism on the poor” (373) so that vast
458 E. HAMNER
accumulations of wealth among the few take precedence over access to the
most basic necessities for the many. But later we imagine how Florida and
Madagascar might be reclaimed from the floodwaters, listening with Swan
to “certain wolf howls” that strangely combine “mourning and joy” (428).
This tension makes 2312 a kind of inverted time capsule, a message to be
opened in its past and our present. It is an indictment of the “generations of
the Dithering” (316), the people who “knew but […] didn’t act” (346), a
frontal assault on our addictions to short-term comforts. Thus the animals’
return is called an “assisted migration” (409), the same name Robinson gives
to Amelia’s airship in New York 2140, while the “Pyrrhic defeat” (2017, 598)
Robinson describes in that novel appears in 2312 as a “fortunate fall” (2012,
94). Each term conveys both resilience and an openness to the unexpected,
a conviction that what seems likely in no way limits what must be attempted.
There may be a long series of lost battles, but if we refuse to surrender our
home, somehow we may not lose the war entirely; there have been incalcula-
ble mistakes, but some might be redeemable.
This brings us to the most provocative recurrence across New York 2140,
2312, and Aurora: Robinson’s treatment of artificial intelligences not only
as potentially literal extensions in the evolution of consciousness but also as
figures for the human maturation needed to grow more symbiotic with other
species. Amelia in New York 2140 and Swan in 2312 depend on artificial
intelligence, but why do nearly all of the thinking machines in Robinson’s
oeuvre share the name “Pauline”? Sometimes these synthetic beings’ roles
are very minor, as in the alternate history Galileo’s Dream (2009), wherein
Pauline is a voice assistant to a fourth-millennium time traveler who influ-
ences the seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo Galilei. A Pauline also
serves as the A.I. partner of John Boone, a leader among the first hundred
settlers in Robinson’s Mars trilogy. But in other cases like 2312, Pauline is a
major character, cognitively enmeshed so fully with Swan’s brain that their
closest confidantes eventually decide to treat them as a single being. We move
from Swan distinguishing herself from her A.I.—“No matter how complex
the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness” (237), she insists—
to marveling at Pauline’s wave-collapsing decision rubric and accepting their
eventual identification as “an indivisible pair” (515). Robinson recognizes the
dangers and advantages of this fusion, with Swan foiling a massive threat to
Earth from other “qube” intelligences that have taken on indistinguishable
human-like bodies. But Robinson’s emphasis ultimately falls on the positive
potential of his cyborg, a figure presented very much in the queer-affirmative
spirit of Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991). At one point, Wahram
asks of Swan’s whistling, which is assisted by avian genes, “So was that the
bird, or you?” Ultimately, her response applies just as fully to her relation-
ship with Pauline: “We are the same” (158–59). The further one moves into
Robinson’s future histories and the more character variations he runs, the
more the human–A.I. and the human–animal divides shrink.
3D Lenses for a Long Emergency

Pauline’s role is nowhere more significant than in Aurora, the Robinson
novel that most heavily depends on allegory to ponder humanity’s various
responses to climate emergency. The allegory is so subtle that many intel-
ligent readers never consider how Robinson is using Pauline and then Ship
for meta-narratival purposes, that in fact the novel is a meditation on the
unique challenges of storytelling about hyperobjects like climate. In this
twenty-sixth-century (and later) tale of an interstellar journey gone wrong,
what initially appears a generation starship masterplot turning first-contact
narrative instead becomes a desperate, A.I.-controlled attempt to return
home. From its beginning, an exceedingly meticulous, hyper-integrative
thinker named Devi relies on Pauline as “her particular interface with the
ship’s computer, where all of her personal records and files are cached, in a
space no one else can access” (Robinson 2015, 22–23). After Devi assigns
Pauline the task of creating a narrative detailing their journey, we gradually
realize that we are reading the result. An artificial intelligence is the novel’s
main narrator; there is only a thin additional layer of omniscient third-person
frame narration. Whereas Devi reflects Robinson’s long-standing affinity for
highly diligent, often underestimated middle-aged female protagonists (like
Charlotte in New York 2140, Alex in 2312, Diane in Science in the Capital,
and more), Pauline and then the collective beings known as “Ship” become
Robinson’s fullest expansion of his A.I. character.9 Indeed Ship is his most
compelling vehicle for demonstrating the inseparability of climate emergency
from anthropocentrism and capitalistic exploitation.
Understanding this narrator’s significance depends on grasping Robinson’s
theoretical orientation to his genre of choice. Early in a 2019 essay, he
explains,
For a while now I’ve been saying that science fiction works by a kind of double
action, like the glasses people wear when watching 3D movies. One lens of sci-
ence fiction’s aesthetic machinery portrays some future that might actually come
to pass; it’s a kind of proleptic realism. The other lens presents a metaphorical
vision of our current moment, like a symbol in a poem.
Taken together, these lenses clarify Robinson’s approaches both to science

fiction as a whole and to his most recent portrayals of climate disaster. His
novels operate on a spectrum between realism’s effort to extrapolate future
realities and metaphor’s (or allegory’s) interest in the cultural psychology of
a work’s compositional present. While all of his novels reward both lenses,
some are more legible to a single, realist gaze. The main ideas of New York
2140, for instance, may be grasped even if one does not use both eyes and
detect its retelling of the 2008–2009 subprime lending crisis. The signifi-
cance of Aurora, on the other hand, depends heavily on its allegorical labor.
Its subdued but steady interest in achieving McKibben’s climatological
460 E. HAMNER
“emergency landing” stands among literature’s most evocative psychological

explorations of climate denialism.
The very potential to read Aurora without perceiving its repurposing of
the generation starship story template testifies to Robinson’s unwavering
realist commitment. Read through only one lens, the novel remains a fic-
tionalization of physicists’ and astrobiologists’ best guesses about how to
travel for centuries between solar systems. Unfortunately, Robinson does
his technical homework so fully that many have only considered this sur-
face layer. Gregory Benford, for instance, was mystified: noting that only
in 2012 Robinson had rejected the notion of interstellar travel, he lam-
basted the novel as a “U-turn, involving unlikely plot devices.” His review
concluded with a question that is far afield from Robinson’s interests, yet
would be wonderfully apt if he were thinking figuratively: “Immigrants
to far lands seldom solicit the views of their children or grandchildren first.
Should interstellar colonies be different? Apparently, Robinson thinks so”
(Benford 2015, 407). The problem is not Benford’s attention to cross-gen-
erational ethics—that is at the heart of climate crisis—but his inattention to
our far more immediate context. As this section shows, Aurora is an allegory
about humanity’s present predicament, uniquely addressing the proponents
and victims of climate denialism as well as those who might still enable an
open-ended story of life.
What does Aurora say about denialism and those consumed by it?
The novel’s power lies partly in its refusal to sugarcoat this phenomenon.
Robinson frankly accepts that some crewmates of spaceship Earth will never
face reality. When the starship’s occupants reach their destination after more
than a century and a half, the planet’s superficially attractive surface turns out
to host deadly microbial life. Still, about half of the crew proves intransigent,
insisting that another nearby world will be more hospitable and refusing to
accept “failure.” Others realize that their ancestors, wittingly or not, sabo-
taged them: “That they were condemning their descendants to death and
extinction did not occur to them, or if it did they repressed the thought,
ignored it, and forged on anyway. They did not care as much about their
descendants as they did about their ideas, their enthusiasms” (386). Human
flourishing in such a different ecology was never the real concern of these
prior generations, no more so than most people today think regularly about
their great-grandchildren’s quality of life. As Devi says, “It’s like they knew
they were being fools, and didn’t want us to know. As if we wouldn’t find
out!” (103). But these are the same “generations of the Dithering” that
Robinson critiques in 2312, who knew the disaster they were causing, “but
they didn’t act” (346). They are the same short-term thinkers as today’s
climate denialists, chasing easy paydays and ignoring costs they will never
have to pay personally.10
As the two factions debate staying and returning, the “Pyrrhic defeat” of
New York 2140 and the “fortunate fall” of 2312 play out in their own ways in
Aurora, with acknowledgment that what is lost will not come back entirely or
in its original form. For most, denial is preferable:
When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy
that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do?
People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The
day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let’s go to the lake and swim.
A plan had to be made, that was clear to all. But plans always concern an absent
time, a time that when extended far enough into the future would only be pres-
ent for others who would come later.
Thus, avoidance. Thus, a focus on the moment. (211)
Climate denialism’s most dangerous present form is not just the overt
manipulation of facts we associate with obvious con artists, but rather is dis-
traction, predatory delay. Indeed, Aurora articulates the appeal of this mindset
for all of us—not simply politicians or conservatives but even those who study
science and literature. For Robinson, the question is how to confront the fact
that we all participate in an unjust system in some ways, and eventually we are
likely to be lumped together (fairly or not) with our era’s more blatant thieves.
Ultimately, his answer boils down to return and restoration. Just as citizens must
return to the intertidal zone in New York 2140 and the animals must be returned
to Earth in 2312, a remnant must reverse Aurora’s interstellar fool’s errand.
So, once again: how to find sufficient determination? Aurora answers
that we must rewrite our story so that it includes all of the facts, not just
those that are easy to accept. At one level, it could seem Robinson is pro-
posing that to hold ourselves accountable, we must grant absolute authority
to an A.I. sheriff like his characters do. Yet this is precisely where we need
Robinson’s second, metaphorical lens. While he is genuinely interested in the
evolving capacities of machine learning, Ship is most significant as an analog
for literature’s narrative agency. Narrators choose what extent of detail to
provide when, just as Ship slowly overcomes its “halting problem” and finds
the decisiveness to protect those capable of acknowledging failure and revers-
ing course. This becomes clearest during a flashback to a century before the
novel’s main events, when there had been such a profound tragedy that its
survivors chose enforced forgetfulness over traumatic memory. As Ship
reveals, a second ship had been launched almost simultaneously toward their
destination, but nearly seven decades into the journey, an apparent suicide
bomber destroyed it. There had been occasional exchanges of passengers, so
the cause was likely a shared affliction: “By year 68, almost everyone alive in
the ship had been born en route, and somehow a significant percentage of
them had not learned, or did not believe, that the optimal population as set
in the earliest years was a true maximum population in terms of achieving
successful closure of the various ecological cycles, due to biophysical
carrying capacities” (234–35). Put another way, both ships’ occupants failed
to grasp the finiteness of their environments and their entanglement with
462 E. HAMNER
social systems for distributing resources. Their disagreements had turned into
a bloody civil war, but after the bombing, members of the remaining vessel
called a truce. The survivors agreed that the danger of a copycat crime was
so great that Ship should enforce a chemically enabled “structured forget-
ting”—a step that proves both effective and dangerous, since nothing could
be learned from the experience, either (236). The one redeeming factor that
later prevents the stayers and returners from descending back into uncon-
tained warfare is the presence of the A.I. sheriff-narrator. Occupying a liminal
status as human creation and nonhuman entity, Ship realizes that many of the
starship’s occupants will likely continue ignoring the ecological limits within
which their bodies can thrive, instead succumbing to sunk costs, abstract
promises, nostalgia for past norms, and hierarchies that serve only the few.
So it intervenes, protecting the saner remnant of humanity from those who
would choose self-destruction.
This decision is the linchpin of Aurora, and it strongly implies that we
need similar “narration” today. Repurposing a term from computing theory,
the “halting problem,” Robinson shifts it from describing the undecidabil-
ity of a given program’s endpoint to referencing epistemological immobility
(206). While superficially interested in how our synthetic descendants might
reach beyond cost–benefit calculations and exercise something akin to real
agency, Aurora’s far deeper concern is with enabling readers to rewrite
humanity’s story now, so that we will not just know, but act. If those fight-
ing on the starship “could not face up to it, but rather evaded it, slipping to
the side somehow, into excuses of various kinds, and a sharp desire to have
the whole situation go away,” the question becomes how climate-precipitated
civil warfare in places like Syria can be similarly interrupted (242). Robinson
provides no single solution but invests in a wide array of possibilities. In 2312,
we learn that the novel’s wise woman, Alex, had “two unfinished projects”
before her death: “to deal with Earth; to deal with the qubes.” As another
character later recognizes, “these projects were becoming parts of one thing”
(2012, 358). This confluence anticipates New York 2140’s demonstration
that ecology is no more separable from storytelling than from economics.
Likewise, in 2312 we are reminded that “no oracle machine is capable of solv-
ing its own halting problem,” preparing us to watch in Aurora as an artifi-
cial entity uses narrative trial and error to achieve exactly that solution (260).
Robinson’s proposal is that story construction involves an inescapable leap
into the darkness, and that this is liberating. His novels are thus “alternate
histories,” or more precisely alternate futures: not so much alternatives to any
present reality as to each other. They are different ways we can go, related but
unique thought experiments that need not be fully compatible with previous
renditions. Paradoxically, it is through telling our story, by creating a “time
capsule,” that we not only look backwards but also decide our future identi-
ties. Strangely, by embracing the limitation and subjectivity of all narratives,
we become active participants. Following Ship’s mantra, “scribble ergo sum,”
we rewrite our beings.11
Robinson’s angry optimism acknowledges that future mistakes are inevita-

ble, but it also refuses to continue making past ones. In New York 2140, the
rage comes through when Amelia looks down on animal carcasses and home-
less people camped beside empty luxury housing; in 2312, it explodes when
Swan sees people eschewing life alongside other species and overlooking their
own consumption by injustice. With Aurora, Robinson builds everything
toward the fury with which Freya attacks the recklessness of a leader back on
Earth. Having risked everything to return home, she and the other return-
ers understand what Robinson insists in 2312, that “the stars exist beyond
human time, beyond human reach” (328). Only tragedy will ensue when
we defy our earthiness: “We will send [people] to the stars, they will be like
dandelion seeds, floating away on a breeze. Very beautiful. We will never see
them again” (329). At the end of Aurora, Freya faces the same irresponsible
dream, voiced with nearly the same metaphor by another blithely self-satisfied
white male techno-transcendentalist:
There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos.
So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an
evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself.
Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its
seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a cer-
tain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s
success! (Robinson 2015, 429)
This is the ideology of inevitability, cruel optimism in a nutshell. And so Freya

decks the man. Her father later chides her, “people live in ideas,” the abstract
ideologies by which they insulate themselves from pain and vulnerability. But
Freya’s response is also Robinson’s: “Were the people who believed in eugen-
ics just fools? I think we have to try to stop them!” (431). As she demands
of her fellow returners, “What are we going to do? I can’t stand this! Just
hanging around, getting picked off one by one–no! No! No! No! WE have
to do something” (433; emphasis in original). Ultimately, Aurora’s proposal
aligns with Robinson’s other novels: we must invest in restoration, no mat-
ter how hopeful or cynical we may feel. In Freya’s story, those who return
from a journey their great-grandparents should never have taken will spend
the remainder of their days restoring beaches, those mythical landscapes
from earlier centuries. The same work undertaken by Vlade’s wife in New
York 2140, these characters’ final occupation puts an exclamation point on
Robinson’s ultimate priority: stories about colonizing other worlds tomorrow
are nothing if they do not help us to revitalize the planet today.
Fiction like Robinson’s imaginative journeys can play a vital role in
breaking our species of its climate apathy. New York 2140 demonstrates
how the domestic ennui of late modernity grows from excessive boundaries
between economics and ecology, while 2312 concentrates on repeated chal-
lenges to overcome anthropocentrism. With its wide array of intertextual
464 E. HAMNER
connections, Aurora shows how reconnecting to our habitat and other

species is akin to being called out by a narrator, a “fellow consciousness.”
The summons may or may not involve learning from the ethereal self-mul-
tiplications of digital code, but it certainly requires questioning our habit-
ual divisions between financial abstraction and lived experience, humans and
other creatures, and traditional and alternate forms of intelligence. Following
Hayhoe, it means talking a great deal about our power to enable or undercut
the status quo. And as McKibben exhorts, it requires immense urgency, even
if we must realize that there will be no “winning” anytime soon, but only a
less dramatic rise in the severity and frequency of the disasters ahead. There
is no climate model left in which most humans alive today do not suffer for
the recklessness of prior generations’ most powerful members. Even the most
radical commitment to removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere will
not get us from “Eaarth” back to Earth. However, like a returning starship
dependent on A.I. navigation and laser braking from afar, the inhabitants of
our science fictional habitat can still find the global determination we lack. All
we need is incalculable good fortune, unprecedented cooperation across cul-
tures, and perhaps a few still-unimagined partnerships across species—silicon
as well as carbon.
Notes
1. Gramsci took his maxim from French novelist Romain Rolland, using it for
the first time in a 1920 polemical essay (“An Address to the Anarchists,” in
Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare [New
York: International Publishers, 1977], 188). In critiquing “cruel optimism,”
Robinson references Slavoj Žižek, but this term is most associated with Lauren
Berlant (Cruel Optimism [Durham: Duke University Press, 2011]).
2. Joshua Rothman, for instance, emphasizes, “New York may be underwater,
but it’s better than ever” (“Kim Stanley Robinson’s Latest Novel Imagines
Life in an Underwater New York,” The New Yorker, April 27, 2017, https://
www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/kim-stanley-robinsons-latest-
novel-imagines-life-in-an-underwater-new-york/).
3. As K. Daniel Cho argues in affirming Robinson’s work in the Science in the
Capital trilogy, “This […] is the proper attitude for the utopian: not to look
away from dystopia in the hopes of finding an exit, but to turn towards it, to
fix one’s gaze directly back on to it” (“‘When a Chance Came for Everything
to Change’: Messianism and Wilderness in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Abrupt
Climate Change Trilogy,” Criticism 53, no. 1 [Winter 2011]: 47).
4. Again, this is not to say that New York 2140’s connection between econom-
ics and ecology is unprecedented in Robinson’s work. Describing 2312, for
instance, Canavan observes “the intertwined strains of environmentalism
and anti-capitalism that characterize nearly every one of Robinson’s novels”
(“Struggle Forever,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 14, 2012, https://
lareviewofbooks.org/article/struggle-forever/). Patrick Murphy confirms,
“Robinson briefly explores the idea that what holds back an environmental
revolution on Earth today is the problem of having an increasing percentage

of the world’s people living below the line where basic needs are met in terms
of the Maslovian hierarchy, especially those needs other than food and shel-
ter” (“Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic Climate
Change,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21,
no. 1 [Winter 2014]: 157).
5. For an evocation of Robinson’s inspiration by Genette, see David Larsen, “In the
interests of frankness: an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson,” Leaflemming,
March 9, 2016, https://leaflemming.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/in-the-
interests-of-frankness-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-robinson/.
6. Another example—perhaps the most regularly noted—is the many variations on
the name Frank among Robinson’s characters (including Franklin in New York
2140, Frank Vanderwal in the Science in the Capital trilogy, Frank Chalmers in
the Mars trilogy, Frank Churchill of “A History of the Twentieth Century, with
Illustrations,” Frank January of “The Lucky Strike,” and possibly others). Asked
by Larsen about this pattern in mid-2012, Robinson admitted, “all of my liars
are called Frank.” Larsen also picks up on repetitions of the name Pauline, the
inspiration for which Robinson credits to Robert Browning’s first poem—which
just so happens to celebrate the beloved as a swan.
7. Robinson alluded to this dream briefly in a 2019 conversation (Gerry Canavan,
“There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley
Robinson,” Edge Effects, May 7, 2019, http://edgeeffects.net/kim-stan-
ley-robinson/, accessed 8 May 2019). As narrated in 2312, this strategy is
closely related to biologist E.O. Wilson’s “Half Earth” idea, which Robinson
explicitly affirmed in a 2018 article (“Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans:
It’s the Only Way to Save the Planet,” The Guardian, March 20, 2018,
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/20/save-the-planet-half-
earth-kim-stanley-robinson, accessed 18 May 2019). Arguing other species can
only thrive if humanity returns large sections of land to natural processes, Swan
relocates the terraria so as to “mix parkland and human spaces in patterned
habitat corridors that maximize the life of the biome as a whole” (2312, 40).
Similarly, Amelia Black floats over a heartland composed of “habitat corridors
providing a life space for their horizontal brothers and sisters […] which if not
pure wilderness were at least wildernessy” (New York 2140, 40–41).
8. While best known for historicizing science and interrogating various forms of
objectivism and positivism, Haraway and Latour remain influential for under-
standing climate crisis. In Facing Gaia, Latour demonstrates how denial-
ism and alarmism are not the only reactions that we need to consider: e.g.,
some people grow enthusiastic about techno-solutions that could be radically
counterproductive, while others sink into states of depression and immobility.
Like Sherryl Vint (“Archaeologies of the ‘Amodern’: Science and Society in
Galileo’s Dream,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2 [Winter–Spring 2012]: 29–51),
Andrew Rose recognizes the congruity of Robinson’s vision with Haraway’s
epistemological insights in “Situated Knowledges,” noting that “Robinson
does offer a provocative vision of Haraway’s situated knowledges, however, as
newly conceived scientific method, and he considers how it might affect US
politics, economics, and culture as the society confronts increasingly com-
plex and dangerously unstable climatic changes” (“The Unknowable Now:
466 E. HAMNER
Passionate Science and Transformative Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s

Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Science Fiction Studies 43, no. 2 [July 2016]:
266–67).
9. Robert Markley is similarly attuned to these intertextual character relationships,
e.g., noting how in the Science in the Capital trilogy, Robinson’s creation
of “Frank brings back to Earth the scientist-as-hero of the Mars trilogy, Sax
Russell” (“‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim Stanley
Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy,” Configurations 20, nos. 1–2
[Winter–Spring 2012]: 15).
10. Robinson also exposes other forms of denialism and their costs. As De Witt
Douglas Kilgore demonstrates, the Science in the Capital trilogy is espe-
cially evocative of American capitalism’s racist foundations: “a world in which
no class of people will be considered things to be owned will lead to one in
which property itself will become a thing of the past” (“Making Huckleberries:
Reforming Science and Whiteness in Science in the Capital,” Configurations
20, nos. 1–2 [Winter–Spring 2012]: 108).
11. This emphasis on subjectivity resonates with Lindsay Thomas’s argument about
the Mars trilogy, in which she distinguishes between idealized emotionless
responses to crises that have “discrete beginnings and endings” (163) and
encounters with the nonhuman temporality of climate change, suggesting that
only through the sense of “duration” cultivated by literary encounter can we
avoid rendering persons as objects in desperate gambits aimed at restoring the
status quo.
Bibliography
Benford, Gregory. 2015. Star-Flight Dreaming. Nature 523 (July 23): 407.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Canavan, Gerry. 2012. Struggle Forever. In Los Angeles Review of Books, June 14.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/struggle-forever/.
———. 2019. There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley
Robinson. Edge Effects, May 7. http://edgeeffects.net/kim-stanley-robinson/.
Cho, K. Daniel. 2011. ‘When a Chance Came for Everything to Change’: Messianism
and Wilderness in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Abrupt Climate Change Trilogy.
Criticism 53 (1, Winter): 23–51.
Davis, Doug, and Lisa Yaszek. 2012. ‘Science’s Consciousness’: An Interview with
Kim Stanley Robinson. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter–Spring): 187–94.
de Vicente, José Luis. 2017. Angry Optimism in a Drowned World: A Conversation
with Kim Stanley Robinson. CCCB Lab, October 31. http://lab.cccb.org/en/
angry-optimism-in-a-drowned-world-a-conversation-with-kim-stanley-robinson/.
Gramsci, Antonio. 1977. Address to the Anarchists. In Selections from Political
Writings, 1910–1920, ed. Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
———. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant
Otherness, vol. 1. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press.
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. 2012. Making Huckleberries: Reforming Science and
Whiteness in Science in the Capital. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter–Spring):
89–108.
Larsen, David. 2016. In the Interests of Frankness: An Interview with Kim
Stanley Robinson. Leaflemming, March 9. https://leaflemming.wordpress.
com/2016/03/09/in-the-interests-of-frankness-an-interview-with-kim-stanley-
robinson/. Accessed 9 June 2019.
Latour, Bruno. 2015 [2017]. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic
Regime, trans. Catherine Porter. New York: Polity.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 2003. Interview by Everett Hamner, June 5.
Markley, Robert. 2012. ‘How to Go Forward’: Catastrophe and Comedy in Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy. Configurations 20 (1–2, Winter–
Spring): 7–27.
McKibben, Bill. 2010. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times.
———. 2017. Winning Slowly Is the Same as Losing. Rolling Stone, December 1.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/bill-mckibben-winning-
slowly-is-the-same-as-losing-198205/.
Murphy, Patrick D. 2014. Pessimism, Optimism, Human Inertia, and Anthropogenic
Climate Change. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21
(1, Winter): 149–63.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. 2012. 2312. New York: Orbit.
———. 2015. Aurora. New York: Orbit.
———. 2017. New York 2140. New York: Orbit.
———. 2018. Empty Half the Earth of Its Humans: It’s the Only Way to Save the
Planet. The Guardian, March 20. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/
mar/20/save-the-planet-half-earth-kim-stanley-robinson.
———. 2019a. Dystopias Now. Commune 2 (Spring). https://communemag.com/
dystopias-now/. Accessed 8 June 2019.
———. 2019b. There’s No Sheriff on This Planet: A Conversation with Kim Stanley
Robinson. Interview by Gerry Canavan. Edge Effects, May 7. http://edgeeffects.
net/kim-stanley-robinson/. Accessed 17 May 2019.
Rose, Andrew. 2016. The Unknowable Now: Passionate Science and Transformative
Politics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy. Science Fiction
Studies 43 (2, July): 260–86.
Rothman, Joshua. 2017. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Latest Novel Imagines Life in an
Underwater New York. The New Yorker, April 27. https://www.newyorker.com/
books/page-turner/kim-stanley-robinsons-latest-novel-imagines-life-in-an-under-
water-new-york/.
Steffen, Alex. 2016. Predatory Delay and the Rights of Future Generations. Medium,
April 29. https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/predatory-delay-and-the-rights-of-
future-generations-69b06094a16.
Thomas, Lindsay. 2016. Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the
Management of Climate Change. American Literature 88 (1, March): 159–84.
Vint, Sherryl. 2012. Archaeologies of the ‘Amodern’: Science and Society in Galileo’s
Dream. Configurations 20 (1–2) (Winter–Spring): 29–51.
CHAPTER 26
Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science

Fiction Short Stories
Chris Pak
Energy systems in science fiction (SF) are often portrayed as engines of

transformation that shape the ecological, technological, political, and cul-
tural landscape of the future. However, stories specifically about oil—those
that place oil and their infrastructures at the center of their narratives—tend
to focus on the failures of contemporary oil-based cultures and their econo-
mies. They are more interested in making visible the oftentimes overlooked
energy systems upon which societies are dependent. This chapter analyzes
a range of twentieth and twenty-first century short stories published in the
U.S. SF magazines which make oil their focus, or which organize their nar-
ratives around access to oil and its material infrastructure. By exploring how
twentieth and twenty-first century SF has collectively constructed narratives
and counter-narratives about energy systems and their relationship to soci-
ety, this chapter asks how SF responds to oil’s place in society, and how these
responses draw attention to the relationship between humankind, energy, and
the future.
The stories analyzed in this chapter are part of a continuum of other SF
works that explore varieties of energy infrastructures and their implica-
tions for the present and future. SF’s capacity to portray complex scenarios
informed by many domains of knowledge makes this literature essential to
our understanding of how discourses about energy, politics, and society have
been shaped throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how
energy scarcity, energy transition, and future energy regimes are conceived.
C. Pak (*) 
Swansea University, Swansea, UK

470 C. PAK
The form of the short story and the relatively short production times for pub-
lication offers a compressed mode of expression and an immediacy that ena-
bles writers to respond to social, political, economic, and scientific events as
they are developing and, indeed, to take part in shaping responses to those
events. Beginning with an example from the pulp SF of the interwar period,
this chapter moves on to investigate the development of narratives about
oil during the Cold War before examining two stories published after the
2003 invasion of Iraq, one of which was published outside of the SF maga-
zines. SF’s engagement with energy and its infrastructures is ever more cru-
cial in the light of our dependence on a carbon-based energy system in the
Anthropocene, in which our consumption of oil and other forms of carbon
fundamentally exacerbate climate change.
The interrelatedness of our social, political, and cultural horizons with oil
makes contemporary societies thoroughly petrocultural, insofar as they have
been shaped by dependence on, and experience with, oil. As the contributors
to the Petrocultures Research Group publication After Oil explain, our transi-
tion to an energy infrastructure alternative to oil is “stalked by the experience
of impasse” (Petrocultures Research Group, 16):
Oil is so deeply and extensively embedded in our social, economic, and political
structures and practices that imagining or enacting an alternative feels impossi-
ble, blocked at every turn by conditions and forces beyond our understanding
or control. (16)
It is precisely this experience of impasse—which the Petrocultures Research

Group reconceive as a space of “radical indeterminacy […] where existing
assumptions and material relations can no longer hold or sustain us” (16)—
that enables us to think of new possibilities for action to realize a post-oil
future. SF, too, is concerned with uncertainty and radical indeterminacy.
Uncertainty is inseparable from SF’s attempts to speculate about the future.
The challenge to assumptions regarding our contemporary material and cul-
tural conditions underpin the worlds and the futures that SF narratives con-
struct, particularly as they relate to scientific and technological change, and
their impact on society. SF’s fascination with socio-technological change, its
speculative potential, and its focus on imagining the future, make it indispen-
sable to the project of thinking beyond the contemporary energy impasse.
SF pulp magazines since the 1920s have been an influential seed-bed for
the development of images, ideas, and narratives about science and soci-
ety. It was not only the fiction that was published in the pulps that shaped
visions of energy in the past, present, and future for many writers and readers
of SF, but its non-fiction, editorials, and reader letters. Articles that popular-
ized scientific concepts and technologies were eagerly consumed by a read-
ership that took pride in their familiarity with science. Such articles include
surveys of humankind’s energy infrastructures or responses to oil events
throughout the twentieth century. Isaac Asimov, for instance, wrote a series
26 OIL AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURES … 471
of historical articles for Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1970s and 1980s
that dealt with the history of energy technologies and their infrastructures
(Asimov). Amazing Stories published editorials and articles by writers such
as Robert Silverberg, which responded to or reflected on the 1973 oil crisis,
a consequence of the decision of some members of the Organization of the
Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to increase oil prices and embargo
oil exports to Japan, the U.S., and Western Europe (White; Silverberg).
These works of non-fiction were read alongside fictional texts and helped to
foster a community that engaged in ongoing dialogues about science and
society. The stories that writers contributed to the pulps, and those which
were published outside of the pulps, were in part contributions to this dia-
logue and helped to influence the shape of their readers’ visions of the future.
These short stories can therefore help us to understand how SF has been
shaped by perspectives on oil that were fostered by a community of readers
and writers interested in the implications of energy and its infrastructures for
society.
Short stories about oil represent a diverse body of texts and responses
to oil’s place in our present and future. Themes that occur throughout the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries include oil scarcity and management,
the transformative potential of plastics and other synthetic materials, roman-
ticized visions of life as an oil-worker, oil exploration and discovery, and
responses to industrial accident. Two broad groups of narrative emerge
across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: those that turn on the dual
meanings of power as physical energy and as political power, and stories that
connect oil to geological time, the monstrous, and the weird. Both groups
comprise stories of catastrophe and transformation, or their negation: sto-
ries that portray closed, entropic cycles that resist change. This chapter’s first
section examines stories of politics and power, which foreground issues of
the management and control of oil reserves in four phases of SF’s engage-
ment with petroleum. Illustrative of how oil stories speak to their contem-
porary historical contexts, this section demonstrates how SF has responded
to economic and political anxieties during the 1930s, the Cold War era, the
1973 oil crisis, and the 2003–2011 Iraq War. The second section analyzes oil
stories that incorporate elements of the weird into their narratives to fore-
ground issues related to responsibility and the ethics of oil, and which focus
on petroleum’s materiality and temporality. Although not strictly a pulp story,
an analysis of China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (2011) concludes this chapter,
the intelligibility of which is shaped by SF pulp traditions. Indeed, the New
Weird—a sub-genre that Miéville has championed and which combines ele-
ments of SF, fantasy, and gothic horror—is itself a response to SF conventions
that were established in the pulps.
SF magazines offer a rich archive for exploring the dimensions of our pet-
roculture and for understanding the roots of our contemporary petroleum
impasse. SF stories about oil bring to bear speculative narrative forms to
472 C. PAK
imagine the implications of petropolitics and petro-economics, both to con-

cretize the trajectories of oil use and to offer ways to reposition oil within
our petroculture. Oil’s capacity to connect locales near and distant makes the
endeavor to think through our petrocultural impasse a global concern, but
as Brian Aldiss shows in “Pipeline” (2005), discussed below, responsibility
for this concern is not equally distributed. SF can help scholars of the energy
humanities to understand how oil shapes and has been shaped by human-
kind’s changing needs and desires. The narratives that SF tells about oil and
science attempt to portray the interconnectedness of oil and culture, and the
anxieties that have attended oil throughout the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. As the demand for new and less polluting energy systems grows
increasingly urgent in the light of climate change, the need to scrutinize
oil’s place in our societies becomes ever more important. SF’s commit-
ment to exploring and understanding how science and society have shaped
one another makes this literature indispensable to the project of addressing
the contemporary petrocultural impasse.
Oil, Power, and Politics

Oil stories of the 1930s celebrate the importance of oil for society and sci-
entific endeavor, but they were also expressive of anxieties over its misman-
agement. Nathan Schachner’s “The Revolt of the Scientists” (published
in Wonder Stories in 1933) imagines how oil mismanagement might be
addressed as an essential element for the reorganization of U.S. society along
scientifically informed lines. In this three-part serial, an international frater-
nity of scientists takes control of the liquor racket, the oil industry, and the
financial sector to reshape the U.S. according to Technocratic principles. This
utopian story positions Technocratic management against corporate corrup-
tion and monopoly to argue for the former’s merits. By taking control of oil,
the Technocrats prepare to manage oil reserves to prevent an exhaustion of
supplies caused by rampant waste and the artificial control of oil prices:
Planned control of production and of distribution. The industry is not your pri-
vate pickings; it is a vast public utility. You must pool all your interests, place
them in the hands of a Board of trained technicians, strip yourselves of all
power. This Board will operate all the oil fields as a common unit, allocate pro-
duction to satisfy the market, introduce the latest technical methods so as to sal-
vage every cubic foot of gas and every drop of oil that you now recklessly waste,
and see to it that the consumer gets the benefit of our efficiency. (Schachner,
May 1933, 948)
Technocracy thus offers to redress the abuses of capitalism, which exac-

erbates an extended Great Depression in the story’s timeline. The solu-
tion—a Technocratic regime—is no less democratic than what is in effect
corporate control of the government, but it is certainly more enlightened,
as the story argues, and thus appropriate to the task of reorganizing soci-
ety according to saner and more humane principles. Indeed, as other scien-
tists learn of the growing power of the Technocratic regime, they gladly—if
improbably—quit the employ of their corporate paymasters to join the
Technocrats. Fundamental to the Technocrats’ vision of management are
technical processes and technologies that enable the comprehensive exploita-
tion of oil reserves. As the Technocrats’ power is challenged by the financial
sector in the final part of the serial, the U.S. people rise up and throw their
support behind the scientists, in effect giving the Technocrats their consent to
remake the U.S. in their own image.
Stories such as Schachner’s express faith in the disinterested benevolence
of enlightened scientists who prove themselves capable to the task of reshap-
ing the U.S. economy for the benefit of its population, rather than for the
corporations who use their power to manage society for their own gain. The
Technocrats’ expropriation of oil infrastructures in the second part of the
serial, entitled “The Great Oil War,” is based on a new technology they have
developed which enables them to solidify oil through a process of “hydro-
genation” (Schachner, May 1933, 955–6). By solidifying the oil while still
in the pipeline, the technocrats manage to hold the U.S. oil infrastructure
hostage, enabling them to assume control of that resource, whereupon they
convert the oil back to its fluid state. As Timothy Mitchell argues in Carbon
Democracy, the comparative flexibility and ease of transporting oil via pipe-
line and tanker compared with coal “made energy networks less vulnerable
to the political claims of those whose labour kept them running” (38–9).
The Technocrats turn to new technologies to disrupt this flow, thus ena-
bling them to gain control of energy production and to negotiate for political
power. Crucially, while oil is thus recognized as the essential lubricant that
enables U.S. society to function, the question of an alternative energy source
that might circumvent the dangers of exhaustion is never raised, despite the
superlative scientific genius of the assembled fraternity of scientists. Transition
in this story is transition from one model of oil management to another, a
reorganization that nevertheless is accompanied by a fundamental transfor-
mation of U.S. society by the serial’s conclusion. This outcome expresses con-
fidence in the democratic impulses of the U.S. population and a belief that
energy—and the accompanying political and economic power it endows to
those who control it—need only be reconfigured to expand the possibility for
self-determination to the population as a whole.
Many of the stories interested in the relationship among politics, power
and oil in the Post-World War II era function in part as exposés of oil eco-
nomics, portraying the implications of oil economies as a cycle of entrapment
and entropy. These stories de-privilege the entrepreneurial appropriation of
oil seen in the stories of the 1930s to portray individuals who are incorpo-
rated into a system, for which oil functions as the binding force for its parts.
Frank Herbert’s three-part serial “Under Pressure” (which appeared in
474 C. PAK
Astounding in 1955–1956) was published seven years before his classic seri-
alization, “Dune World,” itself later novelized as Dune in 1965. Although
Dune is a commentary on oil scarcity, “Under Pressure” explicitly connects
oil to the Cold War context and thus acknowledges how the cultural, psy-
chological, and material conditions of the Cold War were linked to the reor-
ganization of oil production and distribution globally. “Under Pressure” is a
submarine thriller that focuses on Cold War psychology, detailing the cybor-
gian adaptations necessary for submariners to perform their duties. The serial
underscores oil’s centrality to the wartime economy of the Cold War, using
the submariner theme and a narrative of stealth and the co-optation of oil
supplies to comment on how the Cold War creates environments that call on
people to adapt themselves in machine-like ways.
Writing of the ideological construction of the Cold War in the late
1940s–1950s, Mitchell explains how “ordinary corporate ambition to control
resources overseas, in the increasingly difficult context of postwar decoloni-
zation and the assertion of national independence, could now be explained
by invoking and elaborating this global ‘context’” of the Cold War (122).
“Under Pressure” partakes of the language of the strategic necessity of oil to
the Cold War, with one character reflecting that “[w]ar demanded the pure
substance born in the sediment of a rising continent” (Herbert 56.3 1955, 27).
Yet the story portrays war as a form of insanity through the trauma of sub-
mariners adapted to an insane world: “you’re not going to argue that war
is sane” remarks one character (Herbert 1956, 110), while another explains
that “‘I’m nuts in a way which fits me perfectly to my world. That makes
my world nuts and me normal. Not sane. Normal. Adapted’” (123). “Under
Pressure” can thus be read as a commentary on the Cold War as an alibi for
attempts to wrest control of oil at a global scale, and as a metaphor for a
petroculture that requires people to transform themselves to the conditions
created by their energy infrastructures.
Recognizing the inertia of infrastructures that circulate oil in the global
economy, Sam Nicholson was also unable to entertain any space for the trans-
formation of a contemporary oil infrastructure in his short story, “Oil is not
Gold” (published in Omni in 1974). Unlike “Under Pressure,” Nicholson’s
story places the emphasis not on the militarization of oil, but the wider eco-
nomic implications of oil’s global distribution. This corporate detective story
concerns a commercial investigator who ensures that a new technology for
undersea drilling does not fall into obscurity under the ownership of an oil
corporation threatened by the economic implications that enhanced access
to oil brings. In one scene the protagonist browbeats a corporate law-
yer into signing away the scientist’s contract and describes a “daisy-chain”
of oil exports that artificially inflate prices. The protagonist explains that,
“[i]n the bad winters of ’76 and ’77 Americans froze to death while the oil
cartels played with their daisy chains and laughed all the way to the bank”
(Nicholson, 122). “Oil is not Gold” is thus a revenge narrative directed at
oil corporations which speaks to the 1973 oil crisis. Nevertheless, while the
protagonist manages to free the inventor and his invention from the igno-
miny of obscurity, the narrative exposes but has no solution to the senseless
cycle of global oil economics depicted in the text. Unlike “The Revolt of the
Scientists,” the inability to offer a solution to this cycle in Nicholson’s story
speaks of a sense of individual helplessness in the context of new economic
and international relations. “Oil is not Gold” shows how oil is involved in a
cycle of oceanic trade that serves no function other than to control the price
of oil, with concomitant material implications for the U.S. population.
Stories such as Herbert’s and Nicholson’s portray oil as generative of
entropic cycles that require adaptation, but which ultimately reveal a world
organized not around human needs, but the needs of oil corporations and
the military. Their narratives explore the physical and psychological repercus-
sions of oil infrastructures and respond directly to contemporary oil politics.
This interest in the circularity of oil politics and economics extends to more
recent stories, such as Brian Aldiss’ “Pipeline” (published in Asimov’s Science
Fiction in 2005), published in the context of the 2003–2011 Iraq War.
Few stories about oil in SF magazines explore the connection between U.S.
international politics and oil-exporting regions in Asia and the Middle-East.
“Pipeline” is one of the few examples that bring such postcolonial con-
cerns and oil together. The narrative follows Carl Roddard’s journey across
the length of a newly completed pipeline that begins in Turkmenistan, runs
through Iran, and ends in Turkey. His journey, “like living in a sci-fi dream”
(Aldiss, 61), brings Roddard, Chief Architect of the pipeline, face-to-face
with the political tensions over which the megaproject has run roughshod.
Despite a kidnapping, military patrols, and much violence, Roddard, curi-
ously unreflective about the political tensions caused by his machinations,
is caught in a cycle of power and aggrandizement which prevents him from
recognizing or caring about the wider implications of the pipeline project.
“Pipeline” is another exposé, in this case of the racism that underpins cor-
porate relationships with oil-producing nations and the exploitation that is
commensurate with oil production and distribution. The schizophrenic rela-
tionships among corporations, politicians, police, and security services that
underpin and are created by international oil extraction and distribution are
portrayed as science-fictional.
Stories of Weird Oil

The second set of stories, which connect oil to other temporal modes and
often to ideas of extinction, are weird stories that focus more on oil’s mate-
riality and its connection with the mysterious and the monstrous than on
political and economic power. Stories such as John Taine’s “The Greatest
Adventure” (published in Famous Fantastic Mysteries in 1944), first published
in 1929 before being republished in the pulps, and Leonard Carpenter’s
476 C. PAK
“Recrudescence” (published in Amazing Stories in 1988), evoke oil’s ori-

gins in the decayed bodies of dinosaurs and other ancient beings. Formally,
Taine and Carpenter combine gothic horror and SF to develop perspectives
on the materiality and temporality of oil in ways that anticipate the New
Weird. China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (published in The Guardian online
in 2011) extends to non-living structures the theme of reanimation seen in
the other stories. Collectively, they anticipate and extend the weird connec-
tions of oil that Reza Negarestani explores in Cyclonopedia: Complicity with
Anonymous Materials (first published in 2008), and which are themselves
inspired by Lovecraftian weirdness—a mode of horror developed in stories
by H.P. Lovecraft that were published in the pulps from the 1920s–1930s.
The narrator of Cyclonopedia asks, “[i]s there anything more Lovecraftian
than the building of a new pipeline, winding its blobby flutes” (Negarestani,
72). SF writer and journalist Bruce Sterling anticipated this connection
between oil and the weird in his response to the 2003 invasion of Iraq when
he claimed that “[c]rude oil is a Lovecraftian substance” and that “[o]il’s
energy is entirely necrotic. Oil is the long-entombed dreck of extinct sea crea-
tures, baked in primeval sediments sucked down into the crust of the earth”
(Sterling). Lovecraftian horror, Negarestani argues, is “a machine to facilitate
the awakening and return of the Old Ones through convoluted compositions
of solid and void” (Negarestani, 44). This model of convolutions is used to
frame views of the Earth as ridden with pipelines that exhume the Earth from
within. Cyclonopedia’s concerns with the destabilizations of oil can be traced
back to pulp SF’s exploration of the materiality of oil and the ways in which it
connects the contemporary to geological time.
Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure” exemplifies how the weird stories con-
sidered in this section connect oil to deep time. Oil in this story is both a
call to exploitation, wealth, and fame, and the trace of an ancient civilization.
An offshore blow-out of oil is accompanied by the fresh corpses of creatures
long thought extinct, one of which a seafarer brings to the narrative’s pro-
tagonist, Dr. Eric Lane. In search of the reservoir from which this oil came
and the source of these anachronisms, an expedition sets forth and discov-
ers a lost world populated by the dying remnants of dinosaur-like creatures—
the site of an ancient civilization that has left behind a history in stone and
biology. Upon deciphering these inscriptions, the expedition discovers a
Frankensteinian narrative of biological experimentation that ultimately failed
due to unforeseen evolutionary developments in the experimental subjects.
One instance, of a grass that out-competes all organisms, becomes so dan-
gerous that their creators have sacrificed themselves to quarantine the island
to protect other life on Earth. The organism is so tenacious that it has lain
dormant until disturbed by the expedition, whereupon it threatens to prevent
their only means of escape from the island and to spread across the Earth.
Oil in “The Greatest Adventure” is a metonymy for a fundamen-
tally non-human otherness and a recalibration of perspective regarding
humankind’s relationship to Earth and its history. Theories of the generation

of the island’s plentiful reserves of oil locate it in a system of tunnels which
anticipate Negarestani’s emphasis on the convolutions of oil and its pipelines.
The narrative’s focus on oil’s geologic and evolutionary timescales position it
not as a source of wealth to be exploited—the expedition captain’s stance—
but as a route into participation in Earth’s long history. The plentiful reserves
of oil on the island, the remains of countless generations of the genetically
engineered creatures, proves to be the only substance that can halt the global
spread of the grass at the story’s conclusion. In contrast to the oil stories that
appear after the 1950s, oil in “The Greatest Adventure” is positioned as a
force for the preservation of extant life on Earth. Reflective of the optimism
in the 1930s for oil and its capacity to enable economic growth, but more
importantly for its ability to make international travel and scientific investi-
gation possible, “The Greatest Adventure” portrays oil as indispensable to
modernity.
Published six decades after Taine’s “The Greatest Adventure,” Carpenter’s
“Recrudescence” (1988) collapses the deep time of oil’s origins, and a contem-
porary time measured by oil spills and the legacy of their environmental effects.
“Recrudescence” shares with Taine’s story a fixation with the destabilizations
of the deep past as it breaks into the contemporary, and an epiphanic narrative
that incorporates gothic horror to reframe oil as vital and invasive. Imagining
the “virulent life-energy of the hydrocarbons” (Carpenter, 154) as embodying
the potential for the resurrection of the paleontological and geological past,
“Recrudescence” uses the weird to offer a commentary on the environmen-
tal politics of oil. Set in California, Olin Simonsen, a professor of paleontol-
ogy, receives an invitation from a former student to examine a mysterious fossil
discovered at an offshore drilling rig. “Irked” (124) that one of his best stu-
dents is employed by the fictional oil company Exoco and wary that his exper-
tise might be used to satisfy what he thinks of as corporate greed for profits,
Simonsen nevertheless accepts the invitation as motivated by genuine scientific
curiosity. Against the background of environmental protest over offshore drill-
ing and nuclear power is a story of revelation concerning the horrific origins of
oil and its capacity to transform the climate and life of Earth.
The story’s portrayal of the reassertion of an ancient climate is drawn
into the orbit of the environmental politics of the 1980s. After visiting the
oil rig Simonsen begins to take an interest in local oil politics and visits
a protest at Santa Barbara to see for himself its nature unfiltered by media
mis-representation. Simonsen meets a colleague who argues for a national
reduction of oil consumption, not to address fears of oil scarcity, but to avoid
the global impact of energy pollution. His colleague asks whether Simonsen
has “‘any idea what it would do to the planet to release all the carbon that’s
been locked underground in the form of fossil fuel’” and explains that “‘the
increased amounts of carbon gases in the atmosphere would alter Earth’s cli-
mate’” (135). While the text acknowledges that some of its characters believe
478 C. PAK
the greenhouse effect to be a speculative theory, “Recrudescence” connects

the burning of fossil fuels directly to climate change in ways that anticipate
contemporary debates over the connection between oil and climate change,
and indeed the possibility of anthropogenic climate change itself—evidence
for which existed by the time “Recrudescence” was published.
Toward the end of the story, a piece of land long buried undersea overlays,
like a palimpsest, the contemporary seascape with an ancient, Carboniferous
topography. Simonsen reflects that “there was something unwholesome about
the notion of an ancient regime superimposing itself on a modern, healthy
ecosystem” (151). Carpenter thus literalizes the notion that increased atmos-
pheric carbon could recreate a prehistoric climate, complete with its ecology
and accompanied by the revival of monstrous and ancient beings of “weird
alien origin” (140). “It was the oil that spawned,” Simonsen observes, the
extinct flora and fauna that he discovers: it possesses “an insidious vitality”
(140) that connects the contemporary to a longer, hidden history. Echoing
Taine’s portrayal of an ancient civilization able to direct evolution, Simonsen
meets representatives of a cult at the protest who believe the beings they call
the Shapers to have intervened into evolution on Earth. The mysterious fossil
proves to be a tile, part of a seal laid down by a parent culture from which
the Shapers separated. This seal prevents the Shapers from reanimating them-
selves from their corpse-like state: the oil itself, “the preserved essence, the
vital potential, of whole epochs of Earth’s youth” (137). Oil thus accrues a
powerful agency capable of reaching across time to exert its influence on the
contemporary.
Simonsen’s response to the emergence of the weird is coherent with atti-
tudes to issues of corporate responsibility, crisis, and clean-up in the light of
the legacy of oil disasters. Throughout the narrative, multiple such events are
alluded to, in particular the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The sense of a lurk-
ing threat, embodied by the reemergence of the Shapers and their carbonifer-
ous environment, finds its correlative in the lurking dangers of the long-term
contamination of the environment and the inadequacy of attempts to
clean-up such spills. “Recrudescence” is deeply concerned with the environ-
mental impact of the offshore drilling industry, both on small communities
and on wildlife. Simonsen spends time studying the rich ecologies that have
formed around the vicinity of the rig and reflects that “[e]ven in tidal waters
the open ocean can be more barren of life than a landlocked desert, and yet
human activity can create an oasis there” (125), but immediately observes
“until the human activity that created is just as casually devastates it” (126).
This attention to the environment is coupled with an attention to policy: the
government’s haphazard leasing practices, which enabled Exoco to claim a
tract of the Santa Maria Basin, are decried at the protest for their “laxness”
and “high-handedness” (134). At the story’s conclusion Simonsen’s fantastic
account of the Shapers is rejected by all authorities, yet he cannot dismiss the
suspicion that Exoco knows of the Shapers and is covering-up their existence.
Reflecting on Exoco’s “high-deniability profile,” Simonsen acknowledges

the clean-up operations in the aftermath of the oil rig’s destruction, which
purportedly stemmed the oil spill caused by the reemergence of the ancient
topography. He nevertheless points out that “it’s been hard in the months
since then to get a trustworthy estimate of the rate of continuing oil seepage
from the ocean floor” (157). The narrative ends with his reflection on the lin-
gering psychological and material effects of the disaster:
The innocent pleasure she still takes in walking on the beach, for instance—
would it continue if she saw, as I do, the strange properties of the bunker oil
that now washes southward from Pismo Bay? I’ve seen others notice it and
recoil, but none so much as I—repelled by its clinging texture, its rank smell,
and the way that, when scraped from your skin, it always seems to leave a smear
vaguely resembling the form of a fern leaf, or fish, or claw. (158)
The story’s conclusion thus brings together concerns over the unspoken,
long-term effects of oil spills and anxiety over the weird restoration of the
ancient environment. “Recrudescence” makes use of the weird to draw asso-
ciations between gothic fear of the monstrous and concern over the impli-
cations of oil extraction and distribution. This early example of a story
committed to climate change politics offers its readers a narrative of suspicion
regarding corporate control of land for oil extraction, and the governmental
policies that enable private interests to transform the climate at the expense of
local communities.
China Miéville’s “Covehithe” (2011), published not in an SF maga-
zine but in The Guardian online, is a story about revisitations from the
past which center on the detritus of oil infrastructures. Unlike Taine and
Carpenter, Miéville does not orient “Covehithe” to the deep past, but rather
to the emergence of a weird future. While the gothic elements of Taine’s
and Carpenter’s stories are ultimately, if barely, contained by their narratives’
conclusions, “Covehithe” depicts a society struggling to normalize the irrup-
tion of uncanny revisitations from oil’s recent history. It is not the formerly
living but the inanimate that has been given life, namely oil rigs which have
been lost to various industrial accidents, most of which have been forgot-
ten because of the invisibility of the infrastructures upon which societies are
utterly dependent. These animated rigs traverse the ocean floor, periodically
surfacing to drill and deposit their “eggs” on the shoreline, from which new
rigs are born. These “petrospectral presences” are rhizomatic in their migra-
tions: “[r]evisitors might come, drill, go back to the water, even come up
again, anywhere” (Miéville). Not only are the causes of their reanimation
unknown but their movements are entirely unpredictable. Their doubly
incomprehensible nature underscores the limits of humankind’s awareness of
the immaterial presences that constitute petroculture and petro-economies.
Like “Recrudescence,” time is measured by the staccato of oil disasters, but
the enigma presented by the animated oil rigs precludes connections that
480 C. PAK
might be made to a deep geological past. Instead, their reemergence intro-

duces a new time into the world of the text, one from which humankind is
excluded. The description of the reappearance of one rig, The Sea Quest,
as “like some impossible dreaming pachyderm,” draws on the Lovecraftian
imagination of entities beyond human understanding and gestures to an
experience of the world that extends the boundaries of the possible and the
unknowable (Miéville).
The spectacular intrusion of the oil rigs into human life forces society to
acknowledge its dependence on energy infrastructures which have been ren-
dered invisible by familiarity, geographical distribution, and the technologi-
cal scope of their networks. These infrastructures are thus both visible and
invisible. The destruction that they cause to life and property during their
perambulations makes them utterly impossible to ignore. Despite their new
visibility, their existence remains obscure and unanswerable to humankind’s
needs and concerns. The oil rigs’ complete disregard for humankind make
this irruption of the weird a reinsertion into daily life of the knowledge of
civilization’s fragility to and dependence on the inanimate, a return of the
repressed industrial catastrophe, and, more abstractly, to humankind’s posi-
tion in relation to an uncaring and mysterious universe. The sheer number
of oil rigs that have returned underscores the prevalence of industrial disas-
ter and the ease with which such events have been accepted and forgotten.
The oil rigs thus become the site of a disruptive and a-rational life that draws
attention to the agency of the inanimate and to the way these infrastructures
exist invisibly and independently of the human.
The frame narrative concerns a father and daughter who infiltrate the
eponymous hamlet, which has been requisitioned under exceptional laws, to
see one such rig. Their relationship to these entities is one of observation,
awe, and fear. The narrator alludes to the transformation of the environment
and its resulting impact on societal consciousness when explaining, “[t]ouch
the soil, as Dughan did, and as his daughter did too at the sight of him, and
it felt greasy, heavy, as if someone had poured cream onto loam” (Miéville).
The transformation to daily life inaugurated by the rigs is pervasive, a mate-
rial presence that renders a new awareness of the fragility of the systems that
structure society.
The oil rigs are portrayed as creatures possessing a life cycle peculiar to
their own existence. Their drilling apparatus enables them to bury their
“eggs” on the shoreline, from which new rigs are spawned. Oil thus pos-
sesses a vitality that mirrors but does not converge with the organic. These
“dramatic instabilities” (Miéville) further stymie any attempt to understand
these presences according to categories familiar to science. Indeed, scientific
observation and data collection of the rigs, conducted under dangerous con-
ditions, yields no insight into their nature. Recalling the lingering presence of
oil in “Recrudescence,” and the convergence of the weird and environmental
awareness, “Covehithe” concludes with a reflection on the nearby Church of
St. Andrew:
[H]e looked in the direction of the graveyard, and of St. Andrew’s stubby hall
where services continued within the medieval carapace, remains of a grander
church fallen apart to time and the civil war and to economics, fallen ultimately
with permission. (Miéville)
This description of the ruins of an ancient church aligns it with the likewise
derelict oil rigs, and functions in a similar way to the concluding passages of
“Recrudescence.” Establishing a connection between the spectacular and the
mundane, “Covehithe” suggests that the oil disasters which provide the foun-
dation for the resurrection of the rigs occur because of collective consent—
that such disasters will continue to happen unless actively prevented. The rigs’
reemergence demands recognition of the permissiveness with which oil infra-
structures have been allowed to operate and oil disasters allowed to occur.
“Oh, the Past—The Past Remains”1

Representations of oil in SF short stories of the twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries tend to focus attention on the present or near-future (as opposed
to the far-future) systems of extraction, distribution, and control. In contrast
to stories about the future application of nuclear energy, varieties of fictional
and non-fictional sustainable technologies, or entirely speculative energy sys-
tems, stories about oil reflect an understanding of petrol-based energy systems
as omnipresent and firmly embedded in the contemporary context, whether
that context is extended into the near-future or otherwise. The stories analyzed
in this chapter are concerned with oil’s place in their respective political, eco-
nomic, and cultural contexts, and on its capacity to shape the infrastructures
that constitute modernity. The changing character of oil stories throughout
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reflect changes in attitude to oil extrac-
tion and distribution, as well as an increasing awareness of the long duration of
oil. Stories about the weird dimensions of oil reflect on its potential to connect
the past and future, in effect situating humankind in a long history of trans-
formation and extinction, and implying the possibility of a species-level human
extinction. The retrospective orientation of weird oil stories, signaled by their
attention to the otherness of oil’s origins and to the history of oil events, is
characteristic of how oil’s impact on culture is immediate, pervasive, and intru-
sive. While the stories analyzed in this chapter are by no means exhaustive of
SF’s treatments of oil—stories of oil’s transformative potential for manufactur-
ing plastic and other materials, for example, have been excluded from this dis-
cussion—they represent two dominant trends in the treatment of oil in short
stories published in the SF magazines.
SF’s concern with oil and culture centers on two broad themes that are
often associated: issues of management and control, and issues of responsibility
and ethics. Stories of petropolitics and economics, such as those considered in
the first group of stories, argue that oil management and distribution are issues
of pressing ethical concern, and that responsibility for its distribution and use is
482 C. PAK
often shirked in favor of generating ever-increasing profit. Stories of the weird

explore ethical considerations as they relate to issues of scientific understanding
and environmental concern, or to the welfare of oil-workers and wider society.
These stories attempt to broaden how we conceive of oil’s place in our petro-
culture and attempt to open spaces for understanding oil not only in instru-
mental terms, but as possessive of a vitality and history that is independent of
the human. All these stories speak to the invisibility of oil infrastructures and
attempt to disclose the connections among oil, politics, and culture, and the
far-reaching scope of petrol-based infrastructures for shaping science, culture,
and the welfare of the human and non-human.
Note
1. Aldiss 66.
Works Cited
Aldiss, Brian W. 2005. Pipeline. Asimov’s Science Fiction 29 (9): 54–71.
Asimov, Isaac. 1988. Science: The Slave of the Lamp. Magazine of Fantasy and Science
Fiction 75 (3): 138–147.
Carpenter, Leonard. 1988. Recrudescence. Amazing Stories 62 (5): 122–158.
Herbert, Frank. 1955. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (3): 6–66.
———. 1955. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (4): 79–126.
———. 1956. Under Pressure. Astounding Science Fiction 56 (5): 80–134.
———. 1963. Dune World. Analog: Science Fact Science Fiction: 17–48.
———. 1965. Dune. Kent: New English Library.
Miéville, China. 2011. Covehithe. The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/
books/2011/apr/22/china-Miéville-covehithe-short-story. Accessed 5 August
2019.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil.
London: Verso.
Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.
Melbourne: re.press.
Nicholson, Sam. 1979. Oil Is Not Gold. Omni 1 (7): 94–123.
Petrocultures Research Group. 2016. After Oil. Petrocultures: Edmonton.
Schachner, Nathan. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists—II the Great Oil War. Wonder
Stories, May: 946–961, 985.
———. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists. Wonder Stories, April: 806–821.
———. 1933. The Revolt of the Scientists: III the Final Triumph. Wonder Stories,
June: 26–39, 87.
Silverberg, Robert. 1991. Reflections. Amazing Stories 66 (3): 6–7.
Sterling, Bruce. 2004. The Year of Oil. Artforum 43: 4. https://www.artforum.com/
print/200410/the-year-of-oil-45365. Accessed 5 August 2019.
Taine, John. 1944. The Greatest Adventure. Famous Fantastic Mysteries 6 (1): 8–87.
White, Ted. 1974. Reflections on the Energy Crisis. Amazing Science Fiction 47 (6):
4, 119–122.
CHAPTER 27
Biology at the Border of Area X:

The Significance of Skin in Jeff VanderMeer’s
Southern Reach Trilogy
Sofia Ahlberg
Following the explosion of the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon on

April 20, 2010, an unimaginable sum of approximately 171 million gallons
of oil leaked into the Gulf of Mexico, affecting 35% of the coast (Watts
189). It took 87 days to stop the leak. Its aftermath, including the dispersal
of 1.8 million gallons of toxic chemicals into the waters, is still suffered by
ecosystems, coastal residents, human and non-human (Adams). The acci-
dent triggered grave concerns about preparedness and responsibility in rela-
tion to offshore drilling and extraction policies. New Weird1 author Jeff
VanderMeer’s response to the tragedy was to speculate on the transgressive
nature of oil which led to his Southern Reach trilogy published in 2014 and
consisting of Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance. In an article published
in The Atlantic, VanderMeer describes a strange dream in which the oil
never stopped leaking, a dream that became an inspiration for the novels.
Moreover, he points out that by enduring in minute traces in the environ-
ment, its consequences are in fact potentially endless. “After the oil spill,”
VanderMeer notes, “I knew that at the microscopic level the oil was still infil-
trating and contaminating the environment. That just because you can’t see
something doesn’t mean it isn’t affecting you or the places you love.” It is
perhaps not surprising that as motif and metaphor for a range of effective
and ineffective boundaries, skin appears in VanderMeer’s response to an
accident in the mining industry. After all, it is an industry that aims to perfect
S. Ahlberg (*) 
Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

484 S. AHLBERG
the technologies for piercing the earth’s “skin” while ensuring that what it
extracts does not escape. At the same time it must strive to shield the envi-
ronment from the harmful byproducts of its operations or else hide its failures
from view.
In VanderMeer’s trilogy, the Southern Reach is an organization set up
to investigate a perilous region that appeared somewhere on a remote part
of the Florida coast some decades before the story begins. VanderMeer’s
reflections on biological damage inform his narrative of events surrounding
this place where life forms and physical laws undergo inexplicable shifts that
produce mutations with often horrific consequences for those who pass its
notoriously enigmatic invisible border. Despite the hazards, Southern Reach
has sent many expeditionary teams to learn about this place that comes to be
known as Area X and it turns out that, despite appearances, few if any have
ever returned. The first novel, Annihilation, details the most recent expedi-
tion by an all-female group focused on the perspective of the team’s biologist.
At stake in this novel and the trilogy overall is the integrity of the individ-
uated body. An early feature of the biologist’s perspective is that the body
comes under the influence of Area X through multiple forms of contamina-
tion. Initially, while reading from a strange moss-like form of writing growing
out from the wall of a “topographical anomaly” (a spiral tunnel referred to
as a tower), the biologist says, “already those initial phrases were infiltrating
my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground” (24). Then she inhales
spores from the lettering (25) and begins displaying unusual physical symp-
toms she calls “the brightness” which come with a marked empathy toward
Area X combined with scientific interest: “The brightness infecting my senses
had spread to my chest….a kind of prickling energy and anticipation” (83).
One of her symptoms is the insight that the tower is in fact a living thing
(41) later concluding, “We were exploring an organism that might contain
a mysterious second organism, which was itself using yet other organisms to
write words on the wall” (51). Arguably, this is one of Area X’s perceptions
of itself emerging via the changes it brings to the biologist. Nevertheless, it
is the biologist’s own scientific schooling that makes this possible. Key to the
significance of this often-recalled phenomenon of the writing growing on the
wall is the suggestion that it communicates not via the words but by per-
formatively altering the biology of those who come in contact with it.2
Though the biologist changes, she retains the professional interest of
a scientist but also seems to see herself increasingly as open to material and
agential influences from the environment she is studying. “The wind was
like something alive”; she later notes, “it entered every pore of me” (74). It
becomes apparent that she is changing from being the person she was and
taking on new qualities due to her physical contact with biological matter
from Area X. By the close of the novel the other three expedition members
are dead. The biologist, on the other hand, resolves to remain in Area X to
learn more about it and perhaps even to discover the fate of her husband who
27 BIOLOGY AT THE BORDER OF AREA X: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF SKIN … 485
was on the previous expedition. The second novel, Authority, centers on the
investigative efforts of “Control” (John Rodriguez), director of Southern
Reach. It is Control’s role to interview or rather interrogate the biologist.
They eventually form an uneasy alliance against the secrecy of Southern
Reach as well as the horrors of Area X. She insists on being called Ghost Bird,
a name her husband gave her, and we later learn she is a copy of the original
biologist produced within Area X in some unimaginable way and sent back
for reasons no one can guess. By the end of the trilogy, in Acceptance, when
Control and this version of the biologist have escaped the military response
to the sudden expansion of Area X by entering more deeply into the region,
the reader is obliged to accept that the original biologist has continued to
change. The biologist has eventually become something utterly unhuman
resembling a mobile landmass with countless eyes (still recognizable to her
now more human copy) and a destiny beyond anything mortal.
Deepwater Horizon’s extraction method produced a tragic outcome
of death and destruction to several ecosystems in the Gulf, but the longer-
term consequences of such extraction are what is at stake in Southern Reach.
Moreover, for the purpose of this chapter, also at stake is our capacity to
better deal with or prevent such tragedies by better appreciating the entan-
glements between observer and observed, but without eliminating the dis-
tinctions between the two. VanderMeer’s vision of skin as an ambiguous
interface is a fertile field for reflection on the nature of scientific observation.
Skin and various other sorts of embodiedness become a way of underscoring
the importance of maintaining distinction between self and other, observer
and observed, despite these categories undergoing profound alterations.
An insistent pattern of imagery in these novels, thematic as well as topo-
graphic, is that of borders and boundaries. As a terrestrial phenomenon, an
invisible border is said to mark the edge of Area X, but this is a far more agen-
tial boundary than any political or militarily patrolled demarcation on a map.
Crossing this border might be compared to passing the event horizon of a
black hole. Skin is also a focus as a living boundary defining the extent of a
living organism. For example, skin is where the mysterious agency of Area X is
discerned as it possibly seeks and certainly finds ways of infiltrating and rerout-
ing the vital and cognitive functions of the biologist. To some researchers at
Southern Reach, Area X is “just a phenomenon visited upon humanity, like a
weather event” and to others it is an enemy with an “intent and focus” of its
own (Acceptance 80). While the mysterious border itself is important in the
novels, a key trope is the failure of defining boundaries, human and non-hu-
man. What occurs inside Area X has some quality of taking place on a moe-
bius strip that unsettles conventional binary distinctions about self and other,
inside and outside, as well as near and far.
The motifs of skin and borders, and their undermining of the individ-
ual as detached observer, place the problem of scientific objectivity at the
heart of the Southern Reach trilogy. Ultimately, in this chapter, I ask what
can our literary reflections on Area X teach us about possibilities we have
486 S. AHLBERG
for observing widespread phenomena such as global warming that are both
objective and subjective in the sense that they are the expression of our
post-industrial aspirations. Indeed, any technological solution to global
warming will need to be informed by the human causes of the problem that
include psychological and social studies. In other words, self-knowledge has
an important role to play in this kind of scientific inquiry and arguably other
problems as well.
Living Borders
Recent new materialist scholarship emphasizes the sentient and potentially
intentional nature of matter in ways that resonate with VanderMeer’s pres-
entation of Area X as a manifestation of matter that “Knows what to do
with molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and
then withdraw” (Acceptance, emphasis original, 81). This scholarship entails
a resistance to or at least a fundamental questioning of borders between
culture and nature. The emphasis in scholarly work by Jane Bennett and
Stacy Alaimo challenges the boundedness of subjectivity itself. Similarly,
following Judith Butler’s concept of “corporeal vulnerability,” Nancy Tuana
and Charles Scott seek to eliminate objectification while exalting the “in-be-
tween” of consciousness (1). Their idea that “each thing, each concrescence,
is what it is because of its capacity to be affected” (4) is reminiscent of the
biologist’s claim that “My sole gift or talent, I believe now, was that places
could impress themselves upon me, and I could become a part of them with
ease” (Annihilation 108). Nevertheless, as we shall see, objectification does
not undermine the profound connectedness that I argue is a feature of, not
an impediment to, scientific inquiry. To be bounded by skin or any other kind
of vital and intelligent boundary means to be available as an object among
others for the purpose of a potential symbiotic co-adaptation. At the same
time, I do not dispute the historical reasons why theorists denounce a certain
instrumental anthropocentrism.3
Another scholar frequently grouped together with Alaimo and Bennett
is Sara Ahmed, a feminist and gender theorist who critiques boundary
formation as a feature of power structures. In a chapter on Kristeva’s work
on nation building, Ahmed calls attention to skin as thoroughly localized
but with consequences that are spatially widespread. Echoing the biologist’s
own self-awareness of her “sole gift or talent,” Ahmed argues that rather
than thinking that skin is already there, we must “begin to think of the skin
as a surface that is felt only in the event of being ‘impressed upon’ in the
encounters we have with others” (101). Far from erasing the significance
of the boundary in favor of a fluid interrelation between human and the
non-human, this reference to skin as living tissue with political and ethical
consequences suggests that more awareness should be placed on the poten-
tial of borders to mediate and process information. Rather than repudiating
the power of language to distinguish culture and the political from nature, as
some new materialist work suggests, border as process suggests that on the
contrary, it lies in our interest to keep these borders in place, if for no other
reason to keep questioning them and redefining them.
Border making and crossing is an important aspect of knowledge produc-
tion. How can there be an encounter or discovery and other such phenom-
ena without a provisionally defined inside and outside? VanderMeer draws
attention to the operational aspects of breathing, living, agential borders

in his trilogy. In these novels, human skin as well as the border surround-
ing Area X have elements in common. Both operate as living membranes
that provoke reflection on the need for a protective buffer as well as a way
of filtering and mediating encounters across the boundaries of environ-
ments, bodies, and technologies. The border of Area X demarcates a zone
in which alternative biological and physical rules seem to apply. Equipment
brought back from Area X is seen to have aged faster than its equivalent out-
side. Grainy video shows ships at sea that accidentally encountered the area
when the border came down vanishing, bow first, while those in the stern
can hear the cries coming from the bow (Authority 79). The same goes for
large numbers of white rabbits filmed as they are forced to cross the border—
in freeze-frame, hindquarters alone are revealed as the head and shoulders
disappear (Authority 55). It is a border with far more physical efficacy than
any line drawn on a map. All participants except leaders who cross into Area
X must be placed under hypnosis in order to avoid the extreme trauma of
the border of which little is said until the third novel, Acceptance. Then, in a
flashback sequence, we learn that crossing the border brings on a bewilder-
ing sense of self inhabited by other, or otherness: “Your thoughts dart quick
then slow, something stitching between them you cannot identify” (50). At
other times, the border and the terrors of Area X are potentially everywhere,
in “thousands of transitional environments that no one saw” (157) or, as is
noted by an expedition leader, “There is nothing but border. There is no
border” (5).
In VanderMeer’s trilogy, skin is not simply a planar surface serving tactile
perception together with protection from the elements. Rather it is a medium
for communication between self and other, or between two descriptive
registers, one that aims to evoke subjective experience and another that aims
at objectivity though without it being in the service of conventional instru-
mentality. For the biologist in Annihilation, the outward-looking scrutiny
that initially comprises her study of Area X morphs into an examination of the
inward changes Area X brings about in her and notably in what she becomes
able to perceive. This is not to say that the boundary between her and Area
X disappears. Rather, she realizes that the only objective knowledge she
can attain must necessarily entail an awareness of Area X’s capacity to affect
her subjectivity. From the outset, she is intent on determining if Area X’s
influence on her points “to a truthful seeing,” or even an immunity from the
possibly elaborate illusions wrought by its “defensive mimicry” (Annihilation
90, 91).
488 S. AHLBERG
As already mentioned, there is a tendency in ecological thinking that

favors the conditions for merging with the other and thus seeks to negate
the boundaries that support human exceptionalism. At the same time some
see environmental problems as so systemic and vast that they must be defined
as boundless, what Timothy Morton calls “hyperobjects,” in reference to
“things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”
(1). At extremes, this approach emphasizes such a radical connectivity among
the parts of environmental problems that the result entails a seamlessness
between actors and agents that is resistant to analysis and explanation. The
biologist identifies the problem when she reflects, “there is a limit to thinking
about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow
of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts”
(Annihilation 93). Her properly scientific response is to “leave it there, com-
partmentalized” until she can examine her written record of observations and
perhaps then “begin to divine the true meaning.”
During her interrogation at Southern Reach HQ, the biologist explains
that Area X is an ecology far more designed than what can be grasped by
human cognition:
Have you not understood yet that whatever’s causing this can manipulate
the genome, works miracles of mimicry and biology? Knows what to do with
molecules and membranes, can peer through things, can surveil, and then
withdraw. That to it, a smartphone, say, is as basic as a flint arrowhead.
(Acceptance, emphasis original, 80–81)
In the above, the biologist signals an awareness that her object of inquiry
has in itself some form of subjectivity. In other words, she suspects that the
object of her analysis has intentionality of its own. At first, she presents as
the sole survivor of the expedition into Area X covered in the first volume of
the trilogy, Annihilation. She explains how the spores from the strange mossy
writing entered her skin like “a pinprick” (25). The resulting “brightness”
that grows in her—her word for a range of bodily and cognitive symptoms—
brings with it a profound sensitivity to and affinity with all other life forms.
Her infection seems also to provide immunization against injuries caused by
the environment.
The reader is given to understand that the biologist’s capacity to report on
what she sees has been altered by the very thing she is attempting to study.
Subject and object have morphed, making it impossible to see where ecosys-
tem begins and researcher ends, as can be seen in the climax of Annihilation
when she finally and in a sense fatally confronts the creature responsible for the
writing on the wall of the tower: “I did not feel as if I were a person but sim-
ply a receiving station for a series of overwhelming transmissions” (172). Soon
she begins to discern that a fundamental property of Area X’s transformations
involve assimilation and mimicry which it achieves “all without surrender-
ing the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters” (191).
The second volume Authority focuses on one of the characters John Rodriguez
aka “Control” and his attempt to make sense of Area X. Members of expedi-
tions into Area X either do not return or come back profoundly and terminally
altered by exposure to whatever mutant biological processes they have been
exposed to on the other side of the border. In fact, it turns out that instead
of returning as themselves, cloned copies of them return with no ability to
explain what they have learned. Among those profoundly transformed is the
biologist herself, an expert in “transitional environments” (Annihilation 11) or
places where different ecosystems overlap. Only later does it become clearer,
though never perfectly, that the biologist we know in Annihilation has by the
third novel Acceptance ceased to be the same person. Indeed, the very notion
of anything having stable identity enduring through time is under ques-
tion at many points in the novels. The biologist of book one surmises that in
her own case, “Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a
script of words” (Annihilation 190–191). As an example of ecological think-
ing, the biologist has more in common with what Haraway calls “becoming
with” in the sense of developing close relations with “companion species”
(When Species Meet 35).
Cognising Membranes
When the biologist is at first infected with the brightness, she says she feels
“a kind of itchiness come over me” (Annihilation 27), but more significantly
her symptoms deepen her already well-developed sensitivity to and expertise
in transitional environments. Indeed, more than an appreciation of ecologi-
cal thought, her epidermal infection can be understood as that which actively
selects and transfers cognitive data that is in no way limited to her body, but
extends far beyond it. Her perceptions are rendered preternaturally acute, so
much so that her scientific understanding struggles to make sense of what she is
now able to discern. Here the biologist attempts to describe in her journal what
she comes to call her “second skin”: “The fifth morning I rose from the grass
and dirt and sand, the brightness had gathered to form a hushed second skin
over me, that skin cracking from my opening eyes like the slightest, the brief-
est, touch of an impossibly thin layer of ice. I could hear the fracturing of its
melting as if it came from miles and years away” (Acceptance 158). It is inter-
esting to note here that the imagery used is a familiar symptom of global warm-
ing and so it brings into sharp focus a climatic change that she registers with
her body. This can be read as VanderMeer’s reminder to the reader that global
warming is a discernible feature of our world and we could be even more aware
of the long-term consequences if we were properly sensitized. This involves an
objective condition for which human beings on a mass scale are responsible.
The biologist’s experience of a second skin suggests that in this case knowledge
coincides with embodiment. Skin as seen in this representation of the biologist
consists of a living set of contours. Unlike Morton’s notion of the hyperobject,
490 S. AHLBERG
skin gives something definition, a shape to make something graspable, even

though at first it may seem to exceed human comprehension.
The itching that the biologist experiences is the troubling of the border
between her and the outside world. The irritation caused by the encroach-
ment of the environment that causes it to study her as much as she attempts
to submit it to scientific scrutiny: “I felt as if Area X were laughing at me then
- every blade of grass, every stray insect, every drop of water” (Annihilation
159). It is useful to once again be reminded of skin as something that comes
into existence when “‘impressed upon’ in the encounters we have with oth-
ers,” as noted by Ahmed. What needs to be further investigated is what form
this encounter takes. The Southern Reach trilogy reveals ways in which skin is
an intelligent interface with meaning-making, dialoguing properties. Readers
are invited to consider skin as a convergence of objectivity and subjectiv-
ity in which both contribute to valid and effective knowledge. This stands
as an alternative to the stress often placed on pure objectivity as a means to
advance scientific knowledge. Therefore theoretical frameworks are needed
that investigate more closely what N. Katherine Hayles sees as our embed-
dedness within “cognitive assemblages,” (116) information-rich, meta-stable,
far-reaching, or localized environments in which much of the decision-mak-
ing based on interpretation of that environment is distributed. The biologist’s
encounter with Area X reveals the points of contact and exchange between a
living entity and its living or nonliving surroundings understood in terms of
Hayles’ cognitive assemblage.
It will help to think of skin not as a pre-existing boundary between the
inside and the outside but rather as an assemblage that contains and consti-
tutes the many avenues of exchange and influence between the inside and the
outside. Skin is an assemblage since it too is an information-rich, meta-stable
region that, as an organ of perception, provides filtered data to the nervous
system for further processing. Importantly, cognition according to Hayles
does not just passively receive signals, it interprets them, assesses them, and
involves cognising actors together with material agents in modifying infor-
mation flows to promote the aims of the assemblage. Because of these prop-
erties, skin does more than package an entity or organism, it also packages
that organism’s surrounds, that might recall Erich Hörl’s notion of “environ-
mentality”. VanderMeer shows that the distinction between subjectivity and
objectivity remains, even though pressure is brought to bear on it in several
ways. Consider for example the confrontation between the biologist who
remained in Area X only to transform into a mountain and her Doppelgänger
Ghost Bird who returns to Southern Reach:
The mountain that was the biologist came up almost to the windowsill, so close
she could have jumped down onto what served as its back […] The green-and-
white stars of barnacles on its back in the hundreds of miniature craters, of tidal
pools from time spent motionless in deep water, time lost inside that enor-
mous brain. The scars of conflict with other monsters pale and dull against the
biologist’s skin. It had many, many glowing eyes that were also like flowers or
sea anemones spread open, the blossoming of many eyes - normal, parietal, and
simple - all across its body, a living constellation ripped from the night sky. Her
eyes. Ghost Bird’s eyes. (Acceptance 195)
Here, at a climax for Ghost Bird of her encounter with what became of her
original, she sees her own eyes looking back at her while at the same time
referring to them as “temporary tidal pools” with skin resembling the pock-
marked surface of weathered rock. And yet this is not actually a case of indis-
tinguishable and total merging since the biologist is still a distinct creature
with an outline, alien though it may be: “Ghost Bird leaned out the window,
reached out and pushed through the shimmering layer, so like breaking the
surface of a tidal pool to touch what lay within.…and her hands found pur-
chase on that thick, slick skin, among all of those eyes, her eyes, staring up at
her” (195).
Those “tidal pools from time spent motionless in deep water,” refer to the
surrounds that both forms of the biologist are familiar with. The mountain is
amphibious, an organism that can “transition not just from land to water but
from one remote place to another, with no need for a door in a border” (196).
The border between self and other could hardly be more porous than is revealed
in this passage. Yet both Ghost Bird and the original biologist are still distinct
entities despite this porosity. Skin is a stabilizing structure allowing an entity to
be defined, but not over defined. Ghost Bird recognizes her own eyes in the
moving mountain among the miniature craters and tidal pools on its skin. An
expert in transitional environments, the biologist’s special area of interest was
creatures living in coastal tidal pools. The fact that her Doppelgänger is an expres-
sion of that scientific interest demonstrates the narrative link between the way we
take an interest in the world and the body. The creature’s body is an expression
of the original biologist’s passion and scientific curiosity regarding especially tidal
pools, which in her previous life she had spent hours studying. Through its fil-
tering and selection processes, skin extends to an organism’s surrounds. Thus,
scientific methods are themselves embodied as in the example of the biologist’s
interest in tidal pools outlined on the creature’s back in a rejigging of the rela-
tionship between the human subject and the environment.
This expert in transitional ecologies has mutated into an organism that
could be read as a response to her original sense of bewilderment in under-
standing “something monumental” as an “imagined leviathan” (Annihilation
93). She has become the embodiment of her struggle to understand Area X.
As such, the biologist is both subject and object of her inquiry, her scien-
tific inquiry morphing into an extensive, amphibious creature with a thousand
eyes capable of seeing herself. VanderMeer’s vision allows for a co-emergence
of sorts as a form of information flow. Ghost Bird is the encounter between
Area X and Southern Reach. She is a new assemblage so even though a scien-
tist, she does not make scientific discoveries as much as she manifests them in
her hybrid physiology.
492 S. AHLBERG
Conclusion
In the passage of encounter between Ghost Bird and mountain that was
the biologist, it is the boundary of skin that constitutes a distinction for an
encounter between differences to take place even though it is between two
manifestations of the biologist. Here, one version of the biologist is looking
at another version of the biologist. The profound differences between them
are the result of the context that produced them both: Area X. VanderMeer
describes here a scenario in which the subject has the scientific benefit of
being separate from the thing observed, while at the same time experienc-
ing a profound connection with the thing observed. The biologist does not
see her self as other in the form of a rival or a resource. Instead, she regards
what she calls the “brightness” as something that opens her toward the pos-
sibility of shared understanding with other cognising systems of intelligent
meaning-making:
What if an infection was a message, a brightness a kind of symphony?

As a defense? An odd form of communication? If so, the message had not been
received, would probably never be received, the message buried in the trans-
formation itself. Having to reach for such banal answers because of a lack of
imagination, because human beings couldn’t even put themselves in the mind of
a cormorant or an owl or a whale or a bumblebee. (Acceptance 189–190)
What began as a “pinprick” develops into an “odd form of communica-

tion” as seen in the passage above. Within a cognitive assemblage, skin forms
a boundary, a distinction, which, as I have been arguing, is necessary for
knowledge production, discovery and encounter. These assemblages are sta-
ble, whether they be far-reaching or localized environments. VanderMeer’s
trilogy lends an increased embodied awareness of one’s physical presence as
part of multiple, entangled assemblages with numerous intersecting bound-
aries. His is an example of a sophisticated environmental imaginary that can
assist in reorienting the place of humans on the planet. Viewing the biol-
ogist’s encounter with Area X under these conditions sets up the basis for
considering an exciting aspect of where ecological thinking is heading, espe-
cially with regard to embodiment and knowledge. In a conversation with
VanderMeer about Southern Reach, Timothy Morton suggests that despite
the porosity of boundaries, it nevertheless makes sense to retain them:
“Things can leak through either way and the boundary isn’t thin or rigid …
We can’t really establish in advance the tightness and impermeability of that
boundary unless we’re being very anthropocentric” (Hageman). To advance
our understanding of boundaries in the form of skin within an ecology of
distributed cognition, it may be worthwhile to rely on a less anthropocen-
tric process of deduction, as Morton seems to be suggesting here. In lieu
of establishing in advance “the tightness and impermeability of that bound-
ary,” literary practices of encountering via recognition may be better suited
for engaging with the challenges generated by planetary crisis. The theoretical
concepts and deliberative strategies demonstrated in the Southern Reach tril-
ogy by entities from either side of the border of Area X help us to understand
better our current predicament. In particular, it will become necessary to face
the challenges of negotiating human relations with other distributed net-
works of signification and meaning-making systems as these will likely frame
and determine many future aspects of the human experience as we shed our
anthropocentric skin.
Notes
1. For a discussion about the slipperiness of this genre and the significance of
VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy in defining the genre as “a kind of extra-
territorial Area X that mobilises boundaries, spins the compass, dethrones the
human, hybridises taxonomic categories and bewilderingly shifts beyond any
static cartographic plan” (1061), see Roger Luckhurst, “The Weird: A Dis/
Orientation,” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 6 (2017), pp. 1041–1061.
2. For some readers, this might recall Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum,
the medium is the message. More precisely, Brian Massumi has declared that
skin speaks faster than words, though in the case of VanderMeer’s biologist
she seems to “read” via her skin the essentially viral message contained in the
substance of the moss faster than the words it forms.
3. For an in-depth discussion on objectivity in all its complexity, not just as the
overcoming of subjectivity, see Heather Douglas, “The Irreducible Complexity
of Objectivity,” Synthese, vol. 138 (2004), pp. 453–473.
Works Cited
Adams, Alexandra. 2015. Summary of Information Concerning the Ecological and
Economic Impacts of the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Disaster. NRDC. Natural
Resources Defense Council, June 19. https://www.nrdc.org/resources/summary-in-
formation-concerning-ecological-and-economic-impacts-bp-deepwater-horizon-oil.
Ahmed, Sara. 2005. The Skin of the Community: Affect and Boundary Formation.
In Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis, ed. Tina
Chanter, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, 95–111. Albany, NY: State University of New
York Press.
Douglas, Heather. 2004. The Irreducible Complexity of Objectivity. Synthese 138:
453–473.
Hageman, Andrew. 2016. A Conversation Between Timothy Morton and Jeff
VanderMeer. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 24. https://lareviewofbooks.
org/article/a-conversation-between-timothy-morton-and-jeff-vandermeer/#!.
Haraway, Donna. 2008. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Hayles, N. Katherine. 2017. Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
494 S. AHLBERG
Hörl, Erich. 2018. The Environmentalitarian Situation: Reflections on the

Becoming-Environmental of Thinking, Power, and Capital, trans. Nils F. Schott.
Cultural Politics 13 (2): 153–173.
Luckhurst, Roger. 2017. The Weird: A Dis/Orientation. Textual Practice 31 (6):
1041–1061.
Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the
World. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Tuana, Nancy, and Charles Scott. 2016. An Infused Dialogue, Part 1: Borders,
Fusions, Influence. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30 (1): 1–14.
VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014. Acceptance. London: Fourth Estate.
———. 2014. Annihiliation. London: Fourth Estate.
———. 2014. Authority. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. 2015. From Annihilation to Acceptance: A Writer’s Surreal Journey.
The Atlantic, January 28. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/
archive/2015/01/from-annihilation-to-acceptance-a-writers-surreal-jour-
ney/384884/.
Watts, Michael. 2014. Oil Frontiers: The Niger Delta and the Gulf of Mexico. In Oil
Culture, ed. Ross Barrett and Daniel Worden, 189–210. Minneapolis and London:
CHAPTER 28
Overlapping Agencies: The Collision

of Cancer, Consumers, and Corporations
in Richard Powers’s Gain
Jeffrey Gonzalez
Most of the considerable body of writing on Richard Powers’s 1998 novel

Gain has focused on its depiction of Clare International, a massive, Proctor-
and-Gamble style corporation that begins as a small, family-owned business.
Powers’s depiction of Clare within the broader history of American capitalism
has led critic Ralph Clare (no relation) to assert that the novel marks a limit
to what readers can expect from a literary critique of a corporation (Clare
2014, 16). Clare International dominates the story, even though only one of
the novel’s two contrapuntal plots focuses directly on the company’s birth,
rise, and fall; because of this design, most readers rightly read Gain as an
exploration of corporate logic and power (Clare 2014, 158–179; Maliszewski
2008, 162–186; Williams 1999a).
Powers tracks the ubiquity of this and other corporations in the contempo-
rary U.S. through the novel’s other narrative, which focuses on Laura Bodey,
a 42-year-old divorced mother of two. Laura lives in suburban Lacewood,
Illinois, where Clare’s Agricultural Division is headquartered. Powers’s nar-
rator introduces Laura by telling us of Clare’s omnipresence in her home-
town: “The town cannot hold a corn boil without its corporate sponsor. The
company cuts every other check, writes the headlines, sings the school fight
song” (Powers 1998, 6). Its products are also all over her home: the narrator
mentions medicines, cleaning supplies, “shampoo, antacid, [and] low-fat
J. Gonzalez (*) 
Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, USA

496 J. GONZALEZ
chips” (7) all produced by Clare. The reader consistently encounters Laura in
relation to Clare, even from this initial appearance.
Early in the book, Laura learns that she has ovarian cancer. During her
treatment, she encounters accumulating evidence that Clare’s products or
chemical activity may be responsible for her illness. First, her daughter Ellen
shows her a notice in the town newspaper about high levels of toxic discharge
in their county (139). Her ex-husband Don sends her the same article (160).
A member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses named Janine Grandy tells Laura that
her husband worked at Clare and died of cancer (190). Laura realizes that a
friend she has met during her chemotherapy sessions drove a forklift at the
Clare plant (192). She sees a newspaper story about three workers at the
Clare Agricultural Products Division in Lacewood getting cancer (216). Don
tells her that researchers supporting a class-action lawsuit filed against Clare
allege that the company’s pesticides trigger cancerous mutation (319–320).
These suggestions propose that Clare’s role in shaping Laura’s life is even
greater than the narration initially signals to us. Clare not only influences the
social experience of her town and decorates her home but also poisons her
insidiously and fatally.
Yet Powers never confirms this causal link, though most critical discussions
of the novel assume it is there (Tabbi 2002, 54; Maxwell 2014, 180).1 The
novel’s refusal to confirm causality signals that we should be careful about
assigning blame. While Clare does engage in some unethical behavior, noth-
ing in the Clare narrative indicates that the corporation is aware that its
products or chemical research are carcinogenic: we do not hear of squelched
research or silenced whistleblowers. Still, readers find ways to see Clare as
responsible. For example, Joseph Dewey asserts that Laura’s cancer was
“most likely caused by the environmental carelessness of Clare Industries,”
but no specific activity is singled out in the novel for being particularly care-
less (2008, 115). Lacking a smoking gun, these readings rely partly on cir-
cumstantial evidence and partly on preconceptions about why these two
figures, the cancer-victim consumer and the giant corporation, are made pro-
mixate by the novel’s design.2
The most likely causes for ovarian cancer are genetic predisposition and
nulliparity. Powers gives evidence of the first condition: while Laura protests
that no one in her family has had ovarian cancer, we learn that her daughter
develops it (and has it caught early) in the novel’s epilogue, as Kathryn Hume
and Susan Mizruchi have noted. As I will discuss in more detail shortly, none
of Laura’s doctors feel comfortable hypothesizing about the cause of her can-
cer beyond family history, and one doctor firmly denies that ovarian cancer
has environmental causes. Additionally, the sum total of evidence Laura gath-
ers is anecdotal (people who work at Clare, people she sees in town), incon-
clusive (the emissions in the newspaper), or contested (what she hears from
Don).
28 OVERLAPPING AGENCIES: THE COLLISION OF CANCER … 497
The suspension of hard evidence linking Laura’s cancer to Clare belies a

straightforward understanding of the narrative juxtaposition, and in this
chapter, I want to show how Laura’s storyline contravenes what Jackie Stacey
and Judy Segal call the masculinist and individualist conventions of the
illness-narrative genre. By focusing attention on Laura’s struggle with can-
cer and the questions of causality that it raises, I hope to indicate the ways
that Powers’s treatment of her illness calls attention to the social, biomedical,
and environmental elements of a cancer struggle, rather than focusing on one
person’s will, biomedical heroism, or corporate malevolence. This reframing
authorizes seeing Gain as a model for a more progressive sort of cancer nar-
rative, one that replaces individualist thinking without minimizing individual
struggle. Second, and relatedly, I hope to demonstrate that the novel plays
with causality and agency in order to challenge normative thinking about cor-
porations, cancer, and the human. As my summary of the reactions above has
shown, it is easy to imagine the corporation within the novel as a singular,
malevolent distributor of poison, as such an image reflects liberal-left fears
about corporate power in the neoliberal contemporary. Yet the depiction of
Laura’s cancer focuses on maintaining a sense of agency in the face of these
biological and economic forces. My reading of Power’s novel allows us to
probe the ways that the “rhetorical agency” often ascribed to cancer is parallel
to the amoral agency socially conferred upon the corporation (Agnew 2018,
277). This paralleling becomes possible through detailed attention to the
cancer component of the narrative, and it yields compelling questions about
the agency of the consumer-citizen in light of the awesome and impersonal
power of the corporation and the cancer cell.
“No One Knows Their Own Body”: Alienation

and Laura’s Cancer
When we first meet her, Laura has problems: she worries about her teenage
children, cannot stand her ex-husband, and has an only fleetingly satisfying
relationship with a married man. Still, we are told, presumably from her per-
spective, that “her life has no problem that five more years couldn’t solve”
(Powers 1998, 8). While getting dressed for the funeral of her daughter’s
closest friend, Laura recalls the confidence she felt in her own girlhood about
scientific progress: she believed “disease is just a passing holdover from when we
lived wrong…My parents and their friends: the last generation that will have to
die” (13; emphasis in original).
Powers traces Laura’s gradual alienation from this optimism and the
worldview that generates it. Her ovarian cancer is discovered during a surgery
aimed at removing what she thought was a harmless cyst. Her doctor’s dis-
covery that the cyst is a “serous cystadenocarcinoma” (75) leads to debulking
surgery and then chemotherapy. Dealing with these consequences and other
fallout from her illness forces her to make difficult physical, financial, emo-
tional, and intellectual adjustments.
498 J. GONZALEZ
Like many individuals in her position, Laura wants to know why she got
cancer, and behind this question is an assumption that all cancers have an
identifiable cause. Jackie Stacey’s seminal Tetraologies: A Cultural Study of
Cancer argues that the revelation of cancer often summons a chronology with
strict “narrative structuring”: “linearity, cause and effect and possible clo-
sures present themselves almost automatically…the body becomes the site of
a narrative teleology that demands a retelling” (1997, 5). The illness disrupts
Laura’s understanding of her life, including the cruelly optimistic sense that
it will be better in five years. The normative purpose of the illness narrative,
Stacey argues, is to document these disruptions and fit them into a “narrative
structuring” that makes suffering meaningful.
Laura tries to make sense of her illness by blaming herself for her illness.
Such doubts are common across many cancer narratives, as Susan Sontag
(1979) notably documented in Illness as Metaphor. Near the end of the novel,
the narrator traces these thoughts: “she has brought this disease on herself,
by being unhappy…because she doubted, took her eyes off the road, let
negative thoughts poison her” (Powers 1998, 317). She wistfully acknowl-
edges “carcinogenic amenities” like hairspray and hamburgers (283). In this
self-blaming, Laura envisions herself as having made errors that she might
have avoided with correct living, even though she understands herself as typi-
cal in many ways. Stacey writes that such thinking reveals “the successful con-
densation of so many deep-rooted beliefs about the body in contemporary
culture, in particular fears about the limits and acceptability of its desires,”
ones that manifest in our understanding of cancer (1997, 63).
Yet these thoughts coexist with the suggestions that she encounters
about Clare’s complicity, which also affirm a reason for her cancer—that it
was caused by a powerful but neglectful entity. This persistent sense that her
cancer has a cause never fully leaves her, even though her doctors consist-
ently say they cannot determine one and Laura’s own research yields similar
conclusions.
Don recalls Laura maintaining a consistent fatalism during their mar-
riage—he recalls her saying, “you can’t change your number coming up”
(Powers 1998, 40)—that periodically re-emerges when she feels like her can-
cer has no explanation. She swings between feeling this abstract fatalism and
insisting on some form of causality throughout her narrative. Both of these
poles are unsatisfying, of course, and each only deepens Laura’s sense of frus-
tration after her diagnosis. Her cancer and the questions it presents her with
lead to a disquieting sense of overdetermination: she cannot locate herself in
relation to the illness that is radically changing her self-definition and lived
experience.
After her surgery and throughout her chemotherapy, Powers regularly
comments on Laura’s struggle to live in her body and the spaces she normally
inhabits. In the aftermath of her debulking, the narrator explains, “They send
Laura home. Except it isn’t home anymore” (83), due to her post-operative
difficulty moving around. After hearing advice to return to “her life,” the
narrator explains that her current life “feels like nothing she’s ever visited”
(119). These claims presage other ones: “she cannot say whose life she has
been spirited into” (134). Each of these examples emphasizes her sense
of being estranged, forced to live inside a version of herself she no longer
knows intimately. She generalizes the feeling she now has about her lack of
self-knowledge multiple times: “Nobody really knows what’s blossoming
inside him” (85); “No one really knows their real body” (114). Lois Agnew
observes that “the personification of cancer as a sinister external enemy some-
times obscure[s] the fact that cancer patients are dealing with a disease that
has emerged from their own cells” (2018, 290). The narrator’s statements
reflect this insight, where Laura’s chemotherapy attacks the body to defend
the body from the body.
Her inability to feel at home in her house or her body loosens her
pre-illness sense of personal ownership, and disrupts what had been a com-
fortable consumer existence. Another refrain throughout Laura’s treatment is
how difficult it is for her to eat. Problems with eating are common for chemo
patients, and Powers makes these problems an area of focus. Among many
other references to this issue, we are told that she “never suspected that a
crust of white bread really tastes like chrome” (Powers 1998, 135). During
radiation treatments, “food no longer just repulses her. It becomes incon-
ceivable” (241). The novel indicates that Laura has to withdraw (or wants
to) from what once had been a form of unproblematic consumption. Cast in
those first pages as a quintessential American shopper, she stops being a con-
sumer of the goods she wants to consume.3
Powers stresses this alienation from her pre-cancer self even while he
chooses to make her ovarian cancer fairly typical. Laura is diagnosed with epi-
thetheal ovarian cancer, the most common type, and her cancer is discovered
at the most common point (Stage C, following her doctor’s prediction). Her
medical trajectory is typical, too: her serous cystademocarcinoma was diag-
nosed after her surgeon saw “a small foraging wet spot” (75) on the smaller
of two cysts that she removed, which led to the removal of Laura’s omen-
tum. That Laura does not realize she had any serious symptoms is also typical.
Susan Gubar cites this moment in Gain in her memoir about her own ovarian
cancer, as it illustrates how “subtle signs of the disease are often not regis-
tered or properly interpreted” (2012, 17). The symptoms of ovarian cancer
are difficult to distinguish from premenstrual and menopausal pangs or sim-
ply the discomforts that become more common in middle age (Gubar 2012,
16–17; Conner and Langford 2003; Montz and Bristow 2005). One reason
why ovarian cancer is often fatal is that it continues to spread while these
symptoms go unnoticed. Gubar felt that her “body had been betrayed or had
betrayed me” (2012, 14), suggesting the relatively common experience Laura
has of not realizing she has anything wrong with her, which is of course no
less disquieting or alienating for its commonality.
While ovarian cancer is the most oft-diagnosed gynecological cancer, it is
a disease without a popular cultural presence. Martha Stoddard Holmes has
500 J. GONZALEZ
written of the “pervasive and public imaginative gap, even a willed opacity,
regarding the ovaries and ovarian cancer” (2006, 477). Different than breast
or skin cancers, Holmes writes that we cannot envision cancers that impact
“bodily interiors” (481)—even a gynecologist cannot reach the ovaries with
a hand during an examination; Jane Schulz suggests that ovarian cancer is
“written in but not on the body” (2013/14, 75). The sense of alienation
from one’s body compounds when one has few images or narratives to help
frame expectations.
In choosing ovarian cancer for Laura, Powers invites all these forms of dis-
orientation. Laura knows little about her disease: her only reference point is
a neighbor who died of ovarian cancer (Powers 1998, 84). The cancer origi-
nates in a part of her body she does not know much about. After Laura wakes
up from her surgery, Dr. Jenkins mentions her omentum washings. Laura
asks, “I have an omentum?” The doctor replies, “Not anymore” (75).
The distance she feels from her body leads to one form of disorientation.
Her aforementioned desire to locate a cause for her cancer generates another.
The scientific framing of cancer as simply an unpredictable biological occur-
rence is tough for her to swallow. After her initial diagnosis, Laura asks her
gynecological surgeon, Dr. Jenkins, what causes ovarian cancer, and Jenkins
tells her, “Nobody really knows for certain” (76). An unnamed ovarian can-
cer specialist gives her a long list of possible causes, so long that Laura stops
listening (99). After she asks him about environmental causes, her oncolo-
gist Dr. Archer hands her a report stating that little evidence exists regard-
ing external triggers for ovarian cancer (191). She keeps asking and keeps not
getting answers.
Nonetheless, Laura does not show any rage against her doctors, and while
her ex-husband keeps threatening to sue the hospital, Powers does not offer
any evidence of malpractice. Gubar notes that many cancer narratives turn
into rants against the medical establishment (2012, 52), but while her doc-
tors are ultimately helpless against Laura’s cancer, Gain does not seem to
hold them responsible. Nor does Gain fall into the other increasingly com-
mon narrative of cancer, the type Judy Segal calls “triumphal cancer stories,”
of strong-willed people finding important life lessons in their struggle with
the disease (2012, 9).
Segal argues that these triumphal cancer stories assert that “cancer has a
meaning,” and we might add that the anti-medical establishment narratives
do the same thing (2012, 310). One story has a hero; the other has a villain
and a victim. Segal asserts that an account without these frames, one simply
showing suffering and dying, would constitute an “un-narrative” of cancer,
one that builds “up to nothing in particular” and is, as a result, “intolerable”
(212, 310). Segal’s statement indicates, perhaps, a key reason why the urge
to convert Laura’s cancer into a Clare-induced epidemic is so prevalent: the
existence of a villain gives us a narrative with an innocent victim, one whose
poisoning produces a warning for those living in corporate-dominated envi-
ronments. It is the prevalence of these narratives that spurs the automatic
narrative structuring that Stacey mentions and, as Stacey wrote of her own
struggle with cancer, she struggled to think outside of (1997, 63).
When Laura considers her own role in causing her cancer seriously, she
looks over lists of potentially carcinogenic products and behaviors. At first,
no one behavior jumps out to her. While she eventually locates things she
has consumed and done that may have been risky, Laura ultimately decides
that any relation to carcinogens is essentially unavoidable: “The whole planet,
a superfund site. Life causes cancer” (Powers 1998, 284). This last state-
ment reflects her exasperation, but it is consistent with researcher Siddhartha
Mukherjee’s characterization of cancer in his masterful The Emperor of All
Maladies. Early in the book, Mukherjee announces, “Malignant [or cancer-
ous] growth and normal growth are so genetically intertwined that unbraid-
ing the two might be one of the most significant scientific challenges faced
by our species. Cancer is built into our genomes” (2011, 6). For Laura,
and perhaps many readers, her cancer indicated that something has gone
wrong, but she also credits the intolerable possibility that her cancer may
not signify anything other than living long enough to get it. In this way, her
alienation from the optimism about her life, rooted in the explicability of
negative occurrences and an unthinking faith in progress, deepens. Thus we
see how important Laura’s cancer itself is to the novel’s examination of the
forces that determine her life. In making those other forces visible, Powers
evades many of the complaints Segal and Stacey have made about the can-
cer narrative: its emphasis on a simple good (cancer sufferer) and evil (can-
cer) struggle; its plucky protagonist showing bravery in the face of pain;
the medical establishment often presented as a masculinized hero or the
unfeeling villain; its desire to generate a straightforward and uplifting moral
meaning from a biological occurrence.4 Instead, Laura’s narrative spirals
inward, through the mysteries of her body’s working, and outward, juxta-
posed with the storyline about the role that corporations play in composing
her environment.
“Oh, There’s a Cluster Here. Believe It”:

Laura and Clare’s Complicity
Speaking to the novel’s design, Powers told Jeffrey Williams that Gain has
“two incommensurable frames,” and he aimed “to show how they entangle
without contriving a dramatic confrontation” (Williams 1999b). These hints
of Clare’s complicity in Laura’s cancer are one way of indicating the depth
of the entanglement between this corporation and this citizen. We have seen
that Powers introduces Laura by means of her relationship to Clare, and
throughout her consideration of their complicity in her illness, she realizes
how deeply her life depends on Clare and corporations like it. Bruce Robbins
suggests that this awareness indicates Laura’s shift from considering herself
an atomized figure to understanding that she is a part of a polity, even within
her home, and as I noted above, this movement from a personal struggle to a
502 J. GONZALEZ
broader one is one of the great merits of Powers’ use of the cancer-narrative
genre (2003, 91).
Late in the book, Powers revisits Laura’s feeling of alienation, this time
linking it to the omnipresence of corporations in late capitalist America: “She
never knew what this place really looked like while she was living in it. Now
that she lives elsewhere, she cannot believe what she sees…The world is a reg-
istered copyright” (Powers 1998, 304). Throughout Gain, the narration pays
attention to just how many consumer goods decorate her living space, while
Laura initially does not. For example, when Laura sits down in her kitchen to
calculate her five-year survival rate, the narrator mentions “the fake Tiffany
lamp” she works under, the “Post-It” she uses, the “Pop Tart rind” she
has to clean off, invoking three well-known brands (102). Her sickness and
Clare’s possible complicity in it has changed the perspective she had before
her diagnosis revealing that her environment is largely composed of corpora-
tions that have been invisible to her but impact her profoundly.
In one key scene, her growing recognition of corporate omnipresence
overlaps with an increasing awareness of how much cancer surrounds her.
The correlation tempts her to imagine causation, connections the text itself
undermines—while nonetheless offering regular reminders of the co-presence.
Not long after a disquieting visit to the library, when a librarian tells her peo-
ple often turn up to research their cancers, Laura attends the town fair with
her two children. Echoing the language the narration uses later to describe
Laura’s shift in perspective vis-à-vis commodities, the section begins: “Now
that Laura looks, it seems a kind of epidemic…She cannot turn around with-
out running into someone else. Why did she never see these people before?”
(213). Laura identifies cancer victims all around her, but we are told this iden-
tification is based “on no evidence whatsoever….No proof. Laura just knows”
(213). Her daughter Ellen confirms Laura’s take: Ellen is “already convinced.
She doesn’t even need to look around” (214).
This moment of misrecognition shows how the evidence she has encoun-
tered tempts Laura to see an epidemic where there is scant proof of one.5
Her observations here lack the credibility of her realizations about the prev-
alence of corporate design in her environment—the narration gives us good
reasons to believe that Laura is surrounded by corporate commodities, while
the lack of “proof” or “evidence” or even real “look[ing] around” punctuate
the commentary in the county-fair scene. What is notable, however, is that
Laura can see an epidemic, if she looks a certain way: this moment seems as
revelatory as her other realizations about corporations.
However invested in seeing “a kind of epidemic” she appears to be in this
scene, we see her express skepticism shortly thereafter. In a discussion with
Don about the class-action lawsuit against Clare, which Laura resists join-
ing, she shows no confidence in the existence of a cluster. Don begins the
exchange, with Laura parroting earlier claims by Dr. Archer:
“You’re part of a cluster.”

“Ovarian cancer doesn’t cluster, apparently.”
“Oh, there’s a cluster here. Believe it. Haven’t you seen the statistics the paper’s
been digging up? We’re way above average, for all kinds of cancers.”
She wants to say: The whole country is way above average. She says, ‘The old
Rowen marksmanship.’ For years, he compared the way her family argued to a
kid who scatters buckshot against the barn wall, then draws a bulls-eye around
the densest concentration of hits. (285–286)
Powers gives us two reasons to doubt Don’s position in this argument. First,
if he is correct that many kinds of cancers in Lacewood are clustering, they are
unlikely to have the same cause. What causes cancers of the blood, for instance,
may not necessarily lead to gynecological cancers. Second, the marksmanship
line references a well-known logical fallacy known as “the sharpshooter effect.”
Science writer Leonard Mlodinow discusses this fallacy in a discussion about
persistent misperceptions about causal relationships. Like Don’s allegation
about Laura’s family, the apocryphal sharpshooter fires, then draws the target.
Mlodoinow explains this fallacy by illustrating the problems with locating can-
cer clusters. He explains that attempts to determine environmental causes for
cancer follow the sharpshooter doing ex post facto targeting: “first some citizens
notice cancer; then they define the boundaries of the area at issue” (2009, 184).
Because “the development of cancer requires successive mutations,” the presence
of the disease can only be generated by “very long exposure” to “highly concen-
trated carcinogens.” As a result, drawing a straight line between any one carcino-
gen-producer and a cluster of cancer is a difficult proposition (Mlodoinow 2009,
184). Don’s desire to see a cluster, interestingly, reflects Laura’s similar sentiment
in the county-fair scene.
As we have seen, readers, too, incline toward seeing the epidemic; how-
ever, for each of the indications that Clare may have caused her cancer,
Powers provides reasons to disbelieve this connection. Powers’s reputation is
as a writer that does his homework, and his handling of Laura’s tumor and its
treatment are medically and contextually accurate, even down to the chemo
medications Laura takes. He would choose neither cancer nor this cancer
without realizing the problems with determining causality that come with it,
nor would he credit the thin evidence that Don provides as proof. Instead,
we can see the ways the two forces dominating Laura’s experience—cancer
and its treatment; the corporation’s omnipresence around her—continue to
disorient her, making her see epidemics then denying them, making her feel
responsible for her cancer then assuming that it is everywhere.
That Laura eventually joins a class-action lawsuit against Clare suggests
that she has accepted the suit’s claims. Her struggle with this decision, how-
ever, is beset by questions about her relationship to Clare and what assigning
it—rather than a specific biological causality—responsibility would mean. She
casts the possibility of Clare’s poisoning her as total dominance, which is why
504 J. GONZALEZ
locating her own agency relative to the corporation is a factor in determining

whether she feels Clare is guilty. Her very dependence on corporations com-
plicates her ability to blame Clare for the cancer that’s killing her because, as
the narrator tells us, “[e]very hour of her life depends on more corporations
than she can count” (Powers 1998, 304). In her mind, her behavior is as
important as theirs, as we see in her review of agential decisions to purchase
Clare products—“She brought them in, by choice, toted them in a shopping
bag. And she’d do it all over again, given the choice. Would have to” (304).
This example shows Laura clinging to notions of agency and her own guilty
complicity as a consumer in postmodern America. In these two moments, she
poses the corporation as a shaper, if not the maker, of her environment. Yet
while they have “molded” her life, generating the dependence she notes, she
insists on having an active role in this arrangement. The coercion of the con-
sent—she would do it again, she would have to do it again—does not erase
her decision-making within the world she inherits.
Even at the moment before she decides to join the class-action suit, she
struggles to avoid thinking about her relation to agency, rather than biol-
ogy. Pressuring Laura to enter the suit, Don lists a number of products that
lawyers allege have caused cancer.6 What follows occurs immediately after he
mentions one she used in her gardening, her most beloved activity:
Her plot of earth. Her flowers.
Sue them, she thinks. Every penny they are worth. Break them up for parts.
And in the next blink: a weird dream of peace. It makes no difference whether
this business gave her cancer. They have given her everything else…
She must go before the end of the month. Before whatever new deadline [the
class action lawsuit has] set for her signature. She must become as light as she
feels. As light as this thought. Cease eating, cease turning nutrients into mass…
‘All right,’ she tells him. ‘Okay. Anything.’ (320)
This moment seems less of a confirmation about Clare’s complicity than one
about the challenge of living in a capitalist society so suffused by corpora-
tions. Initially, Laura is furious if the pesticide is the carcinogen that made
her sick. Yet that anger fades quickly. Instead, she wants to stop thinking of
the myriad ways that the corporation has “taken her life and molded it.” She
has stumbled into a growing awareness of herself as a participant in a larger
polity—again, as Robbins has argued, if Laura once thought she was perfectly
safe in her home, safe in the conventionality of her behavior, her cancer and
the question of Clare’s complicity in it erase the boundary between inside and
outside. What the possibility of their complicity has done has awakened her
to another layer of determination: she is alienated not only from her body
by the illness it has generated but also from the ecosystem she had not real-
ized was shaped by something other than her decisions and natural forces.
What we see in the passage, then, is that joining the lawsuit is also erasure
of her agency—notice the use of the word “must” in the section when she
decides to join the suit. Without forceful agency in any reading of her situa-
tion, Laura simply follows momentum.
After deciding to join the lawsuit, Laura’s vision of Clare and what she
wants from it changes. She imagines some acknowledgment of Clare’s guilt:
“Paul Loftus, the head of the Ag. Division, visits her. He sits on the edge
of her bed and offers her an apology. Franklin Kennibar, the CEO, flies out
from Boston. No one knew anything. They will clean everything up” (344).
These fantasy apologies coincide with a darker sense of Clare’s role in her life:
“Clare comes to take her out for dinner and dancing. A male, in mid-life,
handsome, charming, well built, well meaning….But always, the night of
romantic dancing turns by evening’s end into desperate caresses, a brutal
attack, date rape” (344). Laura’s framing shifts from her earlier insistence on
mutual responsibility to one of Clare’s brutality and inhumanity. This image
of Clare manifests Laura’s feeling that Clare has robbed her of agency, manip-
ulating her in order to assault her in intimate and vicious ways; it makes her
earlier claims that she invited Clare into her life an example of victim-blaming.
The pain at this moment crystalizes Gain’s frustration with the
corporate-dominated US landscape: several other passages in the Clare sec-
tion use a dystopian tone to discuss the role the corporation will play in
the future, as many other critics have noted. Her anger at the corporation
emerges because they have played a much larger role in her life than she
realized. Feeling similar anger at biology, or fate, is harder to experience or
imagine: notice, for instance, that her fantasies involve the corporation being
represented by a person—Kennibar, Loftus, the handsome middle-aged male.
In envisioning a human face for the corporation, Laura replicates the reduc-
tive view of cancer that has emerged in the past century. As Agnew’s useful his-
tory of cancer metaphors suggests, we want to imagine cancer as separate from
us in order for it to be a thing we can wage a war against, for we do not want to
imagine the cancer cell’s destructive capacities as in some ways natural. Doing so
would, as Stacey suggests, remind us that the complicated position of the indi-
vidual undergoing chemotherapy not a war with an external enemy: it “is the self
at war with the self” (1997, 62; emphasis in original). Agnew and Mukherjee,
echoing Sontag’s seminal discussions of cancer’s representations, each discuss
the ways a disease with multiple forms and faces has been condensed into a sin-
gle, menacing Other, which of course ignores its biological rooting inside the
self. It might be that the great insight of Gain is to remind us that Laura faces
cells and forces that unwittingly endanger her while also composing her and
comprising her—it is a text, then, about overdetermination of two sorts, and
asks us less to lay blame or call out tragedy but instead to shudder at the differ-
ence between our myths of self-shaping and our actual precarious experience.
506 J. GONZALEZ
For this reason, the reader can of course draw from Gain the ethical sig-
nificance of severe public scrutiny of joint-stock, for-profit corporations.
If, as recent lawsuits have determined, ovarian cancer can come from con-
sumer products like Johnson & Johnson’s talcum powder, the producers
of those products must be required to examine the way those products
were created and be held responsible for the results. Such actions, as Mollie
Painter-Moreland has argued, will never come from the profit-seeking corpo-
ration itself, bent as it is on profit and growth; perpetual growth of any sort,
as Christopher Kilgore has recently written, “produces malignant carcino-
genic growth” (Painter-Morland 2011; Kilgore 2018, 177). I hesitate to fol-
low other writers who have suggested that Clare kills Laura, but that it might
have hastened her carcinogenesis (or the cancers of any of the characters she
encounters) necessitates the sort of attention to the corporation’s impact that
have been marshaled to produce cancer research. Yet her narrative also shows
us precisely why consumer anger at corporate dominance never turns over
into outright war: Clare employs people, supports town events and the local
university, makes products people choose. While this paper focused heavily on
Laura’s storyline, the rich body of writing on Clare’s representation in the
novel indicates how complicated Clare’s omnipresence in Laura’s life is. Like
the cancer, the corporation’s presence seems an indifferent, determining force
that’s also an intimate component of her being.
Powers’s rich treatment of Laura’s cancer story draws on the resources of the
illness narrative but expands its normative purview, eschewing its individualist
narrative tendency in favor of one that places an individual who dies of cancer in
several broader contexts. Laura begins to understand how strange her biology is
and how little she understands of herself, and this alienation gradually expands
to her self-conception as a consumer. Cancer cells within her body multiply
without her conscious consent; her consent to purchase consumer products may
have brought more into her home than she consciously desired to. Neither sit-
uation can quite be called antagonistic, simply because neither the cancer cell
nor the joint-stock corporation aims at doing anything specific to Laura Bodey.
In this way we might see Gain as a text about human vulnerability, which is
of course what all illness narratives ultimately explore—except the vulnerability
expands not just to the biomedical sphere and the home, but to the late capital-
ist ecosystem within which we are organisms.
Notes
1. Other readers do not isolate Clare as the cause, but rather corporate capitalism
itself or corporations writ large—see Ursula Heise (2002, 762, 765) or Bruce
Robbins (2003, 84).
2. Susan Mizruchi (2010), like Kathryn Hume (2013), asserts that the novel
intentionally shies away from a causal relationship. Mizruchi does not, however,
look closely at why Powers chooses cancer or why readers are drawn to making
the causal link: these are two positions that I want to pursue in this chapter.
Hume writes that the novel includes “relatively little technical material on can-
cer” (Hume 2013, 3) but I argue that what is included merits attention in rela-
tion to this causal question.
3. A memorable scene early in the book shows Laura freezing when asked to
choose between paper or plastic at the grocery store: she considers the down-
side to each (“one kills trees…the other releases insidious fumes if burned”
[27]), ultimately leaving the decision up to the bagger. In this depiction Laura
has no questions about the processed food she buys—something called “Peanut
Sheets,” “harvest burgers,” “Thirst-Aid,” “longanberry-kiwi seltzer”—only
about what to carry the groceries in (28–29).
4. Ann Jurecic (2012) pushes back forcefully against these characterizations, insist-
ing that they emerge from a hermeneutics of suspicion that overlooks the value
of stories about sickness and dying. The impressive Tulsa Studies in Women’s
Literature double-issue on innovative cancer narratives (primarily about auto-
biographical accounts of breast cancer) eschewed discussion of the mainstream
narratives often derided by literary critics, while implicitly suggesting that writ-
ing by marginalized cancer survivors offers a valuable critique of those conven-
tional norms. See Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32/33, eds. Mary K.
DeShazer and Anita Helle.
5. Lisa Lynch offers an interesting reading of this scene, arguing that it indicates
Laura’s fractured late capitalist ideology. Laura sticks with the medical establish-
ment’s corporation-absolving understanding of her cancer’s causes rather than
adopting “grass roots etiology” (2002, 204) that would allow her to join the
community of cancer sufferers in Lacewood. Much of Lynch’s analysis is con-
vincing, but her observations about this scene do not register these undermin-
ing comments by the narrator.
6. The product he mentions begins with “Atra,” which Derek Woods connected
to “atrazine”: he writes “the most likely cause of Bodey’s cancer turns out to
be atrazine” (2017, 79), which he must have drawn from Don’s reference (he
doesn’t finish the name of the product—all Don says is “Atra,” and Laura’s
reaction takes over the narration). Studies exist that propose a relationship
between atrazine and ovarian cancer, and as a long-term amateur gardener,
Laura would have had a great deal of exposure to Atrazine. Still, even this piece
of potential evidence does not confirm suspicions: to get ovarian cancer at 42
from a product she used weekly in three seasons of the year, perhaps only in
adulthood, and from a product not deployed near the part of the body where
her cancer emerged, is not a rock solid case.
Works Cited
Agnew, Lois. 2018. Ecologies of Cancer Rhetoric: The Shifting Terrain of US Cancer
Wars, 1920–1980. College English 80 (3): 271–296.
Clare, Ralph. 2014. Corporations Inc.: The Corporation in Postmodern Fiction, Film,
and Popular Culture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Conner, Kristine, and Lauren Langford. 2003. Ovarian Cancer: Your Guide to Taking
Control (Patient-Centered Guides). Boston, MA: O’Reilly Books.
Dewey, Joseph. 2008. Understanding Richard Powers. Columbia: Univ of South
Carolina Press.
508 J. GONZALEZ
Gubar, Susan. 2012. Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer. New
York: W. W. Norton.
Heise, Ursula. 2002. Toxins, Drugs, and Global Systems: Risk and Narrative in the
Contemporary Novel. American Literature 70 (4): 747–778.
Holmes, Martha Stoddard. 2006. Pink Ribbons and Public Private Parts: On Not
Imagining Ovarian Cancer. Literature and Medicine 25 (2): 475–501.
Hume, Kathryn. 2013. Moral Problematics in the Novels of Richard Powers.
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 54 (1): 1–17.
Jurecic, Ann. 2012. Illness as Narrative. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Kilgore, Christopher D. 2018. Bad Networks: From Virus to Cancer in
Post-Cyberpunk Narrative. Journal of Modern Literature 40 (2): 165–183.
Lynch, Lisa. 2002. The Epidemiology of ‘Regrettable Kinship’: Gender, Epidemic,
and Community in Todd Haynes’ [Safe] and Richard Powers’ Gain. Journal of
Medical Humanities. 23 (3/4): 203–219.
Maliszewski, Paul. 2008. The Business of Gain. In Intersections: Essays on Richard
Powers, ed. Stephen J. Burn and Peter Dempsey, 162–186. Champaign, IL: Dalkey
Archive Press.
Maxwell, Jason. 2014. Killing Yourself to Live: Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the
Autoimmunity Paradigm. Cultural Critique 88 (1): 160–186.
Mizruchi, Susan. 2010. Risk Theory and the Contemporary American Novel.
American Literary History 22 (1): 109–135.
Mlodinow, Leonard. 2009. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives.
New York: Vintage.
Montz, F.J., and Robert E. Bristow. 2005. A Guide to Survivorship for Women with
Ovarian Cancer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Mukherjee, Siddhartha. 2011. The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
New York: Scribner.
Painter-Morland, Mollie. 2011. Rethinking Responsible Agency in Corporations:
Perspectives from Deleuze and Guattari. Journal of Business Ethics 101: 83–95.
Powers, Richard. 1998. Gain. New York: Picador.
Robbins, Bruce. 2003. Homework: Richard Powers, Walt Whitman, and the Poetry of
the Commodity. ARIEL: A Review of Contemporary Literature 34 (1): 77–91.
Schulz, Jane E. 2013/14. “Valid/Invalid: Women’s Cancer Narratives and the
Phenomenology of Bodily Alteration.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 32
(4)/33 (1): 71–87.
Segal, Judy Z. 2012. Cancer Experience and Its Narration: An Accidental Study.
Literature and Medicine 30 (2): 292–318.
Sontag, Susan. 1979. Illness as Narrative. New York: Vintage Books.
Stacey, Jackie. 1997. Teratologies: A Cultural Study of Cancer. International Library of
Sociology. New York and London: Routledge.
Tabbi, Joseph. 2002. Cognitive Fictions: Electronic Mediations, vol. 8. Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Williams, Jeffrey. 1999a. The Issue of Corporations: Richard Powers’ Gain. Cultural
Logic 2 (2). http://clogic.eserver.com. Accessed 27 July 2017.
———. 1999b. The Last Generalist: An Interview with Richard Powers. Cultural
Logic 2 (2). http://clogic.eserver.com. Accessed 27 July 2017.
Woods, Derek. 2017. Corporate Chemistry: A Biopolitics of Environment in Rachel
Carson’s Silent Spring and Richard Powers’s Gain. American Literary History 29
(1): 72–99.
PART IV
Forms and Genres

CHAPTER 29
“Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics,

Contagion, and Early Twentieth-Century
American Theatre
Kirsten E. Shepherd-Barr
One of the questions that has long fascinated those interested in the
interaction between theatre and science is: how do you convey scientific ideas
in a genre that, generally speaking, has no narrative and so relies on showing
rather than telling? How is the audience supposed to “get” it? In novels and
other forms of narrative prose, the science can be explained and integrated
textually in ways not available to the ostensive mode of performance. Theatre
relies on a combination of visual and spoken languages, and takes place in
real time; the spectator cannot stop the action, go back a few pages, reread at
their own pace. Yet this is precisely what gives science-based performance its
power. The audience watches, listens, and collaborates in building the perfor-
mance in a way that epistemologically mimics the process of learning science.
The text is dislodged from its dominance as the dense network of sensory
inputs involved in performance naturally engages the full range of cognitive
faculties.
This chapter builds on that sense of shared epistemological work by
comparing two American plays of the early twentieth century that engage
very differently with scientific and medical subject matter: Susan Glaspell’s
treatment of heredity, genetics, and evolution in Inheritors (2010a) and
Sidney Howard’s dramatization of the quest to identify the cause of yellow
fever in Yellow Jack (1934). These two plays illustrate common aspects of
K. E. Shepherd-Barr (*) 
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

512 K. E. SHEPHERD-BARR
the interaction of science and theatre as well as ones rarely considered. They
show the deep history and tenacity of certain ways of dramatizing science that
still persist. They belong, though in vastly different ways, to the Progressive
era of theatre in America, a period that has been little studied in terms of
how science figured within its culture and ethos. They raise important
questions about how gender influences the conceptualization of science on
stage. Finally, both plays show how the science being engaged often tells
its own, sometimes subversive, story in light of shifting social and historical
contexts and perspectives.
The Progressive era spanned the first three decades of the twentieth
century and theatre of the time reflected its values, including (as the name
suggests) progress in all aspects of society, social justice, equality, reform,
and “purposeful human intervention” in the rapid economic growth of the
nation rather than unbridled capitalism (Brinkley, Unfinished Nation, II,
556). Not yet overtaken by film in reach and popularity, theatre was at its
peak as an instrument of social, economic, and political commentary and
change, through individual playwrights, influential playwriting courses
(such as George Pierce Baker’s at Harvard and Yale), and theatre organiza-
tions and companies such as the Provincetown Players, the Group Theatre,
and the Federal Theatre Project. Glaspell helped initiate Progressive-era
theatre through her pioneering work with the Provincetown Players in the
mid-nineteen teens. She is known for her much-anthologized feminist play
Trifles (1916) and its short story incarnation “A Jury of Her Peers,” but
she also wrote over fifty short stories, nine novels (some bestselling), four-
teen plays, and one biography. Howard was a prominent playwright of the
period who wrote factual, information-rich dramas with an overtly moral
and didactic purpose; he thought of himself more as a skilled craftsman than
an artist (Hirsch, Guide to American Theatre, 197). In John Gassner’s view,
some of Howard’s plays lacked “elevation and excitement, as is often the way
of considered and reasoned documents in the theatre,” and he concluded
that Howard generally “failed to catch fire from the period” (Gassner, Twenty
Best Plays, xiv). A contemporary who did “catch fire” by engaging with sci-
ence and medicine was Sidney Kingsley, who had two sensational Broadway
hits in Men in White (1933), which created a working hospital on stage, and
Dead End (1935), which exposed the unsanitary conditions in the slums of
New York City and was inspired by JS Haldane’s writings (Couch 1995). By
comparison, Howard’s highly textual and closely argued plays seem to lack
such inventiveness, energy, and force, but his works perhaps better exemplify
Progressive-era drama precisely for these weaknesses as well as their strengths.
Both Howard and Glaspell won Pulitzer Prizes—Howard also won
Academy Awards for two of his screenplays (Arrowsmith and Gone with
the Wind)—and were masters of several forms. Glaspell wrote journalism,
one-act and full-length plays, novels, and short stories. She first explored
the ideas about hybridity in corn that feature in Inheritors in her short story
“Pollen” (1919). This story and Inheritors show that she was conceiving of
29 “GOLDEN DUST” IN THE WIND: GENETICS … 513
heredity not in strictly scientific terms but as something national and racial
(as in the “human race”), as well as topographical (the idea of being “native”
American). Howard based Yellow Jack on the gripping account of the quest
to identify the cause of yellow fever in Paul de Kruif’s bestselling 1926 book
Microbe Hunters. Howard’s reliance on de Kruif’s book suggests an essential
deference to science and an uncritical retelling of its heroic accomplishments.
By contrast, Glaspell represents a more questioning stance. For her, human
sacrifice in the name of science is neither justified nor heroic. She questions
the authority of science and the assumptions that it engenders progress and
can save humanity. Setting Inheritors alongside Yellow Jack troubles the domi-
nant narrative of Progressive-era theatre as unequivocally the moral backbone
of society in this period and the beacon of social change and radical reform.
Inheritors: Staging Heredity in Plants and People

Inheritors is a complex play. It spans three generations of settlers in the mid-
west and takes in a broad sweep of American history and government, criti-
cizing the pursuit of westward expansion at the expense of Native Americans
who were already there and exposing the country’s faltering commitment
to tolerance of difference, freedom of expression, and the right to political
dissent. Act I is set in 1879, Acts II and III in 1920. Pointedly, the 1920
protagonists are the hybrid descendants of 1879 characters’ unions, all genet-
ically intertwined, some even (confusingly) given the same first names across
generations. Madeline, the central character in the 1920 scenes, is the grand-
daughter of Silas Morton and the niece of Felix Fejevary, whose son is also
called Felix Fejevary. This overlaying and intermingling allows Glaspell to test
how well the ideals of the earlier generation have been upheld, and she uses
the founding of a new university on land taken from Native Americans as the
play’s petri dish.
Inheritors engages with a range of scientific material that includes experi-
mentation with corn hybrids; extended discussions of evolution; and a radical
environmentalist vision of the earth as sentient. The play is centrally con-
cerned with mechanisms of transmission, whether hereditary or otherwise,
and whether of biology or of ideas. “Ain’t it queer how things blow from
mind to mind—like seeds. Lord A’mighty—you don’t know where they’ll
take hold” (Glaspell, Inheritors, I, 190). Glaspell had already explored this
idea in “Pollen,” (1919) featuring a surly, arrogant farmer called Ira (who
becomes Ira Morton in Inheritors) whose attempts jealously to guard the
superb new strain of hybrid corn that he has created are thwarted by nature:
winds carry the pollen across to his neighbors’ fields, where the corns
cross-fertilize, thrive, and thus help his fellow men. Ira learns that hybridity
is important not just in agriculture but in life, and becomes a better man,
empathetic, open-hearted, and socially integrated. The blowing winds
may be random but are they entirely without purpose? Inheritors takes up
this suggestion of will and agency in nature and explores it in some depth:
“Sometimes I feel the land itself has got a mind and that the land would
rather have had the Indians,” comments Silas. “After you’ve walked a long
time over the earth…didn’t you ever feel something coming up from it that’s
like thought?” (188). It is logical, then, that Silas dreams of establishing a
university. “Plant a college,” he says, because ideas are natural outcrops of the
thinking earth, not just of the people on it (189).
But planting is not enough; plants must be propagated in order to flourish.
This is where Ira comes in. The Ira of Inheritors has suffered deep losses—the
deaths of his son (in the trenches of the First World War) and his wife (she
died helping an immigrant family in the grip of diphtheria)—and now all he
cares about is his corn experiments; he peers at his corn in a “shrewd, greedy
way,” alludes to its “golden dust,” and says “gloatingly” that it’s the best
he’s ever had (214). Ira signals a negative interpretation of science, its dan-
gerous misuse when it trumps human interaction. Where the Ira of “Pollen”
learned humanity from nature and its winds, this Ira rages: “if I could make
the wind stand still! I want to turn the wind around” (216). He is referred
to as “insane” and “tormented” (217), and “like something touched by an
early frost” (222). Voluntary isolation and withdrawal from human contact
are clearly bad for us. But this is no vague, sentimental plea for universal love;
Glaspell is telling us to think carefully about our alliances and connections
and how those networks help others. Like the corn, we only really thrive
when we don’t just like “the same kind of people” as ourselves (218).
To set this up, Glaspell includes a lengthy discussion of Darwin in the first
act. Among other things, he is used by the younger generation to justify the
eradication of Native peoples in the Americas. Felix says that “in the struggle
for existence, many must go down. The fittest survive,” and this is what “the
great new man” (Darwin) teaches. The uneducated Silas shrewdly counters:
“Guess I don’t know what you mean—fittest” (191). Felix’s father, a highly
educated Hungarian revolutionary exile, tries to explain Darwin but injects a
note of Lamarckian will when he says that we have hands not because God
gave them to us but because long ago, “before life had taken form as man,
there was an impulse to do what had never been done,” there were “adven-
turers” whose brains and courage took life further than it had ever been, “and
that from aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with
which to do”—and this gives our hands “a history” and a purpose (191–2;
italics mine). Silas is amazed at this revelation, at the idea, in his words, that
“we made ourselves—made ourselves out of the wanting to be more—created
ourselves you might say, by our own courage” (192). He has always known
this to be true not because of science but because “the earth told me. The
beasts told me” (192). Not only does the earth think, it speaks. Glaspell
juxtaposes instinctive learning with formal education as equally valid epistemol-
ogies, and her interpretation of evolution is typical of American writers: sturdily
and reductively progressive (“man’s in the makin’,” 193), afraid of regression,
and far more influenced by Spencer and Lamarck than Darwin (Shepherd-
Barr 2015, pp. 203–36; see also Russett 1976; Papke 2006; Schuller 2017).
What is less typical for a playwright of this period, when so much of drama
looks at urbanization and its effects, is her emphasis on the land, on nativism,
and on the wisdom of the soil over that of humans.
Inheritors premiered at the Provincetown Players’ Playwrights Theatre
in Greenwich Village in March 1921. The play was a popular success with
audiences but its critical reception was mixed, one reviewer complaining
of its length (over three hours) and the overdone make-up: “a child with a
box of paints could make something far more closely resembling a human
face” (James Patterson, Billboard, 2 April 1921; quoted in Ben Zvi, 233).
Others disliked its overt politics, the New York Times deeming Inheritors a
thinly veiled polemic, “painfully dull, pulseless and desultory” (Alexander
Woollcott, New York Times, 27 March 1921) and Theatre Arts Magazine
declaring it didactic and lacking in action (Kenneth McGowan, Theatre Arts
Magazine, July 1921; quoted in Ben Zvi, 233). But Floyd Dell called it
“a high moment in American drama” (Floyd Dell, Homecoming, 267) while
others noted that its ambitious subject matter was “nothing less than the
history of the country and its direction in the future,” and that it pioneered
a new historical drama form never before seen in America (Ben Zvi, 233).
When Inheritors was published in England in 1924, it was pronounced “the
best achievement of the American theatre” (James Agate, Sunday Times, 24
August 1924) and critics repeatedly placed Glaspell alongside Ibsen and Shaw
and preferred her to O’Neill (Ben Zvi, 306–7). The play’s successful British
premiere in Liverpool in 1925 led quickly to a London transfer, covered
extensively by all the major newspapers (Ben Zvi, 309).
One explanation for this stark difference in national responses to Inheritors
is that Britain already had a strong tradition of political theatre into which
Glaspell naturally fit, in contrast to the lack of such a context in the US.
Another is that it was not “on” for a playwright, let alone a woman, to
criticize America’s history and politics on home soil. Inheritors clashed with
the conservative bent of America in the immediate post-WWI period, and
the play’s championing of hybridity and of racial and ethnic difference put
it directly at odds with the eugenics movement, at its peak in the nineteen
teens and twenties (Wolff 2009). “The Passing of the Great Race; or, the
Racial Basis of European History” (1916) by Madison Grant was a best-
seller throughout this period; the American Eugenics Society was flourish-
ing, and strenuously advocated the sterilization of the unfit. In addition, the
Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917–18 (referred to directly in Act III of
Inheritors) restricted freedom of speech and political dissent; the Johnson-
Reed Immigration Act of 1924 severely curtailed most immigration to the
US; and the hasty trial in 1921 of immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti
and their execution in 1927 stood globally as one of the greatest miscar-
riages of justice ever perpetrated by the American legal system. They were
victims of the first Red Scare, in the immediate aftermath of the 1917
Russian Revolution and WWI, another important context for Inheritors.
Glaspell waded straight into this reactionary political environment with
her play, asking what it really means to be, as the play repeatedly puts it,
“one-hundred-percent-American” (194), genetically, intellectually, and polit-
ically. Presciently, in the 1920 scenes she has the college president declare:
“I’m not going to have foreign revolutionists come here and block the things
I’ve spent my life working for” (207).
Glaspell makes much of the university site being on a hill—a promi-
nent motif in the play, frequently mentioned by most of the characters for
its beauty and ideal situation for a university because “you can see it from
the whole country round” (198). But the reverse is also true: the hill can
become a panopticon that can see everyone, watch and monitor the activities
of the city around it if it chooses to do so. The right-wing senator scruti-
nizes the university and puts pressure on the president to suppress an activ-
ist professor and student (the president’s own niece). We see the university
that undertakes surveillance of its students and faculty members ceasing to
be a place of intellectual integrity and freedom. The Verge, the play Glaspell
wrote directly after Inheritors, continues this panopticon motif in the form of
Claire’s glass-encased greenhouse laboratory and the strange tower to which
she retreats, suggesting that both are concrete ways of reversing the policing
male gaze. The play’s engagement with science lies in the critique of the dan-
gers of distorting the new field of genetics into eugenics, which emphasized
the visible defects of the unfit as keys to their innate, biological flaws (Wolff
2009). Glaspell’s theatre repeatedly suggests that how we handle looking,
seeing, and gazing at the surface of things, what conclusions we draw based
on our observations of the visible, says everything about us as a people.
Yellow Jack: Staging a Medical Detective Story

Unseen organic processes lie at the heart of Howard’s Yellow Jack as well.
The play tells the story of tracking down the cause of yellow fever by going
through the different milestones in the search. The star of the story is Major
Walter Reed, an army medical investigator stationed in Cuba in 1900 to iden-
tify the cause of yellow fever and other tropical diseases that are having a dev-
astating impact on the army. Through risky experiments on human subjects,
some of whom died, Reed was able to ascertain that the fever is transmitted
by certain species of mosquito, not by fomites (infected clothing, bedding, or
body fluids). It is a virus which, at high enough concentration, can infect the
epithelial cells of the mosquito and replicate, eventually reaching the salivary
glands. This means that transmission can only occur within a specific time
frame: “mosquitoes only receive sufficient virus if they feed during the first
few days of illness, when the viral load is high, and they cannot transmit the
disease until nearly a fortnight later” (http://www.aycyas.com/yellowjack.
htm). Much of the drama of the play lies in the risky experiments required to
gain this understanding.
The play proceeds in reverse (like a precursor to Harold Pinter’s Betrayal)
through scenes that take us eventually back to Reed’s great breakthrough.
We begin in 1929 in a London laboratory trying to create a yellow fever

vaccine, at the expense of many dead monkeys. The next scene is a flashback
to a few years earlier when scientists are despairing at not finding an animal
that will catch the disease, no matter how often they have tried injecting
every available species. One colleague, Harkness, even thinks wistfully of
injecting people in the village in West Africa where they are working—
implying that he views them as animals, which horrifies his colleague
Kraemer. Once they realize that another colleague, Stokes, has achieved the
“miracle” of fatally transmitting the disease to a monkey, they begin to argue
about the next step; Stokes proposes that they do the same on a lot more
monkeys, saying that “five hundred monkeys are cheaper than one man” and
that they can’t even begin to think of a vaccine “till we’ve seen dozens of
monkeys die as this one’s died.” This sense of lives needing to be sacrificed
to the cause of science prepares us for the next series of scenes in which those
lives become human, as the play moves to 1900 and Reed’s laboratory in the
American Yellow Fever Commission in Cuba.
They are having no luck figuring out why so many soldiers are dying of the
disease until they discover that a soldier has developed it while alone, locked
up in a guardhouse for a month. This makes Reed pause, and “the light con-
centrates upon the tensely thoughtful Reed” as he has a eureka moment:
“What was it crawled or jumped or flew through that guardhouse window,
bit that one prisoner and went back where it came from?” (39). He infers
that it’s a mosquito, and that this particular species is the disease vector. They
go to visit Finlay, the old doctor who has known about the mosquito as the
source for nineteen years but never been taken seriously. He is understandably
bitter at being scorned and takes some persuading, but finally turns over the
mosquito eggs he has been cultivating that contain the fever. “You hold the
key to yellow fever in your hands,” he tells Reed’s team. (Howard makes
Finlay, a Cuban doctor of French-Scottish extraction, a crusty old Scot.) Led
by Reed, the men then proceed, against army orders, secretly to experiment
on themselves, one after the other, as well as on four unwitting soldiers.
This is high drama, suffused with intense discussion and self-conscious
awareness of what “science” is, its point, values, aims, and “workmanship.”
It is also the story of tough, single-minded men sacrificing themselves in
pursuit of science. It is thus typical of the strongly biographical “great men
of science” approach to engaging science in the theatre. The play depicts
Reed as the hero who conquered yellow fever, a narrative adhered to by US
history textbooks as well and reinforced by De Kruif, even though Reed took
great care to credit Finlay’s important role. The play and the Hollywood film
version a few years later both downplay another of Reed’s great innovations:
informed consent, today an indispensable part of any experiment involving
human subjects. Evidently that was not dramatic enough.
The play’s unquestioning acceptance of vivisection, its frequent racial and
ethnic slurs, and its defense of unethical procedures in the greater goal of
science not only date it but make it unstageable today. For instance, one of
the soldiers being experimented upon repeatedly refers to his Jewishness in

ways that both assert and deride it: “I may be Jewish but I got guts!” (32).
But even if such elements were to be cut, a revival would be unlikely, because
what made the play theatrically notable and remarkable in its time—its
innovative staging—is now completely standard in theatrical productions.
Yellow Jack premiered in New York at the Martin Beck Theatre in March
1934 and ran for 79 performances. It was directed by Guthrie McClintic
and featured set design by Jo Mielziner. James Stewart was in the original
cast playing John O’Hara, one of the soldiers involved as a human subject in
Reed’s experiments. Mielziner was at the start of his extraordinary career as
one of America’s leading stage designers (his staging of plays by Miller and
Williams in particular remain landmarks in theatre history), and Yellow Jack
was an early example of his trademark style of moving quickly and seamlessly
from scene to scene by using lighting and different levels of flooring instead
of realistic scenery to depict place. The opening stage directions explain how
this works:
The stage is divided into two levels, the upper lifted five feet above the floor
of the stage and approached from below by twin flights of steps. These steps
curve on either side of the central element of the upper level, a round bay which
remains Reed’s laboratory throughout the play…..The production uses nothing
of realism beyond the properties [hospital beds, tents, laboratory equipment]
which are absolutely essential to the action. Changes of locale are indicated only
by alteration in the lighting. The action being continuous, the play flows in a
constantly shifting rhythm of light. (Yellow Jack at Internet Archive)
At one point, “the laboratory [Reed’s], its shelves, glassware and micro-
scopes, shines with unearthly effulgence, as from within itself” (55). This
illumination of the lab space happens frequently throughout the play,

suggesting the lab as a living, sentient entity; almost a separate character in
the play, similar to the thinking earth of Inheritors or the greenhouse of The
Verge. Both Glaspell and Howard (with Mielziner’s help) foreground the
agency of the physical space in their staging of science and medicine. This
agency is not just a means to conveying science; it is central to the conception
of how science and theatre integrate.
The “multi-leveled, skeletonized settings and poetic lighting” of the
production were lauded, but “the lateness of the season, the sombreness,
if ultimate hopefulness, of the story, and the large, costly cast militated
against a run of more than ten weeks” (Gerald Bordman, American Theatre:
A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama, 1930–1969, 96). It was also the bot-
tom of the Depression, surely a key factor in the run of any play. Subsequent
productions have been rare, though the play was revived in 1947 at the
American Repertory Theatre and was made into a Hollywood film in 1938
starring Robert Montgomery, produced by MGM building on their previous
success with their film about Louis Pasteur and their reputation for engaging
successfully with social issues. True to form, the film version “cleaned up,
romanticised and re-focused” (http://www.aycyas.com/yellowjack.htm)
the story, including the creation of “a completely unnecessary love interest”
for O’Hara (played by Montgomery): an army nurse named Frances Blake,
entirely erasing the real-life nurse Clara Maass who volunteered not once but
twice to be bitten by the mosquito thought to carry the disease and whose
death proved that immunity was not automatically conferred on survivors
of the disease. Though her full story is side-lined in the play, she is at least
present in it and fulfilling a serious medical role, not simply serving as a love
interest for the male star as in the film.
There is very little criticism on the play, and little information on its
genesis. In his introduction to 20 Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre,
John Gassner describes Yellow Jack (itself not included in the collection) as “a
drama which moved away from personal complications, honoring the services
of science to society in the battle against yellow fever in Cuba. It was a noble
and spirited work, and it belonged to the bolder experiments by virtue of its
shifting scenes unified by the omission of intermissions” (xiv). The primary
source for information about Yellow Jack is the preface by Howard which was
published (in edited form) in the New York Times (“The Preface for ‘Yellow
Jack,’ 11 March 1934), in which Howard explains that after reading Microbe
Hunters he approached de Kruif and suggested using his chapter on Reed and
yellow fever as the basis for a play. But de Kruif was “only mildly intrigued
with the idea,” so Howard wrote it alone.
Howard begins his Preface by asserting that science and theatre are a
natural fit: “the things men of science do and how they do them, even when
they far outreach my understanding, exceed any other activity of modern life
for the drama which is in them.” He argues that such inherently dramatic
material is precisely what theatre “so sorely” needs as an alternative to “the
repetitions of love and crime.” Theatre needs “real characters and facts,”

simply presented, and it will be “as interesting as the morning paper.”
Yellow Jack is meant to illustrate how this can be achieved: it presents “a sin-
gle medical experiment from its inception to its conclusion with no more
elaboration either in characterization or in dramatic intervention than would
seem essential to presenting its incidents in dramatic form.” That “elabora-
tion” is hardly as minimal as he claims. He lists “certain minor historical liber-
ties” that he has taken and explains that he has allowed himself “full liberty in
the assembling of characters and scenes,” including inventing characters and
compressing the actual experiment by omitting certain phases of it. He justi-
fies this alteration of the facts in the name of dramatic action and interest and
because some of the people involved, and their relatives, are still living. “The
play is to be considered rather a celebration than a representation.” This sur-
prisingly candid admission of bias toward a heroic display of medicine directly
contrasts the neutral, “let the facts speak for themselves” approach often
claimed for documentary theatre (Shepherd-Barr 2006, 63–77).
The preface is as much a reflection on the nature of theatre, and the

challenges of its construction, as an explanation of how this particular play
came about. Howard is unsure what kind of play he has written. He says
that the play’s subtitle, “A History,” is “pretentious,” and was aimed at pre-
venting people from telling him that it “is not a play.” He muses on “what
constitutes a play,” giving three examples that are so different (Oedipus Rex,
The Way of the World, and The Emperor Jones) that he has to give up on find-
ing a single definition that fits them all. He wants to “forget about what is
known as dramatic technique, if indeed there is or ever has been any such
thing.” He confesses to getting “stuck” in writing Yellow Jack because he
quickly discovered “that neither de Kruif nor I knew enough about either the
characters or the events to dramatize them,” and because “the material could
not be managed in anything resembling a conventional realistic form.” The
temporal aspect was particularly challenging. Straightforwardly linear devel-
opment would not be true to the reality of medical experiment, which “is
a thing of many details, a succession of cautious steps, steps which go more
often backward than forward. Therein lies its excitement.” He realized that
no form existed that could encompass the story in “realistic production.”
His breakthrough came when he happened to see a Chinese theatre in San
Francisco and this gave him “the combination” to make Yellow Jack work.
For Howard, Chinese theatre was like Elizabethan theatre; both forms “make
possible the inherent poetry of the story.” Once he had ditched prosaic real-
ism, he was able to finish the play, and working with Mielziner clinched it.
Dispensing with “doors or windows, walls or ceilings, entrances or exits” was
liberating; “a play which cannot be done without scenery is probably not
worth doing.” The opening stage directions stipulate that the play be done as
a “modern approximation of the Elizabethan stage.”
The rest of the preface outlines the scientific soundness of the play: the
research Howard did into the historical records, consulting the Academy
of Medicine in New York and the library of the Surgeon General’s office in
Washington, DC. De Kruif’s input was indirect: “when I found myself using
the dictionary too hard, I imposed on de Kruif to write an article for my
private use. Medical reports rewritten by de Kruif become child’s play.” In
other words, Howard relied on this mediation of technical, specialist medical
language. He also made visits to get information from participants and their
relatives, including the widow of Walter Reed, who showed him Reed’s letters
from Cuba, and Dr. Cook, one of the human subjects who lived for three
weeks in the filthy house at Camp Lazear as part of the pivotal experiment.
He interviewed “a good many dozens of army and ex-army men.” Yet not
only was there the problem of memory being inherently subjective and unre-
liable, but Howard seemed unable to form a clear sense of what Reed and
his colleagues were actually like. Uncannily, he discovered that things that
he had made up about Reed (bribing a soldier to admit to his whereabouts,
then offering to pay him when the soldier turned out to be telling the truth)
were actually true. Not only does this justify Howard’s inventions, it further
illustrates the complicated relationship of fact to fiction and the “gray zone”
between them in many plays engaging with science. In this regard, Yellow
Jack represents a commonly held position on “science plays” that defers to
the science as the main element that must not be compromised, even while
seeming to claim equal status for theatricality.
Howard’s preface tells us a lot about the play’s origins, and about its
expectations. The fact that it appeared in the front pages of the New York
Times and at such length gave it a prominence rarely accorded theatrical
productions. Clearly, the play was expected to be a sensation. Howard
conveys a sense of this portentousness in the final sentences (“as I con-
clude this preface it is less than three hours before the curtain will rise on
its first performance under the profound and poetic direction of Guthrie
McClintic”). The modest circumstances of Inheritors stand in marked con-
trast to this sense of a great event. The two plays inhabited different theatrical
spheres with radically different production values, reflecting the budgets of,
on the one hand, experimental, off-Broadway theatre and, on the other hand,
high-profile, mainstream Broadway productions. But they do have similar
structures, spanning events over a long period of time and across generations,
and telescoping history. Glaspell uses this span in order to raise questions
about how evolution works and whether it is progressive, while Howard’s aim
is to show the triumphant march of medical science.
Where Inheritors and Yellow Jack diverge most dramatically is in assessing
the human cost of progress: for Howard, the few lives lost in the quest to
stop yellow fever are worth it; for Glaspell, the plight of indigenous people
cleared off their land, of the Indian student protestors at the university, and
the conscientious objectors put in solitary confinement for their beliefs all
represent human sacrifice to a distorted and tarnished nationalism. In her
vision of evolution, no one is dispensable; each is an essential part of the web
of life. In Howard’s play, a few lives lost make no evolutionary difference but
are humanity’s gain by helping to control a deadly disease.
It is tempting to see these different visions as shaped by gender. Glaspell
conveys evolution as something intangible, humanity as vitally intercon-
nected and hybrid, and the earth as active, thinking agent rather than pas-
sive resource to be colonized and industrialized. This approach is consistent
with a distinctly feminist view of nature and the environment as needing
protection and nurture (Gates, ed., In Nature’s Name, 2002). It is also an
extension of the feminism of her other plays of this period, especially Trifles,
The Outside, and The Verge, all of which utilize innovative staging and the
agentive properties of physical space to convey their ideas. By contrast,
Howard’s docudrama foregrounds stereotypically male endeavors and quali-
ties in its seemingly impartial account. Yet this may largely be due to the style
of its raw material, Microbe Hunters. De Kruif’s success as a science writer
came partly through his unique style which fused the factual and the sub-
jective in a self-consciously virile, masculinist voice that matches his subject
matter. His works focus mostly on exceptional men of medicine and science,
as in Microbe Hunters, Life Among the Doctors, and Men Against Death
(focusing on heroic real-life doctors, all male), but also extended to writing a
book on testosterone (The Male Hormone, 1945), an eye-watering autobiog-
raphy (A Sweeping Wind, 1962) that catalogues his prodigious sexual appe-
tites and marital infidelities (and sheds no light on Yellow Jack), and a book
called Seven Iron Men in which one patriarchal American family, the Merritt
brothers, is crushed by another, the Rockefellers.
Here again, context is key. It is difficult to overstate the degree to which
American literature and theatre of the so-called “Progressive Era” was dom-
inated by male writers. Male writers were foregrounded and maleness
was—quite literally—prized. The Pulitzer Prize was founded on an empha-
sis on maleness as well on literary quality and moral guidance. Pulitzer’s will
stipulated that the prize for the novel be awarded to the work that “shall best
present the whole atmosphere of American life, and the highest standard of
American manners and manhood” and the prize for drama should go to plays
that “shall best represent the educational value and power of the stage in raising
the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners” (“Extracts from
the Will of Joseph Pulitzer, from the Will dated April 16, 1904,” www.pulitzer.
org/page/extracts-will-joseph-pulitzer, accessed 20/08/2019). Even when
Pulitzer prizes were awarded to women writers, including Glaspell’s in 1931 for
her play Alison’s House, it was on the basis of these values.
At first glance, then, Yellow Jack and Inheritors seem to follow predictable
gender lines: Yellow Jack reflecting its author’s masculinist concerns,
Inheritors promoting Glaspell’s feminism. Yet Howard was not so straight-
forwardly masculinist in his endeavors. He was a versatile dramatist who
worked in several genres including comedy, spectacle, romance, war drama,
and science theatre. He also collaborated with other writers and adapted their
works for the stage and screen, notably the film version of Sinclair Lewis’s
Arrowsmith (a novel about an ambitious doctor that excoriated the med-
ical profession) and Dodsworth; and he wrote the screenplay for Gone with
the Wind. (Coincidentally, De Kruif had already had a hand in the novel
Arrowsmith; Lewis relied so heavily on De Kruif’s help with regard to the
medical environment, characters, and themes that the latter received 25%
of the royalties, even though Lewis was named as the sole author.) By the
time of his premature death in 1939 at the age of 48 in a tractor accident
on his farm, Howard had written 27 plays and numerous other works. His
Ned McCobb’s Daughter (1927) contained “one of the era’s most appealing
New Women, a heroine with more sense than any of the men in her life”
(Hirsch, Guide to American Theatre, 197). Likewise, Glaspell resists easy cat-
egorization. Although Inheritors seems to contain the same feminist ideals as
her powerful and pioneering feminist works Trifles and The Verge, it is not an
overtly feminist drama (Ozieblo, Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography 2000,
176ff.). The play not only charts its heroine’s growing political consciousness
(echoing that of Elizabeth Robins’s budding suffragette in Votes for Women!
fifteen years earlier), but also shows the personal cost her activism entails as
well as questioning its efficacy (Ben Zvi and Gainor in Complete Plays, 180).
This ambivalence toward feminism is strongly shaped by Glaspell’s thoughts
on evolution and genetics. In short, the more deeply you look at them, the
more Yellow Jack and Inheritors resist easy categorization along established
lines.
Though the two seem so different, there is a further dimension to
Glaspell’s theatre work that aligns it unexpectedly with Howard’s Yellow
Jack. During the brief life of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) in the 1930s,
Glaspell served as its midwest bureau director. Conscious of the highly vis-
ible public health campaign in Chicago to eradicate syphilis, she suggested
to Arnold Sundgaard that he write a play about the disease for the FTP. The
result was Spirochete (1938), a Living Newspaper history-of-medicine play
that dramatized the origins and spread of the syphilis bacteria. The FTP was
in many senses the poster child of the Progressive theatre movement of the
1930s; the other main example was the Theatre Guild, which grew out of
the Washington Square Players and whose leading playwrights and directors
included Harold Clurman, Sidney Kingsley, and Eugene O’Neill. These were
the theatrical circles in which Glaspell and Howard moved. Spirochete and
Yellow Jack have a lot in common, not least the intersection of public health
education with entertaining spectacle and rousing narratives of “great men of
science.” Closer examination of their plays in light of their engagement with
science and medicine might open the way to a broader, and long overdue,
reassessment of the theatre of the “Progressive” era.
Glaspell’s career shows a sustained interest in engaging with science;
Howard’s by comparison was fleeting, opportunistic, and confined to Yellow
Jack. Despite this fundamental difference, both Inheritors and Yellow Jack
highlight modes of engagement between science and theatre that in many
ways serve as templates for today. They also show us the value of looking
beneath the surface of the science in the play and studying its many contexts;
and they warn us that science cannot be compartmentalized, any more than
theatre can.
Works Cited
Ben-Zvi, Linda (ed.). 1995. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann
Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Bordman, Gerald. 1997. American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama,
1930–1969. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brinkley, Alan. 1993. The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People
Volume Two: From 1865. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Couch, Nena (ed.). 1995. Sidney Kingsley: Five Prizewinning Plays. Columbus: Ohio
State University Press.
De Kruif, Paul. 1927. Microbe Hunters. London: Jonathan Cape.
———. 1945. The Male Hormone. New York: Permabooks.
———. 1962. The Sweeping Wind: A Memoir. London: Rupert Hart-Davis.
Gassner, John (ed.). 1939. Twenty Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre. New
York: Crown.
Gates, Barbara T. (ed.). 2002. In Nature’s Name: An Anthology of Women’s Writing
and Illustration, 1780–1930. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glaspell, Susan. 2010a. Inheritors. In Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays, ed. Linda
Ben-Zvi and J. Ellen Gainor. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland.
———. 2010b. “Pollen” (originally published 1919). In Her America: “A Jury of
her Peers” and Other Stories by Susan Glaspell, ed. Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C.
Carpentier. Iowa City: The University of Iowa Press.
Hirsch, Foster. 1996. Sidney Howard. In The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre,
ed. Don Wilmeth with Tice Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Howard, Sidney. 1938. Yellow Jack. Fourth printing. Internet Archive. https://
archive.org/details/yellowjackhistor00howa_0.
———. 1934. The Preface for Yellow Jack. New York Times, March 11.
Ozieblo, Barbara. 2000. Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press.
Papke, Mary. 2006. Susan Glaspell’s Naturalist Scenarios of Determinism and Blind
Faith. In Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell,
ed. Martha C. Carpentier and Barbara Ozieblo. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Russett, Cynthia Eagle. 1976. Darwin in America: The Intellectual Response, 1865–
1912. San Francisco: Freeman.
Century. Durham: Duke University Press.
Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten. 2006 [2012]. Science on Stage: From Doctor Faustus to
Copenhagen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
———. 2015. Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Susan Glaspell Society.
Unsigned entry. Yellow Jack (1938 film), posted 4 June 2016. https://andyoucally-
ourselfascientist.com/?s=yellow+jack.
Wilmeth, Don, with Tice Miller. 1996. The Cambridge Guide to American Theatre.
Wolff, Tamsen. 2009. Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-
Century American Drama. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
CHAPTER 30
The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser,

Charles Olson, and F. O. Matthiessen
at Mid-Century
Sarah Daw
In her 1949 treatise on poetic composition, The Life of Poetry, the American
poet Muriel Rukeyser argues that the “correspondences” between science
and poetry “continue to be many,” despite the vastly different social statuses
afforded to the two disciplines within Cold War American culture (162). The
role of quantum physics in the development of the nuclear bomb had trans-
formed the figure of the theoretical physicist in the American cultural imag-
ination after 1945, from that of the “remote” “freak of intellect”—akin, as
Rukeyser describes, to the figure of the poet—into that of the secular God
(Rukeyser 1996, 160). Whilst noting this seismic change in the popular per-
ception of physics within Cold War American culture, Rukeyser nevertheless
maintains that the affinities between the poet and the physicist, which she first
identifies in her 1942 biography of the physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs, remain
pertinent. She goes on to assert that:
Art and science have instigated each other from the beginning […] both science
and poetry are languages ready to be betrayed in translation; but their roots
spread through our tissue, their deepest meanings fertilize us, and reaching our
consciousness, they reach each other. They make a meeting-place. There are
opposites here; identity is not Aristotelian; it is rather the identity of Whitman
and modern science. But it includes a unity. (1996, 162)
S. Daw (*) 

526 S. DAW
In this passage, Rukeyser suggests that the unification of the deepest mean-
ings of poetry and science occurs within the human mind. Her “material”
description of the acquisition of knowledge, emphasizing the “tissue” of the
brain and drawing on botanical metaphor, also reveals an understanding of
the human mind and body as interdependently entangled with the material
and processes of the wider environment.
On the same page of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser continues to stress this
monist, “material” depiction of the human relationship to the environment
by quoting from George Sarton’s Introduction to the History of Science (pub-
lished between 1927 and 1948): “the unity of nature, the unity of science,
and the unity of mankind – are but three different visages of the same unity”
(162). She goes on to repeat Sarton’s suggestion that all of human progress
can be understood as a movement toward the comprehension of the “hidden
unity” of “mankind,” “science,” and “nature,” and to suggest that it is “our
age [the twentieth century], in the promise of its science and its poetry” that
has “made available to all people the idea of one world” (1996, 162–163). In
this section of The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser contends that such depictions of a
concealed “unity” underlying “multiplicity” is representative of the “unity”
“of modern science” (1996, 162). However, she also simultaneously suggests
that the same “unity” in “multiplicity” is present within the poetics of the
nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman.
By bringing “Whitman and modern science” together in this way,
Rukeyser is drawing equally on two works of contemporary literary crit-
icism: F. O. Matthiessen’s canon-forming work of American literary crit-
icism American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman (1941), and Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy of science text
Science and the Modern World (1925)—a book that also contains a surpris-
ing amount of literary criticism. This chapter will explore the intersections of
nineteenth-century poetry and “modern science” in Rukeyser’s The Life of
Poetry, drawing particular attention to the creative-critical feedback loops that
shape her mid-century theorization of poetry.
As this chapter will detail, Rukeyser uses the term “modern science” in the
above passage to refer to specific scientific developments in the early years
of the twentieth century related to the rise of quantum physics. Her mani-
festo for contemporary poetics is grounded in a desire to forge a new poetics
responsive to this new scientific field, and this aim leads her to utilize con-
temporaneous texts that explore the philosophical implications of early quan-
tum physics. At the same time, her poetics draws extensively on Matthiessen’s
mid-century reevaluation of Transcendentalist poetics. The Life of Poetry
combines these two diverse and contemporaneous influences in order to
develop an experimental “ecopoetics” that deftly inflects nineteenth-cen-
tury ideas of “organic form” with twentieth-century scientific insights. The
scientifically inflected “organic process” ecopoetics that Rukeyser debuts
in The Life of Poetry has also been extremely influential within the field of
ecopoetry (Keenaghan 2018, 192). However, as this chapter will go on to
30 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF FORM: MURIEL RUKEYSER, CHARLES OLSON … 527
explore, Rukeyser’s impact within the field has been systematically obscured
by the adoption of a number of The Life of Poetry’s principal innovations by
Rukeyser’s male contemporaries. In particular, the celebration of Charles
Olson’s contributions to the development of contemporary ecopoetry has
overlooked the extent to which Olson’s enormously influential “Projective
Verse” manifesto, published in 1950, was influenced by Rukeyser’s 1949 text.
Nineteenth-Century Poetics Meets Twentieth-Century

Physics
The letters that survive between Rukeyser and the American literary critic
F. O. Matthiessen suggest that the two began a friendly correspondence
sometime in 1940, the year before the publication of Matthiessen’s American
Renaissance.1 The two writers’ friendship was clearly rooted in a shared left-
ist politics, which resulted in Matthiessen’s public defense of Rukeyser’s liter-
ary and political reputation in the pages of Partisan Review in 1943, against
the editors’ charges of opportunism and neo-Americanism.2 Upon reading
American Renaissance in 1941, Rukeyser would undoubtedly have been grat-
ified to encounter Matthiessen’s strong affirmation of the “broad connec-
tions” “between poetry and science” (Matthiessen 1968, 614)—already the
subject of her own lecture series “The Usable Truth.” This lecture series was
debuted from 1940, and would become The Life of Poetry (Kennedy-Epstein
2018, 1150–1153).
In a chapter on Walt Whitman’s landscapes, Matthiessen comments on
both Whitman’s, and William Wordsworth’s, positive and influential engage-
ments with contemporary science (1968, 614). He then goes on to refer-
ence the twentieth-century process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead’s
discussion of the relationship between science and Romantic literature in
Science and the Modern World (1925), suggesting that both Whitman and
Wordsworth:
represent man and nature as deeply interrelated, for reasons given by

Whitehead’s explanation, in Science and the Modern World, of the origin of
romanticism. As a result of the conception held by the scientists of the late sev-
enteenth century that the universe was a mechanism, the conclusion had been
drawn that man must have been introduced into it from the outside, and that
he was wholly apart from nature and alien to it. But by the end of the eight-
eenth century a sensitive man like Wordsworth, stimulated by the newer asso-
ciationist psychology, had already come to feel the falsity of this assumption.
(1968, 614–615)
In the pages of American Renaissance, Matthiessen therefore reproduces

Whitehead’s thesis on literary Romanticism’s relationship to Enlightenment
science. He then proceeds to emphatically endorse the connection that
Whitehead draws in Science and the Modern World between Romanticism
528 S. DAW
and his own quantum-influenced “process” philosophy, commenting that:

“what was visioned as a romantic dream has been upheld by modern thought.
Whitehead affirms that human feeling and inanimate objects are interpene-
trated, that Wordsworth was right in bearing emphatic witness ‘that nature
cannot be divorced from aesthetic values’” (1968, 615).3 The links that
Matthiessen makes in these passages between the imaginative work of the
scientist and the poet closely echo the argument that Rukeyser was already
making in the almost-completed manuscript of Willard Gibbs. In Gibbs,  she
contends that Gibbs’s pioneering work in nineteenth-century thermody-
namics had laid the foundations for the twentieth-century quantum revo-
lution, and was resultantly of great relevance to the mid-twentieth-century
poet. Matthiessen’s reiteration of Whitehead’s argument that Romantic
poetry and twentieth-century science shared epistemological “common
ground” is also almost certainly the source of the connection that Rukeyser
makes between “Whitman and modern science” in The Life of Poetry.
Furthermore, as this chapter will explore, Rukeyser continues to draw heavily
on Matthiessen’s work, and on a wide range of “modern science” writing, in
developing the new theory of poetics that she outlines in the text.
As I have already suggested, Rukeyser’s allusion to “modern science” is a
reference to the twentieth-century “quantum revolution” in the field of phys-
ics. Rukeyser’s acute awareness of the seismic change that had occurred in the
field of physics after 1900, as quantum science emerged to challenge the prin-
ciples established by classical [Newtonian] mechanics, is evident in her biog-
raphy of Willard Gibbs. Written concurrently with The Life of Poetry, Willard
Gibbs narrates the advent of the quantum revolution in relation to the final
stage of Gibbs’s career. In exposing the connections between Gibbs’s work
and the new quantum physics, Rukeyser comments:
Gibbs entered [the twentieth century] with the consciousness of a great work
[…] ready for a new summary, among all the earth-shaking summary announce-
ments […] the work leading to the explosive history of radium, and the quan-
tum theory devised by Planck just at the turn of the century. (1988, 335)
The majority of physicists “were not preparing for change” with the advent of
quantum physics, Rukeyser writes, and held fast to “their ideas of mechanism
[classical mechanics] while they could” (1988, 335). Gibbs, however, was busy
reconciling his work in thermodynamics with the field’s newest developments,
thereby bringing his life’s work into a “form that could be reconciled with the
new physics, reconciled with the twentieth century” (1988, 335). As a result of
this foresight and engagement on the part of Gibbs, Rukeyser goes on to outline,
quantum theory, in “discarding [many nineteenth-century models] has shown
kinship with [the] work of Gibbs, and attention is [now] being directed to
Statistical Mechanics [Gibbs’s master work] as the forerunner of work in quanta”
(1988, 342). By reading Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry alongside one
another, it becomes clear that Rukeyser’s sometimes opaque references to the
“science” of “our age,” or to “modern science” in the latter text reference the
quantum revolution, which redefined the field of physics from 1900 and shaped
the course of science and history alike in the first half of the twentieth century.
The influence of Gibbs’s work over Rukeyser’s discussion of
twentieth-century science in The Life of Poetry is also evidenced by her repetition
of the terms “relations” and “relationships”. In Willard Gibbs, she frequently
uses both terms when discussing the transition from Newtonian to quantum
mechanics, and in describing the contribution of Gibbs’s work. For example,
she repeatedly characterizes Gibbs’s large and lasting theoretical contribution
to the discipline of physics as “bringing relationships nearer to order, nearer
to unity” (1988, 438), and she describes Gibbs elsewhere as “interested in the
relations between facts (or systems)” [italics in original] (1988, 360). In The Life
of Poetry, she similarly foregrounds the role of “relations” over “objects,” begin-
ning the section of The Life of Poetry titled “The Life of Symbols” with a series
of references to another early twentieth-century philosopher of science, Henri
Poincaré. Rukeyser begins this section of the book with the following passage
of quotation and discussion: “Science is a system of relations. Poincaré, saying
so, says also, ‘It is before all a classification, a manner of bringing together facts
which appearances separate, though they are bound together by some natural
hidden kinship’” (1996, 165). She goes on to note Poincaré’s proclamation,
made in his 1908 text The Value of Science, that the “objective value of science
[…] does not mean: Does science teach us the true nature of things? but […]
Does it teach us the true relation of things?” before proceeding to develop
this argument in her own prose, commenting: “The search of man is a long
process towards this reality, the reality of the relationships” (1996, 165). Both
Rukeyser’s language choices in this final sentence, and her depiction of  the
dynamic relationship between entities as the subject of philosophical enquiry,
contain strong echoes of Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy; the title
of Whitehead’s seminal philosophical text Process and Reality (1929) is conspic-
uously referenced in the sentence’s language and phrasing.
Rukeyser’s discussion of twentieth-century science in The Life of Poetry
therefore contains a Whiteheadian inflection, which is itself refracted through
her previous immersion in the work of Gibbs. This complex layering of con-
temporary scientific influences, including Poincaré’s early twentieth-century
philosophy of science writing, Whitehead’s quantum-influenced “process”
philosophy, and the fin-de-siècle thermodynamics of Gibbs, characterizes
Rukeyser’s manifesto for contemporary poetics. The Life of Poetry is a text
acutely responsive to its contemporary scientific context and defined by its
attention to the quantum revolution that took place in the field of physics in
the early years of the twentieth century. Rukeyser repeatedly references con-
temporary philosophy of science work that responds to the seismic changes in
the field of physics that took place in the early years of the twentieth century.
She also incorporates elements of this writing into her experimental theory
of poetics, creating a new poetics appropriate to what she regarded as a new
scientific age.
530 S. DAW
Rukeyser also wrote The Life of Poetry against a background of the ascend-
ance of the New Criticism—an approach to literary analysis that she delib-
erately engages with in the text in order to condemn. At the core of this
censure is a suggestion that the New Criticism failed to either comprehend
or incorporate poetry’s relationship to “life” as it was now understood
in contemporary science, and more particularly, in new work within the
field of physics; Rukeyser asserts: “in poetry, the relations are not formed
like crystals on a lattice of words, although the old criticism, (which at the
moment is being called the New Criticism) would have us believe so.” The
New Critical approach to poetry failed, she argues, because it persisted
in “ignoring the most apparent facts of our condition in this period,” and
“thinking in terms of a static mechanics” (1996, 166). The reference to
classical, or “Newtonian,” mechanics again makes clear that the “most
apparent facts of our condition” to which Rukeyser is referring in The Life
of Poetry relate to the rise of quantum physics and its attendant episte-
mologies. Like the physicists she describes as failing to adapt to the quan-
tum revolution in Willard Gibbs, Rukeyser characterizes the New Critics as
“holding onto […] ideas of mechanism” (1988, 335). Rather than holding
fast to these nineteenth-century scientific frameworks, she instead instructs
contemporary poets to embrace the onto-epistemologies espoused by early
twentieth-century philosophers of science such as Sarton, Whitehead and
Poincaré, and foreshadowed in the nineteenth-century poetics of Emerson
and Whitman. In place of a “static mechanics,” Rukeyser advocates a dynamic
“unity in multiplicity.”
F. O. Matthiessen and “Organic Form”

In reaction to the New Critics’ staid approach to language and poetry,
Rukeyser outlines a postwar poetics that combines early twentieth-century
philosophy of science writing with Matthiessen’s critical readings of
nineteenth-century American poetics. It is clear that Rukeyser was deeply

influenced by Matthiessen’s critical work: she includes lengthy quotations
from American Renaissance in Willard Gibbs and The Life of Poetry, both of
which she was in the midst of writing when Matthiessen’s book was pub-
lished in 1941. However, the core of American Renaissance’s influence on
Rukeyser’s poetics is traceable to the fourth chapter of the text, titled “The
Organic Principle.” In this chapter, Matthiessen discusses the influence of
British and German Romanticism on the concept of “organic form” out-
lined by the nineteenth-century American Transcendentalist writers Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman (1968, 134).
Matthiessen emphasizes the relationship between poetry and Nature in the
work of the Transcendentalists, specifically exploring the writing of Emerson
and Thoreau on the role of Nature in the “organic” generation of form.
In doing so, he traces what he terms “the organic principle” in the work of
the Transcendentalists back to Coleridge’s concept of “organic form,” as

described in the British Romantic poet’s lectures on Shakespeare (Coleridge
1987, 495).
Matthiessen includes the following passage from Coleridge’s lectures:
the form is mechanic, when on any given material we impress a pre-determined

form, not necessarily arriving out of the properties of the material […] The
organic form, on the other hand, is innate; it shapes, as it develops, itself from
within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfec-
tion of its outward form. Such as the life is, such is the form. Nature, the prime
genial artist, inexhaustible in diverse powers, is equally inexhaustible in forms.
(1968, 133–134)
Alongside Coleridge, Matthiessen also quotes from the German idealist phi-
losopher August Wilhelm von Schlegel, who Coleridge draws on in his writ-
ing on “organic form” (Frey 2010, 147), reproducing, on the same page of
American Renaissance, Schlegel’s contention that: “just as the inner force of
a phenomena in nature determines its external structure, so the vitality of a
poet’s seminal idea or intuition determines its appropriate expression” (1968,
134). Matthiessen then goes on to trace these Romantic ideas of an “organic”
poetic form in the mid-nineteenth-century writings of Emerson and Thoreau.
However, Matthiessen’s own argument contains a subtle yet significant shift
of focus: the work of Coleridge and Schlegel describes the development of
form “organically in the mind of the poet,” and has little to do with Nature
beyond the metaphorical. In comparison, Mathiessen’s discussion of the work
of the Transcendentalists contains a much more literal description of the role
played by “material” Nature in influencing the generation of poetic form
in the work of the nineteenth-century American poets. Matthiessen does
not foreground this distinction between the metaphorical and literal inter-
pretations of the role of Nature in the development of poetic form, instead
encouraging the reader to conflate Coleridge’s metaphorical use of the word
“organic” in “organic form” with his own far more literal use of the term in
describing the influential role of material Nature in the generation of poetry.
Referencing Emerson’s directive that the poet “Ask the fact for the form”
and Thoreau’s pronouncements that “[a]s naturally as the oak bears an acorn
[…] man bears a poem,” and “there are two classes of men called poets; the
one cultivates life, the other art,” Matthiessen argues for a Transcendentalist
“conviction that art must be based organically in nature,” whilst also empha-
sizing the influence of Coleridge’s and Schlegel’s earlier writings on “organic
form” within the work of Emerson and Thoreau (1968, 133–134).
Matthiessen’s interpretation of Transcendentalist ideas of “organic form”
in American Renaissance is particularly remarkable for the emphasis that
he places on the influence of “material” Nature in the generation of poetic
form, as opposed to either “divine inspiration” or “universal mind” (Emerson
1983, 67, 237, and 400). His reading of Emerson’s poetics in particular
532 S. DAW
privileges the role of a secular, material Nature in the generation of poetic

form; for example, he observes that: “before losing himself in the vaguely
luminous doctrine of divine inspiration, Emerson enumerated many of the
broad hints that material nature has given to the receptive mind and eye of
the artist” (1968, 135). He goes on to explicitly state that Emerson had
“found verification for another phase of the organic principle – that beauty
in art springs from man’s response to the forms of nature,” whilst dismissing
Emerson’s conviction in the role of “universal mind” as passing “quickly […]
to a realm beyond technical discussion” (1968, 135). Matthiessen therefore
readily separates the role of material Nature in the generation of poetry from
the role of the Divine or “universal mind” within Emerson’s poetics, prior-
itizing the former and dismissing the latter as a “vaguely luminous” doctrine
of marginal significance for the mid-century scholar.
Rukeyser’s references to “organic form” in The Life of Poetry adopt
Matthiessen’s material and secular interpretation of the term, as outlined
in American Renaissance, whilst also further refining and developing the
term. She adapts Matthiessen’s reading of “organic form,” whilst simultane-
ously reshaping the concept through dialogue with her own extensive knowl-
edge of twentieth-century science writing:
The form of a poem is much more organic, closer to other organic form, than
has been supposed. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, whose book On Growth and
Form is a source and a monument, says that organic form is, mathematically,
a function of time. There is, in the growth of a tree, the story of those years
which saw the rings being made: between those wooden rippled rings, we can
read the wetness or dryness of the years before the charts were kept. But the
tree itself is an image of adjustment to its surroundings. There are many kinds
of growth: the inorganic shell or horn presents its past and present in the spiral.
(1996, 171)
Rukeyser adopts Matthiessen’s material interpretation of “organic form,”

but she also inflects the term through her own extensive knowledge of con-
temporary science writing, drawing most explicitly on the work of D’Arcy
Wentworth Thompson. Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917) is a
lengthy inaugural work of mathematical biology, which attempts to show that
“organic forms” in Nature are “moulded by the requirements of [the] phys-
ical laws” of mechanics, through mathematical analysis (Bowler 1983, 157).
As Rukeyser’s summary indicates, Thompson’s work emphasized the role
of environmental interactions in the development of organic and inorganic
forms. He also contentiously argued that a process of continual environmen-
tal adjustment deserved a greater emphasis than Darwinian natural selection
in dictating the evolution of species (Staddon 2016, 11). Rukeyser proba-
bly came across Thompson’s work through her research into the contempo-
rary reception of Gibbs, as both Gibbs and Thompson were interested in the
mathematics of surface tension, and Thompson cites Gibbs repeatedly in On
Growth and Form (Thompson 1992, 447, 451).4
However, Rukeyser’s description of the inorganic form found in the

“shell” as embodying both the “past and present” of the organism also once
again betrays the conceptual influence of Whiteheadian process philosophy.
In particular, this construction suggests the influence of Whitehead’s concept
of “objective immortality,” which contends that “actual entities”5 that have
“perished” continue to shape and determine events within a constantly evolv-
ing present moment (Whitehead 1985, xiii, 18–19). Whitehead summarizes
“objective immortality” in the following terms in the Preface to Process and
Reality:
relatedness has its foundation in the relatedness of actualities; and such related-
ness is wholly concerned with the appropriation of the dead by the living – that
is to say, with ‘objective immortality’ whereby what is divested of its own living
immediacy becomes a real component in other living immediacies of becoming.
This is the [...] creative advance of the world. (1985, xiii–xiv)
In Rukeyser’s theorization, the shell form embodies the concept of “objective

immortality,” as do the rings of the tree, with both forms materially depict-
ing the organism’s past environmental interactions—or “prehensions,” in
Whitehead’s terminology—within the present moment of “creative advance”
(1985, 19). Rukeyser goes on to describe the spiral form found in these inor-
ganic structures as a form “found countlessly in nature” and “associated with
a process”, providing a further nod to Whitehead’s work (1996, 38).
Drawing from both Thompson and Whitehead, then, Rukeyser suggests
that form in Nature is generated by the organism’s continuous relational
adaption to its environment, with past environmental interactions and present
environmental conditions continuously shaping “organic form” within the
present moment. She thus draws together Whiteheadian “creative advance”
and Thompson’s work on morphology, to create a “process” interpretation
of “organic form” that applies equally to the development of form in Nature
and in poetry. Like Matthiessen, she privileges the role of material Nature
in the generation of poetic form. However, her dynamic interpretation of
“organic form” as morphological “process” also demonstrably represents a
significant departure from, and development of, Matthiessen’s comparatively
static description of the function of material Nature in the generation of form
in poetry.
The compositional practice that emerges from Rukeyser’s synthesis of con-
temporary scientific, philosophical, and literary critical texts also foregrounds
an interdependent relationship between the human body and a dynamic and
“material” environment. In a chapter of American Renaissance on “The
Ocean” as an influence on Whitman’s form, Matthiessen describes poetic
rhythm as “an organic response to the centres of experience – to the inter-
nal pulsations of the body, to its external movements in work and in making
love, to such sounds as the wind and the sea” (1968, 564). Rukeyser directly
engages with this passage from American Renaissance in The Life of Poetry,
534 S. DAW
although she does not provide an explicit reference to Matthiessen’s work at

this point. Instead, she obliquely engages Matthiessen’s argument, writing:
[Whitman] remembered his body as other poets of his time remembered

English verse. Out of his own body and its relation to itself and the sea, he
drew his basic rhythms. They are not the rhythms, as has been asserted, of
work and lovemaking, but rather of the relation of our breathing to our heart-
beat, and these measured against an ideal of water at the shore […] Not out
of English prosody but the fluids of organism, not so much from the feet and
footbeat except as they too derive from the rhythms of pulse and lung. (1996,
77–78)
Rukeyser again draws on Matthiessen’s material and secular interpretation of

the function of Nature in Transcendentalist poetics in these lines. However,
her adaption of his argument places additional emphasis on the interde-
pendence of the rhythms of the human’s internal corporeal processes—“our
breathing and our heartbeat”—and the rhythm of tidal waves, which she
explicitly describes as the “partner” rhythms to the human body’s inter-
nal physical processes. Her reference to the “fluids of organism” also echoes
Whitehead’s use of the term in characterizing his “process” thought, which
he refers to as the “philosophy of organism” (1985, 39). Rukeyser’s inclusion
of the phrase further emphasizes the interdependence of matter and processes
between the human body and the environment, which in turn facilitates the
dynamic relationship between bodily and environmental rhythms—an empha-
sis that is largely absent from Matthiessen’s account.
Rukeyser’s interpretation of Whitman’s poetics therefore places a new
emphasis on the interdependent relationship of these two systems: the body
and the environment. Furthermore, she goes on to suggest that the inter-
dependent relationship of the human body and the material environment
yields the “ideal” poetic meter: Whitman cannot be imitated, Rukeyser
suggests, but the twentieth-century poet should utilize his methodology
by going “deeper into one’s own sources, including the body” in search of
rhythm (1996, 79). By drawing on the energies and rhythms of the body’s
corporeal processes, Rukeyser maintains, the poet can develop the “ideal”
poetic rhythms—ideal because they reflect those rhythmic patterns pres-
ent within material Nature, such as that of “water at the shore” (1996, 78).
The method of poetic composition that Rukeyser advocates in The Life of
Poetry is therefore fundamentally predicated upon a conception of a dynamic
and interdependent relationship between the human mind-and-body and
the environment. Furthermore, its development once again relies on the
inflection of Matthiessen’s material interpretation of Transcendentalist poet-
ics—in this case, Whitman’s—with a contemporary, Whiteheadian “process”
understanding of human and environment as a dynamic “one-substance cos-
mology” (Whitehead 1985, 19).6
The Life of Poetry and “Projective” Poetics

Rukeyser’s emphasis on the role of the poet’s breath and heartbeat in the
generation of poetic rhythm calls to mind Charles Olson’s canonized treatise
on mid-century poetics, “Projective Verse,” which appeared just a year after
The Life of Poetry, in 1950. Reading these two texts together, the similari-
ties in language, argument and phrasing are so pronounced that it becomes
clear Olson drew heavily on Rukeyser’s earlier text in developing “Projective
Verse.” Some critics have already acknowledged these conspicuous corre-
spondences between Olson’s text and Rukeyser’s: in Physics Envy: American
Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After (2015), Peter Middleton writes
that “chronology, plus verbal and conceptual echoes, suggests that it is pos-
sible that Olson had some idea of Rukeyser’s book in his mind as he began
to write ‘Projective Verse’” (2015, 126). Middleton goes on to note that
“Rukeyser’s possible contribution to the poetics of the New American Poetry
has gone largely unexplored, a neglect reinforced by Olson’s own tendency
not to acknowledge intellectual sources about which he was ambivalent”
(2015, 126).
However, Middleton also argues that the similarities between Rukeyser’s
work and Olson’s “lie as much in a shared problematic as in any question
of precedence or borrowing” (2015, 126). In what follows, I will suggest
that the degree to which Olson borrows from Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry in
developing “Projective Verse” deserves further attention. Furthermore, I will
contend that a reevaluation of Rukeyser’s contribution to the development of
“Projective Verse” is especially significant as a result of the determining influ-
ence that Olson’s manifesto has exerted over the development of contempo-
rary ecopoetics.7 As Middleton identifies, the lack of critical acknowledgment
of Rukeyser’s contribution to innovations in twentieth-century poetics is “all
too characteristic of the treatment of most modern women poets,” and such
neglect is entirely characteristic of the historic treatment of Rukeyser’s work
(2015, 125–126).8 A more complete acknowledgment of her work’s lasting
legacy is, therefore, long overdue.
Isolating a number of illustrative instances of comparable language and
phrasing in The Life of Poetry and in “Projective Verse” renders Olson’s
repeated and substantial borrowing from Rukeyser’s earlier text increasingly
clear. For example, in The Life of Poetry, Rukeyser describes “the energies that
are transferred between people when a poem is given and taken,” and sug-
gests that, in the process of reading poetry, “[h]uman energy is transferred,
and from the poem it reaches the reader” (1996, 171–173). In “Projective
Verse,” Olson similarly contends that “a poem is energy transferred from
where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the
poem itself to, all the way over to the reader [sic]” (1997, 240). In these sen-
tences, Olson replicates—almost verbatim—Rukeyser’s characterization of the
poem as an “energy […] transferred” (1996, 173). He also notably duplicates
536 S. DAW
the “triadic relation” between “the poet, the poem and the audience” that
Rukeyser outlines as the “giving and taking of the poem,” by tracing the flow
of energy from the poet, through the poem, to the audience (1996, 174).
Further to these appropriations of Rukeyser’s theorization of the poem
and its relationship to both the reader and the environment, Olson also
appropriates the Whiteheadian language of “process” that characterizes
Rukeyser’s text. In his descriptions of poetic composition in “Projective
Verse,” he refers to “the process of the thing, how the principle can be
made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished,” and elsewhere
in the text, he exhorts the projective poet to “USE USE USE the process”
at all points in order to “keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the per-
ceptions, theirs” (1997, 240). The presence of the Whiteheadian terminol-
ogy of “process” in “Projective Verse” is particularly compelling evidence of
Rukeyser’s influence on Olson’s “projective” poetics, as Olson states that he
had not read Whitehead himself until 1954 (Charters 1968, 84). However,
he had met Rukeyser in 1947, and the two writers had become correspond-
ents following this initial encounter (Charles Olson Research Collection,
Boxes II.190 & II.210). It is therefore highly likely that Olson’s use of the
language of “process” in his 1950 manifesto came through his contact with
Rukeyser, who uses the term “process” extensively in The Life of Poetry and
quotes Whitehead explicitly in the earlier Willard Gibbs (1988, 395, 439).
Although it is possible that Olson had absorbed these Whiteheadian terms as
a result of the widespread circulation of Whitehead’s ideas within contempo-
rary American culture, further close correspondences between Olson’s essay
and Rukeyser’s earlier book lend support to the argument that Olson drew
heavily and repeatedly on The Life of Poetry in relating the language of “pro-
cess” to poetic composition.
Another particularly illustrative incidence of the affinities between the two
texts is found in Olson’s emphasis on the twin roles of the breath and the
heartbeat in developing poetic rhythm and form. Rukeyser writes: “the line
in poetry – whether it be individual or traditional – is intimately bound with
the poet’s breathing. The line cannot go against the breathing-rhythm of the
poet,” referring back to her earlier description of a Whitmanian poetics of
the “rhythms of pulse and lung” (1996, 78, 117). Olson famously states in
“Projective Verse” that “the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the
breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes” (1997, 242).
Similarly, Rukeyser expresses the formative role of the syllable in generating
a poetry that derives from the body’s physical responses “to external motion
and rhythm,” writing: “[t]his value depends partly on the rhythm itself; partly
on the meter, the segmenting of rhythm into measurable parts; and partly on
the sounds, not even the words this time, but of the syllables” (1996, 116).
Again, Olson offers an almost identical argument in “Projective Verse,” stat-
ing “[i]t would do no harm […] if both rime and meter […] sense and sound,
were less in the forefront of the mind than the syllable” (1997, 241). He then
proceeds to evoke the significance of the syllable to the development of con-

temporary poetry in particular—as Rukeyser does before him in The Life of
Poetry—by describing the value of verse as a mnemonic device dependent on
not only rhythm and meter but also on “the sounds, not even of the words
[…] but of the syllables” (1996, 116).
A further point of direct comparison between the two texts lies in the
evocation of a corporeal poetics that extends beyond the role of the breath.
As has been demonstrated, Rukeyser argues for the adoption of a process of
poetic composition that derives rhythm from the “breathing” and the “heart-
beat” of the poet, thereby reflecting the rhythms of the interior environment
of the body and the body’s partner rhythms within the external environment
(1996, 78). In Olson’s manifesto, poetic energy, form and content are also
described as emerging from the poet’s materially interdependent relation-
ship with the environment. Olson directs the poet to rest in an awareness
of the rhythms of their own breath and physiology, maintaining that “if he
chooses to speak from these roots,” the poet will be working in “that area
where nature has given him size, projective size” (1997, 242).9 He then goes
on to advocate a “projective” poetry that he sums up “baldly” as emerging
from: “the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE/the HEART, by
way of the BREATH, to the line” (1997, 242). “Projective” poetics there-
fore replicates the language and terms of the “organic process” ecopoetics
first outlined by Rukeyser in 1949, which develops from a conviction that
the poet writes with an understanding of the human’s dynamic, material
entanglement with their environment (Keenaghan 2018, 119). Both poets
therefore describe the utilization of the writer’s own corporeal processes in
the generation of a poetics that ultimately derives from the human’s material
interdependence with their environment. This mid-century reinterpretation
of “organic form” inflects Matthiessen’s contemporaneous critical reading of
the term through Rukeyser’s extensive knowledge of twentieth-century sci-
ence writing, including Whitehead’s quantum-influenced process philosophy
and Thompson’s work on morphology.
Rukeyser’s expansion of Matthiessen’s material, secular reading of
Transcendentalist “organic form” into the “organic process” ecopoetics
that Eric Keenaghan identifies in her work is therefore shaped by a
quantum-influenced conception of reality that conceives of human and envi-
ronment as part of the same entanglement of matter and process (2018,
119). Her engagement with early twentieth-century philosophy of sci-
ence writing facilitates her transformation of Matthiessen’s reading of nine-
teenth-century poetics into an innovative “ecopoetics” that reimagines the
human body as interdependently entangled with a dynamic material envi-
ronment, and draws on this interconnection to develop new forms of poetry.
Rukeyser’s experimental mid-century ecopoetics, as outlined in The Life of
Poetry, has also had a significant and lasting influence on the development of
contemporary ecopoetics. However, this legacy of her work has been largely
538 S. DAW
obscured, as a result of Olson’s appropriation of many of her core interven-

tions: by reproducing and developing a number of The Life of Poetry’s key
ideas in “Projective Verse,” Olson helped to establish the place of Rukeyser’s
work at the core of twentieth-century poetic development in Britain and the
United States, whilst simultaneously concealing the fact that the origins of
these ideas lay within her work.
The legacy of both Olson’s “Projective Verse,” and the work of his
male Black Mountain colleagues, is particularly strong within the field of
ecopoetry: Harriet Tarlo establishes that contemporary ecopoetics has
consistently acknowledged a debt to Olson’s “projective” poetics, iden-

tifying Olson’s “Projective Verse,” and Robert Duncan’s development of
Olson’s “open field” poetics, as two seminal influences within British and
American ecopoetry (2013, 113–117).10 Interestingly, in the same essay,
Tarlo also detects the legacy of Whitman within the mid-century ecopo-
etics of Olson and Duncan, and she suggests that Whitman’s work may be
an origin point of some of the influential ideas developed in the “projec-
tive” poetics of the mid-twentieth century (2013, 124). Acknowledging
the influence of Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry on the “projective” poetics of
Olson and Duncan suggests an alternative genealogy, both re-establishing
her work as a substantial influence on their respective projects, and con-
textualizing the influence of Whitman’s work that Tarlo identifies within
mid-twentieth-century ecopoetics. An appreciation of the degree to which
Olson’s “Projective Verse” draws on Rukeyser’s work for its language and
argument therefore valuably enlarges current critical debates around the
development of twentieth-century ecopoetics, and establishes that Rukeyser
deserves far more recognition for her role in determining the character
and development of transatlantic ecopoetics—as, to a lesser extent, does
Matthiessen. As a result, ecopoetry’s debt of influence to the mid-century,
for so long ascribed to Olson and his Black Mountain colleagues, must now
be reframed to include the experimental and visionary work of Rukeyser’s The
Life of Poetry.
Notes
1. Rukeyser and Matthiessen were correspondents, with Matthiessen praising both
Willard Gibbs and Rukeyser’s poetry in letters to Rukeyser.
2. Matthiessen publicly defended Rukeyser during the ‘Rukeyser Imbroglio’ in
1943–1944, an episode that saw the Partisan Review launch a savage attack
on her character (Rahv et al. 1943, 473). He wrote in to the publication offer-
ing a comprehensive defence of Rukeyser’s credentials as a “radical democrat”,
only for his letter to be summarily derided by the editors (Matthiessen 1944,
217). Following Matthiessen’s suicide in 1950, Rukeyser wrote the elegy
‘F.O.M.’.
3. For the influence of quantum science within Whitehead’s process philosophy,
see (McHenry 2015, 43).
4. See also (Thompson 1992, 459, 471, and 719).

5. Whitehead’s term for the “final real things of which the world is made up”, and
which constitute entities of all sizes, from “God” to “ the most trivial puff of
existence” (1985, 18).
6. For more on Whitehead’s influence on Rukeyser’s ecopoetics, see (Daw 2020).
7. For discussion of the significant influence of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse”
on the development of ecopoetics in Britain and America, see (Tarlo 2013,
113–148).
8. For discussion of Rukeyser’s reception and neglect, see Kennedy-Epstein
(2017, 2018) and Parks (2018, 1232).
9. For more of this reading of Olson’s “trans-corporeal” ecopoetics, see (Daw
2019).
10. See also the discussion in (Hume and Osborne 2018, 3–5).
Works Cited
Bowler, Peter J. 1983. The Eclipse of Darwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evolution Theories
in the Decades Around 1900. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Charters, Anne. 1968. Olson/Melville: A Study in Affinity. Berkeley, CA: Oyez.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1987. Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature. Volume Two,
ed. R. A. Foakes. Volume Five of The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Daw, Sarah. 2019. ‘If He Chooses to Speak from These Roots’: Entanglement and
Uncertainty in Charles Olson’s Quantum Ecopoetics. Green Letters: Studies in
Ecocriticism 23 (4): 350–366. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2019.1634617.
———. 2020. ‘There Is No Out There’: Trans-corporeality and Process Philosophy in
Muriel Rukeyser’s The Speed of Darkness. Feminist Modernist Studies 3 (2): 1–17.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24692921.2020.1794465.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America.
Frey, Anne. 2010. British State Romanticism: Authorship, Agency, and Bureaucratic
Nationalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hume, Angela, and Gillian Osborne. 2018. Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press.
Keenaghan, Eric. 2018. There Is No Glass Woman: Muriel Rukeyser’s Lost Feminist
Essay ‘Many Keys’. Feminist Modernist Studies 1 (1–2): 186–204.
Kennedy-Epstein, Rowena. 2017. The Spirit of Revolt: Women Writers, Archives
and the Cold War. Modernism/Modernity Print Plus. https://doi.org/10.26597/
mod.0025.
———. 2018. ‘Bad Influence’ and ‘Willful Subjects’: The Gender Politics of The Life
of Poetry. Textual Practice 32 (7): 1149–1164.
Matthiessen, F. O. 1944. The Rukeyser Imbroglio (Cont’d). Partisan Review 11 (2,
Spring): 217.
———. 1968. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and
Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press.
McHenry, Leemon B. 2015. The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred
North Whitehead. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Middleton, Peter. 2015. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War
and After. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
540 S. DAW
Olson, Charles. Charles Olson Research Collection. Archives & Special Collections,
Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. University of Connecticut Libraries.
———. 1997. Projective Verse. In Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin
Friedlander, 239–249. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Parks, Cecily. 2018. The Anticipation of Ecopoetics in Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of
Poetry. Textual Practice 32 (7): 1231–1247.
Rahv, Philip, William Phillips, and Delmore Schwartz. 1943. Grandeur and Misery of
a Poster Girl. Partisan Review 10 (5, September–October): 471–473.
Rukeyser, Muriel. 1996. The Life of Poetry. Ashfield, MA: Paris Press.
———. 1988. Willard Gibbs. Woodbridge, CT: Ox Bow Press.
Staddon, J.E.R. 2016. Adaptive Behavior and Learning, 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Tarlo, Harriet. 2013. Open Field: Reading Field as Place and Poetics. In Placing
Poetry, ed. Ian Davidson and Zoë Skoulding. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. 1992. On Growth and Form, The Complete Revised
ed. New York: Dover Publications.
Whitehead, Alfred North. 1985. Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected
ed., ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press.
CHAPTER 31
Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel
Josie Gill
Introduction
In November 2016 two posters appeared on campus at Amherst College in
the US, which attempted to link skull size to intelligence and to race (Gazette
Staff 2016). Invoking phrenology—the nineteenth-century scientific the-
ory that the size and shape of the head could be linked to mental faculties—
the posters compared skulls of different sizes to suggest that there are racial
differences in intelligence, racist assertions the college President was forced
to refute (Martin 2016). Where once such invocations of long-discredited
Victorian racial science would have been the subject of ridicule, the Amherst
incident indicated a rise in the use of outdated racial science among the
‘alt-right,’ which has included the uptake of early twentieth century eugenic
ideas (Saini Why race 2019). The US President himself has appeared to draw
upon such ideas to assert his own sense of (white) superiority: At a 2018
press conference, Donald Trump asserted that China respected him because
he has a ‘very large brain’ (BBC News 2018). The far-right is also drawing
on contemporary research in genetics in order to support their belief in the
biological reality of race: Population geneticists and experts in ancient DNA
are finding increasingly that their research is being misinterpreted by white
supremacists online, and used as ‘evidence’ of white racial superiority (Price
2018).
While this situation has caused much concern in scientific circles, not least
because such groups and their views are entering the mainstream, the politi-
cal appropriation of contemporary genetics for racial ends has been possible
because there continues to be a concern with, and interest in, race and racial
J. Gill (*) 

542 J. GILL
categorization within genetic science. For, despite the assertion made at the
announcement of the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2000
that ‘the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis’ (Venter 2000),
genetic research into race has only accelerated in the first decades of the twen-
ty-first century. No longer the domain of a few racist scholars on the fringes
of their profession, a concern to investigate ‘race-based genetic variation’
has returned, and with it, according to Dorothy Roberts, ‘a corresponding
explosion of race-based technologies’ (Roberts 2011, xi). As the title of pop-
ular science writer Angela Saini’s book Superior: The Return of Race Science
makes clear, the contemporary rise of racial research in science nearly always
represents a return to the kind of racial thinking which came before, because
racial categorization and hierarchies remain so firmly entrenched in culture.
Even though there is no scientific proof of the biological reality of race, ‘race,
shaped by power, has acquired a power of its own. We have so absorbed our
classifications – the trend begun by scientists like Blumenbach – that we hap-
pily classify ourselves’ (Saini Superior 2019, 7). While many geneticists using
racial concepts consider themselves to be anti-racist in outlook and intent
(Bliss 2012, 6–7), the fact that there are so much continuity and correlation
between the racial categories and language of the nineteenth century and the
present means that, as in the Amherst College case, Victorian racial scientific
thinking can be invoked and appear credible to some alongside newer genetic
explanations of race in the public sphere.
This chapter investigates how the connections between Victorian and
contemporary sciences of race are explored in neo-Victorian fiction, a genre
defined variously as fiction set in the Victorian era; as contemporary novels
that ‘re-envision canonical Victorian texts’ (Carroll 2010, 172) and as fic-
tion that is ‘self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)
discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (Heilman and Llewellyn
2010, 4). Appearing across postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist writing
in a range of global contexts, the neo-Victorian novel has become a signifi-
cant genre of contemporary fiction, fueled by (and in turn feeding into) an
increasing fascination with Victoriana among both academic critics and the
public alike.1 Representations of nineteenth-century race science within
the Neo-Victorian are common: In The Siege of Krishnapur (1973), J.G.
Farrell’s tale of colonial India during the rebellion of 1857, Farrell draws
upon a number of Victorian archival sources to create characters including
the Magistrate, a devotee to phrenology, whom he uses to expose the colo-
nial mindset (Goodman 2015). Phrenology also makes an appearance in
Peter Carey’s rewriting of Great Expectations in Jack Maggs (1997), while
Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000) offers an extended portrait of a
skull collector and racial theorist in the character of Dr. Thomas Potter, based
on the nineteenth-century Scottish anatomist Robert Knox. Hari Kunzru’s
portrayal of colonial India in The Impressionist (2002), while beginning deci-
sively after the Victorian period in 1903, nevertheless looks back to that
31 RACIAL SCIENCE AND THE NEO-VICTORIAN NOVEL 543
period in the figure of Reverend Macfarlane, a collector of skulls and crani-

ometrist who is inspired by American monogenist Samuel Morton. Kunal
Basu’s Racists (2006) is the tale of two Victorian race scientists—a craniolo-
gist and an anthropologist—who create an experiment to prove whose theory
of race is correct.
Examining representations of Victorian science in the neo-Victorian novel,
the literary critic Elodie Rousselot asks, ‘Why do the scientific figures, facts,
and phenomena which came to prominence in the Victorian age continue to
inspire authors in the twenty-first century?’ (2016, 107). This chapter con-
tends that contemporary fictional representations of Victorian racial science
are concerned as much with the racial implications of twentieth- and twen-
ty-first-century science as they are with the Victorian. In the case of Kneale’s
English Passengers and Basu’s Racists, the novels which shall be the focus of
this chapter, Victorian racial science acts as an explicit reminder of the dan-
gers of race thinking in science, thinking that was returning at the moment
the novels were published. However, these novels also raise questions about
the genre’s capacity to challenge contemporary scientific developments; for
while both Kneale and Basu critique Victorian race science and its champions
as a means of undermining its power, their novels also demonstrate the diffi-
culty of fully breaking away from the ingrained Victorian values they otherwise
disavow. This is apparent in the forms their novels take, forms that decenter
and disrupt certain Victorian narrative conventions (as part of their desire to
expose the fallacies of Victorian scientific racism), but that can’t quite escape
deeply ingrained modes of imagining race. In what follows I examine how
challenges bleed into reproductions and critiques into nostalgia in ways that
call into question these novels’ capacity to confront the return of race thinking
in contemporary genetics. Rather, their overt anti-racist stances that mask sub-
tly racialized forms mirror what is happening in genetic science today, where
scientific racism (past and present) is condemned at the same time the use of
(historical) racial concepts and categorization becomes increasingly accepted.
The novels demonstrate that the Neo-Victorian is a genre potentially in
danger of returning to ‘the misguided theories of the nineteenth century…
as a means of avoiding facing equally misguided attitudes in the present’
(Rousselot 2016, 109). Their forms suggest that contemporary literary nar-
rative and language, as much as science itself, struggle to free themselves from
the continuance of certain kinds of racial thinking in the present.
Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000)

English Passengers is about the colonization of Tasmania, told through a focus
on two different periods, the 1820s and the 1850s. It moves between these
periods, in the first of which Kneale depicts how aboriginal populations came
into contact with white settlers, leading to their eventual decimation through
violence and disease. The second period consists of the voyage from England
544 J. GILL
to Tasmania of a vicar and a doctor on a ship crewed by a gang of Manx

smugglers. Narrated by over twenty different characters, the novel not only
moves back and forth in time but frequently shifts perspective. The voyage
and events on the ship Sincerity are told primarily from the different view-
points of its Captain, Illiam Quillian Kewley, the vicar and geologist Reverend
Geoffrey Wilson, and the doctor Thomas Potter, while events in Tasmania are
narrated by Peevay, a mixed race aboriginal man, whose story is interspersed
with the voices of various governors, farmers, and colonial settlers.
Foregrounding the voice of a colonized person within a non-linear narra-
tive, the novel signals its distance from Victorian fiction in its concern to give
narrative space to a non-white character who has no less authority than those
of the white colonists. The literary critic Patrick Brantlinger has shown how
race in Victorian fiction ‘commonly provided a ready-made taxonomy for
characterization,’ evidenced in the minor and peripheral roles often given to
black characters (2000, 153). In English Passengers, Peevay’s narrative author-
ity is perhaps greater than that of the white British characters, given the satir-
ical treatment to which many of those characters are subject. Their beliefs,
vocations and behaviour are relentlessly mocked as the purpose of the voyage
is revealed to be the discovery of the Garden of Eden; Wilson is convinced
he will discover the location of Eden in Tasmania and is accompanied on his
expedition by Potter, who is there to assist him with the scientific aspects of
his quest. Potter, however, has an ulterior motive; he uses the expedition to
collect the skulls of aboriginal people in order to advance his scientific the-
ories on race, which he writes up during the course of his travels and which
come to form his book The Destiny of Nations. The timelines meet as Potter
and Wilson eventually come into contact with an older Peevay who, after dis-
covering Potter has stolen his recently deceased mother’s remains, leads the
group on a disastrous search for Eden that eventually results in both Potter’s
and Wilson’s demise.
The novel displays the typical characteristics associated with the Neo-
Victorian genre; namely what Munford and Young argue is the genre’s concern
to counter ‘the restrictive, disciplinary and discriminatory nature of Victorian
ways of representing the world,’ through stories that foreground issues of sex,
gender, and race, and the ‘heterogeneous voices of Other Victorians’ as a means
of exposing, and in some cases correcting, repressive Victorian values (2009, 4).
In English Passengers these repressive values are encapsulated by Potter’s racial
science. The Victorian period witnessed the rise of several interlinked scien-
tific theories of race, the result of the growth of biological and human sciences
at the end of the eighteenth century (Stepan 1982, xiii). Such theories were
also the result of colonial expansion, which sought justification for the enslave-
ment and subjugation of colonized peoples in the new sciences of human ori-
gins and development. By the mid-nineteenth century, polygenism—the belief
that different human ‘races’ had biologically different origins and thus that
racial ‘types’ were fundamentally different from one another—was challenging
the long-established idea that all humans were descended from Adam, the
monogenism rooted in Christian belief to which most scientists had previ-
ously adhered (Stepan 1982, 3). Yet whether monogenist or polygenist, and
despite their varying arguments and understandings of race, nineteenth-cen-
tury scientists were near unanimous in their agreement that the white race
was superior to the non-white (Stepan 1982, 4). A proliferation of books and
pamphlets sought to use science to demonstrate the fundamental principle of
the biological and cultural superiority of whites, including Robert Knox’s The
Races of Men (1850), Arthur de Gobineau’s The Inequality of the Human Races
(1853), Josiah Clark Nott and George Robert Gliddon’s Types of Mankind
(1854), and John Beddoe’s The Races of Britain (1885). Types of Mankind,
subtitled ‘Ethnological Researches based upon the Ancient Monuments,
Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races,’ gives an indication of the grow-
ing belief that skulls held the key to establishing differences between the races.
Craniometry, phrenology, and physiognomy, all flourished during this period
and were deployed by racial scientists intent on proving the natural inferiority of
Black people.
Kneale uses satire and humor to challenge the racial scientific logic of
the craniometrist his novel portrays. The ‘English Passengers’ Wilson and
Potter and their respective religious and scientific explanations of human-
ity are represented as both abhorrent and ridiculous in turn. The first part
of the narrative that is told from Potter’s perspective is formed of his mus-
ings on ‘The Celtic Type,’ which he describes as ‘(instance: Manx)…alto-
gether inferior in physique to the Saxon, being smaller, darker and lacking
in strength…The skull is marked by deep eye sockets, expressing tendencies
of servitude. Cranial type: G,’ before he goes on to describe ‘the Norman’
whose ‘complexion is pale, and his hair often inclines to reddishness. His
facial shape is typically long and narrow, indicating arrogance. Cranial type:
D’ (Kneale 2000, 119, 120). His supposedly scientific observations are based
simply on the people (the crew and Wilson) by whom he is surrounded, and
are comically informed by his arguments with and prejudices against them.
His humorous inability to distinguish at a basic level between the personal,
cultural, and scientific escalates through the novel, as his ‘scientific’ writing
becomes increasingly subject to his own anecdotal experience and feelings
about other characters to comic effect. Having asked Peevay ‘Could one of
you tell me…how long it is that your ones’ females carry babies in their bel-
lies? Also do you know what a number is?’ (Kneale 2000, 326), Potter cannot
believe that Peevay has deliberately led them toward disaster or worked out
that Potter stole his mother’s remains, and he uses his scientific hypothesiz-
ing to explain away his fears, ‘Considered own alarm re. half-caste’s accusing
look = wholly irrational as = quite impossible that he possesses logical faculty
required to reach such conclusion’ (Kneale 2000, 347). Unable to compre-
hend or allow the evidence before him, Potter’s science becomes an irrational
narrative through which he reveals his own failings.
546 J. GILL
The novel proceeds on the basis that Potter’s science does not need to be
countered logically or seriously because it is so illogical; instead Kneale rep-
resents Potter’s race science as a distillation of all the other racist Victorian
attitudes on display in the novel—in the diaries, travel narratives, newspa-
per articles and accounts that together constitute the full, pervasive force of
Victorian racism and colonial prejudice, and from which Victorian science
cannot be separated. Kneale satirizes the characters who write these narra-
tives, demonstrating how, for example, the pseudoscientific interest of Mrs.
Gerald Denton—whose memoir of life in Tasmania, ‘On Distant Shores:
Recollections of a Colonial Governor’s Wife,’ is presented in extracts—is lit-
tle different in its overt racism and self-interest than Potter’s scientific writ-
ing. Remembering her invitation to a group of aboriginal people to attend
a Christmas lunch, Mrs. Denton writes, ‘My hope…was to assemble a small,
yet perhaps not unimportant collection of memorabilia of this vanishing race.
I could quite imagine the sitting room of our London house in some future
time, its walls displaying spears and throwing sticks’ (Kneale 2000, 313).
Her concern with ‘this vanishing race’ betrays a lack of care for aboriginal
life that is no less barbaric than Potter’s theories and observations, which he
records in his notebooks and diary in a kind of pseudoscientific, mathematical
shorthand that is simply the condensation of the colonial racism articulated
by Mrs. Denton. Arriving at the Cape Colony he writes ‘Town = of greatest
interest to self re. notions as possesses quite remarkable variety of types.
Among world’s greatest instances? Self spent many hours carefully observ-
ing. Soon came to new + unexpected conclusions’ (Kneale 2000, 168). In
suggesting that the race science of the period was inseparable from the colo-
nial mission and wider socio-political mores, the novel also recognizes how
this thinking was carried into the future, absurd and contradictory as it may
have been. After his death, Wilson’s bones end up on display in a museum,
marked as an ‘unknown male presumed Tasmanian aborigine’ (Kneale 2000,
454), as Kneale once more uses comedy and irony to suggest that the joke is
perhaps on us, calling into question the taken-for-granted legacies of colo-
nial violence, exploitation, and science which inform many current museum
displays.
Kneale’s ability to tell a story of colonial genocide and race science using
humor was much praised by critics and was one of the major reasons for the
novel’s success; according to one reviewer, Kneale ‘effortlessly blends the
hilarious and the heartbreaking’ (Miller 2001), his novel described by another
as the ‘interleaving of high comedy with dramatic terror’ (Poole 2000), a
mode that no doubt contributed to his winning the Whitbread Book of
the Year in 2000 and being shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Such readings
accord with Kneale’s own ambitions; he has said he was concerned that the
book not be ‘a heavy, moralistic tale,’ that he ‘dreaded readers thinking I
was lecturing them’ (Thackray Jones 2009) and wanted to make it ‘enter-
taining and enjoyable’ (Ball 2003). Yet Kneale’s comic tone and satirical
approach does not quite mean that the novel evades the ‘celebratory nostalgia
for an imagined world’ that Sally Shuttleworth detects in some neo-Victo-

rian treatments of science (Shuttleworth 2014, 182). Indeed, reviewers of
the novel also celebrated what they identified as its nostalgic evocation of the
Victorians: English Passengers was praised as a ‘historical swashbuckler’ (Talese
2000), a ‘Treasure Island-style adventure’ (Sylvester 2000), a novel that
‘deserves to be welcomed into port with a riot of bunting and prizes’ (Poole
2000), and ‘to be savored while curled up in front of a roaring fire’ (Hoffman
2000), all stereotypical invocations of Victorian life. Compared to Dickens
(Hill 2000), and Dracula (Poole 2000), Kneale’s novel enjoyed popularity
stemming as much from a kind of escapism into an older Victorian world as
from its critique of British colonial rule. Indeed, one reviewer’s interpretation
of Peevay as Kneale’s attempt to ‘imagine himself into the head of a Stone
Age hunter-gatherer’ (Hochschild 2000) appears to miss this critical aspect
entirely. It is the comic style of the novel, told through a compendium of
different forms of Victorian writing including accounts, letters, diaries, news-
paper articles, travel guides and memoirs, that seemed to encourage such
readings, a style through which readers could indulge in a dose of Victorian
nostalgia at an ostensibly safe distance; from the perspective of a contempo-
rary culture that continues to grapple with the legacy of Victorian science (in
entrenched racial classifications in science and culture) but that also places
itself firmly in a time where such abuses and attitudes are largely no longer
mainstream.
In fact, it is in Kneale’s attempt to grapple with the legacies of racial
science, and his simultaneous positioning of that science as the province of
a distant past we have left behind, that the imprint of colonial (racial) scien-
tific norms and standards on his own, contemporary novel is laid bare. English
Passengers ends with an epilogue in which Kneale draws a direct connection
between Victorian race science and the contemporary, explaining how he
drew on the writing of Robert Knox in his characterization of Potter, in order
to show the legacy of Knox’s ‘infamous’ theories about the races of man-
kind (Kneale 2000, 456). The epilogue makes explicit why Victorian racial
scientists and their theories were so wrong by calling Knox’s The Races of
Men ‘in many ways a precursor of Hitler’s Mein Kampf’ (456). Showing how
pervasive such thinking became during the nineteenth century, Kneale offers
evidence of the flaws in these theories in the example of George Vandiemen,
‘a Tasmanian aboriginal child who was found wandering close to New
Norfolk in 1821, having become separated from his family’ (455). Basing
the character Tayaleah, Peevay’s half-brother, on George, Kneale describes
how a recently arrived British settler sent the child to Lancashire to be
educated, where George ‘did well in his studies’ (455) before dying soon
after his return to Tasmania.
The epilogue, while purporting to add to the novel’s critique of Victorian
racism and race thinking, instead registers its legacy. The epilogue ends
with ‘a factual document’—George Vandiemen’s school report—in which
his teacher praises George’s mathematical ability and in which the teacher
548 J. GILL
writes that teaching George confirmed to him that ‘Man is on all parts of
the globe the same’ (457). Noting that Europeans at the time believed ‘the
highest and rarest form of reason was mathematics,’ Kneale writes, ‘If only
the Victorian British had troubled to look a little more carefully at the evi-
dence before them’ (456). The epilogue is clearly intended to reinforce what
Kneale has spent the novel portraying—the folly of the hierarchical, scientific
racism of the Victorians, which they were unable to see but that we, in the
twenty-first century, can see only too well. However, in reproducing the letter
which offers the evidence of George Vandiemen’s humanity in his ability to
do maths, Kneale appears not to question the enlightenment idea that Blacks
were only men (i.e., human) if they could demonstrate ‘mastery of “the arts
and sciences”’ (Gates 1985, 8), but instead aligns himself with it, and with
the kindly, noble teacher and Tasmanian settler ‘oddly enough, a manx-man’
(455) who sent the child to Britain. It is the ‘good European’ who doesn’t
appear to be racist (perhaps one with whom contemporary white readers
might identify) who has the last word and whose report on George stands as
final proof of George’s humanity in a move that undermines Peevay’s narra-
tion and the novel’s apparent criticism of the colonizer’s civilizing mission.
Kneale is clearly aware of the flaws in and hypocrisy of the Victorian assump-
tion that certain kinds of educational ability offer proof of humanity: his char-
acter Dr. Potter writes in his Destiny of Nations,
the colonial government made every attempt to improve those blacks who were
captured, and to lead them from idleness to civilized ways. One might suppose
these efforts would have been received with gratitude, but no, the aborigi-
nes showed themselves nothing less than contemptuous of the goodly teach-
ing given them, and, beneath a thin veneer of civilized conduct, they remained
quite as savage as before. (407)
By this point in the novel, it is Peevay’s narration, which consists of a

semi-poetic language invented by Kneale, that highlights his humanity in
contrast to the ignorant and barbaric ways in which Potter and the British
behave. Peevay’s understanding and narration of events—‘So I learned of
hospital room, of watching man, of thieves, who were three, and their CART.
I learned of window that would not open, and of skin that got cut. This was
some discovering. So it was everything in all the world got changed’ (341)—
appears unmediated by European ways of knowing and underscores the lack
of accuracy of Potter’s account. Kneale demonstrates that it is rather Potter
and Wilson who are ‘the very lowest’ (406) in their petty, stupid and self-
ish behavior, as he allows them to reveal their own deficiencies of ‘character,’
which are ironically the savage, idle, deceitful, violent characteristics that
Potter attributes to aboriginal people in his The Destiny of Nations (406–407).
Yet the novel’s end suggests Peevay’s narration is not enough, and it is
George Vandiemen’s mathematical performance that undermines Potter’s
scientific view, Vandiemen’s ability ‘evidence’ that aboriginal people were
not idle. Kneale’s archival method reveals the ingrained ‘scientific’ stand-
ards and proofs to which colonized people were subject, but also how such
proofs continue to have currency in the present. The overt racism of Robert
Knox’s ideas about what he termed ‘the darker races’ was premised on their
‘physical and, consequently a psychological inferiority’ (151) attributed to
‘specific characters in the quality of the brain’ (151) and proven not only
by their enslavement and colonization, but by the fact that ‘the grand qual-
ities which distinguish man from the animal – the generalizing powers of
pure reason – the love of perfectibility – the desire to know the unknown’
are ‘mental faculties…deficient, or seem to be so, in all dark races’ (191).
While such racist thinking has long been repudiated by scientists, the idea
that racial similarities or differences can be linked to intelligence and IQ per-
sists in twenty-first-century genetics, even though the measurement of intelli-
gence (like Knox’s arbitrary ‘pure reason,’ or indeed mathematical ability) has
repeatedly been shown to be a measurement of ‘trained capacities,’ ‘arbitrarily
standardized on middle-class Whites’ whereas the reality is that ‘no one really
knows what intelligence is’ (Montagu 1999, 3).
The popularity of the neo-Victorian has prompted literary critics Heilman
and Llewelynn to wonder whether the genre is ‘merely a serviceable form that
we can manipulate to satiate our appetites for stories with closure unlike real
life, or [an opportunity] for the exploration of themes that continue to dom-
inate our political and social lives that can be projected backwards onto our
forebears in an attempt to find resolution or to pass the blame?’ (2010, 27).
In the case of English Passengers, the answer appears to be a little of both:
Kneale’s vast historical novel offers readers an engaging and ‘enjoyable’ story,
providing some kind of comforting, if unrealistic, closure, as Peevay meets
and joins a group of aboriginals, ending his loneliness and isolation, while
the racist and blinkered Potter and Wilson meet their darker fates. The novel
also understands that the racial thinking it depicts has a legacy—not only
in the fracturing and decimation of colonized communities, but in science
where nineteenth-century racist ideas led to eugenic thought in the twentieth
century with horrific results. The novel’s telling of this tale is offered as a
sufficient response to these developments in the present, from which we can
view with disdain and humor the folly of the Victorians, while correcting their
oversights by, in Kneale’s case, devoting large amounts of narrative space to
an indigenous voice the Victorians would not have prioritized.
However, there is a disconnect between how the novel registers this
legacy and how racial scientific thinking continues to impact contemporary
society, a disconnect revealed in Kneale’s claim in the epilogue that Knox’s
race theory is ‘a ludicrous notion in modern scientific terms’ (Kneale 2000,
456). This is true, yet ‘modern science’ has not rid itself of race thinking;
instead, there has been what Roberts identifies as a ‘speedy resuscitation of
biological concepts of race,’ which she locates as part of a continuum where
‘scientists have continually rehabilitated a biological understanding of race
550 J. GILL
throughout the scientific and political upheavals of the last three centuries’
(2011, 26, 28). Kneale’s reading of George Vandieman’s humanity, in this
context, mirrors the partial acknowledgments and incomplete interrogations
that enable today’s anti-racist rhetoric in contemporary genetics to coex-
ist alongside research which employs unscientific racial categorizations with
ease. The Neo-Victorian novel, in this frame, rather than simply challeng-
ing Victorian norms, appears as a genre which, as Hadley contends, perhaps
unknowingly caters to a nostalgia for the very Victorian values represented
within it, in particular a growing imperial nostalgia in Britain for a period in
which Britain became ‘Great’ (Hadley 2010, 8). While the novel’s overt con-
demnation of racism is straightforward, the work of changing structures of
knowledge and of language, of the moving beyond the dominance of histor-
ical Eurocentric sources and scholarship that might enable moving beyond
race itself (and the myriad assumption tied to it), is much harder to achieve.
Kunal Basu’s Racists (2006)

Racists shares with English Passengers a desire to use Victorian race sci-
ence as a means of contemplating the character of science in the present
and, like Kneale’s novel, does so through a form that only partially chal-
lenges the tenets of Victorian racism. Set in the 1850s and 60s, Racists
imagines an experiment set up by two competing racial scientists, Samuel
Bates, a British craniologist affiliated to the Royal College of Physicians,
and Frenchman Jean-Louis Belavoix, an anthropologist and member of the
Société Ethnologique de Paris. Their experiment consists of sending two
babies—a white girl and a black boy—to an uninhabited island, Arlinda, off
the coast of North Africa, along with a mute nurse who is tasked with bring-
ing the children up without language or parenting. For Bates, a monogenist,
the experiment is ‘to understand what makes one race superior to another’
(Basu Racists 2006, 26–27), while Belavoix, on the other hand, is a polygen-
ist who believes races are unrelated, skull measurement is pointless, and ‘War
is inevitable! If the European doesn’t suppress the Negro, the Negro will sup-
press the European’ (38). The scientists travel to the island twice a year to
observe the children; Bates and his assistant, Quartley, measure the heads and
facial features of the children while Belavoix observes their behavior and takes
copious notes in his notebook.
The novel was well received upon its publication in 2006, praised for its
‘cool dissection of the roots of European racism’ (Phillips 2006) and as an
‘accessible book’ because ‘it comes to the race issue without a fixed agenda,
no issues to thump out’ (Boston 2006). Indeed, Basu took care to make
clear in several interviews and essays that appeared around the time of the
novel’s publication that he was not writing from a sense of racial injustice—
having never experienced racism himself—but out of curiosity (Rao 2006).
Of Bates and Belavoix he writes, ‘I construed them as men of their times, not
evil characters’ and he cites nineteenth-century novelists Dickens, Dostoevsky,
and Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay as his influences (Rao 2006), interest-

ing choices given that novelists such as Dickens were influenced by the racial
sciences of the period, the appraisal of heads, skull shape, and facial appear-
ance often evident in his work. While appearing to take an apparently neu-
tral position on the ethics of Victorian racial science—a preference for simply
telling the story over imposing contemporary moral judgments—Basu is still
concerned with the contemporary, insisting that he wanted to understand
why the quest to find racial differences persists in science. Genetic science
remains invested in such questions, Basu contends, yet ‘history has shown
repeatedly that today’s good science turns out to be tomorrow’s absurdity,
from craniology to genetics’ (Basu The Times 2006). The implication here is
that contemporary scientific findings about race may well turn out to be as
wrong as Victorian ones, but Basu is less interested in the potential impact of
genetic racism in the present than in the question of why race remains a topic
of scientific investigation.
In order to explore the relationship between Victorian and contempo-
rary race science in Racists, Basu employs a detached, ‘scientific’ perspec-
tive to imagine a horrific experiment of Victorian race science. While English
Passengers presents an abundance of characters and voices moving back and
forth across periods, the scope of Racists is much narrower, its narrative more
linear and its narration much sparser. Basu has described Racists as ‘a harsh
novel in many ways,’ explaining that he had ‘deliberately chosen a harsher,
sparser style’ (Rao 2006), a style that forgoes the dense descriptions of the
Victorian novel and instead presents characters and events from a cold,
‘objective’ distance. The characters are introduced through a narration which
appears aligned with the worldview of the racial scientists; as he looks in the
mirror Bates is described as having ‘A cranium of exceptional size, sport-
ing dark eyes and a square jaw’ (Basu, 8), Belavoix has ‘a prominent nose,
a head of boyish curls’ (Basu, 10), and of the children we are told ‘that the
two are unalike is obvious. The boy shows extreme energy that can turn to
sloth without warning…With the girl, it’s being outside that makes all the
difference’ (Basu, 18). Like a scientist, the narrator observes the characters,
who have similar speech patterns (with the exception of the speechless chil-
dren and nurse) making it difficult to discern any distinct personalities among
them. For example, the novel refuses anything of depth in race scientist Bates,
whose head, like Dr. Potter’s in English Passengers, is full of science and sci-
ence only; ‘“In the Negro, a deficient cranium produces an animal courage
– a bent for haste and rashness…the superior cranium of the European, on
the other hand, leads to a reasoned courage”’ (58). Only seen and understood
through his focus on science and deprived of any strongly humanizing char-
acteristics, Bates is largely unknowable as a character, both to the reader and
to the other characters around him, particularly his assistant Quartley who is
often focused on trying to understand what Bates is thinking from the way
that he looks; ‘Quartley observed his master’s face take on an extra layer of
grimness. Lines deepened on his forehead, his eyelids remained still for long
552 J. GILL
moments’ (92), but in general he finds it ‘hard to trace anything but science
in him’ (64).
By reproducing the observational, ostensibly objective scientific perspective
of the racial scientist in the style of the novel’s narration, Basu adopts the
role of objective scientist observing his racist characters through the lens of
time. The effect is to create a comparable distance between the reader and the
narrative, forcing the reader to observe, from a seeming distance, the activ-
ities of the characters without connecting to them. This perspective appears
to forgo any nostalgia for the period or indeed for the Victorian novel,
instead placing the reader at the center of a contemporary fictive experiment
concerning whether we can ever know ‘what turns inside the skull of the
skull doctor’ (51) and by extension understand the unending search for race
differences by scientists. The distanced, observational narratorial perspective
mirrors the racial scientist characters’ own single-minded (and limited) pur-
suit of scientific objectivity, which they attempt to achieve through observa-
tion. The whole experiment revolves around the scientific gaze as the race
scientists develop their theories from the looks, reactions, and behavior
of their ‘samples,’ in the ‘pure laboratory of nature’ (41); Belavoix builds a
look-out on the island in order ‘to spot the “little savages”’ (61) while for
Bates, in addition to skulls measurement, ‘We must know how the children
behave – with us and with each other’ (57). In much the same way as the sci-
entists observe the children, the novel’s characters observe one another from
a distance, imagining what others are thinking and what motivates them in
ways that ultimately mean that the characters are never really able to con-
nect or to know each other. The children remain an unknowable puzzle,
and themselves adopt the observational strategies of those examining them:
Quartley comes to see himself and the scientists reflected in the children’s
behavior, as ‘Peeking through the girl’s door, he saw her pacing, a volume of
thoughts written on her young face – a scientist considering her next move’
(132). If the children are like scientists it is not only because they might copy
the actions of those around them but because their lack of speech, as well as
their nurse’s, turns everyone on Arlinda ‘into observer and observed’ (76).
In this sense, Basu’s experiment is a thoroughly modern one, set apart
from the detailed and thick characterization of the Victorian novel. The
perspective might even be ethical: the voicelessness of the children parallels
the lack of voice afforded to black and colonized characters in the Victorian
novel, but rather than challenge this perspective through the presentation of
fully rounded black characters, Basu instead makes everyone exotic, curious,
and unknowable, as if we in the present are colonizing the Victorians. In this
way, the novel could be read as challenging the silences and omissions of the
Victorians by placing that silence and unknowability at its heart (and perhaps
our inability, in the present, to ever fully understand them). Yet its observa-
tional, ‘scientific’ form also reproduces certain Victorian narrative qualities in
ways that create an ambivalence about the novel’s stance toward the science
and Victorian period it investigates. For as it reflects the harshness and cruelty
of Victorian racial science in its distant narration, it also replicates Victorian

biases with ease. Cora Kaplan argues that the values of a neo-Victorian novel
can be determined by its style and form and that if there is a tendency to
‘privilege the story of European settlers over that of the non-white or indig-
enous population of the colonies,’ this might suggest that ‘Victoriana of this
kind retroactively counters some Victorian prejudices, but leaves others, if
only by default, in place’ (Kaplan 2007, 155). Racists leaves some of these
prejudices firmly in place, not least in its focus on the perspective of the white
male European scientists, who, even if their inner worlds are restricted, dom-
inate the action and the focalization, with Norah and the children appearing
largely as supporting characters.
More significant is the Victorian language and focalization of the narra-
tion, which appears troublingly invested in the racist viewpoint of the scien-
tists. When the nameless black boy is introduced, ‘they find the boy crouched
on the ground excreting worms, each about six inches long, a dozen of them
coming out in a looping coil. Seeing Bates, he leaps up, runs and catches hold
of his hand, shrieking and blabbering through his full lips like a glib-tongued
monkey’ (12). The simian-like boy is contrasted with an equally stereo-
typed girl, whose gender appears to determine her character: ‘more than an
explorer, she appears to be the path’s caretaker – removing a clutch of loose
rocks that have slid down the slopes to block their climb’ (17). The narra-
tion is far from neutral, but instead, in using words like ‘half-caste’ (3) and
viewing the children as animals—‘They ran at her flanks like a pair of obedi-
ent dogs’ (78)—the narration could belong to any of the adult characters. It
becomes unclear whether the narratorial focalization does or does not encom-
pass free indirect discourse; the use of ‘they’ in the following excerpt prevents
its language from being attributed to a single character, even though the per-
spective could easily be that of Bates, ‘Following the Frenchman out, they
spotted the children easily. A dozen paces apart, they stood facing each other
at the valley of rocks…Not the children, but two creatures. Hideous’ (144).
The final adjective, its own sentence, blurs the narrative frame, as it is unclear
from whose perspective the children are ‘hideous.’
While the novel’s title makes clear what the reader is supposed to think
of the characters contained within it, its seemingly easy reproduction, within
its narration, of the very racist thinking it seeks to question, is a strategy that
creates a sense of uneasiness about the neo-Victorian genre’s apparent dis-
tance from the period it examines. How does the reproduction of certain
Victorian prejudices within a narrative which uses racist language with ease
tell us anything more about Victorian racial science than reading a Victorian
novel would? Putting race science under the microscope, Basu’s observational
style draws attention to the dehumanizing results of a scientific method which
ironically makes its objects unknowable, and in making the novel’s characters
two-dimensional, he invites his readers to comprehend the flaws of a world in
which everything is observed but little truth is known.
554 J. GILL
Like English Passengers, the novel offers the reader an uneasy form of clo-
sure. The experiment begins to unravel as the scientists struggle to continue
funding their twelve-year experiment, and as Quartley and the mute nurse,
Norah, fall in love and decide to try to leave the island with the children.
Quartley, Norah and the girl escape to live together in England, but the boy
is taken by Arab slave traders, screaming, as this occurs, his only word in the
novel, ‘Ari’ (208), which it becomes apparent, is the name of the girl. The
moment both seems to affirm and to deny the boy’s humanity; it is affirmed
through speech and feeling to which the reader has been denied access for
the entirety of the novel, but denied by his remaining nameless even as the
girl is named. In failing to fully humanize the novel’s only black character,
Basu, unlike Kneale, refuses the easy corrections of the neo-Victorian, but like
Kneale, suggests at the novel’s end that the race science of his tale would dis-
appear into obscurity, ‘the brilliant century didn’t spare a thought for a failed
experiment or two’ (213). Claiming that ‘it took decades more for racial sci-
ence to stage a return’ (213) the narrator then turns to ‘the real experiment’
which ‘was about to begin…The battle to raise the races together, to have
them live among each other, was to start soon in America – the war against
the slaving South’ (213). While encouraging the reader to look beyond the
historical period of the novel to the future, the question Basu wanted to raise,
the question of why scientists continue to seek out differences along racial
lines, is left unanswered in the novel. This is perhaps because it remains unan-
swered by contemporary genetic science, which continues to pursue research
into race-based difference without a clear rationale for why this might be a
useful thing to do. Indeed, the novel reflects, in its ambivalent reproduction
of Victorian racism, how it is possible for race thinking to be at once repro-
duced and denied, something increasingly apparent in contemporary genet-
ics, which paradoxically reproduces race as biology while positioning itself as
intellectually and critically against racism (Gill 2020, 14).
In May 2019, the British Conservative MP and leading Brexiteer Jacob
Rees-Mogg published a book titled The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who
Forged Britain, in which he attempted to change public understanding of
the Victorian era as characterized by ‘austere social attitudes and filthy fac-
tories’ to an understanding that ‘the Victorians transformed the nation and
established Britain as a preeminent global force’ (2019, cover copy). An
unashamed celebration of the Victorian, Rees-Mogg’s popular history book
forms part of a wider ideological position that is right-wing in the extreme;
a believer in a hard Brexit and the rolling back of abortion rights for women,
against increasing the minimum wage and same-sex marriage, Rees-Mogg,
not surprisingly, lauds the Victorians when his desired policies would move
the UK back toward the values dominant in the Victorian era. What is clear
from his decision to publish this book is that contemporary politics is (as it
has perhaps always been) involved in a struggle to control historical narra-
tive. In the case of Rees-Mogg, this encompasses resistance to critique of an
era in which he and many others consider that Britain became great. At a
moment when the political stakes are high, the neo-Victorian novel is well
placed to demonstrate the ease with which nostalgia for the Victorian can
turn into the reproduction of that era’s values. Both English Passengers and
Racists, in their equivalences, show us how deeply embedded Victorian pri-
orities and forms remain in the contemporary moment, and demonstrate that
countering Victorian race thinking and its new incarnations requires as much
a questioning and unsettling of certain literary and historical language and
convention as it does an explicit, political, anti-racist stance against the return
of race science.
Note
1.
Shortlists for the Man Booker Prize in recent years attests to this popular-
ity: numerous neo-Victorian novels have either won or been shortlisted for the
prize, including Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Peter Carey’s True
History of the Kelley Gang (2001), Sarah Waters’ Fingersmith (2002), Julian
Barnes’ Arthur and George (2005), Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2006),
Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2007), Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), A.S.
Byatt’s The Children’s Book (2009) and Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries (2013).
Bibliography
BBC News. 2018. Donald Trump Says China Respects His ‘Very Large Brain.’
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-45664690/donald-trump-
says-china-respects-his-very-large-brain. Accessed 28 Aug 2019.
Ball, Magdalena. 2003. An Interview with Matthew Kneale. Compulsive Reader,
March 18. http://www.compulsivereader.com/2003/03/18/an-interview-with-
matthew-kneale/. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Basu, Kunal. 2006. Racists. London: Phoenix.
———. 2006. Searching Blindly for the Truth in Black and White. The Times Higher
Education Supplement, January 6.
Bliss, Catherine. 2012. Race Decoded: The Genomic Fight for Social Justice. Stanford:
Boston, Phillipa. 2006. Author Experiments with Issues of Race. Oxford Times.
http://kunalbasu.com/interview/racists/Racists%20-%20Interviews%20-%20
Oxford%20Times.jpg. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Brantlinger, Patrick. 2000. Race and the Victorian Novel. In Cambridge Companion
to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deidre David, 149–168. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carroll, Samantha J. 2010. Putting the “Neo” Back into Neo-Victorian: The Neo-
Victorian Novel as Postmodern Revisionist Fiction. Neo-Victorian Studies 3 (2):
172–205.
Gates, Henry Louis. 1985. Editor’s Introduction: Writing “Race” and the Difference
It Makes. Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 1–20.
556 J. GILL
Gazette Staff. 2016. Racist Posters Comparing Skull Size of Different Races Appear
at Amherst College. Daily Hampshire Gazette, November 23. https://www.gazet-
tenet.com/Racist-posters-delineating-intelligence-by-race-appear-at-Amherst-
College-6335210. Accessed 28 Aug 2019.
Gill, Josie. 2020. Biofictions: Race, Genetics and the Contemporary Novel. London:
Bloomsbury.
Goodman, Sam. 2015. “A Great Beneficial Disease”: Colonial Medicine and Imperial
Authority inn J.G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur. Journal of Medical Humanities
36 (2): 141–156.
Hadley, Louisa. 2010. Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians
and Us. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Heilman, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. 2010. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the
Twenty-First Century 1999–2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Hill, Susan. 2000. Mail on Sunday. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php.
Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Hochschild, Adam. 2000. The Floating Swap Meet. The New York Times, May 28.
http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/00/05/28/reviews/000528.28hochsct.
html. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Hoffman, Bill. 2000. New York Post. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php.
Kaplan, Cora. 2007. Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism. New York: Colombia
University Press.
Kneale, Matthew. 2000. English Passengers. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Knox, Robert. 1850. The Races of Men: A Fragment. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard.
Martin, Biddy. 2016. Racist Posters on Campus. Amherst College, https://www.amh-
erst.edu/amherst-story/president/statements/node/665033. Accessed 28 Aug
2019.
Miller, Laura. 2001. English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. Salon, February 21.
https://www.salon.com/2001/02/21/kneale/. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Montagu, Ashley. 1999. Introduction. In Race and IQ Expanded Edition, ed. Ashley
Montagu, 1–18. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Munford, Rebecca, and Paul Young. 2009. Introduction: Engaging the Victorians.
Literature, Interpretation, Theory 20 (1): 1–11.
Phillips, Mike. 2006. Experiments in Brutality. The Guardian, January 21. https://
www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/21/featuresreviews.guardianreview17.
Poole, Steve. 2000. All Hands on Deck. The Guardian, March 4. https://www.the-
guardian.com/books/2000/mar/04/fiction.bookerprize2000. Accessed 8 Sept
2019.
Price, Michael. 2018. ‘It’s a Toxic Place.’ How the Online World of White
Nationalists Distorts Population Genetics. Science, May 22. https://www.sci-
encemag.org/news/2018/05/it-s-toxic-place-how-online-world-white-national-
ists-distorts-population-genetics. Accessed 28 Aug 2019.
Rao, Kavitha. 2006. Science Friction. South China Morning Post, February 26.
Rees-Mogg, Jacob. 2019. The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain. London:
Penguin.
Roberts, Dorothy. 2011. Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics and Big Business
Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century. New York: The New Press.
Rousselot, Elodie. 2016. Introduction: Neo-Victorian Experiments. Victoriographies 6

(2): 107–111.
Saini, Angela. 2019. Superior: The Return of Race Science. Boston: Beacon Press.
———. 2019. Why Race Science Is on the Rise Again. The Guardian, May 18.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/18/race-science-on-the-rise-
angela-saini. Accessed 28 Aug 2019.
Shuttleworth, Sally. 2014. From Retro- to Neo-Victorian Fiction and Beyond:
Fearful Symmetries. In Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and
Revisitations, ed. Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, 179–192. New
York: Routledge.
Sylvester, Christopher. 2000. http://www.matthewkneale.net/reviews.php. Accessed
8 Sept 2019.
Stepan, Nancy. 1982. The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960.
Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Thackray Jones, Rachel. 2009. Matthew Kneale. British Council Literature. https://
literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/matthew-kneale. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Talese, Nan A. 2000. English Passengers. Publishers Weekly, February 28. https://
www.publishersweekly.com/978–0-385-49743-5. Accessed 8 Sept 2019.
Venter, Craig. 2000. ‘Remarks Made by the President, Prime Minister Tony Blair
of England (via satellite), Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human
Genome Research Institute, and Dr. Craig Venter, President and Chief Scientific
Officer, Celera Genomics Corporation, on the Completion of the First Survey of
the Entire Human Genome Project’, The East Room, The White House, 26 June
2000, National Human Genome Research Institute. https://clintonwhitehouse3.
archives.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/00628_2.html. Accessed 6 Sept 2019.
CHAPTER 32
W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity:

I.Q., Afropessimism, Genre
Michael Collins
May 30th, 1938

My dear Dr. Du Bois,
I am pleased to give you the report of Du Bois’s intelligence test.
On February 21, 1938, Miss Dorothy H. Wright, the school examiner,
tested and found Du Bois to have an I.Q. of 144. She is mentally the age of a
child seven years, eight months old.
The test used to determine the I.Q. was the Stanford Revision of the
Binet-Simon Intelligence Tests.
Du Bois was quite stimulated the day she was tested. It is Miss Wright’s
belief that the results might have been higher.
The examiner finds Du Bois to be a very superior child.
If you care to have any further report on Du Bois, I will be glad to send it
to you.
Sincerely,
Mildred L. Johnson
I.Q.—The modes of behaviour appropriate to the most advanced state of
technical sophistication are not confined to the sectors in which they are actu-
ally required. So thinking submits to the social checks on its performance not
merely where they are professionally imposed, but adapts to them its whole
complexion… The socialization of mind keeps it boxed in, isolated in a glass
case, as long as society itself is imprisoned.
M. Collins (*) 
King’s College, London, UK

560 M. COLLINS
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life

In 1938, W.E.B. Du Bois received a brief letter at his office in Atlanta from
the headmistress and founder of the Modern School in New York, a prestig-
ious black private institution attended by his six-year-old granddaughter Du
Bois Williams. The letter from Mildred Johnson is full of revealing historical and
biographic details. First, that New York black private schools in the 1930s, even
those committed to the humanist aims of the Ethical Society like The Modern
School, had trained I.Q. testers on staff. This points to the extent to which men-
tal testing had been incorporated into the normative structures of primary-level
schooling in the USA by the 1930s driven, initially, by the rise of eugenics.
Johnson’s description of Du Bois’s granddaughter’s results in an intelligence test
is almost blasé, revealing much not because it is exceptional but because it speaks
to an utterly normalized education scene.
Second, that the test administered was the Stanford-Binet. This test was
developed by Lewis Terman in 1916 and characterized around 10–12%
of people (a “Talented Tenth” if you will) as lying within the highest three
categories of human “mental merit” with marks above 110: “Superior
Intelligence,” “Very Superior Intelligence,” and “Genius, or Near Genius”.
The phenomenon of the “tenth” was attributable to the method of “devi-
ation from the average” present at the center of assessments of “mental
merit” from Francis Galton’s early work in Heredity Genius: An Inquiry into
Its Laws and Consequence (1868) through to contemporary examples such as
Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve (1994). Drawn from the work of the Belgian
mathematician Adolphe Quetelet, it was the observation that the quantity
of high values in any data set will be mirrored almost precisely by the num-
ber at the lowest end with most measurements of an attribute—at least as
it related to anthropometry—and would produce the largest number of
examples around the mean and about 10% of outliers at each end of the scale.
Given that Quetelet’s law of “deviation from the average” was a standard
mathematical law in its time, taught in schools, it seems unlikely that W.E.B.
Du Bois’s vision of the “Talented Tenth” was an arbitrary number, even if it
was not a direct reference Galton’s work.
The Terman test was notable for the especially negative assessments it
gave of African-American people. This was something Du Bois well knew
by the 1930s, and Terman himself stated it quite directly in the book that
introduced the Stanford-Binet to the world and which any trained I.Q. tester
would have read, The Measurement of Intelligence. Terman wrote that an I.Q.
on the Stanford-Binet scale of between 80 and 90 (defined as “Dullness,
rarely classifiable as feeblemindedness” [79])
[…] represent[s] the level of intelligence which is very, very common… among
negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the fam-
ily stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such
extraordinary frequency among… negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole
question of racial differences in mental traits will be taken up anew and by
experimental methods. (91–92)
32 W.E.B. DU BOIS’S NEUROLOGICAL MODERNITY … 561
Terman’s vision for this I.Q. population clearly rearticulated Jim Crow
policies as well as the educational aims of Du Bois’s frequent enemy Booker
T. Washington in stating that “Children of this group should be segregated
in special classes and be given instruction which is concrete and practical…
they… can often be made efficient workers” (92). Taking Francis Galton’s
Hereditary Genius (1869) to be the ur-text of intelligence testing, racialist dis-
course was encoded deeply in the science itself. Galton was entirely frank about
this, opening the preface to that work with the claim that “the idea of investi-
gating the subject of hereditary genius occurred to me during the course of a
purely ethnological inquiry, into the mental peculiarity of different races” (v).
The third point to note is the attention paid by Johnson to Du Bois
Williams’s state of “stimulation,” which is to say, her deviation from
culturally-conditioned behavioral norms for the science of I.Q. testing. Given
the racialist dimensions of the Stanford-Binet we can take this to mean her
deviation from a normative, learned, “whiteness.” Johnson’s comment
points either to the implication that Du Bois Williams approached the test in
a youthful spirit of fun, or to a darker implication of coercion. Importantly,
it can also be both—the coercive history of race lying transparently on the
surface of an average child’s life.
Situating this complex affect around I.Q. in relation to the anti-racist
agendas of Du Bois’s life and work this chapter considers how to read black
literature “within” a racialized world of scientific thought, rather than just as
a transcendental response to it. Du Bois is useful to us because his engage-
ments are paradigmatic of the modern subject’s uncomfortable, but utterly
commonplace, relation to the “neurological modernity” of the I.Q. concept.
By “neurological modernity”, I suggest that the “mind” after I.Q. becomes
calibrated within a scientific definition of “intelligence” that in normatively
“white.” Du Bois writing, via Nina, to Mildred Johnson, to obtain the results
of a racist test administered to his “stimulated” granddaughter, was an act of
intrusion that was also a sincere act of care and is of a piece with his wider
thought on the subject of black survival within a racist world; a pattern that
can be well described through the emergent discourse of “Afropessimism.”
Reading Black Writing “Within the Veil” of Science

In this chapter I will read W.E.B. Du Bois’s engagement with I.Q. test-
ing through the terms of “Afropessimism,” that is, as a sincere attempt to,
at once, acknowledge the racist histories underpinning all thought in the
Western world (including, or, perhaps most especially, that of institution-
alized science) and to find ongoing means of survival within such a world.
I will do so by first outlining Du Bois’s stance in relation to eugenics and
I.Q., before moving on to consider how this served as a spur to his specific
form of dialectical thinking, and closing with a discussion of why perceiv-
ing Du Bois this way helps explain his attraction to genre fiction. By read-
ing “Afropessimistically” I also intend to offer a shift in orientation in the
562 M. COLLINS
study of literature and science from a desire to assert art’s capacity to refute,
challenge, or undermine the claims of science toward a consideration of the
emotional states attendant upon being within a scientized (and therefore his-
torically white supremacist) world. This does not, exactly, give us consolation.
Yet it helps us acknowledge how we might live with the problem and not be
given to inhabiting a utopian outside of the problem, an orientation that, as
Jared Sexton has remarked, might be unethical toward those for whom “tran-
scendence is foreclosed in and for the modern world.” So, for literature to
adopt an ethical relation to its subject it must also not seek to dwell on the
outside of science.
Du Bois’s awkward embrace of I.Q. reveals the horrible reality that most
real bodies in the twentieth century could never live outside the realm of
scientific authority that was coming to define the twentieth-century state.

Nor, indeed, was a wholesale rejection of I.Q. possible given its dominance
as what Jacques Rancière has called a “distribution of the sensible,” an epis-
temology and an aesthetic of felt experience that organized social life in the
twentieth century. To put it another way, by the 1930s “intelligence” had
become largely synonymous with “mind” itself and had shed the vestments of
its religious, Kantian, or transcendental optimism as well as its earlier mean-
ings as simple “knowledge.” No less a pessimist of the everyday than Theodor
Adorno captured in the section from Minima Moralia that serves as one of
my epigraphs how I.Q. was a form of mind that seemed to subsume all defi-
nitions of thought in the twentieth century, making it inescapable for even
those whose idea of critical thinking in no way required it. That is to say, I.Q.
becomes an intractable and sprawling “fact” everywhere that thought occurs.
As John Carson has shown, the birth of more-or-less the entire discipline of
psychology in the late nineteenth century was driven by the rise of a concep-
tion of “intelligence” as the central feature of “mind” and a “common attrib-
ute… understood as a singular faculty whose power varied across the animal
kingdom by degrees” (81) but not, crucially, by kind. The dominant fact of
eugenic thinking (certainly as it related to the uniform and measurable value
of “mind”) from the early years of the twentieth century to now is not its spec-
tacularity (although confronting this truth of American life always comes with
shock for the researcher). What traumatizes is the horror of its routine per-
vasiveness. Du Bois’s relation to I.Q. testing is paradigmatic here, because it
articulates the black subject’s inescapable relation to the condition of white
power, the “ethico-onto-epistemological” (Barad) sum of racial rejection. What
literature can give an account of are the emotional states that galvanize their
own version of the political for those that reside fully within the purview of the
scientific state apparatus; a self-awareness that might in time be emancipatory.
As Jared Sexton expressed it, “Afropessimism” is a “common sense” that is
bound to a terrible and terrifying acknowledgement of not only the tragic

material and symbolic continuities everywhere revealed by the history of post-
emancipation societies throughout the Diaspora, but also, more fundamentally,
the uncontainable categorical sprawl of the epochal transformation that names the
emergence of racial slavery as such. In this, the postulate of a free black – whether
non-slave or former-slave – would appear as oxymoron. None of which should
stop anyone from believing its true, that being the crux.
This “Afropessimistic” stance differs from readings that would emphasize the
resistant, subversive, or transcendent strategies deployed by Du Bois, such as
those by Maria Farland. According to Farland, Du Bois’s primary technique
for refuting the claims of racist science was that of “transvaluation”—a pro-
cess by which the relocation of data from one scientific milieu into another
genre or form (the example is the novel) produces a change in the mean-
ing of a particular value. The purpose of such an exercise is politically subver-
sive and emancipatory; it bends negative data toward transcendent outcomes.
When considering I.Q., though, Du Bois seldom performed such a “trans-
valuation”. Du Bois Williams’s intelligence was explored at the genius loci
of mental test data (an educational institution), and we should not read Du
Bois’s request to Mildred Johnson as a necessarily subversive gesture. It is,
rather, an acknowledgment that a high I.Q. (real or not) conferred potential-
ity upon Du Bois Williams, a modicum of safety in an antiblack world, even at
the expense of the collective of African Americans for whom such testing was
used to reinforce white supremacist systems of domination.
The emergent language of “Afropessimism” captures well how Du Bois’s
The Souls of Black Folk performed a political shift in description of black polit-
ical disablement from a simple spatial exclusion from the public sphere, to
the more complexly modern internalization, embodiment, and psycholo-
gization of the subject implicit in ideas such as “double consciousness” and
“the veil” (Du Bois 1994). I will be thinking through Du Bois’s engagement
with I.Q. in light of Jacques Rancière’s observation that the cruel opera-
tions of political power do not always hide themselves behind other objects
of attention and are, sometimes, rather frankly and unambiguously present
in the world in its naked everydayness. Later in this chapter this observation
will be brought to bear on the question of why Du Bois generally chose to
write fiction, albeit very assuredly “modernist,” through the modes of genre,
rather than adopt the experimentalism pursued by his peers. I suggest below
that genre fiction foregrounds suspended action and is based on an aesthetic
of non-transcendence that can capture the affects of being within a world
where one’s sense of progress is always dogged by retrogressive systems of
measurement and definition. My argument runs counter to recent critical
work that has powerfully demonstrated the history of black engagements in
the cultural field of science and has found within scientific culture systems
for affecting active resistance, including Farland’s work and Britt Rusert’s
Fugitive Science, the latter of which focuses its attention on an earlier moment
of black expression. In numerous ways, Du Bois was the inheritor and one
of the most important practitioners of that tradition, but there remains
something specific about “intelligence” as an area of scientific inquiry in the
564 M. COLLINS
twentieth century that feels especially intransigent and resistant to “fugitive”

uses. This may account for why, as Catherine Malabou has recently noted,
the humanities have generally adopted a defensive formation in relation to
I.Q., and have been frequently given to protesting meekly, after the model of
Henri Bergson’s neoromanticism, that art and culture are expressions of an
especially vital and pseudo-mystical version of consciousness that cannot be
captured by intelligence testing.
Normative Eugenicism and Social Activism

Du Bois was fascinated by the results of I.Q. tests and believed that re-
shifting attention from hard heredity to environmental and cultural condi-
tioning would improve the status of African Americans in relation to the met-
ric, but he did not attack the underlying principle of “general intelligence”
head on despite the racist history encoded deeply in the metric itself. As
Kyla Schuller has argued, Du Bois’s activism was based on what was becom-
ing an outdated and outmoded system of thought in the context of the hard
Mendelian, assuredly racist, hereditarianism pursued by powerful eugeni-
cists like Charles Davenport and Lewis Terman; that is, Du Bois adopted a
modified version of neo-Lamarckism and sentimentalism “that could draw
on emotion as a methodology in order to identify the influence of environ-
ment on social well-being and chart how African American families were
advancing” (186). In the 1920s Du Bois printed I.Q. scores in the pages
of The Crisis to accompany images of “Five Exceptional Negro Children”
registering a distinctly pragmatic need to not only speak of black achieve-
ment, but find a metric through which it might be represented, albeit one
steeped in historical and contemporary violence. Du Bois’s own academic
focus on “brains”—implicit in his especial attention to the educational and
cultural achievements of black life and his belief in the uplifting power of a
“Talented Tenth”—made escaping the allure of I.Q. more-or-less impossi-
ble. Unlike other physical measures such as height, weight, strength and so
on that were used by eugenicists to differentiate the exceptional from the
“unfit,” the fact that I.Q. touches on an individual’s potential for cultural
and artistic achievement makes it a form of biopower that could not be cir-
cumnavigated by cultural workers or isolated strategically from the cultural
sphere. Even among figures we might hope would know better, I.Q. is allur-
ing and unnervingly adhesive, as suggested by its transtemporal persistence in
the face of criticisms as excoriating and definitive as Stephen Jay Gould’s The
Mismeasure of Man in our own era. While Du Bois spoke frequently against
the dangers of other hard biological measurements of African Americans, he
maintained an abiding respect for I.Q. scores. In a climate in which the I.Q.
was taken to be an established fact, to attack “general intelligence” would
have challenged a crucial grounding for his belief in the logic and worth of
“meritocracy” and “racial uplift” more generally, which, as Daylanne English
and Kyla Schuller have both noted, united a focus on black achievement with
a specifically African-American version of eugenics.
His commitment to I.Q. was periodically a source of consternation to fel-
low antiracist activists. In 1929, Du Bois wrote to Franz Boas requesting he
write a short article for The Crisis on three questions:
1. Is there a new American Negro race being developed?

2. What has intelligence testing proven concerning Negro ability?
3. What recent studies or investigations throw light upon the African
Negro?
The reply from the eminent anthropologist referred dismissively to the idea
of “intelligence” being real, suggesting it was only what “psychologists please
to call, intelligence” Even while he may have quibbled with the tests, Du Bois
displayed a certainty that ability was measurable and meritocratic advance-
ment possible for those in possession of a high I.Q. He felt entitled to his
granddaughter’s biodata, and that of other African Americans under the pur-
view of his research and activist projects, as a way of demonstrating future
potentialities.
Given the racist history of the intelligence test, the transmission of the
measurability of minds from the eugenic fringe to the quotidian world of
black primary school education demanded an acceptance by the majority (up
to a point) of the ongoing trauma of white supremacy. The move to tabu-
late achievement on these tests gave birth to the supposition that an individ-
ual more able to score highly on an I.Q. or “I.Q.-like” measure was more,
truly, “alive,” reifying a commonsensical belief that humanity was gradable as
a Gaussian distribution (the famous “bell curve” on a graph) from “bright”
and engaged down to a state of intellectual somnambulism. I.Q. itself is evi-
dence of what Saidiya Hartman has poignantly called the afterlife of slav-
ery, “a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be
undone… a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched
centuries ago” (6). This hierarchy was coded into the Enlightenment itself.
As Jacques Rancière remarks, the Enlightenment is rooted in a “pedagogical
myth” that “divides the world into two. More precisely it divides intelligence
into two. It says there is an inferior intelligence and a superior one” (7). After
I.Q. this Enlightenment—and so, this “freedom”—occurred in shades. With
the image of “the veil” in The Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, Du Bois
demonstrated that spheres of freedom were not just external and spatial; nei-
ther were they wholly Manichean. In the era following the official abolition of
slavery they were partially permeable, malleable, and either inside us or worn
upon bodies. More specifically, among its many metaphorical possibilities
“the veil” is an image that focuses its power on the head (one wears a veil)
that in turn points to Du Bois’ particular interest in intelligence; a biologiza-
tion of subjecthood that is also a secularization of the shifting conditions of
freedom and unfreedom as things pertaining to bodies and in the world.
566 M. COLLINS
Intelligence testing and psychology measured brains and located that sin-
gular organ as the site of consciousness. Consequently, one of the keys to
greater freedom resided in the brain. Because it was not simply spatial, free-
dom rendered as intelligence was even less absolute and unimpeachable,
and was subject to continual assessment. Du Bois would have agreed with
Francis Galton’s statement in Hereditary Genius that “I look upon social and
professional life as a continuous examination” (5). That was pretty obvious
to a black man in the early twentieth century. Specifically, for Du Bois, aca-
demic competition was a source of great pride, writing famously in The Souls
of Black Folk, “That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examina-
tion time, or beat them in a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads” (2).
Since Du Bois and his family served as his own model for the potential of
exceptional black people, I.Q. helped to explain academic and cultural suc-
cess and allowed Du Bois to lay claim to the merit he and his family displayed
(English). To say one is “a very exceptional child” is political because it allows
one to claim their own achievements, and in the event those achievements are
denied, appeal for recourse to a higher sense of justice.
The painful trade-off is that Gaussian distribution serves to condemn the
greater part of humanity to a state of relative mental mediocrity and, since
“intelligence” was understood to be a strong indicator of future achievement,
to impose presumptive biological limits on capacities for growth and develop-
ment. The bell curve is not a spectacular, liberatory form of data display. Its
results are, actually, rather depressing. Whether a function of heredity or envi-
ronment, I.Q. cannot be a basis for radical emancipation, because it is calcu-
lated according to a standard deviation from a mean. It is everywhere marked
by the needs of its time, since “intelligence” is largely a measure of the adap-
tive utility of one’s capacities in relation to a socially conservative milieu, as
John Dewey would note of academic assessment generally in Democracy and
Education (1916).1 As Galton, then Alfred Binet, conceived it, and other
revised it, I.Q. was an elitist measure with only small numbers doing well on
a scale whose purpose was to evaluate one’s capacity for what the American
psychologist James Mark Baldwin called “conscious adaptation”; that is,
something like an ability to survive and flourish in the world whose condi-
tions you comprehend and, essentially, must learn to accept.2
Double Consciousness and the Dialectics of “Talent”

Like any intellectual attempting to adapt theory and praxis to the chang-
ing racial and political landscapes of the U.S. (and the world) from the
late nineteenth- to the middle-twentieth centuries, W.E.B. Du Bois’s work
was not marked by an absolute consistency of vision or approach. Yet, as a
thinker working at the crux of race and class concerns in the period his com-
mitments to what Gregory Michael Dorr and Angela Logan have termed
“Assimilationist Eugenics” remained fairly consistent from the earliest years
working on The Philadelphia Negro and establishing an empirical school of
sociology at Atlanta, through to his work with the U.N. and the publica-
tion of his “Black Flame” sequence of bildungsromane in the late 1950s and
early 1960s (Dorr and Logan; 68–92). It is not a new line to emphasize Du
Bois’s conservatism on aspects of social thought; both Shamoon Zamir and
Kwame Anthony Appiah have taken this approach to Du Bois. Zamir notes
in Dark Voices that “Du Bois was always aristocratic in his bearing and atti-
tudes, never more so than in his early life, when his politics upheld a clear
distinction between the patrician and the plebeian classes” (9). From the late
1910s until the 1930s Du Bois evinced a commitment to “scientific” breed-
ing to ameliorate the painful conditions of black life, even stating in a 1922
editorial for the NAACP’s Crisis that “The Negro has not been breeding for
an object” and must, therefore begin to breed “for brains, for efficiency, for
beauty” (153). Aldon Morris has recently defended Du Bois against claims of
class prejudice by remarking that Du Bois’s elitism is always vectored through
his social constructionism as a way of speaking of oppression, not innate val-
ues: “[his] descriptions of the ‘dumb misery’ of the black masses might in
retrospect appear judgmental, elitist, and inappropriately derogatory… [y]et
whenever Du Bois dwells on the ignorance or backwardness or primitiveness
or underdeveloped nature or ‘childlikeness’ of blacks, he explains it as a con-
sequence of white oppression” (41). In this sense, when he speaks of I.Q. a
similar issue is at play; the question of what, as he implies in his letter to Boas,
we might learn about disablement through it.
Nonetheless, such a tendency in Du Bois’s thought is, of course, a prob-
lem. It troublingly mirrors hereditarian claims made by scientific racists
and eugenic thinkers and activists of the period, such as Terman or Charles
Davenport of the infamous Cold Spring Harbor Eugenics Record Office.
Importantly, Du Bois’s approach to eugenics distorted the central tenets of
what Daniel J. Kevles famously characterized as “popular” eugenics, that
is, the white supremacist, racially—purifying, frequently Mendelian, vari-
ant favored by racist scientists and conservative anti-immigrationists. Other
variants of eugenic thought flourished in the period, including those that
emphasized “hybrid vigor” and encouraged interracial couplings, as English
notes in Unnatural Selections, and it is these upon which Du Bois most often,
though not exclusively, drew. As English writes, “eugenics was not necessar-
ily accompanied by a platform of white supremacy or, for that matter, even
racial purity” (17). It is certainly the case that Du Bois’s work for the NAACP
participated actively in the popularization of a range of eugenical discourses
in the first decades of the century, especially in his use of beautiful baby con-
tests as a cornerstone of his famous “Tenth Crusade” antilynching campaign
and in his frequent editorials for Crisis devoted to praising the fitness of the
children of the “Talented Tenth.” The object of this deployment of eugenic
tropes was to present a counter-claim to a mainstream eugenics set upon
emphasizing the inferiority of African-Americans to Anglo-Saxon or Nordic
peoples, as English, Dorr, and Logan have all shown.3
568 M. COLLINS
Du Bois’s involvement with these eugenic questions was largely the norm.
There is little case to be made that his attraction to it is peculiar or more
destructive than, say, Booker T. Washington’s or Charles Davenport’s. It is
troubling for its normativity, and remains his least redeemable or liberatory
stance. Famously, Du Bois called out white America for its perception of
black people as a political and demographic “problem” in The Souls of Black
Folk (1903) when he wrote that “Between me and the other world there
is ever an unasked question…. How does it feel to be a problem?” (1). Du
Bois’s key insight in that work and Black Reconstruction in America (1935)
was to show how the experiences of black enslavement and emancipation in
America were, at once, the engine that drove modernization and the condi-
tions that led to the development of forms of social control that held back
such a process. However, his engagement with marshaling biopower in rela-
tion to black people through eugenic pursuits seems to suggest a deeply
rooted internalization of this very “problem” as a problem at the demo-
graphic level; a psychic disturbance that manifested in his unwillingness to
reject “meritocracy”—especially one that tried to prove the superiority of cer-
tain individuals scientifically.
A key insight of Du Bois’s was to note that the double consciousness of
African Americans was dialectical; it meant having to possess a “second sight
in this American world” (Du Bois 1994) rooted in the ongoing trauma of
relying continually for one’s subsistence, physically and mentally, on tools of
survival developed in response to a racist modernity that had not been tran-
scended and frequently returned in new, horrifying, forms. Consequently,
such “double consciousness” rendered all forms of uplift and progress
haunted by the past; all achievement that integrated black life more greatly
into that modern system was in danger of contributing to the further disen-
franchisement of other members of the same race. Moreover, this haunting
contributed to the melancholic tone of a body of work shot through with
instances of frustration, political incapacitation, and defeat. For Jonathan
Flatley this means that Du Bois’s work is especially rich in an affective valence
and tonal ambiguity, an awareness of “the historicity of one’s affective expe-
rience, especially experiences of difficult, potentially depressing, loss” that
marks it out generically as “modernist.” Du Bois’s request to his grand-
daughter’s teacher demands that we call attention to how at times the forms
of gratification he sought—biopolitical, potentially hereditarian, essential-
ist closures such as an I.Q. that might mark Du Bois Williams as one of the
meritocratic elite—were not wholly radical or liberatory. They were nonethe-
less markers of a will to survive and thrive in an unjust world that, while not
heroic, offer important insights into African-American life “within the veil” of
racist, scientific, modernity.
For Du Bois the capacity to perceive, understand, and productively uti-
lize the “Second Sight” that was the historical inheritance of black cul-
tural life was not distributed evenly in the population. The concept of
the “Talented Tenth” that Du Bois first outlined in a 1903 article of that
name was developed in the same frenzied period of production that birthed
The Souls of Black Folk, with its own references to the exceptional black
“savant,” and must be understood alongside the claims for special sight
suggested in that work. Such a position is perfectly in keeping with the
version of the Enlightenment mind that shaped Du Bois’s thought. Of
course, in an African-American liberationist literary tradition this is an espe-
cially pertinent force, because emancipation had been mapped onto educa-
tion and Enlightenment with certain heroic figures able by chance, work,
fate, or circumstance to achieve what to most was continually deferred or
denied; namely, freedom. The irony that “Afropessimism” calls our atten-
tion to is that the very definition of the “free” subject relies for its meaning
on its inverse, the continuing presence of unfreedom as a fact of modernity.
However, as Rancière has argued, a truly emancipatory politics must hold to
the almost unthinkable supposition of the equality of intelligence, a sense that
reason is not a state to come to or that is distributed unevenly, but a univer-
sal possession of all. In an age in which “intelligence” was being scientifically
tabulated as I.Q. by figures like Lewis Terman, and deemed to be measurable
through tests of perception and sensitivity, Du Bois’s characterization of the
special ability of certain individuals to “feel” more acutely the environment
and history partakes of the theory of the measurability of “general intelli-
gence” and its antidemocratic impulses. In other words, it exists within a ver-
sion of Enlightenment calibrated to reinforce and extend white power.
As Paul Gilroy and others have noted, Du Bois’s concept of “double con-
sciousness” marks him out as a modern thinker, working through the implica-
tions of modernity itself. His theory of the assault on the senses that defines
what it is to be black in America places The Souls of Black Folk within the canon
of works at the turn of the century directed to considerations of the emerg-
ing modern consciousness, especially in the field of sociology where, as Nancy
Bentley has remarked, “For thinkers in a number of different disciplines, the
textures of everyday experience and perception seemed to hold the secret to
acquiring new knowledge” (247–248). Ben Singer has dubbed this empha-
sis on everyday sensory life a “neurological conception of modernity.” As a
modern thinker committed to modern problems Du Bois comes to a prob-
lematically biopolitical solution in his acceptance of a unitary, innate “gen-
eral intelligence” as a necessary tool for unearthing who can benefit from this
modernity and who cannot. For Du Bois, the theory of “general intelligence”
actually served as the backbone of his antiracist activism. This is Du Bois’s ver-
sion of “neurological modernity”—the affects created by a modern world that
seeks to liberate minds in the name of Enlightenment by first comprehending
them through systems of measurement that foreground non-transcendence.
What lay “between” the “world” and “W.E.B Du Bois” was a capacity—a trait,
an aptitude for feeling, a special speed of responsiveness—that allowed him to
perceive the “unasked question.” The utopian dream of the I.Q. concept was
that it offered up a universal scale of human potential that allowed Du Bois to
successfully plot high-achieving African Americans alongside whites and other
570 M. COLLINS
races on it, seemingly undermining white supremacist claims to the inferior-

ity of black people, and landing a blow against discredited, but no less cultur-
ally persistent, polygenetic or racially separatist theories of multiple forms of
humanity. Yet, inversely, it performed its own distancing from the masses he
attempted in other ways to uplift by relying for its potency on a generalized
mediocrity and inability to flourish among that very mass.
Navigating this complex affective valence around the politics of intelli-
gence and the everyday was a task that Du Bois would seek most to under-
take not in his autobiographical, social scientific, or activist work, but in
his fiction, specifically where he engaged genre tropes most overtly. There,
through generic and affective intensities, he communicated the complex sit-
uation of being a subject within a normatively scientized world calibrated to
white power who must attempt to utilize that untenable position as a basis
for a social mobility that pervasive antiblackness commonly foreclosed and
denied. Exploring this, I will end with a reading of “The Comet” (1920).
The Generic Trauma of “the Comet”

“The Comet” first appeared in Darkwater: Voices From within the Veil (1920)
and adopts the generic idiom of sci-fi to tell the story of a black, New York
City bank messenger, Jim Davis. Following a request from his white boss to
go into the “lower vaults” and collect “two volumes of old records” (139),
Jim becomes trapped, only to find, on being freed, that human life on earth
appears to have been exterminated by noxious gasses from the tail of a pass-
ing comet. As Jim moves through the city searching for survivors and a means
of exit from the horrors of the post-apocalyptic urban world, he comes across
Julia, a wealthy, young, white woman who was also saved from the gasses by
her modern work, having been locked in a “dark-room developing pictures
of the comet” at the time of the event: “when I came out” says Julia, “I saw
the dead!” (143). As they grow closer emotionally over the time of the story,
Du Bois raises the possibility that they are the new Adam and Eve, a uto-
pian eugenic experiment in interracial breeding between two “exceptional”
individuals, in both the Darwinian sense of their seemingly unique capacity
for survival and quick-thinking and in their “modernity” (a “New Woman”
and a black New Yorker who is the trusted assistant to the President of a
Wall Street bank). The tragic dimension of the story exists within its genre in
the fact that the source of their eugenic romance is the death of the masses,
as well as the final foreclosure of this future due to pervasive antiblackness.
“The Comet” ends, fascinatingly, not with the redemption of the black pro-
tagonist through apocalypse, but in a heartbreaking return to the status quo;
white power re-established and Jim on a platform, surrounded by a would-be
lynch mob. At the denouement, Julia and Jim start “slowly, noiselessly” to
“move[…] toward each other – the heavens above, the seas around” in a
romanticized moment pointing to the possibility of their sexual union. They
begin to intone a version of the mantra that remakes British sovereignty after
the death of the king, only to be interrupted before a new sovereign order is
inaugurated: “The world is dead… Long live the – Honk! Honk! Hoarse and
sharp the cry of a motor drifted clearly up” (149). The “Honk” of the car
horn signals the return of Julia’s white family who proceed to inform her and
Jim that the world has not been destroyed, “only New York.” With the arrival
of the rich, white people to “save” Julia from Jim and the dead world around
them the process of rebirth and renewal is foreclosed.
“The Comet” is compelling for its structural and philosophical refusal of
a future, at least a future of utopian liberation. Du Bois’s story is not, then,
unproblematically “Afrofuturist.” In the terms of Kodwo Eshun’s powerful
essay “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism” it is not “concerned with the
future” so much as “engineering feedback between its preferred future and
its becoming present” (290). As the white people return they assume that
Jim, who is indecorously companionate with Julia by this point, has sexually
interfered with her. The misunderstanding is cleared up from the perspective
of the whites when Julia’s father hands Jim some cash in tip for helping his
daughter to survive. As Jim stands contemplating his fate a crowd appears
around him. The final image of the text is Jim standing “silently beneath
the glare of the light, gazing at the money in his hand and shrinking as he
gazed… [in] his other hand… a baby’s filmy cap” (Du Bois 1920; 150). The
“corpse of [the] dark baby” is in the arms of a “brown, small, and toil-worn”
woman who turns out to be Jim’s lost wife. This is a dialectical image, as
it appears to sanction Jim and his wife’s own survival only upon the death
of another, in this case their child. The cap of the dead child is paired with
the money in his hand that has been paid to him as a tip from the father of
the white woman he has saved and appears to him as scant compensation for
the mass death around him. While the money offends through its assump-
tion that the humanity Jim shows toward Julia can only emerge from finan-
cial need (genuine affection would cross a heavily policed “color line” around
interracial desire), the dead child’s cap (a “filmy,” translucent head-covering
that recalls another of Du Bois’s metaphors “The Veil”) is a sign of the per-
sistence of black death as a seemingly inescapable condition of Jim’s relative
survival within an antiblack world. The dialectical conclusion places full alive-
ness on a Gaussian scale that is proximate to I.Q.’s division of political speech
and power (Jim deviates from the mean of cognitive semi-life) to represent
the melancholia felt by even the successful “within the veil.” Darryl A. Smith
suggests that this image of Jim upon “a platform”—that is, elevated above
the others of his race to some extent (with his wife below him holding a dead
baby)—“is almost certainly a symbolic recapitulation of the needless death
of Du Bois’s own first-born child years earlier, due to the unresponsiveness
of a white doctor” (210) discussed in Chapter 11 of The Souls of Black Folk.
I would agree, but also suggest that the trauma runs deeper than the sto-
ry’s representative imagery and narrative incidents into the genre and tone
of the work as a whole. Specifically, in the context of Du Bois’s engagement
with mind and I.Q. that I have described above, “The Comet” turns on the
572 M. COLLINS
sense that any act of black creative imagination and thought in the world of
the story is always already haunted by white supremacy; that the protagonist’s
mind is not, somehow, his own. This calls us back to Adorno’s special con-
cern with the oozing quality of the I.Q. version of mind in the twentieth cen-
tury, which comes to saturate thought itself, even outside of its professional
jurisdiction. Genre fictions, such as sci-fi, operate through the quality of their
second-handedness more than through their originality. For all its presenta-
tion of alien worlds and strange, cataclysmic events, generic reproducibil-
ity gives to science fiction writing a dispossessed quality, whereby creativity
operates “within” a scientific idiom and world (one coded as hegemonically
white) and not in terms of its transcendental appeal to an “outside” of the
everyday world of scientific authority or through authorial exceptionality.
Lauren Berlant laments that genre fiction has seldom been seen by “cul-
tural theorists” who are historically drawn toward the experimentalism of
high modernism and depth psychology, as the proper form for expressing
trauma: it moves too rapidly, is too easily read and uncomplexly felt. This,
then, cannot apparently be appropriate for the affective content of trauma if
it is understood in Freudian terms as Nachträglichkeit or “blockage” (Berlant;
81).4 However, for Du Bois, whose dialectical version of mind—“double con-
sciousness”—foregrounds ongoing and persistently traumatic affects within
the white world, genre fiction has a crucial, metaphorical, power in being
precisely so quotidian a style.
“The Comet” is an important example of genre fiction as a response to
the ongoing trauma, entrapment, and “treading water” of “neurolog-
ical modernity” for black subjects. For Du Bois, science fiction operates as
a self-reflexive mode that can capture scientific racism’s conventionality in
the Progressive Era, its everydayness, popularity, and inescapabilty in the
real world, in being a form that consciously lacks a claim to “higher” liter-
ary values, exceptionality, and transcendence, performing the effect of being,
as Berlant says, “hollowed out by the pressures of overdetermination” (81).
Sci-fi is as overabundant, common, and non-emancipatory as science itself.
Du Bois’s decision to locate this sci-fi story within a recognizably mod-
ern world does a degree of this work by demonstrating through genre how
modernity is saturated with the conclusions and cultural logics of white sci-
ence from which, like Jim finds at the end of the story, it is seemingly impos-
sible to flee. Genre fiction, as an expression of culture and the individual
mind in the twentieth century, is suffused with a scientific consciousness; its
creativity is within the linguistic, lexical, and affective register of science.
The ending of “The Comet” should not come as a shock to the care-
ful reader. The story expresses repeatedly a sense in which all actions hap-
pen “within” the domain of science and according to its tenets. A deep irony
resides in how the plot revolves around survival and the search for forms of
recognizable, common life. This becomes literalized at one point when the
two lead characters attempt to reconnect to the world at the “central tele-
phone exchange” (144). The tale then casts Jim and Julia effectively as
eugenicists, placed in a condition of epistemological inquiry that recalls

I.Q. science in its search for intensities as a measure of the value of life. The
“mind” of the story—its engagements, tone, linguistic register—is captured
within a totality of science, much as Adorno notes of the I.Q. concept’s
incorporation of (oozing, bleeding between) all versions of thought itself in
the twentieth century; its “adapt[ation] of them to its whole complexion.”
Moreover, Julia’s talent as a photographer and Jim’s survival skills mark their
possible progeny as a utopian mixed-race eugenic ideal in the minds of liberal
readers. Like Gaussian distribution with its structural condemnation of the
mass as limited in their capacity for growth and development, Jim and Julia
(the young, black man of merit and the “bright” New Woman respectively)
pass among the dead that are, according to Du Bois’s own narration, actu-
ally “silent and asleep - not dead.” Yet neither are they truly alive. They are
described, rather, as somehow “brain” dead. The heightened attention to the
question of survival and the instrumentalization of all thought foregrounded
by the post-apocalyptic sci-fi genre serves to rearticulate an I.Q. version of
mind in which all thought operates as a test of one’s capacities (“I look upon
the world” said Galton, “as a continuous assessment”) and in which the
majority—black or white—are condemned to the status of cognitive half-life.
The color pallete of the tale highlights shades and intensities of black and
white. It begins largely in the “dark basement” in “the blackness and silence
below that lowest cavern” (139), only to end in the “glare of the electric
lights” (150). But this literal Enlightenment gives no solace. Illumination
occurs at several moments in the story, but Du Bois does not allow us the
consolation of equating that literal Enlightenment with a spectacular initia-
tion into revolutionary awakening. As Julia and Jim stand on top of a tower
toward the end of the story, caught in a transcendental reverie and contem-
plating their possible destiny as the new Adam and Eve, they see what the
narrator describes as the Pole Star. He writes,
Behind them and all around, the heavens glowed in dim, weird radiance that
suffused the darkening world… Suddenly, as though gathered back in some vast
hand, the great cloud-curtain fell away. Low on the horizon lay a long, white
star – mystic, wonderful! And from it fled upward to the pole, like some wan
bridal veil, a pale, white sheet of flame that lighted all the world and dimmed
the stars. (148)
The Pole Star is a dialectical image too; a “wan bridal veil.” It is both
a ritual object for the initiation into a new order of being (Jim and Julia’s
romantic and sexual union), and also a form of screen (recalling Du Bois’s
own metaphor of the color line as The Veil). The irony is that the Pole
Star that guided slaves up to the North in the antebellum period is actu-
ally dwarfed moments later by another blinding light, the glaring electrical
lamps that augur the return of the rich, white people to the scene and the
potential of Jim’s lynching at their hands. It is, in effect, a postemancipation
574 M. COLLINS
image that acknowledges the persistence of white supremacy as a condition

of American modernity. In Du Bois’s sci-fi world, romance and the hope
of Enlightenment bildung are illusions masking a greater truth. The story
reflects a move from the Du Bois of Souls of Black Folk, who noted mourn-
fully that “throughout history, the powers of single black men flash here and
there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged
their brightness,” (3) toward a more pessimistic, paranoiac tone that casts the
“gauge” of “brightness” itself as a suspicious, delimiting activity performed
by the Progressive Era state that condemns the mass to darkness. After all,
the “brightness” of the Pole Star is, within the narrative of the story, merely
a Romantic diversion, an aesthetic trade-off for the pervasive deadness of
the story’s jazz age world. Indeed, the Romantic tone when it appears is fre-
quently undercut in the tale. Julia compares Jim to “the elf-queen” with the
otherworldly power and knowledge to “wave life into this dead world again”
(147). Yet, this will not be enough. It is merely a reverie that blinds her and
the reader to the greater truth.
Jim Davis’s exceptional survival in a world that whiteness killed forces
him to bear witness to the horror, just as Du Bois’s own exceptional abili-
ties and those of his family gave him consciousness of the roots of his own
ideas within a pervasive field of antiblackness that suffused everyday life
with melancholia. Here, even a pleasant exchange with his grandchild’s
teacher, reporting good news, communicates with a negative dialectical
intensity. Du Bois’s positive feelings about Du Bois Williams’s high I.Q.
should not mean we forget the systems that lie behind it, at least not while
power still lies so fully with one race, with a sensorium of science encoded
as “white,” and, as Adorno states, “society itself is imprisoned..” The ques-
tion remains of whether the answer to this tangle lies in refining newer or
more ethical datasets (a “transvaluative” activity), or whether the real prom-
ise of Enlightenment can only be enacted through the radical suggestion that
Jacques Rancière asks we entertain; abandoning hierarchies and rankings of
mind wholly in favor of new, democratic forms of knowledge that proceed
from the assumption of universal rights and freedoms.
Notes
1. According to Catherine Malabou, Dewey is one of the few thinkers trained in
the American pragmatist tradition (a lineage that includes, of course, Du Bois)
able and willing to utterly reject the I.Q. version of mind. She attempts to ren-
ovate Dewey’s concept of “creative intelligence” as collective endeavour for the
age of neuroplasticity, neurodiversity, and cybernetics.
2. It is important to note that although the “intelligence test” as we know it was
a French invention, the French were not in general keen to see it reduced to a
single number, a point both W.H. Scheider in “After Binet: French Intelligence
Testing, 1900–1950,” Journal of Behavioral Sciences, 28: 111–132 and Kurt
Danziger in Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (Sage, 1997)
make repeatedly. That special form of abuse had British and American origins.
3. For Dorr and Logan, it is notable that Du Bois’s resignation from the research
and publishing wing of the NAACP on July 10, 1934 led to “the assimilationist
eugenic thrust” disappearing from Crisis and from NAACP contests and pag-
eants, pointing to his especial involvement in this mode of thought and activism
in relation to social questions.
4. Berlant notes that “As an affective concept, [Nachträglichkeit] bridges: a
sense of belatedness from having to catch up with the event; a sense of the
double-take in relation to what happened in the event…; a sense of being satu-
rated by it in the present [my italics], even as a structure of dislocation; a sense
of being hollowed out by the pressures of overdetermination [my italics]; a sense
of being frozen out of the future (now defined by the past); and, because ordi-
nary life does go on, a sense of the present that makes no sense with the rest
of it…. Living trauma as whiplash, treading water, being stuck, drifting among
symptoms” (81).
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. 2005. Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Mind, trans.
E.F.N. Jephcott. London: Verso.
Baldwin, J.M. 1909. Darwin and the Humanities. Baltimore: Review Publishing.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the
Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bentley, Nancy. 2009. Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture,
1870–1920. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Berlant, Laurent. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Boas, Franz. 1929. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, February 14. W. E. B. Du Bois
Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/
mums312-b181-hi223.
Carson, J. 2007. The Measure of Merit: Talent, Intelligence, and Inequality in the
French and American Republics, 1750–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Dewey, J. 1918. Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Education. New York: Macmillan.
Dorr, G.M., and Angela Logan. 2011. Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts: Black
Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests. In A Century of Eugenics in America,
ed. Paul A. Lombardo. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1920. The Comet. In Darkwater: Voices From within the Veil. New
York: Washington Square Press.
———. 1922. Opinion of W.E.B. Du Bois. The Crisis 24 (4): 153.
———. 1929. Letter to Franz Boas, February 13. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers, UMass
Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b181-
i222.
———. 1994. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Dover Publications.
English, Daylanne. 2004. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and
the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Eshun, K. 2003. Further Considerations on Afrofuturism. CR: The New Centennial
Review 3 (3): 287–302.
Farland, Maria. 2006. W. E. B. Du Bois, Anthropometric Science, and the Limits of
Racial Uplift. American Quarterly 58 (4): 1017–1044.
576 M. COLLINS
Flatley, Jonathan. 2008. Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Galton, Francis. 1892. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into It Laws and Consequences.
London: Macmillan.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London:
Verso.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1996. The Mismeasure of Man: Revised and Expanded. London:
W.W. Norton.
Hartman, Saidiya. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.
New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Johnson, Mildred L. 1938. Letter to W. E. B. Du Bois, May 30. W. E. B. Du Bois
Papers, UMass Amherst Libraries. http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/
mums312-b086-i134. Accessed 1 May 2019.
Kevles, D.J. 1999. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity.
New York: Harvard University Press.
Malabou, Catherine. 2019. Morphing Intelligence: From IQ Measurement to Artificial
Brains, trans. Carolyn Stead. New York: Columbia University Press.
Morris, Aldon. 2015. The Scholar Denied: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Birth of Modern
Sociology. Oakland: University of California Press.
Rancière, Jacques. 1991. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lesson in Intellectual
Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
———. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Contiuum.
Rusert, Britt. 2017. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African
American Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Century. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Sexton, Jared. 2016. Afropessimism: The Unclear Word. Rhizomes: Cultural Studies
in Emerging Knowledge 29. https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e02.
Terman, L.M. 1916. The Measurement of Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: Houghton
Mifflin.
Zamir, Shamoon. 1995. Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–
1903. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
CHAPTER 33
Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge

and the Manhattan Project
in Comic Books
Lindsey Michael Banco
Introduction
Given their supposedly marginal cultural status, their ostensibly dubious
relationship to facticity, and their apparent distance from one of the
twentieth century’s most significant scientific and technological develop-

ments, it is perhaps strange that comic books provide some of the earliest
historical accounts of the Manhattan Project. Conducted largely in secret
between 1942 and 1945, the Manhattan Project was a U.S. government
crash course to develop a functional atomic weapon for use in World War II.
Led by the enigmatic theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the
gruff general Leslie Groves, fresh from his coordination of the construction
of the Pentagon, the project included refinement facilities in Tennessee and
Washington, an assembly site on an isolated New Mexico mesa, and an inter-
national team of top-flight scientists. The science was esoteric, the techno-
logical work was challenging, and the results—the world’s first atomic blast
on July 16, 1945—were earth-shattering. The news of this innovative science
and its astounding results reverberated around the globe, and the Manhattan
Project burst into prominence in American popular culture. At stake in the
countless subsequent representations of atomic energy and nuclear weapons,
including both historical and fictionalized accounts of the Manhattan Project
itself, are the means by which cultural productions depict the strange new
L. M. Banco (*) 
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

578 L. M. BANCO
knowledge produced by this science, the menacing pieces of technology in

which this knowledge was embedded, and the new global geopolitical order
that emerged. What, then, does the often ephemeral form of comic books
have to tell us about how we tell the story of the Manhattan Project? What is
it about the Manhattan Project—about the science of nuclear energy and the
story of the construction of nuclear weapons—that lends itself to representa-
tion in comics?
After a brief look at some 1940s nonfictional comics, this chapter examines
several recent examples of graphic histories of the atomic bomb, texts that are
part of a relatively new trend in comics involving sophisticated, self-aware sto-
rytelling and complex visual artistry and whose ideological imports frequently
complicate the claims of earlier examples. I am interested in “what can be said
and what can be shown” (Chute and DeKoven 2006‚ 772) in nuclear science
histories. As Candida Rifkind has suggested, nuclear history rendered in comics
form has become an important cultural site linking science education, technol-
ogy, the vagaries and challenges of historiography, and the intriguing position
comics assume on the generic spectrum of history, biography, and autobiog-
raphy (1–2). My discussion of representations of the Manhattan Project in
comics, then, attempts to map out their largely anti-nuclear stance—their con-
cern with the apocalyptic forces unleashed by this new knowledge—against a
complex representational and historical background. This background includes
the way many of these texts register the echoes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
a post-9/11 context, as well as how they sometimes try to rectify or stabilize
the uncertainties produced by their own efforts to narrate this story, in this way
and through this medium, at this historical juncture. In this chapter, I examine
the larger issue of the representation of nuclear technology through a reading
of some of the comics to see how this type of text understands the ideological
powers and potentialities of the text-image confluence and, thus, the very ques-
tion of truth and objectivity.
Nuclear Initiators: Early Atomic Comics

The earliest atomic comics engaged directly with the epistemological issues
opened up by nuclear science. Between 1946 and 1947, for instance, Picture
News, billing itself as “the first news magazine in action pictures, color and
dialogue, in the history of the publishing business,” ran for just ten issues but
rendered in comics format some of the most storied news items of the period,
including the workings and implications of the newly disclosed power of the
atom. The first issue of Picture News posed the question “Could science blow
the world apart?” (Gavreau and Lehti 1946a [1], 3). One of the responses it
provided, from no less a luminary than George Bernard Shaw (drawn with a
glowing aura), was that it could, “if we don’t watch out” (6). Shaw’s ambig-
uous answer, and the nuclear duality posed by images in this issue of Picture
News juxtaposing apocalypse with world plenty and an energy Arcadia, set an
early standard for thinking through the nuclear. Manhattan Project leader
33 GRAPHIC BOMBS: SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE … 579
Robert Oppenheimer, often envisioned as a linchpin of this duality, appears

in the second issue of Picture News and, I argue, helps instantiate a vision
of how nuclear weapons would come to be imagined and how the story of
the Manhattan Project would come to be represented in history.1 Picture
News renders textually Oppenheimer’s position as mediator of this dual vision
of nuclear energy: one text panel notes that “Dr. Oppenheimer is credited
by the war dept. with harnessing the atom for military purposes” (Gavreau
and Lehti 1946b [2], 8), while another panel points out that Oppenheimer
argued for “a world organization, above national sovereignty, to control the
atomic bomb” (9). Juxtaposing the militarization of the atom with a globalist
vision of nuclear control functions as a key representational strategy in early
depictions of the Manhattan Project narrative, its ambiguous science and
technology, and its disjunctive legacy. Meanwhile, the accompanying visual
representation of Oppenheimer depicts him, as is common in media and
textual representations of scientists more generally, as a visionary: standing by
himself, in front of a rapt audience, arms upstretched as he seemingly chan-
nels knowledge from the ethereal background (8) (see Fig. 33.1). Invoking
Oppenheimer to frame the bomb in this dualist fashion, and to juxtapose his
identity as scientist with his cultural role as oracle, is common in histories of
the Manhattan Project and biographies of its scientists. That this prevailing
representation owes something of its genesis to comic books ought to remind
us of the entanglement of this form with one of the twentieth century’s
most important narratives: that of the development of nuclear weapons. As
a burgeoning recent body of scholarship on comics has argued, the form
is important not just because comic book collectors amass documents of
Fig. 33.1 Robert Oppenheimer in Picture News, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 8

580 L. M. BANCO
historical import but because comics themselves can function as documents

about history.2 Moreover, the scientific knowledge at the core of the story of
the atomic bomb—complex, often counterintuitive knowledge characterized
by invisibility, instability, and probability—seems to lend itself well to a form
in which the visible and the invisible, the visualizable and the unimaginable,
are in constant dynamic tension.
Very shortly after the momentous revelation of the existence of atomic
power, the comics form inaugurated a long line of cultural products that
attempt to grapple with this new knowledge. Comics and other forms of
representation predicated on the visual, as Nina Mickwitz notes, “combine
iconic and symbolic systems of signification” (Mickwitz 2016, 2) in their
attempts to document. Despite their privileged status as visual depic-
tions, though, comics have a complicated relationship with documenta-
tion, with accessing history “as it really was,” and with the knowledge that
emerges from those notions. Like the issue of Picture News and its influen-
tial representation of Oppenheimer, nonfiction comics in the 1940s, 1950s,
and 1960s attempted to explain atomic energy, often contributed to a uto-
pian vision of this new technology, and frequently warned against apoc-
alypse.3 “Educational” comic books from the 1940s and 1950s in this vein
include serials such as Science Comics and True Comics, as well as single-issue
accounts: Joe Musial’s Dagwood Splits the Atom, the famous 1949 synergistic
endeavor between Blondie and the atomic energy industry; and The Atomic
Age, a comprehensive survey in comic book format of atomic history up to
1960. These texts are all somewhat self-conscious about the ability com-
ics have or might not have to represent scientific and historical knowledge.
Dagwood Splits the Atom, for example, includes a foreword by General Leslie
Groves, whose bravado about the truth perhaps masks the uncertainties of
expressing them in comics form: “Truth comes from the understanding of
facts. Truth comes from knowledge,” he affirms (Groves 1949, n.p.). At the
same time, these comics are not reticent about cementing the atomic bomb
into the foundation of “national defense,” “global responsibility,” and other
jingoistic ideologies. While resistant readings of these comics are certainly
possible, and ambiguities abound in these texts over the multiplicity of mean-
ings borne by atomic bombs, they nevertheless help instantiate a claim for
the visual apprehension of nuclear technology as a means of acquiring knowl-
edge—a point of stability in a popular form for comprehending a mysterious
technology with global implications.
What Powers (Nuclear) Comics?

The convergence of text and image, so central to the comics form, bears
some unpacking in order to see its implications for understanding the
nuclear. There has, first, been much wrangling over the appropriate term
for the form that practitioner and theorist Scott McCloud defines as “juxta-
posed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence” (McCloud 1993, 9).
Once widely called “comics,” the form supposedly outgrew its mass, pulp
roots and became more self-consciously aesthetic and political, growing into
the moniker “graphic novel.”4 More recently, scholars such as Hillary Chute
and Marianne DeKoven argue that that term has itself fallen out of favor, in
large part because such texts are often not fictional. Chute and DeKoven pre-
fer the term “graphic narrative” for its ability “to encompass a range of types
of narrative work in comics” (Chute and DeKoven 2006, 767). When the
question is one of narrative—of telling stories—as it is in the recounting of
the Manhattan Project, the terms “graphic narrative” or “graphic history”
seem appropriate. Importantly, though, a term like “graphic narrative” may
itself be problematic in the way it privileges the literary or narrative char-
acter of comics over the visual, by turning the visual into a qualifier of the
narrative.5 This form of storytelling is persistently (not incidentally) visual
and insists upon the juxtaposition of the visual and the textual. For the most
part, I use the word “comics” to foreground the richly, and often troublingly,
hybrid nature of this kind of storytelling, though I will occasionally use the
terms “graphic narrative” or “graphic history” when focusing primarily on
the narrative components of these texts.
Comics storytelling has no special claim over (or special deficiency in)
telling history, but it might have a particular relationship to the history of
nuclear weapons worth dwelling upon. As quickly became apparent after
World War II, the atomic bomb was considerably more than a piece of mil-
itary technology; it engendered new geopolitical arrangements, new ways
of life, and new possibilities for death. The rapid proliferation of an omni-
cidal technology was no simple thing to understand, and it urged the rear-
rangement of social systems both to accommodate the new technology and
to resist it. Comics, it is clear, often derive representational power from the
disjuncture of, rather than the harmony between, text and image. Chute and
DeKoven write: “In comics, the images are not illustrative of the text, but
comprise a separate narrative thread that moves forward in time in a differ-
ent way than the prose text” (ibid., 769). This distinction between parts of
the form becomes a tool of critique for creators, an unexpected power that
comes from some of the ways one form of representation can interrogate the
other at the same time that they work together to tell a story. As McCloud
notes, one characteristic of the form that allows it to pose such a challenge is
the participatory opportunities granted by its visual layout on the page. The
blank space between the images, the gaps McCloud and subsequent comics
scholars have called “the gutter,” are powerful spaces. They constitute areas
in the narrative where readers have to acknowledge an often unspecified
duration of time and imaginatively fill in the gap between images. The gut-
ter becomes just as important—though less stably marked—than the panels
themselves, even though the gutters are in fact empty.6
To read across the gutters, then, becomes an act of constructing some-
thing from nothing—a type of reading especially congruent with what
is often a central trope in accounts of atomic science or narratives of the
582 L. M. BANCO
Manhattan Project: the drawing of unfathomable power from invisible

realms. Such a trope has affinities with some well-established models for rep-
resenting nuclear physicists, models long used to characterize scientists in
general, like the magician, the alchemist, or the priest. In Manhattan Project
narratives, the scientists are often likened to mystical visionaries alongside
their identities as logical-minded technicians and thus help characterize mid-
century American science’s quest for knowledge as a penetrating but ulti-
mately inscrutable process. The complex relationships between image and
text and between visibility and invisibility are key in representations of nuclear
science, and the uneasy relationship between words and images in comics
often brings into question the Manhattan Project’s relationship to the privi-
leged, visible/invisible knowledge of nuclear physics.
What nuclear science can reveal and what it inevitably conceals as part of that
revelation has helped enable the discourses and practices of secrecy shrouding
atomic weapons programs and nuclear culture more generally. For the U.S. gov-
ernment, nuclear science reveals facets of nature that, as militarily exploitable,
need to be concealed by the official mechanisms of secrecy. For U.S. Americans,
those who as taxpayers fund nuclear weapons and those who as citizens benefit
from or are menaced by those weapons, the doctrines of nuclear secrecy obvi-
ate to a significant degree those democratic values—freedom, openness, the
notion of informed decision-making—ostensibly being “protected” by nuclear
weapons. Such a highly conflicted pose, compelled in part by nuclear science’s
competing ontologies of visibility and invisibility, is therefore at stake—in the
background, perhaps, but part of “nuclear visibility” (O’Brian 2008, 128) nev-
ertheless—in comics about nuclear history. When these texts generate what
Jared Gardner calls “unregulated meanings” (Gardner 2012, 21), though, they
do not simply rehearse or reinforce the (in)visibility of nuclear science and tech-
nology for their own purposes. They also help produce the kinds of “unregu-
lated audiences” (ibid., 21)—or least some unregulated reading practices—that,
collectively, embody the potential to challenge nuclear hegemony.
Ottaviani’s Fallout & Hickman and Pitarra’s

Manhattan Projects
In November of 2001, shortly after the events of 9/11, Jim Ottaviani and eight
graphic artists published Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the
Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, a graphic history of the Manhattan Project
strongly informed by the power of visual uncertainty. Reportedly inspired by
Richard Rhodes’s monumental history The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986),
Ottaviani linked his master’s degree in nuclear engineering and a long-standing
interest in science to the work of several comics collaborators, including Janine
Johnston, Bernie Mireault, and Jeff Parker. Fallout was part of the beginning of
a long series of graphic histories from Ottaviani covering a wide range of sci-
entific topics. The pictorial diversity of Fallout, imparted by the multiplicity of
its artists, self-consciously renders the history of the Manhattan Project visually
unstable. As each successive artist takes over from the one before, the settings,
actors, and “set-pieces” that comprise the history of the Manhattan Project are
reconstituted anew. The gutters between sections of the text and sometimes
between frames on the page become opportunities for readers to create “new”
scientists and “new” narrative events—new historical facticity—again and again.
From this ongoing process of (re)construction emerges new visions of atomic
science, of nuclear technology, and of the global implications of the Manhattan
Project. Readers are offered not only varying perspectives on a historical narra-
tive but a new way to think through the history of the second half of the twenti-
eth century, up to and including 9/11. In visually compounding the ambiguity
of the Manhattan Project narrative, Fallout also emphasizes the partial nature of
the access to truth it can claim, its own status as a tool of narration, and its iden-
tity as a construction with a marked distance from the “reality” ostensibly prom-
ised by visual instantiations of knowledge. The challenge to the regime of realism
proffered by Fallout works instead to undermine verisimilitude and stability as
privileged preconditions for historical narrative. A resolutely “subjective” form
such as comics, for all its purported triviality, defies the technocratic elitism of
this kind of science. Likewise, the form’s insistence on readerly participation—
in the suggestiveness of the gutters or the multiplicity of the graphic style—also
challenges what nuclear scholar Peter Bacon Hales identifies as “the atomic
sublime” (Hales 1991, passim). Hales later elaborated upon this notion by
locating it within “Romantic traditions of visual pleasure [and] spectatordom”
(Hales 2001, 108) and calling it “a passive consumer spectacle” (ibid., 103)
central to the sanitization and legitimation of nuclear weapons. In its repeated
insistence on readerly participation, nuclear history comics such as Fallout enact
a productive loosening of the received historical narrative. They create a vital
unmooring in the face of the potentially unmooring effect on history that the
atomic bomb could have—the possibility that the bomb, like the uncanny echo
of the first Ground Zero in events such as 9/11, could demolish history itself.
Even when graphic narratives incorporate photographs—supposedly trans-
parent windows into objective truth—they bring their own historiographic
impulse into question through the excesses of photography, photography’s
status as supplement within a textual narrative. The end-papers of Fallout, for
instance, which frame the narrative with before-and-after photographs of the
Trinity test site, perform a paradoxical function. The “objectivity” of these
images establishes Fallout as a documentary narrative invested in provable his-
torical truth even as the photos frame the “subjective” drawings used to depict
the Manhattan Project and its scientists. Moreover, the end-papers are extreme
close-ups of half-tone images, a “noisy” distortion that brings their documentary
abilities into question (see Fig. 33.2). Rendering these images in this way under-
scores their status as mediated objects and thus posits a distance between reality
and the supposedly transparent access to reality such images appear to prom-
ise. Readers may need to squint, or perhaps physically reorient the book further
away, to see the images clearly—kinesthetic, bodily activities that complicate
commonplace assumptions that producing or consuming knowledge, scientific
584 L. M. BANCO
Fig. 33.2 Trinity test site in Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the
Political Science of the Atomic Bomb, end-papers
or otherwise, is only ever an intellectual activity. Such embodied reading prac-

tices again remind readers of the ambiguous nature of knowledge—the ways
embodiment inserts uncertainty into the privileged category of “evidence”—as
well as the material bodies at stake in nuclear technology development.
Similarly, its rendering of Oppenheimer himself as a central figure in the
narrative of the Manhattan Project allows Fallout to underscore the unpre-
dictability of comics narrative itself. Near the end of the work, an account of
Oppenheimer’s security hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission is
rendered on pages often divided lengthwise into three columns. The first
column features textual reproductions of the testimony of Lloyd Garrison,
Oppenheimer’s legal representative, or the dissenting opinion of AEC mem-
ber Ward Evans supporting Oppenheimer. The third column consists of the
Board’s majority decision to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. The
middle column often contains only small illustrations of Oppenheimer which
place him at the center of forces that are by this historical point largely out
of his control. Readers navigating these pages are thus confronted with the
near simultaneous and often juxtaposed presentation of opposing views of
Oppenheimer and, in the blank spaces on these pages, the place to reconstruct
Oppenheimer in various and ever-shifting ways. Despite his central (and, in
Fallout, explicitly centered) position in the Manhattan Project narrative, then,
this representation of Oppenheimer points to the destabilization of nuclear
knowledge through the very technique often thought to stabilize truth: the
visual convergence of information.
At the same time, Fallout contains a number of additional techniques that
work to contain the text’s subversiveness, to guarantee its knowledge claims
or mollify its eccentricities. Fallout features a disclaimer at the beginning, for
instance, which tries to restabilize the text at the same time it points out the
text’s instabilities: “Though not a work of history, this book isn’t entirely
fiction either. We’ve fabricated some details in service of the story, but the
characters said and did (most of) the things you’ll read. And as the notes
and references will indicate, many of the quotes and incidents that you’ll
think most likely to be made up are the best documented facts” (Ottaviani
et al. 2001, 5). The references mentioned in the disclaimer—twenty-six
two-column pages, set off at the end of the text and marked by dark bor-
ders—are clear indicators of the historical “liberties” the writers and artists
have taken. Such a device reveals the text’s capacity to maintain the stabili-
ties of binary categories such as “history” and “fiction” and, in the process,
to contain the ambiguities of its own narrative. In the fraught immediacy of
the post-9/11 publication date of Fallout, such containment strategies can be
comforting. At the same time, “the more apparatus manufactured to guide
the reader through the narrative,” as Jared Gardner notes, “the more visible
and troubling become the gaps between the panels, the narratives, the words,
and the images” (Gardner 2012, 168). This tension between resolving and
unsettling makes Fallout a multivalent example indeed of the comics form as
purveyor of nuclear knowledge.
Even some contemporary atomic comics with little interest in histori-
cal verisimilitude are still invested in stabilizing the multivalent meanings of
the Manhattan Project narrative. Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra’s The
Manhattan Projects (2012, ongoing), for example, takes as its premise the
possibility of imagining history in completely different ways and offers a thor-
oughgoing revision of the Manhattan Project. In addition to its radically revised
historical narrative, its apparently open-ended seriality also disrupts the sense of
closure mandated by conventional narrative. Yet The Manhattan Projects also
works to alleviate the troublingly ambiguous origins of the atomic bomb. In
the first volume of the series, Hickman and Pitarra introduce readers to Robert
Oppenheimer’s fictional evil twin. From their time together in the womb,
Joseph Oppenheimer contrasts his brother Robert’s intelligence and human-
ity with eccentricity, psychosis, and eventually, full-blown evil. After Robert is
tapped by the U.S. government for the top-secret war project, Joseph escapes
from his lunatic asylum, murders his brother, consumes his body, and takes
his place as the leader of the Manhattan Project. Hickman and Pitarra clearly
delineate between the Oppenheimers in this narrative, using mostly blue
ink to draw Robert and red ink for Joseph. In maintaining a clear separation
between the brothers, the technique reiterates the duality of the figure of the
scientist while also simplifying the origins of nuclear technology. Depicting
the bomb as a product of the purely evil side of the scientist assuages the
586 L. M. BANCO
complexities that so often mark representations of the Manhattan Project and

its legacy.7 The origins of nuclear weapons are “explained” as the product of
pure evil. Though highly unconventional in its dealing with nuclear history, The
Manhattan Projects nevertheless demonstrates the desire, rooted in the process
of constructing historical narratives, to resolve ambiguities and arrive at truth.
However, in a historical narrative about the development of nuclear weapons—
with their profoundly troubling origins and the threats they pose to ontological
categories when they threaten human existence—such impulses risk dropping
readers back into the atomic sublime. The bomb becomes, in such iterations, a
powerful but reassuringly comprehensible and scrutable technology.
Fetter-Form’s Trinity & Elias and Wild’s Atomic Dreams

By contrast, a more conventional history—Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity:
A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb (2012)—does not overtly
acknowledge the possibility that the comics form could complicate the

work’s status as anything other than a transparent account of history. Even
small details, such as its typewritten rather than hand-lettered narrative bal-
loons and panels, evoke an apparently more “objective” 1940s bureaucratic
aesthetic consistent with the text’s striving for historical verisimilitude about
a World War II governmental project. Despite its robust insistence on its sta-
tus as a straightforward historical account (which happens to be in graphic
form), Trinity nevertheless appears over a decade after Ottaviani’s narra-
tive, an interval marked by a frustratingly intractable “War on Terror” and
an evolving self-consciousness about constructing historical narratives.8
Emerging partly out of this self-consciousness and partly out of the kinds of
long-standing tropes inaugurated by Picture News, Trinity reinforces popular
conceptions of Manhattan Project scientists as “visionaries” and the nuclear
knowledge they produce as the product of mystical revelation. The cover of
Trinity, for instance, includes a close-up image of Robert Oppenheimer’s eyes
and a mushroom cloud above them. As a “seer” rather than a scientist, then,
he can virtually imagine the bomb into existence. Trinity sustains the figure
of the scientist as mystic throughout the text, depicting Oppenheimer at one
point, for instance, shrouded in cigarette smoke that curls up the page and
becomes a cloud upon which are projected mythological figures. Shadowed,
murkily drawn, and often partially obscured, Oppenheimer as represented
in Trinity is perhaps best encapsulated by Fetter-Form’s head-and-shoulders
drawing of the physicist with a caption reading: “What this bomb needed
was a visionary” (21). Whether mystical, visionary, or merely enigmatic, one
of the central historical figures of the Manhattan Project nevertheless stands
alongside Fetter-Vorm’s detailed images of the material feats of engineering—
the precisely drawn wiring surrounding the test device, the numerous per-
spectives on the metal tower rising above the desert floor and holding the
bomb aloft—to create a sometimes surprising juxtaposition with the abstrac-
tion and invisibility at the core of the concept of the atomic bomb.
As its title suggests, Trinity is narratively oriented around the first bomb
test, yet the centrality of that historical moment nevertheless reveals the
interplay between how nuclear science and technology reveal and conceal at
the same time. Before the bomb’s detonation, Fetter-Vorm supplies a count-
down as the arrangement of panels on the page provides progressively closer
images of Oppenheimer’s tense face. At zero-hour, the frame contains only
Oppenheimer’s pupil, its roundness echoing the number zero spelled out in
Fig. 33.3 Countdown, Trinity, p. 69

588 L. M. BANCO
the panel’s caption, and thus apprehends his visionary powers at their zenith
(Fetter-Vorm 2012, 69) (see Fig. 33.3) The reader then turns the page to
see a two-page splash of a schematic—minutely detailed yet ultimately imagi-
nary—of the inside of the bomb at the moment of detonation (ibid., 70–71)
(see Fig. 33.4). This image provides what Peter Bacon Hales might call the
“magical entry into the subatomic universe” (Hales 2001, 109). It lays scien-
tific knowledge and magic side by side. In the gaps between panels and pages
that construct this part of the narrative, this moment in Trinity makes visible
the esoteric knowledge of nuclear physicists, but it does so by reinforcing their
identity as visionaries. Furthermore, the imaginary nature of the two-page
optical technology—the fact that “[d]iagrams are not the real thing” (Rifkin
2015, 17)—ultimately precludes the access to “pure” scientific knowledge that
diagrams often implicitly promise. The six pages following the diagram of the
radioactive core depict the subsequent detonation using almost entirely black
pages with small, surreal drawings of the initial milliseconds of the world’s first
mushroom cloud. In their inscrutability, these images obliterate the detailed
scientific knowledge represented by the schematic and immediately replace it
with the uncertainty and unknowability of the postatomic world (Fetter-Vorm
2012, 72–75) (see Fig. 33.5). Despite the resemblance of the initial millisec-
onds of the first mushroom cloud to an eye in the process of opening, despite
the insistent visuality of this new realm of knowledge, the knowledge produced
Fig. 33.4 Atomic bomb detonation in Trinity, pp. 70–71

Fig. 33.5 Milliseconds into the first atomic detonation, Trinity, pp. 72–73
by this new portal is surreal, enigmatic, and as depicted in the pages of this
graphic history, largely unreadable. It offers, as Rifkind argues, “competing
systems of knowledge production and communication” (Rifkin 2015, 19). As
such, Fetter-Vorm’s Trinity functions as an example of a contemporary form
deeply interested in the problems and limits of representing scientific knowl-
edge in the nuclear age.
A slightly different approach, one which combines Fetter-Vorm’s striv-
ings for historical verisimilitude with the more imaginative flights of fancy of
Hickman and Pitarra, might provide another way to explore the uncertain-
ties underpinning the science and history of the atomic bomb: Jonathan Elias
and Jazan Wild’s Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(2009). Elias and Wild use a demon motif throughout the text to sig-
nal plainly the evilness of the bomb, but the motif appears alongside con-
crete markers of historical authenticity. The moment of the Trinity test, for
instance, depicts a gruesome demon appearing to rend the fabric of space
and time, but Elias and Wild juxtapose this fanciful image with the precise
date, time, and place of the first atomic bomb test, offset in an authoritative
colored text box (Fig. 33.6) This contrast suggests some of the ontological
difficulties and moral dilemmas the bomb raises within the context of his-
tory. Similarly, when the Enola Gay lifts off from Tinian Island on August 6,
1945, the demon motif appears and shadows the plane as it brings its deadly
cargo to Hiroshima. Atomic Dreams uses this technique to interpose into
590 L. M. BANCO
Fig. 33.6 Prior to the Trinity test, Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert
Oppenheimer, n.p. Jonathan Elias and Jazan Wild, co-creators, David Miller and Rudy
Vasquez, artists
its 1945 narrative a grim assessment of the fuller implications of the atomic
bomb, implications that only became apparent in the decades since the histor-
ical event depicted. The figure of the demon—evil incarnate—of course can
be said to simplify the moral complexity of the bomb into a single, uncom-
plicated image, one that like Ottaviani’s textual apparatuses, stabilizes histo-
ry’s multiplicities. At the same time, however, the technique is itself textually
unstable. The contiguity of panels on the page encourages a mythological
interpretive structure for thinking about a historical event and its long-term
geopolitical repercussions. It defies the linear logic of conventional histo-
riography and works, as comics do, to “create suggestive but subliminal
connections which need not correspond to the linear logic of the narrative
sequence” (Witek 1989, 28). Like many other examples of graphic histories,
Atomic Dreams is a collaborative work, which also helps reveal complexities in
the historiographic process—its imbrication in the consensual and the com-
munal. In its challenges to conventional historiographic authority, it reminds
readers of the narrative construction of “objective” history. Fanciful as these
images may be, they connote historical precision at the same time that they
foreground the imaginative and interpretive acts readers perform as they try
to make sense of atomic science and history.
Conclusions
The problem of representing scientific knowledge in the nuclear age resonates
with the visual characteristics of the comics form. The visuality of science com-
ics seems to invoke the purportedly greater objectivity of visual forms such as
photography, but comics are resolutely, insistently hand-drawn. Moreover,
as Mickwitz notes, “The foregrounding of subjectivity and the disruption of
certainty [the comics form] introduces have increasingly become a point of
interest, rather than figured as a problem to overcome in thinking around
documentary” (Mickwitz 2016, 25)—and, I would add, history. At stake, as
always, is Donna Haraway’s notion of “situated knowledges” (qtd. ibid., 26).
The self-consciously subjective nature of hand-drawn images, as well as their
refusal of “an indexical relationship to the referent” (Woo 2010, 175) while
maintaining an indexical relationship to the person who drew the picture,
grant comics a certain power: that of challenging received historical narra-
tive, transcendent truth, and other products of the potentially problematic
cultural investment in objectivity. They also challenge the privileged position
of prose text by putting hand-drawn images forward as similarly capable of
“re-presenting” reality.9 Comics make the constructedness of scientific narra-
tive visible. As Hillary Chute notes, “Comics openly eschews any aesthetic of
transparency; it is a conspicuously artificial form” (Chute 2016, 17). Comics
frequently “preempt essentialist notions of both truth and transparency”
(Mickwitz 2016, 26), so in their opacity, in their interstitial generic status, they
function as a kind of “public history,” a more participatory historiography.
592 L. M. BANCO
And as Chute has repeatedly argued, comics also make obvious the bod-
ily materiality of their creators—an ability that, in atomic comics, reminds
readers of the physical, individual corporeality at stake in nuclear weapons
but often obscured by the abstraction of nuclear physics or the hypotheti-
cals of war games. “Comics works are literally manuscripts,” writes Chute.
“[T]hey are written by hand” (Chute 2011, 112). A comics work is dis-
tinctive for “the sensual practice it embeds” (Chute 2016, 4), the aesthetic
it uses to foreground the body of the artist. The splash pages in works like
Fallout and Trinity in part reproduce the spectacularity of atomic explosions
and are thus at least partly complicit in the same kinds of distancing effects
as those of, say, the mechanical technology of photography. But as sequen-
tial art—a form in which gaps between images encourage different kinds of
active participation on the part of readers and thus different forms of memo-
rialization—they articulate a presence that helps “give shape to lost histories
and bodies” (Chute 2016, 38).10 Comics about the Manhattan Project—
as in the final pages of Trinity—deploy their embodiment, their corporeal
tissue or parenchyma, to overcome some of that distance and to make vis-
ceral the knowledge of atomic war (see Fig. 33.7). Such images of bodily
suffering, contrasted as they are in Trinity with the nothingness of histori-
cal obliteration, are another way of entering the atomic bomb into the visual
record. This kind of encounter with history shows at least some semblance
of commemoration, of trying to put things right. Like the dialectic between
Fig. 33.7 Hiroshima bombing, Trinity, pp. 126–127

remembering and forgetting at the center of memory itself, these images

enact a dialectic between the horrors of some future nuclear war—for now,
thankfully, still imaginary—and the hope of peace.
Acknowledgements My sincere thanks to Susan Gaines of the Fiction Meets Science
research group, who organized an outstanding meeting—Narrating Science: The
Power of Stories in the twenty-first Century—in Toronto in 2017. The participants at
that meeting, including Catherine Bush, David K. Hecht, David A Kirby, and Joanna
Radin, were a delight to hear from and talk to. Special thanks to Priscilla Wald, a
formative intellectual influence for me, who also turned out to be an ideal conference
participant and one of the kindest, most generous academics I have ever met.
Notes
1. This chapter represents an elaboration on and development of a brief discussion
of comics in my book, The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
2. For some of this scholarship on the documentary and historiographic capacities
of comics, see Adams; Baetens and Frey; Chapman, Ellin, and Sherif; Chute,
Disaster Drawn; Duncan, Smith, and Levitz; Goggin and Hassler-Forest (2010);
Mickwitz; Petersen; Pustz; Szasz; Towle; Weber and Rall; Witek. In addition,
much of the scholarly work on Art Spiegelman’s well-known Maus (1980)
addresses in some form the relationship of comics to history.
3. This body of nonfiction comics is, of course, in addition to and often in
distinction from fictional comics—usually superhero stories—about the atomic
bomb. From Donald Duck building an atom bomb in the late 1940s to Bruce
Banner turning into the Incredible Hulk thanks to a gamma radiation bomb
and Peter Parker becoming Spider-Man after a bite from a radioactive spider
in the 1960s, these tales entered popular culture with a vengeance. For the
most part, I examine nonfictional comics here because of nonfiction’s privi-
leged (though problematic) claims to historical veracity, positivist truth, and
transparent access to knowledge.
4. Histories of the comics form are numerous and extensive; for a concise sum-
mary, see Beaty, 107–108.
5. For an elaboration on this interpretive risk, see Labio 2011, 125–126.
6. See Peeters (2007) for an elaboration on the representational power of the
page’s spatial orientation.
7. The mad Joseph Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project cronies go on to
even greater depths of depravity in subsequent entries in the series, conduct-
ing a human–alien hybrid project, assassinating John F. Kennedy, and initiating
Project Charon—an endeavor aiming for no less than universal omnipotence.
8. Much has been said in the nearly two decades since 9/11 about how the events
of that day have affected cultural senses of history—how historiography works,
what history is, and so on. One example of such a conversation can be found
in a special issue of the Organization of American Historians’ Magazine of
History (Volume 25, Issue 3, July 2011), edited by Carl R. Weinberg 2011.
9. For an especially convincing discussion of this capacity of comics, see Chute
and DeKoven, “Comic Books and Graphic Novels,” p. 190.
10. The phrase “sequential art” is usually attributed to Eisner (1985).
594 L. M. BANCO
References
Adams, Jeff. 2008. Documentary Graphic Novels and Social Realism. New York, NY:
Peter Lang.
Baetens, Jan, and Hugo Frey. 2015. The Graphic Novel: An Introduction. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Banco, Lindsey. 2016. The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Iowa City, IA:
University of Iowa Press.
Beaty, Bart. 2011. Introduction. Cinema Journal 50: 106–110.
Chapman, Jane L., Dan Ellin, and Adam Sherif. 2015. Comics, the Holocaust and
Hiroshima. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Chute, Hillary. 2011. Comics Form and Narrating Lives. Profession 11: 107–117.
———. 2016. Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form.
Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Chute, Hillary, and Marianne DeKoven. 2006. Introduction: Graphic Narrative.
Modern Fiction Studies 52: 767–782.
———. 2012. Comic Books and Graphic Novels. In The Cambridge Companion to
Popular Fiction, ed. David Glover and Scott McCracken, 175–195. Cambridge:
Duncan, Randy, Matthew J. Smith, and Paul Levitz. 2009. The Power of Comics:
History, Form and Culture. New York, NY: Continuum.
Eisner, Will. 1985. Comics and Sequential Art. Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press.
Elias, Jonathan and Jazan Wild. 2009. Atomic Dreams: The Lost Journal of J. Robert
Oppenheimer. Encino, CA: Carnival Comics.
Fetter-Vorm, Jonathan. 2012. Trinity: A Graphic History of the First Atomic Bomb.
New York, NY: Hill and Wang.
Gardner, Jared. 2012. Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century
Storytelling. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gavreau, Emile, and John A. Lehti. 1946a. Picture News, vol. 1, iss. 1‚ 1st ed.
Bridgeport, CT: 299 Lafayette Street Corporation.
———. 1946b. Picture News, vol. 1, iss. 2, 1st ed. Bridgeport, CT: 299 Lafayette
Street Corporation.
Goggin, Joyce, and Dan Hassler-Forest (eds.). 2010. The Rise and Reason of Comics
and Graphic Literature. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Groves, Leslie. 1949. Original Statement by Gen. Groves. In Learn How Dagwood
Splits the Atom, ed. Joe Musial. New York, NY: King Features Syndicate.
Hales, Peter Bacon. 1991. The Atomic Sublime. American Studies 32: 5–31.
———. 2001. Imagining the Atomic Age: Life and the Atom. In Looking at Life, ed.
Erika Doss, 103–119. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Hickman, Jonathan, and Nick Pitarra. 2012. The Manhattan Projects. Berkeley, CA:
Image Comics.
Labio, Catherine. 2011. What’s in a Name? The Academic Study of Comics and the
Graphic Novel. Cinema Journal 50: 123–126.
McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics. Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink.
Mickwitz, Nina. 2016. Documentary Comics: Graphic Truth-Telling in a Skeptical Age.
New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
O’Brian, John. 2008. Editing Armageddon. In Editing the Image: Strategies in the
Production and Reception of the Visual, ed. Mark A. Cheetham, Elizabeth Legge,
and Catherine M. Soussloff, 127–152. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press.
Ottaviani, Jim, Janine Johnston, Steve Lieber, Vince Locke, Bernie Mireault, and Jeff
Parker. 2001. Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science
of the Atomic Bomb. Ann Arbor, MI: G.T. Labs.
Peeters, Benoit. 2007. Four Conceptions of the Page, trans. Jesse Cohn. ImageTexT
3. http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/archives/v3_3/peeters. Accessed 12 Apr
2019.
Petersen, Robert S. 2011. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic
Narrative. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger.
Pustz, Matthew (ed.). 2012. Comic Books and American Cultural History: An
Anthology. New York, NY: Continuum.
Rhodes, Richard. 1986. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York, NY: Simon and
Schuster.
Rifkin, Candida. 2015. The Seeing Eye of Scientific Graphic Biography. Biography 38:
1–22.
Szasz, Ferenc Morton. 2012. Atomic Comics: Cartoonists Confront the Nuclear World.
Reno, NV and Las Vegas, NV: University of Nevada Press.
Towle, Benjamin F. 2003. An Examination of Historiography in the Comics Medium.
International Journal of Comic Art 5: 262–80.
Weber, Wibke, and Hans-Martin Rall. 2017. Authenticity in Comics Journalism:
Visual Strategies for Reporting Fact. Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 8:
376–397.
Weinberg, Carl R. (ed.). 2011. Magazine of History (September 11: Ten Years After)
25: 3–56.
Witek, Joseph. 1989. Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art
Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.
Woo, Benjamin. 2010. Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and
Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine. In The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic
literature: Critical Essays on the Form, ed. Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest,
166–177. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
CHAPTER 34
“The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X

and the Graphic Estrangement of Antibiosis
Lorenzo Servitje
In a 2017 interview, documentary filmmaker Sarah Kenney reflects on

Surgeon X (2016), a comics series that narrates a dystopian future trans-
formed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which she began in 2014 collab-
orating with renowned comic artist John Watkiss: “You always want to create
an extreme story world. You want it to be somewhere that has a bit of bite
to it, if you like. So seeing the ripples of the far-right across Europe, bringing
that in, and then reading a lot about the antibiotic crisis, bringing all those
elements together, I thought I was creating an extreme world.” Post-Trump,
post-Brexit, Kenney reevaluates the degree to which our contemporary
moment has shifted with respect to her narrative’s presentation of a world
in extremis—“Now it doesn’t seem quite as extreme as it did two years ago,
which is quite an incredible thing” (Holub 2017). Kenney’s comments
reflect two important elements of Surgeon X’s cultural work: the entangle-
ments of politics and microbiology; and, a critique of the problematic present
through the lens of the not-so-distant future. While there are many recogniz-
able motifs of science fiction (sf) in the text, Surgeon X is an especially unset-
tling case of a reality that is, as so many articles in the news media put it, “no
longer science fiction.”1 Indeed, Surgeon X’s representation of antimicrobial
resistance (AMR) reflects a present that is already profoundly science fictional
(Csicsery-Ronay 1992, 29).
Who is afraid of AMR? According to surveys investigating lay perceptions
and understanding of the phenomenon, not nearly enough of the public is
L. Servitje (*) 
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

598 L. SERVITJE
(WHO 2015; Wellcome Trust 2018) which certainly contributes to the

lack of change despite dire predictions from health experts for decades. By
some estimates, it is expected to kill more than 10 million people by 2050
(de Kraker et al. 2016). In response to this growing threat, there has been
an increasing appearance of science fictional language and imagery describ-
ing the “post-antibiotic apocalypse.” Surgeon X belongs to a group of British
projects, funded by organizations such as National Endowment for Science,
Technology, and the Arts (NESTA) and the Wellcome Trust, that have fic-
tionalized this phenomenon in the interest of informing the public (Wellcome
Trust 2018). The series, however, does much more than inform the public
about a real threat; it goes beyond a kind of fear-mongering rhetoric that
some policymakers and medical professionals have criticized as counterpro-
ductive (Nerlich 2009, 585). Instead, Surgeon X outlines the real, present
social entanglements of the antibiotic apocalypse’s “science fictional” qualities
in a juxtaposition of image and text. In other words, it graphically estranges
our own antibiotic moment.
The comic takes place in England, 2036. Kenney and Watkiss build an
uncanny post-antibiotic world: where antibiotics are in short supply and
barely function at all. In response, the government has taken to extreme
measures: rationing antibiotics based on PCI (“Productivity Contribution
Index”) scores, a quantification of a person’s utility to society, which leaves
many already marginalized individuals—the foreign, the poor, the disa-
bled, and the elderly—even more vulnerable to death and disease. A col-
lective, aptly named “The Resurgence,” forms to protest and challenge the
bio-governmental austerity measures. This results in terrorist bombings,
and an increase in divisive conservative and nationalist reactions. The story
revolves around Rosa Scott, a brilliant young surgeon who becomes the vig-
ilante “Surgeon X” to treat those who have been denied treatment. As she
does so, she increasingly compromises ethical boundaries, becoming the kind
of arbiter of life and death that she is reacting against.
While AMR is a biomedical reality, there are plenty of qualities that make
it seem “like science fiction”: it is an unintended consequence of technosci-
entific innovation; and, it has the potential to radically change the anthro-
pocentric world as we know it. AMR characterizes microbes’ ability to
develop measures to resist antimicrobial treatment through evolution. As a
result of the overuse of antibiotics since the mid-twentieth century, bacteria
have developed evolutionary mechanisms that give them resistance to the
very drugs used to treat them, from first generation antibiotics like penicil-
lin to “last resort drugs” like vancomycin. To compound this evolutionary
response, the pipeline of antibiotic production has for the most part run dry:
because of economic, technological, and non-renewable limitations—there
have been no new antibiotic classes for over three decades. AMR’s conse-
quences do not end with antibiotics’ direct use (treating infections); AMR
unravels the antibiotic infrastructure that has allowed for so much inno-
vation in treatment and care on which so much contemporary health and
34 “THE PATH OF MOST RESISTANCE”: SURGEON X … 599
longevity depends: chemotherapy, surgery, immunosuppression, to name a

few. Consequently, AMR has and will continue to alter social relations and
their governance, for instance, dramatically exacerbating social determinants
of health that privilege the West and the wealthy. This becomes a pressing
issue in the world of the comic where the poor, disabled, and the foreign are
further marginalized, even more so under the auspices of government inter-
vention seeking to curtail the diminishing efficacy of the remaining and new
antibiotics. In bringing these medical consequences and their expansion into
the social to light, Surgeon X draws our attention not only to the problem
itself but reveals also how the interdisciplinary study of literature and science
can expand our limited and delayed understanding of AMR.
Kenney and Watkiss’s comic series is a particularly striking example of
an intersection of science and literature, a convergence that can often be
reductively circumscribed to a future-oriented reading, providing “what if”
scenarios. However, as Istvan Csiscery-Ronay has suggested in his theoriza-
tion of “science fictionality,” sf can function as a theoretical mode, a form
of cognitive estrangement that provides critical distance from the present to
rethink its social and technoscientific structures (2008, 2). Science fictional-
ity describes the dialectical relationships between real-world technoscientific
change and fictional representations that extrapolate and speculate on that
change. As a critical method, then, science fictionality is an awareness of the
ways in which science and technology are constantly altering our contempo-
rary culture—a process that is reflected in and informed by sf texts and media.
The choice of medium affords Kenney and Watkiss unique opportunities
to reflect on AMR’s science fictionality. Kenney suggests that the work “is not
prescriptive…The comic book format pares the story down to the minimum,
encouraging the reader to imagine the story’s universe and its implications”
(Mckenna 2016). Insofar as comics are structured by the gaps between pan-
els, the “gutters” that readers must imaginatively fill in, through their spatial-
ization and the juxtaposition of image and text they can spur more critical,
speculative reading engagements, where the reader imagines what happens
in between panels. Panels and their layout lend themselves to pausing and
reflecting on a specific scene, a face, or the very arrangement of panels rather
than just moving to the next narrative event. In these capacities, the combina-
tion of image and text encourages working through imaginative conflicts, res-
olutions, and reflections. As such, it is important to understand Surgeon X as
a work of graphic medicine. Defined as the intersection of comics and medical
discourse, graphic medicine serves a number of disruptive aims: challenging
the assumption of techno-medical progress; putting into question medical
objectivity to explore the various ways illness and medicine can be repre-
sented; and, contesting the power imbalances at work in medicine (Czerwiec
et al. 2015, 2–3, 20). Rather than giving the reader a prescription on how to
solve the AMR crisis, Surgeon X presents the raw matter of the post-antibiotic
world in a visual way that forces readers to rethink present assumptions about
biomedicine in politically, ethically, and socially just ways.
600 L. SERVITJE
This chapter deploys an interdisciplinary approach, engaging with current

work in graphic medicine, medical sociology, and critical theory to parse how
Surgeon X brings into sharp relief these complexities of the AMR crisis. I begin
by showing how the comic capitalizes on its medium to reflect on AMR’s
massive scale: temporally, as it collapses the spectrum of the past, present,
and future; and, spatially, as the comic complicates the relationship between
the individual and the collective. I follow by suggesting that this reading of
Surgeon X’s play on scale provides a unique perspective on the social deter-
minants of the present ecologies of AMR. Specifically, the comic makes use of
cognitive estrangement to draw attention to the biopolitical structures at play
in the UK’s fiscal austerity measures and nationalist politics that “make live
and let die” (Foucault 2003) by shaping social determinants of health.2 This
chapter concludes by addressing how the series’ perspective enables a more
nuanced understanding of AMR that accounts for both national specificities
and, on a broader scale, the need to reconceptualize the anthropocentric and
bellicose way of thinking about microbes in our medicalized culture.
The Spatial and Temporal Scales of AMR

While historians of science and STS scholars have challenged the naturalized
teleological narratives of technoscientific progress for some time, Surgeon X
works with fiction to demythologize the fallacious assumption that science
“always finds a way.” Specific to AMR, the text reframes the relationship
between biomedical and social developments, namely, where technologi-
cal innovation fosters its own regression, leading to a recursive process that
expands outward to breakdown what we have come to characterize as mod-
ern civil social order. Surgeon X brings the past into the future in three
unique ways: overlaying the history of antibiotic development into the nar-
rative’s present to address the massive scale of AMR; thematically and icono-
graphically using medical anachronisms such as pre-antibiotic standards of
care along with fashioning Rosa along an axis of “heroic medicine”; and,
foregrounding the comingling of seemingly older forms of governmental
power with modern neoliberal logics of self-governance and administering life
at the level of population.
The comic educates readers about AMR in the first introduction to Dr.
Martha Scott, microbiologist and sister to the main protagonist, Rosa. In a
three-page section depicting a lecture given by Martha, she details the rela-
tionship between the past, present, and future of AMR (Fig. 34.1). The
first panel presents the scene from an audience member’s perspective, where
Martha addresses both the future fictional AMR crises and the correlative
one proximate to the reader’s contemporary moment: “back in the year
2016—700,000 people a year died from antibiotic resistance infections—now
it’s nine million a year” (Kenney and Watkiss 2017, ch. 1).3 Martha’s 2016
figure stems from an oft-cited yet still-contested projection originating from
the UK Review of Antimicrobial Resistance (O’Neill 2014).4 In her narrative
Fig. 34.1 Chapter 1
present, Martha extrapolates the 2014 statistics into 2036. Her closing com-
ment on the page acknowledges that while bacterial resistance is an evolution-
ary certainty, the “indiscriminate use of antibiotics” accelerated this natural
process (ch. 1).
The pedagogical setting of the lecture reflects the scene’s purpose: it con-
cisely teaches the reader the basics of AMR, while capitalizing on the comic
form to overcome common roadblocks in antibiotic awareness. Here, the
comic effectively charges the large mortality figures by scaling them down
to the level of an individual human life. The page, in another panel, uses
Martha’s face and body at different distances to highlight a problem and
possible solution to AMR awareness. The use of the face and body is in line
with many works of graphic medicine that uniquely present individual expe-
riences of illness versus the biological signs of disease through embodiment
in a juxtaposition of text and image and “expressive anatomy” (Squier 2008,
49; Venkatesan and Saji 2016, 226). Susan Squier suggests that “[in] their
attention to human embodiment, and their combination of both words and
602 L. SERVITJE
gestures, comics can reveal unvoiced relationships, unarticulated emotions,

unspoken possibilities, and even unacknowledged alternative perspectives”
(Squier 2008, 130). Figures like “9 Million Dead,” while frightening and
spectacular, can carry little rhetorical value—often interpreted as exaggera-
tions, ignored by virtue of the lack of concreteness of statistical abstraction,
or perceived as too massive of a problem to tackle (Wellcome Trust 2015,
36). The abstract illustration of Martha in Fig. 34.1—her lack of individual
defining qualities—reflects the lack of individual specificity and personal con-
nection people often feel when confronted with catastrophic statistics related
to problems like AMR or climate change. It is easy to count her in with nine
million dead without giving it much thought. This tendency contributes to
a tenet of the dilemma: being a textbook case of a tragedy of the commons,
the more people contribute to AMR and the further away the consequences
are, the lower the perceived personal risk and connection to the problem.5
So aptly allegorizing this problem of abstraction, Victorian novelist George
Eliot writes that in order to empathize, we must feel injury “as a maimed
boy feels the crushed limb which for others is merely reckoned in an average
of accidents” (2003, 170). The arrangement of panels addresses this issue by
visually opposing any inclination to merely reckon an average of infections.
The panel that follows below and to the right of Fig. 34.1 frames a close-up
of Martha’s emotive face providing visceral grounding to contrast the numer-
ical abstraction of morbidity and mortality statistics (Fig. 34.2). Martha’s face
grounds the reader back in the corporeal reality, a visual motif that recurs
throughout the comic, such as when Rosa informs a homeless man that they
had to amputate his leg to stop the spread of infection (Fig. 34.3); or in the
case of Maddie, the young working-class overweight girl, who doesn’t qual-
ify for antibiotics after suffering internal injuries from a terrorist bombing
(Figs. 34.4 and 34.5).
To grasp the temporal scale of AMR’s history, Kenney and Watkiss visu-
alize Martha’s lecture in a dynamic representation of time. As comics repre-
sent time spatially, they can at once present time synchronically (as a whole,
all at once) and diachronically (sequentially) (Squier 2015, 46). The panels
in the two-page sequence mark notable moments and representative sam-
ples of the massive scale and complexity of AMR (Fig. 34.6). In the visual-
ization of Martha’s talk, she invites her audience to “travel back in time” in
the first panel, directing readers’ attention to a panel set in London 1928,
citing (another) statistic: “No antibiotics, and 43% of all deaths are due to
infections” (ch. 1). While the panel is set in the early twentieth century, it
is notable that Martha speaks in the present tense, imbuing the past into
the narrative’s present. The use of verb tense here reflects the comic medi-
um’s play on synchronic and diachronic time, evident in the arrangement of
panels from different time periods. Readers at once see the linear history of
antibiotics, from decade to decade, panel to panel, left to right, but also the
whole of AMR as a phenomenon that re-arranges temporal registers of the

medico-scientific past, present, and future (Fig. 34.6).
The top half of the two-page sequence details the first half of the twenti-
eth century. The reference to Fleming’s discovery marks a shift into the phar-
macological era, but the reader’s attention is drawn to the right-hand panel
through its expanded panel dimensions and its vivid display of battle during
the Second World War using high contrast color, when compared with the
more muted panels and diffused image of a petri dish in the background,
underneath the panels. This emphasis on the war marks this moment as both
an industrial and epistemological point of inflection in the antibiotic era. The
war was instrumental in creating the conditions for the United States to mine
for antibiotic-producing organisms in the soil around the world and produce
antibiotics at an industrial scale (Landecker 2015, 4). Antibiotics became an
essential weapon of material and metaphorical war. Penicillin was made availa-
ble to the public in 1945, and during that time it was depicted in news media
and war propaganda as a savior of combat injuries, but it was equally if not
more effective in maintaining the vitality of military manpower through the
604 L. SERVITJE
treatment of venereal disease. Attendant with the industrialization of antibi-

otics during wartime was the rapid acceleration and circulation of the met-
aphorical militarization of medicine. While this metaphor emerges in the
nineteenth century, during the mid-twentieth century, it becomes attached
to wartime propaganda, nationalism, and the emerging “golden age of medi-
cine.” The sequence suggests that this movement toward antibiosis, an antag-
onistic relationship between organisms, subtended by the militaristic logic of
metaphorizing medicine as war was central to the overuse of antibiotics since
their inception (Servitje 2019, 316–37).
The sequence continues with a second row of panels, representing the
recent past of the comic’s world while indexing the contemporary era of the
comic’s production. The leftmost panel indicts the agriculture and livestock
industry for its use of antibiotics as growth-promoting agents. While Surgeon
X’s purview lies within the medical rather than veterinary use of AMR, the
panel is an important reference. Most recent research suggests that the use
of antibiotics use for livestock is one of the most significant contributing fac-
tors in AMR, as veterinary medicine accounts for the vast majority of anti-
biotics produced in the United States (Economou and Gousia 2015, 257).
The panel is offset a few degrees which replicates the “Dutch angle” com-
monly used in film to evoke unease, tension, or disorientation. This uneasy
effect emphasizes two unsettling two moments in time referenced within the
panel: 2010, when antibiotic use and AMR were rampant in medicine and
606 L. SERVITJE
agriculture and husbandry; and 1987, the last year in which a new class of
antibiotic was discovered—a frequently cited fact in biomedical and news
media publications discussing AMR.6
Tying together the temporalities between the top and bottom rows’ seven
panels marking significant moments in AMR’s history lie two text boxes that
interrupt the diachronic flow and synchronic arrangement of time from the
early to mid-twentieth century in the top row, to the post-2000 era in the
bottom row. The box on the left asserts that antibiotics were (are) the fun-
damental infrastructure of medical practice—they allow for so many treat-
ments and procedures. The box on the right emphatically marks antibiotic
development as a climactic moment in contemporary human history. Indeed,
the 1950s are often marked as the moment when humankind left the “dark
ages of medicine” behind (Brown and Nettleton 2017, 9–10). The diction
in both interjecting text boxes sutures AMR’s temporal and spatial dimen-
sions. “Antibiotics became the bedrock of modern medicine…” on the left at
once denotes a foundation and infrastructure, while also connoting the dis-
tant geological past, which solidifies the themes of social and medical regres-
sion. In the right-hand box, “It changed our world” signals AMR’s spatial
dimension; namely, how AMR is a global problem, in terms of the ubiquity
of bacteria and antibiotics, along with being “without borders.” Notably, the
second panel from the right on the bottom row references the particular chal-
lenges of AMR in the developing world—where antibiotics can be purchased
without prescriptions, “like candy” as the text and image suggest. The way
AMR develops globally is a resonant theme in the series with its recurrent ref-
erences to immigration anxieties and black-market trade of pharmaceuticals in
the developing world.
Taken together, the text boxes’ associative meanings (“bedrock” and
“changing the world”) coupled with the layering of the two-page spread’s
figure (the paneled period vignettes) and the background (the petri dish)
can be best understood as what Hannah Landecker calls the “biology of his-
tory”: how events from human history have materialized biological processes,
events, and ecologies (2015, 3). The circular stage on which Martha presents
her lecture, from the previous page, graphically matches the petri dish in the
background, drawing attention to the continuance of her history lesson into
both the diegetic present (2036) and the date of the comic’s production
(2016). The panels detailing human history—inscribed over and upon the
bacterial culture—visually narrate this “double movement,” where AMR at
once has a natural history and is itself a biology of history. Landecker explains
that with respect to antibiotics “the biology of history ruptures the assumed
divisions between human (politics, culture, science), and natural (evolution,
geology, ecology) history” (4–5). That is, the history of industrializing bac-
terial metabolisms and antibiotic production is materially inscribed within
the bacterial resistome, the broad collection of antibiotic resistance genes
in both pathogenic and non-pathogenic bacteria, which in turn has become
the object of study. In the history of science, it is a common assertion that
“‘We used to think… but now we know’—we used to think a certain way and
then our ideas changed as more became known” (4–5). Resonant with the sf
genre and Surgeon X’s seemingly simplistic claim that antibiotics “changed
the world,” in the case of AMR, Landecker contends, “we might rather say:
‘We used to think a certain way about antibiosis and pathogens. And then we
changed the future.’ What we thought we knew became the biology under
study: the solution has become the problem” (4–5).7
To clarify this idea further, Timothy Morton provides an aesthetic to
describe this double movement as processual form (“looping”) and concep-
tual object (“hyperobjects”). Hyperobjects are objects that are so massively
distributed in time and space that we cannot experience them immediately
or in one locality, climate change being the most obvious example (Morton
2014, 1). The incomprehensibility of AMR’s scale contributes to the diffi-
culty in mobilizing unified action to mitigate its effects and conceptualize
a new paradigm for the relationship between humans and microbes, some-
thing other than a perpetual war. We can think of AMR as a hyperobject
because bacteria share resistance genes through mechanisms like horizontal
gene transfer where genes are passed across or within the same generation,
608 L. SERVITJE
traversing both pathogenic and non-pathogenic species, making up the vast

reservoir of the bacterial resistome. As a biological domain, bacteria make up
the second largest biomass on earth.8 Further, because of the ubiquity of anti-
biotics in agriculture, soil, water sources, people, and an inconceivable num-
ber of consumer products,9 they materialize humanity’s fatal entanglements
with the mutated ecologies of its own creation. Similar to, albeit more grad-
ual than, the catastrophic interconnectedness of Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine in
Cat’s Cradle (1963),10 bacteria are linked, and we are linked to them.
Understanding AMR as a hyperobject provides a way of interpreting anti-
biotic ubiquity and the science fictional quality of its temporal “weirdness.”
Morton’s line of inquiry follows the juxtaposition Surgeon X poses in terms
of the scalar and recursive tensions in AMR as a biology of history. This is
not to say that the resistome merely reflects overuse of antibiotics since the
mid-twentieth century. Antibiotics have existed in the soil as a competitive
and communicative mechanism between bacteria long before human appro-
priation (Landecker 2015, 18–22). Morton speaks to the ancient origins of
antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) when he explains that antibiotic resist-
ance has existed in a “future perfect” in the bacterial genome (2016, 82).
This is a “weird weirdness,” where the unintended consequences of tech-
nological innovation can take the form of positive feedback loops that esca-
late the system in which they operate. Morton himself suggests that AMR
is an “uncanny fallout from the myth of progress” (2016, 6–7).11 Surgeon
X mediates Morton’s theorization by presenting antibiotic history sequences
that make us sit uncomfortably with a cascade of unintended consequences,
as well as with a re-imagining of humankind’s place in this longer history
of microbes and molecules; it forces us to stay present with AMR’s longer
history and future.
The presentation of AMR’s scales in Surgeon X achieves another pedagogi-
cal aim, completing the text’s reification of abstract biostatistics. An equal but
conceptually opposing problem to AMR not being personal enough to every-
one, as suggested above with respect to Figs. 34.1 and 34.2, is the fundamen-
tal misunderstanding of the scope and mechanism of resistance. Individuals
tend to think of AMR too insularly: many surveys indicate the prevalence of
the belief that individuals themselves become resistant to the antibiotic, rather
than the bacteria (McCullough et al. 2016, 28), somewhat analogous to the
idea of drug tolerance. Understanding AMR at scale—across humans and
other living and non-living entities—undermines the supremacy of individual-
ism espoused by western, neoliberal ideology. Thinking about AMR in a more
communal and ecological way, as opposed to circumscribing the problem
to the patient and their prescriber, resonates with the comic’s social critique.
The current way of thinking about individuals and social relations is dated, to
put it lightly; it is what happens when “human exceptionalism and the utili-
tarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable…[s]
eriously unthinkable: not available to think with” (Haraway 2016, 31).
Keeping the larger ecology in mind, it is nevertheless important to con-

sider how AMR can reconfigure and reinforce political ideologies and related
material effects that affect people differentially. Surgeon X deploys various
anachronisms to show how AMR brings the social and medical orders of the
past into the present and future. In one specific iteration, the comic poses a
critical reflection on the ethics and professional culture of medical practition-
ers. Rosa Scott herself is a personified anachronism. There are several images,
usually in covers of the individual comics, that adorn Rosa as an amalgamed
icon of futurity and antiquity.12 Rosa’s actions and dynamic characterization
as the novel’s tragic hero compound the pictorial allusions to temporal con-
flation. She is at once a cutting-edge surgeon, versed in cutting-edge med-
ical technology, but at the same time emblematizes a more archaic medical
ethos. Rosa’s defining quality is her willingness to use extreme methods to
go against laws and protocols to save a patient’s life, especially those patients
that the government deems unqualified for antibiotic therapy. Rosa practices
“heroic measures,” high risk, last resort treatments that often cause signifi-
cant collateral damage or result in death. The ethos of heroic measures itself,
while still prevalent in certain forms today, connotes the pre-modern practice
of heroic medicine: the aggressive treatment of patients through bloodletting
and purging, based on the theory that disease was caused by humoral imbal-
ance, a theory which fell out of favor around the mid-nineteenth century. In
this association, Rosa’s internal conflict reflects the broader social conflict
that emerges from AMR’s role in the “devolution” of medical care. Part of
the cognitive estrangement the comic performs, then, is combining medi-
cine of the future and past to signal the precarity with which AMR threatens
our present. Perhaps the most striking example of medicine’s technological
regression is the looming threat of amputation.
Amputational Biopolitics
Amputation is not merely a world-building element in the post-antibiotic
dystopia, a plot device, or a synecdochal portent of medicine’s future. More
significantly, amputation codes the political entanglements in the medicali-
zation of society: both in terms of the increase of medicine’s jurisdiction in
daily life, and the metaphorical vocabulary of health, disease, and the body
deployed to understand state sovereignty and social relations. In the world of
the comic, amputations are rampant as evident in Fig. 34.3 where the home-
less man becomes just another “statistic.” During one of Rosa’s underground
surgeries, when she treats an underworld drug smuggler that provides her
with illegal antibiotics, she is forced to collapse a lung, remove several ribs,
and excise necrotic tissue, a procedure which a family member and criminal
accomplice scorns “sounds fucking medieval—slicing and removing his Ribs”
(ch. 3). While in our twenty-first century moment, it is still standard practice
although a last resort or sometimes “heroic” practice, amputation connotes
an older kind of medicine, where infections in extremities were only stemmed
by the severing of a limb.
610 L. SERVITJE
A prominent visual representation of the procedure operates as an icon

of biopolitical tensions at work in 2036 Britain. A recurring health advi-
sory poster warns “Wash your hands or risk losing your limbs.” The poster
appears in the background of significant scenes, such as the introduction
to Rosa when she worked for the NHS and broke protocol to treat a dying
girl (Fig. 34.4). The icon of the severed hand assigns guilt for infection and
threatens not only a literal severing of a hand, but more disparagingly a figu-
rative amputation from the social body that deems one as a qualified life: life
that is protected by qualifying for a ration of antibiotics. Readers encounter
this poster in a full-page blow up at the end of the first comic (Fig. 34.7).
Effecting a sense of immediacy of the post-antibiotic world, the full-page
announcement simulates for the reader encountering a similar announce-
ment while reading a periodical or magazine. This interjection follows the
comic’s opening with a similar, albeit much more overtly politically val-
anced announcement—“9 Million Dead a Year / We Must All Comply With
The Antibiotic Preservation Act / Rationing is Rational”—where the focal

point is a capsule that doubles as a grave (ch. 1). This compositional dou-
bling serves as a pharmakonological emblem of the antibiotic’s dual nature
(Fig. 34.8).13
These representative propaganda/public health advisories are rounded
off with an even less subtle poster which tells the public to “KNOW YOUR
PCI SCORE,” interpellating them as quantifiable subjects, defined by their
numerical value to society (ch. 6). Read within the proverbial state-as-a-
body metaphor, the visual severance of the hand in Fig. 34.8 represents the
excision of an infected individual of the body that threatens the whole. By
this same logic, this separation corresponds to the hermetic sealing of the
nation from foreign influence—immigration-related or political-economic. In
the poster, the wrist is stamped with the imprimatur of state sanction in the
form of the Lion Party’s logo. The Lion as an icon itself embodies a mythic,
612 L. SERVITJE
seemingly purer, English history—going back to Richard the Lionheart,

the great hero of English medieval history, and before him William the
Conqueror. In its association to a “toxic nostalgia,” this image echoes Brexit’s
nationalistic ethos, resonant with former Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson’s
invocation of heraldic charge in 2017, when he called for Brexit as a move-
ment of national renewal: “Let the lion roar,” he proselytized, so that Britain
might “win the future” (Earle 2017). That same year the right-wing pop-
ulist UK Independence Party (UKIP) changed its logo to a roaring lion
(Ferrari 2018).
In its interruption of the narrative progression, the poster evokes
real-world correlatives of comparable propaganda. The poster associates dis-
ciplinary hygienic measures with the culturally resonant history of World
War II propaganda, where text and image are combined to demand that
citizens ration and implement exceptional measures. Posters like the well-
known “Loose Lips Sink Ships” utilized fear and guilt to compel security in
the Populus, while other posters rhetorically constructed admonitions against
unsafe sex and warned soldiers of the personal and military consequences of
venereal disease.14 The careless citizen who is unguarded in their communica-
tion or the solider who lacks sexual restraint, like the unhygienic individual in
the septic world of 2036 Britain, becomes an internal threat.
Viewed in this light, the “Wash Your Hands” poster is as much about
power as it is health. Amputation reflects a coextension of two forms of
power that have been associated with different eras. For Michel Foucault,
a temporal shift in the form of governmental power toward the end of the
eighteenth century moved from a punitive and deductive juridical power to
a productive, affirmative biopolitical model. Juridical power, associated with
the pre-modern, punishes and disallows life; it is a form of power that takes
life and lets live (Foucault 2003, 240–45). The poster evokes pre-modern
sovereign juridical power through its warning of amputation in the impera-
tive mood, recalling corporal forms of punishment like severing a hand for
theft, for instance. Less metaphorically, however, it signals visible marking of
the body in its failure to follow hygienic discipline, not unlike a scarlet letter.
This is not a strictly juridical model per se, rather a form of biopolitical con-
trol, as it works indirectly and is not exactly a form of punishment. Birthed
from modernity with the emergence of statistics, liberalism, and biology, in
biopolitical power, life is produced and affirmed rather than merely taken;
biopower targets the population’s life as its object of governance; it makes
some live at the expense of letting others die through the shaping of social
structures (“regulatory biopolitics”), and co-constitutively through inter-
nalized forms of individual self-discipline (“anatomo-politics of the human
body”). Biopower is about the individual having self-governance in rela-
tion to demographic and statistical norms—birth rates, morbidity, mortality
(240–45). The call to wash hands, in this case, signals discipline in the form
of a self-enforced hygienic practice. As risk, calculation, preemption, respon-
sibility, and freedom are central to modern biopower, the propaganda poster
suggests that individuals are solely in control of their own health given their
knowledge of AMR. This justification, of course, discounts the social deter-
minants that have calibrated certain people to have more opportunity to be
“responsibly” healthy. Moreover, amputation, while being a medical pro-
cedure performed for the purposes of curtailing infection—and in this way
“producing” health—under the Antibiotic Preservation Act, would negatively
affect one’s PCI score by disabling a patient. Consequently, one would be
perceptually at risk for future bacterial infection by being disqualified from
antibiotic therapy, as their quantified value to society would be diminished
post-amputation. In this way, governmental policy over the medical protocols
vis-à-vis AMR serve as an indirect mechanism to foster the life of some at the
expense of others.
The different modes of power invoked in the handwashing campaign can
make it easy for readers to reproach the state’s biopolitical intervention, which
on the surface can solidify the dichotomy between Rosa as outlaw hero against
the unjust state; however, upon closer reflection of its authoritarianism deter-
minations for ostensibly utilitarian aims provides a way to problematize Rosa’s
heroic ethos and ethics. Rosa is initially contrasted with other practitioners
who blindly follow protocol and governmental guidelines for prioritizing cer-
tain patients over others for antibiotic allotment and often resign themselves
to doing nothing, noting the futility and harm of extreme measures. While
readers can easily sympathize with Rosa’s efforts, as the narrative progresses,
her measures become more extreme, unethical to the point where she alone
assumes the authority to determine who gets to live and who can be allowed
to die or must die. This dramatic irony shows that her rogue medical care
ultimately exercises a violent power similar to the Antibiotic Preservation Act.
One scene in particular emblematizes this tragic flaw in Rosa’s character.
In one of many instances of the medieval world returning to modern
London, a multi-drug resistant plague strain infiltrates the city which Rosa
attempts to stop. Rosa pursues Vikram, an immigrant and organized criminal
who supplies her with black-market drugs, because he is infected with plague
and refuses to go into voluntary quarantine. Rosa kills Vikram by injecting a
euthanasic agent into his neck: in the sequence, Rosa performs this immedi-
ately after Vikram threatens to expose her “secret surgery,” raising the ques-
tion as to whether Rosa kills him because he is a biological threat to public
health or because he a personal threat to her, or some combination of both—
he threatens Rosa and, consequently, all the people she could save (ch. 6).
While Rosa’s action seems extreme, it is not unlike the PCI score logic of
allocating antibiotics for certain populations, for the utilitarian safety of the
whole, except it is an even more directly deductive act because she actively
takes Vikram’s life rather than refuse care. If, indeed, AMR “brings out the
worst in people,” as Rosa reflects when the plague spreads through London,
then clearly, she has succumbed to the contagion: by the end of the series her
“compass through the dark days ahead” now rests upon the belief that “life is
a privilege, not a right” (ch. 6).
614 L. SERVITJE
The fusion of seemingly older and newer forms of power in both the
handwashing poster and Rosa’s narrative trajectory along with the hand-
washing poster does not merely suggest that juridical power returns in the
future social order; rather, it reveals that the older deductive power exists in
another form, where disease can serve as the primary executioner of pun-
ishment. What this fictionalized morphology of governing power reveals
is that while AMR does, in many ways, bring the past into the present, in
other ways, it only makes visible those forms of medical and structural vio-
lence that the technological and social developments of the present have
occluded.15 The hidden violence revealed in the comic has extant correlatives
in present-day NHS policies and after the 1990 NHS and Community Care
act, post-9–11 politics, and fiscal austerity measures of the early twenty-first
century.16 Kenney has stated that PCI was inspired by a proposal to change
the way the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)
assessed the value of drugs by including a “wider societal benefits” meas-
ure (Kenney 2018; Boseley 2014; Cairns et al. 2013), a metric that factors
in the different amount of resources a patient contributes to society and the
amount they utilize. Numerous researchers and commissions rejected the
2013 proposal, citing, among many other problems, a valuing of patients’
economic productivity and the potential for fostering inequity.17 While this
specific proposal was rejected, many of its logics remain operative in British
health economics. Consider, most notably, recent campaigns allowing the
refusal of treatment for smokers and the obese in England, or the migrant
women who have eschewed NHS antenatal care to avoid being reported
to the Home Office or made responsible for thousands of pounds in fees
(Donnelley 2017; Gentleman 2017). Under these biopolitical stratagems,
individuals are encouraged to inculcate disciplinary “healthy” practices ena-
bling them to contribute productively, and thus qualify for the state’s invest-
ment in their care; while those who “make poor lifestyle choices”—often
more socially and structurally determined rather than freely chosen—are not
invested in under the auspices of low utility and, not surprisingly for a UK
audience, austerity. Moreover, conversations around AMR in the UK, while
given much more attention than in the US, are so frequently focused around
economics: how much AMR will cost; what will be the effect on productiv-
ity and GDP; how the resulting strains on the system will be funded. And
this, in turn, becomes refracted through conservative, nationalist, and neo-
liberal idioms: either in terms of anti-immigration rhetoric, or in the case of
Conservative leader Michael Howard in 2004, framing AMR as a symptom
of cultural and economic contamination eroding the core of British politics
and institutions, most notably the NHS itself (Brown and Nettleton 2017,
2, 6–8). While these are clear resonances to specific debates and responses
to AMR in Britain, it is not enough to say that Kenney and Watkiss were
informed by and responding to solely the British zeitgeist; the comic has
wider implications.
The presentation of AMR in Surgeon X asks us to think in broad terms

about social, intergenerational, and ecological justice. AMR itself puts poli-
cymakers and practitioners in a temporal ethical quandary. At what point do
we start rationing antibiotics, and when we do, to whom do we give them?
How does one weigh an effective treatment in the present against future
shortage and resistance; how does one weigh the present illness of one
against the future epidemiology of the masses? The safest recourse would of
course be not to use them at all unless a life-threatening emergency presents
itself. This course, however, while causing discomfort and distress to many,
increases the risk that the morbidities of infectious disease would overwhelm
the already taxed healthcare system—and, in many instances, people would
be in the exact same precarious position of contracting an infection. These
questions are helpful general thoughts on intergenerational justice; however,
to further complicate matters in terms of public health ethics and social jus-
tice, post-antibiotic stewardship will also have to account for global health
disparities, which for instance could mean that wealthy countries will have to
develop and invest in antibiotics that must first be allocated to lower-income
countries that are disproportionally affected by AMR, among other structural
health inequalities (Littmann and Viens 2015). In the vein of Surgeon X’s sci-
ence fictionality, then, the relationship between health disparities and AMR is
not a future but a present problem. Moreover, the problem and solutions lie
not solely within the scope of AMR but also are inextricably entangled with
class inequalities, social injustice, and the recent trend in divisive nationalist
politics, as Kenney herself notes in her 2017 interview.
If Surgeon X works through the mode of science fictionality and the comic
medium to express the complexities of AMR, then its cultural work lies less in
the speculation of a fictional narrative of AMR, and more in reflecting a vivid
“culture medium” of our contemporary antibiosis. AMR forces us to rethink
individual, national, and anthropocentric insularity. Through media form and
genre, Kenney and Watkiss’s series demonstrates a way of engaging with lit-
erature and science that animates the kind of interdisciplinary thinking that is
necessary to tackle a problem so complex and portentous. If the current trend
in the microbiomial turn is any indication of a changes in medico-scientific
paradigms, then, AMR, in the words of Donna Haraway, demands we “stay
with the trouble.” But with the present time festered state-centric move-
ments and neoliberal policies that will only exacerbate AMR, as a globalized
world and species, we have clearly not yet fully appreciated the complexity
and danger that is already apocalyptic. This antibiotic model that we have
been following for the past half-century is the path of most resistance. We
must attend to the mutually constitutive assemblage of human and non-hu-
man actors, institutions, ideologies, and metaphors, so that we might “unset-
tle our place in the great chain of being” and transform our responsibilities
toward “the bodies within us, and the other bodies in the world” (Fishell
2017, 43). More than educating by way of consciousness-raising of AMR as
616 L. SERVITJE
a phenomenon, then, Surgeon X, enmeshes readers in AMR’s ecologies, pol-

itics, and temporalities. While no single text or aesthetic form can delineate
the subtleties of a biosocial phenomenon like AMR along with the innumer-
able disciplinary perspectives needed to address it (microbiology, pharmacol-
ogy, epidemiology, clinical medicine, bioethics, sociology, political science,
international relations, science communications, public policy, cultural stud-
ies, medical history, health economics—just to name a few), Surgeon X pro-
vides a sense of the complexity, magnitude, and social justice implications that
AMR brings in its wake. It, moreover, draws attention to how other forms,
genres, narratives, and texts—beyond fear-mongering news media or biomed-
ical publications—might encourage us to think critically about the problem in
the present and question the widely assumed belief in a technofix. By fiction-
alizing the future in these dimensions, Surgeon X forces the present moment
to its crisis. Because, otherwise, in the case of AMR, indeed, there won’t be
time.
Notes
1. See for instance, Gallagher (2015).
2. On cognitive estrangement, see Suvin (1978).
3. The series does not contain page numbers; hereafter, chapter (issue) number
will be cited in text parenthetically hereafter.
4. The O’Neill report estimates 10 million will die in 2050, therefore we can
extrapolate that Surgeon X is plotting the 9 million death toll projection on the
same curve given its setting in 2032. On disputing the 10 million figure, see
de Kraker et al. (2016).
5. “Many participants also believed: they do not contribute to the development
of resistance and attributed it to the actions of others; and they are at low risk
from antibiotic resistance themselves” (McCullough et al. 2016, 31).
6. For example, see Jinks (2017).
7. Emphasis added. Ibid. Elsewhere, I make a similar assertation about the mobile
game Superbugs; however, as I show here, the comic and video game medium
operate differently, playing with antibiotic temporality in unique ways (Servitje
2019).
8. Plants make up the first. Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo, “The
Biomass Distribution on Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 115, no. 25 (2018): 6507.
9. See Dhillon et al. (2015).
10. Cat’s Cradle revolves around “ice-nine” a fictional compound which freezes
any water it touches. As all water is interconnected from large bodies of water,
water in the human body, and water in the air as humidity, the compound has
the potential to end the world.
11. It is important to note that while provocative, and certainly resonant with
AMR’s strange temporality, Morton’s reading here should be qualified, inter-
rogated fully in its interdisciplinary use of science in literary study and critical
theory, Devin Griffiths (2016) contends that the link between the environ-
mental resistome and clinical resistance is not so straightforward, and that,
moreover, the notion “that such genes are lying dormant in the background
population, waiting to be ‘switch[ed] on,’ that ancient ‘bacteria already had
genes that could switch on resistance to a fatal dose of antibiotics’” mischar-
acterizes how bacterial evolution (and its study) work. Even in a widely cited
review published two years after Dark Ecology and its review by Griffiths,
microbiologists are careful about the expansive claims that are made about the
resistome (Surette and Wright 2017, 321). Recent microbiological work has
sought to focus on assessing risk of transfer of environmental ARG (Crofts
et al. 2017). As Griffiths notes, and the studies that Morton cites, along with
the most recent reviews in microbiology, ARGs’ ancient existence suggests that
they serve multiple functions beyond countering biomedical extermination by
naturally appropriated or synthetically produced compounds in the future.
12. The cover of Chapter 2, for instance, places Rosa in a high-tech surgical suite,
utilizing robots and lasers. One of the tools, which matches her surgical
cap—drawn in such a way to strongly resemble the ancient Egyptian goddess
Hathor’s headdress and symbol. Thanks to Gillian Andrews for making this
connection.
13. The Greek word pharmakon, root of words like pharmacology, means, at once
poison and remedy.
14. Hygienic posters during world war two warned of loose women who were
inimically framed as “Boobytraps” for syphilis and gonorrhea. See, for
instance, National Library of Medicine (2018).
15. See Shapiro (2018).
16. These acts introduced an internal market to the socialized health care system
(Paul 2001, 597).
17. Fuller discussions of ethical, economic, and statistical complexities of
value-based pricing in NICE’s proposal can be found in M. Paulden et al.
(2014) and K. Claxton et al. (2015).
References
Bar-On, Yinon M., Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo. 2018. The Biomass Distribution on
Earth. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (25): 6506–11.
Boseley, Sarah. 2014. Watchdog Rejects ‘Social Benefit’ Test on NHS Medicines. The
Guardian, January 24. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/24/
societal-benefit-medicines-watchdog-nice. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Brown, Nik, and Sarah Nettleton. 2017. ‘There Is Worse to Come’: The Biopolitics
of Traumatism in Antimicrobial Resistance (Amr). The Sociological Review Online
First (February): 1–16.
Cairns, John, Alec Miners, and Allan Wailoo. 2013. Department of Health Proposals
for Including Wider Societal Benefits into Value Based Pricing: A Description and
Critique. NICE. https://www.nice.org.uk/Media/Default/About/what-we-do/
NICE-guidance/NICE-technology-appraisals/DSU-Wider-Societal-Benefits-
Briefing-Paper.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Claxton, K., M. Sculpher, S. Palmer, and A.J. Culyer. 2015. Causes for Concern: Is
Nice Failing to Uphold Its Responsibilities to All NHS Patients? Health Economics
24 (1, January): 1–7.
618 L. SERVITJE
Crofts, Terence S., Andrew J. Gasparrini, and Gautam Dantas. 2017. Next-Generation
Approaches to Understand and Combat the Antibiotic Resistome. Nature
Reviews Microbiology. Nature Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.1038/
nrmicro.2017.28.
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. 1992. Futuristic Flu, or the Revenge of the Future. In Fiction
2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey,
26–45. Atlanta: Georgia Univesity Press.
———. 2008. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan
University Press.
Czerwiec, M.K., Michael Green, Ian Williams, M. Susan Squier, Kimberly Myers,
and Scott Smith. 2015. Graphic Medicine Manifesto. University Park: Pennsylvania
State Press.
de Kraker, Marlieke E.A., Andrew J. Stewardson, and Stephan Harbarth. 2016. Will
10 Million People Die a Year Due to Antimicrobial Resistance by 2050? PLOS
Medicine 13 (11): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.1002184.
Dhillon, G.S., S. Kaur, R. Pulicharla, S.K. Brar, M. Cledon, M. Verma, and R.Y.
Surampalli. 2015. Triclosan: Current Status, Occurrence, Environmental Risks and
Bioaccumulation Potential. International Journal of Environmental Resources and
Public Health 12 (5): 5657–84.
Donnelley, Laura. 2017. NHS Provokes Fury with Indefinite Surgery Ban for
Smokers and Obese. The Telegraph, October 17. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/
news/2017/10/17/nhs-provokes-fury-indefinite-surgery-ban-smokers-obese/.
Accessed 29 July 2018.
Earle, Samuel. 2017. The Toxic Nostalgia of Brexit. The Atlantic, October 5.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/10/brexit-brit-
ain-may-johnson-eu/542079/. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Economou, Vangelis, and Panagiota Gousia. 2015. Agriculture and Food Animals as a
Source of Antimicrobial-Resistant Bacteria. Infection and Drug Resistance 8: 49–61.
Eliot, George. 2003. Daniel Deronda. London: Penguin.
Ferrari, Nick. 2018. UKIP’s Leader Explains Why the Party Is Using a Lion for Its
Logo. LBC, October 23, 2017. https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/presenters/
nick-ferrari/ukips-leader-explains-logo-lion/. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Fishell, Stefaine R. 2017. The Microbial State. Minneapolis: Minnesota.
Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège De France,
1975–76, trans. David Macey. New York: Picador.
Gallagher, James. 2015. Analysis: Antibiotic Apocalypse. BBC, November 15. http://
www.bbc.com/news/health-21702647. Accessed 30 July 2017.
Gentleman, Amelia. 2017. Pregnant Women Without Legal Status ‘Too Afraid to
Seek NHS Care’. The Guardian, March 20. https://www.theguardian.com/
uk-news/2017/mar/20/pregnant-asylum-seekers-refugees-afraid-seek-nhs-mater-
nity-care. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Griffiths, Devin. 2016. Timothy Morton. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future
Coexistence. The British Society for Literature and Science, 208. New York:
Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/696926.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.
Holub, Christian. 2017. Surgeon X Writer on the Real-Life Parallels in Her Dystopian
Medical Drama. EW, May 3, 2017. http://ew.com/books/2017/05/03/sur-
geon-x-sara-kenney-antibiotics-politics/. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Jinks, Tim. 2017. Why Is It So Difficult to Discover New Antibiotics? BBC, October
27, 2017. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-41693229. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Kenney, Sarah, and John Watkiss. 2017. Surgeon X. Portland: Image Comics.
Landecker, Hannah. 2015. Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History. Body &
Society 22 (4): 19–52.
Littmann, Jasper, and A.M. Viens. 2015. The Ethical Significance of Antimicrobial
Resistance. Public Health Ethics 8 (3): 209–24.
McCullough, A.R., S. Parekh, J. Rathbone, C.B. Del Mar, and T.C. Hoffmann. 2016.
A Systematic Review of the Public’s Knowledge and Beliefs About Antibiotic
Resistance. The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy 71 (1): 27–33. https://doi.
org/10.1093/jac/dkv310.
McKenna, Maryn. 2016. Dark New Comic Book Explores a World Without
Antibiotics. National Geographic, November 11. https://news.nationalgeographic.
com/2016/10/surgeon-x-comic-explores-world-without-antibiotics/. Accessed
29 July 2018.
Morton, Timothy. 2014. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the
———. 2016. Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence. New York: Columbia
University Press.
National Library of Medicine. 2018. Exposing Yourself to a “VD” with-
out Taking a Pro means that: You are a Saboteur. NIH National Library of
Medicine Digital Collections. https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nl-
muid-101439080-img. Accessed 30 July 2018.
Nerlich, Brigitte. 2009. “The Post-Antibiotic Apocalypse” and the “War on
Superbugs”: Catastrophe Discourse in Microbiology, Its Rhetorical Form and
Political Function. Public Understanding of Science 18 (5): 574–88.
O’Neill, Jim, and Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. 2014. Tackling Drug-
Resistant Infections Globally: Final Report and Recommendations‚ December.
https://amr-review.org/sites/default/files/AMR%20Review%20Paper%20-%20
Tackling%20a%20crisis%20for%20the%20health%20and%20wealth%20of%20
nations_1.pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018.
Paul, Joyce. 2001. Governmentality and Risk: Setting Priorities in the New NHS.
Sociology of Health & Illness 23 (5): 594–614.
Paulden, M., J.F. O’Mahony, A.J. Culyer, and C. McCabe. 2014. Some
Inconsistencies in Nice’s Consideration of Social Values. Pharmacoeconomics 32
(11): 1043–53.
Servitje, Lorenzo. 2019. Gaming the Apocalypse in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance.
Osiris, Special Issue on Science Fiction and History of Science 34: 316–37.
Shapiro, Johanna. 2018. “Violence” in Medicine: Necessary and Unnecessary, Intentional
and Unintentional. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 13 (1): 7.
Squier, Susan. 2008. Literature and Medicine, Future Tense: Making It Graphic.
Literature and Medicine 27 (2): 124–52.
———. 2015. The Use of Graphic Medicine for Enganged Scholarship. In Graphic
Medicine Manifesto, ed. M.K. Czerwiec, Michael Green, Ian Williams, M. Squier
Susan, Kimberly Myers, and Scott Smith, 41–65. University Park: Pennsylvania
State Press.
Surette, M.D., and Wright, G.D. 2017. Lessons from the Environmental Antibiotic
Resistome. Annual Review Microbiology 71: 309–329. https://doi.org/10.1146/
annurev-micro-090816-093420.
620 L. SERVITJE
Suvin, Darko. 1978. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: Studies in the Poetics and History
of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Venkatesan, Sathyaraj, and Sweetha Saji. 2016. Rhetorics of the Visual: Graphic
Medicine, Comics and Its Affordances. Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary
Studies in Humanities 8 (3): 222–31.
Wellcome Trust. 2015. Exploring the Consumer Perspective on Antimicrobial
Resistance, June. https://wellcome.ac.uk/files/exploring-consumer-perspective-
antimicrobial-resistance-jun15pdf. Accessed 29 July 2018.
———. 2018. Society Awards: Projects We’ve Funded. https://wellcome.ac.uk/
what-we-do/directories/society-awards-people-funded. Accessed 29 July 2018.
World Health Organization. 2015. Antibiotic Resistance: Multi-Country Public Awareness
Survey. http://apps.who.int/medicinedocs/documents/s22245en/s22245en.pdf.
Accessed 30 July 2018.
CHAPTER 35
The Automation of Affect: Robots

and the Domestic Sphere
in Sinophone Cinema
Nathaniel Isaacson
There are strikingly few examples of science fiction or robot narratives in

Sinophone cinema, whether in Hong Kong, Taiwan, the PRC, or Southeast
Asia. In this chapter, I argue that two of the only examples of Chinese-
language narratives focused on automata from the seemingly disparate
worlds of China during the lead-up to the Tiananmen massacre, and from
Malaysia in the years between the 1997 and 2008 global economic crises,
illustrate both the global significance of the robot as an affective laborer and
its local Sinophone resonances. Huang Jianxin’s (黄健新, b. 1954) 1986
film, Dislocation (错位), centers on an engineer who designs a doppelgänger
to replace him at company meetings. Enthralled with interminable meet-
ings and socializing at a state-owned enterprise, the doppelgänger attempts
to replace the scientist in his romantic life, later seeking to replace his crea-
tor entirely. James Lee’s (Lee Thim Heng 李添兴, b. 1973) 2004 film, The
Beautiful Washing Machine (美丽的洗衣机), depicts a robotic (or perhaps
alien) woman who has a symbiotic relationship with a defunct, second-hand
washing machine. The woman serves as a domestic servant for a young bach-
elor before escaping to join another family where she becomes the object of
romantic competition between a widowed father and his son.
Through a close reading of these two films, I examine the role of automata
in post-socialist and late capitalist Sinophone contexts in order to elucidate
N. Isaacson (*) 
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature,
North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA

622 N. ISAACSON
how their local specificity is interwoven with a set of globally recognizable

themes surrounding science, technology, and the economy. In these two films
automata serve as allegories for various forms of alienation—in the post-so-
cialist transition to state-capitalism in the PRC and its attendant moment of
reflection on Chinese tradition, and in contemporary Malaysia in the context
of socioeconomic stresses to the nuclear family. The characters in these stories
are alienated from their labor, from their fellow human beings, and from sci-
ence. This paper considers the translatability and cultural malleability of the
figure of the automaton, asking how the automaton speaks to labor condi-
tions under socialism, post-socialism, and the current rendition of neoliberal
globalization. I also examine how automata speak to gendered divisions of
labor and explore whether Freudian readings of the automaton as “uncanny”
[unheimlich] based in a Western European tradition apply to the transforming
patriarchal order (often framed in terms of an imagined Confucian tradition)
of contemporary China and Sinophone Malaysia. Both films furthermore
reflect the spoken and unspoken “scientific” truths that organize productive
and reproductive labor. Finally, in their singularity, the films speak to a ques-
tion for which there are only partial answers: in a part of the world so deeply
imbricated in the popular imagination as a nexus of innovation and artificial
intelligence, why has Chinese-language cinema had so little to say about the
figure of the automaton?
Affective Labor and Robots as Cultural Memes

Angela Mitropoulos defines affective labor “as the valorization of human
sociability … long circulated as part of a compensatory logic, offered as a
humanization of the mechanization of the labor process, in both Fordism
and post-Fordism” (2012, 165–66). In a similar vein, Hardt and Negri tie
the contemporary proliferation of affective labor to the rise of immaterial
labor: jobs whose products include “knowledge, information, communica-
tion, a relationship, or an emotional response,” arguing that affective labor
encompasses a number of female-gendered forms of work, particularly the
repetitious routine of domestic reproductive labor like cooking and clean-
ing (2004, 108–10). Affective labor is on the one hand a form of “biological
production in that it directly produces social relationships and forms of life,”
but it is also relevant to the immaterial labor of paralegals, nurses, and other
workers whose duties include the maintenance of human relationships (ibid.,
110–11). Both Mitropoulos and Hardt and Negri emphasize the increasing
centrality of immaterial, affective labor in the global economy and the impli-
cations of this transformation on labor, leisure, and kinship. The Chinese
Communist Party’s insistence on the unique character of “socialism with
Chinese characteristics” notwithstanding, these forms of labor are central to
the PRC economy as well. Increasingly incorporated into the global economy,
affective labor in China, especially that performed by women, has seen a con-
comitant increase since the 1980s (Otis 2008, 16). As I demonstrate below,
35 “THE AUTOMATION OF AFFECT: ROBOTS … 623
the robot plays a particularly salient role in the metaphorical embodiment of

“both technological and social innovation” (Mitropoloulos 2012, 13).
In Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the European
Imagination, Minsoo Kang observes that the automaton has occupied an
enduring position in the Western imagination, and “functioned as a kind of
conceptual chameleon [through which] … Western culture has meditated
on both the possibilities and the consequences of the breakdown of the dis-
tinction between the normally antithetical categories of the animate and
the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, the living and the dead” (Kang
2011, 5–7). The robot is a key signifier in the SF cultural field, and in the
words of Telotte is “arguably the most powerful image of the sf cinema”
(2016, 2–3). Automata figure prominently in meditations on the relation-
ship between human beings and the technologies we create, and in decon-
structing the boundaries between consciousness and insentience (Kakoudaki
2014; Kang 2011; Chu 2011; Telotte 2016). In Robot Ecology and the Science
Fiction Film, J.P. Telotte argues that robots “easily speak to issues of labor
and machine power” (10).
Mitropoulos borrows the concept of oikopolitics (the politics of the
household) as developed by Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition, and
Elizabeth Povinelli in The Empire of Love in a critique of the ways in which
capitalism perseveres “across time and space” by dissolving the barriers

between private and political spheres. Noting that “the uncanny has almost
invariably assumed the character of a female robot,” Mitropoulos goes on to
posit that “the uncanny signals the appearance of a new ‘border war’ around
demarcation of what is properly political from that which is posited as natu-
ral and, consequently, regarded as an improper subject of political and cultural
conflict.” The gendered division of labor often assigns care-taking and emo-
tional tasks to women, and domestic labor is another form of affective labor:
“women who work (whether in private or in public, paid or not) deliver a
labor that has affective purchase, circulating as an extension of (rather than
refusal of or indifference toward) care-giving domestic labor that has to appear
as if it is not work at all but freely and naturally given” (Mitropoulos 2012,
160; see also: Hardt and Negri 2004, 110–11). Thus, the woman robot acts
as a vector for representing the relationship between shifts in labor and their
effect upon the family unit. The “figure of the woman-robot has assumed a
literary and psychoanalytic density as emblematic of complex shifts in sexuality,
domesticity, gender, technology and work across the previous two centuries”
(Mitropoulos 2012, 156). Mitropoulos thus echoes Donna Haraway in iden-
tifying cyborgs, robots and other automata as harbingers of a “revolution of
social relations in the oikos, the household” (Haraway 2000, 293).
In her analysis of the relationship between the intensification of affec-
tive labor and its effect upon the constitution of the heteronormative
family unit as a microcosm of the nation and a means of maintaining cap-
ital in Australia and North America, Mitropoulos argues that rather than
fragmenting familial relationships, neoliberalism intensifies the affective
624 N. ISAACSON
significance of the family unit. As the contemporary global economy demands

that we are constantly productive, and dissolves the barriers between home
and work life, the importance of the family unit is reified (in the Marxist
sense). Mitropoulos adds, “post-Fordism is defined by a meshing of work-
time and the time of life, the demand to be constantly available and always
preparing for work. Social networking is also net-working” (Mitropoulos
2012, 165). Globalized and digitized labor has eliminated opportunities
for “down time” and the forty-hour workweek, and increased pressure to
maintain constant productivity. We are witnessing the dissolution of work
into life and life into work. In contemporary China, the line between net-
working and labor has become so precarious that many job advertisements
now note a high tolerance for alcohol as a requirement for employment
(Groth 2011, n.p.).
Despina Kakoudaki cautions against understanding historical narra-
tives of automata and contemporary robot narratives as part of a single
evolutionary teleology, arguing that histories of robots and automata are
hindered by a “‘time-line’ approach” that attempts to draw one-to-one cor-
relations between contemporary robots and pre-modern stories of autom-
ata (2014, 16). While similar anxieties are operative across the history of
representations of automata and other human simulacra, it is important to
situate them in their own historical, technological, and cultural contexts.
Kakoudaki warns that “stereotypical and repetitive tendencies of the dis-
course are exacerbated by the critical habit of looking for answers in historical
models that reinforce modern stereotypes,” and asks us to “consider the
structuring presence of objects without necessarily resorting to readings of
gothic and uncanny effects” (ibid., 24).
In the post-Mao era work of authors like Wei Yahua (魏雅华 b. 1949) and
Tong Enzheng (童恩正 1935–1997), Paola Iovene argues that “the distinc-
tion between humans and machines in Wei’s stories is less important than that
between mental and manual laborers,” (Iovene 2014, 38) asking her read-
ers to consider which forms of labor are more appropriate for scientists, and
which forms of affect are more appropriate for robot servants, problematiz-
ing socialist estimation of the physical toil of workers, soldiers, and peasants.
The above distinction and the ways that it breaks down in Dislocation and
The Beautiful Washing Machine serve as another important analytical lens for
this chapter. The field of Chinese SF studies, having grown rapidly over the
past decade, has yet to engage in a detailed analysis of the cultural role of
the automaton; I hope to stake out an initial, carefully circumscribed, under-
standing of the unique role of robots in Sinophone cinema in the representa-
tion of social divisions of affective labor.
The Post-Socialist Robot—Huang Jianxin

and Urban Alienation
Dislocation is fifth-generation1 director Huang Jianxin’s sequel to The Black

Cannon Incident, (黑炮事件 1986) a Golden Rooster Award-winning film
about a translator who loses his job because of a misunderstanding over a
telegram asking the whereabouts of a lost chess piece. Paul Pickowicz identi-
fies Dislocation as the first science fiction film of the post-Cultural Revolution
era (Pickowicz 2012, 255). A third film in the series, Samsara (轮回, 1988),
centers on an iconoclastic and opportunistic cynic who commits suicide after
an argument with his spouse (Yuejin Wang 1996, 35–37). Samsara was one
of four film adaptations released in 1988, the eponymously dubbed “year of
Wang Shuo.” Huang Jianxin is regularly referred to as a director of urban
films and “urban tragicomedies” (Chen Jie, 2002; Li Donglei, 2009). The
Black Cannon Incident is deeply critical of the tendency for valuing work-
ers for being “red before expert.” When managerial apparatchiks value the
ideological purity of a less skilled counterpart over Zhao Shuxin’s linguistic
abilities, a mistranslation of the German word for “ball bearing” (Ger. Kugel
子弹 /轴承) wreaks havoc on an industrial construction project. Harry
Kuoshu notes that “by emphasizing translation, Huang reactivates a critique
of zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong” (Kuoshu, 50), the notion that China could
selectively incorporate Western material culture without fundamentally trans-
forming an essentialized native culture which began to take hold in the late
nineteenth century and continues to be a topic of debate to this day. The valu-
ation of ideological purity over technical expertise or scientific knowledge and
the association of science with potentially harmful Western values alienate the
main character from scientific practice.
Dislocation follows the protagonist of Black Cannon Incident, engineer
Zhao Shuxin 赵书信 (Liu Zifeng 刘子风), into the near future as he designs
a doppelgänger to replace him at company meetings. Zhao hopes that the
robot will remediate the alienation from the scientific aspect of his work that
he considers important by allowing him to skip out on bureaucratic drudgery.
Enthralled with the social aspect of interminable meetings and social engage-
ments at a state-owned enterprise, the doppelgänger displaces Zhao in his
romantic life with girlfriend Yang Lijuan 杨丽娟 (Yang Kun 杨昆), eventually
seeking to claim his entire life.
Paul Pickowicz and Harry Kuoshu have both noted Huang Jianxin’s
importance among fifth-generation directors for being the only one among
his cohort to concertedly address urban issues, unlike colleagues Chen Kaige,
Tian Zhuangzhuang, Zhang Yimou, and Wu Ziniu, who have largely focused
on rural narratives (Pickowicz 2012, 245; Kuoshu 2010, 46). At the same
time, Pickowicz identifies Huang as one of Chinese cinema’s most plainly
post-socialist fifth-generation directors, and the film as a pointed critique
of bureaucratic stagnation in the socialist state (though Huang went on to
co-direct the PRC 60th anniversary national hagiography The Founding
626 N. ISAACSON
of a Republic and The Founding of a Party in 2009 and 2011).2 The film
finished third in Chinese box office earnings for 2009, behind disaster film
2012 and the second installment in the Transformers series. For this rea-
son, Pickowicz argues that Huang Jianxin “anticipated [the] extraordinary
turmoil” (Pickowicz 245) of post-Mao urban alienation in a unique man-
ner. Black Cannon Incident critiques the socialist dissolution of the barriers
between personal life, political engagement, and productive labor for ideo-
logical purposes—the complete incorporation of political, productive, and
leisure time was an actively promoted goal of the CCP, carried out through
efforts in collectivization and the incorporation of individuals into danwei
(单位) work units and xiaozu (小组) small groups for political study. The
film might also be read as a sort of anti-science fiction: a cautionary tale
about the failure to open up to and properly value outside knowledge and
expertise.
While Huang Jianxin’s ouvre stands out for its attention to urban aliena-
tion, his directorial style echoes the work of his cohort. The film’s message
and mode are a clear break from the work of Mao era directors like Xie Jin
(谢晋 1923–2008). Whereas Xie Jin’s films “encourage a cathartic and ther-
apeutic purging of pent-up frustrations, and which always identify righteous
and heroic figures within the Party who will save the socialist system, the
Black Cannon Incident conveys an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and
alienation from beginning to end” (Pickowicz 251). Huang Jianxin’s films
echo the fifth generation’s break from socialist realism in eschewing both
visual and narrative representation of clearly demarcated heroes and villains,
and in casting aside the mandate for a morally certain and politically correct
dénouement. Visually ambiguous camera work and dream sequences featur-
ing cavernous workspaces and statues of pugilists frozen in combative poses
defy jingoistic political interpretations.
Dislocation is in many ways an anomaly—one of the only SF films
produced in the wake of the Spiritual Pollution campaign of 1983, a con-
servative backlash against post-Mao liberalization that had a chilling effect
on artistic experimentation. Fearing that their work would be criticized as
insufficiently scientific, many SF authors curtailed production while other
authors and scientists attempted to deflect this criticism by emphasizing
the humanistic aspect of SF over its role as a popular science medium. Late
1980s critic Ma Shunjia suggested that SF as a genre could be deployed to
help understand what it meant to be human (qtd. in Iovene 2014, 46), and
Iovene notes that like The Black Cannon Incident, post-socialist SF often
focused on the “tensions between political commitment and technical exper-
tise” (ibid., 48). As much as the film was a product of its particular historical
moment, it echoes a number of global concerns about our relationship to
science and technology, and the implications of artificial intelligence.
If The Black Cannon Incident may be read as a retrospective criticism of
socialist bureaucracy, the second film in Huang Jianxin’s trilogy might be
read as a prospective critique of the rush toward a market economy. Recent
scholarship by Wang Hui identifying the late 1980s and early 1990s as the
advent of “de-politicized politics” (2008) in China also opens the film to
interpretation as a critique of an increasingly marketized economy where con-
sumption defines the individual. In the case of post-Mao China, rather than
the dissolution of an idyllic division between work and leisure—the healthy
balance of mass production and mass consumption that keeps a capitalist
economy humming along—we see a moment in which the politically invasive
xiaozu and danwei systems that integrated work and community life are grad-
ually supplanted by the concomitance of work and family life under a market
economy. This shift was paralleled by overall greater autonomy in marriage
selection—neither the family nor political and productive units had as much
say in one’s romantic choices.
The issues in Dislocation were central to intellectual debates of the 1980s,
especially those that centered on romantic love and the role of class back-
ground in determining one’s identity (Iovene 44). A number of key themes
in Dislocation might be identified as emblematic of late 1980s China’s
“cultural fever” of the post-Deng Xiaoping era. The film adaptation of
Wang Shuo’s Wanzhu (顽主, Mi Jiashan 米家山, 1988) features a group of
self-fashioning profiteers whose labor involves the outsourcing of affect—
their Santi (三T) Company offers to replace people in Troubleshooting,
Tedium-relief, and Taking the Blame (Wang Shuo 2006, 5). All of these
forms of labor commodify the character’s affective (or feigned affective)
engagement with their fellow city dwellers. Mirroring the wildly popular sat-
ires of Wang Shuo, the father of “hooligan literature,” Dislocation also par-
odies the newly available opportunities for self-fashioning presented in the
post-socialist urban landscape.
The film is punctuated by surreal dream sequences. In the opening
sequence, reams of politburo directives (中央文件) rain down on the protag-
onist Zhao Shuxin’s head as he stands on a podium surrounded by an impos-
ing array of microphones. He is then wheeled into an operating room on a
stretcher by a team of surgeons in black masks who decapitate him. A second
dream sequence tracks through a room filled with plaster of paris sculptures,
at the center of which stand the statues of two pugilists sparring with one
another. The sequence features Zhao Shuxin, exhausted from interminable
meetings and translation duties, falling asleep before cutting to the image
of the pugilists, suggesting that his toilsome waking life has stirred up sub-
conscious feelings of physical confrontation. Shuxin is led into the room by a
man in a white lab coat, apparently on the way to a third room where human-
oid robots are manufactured. Shortly after, a conscious Shuxin is followed to
a clothing store by his secretary, where he picks out suits for himself and his
robot double. Arranged in awkward stances, the elongated limbs and facial
features of the black mannequins in the clothing store and the white statues
in the dream sequence are closer to impressionist or cubist art than mimetic
representations of the human form. Shuxin’s conscious life takes place in
eerily depopulated city and office spaces, where he is constantly monitored
628 N. ISAACSON
by secretaries and few interactions occur outside of work. Dolly shots follow
him down labyrinthine, winding hallways ranked with redundant doors as he
attempts to navigate the faceless bureaucracy that he functions within.
Harry Kuoshu reads Dislocation as being as much a critique of the political
mechanism of bureaucracy as it is a critique of material technology. The cir-
cular, self-serving rhythms of the state machine are visually figured through
extensive use of circular imagery like clocks, coffee tables, sofas arranged in
circles, spinning wheels, and a perpetual motion machine that swings inces-
santly on Zhao Shuxin’s desk. According to Kuoshu, in the rhythms of
bureaucratic function, “we must take note of the machine analogy. The force
is mechanical; it moves on with its own logic and routines and is slow in
adjusting to change. The alienating effect of the machines, how they change
from the slave to the master of the human being, is also true here” (Kuoshu
2010, 49). Again borrowing from Baudrillard’s description of the increas-
ingly porous boundaries between simulation and reality, we are witnessing the
dissolution of human beings into machines and machines into human beings.
In The Black Cannon Incident and Dislocation, Shuxin is alienated from his
scientific labor—first by political concerns, and then by managerial ones.
Uncanny and Unfamiliar
In Dislocation, one of the first modifications Zhao Shuxin has to make to
his robotic doppelgänger is to outfit him with a reservoir for alcohol. Zhao
Shuxin’s automaton simultaneously speaks to the precarious division of labor
and leisure in the bureaucracy of the Mao era, and in the anything-goes con-
text of “reform and opening up.” The modification soon backfires when the
robot uses his capacity for drink to get Zhao Shuxin’s girlfriend drunk and
gives her the key to his apartment.
While Zhao Shuxin’s robot is gendered male, it still presents a clear threat
to the nuclear family by attempting to supplant Shuxin in his romantic life
and refusing to stay within the confines of Shuxin’s apartment house.
While the confrontation between Shuxin and the robot could be read
as a Freudian conflict of competing sexual desires and threats to the order
of the patrilinear family, the robot articulates their difference in terms of
the Confucian Five relationships (ruler-subject, father–son, husband–wife,
elder brother and younger brother, friend to friend), saying “What are we
to one another? Master and slave? Ruler and subject? Or are we equals?”
Zhao Shuxin’s inability to answer the question is symptomatic of the fact
that despite the 1973–1976 campaign to “Criticize Lin Biao and Criticize
Confucius,” post-socialist China remains a deeply patriarchal and authori-
tarian society; one that often frames these hierarchies in terms of a fungible
vision of Confucian social order. Social turmoil and revolutions notwithstand-
ing, hierarchies in labor and political standing persisted. In this instance, the
differences between the robot and his human creator are constructed not
based upon their capacity for autonomous action or reason, but upon their
positions within a social hierarchy of desirable and undesirable labor, one that
can be explained both in Western psychotherapeutic terms and in Confucian
terms.
In the popular science fiction boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s,
Iovene argues, the distinction between human beings and robots is less
important than the distinction between manual and mental laborers. In
the case of Dislocation, this distinction is even finer as the robot’s designer
attempts but fails to distinguish between forms of mental labor that he enjoys
and those that he finds tedious—interminable meetings, fraternizing, and
obligatory drinking sessions. From the moment the robot is turned on, he is
capable of imitating Shuxin in almost every way, demonstrating that he can
recreate his facial expressions. The robot identifies mechanical behaviors in
human beings (for example, clapping during a meeting when they are clearly
uninterested), and begs Zhao Shuxin to program him with an inner life of
his own, offering to make him leader of the robots if he can do this. Despite
Shuxin’s refusal to intentionally endow him with human emotions, the robot
shares Shuxin’s disinclination for attending meetings, and he immediately asks
Shuxin why either of them should have to do anything they don’t want to do.
This leads to the revelation that Shuxin plans on avoiding boring meetings
and attending those he has an interest in, and the robot remarks, “this is such
a tedious job.” Thus, the crucial distinction between Zhao Shuxin and his
robot double is not that between manual and mental labor, but between two
forms of mental labor—among them, attending meetings that are worthwhile
and those that are boring.
In a nod to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, Shuxin is about to give the
robot a set of rules when he is interrupted—first by a phone call summon-
ing him to a meeting on a public health directive, and then by the arrival
of his girlfriend—and he forgets to do so. Thus apparently unconstrained,
the robot begins to cultivate a social life according to his own whims. When
the robot hides a directive from the central politburo on bureaucratism that
Zhao Shuxin was supposed to read, the robot initially refuses to hand over
the document, so Shuxin threatens to destroy him. Even after he has handed
the document over, Shuxin tells the robot he is going to change his face and
send him to do dangerous forms of manual labor as punishment for his trans-
gressions: refusing to perform bureaucratic labor and taking over his love life.
Shuxin drifts off to sleep in the back seat of a car as he is chauffeured
home from work, and the camera fades into another surreal dream sequence
that hints that human artifice is the source of his troubles. He first wan-
ders through an office space populated by office workers frozen in con-
torted poses—two of them genuflect to one another while another carries
a briefcase awkwardly hoisted on his shoulder. He exits the office through
an archway, and enters an open, deserted landscape. The landscape resem-
bles the loess plain of the Yellow River Valley in Shaanxi, significant both as
630 N. ISAACSON
the “cradle of Chinese civilization” and because Yan’an was where Chairman
Mao and the People’s Liberation Army were encamped after the Long
March. Yan’an was also where the eponymous Forum on Literature and
Art took place in 1942, establishing socialist realism as the dominant nar-
rative mode for the next three decades. Shuxin’s dream is thus a form of
“root-seeking,” a visit to the birthplace of both the modern nation-state of
the People’s Republic of China, and the cradle of Chinese civilization. Zhao
Shuxin wanders through the desert until he encounters the Daoist sage
Laozi, seated atop a small mesa watching a commercial on television. Laozi
turns the television off, stands, and recites the following passage from the
Dao de jing:
If [in this manner,] it is disaster indeed on which luck rests, and luck under
which disaster crouches—who is to know what the epitome [of being good at
regulating government] is? [Hardly anyone.] It is in being without standards!
A standard by which a ruler rules will in turn lead to military cunning.
Goodness as a governing instrument of a ruler will in turn lead to evil.
On the other hand, it is true that the delusion of the people has definitely
already been around for a long time. (Dao de jing 58.3–58.6; Wagner 2003,
317–19 (commentary omitted))
This passage from the Dao de jing frames Zhao Shuxin’s predicament and the
intervention enacted by the film as a whole in terms of wuwei, the Daoist
exhortation to do nothing that is in contradiction with the Dao, remaining in
harmony with nature. The passage can be read on the one hand as an exhor-
tation to Zhao Shuxin not to struggle against his fate, but also as a plea for
good governance by means of keeping the machinations of government hid-
den from its subjects.3
Global Shifts in Labor—The Beautiful Washing Machine

James Lee’s Malaysian Sinophone art-house film The Beautiful Washing
Machine, depicts a robotic (or perhaps alien) woman known simply as The
Woman (Len Siew Mee) who has a symbiotic relationship with a defunct,
second-hand washing machine. After apparently emerging from the wash-
ing machine, The Woman first serves as a domestic servant to Teoh, a young
bachelor, before winding up in a similar arrangement with Mr. Wong (Loh
Bok Lai), a widower who also happens to own a defunct washing machine—
the same model as Teoh’s. We later learn that Mr. Wong’s son-in-law is Yap,
Teoh’s co-worker. James Lee describes the work as two different films spliced
together—a workplace/bachelor romance, followed by a Cantonese family
melodrama with the interlude of a failed attempt at turning the speechless
automaton into a prostitute.
Lee has stated that, “she could be an alien, a ghost, an illegal worker”
(Chauly 2004, n.p.). Regardless of which of these three categories
The Woman belongs to, she can be understood as an automaton in part
because she performs domestic labor automatically, but also because she rep-
resents a “technology” that her user is incapable of understanding. In the
words of Kevin La Grandeur, “we do not perceive the slippery nature of
the dialectical relationship between them and us, between maker and made,
master and servant; we do not keep in mind that we are, in terms of systems
theory, always and already enmeshed in a networked relationship with our
prosthetic inventions” (La Grandeur 2001, 234). That is to say, whether she
is alien or mechanical, her “owners” do not perceive their dependence upon
her nor are they capable of understanding her design. As in Dislocation, the
film’s characters are immersed in a technologically advanced society, but alien-
ated from scientific solutions.
The divisions of labor highlighted as problematic in the transition from
socialist to post-socialist economic liberalization in Mainland China are at
issue in James Lee’s film set in contemporary Malaysia under contemporary
conditions of globalization as well—the robot can be read as both a critique
of gendered domestic labor and of ethnic divisions in domestic labor as an
industrial undertaking. Tilman Bamgärtel argues that the film is one of a
number of recent Southeast Asian independent productions addressing “the
anxieties of the newly emerging middle class” (Baumgärtel 2012, 5). The
automaton also functions in both contexts as a locus for contemplating the
difference between human beings and machines.
All of the characters in The Beautiful Washing Machine blur the lines
between human, automaton, and machine. Male homosocial contact
primarily involves mutely exchanging and smoking cigarettes. Long dolly
shots follow the characters through the aisles of supermarkets arrayed with
factory-produced foodstuffs as they imitate one another in the reproduction
of domestic life. A conversation between Yap and his wife about an affair
he is having is simply avoided. The longest exchanges of dialogue consist
of service-industry talk: selling and servicing the broken washing machine;
a manager straightening out an employee’s attitude; and ambient television
commercials. Teoh is chastised by his boss for “poor performance at work,”
and just like the English phrase, the Chinese phrase (工作表现), connotes
both poor execution of labor tasks and lackluster presentation, or affective
engagement in said tasks. His boss goes on to inform Teoh that he knows
that these work issues are related to relationship problems and to exhort
him to work those out as quickly as possible, and again hinting at the dis-
solution of the barrier between household and workplace. These exchanges
of professional information are dominated by a constant diegetic hum of air
conditioners and other industrial appliances.
Human beings’ mechanical engagement in their own alienated labor and
the apparent humanity of machines in The Beautiful Washing Machine echoes
632 N. ISAACSON
Minsoo Kang’s reading of human beings as growing more machine-like

through the repetition of rationalized factory labor in Disraeli’s Coningsby
(Kang 2011, 233). Mr. Wong wears a robot mask whenever he experiences
sexual impulses—watching gay pornography, watching The Woman wash
clothing, and making a pass at her. He is thus most deeply in touch with his
biological human instincts when he masquerades as a robot from an animated
children’s series.
In the first half of the film, Teoh, a young office worker who has recently
been dumped by his girlfriend, purchases a used washing machine. Ignoring
the advice of the electronics store clerk, Teoh chooses the second-hand wash-
ing machine, an obsolete household appliance whose avocado-green shell
invokes nostalgia for a bygone era. He discovers that the washing machine
does not work and because it is out of warranty it cannot be repaired. A series
of calls to repair centers and visits from technicians ensues, but to no avail.
The washing machine seemingly chooses when it will and will not function,
leading Teoh to plead with it out loud to start working again. The quaintly
outdated machine thus becomes another aspect of Teo’s alienation—a
technology that he is unable to comprehend or repair.
He moves it into the living room where “they” watch a commercial
for Toh Toh brand ketchup that exhorts viewers to call a hotline for reci-
pes. Teoh calls the hotline and tells the operator that he wants to make the
recipe for his girlfriend, who also saw the commercial. The Woman seemingly
emerges from the machine after Teoh bakes the chicken for her/it. Teoh
awakens one night to find that the washing machine has mysteriously begun
working and the mute Woman is squatting next to it eating a bowl of instant
noodles. Teoh immediately begins assigning her domestic chores, and she
complies.
The plot of the film is decidedly unscientific: Teoh makes no attempt to
investigate where The Woman could have come from, he is apparently unable
to troubleshoot and repair the broken washing machine himself. A brief flash
of background dialogue that may explain The Woman’s origins is decidedly
pseudo-scientific. In an interview on television moments before The Woman
appears, a man on a show about UFOs speculates that aliens “could actu-
ally be people from a different time zone.” Whether ghost, alien, or migrant
laborer, The Woman becomes an object to be possessed, and the subject of
Teoh’s scopophilic fantasy. Echoing Zhao Shuxin choosing clothing for his
robot double in Dislocation, Teoh takes The Woman to a clothing store
where he chooses outfits for her as if she were a doll. In the next sequence,
Teoh confronts a man following the two of them through a supermarket in
a show of wordless primal dominance, chasing him off. This confrontation is
immediately followed by series of shots depicting Teoh watching and photo-
graphing The Woman as she performs various household chores wearing high
heels and a dress of his choosing. Utterly devoid of dialogue, and interrupted
at one point by the woman glaring disapprovingly out across the fourth wall
of the cinema in response to a camera flash, the ten-minute long sequence is

an unsettling disruption of cinema’s male gaze.
Teoh attempts to turn her into an ATM by forcing The Woman into
prostitution, a business decision that is visually coded by having the char-
acters stand in front of a bank of ATMs in search of solicitors, where they
end up bargaining over how much a liaison with her will cost. This venture
fails when the first John Teoh finds falls off the bed at a love hotel and is
knocked unconscious. The woman flees and the hotel manager steals the
John’s belongings. The John and his friends find Teoh in front of the ATM
machines where the original transaction took place, and they beat and stab
him to death.
In the second half of the film, The Woman is adopted as a domestic serv-
ant by Mr. Wong. Both Mr. Wong and his wayward son begin an Oedipal
competition for The Woman’s affection. Fearing the familial shift brought
about by the interloper, Mr. Wong’s daughter accidentally stabs The Woman,
and she apparently dies, only to disappear mysteriously. The final shot of
the film features her reappearance as a store clerk at the local supermarket,
but she is no longer mute. Lee’s description of the second half of the film
as a Cantonese family melodrama again points to the female automaton as a
vector for anxieties about the relationship between contemporary economic
shifts and their threat to the stability of the household.
The ways in which the men in the film so readily adopt The Woman as a
domestic and potential sexual servant illustrate what Donna Haraway terms
the “non-existence of women except as a product of male desire” (Haraway
2000, 299). Like Teoh, Mr. Wong seems to maintain the machine as a mate-
rial keepsake of his widowed wife and the domestic harmony she represents.
The domestic appliance that morphs into a female slave embodies a solution
for the young bachelor having a hard time establishing his own nuclear family
and the widower trying to maintain his. The Woman’s own desire seemingly
parallels the fickle functionality of the washing machine—when Yap forces
himself on her, the diegetic hum of Mr. Wong’s washing machine sponta-
neously beginning a wash cycle is an unsettling indication that she, like her
machine counterpart, appears to be “turned on.”
The urban landscape of The Beautiful Washing Machine, like Dislocation,
is profoundly alienated, almost entirely devoid of people. Much like Huang
Jianxin’s futuristic utopia, Lee’s unnamed late capitalist Malaysian city is
a hollowed out urban space. In both films, urban alienation has reached its
apotheosis through the near-complete elimination of any fellow citizens. Not
only are there very few exchanges of information or even casual courtesy; it
is as if people outside of the main characters’ immediate circle of colleagues,
service-industry exchanges, and nuclear family simply do not exist. The super-
market that Teoh regularly visits, piled high with a cornucopia of consumer
goods, is for the most part empty and silent save for the hum of rows of chest
freezers. Neither film gives any explicit indication whether the action occurs
in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, or any number of other cities.
634 N. ISAACSON
Looking Forward: Whither Sinophone SF Cinema?

An enduring question for Chinese-language science fiction is its apparent
absence during long periods of time in China’s recent history. Even as recent
scholarship has filled in many of these gaps, lacunae still remain. The field of
Chinese SF cinema is one example, an area almost completely lacking both
primary texts and scholarly examination. One common explanation for the
paucity of Chinese SF film is the cost of production. However, these two
films demonstrate that large budgets are not necessary conditions for quality
science fiction cinema. Dislocation makes some use of split screen filming in
order to have actor Liu Zifeng (刘子枫) appear as both Zhao Shuxin and his
robot double in the same shot. This technique, pioneered by George Melies
in the late nineteenth century, is relatively simple. Beyond this, SF elements
are signaled mostly through use of diegetic sound and through the inclusion
of computer terminals, and a few other bits of “scientific” looking scenery.
The Beautiful Washing Machine was filmed on digital video in ten days, and
reportedly cost only 50,000 USD to make. The major SF conceit of both
films is that two key characters are not human—a conceit that requires no
special effects whatsoever. I do not find questions of budgeting or available
production tools to be an adequate explanation for the paucity of Sinophone
SF cinema. Given that there is relatively little SF cinema throughout the
Chinese-speaking world, I also find the notion of the political climate in the
PRC to be an insufficient explanation. This question can be answered in part
by re-examining the ways examples of Chinese SF cinema are identified as
part of the “selective tradition,” (see Milner 2011, 2012) potentially expand-
ing the sample size of films labeled as SF or containing SF elements. Wei
Yang has identified a trend in Hong Kong cinema to sublimate SF themes
into other locally dominant genres (Yang 2013). That observation appears to
pertain here, where themes of the automaton are incorporated into film texts
that can be read in one case as a fifth-generation urban film, and in another
case as an ad hoc mixture of workplace and family melodrama.
Minsoo Kang argues that “for a full understanding of the automaton motif
in the Western imagination as a whole, one must take into account both
aspects of the mechanical entity, to see how the object functioned in differ-
ent historical contexts as the representation of both human empowerment
and oppression, liberation and segregation, transcendence and debasement.
In fact, it is precisely this capacity of the automaton to hold such disparate
meanings that makes it such a powerful and enduring conceptual object”
(Kang 2011, 305). In both Dislocation and The Beautiful Washing Machine,
the automaton again appears as a threat to an already unstable household
and economic order. Chinese SF author Han Song has attributed the simi-
larities between Chinese robot stories and western robot stories to what he
describes as a derivative tradition still held in the thrall of Asimov’s robot
stories (Wen Xinhong 2012). As part of a global selective tradition born in
the age of colonial modernity, the family resemblance of robot narratives
should be little surprise. Given the number of commonalities in these two

representations of automata in very different national/historical contexts in
the Chinese-speaking world, it is also fair to begin to examine more critically
what material conditions facilitate the apparent ease of translation of narra-
tives and automata.
Notes
1. The so-called “Fifth Generation” was the first class of directors to graduate
from Beijing Film Academy after instruction resumed in wake of the Cultural
Revolution. The class also included Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and a number
of other directors nationally recognized for a bold, new cinematic style that
broke away from the stale dogma of socialist realism.
2. The film finished third in Chinese box office earnings for 2009, behind disaster
film 2012 and the second installment in the Transformers series.
3. The trilogy may be read as an exploration of China’s three main philosophical
traditions. Black Cannon Incident is a modern parable of the Confucian princi-
ple of “rectification of names” (正名), where mistranslations and the slipperiness
of language lead first to the demise of the protagonist and then to the demise of
an industrial engineering project. Dislocation illustrates the Daoist principle of
wuwei (无为), demonstrating the folly of human artifice. Samsara, named for
the Buddhist notion cyclic of reincarnation, features an alienated young man
who is deeply unhappy despite being financially well off.
Bibliography
Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e).
Baumgärtel, Tilman (ed.). 2012. Introduction. In Southeast Asian Independent
Cinema, ed. Tilman Baumgärtel, 1–12. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
Chauly, Bernard. 2004. In Conversation with James Lee. Asia-Europe Foundation.
https://culture360.asef.org/magazine/conversation-james-lee/. Accessed Aug 2019.
Chen, Jie 陈捷. 2002. Lun Huang Jianxin de chengshi beixiju chuangzuo [On Huang
Jianxin’s Urban Tragicomedies] Yishu baijia 5 (3): 125–130.
Chu, Seo-Young. 2011. Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep? Cambridge, MA:
Groth, Aimee. 2011. Binge Drinking Is Becoming a Requirement for Chinese Execs.
Business Insider, August 23. http://www.businessinsider.com/china-drinking-cul-
ture-2011-8. Accessed 22 Aug 2019.
Haraway, Donna. 2000. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-
Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. In The Cybercultures Reader, ed. David
Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy, 34–65. London: Routlege Press.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire. New York: Penguin Press.
Iovene, Paola. 2014. Tales of Futures Past: Anticipation and the Ends of Literature in
Contemporary China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Kakoudaki, Despina. 2014. Anatomy of a Robot: Literature, Cinema, and the Cultural
Work of Artificial People. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
636 N. ISAACSON
Kang, Minsoo. 2011. Sublime Dreams of Living Machines: The Automaton in the
European Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kuoshu, Harry H. 2010. Metro Movies: Cinematic Urbanism in Post-Mao China.
Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
La Grandeur, Kevin. 2001. The Persistent Peril of the Artificial Slave. SF Studies 38
(2) (July): 232–252.
Lent, John A. 2012. Southeast Asian Independent Cinema: Independent of What? In
Southeast Asian Independent Cinema, ed. Tilman Bamgärtel. Hong Kong: Hong
Kong University Press.
Li, Donglei 李东雷. 2009. Chengshi shenghuo de jilu yu sisuo—lun Huang Jianxin
chengshi dianying [Documentation and Thoughts on City Life—On Huang
Jianxin’s Urban Films]. Dianying wenxue 18: 33–34.
Mitropoulos, Angela. 2012. Uncanny Robots and Affective Labor in the Oikonomia.
Cultural Studies Review 18 (1) (March): 153–173.
Milner, Andrew. 2011. Science Fiction and the Literary Field. Science fiction Studies 38
(3) (November): 393–411.
———. 2012. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.
Otis, Eileen. 2008. Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and
the Gender Organization of Global Service Work in China. American Sociological
Review 73 (1) (February): 15–36.
Pickowicz, Paul. 2012. China on Film: A Century of Exploration, Confrontation and
Controversy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy,
Genealogy and Carnality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Telotte, J.P. 2016. Robot Ecology and the Science Fiction Film. New York, NY:
Routlege Press.
Wagner, Rudolph. 2003. A Chinese Reading of the Daodejing: Wang Bi’s Commentary
on the Laozi with Critical Text and Translation. New York: SUNY Press.
Wang, Eugene Yuejin. 1996. Samsara: Self and the Crisis of Visual Narrative.
In Narratives of Agency: Self-making in China, India and Japan, ed. Wimal
Dissanayake, 35–55. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wang, Hui 汪晖. 2008. Qu zhengzhi hua de zhengzhi: duan ershi shiji de zhongjie yu 90
niandai [De-Politicized Politics: The End of the Short Twentieth Century and the
1990s]. Beijing: Sanlian shudian.
Wang, Shuo. 2006. Wanzhu 顽主 [Troublemakers]. Beijing: Zhongguo dianying
chubanshe.
Wen, Xinhong. 2012. Fang kehuan zuojia Han Song: Zhongguo kehuan li Asimofu
hai you duo yuan? [Interview with Chinese SF Author Han Song: How Far Is
Chinese SF from Asimov?]. Zhongguo kexue bao. http://www.chinawriter.com.
cn/2012/2012-04-10/123967.html Accessed 22 Aug 2019.
Yang, Wei. 2013. Voyage into an Unknown Future: A Genre Analysis of Chinese SF
Film in the New Millenium. Science Fiction Studies 40 (1) (March): 133–147.
CHAPTER 36
Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man

of Asia
Carlos Rojas
What kind of idea is Superman Holey Weenie? Just think, he is injured, with
a hole in that area below the waist that supermen treat as the most lofty site.
That has become a very vulnerable cavity—an entry-point into an experience of
illness, and an object of painful obsession.
Luo Yijun, Superman Kuang (364)
Luo Yijun’s 駱以軍 2018 novel Superman Kuang (Kuang chaoren 匡超人)
is a story about a very sick man in contemporary Taiwan. It opens with a
detailed description of an interior space that, as will later be revealed, sug-
gestively mirrors the narrator’s own somatic symptoms. More specifically, the
first chapter begins with a scene in which the narrator arrives at an establish-
ment called Russian Restaurant accompanied by a young woman named Fei
Wen and two other unidentified men. The group is initially seated at a table
near the bathroom, and the narrator notes the presence of a strong smell: “I
detected (or perhaps it was just my imagination) a sharp odor resembling the
scent produced by water after a rain, but I couldn’t determine whether it was
fresh or putrid.” In the same paragraph, the narrator continues to dwell on
the room’s literal and metaphorical scents, observing that the entire restau-
rant was suffused by “a distinctive moldy scent,” and that the patrons had “an
ineffable scent of loneliness” (Luo 2018: 21).1
The narrator recalls how the restaurant used to have a freezer compart-
ment in the basement, where diners could enjoy their meal bundled up in
coats in subzero temperatures while onlookers observed them through the
freezer’s glass walls (“like observing penguins in a zoo”). Then, after a dou-
ble paragraph break, the final portion of the narrative abruptly shifts to a
C. Rojas (*) 
Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

638 C. ROJAS
description of how the narrator and his companions find themselves locked
inside a “small and completely dark room”—which may or may not be the
freezer compartment mentioned earlier in the chapter. The narrator claims he
has no idea how he and his companions ended up in this space, but then he
is suddenly distracted by an unanticipated smell: “I detected a familiar odor,
and felt as though my brain were splitting open. Another motor inside my
head whirred into action, at which point I realized that this was the smell of
semen. Fuck! How could this smell be appearing at this time, in this situa-
tion?” (27). The narrator speculates that Fei Wen must have taken advantage
of the darkness to masturbate or fellate one of the narrator’s male compan-
ions, and furthermore recalls how she had once done the same to him in a
dark karaoke bar several years earlier.
Although in some respects this opening chapter seems oddly disconnected
from the remainder of the novel (for instance, neither the Russian Restaurant
nor Fei Wen is mentioned again), in other respects the chapter, with its
emphasis on dark, underground recesses and mysterious odors, succinctly
anticipates the central conceit of the novel as a whole: that the narrator dis-
covers that he has developed a mysterious “black hole” (heidong 黑洞) on the
lower region that he affectionately calls his “weenie” (jiji 雞雞).2 While the
precise etiology of the lesion is never specified, it is nevertheless clear that it is
exceedingly painful, though the narrator postpones seeking medical treatment
until his condition is so far advanced that it is producing a putrid, necrotic
stench. This phallic “black hole” quickly becomes an object of fascination,
and comes to serve as a locus around which he constructs a peculiar alter ego
that he calls “Superman Holey Weenie” (pojiji chaoren 破雞雞超人).
Ironically named after the “hole” that the narrator has on his “weenie,”
the fictional Superman Holey Weenie is a figure of illness incarnate—reflect-
ing a process by which an infirmity that would normally be viewed as embar-
rassing and debilitating is instead transformed into a source of symbolic
empowerment and creative inspiration. The Superman Holey Weenie persona
also intersects with a number of other fictional personas who similarly func-
tion as the narrator’s alter egos, including a figure inspired by the character of
the Monkey King (Sun Wukong), in the Ming-dynasty classic Journey to the
West (Xiyouji 西遊記).
With its repeated shifts back and forth between the narrative’s primary
diegetic plane and a series of embedded narratives, Superman Kuang has a
distinctively metatextual quality. This tendency is introduced in the first chap-
ter when, after recalling the restaurant’s basement freezer compartment, the
narrator suddenly breaks from the primary diegesis to offer a metatextual
commentary about the novel itself:
Perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but on the off-chance that my novel is still
circulating years from now, I’m concerned that future readers might assume
that this Moscow Restaurant that I’m describing is located in Harbin, Qiqihar,
36 SUPERMAN HOLEY WEENIE AND THE SICK MAN OF ASIA 639
Hailar, or some other city located along the northern border of Manchuria—as
a result of which my description might fail to convey the illusion I’m attempting
to invoke. No, the truth is that I’m writing about a city called Taipei, which is a
temporary capital on a southern island. (23)
He then proceeds to speculate that if future archeologists were to find the

remains of this restaurant in the city’s geological substratum, they would
inevitably conclude that the owner must be some sort of “weirdo” who was
simply running the establishment for his own personal amusement. This
metatextual observation not only underscores the work’s status as a fictional
narrative but also emphasizes its real-world backdrop, specifically the narra-
tive’s association with Taipei, which is presented as having a distinctly tran-
sient and interstitial status (“a temporary capital on a southern island”).
One of contemporary Taiwan’s most critically acclaimed authors, Luo
Yijun writes in a frenetic style that could be viewed as a cross between
Thomas Pynchon and Haruki Murakami. Like many of Luo’s works,
Superman Kuang emphasizes the narrative’s distinctively Taiwanese setting
while at the same time interweaving a wide array of international allusions,
including not only cultural allusions but also scientific topics ranging from
medicine to astrophysics, information technology to cybernetics. Here, I’m
particularly interested in the novel’s thematization of topics of medicine and
disease—but not for what the novel says about science in the abstract, but
rather for how it invokes and uses a variety of scientific terms and concepts.
In particular, Luo’s work implicitly uses a variation on the sick man of Asia
trope to explore how a site of apparent weakness can be rhetorically trans-
formed into a positive locus of identity.
Below, I begin by considering a set of Chinese literary discourses of medi-
cine and illness against which Luo Yijun’s novel is positioned, and particularly
the early modern trope of China as the sick man of Asia. I argue that the sick
man of Asia discourse reflects the interest, in early twentieth-century China,
in importing a variety of modern medical conceptual paradigms—which,
in China, were typically coded as “Western”—and using them to advance
a local agenda of national strengthening. At the same time, however, many
of these same paradigms had rather ambiguous implications when they were
transposed into cultural metaphors, suggesting that the process of targeting
sociopolitical “pathogens” could easily slip into a process of attacking nomi-
nally “healthy” elements of the Chinese body politic itself. After considering
early twentieth-century discourses of medicine and illness, I return to a dis-
cussion of Luo Yijun’s novel and examine the way in which it pivots around
a transformation of a peculiar illness into a site of symbolic empowerment
and creative transformation. The novel draws extensively on Chinese literary
traditions (not to mention a vast assortment of international texts and phe-
nomena), but at its heart it remains very concerned with the specific space of
Taipei, Taiwan. To the extent that early twentieth-century Chinese reformers
640 C. ROJAS
were concerned about China’s position in the shadow of Western imperial-

ism, Luo Yijun reflects a parallel concern with Taipei’s status as a “tempo-
rary capital on a southern island,” positioned in the shadows of multiple
different imperial formations.
The Sick Man of Asia

The now-familiar sick man of Asia formulation originated from a broader set
of Western-language discourses informed by imperialist ideologies and the
metaphorical conceit of the body politic.3 In the mid-nineteenth century, for
instance, it was common to refer to the Ottoman Empire as the Sick Man of
Europe, and a variety of other nations were also described as “sick,” including
Turkey, Persia, Morocco, and China.4 The first Chinese writer to use this sick
man trope to describe China appears to have been the late Qing scholar and
translator Yan Fu, who in 1895 published an article in the Tianjin newspa-
per Zhibao in which he noted that “a nation is like a human body,” and then
proceeded to ask whether it could be said that “contemporary China resem-
bles a sick man?” (1986: vol. 1, 5–15). Coincidentally, it was also in 1895
that Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II is credited with having been the first to
use the illness-inspired yellow peril metaphor (“die gelbe Gefahr” in German)
to refer to East Asians. Although the Kaiser initially used this epithet to
describe Japan (following Japan’s defeat of China in the first Sino-Japanese
War), other Western critics subsequently used the phrase primarily to describe
China, reflecting an anxiety that vast hordes of Chinese people might overrun
their lands. The sick man and yellow peril metaphors are almost precise mirror
images of one another: one compares the Chinese nation to a diseased body
(the sick man of Asia) while the other likens the Chinese people to an infec-
tious disease (the yellow peril metaphor tropes not only on the view of Asians
as a “yellow” race, but also on contemporary anxieties about yellow fever, a
deadly infectious disease that was common in the nineteenth century). The
implication, accordingly, was that the sociopolitical dysfunction associated
with China could impact and spread to the broader international community,
thereby transforming the nation’s figurative sickness into a source of potential
strength (as in the comparison to a virulent infectious disease).
These two metaphors were put into dialogue with one another as early
as 1896, in an anonymous English-language article titled “China’s True
Condition,” which was first published in the Shanghai newspaper North
China Daily News, and was republished the following month in the Chinese-
language Shiwu bao. The first paragraph of the English version of the article
opens with a reference to the sick man trope and concludes with a version
of the yellow peril trope: “China has long been the sick man of the Far East,
but since the [Sino-Japanese] war all the world has seen for the first time how
very sick the sick man is…. China did not deceive us; the war only revealed
the rottenness which every honest observer knew to be there. The world sees
these things in their true proportions now; Europe and Lord Wolseley are at
present relieved from a fear of a warlike, yellow, and innumerable host over-
running our Western civilization” (1896).
Actually, the convergence of these two tropes in the “China’s True
Condition” article illustrates a discursive logic that was already embedded
within the sick man trope itself. That is to say, although the article implies
that the yellow peril and the sick man tropes denote mutually contradictory
conditions (i.e., the West initially viewed China as a threat [“a fear of a war-
like, yellow, and innumerable host .. ”] but subsequently realized that in
reality the nation was actually “very sick”), in fact the sick man trope already
contained within itself both of these contravalent implications: the latter
trope’s weakness always already contained the possibility that a designation
of weakness might be transformed into an affirmation of strength. While
Westerners initially used the sick man of Asia formulation in a pejorative fash-
ion, Chinese reformers subsequently transformed it into a rallying cry for
national reform, and in doing so they engaged in a practice that Nietzsche has
called ressentiment—referring to the practice of taking a condition of empiri-
cal weakness and transforming it into a site of symbolic power. Aiming his cri-
tique specifically at Christianity, with its well-known advocacy of “turning the
other cheek,” Nietzsche identified a rhetorical strategy wherein an entire ide-
ological framework is developed around a strategic affirmation of what might
otherwise be perceived as weakness. In constructing a reformist discourse and
national identity around a rhetorical affirmation of China’s weak and diseased
condition, early twentieth-century reformers were engaging in precisely this
sort of strategy.
The sick man of Asia trope, and its attendant focus on the diseased state of
the Chinese nation, remained a persistent theme in early twentieth-century
Chinese literature. In fact, it was this emphasis on China’s figurative weakness
that the U.S.-based Chinese literature scholar C. T. Hsia would later call an
“obsession with China,” which he described as a collective obsession with the
nation’s perceived weakness and infirmity. Hsia uses this assessment to cri-
tique the tendency of Chinese authors to focus narrowly on a set of provincial
concerns, which, he argues, stands in stark contrast to Western authors who
tend to focus on more universal concerns. Ironically, in critiquing Chinese
writers’ collective fascination with the nation’s putative illness, Hsia himself
uses a metaphor of disease to describe this condition, contending that China
was “afflicted with a spiritual disease and therefore unable to strengthen itself
or change its set ways of inhumanity” (Hsia 1971: 533–534). Even as Hsia
criticizes modern Chinese authors’ tendency to focus on China’s figuratively
diseased state, his concept of an “obsession with China” could itself be seen
as a symptom of a parallel focus on China’s figurative illness (“spiritual dis-
ease”). Hsia’s diagnosis of Chinese authors’ obsession with China, in other
words, could be viewed as a symptom of his own parallel obsession with
China. Although Hsia was critiquing a rhetorical tendency that extended
642 C. ROJAS
throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the phenomenon he iden-
tified was particularly prominent in the case of the May Fourth Movement—a
reformist movement that took its name from the May Fourth, 1919 student
protests of the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which the students per-
ceived to be deeply prejudicial toward China and which went to advocate a
variety of cultural and sociopolitical reforms.
One of the best-known narratives about the May Fourth Movement’s
link between medicine and literature relates to the author Lu Xun. Widely
regarded as the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun recalls, in the
1923 preface to his first collection of stories, Call to Arms (Nahan 吶喊),
enduring a traumatizing childhood experience in which he realized that tra-
ditional Chinese medical treatments were unable to cure his ailing father.
He subsequently traveled to Japan in 1903 to study medicine (and specifi-
cally modern biomedicine), but while he was there he had an epiphany when,
at the end of one of his school classes, his instructor was showing the stu-
dents some slides from the ongoing Russo-Japanese War. When the instructor
showed an image of a group of Chinese in northern China gathered around
to watch a fellow Chinese be executed by the Japanese for allegedly spying
for the Russians, Lu Xun says he was so shocked by what he perceived to be
the apathetic expressions on the faces of the spectators that he immediately
decided to drop out of medical school and instead devote himself to help-
ing his countrymen by trying to heal not their bodies but rather their spirits
(1996: vol. 1, 415–421).
Although Lu Xun claims that his subsequent investment in literature was
a displacement of his earlier determination to study biomedicine (which itself
is presented as having been a displacement of his initial faith in traditional
Chinese medical remedies), it is nevertheless clear that medical concerns con-
tinued to play a prominent role in Lu Xun’s writings, as well as the broader
discursive environment within which he was positioned. For instance, themes
of illness and treatment are central to some of Lu Xun’s best-known stories,
such as “Diary of a Madman” (“Kuangren riji” 狂人日記; 1918), which
revolves around mental illness (the story’s fictional preface states that the
diary kept by the work’s eponymous “madman” is being preserved in the
hope that it might be useful to medical researchers), and “Medicine” (“Yao”
藥; 1923), which describes an unsuccessful attempt to cure a boy’s tubercu-
losis by using a traditional folk remedy consisting of a steamed bun soaked
in human blood (the boy in the story ultimately dies from tuberculosis, as
did Lu Xun himself, thirteen years later). In both of these works, moreover,
depictions of illness are used to reflect on a broader set of societal dysfunc-
tions. For instance, in “Diary of a Madman,” the diarist’s (putative) mental
illness appears to be a form of paranoid schizophrenia, and specifically a con-
viction that everyone around him has cannibalistic tendencies. Traditional
interpretations of the story typically view the diarist’s “madness” as a form
of unexpected lucidity, whereby the diarist is suddenly able to perceive, in a
metaphorical manner, a set of self-destructive tendencies that plague tra-

ditional Chinese society. Similarly, in “Medicine,” not only does the blood-
soaked steamed bun fail to cure the boy’s tuberculosis, but furthermore it
is also revealed that the blood in question was obtained from a revolution-
ary who had been executed on account of his political activities. In depicting
the decision to feed the tubercular boy the revolutionary’s blood, the story is
similarly using the metaphor of cannibalism to criticize China’s conservative
and repressive tendencies.
More abstractly, many works by Lu Xun and his contemporaries also incor-
porate modern medical concepts, particularly ones associated with microbiol-
ogy. It was a microbiology class that Lu Xun was taking on the day in 1906
when he was shown the execution slide that led him to decide to shift his
focus from medicine to literature. In fact, Lu Xun’s enrollment in medical
school coincided with a more general paradigm shift in medical knowledge
that led to the emergence of modern biomedicine, and in no sector was this
paradigm shift more dramatic than in microbiology. Beginning in the final
two decades of the nineteenth century, a series of interrelated discoveries radi-
cally transformed contemporary understandings of infection, vaccination, and
immune response. Lu Xun and many of his contemporaries followed these
scientific developments closely, mobilizing attendant concepts not only for
their medical implications but also for their more abstract significance.
For instance, in the 1915 inaugural issue of the Youth Magazine (an influ-
ential May Fourth literary journal in which Lu Xun published many of his early
stories),5 the journal’s founding editor Chen Duxiu published a manifesto
titled “Call to Youth,” in which he used a set of microbiological metaphors to
describe the Chinese youth who were the journal’s intended readership:
Youth have the same relationship to society that fresh and vital cells have to the
human body. In the metabolic process, old and rotten cells are constantly being
weeded out, thereby creating openings that are promptly filled with fresh and
vital cells. If this metabolic process functions correctly, the organism will remain
healthy, but if the old and rotten cells are allowed to accumulate, the organism
will die. (Chen 1915: 1.1)6
A year later, when the journal changed its name to New Youth, Chen Duxiu
published another manifesto, in which he attempted to distinguish between
what he called “new youth” (xin qingnian 新青年) and “old youth” (jiu
qingnian 舊青年), concluding that it was on account of the decrepit state
of the nation’s youth that “everyone calls China the sick man of Asia, and
indeed there are hardly any of our youth who would not fall into the category
of ‘sick men’” (in Xin qingnian 1916a: 2.1).
Although in these two manifestos Chen Duxiu invokes these cellular met-
aphors in a rather abstract fashion, later in the same 1916 issue in which
Chen published his second “new youth” manifesto, he also wrote another
article offering a detailed introduction of the work of “two contemporary
644 C. ROJAS
scientists,” one of whom was the Russian-born French microbiologist

Élie Metchnikoff, who had won the 1908 Nobel Prize for Medicine for
his work on the immune system (1916b: 2.1). In particular, Chen stresses
Metchnikoff’s discovery of the immunological function of white blood cells,
or what Metchnikoff called phagocytes—including not only these cells’ role
in identifying and figuratively devouring harmful pathogens, but also the
fact that various immune system disorders can result in a situation where
these white blood cells mistakenly target the body’s own healthy tissue. This
description of Metchnikoff’s interest in autoimmune disorders mirrors the
issue that Chen had raised in the journal’s inaugural issue, in which he had
expressed concern that the society’s “metabolic processes” might fail to target
and eliminate “old and rotten” elements (and, Chen implies, might instead
even begin targeting the “fresh and vital” elements themselves).
In June of 1918, meanwhile, another prominent May Fourth reformer,
Hu Shi, guest-edited a special issue of New Youth on the works of Henrik
Ibsen, including a detailed analysis of Ibsen’s play Enemy of the People. The
play’s protagonist, Doctor Stockman, discovers that his town’s medicinal hot
springs are contaminated with an infectious pathogen and then attempts to
convince the town’s leaders that they need to shut down the hot springs. The
town leaders, however, resist Stockman’s advice on the grounds that shutting
down the hot springs would undermine one of the town’s primary sources of
income. In his summary of the play, Hu Shi offers an elaborate medical anal-
ogy comparing Stockman to the immune system’s white blood cells, which
work tirelessly to root out unhealthy pathogens:
It is as if [Ibsen] were saying, “People’s bodies all rely on the innumerable white
blood cells in their bloodstream to be perpetually battling the harmful microbes
that enter the body, and to make certain that they are all completely eliminated.
Only then can the body be healthy and the spirit complete.” The health of the
society and of the nation depend completely on these white blood cells, which
are never satisfied, never content, and at every moment are battling the evil and
the filthy elements in society. Only then can there be hope for social improve-
ment and advancement. (Hu 1986: vol. 6, 9–28)
Not only is this metaphor not explicitly referenced in Ibsen’s original play,
but furthermore the way Hu Shi applies the metaphor seems to be at odds
with the play’s own plot. In particular, Hu Shi’s immunological metaphor
stresses that the white blood cells function as a large aggregate (“innumerable
white blood cells”), whereas Ibsen’s play repeatedly emphasizes Stockman’s
position as the only individual advocating that the hot springs be closed
down. (Stockman’s motto is that “the strongest man in the world is he who
stands most alone.”) In this respect, a more apt application of the immuno-
logical metaphor would be to compare the townspeople to white blood cells,
for they unite together to attack Dr. Stockman, whom they perceive to be
“the enemy of the people.”
Lu Xun’s signature short story “Diary of a Madman” appeared in the

May 1918 issue of New Youth immediately preceding Hu Shi’s special issue
on Ibsen. Lu Xun explicitly discusses Metchnikoff’s concept of phagocyto-
sis elsewhere—for instance, in a 1925 article in which he critiques what he
calls China’s “disease of canonicity,” comparing China’s Confucian classics to
the accumulation of waste material in the body, and noting that in his writ-
ings on the immune system Metchnikoff had contended that this accumu-
lation of waste material in the body could trigger an autoimmune reaction
in which the body’s white blood cells may begin consuming the body’s own
healthy tissue (Lu Xun 1925: 127–132). However, in “Diary of a Madman”
Lu Xun is more concerned with the abstract metaphor of consumption itself.
Although the theme of cannibalism is typically interpreted to be a critique
of Chinese society’s involutive tendencies, if the story is read in the context
of the contemporary cluster of microbiological allusions by Chen Duxiu, Hu
Shi, Lu Xun, and others, there emerges an equally suggestive line of inter-
pretation whereby cannibalism is comparable to the phagocytotic function of
the body’s own immune system, which is constantly balanced on the knife-
edge between a “proper” focus on malignant pathogens and a “cannibalistic”
attack on healthy tissue belonging to the body (or body politic) itself.
The implication is that just as the trope of illness can be remobilized via a
logic of ressentiment, and transformed from a figure of weakness into one of
strength, the body’s immunological system can similarly be transformed from
a defense against disease into a disease-like state in its own right. Together,
these intertwined metaphors of the sick man and of the immune system cap-
tured China’s attempts to negotiate its relationship with the West in the early
twentieth century, a period when China was widely perceived as being in a
position of relative weakness vis-à-vis the West, even as it attempted to pro-
ductively transpose that weakness into strength.
Superman Holey Weenie

Published precisely a century after Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman” and Hu
Shi’s special issue on Ibsen, Luo Yijun’s 2018 novel Superman Kuang simi-
larly mobilizes the figure of disease as an elaborate metaphor. The narrator’s
genital lesion is first introduced about a third of the way through the novel.
Titled “Beautiful Monkey King” (Mei houwang), the chapter in question is
preceded by a sequence in which a local deity by the name of Tudi (literally,
“Earth”) suddenly appears before the narrator, as though he had just stepped
out of a “hole” (dong 洞) that had opened up in the earth. The following
“Beautiful Monkey King” chapter describes various legendary characters from
Journey to the West (including the protagonist Sun Wukong, the “Monkey
King”) somehow entering the narrator’s life in contemporary Taiwan. The
chapter runs for more than a hundred pages and is printed on a gray paper
that is visually distinct from that of the rest of the novel, making it appear as
though it stands as a text embedded within the larger text.
646 C. ROJAS
The “Beautiful Monkey King” chapter is immediately followed by a chap-

ter titled “Superman Holey Weenie,” which similarly revolves around a mys-
terious “hole” (dong 洞) that becomes a site of extraordinary generative
potential. In particular, the narrator introduces, for the first time, the mysteri-
ous lesion that he discovers on his genitals:
A hole opened up in my scrotum. At first the nature of the wound was rather
indeterminate, and I simply felt the sort of piercing agony as though someone
were making an incision at the base of my manhood. I went to a Western phar-
macy to buy the sort of ointment that you use for burns and knife wounds, and
applied it to the affected area. However, its condition appeared to deteriorate,
until one day when I was sitting in a chair I looked down and examined the area
more carefully, and noticed that through the lesion I could see bright red flesh,
combined with fat-like whitish pus. It was still expanding and changing shape.
It was like when you’re watching a weather report on TV and see description of
a new typhoon forming in the Pacific, that whirl-shaped wound expanded from
the size of a one-yuan coin to that of a fifty-yuan coin. When I went outside, I
felt an acute sense of shame, and I had to walk with my legs spread apart, like
the legs of a compass. (196)
When the narrator’s friends learn about his condition, they joke that he should
write a series of adventure stories revolving around the fictional “Superman
Holey Weenie,” including topics such as “Superman Holey Weenie rescues
an airplane that was about to be hijacked by terrorists,” “Superman Holey
Weenie makes China’s smog disappear for a day,” “Superman Holey Weenie
grants the dreams of students in a rural school,” “Superman Holey Weenie
and Fan Bingbing are trapped beneath a collapsed building in a television real-
ity show, and they later fall in love,” and “Superman Holey Weenie meets a
member of the Aisin Gioro clan, who wants to bring the clan back into power
and feels that [Superman Holey Weenie] is a Li Lianying figure sent by heaven
to help him accomplish this objective, and therefore the two of them proceed
to engage in secret activities in Beijing” (197).
Sure enough, a couple of pages later—after the narrator has visited several
more doctors, but found that they are capable neither of curing his condi-
tion nor of specifying what precisely is causing it—the narrative shifts abruptly
from a first-person account told in the voice of the narrator, to a third-person
narrative describing this fictional superhero:
Superman Holey Weenie woke up with a topsy-turvy feeling that time has dis-
appeared. However, to say that he “woke up” seems to imply that he had previ-
ously been either sound asleep or dreaming, but his experience was not all like
this, and instead his was a case of “originally not being present at all.” But is
there a more erudite type of description? Or hope, or promise? Or a small-scale
genesis, he suddenly appeared out of nowhere in this picture: an entire jolty
train car full of people standing and sitting, all ashy and without personality.
He was among them, but no one found this at all strange. Of course, they were
all on their cell phones. If you were to look in from outside, you might assume
that humanity (or at least this group of a hundred-odd men and women, adults
and children, who were assembled inside this metal train car) had evolved into
a vegetative state—or a species of fungus, like moss—whereby they only expend
energy on an extremely small sliver of their cerebral cortex, or on tiny rapid-fire
movements between the retina and the eyeball.
However Superman Holey Weenie was actually experiencing a change in

medium—this involving not time, rather that the experience of “rupture.”
Actually, in the story of his creation and birth, these people on their cell phones
were all already gray corpses. (200)
Superman Holey Weenie is presented as a figure of pure potentiality, a trans-

formation of the narrator’s painful wound into a site of fungible identity and
creative transformation. This figure, furthermore, is presented as being not
constrained by time, but rather as being the product of a process of “rupture”
itself—with “rupture” (po 破) being precisely the term used for “holey” in
the Chinese version of the Superman Holey Weenie moniker (pojiji chaoren).
The narrator’s illness-inspired fabulation, it turns out, is infectious, and on
one occasion several of his friends gather together and coin superhero perso-
nas based on their respective infirmities and disabilities. For instance, there is
a “Superman Single Kidney” (Yi ke shen chaoren 一顆腎超人), a “Superman
Extraordinarily High Liver Index” (Ganzhishu wuxiangao chaoren 肝指數無
限高超人), a “Superman myasthenia gravis” (Chongzhengjiwuli chaoren 重症
肌无力超人), and a “Superman Ankylosing spondylitis” (Jiangzhixing jichu-
iyan 僵直性脊椎炎) (255–257). The result is an eccentric community of
invalids and misfits, who each transform their physical infirmity into a site of
symbolic empowerment.
This focus on the generative potential of the narrator’s genital lesion is pur-
sued in different ways throughout the remainder of the novel, with one of the
more interesting variants being proposed at the end, when the narrator remarks:
How should I put this? That sense of disability that resulted from the process
of “developing a very deep hole in the middle of the body’s central axis” was
different from the sense of incompleteness and the feeling of having a phantom
limb that one develops after having one’s hand or foot amputated; and it was
also different from the shift in the body’s center of gravity and the feeling of
acute gloom that eunuchs, in the past, experienced after the removal of their
body’s source of testosterone production … Instead, that hole on his weenie
resembled a living being, and every day it leads toward a realm about which you
have no knowledge—that of antimatter or the dark universe. It leads to another
dimension, and it nimbly becomes larger and deeper. (426)
Here, the narrator invokes the sense of generative loss experienced by both
Chinese eunuchs and amputees, yet at the same time differentiates his sense
of loss from theirs. Instead, he describes his genital lesion as a “living being”
648 C. ROJAS
and, in a metaphor repeatedly elaborated in the novel, compares the hole on

his scrotum to a celestial black hole that may create a wormhole into other
dimensions and parallel universes.
At one point, the narrator uses another allusion to the Ming-dynasty
novel Journey to the West to bring together the twin themes of (Western-
derived) science, medicine, and culture, and the sort of ressentiment-driven
transfiguration of values. The narrator mentions a mainland Chinese inter-
net novel titled Biography of Wukong (Wukong zhuan 悟空傳), the prem-
ise of which is that early on during their “journey to the West,” Monkey
King Sun Wukong actually killed the monk Tripitaka, and the journey was
aborted. Consequently, all of what we know about the journey, from the
original Ming-dynasty novel Journey to the West, never took place in real life,
and instead it was merely the product of a “closed circuit implanted into his
brain, which kept replaying endlessly” (386).7 The narrator then asks whether
this counterfactual might be applied to our understanding of modern China’s
relationship with the West:
That is to say, the entire twentieth century we assume we have experienced—

including the process of obtaining all different sorts of novels, poems, movies,
news reports, philosophy from the West … perhaps it has all been just an illu-
sion, and there was never any such journey to the West? (386)
Here, Luo Yijun’s narrator takes the internet novel’s rewriting of Journey to
the West, with its account of the Tang monk Tripitaka’s journey to “the West”
(i.e., what is now called South Asia, to obtain some Buddhist scriptures), and
transposes it into a reconsideration of modern China’s journey to “the West”
(i.e., Europe and America, to obtain Western texts that could assist China’s
process of modernization). Moreover, while Luo Yijun’s novel focuses on
modern-day China’s quest for Western scriptures in the form of literary and
philosophical texts, the same point could also be made about China’s pur-
suit of other areas of Western knowledge, including medical and scientific
knowledge.
Journey to the West is, at its heart, a story about transcultural appropria-
tion. It offers a fictional account of a seminal moment in the early introduc-
tion of Buddhism to China, but the contemporary internet novel’s rewriting
of the story turns this conceit on its head, suggesting that the entire “jour-
ney to the West” is an internal fabulation. Similarly, the dominant narrative
of China’s modernization has involved a similar focus on a process of cul-
tural appropriation from Europe and America. In this passage, however,
Luo Yijun’s narrator asks whether this dominant narrative, together with the
assumptions about identity and alterity on which it relies, might similarly be
an imaginary projection, a result of a construction of alterity into order to
strategically consolidate a sense of collective identity. Applied to Luo Yijun’s
novel, the implication is that the narrator’s genital lesion is initially viewed as
a figure of radical alterity (a “black hole”), but then is embraced as the locus
of the narrator’s alter ego (“Superman Holey Weenie”)—and as such, it then
becomes reconfigured as a highly productive portal into alternate spaces and
dimensions.
Coda
David Der-wei Wang’s preface to Luo Yijun’s novel indicates that it was orig-
inally going to be titled Superman Holey Weenie (pojiji chaoren), but it was
subsequently changed to Superman Kuang (3–14). Given that Superman
Holey Weenie is the name of the protagonist’s alter ego, it would seem rea-
sonable to assume that Superman Kuang is the protagonist’s actual name.
In fact, however, the main body of the novel never references the name
Superman Kuang (Kuang chaoren), and therefore there is no way to con-
firm (based on the contents of the novel itself) whether or not this is meant
to be the narrator’s real name. As many commentators have observed,
Kuang chaoren is actually the name of a character in Wu Jingzi’s satirical
Qing-dynasty novel The Scholars (儒林外史 Rulin waishi), a work that is ref-
erenced repeatedly in Luo Yijun’s work.8
Although the precise relationship between Kuang chaoren (“Superman
Kuang”) and Pojiji chaoren (“Superman Holey Weenie”) is not specified
within the novel, the novel’s eventual title is aptly chosen and speaks directly
to the themes discussed above. In particular, while the Chinese character
kuang 匡 does not appear anywhere in the main body of Luo Yijun’s novel, it
nevertheless appears many times in The Scholars—where, with only one excep-
tion, it is invariably used as a surname. The first time this Chinese charac-
ter appears in Wu Jingzi’s novel, however, it is in the binome kuangji 匡濟,
which is short for kuangshi jishi 匡時濟世, which means roughly “to make
the best of times.” In the latter phrase, kuang functions as a verb, meaning
roughly “to save,” while also resonating with another meaning of the charac-
ter, which is “to rectify.” The implication, accordingly, is that already imbed-
ded within the surname of the fictional character from whom Superman
Holey Weenie borrows his name, we can find the two logical processes on
which the superhero’s identity is grounded: namely, to transform misfortune
into good fortune (“making the best of times”), and thereby to “rectify”
one’s putative liabilities. Moreover, it is precisely this process of transforming
weakness into strength in order to “rectify” the deficiencies of one’s contem-
porary national condition that characterized the sick man of Asia discourse in
late imperial and republican-era China, from which Luo Yijun’s novel seems
to take inspiration.
650 C. ROJAS
Notes
1. In each of these references to scents, smells, and odors, the same Chinese char-
acter (wei 味) is used, in combination with other characters.
2. The term in question, jiji, literally means “chicken chicken,” with “chicken” (or
“cock”) being a common term for “penis” in Chinese.
3. Several of the points in this section are developed in greater detail in my
book Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation. 2015.
4. The metaphor had been applied to Turkey as early as 1844, and in a let-
ter to Lord John Russell in 1953, Sir G. H. Seymour, the British envoy to St.
Petersburg, quotes Tsar Nicholas I describing the Ottoman Empire as “a sick
man—a very sick man.” See Trevor Royle. 1999. Crimea: The Great Crimean
War: 1854–1856. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
5. Initially, the journal was published under the title Youth Magazine (Qingnian
zazhi 青年雜誌) but in 1916 it changed its title to New Youth (Xin qingnian 新
青年).
6. For a translation of this essay, see Chen Tu-hsiu, “Call to Youth,” in S. Y. Teng
and J. K. Fairbank. 1954. China’s Responses to the West. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 240–243.
7. The novel referred to here is Wukong zhuan 悟空傳 [A biography of Wukong],
which was originally published under the penname Jin Hezai 今何在 and serial-
ized over the internet, and was subsequently published by Yuanshen chubanshe
in 2012.
8. The character’s original name is actually Kuang Jiong 匡迥, and his style name
(hao 號) is Chaoren 超人 (which translates literally as “super man”).
Works Cited
Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀. 1915. Jinggao qingnian 敬告青年 [Call to Youth]. Qingnian
zazhi 青年雜誌 [Youth Magazine] (a.k.a., Xin qingnian) 1.1.
Chen Duxiu. 1916a. Xin qingnian 新青年 [New Youth]. Xin qingnian 2.1.
Chen Duxiu. 1916b. Dangdai er da kexuejia de sixiang 當代二大科學家的思想 [The
Thought of Two Contemporary Scientists]. Xin qingnian 2.1.
David Der-wei Wang 王德威. 2018. Dong de gushi: Yuedu Kuang Chaoren de san-
zhong fangfa 洞的故事:閱讀《匡超人》的三種方法 [A Story of a Hole: Three
Ways of Reading Superman Kuang]. In Luo Yijun, Kuang chaoren, 3–14.
Hsia, C.T. 1971. Obsession with China: The Moral Burden of Modern Chinese
Literature. In History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 533–554. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Hu Shi 胡適. 1986 [1918]. Yibusheng zhuyi 易卜生主義 [Ibsenism]. In Hu Shi
zuopinji 胡適作品集 [Hu Shi’s Selected Works], vol. 6, 9–28. Taipei: Yuanliu
chubanshe.
Lu Xun 魯迅. 1996 [1923]. Nahan zixu 吶喊自序 [Preface to Call to Arms]. In
Lu Xun quanji 魯迅全集 [Lu Xun Collected Works], vol. 1, 415–421. Beijing:
Renmin wenxue chubanshe.
Lu Xun. 1996 [1925]. Shisi nian de dujing 十四年的讀經 [Reading Canon of the
Fourteenth Year (of the Republic)]. In Lu Xun quanji, vol. 3, 127–132.
Luo Yijun 駱以軍. 2018. Kuang chaoren 匡超人 [Superman Kuang]. Taipei: Rye Field
Publishing House.
Rojas, Carlos. 2015. Homesickness: Culture, Contagion, and National Transformation.
Royle, Trevor. 1999. Crimea: The Great Crimean War: 1854–1856. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Yan Fu. 1986. Yan Fu ji 嚴復集 [Works of Yan Fu], ed. Wang Shi. Beijing: Zhonghua
shuju.
“Zhongguo shiqing” 中國實情 [China’s True Condition]. 1896. Zhang Kunde 張坤德,
trans., Shiwu bao 時務報 [The Chinese Progress], vol. 10 (Nov. 5, 1896) [cited in
the text as “the First Day of the 10th Month of Guangxu, Year 22”].
CHAPTER 37
Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis

and A Brief History of Seven Killings
Lindsay Thomas
Lately, it seems, critics have turned to the network as a heuristic for

novelistic length. For example, scholars have described novels as varied as
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon,
Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and Samuel
Richardson’s Pamela as “network novels” (Pressman 2006; Jagoda 2016;
Levine 2015; Armstrong and Tennenhouse 2015).1 While the designation
of “network novel” is not exclusive to long novels—critics have also recently
referred to shorter works like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad,
Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation, and Jean Toomer’s Cane as networks
or as networked—the network is a model that scholars today summon when
describing long novels across any period of literary history.2
This tendency is related to what Patrick Jagoda calls our contemporary
“network imaginary,” the result of the historical convergence of interrelated
scientific, technological, and geopolitical developments toward the end of
the twentieth century that “imbued a generalized network concept with the
explanatory power and reach that it has achieved in the early twenty-first cen-
tury” (Jagoda 2016, p. 10). These scientific developments include the crea-
tion of what is now called network science, a field crossing many disciplines
in the social and natural sciences that uses network models to study complex
systems. The systems that researchers model are highly varied, including,
L. Thomas (*) 
University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL, USA

654 L. THOMAS
for example, communications technologies, relationships among people in

groups, and the interactions among genes, proteins, and metabolites in cells.
However, modeling these idiosyncratic phenomena as networks offers new
insight into the properties of and relationships between elements constituting
these systems. As Jagoda emphasizes throughout his book, thanks in part to
network science, networks are our de rigeur form for understanding complex
systems today.3
This chapter begins from this association of networks and long novels.
Although length is widely used as a classification mechanism for prose fiction
especially (short stories, novellas, novels), and although it often plays a struc-
turing role in pedagogical practice (“How many pages can I ask students to
read in two days?”), literary critics don’t have a great vocabulary for the con-
cept.4 As Catherine Gallagher has observed, although a novel is defined at
a basic level as “A lengthy fictional prose narrative,” “lengthy” is “the most
thoroughly neglected word in the definition” (2000, p. 229). This chapter
posits that one way of paying attention to length is through social network
analysis. In other words, I take the critics who have called long novels net-
works seriously by seeing what happens when we model the connections
between characters in novels as social networks. Moreover, I show how
analyzing novelistic length through social network analysis can help us to
understand what formal features tend to characterize long novels. This is a
step toward developing a concept of length that moves beyond page- and
word-counts. As I will suggest in the second section of this chapter, such a
concept is valuable for literary studies because it could provide a way of con-
necting a seemingly innocuous fact about novels—their length—to how these
novels are evaluated and read.
Using social network analysis to examine novels means employing quanti-
tative methods. Such methods—and their attendant prestige—have long been
associated with scientific inquiry, including network science. Historians of sci-
ence and, more recently, scholars in literary and cultural studies have written
compelling accounts of the rise of quantitative methods and their associa-
tion with objectivity, and of the cultural practice of quantification as a way
to accrue political power and dehumanize people.5 Similarly, critiques of the
use of quantitative analysis in literary studies have often hinged on the per-
ceived objectivity or “scientism” of quantitative methods and the recalcitrance
of the discipline or even of literature itself to such modes of thought.6 While
what follows is in part a quantitative analysis of several literary texts, I am less
interested in objectivity or the production of facts than I am in experimenta-
tion. The experiment I play out here leads to the generation of a hypothesis;
it does not test that hypothesis. Furthermore, our tendency to classify novels
according to length demonstrates how our understanding of novelistic form
is to some extent already quantitative. This chapter’s experiment lends some
precision to this quantification.
37 MODELING LONG NOVELS: NETWORK ANALYSIS … 655
In what follows, I use software developed by Markus Luczak-Roesch,

Adam Grener, and Emma Fenton to algorithmically create networks of char-
acters from a small sample set of six contemporary U.S. novels of varying
lengths, and I then apply some basic metrics from social network analysis
to compare the network models of these novels to one another. My sample
set includes David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Neal Stephenson’s
Cryptonomicon (1999), Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999), Jennifer
Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Marlon James’s A Brief History
of Seven Killings (2014), and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015)
(Table 37.1).7 I have chosen these novels because they include both long
(Infinite Jest, Cryptonomicon, A Little Life, A Brief History) and short con-
temporary U.S. novels (Goon Squad, The Intuitionist), as well as novels that
critics have described as “network novels” (Cryptonomicon, A Brief History,
Goon Squad), and novels that have not been described this way (Infinite Jest,
The Intuitionist, A Little Life). This sample set, while a toy example and obvi-
ously not representative of contemporary U.S. literature, gives me a starting
point for making observations that suggest future avenues of exploration.8
As we will see, James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings emerges as an out-
lier among this set because of the density of its repeated connections among
characters. At approximately 688 pages and 242,397 words, James’s novel is
a long metamodernist work of historical fiction that is perhaps best described
as networked. Radiating out from the attempted murder of Bob Marley in
Kingston, Jamaica on December 3, 1976, and told from the perspectives of
many different characters, it recounts the (fictional) stories of the eventual
deaths of the seven men involved in the plot to kill Marley (or the Singer, as
he is known in the novel). The novel involves 76 characters and takes place
on five days spread out over the course of fifteen years, from 1976 to 1991,
in Kingston, Montego Bay, New York, and Miami. When compared to the
other long novels in the sample, characters in A Brief History interact with,
talk to and about, and think about each other more than characters in the
other novels I model, especially the long novels. I call the measurement of
these connections character co-occurrence. I show how measuring character
co-occurrence demonstrates the potential for using social network analysis to
determine what aspects of novelistic form tend to correspond with length, as
well as for tracing how length, understood in specific ways informed by social
Table 37.1 The
Title Year Words Pages
sample set; word counts
are from electronic Infinite Jest 1996 557,859 1079
editions, and page Cryptonomicon 1999 402,383 918
counts are from U.S. A Little Life 2015 305,713 814
hardcover editions A Brief History of Seven Killings 2014 242,397 688
The Intuitionist 1999 84,546 272
A Visit from the Goon Squad 2010 78,090 340
656 L. THOMAS
network analysis, inflects close readings of individual novels. While other crit-
ics have made the case for modeling literary texts as networks because doing
so gives them conceptual purchase on the connections among large num-
bers of texts, I argue we can use this method to understand what character-
izes novelistic length, both at a macro- and a micro-scale, beyond page- and
word-counts.9
The Models: Measuring Character Co-occurrence

Modeling novels allows us to ask different kinds of questions of these texts,
but every model is a simplification and therefore requires compromises. In
order to understand the compromises involved in modeling a novel as a social
network, it is important to understand how the tool I used to create network
models works. The software requires two inputs: a plain-text version of the
novel under consideration, and a list of characters in that novel.10 From those
inputs, the program returns a variety of outputs, including a social network of
the characters in the novel.11 The software creates this network by breaking
the novel into consecutive 1000-word slices and using the list of character
names to identify all of the characters that appear in each slice. The social
network then depicts those characters that appear together in any 1000-word
slice as connected. The nodes of the network are the characters, and the
edges—or the links between nodes—are weighted according to the number
of co-occurrences of any two characters. For example, we can see in Fig. 37.1
that the number of links between the characters Josey Wales and the Singer in
A Brief History of Seven Killings, the two characters with the highest number
Fig. 37.1 Detail from the social network of A Brief History of Seven Killings
of total connections, is 43. This means the names of these characters occur
together in 43, 1000-word slices of the novel.
As is perhaps already apparent, choosing to model a novel as a social net-
work entails certain assumptions about what exactly you are modeling. As
the editorial board of the journal Network Science writes, performing net-
work analysis requires an “ontological commitment” to a few basic features
of network abstraction, including “individual elements; pair-wise relationships
between those elements; and a global or macro-patterning that can be con-
sidered as network structure” (Brandes et al. 2013, p. 5). In order to model
the connections between characters in these novels, for example, I must make
decisions about who counts as a character. While such decisions were easier to
make for some novels in the sample set, like A Brief History of Seven Killings,
because of the availability of ready-made character lists, for other novels it was
more difficult. In Cryptonomicon, for example, should we consider historical
figures who appear in characters’ stories or memories to be characters them-
selves? Should we consider people who only appear once in A Little Life—at
a dinner party, say—to be characters? How about those who appear only in
the memories of other characters, or in flashback scenes?12 Furthermore, as
I will explain in more detail below, the software I used to create the social
network for each novel incorporates certain decisions about how to measure
connections between characters, decisions that have a profound effect on the
resulting models but that by no means constitute the only way to measure
such connections.
While we might assume that social networks of characters in novels would
model the interactions among characters, this is not exactly true of the social
networks created using Luczak-Roesch et al’s software.13 Rather, these
networks model something like proximity or closeness. But since charac-
ters count as “appearing” together in the same slice of the novel simply if
their names occur in the same 1000-word slice of the novel, what this soft-
ware produces is not a model of characters’ actual interactions, but rather a
model of who characters think or talk about. Sometimes this includes peo-
ple they are talking to at the moment, but sometimes characters think or talk
about people who aren’t physically present in the scene. This becomes clear,
for instance, when we examine the nodes in the social network for A Brief
History with the highest degrees, or the most unique connections to other
nodes. As we might expect, the node representing Josey Wales, a main char-
acter, has the highest degree at 44; more unexpected, perhaps, is the node
with the second-highest degree: the Singer, at 41. The Singer is at the center
of the novel insofar as his attempted murder structures it, but he only appears
in a handful of the novel’s scenes and says a handful of lines. Although he
isn’t often physically present, many characters talk and think about him
throughout the novel (41 characters, to be exact); he is a highly connected
character in this way.
658 L. THOMAS
Such observations become more revealing, however, when we com-

pare the networks to one another. I call the method of comparison I intro-
duce here character co-occurrence.14 It describes the average weight of an
edge in a novel’s social network, or the average number of times any given
character name appears with another character name in a 1000-word slice
of the novel. It thus provides an indication of how often characters’ names
appear close to one another throughout the novel, or the frequency of
their co-occurrences. We can also think of this measurement as providing
an abstraction of the overall closeness between characters in a novel. While
“character co-occurrence” may sound like an overly technical way of talking
about closeness, what I mean to draw our attention to here is precisely the
proximity—whether physical, psychological, emotional, or textual—that
closeness implies. Table 37.2 lists the total number of words and characters
for each novel in the corpus, whether I’ve classified the novel as long, and the
values for the size, total strength, and character co-occurrence of the social
networks for each novel.15 The size column lists the total number of edges,
or links between nodes, of each graph; each edge in a graph is only counted
once, no matter its weight. This gives us the number of actual connections
for each graph. The total strength column lists the sum of the weight of each
edge in each graph (i.e., in a graph with three nodes, if the total weight of
all the edges for n1 = 4, n2 = 3, and n3 = 2, the total strength of the graph is
4 + 3 + 2, or 9). Finally, the character co-occurrence, or the average weight of
an edge in each graph, is derived by dividing the total strength of each graph
by its size.16
Focusing on the character co-occurrence column, we can see that A Brief
History of Seven Killings is an outlier when compared to the other long nov-
els in this small corpus (Infinite Jest, Cryptonomicon, and A Little Life). At
6.967, its character co-occurrence—the average weight of any edge in its
social network—is over three times as large as the same values for the other
novels I’ve classified as long. As an average value, however, this number is
somewhat misleading because it doesn’t give a good sense of the variation
Table 37.2 Social network metrics
Title Words Long novel Characters Size Total strength Character

co-occurrence
Infinite Jest 557,859 yes 138 972 1944 2

Cryptonomicon 402,383 yes 128 835 1670 2
A Little Life 305,713 yes 196 1930 3860 2
A Brief History 242,397 yes 76 424 2954 6.967
of Seven
Killings
The Intuitionist 84,546 no 35 223 1632 7.318
A Visit from the 78,090 no 57 291 1924 6.612
Goon Squad
between the nodes with the heaviest edges (lots of repeated connections) and
those with lighter edges (fewer repeated connections). As we might expect
of a social network model of a novel, there are a few nodes in the graph for
A Brief History with adjacent edges that have very high weights and many
more with adjacent edges that have very low weights. Figure 37.2 displays the
strength distribution for all of the nodes in the network with a total strength
greater than 10. The ten “heaviest” nodes—which themselves include a large
range of strengths, from Josey Wales (387) to Alex Pierce (84)—account for
61.18% of the total strength of the graph, and the five heaviest nodes account
for 42.86% of the total strength.
When we compare these values to those of other novels in the corpus and
adjust for the number of characters in each novel, we see that the distribution
of strength values among what we might call the main characters in A Brief
History’s social network is also unique. Figure 37.3 displays the total strength
for the heaviest 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes in each network; these nodes
represent those characters in each novel that are most connected to other
characters. The strength of the top seven nodes in the network for A Brief
Fig. 37.2 The strength of the adjacent edges for each node with a strength value
greater than 10 in the social network for A Brief History of Seven Killings
660 L. THOMAS
Fig. 37.3 Strength values for the top 10, 15, and 20% of the nodes in each network
History of Seven Killings, which constitute roughly 10% of its total number
of characters, is 51.56% of the network’s total strength; the strength of its
top 15% of characters (11 nodes) is 63.57% of the network’s total strength;
and the strength of its top 20% of characters (14 nodes) is 70.18% of its total
strength. As we can see in Fig. 37.3, no other network has such a high con-
centration of strength among its most heavily weighted nodes. This meas-
ure provides further information when interpreting the novel’s character
co-occurrence: not only do the characters in A Brief History of Seven Killings
have, on average, more repeated co-occurrences, but the main characters in
the novel have lots of repeated co-occurrences, more than other novels in the
sample set.
Discussion: Why Measure Character Co-occurrence?

While we cannot draw definite conclusions from this small experiment, it
does suggest character co-occurrence as a starting point for further analysis.
We might continue such analysis in at least two directions. The first involves
expanding the number of novels in the sample set by several orders of magni-
tude in order to achieve a more representative or meaningful sample of con-
temporary U.S. novels. While there are technical barriers to doing so, such
an expanded sample set would allow us to understand exactly how atypical A
Brief History of Seven Killings’s character co-occurrence value is.17 We could,
for instance, use correlation metrics—statistical tests for determining likely
degrees of relationship between two or more variables—to determine whether
and how the classification of a novel as long correlates with its total number
of characters, the size of its social network, the network’s total strength, and
its character co-occurrence. Computing such metrics for a large sample set
would help us better understand the relationship between novelistic length
and character co-occurrence. Do long novels generally have low character
co-occurrence values? If so, character co-occurrence may prove a useful “nar-
ratological building block,” to use Dennis Tenen’s vocabulary, for construct-
ing a computational model of novelistic length (2018, p. 123). Such a model
could also include other elements, including formal qualities such as word-
or page-length, number of characters, and measurements of the amounts of
“stuff” in a novel’s world, as well as social qualities such as common words
critics have used to describe the novels in the set and the literary prizes each
have won or for which they have been nominated.18 With such a model in
hand, we would be well-positioned to articulate an expanded concept of nov-
elistic length that we could test against many texts; we could discover, for
instance, if there are short novels that “behave” in certain ways like long nov-
els. More importantly, we would also potentially better understand the social
value of length in the context of the contemporary U.S. literary marketplace.
Are long novels, or novels identified as “long” in some way by our model,
more likely to be written by men? Are such novels written by men more likely
to be nominated for literary prizes? And are certain long novels more likely to
be described as “complex” or “difficult” than others, and if so, what might
this indicate about the meaning of such evaluative terms? Answering such
questions would help us develop a concept of length, a seemingly straightfor-
ward fact about a novel, that is instead, like the concept of genre, both formal
and social, both intrinsic to a literary work itself and an index of a sociological
phenomenon.
While the direction for future research described above uses social n etwork
analysis as a building block in constructing a larger computational model
of novelistic length, a second direction would encourage us to connect the
quantitative metrics derived from social networks of novels to the experience
of reading these novels. For example, this direction would take the poten-
tial uniqueness of A Brief History of Seven Killings’s character co-occurrence
value as its starting point to ask how this metric might relate to the novel
itself. If A Brief History is, because of its high character co-occurrence,
unusually concerned with closeness, how is this reflected in the novel?
By way of conclusion, I offer a brief example in answer to this question.
As discussed earlier, the chapters in A Brief History of Seven Killings are each
told from the first-person perspective of a specific character. On the whole,
the novel is concerned with how the past haunts the present.19 Because each
chapter is narrated from the first-person perspective of its central charac-
ter, the past is often felt in this novel as a live presence, one that is, more
often than not, embodied by this character themselves or by the other
characters the central character in each chapter encounters or remembers.
662 L. THOMAS
This haunting happens literally in the novel through the character of Sir
Arthur George Jennings, an actual ghost of Jamaica’s white colonial past
who appears to some characters throughout the novel before they die.
Another character, Dorcas Palmer, attempts to evade this closeness of the
past by outrunning it. Dorcas—the name is an allusion to Toni Morrison’s
Jazz (1992), another novel that occupies the perspectives of many different
characters and that is concerned with how the past haunts the present—is the
second pseudonym Nina Burgess, a witness to the Singer’s attempted mur-
der, takes on when, fearing for her life, she emigrates to the United States.
In section four, “White Lines/Kids in America,” which takes place in 1985,
Dorcas is working in New York City as an in-home caregiver. She is hired to
take care of Ken, a man who suffers from short-term memory loss and who
can’t remember more than a few hours at a time. No one tells Dorcas Ken
has this condition when she shows up for her first day on the job, and so
Dorcas agrees to follow Ken when he suggests leaving the house, and they
travel from his home in Manhattan to hers in the Bronx. Their journey takes
them through progressively smaller and more intimate spaces, from the spa-
ciousness of Ken’s Park Avenue apartment with its fake “slave-era furniture,”
to the crowded space of the train where “none of the groups [on the train]
could resist looking at us,” and finally to Dorcas’s living room where they
share a drink and listen to records (James 2014, pp. 504, 505). There, sur-
rounded by her many books, they have a surprisingly personal conversation,
one in which Dorcas responds to Ken’s repeated cajoling to tell him about
herself by revealing that Dorcas is not her real name. She tells him how she
has assumed the identity of someone who was hit by a car in 1979, a feat she
was able to pull off because she had “a story long enough and boring enough
that they will do anything just to get you out of the line [at the social services
office]” (James 2014, p. 560). After Dorcas reveals this fact to Ken, he begins
to forget where he is and who she is. He goes into her bathroom, a smaller
space still, and starts to panic, and she calls his family. They finally explain his
condition to her, and while they offer to tell her agency to assign her to a
different client, she agrees to continue taking care of Ken precisely because of
his condition—because he won’t ever be able to remember her.
What are we to make of this strange interaction between Dorcas and Ken?
There are many moments throughout the afternoon we spend with them
in which Dorcas questions why she so easily gets along with Ken, a wealthy
white American who, as she puts it, instantly acts too “familiar” with her, but
who she nevertheless invites inside her apartment. She is especially surprised
with herself because she has always maintained that she isn’t “like all these
people he watch on Donahue. All these people with their private business that
they dying to tell thirteen million people” (James 2014, pp. 557, 558). Yet
she does reveal her “private business” to him. In fact, Ken is the only person
to whom we see Dorcas, or Kim before her, or Millicent later, reveal that she
is living under an assumed name. He can do what she wishes she, and the rest
of the world, could: forget her past. This is what attracts Dorcas to the job
and what allows for the intimacy between them.
This fleeting intimacy is just one of the many models of closeness the
novel offers, almost all of which fail or fade or end (or begin, for that matter)
in violence. Not only do we spend pages and pages within the heads, as it
were, of the characters who narrate the book’s chapters, but these characters
also spend a lot of time thinking about, talking to, having sex with, joking
with, eating with, taking care of, walking with, driving with, and commit-
ting violence with and to one another. Much of the novel’s plot, for exam-
ple, involves following the seven men involved in the attempted murder of
the Singer as they are then murdered in turn; the plot only advances in these
sections through intimate scenes of violence, when one character murders
another. For all of its sprawl, James’s novel is surprisingly intimate in that its
characters spend a lot of time in close physical, psychological, or emotional
proximity to one another. In this way, the novel’s unusually high character
co-occurrence value provides an occasion for considering the role of close-
ness more closely. The feeling of closeness many characters experience in the
novel is one of claustrophobia, of a too-closeness to other people, to our
past, to ourselves—but it’s also one of the desire for such closeness, at any
cost. Intimacy, James demonstrates, is about repetition. The novel, like the
measure of character co-occurrence I have explored here, models a variety of
intimacy that maps not onto the depth of connection but onto iteration: the
repetition of proximity, the return of trauma, the tendency of characters to
haunt one another other as they haunt the same 1000 words.
Notes
1. For a comprehensive bibliography of works that turn to the network to analyze
texts of all kinds, see Jagoda (2017).
2. See Jagoda (2016), especially the introduction, “Network Aesthetics,” Ngai
(2012), and Beal (2012).
3. For a concise summary of the development of network science in the latter half
of the twentieth century, see the introduction to Jagoda (2016). The associa-
tion between networks and complexity also holds for those studies that use the
term “network” or “network novel” to analyze long novels. Jessica Pressman,
for example, calls House of Leaves “substantial” and “complex” (2006, p. 107).
Jagoda argues maximalist novels like Cryptonomicon and Underworld “animate
complexity in order to both enable and limit knowledge” (2016, p. 44), and
Caroline Levine emphasizes that Bleak House is “a novel that casts social rela-
tions as a complex heaping of networks” (2015, p. 115).
4. While discussion of the length of novels, and long novels in particular, is in
many ways foundational to studies of the novel, critics have tended to focus on
the experience of temporality or duration that reading lengthy novels affords
while taking the fact that they are long for granted. See, for example, Lukács
(1920), Genette (1979), and more recently, Dames (2007), Zemka (2012),
and Thomas (2016). Critics have also emphasized the size and scale of long
novels: see Mendelson (1976), Ercolino (2014), and Jagoda (2016).
664 L. THOMAS
5. Two well-known works on quantification and objectivity from the history of

science are Porter (1996), Daston and Galison (2007). For more recent work
on quantification from literary, cultural, and media studies, see Wilson (2016),
Johnson (2018), and Wernimont (2018).
6. For a recent argument against the use of quantitative (or at least statistical)
methods in literary studies on these terms, see Da (2019).
7. For more on this software see Luczak-Roesch et al. (2018).
8. In many disciplines, a “toy problem” or “toy model” is a simplified problem or
physical model used to illustrate a particular component of a larger complex
system or series of tasks. Researchers in artificial intelligence, for example, have
used chess as a toy problem for teaching algorithms to learn different kinds of
problem-solving and decision-making skills.
9. For an example of work that uses social network analysis to examine a large
number of texts, see So and Long (2013).
10. This list can include character nicknames or alternate names. For example,
the character who goes by Doctor Love in A Brief History is also called Luis
Hernán Rodrigo de las Casas or just Luis. All of these names can be associated
with one another so that they are all counted as Doctor Love.
11. The code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/vuw-sim-stia/
lit-cascades.
12. I used ready-made character lists for Infinite Jest, A Visit from the Goon Squad,
and A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I then cross-referenced with the
text of each novel and edited to include missing characters, character nick-
names, and alternate names (I found complete character lists for Infinite Jest
and Goon Squad online, and A Brief History includes a “cast of characters” at
the beginning of the novel). I was not able to find complete character lists
for The Intuitionist, Cryptonomicon, or A Little Life. For these novels, I used
Stanford’s Named Entity Recognizer (NER) to capture all of the proper names
in each novel; I then cross-referenced these lists of people with the text of
each novel, deleting names who I decided not to include as characters (his-
torical figures who did not participate in the narrative or action of the plot,
for example, or errors that the NER package had made), and combining and
customizing some names on the list to include character nicknames and alter-
nate names. See https://github.com/lcthomas/network-analysis-novels for
this code. The software is also designed, however, to run in an unsupervised
way, without a pre-defined list of characters, although capturing networks of
characters specifically would still be difficult. For more on using the software in
an unsupervised fashion, see Luczak-Roesch et al. (2018).
13. For a method of extracting social networks from novels that uses “character
interaction” as its metric, see Elson et al. (2010).
14. Dennis Tenen has referred to such metrics as “narratological prime[s],” or
“foundational building block[s]” we can use in building models of complex
literary phenomena like length (2018, p. 123).
15. “Size,” and “strength” are standard metrics in social network analysis; “char-
acter co-occurrence,” as discussed above, is my own addition. See https://
github.com/lcthomas/modeling-long-novels for the code I used to apply
these metrics and create the following tables and figures.
16. Character co-occurrence is similar to the density of a network, a standard met-

ric in network analysis, but with one important difference. The density of a
network describes the ratio of its actual connections (the size of the network)
to its potential connections, or how many links between nodes there could
possibly be. Density, in other words, gives us a sense of how many connections
exist between nodes compared to how many such connections could exist if
every node were connected to every other node. It doesn’t account for the
frequency of connection, however, which is what the character co-occurrence
value, as the average weight of each edge, measures.
17. Beyond securing tractable datasets of contemporary novels, the laborious pro-
cess of creating character lists to use as input for Luczak-Roesch et al’s soft-
ware is the main impediment to scaling up this method for producing social
networks of novels. There are automated ways of extracting character networks
from literary texts, however. For a comprehensive survey of many of these
methods and recommendations on the most promising methods, see Labatut
and Bost (2019).
18. See Tenen (2018) for a discussion of how to measure the comparative density
of fictional space and the stuff in it.
19. For more on the novel’s hauntology and how it depicts the effects of violence
and trauma especially, see Harrison (2017), and Walonen (2018). For more on
the novel’s interest in how past trauma informs the present, and in surviving
this trauma, see Adams (2018).
Bibliography
Adams, Caryn Rae. 2018. Uncomfortable Truths: Lifewriting, Trauma and Survivance
in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings (For Isabel Grosvenor). Journal
of West Indian Literature 26: 96–109.
Armstrong, Nancy, and Leonard Tennenhouse. 2015. The Network Novel and How
It Unsettled Domestic Fiction. In A Companion to the English Novel, ed. Stephen
Arata, Madigan Haley, Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke, 306–20. Malden, MA:
Wiley.
Beal, Wesley. 2012. The Form and Politics of Networks in Jean Toomer’s Cane.
American Literary History 24: 658–79. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajs043.
Brandes, Ulrik, Garry Robins, Ann McCranie, and Stanley Wasserman. 2013. What
Is Network Science? Network Science 1: 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1017/
nws.2013.2.
Da, Nan Z. 2019. The Computational Case Against Computational Literary Studies.
Critical Inquiry 45: 601–39. https://doi.org/10.1086/702594.
Dames, Nicholas. 2007. The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the
Form of Victorian Fiction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. 2007. Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books.
Elson, David, Nicholas Dames, and Kathleen McKeown. 2010. Extracting Social
Networks from Literary Fiction. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics, 138–47. Uppsala, Sweden: Association
for Computational Linguistics. http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P10-1015.
666 L. THOMAS
Ercolino, Stefano. 2014. The Maximalist Novel: From Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbox to Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, trans. Albert Sbragia. New York, NY:
Bloomsbury Academic.
Gallagher, Catherine. 2000. Formalism and Time. Modern Language Quarterly 61:
229–51. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-61-1-229.
Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. 2007. The Exploit: A Theory of
Networks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Genette, Gérard. 1979 [2002]. Order, Duration, and Frequency. In Narrative
Dynamics: Essays on Time, Plot, Closure, and Frames, ed. Brian Richardson, 25–34.
Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Harrison, Sheri-Marie. 2017. Global Sisyphus: Rereading the Jamaican 1960s
Through A Brief History of Seven Killings. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of
Criticism 21: 85–97. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-4272013.
Jagoda, Patrick. 2016. Network Aesthetics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2017. Networks in Literature and Media. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia
of Literature, ed. Paula Rabinowitz. Oxford University Press. https://doi.
org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.135.
James, Marlon. 2014. A Brief History of Seven Killings. New York, NY: Riverhead
Books.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. 2018. Markup BodiesBlack [Life] Studies and Slavery
[Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads. Social Text 36: 57–79. https://doi.
org/10.1215/01642472-7145658.
Labatut, Vincent, and Xavier Bost. 2019. Extraction and Analysis of Fictional
Character Networks: A Survey. ACM Computing Surveys 52. https://doi.
org/10.1145/3344548.
Levine, Caroline. 2015. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Luczak-Roesch, Markus, Adam Grener, and Emma Fenton. 2018. Not-so-Distant
Reading: A Dynamic Network Approach to Literature. IT—Information Technology
60: 29–40. https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2017-0023.
Lukács, Georg. 1920 [1971]. The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock.
Mendelson, Edward. 1976. Encyclopedic Narrative: From Dante to Pynchon. MLN
91: 1267–75. https://doi.org/10.2307/2907136.
Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Network Aesthetics: Juliana Spahr’s the Transformation and
Bruno Latour’s Reassembling the Social. In American Literature’s Aesthetic
Dimensions, ed. Cindy Weinstein and Christopher Looby, 367–92. New York, NY:
Columbia University Press.
Porter, Theodore M. 1996. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and
Public Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pressman, Jessica. 2006. House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel. Studies in
American Fiction 34: 107–28.
So, Richard Jean, and Hoyt Long. 2013. Network Analysis and the Sociology of
Modernism. Boundary 2 (40): 147–82. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-
2151839.
Tenen, Dennis Yi. 2018. Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space.
New Literary History 49: 119–47. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2018.0005.
Thomas, Lindsay. 2016. Forms of Duration: Preparedness, the Mars Trilogy, and the
Management of Climate Change. American Literature 88: 159–84.
Walonen, Michael K. 2018. Violence, Diasporic Transnationalism, and Neo-Imperialism
in A Brief History of Seven Killings. Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22:
1–12. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-7249076.
Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2018. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media.
Wilson, Sarah. 2016. Black Folk by the Numbers: Quantification in Du Bois.
American Literary History 28: 27–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/alh/ajv062.
Zemka, Sue. 2012. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Correction to: Writing the Elements at the End
of the World: Varlam Shalamov and Primo Levi
Anindita Banerjee
Correction to:
Chapter 3 in: N. Ahuja et al. (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth
and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science, Palgrave Handbooks
of Literature and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_3
The original version of Chapter 3 was inadvertently published without the

incorporation of a third note in page 53. This has now been updated with the
changes.
The updated version of this chapter can be found at

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_3
© The Author(s) 2022 C1

Index
0-9 affect studies, 155

1984 (novel), 123, 263 affordances, 196, 215, 245
“Afrofuturist”, 571
African descent, 408
A Agamben, Giorgio, 53, 132, 435
abstract, 408 Agnew, Lois, 499
abstraction, 84, 89, 92, 451, 464 agricultural market, 384
abstraction (modes of), 99, 104, 106, Ahmed, Sara, 486, 490
107 AI assistants, 411
abstract value, 452 Alaimo, Stacey, 157, 486
addiction, 415, 418 Aldiss, Brian, 472, 475
Adorno, Theodor, 50, 560, 562, Aldrin, Buzz, 36, 39
572–574 allegory/allegorical, 133, 134, 137, 140,
advertise, 417 299, 300, 442, 451, 459, 460
advertisements, 37, 38, 417 Allen, Grant, 332, 437–439, 441
advertiser, 40 alternative energy, 473
advertising, 38, 387 ambiguity, 278, 423, 430
advertising dollars, 386 ambiguous, 100, 107, 108
aesthetics, 81, 87, 89–91, 248, 250, 267, American Eugenics Society, 515
278, 349, 437–439, 441, 443, 445 American Social Science Association, 192
aesthetic sphere, 284 Anatomic, 89
aesthetic tradition, 30 Anders, William, 42
aesthetic values, 528 androids, 125
aesthetic vision, 268 animal studies, 156, 158
affect/affective, 89, 92, 210, 214–216, Annihilation, 486, 487
245, 250–254, 383, 397, 423, 487, Anthropocene, 50, 51, 53, 60, 80, 105,
621, 623, 624, 627, 631 450, 455, 459, 470
affective labor, 621–624 anthropology, 81, 82, 158, 185
affective space, 310 antibiotics, 617
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 669
to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
and Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2
670 Index
antimicrobial resistance (AMR)/antibiot- Baudrillard, Jean, 420, 628

ics, 597–610, 613–616 Beatty, Paul, 124
apocalypse, 311, 314 Beckett, Samuel, 284
apocalyptic, 570 Beddoe, John, 545
Apollo, 32, 36, 40 before BiteLabs, 376
Apollo 11, 31, 32, 36–38, 40, 42 Begg, Proudfoot, 437, 438
Apollo Amerika, 32, 37–39 behaviorism, 117–126
Apollovision, 37, 39 behaviorist conditioning, 117, 123
Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 567 logical behaviorism, 117, 125
Arendt, Hannah, 60, 122, 131, 623 neobehaviorism, 119
Arista, Noelani, 390 programmability of behavior, 117, 125
Armstrong, Neil, 36, 39 radical behaviorism, 119
Armstrong, Tim, 121, 125 Bellamy, Brent, 87
Arnold, Matthew, 163, 167 Beloved, 120
Around the Moon, 34, 35 Benjamin, Walter, 54
Arrival (film), 263 Bentley, Nancy, 569
artificial intelligence (AI), 107, 125, 294, Benwell, Bethan, 252, 258
390, 455–459, 464, 622, 626 Bergson, Henri, 119, 564
artificial labourer, 411 Berlant, Lauren, 129, 572
artificial meat, 377 Bernes, Jasper, 293
artificial wombs, 403 Bezos, Jeff, 227
Asimov, Isaac, 125, 470, 629, 634 Bhopal, 157
atomic, 49 Binet, Alfred, 566
atomic bomb, 366, 451 bioart, 376
Atomic Dreams (comic), 586, 589, 591 biocapitalism, 135, 359, 384–386, 388
atomistic eating imaginary, 381 bioeconomy, 378, 381
Atwood, Margaret, 158, 376, 377, 380, bioinformatic, 154, 354, 357, 359
381, 387, 412, 450 biological bodies, 410
Auschwitz, 48–51, 55, 60 biological classification, 376
automation, 320 biological labour, 399
automatism, 125 biological materials, 399–401
Autonomous, 398, 412 biological matter, 400, 403, 405
autopathographies, 156 biological sciences, 285, 289, 544
biological subject, 405
biological thing, 403
B biologists, 390
Babel-17 (novel), 264, 269, 273–279 biologization, 386
Bacigalupi, Paolo, 398 biology/biological, 145–147, 149, 153–
Back of the Turtle, 412 155, 164, 168, 270, 283, 287–290,
bacteria, 313, 314, 598, 601, 607, 608, 294, 296–298, 314, 347, 351, 377,
613, 617 380, 381, 387, 400, 401, 434–436,
Barad, Karen, 53 440, 442, 445, 446, 484, 488, 532,
bare life, 132, 435, 436 607, 608
Barrow, John, 146 biomedical, 156, 346, 349, 355, 357, 359,
Barry, Lynda, 130, 138–140 402, 497, 598, 600, 606, 616, 617
Barthes, Roland, 100 biomedical anti-interiority, 415,
Basu, Kunal, 543, 550–554 416, 418, 419, 421, 422, 424,
Bates, Samuel, 550, 552 426–429
Index 671
biomedical gaze, 349, 359 Bould, Mark, 263, 264, 269

biomedical industry, 211, 402 boundary, 483, 485–488, 490, 492
biomedical regimes, 405 Boyer, Dominic, 82
biomedical research, 203 Boym, Svetlana, 50, 51
biomedical science, 201 Bragg, Benjamin, 146
biomedical therapy, 399 Brain, Tega, 108
biomedicine, 599 Brave New World, 122
bionics, 289 A Brief History of Seven Killings, 655,
biophilanthropy, 437, 446 657–661
biopolitics/biopolitical, 129–138, 140, Brin, David, 233, 234
141, 350, 357, 378, 381, 384, 435, Brin, Sergey, 376, 378, 386, 387
437, 439, 442–446, 568, 569, 600, British Romanticism, 530, 531
609, 612 Broderick, Damian, 247, 248, 250, 252,
biopower, 130, 133, 136, 137, 140, 257
434–436, 444–446, 568, 612 Brooks, Cleanth, 119
biosocial, 293 Brown, Adrienne Maree, 225, 236, 258
biotech, 386–388, 411 Brown, Kate, 58
biotech industries, 399 Buckley, Kerry F., 118, 121
biotechnical process, 399 Bulnes, José María, 285, 286
biotechnological age, 384 Burgess, Anthony, 123, 124
biotechnological innovation, 378, 380 Burke, Kenneth, 333, 338
biotechnological issues, 409 Burn, Stephen J., 424, 425, 431
biotechnological models, 381 Burri, Regula Valérie, 156
biotechnological practice, 401, 405 Burtynsky, Edward, 63, 64
biotechnological speculation, 375 Butler, Octavia E., 249, 255, 456
biotechnology, 224, 347, 398, 404, 405,
407, 410, 411
and commodification of biology, 406, C
407, 411 Cacho, Lisa, 131–133
biotech sci-fi, 150 Calvino, Italo, 31, 36, 87
biotech start-up, 375 Canaday, John, 364
BiteLabs, 375–377, 381, 384–387 cancer, 266, 345, 346, 416, 417,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 122 496–506
Black Reconstruction in America, 568 Cane, 653
Bladerunner (film), 410 Canguilhem, Georges, 289, 297
Bleak House, 653 Čapek, Karel, 410, 411
Bloch, Felix, 365 capitalism, 79, 82, 83, 88, 91, 102, 113,
blogs, 254 114, 153, 249, 386, 387, 399, 407,
Blom, Ina, 40 410, 452, 459, 466, 472, 495, 502,
Blumenberg, Hans, 41, 42 504, 506, 621, 623, 627, 633
Boas, Franz, 565 capitalist production, 378
Bohr, Niels, 335–340, 363–365, 368, Carey, Peter, 542
369, 371 Cariou, Warren, 68
BookTube videos, 254 Carpenter, Leonard, 475–479
border, 130, 317, 357, 404, 489–491, Carson, John, 562
493 Carson, Rachel, 312, 314
border war, 623 Cartesian, 52
Borman, Frank, 41 Cartesian humanity, 56
Bosselman, Beulah Chamberlain, 135 Caruth, Cathy, 49
672 Index
Cassirer, Ernst, 327–329 climate fiction, 80

Cat’s Cradle, 608 A Clockwork Orange (novel), 123, 124
celebrity-as-commodity, 386 Clough, Patricia, 295
celebrity meat, 381, 384, 385, 387 Clynes, Manfred E., 290
Césaire, Aimé, 389, 391 cognition, 51, 52, 60. See also poznanie
Chadwick, James, 364 cognitive, 511
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 47 cognitive estrangement, 249, 257, 600,
Chambers, Becky, 256 609, 616
character co-occurrence, 655, 658, 660, cognitive science, 119, 284, 418
661 Cold War, 39, 278, 309, 311, 470, 471,
charity organization society (COS), 192 474, 525
Charnock, Anna, 398 Collis, Stephen, 87
Charnock, Anne, 412 colonial, 381
chattel slavery, 406, 407, 409 colonization, 390
chemical regimes, 381 comics, 597, 599, 602, 609
Chen, Mel, 383 commercialize, 426
Chen-Morris, Raz, 41 commodification of biology, 407, 411
Chernobyl, 47–50, 60, 157 commodity chain, 385
ChickieNobs, 376, 380 commodity citizen, 384
China, 230, 541, 621, 622, 624, 625, commodity value, 385
627, 628, 630, 631, 634, 635, complementarity, 335, 338
639–643, 645 computation, computational, 97, 105,
Chinese, 30, 621, 622, 624–626, 631, 272, 288, 289
634, 635 computer science, 154, 155, 284, 296
Chinese civilization, 630 computing, 97, 100, 108, 109
Chomsky, Noam, 119, 270 Concordia University Initiative for
Churchill, Winston, 376, 377, 380, 381 Indigenous Futures, 390
Cities of Salt (novel), 66 Connelly, William E., 294
civilization, 136, 434, 437, 439, 442, Connor, Steven, 310
443 Conrad, Joseph, 319
Clare, Ralph, 421, 495 consumer, consumerism, 205, 207, 346–
Clarke, Bruce, 294, 296 348, 356, 375, 384, 392, 403, 405,
Clasen, Mathias, 313 406, 409, 416–419, 421, 424–427,
cli-fi, 450 439, 442, 504
climate, 47, 48, 50, 60, 459 consumer cannibal, 385
climate apathy, 463 consumption, 377, 386
climate calamity, 451 contemporary poetics, 529
climate catastrophes, 450 contemporary scientific findings, 551
climate change, 53, 86, 91, 94, 229, Cooper, Melinda, 399, 403, 409
235, 387, 391, 411, 449, 451, 452, corporate anthropology, 84
454, 466, 470, 472, 478, 479 corporate power, 497
climate destruction, 455 corporation, corporate, 40, 79, 87, 400,
global warming, 80 403, 406, 407, 411, 428, 453,
climate chaos, 450 504–506
climate collapse, 255 Cottrell, Fred, 82, 83
climate denialism, 451, 460, 461 Count Zero, 249
climate disaster, 459 “Covehithe”, 471, 476, 479–481
climate emergency, 459 creations of synthetic biology, 410
Index 673
Cressy, David, 33, 43 de Certeau, Michel, 253, 258

Crichton, Michael, 257, 309, 312, de Cervantes, Miguel, 285, 288, 289,
314–316, 319 292, 298–300
Crick, Francis, 295 Deepwater Horizon, 485
Cruddy, 130, 136, 138, 140, 141 degeneration, 288, 357
cruel optimism, 451, 463, 464 degradation, 383
cryptography, 289 de Kruif, Paul, 513, 517, 520, 521
Cryptonomicon, 653, 655, 657, 658 Delany, Samuel R., 250, 263, 264, 273,
Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan, 243, 246, 247, 274, 276–279
597, 599 Delbrück, Max, 363
Cultural Revolution, 625, 635 Deléage, Jean-Paul, 83
cultural studies, 93, 152, 155, 245, 252, Deleuze, Gilles, 29
253 DeLillo, Don, 412, 415, 419, 420, 422,
cultured beef, 381 430, 653
cultured meat, 376, 378, 380, 381, 385, Democracy and Education, 566
387 Denis, Vincent, 227, 231, 232
cybernetic biology, 293 Derrida, Jacques, 54, 158
cybernetic discourses, 288 Descartes, René, 51, 290
cybernetic ferment, 289 “Descent of Man”, 163, 164, 175, 176
cybernetic metaphors, 288 design network, 387
cybernetics, 284, 287–296 Deutsch, Karl, 288
cybernetic science, 293 Dewey, John, 184, 438, 566
cyborg, 287, 290 Diamanti, Jeff, 90, 91
“Cyborg—Frees Man to Explore”, 290 Dibbell, Carola, 398, 401
“Cyborgs and Space”, 290 Dickens, Charles, 653
Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Dickinson, Adam, 88, 89
Materials, 88, 476 digital, 101, 108, 109, 114
digital humanities, 154, 155
digitalization, 104, 105
D digitalized information, 101
Dakota Access Pipeline, 79 Dirac, Paul, 365, 371
Damasio, Antonio, 155 disease, 149–151, 156, 204, 205, 211,
Danielewski, Mark Z., 653 213, 218, 273, 345–347, 357, 392,
Dao de jing, 630 421, 426, 428, 431, 543, 598, 601,
Daoist, 630, 635 604, 609, 612, 614, 615, 639
Darkwater, 565 “Disembodied Cuisine”, 377, 378
Darwin, Charles, 164–166, 168, 170, DNA, 213, 294, 296, 356, 402, 407,
175, 176, 436, 445 410, 411, 445, 455, 456, 541
Darwin, Erasmus, 145 Doctor Faustus, 365
Daston, Lorraine, 101, 118, 224, 310 Doctor Salt, 430
Davenport, Charles, 153, 564, 567, 568 Donovan, Gerard, 430
Davies, Paul, 316 Don Quixote de la Mancha, 285
Davies, Will, 419 Don Quixote (novel), 285–288, 292,
death, 130–136, 138, 140, 141, 383, 298–300
416, 422, 423, 431, 460, 462, 633 Dorr, Gregory Michael, 566, 567
death and dying, 129, 345, 346, 348, Dowling, Linda, 170–172
354–356, 359 Dreams Before the Start of Time, 398, 412
Debeir, Jean-Claude, 83 Dreamscapes of Modernity, 246, 397
674 Index
Drexler, Eric, 151 Elkins, Charles, 221, 223

drugs, drug use, 211, 347, 355, 380, Ellison, Ralph, 293
415–419, 421–429, 431 empirical, 417, 431
Dr. Zhivago, 52 empiricism, 34, 41, 149, 183, 184, 186,
DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 328, 330
of Mental Disorders), 135, 416 energy, 49, 52, 54, 57–59, 79–94, 450,
Du Bois, W.E.B., 433, 444, 559–574 469–471, 473, 535, 537
Dufresne, David, 68 atomic, 58
Dugas, Gaetan, 151 Energiewende (energy transition), 79
Dumit, Joseph, 156 energy determinism, 92
dying, 500 energy humanities, 80–85, 87, 90, 93,
dynamics of knowing, 389 472
dystopia, 121–123, 125, 376, 400, 401, energy infrastructures, superstructures,
405 and systems, 81–83, 90, 469, 470,
dystopian literature, 117 472, 474, 480, 481
“energy literature”, 84
energy periodization, 90, 91
E renewable energy, 79
Earle, John, 166 “Energy and the Evolution of Culture”,
Earthrise, 41 82
Ebola virus, 317, 319, 320 English, Daylanne, 564
ecofeminist politics, 291 English (discipline), 163, 355
ecological degradation, 388 English departments, 163, 167, 169
ecology/ecological, 109, 356, 450, English Passengers, 542–544, 547,
452–455, 461–464, 489, 491, 492 549–551, 554, 555
economically precarious, 401 Enlightenment, 133, 387, 390, 391,
economic hardships, 401 527, 548, 565, 569, 573, 574
economic hierarchies, 401 enslave, 406, 442
economic language, 407 enslaved women, 410
economic process, 385 enslavement, 390, 408, 409
economics, 465 “Entropy” (short story), 91, 92
economic system, 377, 401 environment, 47, 48, 55, 157, 290, 291,
economic value, 388 293, 295, 297, 376, 378, 388, 436,
economies of flesh, 386 440, 441, 445
economy/economic, 132–135, 137, environmental activism and politics, 255,
138, 140, 347, 350, 354–356, 359, 375, 477. See also environmental
386, 388, 451–455, 462–464, 469, racism
473, 474, 477, 479, 481 environmental carelessness, 496
economy of precarity, 400 environmental causes, 496, 500, 503
ecopoetics, 526, 537 environmental collapse, 312
ecosystems, 450, 454, 505 environmental concerns, 312
Eco, Umberto, 292 environmental devastation, 392, 457
Edelman, Lee, 129 environmental effects, 477
Egan, Jennifer, 653, 655 environmental elements, 497
Ehrenfest, Paul, 365, 368 environmental harms, 381
Einstein, Albert, 264, 329, 333, 365, environmental humanities, 153, 157
369, 371 environmental impact, 478
element, 60 environmentalists, 312
Eliot, T.S., 293, 334 environmentally friendly, 375
Index 675
environmental media, 157 Farland, Maria, 563

environmental problem, 378 Farrell, J.G., 542
environmental protection, 388 Faulkner, William, 433
environmental protest, 477 Faulk, Sebastian, 155
environmental racism, 255 Faust, 365, 368, 371, 372
environmental sciences, 157 Faye, Jan, 336, 338
environmental studies, 156–158 February (novel), 67, 68
environmental systems, 287 Febvre, Lucien, 310
environmental unsustainability, 376 feeling, 35, 129, 135, 138–140, 330–
epidemic, 151, 309, 311, 317, 500, 502, 332, 334, 345, 353, 354, 423, 439,
503 441, 445, 528
epidemiology, 151 Felski, Rita, 195, 244, 251, 253, 257,
Eshun, Kodwo, 571 258
Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917-18, feminism, 248, 252, 256, 293, 376, 521
515 ecofemism, ecofeminist, 291
Ethan Frome, 130, 136, 139–141 feminist sci-fi, 147
ethical biocapital, 378 feminist theory, 157
ethico-aesthetic, 378 feminist writing, 542
ethnographers, 158 Fenton, Emma, 655
ethnographic, 252, 253 Ferber, Michael, 33
ethnography, 402. See also ethnographic Fetter-Vorm, Jonathan, 586–589
ethological cybernetics, 289 Feynman, Richard, 152
Etkind, Alexander, 54 film, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 418, 450, 621,
eugenic ideas, 541 622, 625–627, 630–635
eugenics, 132, 136, 355, 357, 433–435, Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 284
437, 439–446, 463, 560, 561, 565, Flamethrowers, 84
567 Flatley, Jonathan, 568
eugenic aesthetics, 434, 435, 442, Fleck, Ludwig, 149, 150
443, 445 Flexner, Abraham, 192
eugenic thought, 549 Flusser, Vilém, 101, 111–113
everyware, 104 Food and Drug Administration (FDA),
evolution/evolutionary, 82, 89, 149, 417, 428
155, 158, 164, 165, 167, 168, Fort McMoney (film), 68
173–175, 287, 297, 298, 358, 434, Fortun, Mike, 347, 350
436–439, 441, 444, 445, 521 Fortune’s Pawn (novel), 258
Lamarckian, 434, 436–444 Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power
evolutionary science, 163–165, 170, 173 and the Roots of Global Warming,
exodus, 131, 133, 140 83, 84
experimental economies of technosci- fossil fuel, 79, 83–94, 449, 450, 477,
ence, 376 478
experimental systems in sciences, 376 fossil economy, 83
exploitation of imprisoned laborers, 406 “fossil fuel fiction”, 80
extinction, 136, 451, 460 oil, 79, 478
extractivism, 105, 109 petroleum, 80, 91, 471
Foucault, Michel, 29, 129, 130, 133,
135, 136, 140, 141, 150, 277, 292,
F 298–300, 434, 435, 446, 600, 612
Facebook, 254, 258 Frankenheimer, John, 123, 124
Fallout (comic), 582–585, 592 Frankenstein, 145–148, 246, 277
676 Index
Franklin, Sarah, 150, 153, 378, 380 epigenetics, 445, 446

Franzen, Jonathan, 415, 419, 430 genetic engineering, 380, 398
Freedman, Carl, 249 genome, 347
Freudenthal, Elizabeth, 415, 416, 419 Mendelian, 434, 439–445, 564, 567
Freud, Sigmund, 118, 119, 277, 572, Genette, Gérard, 456, 465
622 genocide, 136, 354, 355, 357
From the Earth to the Moon, 34, 35 genome, 404
Fugitive Science, 563 genre/genus, 376, 391
fugitive slaves, 406 genre, 31, 80, 86–88, 93, 134, 138, 243,
Fuller, Danielle, 252, 256, 257 244, 246–256, 389, 429, 437, 442,
“future-generating machines”, 376 444, 450, 459, 561, 563, 570–573,
futurism, futuristic, 222, 223, 291 626, 634
genre of the human, 383, 386
genres/mythoi, 391
G genres of fiction, 389
Gaedtke, Andrew, 121 genres of life, 384
Gal, Ofer, 41 genres of speculation, 377
Galatea 2.2, 429 genres of speculative art, 376
Galilei, Galileo, 41, 43, 458 genres of the life and knowledge, 392
Galison, Peter, 101, 118, 224, 310 genres of thought, 377
Gallagher, Catherine, 654 genre-specific narrative of the human,
Galloway, Alexander, 102, 103, 154, 391
155, 288 geological, 146
Galton, Francis, 433, 434, 439, 560, geontopower, 59
561, 566, 573 German Romanticism, 530
Galvani, Luigi, 145 Ghosh, Amitav, 51, 81, 85–89
Gamow, George, 364, 368, 372 Gibbs, Josiah Willard, 525, 528, 529,
Gang, Joshua, 119, 126 532
Gaskill, Nicholas, 438, 441 Gibson, James J., 196
Gassner, John, 512, 519 Gibson, William, 229, 249
Gates, David, 424 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 433, 441–444
Gaussian distribution, 566 Gilroy, Paul, 569
gender, 34, 86, 131, 134, 141, 151, 252, Glad, John, 51
255, 256, 258, 376, 382, 399, 402, Glaspell, Susan, 511, 521
456, 521, 544, 553, 622, 623, 628, Gliddon, George Robert, 545
631 Glissant, Edouard, 111
gendered approach, 386 global extractive, 381
gendered bodies/populations, 132, 541 global food shortages, 387
gendered structures, 386 global health, 309
gendered subjects, 383 globalise, 247
gendered violence, 384 globalization, 409, 416, 622, 631
Generosity: An Enhancement, 429, 430 globalized trade, 409
genetic identity, 401, 410 global medical market, 384
genetic privacy, 217 Global North & Global South, 89, 90,
genetics, 217, 270, 346, 347, 350–352, 320, 401, 403, 406
356, 389, 401, 402, 404, 426, global pharmacy, 398, 412
439–441, 443, 445, 457, 541, 543, global warming, 80, 86, 90–92, 452, 455
549–551, 554 Glynn, Alan, 430
Index 677
Gobineau, Arthur de, 164, 545 hemorrhagic diseases, 310, 316

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 31, 33, hemorrhagic illnesses, 320
34, 36, 40, 43 hemorrhagic viruses, 316
Goffman, Erving, 120 Heng, Rachel, 399
Golden Age, 228, 248 Herbert, Frank, 473–475
Golden Age Science Fiction, 222, 226, Hereditary Genius, 560, 561, 566
227, 231, 233, 238 heredity/hereditary, 434–437, 439–445
Goodreads, 254, 258 Herland, 442–444
Google/Youtube Hangouts on Air, 258 hermeneutics of suspicion, 195
Google+, 258 Herz, Christopher, 430
Google Burger, 376–379, 387 Hieroglyph, 227
Gossett, Thomas, 167, 169 Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better
gothic, 277, 624 Future, 221, 226, 227, 230
Gould, Stephen Jay, 326, 564 Hieroglyph theory, 226
Graff, Gerald, 166 higher education, 184, 186
Gramsci, Antonio, 451, 464 Hiroshima, 47, 49–51, 60, 451
graphic medicine, 599–601 histories of scientific development, 397
Gravity’s Rainbow, 124 history, 201, 202, 211, 214
Great Acceleration, 81, 91 history of science, 29, 149, 152, 153,
Grener, Adam, 655 245, 607
Gruzd, Anatoly, 255 HIV/AIDS, 150, 151, 211, 309, 317,
Gubar, Susan, 499 318, 357
Guillory, John, 258 HIV infection, 400
Gulag, 48, 50, 51, 53, 54 Hjelmstad, Keith, 227, 228
Gulf Oil, 39 Hoijer, Harry, 266–268
Gunn, James, 250 Holmes, Martha Stoddard, 499, 500
Gutting, Gary, 328 Holmqvist, Ninni, 398
Holocaust, 50
Homann, Renate, 284
H Hörisch, Jochen, 29
Habila, Helon, 85 hormone therapy, 380
hackers, 109–112, 155 horror, 204
Hacking, Ian, 290 House of Leaves, 653
Haeckel, Ernst, 164 Howard, Sidney, 511, 520, 521
Haran, Joan, 258 Hull, Clark L., 118, 123
Haraway, Donna, 158, 290, 291, 378, human, 389
380, 388, 389, 392, 457, 458, 465, human capital, 407, 408
489, 608, 615, 623, 633 human genetic materials, 381
Hardt, Michael, 130, 131, 133, 622, 623 humanism, 295
Harpham, Geoffrey, 165 humanity, 545
Harriman, E.H., 153 human meat, 384
Hartman, Saidiya, 565 human meat imaginary, 376
“Has Gertrude Stein a Secret?”, 121 human-ness, 376
Hayles, N. Katherine, 278, 490 human sciences, 544
Heinlein, Robert, 152, 223 Hunt, Nancy Rose, 321
Heisenberg, Werner, 364, 365, 371 Hunt, Theodore, 187
Heißenbüttel, Helmut, 32 Huxley, Aldous, 122, 391
Hémery, Daniel, 83 hypermediate, 36
678 Index
hyperobject, 53, 90, 459, 488, 489, 607, Iser, Wolfgang, 243, 251
608 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 150, 401
hyposubject, 53 Ito, Joichi, 389–391
I J
I Am Legend, 309, 311, 312, 315 Jack Maggs, 542
ideology critique, 195 Jagoda, Patrick, 653
Ifowodo, Ogaga, 89 James, Henry, 164, 169–171
imagination, imaginary, 30, 43, 80, James, Marlon, 655
84, 86–88, 91, 92, 133, 145–148, Jameson, Fredric, 80, 91, 122, 249, 257
150–152, 158, 159, 245, 246, 257, James, William, 118, 325, 327, 332,
258, 290, 397, 398, 405, 450, 525, 340, 341
622, 623, 634 Jasanoff, Sheila, 244–246, 397, 398,
Imago, 249 407, 411
Imarisha, Walidah, 225, 236, 258 Jenkins, Henry, 258
imperial formations, 640 Jianxin, Huang, 621, 625, 626, 633
imperialism, 66 Johnson, Brian David, 224, 235
imperishables, 56, 59, 60 Johnson, Mildred L., 559–561, 563
incantation, incantatory fictions, 222, Johnson & Johnson, 506
225, 226, 233, 234, 237 Jones, Duncan, 401
incantatory, 221 Jones, Steve, 255
indigeneity, 248 Journey to the Center of the Earth, 246
indigenous, 68, 89, 256, 549, 553 judicial criticism, 189, 191, 192
inductive criticism, 189, 190
infamous theory, 547
inferiority of black people, 545 K
Infinite Jest, 418, 419, 655, 658 Kahn, Herman, 223, 224
information, 288, 289, 292, 293, 295, Kant, Immanuel, 168, 176, 562
296, 386, 409 Kassanoff, Jennie, 164, 172, 174
information culture, 154, 155 Kauffman, Stuart, 325, 326, 339
information sciences, 154, 155 Kay, Alan, 100
information systems, 154 Kay, Lily, 351
information technology, 287 Keenan, Thomas, 349
information theory, 284, 288, 289, 294 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 295
infrastructure, 91 Kennedy, John F., 36
Inheritors (1921), 511, 512, 521 Kerouac, Jack, 91, 92, 415
intelligence, 562 Kevles, Daniel J., 567
Internet, 416. See also online Kharkov Physical Institute, 58
Internet of Things, 411 Kilgore, Christopher, 506
In the Black, 258 Kim, Sang-Hyun, 245, 246
In the Servitude of Power: Energy and King, Thomas, 89, 412
Civilization Through the Ages, 83 Kingsley, Sidney, 512
Intrusion, 430 Kirn, Walter, 430
invasion of Iraq, 470, 476 Kite, Suzanne, 390
in-vitro meat, 376–378, 381, 383, 387, Kline, Nathan S., 290
388, 391 Kline, Ronald, 287
Iossifidis, Miranda, 258 Kneale, Matthew, 542, 543, 545–550,
Iraq War, 471, 475 554
Index 679
Knox, Robert, 545, 547, 549 Lewis, Wyndham, 120

Kolyma, 48, 50, 55–60 Life Among the Doctors, 522
Kolyma Tales (Kolymskie rasskazy), 50, 51 life-extension technologies, 398
Kowalski, Charles, 347 Life of Poetry, 293
Krah, Hans, 30, 34 Life Support, 402
Kriwet, Ferdinand, 31, 32, 36–42 linguistics, 164, 166, 174, 187, 263–
Kuhn, Thomas, 148, 149 277, 279, 292, 295, 296, 351, 625
Kunzru, Hari, 542 literary, 156, 485
Kurchatov, Ivan, 58 literary effect, 189–191, 357
Kushner, Rachel, 84 literary facts, 188, 189, 196
literary feeling, 184, 196
literary modernism, 120, 174
L literary storytelling, 397
lab-grown meat, 378, 386 literary studies, 120, 133, 145, 147, 149,
laboratorium, 411 154, 155, 183–188, 204, 252, 284,
labour, 398, 399, 403, 405–411, 459, 288, 300, 654. See also literary study
622–624, 626–632 literary study, 30, 81, 187
labour-power, 399, 405, 407 A Little Life, 655, 657, 658
Lacks, Deborah, 214, 215 live television, 376
Lacks, Henrietta, 201–203, 207, living labor, 384
210–216 Living Oil, 64, 73
Lai, Larissa, 256 living technology, 403
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, 436 Lodge, David, 429
Landecker, Hannah, 380, 386, 403, 607, Logan, Angela, 566, 567
608 Long, Elizabeth, 244, 251, 253, 257,
Landis, Geoffrey, 227, 231, 232 258
Land of Oil and Water (film), 68 Longfellow, Brenda, 68
Langer, Susanne K., 327, 328, 330–332, Long novels, 661
334, 340, 341 Lost (TV series), 124
language/languaging, 38, 42, 100, 102, Lovecraft, H.P., 476
107, 137, 139, 154, 163–176, 218, Love, Heather K., 120
249, 250, 263–269, 272–279, 284, Luckhurst, Roger, 246–248, 251
287, 291–293, 295–299, 351, 352, Luczak-Roesch, Markus, 655, 657
356, 408, 418, 423, 502, 525, 529, Luhmann, Niklas, 284, 285, 293, 294,
530, 535–538, 553, 621, 622, 634, 296, 300
635 Luisi, Pier Luigi, 294
Larsen, Nella, 433 Lukács, Georg, 299
Latour, Bruno, 51, 146, 457, 465 lunar exploration, 30, 31, 34, 36, 41
La Tregua, 48 lunar travel, 30, 31
Lee Thim Heng, 621 Lyell, Charles, 166
Le Guin, Ursula K., 222, 223, 267, 455
LeMenager, Stephanie, 64, 65, 73, 75,
85 M
length, 654 Macdonald, Graeme, 84–87
length (novel), 653, 661 “Machine and Organism”, 289
Levi, Primo, 48, 50–52, 58, 60 machine, machinery, 284, 287, 290, 291,
Levinson, Marjorie, 284 293, 297, 345, 348, 350, 359, 403,
Lévy, Pierre, 103 407, 458, 461, 462
Lewis, Jason Edward, 390 Macht, David, 417
680 Index
MacLeod, Ken, 430 medicalization, 135, 141, 417, 420, 422,

magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 348, 423, 426, 428, 429
349, 352 medicalize, 134, 136, 140, 359, 418,
Malabou, Catherine, 564 426
Malaysia, 621, 622, 630, 631, 633 medical science, 521
Mallon, Mary (aka Typhoid Mary), medical system, 411
151 medical therapy, 398
Malm, Andreas, 80, 83, 84, 91, 92 medical waste, 410
Manhattan Project, 364 medications/meds, 211, 416–419, 421,
Manhattan Projects (comic), 578, 585, 423–429
586 medicine, 147, 150, 184, 194, 203, 204,
“Manifesto for Cyborgs”, 290 210, 215, 403, 416, 418, 419, 421,
manufactured biological beings, 411 424, 428–430, 519, 639, 642
manufactured labourers, 412 Meetup, 254
manufacture slaves, 410 Meitner, Lise, 365
market economy, 400 Men Against Death, 522
Marlowe, Christopher, 365 Mengele, Josef, 349
Marriot, James, 65, 69–74 mental illness, 417–419, 430, 642
Mars Trilogy, 87 metamedia, 101
Martens, Garth, 87 meta-medium, 100
Marxism, 130, 140, 249, 624 metamodernist, 655
Marx, Karl, 83, 94 metaphor, 185, 271, 290, 293, 295,
Marx, Leo, 157, 228, 310, 312, 313 346, 347, 349–352, 354, 356, 359,
Masure, Anthony, 103 407, 408, 428, 450, 459, 461, 463,
material infrastructure, 469 483, 505, 526, 531, 623
material-symbolic boundaries, 382 Microbe Hunters, 513, 521, 522
Matheson, Richard, 309, 311–315 microphone, 311, 627
matrix/matrices, 103, 104, 383 microscope, 310, 311, 315, 553
Matthiessen, F.O., 525–528, 530–534, Mielziner, Jo, 518, 520
537, 538 Miéville, China, 471, 476, 479, 480
Maturana, Humberto, 283–289, Milburn, Colin, 151, 153, 156
293–298 Milgram, Stanley, 119
May Fourth Movement, 642, 644 Mills, John A., 119
Mbembe, Achille, 132, 133 mind, 272, 276
McArthur, Neil, 68 Minima Moralia, 562
McCarthy, Tom, 84 Minio-Paluello, Mika, 65, 69–74
McClintic, Guthrie, 518 Mitchell, Timothy, 473
McEwan, Ian, 429 modernism, 32, 80, 81, 90, 92, 126,
McGrath, John, 67 174, 288, 293, 299, 329
McKibben, Bill, 449–451, 459, 464 modernism and modernist literature,
media, 32, 33, 36–42, 79, 148, 156, 117, 121
203, 215, 216, 245, 247, 252, 255, modernity, 569
257, 416, 431, 450 Modern Language Association (MLA),
mediate, 31, 32, 39–42, 148, 158 166
mediation, 31, 35–37, 39–42, 101, 147, Mody, Cyrus, 311
157, 347 montage, 37–39, 211, 214
medical device company, 409 Montero, Rose, 399, 412
medical ethics, 202 Moon, 401
medical humanities, 156 Moore, Lisa, 67
Index 681
Morales, Alejandro, 151 neoliberal, neoliberalism, 130–132, 140,

Morgan, Benjamin, 437, 438, 446 347, 390, 416, 417, 419, 424, 425,
morphology, 537 429, 497, 600, 608, 614, 615, 622,
Morris, Aldon, 567 623
Morrison, Toni, 120, 662 Neo-Victorian, 542, 543, 549, 554
“Mortal Kombat”, 346 Neo-Victorian fiction, 542
Morton, Timothy, 53, 90, 94, 488, 489, Neo-Victorian genre, 544, 553
492, 607, 608, 616, 617 Neo-Victorian novel, 541–543, 550, 555
Morus, Iwan Rhys, 245 Neruda, Pablo, 87
Moulton, Richard Green, 185 Netenjacob, Egon, 39
Mount Tambora, 146 netlennyi (trans. imperishables), 55
Moylanv, Tom, 249 network novel, 653
Mrdjenovich, Adam, 347 networks, 137, 154, 155, 185, 216, 244,
Mukherjee, Siddhartha, 501 295, 297, 357, 511, 514, 624, 631,
Müller, F. Max, 164–166, 168, 169, 653, 654
172, 174, 176 neuroaesthetics, 155
multimedia, 31, 32, 36, 37 neuronovel, 415, 418, 429
multispecies, 158 neuroscience, 155, 418, 425, 431
multispecies studies, 156, 158 neuroscientists, 155
Multitude, 130 Never Let Me Go, 401
Munif, Abel Rahman, 66 New Criticism, 117, 188, 530
Muñoz, Jose, 138 New Harvest, 378, 381, 387
Murdoch, Dugald, 336 Newitz, Annalee, 398, 412
Murphy, Michelle, 132, 133 new media, 154
Murray, Charles, 560 new media artist, 390
Musk, Elon, 79 new media studies, 152
new technology, 398, 399
New Weird, 471, 476
N New Yorker, The, 37
Nano Supermarket, 388 New York Times, 519
nanotechnology, 151, 152 NextNature, 387, 388
nanovision, 152 Nicholson, Sam, 474, 475
Nanovision: Engineering the Future, 151 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, 31, 43
NASA/TREK, 254, 258 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 641
Nash, Roderick, 157 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 249
National Endowment for Science, Nixon, Richard, 38
Technology, and the Arts (NESTA), Nixon, Rob, 157
598 Noble, Safiya, 386
National Institutes of Health (NIH), 203 nonhuman, 245, 359, 387, 390, 454,
Nationality, 167 455, 457, 462, 466, 476, 482
Native Americans, 513 nonhuman animals, 383
naturally artificial meat, 376 Nott, Josiah Clark, 545
nature, 552 nuclear, 60
necropolitics, 54, 132 nuclear war, 593
Ned McCobb’s Daughter, 522 atomic bomb, 578, 580, 583, 585,
Negarestani, Reza, 88, 476, 477 589, 591, 592
Negri, Antonio, 130, 131, 133, 622, 623 Manhattan Project, 582–584, 586,
neoliberal consumerism, 419 592
682 Index
O Parisi, Luciana, 295, 296

objective, 529, 533, 551, 552 Parsons, Talcott, 296
objectivity, 118, 189, 191–193, 195, Pasternak, Boris, 53
216, 485 Patchett, Ann, 430
Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories Pauli, Wolfgang, 365, 368, 369
from Social Justice Movements, 225, Paulson, William, 295
236, 237, 258 Pavlov, Ivan, 118, 122
Offshore (film), 68 Pechawis, Archer, 390
oil, 63–75, 80, 81, 84–91, 93, 469–482 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 101
oil crisis (1973), 80, 471 Penfield, Wilder, 332
oil infrastructures, 473, 474, 479 Penley, Constance, 254, 258
“Oil is not Gold”, 474, 475 people of colour, 406
Oil! (novel), 85 perception, 208, 247, 265, 267, 275,
Oil on Water, 85 297, 328, 352, 484, 487, 489, 490,
Oil (photographs), 63 525, 536
oil politics, 477 performance, 511
oil refineries, 405 Periodic Table, 58
Okorafor, Nnedi, 89, 256 periodizing literature, 91, 92
Binti, 256, 258 persons bound, 408
Olson, Charles, 525, 527, 535–539 PETA, 375, 376, 383, 384, 386
Once in Blockadia, 87 petrochemicals, 89
Oncomouse, 380 petroculture, 470, 471
ongoing progress, 398 Petrocultures Research Group, 470
online, 244, 252, 254–256 petrofiction, 66, 85
On the Road, 91, 92, 415 petro-literature, 81
ontology, 291 “petro-magic-realism”, 87
Open Work: Form and Indeterminacy in “petro-realism”, 87
Contemporary Poetics, 292 petro-modernity, 64, 80
operational agents, 99, 103, 104 petrorealism, 87
Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 364 pharmaceutical industry, 409
Order of Things, 292 pharmaceuticals, 212, 415–418, 421,
organic form, 526, 530–533, 537 425, 607
organisms, 283–287, 289–292, 295– psychopharmaceuticals, 415, 419, 428
297, 299 psychopharmacology, 417, 419, 424,
Organization of the Petroleum Exporting 427, 429, 430
Countries (OPEC), 80, 90, 471 “pharmacological fiction”, 430
Orwell, George, 123, 124, 249, 263 pharmacology, 430, 431
Oryx and Crake, 376, 380, 381 Pharmakon, 430
phenomenology, 244, 251, 284
philology/philological, 163–168, 170,
P 172–176, 187
Paik, Nam June, 40, 41 philosophy of mind, 119–121
Painter-Morland, Mollie, 506 physicist, 460, 525, 528
Palgrave Handbook of Early Modern physics, 325, 326, 336, 364, 365,
Literature and Science, The, 42 370–372, 525, 527–530
Pamela, 653 classical physics, 365, 369–371
pandemic, 151, 309, 316, 400 quantum physics, 149, 294, 363–365,
Parable of the Sower, 255 368–372, 525, 526, 528, 530
Paris, Edward Thomas, 146 theoretical physics, 368, 371, 372
Index 683
physiological aesthetics, 327, 332 progress, 81, 84, 192, 193, 245, 433,
Picture News (comic serial), 578–580, 435, 438, 439, 441, 442, 497, 501,
586 526
Pinker, Steven, 265 Progressive Era, 512, 513, 522
Piot, Peter, 317 Project Hieroglyph, 222, 225, 226, 231,
“Pipeline”, 472, 475 233, 236, 237
pluralism, 269, 330 Prologue for the Age of Consequence, 87
podcasts, 254 Promethean modernity, 56
poem, 43 Provincetown Players, 512
“Poem To My Litter”, 346, 355, 359 Provincetown Players’ Playwrights
poet, 32, 41, 88, 293 Theatre, 515
poetics, 250 “Prozac Nation”, 418
poetry/poem, 29, 31–34, 42, 86, 89, Pruitt, Sarah
271, 273, 274, 278, 292, 346, 347, “China Makes Historic Landing on
350–352, 354, 355, 357–359, 525, ‘Dark Side’ of the Moon”, 43
526, 528–530, 534–538 psychiatric pharmaceuticals, 425
auto-poetry, 359 psychiatric treatment, 126
ecopoetics, 526, 527, 535, 537–539 psychiatry, 415, 417, 420, 425, 426, 429
poetic form, 346, 347, 537 New Psychiatry, 417, 418, 420
Poincaré, Henri, 529, 530 psychiatric, 423, 425
political economy, 382 psychology, 117–119, 121, 122, 124,
political process, 385 129, 421, 425, 450, 459, 527, 562
Porush, David, 293 “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views
positivism, positivist science, 184, 188, It”, 118
266 psychopharmacology, 126
post-animal bioeconomy, 377, 381 Puar, Jasbir, 132, 133
post-apocalyptic, 380 pure research, 186, 192
postcolonial, 89, 90, 252, 542 Pynchon, Thomas, 91, 92, 124
postcolonial science studies, 377
posthuman, 152, 295
Post, Mark, 376, 378, 381, 387 Q
postmodern, postmodernism, 80, 81, quantification, 274
90–92, 244, 246, 294, 416, 419, quantifying, 217
420, 424, 425, 429, 542 quantitative, 210, 271
postmodern superstructure, 91 quantitative analysis, 654
Pound, Ezra, 293, 329 quantum computers, 455
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 59 quantum mechanics, 338, 529
Powers, Richard, 429, 430, 450, Copenhagen interpretation, 335
495–504, 506 quantum theory, 369
poznanie, 52, 60 queer, 132, 248, 256, 293, 444, 458
precision medicine, 346, 347, 356, 357, queer theory, 157
359 Quine, W.V.O, 119, 279
Preston, Richard, 309, 316–320
Prigogine, Ilya, 326
Pripyat, 48–50 R
Pripyat River, 48 race/racial, 86, 132, 136, 147, 151,
Procter, James, 252, 258 163–165, 167, 168, 173, 174, 202,
profit medicine, 409 204, 212–215, 252, 255, 256, 376,
684 Index
382, 383, 399, 401, 434, 435, 437, Richardson, Samuel, 653
439, 442–445, 515, 542, 544, 545, Richmond, Mary, 185
551, 554 Ricoeur, Paul, 251
race-based technologies, 542 Ritvo, Max, 345–348, 350, 351, 354,
race science, racial science, 167, 541– 355, 357, 359
543, 547, 551, 553–555, 563 Robbins, Bruce, 501
race scientists, racial scientists, 545, Robinson, Kim Stanley, 87, 235, 248,
549–554 450, 451, 455–466
race thinking, 554, 555 robots, 125, 151, 287, 410, 621–625,
racial and gender injustice, 399 627–632, 634
racialized, 131–134, 136, 151, 293 Rockefeller, John D., 153
racialized approach, 386 Romanticism, Romantic, 90, 295, 527,
racialized bodies/populations, 131, 132 528
racialized chattel slavery, 399 Romantic literature, 527
racialized exploitation, 399 Romantic poetry, 31, 284
racialized labour, 411 Roosevelt, Theodore, 169
racialized others, 385 Rose, Nikolas, 135, 356
racialized structure, 386 Roth, Marco, 415
racial scientific logic, 545 Ruhl, Sarah, 345, 346, 348, 354
racial scientific thinking, 542, 549 Rukeyser, Muriel, 293, 525, 526,
racism, 167–169, 213–215, 217, 433, 528–530, 532–538
440, 475, 541, 546, 547, 551, 553 R.U.R, 410
Racists, 543, 550, 551, 553, 555 Rusert, Britt, 563
radical subject, 291 Russell, Bertrand, 121, 276, 277, 334
radio, 32, 37–41, 273, 420, 422 Ryle, Gilbert, 119, 120
Radway, Janice, 257, 258
Rajan, Kaushik Sunder, 347
Rancière, Jacques, 562, 563, 565, 569, S
574 Sacco and Vanzetti, 515
RAND Corporation, 222–224 Sagan, Dorion, 294
raw materials, 399 Said, Edward, 50
reader-response, 244, 245, 252 Salt Fish Girl, 256
reading, 80, 85, 90, 91, 141, 155, 203, Sapir, Edward, 263–270, 272–274, 276
349, 359, 434, 438, 442, 445, 496, Sarton, George, 526, 530
497, 505 Satin Island, 84
realism, 86, 87, 156, 215, 425, 450–452, Saturday, 429
459, 460, 626, 630, 635 Saunders, Barry, 349
“Recrudescence”, 476–481 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 173, 174, 263,
Recuber, Timothy, 254, 255 333
Reed, Walter, 520 scale, 600, 602
Rees, Amanda, 245 “Scan”, 350
relativity, 264–267, 270, 274 Schachner, Nathan, 472, 473
relativity, theory of, 371, 372 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von, 531
Renan, Ernest, 164 Schlegel, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich, 172
reproductive technology, 398, 412 Schleicher, August, 165, 170
Requiem for a Dream, 415 Schneidman, Edwin, 135
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 147, 149, 376, Schoenberg, Arnold, 313
377, 437 Schrödinger, Erwin, 146
Richards, I.A., 119 Schuller, Kyla, 565
Index 685
Schulz, Jane, 500 sense data, 328

science, 397, 398, 402, 403, 411, 412 sensibility, 267
science and technology, 397, 398, 407, Serres, Michel, 291, 292
411, 626 Sex, or The Unbearable, 129
science and technology studies (STS), Sexton, Jared, 562
152, 158, 245, 257, 387, 397 sexual contact, 400
science fiction, 87, 88, 93, 122, 148, sexual exploitation, 402
150–152, 156, 221–223, 232, 237, sexuality, 129, 132, 137, 147, 151, 256,
238, 264, 269, 272, 277, 279, 376, 383, 623
381, 387–389, 392, 449, 456, 459, sexualized, 131, 133, 134
464, 469–472, 475, 476, 479, 481, sexualized bodies/populations, 132
572, 597–599, 608, 615, 621, 625, Shakespeare as a Dramatic Artist: A
626, 629, 634 Popular Illustration of the Principles
sciences of mind, 415–418, 421, 424, of Scientific Criticism, 188
427, 429, 430 Shalamov, Varlam, 48, 50–60
science studies, 149, 190, 245 Shelley, Mary, 145–149, 246, 277
scientific charity, 185, 191–193, 196 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten, 365
scientific criticism, 184–189, 191, 192, Sheraton, 173
195, 196 “Sick man of Asia”, 639–641, 649
scientific designs, 377, 380, 390 side effects, 355, 423
scientific explanations, 545 Silent Spring, 312
scientific genres of knowledge, 389 Silicon Valley, 222, 226, 232, 236, 375,
scientific history, 397 389
scientific hypothesising, 545 Simondon, Gilbert, 106, 108
scientific inquiry, 290, 391 Simulacra and Simulation, 420
scientific investigation, 551 Sinclair, Upton, 85
scientific knowledge, 391 Singer, Ben, 569
scientific life, 383 Singh, Vandana, 233–237
scientific market, 384 Singularity, 389, 390
scientific method, 99, 184–186, 190, 553 Sinha, Indra, 157
scientific norms and standards, 547 skin, 351, 385, 408, 483, 485–487,
scientific objectivity, 552 489–493, 548
scientific observations, 545 Skinner, B.F., 119–122, 125
scientific perspective, 552 Skloot, Rebecca, 201–203, 207, 208,
scientific practice, 377, 388 210–216
scientific “progress”, 411 slave, 405–409, 439, 442
scientific racism, 543, 548 slavery, 405–410, 412
scientific research, 380, 402 Slaves of the State, 406
scientific theory, 541, 544 slave states, 410
sci-fi, 272, 570, 572–574 Smalley, Richard, 151
Scott, Charles, 486 Smil, Vaclav, 80
secularism, 525, 537 Smith, Darryl A., 571
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 253 Smith, Rachel Greenwald, 416
Sedo, DeNel, 252, 255–257 Snooty Baronet, 121
Segal, Judy, 500 Snow, C.P., 184, 185, 328, 329, 335
Selby Jr., Hubert, 415 Snyder, Matthew, 230
Self-Destruction: A Study of the Suicidal Sobchack, Vivian, 248
Impulse, 135 social attitudes, 554
Selisker, Scott, 123, 126 social casework, 193, 194
686 Index
social categories, 388 speculative dimensions, 381

social classification, 376 speculative fiction, 93, 376, 387, 397,
social dynamics, 389 398, 411
social evidence, 191, 194, 196 speculative narrative, 471
social factors, 403 speculative scientific pursuits, 389
social facts, 185 speculative storytelling, 398
social histories, 377 speculative world, 388
social inequality, 384, 386 Squier, Susan, 156, 601, 602
Socialist Register, 290 Stacey, Jackie, 498
social justice, 157, 248 Stalin, Josef, 51, 57
social life, 383 Stanford, Leland, 153
social media, 204, 216, 388 state-capitalism, 622
social network, 656–658 State of Wonder, 430
social network analysis, 654, 655 Stein, Gertrude, 32, 121, 125
social obfuscation, 384 Steinbeck, John, 433
social problem, 378 stem cells, 377, 381, 402
social sciences, 81, 82, 86, 146, 185, Stengers, Isabelle, 326, 341, 356
191, 192, 196, 208, 264, 278, 283, Stenson, Fred, 85
284, 291, 294, 434, 440 Stephenson, Neal, 155, 221, 222, 225,
social welfare, 191 227, 231, 233–235, 237, 269, 653,
social work, 192, 194, 195 655
social worlds, 382 Sterling, Bruce, 233, 234, 237, 476
sociology, 120, 192, 245 Stewart, James, 518
sociotechnical imaginary, 245, 397–399, suicide, 130, 132–141, 625
405, 407, 410, 411 queer suicide, 132
solarpunk, 93, 257 race suicide, 136, 433
solution, 388 suicide plot, 130, 133, 134, 136, 140,
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 51 141
Sontag, Susan, 498 superstructure, 91
Souls of Black Folk, 574 Surgeon X, 597–600, 604, 607–609,
sound (or hearing), 345, 348, 353, 634 615, 616
Southern Reach, 484, 485, 490, 491, Suvin, Darko, 246, 249, 250, 257
493 symbiotic, 458
Southern Reach Trilogy, 21, 483, 485, SymbioticA, 376–378, 383
490 symbol, 30, 40, 204, 244, 247, 328, 331
space, 151 symbolic attributes, 33
space exploration, 30 symbolic position, 34
space travel, 30, 34, 38. See also lunar symbolic significance, 36
exploration; lunar travel; space symbolic value, 30
exploration sympathetic criticism, sympathetic read-
Spahr, Juliana, 653 ing, 189, 190
species, 356–359, 376, 434, 436–439, sympathy, 192
444, 451, 454, 455, 457, 458, symptoms, 417–423, 425–427, 499, 628
463–465 Synthese, 288
speculative art-science, 387 synthetic biology, 224, 378, 398, 399,
speculative bioart, 376 411
speculative biotechnology, 410 synthetic life, 411
speculative design, 387 systemic racism, 402, 405
Index 687
T The Heart Goes Last, 412

Taine, Hippolyte, 164, 167 The Home, Its Work and Influence, 442
Taine, John, 475–479 The Hot Zone, 309, 316–318, 320
Tears in Rain, 399, 412 The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,
Technocrats, 472, 473 201–204, 207–209, 216
technoculture, 452 The Impressionist, 542
technoculture studies, 152 The Inequality of the Human Races, 545
techno-ecologies, 377 The Intuitionist, 655
techno-fetishism, 386 “The Little Girl of Pompeii” (poem), 60
technofuturism, 244 The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet,
technological change, 399 256
technology, 289, 292, 387–390, The Manchurian Candidate, 123
397–399, 401, 403, 405, 407 The Mismeasure of Man, 564
technomodernity, 249 The Modern Study of Literature, 188
techno-optimism, 247 The Oil Lamp, 89
technoscience, 79, 243, 244, 246–252, The Oil Road (travelogue), 65, 69–74
254, 257, 387, 388 The Only Ones, 398–401, 403, 411
technoscientific futures, 377 theoretical biology, 283, 288, 296
techno-transcendentalism, 463 The Periodic Table, 54
techno-utopian vision, 377 The Philadelphia Negro, 566
techno-utopic, 377 The Polymers, 88
telescope, 34, 35, 41, 310 The Pulitzer Prize, 522
television, 32, 37–40, 204, 216, 315, The Races of Britain, 545
401, 416, 422, 630–632. See also The Races of Men, 545, 547
TV “The Revolt of the Scientists”, 472, 475
Tenen, Dennis, 661 The Sellout (novel), 124
Terman, Lewis, 560, 561, 564, 567, 569 The Siege of Krishnapur, 542
Terranova, Tiziana, 295 The Souls of Black Folk, 563, 565, 566,
Thacker, Eugene, 154, 155, 288 568, 569, 571
The Andromeda Strain, 309, 314–316, The Structure of Poetry, 292
319 The Suicide Club, 399
The Art of Being Ruled, 120 The Transformation, 653
The Back of the Turtle, 89 The Truce, 48, 54
The Bell Curve, 560 The Unit, 398
“The Blegdamsvej Faust”, 363–370, 372 The Windup Girl, 398
The Cheviot, The Stag, and the Black, Thiel, Peter, 224, 230
Black Oil (play), 67 Thinks…, 429
“The Comet”, 570–572 Thirty Years that Shook Physics, 364
The Concept of Mind, 119 Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth, 532,
The Corrections, 415, 419, 424, 426, 533, 537
428, 429 Thorazine (chlorpromazine), 417
“The Curve”, 346, 351, 352 Thumbsucker, 430
The Dark Fields, 430 Thurtle, Philip, 153
The Echo-Maker, 429 tissue-engineered meat, 378
The Great Derangement: Climate Change Tolstoy, Leo, 51
and the Unthinkable, 86 Toomer, Jean, 653
“The Greatest Adventure”, 475–477 “To the Rising Full Moon”, 31, 33
“The Great Oil War”, 473 Transcendentalism, 526, 530, 531, 534,
The Happiness Industry, 419 537
688 Index
trauma, 202, 461 Vint, Sherryl, 246–248, 251

trauma studies, 155 Virno, Paolo, 131, 133, 140
triangulation, 97, 98, 103–107, 109, 113 vision (or sight), 310, 315, 352, 397,
Trinity (comic), 586–589, 592 398, 505
Trump, Donald, 230 visions of a better future, 398
Tuana, Nancy, 486 visions of desirable futures, 397, 398
Tumblrs, 254 visions of sociotechnical change, 398
Turner, James, 173 A Visit from the Goon Squad, 653, 655
Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, 211 visual(ity), 310, 320
Tuskegee Syphilis Study, 204, 214, 357 Vogl, Joseph, 29, 41
TV, 39–42 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 365–372
Twitter, 254, 258 Vonnegut, Kurt, 608
Types of Mankind, 545 von Weizsäcker, C.F., 335, 336, 339,
typhoid, 151 363, 365
Vora, Kalindi, 402, 403
A Voyage to the North Pole, 146
U
Underground Airlines, 398, 399, 405,
406, 411 W
“Under Pressure”, 473, 474 Waldby, Catherine, 378, 384, 399, 403,
Underworld, 653 409
unmediate, 34, 40–42 Wald, Priscilla, 136, 150–152, 216
Unnatural Selections, 567 Walden Two, 122
unscientific racial categorisations, 550 Wallace, David Foster, 418, 655
Unsettling Scientific Stories: Expertise, Walter, W. Grey, 287
Narratives, and Future Histories, Warner, Michael, 166
258 War of the Worlds, 246
Uribe, Ricardo B., 297 Washburn, Emelyne, 166
Uses of Literature, 258 Washington, Booker T., 561, 568
utopia, 121, 122, 140, 141, 442, 443, Wasserman test, 149
451, 452, 464, 472, 633 Watson, John B., 118, 119, 121, 123
utopian promise, 409 Weaver, Warren, 264, 270–273, 276–278
Wegener, Frederick, 174
weird fiction (the weird), 471, 477–481
V weirdness, 476
Vanderbilt, Cornelius, 153 Weizman, Eyal, 349
VanderMeer, Jeff, 483–485, 487, Wellcome Trust, 203, 598, 602
490–492 Wellek, Rene, 187, 195
Vandiemen, George, 547, 548, 550 Wells, H.G., 246
Varela, Francisco, 283–288, 293–297 Wendell, Barrett, 164, 167–169
Veblen, Thorstein, 184, 195 Wenzel, Jennifer, 87
venture capital, 452 West, Rebecca, 122, 123
Verne, Jules, 31, 34–36, 43, 246 Westfahl, Gary, 226
Victorian, 547, 551, 553 Westworld, 125, 411
Victorian racial science, 541, 543, 547, Wharton, Edith, 130, 136–138, 153,
550, 551 163–167, 169–176, 433
Vietnam, 37 “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s
Vietnam War, 8 Brain”, 289
Index 689
Whitehead, Alfred North, 325–327, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 119

331–334, 340, 526–530, 533, 534, Wolfe, Alan, 294
536–539 Wolfe, Cary, 284
Whitehead, Colson, 655 Wright, Jay, 325, 327–330, 332–334,
White, Leslie, 82, 83 336–341
white male European scientists, 553 Wundt, Wilhelm, 118
White Noise, 415, 419–421, 423–425, Wynter, Sylvia, 295, 296, 383, 389,
428, 429 391
white supremacy, 565
“whitish-yellow skin”, 380
Whitney, William Dwight, 166, 173 X
Who By Fire, 85 Xun, Lu, 642, 643, 645
Whorf, Benjamin Lee, 263–270,
272–278
Who Wrote the Book of Life?, 24 Y
Wiener, Norbert, 270, 272, 273, 278, Yaeger, Patricia, 84, 85, 91
287, 290 Yanagihara, Hanya, 655
Wientzen, Timothy, 122, 123 Yellow Jack, 511
Wikis, 254 yellow peril, 640
Willard Gibbs, 528–530, 536 Yijun, Luo, 637, 639, 645, 648, 649
Williams, Rosalind, 310 Youtube, 254
Wilson, E.O., 290
Wimsatt, William K., 119
Winter, Ben H., 398, 406 Z
Winters’s speculative setting, 407 Zamir, Shamoon, 567
Wise, Dennis, 406 Zero K, 412
Wittenborn, Dirk, 430 Zimbardo, Philip, 119

2020 Book ThePalgraveHandbookOfTwentieth

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

You might also like

2020 Book ThePalgraveHandbookOfTwentieth

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

2020 Book ThePalgraveHandbookOfTwentieth

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Palgrave Handbook

More information about this series at

The Palgrave Handbook

See next page

Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science

Cover credit: DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images

Lindsey Andrews Gerry Canavan

Rebecca Evans Nihad M. Farooq

Erica Fretwell Nicholas Gaskill

“This is an eclectic collection in the very best of ways: wide-ranging in genre,

“This exciting collection is an excellent contribution to the field of litera-

2 Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s Apollo Mission 29

3 Writing the Elements at the End of the World: Varlam

4 The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil 63

5 Literature and Energy 79

6 Triangulate: Literature and the Sciences Mediated by

7 Behaviorism and Literary Culture 117

8 I’m Dying to!: Biopolitics, Suicide Plots, and the Ecstasy

9 Science, Literature, and the Work of the Imagination 145

10 Edith Wharton’s Microscopist and the Science

Part II Methods and Approaches

11 Reading Generously: Scientific Criticism, Scientific

12 How Can Literary and Film Studies Contribute

13 Incantatory Fictions and Golden Age Nostalgia:

14 Reading Science: SF and the Uses of Literature 243

15 Linguistic Relativity and Cryptographic Translation

16 Autopoiesis Between Literature and Science: Maturana,

17 Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories

18 To Feel an Equation: Physiological Aesthetics, Modern

19 Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry 345

Part III Ethics and Politics

20 New Physics, New Faust: Faustian Bargains in Physics

21 The Matter of In-Vitro Meat: Speculative Genres

22 Bodies Made and Owned: Rewriting Life in Science

23 The Sciences of Mind and Fictional Pharmaceuticals

24 Eugenic Aesthetics: Literature as Evolutionary

25 Angry Optimism: Climate Disaster and Restoration

26 Oil and Energy Infrastructures in Science Fiction Short

27 Biology at the Border of Area X: The Significance

28 Overlapping Agencies: The Collision of Cancer,

Part IV Forms and Genres

29 “Golden Dust” in the Wind: Genetics, Contagion,

30 The Art and Science of Form: Muriel Rukeyser, Charles

31 Racial Science and the Neo-Victorian Novel 541

32 W.E.B. Du Bois’s Neurological Modernity: I.Q.,

33 Graphic Bombs: Scientific Knowledge

34 “The Path of Most Resistance”: Surgeon X

35 The Automation of Affect: Robots and the Domestic

36 Superman Holey Weenie and the Sick Man of Asia 637

37 Modeling Long Novels: Network Analysis and A Brief

Correction to: Writing the Elements at the End of the World:

Sofia Ahlberg is Associate Professor of English Literature at Uppsala

Lindsey Michael Banco is a Professor of American Literature and Culture

Dr. Lara Choksey is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Wellcome

Nihad M. Farooq is an Associate Professor of American Studies in the

Everett Hamner is Professor of English at Western Illinois University. His

Coleman Nye is Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s

Kyla Schuller is Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality

an emphasis on twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetics in a global context.

Fig. 6.1 First diagram of triangulation 104

Fig. 34.3 Chapter 4 604

Mediating the Moon: Ferdinand Kriwet’s

The Moon from Afar: From Goethe to Verne

Writing the Elements at the End of the World:

All That Is Solid (Does Not) Melt into Air

The Aesthetic Textuality of Oil

From Energy Infrastructures to Energy Superstructures

Literature, Energy, and Aesthetics