entanglement

The well-defined focus in the last year on tracing back the performance of nonhumans in many fields of knowledge is often led by the somehow troublesome consciousness of the entanglement of humanity in the technological spectrum. I use the term ‘spectrum’ deliberately, because in my view it brings to mind the scope of critical possibilities of posthumanism.

In my presentation, I would like to pick up on that issue by discussing the “haunting” performance of nonhumans that is revealed when we install a posthumanist lens to investigate the historical accounts on literature. Starting with my current research into the reciprocal designation of the fields of literature and science in the nineteenth century, I will try to define the broad agency of electricity as an agent and a metaphor. Its ontological status cannot be determined.

Brought from scientific discourse (that is never culturally and socially ‘pure’), it served as a matrix of ascending modern, techno-scientific communities in the beginning of the nineteenth century, that started to explain their experiences in reference to scientific theories, models, and terms. Reference to electricity had circulated throughout both dramatic and poetic literature as well as philosophical works up to the point when the metaphor of ‘electricity as spiritual endeavor’ started to become naturalized, and as such, ceased to be separated from the discourse on literature.

I will show then that electricity “invaded” the texts of critics, who, paradoxically, tried to establish a strict border between the science and the literature, and believed that every “trespasser” would be immediately observed and defined. Such a call for control, that aims to be a methodological panopticon, yields in the unaffected hybridization of terms. It exposes the insufficiency of modern critics, just as Bruno Latour pictured this in We Have Never Been Modern (1991).

Following the criticism on modernism given by this French sociologist and philosopher, we can see the interconnectedness of the process of translation (hybridization) of actors and purification of the objects from ‘impure’ inputs (i.e. the performance of nonhumans in establishing the knowledge). What is this disturbing, haunting performance of words-objects? By presenting the abovementioned problems while conducting the research on literature according to the posthumanist view, I would like to name few answers on that issue.

The invasion of electric metaphors into modern discourse should be interpreted as a “haunting” performance according to what Jacques Derrida wrote about specters in Specters of Marx (1993) and Archive Fever (1995). Electricity – the agent and origin of metaphors – works in a larger time span as a specter that reiterates, performs (while not seen), and continually “becomes”. Its “haunting” performance should be referred to by its early interpretation in scientific discourse – as “soul of the world”. By evoking the Derrida’s theory, then I would like to describe this all-important process where electricity – being named a “ghost”, behaves like one of them. In my opinion, this guarantees the opportunity to reconsider the critical potentiality of installing the posthumanist approach that influences not only single study cases but also the discipline of literature history and criticism as a whole.

The notion of entanglement is central to critical posthumanist thought. It might be said to have replaced the ubiquitous network metaphor or even the paradigm of the global in a number of contexts; at the very least, it stands in a tense relationship to them. While the figure of the globe is undeniably linked to human(ist) construction practices and the European colonial project, and a network-like connectedness implies links between objects that are ultimately thought of as separate, the topos of entanglement entails a fundamentally different, relational form of (intra)connectedness with other ethical implications. When fctional texts generate connectivity, e.g. by linking storylines that are separated in terms of their geographies, literary studies often habitually refer to these texts as "global novels" or "network narratives".

The implications of these tropes of connectivity themselves - as briefy outlined above - are rarely given much thought; and as labels, they cannot account for more complex and meshwork-like formations. In this talk, I will be thinking about the poetics and aesthetics of entanglement.

Comparative literature's changing conceptions of world literature have largely been informed by humanist thinking and the global paradigm, but as the climate crisis exposes the inextricable interconnectedness of globalisation and the anthropocene, 'natural' and 'cultural' histories, and species thinking and historical thinking (Chakrabarty 2009), wouldn't it be time to let theories of world literature and critical posthumanism converge? One route into this might be to extend Édouard Glissants poetics of relation to non-human actors, and to put Glissant into a conversation with Karen Barad's concept of agential realism. Working with texts by J.M. Coetzee, Olga Tokarczuk, and Richard Powers, I will show how they destabilise the binaries and demarcations targeted by a critical posthumanist agenda, how literature ultimately test the limits of object-oriented ontology and its anti-relational stance, and how geography still matters in all of this.

At the same time, the framework of posthumanist entanglement helps questioning the popular conception of literature as simply 'playing through' or modelling fctionalised versions of human experience, and to think about literature as an experiential space and as a relational ethics in its own right.