New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory by Monika Kaup Antonia Spencer Monika Kaup, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 347 pp. In the first line of the introduction to her study New Ecological Realisms, Monika Kaup asks her principal theoretical question: what comes after poststructuralism? The parallel literary question her study poses is what comes after apocalypse, and how do the protagonists of post-apocalyptic narratives learn to navigate their worlds. Through a sudden epidemic of blindness, extreme violence and social breakdown, a nuclear holocaust, or a mass poisoning by pharmaceuticals, post-apocalypse narrates the end of one world and the assembly of a new. Via a discussion of four fictional post-apocalyptic scenarios, Kaup demonstrates that reconceptualizing the subject is a primary concern in each. When apocalypse has exposed our innate dependencies, [End Page 314] the concept of a discrete human subject distinct from others and from "nature" is no longer tenable. Remaking subjectivity after a cataclysm consequently requires concepts of the real that reject dichotomies of subject/object and reflect the newly vulnerable position of the human. Structuralist and poststructuralist theories of reality as mediated through language and ideology, in Kaup's view, lose their explanatory power when there is no longer, in the post-apocalyptic setting, any society or authority to bear influence. Current realist approaches, in contrast, grapple afresh with problems of "being, existence, reality, world" (1), making them singularly appropriate to pair with post-apocalyptic fiction. In this fashion, Kaup advances a broad-spectrum, anti-realist reading of structuralist and poststructuralist thought, to underline the inability of these positions to fully engage "the real" in the era of climate change, in which our capacity to respond actively to non-linguistic phenomena is imperative. However, this entails what for some may seem a rather clear-cut demarcation between new realist theories and constructivist approaches encapsulated in Jacques Derrida's often misappropriated "there is nothing outside the text", tending to leave a figure such as Gilles Deleuze, influential in both poststructuralism and present materialist and realist thought, nomadically traversing the smooth space between fortified linguistic and ontological turns. Yet Kaup's analysis of the broad field of new materialist and speculative realist work is as granular as any reader could wish. In her first chapter she clarifies the particular focus of her study within the umbrella of new realisms, making the case for realism specifically over theories of materiality, in order to account for the reality of non-material, humanistic phenomena—a central aim of her study. She largely sets aside the perspective of object-oriented ontology, which posits objects as essentially independent of their relations within systems, in favour of relational and context-based approaches to the real. This is the ecological emphasis which she signals in the book's title, referring to the networked interrelations prominent in the theories she advocates but also the concern of her fictional texts with the emergence of entire contexts. Chapter two sees Bruno Latour's work paired with Margaret Atwood's Madd-Addam trilogy, and Kaup argues compellingly that post-apocalypse stresses the compositional, in Latourian terms, the reassembling of reality. Key here is Latour's concept of the "factish" designed to suture the assumed dichotomy between autonomous facts and human-fabricated "fetishes". The Crakers in Atwood's trilogy are read as an example of the factish, non-violent, human-like creatures designed to inherit the earth. Yet the Crakers increasingly exhibit emergent behaviours not specified in their genetic design, revealing them as both constructed and autonomously "real." The neurophenomenology of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela and their theory of autopoiesis is the subject of chapter three, coupled with José Saramago's [End Page 315] novel Blindness, which narrates the transformation of community and individual experience during an epidemic loss of vision. Kaup underscores the ways in which blindness undermines the primacy of vision, privileging instead a haptic exploration of the world, and embodying Maturana and Varela's non-representationalist conception of mind and world as mutually constitutive. Yet to be blind also means, for Kaup, to be "post-individual" (151), and subjectivity and agency must...