What is it like to be a rat? Early cold war glimpses of the post-human

Abstract

This article explores the interaction and mutual reinforcement of two sets of cultural concerns in early cold war literature and science: the anticipation of humankind's nuclear (self-) annihilation and the emergence of new forms of ecological awareness. The interrogation of anthropocentrism that was enabled by cold war post-apocalyptic fiction, I argue, helped to shape an artistic and critical concern with non-human life in the absence of the human. Considering a range of cultural materials (including 1950s science-fictions and John Calhoun's rodent experiments in the early 1960s), the article contends that the cultural engagement with non-human forms of cognition and agency created an imaginative wedge that made it possible to think what scientists have recently called the ‘anthropocene' and what might become its aftermath. I choose the term ‘post-human’ to describe this confluence of the vision of a world from which human presence has been violently removed and the attention (anticipating more recent forms of ‘posthumanism’) that was brought to non-human forms of animal and vegetative life.