Nonhuman Subjectivity Research Articles

Parables for planetary crisis: storytelling and multispecies migration in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Throughout his oeuvre, Amitav Ghosh deals with storytelling and migration. Exploring legacies of empire and entanglements between the human and non-human world, his writing is driven by an ethical imperative to excavate “forgotten” stories, and, especially in his later texts, to find new forms of storytelling suited to capture pasts, presents, and futures shaped by a growing sense of planetary crisis. Gun Island (2019), a generic mix of personal quest narrative, thriller, romance, and folk tale, depicts a world disrupted by different forms of multispecies migration. Linking the Indian subcontinent, the US, and Europe, it chronicles voluntary and forced journeys of humans and animals between the Global North and South, intertwining refugee and climate crises in the Mediterranean and Bangladesh with the morally charged legend of the gun merchant, a seventeenth-century world traveller. The text brings current and historical links between migration and climate change, which are comparatively rarely treated in literary fiction, into sharp focus. As this essay argues, it highlights specifically the need to broaden the notion of migration literature and its subgenres to include both human and animal migration and the impact of globalization and current realities of climate change. Exploring genre and poetics in Gun Island, this essay reads the novel against the broader aesthetic and cultural-historical arguments made in Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) and The Nutmeg’s Curse (2021). To explore Ghosh’s poetics, which fuse everyday realism with the uncanny, the improbable, and the mythical, this essay also draws on Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose’s notions of “ethography”. It argues that Gun Island, as a multispecies climate migration novel, responds to the author’s call for a rediscovery of storytelling beyond Western-style realism or SF, as a means to capture human and non-human subjectivities and to undo demarcations between rationality and spirituality.

Constructing Posthuman Politics: New Forms of Media Subjectivity (fakes, bots and simulacra)/Konstruowanie polityki posthumanizmu: nowe formy podmiotowości medialnej (dezinformacja, boty, symulakra)

The article is devoted to the emergence of the phenomenon of posthuman politics, in particular, to the study of new forms of media subjectivity. Drawing from the theoretical developments of J. Baudrillard, N. Luhmann, B. Latour, K. Knorr-Cetina, P. Bourdieu, P. Virilio, Z. Bauman and a number of other theorists, the author identifies a number of processes that significantly and ontologically transform the communicative space within the world of media. These processes include the industrialization of communication production, the massification and audiovisualization of image production, the intensification of flows, the increasing role of speed, the standardization of reaction control and the narrowing of the range of these reactions, the elimination of memory structures, the “collapse” of the chronotope to the here-and-now, and the increasing “fluidity” of societal structures. Based on this, the author conceptualizes fundamentally new nodes of relations in posthuman politics: integral network complexes “human-human,” “human-non-human (that is, machine),” “machine-machine” become significant,. The “drone-production of media products” is established, with machines and bots beginning to participate in discussions, imitation and simulation of multiplicity and participation, and non-human subjectivity turns out to be even more subjective than humans. The author argues that all of this leads to significant shifts in “posthuman” politics compared to human ones: human subjects lose confidence in the political act in any of its expressions; the political ceases to be taken “seriously,” and alienation begins to affect even formal communicative acts on the Internet, which gives rise to inactivity Meaningful communication about the political is “noisy”; audiovisual content ceases to be a space of meaning, comprehension, dialogue and communication Political understanding and interaction no longer centre on action and discourse about human lives, pain, suffering, values, hopes; The “silent majority” as a “black hole of the social” absorbs an increasing amount of not only meanings and meaningful statements but also potential opportunities, and an increasing part of the future. The article also outlines the prospects for further research, including empirical research on the topic.

"Art Cinema’s Suicidal Posthuman Women”

Air Doll (Kûki ningyô, dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2009) introduces a posthuman perspective through its protagonist Nozomi, an inflatable sex doll who miraculously comes to consciousness. Meanwhile, On Body and Soul (Testről és lélekről, dir. Ildikó Enyedi, 2017) centers on a surreal romance between Mária and Endre that thrives, in part, on their posthuman connections to animals and objects. Strong narrative, erotic and traumatic elements bind these films—in particular, their treatments of their posthuman women protagonists—which video editing offered the ideal method for unpacking. Air Doll and On Body and Soul explore the posthuman possibilities inherent in their protagonists’ nonhuman and neurodivergent subjectivities, yet the films’ handling of Nozomi and Mária's leaky bodies reveals their confinement within humanist norms. Left bleeding and deflated, what do Nozomi and Mária foretell for posthuman cinema?

A Modernist Bildungsroman: Nonhuman Narrative and Multispecies Community in Virginia Woolf’s Flush

In 1933, Virginia Woolf published Flush: A Biography, an experimental novel in animal narrative that records the life story of Elizabeth Browning’s pet dog. It receives scant scholarship, and critics treat it as serious work only to the extent that it is not concerned about dogs. It is the progress in animal studies that inspires more scholars to re-evaluate Flush as a biography of a dog. In this respect, this paper explores Woolf’s response to the form that Flush adopts, Bildungsroman, by the use of Gregory Castle’s theory of modernist Bildungsroman. Through a close reading of Flush, this paper attempts to investigate the author’s modernist canine presentation that parts with the tradition of Bildung. The present paper starts with an introduction to the relationship between modernism and the genre of Bildungsroman. Then, this paper continues to examine the author’s experiments in narrative and socialization that differentiate Flush from the tradition of canine Bildung. The nonhuman subjectivity demonstrated in the narrative of the cocker spaniel critiques the anthropocentrism that shapes the characters in animal biography. Additionally, the rejection of the hierarchy of breed and the dog’s embracing his identity as a mongrel embody Woolf’s pursuit of freedom in the autonomous Bildung plot.

The nonhuman animal in social studies: Using critical animal studies for empathy

Despite the many contributions of nonhuman animals in history, nonhuman animal representations are seldom crafted with care and accuracy in curricular texts. Because of the anthropocentric vantage point of textbook creation, the nonhuman animal is often portrayed as an object, but as our relationship with the nonhuman world continues to deteriorate, we need now more than ever to consider the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman entities across time and space. In this article, I will use critical contextual analysis as a research method to examine the representation of the horse in a commonly used textbook in middle and high schools in the United States titled World History: Patterns of Interaction to raise larger questions about how to engage with nonhuman animal presence in history with students. Using critical animal studies as a theoretical framework to illuminate the data, the findings reveal that the horse is depicted as agentless and is shown merely as a means for human animals to expand empire and perpetuate social norms. The exploration identifies a gap in the social studies scholarship that neglects the historical contributions of nonhuman animals in curriculum. This article will argue that juxtaposing anthropocentric curricular texts such as the one under investigation with narratives that illuminate nonhuman animal subjectivity is essential for building a more empathetic world and for cultivating a more inclusive historical narrative.

The Posthuman as a Hopeful Monster: “Geneticizing” the Fly-Human Hybrid in David Cronenberg’s The Fly

Abstract Even though posthuman themes abound in fiction, they often rely on representational practices tied to humanist worldviews, perpetuating assumptions about the meaning of being human and humankind’s relationship with its environment. This article discusses the artist’s book Not-Human, Not-Fly (NHNF), which reconsiders David Cronenberg’s The Fly from a critical posthumanist perspective. Tied to horror conventions, the film reduces the posthuman to a condition threatening human life and well-being. NHNF employs tools from molecular genetics, designing a fictional database of the creature’s genes based on human and housefly genetic information. The hybrid genetic material rewrites the film’s narrative, revealing the “postfly” condition of the “posthuman” character and bringing its posthuman content to the fore by disentangling it from humanist representational conventions. This transdisciplinary approach challenges the film’s hierarchies of being, its portrayal of the housefly as a contaminant of the human genome’s purity, and unsettles assumptions concerning the ontological separation of humans, nonhumans, and posthumans. Thus, this work delineates one possible formal approach to representation of the posthuman via reframing through genetics. Moreover, it identifies connections between contemporary genetics and posthumanist thinking that validate posthumanism’s decentralization from the human, providing a nonanthropocentric interpretation of human and nonhuman subjects and subjectivities.

Beyond the mere present: Husserl on the temporality of human and animal consciousness

My aim in this paper is to reconstruct Edmund Husserl’s views on the differences between human and animal consciousness, with particular attention to the experience of temporality.In the first section, I situate the topic of animal consciousness in the broader context of Husserl’s philosophy. Whereas this connection has been often neglected, I argue that a phenomenological analysis of non-human subjectivities is not only justified, but also essential to the Husserlian project as a whole.In the second section, I introduce two notions Husserl resorts to when describing the essential difference between human and animal subjectivities, namely “strata of consciousness” and “person.” Drawing on textual evidence, I argue that Husserl does not simply see animals as excluded from the sphere of personhood. Rather, he draws a distinction between two modes of personal life, one of which is said to be unique to human adults.What holds these two modes apart, according to Husserl, is a subject’s relation to time. In the third section, I delve deeper into this topic, asking how we should understand Husserl’s claim that animals live in a “restricted temporality.” I argue that this has less to do with an inability to remember, imagine, or anticipate future events, and more with an inability to explore temporal horizons stretching before one’s birth or after one’s death. By contrast, humans gradually overcome these limitations during ontogeny, thanks to the practice of linguistic communication. This also has consequences for our capacity to engage in genuinely theoretical thought.

From “footprint” to relationships: Impacts of US military base on Okinawa

AbstractHow does militarism impact the natural environment? There is a growing body of scholarly work interrogating the intersection of environmental impacts and military activities from what can be referred to as a “footprint” perspective, which documents the tangible environmental impacts. Further, this paper introduces an alternative perspective on militarism's environmental impacts, which emphasizes Indigenous people's relationship to the environment, which this paper calls the relational perspective. This review paper argues that the emerging research concerning the environmental impacts of the US military bases in Okinawa employs the relational perspective, which echoes insights from Indigenous studies that see land as a field of the relationship of things to each other. Overall, this paper acknowledges that there is a reciprocal relationship that bridges humans and nonhuman subjectivity, including the natural environment, animals, and plants, and some places, like Okinawa, prioritize this perspective, which gives us a different angle on how we see the natural environment, the long‐lasting impacts of militarism, and countermeasures to the climate crisis. Military bases necessitate natural resources to exist. However, it is not only those material resources that get affected. Relationships with the natural environment, an essential aspect of Indigenous epistemology, are also impacted.

Subjecthood in Cyberspace and the Uncanny Valley of International Law

Abstract In this article the authors build on Masahiro Mori’s 1970s essay “The Uncanny Valley”, psychoanalysis and critical legal pluralism, to analyse how the uncanny in international law is exposed through law’s encounter with the a-human, non-human and more-than-human phenomena challenging legal subjecthood in cyberspace. Discussing autonomous decision-making, dwellers and encounters in international law’s uncanny valley the article proposes that international law needs to cater to a spectrum of non-human subjectivities, entities, laws and normativities. In short, international law needs to ‘get over itself’ and its constant anxiety in the face of the plurality of laws and Others.

Luma and Gunda Stare Back: Integrating Nonhuman Perspectives in The Ecofeminist Documentary

Documentaries about non-human animals abound, but how many of these films are truly attempting to narrate their perspective? Both blue-chip ‘nature’ documentaries narrated by David Attenborough and animal rights advocacy documentaries have an anthropocentric approach: either the non-human animal is turned into a spectacle for the human gaze, or into a helpless “victim in need for human mercy and rescue” (Freeman & Tulloch 2013, 6). The aim of this paper is to make a case for the potentiality of the documentary form as a means to find new, interspeciesist ways of representing non-human animal subjectivities. It also investigates some of the methodologies used to explore the possibility of integrating the non-human animal perspective in documentary. To do so, this paper looks into examples of recent documentaries Gunda (Kossakovsky 2020) and Cow (Arnold 2021), suggesting that these films are able to put critical ecofeminist thought into practice. Moreover, this paper argues that methods such as those invested in sensory ethnography can be useful to let the nonhuman animal ‘speak’ for him or herself, in line with the ecofeminist aim of exposing the underlying power structure resulting in all forms of oppression. Furthermore, this paper explores Anat Pick’s notion of vegan cinema (2018)

Into the Woods: Toward a Material Poetics of the Tropical Forest in Philippine Literature

This study considers how the tropical forest as a material and discursive space mediates the ways in which history is imagined in Philippine literary texts and literary production. Mobilizing ideas from new materialism, material poetics, and tropicality, the paper looks at generative moments from indigenous and revolutionary literature—two broad traditions whose conditions of possibility are inextricably linked with the materiality of the tropical forest and thus inevitably evince the structuring force of such nonhuman agencies and subjectivities. By disclosing how the “more than human” is constitutive of history and historical subject formation, it seeks to foreground the agency of Philippine forests in actively and collaboratively contesting the catastrophic violence of capital and state-making on people and the natural world.

Locomotive Breath: The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse

Locomotive Breath:The Living Machines and Railway Dreams of Alexander Anderson's Working-Class Verse Ethan Taylor Stephenson (bio) By the turn of the twentieth century, the British railway system had left its mark on both the landscape and the literary imagination.1 The proliferation of rail lines and new railway technologies, what Wolfgang Schivelbusch describes as the "machine ensemble," combined with a substantial increase in passenger numbers and travel frequency to redefine conceptions of time and space—and thus, by extension, to influence both the content and form of poetic expression.2 The Scottish working-class poet Alexander Anderson was acutely aware of these changes as "surfaceman" and self-appointed chronicler of the railway.3 A contest winner in and frequent contributor to that "new wave of penny papers" like the People's Journal and People's Friend of Dundee, which, following the repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, "catered first and foremost [to] the working class," Anderson was keen to inspire "a higher reverence for the 'nobility of labour, [and] the long pedigree of toil.' "4 His railway verse too attempts to transcend, even while it responds to, its cultural moment, and, in doing so, it both informs our understanding of late-Victorian attitudes toward technology and comments on the machine's broader viability as a poetic vehicle thereafter. Anderson's 1878 Songs of the Rail, a collection of thirty-four poems (most republished from his own earlier volumes), best expresses his complex attitudes toward the railway as an institution and toward railway technologies like the locomotive. Beyond this, though, it demonstrates the depth and sophistication of his drive to portray railroad workers and their gargantuan steam engines as ontological equals, co-denizens of a new technological age.5 This is not to say that Anderson was unaware of the dangers posed by the railway to both worker and passenger. Accidents were frequent and well documented both in the periodical press and in verse by contemporaries like William Aitken, [End Page 277] whose 1883 collection Lays of the Line, and Other Poems tells the "little histories" of those who were employed in that "most hazardous" line of work, and William McGonagall, who immortalized the 1879 Tay Bridge Disaster.6 Neither does Anderson ignore certain existential fears of the machine age. Besides portraying locomotives' raw, sometimes brutal power, his poems often respond to contemporary warnings about the human costs of technological advancement. Nevertheless, Anderson's work remains striking for its fervent embrace of "progress" wrought jointly by human and machine. Thus, even as Anderson often features what Kirstie Blair has described as rhythmic juxtapositions of "the pulse of the rails with the fragile and easily damaged rhythms of the human body," he more insistently imagines the future of human resiliency and enlightenment as inhering in a new hybrid poetics and, with this, a newly collective consciousness of human and machine.7 Alongside Blair's account of the mimetic properties of railway verse, then, we also need to figure in John Goodridge's assessment that Anderson himself saw the railway's "poetic potential as both a metaphor and a site of reverie, a place where the poet can dream of metaphysics, political progress, and social change."8 In this essay, I apply these two approaches toward a more detailed and specific characterization of Anderson's technophilic vision than has yet been offered—and one that is especially timely as Victorian scholarship is currently reassessing similarly overlooked histories of post- and nonhuman subjectivity.9 It is first important to appreciate how Anderson presented himself as a working-class literary professional. He parlayed his early and ongoing magazine-contest success into several poetry collections in the 1870s, and the reviews and sales of these volumes were favorable enough to win him appointments as a librarian at Edinburgh University and as secretary of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution.10 Even though the image of the laboring literary autodidact had seemingly become clichéd by the time of Anderson's career, his credentials were such that George Gilfillan, in his introduction to Anderson's 1875 volume, could at least plausibly locate him at the top of the Scots working-class poetic tradition as inaugurated...

Toward Interspecies Art and Design: Prosthetic Habitat-Structures in Human-Owl Cultures

Abstract Urbanization severely reduces opportunities for nonhuman habitation and undermines nonhuman subjectivities, aesthetic experiences, behaviors, traditions, and cultures. In response, humans need to reimagine cities as places for interspecies cohabitation. In this article, a team of architects and ecologists demonstrates that such reimagination depends on the cultural behaviors of multiple species. The authors illustrate the implications of this dependence by designing and discussing nesting structures for the powerful owl (Ninox strenua). The project shows that prosthetic habitats can serve as useful provocation for thinking about interspecies cultures. The authors use this work to propose productive avenues for further research.

Female Nudity, Interspecies Sexuality and ‘Horseness’ in Laetitia Dosch's Hate (2018)

The aim of this paper is to analyse Laetitia Dosch's play Hate, first performed in Lausanne in 2018, in light of recent theories on female nudity, interspecies sexuality and non-human animal subjectivity. Featuring a completely naked woman and a white stallion, the show revolves around the possibility of interspecies communication and the need to re-evaluate the meaning of humankind and animality through theatrical performance. I begin by drawing on Derrida's writings on the subject of shame and nakedness as a means to explore interspecies identification. I then turn to recent ecofeminist theories in order to discuss Dosch's performative criticism of industrial exploitation of non-androcentric ‘others’, as well as the implications behind her dramatization of interspecies sexual intercourse. Finally, I examine how her ‘ventriloquist’ techniques to provide the horse with a voice invite considerations regarding Levinas's concept of ‘the face’ and how that affects animal subjecthood and subjectivity.

Perspectivism and shamanism in the Jungian clinic: the jaguar as an archetypal image of the Latin American cultural unconscious.

Amerindians, living in a perspective of synchronicity, attribute to symmetry a negative value that produces an understanding of unstable dualism cosmologies, in a continuous and dynamic imbalance, in a notion of complementarity between conscious and unconscious. These notions are in line with the view of synchronicity proposed by Jung (1952/1972) and Cambray (2013), a view that expands temporal, acausal boundaries, within a perspective of interconnection, resonance and correspondence. Amerindian epistemologies break-up the discontinuity between animals and humans. By establishing a parallel with the Jungian concept of the relationship between unconscious and conscious, we reach a dimension of personification of both, a continuous and permanent flow of meaning. We introduce the jaguar as a symbol of Amerindian cultures and as an archetypal image of the numinosum that activates the unconscious, in asymmetrical and symmetrical movements. This is a qualitative contribution of indigenous mythologies to the understanding of the relationship between unconscious and conscious. Through perspectivism and Amerindian shamanism, we reflect on the archetypal image of the jaguar, as a mythological Latin American knowledge, which contributes to an understanding of the human being in the world, in an instinctive and spiritual integration. Recognizing this cosmos expands the ability to observe and access another point of view, in which the human being is seen in the jaguar, a personification or psychification of his unconscious. In clinical practice, it means finding the humanity that was left behind by that human who became an animal. The shaman, as a therapist, takes on the role of an active interlocutor in the exchange of human and non-human subjectivities, in an amplification process.

‘For the trees have no tongues’: eco-feedback, speech, and the silencing of nature

When Christopher Stone argued for the extension of legal standing to natural objects, he proposed a guardianship model for representing the rights or interests of nonhuman nature. This approach requires that natural objects or systems be able to intelligibly communicate information regarding needs associated with their continued sustainable flourishing. Drawing upon both ‘law beyond the human’ approaches to legal theory and New Materialist theories about nonhuman subjectivity, we conceive of this mode of communication as a political speech act, albeit one that must be interpreted through eco-feedback collected in the study of natural systems rather than directly transmitted from speaker to listener. We then apply this conception of communication to human rights contexts in which efforts to distort or to otherwise manipulate this eco-feedback could be construed as an anti-democratic interference in speech rights, arguing for the extension of such rights to protect against such interference.

Found in Narration: Nonhuman Voices in Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth

This article delves into the problem of nonhuman subjectivity in two literary texts: Jessica Grant’s Come, Thou Tortoise with the first-person tortoise narration, and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth that employs the collective primate narrator. While nonhumans cannot actively participate in the act of creation of the text, their presence in the story, arranged by the author, conveys multiple meanings. Considerations of the narrative techniques are critical for negotiating the relevance of nonhuman actors. I argue that although each author finds different methods of giving voice to nonhumans and both ensure practical significance of animal particularity, nonhuman subjectivity should not be perceived as a fixed value of the presented literary texts.

Plant-women, senses, and ecological considerations: Rethinking ritual plants and their taboos among the Pangcah of Taiwan (1920–2020)

Anthropologists have made strides in theorizing non-human subjectivity in cosmologies but, emphasizing animals, they underestimate the importance of botanical beings. Pangcah rituals and taboos cannot be separated from plants. Through ritual action, they divide plants into three categories: the first is cereals that have deities and soul, which are the center of animistic and shamanic rituals. These spirits will stick to people (like the substance of cereals) asking for food or aggressively make people ill. The second type is leaf vegetables forbidden to eat before and during rituals. They are regarded as unmarried females and have sexual connotations. The third includes ‘enveloped’ plants (beans and bamboo shoots) that are eaten only during rituals. From the important position of plants in the Pangcah lifeway and cosmology, this article explores the Pangcah ontology and analyzes the mediating role of sensory experience played in the people–plants–spirits encounter.

Applying Gloria Anzaldúa’s Creative Works to Speculative Realism: Bridging Jane Bennett’s Vital Materialism and Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Philosophy

In a 1983 interview with Christine Weiland, Gloria Anzaldúa posited that human and nonhuman connectivity exists outside hierarchical arrangements. Some twenty years after Anzaldúa’s interview, the “Speculative Turn” emerged in continental philosophy which critiques anthropocentrism in modern philosophy and reconceptualizes nonhuman subjectivity. While Anzaldúa’s scholarship addresses core issues that are highlighted by the speculative turn, little scholarship exists that places her into conversation with these new trajectories in continental philosophy. In this essay, I aim to contribute to this nascent scholarship and explore the question, How can Anzaldúa’s creative work contribute to and expand scholarship of the speculative turn? I investigate how Anzaldúa’s work can help bridge connections between differing veins of speculative turn thought, specifically Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism (VM). Conversations between Harman and Bennett demonstrate a split in understanding nonhuman autonomy and relationality and represent incompatibilities between OOP and VM. Interested in these departures, I posit that Anzaldúa’s creative works, such as poetry and drawing, offer ways to challenge problematic human/nonhuman relations and bridge philosophical divides within the speculative turn.

Breathing Song and Smoke: Ritual Intentionality and the Sustenance of an Interaffective Realm

In lowland South America, breath animates human and non-human bodies, pulsating through the materialities of organisms. Humans, however, should manage their bodies to recast and reconfigure breath in its most life-enhancing manifestations: singing and smoking. These are the specialized domains of those able to manage their vitalities in such a way as to produce potent effects in themselves and in the world around them, including influencing atmospheric conditions, the lives of animals and plants and the harming and healing of others. In these relational onto-epistemologies, intersubjectivity, intercorporality and states of non-cognitive interaffection find new depths. Breath, properly managed, can make and unmake worldly forms, including bodies and the societies they come together in. Focusing on two Amerindian communities, the Warekena of northwestern Rio Negro, Brazil and the Shipibo-Konibo of the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru, this article examines the interface between human and non-human subjectivities, and how resonant interaffective atmospheric conditions are induced to promote health.