Nonhuman Turn Research Articles

‘Scripted fantasies’: writing the twenty-first century

ABSTRACT If fiction is seldom perceived to be a contemporary form oriented towards global, ecological, or nonhuman concerns, it documents and dramatises crises, particularly of identity, that demonstrate these contexts. The twenty-first century novel both reflects and seeks to influence ethical, philosophical and critical discussion while negotiating its status as a medium that gained a strong cultural foothold because it addressed the establishment and imposition of civilizational norms in human societies from the Enlightenment through to the twentieth century. This essay considers how novels have approached challenges to human and humanist centrality from a range of forces in the last twenty years as multiple debates have taken a nonhuman turn.

The nonhuman turn or a re-turn to animism? Valuing life along and beyond capital

In this commentary, I point out that Büscher and other critics of the nonhuman turn ignore insights offered by Feminist, Black and Indigenous scholarship that help rethink the human and alternate worldmaking possibilities. The healthy corrective to the somewhat apolitical celebration of liveliness and entanglements in Western new materialist and posthumanism literature, that Büscher and others seek, already exists in Feminist, Black and Indigenous scholarship and practices, and in activism for environmental and climate justice around the world. In these times of deep ecological crises and precarity, we would do well to turn to the wisdom of Indigenous Peoples and other land-based cultures that embody and live by some of the central propositions of the ‘nonhuman turn’. I argue that the central propositions of nonhuman turn – relationality and interdependence; decentring and rethinking the human; honouring the agency, intelligence and subjecthood of other beings – offer alternate ways of doing politics and of imagining and enacting pluriversal, postcapitalist worlds. If this is not grounds for radical ecopolitics, then what is?

The dangerous intensifications of surplus alienation, or why platform capitalism challenges the (more-than-)human

This response gratefully acknowledges and engages with the commentaries on my article ‘The nonhuman turn: Critical reflections on alienation, entanglement and nature under capitalism’. It highlights the importance of further defining key concepts like anthropocentrism, ‘the human’, more-than-life and others in discussions of the more-than-human. It challenges desires for ‘returning’ to idealised forms of relationality or animism or the idea that historical, ‘basic alienation’ between humans and the rest of nature rests on some notion of ‘The Fall’. Overall, it aims to reemphasize one of the core arguments in the original article, namely the dangerous intensifications of historical capitalism, how this is critical for both non-human turn scholars and their critics and how this may provide common ground for opening up space for postcapitalism. Central to this argument is a further elaboration of the dangers of intensified surplus alienation due to contemporary platform capitalism for the (more-than)human but also, more specifically, for academic exchange.

Responsibility before the World: Cinema, Perspectivism and a Nonhuman Ethics of Individuation

The recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the theoretical humanities and social sciences has highlighted the need to develop more ontological modes of theorising the ethical ‘responsibility’ of the human in its relational encounters with nonhuman bodies and materialities. However, there is a lingering sense in this literature that such an ethics remains centred on a transcendent subject that would pre-exist the encounters on which it is called to respond. In this essay, I explore how Gilles Deleuze's philosophy offers potential opening for a more ontogenetic thinking of a ‘nonhuman ethics’. Specifically, I focus on how his theory of ‘individuation’ – conceived as a creative event of emergence in response to immanent ontological problems – informs his rethinking of ethics beyond the subject, opening thought to nonhuman forces and relations. I argue that if cinema becomes a focus of Deleuze's ethical discussions in his later work it is because the images and signs it produces are expressive of these nonhuman forces and processes of individuation, generating modes of perception and duration without ontological mooring in the human subject. Through a discussion of Verena Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's experimental film – Leviathan (2012) – I explore how the cinematic encounter dramatises different ethical worlds in which a multiplicity of nonhuman ‘points of view’ coexist without being reduced to a hierarchical or orienting centre that would unify and identify them. To conclude, I suggest that it is through the lens of an ethics of individuation that we can grasp the different sense of ‘responsibility’ alive in Deleuze's philosophy, one oriented not to the terms of the already-existing but rather to the nonhuman potential of what might yet come into being.

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the AnthropoceneAfter Extinction

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the AnthropoceneAfter Extinction

Empathet(H)Ics: Intersubjectivity, Interobjectivity, and (Non)Human Storytellers in Colum Mccann’s Let The Great World Spin

Tracing some of the inflection points in our conceptualization of empathy, social cognition, intersubjective understanding, and social theories over time, this essay attempts to contextualize and give a possible explanation to the more radical changes determined by the so-called nonhuman turn. Drawing on the theories proposed by Steven Connor, Bill Brown, and Bruno Latour on the relations between human and nonhuman agents, the paper will argue for the inherent potential of things to both exceed the limits of human agency and cognitive capacities (specifically, memory and intersubjective understanding) and foster their expansion. A reading of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin (2009) will emphasize the importance of interobjectivity as a mechanism of augmenting empathy and intersubjective understanding. The polyphony of narrativized memories of loss, mourning, trauma – and even pre-trauma, in their construction of an alternative history to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, uses things to encode, store, and retrieve memories, as well as to facilitate (re)connections with others beyond boundaries of space, time, or death. Thus, the democratic force of storytelling returns to corroborate “a democracy extended to things” (Latour).

Unnatural narratives, Brexit and ideology in Ian McEwan’sThe Cockroach

AbstractAgainst the backdrop of sudden shifts in global political and historical climate, our century has witnessed a convergence of turns in humanities, including the nonhuman turn and the historical turn. Ian McEwan’s latest novella,The Cockroach, is a just work along this line. Through the use of unnatural narratives within realistic context, McEwan presents readers with a world that is both strange and recognisable. By examining the unnatural narrative strategies, including the deployment of nonhuman character and omniscient narrator, McEwan expresses concerns for the future of humanity and fear for social and cultural parochialism, populism and anti-cosmopolitanism.

The nonhuman turn: Critical reflections on alienation, entanglement and nature under capitalism

This article critically reflects on contemporary discussions of human–nonhuman relations and their consequences for ecological politics. Recent critiques push back against popular ‘nonhuman turn’ appeals to ‘decentre’ humans and downplay distinctions between humans and nonhumans. The article seeks to both extend and nuance these critiques by emphasising how uneven developments from colonial to digital platform capitalism have intensified historical processes of alienation between humans and the rest of nature. This focus contextualises the nonhuman turn as a response to increasingly alienated forms of entanglement, which may hamper rather than enable challenging contemporary forms of domination. To address this, two conceptual shifts are proposed. First, a shift away from ‘decentring the human’ to a dialectics between more-than-human and ‘less-than-human’. This move emphasises how forms of capitalist domination continue to diminish (certain) humans and nonhumans and how challenging this requires pivoting between de- and recentring humans where needed. Second, a shift from ‘more-than-human’ to ‘more-than-life’, to emphasise how through extremely uneven histories of capitalist development the intensification of alienation has led to growing tensions between ontological relationality and epistemological and practical distinctions.

Simmel’s (non-human) humanism: On Simmel’s ‘ethics of endings and futures’

Given the recent non-human turn in sociology and the social sciences, the popularity of theories of entanglement, and contemporary concern with the concept of the anthropocene, it is easy to forget that classical sociology was always-already aware of the relationship between humanity and non-humanity. Although Daniel Chernilo focuses upon the debate between Sartre and Heidegger in his recent Debating Humanity, and contrasts Sartre’s Humanism with Heidegger’s Anti-Humanism to frame his exploration of the limits of the human in contemporary social theory, we could easily locate the same concern with the human and its relationship to the nonhuman in Marx, Tarde, and centrally for the purposes of this article, the work of Georg Simmel. Expanding upon this insight concerning the relevance of Simmel’s work for understanding our ‘entangled present’, the purpose of this article is to explore Simmel’s work and recent interpretations of his sociology that seek to project Simmelian thought into the future in significantly different ways. To this end, the article critically engages with Pyyhtinen’s recent reading of Simmel’s work that focuses upon his legacy with a view of exploring his future through consideration of (1) Fitzi’s exploration of Simmel’s ethics of the individual, (2) Kemple’s turn to Simmel’s religiosity, and finally (3) Beer’s reading of the late Simmel, who, I suggest might inform the emergence of a kind of non-human humanism capable of thinking beyond the mortal limits of the anthropocene that paradoxically imagines its own post-human immortality.

The nonhuman turn and the body in the Anthropocene in Thomas Day’s Seven Seconds to Become an Eagle

Reading Thomas Day’s Seven Seconds to Become an Eagle (2013), this article shows how the human body distinguishes itself from the nonhuman and then how the nonhuman turn inaugurates the emancipatory imagination in the Anthropocene. Many studies of the Anthropocene have approached the problem from a global and universalizing perspective, overlooking problems of race, sex, and class. Few have looked at the material agency of nature or animism. Current ecological crises have revealed the vulnerability and permeability of the human body. Day’s stories reveal trans-corporeality and deconstruct ontological divisions between nature and culture, human and nonhuman, in the process showing the human failure to control nature. Most strikingly trans-corporeal in his stories is the hybridity of the animal skin and the human blood. This article argues that animism is a powerful theoretical weapon not only for deconstructing human exceptionalism but for re-imagining human and nonhuman relationships.

Introduction

Introduction Katherine Ebury (bio) and Michelle Witen (bio) The idea for this issue on Joyce and the Nonhuman began with a panel for the 2017 North American James Joyce Conference in Toronto on “Our Funnaminal World,” which later turned into the theme for the 2018 Zurich James Joyce Workshop (“Joycean Animals”). The topic came about as a result of our growing interest in animal studies and the nonhuman, specifically with reference to an increasingly technologically driven society. This theoretical context is one that intersects nicely with other theories—ecocriticism, Marxism, queer studies, gender studies, technology studies, postcolonialism, posthumanism, the blue humanities, psychoanalysis, deconstruction—but it also transcends these frameworks, in that it is specifically relevant to twenty-first-century issues. The lens of the nonhuman provides new insights into otherwise well-trodden pastures such as Bloom’s cat, Garryowen, and cattle, in addition to bestiality, animality, and the beastly. As this volume shows, however, it also opens up the field to animals, objects, and concepts that have received less attention, for example, chimera, hybrids, monstrosities, cephalopods, plesiosaurs, embodiments, and bicycles. This special issue consolidates and builds on recent work in Joyce Studies, including Robert Brazeau’s and Derek Gladwin’s Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce; Alison Lacivita’s The Ecology of “Finnegans Wake”; Vike Martina Plock’s special issue of the James Joyce Quarterly on “Joyce and Physiology,” which featured animals prominently in essays by David Rando and Sam Slote; and a first wave of essays on “Joyce, Animals and the Nonhuman” in Katherine Ebury’s special issue of Humanities.1 Other milestone essays within Joyce Studies have included Maureen O’Connor’s chapter on Joyce’s signifying animals;2 Plock’s essay on both human and nonhuman bodies in Ulysses;3 Robert Haas’s essay in ANQ;4 Cathryn Setz’s chapter on Shem the Penman in her recent monograph;5 and Margot Norris’s and Cliff Mak’s essays on animal figures in Finnegans Wake.6 Our special issue has also been initiated as an addition to recent developments in literary theory, such as Richard Grusin’s The Nonhuman Turn (2015), and the new interpretations of the works of Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Jane Bennett, and N. Katherine Hayles (to name a few) . [End Page 11] Grusin’s collection The Nonhuman Turn, in particular—inspired by the proceedings of his innovative 2012 conference of the same name, which included influential contributions from senior theoretical scholars from a range of fields, such as Bennett, Timothy Morton, and Steven Shaviro—has offered a crucial step forward for the Joyce scholars included in this special issue. According to Grusin’s introduction, in a project designed to be “politically liberatory,” the method aims to “extend our academic and critical concern to include nonhuman animals and the nonhuman environment, which had previously been excluded or ignored from critical or scholarly humanistic concern.”7 The nonhuman turn differs from an earlier generation of posthuman scholarship, Grusin indicates, in that while the posthuman “oscillate[s] between seeing the posthuman as a new stage in human development from human to something after the human and seeing it as calling attention to the inseparability of human and nonhuman,” the nonhuman turn focuses entirely on the latter approach in which the two are intertwined (ix). While this focus on the nonhuman is undeniably a twenty-first-century development, some of the central reference points for scholars across Grusin’s volume are key modern-ist thinkers such as Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead (viii), with Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and especially the “Shem the Penman” section, being a core orientation for the final essay by Jane Bennett.8 For Bennett, Joyce’s work (as well as Walt Whitman’s) is a case study of how “texts are bodies that can light up, by rendering human perception more acute, those bodies whose favoured vehicle of affectivity is less wordy: plants, animals, blades of grass, household objects, trash” (234–35). By examining Joyce alongside the “nonhuman turn,” we find that Bennett’s intervention shows that, rather than simply applying a new critical methodology to his work, the conditions are right to acknowledge Joyce’s...

“Beard and Bicycle”: The Human, Nonhuman, and Posthuman Bicyclist in Ulysses

Born just a few years before the invention of the “safety bicycle” (1885) and coming to consciousness amidst the “second bicycle boom,” it is perhaps unsurprising that bicycles reappear throughout Joyce’s works. By 1904, as Ulysses carefully documents, the initial excitement of the boom had largely given way to a period of sober ubiquity as other, more spectacular technologies competed for the future. Yet the bicycle remains a vital source of philosophical and social inquiry. Joyce emphasizes, for example, the technology’s connection with developing and shifting sexual economies (for instance, Reggie Wylie and Gerty MacDowell, Milly Bloom, and others) and in particular with contemporary preoccupations with the notion of the “New Woman” and the gender-bending “rational dress.” But through its connection with the poet and spiritualist George Russell (“Æ”), the bicycle is also brought into a complex conversation about “vegetarianism,” Irish spiritualism, and the cyclist as caught between contradictory animal and post-bodily technological states. I propose to engage the emerging theoretical frameworks of the “non-human turn” to explore the role of the bicycle in Joyce’s efforts to examine the connections between the human and the nonhuman and his efforts to decenter human agency and undermine rationalist, progressivist conceptions of the relationship between human, technology, and nature. As recent work seeks to emphasize (including the “Animal Machines/Machine Animals” conference in Exeter in November), the development of machines affects conceptions about the animal. But in Joyce, there is a feedback loop in which human, machine, and animal are all found to be (often chaotically and irresolvably) interrelated and all defined against competing notions of the “post-human” and the “fully human.”

Steamy

Steamy Jeffrey T. Nealon (bio) Let me begin with a blurb written by Rita Felski, author of The Limits of Critique, for Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter, arguably post-critique's most successful venture: "This manifesto for a new materialism is an invigorating breath of fresh air. Jane Bennett's eloquent tribute to the vitality and volatility of things is just what we need to revive the humanities and to redraw the boundaries of political thought."1 If we survey what's happened in and around the humanities since 2010, when Bennett's book was published and new materialist post-critique debuted as the Terry Gross-style "fresh air" destined "to revive the humanities," we'd have to admit the obvious: rather than post-critique being the god that could save us now, the new paradigm that would sweep to dominance and make us relevant again, we've instead been vexed to nightmare by budget and tenure-line job cuts, disappearing students, and a number of self-inflicted Twitter wounds too numerous to elaborate. But I'm more interested here in the nomenclature of critical "steam"—insofar as, from its inception in Bruno Latour all the way to this journal issue, the steam metaphor is based on very recognizable marketing logic, or "next big thing" thinking: in short, the "Steam or No Steam?" gameshow format (as in, "affect studies—steam or no steam?") reinforces the sense that Kuhnian paradigm shifts (or less generously, neoliberal innovations in the product line) are the fuel for the engine of disciplinary progress, and more specifically that the entire academic enterprise is driven by steamy new scholarly publication protocols and their concomitant acronyms: ANT, OOO, various other OMGs, WTFs, and shiny innovative modes of adjectival reading (as in post-critical, distant, reparative, descriptive, surface, distracted, hyper, and so on). All this emphasis on critical "steam" (as newness or hotness) reinforces the sense that such heavyweight paradigm bouts are the central powering mechanisms of a discipline. So just let me say right out of the gate: from my point of view, it's not this or that theoretical paradigm that has run out of steam, but rather it's the very act of chasing the "next big thing" within critical paradigms that has run out of steam. Or it may be that, when it comes to thinking about theory and what makes it tick, chasing the next big idea was never anything other than a big ole Cleveland Steamer. [End Page 537] In any case, it seems clear that new materialism or post-critical realism is fashionable in theory today largely because its arch-nemesis social constructionism has run aground; there are just no new articles, books or dissertations to be written about the social construction of x or y. And to many jaundiced post-critical eyes, it looks like those social-construction years were tragically hubristic as well, with the tenets of the linguistic turn harboring a secret investment in what turns out to be an earth-destroying humanism. As Jane Bennett writes in "Systems and Things: On Vital Materialism and Object-Oriented Philosophy," almost all of these recent post-critical models "share a critique of linguistic and social constructivism" and thereby "see the nonhuman turn as a response to an overconfidence about human power that was embedded in the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s" (Bennett 2015, 227). As an aside here, one might note that critique in the modern, Kantian sense is grounded in a severely austere humility concerning the power of human logos, not a celebration of its unbounded powers to know everything—the one point of agreement that made postmodernism and Kant such unlikely bedfellows. As Theodor Adorno insists, "The crucial feature of the Kantian work…is that it is guided by the conviction that reason is denied the right to stray into the realm of the Absolute. … The power of the Critique of Pure Reason resides not so much in responses to the so-called metaphysical questions as in its highly heroic and stoical refusal to respond to these questions in the first place" (Adorno 2001, 6-7). In fact, it completely escapes me how turning back toward realist metaphysical...

Neko Case and the Molecular Turn

Few contemporary artists channel the utopian impulses of the nonhuman turn with more creative energy than Neko Case. In her work, the untraceable movements of poisonous gases, the uncanny desires of tornadoes, and the recalcitrant withdrawal of subatomic particles envision an array of transits, elusions, and exit strategies so often denied to the subjects whose bodies, trajectories, and affective lives are policed by the regulatory cultural and institutional forces endemic to heteronormative biocapitalism, particularly poor and marginalized women. Drawing on recent scholarship in feminist new materialism as well as its critics, this essay considers the implications of these imaginings. On the one hand, the modes of agency that Case’s songs invoke frequently entail a circumvention or suppression of specific political interests, making them susceptible to antifeminist and settler-colonialist appropriations; on the other hand, her work potentially offers a vision of the political that refuses to take human action as the inevitable starting point for its theories of power and domination, an increasingly urgent task in an age of ecological catastrophe, when the lives of earth’s most vulnerable gendered and racialized subjects are irreducibly enmeshed in precarious planetary networks of biodependencies that include the actions of microbes, tornadoes, and atoms alike. In Case’s most original compositions, a reductionist materialism attendant to the agency of the nonhuman complements rather than forecloses an older materialist tradition insistent on antagonism between conflicting interest groups as the motor engine of history and the social.

Vital and enchanted: Jane Bennett and new materialism for nursing philosophy and practice.

Nursing theories are typically anthropocentric and emphasize caring for a person as a unitary whole. They maintain the dualisms of human-nonhuman, natural-social and material-ideal. Recent developments in nonhuman ontology question the utility of that approach. One important philosopher in this new materialism is political theorist Jane Bennett. In this paper, I explore Bennett's vital materialism and enchantment as two concepts arising from the nonhuman turn that should inform nursing philosophy. Vital materialism considers the lively power of matter to affect the world and be affected in relations. Enchantment refers to a sense of wonder and captivation with matter. While summarizing her important contributions, I also describe common criticisms and responses. I consider the human as an assemblage of matter as well as the agency or "thing power" of matter external to humans. This has implications for nursing thought and practice, and it can inform a more capacious research methodology. I also discuss how compassion fatigue or burnout and other professional issues may be seen as a form of disenchantment with the material world. I argue that embracing these and other elements of Bennett's new materialist philosophy can help nurses and other health professionals enrich their theories and practice to advance their disciplines and improve care for persons and populations.

Playful design, empathy and the nonhuman turn

Abstract In the context of interspecies play involving humans, we find limitations when it comes to understanding most species. One reason for this may be the fact that we tend to anthropomorphize the other to be able to empathize with it. In light of this, how can we infer communication signs of other species so we are able to connect with the nonhuman world? We look for answers to this question by adopting a phenomenological approach that allows us to decentre from the anthropocentric perspective. We highlight animal studies, especially those that extend to them the notion of play, and the studies on interspecies playful interaction conducted in the context of animal–computer interaction. In addition, we propose considering empathy as an interspecies dialogical bridge with nonhumans. Finally, we argue about an expansion of the field of interaction design as an approach to the connection with the nonhuman world.

Phytomorphizing performance: plant performance in an expanded field

ABSTRACTThis essay embraces the possibilities offered by the “nonhuman turn” (Grusin vii) in the humanities and social sciences, and forwards the claim that plants are performers. In so doing, the essay analyzes the common claims about the ontology of performance, demonstrates how plants meet a strict rubric of evaluation for consideration as performers, and offers potential repercussions and opportunities for performance theory, if a plant performance is seriously considered.

The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction by Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom

Reviewed by: The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction by Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom Charles Stang Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom The Monastic Landscape of Late Antique Egypt: An Archaeological Reconstruction Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 Pp. 448. $135.00. In the conclusion of her study of the late antique Egyptian monastic landscape, Darlene L. Brooks Hedstrom endorses a call made by Norwegian archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen: historians must strive to include non-human "things" in the study of the human past. In other words, Brooks Hedstrom suggests that the study of Egyptian monasticism, like so many other disciplines, must make what Richard Grusin calls "the non-human turn," that is, it must include in its purview not only the history of thought (recorded in the literature of elites) but also such non-human "things" as "animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems" (Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn [University of Minnesota Press, 2015], vii). Grusin's wager is that precisely by shifting our focus away from the human, by displacing humans from the center of all our inquiry, we might paradoxically better understand and appreciate the place of humans in their environments, both natural and built, past and present. What does this amount to in the study of Egyptian monasticism? What are the monastic "things" to which we should be better attending? First and foremost, the natural environment: the realities of living in the near or "outer" desert as opposed to the far or "inner" desert; the proximity of the desert to the sown, cultivated fields along the Nile; the rhythms of the Nile's floods and the conditions of life, human and non-human, along its shores. Second, the built environment: access to water in the near or far desert; finding or growing food at a distance from cultivated fields; types of construction materials and methods; spatial configurations that can accommodate both private and communal forms of life. Third and finally, if we are to restore non-human things as central to Egyptian monasticism, we must keep in mind missing things, the material ephemera of monastic life: mattresses, pillows, lamps, hooks, blankets, books, and so on. Brooks Hedstrom acknowledges that even archaeologists sometimes fail to keep the missing in mind, and too often imagine their excavated monastic spaces as having been as empty as they found them—as if the monks' built interiors should match not only the emptiness of the desert, but also the scorched and holy emptiness of their interior selves. Whereas scholars are increasingly aware of how many voices from the past were never recorded and so will never be heard, fewer are equally mindful of how many things are now missing, gone forever, whose role in the economy of life we cannot observe, but must still imagine. If the former recognition of lost voices has led to a historiography attuned to silences, the latter recognition should lead to one attuned to absences. The challenge, of course, is not only that voices have gone silent, objects have gone missing, and the memory of monastic spaces has faded. The real hurdle, Brooks Hedstrom suggests, is that we scholars have taken the elite monastic literary record too much at face value. She speaks of our long scholarly subjection to the monastic "mindscape," that is, the idealized landscape of the desert and the sown, overdetermined by biblical narratives of the desert wilderness (although [End Page 135] she does acknowledge previous scholarly efforts, such as James Goehring's, to free us from precisely this). Most commonly this idealized desert is a dangerous landscape where the lonely monk does battle with demons, and thereby extends the realm of human habitation further and further into demonic territory. We find this monastic mindscape in such texts as the Apophthegmata patrum, Palladius's Lausiac History, and the Lives of the Monks of Egypt. Too often, this literary imaginary occludes the "desertscape," that is, a view of life in the desert that takes seriously the realities of the particular natural and built environments—in other words, what it really means to live in or on the edge of the Egyptian desert (as opposed, to say, the Judean desert). Brooks Hedstrom also...

Turning Ears; Or, Ec(h)otechnics

The vestigial auricular muscles are a trace of an earlier evolutionary capacity to turn the ears. While they are still functional in other mammal species, they are scarcely responsive in humans, who compensate by turning the head instead. This transformation was part of adaptations in the cervical spine that made possible the becoming-technological of the upright stance and humanity’s front-facing posture. Unable to sense what comes from behind, human ears are oriented toward what lies ahead within the field of vision—toward the foreseeable—and yet in listening, as in walking, the human is thereby compelled to turn back. From this angle, the sonic turn—often figured as a return to sound—instead names multiple moments of turning back: an originary nonhuman turning of the ears, humanity’s turning its back on this turn, and the unavoidable detours from this precipitous path. This essay argues not only for an originary technicity and prostheticity of aurality, but also that the nonhuman turn takes place via a sonorous detour. Analyzing the metaphoricity and tropological of language, it compares two figures—apostrophe and interjection—to show how the sonic and nonhuman turns continually address and animate one another.

Islands of Mind and Matter: Challenging Dualism in J. G. Ballard's ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Chinese Room'sDear Esther

Ideas enter our mind, a realisation can dawn on us, and we should let bad news sink in. This article argues that experimental narrative can destabilise this widespread tendency to describe mental processes through spatial metaphors. My case studies are J. G. Ballard's short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and Dear Esther (2012), an arthouse video game developed by The Chinese Room. These narratives develop and literalise metaphors for mind by foregrounding the continuity between the physical space of the setting (an island) and the protagonists’ existential predicament. Going beyond a dualistic reading of the ‘mind as space’ metaphor, these texts construct spaces that are more than a symbol for the characters’ mental processes: narrative space is causally linked to mind in neurophysiological terms (in Ballard's short story), or extends the protagonist's emotional meaning-making (in Dear Esther). This set-up is unsettling, I contend, because it raises deep questions about the relationship between subjective experience and material realities. By exploring these narratives and their ramifications, the article seeks to open a conversation between the cognitive humanities and the ‘nonhuman turn’ in contemporary literary studies.