Inanimate selves and intelligent systems: late modernism, cybernetics, and science fiction

Date
2019
DOI
Authors
Whitmarsh, Patrick
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Embargo Date
2022-01-30
OA Version
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Abstract
This project explores the dynamics of late modernist writing and midcentury science from roughly 1936 until 1973, during which the emergent field of cybernetics offered writers a new conceptual vocabulary for addressing modernist concerns over selfhood, personality, embodiment, and narrative style and technique. Being focused on the question of communication between humans and nonhumans, including animals and machines, cybernetics often evokes scenarios reminiscent of those found in science fiction. Juxtaposing works of late modernism and midcentury science fiction reveals how both respond to earlier first-wave and high modernism in similar ways. These writers navigate the unsettling territories where selfhood dissolves into impersonality, consciousness gives way to nonconsciousness, and the human body appears as both an animate and inanimate thing. This project frames such territories through the concepts of inanimate selves (in which human characters experience themselves as nonhuman) and intelligent systems (in which nonhuman entities appear to possess human qualities), enabling us to understand the aesthetic motivations of the texts in which they appear, and revealing a strand of late modernist writing that I refer to as science-fictional modernism. I identify four writers in particular as representative of this literary strand: Djuna Barnes, Samuel Beckett, Ralph Ellison, and Thomas Pynchon, whose works salvage agency in an increasingly complex world. Alongside these writers, I also examine texts by H.G. Wells, F.T. Marinetti, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin. I am drawn to the work of these authors not only for the theoretical speculations they provoke, but for the political critiques in which they engage. Through the imagery of cybernetics and science fiction, these writers imagine alternative experiences to those of ordinary, everyday life, and explore how those experiences speak to the politics of race, gender, sexuality, and technology. Placed alongside recognized works of science fiction, these late modernist texts demonstrate alternative strategies for exploring modernism’s central concerns. By adopting a science-fictional mode of representation, they maintain a critical awareness of the utopian dimensions of cybernetic selfhood, as well as suspicion toward the dehumanizing tendencies of science and technology.
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