Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring (2017)

Intimations of Posthumanity in the novella Homefaring

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date.
And one perhaps nearing its end…..If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, 
if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – 
without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, 
as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly 
wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.

—M. Foucault, The Order of Things

     If it were not for the narrative alibi in Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” of a scientific laboratory experiment in a technology of “transtemporalized consciousness,” Jim McCulloch’s migration into a sentient lobster millions or billions of years into the future would have sounded pretty much like the schizophrenic voyages and becomings that R.D. Laing wrote about that became celebrated in Anti-Oedipus and in which he defined

the schizophrenic process as a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego, which causes a subject to remark: "I had existed since the very beginning ... from the lowest form of life [the body without organs] to the present time...."

This whole spectrum represents real material intensities through which a nomadic subject passes.

[E]verything commingles in these intense becomings, passages, and migrations—all this drift that ascends and descends the flows of time: countries, races, families, parental appellations, divine appellations, geographical and historical designations, and even miscellaneous news items..... We pass from one field to another by crossing thresholds: we never stop migrating, we become other individuals as well as other sexes, and departing becomes as easy as being born or dying. ¹

     In these migrational becomings where there is only a mobile field of intensity, it is only by convention of language that we still speak of a “self.” ² The nomadic subject that drifts and migrates can become anything, completely disaggregated from the molar forms or transcendental images like the ego in a process that Deleuze and Guattari call “desubjectification.” In the becoming-animal of Jim, this schizophrenic migration is framed as a scientific temporal voyage, but it performs the same shattering movement of dehumanization. There is nothing degrading in this dehumanization; instead, in Jim’s migration into a futuristic sentient lobster, the anthropocentric view of the world and history is paradoxically decentralized via humanese, the same human language in which the process is communicated to us. Hence, the question of whether or not it is really possible for the inhuman other to speak through us (in lobsterese, let’s say) will accompany this brief discussion all throughout.

     We can see this problematic of a real dialogue between the human and the inhuman put forward in a passage tinged with the same soft ironic humour that suffuses the entire novella. Asked about the existence of lobsters in the anthropocene era, Jim was forced to be circumspect with his reply:

   McCulloch hesitated. "Creatures somewhat like you do exist in the seas of the former world. But they are smaller and simpler than you, and I think their civilization, if they have one, is not a great one."

   "You have no discourse with them, then?" one of the lobsters asked.

   "Very little," he said. A miserable evasion, cowardly, vile. McCulloch shivered. He imagined himself crying out, "We eat them!" and the water turning black with their shocked outbursts—and saw them instantly falling upon him, swiftly and efficiently slicing him to scraps with their claws. Through his mind ran monstrous images of lobsters in tanks, lobsters boiling alive, lobsters smothered in rich sauces, lobsters shelled, lobsters minced, lobsters rendered into bisques—he could not halt the torrent of dreadful visions. Such was our discourse with your ancestors. Such was our mode of interspecies communication. He felt himself drowning in guilt and shame and fear.

    It is through this migratory fusion where borders of identities become blurry—even hypothetically effaced in a humanese that requires borders to conduct its discourse—that Jim (if we can still call him that without quotes ³) saw the bigotry of the anthropocentric view of the universe. Here, billions of years into the future, the very notion of humanity seems like an incredible improbability, a very faint dream.

He had become, it seemed, a lobster, or, at any rate, something lobster-like. Implied in that was transition: he had become. He had once been something else. Blurred, tantalizing memories of the something else that he once had been danced in his consciousness. He remembered hair, fingers, fingernails, flesh. Clothing: a kind of removable exoskeleton. Eyelids, ears, lips: shadowy concepts all, names without substance, but there was a certain elusive reality to them, a volatile, tricky plausibility. Each time he tried to apply one of those concepts to himself—"fingers," "hair," "man," "McCulloch"—it slid away, it would not stick. Yet all the same those terms had some sort of relevance to him.

In another conversation held earlier in the text, we can fully note the semantic, even ontological, incommensurability that holds between humanese and lobsterese:

—Are you awake?

—I am now, McCulloch answered irritably.

—I need definitions. You are a mystery to me. What is a McCulloch?

—A man.

—That does not help.

—A male human being.

—That also has no meaning.

—Look, I'm tired. Can we discuss these things some other time?

—This is a good time. While we rest, while we replenish ourself.

—Ourselves, McCulloch corrected.

—Ourself is more accurate.

—But there are two of us.

—Are there? Where is the other?

McCulloch faltered. He had no perspective on his situation, none that made any sense.

—One inside the other, I think. Two of us in the same body. But definitely two of us. McCulloch and not-McCulloch.

—I concede the point. There are two of us. You are within me. Who are you?

—McCulloch.

—So you have said. But what does that mean?

—I don't know.

     The border between Human and Inhuman is held up paradoxically by the necessity of the human-directed tale at the very moment of its declared impossibility. The impossibility of the tale is bound up with the impossibility of the other speaking as the other, and the impossibility of the other inhabiting its own alterity. Here the other can really speak only if all notions of self and identity are suspended. But these are not just the main humanese concepts that we begin to suspend. The notions of “species,” “body,” “mind,” “individual,” “memory,” “language”, “society,” “history,” “habitat” or “territory,” “differences,” “culture,” “intelligence,” “nature,” “time,” and “space,” and even “Earth” no longer have their validity. ⁴ For our self-declared mastery or dominion over the world is facilitated and enthroned by these humanese terms, the language by which we claim hegemonic colonization of all species we consider inferior.

     This anthropocentrism, however, does not want to be silenced so easily. Before encountering the new god of this future era, a telepathic cephalopod measuring about 15 to 20 meters in diameter, “Jim” had the mistaken belief that he at least migrated into a creature of the same superior intelligence that a human being had, and is therefore also the dominant species of that future world. This is, no doubt, a compensatory concession for the recognition of the possibility that humans are not the only intelligent species on Earth. Lobsters, McCulloch reflected,

are low-phylum creatures with simple nervous systems, limited intelligence. Plainly the mind he had entered was a complex one. It asked thoughtful questions. It carried on civilized conversations with its friends, who came calling like ceremonious Japanese gentlemen, offering expressions of solicitude and good will. New hypothesis: that lobsters and other low-phylum animals are actually quite intelligent, with minds roomy enough to accept the sudden insertion of a human being's entire neural structure, but we in our foolish anthropocentric way have up till now been too blind to perceive.

His exhausted metaphors, indeed, contribute to this persistent blindness. However, “Jim/lobster” is/are not the epitome of superior sentience on the new Earth.

—What is it?

—We are approaching a god, the lobster replied.

—A god, did you say?

—A divine presence, yes. Did you think we were the rulers of this world?

   In fact McCulloch had, assuming automatically that his time-jaunt had deposited him within the consciousness of some member of this world's highest species, just as he would have expected to have landed, had he reached the twenty-second century as intended, in the consciousness of a human rather than in a frog or a horse. But obviously the division between humanity and all sub-sentient species in his own world did not have an exact parallel here; many races, perhaps all of them, had some sort of intelligence, and it was becoming clear that the lobsters, though a high life-form, were not the highest. He found that dismaying and even humbling; for the lobsters seemed quite adequately intelligent to him, quite the equals—for all his early condescension to them—of mankind itself. And now he was to meet one of their gods? How great a mind was a god likely to have?

     Secondly, and most importantly in terms of history, Jim had the mistaken messianic belief that his singular presence and arrival in the lobster’s world constituted the “omen” of an epoch-changing critical and transitional moment. Even in a decentralized historical continuum, the anthropocentrism of world events persists to anchor the semantics of an all-too-human philosophy of cosmic time. This absurdly privileged point of view is now about to be equally debunked:   

   "I'm—not ready to go home yet," he said. "There's so much I haven't seen yet, and that I want to see. I want to see everything. I'll never have an opportunity like this again. Perhaps no one ever will. Besides, I have services to perform here. I'm the herald; I bring the Omen; I'm part of this pilgrimage. I think I ought to stay until the rites have been performed. I want to stay until then."

   "Those rites will not be performed," said the octopus quietly.

   "Not performed?"

   "You are not the herald. You carry no Omen. The Time is not at hand."

McCulloch did not know what to reply. Confusion swirled within him. No Omen? Not the Time?

—It is so, said the host. We were in error. The god has shown us that we came to our conclusion too quickly. The time of the Molting may be near, but it is not yet upon us. You have many of the outer signs of a herald, but there is no Omen upon you. You are merely a visitor. An accident.

   McCulloch was assailed by a startlingly keen pang of disappointment. It was absurd; but for a time he had been the central figure in some apocalyptic ritual of immense significance, or at least had been thought to be, and all that suddenly was gone from him, and he felt strangely diminished, irrelevant, bereft of his bewildering grandeur. A visitor. An accident.

     Or, in lobsterese, Jim is only a “revenant”:

   "When will you show it to us?"

   "Ah, that cannot be done. It has no real existence, and therefore I cannot bring it forth."

   "What is it, then? A wanderer? A revenant?"

   "A revenant, yes. So I think. And a wanderer. It says it is a human being."

   "And what is that? Is a human being a kind of McCulloch?"

   "I think a McCulloch is a kind of human being."

   "Which is a revenant."

   "Yes, I think so."

     A specter, a shadow that keeps returning, that haunts the text and language, a hold-over from an ineffaceable humanese. As Foucault had said, man’s disappearance is a “wager” since he himself understood how, in speaking of this impossible presence of a face drawn on the sand, that the erasure, by having taken place, retains paradoxically what was effaced, in both memory and metaphor. As a presence in metaphor, or as metaphor, above all, with all the paradox this entails. For a literal non-presence cannot logically disappear, and a dramatics of disappearance only re-enshrines the presence it explicitly denies. It is in this way that both the human and the inhuman are the two sides of the same language.

  

     Can the other of this language really speak? Can the lobster really speak lobsterese? Can the inhuman speak, or can the human speak as human through the inhuman, even when the human can no longer speak except as inhuman? And when the inhuman speaks, can we still believe the human can speak through? In the end, what we are hearing are neither but language, the habitat and intersection of both, and is neither human nor inhuman. For language, which we thought to be human, is neither one nor the other. It is simply the place of an imaginary dialogue, the conjuring space of both humanity and inhumanity as such. The dissolution of the image of the human cannot happen fully without the correlative effacement of the image of the inhuman.

     Similar to the “characters” that traverse texts like magical wholes which summon souls and organize the plausibility of events, the “self,” human or inhuman, is nothing but a heuristic unity. It is more aptly the invocation of the unlocatability of the essence of the “human” in language and reaffirms the irreducible enigma of our presence as pure migratory passage in a becoming more inhuman than human, something that the myths, before the advent of reason, had known all along.

Notes

1. Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 84-85.

2. In one passage in his book Consciousness Explained (1991, p. 413-14) we would think that Daniel Dennett had read Robert Silverberg’s “Homefaring” when he spoke of the transitional moment of the invention of the “self”:

People have selves. Do dogs? Do lobsters? If selves are anything at all, then they exist. Now there are selves. There was a time, thousands (or millions, or billions) of years ago, when there were none — at least none on this planet. So there has to be — as a matter of logic — a true story to be told about how there came to be creatures with selves. This story will have to tell — as a matter of logic — about a process (or a series of processes) involving the activities or behaviors of things that do not yet have selves — or are not yet selves — but which eventually yield, as a new product, beings that are, or have, selves.

     The transitional event is theorized as located at the critical moment of the birth of reason:

[T]he birth of reasons was also the birth of boundaries, the boundary between "me" and "the rest of the world," a distinction that even the lowliest amoeba must make, in its blind, unknowing way. This minimal proclivity to distinguish self from other in order to protect oneself is the biological self, and even such a simple self is not a concrete thing but just an abstraction, a principle of organization. Moreover the boundaries of a biological self are porous and indefinite. Border crossings are thus either moments of anxiety… or something to be especially enjoyed.

     Coupling and mating are such types of border-crossings and are actually conceptually within the limits or “normal” human practice (marriage, nationhood, groups, corporations, etc.). The “porousness” of boundaries is not just the property of a socio-erotic dynamic but also of physical systems in general. Extending this logic to the ontology of the self, Dennett asks: The normal arrangement is one self per body, but if a body can have one, why not more than one under abnormal conditions? Aren’t we only the fleeting guests of our own minds, the same way we are the mere transient travellers in the body or bodies that we share as the host of a multitude of other organisms? As strangers to ourselves, our horizon is always elsewhere.

3. Deleuze and Guattari (op. cit., p. 86), on this notion of proper names, write:

The theory of proper names should not be conceived of in terms of representation; it refers instead to the class of "effects": effects that are not a mere dependence on causes, but the occupation of a domain, and the operation of a system of signs. This can be clearly seen in physics, where proper names designate such effects within fields of potentials: the Joule effect, the Seebeck effect, the Kelvin effect. History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history, and not the name of the father.

4. Echoing the difficulty of finalizing the boundaries of the natural from the human, Hans Bertens (2008) asks and affirms:

Where do we draw the line between nature and ourselves, that is to say, between nature and culture? Perhaps the conclusion must be that the attempt to define nature, or the wilderness, in any objective way, leads us to back to the constructedness of our concepts, to their discursive character. Nothing in the real world announces itself as ‘wilderness’. We must accept that we do not know where our discursive construction of nature, or ‘wilderness’, ends and nature itself begins.

The delimitation of the natural, of course, carries the ambiguous poles of valuation and devaluation not only in terms of human exploitation and transformation but also in terms of conservation or preservation. The deep Hegelian resonances of this dialectic in terms of history and human identity where Nature is negated to be posited and sublimated finds its revisionary rephrasing in Slavoj Žižek’s idea of “desublimation” in Michel Houellebecq's Les Particules élémentaires (1998), another posthumanist novel.

This notion that we are entering a new era in which humanity will leave behind the inertia of the material bodies, was nicely rendered by Konrad Lorenz's somewhat ambiguous remark that we ourselves (the "actually existing" humanity) are the sought-after "missing link" between animal and man. Of course, the first association that imposes itself here is the notion that the "actually existing" humanity still dwells in what Marx designated as "pre-history," and that the true human history will begin with the advent of the Communist society; or, in Nietzsche's terms, that man is just a bridge, a passage between animal and overman. What Lorenz "meant" was undoubtedly situated along these lines, although with a more humanistic twist: humanity is still immature and barbarian, it did not yet reach the full wisdom. However, an opposite reading also imposes itself: the human being IS in its very essence a "passage," the finite opens into an abyss.