Among the concerns these papers raise together is the “problem” of allegory and allegorical reading, particularly when applied to emergent logics of human/nonhuman relations. If distinct, often non-realist, logics are being installed in what Ilan Ben-Meir, following Flusser, calls “the universe of technical images” or in the reconfigurations of logic, ratiocination, and scientific reasoning in fantasy and other speculative genres, do these innovations dislodge the cognitive mapping subject in favor of other, “new” kinds of subjects or forms of knowledge?
As Kurt Cavender notes in his paper, speculative realism is the philosophical movement that engages these questions directly. Graham Harman, Iain Hamilton Grant, Quentin Meillassoux, and others argue against Kantian epistemological limitations in which human knowledge is only ever knowledge of our relation to an object, and not knowledge of the object itself. Current work in critical race and queer theory (Tavia Nyong’o, Sami Schalk, Susana Loza) has further interrogated the logics of such phenomenological presumptions about subject-object relations to indicate alternative paradigms for both philosophical and political imaginaries, as addressed in papers by Sugg and McVey. Taking up new media and literary theory, both Ben-Muir and Thomas Foster, as respondent, consider a range of possible transformations wrought by speculative genres in contemporary popular culture.
Cavender’s paper examines New Weird fiction, which presents a conception of the natural world as an alien Other that exists outside (and is thoroughly indifferent to) human efforts to know or understand it. Indeed, in the most commercially successful example of the genre, Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, the typical instrumentalizing/colonizing relationship of human science to the natural world is inverted, as an inexplicable ecological phenomenon begins to colonize spaces of scientific inquiry, up to and including the human mind itself, so that the subject-object relation between humans and their environment is first exploded, and then reconstituted in reverse, with humans themselves becoming the passive objects to be “read” and instrumentalized by the non-human world. By placing ontological/ethical questions at the center of its narrative, the Southern Reach trilogy and Weird Fiction more generally deploy familiar generic tools in service of the most pressing ecological challenges of the contemporary moment.
Troubled by the cultural dominance of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" within today's mainstream cinema, Ilan Ben-Meir takes up Czech philosopher and media theorist Vilem Flusser's theorization of the post-photographic world as a "Universe of Technical Images" characterized by a reversion of the temporality of signification and reads Iron Man and the first Avengers film as allegories of the advent this technological reconfiguration of the semiotic field, demonstrating that the "Marvel Cinematic Universe" and "Universe of Technical Images" are one and the same. Then turning to 2017’s Logan, Ben-Meir argues that in the complex interaction between its self-referentiality and its rich intertextual relationship with George Stevens' seminal Western Shane, the film models a fourth “stage of the image” left unaddressed by Flusser – the nascent regime of what Ben-Meir calls the "textual image." As such, he argues that despite its apparent superficiality, the genre of the contemporary superhero movie reflects fundamental changes in the relationship of the subject to the conceptual-ontological constituents of the signs of today's mass media.
Katherine Sugg considers two popular Afro-futurist trilogies, Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy, that deploy science fiction and fantasy as allegorical meditations on colonialism, racial and sexual difference, and governance in ways that disrupt liberal mappings of these histories and categories. Sugg argues that the revisioning and displacements of human and geologic temporalities in these novels re-imagine their political and subjective impacts, while also collapsing the material/matter vs. human/living binary. Such alternatives to the subject of both rational choice theory and neo-Marxist and anti-colonial theories of dystopia remap conceptions of the human and political possibility. In response to the traps of liberal and capitalist agencies embodied in survivalist life interest, Jemisin, for example, proposes a rethinking of “life” that includes earth, rocks and metals, and electromagnetic forces to offer a posthumanist argument against the Western phenomenological cordoning off of “life” from its other, a foundational precept to the domination and instrumentalizing of human bodies inherent to racial capitalism.
Christopher McVey begins with the widely-held association of the zombie with the uncanny: as Jen Webb and Samuel Bynard have written, zombies are “disturbingly like us, and as such can act as springboards into ways of understanding the ontology of the subject” which “participates in narratives of the body, of life and death, of good and evil; [zombies] gesture to alterity, racism, speciesism, the inescapable, the immutable.” There is no better monster, in short, to reflect a world increasingly attracted toward nationalist politics, border walls, and the belief in a specious notion of racial, cultural, or ideological purity. But what happens when contemporary horror narratives scale beyond the nation-state, and containment becomes impossible? McVey takes up David Freyne’s The Cured (2017) and Jordan Peele’s Us (2019) as examples of speculative horror that clearly invite readings as nationalist allegories, but which also suggest new directions for the genre. Positing speculative horror as inherently comparative, McVey explores the ways the zombie often transgresses the very national allegorical frameworks that create it and suggests that these recent shifts in its figuring help us theorize the transnational in new ways.
Noted media and literary theorist Thomas Foster will respond for 8-10 minutes to the presentations (limited to 12 min each and shared beforehand, also available on CORE).