Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
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Wallace,
Jeff, D. H. Lawrence, Science and the Posthuman, New York, Palgrave Macmillan,
2005. 264 pages, ISBN 1-4039-4232-3, £50.00 (cloth)
Reviewed
by
The challenge of posthumanist future
is gradually becoming the most important challenge of our time. In his recent
book, Jeff Wallace, opens the posthumanist question in the context of the
science and literature debate in the 19th century that evolved after
a century into the two cultures and even provoked the science wars at the end of
the 20th century. Wallace surpasses the rupture between the ideas of
creativity, intuition, human values, etc. on one side and the materialism,
mechanism and abstract mind on the other by using examples of literature,
science and even humans and machines that offer alternatives to this dichotomy.
In the introduction Wallace states
that literature can become more reductive than science when it reduces
everything to question of texts and language and that materialism is not
necessarily mechanistic but could also be imaginative, complex and creative. The
book shows us how to appreciate not only the cultural and specifically
discoursive dimensions of science but also the more cognitive and
“scientific” dimensions of literature. On the issue of posthumanism Wallace
identifies its closeness to the idea of “nonhumanist humanism” in Foucault
but also in the post Darwinian evolutionary materialism that is present in the
work of D. H. Lawrence (non human human being, 202). The work of Lawrence is a
productive example with a help of which to study the paradoxes that evolve in
the science / literature relation. This is especially so because his naturalism
is that heavily influenced by the materialist and evolutionary idea of human as
a part of the animal kingdom and nature, and at the same time it is one of the
most sever critics of science. Lawrence’s irrational insistence on knowing how
not to know is read by Wallace as a
product of the so called alert model of science, “and as the basis of his
exploration of a complex posthumanist condition”. (97) Alertness is, in this
context, an expression of opposition to the didactic or dogmatic model of
science. Alert science consists of a series of constantly renewed efforts that
support the “sense of the fragile provisionality of knowledge”. (97) Such
science must be, in other words, “alert enough to the questionability of its
own assumptions”. (108)
Reading Wallace we learn to see how
Lawrence’s work reveals a complex ambivalent relationship to scientific
knowledge and to the idea of machine which links materialist debates of the past
and future posthumanist concerns of neuroscience. The interest in what is “non
human” in the humanity, in the physical aspects of our memory, the materiality
of our body and consciousness, is what interests both Lawrence and science.
While the evolutionary theory taught us that we exist in a continuum with
organic nature, the contemporary science is – as many posthumanist
philosophers have started to see – rather an exploration of our kinship with
inorganic forms (and machines). In this respect we depend on the materialist
science to take us where literary culture refuses to go and where “the human
seems to be the locus within which technology can become a nature”. (35) To
conclude, we (should) keep on exploring alternative forms of being human since
“to be more than a human being might thus involve the embrace of machines as
well as angels”. (201)