The Virtual Politics of Un-doing Humanity in Speculative Realism: A New Materialist Reading of The Bluest Eyes, “The Birth-Mark,” and “After Yang”
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Quentin Meillassoux offers a model of speculative realism that emphasizes the contingency of thought-and-being correlations rather than their absolute necessity. Pedagogically, this negation of correlationism provides an alternative perspective that prevents the body-mind from becoming ossified. In speculative realism, the virtual capacity to create, contest, and rearticulate the subject/other’s knowledge and materiality as uncertain and open is achieved by understanding reality as its absolute contingency. Moreover, speculative realism considers alternative dimensions of nonidentity that allow us to incur the possibility of extension, emergence, and contingency in our posthuman materiality. This paper focuses on how the ethical approach to the virtual in speculative realism, which, as Rosi Braidotti argues, renders the subject frames of humans, things, and matter as “embodied, embedded, relational, and affective,” allowing novel hermeneutical possibilities for analyzing existing literary works. This paper also seeks to address the issue of how we, as posthumans, otherize already disembodied humans in speculative fiction. It thus teaches us how to mourn the ontological death of such human beings in literature, which as a virtual continuum shows how humans become posthumans. This is a way of paying homage to Katherine Hayles’ desperate gestures in posthuman studies to seize, discover, and create “instantiations of novel potentials.” By applying a new materialism’s turn to the virtual in speculative realism, this paper explores new hermeneutical possibilities by examining Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” and Alexander Weinstein’s “After Yang.”
Abstract
Quentin Meillassoux offers a model of speculative realism that emphasizes the contingency of thought-and-being correlations rather than their absolute necessity. Pedagogically, this negation of correlationism provides an alternative perspective that prevents the body-mind from becoming ossified. In speculative realism, the virtual capacity to create, contest, and rearticulate the subject/other’s knowledge and materiality as uncertain and open is achieved by understanding reality as its absolute contingency. Moreover, speculative realism considers alternative dimensions of nonidentity that allow us to incur the possibility of extension, emergence, and contingency in our posthuman materiality. This paper focuses on how the ethical approach to the virtual in speculative realism, which, as Rosi Braidotti argues, renders the subject frames of humans, things, and matter as “embodied, embedded, relational, and affective,” allowing novel hermeneutical possibilities for analyzing existing literary works. This paper also seeks to address the issue of how we, as posthumans, otherize already disembodied humans in speculative fiction. It thus teaches us how to mourn the ontological death of such human beings in literature, which as a virtual continuum shows how humans become posthumans. This is a way of paying homage to Katherine Hayles’ desperate gestures in posthuman studies to seize, discover, and create “instantiations of novel potentials.” By applying a new materialism’s turn to the virtual in speculative realism, this paper explores new hermeneutical possibilities by examining Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark,” and Alexander Weinstein’s “After Yang.”
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