ENG 885: The Nonhuman Turn
This seminar takes up the “nonhuman turn” that has been emerging in the arts, humanities, and social sciences over the past few decades. Intensifying in the 21st century, this nonhuman turn can be traced to a variety of different intellectual and theoretical developments from the last decades of the 20th century: actor-network theory, particularly Bruno Latour’s career-long project to articulate technical mediation, nonhuman agency, and the politics of things; affect theory, both in its philosophical and psychological manifestations and as it has been mobilized by queer theory; animal studies as developed in the work of Donna Haraway, projects for animal rights, and a more general critique of speciesism; the assemblage theory of Gilles Deleuze, Manuel DeLanda, Latour, and others; new brain sciences like neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence; new media theory, especially as it has paid close attention to technical networks, material interfaces, and computational analysis; the new materialism in feminism, philosophy, and marxism; varieties of speculative realism like object-oriented philosophy, vitalism, and panpsychism; or systems theory in its social, technical, and ecological manifestations. Such varied analytical and theoretical formations obviously diverge and disagree in many of their aims, objects, and methodologies. But they are all of a piece in taking up aspects of the nonhuman as critical to the future of 21st century studies in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Running roughly parallel to this nonhuman turn in the past few decades has been the “posthuman turn” articulated by such important theoretical works as Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? Thinking beyond the human, as posthumanism is sometimes characterized, clearly provides one compelling model for 21st century studies. But the relation between posthumanism and humanism, like that of postmodernism to modernism, can sometimes seem as much like a repetition of the same as the emergence of something different. Thus one of the questions that this seminar will take up is the relation between posthumanism and the nonhuman turn, especially the ways in which taking the nonhuman as a matter of critical, artistic, and scholarly concern might differ from, as well as overlap with, the aims of posthumanism.
The seminar will operate as well as preparation for the C21 spring conference on “The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies.” Several of the readings will be from scholars who have been invited to speak at the conference, which will provide an excellent opportunity for seminarians to engage with many of the issues that will be debated at the conference in May. In addition to smaller writing assignments throughout the semester, students will each write a seminar paper relating some elements of the nonhuman turn to their own areas of interest in their graduate research.
Richard Grusin
Director
Center for 21st Century Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Curtin Hall 929
P.O. Box 413
Milwaukee, WI 53211
grusin@uwm.edu
www.C21.uwm.edu