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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, PalgraveMacmillan, 2005. 264 pages, ISBN 1-4039-4232-3, £50.00 (cloth)

Reviewed by

Pavel Sedlák

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

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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)