CODA

Across the texts that this study has explored, the relationship between human creativity and the possibility of an other-than-human vitality—between the cultural imaginary and the counterhuman imaginary—has taken a range of shapes. In the juxtaposition of the two accounts of storms—by Swift and Defoe—we observed an other-than-human realm extrapolated out of failures of human authority and human-centered coherence, as a vast unfocused confluent backdrop to the human perspective. Similarly, the poetry of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 points toward a force inaccessible to human scenarios of order and coherence, through a persistent formal oxymoron that juxtaposes autonomous multiplicity with sudden, immediate, transformative power. The Dunciad offers a much more sustained, detailed, intense, ongoing experience of that power—represented as “uncreation” and displayed as an other-than-human “new world” emerging from the self-generative force of matter. Robinson Crusoe enacts a self-creative other-than-human vitality by setting matter in motion through the persistent repetition of irresistible succession. And both the lapdog lyric and the circulation narrative, in corollary ways, cross boundaries of being through a formal melding of the human and the other-than-human. The common result in each instance—the vast unfocused backdrop, the sustained “new world,” the self-creative vitality, the melding of human and other-than-human—is the projection of a counterhuman realm just outside the region of human creative purpose, just beyond explicit acknowledgment, just out of the reach of the human cultural imaginary.

This realm of just beyond calls for a new understanding of symptomatic reading. The notion of the cultural imaginary as it is deployed here accepts a core premise of symptomatic reading: that—quoting again from Cornelius Castoriadis—the “central signifying-signified” of human authority is a reflection of “each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its world, and its relations with this world.”¹ The “real conditions of existence” that are obscured by that “central signifying-signified” are the aim of symptomatic reading, which entails, as Fredric Jameson has said, the “diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have … remained unrealized in the surface of the text, which have failed to become manifest in the logic of the narrative, and which we can therefore read as what the text represses.”²

The concept of the cultural imaginary systematically enforces the framing of human assertions of authority and human claims to “indisputable and undisputed meaning.” But the backdropping, the self-generative “new world,” the boundary melding, and the material vitality that we have seen to characterize the forms of the counterhuman imaginary in this study are not fully compatible with those “unrealized” “nodal points”—with the “real conditions of [human] existence” or even of human history—that are central to the methodology of symptomatic reading. Two recent positions on the relevance of symptomatic reading to the explication of this just beyond provide a triangulation of posthuman thinking around this particular theoretical challenge—the relation between the symptomatic and the counterhuman.

In Climate and the Making of Worlds, Tobias Menely explicitly seeks to recover symptomatic reading for a “geohistorical poetics.” Menely distinguishes his position from postcritique, which he exemplifies through citations of Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s advocacy of “an interpretive practice concerned with textual surfaces” and their claim that “the critic must ‘let go of the belief that texts and their readers have an unconscious,’ ” and of Rita Felski’s rejection of “digging” for “what lies concealed.”³ Against these dismissals of symptomatic reading, Menely makes a strong and explicit claim that

climate change requires a deepening, rather than a slackening, of symptomatic reading practices.… Climate and the Making of Worlds advances a mode of reading … concerned with the relation between the positivity of representation and the unconscious as an absence, break, or negation. Literary studies … is best able to contribute to the cross-disciplinary conversation organized around the climate crisis in its sensitivity to the limits of knowledge, the way silence and omission shadow saying, the exclusions that enable a representation of the world to be assembled, the conditions of synthesis but also nonresolution. To read critically, in light of the Anthropocene proposal, is to identify textual symptoms that express not historical but socioecological or even geohistorical contradiction.⁴

Silence, omission, exclusions, and nonresolution are for Menely some of the key characteristics of the expressions of “geohistorical contradiction”—the core conceptual scenario for his recovery of symptomatic reading.

Edna Duffy uses an account of Jameson’s “political unconscious” to generate a similar recovery. She seeks to show, in “Modernism under Review: Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious,” that Jameson’s conceptualization of symptomatic reading accommodates “a modified Deleuzianism”—a potential engagement with “the imbrication of the human, the organic, and the planetary—the extensive network of life forms beyond the human in the environment and the interconnectedness of all living forms.” This “more flexible and Deleuzian Marxism” that Duffy claims for Jameson frames contradiction in relation to realms far beyond the human. Duffy’s citation of Jameson’s reading of Conrad exemplifies the new reach of contradiction: the unconscious realm of Conrad’s Nostromo entails a reversal that reinforces “a new representational space.”⁵ Here, she uses Jameson’s words:

This reversal then draws ideology inside out like a glove, awakening an alien space beyond it, founding a new heaven and earth upon its inverted lining. In that stealthy struggle between ideology and representation, the ideological allegory of the ship as the civilized world on its way to doom is subverted by the unfamiliar sensorium which, like some new planet in the night sky, suggests senses and forms of libidinal gratification as unimaginable to us as the possession of additional senses, or the presence of non-earthly colors in the spectrum.⁶

This “alien space,” this “new planet,” and these “non-earthly colors”—like Menely’s “silence,” “omission,” “exclusions,” and “nonresolution”—point just beyond human vitality, human spaces, and human history. As Duffy concludes this extrapolation from Jameson, she extends her argument to make a larger claim for a “new concept of materiality” and a new proposal for a “cosmological criticism”:

This brings us … to the degree-zero of Jameson’s new Marxist aesthetics.… Submerged beneath the surface of the argument here … is a new concept of materiality itself, struggling to be born. Invoking this “new heaven and new earth” implies a call for a cosmological criticism, in which new unimaginably vast spaces and extended times meet the history of the human senses in a dialectic of utopian desires and fears for the planet’s future.⁷

Menely’s “geohistorical contradiction” and Duffy’s “cosmological criticism” both suggest a revised methodological attention to omission and to the “alien,” and both offer an approach—via the geo-environmental realm—to the methodological challenge of just beyond.

In reading beyond the “alien” and even beyond the cosmological to wider forms of the unimaginable—to the effects of uncreation, impossibility, and the self-efficacy of the other-than-human, the counterhuman imaginary sees the scope projected by “geohistorical contradiction” and “cosmological criticism” and seeks to give it a theory and a method. That that method itself lives just beyond any system that human theory can confirm might in turn be taken as its own confirmation.

1. 1. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Karen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 145 (originally published as L’institution imaginaire de la société, 1975).

2. 2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 51, paraphrasing Louis Althusser, “Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 48.

3. 3. Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108 (2009): 15; Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 5. See Tobias Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds: Toward a Geohistorical Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 18.

4. 4. Menely, Climate and the Making of Worlds, 19–20.

5. 5. Edna Duffy, “Modernism under Review: Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981),” Modernist Cultures 11 (2016): 145, 149, 158.

6. 6. Jameson, Political Unconscious, 231; also cited in Duffy, “Modernism under Review,” 158.

7. 7. Duffy, “Modernism under Review,” 159.