Cristin Ellis ALA May 2013 Boston Emily Dickinson International Society Dickinson’s Posthumanism The work I’ll be trying to do here is still speculative: I’d like to see what happens when we put Dickinson’s characteristically fragmented and self-divided subjects in conversation with contemporary theories of posthuman subjectivity. My aim here isn’t simply to multiply the available critical vocabularies we can throw at Dickinson, but to suggest how reading Dickinson in light of posthumanism can alter our understanding of her poetic ambitions, lighting up philosophical connections across disparate features of her poetry—including her fragmented speakers, her penchant for spatial and temporal dislocation, and her ambivalently lyric poetic form. To begin, and at the risk of disappointing some of you, I should make clear that the posthumanism I am referring to has very little to do with actual cyborgs. At no point in this talk will I be suggesting that Dickinson was or could be resurrected as a robot. Instead, I draw my working definition of the term from N. Katherine Hayles and Cary Wolfe, who argue that posthumanism need not be conflated with fantasies of “transhumanism,” or the technological enhancement of humans. Although these critics’ approaches to posthumanism aren’t identical, they share a fundamental understanding that it chiefly describes an altered view of subjectivity. By contrast to the self-possessed and autonomous figure of the liberal individual, the posthuman subject is, in Hayles’ words, “an amalgam … of heterogeneous components…that may be in only tenuous communication with one another … [and] whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction.”1 This hybrid and porous posthuman subject will likely sound familiar to you. Poststructuralism, postcolonial and diaspora studies, ecocriticism, and evolutionary criticism have all introduced us to some form or other of this decentered subject, the antihero to the liberal individual. But as Cary Wolfe explains, posthumanism parts ways with these fellow travelers— becomes, as he says, “genuinely posthumanist”—insofar as it specifically imagines hybridity in terms of prosthesis. That is to say, Wolfe argues that our thinking becomes posthumanist when we recognize that our subjectivity is not just mediated but also constituted through the given material structures of the body and language. These two foundational prostheses function heuristically—at once affording us contact with the world, while also conditioning or limiting our perception of its complex reality, such that our knowledge of that world remains necessarily partial 1 Hayles 3. and contingent. For Wolfe, then, posthumanism names a subjectivity characterized by a double finitude—by its dual dependence on these alien structures—the body and language—which structure it.2 So as I’ve said, it is my contention here today that these posthumanist observations—about the heterogeneity of the subject to herself, and about the necessity of humility in regards to the limitations of our knowledge3, including the contingency of our meaning-making operations upon legibly human scales of concern—may offer a useful approach to Dickinson’s poetry. Already, posthumanism’s decentered subject is likely to strike many of you as a familiar if somewhat pale imitation of the characteristically self-divided consciousness Dickinson’s poems so vividly explore. To take just one representative example, SLIDE, poems like “Me from Myself—to banish” (which, you’ll note, identifies a sovereign self only to give it a plural pronoun) map subjectivity as an unruly assemblage of distinguishable, yet not autonomous entities. Subjectivity thus emerges as an epiphenomenon of the fractious drama which plays out between these internal agencies—here the head and heart, elsewhere the body and soul, past and present selves, etc.) In producing these lyric maps, Dickinson is often particularly interested to explore how this internal alienation discloses the unfreedom or finitude of subjectivity in its constitutive dependence on the body. For instance, this poem stages the impotence of the object “Me” (identified with consciousness) to “banish” or divorce itself from the object “Myself” (identified with the heart, or desiring body). The subject who speaks this standoff, the poem’s “I,” proves irreducible to either constituent part, vacillating between the prospect of banishing the heart or subjugating consciousness. The question of abdication with which the poem closes goes to the heart of Wolfe’s model of posthuman finitude by wondering if we not simply overcome it by becoming disembodied. This, incidentally, is also the fantasy Katherine Hayles’ charts through 20th century cybernetics, the cyborg fantasy of downloading our consciousnesses into more perfect containers. Although the poem will give no definitive answer, it figures the prospective disarticulation of mind from body as a renunciation of consciousness rather than a transcendence of the flesh. Thus, Dickinson makes the “liberation” of subjectivity unimaginable—instead of attaining the purified consciousness of the disembodied liberal subject, she represents the survivor of this divorce as an unconscious subject. 2 CUT: Although this posthuman skepticism may sound depressing, Wolfe submits, hopefully, that posthumanism’s recognition of human finitude might chasten us into a renewed and ethically salutary “humility” towards the limits of our knowledge and our place in the world. 3 ALT about the structural limitations of our cognitive access to reality, Before moving on I’d just like to further note that for Dickinson, this heterogeneous assemblage called subjectivity need not end at the borders of the body. While some poems like “Me from Myself” figure the “Mutual Monarch” of subjectivity as an intrapersonal collectivity, other poems, like “They put Us far apart,” SLIDE which immediately precedes “Me from Myself” in fascicle 33, generate figures of interpersonal mutuality. Consider this poem’s closing image of a double crucifixion, which divides the Biblical figure of the crucified King of Kings into an image of two bodies staring into each others’ faces. We might see this image of chiasmatic sovereignty as an interpersonal mutuality which is then reworked into the intrapersonal chiasm of the self’s “Mutual Monarch” in “Me from Myself—to banish.” Taken together, these poems explore the more radical decentering of subjectivity which the posthuman invites us to imagine. **** Of course, that Dickinson’s speakers are curiously multivocal is hardly new news. Virginia Jackson has even called the divided self (quote) “the signature characteristic of the subjectivity Dickinson bequeaths to literary history.”4 It might seem, therefore, that to read Dickinson as a posthumanist is merely to dress up familiar observations in new terminology. However, I submit that shifts in terminology can also be substantive. Jackson’s description is telling here. Citing (quote) “the long list of chasms, fissures, maelstroms, cleavings, self-burials, and horrors that irrevocably divide one part of the ‘I’ from another” in Dickinson’s work—Jackson clearly presents self-division as the pathological result of some kind of (quote) “horror” or traumatic shattering. Indeed, as Jackson notes, we’ve generated of a cottage industry of speculation about the nature of the occluded trauma in Dickinson’s life (ranging from theories about Dickinson’s depression or anorexia, to her grief over a dead lover, sexual repression, sexual oppression, and so on). Without suggesting that this mode of reading Dickinson is misguided, I would like to note here that it does require us to start from the assumption that subjectivity is self-identical to begin with. But as we’ve seen, in many poems like “Me from Myself—to banish,” Dickinson seems to adopt a more posthumanist view of multiplicity as an inherent feature of everyday consciousness. When we take Dickinson seriously as a posthumanist thinker, her (quote) “schizophrenic” subjects come to seem less symptomatic, their fracturedness testifying to the structural conditions of human being. Of course, to say that self-division is endemic to subjectivity need not mean that it is not also traumatic—and clearly many of Dickinson’s speakers experience it as just that. But it would mean that self-division is not a pathology—and thus a posthumanist reading of Dickinson would allow us to see how her poems of fissures and chasms might not simply encrypt a biographical trauma, but also seek to make claims about the fundamental conditions of human consciousness. 4 Jackson 223. Take, for example, “I felt a Cleaving in my Mind” SLIDE. Helen Vendler begins her reading of this poem by acknowledging the ambiguity of the verb “to cleave,” which as Dickinson uses it, can either invoke a violent bisection or a natural self-splitting, like the opening of a bud to flower. Although Vendler admits “we cannot [] be certain which usage” Dickinson intends here, she rejects the second possibility on the grounds that (quote) “such ‘Cleaving’ does not happen by itself in the healthy brain.”5 From this assumption that a split brain is pathological—which, again, is standard across the criticism—it follows that the experience this poem narrates is peculiar to its unhealthy speaker. And indeed, Vendler ultimately concludes that the poem illustrates (quote) “the total tragedy of the mind to which no articulation of a future [] is possible.”6 Now consider what happens if we instead follow Dickinson’s lead in other poems, and take the cloven mind to be structural human consciousness. It might be worth recalling here that, as Dickinson would have known, SLIDE the “healthy” brain is in fact quite literally cloven down the center by the “interhemispheric fissure” (a delightfully Dickinsonian-sounding term).7 On this reading, the poem opens out from describing a purely idiosyncratic experience of diseased perception to describing a disconcerting experience available to anyone attempting to think the nature of their own embodiment. The speaker here experiences the recognition of her embodied existence—her divided brain—as a sudden and traumatic realization—cleaving her mind. In other words, the joke of the poem, lies in that “as if”—since the brain is always already split.8 Just like when Wile E. Coyote goes over a cliff but only falls once he looks down, the joke here is that the recognition of internal self-division might be felt to inaugurate that condition. The poem will thematize the recursivity of this scenario—the divisive revelation of self-dividedness—by turning the crisis of splitness in the first stanza, into a crisis of sequencing in the second stanza. Here, no longer merely a random symptom of the speaker’s pathology, her difficulty forming linear thought (joining the thought behind to the thought before) can now be understood as the paradox of self- reflection—the catch-22 that to analyze our minds we must use our minds. On this reading, the unraveling of coherence in the second stanza would disclose the constitutive incoherence of reflexive thought—the attempt to conceive the limits or finitude of our own consciousness.9 Thus, to reiterate the project here: taking Dickinson seriously as a posthumanist thinker helps to give poems like this one a wider purchase. Where our critical habit of pathologizing Dickinson’s divided speakers has tended to condemn poems like 5 Vendler 357. 6 Vendler 360. 7 Cf. “the brain within its groove” “One need not be a chamber to be haunted…the brain has many corridors…” (convolutions). See Thomas J. Otten, Robin Peel. 8 CUT: recognition of our bodily dependence will always be belated, and the 9 A cognate scene here… the plank in reason which breaks… this to a rather narrow interest in documenting the singular misery of an unnamed personal crisis, Dickinson’s posthumanism could suggest her broader interest here in anatomizing both the structure and the experience of the heterogeneity of consciousness. I’d like to close now by just sketching the horizon of one further way of reading Dickinson’s posthumanism. So far, I’ve concentrated on Dickinson’s thematic explorations of posthuman subjectivity, and I’d like to turn now to consider her formal exploration of something like a posthumanist lyric. Dickinson is notoriously difficult to edit because of her unique textual practices—which include her curiously rich vocabulary of dashes and capital letters, her retention of variants within poems and of variant versions of poems, her inclusion of poems in letters, and her inclusion of material artifacts with those poems in letters. These idiosyncracies have generated persistent questions about how to read Dickinson’s lyrics, and whether they are even lyric at all. For if the signature of the lyric (as T.J. Clark defines it) is its “illusion [] of a singular voice or viewpoint,” then, as Sharon Cameron and Virginia Jackson have argued, Dickinson’s poetry is not properly lyrical, insofar as (to paraphrase Cameron) both individually and as collected in fascicles, her poems construct a decentralized “federation” of constituent parts that do not cohere into a “demarcated entitity.”10 Her poetry is, as it were, systematically polymorphous— from her multivocal speakers to her resolutely ambiguous syntax to the multiplicity of contexts framing each poetic text, Dickinson rigorously resists—even philosophically rejects—the efforts of the lyric reader to unify or singularize poetic meaning. For Jackson, this resistance suggests we are mistaken to read the poems as lyrics— instead, she argues, Dickinson wrote in a singular mode irreducible to either lyric or sentimental poetry (the two traditions historically available to her). For Cameron, this resistance reveals Dicksinson’s philosophical commitment to a sublime perspective that cancels the specificity of the lyric subject, leaving us with poems written from an interiority without exterior, and which thsu have (quote) “no goal or no point except that of manifestation.”11 Without quibbling with either reading, I’d like to suggest that both the generic challenge of Dickinson’s work, and her philosophical commitment to “choosing not choosing” might be fruitfully brought together, under the sign of Dickinson’s posthumanism, as facets of her exploration of the multiplicity and finitude of human consciousness. To adopt this reading would lend historical purchase to Jackson’s and Cameron’s insights about her poetry, insight which right now seem to isolate Dickinson from the poetic conventions of her time, and even from exteriority itself. To study these features of her poetry as posthumanist is to suggest the connection between Dickinson’s distinctive form and her era’s troubled discovery of the givenness of identity through the body—what Derrida refers to synechdocally as humanity’s 10 Quoted in Jackson, 236. 11 191. second trauma, the Darwinian revolution.12 In her examination of the fraught mediation of subjectivity through the body (its “mutual monarchy”) and extending to her experimentation with linguistic and textual multiplicity, Dickinson could be seen to be pursuing questions central to the intellectual history of her time— scientific and philosophical questions about bodily determination that were only amplified in the U.S. by the politically salient issue of racial difference. By the same token, to link Dickinson’s posthumanist tendencies to mid-century discourses on evolution, embodiment, and race is to begin to identify a longer prehistory to posthumanism than many of our prevailing accounts of posthumanism currently allow. It is to suggest that before cyborgs made the question of hybrid intelligence unavoidable, authors like Dickinson were struggling to make our conditional subjectivity visible to us. Thank you. 12 Derrida, The Animal that Therefore I Am, 136.