The Book<\/h4>\n
Modernism\u2019s Inhuman Worlds<\/p>\n
The Author(s)<\/h4>\n
Rasheed Tazudeen<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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Reviewing Rasheed Tazudeen\u2019s Modernism\u2019s Inhuman Worlds<\/em> for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is a strange task, for, while the book itself is certainly an example of U.S. thought, it draws its methods and objects of analysis from other intellectual traditions. Not only is the body of literature it examines distinctly European; its methodology pushes back against the very notion of national boundedness, reaching toward what, in a nod to the work of Susan Stanford Friedman, Tazudeen refers to as a \u201cplanetary\u201d conception of modernism.[1]<\/a> Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and affect theory, the book as a whole offers a distinctively posthumanist\u2014or, to use Tazudeen\u2019s preferred term, \u201cinhumanist\u201d\u2014take on the work of several authors key to modernist studies.<\/p>\n The guiding conceit of the book is Tazudeen\u2019s concept of \u201cmultispecies metaphor.\u201d If, as Tazudeen suggests, conceptual language\u2014the kind of language that aims to name and categorize the world in rational ways\u2014is \u201cnothing more than a mechanism by which to possess (land, beings, time) and to enact relations of ownership,\u201d multispecies metaphor offers a decolonial way to imagine relations among human and inhuman beings (3). There are, Tazudeen claims, two antagonistic functions to metaphor: on the one hand, metaphor rationalizes the world, giving unruly phenomena \u201cname, meaning, place\u201d; on the other, its \u201cinconceptual\u201d nature leads it to spawn new and unexpected relations among things (120). Metaphor thus entails both a \u201cgiving [of] names\u201d and a \u201cgathering [of] beings,\u201d both the \u201cmeaningful transference\u201d of conceptual knowledge and the \u201cagglutinative profusion\u201d of unrationalizable relations (2). Using this dual potential as \u201can analytic of planetary gathering,\u201d Tazudeen offers up a way of thinking about modernist literature that attends to \u201cthe enigmatic knottedness of beings in which every being is simultaneously its bounded self and all of the relations that have co-composed a self\u201d (2, 4). Such a perspective, of course, demands a renewed appreciation for the way humans shape and are shaped by the inhuman world around them. It also, however, demands a more fundamental shift in the way we do metaphysics, encouraging us to reconceive human and inhuman being not as two distinct categories but as variations on a single, ontological theme\u2014the \u201cinhuman expressivity\u201d of matter itself (28).<\/p>\n This analytical framework is laid out in the book\u2019s introduction and first chapter; the remaining five chapters use this framework to tease out the posthuman potential of various more or less canonical modernist texts. Chapter 2 explores expressive, agglutinative profusion in Charles Darwin\u2019s On the Origin of Species<\/em> and Lewis Carrol\u2019s Alice<\/em> books; Chapter 3 extends this line of analysis to Gustave Flaubert\u2019s La tentation de Saint Antoine<\/em> and James Joyce\u2019s Ulysses<\/em>. Chapter 4 explores the possibilities of non-anthropocentric, animal-centered philosophy in Franz Kafka\u2019s \u201cForschungen eines Hundes\u201d and \u201cDer Bau,\u201d and Chapter 5 takes up the \u201cinhuman comedy\u201d of extinction in Virginia Woolf\u2019s Between the Acts<\/em> and \u201cAnon.\u201d The book\u2019s final chapter explores how contemporary \u201cmetamodernist\u201d poets (such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Anne Waldman, Brenda Shaughnessy, Jody Gladding, and Sawako Nakayasu) \u201cre- or interanimate the inhuman modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries\u201d in the present moment (187).<\/p>\n Throughout, Tazudeen demonstrates an admirably thorough familiarity with posthumanist theory, especially that particular brand of affect theory that Ruth Leys has dubbed \u201cSpinozist-Deleuzean.\u201d[2]<\/a> (Indeed, although Tazudeen most explicitly positions his argument in relation to animal studies and ecocriticism, the language he employs\u2014rife, as it is, with references to \u201cassemblages\u201d and practices of \u201cattunement\u201d\u2014would be very much at home in the work of Brian Massumi.) What is more, his analysis usefully draws attention to what, in the work of certain modernist writers, seems to be a genuine investment in conceiving of the world as larger than or even antagonistic to the neat, rational world of anthropocentric thought; this is particularly evident in the chapters on Kafka and Woolf. Drawing clear parallels between the thematic concerns of certain modernist writers and the intellectual concerns of certain thinkers critical of Western humanism, the book effectively demonstrates how one might approach modernist literature from an \u201cinhuman\u201d perspective.<\/p>\n Yet however well-versed in Deleuzean theory the book is, it misses, I think, an opportunity to engage with a body of thought that not only paved the way for Deleuze but also inspired much modernist experimentation: vitalist philosophy. Vitalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James were, like Tazudeen, committed to a metaphysics of flux and profusion, one that valorized the messiness of immediate experience over the staid forms of everyday life. They even, at times, embraced the same sort of mystical language that characterizes much Spinozist-Deleuzean affect theory and that permeates Modernism\u2019s Inhuman Worlds<\/em>. James\u2019s theory of the Fechnerian \u201cearth-soul,\u201d for example\u2014a kind of planetary consciousness that is proper to \u201cthe entire earth,\u201d which \u201ctraces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours\u201d as well as the contents of the minds of the whole inhuman world\u2014epitomizes this; so, too, does Bergson\u2019s theory of creative evolution.[3]<\/a> Bergson, however, is only engaged by Tazudeen in relation to his ideas about comedy (pulled from his short book Le Rire<\/em>); his metaphysical writings remain largely untouched. James, moreover, is not cited once\u2014perhaps a function of the book\u2019s relative indifference to American writers and thinkers. Even though many modernist writers were directly influenced by vitalist thought, then, the book remains studiously committed to the analytic of contemporary posthumanism.<\/p>\n I am, to be clear, no enemy of theory. Yet in reading Modernism\u2019s Inhuman Worlds<\/em>, I could not help asking myself the same question again and again: why frame this book as a book about modernism at all? After all, it could easily have laid out its central heuristic of multispecies metaphor without restricting this heuristic\u2019s usefulness to a particular historical period. For yes, it takes as its object a handful of canonical modernist writers, and yes, in its discussions of Carrol and Woolf, it makes a few nods to questions of biography and influence. But the book as a whole never quite articulates why it might be useful to apply a specifically Spinozist-Deleuzean lens to the work of writers who preceded Deleuze. In its reading of Woolf\u2019s Between the Acts<\/em>, for example, the book glosses a moment in which a group of starlings \u201csweep\u2026directly into a tree, \u2018pelt[ing] it like so many winged stones\u2019 until it becomes \u2018a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture\u2019\u201d thusly: \u201cLithic birds articulate new assemblages between sky and earth\u2014multispecied gatherings of animal, (stone), and plant\u2014out of which are produced noises simultaneously inhuman and divine\u201d (152). Such a gloss clearly illustrates how<\/em> we might apply the lexicon of posthumanism to Woolf, but it does not explain why <\/em>we should. It does not point to anything in the text itself that invites a specifically Deleuzean reading; rather, it simply asserts such a framing as self-evidently appropriate.<\/p>\n Modernism\u2019s Inhuman Worlds<\/em>, then, will likely appeal to theoretically minded scholars interested in affect, animality, ecology, the Anthropocene, and postsecular critiques of rational humanism. It may prove less appealing, however, to scholars with strong investments in literary or intellectual history.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time<\/em> (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).<\/p>\n