Limitrophy in contemporary literatures in English

1. Limits, borders, and the posthuman

Contemporary discussions of limits, borders and demarcations often extend to reflections on the nature of human subjects and their relationships with the world, to non-human animals and to machines and artefacts. These explorations eventually lead to a questioning of the dominant paradigm of natural law by posing the question of whether “human” as a category still refers to a Kantian community of reasonable beings and the “human figure as the constitutive […] stuff of history and the social” (Wolfe 2003, x-xi). Clear-cut boundaries between the given and the constructed, human and non-human animals, nature and culture are currently being challenged in favour of “a non-dualistic understanding of nature – culture interaction” which aims to overcome the boundaries firmly established by anthropocentrism (Braidotti 2013, 3), including new formulations of gender. As the philosopher Rosi Braidotti has suggested, the enlightened universal ideal of the humanist “man of Reason” is inadequate because of its partiality and is exposed as “very much a male of the species,” since this paradigm implicitly assumes the humanist subject to be “masculine, white, urbanized, speaking a standard language, heterosexually inscribed in a reproductive unit, and a full citizen of a recognized polity” (2017, 23). In contrast with the hegemonic subject of humanism and the Enlightenment, the notion of the sexualised, racialised and/or naturalised “Other” unearthed world historical systems of domination whilst advocating “multiple and complex reconfigurations of diversity and multiple belongings, so as to challenge the dominant vision of the ‘others within’ that so far had just confirmed the European subject’s self-representation” (Braidotti 24). Hence the contemporary feminist subject must necessarily be a posthuman one, since feminism entails a critique of the narrow-minded self-interests, intolerance and xenophobic rejection of Otherness (25) that characterise the humanist legacy of modernity.

Referring to her own style of thought as “nomadic theory,” Braidotti has insisted on the need to “reassert the dynamic nature of thinking” by “actualizing a nonunitary vision” of subjectivity (2011, 7). This, she states, implies approaching “the process of subject formation in a distributive, dispersed, and multiple manner” that ultimately posits “the primacy of intelligent, sexed, and self-organizing matter” (6) and thereby affirms “a process ontology bent on becoming” (7). Like Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari before her, Braidotti sees becoming not as a metaphorical operation, but rather a real one in so far as “subjects-in-becoming” are real and require “accurate cartographies of the different politics of location” they inhabit (14). In becoming, and more generally in the nomadic style of thought proposed by Braidotti, what is systematically emphasised is “the dynamic or intensive principle of change” (29) that dissolves the dominant or majoritarian subject. It is in this sense that becoming (whether becoming-animal, becoming-woman or becoming-imperceptible) is always becoming-minoritarian, in that the process entails the rupture and abandonment of the “self-perpetuating Being and the flat repetition” implied by the phallogocentric form of the dominant or majoritarian subject (29). If the various “empirical minorities” of modern history (Braidotti lists “women, children, blacks, natives, animals, plants, seeds, and molecules, etc.”) are “specific locations of devalued difference,” they are also, on account of their structural position, “positive sites for the redefinition of subjectivity” (30).

From the viewpoint of a general strategic commitment to becoming-minoritarian, the specificity of the position occupied by the notion of becoming-animal (to which we will return) concerns the mode in which the human-animal (and more generally, the human-nonhuman) relation is “being restructured” in the twenty-first century (82). According to Braidotti, a “bioegalitarian turn is taking place that encourages us to engage in an animal relationship with animals” (82) which is tantamount to a process of de-oedipalisation of the animal that repositions the subject and its ontological and epistemological hierarchies. This repositioning involves a “practice of estrangement” whereby the “process of subject formation” is freed from “the normative vision of the self” and replaced with “open-ended, interrelational, multisexed, and transspecies flows of becoming by interaction with multiple others” (83). Braidotti considers that there is no necessary break with the notion of subjectivity here so long as it is understood as a situated and material practice of construction that “explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level” (83). Ultimately, in this reconfiguration of the subject as a posthuman project, what is at stake is a shift in the conceptualisation of life itself: an abandonment of the model which “privileged bios – discursive, intelligent, social life – over zoe – brutal ‘animal’ life” (92). As contingency and becoming impose themselves at the heart of our conceptual figurations of life, the anthropocentric certainties and hierarchies of modernity begin to collapse.

Braidotti’s posthuman condition is not merely another example of a periodising fad following the seemingly arbitrary sequence suggested by labels such as postmodernism, postcolonialism, postindustrialism or postcommunism, but rather a decisive and “qualitative shift in our thinking about what exactly is the basic unit of common reference for our species, our polity and our relationship to the other inhabitants of this planet” (2013, 2). And this shift requires, in her view, a theoretical break with social constructivist theories reliant on the culture vs nature dualism. The posthuman condition (or “posthuman convergence,” as she also describes it)¹ demands a new approach, one in which the traditional oppositions (upon which human supremacy was founded) are replaced by a monistic preoccupation with “the self-organizing (or auto-poietic) force of living matter” (2013, 3). The point of departure for a critical project guided by the transformative political ambitions of feminism has to be an understanding that “‘we’ – all living entities – share the same planetary home, though we differ in terms of locations and access to environmental, social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity and good health services” (2022, 8). Braidotti’s recent formulation of a posthuman feminist agenda is directly concerned with addressing the “cruel imbalances” that pertain to the posthuman condition while attending to its potential for a transformative decentring of life. For even if the traditional ontological and epistemological hierarchies of the modern era are systematically called into question, “the posthuman condition is neither post-power nor post-injustice” (2022, 8).

The postanthropocentric turn thus requires an epistemological turn in which “we” abandon “a world that was deemed to be indifferent to our narrow historical periods, and ‘we’ recognise that human history is geologically significant after all, and that ‘we’ have made a definitive difference” (Colebrook 2017, 4). Issues such as “sustainability” or “environmental preservation” are today, more than ever before, linked to the welfare state and the economic and political stability of the planet. Bruno Latour has argued that awareness of the Anthropocene closes down the modern conception of the infinite universe, drawing us back to the limited and exhausted earth and to our consciousness of what Colebrook refers to as being “earthbound” (2017, 3). Latour’s “politics of nature” (2017, 1) requires a reformulation of the concept of “nature” itself, traditionally understood as an entity which possesses harmonious balance. Nature should rather be seen as a self-regulating system in a fragile and dynamic equilibrium. This also requires a reformulation of the traditional concept of nature being in opposition with “culture,” as well as recognition of the notions of “Anthropos” and “humanity” as they refer to humans as a species whose behaviour directly impacts the planet. Latour’s “political ecology” challenges the long-established, clear-cut demarcation of the conceptualisation of “politics” and “nature,” developed “over centuries in such a way as to make any juxtaposition, any synthesis, any combination of the two terms impossible” (3). However, a radical reformulation of such conceptualisations – which include, by extension, “the old distinction between humans and things, subjects of law and objects of science” (3) – may also offer new opportunities through “new ways of thinking and new communities that produce environmental solutions as a form of civic knowledge” (Emmett and Nye 2017, 7).

Noël Sturgeon points out that “issues of poverty and inequality must be part of understanding the genesis of environmental problems and identifying adequate solutions” (2017, xxi). Braidotti’s posthuman, in its attempt to “redefine a program of feminist social justice” (28), blurs the categorical distinctions – “human–nonhuman, nature – culture, male – female, European – non-European” – which have structured Western thought. In doing so, feminist criticism emerges as central to critical environmental analysis. On the one hand, this is because of the long-term association between “gender” and “nature” which, despite claims against essentialist identifications which had consistently denied women a significant place in the body politic, reveals diverse and interlocking forms of oppression whilst also problematising both “gender” and “environment” as “value-laden products of specific historical and cultural contexts” and as “social constructions rather than empirical objects” (Macgregor 2017, 2). On the other hand, the association between “gender” and “nature” also problematises the interaction of human labour with the environment and the gendered impact of environmental degradation, although the point is to see these processes through the “lens of power rather than to see gender […] as a biological fact” (MacGregor 4; italics in original). As Greta Gaard suggests, feminism has been central to both “theorizing and enacting gender, racial and inter-species justice” (2017, 115). In advocating such interspecies notions of justice and egalitarianism, new possibilities of relations, alliances and “mutual specification” emerge, especially when considering human animals as both embodied and embedded entities, as “mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (Haraway 2021, 1) and as “part of something we used to call ‘nature,’ despite transcendental claims made for human consciousness” (Gaard 2017, 32). Braidotti’s interspecies egalitarianism and justice pivots on a relational ontology which eventually questions the possibility of defining human subjectivity within the confines of human bodies and consciousness by suggesting cross-species alliances with the productive and immanent force of zoe – or life in its non-human aspects – as opposed to bios. For Braidotti, it is essential not only to reconceptualise process ontologies as bound to non-human and vital forces, but also to frame such concerns within a feminist project of social justice, since the posthuman subject is necessarily a feminist one. Tracking these “cartographies” actualises “the virtual possibilities of an expanded, relational self that functions in a nature – culture continuum and is technologically mediated but still framed by multiple power relations” (Braidotti, 34).

In tracking the cartographies suggested by Braidotti, technology also emerges as an essential component of our relational selves. Starting from Donna Haraway’s seminal A Cyborg Manifesto (1985), contemporary critical thinking has often argued that human ontology is essentially cyborg, not only in the superficial sense of combining flesh and wires but also in the more profound dimension of human minds being “human-technology symbionts: thinking and reasoning systems whose minds and selves are spread across biological brain and nonbiological circuitry” (Clark 2003, 3), ready to merge our intellectual activities with electronics. Paradoxical as it may seem, such an ability to intertwine our mental processes with technology is what makes us essentially human, or “natural-born cyborgs” (Clark 2003, 6), which further suggests relational alliances between biology, nature, culture and technology that may eventually produce further kinds of extended thinking systems, as Katherine Hayles has pointed out (1999). However, such webs of biotechnological imbrications have also been perceived as potential threats to privacy and loss of control, ultimately raising issues about the loss of identity and the ethical consequences of our technological entanglements. In this sense, the biotechnological enhancement of select human capacities – a project broadly referred to as transhumanism – reaches beyond bioethical issues, unmasking serious flaws in its conception of the brain, ethics, liberal democracy, epistemology, and ontology, as Susan Levin has suggested (2021, 2).

2. Animals and the politics of the limit

The conceptual problem of the limit – and of that which, in Derrida’s words, “feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it” (2008, 29) – is indissociable from the processual logic of becoming. Within such processual logic, the human relationship with the (non-human) animal is exemplary in that it poses a fundamental challenge to those imaginary or symbolic modes of thought which ultimately reduce animals to an analogical or mimetic form structurally subordinated to the human subject. For indeed the animal introduces, or at least confronts us with, the non-seriality of becoming. According to Deleuze and Guattari: “To become is not to progress or regress along a series” (2004, 262). Neither fantasy nor imitation, a becoming-animal is real insofar as it produces the reality of becoming itself. This involves a conceptual gesture whereby both subject and object, the traditional terms of anthropocentric thinking about the animal, are fundamentally displaced. A becoming-animal “lacks a subject distinct from itself” and is by no means a matter of evolution or filiation. Its operative logic is entirely contingent and pragmatic: it is defined by alliances and multiplicities, such as those observed in packs, bands and other assemblages.

This is very different to the way in which modern regimes of power and knowledge have both traditionally thought about the animal and invoked the animal for ideological purposes: “Society and the State need animal characteristics to use for classifying people; natural history and science need characteristics in order to classify the animals themselves” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 264). If the concept of becoming-animal has a political meaning, it is precisely in the sense that it reverses the disciplinary logic embedded in these forms of thought and in the fact that it substitutes “modes of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling” – in short, ways of thinking and inhabiting multiplicity beyond the ontological reductionism of the human self. What the animal envelops within itself is precisely an ontological alternative, for “every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack” and therefore has “pack modes, rather than characteristics” (264). There is a transformative potential in this encounter with the animal that pushes the human over the limit, releasing a logic of the multiple, “a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (265). Such is the affective truth of this politics of becoming, since affects are not personal feelings, but the effectuation of a power (potentia, in Spinoza’s sense, rather than potestas), and thus a radical assemblage of the heterogeneous (265).

Even though Deleuze and Guattari differentiate between “Oedipal,” “State” and “more demonic” animals in what amounts to a notorious political bestiary, the key emphasis in their argument is that it is always “possible for any animal to be treated in the mode of the pack or swarm” (2004, 266), in other words to affirm the heterogeneity and multiplicity inherent to them over and against any tentative reduction to an anthropocentric frame of reference or logic of interiority. For indeed the animal, they insist, is not defined by the taxonomical characteristics or filiative attributes that reduce it to a function of human knowledge, but by the external modes of “propagation” that disrupt the idea of origins at the heart of both family and State. This is the exteriority of the pack, the nomadic movement of affect that displaces personological genealogies and classifications in favour of contingent constructions, unnatural alliances, and radical assemblages. The topological inscription of the animal in relation to what Deleuze and Guattari designate as the “anomalous” is crucial. Unlike the “abnormal,” which “refers to that which is outside rules or goes against the rules,” the anomalous indicates “a position or set of positions in relation to a multiplicity” (269). Specifically, it relates to the position occupied by “the exceptional individual in the pack” and thus the point at which “one enters into alliance to become-animal” (269). But this exceptionality of the anomalous does not reduce it to the Oedipal position of a “family animal or pet.” Again, it has nothing to do with interiority or filiation, and everything with affect and the outside. Thus, the anomalous, the exceptional individual in the pack through which the assemblage of becoming is enabled, is “a phenomenon of bordering” (270). It is, in other words, the limit on which the multiplicity rests, “the enveloping line or farthest dimension, as a function of which it is possible to count the others” (270). Deleuze and Guattari’s example is Moby Dick, where the whale, far from being a genus or myth is the borderline through which Captain Ahab can “reach the pack as a whole and pass beyond it” (270). Thus, what counts in the multiplicity is the “peripheral position” (271), the limit which defines it and keeps it in a state of becoming. The animal as anomalous holds the key to this movement, constantly pushing it beyond the capture of personological forms and genealogies: “Sometimes it is a specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack. Sometimes the borderline is defined or doubled by being of another nature that no longer belongs to the pack” (271). Nevertheless, what is at stake is a liminality or limitrophy of contingent creation founded on alliances and assemblages “that are neither those of the family nor of religion nor of the State” (272). These political constructions whose centre lies at the limit, which is along the borderline that announces transformations (rather than the continuity of internalised, genealogical or filiative, forms), are those of “minoritarian groups, or groups that are oppressed, prohibited, in revolt, or always on the fringe of recognized institutions” (272). Admittedly, the revolutionary or radically transformative potential of becoming-animal is never assured or guaranteed, for its politics is “extremely ambiguous” (273). This is due to the fact that “societies, even primitive societies, have always appropriated these becomings in order to break them,” contain them, symbolise them, and internalise them.

The law of the borderline (if it may be called a law) is not a predictable or logical one, since no one “can say where [it] will pass:” it may be captured by those established or emergent institutional forms or it may even become “a line of abolition, annihilation, self-destruction” (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 276), as suggested by the example of Ahab. There are no aprioristic rules or guarantees for this kind of politics, according to Deleuze and Guattari. Nothing can spare us the trouble of experimenting with and in the assemblage or the becoming: that is, at and around the limit that constitutes the multiplicity. Ultimately, what counts is the “consistency,” as they call it, as much as the contingency, of the heterogenous elements that come together in the assemblage or alliance. The fact that this may result in capture by the established forms of power (and knowledge), or in self-destruction, does not detract from the political urgency and creative capacity of this radically materialist strategy in which the animal figures neither as symbol nor transcendent telos, but as an immanent procedural mode or pragmatic model.

3. Borders, limits, and contemporary literatures in English

This special issue investigates the multiple ways in which contemporary literatures in English address and engage with the generative and transformative logics of limits, borders and becomings in the broad context of the Anthropocene and, as Braidotti describes it, the posthuman condition. The first article in the issue, by Bárbara Arizti, examines an important text in contemporary Australian nature writing, Inga Simpson’s Understory: A Life with Trees. According to Arizti, this 2017 memoir cuts across traditional generic boundaries and offers a radical reimagination of the self that complicates the conceptual opposition between the rootedness and relationality proposed by Édouard Glissant in a theoretical text inspired by Deleuze and Guattari. By taking trees as a model of thought and experience, Arizti suggests, Simpson calls into question received ideas about the status of human subjectivity and its differential relationship with nature, and thus develops a far more integrated notion of life (along the lines of Braidotti’s own theorisation of zoe) in the wake of contemporary debates about transmodernity.

In her contribution, Leonor María Martínez Serrano also explores the limits of the anthropocentric perspective on the natural world through a detailed reading of “Sunday Morning,” a notable poem by the Canadian writer Robert Bringhurst. Drawing on the posthumanist thought of Braidotti, Morton (2013) and other theorists, Martínez Serrano presents Bringhurst’s poem as a plea for ontological humility and the undoing of human exceptionality. She demonstrates how Binghurst’s poem aims at levelling out established species hierarchies by means of a vindication of the immersive quality of poetry through a connection between the self (understood as an embodied material entity) and the Earth (experienced as a polyphonic communicative space).

The next article addresses the key theme of human-animal limits and relations. In her reading of Richard Adams’s 1977 novel The Plague Dogs, Lorraine Kerslake investigates the ethical and political implications of a text that subverts the conventional anthropocentrism of traditional animal narratives (especially those with dogs as protagonists) by privileging the perspective of two laboratory dogs on the run and thematising their extreme experiences. The article situates this novel in the historical context of the anti-vivisection movement and connects it to the nascent animal liberation movement of the 1970s.

Jorge Sacido-Romero’s “Acoustic Limitrophies, or Why Roald Dahl’s Work Sounds More Serious than It Seems” problematises fixed boundaries between humans and the environment in an examination of Roald Dahl’s fiction, itself an example of generic border-crossing. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of limitrophy (2008), he explores what nourishes and is nourished by two limits which, against common expectations, are not visual, but acoustic. Through Lacanian psychoanalysis and, more specifically, Mladen Dolar’s theory of the internal limit of language (144), Sacido-Romero considers Dahl’s fictional exploration of the relationship between the human ear and living nature.

Paul March-Russell’s article “Hospitality and Liminality in the Time of the Anthropocene: Jenn Ashworth’s Fell” engages with Ashworth’s exploration of borders, boundaries, power and control as well as the motifs of time, history, geography and alienation. To serve this purpose, March-Russell reads Fell as a meditation upon the idea of hospitality and the ways in which anthropogenic climate change entails new relationships between humans and the non-human world.

The last two articles in the issue offer enlightening reflections on the limitrophy between humans and technology and problematise transhuman anxieties as exposed in dystopian fiction. Zsófia Novák’s article engages with issues of categorisation, human supremacy and (lack of) empathy in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), André Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs (2015), Alice Hatcher’s The Wonder That Was Ours (2018) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Novák reads these novels as being connected by their interrogation of biopolitically produced and policed boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, primarily focusing on interspecies empathy and care. Novák argues that these texts interrogate boundaries between animals, humans and machines, to eventually undermine humanist formulations of subjectivity, agency and community by suggesting productive and transgressive interspecies entanglements.

Patrycja Podgajna’s “The Posthuman Body and Gender Dynamics in Ros Anderson’s The Hierarchies (2020)” explores the existing and future intersections and transgressions of human/non-human boundaries. Drawing on theories of the posthuman body and technologies of the gendered body, Podgajna’s article explores the posthuman subject’s potential to challenge the discursive boundaries between humans and machines and to reconfigure gender and power relations. By examining the liminal qualities of the posthuman body and gender dynamics in the narratives under examination, Podgajna also considers whether technology is a tool capable of eradicating fixed gender boundaries and overcoming the entrenched patriarchal patterns inscribed in the concept of embodiment.

Finally, Ann-Sofie Lönngren departs from the distinction between metaphor and metonymy to explore David Garnett’s novel Lady into Fox (1922) and Sarah Hall’s short story “Mrs Fox” (2014) in the wake of animal studies and interspecies relationships. Lönngren here investigates the ways in which these narratives render human-animal transformations as meaningful, particularly when assessing societal and cultural changes which pertain to notions of gender, identity and the Other.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación [PID2021-122433NB-I00].

Notes on contributors

Laura Mª Lojo Rodríguez

Laura Mª Lojo-Rodríguez is Full Professor of English Literature (Department of English Studies, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain). Her most recent publications include “Magic Realism and Experimental Fiction: From Virginia Woolf to Jeanette Winterson” in The Oxford Companion to Virginia Woolf (OUP, 2021), Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary Fiction (edited with Jorge Sacido-Romero and Noemí Pereira-Ares; Brill, 2021), Borders and Border-crossings in the Contemporary Short Story in English (edited with Barbara Korte; Palgrave, 2019), Gender and Short Fiction: Women’s Tales in Contemporary Britain (edited with Jorge Sacido-Romero; Routledge, 2018), among others. Lojo is also the principal investigator of the research project ‘Tales from the Border’: Global Change and Identity in Contemporary British Short Fiction, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Roberto Del Valle Alcalá

Roberto del Valle Alcalá is Associate Professor of English Literature at the School of Culture and Education, Södertörn University (Sweden). His book-length publications include the monographs British Working-Class Fiction: Narratives of Refusal and the Struggle Against Work (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) and Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism (Routledge, 2019), as well as The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (co-edited with Maria Cristina Fumagalli and Bénédicte Ledent; University of Virginia Press, 2013). He is currently writing a new monograph entitled Socialism and British Literature: A People to Come (under contract with Liverpool University Press).

Notes

1. Braidotti defines the “posthuman convergence” as “the present historical condition of the Anthropocene – not a utopian future.” For her, this historical moment is characterised by three interrelated transformations in the social, environmental and technological spheres(2022, 3–4).