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Space, Assemblage, and the Nonhuman in Speculative Fiction

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Space, Assemblage, and the Nonhuman in Speculative Fiction SPACE, ASSEMBLAGE, AND THE NONHUMAN IN SPECULATIVE FICTION SPACE, ASSEMBLAGE, AND THE NONHUMAN IN SPECULATIVE FICTION By KRISTEN SHAW, B.A., M.A. A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy McMaster University © Copyright by Kristen Shaw, August 2018 McMaster University DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (2018) Hamilton, Ontario (English) TITLE: Space, Assemblage, and the Nonhuman in Speculative Fiction AUTHOR: Kristen Shaw, B.A. (York University), M.A. (The University of Western Ontario) SUPERVISOR: Professor Anne Savage NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 207 ii ABSTRACT Ongoing scholarship on the impact of speculative fiction demonstrates how science fic- tion and fantasy are fundamentally concerned with interrogating the socio-political net- works that define contemporary life, and in constructing alternative environments that both critique and offer solutions to present-day inequalities. This project contributes to scholarship on the politics of speculative fiction by focusing on the ways in which recent speculative fiction re-envisions space—including urban sites, new architectural forms, and natural landscapes—to theorize innovative forms of socio-political organization. This work draws from the spatial turn in cultural studies and critical theory that has gained popularity since the 1970s, and which takes on assumption that space and politics are al- ways intertwined. Drawing predominantly from assemblage theory, assemblage urban theory, and new materialist theory, this project examines how human and nonhuman agents—including space itself—interact to create new spaces and relations that resist hegemonic neoliberal modes of spatial, political, and social organization. Chapter Two analyzes utopian assemblages and spaces in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, deploying Noah De Lissovoy’s concept of “emergency time” and David M. Bell’s theories of place- based and affective utopias. Chapter Three examines place-making tactics in Lauren Beukes’ novel Zoo City through the lens of Abdou-Maliq Simone's concept of people as infrastructure, Deleuze and Guattari's theory of nomadology, and Jane Bennett's theory of “thing power.” Chapter Four uses the work of Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett to explore the thing power of the nonhuman and nature in China Mieville’s Kraken and Jeff Van- dermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. In sum, this work attempts to demonstrate how exam- ining speculative spaces through the lens of assemblage theory can illuminate new paths for political resistance. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First, I would like to thank my amazing committee members: my supervisor, Dr. Anne Savage, Dr. Catherine Grisé, and Dr. Susie O’Brien. Anne, thank you for your ongoing support of this project from stage one. The encouragement, inspiration, and constructive feedback that you provided throughout my experience at McMaster has been invaluable, and it has been an honour to work with you and get to know you. To Cathy and Susie, thank you for being a part of this journey, for your encouragement, positivity, feedback, and insight. This project would not have been possible without your unfailing support. Thank you to my family and friends for always being beside me; for the positivity, support, and care you have shown me throughout the years. I am so lucky to have you all in my life. Finally, thank you to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the Government of Canada, whose financial support made this project possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER ONE Speculative Fiction, Spatial Politics, and Assemblage Urbanisms ...................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO Utopian Assemblages in Emergency Time: Utopian Mobility in Distraction ................... 30 CHAPTER THREE Urban Assemblages, Nomadic Mobility, and the Nonhuman in Zoo City ......................... 76 CHAPTER FOUR Lively Spaces and Thing Power in the Area X Trilogy and Kraken ................................ 127 CHAPTER FIVE Spaces of Today, Spaces of Tomorrow ............................................................................ 182 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................. 188 v Ph.D. Thesis – K. Shaw; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies CHAPTER ONE Speculative Fiction, Spatial Politics, and Assemblage Urbanisms Speculative fiction—an umbrella term that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, and the various weird and fantastic genres that engage with genre conventions in a more slippery fashion1—has always been concerned with critiquing and analyzing contemporary socio-political conditions. As science fiction writer Samuel Delany writes, “[Science fiction is] a tool to help you think about the present—a present that is always changing, a present in which change itself assures there is always a range of options for actions, actions presupposing different commitments, different beliefs, different efforts … different conflicts, different process, different joys” (Starboard 34). Speculative fiction writers construct and explore imagined worlds not as an escapist response to the present, but to serve as an instrument for thinking about contemporary issues and for constructing imaginative alternatives to current circumstances. Darko Suvin’s highly influential article “On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre” put forth the theory of SF as the “literature of cognitive estrangement,” meaning that speculative fiction estranges us from our present day reality so that we can better examine and understand it; indeed, [speculative fiction] “distances us from the contemporary world-system only to return us to it, as aliens, so that we can see it with fresh eyes” (Canavan xi). In this sense, there is always 1 I will use the terms “speculative fiction” throughout this work, as well as the shortened form “SFF” to indicate science fiction and fantasy. There are many debates surrounding the use of this term to replace “science fiction,” “fantasy” or both, but I find that the term “speculative fiction” is particularly useful for covering the full range of texts that fall somewhere on the fantasy or science fiction spectrum. This term is also particularly useful now that the distinction between science fiction and fantasy is so often blurred. 1 Ph.D. Thesis – K. Shaw; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies both a critical, heuristic function to speculative fiction, but also a strain of hope. The fundamental aim of the genre of cognitive estrangement is to provoke the imagination, to think creatively about the present and how we might transform it. Our current political reality is, in large part, defined by specific kinds of capturing flows and networks of power. Neoliberal capitalism has strengthened income inequality, consolidating the majority of the world’s wealth into the hands of the few at the top of the social ladder; market logic infiltrates all areas of life, becoming the dominant mode of social organization; financial deregulation and international, ‘open’ markets have produced new forms of colonialist and imperialistic governance over humans and nonhumans; the prioritization of profit above all else has led to an ecological crisis with irreversible effects.2 And yet, as Ursula LeGuin stated in a powerful 2014 speech for the National Book Award, although the power of capitalism “seems inescapable,” so, too, “did the divine right of kings…Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.” LeGuin’s sentiment echoes the strain of hope that runs throughout the fictional and theoretical texts that I examine here. Speculative fiction, through its creative envisioning of alternate futures, provides a lens to think and act differently, to forge new kinds of collectives, spaces and socialities that push against current political realities that often appear (or are represented as) inevitable, all-encompassing, and apocalyptic. One of the central ways that neoliberal capitalism has infiltrated the everyday is 2 See Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown, The New Spirit of Capitalism by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, by Loïc Wacquant, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, as well as A Brief History of Neoliberalism, both by David Harvey, for recent critical analyses of neoliberal capitalism. 2 Ph.D. Thesis – K. Shaw; McMaster University – English and Cultural Studies through its colonisation of space. Foucault’s now famous statement that, while the great obsession of the nineteenth-century was history, “the present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space” (“Of Other Spaces” 22) has been born out by the proliferation of texts on the topic of space in the age of neoliberalism. This text is inspired and follows from Doreen Massey’s assertation that “attention to implicit conceptualisations of space is crucial…in practices of resistance and of building alternatives to neoliberal globalisation, which is a “material practice and [a] hegemonic discourse…that attempts to tame the spatial” (99). In the face of these attempts to colonize and territorialize, this work employs several theoretical toolkits, focusing predominantly on assemblage theory to examine how speculative fiction writers represent space and politics. A secondary,
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