There are three slightly different ways that language and languages can be considered in relation to the idea of assemblage: assemblages as combinations of linguistic items (language assemblages), assemblages as semiotic gatherings (semiotic assemblages) and assemblages as material arrangements that involve language (sociomaterial assemblages). Looking at language in terms of assemblages emphasizes the processes of communication as people draw on varied resources to make meaning. The notion of semiotic assemblages opens up ways of thinking that focus not so much on language use in particular contexts – as if languages pre-exist their instantiation in particular places – but rather on the ways in which particular assemblages of objects, linguistic resources and places come together. This is to approach language not as a pregiven or circumscribed entity but rather as something that is constantly being put together from a range of semiotic and resources. Sociomaterial assemblages similarly focus on things and places in relation to linguistic resources and consider language to be embodied, embedded and distributed, where language is not so much an abstract system of signs as changing sets of material relations.

This chapter uses Don Delillo’s novel Zero K to consider the historical and structural relationship between bioethics and biocapitalism, particularly in the development of consent forms and contract labour. In this way, the essay examines the role human capital theory and transhumanism have played in influencing definitions of human nature and the bioethical frameworks predicated on these definitions. Using the techniques of literary narrative bioethics and feminist relational bioethics, the essay carefully interprets Zero K’s treatment of cryonics as a bioethical dilemma too often contained and constrained by historical and ideological conceptions of consent, which the novel seeks to critique. Ultimately, the chapter offers a form of posthuman literary narrative bioethics as an alternative methodology.

In earnest efforts to disrupt the racialized space of Anthropocene conversations, Indigenous epistemological alternatives have emerged as exceptional antidotes to ecological despair with privileged access to nonhuman and interspecies lifeworlds. While many Indigenous approaches do offer beneficent alternatives, their broadscale characterization tends to deposit fresh essentialisms in the wake of the old, and battles over intellectual privacy and appropriation frustrate coalitional urgency. Thus, the very incommensurability that these new approaches seek to demolish – those nourished by the imperial practices we aim to counter – are rejuvenated. Simultaneously, Indigenous critical thought continues to herald its singular capacities for reclamation, and at the same time to police its appropriation, at once demanding and rejecting inclusion in serious academic and scientific conversations. Drawing on Timothy Morton’s concept of the “weird” as a way of conceptualizing human embeddedness in a vast biosphere of nonhuman others that both contains and erases us, this chapter argues that a politics of action based on exceptional epistemologies and myths of alterity cannot succeed. We are tangled in a structural universe where fictions of difference – not just between humans and nonhumans, but among humans themselves – emerge from the very systems we seek to explode.

This chapter examines science fiction written during the heyday of the modern synthesis, from the early 1940s to the end of the Cold War, identifying two major phases in science fiction’s representation of the posthuman – one relying on eugenics, the other on genetic engineering. This history has an important bearing on science policy, for it exposes an unacknowledged kinship between science fiction and the policy scenarios developed by some prominent commentators on genetics. Both jeremiads against genetic enhancement and eager anticipations of a posthuman future rely on narrative conventions, world building, and rhetorical practices characteristic of literature, while masquerading as nonfiction. In literature, the formal conventions of fiction alert readers to the provisional nature of extrapolation and safeguard readers against taking possible futures as inevitable. Scientific jeremiads and anticipations, by contrast, warn against a future entailed by a fiction.

This chapter tracks the figure of the rat across American short fiction, focusing in particular on H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Rats in the Walls” (1924), Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Mazes” (1975), and Karen Joy Fowler’s “Us” (2013). These stories illustrate powerful narrative effects that can be produced by constructing particular forms of animality, while also blurring, at times, the boundaries between what it means to be a human and what it means to be an animal. The chapter engages with the academic fields of human–animal studies, multispecies studies, and animality studies, exploring the short stories not only in relation to animal advocacy, but also problematic histories of animalizing certain human groups. Posthumanism cuts across these various fields, questioning constructions of the human as fundamentally different and superior to all other species on the planet. The chapter ultimately argues that some narrative techniques have more posthumanist potential than others.

I introduce the question of what digital technology is – why it is so powerful, why it is different in kind from other media – by focusing on the convergence of two themes. First: Regarded as a tool, digital technology does not really do anything; it does not straightforwardly act on the material world. Unlike steam engines or wheels, it performs no particular physical task. Its scope of action is unspecified and unrestricted. Second: It is a social technology. Its appeal does not reside only in its instrumental means and uses, but in its power to connect us into a single global nervous system. This is in part because information technology is a technology of intentional responses. By responding to us in terms of information and by making our responses themselves the subject of measurement, digital devices engage us personally and in kind. These features thus represent the twin promises of total effectiveness and total responsiveness; that is, digital technology is both a new tool for measurement and a new medium of being in touch with others. It is this synthesis of measurement with medium – of quantitative analysis with social reality – that is most distinctive and transformative about it.

The chapter approaches Kraftwerk‘s oeuvre from a conceptual perspective and treats the band as performance artists. After discussing the artistic major influences, the first three albums from 1970 to 1973, later disowned by the core team of Ralf Hütter and Florin Schneider, are considered aginst the conceptual notion of ‘industrielle Volksmusik‘ (i.e. electronic pop music). Next, Kraftwerk‘s concept albums from 1974 to 1981 are analysed using key themes and lead aesthetics such as retro-futurism, man-machine, and post-humanism. The chapter then examines the impact of digitilisation on the artistic production of the band and discusses the reversal of the primary mode of operaton from the recording of new studio albums towards the curation of the core work in the period between 1983 and 2003. To conclude, the chapter looks at the evolution of their stage craft up to the current fully immersive and ritualistic audio-visual performances. I evaluate to which extent Kraftwerk can be seen as a paradigmatic example of a pop-cultural Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) in the modernist Gesamtkunstwerk tradition, fulfilling Richard Wagner‘s promise of a true Zukunftsmusik (future music).

A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.

In Chapter 16, “The Nature of Animality,” Michael Lundblad explores how questions of animal (and human) nature animate the contemporary interdisciplinary fields of posthumanism, multispecies ethnography, science and technology studies, animality studies, and human-animal studies. The chapter examines how animality has long defined how humans think about each other and how rejecting a fundamental distinction between humans and animals enables us to see the intertwined “becomings” of different beings. The chapter constructs a genealogy of prominent theoretical responses to questions about animals and animality by Jacques Derrida, Erica Fudge, and Donna Haraway, among others. Theories of animality, Lundblad demonstrates, challenge how we think about history, periodization, and culture, and breathe new life into old debates within literary studies such as questions of agency, character, and perspective.

Drawing on various distributive frameworks – distributed cognition, distributed agency, distributed language – this paper makes a case for understanding identity along similar lines. While poststructuralist approaches to identity usefully undermined monological cognitive approaches to identity (where identity is a characteristic of the individual) – emphasizing instead the discursive construction of subjectivity as multiple, conflictual and flexible – many failed by and large to escape the constrictions of methodological individualism, or to account adequately for non-discursive factors, the place of agency or the material world. Distributive frameworks, by contrast, seek to break down the barriers between inside and outside, between humans and their surrounds, between language and context. From this point of view, language, cognition and agency are not solely properties of individuals bur rather operate through larger networks, assemblages or entanglements. In this paper we draw on recent data from our ten-year metrolingualism project to explore ways in which identity may be understood as a relational quality of an assemblage of people, places, things and linguistic resources.