Disentangling Humanism: Science, Future Mastery, and the Biopolitics of Species in Cold War Literature and Culture

This thesis argues that the culture of the cold war United States is marked by a fantasy of ‘the human’ that depends upon its own constructed sense of interconnectivity with nonhuman worlds. Through examining five different sites of scientific-cultural intersection at which the division between human/animal is complicated, the thesis traces a development in philosophies of humanism between the 1950s and 1980s: from a doctrine concerned with the veneration of a singular and ontologically exclusive human subject, towards a system of ideas that functions through the destabilisation of such a subject. In doing so, the thesis develops a reading methodology of ‘disentangling humanism’—a name for the process of unthreading humanism from the contexts in which it seems to disappear.

Across its five case studies, the thesis traces a humanism that operates through mediated forms of inclusion—rather than exclusion—of nonhuman others. Chapter One examines the figure of the virus as an expression of collapsing species boundaries in an increasingly networked world, deployed by midcentury writers to recentre various cultural ideals of the properly human. Chapter Two reads J. G. Ballard’s apocalyptic fiction from the 1960s in the context of a developing environmental consciousness regarding nuclear testing and chemical toxicity. Ballard’s vitally material fictions depict a human caught between its primal origins and technological futures—underlining a shifting and discursive logic of mattering that occurs in the space between these locations. Chapter Three examines the co-implicated logics of nuclear risk and extinction in the 1960s and 1970s. Looking to a collection of cultural texts, including wildlife film, educational anthropology and novels by Thomas Pynchon and Philip K. Dick, the chapter argues that the constructed threats of nuclear apocalypse and extinction are managed through a mediated model of interconnectivity with the nonhuman.

Chapter Four turns to the science of behaviourism as a site at which human–animal relationships are reimagined during the 1970s. With particular focus on John C. Lilly’s work on interspecies communication, and through analysis of the fiction of James Tiptree Jr. and Ken Russell’s film Altered States (1980), the chapter argues that the combination of behaviourist and cybernetic thought produces a paradoxical model of communication between human and nonhuman that also functions as a transcendent ideal of future mastery. Chapter Five, finally, looks to discourses of health and hopeful futures in the culture of the late cold war. Drawing on contexts of environmental health discourses, the chapter reads the fiction of Kurt Vonnegut and Octavia Butler through the lenses of queer negativity and misanthropy. After speculating a form of misanthropy that resists anthroponormative futures, the chapter argues that Vonnegut and Butler imagine futures that draw our attention laterally towards the multispecies present.