It is one of the peculiar contradictions of modernity that the technology that extends the reach of the human, that helps humans to master their environment, also works to weaken the human itself as a category. As Hal Foster has put it, technology is a ‘demonic supplement’, at once ‘a “magnificent” extension of the body’ and a ‘“troubled” constriction of it’.¹ This is a contradiction that reaches a kind of intensity at the beginning of the period under consideration here. Take, for example, Bertolt Brecht’s play Life of Galileo (first performed in 1943). Galileo’s (supposed) invention of the telescope allows humankind to reach far into space, to cast their influence way beyond the immediate parameters of the body. As a result, Galileo says in Brecht’s play, the ‘movements of the heavens have become more comprehensible’, and ‘the battle for a measurable heaven has been won’.² But the problem that lies at the heart of Life of Galileo is that, in gaining a deeper understanding of the universe, humankind forsakes their centrality to it. The church cannot allow Galileo to disseminate his new knowledge of the movement of the planets, because in doing so he would expose the fact that the earth is not at the centre of the universe, and that, in turn, the universe is not constructed in accordance with human reason. To win the battle to measure our environment is to reveal that ‘the earth is a planet and not the centre of the universe’, that ‘the entire universe isn’t turning around our tiny little earth’ (p. 53). The desire for knowledge and control of the environment, which science and technology allow us to satisfy, leads, by a peculiar dialectic, to the loss of such mastery. The current environmental crisis that threatens our planet is perhaps only a logical conclusion to such a process. The technology that has allowed humankind to control the planet has also made it inhospitable to humans, and to all other species, so if we are to understand our environment now, as Richard Powers puts it in his short story ‘The Seventh Event’, we have to think ‘beyond the gauge of the human’.³ The history of the human has led us to a situation in which the human itself can only be contemplated from elsewhere, from some posthuman perspective.

So, to think about science and technology in relation to the human is to recognise that technology has a kind of posthuman logic built into it – a logic which arises in part from the philosophical fragility of the category of the human itself. However powerful the human has been as an ideological and political force throughout the history of modernity – despite the centrality of our investment in the human to everything that has been done in art and science – it has always rested on a kind of fudge, a kind of category error. As Augustine famously puts it in City of God, the human is a ‘kind of mean between beasts and angels’, an approximate category which shares something with both the divine and the animal, without belonging properly to either.⁴ As such, as Hugo von Kleist has famously demonstrated in his essay ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, the human encounters itself in a continual play between the material and the spiritual, between the dumb self-presence of matter, and the divine self-presence of spirit. In working in this way between two states, neither of which it can properly attain, the human, Kleist argues, remains peculiarly at odds with itself, lacking in the simple unity with self that is the province both of pure matter and pure spirit. Inanimate matter – even the matter from which we craft artificial human parts, such as those which make up the moving parts of a puppet, or those of a prosthetic limb – can achieve a grace that fleshy human parts cannot reach. He knows of people, the speaker in Kleist’s essay declares, who have ‘been unfortunate enough to lose their own limbs’, and who wear ‘artificial legs made by English craftsmen’. These people dance on their artificial legs, he says, and can ‘perform and execute’ their movements ‘with a certainty and ease and grace which just astound the thoughtful observer’.⁵ The prosthetic attachment to a human body knows a kind of self-containment that no human body could, as the human body is always caught between self and knowledge of self, always barred from that dwelling within oneself that, for Kleist’s speaker, belongs only to spirit and material, to gods and puppets. ‘Where grace is concerned’, he writes, ‘it is impossible for man to come anywhere near a puppet. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect’ (p. 16).

The thinker who has given perhaps the sharpest and most influential expression to this contradiction at the heart of the human, and of the human engagement with technology, is Sigmund Freud. In his 1930 work Civilization and its Discontents, Freud offers a picture of the human as a vulnerable, naked thing, as a ‘poore inch’, a ‘feeble animal organism’. The human is an inadequate thing, which knows, as matter does not, as the animal does not, as the god does not, its own inadequacy. The development of civilisation, in Freud’s account, is an attempt to overcome this basic generic inadequacy – to harness the power of technology in order to make humans secure in their environment, as gods and puppets already are. Tools allow the human to extend itself into its environment, to amplify that poor ‘inch of nature’, so that ‘with every tool man is perfecting his organs’, or ‘is removing the limits to their functioning’.⁶ As Brecht’s Galileo deploys the telescope to extend the range of human seeing, Freud suggests that the development of tools across the history of civilisation has allowed us to extend every human motor and sensory function:

All of these forms of extension – these ‘things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth’ – allow the human to exert a kind of control, in both time and space.⁷ The capacity to move in space produced by the ship and the motor car has a corollary in the capacity to see and hear at a distance granted by the telephone and the telescope, and the forms of archiving, storing, recording, offered first by writing, and then by photography and sound recording, act as extensions of memory, stretching ourselves backwards into the past, and forwards into the future. These forms of technology, Freud suggests, allow us in some ways to move beyond that stranded condition that Kleist outlines in his essay on the ‘Marionette Theatre’. Science and technology make humans god like. But the central argument in Civilization and its Discontents is that this extension does not overcome the peculiar inadequacy that is native to the human, but exacerbates it; or, more interestingly, exacerbates and overcomes this inadequacy at the same time. The more humanity armours itself against its infirmity, the more infirm it becomes, the less adequate to itself. The more it relies on technological supplement to aid its extension into the world, the less it is able to achieve that peculiar, graceful harmony with its own being that Kleist finds in puppets and in gods. ‘Man’, Freud writes, ‘has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxillary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown onto him and they still give him much trouble at times’.⁸ In the strange gap that Freud sees here between the organic and the inorganic – the junction between the human body and its prosthetic entry into the word – one can see the contradiction between extension and constriction that Foster sees as native to the development of human technology. The more our tools shape the environment, the more flimsy our own presence as human controlling agent becomes. Think of Ripley controlling the robotic forklift in the closing scenes of the film Aliens (1986): technology amplifies the human only to the extent that it dwarfs it.

Any discussion of the connections between science, technology, and the posthuman in the postwar British novel has, at the outset, to attend to these contradictions in the relations between technology and the human. The development of the novel in the period is arguably characterised by the lapsing of the human as the dominant figure for civilised life, and the emergence of a posthuman rhetoric and aesthetic, which shares much with the other postal compounds that shape cultural life in the later decades of the century – such as postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and so on. In what follows I will trace successive waves in this emergence of a posthuman structure of feeling at work in the British fiction of the postwar. But even as this posthuman logic comes to expression, in tandem with developments in the technological production of the culture, it is important to recognise that the forces that shape this emergence are already in place much earlier, and are in fact integral to the way that the human itself as a category has always recognised itself. Hal Foster argues that the modernist aesthetics that developed over the first half of the century turned around what he calls the ‘double logic’ of the prosthetic – that the ‘machinic imagery of high modernism’ that one can find in Wyndham Lewis and Filippo Marinetti is produced by a historically defined consciousness of the prostheticised posthuman body that has always been grafted on to the natural body, since humans were first able to use tools.⁹ The modernist politics of the machine, Foster writes, are circumscribed by the response one takes to the technologies that enhance and adumbrate the body. Modernism is shaped by the tension between the ‘utopias of the body extended, even subsumed in new technologies’, and the ‘dystopias of the body reduced, even dismembered by them’. As the technologies that arm and extend the human enter into a period of rapid development with the advent of twentieth-century modernity, the modernist imagination has either to ‘resist technology in the name of a natural body or accelerate it in the search of a postnatural body on the other side’.¹⁰ The tension between the natural and the artificial that has shaped the history of the human undergoes an intensification with the development of twentieth-century speed and industrial power, and the new forms of violence and conflict that such speed and power allowed. This tension, Foster argues, is a determining force in the history of modernism. It is also this tension, this splitting between a residual, natural human and a technologically produced posthuman, that determines the production of the aesthetic imagination at the beginning of the period, in the wake of high modernism, and of the Second World War.

George Orwell’s 1949 work Nineteen Eighty-Four is possibly the novel that sets the tone for this postwar sensibility most influentially. This is a novel that is possessed, at its heart, by a vision of a mechanised, posthuman state, a state in which the forms of interiority and autonomy that are the foundations of human being have been banished. The now-mythical story of Winston Smith’s battle against the tyrannical powers of the Anglo-American state (named Oceania) turns tightly around the relationship between the natural and the postnatural body. The telescreens that oversee all activities in Oceania produce a scenario in which privacy is banished, and with the enforced loss of privacy, the state also abolishes the experience of private ownership of the individual body. The novel displays an indifference to and an estrangement from the body that remains even now peculiarly shocking. Winston has a varicose ulcer on his leg that itches him throughout the novel, and this irritant is the mark of a wide gulf between public body and private mind, a kind of radical disassociation that signifies the disintegration of the human compound. The leg ulcerates because of poor circulation, as if the body is not properly connected, not properly wired in to Winston’s sense of himself. When Winston discovers a body part lying in the road after one of the routine bomb attacks that are unleashed on the city – he finds a ‘human hand severed at the wrist’, ‘so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast’ – he shows the same kind of indifference to the amputated limb as he does to his own ulcerated flesh, simply ‘kick[ing] the thing into the gutter’.¹¹ But against this dawning sense of the body as disposable public property – as the numb material upon which the state exercises its bio-power – the novel sets up a kind of rear-guard action, an attempt to recover a natural, ‘human’ body from the posthuman, postnatural conditions determined by an emergent global capitalism. The novel begins, of course, when Winston decides to rebel against the tyranny of the state by writing a diary, and in doing so he calls to that earlier conception of privacy, of the private ownership of the self, body, and mind that the Party has so effectively banished. The living room in Winston’s flat is arranged accidentally in such a way that Winston is able to set up a writing desk in an alcove that cannot be overseen by the telescreen. ‘For some reason’, the narrator says,

It is this accidental architectural anomaly that suggests to Winston the idea of writing the diary. Without this fold in the surveilled space of the state, Winston would not have expressed dissent, any more than any of the other apparently unconscious inhabitants of Oceania. But from this chance possibility of withdrawal, Winston builds an entirely new relationship with his body, salvaging a properly human consciousness from the mechanised being that is produced by the Party. From the possibility of privacy inside his room, Winston finds a way of articulating the experience of privacy inside his own mind – the sense that he has sovereignty over the ‘few cubic centimeters inside [his] skull’ (p. 29), and that as a result he is able to think and reflect as an autonomous individual agent. From this recognition, and from the articulation of this recognition, Winston stages a modest rebellion against the state, and the sign of this rebellion is the gradual reassertion of his ownership over his own body, his body as natural and whole as opposed to estranged and prosthetic. The ulcer on his leg acts as a kind of litmus, indicating Winston’s greater integration, the freer circulation of his blood. As he and Julia, Winston’s co-conspirator, set up a little house where they can be freely alone together – a rather mocking mirror image of 1940s domesticity – Winston finds that his ulcer starts to heal. Meeting Julia repeatedly during the course of June, Winston notes that ‘his varicose ulcer had subsided leaving only a brown stain on the skin above his ankle’ (p. 157). As Winston finds a way of living securely within the ‘few cubic centimeters inside his skull’, so his body comes back under his ownership, his skin becoming once more the tightly sealed border of the self.

If Nineteen Eighty-Four is in part the story of this assertion of Foster’s ‘natural body’ against the postnatural bodies administered by the tyrannical state, however, the lasting legacy of Orwell’s novel is the failure of such an assertion. Nineteen Eighty-Four is, above all, a despairing work, a ‘dystopia of the body reduced, even dismembered’ by the technological apparatuses of the state that are bent on disaggregating the human, on undermining the procedures that allow for secure tenancy within the body, and within the cubic centimetres inside the skull. The most prescient stroke in an astonishingly prescient novel is Orwell’s recognition that the development of new technologies for the surveillance and reproduction of the culture would conspire with shifts in the intellectual, political, and economic climate, to radically erode the basis upon which our conception of the free democratic subject was founded. The telescreens infiltrate all private space, and the ‘speakwrite’ machines in the ‘ministry of truth’ allow the state to manipulate all historical archives, and with this double manipulation of reality comes a failure of rationality, a failure of the philosophical protocols that had enabled us to produce accurate pictures of collective life, in which private, autonomous individuals shared a common public sphere. O’Brien, the state intellectual who ‘re-educates’ Winston, gives him lectures on the new, posthuman epistemology as he tortures him, and these lectures resemble crude prototypes of thought forms that were still to come in 1948, thought forms that we have come to associate not only with posthumanism, but with postmodernism, poststructuralism, and the other political and epistemological manifestations of the ‘post’. For Winston, the experience of living inside one’s own body relies on our capacity to make independently verifiable statements about a common world. The Party, he thinks, ‘told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command’ (p. 84). The attempt to manipulate reality relies on the Party’s ability to undermine our capacity to deploy reason and common sense to frame our occupation of the world, our ability to look at the world with our eyes, to listen with our ears. Resistance thus takes the form of an insistence on the truth of reason, and the reality of the world that we can register with our senses, and that we can measure and record with accuracy and fidelity. ‘Freedom’, Winston thinks, is the ‘freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows’ (p. 84). But the story of Nineteen Eighty-Four is the story of the failure of such statements, and the disappearance of the individual freedoms that were based upon them. Winston thinks that the mind and the body can be ‘kept alive’, by ‘passing on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four’ (p. 230); this is how to ‘pass on from body to body the vitality which the Party did not share and could not kill’ (p. 229). But the revelation of Nineteen Eighty-Four is that, under the conditions produced by contemporary technology, as well as by contemporary politics and economics, such fundamental truths, and such intrinsic vitality, no longer obtain. As O’Brien says to Winston, with a Baudrillardrian grin, ‘Men are infinitely malleable’ (p. 282); reality is not immanent in the world, but created by the most powerful observer. The power of O’Brien’s proto-postmodern denial of reality, as much as the pain of torture, overcomes Winston’s faith in the link between reality and our perception of it. O’Brien persuades him easily that ‘two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that was what was needed’ (p. 271), and with this submission to O’Brien’s logic, Winston gives up both his faith in the human, and his recovered sense of ownership of the ‘natural body’. Under torture, his body becomes once again utterly alien to him – ‘its actual appearance’, he says, ‘was frightening, and not merely the fact that he knew it to be himself’. His ‘varicose ulcer was an inflamed mass with flakes of skin peeling off it’, and O’Brien forces him to look at this rotting, emaciated body, and to acknowledge that the human itself, in this vision of wastage, shrinkage, and decrepitude, has expired. ‘Look at that disgusting rotting sore on your leg’, O’Brien says. ‘You are rotting away. ... You are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity’(p. 285).

Orwell’s depiction of the last man – which recurs in the title of Francis Fukuyama’s famous vision of posthistory and posthumanity, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) – is a particularly despairing one, a vision coloured by a lifetime of political disillusion. But it remains exemplary of a kind of structure of feeling that dominates the British novel from the mid to late 1940s to the early 1970s. This period saw the development of a particular kind of prose realism – shaped by writers such as Patrick Hamilton, James Hanley, Muriel Spark, Ann Quin, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Elizabeth Taylor, and others. Interest has grown recently in this group, as Julia Jordan attests later in this volume (see Chapter 11). An aesthetic that often seemed to epitomise lacklustre kitchen-sink realism is now being considered as far more experimental, and far more delicate in its address to reality than was previously acknowledged. This, I think, is certainly true, and the work of Ann Quin and Elizabeth Taylor will be given a much more prominent position in future histories of the novel than they were accorded in twentieth-century accounts of literary fiction. But it is the case that the examinations of realism conducted by these writers – from the ‘click’ in the head experienced by the pathological George Harvey Bone in Hamilton’s novel Hangover Square (1941) to the strange emptiness of the protagonist of Taylor’s Angel (1957) to the odd fluctuations in the realist aesthetic registered by Muriel Spark in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis in The Takeover – are shaped by the recognition of a kind of lapsing of the human, for which there seemed little remedy. The experiments in realism undertaken by this generation of writers were conducted in the spirit of that scepticism exercised by O’Brien: the sense that the foundations upon which the human had rested had been eroded, combined with a sense that there is no new measure, no revolutionary epistemology available with which to repoint or reconstruct the alienated subject.

This experience, this period of a mutedly experimental realism, comes to an end with the emergence of a second wave in this development of the posthumanist postwar novel – a wave that begins with the emergence of a new generation of writers in the early 1970s. The first stirrings of this new aesthetic might be traced to the appearance of two works, very different from each other, that were both published in 1970, although both were written over the later 1960s. Both the works I am thinking of – Samuel Beckett’s The Lost Ones, and J. G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition – respond to the same perception, that the production of a global public sphere, which is mediated and surveilled, as Beckett’s narrator puts it, down to ‘the least particle of ambient air’,¹² has produced a situation in which we have been finally expelled from our own bodies, in which the very possibility of interiority has given way before an administered and mechanised world state. Here, in both Beckett’s and Ballard’s works, Winston’s residual sense that the few cubic centimetres inside the skull might come under the sovereignty of the autonomous self has been completely annulled. In Beckett’s extraordinary text, the technologies that have led to global seeing, to global interaction, have also led to a kind of empty, robotic automatism, in which ‘searchers’ (the ‘Lost Ones’ of the title) move in compulsive patterns around the inside of a cylinder, obeying a set of precise rules for the carriage and deportment of the body, which seem to have no definable purpose. The searchers climb up and down ladders, explore ‘niches or alcoves’ (p. 203) sunk into the brilliantly lit wall of the cylinder, gaze into the eyes of other searchers, looking for something, some missing principle, perhaps, that might animate life in the cylinder. They are looking, one is led to speculate, for that quality that Winston seeks to preserve from the denuding gaze of the Thought Police, as his wasted, suppurating body is stripped bare by O’Brien, what he calls that ‘something in the universe – I don’t know, some spirit, some principle – that you [O’Brien] will never overcome’ (p. 282). But if that principle for Winston is humanity itself, some particular means of inhabiting our flesh, ordaining it with reason, love, compassion, Beckett’s text is a machine designed to expel any such residual faith in the capacity of the human to negotiate between the competing demands of matter and spirit, of Augustine’s beasts and angels. The searchers are not looking for recognition by another person, they are not looking for love or for shared feeling. ‘Man and wife’, the peculiarly affectless narrator declares, ‘are strangers two paces apart to mention only this most intimate of bonds’ (p. 213). The searchers are not looking for another person with whom they might communicate; and neither are they looking for themselves, for some confirmation of a human interiority that is proof against the relentless exposure that life in the cylinder entails. Unlike Winston, whose famished gaze is so often turned inward, the narrator declares that, in the cylinder, ‘none looks within himself where none can be’ (p. 211). The inside, in this vision of total mediation, is as empty as the outside; the ‘inner world’, as Judith Butler puts it, ‘no longer designates a topos’.¹³ The Lost Ones marks the moment, glimpsed in preview in Nineteen Eighty-Four, when the coming together of globalisation and surveillance technology turns the human inside out, ejecting us into a totalising space of automation.

It is just as Beckett is reaching this moment of posthuman expulsion, quite late in his career, that J. G. Ballard publishes The Atrocity Exhibition – a work that marks, along with his 1973 Crash, a coming together of the posthuman body with the mediatised image among the technologies of late modernity. As Beckett enacts the failure of interiority as a function of the globalisation of the visible, so Ballard sees, in The Atrocity Exhibition, that what Guy Debord calls in 1967 the ‘society of the spectacle’ has summoned us all to a kind of visibility that has totally transformed the topography and geometry of the body. Ballard’s work – so experimental and innovative that it remains difficult to classify – offers an extraordinarily naked depiction of a mode of being that has been released from the paradigms of enlightenment rationalism, and that is driven by a kind of psychosexual eroticism that calls to an entirely different rhetoric and protocol of embodiment. The landscape is an intense blend of a bland suburban architecture – concrete overpasses overhung by enormous billboards, interspersed with office blocks, plazas, and carparks – with an exploded, displaced body, which is magnified, distorted, and plastered onto the mediated, photographic surface. Here, the bland and deadened has become the charged, the erotic, as, in William Burrough’s phrase, the ‘line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down’.¹⁴ The overpass becomes as erotically charged as the inner thigh, dashboard and gearstick merge with the language and symbolism of pornography. And as the fractured external world becomes overcharged with the animus of interiority, the electric current of the unconscious, we see exactly that splitting open of the self that is experienced by the searchers in Beckett’s The Lost Ones. As the searchers find that they cannot live inside the self, so the displaced, evacuated characters in The Atrocity Exhibition find, from the outset, that the body cannot hold them, that it continually splits open to release them into some rerouted outside. The ‘protagonist’ Travis, also called by a host of other names beginning with ‘T’, finds that his very face, the surface which brings mind into contact with world, is fractured, unbound. ‘For some reason’, the narrator says, ‘the planes of his face failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature’ (p. 2). The human is not inside, but projected onto the outside, in magnified images of facial parts and genitalia plastered on giant billboards hung over plazas and underpasses. Karen Novotny, one of the recurring figures, finds her ‘fractured smile spread across the windshield’ of a car; Talbot, one of the ‘T’ characters, finds ‘his own face mediated from the billboard beside the car park’ (pp. 35–36); ‘Dr Nathan’, ‘limping along a drainage culvert’, finds himself ‘peering’ at the ‘huge face’ of Elizabeth Taylor, ‘painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse’, magnified to such a degree that ‘the wall on his right, the size of a tennis court’ contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone’ (p. 13).

In both Beckett’s and Ballard’s works of 1970, then, we find this same cracking open of the self, this same failure of interiority, as the search for spirit finds itself directed not inwards but outwards. But if Beckett and Ballard are responding collectively to a new relation between the global public sphere and the lapsing of the human, the direction taken by this response is perhaps very different, almost diametrically opposed. Beckett’s automata seemed to be an afterimage of those imagined earlier by Wyndham Lewis, under the sign of a machinic modernism; this is the final yielding of the human to an affectless, mechanised antihumanism. Against this pale after-image of modernism, Ballard’s work offers something entirely different, a new way of conceiving being that might take us past the impasse of disaggregated humanism, towards a different kind of psychosexual geography, one shaped by a posthuman verve and eroticism that is difficult to detect in Beckett’s wound-down machines. Both Beckett’s and Ballard’s pictures of globally mediated spaces contain niches and alcoves, those folds in the revealed system that are perhaps the leftovers of that alcove in which Winston sits to write his diary. But if those niches in Beckett are peculiarly stunted, offering no apparent ‘way out’ of the cylinder, nowhere to escape from the brightness that falls from the air, the impetus of Ballard’s global imagination is towards the discovery of new faultlines, new fractures and limit boundaries that open to unseen dimensions and strange, unthought geometries. Where Hal Foster suggests that the modernist imagination seeks a form of ‘acceleration’ that takes us towards a ‘postnatural body on the other side’, then Ballardian speed, power, and information flow takes us past a far horizon, into that other side that has not yet been properly thought or seen. The geography of The Atrocity Exhibition, like that of Beckett’s Lost Ones, can appear sealed, a global system that has revealed its interior, in which nothing remains latent or withdrawn or unseen. Beckett’s hermetic cylinder makes a kind of appearance in The Atrocity Exhibition, in what the narrator calls the ‘impossible room’ – ‘a perfect cube’, whose ‘walls and ceiling were formed by what seemed to be a series of cinema screens’ (p. 44). We are entirely enclosed within a perfectly mediated system in Ballard. Yet this very completion, the experience of the global totality of the image, leads to a peculiar ejection into an outside, an odd ‘intersection of planes’, where a new, impossible angle opens up between war and ceiling, an odd niche or alcove in the smooth surface of the visible. As the culture industry mediates the world, turning it into a Warholian replica of itself, the erotic drives released by the image open new contours, push out to a new reality, a new organisation of the inside and the outside. ‘Planes intersect’, Dr Nathan says. ‘On one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards. ... On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by your opposing hands ... the angle between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche’. Where these planes intersect, where the geometry of interiority meets with the architecture of the built environment, and with the mass production of the spectacle, there, Dr Nathan says, ‘images are born, some kind of reality begins to assert itself’ (p. 72).

It is this assertion of a new reality – a new kind of posthuman accommodation of personal space and built space, framed by the speed and violence of the image – that opens onto a new wave in the production of the posthuman. What Ballard makes possible in 1970 is the expression of a new relation with the image, recognising that the image is not the reflection of a pre-existing life world but that life world itself. As Burroughs puts it, ‘The human image’ in The Atrocity Exhibition ‘explodes into rocks and stones and trees’ (p. viii). The human is turned inside out, merging with the inorganic, the material. But in doing so, in exploding the human image, Ballard suggests that we are fashioned out of the images we make. ‘Since people are made of image’, Burroughs writes, ‘this is literally an explosive book’ (p. viii). And it is precisely this recognition, this discovery of a new geography of desire, of possibility, of rerouted being, carried in the surface of the image, that determines the passage of posthuman thinking across the remaining decades of the century. Under his peculiar, pornographic, sometimes misanthropic and misogynistic optic, what Ballard makes possible is the reorganisation of relations between subject and world through the manipulation of the image, of the performed and mediated spaces in which we encounter ourselves and each other.

The explosion of literary possibility that is unleashed in the British novel in the last quarter of the century follows, to a significant degree, from this reorganisation of being, this encounter with a newly decentred form of consciousness. Where Orwell’s Winston seeks to keep the human compound intact, to maintain a rationalist relationship between interiority and the natural body, in the face of political and technological forces that are threatening to abolish it, Ballard lets the whole apparatus of human rationality come asunder, and in so doing releases us into new geometries of thought. And the passage of the novel in the decades that follow makes of this decentering of the human, this exploding of a sense of the interiority of the consciousness, an entirely new posthuman aesthetics and politics. Writers such as Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson discover in the posthuman spectacular body the possibility of a new kind of feminist or postfeminist politics. The expression of the human has doubled, through most of the history of civilisation, as a defence of a patriarchal status quo, and a naturalisation of unequal distributions of wealth and power. In the sudden freedom that the disaggregation of such structures affords, these writers produce forms of unregulated being, forms of thinking and writing in which gender is freed from the restrictions of embodiment, and in which we discover new capacities for self-fashioning. From Carter’s The Passion of New Eve (1977), in which the body is fashioned from its cinematic representation, to Winterson’s Written on the Body (1993), in which the narrator opens a peculiar space between genders, to the experiments in electronic identity in Winterson’s The Power Book (2000), the British novel has discovered the possibility of a new feminist politics in the junction between posthumanism, spectacular mediation, and the production of a technological as opposed to a natural public sphere. If the innovative realists between the 1940s and the 1970s were circumscribed by a form of humanism that lived on after its conditions of possibility had expired, the next generation of writers – Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, and Kazuo Ishiguro as well as Carter and Winterson – freed themselves from such circumscription by thinking their way past the limits of the human itself. Where the human has always found itself in a difficult relationship with its prosthetic extension as techne (where such extension has both enlarged the human and constricted it), writers in the 1980s and 1990s discover a freedom from such restrictions by dispensing with the human as a category altogether. If being is made out of its extension as image, as electronic code, as machine or clone, then there is no longer any tension between some notion of proper natural being and such being as it is brought into the media sphere. By recognising that ‘people are made of image’, we allow for a kind of free interchange between interior and exterior landscapes that has been denied us throughout our histories. Indeed, it is perhaps such denial – the policing and blocking of interchanges between the inside and outside of being – that has constituted the human; the sense of liberation that late-twentieth-century posthumanism brought with it arose from the perception that this denial was finally being overcome.

If the second wave of posthuman thinking that I am identifying here was characterised by this sense of possibility, this sense that the experience of being dissolves into the manufactured image, I think it is nonetheless possible to detect a third wave in the development of a posthuman aesthetic, emerging only now, in the first decades of the twenty-first century. This new wave is closely bound up with the realisation that environmental disaster is the greatest threat facing our planet, and the connected realisation that the political sphere, in which human and posthuman interaction takes place, has a connection to a material environment, one which cannot be simply dissolved, which cannot be reduced to the condition of specularity, or to an effect of discourse. The perception that we are somehow fashioned out of our own representations, liberating though it seems, has made it difficult to produce a critical sense of our own relation with our environment. As such, a recent generation of writers, philosophers, ethicists, and environmentalists are trying to develop a way of understanding how the material environment intersects with discursive forms, without simply reviving older political forms, or reverting to prior models of human being. British novelists such as Ali Smith, David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, and Tom McCarthy are seeking, in various modes, to produce a way of seeing that might allow us to understand how new forms of technological being might relate to a material reality, a reality that does not come to us in terms of humanist models – that does not obey the protocols of Winston’s ‘two plus two equals four’ – but which nevertheless requires us to apprehend it.

The dissolution of the human compound, this generation of writers might suggest, has freed us into the domain of the image. As Tom McCarthy’s extraordinary novel Remainder (2006) demonstrates, however, this has left as a ‘remainder’ a kind of materiality that underlies being, which is being, but which does not easily find expression within our mediated circuits of representation. The protagonist of McCarthy’s novel is famously estranged from his environment when he is struck down by what he can only call ‘technology’. ‘About the accident’, the narrator says in the opening paragraph of the novel, ‘I can say very little. Almost nothing. It involved something falling from the sky. Technology. Parts, bits. That’s it, really’.¹⁵ He receives a huge sum of money as compensation for this forgotten trauma, which he invests in ‘telecommunications and technology’ (p. 45) – as if he can sense a terrible conspiracy between information technology and the circuitry of the global economy. The investment of electronic money in the very technology that alienated him from himself, of course, does not help him to find his way back into the world, but rather pushes him further and further into neurosis. He becomes obsessed with the performance of what he calls ‘re-enactments’, in which he invents forms of empty, repetitive, Ballardian representation that have no purchase on the real, that cannot quite capture the fullness of an original experience that comes to him in the evacuated form of déjà vu. His attempts to recover the experience of authentic being are continually undone by what he calls ‘surplus matter’, by a kind of materiality that is everywhere around him, but which cannot make its way into his representations and re-enactments of the world.

McCarthy’s novel – which has become iconic for this new wave of British writers seeking to give expression to a contemporary posthumanism – suggests, with an absolutely singular kind of insistence, that the forms we have in which to enact our relations with the world cannot accommodate this matter, cannot account for the ‘remainder’ that is not captured in language, in the image. But if Remainder is caught in a kind of neurosis that emerges from this failure, at its heart is a vision of a new kind of writing that might give expression to a kind of posthuman materialism, a kind of writing that might be equal to the challenge of describing our transformed relations with the world, without reverting to exploded conceptions of the sovereign human. At the heart of McCarthy’s novel there is a vision of a kind of accommodation with self that is as complete as that which is achieved by puppets and prosthetics in Kleist’s essay on the marionette theatre. In the midst of his re-enactments, when the protagonist of Remainder is trying desperately to match the world that exists in his faulty memory with the material world around him, he occasionally experiences that sublime kind of balance that Kleist sees in the dance of the puppet. Puppets, Kleist’s narrator says, are ‘for all practical purposes weightless. They are not afflicted with the inertia of matter, the property most resistance to dance. The force which raises them into the air is greater than the one which draws them to the ground’ (p. 16). As McCarthy’s re-enactor moves into the heart of his own dance with matter, it is precisely this kind of weightlessness that he experiences. ‘For a few seconds’, he says, ‘I felt weightless – or at least differently weighted: light but dense at the same time. My body seemed to glide fluently and effortlessly through the atmosphere around it – gracefully, slowly, like a dancer through water’ (p. 135). McCarthy’s narrative doesn’t mean to suggest, of course, that this accommodation between being and matter is possible for us now. Remainder is precisely the story of this unavailability. But what such posthuman novels of the current century imply is that for us to understand the possibilities of posthuman life under the conditions produced by contemporary information technology we have to find a new accommodation with matter – the accommodation that Kleist had already envisaged in 1810, when the human was still the most powerful construct on the planet.