Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 An Inner Transhumanism: Modernism and Cognitive Evolution -- 2 Astounding Transhumanism! Evolutionary Supermen and the Golden Age of Science Fiction -- 3 Toward Omega: Hedonism, Suffering, and the Evolutionary Vanguard -- 4 Transhuman Aesthetics: The New, the Lived, and the Cute -- Conclusion: Acceleration and Evolutionary Futurist Utopian Practice -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z
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In Jeff VanderMeer's _Southern Reach Trilogy_ (_Annihilation_, _Authority_, _Acceptance_, all 2014), the style and language of H.P. Lovecraft's weird horror are updated for an age of ecological collapse and posthuman sensibilities. As Stephen Rust and Carter Soles argue in their introduction to a recent special issue of _ISLE_, "ecohorror" is a growing genre of cinema and literature in which ecological visions are used as fodder for horror narratives. VanderMeer's trilogy---involving the attempts to scientifically and bureaucratically manage an alien-created, pristine natural environment on the coast of the Southern US---clearly engages these tropes but, I argue, toward different ends. Rust and Soles argue that ecohorror---defined more capaciously than the popular definition as "revenge of nature" narratives---uses horror to foreground ecological politics and sensibilities. However, I argue that VanderMeer is focusing not on a notion of nature but on the human itself as a vector for producing horror: his unsettling descriptions of a seemingly pure natural world evoke a clear sense of our post-natural realities. Rather than produce an ecological awareness, VanderMeer's ecohorror produces an awareness of our own inability to produce an ecological vision in the Anthropocene. By creating an ecology that does not reference the human, and using this ecosystem as a vector for weird horror, VanderMeer's trilogy captures an inhuman vision of the natural, non-human world as, to use Eugene Thacker's term for the truly horrifying, a "world-without-us."
"*Lachrymator*: Persuasion's Tear Gas," experiments with the role of democracy in the rhetoric of objects. Where "being moved to tears" is often associated with experiences of *pathos*, recent brutal police responses in American cities figure being moved to tears as the product of an involuntary bodily response produced tear gas. Considering such a substance---scientifically designed for the sole purpose of producing pain---serves as a limit case for the commitments of an object-oriented rhetoric. Through theoretical metaphors of carpentry (Bogost), parliament (Latour), and ambience (Rickert), the conceptual vector for considering the rhetoricity of nonhumans is inclusivity: bringing objects to the table of a deliberative, democratic rational persuasion. As tear gas rains down on protesters across America, this paper asks if democratic deliberation is the best model for thinking about the rhetoric of *these* objects. Further, this paper constructs a "dark persuasion" following a thread of horror from OOO (Harman, Morton) to an emerging weird philosophy of horror (Negastrani, Thacker, Ligotti). Thinking darkly about nonhuman rhetoric constructs objects as producers of rhetorical effects not through calm deliberation but through violent collision. In this dark rhetoric of objects, we find responses like Bree Newsome's removal of the South Carolina flag to be *the* rhetorical strategy for dealing with the darkness of rhetorical objects.
In *After the Future*, Franco ?Bifo? Berardi documents the failure of the anti-globalization movement to attain lasting political change, despite huge global visibility following the Battle in Seattle and the 2003 protest of the war in Iraq. Bifo argues that this movement was ethical and never a vector for social change because it was incapable of imagining a future in which an alternative to neoliberal brutality held sway. For Bifo, this diagnosis suggests a failure of the collective conscious imaginary of the future itself, hence his claim that the myth of the future is now over. In offering a genealogy of this myth and an account of its failure, Bifo connects the emergence of the future as a space of promise and prosperity to the emergence of capitalism and heavy industry itself. However, I suggest that a much older rhetorical concept offers a different and, in the context of Bifo?s autonomist Marxism, more relevant model of the future. The sophistic concept of *plasma* is a genre in which a better or at least different world is extrapolated from current data. In contrast to the deceptive and intentionally false *pseudos*, *plasma* articulates a myth of a future by making the current world virtual. For the sophists, *plasma* is a source of positive invention, just as the myth of the future was needed to animate the struggle for spaces autonomous from capital?s privations. Thus, Bifo?s diagnosis signals the failure of *plasma* in our present argumentation. Through this figure of an imagined world, I link Bifo?s diagnosis of the soul as the site of capitalist exploitation with accounts of cybernetic sophistry from Richard Lanham and Jeff Pruchnic to highlight the terrain upon which rhetoricians can reinvigorate the idea of a plasmatic invention in the age of semiocapital.
