SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE

Nonhuman Turn in Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio

Authors

  • Kee Wha Joo Kyung Hee University

Keywords:

Anthropocene, Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear, Knowledge Society, Nonhuman Turn, Post-Anthropocentrism, Scientific Knowledge

Abstract

This essay analyzes the post-anthropocentric human-nonhuman network in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio as a new scientific knowledge to help knowledge societies moving forward by utilizing and sharing such knowledge in the Anthropocene. Nonhumans possess a powerful force beyond human control, and some are indispensable in human lives. In the ‘nonhuman turn,’ the anthropocentric thinking on humannonhuman relations should be revisited. The mutant children in this novel, considered monsters by some, are a new subspecies who have experienced accelerated evolution in the upheaval of the Anthropocene, emerging internally from the dynamic human-nonhuman network. The paper focuses on the new human subspecies’ mechanism of emergence within the human-nonhuman network, from the vantage point of Gilbert Simondon’s Individuation theory, Bruno Latour’s Actor-network theory, and Karen Barad’s Agential realism. We see that the new subspecies is a product of the humannonhuman network, and that nonhumans enable such human ontological leap. This analysis not only informs us about the mechanism of the human-nonhuman network, but also helps us navigating a different relationship with nonhumans.

Author Biography

Kee Wha Joo, Kyung Hee University

Dr Kee Wha Joo is a research professor for Center for Cross-Cultural Studies at Kyung Hee University. Her areas of interest are British and American Literary Criticism and Posthumanism. This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF2018S1A5B5A01029756).

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Published

2019-03-31

How to Cite

Joo, K. W. . (2019). SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE: Nonhuman Turn in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio . Journal of Dharma, 44(1), 11–32. Retrieved from https://dvkjournals.in/index.php/jd/article/view/202