SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE AND THE ANTHROPOCENE
Nonhuman Turn in Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio
Keywords:
Anthropocene, Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear, Knowledge Society, Nonhuman Turn, Post-Anthropocentrism, Scientific KnowledgeAbstract
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.
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