TRANSHUMANISM, FRANKENSTEIN, AND EXTINCTION

Abstract

Shelley's novel has been fertile ground for ecocritics over the last two decades. In Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture (2014, 2016) I wrote about Frankenstein and culture's dialectical horror of nature. As a narrative of failed continuity, Frankenstein also exhibits our fear of culture, its machine determinism, of monstrous production in place of sustainable reproduction. Victor, the isolated, compulsive scientist is not unlike the figure of the lone programmer, coding for the "enhanced" human or cyborg of his uncritical posthuman dreams. Our world and its problems demonstrate that Frankenstein continues to be a prescient novel: before Darwin's theory of evolution, and long before genetic modification and what we call information technology, Shelley imagined the creation of a being as an assemblage of contingent "natureculture" in a bildungsroman that juxtaposes its creator's. While the novel invites us to consider the political promise of the monster (as I've argued elsewhere), it is also a commentary on the dangers of solitude, the dangers of failing to honour the social and ecological contingency, the entanglement, of all things in the pursuit of knowledge.