What kind of not‑humanist am I?

This was my first contact with a well‑known (but still unknown to me) cultural critic, teacher of science fiction courses and ableism studies. His career maps and spans over an acafan’s (academic fan) transformation (from 50 years ago), when authors such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Bradley under pseudonym) were still considered outliers, slowly replacing the hegemony of Asimov, Clarke and Bradbury.

For me it is important to find out what were the concerns, questions and self‑doubt of those who have worked with science fiction in their academic career (SF is being used with great success as a teaching tool – see the soon‑to‑be‑published book by John Rieder Truth, Lies, and Speculative Fiction: Confronting Dogmatism, Demagoguery, and Disinformation, Gerry Canavan’s Teaching Science Fiction or Jörg Matthias Determann’s Teaching Science Through Science Fiction: A Story of Innovation in the Classroom and Beyond). For sure, they were severely impacted by world events, disciplinary changes and following their publications makes us better understand how their experiences have altered their readings and theories of SF.

We may get a better sense of the times they/we live in and refuse to be isolated from surrounding modern culture, including socio‑political, geopolitical and ecological history (whether you decide to call it internal contradictions of capitalism or polycrisis). To make it clear, Bérubé maintains that he is a hesitant teacher of SF classes.

In the wake of countless jeremiads, super‑AI scares and ‘exterminist’ fantasies, this book reconsiders what was deemed unthinkable in yesterday’s humanities or liberal arts terms.

Whether you may call it a defeatist attitude, liberal arts are justified in trying to refuse easy anti‑intellectualism or trying hard to get beyond mere performative progressive posturing, usual Anthropocene vituperations against the ills of civilization, especially now when SF is being used as a selling device for more goods or a way to financially speculate on the climate disaster and prop up masculine white fears – aka Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt‑Right.

What would mean today thinking the impossible or trying to overcome yesterday’s elitist bourgeois condition, even if one is a citizen of the most powerful (if hated) state on the planet today (just think of the current propping up gun diplomacy of right wing governments in south America by the Rubio/Trump team).

This study is interesting because it is situated at a doubly painful juncture (Angel of History double whammy) – by being a product of the pandemic work stoppage and sabbatical year (for some). An imperfect apocalypse and contested lockdown (something that has not been thoroughly overcome, but how can it be overcome or transcended? For why this is not over, see Fauci’s show trial). A book written before the defeat of Harris democrats and the Trump’s second term.

In a sense, it is a book written in dialogue with SF literature class students and in another sense it summarizes a lot of academic and theoretical literature, gender studies, feminist critique (or what might be inside jokes, but this is reserved mostly to end notes) as well as nonacademic responses, be it form bloggers and others, even anecdotes and lots of family and personal happenings.

Michael Bérubé’s position is very delicate in a way, because it offers a refreshingly pessimistic tract (how else these days?), that tries to separate the ecopessimist from the misanthrope, accepting the critique of anthropocentrism, but also a sort of refusal to give into the eco‑fascist, or anti‑natalist (the queer critique of „reproductive futurism”) or dime‑a‑dozen exterminist thoughts („becoming so detached as to wish it into the ash heap of cosmic history”), which sadly to say, come much too easy under today’s AI‑(mis)guided genocidal war fervor.

He walks this tightrope cautiously. If it is easier to imagine the end of the world today that is also because „the civilisational‑collapse genre” (Mad Max, The Road, Waterworld, Book of Eli – all given as examples by Bérubé) became the „preferred province of preppers” who aim to use their stockpiles of weapons „to murder nonwhite people en masse”. Consensus and common sense have collapsed amidst chemtrail and Pizzagate triggering, and SF as a preeminent progressive genre and SF studies as a discipline have to adapt and wade through this murky imaginal swamp that is not just mere fictional world‑building, but world‑making. Bérubé offers an unpleasant and uncomfortable consensus (even against the preferences of his students) drawn from a varied range of science fiction authors.

While non‑STEM fields are being defunded and the arts and humanities are being junked as bad investments, one feels one has thought through and not jump on the bandwagon (if one has some professional honesty) and adopt the „not‑humanist” label undigested. Bérubé asks from the get‑go, „What kind of not‑humanist am I?”

How can one avoid the post‑ something (and I am also thinking here of the post‑Marxist or post‑critical pernicious labeling) and not fall back into pre‑ something. Bérubé’s response to the confusion of post‑ is to refuse the posthuman, the transhuman or the antihumanist. And I tend to agree.

In his words, „It is about the challenges of adopting the perspective of the ex‑human. If there are any relevant ordinary‑language connotations or the prefix ex‑, they most likely lie in the fact that many people have complicated relationships with their exes.” Personally, I always appreciated the ex‑, because being an ex‑curator or ex‑art critic, or ex‑artist shows that we’ve moved on, but our new position is very insecure and confusing.

I think Ex‑Human functions best when it manages to also catch itself before falling into the pitfalls of the „X‑risk” Institutes and pundit industry unborn future humans calculus (and by extension „longtermism” and „effective altruism” trappings). It is also a book that still wants to acknowledge a „total despair in humanity”, something that he finds compelling in Ye Wenjie character in Liu Cixin’s SF hit and that became an important impetus for writing this book.

It asks some really tough questions – if indeed (spoiler alert) „what of value is lost, really, if these people and their shitty societies disappear?” If today constant maximization of value is the domain of Paranoid Finance, we might be finally getting ready to become valueless traitors to the species. This is the hard question that Michael Bérubé poses us, and it is likely unanswerable, but then this is the conundrum of realizing the imperial boomerang hitting back especially after realizing the cyber‑military industrial financial complex is ready to bust the planet open.

In the long run I would say this question comes from a society that has gotten the better of the Cold War, and found a way to impose austerity and discipline their work force not to mention start a merciless for‑profit internment system were an underpaid underclass of migrants and climate refugees toil. (The comparison with the East comes to mind: The Triumph of Broken Promises: The End of the Cold War and the Rise of Neoliberalism.)

Neoliberalism made austerity and rising financialization (less welfare), wage stagnation and inequality more palatable, and techno‑optimism, bland Hollywoodian happy ends and patriotic fervor salable – till recently: see Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth‑Century Europe. Irresistible it might have been, but its consequences are also hard to resist. Positive thinking about anything, including profiting out of catastrophic man‑made situations (betting on devastating gigantic fires still burning in Canada) has made risk‑taking into the ultimate drug (see Kalshi and Polymarket).

It is hard to think this book would have been written differently after the DOGE „optimization”, and the apathetic followers of US Imperialist Realism war with Iran and support of Gaza genocide (Imperialist Realism) or the continuation and paramilitarization of the ICE. Recently Elon Musk became a trillionaire, something that brings him closer to the stratosphere of a Padishah Emperor. This book is bleak, but it was still good times compared with today’s current reinforcing disasters. It is really tragic that „giving up” (in this sense it is impossible to give up the Empire) is not an option outside of the science fiction examples considered (that feel like a hard to stomach alternative if one actually looks at today’s US foreign policy).

If one accepts alien Oankali invasion and subjugation, and reads till the end through the various chapters dedicated either to Oryx and Crake, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1, Dawn and ends up with the tellingly titled Epilogue: Just Kill Me, one has to accept the full brunt of actually starting to despise the MAGA base or the antivaxxers. Tourism industry seems to be criminally detached from large portions of wildlife and fires and heatwaves hitting the US and Europe nowadays. Indeed, one feels that vacationing while the world gets charred is still an option for some. So, paraphrasing Bérubé, what would be more dizzying than organizing COVID super‑spreader events, „save Diesel” protests, a scenario that was never anticipated by zombie movie script writers, one where the human contingent is willingly accepting to get their brains eaten by zombie in a zombie movie scenario?

After 2016, suddenly it became easy to see „the resistors” from Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood as the „violent white nationalists” Trumpers who came back with a vengeance and would never go away soon. China recently criminalized spreading nihilistic attitudes online, but nihilism ABOUT China’s 2.0 shock abounds online in Europe and US. China bashing is also a very convenient way to shield Western elites from actual responsibility and accountability.

Bérubé contends that „My reading of the human resistance to the Oankali is then to twelve times less generous than that of Gerry Canavan because I see the resisters as those people: antimaskers and antivaxxers, waving the Gadsden ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flag at the Oankali and wearing bright‑red MEGA (Make Earth Great Again) hats. Again this is not a book about dissatisfaction with the human, but about what we would not like to see encouraged, propped up, goaded, and channeled under such technofascistically poised times.” And who can blame him?

Inversely, what is distinctly strange is that health care systems, and particularly the CDC in this sense (one of the foremost medical institutions and pandemics prevention centers in the world, that is, before its current de‑fanging and gutting under JKR Jr), become in Bérubé’s „less generous” reading a sort of Oankali institution, a hated alien, the They Live invasive institution (I would say statist alien enemy). In the midst of a rapidly segregating, secessionist and „conspiritualist” ancap (neo‑earther) prepperism (that also comes from a place of privilege) crystallized against such international institutions (not to mention anti‑WHO, anti‑World Gov, anti‑UN paranoia).

What I like is that it’s not a book that speaks from a position of moral superiority, but one almost of self‑doubt, of entertaining unwelcome thoughts, of hard to refuse conclusions. Continuing this line of thought, can one accuse the EU farmers „resistors” of protesting each time when gas gets hiked or when agro‑tech subsidies are under threat? Is it right to say that the ones who are bankrupting farmers world over will also be the ones propping up the systems that till recently made them Too Big to Fail? Those very mid‑westerners that became easy prey for supremacist propaganda leaflets spread widely among decaying towns (related by Ganz in When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s). The left (or whatever remained from that) has been particularly good at avoiding „contact with the masses”, but at the same time they were out‑gunned, out‑competed and financially dependent, so demonization came easily. Distance (which is understandable in a gun friendly culture) and (worst of all) being in denial and aloof while culture wars and Wars on Terror did their damage is something we have to reckon with, something that Bérubé has warned against in the past (The Left at War).