Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene

Front matter

Craig Dionne

Reading Shakespeare in the _Anthropocene

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Contents

Acknowledgments | xiii Introduction - This is the Thing | 15 1- Listening to the Past; Or, How to Speak to the Future? | 27 2 - Lear and the Proverbial Reflex | 69 3 - Accessorizing King Lear in the Anthropocene | 111 Coda - Lear's Receding World | 165 Bibliography | 199

Index | 215 xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE Listening to the Past; Or, How to Speak to the Future?

Is this the promised end?

— King Lear 5.3.263

...the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight... — Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

Imagining our Material Contexts

As I write this, sitting in my office in my apartment in Minatoku, Tokyo, there is, just two hundred kilometers from me, what eco-materialist critics call an assemblage of objects conspiring to tether me and my immediate world to its chain of causation.’ Every day eighty thousand gallons of radioactive water leaks into the Pacific Ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. This is about a gallon a minute. If you are reading these words at the average rate of 250 per minute, let’s say, you will start and finish this paragraph as another couple gallons of

1 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 20-40.

contamination drains into Ishinomaki Bay and into the eastern Pacific basin. At the time of this writing, this free flow of contamination is unabated and will effectively continue, its power to mutate cumulatively growing. Tracing this dissemination of radioactivity is a lesson in what new materialists call the dispersal of agency across the “surface” of a slow moving but no less immanent event. The isotopes cesium 134 and 137 are water-soluble (cesium 137, one of the most deadly products of fission, has a half-life of thirty years). These radiated particles are dissolving in seawater and dispersing throughout the different layers of the ocean, at different rates depending on wind, currents, weather patterns, into plants, single cell organisms, causing a bioaccumulation of radioactive compounds in those animals at the top, “up” the ladder of the food chain.* Though scientists do not see humans beings immediately threatened by the fallout, it is easy to imagine the exponential spike of long term bio-magnification within this chain, especially given the main source of protein for islanders of Honshu, Tokyo's Tsukiji Fish Market, which sells 2,000 tons of seafood on average each day.

You have every right to think it is absurd to read an academic book in literary studies purporting to offer yet another “Lear in Our Times, and to be abruptly asked to consider the depressing

2 One fear is that marine phytoplankton in the surface waters of the sea basin, responsible for photosynthesizing oxygen, will be killed off. David Pacchioli, “How Is Fukushima’s Fallout Affecting Marine Life?” Oceanus Magazine, May 2, 2013, http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/how-is-fukushimas-fallout-affecting-marine-life. An article by Ken O. Buesseler et al. is typical of the way some are downplaying the immediate threat of cesium 137 (with a half-life of 30 years) to humans. “Fukushima-derived Radionuclides in the Ocean and Biota off Japan,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109.16 (2012): 5984-88: DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1120794109, http://www.pnas.org/ content/109/16/5984. But an article by Atsuki Hiyama et al. is representative of how others see significant effects of genetic mutation in the near future. The “indicator species” — the grass blue butterfly — portends other genetic mutations in the food chain. “The Fukushima Nuclear Accident and the Pale Grass Blue Butterfly: Evaluating Biological Effects of Long-term Low-dose Exposures, smc Evolutionary Biology 13.168 (August 12, 2013): DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-13-168, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471- 2148/13/168.

image of the Fukushima Daiichi facility poisoning our Pacific rim ecosystem. Judging the vast scale of the potential future damage, the repercussions to generations of life on the planet in the long term, my gesture here must appear sensational, if not histrionic. However, if we take seriously the challenge of the new eco-materialism to imagine ourselves impacted by the object world around us, it is easy to reverse the terms of the question and ask, why are we considering another perspective on Lear at all when such a thing is happening? Another way to put this might be to force the question: how can we imagine doing the work of literary studies and not consider such an eco-material context? How could we plod on without appearing like we are repressing some terrifying truth that figures like the old medieval theme of mortality, a new existential horizon whose bounds can promise no safe passage? At the very least, it seems an important question to ask— perhaps the question — as another two gallons of water tainted with deadly radioactive isotopes lap into the turbid brine.

This is not to mention the countless millions of gallons that have been dumped since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami occurred. How do we ponder such a bleak image? Imagining a post-apocalyptic future is one of the things Shakespeare’s King Lear is about. At least, this is where it leaves us in the end. On the beach, among the bodies, with no real plan to move forward, but with a few austere adages about what we've learned from our mistakes. But this simple awareness of the ecological challenges of our day does not seem enough in the face of the rising tide. For all of its sophisticated philosophical evacuations of the old epistemic critical categories, perhaps the greatest challenge of the “new” materialism is that it demands that we rethink causality, ideas of agency, and reexamine the present in the context of a doubtful posthuman future. Imagining the end is where eco-material posthuman theory begins. I want to eventually get to the second-order philosophical unraveling implied in the title of my book, but I want to start here, at the end, on the beach, as it were, to frame one important textual feature of Shakespeare's great tragedy with our current ecological present. Assemblages and complicated causality work both ways. They can effect ripples in our environments as well as our interpretative systems. We start with unpacking a hermeneutic riddle in Shakespeare's play: why do characters speak in proverbs? And, like a juggler on the beach tossing washed up items in the air, we soon find ourselves juggling it all, early modern rhetorical devices, Renaissance educational practices, inheritance of Lucian stoicism, clashing ideologies evinced in the text, not to mention readerly techniques and dispositions — close reading, affective theories, modernist aesthetic philosophy, disappearing philosophical categories replaced with new. The soapy episteme is mixed at our ankles, and waves touching our thoughts on early modern theater do not pose an immediate threat, but we have time to sort it out, for the time being.

The posthuman will be foregrounded in my reading of Shakespeare as the unformed, “emergent” discourse allowed to speak in our present context. Hugh Grady has defined in the corpus of his critical works this approach as presentist historicism, a rigorous contextualizing where “the past takes on new contours and qualities for us as our thinking shifts in the present.” “Our knowledge of works of the past,” he continues, “is conditioned by and dependent upon the culture, language, and ideologies of the present, and this means that historicism itself necessarily produces an implicit allegory of the present in its configuration of the past.’ Indebted to the Frankfurt School and especially to Adorno’s dialectical method, Grady is careful to acknowledge that the moment of identification in the critical act is one based on seeing oneself in the otherness of the past: “part of this work of reinterpretation involved coming to understand how and why themes of late modernity might have been produced in the discourses of early modernity in the forms close enough to our own to seem cognate to us?’ I think it is fitting to

3 Hugh Grady, Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 2.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

frame an analysis of William Shakespeare’s most nihilistic narrative about cosmic decay by foregrounding the problem of our own uncertain future. Shakespeare’s King Lear desacralizes the old-world ideals that informed Jacobean culture. The tragedy depicts wide-scale destruction of war and social cataclysm as a backdrop to the King’s story of domestic rule and his ensuing madness. “In the epilogues to the Histories and Tragedies,” Jan Kott reminds us, “the new monarch invites those present to his coronation. In King Lear there will be no coronation. There is no one whom Edgar can invite to it. Everybody has died or been murdered... Those who have survived — Edgar, Albany, and Kent — are, as Lear has been, ‘just ruind pieces of natures Thinking about the scientific problem of surviving in the Anthropocene, and especially the disposal of nuclear waste — whose radioactivity remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years — helps us imagine the terror about physical dissolution evinced in Lear. In this tragedy, Shakespeare articulates a morbid fixation with nature’s decay, and the radical indifference that time and nature have to human life. When compared to his other tragedies, King Lear seems to offer no future, no way to think beyond its ending. On Shakespeares Dover Beach, there remains no surviving character to show the world how to rebuild from the carnage. Scholars have tried to explain the tragedy’s aesthetic effect as a kind of exorcism or evacuation of medieval feudal customs, an interrogation of the moral system so devastating that it leaves nothing in its wake to imagine a new one.’ Kott, whose brave ear confronted the nihilism of the

6 Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (London: Methuen, 1965), 120-21. 7 William Elton’s description of the “The Problem’ (Chapter One) in his King Lear and the Gods (Chicago: Huntington Library, 1966) summarizes this historically rich scholarly debate, where, in his mind anyway, Shakespeare’s depiction of pagan animism presents serious “obstacles” to the Christian reading. In my opinion, Maynard Mack’s King Lear in Our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) is the well source of many contemporary readings of King Lear’s skepticism. Also see Graham Bradshaw’s idea of “perspectivism” in his Shakespeare’s Scepticism (New York: St. Martin Press, 1987), and Millicent Bells idea of “skeptical disillusion” in Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). The idea that play and who famously read King Lear through Samuel Beckett's avant-garde theater, described modern productions approaching the “absurd mechanism” of the play’s destruction free from salvation. “Various kinds of impersonal and hostile mechanisms have taken the place of God, Nature and History, found in the old tragedy. The notion of an absurd mechanism,” he continues, “js not transcendental any more in relation to man, or at any rate to mankind. It is a trap set by man himself into which he has fallen’ I think there is a way to read Shakespeare’s tragedy that recognizes and reworks this posthuman kernel of its absurd mechanism. When Matthew Arnold wrote “Dover Beach,’ I have to imagine that the poem’s bleak image of the world was meant to respond to Shakespeare’s last scene on Dover Beach in King Lear. Arnold is using the play, at least tangentially, to think about the nihilism of his own time; the poem's question-

Shakespeare's “aesthetic distancing” of even his own disillusion — that his own doubt is framed with poetic ambivalence — teases at some of this scholarship. John Cox’s idea of “skeptical faith” in Seeming Knowledge: Shakespeare and Skeptical Faith (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2007) attempts to square this circle by framing the question of Shakespeare's doubt within a religious discourse, a strong trend in the last twenty years to read Shakespeare as Catholic and all his mysteries as recusancy. Much of the current historicist readings attempt to frame Shakespeare’s skepticism in classical antecedents or through his reading of Montaigne, or trace this ambivalence through sixteenth-century contradictions in political and economic forces: Stephen Greenblatt’s “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), discusses Shakespeare’s distancing gestures in the context of Reformation critiques of Catholic ritual, while Jonathan Dollimore’s Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Richard Halpern’s The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Cornell, ny: Cornell University Press, 1991) place the idea of decentered subjectivity in the neo-Marxist contexts of Althusserian critiques of power and “primitive accumulation” respectively. Grady’s Shakespeare, Machiavelli, and Montaigne argues forcefully that there is a trajectory from political critique to doubt. For current framing of this topic, see the special Open Review “Shakespeare and Skepticism’ in Shakespeare Quarterly, ed. Joseph Loewenstein, http:// shakespearequarterly.folger.edu/openreview/?page_id=4. 8 Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 105.

ing of faith, its existential doubt, and finally its secular humanism, are nevertheless released through the allusion. As its own actant, the reference to Lear lingers in the margins of the poem, activating a series of recognitions, mental cognates. One reads the poem and thinks of Kent walking off the stage to a dubious end. And when returning to King Lear, one thinks of Arnold’s “confused alarms of struggle and flight” Arnold’s “solution,” if we can call it this, to the problem posed by nature’s indifference is to see genuine community, the idea of being “true” to one another as an effort to solidify sustaining social bonds (friendship? love?) in age where the older paradigms seem mute and no longer speak to us. It’s a solution that elegantly frames King Lear’s radical skepticism. Another way to see Arnold’s reading, however, is to consider how its own solution reproduces the crude mechanical logic of the world it opposes, the panicked moment of discovery — “if no faith, then I will accept a secular love’ — that admits its attitude toward communalism is a last resort. This is a crude rendering, but it gets to the logic of much literary criticism of Shakespeare’s tragedy, which similarly recoils at the profound skepticism of the play, and then reaches out to find something to explain this lack of redemption.’ Staring at the stark reality presented in the play, critics wince and then attempt to see some hope offered in its silences.

I want to believe that Shakespeare's play helps us identify the posthuman in our time, especially in the way it grapples with this idea of imagining the future. I want to explore this idea of speaking to the future a bit more before returning to the play itself. Take some time on the beach, with the bodies and the

9 Iam indebted to John Cox’s summary in Seeming Knowledge of the critical debate about suffering in Lear, from Samuel Johnson, Nahum Tate, up to Jan Kott, William Elton, and Maynard Mack. Maynard Mack comments that Tate's revision is not wrong or willfully corrupting of the original. Rather, Tate discovers the “romantic core” of the plot by allowing Cordelia and Lear to live. Oddly, Mack doesn’t mention King Leir as the Renaissance equivalent to Tate’s version, which is to say, the literary antecedents of King Lear that are also romantic. Another way to put this might be that Shakespeare's play sees the skeptical posthuman core in a story that is romantic for everyone else.

remains of social cataclysm, to think about the idea of reading literature to prepare, to fit ourselves. Literature as equipment, in Burke’s famous formula, but also equipping. Literature as equipping for the future (I will speak more about Burke below). The posthuman kernel is here, on the beach. It is fitting to start, then, with one of the great critical paradoxes of the play offered by Edgar at the end (or Albany in Q1), when he tries to makes sense of Lear’s death by signaling its meaning in a trite adage. Scholars tend to search for an aesthetic distance in the play’s final rationalization of violence.’° Some claim that the idea of alienation-effect institutionalized by Bertolt Brecht’s modernism is indebted to Shakespeare’s realism. As I will explore later, these moments of proverbial reflection seem “wrapped” in this critical overlay, as moments of alienation and thus critique, but as I will argue this is not the only way we have to read these passages. Reflecting on Lear’s earlier transgression, Edgar’s famous final lines provide for us nonetheless a way to reflect on one of the play’s nostalgic strains. His words, “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say,” carve a cautionary path forward, a way to parse the providential lesson of the play, what we might identify as the stoic lesson of Lear’s precipitous fall. To move on, to keep living, remember to “speak what we feel.” But is this really all that we are left with at the end? If we remember, we can avoid past mistakes and move on? Edgar is taking us back to the beginning, looking for that point in the past that triggered the tragic unfolding: Lear’s question, “Which of you... doth love us most?” (1.1.49). His adage also serves as a signpost to the notion of desis, tragedy’s depiction of the protagonist's life caught in the web of past actions. Arent we merely back where we started? Isn't a scripted answer to Lear’s question... unethical?

Set this down. “Speak what we feel. Not what we ought to say.’ Remember it, and then, when asked, perform the prescript

10 One notorious “read” of the jarring simplicity of the ending, which I want to examine in more detail below, is Jonathan Dollimore’s theory of the “refusal of closure” in Radical Tragedy. To me, Dollimore’s reading of King Lear is formative. I speak more of this in the chapters below.

out of habit. Performing language out of habit would be recognizable to early modern teachers and scholars, trained as they were in the rote habits of memory and translation. But wait. If we write this down to memorize it, is it really what we feel when we say it? Isn't this the “glib and oily art” of artificial speech that got us into the trouble in the first place? This is Shakespeare's version of the philosophical liar’s paradox— “this sentence is false” — but in this instance it is hard not to feel like a crude joke is being played on us as we try to parse through the semantic possibilities. If we remember to speak what we feel, the form of remembering to do this undermines the authenticity of the act of responding free from a rehearsed, mediated form. Like Arnold’s attempt at finding hope in the face of the indifferent ebb, here we have a mechanical reaction to write lessons in the sand, find some solace in the wake of destruction. What interests me is the aphoristic quality of Edgar's advice, how the sharp proverbial form shapes the expression. If Edgar is meant to be a character of hope, say, like Fortinbras from Hamlet, a symbol for the promise of a new society that returns to the themes of duty and justice, then this very moment in the play teases us with the lingering image of rebuilding on such a sandy foundation. Edgar has borne witness to too many of the betrayals and moments of self-destruction to arrive as deus ex machina. One could make an argument that his challenge to Edmund renews justice and simulates the cult of blood and honor lost in the play’s anatomy of Machiavellian politics, if it weren't for the fact that the decision itself is tinged with the same theater and stagecraft used by Edmund. Where do we begin parsing this quizzical use of proverb?

Warning Signs: Tsunami Stones and Eternal Markers

What if we were to approach these lines as an earnest attempt at survival? Edgar leaves everyone with a warning: his proverb is meant to work as cautionary sign. But how are we meant to read it? Where do these seemingly memorized lines come from? And what is their affect? How are we meant to listen to them? How

Figure 2. Aneyoshi Tsunami Stone. “The homes on higher places will guarantee the comforts of the descendants, Remind the horror of the tsunamis, do not build homes below this point. We suffered tsunamis in 1896 and also in 1933, only two villagers ... survived [sic]? Photo courtesy of Hatsuki Nishio. Photo

taken June 14, 2013.

are we to interpret the seemingly endless uses of adages and proverbial speech in the rest of the play? Taking Edgar’s lines as a microcosm, it is as if trauma induces Renaissance humanism to retreat into itself, to return to rote habit, but we are left realizing that, taking the play as a whole, this is perhaps both the cause and solution to the crisis. Edgar imagines speaking to the future: his first thought is to think of a way to avoid the tragedy again. I want to explore more of the history of proverbs and their value to Renaissance humanism. But first I want to return to the example of Japan and radiation to frame the idea of speaking to a deaf future in the context of our possible radioactive reckoning. I want to raise the stakes a bit through considering more our posthuman crisis. Are we learning our lesson? How do we think of speaking to the future? More tangents. A few more gallons.

To get at “it” — the cause or “object” responsible for the Fukushima meltdown in this case — means to unravel parts of the assemblage, the different actants responsible for the nuclear plant’s destruction, which can read like tracing the hero’s past actions in a tragedy. What was the original act that led to this moment? The seawater was responsible for the power outage. The power outage led to the pump’s failure in the core. Was the earthquake responsible for the meltdown, then? Maybe the building of the plant to begin with? The ineffectual seawall? What about the tsunami itself? But what caused that? The earthquake? These quakes occur from of the force of the two tectonic plates — the Phillipine Sea Plate and the Eurasian Plate— crashing against each other. When the Eurasian Plate slips, it releases an awesome amount of kinetic energy, resulting in tremors. The quakes and tsunamis are part of the natural world in this region, like the tide and moon, part of the earth’s eternal clock.

Because these earthquakes have gone on for centuries, people have learned to keep the collective memory of the natural danger alive through the use of special markers. Past generations in Japan knew of the dangers of tsunamis and built stone signposts meant to warn future generations of building houses and villages near the sea. Tsunami stones, as they are called, can be found up and down the northeastern shore of Honshu. They are made of flat tablets, some nine feet high, marking the dangerous limit of the tsunami’s reach. “Do not build your homes below this point.” Or: “High dwellings ensure the peace and happiness of our descendants." The magnitude of the Tohoku quake that triggered the March 2011 tsunami was not the worst experienced in Japan. One of the controversies surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown is the way the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO)—who own and manage the plant— handled the report written by geologist Yukinobu Okamura, three years before the crisis. Based on studies of the sand deposits in Sendai, Okamura calculated how powerful earlier tsunamis had been, confirming the legend that, as stated in The True History of Three Reigns of Japan (901 Ck), inland castles were destroyed by waves resulting from the great “Jogan” quake of 869 cE.” As reported in Mark Willacy’s Fukushima and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns, the nuclear plant was built with outdated safeguards. Fukushima Daiichi was built to withstand six-meter tsunamis that result from magnitude six quakes thought to occur every 100 to 150 years.” The monster Tohoku quakes in Okamuras study were at least eight-plus magnitude and resulted in 16.5-meter waves. “We discovered that the intervals between the tsunamis are 500 to 800 years. That means that if no quake had hit since the Jogan tremor, then the probability of [another large earthquake] was high” (100). TEPco decided against building the necessary protective wall that may have shielded the power plant from the brunt of the tsunami’s first waves.

Tsunami stones mark the impending danger: they are meant to speak the language of tomorrow, to warn people in the future u Martin Fackler, “Tsunami Warnings Written in Stone, The New York Times, April 20, 201, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/world/asia/21stones. html?pagewanted=all&_r=o.

12 Nihon Sandai Jitsuroku (“The True History of Three Reigns of Japan’]. National history of Japan written in 901 CE. For translation see: Sakamoto Taro, The Six National Histories of Japan. (UBC Press: Tokyo, 1991), 169-186.

13 Mark Willacy, Fukushima and the Inside Story of the Nuclear Meltdowns (Sydney: Macmillan Australia, 2013), 100-104.

Figure 3. Tsunami stone of Attari.

Photo courtesy of Hatsuki Nishio. Photo taken September 12, 2015.

that this too will happen to them (fig. 2). But to do this, they have to exist unchanged, fixed. These markers are meant to speak across generations to keep the lived memory of the cataclysmic from fading. The problem with the tsunami stones is that they are so old as to be taken as part of the natural landscape. There seems a limit to peoples interest, a kind of crude news cycle to human memory. Fumihiko Imamura, a professor of urban studies specializing in disaster planning at Tohoku University in Sendai, explains: “It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and their grandchildren, but then the memory

14 See Aska, “Aneyoshi tsunami warning stone tablet? Megalithic Portal, June 22, 2013, http://www.megalithic.co.uk/article.php?sid=34248.

fades.» Pictures of the tsunami markers taken today often reveal this neglect, as they appear like forgotten monuments left to their own slow erosion among the cedars (fig. 3).

Tsunami stones are designed to function as universal warning signs to speak across the great generational divides to ensure the survival of the community. But how to speak across this divide in a language that is recognizable to people of tomorrow? In a language that can be understood?

This is precisely the problem the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency faced — on a much grander scale— when it attempted to devise a timeless warning sign, officially termed a “Passive Institutional Control,” to caution future generations of the environmental hazard of nuclear radiation at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant storage facility in the Delaware Basin outside Carlsbad, New Mexico. When considering the hazards of nuclear energy, perhaps the Carlsbad case is closer to home for most of us. This site, the third deepest storage facility in the world, is licensed to store nuclear waste permanently for more than a hundred thousand years. In this instance, given the half-life of the radioisotopes, the question of communicating to future generations about the lingering hazard of radiation is infinitely magnified. How to build tsunami stones that speak to generations this far in the future? To conceive of this span of time, one has to employ a geological time scale. Not only do civilizations come and go, but entire species can appear and fade from earth's memory. Instead of having to speak across the divide of three generations, the Epa had to imagine a moment so far in the future relative to the history of our own that the dump site could be inhabited by people who speak and think differently. How to conceive of a language to warn people (can we call them people? What will they call themselves?) living past the end of human time? But how to insure that the vital record of the past isn't lost in the weeds?

15 “Ancient Stone Markers Warned of Tsunamis,’ cas News, April 6, 2011, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ancient-stone-markers-warned-of-tsunamis/.

The EPA put together a panel of expert linguists, anthropologists, and sociologists to devise warning signs, a set of signposts, markers, and architectural structures that might speak to all readers of the future. N. Katherine Hayles’s momentous book How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics traces the origins of the idea of the posthuman as it emerged from the cognitive science developed out of sponsored academic “think tanks” in the post-war moment of cybernetics and “informatics” Hayles could have easily included in her narrative the EPa’s “Permanent Markers Team” because its consideration was to imagine the posthuman in the most literal of terms.” The “team” (teams, more properly) was to focus intently on the deadly environmental legacy of human life, not from a skeptical vantage point fueled by contemporary political debate, but as a foregone conclusion. Their plan, called “Permanent Markers Implementation Plan,” involves a ghoulish architectural scheme installing huge, grotesque, and menacing fences spread across the desert, with signs made out of imperishable stones. The plan for this macabre theme park (what else do we call it?) proposes using colossal forms to warn people away from the site: berms, giant jagged iron posts, a “landscape of thorns” meant to look like the remnants of a war zone (fig. 6, p. 46"), including tall murals with menacing images of death, an entire built landscape designed to evoke instant threat. What is the best way to warn of the dangers of nuclear waste but to

16 N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 50-83.

17 The “team” I refer to above consisted of three specific groups looking at “drilling intrusions” (Boston Team), “inadvertent intrusions” (Southwest Team), and “decomposed judgments ... probability of intrusion” (Washington Team). See Stephen C. Hora et al., Expert Judgment on Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Sandia National Laboratories Report SAND90-3063 / UC-721, December 1991, http://large.stanford. edu/courses/2011/ph241/dunn2/docs/SAND90-3063.pdf.