Patrick Kindig on Rasheed Tazudeen’s Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds

Reviewing Rasheed Tazudeen’s Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds for the Society for U.S. Intellectual History is a strange task, for, while the book itself is certainly an example of U.S. thought, it draws its methods and objects of analysis from other intellectual traditions. Not only is the body of literature it examines distinctly European; its methodology pushes back against the very notion of national boundedness, reaching toward what, in a nod to the work of Susan Stanford Friedman, Tazudeen refers to as a “planetary” conception of modernism.[1] Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and affect theory, the book as a whole offers a distinctively posthumanist—or, to use Tazudeen’s preferred term, “inhumanist”—take on the work of several authors key to modernist studies.

The guiding conceit of the book is Tazudeen’s concept of “multispecies metaphor.” If, as Tazudeen suggests, conceptual language—the kind of language that aims to name and categorize the world in rational ways—is “nothing more than a mechanism by which to possess (land, beings, time) and to enact relations of ownership,” multispecies metaphor offers a decolonial way to imagine relations among human and inhuman beings (3). There are, Tazudeen claims, two antagonistic functions to metaphor: on the one hand, metaphor rationalizes the world, giving unruly phenomena “name, meaning, place”; on the other, its “inconceptual” nature leads it to spawn new and unexpected relations among things (120). Metaphor thus entails both a “giving [of] names” and a “gathering [of] beings,” both the “meaningful transference” of conceptual knowledge and the “agglutinative profusion” of unrationalizable relations (2). Using this dual potential as “an analytic of planetary gathering,” Tazudeen offers up a way of thinking about modernist literature that attends to “the enigmatic knottedness of beings in which every being is simultaneously its bounded self and all of the relations that have co-composed a self” (2, 4). Such a perspective, of course, demands a renewed appreciation for the way humans shape and are shaped by the inhuman world around them. It also, however, demands a more fundamental shift in the way we do metaphysics, encouraging us to reconceive human and inhuman being not as two distinct categories but as variations on a single, ontological theme—the “inhuman expressivity” of matter itself (28).

This analytical framework is laid out in the book’s introduction and first chapter; the remaining five chapters use this framework to tease out the posthuman potential of various more or less canonical modernist texts. Chapter 2 explores expressive, agglutinative profusion in Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Lewis Carrol’s Alice books; Chapter 3 extends this line of analysis to Gustave Flaubert’s La tentation de Saint Antoine and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Chapter 4 explores the possibilities of non-anthropocentric, animal-centered philosophy in Franz Kafka’s “Forschungen eines Hundes” and “Der Bau,” and Chapter 5 takes up the “inhuman comedy” of extinction in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and “Anon.” The book’s final chapter explores how contemporary “metamodernist” poets (such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Cody-Rose Clevidence, Anne Waldman, Brenda Shaughnessy, Jody Gladding, and Sawako Nakayasu) “re- or interanimate the inhuman modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” in the present moment (187).

Throughout, Tazudeen demonstrates an admirably thorough familiarity with posthumanist theory, especially that particular brand of affect theory that Ruth Leys has dubbed “Spinozist-Deleuzean.”[2] (Indeed, although Tazudeen most explicitly positions his argument in relation to animal studies and ecocriticism, the language he employs—rife, as it is, with references to “assemblages” and practices of “attunement”—would be very much at home in the work of Brian Massumi.) What is more, his analysis usefully draws attention to what, in the work of certain modernist writers, seems to be a genuine investment in conceiving of the world as larger than or even antagonistic to the neat, rational world of anthropocentric thought; this is particularly evident in the chapters on Kafka and Woolf. Drawing clear parallels between the thematic concerns of certain modernist writers and the intellectual concerns of certain thinkers critical of Western humanism, the book effectively demonstrates how one might approach modernist literature from an “inhuman” perspective.

Yet however well-versed in Deleuzean theory the book is, it misses, I think, an opportunity to engage with a body of thought that not only paved the way for Deleuze but also inspired much modernist experimentation: vitalist philosophy. Vitalist philosophers such as Henri Bergson and William James were, like Tazudeen, committed to a metaphysics of flux and profusion, one that valorized the messiness of immediate experience over the staid forms of everyday life. They even, at times, embraced the same sort of mystical language that characterizes much Spinozist-Deleuzean affect theory and that permeates Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds. James’s theory of the Fechnerian “earth-soul,” for example—a kind of planetary consciousness that is proper to “the entire earth,” which “traces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours” as well as the contents of the minds of the whole inhuman world—epitomizes this; so, too, does Bergson’s theory of creative evolution.[3] Bergson, however, is only engaged by Tazudeen in relation to his ideas about comedy (pulled from his short book Le Rire); his metaphysical writings remain largely untouched. James, moreover, is not cited once—perhaps a function of the book’s relative indifference to American writers and thinkers. Even though many modernist writers were directly influenced by vitalist thought, then, the book remains studiously committed to the analytic of contemporary posthumanism.

I am, to be clear, no enemy of theory. Yet in reading Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds, I could not help asking myself the same question again and again: why frame this book as a book about modernism at all? After all, it could easily have laid out its central heuristic of multispecies metaphor without restricting this heuristic’s usefulness to a particular historical period. For yes, it takes as its object a handful of canonical modernist writers, and yes, in its discussions of Carrol and Woolf, it makes a few nods to questions of biography and influence. But the book as a whole never quite articulates why it might be useful to apply a specifically Spinozist-Deleuzean lens to the work of writers who preceded Deleuze. In its reading of Woolf’s Between the Acts, for example, the book glosses a moment in which a group of starlings “sweep…directly into a tree, ‘pelt[ing] it like so many winged stones’ until it becomes ‘a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture’” thusly: “Lithic birds articulate new assemblages between sky and earth—multispecied gatherings of animal, (stone), and plant—out of which are produced noises simultaneously inhuman and divine” (152). Such a gloss clearly illustrates how we might apply the lexicon of posthumanism to Woolf, but it does not explain why we should. It does not point to anything in the text itself that invites a specifically Deleuzean reading; rather, it simply asserts such a framing as self-evidently appropriate.

Modernism’s Inhuman Worlds, then, will likely appeal to theoretically minded scholars interested in affect, animality, ecology, the Anthropocene, and postsecular critiques of rational humanism. It may prove less appealing, however, to scholars with strong investments in literary or intellectual history.

[1] Susan Stanford Friedman, Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

[2] Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 442.

[3] William James, A Pluralistic Universe (Salt Lake City, UT: Project Gutenberg, 2004); Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Routledge, 2024).