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Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems by Bruce Clarke. New York: Fordham U. Press, 2008. Pp. x + 242. Paper $26.
In his Allegories of Writing: The Subject of Metamorphosis (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), Bruce Clarke examined metamorphosis narratives as allegories of narrative transformations inspired by new writing technologies. Clarke's most recent book builds on this work by similarly examining metamorphosis narratives in contemporary science fiction. As with his previous book, Posthuman Metamorphosis argues that changes in narratives are linked to changes in media, yet it also employs narrative transformations as a metaphor for transformations of the human: "Modern technological developments have driven the assembly of new stories that rewrite the boundaries between ourselves, animals, and machines" (2). Clarke's primary argument, therefore, is that there is an inherent connection between media ecology and the ecology of living systems.
Clarke explores this connection using second-order cybernetics to understand both narrative structures and the nature of posthuman subjectivity, and the first chapter of the book outlines the fundamental similarities between second-order cybernetics and narrative theory. Using Mieke Bal's approach to narratology, Clarke distinguishes between two aspects of narrative: narrative presenting, or narration, and narrative perception, or localization. According to Clarke, the distinction between narration and focalization reflects the interpenetration of social and psychic systems, and "maintaining that distinction . . . reinforces the posthumanist understanding that persons' are always already social as well as psychic constructions constituted in and by an assemblage of autonomous systems embedding them in complex nonhuman environments" (31). While this theory could ostensibly be applied to any narrative structure, Clarke suggests that it is particularly useful in analyzing science fiction narratives that represent posthumanism as a hybrid identity formed by the interpenetration of systems. Clarke demonstrates this idea by examining several alien contact narratives, such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, and Carl Sagan's Contact. Clarke refers to these texts as narratives of "cosmic focalization" because the aliens possess knowledge that is beyond human cognition. Communication with aliens thus serves as an allegory for the interaction between systems and environments.