Towards Affective Humanism:a Study Of Body Writing In Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker

Richard Powers(1957–)is a contemporary American writer renowned for his synthetic writing of science and literature.His works explore how commercial and technological developments,subsequent rational alienation in particular,impact and renovate people’s living conditions and humanist spirits.They are thereby saliently postmodern but with profound humanist concerns.Published in 2006,The Echo Maker is the widely-acclaimed winner of the National Book Award.With its focus on contemporary America and the Anthropocene,the novel merges neuroscience and ecoaesthetics and is saturated with Powers’ unique humanist solicitudes.It unfolds along Mark’s disease narrative and the Platte’s ecological crisis to exhibit postmodern body in predicament and its affective breakthroughs.Critics mainly discuss the novel from perspectives of postmodern narratology,ecocriticism,trauma study and narrative affect,yet have rarely touched upon its fundamental body aspect,textual and authorial reasonfeeling relations.With Foucault’s,Deleuze’s and Guattari’s body theories as basic framework and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental rationality to deepen its discussion,the thesis studies the novel’s delineation of body governance in neoliberal America and body imaginations so as to examine via textual affects its reason-feeling relations on individual and collective levels,and further looks into Powers two-way traffic writing of post-human reflections and humanist care.The novel limns rational body under neoliberal governance to disclose body’s reason-feeling aporia which is possibly solved via post-human reconfiguration of affective body and world body.Three kinds of body with distinct reason-feeling tensions not only serve to enable individual and collective unity,but also reveal authorial anxiety of synthesizing post-human rationality and humanist feeling.The rational body subjects to neoliberal governance impelled by instrumental rationality and is stripped of authentic feelings.Dominated by market rationality,individuals under acoustic governance and emotional rules suppress negative affects and perform positive emotions to consolidate their social self-reliance.Biomedicine’s epistemic shift traces how scientific rationality validifies biomedical gaze and accents corporeal precariousness.More notably,market rationality and scientific one reinforce each other to constitute a neoliberal self-regime actualized by bioeconomies.Nonetheless,Powers advocating affective subjectification rather than the rational one imagines affective body and world body to salvage the postmodern subject.With natural encounters,the body turns affective.It regains authentic affects,undergoes post-human contemplations and hence keep reason and feeling in unison with cognitive leap.Individuals through acoustic perceptions of nature generate affect-passion “wonder” which develops into positive affects of extreme intensity and thus experience “becoming-refrain”,“becoming-animal” and “becoming-Bw O”.In fluctuating affects,they are inspired by systematic soundscape and progress to posthuman reflections upon body governance and seek ethical changes.Through extension of body imaginations to group existence and planetary becoming,Powers visualizes world body to achieve collective equilibrium,which exposes his underlying anxiety in balancing between post-human rational criticism and humanist concerns.While the intensity-less and homogenizing “water” image metaphorizes nonhuman essence,autopoietic “cell” and “brain” images with their dual function of scientific representation and aesthetic creation incarnate transspecies society.These images cue readers’ “ecoglobalist affect” of detachment and attachment and from environmental,social and mental dimensions accentuate affect’s deterritorializing and reterritorializing forces as well as establishing “gentle politics” which is grounded in affective subjectification and driven by gentleness.Notwithstanding its conservative political attitude and anthropocentric limitations,Powers’ two-way-traffic writing boils down to affective humanism that mobilizes affect as the narrative drive and builds on post-human reflections to strengthen humanist care,which shows his humanist extension of postmodernism and instantiates the latter’s literary performativity.Engaged with double crises of American spiritual loss and ecological deterioration,Powers advances social questioning and aesthetic performance of both depth and width.The Echo Maker contours postmodern body in predicament with reason-feeling relations to re-evaluate body’s capacity with its authentic feelings and criticize capitalism for possible redemption in the Anthropocene.As the neoliberal society anchors the body in the matrix of capital,knowledge and technology to govern it,people learn to ask from the affect perspective: “what can a body do?” From every living moment to transspecies affective space,varying encounters bring to light our bodily potential and urge us to progress from sensual domains to rational reflections and even ethical practice so as to resist capitalism validified by instrumental rationality and found transspecies ethics.In this way,readers are re-subjectified by Powers’ two-way traffic writing to gently approach a new politico-ethical horizon.With Powers’ writing as a heuristic guide,we should persist in exploring epistemic vision and ethical undertakings pertinent to late capitalism.In that spirit,we will work out a new outlet for postmodern subject by undertaking the dual task of both critiquing neoliberalism’s development and returning to a humanist body orientation as well as consciousness of transspecies community.