So I wrote my thesis on this book during the 2020 lockdown (along with the game Observation and the film Arrival). It was on posthumanism, ahahahahaha, oh no (◡﹏◡✿)

I'll link it at some point (and maybe write a proper review) — but until then, here's an excerpt (sowie, it's a bit formal):

Synopsis

Spoiler

Jeff VanderMeer’s (2014) Annihilation is a weird fiction novel that details a scientific expedition into a region called Area X where an inexplicable alien phenomenon is taking place. The members of this expedition are nameless, referred to only by their respective professions as the biologist, the anthropologist, the surveyor and the psychologist. Though they have been tasked with investigating Area X, their mission parameters are vague. They are, ostensibly, the twelfth expedition, in a line of expeditions that have returned with no data or journals, only individuals who have, seemingly, lost all personality. The story of the twelve expedition is told through the journal entries of the biologist, whose husband had been a part of the eleventh expedition. Her writing is filled with allusions to mimicry and repetition — the emergence of human characteristics in the anatomy and behaviours of non-human beings, and consequently, the assimilation of non-human things into her own being.

Early on, their expedition stumbles on a spiral staircase, which the biologist insists on calling the tower (VanderMeer, 2014). They descend and find writing on a wall, formed by what appear to be fungi fruiting bodies. The biologist accidentally breathes them in and begins to perceive the tower as a living being made of flesh. The next day, the biologist and the surveyor find the anthropologist dead, half-merged into her surroundings, and the psychologist gone. The biologist decides to continue the mission alone, heading to the lighthouse. She finds the psychologist at the bottom of it with broken legs. The psychologist has, seemingly, flung herself off the top. Inside the lighthouse, the biologist finds a picture of the lighthouse keeper, and hundreds of journals — far more than that of twelve expeditions. One details the ecological niche a single species of plant, another the construction of a barricade against the sea, another variations on the words the fungi fruiting bodies formed from the tower. Despite their varied accounts, the biologist interprets them all as fixations whose present subject matter traces out an absence — a horror at the core of Area X. The biologist hypothesises this horror as a nonconscious and automatic integration of all material forms in its vicinity. Eventually, she finds her husband’s journal. He details a story similar to the biologist’s own — various madnesses, disappearances and deaths of his own expedition members, ending with him and another member watching a procession of themselves walking into the tower. The biologist follows her husband’s trail. She descends to the bottommost level of the tower and encounters the Crawler, a creature whose form is a rapid, incomprehensible transformation through a seemingly limitless number of forms. When it touches her, the biologist has the sense that she has been incorporated into its memory, into Area X. She retreats and turns back one last time to sees the lighthouse keeper’s face, eternally preserved in the Crawler like the photograph of him in the lighthouse. She ends the journal with the statement that she is going to find her husband in whatever form he is in, and that she is not coming back from Area X.

Scientific Positivism or Objectivity’s Double

Spoiler

Let me begin by unpacking the ideas of ecosystem and alienation in Annihilation, before turning to the ideas of objectivity and mastery. Area X is a space rife with constant interchange. As the book progresses, the nameless characters lose sense of themselves, each other and their environment. Their bodily boundaries blur. They cannot determine where they end and where other things begin. Consequently, the characters doubt their own humanness, their difference from the beings of Area X. They cannot disentangled themselves from the world they are attempting to understand. The biologist fixates on feelings of mimicry and repetition, alluding to some cycle of appropriation under which her and the other characters are mere passengers of. Though the biologist (for the most part) encounters no explicit threat from the inhabitants of Area X, her attempts to understand Area X generate further alienation. After paragraphs of hypothesising over the nature of Area X, the biologist states “I am aware that all of this speculation is incomplete, inexact, inaccurate, useless” (VanderMeer, 2014, pp. 190-193). Her observations, her labour upon the environment, elicit feelings of loss, dislocation and incomprehension. The more she observes the environment, the more she feels the environment is looking back — that she herself is being laboured upon by a being not humanly conscious. In other words, that she is being manipulated as both a subject and an object. Area X operates autonomous from her understanding, yet nonetheless pulls her into its assemblage, and she, as a scientist whose very role is to be an impartial observer, is compromised at the level of of being. She is too near, too present, to be totally absent.

Near the beginning of the book, the biologist informs the reader that this document, her diary of her journey through Area X, will be an objective account (VanderMeer, 2014, p. 55). She adheres to the doctrine of scientific positivism, positioning herself as an impartial observer operating through the scientific method to generate objective data. She denies her own situated embodiment within the phenomena of which she records, fashioning herself into an instrument of knowledge. Already we have a strange contradiction here: to gain mastery over the environment, the biologist alienates her self. She self-alienates, dispossessing her body, to repossess it as an external tool, so that it may operate autonomously from the taint of the self. She gains objective capacity through subjective disavowal. She is already a mimic and a repeat, before ever having entered Area X. Scientific rigour is, after all, founded on iteration, on the same thing happening over and again, no matter the place or time. The subject of this iterative cycle exists as a transcendental abstraction, as an objective vessel of knowledge seeking, that anyone operating the scientific method may supposedly occupy (Haraway, 1988, pp. 581-582). The terror of Area X to such a stance is that its iterative subject is founded on immanence, on material transfers. In other words, on actual bodies. The very thingliness that science disavows, Area X draws out and shows back to its observer. The biologist feels she’s being mocked by Area X, because even if Area X has no intent, it is nonetheless antithetical to her subject position. It gets the better of science without even trying. The biologist as impartial observer, as nothing, is faced with her something, outside of herself, through the mirror of nature.

What is absent in the journals of past expeditions then, is the expedition members themselves. What is traced through neurotic avoidance is precisely the empty subject of science, whose fixation on exteriority conjures a grasping void in its centre, from which all the world is organised to. However, Area X, as a supersped ecosystem, tears down all barriers of the self. It reveals what already is, but in dramatic fashion — that nothing is truly objective, and that nothing is truly human, or at least, remains human for very long. That which is human is externalised and brought back into the sights of those who have disavowed their humanness.

Assemblage Theory or Capitalism’s Double

Spoiler

We saw in the previous section, the deconstruction of the subject of scientific positivism, through an analysis of its own internal contradictions. Yet more than this, the deconstruction of the human. The biologist states near the end of the book “It is just beginning, and the thought of continually doing harm to myself to remain human seems somehow pathetic” (VanderMeer, 2014, p. 194). Such a revelation, rather than emancipate the biologist, generates resignation and disgust. Why is that? Well, the biologist has moved from the alienated subject position of a scientific apparatus to the alienated subject position of an ecological component. Neither subject position grants her agency. The biologist may have a greater understanding of her corporeal fluidity, but her fluidity remains under another’s control, channelled through alien conduits towards inconceivable ends.

This is because Area X is more than an ecosystem — it’s an ecosystem expanding and displacing all other ecosystems once in place. It’s a particular configuration becoming universal. From the way human features are transposed onto crab shells (VanderMeer, 2014, p. 140), or the way human words are reproduced by fungi (VanderMeer, 2014, p. 23-25), everything once situated is detached, to circulate senselessly. No matter how much the biologist labours to understand Area X, she realises in the end that she has been the object of labour all along. That she has been used to expand a system of production, incapable of registering her as a living being. The biologist’s feelings of mimicry and repetition thus also allude to her position as a wage labourer. This is systemically reinforced across all the characters, who are referred to only by their most generic job titles of anthropologist, surveyor and psychologist (VanderMeer, 2014, pp. 1, 9). Though the biologist admits to choosing this particular site of labouring in her journal, she, as a wage labourer, would have had to have picked some site in the end, and if she had not picked this one, another biologist would have (VanderMeer, 2014, pp. 11-12). In such a way, all the characters are already mimics and repeats — the latest in a procession of identical expeditions. None of them matter, in their particularity as human beings, only in their generality as labourers. Area X, in the way that it organises its inhabitants labour unto their own dissolution, is capital naturalised (Marx, 2009d). It is alien in its capacity to dismantle material bodies without consent, more so than its extraterrestriality.

There is a moment in Annihilation where the interchangeability of these characters becomes the most apparent. When both the biologist and her husband return to the tower, one after the other. After witnessing the multiple deaths and disappearances of his expedition, the biologist’s husband goes to the tower, only to see the majority of them walking into the tower unscathed, along with a duplicate of himself (VanderMeer, 2014, pp. 161-168). The biologist traces her husband’s path, descends into the tower, and comes face to face with a creature she calls the Crawler (VanderMeer, 2014, pp. 170-187). She cannot describe it, however. It exceeds a singular form, constantly reshaping itself. It appears to have no foundational being. Instead, it iterates without stability, without apparent purpose or meaning. Yet all that assembles it are parts of other once meaningful things — archways, slugs, stars, faces. It operates like an engine of accumulation, through which all other bodies become appendages (labouring instruments) and raw material (Marx 2009d). The boundaries of the labourer, as a human-machine appendage, are broken down. They too become an organic body (a thing of nature) that capital exploits for the extension of its own inorganic body (Marx, 2009a). The human becomes an empty land (terra nullius) that must be made productive through extraction and standardisation — duplicated ad infinitum until all resemble one another and none resemble themselves. Consciousness, as a situated becoming, is destroyed under such a system.

In such a way, Annihilation reminds us of capitalism’s history as a colonial force, its ontology of homo economicus, and its ecological devastation across the globe. Area X colonises the world in the name of exchange, yet the content of these exchanges does not so much matter as their intensification. Area X, like neoliberal capitalism, maximises “the reach and frequency of market transactions” so that all actions are brought “into the domain of the market” (Harvey, 2005, p. 3). Bodies are dislocated from their living sites and dismembered into parts. Bodies of animals, bodies of water, bodies of knowledge. That which is particular and local is flattened out by a general equivalent that effaces the positive differences of all beings.