Submitted Dec 15, 2022 for Dr. Noah Heringman's ENG4996W at the University of Missouri
The biologist begins Annihilation as something of a walking stereotype of a research scientist: intelligent, unemotional, socially detached, and driven only by a nearly “self-immolating desire for the truth” (Annihilation 8). Most of all, she is deeply concerned with her own ability to be objective. Like any good scientist, she equates this ability with her credibility as an observer of the natural world. Over the course of the novel, however, it becomes clear that the scientific method as the biologist knows it cannot be of any use within the confines of the alien and inscrutable Area X because Area X continually rebuffs any attempts to limit it to the objective facts of its existence. The biologist’s relationship to Area X is slowly transformed from the unequal dynamic of scientist and subject to a deeply intimate personal relationship, allowing her to thrive where other expedition members failed and died.
As climate change continues to rapidly accelerate, it is likely that humans will find ourselves living in a world that more and more closely resembles VanderMeer’s imagined Area X – unfamiliar, uncanny, and hostile to many of the cultural institutions and inventions that we currently take for granted. In such a world, humans will no longer be capable of claiming our self-imposed role apart from nature as the detached, clinical observer. Instead, human survival will hinge on a complete reorientation of human relations to nonhuman entities. Like the biologist, we must learn to integrate with our environments, live with subjectivity, and build reciprocal and equal relationships with nonhuman entities.
Throughout Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy as a whole, Area X is deployed as a potent and versatile metaphor for human relationships to nature, including but not limited to human-driven climate change. The biologist explains that the existence of Area X has been kept secret from the public by grouping evidence of its existence in with the “general daily noise of media oversaturation about ongoing ecological devastation,” linking it to said devastation (Annihilation 94). Later, the psychologist asserts that Area X is expanding at an accelerating rate (Annihilation 129). This idea is reminiscent of the greenhouse effect and its relationship to climate change. Just as the greenhouse effect accelerates the effects of climate change, the border of Area X is advancing exponentially. The government’s response to the creation of Area X also mirrors the conservative and inadequate global response to the climate crisis. The Southern Reach, a department of government created to deal with Area X, continually sends in expeditions to try to deepen their understanding of the problem but never pursue solutions. Writing about the situation, the biologist comments that the Southern Reach “seemed to fear any radical re-imagining of this situation” (Annihilation 158) to the point that they choose to sacrifice numerous human lives in their attempts to maintain an already-shaky status quo.
Area X acts as a particularly potent metaphor for climate change when considered in the context of its mysterious origins. Late in Annihilation, the biologist attempts to put forward a coherent and unified theory of the nature of Area X based on her experiences there. She proposes that it began as a “thorn” with an “endless, perhaps automatic, need to assimilate” (Annihilation 190). This endless-growth mindset is similar to the constant expansion on which capitalism and imperialism rely to function as intended. These social systems and their requirement for ever-increasing profits drive fossil fuel use and, thereby, climate change. Like the thorn, the problems presented by capitalism and imperialism are “so large [they are] buried deep in the side of the world” (Annihilation 190). In other words, they cannot be easily extracted from our lives. To effectively address the problems they cause would require a total reordering of society. The reading of the “thorn” as a metaphor for human-driven climate change is further supported by the biologist’s statement that “Assimilator and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script of words” (Annihilation 190-191). This description mirrors how colonizers interact with colonized cultures. Historically, colonial settlers have often encouraged the obedience of native peoples by following a kind of assimilatory “script” such as religious evangelism or cultural education. These interactions “[power] the engine of transformation” (i.e. climate change) by assimilating colonized cultures into global systems of power such as capitalism and imperialism. Embracing the principle of endless growth is necessary to participate in the global economy, ultimately making many colonized cultures complicit in environmental destruction. Similarly, Area X integrates foreign beings into its own way of life. In some cases, such as the creation of the doppelgangers, it uses them to fuel its expansion by sending them out into the world as “contaminants” (Authority 303). This integration mechanism and the larger processes behind Area X as a whole are later revealed to have been created by extraterrestrial beings. Crucially, when human characters pass through the border to Area X without first being hypnotized, they sometimes witness a desolate landscape including “ruined cities” (Acceptance 189), implying that these extraterrestrials’ civilization has likely gone extinct. Their only surviving legacy is the “thorn” and the destruction it causes on Earth in the form of Area X. The relationship between this past civilization and Area X again parallels that of humans and climate change, suggesting that our eventual fate, too, may be extinction, leaving behind nothing to remember us by except for the changed climate.
Beyond climate change, Area X is representative of nature as a whole. This becomes most evident in the biologist’s account of her encounter with the destroyer-of-worlds starfish in Rock Bay, years before she becomes involved with the Southern Reach. She repeatedly describes it as “glowing” (Annihilation 174-175), evoking the “brightness” that marks Area X’s infection of the human characters. As she continues to observe the starfish, the biologist concludes that it is “irreducible” to the mere recorded facts of its existence, “eclips[ing] sense” (Annihilation 175). This suggests that Area X’s mysterious inscrutability is not a unique quality but one shared by all of nature. Further emphasizing the link between the starfish and Area X is the biologist’s implicit comparison between the starfish and the Crawler (Annihilation 180). She frames herself as the hapless prey of the starfish and, by metaphorical extension, the Crawler, emphasizing the frightening power shared by both entities. The starfish, however, is not the only link between Area X and “ordinary” nature. The biologist, in response to the idea that the border is advancing, says that “There were thousands of “dead” spaces like the lot I had observed… Anything could inhabit them for a time without anyone noticing” (Annihilation 157). These “dead” spaces are, in fact, not dead at all. As the biologist observes, they teem with life, not despite the fact that humans have abandoned them but because of it. Later in the trilogy, we learn that Area X releases its doppelgangers into the outside world via these “dead” zones (Authority 6). These post-human habitats are the method by which Area X expands because Area X is in some ways the ultimate post-human habitat. Once a small, but bustling coastal town, it has long since been reclaimed by nature to the point that even though it was previously inhabited characters frequently describe it as “pristine.” Even when humans attempt to return to Area X and resume their control over it, it rebuffs and/or transforms them, ensuring that it will always be a post-human habitat.
Late in the novel, it becomes clear that the biologist has written her entire first-person account in retrospect, while still residing in Area X but after all the other events of the novel (Annihilation 193). Although this perspective – as well as the fact that the biologist is already fully “contaminated” by Area X by the time she begins writing – causes the audience to question the biologist’s reliability as a narrator from the very beginning of the novel, in the early parts of the expedition the biologist herself still relied on an understanding of science as factual and reliable. For example, after their encounter with the boar, the biologist says that she assumed it must have been affected by a parasite or disease because she “was searching for entirely rational biological theories” (Annihilation 17). Later, when the group is performing “ordinary” scientific observations in and around their base camp, the biologist mentions that she struggled with the impulse to look beyond what she could physically observe about Area X for explanations because “it could overwhelm my scientific objectivity” (Annihilation 30). This philosophy of objectivity goes beyond emphasizing reliance on observation and becomes one of rejecting the entire concept of knowledge that exists outside what can be observed, which the biologist describes as looking for “hidden meanings” and scientifically useless (Annihilation 35).
Grinnell writes that “For some, admitting the human associations of science can challenge the belief that science provides an objective description of reality” (13). This is exactly the issue that the expedition members struggle with in the first half of Annihilation, as their internal biases come into play and conflict with their self-images as objective scientists. For example, the biologist intuitively understands the “tunnel” to be a tower which grows upwards and out from a base level deep underground (Annihilation 15). Later in the series, her initial instincts prove to be very near the truth (Acceptance 325), but by the rules of “objective” scientific practice, they’re just a hunch. The biologist’s insistence on this point causes conflict, and it is implied that the other members of the expedition come to mistrust her after the incident (Annihilation 19). Their reaction to her belief that the “tunnel” is a tower echoes Kimmerer’s description of her university dean’s reaction to a grad student who wanted to draw from traditional indigenous knowledge instead of established Western scientific theory in designing her thesis project (Kimmerer 195). As a system of knowledge, the scientific method and its representatives can be jealous and possessive, often insisting that its adherents not seek truth by other means. Just as Kimmerer observes that academic scientific spaces dismiss theories for the sole fact that they are based in alternative systems of knowledge, the biologist’s fellow expedition members dismiss her because her observations are rooted in intuition rather than observation.
Appropriately, it is the psychologist – whose detached, clinical air and leadership position associate her symbolically with the objective and reliable institution of science that the biologist initially put her faith in – who inadvertently reveals to the biologist that there is, in fact, much more to Area X than what meets the eye (Annihilation 32). The biologist’s discovery of the extent to which the psychologist has been manipulating her is the realization that “social influences, of which she is already aware, are both more extensive than she had guessed and less powerful, in that Area X’s material influence is capable of disrupting them” (Prendergast). Among the social influences that this event causes her to question is the notion of scientific objectivity. Previously, the biologist had conceived of her own inability to be completely objective as a personal failure, “not sticking to the focus of the job” (Annihilation 173). After the discovery that there is hidden meaning in Area X, however, she stops blaming herself and accepts that objectivity is less powerful than she had once believed. This means that her observations will always be colored by personal bias, but it also means that she is freed from the obligation to shape her observations around external social influences. Ultimately, her increasing doubt in her own objectivity and reliability moves the biologist towards a “more radical uncertainty about the very constitution of the world” (Vermeulen), writing of her own recollections that they are “real and not real” (Annihilation 193). Her husband’s comment in his own journal that he has come to be “suspicious of the entire idea of borders” (Annihilation 166) also points toward the novel’s larger attitude towards rigid binaries, including the hard distinction between “fact” and “feeling” on which the institutional practice of science relies.
Instead of the half-truth offered by rigidly objective and emotionally detached scientific practices, the biologist finds fuller truth in establishing a more personal and intuitive relationship with Area X. In the final book in the trilogy, the biologist’s “last will and testament” is discovered by other characters. In this document, she outlines the course of the final decades of her life, including her eventual conviction that Area X transformed her husband into an owl. This belief makes it clear that she has fully rejected her previous scientifically-motivated impulse against anthropomorphizing nature (Annihilation 92) and instead come to embrace the most personal of relationships with it – marriage. Though she describes her relationship with the owl as only distantly companionable, her belief in his origins frames their relationship as a romantic one, implying their emotional intimacy. Her emotional relationship with the owl also kicks off a materially reciprocal one, wherein the biologist feeds the owl by hand and he sometimes brings her food in return. The biologist’s new willingness to embrace her personal bias in regards to the owl therefore allows her to survive more than thirty years in Area X. Eventually, Area X transforms her to the point of complete unrecognizability (Acceptance 193-196), indicating that the biologist has been fully integrated into the ecosystem of Area X. Her transformation horrifies the character Control, who throughout the trilogy is characterized as highly reliant on external authorities and human paradigms for his sense of stability and reality. But the biologist’s ultimate integration into a “larger human-nonhuman community” (Prendergast) is ultimately recognized by her doppelganger, Ghost Bird, as a newly positive possibility for humanity.
Scientific objectivity, as a principle by which science is practiced, has a single, explicit goal: to ensure that only verifiable facts are accepted as scientific knowledge, and never feelings, hunches, religious beliefs, or other non-verifiable types of information. This noble idea is complicated by the fact that it is difficult, if not impossible, for an individual to completely distinguish between ‘true’ facts and personal bias. Only by repeating experiments are scientists able to prevent non-facts from becoming accepted as scientific knowledge. This process is not driven by personal commitment to objectivity but rather what Grinnell describes as “intersubjectivity.” Intersubjectivity in this context means the nature of reality can only be revealed by verifying that one’s individual experiences are not unique. This eschews the principle of scientific objectivity, which relies on the notion it is possible for a sufficiently-determined individual to uncover truth; it emphasizes instead a “reciprocity of perspectives” (Grinnell 15). In short, intersubjectivity means that "the world is ours, not mine alone” (Grinnell 15). Truth can only be successfully pursued in a community that has an open and reciprocal economy of information.
The process of intersubjective knowledge-gathering cannot be solely attributed to Western science. The ideas on which intersubjectivity rests – of sharing information, of bias as an essential part of knowledge, of seeing alternative perspectives as equally valid to one’s own – are central in many traditional indigenous systems of knowledge, though these systems are often criticized and rejected by Western scientists for their lack of objectivity. This is at least in part because many of these indigenous cultures do not limit their economy of information to only human actors. If every perspective is a valid source – if the world is truly “ours” and not “mine” – then nonhuman actors like plants and animals must also have valuable information and can become our “teachers,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer phrases it. In Annihilation, the unique relationship the biologist develops with Area X violates the expectations of the Western scientific mindset, but the her deep respect for and willingness to learn from nonhuman actors is reminiscient of indigenous practices of human-nonhuman intersubjectivity. Moreover, as time passes and the biologist comes to reject the notion of objectivity, she fosters further “dependence on larger human-nonhuman communities” (Prendergast) allowing her to come to rely on intersubjective knowledge-gathering instead. This further allows her to embrace the personal and biased nature of her own experience.
As Kimmerer argues, Westerners’ relationships with land are often impersonal, defined by the same detachment from and de-personification of nature that VanderMeer so extensively criticizes in Annihilation. As a research biologist herself, Kimmerer initially subscribes to this mindset, but by developing a personal relationship to the plants she was studying, she describes finding greater personal fulfillment and learning more than she had previously been able to. The traditional argument against introducing personal bias into scientific knowledge is the issue of replication. In order to be considered credible fact, scientific observations must be verified by many people. Because personal relationships are by nature personal and not universal, Western scientific knowledge holds that they must be excised from the process. “At the ideal limit, reciprocity of perspectives means that all scientists can share the same experiences,” Grinnell writes (17). But this ideal limit is nothing more than an ideal and, as Kimmerer points out, a personal relationship to knowledge does not preclude its being true. On the contrary, Kimmerer’s graduate student who chose to ground her botanical studies in traditional Potawatomi knowledge was eventually able to prove the truth of that knowledge through scientific observation. Over the course of her study, the student “came to believe with increasing conviction in… the quality of observations from the women who had long had close relationships with plants and their habitats” (Kimmerer 197). The biologist’s close relationship to Area X is an example of this often-dismissed approach, wherein biases are not just disclosed but embraced and considered essential to a full understanding. Kimmerer writes that in indigenous “ways of knowing,” a person only fully understands something when they understand it with “mind, body, emotion, and spirit” (68) but that science privileges only the mind and body as ways of knowing. Just as Kimmerer and her graduate student formed personal and semi-spiritual relationships with the plants they studied, the biologist comes to rely increasingly not just on her ability to observe and reason but also on her intuition and emotions regarding Area X. In turn, Area X rewards her trust by revealing more of itself to her. Her reliance on intersubjectivity with non-human actors is precisely what allows her to learn more about Area X than any of her fellow expedition members.
The principles that underlie intersubjective knowledge-gathering are also central to queer and particularly trans* theory. In fact, regarding emotion as an equally valuable source of knowledge to external observation is arguably the central tenet of trans* theory, since the definition of the trans experience is that of choosing to engage in gender roles depending on one’s personal feelings towards them rather than depending on one’s sexual phenotype. Nash describes this as a conflict between what “should” be and what is, comparing the dichotomy to that between the lighthouse and the tower. The twelfth expedition “immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like” (Annihilation 21) because they have been provided with “objective” information about it from the Southern Reach, a scientific authority. The lighthouse is further associated with objective information-gathering by the pile of expedition journals that the biologist discovers inside it. The tower, on the other hand, is marked on none of the expedition’s maps and defies objective observation, making it literally a queerer subject than the lighthouse. Its importance is only corroborated by the fear and curiosity the expedition members have towards it. The fact that the tower, not the lighthouse, is the ultimate key to understanding Area X is consistent with a queer intersubjectivity, which privileges personal feeling as equal to recorded fact.
Queer theory is also deeply concerned with the idea of failure – failure to reproduce, failure to perform gender, and, overall, a failure to achieve “normality.” In order to survive, queer people often must recontextualize these “failures” as alternative ways of being. In the context of environmentalism, climate optimism and securing the future are dominant modes of discourse; however, VanderMeer rejects climate optimism partly by invoking a queered narrative of environmentalism. Annihilation ends with a “refusal to return home [that] gives [the biologist] an open ending” (Nash). The biologist has ultimately failed in her mission as a member of a scientific information-gathering expedition. Instead of attempting to redeem herself for her failure, however, she embraces the uncertain future that her failure has brought and commits to a future in Area X. Hume calls this queered environmental philosophy “blue” (as opposed to green), writing that unlike mainstream environmental narratives, blue narratives reject climate optimism, instead lingering “in an open-ended present that undoes the boundary between self and world and affords a new environmentalism based in shared experiences of precarity.” By lingering on human emotions about environmental destruction, a blue narrative approaches climate change from a queered, intersubjective approach that values all shared observations, even those that come from the heart instead of the mind.
Moreover, queer theory’s emphasis on non-traditional interpersonal relationships naturally works in concert with a nonhuman-centric intersubjectivity. If “queering” a relationship means closely examining and overturning the social structures on which it is built, then a human who centers their relationship with non-humans is practicing a kind of queerness. The conclusion of the Southern Reach trilogy even more explicitly rejects a green narrative and replaces it with a queered blue one by focusing on nonhuman actors. The ending of Acceptance features two female characters, one of whom is non-human, who are implied to be the last remaining vestiges of the pre-Area-X world. This image inverts the common symbol in green narratives of a heterosexual pair of Adam and Eve figures who “repopulate” the Earth after climate disaster. In VanderMeer’s blue narrative, the two survivors remain, but they are a same-sex interspecies pair, guaranteeing that any sexual relationship between them would be non-reproductive. In this case, the shift to a queered and non-human-centric philosophy guarantees the extinction of humanity. But VanderMeer explicitly undermines the idea that this conclusion is a pessimistic one. When Grace questions whether there is still any route out of Area X into “the world,” Ghost Bird reflects on the fact that she is says this “while existing in that moment in a world that was so rich and full” (Acceptance 331). A “green” narrative would frame the situation these characters find themselves in as a failure to prevent apocalypse. Instead, VanderMeer proposes via Ghost Bird that it is merely a different kind of existence. In VanderMeer’s vision of intersubjective environmental relations, the end of a world with humans in it is not and should not be regarded as complete apocalypse.
In Annihilation and the Southern Reach trilogy as a whole, VanderMeer argues for a complete paradigm shift in human thought about our relations with nature. This is focalized through the character of the biologist, whose arc is one of rejecting many of the cultural institutions that govern our current relationship with nature. By embracing her position as a single individual human in a world teeming with life, the biologist is able to reject objectivity and the human-nonhuman binary and find a much more fulfilling, personal, intersubjective and non-human-centric way of being. Because of these themes, Annihilation is often read as a work of climate fiction, but nowhere does VanderMeer suggest that the paradigm shift he argues for would avert climate disaster; on the contrary, it may well lead to human extinction. But involved in his proposed paradigm shift, too, is the idea that this would not be the complete disaster it is often framed as. A non-human-centric perspective that truly values non-humans as equal to humans must mourn humanity, but it also must acknowledge that the end of human society as we know it would be greatly beneficial to non-humans or, as the biologist puts it, “The only solution to the environment is neglect, which requires our collapse” (Acceptance 242). Rather than seeing such a collapse as a problem to be solved or a tragedy to be avoided, VanderMeer argues for understanding it as a crisis point that can open up new avenues of being. And, though it may look strange or frightening, there is nothing to be feared from transforming into something new.
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