One day ten years ago, as I sat reading in a doctor’s waiting room, my attention was colonized by a slick-haired man in a Brooks Brothers suit selling amniotic fluid on his cellphone. The fluid was “harvested” from C-sections, I learned, without wanting to. “Usually it’s just tossed; there’s very little ownership,” he reassured his mark, adding, “but it can be used for so much healing.” When he finished his pitch, I asked him if the women whose fluids he was hawking were paid for their labor. He dropped his eyes and shifted uncomfortably in his chair. I said I assumed it was illegal, or should be, to sell someone’s body fluids without consulting or compensating them (turns out it’s not). He stammered a vapid reply ending with “I’m sure the women are compensated in some way.” I noted that placentas also have a lot of healing abilities. It’s a wonder they’re not being sold too, I mused. “Oh, but they are,” he said, “everything but the outer layer is Rh negative - universally useful.” Just then, the nurse called me back. “What’s your background?” he asked as I passed. “Literature professor,” I replied, savoring the bafflement on his face.

Of course, I’m not just a literature professor; I’m a reader of Steve Tomasula, whose fiction has taught me a lot about the intersections of commodity and ideology with nature and the human body. In fact, I was reading David Banash’s collection about Tomasula’s work while that man sold women’s body parts on his cell phone; I found my notes about our conversation on the book’s flyleaf while preparing this talk.¹ Had the man’s smug pitch not been such a fitting soundtrack to my reading, I might not have confronted him about the dubious ethics of his dealings. Tomasula’s work has that kind of effect: it makes you see new things in the world, things that appall and frighten you, things that people accept and profit from unthinkingly, and it gives you language for making these things visible to others. Mostly, for me, those others are students or readers of my highly specialized critical work on this highly specialized author. So, it was particularly satisfying to force this man, who transforms unpaid women’s bodies, pain, and labor into corporate profit and Brooks Brothers suits, to see his work for a moment through the clarifying lens of Steve Tomasula.

By that day in 2015, Tomasula had published five major works of fiction, all of them warning about the power of science and narrative (which Tomasula reminds us are the same thing, the history of science being, “a history of failed theories” [VAS 73]) to alter our notions of nature and the human body, and the dangerous power of technology to reshape both. All of these books are formally and materially innovative, and most of them are multi-media and hypertextual as well, linking print text to internet websites (“C-U See-Me,” 2000; Once Human 2015) or to audio material on a CD (VAS 2002), or, as in the case of TOC (2009), existing entirely on CD or webpage. His latest novel, Ascension (2022), continues these arguments while using formal innovations and contemporary technologies that push his inquiries into new intellectual and literary territory. Ascension is of its moment in the way that “C-U See-Me” was twenty-five years ago, asking, what is the human as shaped by technology and our narratives of the world? And how can literature make visible this continual transformation and its consequences? But, over those intervening decades, technology has become increasingly continuous with human bodies and experience, bringing the posthuman of late-20th-century theory into mainstream culture and material being and crucially shifting Tomasula’s inquiry. The core issue that launched and fuels Tomasula’s work—concern over the technological reshaping of the human body— has become a concern for the redefinition and survival of the human in a fully posthuman landscape.

1. Ascension as Posthuman Narrative

In his 2010 essay, “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative,” Tomasula pointed out that authors have always used elements of visual scale to establish the shape of a text’s lens and the values of its viewpoint, with the “optical metaphor” of “Stendahl’s mirror traveling down the road of life, and embodied as its main character” (3), neatly conveying the human-centered perspective that shapes the form and narrative techniques of Realist fiction. The visual scale created in a piece of art communicates the perspective from which the viewer or reader encounters the scene, revealing the human’s place in the world—our relationship to nature and to other human beings, as Tomasula demonstrates with this 19th century painting of Napolean: it focuses the viewer’s gaze on Napolean (and not on the corpses on the ground) while placing the viewer at horse-back height and a couple of horses away from Napolean, in the position of a fellow officer on the field. In other words, the scene is “at the scale at which humans interact as individuals,” a “human scale” that centers the individual. But, “as the point of view rises,” as Tomasula demonstrates using clips from the film The Powers of Ten, “the Humanist scale gives way to a scale of grander proportions - one that quickly dwarfs the individual;” from such a “posthuman” point of view, we see geometry and absence (5-7). Rather than the world as an individual would see it, as in the painting of Napolean, we gain access to the larger systems, relationships, and patterns in which the individual plays a miniscule part, as we see from the statistical representation of Napolean’s army from June to September of 1812 (3)—but we lose the individual’s viewpoint. As new technology changes not just how we make art but the scale at which we experience the world, our relationship with nature changes, as do our relationships with each other, with art morphing its own techniques and shapes - its lenses - to depict these changing relationships.

All of Tomasula’s fictions function as posthuman lenses, by representing time and space at scales not available to the unaided human eye and by depicting individuals coming to terms with such technologically extended points of view. Rather than the verisimilitude of a single mirror traveling down one road, Tomasula’s novels offer the overwhelming product of scores of mirrors positioned at myriad positions through space over time and reflecting reality from impossibly macro and micro perspectives that expand our sense of what the world is while reminding us of the particularity and ideology of our inescapably human ways of seeing.

His fictions’ attempts to represent how technology reorients our perspective go back to his first major fiction, “C-U See Me” (2000), in which Tomasula invites us to surveil him in macro and micro ways by locating his exact position on earth, and by watching a video of the inside of his body. Likewise, his subsequent books represent macro and micro perspectives of space and time using formal and structural methods*.* As only a few of many examples, VAS includes websites as snapshots of real phenomena from all over the world and the internet (262-265), while TOC mythologizes the emergence of time, and The Book of Portraiture represents the evolution of human representation from prehistoric hieroglyphs to “poly parentage” - an artist using “My egg, your sperm and some junk DNA” - to make art (294). Drawing our eye to the micro scale, VAS devotes 25 pages to spelling out the code of one gene (201-226), Book offers a story told by genes mutating in a petri dish (318), and TOC makes us uncomfortably aware of every moment we’re forced to sit through a video to see whether it contains a narrative element (“Chronos” opening).

These books also illustrate the effects of posthuman scale on humans in narrative ways, by depicting characters contemplating the world from sub- or super-human perspectives, as when Square in VAS considers antique microscopes whose “truths” have been eclipsed by more recent technology, making them “history or art…not technology” (365). And most of Tomasula’s fictions include at least one character searching for a “god’s-eye view” (as in “C-U See Me”) or “Adam’s Peak” - the “highest point on earth” in Eden in VAS (190) and IN&OZ (129); or in TOC, a point reached by climbing a ladder leading outside time (“Visiting the Future”); or in Book, genetic code we manipulate in godlike ways (318)—perspectives that might place limited human understanding inside a context beyond the human.

In that 2010 essay, Tomasula asks what such reformulations of scale would mean for a “refiguration” of the realist novel (11); that is, “What might an emerging posthuman narrative look like” in form and content? One answer is Ascension, his most effective example yet of what he calls “the emergence of posthuman narrative.” Like his earlier work, Ascension unfolds from the perspectives of many characters situated across vast distances and over centuries during which narrative styles and forms, stories about nature and science, and technologies for experiencing and representing reality evolve, causing individuals’ relationships with nature, others, and narrative itself to evolve as well. To the formal devices for constructing scale and perspective used in previous books, Ascension adds a structural element of organization that asks the reader to contemplate the macro - which in this case means the history of all life on earth - from the perspective of the micro, a single point in space, while illustrating that what we see and how we understand that change as how we view that point changes.

The coordinates of this organizing point first appear in chapter two, when an entomologist in the 1970s finds a prehistoric feather louse in the forest of Paraguay that she hopes will prove an unbroken evolutionary link between dinosaurs and contemporary birds. Finding a sextant in that spot connects it with a biologist from chapter one, who arrived there searching for proof of his narrative of nature - that every living creature descends from the Garden of Eden. Instead, he encounters possible proof of the world view of his Indigenous guide, who knows the spot as “Ywy Mará Ey” (32) and the home of a mythical Guyra Kyhyje or “Terror Bird” (33), which sounds a lot like the English translation of the misnomer “dinosaur” - terrible lizard. By chapter three, which appears both in the print book and online, these coordinates reappear when the entomologist’s article is unearthed by near-future scientists researching feather lice to develop a vaccine against bird-borne diseases being weaponized by the US military (251). Training our vision at one point in space over time reveals how humans harness the earth, both to create stories of nature and humanity and to use those stories to accumulate wealth and power.

Tracking these coordinates over three narratives also forces us to witness the devastating effects of colonization and the commodification of nature - technology empowering both - on the physical location they mark, and on the narratives and belief systems attached to it. The first chapter’s painstakingly drawn - even worshipful - depictions of forest-dwelling creatures and their relationship to their environs give way in chapter two to photos from the 1970s of logging roads and satellite images of deforestation (97, 103). By chapter three, the coordinates enter the narrative through a “video made by teenagers in Paraguay” in the near future; “a homemade version of Jackass: The Reunion Movie…But this DIY version was pathetic…the boys dirt poor” and “emaciated.” Their antics - like “surfing” behind a truck, till they were “so dirt-encrusted and scratched that they looked as though they’d been mauled by jaguars” (250) - demonstrate destitution so total as to render the original’s sociological critique impossible. Their video’s title, “The Land of No Evil,” positions the video as a mockery of earlier Paraguayan generations’ faith in their land and their myths about that land, which they called “la Tierra sin Mal” (“The Land-without-Evil” in English), the ancient Spanish name for the mythological origin of humanity. While the professor’s Indigenous-Spanish guide in the 19th century searched for this sacred space in lush forest at the coordinates that anchor the novel, the near-future video of chapter three documents the destruction at that location of the physical land by foreign capitalists and of the current generation’s faith in their culture’s founding myth.

Tracing the place and myth through time also reveals the damage done to native cultures over time by acts of colonizing translation. We know from the guide of chapter one that “la Tierra sin Mal” is itself a Spanish translation of the original Indigenous name, Ywy Mará Ey (20), which future Anglos will replace with their own name and mythology - the “Garden of Eden,” as the British professor thinks of it (22). The American scientist in the 1970s will confuse the Indigenous name of the ancient Paraguayan fabled place with the name of the extinct bird whose fossil she’s pursuing, or perhaps with the mythological “Terror Bird” said to inhabit it, further distorting ancient stories and cultures (154).

Thus, Ascension is not just a lens but a time-lapse camera, using one point in space to tell a story of the evolution and dissolution of the earth and of the humans who briefly inhabit it, what it means to us, and the stories we tell about it. The coordinates reappear in each section and historical period to remind us how differently humans use and experience the earth, according to our differing narratives about it, and how we in turn shape the earth because of those narratives: what Tomasula has done for the human body in VAS and Book of Portraiture he has now done for the planet Earth.

Many other stories in the novel as framed from other coordinates also illustrate how one’s geographical location determines one’s safety or suffering - from tsunami, drought, famine, heat - as best evidenced by the overlapping poverty and climate-vulnerability of the “Bottom Billions” (228). In this way, Ascension is Tomasula’s most materially minded book yet, depicting not just how material culture shapes bodies, stories, and reality, but also how all material aspects of our lives, including where and when we live on earth, shape everything about what we experience and believe.

2. Ascension’s Posthuman Technologies

The evolving technology used by characters to navigate to those unifying coordinates - from sextant to GPS to Google Earth - points to technological developments that alter how we see the earth, from what perspective, at what scale and distance. But Ascension doesn’t just depict characters encountering such new technology; it includes technology as formal technique, requiring us to use this technology to read the novel, to see what the world looks like when framed by it, and to work out what the novel looks like when shaped by these lenses as well.

To the arsenal of visual, audio, and digital technologies Tomasula used in his previous books, Ascension adds a technology that became widely available in 2015, when Apple incorporated it into its iOS 11, and widely used in 2020, when restaurants began to use it in lieu of germy menus: QR codes. These allow Tomasula to incorporate videos, tweets, maps, and websites from the real world into his fictional world even in the fully print version of the novel. As in VAS, the real-world content functions less as “reality effects” - bringing the sense of verisimilitude to fiction - than as bridge between his fiction and the real world, requiring us to see and discover things about the world where we live in order to read the world of the fiction, while the fictional world forces us to see our own world anew. The internet content interjected into the narrative via QR codes makes poignantly evident the ways in which recent technology allows us to radically alter the scale at which we experience distance and time, making us privy to strange intimacies across space and time while demonstrating our alienation. The novel illustrates this contemporary paradox through plot as well: lab techs watch soldiers in undisclosed “conflict zones” die on YouTube (249); US military drone operators watch South Americans explode under their remotely piloted missiles (187; real-life cognates of these exist as well, as my son reminded me last Christmas day in Texas with a video from the point of view of a Ukrainian drone hunting down a Russian soldier). Ascension asks us to follow links to real-world videos of children running screaming from tsunami waves in Malaysia, boats and cars churning in tsunami backwash in Japan (200). Glaciers calving, digital effigies to dead immigrants multiplying (358). At every turn, Tomasula reminds us that our beliefs, decisions, and actions have the power to cause material change locally and globally, yet we are impotent in the face of the resulting suffering.

Tomasula underscores such connections between his fiction and our world by interweaving existing crises of technology, culture, and climate so seamlessly into the narrative that the only way to fully experience the novel’s world, and to distinguish reality from fiction, is to scrupulously check every link, photo, and QR code he provides. Thus, the novel demands a new way of reading that forces the reader to jump from printed page to digital world and back again, falling into internet rabbit holes along the way, in a temporally and spatially fragmented experience that reproduces the unfocused, discontinuous, pseudo-multitasking chaos that passes as “reading” for generations of people growing up in a digital world. How to keep your mind on the overwhelming problems of climate change, capitalist exploitation of nature and the most vulnerable humans, and the terror of deep fakes and fake truths, when it’s so hard to focus on one book?

But the QR codes also produce a kind of reading that is more continuous with the real world, massively enlarging the context in which we experience the novel’s narrative, not just connecting fiction with reality but connecting all narrative content to our larger communities, geographies, and real-world stories about ourselves, nature, and the planet. The reading process is more continuous with the real world than ever before as well. Unlike VAS, which required an intrepid reader to put her book down and move to a computer to conduct searches to determine whether something is “real” (I will never get over the fact that I hadn’t heard of Ota Benga [VAS 297]), QR codes allow a reader to jump straight to the real-world content using the little computer that’s always in arm’s reach - our smartphones - integrating the digital content more seamlessly into our reading experience.

But this reading experience remains embodied. Accessing the digital content still requires unlocking then hefting the phone, juggling phone and book, or perhaps fixing the book at the right page with some material prop: that is, while delivering us into the digital world, the QR codes also remind us far more than traditional Realism that reading is an embodied practice. And because its posthuman narrative is dispersed across forms of media, Ascension reminds us that a big part of our embodied experience today is using our smartphones (which we now do over 200 times every day (Miller). By making us equally aware of our reliance on our bodies and on our devices for our reading, Ascension makes us aware of our posthuman hybridity.

In doing so, the novel reveals the virtuality of these “connections” and the constructedness of its “intimacies” and of the very body that reading the book returns us to, exposing the limits and biases of its methods for making and critiquing meaning, like all of Tomasula’s fiction. The QR codes also remind us of the embeddedness of Ascension and all narrative within the commodifying forces of the culture that shapes it. When YouTube forces us to watch maddeningly stupid ads before we can access the tragic content Tomasula has directed us to—of death, loss, a suffering planet—his inability to shield us from that ad, or to control which one will be foisted upon us, becomes part of the novel’s satirical content.

Perhaps the novel’s most potent self-critique, or revelation of its own ideological methods, lies in the unprecedented extent to which it draws attention to the fact that it is, as Tomasula said of all novels, “a lens, a way of seeing” (“Emergence” 4). In The Book of Portraiture, a 17th-century painter explains how mimetic, or realistic art acts as an instrument of ideology by masking the perspective around which it is organized and which the viewer must occupy for the art to make sense:

This is why a crucifix paint’d from the perspective of one on his knees then hung at the right height before a pad’d kneeler will act as an invisible hand, bringing its viewer down into alignment. It is only by aligning himself with the assumptions embody’d in the work that it will appear normal (79).

By organizing Ascension’s entire universe around a single point in space, using digital technology that directs our gaze and alters the scale at which we encounter our real world, and by combining the writerly technique with the digital technology - the coordinates in chapter three linking the reader to access the “god’s-eye view” of Google Earth² - Ascension tells us exactly where to look so we might inhabit the story of the earth Tomasula wants to tell, while asking us to notice how we’re looking and wonder why.

3. Posthuman Emergence

The narrative of reality that organizes chapter three and governs the perspective of its near-future characters is one of emergence, which Tomasula defines as “the process by which lower-level conditions and interactions give rise to higher order behaviors, patterns, formations, meanings.” Characters and plotlines in the novel illustrate how emergence functions as both an “organizing principle” and a “manner of seeing” (13-14). “All reality could be seen as flux in patterns,” muses a character for whom patterns extrapolated from data are the organizing principle for all modern scientific understanding, starting with Darwin (Ascension 177). The company he works for, InformationInMotion, harnesses this principle for profit, amassing data whose patterns can be read for the benefit of the highest bidder. He also uses technology as a way of viewing the social world, surveilling his boss using the data generated by her car, Fitbit, social media, and even her toothbrush to extrapolate a portrait of her private life (170). The world of chapter three is legible and representable because of technology that renders it as data. It is comprehensible and manipulatable for its characters precisely to the extent to which they have access to this technology and its data, so that those with access to the most data—like IIM and their patron, the US military—have the most power to shape the world and our perceptions of it. To view reality as emergent, then, is to render it as data, a product of the technology that measures it, and so of the capital that controls technology. Chapter three uses real-world technology to demonstrate that our world is already emergent in this way (as we see from the Shark and Air Traffic trackers, 172-175), while also reminding us of some of the treacherous uses to which this data can be put (like tracking a political candidate) (171).

Chapter three, also titled “Ascension,” suggests what a world that has emerged through and beyond the posthuman might look like by also imagining a digital world inside the narrative’s real one. Created by collaging photos of the real world, “WORLD.2” is not a simulacrum of the world but an extrapolation from it. It is blatantly ideological, the product of heated arguments about when the earth was truly unspoiled and “whose history would be remembered” (180), and it is obviously constructed, inserting unrealistic avatars of users into their chosen historical moments (181). As with all of Tomasula’s fiction, its anti-Realism points to the ideology of its construction. In this way, WORLD.2 is to Ascension what Ascension is to our real world, raising some crucial questions: how do we read WORLD.2 in this novel, which is to say, how do we read emergence as a strategy for seeing, commenting on, or inhabiting the real world, or for instantiating reality in narrative - as potential salvation or probable ruin? (As Ywy Mará Ey, the Land Without Evil, or Guyra Kyhyje, the Terror Bird?)

Tomasula’s own attitude about emergence as lens and strategy for fiction and for our lives has been complicated. In his 2010 “Emergence” essay, he described the posthuman concept of the human, generated by the extreme scales enabled by new technology, as communal rather than individualistic, “[pattern] rather than [self]-possessive individualism…as the ground of being’.” In posthuman narrative, this blurring of the self is viewed, he writes, not as a crisis but as a possibility (11). He repeats these claims in his 2014 essay “Our Tools Make Us (and Our Literature) Post,” defining “post-literature literature” as “writing in which the erasure of the individual is a value to be aspired to” rather than feared (11). But his “Apology for Post-Literary Literature” near the end of that essay strikes me as unpersuasive, particularly in comparison to the “Apology for Postmodern Prose” he had published twelve years before. Then, he argued that the shift away from the social realism that had dominated commercial literature for over a century and creative writing programs for decades marked a paradigm shift in literary style and method that was called for by changes in how we read and distribute literature and by the increased discursiveness of culture. For Tomasula in 2002, “postmodern prose” meant discursiveness, specifically self-conscious discursiveness, which, when used in combination with traditional Realist practices could make visible the powerful real-world consequences and ideological effects of art—or, the “importance of aesthetic decisions to real humans” (122). It meant “yes and both; craft and anti-craft”—or, we might say, Realism and anti-Realism, a productive and dialectic combination of techniques that fuels the materialist and metafictive realism of Tomasula and many other contemporary writers, as I have argued elsewhere.³

By contrast, his “Apology for Post-Literary Literature”, in 2014, primarily describes the fact of it - that it is not a “dominant genre,” not strikingly new, but a predictable emergence from our digital technologies - rather than arguing that it offers newly effective tools for doing the meaning-making and debunking work of art (15, 16). How is post-literary literature better equipped than postmodern prose to meet our contemporary cultural and technological moments? As the real world becomes more emergent, subsuming the individual human experience into hyperconnection and pattern, does literature that does the same provide solace, critique, or a blueprint for change, in the tradition of literary art? Or does it simply mirror our dissolution?

Ascension’s own extrapolation, WORLD.2, seems to present a similarly ambivalent solution to the problems of living in an increasingly emergent culture and on a dying planet. Initially it offers characters a digital utopia and refuge from the brutal realities and power inequities of their real world. Users enter through a portal named “Eden,” into a landscape of impossible natural beauty where everyone gets to choose their own outfits, body type, gender (or lackthereof), and even species (183-184). In Eden.2, there’s no death (197)—not of the individual and not of the planet. But whether people enter WORLD.2 to “connect with the earth” or “abandon a dying planet” is up for debate (180), and the realest thing about WORLD.2 is - like our own nascent WORLD.2, the internet - the engine of consumerism that built and drives it, that absorbs all attempts at counter-culture into the mainstream and turns all “anti-marketing” into “marketing” (265).

If there’s a truly utopic emergent space in the novel it’s the most marginal space of WORLD.2 - which is “marginal” in that users only wind up there when they stop buying things in the virtual world (339, 356) and so are denied access to and then directed away from the consumer-driven interactions that form its core. That a dimensionless product of code can reproduce centered versus marginal spaces and organize people into community members versus outcasts itself underscores that capital does not require embodiment to reproduce ideology or build society in its image and further undermines the postmodern promise of democratizing decentralization. Outside the defining forces of capital, the landscape of marginal WORLD.2 is featureless and colorless, making it seem to Meadow, who winds up there by searching WORLD.2 for a trace of her dead son, more like a “construction zone,” “a loop of code left incomplete” or rendered nonfunctional by surrounding upgrades (364) than a part of the virtual world. No longer able to use her VR goggles, Meadow is ejected from the virtual verisimilitude and confronted with the unreality of WORLD.2; no longer able to fly, she’s forced to walk her avatar for hours over several days to reach its emptiest spaces. When she finally encounters other avatars, the speech function no longer works, sending her back to her old keyboard, whose obsolescence in the rest of WORLD.2 renders it uncanny (365). The outdated tech also defamiliarizes language for Meadow in the way that the dysfunctional world-building code defamiliarizes these marginal spaces, making her see them both for what they are —elements of code (366).

These technological regressions in the context of a fully digital, emergent world function like anti-Realism in the context of Realism, destroying the illusion of verisimilitude that pretends to reflect reality but instead hides the fact of its replacement by representation - thereby revealing the truth of representation’s lie. The regressions also remind Meadow of the truth of her embodiment in time and space. Traversing real time to move through digital space, pausing the program to attend to bodily functions in the bathroom or at the vending machine, and translating her thoughts into clicking keystrokes make her journey to the outskirts of WORLD.2 a thoroughly embodied one.

Her exchanges with other avatars there also suggest that these farthest flung spaces house the last remnants of the human in WORLD.2---and in the narrative’s real world—if by “human” we mean the humanity, or perhaps humanism, that predated the emergent, posthuman, highly virtual, and wholly commodified society that occupies chapter three. The marginal avatars, called “Book People,” look like classic books; their real-world operators share a love for language and occupations outside the reining power structures of capitalism and science (367). Their conversations meander around philosophy and art, “never coming to any conclusion but in the end creating an aura that seemed meaningful if not meaning any one, or even a dozen things” (370). These people, their jobs, and their conversation are, in other words, useless to their dominant culture, allowing the possibility of meaning and art, as Tomasula argued most directly in his novel IN&OZ - which, coincidentally, is the avatar of one of the Book People Meadow encounters (370). In the company of such human-oriented avatars and such humanistic conversation, Meadow feels comforted and humbled, like a “tourist entering a shrine or some sacred space” (365). Ascension seems to offer this space and its humanities-oriented community as preservation of the sacred at human scale in an otherwise emergent and posthuman world, perhaps not unlike the mystical spaces in the midst of the postmodern simulacra offered by DeLillo’s White Noise. (This world in which Book People are marginalized by consumerism, technology, and science also reads like a manifestation of the humanities today.)

Meadow discovers that preserving the human in the posthuman is the stated mission of the Book People, “some of [whom] still believe that [their] perspective can put off the day that Bradbury imagined,” when books are eradicated by the ruling class (370):

We supply a sense of what the poem means to humans and the program makes us part of itself…The poem is the software running on the wetware of our minds; our judgment becomes the variables of the software; in this way we become the ghost in the machine…we ensure that a literary perspective will continue for at least as long as there are humans: The human perspective doesn’t lose out to the machine’s database because we are part of it (369).

In this ultimate merging of human and code, the Book People represent humanities-minded humans participating in the code to preserve the human in it, much as Tomasula wrote in 2014 that “it’s important for poets to take part in contemporary methods and discourses [like computing] in order for poetry to stay relevant” (“Our Tools” 16). In doing so, these users seem to offer the possibility of a still-human posthuman perspective, their collective knowledge “like the multi-lens eye of a fly, each a slightly different view of the world. A view that is diminished by one lens every time a book winks out of the world” (368). This view also allows for a productively emergent posthuman version of the god’s-eye view coveted by so many Tomasula characters - a lens created through digital technology that still requires the gaze of the human eye: “If she could rise above them to have a bird’s-eye view, they would appear as a weather system, leisurely turning about an eye” (370).

Poised on the brink of the portal out of WORLD.2’s marginal spaces and into the “Elysian Fields,” Meadow asks the Book People the question at the heart of all inquiries about the intersection of self, art, and digital technology: “Are you real?” When they answer by noting that it “depends what you mean by ‘real.’ And ‘you’…and ‘are’” (371), we seem to have landed, at the edge of the outskirts of Ascension’s emergent world, in a redefinition of subjectivity, reality, and epistemology—not to mention space and time—that removes us from the tyranny of human scale precisely to preserve humanity in its least colonizing, commodifying, narcissistic form. If only Ascension ended here.

4. The Posthuman Inhuman / after the human

Everything that happens after this moment heralds the death of the human, which posthuman humanity can’t survive. The first mammal dies from avian flu - a cat - while a COVID-like plague moves across the globe toward North America. “People used to think they didn’t share a body,” a lab scientist thinks. “And maybe once that was true. But [now] there wasn’t even any separation between people and animals, let alone each other” (372). In the real world of chapter three, the liberating promise of hybridity and porous boundaries between bodies has become ominous - as it has in the real world, where the first human died from avian flu while I was writing this talk. Porous hybridity has become a death sentence. Acts of resistance to the natural and systemic forces triggering extinction events - like José saving sea turtles (379); Gabe corrupting data the military will use to weaponize bird flu (384) - read as futile, because “the world was ending…for everyone - the whole planet becoming uninhabitable though everyone continued to live as if it weren’t” (378). An anthropologist views the remains of an Indigenous Anasazi village in North America - abandoned when “they grew larger than their fields” (387) - as analogous to the dilemma of all of humanity, which has used up village earth, with no new fields to move on to.

Tomasula moves directly from the Anasazi people doomed by dust-encrusted fields to Meadow’s arrival in “Elysian Fields,” which looks to her “like a beach” (387). The analogy is clear: even humanity’s virtual fields can’t save us. The comforting, sacred space populated by the Book People that inspired Meadow to imagine rising to a “bird’s-eye view” organizing them into a legible system (370) has given way to an “overwhelming scale” that erases individual and meaningful pattern. The formerly friendly Book People with their evocative avatars have been replaced by “faceless,” “expressionless” figures that stand “silent and apart from one another,” occasionally “mumbling to themselves” (388). They seem to all be piloted by people like Meadow - people grieving the loss of loved ones whose ghosts appear in the Fields as traces of death extrapolated from media representations of real-world tragedies. If marginal WORLD.2 represents the humanities today, Elysian Fields is Tomasula’s rendering of what Roderick Coover calls “the digital imaginary” which, in his afterword to Coover’s collection by that name, Tomasula conceives as “haunted” in the Derridean sense by the “‘figure of the ghost’ ” that is “‘neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive’” (quoting Derrida 176). The “ghosts” in Elysian Fields literalize Tomasula’s reading of the digital imaginary as “haunted”: by the deaths of individuals from the real world (Ascension 358), death of respect for human suffering (as people chase Pokemon at Auschwitz, “Haunting” 182), and of our concepts of the real and of the human (“Haunting” 184) that are eclipsed by data and pattern.

Like all versions of the Garden of Eden in Ascension, the Elysian Fields has its Guyra Kyhyje or “Terror Bird.” Here it is “an ark or huge wooden bird” being built by avatars in the distance: a land-locked escape boat, a flightless bird. Ascension ends with Meadow pondering the past and present death of the human and the posthuman from both micro and macro points of view, reflecting on “machines falling silent, stars winking out. The heart monitor in her mother’s hospital room going to flatline” (394). The “winking out” of the stars recalls the Book People’s concern that an aspect of the human is lost with every book that “winks out” (368), so that the images together suggest the winking out of human perspective from macro and micro scales. Having traveled so far in time and space—from the lush materiality of the Paraguayan forest to the desolate ghost-town of partially defunct code; from the beginning of the universe to the end of the Earth (a span of events represented in a two-page rush just before the book’s last narrative moment 390-392), we readers feel as if we’ve traveled as far from the real as we could go, past the humanist individual and the emergent posthuman and finally humanity itself. Finally, the letters of the novel wink out on the page with Meadow’s dismissive closing question: “So what was that all about?” (394).

Ultimately, Ascension seems to suggest that, while technological changes in scale can enable new visions of nature that yield new stories, forms, and concepts of the human, and new relationships between human and nonhuman, there’s a limit to this productive rising, that the posthuman can’t survive the loss of the embodied human. A story of epic scale organized around a single point in space, what had seemed to be a bildungsroman of the earth from an increasingly posthuman perspective turns out to be the story of the earth as seen, framed, represented, understood, and imagined from a changing human point of view. Rather than Italo Calvino’s wholly alien story of the birth of the universe from the point of view of a point in space, Ascension illustrates the absurdity of any wholly inhuman point of view, that our stories can’t be sustained without the perspective of a human mind. The very notion of macro and micro scaling remains relative to the scale of the human, a way for people to redefine reality according to new ideas and inventions, the human as organizing principle. A truly nonhuman perspective might remain relational, as Karen Barad argues about all matter using quantum theory⁴, but it would have no viewpoint at all, certainly not a “micro” or “macro” one. Even the notion of a “god’s-eye view” imagines a satellite-enhanced gaze of what humans consider to be the whole world but is, from a truly posthuman perspective, only a dot - or maybe only a pixel, or a period.⁵

But look closely, and we see that no matter how the lens of Ascension travels, plunges, and rises, it also remains controlled in some way by the human individual. Who owns the first-person point of view that opens the novel (8-9)? Or the one that interjects twice into chapter three (316, 338)? In the online version, Tomasula draws our attention to these subtle interjections of first-person by visually setting them outside the rest of the story (“The Hives,” “Circles”). From the increasingly dispersed point of view of the novel, a first-person point of view emerges, unexplained and unaccounted for, suggesting that even the thought experiment of the emergence of the posthuman and the erasure of the individualistic human is a story that can only be told from the perspective of an individual human being.

5. Ethics, Constraint, and the Human

For Steve Tomasula, “art,” “writing,” and “self” have always required the participation of the embodied human. In one of his earliest essays on posthuman art, he worried that “to posit the body as construct” — as feminist critiques and science technology had done — “is to navigate the deconstruction of the individual, the collapse of the self, and this collapse’s own rebuttal - with all of its ethical consequences and ramifications for what we will see when we look at one another.” As artists struggle to create a vision of the human still moored to the body and subjectivity, he asks, “In whose image will we recreate this “post-human human?” (“Art in the Age of the Individual’s Mechanical Reproduction” 23, 22). Despite these cultural and technological forces of erasure, he reassured us that “there will still be the body” to bear our humanity. So, when, in his 2014 introduction to an American Book Review issue on “Machine Writing” he asks, “If a poem is written in the vacuum of space and there’s no human there to read it, is it still a poem?” (3), the question feels rhetorical.

A decade later, after machine-writing had gone mainstream via chatbots, his argument for the human behind the art becomes still clearer. In his review of Hallucinate This, a book composed in part by ChatGPT, Tomasula repeatedly points out that the book’s “apt[ness]” depends on its human “co-author,” Mark Marino, whose expertly crafted prompts dictate the frame through which the LLM (large language model) might run its code to produce an answer in a recognizably meaningful shape (79, 80). Likewise, the bot’s seeming artfulness relies on its facility with human notions of genre, style, and literary history - topics toward which “Marino guides ChatGPT” - making it simply another tool used by a human to be artful in human ways. That is, ChatGPT may be more sophisticated in its technological mimicry of the human than the tools used to make “Post-Literature Literature,” which Tomasula considered in 2014, or those used to make the “conceptual art” he categorized in his 2022 anthology, but it’s no less dependent on the human hand, eye, and mind to make something artful or meaningful.

But, as AI technology continues to develop and become more widely used, its relationship to human - who is using or shaping whom - is shifting. This is not yet the disappearance of the human: AI still requires human input, and Marino and chatbot recognize that their “autobiography” is “Not human,” though it is “born of human thought, the reflection of’ the ‘thousands of minds’ that ChatGPT draws on” (82). But Tomasula also notes that “the ELIZA effect showed long ago [in 1966] how willing humans are to ascribe consciousness to our machines” (82). In not re-creating or replacing the human but seeming to, AI is clearly not the empowering extension of human by code, or the hybridity of human with machine, that Kate Hayles and Donna Haraway envisioned as liberating us from liberal humanism and other oppressive power systems.⁶ Recombining human thought and creative output into its own performance of human voice, AI is a reshaping of writing - and by extension thinking - as the product of code, as unexamined ideology scraped up by the code, as commodification of uncompensated human labor repurposed for the profit of the writers of the code. As the uncritical, at times hallucinatory amalgamation of unvetted content, it’s certainly not the Adam’s Peak chased by Tomasula’s characters in quaintly pre-AI landscapes - though it may be akin to the nightmarish “god’s-eye view” imagined by a scientist in Ascension as he wires together the brains of rats to speed up their maze-running (352).

Tomasula’s theories of constraint suggest we should expect AI (and eventually AGI, or artificial general intelligence, now predicted to emerge by 2027 [Aschenbrenner; Kokotajlo et al]) to dramatically transform writing and art alongside our concept of the human. When Mark Marino gets ChatGPT chatting about Oulipo and “how all writing can be seen as a kind of writing under the constraints of a given genre or technology” (81), he conceptualizes writing in the same terms in which Tomasula has long conceived of literature: as determined by constraints built by people in particular historical and cultural moments. In 2002, Tomasula posited Realism as a constraint against which postmodern prose - what he would later call conceptual or posthuman writing - could emerge: Realism “forms a rearguard, or…Oulipian constraint against complete subjectivity during our paradigm shift” (121). Such reasoning when applied to Marino’s collaboration with ChatGPT suggests that Marino co-opts his coded co-author to conceive of what it is doing - writing and commenting on literary art - in terms with which it can have absolutely no experience. Because what is the constraint of the chatbot? What could literature be if “created” outside the constraints of the human and the human body?

The increasingly common interjection of AI into human relationships adds ethical concerns to these aesthetic ones. In 1998 Tomasula posited the body as “a firewall against complete subjectivity” (21), a bulwark against the “infinite regress” of self-reflection which, near the end of obsessively discursive postmodernism and before the ubiquity of the digital, seemed to be the greatest threat to our notions of the human. But what will happen, for example, as more men turn to chatbots trained to anticipate and fulfill their needs (Bates, Martin)? Today’s increasingly common uses of AI to perform acts of human intellect and relationality force us to ask, what happens when there is no body? What are the effects on the human - on our notions of humanity and of the self, on our ways of interacting with others - of being in relationship with subjectivity (or a performance of one) without constraint?

When Meadow steps from the world of the Book People into Elysian Fields, she and the novel move from the promise of postmodern prose and its “post-human human” to the ghostly traces of a digital world on its way to eclipsing the human as defined by the constraints of the body. Whereas the Book People represent human beings “hungry for intimacy” like Haraway’s cyborg and use technology to extend the reach of their post-liberal humanist ideas, as was the hope of Hayles, the faceless, distanced avatars in Elysian Fields seem to represent what humans are becoming as digital culture reshapes us into far-flung traces of our former selves. Two texts separated by a century neatly contrast the real-world alienation and erasure that posthuman technology promised to prevent with the alienation it has begun to engender. In Halldór Laxness’s novel, Independent People (1934), an adolescent boy born into a remote Icelandic farmstead in the early twentieth century, with no connection to the outside world, books, people, or ideas, says to his younger brother, “Look into my eyes. You see a dead man.” He disappears into the driving snow; his body will emerge in the spring melt. But according to the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, the world’s overwhelming availability and knowability in the early 21st century results in a new kind of alienation and death: “The scientifically, technologically, economically, and politically controllable world mysteriously seems to elude us or to close itself off from us. It withdraws from us, becoming mute and unreadable,” and leading to a “dead world” (19, ix). Where and when was the sweet spot between the mortification of a hyperconnected, technologically emergent society and a technologically isolated one?

Ascension suggests that even if we could pinpoint that sweet spot, there’s no getting back to it. Reading the novel feels a lot like encountering the dire warnings by AI developers, or climate scientists, or epidemiologists today. We all know what’s coming. The evidence is all around us - not just in front of our eyes, but in our databases. Tomasula reminds us with every satellite photo of dwindling glaciers and each YouTube link of tsunamis and drone attacks that Ascension is anything but prescient. In fact, it’s eerily like the LLM programming that AI chatbots are built on, using all the evidence it can sort through to predict the next likely outcome, extrapolating from the known past and lived present to a terrifying future that lies in a short, straight line from this moment. It is, as a character thinks about her apocalyptic comic books, “[not] really Sci-Fi so much as Fi about Sci” (376). It’s less speculative fiction than a rendering of science, nature, and the human as seen through the lens of our latest technologies - a new kind of realism, one that signals the danger of human extinction before the end of the earth or even the end of the human body.

My concern about the ethics of commodifying women’s bodies and labor in that waiting room in 2015 seems quaint today, when technology now allows men to replace women’s bodies and labor altogether in ways that will impact what it means to be an embodied woman in a society in which men are deciding what we are allowed to do with our bodies and whose technology is coded primarily by men. Rather than simply profiting from our bodies without our consent, men can now shape what it means to be a woman, and determine what women owe to men, without the constraint of our consent. This is one of many ways that technology might kill the human long before the extinction of human bodies, assuming “human” ever signified anything more complex and varied than the interests of the ruling class.

But in constructing Ascension once again as a lens that reveals the ideology of its construction - craft and anti-craft - Tomasula reminds us of art’s power to reshape the world it reveals. By enlisting our digital archive as alarm bells, Tomasula illustrates that digital and computing technologies can do more than create alternative worlds in which we can escape the painful transformation of our real one. By enlisting the novel to connect us to digital evidence of a real present and past we might have forgotten or want to look away from, and of geography-driven suffering we can’t see from where we’re sitting, he reaffirms the print book as a technology that, like the microscope and telescope, allows us to see and know new things. Like computer code, it connects us and our individual knowledge into a network more powerful than the sum of its parts. He leaves it up to us to figure out how we might use the technology of the novel, still inescapably human, not to stop or control the technologies that threaten to eclipse it and us and the planet on which we’re spinning, but perhaps to write for them a narrative in which the human continues to play a crucial part.

Works Cited

Aschenbrenner, Leopold. Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead. https://situational-awareness.ai/. Accessed 14 April 2025.

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

Banash, David, ed. The Art and Science of New Media Fiction. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Bates, Laura. “Online Brothels, Sex Robots, Simulated Rape: AI is Ushering in a New Age of Violence against Women.” The Guardian, 3 Jun 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/03/ai-sexism-violence-against-women-technology-new-era. Accessed 6 Jun 2025.

Calvino, Italo. “All at One Point.” Cosmicomics, Harcourt Brace, 1976.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, 1990 (1985), pp. 149-182.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Holland, Mary K. The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism. Bloomsbury, 2020.

Kokotajlo, Daniel, Scott Alexander, Thomas Larsen, Eli Lifland, and Romeo Dean. “AI 2027.” 3 April 2025. ai-2027.com/summary. Accessed 29 May 2025.

Laxness, Halldór. Independent People. Vintage, 1997 (1934).

Martin, Daniel. “10 Best AI Girlfriends Apps & Websites.” Unite.AI, 11 May 2025. unite.ai/ai-girlfriends/. Accessed 29 May 2025.

Miller, Anna. “On your Phone Right Now? A 2024 Report Shows that We Check our Phones 205 Times Per Day.” _MSN.com_, 27 Dec 2024, https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/consumer-electronics/on-your-phone-right-now-a-2024-report-shows-that-we-check-our-phones-205-times-a-day/ar-AA1wAo6J. Accessed 10 Feb 2025.

Rosa, Harmut. The Uncontrollability of the World. Translated by James C. Wagner. Polity Press, 2020.

Tomasula, Steve. “00.0 Machine Writing.” American Book Review, vol. 35, no. 2, 2014, pp. 3-7.

—. “Afterword: Haunting the Digital Imaginary.” The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database, edited by Roderick Coover, Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 175-188.

—. “An Apology for Postmodern Prose.” The Iowa Review, vol. 32, no. 1, 2002, pp. 116-122.

—. “Art in the Age of the Individual’s Mechanical Reproduction.” New Art Examiner, vol. 25, no. 7, 1998, pp. 18-23.

—. Ascension. University of Alabama Press, 2022.

—. Ascension. https://www.ascensionnovel.com/, 2022.

—. The Book of Portraiture. FC2, 2006.

—.”C-U See-Me.” http://stevetomasula.info/intro.html (2000).

—. “Emergence and Posthuman Narrative.” Flusser Studies: A Multilingual Journal for Cultural and Media Theory. Spring 2010, 1-18.

—. IN&OZ. Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2003.

—. “The New-Materialism Novel: Twenty-Two Bricks in Its Theory and Construction.” Fictionality and Multimodal Narratives, edited by Torsa Ghosal and Alison Gibbons, University of Nebraska Press, 2023, pp. 113-131.

—. Once Human: Stories. FC2, 2013.

—. “*Our Tools Make Us (And Our Literature) Post.”The Handbook of Electronic Literature, Joseph Tabbi ed., Bloomsbury 2018, pp. 39-59.

—. Review of Hallucinate This! An Authorized Autobotography of ChatGPT by Mark C. Marino and Chat GPT. American Book Review, vol. 45, no. 2, 2024, pp. 78-83.

—. TOC. 3^rd edition, https://www.tocthenovel.net/ (1^st edition 2009).

—. VAS: An Opera in Flatland. University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Tomasula, Steve, ed. Conceptualisms. University of Alabama Press, 2022.

Footnotes

1. This essay originated as a keynote speech for The Art of Representation: Steve Tomasula, a conference organized by Monica Manolescu, Francoise Sammarcelli, and Anne-Laure Tissut in Paris in June, 2025. I am so grateful to them for inviting me to speak at and participate in that wonderful conference, and to ebr for the opportunity to share my talk here. ↩

2. The coordinates appear, hyperlinked to Google Earth, in the “Silpa, Jak, Gabe” chapter of the online version of chapter three, but are not in that chapter in the print version. ↩

3. See Holland, The Moral Worlds of Contemporary Realism (2020). ↩

4. See Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007). ↩

5. Tomasula connects this image of the distant Earth as dot or pixel in Ascension (“Just before Voyager left our solar system for good, it turned is cameras around for one last look at home, which from that distance was smaller than a pale, blue dot, not even a pixel,” 390) to a similar concept in “Haunting the Digital Imaginary” (“a faint blue dot, smaller than the period that ends this essay,” 188). ↩

6. See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (1999) and Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985). ↩