Derrida’s Signification and Simulation in Vandermeer’s Annihilation

Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation turned 10 years old earlier this year. I only realised recently, when I was rereading it, that the entire trilogy turned 10 this year. He actually released them all in 2014 like the staggered singles of an upcoming album.

The novel sees a group of nameless scientists enter a biologically contaminated zone called ‘Area X’ whose expedition causes their bodies to mutate as each organism within the zone metamorphosizes and blends into one another. It creates a (kind of?) body horror aesthetic this way. And it’s very much in the vanguard of posthumanist debate on humanity and environment; how we inhabit it, process it, interact with it. But not so much in trying to redefine the conceptual boundaries of bodies, cultures, and ecology – more trying to blur the question, and deconstruct the generalisations of common anthropomorphisms. He mainly does this through the overlap of systems. Nothing in the book can really be analysed by itself and the thing that makes it so fascinating is the decentralisation of any given biology.

Okay, enter Derrida. He’s a French post-structuralist lingustist and critic. Originally wrote a lot on updating Ferdinand De Saussure’s semiotics. But really, Derrida’s oeuvre is ripping apart the framework of what everyone else lays down – shades of Socrates: the only thing I know is that I know nothing. Derrida is a little more nuanced than that though. Rather than saying we can’t know anything, you won’t find a meaning; it’s more along the lines of, the meaning is constantly shifting, so just be careful where you place the line in the sand because it’s guaranteed to move. Either way, I don’t think he was much fun at parties.

In his essay, Of Grammatology, he lays down the foundations for the mutable process of signification, and Sous Rature (translated to Under Erasure: which is his method for the deconstruction of a signifier, a signifier being a word, and a signified being the meaning behind a word). Both are a way of questioning, and holding accountable, the generalisations and underlining stuctures to which linguistics and epistemology are based on. Hence why I think it’s such a good side-by-side with Annihilation, because Vandermeer is doing the same with posthumanism.

The biological entities in ‘Area X’ mutate to inhibit other entities’ characteristics. Transferring genetic code. Altering DNA. Creatures thrive in habits that they shouldn’t, ‘Marine life that had adjusted to the brackish freshwater’ (p. 12). Even specific biological features are shared across animals, ‘the moss and the fox […] were composed of modified human cells’ (p. 159).

An interesting questions pops up of how much original identity can be attributed to these organisms once this alteration occurs. Their characteristics are either shared and assimilated into their environment; or they no longer have an origin. There’s also the duplication the cells. Brand new copies pop up, like the biologists’ husband. He writes upon seeing his doppelganger, ‘It was so clearly not me… and yet it was me’ (p. 165). Vandermeer is obsessed with blending forms and figures; but these aren’t copies, they’re simulacra; copies without origin, representation of an entity yet without originality. Baudrillard calls this a ‘hyperreality’. The husband hasn’t been replaced, but the doppelganger’s existence has altered the reality of what makes up the referential in the first place. Baudrillard epitomises hyperreality as an era ‘inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials’. In other words, the process of duplication forever changes the original referent (thing being duplicated). Regardless of whether the husband we’re familiar with is the original or the copy, the pre-copy existence cannot be returned to.

This assimilation and duplication reflects Derrida’s interpretation of linguistics and model for the phenomenology of language; that the meaning of words is in an endless process of signification. Terry Eagleton, who sometimes made cameo appearances back at Lancaster, summarises that ‘[meaning] is never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a constant flickering of presence and absence together’. His work in general is great for introductions and summaries for basically any literary concept.

Derrida isn’t trying to make any grand cultural claims, or offer anything to be completely bereft of meaning. More that the search for any true signified (any one inherent meaning to a sign) is a futile search, as signifiers simply lead to other signifers in an infinite cycle of rotating context. Vandermeer’s biological entities follow this exact same process. The biologist (and us, the readers) are in a constant state of deconstructing where specific features have come from, to a point where the process falls back upon itself. The biologist constantly tries to find the ‘true meaning’ of this ecological flux but, like Derrida, recognises that this process is endless.

Maybe it’s considered a stretch to suggest that dolphins, boars, cells, and plant-life are perfect stand-ins for Derrida’s depiction of signifiers. So Vandermeer actually extends the assimilation of entities to directly involve written language. During the tower sequence, the biologist descends a seemingly infinite staircase, akin to the labyrinth in House of Leaves. She finds moss on the walls which form the words ‘where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the…’ (p. 46). This text itself is duplicated and stolen from the thousands of scientific journals found in the lighthouse. But the journals themselves are writing about the experience of encountering these mossy words. Chicken and the egg type stuff. It mirrors its own experience; it’s infinite and paradoxical. Just how Derrida’s signifiers are infinitely indeterminable. But the ‘copy of a copy in perpetuity’ idea isn’t relevant for the copy, it’s more used to talk about the referent. Walter Benjamin has a really famous book called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and he raises a concern that when something is made with the intended purpose to be duplicated, that completely undermines it. For example, compare Mona Lisa with a blockbuster film. We praise the physical properties of Da Vinci’s painting, how small it actually is, the brush work, etc; but we don’t praise the original negatives used for an action film. Apply this to a system / culture. When everything is intended for reproduction, then what has an origin? As a question, this is actually an antithesis to Derrida’s interpretation of historical epistemology. He calls it ‘meaningful for us only in terms of an origin and which […] speech and writing have already been assigned’. Basically, that written language is the origin, and the necessary building block for civilization. By suggesting that nothing has origin, with the moss-script / lighthouse-journal paradox, Vandermeer is repositioning how we use scientific data, and flipping Derrida’s history of epistemology on its head. Even Derrida’s Trace can be found here (which he coins as ‘[the absence] of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself’ – which translates to: signification always has something hidden, a darkspot), because the moss-script and journals are defined by that very absence. It either exists without context, because they have not created themselves; or that their context is their own existence – hence the paradox.

The moss-script is also endless. Literally. It’s paper (the walls in this case) are in the from of an infinite staircase. Derridean signification is told through perpetually self-constructing interior space. But besides topographically, the script is syntactically endless in that it has no full stops, just a never ending sentence whose syntax becomes increasingly incoherent. Perhaps more apparent with other languages whose verbs are usually secondary, but meaning doesn’t often emerge until the end of a sentence. The moss-script’s meaning can never be inferred with this elusive full stop and, like Derrida criticising Saussure, meaning is constantly being deferred. True signifieds are held at an arm’s reach away, or in this case, at the bottom of an endless staircase. Just one more step…

I think some interesting questions get asked in this book. Is the assimilation of bodies into a surrounding environment a good thing? Is it dangerous to associate with the Other (the Sartrean version with a capital O)? Should we reach a Schopenhauer style pessimism when confronted with endless deference – for this one of the criticisms of Derrida; deconstruction puts an end to ‘any dreams of unification’; it is ‘nihilistic textual free play’ which looks to destroy whilst saying nothing. These are quotes from American critics who saw Derrida as a bit of a vibe-killer. The biologist takes a stand against these Americans, she has a self-revelatory epiphany, finds comfort in this endless deference, and comments on Area X consuming the entire world, ‘I can no longer say with conviction that this is a bad thing […] I had changed sides’ (p. 192).

As a prerequisite to the expedition, all the scientists are placed under hypnotic suggestion to reduce compromises to mission goals. When the biologist breathes in the spores, she becomes immune to this suggestion. Assimilation grants her agency, even if it does make it more dangerous for her because the safety net has been removed. Maybe a little on the nose, but it could be argued that by becoming estranged from the mission’s ‘purpose’ it implies, by binary opposition, that she is finding her own. Her whole narrative arc is one of accepting subjectivity. Consider the start of the novel, ‘anything personal should be left behind’ (p. 9) and that with the ending words, ‘I melted into my surroundings, could not remain separate from, apart from, objectivity a foreign land to me’ (p. 173). This line could have been taken straight from Derrida himself whose mantra is to reject the idea of the stable sign and understand that meaning comes from shifting linguistic relativisms. He renounces pursuits of the true objectivity of the sign: ‘[the signifier] is always technical and representative. It has no constitutive meaning.’ The biologist, in the end, fears true objectivity. She finds total comfort in the assimilation into her environment; body becoming space.

It’s quite clear to me that Alex Garland idolises Solaris. There’s shades of it in all his work; the isolated space station nightmare of Sunshine, and in his adaptation of Annihilation he really delves into the ‘alien’ alien. The completely uninterpretable Other. The monster in his adaptation is a polymorph. For Vandermeer it is ‘The Crawler’, a cosmic slime monster. It is neither a traditional alien, as perhaps presented in classical (Lovecraftian) ‘weird’ stories with evil, horrific aesthetics; nor is it seem as human, its motivations are so abstract, any evaluation of them is nonsensical. Again, this is the central idea of Solaris in my opinion – almost a backlash against generalisations of evil found in popular sci-fi. This shift in characterisation embodies posthumanism, that pre-conceived ideas or traits exclusive to humanity (or even the Other) are now considered too arbitrary or generalised. Specifically, the Hegelian, western-style philosophy that meaning and agency are found in empirical observations and examples of presence. The biologist and Kelvin could examine the Crawler or Solaris for five-thousand years and no truth would ever be found. It’s also a dig at Kantian transcendental consciousness (of knowing without experiencing, via logical rationalism and a priori) by questioning whether scientific discover can ever be properly understood. Are we capable of ever understanding the Crawler’s intentions? Derrida’s Trace comes back here; there exists, in any system, a presence of absence. There’s always something hidden behind the veil. Something indeterminate. But unlike Plato’s theory of forms, even the absence is not determined by human ideology. There is no ‘ideal’ form or knowledge of which we are missing; posthumanism, as depicted by Vandermeer, is one where even the ideologies of concepts behind the veil are elusive; are non-human. There is a section which perfectly summarises this ambiguity, and probably my favourite segment of the whole book:

Perhaps [the Crawler] is a creature living in perfect symbiosis with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is “merely” a machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims are utterly alien – one that works through supreme acts of mirroring and by remaining hidden in so many other ways, all without surrendering the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters.  

(p. 190-91)

Either, Vandermeer is arguing that the Crawler is truly alien because it assimilates without intent (we would do so consciously. But even that is arguable, I suppose); or that the Crawler has an intent so different to our own, it can’t be interpreted by any human.

There are big issues with this personification. Firstly, if it doesn’t ‘[surrender] the foundations of its otherness as it becomes what it encounters’, then without a viewpoint, or displays of Otherness to the subject (biologist), then is it even alien? If the Crawler’s only purpose is to assimilate and copy the actions of humans (there’s a poetic image to mention here, the Crawler literally swallows the lighthouse keeper like a DnD gelatinous cube), then surely its disingenuous to label it as non-human. Is not all humanity in a constant cycle of duplicating the actions and conventions of what humanity should look like? This is an extension of Baudrillard’s hyperreality; ‘never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference’. Baudrillard reduces humanity down to no longer consisting of the original referent, it is now solely defined by its ability to simulate. Is that not then exactly what the Crawler does? By that logic, it’s doing the one thing humans do all the time, copying other humans. So, is ‘non-human’ a false label?

The second problem of this personification is binary opposition. Derrida criticises Rousseau’s reliance on the supplement when describing an event. Derrida’s Sous Rature (under erasure) method, of crossing out whilst retaining both word and cross, acts as a kind of Curb Your Meaning. It highlights the limitations and inadequacies of a word or symbol, but also keeps them there to show how much we rely on them. Anyway. To see the Crawler as non-human is to include a binary opposition which might, and should, be completely irrelevant. Following the way Rousseau interprets phenomenon, we can only see the Crawler as distinctively non-human because, as the biologist writes, ‘that intelligence is far different from our own’ (p. 190). But Derrida isn’t criticising that we’ve chosen the wrong subject to compare it to; it’s that we’re even trying to find its antithesis in the first place. In fact, we take for granted and incorporate many common binary oppositions into our lives: good/bad, light/dark, nature/culture; we even base entire language models on these oppositions being true, as if nature doesn’t overlap with culture in any way. To call the Crawler non-human, or Other, is to immolate any overlap with humanity or the subject. There’s also the fact that the first term in each opposition traditionally constitutes the privileged entity. Innocent language structures reveal hierarchies of power this way; when we say the Israeli/ Palestine war or conflict, we’re subconsciously prioritising which one we support by which one we place first. Even human/non-human has this invisible priority – it’s almost as generalised as good/bad. This means that our attempts to bridge the gap and move ecological posthumanist debates using ‘human/non-human’ is equally as restrictive as the structuralist history its pretending to criticise.

It is then revealed that the Crawler is the moss-script writer. It has a strange biology, ‘only a suggestion of an arm and the impression of the words being written’ (p. 178) the biologist writes. Derrida says that there is ‘no linguistic sign before writing. Without [the exteriority of the signifer], the idea of the sign falls into decay’: it’s a concession on his part; the written word, although misinterpreted, misjudged, was the necessary building block, and moving on from it would be ‘silly’. If written language is integral to humanity this way, then the Crawler (our, at first, symbol of the Other) is ripping down what the preconceptions of ‘Alienness’ are by involving itself in the writing process. Written language is exclusive to humans. So Vandermeer incorporates the Crawler into this process to make us question where the human/non-human line is, or if it’s even correct to draw the line at all.

There is a distinction to made, however. The written word could never hope to harness the true signified of the future. The exteriorised symbol is, at its heart, a nostalgic one, built upon past significations. It’s non-predictive. Derrida says ‘the order of the signified is never contemporary’ – meaning is entrusted onto a symbol based on its history with that symbol. So, the phenomenology of the written word is inherently retrospective, which kind of undermines the ideas of posthumanism.

Vandermeer creates dozens of poetic overlaps to back up this idea of shifting the posthuman focus. Firstly, there are biological overlaps on an atomic level, ‘Transformations were taking place here […] in a deeply unnatural way’ (p. 160). Then, there are ecological ones, how varying subjects in a given system overlap, ‘hawks and ducks, herons and eagles all grouped together as if in common cause’ (p. 164).  Moving deeper, there are cultural merges, ‘the Crawler went far afield to gather the words, and it had to assimilate them […] in a sense memorize them, which was a form of absorption’ (p. 93), which certifies that memory equals development, it learns through the exteriorisation of others’ memories. Finally, there are overlaps which are purely conceptual, ‘I can’t shake the sense that he is still here, somewhere, even if utterly transformed – in the eye of a dolphin, in the touch of an uprising of moss, anywhere and everywhere’ (p. 194); the biologist is talking about the spirit of her husband finding itself in the myriad of forms populating Area X. And not literally, but just from her own subjectivity, of which she has finally grown to accept as the only important exegesis to her.