“My Body is a Spaceship”: Technoscience and Experiments Otherwise in Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic

Abstract

What does an understanding of the self as constantly rearticulated mean for ecopoetry and the lyric “I”? And how might an emphasis on a multiscalar semiotics, where different forms of writing are understood to carry the capacity to literally reorganize material life, reframe the possibilities for writing under the contested sign of the Anthropocene, in the midst of the Earth’s sixth extinction event, the accelerating acidification of the planet’s oceans, and the largescale climatic reorganizations wrought by climate change? This article reads the idiosyncratic mode of production and the poems of Adam Dickinson’s Anatomic alongside recent scholarship in ecopoetics, environmental humanities, and science and technology studies to advance a particular and specific (that is, non-generic) understanding of Dickinson’s experimental poetics. From its beginnings in the desire to catalogue and identify the presence of a dizzying array of bacteria, chemicals, metals, and other substances in the body, Anatomic narrates the movement from a misguided and despairing purity politics to a transformative conception of the individual body and consciousness as shot through with relations at multiple, unfathomable scales. Intervening in the discourses, techniques, and worldview of what Max Liboiron (Métis) has termed “dominant science” (20), Dickinson’s text elaborates an experimental practice that invites us to rethink our modes and forms of relating to one another and the more-than-human entanglements that sustain, feed off, or simply co-exist with us.