Concrete and desert islands: Proto-posthuman crusoes in Daniel Defoe and J. G. Ballard

This article will argue that J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island can be productively read as a narrative that engages some of the central ideas of posthumanism and that from this reading one can then re read its source text, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, as a proto posthumanist text. Ballard’s rewriting of this highly influential tale of a castaway trapped on a desert island emphasises the inhuman quality of contemporary Western society by having the protagonist, Robert Maitland, discover a more meaningful and more vital existence during his exile in a concrete wasteland. Paradoxically, this life is more human precisely because it involves an acknowledgement of the human as animal and of the similarly problematic distinction between the human and the technological. Maitland’s becoming posthuman is thus both a moving beyond and moving towards the human. From this perspective, it becomes possible to re-read Robinson Crusoe as a proto-posthumanist text, as Crusoe’s constant anxiety about the distinction between the human and the non-human anticipates the posthumanist turn in the twentieth century. Robinson Crusoe reveals that the human is always already posthuman insofar as the text highlights Crusoe’s failure to police the boundaries separating the human from the non-human. Similarly, I suggest here, the text also allows us to see how posthumanism is always already a proto-posthumanism, insofar as it is always already implied in that which it seeks to critique