“Mackerel and Porpoise / Was This 
the Last of Us”: The Posthuman in 
Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Foreign Languages, University of 
Isfahan, Hezar Jerib Ave., Azadi Square, Isfahan, 81746-73441 Iran 
pirnajmuddin@fgn.ui.ac.ir, maryammousavi62@fgn.ui.ac.ir
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8349-2626, http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1556-9681
This article reads Susan Howe’s poem “Periscope” (2017) to examine how it 
challenges liberal humanist strands of thinking about the supposed centrality 
and privileged position of humans while opening up new ways of representing 
humans vis-a-vis the non-human. Drawing on Rosi Braidotti’s concepts of 
“nomadic subjectivity,” “figuration,” and “transversality,” Bill Brown’s “Thing 
Theory,” and Pieter Vermeulen’s “Posthuman Affect,” the study looks into how the 
poet’s preoccupation with the agency of the other-than-human species depicted 
in the poem leads to a posthumanist interpretation. It also examines how the 
narrator questions the boundaries between human and non-human, animate 
and inanimate in order to evoke uncanny effects that are best realized in the 
form of post-human defiant challenges to liberal humanist models of subjectivity. 
The poet, it is argued, creates a suggestive visionary engagement and encounter 
with the natural world and “anthropomorphized things” in an attempt to awaken 
historical consciousness to give voice to the non-articulated Other.
Keywords: American poetry / Howe, Susan / nomadic subjectivity / posthumanism / 
otherness
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Introduction
The contemporary American experimental poet Susan Howe (1937–) 
originally garnered literary attention and critical acclaim during the 
1970s without being faded into obscurity ever since. She is closely 
associated with the American avant-garde Language Poetry move-
ment which commenced in the 1970s. As a representative, influential 
figure of Language Poetry, Howe “uses language in ways that maxi-
mize ambiguity and mystery, often by introducing arbitrary rules or 
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stressing acoustic or visual elements in the text” (Axelrod, Roman, 
and Travisano 299). Her poetry has thus always produced a sense of 
bafflement and uncertainty amongst scholars and readers alike and has 
notably opposed, and continues to oppose the hegemony and domi-
nance of a well-defined, stable, and established meaning. It defies and 
destabilizes “the concept of the natural presence of a speaker behind a 
poem” (Koirala 179). In particular, as a really tangible, thoughtful and 
meaningful alternative, in her poetry, “the speaking subject is prob-
lematized or dispersed, and the poem’s ‘I’ exists merely as a textual 
construct, a grammatical convenience, or an object of verbal play” 
(Axelrod, Roman, and Travisano 299). The speaking subject, highly 
uncertain and insecure of his/her knowledge of the facts, reveals the 
collapse of human understanding and cognition in the contemporary 
age, thus giving rise to a posthumanist interpretation. While it could 
be argued that posthumanism figures significantly in Language Poetry 
movement, there have been surprisingly few attempts to explore the 
sway of posthumanist theories and philosophies on the movement’s 
poetic compositions as a whole.
Howe’s poetry is also adjudged and labeled as “an important irri-
tant in its unwillingness to let us deny the myriad mysteries embed-
ded in the very fabric of the poem,” hence providing a space for a 
cognitive adventure (Bartlett 750). These mysteries in the very fab-
ric of her poem perfectly demonstrate that human beings are no lon-
ger thoroughly capable of knowing everything and are no longer at 
the center of the universe, hence they should not be enthralled and 
seduced by the idea of humanity’s boundless possibilities for enlight-
enment. These enigmatic mysteries seem reasonable enough, per se, to 
undermine humanity’s superiority, preeminence, and exceptionalism 
in the posthuman era and prompt a rethinking of human agency and 
autonomy over nonhuman agency. The inscrutabilities clearly reveal 
how human beings’ ways of knowing appear to have been increas-
ingly inadequate and inefficient in order to understand the complexi-
ties of life in a global context. The indeterminacies and ambiguities 
in Howe’s poetry reveal that the poet does not intend any more to 
valorize man and his intellectual capital the same as liberal human-
ists have done. Therefore, the purported human capacity to dominate 
knowledge is largely contested. Moreover, Howe’s poetry drives the 
reader to “acknowledge the otherness of language” (Axelrod, Roman, 
and Travisano 301). Because of experimental syntax techniques and 
new lexical coinages, in Howe’s poetry, language is treated like the 
other whose nature cannot be entirely explored.
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Howe’s writing, as William Montgomery in The Poetry of Susan 
Howe: History, Theology, Authority has argued, makes “the resistance 
of interpretive endeavor almost a condition of its existence” (xiii). This 
resistance can severely stultify and debilitate the human being’s endeav-
our for a comprehensive understanding of the entire universe and fur-
nishes a sense of the inadequacy of human knowledge to encounter 
new and unfamiliar experiences. Like most of Howe’s poetry collec-
tions, her International Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Debths, 
figuring “Periscope,” is “a hybrid animal, a composite of autobiograph-
ical prose, minimalist verse, collaged (and mainly illegible) clippings of 
old texts, and lots of white space” (Chiasson). The appearance of her 
poetry collections thus attempts to force on human perception and 
understanding a new reading of everything in the world, including 
human beings. To respond to the recent innovations in technology, 
Howe presents her 2017 poetry collection in an electronic format. In 
the poem under consideration, she even utilizes the new technology of 
optical instrument (i.e., periscope) to see things not directly in her line 
of sight. So, she introduces elements of technological wonder to evoke 
uncanny impressions.
Howe’s 145-line poem “Periscope” (2017) has not been the sub-
ject of substantial critical attention up to the present moment. The 
poem’s exclusiveness and impenetrability make it difficult to under-
stand and interpret in detail, but its general purpose can be rather 
clearly identified. A reviewer in Goodreads has also asserted that the 
poem is “difficult,” and thus he does not expect to be able to find 
definitive answers on what the poem is all about, but he thinks that 
“it has rich opportunities for thinking with and through it, perhaps a 
touch of nonsense creates the entrance to a vision of the nonsense in 
our own world” (Tristan). By virtue of this difficulty, Howe implies 
that the complexities of such a venture into understanding the 
poem far outstrip the human intellect, hence requiring a posthuman 
knowledge. Therefore, Kant’s motto of Enlightenment in his 1784 
essay (“Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understand-
ing!”, 58) can no longer be applicable in the contemporary era. The 
poem thus displays its author’s penchant for experimental writing, as 
it has also been displayed in the speaker’s expression: “Choose one 
rugged raggedy” (Howe, line 37), and her dismission of “quatrain its 
puppet pattern” (line 38). “Periscope” is also poetic representation 
of posthuman models of consciousness, revealing the poet’s strong 
urge to interrogate dominant conceptions of humanity and self-
hood. Howe’s fictional, mythological, and historical figures inhabit a 
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liminal state of in-betweenness, extending beyond the rigid and hier-
archical stratification of human consciousness prevalent in Western 
humanist traditions.
In what follows, the authors contend that the main question Howe 
aspires to address in her “patchwork” poem is one Rosi Braidotti puts 
forward in her book The Posthuman: “what new forms of subjectiv-
ity are supported by the posthuman?” (3) At issue here is the poet’s 
attempt to rewrite humanism and extend humanist epistemology 
and ontology to feature new forms of posthuman subjectivity deeply 
rooted in her unsurpassed “American aesthetic of uncertainty.” For 
Howe, “the discourse of species, and with it the ethical problematics of 
our relations to nonhuman others” can “be treated largely as if species 
is always already a counter or cover for some other discourse” (Wolfe, 
Animal 124). In her view, the discourse of “nonhuman others” is an 
ideological smokescreen for historiography in which she is fundamen-
tally interested, “My poems always seem to be concerned with his-
tory” (Beckett 20), as she observes in an interview with Tom Beckett. 
History provides the possibility for humanity to confront its past, 
present, and future and to establish an ideal balance with the natural 
world on all levels. History has always demonstrated that humanity 
is not separated from the universe which it inhabits, and his relation-
ship with other beings extends far beyond the imagined limits. History 
reveals to humanity how its existence amounts to those experiences of 
encounters where there is a myriad of labyrinthine interactions among 
all entities in nature including human beings. To examine the notion 
of the posthuman in Howe’s poem, we have to focus on figurations 
of boundaries (especially between man and animal, animate and non-
animate, man and machine or technology) and the way she traces such 
transitions/transformations/crossings. In what follows, the authors 
attempt to provide a detailed reading of Howe’s poem “Periscope” to 
show how ample possibilities of posthuman encounters emerge within 
the poem. Central to our analysis is how Howe’s establishment of 
ontological unity between all beings facilitates the deconstruction of 
binary oppositions and a critical exploration of the ways in which bor-
ders between the human and the nonhuman and the animate and the 
inanimate are dynamically and continuously constructed, collapsed, 
and reconstructed.
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Posthuman subjectivities
The primeval phenomenon of posthuman subjectivity actually has 
an extended history, even dating back before the inception of human 
civilization. More than forty years ago, Ihab Hassan in his landmark 
essay “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” 
observed that posthumanism currently may appear as “a dubious ne-
ologism, the latest slogan, or simply another image of man’s recurrent 
self-hate. Yet posthumanism may also hint at a potential in our culture, 
hint at a tendency struggling to become more than a trend” (843). 
Hassan employs the term “posthumanism” to portray an era in which 
“the human form—including human desire and all its external repre-
sentations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned” 
(843). He “helplessly” envisages the demise of humanist ideology, de-
claring “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as 
humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call 
posthumanism’’ (843). Introducing the Titan Prometheus as a symbol 
of posthumanism, Hassan testifies to the fact that posthumanity has 
existed even long before the advent of human consciousness. He thinks 
of Prometheus as “a vague metaphor of a mind struggling with the 
One and the Many” (835). Prometheus’ mind, as Hassan announces, 
is where “Imagination and Science, Myth and Technology, Language 
and Number sometimes meet. […] Prometheus presages the marriage 
of Earth and Sky” (835). Only through this contradictory alliance “per-
haps, will posthumanism see the dubious light of a new day” (835).
Nevertheless, concepts such as “posthuman” and “posthumanism” 
have only recently been a matter of constant concern and a focus of 
critical debates. They have generated a new way of thinking, theoriz-
ing, and discussing the paradigm of human-nonhuman interaction, 
humanity’s potential collapse, and its past, present, and future pros-
pects. From the last decades of the twentieth century to the present, 
a range of philosophers and theorists have endeavoured to define and 
conceptualize the posthuman subjectivity in a great number of distinct 
ways and with a broad variety of outcomes, as the subject still continues 
to fascinate humanity. Much of the current reflections and arguments 
on posthuman theory is informed by critical and philosophical accounts 
advanced by theorists such as Donna J. Haraway, Neil Badmington, 
Nancy Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, Stefan Herbrechter, Rosi 
Braidotti, Pramod K. Nayar, Robert Pepperell, Francis Fukuyama, 
and Karen Barad, among many other scholars. They have fervently 
sought to reassess the human’s relation to the universe, raising serious 
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objections to the alleged centrality, self-sufficiency, and dignity of 
humanity as a glorified species in liberal humanistic discourses. In their 
views, the idea of the human agency has emerged as highly contingent 
and uncertain, depending on transitory set of circumstances. What lies 
at the heart of posthumanist philosophical thought is basically the idea 
that the human now engages in an array of relations with other enti-
ties as part of cosmological entanglements. Thus, the self is no longer 
perceived as an autonomous entity.
As such, posthumanism “isn’t posthuman at all—in the sense of 
being ‘after’ our embodiment has been transcended—but is only post-
humanist, in the sense that it opposes the fantasies of disembodiment 
and autonomy, inherited from humanism itself” (Wolfe, What Is xv). 
Posthumanism identifies a historical moment in which the human and 
non-human subjectivities have been severely transformed as a result 
of “the embeddedness and entanglement of the ‘human’ in all that it 
is not, in all that used to be thought of as its opposites or its others” 
(Wolfe, Animal 193). The “human” is lowered in status by its inabil-
ity to transcend the restrictions of the physical body and reasoning 
mind and the “nonhuman” is elevated in status to construct its own 
environment. Hayles perceives in posthumanism not the possibility of 
anti-humanism or the apocalypse but the possibility of a perfect and 
harmonious symbiosis “that will be conducive to the long-range sur-
vival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artificial, 
with whom we share the planet and ourselves” (291).
A specific set of political, historical, ideological, and environmen-
tal circumstances has contributed to the creation of the posthuman 
subject and led to reconceptualization of the relationship between 
humans and non-human species. The much-acclaimed human-
ist Tony Davies’ reformulation of the concept of humanity and his 
introduction of the notion of “becoming human” exactly demon-
strates the interdependency of the human and other nonhuman crea-
tures. Davies insists: “Humanity is neither an essence nor an end, 
but a continuous and precarious process of becoming human, a pro-
cess that entails the inescapable recognition that our humanity is on 
loan from others, to precisely the extent that we acknowledge it in 
them” (Davies 132). Through commitment to the rhetoric of becom-
ing, posthumanism envisions a fluid boundary between humans and 
nonhumans, and does not draw definite distinctions between them. 
Claire Colebrook, a leading Deleuzian scholar, in Gilles Deleuze, too, 
attends to the ontology of becoming: “The human becomes more than 
itself, or expands to its highest power, not by affirming its humanity, 
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nor by returning to animal state, but by becoming-hybrid with what 
is not itself.” (129) To open up innumerable possibilities for pos-
sible becomings, human beings should establish hybrid relations with 
other beings, which “creates ‘lines of flight’; from life itself we imagine 
all the becomings of life, using the human power of imagination to 
overcome the human” (129).
The posthuman entity is thus always in a state of flux, challenging 
absolute constructs and embracing “a becoming ontology,” or in Rosi 
Braidotti’s stipulation, “the ethics of becoming.” Braidotti uses the 
concept of figuration to account for the process of becoming. “A figu-
ration,” Braidotti asserts in The Posthuman, “is the expression of alter-
native representations of the subject as a dynamic non-unitary entity; it 
is the dramatization of processes of becoming. These processes assume 
that subject formation takes place in-between nature/technology; male/
female; black/white; local/global; present/past—in the spaces that flow 
and connect the binaries” (164). These in-between, interstitial states 
challenge the established modes of the subject’s representation, as they 
erase binary oppositions and place the humanistic hierarchies of beings 
into question. The in-between states seek to undercut a unitary image 
of human beings in the cosmos, as they explore to establish hybrid rela-
tions with animals, machines, monsters, mythical creatures, and ethe-
real and celestial beings. “As a brand of vital materialism,” Braidotti 
thus contends, posthumanism “contests the arrogance of anthropocen-
trism and the ‘exceptionalism’ of the Human as a transcendental cat-
egory. It strikes instead an alliance with the productive and immanent 
force of zoe, or life in its nonhuman aspects” (66). Braidotti thus privi-
leges zoe “the non-human, vital force of Life” over bios, or life as “that 
has traditionally been reserved for anthropos” (60). In the ensuing sec-
tion, the authors attempt to consider how Howe as a postmodern poet 
might approach posthuman representations in her experimental poem, 
in order to contest the alleged centrality of humanity, mostly drawing 
on Braidotti’s notion of posthuman subjectivities but also resorting to 
Brown’s “Thing Theory,” and Vermeulen’s “Posthuman Affect.”
Howe’s “Periscope”
“Periscope” is the third of Debths’ four sequences which drives its 
title from one of “late ‘picture-light’ paintings” by the renowned 
American artist Paul Thek (1933–1988) as Howe informs us in the 
“foreword” to her poetry collection. In Thek’s painting “a periscope 
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peers out of the water, which Howe links to the ‘Castaway’ chapter 
of Moby-Dick, in which the cabin boy Pip is abandoned in the open 
sea, sinks into the depths, and has a vision of ‘God’s foot upon the 
treadle of the loom’” (Hammer). The title of the poem is a telling 
one. The poet seems to take the deployment of the then extraordi-
nary technology of periscope to convey “some amount of reflection 
on the idea of perspective” (Tristan). The title indicates the desire 
to communicate a new perspective of humanity and its place in the 
universe. Periscope-like, the poem offers the desire for exploring the 
possibility of withdrawing from any anthropocentric or human-cen-
tered worldview. Instead, the poem privileges engagement with and 
immersion in the natural world to expand the possibilities of vision 
and to evoke “imagined” imageries rather than to capture only real 
images. The poet seems to deal with “the mechanics of verse as a 
technology for wonder” (Chiasson). The poem’s title implies that the 
speaker is below the surface of water, possibly in a submariner navi-
gating the alien sea or ocean. In this way, Howe provides a natural 
space to observe “cognition in the wild” and not in laboratory experi-
ments. The ethnographer and cognitive scientist Edwin Hutchins’ 
metaphor of “cognition in the wild” evokes “a sense of an ecology of 
thinking in which human cognition interacts with an environment 
rich in organizing resources” (Hutchins xiv). Drawing on Hutchins’ 
meticulous study of the navigational systems of oceangoing ships, 
Hayles claims that “the cognitive system responsible for locating the 
ship in space and navigating it successfully resides not in humans 
alone but in the complex interactions within an environment that 
includes both human and nonhuman actors” (Hayles 288). As such, 
the setting Howe chooses for her poem provides her with the op-
portunity to explore, nurture, and cultivate her special aims and to 
situate her poem in a posthumanist context, which makes thorough 
and direct interactions with the natural world possible.
The epigraph to the poem, “God’s foot upon the treadle of the 
loom,” alludes to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), which is itself 
an example of a posthumanistic novel. Ishmael, the narrator, and a 
junior member of the crew of the Pequod imagines that in the sea Pip 
had firsthand witnessed the wonders of “God’s foot upon the treadle of 
the loom” and had “glimpsed the very origins of the cosmos” (Horton 
237). Afterwards, Pip appears to the crew members “to be an idiot 
who speaks nonsense; to Ahab, though, Pip has the wisdom of heaven” 
(237). For his shipmates, “this madness is manifested foremost in the 
way in which the ocean has inflected Pip’s voice” (Packham 567). Pip’s 
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encounter with the utterly alien and nonhuman world of the ocean 
primarily affects his human language, thus conveying the attributes 
of other-than-human species’ communication systems. Initiating the 
poem with the image of Pip who speaks gibberish, Howe implies that 
her poem is going to be a tale of nonsense. Ahab too “sees Pip as evi-
dence of the plight his own special vision has revealed” (Corner 56). 
For him, Pip is an “orphaned and ‘abandoned’ child of the ‘frozen 
heavens,’ ‘the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man’” (56). He 
is thus rejected by the heavens and the crew and thrown into a state 
of otherness; he is transformed into a nonhuman other. Powerless and 
inarticulate in the face of the overwhelming power of the alien ocean, 
he stands somehow symbolically for all those inarticulate figures of his-
tory. In fact, Howe’s history-conscious poetry is, in a sense, supposed 
to give voice to those powerless figures of history. The poet attempts to 
present those figures who pass through the processes of “becomings” 
between human and nonhuman states. The poem thus begins with “the 
very origins of the cosmos,” hence conjuring a prehuman state of being. 
The poem, then, attempts to reconstruct the universe from scratch by 
the agency of a posthuman god, endowed with human characteristics. 
Moreover, this time the poet gives priority to the harmonious relation-
ship between human and nonhuman beings, rather than privileging the 
self as an autonomous, self-sufficient agency.
From the outset, the speaker of Howe’s poem attempts to efface 
the boundaries between the animate and the inanimate. “Closed book 
who stole / who away do brackets / signify emptiness was / it a rift in 
experience” (Howe, lines 1–4) cannot be defined as either inanimate 
or not inanimate, and necessarily needs to be labelled as posthuman. 
However, brackets do not “necessarily signify emptiness, but enclose 
parenthetical information about something—not directly related, per-
haps out of context, but certainly something, not a void” (“Notes on 
the Poem”). In this way, it seems that meaning is no longer accentu-
ated as an attribute of life in the posthuman era. This is the perspec-
tive Wolfe attempts to formulate while considering the question of 
posthumanism, “to describe the human and its characteristic modes of 
communication, interaction, meaning, social significations, and affec-
tive investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning 
from the ontologically closed domain of consciousness, reason, reflec-
tion” (Wolfe, What Is xxv). Thus, posthumanism manages to accom-
plish its undertaking, in case it disrupts or takes away meaning from 
humanity’s realm of consciousness to force it to see things anew in a 
fresh light.
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The speaker, in “Mackerel and porpoise / was this the last of us” 
(Howe, lines 5–6), intends to disrupt previously assumed clear distinc-
tions between humans and animals. In order to furnish ideal possibilities 
for establishing seamless continuities which unite all entities together, 
she here affirms that human beings should form hybrid relationships 
with all sentient beings. As such, the discourse of the Great Chain of 
Being can no longer rank all beings from the highest degrees of perfec-
tion down to the lowest ones. Raising the status of nonhuman animals, 
Fukuyama also confirms: “Many of the attributes that were once held 
to be unique to human beings—including language, culture, reason, 
consciousness, and the like—are now seen as characteristic of a wide 
variety of nonhuman animals.” (Fukuyama 144) The speaker thus blurs 
the human-animal boundary, so that her posthuman model upsets and 
displaces the established centrality of human beings and considers the 
human beings as just one part of a larger whole. Therefore, the duty of 
man on earth as a crowned creature of God is relegated to other crea-
tures and man’s dominion on earth is questioned. Humanity’s removal 
from an alleged privileged position, authority, and power vis-à-vis non-
human species could be understood in terms of biological, technologi-
cal, philosophical, social, cognitive and also ethical demotion of the 
human subject in the posthuman era. Howe here predominately thinks 
of human identity, consciousness, and body as elusive, ever-changing, 
fluid, and mutable realities, subjective and difficult to describe and cap-
ture rather than clearly defined and stable constructs. She perceives 
identity as a dynamic, transitional, and hybrid construct, not ever fro-
zen in a determined place and time. In the posthuman era, even the 
speaker sees herself as a hybrid figure, considering her characterizations 
as “‘sightseer,’ a pure voyeur, or ‘ghost,’ a felt but invisible presence. 
Or […] a transitional figure, monitoring the boundary between private 
and public, past and present: a ‘poet-caretaker’” (Chiasson).
Howe’s version of posthumanism, as the influential posthuman 
scholar Robert Pepperell proclaims, “is the posthumanism of embodi-
ment, which recognises hitherto concealed continuities between realms 
that were once held as distinct and bounded, such as mind and body, 
or human and machine” (Pepperell 28). This includes, as Pepperell 
points out, “the continuity between humans and everything else in 
the world, with a consequent loss of the human supremacy implicit 
in more extreme tendencies of humanism” (28). Howe also affirms 
this transition in humanity’s understanding of the universe, formerly 
acknowledging only the materiality of the real world: “Once when 
the real world / was our world in its nature.” (Howe, lines 17–18) 
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However, the narrator now gives credence to the idea of threshold 
and liminality which induces a sense of bewilderment: “to mind our 
would world / Threshold word little hinge / hope of bewilderment its / 
parchment memory sign.” (lines 19–22) It should be further noted that 
when the speaker talks about what it means to be the last human in 
the interrogative form, her words do not exude certainty, security, and 
mastery, since reason, the ability to determine the truth that convinces 
the human of its humanness is no longer at the foreground: cogito, 
ergo sum, the basic tenet of Réne Descartes’ philosophy can no longer 
provide a sense of comforting solace and safe haven for mankind in this 
era. The speaker later confirms the idea once more that in the posthu-
man era intelligence does not play a significant role in man’s life and 
progress as “intelligence sealed from us / Days and hours are blinds” 
(line 136–137).
The speaker soon conjures a border space: “These tallied scraps 
float / like glass skiffs quietly for / love or pity and all that” (Howe, 
lines 7–9). Certainly, the image of floating scraps “evokes the surface 
of water, which we’ve just learned periscopes can help to transcend 
and navigate” (“Notes on the Poem”). The water surface scene opens 
up ideal possibilities of interpretation in terms of a posthuman space 
of encounter between man and nature. The periscope carefully posi-
tions itself at the surface of water, at the liminal threshold of the border 
space between the exterior and the interior to establish a unique niche 
of understanding new posthuman subjectivities. The objects depicted 
through the poem and seen through the periscope become impreg-
nated with meaning and agency in such a way that they transcend the 
materiality of “objects.” They signify and embody a plethora of hidden 
meanings and states of interdependence not through human meaning-
making but through their relation to other creatures. Thus, objects 
are not really inanimate and fixed entities in space and time and they 
intrinsically possess a sense of momentum and dynamism, which can 
erode established hierarchical, binary oppositions.
Differentiating “objects” from “things,” Bill Brown in his seminal 
essay “Thing Theory” acknowledges the powerful agency of “things” 
as “what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere material-
ization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—their force as a 
sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which 
objects become values, fetishes, idols, and totems” (Brown 5). As such, 
“things” transcend the materiality of “objects.” “The story of objects 
asserting themselves as things,” as Brown contends, “is the story of a 
changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the 
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thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object rela-
tion” (4). “Things” in this formulation signify human beings’ intercon-
nections with history, technology, and the natural world to develop 
a sense of unity, harmony, and connection with all sentient beings. 
Likewise, each “thing” in this poem cultivates a sense of integration, 
continuity, and interconnectedness with human beings and with the 
world. However, as Brown also affirms, the reality of the “thing” can-
not be truly apprehended: “On the one hand, then, the thing baldly 
encountered. On the other, some thing not quite apprehended.” (5) 
The speaker also points to this fact when proclaiming: “If I knew what 
it is / I’d show it—but no.” (Howe, lines 52–53)
The speaker then displays her close affinity with mythology to bring 
to consciousness alternative models of the human-nonhuman rela-
tionship: “Cross counterclockwise via / cobbled childhood juvenalia 
/ to hobbled monosandalism” (Howe, lines 34–36). The speaker of 
Howe’s poem here makes use of the myth of monosandalism from 
Greek antiquity, which relates the story of mono-sandaled Jason’s 
ascension to the throne of Pelias who had formerly been warned of a 
prophecy to beware of a man with only one sandal (Daly 73). So, the 
sandal is likewise saturated with meaning, and can signify freedom 
from a despotic monarchy. The sandal also helps Jason to experience 
a hybrid identity to become the king of Iolcos in Thessaly after he was 
sent away to the care of the Centaur Chiron (Daly 73). Comparably, 
the motif of monosandalism helps the speaker to liberate oneself from 
absolute constructs of reality. Furthermore, in Howe’s poetry “empty 
spaces” also carry meaning: “Each word may be six six / razzle rungs 
it may be two / places at once in the old / secret escapades a vault” 
(lines 23–26). It is as if, as LaBarge argues, the speaker “has learned 
to climb ladders using the spaces between the steps. There is magic in 
the margins; the empty spaces around objects and words are filled with 
equivalent meaning”.
Objects also establish a network of affective relationships. The tal-
lied scraps’ exploration for the feeling of “love or pity and all that” 
(Howe, line 9) aims to bring about “a shift from human emotion to 
posthuman affect” in Pieter Vermeulen’s sense of the term in his essay 
“Posthuman Affect” (121). Bringing the resources of the “‘turn to 
affect,’” Vermeulen argues, “the passage of the human to the posthu-
man […] can be fruitfully described as a minimal emotive scenario” 
(123). Vermeulen notes how “the posthuman can be plotted as a nec-
essarily affective experience of the demise of the strictly codified, sub-
jective feelings that are associated with traditional notions of human 
Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi:     The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
199
subjectivity” (123). Liberal humanist subjectivity is thus dictated by 
recognizable and codified emotions. However, Vermeulen argues, “the 
demise of feeling that posthumanist thought seeks to enact generates 
second-order feelings that are less easily captured, defined, understood 
or reterritorialised onto the subject” (123). These “second-order feel-
ings” can act as an antidote to inertia and stasis of codified emotions, 
enabling all beings to achieve a new quality of existence, spreading the 
love and respect for all of the creatures that exist.
It is furthermore hinted several times in the poem that nothing 
is determinate or predictable: “Mystical accidentalism for / sound-
hemmed naught in / night’s botanical glossary” (Howe, lines 12–14); 
or “You sit in our tent of belief / and ask what to do with it / Faithful 
first then frivolous / Half scientific but good at / guessing by sensation 
you / look at a flame is it orange / within you or without you” (lines 
60–66). In the second instance, the narrator admits that everything is 
in the process of becoming, particularly sensations and feelings. The 
speaker even points to the metafictionality of her work: “In another 
poem I’m in a / perfectly black room with / my eyes directed on this / 
sheet of paper to make a / long story short I will tell / Baba Yaga in 
her tinsel hut / to heal your hobble foot” (lines 67–73). The poem’s 
metafictive elements characteristically demonstrate a defiant interroga-
tion and refutation of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. The narrator 
also seeks remedy for the addressee’s “hobble foot” from Baba Yaga, a 
posthuman hybrid figure.
Overall, in “Periscope,” the speaker makes use of supernatural 
elements and figures such as “Pleiads” (Howe, line 11), “monosan-
dalism” (line 36), “Baba Yaga” (line 72), “Achilles” (line 75), “Peter 
Rugg” (line 90), “the Galoshes of Fortune” (line 94), “Lethe” (line 
123), and “Helios” (line 124). The transformations in these myths 
manifestly debunk the boundary between human and nonhuman and 
throw into high relief hybrid constructs. In an attempt to deconstruct 
the myth of humanity’s centrality anchored in the philosophy of lib-
eral humanism and to help readers feel a sense of awareness of human-
ity’s relatedness to the whole of the creatures, the poem also retells the 
Slavic myth of Baba Yaga, a supernatural being in Slavic folklore who 
appears as a deformed witch. “Baba Yaga” along with her hut stand-
ing on chicken legs provides an image of the grotesque. In her essay 
“Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others: De-oedipalizing the 
Animal Other,” Braidotti maintains that some modes of embodiment 
are illustrative of “dialectical otherness (nonwhite, nonmasculine, 
nonnormal, nonyoung, nonhealthy)” and of “categorical otherness 
PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022
200
(zoomorphic, disabled, or malformed)” and thus “cast on the other side 
of normality—that is, viewed as anomalous, deviant, and monstrous” 
(526). The speaker’s allusion to visitors’ request of Baba Yaga’s hut to 
turn around and face them, “‘Hut, hut! Stand with your back to the 
forest, your front to me’” (qtd. in Johns 2) transparently reveals that 
inanimate things can be granted life and sentience as well. Verifying 
nonhuman life, the narrator thus inquires the addressee not to stand 
in the way of the hut’s turn: “To stagger and fall to the / nether side 
of the hut never / to stand with your back to / the forest because the 
hut / when it wants to allegedly / rushes this way then that” (Howe, 
lines 101–106).
Drawing on the story of Achilles, the son of King Peleus and the sea 
goddess Thetis, Howe implies how the greatest Greek warrior in the 
Trojan War became seemingly invulnerable through his immersion 
and engagement with other-than-human agency. In order to thwart 
his son’s destiny and grant him the boon of immortality, his mother 
plunged her infant’s whole body into the sacred river of Styx, which 
separates the world of mortality from the underworld of immortality. 
This act of immersion rendered every part of his body invulnerable 
except for the heel, held by his mother. Achilles’ transformation to 
an invulnerable state obviously manipulates the boundaries between 
different classes of beings and elevates him to the status of gods. 
However, as the speaker reminds us, “Achilles has his heel what’s / left 
to a thirdhand sightseer” (Howe, lines 75–76). Implied here is that his 
identity is still hybrid, part human and part god. Thus, even a posthu-
man creature is doomed to extinction, as the speaker elsewhere in the 
poem “makes it clear that we cannot truly escape either our destinies 
or fatalities” (Messerli); observing “I sold your shadow for you too / 
Let’s let bygones be bygones / Dust to dust we barely reach” (Howe, 
lines 57–59).
The speaker also makes use of American author and lawyer William 
Austin’s 1824  tale, Peter Rugg, the Missing Man, which later influ-
enced Nathaniel Hawthorne and made Austin known as a “Precursor 
of Hawthorne.” Peter Rugg is arguably the most challenging figure in 
Howe’s poem, yielding two alternative interpretations. In one inter-
pretation he is probably the flattest character of Howe’s poem. His 
identity is fixed and unchangeable and he cannot escape his ill-fated 
destiny. He is responsible for his own ruin, but the punishment may be 
unjustifiable without any knowledge of the nature and seriousness of 
his offense. The speaker is “Telling the story of a man / who is respon-
sible for his / own ruin and is inexplicably / condemned to wander in / 
Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi:     The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
201
a one-horse chair eternally / around Boston from which / histori-
cal song he himself / cannot free himself with a / wave of his hand 
whither—” (Howe, lines 80–88). The choice of the term “man” rather 
than “ghost” intimates that Peter Rugg does not possess a fluid body. 
That is, he is not a posthuman figure or has not accommodated him-
self to the posthuman condition yet. But another plausible insight that 
Howe tries to throw into high relief is Peter Rugg’s nomadic subjec-
tivity, one which, to use Braidotti’s terms, “requires dis-identification 
from established, nation-bound identities” (Braidotti, Posthuman 54). 
The development of this nomadic subjectivity, as Braidotti suggests, “is 
political at heart, but it has a strong affective core made of convictions, 
vision and active desire for change” (54). Peter Rugg’s nomadic way 
of life can also destabilize Cartesian dualisms of mind/body in which 
mind and body are essentially two distinct substances.
The narrator is even infected and inflected by animal otherness: “In 
the old days I used to sit / up late till an owl appeared / Negative 
infinity melodrama / I shall never forget you half- / way owl shadow 
marauder / How you flew over and over” (Howe, lines 95–100). And 
then “shadow” seems to cast a spectral quality over the materials of the 
poem: “Come lie down on my shadow / Being infinitely self-conscious 
/ I sold your shadow for you too” (lines 55–57). A shadow can be a 
posthuman figure, as it does not possess a body; it cannot be embod-
ied. Moreover, a shadow does not show any “markers of bodily differ-
ence” (Hayles 4–5); its very presence subverts and transgresses fixed 
identities and bodies. In the Haylesian discourse, “the liberal subject 
possessed a body but was not usually represented as being a body […] 
the body is understood as an object for control and mastery rather than 
as an intrinsic part of the self,” whereas posthumanism assumes that 
“embodiment is not essential to human being” (4–5). Also figuring 
several times in the poem are “ghosts” (“A nearest faint ghost alias—”, 
line 116, or “our ghosts appear in mirrors,” line 128), blurring the 
distinction between the living and the dead, conjuring a sense of terror. 
In his essay “État Présent: Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms,” Colin 
Davis observes: “Attending to the ghost is an ethical injunction insofar 
as it occupies the place of the Levinasian Other: a wholly irrecuper-
able intrusion in our world, which is not comprehensible within our 
available intellectual frameworks, but whose otherness we are respon-
sible for preserving.” (53) Furthermore, the shadow’s or the ghost’s 
posthuman body, as Jack Halberstam and Ira Livingston suggest, is 
only “a screen, a projected image” (Halberstam and Livingston 3). The 
narrator’s spectral, uncanny encounters with shadows and ghosts are a 
PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022
202
posthuman agenda of the need for establishing a new relationship with 
other-than-human species and beings in order to develop an empathy 
with the rest of the creatures.
However, at one part in the poem, the speaker observes “Let’s be 
human we can’t carry / the Galoshes of Fortune home” (Howe, lines 
93–94). With the allusion to Hans Christian Andersen’s 1938 fairy 
tale of “the Galoshes of Fortune,” telling the story of a magic pair of 
time-travelling boots (line 94), and the parrot’s witty saying “Let’s be 
human” (line 93; Andersen 147), the speaker intimates that one’s aim 
is not going to travel to another historical period to fulfill one’s post-
humanistic wishes. Despite one’s lofty aspiration to manipulate time 
miraculously, the speaker does not, however, intend to return to the 
past which is “all darkness and dirt” (de Mylius 175). But, in order 
to manipulate time and in turn the world of the living, the speaker 
stops time at one point in the poem to return to that point later: “Do 
you hear the clock lock / Just wait till I turn back—” (Howe, lines 
107–108). Even infinitesimal particles are of significance in the post-
human era in developing alternative identities: “When stars are not 
so faint / and new astronomers assign / numbers one may count one 
/ other and each secretly jot / down in units and tenths for / photo-
metrics other instant / infinitesimal arc predicates” (line 109–115). As 
such, photometry as “the science of light measurement” can bring into 
foreground even the most remote heavenly bodies, seemingly out of 
reach of human beings.
Later on, the speaker endeavors to portray a new form of com-
munity which transcends human subjectivity both in time and place: 
“Unseen in canoe or cut glass / skiff scudding past centuries / on another 
map kept secret” (Howe, lines 117–119). To navigate the boundaries 
between the realm of the living and that of the dead, the speaker even 
summons the images of the chthonic underworld: “Setting sun then 
Lethe where / ever fabled swan-white Helios / in our own time under-
ground” (lines 123–125). The reference to the myth of “Lethe” signi-
fies that her posthuman figures are conferred the blessing of drinking 
the water of the underworld river of oblivion to forget their mortal 
lives on earth. They are allowed to surpass the “dark” past and look to 
the “bright” future. Furthermore, the Titan God of the Sun, Helios, 
who once presided over the heavenly and earthly bodies and observed 
everything from above, is positioned “in our own time underground” 
(line 125). So, Howe through her speaker violates the hierarchy of the 
universe once more to thoughtfully and thoroughly prepare the ground 
for a new posthuman state of the world.
Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi:     The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
203
The speaker of Howe’s poem also challenges the human thought: “In 
this second place we think / we only think we think though” (Howe, 
lines 126–127). This nicely epitomizes the so-called posthuman con-
dition. Howe seems to confirm that “I do not think, I am thought. 
You do not speak, you are spoken. Thought and speech, which for the 
humanist had been the central substance of identity, are located else-
where, and the self is a vacancy” (Davies 60). The narrator of Howe’s 
poem also reiterates the same proposition, testifying “What I lack 
is myself” (Howe, line 54), which clearly portrays “the post-human 
predicament” (Braidotti, Posthuman 1). More precisely, to live in the 
posthuman era, the nature of thought should be changed, as Wolfe 
informs: “we must take yet another step, another post-, and realize that 
the nature of thought itself must change if it is to be posthumanist” 
(Wolfe, What Is xvi).
Howe, through her speaker, also uncannily portrays a miniature 
microcosm of cosmological entanglements through punctuation 
marks of comma and semicolon: “This side I will show miniature / 
network entanglements comma” (Howe, lines 129–130); and “half-
hesitation semi-colon semi- / colon” (lines 132–133). Furthermore, 
the speaker identifies “full stop” as “Blessings,” as it can, in a sense, 
liberate man out of a web of labyrinthine relationships existing 
between humans and non-humans (line 131). Reiterated in the poem 
is also the idea of the insignificant position of humans in the universe 
and its interconnectedness and interdependence with nature: “yes the 
sea lies about us / Our tiniest on earth as such” (lines 133–134). As 
Jean-François Lyotard also observes: “The human species is not the 
hero of the fable. It is a complex form of organizing energy. Like the 
other forms, it is undoubtedly transitory. Other, more complex forms 
may appear that will win out over it. Perhaps one of these forms is 
preparing itself through techno-scientific development right from the 
time when the fable is being recounted” (Lyotard 93). So, the once 
deep faith in humanity has been diminished and it is no longer able 
to reign in the posthuman world as more intricate forms of life with 
complex designs have taken its place. On the other hand, the speaker 
believes “each new extreme outvies” (Howe, line 139), signifying 
extreme forms of life are more vigorous and competitive compared to 
the ordinary forms of life.
In the last part of the poem, the speaker directs the readers’ atten-
tion to the fact that she is part of a posthuman world in which no 
logic dominates: “Humming octaves with wild / trills of magic and 
symbolic  / logic a not-being-in-the-no” (Howe, lines 143–145). 
PKn, letnik 45, št. 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2022
204
The speaker’s humming octaves with the wild nature in the last three 
lines of the poem authenticate Braidotti’s “transversality of relations” 
which “traces transversal connections among material and sym-
bolic, concrete and discursive lines of relation or forces” (Braidotti, 
Posthuman 95). Braidotti’s transversality “actualizes zoe-centred egal-
itarianism as an ethics and also as a method to account for forms of 
alternative, posthuman subjectivity” (95). This concept reifies an eth-
ics “based on the primacy of the relation, of interdependence, values 
zoe in itself” (95). In sum, Howe’s poem valorizes zoe-saturated forms 
of posthuman subjectivity rather than bio-saturated forms of liberal 
humanist subjectivity.
Conclusion
In “Periscope,” Howe uncannily enacts posthumanist perspectives, 
putting at the center of her poem nonhuman entities in an attempt 
to deconstruct the myths of humanity’s superiority and authority over 
the natural world. Howe employs experimental syntax techniques and 
new lexical coinages to challenge the human’s assumption of unlimited 
knowledge and cognitive powers. On the other hand, Howe’s posthu-
man entities interconnected in multiple transversal relations are en-
dowed with the productive life-force of zoe, which provides a space of 
hybrid configuration and dynamic reconfiguration of identity. Howe’s 
“posthumanism of embodiment” traces post/humanity’s trajectory 
from the moment of existence up to the present moment, to construct 
a more comprehensive picture of history in which different forms of 
life are interconnected and inseparable. As such, Howe’s poem does 
not create rigid unitary binaries and hierarchies, but captures the vi-
brancy of “in-between states” through the depiction of mythological, 
historical, and literary figures whose very transformations destabilize 
the boundary between human and nonhuman, and animate and in-
animate. The poem’s commitment to the becoming ontology gives rise 
to the depiction of characters who prefer to remove their “Galoshes of 
Fortune,” to drink the water of Lethe, to forget their mortal lives and 
look to a bright and promising future.
Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi:     The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
205
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Hossein Pirnajmuddin, Maryamossadat Mousavi:     The Posthuman in Susan Howe’s “Periscope”
207
»Skuša in pliskavka / Je bil to zadnji od nas?«: 
postčloveško v Periskopu Susan Howe
Ključne besede: ameriška poezija / Howe, Susan / nomadska subjektivnost / 
posthumanizem / drugost
Razprava se osredotoča na branje pesmi Susan Howe »Periscope« (2017), v 
kateri pesnica izpodbija vprašanja liberalnih humanističnih smeri razmišljanja 
o domnevno osrednjem in privilegiranem položaju človeka, hkrati pa odpira 
nove načine za reprezentacijo ljudi v odnosu do tistega, kar ni človeško. Štu-
dija, ki temelji na konceptih »nomadske subjektivnosti«, »upodabljanja« in 
»transverzalnosti« Rosi Braidotti, »teorije stvari« Billa Browna in »postčlo-
veškega vpliva« Pietra Vermeulena, preučuje, kako pesničina preokupacija z 
delovanjem vsega ne-človeškega, ki je upodobljeno v pesmi, vodi v posthuma-
nistično interpretacijo. Preučuje tudi, kako pripovedovalec prevprašuje meje 
med človeškim in ne-človeškim, živim in neživim, da bi priklical nenavadne 
učinke, ki se najbolje uresničijo v obliki postčloveškega kljubovanja liberal-
nim humanističnim modelom subjektivnosti. Izkaže se, da pesnica vzpostavlja 
sugestivno vizionarsko angažiranost ter srečanje z naravnim svetom in »antro-
pomorfiziranimi stvarmi«, da bi prebudila zgodovinsko zavest, ki bi dala glas 
neartikuliranemu Drugemu.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.111(73).09-1Howe S.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i2.11