Relational Practice and Collective Solidarity as Alternative Futures in Newitz’Automatic Noodle: A Braidottian Posthumanist Analysis

Abstract

In Automatic Noodle (2025),  Newitz portrays a world of AI creatures in post-war San Francisco building a restaurant that is a place of true other social forms. This article proposes that the novel's most philosophically relevant side is its representation of relational practice and collective solidarity as material conditions for alternative futures that are subversive of Human Ontological Exceptionalism (OE), and challenges the ontological superiority of the human being. Based on Braidotti's (2013) posthumanist framework, the analysis focuses on five passages from the novel, using Belsey's (2005) textual analysis method and applying its principles of affirmative ethics, metamorphosis, and nomadic subjectivity. The analysis reveals that the novel enacts three particular alternative future scenarios. First of all, the restaurant community is a mobile population of members who are joined voluntarily by caring for one another, not by business necessity or institutional designation. Second, the practice of honest food-making is a metamorphosis in the Braidottian sense because, the AI beings use instruments of war and commercial bondage to become instruments of real communal nourishment. Third, that the transmission of Staybehind's war memories to Sweetie is a practice of collective solidarity whereby grief is distributed and, in this instance, true kinship is forged within the community. This article can be seen to make two contributions to the study of AI fiction in the fields of posthumanism: the first is a systematic analysis of Automatic Noodle (2025) in the light of Braid's philosophy of possibilities, and the second is the novel's material grounding of alternative futures without being ideologically asserted.

Keywords:  affirmative ethics, metamorphosis,  collective solidarity, alternative futures, human ontological exceptionalism