by J J Cohen
I flew to Detroit last Thursday to participate in the
Journal of Narrative Theory annual Dialogue. This year's topic was
Nonhumans: Ecology, Ethics, Objects and I was scheduled to present with
Tim Morton. My plane was a bit delayed arriving due to severe weather in Ohio and Pennsylvania, but I didn't take the extra forty minutes we spent circling the airport to be an omen of anything to come. It was.
The event began beautifully.
Craig Dionne, who had labored to make the day perfect, started with some remarks about the objectives of the series and his hopes for the evening. Eileen Joy then introduced Tim and me, connecting our work in ways that were generous and illuminating. I began my presentation, which I'd timed carefully to work with an automated PowerPoint of photographs of stone and flame that I've taken over my past few years of travel. Five minutes into the talk and the audience had heard me begin the framing of the project (and seen projected a makeshift
inuksuit on the shore of southern Maine, the entrance to Newgrange, candles burning in Sagrada Familia, and pebbles on a Jewish grave in Montparnasse). A garbled announcement intruded from the hallway, but I spoke over it, assuming it had nothing to do with us. Then a man entered the room and announced that we needed to take shelter immediately as we were under a tornado warning. He led us to a large, windowless auditorium into which everyone in the EMU student center had been packed. The air conditioning was not yet functional (it being only March) so we sat in that noisy space together for the next two hours and watched on a giant screen the progress of the F3 tornado as it descended nearby. Out of boredom, a student group recited poetry. Some Girl Scouts engaged in Duck Duck Goose. I pretended I needed to use the restroom several times so that I could look at the deluge outside. You can read quite a vivid (and affirmative) account of the unfolding events here. Fortunately -- miraculously, really -- no one was injured by this whirlwind, but many homes in a nearby town were smashed.
The strange thing is that when we were evacuated to the shelter I was just arriving at the portion of my paper about bolted doors bursting open and the elements or some monster rushing inside.
After the long, hot duration of the auditorium we were given an all clear and returned to the room to continue the event. I told Craig I was perfectly willing to condense my talk on the spot to a ten minute overview and give up on a performance. It seemed to me that we had all the conditions in place for the emergence of something memorable: one of those rare events when formality dissolves and everyone admits that they've already bonded because of what has unfolded and instead of a talk you have a conversation, one in which everything can change. At that point, honestly, I was more interested in a vigorous Q&A than in being an actor with a visual accompaniment: the tornado had intruded and its aftermath should not be to carry on as if the elemental relations had not been profoundly altered. So I gave my brief version, Tim read his own paper very quickly, and then we had a far-reaching discussion of why all of this matters anyway. It was great.
Here, below, is a slightly expanded version of the paper I would have delivered. It incorporates some material that will appear in the Ecomaterialism essay on "Fire" I co-wrote with Stephanie Trigg, and no doubt the stone sections will find their way into the book I am supposedly composing. Imagine lovely pictures of stones and fires dissolving into each other as you read it and you'll have the effect of my PowerPoint as well.
Let me know what you think.
----------------
Elemental Relations
In
truth we know that the wind is its blowing. Similarly the stream is the
running of water. And so, too, I am what I am doing. I am not an agent
but a hive of activity. If you were to lift off the lid, you would find
something more like a compost heap than the kind of architectural structure
that anatomists and psychologists like to imagine.
(Tim Ingold, “Clearing
the Ground”)
How
then can we claim that roads and buildings are part of the material world, if
rain and frost are not? And where would we place fire and smoke, molten lava
and volcanic ash, not to mention liquids of all kinds from ink to running
water?
(Tim Ingold, “Materials Against Materiality”)
Today
I’d like to explore with you what happens when we produce a story, an ethics
and a world with the elements.
This
project may seem retrograde and humanistic, but only because I am going to
admit from the start that we’ve fucked up the world we inhabit. Unless we can refashion our relations to
materiality and objects and the nonhuman, we may end up in a grey place of stumps,
fumes and sludge – like the ending of The
Lorax, when the grumpy little ecologist hoists himself by his keister and
vanishes into the smog (though in the film version I hear he drives away in a
Mazda SUV). Yet even if we wind up schlupping across a dark ecology, that’s not
the end.[1] From
Tim Morton I have taken that sonorous word schlup,
which sounds like it ought to be Yiddish but isn’t, as well as the notion of a
dark ecology; and as Tim insists, even toxic sludge possesses aesthetic power and,
like mountains and SUVs, numbers among the “irreducibly unique” objects that
compose our world. Sludge is produced (by humans, by factories, by elements) and
is likewise productive (of feelings, of stories, even – perversely - of life).
So
let’s start with the blunt fact of production,
that consummate noun of relations. Tim Ingold argues that “to produce” is an
intransitive verb: whether affects, perceptions, artworks, story, or toxic
matter, we insistently produce. Ingold
is speaking only of humans, but the nontotalizable amalgam of forces and
substances that we call the world likewise produces without necessary object. Among
its products are numerous recording devices: things that inscribe, transmit and
intensify relation. Our longest functioning clock and fullest archive are
geological strata, lithic pages filled with monsters and primal history and
future destinations. Other libraries include tree rings, ice cores and DNA,
even if these devices hold more data than evident story. If narrative is a
history minded yet future-saturated process of artful connection-forging, then
humans are among the world’s most finely attuned story machines. Only stone has
fulfilled this charge better than we have.[2]
Narrative
is not merely human, but a mechanism, being or object exterior to any author
and itself alive, as Eileen Joy has inspirationally traced in her recent work.[3] A
worlding and a voice for nonhumans, narrative is one instance among many of the
artworks and monuments created by the volatile composite which in convenient
shorthand we designate the world. Through ceaseless human and inhuman
generation emerges a densely populated thingscape. Differences between objects
and bodies are not necessarily keen, but that is not to say that the world is
undifferentiated: as our various object oriented ontologies have insisted,
everything has its integrity, dignity, and mystery. With humans and inhumans
alike, then, we will ideally foster ethical relation: complicated, hesitant, consequence-minded
interconnection that thickens, fructifies and affirms.
The
elemental relations I’ll trace depend upon narrative, the substance through
which meshes, mangles and networks are articulated, documented, vitalized. Narrative
provides Graham Harman the vehicles for his myths and poetic flights, Ian
Bogost his estrangement apparatus, Tim Morton his multimedia machinery of
envisioning, crafting and dissemination. As Tim writes:
Reading
a text is a profoundly ecological act, because ecology, at bottom, is
coexistence (with others, of course), which implies interdependence.[4]
Acts of reading are acts of ecology,
which must in turn be ethical acts. Reading a text is an action performed with
something already agentic. Don’t get me wrong: I realize we’ve turned away from
the linguistic turn, and I am not arguing for the primacy of text over reality.
Today I want to follow how narrative -- which is at base a propinquity that
triggers relations and transmits their burgeoning or failures – how ecological narrative
is a kind of nonhuman substantiality intimately related to the ethics of
worlding. Narrative is not the only means we possess for plumbing our
environmental entanglements, but it is among the most efficacious. Story-making
is our most potent magic. It’s elemental. That sounds quite abstract, I know,
so I will ground this investigation in the foundational, in that through which
humans humanized themselves. My argument engages the most intractable of
materials and pursues the most fleeting. To get elemental I will turn to inscriptive
stone and combustive fire: one is archival, the other obliterative; one the
material of our earliest surviving tools, the other a chemical process through
which we transformed every landscape into which we stepped.
Smallerthan gods and larger than atoms, the elements offer a human-scale entry into nonhuman
relations. The elements are amenable allies because unlike vast divinities or
minuscule particles their narratives are noisy but audible, their activity energetic
and obvious. I’m most interested in the slowest and the swiftest, rock and flame,
because they are the most challenging to contain within customary frames:
though both are processes as much as substances, we human story-making devices don’t
naturally inhabit lithic or igneous temporalities. Our moderate duration is
closer to air and water. Yet fire and stone likewise flow, at least when we
accept their invitation to abandon anthropocentric measures of time. My
analysis travels from the present day to the Middle Ages and prehistory. Since
humans are narrative machines, and since stories archive the fertile past and pulse
with futurity, I concentrate on old tales. Like Stonehenge, they have had more
time to draw meanings to themselves.
Our
elemental confederates are more ancient still. Their intimacy extends to
billions of years. They’ll remain here together long after we’re gone. Despite
my invocation of inhuman time scales, I’m not going to tell a story indifferent
to homo sapiens: that’s too easy.
Dreaming a world emptied of human presence, like dreaming the apocalypse, often
suggests a failure of the imagination: ridding the world of its most
troublesome occupants instead of committing to the more difficult project of
laboring to foster the ethical relations required to compose a more just worldedness.
I am not arguing that elements do not relate to each other on their own,
outside of human terms. As Graham Harman has made clear, when “the gap between humans and world” is
“privileged over the gaps between tree and wind, or fire and cotton” (Prince of Networks 67), we end up
reinscribing a tiresome anthropocentricity that measures all things solipsistically,
as if humans were the apex of the universe rather that one creative and
productive agent among many. Time neither culminates nor ends at the
Anthropocene, and even though we are irremediably human it does not follow that
the measure of all things should be our limited senses.
Yet
this object oriented realization does not allow us to wave good-bye to an earth
we’ve ruined, departing for realms that aren’t so postlapsarian, Edens that
remain unspoiled because it’s impossible to dwell in them. We are not the Lorax
and we can’t hoist ourselves above the clouds. Through human scale elemental
relations I hope to avoid scientism and theology, roaming a world without atoms
(no electron microscopes or ardor for precision required) and a world without
gods (no Big Other so no answers in advance, and no outside to what we’re
intractably within). Our world: a
co-inhabited realm of humans and inhumans, neither the measure of the other, a
stormy fiery watery earthy text-littered expanse that isn’t anthropocentric,
but that also isn’t indifferent to me as I am telling you this story and you who
listen and consider, for a while, how roiling the ground beneath us might be,
how inadequately or well we have constructed our shelters – this very
auditorium – with and against the elements, what happens when the door blows
open and something unexpected enters.
We
travel to medieval Iceland, and two stories of sudden advent. In both a door
will burst from its hinges and a dangerous stranger will arrive.
Hold
on.
A
Story of Fire and Water, Rock and Gale
Twelve men warm themselves round flames in a tempest-battered hall. The sea
rages, thunder at the rocks, but the men drink beer against the elements. A
troll bursts through the door, his garments made of ice. They attack the
creature with sticks pulled from the blaze. The next morning where the hall once
stood is seen only “a huge pile of ashes, and in the ashes were many human
bones.”[5]
A
Second Elemental Story
Travelling with merchants who fear they
will not survive the night without fire, the warrior Grettir strips to his
tunic and swims across a stormy harbor towards a blaze. Encrusted in briny
icicles, he enters the hall with a tub to convey some logs. He is attacked
immediately. The straw on the floor ignites. Grettir returns. When the
merchants seek their benefactors the next day, they find only “a huge pile of
ashes, and in the ashes were many human bones” (Grettir’s Saga 38).
Two
stories of burst doors and elemental intrusion, but they are both the same
story, a diptych of narrative perspectives. The fourteenth-century Grettir’s Saga contains both within a
single narrative unfolding: troll and warrior are one. The saga is an intricately
woven story of a warrior who had the misfortune to be born as the Viking Age
dwindled into farmsteads. From his youth Grettir is exceptional in size and
strength. The son of a farmer, he finds himself too large to be contained by a
pastoral frame. Through
the eyes of the twelve men on the Norwegian shore, icy Grettir bursting into
their revel is a monster, barely distinguishable from the elements that keep
them in the hall; from his own point of view, Grettir is undertaking a heroic
act, a supremely cultural endeavor. Only after the bleak revelations of the next
day will he realize what he, hungry flames and the clinging sea have ignited. Grettir’s
decapitation on a lonely island will be the culmination, almost twenty years later,
of the chain of events sparked by his swimming for fire here.
Grettir’s saga unfolds with slow precision,
its intricacy driven by its perspectivism. Few details go to waste. Yet despite
its capacious ambit, Grettir’s saga
reveals the anthropocentric limits of all texts. The tale of the stolen fire is
narrated from Grettir’s point of view as well as from that of the men within
the besieged hall. As Skapti the lawman says before rendering judgment on Grettir’s
deed, “a story is always half told if only one side speaks” (46). But isn’t
there a third side? What about the jetties of land that anchor the narrative,
the rocky places of refuge without which all the men might have been swept to
their cold deaths? What of the sea that swells and pummels, the ice and hail
that immobilize through relentless bombardment? The perturbed air that with its
gusts threatens one group with hypothermia, and cannot lessen the merriment of
the other, secure from its bite? What about the fire that shimmers, warms,
consumes, and is transported? No less than incinerated sailors, tiresome merchants
and unlucky warriors, these elements must possess story. Water is the Viking
roadway, stony islands their farms and bivouacs, the matter of foundation. Flames
that reduce timbers and men to ash exert material as well as narrative agency:
as the transmutation of substance; the combustive vanishing of stories that
might have been; as the ignition of narrative chains that will end in Grettir’s
death. Human actors in the saga jostle with a swarm of nonhuman characters. Even
humans become objects of a sort, sometimes walking in death, forming their
uncanny alliances with subterranean spaces or the shimmer of the moon behind
winter clouds. These objects and elements are active, effective, powerful. Like
the undead humans, lively in their afterlife, they have compelling stories to
unfold.
When graves refuse to still their
occupants, we might worry about the unfinished business of ghosts that return.
But we also might not limit our attention to human bodies: what about
sepulchral spaces themselves? Might they also be restless, even in a way alive,
and might the wandering of the dead convey that material vitality? The Old
Icelandic term for what we’d call a zombie or vampire is draugr or, more interestingly, aptrgangr,
“return-walker,” a person still moving after he is supposed to have been
reduced to a corpse’s inanimation. The dead are supposed to be as immobile as
the stones beneath which they are buried; but what if those rocks also reveal
themselves as exerters of unexpected agency, holders of an uncanny life? Rock
is our most inert substance, our cliché for inaction, our symbol for givenness,
an element that Heidegger declared weltlos
(worldless), the very substance of the impassive Real. We found our lives upon
a base of stone but do not take stone’s power to initiate into account. What if
we did?
Our myths might change. Having thought
that he was clever enough to outwit the gods, Sisyphus is doomed to roll a
boulder up a mountain, only to have the rock fall repeatedly back. Yet Michel
Serres argues that we impoverish the story’s possibilities when all we behold
is an allegory of transgression and justice:
We never see anything but ourselves …
What if, for once, we looked at the rock that is invariably present before our
eyes, the stubborn object lying in front of us?
Serres explores what happens when we
find in the tumbling stone of Sisyphus not the outcome of a judicial process
(as if a court of law has sovereignty over materiality), but an agency that
does not originate in the human and might operate indifferent to crime and
punishment. Attention to the weight of the rock upon the shoulders of Sisyphus
gives the lithic a voice that raises the narrative’s ethical stakes, allowing
that the stone might be something more than a prop. For Émilie Hache and Bruno
Latour, however, Serres does not push the perspective shift far enough. His
rock is the plaything of physics. Whether gravity or justice moves the boulder,
the stone itself remains inert. What if “storms, heat waves, and glaciers
taking shape or changing shape before our eyes” – all the elements that roil
our ecologies – had the power to “compel us to remix science and politics,” to
rethink with slow care our relations to materiality, this time with less
anthropocentricity, less moral certitude (“Morality or Moralism” 323)? When the
world is figured as a wilderness of forces alien to us, a collection of
resources for mastery and profligate consumption, then its elements become that
against which we build a house and hope the door holds firm. Yet if through and
with these same forces we devise modes of deliberative coinhabitance, we will
better discern the network of relations that bind us to the destructive and
creative powers of the nonhuman. Ethics is best served not by certainty and
prescription but hesitation and tentative connection, a carefulness fostered
through multifarious rather than comfortably anthropocentric narratives. The
task of ethics is not simply to unmask, debunk, or demystify. Critique
typically strives to enlighten by revealing the social constructedness of its
objects (as if construction were a kind of untruth) or the false consciousness
of its texts, by a revelation of a reality beyond mere appearances. Ethics,
especially an environmental and thereby elemental ethics, might instead embrace
a process of composition in which nature and culture are inseparable and “there
is no world of beyond.”[6]
This process of production and composing might also be described as a call to occupy.
But how to occupy an element? Let’s
start with the most difficult case, rock. Stone is our trope for immobility.
Water undulates, air is ceaseless in its agitations, fire leaps so quickly we
need time lapse to capture its motility, but earth stays put.[7] Stone is the fixed point from which origins may proceed, moorage in a volatile
world. Our lapidary nouns arrive saturated in metaphor, our vocabulary for the
commencement and secure construction of even that which is immaterial. “Written
in stone” denotes the permanence the lithic bestows upon the verbal. Moses
transports the Ten Commandments from Sinai incised upon stone tablets. The
petrification of these words is the declaration of their originary status and
sacred permanence.[8] Stonehenge and the menhirs of Brittany have
survived far longer than the peoples who erected them. Immobile, immune almost
to time, stone signifies material endurance.[9]
Yet stone seldom makes good on its
promised stability. “Rocky” mean precarious, troubled, unsteady. Landslides and
earthquakes reveal the sporadic rapidity of earthly motion. For all its petric
durability Moses shatters in anger the first edition of the Ten Commandments.
The medieval travel writer John Mandeville describes a sea composed of shifting
gravel, gray pebbles constant in their surge. The seventh-century encyclopedist
Isidore of Seville went so far as to grant earth the same restless mobility as
its three elemental siblings: “The world (mundus)
is so named, because it is always in motion (motus), for no rest is granted to its elements” (Etymologies 3.29).
Isidore’s insight is a prescient
summation of two related philosophical arguments, Actor Network Theory (aligned
with Bruno Latour and Andrew Pickering, among many others) and vibrant
materialism (a phrase coined by Jane Bennett in her recent work on political
science and ecologies, but an approach that has much in common with Tim
Ingold’s anthropological work on materiality). Both these modes of
reconceptualizing materiality stress the agential power of that which has been
too long assumed inert. Despite the lithic’s propensity to undermine its own
cementing into metaphor, for example, few would grant it animation, let alone
agency. Because lapidary movement is natural (this logic goes), it must be a link
in a causal chain with initiation elsewhere. An inert material through which
the actions of humans, gods or natural forces are made manifest, rock is our
metaphor not only for stability but for lifelessness: “as cold as any stone,”
stone dead. Rock can certainly injure. We all know what people dwelling in
houses of glass are not supposed to hurl. Yet stone’s ability to cause harm
must depend upon motion that arrives from another source: the foot that treads
the rock’s oblivious point, the rain and gravity that propel the mudslide, the
slingshot that hurls the pebble towards the giant’s brow. Stones are
insensible, passive, worldless. Earth is the material from which God fashions
life in Genesis, but clay or dust requires divine breath (ruah) to ambulate.
When premodern texts describe jewels in
active terms, the contemporary reader is therefore startled. In his compilation
of classical and patristic wisdom,
Isidore writes that the gem astrion “shines
with the gleam of the full moon” and
enhydros gushes crystalline water like a fountain (16.13), while galactitis exudes a milk that can cause
forgetfulness and will render the breasts of nursing mothers more productive
(16.10). These active, emanative descriptions must be misapprehensions of
impassive geological qualities rather than a recognition of some liveliness
within stone, some ability to engender ecological connections that look like
movement, even desire. Isidore’s ascription of activity to the gems he
describes no doubt makes clear why works like the Etymologies had to be left behind for recognizably modern science
to commence. Disenchanted and geologized, Isidore’s stones lose their glimmer,.
Sort the rocks into the display cases of the museum, admire them from afar as
the colorful products of immense subterranean pressures and mineralogical
comminglings, accidentally beautiful but devoid of life. Do not say that they
act, move, or desire.
Except they do.
A fossil ammonite sits on my desk, a
treasure purchased years ago at Harvard's Museum of Natural History. Its allure
was inescapable. I'd been contemplating rock’s function as our sign for that
which is stubborn, lifeless, impedimental. Yet the halls through which I had
just passed, where cases of gems and minerals attract hundreds of visitors, where
fossils announce the primordial intertwining of organic life and lithic
activity, eloquently declare that stone is never so passive. The ammonite
became my totem object, my mineral familiar. These shelled invertebrates appear
in the fossil record about 400 million years ago, and vanished with the
dinosaurs.[10]
This remnant of a vanished world unfolds a compelling story of lapidary
transformation. The curve of its shell evidences the ceaseless motion that is
stone, manifesting how ancient invertebrates learned over the long years to
produce lithic houses. Trillions of such creatures dwelled inside extruded
carbonate and upon their death were compressed into sedimentary stone on the
seabed, a material for future cathedrals. Sometimes instead of being pulverized
into limestone, an ammonite shell was colonized in its entirety by minerals,
transmitting to the distant future a record of its once having inhabited the
earth. Neolithic peoples prized these serpentine fossils and worked them into
their own architectural creations. They could not have known about natural
selection or extinction, nor did they likely measure temporal spans
geologically, but they certainly discerned in fossil remains a living art, an
intensification of the world's truths.
My ammonite shell declares that organic
life petrified itself, took stone into and upon itself because it sought
durability, desired stone’s ability to confer persistence and motion.
Exoskeletons became endoskeletons: organic creatures interiorized calcium,
rendering the lithic that which upon flesh is hung so that it can swim, soar,
run. Stone, the fossil's curves intimate, is anything but inert. It circulates
through lively systems of relation, long-lived networks or meshes that
energetically intermingle the organic and the petric. The ammonite is an
organism that self-lithicized, and became a rock when stone repeated that
process, infiltrating what had been soft body and making flesh its own. The
spiraling shell is the record of strange and vanished life as well as an invitation
to the contemplation of cosmically complicated helices, of the agency and
movement that unfold outside human duration but are not invisible to
apperception. Even stone not shaped by human sculpting holds stories to impress
upon those who yield to its allure, who discern in its magnetism, tectonic
creep, corkscrews and gyres not unending stasis but slow mobility, vibrant
substantiality.
The fossil ammonite that has insisted
upon service as my spirit guide is perched at the edge of my office desk. Almost
all who come to visit unthinkingly take hold of the petrified animal when they
sit down to talk. They palm its heft, run their fingers along its elegantly
ridged coil. That a hand should instantly yearn to touch that durable whorl
reveals the intimacy of movement to desire, manifesting the expansive meshworks
of nonintentional connection within which bodies and objects, human hands and
lithic spirals act together, companions of an epochal road.[11]
To quarantine matter (limestone, sea,
sand, shell) from life (the extinct mollusk, the one speaking these words, you
sitting in the audience today) – to quarantine matter from life enables us to
disregard “the vitality of matter and
the lively powers of material
formations,” including those possessed by rocks and metals.[12]
Anthropocentricity promises a world that belongs to us, resources awaiting our
use. The current ecological crisis suggests the limitations of such a
viewpoint. Disanthropocentricity intimately involves temporality. Although we
employ the word “material” to denote “some stable or rock-bottom reality,
something adamantine,” in fact objects like coal, diamonds or iron chains
“appear as such because their becoming proceeds at a speed or level below the
threshold of human discernment” (Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter 58). Any body, object or materiality might couple to
any other in this tumultuous ecology, charged with possibility.
Such an active materialism returns to
Isidore’s gems their ability to enchant. Humans become one actant among many
within a turbulent mesh.[13]
Agency circulates within and emerges from proliferating connections. The
movement that is causality or desire is evident as a phenomenon that thrums
throughout this distributive lattice, a network devoid of lonely initiators and
uncomplicated resultants. Such heterogeneous, chaotic and creative assemblages
are “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the
persistent presence of energies that confound them from within” (23). In this
dispersive account animation is not the exclusive property of organic bodies,
nor a synonym for intentionality, autonomy or singularity. Certain
epistemological habits and hermeneutic frames may render it difficult to
discover or express, but this “anthropomorphic” vitality of matter would seem
to be a universal truth, discernable to any observer attuned to its presence.
Even stone becomes lively. Given enough time, its motion is as fluid as wind and
wave.
Or
fire. In contrast to slow and dense stone, flame is the most fleeting of elements, the most rapid, the most
enamored of oblivion. Texts incised upon rock endure centuries, but the lesson
of the Asburnham House blaze of 1731, which incinerated the Cotton library and singed
the Beowulf manuscript, is that ephemeral
fire consumes narratives more easily than conveys. Flame
signals a change in materiality and is not itself substantial. Yet Stephen J. Pyne has composed what he
calls “fire history,” a mode of ecological analysis attentive to material and
biotic relations from the deep past in order to reimagine contemporary modes of
inhabitance. Fire history illuminates the intimacies among humans, the
elements, and living ecosystems, stressing that the alliances constitutive of
such expanses come about through the agency of all involved. Pyne’s critical
method does not distinguish all that well among fire-wielding humans, fire-loving
plants like the eucalyptus, and fire itself: all are self-adaptive and promiscuously
symbiotic agents, acting in uncannily similar ways within the possibilities and
constraints of the environment in which their actions unfold.
Returning
to Grettir’s saga and the stolen fire at its center can illuminate these
points. A fire history of the saga starts with the fact that despite the
preponderance of other elements in the story, flame impresses itself upon the
narrative repeatedly. The text’s landscapes are sweeping because they lack
trees, an absence which once recognized makes evident the ecological impress of
the work’s generative environment. By the time the story was written Iceland
had long been deforested.[14]
Firewood was a gift from the ocean. Flame is nonetheless tangibly present. Its zeal
for collaboration with humans and its power to radiate warmth determines the
architecture of the many halls and houses that Grettir inhabits. Fire is the
gravitational force around which sleeping arrangements are organized and the daily
progress of domestic chores arranged.[15] Fire
burns repeatedly throughout the text, drawing or frustrating or intensifying narrative
action: a slow unfolding of an environmental awareness in which humans are not
lonely actors within or masters of the ecosystems they inhabit: an ethics of
composition rather than imposition. This perspectivism is so potentially
multiple, in fact, that fire must retain an ultimate mystery.[16] There must remain in fire stories and
possibilities unknown to those who play with it: potentials never exhausted, secret
spaces where fire smolders or flares indifferent to warriors and merchants and
curses. Fire’s withdrawal will matter to human relations as much as its burning
presence – though this object oriented environmental ethics does not allow us
to opt out of the world we co-inhabit. You can’t leave a mesh.
As the unintended house fire ignited by
Grettir makes clear, of its own volition the process that is fire will seek
unceasing incendiary relation. Fire will not necessarily remain encompassed by
the hearth’s circle, or by a human story. Fire perilously spreads. We inhabit
the known world through ancient alliance with flame, and yet human intentions,
human stories are not able to circumscribe its incendiary ardency, even if they
domesticate its intensity for a while. Playing with fire leaves you burned,
thinking with stone leaves you smarting. Elemental relations quicken as they
bind, thicken as we cultivate an ethical complexity with their materiality and
force. They emerge within narrative but they do not necessarily become servants
indentured to anthropocentrism. Narrative enables the envisioning of realms at
times indifferent to us, thingscapes that often excludes us, but through that
imagining we connect and interdepend all the more deeply. Materially,
ethically, narratively we’re too entangled to escape this call to dwell with rather than despite, against, or
through.
Narrative is the relational machine of
ethics, and the perspectivism of stories is our complicated but unremittingly
productive angel of connection. On ground that is never firm, lit by dangerous
burnings that are also our sine qua non,
we imagine more just modes of coinhabitance.
Through stories of stone, fire, wind and water we attend with slow care to the ethical
bonds that ally us with a thing coming always into being: with that impossible
and always already ruined but absolutely essential converging of restless
elements that is the world.
As Empedocles insisted, what binds
the elements is love.
[1]
“Schlup” and “dark ecology” are both from Timothy Morton, Ecology without
Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007) 159.
[2] But
we have a possibility that the lithic does not: our narratives have more
ethical potential, because we possess a deliberative power to create relations
that more or less just, more or less harmful. Stones are not indifferent, but
(because I am human) I prefer the best ways that humans love over how rocks demonstrate
their desires.
[3]
See for example “Notes Toward a
Speculative Realist Literary Criticism,” http://svtwuni.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/eileen-a-joy-stu09/
[4]
He continues, “What I call the ecological thought is the thinking of
this coexistence and interdependence to the fullest possible extent of which we
are capable.” See the “Ecological Thought - Mission Statement” at
http://www.rc.umd.edu/blog_rc/?p=214
[5] Grettir’s Saga, trans. Jesse Byock
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) chapter (p.110). Further references by
chapter number. For the Old Icelandic I have consulted the edition of Örnólfur
Thorrson (Reykjavik: Mál og menning, 1994).
[6]
Bruno Latour “An Attempt at a
Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary
History 41 (2010):471-90, quotation at 475.
[7] I
will use lithic words like “stone” “earth” and “rock” and “gem” almost
interchangeably throughout this book, even if (for example) a gem is obviously
a very special kind of stone. These terms could be differentiated, as Isidore
of Seville (c. 560-636) did in his Etymologies,
but they remain forms of the same substance. Thus for Isidore stone is dense
earth; stones are smooth and rocks (saxum) are aggregates, and so on, but all
belong under the same heading (Etymologies
16.3)
[8]
Along these same lines, Jean-Pierre Vernant has written that the transformation
of ancient Greek law from a memorized and spoken form to a code inscribed on
buildings in public spaces changed the reception of this law as well as the
society that now inherited what seemed a legal system as fixed and durable as
stone itself. See The Origins of Greek
Thought 52-60. Levi Bryant observes: “law written on the side of a building
takes on a sense of eternity and universality by virtue of enduring through
time … the medium has a tremendous impact on the content. We can’t say that the
content is something that is just there before such that one and the same
proposition expressed in speech and writing are identical, but rather content
seems to come after.” http://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/12/23/speculative-realist-literary-criticism/
[9]
Kellie Robertson has rightly observed that “the basis of any time period’s view
of nature is based on its views of material substance” (“Medieval Materialism:
A Manifesto” 105). By starting with materiality as expressed in metaphor (that
is, in everyday as well as literary language), I hope to make clear that I will
derive my medieval “views of material substance” not primarily from
intellectual culture (e.g., not from the scholastic project to reconcile an
Aristotelian notion of form giving meaning to substance with biblical
exegesis), but from literary and scientific texts that do not theorize matter
so much as place it into motion. That is, I am most interested in the stories
in which stone is entangled (as an actor, even a kind of inorganic character)
rather than in the stories told about it (where stone is something to be
described from a distant, a taxonomic approach that emphasizes separation,
abstraction, and inorganic interness).
[10]
“Some of the most common and distinctive fossils in the Secondary formations
had no obvious counterparts at all in the present world. The most striking
examples, and certainly the most frequently cited in this context, were the ammonites … They displayed an
astonishing diversity of form, and they varied in size from a coin to a
cartwheel; clearly they represented a profusion of different species. Yet not a
single ammonite shell had ever been found in the present world.” (Martin J. S.
Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time
247)
[11]
By “nonintentional” I mean that volitionality is mainly beside the point;
sometimes it comes into play, sometimes it does not, but intentionality is
ultimately discerned retroactively, as an outcome or emergent effect of these
networks.
[12]
The quotation is from Jane Bennett, Vibrant
Matter vii.
[13]
“Actant” is a term borrowed from the philosopher of science Bruno Latour, who
employs the word to emphasize that nonhuman objects and collectives may possess
agency. For a comprehensive introduction to Actor Network Theory, see his Reassembling the Social. “Mesh” is the
favored term of Timothy Morton in Ecology Without Nature. Andrew Pickering,
whose work also informs this chapter, conceptualizes this connective
interrelation as a mangle.
[14]
See Ian Y. Ashwell and Edgar Jackson, “The Sagas As Evidence of Early
Deforestation In Iceland,” Canadian
Geographer / Le Géographe canadien 14 (1970): 158–166; William R.
Short, Icelanders in the Viking Age: The
People of the Sagas (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2010) 121-22.
[15]
Fire is integral to the structuration of inhabited spaces and the social
relations that unfold within them. To give an early example, when Grettir is
experiencing his troubled childhood we are told “It was the custom on the farms
to build large longhouses, and in the evenings people sat on both sides of the
central long fire. Tables would be set up for eating, and afterwards, people
slept alongside the fires. During the day it was here that the women worked
wool” (chapter 14, p. 35). The Icelandic word for this long house is eldaskáli (“fire-hall”) or eldhús (“fire-house”). See Richard
Cleasby and Gudbrand Vigfusson, An
Icelandic-English Dictionary (1874), accessible electronically at
http://lexicon.ff.cuni.cz/texts/oi_cleasbyvigfusson_about.html
[16] A
necessary hesitation within our world-making relations to the element is easier
to inculcate once we acknowledge the ultimate incapacity of our narratives to
domesticate fire’s wildness. Graham Harman observes that “No one sees any way
to speak about the interaction of fire and cotton, since philosophy remains
preoccupied with the sole relational gap between humans and the world.” “On
Vicarious Causation” Collapse II
(2007):187-221, quotation at 188. Cf. Prince of Networks: “No matter what variations
we play on this theme, whether through absorbing the supposed
things-in-themselves back into the human subject, or denying that the question
makes any sense in the first place, the gap between humans and world always
remains privileged over the gaps between tree and wind, or fire and cotton”
(67).
I
animal 