by J J Cohen
[first read Eileen's letter, then read about blogs, then read this]
To pass the time while I was on fellowship leave not writing my book about stone, I assembled a collection of essays for the University of Minnesota Press entitled
Prismatic Ecologies: Ecotheory Beyond Green. You can access the table of contents
here (though there are two small errors:
Lawrence Buell composed a gorgeous foreword, while the inimitable
Serenella Iovino and
Serpil Oppermann composed its concluding "Onword"). The draft of my own essay is
here, and Eileen's is
here. The volume will be published in fall 2013.
In the mean time, you might enjoy an advance look at the introduction I composed. It'll yield a good idea of what
Prismatic Ecologies is all about.
Ecology’s
Rainbow
‘Composition’
… underlines that things have to be put together (Latin componere) while retaining their
heterogeneity. Also, it is connected with composure; it has clear roots in art,
painting, music, theater, dance, and thus is associated with choreography and
scenography; it is not too far from ‘compromise’ and ‘compromising,’ retaining
a certain diplomatic and prudential flavor. Speaking of flavor, it carries with
it the pungent but ecologically correct smell of ‘compost,’ itself due to the active
‘de-composition’ of many invisible agents. (Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a
‘Compositionist Manifesto’”)
Prismatic Composition 1: c. 1360-c.
1375
An
artist has painted an artist preparing to paint.[i]
He sits at his desk, blankness of a white page attending. A world awaits
composition – but not ex nihilo. The artist
is surrounded by floating bowls of color, each evocative of objects to come: two
shades of yellow (one for hair, one for furniture); a brown and verdant mélange
for backgrounds and shadows; forest green and orange mixed with crimson for
vegetal flourishes; blue tinged violet, a shade for stockings and intricate manuscript
borders; a lush red for robes and the outline of a historiated capital. The
rainbow of oversized paint vessels holds the tints that the illuminator has actually
employed to compose this scene. In a brown study,
as the saying goes: the perspective here is not one of detached mastery (since
its enmeshed framing emphasizes that “things have to be put together,” it is
difficult to find a stable outside to this meditation on composition).[ii]
The illustration instead offers an implicative prospect, an extemporal dreaming:
possibility through relation, collaborative engagement, emergence within material
constraint.[iii]
The mis en scène
stresses that color is formative, the substrate as well as conveyor of an
intricate world. The white vellum is a collaborative space as well as a
substantial thing (skin from a grazing sheep; a blankness that is not
infinitely malleable; an object with ample properties and inbuilt constraints).
This mundane materiality is also evident in the fact that the artist has mixed his
colors from environmental compounds become cultural actants. His artistic
alliances are crafted with precise combinations of pulverized minerals, juice
pressed from harvested berries, oak gall boiled in water and mixed with
powdered egg shells, common ash, rare pollen, acidic urine. His pigments loom in
enormous bowls, probably the shells of mussels, harvested from the shore. They
are larger than the artist, importunate in their heft. Color is not some
intangible quality that arrives belatedly to the composition but a material
impress, an agency and partner, a thing made of other things through which worlds
arrive.
This medieval illustration of chromatic efficacy is
placed within a large letter C. Part of a fourteenth-century encyclopedia
entry, the illuminated capital introduces the Latin word COLOR. James le Palmer never finished his impossibly ambitious
compilation of knowledge, the Omne Bonum. Composition
is exhausting. No matter how variegated the scheme more of the world remains to
be gathered. No matter how capacious taxonomy necessarily remains incomplete:
you can’t fold the world into an alphabet, or a palette. A white page rests in
the middle of COLOR's enclosing C.[iv]
And bright white, as we know, needs only a
transparent prism to begin the work of diffraction, renewal and multihued
composition.
Prismatic Composition 2: c.2012
Like
our medieval illuminator, Dublin artist John Ryan paints color’s compositional agency.
His pieces are sculptural, emphasizing the substantiality of hue, a phenomenon
too often associated with mere light. Ryan’s installations stress that the
artist cannot fully direct raw paint’s flow, thereby granting an elemental purposefulness
to art’s material base. Ryan works mainly in luminous monochrome. His sturdy swathes
of brushed pigment capture a transmutation from liquid to solid, the congealing
of color’s vibrant materiality.[v] His large
scale installation “Polyptych,” for
example, concatenates lustrous accretions of oil paint, acetate sheets, and
screws that fasten the various components into multihued assemblages. The masses
of color artfully curved across these transparent sheets are heavy yet radiant,
as vivacious as lichens, fungi and epiphytes. Nothing is represented in these
assemblages but much comes into being. Color is allowed its dignity, its elemental
ability to produce affect and sensation. The room in which these thick hues hang
becomes a polychromatic, ecstatic ecology (from οἶκος: a fundamental unit, a household, a
collectivizing space, a gathering of people and things). Through lively profusion
Ryan's compositions open new ways of apprehending, feeling, imagining,
narrating. A biome of hue.
Prismatic Composition 3: c.1700
BCE-c.5700 CE
An
intimate of the restless glaciations of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, the
Mississippi is an earth artist, but its projects take so long to execute that
humans have a difficult time discerning their genius. The river composes with
ice, stone, potent flows of water, heterogeneous biosystems, and tumbling sediment.
Its current installation curves sinuously across 2,320 miles, extensively terraforms,
slowly alters the Gulf of Mexico through delta formation, and constantly extends
land into what had been sea. Every millennium or so the Mississippi undergoes avulsion,
suddenly emptying itself somewhere else along the coast, leaving fertile bayous
in its wake. Humans have attempted frequent domestication of the river. Dams,
dikes and levees modify its flow; industrial pollutants darken its currents; its
waters are employed as an aqueous highway for the transport of goods. Yet the Mississippi
is inassimilable. An incessant flow of objects, animals, elements and forces
not reducible to human use value, the powerful river exerts a relentless agency
easily readable in its engendered worlds. Its artist’s colors derive from a fluvial
spectrum that tends mostly towards deep green, dim blue and murky brown, but
with glistening patches of yellow, some infrequent deep reds, and from time to
time even violet.
Green Criticism
As they compose their worlds the anonymous medieval
illuminator, John Ryan and the Mississippi River feature green prominently in
their creative palates, but as one hue among many. Green dominates our thinking
about ecology like no other, as if the color were the only organic hue, a
blazon for nature itself. This verdant link makes a certain amount of sense. Chlorophyll
deployed to harvest solar energy renders leaves and grasses green (even if they
are also yellow, red, orange, purple, winter brown). The forest is predominantly
a Green World. The color is lush, fecund, vigorous. Yet a preponderance of green
prevents the eye from noticing that the aerial is as much a part of an ecology
as the arboreal -- and that when the heavens viridesce the tint presages
tornado, not green peace. No woodland is monochrome (grey of tree bark, yellow
penetration of solar spangles, crimson for low hanging berries, beige for
humus, black for birds, mushrooms, and snakes). Shadow itself is ecological: the
umbra of plants, planets, stones creates ephemeral biosystems where questions
of light matter more than specificities of hue.[vi]
Green has become our synonym for sustainability, but such a colorful ascription
begs the question of exactly what mode of being we are attempting to sustain,
and at what environmental cost.[vii]
Green has long been the favored color of eco-criticism.[viii]
A green reading offers an environment-minded analysis of literature and culture,
and is typically concerned with how nature is represented within a text and how
modes of human inhabitance unfold within an imagined natural world. Like queer,
feminist and critical race analyses, green readings are inherently presentist
and possess an admirably activist bent. Yet green readings have a tendency to reproduce
what Bruno Latour calls the Great Bifurcation, a split between Nature and
Culture that founds a structurating antinomy even in the face of constituative
and intractable hybridities.[ix] Assuming
such a split can lead to analyses stressing anthropocentric and detached
concepts like stewardship, preservation and prescriptive modes of environmental
management.[x]
Green analysis often focuses upon the destabilizing encroachment of
industrialized society into wild spaces, the restorative and even ecstatic
powers of unblemished landscapes, and the companionless dignity of nonhuman
creatures. Woodlands, serene waterscapes, sublime vistas, and charismatic
megafauna feature prominently. Blending the romantic, the pastoral, and the
georgic, green ecologies tend to dwell upon the innate plenitude which nature offers,
mourning its commodification and disruption. Such readings demonstrate a quiet
faith in the totality envisioned by Deep Ecology, in a world that if left to its
primordial solitude would abide in lasting stability.[xi]
But green is also complicated. It’s the hue of simple
creatures like algae, and of flora indifferent to the lumbering of mammals,
organisms without which largescale aerobic life would be impossible. The green
revolution was not without cost: the Great Oxygenation Event, the environmental
introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere by photosynthetic creatures 2.4
billion years ago, triggered a mass extinction of anaerobic earth dwellers. This
excess of oxygen also enabled thousands of new forms of minerals to flourish. The
color is emblematic for the various Green Parties of the US and Europe, some of
which offer a traditional humanist politics of conservation, while others
embrace ecoanarchism and radically open ended structures for the emergence of
new modes of life. Blending blue and yellow in varying proportions, green is a
composite color that arrives in a multitude of shades. Many of these variations
do not easily fit within my swift description of green criticism. Green modes
of interpretation are powerfully attractive in part because they are not easily
reduced to a facile program of analysis. The best green criticism is ceaseless
in its natality. It does not necessarily know its conclusions in advance, but
collaborates with text and world to craft something unpredetermined. Yet the
color green too frequently signifies a return, however belatedly, to the
verdancy of an unspoiled world, to whatever remnants of a lost paradise might
be reclaimed. Classical and medieval myths of a Golden Age have been replaced
by dreams of a primordial verdure, the Green Eden in which humans took no more
from the land than they needed, and a sustainable mode of earthly inhabitance flourished.
A corollary to such thinking renders indigenous peoples possessors of an
ecological wisdom otherwise lost, so that native peoples are assumed to be
closer to the land. Such reductivism represents contemporaries as living
fossils, as if they existed out of time. Indigeneity (an almost impossible
category: only Africa has indigenous humans) comes to represent a prehistory in
which humans dwelled in a state of enchantment, were child-like in their
simplicity, and because of their innocence from technology had not yet become
ecologically alienated.[xii] Yet some
American Indians run casinos. Australia’s largest native animals were hunted to
extinction soon after Aboriginal peoples arrived, a swift disappearance that does
not well accord with the assumption that natural equilibrium is the primeval
state of hunter-gatherers or early agriculturalists.
Bright Green
As Timothy Morton has pointed out, a preponderance
of ecocritical writing is conducted in the shade of “bright green,” a hue that tends
to be “affirmative, extraverted and masculine” as well as “sunny,
straightforward, ableist, holistic, hearty, and ‘healthy.’’’[xiii]
Bright green is also too solitary, a romantic color through which individuals
commune with Nature and arrive at personal revelations and solipsistic calm --
as if Nature were an angel or messenger. To obtain such revelatory power the
wilderness must be imagined as a purified place to which one travels rather
than dwells always within: separate from the human, empty, foundationally pure.
Yet as Stephen J. Pyne has detailed, landscapes that arriving Europeans
perceived as untouched had been profoundly reconfigured by fire regimes, such
as those pre-contact peoples in Australia developed to manage the diverse
environments in which they dwelled.[xiv] Lawrence
Buell has written compellingly of how ecofeminism and environmental justice --
among many other movements within ecological theory -- can move us beyond the lonely
limits of some green ardors towards more communal and collaborative formations.[xv]
Yet even a feminist, postcolonial or queer ecocriticism is not necessarily an
analysis that moves beyond green.[xvi] Verdant, park-like, and unpopulated, Spaceship Earth
(that green, blue and white marble suspended in a cosmic sea of black) offers
too bounded, too totalized and too self contained a vision.[xvii]
To compose (write, paint, envision, act) ecologically is to inbuild openness,
and therefore vulnerability.
It’s not easy being viridescent. Bright green
criticism emphasizes balance, the innate, the primal, landscapes with few
people, macrosystems, the unrefined. What of the catastrophic, the disruptive, urban
ecologies, the eruptive, heterogeneous microclimates, inhumanly vast or tiny
scales of being and time, the mixed spaces where the separation of nature and
culture are impossible to maintain? Underneath every field stretches an
unplumbable cosmos of primordial stone, worms, recent debris, reservoirs of
natural and manufactured chemicals, poisonous and fertile muck. In a green
Arcadia what do we make of the airplane, graves, gamma rays, bacteria, invasive
bamboo accidentally planted as an ornament, inorganic agency, the crater become
a lake, the invisibly advancing or receding glacier, relentless lunar pull,
electronic realms, prehistoric flora lingering as plastic refuse, lost
supercontinents, parasites, inorganic compounds that act like living creatures,
species undergoing sudden change? Other colors may be necessary to trace the
impress and interspaces created by ecologies that cannot be easily accommodated
within the bucolic expanses of green readings, or at least within those that
possess a utopian emphasis upon homeostasis, order, and the implicit
benevolence of an unexamined force labeled Nature. What of the ocean's violet turbulence,
the beige fecundity of excrement, the blue solitude of the wandering iceberg,
the mineral excrescence of a grey city, the polychromatic lives of objects that
may or may not demonstrate an interest in connecting to human spaces? Nature is
not a creature of seclusion and solace, but a concept for repeated
interrogation, a term without transparent explanatory force. The essays
collected in this volume argue that breaking monochromatic light into a
multitude of colors offers a suggestive entryway into nonanthropocentric
ecologies, where the oikos is not so much a
bounded home as an ever unfinished world.
Ursula K. Heise has demonstrated that, contrary to
a belief long cherished in environmental studies, an attachment to the local
does not necessarily foster the globalized ethic of care demanded in a
transnational age.[xviii] Her
notion of eco-cosmopolitanism is useful for broadening critical perspectives,
substituting a view from a planet at risk for the boundedness of small
citizenships. But a sense of planet will not in the end be capacious enough. Space
is as multiple as it is disorderly. Moving beyond the near-to-hand and pastoral
(that is, bright green) locales that are focus of much environmental criticism
requires emphasizing the cosmos in
eco-cosmopolitanism – yet not in the classic sense of a tidy and beautiful
whole (Greek kosmos means “order,
ornament”). Bruno Latour has coined the “dirty” term kakosmos to describe the tangled, fecund and irregular pluriverse
humans inhabit along with lively and agency-filled objects, materials, and
forces.[xix]
A middle space, unbounded, perturbed, contingent. “Contingency,” observes
Michel Serres, “means common tangency,” haptic entanglement of body and world,
knotted and multidimensional admixture, so that “knowing things requires one
first of all to place oneself between them.”[xx]
Multihued Agency
Following colors in their materiality as entry
into this messy intricacy, the contributors to this volume follow the human and
nonhuman actors with which the eco-kakosmopolitan is always in alliance: mysterious
forces, object and organisms that do not fully disclose themselves, radiation, black
holes, distant arms of the galaxy and event horizons, shit and muck, the
ephemeral and the volatile, disability, distillation, capitalism as an ordering
system, domestication, alien substances, supernovas, urban sprawls, the undead,
lost worlds, networks of travel or sonority, human difference, negativity,
depression, the aurora borealis, deep sea dwellers, luminescence for no
audience, feedback loops, alien metals, soundscapes, slaughterhouses, environmental
justice, chimeras, the vegetal, the indistinct, the solitary, failure, queerness,
violence, swamps, an errancy of earth and seas and skies.[xxi]
No Green Eden here, but a restless expanse of multihued contaminations,
impurities, hybridity, monstrosity, contagion, interruption, hesitation,
enmeshment, refraction, unexpected relations, and wonder. A swirl of colors, a
torrent, a muddy river.
Perhaps it was surprising to see the Mississippi appear
alongside a medieval illuminator and a Dublin painter as the third artist in
the chromatic vignettes with which this introductory essay opens. To claim a
river can create is perhaps to subscribe to a naïve animism; to believe that
rivers compose might be to project human qualities on indifferent things; to
call ancient fluvial terraforming a mode of earth art could ascribe desire to
matter devoid of will. Yet what is at stake in limiting agency to an origin in human
volition – as if we intend much of what we accomplish? The profundity of
climate change in the Anthropocene argues against such easy alignment. Causes tend
to be known retroactively when they are known at all, traced back through
multiple threads of effect, through volatile knots of human and inhuman actors
operating in alliance as well as at odds with each other. When Jane Bennett maps
the intricacies of the American power grid during a substantial blackout, no
single intention – or single actor, or single failing – can be found to trigger
the spiral of effects that collapsed a network.[xxii]
“Human” is one among a wide many. No observer can even conceptualize this
shifting mesh of power lines, generators, engineers, distribution nodes,
consumers, conveyors, geographical expanses, appliances, managers, weather, and
electrical flow in its entirety: there is no divine or objective perspective
upon a web within of such deep relation. Agency is distributed among
multifarious relations and not necessarily knowable in advance: actions that
unfold along the grid surprise and then confound. This agentism is a form of activism: only in admitting that the inhuman
is not ours to control, possesses desires and even will can we apprehend the
environment disanthropocentrically, in a teetering mode that renders human
centrality a problem rather than a starting point.[xxiii]
As Andrew Pickering observes, “instead of seeing dualist detachment and
domination as a move, a tactic, a ploy, and a very specific way of living in
the flow of becoming, we tend to mistake it for the world itself” (“New
Ontologies” 4). The power grid is, like a desert or a pond or a household,
itself an open system comprised of biological, inorganic, natural and
technological actors, an untidy and dispersive entanglement similar to what Pickering
calls a mangle, Bruno Latour a network, Timothy Morton a mesh, Stacy Alaimo
trans-corporeality, Tim Ingold a meshwork, Deleuze and Guattari an assemblage
Graham Harman (working in a register with far greater emphasis on the integrity
of objects, but one in deep sympathy with network theory) the quadruple object,
mapped via ontography.[xxiv] Such a
web might also be called an environment (from a Middle English noun that means circuit, itself from an Old French verb that
means to veer) or an ecosystem (a fragile
co-dwelling of organisms, things and elements in relation). These motion-filled
metaphors might seem too much like forceful rivers, animated by relentless
flow. Yet nonhuman things do not thereby vanish into a swirl of primordial
possibility, as if nothing possessed integrity. Instead the human and the
nonhuman are granted the ability to forge multiple connections, to sustain (or
break) transformative relations, to bring about the new thing, to create, to
vanish, to surprise. Even rivers on the move possess their submerged stones, overhanging
cliffs, vorticose shallows, lush bayous, obscure thrivings.
Rainbow and Arrow
A natural phenomenon as simple as a rainbow, sudden
child of a pluvial prism, illustrates well how ensnarled relations among human
actors and inhuman actants may be. This ethereal spectrum shimmers when a
tumble of raindrops refracts and reflects daylight back to an observer at an
angle of 42 degrees. For the sun’s white brilliance to separate into its constituent
colors, its rays must arrive from directly behind the perceiver. The source of a
rainbow’s luminosity therefore cannot be glimpsed at the same time as the
rainbow itself. A rainbow must also be constantly renewed to remain visible. Once
the mist or showers stop, the bow is gone. The rainbow that we glimpse one
moment is the gift of different water than that of the previous moment. But
these ethereal bands of color are even more complicated. Like the horizon, rainbows
are perspectival and therefore exist in no particular location. Since the angle
of ocular perception cannot precisely coincide for any two onlookers, to stand
in a slightly different place yields a different arc. As Giovanni Battista Vico
proved long ago, each eye of the same observer beholds a divergent rainbow, a
fact that can be proven by closing one at a time, causing the bow to “jump.” As
Phil Fisher has observed, because the rainbow is an optical effect that depends
upon a specific kind of visual apparatus to come into being, “without observers,
there are no rainbows.”[xxv] The
celestial band of hues shimmers through a particular biology without which it
cannot exist. A rainbow forms when the organic and the inorganic, eye and
sunlight, matter and energy are brought into a sudden relation that changes the
quality of light itself. The rainbow exists as an object, but an interstitial
one, at a meeting place of relations and materiality. A rainbow is an alliance:
solar gleam, errant cloud, waterdrops in motion, captivated human, changed
world. We could diagram the conditions necessary to observe a rainbow, placing
the human in the middle, the sun directly behind and a plummet of refracting
raindrops above. Yet this totality is impossible as a lived perspective. When
we see the rainbow we are enmeshed within refracted light from an obscured
source. The arc of radiant colors is a medial thing, a co-creation. Its polychromatic
curve arrives through optical and biological intimacy with color, through a prismatic
impress that engenders ecological composition. We behold the rainbow by living
with its cloudbursts and sunlight, by attuning ourselves to our dwelling within
a particular environmental space. The result of finding ourselves in the
company of this rare object is wonder, an aesthetic experience essential to
thought (cognition begins when we are struck by a thing that has called
attention to itself).[xxvi] Its
contingency or mutuality (which also might be called a composition in Bruno Latour’s sense, a placing together that retains
difference) renders the pluvial prism no less real.
Messenger
“Iris” is therefore the Greek and Latin word for
rainbow; a noun designating the colored ring in the human eye; and the name of
a messenger who connects heaven and earth, human and nonhuman realms. Intimates
of the elements as well as objects in abiding human relation, rainbows hint at
the complexities that dwell both within and beyond green ecologies. Following
the path of the arc’s rain as it cascades to the earth and feeds a small
stream, we may find ourselves propelled along creeks to bourns, tributaries,
headwaters, all the way to the torrential roll of the Mississippi. A
traditional ecocritical reading of this mightiest of American rivers would
likely focus upon the what might be called the “River as It Was,” a Green
Mississippi that comprises a small Gaia, a bounded and balanced system existing
in placid indifference to the human world. Indigenous peoples may have fished
along its banks or coursed its restless waters in small boats, but this is the
river before industry arrives -- before anyone thought to dam its flow, harness
its force, or redirect its course. An Edenic space, a waterway of innate
plenitude, the Green Mississippi runs outside of cataclysm or imbalance, runs
outside of history. Such a river never existed. Its waters perpetually erode
the earth, reshaping the kaleidoscope of biomes that cluster along its long
path. The massive amounts of silt it moves downstream have altered the Gulf
profoundly.
The Mississippi can be a languid flow, abounding
in aesthetic power and serene plenty. But the river is also place of danger:
drought, flood, scouring force, hazardous currents, catastrophic changes of
course. This perilous waterway is similar to what Steve Mentz has called a blue
ecology.[xxvii]
Mentz employs the term to designate an environmental cultural studies focused
upon the ocean. “The sea is not our home,” he writes, and when we venture upon
its waves we face extinction, a “bitter ecology of salt” (18).[xxviii]
Yet his marinal insights are also true of some fresh and brackish waters.
Though they differ in scale and dynamism and do not therefore necessarily convey
the same hazards, and are typically small, shallow and local spaces against the
ocean’s universalism, vastness and profundity, no water offers a safe or
permanent habitation to terrestrial creatures. The Blue Mississippi (or Old
Blue as the river is sometimes called) is an aqueous surge that cannot be our
home. We are earthbound creatures. Submergence is our demise, the ruin of those
who think ecology’s oikos is
anthropocentric, that its inhuman force may be domesticated into lasting or
comfortable shelter. Water is a deep and alien world, filled with animals we
might harvest but only at peril. A river, like the ocean, can swallow. It’s no
Eden.
Pollution, silt and swift force ensure that the
roiled depths of the Mississippi are murky. This swift moving flow is too
powerful to gain a secure epistemological foothold within: it keeps knocking foundations
loose, keeps disturbing what we know. The Muddy Mississippi is the brown river,
a place of interstices, mixing, hybridity, autonomy, cogency. The closer to the
sea it flows the more impure it becomes, culminating as an estuary that
combines salt water with fresh and everything with mud. Estuary comes from the Latin word aestus,
a boiling, a tide. It’s etymologically related to the words for summer (aestas) and building (aedes, and thereby “edify”): time and tide and composition. Estuaries
are places of precarious existence (not every organism can adapt to brackish
flow). They are also stone producing factories. Much of our terrestrial lithic
inheritance derives from alluvial deposits that have been enfolded into
landmasses as the continents drift the seas. The Brown Mississippi transports
us into geological time frames, transports us into a temporal scale so vast
that the agency of the river becomes palpable as it terraforms two thousand of
miles of land, scattering sediment into the Gulf of Mexico and giving birth to future
bedrock. Within this fluvial time scale, the desires of the river also become
more evident: “the Mississippi wants to move” (Pickering, “New Ontologies” 6).
Engineers and city planners have long battled the river, erecting artificial
levees atop the natural embankments of riparian New Orleans. The strategy has
never worked. The river keeps rising, so that the walls of the levees loom so
high that cargo ships now pass overhead relative to the city streets. The
desire of the Muddy Mississippi is to pour into the Atchafalaya river and surge
into the Gulf a few hundred miles west of its current delta. A long history of
the river demonstrates that such shifts in its course are inevitable. Yet
because a change in the Mississippi’s flow would mean that New Orleans would
lose its fresh water supply (and thereby the shipping and industrial production
that sustain the city), a prolonged battle has been waged against the current’s
agency. Instead of living with the muddy river, those dwelling in New Orleans
have attempted its domestication. The river continues to rise and to eat away
at its constraining levees, sometimes with disastrous results.[xxix]
As Hurricane Katrina well illustrated, those who pay the highest price (loss of
home, loss of livelihood, loss of life) when such domination fails are those
who are civilly disempowered, minorities and the poor. The Muddy Mississippi
demands attention to inhuman time scales, but its flow is not oblivious to
environmental justice as well.
The River that Is: the brown Mississippi, with its
murk, lithic factory of an estuary, strong currents, peril and geological
temporality. What of the River to Be? An ecosystem is an oikosystem, a dwelling system. Is there a wider way to
conceptualize ecology, one that embraces the harmonies of green, the dangers of
blue, and the difficult admixtures of brown, but recognizes that there is not
sufficient dwelling space in any of these hues? Green loves nature left to
itself; blue traces spaces inimical to home-building, brown leaves some cities
dry, others inundated, nothing much affirmed. A more prospective palette
emerges when these colors are allowed contiguity and contingency, joining them
to others. The colors of the prism are manifold, nebulous, less easy to divide
than we think. Indigo dwells between blue and violet because Isaac Newton liked
the color of an imported dye. The human eye perceives a limited spectrum; some
animals behold more than we can. Every hue, real or imagined, bodes a world.
Prospect
A rainbow promises. The skyborne arc is a biblical
sign of covenant, of God’s pledge not to flood the entirety of the world again.
Despite this assurance, though, its curve threatens. The bow or arcus in the sky is named
after a martial weapon, that which grows tight to let fly the deadly arrow. Sometimes
the rainbow is a symbol of harmony, and yet it is also provisional, perspectival,
fleeting, messy. It’s also a little embarrassing. We associate rainbows with
the juvenile. Color is often denigrated this way, to attenuate its power. Bright
tone, like the wonder it inspires, is relegated to children. Rainbows have
therefore become trippy, a symbol of queer alliance, of non-normative
occupation of space. By refracting light into manifold colors and gathering
those hues and their observers into a temporary community, rainbows have diverse
material effects.
And they also remain themselves. Though they
appear in the heavens rainbows are indifferent to allegory. No arc in the sky
can portend safety, can promise futurity. The deluge will arrive. Clouds do
what clouds do, light’s relentless agency and energy persist whether observed
or not, forces and objects among other forces and objects, entering into all
kinds of relations with each other, unconcerned with us. I write these lines by
hand in the wake of a derecho, the arc-shaped spawn of anthropogenic climate
change that cut a destructive swathe from Chicago through West Virginia to Washington
DC in the summer of 2012. Our house lost power for a week. Many less fortunate
people lost their dwellings, even their lives. A meteorological sympathy we
have inbuilt in our technology rendered the radar representation of the
derecho’s spearhead an enormous rainbow that moved swiftly across the
continent, smashing trees as it relentlessly coursed.
Yet the rainbow is also a partner. It requires our
eyes. With it we compose. An object in perpetual motion, the rainbow is
ephemeral, but perceived because it touches, excites, compels. The rainbow is
what we behold when we realize we live in the thickness of things, in a world
where the sun and the rain and our eyes and our skin and our desires are part
of a system without a totality, without an outside. A rainbow’s arc is a
dispersal of color, but its curve is made possible only through a gathering of
the elements. Love, desire, agency, human and non-human alliances: as
Empedocles wrote long ago, reflecting upon how the world came to be composed,
the binding of the elements, of the primal materiality of the cosmos, is philia.[xxx]
There is no over the rainbow. The arc recedes as
we draw close. Or, better, the rainbow is at once intimate and distinct, a
partner in composition as well as an energetic object that retains its
integrity, inexhaustibility, mystery. Because I cannot speak this ecological
vision any better, I close with Derek Jarman’s meditation from Chroma, the book of poetry and color that he
composed while dying, as gift and as future. Chroma
is itself a prism, gathering the world beneath its radiant colors, from White
and Shadow through Rose, Blue, and Isaac Newton to Iridescence and Translucence.
The rainbow Jarman envisions as the volume draws to its end, as his life draws
to its end, is elemental. It bridges like and unlike, culture and nature,
promise and indifference, human and inhuman, oil and water: Who has not gazed in wonder at the snaky shimmer of
petrol patterns on a puddle, thrown a stone into them and watched the colours emerge
out of the ripples, or marvelled at the bright rainbow arcing momentarily in the
burst of sunlight against the dark storm clouds?[xxxi]
And the binding of the elements is love.
My gratitude to Lowell Duckert for his companionship
in thinking through this introduction.
[i] The image I’m
discussing is from the
Omne Bonum of James le Palmer, now held in the
British Library and catalogued as
Royal
6 E VI f. 329. The electronic record for the manuscript
may be found here.
[ii] See Bruno
Latour, “An Attempt at a Compositionist Manifesto,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 471-90, at
473.
[iii] In
thinking about a perspective of mastery versus a surrender to transformative
relation I have in mind Andrew Pickering’s paradigmatic reading of de Koonig
and Mondrian in “New Ontologies,” The Mangle in
Practice: Science, Society, and Becoming, ed. Andrew Pickering and Keith
Guzik (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008) 1-14, as well as the two strangely convergent, anxious terms for domination and
management in Simon C. Estok, Ecocriticism and
Shakespeare: Reading Ecophobia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) and
David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London:
Reaktion Books, 2000).
[iv] James’s
multitude of entries for “A” run the gamut from absolutio
(absolution), acutus sapor (intense flavor)
and advocatus (lawyer) to adulterium (adultery), agere (to act), alea (dice) and aqua (water). B is nearly as copious in its
gathering of natural and social terms, C and D even more expansive. Yet by the
time the encyclopedist arrives at letter N, his energy has flagged. A single
entry per letter henceforth appears. James
le Palmer’s encyclopedia is thoroughly examined by Lucy Freeman Dandler in Omne Bonum: A Fourteenth-Century Encyclopedia of
Universal Knowledge (London: Harbey Miller, 1996-99), 2 vols.
[v] “Vibrant” or
“vital” materiality is Jane Bennett’s useful entryway into the agency of matter
in her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). See also the copious work
being conducted under the descriptor of the “new materialism,” such as New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics,
ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) and Material Feminisms, ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan
Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). I would like to thank Michael O’Rourke for introducing me to John Ryan,
and the artist himself for sharing his work with me and discussing its aims.
[vi] For an
ecological phenomenology of shadow see David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (New York: Vintage Books,
2010) 13-24.
[vii] Most
scholarship on sustainability either takes it for granted as a self-evident
goal or critiques it as a mode for living with minimal change of habit. For a
sophisticated re-reading of its key concepts (including energy, expenditure,
and excess), see Allan Stoekl, Baitaille’s
Peak: Energy, Religion and Postsustainability (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2007), as well as the essays published in the PMLA “Sustainability” cluster (vol. 127
[2012]: 558-606).
[viii] A
selective overview of the field and survey of some early key texts may be found
in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism
to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000). It would be
difficult to instigate such a volume in the Eighteenth Century today, since
ecocritical modes have been profoundly influential in the early modern and
(increasingly) medieval periods. Some scholars distinguish between ecocriticism
as literature-focused and green cultural studies as more capacious in its
analytical scope (e.g., Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals and the Environment [London:
Routledge, 2010] 24), but that distinction seldom holds in scholarly practice,
which tends inherently to the interdisciplinary.
[ix] Latour
argues against the factual neutrality of science as much as he does the
self-evidence of nature. In addition to his “Compositionist Manifesto” (already
cited), see also “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30
(2004) 225-248; We Have Never Been Modern, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and especially Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into
Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2004), where Latour describes the death of Pan and argues that “ecology
dissolves nature’s contours and redistributes its agents” (21). See also Émilie
Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism?: An Exercise in Sensitization,”
trans. Patrick Camiller, Common Knowledge 16.2 (2010):
311–30. For a seminal example of a green criticism that at once complicates the
color by critically revaluating Romanticism’s “ever green” language and yet
remains wholly invested in a self-evident and keenly demarcated Nature, see
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and
the Environmental Tradition (London: Routledge, 1991).
[x] Greg Garrard
calls it “anthropocentric managerialism” and points out that its too easy
indictment tends to privilege intuition and “modern reconstructions of …
‘primal’ religions” over science; see Ecocriticism
(London: Routledge, 2010) 23. Cf. Lynn White, Jr., who aligns a tendency
towards the domination of nature with Christianity and finds an alternative in
Francis of Assisi (“The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” Science 155
(1967) 1203-7, reprinted in The Ecocriticicism
Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm [Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1996] 3-14). A balanced emphasis on science and indigenous practices as
postcolonial, mediated and local ways of knowing may be found in Julie
Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and
Social Imagination (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); yet
like all of the work so far cited, Cruikshank’s is almost unremitting in its
anthropocentricity. For a bracing examination of what the world would look like
from a disanthropocentric point of view, see Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press). Bogost’s work is allied with the movement known
as Object Oriented Ontology. Heavily indebted to the philosophy of Levi Bryant,
Graham Harman, and Tim Morton, its influence is evident throughout this
introduction as well as the volume as a whole.
[xi] Most
famously this totality becomes James Lovelock’s Gaia, the earth considered as a
single organism. “Deep ecology” itself is associated with the work of Gary Snyder
and Arne Naess. Within such totalized models, disequilibrium-prone humans can
easily become not a part of the system but a virus or cancer (leading to a call
for their eradication so that Mother Earth can recover). The gendering of the
planet as feminine, moreover, can also play into its exploitation, as Val
Plumwood and Carolyn Merchant have argued. For a good overview of the strengths
and weaknesses of green approaches in the encounter with historically diverse
literature that stresses unease rather than balance, see Gillian Rudd, Greenery: Ecocritical Readings of Late Medieval
English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007),
especially 1-19.
[xii] Drawing on
the work of Shepard Krech III (The Ecological
Indian: Myth and History[New York: W. W. Norton, 1999]), Lawrence Buell
aptly labels this figure “the paradigmatic ‘ecological Indian,’ the model
minority sage of green wisdom” and the “eco-sensitive indigene”: The Future of Environmental Criticism:
Environmental Crisis and the Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
23-24.
[xiii] The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2010) 16. Morton’s idea of a “dark ecology,” with its
uncertainties, implicatedness, and refusal to offer a metaposition, has much
resonance throughout this volume.
[xiv] Pyne makes
this point repeatedly throughout the series of volumes he has dubbed the “Cycle
of Fire,” but see especially Burning Bush: A
Fire History of Australia (New York: Henry Holt, 1991). Stephanie Trigg and I have followed
this fiery line more closely in our essay “Fire,” postmedieval 4 (2013), forthcoming.
[xv] See Buell’s
magisterial The Future of Environmental
Criticism 97-127. For an inspirational enacting of this envisioned future,
as well as a meditation upon some alternatives, see Serpil Oppermann, Ufuk
Özdağ, Nevin Özkan and Scott Slovic, eds., The
Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge
Scholars Publishing, 2011).
[xvi] Compare,
for example, the otherwise excellent collection of essays Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics and Desire, ed. Catriona
Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 2010), with its recurring oppositions between sex and nature, nature and
environment, the natural world and the human constitution of that world (e.g,
“Introduction” 5), to the thoroughgoing posthumanism of Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2008).
[xvii] For a
short history of the contradictory meanings of the image of the earth as viewed
from space see Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism
160-62.
[xviii] Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The
Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008). For an explication of eco-cosmopolitanism see especially 57-67. Heise
stresses the human-nonhuman alliances upon which this sense is built at 157-59.
[xix] See Politics of Nature 99, “Compositionist Manifesto” 481.
[xx] Michel
Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of
Mingled Bodies (I), trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London:
Continuum, 2008) 80
[xxi] This list
in part details the contents of this collection of essays, but also foregrounds
some of the critical approaches that many of the essays have in common –
especially those critical modes that have been labeled the new materialisms and
object oriented ontology.
[xxii] See
Bennett’s discussion of assemblages, distributed agency, thing-power and a
massive blackout in Vibrant Matter 23-38;
compare what she writes about something so obviously animated (electricity) to
the life she finds even in the crystals that compose metal, 52-61. Although his
approach is very different, for a detailed consideration of life as non-self
evident and not reducible to biology see Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
[xxiii] The
ethics of this objectal agency are explored in the collection Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects,
ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (New York: Oliphaunt / punctum books, 2012).
[xxiv] See
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time,
Agency and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Bruno
Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005); The Ecological
Thought; Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science,
Environment, and the Material Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2010); Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on
Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011); Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),
as well as the inspirational essays assembled in Deleuze|Guattari
and Ecology, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009);
and Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Alresford:
Zero Books, 2011). Examples of this kind of dispersive intimacy could be
multiplied across material, bodily and network theory, but these are some
articulations that have aided me in this project.
[xxv] Rainbows
are in this way a phenomenon that marks a relation between eye and landscape, a
meeting place rather than an autonomous thing. Fisher therefore writes that “On
an uninhabited planet there would continue to be sun and rain, stars and snow,
but there would be no rainbow and no horizon.” See Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998) 37 and 122-23.
[xxvi] Phil
Fisher writes, “Rare objects … elicit from us an activity … the activity is, of
course intellectual … Wonder begins with something imposed on us for thought” (Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare
Experiences 40).
[xxvii] At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London:
Continuum, 2009). Against a landlocked green perspective, a blue ecology
conveys what Mentz calls the “real taste of ocean … a sharp tang of nonhuman
immensity” (1) that wrenches us violently from our “landed perspectives” (3).
[xxviii] Cf.
“the ocean is no place to live … Long ago we crawled out of the water. We can’t
go back” (96). The closing section of the book (“Toward a Blue Cultural
Studies”) is as beautiful as it is compelling. See also Dan Brayton, Shakespeare’s Ocean: An Ecocritical Exploration
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012), who writes of green’s
terrestrial bias and writes of “chlorophilia – an inability to look beyond the
imagery of the land and its leafy green oak. Green is indeed a vital color, but
it is not nature’s only shade.” (37).
[xxix] This
account of the Mississippi’s flow and the war of the engineers to constrain it
is based upon Andre Pickering, “New Ontologies” 5-13 and John McPhee,
“Atchafalya: The Control of Nature,” The New
Yorker (Feb. 23 1987) http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1987/02/23/1987_02_23_039_TNY_CARDS_000347146?currentPage=all.
[xxx] An
excellent and easily accessible introduction to the work of Empedocles
(including the surviving Greek fragments and an English translation) may be
found at http://classicpersuasion.org/pw/empedocles/
[xxxi] From
“Iridescence” in Derek Jarman,
Chroma: A Book
of Color (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 201
0).
