by J J Cohen
This summer comes to an unprecedented close for me a week from today. Rather than enjoy the inrush of eager freshmen to GW as I usually do, I'll be flying to Portland to drop my own son off at college. Perhaps you have been reading this blog long enough to recognize Alex from occasional mentions here when he was much younger (for example here here here here here, as well as once dressed in a knight costume and I can't seem to find that picture). But the older he and his sister got -- and the more professional and communal this blog became -- the less often they have featured, with most of the personal stuff now going to Facebook. Next week Alex departs for Lewis & Clark College for their Environmental Studies program and yes indeed, we are proud of the guy. Can he really be 18?
When we return from Oregon I have a semester of leave to enjoy, so I will not be in the classroom for a while (though I am doing the usual, crazy amount of travel). GW has a program called the Dean's Research Chairs which, should your application be selected, provides a reduced teaching load for three years so that you can either begin or complete a project. I want to share with you what I proposed, since both recently went under contract and are my preoccupation for the foreseeable future. I swore that Stone was my last solitary project, so not surprisingly both books I will be working on in the next two years are collaborative.
I. Earth
Earth, a book to be co-authored with planetary scientist Lindy-Elkins Tanton, and under contract with Bloomsbury Press for their wonderful Object Lessons series.
This book explores what happens when we think of the earth as an object viewable from space. As a “blue marble,” “a blue pale dot,” a spaceship, an organism, or (as Chaucer described it) “this litel spot of erthe,” the solitary orb is a challenge to scale and to human self-importance. Beautiful and self-contained, the earth suspended in cold blackness turns out to be far less knowable than it at first appears: its vast interior is after all an inferno of molten rock and a reservoir of water vaster than the ocean, a world within the world.
Earth
is at once too large and too small. It exceeds human scale, and yet even
medieval manuscripts depict the earth as a sphere suspended in space, as if the
planet could be known from its outside, could be diminished into a human point
of view. From an earthbound perspective, earth is the ground that muddies our
hands, a foundation for thinking and creating, and a substance carried in our
bodies. Yet the evidence that Earth is also something much larger is offered by
the curve of every horizon, and the archive of deep time embedded in stone.
From space the earth seems like a green, white and blue globe, serenely gliding
the galaxy, but where does this planet end: at its crust? in the exosphere?
What do we lose when we think of the Earth as a discrete unit, a singular
planet or self-regulating creature? For humanists and scientists alike, earth
poses difficult questions of knowledge. How do we know what inhabits its
interior -- a hollow space filled with mole people, an iron core, vast oceans?
We like to imagine that we can hold the world in our hands, as if it were a
plaything, a Blue Marble (as the famous Apollo 17 picture of the earth from
space has been called). Or we shrink the planet to insignificance, the “pale
blue dot” glimpsed by Voyager 1 in 1990 (or by Troilus in Chaucer’s medieval
poem). Yet the Earth is not so easy to diminish into something so bounded and so
still. A turbulent and open system, Earth is an object that challenges our
creative capabilities. The Earth is something we all think we know – and yet it
cannot be known directly, only mediated through digital image and metaphor. The
blue marble has a vast and molten core, a domain of inhuman temperature,
pressure and time that challenges our confidence that we can know the Earth.
Space
is too cold. The earth’s subterranean expanses, the realm below the gliding of
tectonic plates, is infernal in pressure and heat. Inhabiting a thin crust between
these extremes, we have long explored through story and experiment the
questions of spatial and temporal scale that the earth invites. Many of these
narratives offer glimpses of the Earth’s future. This book shows how
conceptualizing the Earth as a globe with a potentially viewable exterior (a
totality) and a mysterious core (a temporality and a materiality that exceeds
all human experience) have shaped what we know of Earth, and the destinies we
dream for the planet and ourselves.
The
book is inspired by a collaborative keynote that Cohen and Elkins-Tanton delivered
at the BABEL Conference “Cruising in the Ruins: The Question of Disciplinarity
in the Post/Medieval University” (2012). Our talk and live interviewing of each
other (“The Deep and the Personal: The Earth, Time, and Thought”) made us
realize that we shared obsessions with how to represent and convey scale, the
aesthetics of how arguments are made persuasive, the ways in which a beautiful object
“earth” might be part of that process (for good and ill), metaphors as both
help and hindrance, extinction, deep time, and the ways in which humans are
agents shaping the future of the planet. “Earth” would continue that dialogue
as a series of letters. We are interested in posing (and answering) questions
that do not translate well across disciplines, to provoke each other out of
disciplinary norms. Specifically we are interested in what methodologies we might
work out for thinking through the twin impulses to render the earth a solitary
object viewable from its exterior, and to plunge into the depths of the earth to
explore a roiled landscape that (like cold space) no human can actually
withstand. It is difficult to give a table of contents at this point, but we do
know that the topics we would likely cover include: the long history of
depicting the world as viewed from its exterior (including some medieval
manuscript images and some engravings from early printed books); the history of
imagining what is inside the earth; contemporary 3D technologies for simulating
earth and space exploration; the limitations of representing the earth from
both its exterior and from within; stones as archives of the deep past and
conveyors of earth stories; the use and the dangers of metaphor; the porous
interface between theory and observation. Though this all seems rather
abstract, we are both committed throughout these letters to foregrounding earth
as object rather than using earth as invitation to speak about related themes.
II. Veer Ecology
Veer Ecology gathers a
cross-disciplinary array of scholars to explore through short,
provocative essays vital terms for practicing ecological and environmental
theory. This book is a companion in a dual sense: a ready partner and fellow
traveler; a handbook, vademecum, and invitation to explore. In both these
functions Veer Ecology aims not to
provide encyclopedic overviews and definitive accounts, but to imagine possible
futures for the environmental humanities.
Ecotheory is an emergent field that makes use of recent
advances in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, literature, sustainability
studies and cultural studies to deepen our understanding of how we can better
frame our ethical, historical and cognitive relations to the world, especially
at a time of anthropogenic climate and resource crises. It is born of the
intersections among environmentalism, green studies, critical theory, literary
studies, and the new materialisms (material feminism, object studies, vibrant
materialism, and so on). Literature, history and the arts bring to
environmental science a long conversation about the relation of human activity
to the non-human world. Working against the cementing tendency of a research
companion or a would-be definitive account of a field, the terms collected here
are all verbs (to stress ecological activity and relations rather than states
of being). Ecotheory is a ceaseless spur and a doing, not the concretizing of an extant body of knowledge into
perduring form. A thoughtful response from the academy to the states of
emergency in which we increasingly find ourselves, ecotheory urges an ethically
complicated understanding of the enmeshment of the human within the natural
world. Because of its origins in ecology, ecotheory cannot be separated from
multi-modal forms of activism. This collaboration therefore aims for catalysis
rather than mastery, incitement rather than codification.
The collection’s title plays upon the root verb within
“environment”: French virer means
"to turn.” Veer Ecology responds
to environmental studies' intensified interest in directionality over the last
five years: an “animal turn,” “material turn,” "geologic turn" and
“hydrological turn" (among others) designate some incisive investigations
into how the ecological works. This collaborative endeavor takes the ecological
action or “turn” of ecotheory literally. Far from merely “environing” the human
in anthropocentric ways (Michel Serres’s worry about “environment” in The Natural Contract), veer ecology
acknowledges a world full of non/human and in/organic things that suddenly, and
unpredictably, go off course. They act, they drift, they swerve and resist. In
deviating from human domination, they change the course of other beings in ways
catastrophic, pleasurable, orbit-changing. Besides a sudden change of course,
subject, or direction, “veer” describes wind's movements across a compass or
weather vane. Though wind is not the only sudden
substance in the world, its veering suggests another meaning embedded in the
word, conveyed by the relation of French virer
to medieval Latin gyrare: to spin,
encircle, environ, whirl as a vortex. As the increased intensity and frequency
of storms like Sandy has made evident, climate does not conform to a bounded
system or circle (it cannot be encompassed). The human becomes de-centered,
part of a turning that is environmentality. Instead of indicating only an
epistemological turn, veer ecology stresses the agency of forces and things to
change course — of inquiry, weather, bodies, desires — with shared, material
impacts. This collaborative book is therefore not a compass or closed system of
points: each word is a direction for us to take to yet more positions, veerings
that might make the ontological, epistemological, and ethical positions we take
with the world move (affectively, cognitively, materially), curve, sheer,
converge, converse.
Table of Contents
3. Freeze (Lowell Duckert)
5. Drown (Jeffrey Cohen)
Jupiter-like torrid zone image from here.
