Tag Archives: Literature

Final Prompt

Performative Assembly and a Revised Ethics of Doing

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I always appreciate the opportunity to read Judith Butler’s work because there is such a depth to her writing. The chapters from her recent Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly that we read for the course is one that I had not read before and am glad to have. It has helped me flesh out some theoretical issues that have been at play in my own work and shaped my thinking around the role of the humanities within the larger scope of environmental action.

At the forefront of Butler’s argument is precarity, that is, existing within the system of neoliberal capitalism wherein our bodies and identities are caught up in our ability to produce some kind of economic value. This reduction makes the exigence of much academic work focused on results that generate capital, draw investors or grants, and help market the university or department where the work is done. This model is something I think we all feel on some level, some more than others. But, in the humanities, the drive toward marketability has in recent years grown louder and louder.

This is where I feel Butler’s intervention most dearly. When she writes that, “My increasing urgent sense about speaking in public, or writing for a public, is not that it should lead us straightway to a path for action; it is, rather, a chance to pause together and reflect on the conditions and directions of acting, a form of reflecting that has its own value, and not merely an instrumental one” (124). Doing for the sake of doing or rather, critical inquiry for the sake of education, something which the humanities as a discipline took as foundational for years seems under pressure to change into a more market driven approach to knowledge production. I think this formulation can be of use in thinking about the power of the humanities and its role within global disasters. The STEM programs are not the only ones with answers to these problems.

While, “just doing something” even if it doesn’t create any discernable change may seem like a futile attempt to participate, I think Butler wants us to think about this kind of action on a deeper level of what such action can evoke in those who are a part of it—that is, what can it helps us realize about ourselves and our communities? She writes, “What does it mean to at together when the conditions for acting together are devastated or falling away? Such an impasse can become the paradoxical condition of a form of social solidarity both mournful and joyful, a gathering enacted by bodies under duress or in the name of duress, where the gathering itself signifies persistence and resistance” (123).

What she calls “Vulnerability as a form of activism” is probably the most impactful idea that I learned from this course (123).  Care and vulnerability already shape a lot of my work, especially in how we think of our relationships with the nonhuman world. But also in my interest in contemporary fiction and what some are calling a turn away from post-modern irony toward a kind of “new sincerity”.  This movement is shaped by a desire to be engaged with genuine feelings without needing to create ironic distance between the self and the object of attention while at the same time not relinquishing the self-awareness and self-referential power of the post-modern. Such a discourse benefits from Butler’s notion of vulnerability as activism because it helps to inject a politics into the otherwise aesthetically focused concept of sincerity. To be vulnerable together—to care together—about the things we like and about the things we hold dear, (our political identities and our collective interests among them), is a way to embrace the precarity of our lives and find empowerment because of it. The importance of care and vulnerability, touch on nearly all of the major topics in the environmental humanities that we covered this semester. From precarity (which Butler also helps us theorize) to an openness to the agency of the material world beyond the human that Bennett asks us to embrace, there lies a push to recognize the already vulnerable nature of our existence. To think that we are not already vulnerable is delusion. The only way forward in terms of reconciling human impact on the planet and what we can do about it while entrenched in a system that complicates and perverts collective action, is through an embrace of that vulnerability.

 

 

 

Final Prompt

Notes on How I Intend to Not Just Watch the World Burn

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Prior to this course I had had no exposure to the Environmental Humanities whatsoever. I assumed it was field of scholars doing nature writing, reading Annie Dillard, or, I suppose, contemplating the hermeneutics of foliage. Therefore, I thought, it has no relevance to my research. I am delighted, if not really surprised to find I was quite wrong. Every text in this course has opened a new perspective for me, as I learned that the Environmental Humanities is not only legitimate but actually useful to me. More than any other text, though, I keep coming back to Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble. To explain why Haraway has resonated with me, let me first, as briefly as possible, touch on my aims and methods as a scholar of literature.

I research the material cultural history of literature and practices of reading and writing. My methodology tends to draw on Book History, Media Studies, and Textual Studies. Texts are always encountered as material objects. I like to think about texts therefore with an eye toward production and use. Textual production and use are always deeply interrelated. I mean a variety of things by this, but to avoid writing my dissertation in a blog post, allow me to home in on a single instance: one use for a text is the production of a new text. This is as much true when Seth Grahame-Smith added his own words to Jane Austen’s to produce Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as when a young Emily Dickinson read poetry by the Brontës. Moreover, if we consider production beyond mere composition, it becomes clear that many more hands were involved in making the thing we read than just the author’s. What I’m getting at here, is that my broader interest is a decentering of the author, not à la Barthes as a rhetorical or logical position intended to open up interpretive possibilities, but as a way of reading intertextually and revealing the labor hidden or elided by an “author-”centered approach. This is, make no mistake, a political project. I am resisting a neo-liberal discourse of individualism.

I was elated, then, to discover, amidst Haraway’s admittedly fruity prose, concepts that seemed to line up strikingly with my own work. Take sympoiesis, which Haraway learned from Katie King, who in turn learned it from M. Beth Dempster. Sympoiesis, Haraway explains (by quoting Dempster), describes “collectively-producing systems that do not have self-defined spatial or temporal boundaries. Information and control are distributed among components. The systems are evolutionary and have the potential for surprising change” (33). What have I been moving toward if not a sympoietic model of literary production? Haraway seems to call to me to push what I’ve been thinking about even further. Her literary form enacts what it describes. She embeds herself in tentacular networks of ideas and writers. Haraway’s SF [string figures, “speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle” (31)] is both a way of thinking the world and telling the world. “SF is storytelling and fact telling; it is the patterning of possible worlds and possible times, material-semiotic worlds, gone, here, and yet to come” (31). Haraway marries cultural criticism and cultural production; that is to say, she positions interpretation in a reflexive relationship with what is normally thought of as creation [a problematic term in Haraway’s cosmology and indeed in my own model of shared labor]. Moreover, her model of sympoiesis emphasizes distributive authorship and distributive responsibility. Her form both interrogates and postulates (and then she closes with fiction!). She makes different syntactic, semantic, and aesthetic choices than I certainly ever will but this way of thinking and doing scholarship (or theory or philosophy) seems more alive than almost anything I’ve encountered.

At heart, what I find so compelling (or maybe just validating) about Haraway is that it makes me feel like my work could be connected to something more significant than the academy. In the last few years academia has come to feel like a particular pair of panels from K.C. Green’s Gunshow that are quite popular online:

K. C. Green Gunshow

Only it’s worse than that, because some of us have decided this is not fine and we seem helpless to communicate the urgency of that fact with anyone but ourselves. It is helpful to be reminded that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas” (34), that our work does not need to carry the weight of the world, that we can become together, and move toward a way of working, writing, and doing that has stakes for confronting issues like nuclear power/proliferation and climate change. Not only does Haraway expand my conception of what scholarship can accomplish but my conception of how we might perform and undertake scholarship altogether.

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Top: “Spawn of the Stars” by Sofyan Syarief: Deviantart – Artstation – Behance – Instagram [CC BY-SA 3.0] Please note that Haraway’s “ChthuIucene” has nothing whatsoever to do with Cthulhu, and you are silly for assuming it might. However, I, for one, am looking forward to abandoning both the Anthropocene and the Chthulucene for the coming Cthulhucene, when the blessed cradle of madness can at last rock humanity to its longed-for slumber. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn

Prompt 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).