After It Almost Unmade: Action in Failing Systems
JMW Turner, "Fire at the Grand Storehouse of the Tower of London," Sketch (1841) Tate Gallery, Turner Collection Archives (photo by NH)
What does it feel like to live in a world that's falling apart? And to know, either as embodied intuition or through a straightforward analysis of the facts, that there’s nothing you can do to stop it?
Tentatively titled After It Almost Unmade, my current book project is about living in a burning world. It shows how certain nineteenth-century writers bore witness to an emergent fossil-fueled catastrophe whose ruins we inhabit today. In response, they harnessed the capacities of art to comprehend what I suggest is a deeply contemporary feeling of powerlessness: the sense, all too common now, that individual action can do nothing to stop the breakdown of massively intricate global systems. In response to this early insight into the suicidal nature of modern life, the writers and painters I discuss developed new ways to understand action: collaborative, collective, and improvised, aimed not at heroic revolution but low-frequency and incremental gains toward a livable world. In this way the book traces a prehistory of the climate crisis, while recasting "climate crisis" to mean not just the interlocked material processes destroying earth systems now, but also a conceptual and ethical dilemma about action.
To make this case, I turn to a series of nineteenth-century British writers and artists who bore witness to the early phases of a disastrous modern order whose terminal crisis is transpiring now. From Emily Brontë and Gerard Manley Hopkins to J.M.W. Turner, Christina Rossetti, and unknown romantic-era painter John Berryman, among others, the thinkers arranged here grasped that their modernizing world was best understood not as continually improving, progressively enlightening, or providing increased comfort for ever more people. Instead they saw themselves as part of a slow-motion catastrophe. The extractive rationality metastasizing over their lifetimes was based on coercion and growth and would culminate, they intuited, in what Rossetti called our “common ruin.” The endgame of these logics is visible today in wildfires, floods, and superstorms: dialectical images of our unwinding present, yes, but also traces of a nineteenth century we have not yet outlived.
With different levels of self-consciousness, then, the thinkers I examine here understood that the most beautiful moments of their bourgeois world were predicated on disaster elsewhere, its fantasies of infinite improvement powered by a fossil fuel, coal, that choked the earth in soot and was bound to run out. The “smeared” and “bent world” that Hopkins saw in 1877 was “seared with trade,” as he put it, scarred by human rapacity and broken at a scale that made its restoration impossible to effect by any single one of us. What could be done? To address this insoluble dilemma these writers and artists turned to the resources of aesthetic presentation. Sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches and vast, multiplot novels: these and other conceptual experiments, I argue, show in different ways how the philosophical and, I claim, aesthetic category of agency might be shifted beyond the post-Enlightenment presumption that willed decision can result in effective change. Against such fantasy formations, the slantwise logics of action I recover here amount to a repertoire for imagining possibility in a diminished world; they recast for the era of climate breakdown what Fred Moten has termed subjectless predication—doing without a single doer—and what George Eliot, in Middlemarch, described as the world-changing force of "unhistoric acts."
Across five chapters the book shows how nineteenth-century thinkers worked by aesthetic means to critique voluntarist frameworks while maintaining the commitment to activity and freedom without which we can only sit back in hopeless despair. To do this they (a) redefined categories like “will” in light of humans beings’ densely mutual relations with other worldly phenomena (in Brontë and Hopkins); (b) rescaled action from the grandly heroic to the intimate and small (in Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Turner); and (c) (in Rossetti and Berryman) reconceptualized personhood itself by locating the universally-shared qualities of human beings not in freedom but constraint. Together, these efforts enabled bystanders to an early and then maturing fossil economy to conceive of action outside the limiting categories of bourgeois subjectivity without losing the commitment to new beginnings that enables us to avoid climate despair today. The alternate forms of possibility reconstructed here developed from the experience of minoritized subjects, women in particular, who were no strangers to the illusory quality of unconstrained freedom. Their practices of changemaking depended not on direct lines of predication or the masculine grammars by which subjects do things to objects. Instead they mobilized partial, fragmented, even agrammatical models for doing, lower in frequency than the cymbal-clashing stories of self-sovereign agents still claiming pride of place in the think-tank dreamworlds of climate policy today.
The pandemic has delayed this work. A recent essay in The Victorian Review frames some of the key stakes, and a short piece in The Ecologist frames other central concepts. Some recent courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene, which was linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change," helped me test some of these ideas in dialogue with students. A few blog posts (here and here) float initial treatments of some ideas. And an essay on Christina Rossetti, which will become a section of the book, has been published in Nineteenth Century Contexts. I am grateful to e-flux journal for letting me try out an early version of another section at their studios in New York (see video below). The working title comes from Hopkins:
Tentatively titled After It Almost Unmade, my current book project is about living in a burning world. It shows how certain nineteenth-century writers bore witness to an emergent fossil-fueled catastrophe whose ruins we inhabit today. In response, they harnessed the capacities of art to comprehend what I suggest is a deeply contemporary feeling of powerlessness: the sense, all too common now, that individual action can do nothing to stop the breakdown of massively intricate global systems. In response to this early insight into the suicidal nature of modern life, the writers and painters I discuss developed new ways to understand action: collaborative, collective, and improvised, aimed not at heroic revolution but low-frequency and incremental gains toward a livable world. In this way the book traces a prehistory of the climate crisis, while recasting "climate crisis" to mean not just the interlocked material processes destroying earth systems now, but also a conceptual and ethical dilemma about action.
To make this case, I turn to a series of nineteenth-century British writers and artists who bore witness to the early phases of a disastrous modern order whose terminal crisis is transpiring now. From Emily Brontë and Gerard Manley Hopkins to J.M.W. Turner, Christina Rossetti, and unknown romantic-era painter John Berryman, among others, the thinkers arranged here grasped that their modernizing world was best understood not as continually improving, progressively enlightening, or providing increased comfort for ever more people. Instead they saw themselves as part of a slow-motion catastrophe. The extractive rationality metastasizing over their lifetimes was based on coercion and growth and would culminate, they intuited, in what Rossetti called our “common ruin.” The endgame of these logics is visible today in wildfires, floods, and superstorms: dialectical images of our unwinding present, yes, but also traces of a nineteenth century we have not yet outlived.
With different levels of self-consciousness, then, the thinkers I examine here understood that the most beautiful moments of their bourgeois world were predicated on disaster elsewhere, its fantasies of infinite improvement powered by a fossil fuel, coal, that choked the earth in soot and was bound to run out. The “smeared” and “bent world” that Hopkins saw in 1877 was “seared with trade,” as he put it, scarred by human rapacity and broken at a scale that made its restoration impossible to effect by any single one of us. What could be done? To address this insoluble dilemma these writers and artists turned to the resources of aesthetic presentation. Sonnets and fractured lyrics, watercolor sketches and vast, multiplot novels: these and other conceptual experiments, I argue, show in different ways how the philosophical and, I claim, aesthetic category of agency might be shifted beyond the post-Enlightenment presumption that willed decision can result in effective change. Against such fantasy formations, the slantwise logics of action I recover here amount to a repertoire for imagining possibility in a diminished world; they recast for the era of climate breakdown what Fred Moten has termed subjectless predication—doing without a single doer—and what George Eliot, in Middlemarch, described as the world-changing force of "unhistoric acts."
Across five chapters the book shows how nineteenth-century thinkers worked by aesthetic means to critique voluntarist frameworks while maintaining the commitment to activity and freedom without which we can only sit back in hopeless despair. To do this they (a) redefined categories like “will” in light of humans beings’ densely mutual relations with other worldly phenomena (in Brontë and Hopkins); (b) rescaled action from the grandly heroic to the intimate and small (in Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Turner); and (c) (in Rossetti and Berryman) reconceptualized personhood itself by locating the universally-shared qualities of human beings not in freedom but constraint. Together, these efforts enabled bystanders to an early and then maturing fossil economy to conceive of action outside the limiting categories of bourgeois subjectivity without losing the commitment to new beginnings that enables us to avoid climate despair today. The alternate forms of possibility reconstructed here developed from the experience of minoritized subjects, women in particular, who were no strangers to the illusory quality of unconstrained freedom. Their practices of changemaking depended not on direct lines of predication or the masculine grammars by which subjects do things to objects. Instead they mobilized partial, fragmented, even agrammatical models for doing, lower in frequency than the cymbal-clashing stories of self-sovereign agents still claiming pride of place in the think-tank dreamworlds of climate policy today.
The pandemic has delayed this work. A recent essay in The Victorian Review frames some of the key stakes, and a short piece in The Ecologist frames other central concepts. Some recent courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene, which was linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change," helped me test some of these ideas in dialogue with students. A few blog posts (here and here) float initial treatments of some ideas. And an essay on Christina Rossetti, which will become a section of the book, has been published in Nineteenth Century Contexts. I am grateful to e-flux journal for letting me try out an early version of another section at their studios in New York (see video below). The working title comes from Hopkins:
Thou hast bound bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh.
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
—G.M. Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876)
And after it almost unmade, what with dread,
Thy doing: and dost thou touch me afresh?
Over again I feel thy finger and find thee.
—G.M. Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland (1876)
"My task is done." Smudged fragment on mourning paper. Emily Brontë, 1844 (Berg Collection, NYPL).
Streetside wreckage. Kashmere Gardens (Houston), two weeks after Hurricane Harvey. 9.16.2017, photo by the author