After it Almost Unmade: Action in Failing Systems
JMW Turner, Rockets and Blue Lights (Close at Hand) to Warn Steamboats of Shoal Water. 1840. Oil and Canvas. Clark Museum. Detail.
Tentatively titled After it Almost Unmade: Action in Failing Systems, a second monograph project puts literary reading methods in dialogue with Victorian and contemporary thinking about ecological networks. Its aim is to show how the nineteenth century used literary forms to imagine massive systems and the failure of those systems, and how Victorian thinkers nevertheless imagined, in the midst of entropic networks of entangled causation, the possibility for action. In contrast to existing studies of environmental content and ecological themes in the world's first industrial era, this project locates in nineteenth-century literary writing an incipient conceptual language for understanding relations between individual and system, "environment" and action.
For twenty-first century thinkers like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, our present environmental calamity presents itself most pressingly as a problem of agency. One the one hand, climate change aggrandizes human capacity by placing human action at the center of geological processes; on the other, it radically attenuates this capacity, since no single act now seems capable of altering the course of our system-wide, networked catastrophe. My project unearths a prehistory to this paradoxical situation so as to begin conceptualizing a way out. To generate this critique of ecocidal reason, the book spans the high period of nineteenth-century industrialization; chapters treat the interlinked character-systems of multiplot novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens; theological lyrics about shipwreck, fate, and the end of time by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Anglican Christina Rossetti; watercolor sketches about extraction and dissolution by JMW Turner; and tiny, fragmentary poem-objects composed on torn paper by Emily Brontë. In all this, the book aims to track literary efforts to comprehend human capacity in a world no longer responsive to the post-Enlightenment mythology that individual will can result in effective action.
The multiplot novel, the epic poem, the lyric fragment, and the sonnet: these and other aesthetic technologies, I suggest, constitute scale models for imagining how the concept of agency might be rebuilt for a world where J.S. Mill’s presumption that “over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign” is revealed as the fantasy it always was. The authors I study here used aesthetic techniques to imagine, instead, what I call nonsovereign action: improvised, elaborative models of collaborative making and doing, often at minor scales, that become available only when illusions of personal autonomy are abandoned. In the place of such fantasies I describe models of ensemble-based effectivity and gestural predication: minor and interactive models that run aslant from the logics of self-mastery that continue to animate the tradition of political thought following from Mill. In tracking this rewired voluntarism, the project speaks to an interdisciplinary audience concerned to understand their own place in a world of failing systems. Bookended by scenes of collapse in Houston, Texas, two weeks after Hurricane Harvey and a toxic, haze-shrouded Fresno, California, the project reaches from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, spotlighting the power of human making (poiesis) when the capacity to act seems lost. What results is an inventory for thinking human possibility —as slantwise agency, mutualized action, and unwound voluntarism— after the bourgeois world has eaten itself alive.
Some recent courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene (linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change") have helped me road-test some of these ideas in dialogue with students. A few blog posts (here and here) float initial parts of this work, 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 test out some other parts this project at a lecture at their studios in New York, which they filmed and stored on the internet (see below). The working title for the project comes from Gerard Manley Hopkins:
For twenty-first century thinkers like Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, our present environmental calamity presents itself most pressingly as a problem of agency. One the one hand, climate change aggrandizes human capacity by placing human action at the center of geological processes; on the other, it radically attenuates this capacity, since no single act now seems capable of altering the course of our system-wide, networked catastrophe. My project unearths a prehistory to this paradoxical situation so as to begin conceptualizing a way out. To generate this critique of ecocidal reason, the book spans the high period of nineteenth-century industrialization; chapters treat the interlinked character-systems of multiplot novels by George Eliot and Charles Dickens; theological lyrics about shipwreck, fate, and the end of time by the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Anglican Christina Rossetti; watercolor sketches about extraction and dissolution by JMW Turner; and tiny, fragmentary poem-objects composed on torn paper by Emily Brontë. In all this, the book aims to track literary efforts to comprehend human capacity in a world no longer responsive to the post-Enlightenment mythology that individual will can result in effective action.
The multiplot novel, the epic poem, the lyric fragment, and the sonnet: these and other aesthetic technologies, I suggest, constitute scale models for imagining how the concept of agency might be rebuilt for a world where J.S. Mill’s presumption that “over himself, over his own mind and body, the individual is sovereign” is revealed as the fantasy it always was. The authors I study here used aesthetic techniques to imagine, instead, what I call nonsovereign action: improvised, elaborative models of collaborative making and doing, often at minor scales, that become available only when illusions of personal autonomy are abandoned. In the place of such fantasies I describe models of ensemble-based effectivity and gestural predication: minor and interactive models that run aslant from the logics of self-mastery that continue to animate the tradition of political thought following from Mill. In tracking this rewired voluntarism, the project speaks to an interdisciplinary audience concerned to understand their own place in a world of failing systems. Bookended by scenes of collapse in Houston, Texas, two weeks after Hurricane Harvey and a toxic, haze-shrouded Fresno, California, the project reaches from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, spotlighting the power of human making (poiesis) when the capacity to act seems lost. What results is an inventory for thinking human possibility —as slantwise agency, mutualized action, and unwound voluntarism— after the bourgeois world has eaten itself alive.
Some recent courses, Tragic Ecologies (grad and undergrad) and Approaching the Anthropocene (linked to the 2016-2018 Mellon-Saywer Seminar I co-directed, "Approaching the Anthropocene: Global Culture and Planetary Change") have helped me road-test some of these ideas in dialogue with students. A few blog posts (here and here) float initial parts of this work, 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 test out some other parts this project at a lecture at their studios in New York, which they filmed and stored on the internet (see below). The working title for the project comes from Gerard Manley 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