The Disposition of Nature

Environmental Crisis and World Literature

Jennifer Wenzel

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780823286775
  9780823286782
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780823286799
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Finalist, 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize, Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
Shortlisted, 2020 Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present

How do literature and other cultural forms shape how we imagine the planet, for better or worse? In this rich, original, and long awaited book, Jennifer Wenzel tackles the formal innovations, rhetorical appeals, and sociological imbrications of world literature that might help us confront unevenly distributed environmental crises, including global warming.

The Disposition of Nature argues that assumptions about what nature is are at stake in conflicts over how it is inhabited or used. Both environmental discourse and world literature scholarship tend to confuse parts and wholes. Working with writing and film from Africa, South Asia, and beyond, Wenzel takes a contrapuntal approach to sites and subjects dispersed across space and time. Reading for the planet, Wenzel shows, means reading from near to there: across experiential divides, between specific sites, at more than one scale.

Impressive in its disciplinary breadth, Wenzel's book fuses insights from political ecology, geography, anthropology, history, and law, while drawing on active debates between postcolonial theory and world literature, as well as scholarship on the Anthropocene and the material turn. In doing so, the book shows the importance of the literary to environmental thought and practice, elaborating how a supple understanding of cultural imagination and narrative logics can foster more robust accounts of global inequality and energize movements for justice and livable futures.

PART I

Citizens and Consumers

CHAPTER 1

Consumption for the Common Good? Commodity Biography in an Era of Postconsumerism

In bourgeois society the legal fiction prevails, that each person, as a buyer, has an encyclopedic knowledge of commodities.

—KARL MARX, Capital

It is a matter of great astonishment that the consideration of the habits of so interesting, and, in a commercial point of view, of so important an animal [as the Sperm Whale] should have been entirely neglected, or should have excited so little curiosity among … [those who] of late years must have possessed the most abundant and the most convenient opportunities of witnessing their habitudes.

—THOMAS BEALE, History of the Sperm Whale

Taken together, these remarks of Karl Marx and Thomas Beale suggest that consumers and producers should know a lot about commodities and where they come from, but neither actually do. Herman Melville cites Beale in the “Extracts” chapter of Moby-Dick, one of several chapters in which Melville’s own encyclopedic knowledge of whales and whaling—gathered through reading and observation—overtakes the novel’s narrative thrust. What meaning can be found in a whale is one question that drives the novel, and Melville is canny about the similarities between whales and books. In terms of present-day concerns, particularly significant is the whaler-narrator Ishmael’s disclosure to his readers (who consume whale oil in order to consume books) this bit of knowledge about whaling: “Upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others we spoke thirty different ships [sic], every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat’s crew. For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! Not a gallon you burn, but at least one man’s blood was spilled for it” (Melville [1851] 1993, 171). For Ishmael, the exchange of blood for oil is an unfortunate necessity that demands mindful consumption, rather than a moral horror that necessitates a different geopolitics, as with the “No Blood for Oil” slogan inspired by the Gulf Wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Ishmael’s direct address to the reader momentarily narrows the gap between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century modes of combustion and their costs in human lives. His uncertainty elsewhere in the novel about whether whale populations are threatened by whaling invites a certain pathos today: Not only are whales now regarded sympathetically as endangered fellow mammals rather than as diabolical resource-fish, but the dominant fuel of our own phase of modernity is also finite and entails costs that jeopardize the oceans’ (and thus the planet’s) capacity to support cetacean and human life.¹ For his own part, Melville seems not to have heeded this call to parsimony in calculating the ratios among gallons of ink, oil, and blood spilled for the sake of Moby-Dick.

Moby-Dick would have been impossible to write or decipher in the absence of a global—or at least oceanic/littoral—capitalism. Tracing the “devious zigzag world-circle of the Pequod’s circumnavigating wake,” Melville pushes the novel form to its limits to tell a tale of whaling, a global industry he posits as the vanguard of imperialism’s maps, markets and missionaries ([1851] 1993, 167). Moby-Dick is a prodigious feat of world-imagining, in which Nantucket figures not as quaint summer retreat on the margins of US territory (nor as inspiration for ribald rhymes) but as the center of a world-system and world-ecology in which the real action is at its furthest reaches: “Ah, the world! Oh, the world!,” Ishmael exclaims, remarking on whaling’s largely unwritten history (92). “Ah, the whale! Oh, the whale!” is the novel’s implicit alternating refrain. The relationship between world and whale is captured in the image of the Pequod, bedecked in whale ivory and bone, as a “cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies” (59). Captain Ahab’s “barbaric white leg,” the whalebone prosthesis he adopted after having been “dismasted” along with his ship, echoes this murderous incorporation of a vanquished antagonist (103). Described as “cannibal” and “barbaric,” on the wrong side of the civilization binary, these expropriations of whales’ body parts effect a reverse totemism, pledging enmity rather than affiliation. They are perhaps even fetishistic, a variant on the process of reduction by which, “however peculiar … any chance whale may be, they soon put an end to his peculiarities by killing him, and boiling him down into a peculiarly valuable oil” (170).

Moby-Dick peers into the mist and mystery of the commodity fetish, as it restores to view not only the human social relations that underwrite a cask of whale oil, but also the singularity of one whale whose peculiarities cannot be boiled off when he is quite literally rendered into a commodity, no matter how peculiar—or, as Marx might say, “very strange” (1977, 1:163)—its value may be. Unlike whale oil, Moby-Dick’s value as cultural commodity depends precisely upon the metaphysical singularity of its namesake whale. Ishmael’s description of whale oil production as the elimination of individual whales’ peculiarities resonates ironically with his dismissal of the threat posed by whaling: “we account the whale immortal in his species, however perishable in his individuality” (Melville [1851] 1993, 381). In these respects, Moby-Dick differs from a novel like Heart of Darkness, which tallies the costs of the ivory trade in terms that also broach the metaphysical but says not a word about elephants. For that, we must let the commodity do the talking.

Could elephant tusks themselves speak, what would they say? As if rewriting Marx’s scenario from the “Commodities” chapter of Capital, ivory tusks carved on the Loango coast of central Africa in the late nineteenth century seem to speak not of their “natural intercourse as commodities,” where “in the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values,” as Marx ventriloquizes (1967, 1:83), but the unnatural—and brutal—history of European trade and its disposition of nature, in which human beings, elephants, palm trees, and other flora were reduced to nothing but exchange-values (see Figure 1). With human and animal figures relief-carved in an ascending spiral, the violence of the African/European trade in palm wine and palm oil, rubber, ivory, and humans is on full view. Images of chained gangs of slaves and forced laborers insist upon the continuities among these forms of trade, despite the official British suppression of the transatlantic slave trade and its ostensible replacement by a “legitimate commerce” in nonhuman products.² The sociocultural effects of African and European encounters are legible in images of Africans in European dress. Elephants, elephant hunts, and human porters bearing ivory tusks are depicted within these narratives, in which the commodity tells its own story, inscribed upon its body (see Figure 2).

It is, of course, not the ivory nor the elephants that craft this narrative, but the ivory carvers of Loango for whom the tusks are the medium on which the history of Euro-African trade can be inscribed. Whereas the Loango tusks bear a narrative of their history, the whale parts on the Pequod are “trophies” that begin to turn the ship into a whale and are implied to have some relation to narrative and the ship’s history. Ahab’s whale prosthesis and the tattoos of Queequeg and Ishmael extend the metonymic slippages of inscription among whale, ship, whaler’s bodies, and narrative.³ The novel form (and his own leviathan ambitions) afforded Melville nearly endless possibilities for constellating meaning and matter; as a medium, the Loango tusks are less malleable.

Figure 1. Elephant tusk carved with figures in relief, Kongo (Vili), late nineteenth century. A. August Healy Fund. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum.

Figure 2. Elephant tusk with scenes of African life (detail), Anonymous (Congolese), c. 1850–60. Acquired by Henry Walters, ca. 1910. 71.586. Courtesy of The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the Loango tusks is the audience to whom they and their carvers spoke: they were produced for European traders, as souvenirs of their African sojourns.⁴ The tusks were mnemonic devices that supplemented the tales with which returned traders regaled family and friends (Bridges 2009). They were not unlike the nineteenth-century stereoscope, or twentieth-century View-Master, which disseminated mass-produced photographic image of exotic places. With the tusks, images were inscribed by local artists onto a medium of trade; the increasing scarcity of ivory in the late nineteenth century bears witness to that trade’s rapacity. And yet, the knowledge inscribed onto the tusks seems distinct from the knowledge read off of them; we can only surmise that the carvers’ sly incivility in depicting some of the horrors of trade with Europeans may have been read by their intended audience under the sign of adventure, or along the lines of the unfortunate necessity that Ishmael sees in the human blood distilled in whale oil, or as Marx’s “intercourse” between commodities. If anyone could be expected to know that “commodities cannot themselves go to market and perform exchanges in their own right,” as Marx writes, it would be “their guardians”: the traders themselves (1977, 1:178).

Marx’s insight is that the commodity fetish remains under its own thrall; could they speak, he implies, commodities would not necessarily tell a defetishizing truth. They are as “in love with money” as anyone else (1977, 1:202). Or, as with Moby-Dick and the Loango tusks, knowledge about human and animal suffering obscured by the mystique of the commodity does not necessarily interrupt exchange; indeed, in the case of the tusks, trade depends precisely upon the exchange of such knowledge, which, nonetheless, may not have the same meaning on either side of the exchange. Art historian Zoë Strother argues that the carved tusks should be read not as a continuous narrative, following around the spiral, but instead according to a discontinuous logic of juxtaposition, along the vertical axis: The most skilled carvers aligned these juxtapositions in particularly meaningful ways, and large tusks are too unwieldy to have been intended to be viewed by moving (around) them (2010, 52). The carved tusks pose an interpretive problem because of the tension between a narrative history of violent exploitation that the carvers inscribed as they worked their way around the spiral, and the juxtapositions of images, abstracted from this history, that are available to the stationary viewer.⁵ The problem of viewing the tusks approximates the consumer’s predicament: limited knowledge of the commodity, even if its story is writ large upon its surface.

Moby-Dick and the Loango tusks can be read as narratives that disseminate knowledge about commodities: texts that tell commodity stories—or commodities that tell their own stories—and thereby implicate consumers in the forms of violence that surround them. My concern in this chapter is with consumption, consumerism, and a more recent cultural form that confronts their attendant social and environmental harms: documentary films that I read as commodity biographies. These narratives of the life-stories of commodities trace global networks—Melville’s “devious zigzag world-circles”—linking (mostly Third World) producers and (mostly First World) consumers. Such films might be seen to remedy the lack of knowledge about commodities that Marx and Beale remark upon in my epigraphs. Although these documentary films are in many ways far removed from the nineteenth-century examples with which I began, these “texts” each contemplate what medium or form is adequate to both the commodity stories they want to tell and the worlds they want viewers to imagine. In this, they offer instructive allegories for versions of world literature modeled on itineraries of worldwide commerce, whether in the nineteenth-century era of whaling and Melville’s seminal world novel or the present era of resource exhaustion and documentary film. Asking viewers to connect the dots between their consumption habits and the lives of distant producers, commodity biography film is a genre premised upon reading for the planet.

This chapter considers three examples of commodity biography film: Life and Debt (2001), Darwin’s Nightmare (2004), and Black Gold (2006). Moby-Dick and the Loango tusks bring into relief a crucial paradox by offering a longer historical trajectory for these films—that, say, of capitalism, rather than merely late capitalism’s postmodernism. The paradox is this: While we might want to read these films as defetishizing their commodities—breaking the spell of enchantment that obscures the social relationships constituted by the movement and exchange of matter and labor—the films generate not only knowledge of the commodities’ life stories but also desire for the commodities themselves. This is particularly true—as with the Loango tusks—when knowledge about a commodity, even horrific knowledge, becomes part of its appeal. In other words, commodity defetishization is a classic gesture of the sort I consider in The Disposition of Nature: making legible the obscured histories and geographies that generate pleasure and privilege for some, immiseration for others, a fragile planet for everyone. Yet the knowledge project of rendering things visible collides with questions of aesthetic form—in this case, cinematic structures of scopic desire. Images of others’ suffering on screen somehow generate another kind of pleasure for those who watch.

Knowledge, then, has its limits. The echoes between exchanges of blood for oil in Moby-Dick and in Iraq indicate that US citizens have long known that their energy consumption habits have consequences for people in distant places. As Darwin’s Nightmare director Hubert Sauper remarks, his film merely connects the dots among discrete facts that “everyone knows” (Sauper 2004). The injustices of contemporary globalization do not stem from a simple lack of knowledge. Even as these films seek to move viewers, as consumers and citizens, along that media relay from knowledge to understanding to action, knowledge itself becomes part of the problem, rather than the solution.⁶ In terms of the tension between narrative and juxtaposition noted above, these commodity biography films might offer consciousness-raising narratives of suffering and exploitation. Yet they can also be read in terms of juxtaposed figures of knowledge that are themselves a source of consumerist pleasure.

In what follows, I read each film in turn, examining how it narrates the life-story of its respective commodity: Jamaican tourism in Life and Debt, Nile perch in Darwin’s Nightmare, Ethiopian fair trade coffee in Black Gold. These films aim to change consumer behavior by charting complex, transnational networks that implicate viewers in distant economic and ecological crises. They appeal to viewers as consumers and citizens by engaging the tangled webs of ideology, moral responsibility, and desire that shape their relationships to commodities and polities. Each film’s commodity biography constructs a different relationship between consumption and knowledge, and I am interested in how this nexus generates its own form of consumerism that obstructs the imagining of new modes of citizenship.

Commodity biography films aim to transform consumer behavior even as they elicit consumerist desire. This tension belies an important predicament involved in reading for the planet. I understand consumerism as central to the project of environmental justice, in a world where some people consume too much, others arguably consume too little, and it is difficult to imagine either the planet or politics as capable of sustaining a more equitable arrangement. These films reflect an emergent shift from an ethos of overconsumption to a putative ethics of consumption—from consumerism to postconsumerism. Postconsumerism posits mindful consumption as an altruistic act whose benefits accrue not immediately (or not only) to the consumer but to the producers (as in fair ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Reading for the Planet
• Part I: Citizens and Consumers
• Part II: Resource Logics and Risk Logics
• Epilogue: Fixing the World
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author