Material Ecocriticism

Serenella Iovino, Serpil Oppermann

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780253013958
• eBook ISBN: 9780253014009
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy
• Index: Biological Sciences

Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandings of the planet to which we are intimately connected.

PART 1

THEORIES AND RELATIONS

1From Ecological Postmodernism to Material Ecocriticism

Creative Materiality and Narrative Agency

Serpil Oppermann

THE CONCEPTION OF physical reality within the framework of ecological postmodern thought and the nature of the material world described by quantum theory have recently been given new life by the emergence of the new materialist paradigm. The radical revisions of our ideas about the description of physical entities, chemical and biological processes, and their ethical, political, and cultural implications represented in recent discourses of feminist science studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities have also occasioned considerable interest among ecocritics, leading to the emergence of material ecocriticism. Proposing that we can read the world as matter endowed with stories, material ecocriticism speaks of a new mode of description designated as “storied matter,” or “material expressions” constituting an agency with signs and meanings. The idea that all material life experience is implicated in creative expressions contriving a creative ontology is a reworking of ecological postmodernism’s emphasis on material processes intersecting with human systems, producing epistemic configurations of life, discourses, texts, and narratives. Because ecological postmodernism perceives matter equipped with internal experience, agentic creativity, and vitality, it is important to acknowledge it as one of the roots upon which material ecocriticism constructs its theoretical premises, as this chapter aims to show.

Relational Materiality

Although material ecocriticism moves its focus beyond the perimeter of ecological postmodernism, there are plenty of ecological postmodern ideas within its radius. The postmodern discussions on the basic units of nature, such as atoms and molecules, as well as nature’s individual units, such as rocks and minerals, conceived as material entities with varying degrees of agency, for example, are implicated in material ecocriticism’s reflections on matter’s creativity. This creativity can be interpreted as a form of narrative transmitted through the interchanges of organic and inorganic matter, the continuity of human and nonhuman forces, and the interplay of bodily natures, all forming active composites.

Standing at the intersection of ecological postmodern ideas that converge on the new ontologies of matter and agency, material ecocriticism advances the understanding that composites, as noted by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter, are “inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations” (13). The premise that the world is “a dense network” of agencies constitutes the leading idea of both the new materialisms and ecological postmodernism. The sustained attention to interconnected processes that operate as composite agentic assemblies in networks is complemented by the keyword “relation.” A vision of the world’s phenomena as being in constant “relation” with each other is in fact what connects ecological postmodernism, material ecocriticism, and the new materialist theories.

Ecological postmodern thinkers such as Charles Hartshorne, David Ray Griffin, and Charlene Spretnak, among others, have repeatedly argued that the exponential escalation of the ecological crisis necessitates a radical epistemic shift in perspective from a mechanistic to an ecocentric paradigm. The solution to the highly problematized relationships between the human and the nonhuman spheres of existence for them lies in replacing mechanistic models of nature grounded in Cartesian dualisms with a relational ontology. In order to provide an adequate framework for more ethically and ecologically accountable interpretations of the more-than-human world, ecological postmodernists have proposed a new worldview, one that recognizes the vitality of things in all natural-cultural processes and cultivates the idea of restoring “health and aliveness through an empowered new vision” (Gablic 179). Ecological postmodernism, in other words, has made a clarion call for an integral relationship between humanity and the more-than-human world (on this point, see also Oppermann, “Rethinking”). In his “Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought,” David Ray Griffin, the major exponent of ecological postmodernism, for example, calls attention to the “ecological devastation of the modern world” and compellingly argues that this devastation “is providing an unprecedented impetus for people to see the evidence for a postmodern worldview and to envisage postmodern ways of relating to each other, the rest of nature, and the cosmos as a whole” (Sacred xii). Similarly, Charlene Spretnak emphasizes the significance of embracing the ecological postmodern paradigm, as it provides the best “understanding of the deeply relational nature of reality” (Relational 1). According to Spretnak, “The failure to notice that reality is inherently dynamic and interrelated at all levels . . . has caused a vast range of suffering” (1). In such a critical climate, ecological postmodernism rigorously contests the Cartesian model of rationalism with its mind-matter dualism, its modernist legacy of subject-object splits, and its social, cultural, and linguistic models of constructivism. Ecological postmodernists aver that at a fundamental level, dualist models define the basic constituents of nature as objects that “are devoid of all experience, intrinsic value, internal purpose, and internal relations” (Griffin, Whitehead’s 8). One of the destructive practical consequences of anthropocentric models of knowledge that describe nature either as a lifeless mechanism or as a mere textual construct is the capitalization of local ecosystems in the name of economic progress. Another related consequence is the oppressive social practices such as racism, sexism, and speciesism. In short, all manner of familiar ramifications follow from these anthropocentric models. Its most tragic outcome, however, as Charlene Spretnak points out, can be seen in the planetary disequilibrium:

the entire planet is now imperiled by climate destabilization and ecological degradation, resulting from the modern assumption that highly advanced societies could throw toxic substances “away” somewhere and could exude staggeringly unnatural levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere without ill effect. (Relational 1–2)

Spretnak highlights how the illogical view “that all entities in the natural world, including us, are essentially separate and that they function through mechanistic ways of interacting” (4) continues to inform worldwide modes of consumption and production, and thus “threatens the survival of life on our planet,” as Griffin also points out (“Introduction to SUNY” xii; emphasis in the original).

Ecological postmodernism offers an alternative to this view of nature with its main objective of “re-enchanting nature.”¹ As Griffin explains, the “disenchantment of nature” meant “the denial to nature of all subjectivity, all experience, all feeling” (“Introduction: The Reenchantment” 2), which created alienation and instrumental positioning of human practices and discourses. The major legacy of this approach is what quantum physicist David Bohm calls fragmentary perception of reality. Indicating the limitations of this view, Bohm states that fragmentation “is an attempt to divide what is really indivisible” (Wholeness 15–16), whereas the experimental confirmation of the true nature of reality is that “both observer and observed are merging and interpenetrating aspects of one whole reality” (9). In his chapter “Postmodern Science and a Postmodern World” in Griffin’s edited collection The Reenchantment of Science, Bohm further clarifies this point by calling attention to the findings of “postmechanistic physics,” or “quantum mechanical field theories” (64; emphasis in the original), which reveal an “unbroken wholeness” (65). In concord with Griffin’s claim of internal relations in matter, the more fundamental truth, Bohm argues, “is the truth of internal relatedness . . . which I call implicate order” (66).

Ecological postmodernism places a concerted emphasis on “internal relations” (Griffin, “Introduction: The Reenchantment” 2), or acting in response to the environment. Biologist Charles Birch defines internal relations in terms of having a “compelling purpose” to respond to external relations:

The idea of internal relations is that a human being, let us say, is not the same person independent of his or her environment. The human being is a subject and not simply an object pushed around by external relations. To be a subject is to be responsive, to constitute oneself purposefully in response to one’s environment. The postmodern view that makes most sense to me is the one that takes human experience as a high-level exemplification of entities in general, be they cells or atoms or electrons. All are subjects. All have internal relations. (70–71)

As explicitly underlined by Birch and others, such a postmodern approach is not dependent on teleological explanations; rather, it aims to show that all organisms “exercise at least some iota of purposeful causation” (Griffin, “Introduction: The Reenchantment” 22). This idea is particularly foregrounded by another ecological postmodern thinker and proponent of process philosophy, Charles Hartshorne. Anticipating the new materialist conceptualizations of matter as being “affective, and signaling” (Bennett, Vibrant 117), and imagining “the universe as a vast system of experiencing individuals” (6), Hartshorne points to nonhuman entities as possessing creative experience and some degree of feeling. He explains the “creative freedom that is found on this planet” (190) in terms of what Whitehead has called “compound individuals” (individuals compounded out of simpler entities). A compound individual can be high-grade, such as an animal, or low-grade, such as a molecule. More complex life forms have a higher degree of cohering experience, which enables them to express a unity of feeling or purpose. Hartshorne extends the concept of experience into less complex entities, such as molecules and cells, which do not have consciousness, but nevertheless have internal relations as they respond to their environment. In his vision, “the cells of one’s body are . . . constantly furnishing their little experiences or feelings which, being pooled in our more comprehensive experience, constitute what we call our sensations” (7). Against the objections raised to this claim that molecules and atoms also possess creative experience and some degree of feeling, Hartshorne responds by stating, “If atoms respond to stimuli (and they do), how else could they show that they sense and feel? And if you say, they have no sense organs, the reply is: neither do one-celled animals, yet they seem to perceive their environments” (6). Because, according to him “atoms, molecules, and still more nerve cells, seem to exhibit signs of spontaneous activity” (8), Hartshorne concludes that “we have no conceivable ground for limiting feeling to our kind of individual, say the vertebrates, or even to animals” (144). Considering reality as a “creative becoming” (13), Hartshorne suggests that we sympathize “with the universal ‘life of things,’ the ‘ocean of feelings,’ which is reality in its concrete character” (144). This is in fact something that the new materialists have consistently insisted upon, increasingly acknowledging the idea of creative becoming as the most conspicuous characteristics of material entities. This emphasis on creativity locates agency as a property “inherent in nature itself” (Coole and Frost, “Introducing” 20). In other words, concepts developed by ecological postmodern thinkers complement “ontologies of immanently productive matter” (20)—a matter that is defined today as unpredictable, self-creative, generative, active, and expressive by the new materialists. In this regard, the influence of ecological postmodernism on some of these accounts of matter is far from speculative, because it does underpin the shifting definitions of matter, life, nature, and agency. The ecological postmodern idea that nonhumans should be regarded as enlivened, or animated, beings in interacting with what the new materialists, such as Jane Bennett, call the “vibrant matter” itself is an obvious example.

Bennett’s aim to “theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality” (Vibrant xiii), and “material vitality” (55) of all nonhuman forces, clearly evokes ecological postmodern sentiments,² developed, for instance, by Charlene Spretnak regarding life processes: “Animate or inanimate, our relatives are all around us, lighting the sky, rushing through a river bed, thrusting upward through Earth’s crust” (Resurgence 183). Spretnak alleges that postmodernism’s ecological orientation “acknowledges our constitutive embeddedness in subtle bodily, ecological, and cosmological processes” (73). Likewise, the work of such postmodern environmental thinkers as J. Baird Callicott, Jim Cheney, Michael E. Zimmermann, Carolyn Merchant, Daniel R. White, and Arran E. Gare indicates that in dismantling the binaries of language-reality, culture-nature, discourse-matter, human-nonhuman, ecological postmodernism sets in motion a nonanthropocentric paradigm. Postmodern theoretical approaches are also consonant with material ecocriticism’s similar contestation of the distorting dichotomies between the human and the nonhuman realms, between realism and constructivism, and between discourse and matter.

In summary, postmodern thought is far from emphasizing the discursive to the exclusion of the material. Postmodernism today is intensely involved in challenging the old conceptualizations of nature, matter, reality, and discourse within a hierarchy of relations. It is precisely this vision that brings postmodernism into alliance with the new materialisms and material ecocriticism, as they all contest theories of the world as linguistic constructions disconnected from the material world, hence the lateral continuum of postmodernism, the new materialisms, and material ecocriticism (see Oppermann, “A Lateral”).

The ecological postmodern conceptualization of matter is in fact a comportment that scientists (molecular biologists and quantum physicists in particular) consider as an underlying reality. It is also consonant with the new materialist theorizing of material agency in terms of matter’s “expressive” dimension. Being perspicuously efficacious and morphogenetic, animate matter, both parties agree, exhibits a considerable degree of experience. Similarly, inanimate matter, though lacking morphogenetic quality, is performative and produces significant material effects in social processes and induces changes in corporeal forms or, in Stacy Alaimo’s words, trans-corporeal interchanges. This, in other words, is a “reenchanted world” where every entity, living or nonliving, macro or micro, enacts causal structures, which Karen Barad calls “differential responsiveness” and “differential articulations” (Meeting 335), with emergent patterns of intelligibility. The only way to cultivate this new discernment, as Jane Bennett reminds us, is to “elide the question of the human” (Vibrant 120) and thus, in a way, bypass the hierarchy of subjects over objects. Similar to Griffin, Bennett contends that the image of the nonhuman world as inert, passive, and inanimate “feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption,” whereas acknowledging the vitality, creativity, and effectivity of nonhuman entities enables us to detect “a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies” (ix). Bennett evokes “bacteria colonies in the human elbow” (120) to express the obvious interchanges of human and nonhuman natures and to display the human as an assemblage of microbes and other substances. “If human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, nonhuman agencies,” she writes, then we need to devise new “regimes of perception that enable us to consult nonhumans more closely, or to listen and respond more carefully to their outbreaks, objections, testimonies, and propositions” (108).

Is it possible to consult the nonhuman world, or “listen” to it in a way that does not presume that humans are separate observers who translate this world’s stories into comprehensible narrative format, to quote Vicki Kirby? Because any answer to such questions will inevitably lead us “down the anthropocentric garden path,” as Bennett concedes (120), maybe asking the question differently might offer an outlet, as Kirby does: “Does Nature require a human scribe to represent itself, to mediate or translate its identity?” (Quantum 86). Taking the notion of agency in terms proposed by Bruno Latour (actors emerging in agential networks) and Jane Bennett (distributive agency), and using Karen Barad’s notion of intra-activity as a model, Kirby’s response is that “nature does not require human literary skills to write its complexity into comprehensible format” (Quantum 87), because we are, as human scribes, part of the collective expressions (83). This statement can be understood within the broader onto-epistemology of Karen Barad, a wider framework that connects “human and nonhuman, material and discursive, and natural and cultural factors” (Meeting 26) in an undivided field of existence called “phenomena.” To resolve the subject-object split and related dichotomies, Barad offers a compelling account of an agential-realist ontology where “mutual constitution of entangled agencies” (Meeting 33; emphasis in the original) emerges through specific “intra-actions.” Intra-action designates the world’s radical aliveness, its vitality, dynamism, and agency (Meeting 33), but, more important, it also refers to a dynamic topology where nothing precedes another thing, nor do humans preexist relations. There is no before or after, but an ongoing process of intra-acting agencies generating the world’s “exuberant creativeness” (Meeting 177). This understanding—being wholly consonant with the postmodern proposal of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedtication
• Contents
• Foreword: Storied Matter
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Stories Come to Matter
• Part 1. Theories and Relations
• Part 2. Narratives of Matter
• Part 3. Politics of Matter
• Part 4. Poetics of Matter
• Coda. Open Closure A Diptych on Material Spirituality
• Afterword: The Commonwealth of Breath
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors
• Index