A nice new issue of Coriolis is out, with a trio of articles on the state-0f-the-field in maritime and Atlantic World history.  The three authors — Josh Smith of the Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point, NY; Kelly Chaves, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick; and Lincoln Paine, independent scholar and editor — make a nice survey of recent developments in maritime history, including dust-ups about how new the “new thalassologists” really are, how imperial and Anglophone the Atlantic World still is, and how much ethnohistory and especially the history of Native American cultures might add to our maritime world-views.  All three authors build on Paul Cohen’s great 2008 article, “Was there an Amerindian Atlantic?”
References to literary matters are somewhat scattered, though Hester Blum gets respectful citation and I get a quick shout-out alongside the great Mary K. Bercaw-Edwards.  Makes me wonder if a more sustained hashing out of literary-cultural-historical matters might shed light on a few things, including the bifurcated status of the ocean as preeminent symbol and structuring physical reality of the global era.  But that’s for later, or maybe for the maritime panel I’m organizing for the JCB’s 50th anniversary panel this coming June.

1.  We talked a lot about fishing in contrast with agriculture — but is it really true that, over the long duree of human history, fishing has been more destructive?  It’s true that a farmer plants seeds for next year, this cultivating both soil and, its etymological congnate “culture,” but if we think about the widespread alteration of the land through agriculture, starting millenia ago, I wonder if farming still looks innocent.

I suspect the whole biosphere-into-nutrition spectrum — fishing / hunting / mining / farming / gathering — could use some analytical pressure.  All these things deplete ecosystems, all of them have long and complex histories, all of them have different political valences in a modern environmental context.  Not sure what to do with this right now, but perhaps it can shift fishing conversations out beyond fish, some of the time.

2. Circling back to the question of heroism and ecology, I’d like to state more directly the paradox I was trying to elaborate in response to Senayon’s paper.  It’s a pretty simple double bind: humans can’t do without heroes, but heroic striving for distinction is not, on a basic level, compatible with ecological inter-connectedness.  That’s not a problem to be solved, I think, but a condition with which to struggle. 

I might emphasize, in this context, a post-modern (and post-Hemingway) resistance to the hero as such, in writers such as Thomas Pynchon, whose characters sometimes fragment into unintelligibly, in a work like Akmatova’s “Poem without a Hero” (a Russian reference for Ryan), or in various other modern / post-modern literary texts.  Against the heroic drive to distinguish the one from the many, some recent writers have been working on a way to de-ego-ize heroism, sometimes with an ecological end in mind.

Eco-heroes from Rachel Carson to John Steinbeck, Al Gore, Bill McKibben: how might these figures fit on the heroic continuum?

Thanks again everyone for a stimulating conferences, and I hope our rivers flow together again sometime soon.

For my epsirit d’interstate after a great weekend at Final Frontiers, a conference on maritime environmental history at the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine, I was thinking about Michael Pearson’s challenge to the group to eschew terrestrial language and its metaphors.  Not an easy thing to do, but —

Current (formerly field):  If we re-divide or re-describe ourselves through scholarly / intellectual currents, perhaps we’ll be able to avoid defensive postures and emphasize movement and connection between differences — or perhaps through differences.  I want to write about the Gulf Stream as poetic and historical agent.

Water (formerly ground): Thinking not only about ground / land / earth as metaphors of solidity and stability, but also about the tenor-vehicle relationship itself as the “ground” of a working metaphor.  What if metaphors float on water, rather than resting on ground?  Nothing stays on the surface forever.

Flow (formerly progress): Rethinking movement as flows and circuits, rather than progress or retreat, might make some ideas about intellectual shifts richer.  It is likely to make them more confusing, and less familiar.  Both good things.

Ship (formerly state): We know ships are heterotopias and polyglot fantasies, but what would happen if we started thinking politics through ship-to-ship contacts, rather than the very different metaphorics of the state?

Seascape (formerly landscape): Is the “scape” still a problem?

Distortion (formerly clarity): As I’ve been thinking about for a while, a basic feature of aqueous environments, at least in visual terms, is distortion.  But of course air bends light also, producing rainbows and pretty sunsets, and the earth flows, especially when heated.  So perhaps distortion of various types is a baseline condition?  Is “baseline” a terrestrial or aqueous metaphor?  Water’s tri-dimensionality sometimes orients us on the buoyant top as well as irresistible bottom.

Horizon (formerly horizon): We spent some time thinking about oceanic horizons, sea-marks and landmarks, and elevation in places like Tenerife.  Is horizon one of the metaphor-concepts that’s already present in both green and blue worlds?  Not as a sight of struggle or transition, like beaches of coastlines (“line” is a problematic metaphor there), but as a merging of perspectives.  Horizons of ocean, currents and horizons.  Places from which new things are visible…

More thoughts to come, I hope.

 

Over on the right side of the blog, under “Pages,” you can now find a copy of this description of my SAA 2012 seminar, “Oceanic Shakespeares.”  It will be updated as the event draws nearer.

A shockingly swift jaunt through Queens and the Midtown tunnel got me to Speculative Medeivalisms II in time to catch most of Kellie Robertson’s talk on the changing fortunes of Aristotle.  It was a good sign, a good talk, and a good day.  Traffic is not always the dominant reality.

Part of the draw of this event for a non-medeivalist like me — I sat in the designated early-modern row with Julian Yates & Drew Daniel at first, but we were allowed to mingle later — was to finally see the bio-extensions of some famous folks I’ve heretofore  known only in e-form, especially Karl Steel and Eileen Joy.  Jeffrey Cohen, here pictured explaining how Merlin engineered Stonehenge, also featured in a lively lineup of theoretical, playful, creative work that bubbled up from, and sometimes overflowed out of, medieval studies.  I really like the way this group plays the game.

The intellectual crux of the event for me, though, was the presence of Graham Harman, philospher and guru of OOO (pronounciation uncertain) or Object Oriented Ontology, a model that flattens and distributes object-status, agency, and meaning across all objects in every form. Many of the early talks, esp Kellie’s and Jeffrey’s, presented themselves in dialogue with Graham’s work. Liza Blake’s response to Julian Yates’s Latourian reading of cooking in and out of Titus Andronicus — it’s nerve-wracking, Julian reminded us all, to make home-made piecrust, even if you’re not trying to bake your enemy’s children inside it — imagined an unwritten fourth part of Harman’s Prince of Networks that would put OOO’s reformulation of metaphysics in closer touch with the sorts of things we literary types tend to offer.  (Autobiographical sidenote: I’m pretty sure I was reading Prince of Networks on the Jubilee Line when Speculative Medeivalisms I was going on in London last January.)

Graham Harman’s talk batted cleanup, & he was smart, erudite, eloquent, and thorough, taking us through the history of the object in modern philosophy and showing why his efforts to de-center and de-privledge humanity flow naturally from a right understanding of Husserl and Heidegger, among others.  There wasn’t much time for questions as the day wound down; we were exhausted, the wine was waiting upstairs, many people needed to get to dinner, and I needed to rescue the babysitter in CT.  But while driving home I couldn’t help thinking that the question I had was the one I pose a half-dozen times a day to my students: So what?  What’s next?  What can we do with that insight?

Partly it’s a disciplinary issue: I don’t have a huge stake in the right reading of the history of 20c philosophy, but I am always looking for a philosophical structure or model through which to think about how creatures, including but not only humans, live in a disorderly world.  OOO is great on variety and perspective-shifting lists; Graham calls these “Latour lists,” but I think of them as coming first from Borges.  I spent a lot of time yesterday thinking about the blind Argentine and Tlön:

The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for truth or even for verisimilitude but rather for the astounding.  They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. (Labyrinths, 10)

In Borges’s story, the astounding as metaphysics is enticing but never really real.  Its fictions encroach upon the given world.  “The world, unfortunately,” he concludes elsewhere, “is real.”  I’m not sure that Borges’s vision, which in Tlön at least is an allegory of mid-century modernism and fascism, quite fits with OOO’s insistent opening up of agency, but I’m not really an OOO-master.  I’ve read, thought about, and cited, Tim Morton’s eco-books, and  I’ve also enjoyed Harman on Latour, but I’ve not (yet) dug deeply into the sub-field.  (Digging may be the wrong metaphor for a model that denies vertical hierarchies.)

The question for me as an omnivorous literary scholar who always wants something to take home from these cross-disiplinary buffets is, what can I do with OOO?  I like its post-human de-centering, its claims for the agency and autonomy and respect due to objects like the Gulf Stream or the process of evaporation or the movement of ballast water.  Like Latour’s ANT(s), it’s a powerfully descriptive and poetic horizontalizing of the world.  I can see why Kellie and Graham both connect it to Aristotle, and I get why Jeffrey and Eileen both dig it.

It’s a good challenge and prod to get outside of humanism, to move to what some other OOO-ers (Levi Bryant?) call the “great outdoors.”  But it also seems to me — and perhaps here I risk outing myself as too humanist to sit with the cool kids at the lunch table —  that’s it’s not quite possible for literary culture to make this move the same way philosophy does.  How far outside our bodies can we really sit when rain and winds lash us and the mad old King “to the skin”?  To know that ourselves, our loved ones, our household pets are no more or less objects than veins of coal or moon-rocks or cows being led to slaughter is salutary, and of course it’s essentially, intellectually, fundamentally true.  But can literature really live that way?  Emotional pulls distort any intellectual field, especially one built around play and pleasure — which is why the question Julian Yates circled around, how do we live a good life?, still challenges or provokes any descriptions of what the real really is.  At the end of the day — or so went my espirit d’interstate yester-eve — I don’t need to know what the world really is.  I want to know what to do.

Perhaps I’m asking for something to supplement our sighs of OOO.  What if we don’t give up all the charms and puzzles of the human in a posthuman object-oriented world?  What if we decide instead to combine a  recognition of a insistently cascading and circulating world of fluid object-states — what the ecological sciences have been calling “dynamic post-equilibrium” for some time — with the constant, changing, niggling, sticky return of human and fleshy embodiment and its extensions, a persistent recognition of the claims of pain and pleasure and the permeable boundary between skin and world?  How might a corresponding AHH moment — an Artifact-Hungry Humanism? — work alongside our OOOs?  A way to remember that bodies are both objects and object-makers, both withdrawn into mysterious autonomy and also eagerly grasping and making.  I don’t mean this as a resistance or debunking, and I certainly don’t want to re-enthrone human perception or consciousness atop any great chain of understanding.  But in the horizontal maelstrom I think one of the things poesis does or wants to do is remember that thoughts come in bio-packages, and they are limited by their limits, hurt by their discomforts, and pleased by their pleasures.

Maybe Graham would say that’s chickenshit phenomenology or backdoor idealim.  And maybe it is.

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to.  I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary.  I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.  It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship; I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature…. I do not know which of us has written this page.  (246-7)