Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

Bruno Latour “Inside” (plus French Natures!)

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In the final phrase of his dazzling “anti-TED talk” “Inside,” which I saw at the Linney Courtyard Theater on West 42nd St Friday night, Bruno Latour named his vision for the future as something that might “merit the term Renaissance.” I was surprised enough that I had to ask the person next to me, an eco-modernist from City College, if I’d heard the R-word correctly. Has the man who denied modernity gone over to the side of Rebirth?

An image from Inside

After joining everyone on my twitterfeed in reading an engaging profile of Latour in this week’s Times, I was excited for the “lecture-performance.” Latour’s part of the show was mostly lecture, but in front of him on the stage electronic images and graphics designed by Frédérique Ait-Touati  superimposed themselves. The pictures started with a vision of the polar ice caps, which Latour said spoke to him on a flight from France to Calgary, and ended with a four-way image of the polarities of modern politics. One axis angled from the local to the global; its partner crossed between an empty circle that Latour associated with the current US President, matched against his hopes for what he calls “terrestrialism,” a way of living that engages with our shared planetary system in its era of stress. At its odd angle, terrestrialism represents Latour’s off-kilter optimism, his belief that ways of imagining our world — what he called “representations” throughout the lecture — can change political reality. Like his earlier notion of a “Parliament of Things,” his utopian future hinges on a radical expansion of representative democracy.

Much of “Inside” critiques traditional ways of thinking that Latour wants us to move beyond. Whatever his reservations about critique as a methodology, he ran through a litany of ideas he believes have distorted Western thinking. Here’s a partial list of Things Latour Doesn’t Like:

  • Plato’s Cave, which insists that true reality lies Outside, rather than before our eyes on the surface of the planet where humans and “everything we have ever cared about” live.
  • The desire to escape, which he suggests comes from, among other things, Plato’s cave. His hope throughout the lecture was to re-value being “inside,” rather than wanting to escape to an idealized or imaginary “outside.”
  • The sublime as a way to relating to nonhuman nature, which he associates with imperialism and global conquest. He’s not wrong about intellectual history, but his comments on the sublime made me think that an important project for the environmental humanities might be to conceive a non-imperial, non-racist, non-sexist sublime. That project means recognizing and refusing the imperial dreams of mountain peaks and storms at sea, but maybe also salvaging something of the sublime’s open-ness to nonhuman experience. My money is on swimming, not rock climbing.

    Stratigraphy

  • The blue marble image of the planet seen from orbit, which Latour associates both with NASA’s drive to escape our terrestrial “inside” and with the global view, which he, in a moment of uncomfortable agreement with nefarious forces in our current politics, wishes to reject. He reads the globe the way Peter Sloterdijk does, as Western culture’s dominant image of totality, abstraction, and global conquest. He seeks a different model to understand our planetary home.
  • Stratigraphy, which in a moment that surprised me he read as a problem, a lure into inhuman “deep time” which distracts and disorients human attention away from the terrestrial engagement at hand.

These elements all share a fundamental disorientation that historicist thinkers from Petrarch to Burckhardt to Foucault have associated with the sense of being “modern” that Latour has famously claimed we “have never been.” Disorientation, as I understood his lecture, emerges from the desire to escape from “inside” into a vastness and perspective from which we can see either the globe as a marble or human history as one more layer in the rock. He asked for a different response to disorientation, a burrowing into rather than escaping from the bounded experience of living on our planet. Trying out the thought experiment, I thought — as I often do — of a line from one of my favorite novels: “this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting into –”

A diagram of the local and the global

There are some things that can help. In its second half, “Inside” turned toward politics and also toward hope. Latour asked us to re-imagine being “inside” as a place of connection. The physical space he asked us to imagine was neither the globe as blue marble when viewed from orbit nor the deep layers of rock leading down toward the planetary core. Instead, he asked that we focus on what scientists call the “critical zone,” the narrow splash of “biofilm” that spreads across the earth’s surface and extends just “a few kilometers” above and below. Only on this thin, permeable layer, Latour reminded us, does life exist. It’s the space where living and nonliving things and systems interact. It’s where our bodies are, and where our attention should be.

He mentioned the word “Anthropocene” only one or two times in the lecture– he’s previously suggested that he doesn’t like the term — but when he talked about the Critical Zone I could not help thinking that he was asking Old Man Anthropos to look around his aging and broken body and remember that he’s only been in one place all this time. In a cave, on a thin membrane, inside the atmosphere, standing on rock, with wet toes on the edge of the sea —  these are all the same place, from a certain point of view. Have we always and only been Inside?

By chance — we were two among 4+ million riders the subway last Friday — I bumped into my sister in the West 4th St station when I was moving between NYU and Latour’s lecture. She lives in Florida and I live in Connecticut. Coincidences happen!

I wondered if it matters, from the point of view of Inside-theory, that roughly 70% of the Critical Zone is covered by salt water.

I also wondered if Latour’s vision of science as a technique for re-enchantment, for revealing the nearly infinite richness of the limited and in a cosmic sense tiny world Inside, might prove useful in re-structuring an eco-sublime for our broken world. He spent some time, when talking about the science of measuring the Critical Zone, engaging with Thoreau’s Walden. (He also got some comedy out of pronouncing the American writer’s name in several different ways in his French accent.) I wondered not only about the canonical pond in Massachusetts, but also about Thoreau’s wilder and less settled spaces, from the shipwreck beaches of Cape Cod to his failed attempt to scale Mount Katahdin in Maine. The mountain that repulsed him generated some ecstatic language:

Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

The mountain-top sublime bears many too-familiar Romantic and imperialist flaws, including a worship of masculine power and solidity, a rejection of social and feminine spaces down below, and the belief in a super-reality — “Matter” — that exists only in solitary splendor at the uttermost edge of things. But I wonder, too, if the matter-of-fact-ness of Thoreau’s matter, its “rocks, trees, wind” and “solid earth,” might lend itself to reconceptualization via Latour’s networks and actants and desire to find all the imaginable riches Inside. Is there a salvageable sublime still to be found? Might that project be what Latour enigmatically called a “Renaissance”?

Bruno Latour

It was a stunning lecture, and a pleasure to attend with many of the amazing people from the French Natures  “conference-festival” (shouldn’t all conferences also be festivals? an excellent idea!) that I caught a bit of at NYU earlier on Friday. Thanks to Phillip Usher, Frédérique Aït-Touati, and the other organizers, and also to Hannah Freed-Thali for a lively blue humanities-flavored talk about the modernist beach in French literary culture.

I’m looking forward to the English translation of Latour’s new book, Down to Earth, which should expand on many of these ideas!

Imagining the Coast in Mystic and Enders Island

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Day 1 at the Greenmanville Church

I’m back home after a glorious two days at the Imagining the Coast symposium organized by Nels Pearson and the Fairfield Humanities Institute. I come away buzzing with ideas about coastal retreat and the need to face our shared history of human and environmental injustice. Turning it over, I’m mulling two semi-inverted questions about coastal ecologies and societies:

  1. How will it be possible for us to retreat from the over-development that puts coastal areas at risk while still facing and learning from the sea ?
  2. Can we face our shared history of prejudice and injustice while also remaking the cultural and physical systems we have inherited?

In other words — can we learn from our engagement with our coasts and oceans? Can we transform ourselves into that combination of unlike things Melville calls “terraqueous”? How might we swim in these coastal waters?

The Vinland Map (a forgery)

At the end of the event some eloquent answers came from Barbara Hurd, who at sunset on Saturday afternoon on Enders Island, as we watched a three-masted sloop disappear behind the silhouette of Fisher’s Island, read  from her dazzling memoir Walking the Wrack Line while also getting to the heart of the matter.

“We live in more than one world at a time,” she insisted. We need the project of attention — which is the project of art — to help us to “glide easily between the scales.”

In listening to her in golden afternoon light pronounce the dual imperatives to embrace all the scales (physical, temporal, human) and to cultivate attention as the engine that drives language and narrative, I found myself more hopeful than I often am at environmental events. More hopeful, also, than I allowed myself to be after my own talk on Atlantic hurricanes past and present.

So many riches in this dense and friend-filled weekend! I’ll skate through some highlights, with apologies in advance for mis-statements and omissions —

Nicholas Bell of Mystic Seaport opened the weekend by leading us through Mystic’s current exhibition on the Vinland Map, a forgery that Yale University was attacked for exhibiting as truth in 1965, though one of the ironies of the story is that while the map has been conclusively exposed as a fake, the underlying claim that Viking traveled to the Americas around 1000 CE — the fact that outraged Italian-Americans just before Columbus Day in 1965 when Yale unveiled the map — seems unquestionably true. There’s a lesson in the Vinland Map story about secrecy and the hubris of elite institutions, and also one about why certain kinds of evidence — maps you can photograph — count for more than, say, Viking artifacts found in archeological digs.

Working aloft on the Joseph Conrad

The first panel that afternoon include information about the fantastic Blue Heritage Corridor Project, a work-in-progress presented by Nat Trumbell, Syma Ebbin, and the Maritime Studies faculty at UConn Avery Point, and a presentation by John Buell about the Sound School in New Haven, where my kids used to go to summer camp. It turns out, not surprisingly I suppose, that I share some common ground (and water) with the folks from the Sound School.

Next I shared a plenary stage with my long-ago teacher Glenn Gordinier of Mystic seaport. I talked about American hurricanes and the violent weather of the Western Hemisphere, and I used the disorienting experiences of early modern Europeans encountering this weather system for the first time as a way to imagine our own era of increasingly unfamiliar storms. Glenn talked about the long history of Connecticut and the sea, starting with the last Ice Age.

After a festive dinner including oysters and local craft beer, the next morning started early with a panel on Long Island Sound featuring talks by Jason Mancini of Connecticut Humanities on Native American mariners, Glenn Gordinier (again!) on Yankee whalers, and Andrew Kahrl of UVA with a close-to-home discussion of coastal development in Shoreline CT towns after hurricanes Sandy and Irene.

(One personal undersong of this short trip was me getting lost driving around Mystic with a car full of visiting scholars from Ireland, England, and Spain. I spent six weeks in Mystic as an NEH fellow in 2006, came back regularly over the next couple years to work on the demo squad, guest-taught for the Williams-Mystic program, and brought my then-young kids to the Seaport and Aquarium — so I think of myself as someone who knows my way around the area. But I’ve not been back much in the past half-dozen years, and to be honest I was sometimes distracted by coastal academic chatter. So my car took some roundabout routes. But the good news was that we discovered the new home of my long-ago favorite breakfast spot, Kitchen Little, which is now out by the harbor on Mason’s Island. The Portuguese Fisherman scramble with chorizo, just as I remember it from 2006, tempted me into sliding off the vegetarian wagon just for one meal.)

During a very busy Saturday I heard some concurrent panels featuring Kurt Schlichting of Fairfield U on the Manhattan Waterfront; Richard Greenwald, also from Fairfield, on the containerization revolution and the New York’s longshoreman’s union’s connections to the shift of the port to Newark, NJ; Mary Murphy of Fairfield on Newport; Shawn Driscoll of Becker College on Nantucket separatism during the War of 1812; Ken Reeds from Salem State U on Kipling’s poetics of (American) empire); and Elizabeth Rose from the Fairfield Museum on their great exhibition on Rising Tides on the CT coast.

The Featured Panel in the afternoon brought together three stunning papers about Atlantic connections. Hester Blum of Penn State, a leader in oceanic literary studies, presented her research on Inuits who were buried in Groton, CT, in the 19c in a way that demonstrated both the powerful local New England connections of some well-traveled Inuits and also their continued longing for the land of ice. Nicholas Allen, who runs the Wilson Center for the Humanities at the U of Georgia, spoke compellingly about an Irish revolutionary whose portraits of his home superimposed themselves onto American landscapes from Taos to Stonington, CT. John Brannigan, who’s recently been directing an interdisciplinary Coastal project at University College Dublin, juxtaposed nuclear power plants in Connecticut  and Cambria and showed how these environments reflect and are reflected in site-specific poetry. All three papers wrestled with how oceanic connections allows us to think plurality and human individuality at the same time. All coasts are particular and the tidal circulation of winds and currents makes coastal experiences at least partly mobile and shared.

Our final shared event Saturday was Barbara Hurd’s keynote about scales of time and poetic attention, wrack lines and artistic visions. After so many dense academic papers, it was a pleasure to hear from a writer whose directness squarely faced the challenge of loving and attending to our beautiful broken world as it breaks and dazzles us and our communities.

I’ll be thinking about what I learned this weekend at Mystic and Enders Island for a long time. I’ll also be thinking about what Barbara Hurd said to me when I thanked her for her words, and for bringing together the challenge of thinking across many scales with the imperative to focus our attention.”I think swimming has something to do with it,” she said.

I said that I think so, too.

View from Enders Island

Thanks to the Fairfield University Humanities Institute, Mystic Seaport and Enders Island, CT Humanities, the SeaGrant Program, and all the interlocutors of the weekend! I look forward to seeing these thoughts and words continue their circulations.

Another view from Enders

Water City Bristol!

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Brunel’s suspension bridge over the Avon

If you don’t fix things in words, they might float away. So, briefly, a skeletal accounting —

  • 3 open-water swims
  • 2 workshops in maritime writing
  • 1 public lecture
  • 1 trip up the canal locks to Saltford
  • 2 days at #MT2018 (Marine Transgressions Conference)
    • 2 keynotes
    • ~ 12 panels
    • 1 Blue Humanities roundtable
    • 2 receptions
    • [a poetry reading that I missed]

And many half-garbled memories, starting in the middle —

Toxicity, the Ocean, and Urban Space (Wed)

I was trying some new things for this public lecture, knowing that the audience would swirl together academics with non-academics, be mostly composed of city-dwellers, and further include mostly those with a particular interest in the sea. Unpicking the knots of writing and thinking I’ve been chasing down in the wake of Oceanic New York, my talk splashed through some recent watery adventures, included images of Thanos the purple God of demonic Malthusianism, strayed into verse in three of my own poems, and — maybe? — crossed wild water to make landfall with hopeful gestures toward Ocean citizenship. How can our Cities and our bodies prepare themselves for and live with rising waters? I’d like to speak that as a not-only tragic story.

Public lecture at the University of Bristol

The Llandoger Trow, where Daniel Defoe met Alexander Selkirk

The Henleaze Swimming Club (Mon)

On Monday afternoon, jet-lagged and still-missing my baggage from the overnight flight in via Dublin, I bought a replacement suit & goggles from the hotel & Uber’d up to Henleaze, a former quarry that’s been a private swimming club since 1919. This gorgeous, narrow, fresh-watered lake now overflows with people, half with swimmers and half fisherfolk. What better anti-jet lag tonic can be?

Underwater Bristol (Tues)

Building on the perpetual inspiration of underwaternewyork.com, I hatched a plot with members of the U of Bristol English faculty to incubate some to-emerge-later responses to Bristol’s waterways. So many glorious things! A sailboat named Svendgar that I spotted a few days later for sale in the harbor. Brown mudflats. The kayaks that were paddled around the Bay by the Inuits kidnapped in Frobisher’s Second Voyage to Newfoundland in 1577. A football pitch next to a Cadbury Chocolate Factory that I’d seen earlier that morning while riding a canal boat up five locks to Saltford. Plastic. Breeding eels. What will they all become?

A secret monastic pool (Wed)

Bristol Harbor on the last night

Having been promised a bit of true English wild swimming on the condition that I not mention the name or location of the waters in which I would plunge, I suppose I was a bit surprised to come around the corner of the quiet country lane to discover maybe sixty students lining the pool’s far bank, sunning themselves in post-exam freedom. The secluded pool, built “in the Middle Ages” to store fish for the Abbey of St. Augustine (founded 1140), now hosts lily pads, a gorgeous 15-foot tall purple rhododendron, supposedly a few tench, and — alas! — some horseflies that enjoyed landing on my bald head. It’s an excellent place for an afternoon’s swim. Thanks to my hosts for taking me there!

Sea-themed creative writing workshop (Wed)

I was deeply impressed by the almost-dozen enthusiastic  Bristol undergrads who submitted maritime poetry and prose works for an post-term bonus workshop. I was joined also by Shakespearean Laurence Publicover and poet David Punter, and we spent a thrilling two hours wrestling with the joys and frustrations of writing with and into oceanic spaces. The student writing was gorgeous and wonderfully ambitious, from a narrative built from fragments of a diary from the S.S. Great Britain to a brilliantly post-Agatha Christie cruise montage, a boat-launching story, several quite lovely lyrics about blue spaces, and a hashing of Pip’s dream of drowning from Moby-Dick that spoke to my Melvillean core.

Clevedon Marine Lake (Fri)

Diving into Clevedon Marine Lake

Located as far upstream as big boats could travel the tidal Avon, Bristol today is water-filled but brackish rather than salt. Much of my time there was semi-marine, from the walks along the harbor to the floating bar the Marine Transgressions Conference decamped to after our final keynote. But though the Avon is tidal for a long distance and boasts (I am reliably assured by tide-guru Owain Jones from the Environmental Humanities department at Bath Spa) the second-highest tides in the world, there’s not a lot of open salt water in the city. I wanted to swim in the Bristol Channel (still known in Wales as the Severn Sea), so the morning of the conference’s last day I met swimographer Vanessa at an early hour that precluded other swimming companions, and we Uber’d out to the Clevedon Marine Lake. I’ve seldom or never seen a more starkly ideal swimscape. The pool is built, framed in by concrete and stone, but at high tide the swell tops the wall and fills the pool with ocean water. The tide was near the ebb when we arrived that morning, and over 100 yards of brown mudflat extended below the “lake,” reflecting the gray sky up toward us. The water was perfect — cool but not cold, salty but not bitter, manageable even thought I’d forgotten my goggles in the hotel, and a generous 250m per lake-length. One of the few other swimmers who was also there on a grey misty morning was a man training for 70km in Lake Geneva. He churned in slow circles around the lake and planned to swim through dinner time. We had panels to rush back to in Bristol, but I was tempted just to keep swimming.

#MT2018 Marine Transgressions Conference (Th & Fri)

In front of Nancy Farmer tiles with Vanessa Daws at Clevedon

My visit to Bristol was fortuitously timed with an interdisciplinary conference on Marine Transgressions — a geologic term of art for moments in which the sea invades the land. Packed in to the last two days of my stay, the conference’s turbulent energy kept me going even when my own energy flagged. From Helen Rozwadowski’s amazing opening keynote on Jacques Cousteau and utopian fantasies of homo aquaticus in the 1950s and ’60s all the way through Tim Dee’s gorgeously lyrical evocation of the human and avian intertwinings of gulls and landfills, #MT2018 was an stirring mixture. I can’t do justice to all the great panels and papers that I heard over the two days, but I was struck by the variety of disciplinary perspectives — lots of poetics, history, and environmental humanities, but also marine law, policy, science, technological remediation, and other things. All these were joined together by a shared passion for the oceanic “blue” — though of course we all know, and we repeated as a kind of refrain over two days, that the ocean is also and meaningfully green, gray, purple, and many other colors — including gold, in the memorable image of the geochemist Kate Hendry describing the glimmer of microscopic diatoms on the salt flats of the Severn estuary at low tide.

Blue Humanities Round Table (Fri)

Foot selfie at secret swimming spot

The best parts of a small conference come from listening to new things, and also from catching an extension of someone’s work over a beer at the floating bar after the day’s sessions. But in addition to many great discoveries, I’ve seldom had more fun at an academic presentation than I did chairing a Blue Humanities Round Table near the end of the second day. The amazing panel of disparate thinkers and makers included Owain Jones, whose hydrocitizenship project connects Bristol’s to its people and its past; Vanessa Daws, swimographer and immersive artist; Kate Hendry, a biogeochemist whose fields work takes her to both the Arctic and Antarctic ice fields; and my friend from the CT Shoreline Helen Rozwadowski, historian of science and founder of the Maritime Studies Program at UConn Avery Point. I started us out with a general question — “What can you do because of your focus on the sea that you could not do otherwise?” — and our conversation waterfalled down through several memorable twists and turns into a fantastic question period. With thanks to Alexandra Campbell and her twitter-agility, here’s a partial reconstruction of the ship we built as we sailed along:

  • The sea is not a metaphor (quoting Hester Blum) — except that sometimes it is, and sometimes its metaphors rub against and into the real salt water.
  • The sea is history (not-quite-remembering to quote Derek Walcott) — and given a few generations of blue humanities historical scholarship it should hopefully become more richly historicized.
  • The sea disorients and distorts, always and relentlessly, even as humans respond partially to that disorientation.
  • Is water alien? Does it come from outer space or from inside the earth’s core? Why might it matter? (in dialogue with Lindy Elkins-Tanton)
  • The sea’s lack of visibility redoubles its its moral challenge, informs the cultural history of its monstrous depths, and increases the force of its alien elements. (I rambled here about the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” poster art on the walls of Catch-22, the fish & chips place where I ate my first Bristol meal.)
  • Does the weakness of human eyesight underwater attenuate our moral connection with sea creatures? (A Levinas-ian question, though we didn’t mention his name)
  • Can science “illuminate” (Kate’s word) the sea in ways that increase its ethical claims on human subjects?
  • What are the politics of the interdisciplinary ocean? How can the sea speak to social justice, especially remembering the twin horrors of the slave trade and transoceanic capitalism (which two things might actually be parts of the same thing)?
  • Can the sea be a space of hope? (Last question, I think? We said yes. But I’m not sure that we’re sure.)

    Selfie with mermaid and Vanessa Daws in Clevedon

“Under the sea everything is moral”

The hardest and most evocative phrase of the conference came when Helen quoted Cousteau or one of his fellow sea-utopians in her opening keynote. What might it mean for “everything” to be “moral” beneath the waves? “It’s all subtle and submarine,” says Walcott, thinking about Atlantic slavery and Caribbean beauty. Owain quite rightly objected that the underwater industriousness for which Cousteau was a booster has fouled our waters. The panel speculated together about the morality that emerges from the shared vulnerability of terrestrial human bodies in deep waters. I thought about, but did not share, a terrifying vision of drowning and struggle from Macbeth —

Doubtful it stood / As two spent swimmers that do cling together / And choke their art (1.2)

There’s another way, it occurs to me now as my big green metal bird arcs past the southern tip of Greenland, in which the undersea might be “moral.” It’s not that all undersea activities are permitted or approved, but that the questions we face — what we talk about when we talk about oceans — become starkly and painfully ethical. As mer-scholars, academic selkies, blue humanists, we swim into hard questions about disorientation, about buoyancy, about living-with alien lives. We face questions of social justice and tragic history, of oceanic dislocation and ongoing violence. Moral urgencies splash into marine lakes in the West Country and haunt overcrowded refugee boats in the Eastern Med.

The sea supports and threatens human life. What moral dilemmas fix us from the cold glaze of a fish’s eyes?

Floating bar

Thanks to all who were there this week, and in particular to my hosts at the University of Bristol, the Perspectives on the Sea cluster run by Laurence Publicover, the Brigstow and Cabot Institutes, and all the people who made Marine Transgressions possible! I’m looking forward to my next visit to Bristol already.

Blue Humanities in Bristol!

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Image result for bristol water clevedon

  It’s summer in CT and the kids have just finished school, but I’m sneaking in one last academic trip into this sabbatical semester when I fly to Bristol, UK, on Sunday night, to spend a week as a Visiting Fellow at the University of Bristol.

Web page for Underwater Bristol

It’ll be a busy time. Here are some highlights —

I’m planning to swim with the Henleaze Swimming Club on Monday afternoon, also get a few laps in at the pool at U. of Bristol, and maybe splash around in salt water in Clevedon if I can squeeze it in. I’m also joining a group of Earth Sciences students for a trip up the River Avon on Tuesday.

Image result for henleaze lake swimming club

Henleaze Lake

Image result for bristol waterfront

Water City Bristol

Academic events will include

If you’re in or near the west of England next week, please come! 

An Eco-Trio: Posthuman Glossary, Brave New Worlds, Victorian Ecotime

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Victorian Ecotime: the cake! (Photo by Nathan Hensley)

May is a transitional month where I live in southern New England. After a long wait, tulips, cherry blossoms, and hay fever all erupt. Academic semesters wind into exams. The air can be hot, but the water in Long Island Sound is still too cold for me to swim. (54.5 degrees at the New Haven buoy this morning: not yet, but soon!)

I’m submerged in sabbatical time-warp this spring, listening to my colleagues announce their final classes of the semester on FB and wondering if that means my research leave is over. So soon hath time, &c.

But this first week of May has also given me an intense eco-trio of events  that have me excited about the brilliance and imagination in the environmental humanities today. A good time to be catching the tide in flood!

(from Posthuman Glossary video)

First up on Wed May 2 was the book launch of The Posthuman Glossary, co-edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (Bloomsbury). The event was hosted by Deakon U. in Melbourne, Australia, which meant I couldn’t even Skype in effectively b/c of the time change: 2:30 am local time is no good for this old body, even if I could have avoided waking kids and dogs.

Tulips of May

So I ended up learning a new trick by contributing a 4-minute video, in which I talk over a series of pictures taken from the little splash of the World Ocean to which I walk my dogs each morning. As my daughter told me with classic teenage eyeroll, iMovie is easy to use– and fun!

Here it is, uploaded to YouTube.

I hope at some point to hear the rest of the presentations!

Next up on Th May 3 was the first of two at the CUNY Grad Center: Brave New Worlds: Dwelling in a Changing Climate. Just the sort of multi-disciplinary thing that I like, this event featured a brilliantly arranged triplet of talks. Setha Low, anthropologist (and swimmer!) from the CUNY Grad Center, talked about her work in the Rockaways and Puerto Rico, with particular attention to how social justice should remain at the forefront of thinking about climate change. Bethany Wiggin, founder of the amazing Environmental Humanities program at Penn, spoke about the swampy history of Philadelphia in terms of oil, the “1610 Anthropocene,” and colonial expansion into the New World. Dylan Gauthier, a “boat builder artist” who teaches at the New School and Parsons School of Art and Design described a series of projects he’s been involved in over the years, including his work at Penn in the “Ecotopian Toolkit” project and (to my great delight) his longstanding interest in the glories of Newtown Creek. I’ve known Bethany for a few years, and it was great to get caught up a bit on the amazing things she and her Penn colleagues have going on. I’ve been a fan of Dylan Gauthier’s for a while also — I meant to ask how influenced by Hugo Grotius his Mare Liberum project is — and it was a treat to meet him finally. Plus Setha turns out to be another academic who does much of her concentrated thinking while swimming — so great to meet a kindred waterspirit!

Double Eco- at CUNY Grad Center!

Friday the 4th was the  most intense of the three. Victorian Ecotime, a full day conference, juxtaposed seven substantial presentations of new eco-scholarship in Victorian literature and culture, followed by brief dessert-slices by four representatives of other areas of eco-study, including me speaking on behalf of the premodern.

It was quite amazing to be in a room all day listening to talks by academics who I don’t know discuss works I mostly haven’t read, or, if the works were canonical — Alice in Wonderland, “Dover Beach,” Hopkins’s “Binsey Poplars” — they were mostly things I haven’t thought about in eco-terms. (To me, I may as well admit, “Dover Beach” appears first and foremost as a slightly sentimental gloss on King Lear’s Dover cliff scene, 4.6. Am I missing something?)

As a couple of us on the closing round-table noted, the eco-theoretical touchstones invoked over the course of the day were familiar to us non-Victorianists: Haraway, Latour, Bennett, Ghosh, Morton, Heise, Scranton, etc. The terms of analysis were both familiar and tantalizingly askew: I’ve never heard so many great papers on genre without any mention of the inescapable (in my world) terms tragedy and epic. It was tremendously liberating to think about genre untethered to Aristotle and his interpretive tradition, though I also wondered if readings of Tennyson and George Eliot especially might have interesting things to say in dialogue with early modern generic ideas such as imitatio and contaminatio, not to mention Polonius’s “comical-historical-pastoral” hodge-podge. It’s not possible to keep all the balls in the air all the time, and it was a pleasure to watch people playing a slightly different game, with some of the same tokens I use on my home field.

In an effort to fix the super-abundance of the day’s talks in my memory, I’ll trace them quickly here before I lose them — with apologies for anything I’ve garbled or mistranslated out of the 19c idiom!

Outside the Grad Center on Th night

The opening session,”Inveting Ecostories,” paired Dennis Denisoff (Tulsa) presenting a dizzying array of eco-pagan narratives with Siobhan Carroll (Delaware) unpacking the peat archives and coal plots shared obliquely by Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. I came away from that session thinking about heroism, and how the epic desire to stand alone and apart, to distinguish oneself — a problematic and sometimes destructive imperative in late capitalism and neoliberal academic culture also! — may not be compatible with the shared and systematic virtues that underwrite much ecological thinking. Can we have an eco-epic, an eco-hero, an eco-warrior? Do we want such a figure?

Next up, “Imagining Ecofutures” brought together Mark Frost (Portsmouth) on Victorian eco-apocalypse narratives about the destruction of London with a powerfull micro-analysis by Deanna Kreisal (UBC) of “Dover Beach” and “Binsey Poplars” in relation to what she calls the “eco melancholiacs,” in whose number she puts Morton, Scranton, Heise, and perhaps also Haraway. There was a lot of Freud throughout the day, and I wondered about the figure of the melancholiac as a response to eco-catastrophe: not a hero but something like a sensitive, attuned in mood (and perhaps bodily humors, in an older model of melancholy) to changes in the planetary climate.

After lunch we returned to “Mapping ecoforms” with a lively and sometimes musical presentation by Devin Griffiths (USC) on “just in time formalism” in a Darwinian sense, paired with with Nathan Hensley (Georgetown), who presented readings of Alice and Tennyson’s “Maud” in terms of the “boundary event” that ruptures categories: might these genre-breaking/reforming literary works provide an echo or ways to think about the boundary-erasure that is the Anthropocene/end Holocene event? I thought both about Derrida’s “law of genre,” in which nothing ever really belongs to itself (I think Nathan mentioned this?) and also, as I tend to do, about 16c Italian genre theorists who articulated what I basically think of as a sophisticated humanist theory of mash-up culture.

The keynote talk by Barbara Leicke (Carlton) dove deeply into two Eliot novels, Adam Bede and Daniel Deronda, that I’m ashamed to admit I do not know very well: maybe I read Bede in high school, or maybe not, and sadly Deronda still sits unread on the virtual self. But I loved her talk’s framing of the “too late” refrain in climate change rhetoric, and also the idea that a novel’s complex narration can isolate and engage the multi-faceted temporality that the Anthropocene demands. “Too late” for what? What might it mean to over-live an over-heated planet? Does the Anthropocene make zombies? Has it already?

I’m not sure who it was in the audience who asked the Bob Dylan comparative question, with reference to the great late-period song, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there” (Time Out of Mind, 1997) — but I appreciated it! (Pedantic & obscure note: in Toneelgroep’s incandescent production of Shakespeare’s Roman Tragedies, which I saw in Brooklyn in 2012, this song heart-breakingly choreographs Antony & Cleopatra’s last dance the night before the world ends at Actium. A sound track for the pre-catastrophize?)

The non-Victorian round-table opened at the close with brilliant post-colonial insights by Sonya Postmentier (NYU) and Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia), a rousing call to arms by Ashley Dawson (Grad Center and CSI), and was rounded out by my own plea, on behalf of the long premodern period from Lascaux to Hamlet, to, as the hashtag sez, #pluralizetheanthropocene!

Such a pleasure to spend three days in May eco-ing with such imaginative and generous colleagues!