When schoolteacher-turned-whaleman Ishmael walked the streets of “your insular city of the Manhattoes,” he knew New York as oceanic city and commercial capital. Standing on the Battery looking south, he saw a cityscape “belted round by wharves as Indian islands by coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf.”

Today commerce dominates but the surf lies hidden. This round-table event digs into New York City’s asphalt, pries up the streets, and finds underneath not beach, but – ocean.

Oceanic New York aims to recover traces of the salt-water past that still lies beneath New York’s urban feet. Taking inspiration from Elizabeth Albert’s gorgeous and startling exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories,”  — about which I’ll have more to say soon — we’ll plunge into the urban and the oceanic. “Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon,” entices Ishmael. Everywhere people stare toward water. “Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land,” says the mast-head philosopher. That’s where we want to be.

The twentieth century witnessed the drying up of New York: shifting the industrial port across the harbor to Newark, exhausting the oyster beds, turning South Street Seaport into a museum,. That’s where the mighty four-masted USS Peking sits today, her 170-foot steel mainmast dwarfed by skyscrapers. The twenty-first century, however, with its ecological crises, extreme weather, and growing recall of oceanic history, is returning to New York’s salt-water identity.

Drawing on the forgotten waterscapes of the city, the catastrophic floods of Hurricane Sandy, and still-wet histories and legends, these talks and conversations surface the oceanic substrata on which New York floats. Oceanic New York goes beyond insular Manhattoes to Dead Horse Bay, Breezy Point, Gravesend, Hell Gate Bridge. Anywhere salt water seeps into our shoes and stains our clothes.

Three weeks from today…

 

My main event this summer has been working my way through the final bits of my book-in-progress, Shipwreck and the Ecology of Globalization. A  lively side-bar has been exploring a useful theorist for ecological globalization, Peter Sloterdijk.

Since my German isn’t up to the task, I’ve been keying off the useful Sloterdijk in English page that I found via Stuart Elden’s blog. There’s lots out there, and more in the pipeline.  Terror from the Air, Rage and Time, and Stuart Elden’s collection Sloterdijk Now (2012) are sitting on my desk right now, and Spheres I is on its way. Neither Sun nor Death made a good introduction to the entire corpus.

The key work for my purposes, I think, will be Spheres vol 2: Globes, which isn’t out in English yet, but I’ve  found a selection from it published as “Geometry in the Colossal: The Project of Metaphysical Globalization” in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27 (2009): 29-40. (It’s a translation by Samuel Butler of pp. 47-72 of Spharen II — Globen [Suhrkhamp, 1999].) It’s pretty exciting stuff & will make an appearance in the opening pages of the Shipwreck book, as well as at a talk I’ll give at GW MEMSI this coming fall.

Especially engaging for my purposes is Sloterdijk’s desire to locate globalization both as a historical phenomenon, linked to the maritime expansion of European cultures in the 15-17c, and also to see its influence enfolding in much earlier, and later, eras. It starts with Greek geometry:

If one were to express, with a single word, the chief motif of European thought in its metaphysical age, it could only be ‘globalization.’ The affair of Western reason with the totality of the world is created and unfolds in the symbol of the geometrically perfected round form, which we still signify with the Greek ‘sphere’, or more frequently with the Latin ‘globe.’ (29)

Geometry prefigures geography:

Globalization of sphereeopoise in general is the fundamental event of European thought, one that has not ceased to provoke revolutions in the thought and life relations of humans for two and a half thousand years….Mathematical globalization proceeds [sic] terrestrial globalization for more than two thousand years. (30)

In this  totalizing perspective, which seems exaggerated but stimulating, spherical thinking shapes Western culture:

The representation of the world with the globe is the decisive deed of the early European enlightenment…the radical change to monospherical thought…the unity, totality, and roundness of existence…first comes the sphere, then morality (31).

I like the pressure Sloterdijk gets from abstraction here, the sense that an imagined form — the sphere as geometric absolute, a creature of the mind — puts pressure on lived historical experience. I don’t really believe pre-geometric or pre-Greek cultures were innocent of morality — what could that mean? — but I think the geometric imagination shapes (pardon the pun) cultural ideas about wholeness, centered-ness, conceptions of substance and weight.

This project is interesting to me because Sloterdijk also focuses on early modern maritime globalization. In his sphere-centered understanding, maritime expansion becomes less a question of radical “discovery” than of  putting into physical practice  a vision that has long been accepted & watching that vision assume tangible form:

…the fundamental thought of modernity was articulate not by Copernicus, but rather by Magellan. The fundamental fact of modernity is not that the earth orbits the sun, but rather that money circumnavigates the earth. The theory of the sphere is, at the same time, the first analysis of power. (33)

In making use of this material, I’ll want to tone down and refigure the “modernist break” language here, since globalization seems much more a “time knot” than a historical break: money circled much of the Eurasian / African world before Columbus & Magellan, and the epoch-hunting of “fundamental thoughts” seems a profitless game. But I agree that the conceptual unity of the globe assumes a changed resonance after maritime expansion into the New World, and especially after the establishment of global trade routes between the oceanic basins. It’s not the “invention” of something new, but the progressive re-interpolation or knotting together of old and changing things.

The core of Sloterdijk’s article / selection is detailed reading of the first-century Farnese Atlas, a Roman statue made after a presumed Greek original, now in Naples. Atlas supports a celestial globe on which half of the known constellations of the ancient world are visible (36); it’s the heavens, not just the earth, on the Titan’s laboring back.

Sloterdijk reads this Atlas as a philosophical athlete, because

a philosopher is one who, as an athlete of totality, is laden with the weight of the world. The essence of philosophy as a form of living is philponia — friendship with the entirety of weighty and worth things. The love of wisdom and the love of the weight of the one whole are unified (39).

In Neither Sun nor Death, Sloterdijk has a few nice oceanic nuggets that I might be able to use also —

People born today do not develop any oceanic consciousness — neither in the phobic nor the philobatic sense (239). (Cf At the Bottom, pix-x)

Moreover, from a historical viewpoint, the opposition between thinkers of down-to-earthness and thinkers of maritime situations remains pertinent — it is a contrast that has not ceased to widen since 16000. This division between these two types of thinkers is one of the most important factors in the psychodrama of modern reason….Among the theoreticians of emergent maritime situations the towering authors all lived in port towns — and this is no coincidence — whether we are talking of Montaigne, who, from Bordeaux, had a view of the Atlantic, or of Bacon, who, like a Pliny of early capitalism, even wrote a history of the wind (239).

A collective biography should be written of about the lives of those infamous men of the sea, those newly desolate people for having slipped out of our historical memories (241). (Cf Marcus Rediker)

Terrestrial globalization is the common work of astronomers, mathematicians, trades, mariners, and a plethora of dubious figures (198).

To which last group I’d add poets, playwrights, and other writers.

I’ve got lots more Sloterdijk to read, but it’s fun to get started.

The semester is almost upon us! One of the things I’m planning for this early fall is Oceanic New York, a Round-Table and Conversation event at the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s on Sept 26th. I’ll post updates via the Oceanic New York Page on this blog, and probably add a few things here as well.

Here’s the flyer: Oceanic New York Poster

And here’s what the Page has right now —

Welcome to Oceanic New York, a round-table and discussion that will take place in the Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery on the St. John’s University campus in Queens on Th 9/26/13, from 6 – 8 pm.

We’ll be exploring the relationship between New York City and the Ocean, building our remarks variously from artistic, literary, eco-theoretical, or personal perspectives. The participants include academics and artists, sailors and swimmers, bridge-builders and castaways. We’re hoping to uncover watery connections between urban living and oceanic space.

The Gallery space where we’ll meet will feature Elizabeth Albert’s new exhibition, “Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront.” We’re hoping to contribute to this show’s surfacing and re-figuring of the watery coastlines of NYC.

I’ll post previews and further information to this page as we get closer to the event. The round-table is free and open to the public.

 

Current participants include

Jamie Skye Bianco, NYU

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U

G. Ganter, St. John’s U

Eilleen Joy, BABEL Working Group and Punctum Books

Allan Mitchell, University of Victoria

Nancy Nowacek, Artist

Karl Steel, Brooklyn College, CUNY

Marina Zurkow, Artist

The technical name is a perigee moon, or a perigee-syzygy of the earth-moon-sun system, which means that the full moon tonight brings the silver rock as close to earth on its elliptical orbit as it gets. These extra-full moons happen about every 14 lunar cycles, so not quite once a calendar year. A swimming tide after dinner happens about once every two weeks during the summer around here. Nice to have both together.

The flood tide tonight will be  7.5 feet at 11:58 pm, which means the storm drains on Beckett Ave will flood & we might get water sloshing up over the sidewalk on Clark Ave.

A beautiful evening for the first night swim of the season.

What does the sea feel, I wonder, when that fat moon pulls her up onto shore? Does she notice? The slow piling of water upon water, inching, gathering, surging up, so that  what Fitzgerald  called “the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound” spills over itself?

Even these placid warm waters are part of the great god Ocean, insinuating its fingers around the world. I dive in because I know it, and I like how it feels like on my skin.

What would it take, I wonder, for the ocean to know me? What would I have to be? Ahab? Or 400 ppm?

It’s not a night for storms or strains or hard thinking. Just immersion by silvery light. I took a short swim out to the swimming buoy, spent a moment floating in cool water staring up at the moon, then walked back home.

 

Look at that green! Surrounding, confining, holding us in. It was beautiful, with the wet lush soggy brilliance that follows two days of violent storms. We’d been thunderstormed out of plans to go kayaking on the mighty Kansas River and had ended up in Clinton State Park, where we wandered around on muddy trails looking for the way down to the lake’s shore. Eileen’s Cole Haan shoes transformed themselves into muddy skis, gliding downhill. In this picture, you can see me and Lowell staring perplexed into the green labyrinth, and Jeffrey sagely consulting the i-Gods.

Since all images are allegories, I think this picture captures the challenge of moving beyond the green, and the aesthetic pleasures of being surrounded.

My first trip to ASLE had something of the disorienting beauty of this woodscape, but also many more simple pleasures. I’ve seldom been to a happier academic gathering, which seems odd given the fairly constant anxiety about eco-crisis. Perhaps it was the infectious high spirits of Serenella Iovino and Serpil Opperman, international eco-thinkers who I met for the first time in Lawrence, or the great food & drink in the fun college town, or finally meeting Stacy Alaimo and Simon Estok and Chris Schaberg, or hearing Cary Wolfe on biopolitics for the second time in a month, or closing yet another set of bars with Lowell, Jeffrey, and Eileen  — but in all ways, it was great fun.

On Thursday morning I woke before dawn in coastal Connecticut and somehow made it 1500 miles west to Stacy’s plenary at 10:30 am in the Kansas University Memorial Union. Arguably that place-erasing speed, my pre-dawn itinerary of planes, automobiles, and internal combustion engines, represents an ecological problem. But it was great to get there and think about the eco-poetics Stacy’s finding in submarine depths.

The questions after Stacy’s plenary, which she shared with Cary, were hard to follow. That would become an ASLE pattern. Also a sign of interdisciplinarity?

In a conference filled with questions, I remember the most succinct. At the “Building the Environmental Humanities” roundtable the next morning, it was about the difference between the sciences and the humanities. “They build things, we ask questions.” The panelists didn’t accept that characterization of the “two cultures,” and nether do it. But I do think that there are meaningful distinctions between the sciences and humanities, which make interdisciplinary alliances both productive and challenging. So maybe it’s worth seeking a better way to describe that difference, one that employs a richer understanding of “materiality,” one of the obsessions of at least my strain of this ASLE. We don’t need to flatter the physical sciences by paying homage to direct forces or financial investments, nor conversely to imply that questioning humanists are somehow uncorrupted by modern institutions, economics, and power dynamics. “They” ask lots of questions, and “we” build plenty of things. Might this be a better way to phrase it: “They build models, and we tell stories”? Which perhaps begs the question of what the difference is between testable models and persuasive stories. I’m a narrative-monger myself, though I understand the value of testable models. Perhaps the we/they syntax is too problematic?

I also came away with a perhaps cynical historicizing question: has it ever not been true, at least subjectively true, to say that “Now more than ever…we live in crucial times”? What other times might anyone ever live in? Part of the issue with multiple time scales — human, geological, ecological — remains our difficulty in escaping mortal or perspectival boundedness. Maybe that’s not a problem, more of a condition of embodied thinking, which means that whenever we invoke time scales they are always plural, always adding to what we are already experiencing. Times of the self, the fiction, the scholarly talk, the glacier, the rock, the hummingbird, the river, the thunderstorm…

ASLE was the final lap of the five-part conference relay I’ve been running since late March, and I must say I’m exhausted, ready for a slower-moving summer and the shipwreck project. Conferences are, at their best, productive entanglements, which means (in an eco-sense) that they enable new networks, products, processes. Now it’s time to put those networks to work!

 

It’ll take me a few days to gather my thoughts about my first-ever trip to Kalamazoo, so as a place-holder, I’ll offer most of my half of the collaborative presentation Lowell Duckert and I did on Sea Change / World change in the GW-MEMSI panel organized by Jeffrey Cohen. The full panel, which brought together six pairs of speakers collectively charged to imagine “The Future We Want,” was as wonderfully mind-bending as anything I’ve encountered since…well, since Alabama, I guess. Except this time compressed into 90 minutes, bewilderingly rapid, and ranging from The Battle of Maldon to multilingual poetics.

These fragments won’t give the full measure of our collaboration, which included daybreak immersion in the icy waters of Lake Michigan and ended (for now) with a public singing of Ariel’s “sea-change.” But if you imagine me as this black-winged bird, you’ll get some of the idea. 

In the future I want, I am a cormorant. A screeching sea-crow, I perch on a high branch on the Tree of Life overlooking Paradise, which some call Kalamazoo.

“Various” is the word for what I see. “A happy rural seat of various view” (4.247) is the full line in Paradise Lost, but it’s just “various” that I crave. It’s what I roll around inside my bird’s mouth. Various. All of the things that inhabit this Paradise, spread out before me. Not just one thing, but another.

From my crow’s mouth I scream three horrifying truths:

Truth #1: Change fractures our desire for wholeness. It will break, all of it.

Truth #2: A better name for this planet would be Ocean, not Earth.

Truth #3: Salt water tastes bitter, flavored with the recognition that nothing lasts.

I am high enough up to tree to see Heteronyms.

The term “heteronym” refers to a member of a large group of imaginary personae, numbering over 70, in which the great 20c Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa wrote. These authors, each of whom has an individual name, style, biography, and physical characteristics, collectively represent a rage for variety amid the poverty of identity. Multiple names and multiple selves become ways to navigate our over-abundant world. Author-ness and its auctoritee become various, and the original self appears one of many voices, and not the most important one. The most influential heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, also looks over Paradise. “I don’t pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world,” Cairo claims. “I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children. I noticed the Universe.”

My question for our future is, how can we become heteronyms? And my answer is, by looking over the world’s change. Variously. 

My crow’s eyes snatch two quick glances out from the Tree of Life over salty vastness.

The first glance finds Bernando Soares, technically a semi-heteronym because of his close resemblance to the biographical Pessoa, and The Book of Disquiet (Livro de Desassossego), his “factless autobiography.” In a fragment that may or may not have been intended for the final work, he writes about human encounters with the ocean:

Shipwrecks? No, I never suffered any. But I have the impression that I shipwrecked all my voyages, and that my salvation lay in interspaces of unconsciousness.
— A Voyage I never Made (III)

The whirl of heteronyms teaches shipwreck as identity and salvation, that no voyage arrives without disaster. Therefore we embrace suffering and seek “interspaces.”

And one last wet one, my favorite, Álvaro de Campos, from the “Maritime Ode”:

Wharf blackly reflected in still waters

The bustle on board ships,

O wandering, restless soul of people who live in ships,

Of symbolic people who come and go, and for whom nothing lasts,

For when the ship returns to port

There’s always some change on board!

Campos knows what the sea lures us into accepting. Even music won’t hold us in place.

If my cormorant-self had more time looking out over Paradise with all of you, I’d fly toward medieval heteronyms, Mary Magdalene’s various names and identities in The Golden Legend and Custance’s return to her father in the Man of Law’s Tale. 

 

Can we sing it again, that old anthem? All together?

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange? (1.2.400-402)

 

(For a much more coherent narrative, see Jeffrey’s wonderful post. What follows is fragmentary and still smoldering.)

The First Essence: Sociability

Where else to start but with the elemental call, the coming together, elements meeting with a wrenching shock that shakes foundations, a wind that blows us away? The physical elements proffer essences that are human-sized and tangible. You touch them, and they touch you back.

The symposium hit us with elements and mixtures disgorged from a magic burrito bowl. In order of appearance: biopolitics, earth, earth-air (spontaneous generation), air, air-water (sea above), water, mud, phlogiston (air-fire), fire, ether. But more even than flames burning in the lecture hall or ether-ish compounds swilled in Hudson Strode’s house, the bests parts of the weekend in ‘Bama were communal: social, joyous (sic), playful, with a wild rage for particularity and passionate attention to form.

An incomplete litany of props seen at the lectern: champagne, orange juice, burning matches, smoke rings, play dough, family pictures, Paradise in West Virginia as well as a gated place of the same name, a lovelorn volcano, Prince Rupert’s drops, the Bookfish (not in my talk!), coal (actually Lowell forgot to bring this but it was there all the same), bees, ants (not really)…

The Second Essence: Beheading the Anthropocene

Cary Wolfe, who kicked us off with a downtown keynote on Th night, talked at one point about a division of opinion he’d noticed in recent conversations about the term “Anthropocene” as a register of human-caused climate change. Might the term be a little too Anthropic, too concerned to keep anthropos at the center, even as it replaces old stories of dominion or progress with tales of tragic loss and coming apocalypse?

We didn’t talk about it at every session, but the need to behead or at least displace the human in the Anthropocene came together for me this weekend. I’m not entirely happy with the term I’ve been auditioning to take its place, the Homogenocene, though I like the non-epic & non-particularistic flavor of that homogenizing term. I like the idea that our eco-catastrophe is, in a sense, a product of too much sameness spreding across our globe. If we want to get past stories that privilege humans, we might not be able to hang on to tragic consolations of radical difference or memories of lost paradise.

But maybe “getting past” isn’t the thing either, and really getting past is an odd thing for those of us committed to premodern literary culture to champion. Nothing goes away, the eco-maxim insists. Even after we’ve gently & humanely (that’s a word I’d like to keep, even if we jettison human-centricity and worry about humanism) severed the neck of old man Anthropos, we’ve still got the body to deal with, in its textual and fleshy forms, all around us, food for worms and other things (as Karl’s talk explored). Humanism’s legacy isn’t as easy to get away from as all that.

I think my preferred term to replace the Anthropocence for our ecological present might well turn out to be shipwreck, but that’s for another time. 

The Third Essence: Lines to cross

Material	Metaphor
Reading (narrative)	Analysis (argument)
Homogenocene	Anthropocene

Toward the end of my talk, I offered the suggestion that the intentional, frequent, and self-aware crossing between the first of the three critical pairs in the text box above as my own rough definition of a shared method for ecomaterialist criticism, knowing of course that speaking for a collective of brilliant and idiosyncratic scholars is a tricky business. I’m very sympathetic to counter-suggestions from Eileen and Julian, who aren’t sure the separation between material and metaphor itself is all that tenable. But it’s less the separation or what I was calling, perhaps awkwardly, the “line” between these practices that engages me than the act of crossing between them. It’s the sudden shift, of perspective, of subject matter, even of rhetorical mode, that creates intellectual fire. I think that what humanities scholars do best is perform that jump, the turn from the minutely textual to the wildly general, from tensions inside a single Miltonic word (“prospect,” says Lowell, and so much follows) to the endlessly fecund dance of the organic within and entangled with the inorganic. Moving is more fun when there are boundaries to leap over.

Cary re-opened this question over wine Saturday night amid the deafeningly sexual roars of Alabama frogs on the back porch of the Strode house. He commented, from his anthropological perspective, on what we medieval and early modern literary types do and how it sounds to someone outside these sub-fields. Might, he suggested (though not in these words), the care and patience and gymnastic play with which we read texts blind us, to some extent, to the virtues of direct argument? Might there be some strain between our love of inventive reading and a need for action or argument or even (another word worth saving) agency?

Wine, frogs, a series of wonderful jokes (h/t Valerie Allen) and eventually dancing cut short this conversation on Saturday night, but it’s worth coming back to. I like direct arguments. I like short sentences. These things work. But I’ll also stick up for variety, pushing against the Homogenocene, and for a critical / rhetorical / performative practice that produces as many differences as it can find and create and explore.

Or, in slightly different terms, Jeffrey’s blog post very generously rephrased my comments as an effort “to move beyond the metaphor / materiality impasses native to speaking about the elements,” which I suppose is true enough & even does that great thing that commentary can do in exposing what the original wanted but did not fully articulate. But I also wonder if I should admit to my own attachment to just that “impasse,” to its difficulties and textures. I remain pretty happy inside certain elemental dilemmas and don’t want (or expect) to escape them.

The Fourth Essence: Paradise or Faerie Land? (Note: special pleading here for early modernists)

A very brief elemental turn here to early modern English poetic epics. Lowell said in conversation — perhaps the greatest organizational triumph of this event was the richly supported spaces for conversation: a full 30 min of public exchange after each of the 10 talks, lunches, dinners, late nights, etc — that he didn’t think Milton was a “vibrant materialist” in Jane Bennett’s sense. I quipped back that I thought he was, without working too hard at reconciling vitalist monism with 21c theoretical structures. But, without digging John Rogers’s book off my shelf this morning, it was great to start with Milton. Satanic mines and Edenic “coalitions,” with that unceasing Miltonic interpretive pressure forcing forward.

I only talked about Spenser for a few minutes in my talk, but I spent most of the weekend thinking about Faerie Land. Isn’t Spenser’s allegory-saturated landscape a kind of pre-chewed ecocriticism of the elements? In which all the things we seek, Valerie’s “Airy Somethings” and Anne’s Prince Rupert’s Drops and Sharon’s richly fecund mud and Julian’s wet books and dead poets and Bookfish, are hyper-visual, thrusting their selves and their meanings into our faces? A world in which we can’t not-interpret all the things around us?

I don’t do as much with Spenser or Milton these days as I used to. Maybe I should.
The Fifth Essence: Wit

The person on the bill I knew the least, Chris Barrett, gave the anchor talk to an exhausted and exhilarated audience late Sat afternoon. She wonderfully drew together the medical, physical, poetic, and scientific meanings of “ether” into an inventive knot. Laughter and/as/in anesthetic: the special poignancy of the climate change joke: the salvific dream of painlessness, celebrated in Boston on “Ether Day” in 1846.

Wit, of course, also neatly circles back to the sociable origins of the symposium, the pleasure in play and difference in each of the presentations and conversations during the weekend. These elementals are a witty bunch, it seems to me, and a gang that enjoys intellectual play. Already there’s chatter in the great blue world about moving the next installation in the series to an isolated mountain cabin or a volcano.

Anne’s Pyromena talk ended with Empedocles and the volcano, our initiating elemental philosopher meeting his doom. Via Gaston Bachelard, another shared text for many of us, she invited us to consider that the volcano wants Empedocles, its fiery heat craving his water-filled body. What else would volcanos want? I wondered about the things that connect humans to the elements: feeling and thinking and of course language. Perhaps also plurality and difference? Isn’t the great joy of the four elements always the presence of all the others in each one?

It’s going to be hard to resist trying to put together another symposium like this one. 

 

Excitement is building for three days of Elemental Ecocriticism at the U of Alabama in Tuscaloosa later this week. I’m very excited to be on the program with Cary Wolfe, Lowell Duckert, Karl Steel, Valerie Allen, Jeffrey Cohen, Julian Yates, Sharon O’Dair, Anne Harris, and Chris Barrett.

The story goes that our elemental topics were picked out of a burrito bowl by Jane Bennett in Boston last September, though I was not a witness to that event. I was given fire and air, which have taken me, of course, to…phlogiston.

Here are a couple paragraphs out of the early part of the talk. Any actual combustion will be kept carefully governed.

We all want ignition. Sparks that lead to fire, blazes that spring up, alive and crackling, giving life to dead things. From the nuclear cauldron inside the sun to the sub-cellular energy generators within mitochondria, organic and inorganic systems need energy produced through rapid combinations of fire and air. After Antoine Lavoisier, the so-called “father of chemistry,” discovered and named the elements oxygen and hydrogen in the late 18^th century, enlightenment science came to recognize burning as rapid oxygenation, but for premodern thinkers the causes of ignition were mysterious. The question of why and when some things burned and others did not led, in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to the temporary innovation of “phlogiston,” an invisible but material “principle of inflammability.” It’s famous today, if at all, as a laughable scientific error, though a few bloggers and policy intellectuals including Paul Krugman and Matt Yglesias have recently employed the term “phlogiston economics,” by which they want us to understand ways to describe fiscal policy that are not just wrong but intricate and silly. In his book The Psychoanlysis of Fire, which I’ll refer to fairly often in this talk, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard subtitles his chapter on phlogiston “History of a False Problem.” It’s not real stuff, but phlogiston traces conceptual paths about the processes of ignition and burning that remain valuable after the supposed displacement of error by accuracy. By isolating and consolidating the explosive mixing of fire and air, phlogiston burns with poetic ecological meaning.

 

     The concept of phlogiston emerged in the late seventeenth century in the work of the German alchemist Johann Becher. Becher’s model, interestingly for our purposes this weekend, restructured the four classical elements by removing fire and air from the group, and replacing their chemical functions with three different kinds of earth. The oily and sulphurous earth, which Becher called terra pinguis, eventually morphed into phlogiston, with that catchy Greek=derived word arriving by way of German chemist Georg Ernst Stahl in 1718. But the poster-boy for phlogiston was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment scientist Joseph Priestley [Slide], who clung to the theory even as nearly every respectable chemist had come to follow Levoisier’s new system.  In an open letter of 1796 published in Philadelphia, Priestley outlined a “short defense of the concept of phlogiston.” In places Priestley’s rhetoric may sound familiar to an academic audience, as when he writes, “I cannot help thinking that what I have observed in several of my publications has not been duly attended to, or well understood” (3). But Priestley’s attachment to phlogiston as concept and also as the material basis of all inflammable compounds arises from his basic commitment to symmetry as well as experiment. “In all other cases of the calcination of metals in air, which I have called the phlogistication of the air,” he writes, “it is not only evident that [the metals] gain something, which adds to their weight, but that they likewise part with something” (4). That something-lost, for Priestley, is phlogiston – and for my purposes, phlogiston represents a double loss: it is something consumed in the process of burning, and, if we accept modern chemical theory, it is a substance that itself has vanished entirely from our intellectual history. Taking Priestley’s essay as a touch-stone, my talk today traces the imaginative benefits of this non-existent substance. Phlogiston shows why things catch fire and why conflagration makes us feel certain ways. It speaks to human needs, if not chemical processes.

Fluid, trees, humans, matter, post/apocalyptic, shipwreck, hewn, recreation, green, inhuman.

Or: James Smith, Alf Siewers, Alan Montroso, Valerie Allen, Eileen Joy, me, Anne Harris, Lowell Duckert, Carolyn Dinshaw, Ian Bogost. Jeffrey Cohen conducting.

Or: Hugh of St. Victor, the Dream of the Rood, parasitic music, “measure,” 100 tiny apocalypses, Bob Dylan’s “Tempest,” arma Christi, Caesar’s parks, green men in the Norwich cloisters, a Lamborghini named “the beast.”

God, forests, song, triangles, early 21c publishing, the Titanic, 115 volts, politics, homelessness, fast cars & bullfighting…

Words to think by —

• inspire and unsettle
• we still live inside trees
• music parasites the human
• misrepresent more!
• de-specialize thought!
• the sudden shocking awareness that the vessels that have carried us this far are coming to pieces under our feet
• the capacity of wood to respond
• recreational ethics
• I want more life!
• the reality of (all?) metaphors

It’s hard to get yesterday’s whirlwind into coherence. I like it that way.

The gathering, a meeting of old friends and new, carried a strong whiff of potential, of things about to hatch. One formal gambit which I’ll certainly steal was Jeffrey’s method of introducing the ten of us: he read a few favorite sentences, unsourced, with the author’s name coming after, so that we were each preceded by sentences over which we’ve labored. Like Spenserian figures who are only named after their allegorical structures have been first laid out.

Lots to wrestle with at the event, but for now I want simply to enjoy working with people who write with such care and pleasure, such craft and energy.

I’ll share my talk on shipwreck, Bob Dylan’s new song about the Titanic, and eco-thinking in a later post.

Another one in the books: SAA 2013 saw my first visit to Toronto, many excellent chats generated through the Brownian movement of densely-populated coffee breaks, a high quality pub less than 2km from the conference hotel, a great seminar on “Shakespeare’s Earth System Science” which included historians of religion and intellectual history, and many things besides.

Three moments stand out. Looking at them, they all appear to be about the same thing, which maybe isn’t surprising.

1. Pleasure and Strife: In the Q&A in our seminar, Vin Nardizzi asked a great question about pleasure, a word we hadn’t used in our discussions of global systems and other modes of relation. I answered, in that appeal to secret knowledge that so often marks the way a seminar member responds to an auditor within the deeply formalized ritual of the SAA seminar, that I thought many of our papers about strife and conflict also had been about pleasure, and that strife and strain need not exclude pleasure in any way. It was a slightly mystifying answer, but espirit d’escalier (or d’aeroport) suggests maybe I should have moved directly to Empedocles and his paired principles of Love and Strife that govern the mixing and separating of the four classical elements. I think Vin was onto something: we need a language that talks about both these principles at once. Energy exchange, which emerges through both Pleasure and Strife? Change, in Ovidian, Lucretian, or other models? (Spenserian? Shakespearean?) The Empedoclean model suggests that Pleasure (Love) and Strife are always at odds, the former uniting and the latter separating elemental substances. I wonder if we can find a language of dissension and disunity, of Strife, that is also a language of pleasure.

2. Entrainment: The talk I didn’t hear live but heard lots about was Robert Shaughnessy on Global Shakespeare, entrainment, and jet lag. He showed a YouTube video of metronomes coming to assume a common rhythm as a way to talk about global performance culture and the perils of jet lag. The central idea, as explained to me by people who actually went to the talk, was “entrainment,” a process through which rhythmic proximity becomes contagious. For Shaughnessy, entrainment provides a way to talk about the relationship between actors and audience and the bio-rhythmic dilemmas of, say, a UK-based professor giving an early morning talk in Toronto or a RSC company on tour in the Pacific. I wonder if it’s also a way to talk about all kinds of collective action. (The Wikipedia page I link to above includes human foot tapping along with dance, firefly flashing, and misquito wing clapping (!) as examples of this biomusical phenomenon.) Apparently the purely physical form of entrainment was first noticed by the Dutch clockmaker Christian Huygens in 1666 when he invented the pendulum clock; he called it “odd sympathy.” Shaughnessy also referred to a recent book, Sync: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily LIfe, by Steven Strogatz, a mathematician at Cornell. (A copy just arrived at my door just now: the wonders of our amazonian world.)

I’m wondering about entrainment as a model for action across distance. It would do Shaughnessy’s performer-audience work in really interesting ways and maybe also be generalizable to other kinds of remote influence. Including literary or intellectual influences? All the social-intellectual hybrid entanglements of the SAA — the coffe break chat, the paper session or seminar, the late-night visit at the crowded bar, the animated conversation while distractedly walking through mostly unknown streets — might display such rhythmic entanglements and accommodations  I like having a high-concept takeaway to bring back from a conference!

3. The Ghost is a MOOC: Henry Turner’s excellent talk on Hamlet, corporate identities, and the “crisis of the university” drew spontaneous applause when he charged the assembled Shakespeareans to reclaim the  historical homology between “universitas” and “corporitas” in order to challenge rival claims to speak for academic commonality. (I particularly liked the jab about how Business has displaced Theology at the imagined center of the modern Uni.) He clearly touched a nerve, and one that Rob Wakeman, in real-time twitter —  the posts are still legible at #shakesass13, which punny hashtag was called out by name at the lunchtime talk by SAA President Dympna Callaghan — that Hamlet’s dead father, the looming force that drives the play into violence, resembles a MOOC, a fantastic amalgamation of past and future glories that demands a radical curtailing and focusing of our shared pedagogical enterprise. Some hours later — I’m not a real-time twitterer — I tweeted back that MOOC-mania, with its vision of evacuating futurity, might invert the Ghost’s imperative: not “Remember me” but (to pick up on a key term in Henry’s talk) “Remember…nothing.” Henry’s project on corporate identity seems wonderfully complicated, and his desire to reclaim collective unity in the name of some common project was inspiring, and resonated interestingly with Madhavi Menon’s universalizing plea, via Badiou on St Paul, for an “indifference to difference,” a rejection not of difference as such but of paranoid meaning(s) attributed to difference(s). Was there something in the Canadian water that made universalism, or at least communal identities, seem suddenly possible?

There might have been some nervousness in our collective (!) response to Henry’s exhortation, and in some ways Madhavi’s appeals for a universalism beyond historicism, which has drawn some recent fire in PMLA, stirs up an ambivalence about unity that resonates with (entrains?) the idiosyncratic habits of academic thinkers. But that moment in Henry’s talk, plus the coming-together of entrainment, and my own halting efforts to articulate a pleasure in shared strife and intellectual jousting, suggests an academic fantasy that, I should confess, I don’t usually feel all that strongly. The idea of unity seemed oddly attractive at this year’s SAA.

Here’s one last conference vignette that sparked this coming-together fantasy for me. A little after 4 pm on Saturday, four of us were sitting on the corner across from the construction zone near the Fairmont waiting for the airport shuttle. Around the appointed time, the bus arrived, signaled that it was going to pull over, and then drove away without picking us up. We grabbed our rolling bags and sprang into action. The suddenly united SAA foursome failed to catch the bus by walking across the street, but we found a phone number, a working cell phone, another way through the maze of construction, and eventually we recovered the bus-that-had-vanished. As soon as we climbed aboard the united foursome dispersed, and by now we are happily back in homes from Vermont to California to New York. It was nice while it lasted.

I’m not a big joiner and often tell my classes that I hate nothing more than a room in which everybody things the same thing. But this little bus-parable was about strategic and temporary en-corporation, sympathetic and valuable. About timing, good will, and, it must be said, those prosthetic/cyborg-ish vehicles of extended cognition known as iPhones. Were we entrained into a common rhythm or did we assume it consciously? Hard to say. But our ad-hoc community got us to the plane(s) on time.

Can this kind of temporary en-corporation resist the MOOC-ian command to Remember Nothing? I wonder. It’ll be fun to try.