Steve Mentz

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

Notes from day 2

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.

Fedora by Waterford

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

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)

Strode House on Fire

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.

Without doubt, it was the wettest shipwreck scene I’ve ever seen, in my many years of seeing productions of The Tempest. Probably the best, too.

Synetic Theater’s game is Silent Shakespeare, no words spoken at all, though Stephano did hum a sea chanty at one point. I’ve heard about this company for a long time, and almost got tickets to a staging of Don Quixote a year or two ago — but I must admit it was the flooded stage that drew me down to DC.  It’s been a great short trip, with a couple of half-days in the Folger reading piscatorial verse, and a happily-timed jaunt over to Foggy Bottom to listen to Will Stockton say brilliant things about Romeo and Juliet. But let’s not kid ourselves: it was the water, 4″ of it all over the stage, that punched my ticket.

When I got to the theater in the basement of an office building in Crystal City, they handed me a poncho to take to my seat. I’m glad I put it on, though it didn’t really  keep me dry.

Liberated from the text, the Synetic production made some interesting decisions about narrative arc. They opened with the arrival of young Prospero and a swaddled infant Miranda on the isle, guided by spirits and music from a piano that spouted an arching waterfall from beneath its waterlogged keys. The piano, perhaps the source of Ariel’s power, was the only prop on stage beyond the water itself. Ariel played it, Ferdinand scrubbed it, Caliban jumped on top of it, and the young lovers first glimpsed each other through the waterfall beneath which Miranda was hiding. Music and water together.

The splashing started with a Gandalf-v-Saruman style fight scene between Prospero and Sycorax, in the course of which he wrested a staff from her and stubbled her with it while I and the other Splash Zoners got our first taste of the water. Sycorax and her son dressed in red body suits, Caliban’s sporting horns, but when he prodded his mother’s still form after she’d been laid low by our hero, the feel of his character — here and elsewhere — was more puppy than devil. As Prospero learned his way around the island, freeing Ariel from imprisonment and looking after soon-teenage Miranda, Caliban, having no choice, slowly warmed to his mother’s killer. Before the Italian ship arrived they were a happy-ish quartet, with girlish Miranda leaping around the watery stage with Caliban.

Caliban with the body of Sycorax

The play told its story through broad, playful physical movements set to music: a few fights such as the one between Prospero and Sycorax, a few magical light shows, lots of music, but the most compelling set-piece in the early going was the hide-and-seek game between Caliban and Miranda that circled round and round her distracted father. Watching them, you knew what was going to happen — the water-soaked bodies, jumping, rolling, and leaping really could only lead one place, even if you didn’t remember the play’s backstory — but still, watching the game shift by degrees from chase to catch to run away and finally all the way to sexual assault was sadly inevitable. It never became overtly violent, though Prospero did lock Caliban in his cell when he interrupted the game. But clearly something was wakening — and then the Italians came.

The restructured narrative meant that the shipwreck that opens Shakespeare’s play became a mid-production high point  for Synetic, with a disorganized chaos of new characters spilling and splashing their ways onto the stage, kicking water high into the air, miming maritime labor, and generally having a great time. I’m always disappointed with productions of the Tempest’s shipwreck — it’s my favorite scene anywhere in Shakespeare, but so hard to get right on stage. But this show, with no words and even no Boatswain, got to the scene’s disorderly heart. This kind of fracturing is what happens when ships break and bodies get wet. The old rules about weather and politics and fathers and magic and theater start to pull apart. “We split, we split, we split!” — as no one said during this production.

Prospero learns his magic

I won’t say that the show went downhill from there, but as the familiar scenes flowed by, the performances were great but never really got back to the intensity and high-jinx of the wreck. For me, at least, that was the slipper top. How do you beat immersion? (By this time I was thoroughly soaked and grinning.)

Some smart stage bits followed, including a touching scene in which Miranda shows up with a set of keys to unlock Caliban’s cell — is all forgiven? — but then drops them in the water when Ferdinand strolls by. It turns out that Caliban didn’t need the keys, because the cell wasn’t really locked. The scene set up the orphan’s flight into the arms of a wonderfully drunken and later cross-dressed Stephano.

There were some interesting changes in casting — both Trinculo and Antonia were played as women, which added sexual tension to the drunkards’ reunion and seductive force to the usurpation of Milan. The performance of Ariel by Don Istrate was brilliant, playful and ice-hard at the same time, shimmering in silver body paint.

Don Istrade as Ariel

Perhaps because we’d seen him young and alone, struggling to care for his infant and ambushed by Sycorax, this Prospero was unusually sympathetic and non-tyrannical. In the end, his drowning of book and  staff (no place to bury anything on this stage) was elegiac rather than terrifying. I thought about Ovid’s Medea, but didn’t really see much of her.

The magic book itself, which looked like nothing so much as a waterproof MacBook in one of those faux-folio cases, ended up in Caliban’s hands as the ship rowed away. He gazed into its luminous pages, a hopeful, wistful expression on his face. Did he see something? No. Then the lights went down quickly, leaving him alone in the dark.

A great, wet, exuberant show, with a touch of sadness at curtain. It’s amazing what water can do, even now that it’s become almost a stage cliche — though I’ve never seen anything as fully immersed as this show before. The run closes March 24, and it’s quite silly for me to even think about a second trip to DC in that time, especially since I’ll be back in early April for an eco-event at MEMSI. But it’s tempting.

If you’re in or near DC before then, go. And sit in the Splash Zone.