Notes on Merchant

Here is the note about our class that Merchant received from me:

Monday, March 30

10:30 am Meeting with Professor Christoph Irmscher and his students, IAS conference Room, Poplars 332.

"The students who will meet with you are all graduate students who are taking Professor Irmscher's 700-level ecocriticism class. They're familiar with some of your work. Throughout the semester, they've been talking about representations of nature in literary texts and ways in which ecologically conscious scholars can address such representations. They have read Lawrence Buell's The Future of Environmental Criticism, familiarized themselves with the history of environmental criticism, and brought these questions to bear on some canonical texts of environmental writing in the American tradition, including John James Audubon, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Henry David Thoreau and, perhaps a more unexpected choice, Edgar Allan Poe. They have also pondered alternate ways of addressing texts that deal with nature, mainly by reading Bachelard's The Poetics of Space. They're now branching out, reading texts about hunting, nature in Anglo-Saxon literature, the Canadian tradition, and so forth. They will probably be curious about ecofeminism (something they have only barely addressed during this semester) and how it's possible to remain committed to ecology in one's work without confusing scholarship and activism."

And here are my own notes about the essay I handed out (on Bacon and the "secrets of nature"):

"Though the essay is part of a more extended discussion (it's a response to a vitriolic essay by the Renaissance scholar Brian Vickers on what ecofeminism has done to Bacon scholarship), I picked it because it represents, in condensed form, Merchant's blend of history of science, feminism, and critique of the western tradition (which also includes critique of environmental depredation). She is interested in the transition from occult knowledge to public knowledge that took place in the 17th century and seeks to make a dent into the triumphalist narratives about the Scientific Revolution as a time of progress and hope. She also argues that traditional scholarship about the Scientific Revolution completely ignores the cost to the laboring classes and the environment (an argument she only gestures at in the current essay, though it's more fleshed out in her book, The Death of Nature).

She is critical of the 'conjoining' of science, technology, and mercantile capitalism that most of the scholarly debate seems to endorse. What Bacon did, in her view, was transpose the discourse about 'nature's secrets' (which in the occult tradition was something to which women could be privy, too) to the discourse of experimental science, which he helped create. This discourse is one of 'recovery'--we have a right to know these secrets, and experimental inquiry is a way of mitigating, or even undoing, the 'tragedy of the Fall.' Nature, in Bacon's writings, is connoted as female--and the place from which 'her' secrets need to be recovered is the 'womb' or the 'bosom' (see the lengthy footnote). Throughout the essay, she makes use of previous scholarship, notably that of Katharine Park.

In the Baconian tradition, nature, like Proteus, has to be constrained be experiments that force it out of its 'natural' condition. Women's bodies--like nature-are understood to contain 'secrets' that need to be extracted violently in the service of humanity--viz. the anatomical theatre of the Renaissance or the locations for nature study that are created (museums, botanical gardens etc.) where nature is disciplined."

Some questions we could ask her:

1. Is the western tradition really that monolithic? What about male writers that have opted out of this tradition--Goethe (who critiqued Newton's experimentalism), Thoreau, or even Poe?

2. Since she herself describes the scientific revolution as having had beneficial and irreversible results and modern science can't seem to do without experiments, where does that leave us today? Is there hope for the future? How can critique translate into activism? Should it? Are we condemning ourselves to (humanistic) irrelevance if we start criticizing the Baconian tradition today?

3. Don't we run the risk of reifying gender divisions if we adopt Merchant's reading?

4. If environmental criticism becomes part of the academy (acquires orthodoxy, so to speak), will it lose its provocative edge? (Example: Buell's book, in which environmental criticism ends up being a form of postcolonial critique and "nature" as a critical problem threatens to become lost).

Feel free to add questions to this--this is just a very preliminary list.

Christoph