On page 288, Tallmadge compares the “discipline of erudition” to “ordinary science” as Thomas Kuhn conceived of it. Ostensibly, Tallmadge cites Kuhn to bolster his argument that though necessary, book learning is pushed into the “background” when the literary critic-cum-natural historian is radiated by the real, “referential world,” with its powers to induce discovery (If I remember Kuhn’s argument correctly, ordinary scientists make up the brunt of the field, they are the middling technicians whose data is necessary to the revolutionary paradigm shifts in a science). The analogy to Kuhn is curious, though, because his efforts to historicize science seem contrary to Tallmadge’s faith in a mostly unmediated access to the “more-than-human-world…[with] intense, incontrovertible certainty” (287). So while Tallmadge presents scientific discourse as the “discipline” necessary to receive nature’s message, his argument (besides falling prey at times to what Bennett refers to as “nature fetishism”) seems ahistorical w/r/t science. I think his argument would be troubled if he recognized the historically bound nature of the “background erudition” that supposedly sufficiently cleans the doors of perception onto the “referent.” To be fair to Tallmadge, he presents King’s Mountaineering as exhibiting a complex interaction between competing literary and scientific discourses. Moreover, while it is naïve to conceive of science as a privileged discourse capable of furnishing us with a complete “coherent picture of the living world” (285), there is no doubt that in the natural sciences, such observation is hugely important (whether or not it is accompanied by sublime feelings). Tallmadge’s field work, however, seems more like a fact-checking mission, of limited interest and practicality.
All of this isn’t to suggest we go completely in the opposite direction and say that the experience of “wide open spaces” is typically a fetishistic scam made for and consumed by credulous new-agers. But even if replicating the “experience” is a useful component in promoting environmental justice, theoretical challenges to the “referent” cannot, and should not, be dismissed offhandedly. Bennett’s argument, I think, lays out a number of reasons why, for instance, taking science uncritically (as a key to unlocking the experience of nature or narrativizing it as a whole) has historically led to social injustice. Likewise, the privileging of “non-human” environments as somehow more natural seems specious. But unlike Buell’s flip-flop towards a cosmopolitan, cultural ecocriticism, Bennett’s “hope” that deep ecology and social ecocriticism can find some common ground seems an attractive direction for the field.