I don’t know if it’s just me, but at a number of points reading Ammons’ “garbage” (no affront intended) I was reminded of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (though this is from my very cursory undergraduate reading of it; so those of you who know more about modern poetry, be kind in correcting me). From what I gather from Scigaj’s introduction, it is this sort of posstructuralist self-referential poetry that is eco-poetry’s bête-noir; the bullshit that Ammons’ et. al. want us to cut. My sense though is that this poetry is so in dialogue with posstructuralist ideas that the two are bound to sound familiar at times; and both, moreover, share paradoxes of self-reference—Derrida was plagued by the fact that he had to use the tools of Western metaphysics to deconstruct it; ecocritical poets must use language to refer us beyond it. Also, both are concerned with attacking hyperrationalism; even if ecopoetics aligns deconstruction with empty abstraction—both favor “becoming” (at least Ammons advocates this sort of “process” metaphysics in “Corsons Inlet”)-- over Being…..
It could also be argued that ecopoetics has certain types of rationality it favors: certainly it values empirical science highly—“biocentrism” implies that scientific knowledge does not simply construct, but points us towards “reality.” Even if this seems to me an article of faith, I’m having a difficult time aligning this faith in science to refer us to the real with this equal insistence on a phenomenological “originary experience.” It seemed to me from Scigaj’s introduction that the phenomenological experience of the non-linguistic “thing”—Ponty’s “figure” emerging from a “ground”—is where ecopoets hope to return us. But to claim that language first depends upon us being endowed with perception does not to me seem to point to an ecocentric position—it still refers back to our experience of things as things. Perhaps this is a strategic anthropocentrism—like the way Ammons claims that primates say all that we can say through the medium of grooming—but to point to the originary experience of a tree is not to point to the tree itself. Subsequently, although Scigaj claims that ecopoetry aims to get beyond immanence, it seems to be a celebration of immanence; that is, immanence as our supposedly pre-linguistic or a-linguistic perception of what Ammons calls “facts.” My feeling is that what ecopoetry really wants to urge us towards is a sense of wonder at the ground of our experience, the nature that undergirds our consciousness and subsequently our language. This romantic, poetic comportment towards the a priori seems strange though when it relies on scientific narrative…do ecopoets want us to believe that the scientific object, say, sexual morphology in dung beetles, is not the product of our language games? Or that it will direct us towards an originary experience? Is the “interrelated series of cyclic feedback systems” Scigaj refers to something we can understand without a network of scientists? Without mediation? Without language? Can grooming tell us this? I’m not sure, but I’m reminded of the way in which popular science these days often translates into a quasi-religious sense of grandeur and amazement. Which is maybe what we need to derail our current collision course with doom. If the ecopoets are right, my feeble attempt here to understand poetry rationally (if what comes above qualifies as ‘rational’) misses the point completely. In this case, I take it all back.
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This is something I meant to post a few weeks back:
ReplyDeletePerhaps due to excessive fatigue, I have begun to fall into a (“Bachelardian?”) reverie on how to narrate the life of a seed (or seeds). The first thing that sprouts in my head (relatively unencumbered by any real knowledge of ecology) is that, beyond our perceptions and narrations of it, the seed has no individual “life”. That is, if everything is somehow intertwined or deeply entangled as ecology has it, we have no choice but to remain agnostics on the status of “seeds” as individuals. In my perhaps pseudo-scientific opinion, “individual” refers to something that has experience—that, in Kantian terms, is able to “apperceive” perception across a variety of moments and string them into a continuum a self can attribute ownership to. Although I devoutly wish that what we refer to with ‘seeds’ actually contains some mind-blowing experiential dimension, there is no way to “scientifically” (i.e. “objectively”--with the desire to evacuate human subjectivity) narrate the life of a seed. As Merleau-Ponty claimed (to paraphrase in quotes): “there is either consciousness or nothing, there is no half-way house”.
Here’s a maybe less nutso sounding way of expressing the problem of telling the seed’s history: beyond the classic identity/difference aporia, is the nature of what Bruno Latour would call “scientific objects.” Latour uses this term to make provocative claims such as that tuberculosis didn’t exist for Egyptians because it hadn’t been invented yet. This may seem like the sort of counter-intuitive, academic masturbation we’ve grown innured to (e.g., Derrida’s ‘there has never been any perception”) but I think when we think about Thoreau out in the fields feverishly filling his notebooks with the minutiae of rodents and their accidental adventures with seeds, we need to consider how much the seed as a “scientific object” has been defined by his contemporary scientific culture. Conceivably it would be easier to narrate the seed today: with a profusion of popular scientific texts that would allow you to tell the seed’s story from the universal to the genetic to the subatomic scale. There may actually be a lack of limits on the story you could tell: you could, using positron emission tomography, imaginatively track the calcium ions in action potentials across Thoreau’s neurons as the seed casts its image on his retina. And there could be a Thoreau neuron subplot about how the neural net containing this seed is really just a complex symphony of billions of vibrating ‘strings’ resonating in a 13 dimensional non-Euclidean geometry….with some killer CGI and a Jeff Goldblum voiceover you’ve got an episode of NOVA……So maybe it’s more difficult in our contemporary scientific Babel to construct a coherent narrative—but there’s certainly more raw material to work with. We might also consider that the “seed” is, as any well-behaved undergraduate in the humanities could know, a “cultural construction.” The acts of concerted, disciplined attention, the sociologies of scientists, etc., might help us tell the “story” of the seed.
And maybe the trouble is simpler to define. As narratologists since Aristotle have contended, a plot must have a beginning middle and end. Seeds, representing always a beginning and never a death, are incomplete, plotwise. And here we have both an ecological and an ontological conundrum. When we talk about seeds are we talking about Being or becoming? Are we considering the seed and the tree as separate entities?
Chris,
ReplyDeleteYou make some very insightful and dead-on observations, some of which are precisely the ones I grapple with in trying to understand what exactly Ecopoetics is and whether it is doable given its resistance to language meditation in attempting to access the 'facts' that are grounded in some kind of original experience; like you, I agree that the central tenants that lay this out often seem like a conundrum and become essentially, impossible ... for how can we do anything (be it perceiving or otherwise) without mediating it through our anthropocentric systems of language (and understanding) first? And your point about how attempting to access the 'originary experience' as ultimately an anthropocentrized gesture towards knowing/seeing 'things as things' and one that really moves away from ecocentricism interests me, yet isn't the ecopoet supposing that 'originary experience' is one that is firmly rooted in the natural, unadorned, unalduterated, unmediated world--so wouldn't that (in and of itself) be ecocentric? On the other hand, and as I think you suggest, can we ever have such an 'originary experience' given that (as the ecopoets insist most) we have so destroyed and manipulated the planet and perceive everything through already established anthropocentric systems? What, then, are we after in ecopoetry and is it essentially unattainable? Is the best that we can do just merely be aware that there was once (before the 'fall) such possibilities and that we need to reach towards them somehow? But then isn't this an act in futility? Again, a conundrum.
The other thing I'd like to draw attention to that you brought up is this idea of "becoming" over "Being" and how this ties in with transcendentalism ... and if, as you suggest, Ammons is more concerned with "becoming", what is he hoping to become? Is this process of becoming something that brings us closer to the natural world or transcends us beyond it? And if it takes us beyond, what does that say about the role of the natural world in this process and does it undercut the presence of the natural world? (Again, I think of Leo Marx's essay on "Walden" here) ...
I hope we can delve more deeply into these complex and at-times conflicting ideas more on Tuesday. And thanks for your thoughts, Chris.
I was struck by many of these same thoughts about the role that language plays in mediating experience as I read Scigaj's introduction. On the one hand, I am happy to read attempts to break down some of the post-structuralist assumptions that our discipline operates under, but I also think that in this case Derrida is right. Chris's semi-facetious observation about Latour (and I'll take this opportunity to cry foul over responding to one's own comment!) makes a lot of sense to me. Foucault's equally counterintuitive claims about the invention of "the homosexual" trouble Scigaj's idea of referentiality. He wants language to refer back to natural referents, but language is also responsible for creating new referents and this tension between natural and nonnature-based referentiality is not fully resolved in Scigaj.
ReplyDeleteI can understand why the claim that language can represent reality without distortion, would be appealing to poets. Scijag never says that language necessarily DOES represent without distortion, but only that it is possible. This poses a challenge to poets, and it is one that he feels the poets in his collection have met. This is tantalizing, and I think what Magda refers to when she asks if the goals of ecopoetry are attainable. Surely some poems ought to be able to craft an approximation of the things they refer to that is mediated more through the mind of the poet than the language used to write the poem (or is there an essential difference here?). Still, there is no reason why this transformation of things into words should exclude the manmade. Aside from my lack of poetic mastery, why couldn't I write a poem a poem that perfectly captures the thingness of a skyscraper? That would, I suppose, be referential but not sustainable.
To respond directly to Magda's question about how much Bryson's definition of ecopoetry would excite a critic/activist such as Lindholdt: I would think Lindholdt might argue (and Scijag might agree) that it is exciting but not activist enough. Bryson's definitionis close to Buell's definition of first-wave ecocriticism in that it identifies a set of interpretive contexts but does not prescribe specific activism. Lindholdt on the other hand, and Scijag (especially in his first chapter) both seem to think that poetry and its criticism might be able to change the world. I couldn't help laughing as I read Scijag's Lindholdtian arguments (especially at the top of page 5) and thinking about our class discussion on self-important literary activism and misdirected earnestness.
Ecopoetry, like ecocriticism, seems to offer a compelling set of perspectives from which to write poems and from which to think about poems, and the ecopoetic (ecocritical) perspective might actually do some good in at least offering students a less anthropocentric perspective that could move from the study of nature writing to the way they view the world. As I've said before, it is an extremely indirect way of solving the ecological crisis on our hands.
I have to say John, it's quite refreshing reading what you wrote about the limitations of the poetic act on 'saving the world' from ecological/environmental collapse. For one, if we as ecopoets and ecocritics (or however we define ourselves) are centrally concerned with putting a necessary cap on the anthropocentric perspective that has driven literary criticism and activity for the last couple of centuries (and before) as a way to widen our scope and our understanding and give equal footing to the natural, non-human world, then isn't supposing that an creative act--the poem--however steeped in an 'originary experience' within the natural world it may be is still anthropocentric by design and wouldn't we be better off for recognizing such limitations than assuming that, instead, these acts will somehow (by themselves or co-jointly) save us from our own man-made environmental collapse? Where is the humility! The poem, by itself, of course, though perhaps a 'field of action' cannot alone define what we mean by activism, but rather something beyond the page need comprise this sort of activism. And this, it seems, might be something wholly (or atleast partially) outside of the study of literature and literary criticism, lest we write our poems and critical essays on board Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd anti-whaling vessel. As someone who completely believes in the necessity of environmental activism (and action), I'm not sure how the two -- activism and literature -- can be merged without avoiding the kind of problem we saw during Carolyn Merchant's recent talk i.e., reductionism and disjointedness. (What anyways do we define as activism?) It seems a rare occasion when literary critic/writer meets activist in a substantive, productive way; a few examples that come to mind are Rachel Carson, Rick Bass and Bill McKibben, but they, of course, are the exception. What to do about all of this then? I'm not quite sure, but these topics sure do make for exciting conversations.
ReplyDeletecorrection: while avoiding, not without
ReplyDeleteOur talk on Scigaj, Ammons, et al. the other day as well as this post have brought up some unsettling and perhaps incommensurable feelings in me over the last week. I'm going to try to get them out on this blog, but forgive me if I sound completely disconnected, even mad.
ReplyDeleteI am particularly interested in what Chris is saying about language in ecopoetry and the connections he makes with Derrida... in class we talked about the problem of referentiality and whether or not there is indeed something outside of the text. I think there has to be, personally, from an a priori standpoint. Where does text or language come from, or in Kantian terms, what are the conditions of language? I think we have two options here which might be mutually exclusive, but which may also collapse into a single thing. Either language comes from some non-linguistic portion of our brains and is a closed system of binaries and self-referential epistemology, or it comes from "the real world" as a set of not-necessarily-binary open referential systems... another way to put it is do we create a word to refer to something we experience outside of us in the real world (trees, rocks, etc)? Or do we create a word in order to keep our internal linguistic system in check and then apply it to something outside of us (black/white, earth/sea, etc)? Perhaps raising two spectres here can help, or at least in my sick bizarro-world mind they can help: mysticism and Lacan.
I want to go back to Chris' question about aporia, i.e. being unable to speak. For the mystics, the experience of God was (or is) ineffable, something beyond language. And yet, mystical poets for ages have been trying to describe what exactly that mystical experience is like... is this beginning to sound familiar? Here's a representative line from Rumi, the most famous Persian mystical poet:
Remember God so much that you are forgotten.
Let the caller and the called disappear;
be lost in the Call.
The point here is that the identity of the mystic is annihilated in the presence of the Divine, but it is important that they are termed the "caller" and the "called," as both incorporate language, which is transcended in the moment of spiritual union. It seems to me that ecopoetry is trying to do something similar, to recreate the natural world outside of language within language... an impossible feat, but one which can create poetry of extreme beauty.
Now for Lacan... I have to start with a personal note. When I began grad school, I thought that I was going to be studying mystical poetry and that I knew exactly what I wanted to say about it... something along the lines that if you look at mystical poetry from all different religions and cultures, you see the same kinds of tropes popping up, and that the aporia caused by the divine presence is universal, and therefore God or something beyond exists. You can laugh if you'd like. I told this theory to my mentor and he shook his head and introduced me to Lacan in a round about way. He explained that what all of these cultures and religions had in common was not God but an inherently imperfect language, and that any kind of experience outside of the bounds of language was going to sound alike, simply refracted through different lenses of desire. So, for mystics, whatever is outside of linguistic experience is God (and for ecopoets, it is nature). Then he explained that what is extralinguistic is "the Real," and that many people think of it as an emptiness inside of the human subject which we have to fill in order to feel okay. But this was not right, he continued... the Real can never be filled, only covered up. And what we cover it with is what we desire, something which can "stand in for the Real" like a lover or food, or whatever. The easier something is to get, the poorer a covering it is for the real, because once we get it we have to move onto something else, constantly deferring our desire. So God is a really good cover because whether there is one or not, we can never get there. When we actually experience a rupture of the Real (an Event), it is absolutely terrifying, and prolonged contact with it would cause us to go crazy or die. So we frantically search for a label to put on it and cover it back up, like the concept of God or sublime nature.
But we shouldn't feel bad about this, because if we stopped trying to cover up the real with something else, we'd become stagnant. The Real isn't just a void which makes us imperfect. In fact, "the Real" is a kind of productive emptiness, a producer of language and art, i.e. it is the condition of language I was looking for above. If language, or art is water, the Real is the fountain, but we can only see the water because that's what we live in. Or it's like a reverse black hole which we can't see except for the huge amount of energy it is spewing out... we can sense our way around it, but can never see the thing itself. In the same way, we can point to the Real with language but can never touch it. The only times that we can claim to have some actual experience of the Real (say with God or communing with nature) we necessarily have to step outside of language.
But at the same time, saying that the Real is simply the outside world beyond language is too simplistic... the Real is also what creates what Derrida calls differance and play. The Real is the gap between a sign and its referent. It is also the gap between the flesh which constitutes our brains and the consciousness we have. The Real is built into language and consciousness itself.
I feel like I've been rambling, so I'll try to finish soon. I guess I think from my point of view, we need to reformulate the question of ecopoetry. Instead of "Can ecopoetry actually refer to an outside place and objective nature?" or "What is the purpose of the originary experience?" we might ask "If ecopoetry is an attempt to describe a rupture of the Real, i.e. an originary experience, how does the poet position the natural environment as the extra-linguistic producer of their language?" I think the reason I found Garbage by Ammons to be so fascinating is the way he seems to direct this stream of words from almost undifferentiated materiality, with the goal of undermining language itself. Both the method and object seem to be getting back to "the Real," insofar as his topic seems to be critiquing the human construction of language, while the whiplash effect of the stream of disconnected images never lets us latch on to any specific example for very long, letting us sense a kind of rippling beneath the language itself. Maybe this sounds a little off-kilter and baseless, and it probably is, but it's what I've been thinking about and I can't explain it any other way.