Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Edited by
Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy
iv
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v
Contents
8 Astral guts: The nemocentric self in Byron and Brassier Aaron Ottinger 157
10 Plasticity, poetry, and the end of art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats Greg Ellermann 197
Figures
12.1 J. M. W. Turner, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island
of St Vincent, at Midnight 246
13.1 Full-plate illustrations from the 1836 edition of Marie Antonin
Carême’s French Cookery 264
1 3.2 From the sixth edition of Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook 265
1 3.3 From Ude’s The French Cook, published by John Ebers, 1819. The
British Library 266
13.4 A table setting from Domestic Economy, and Cookery, For Rich and
Poor (1827) 267
1 3.5 Keats’s poem as first published in The Examiner, March 16, 1817 268
1 3.6 The frontispiece and title page to Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery 271
13.7 Annotations from Mary Bingham (at bottom, “Mary Bing ham Her
Book”) in the second edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747) 274
viii
1
The essays in this collection map the territory produced by the conjunction of the
two terms in the title. Although this is not the first publication to identify important
resonances between the literature and philosophy of the romantic era and the
paradigms advanced under the banner of speculative realist philosophy, the “and” in
our title signifies something at once more bold and more complex: the necessity of
romanticism for understanding the world revealed by speculative realism; the horizons
opened up for both romanticism and speculative realism when they are read with each
other; and the possibility that perhaps they are only foils for one another, critiques that
rebuff and curtail as much as they advance. If speculative realism provides a conceptual
framework for reexamining anew the “romantic ideology” stereotyped as anti-realist
and preoccupied by the human mind, then romanticism enables a radical rereading
of speculative realism that reminds it of the aesthetic, the political, and the ethical
dimensions that, in some accounts, it supposedly flees.
Romanticism and Speculative Realism thus aims to provide substantially new
readings of romantic-era texts that can emerge only from an engagement with
speculative realism when the singularity and multiplicity of both the romantic subject
and object are taken into focus. The “and” of this volume’s title, then, does not strictly
conjoin the terms but rather lets them communicate their intimacies and extimacies
as they discover them in an “unremitting interchange,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley might
describe it. To put it another way, this is a collection that is speculative in the sense
that it is determined to speculate about its own reasons for being and romantic in that
it acknowledges that it is perhaps romantically destined to fall short of realizing any
ambitions it harbors.
Romanticism has long been characterized as preoccupied with anthropocentricism,
the human subject, and their ability to transcend the material world around them,
whereas speculative realism is apparently at odds with such a preoccupation.
Speculative realist thought took shape in the first decade of the twenty-first century,
against the background of what three of its main thinkers, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek,
and Graham Harman, describe as “looming ecological catastrophe, the increasing
infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies),” and
2
a burgeoning sense that it was time to mount a broad critique of “humanity’s place
in the world”—and of notions of reality that remained “the correlate of human
thought.”1 More than simply the antihumanist critique of language and culture
associated with late twentieth-century philosophy, speculative realism aimed to reject
the so-called anti-realism of Immanuel Kant, without thereby returning to simplistic
or naïve forms of materialism.2 For Harman, Bryant, and Srnicek, the post-Kantian
tradition that culminated in deconstruction—and, more generally, in a philosophical
preoccupation with anthropocentric topics such as language, consciousness, and
human subjectivity—leaves us ill-equipped to confront the existential challenges and
temporal distensions of the Anthropocene, where “not only do we have to swallow
the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly
older than the very existence of the human race … but [we] have also to absorb the
disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary
event is behind us.”3 Attempts to deconstruct notions of the human amount, in this
reading, to an expansion and, in some sense, the reification of what Rosi Braidotti calls
a “compensatory humanism.”4 Given its historical association with the boundlessness
and power of the human imagination, romanticism and speculative realism would
seem to be diametrically opposed.
It is perhaps all the more strange that, in the opening pages of After Finitude: An
Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006; English translation 2008), Quentin
Meillassoux proposes that it is time for philosophy to go play outside in what is,
essentially, a romantic terrain. “[I]t could be,” he argues,
that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside
of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was
given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless
of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore
with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely
elsewhere.5
For Meillassoux the “great outdoors” signifies the vast territory that Kantian and
post-Kantian philosophy had largely excluded from its anthropocentric worldview.
Since the human mind, according to Berkeley, Kant, and their successors, cannot
access the thing-in-itself, its knowledge-claims must be limited to what Meillassoux
names the “correlation”—“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term apart from itself.”6
On Meillassoux’s telling, Kant did not deny the existence of an absolute, but he did
place limitations on our ability to “know” it. Correlationist thinking dictates that there
can be no object in itself, existing independently of the subject that perceives it—and
no independently existing subject either. Some two centuries of Western philosophical
thought had, in Meillassoux’s estimation, remained in this “correlationist slumber,” even
as science and mathematics possessed the “ability to discourse about the great outdoors,
to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”7 Philosophy, in
other words, had remained resolutely asleep, while science—beginning, arguably, with
3
Introduction 3
James Hutton’s investigations into deep time that were roughly contemporaneous with
Kant’s Critiques—had consistently expanded its vocabulary to talk about notions of the
real far beyond the human. It is worth noting, then, that Meillassoux is talking about a
discursive problem: we make statements about reality outside the correlation but can
only affirm them via correlationist discourse.8 And so while exiting the correlation
entire remains impossible, as Meillassoux concedes, he nevertheless recommends
abandoning the false modesty of the mind’s finitude in order to approach once
again the absolute of being and thereby rediscover the “great outdoors.” But the great
outdoors also feature a flipside. As Meillassoux writes, “the arche-fossil,” evidence of
the world’s existence before and after human existence, pushes “us to discover” what
philosophy claims is impossible, “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know
what is whether we are or not.”9
Granted, not every speculative philosopher agrees on the specifics of how best to
conceptualize this world without us, radically independent of mind. Certain thinkers,
notably Ray Brassier, the English translator of After Finitude, have even distanced
themselves from the term “speculative realism” altogether. Meillassoux is, to some
extent, alone in his insistence on the necessity of contingency and his adherence to
the principle of noncontradiction; object-oriented ontologists such as Harman and
Timothy Morton, on the other hand, take the self-contradictory status of objects as
fundamental.10 Not every speculative realist, for that matter, elevates the critique of
correlationism to the same importance.11 Still, when Meillassoux writes about whether
or not we can get outside the correlation, or when object-oriented philosophers
criticize the anthropocentrism of the linguistic turn, they are all engaged in a rejection
of a philosophical and cultural edifice associated—rightly or wrongly—with a concept
of “romanticism”: an obsession with the power of human consciousness and the
imagination and their correspondent yearning for a sublime transcendence over a
world at the disposal of said individual consciousness and imagination. Meillassoux,
in fact, specifically criticizes what he calls “the logic of romanticism,” because it aspires
to merge the human and the natural world so that it “collapses under the weight
of illusions … which can survive only in the form of various irrational and amoral
vitalisms.”12 Contrary to this view, the essays in this collection aver, in many different
ways and from many different perspectives, that romantic-era authors have long
tarried in the real.
For these reasons, the version of romanticism laid out in this collection is
profoundly aware of the precarity of its own identity, ideology, and ontology. From the
political shocks of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars to scientific discoveries
that posed quandaries about human extinction to the rise of the autonomous subject
of the romantic imagination, the years 1780–1830 offered myriad opportunities for
reflecting upon contingency of the kind Meillassoux presents in After Finitude. It has
long been a commonplace reading, for example, that all of these romantic events,
discoveries, and nonanthropocentric concerns did not seem to conform to existing
political or scientific laws but rather to have emerged, to use Meillassoux’s term, “ex
nihilo,” marking them as in line with Meillassoux’s ideas about a world that functions
via the absolute contingency of Hyper-Chaos. Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods (2005),
4
along with Mary Favret’s War at a Distance (2009) and Joel Faflak’s and Richard Sha’s
collection, Romanticism and the Emotions (2016), for instance, all show how feeling
or affect worked at the time to cleave the subject from its very self. Affect has agency
before feeling or emotion, and as such operates prior to the subjective recognition of
one’s own bodily processes.13
In a more immediate sense, this collection builds upon the insights and arguments
laid out by Evan Gottlieb in his pathbreaking Romantic Realities. Gottlieb begins
his analysis with the reminder of the historical contingency of romanticism itself,
particularly when it comes to its philosophical underpinnings; romanticism arrives, he
writes, “at a moment that is neither post-Humean, since the force of Humean skepticism
was very much alive and well for the romantics, nor post-Kantian, since the latter’s ideas
were just beginning to be widely disseminated in Britain in the 1790s.”14 Granted, Kant’s
influence, or at least the correlationist problem Meillassoux identifies as Kant’s primary
bequest to us, surfaces in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the later Shelleys (among others).
Yet, Gottlieb crucially identifies a divergence between Kant’s argument that the mind’s
finitude limits its transcendental capabilities and the romantic notion that knowing the
absolute might indeed be imaginatively possible. Indeed, he writes, “it is a classroom
commonplace that the Romantic poets were uniquely interested in the powers of the
human imagination,” yet “such interest was frequently directed toward seeing how far
the powers of human imagination could carry the mind out of itself.”15 This is not to
say that romantic-era writers had themselves escaped the correlationist circle; poets
like Wordsworth were ultimately ambivalent about whether it is possible to see into
the life of things, to access the object-in-itself. Nevertheless, we contend, along with
Gottlieb, that a persistent anthropocentric reading of romanticism has long overstated
the movement’s preoccupation with individual subjectivity. Romantic writers were
hardly the ineffectual angels of idealism and Satanic apostles of anthropocentrism that
they are often made out to be.16
Romanticism’s awareness of the possibility of a broader subjective extinction is
now often invoked in order to obliterate the traditionally anthropocentric concerns
of literature and philosophy. Such an insight is at the center of David Collings’ Stolen
Future, Broken Present (2014), which marshals the cognitive and philosophical tools
of romanticism to confront the consequences of climate change and the attenuation
of a human future.17 His collection, “Romanticism and Disaster,” with Jacques Khalip
provides a host of different views of human annihilation in the period.18 In fact, Khalip
has recently argued that extinction is internal to romanticism itself. Khalip’s definition
of romantic extinction resists its anthropocentric negativity, contending that it
“speaks less to privation than it does to a revision of ‘life’ under other terms—non-life,
worklessness, a life that is not the self-reflexive ground and measure of the human.”19
Romanticism, he concludes, “is the extinction of the ongoing; it is the lifelessly reiterated
extinction of a life that endures through inscriptions promising ‘man’ survival through
reiteration.”20 Chris Washington, meanwhile, argues that romantic post-apocalyptic
“texts work counterintuitively and paradoxically, facing down extinction as the limit of
life to show that it is this very extinctual limit that makes life possible, both in the now
and in whatever future may come.”21 In this sense romanticism reveals “life’s possibility
5
Introduction 5
existence of man—not because man is able to survive the threat posed by the power
of the material world but because he is able to domesticate the material world for
the purposes of the aesthetic.”27 But more recently, the poem has been a central text
in the dialogue between romanticist and speculative realist thinking.28 Speculative
romanticist readings of “Mont Blanc,” however, challenge the assumption that Shelley
ultimately reifies the correlationist circle. Following Shelley’s declaration, to repeat,
that “the everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind” (ll. 1–2), scholars
including Gottlieb, Anne C. McCarthy, Greg Ellermann, and Washington have offered
readings of “Mont Blanc” that displace the correlation of the mountain to the human
mind.29
Indeed, the aporia “Mont Blanc” confronts—“and what were thou, and stars,
and sea, and earth / if to the human’s mind’s imaginings / silence and solitude are
vacancy?” (ll. 143–5)30 —is a version of the fundamental challenge of this collection’s
approach to romanticism: how to think what there is when we are not, all the while
negotiating how to live with and outside ourselves in a world without us. Affirming
that “Mont Blanc” presents a paradigmatic articulation of the romantic sublime,
McCarthy argues that its center is not the “remote, serene, and inaccessible”
mountaintop, but the cacophonous Ravine of Arve, where Shelley’s attention is
focused for nearly half of the poem (l. 97). Drawing upon Meillassoux’s discussion
of the “great outdoors” and his argument that contingency governs the real, wherein
everything could become otherwise without reason, McCarthy concludes that
the sublime that emerges in Shelley’s poem is one “whose telos is not stability but
contingency, an undoing or suspension of telos.”31 Gottlieb’s reading dovetails with
McCarthy’s in that it, too, draws on Meillassoux, locating in the poem Shelley’s
realization of the correlationist dilemma. This awareness allows Shelley to perceive
what Gottlieb describes as the Meillassouxian absolute—the world that exists without
us. Shelley knows, Gottlieb writes, that “he is in the presence of something that holds
at least the promise of an enlightenment or clarification that exceeds the human” even
if he can only finally term this a “Power” that “remains both objectively present and
impossible for us to apprehend directly.”32 Ellermann, like McCarthy, sees the poem
designating that “contingency functions as a general ontological principle for Shelley”
wherein contingency “displays itself through language without being confined to it.”33
However, this does not affirm the absolute in the sense of transcendence but rather
that “absolute contingency in ‘Mont Blanc’ is nothing but the form that events take.”34
Washington’s reading follows Meillassoux as well, but with an explicitly existential
bent: “it is the mountain’s surface that itself indicates reality’s radical inaccessibility
and human eradicability.”35 For Washington it thus “stands as the nexus of Romantic
post-apocalyptic temporal vortices, an attempt to think being outside of thought,
to ground consciousness in the falseness of an exteriority hyper-aware of its own
illusory, and hence ironic, dissimulation, what divides itself from the world outside
it.” None of these explications of noncorrelationist romantic thought, then, conform
to Meillassoux’s version of a romanticism built on a cohesive illusion or divided
vitalism, but are instead a speculative romanticism that unveils our own blindness to
a world always already without us.36
7
Introduction 7
Indeed, Romanticism and Speculative Realism argues that romanticism has always
been embedded in a “universe of things”—a universe where “things that have never
spoken fall silent and things that have never moved acquire strange motion,” to borrow
Mary Jacobus’s description of Wordsworth’s poetry.37 The romantic world is one of
radical alterity that both does and does not conform to our expectations. It is a world
that, as Robert Browning wrote in his Essay on Shelley (1852), “is not to be learned
and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”38 The process of “relearning” this
world without us requires a commitment to reality as a form, without necessarily
predetermined content, and a responding to a world of contingency with the rigorous
openness of both a speculative philosopher and a romantic poet. Furthermore, we affirm
that the romantic real was not and never has been fully reducible to an anthropocentric
conception of “Nature.” We find in the romantic tradition a long-standing resistance
to anthropocentrism, hearing in Wordsworth’s admonition to “Come forth into the
light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher” the anticipation of speculative realism’s
insistence that, in an era of anthropogenic climate change, it is more necessary than
ever to think beyond the limitations of human consciousness.39
Somewhat against the mainstream of speculative philosophy and its stated
impatience with the “the now-tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn,’ ” the essay in this collection
maintains a commitment to the particularity and the exemplarity of the literary
object as well as to the practices of close reading forged in the momentous crossing
of romanticism and deconstruction in the work of Paul de Man and the Yale School,
as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent, that of Derrida.40 Even Morton, whose early
scholarship focused on Percy Shelley, and who continues to resist some of the more
strident calls to render literature one object among many, has in many ways moved
away from the field itself, insofar as the field supposedly remains committed to Kantian
philosophies of transcendence and the emphasis on the individual mind as the nexus
of world-making. As this story goes, in a posthuman world of mysteriously operating
objects, the literary object can no longer be said to possess the same kind of privileged
access to structures of consciousness as it did in the heyday of deconstruction. We
argue, by contrast, that romantic literary objects function as privileged sites for
expanding speculative realism and object-oriented ontology beyond their central
concerns with finite subjects, the Kantian absolute, and the withdrawn object.
In this respect, this volume is not simply about rereading romanticism through
speculative realism; it also concerns rereading speculative realism through romanticism.
Rather than skew us toward a realism that excludes the supposed anti-realist literary
object, romanticism (and deconstruction) and speculative realism, it turns out, remain
committed to the literary object—even as they expand what we mean by “literary.”
Joined together, they also maintain the central importance of close reading to the
speculative realist project and simultaneously champion the continued relevance of
critical theory. And, for the most part, too, the contributors to this volume share a
belief in the value of the aesthetic—a belief that is always already inseparable from
beauty, as Keats declared in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”
(l. 49)—the statement is as simple and as dizzyingly complex as it ever has been.
Take, for instance, de Man’s striking comment in “The Resistance to Theory”:
8
The “resistance to theory” de Man diagnoses turns on the difference between the
real and the linguistic, but affirms that confusing the two gives rise to ideological
aberrations that forestall any understanding of the real. Most of us have long since
absorbed the lesson that the connection between the signifier and the signified is
conventional rather than phenomenological, a product of ideological practices. But
de Man’s hypothetical, resolutely realist vigneron nonetheless reminds us of how easily
we fall back onto ideological and ontological fictions about our independence from the
spatiotemporal reality of the world. The danger is not in the fictions themselves, that is,
but in taking those fictions—de Man’s “temporal and spatial schemes”—as constitutive
of reality’s great outdoors.
De Man’s example recalls us to another ideological aberration that speculative
realism struggles with: the nature of aesthetic phenomenalism and the aesthetic real,
which many of the essays in this volume take in myriad new directions. Keats’s “Ode
on Melancholy” illustrates the intersection of these modes of critical thought and
reading concerning the aesthetic:
Introduction 9
human, whatever that might be. Lack of phenomenal access to melancholy and joy
makes both affective states withdrawn objects, which are disclosed only by means of
an aesthetic ideology that bars our mind from our own experience via the befuddling
of the literary and the real. This is why de Man says the self is always divided from the
self—the self is yet another object withdrawn. Rewritten in object-oriented parlance,
the oenophilic lips become another withdrawn object that blasts the “self ” apart into
parts and objects. As de Man says, we are not so much confusing the literary with the
real but nor, as Harman would point out, are we able to know the core of the object.
Instead, we are left with the nonreal grape posited as a real object forever removing
itself from us even while this aesthetic process and the object’s bling—what Harman
calls the “allure” of the object—is also, on de Man’s terms, what shields the object’s
essence and gives rise to ideological blurring.43 And yet, de Man allows us to see that it
is this same process that reveals its own withdrawing process, which is somewhat akin
to Harman’s ocean-floor objects, unable to make contact yet still making contact but
nonetheless resolutely linguistic as well.
Romanticism thus affords speculative realism the opportunity to break free of its
representations of the world as objects all the way down. In turn, speculative realism
lets romanticism close its eyes and see the ontological world of things without us, the
stars, the sea, the earth, in new lights. Ultimately, readers of this volume will find that
the nexus of romanticism and speculative realism produces several multidirectional
avenues for further thought that crisscross the essays. We might, very broadly,
categorize these avenues as: materialism, ethics, and aesthetics. In this spirit, the
essays in conversation here enrich these networked yet disparate fields, bringing new,
often unexpected, topics and concerns to both the romantic and speculative realist
tables.
Nevertheless, we should invoke a caution about what this volume does not want to
suggest. While it is true that various critiques have been launched against speculative
realism, many of which misunderstand it or intentionally misrepresent it, often
attacking straw men rather than honestly engaging with its central thesis, certain
concerns bear mentioning.44 Scholars of various feminist and new materialist stripes
have opened dialogues with speculative realism even when finding much to critique.45
As Rebekah Sheldon perceptively writes, “OOO has been so provocative for feminist
theorists because of its cannily unknowing usurpation of the energies of feminist
thought and its relegation of that history to footnotes within its own autobiography.”46
And, as Katherine Behar similarly notes, speculative realism has largely been
apolitical, perhaps, she wonders, because of its primary orientation in the writing
of a small number of white men. Although a number of speculative philosophers—
Morton in particular—have attempted to answer these critiques, speculative realism
continues to have a reputation as being patriarchal, heteronormative, anti-language,
and aligned with discourses of Western imperialism.47 Parallel to Behar’s notion of
an object-oriented feminism, romanticism’s intervention in this collection shows how
speculative realism can acquire political, social, and cultural capital and textures. These
are energies romanticism, born in the crucible of revolution, has always cultivated and
circulated.
10
Introduction 11
writes, “is not just to be ecologically interconnected with a world of things, but also to
be radically disconnected from that world.” The subject, we might say, is found precisely
nowhere, yet still felt “along the blood,” as Wordsworth puts it—an overarching claim
of the whole collection.
Writing on sound, wind, and air, Michele Speitz proposes a related insight: that
affect takes place in nonhuman forms of materiality. Speitz’s electrifying essay shows
how the electrochemical experiments of Humphry Davy are demonstrative of air and
ether’s material effect on the human subject as well as how Charlotte Smith’s nonhuman
affects snowball into a material agency. For Speitz, romantic writers “depict a material
world rife with reverberating interrelations and contingencies, replete with sublime
ecologies that might outpace the reach of human minds but nonetheless reside in and
among the earth and all earthly bodies. In essence, they render a materially sublime
world made both possible and wondrous by virtue of being mediated by nonhuman
affective agencies.” Speitz, like others in this volume, links the materiality of affect to
aesthetics and in so doing reminds us how mundane everyday facts like air, oxygen,
and respiration are actually profoundly weird and, to use her word again, sublime. Yet
here this type of material sublimity carries over to the textual and the aesthetic as well
since “human words and marks share space with the nonhuman page and once uttered
aloud, they take shape in not-exclusively human sounds, sounds made manifest by
contingent collaborations of earth, air, verse, and versifier.” By rethinking aesthetics in
the light of such nonhuman agencies, the romantic sublime thus becomes, in Speitz’s
hands, more than anthropocentric terror—boundless ecology and ontology. Her essay,
then, has powerful ethical implications. Indeed, her study of romantic aerography
and acoustics underscores how “romantic affect and aesthetics can dampen human
exceptionalism while amplifying nonhuman ontologies.” Again, we can see how an
essay captures an overall aim of the whole of the collection in that the amplification of
nonhuman ontologies occurs throughout.
Like these two, Rejack’s essay is another stunning reflection and reading of how the
intersection of romanticism and speculative realism rethinks aesthetics and ethics. But
like all the other essays in the collection, it is unique in its subject matter and style.
Writing on romantic-era cookery books, Rejack’s essay strikes a playful tone, inviting
us in for a four-course dinner, in part to help illustrate one of his claims: “cookery
books,” Rejack argues, “ponder the nature of aesthetics through reflections upon
textual mediation.” By analyzing how romantic cookbooks preoccupy themselves
with aesthetic self-reflection (a defining trait of romanticism in general), Rejack
connects these texts to speculative realism “to counter the anti-realist assumptions
which contemporary media theory leans toward.” In turn, “speculative realism helps
us see the realism of romantic aesthetics” and “inject realism into our understanding
of media.” For Rejack, rereading romantic media like cookbooks alongside speculative
realism refashions contemporary media theory that tends to endorse a view of media
that disinvests it of ontological concerns in favor of pragmatics or process philosophy,
the latter of which are both anathema to speculative realism. Rejack suggests that this
elision of ontology in media erases ethics from the study of media since it also obscures
conversations about beauty, which is, he argues, a necessary category in discussing
12
ethics since without beauty we fall into an indifferent criticism about how things work
rather than how they signify and sing to us. In this sense, aesthetics are about both
beauty and being, just as Rejack’s essay puts into motion with its playful style that does
not match the staid and tired confines of the academic essay—a recurrent aesthetic
theme that we will see in several other essays in this collection.
Other essays push speculative realism differently, into a politically aware arena fully
invested in social justice and ethical awareness.48 In these essays, we see lines of flight
that place speculative realism into intersectional conversation with critical race studies,
postcolonialism, democratic theory, new-wave feminism, and eco-theory. In this vein,
Alexander Dick contends that the correlationist turn is linked to the white privilege of
middle- and upper-class male Enlightenment authors. On this account, correlationism
is not an abstruse philosophical problem but a wide-ranging historical one that has
contributed to the ongoing atrocities that have defined humankind. Correlationism
has more to answer for than simply its post-Kantian phenomenology since a direct
result of this legacy is that “discussions of slavery and other ‘monstrous’ historical
events have, in contrast to language, emotion, and imagination, been marginal to
philosophical and literary studies.” Recovering this discourse, Dick reads Equiano’s
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, a founding
text in the slave narrative genre, as inspiring in us a speculative realist “wonder” that
“is an initial response to objects in the universe, before I rationalize them according to
existing correlationist protocols.” It “both draws us to things and inspires our curiosity.”
Wonder, Dick argues, allows Equiano to liberate himself from the death-in-life of
slavery, and his narrative, in turn, can break us out of our own stultified unawareness of
our own “imperial condition.” An important, wondrous reading of Equiano and slave
narrative studies in its own right, the piece also adds the crucial underexplored topics
of race, imperialism, and empire to the speculative realist conversation.
Allison Dushane and Chris Washington also invoke a speculative romanticism
with an explicitly ethical dimension—or at least the possibility of an ethics- or justice-
to-come—by thinking through some of the claims and implications of Meillassoux’s
as-yet unpublished L’Inexistence divine. Dushane’s discussion of how Blake and
Meillassoux invoke a liminal spectrality that collapses yet reifies the distinction
between the living and the dead while providing a new theory of justice, connects
to Washington’s, which looks to Rousseau’s state of nature aporia to similarly think
about Meillassoux’s fourth “World of justice.” Dushane argues that, “like Blake …
Meillassoux repurposes the structural features of eschatological narratives and deploys
the rhetoric of prophecy in order to reimagine the limits and potential of human agency
in relation to the rest of the material world.” She reads Blake’s prophetic books to show
how “Blake’s equivalence of ‘Poetic Genius’ with the ‘Spirit of Prophecy’ can illustrate
how Meillassoux’s insistence on the eventual incarnation of a God that does not exist
works to transform conceptions of human subjectivity in the present.” But whereas
Meillassoux’s idea recalls Blake’s visions of a world-to-come of justice, on Dushane’s
reading Blake leads Meillassoux by the prophetic hand into realms he cannot imagine.
Blake’s Jerusalem affirms Meillassoux’s contention that contingency is the fundamental
principle governing life, which allows for a totally wild concept of justice—it will only
13
Introduction 13
eventuate once we can reclaim the dead from death. But to her, Blake’s work “can be
read as the expression of the eternal hope of Meillassoux’s vectorial subject, which
refuses to accept the structures of reason that support the self-enclosed, self-generating
autonomous subject of modernity without succumbing to the gesture of negation that
tends to underwrite materialist explanations of reality and history.”
Washington’s reading of Rousseau argues that his state of nature thought experiment
augurs a life-to-come based on a nonanthropocentric social contract.49 Returning to
Rousseau in a complementary but counter-reading of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, he
claims that Rousseau’s state of nature shares much with Meillassoux’s “extro-science
fiction,” a place in which the laws of our world no longer apply, and anything can
happen since it is a world governed by Hyper-Chaos. On Washington’s reading,
Rousseau’s extro-science fiction state-of-nature offers a space for thinking radical
modes of politics and an alternative to Meillassoux’s proposed fourth World of justice
where the dead are returned to life. Rousseau’s strange paradoxical state-of-nature/
society aporia is one in which the impossible occurs: humans realize they have never
yet been alive because they remain stuck in the double bind of a finitude that forces
us to continually imagine how to die but not how to live. Instead, we must create a
nonanthropocentric social contract focused on all life rather than one determined to
prevent our death. But whatever the virtues of Washington’s reading of Rousseau as a
thinker transgressing a universalist patriarchal Enlightenment, we should also be wary
that Rousseau, however his texts may help theorize a nonanthropocentric politics,
repeats an Enlightenment white privilege coeval with correlationism that Dick’s essay
outlines.
Singer broaches this same concern elsewhere in this volume. She both invokes and
critiques speculative realist insights in order to investigate long-standing assumptions
about prosopopoeia in Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith. In this, we
return to the merger of aesthetics and ethics that characterize so many of the essays
in this volume. Singer shows how romantic women poets mobilize a nonhuman
poetics that models for us a feminist politics. In doing so, she brings to bear a new
materialist critique of what she reads as speculative realism’s masculinist ethos and
Wordsworthian egocentric isolationism by braiding together Jane Bennett’s vibrant
matter and Karen Barad’s theoretical physics quantum entanglement. She finds in
Barbauld, for instance, that “unlike Barad’s ‘cuts,’ which enact decisive, if violent, splits
of ontology, or Bennett’s gathering or identifying of things into relation, Barbauld
shows that both things occur.” The result is that women romantic poets “show us not
only how language’s patterns actively shape materiality but also how new material
forms might, even more imperatively, erupt new tropes that portend poetry as a testing
ground for other ways of being and becoming.” The romantic object of poetry proves
to be at once discursive and material, a site of linguistic and real transformation that
escapes the ideological aberrations de Man identifies through a constant iteration
of new entangled assemblages. Singer’s searching, mixtape remix of these poets and
contemporary feminist theorists culminates in an intense, field-defying and field-
defining analysis against heteropatriarchy, a rowdy and rousing nonanthropocentric
feminist romanticism.
14
Connecting with all of these material, aesthetic, and ethical concerns, David Collings
finds that particular natural objects, trees, in unstudied poems of John Clare resist
a totalizing environmental collapse into finitude mandated by anthropocentricism.
Clare’s work, in Collings’s poetic, poignantly mournful reading, is “a locus through
which to mediate several leading concerns of those who seek to address the import
of the human relation to the nonhuman” and “to decipher the political implications
of this relation.” Collings finds in three short Clare poems—“Obscurity,” “Old times
forgetfull,” and “Where are the citys”—a writing of the disaster that hearkens backward
from recent speculative writings by Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier to Maurice
Blanchot. Although Collings reads this cluster of poems as effacing the concept of
justice, it “does not leave the reader without recourse,” but rather, in opposition to
Brassier’s nihilism (concepts Ottinger also discusses), invokes a “radical passivity” that
resists the anthropocentrism that remains at the heart of nihilistic disaster. Collings’
radical passivity proposes a startling and empathic form of a justice-to-come that
departs from Meillassoux’s resolutely anthropocentric Fourth World of justice.
Aaron Ottinger’s essay crosscuts Collings’s argument, although it finds a positivity
in Brassier’s ideas about extinction that underlines a different type of disaster, one
that is mathematical and material. As Ottinger explains, to Brassier, “from the
perspective of extinction … the world has already unfolded, everything has already
happened, and therefore the universe, including human thought, can be outlined
according to propositional logic.” For Brassier, we are all already dead. Ottinger turns
to Byron, whose investments in extinction in poems like “Darkness” are well known;
but Ottinger finds a similar, yet more surprising, interesting and mathematical
existential theme in Don Juan. In fact, “for Byron, the mind is geometrical, while
the gut belongs to astronomical numbers” and “the significance for Byron is that
digestion and cognition operate according to two separate mathematical domains.”
In “Byron’s geo-historical outlook, extinction precedes life, and the latter (life) does
not produce but feeds on the former (death). Geological history proceeds according
to a strange, backwards, axiomatic history, in which humans are only an iteration
of inorganic matter.” As Ottinger argues, Byron’s narrator attempts to return to this
kind of primordial chaos of extinction that precedes life—but at the same time, the
mathematical distinction between the mind and the gut in the poem undoes the self
in a manner that is similar to what Brassier calls the nemocentric self, the dissolution
or disappearance of the self. Like the collection as a whole, Ottinger’s essay observes
a subject whose nemocentricism counters romanticism’s supposed long-standing
anthropocentricism.
While Morton has argued that causality is aesthetic since objects relate to each
other via external appearances, romantic aesthetic forms complicate this picture in
Ellermann’s reading. Like Singer does with Bennett and Barad, Ellermann turns to a
thinker who is not a speculative realist stricto sensu: Catherine Malabou. For Ellermann,
Malabou’s study of Hegel’s aesthetics provides a theory of plasticity—art’s open-ended
possibility—that can be applied to the study of poetry. He turns to Malabou’s theory of
plasticity in art because “plasticity, understood as the reciprocal giving and receiving
of form, already belongs to the aesthetic analysis of poetry.” He cites the “association
15
Introduction 15
between plasticity and the material forms of poetry: rhythm, meter, caesura, rhyme.”
For him, “this theory of plastic verse reveals an intimate, and often overlooked, relation
between aesthetic forms and speculative thought.” “Malabou’s work,” then “offers
a corrective to speculative realist philosophies that are inattentive or hostile to the
aesthetic.” But on Ellermann’s reading, it is precisely this same plasticity, exemplified
for him in Keats’s famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that resists Hegel’s theory of the end
of art and instead proves a staging ground for poetry’s speculative future, a merger of
the aesthetic and the real that belies Hegel’s linear historicism and instead instances
a version of what this volume underlines: a speculative historicity defined more by
contingency than telos.
In an extensive reading of Meillassoux’s various dense texts—this is the essay to
start with in this collection if one knows nothing about speculative realism—Evan
Gottlieb also turns to form, drawing on Meillassoux’s L’Inexistence divine, as Dushane
and Washington do, and, like Washington, brings in Meillassoux’s Science Fiction
and Extro-Science Fiction, to think about how Walter Scott’s novels exemplify the
law of Hyper-Chaotic contingency. Looking at what he characterizes as a bizarre
Walter Scott text, Waverley’s “Postscript which should have been a Preface,” Gottlieb
finds that “frequent eruptions of randomness that occur outside the realm of human
agency” in Scott’s novels disrupt Lukácsian notions of narrative forms, and are instead
a Meillassouxian type of Hyper-Chaos that reinforces Ellermann’s contention that
romantic aesthetics is about possibility. As he puts it, “putting Meillassoux in dialogue
with Scott creates an opportunity not only to highlight what the French philosopher’s
version of speculative realism says about narrative probability, but also to shed new
light on what Scott brings and bequeaths to the romantic-era novel, as well as to generic
successors like science fiction.” Putting these two into dialogue questions our long-
standing “assumptions about Scott’s supposed commitments to historical progress
and narrative causality.” And so while “romanticists have embraced Lukács’ vision
of Scott as the great chronicler of historical conflict … it may now be time to think
again about the roles of contingency, randomness, and probability in Scott’s plots.” For
Gottlieb, those possibilities might just arise randomly in a fashion that proves Scott is
perhaps the first novelist of Hyper-Chaos, of extro-science fiction. Gottlieb’s absorbing
essay opens an unexpected and wide-ranging possibility that maps onto the whole
collection: romanticism, as the authors here read it, may be extro-science fiction, a
thoroughly nonanthropocentric writing not focused on the human imagination and
subject.
And here we should note, then, that while on the surface Romanticism and
Speculative Realism appears to be primarily concerned with British romanticism, the
volume transgresses this seeming limitation insofar as Washington discusses French
romanticism, Ellermann German romanticism, and Harman American romanticism.
In fact, given speculative realism’s deep-dive Kantian investments, one could argue
that all the essays, dealing implicitly or explicitly with Kant as they do, are focused
on German romanticism. In that sense, all of the essays can be said to be about not
only British romanticism but also romanticism as we are only beginning to come to
terms with it as a transnational, multiauthored, polyglot, conceptually amorphous,
16
boundariless, constantly moving field that continues to desire to breach and even
dispel romanticism of the kind we used to call Big-Six romanticism.
Graham Harman’s essay is remarkable in this regard because he begins by recurring
to his reading of H. P. Lovecraft in Weird Realism before suggesting that perhaps Poe “is
a better match than Lovecraft for what we might call OOO 2.0.” Although, as he notes,
the authors frequently get lumped together since “Lovecraft and Poe can both easily be
classified as ‘horror writers,’ ” this transatlantic linkage by one of speculative realism’s
defining figures reminds us of how romanticism—in all its nationalities and guises—
continues to fuel definitions of the speculative field. For those in need of a crash course
in OOO, Harman’s essay serves as a great primer. There is a crucial difference between
the real and the sensual, which Harman carefully explains, connecting this essay to the
others that focus on aesthetics. As he writes, “OOO holds the real to exist definitely
in the plural, whereas neither Kant nor Heidegger is sure that the real is many rather
than one, and Heidegger openly tends to doubt it. By contrast with the real, the sensual
consists of that which exists only as a correlate of experience.” object-oriented ontology’s
(OOO) uniqueness from Meillassouxian speculative realism stems from many things.
But as Harman points out here, OOO “gives the sensual a cosmic scope, so that even
inanimate entities make contact with the sensual rather than the realm,” meaning that
living and nonliving nonhumans participate in the aesthetic as well as humans—think
of Keats’s urn or the airs and affects in Speitz and Singer, the trees in Collings, Rejack’s
cookbooks, or what Harman here calls “black cats.” Harman reads Poe’s “The Black Cat”
as defining this literary object black cat as “a frequently encountered entity that cannot
fail to capture our attention, whether through superstition or sheer visual interest.” In
doing so, Poe’s work illustrates how OOO literature works because these black cats
“bring the reader as a real object into his works, as when he denounces superstition
while leading us to become temporarily superstitious ourselves.” Ultimately, Harman’s
essay continues to sketch out not only what OOO 2.0 is but what OOO literary criticism
looks like and will look like in the future.
Mary Jacobus’s essay turns back to deconstruction even as her essay executes
a critical re-evaluation of the field by reading Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory
alongside Geoffrey Hartman’s and de Man’s deconstruction of Wordsworth. Her
essay adds to the growing compendia of speculative-realist-tempered analyses
of “Mont Blanc,” a “plausible reading” of which, she suggests, “would be that it is
Latourian avant la lettre.” Jacobus’s essay exemplifies the crossroads of deconstructive
romanticism and speculative thinking. She “find[s]Latour’s notion of a composite
actant . . . surprisingly helpful for thinking about poetry—an alternative to de Man’s
evisceration of subjective agency in the name of machine-like linguistic agency with
all its potential for accidents.” Nonetheless, she also thinks we should “be turning the
tables and asking what ‘romanticism’ has to tell us about Latourian [Nature].” For her,
however much “Mont Blanc” might read as Latourian in its actants of rivers, winds,
seas, and snow storms, it retains the formal awareness of how entangled ontology
and epistemology are through language, in networks like Latour’s that are themselves
linguistic—an argument that, read alongside others in the volume, showcases the far-
reaching implications of romanticism as developed in this collection. In this entangled
17
Introduction 17
sense, we are “no longer ‘after’ Nature, at least when it comes to language.” Like Marx
did with Hegel, Jacobus’s argument ultimately turns Latour on his head: “if ‘we’ have
never been Modern, it turns out that we may be romantic still,” a claim that wittily and
stylishly captures this collection’s overarching revelation.
If speculative realism continues romanticism’s objective of setting the subject rolling
outward from our anthropocentric notion of it as the center of the universe, then these
essays add layers to this by giving us a romanticism ready to go into bold and wild
new territories. Romanticism has long speculated on selves split from selves, on other
worlds, worlds housed and hidden within worlds, of a world(s) separate from our own,
disguised in our phenomenological correlationism in plain sight as mountains and
stars and seas and, even, minds. But romanticism, we might say, also has the ability
to break with the finitude of the mind and journey into the ontological realm without
leaving the vaunted romantic individual imagination behind. Instead, we must imagine
that imagination anew—and the fields of romanticism and speculative realism as well.
If the Kantian slumber was never complete, if we always claimed to be interested in
the great outdoors, this is our time to fully embrace speculative thought and see what
new realities await—or do not await—us in whatever romantic future there may yet be
without us.
Notes
1 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.), “Towards a Speculative
Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism
(Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 2–3.
2 See Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
3 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45,
no. 1 (Winter 2014): 1.
4 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 76–81.
5 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 7.
6 Ibid., 5, 26.
7 Ibid., 26.
8 Hutton disseminated his ideas in print between 1785 and his death in 1795. His
influential theory of deep time was popularized by John Playfair’s Illustrations of the
Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802). Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason
in 1781, followed by the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788 and the Critique of
Judgment in 1790. For a concise overview of Huttonian theories and their influence
on science and poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Nigel Leask, “Mont
Blanc’s Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science,” in The Third
Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998),
182–203.
9 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27.
10 “[T]he qualities of the object are not the object. Objects then are both themselves and
not-themselves. In defiance of the Law of Non-contradiction—a law that has never
18
been properly proved—objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both
objects and non-objects.” Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality
(Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2013), 27.
11 This is particularly true of Harman. See his critique of correlationism in “Meillassoux’s
Virtual Future,” Continent 1, no. 2 (2011): 79–81. For a critique of Meillassoux’s
commitment to the law of noncontradiction, see Robert S. Lehman, “Toward a
Speculative Realism,” Theory & Event 11, no. 1 (2008): para. 16.
12 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224–87, 250.
13 Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790–1840
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Mary A. Favret, War at a
Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009); John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British
Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
14 Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: British Romanticism and Speculative Realism
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 5.
15 Ibid., 8.
16 The familiar story of the taming of Romanticism by the Victorians has been
given new life and a material interest by Tom Mole’s What the Victorians Made of
Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
17 David Collings, Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate
Change (Ann Arbor, NY: Open Humanities Press, 2014).
18 Jacques Khalip and David Collings, “Romanticism and Disaster,” Romantic Circles
Commons. https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/disaster/index.html. Accessed December
1, 2017.
19 Jacques Khalip, “Contretemps: Of Extinction and Romanticism,” Literature Compass
13, no. 10 (October 2016): 629.
20 Ibid., 635.
21 Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2019).
22 Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 30.
23 Gavin Budge, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent
Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 (Houndmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3.
24 Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43,
no. 2 (Spring 2012): 213.
25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and W.
Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 2:6; John Keats,
Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 41.
26 For a longer discussion of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief as a means
of confronting a world of contingency, see Anne C. McCarthy, Awful
Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 46–84. On negative capability, see
Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (eds), Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and
Afterlives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming).
27 Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism
and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 213.
19
Introduction 19
28 For a brief speculative realist take on the poem, see Steven Shaviro, The Universe of
Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
29 Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 161–70; Greg Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,”
SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 154–74; Anne C. McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of
Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things’, or, ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont
Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 355–75; Chris Washington,
“Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (September
2015): 448–60.
30 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley,
vol. 3, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2012), 79–90.
31 McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency,” 358.
32 Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 166.
33 Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” 169.
34 Ibid.
35 Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 455.
36 Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
37 Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), 3.
38 Robert Browning, An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. W. Tyas Harden
(London: Reeves and Turner for the Shelley Society, 1888), 14.
39 William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130–1, lines 15–16.
40 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 1.
41 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1986), 11.
42 John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (New York: Penguin,
1988), 349.
43 Graham Harman, Quadruple Object (Washington, DC: Zone Books, 2010).
44 Four prominent examples are Ray Brassier, Alexander Galloway, Peter Wolfendale,
and Nathan Brown. Brassier, “Interview with Ray Brassier,” Kronos. http://www.
kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896. Accessed February 1, 2014. Galloway,
“The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39
(2013): 347–66. Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Ontology: The Noumenon’s New Clothes
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014). Nathan Brown, “The Nadir of OOO: From Graham
Harman’s Tool Being to Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality,”
Parrhesia 17 (2013): 62–71.
45 See, for instance, various essays in: Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Katherine Behar (ed.), Object-
Oriented Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Richard
Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2016).
46 Rebekah Sheldon, The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014), 204.
47 See, for instance, Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 273–
82; Morton, “All Objects are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy,” in
20
if Scott’s main tendency in all his novels—and which forms of them in a sense a
kind of cycle—is to represent and defend progress, then this progress is for him
always a process full of contradictions, the driving force and material basis of which
is the living contradiction between conflicting historical forces, the antagonisms of
classes and nations.3
Lukács sees that Scott has great sympathy for the “losers” of history, especially those
remnants of feudalism who by choice, chance, or clan find themselves bound to its
increasingly outdated codes and structures. But the winners of most Waverley Novels
are not those for whom Scott shows the greatest feeling—be they Highlanders, gypsies,
Covenanters, or Jews—but rather those who prove themselves ethnically, ethically, or
nationally flexible enough to navigate their way toward British modernity. In other
words, Scott’s plots generally rehearse the Enlightenment logic of stadial history that
Marx drew on for his own dialectical materialism.
This Lukácsian version of Scott has been highly influential—even if, as Fredric
Jameson has observed, the historical novel as a vehicle for authentic (i.e., Marxian)
historical consciousness is now mostly an “impossible form or genre . . . that is still
assiduously practiced”4—not least because it helped counter the Victorian and early
Modernist disparagement of Scott as little more than an author of adventure stories
fit for consumption only by boys and invalids. The great flowering of critical interest
in Scott that has taken place in the past decades owes much to this paradigm, such
that most of the major critical initiatives put forward continue to assume its basic
functionality. The masculinizing of the novel genre described by Ina Ferris, the
generic dialectic of romance and realism identified by Ian Duncan, the absorption and
redeployment of Scottishness identified by Katie Trumpener, the zeitgeist-forming
power of the historical novel identified by James Chandler, Caroline McCracken-
Flesher’s deconstructive examination of Scott’s nation-building work, Alison Lumsden’s
investigation of Scott’s surprisingly unorthodox language usage, and even my own
study of multiple critical theorists’ applicability to the Waverley Novels—each of these
modifies the terms of Lukács’s original paradigm, to be sure, but leaves its totalizing
structure intact.5 The assumption is that, consciously or not, Scott’s novels represent
history as a totality, one that can be apprehended as a whole—from the outside, as it
were—such that its patterns can be recognized and regularized, even when fictional
elements (e.g., invented characters and events) are introduced.
Recently, Matthew Wickman has employed a similar approach, taking Scott’s
self-reflexive “Postscript which should have been a Preface” at the end of Waverley;
23
Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since as exemplary of the novelist’s claim “to be able to grasp
these [historical] developments in their complexity.”6 But Wickman contrasts Scott’s
methodology, which is both indexed and facilitated by “the narrative closure which
Waverley . . . seems to provide,” with the more open-ended approach of Scott’s fellow
countryman and sometime literary competitor, John Galt. Galt’s refusal to treat
history as a totalizable entity, especially in his acknowledged masterpiece Annals of
the Parish (1821), leads him away from Scott’s chosen genre of the historical novel
and toward more experimental styles of writing; hence his insistence that Annals be
received as a “theoretical history” or even a “fable” rather than as a historical novel.
In Wickman’s analysis, Galt’s alternative vision of history can best be understood
via the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou, who has staked his career on the
proposition that mathematics—especially set theory, more recently supplemented
by topography—is first philosophy.7 According to Badiou, the radical ontological
potential of number qua number has been stolen from us; he aims to restore it by
showing how every set conceals the arbitrariness of its own “count as one” and
represses the point of its own void: a point that, when discovered or manifested,
can become the ground for a new count, or truth, to whose realization the newly
formed subject must pledge itself. Galt, in Wickman’s analysis, is best understood
as a novelist in this mold, one who bursts open the seemingly closed set of early
modern Scottish and British history. The relation Wickman develops between Galt
and Badiou provides a partial template for how in this chapter I want to reconsider
Scott in light of Meillassoux’s theories. I say “partial,” however, because the relation
between the latter couple will prove to be more fractious than Wickman’s ingenious
Galt–Badiou pair, and also because Meillassoux’s ideas differ in some important
respects from Badiou’s.
Like his mentor, Meillassoux accepts mathematics as first philosophy; unlike
Badiou, he primarily uses set theory not to help describe the emergence of new truths
but to indicate the limits of probabilistic thinking. Although the main target of After
Finitude is Kant’s insistence that we can never have direct knowledge of the essence
of things, Meillassoux frequently approaches this problem by returning to earlier
questions raised by Kant’s great predecessor, David Hume. For Meillassoux, “Hume’s
problem” names the difficulty of explaining causality. Famously, in section IV of
his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume uses the example of
colliding billiard balls to highlight the extent to which our reason in fact depends on
experience and cognitive habit; although we think we know what happens when one
billiard ball strikes another, we only really know the surface effect—one ball strikes
another and the latter moves—while the underlying cause is left obscure. Moreover,
our so-called knowledge that the same effect will occur time and again under the
same conditions is just a form of heavily vetted prediction: we “know” what will
happen when one billiard ball strikes another because we’re in the habit of expecting
that, in the arena of natural phenomena at least, the future will follow the same course
as the past.
Rather than rehearse the entirety of Hume’s well-known thought experiment, let’s
look, instead, at his subsequent deductive summary, which is worth quoting at length:
24
In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not,
therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a
priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction
of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary, since there are always many
other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain,
therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or
effect, without the assistance of observation and experience.
Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and
modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation,
or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in
the universe. It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the
principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve
the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from
analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes,
we should in vain attempt their discovery … These ultimate springs and principles
are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.8
It was passages like this that famously interrupted Kant’s “dogmatic slumber,”
prompting him to respond to Hume’s skepticism with a theory of transcendental
idealism in which space and time become precisely those a priori forms through which
human consciousness operates to make our shared experience of the world possible.
In effect, in order to solve Hume’s problem, Kant requires that human subjectivity
becomes a permanent feature of the world. This in turn is what Meillassoux calls
“correlationism”: the presumption that the world can only be meaningfully talked about
in relation to human consciousness, never on its own terms. Most of After Finitude
is thus concerned to demonstrate not only that correlationism is incompatible with
modern science—hence Meillassoux’s increasingly well-known thought experiment
regarding “the arche-fossil”9—but also that by its own logic, the correlate allows us
to make certain positive, albeit necessarily speculative, statements about the nature
of reality. In essence, these boil down to two conjoined assertions: first, that there
is no such thing as a necessary entity; second, that as a result the only necessity is
the contingency of everything. For Kant, we might say, the in-itself is thinkable but
unknowable; for Meillassoux, the in-itself is both thinkable and knowable, but only as
“chaos—which is the only in-itself.”10
Restating the gist of the critique of correlationism, Anna Longo notes that “by
accessing the contingency of thought … Meillassoux can establish the contingency
of natural laws since, if thought is in-itself contingent, then any other thing in-itself
must be contingent.”11 This is worth dwelling on because it’s precisely the continuity of
these natural laws—the assumption that they can be regarded as permanent features
of our existence—that, even before Kant’s transcendental analytic, Hume’s skepticism
leaves intact. In Hume’s famous billiard-ball thought experiment, we recall, there is
no way to know why the collision of a moving ball with a motionless one produces a
predictable movement; we can only know that, based on past observation and the law
of noncontradiction (which in this case dictates the impossibility of the second ball
25
moving and remaining still simultaneously), this appears to be the nature of reality.
But as Meillassoux observes, if Hume had taken his skepticism regarding causality to
its logical conclusion, then the behavior of everything surrounding those billiard balls
would need to be called into question as well: “This is why Hume’s imaginary scenario
of the billiard balls is impossible—for in this scenario it is only the billiard balls that
escape causality, not the table upon which they roll, or the hall containing the table.”12
That Hume does not imagine such possibilities, says Meillassoux, confirms that the
earlier philosopher retains an underlying commitment to a stable, Newtonian-style
universe of universal, ahistorical natural laws.
Of course, modern scientific discoveries in fields like quantum physics have
demonstrated that such “laws”—especially, in this case, those of motion and gravity—
are neither stable nor timeless; on scales both incredibly tiny and outrageously vast,
reality is indeed “weird,” as proponents of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) like
Graham Harman and Timothy Morton regularly remind us.13 Unlike these other
speculative realists, Meillassoux generally prefers to work out his philosophical vision
via numbers; moreover, his speculations regarding the nature of Hyper-Chaos are less
concerned with space than with time. Nevertheless, certain analogies between the two
approaches may be helpful. For just as theorists of OOP assert that the underlying
weirdness of reality must be allowed to shape our understanding of “normal” objects
and their relations, so Meillassoux claims that our theoretical knowledge regarding
infinity and temporality must be allowed to inform our understanding of probability.
Under normal conditions, we might not be wrong to assume that if the laws of the
universe were actually as unstable as Meillassoux makes them out to be, we would
live in a Heraclitean world of constant flux. The absence of such flux—the seeming
permanence of the natural laws that govern our universe—is then taken as evidence
of their necessity, just as (to take an example from Meillassoux) a gambler would be
correct to assume that a die that repeatedly only lands on one of its sides must be
loaded.14 But does this model scale up? We tend to assume so, blithely reasoning that
if the laws governing nature could change, then they would always be changing—just
like the gambler expects that a non-loaded die will, with enough throws, regularly
land with each of its sides facing up.15 As Meillassoux points out, however, this is
a faulty analogy because the logic of probability only works within a measurable
totality. You can only predict the chances of something taking place, that is, by setting
constraints within which the event in question may or may not happen—for example,
using a six-sided die and limiting the number of times it is thrown. In other words,
as Meillassoux puts it, “probabilistic reasoning is only valid on condition that what is
a priori possible be thinkable in terms of a numerical totality.”16 Cantorian set theory,
however, teaches us that number is inherently unquantifiable. In brief, as Meillassoux
explains, if you take any set, count its elements, and then count the possible groupings
of those elements, the latter number will always be bigger than the former; and this
holds true even if the set in question contains an infinite number of elements.17 (One
can also count the empty set—what Badiou calls “the void”—as one of these sets.)
What set theory demonstrates, in other words, is that number is not just infinite but
transfinite; translated into ontological terms, says Meillassoux, modern set theory
26
possible futures, says Meillassoux, “in science fiction we generally inhabit a world
where physics (theoretical, natural) differs from ours, but in which laws are not purely
and simply abolished—i.e. in which everything and anything cannot happen in an
arbitrary way or at any moment.”25 In other words, even when science fictional worlds
differ radically from our own, for example featuring new planets with different laws
of physics or new technologies that radically break with current understandings of
what is physically possible (e.g., “Beam me up, Scotty!”), they nevertheless usually
abide by the principles of continuity and constancy that in turn facilitate Karl Popper’s
theory of falsifiability—which holds that any truly scientific knowledge must be open
to being disproven, at least in theory—as the main criterion for judging the legitimacy
of experimental results.26 Continuity within a framework of overall causal logic, in
fact, seems to be a necessary principle not only of the content of most science fictional
representations but also of the very possibility of their representation as a series of
actions; in Meillassoux’s words, “Stories can thus be told because we are still dealing
with worlds, with ordered totalities, although they are governed by another order.”27 But
if the defining representational feature of “regular” science fiction is a high degree of
logical continuity and repeatability within its conditions—exemplified in Meillassoux’s
essay by Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Billiard Ball”—then by extension another
genre becomes possible, which Meillassoux provisionally calls “extro-science fiction.”
Here, the ramifications of the principle of unreason would be taken to their logical
conclusions, says Meillassoux, such that “we start from what normally has to be
excluded from narrative: not only pure arbitrariness, but an arbitrariness that can
be reproduced at any moment.”28 Not surprisingly, given the extreme damage such
“unreason” would do to conventional practices of narrative continuity, Meillassoux
is hard-pressed to find too many examples of pure extro-science fiction; he does,
however, locate several partial examples in the fictions of Philip K. Dick, Douglas
Adams, and Robert Charles Wilson.29 In works by these authors, Meillassoux finds
evidence of our ability to imagine worlds characterized by the semi-inoperability of
Popperian scientific knowledge—or, to put this another way, a partial suspension of
the usual frequentialist logic that allows us the comfort of a predictable future.
If the future is radically unpredictable for Meillassoux—hence his description of
Hyper-Chaos as “time without Becoming,” since the future is under no more obligation
to bring forth novelty than it is to remain consistent with the present—the past, too,
must be rethought.30 Here we can begin to connect Meillassoux to Scott via the figure of
Hegel, whose theory of the dialectic famously informs Marx’s materialism, and hence
Lukács’s rehabilitation of Scott. Meillassoux’s philosophy, like that of Badiou, is (or
at least attempts to be) profoundly and intentionally non-dialectical. In an interview,
when asked whether he dislikes Hegel, Meillassoux clarifies that his philosophy of
radical contingency was prompted by a break with the German idealist:
I read Hegel fervently as a student, and can say without exaggeration that the love
of dialectic ‘consumed me from within’ during youth. I abandoned this mode
of thinking once I understood the profound reason why there could never be
contradictions in reality. There could be tensions, conflicts, and collisions, certainly;
28
Author. That is a sore point with me, my son. Believe me, I have not been fool
enough to neglect ordinary precautions. I have repeatedly laid down my future
work to scale, divided it into volumes and chapters, and endeavoured to construct
a story which I meant should evolve itself gradually and strikingly, maintain
suspense, and stimulate curiosity; and which, finally, should terminate in a striking
catastrophe. But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of my
pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from my purpose. Characters expand
under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials
increase; my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is closed
long before I have attained the point I proposed.34
Even allowing for Scott’s habitual self-deprecation, this doesn’t sound like the work
of an author who thinks in terms of inevitabilities, closed sets, or totalities. Instead, it
suggests that in the name of rehabilitating Scott as a Lukáscian dialectician, we’ve been
29
too quick to dismiss his own accounts of his (lack of) method, and the possibilities they
open for the intrusion or eruption of unpredictability—contingency—in Scott’s plots.
Following this lead, what should we make of the Eidolon’s rueful admission slightly
later in the same prefatory dialogue that “I cannot form a plot”?35 Scott is likely
thinking here of plot in the classical sense, as in Aristotle’s famous definition of plot as
“the arrangement of the particular actions” of a given representation, or mimesis; one,
moreover, with “a beginning, a middle, and an end” connected by some combination
of necessity and probability.36 To admit to being unable to “form” a “plot,” then, doesn’t
mean an inability to write a story; even E. M. Forster knew that storytelling was Scott’s
forte (although he didn’t mean this as a compliment, of course).37 Rather, especially
when considered in light of Meillassoux’s critique of probabilistic reasoning, it seems
to point to Scott’s awareness that the sequences of events in his novels do not always
meet or measure up to the requirements of perfect necessity. Instead, “the materials
increase,” as Scott puts it, and “the story lingers” until the intervention of the author,
who artificially imposes limits on it. This, of course, is Aristotle’s point when he
observes that the great difference between history and poetry is that “the one tells us
what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen.”38 Yet speculating
about what would happen in a given situation requires invoking precisely the kind of
probabilistic reasoning that Meillassoux shows is little more than a comforting fiction
at best.
For example, in Volume 2, Chapter 7 of Waverley—the rough center of the novel—
the course of Edward Waverley’s future is literally changed accidentally when his
guide’s horse loses a shoe. The chain of events here is both routinely causal and entirely
contingent. Presumably, within Scott’s fictional world, Waverley could have stopped at
a different inn, where the proprietor would have been someone other than Ebenezer
Cruikshanks, whose horse might not have lost a shoe, who might have taken him to
a village other than Cairnvrecken, whose blacksmith might not have had a Jacobitical
wife, where Waverley might not have been mistaken for the Bonnie Prince Charlie, after
which he might not have pulled out his pistol, been attacked by the angry blacksmith,
shot him, and been arrested. This arrest, however, is what leads to Waverley’s forced
march toward Stirling, his subsequent rescue by Jacobite forces, and his subsequent
introduction to the Bonnie Prince in occupied Edinburgh. There is obviously a fair
bit of string-pulling going on behind these scenes: Fergus MacIvor, his sister Flora,
Rose Bradwardine, Donald Bean Lean, even the Bonnie Prince himself have all been
manipulating Waverley from close up and afar alike—and their strings, of course, are
pulled in turn by the author of Waverley himself. But the lost horseshoe that sets off
the chain of probabilistic events that follows is a moment of complete nonnecessity—
an eruption of contingency on which both sides of the novel’s plot (before and after)
arguably rest. As Hilan Bensusan observes in his study of nonnecessity, “Contingencies
coincide to weave a plot that makes some events more likely than others.”39 Improbable
plot twists, belief-stretching coincidences, and other elements usually considered to be
flaws in Scott’s fabric (even by his original readers) are, in this sense, the more or less
random twigs from which the nest of Waverley’s plot is formed.
30
Here, Scott plainly stakes the legitimacy of the plot he’s just woven, especially the
believability of many of its individual strands, on his access to eye-witness accounts
of the events in question.43 At least two ramifications of this move are worth noting.
First, the emphasis is clearly on the authenticity of the individual events portrayed in
the novel, rather than on the (frequently quite doubtful) necessity or even probability
of their occurring in the order or manner depicted. Second, and following from this
point, this logic again entails a reduction of history to human-sized elements.
31
to slip away after he’s cut off from his Highland comrades. No doubt the most famous
“weather event” in Scott’s early novels is the quickly rising tide in The Antiquary (1816)
that cuts Isabella Wardour off from safe passage back to land and requires a daring
cliffside rescue by Neville—an event made all the more contingent by the fact that Scott
famously confuses coastlines in this scene, depicting the sun setting off the eastern
coast of Scotland. To his credit, Scott never changed this error even when he revised
The Antiquary for the magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels—a tacit admission,
perhaps, of the futility of attempting to control for all contingencies in a fundamentally
unreasonable world.
Supernatural or irrational forces, geography, geology, and climate-weather: these are
just a few of the nonhuman actants, as Bruno Latour would call them, that have begun
to play increasingly important roles in both the theory and practice of critique. Given
that we live in the Anthropocene—an era of entangled and increasingly unpredictable
agencies—this is not surprising; indeed, the pressing need for new frameworks of
understanding and interpretation has played no small part in popularizing speculative
realism across a range of disciplines. Meillassoux’s ideas, in particular, lend themselves
to rethinking our understandings not only of the world at large but also of the modes
and methods by which we tell ourselves stories about our world (and perhaps also about
possible worlds to come). As the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century—and
one whose critical reputation is now higher than at any time since his death in 1832—
Scott’s oeuvre continues to define the historical novel and, via that sub-genre’s ongoing
influence, many other varieties of genre fiction, including the science fiction of which
Meillassoux is understandably fond.
Romanticists have embraced Lukács’s vision of Scott as the great chronicler of
historical conflict, a supreme scribe of the rise of bourgeois modernity, and for good
reason: the critical rehabilitation of Scott’s reputation as a serious author has rested in
large part on it. But having achieved that critical rehabilitation, it may now be time to
think again about the roles of contingency, randomness, and probability in Scott’s plots.
To do so might indeed necessitate revising above all the long-cherished notion of Scott
as a great dialectician. Meillassoux’s revisionary understanding of temporality as Hyper-
Chaos, “Time without Becoming,” provides the right methodological opportunity for
this operation. Freed by Meillassoux’s radical philosophy of contingency from having
to remain within the correlationist circle, it remains for us now to take full advantage
of the possibilities he opens up for rethinking what we think we know about literature,
as well as about existence tout court. By way of a provisional conclusion, then, let me
end with a suggestion—and with apologies to William Godwin—for a new subtitle
for Scott’s first novel: Waverley; Or Things as They Happened to Happen, Speculatively
Speaking.55
Notes
1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 34.
34
2 Ibid., 64.
3 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 53.
4 Fredric Jameson, “Is the Historical Novel Still Possible?,” in The Antinomies of Realism
(New York; London: Verso, 2015), 260. See also Ian Duncan, “History and the Novel
after Lukács,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50, no. 3 (November 2017): 388–96. The
runaway success of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is exemplary of this situation,
viz., the historical novel leached of historical consciousness.
5 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the
Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ian Duncan,
Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Katie Trumpener, Bardic
Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1996); James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary
Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL; London: University
of Chicago Press, 1998); Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter
Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alison
Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2010); Evan Gottlieb, Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory
(New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
6 Matthew Wickman, “Of Tangled Webs and Busted Sets: Tropologies of Number and
Shape in the Fiction of John Galt,” in Romantic Numbers, special issue of Romantic
Praxis, ed. Maureen McLane, Romantic Circles (2013): www.rc.umd.edu/print/praxis/
numbers/HTML/praxis.2013.wickman. Accessed June 9, 2014.
7 See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London;
New York: Continuum, 2006); Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans.
Alberto Toscano (London; New York: Continuum, 2009).
8 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning
Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., introduction
L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. P. H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30.
9 See Meillassoux, After Finitude, 9–27.
10 Ibid., 111.
11 Anna Longo, “The Reality of the End of the World,” in Breaking the Spell:
Contemporary Realism Under Discussion, eds. Sarah de Sanctis and Anna Longo
(Fano, Italy: Mimesis International, 2015), 41.
12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 89.
13 See, for example, Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
(Winchester: Zero Books, 2012); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology,
Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013). For an early study of
how quantum physics intervenes in earlier theories regarding motion and matter,
see Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science
(New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), esp. 147–66.
14 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 96.
15 Meillassoux’s interest in probability and numerology receives its fullest expression
in his wonderfully idiosyncratic study, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of
Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011).
16 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 101.
35
17 For example, the set A, where A = (1, 2, 3), contains the following sets: itself, (1), (2),
(3), (1, 2), (2, 3), (1, 3), and the empty set (). If you then construct a set of the sets
contained in A, it too will contain more sets than elements—and so on! Which means,
as Meillassoux puts it, that “for any set whose existence we assume, we also assume its
quantitative surpassing by the set of its parts” (After Finitude, 135n11).
18 Ibid., 105.
19 Meillassoux, “Appendix: The Divine Inexistence,” trans. Graham Harman, in Harman,
Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2011), 176.
20 Ibid., 188–9.
21 Ibid., 176.
22 See Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities
Press, 2011).
23 Meillassoux, “Divine Inexistence,” 215–16.
24 This p World, moreover, is related to the advent of God—a God who must not
exist now, given the current injustices of our World, but in whom we must believe
nonetheless to be worthy of the World of justice to come. In addition to the relevant
passages in Divine Inexistence, see also Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” Collapse IV
(May 2008): 261–75.
25 Quentin Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, trans. Alyosha Edlebi
(Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015), 23.
26 Ibid., 11–17.
27 Ibid., 23.
28 Ibid., 43.
29 Ibid., 45–56.
30 See Quentin Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (Fano,
Italy: Mimesis International, 2014).
31 Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 168.
32 Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, 15.
33 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 108. See also Robin Mackay’s observation that “the
necessity to think contingency spells the ruin of all such . . . systems of thought which
would subordinate the events that befall us to some kind of predestined necessity.”
Mackay, “Introduction: Three Figures of Contingency,” in The Medium of Contingency,
ed. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2015), 1.
34 Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1900), 16.
35 Ibid., 17.
36 Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and
M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 60–1.
37 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 51.
38 Ibid., 62.
39 Hilan Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology (Ann Arbor,
MI: Open Humanities Press, 2017), 23.
40 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 112–17. See also E. O. Hirschman,
The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph,
20th anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On Scott’s
strategic use of anachronism, see esp. Richard Maxwell, “Inundations of Time: A
36
Definition of Scott’s Originality,” ELH 68, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 419–68. Not all
of Scott’s contemporaries approved wholeheartedly of prudence; see, e.g., Samuel
Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against it in Aids to Reflection, ed. H. N. Coleridge
(New York: Tibbals and Son, 1872).
41 Scott, Waverley, 363.
42 Ibid., 363–4.
43 For more on the relationship between Scottish history and eye-witness testimony, see
Matthew Wickman, The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s ‘Romantick’ Highlands and the
Birth of the Modern Witness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
44 See Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring
2012): 533–53; and McGurl, “Gigantic Realism: The Rise of the Novel and the
Comedy of Scale,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 403–30.
45 See Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority.
46 Scott, Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside, intro. Ian Duncan (London; New York: Penguin,
2011), 5.
47 See, for example, Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I, in The Marx-Engels Reader,
2nd edn., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 192.
48 Susan Manning, Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters, 1700–1900
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 123–4.
49 On the tendency to overstate Waverley’s status as the model for all the Waverley
Novels, see, for example, Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic
Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 100–1.
50 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 71.
51 Lukács, Historical Novel, 50.
52 Going beyond the Scottish Waverley novels would allow consideration of many more
geographical and geological features of Scott’s fiction, including the alternating deserts
and oases of The Talisman (1825) and the Swiss Alps of Anne of Geierstein (1829).
53 See, for example, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the
World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Mary Favret, War at a
Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Warfare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2010), esp. 119–44.
54 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture
(Durham, ON: Duke University Press, 2016), 64.
55 Cf. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, ed. Gary Handwerk and
A. A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000).
37
When John Keats evokes a “material sublime” in his verse epistle to John Hamilton
Reynolds (1818), the poet draws inspiration from effervescing, ethereal hues of
the heavens, from a changeling world wherein “We jostle,” wherein “Things” exist
unsettled and “cannot to the will / Be settled.”1 Under the rubric of romantic material
sublimity neither human will nor mind triumphs over the rhetorically figured
naturescape. Alternatively, regardless of human will or mind, here the material world is
characteristically unsettled if not volatile, always already interacting and transforming.
Departing from the dualist accounts of sublimity penned by Edmund Burke and
Immanuel Kant, which endure as the “two most influential accounts . . . of the sublime
as an aesthetic category,”2 Keats and various romantic writers envision a competing
world of sublime aesthetics. They depict a material world rife with reverberating
interrelations and contingencies, replete with sublime ecologies that might outpace the
reach of human minds but nonetheless reside in and among the earth and all earthly
bodies.3 In essence, they render a materially sublime world made both possible and
wondrous by virtue of being mediated by nonhuman affective agencies, and wherein
we necessarily “never hear a voice as such, only a voice carried by the wind.”4 As
Timothy Morton’s essay on “Sublime Objects” rightly suggests “air and gravity make
humans speak certain words in certain ways. Valleys encourage yodeling.”5
Often taking recourse to topographies of oscillating winds, vaporous airs, spuming
gases, and ethereal spheres in the same breath as embodied voice and incarnate verse,
romantic writers figure an important counter-sublimity to that of Burke or Kant: the
material sublime.6 By way of romantic-era aerography they locate an unavoidable
material sublimity at work within and without the human body. Furthermore, their
representations of aeriform activity intimate a material sublimity that is extant and at
play within nonhuman life-forms and even inorganic bodies from which humankind
cannot distance itself (necessary for Burkean sublimity), and from which humanity
cannot imaginatively or rationally rescue itself (as in Kant’s transcendental idealist
account of sublimity). Ever-motile material ecologies reciprocally manifest ever-animate
and always-material affective relations which precipitate and make possible the very
real stuff of earth and poetry, of graspable things and waning sunsets.
38
But romantic literature did indeed have a lot to say about the being of objects, or as
Wordsworth memorably put it, about “see[ing] into the life of things.”11 Illuminating
such points of contact, Evan Gottlieb observes how the “Romantics anticipate some
of [speculative realism]’s methods and concerns . . . [including a] desire to explore
reality itself . . . [and a] yearning for knowledge of the absolute.”12 Gottlieb is right to
point out the value of romantic literature’s representations of the natural world and the
things in it, given its unique “historical positioning at a moment that is neither post-
Humean, since the force of Humean skepticism was very much alive and well for the
39
romantics, nor post-Kantian, since the latter’s ideas were just beginning to be widely
disseminated in Britain in the 1790s.”13 The way to proceed, then, is not to throw out
romantic representations of sublime nature because of their epistemological tarnish,
but, alternatively, to investigate how romantic aesthetics might help us to rethink the
nature of ecological systems in less anthropocentric terms, and most especially, to
prize those moments when a materially sublime aesthetics presses us to acknowledge
how “questions of ontology must precede questions of epistemology or questions of
our access to objects.”14
The present essay considers how the romantic material sublime borrows from and
extends romantic-era speculative sciences, particularly those that study the physical yet
protean dimensions of air. Moreover, I reveal how the material sublime as an aesthetic
category moves beyond issues of taste, aesthetic judgment, and human emotion while
still being very much involved with these questions. As Sianne Ngai observes, “the
sublime is still western philosophy’s most prestigious example of an aesthetic category
that derives its specificity from mixed or conflicting feelings.”15 But contrary to the
performative acts of judgment built into the aesthetic of the merely interesting, as she
calls it, where “[j]udging something interesting is often a first step in actually making it
so,” the “reverse” is true “for [the] material sublime.”16 Ngai recognizes that, in the case
of the material sublime, “we don’t make it sublime via judgement but the judgement
reflects sublime being.”17 Heralding something approaching a new materialist’s
rendition of Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, the material sublime’s
figurations of all-pervading affective relations make available nonanthropocentric
accounts of a speculative realist world that is before us, beyond us, or without us.18 This
model of material relations ultimately has bearing on thinking nature independently
of humanity because it assumes the antecedent “sublime being” of “mountains, water,
air.”19 Two hallmarks of romantic literature—waxing and waning affective states and
portraits of puzzling, daunting natural phenomena—effectively usher in and become
the preconditions for the kinds of ontological findings or hypotheses championed by
speculative realism’s forerunners and practitioners. In this sense, romantic affect and
aesthetics can dampen human exceptionalism while amplifying nonhuman ontologies.
This claim is admittedly counterintuitive since affect and aesthetics are generally
regarded as problematic children of phenomenological experience.20 However,
the presumed epistemological and phenomenological, and, hence, ostensibly
anthropocentric bases for aesthetic experience and judgment has lately come under
fire. Ngai reminds readers of the “widespread and broadly diffused nature of the
‘aesthetic relation,’ which [only] some philosophers have adopted Kant to generalize as
a special kind of attention paid solely to an object’s appearance or ‘aspect’ (as opposed
to its origin, identity, or function) accompanied by an appraisal based on the positive
or negative feeling that its apperception elicits.”21 More particularly, Ngai observes
how for “George Santayana, Gérard Genette, and others these values are ‘objectified’
or projected back into the object, treated ‘as if ’ they were one of the object’s own
properties or ‘an objective property, like any other.’ ”22 In the same vein, Timothy
Morton has set out to reclaim the sublime for object-oriented ontology. Proposing a
speculative sublime, Morton contends that the “kind of sublime we need doesn’t come
40
from some beyond, because this beyond turns out to be a kind of optical illusion of
correlationism, the reduction of meaningfulness to the human–world correlate since
Kant. . . . The sublime resides in particularity, not in some distant beyond. And the
sublime is generalizable to all objects, insofar as they are . . . alien to themselves and
to one another in an irreducible way.”23 Ngai’s diffuse account of aesthetic relations
resists simple subject–object dualisms, harmonizing with Morton’s ecocentric model
of sublimity. Morton finds sublimity to be manifest within the particularity of “all
objects,” which, for him, extends to include all earthly entities, even so-called human
subjects. Last but not least, “[a]ffect,” as Brian Massumi gnomically suggests, “is the
whole world: from the precise angle of its differential emergence.”24 Massumi’s strongly
nonsubjectivist version of affect pivots away from anthropocentricism’s prioritization
of human subjective experience, suggesting that “emotion requires a subject while
affect does not,” which, among other things, allows for a more materially distributed
understanding of affective agency grounded primarily within ontologies of substance
and physical matter rather than strictly by way of the sensate human being.25
When gathered together within figurations of the material sublime, romantic affect
and sublime aesthetics mark ontological states that themselves precondition speculative
thinking about modes of existence and materialities well beyond the realms of human
experience. With this claim, I knowingly court Meillassoux’s correlationist circle and
evade it by degree. Where for Meillassoux modern thought narrows and rigidifies due
to a long-standing inability to consider thinking and being apart from one another,
I turn to romantic thought to foreground the aesthetic and affective properties ascribed
to romantic nature that are especially valuable to the speculative realist project of
decentering humanity and taking more seriously those realities bestowed upon the
more-than-human world, including modes of being that may or may not overlap with
human ontologies. The romantic sublime (material or not) is the aesthetic category
par excellence that manifests first as a human response to the unknown or unknowable
in nature which then prompts speculation beyond established epistemological
boundaries. Furthermore, it is the aesthetic concept most caught up with fundamental
questions of nonhuman being: at times contending with earthquakes, lightning, or
volcanic eruptions—on other occasions attempting to reconcile how stars and oceans
move and exist across time and space.
By speculating about nonhuman feeling, sensation, and affect and by orienting
ontologies of the planet through the aesthetic registers of the material sublime,
romantic figurations of nature arrive with crucial tools for rethinking the essence of
nonhuman entities and the world in itself.26 The material sublime differs markedly from
idealist versions of Kantian sublimity that ultimately privilege the human mind over
whatever it is that initially inspires the sublime’s telltale reactions of wonder and terror,
pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Moreover, during the romantic period,
the concept of the material sublime blended early physiography (which often framed
earthly patterns and process in terms of chemical condensation and evaporation)
with something vaguely approaching contemporary affect theory (which at times
does indeed examine human emotion as it relates to affect, but more broadly studies
emergent and waning material states and agencies not exclusive to human being).
41
Unlike the Kantian sublime, the Keatsian material sublime privileges material relation
and transformation—not transcendence. It grants substance even to “spirits” and
conceives of refined and rarefied “essences” in terms of chemical components. Running
counter to Kant’s anthropocentric transcendental philosophy, it affords little room for
idealist notions of superseding material existence by virtue of great feats of mind. Even
Keats’s celebrated poetic imagination could never outdo “the limits and conditions of
the material world.” According to the logic of the material sublime, then, the physical
world’s unseen or “silent Working[s]” make possible agencies of an embodied human
mind, not vice versa. Keats’s chemically routed figurations of sublime nature resist
Kant’s transcendental idealism by insisting upon an agentic material world full of
nonhuman affective intensities.
The material sublime furnishes a nondualist account of humanity and nature
that points to inescapable material contingencies and nonhuman affective agencies,
an account that anticipates Jane Bennett’s account of the world in itself in Vibrant
Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Bennett “articulate[s]a vibrant materiality that
runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change
42
if we gave the force of things more due.”28 For Bennett, the “image of affective bodies
forming assemblages . . . enable[s her] to highlight some of the limitations in human
centered theories of action . . . [and to conceive] a theory of action and responsibility that
crosses the human-nonhuman divide.”29 In similar fashion, the politics inherent in the
aesthetic of the material sublime implicitly suggest that we have a moral obligation to
recognize the limits of human-centered accounts of action and affect and it encourages
readers to experiment with thinking nature independently of humanity—to imagine
ecologies that do not exist for us, but rather with us and in themselves. Delineating such
alignments within speculative, romantic, and new materialist thought, what follows is
a case study of material sublimity couched within romantic aerography, one especially
attuned to the affective and aesthetic registers of a wide range of romantic-era writing
about airs, gases, breath, and wind.
Romantic aerography: Pneumatics,
affect, and the forgetting of air
You may laugh, Sister, but let me tell you the speculative philosophy of the present
age is too sublime for our feelings, till they let the spirit of them evaporate—
—Henry Ryder Knapp, The musical farce of Hunt the slipper. In two acts. As
performed at the Theatre-Royal. Smoke-Alley (1792)30
During the romantic period, pneumatology encompassed no less than the “science,
doctrine, or theory of spirits,” the “[s] peculative part of the philosophy of the
mind,” and “any of several branches of science dealing with air and other gases, esp.
[regarding] their physiological properties and effects.”31 Knapp’s romantic-era farce
captures the degree to which evolving programs of speculative philosophy eclipsed
empirical science and pressed well beyond the realm of the visual. As the joke from
the play runs, practitioners of speculative philosophy dabble in the absurd: they
would venture to study the very evaporation of our feelings. In this approximation,
Knapp’s charge that speculative thought might dissolve human feeling and affect into
a kind of transcendental sublimity misses the mark. The more telling adumbration
of speculative philosophy, and of romantic-era pneumatic affect in particular, exists
in Knapp’s qualifying remarks. There he attributes an elastic, almost fluid physical
property to the unseen “spirit” of “feelings” that might only later dissipate into the
ether in manifestations of attenuating affect. “Feelings” and states of primary affect here
alluded to as “spirits” could only cease to hold their presumed pneumatic materiality
in the overzealous imaginings of the human mind. In truth, romantic pneumatology
did not consign feeling or even affect to nothingness; nor did it relegate feeling and
affect to mind and body alone. Rather, it borrowed from speculative approaches to
meteorology, chemistry, and biology to liken passing psychic and physical states to
mutable atmospheric bodies and gaseous cocktails that in turn permeated the human
subject, albeit only for a time and not always for the better.32 Pneumatic affect made
near analogs of breathing and feeling and, by extension, yoked the vibrating air to
43
the impassioned, enlivened word. By this logic, affective materialities of wind, airs,
and gases all animated the basic operations of body and mind, all powered humanity’s
finite range of inspiration, articulation, and expression. While critics have long mused
over a romantic preoccupation with improvisation, spontaneity, and the affective
force of spoken utterance, speculative philosophy suggests that part of this enduring
puzzle is more or less wrapped up in our forgetting of air, particularly in our forgetting
of air’s material sublimity and affective agency.33 Or to put this more squarely in
terms of contemporary speculative realist thought, in place of falling prey to Kant’s
“transcendental method [which] ultimately prevents us from engaging with nature
other than as it is shaped by the conditions of human knowledge,”34 we might be better
served by contemplating the more alien natures and material components of existence
that make human knowledge and being possible in the first place—that shape the
conditions of human knowledge rather than being shaped by it.
The forgetting of air is no small charge. It is not a new charge either, but one that Luce
Irigaray mounted against Heidegger and, in so doing, against the larger preoccupations
of Western philosophy. For Irigaray, Heidegger and others laudably questioned human
being, spirit, thought, and thought’s relationship to a technologically, architecturally
enframed world.35 But Irigaray could not overlook how Heidegger seemed to begin
in medias res, leaping into questions on the nature of life before examining the
requisites for life, prior to exploring the conditions necessary for being, spirit, world, or
thought.36 Her question is deceptively simple: she asks, “Can man live elsewhere than
in air?”37 Her words echo Percy Shelley’s in Prometheus Unbound where he writes of
“the all-sustaining air.”38 They recall Humphry Davy’s discourse on the invisible, elastic
atmosphere, the “oxygene” required by each and “Any seed,” by “All animals, from the
most to least perfect classes.”39 By extension, and more pointedly for the purposes of this
collection, we might then ask: Can feeling live otherwise than with air? Such a question
forces us to proceed quite slowly, to speculate more deliberately within the nonhuman
arenas of affect studies.40 It asks us to consider more carefully the not-necessarily-
human requisites for the kinds of affective interactions precipitating feeling—or,
better still, it suggests we scrutinize the not-necessarily-human requisites for affective
phenomena writ sublimely large, which might lead to a “better discernment of the
active powers issuing from nonsubjects.”41 It compels us to look again at Jane Austen’s
Mansfield Park where “The season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness
and sentiment.”42 Austen’s phraseology invites further scrutiny not least because
romantic aerography places such a statement at a far remove from the pathetic fallacy,
with its naïve sentimentalism that reductively humanizes all of nature by rendering it
little more than a backdrop for human emotions. Instead, could it not be that Austen
detects how affective materialities of the external world routinely encourage and shape
human being and feeling? Romantic writers and experimenters help us to remember
what Irigaray feels Western philosophy is in peril of forgetting: that “Life is cultivated
by life itself, in breathing”; or, as she puts it: “I can breathe in my own way, but the air
will never simply be mine.”43 If air is all-sustaining, we, our thinking and our feeling,
our world and our works, all rely upon it. Such a sentiment became the consensus
during the romantic period.44 Alternatively, to forget air is to forget an invisible yet
44
In [our atmosphere] all the bodies of the earth are continually sending up a part
of their substance by evaporation, to mix in this great alembic, and to float a-while
in common. Here minerals, from their lowest depths, ascend in noxious, or in
warm vapours, to make a part of the general mass; seas, rivers, and subterranean
springs, furnish their supplies; plants receive and return their share; and animals,
that by living upon, consume this general store, are found to give it back in greater
quantities, when they die. The air, therefore, that we breathe, and upon which
we subsist, bears very little resemblance to that pure elementary body which
was described in the last chapter; and which is rather a substance that may be
45
conceived, than experienced to exist. Air, such as we find it, is one of the most
compounded bodies in all nature. Water may be reduced to a fluid every way
resembling air, by heat; which, by cold, becomes water again. Everything we see
gives off its parts to the air, and has a little floating atmosphere of its own round
it. . . . A thousand substances that escape all our senses, we know to be there; the
powerful emanations of the load-stone, the effluvia of electricity, the rays of light,
and the insinuations of fire. Such are the various substances through which we
move, and which we are constantly taking in at every pore, and returning again
with imperceptible discharge!
This great solution, or mixture of all earthly bodies, is continually operating
upon itself; which perhaps, may be the cause of its unceasing motion.52
Far from offering a reductionist account of the world in itself modeled upon a
monolithic body of air that all too closely resembles human embodiment, here differing
earthly bodies of all sorts “float a-while in common.” All things that exist have once
touched or now intermix with the “Air . . . one of the most compounded bodies in all
nature;” hewing closely to the physiography of distillation and evaporation grounding
the Keatsian material sublime, Goldsmith imagines an heterogeneous external world
that may “escape[s]all our senses,” but nonetheless harbors affective agencies including
“the powerful emanations of the load-stone, the effluvia of electricity, the rays of light,
and the insinuations of fire.” Anticipating contemporary speculative materialisms, he
urges readers not to overlook the often imperceptible world that is. And by styling the
natural world in terms of “This great solution, or mixture of all earthly bodies, [which]
is continually operating upon itself,” here ecological systems of the planet assume
a high degree of autonomy, working upon themselves, as it were, rather than being
worked by human agents of change. This speculative account of a materially sublime
planet in flux prefigures contemporary systems theory assuming the world in itself to
be ineluctably interrelated, interdependent, and changeling by nature.53
Later studies assume the sublime materiality of atmospheric bodies, yet markedly
expand the weather’s affective force by again ascribing emotions and passions to the
more than human world. For instance, in a general study of the air’s affective relations in
1774, naturalist William de Brahm “combined electrical and mineral theories,” seeking
to “complete a ‘physic-systematic’ picture of the atmosphere and its ‘passions from
different meteors’ using electrical fluid as the primary cause and the vertical motion
of air as the secondary one.”54 In late-eighteenth-century investigations of the air, the
physicality of the atmosphere bears the potential not only to alter human experience
but also to alter itself from within itself. In this case, it is as if the skies themselves
move by way of cooperative affective materialities—the skies convulse or more calmly
subsist by the work of interfused chemical, electrical, physical, and other relational
affective forces here characterized as meteoric “passions.” Such aerography suggests
a diffuse, transformative material agency home to the material sublime which here
invites the contemplation of atmospheric being in itself, in its collectively instantiated
self. What could today count as glaringly anthropomorphic terms (body, passion)
operate quite differently here, much more expansively and pervasively. Indeed, in these
46
questions of ethics, morals, even politics previously and all too neatly organized by an
assumed human–nonhuman divide. Striking a chord with Bennett’s Vibrant Matter,
Davy’s work in the field of pneumatics foregrounds an imbricated affective network
where one’s bodily sensations, thoughts, and imaginings all seem to run according to
an electrochemically spiked mélange of air. And as Davy was quick to point out, and as
Bennett would again remind us, this affective network is derived from the agencies of
the human being (both body and mind) when mixed with the agencies of air—affective
agencies work in tandem, reside where we might least suspect.
While Abrams is right in his classic observation that for romantic poets the “wind-
harp” perhaps too easily stood in for the “poetic mind” or that they made a stock figure
of “air in motion, whether it occurs as breeze or breath, wind or respiration—whether
the air is compelled into motion by natural forces or by the action of the human
lungs,” these metaphoric relations signify more than what Abrams calls “an emblem
of the free Romantic spirit,” with “nature’s breeze [becoming] the analogue of human
respiration . . . [promising finally to] fuse materially, as well as metaphorically, the
‘spirit’ of man with the ‘soul’ of nature.”59 Much more than this, as Davy’s and countless
other pneumatic studies attest, for the romantic imagination neither wind, nor air, nor
atmosphere is without a material body—the spirit of them never evaporates. And so
it should go without saying that of course Davy’s occasionally poetic and sometimes
intoxicated mind was lodged in affective if not living bodies—bodies, plural, inclusive of
earthly and aerial bodies other than his human body.60 Rather than free spirits, we find
bidden bodies insofar as they are sublimely empowered and limited via inescapable
material interdependence. This is not to suggest a crude material determinism but
rather to posit romantic aerography’s relation to evolving geographies of earthly
interinvolvement “where there is no distinct surface separating earth and sky, but an
interinvolvement of land and air,” and further still, interinvolvements of permeable
human beings and all manner of affective assemblages.61 Routinely cast in the oblique,
unknowable aesthetic of the sublime, romantic aerography indexes what might be an
earthling sort of affective restlessness, an essential motility rehearsed by chemical,
electrical, and physical forces in the air, an essential material exchange where feeling
and breathing mark the intimate movements and shared affective relations of earth’s
ethereal-corporeal bodies.
The speculative materialisms imagined across romantic nature, and perhaps most
crucially, those representationally manifest in the material sublime’s “all-sustaining”
airs, conceptualize nature independently of humanity and recognize the force of
nonhuman things, to paraphrase Bennett.62 In this essay I have endeavored to show how,
regardless of any rightly or wrongly attributed epistemological or phenomenological
connections, affect and aesthetics contribute substantially to the project of countering
anthropocentric modes of thinking that likely contribute to human rituals of ecological
48
decadence and degradation. As Peter Adey suggests, “in relation to a theory of affect,
elements like air could be thought not merely as substances but as gathering tendencies
towards structures of feeling, such as practices, thoughts, ideas and sensations” which
are, at least in part, structured by the atmosphere.63 The material sublime grants air its
affective agency and autonomy, albeit a necessarily qualified autonomy given that air,
like all things earthly, functions within the limits, conditions, and interinvolvements
of the material world.
To draw out how the material sublime qualifies human agency and autonomy by
foregrounding the affective agencies of air, I’ll close with a brief close reading. Charlotte
Smith’s aerographic sonnet takes a page from the material sublime, reminding us that it
is not simply that we feel the air, but moreover, that the air makes itself felt regardless
of our feelings. The poem “To the Insect of the Gossamer” addresses barely perceptible
insect life cradled by air. At the same time, it is a poem about human being and emotion
as much as it discourses upon pervasive agencies and affective intensities belonging to
air, breath, and wind. In the sonnet, Smith trades “dull realities” for “Living Atom[s]”:
The sonnet conjures material sublimity and something of Bennett’s vibrant, affective
materiality via references not only to the circumambient ether but also to rainbow
light, both of which harbor or surround, sustain and support the poem’s living beings.
The arachnid resident in Smith’s lines exists in “mid air,” or in other words, lives amid
the air, floating and guided by the wind. For all the activities attributed to Smith’s
“viewless Æronaut” (suspension, floating, flying, launching, sailing) none of them
would be possible without the air. The spider’s interinvolvement with the atmosphere
furthermore plays out in Smith’s nod to the weather, to aerial movements of dense
clouds charged with either exposing the insect or hiding it from view, perhaps for a
time concealing it from the predatory eyes of “keen Swift” and Smith’s reader alike.
Adeptly manipulating poetic form, Smith’s verse becomes as mercurial as the
atmospheric dynamic that holds and mediates the spider’s fate, and by extension,
the fate of humanity (here represented explicitly in the figure of the poet and later
49
tacitly as the arachnid’s fellow Æronaut). The sonnet’s opening quatrain is Petrarchan,
bearing out the form’s long-standing link to love poetry, and embraced by these lines
is Smith’s “Living Atom,” notably not a living Adam mythically made of earth or
clay, but an animalian Æronaut whose being is here made possible and borne out by
aerial materialisms of light and air. The following elegiac quatrain fittingly rehearses
a trauma fantasy of the spider’s loss of life at the hand of winds and skies that are
always both “Destroyer and Preserver.”65 The final quatrain assumes still another form,
a block of lines all ending on the same sound, binding together works of art (“weaves,”
“wreathes”) with life giving breath ever destined to depart (“breathes,” “leaves”). Again
Smith’s rhyme scheme is apt, using the affective intensity and materiality of insistently
repeated sounds to braid together the work of art and the human artist qua poet.
Affective and aesthetic endeavor helps the visionary poet to shed notions of a dull
reality, of a world in itself that might seem to dissolve at sorrow’s touch. But for Smith,
a world replete with awe-inspiring material sublimity nonetheless remains, vibrantly
endures and revolves, here figured in terms of “sevenfold wreaths / Of rainbow-light
[moving] around [the poet’s] head.” By these lights, “To the insect of the gossamer”
hearkens back to Goldsmith’s neo-Lucretian speculations about air and water, where
“Everything we see gives off its parts to the air, and has a little floating atmosphere of its
own round it.” Less whimsically perhaps, Smith’s sonnet anticipates not only Bennett’s
vital materialist account of the world in itself but also Mitch Rose’s investigations
into contemporary geography. Rose describes something akin to romantic nature’s
aerographies of material sublimity, wherein it becomes nearly impossible to forget that
air preconditions human being, feeling, affect, art, and thought, where the air might
exist beyond or without us—but never the reverse. “The wind,” writes Rose, “appears
from nowhere. Its presence forces itself upon us and we are at its mercy. We mourn the
loss of warm sun on our skin or ache for the appearance of a cooling breeze. We want
these things but have no recourse or claim on their coming and going. Life itself is the
unattainable source that bequeaths such things or takes them away. It signals those
elemental features of our being that are wholly beyond our grasp.”66
Air holds us, supports us, its pressures press upon us, and “as a result of explicating
air, we come more and more to merge with it.”67 We conceive of a nature not for us
but with us. Romantic aerography’s material sublime foregrounds a weak version of
speculative realism finally able to relinquish reductive naturalisms that would reduce
the natural world to a monolith, to no more than a nature for us, for humanity. By
dint of its resolutely ecological and hence interrelational and interdependent topos,
romantic aerography proposes “contiguous forms of conversant matter” that at
once open up and delimit human agency and being, nonhuman agency and being.68
Discourses of sublime aesthetics have long entertained questions of power, agency,
freedom, and liberty, but romantic aerography’s materialist sublimity instantiates an
aesthetic of co-constituted abilities and limitations, of contingent systems, existences,
and extinctions. Smith’s figurations of material sublimity perhaps best capture romantic
aerography’s ecocentricity. As Kate Singer rightly suggests, Smith’s sonnets challenge
“anthropomorphic tendencies . . . [wherever] the speaker gives way to a more material
transliteration of affective force, as the interlocking motions of bird songs, growing
50
flowers, the Arun river, the ocean, the coastal winds, and human strains act upon each
other in minute particularities.”69 Any aesthetic representation in verse demands a
human voice, or at the very least, human words or marks, but through such figurative
and always already affective means, human words and marks share space with the
nonhuman page and once uttered aloud, they take shape in not-exclusively human
sounds, sounds made manifest by contingent collaborations of earth, air, verse, and
versifier. Not solitude and the sublime, but plenitude, if we follow the material sublime
which is tantamount to following Smith, “eschew[ing] the ascendancy of human
feelings in favor of the concurrent creation of various forms of matter . . . moving
in all sorts of ways.”70 Living, breathing, feeling, and departing in air, embodied and
enworlded lines of verse take flight as vocalized words; so too, in a materially sublime
air the arachnid’s “filmy Gossamer is lightly spread; / Waving in every sighing air that
stirs.”
Notes
1 John Keats, “[Dear Reynolds, As Last Night I Lay in Bed],” in Keats’s Poetry and
Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 133–6, lines 69,
72, 76–77.
2 Frances Ferguson, “Reflections on Burke, Kant, and Solitude and the Sublime,”
European Romantic Review 23, no. 3 (2012): 313.
3 Here I draw from Rachel Carson’s notion of entangled earthly and bodily ecologies
where “problem[s]of ecology . . . [are always problems] of interrelationships, of
interdependenc[ies]” and where “there is also an ecology of the world within our
bodies.” At the same time, my thinking builds upon speculative realism’s ontological
investigations positing a material world that is (to a degree) separate from the
thinking, feeling subject, and the phenomenological conditions of human knowledge.
In this and many regards, speculative realist thought is indebted to Quentin
Meillassoux’s rendering of Kantian thought in terms of correlationism, which is the
“idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking
and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” This is not to
advance notions of a humanity divorced from earthly existence. Here humanity is
less the issue. Rather, this is to postulate a world whose being doesn’t require life or
any perceiving mind. Existing not only beyond us as an absolute and thus existing in
many ways without us, the earth of the speculative realist is not given to us—to access
fully via perceiving mind, or otherwise. See Carson, Silent Spring, 4th edn. (Boston,
MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 189; Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the
Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 5.
4 Timothy Morton, “Sublime Objects,” Speculations II (2011): 209.
5 Ibid.
6 I am not alone in revisiting the politics of sublime aesthetics in the light of speculative
realism or its offshoot, object-oriented ontology. Timothy Morton similarly calls for a
“speculative sublime” that might override the “two dominant theories of the sublime”
authored by Burke and Kant. But while I foreground romantic-era discourses of
material sublimity contemporaneously relevant to romantic literature, Morton
51
investigates the ancient ur-text of sublime aesthetics, Longinus’s Peri Hypsous, to argue
that the “Longinian sublime can . . . easily extend to include non-human entities—and
indeed non-sentient ones. Rather than making ontic distinctions between what is
and what isn’t sublime, Longinus describes how to achieve sublimity. Because he is
more interested in how to achieve the effect of sublimity rhetorically than what the
sublime is as a human experience, Longinus leaves us free to extrapolate all kinds of
sublime events between all kinds of entities.” Morton, “Sublime Beginnings,” in Realist
Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (London: Open Humanities Press, 2013), para 2,
4, 8-9, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.13106496.0001.001.
7 David Collings reads early Wordsworth alongside the Jena romantics, underscoring
a Wordsworthian “attention to feeling as such [that] eventually leads him to
conceive of an affective state without emotional content, a state of pure receptivity
and affective respiration, of primary affect, which arises in response to mere being.”
Collings, “Emotion without Content: Primary Affect and Pure Potentiality in
Wordsworth,” in Romanticism and the Emotions, ed. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 172.
8 Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1977), 154.
9 On questions of not-necessarily-human material affect, agency, and interrelation,
see Jane Bennett’s compelling account of the affective agencies of materiality broadly
conceived in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010).
10 Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press,
2011), 18, original emphasis.
11 William Wordsworth, “Lines Written A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting
the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798,” in Lyrical Ballads (London: J. &
A. Arch, 1798), line 50.
12 Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 5–6.
13 Ibid., 5, original emphasis.
14 Tellingly, Percy Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc has been central to criticism inaugurating
romantic studies’ speculative-realist turn; Shelley’s iconic example of and response
to the affective-aesthetic discourse of the sublime stands as a primary object of
study in essays by Anne C. McCarthy, Chris Washington, and Greg Ellermann, each
at the vanguard of what Ellermann dubbed “Speculative Romanticism.” Gottlieb’s
monograph provides a substantive engagement with the poem, arguing that “its
philosophy is neither as purely object-oriented as Steven Shaviro argues nor as
radically speculative materialist as Ellermann would have it.” The canon of speculative
romanticism was born with Mont Blanc’s sublime aesthetics and affective intensities
clearing the way. To my mind, Mont Blanc’s routine treatment within speculative
romanticism is not coincidental, nor simply a matter of deferential or citational
academic custom. The recent interest in speculative readings of Mont Blanc is
symptomatic of a larger issue having to do with the sublime that has not been fully
worked out in the aforementioned criticism. The poem’s recurrent focus puts pressure
on an investment in reading a Kantian sublime into a British romantic tradition that
has led to undervaluing the material sublime. Ultimately, the poem’s appeal indicates
how certain affective and aesthetic contours of romantic literature’s figurations of the
material sublime serve as entry points into speculative ontologies and materialities.
52
31 “pneumatology, n.1.a,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017); James
Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh: William Creech; London: T. Cadell,
1790–1793); “pneumatology, n.2,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017).
32 On the double-edged-sword quality of romantic airs, gases, and winds, see for
example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s celebrated Ode to the West Wind where the wind is
both “Destroyer and Preserver” (line 14) or John Keats’s prominent rhyming of breath
and death in such works as Ode to a Nightingale (lines 52, 54) and “Bright Star” (lines
13–14).
33 See, for example, Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Macovski, Dialogue
and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy,
and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008); Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social
Practice 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jeffrey C.
Robinson, “Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation,” The Wordsworth
Circle 38, no. 3 (2007): 94–100.
34 Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” 155.
35 See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic
Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Martin Heidegger, Being
and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962).
36 Although Graham Harman initially takes issue with Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger,
he later mounts a case for thinking along similar lines: “Does the air become air only
when someone breathes it? The tool-analysis [Harman proposes through his account
of Heidegger] is nothing but a refutation of this kind of deflationary realism. If our
encounter with all such entities is thoroughly determined by our own projections, this
is still only half of Heidegger’s ‘temporality.’ ” Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the
Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002), 6, 184.
37 Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 8.
38 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed.
Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton [1820]
2002), 1.754.
39 Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry: In a course of lectures for the
Board of Agriculture (New York: Eastburn, Kirk & Co.; Boston, MA: Ward and Lily,
1815), 190, 192.
40 On developing a more careful vocabulary within affect studies, Massumi distinguishes
emotion from affect in these terms: “An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-
linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward
defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point
of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions,
into narrativizable action reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity
owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and
emotion. If some have the impression that it has waned, it is because affect is
unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to
critique.” Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88.
54
Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.”
New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 228.
54 Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 147.
55 Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous
Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (London: J. Johnson,
1800), 454.
56 Ibid., 462.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 463.
59 M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” The Kenyon
Review 19, no. 1 (Winter 1957): 113, 114, 129.
60 On Davy’s poetic endeavors, which famously included editing the second edition
of Lyrical Ballads, see Catharine E. Ross, “ ‘Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same
Hopes’: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth,”
in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman
(New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 23–52.
61 Peter Adey, “Air’s Affinities: Geopolitics, Chemical Affect and the Force of the
Elemental,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 57.
62 Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political
Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 347–72.
63 Peter Adey, “Air’s Affinities,” 61; Adey here loosely alludes to Raymond Williams’s
Marxist reading of human emotion and affect.
64 Charlotte Turner Smith, “To the Insect of the Gossamer,” in The Poems of Charlotte
Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66–7,
lines 1–14.
65 Percy Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in The Poems of Shelley 1819–1820, ed. Jack
Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington (London: Longman,
2011), 3:204–12, 206, line 14.
66 Mitch Rose, “Negative Governance: Vulnerability, Biopolitics and the Origins of
Government,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 2 (April
2014): 218.
67 Steve Conner, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion
Books, 2010), 14.
68 Kate Singer, “Limpid Waves and Good Vibrations: Charlotte Smith’s New Materialist
Affect,” Essays in Romanticism 23, no. 2 (2016): 175–92, 181.
69 Ibid., 180.
70 Ibid., 181.
56
57
Feeling as hyperobject in
Wordsworth’s The Prelude
Joel Faflak
power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the
relationship between these two powers.”7
The above cases speak implicitly to a romantic impulse to understand and thus
name feeling and to give it free rein as a kind of psychochemical radical transferring
between and transforming relations between subjects and their world.8 What we feel
along our pulses registers the natural and preternatural (uncanny) psychosomatics of
our sensorium as it touches and withdraws from the world. For instance, Julie Carlson
reads Percy Bysshe Shelley’s use of simile as embodied thought, unlike metaphor,
which subordinates reality. Simile registers language’s affective pull as the feeling of
relationality among selves as others. By enacting their difference from reality, similes
offer a nondefensive, noncoercive response to the very antagonism they stage.9 Richard
C. Sha reads this relation in terms of the motion or force of emotion as a “metalepsis”
of the human and nonhuman (both mechanical and divine). Our subjectivities
materialize this unstable but productive relational matrix: “emotions . . . literally
matter because of the force they contain,” Sha writes, “the mechanism by which the
mental becomes somatic and emotion is communicated.”10 Emotions lack agency,
but not intentionality, and thus confuse the “border between matter and sociality,” so
that “affinities are necessarily multiple, and by implication, transient” and “fungible.”11
This paradoxical transfer informs Terada’s sense of how passion undoes “intentional
subjectivity” to mark the “nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject,”12 the
nonhuman within the human.
What does feeling “mean” as a form of nonhuman cognition that at once locates
us in and beyond the world? This essay meditates on feeling as both immediate and
recessive ecology in which the human at once finds, loses, and eclipses itself as human.
Within this context, and given our critical fascination with feeling, it seems we are
only beginning to understand the stakes of what romantic feeling “means,” which is
to take us past the human and the world as we think we understand it. My present
concern is to address a text that epitomizes romantic feeling because of its attempt
to epitomize feeling: The Prelude, primarily in its earliest two-book form of 1799 but
also in its later thirteen-book (1805) and final fourteen-book (1850) iterations. If no
longer at the center of a now much-diversified romantic canon, even now roaming
about in a cultural field unmoored from any notion of a canon (or of any fixed notion
of romanticism itself), The Prelude pays visitation precisely for these reasons. Already
in texts such as Rousseau’s Julie; or the New Heloise (1761) or Goethe’s The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), we find a particularly acute and complex attention to feeling in
“an age compelled by affect’s intimate and extimate (re)cognition.”13 Feeling had long
been an anxious concern of and for romantic criticism, beginning the period’s reactions
to its own enthusiasms. Studies by Jerome McGann and Adela Pinch, however, got
us to rethink feeling as one of the more enlightening and disconcerting shadows
romanticism casts on our future.14 As Terada argues, feeling indicates how to think
the subject after her death; it locates the subject in the sensorial but labile interstices
between mind and body, self and world, where we are at once grasped, found, and lost to
ourselves and one another. Again, we find the romantics preternaturally caught in, and
attempting to think their way out of, this bind. What in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth
59
calls “sensations sweet / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even
into [our] purer mind / With tranquil restoration,”15 are at once constitutive of being
and an essential register of knowledge about the human and its relationship to the
world that we accept unreflectively at our peril, a spontaneity whose overflow needs to
be less curbed or recollected than delineated for our inability to delineate it.
My focus is the romantic period, although my inspiration comes from our current
ongoing obsession with feeling in the form of mindfulness or wellness as avatars of an
easily diagnosed and diagnosable pathogens of what John Locke called the “uneasiness”
of empirical existence.16 Elsewhere I call this condition the “psychopathology of
happiness,” in which the rise of psychiatry, coupled with the emergence of the neoliberal
state, shapes the post-Enlightenment, capitalist subject, for whom self-improvement,
self-fulfillment, and thus self-determination drive social and civil progress.17 Within
this process, how one feels about one’s place in the world becomes as important as
what one thinks about or how one believes in this acclimatization. For this essay, I set
aside this broader sociopolitical or ideological context to focus on how The Prelude,
arguably the ur-text of how to overcome adversity, wrestles with the spectres of what
Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism”—“the idea according to which we only
ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either
term considered apart from the other.”18 Correlationism entails the Kantian idealism
that we can think the Ding an sich of being, but only from the perspective of thought.
Wrestling thinking from being, however, demands that we think a being beyond
our thought of being, on its own terms, as it were, which is to say prior to its own
“givenness.” In Meillassoux’s wording, this is to locate “the great outdoors . . . that
outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign
territory—of being entirely elsewhere.”19 Feeling in Wordsworth, I want to argue,
“thinks” after the finitude of correlation, which in turn, and contrary to notions of
The Prelude as producing the happy subject—the therapeutic value of Wordsworthian
verse exemplified in John Stuart Mill’s point that reading Wordsworth saved him from
the soullessness of utilitarianism—leaves us on the “foreign territory” of feeling itself.
This is what makes feeling itself a rather strange locus. While Chris Washington
reads Meillassoux’s project as allowing us to think a “post-apocalyptic state that takes
place ulterior to human finitude” that thus “pitches humans headlong into a heedless
future,”20 I would argue that Wordsworthian feeling indicates an apocalypse now—
though not in M. H. Abrams’s sense of the secular Christian paradigm of a world
renovated by feeling.21 Feeling is, as it were, everywhere, like the ocean in which one
swims—the bonding agent of all personal and social exchanges and obligations. It
defines the thrust and work of the aesthetic as Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings.” Echoing Terada’s sense of how “feeling” tracks ambiguously
between psychology and physiology, we can read “feelings” here as a generative,
overpowering, and unbidden affective force, the origins of which are, as Shelley
reminds us in A Defence of Poetry (1821), immediate, inaccessible, and unknown. The
time’s overweening concern for and distrust of affect produces both an idealism and
a skepticism born from an inability to make visible and thus knowable a fundamental
psychosomatic register of human being. The very place where the body’s sensual
60
apparatus touches the world and thus brings it home to us is precisely where the world
withdraws itself, and takes us with it. So, when Wordsworth argues that “we cannot
chuse but feel / That [man’s works] must perish,”22 he rather ambivalently prefers feeling
to rational determination and marks feeling as our unavoidable lot tied to a death that
we unavoidably must feel. Our “works” are rather beside the point, for feeling is our
work, whether we like it or not.23
How, then, to speak of the very thing that at once locates us in the world—the
thing that “worlds” our world for us—and is symptomatic of what Meillassoux calls
“dia-chronicity”? Dia-chronicity indicates the “temporal discrepancy between thinking
and being,” which speaks “not only [to] statements about events occurring prior to the
emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the
extinction of the human species.”24 Meillassoux contemplates the existence of what he
terms the “ ‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter,’ ” which “indicat[es] the traces of past life . . .
but [also] materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event,”25 like the
luminescence of a star reaching us after billions of years of light travel. This ancestrality,
in Washington’s powerful summation, “reveals an aporia that exists in both philosophy
and science: our inability to account for a world outside of us without, paradoxically,
accounting for it.”26 Something of the attempt to write an account of a “world devoid
of humanity” that speaks as if outside of humanity itself informs the strange affective
labor of Wordsworth’s verse.27
Feeling in The Prelude thus constitutes what Timothy Morton, in the vein of object-
oriented ontology, an offshoot of speculative realism, calls a “hyperobject”: a thing,
such as climate, that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”28
Washington explains the hyperobject as something that “remains nowhere at all in
empirical reality, an object with thousands, perhaps millions, of qualities with no
actual concrete manifestation of itself in its totality.” In this way “[r]eality therefore
suddenly becomes radically inconsistent with human experience.”29 For my present
purposes this inconsistency marks the weirdly proleptic moment of feeling itself, the
way in which we always understand things after we’ve initially felt them. As Massumi
argues, this feeling thought—this thought of feeling—arrests and polices our constant
attention to a future state that never comes or, one that, as Morton reminds us, makes
us miss attending to the realities of the present at our peril. Which is to say that the
ambient effects or environmental milieu of affect, like the ocean in which the whale
swims, deeply concerns our survival. For Wordsworth in The Prelude, it would seem
that the stakes are just that high.
II
In his 1912 essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” T. E. Hulme pits the carefully
delimited finitude of classicism (tradition, organization, etc.) against the formless
infinity of romanticism. Discussing what happens when the “normal religious attitude”
that is “the fixed nature of man”—that is to say, “belief in the Deity”—gets repressed,
Hulme writes,
61
I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such
a torrent that I was unable to remember it; I could not hold the pen myself, and
the subject was such, that I could not employ Mrs Wordsworth or my Sister as my
62
amanuensis. This work must therefore rest awhile till I am something calmer. . . .
Unable to proceed with this work, I turned my thoughts to the Poem on my own
life. . . . It will not be much less than 9,000 lines . . . ; an alarming length! and a thing
unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself. It
is not self-conceit, as you will know well, that has induced {me} to do this, but real
humility; I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous
subject and diffident of my own powers. Here at least I hoped that to a certain
degree I should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothing to do but describe what
I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered. . . . If when the
work shall be finished it appears to the judicious to have redundancies they shall
be lopped off, if possible. But this is very difficult to do when a man has written
with thought, and this defect, whenever I have suspected it or found it to exist in
any writings of mine, I have always found incurable.34
The romantic effusion (“torrent”) of romantic emotion (in this case, grief) indicates
that memory cannot adequately process what Cathy Caruth calls “an experience that
is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”35 In this “complex relation between knowing
and not knowing . . . the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of
traumatic experience precisely meet.”36 Put another way, the passage marks trauma as
trauma: the trauma isn’t the death of Wordsworth’s brother, it’s the inability to witness
the event of his attempt to properly remember—to record—the event of his attempt to
remember. And part of the complex knowing that is the trauma of signification and
representation (“I could not hold the pen myself ”) comes with its possible address to
the other, most immediately Mary and Dorothy. As Caruth also notes, “trauma and
its uncanny repetition” are at the heart of psychoanalysis “as it listens to a voice that
it cannot fully know but to which it nonetheless bears witness.”37 But in Wordsworth’s
case the trauma is so overwhelming that it precludes others altogether, leaving Mary
and Dorothy “unemployable” in the work of working-through. “Unable to proceed
with this work,” Wordsworth turns to another task, his “Poem on my own life.” This
labor seems less arduous because he “had nothing to do but describe what I had felt and
thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered,” although it produces an “incurable”
inability to ‘lop off ’ “redundancies” of thought and feeling.
The Prelude thus presents a subsequent problem via its “unprecedented” attention
to one subject’s feelings. The poem locates Wordsworth in the miasma or viscosity
of its “spilt” negotiation with the world that is the work of feeling itself. This is how
we have traditionally understood Wordsworth’s verse as an account of the human’s
fundamental interaction with nature transacted through the primal meeting between
infant and mother. But as David Collings reminds us, Wordsworth’s autobiography is
less a retreat from than a libidinal response to history as trauma and disaster, a series of
interactions with the world that are instead disjunctive but nonetheless constitutive.38
One of Wordsworth’s paradigmatic statements about this disjunction comes in the
1805 version of The Prelude. Attempting to assess the “mystery of man,” he writes: “The
days gone by / Come back upon me from the dawn almost / Of life; the hiding-places
of my power / Seem open, I approach, and then they close” (11.333–6). Although
63
Wordsworth can glimpse “in simple childhood something of the base / On which
[man’s] greatness stands,” he is nonetheless “lost” in and to the “depth” of the “mystery”
(11.328–31). By the time he undertakes revisions that would eventually produce the
poem’s final 1850 version, the path becomes both more certain and less distinct.
Now the doors “open” rather than “seem open,” and the poet’s approach is an oddly
bifurcated moment that expresses at once the conditional mood of an imagined event
and the feeling of something radically past: “I would approach them, but they close”
(12.280). And rather than the active sequence of open and “then close,” in which the
poet tarries with the possibility of failure, or worse with getting burnt by the passion
of curiosity, we have a foregone conclusion that acknowledges but avoids the plague of
fantasy altogether: look but don’t touch.
Yet, regardless of whether things advance, retreat, or stay the same, one thing
remains in both 1805 and 1850 versions, which is how events affect him: “but this
I feel” (11.331, 12.275). That is to say, what he feels is what he knows he can never
possess wholly, what from the 1799 version he calls “days disowned by memory”
(1.445, 1.643 [1805]; 1.615 [1850]). Giving power a wide berth in 1850, as if in
eternity, fits with Wordsworth’s desire to leave the mystery well enough alone in a
state of grace that delimits the human reach beyond limits. This is less to mark out
what is for Meillassoux the “correlationist circle” that yokes thought to being than, as
Washington notes, to account for “our inability to account for a world outside of us
without, paradoxically, accounting for it.” For Wordsworth, the world is at once beyond
his capacity to grasp its being, a world of being beyond the givenness of his own being,
and also the world itself within his grasp as itself beyond the givenness of his own
being. Like an experience of the Lacanian Real, as that which “resists symbolization
absolutely,”39 the world is at once immediately present to our senses’ capacity to sense
it, and at the same time absolutely resistant to this capacity. Like Adam and Eve at the
end of Paradise Lost, the world is all before him; he just can’t take it in. To locate this
impossible locus of feeling is less to buck the trend that Wordsworth does nothing
in his poetry but feel than to account for his account of feeling as an encounter with
radical alterity as an inability less to understand the unknowable than, as Morton says,
to “un-know what we know.”40 To borrow the opening line and title of Wordsworth’s
sonnet from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), “The world is too much with us,” which
suggests a call to unknow what we know (“to imagine that which we know,” as Shelley
writes in A Defence of Poetry) in order not to account for the world.41
Despite his prolonged attachment to The Prelude and the notion that his later
revisions for the final 1850 version produced a conservation of the earlier versions’
apparently more radical insights, the poem never moves beyond the pattern of how
Wordsworth feelingly responds to the world set out in the first two-part Prelude.
Written between October 1798 and February 1799, the poem begins,
Like the sun that springs forth at the opening of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (1822),
Wordsworth’s sudden opening stages the aftershocks of some unknown event, like the
work of resummoning trauma itself. The text manufactures its own symptom, which
it then seeks to diagnose, as if to analyze the same feelings it manufactures by opening
as it does. Later versions of the poem embed the question in Book I after the Glad
Preamble, which registers the force of Wordsworth’s solitary imagination as “tempest”
or “redundant energy” within the “corresponding mild creative breeze” that is the
mind’s meeting with Nature (1.43, 46[1805]). Now “this” refers to the “vain perplexity”
(1.268) and “hollow thought” (1.261) of his inability to write The Recluse, what by then
he calls his “philosophic Song / Of truth that cherishes our daily life, / With meditations
passionate from deep/ Recesses in man’s heart” (1.230–3 [1805]). This failure already
to feel in 1799 dilates in 1804–5 to five and eventually thirteen books, and beyond that
to fourteen by 1850.
After 1798–9, the opening question as a symptom without origin gets attached to
a possible trauma the reading of which offers a possible access to the hiding places of
power. Instead, Wordsworth translates this swerve through the missed encounters of
various spots of time whose possible analysis and cure form what we think of as the
matrix of Wordsworthian vision: man’s habitual return to nature’s nurturing presence.
What is earlier eruptive, disruptive, or restless is transposed through a transforming
relationship rooted in a kind of eighteenth-century Common Sense empiricism that
pragmatically and firmly locates man in the world of his perceptions, beyond skepticism
and speculation. It also expresses this transformation through the finer, visionary tone
of nature’s pantheistic future, which binds man to nature in a community born of love
and holy sacrifice. At some level, that is to say, what “this” is becomes a moot point.
What matters is how the briefer text becomes a prelude to a longer case history that
shapes Wordsworth as what the later eighteenth century would deem the “morally
useful man,” which thus prepares him to write The Recluse. The phrase “was it for this?”
frames a psychological beginning in medias res in terms of a philosophical question
that determines the text’s longer analysis. Yet the end of the text, when Wordsworth
has ostensibly worked through its opening sense of “redundancy,” takes us back to its
beginning with the poet ready to write The Recluse, which gives the poem’s trajectory
from symptom to crisis and resolution a rather more recursive and interminable
shape.42
It also speaks to something atavistic about the encounter with power, like his later
“reverie” (12.320 [1805]) on Sarum plain in which he “called upon the darkness, and it
took – / A midnight darkness seemed to come and take – / All objects from [his] sight”
(12.327–9). In 1850 the “reverie” becomes a “waking dream” (13.343) and “vision
clear” of “Our dim ancestral Past” (13.320), and the unbidden advent of fantasy that
“seemed to come and take” away the “objects” of the empirical world becomes instead
a conscious act of remembrance. In 1805, the “intricate profusion” (13.342) of the
Druid “mystery of shapes” (13.340) inscribed on the “untilled ground” (13.343) figures
65
the startling disjunction between a recessive past and an “untilled” present that is
unwilling but also unable to resist the imprint of the “ancestral.” In 1850 what is earlier
called an “infant science, imitative forms / By which the Druids covertly expressed /
Their knowledge of the heavens, and imaged forth the constellations” (12.344–7) has
become how they “represent / Their knowledge of the heavens, and image forth /
The constellations” (13.340–1). Now the ineluctably queer transference of the past
through the uncanny effects of a secreted mimesis becomes a kind of synchronous
transmission in which the nascent experimentations of knowledge are laid bare and
thus transformed as a timeless projection of the “divine” order of things.
As early as the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of “the ghostly language of the
ancient earth” (2.358 [1799]) that marks, as it were, the place where his love of nature
has gone. The Prelude’s Norton editors parse “ghostly” as “spiritual,” then add, “but
also disembodied” (23n3), which sidelines but almost reluctantly acknowledges an
alternate embodiment with which Wordsworth resists tarrying. Wordsworth speaks
of his earliest negotiations with nature as the “props of [his] affections” that, once
“removed” in later life, left the “building” of his feeling life “as if sustained / By its own
spirit” (2.324–6). Yet it is an “interminable building” (2.432), which suggests at once
the continuity of a self-sustaining emotional life, eternally recollected in tranquility,
and an existence, to borrow Meillassoux’s designation, after finitude that extends far
beyond human sway. From having an immediate but unconscious interchange with
objects in the world, one arche of which is the infant babe’s wordless converse of feeling
with its mother, Wordsworth is left at once within and apart from the world around
him. Nature at once takes him in and challenges him with “Low breathings … / Of
indistinguishable motion” (1.47–8). In the boat-stealing scene, the first of the spots of
time he describes in the 1799 Prelude, such movements confront him with autonomous
“huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men” (1.127–8), such that the
“surface of the universal earth / With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, / Work
like a sea” (1.196–8). Wordsworth’s progress out of adolescence into adulthood leaves
him with a “trouble [that] came into [his] mind / From obscure causes” (2.321–2).
Nature encloses Wordsworth by coming after him, which is to say that the after-feeling
nature engenders in him produces a feeling of belonging with nature, but tracks him
as a being apart from the very thing that engenders him, which means that feeling is
now his own best enemy. All of which is to say that Wordsworth is suspended at once
in finitude and after finitude.
Wordsworth’s time with nature nurtures his archetypal life, the “Poetic spirit
of our human life” that is the “Great birthright of our being” (2.306, 317). All such
interchanges are “spectacles and sounds to which / [He] often would repair, and thence
would drink / As at a fountain” (1.367–9). Yet, there is a “subtler origin” (1.381) that
materializes how his “infant veins are interfused” by “The gravitation and the filial
bond / Of Nature that connect him with the world” (2.292–4). In this “one beloved
presence—nay and more, / In that most apprehensive habitude / And those sensations
which have been derived / From this beloved presence—there exists / A virtue which
irradiates and exalts / All objects through all intercourse of sense” (2.285–90). This
irradiation that is at the same time the feeling (exaltation) of the “intercourse of sense”
66
that both creates and sustains it at once immerses Wordsworth in the “one life . . .
that was joy” (2.460) and marks him separate from its pantheistic, panentheistic grip,
leaving him an “inmate of this active universe” (2.297). Recalling the “dead man” who
“Rose with his ghastly face” (one of the most defamiliarizing moments in romantic
verse), Wordsworth notes that the occasion “impressed [his] mind / With images to
which in following years / Far other feelings were attached—with forms / That yet exist
with independent life, / And, like their archetypes, know no decay” (1.283–7). Again,
Wordsworth is at once embedded within nature, irrevocably tied to its “archetypal”
ground, yet at the same time its “inmate,” endowed because of his foreign locus within
nature, with an equally foreign nature or “independent life” that both is and is not in his
possession. Indeed, his stubbornly passionate attachment to nature exists only because
he is dispossessed—“disowned”—by nature itself. Hence in the ensuing recounting of
the “gibbet-mast” (1.310), all Wordsworth can do is recount his “inability to account for
a world outside” of him, “without, paradoxically, accounting for it.” Unable to describe
a scene whose historical vitality departed the scene long ago, Wordsworth immediately
turns to the more present, “ordinary sight” of “A girl who bore a pitcher on her head”
(1.317, 320). Yet even the more recent past leaves Wordsworth wanting “Colours and
words that are unknown to man / To paint the visionary dreariness” (1.321–2) that
“invest[ed]” the scene in its entirety. Remarkable in his connection of these scenes
is both a latency and lapse in feeling cognition, which foreshadows Wordsworth’s
sublimely missed encounter while crossing the Simplon Pass in Book VI.
The same “passions that build up our human soul” and tie us to “eternal things” (1.134,
136) also reflect the soul’s “fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation” (2.361–2), like the
“tumult” or “alien sound / Of melancholy” (1.166–7). But like nature’s “investment,” as
opposed to Wordsworth’s investing in nature, the “melancholy,” signifying irretrievable
loss, is the sound nature gives, not necessarily the feeling Wordsworth receives, what
he calls nature’s “extrinsic passion” (1.377). Or as Wordsworth says of the soul’s
vertiginous work, “Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not—
retains an obscure sense / Of possible sublimity” (2.364–7). The soul is all that remains
of feeling. Or rather, all that remains is feeling to remind subjects they are or were
here, which is also to tell them how to, or how they will, go on, which evokes existence
as an oddly suspended state of being beyond both thought and feeling. Setting aside
how Wordsworth genders the soul, although that itself is telling, we can note how
Wordsworth speaks of his own soul in the third person. The objectification reads
like a projection of Keats’s sense of the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, but it also
weirdly dislocates the process of Wordsworthian feeling, as if to locate the poet in the
world by not locating him. Put another way, to cite Morton, “the process” of feeling
here is “simply an object,”43 an objectification of feeling that is not at the same time
a projection of Wordsworth’s ego onto nature, less a correlation with it than an alien
positioning within it. Objects become the feeling of objects, or put another way, feeling
is the object as the “viscosity” of hyperobjects. Which may be why Wordsworth says
it is a “Hard task to analyse a soul” which “Hath no beginning” (2.262, 267): “How
shall I trace the history, where seek / The origin of what I then have felt?” (2.395–6).
Feeling is a “plastic power” and “forming hand” that is “At times / Rebellious, acting in
67
a devious mood” (2.411–13). Which leaves Wordsworth bifurcated within the ecology
of his own affective life:
III
I could” (89); “I’ll tell you everything I know” (105); “I’ll give you the best help I can”
(111); “No more I know – I wish I did” (155); “There’s no one that could ever tell”
(160); “I thought I saw” (192); “I cannot tell, but some will say” (214). Within nature
the narrator thinks he witnesses supernatural occurrences: a “fresh and lovely” mound
that is uncannily “beauteous” (35); a patch of earth that shakes when the wind, which
“Cuts like a scythe” (25), blows over the pond; a woman in scarlet moaning for her lost
lover or dead child; the image of a baby’s face in the pond staring back at the viewer;
“plainly living voices” (171) like “voices of the dead” (173) mingling with Ray’s cries.
Observation itself, like the shuddering ground, renders indeterminate the mooring
points of perception, understanding and rational communication. The more one peers
into the everyday, the more this perception contrives to make the world appear real.
The poem is “steeped,” and steeps us, in feeling. But it leaves the time of feeling, of
experience itself, at once absolutely immediate and absolutely resistant to being.
The Prelude would seem to offer abundant correlationst recompense for the dia-
chronicity of “The Thorn” and certainly otherwise conforms to Abrams’s secular
Christian eschatology. But feeling also has the texture of what Bruno Latour calls a
“tangled” as opposed to a “smooth” object. Smooth objects are “risk-free,” with “clear
boundaries, a well-defined essence.”48 “Tangled” objects, on the other hand, are “ ‘quasi-
objects’ [that] do not have an impact of the social or political world in the sense that
they affect it from without; they are themselves . . . part of that new sociality,” which is
to claim how “ ‘nothing’ is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else”:
Latour traces the network of associations and transformations that link humans and
nonhumans, facts, and values in the circulatory system of science that fabricates
a machine or fact or object. Treating objects as things opens them to deliberation
and dispute and returns us to the possibility of a viable political ecology.49
of a past origin inaccessible to and thus incommensurate with, yet interminably and
irrevocably projecting itself toward, an indeterminate future. In “The Baker’s Cart,”
the speaker approaches a “wretched hut” with five children who appear “not born to
live.” A “loaded wain” has just passed by, suggesting a social abundance at odds with
their abject poverty. He watches “with involuntary look” as the cart disappears and is
addressed by a woman, who says, “ ‘That waggon does not care for us.’ ”52 Expressing
the destitutions and social neglect brought about by wartime, the poem offers an
affective response to the insidious socioeconomic bargain Britain made with its
inhabitants on the eve of the second British Empire. But not caring also speaks to the
speaker’s inability to account for the very experience he is recounting, a taking in that
is at the same time not even a letting go. Like the woman who addresses the speaker,
the speaker himself has no place in the world around him. In “Incipient Madness,” the
narrator, compulsively returning to a cottage that, with each visit, entropies further
into nature itself, experiences a grief that “Become[s]an instinct, fastening on all
things / That promise food,” and “doth like a sucking babe / Create it where it is not.”53
In both poems, at the very beginning of Wordsworth’s verse, we find an unavoidably
feeling response to the world that is feeling’s response to its own incompossibility, an
acknowledgement of the radical ancestrality of feeling from within feeling itself.
The title of one of Morton’s earlier books, Ecology without Nature, preludes his
account of the hyperobject of climate change to this end: to care more for the planet,
its future, and our place in and on it, we have to care less about nature.54 Our care
for nature implies our possession of a being whose existence we have only borrowed,
not owned. In his Prospectus to The Recluse, Wordsworth remarks “How exquisitely
the individual Mind / (And the progressive powers perhaps no less / Of the whole
species) to the external World / Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too— / Theme this but
little heard of among men— / The external world is fitted to the mind.”55 This is to
mark our philosophical “great consummation” between the “discerning intellect” and
“this goodly universe / In love and holy passion.”56 Yet in The Prelude, his affective
account of the growth of the mind leaves the poet “steeped in feeling,” and so unable,
like Coleridge’s Mariner, to get to the wedding, he is waylaid by “something evermore
about to be” (6.542 [1805]). Of course, Wordsworth ascribes to this future after finitude
“clearest insight, amplitude of mind / And reason in her most exalted mood” (13.169–
70 [1805]), which signifies the potentiality of the imagination’s unconscious within
the otherwise “steadiest mood of reason” (5.1 [1805]). Reason’s “mood,” however,
implicitly manifests the unsteadiness of its idea. Given reason’s often “rebellious” and
“devious” nature, Wordsworth encounters how feeling leaves thought and being stuck
to and with one another, yet paradoxically across an alien divide that finds feeling a
stranger to itself. That in the “Prospectus” he writes nature large to include “perhaps
no less the whole species” evokes the ancestral sweep of a history and evolution
incommensurate with the very feeling that manifests its reach beyond the human. Like
the radical physics of Shelley imagining how the earth looks from the moon in Queen
Mab (1813), Wordsworthian feeling evokes “the legitimate [human] feeling of being on
foreign [non-human] territory”—a human world incompossible with its nonhuman
existence—a human world made inhuman because of its incompossibility with itself.
70
And yet, for Wordsworth, as for the ecocritical and (more profoundly) ecological
awareness he helped to foster, we may yet be saved by feeling less about what we feel
too much for.
Notes
1 I thank Chris Washington and Anne McCarthy for their kind invitation to contribute
to this volume this essay, and for their endless patience in waiting for its arrival. Two
paragraphs of this essay were first published in different form in Romantic Circles
Praxis; “Romanticism and Affect Studies,” ed. Seth Reno, 2018, Romantic Circles,
https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis. Accessed May 15, 2018. With thanks to Seth, Steve
Jones, and Orrin Wang.
2 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Poetical Works, ed. Thomas
Hutchinson; rev. edn. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1988), 740.
3 Mary Favret reminds us of this “attack” in “The Study of Affect and Romanticism,”
Literature Compass 6, no. 6 (2009): 1159–66.
4 See Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha, “Introduction: Feeling Romanticism,” Romanticism
and the Emotions, ed. Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), 1–18.
5 Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14–15.
6 Cited in Favret, “Study of Affect and Romanticism,” 1159.
7 Michael Hardt, “Foreword: What Affects Are Good for,” The Affective Turn: Theorizing
the Social, ed. Patricia T. Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2007), xi.
8 See Richard C. Sha, “The Motion behind Romantic Emotion: Towards a Chemistry
and Physics of Feeling,” Romanticism and the Emotions, 19–47.
9 See Julie Carlson, “Like Love: The Feel of Shelley’s Similes,” Romanticism and the
Emotions, 76–97.
10 Sha, “The Motion behind Romantic Emotion,” 22, 23.
11 Ibid., 31.
12 Terada, Feeling in Theory, 4–5.
13 Faflak and Sha, “Introduction: Feeling Romanticism,” 2.
14 See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Jerome McGann, The Poetics of
Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
15 William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Poetical Works, ll, 28–31.
16 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 217. For Locke, happiness becomes the prime mover
of human desire by encountering the “uneasiness” of the will as an autonomous spur
to action, the check ensuring that humankind stays focused on its own amelioration.
Happiness only counts once “our desire . . . makes us uneasy in the want of it” (p. 234),
and thus encrypts the pain of potential loss, even the impossibility of happiness
altogether. Locke’s ambivalence evokes thereafter the struggle to account for the
intangible quality of happiness. That he discusses happiness, not in Two Treatises
71
34 William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de
Selincourt, 2nd edn., Volume 1: The Early Years, 1787–1805, rev. Chester L. Shaver
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 586–7.
35 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5.
36 Caruth, “Introduction,” 3.
37 Ibid., 9.
38 See David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), esp. 118–56, 180–206.
39 Jacques Lacan, Seminar One: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller,
trans. J. Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 66.
40 Morton, Hyperobjects, 180.
41 Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” Poetical Works, l. 1; Percy Shelley,
A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat
(New York: Norton, 2002), 502.
42 For an account of the poem as case study, see my Romantic Psychoanalysis: The
Burden of the Mystery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 75–114;
and “ ‘Was it for this?’ Romantic Psychiatry and the Addictive Pleasures of Moral
Management,” Romanticism and Pleasure, ed. Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle
Faubert (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 61–82.
43 Morton, Hyperobjects, 72.
44 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ll. 38, 88.
45 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 26.
46 See Morton, Hyperobjects, 181. This does not discount Morton’s own apprehension,
throughout Hyperobjects, of Wordsworth’s own radical insight into the life of “things,”
which apprehension is one of my present essay’s key inspirations and touchstones. See
esp. 51.
47 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ll. 30, 35, 52, 61. All subsequent references are cited
parenthetically in my main discussion.
48 Cited in Carl G. Herndl and S. Scott Graham, “Getting Over
Incommensurability: Latour, New Materialisms, and the Rhetoric of Diplomacy,”
Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and
Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 49. See
Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). According to
Tilottama Rajan, “fram[ing] his distinction between smooth and tangled objects
within the issue of ecology,” Latour speaks to a “ ‘crisis’ of ‘objectivity’ rather than
‘nature’ per se (18): a shift in how we understand material and intellectual objects.”
“The Vitality of Idealism: Life and Evolution in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Systems,”
Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. Joel Faflak (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2017), 242.
49 Herdl and Graham, “Getting Over Incommensurability,” 49–50.
50 Oxford English Dictionary, definition of “steeped,” accessed at: http://www.oed.com.
proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/view/Entry/189585?rskey=tIunVQ&result=3#eid.
51 See Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 75–85.
52 William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), ll. 3–16.
73
Few poets could promise more than John Clare to those interested in the intersections
between romanticism and recent developments in object-oriented ontology (OOO),
vibrant matter, and speculative realism.1 Over the course of his career, Clare composed
hundreds of poems on nonhuman modes of being, ranging across the lives of birds and
mammals, the vibrancy of grass and trees, and the tangled flourishings of fields, lanes,
and meadows. Moreover, he forcefully registered the broader political and philosophical
stakes of such a poetics; as Katey Castellano argues, he celebrated the “inhuman will to
variation” in the natural world “that ranges from caprice to monstrosity,” leading him to
advocate for a “politicized ‘neglect’ that opposes the appropriation of nonhuman life.”2
Such a project committed him to exposing biopolitical attempts to subjugate human
and nonhuman lives and to advocate instead for a broadly conceived politics of the
commons.3 His work can thus serve today as a locus through which to mediate several
leading concerns of those who seek to address the import of the human relation to the
nonhuman, to decipher the political implications of this relation, and to think through
these concerns with regard to the era we are beginning to call the Anthropocene.
Within the context of this vast corpus of writing, however, another concern emerges.
In one sonnet and two short lyrics, Clare evokes a dimension one step further out from
the human—one outside even objects and nonhuman lives. These poems exemplify
what Eugene Thacker describes as “horror,” the “non-philosophical attempt to think
about the world-without-us philosophically.”4 The formulations in these poems are so
radically conceived that it is difficult for readers to find a suitable language in which
to theorize their achievement. Only the most adventurous thinkers in certain strands
of postwar continental philosophy can begin to formulate the terms with which one
might begin to do these texts justice.
One such moment appears within recent speculative realist writing, the final
chapter of Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. In pages that remain distinctive, even unique,
within the speculative realist archive, Brassier follows up on a suggestion by Jean-
François Lyotard and reflects on the significance for human beings of the eventual
death of the sun.5 For Brassier, that death is a catastrophe “because it blots out the
terrestrial horizon of future possibility relative to which human existence, and hence
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it puts something else at stake, the strange possibility that nonhuman life might be
condemned by oblivion. Given the uniqueness of this exploration, the sonnet retains
the power even today to provoke a response beyond the range of familiar contexts,
demanding a sustained effort of close reading and resourceful speculation across
related texts and theoretical traditions—an effort to which I will devote the remainder
of this essay. Here is the sonnet itself:
On first impression, the sonnet’s reference to this tree’s condemned life may implicitly
evoke a strong contrast between Clare’s failure to notice this tree and his more typical
practice of attending to the lifeforms surrounding him in the landscapes he knew
intimately over the first several decades of his life. On this score, the poem might seem
to point back to the establishing framework of human witnessing. Yet the poem is not
merely attempting to acknowledge the prior absence of Clare’s witnessing; it attempts
to apprehend what transpires without reference to him. It sets out to register not his
own affect but what happens, has happened, and will happen apart from him—except
for his encounter with this happening.
By recording Clare’s response to a process that transpires without reference to him,
the sonnet enters that apparently paradoxical terrain familiar in our moment. Here
too, as in speculative realism, one asks how one can begin to apprehend real things
or events that take place without our apprehension. In registering this nonhuman
happening, are we not already bringing it within the zone of human witnessing? How
might one recognize and bear the impress of what takes place without us? In this most
basic concern, the sonnet already takes its place alongside recent speculative realist
thought, posing for itself an array of questions we are once again attempting to address.
We can thus register the force of this sonnet’s intervention best if we sense in that
implicit reference to human consciousness in its opening lines not a privileging of that
consciousness but a deliberate turn away from it, a turn that foregrounds and privileges
a radically different mode of relation.12 That turn, as I have suggested, also takes Clare
beyond the poetics of living things and into a new problematic, for it shifts focus from
78
the attributes of the tree’s life to its oblivion, from its place within the interrelation of
living things to its radically evacuated condition. Here Clare dwells on how a form of
life, buffeted by a force as blank as itself, does not register, comes to seem as nothing;
without witnesses, its life, now “condemn[ed],” disappears.
As it formulates this initial sense of blankness, the poem relies on a complex figural
construction. On one level, the poem states that the tree’s life is blank and recordless as
the wind, thereby linking the tree’s life and the wind through a simile and suggesting
that the blankness of that life is only figured through the wind’s blankness, that the
empty and invisible movement of an oblivious wind serves as an apt comparison to
an oblivion already characteristic of the tree’s life. Yet in this figural register, the poem
also hints at a causal relation, suggesting that because of the wind’s blankness and
disappearance, none could possibly recover the impress of the life of that tree. As a
result, the poem suggests that the blankness of the tree’s life is simultaneously figurally
prior to the wind’s blankness and brought about by the latter. The sonnet resolves this
apparent paradox, however, by suggesting that the significance of a life depends on its
place within the field of recording, reception, or inscription; in a logic familiar from
intersubjective relations, the intrinsic here is knowable only through the extrinsic,
through being acknowledged by other objects, lives, processes. The blankness of the
latter, then, speaks of—and more radically, brings about—the blankness of the former.13
In that case, the sonnet’s foregrounding of the figure of the wind is central to its
import: where the relations between objects is a key feature of OOO speculation,
especially around the problem of what remains available to other objects and what is
withdrawn from them, here the wind’s invisibility figures a process that makes some
aspects of relation impossible and in consequence effaces at least one level of the tree’s
inner life.14 No doubt the wind, as a physical, nonhuman process, may still be regarded
as an object, even if a subtle one, but insofar as the poem treats the wind as a figure for
“oblivion,” it refuses the reduction of its themes to the field of objects, thereby insisting
on an aspect of nonhuman activity that is at once beyond or outside objects per se and
that through its blankness evacuates their import.15 In effect, the sonnet proleptically
intervenes into OOO, treating the wind’s radical nonreceptivity as a figure for what
one might call a process-oriented non-ontology, a movement of ongoing erasure that
leaves no trace.
In foregrounding the figure of the wind, the sonnet evokes not phenomena from
the prehuman past or posthuman future—Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil or
Brassier’s death of the sun—but a perpetual, nameless process that, extending across
all temporal sites, incorporates them into an indifferent, devastating flow that bears
upon the apparent present as well.16 On first impression, the poem’s rendition of the
wind’s movement over the tree’s young shoots might seem to echo “Mont Blanc,” a
poem crucial to how we think romanticism’s anticipations of speculative realism.
When in that poem the “chainless winds still come and ever came / To drink” the odors
of the “giant brood of pines” (20) and “their mighty swinging / To hear—an old and
solemn harmony” (22–24), in effect the winds, listening to the sound that they cause,
serve as a remarkably efficient metaphor for Shelley’s theory of perception, according
to which “All things exist as they are perceived: at least to the percipient.”17 But in
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Clare’s sonnet, the wind registers nothing, effacing the import of what it moves. The
sonnet thus evokes the opposite prospect, that of nonreceptive, radically indifferent
movement over the world’s life-forms. By implying that the wind could register what it
moves yet emphasizing that it does not, the sonnet starkly effaces the process Shelley
encapsulates, suggesting that where perception is blank, nothing exists; the tree is
condemned to inexistence, to wasted life.18
Moreover, since the sonnet nowhere proposes that the narrator’s encounter salvages
the tree from its ruined state, it implies one further step: when one witnesses the life of
a tree, one does not give that tree existence; on the contrary, one discerns the incapacity
of perception to give that life existence. The sonnet might thus seem to explore a stance
radically unlike Shelley’s. Yet insofar as Shelley writes that all things exist as they are
perceived at least to the percipient, he hints that things may exist outside the domain
of perception, perhaps outside the arena of human concern, anticipating one of the
cardinal themes of speculative realist thought. As if granting this possibility to Shelley,
the sonnet nevertheless radicalizes it, transforming the unperceived into a “recordless,”
unperceiving force; in doing so, it displaces the centrality of human perception,
depicting an agency to which that mode of perception, and its effects, are subordinate.
Human perception, it seems, cannot overcome the effects of a process that transpires
without regard to human concerns.
Yet in the next lines the sonnet displaces these provisional inferences. This process
of recordless passage gives way to another erasure, the utter disappearance of those
winds. The process of effacement itself disappears, for “who can find / Their homes of
rest or paths of wandering now” (4–5)? The wind that figurally effaced the life of the
tree has no proper place, no stable position that one might decipher to understand its
work; what subjects the tree to oblivion has itself entered a similar state. The work of
the erasure redoubles itself, cancels even cancellation.
If we are unsure as to whether Clare would wish to carry out such a philosophically
radical step, we need only turn to the paired lyrics he composed over a decade later, for
they amply confirm his capacities in this regard, testifying again to what Thacker calls
“horror.” The first poem, to which I will refer as “Old times forgetfull,” makes more
explicit a logic already present in the sonnet:
Here the fragments thrown up from a disastrous inundation are effaced once again
by an “eternal blast / Oblivion [that] leaves the earth” only a “Darkness in which the
80
very lights forgot” (7–9). Such a double negation appears as well when snow and
flowers, winter and summer, as well as the earthly life that revolves through those
seasons, are all subjected to an eternal blast, as if absolute “Darkness” can condemn
the life of the earth itself. Furthermore, the forgetting with which this poem begins
is itself erased by a darkness that forgets the light, that forgets even what memory—
or indeed forgetfulness—might be.20 A similar logic is at work in the second poem,
which I will call “Where are the citys,” which at once confirms and varies the logic of
the first:
The devastating process wipes out not only the “citys” but the earth, carrying out in
an initial blow the full sequence at play in “Old times forgetfull.” This is not a story
of mere slaying or death, nor of ruins or entombment, but of the erasure of any ruin
that one might find. This second negation, in turn, takes place before the witness of an
“ever burning bright eternal Sun” (9), an apparent counterpart to “the eternal blast /
Oblivion,” though taking the form of an eternally scorching brightness (7–8). Absolute
darkness, absolute light: either way, this scorching, blasting process destroys all, rots
the earth, and erases any memory or residue of that devastation as well. The sweeping
annihilation of the second negation makes clear that pure process bears not only on
the life of a tree but also on all life, all objects, indeed on the matrix that can sustain
any particularity, for it rots the earth and annihilates even the memory of light. These
short poems thus foreground what is already present in the sonnet, the realization that
oblivion condemns the life of human beings as well.
But it would be a mistake to claim that these double negations bear primarily on
human self-regard. The second negation cuts against any such implication. Insofar as
that first erasure is a blow to human narcissism, it retains a tacit reference to the latter,
still enabling a nostalgia for human significance. The second negation, however, insists
that the logic of pure process erases any memory of human centrality, any resentment
regarding its loss. These poems thus do not merely decenter the human from its
apparent pride of place; they speak instead of a voiding of the human, an erasure so
absolute that it would be vain ever to seek it.
Without question, in these moments Clare participates in a writing of the disaster,
conceived here not as anything one could witness in empirical reality or historical time
but one that, in its hyperbolic force, erases any trace of such an event. This erasure of
history or the event might thus seem to take these poems far beyond political terms;
81
after all, the leap beyond empirical experience into an absolute darkness threatens to
become a suspect leap outside the political as well. But the references to Sodom and
Gomorrah and certain “marble pallaces” in “Where are the citys” allude to themes Clare
broaches in one of his more political lyrics, “The Flitting,” written in 1832, shortly after
the sonnet (and after his move to Northborough). This poem proposes that the familiar
molehills, weeds, and blossoms of his former landscape are “All tennants of an ancient
place,” “Coeval . . . with adams race,” as if they remain perpetually at the origins and
keep alive the primordial freshness of the world (129, 131).22 That emphasis culminates
in the final stanza, where the opposition between marble cities and enduring grasses
captures Clare’s disdain for all pomp and grandeur, all claims to human privilege:
According to this poem, time carelessly accepts the shattering, levelling effects of
history, cultivating instead a unique affection for those “persecuted weeds” that history
neglects and protecting them from its own ruinous effects. Here a certain endless
temporal process protects and sustains the earth, exempting it from the historical
process that lays waste to all human constructions.
In this conception of nonhuman process, the apathy of time does not condemn life
but sustains it, making it “coeval” with “adams race” (129) affirming whatever form of
life, human or nonhuman, that finds its place with “little things” (213), with what is
marginal to history. Here the politics of the commons becomes one of what the human
and nonhuman commons share, a politics of the persecuted. These final stanzas of
“The Flitting” elucidate well what is at stake in recent thinking that contests human
privilege and emphasizes instead a shared vibrant life or a democracy of objects.23
But “Where are the citys,” invoking the stance of “The Flitting,” at once sustains and
exceeds it. It takes the step of the second negation, pushing beyond a politics of the
marginal, erasing that erasure of a certain human privilege, and yet, through the very
logic of that negation, remaining continuous with the first, redoubling its gesture on
another level. The “eternal blast / Oblivion” (7–8), it seems, erases the eternal grass; its
pure process began before and will continue after any reference to “adams race” (129).
In that case, through this gesture the poem undermines the claim that “little things” are
given a perpetual flourishing outside history, in this respect anticipating the ubiquitous
recent arguments that expose the costs of an idealizing notion of Nature (213). Thus
“Where are the citys” undercuts a poetics of the earth, a poetics through which even
an apparently humble humanity may anchor claims to a more-than-historical origin.
In consequence, a more capaciously conceived political stance becomes clear: this
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cluster of poems outlines a politics of radical fragility—a fragility not of Dasein (which
experiences its thrownness within a distinctly human temporality) nor of “little things”
(which despite their vulnerability are guaranteed endurance) but rather of entities that
endure a nullity held in common, a shared inexistence. It conceives of a politics well
outside the reach of any biopolitical regime or indeed of any human sovereignty—one
that arises in a condition of shared oblivion.24
The tenderness for such fragile entities is not explicit in these short poems but is
evident at once in the sonnet, which begins with an apostrophe to the tree that seems to
express a certain nonanthropocentric solidarity with its condition: “Old tree oblivion
doth thy life condemn” (1).25 It might seem odd for the sonnet to develop this tone
of tenderness in a context so devastating, for the oblivion bestowed by pure process
could be understood to erase any basis for concern. Yet the sonnet makes clear that,
despite the process that has condemned the life of the tree, it continues to flourish;
the nullity that has befallen it does not bring its thriving to an end. Somehow, then,
its life continues in the void of that life’s undoing; it belongs to an earth that is long
forgotten yet somehow persists. The panoply of relations embedded in shared life, in
the interobjectivities and intersubjectivies of the commons, apparently remains intact,
as do the affective and political possibilities it perpetually generates.
What might this strange conjunction of oblivion and persistence suggest? Here it
may be best to note the strong resonances between the sonnet and Maurice Blanchot’s
theory of disaster, whose initial articulation lingers with a similarly elusive theme. The
tree, no trace of whose earlier life can be found, has grown up “to flourish now” (8);
it follows that oblivion, in Blanchot’s words, “ruins everything, all the while leaving
everything intact.”26 The tree’s life is condemned, yet the tree thrives; to borrow from
Brassier, one might say that like everything else, the tree is dead—yet it lives on.27
The event, then, is indeed obscure, beyond any ordinary concept of condemnation or
destruction. “When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come,” writes Blanchot; “it
does not happen.”28 Disaster’s advent is so elusive we cannot arrive at any knowledge
of it, for it is “related to forgetfulness—forgetfulness without memory, the motionless
retreat of what has not been treated,” or the disappearance of a wind that never
registered the significance of the “young stem” in the first place.29 The sonnet thus
seems to anticipate Blanchot’s disaster precisely, except that by discerning a disaster
that has befallen a tree, rather than a human being, it expands his rendition of disaster
to include all entities over which a wind might flow.
How might Blanchot’s articulation of this quiet disaster bear on the renditions
of such an event in speculative realism? For Brassier, as for Clare and Blanchot, the
condemnation comes not in a distant future but has already transpired. Brassier
makes clear that the empirical death of the sun is ultimately a figure for a contingency
that underlies all physical realities, one that is radically intimate to any living thing.
The arche-fossil does similar work for Meillassoux; as he argues, the category of the
ancestral that it captures “designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence
anterior to givenness itself.”30 One could thus surmise that the chronological distance of
any ancestral thing or terminal event figures the elusiveness of this perpetual process,
its taking place below the threshold of ordinary perception. Whatever produced the
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arche-fossil or will kill the sun is already rotting the earth and condemning the life of a
tree; that process operates already in every conceivable time or place.
But even this formulation falls short; as both Clare and Blanchot suggest, one can
never locate that event in time, for as an event that cancels even forgetfulness, one that
wipes out the attributes of any temporality—as one that “does not happen”—it befalls
every entity through a constitutively self-erasing dimension of temporality itself. The
sonnet captures this complex structure through its figure of the wind, which flows over
the tree in a movement that can take place only in time while erasing the significance
of any difference between past and present. The disaster “does not happen” because it
evacuates a happening that nevertheless continues to flow.31
This reading of temporality in “Obscurity” might seem to cut against its
formulations, for in lines seven and eight it twice invokes the term “now,” as if for a
moment it proposes counting the past as nothing in relation to a present in which the
tree flourishes and the speaker gazes upon it. But the poem’s insistence both on blank
oblivion and its equally blank reception highlights instead the utter erasure of that
“now,” its incapacity to escape or evade the obliterating flow of the indifferent wind.
Within that context, the sonnet’s use of the word “now” at least in part makes explicit
how this reiterated blankness produces what Blanchot describes as a “time without
present,” a time without a now that could count itself as such—a time that is not time,
that erases itself.32
Such an insight, however, bears on the notion of eternity as well, and especially on
the notion of an “eternal blast / Oblivion” (7–8). If oblivion wipes out every temporal
location, even the present, does life subsist under the impress of an eternal now, an
endless present that is sovereign over all moments? On the contrary, this sonnet works
out the temporal consequences of living under oblivion, ultimately suggesting that one
can never be present in, for, or with that oblivion, that it is precisely the effacement
of any present—even an eternal present—and thus constitutes what one might call a
noneternity, a perpetual capacity to void time. Here again this small cluster of poems
bears on a question of central, vexing concern within speculative realist thought, how
and whether to think time outside or beyond human reference.33
Such gestures radically undermine nearly any category crucial to phenomenology,
carrying the sonnet not only into post-phenomenology, to which, as Tilottama Rajan
argues, many “poststructuralist” theorists belong (including Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard), but beyond such theorists into a mode of non-
phenomenological writing, sharing and extending this feature of speculative realism.34
In this broad terrain, one might provisionally argue that the obliteration of the tree’s
life puts it in a zone that, in Blanchot’s words, “escapes the possibility of experience,” for
without a present, the self-evidence of experience—or the priority of experience as an
explanatory framework—is subtly condemned.35 One might say as well that the sonnet
evokes what Blanchot describes as a condition “outside being”—a state not of anti-
being, which still invokes the possibility of being, but one in which the very possibility
of being is effaced.36
How might a living thing thrive in the midst of such a quiet but severe disaster?
The sonnet implicitly addresses this question when it depicts how the tree receives its
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mode of inexistence: “Thou grew unnoticed up to flourish now / & leave thy past as
nothing all behind” (8–9). That past, the poem suggests, is indeed nothing, as blank as
a disappeared wind; but in treating that blank past as nothing, the tree abandons that
blankness, fails to record the fact of that recordless fate. Because of its blank receptivity,
the tree endures these obliterations without reference to what it seems to have lost. To
follow Blanchot once again, it endures in a mode of a “radical passivity” so severe it no
longer sustains any link to the possibility of action.37
This passivity—its erasure of the very possibility of action—should remind us of
the second negation, in which darkness erases the very memory of light. The tree’s
passivity repeats that negation again, replicating it in a third register. In effect, the
wind’s absolute indifference to the life-forms over which it flows is replicated in the
tree’s absolute indifference to that indifference. The tree does not notice that it grew up
unnoticed. If the wind utterly effaces the tree’s history, the tree in turn utterly effaces
that effacing.
By bringing forward this aspect of the tree’s life, the sonnet goes far toward
deprivileging the potentially disabling weight of oblivion. It gives us a moment
of horror, a certain negative revelation, pointing to the sheer inconsequence of life
under the movement of a pure blankness, but just as quickly turns its back on its own
insight. In doing so, it spurns one possible response to condemned life, the cultivation
of anguish over such a condition, and explores a nonanthropocentric alternative. It
instances instead what Anne-Lise François terms “recessive action,” whereby one
might encounter such a revelation and not take it up, not accept it as a determining
gift. Invoking Wordsworth’s line, “Stop here, or gently pass,” François suggests that it
“scandalously grants permission to pass, implying an indistinct continuity between
the act of stopping to listen and that of letting lapse or fall behind.”38 Wordsworth’s
“or” may hint at a choice between two options, but as François proposes, it may also
highlight the fact that each option may stand in for the other. Clare’s sonnet addresses
a similar question in another vein: suggesting that the tree is capable of responding
blankly to the blankness of the wind, it points to another continuity, this time between
the negative revelation and its reception.
In identifying how the logic of a renewed negation is replicated yet again, the
sonnet may remind us of a Hegelian dialectic whereby the negation of the negation
sublates spirit into a higher level. But in this sonnet, no such sublation takes place;
on the contrary, each further cancellation makes more severe the initial erasure,
making more apparent a radical nullity. The renewed negation happens, as it were,
not through Hegel but through Blanchot, where the opposition between light
and dark leads not to a synthesis but a renewed cancellation through which the
very possibility of the first term disappears. The poem underlines this logic in its
reiterations of the term “blank,” which it first introduces in the key phrase “Blank &
recordless,” then replicates twice in the final two lines as it refers to the tree’s “blank
past” and the “blank oblivion” that condemns it (2, 13, 14). In this way, the poem’s
figurations respond, as it were, to the productive capacities of Hegelian negativity
through a workless counterpart, what Rajan calls in another context “unusable
negativity,” which evacuates the temporal sequence of self-consciousness toward
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best described as “blank oblivion.” Much as the poem sketches the non-dwelling proper
to a tree, in this reading it also maps out a contrary analytic of the earthly sublime,
whereby natural forms, passing through a violence that interrupts merely biological
life, would ultimately gain access to a more effaced condition. Such a sequence would
rehearse within the aesthetic register the unusable negativity of a counter-Hegelian
descent toward the more severe nullity sketched above.
What significance does this earthly sublime then bear for the poet who inscribes
it? As I have suggested, for the most part, the poem thematizes its concerns by
attending to the consequences of a stunningly nonhuman pure process; nevertheless,
it acknowledges that its addressee must be human, separating the speaker from the
ewe and the fly with that minimal word “almost” (13) and thereby hinting at the
human relevance of what it captures. But rather than subsuming its themes under
the sovereignty of human response, the poem subjects the speaker to oblivion’s reign,
locating him not so far from the ewe and fly under the shelter of the tree. In doing so,
it suggests that the domain of human time, whose pages—including those of the poem
itself—are apparently not blank, relies on the protection of natural oblivion. Evidently,
the tree offers not a hospitality to disaster, of which Scott J. Juengel unforgettably writes
in another context, but a hospitality of disaster, so that the human and the poetic find
shelter under what is rendered blank, as if to receive a pointless care from the process
of obliteration itself.41
Here the sonnet proleptically intervenes into the speculations of the late Derrida,
suggesting that the notions of pure gift and absolute hospitality do not apply to human
beings, for which even in his account they are impossible, but rather to a process
that operates without regard for us.42 To any human gift, after all, one may respond
with gratitude, an affect that at least in small measure cancels out the absoluteness
of the initial gesture and thus disqualifies it from Derrida’s understanding of pure
hospitality. No human act, it seems, can entirely overleap its place within the field
of mutual relations. In contrast, a pure process may well be capable of carrying out
the gesture of bestowing an absolute hospitality to the life of a tree, ewe, fly, or poet,
for it remains absolutely indifferent to any gratitude that might return. Pure process
may therefore enable and condemn any life in the same gesture, in which case disaster
and flourishing are two faces of the same flowing—a possibility that goes far toward
unpacking Blanchot’s account of disaster.
This reversal of sovereignty, whereby the poet takes shelter under the sign of
disaster, applies to the poem as well. While the sonnet does leave a record, it registers
a disaster to which it is subject, proposing that it too is buffeted by a process that will
eventually efface its frail form. Thus ultimately even a poetic witness to that process
is only marginally distinct from the response of a ewe or fly, knowing very little more
than they about the nontemporality to which all of them are subject.43
In placing the human alongside nonhuman animals outside our familiar
phenomenological concepts, the sonnet may seem to exemplify the stance of one who,
according to Giorgio Agamben, in an argument responding in part to the work of
Heidegger, has learned not merely to let the animal be, but also “to let it be outside of
being,” in a zone “beyond both knowing and not knowing . . . beyond both being and
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the nothing.”44 This gesture, Agamben tentatively proposes, might enable as well the
arrival of a certain ignorance which suspends the hiatus between human and animal
and lets both be, outside of being.45 Clare’s sonnet seems to pick up these threads of
Agamben’s argument, but it does so not because it finds a place of suspension between
the human and nonhuman, as Agamben ponders, but rather subjects both to a radically
non-Heideggerian process, a nontemporality indifferent to the human and nonhuman
alike. The sonnet marks not a moment of messianic suspension, nor of the condition
of bare life one might overcome through it, but of subtle disaster, of wasted life, which
flourishes in a state none can overcome.46
If the sonnet effaces even those renditions of justice or of transformation proposed
by recent speculation—such as absolute hospitality or messianic suspension—it does
not leave its reader without recourse. In its third repetition of effacement, it opens
up yet another, seldom considered response to the possibility that all life transpires
under the sign of disaster: it leaves its own nullity “as nothing all behind” (9). The
contrast between this sonnet and the stance of Brassier, who elaborates such insights
into a version of nihilism, suggests that the latter still clings too closely to subjectivity’s
privilege, its search for an ultimately rewarding framework for existence. The turn
away from such expectations, in contrast, exposes the privilege of such demands by
abandoning them. Here nothingness ceases to remember a prior claim and makes
possible instead a radical passivity in the face of an unredeemable inexistence.
This turn away from the seductions of annihilating affect or searing insight leads
the sonnet in the direction of a rather surprising minimalism—one that contrasts
sharply with the lavish attention that speculative realism and OOO provide to these
concerns. The poet does not give the insights of these poems too great a weight; on
the contrary, he enacts what one might call, following François, a recessive mode of
writing, taking it so far that on these matters he cultivates near-silence. The fact that
Clare included the sonnet within scores of poems on other themes for The Midsummer
Cushion and returned to these concerns only in two short poems over the rest of his
career suggests that he knew how he might “gently pass.” Like the tree, he could treat
his sense of oblivion as nothing. If Coleridge explores a mode of “blank attachment” in
his Dejection Ode, as Noel Jackson proposes—a state of receptivity without prospect—
here Clare attributes to the wind, the tree, and himself a state of blank nonattachment,
a receptivity that abandons what it apparently receives.47 In doing so, he authorizes us
as well to extend this gesture in our turn, to recognize that we may best acknowledge
our place under the shelter of oblivion by turning away—by evoking that sheltering
briefly, implicitly, or in silence.
Nevertheless, the emergence of the outlines of a rigorous poetics of oblivion in this
small cluster of poems also makes clear that the formulations of Blanchot and Brassier,
arising as they do in later historical moments, articulate a quiet disaster that had already
taken place on the threshold of the nineteenth century, one brought about by the new
awareness of those physical and biological processes that, operating over vast reaches
of time, provided the alien, if necessary, preconditions for human flourishing.48 While
speculative realism may seem to exemplify a moment arising after the postmodern, it
may instead suggest that we are only now beginning to grapple with the import of an
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event that took place at the onset of a certain modernity—an event that, apparently
buried under Kantian critical philosophy, romanticism, and historicism, in fact, at
times found its articulation through them. In confronting a condition outside being,
perhaps we are only now beginning to contend with a barely suspected feature of the
romantic legacy.
Notes
1 I presented a much earlier version of this essay at the seminar “Wasted Life” at the
American Comparative Literature Association conference at Brown University in
early April 2012. I wish to thank Jacques Khalip for organizing the seminar and the
seminar’s participants for their many astute comments on the essay.
2 Katey Castellano, The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 159.
3 For recent, compelling accounts of Clare’s opposition to his moment’s biopolitical
imperative, see Chris Washington, “John Clare and Biopolitics,” European Romantic
Review 25, no. 6 (December 2014): 665–82; and Sara Guyer, Reading with John
Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2015).
4 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of the Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Washington,
DC: Zero Books, 2011), 9.
5 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey
Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 8–23.
6 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 223.
7 Ibid., 223.
8 Ibid.
9 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1986).
10 In one of the very few discussions of “Obscurity,” Adam Phillips cites its exploration
of obscurity to specify what he considers Clare’s resistance to exposing himself
as a poet to the public, reading it as “one of his finest poems, or anti-poems” that
uniquely dares to celebrate oblivion; see Adam Phillips, “The Exposure of John Clare,”
in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187. But his reading understates
how Clare, rather than seeking obscurity, long attempted to cultivate an audience on
whatever terms were available to him; for a lucid treatment of these concerns, see
Alan Vardy, John Clare: Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
11 John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period: 1822–1837, vol. 4, general ed. Eric Robinson,
ed. Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998),
256. Further references to this poem will be cited by line number in the text.
12 In anticipating the gambit of speculative realism, the sonnet challenges the formative
tradition, outlined by Thomas Pfau in Minding the Modern: Human Agency,
Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 2013), which rests on the idea that “object and concept . . . are
mutually constitutive” and that as a result one cannot separate fact and value; see
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Pfau, 31 and 311. This lucid argument, however, does not consider how human beings
should respond to the fact that certain objects (such as Meillassoux’s arche-fossil)
arose eons before human beings appeared and thus on some level existed and exist
apart from the concept. An attempt to answer this question would require a rigorous
intervention into the tradition Pfau espouses—inherited from Aristotle, Augustine,
and Aquinas—and speculative realism both.
13 The sonnet thus touches on a problematic broached in the late lyric “I Am,” where
the absence of an other effaces the speaker’s identity; Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric
Robinson and David Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 361. On
Clare’s attempt to craft a notion of identity that could subsist apart from another, see
Guyer, Reading with John Clare, 57–77.
14 For a formative discussion of this problematic in OOO theory, see Graham
Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open
Court, 2002).
15 In its emphasis on process, Clare’s cluster of poems may seem to share much with
the stance of the foremost exponent of process in speculative realism, Iain Hamilton
Grant, especially in his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (New York: Continuum,
2008) and “Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman,” in The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and
Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 41–6. But where Grant, following
Schelling, emphasizes the productive aspects of process in its capacity to generate
objects, these poems focus on its condemning them to oblivion.
16 On the arche-fossil see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity
of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), especially 8–27.
17 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn.,
ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 96–100; “A
Defence of Poetry,” 533. For a discussion of these lines on which I build here, see
also Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1971), 225. On “Mont Blanc” and speculative realism more
generally, see, among others, Greg Ellerman, “Speculative Romanticism,” SubStance
44, no. 1 (2015): 166–70; Anne C. McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency in
the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies
in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 355–75; and Evan Gottlieb, Romantic
Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016), 161–81.
18 In this regard, the sonnet anticipates Emily Dickinson’s “Four Trees,” which as
Lily Gurton-Wachter suggests, “presents a landscape with no one watching it,”
except for one who might pass by; it thus complicates the thematics of attention
she finds throughout important strands of romantic poetics. See Gurton-Wacher,
Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2016), 188.
19 John Clare, The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837–1864, vol. 1, general ed. Eric
Robinson, ed. Robinson and David Powell, associate ed. Margaret Grainger
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 211.
20 The loose syntax of the passage gestures toward still further implications, for it
suggests that the lights “forgot”—perhaps that they forgot to shine, or forgot that
they were lights at all, and thus participating, even where they shine, in what doubly
negates them. The passage inscribes a double negation within the apparently positive
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regime itself, hinting that disaster might befall in a way that may remain seemingly
invisible—in a logic to be explored below.
21 Clare, Later Poems of John Clare, 211.
22 John Clare, “The Flitting,” in Major Works, ed. with an intro. Eric Robinson and
David Powell, intro. Tom Paulin (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 250–6.
In “Songs Eternity,” nonhuman song is depicted as similarly coeval with Adam and
Eve and surviving far longer than cities or books. See Major Works,122–4.
23 See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010) and Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor,
MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011).
24 This shared condition may be captured best in two texts regarding disfigured
community: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor
and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and the response
in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown,
NY: Station Hill Press, 1988). The French title of Nancy’s text, La communauté
désoeuvrée, invokes the term désoeuvrément, or worklessness, central to Blanchot’s
thought; on this question, see Joris, “Translator’s Preface” to The Unavowable
Community, xxii–xxv.
25 This instance raises key questions about the figure of apostrophe, for analyses of
that figure rely on the assumption that nonhuman lives share a condition clearly
distinguishable from that of human subjects. OOO theory thus opens the way to new
understandings of such rhetorical figures, a rewarding problematic I do not have
space to explore here. For an extended treatment of apostrophe and related figures in
Clare, see Guyer, Reading with John Clare, 11–24.
26 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 1.
27 For considerations of the Blanchotian resonances of the phrase “living on” relevant
in the present context, see Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” in Parages, trans. James
Hulbert, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 103–91.
28 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 1, 5.
29 Ibid., 3.
30 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 20.
31 Such a rendition of temporality suggests that this sonnet’s stance shares much
with Derridean deconstruction’s account of the radical destructibility intrinsic to
temporality, especially in the logic of the trace; for an exemplary account of the
latter, see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) and “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique
of Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn, 114–29. In effect, the sonnet gives time
the name of oblivion, showing how its process subjects the tree to the logic of the
trace, evacuating its presence. But by using the metaphor of a disappearing wind to
designate time, the sonnet explores as well how time itself may not be found, even
in the trace. While this treatment is broadly consistent with Derrida’s argument, it
nevertheless foregrounds a theme that Derrida himself does not emphasize.
32 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 15. Tim Chilcott makes a related point, writing that
in “Obscurity,” “even time itself seems subject to the greater force of oblivion”; see
Chilcott, “A Real World & Doubting Mind”: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare
(Hull: Hull University Press, 1985), 126.
33 On this theme, see Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” at https://
speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.
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pdf. Accessed July 20, 2015, and Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and
Prospects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), esp. 210–16. For an approach that explores
the “temporal undulations” of quantum time and the non-present of the relations of
interobjectivity, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the
End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55–68, 81–95.
34 Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). For a discussion of how speculative realism
challenges core aspects of the phenomenological tradition, see Tom Sparrow, The
End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2014).
35 Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 7.
36 Ibid., 5.
37 Ibid., 13.
38 Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10.
39 Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s ‘Mathilda’: Melancholy and the Political Economy
of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 1/2 (Summer 1994): 46. Over the course
of its reiterations of blankness, the sonnet thus figures with unusual rigor the theme
of anonymous life; for an exemplary treatment of the latter, see Jacques Khalip,
Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009).
40 Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 335.
41 Scott J. Juengel, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Perpetual Disaster,” in Romanticism and
Disaster, ed. Jacques Khalip and David Collings, Romantic Circles Praxis 2012, http://
www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/disaster/HTML/praxis.2012.juengel.html, para. 31.
42 For representative statements along these lines, see Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit
Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 28–9,
34–70; Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond,
trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and The Gift of
Death, 2nd edn. and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2008).
43 The poem emphasizes the absence of knowledge through a fine irony, suggesting that
a fly might know almost as much as the speaker about a blank past “with time”—that
is, with the lifespan of a fly—and thereby reinforces in another way the theme of a
self-cancelling temporality.
44 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 91.
45 Ibid., 92.
46 For Agamben’s reflections on bare life in the context of the human and animal, see The
Open, esp. 33–8, 75–7. I am grateful to David Clark for pointing out the relevance of
these passages to the present argument.
47 Noel Jackson, “Coleridge’s Criticism of Life,” Coleridge Bulletin n.s. 37 (Summer
2011): 21–34.
48 For an attempt to evoke the contours of this event, see my “After the Covenant:
Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence,” European Romantic
Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 345–61.
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93
William Blake’s illuminated books, which explore alternative avenues for being and
becoming through a distinct eschatology that coincides with his unconventional
conceptions of causality and temporality, offer a rich archive for the pursuit of
connections between romanticism and speculative realism.1 Like Blake, speculative
realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux repurposes the structural features of
eschatological narratives and deploys the rhetoric of prophecy in order to reimagine
the limits and potential of human agency in relation to the rest of the material world.
In the final sentence of After Finitude, Meillassoux assumes the stance of a prophet of
contemporary thought; he expresses his hope that his work will succeed in “waking us
from our correlationist slumber, by enjoining us to reconcile thought and absolute.”2
Meillassoux’s brief but provocative text critiques what he sees as the dominant thread
of post-Kantian philosophy, a “correlationist” perspective that claims that we only ever
have access to truth through a “relation of thinking and being, and never to either
term considered apart from the other.”3 Scholars of British romanticism have begun
to engage with the major concerns of speculative realism, in particular Meillassoux’s
challenge to the hegemony of correlationism, in order to argue for the relevance of
romantic-era texts to critical conversations about nature, subjectivity, and ontology.4 In
this essay, I take these shared aesthetic strategies as an invitation to read Meillassoux as
a prophet in the Blakean tradition. I argue that an understanding of Blake’s work can
illustrate the significance of an area of Meillassoux’s philosophy that has received less
attention from literary scholars: Meillassoux’s formulation of an “immanent ethics,”
which relies upon a faith in the possibility of the arrival of an as yet inexistent God who
will inaugurate a truly just world populated by the resurrected bodies of humanity as
immortal beings.5
For contemporary scholars drawn to Meillassoux’s alignment of philosophy with
science and mathematics, the eschatological dimension of his thinking appears to
be at odds with his insistence on the intelligibility of material existence. However,
an understanding of what Meillassoux calls an “eschaology,” which serves as the
foundation for his divine ethics, is both thoroughly consistent with his thesis on
radical contingency and crucial to understanding its ethical possibilities.6 The distinct
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Speculative enthusiasm 95
the mere shadow of a living being,” is not merely elegiac, but meant as a radical
theological claim.16 As Peter Gratton puts it in his introduction to and commentary
on the major ideas of speculative realism, “Meillassoux’s discussion of this—there’s
no way around saying it—is where he likely loses many readers, even those who were
willing to follow him to the edge of the hyper chaos.”17 The very elements that make
Meillassoux’s work attractive to contemporary audiences appear to work against the
ends to which that work leads. Graham Harman addresses this apparent contradiction
in the introduction to his translation of selections from The Divine Inexistence, a
work that began as Meillassoux’s 1997 doctoral thesis and is currently in preparation
as a multivolume magnum opus: “Here, in a twenty-first century work of French
philosophy that is ostensibly materialist in spirit, we are led by a rational argument
to a concept of incarnation.”18 However, these ideas both predate and intersect with
the key interventions of the more widely read After Finitude and are intrinsic to an
understanding of the ethical possibilities of radical contingency.
Although the central role of the incarnation in Blake’s work comes as no surprise,
the manner of its implementation also frustrated the theological categories available
to his contemporaries. The romantic-era diarist Henry Crabb Robinson records
a conversation with Blake in which he declared: “We are all coexistent with God—
Members of the Divine body—We are all partakers of the divine nature . . . He is the
only God—But then he added—And so am I and so are you.” Robinson, who begins
the entry by questioning Blake’s sanity (“Shall I call him Artist or Genius—or Mystic—
or Madman?”), remarks that he had difficulty in attempting to “fix Blake’s station
between Christianity Platonism & Spinozism.”19 Blake’s insistence on the coincidence
of the human and the divine align him with the radical religious discourses of
antinomianism and popular enthusiasm, which surfaced with renewed fervor in the
political unrest and millennial anticipation of 1790s Britain. In his study of Blake’s
relationship to these traditions, John Mee traces the discourse on “enthusiasm” from
its origins in the Greek, where it was “associated with the inspiration to the poet
and the seer,” to its development over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into
“species of mania or delirium” produced by a disordered “relationship between the
imagination and the animal spirits.”20 Enthusiasm, as an accusation of religious error,
encompasses any position that would equate the human imagination, particularly in
its more materialist interpretations, with the wisdom of God. The puzzlingly messianic
dimension of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism can shed light on the challenge
to necessity that drives Blake’s enthusiastic vision; conversely, Blake’s equivalence
of “Poetic Genius” with the “Spirit of Prophecy” can illustrate how Meillassoux’s
insistence on the eventual incarnation of a God that does not exist works to transform
conceptions of human subjectivity in the present (E 1).
Blake’s work is consistently occupied with the process of Meillassouxian essential
mourning. His spectral figures range from the child laborers and slaves in Songs of
Innocence and of Experience (1789–94) to the soldiers and citizens who shed their
blood in the French and American revolutions in America: A Prophecy (1793) and
Europe: A Prophecy (1794). In Jerusalem (1804–21), Blake confronts the violence of
the Terror that followed the promise of the French Revolution and calls attention to
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Speculative enthusiasm 97
a merciful spirit, transcending humanity, is at work in the world and its beyond,
bringing justice for the departed; or such a transcendent principle is absent.”23 Both
positions—the religious and the atheistic—“are paths to despair when confronted
with spectres.”24 He explicates the source of this despair through a hypothetical
dialogue between a believer and a nonbeliever. The believer insists on the existence
of a God precisely on account of the terror invoked by the unresolved deaths of
essential spectres; a life lived devoid of hope for the eventual justice for such deaths is
simply too much to bear. In response, the atheist argues that an afterlife where justice
for the dead is distributed by the same God who allowed, or even commanded, their
earthly suffering must be a hell of the first order. This conversation illustrates the
perversely reciprocal nature of the spectral dilemma, as each participant “masks his
specific despair by exhibiting his avoidance of the other’s despair.”25 That is, each
position works by pointing to the unacceptable condition inherent in the other, but is
also dependent upon the terms of the opposing position. The believer retains a faith
in God because the thought of confronting essential spectres without the promise
of an afterlife is unfathomable, and the atheist cannot imagine taking comfort in an
afterlife facilitated by the same terrible God that produced suffering from which the
religious hope to be liberated.
In “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” Meillassoux expands on the claims
in “Spectral Dilemma,” offering three theses that link his proclamation of the God-
to-come to the rest of his philosophical project. The first two theses, “speculation
is possible only insofar as it is non-metaphysical” and “irreligion is possible only
by being speculative,” are linked to the central aim of After Finitude: “to revive the
idea of a speculative yet non-metaphysical philosophy.”26 The process of beginning to
think the absolute instead of resigning to the deadlock of correlationism begins with
a reevaluation of one of the central premises of metaphysics: “our inability to prove
why there is something rather than nothing . . . is not the mark of our ignorance of
the true reason for things, but an indication of our ability to come to know that there
are, effectively no reasons for anything.”27 His insistence that “radical contingency is
the very truth of all things” counters the power that the principle of sufficient reason
has held over metaphysical speculation.28 Meillassoux’s call for new forms of irreligion
is distinct from atheism and other previous attempts at secularization of the absolute,
which, in their insistence on primacy of the principle of reason, only ends up defending
the impossibility of definitively proving the nonexistence of God. This distinction
is crucial to his third thesis: “immortality and access to the divine, are the possible
conditions of immanence—thinkable and livable—arising only from irreligion.”29 The
apparently opposed positions of the spectral dilemma are actually united through their
insistence on philosophical necessity. A commitment to a philosophy of immanence
grounded in the necessity of radical contingency is the only way to “untie the atheist-
religious knot between God and necessity (God must either exist or not) in order to
reconnect him with the virtual (God can exist).”30 The existence of the virtual God is
merely one possibility among others, and is itself contingent, or “eternally eventual.”31 If
contingency is truly necessary, then anything is possible, including an event that would
bring about an entirely new God that is innocent of the history of human suffering.
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This God could be capable of providing justice for the dead, and, via the hope of its
eternal possibility, serve as a source of subjective transformation for the living.
The resolution of the spectral dilemma, then, begins with a wholesale revision of
assumptions governing causation and the stability of natural laws and looks toward
the opposite of finitude—immortality. In the first excerpt included in the English
translation of selected fragments from The Divine Inexistence, Meillassoux argues
that the starting point for a rethinking of causality and the development of life is “an
irreligious notion of the origin of pure novelty,” which he calls “advent ex nihilo.”32 He
mobilizes this concept to critique prevailing materialist approaches to the origin of
life and thought, which rely on the presence of a vital potential within matter that
necessarily awakens as a result of its organization or environmental interactions.
Instead, Meillassoux insists on the utter lifelessness of matter itself.33 He argues that
the emergence of life is not caused by matter’s inherent potential but, instead, is the
effect of radical contingency, an event utterly without cause, an advent “accompanied
by the simultaneous advent of material configurations that rupture with the physical laws
in the midst of which they emerge.”34 What he calls the order, or World, of life arises
without reason from the previous World of matter, a qualitative leap that results from
the absolute contingency of physical laws and establishes a new set of laws through
its appearance. Likewise, the World of thought emerged as an advent in the previous
World of life. The resolution of the spectral dilemma lies in the possibility of a fourth
advent, “the World of justice, a World where humans acquire immortality, the sole life
worthy of their condition.”35 The World of justice is not an afterlife as conventionally
conceived. As an alternative to a heaven that exists in a transcendent relation to the
present world or a period of millennium that will take place after the present world’s
end, Meillassoux conceives of the World of justice as the product of an advent that
ruptures present physical laws completely, inaugurating an entirely new, and as yet
inconceivable, set of laws. He conceives of the World of justice as an absolute novelty;
it will surpass this World, the World of thought, just as the World of life once surpassed
the World of matter. The “rebirth of bodies” that he proposes, then, is not a strange
detour into the Book of Revelation, but an event that is entirely consistent with radical
contingency through a conception of advent as distinct from the traditional duality of
chance and finality, a possibility “that would be no more astonishing than these latter
advents that have in fact taken place.”36 The “recommencement of the human” is the only
way to make “universal justice possible, by erasing even the injustice of shattered lives”
without recourse to the transcendence that grounds both the atheist and religious
terms of the spectral dilemma.37
Meillassoux’s claim that the possibility of obtaining justice for essential spectres
involves the resurrection of the dead in reconstituted bodies, startling as it is in the
context of the usual concerns of speculative realism, would have fit readily into the
religious discourse of eighteenth-century Britain.38 In one striking example, Joseph
Priestley, a scientist and Dissenter associated with Blake through the radical publisher
Joseph Johnson, issued a series of treatises that attempt to reconcile his materialist
philosophy with Biblical prophecy. For Priestley, the duality of matter and spirit must
be collapsed in order to support a rational reading of Christianity. In his “Introductory
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Essays” to Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775), Priestley seeks to assure
those who would be opposed on religious grounds to the assertion “so much of the
business of thinking should be made to depend upon mere matter” with a version of
materialism that would “not at all alarm those who found all their hopes of a future
existence on the Christian doctrine of a resurrection from the dead.”39 This claim sets the
stage for Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), in which Priestley authors a
materialist eschatology that proceeds through a meticulous reading of the Scripture as
evidence. In the Disquisitions, the possibility of an afterlife is not precluded by, but rather
depends upon, the resurrection of the material body independent of a superadded
immaterial spirit. Priestley quickly published The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity
(1777) as an appendix to Disquisitions to clarify his argument as a commitment to a
philosophical necessity: natural laws, as the product of a benevolent God, tend toward
perfection and support a progressive view of politics.40 Priestley and Meillassoux both
make claims about the afterlife in the interest of developing a thesis about causality;
however, Priestley’s system exemplifies the traditional materialism that Meillassoux
critiques in The Divine Inexistence. Priestley’s insistence on matter as living potential
is derived from an impulse to accommodate divinity to the existing laws of the natural
world, leading to a vision of the afterlife that would horrify Meillassoux’s atheist.
An afterlife necessitated by a God that included the suffering and incomprehensible
death associated with essential spectres as part of a so-called benevolent plan from the
beginning cannot provide justice for the dead.
Blake’s prophecies, likewise, are consistently occupied with dismantling the
doctrine of necessity assumed in Enlightenment philosophy. His vehement rejection
of deism and “Natural Religion” centers on a critique of the insistence on empiricism
and adherence to the principle of reason that dominated Enlightenment discussions of
religion. The letter that precedes the third book of Jerusalem, “To the Deists,” not only
casts them as “Enemies of Christianity” and “Enemies of the Human Race & of Universal
Nature” but also names deism as the agent of the historical and contemporary violence
attributed to religion: “All the Destruction therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen
from Deism, which is Natural Religion” (E 200–1). In his first two sets of illuminated
plates, All Religions Are One and There is No Natural Religion (1788), Blake contrasts the
empiricism of Natural Religion with a “Poetic Genius” or “Spirit of Prophecy,” which
serves as the source of “the body or outward form of Man” and likewise generates
the “form of all things” (E 1). Blake argues that limiting the sphere of knowledge to
what can be derived from the senses, or “organs of perception,” will reduce human
“desires & perceptions” to the limited realm of “objects of sense.” Likewise, he argues
that the “Philosophic & Experimental,” dominated by an adherence to the principle of
reason, “would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than
repeat the same dull round over again” (E 2–3). These limits, felt by the individual as a
desire for an infinite he is “incapable of possessing,” leave the human race in a state of
perpetual “despair” (E 2). Thinkers such as “Voltaire Rousseau Gibbon Hume,” in their
efforts to liberate religion from the tradition of received authority, end up calcifying
human potential within the confines of necessity: “Man is Righteous in his Vegetated
Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to Man” (E 200–1). For Blake, the
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anguish of the religious becomes coincident with the anguish of the atheist through the
assimilation of Enlightenment discipline into religious discourse.
In Jerusalem, Blake dramatizes the despair perpetuated by the atheist and religious
interlocutors of the spectral dilemma through his depiction of the patterns of violence
and suffering that result from Albion’s fall and ensuing divisions. In the opening of the
first book, this fall is precipitated by Albion’s rejection of a call to participate in the
“Divine Vision,” dictated to Blake by the “Saviour” himself (4.4, 13). Albion dismisses
this vision as a “Phantom of the over heated brain!” attempting to seduce him with the
empty promise of transcendence: “shadows of immortality! /Seeking to keep my soul a
victim to thy Love” (4. 24–5). Arguing that “By demonstration, man alone can live, and
not by faith,” Albion vows to “build [his] Laws of Moral Virtue” while “dissembling/
His jealousy before the throne divine, darkening, cold!” (4.31, 34–35). Later, as Albion
fully succumbs to the “Sleep of Ulro” (4.1), a worldview dedicated to and constrained
by knowable and measurable material existence, he voices the despair at the lack of
human agency that arises in the absence of the divine:
Human lives, experiences, and emotions have become simultaneously subject to the
random and unfathomable causes of nature and fated to become waste products of
the relentless activity of the institutions of modernity. From Albion’s strict materialist
perspective, which rejects the absolute as irrational, life appears to be coterminous with
perpetual death, as “Man”—or “Life” itself—emerges as Jerusalem’s essential spectre.
The impassioned speeches between Los and his Spectre in the first book dramatize
the terms of the atheist and religious positions that generate the spectral dilemma.
The Spectre, “A horrible Shadow of Death,” first attempts to sway Los from his
efforts to regenerate Albion through faith, art, and imagination with the discourse
of Enlightenment rationality: “he sought by other means, To lure Los: by tears, by
arguments of science & by terrors” (7.4–7). He describes the atrocities committed
in the name of faith, the “webs of war & of/ Religion” that consume the Sons and
Daughters of Albion in the ongoing efforts to “separate a Law of Sin, to punish thee in
thy members” (7.44–50). Later on, as Los compels the Spectre to labor with him, the
Spectre gives voice to his despair:
The Spectre’s lament proceeds on the terms of Meillassoux’s atheist, who asks the
believer: “To live under the reign of such a perverse being, who corrupts the most
noble words—love, justice—with his odious practices: isn’t this a good definition of
hell?”41 A God that “feeds on Sacrifice & Offering,” who not only allows terrible deaths
but also revels in the “cries & tears” of his subjects and makes a mockery of “Pity &
Compassion” is incapable of granting justice for the dead. William Paley’s reading of
Jerusalem argues that the Spectre of Albion “takes the ideological form of the worship
of authoritarian Reason,” whereas the Spectre of Los “manifests itself as an obsession
with a God who damns His subject creatures irrevocably and without reason.”42 Both
of these perspectives are aspects of Blake’s vehement rejection of deism and natural
religion. The Spectre of Los, who has become “Despair,” serves as an example of a
believer who perceives human life as “Contrary” to the “Almighty.” This form of belief
eats away at the currently living as it corrupts the possibility of a truly redemptive
afterlife, manifesting itself as a deeply conflicted subject who moves through the world
“all reversed & for ever dead: knowing and seeing life, yet living not.”
Blake’s refusal to assimilate Enlightenment discourse into religious prophecy also
informs the narrative strategy of his illuminated books, which refuse to conform
to the necessitarian vision of apocalypse and millennium visible in thinkers like
Priestley. Jerusalem does not adhere to the conventions of eschatological narratives,
which assume the teleological progression of providential history. In Jersualem,
Blake repeatedly pits the labor of Los and his Spectre against institutions founded by
empiricism and abstract reason:
Here, Blake aligns “Natural Religion” and “Natural Morality” with “eternal despair,”
critiquing deism in the same terms that Meillassoux’s atheist uses to counter the
religious position of the spectral dilemma. The deist’s altar is built on “Reasonings,”
“Demonstrations,” and the unavoidability of human suffering; the deist God rules
over a “wondrous rocky World of cruel destiny” and promises only “eternal death.”
Los’s efforts to dismantle and interrupt the construction of institutions that support
the worship of this terrible God are repeatedly unsuccessful; over and over again
in Jerusalem, the well-intentioned activity of the revolutionary artist is assimilated
repeatedly into the discourse of Enlightenment as “at the sight of the Victim, & at
sight of those who are smitten, / All who see become what they behold” (66.35–6).
Throughout Jerusalem, Blake casts deism as an insidious and communicable disease.
This particular passage is one of many that recur throughout Chapters 2 and 3, as Blake
stages scenes that repeat this process, in which the despair perpetuated by “Natural
Religion” and “Natural Morality” spread, and individuals “Stricken with Albion’s
disease . . . become what they behold” (39.33). The events of Jerusalem frustrate the
narrative progression of an eschatological narrative as they “repeat the same dull
round” of the spectral dilemma.
Meillassoux contends that the way to break free of the cycle of “eternal despair”
perpetuated by the religious and atheist positions is through a “factial ontology” that
follows from the concept of advent ex nihilo. In the available fragments of The Divine
Inexistence, he constructs an argument to support what he calls a “divine ethics” that
“rests on the real possibility of immortality.”43 His insistence that this immortal life must
involve the rebirth of the human follows directly from his conception of advent. If the
fourth World of justice were to appear—and its appearance is both entirely possible
and never a certainty—it would require a rupture with the current World of thought
as profound as that between the earlier Worlds of matter and life. If humans are able
to access the absolute through their grasp of radical contingency, then they cannot be
surpassed by anything except an all-powerful God. This being, brought into existence
through the radical leap of an advent, would accompany a completely new set of
physical laws, eliminating the most significant injustice that affects the human in the
present: death. Meillassoux writes,
What advent could produce something other than a variant of former Worlds (some
new law of matter, new living species, or new creation of thought) since no being
can be incommensurable with humans in the same manner as humans are with life
or life with matter? The response follows naturally from this question: namely, the
sole possible novelty surpassing humans just as humans surpass life would be the
recommencement of the human. That is why the fourth World ought to be called
the World of justice: for it is only the World of the rebirth of humans that makes
universal justice possible, by erasing even the injustice of shattered lives.44
How, then, does a conception of the fourth World translate into an ethics for the
present? According to Meillassoux, the aim of his project is to “make the fourth world
a possibility which can enhance, in our own world, the subjectivity of human beings
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living in our day by profoundly transforming the private lives of those who take
seriously such a hypothesis.”45 This transformation awaits those who actively desire
it: “If the fourth world can have an effect upon present existence, it can do so only in
the case of an eschatological subject, moved by the desire for universal justice. I call
such a subject a vectorial subject—that is to say one magnetically attracted by the
vector of the emancipation to come.”46 It is precisely through a realization of the gap
between the laws of the World of Justice and the laws of the present that the ethical
possibilities of advent begin to come into view.
Blake’s vision of the afterlife appears as the advent of an entirely new World in the
Meillassouxian sense, which appears suddenly, at the moment “Time was finished,”
driven by a vibrant conversation between the previously fallen aspects of Albion:
Blake’s vision heralds the rebirth of human life, but also of the particulars of previous
worlds of thought, life and matter: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth
& Stone.” The specific literary, scientific, and philosophical figures that once warred
with one another in an unceasing cycle of violence, including “Bacon & Newton &
Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer,” reappear as participants alongside the rest
of Albion’s citizens in a vibrant and perpetual conversation (98.9). The laws of the
current world no longer apply as Blake exposes their contingency through a series of
paradoxical juxtapositions. “Time & Space” themselves “vary according as the Organs
of Perceptions vary,” as humanity (or the recommencement of humanity) is no longer
constrained by the ratio of Reason. Death no longer serves as the greatest injustice or
a source of despair, as the “all tremendous unfathomable NonEns / Of Death” itself
appears in continual “regenerations terrific.”
Using Meillassoux’s terms to read Blake’s prophetic rhetoric reveals that the prophet
of the World of Justice is not a cause of the advent of the new world or a sign of its
inevitable arrival, but an effect of its eternal possibility. It is possible to read the labors
of Los as the activity of what Meillassoux calls a “vectorial subject.” In first book of
Jerusalem, Los first assumes the stance of a prophet in his struggle with the Spectre
104
In this protracted moment, Los projects a unified Albion into a nonspecific future
time and prophesies an End. In his state of separation and fury, he casts the process
of “regeneration” and “self-annihilation” in terms of “anguish” and “terror.” With the
allusion to a time that “will arrive,” and the ambiguous placement of that time with
the repetition of “shall,” Los locates the regeneration of Albion in an uncertain point
in the future, suspending time while simultaneously calling attention to the moment
of utterance. This uncertainty and temporal disruption serve as incitements to action.
Jerusalem answers the questions that it poses about the agency of individuals within
systems through its constant refusal to follow a predetermined narrative trajectory;
through a series of prophetic moments, Blake explores the means through which the
hope for the afterlife can transform those that await it. The final plates of Jerusalem
break the cycle of the spectral dilemma with Blake’s idiosyncratic version of the
incarnation:
The society that emerges in Jerusalem is built on conversation, as “The Four Faces
of Humanity,” formerly separated, converse “together in Visionary forms dramatic”
and commune “In the Forgiveness of Sins according to the Covenant of Jehovah”
(98.12–46). The “pity” that moves it, “every kindness” figured as “a little Death,” works
through moments of self-annihilation, no longer figured as “terror” and “anguish.”
Instead, acts of mutual forgiveness, recognition of the other, and intellectual exchanges
dissolve boundaries between individuals and constitute moments of benevolent self-
annihilation that regenerate and transform. The community that emerges from these
iterative acts of love, pity, forgiveness, and death is instantiated through an ongoing,
dynamic process.
Blake’s speculative enthusiasm encourages an affective stance that operates through
openness to and reciprocal exchange with the other in order to embrace radical
contingency. In “After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous
Transcendence,” David Collings asks scholars of British romanticism to consider the
ramifications of the narratives of secularization that have justified the field within the
canon of literary studies and the university. These secular narratives, which ground
their explanations of humanity in materiality to secure their legitimacy are actually,
like modernity, founded on a “gesture of negation, on whose (anti)basis it can build not
only its idea of material process but also its notions of historical aimlessness (shaped
by the absence of a telos), scientific investigation (of a reality stripped of ontological
import), the delimitation of any ‘culture,’ the philosophical critique of metaphysics,
and the literary supersession of the religious.”47 Collings proposes a challenge that
invites not only romanticists but also practitioners of the humanities and the arts more
generally, to embrace the vulnerability of human subjectivity in a universe lacking
the certainty of a divine covenant rather than proceeding with “modernity’s intricate
practices of self-construction.”48 For Collings, “The challenge is not to perfect a new
guarantee but to reconstruct something like symbolic exchange itself as a mode of
subtle relation between parties neither of which can finally master the other, neither of
which is ultimately final or sovereign.”49 Meillassoux defines his solution to the spectral
dilemma as “speculative” in contrast to both the religious and the atheist perspectives
as a form of hope that breaks through the despair of modernity, which “aims at the
liberation of the power of action present in the subject.”50 In Jerusalem, individuals can
initiate action, but can only effect change through acts of exchange between human
beings, through what Collings calls “an incalculable reciprocity, a radically vulnerable
telos that is given to and received from the other.”51 Both Blake and Meillassoux, though
ostensibly working through a religious framework (eschatology/eschaology), establish
106
distinct models of subjectivity that both eschew covenantal guarantee and challenge
the gesture of negation on which modernity is founded.
At the conclusion of the currently available fragments of The Divine Inexistence,
Meillassoux articulates the four links that humans can establish with God, associating
each with an affective state. The first, the atheist position, leads to “sadness, tepidity,
cynicism, and the disparagement of what makes us human,” or, as he characterizes
it in his discussion of the spectral dilemma, “despair.”52 The counterpart to atheism,
believing in the existence of a transcendent God, leads to “fanaticism, flight from
the world, the confusion of sanctity and mysticism and of God as love and God as
power.”53 He characterizes the third position as a monstrous hybrid of the atheist
and religious positions. “Not believing in God because he exists” takes the form of
a “demoniacal revolt in the fact of all the disasters of existence,” which draws its
power from “indifference” and “apathy” and results in “cynicism, sarcasm toward
every aspiration, hatred of self.”54 The fourth position, “believing in God because he
does not exist,” is the only one to offer an “immanent form of hope.”55 This not-yet-
existent God and the fourth World of justice reinforce Meillassoux’s philosophical
insistence on the necessity of contingency. To truly redeem the lives of those who are
already passed requires the resurrection of the dead not only to avoid a sacrificial
politics that subordinates the dead to the living, but also because it is philosophically
consistent with the operation of advent ex nihilo. The rebirth he proposes is not
necessary, but possible, “and not only is rebirth possible; it cannot be deemed either
probable or improbable.”56 In a 2010 interview with Graham Harman, Meillassoux
clarifies the political significance of what Harman calls “the strange but fascinating
concept of a virtual God.”57 Meillassoux claims that a faith in this “eternal possible”
separates radical politics from its own messianic impulses, frees individuals from
the paralyzing despair of the spectral dilemma, and allows for more productive
investment of “energy in an egalitarian politics that has become conscious of its
limits.”58 He argues that human beings can “expel the eschatological desire from
politics only by allowing this desire to be unfolded openly in another sphere of
existence.”59 For Meillassoux and Blake, affective transformation is a key component
of revolutionary radicalism.
Blake makes an impassioned case for the centrality of artistic creativity and
intellectual dialogue—the labor of the humanities—to the revolutionary process.
Blake’s “Poetic Genius,” coincident with the “Spirit of Prophecy,” can be read as the
expression of the eternal hope of Meillassoux’s vectorial subject, which refuses to accept
the structures of reason that support the self-enclosed, self-generating autonomous
subject of modernity without succumbing to the gesture of negation that tends to
underwrite materialist explanations of reality and history. To combat the “Mighty
Polypus” of modernity that Blake depicts in Jerusalem, every individual is called upon
to be a prophet of the Divine Appearance, to combat the myriad temptations to fall
into “despair,” to avoid becoming ensnared, rooted, and fixed in unproductive habits of
thought and feeling, whether they are built and maintained through systems of labor,
politics, religion, or nature itself.
107
Notes
1 For example, Saree Makdisi makes a case for what he calls Blake’s “ontological
antinomianism.” He reads Blake’s illuminated books as “constituting a new kind of
body, and anticipating a new kind of being, one no longer subject to the law, and
especially to the laws of necessity and of regulation.” William Blake and the Impossible
History of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 262. Christopher
M. Bundock observes that Blake’s prophetic writing, through its repeated failures
to fulfill the expectation of eschatological narrative, “dilates the sense of actual
life’s impossibility: the realities of limitation, depression, and failure” in order to
“reformulate our most basic expectations about time, probability and impossibility.”
“Auguries of Experience: Impossible History and Infernal Redemption” in Romantic
Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2016), 167.
2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), 128.
3 Ibid., 5.
4 Greg Ellermann argues that “speculative realism helps us unearth a less-familiar vein
of romantic nature philosophy—according to which nature can be conceptualized
without being inevitably annexed to notions of will, thought, or vitality.” “Speculative
Romanticism,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 156. Likewise, Anne McCarthy, in a
reading of Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” points out that Shelley anticipates what
Meillassoux calls the “great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers”
in a poem that dramatizes “the catastrophic realization of his own vulnerability
and a subject-position that is characterized first and foremost as a relation to
contingency.” “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’
or ‘Mont Blanc,’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (2015): 357.
Evan Gottlieb makes a forceful case that the relevance of British romanticism and
speculative realism to each other (and their mutual relevance to the concerns of the
present) is rooted in their shared commitment to “exploring ontological questions
of the first order.” Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 7.
5 Quentin Meillassoux, “Appendix: Excerpts from L’inexistence divine,” trans. Graham
Harman, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 189.
6 Quentin Meillassoux, “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” in The Grandeur of
Reason: Religion, Tradition, and Universalism, ed. Connor Cunningham and Peter
Candler (London: SCM Press), 463.
7 All references to Blake’s poetry and prose refer either to plate and line number or “E”
followed by the page number according to William Blake, The Complete Poetry and
Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor
Books, 1982).
8 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 463.
9 Quentin Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” Collapse IV (2008): 262.
10 Ibid., 261.
11 Ibid., 262.
12 Ibid.
108
13 Ibid., 266.
14 Ibid., 265.
15 Peter Gratton includes a discussion comparing Meillassoux’s formulation of “essential
mourning” to Derrida’s work on mourning. He locates the key difference in Derrida’s
“Heideggerian conception that our lives are lived in our being-towards-death,”
versus Meillassoux’s refusal to choose “for or against God’s existence, as the theists
and atheists do, but follow the proposition that ‘God does not yet exist.” Speculative
Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloosmbury, 2014), 79–81.
16 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 263.
17 Gratton, Speculative Realism, 65.
18 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 115.
19 Gerald E. Bentley (ed.), Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 309–312.
20 John Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of
Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25, 29.
21 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical
Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1.
22 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 263.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 265.
26 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 444–5.
27 Ibid., 446.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 445.
30 Ibid., 449.
31 Ibid., 460.
32 Meillassoux, “Appendix,” 179.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid., 183.
35 Ibid., 189.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., 190.
38 Ibid., 187–93.
39 Joseph Priestley, “Introductory Essays to Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the
Principle of the Association of Ideas,” in The Theological and Miscellaneous Works &C.
Of Joseph Priestley, Ll.D F.R.S. &C. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1972), 181.
40 Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger,
2005); and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated: Being an Appendix to the
Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. to Which Added an Answer Theory of the
Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1977).
41 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 264–5.
42 Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983), 245.
43 Meillassoux, Divine Inexistence, 188.
44 Ibid., 190.
45 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 463–4.
46 Ibid.
109
In the current speculative materialist debate about subjects and objects, romantic
women writers might well have something significant to say, if only because their
own struggles in becoming speaking subjects have for so long—now and in their own
time—been seen as natural and unnatural objects themselves. Recent scholarship
has lauded the expressly feminine subjectivities of poets such as Charlotte Smith,
Mary Robinson, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, and has likewise been attentive to their
representations of an empirical body cultured through Enlightenment discourses
of taste and sensibility, their understanding of the sciences of geology, botany, and
medicine, and their eloquent resistance to an array of gendered ideologies.1
Women writers, however, may make their most valiant objections to an
Enlightenment that has left them behind when they shirk subjectivity altogether,
when they describe nature as a series of encounters between materiality and human-
bound poetic discourse. Their attention to the nonhuman world reveals them to be
already entangled with it, without their romantic subjectivities, and sometimes even
in spite of poets’ own tendencies to represent nature for their own ends. Our own
close regard for nightingales, waves, light, wind, bubbles, and the moon in romantic
writing can help us to complicate the debates within the so-called “speculative turn”
about the ethical withdrawal of objects from humans, particularly regarding feminism,
subjectivity, and the potential actions of politicized subjects and objects. This essay
suggests how humans, bodies, and objects exist in relation to one another without
simply privileging the human. Women’s things dissolve the separateness of human
subjectivity, particularly the exceptionalism of the feminine subject, by incorporating
them as a body among bodies, a thing among things. What is more, romantic writers
reveal both the isolation of the human subject and withdrawn objects to be forms of
egocentric masculinity. While I concentrate on Smith and Barbauld to make these
claims, we can see that Robinson, Wollstonecraft, and even Wordsworth, when they
think through gendered subjects and objects, end up thinking beyond bodies and
things to more nebulous materialities that undo gendered subjects and discrete objects
all at once.2
112
In contrast to philosophers who tend to emphasize ontologies of the real over and
against socially constructed discourses and representational practices that distance
us from that real, romantic poets tend more toward something like Jane Bennett’s
notions of assemblages of things that are both matter and energy, tied together through
“impersonal affect,” the Lucretian and Spinozan shared threads of atomic or affecting
materiality.3 Yet, unlike Bennett’s ontology, which gives literary studies short shrift
in its attempts to think about how allegedly “human” language would irrevocably
anthropomorphize its descriptions of nature and the world outside the human psyche,
poets pointedly include language in the mix of human and nonhuman matter.4 In so
doing, they help us to put Bennett’s assemblages into conversation with Karen Barad’s
attention to the entanglements of language and materiality.5 Such an opportunity is
compelling for feminist new materialists and romantic scholars alike, as Bennett’s and
Barad’s theories still have not been mingled together as they might be. It is romantic
poets—particularly women poets most interested in the mobility of gendered bodies
and in philosophical thinking about dynamic forms of language and materiality—
who give us the startling opportunity to do so. They ask some of the most prescient
questions facing any nonanthropocentric theory: how are materialities dynamic? How
do these materialities intertwine with language that is doubly human and nonhuman?
How does materiality reveal problems with philosophies of discrete objects that
replicate masculinist ideologies? And perhaps most importantly, how do materialities
provoke ontological change: how does it start and what does change look like? As poets
raise these questions, they show us not only how language’s patterns actively shape
materiality but also how new material forms might, even more imperatively, erupt new
tropes that portend poetry as a testing ground for other ways of being and becoming.
In this sense, romantic poets move beyond even Bennett and Barad because they show
how change does not simply result from additive assemblages or differential cuts but
from self-created shape-shifting that inaugurates transfiguring revolution.
Romantic poets’ complicated use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe, two tropes that,
since Paul de Man, have become representative of romantic poetry and the lyric more
generally, alters the grounds of our assumptions about how feminine subjects became
human by grasping at this vocative agency. Rather than mimicking the Enlightenment
subject positions of either rational man or the man of feeling, romantic writers stage
a confrontation between human subjects and nonhuman things such as the moon in
order to reconfigure the status of both. Women poets, however, do not easily reject those
subject positions that eighteenth-century women novelists, as well as philosophers such
as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft, had so long fought to obtain.
Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784–97) and Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon
(1796)—two volumes written in conversation—both appear to construct speakers who
113
struggle with the desire to heighten their subjective positions with a poetic agency that
only seems to grant the moon and the sea anthropomorphic status. In both Smith’s
“To the Moon” and Robinson’s “Address to the Moon,” the distressed speakers cannot
help but ask for the comfort of the “fair planet.” These acts of imagination might at
first appear to transmute nonhuman persistence into mental respite, a brazen if not
banal anthropocentric use of the moon to adumbrate the tides of sensibility within and
without the speaker.
Yet, as I hope to show, the impossible inverse occurs: the materiality of the nonhuman
infects and affects the speaker’s own body, such that the speaker, her environment, and
the language of nature together become tied in a confederation of things that share and
exchange a series of shifting materialities, including human breath and voice, light,
wind, and gravitational force. Poets arrive at the primacy of things and the natural
world only after an intense, poetic negotiation of relations between the human and
nonhuman. More resolutely, Robinson and Smith reveal how modes of address do not
animate the nonhuman at the cost of the impairing human subject and her colonizing
thought. Their lines serve as a corrective to classic arguments about apostrophe and
prosopopoeia that understand figures of address to personify and enliven their objects.
Rather, tropes of address, on my reading, become a transformative means of bringing
into being new human–nonhuman alliances and assemblages that radically sidestep
the binaries of life and death, lyrical voice and silence. Their mytho-poetics bend
classical rhetoric into a myth-making venture, where all humans are already fictive
characters created by their nonhuman terms of address.
“To the Moon,” the fourth sonnet in Smith’s collection, engages a bifurcating
technique by first addressing and personifying the moon as a fellow subject, but then
turning in the last eight lines to a different conception of the moon that undoes, or
at the very least questions, Smith’s compulsive anthropomorphism. The poem begins
with a direct address: “QUEEN of the silver bow!” immediately characterizing the
moon as Diana, that virginal, protective, feminine mytho-poetic force (1).6 At first
such personification prompts us to read the lunar rock as an anthropomorphic
analogue for the idealized woman who, unlike the speaker, has great power over herself
and over nature. The speaker arguably attempts to understand and categorize nature
as something illuminated by subjective, cultural categories that, as object-oriented
ontologists tell us, falsely relate everything in the real world back to human subjectivity
and its knowledge systems. Yet, the poem’s supermoon effects a gravitational pull that
reverses the weight of the lyric’s seemingly anthropomorphic animation.
Whatever we might want to say about Smith’s invocation of Greek myth and the
classical world’s personification of scientific forces, this humanistic shout out converts
the moon into an object that does not idly listen to the melancholy speaker but affects
her in return. The silver bow not only represents the material world in a state of
potentiality but also marks a medium of technology that will enable the moon to move
and communicate itself, through arrows of light. Smith is dancing on a very thin line
here when she describes how the moon’s light both figuratively and literally affects the
speaker:
114
While the metaphor of the moon as “Queen” might tempt us to read this description
as part of an extended metaphor for maternal soothing or even female aristocratic
patronage such as that Smith received from the Duchess of Devonshire, in fact the
description registers more profound material transactions between two moving
objects, both subjected to the force of movements that express their very natures.7 The
speaker—in definitive and simple monosyllabic verbs—strays, watches, marks, and
gazes, until finally the moon sheds the light upon her. Smith’s speaker is no Swiftian
gullible traveler, marking observations with the ideology of empirical truth; her own
embodied motion and affective attention give up affect to the natural world, as it emits
its material energy to her. The moon’s “mild and placid light” tempers the speaker’s
“troubled breast” with “a soft calm,” as if the light itself, its calm vibrations, alters the
speaker’s own body. Such an affect, akin to Spinoza’s formulation of one body affecting
and moving another, has already been anticipated by the speaker’s watching, marking,
or gazing at the stream, clouds, and light. Thus the affective activity and response that
seems to be dialogic—the speaker watches nature, that in turn aids her emotional
state—is actually nearly simultaneous: “And while” she gazes the moon is already
acting upon her.
The poem might seem to enliven the “suspended animation” that Barbara Johnson
famously claimed is endemic to lyrical address, whether through the “self eternal
possessed by the other” or the address that attempts to make the poem’s object human
(32–34). Yet, the poem’s first six lines actually demonstrate an entwining of speaker
and object that the final eight lines unravel.
Once the phrase “oft I think” disrupts the gentle interplay between the speaker’s gaze
and the moon’s light, the positing of the shared space of materiality becomes conditional
upon the death of the sufferers and the children. The speaker, too, in her final vocative
couplet places herself in eternal transit between this world and that of the moon: “Oh!
That I soon may reach thy world serene, / Poor wearied pilgrim—in this toiling
scene” (13–14). The speaker longs to put herself to death, if only through a figural
transcendence to a more heavenly scene, in a reversal of prosopopoeia’s animating
115
force. This reversal, however, signals more than the impossibility or limits of this trope’s
powers of vitality and its anthropomorphism. The sighing “Oh” represents neither the
vocative “O” that calls the moon into a pure presence nor the “Oh” of the speaker’s pure
expression of subjectivity that would, in the end, countermand the moon’s power by
reminding us that the speaker, after all, continues to survive and to feel more strongly
than the moon ever could. The speaker is not simply de-animated nor even put to rest
with a lyrical nap; if we pay closer attention to Smith’s language, which undercuts such
vocatives, the speaker becomes one more material thing conversant with another. In
an ironic twist, it is the figure of sight and light, so often the trope of rationality and the
white-lighted supremacy of the Enlightenment subject, that offers a ubiquitous form of
address, a relationality that transverses humans and nonhumans.
Not an instance of anthropomorphic prosopopoeia, the moon is neither animated
nor anthropomorphized so much as located as a series of dynamic material
movements: “queen of the silver bow”; “fair planet of the night”; “thy benignant
sphere”; “thy world serene.”8 The moon is a silver bow (an arched sliver of light with
the potential for casting itself upon others), a planet (not a transcendent heaven but
an astrological body), a sphere that mildly rather than harmfully affects others, and,
finally, another world, a calm one. Meanwhile the speaker herself becomes a “poor
wearied pilgrim—in this toiling scene”—a body in transit amid bodies overtaxed
by movement—working, tramping, and struggling. Here we have two bodies in
movement—one gently without rough affect, the other too busy, looking to the moon
as a model for slow and calm movements (and rests).9
What begins as a material exchange becomes a relation of two bodies that move
each other even as they reveal their differential motions within a material, affective
ecosystem. Rather than replaying the binaries of subject and object, life and death,
human and nonhuman, Smith’s poem moves us toward what Bennett in Vibrant
Matter describes as the material relations among human and nonhuman subjects.
Bennett—and new materialists more broadly—intervenes into speculative realist and
object-oriented ontologies by insisting, unlike Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,
that objects are not the basic ontological unit, and they do not primarily exist alone,
resistant to the world that tries to know them. Instead, humans and nonhumans
need to be seen in a larger assemblage of materials and objects. As Bennett argues,
anthropomorphism in small doses “can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled
not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with
variously composed materialities that form confederations.”10 Thus we might say that
the glimmers of personification (“Queen,” “fair,” “benignant”) in Smith’s descriptions
of the moon are swept away and engulfed in the moon’s material motions as well as her
own, which put moon and speaker on similar terrain of conversant material exchange.
Similarly, Smith’s sonnet twelve, “Written on the Seashore,” ends when the speaker
posits herself as a shipwreck’d mariner whose “feeble cries” become more and more
faint, “ ‘Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies” (14).11 When Smith’s speakers
envision their own death, they do not simply die a hysterical death of sublime woe.
Instead, Smith depicts a union between those “cries” and the “tide,” as wind and water
unite in a sort of semiotic-material haze. Boundaries between subject and object dissolve
116
inside the liminal, choric materiality of the ocean. The speaker enables a purer sort
of pilgrimage, a movement that disintegrates the human into a dispersed materiality
that can ascend to heaven particle by particle. Smith intensifies her heterogeneous
ocean-cliff-wind-human assemblage into what Bennett describes as “living, throbbing
confederation” with a “swarm of vitalities at play.”12 Assemblages form a complex body
or mode that “maintain[s]the specific relations of ‘movement and rest’ that obtains
between its parts.”13 To “form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be
modified by others” in a confederate body of jointly participating elements.14 Now a
unit of sorts, a confederate body, the lunatic and tides are both moved unaccountably
by the moon.
If this shared materiality provides an alternative form of ontology between speaker
and moon, is it nevertheless muted and subverted by the very human description that
sets out to evoke it? Critics have tended to consider prosopopoeia, as a figure of thought,
ultimately anthropocentric; however, it may invoke a more complicated relationality
of human and nonhuman.15 Bennett, in her characteristically elliptical comments
about the politics of anthropomorphism, writes, “an anthropocentric element in
perception can uncover a whole new world of resonances and resemblances—sounds
and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe
to have a hierarchical structure. We at first may see only a world in our own image,
but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the
seeing self).”16 While skeptics of Bennett’s philosophy have taken such short asides
as a lack of extensive political thinking, such sparing rhetoric may be entirely the
point, as it is in Smith’s sonnet. The almost unavoidable personifications give way
to more flatly material, nearly scientific descriptions of the moon (“bow,” “planet,”
“sphere”), until the speaker ends only with her own affective and physical movement,
leaving the vibrancy of the moon, at least in part, to its own devices. Lest I overstate
Bennett’s case, Smith, it may be safer to say, reveals some of the undiscovered country
of Bennett’s argument that the rest of this essay will seek to explore: namely, how is it
that things come into an assemblage, how do they share specific kinds of materiality,
what are they, and, perhaps most importantly, how do such assemblages create (or
emerge from) both ontological and ethical change? That is, how do they change the
nature of our being and our living?
Part of answering these questions, however, is returning to Smith’s particular
techniques of language and how they create what Bennett calls “resonances and
resemblances” between human and nonhuman things. From the very first couplet of
“To the Moon,” “by thy pale beam, / Alone and pensive, I delight to stray,” Smith sets
up not so much a correlation between subject and object but a resonance of sound and
a diffraction of light. Like the bow of light and the pale beam, the speaker strays. These
consecutive end words have long vowel sounds (ee and ay) that are similar although
not rhyming. Rather than becoming—as in a metaphor—a beam of light, the speaker
strays as a beam does. The phrase “Alone and pensive,” which is placed between
nonhuman beam and human speaker, acts as a liminal space of descriptive ambiguity,
in that it can literally go both ways. A beam can be solo and “absorbed,” another word
for pensive, as can the weary traveler.
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In this descriptive practice, words can pertain to both human and thing in
transit, and, in fact, entangle them together—the speaker is yet one more solo beam
emanating from the silver bow. This subtle poetics suggests a more radical tropic
technique, using words to cocreate bodies and things. Rather than simply, loosely
tracking “resemblances,” Smith’s prosopopoeia acts as what Barad calls an apparatus,
a phenomena shaped by both material and discursive forces, which itself is iteratively
reconstituted and reconfigured. Barad’s philosophy, based in theoretical quantum
physics, theorizes a new materiality that allows us to get at the double aspect of
address, its material-discursive face. And it suggests that in these poems, human and
nonhuman are not merely placed in material confederation, as in Bennett’s assemblage
where different things—separate but somehow allied through shared material streams
and beams—converse and relate. Rather, the speaker’s mode of calling out and being
lit up accentuates the prior relations of materiality and poetry that create the speaker
and moon as entities in the first place.
In this way, prosopopoeia might reveal that in fact all subjects are constructions of
address, not only as subjects by other subjects but as objects by objects as well. Barad’s
theory of becoming suggests that no entities exist before they are brought into being
by an apparatus, a form of measurement composed of both material items, such as the
mirrors and lasers physicists use to measure electrons, but also the ways humans use
them, the discursive practices that shape those materials and their use. As Barad writes,
“apparatuses are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans; they are open-ended
practices involving specific intra-actions of humans and nonhumans . . . . That is, human
bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties
but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended
dynamics of intra-activity.”17 Unlike the idea of interaction, where individual elements
come together to produce interaction, during intra-actions entities are only distinct in a
relational and not absolute sense, only in relation to their mutual entanglement.
Barad’s focus on science studies—her own apparatus—entails scientific practices
(the art of using Hadron colliders, sonograms) and sometimes more quotidian things
we do with bodies (touching). I want to suggest that figuration, some forms of it at
least, is an apparatus. In the most basic sense, language is a nonhuman thing, words on
a screen, breathy tones and vibrations in the air across fiber optic cables, that humans
alter—and are altered—through their shifting discursive practices. Rather than
reading Smith’s and Robinson’s addresses to the moon, the stars, the sea and earth, as
obsessive and neurotic pleas to a contiguous natural source to animate them (or calm
their overabundance of sensibility’s excessive animation), instead, it is an apparatus’s
iterative intra-actions that draw and redraw the relationality between human and
nonhuman. Matter comes into being only as subjects, objects, or things addressed
and configured through language—and it does so multiply and iteratively, with all the
polysemy language can eventuate. Barad calls this repetition “diffraction,” an attention
to minute patterns of difference (both metaphorical and ontological) that attends to
“genealogical analyses of how boundaries are produced rather than presuming sets
of well-worn binaries in advance.”18 Smith’s spooling description of the moon is one
good example, as it becomes “Queen of the silver bow”—archetype and tool; “fair
118
Sappho, perhaps at her most logical here, is able to see lucidly that “all nature owns”
these qualities of materiality easily realized at night: thoughtful, slow, pervasive
whispers of light and wind. If the flowers kiss the stream, they do so not out of
humanistic love but more literally as things whose flexible bodies can bend and touch
others without detriment. For Barad, touching is a quintessential form of intra-action,
as touching and being touched occur reciprocally. Yet, like Robinson’s bower of diverse
pleasures earlier in the sequence, such mutual materiality eventually cannot compete
with “madd’ning love”; calm, shared materiality cannot compete with a mind fixated
on soothing dreams. These descriptions work in the reverse of the earlier poems
discussed by placing the materiality first and then reforming that materiality with
discursive constructions. This reversibility, working both ends by the middle, reveals
the double-sided coin of matter and poetry: one works to materialize discourse, the
other to reveal the discursive performativity of matter.
The constant conjunction of language and matter in Smith’s and Robinson’s poems,
as it cuts different types of phenomena again and again, at times seems to posit another
notion of materiality, a pure relationality, or perhaps a formless dynamism of matter
that occurs before and after subject and object, human and nonhuman are necessarily
split from one another. Accordingly, this type of relating offers a materiality without
boundaries always about to be cut in different ways: whether it is actuated from an
119
affective materiality or virtual primordial stew or whether space, time, and matter
only come into existence with each discursive–material entanglement. Barad’s theories
suggest that matter itself only comes into being through intra-actions, what she calls
the “cut” of an apparatus’s measurement. Whatever the form of relationality, these
writers resist both masculine subjectivity and any poetics or philosophy that would
privilege the object as the basic unit of materiality. By prima facie entangling matter as
a dynamic materiality, romantic writers—Smith and Robinson but also Wollstonecraft,
Felicia Hemans, and Barbauld—offer a theory of materiality that, subsequently, allows
us to critique current Object-Oriented Ontology’s own isolationist and masculinist
theories of matter.
Where Smith and Robinson’s pensive beams of lunar prosopopoeia exact a mutual pull
on humans and nonhumans, William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much
with Us,” which works from their poems, begins with the problem of anthropocentrism
but ends with the anthropomorphic Proteus and with Triton blowing his horn for
ontic, epistemological change. His Object-Oriented poetry, as Evan Gottlieb has
termed it, reveals an alternative speculative realist position—but one in conversation
with the women sonneteers and their new materiality from which Wordsworth took
so much.20 The possibility that both positions reside in this poem—and other works
by Wollstonecraft, Smith, and Hemans—suggest in fact that figures of address create
both a masculine object-oriented ontology predicated on isolationist tumescence
and new material fluidity thought to be feminist in its relationality, sometimes at
the same time. Rather than understanding this as a classic romantic trait of figural
(and deconstructive) ambiguity, it might instead be read as an apparatus that creates
ontologies in assemblage with, or as diffractions of, each other. Assemblages, like the
bosom with the sea and the salty breeze, amass the potential to activate prosopopoeia’s
apparatus. Such an ontological multiplicity intimates a masculine ontology of objects
that tries but cannot cede itself to a more feminist fluidity, or perhaps an androgynous
assemblage of self-altering ontologies that seeks to get beyond gendered beings by
putting them in impossible proximity.
In the poem, Wordsworth remarks on humans’ “getting and spending” that
separates us from nature, the “[l]ittle we see in nature that is ours” (3).21 Presented
with such an anthropocentric problem, the octave of the poem lounges in a dynamic
materiality quite redolent of his predecessors: “This Sea that bares her bosom to the
moon; / The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like
sleeping flower / For this, for everything, we are out of tune” (4–7). Despite humans’
tendencies to get and spend in a fast modernity that places everything in commodity
relation, the sea and moon are nevertheless still involved in a vibrant, material exchange
or connectivity that underlies different seemingly stolid objects. As neither objects
120
nor clear personifications, the sea and moon sit in the Smithian human-nonhuman
material space. The apparatus of the poetic bosom animates an interchange with hints
of queer love, the second sex divulging herself to another, unearthly second, entangled
in a naked, fluid exchange.
Yet, ultimately, “It moves us not”: humans cannot hear or see the figuring tunes
of this particulate exchange, and as a result, the speaker’s only recourse is to become
Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, something like Steven Shaviro’s panpsychism or
Harman’s and Morton’s Object-Oriented Ontology (9).22 When Proteus rises from the
sea, then Triton with his horn, the poem’s prosopopoeia “cuts” two anthropomorphic
gods, masculine mythopoetic figures, the latter of which blows his horn to enunciate
their existence. The sea becomes an object animated by the poet’s lyrical subjectivity, and
the final quatrain re-instantiates a subject (“So might I, standing on this pleasant lea”
[11]) and object (“the sea” and the “wreathed horn” [5, 14]). These anthropomorphic
and heraldic allegories juxtapose masculine masturbation—the object blowing its own
horn to reify his hard, objective status—with breast-baring, a fluid, sexual exchange
between sea and moon.
Both Harman and Morton have attacked this new materialist line of thinking for
its realist apostasy: relation.23 As a main off-shoot of speculative realism, Object-
Oriented Ontology posits objects as the basic unit of materiality. Objects may have
a phenomenological existence, but their true natures are always partially withdrawn
from their appearance in the world, a “weird essentialism,” as Morton terms it, that
gives them a depth or reservoir unknown to human observers.24 We, too, are objects
whose own depths are inaccessible.25 One great impasse, which occurs not incidentally
along gender lines in speculative realism is the agon between relation and object—
one which we could translate in any number of ways familiar to romanticists: process
and product, exchange and commodity, vitalist fluid and materialist structure, poetic
improvisation and form. The solitary masculine subject cathects its grand isolation into
an ontological state of all beings, matched by objects who replicate the subject’s longed-
for supremacy in isolation, even as they mimic an untouchable allure that provokes our
gaze. As Wordsworth’s poem suggests, an Object-Oriented position risks resolutely
landing us back in an anthropocentric, masculinist viewpoint, while new materiality
irrevocably bears us more intrinsically to the nonhuman. As objects unmoved by the
sea, we can only watch the nature we have lyricized in our own image.
When we deny the sea’s and moon’s queer vital cohabitation, we are forced to
recapitulate masculine anthropocentric subjects and their opposite, nonhuman
objects. Although Morton expressly argues that everything is an object, Wordsworth’s
poem suggests how the resort to object-oriented positions can all too easily
resurrect an egotistical sublime. The doubled ambivalence in the figure—as both an
anthropomorphic manifestation of the sea that cannot move us and as the withdrawn
reality of the ocean or moon—obviates the sea’s new materiality, which is there but
for the reality we are out of affective frequency with. In this new “cut,” Proteus and
Triton evince the egotistical sublime of the writer who must displace and disfigure the
vibrant matter of sea-moon-sky-human with human-like gods whose power is derived
from the lyricism that evinces a tune that can finally unify sea and human through
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Nature, we have the opposite.31 Nature conquers the vast works of human empire
with its own persistent materiality. Fig tree and vine are counterposed to human
objects like Hadrian’s villa (or, later in the poem, the statues submerged in the Tiber).
The image of the enthroned vine, like those of flames and lava through her oeuvre,
presents a puissant materiality alternative to the trees and swords of patriarchal power
often allied to her male figures—rousing ontologies that are both object-based and
relational. What Hemans sketches for us in the tracings of her flexible figures of nature
is a metamorphic materiality that, unlike the sandy, de Manian negation of Shelley’s
“Ozymandias,” presents a curvature of change at once political and ontological. These
heart pulsings and fluid contours alight through a kind of gender critique not so
different from Wordsworth’s poem, where the shape of the feminine arrives to converse
with a staunch and separate objective masculinity.
These poems raise perhaps a larger, underlying question: Does putting objects into
assemblage or continually re-cutting their materiality create ontological change—
change that might advance new organizations of and conversations among beings in
cohabitation? Barbauld’s “Washing Day”—with its domestic accouterment, its bubbles,
and, finally, the image of the hot air balloon—allegorizes a quotidian assemblage
whose confederation has been engaged through a figural apparatus—beginning with
an apostrophe to the domestic muse and ending with the prosopopoeia of the “silken
ball.”32 Barbauld intimates here not only a series of intra-actions but also a series of
things that shift their shapes. Arms become red, meaty, filled with blood; clothes
become wet, clean, then dry; soap moves from powder to liquid to, most stunningly,
bubbles; and all of these objects, real and discursive, eventually produce the poem-
bubble that is “Washing Day.”33 Assemblages and intra-actions become diffractions of
each other, and rather than cutting ontologies different ways, they instigate a process
of morphing from one thing to another, one ontic system to another.
If these things, and their transformations, still seem too discrete, it may be that we
are encountering a problem that surfaces for both romantic poets and new materialists
when they consider how objects relate to one another and how change actually
happens—how one thing might become another, with all the revolutionary undertones
of the period’s attention to revolution of all kinds. Barbauld offers another, thorough
answer in her list poem, “An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study.”34 We
might at first assume that Barbauld’s inventory ostensibly gives us insight into Joseph
Priestley’s scientific brilliance or his unique scientific-literary methodology by moving
through his study’s books (he uses the pile method of organization and contemplation),
objects (bottles, jars, phials, thermometer), papers, maps, and other emblems (all the
British kings and Fathers). In fact, the inventory gives us less the subject “Priestley”
or his “furniture” than a map of objects in relation. The poem begins obliquely but
provocatively, “A map of every country known, / With not a foot of land his own”
(1–2).35 Perhaps there was a map so large in Priestley’s study to warrant its top billing
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at the start of the poem, yet the couplet seems to intimate that the poem itself will be
a map of every country, or object, known but not possessed by Priestley—that is a
map of the withdrawn objects that are held and seen yet remain partially inaccessible
to human understanding and indeed existential ownership. We could call the first
two-thirds of this list poem “carpentry,” what Ian Bogost describes as “constructing
artifacts that illustrate the perspectives of objects.”36 Different objects are placed one
after another in such a manner that they tell us more about the objects themselves
rather than Priestley or his anthropocentric scientific thought.
The list proceeds quite ordinarily with discrete objects—until we arrive at “Papers
and books, a strange missed olio” (29). With the word “olio,” suddenly we have not a
single object but an assemblage of heterogeneous things. How have we moved from
objects into a more ragout assemblage? The simple answer might be that the olio is
formed from books and papers placed adjacent, merely touching, perhaps altering the
phenomenology but not the ontology of its constituent parts. This purview, ironically,
is how Bennett’s methodology—Vibrant Matter’s philosophical olio—has most often
been read. She, it has been alleged, too quickly and superficially stacks Adorno,
Derrida, Latour, Spinoza, and Lucretius next to each other. Yet, like Barbauld’s own
poem, Bennett’s text, as both discursive and material, enacts assemblage in theory
and practice. And what occurs in Bennett’s olio is a transformation of an archive of
different things into an assemblage where constituent parts alter themselves through
relation.
Derridean “messianicity,” to take one example, is not simply, as Bennett would have
it, “the open-ended promissory quality of a claim, image, or entity,” a fullness or future
on the wing, but a more complicated sense of the future that has not fully—cannot
fully—arrive.37 Readers of Bennett who might balk at her simplistic use of Derrida
have strikingly misunderstood her writing as philosophical exegesis rather than what
it is: an enactment of assemblages in practice. What comes before her use of Derrida’s
future-to-come is her notion of “a swarm of vitalities at play”; what comes after is her
contemplation of emergent causality. Derrida’s notion of “the future-to-come” becomes
a way to talk about trajectories or directionality without telos or purposiveness but
within the context of swarming vitalities whose ontic movements are emergent.
Derrida is the way to figure movement and force without solidified substance, as
both Pheng Cheah and Derrida himself suggest.38 Bennett reshapes Derrida, as Barad
also tries to do, into an ontic lack of origin that propels a force of vital materiality.39
Bennett does not merely stack Derrida and Latour into a randomly selected olio that
may become forgotten like a graduate school seminar paper; rather, as they affect and
are affected by one another, they are converted into an assemblage mod(e)ified by
Bennett’s words. Bennett enacts what she does not quite theorize: how words can put
things into motion and relation, as perhaps the most viscous, porous things. And it
turns out, her compositional verve enacts the intra-action of those material-discursive
“things” we call Derrida, Adorno, and Latour by placing them together in an affective
relation that shares the same rate and kinds of “movements and rests.” Bennett shows
us how some assemblages, perhaps especially the excessive ones that put many things
in motion at once, can heat and cook up a new intra-action.
124
The papers and books seem to multiply, as do the forms of address, the “Answer,
remark, reply, rejoinder.” It is not simply, however, that the discursive argumentation
of the books and their rhetoric create new bodies or things through a citational
practice. Rather, Barbauld is quick to collect these all as different sorts of becomings—
the “new-made glass” before it has been etched or shaped, the “blotted proof-sheet”
not yet become a “paper” or “book,” and the more general “embryo schemes.” These
waxing, incipient, formless shapes of matter are not privileged as Barbauld likewise
includes “worm-eaten plans,” those maps waning from form riddled with holes that
have become vague plans. Barbauld’s meta-assemblage collects into relation different
modes of becoming, different types of change.41 All at once we arrive elsewhere than
Harman’s loathed primordial stew, which he says undermines Barad’s philosophy by
creating stasis or idle differences.42 The assemblage, rather, has been converted into
a milieu of vibrant matter: the transparent, liquid glass, the embryo scheme, planless
plan, a materiality on the move. Each is its own material-discursive formation yet
with different rates of change, different contours, different figures that enact different,
though conversable forms.
Barbauld’s allusion to chaos, Christian and classical, raises again questions of
prosopopoeia and the enactment of ontic change. As the oldest of the gods and the
first being to exist, Chaos is matter personified; but as a gaping void of pre-creation,
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Chaos reverses the lingering personification, denuding matter even of its initial forms,
land or water, solid or liquid. Barbauld marks the birth of new partially formed objects
but through figural turns that inaugurate new shapes and new ontologies:
The passive voice seems to give rise to the idea that the mass, the shifting relationality
that Barbauld has created and evoked, now irrupts with new forms—human,
nonhuman, and some combination of both in Cadmus’s half-formed men. These
things are “unfashioned” or half-formed, as if revealing their own becoming:
In this description, Barbauld makes meta-poetic what we have seen intimated in other
writers: the entanglement of intra-action and assemblage. Her motley crew is doubly
made from the heterogeneous mass but also, we later learn, from planted dragon’s teeth
that spring up as half-men. Cadmus famously buried dragon’s teeth in the soil to create
warriors that, in the end, fought themselves before founding Thebes. In Areopagitica
(1644) Milton compares books to dragon’s teeth that instigate the springing up of
armed men. In Barbauld’s re-cutting of this double mytho-poetics, the olio of books
and things in the study creates—or recreates—a choratic space of chaos, even as it also
generates those books-and-things that, when planted, spring up to form new things.
We could say that these books together—Milton, the Bible, Priestley, “controversial
writing” more generally—amass their materiality and discourses together to repeatedly
produce different diffractions of the same matter—books, infants, mushrooms, teeth,
and limbs—all without the recourse to subsuming all as “men” or manly fighting words.
(Men, too, are assemblages of discursive-material parts we bring into and out of being.)
Using the Cadmus myth, Barbauld continues to imbricate human and nonhuman,
masculine aggression and feminine fertility, not simply as two intra-actions of the same
material or as an androgynous assemblage but as one continuous material becoming.
Not merely akin to Barad’s “cuts,” which enact decisive, if violent, splits of ontology,
or to Bennett’s gathering or identifying of things into relation, Barbauld shows that
126
both things occur and in relation alter each other. New agglomerations of bookish
materiality amass, “New books, like new-born infants,” cut differentially as humans
and nonhumans but also as incipient beings with still great potential for change, even
as they begin to stand for something, about to be clothed by the printer for the world.
Such “controversial writing” was already born with teeth—a hard materiality that
cuts through the earth to birth another form of matter, half-formed men. Rather than
ontic change having a genesis in accumulation or in a type of identification that severs
one ontic form for another, Barbauld seems to suggest that all being, even lacerating
masculinity, is always half-formed, “Their limbs unfashioned all, and rude,” effected by
toothsome words and things already confabulated: cutting, conversing, amassing, and
growing at once.
These accounts of ontic change, of generation and becoming, suggest two
interesting developments in new materialist thought. First, assemblage and intra-
action may be diffractions of each other because when named or identified in any way,
they participate in a confabulation of discursive-materiality that rehearses matter and
poiesis anew. Second, Barbauld evinces something like Barad’s intra-actions, where
different combinations of discourse and material can produce different phenomena
and different ideas of how phenomena are produced. Yet, unlike Barad, who suggests
that the way to new-fangle matter is by recutting it, or unlike Morton and Harman who
suggest we find the allure of new objects, she resists the “cut” by posing more liquid
motions that rearrange relations. There is no cut that slices and dices matter into new
objects or things; rather, things accumulate and shift and blur into a simmering ragù
untendered by violence. Things may fight to become something else, but they do so
without ceasing to be, without the ontological death of their kind, nor without even a
Keatsian “dying into life.” For Barbauld, these changes occur either when an assemblage
smushes into a heterogeneous mass of matter or through a retroactive planting of
matter that produces an unseen genesis of new forms, perhaps an autogenesis of sorts.
Where Smith, Robinson, and Wordsworth’s use of prosopopoeia as an apparatus to
shape human and nonhuman intra-actions (woman/goddess/thing), Barbauld’s subtle
mythography allows for a morphing through a relational contiguity whereby things
gather into an assemblage that itself has already been seeded with a mythographic
prosopopoetic apparatus, the teeth of dragons. The book/teeth/dragon/baby/
mercenary would seem to exclude the feminine from the genesis myth of aggressive
books and men, except it lies more subtly as the powering affectivity of alteration that
knows masculinity is only always half-formed and infantile, especially with respect
to the larger process of change. Even though the heads of mushrooms and tumescent
limbs rise from a giving ground, seeming to become an apparatus for new phenomena,
they are born of dragon’s teeth, and as long as language turns, so the shapes of the world
shift. This is exactly what occurs in the extremely mysterious final lines of the poem:
The poem ends with “a thing unknown, without a name / Born of the air, and doomed
to flame” (57–58). It would be easy to revert to an object-oriented view that Barbauld
resurrects the withdrawn object as the entity that first and last exists, as the end all
and be all. Things are always unknown, in excess of their sensuous qualities, whether
born of air or extinguished by flame. Yet, the couplet turns to remind us that even the
quintessential unknown object, in a new material alchemy, coalesces from Priestley’s
chemistry of air manifested by the materiality of the flame.43 Michele Levy claims that
the “this” of apostrophe is Priestley’s discovery of oxygen. If it is, even at the early date
of 1767 when Barbauld composed the poem, then it is the thing that is made and then
unmade. Not simply what Steve Mentz has described as phlogiston’s missing element
of “fire-air combination” that is “both substance and process,” Barbauld cocreates
dynamic materialities that alter themselves and their processes of change.44 This
“weird essence of things,” Barbauld tells us, is to be made and unmade both through
the apparatus of the nonhuman apostrophe and an intra-action that entangles air and
flame through an assemblage that doctors continuous ontological change.
The reverse of Wordsworth, Barbauld begins with what seems to be an object-
oriented view of the scientist’s study, only to reject such a masculinist isolation for
a revolutionary shape-shifting that demands a more supple, feminist account of
materiality. Feminist relationality is what allows ontological change to occur, to
recur: when assemblages are put into relation or when discursive practices recut
matter, transformations have teeth, fire, and alchemy. Although Marxist Christopher
Nealon has exhorted that the ontological turn is distinctly anti-hermeneutic, anti-
philosophic, and anti-humanist, in fact, assemblages and intra-actions entangled
together make meaning in the most activist sense possible, by bringing it into being—
again and again.45 Nealon denigrates assemblages as bad poetry that purposefully does
not mean anything, but Barbauld—if not Bennett herself—creates assemblages that
mean through their contingent proximity, through their shared affect, through their
ability to instigate transformations in matter and through language’s own entangling
power. Meaning through effectivity of matter and poiesis. Romantic poets reveal
their new materialism as especially equipped to encourage new discursive-material
hermeneutics through shape-shifting that repeatedly revamps matter, affect, meaning,
and us, in the pursuit of all the different relations, already partially nonhuman in our
alliances, our bodies, our affects, our alien and thankfully re-composing beings.
Notes
1 Selected examples might include Jacqueline M. Labbe’s monograph on Smith’s
feminine performativity, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of
Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Theresa Kelly’s “Romantic
Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 3
(December 2004): 281–314; Kevis Goodman on the georgic in “Conjectures on Beachy
Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present,” ELH 81,
no. 3 (Fall 2014): 983–1006; Donelle Ruwe on the microscopic sublime in “Charlotte
128
13 Ibid., 22.
14 Ibid.
15 Chris Washington, for example, terms the trope “an inexorable relationality [that]
. . . blurs the boundary between both the human and the animal, the living and the
dead” but in ways that remind us of the violence such relationality can exact upon
the nonhuman (“John Clare and Biopolitics,” in European Romantic Review 25, no.
6 [2014]: 675). Barbara Johnson suggests that any address animates its object and
attempts to make it human in some way (“Anthopomorphism in and the Lyric and
Law,” in Persons and Things [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010], 188–208). Sara
Guyer, too, with her deconstructive parrying of death, considers “the capacity of the
human to survive the human” and retains the frame of humanity (“Testimony and
Trope in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no.1 [Spring 2006]: 100).
16 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99.
17 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 171–2.
18 Ibid., 30.
19 Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, in Mary Robinson: Selected Works, ed. Judith
Pascoe (Ontario: Broadview Literary Press, 2000), 169.
20 See Evan Gottlieb “Seeing into the Life of Things: Re-Viewing Early Wordsworth
through Object-Oriented Philosophy,” in Beyond Sense and Sensibility: Moral
Formation and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Wordsworth, ed. Peggy
Thomson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015): 145–62; see also
his discussion of Keats for an Object-Oriented take on Bennett in Romantic
Realities: Speculative Realism an British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2016). For accounts of Wordsworth, women poets, and sensibility,
see Duncan Wu, “Wordsworth and Sensibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of William
Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 467–81; and Christopher Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility
(Houndmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
21 William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” in The Major Works,
ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 271.
22 Steven Shaviro, “Consequences of Panpsychism,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard
Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 19–44.
23 Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History
43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 205–24; Graham Harman, “Agential and Speculative
Realism: Remarks on Barad’s Ontology,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging
Knowledge 30 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e10.
24 Timothy Morton, “All Objects are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy,”
in Object-Oriented Feminism, ed. Katherine Behar (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2016), 65–82.
25 Harman argues that Barad, and other new materialists working from assemblage
theory, both “undermine” and “overmine” matter. They insist on breaking all
things down into constituent parts, and, at the same time, they understand all
matter as made of a “primal goo” which flattens ontology into a pervasive but
static form of matter than has no secret reservoir from which to activate change.
Harman, “Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad’s Ontology,”
Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 30 (2016). http://www.rhizomes.
net/issue30/harman.html.
130
in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2009), 70–91.
39 See Barad’s interesting but problematic article on Derrida, “Quantum Entanglements
and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings,
and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (November 2010): 240–68.
40 See Harman, “Agential,” para. 20.
41 Unlike Manuel DeLanda’s “flattened ontology,” where all things exist equally with the
same ontological status, Barbauld’s lists should be seen in a slightly different light,
as allowing for change without reducing objects to smaller parts or their effects in
the world.
42 Harman, “Agential,” para. 22 and 23.
43 See Priestley: “But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle
burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame, very much like that enlarged
flame with which a candle burns in nitrous air, exposed to iron or liver of sulphur;
but as I had got nothing like this remarkable appearance from any kind of air besides
this particular modification of nitrous air, and I knew no nitrous acid was used in
the preparation of mercurius calcinatus, I was utterly at a loss how to account for it”
(II.iii). Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. https://archive.org/
details/experimentsobser01prie.
44 Steve Mentz, “Phlogiston,” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water,
and Fire, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2015), 56.
45 Christopher Nealon, “Infinity for Marxists,” Meditations: Journal of the Marxist
Literary Group 28, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 47–63. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/
files/Mediations28_2_05.pdf. My many thanks to Iyko Day and Wesley Yu for this
citation and their social relations that enabled the discussion of this article.
132
133
Contrary to a currently in-vogue idea, we do not need to learn how to die in the
Anthropocene.1 Roy Scranton, who has brought this idea into the mainstream, argues
that we must accept death since we are, in effect, already dead as a result of the imminent
disasters climate change will bring. However, to embrace such a proposition, as some
speculative realists have, is to reanimate an Enlightenment legacy of Hobbesian,
nihilistic, hopeless thanatopolitics.2 Modernity’s other dominant policy prescription—
Enlightenment social-contract politics—might seem to offer an alternative, a model
for a politics not obsessed with death. Yet, because it inscribes politics within a social
structure centered on anthropocentrism, it too fails to surmount thanatopolitics,
particularly in the time of the Anthropocene. Enlightenment politics, it seems, are
either hopelessly outdated or ironically irrelevant in this time of planetary crisis.
Meanwhile, speculative realism’s attempt to think reality as other than
phenomenologically human would seem to offer promising alternatives to
anthropocentric politics. Many critics of speculative realism have, in fact, argued that
despite its philosophical value in finally allowing us to surpass theory’s linguistic turn,
thinking anew about a material reality that social-discourse theory has dismissed, it
has little political relevance because it sputters indefinitely when it comes to gender,
racial, class, and ethnic issues. Alexander Galloway, in one of the best-known critiques
along these lines, claims that speculative realism is simply the philosophical version of
big-business-as-usual, the reflection of a global neoliberal hegemony.3 But perhaps, as
Graham Harman suggests, speculative realist philosophy—like any philosophy—is and
should be incapable of thinking politically.4 Harman’s ambivalence about speculative
realism’s potential for political intervention may, in fact, stem from his own sense of a
rightward, “might-makes-right” strain of thinking that he has recently identified in the
work of Bruno Latour.5 Harman finds that Latour’s thought, at least in his work prior
to 1991, tends to affirm the thanatopolitics of Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Latour’s actor-
network theory is a flattened ontology, privileging networks of humans, nonhumans,
and objects alike (what Latour calls “actants”).6 Yet, Harman argues, even as Latour
134
life. To choose libertarianism would be to choose the social contract; to choose the
social contract would be to choose libertarianism. Rousseau’s thinking, that is to say,
corkscrews far beyond the predominant representation of it as a leftist theorization of
social-contract republicanism.
Rousseau evaluates this aporia of the state of nature and social-contract society
as a failure of the Enlightenment’s project of reconciling individuals and social
collectivity.16 As Rousseau writes in the fragmentary and little-noticed “The State of
War” (ca. 1750), we continue, when in society, “living in both the social order and the
state of nature” and “are subject to the inconveniences of both without finding safety in
either.”17 Worse still, we discover that war arises from that which is meant to forestall
it, peace. Rousseau slams “the horrible system of Hobbes” because, he says “the state of
war is far from being natural to man,” and “war is” instead “born of peace, or at least
of the precautions men have taken to assure themselves a lasting peace.”18 Society and
the state of nature are irreducibly coimplicated, and therefore we remain in a state of
postapocalyptic politics, facing down endless war in what looks like, simultaneously, a
world at peace and a peace that is all-out warfare.
Only the speculative nature of the aporia can circumvent the inevitability of war,
precisely because of the state of nature’s speculative impossibility: “it is no small
undertaking . . . to have a proper understanding of a state that no longer exists and
perhaps never did and probably never will, but about which we should nevertheless
have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly.”19 We must have, it
transpires, according to Rousseau, accurate notions about an inexistent state, a place
that exists in nonreality, a speculative space for thinking outside of human thought. In
other words, Rousseau’s texts imply that in order to live we have to think beyond our
own existence, to think a place that is neither the state of nature nor society but the
aporia produced by their impossible crossing. It is from this aporia that Rousseau’s work
enables us to extrapolate a speculative politics that ventures beyond the alternatives of
libertarianism and social contractualism, beyond a left or right position, and beyond
the individual subject and its social collective incorporation, beyond the looming
specter of immanent war that looks—bizarrely—exactly like peace.
Rousseau’s aporia functions much like Meillassoux’s “extro-science fiction,” a fiction
which defies all known laws and depicts a reality that operates on Hyper-Chaos’s
irrational contingency, the idea that anything can happen for any reason, or for no
reason, at any time.20 Because the state of nature does not exist, and because society is
wrapped up in this inexistent state, in Rousseau’s work we enter Meillassoux’s playing
ground, a fiction that is “real” yet decidedly different from our own perceived reality.
Unlike the anthropocentric politics we continue to debate, Rousseau’s speculative
politics veers completely away from Enlightenment logocentricism and intersects
with Meillassoux’s irrational “Hyper-Chaos,” the absolute contingency that governs
the world. Reality, in the form of the social, derives its politics from the extro-science
fiction of Rousseau’s state-of-nature aporia. Like extro-science fiction, Rousseau’s work
imagines the unimaginable: a nonanthropocentric social contract. Moreover, as we
will see, this nonanthropocentric contract offers an alternative to what Meillassoux
calls, in his later project, the fourth “World of justice,” in which the dead are reclaimed
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from death.21 For Meillassoux, there have been three “Worlds,” each of which occurred
via what he calls “advent ex nihilo,” sudden contingent changes that bring about new
forms of being: matter, life, thought. The fourth World of justice will emerge once the
human dead can be restored to life. On my reading, Rousseau’s nonanthropocentric
social contract allows for life for the first time, at least politically speaking, for humans
and nonhumans alike.
Learning to live
Ever since Paul de Man’s “Shelley Disfigured” (1984) called our attention to what
Orrin Wang calls “the monumentalization” of Rousseau in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The
Triumph of Life” (1822), romanticism has struggled to exorcise the ghost of Rousseau
and the deconstructive readings perpetuated by de Man.22 According to many exponents
of speculative realism, meanwhile, deconstruction is simply incorrect, a philosophy
of the past whose anti-realist obsession with language renders it unable to think
speculatively about nonhuman ontology. Despite these critical divergences, though,
and unbeknown to each, deconstruction and speculative realism occupy twin peaks
when it comes to spooky apparitions of alien otherness. Both Derrida and Meillassoux
are working through the same ontological aporia as Rousseau, possessing similar
commitments but radically different conclusions. Rousseau, the original thinker of the
ontology of alien weirdness, therefore helps us reread Derrida and Meillassoux even
as rereading them helps reread Rousseau because Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux
all have constitutive blind spots that can only be seen when the three are read in
triangulation. Derrida underestimates how speculative différance is; Meillassoux
undervalues how deconstructive his speculative realism truly is; and Rousseau cannot
know how speculative and deconstructive his aporia is. It is something like Jacques
Lacan’s ostrich metaphor: Derrida sticks his head in the sand, Meillassoux leans over
him to have a look-see, and Rousseau calmly plucks him on the rear.23
To accomplish this post-Kantian noncorrelationist thinking, Meillassoux develops
what he terms “Hyper-Chaos,” the idea, as I said above, that anything can happen at
any time. According to Meillassoux, the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that
there is a reason a thing is only itself, has long been philosophical dogma. This presents
something of a problem on Meillassoux’s analysis because the absolute holds that it
must be one thing and one thing only even while, simultaneously, change must also
be able to happen since change clearly does occur in the world. As he points out, if
something is always absolutely what it is, then a person, say, would be and not-be at
the same time (already containing both their life and death) and so unable to change.
For Meillassoux, this would mean that everything that is “is already everything and its
contrary.”24 Clearly, this cannot be the case or humans would never die. To be cannot
mean to not be, Hamlet. The principle of sufficient reason therefore also violates the
principle of noncontradiction. This leads Meillassoux to uphold the unreason of
Hyper-Chaos as the absolute rather than the principle that there is sufficient reason
to believe in the absolute: “we are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of
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sufficient reason, according to which there is a reason why everything is the way it is
rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of sufficient unreason.
There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must,
without reason, be able not to be and/or to be other than what it is.”25 If life followed
the principle of sufficient reason, then all life would be static and always already fully
formed; therefore, life must follow the principle of sufficient unreason, or Hyper-Chaos.
For this (un)reason, Meillassoux argues that reality operates via Hyper-Chaos, even
that Hyper-Chaos or becoming can be eradicated by the contingency that structures
life. As Meillassoux explains,
Since everything is contingent rather than necessary, as Meillassoux argues, the only
true necessity is, paradoxically, the principle of contingency itself. As he puts in an
interview with Harman, “the necessity of contingency entails that there cannot be
contradiction, since a contradictory entity, being always already that which it is not,
is destined to be revealed as ultimately necessary.”27 In contrast, because it is based on
the principle of noncontradiction, wherein an entity can change into something it is
not already, in Hyper-Chaos “nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the
unthinkable.”28 For this reason, the necessity of contingency allows us, Meillassoux
claims, “to do what correlationism says is impossible: to know what there is when we
are not.”29
Meillassoux’s idea about contingency resembles Derrida’s initial insight: the trace
“contingently” makes possible “What is” by breathing, so to speak, initial life into life,
differentiating it from death as well as performing, instituting, differentiation in general.
Derrida writes that “the trace . . . must be thought before the opposition of nature and
culture, animality and humanity,” or, we might add, the state of nature and society.30
The trace, we can say, for Derrida, exists before us and after us, when we are not. For
Derrida différance, or the trace, is always already evanescent, neither epistemological
nor ontological: “what the thought of the trace has already taught us is that it could
not be simply submitted to the onto-phenomenological question of essence. The
trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is? and contingently
makes it possible.”31 While Derrida’s assertion that the trace exceeds any ontology—
that its “present-absence” iterates ontology—ostensibly departs from speculative
realism’s ontological project, the trace’s contingency actually anticipates Meillassoux’s
grand philosophical ambition to think “after finitude.”32 Contingency, then, connects
Derrida’s and Meillassoux’s projects as both deconstructive and speculative, about life
not only before and after, but beyond finitude. Meillassoux himself refers to his project
in After Finitude as deconstructive, and Derrida, for his part, writes that “différance is
also something other than finitude.”33 Différance is, because before and beyond and
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nowhere, “after” finitude, before and after ontology itself since the trace “extends well
beyond humanity.”34 And yet, the “ghost” that is différance is not alive. Nor is it dead.
It participates in life only in life’s interstices, but it does so before life. In this sense,
the trace is a literal ghost, neither alive nor dead, but it was also never alive nor dead
to begin with and as such is the ghost of a ghost, an immortal ghost that precedes
and postdates mortality. It is Derrida’s nonlinguistic equivalent of Meillassoux’s non-
linguistic “arche-fossil,” which represents the scientific claims we make about life
anterior and posterior to human life that contradict Kantian correlationism—and this
is the aporia Meillassoux, like Rousseau and Derrida, tries to resolve; like Derrida,
Meillassoux is also making a linguistic claim via the nonlinguistic.
Meillassoux’s unpublished L’inexistence divine provides a snapshot of what he calls
“an immanent ethics” that differs from yet dovetails with (one almost wants to say
“defers to”) the trace’s ghostly immortality:
it would thus be an ethics that . . . would not promise some other life than ours . . .
but an ethics that manifests on the contrary such a desire for this life that it wishes
this life to be immortal. Immortality is the philosophical desire for life, the desire that
this human life and no other should again and always be lived. Philosophy wants
a life without a beyond, and that is why philosophical ethics must be an ethics of
immortality: that is to say, an ethics of life with no elsewhere [Meillassoux’s italics].35
Meillassoux’s proposed ethics seeks immortality not beyond this life, as in religion, but
rather immortality of this life’s mortality only: that is, a focus on this earthly life and
not some life in the afterlife. In Meillassoux’s conception of the World of justice, all that
is immortal would be mortality itself because it endures past the transcendent desire
for an immortal life beyond our mortal one that will perish.36 Immortal mortality
outlasts immortal immortality. This form of “after finitude” coheres with Meillassoux’s
work in After Finitude where he proposes trying to traverse Kant’s claim that the mind
is finite in order to be truly able to think the absolute of transcendence.
For both Meillassoux and Derrida, contingency always precedes and exceeds our
life. The goal of each thinker is to think life beyond its relation to the finitude of
a death from which we have not yet started to live. To this end, Meillassoux and
Derrida grapple with an ontological space of inexistence that leads to existence,
the same aporia Rousseau’s theory of the state of nature and society breaches. On
one hand, Rousseau’s work exemplifies the contingency of Meillassouxian ontology.
On the other, his state-of-nature/society aporia mirrors the ontology of the non-
ontology of Derrida’s trace. As in Meillassoux’s account of Hyper-Chaos, and per
Derrida’s account of the trace as precessional to ontology, Rousseau’s state-of-nature/
society aporia is an ontological space that cannot be thought by any epistemology
because being exceeds correlationism’s anthropocentricism. This aporia is a space
that exists but does so without existing, a space that Rousseau thinks by discussing
it, speculating about its inexistent existence, while being unable to clearly say what
he is describing because a trace of the state of nature exists in society and vice versa
without ever being fully present in either. It is this feature of his work that sidesteps
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pity becomes stronger as the animal looking on more closely identifies itself with
the animal suffering. Clearly, this identification must have been immeasurably
more powerful in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason
that breeds vanity and reflection that strengthens it; reason that turns man inward;
reason that separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him.39
Prior to reason’s rise, humans and animals shared a mutual, affective capability to feel
pity. Pity, it seems, levels the playing field in Rousseau’s state of nature, whereas society
differentiates via essentialist reason (which is, we will see, tied to speech). But despite
their similarities regarding nature’s irrationality, Meillassoux differs from Rousseau
regarding pity. He claims that Rousseauvian romanticism eliminates justice from the
world because “the human community” rules the world and among humans “pity is
no more common in the living than are war, violence, or cruelty.”40 However, pity is
emblematic of Rousseau’s aporia in that pity exists in the state of nature while war only
arises in society. By conflating them, Meillassoux inadvertently underscores the aporia
I’ve been tracing—pity and war, reason and peace, feature in both the state of nature
and society even while Rousseau insists on the impossibility of such a chiasmus despite
that his texts demonstrate this chiasmus. As Derrida has famously demonstrated in his
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in the first of those thousand years.”48 Progress, which occurs only when one human
bumps into another in the state of nature and uses this faculty of speech, begins the
drive toward forming civilizations to protect the species, to make it live, live longer,
live better, by means of a social-contract politics that ironically leads to the species’
death. Human language use creates a distinction between humans and animals since
animals, now, are a different species, one to be guarded from, and used for food and
fuel for the human individual and the human species. It is only with this progress—
what Rousseau calls society—that animal death and inequality manifest. But there is,
as with everything in Rousseau, a paradoxical corollary: animals are put to death for
human sustenance even as efforts to preserve human life lead to human death. The
capitalist climate change and degeneracy of the earth Rousseau speaks of in Émile take
place when land is claimed for personal use: “the true founder of civil society was the
first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘this is mine,’ and
came across people simple enough to believe him.”49 Meanwhile, animals, when they
lived in the state of nature, did not engage in extending their life due to a desire for a
perfectibility that elevates them as a special species and therefore they could not die.
Animals, for Rousseau, have always already fulfilled the immanent ethics of the World
of justice Meillassoux craves: they achieve the immortality of their mortality in the life
they live, in that life and no other.
In Rousseau’s texts, then, animals exemplify how to live for humans who do not
yet know how to be alive. Humans, that is, will only decide how to “live” in society,
a decision that entails putting to death the nonhuman, animals and the earth—
and, thereby, as we know from contemporary climate science wherein large-scale,
mechanized animal slaughter is destroying the parameters that make life livable for
humans, themselves as well. Rousseau’s politics are thus unexpectedly progressive but
only in their retrogression: a roadmap for a civil politics originates with the nonhuman
in the state-of-nature/society aporia and not with the human. Consequently, as I said
above, it turns out that the social contract is necessary to preserve the state of nature
and the state of nature necessary to preserve a social contract. In the state of nature,
humans and animals both seek to preserve themselves (what Rousseau calls self-love),
even though neither can die, but not as species (into which they are not yet organized)
but as individuals. And meanwhile, human self-improvement, which already can,
and will (but won’t) differentiate them in this undifferentiated state, demarcates them
further when they form a political union to preserve themselves as a species. But
humans do so because they could not die in the state of nature and feel the need to
protect against this inability to be otherwise than immortal. For Rousseau, this aporia
models a new nonanthropocentric social contract not based around a life exclusively
devoted to not dying. It is this social-contract politics that allows for what Meillassoux
seeks, the immortality of this mortal life rather than the immortality of a transcendent
life obsessed with infinitude, with life after death. This immortal morality is what he
terms, again, the fourth World of justice.
Key to this new contract for Rousseau is a resistance to an anthropocentric
romanticism. Rousseau deplores the all too human faculty of imagination by associating
it with the malignant forces of society. In Émile, he writes of the eponymous pupil:
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In this condition, nature, who does everything for the best, has placed him from
the first. To begin with, she gives him only such desires as are necessary for self-
preservation and such powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction. All the rest she
stored in his mind as a sort of reserve, to be drawn upon at need. It is only in this
primitive condition that we find the equilibrium between desire and power, and
then alone man is not unhappy. As soon as his potential powers of mind begin to
function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes, and precedes all
the rest. It is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us, whether
for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying
them. But the object which seemed without our grasp flies quicker than we can
follow; when we think we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead
of us. We no longer perceive the country we have traversed, and we think nothing
of it; that which lies before us becomes vaster and stretches still before us. Thus we
exhaust our strength, yet never reach our goal, and the nearer we are to pleasure,
the further we are from happiness.
On the other hand, the more nearly a man’s condition approximates to this
state of nature the more the difference between his desires and his powers is
small, and happiness is therefore less remote. Lacking everything, he is never less
miserable; for misery consists, not in the lack of things, but in the needs which
they inspire.
The world of reality has its bounds, the world of imagination is boundless; as we
cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other; for all the sufferings which really
make us miserable arise from the difference between the real and the imaginary.50
Émile has been given, in this pedagogical attempt to reproduce the state of nature, self-
love, only that which is needed for “self-preservation.” Imagination, rhetorically posed
as capable of leading to good or ill, is held in “reserve” and, following Derrida’s logic,
is therefore a supplement both natural and unnatural. It will correspondingly lead to
the love of self that society engenders and therefore to a lack of life since it ejects Émile
from the state of nature into society, which is a death sentence. The imagination, which
is “boundless,” requires “restrict[ion]” since reality, the state of nature, is unchanging.
The real of the fictional state of nature produces happiness; the unreal of nonfictional
society produces unhappiness. However, that the difference between “the real and
the imaginary” occurs in the “between” of these states signals something different
altogether. The “between” between the real and the imaginary is a “between” because
the boundlessness of the imagination provides the boundary of the state of nature
that is itself imagination-less. If “a lack of things” inspires “needs,” it does so, in this
description, on the basis of distance between the objects of lack and need that always
eternally keeps trying to close in order for the not-met lacks and wished-for needs
to know they are not meeting. “Lacking everything,” Émile is “never less miserable”
but, via negation, he contains the reserve of misery that only “arise[s]” from a double
lack: he already lacks everything but that lack gives rise to a lack of the very things it
lacks in order to lack. Misery, like lack’s lack, must have the imagination to know what
it really lacks in its imagination.
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The upside down
The solution to this impasse between libertarian anarchism and social-contract politics
occurs in two previously mentioned, relatively ignored works of Rousseau. The first is
“The State of War” that functions in opposition to what he describes as “the dangerous
reveries of the likes of Hobbes.”52 The second is a record of Rousseau’s own reveries,
Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782).53
A short, intense fragment on death and destruction, “The State of War” delineates
Rousseau’s postapocalyptic vision of societal life, the cross-hatching of war and peace
that he reconciles by dissolving the state of nature and the social contract. He begins
with a terrifying picture that will defy readers’ expectations:
I see fire and flames, countrysides deserted, and towns sacked. Wild men, where
are you dragging these poor wretches? I hear a horrible racket. What an uproar!
What cries! I draw near. I see a scene of murders, ten thousand men slaughtered,
the dead piled up in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, everywhere
the image of death and agony. This is the fruit of these peaceful institutions!54
While this feverish vision might seem to foretell events like the French Revolution
and the Terror, Rousseau instead metaphorically depicts the compact humans make
to create society and its institutional safeguards like a social contract. The metaphor
is complicated and functions much like the giants do in Rousseau’s Essay on the
Origin of Languages (1781). In that text, Rousseau writes that humans, when they
first encounter other humans, view them as giants, a literalization of a metaphor
that Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1976), reads as upending speech acts since,
for Rousseau, language begins in metaphor and yet the literality of vision unravels
into the firm reality that these giants are human beings possessing average height.
Rousseau pulls a similar trick here. Human beings are not literally running wild
through the nation’s landscape, burning down country houses and torching towns
while committing acts of profligate homicide. And yet it is a metaphor for the literal
in that Rousseau finds the social contract and the institutional governments it gives
rise to actually do instrumentalize death. War, he writes, is only possible between
nation states, which equate to society. Individuals have no power to declare war or
wage war: “I therefore call war between one power and another the effect of a mutual,
steady, and manifest inclination to destroy the enemy state, or at least to weaken it, by
all means possible. This inclination put into action is war properly so called.”55 It is the
very opposite of Hobbes, who thought war reigned in the state of nature and peace
in society. In Rousseau’s eyes the peaceful transactions of the everyday conceal the
actual war that is society—why he yearns for the peace of the state of nature to which
humans can never return. Peaceful society is, literally, to Rousseau, a state of war. This
again unveils the aporia. Society centers on a social-contract theory that he thinks is
only another form of anarchy whereas the libertarian anarchy of the state of nature
would constitute peace—if humans could agree to leave each other alone in the state
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of nature, which would mean they had a social contract. Which means they would
have, in other words, society.
“The state of war is far from being natural to man,” Rousseau writes, because
humans in the state of nature by definition have no social contract and are, as we know
from the second Discourse, naturally good.56 Society, in this sense, would institute
the state of war. However, in rhetorically dismissing Hobbes, Rousseau notes that
the state of war, or society, does not exist: “what a strange animal he must be who
would believe his good is bound up with the destruction of his species.”57 In the state
of nature, because humans have no wants, only needs (lacks) like food and shelter,
they have no reason to wish to kill anyone as doing so would gain them nothing—it
is irrational to seek to kill animals even since there are no species distinctions. But
species, as we saw above, is a conceptual categorization that occurs with society and the
wants and pleasurable desires it brings out in people. Rousseau presages later romantic
postapocalyptic last-man poems and novels (like Byron’s “Darkness” [1816] and Mary
Shelley’s The Last Man [1826]) in his analysis of war’s impossible existence: “The
unbridled desire to appropriate everything is incompatible with that of destroying all
of one’s fellowmen; and the victor who, having killed everyone, had the misfortune to
remain alone in the world, would enjoy nothing in it for precisely the reason that he
would have everything.”58 If society begins with the first man who declares property
his and his alone and this leads to a material acquisitive impulse in the whole species,
then only in society can the advent of war for goods and power and riches happen.
But even then, as Rousseau reasons, no one would wish to eradicate the whole human
species because then they “would have everything” and could derive no pleasure from
acquisitive stockpiling of capital and goods since this want would be sated to the point
that it no longer existed. If one owns everything there is nothing left to want to own.
The victor’s spoils of war are spoiled by his perfectly pyrrhic victory. War, it turns out,
will not occur in society because it would erase wants, leaving nothing but needs, lacks.
Paradoxically, then, this imagined last-man victor would return to the state of nature,
alone, friendless, and with only his basic needs like food and shelter to fulfill. The same
double bind of the state of nature and society plays out: humans “living in both the
social order and the state of nature are subject to the inconveniences of both without
finding safety in either.”
At the same time, while the last man’s victory might look like peace, because,
as Rousseau claims, no one would ever slaughter his or her fellow humans, society
nonetheless remains permanently in a state of impossible war in peace. It is precisely
this double bind that proves so pernicious. Rather than seek species extinction this
victor, according to Rousseau, would stop short, put everyone in shackles instead,
converting them into slaves—hence this scenario avoids a return to the state of nature
and cul-de-sacs instead into the opening line of The Social Contract: people are born
free but live everywhere in chains.
Rousseau’s fragment correspondingly ends on a curious analogy that equates slavery
with the state of war, driving home the point that the chains of The Social Contract
are a metaphor that Rousseau, as the opening pages of this text demonstrate, means
literally. Referencing Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau opines on the relations between the
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Lacedaemonians in Sparta and the helots, their serfs or slaves, in Greek antiquity, and
the ephors, a five-person council that shared powers with the Spartan kings. Rousseau
claims that Aristotle wrote that the “ephors, on taking charge, solemnly declared
war on [the helots],” though, actually, Aristotle did nothing of the sort.59 Regardless,
Rousseau argues that any such declaration would be “superfluous” and “barbarous.”60
While the barbarity of slavery is left to stand as obvious, Rousseau explains the
superfluity by the fact that “the state of war necessarily existed between them solely
because they were the masters and the others were the slaves.”61 The ephors and helots,
by virtue of their master-and-slave relationship, are already in a state of war just as,
by implication, any systemic slaving society would be in a state of war. Such a system
justifies death: “without doubt, since the Lacedaemonians killed the helots, the helots
had every right to kill the Lacedaemonians.”62 The victor, then, in abjuring his last-man
potential to kill everyone, by enslaving his defeated fellow humans, recreates the state
of war even in his actions to curtail it through the forced peace of a slave society that,
ostensibly, is a cessation of warfare.
This circle appears to be unbreakable and the state-of-nature/society aporia an
impossibility that traps humans in a war-and-peace never-land. Instead of seeking to
massacre everyone “we [would] now,” he writes, “enter into a new order of things,”
enchained social life.63 But even in this new order, meant to prevent mass species death,
“we will see men, united by an artificial concord, assemble to cut one another’s throats
and all the horrors of war arise from efforts made to prevent war.”64 No lasting peace
can ever be had in society for the very fact that the social contract, Rousseau’s supposed
enduring contribution to liberal politics, proves to be the countervailing force that
impels war since society introduces capitalism, the desire to accumulate things, which,
in turn, illusorily leads back to the peace of the state of nature but in reality leads
to the illusion of society (“land, money, men, all the spoils that can be appropriated
thus become the principal objects of mutual hostilities”).65 The state of nature, after
all, never existed and probably never will. But it turns out society never has and maybe
never will either.
Rousseau’s response to the aporia is, surprisingly, to discard the social contract
entirely. If, as he says, “people have taken on the task of turning upside down all true
ideas of things,” part of the solution is to flip things from the upside-down back right
side up. Given that “it is from the social pact that the body politic receives its unity and
its ‘common self,’ ” then at issue is this social pact and the common self that divides the
soil and material goods. He writes,
Take away the public convention, and right away the state is destroyed without
the slightest change in all that comprises it; and never will all the conventions
of men know how to change anything in the physical makeup of things. What
then is it to wage war on a sovereign? It is to attack the public convention and all
the results from it; for the essence of the state consists exclusively in that. If the
social pact could be broken with a single stroke, right away there would be no
more war; and with that single stroke the state would be killed, without a single
man dying.66
This passage evinces the same state-of-nature/society aporia in that under the “social
pact” or contract the state owns everything within its compass, including human
beings (everyone is in chains). However, given that society and the state are predicated
on “nature,” then everything within the state’s compass is divided, belonging to both
the individual who possesses it and to the sovereign. “A construction of reason,” the
body politic can be said to only exist insofar as humans believe in and agree to it and
its erasure will lead to, presumably, a state of unreason like in Meillassoux’s vision
for the World of justice. To accomplish this goal, society, rather than humans, must
be killed by “a single stroke” that severs the social compact. By this point, we know
the end of this story: this strike will cut the aporia, divide society and the state of
nature and re-deposit everyone back into that latter state. Now “there is no more war.”
Unfortunately, given that “the object of all the evil that is inflicted on one’s enemy by
war is to force him to endure having even more evil done to him by peace”—the scene
of fiery death this text opens with—this recourse to the state of nature’s peace merely
restarts the endlessly circling circle—especially as we recall that society exists in this
nonexistent state in that only a social compact, that which is fundamentally at odds
with the state of nature, allows the state of nature to maintain itself.67 But if the solution
is dissolving the aporia by purging the social compact, and yet that social compact is
a necessity for peace, then how can society square this circle that correlates humanity,
“this strange animal,” with reality?
In his last book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau envisions a social contract
based on a form of radical Derridean hospitality to the other in contrast to self-love in
the state of nature (amour propre) or love of self in society (amour de soi-même). The
former, again, Rousseau defines as a simple individual drive to satisfy one’s basic wants
and the latter as a selfish investment in the myriad properties, goods, and pleasures one
can accrue in society like we saw with the victor in “The State of War.” Without this
radical hospitality, humans are not alive because self-love drives them to do nothing
more than feed and shelter themselves while societal love of self seeks only pleasure and
makes them fear death in society and look for transcendent immortality. As Rousseau
writes of those imprisoned by love of self in Émile: “the wretch has neither life nor
feeling, he is already dead.”68 These “dead souls” are “alive only to self-interest.”69 With
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self-love and love of self we discover another version of the same aporia, wherein what
is juxtaposed to it’s supposed opposite ends up requiring that opposite to exist.
The centerpiece of Rousseau’s new social-contract politics is this rethinking of
hospitality.70 As Derrida defines it, hospitality, to truly be hospitable, would have to
escape from the general economy of the gift, which is impossible because any act of
hospitality is inscribed within an economy of debt.71 To give to someone depends on
the notion of a giving back, however unwarranted or unwanted such a return gift
might be, because a gift contains the built-in expectation of return, even if that return
is something as simple as “thank you.” For it to exist, pure hospitality, given freely with
no expectation, must escape that which it claims it does not inhabit (gift as both oikos,
munes, and Heideggarian es gibt) and that which does not inhabit it: the economy of
the gift. As such, according to Derrida, hospitality, etymologically and conceptually,
does not yet exist. It always locates the host as welcoming the guest in a double bind
in which the host must give to the guest even if the guest is hostile. True hospitality
must welcome the inhospitable. The guest, meanwhile, however much a rampager he
might be, must accept the host’s hospitality without accepting it; the guest must be
inhospitable, for if he accepts, then their relationship becomes one of exchange and,
therefore, the guest becomes the host of the host who, in turn, becomes his guest, a
violent and seemingly inescapable whirligig.
Thus Derrida’s deconstruction: being hospitable, in the true sense of the word,
would mean escaping this violence to the other by being inhospitable to them, by not
allowing the guest entrance over the threshold, in order to be hospitable—which is no
hospitality at all. As Peter Melville argues in his remarkable book on the subject, it is
only when we accept the violence of hospitality that we can be hospitable, “and only
then, when we can begin, without ending, to be responsible to and for the exclusions
by which we proceed.”72 Pure hospitality would then be a singular event, one to come
from the future, but one also unanticipatable and impossible, for if it were either
anticipatable or possible, then it would already be inscribed within this gift economy.
It is here that Rousseau pushes hospitality further than Derrida by replacing the social
compact of society with a hospitality that limns a future-to-come of social-contract
politics.
In Reveries, hospitality precedes the social contract of society as well as the state
of nature since no gift giving transpires therein. He writes, “I know that there is a
kind of contract, indeed the most sacred of contracts, between the benefactor and the
recipient; together they form a kind of society, which is more closely knit than the
society which unites men in general, and if the recipient tacitly promises his gratitude,
the benefactor likewise commits himself to continue showing the same kindness.”73
While this is as yet a gift economy, Rousseau gestures to a different type of hospitality
here. As a contract more important, more sacred, than the social contract, hospitality,
if it can reject its benefactor-and-recipient circle, will return to a pre-state-of-nature
that exists before the social contract and hence hospitality can redefine society since
hospitality will escape the aporia I have been tracking. A contract based on hospitality
can ground politics in our postapocalyptic world because it does not hinge on how to
avoid death and transcend this life. While Rousseau, as Melville says, was previously
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interested in being the guest who receives hospitality, in Reveries, he now refuses the
role of either host or guest and so sidesteps the circle of hospitality altogether and
envisions a Derridean hospitality-to-come.74 By stepping outside of its circle, neither
“the benefactor” nor “the recipient,” Roussseau becomes, now outside of hospitality’s
double entrapment of its own hospitable violence, hospitable.
The difference between benefactor-and-recipient hospitality and a hospitality-
to-come for Rousseau centers on renouncing both self-love and love of self (which
correspond to the state of nature and society) by refusing the pleasure derived from
gift giving. In Reveries Rousseau writes, “when I pay a debt, I am performing a duty;
when I make a gift, I am indulging in a pleasure.”75 But Rousseau is aware of the perils
of hospitality, how a gift can as quickly become a debt: “a purely voluntary good deed
is certainly something I like doing. But when the recipient uses it as a claim on further
favours and rewards me with hate if I refuse . . . then charity becomes burdensome and
pleasure vanishes.”76 This conversion of payment into debt redounds badly to Rousseau
“who reproach[es] myself inwardly for doing good against my will.”77 After these lessons
in gratitude, he “often abstained from a good deed . . . fearing the enslavement which
I would bring upon myself if I gave way to it unthinkingly.”78 In this most important of
contracts, a contract that binds people even more closely than the social contract, we
can see a repeat of the same economics that can develop from the social contract: an
endless cycle of capitalism wherein “good” or acts “purely good” become impossible
in a market that, to borrow a phrase from A Game of Thrones, always pays its debts.
Indeed, Rousseau’s language of “enslavement” recalls the chains of society. Rousseau
realizes that he performs these acts in an economy that always demands a return gift or
payment for the gift: a hospitality that is not pure hospitality. Forcing him to do good
against his own will, Rousseau halts the process in the only avenue possible: he stops
doing good deeds altogether, stops giving, and in this respect freely gives the ultimate
gift. As he says in Émile, “it is the free gift which is beyond price.”79 It is a gift that is not
a gift, giving nothing, and in this sense it gives giving itself. It gives to Rousseau no gift,
which is the opposite of the expectation installed in gift-giving. He gets nothing from
any exchange, not even pleasure. Thus he removes himself from the circle of gift and
debt, of violence to the other based on the expectation of the inability to purely give.
Rousseau de-links hospitality from pleasurable recourse, from the thank you, from
any economy that powers society or the state of nature. Rousseau has exceeded, even,
the society of the northerners Julie’s St. Preux meets in the mountain passes of upper
Valais, who live unhindered by human exchange and rely, instead, on hospitality’s
emancipatory non-economy.80 In doing so, in relinquishing pleasure, he abandons
society’s love of self.
Giving up on “good deeds” and the involuntary pleasure it causes also sidesteps self-
love, preservation of one’s life at the expense of others, giving one’s own life in exchange
for another. “Whatever our situation,” he writes, “it is only self-love that can make us
constantly unhappy.”81 This abdication of preservation is very contrary to his claim in
the second Discourse, wherein, to repeat, humans are alone and perforce good. In the
state of nature self-love coheres with that solitary, individual goodness. The only way to
reach true happiness is to give the gift of giving up the concept of self-love and happiness
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altogether, to forget our wants, to live in a present beyond the metaphysical desire for
full presence (“I am content as long as I am not suffering today”) and “learn to regard
life and death, sickness and health, riches and poverty, fame and slander with equal
indifference.”82 Giving up self-love as well as the nihilism of love of self ’s pleasure, of
self-enrichment, moves beyond the economics of capitalism and hospitality and of life
and death. It achieves a pure hospitality for it gives everything, even life, and expects
nothing, for it is not possible to return something to the impossible, to the subject-
less human indifferent to pleasure, to the self, to death. We can now hear Rousseau’s
opening pronouncement in the The Confessions (1782) differently, not as some kind of
self-aggrandizement or self-preservationism, but as the achievement of a speculative
world outside the state of nature/society aporia: “I am unlike any one I have ever met;
I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world.”83 He is like no one
because he has no will to either self-preservation or species extinction; he exists in a
postapocalyptic world of political and ethical possibility. No longer dead in society, he
is now in an extro-fictional state that subscribes to no mores, laws, or reality that we
know, a contingent state in which anything can happen, even life.
Like agents Mulder and Scully, the star-obsessed lovers in The X-Files who “want
to believe” in a different world, in different ontologies of beings, Rousseau’s work
explores alternate alien realities in its reimagining of this aporia. Such beliefs occur,
on Rousseau’s telling, only once humans leave the Garden of Eden and enter the state
of nature. He configures his version of the state of nature as explicitly postapocalyptic,
divorced from romanticism’s traditional, apocalyptic yearning for a newly revealed
paradise borne of revolution (apocalypsis means “revelation”). Romanticism, for
Rousseau, exists after biblical apocalypse: “it is clear from the Holy Scriptures that the
first man [Adam in Eden], having received his understanding and commandments
immediately from God, was not himself in such a state [of nature].”84 In eschewing
romantic apocalypse, the notion of refinding paradise, Rousseau avoids Meillassoux’s
correlationist trap by engaging in romantic postapocalyptic thought experiments that
remove anthropocentricism as the axiological Enlightenment guarantee for the success
of any political social contract.85
Contingency is key. In his discussion of fiction in the Reveries, Rousseau writes
that “to lie to one’s own advantage is an imposture, to lie to the advantage of others
is a fraud, and to lie to the detriment of others is a slander—this is the worst kind of
lie. To lie without advantage or disadvantage to oneself or others is not to lie; it is not
falsehood but fiction.”86 He goes on, “fictions which have a moral end in view are called
parables or fables.”87 The irony of Rousseau’s final fable, its extro-science fiction—a
fiction where anything can happen however unlikely—of giving up on the self totally,
the self ’s importance, the self ’s happiness, and embracing a complete indifference to
self, seeking no advantage or disadvantage, is that the time when we give up on the
self is the very moment when the world becomes more with us precisely when it is
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most without us—speculative realism par excellance. For politics is only a human belief
predicated on humans’ own ability to fabulize, to fictionalize a society that lies about
life and how to keep it living. This politics acts to our great disadvantage in that death is
the only possible end, unlike Rousseau’s extro-science fiction aporia in which anything
can happen, even a reprieve from death by thinking in terms of the immortality of this
mortal life. Rousseau’s extro-science fictional speculative space, free of the fictions of
any self-regard, begins to glimpse a genuine event, the appearance of a self-less social
contract, one that locates the object of its politics as more than human, as focused on
more than the death we are living in society, concerned neither with human species
preservation or human pleasure derived from wealth, commodities, land, or even the
power wielded by the slaving victor.
If extro-science fiction envisions worlds that function radically different than the
reality we have inherited from the Enlightenment, then a politics predicated on a
self-less social contract would complete the project of postapocalyptic romanticism’s
nonanthropocentric dream. A selfless social-contract politics would allow us to do
more than just live on, as it were, by perpetually dying in society. Death becomes a
nonissue, not included as a clause in this radically hospitable social contract that is,
rather, focused on the immortality of this life, for humans and the nonhuman other.
The final irony of such a politics shows us that it is not even possible to learn how to
die in the Anthropocene because, having inhospitably maintained an anthropocentric
social contract, we have never yet been alive.
Notes
1 Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” The New York Times,
November 10, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learning-
how-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/. See also his book: Learning How to Die in the
Anthropocene (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2015). Accessed October 15, 2017.
2 Timothy Morton endorses Scranton’s idea. Ecology without Nature. http://
ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2015/12/i-cant-stand-it-no-more-i-have-to-say.
html. Accessed October 15, 2017.
3 Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39,
no. 2 (Winter 2013), 347–66.
4 For Harman this is a problem with philosophy in general: “As philosophers we tend
to favor very slow-moving arguments. Other fields do not have this luxury—there are
urgent problems to which they are trying to respond. Philosophy is the least urgent
discipline because we’re dealing with long-term, subtle, slow conceptual changes that
might not have much impact for a long time.” Liesbeth Koot and Menno Grootveld,
“Interview with Graham Harman on the Anthropocene,” Sonic Arts Research Series
#10, Sonic Arts. http://sonicacts.com/portal/anthropocene-objects-art-and-politics-1.
Accessed October 15, 2017. The editors of The Speculative Turn wonder the same: “A
more serious issue for the new realisms and materialisms is the question of whether
they can provide any grounds or guidelines for ethical and political action. Can
they justify normative ideals? Or do they not rather evacuate the ground for all
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intentional action, thereby proposing a sort of political quietism? What new forms
of political organization can be constructed on the basis of the ideas emerging from
this movement?” (p. 16). Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.),
“Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism
and Realism (Melbourne: re:press, 2011), 1–18.
5 Whether this “might-makes-right” idea recurs in Latour’s later work is beyond
the scope of this essay. Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political
(London: Pluto Press, 2014).
6 Ibid., 18.
7 Ibid., 19.
8 Latour writes, “reactionary thinkers are more interesting than the progressive ones . . .
in that you learn more about politics from people like Machiavelli and Schmitt than
from Rousseau.” Quoted in Bruno Latour, 133.
9 I use “Hobbes” as something of a stand-in for libertarianism throughout this essay.
Hobbes obviously thinks that we must form a strong monarchical government. But
“Hobbes” here serves as a descriptor for his view that humans in the state of nature
are all at war—the libertarian view of unrestrained individualism freed from any
government restraint.
10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Or Treatise on Education, trans. Barbara Foxley
(London: Everyman, 1997), 11.
11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 37.
12 I have modified this translation (E, 5). In the state of nature, by contrast, humans are
“accustomed from infancy to bad weather and the harshness of the seasons, inured
to fatigue . . . and develop a robust and nearly inalterable constitution” (DI, 27). Once
they leave the state of nature and alter the climate everything goes to hell and this
is why, in Émile, Rousseau advocates physically preparing students to deal with the
weather, the climates, the seasons.
13 Maurice Cranston also refers to that state as “anarchic” and notes how much of
the Discourse is a direct response to Hobbes. Rousseau’s little-known text “The
State of War” helps clarify his intensive engagement with Hobbes. Rousseau, “The
State of War,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress
(New York: Hackett, 2011), 253–65. Cranston, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Early
Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (New York: W. W. Norton,
1983), 294–5.
14 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 229.
15 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 45.
16 This is Derrida’s conclusion about Rousseau’s dream-work: “To the extent that he
belonged to the metaphysics of presence, he dreamed of the simple exteriority of
death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signified, representer
to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all such oppositions are
irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics. Using them, one can only operate by reversals,
that is to say by confirmations. The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially
not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a
speech.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, 255–68.
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17 Rousseau, “The State of War,” The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A.
Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), 253–65, 256.
18 Ibid., 256.
19 Rousseau, Discourse, 15.
20 Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (Minneapolis, MN:
Univocal, 2015).
21 Quentin Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the
Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224–87.
22 Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1984), 93–123. “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s
Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–41. For its
monumentalization, see: Orrin Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings
in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), 37–68.
23 Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” The Purloined Poe: Lacan,
Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 28–54, 32.
24 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (London: Mimesis
International, 2014), 28.
25 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 60.
26 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 25.
27 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh, Edinburgh
University Press, 2011), 168.
28 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64.
29 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 19.
30 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 70.
31 Ibid., 75.
32 “The presence-absence of the trace, which one should not even call its ambiguity but
rather its play . . . carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body
and soul, and all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled” (Derrida, Of
Grammatology, 71).
33 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68.
34 Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Point…Interviews,
1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995),
255–87, 280–1.
35 Excerpts of Meillassoux’s unpublished L’Inexistence divine, where he makes this claim,
can be found in Harman’s book, L’Inexistence divine, 236–7.
36 Ibid., 265–6.
37 Ibid., 250.
38 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascal-Anne
Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Melville House, 2011).
39 Rousseau, Discourse, 47.
40 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 250.
41 See Derrida, Of Grammatology. De Man, “Metaphor (Second Discourse),” in Allegories
of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).
155
42 Rousseau, Discourse, 34–5. Rousseau similarly writes, “so does the child become man
when he opens himself to “the consciousness of death.” (Émile, p. 2o) [p. 15].
43 It is language, Rousseau writes, that distinguishes human from animal. Derrida
has already pointed out the deconstructive aporia at work in such a claim in Of
Grammatology.
44 “[T]he true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece
of land, thought of saying, ‘this is mine,’ and came across people simple enough to
believe him” (Rousseau, Discourse, 55).
45 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:136.
46 Rousseau, Discourse, 32–3.
47 “Speech differentiates man from other animals.” Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of
Languages, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor
Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 247–99, 248.
48 Rousseau, Discourse, 33.
49 Rousseau, Social Contract, 55.
50 Rousseau, Émile, 52.
51 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 229.
52 Jean Jacques-Rousseau, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in The Basic Political
Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), 1–26, 23. As
David Wooten remarks, this text is necessary to understand how Rousseau’s project
stems from a direct engagement with Hobbes. “State of War,” 254.
53 Rousseau, “State of War,” 254.
54 Ibid., 255.
55 Ibid., 264.
56 Ibid., 256.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 258.
59 Ibid., 265.
60 Ibid.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid.
63 Ibid., 259.
64 Ibid.
65 Ibid., 264.
66 Ibid., 265.
67 Ibid., 263.
68 Rousseau, Émile, 300.
69 Ibid., 300.
70 Peter Melville has shown us how hospitality crisscrosses all of Rousseau’s
thinking. Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation
(Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007).
71 On hospitality and the gift, see: Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit
Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and
Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
156
Lord Byron refers to the eponymous hero of Don Juan (1819–24) as “real or ideal,— /
For both are much the same” (10.20.153).1 This equivocation between real and ideal
calls to mind the relationship between objects and their formal or mathematical
concepts, a connection Byron reinforces when he claims, regarding Dante, that Beatrice
was “Meant to personify the mathematics” (3.11.88). Accordingly, I take the reference
to real and ideal as indicative of the poem’s central problem: If a figure changes, is
this change only a difference in the human mind, or is the figure’s formal essence also
subject to change? It was an important distinction in the long eighteenth century, for
even nominalists held, without recourse to abstract Platonic forms, that a square is
the same in all times and places.2 Indeed, it is a problem at the heart of the nature of
representing, representation, the human self, and time.
Byron’s position on the real/ideal divide can be further extrapolated from his
protagonist’s name. The first two lines of the poem establish the well-known pattern
forcing “Don Juan” simultaneously to obscure and rhyme with the number one: “I
want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new
one” (1.1.1). In the fifth stanza, the name follows the word “none” and precedes “one,”
locating Don Juan on a number line between zero and one. The metrical rhyme
reinforces Juan’s fuzziness. As Jim Cocola recounts, Byron varies the sound of Juan,
from “Joo-uhn” to Joo-wan”: “the indeterminate sonic structure of Don Juan’s name
rests somewhere between the traditionally ascribed English mispronunciation ‘Dahn
Joo-uhn’ and the more conventional Spanish pronunciation, ‘Don Hwan.’ ”3 No doubt,
the difference in the figure of Don Juan implies a change in the word, and the difference
appears to follow from Byron’s adaptation. Yet Don Juan emerges, not from the past
alone, but also from the underworld, “Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time” (1.1.8).
In his reintroduction, Don Juan breaches the divide between life and death, and it is on
account of this rupture that Don Juan changes on a conceptual level.
Accordingly, the first half of my argument is that Don Juan is conceptually
mathematical and indeterminate. Don Juan neither identifies with nor fits his referent,
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which equates to the difference between a geometrical figure (a square) and its
mathematical concept (four right angles). A difference in the representational Don
Juan does not imply a necessary difference in the concept. But it also does not preclude
the possibility that Don Juan the concept is multiple and changing. This claim is
tantamount to a disavowal of Platonic forms, which Byron references (15.5.40). And
yet, as I will demonstrate, this disavowal does not commit Byron to reducing concepts
to the human sense of words. Rather, concepts are something in between.
Arriving at this view requires a darker look at the epistemological origins of Don
Juan, or put another way, the figure’s relationship to the self. As represented in the
text, one might explain Don Juan’s appearance as coinciding with the cognitive act
of selection, reflection, or some version of intellectual intuition. But, as the second
part of my argument stresses, Byron links his representation with the horror of the
gut.4 It is an altogether different sensorium upon which the mind depends, not the
other way around: “who / Would pique himself on intellects, whose use / Depends so
much upon the gastric juice?” (5.32.254–6). My position is indebted in part to recent
work by Elizabeth Wilson, who espouses a scientific approach to the gut and its role in
determining the human psyche and behavior.5 Moreover, Philip Martin emphasizes the
role of the gut in Don Juan, arguing that the mind is subordinated to the body.6 Byron
goes farther still, suggesting that, if a conceptual framework of thought was opened
up to the gut, what emerges at first only as a split representation (Dahn Joo-uhn and
Don Hwan) does not necessarily evince a coincident split in the subject, between a
present, naïve self and a removed, contemplative self. Rather, on account of Don Juan’s
ongoing change, the conceptual framework might link to something altogether more
chaotic: “mind is lost in mighty contemplation / Of intellect expended on two courses
[immanence and transcendence]; / And indigestion’s grand multiplication / Requires
arithmetic beyond my forces” (15.69.545–8). For Byron, the mind is geometrical, while
the gut belongs to astronomical numbers. The significance for Byron is that digestion
and cognition operate according to two separate mathematical domains. And Don
Juan, I contend, is an expression of the more chaotic realm which aims to render the
latter (consciousness) concomitant with the former (mindless processes). Indeed, as
the present essay articulates, Don Juan is not the result of the narrator’s discerning
powers of selection, but the unconscious manifestation of the gut’s nonconceptual
reality, which functions as the disturbance overwriting the structure of knowing that
the concept/object identity would otherwise reinforce.
In linking the figure of Don Juan to the structure of the subject, my reading of
“Don Juan” intersects with recent responses to the post-structuralist interpretation of
romanticism, of the kind following Paul de Man’s link between allegory and the self.
De Man’s well-known subordination of symbol to allegory as the dominant figure of
romanticism marks an attempt to cut through the conflation of concepts and objects
by including time. But when de Man rejects the “reconciliation between the ideal and
the real as the result of an action or the activity of the mind,” he only objects to the
final synthesis, preferring instead an endless dialectic.7 Thereby, de Man inaugurates
an optimistic view of romanticism, which Jerome Christensen claims in his study of
Byron, “will never amount to a final word.”8 However, several romanticist scholars have
159
Denying anteriority and exteriority, Fichte lays out the conditions for a self-enclosed
reality, where anything posited by the self is also for the self. Thereby, the stage is set for
death’s transcendence and the concomitant never-ending story critics have detected in
Byron’s Don Juan and romanticism more generally. Likewise, for Meillassoux, there is
no way out of this Fichtean (correlationist) model of the self. Rather, he stresses that
the “self-grounding act” is a “free act,” which is “to recognize, after Descartes, that
our subjectivity cannot reach an absolute necessity.”15 Thus the distinction between
concepts and objects is upheld—the correlationist is actually a realist but only with
160
respect to the power of the postulate, “or act of self-positing”—and our knowledge
of the latter (objects) ensues from an act independent of both (objects and concepts).
Brassier singles out for critique the privileged act of self-reflection (the postulate).
For scholars of romanticism, this rebuke should be regarded as an indictment of Fichte,
his theologically oriented analogue in England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and to a
lesser extent, William Wordsworth. My purpose in the present essay is to determine
if Byron also belongs to this list, and if not, what alternative can he offer speculatively
invested images of romanticism today. In other words, “What can Byron teach us about
speculative philosophy?” a question entirely ignored in M. H. Abrams’s philosophical
reading of the period.16 And the criterion guiding this investigation is, to start, Brassier’s
criticism of correlationism: the refutation of transcendental realism cannot rest on the
ambiguous division between the mathematical and formal conditions underlying a
reflective human subject and the laws of nature.17 In short, human acts do not operate
according to a special set of laws irrespective of the universe. But without privileging
human construction, how does one distinguish between words/things and concepts/
objects? And what are we to make of those discoveries which seem to disrupt these
binaries, represented today by efforts to demystify the mind, thereby reducing selfhood
to objecthood.
To some extent, Byron anticipates answers to these questions. To appreciate his
more realist and vatic outlook, it is necessary to examine in greater detail Don Juan’s
epistemological source, thereby addressing the nerve of Brassier’s project: “why [are]
those who are so keen to attribute absolute or unconditional reality to the activities of
self-consciousness . . . so loath to confer equal existential rights upon the unconscious,
mindless processes through which consciousness and mindedness first emerged and
will eventually be destroyed.”18 Given Brassier’s indictment, it behooves us to revisit
the narrator’s selection of Don Juan in greater detail. Through this exploration, I will
demonstrate that Don Juan is not a figure “for” the narrator, acquitting Byron of
fostering an anti-realist tendency. Figuration is no less an act, but as Brassier would
insist, after Sellars, it is an act of inference, irrespective of volition or the will.19 The
asymmetrical relationship between narrator and figure, ultimately negates the former
(narrator) in a process of mapping the underlying complexities of the latter (figure).20
Put another way, Don Juan is a representation that rewrites the relationship to the
formal and mathematical underpinnings from which a narrator/self emerges. Last,
I will turn to the consequences of this revision and outline Byron’s aspirations for a new,
“astral” level of sapience, resulting from a strange relationship between the conceptual
domain and the blood and guts undergirding it—without synthesizing them “for us”—
thereby inaugurating a conceptual, temporal difference.
Byron’s narrator appears to occupy what could be construed as a “view from nowhere.”
He traverses the length of the poem, addressing matters inside and out, from the
present and retrospectively, and he even joins in the action, as in the dinner scenes in
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England (15.66). More revealing, as Leslie Marchand observes, are those comments
from the narrator that belong not to a “persona” but to “Byron himself, which he takes
no pains to disguise.”21 No doubt, as a conduit for characters unrevealed within the
text (and where is the narrator at these moments?), and operating in different registers
and from different points in time, the narrator is unconstrained by the normal laws of
where, when, and who one can be.
For Brassier, this view from nowhere implies the ability to traffic between versions
of the self, from a first-person perspective to something approximating a third-
person or “first-object” perspective.22 It is a “nemocentric” view of selfhood, or a
“non-phenomenologically centered model of reality,” a role Brassier reserves for the
philosophical subject:23
[Philosophy] should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of
abstraction . . . to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of
transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up
within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries
generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order.24
At first, the closest comparison to Brassier’s idea of a nemocentric view would seem
to be the narrator of Euclid’s Elements. According to James Harris, in Hermes or a
Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751), the text contains “neither
First person, nor Second” and “the reason is, that neither Speaker nor Party addressed
. . . can possibly become the Subject of pure Mathematics, nor indeed can anything
else, except abstract Quantity, which neither speaks itself nor is spoken to by another.25
Harris pinpoints an eighteenth-century version of the nemocentric perspective. But
Brassier’s updated version is more complicated because it includes the “mindless
processes” supporting this conceptual domain without synthesizing them. Thus, if there
is a comparison to be made between Brassier’s nemocentric self and Byron’s narrator,
it is incumbent upon us to illustrate how the narrator shuttles back and forth between
images without separating this plane of abstraction from the body, but also without
identifying them. Such an inquiry requires a look into the fundamental structure of
identifying and differentiating, a power afforded to the narrator in selecting his hero.
Ultimately, outlining these steps will provide a clearer explanation as to how the
narrator migrates across registers and the temporal repercussions that follow.
Marjorie Levinson elucidates the act of selection in her reading of romantic fragment
poetry: “All speech—and certainly all poetry” she posits, with respect to Wordsworth,
“delineates arbitrarily, wantonly, a circle of significant representations and pretends to
discover what it in fact produces by its curtailments.”26 Levinson means that the poet
necessarily excludes other representations in the construction of a figure. Byron differs
from other romantic-era writers, according to Levinson’s reading of The Giaour (1813),
in that the narrator selects a tale from history to translate.27 Similarly, in Don Juan, the
narrator pulls Juan from history but not before sorting through a list of contemporary
candidates: “Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, / Prince Ferdinand,
Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe, Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk” (1.2.9–11).
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Excluding these would-be heroes, the narrator nominates Don Juan, and as Levinson
might offer, what is really excluded are not the would-be contemporary heroes but
the historical context surrounding the traditional Don Juan figure. It could certainly
be argued that in the act of selection, the narrator self-reflexively incorporates the
object and in reflection, distances himself from it, achieving the sense of a “moment,”
or a form of reflection often represented as a scene severed from history. No doubt,
Don Juan’s nomination removes him from the meaningless rubble of history (a thing
turned word) and reactivates him as a figure with existential properties. This is the
reading Levinson critiques, all in the name of historicism. However, this interpretation
assumes that the narrator actually selects Don Juan and that Don Juan is a figure “for”
the narrator.
In the dinner scene of canto 15, Byron qualifies the narrator’s earlier selection
of Don Juan, namely when the narrator selects a bite to eat. For several stanzas, the
narrator lists the foods on display, “Fowls à la Condé, slices eke of salmon” and so forth
(15.65.513). The listing recalls the narrator’s enumeration of contemporary figures at
the poem’s beginning, and once again, the narrator enters the process of selection.
But in surveying his options, the guiding metaphor’s implication of bounty and life,
recalls a grimmer link to eating. “To be or not to be” the narrator claims, is bound up
with “digestion” and “Indigestion”: “that inward fate / Which makes all Styx through
one small liver flow” (9.14.105, 9.15.116–17). The allusion to a hellish seascape is less
surprising if “that inward fate” splits the subject, thereby relocating the void behind
the self to the stomach. More impressive is the power Byron ascribes to the gut. Rather
than a passive reservoir to be filled, it is a strange muse, whose own “stomach’s not her
peccant part: this tale / However doth require some slight refection, / Just to relieve her
spirits from dejection” (15.64.510–12). The pun on “peccant” is a bawdy distraction
from the more abject point that Byron’s muse resides in the river of hell separating life
and death—and still needs to be fed. No doubt, Byron’s image of the muse—a diseased
border figure—is vampiric. For the narrator, eating thereby becomes more like force-
feeding. The narrator acquiesces at mealtime against his better judgment, ingesting
“things I can’t withstand or understand, / Though swallow’d with much zest upon the
whole” (15.66.523–4). The dinner party scene then turns a shade more nightmarish, as
it becomes difficult to distinguish the dinner from the diner: “The guests were placed
according to their role, / But various as the various meats display’d” (15.74.587–8). The
narrator carries it well, but he has already admitted to his passive role. He is a vessel
through which a vampiric gut operates, and in this state, the appearance of selection
must be something altogether different, less like digestion and more like indigestion,
or the inability to process external-sense data from beyond the grave.
For Byron, the process of selection serves as a step toward the gradual dissolution
of the egocentric model of self-consciousness. This gesture toward the self ’s dissolution
anticipates an additional feature yoking together the speculative realists: the human
subject’s removal from a central position within a philosophical outlook. It is part of
a project of demystification stretching back to Hume and extending to contemporary
brain science.28 Thomas Metzinger, a point of reference among speculative realists,
claims that the first-person perspective, or the “phenomenal Ego is not some
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mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image—
namely, the conscious self-model.”29 Metzinger concludes that there is no self: it’s an
illusion. Of course, we have a sense of self, and in this regard, it serves as an important
historical point of reference in the evolution of consciousness. But against a much
larger evolutionary background, it may be negligible. “Don Juan,” if it can be regarded
as an image of the self-model, indexes a stage in which the self stands on unstable
ground, for the so-called self ’s postulating mechanism is grounded in the mathematical
maelstrom of the gut. Thereby, the self that selects takes a backseat to the vampire that
chews/chooses through him.
Brassier, to be clear, is not interested in the gut—at least not explicitly. He is
interested in the processes according to which representations are made, and the
binding of representing to representations (without reducing them to the same). In
joining mindless processes and abstract conceptual framework, there is no room for
the personal, subjective histories normally attributed to the self. Brassier’s solution to
the mind/world divide thereby differs from the binding of sense and being.30 This route
was already the path of eighteenth-century empiricists and nominalists. For the likes of
Berkeley and Hartley, following Locke, the language of nature could be shaped according
to the artificial language of humans, namely mathematics, as mediated by the senses.31
Plus, because this process begins axiomatically from a tabula rasa, everything becomes
human from the ground up, thereby securing an image of idealism and the indefinite
or ongoing dialectic between mind and nature. Thus, if Byron’s narrator could access
the gut, forcing it to conform to conventional language, it would become yet another
thing for us. But by maintaining its inscrutable mathematical complexity, Byron treats
it as wholly other. Still, this qualification does not explain the gut’s power over the self
and its strange relationship to representations (Don Juan). In the next section, I want
to explore what powers the gut and establishes its hold on the conceptual framework of
the narrator, rendering the act of selection into a form of ingression.
Into darkness
In canto 9, Byron further complicates the relationship between the word that becomes a
thing and the self that recovers it as a figure. After scorning Britain’s imperial efforts, the
narrator interrupts the Don Juan narrative several more times before acknowledging
that he’s lost his train of ideas, hastening to add: “But let it [the thought] go”:
For Byron, the universe is layers upon layers of elements, matter, and even thoughts,
punctuated by black holes and held together by a “Superstratum,” or “Chaos.” The link
I am trying to establish is between this image of a thought “hurled” inside and out of
chaos, and the relationship between Don Juan and the gut. The mediator tying them
together, as I have argued, is a variation on selection, one that makes an instrument out
of the narrator’s self. Now I wish to suggest that the comparison between the gut and
death or an abyssal chaos be taken more seriously. The comparison modifies the act
of selection by extending the poles between recent history and Don Juan to extinction
and a thought that “will one day be found.” This scalar change rewrites the structure of
selection, qualifying the relationship between narrator and figure, mind and nature. It
is also a step on the way to defusing any charge of fostering an eternal dialectic between
mind and nature and decisively sidestepping the correlationist circle.
To include chaos in the act of selection anticipates Brassier’s response to the
mind/nature correlate. As Brassier points out, “roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion
(101728) years from now,” the universe will expand beyond its ability to sustain life of
any kind.32 And thus, he stresses the parameters separating being and nothing, the
annihilation of space and time as we know it, or what he refers to as “being-nothing”
(the real, or an unobjectifiable essence).33 What Brassier takes as scientific fact is a
truth rendering philosophy (and thus the philosopher) “the organon of extinction.”34
Extinction, as a concept, seizes or grips the subject.35 It does so by introducing a wholly
other temporal element into the picture of the mind. Because this death marks the
end of all ends, extinction can never be incorporated within a correlationist circle,
and instead, “extinction indexes the thought of the absence of thought.”36 In my view,
this maneuver reverses Locke’s position that personal identity begins with a tabula
rasa, and that human consciousness thus proceeds axiomatically. Instead, from the
perspective of extinction, Brassier insists, the world has already unfolded, everything
has already happened, and therefore the universe, including human thought, can be
outlined according to propositional logic. Accordingly, the self as an existential being,
replete with feelings, an inner-life, and memories, is reduced to the same information
as other things. As Brassier announces, rather more baldly than lugubriously, we are
“already dead.”37
The question is, does Byron’s image of a universe swallowing and spitting back
ideas conflict with Brassier’s axiomatic look at a universe with a definitive end? If so,
Byron may be accused of harboring an image of eternal recurrence. The question can
be laid to rest by turning to Byron’s “Darkness” (1817), in which everything perishes,
for “Darkness had no need / Of aid from them—She was the universe” (81–2). This
response is unsatisfying though because it dismisses the narrator’s comment in “Don
Juan” that the idea will return. Rather, it is worth considering how Byron can maintain
an image of finitude and an image of repetition without the pitfalls of idealism. As
a testing ground, it is worth turning to Byron’s image of previous extinctions here
on earth.
In canto 9, Byron provides an image in between cosmic extinction and the earth’s
accretion: terrestrial extinction. Citing the geologist George Cuvier, the narrator
explains that a “new Creation” will arise from “our” wasted remains. He imagines a
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human-like culture, but one that looks back on present-day relics like “monsters of a
new Museum” (9.40.320). With a similar retrospective view, he assesses the humans
that already occupy the earth:
Entire worlds beget miscarriages and humans emerge from the refuse, not as willful
creatures oriented according to future progress but as creatures of reaction, feeding
on death’s remains. So in Byron’s geohistorical outlook, extinction precedes life, and
the latter (life) does not produce but feeds on the former (death). Geological history
proceeds according to a strange, backward, axiomatic history, in which humans are
only an iteration of inorganic matter. Byron’s reference to a future race coupled with
the image of humans as the remainder of some distant extinction, emphasizes the fact
that humans are artifacts of history, and that any existential thing is an accident in the
algorithm of the universe.
The compulsion to repeat is not synonymous with eternal recurrence, in Byron or
in Brassier’s work, because the agent of repetition is not the act of a willful poet but
the result of inorganic processes, churning up the dead, and in its indigestion, life
hurls forth. Indeed, for Brassier, extinction marks a kind of backward birth, providing
the conditions for an “organism’s ability to reproduce and die.”38 The process, which
extinction inaugurates, motivates the “compulsion to repeat,” despite the impossibility
of being “satisfactorily repeated,” because this birth occurs prior to life.39 But the
process is inscribed into our very cellular makeup, a speculative biological notion
Brassier borrows from Freud:
posits that death “is not a past or future state towards which life tends,” rather “the
only temporality commensurate with it is that of the ‘anterior posteriority’ proper to
physical death as that which seizes organic temporality, but which cannot be seized by
it.”42 Death, “round him, near him, here, there, every where” (14.5.33) is representative
of noumenal time, unconstrained by sense perception’s chronological time, which
is only a burp, yawn, or “Pooh!” interrupting oblivion: Apparently, “All present life
is but an interjection,” even on a cosmic scale (15.1.7, 5). But the process does end,
for it is the end that conditions these chance happenings in between. In other words,
neither Byron nor Brassier can be charged with fostering hopes of an eternal or infinite
recurrence. Chaos is the superstratum.
Ultimately, the process of the dead ushering in life on meso- and macroscales
can inform how the narrator’s postulate works and how Don Juan becomes separate
as well as multiple. Brassier provides an additional clue, tying the knot between the
gut and extinction. Drawing once again on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,
Brassier claims that extinction is a trauma registered by the unconscious, and only
as the “un-dampened excess of excitation.”43 The phrase recalls Byron’s view of the
gut producing multiplicities of information beyond the power of arithmetic to render
knowable. Indeed, the indigestion of the vampiric and inaccessible agent behind
the narrator’s actions is compatible to Brassier’s image of “the originary traumatic
scission between organic and inorganic” matter, which “demands to be integrated
into the psychic economy of the organism but which cannot.”44 It cannot, Byron and
Brassier would say, because this scission occurs at the intersection of life arising
from dead matter, or at the meso-point of terrestrial extinction, the macro-point
of the cosmic extinction, and at the local point of Don Juan’s appropriation from
history. Accordingly, indigestion, the inability to process organic matter “for us,” is
the material manifestation of the trauma tracing the separation between organic and
inorganic matter, and Don Juan is the result. He is the figure the narrator appears to
select from a historical point in time, but as a figure from the dead, he more adequately
fits the impossible bond between the geological ages extinction punctuates and the
gut materializes. Therefore, he is already multiple (“Joo-uhn” and Joo-wan”), not on
account of a difference in the narrator but on account of the “un-dampened excess”
from which he emerges.
This figure, though, is disastrous.45 He springs from the chaotic indefinite quantities
of the bowels, and in the compulsion to repeat, to this chaos he attempts to return. This
drive to relive the trauma of being plucked from history moves the poem ever closer
to a new bond, between the realm of abstraction and the nonconceptual processes
that produce it. In this drive forward, “Don Juan” rewrites the structural relationship
to nonconceptual reality. The evidence is in the narrator’s transpositions from within
the poem. As the narrator’s location becomes increasingly open and loose, it evinces
Don Juan’s restructuring of the narrator’s conceptual framework that is the poem’s
form. The narrator bears witness to this process. But because he also belongs to it,
as representation and representing are drawn together, it is the narrator who will be
torn apart.
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(G)astronomical difference
Don Juan’s trajectory charts the rewriting of the poem’s fundamental structure and thus
the narrator’s self-model. In his pursuit of his own formal reality, the immeasurable
quantities undergirding his existence, Juan pushes the poem forward achieving a
new kind of knowing. Byron elucidates the enterprise in his meditation on Newton’s
demystification of cosmic forces:
Byron refers to Newton’s explication of gravity, which refigured the motion of the
planets as a mechanical and mathematized process, thereby raising the power of
humankind to think things in a formalized way. Byron imagines something similar
for humans. The stanza recalls canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), where
Byron exaggerates the image of “steam engines” conducting people to the “moon,”
referring instead to stars as “the poetry of heaven! . . . —‘tis to be forgiven, / That
in our aspirations to be great, / Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state” (3.88.824–
8). These techno-rational visions imply an aspiration that goes beyond “looking at
stars forever.”46 Rather, Byron wishes to be astral.47 If his self-model is to “o’erleap”
the mortal state of humankind, then the aim is an eternal-like state, as represented
by a celestial object, like a star (“man hath glowed”). This position should not be
mistaken for an avowal of “eternal life,” in a Christian, theological sense. It should be
regarded as the end of human life as it is currently recognized and the introduction of
a fundamental difference, not an “ontological” difference but, as Brassier would offer,
a “methodological” one.48
To aim for such a futuristic, techno-rational image of the self is to fulfill a potential
outcome of speculative realism, which Brassier outlines. Brassier claims that the main
challenge for philosophy is to construct rules for thinking based on an understanding
of the physical universe, bearing in mind that as human understanding changes, these
rules require updating.49 Moreover, rules for thinking ought to change according to
an updated understanding of the “ways in which we change the world.”50 Brassier
recognizes that human actions, like the introduction of a “golem,” or an artificial life,
can inaugurate “another kind of difference.”51 Accordingly, philosophy must struggle
to grasp “the stratification of immanence, together with the involution of structures
within the natural order.”52 This involution in Byron, begins with the selection of Don
Juan: the representation of a concept which reopens conceptual possibilities (Don
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If there is a way to make the process of indigestion more explosive, add “Cayenne.”
More to the point, as the pace accelerates, the scale of Don Juan’s travels widens (he
covers multiple cities and states, from Poland to Holland, within the span of stanzas
60–3 in canto 10). This tendency to move at ever-greater speeds across the globe is
significant because, the more nodes or points are connected, the more the world is
reduced to an objectified whole.53
Indeed, Don Juan collapses here and there, now and then, like a train joining cities
(or a steam engine linking celestial objects). To be present and absent simultaneously
renders self-conscious existence, not exactly essential, but even more spontaneous.
The process coincides with Brassier’s clearest explication of the emerging nemocentric
self, that is, the “subject of a hypothetically completed neuroscience in which all the
possible neural correlates of representational states have been identified [providing]
an empirically situated and biologically embodied locus for the exhaustively objective
‘view from nowhere.’ ”54 This perspective is not a view from “outside” of reality. Rather,
it implies a new stage in human evolution, in which the demystification of mind is
won. This speculative view belongs to a legacy that encourages demystification
through unification, albeit of a different kind for Brassier. Brassier limits himself to
a tighter bond between sub-personal representing structure (“neural correlates”) and
conceptual superstructure, separated only by the unincorporated rift extinction writes
into their relationship. For Byron, Don Juan plays an essential feature in this collapse
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by altering the relation between locales, thereby tightening the parameters between
representing and represented.
It is worth emphasizing here that Don Juan does not reduce consciousness to a
fixed or essentialized thing. Consciousness remains finite, but this—as Meillassoux’s
title (After Finitude) suggests—is the liberating force, raising the question: what
kind of finitude? Jerome McGann points out that the poem was to end with Juan’s
death in France.55 Even with this end in sight, Juan’s actions make the path to the
poem’s final termination unpredictable. As Byron reminds us, whether Juan does
this or that, “Is yet within the unread events of time. / Thus far, go forth, thou Lay!
Which I will back / Against the same given quantity of rhyme” (11.90.712–13). He
then ends the succeeding canto with, “When the body of the book’s begun, / You’ll
find it of a different construction / From what some people say ‘twill be when done”
(12.87.689–90). The poem will “go forth,” not without end but also not ending within
any foreseeable future. Furthermore, it will change, defying “construction[s]” based on
what is already known: it is becoming what is unknown. And yet, the poem will remain
formally consistent (“Against the same given quantity of rhyme”) in terms of the ottava
rima, the mathematical form providing the objective framework for Byron’s epic. So,
in at least one regard, the poem is read in the events of time.
The unforeseen continuation of the poem, combined with the consistency of the
form’s metrical or mathematical backbone, introduces a different difference. Byron at
one point refers to an “in-difference,” which he calls wisdom, or the quelling of the
passions (13.4.30). If this definition of indifference has any bearing on the poem, it
could variously imply the diminution of the narrator’s passions, or the affective-ego; or
it could imply the indefinite extension of the poem—at least, up until a point. It could
also suggest the conjoining of these two ends, for the indefinite elongation of the “same
quantity of rhyme” is none other than the axiomatization of the gut’s indigestion—
that inscrutable chaos of astronomical numbers. Byron hints at his purpose when he
compares what “Troy owes to Homer [to] what whist owes to Hoyle” (3.90.813): the
former gave narrative to a historical event while the latter mathematically formalized a
game of chance. If Byron sees himself in this lineage, it is because he is formalizing the
history of the development of consciousness. He does not ground consciousness in an
immediate present, the hic et nunc. Nor does he envision consciousness as part of an
eternal paradise. Instead, Byron sees an algorithm of the gut, indefinitely churning its
infinite quantities of information and expanding accordingly, thereby realizing rather
than identifying with this dark underbelly. The gut is an astral figure, (almost) eternally
feeding the algorithm that consciousness becomes. Don Juan, a datum sprung from
hell, is the first crack inaugurating this weird formalization.56
If Newton’s mechanical illustration of planetary orbits disenchanted some with the
stars (or rainbows, in the case of Keats), Byron’s axiomatization of the gut likewise
runs the risk of disenchanting some with ourselves. Realizing consciousness in these
mathematical and formal terms—despite the conceptual ability to change—seems to
dampen the splendor of human life and its accompanying affections. It is important to
remember though that Byron is on the earlier side of this history, closer to Newton than
digital algorithms and artificial intelligence. Brassier is on the later side and his figure
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of the self ’s dissolution, taken from entomology, gets at the real horror of extinction’s
grip on consciousness: “Mimicking the death of that from which it draws nourishment,
the Phyllium [a leaf insect] becomes the living index of its food’s decay for its own vital
appetite.”57 While the Phyllium is a natural-born zombie, it illustrates how, through
a weird form of ingression, the subject becomes a thing through which the object
thinks.58 That being the case, Byron’s portrait of the narrator is historically instructive,
for he is certainly not a zombie, and maintains the qualities of an emotional-affective
person.
However, the narrator shows the early signs of a centralized ego being submerged
in his own guts’ realization. He claims, for instance, to only begin the poem in canto 12
(“ ‘Tis / Perhaps a little strange, if not quite new, / That from the first of Cantos up to this
/ I’ve not begun what we have to go through” (12.54.425–8). This interruption is one
of many, and it has been argued in the past that the narrator’s increasing interruptions
evince a more centralized narrator.59 More likely, given the trajectory outlined here,
the “beginning” in canto 12 indicates that the conceptual structure through which the
narrator navigates is becoming increasingly fluid—and not fragmented in the sense of
The Giaour’s indefinite fragmentation60—but almost achieving a round boundlessness,
like a bubble:
Guinn Batten, who examines the creative explosions emanating from Byron’s
impossible in-betweenness, also lands on Byron’s bubbles: “A bubble, the very image
of nothingness, may stray and even survive to lead . . . a nation into freedom, but
it may also vanish or go astray and . . . become tyrannical.”61 The bubble is one of
possibility and (almost) nothing, a blip on the screen of the cosmos in either case.
But like a representation that touches, however lightly, the chaos of its ground, the
bubble captures the image of realized consciousness. It is star-like, extending for an
astronomical length, and it is also boundless, defying the normal (Euclidean) rules of
space. It sounds strangely optimistic. Indeed, on its surface, where can one not go? The
trouble amounts to the same: the bubble is impossibly oriented. If the poem maximally
realizes consciousness, A will lack that geographical difference from B so ineluctably
tied with our sense of here and there, now and then. Therefore, the narrator’s increasing
interruptions may signify less the coalescence of a centralized self and rather the image
of an ego teetering on the cusp of knowing that there is no now.
Brassier asks in a recent review, “if reason’s self-understanding (or self-
consciousness) is decisive for its self-realization, can one cleanly separate the
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objectivity of concepts, i.e. what concepts are, from the history of the senses through
which we grasp them?”62 All indications from Brassier’s project point toward the
affirmative. For Brassier, any change in a concept is on account of our relationship to it,
and not because the concept has altered—at least, not from the perspective of the end
of the cosmos. But our conceptual framework can change radically, and that change
depends on a tripartite relationship between the cosmos, the meaningless processes
of our biological makeup, and representations. What Brassier stresses is that any
resulting change in our conceptual framework reinforces the point that concepts are
not “for us,” because it is precisely the shift in conceptual framework that negates the
self. Likewise, Don Juan opens a door to an altogether different relationship to time,
where the teeming explosiveness of indigestion once punctuating our relationship to
reality utterly reorganizes the narrator’s conceptual landscape, leaving little room for
the narrator. It is according to a similar process that Brassier can claim, “Thinking
has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been
pitted against the latter.”63
Notes
1 Lord Byron, Don Juan (DJ) in Byron (The Oxford Authors), ed. Jerome J. McGann
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). All citations from Byron’s poetry refer to this
edition. Citations correspond with the canto, stanza, and line numbers, respectively.
I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their tireless efforts to aid me in
crafting this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader at Bloomsbury.
Last, I would like to thank Henry Staten for suggestions early on and encouraging
conversation throughout the summer of 2017. All errors and missteps are my own.
2 See David Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century
Mathematical Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 78.
3 Jim Cocola, “Renunciations of Rhyme in Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ ” Studies in English
Literature, 1500–1900, 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 848.
4 Ray Brassier calls the “cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility . . . the
point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or
not-being becomes intelligible.” Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
(Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 218.
5 See Elizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 5ff.
6 Philip Martin, “Reading Don Juan with Bakhtin,” in Don Juan, ed. Nigel Wood
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), 112–15.
7 See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice,
ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 201.
8 See Jerome Christensen’s Lord Byron’s Strength (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 220.
9 To my knowledge, Joshua D. Gonsalves offered the earliest account in print on
the links between romanticism and speculative realism. See “The Encrypted
Prospect: Existentialist Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and the Speculative
Realism in ‘To Autumn,’ ” European Romantic Review 24, no. 3 (2013): 287–95. On
the selection of the phrase “speculative realism” and its fate, see Graham Harman,
172
47 The idea of becoming astral comes from Blanchot, who has in mind the harnessed
power of stars through atomic energy, and as Bernard Stiegler elucidates, thus begins
a new age of humans, characterized by the total “mobilization” of terrestrial and
even celestial energy. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard
Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998),
88–91. Brassier responds to this Heideggerian lineage in “Prometheanism and Its
Critics,” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. R. Mackay and A. Avanessian
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 467–87.
48 Brassier, “Transcendental Logic,” 17.
49 Ibid., 17–18.
50 Brassier, “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” 486.
51 Ibid., 485.
52 Ibid., 486.
53 Eric Strand helpfully ties figuration in Don Juan to Immanuel Wallerstein and
Fernand Braudel’s model of a world-system. “Byron as Global Allegory,” Studies in
Romanticism 43, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 503–36.
54 Brassier, “View from Nowhere,” 18.
55 Jerome McGann, in “The Book of Byron and the Book of the World,” The Beauty of
Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1985), 265–6.
56 Here, I am importing an idea from Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture:
Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Parisi studies
a digital world where “algorithms are no longer or are not simply instructions to be
performed, but have become performing entities: actualities that select, evaluate,
transform, and produce data” (p. ix).
57 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 43.
58 Ibid., 140–1.
59 Marchand, “Narrator and Narration in Don Juan,” 35.
60 Evan Gottlieb compares Byron’s middle-period poem The Giaour to an infinite set,
“a set, moreover, built around and out of a void” (Romantic Realities,115). It is an
important precursor to Don Juan because, every time a section in this fragment poem
begins, “or a different narrator picks up the thread of Leila’s murder and the Giaour’s
subsequent revenge on Hassan, the elements of the set—the parts of the poem itself—
increase in number.”
61 Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture
in English Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 71. For an
extensive discussion of the role of bubbles in the eighteenth century and their
influence on romanticism, see Sarah Tindal Kareem, “Enlightenment Bubbles,
Romantic Worlds,” The Eighteenth Century 56, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 85–104.
62 Ray Brassier, “Comments on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing Reason: A Narrative of
Truth and Knowing,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25, no. 1 (Jan.
2017): 145.
63 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi.
175
The romantic period has been called “the very advent of the Anthropocene, when a
layer of carbon is deposited by human industry throughout Earth’s top layers of crust.”1
What if we reread romantic poetry from the vantage point of the Anthropocene? In
particular, what is the fate of that quintessentially romantic figure, Nature? Or rather,
as Latour has it, in parentheses, “[Nature],” now definitively end-stopped by the advent
of ecology, science studies, feminist theory, and environmentalist movements: “In
brief, ecology seals the end of nature.”2 The route I plan to take will proceed via some
reversed signposts, a few crumbling cairns, and a trio of hard-to-access mountains. As
well as revisiting the romantic sublime, I will revisit the well-worn map of romantic
(mis)reading provided by Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man—late twentieth-century
critics whose monumental work is synonymous, respectively, with Wordsworth’s
poetry and with the rhetoric of romanticism. Hartman writes, “Mountains . . . are
former heroes . . . they have giants in or below them.”3 In literary studies, the work of
Bruno Latour is widely seen as superseding the old Titans when it comes to confronting
the perilous changes wrought by the Anthropocene. By way of provocation, I will ask
how rereading this particular strand of romantic studies, the so-called Yale critics,
may provide an unexpected route to approaching Latour’s recent writing.4 Specifically,
I hope to suggest that rereading Latourian [Nature] brings into view the work done
by romantic tropology—especially the trope of anthropomorphism—when it comes
to the question of “CORRESPONDENCE” (Latour’s capitalized term for the relation
of statements about the world to the world “itself ”).5 “Everything,” he writes, “hinges
on the question of the CORRESPONDENCE between the world and statements about
the world.”6 If “we” have never been modern, it turns out that we may be romantic still.
picaresque novel: “in which our heroine confronts” (Latour refers to his Investigator as
“she”). Chapter 3 begins “with what is most difficult, the question of Science.” It contains
a “Description of an unremarkable itinerary: the example of a hike up Mont Aiguille.”
Its stated aim is to “define chains of reference and immutable mobiles by showing
that reference is attached neither to the knowing subject nor to the known object.”7
Mont Aiguille is the dramatic limestone mesa whose ascent in 1492 (quite a year for
historic encounters!) was said to mark the birth of mountaineering (“L’alpinismeest né
dans le Mont-Aiguille en 1492”). Its name means “needle” or “crag” (“Mount Crag”).
Known to Rabelais as “Mont Inaccessible,” it features in Book IV, chapter 57, of the
comic adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1552), where Rabelais compares it
to a pumpkin.8 What could be more intriguing than Latour’s “hiking metaphor”—
especially when he clearly has his tongue in his cheek.9 His “unremarkable itinerary”
conceals a romantic trope: “The Blocked Ascent.”
Latour’s aim—throwing a spanner in the Kantian works—involves disabusing his
readers of the idea that there is any necessary correspondence between minds and
things; his theme is neither the knowing subject nor the known object. Not philosophy,
then, but ecology. Since his argument, he says, is “frightfully difficult,” he starts with
a deceptively matter-of-fact account of “what will not be a simple little stroll for our
health.”10 Like any hiker in unfamiliar terrain, his first step is to consult the French
geological survey map with which he has fore-thoughtfully equipped himself:
As I was having trouble finding the starting point for the path leading to the Pas
de l’Aiguille, I unfolded the map and, by looking from the plasticized paper to the
valley, located a series of switchbacks that gave me my bearings despite the clouds,
the confusion of my senses, and the unfamiliarity of the site. I was helped by the
yellow markers that punctuated the route, and by the fact that the tourist office
was kind enough to associate those markers with the map so carefully that one can
go back and forth and find the same words, the same distances and times, and the
same turns on both the map and the landscape—although not always.11
While enjoying what he calls “the privilege of being ‘outdoors,’ ‘in fresh air,’ ‘in the
bosom of nature,’ ‘on vacation,’ ” and so on, our hiker keeps his bearings with the help of
map 3237 OT (“Glandasse: Col de la Croix-Haute”): “I was definitely inside a network
whose walls were so close together that I chose to lean on them every ten minutes or
so, verifying whether the map, the markers, and the approximate direction taken by
other hikers were indeed in correspondence, forming a sort of coherent conduit that
would lead me up to the Pas de l’Aiguille.”12 For the anthropologist who invented ANT
(Actor Network Theory), this is a busman’s holiday. The experienced hiker knows that
the high plateau of the Vercors contains perils that include getting lost in the fog and
falling into crevasses: “If you doubt that I needed to stay within a network (‘Don’t leave
the marked trails!’), you’re welcome to go get lost up there in my wake, some foggy day
when you can’t see the tips of your shoes.”13 The hiking metaphor is no joke—really!
The storyteller in Latour can’t resist recounting his difficulties in aligning the two-
dimensional paper map with “the wooden signposts painted yellow, the trail marked
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by trampled grass and blackened leaves, the landmarks spotted (cairns or just piled-up
stones? I hesitated at every turn).”14 Still, he knows more or less where he is, thanks to his
sturdy pocket-sized map (“mobile, foldable, tear-proof, waterproof ”) and the network
of intersecting relations that it establishes with signposts and landmarks, creating a
reliable set of “geometrical liaisons” or “constants”—constants produced by “three
centuries of geographers, explorations, typographical inventions, local development
of tourism, and assorted equipment.”15 The result is a strange mix of resemblance and
dissimilarity: “nothing looks less like Mont Aiguille than the map of Mont Aiguille.”
Since he can refer to both map and mountain (so long as there’s no fog, the signposts
point the right way, and the cairns haven’t been kicked over), he hikes on in relative
safety, saying to himself: “I am not lost. I know where I am. I am not making a mistake.”16
Combining two seemingly incompatible elements, immutability and mobility, Latour’s
network consists of “CHAINS OF REFERENCE” covered over with “IMMUTABLE
MOBILES.” We become aware of the multiplicity of means—scientific technologies of
visualization and inscription, Greek geometry and trigonometry, modern GPS—by
which he is able to move safely between map and mountain. If Latour is right, we’re
always totally networked, wherever we are, and whatever the weather.
For Latour, neither of his chains of reference [REF] would be “clarified in the least
if we introduced into their midst the presence of a ‘human mind.’ ”17 Not for nothing
is Latour the Rabelais of Modernity—a satirical traveler showing us the profound
un-reason that inhabits the seeming rationality of the Moderns. Unless we stick to the
map and keep checking our coordinates, we’ll never reach the top:
We gain access to the emotions elicited by the High Plateau of the Vercors only if
we do not stray an inch from the composite network formed by the roads, paths,
maps, tourist offices, hotel chains, hiking boots, backpacks, and the walkers’ habits
introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, along with the clichés developed during the
nineteenth century expressing admiration for the heights. Without mediation, no
access.18
elevate the soul by imitating moral law,” or else brutally indifferent to human feeling.
He has no wish, he says, “to make [his] reader resonate with the warmth of [his] feeling
for Mont Aiguille.”30 The achievements of cartography, geology, and trigonometry are
“just as warm, just as respectable, as worthy of attention as my pale expressions of
admiration, as my emotions as an amateur hiker and the shiver I feel when the wind
comes up and chills the sweat running down my chest.”31 Neither transcendence nor
indifference—just mental and physical exertion, ignoring the map’s color-coding and
even the fifteen-point type “Mont Aiguille” that in no way resembles the mountain
peak disappearing into its cloud. But there’s a mountain out there, and what’s more, it
doesn’t seem to be cooperating:
Mont Aiguille, which I am going around on my hike, stubbornly continues not to
resemble in the slightest the map that I unfold from time to time. It continues to bear
down with its full weight, to veil itself in the scattered mist, to gleam intermittently
with colors that the map does not register, and, especially, it continues to exist at
scale 1: there is no way I can fold it up or make it change scale.32
We glimpse the reducibility of Mont Aiguille—“its own way of persisting, and, equally,
the various sciences that have striven to know it.”33 How can we make room both for
the mountain and for the perilous defile through which we approach it?
For romantic readers, Latour’s hiking metaphor and cloud-capped summit inevitably
recall Wordsworth’s account of climbing Mount Snowdon in the last book of the 1805
Prelude (xiii.1–65).34 Latour—a knowing repository of the tradition associated in
France with Rousseau and in England with picturesque walking-tours—is retreading
a well-worn track, one that nonetheless often includes an element of surprise.35 In
this pedestrian history, thinking and walking, meditation and mountain sublime, are
inextricably linked. The Snowdon episode unfolds not unlike Latour’s map, made for
the literary reader. A network of prior texts (as the Norton edition helpfully reminds
us) links Wordsworth’s Welsh mountain to other picturesque texts—Wordsworth’s
own earlier description of the Lake District in Descriptive Sketches (1792), James
Beatie’s The Minstrel (1771), and Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes (1787). This chain of
reference [REF] argues not so much for the “lived experience” of Wordsworth’s ascent,
as for the precursor-texts that make it possible for him to “access” the mountain
sublime in the guise of an eighteenth-century pedestrian tourist.
Early on in the Prelude narrative, a barking sheepdog unearths a hedgehog;
Wordsworth calls it “a small adventure”—“for even such it seemed / In that wild place
and in the dead of night” (xiii.26–7). This is the kind of detail you don’t invent. Or is
it? We believe in Latour’s hike for similar reasons—his unfolding of the plastic-coated
map, the shiver he feels when the wind chills the sweat on his chest, his uncertainty
about the cairns. Wordsworth and his friend Robert Jones follow a local shepherd up
180
the mountain path, unable to see beyond their feet because of the fog, each lost in
“commerce with his private thoughts.” The “commerce” here—“private thought” or
“musings”—isn’t at all the same kind of self-communing as Latourian “correspondence”
(French: communication, match, similarity, resemblance). Wordsworth’s pedestrian
tourists are grounded in another fashion: lost in their own thoughts, unable to see a
thing. All the more startling, then, when the climbers suddenly emerge from the mist
and experience a kind of revolution: “instantly a light upon the turf / Fell like a flash.”
As Geoffrey Hartman declares: “It is often the ‘secret top’ of a mountain which turns
the man about.”36
The suddenly visible moon is the harbinger of transformation: “Lo / The moon
stood naked in the heavens . . . ” (xiii.40–2). The dramatic inversion (from earth to
heaven) turns everything around, not just the man. Mountain becomes seashore:
Charged with its own energies and activity, the mutable cloudscape has its own
nonhuman viewer: “Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew / In single
glory . . . ” (xiii.52–3) But who really commands the show? Not the nonhuman,
for sure. Frances Ferguson puts it succinctly, apropos of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”
(1816): “What the sublime does for nature is to annex all that is material to the human
by appropriating it for aesthetics.”37 Nature provides the model for art’s usurpation on
nature (“the sea, the real sea”). But we are not done yet. A rift in the mist discloses “a
blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour, / A deep and gloomy breathing place” through
which mounted—what?—“the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring
with one voice” (xiii.56–8). The human onlooker confronts unmistakable evidence of
natural agency: “in that breach . . . had Nature lodged / The soul, the imagination of
the whole” (xiii.62–5).
Agency—or analogy? Did Wordsworth really mean to say that animated Nature has
a shaping imagination of its own? His invisible pun (“whole” or “hole”?) signals a breach
of a different kind—the intrusion of Kantian philosophy. The visionary redescription
that follows (“A meditation rose in me that night”) refashions the self-transforming
cloudscape into “The perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that that feeds upon
infinity” (xiii.66, 69–70). Either Nature “images” the mind, or else it possesses its own
powers of self-transformation. Or both. The passage supplies a plurality of terms—
“resemblance,” “counterpart,” “brother”:
181
“The power is,” or “The power is like”? Does it take a mighty mind to recognize itself
in the spectacle? Or is the cloudscape endowed with a mighty mind? As often in
Wordsworth’s poetry, the crux is left unresolved.
Wordsworth runs the obvious risk of falling back on the Kantian categories
of Subject/Object, while hedging his bets by implying that mind and Nature
are actual “counterparts” to each other. The slippery language of resemblance
holds open questions of natural agency—mysterious at best, even for humans.38
Poetry unlocks the power of figurative language to anthropomorphize and name.
Anthropomorphism, the philosopher Jane Bennett writes, “can uncover a whole world
of resonances and resemblances.”39 As she puts it, “a chord is struck between person
and thing.”40 Hartman’s classic reading of the Snowdon episode cautiously insists on
likeness rather than identity: “though nature on Snowdon points to imagination . .
. what [Wordsworth] sees is still a Power like nature’s.”41 Noticing that the climbers
gradually mount through the mist “as if already in imagination’s landscape,” Hartman
avers: “It is as if the poet, in passing through the mist, had passed his own imagination
unawares.”42 The poet has missed a signpost, but the mountain hails him with abyssal
resonances. For Hartman, the climbing of Snowdon is “Wordsworth’s most astonishing
avoidance of apocalypse.”43 His (missed) encounter is with self-consciousness, the via
naturaliter negativa that usurps on Nature in likeness of a cloud. In this case, however,
“The attributes that define imagination figuratively . . . are still a literal part of the
landscape.”44
Hartman’s account of the ascent of Snowdon sees in this figural/literal doubling
an escape from fixity that informs “even the properties of things and the relationship
between thing and symbol.”45 The mist is like a sea, but “solid” like the mountains;
the mist “hung” low but the moon above “hung naked.”46 Despite (or because of) the
hanging moon and vocal chasm, Hartman’s Wordsworth “is unable to make a sharp
‘symbolic’ identification of the imagination with moon or sounding abyss.”47 Hartman
ends upon unexpectedly Latourian terrain: “Snowdon . . . does not project the image of
an agent but at most the image of an action.”48 Abandoning the question of agency, he
focuses instead on the subtle shifts and transfers (“trafficking”) that weave a linguistic
web: “Wordsworth’s greatest poetry is such a web of transfers, which are not showy
or patently metaphorical, and are rarely felt as unusual turns of speech.”49 The web is
“naturalized” via this un-showy transfer that can sound like everyday speech, creating “a
dizzy openness of relation between the human mind and nature.”50 Instead of having to
decide whether the poet is “participating in or striving to break with nature,” Hartman
argues that the import of the Snowden episode is “analogy” or “resemblance.”51 Nature
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lives a parallel life. And yet, he concludes, “Wordsworth is of the mind’s party without
knowing it”—a good Kantian despite himself.52
Hartman reads the Snowdon episode in terms of a “potentiality of interchange
[that] points to the ethics of metaphor and perhaps of poetry as a whole.”53 It thus
foreshadows modern poetry’s reliance on what he calls “nonobjective (syntactical)
forms.”54 This “transcendence of object-consciousness” dissolves fixities, much as the
mist (a consummate mimic of properties) dissolves the “real” sea.55 What becomes
visible from the top of Mount Snowdon, for Hartman, is the circulation between
worlds (or should one say words?)—the “subtle intercourse” of Wordsworth’s animist
Alfoxden poetry, with its vital interchange between man and Nature. Not apocalypse,
then, but “naturalized vision,” enmeshed in the web of linguistic transfer.56 Poetry’s
distinctive action, its “nonobjective (syntactical) forms,” complicates ideas about
agency. Like Derrida’s hedgehog, la poesia (“Che cos’ è la poesia?”) rolls itself up into a
defensive ball if we try to read it literally.57
Paul de Man’s essay, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” in The Rhetoric of
Romanticism underlines the power of naming; that is, the power of anthropomorphism
to freeze tropes into proper names.58 De Man’s example is a sonnet by Baudelaire
called—what else?—“Correspondances.” He reads the poem as a response to an implied
question: “Qu’est-ce que la nature?” Baudelaire’s answer begins,
De Man’s question, however, concerns the quandaries posed by language and the
“relational” (as distinct from “relative”) trope of truth. He pays special attention to the
word “like” (“comme”). Capable of functioning as both comparator and enumerator,
“like” may introduce a trope of resemblance, or a list of examples (“such as”). In
Baudelaire’s sonnet, de Man argues, the unexpected shift at the end of the poem, from
metaphor to example, signals a disjunction or rhetorical mishap.
For de Man, the sonnet is about “language as the stage of disjunction,” that is,
language regarded as “a chain of metaphors” capable of breaking or breaking down.60
Baudelaire’s “forests of symbols” designate “the verbal, the rhetorical dimension within
which we constantly dwell.”61 The poem’s “perplexing messages” (“de confuses paroles”)
constitute a “dialogical exchange that takes place in mutual proximity to a shared
entity called nature.”62 All goes well with the repeated word “comme” (the figure of
resemblance) until the sonnet’s final stanza, where de Man drops into mock-shocked
French to observe, “Ce comme n’est pas un comme comme les autres”:63
183
Exemplification is not the same as analogy; it risks mere lists of attributes and entities—
obsession rather than metamorphosis. Why should this matter? De Man puts it like
this: “Instead of analogy, we have enumeration”—“Enumerative repetition disrupts the
chain of tropological substitution at the crucial moment when the poem promises . . . to
reconcile the pleasures of the mind with those of the senses and to unite aesthetics with
epistemology.”64 It is as if Wordsworth’s Kantian union of aesthetics with epistemology
were to have ended up substituting a list of cloud-forms, rather than referring to “like
transformation” or “like existence.”
De Man accentuates the shift at the close of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” as “too
striking a coincidence not to be, like pure chance, beyond the control of author and
reader.”65 The sonnet’s combination of sensual and mental raptures (“transports de
l’esprit et dessens”) puts de Man in mind of a form of transport more like the French
transport systems (trolley-cars) where the word “correspondance” approximates to
the English word “transfer” (i.e., connecting to different lines of the Paris Métro on
the same ticket). Having successfully imported public transportation systems into the
temple of Nature, de Man reaches his destination: “Within the confines of a system
of transportation—or of language as a system of communication—one can transfer
from one vehicle to another, but one cannot transfer from being like a vehicle to being
like a temple.”66 (By a nice coincidence—“beyond the control of author and reader”—
Latour’s Aramis studies the circumstances surrounding a failed mass-transit system
whose actants are as much nonhuman as human). With this syntactical train wreck,
Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” comes to an abrupt halt. De Man’s analysis allows the
reader to glimpse the work done by networks of agent-less (driver-less?) tropes and
transfers within and between poems. His reading is itself, he suggests, “a process of
translation or ‘transport’ that incessantly circulates” between texts.67 His undoing of lyric
genre (“Correspondances,” he asserts, counterintuitively, is “emphatically, not a lyric”)
requires him to view it as “one name among several to designate the defensive motion
of understanding.”68 A term of resistance and nostalgia like (“like”!) “romanticism,” the
designation “lyric” reveals the twin violence of tropology and periodization.
One might ask what is gained and lost (apart from “lyric” and “romanticism”)
by de Man’s rigorously de-subjectified reading. If we lose the lyric, considered as
“the instance of represented voice,” he argues that we may gain something more
worthwhile: the possibility of enumerating “non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non-
celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or better, historical modes
of language power.”69 Some list. This brings me abruptly to a fork in my own path.
Despite what I have learned from the practice of rhetorical reading, I find Latour’s
notion of a composite actant (both human and nonhuman) surprisingly helpful for
thinking about poetry—an alternative to de Man’s evisceration of subjective agency
184
in the name of machine-like linguistic agency with all its potential for accidents.70
But, on the other hand, for all that I have learned from reading Latour—turning the
Moderns upside down, reversing the signposts, redefining “modes of existence”—I
want to ask, stubbornly: what about “historical modes of language power”? Isn’t a
“network” already a trope? And how are we to read the anthropologist’s own patent
resort to anthropomorphism?71 Now that ecological criticism has put “ecology without
nature” (to use Timothy Morton’s phrase) firmly on the romantic agenda, shouldn’t
we be turning the tables and asking what “romanticism” has to tell us about Latourian
[Nature]?72
Or rather, as Latour has renamed it, “Gaia” (James Lovelock’s Gaia designates the
interaction of organic and inorganic elements in a self-regulating organism).73 I don’t
want to make the chiastic claim that “romanticism” offers a handy map for (mis)
reading Latour’s epistemological hike. Nor do I intend to make the sufficiently obvious
point that Latour himself necessarily, knowingly, even enthusiastically, inhabits
tropology—what de Man calls the “rhetorical dimension within which we constantly
dwell.”74 Latour would doubtless agree, while regarding tropology as just one among
other forms of network and transfer (mapmaking, tourism, GPS, and all the rest)
by which the man circles around the mountain. Nevertheless, I want to scrutinize
the work done in Latour’s writing by the linked tropes of anthropomorphism and
naming, and specifically by Gaia. Conveniently for my purposes, Latour himself has
on occasion summoned romantic poetry to his aid in the form of Shelley’s “Mont
Blanc,” another mountain that plays hard to get. In his 2011 lecture, “Waiting for Gaia,”
Latour refers to the “scaling up of history,” not in terms of the post-human but rather
with “what should be called a post-natural twist!”75 He continues, with his customarily
energetic rhetoric: “If it is true that the ‘anthopos’ is able to shape the Earth literally
(and not only metaphorically through its symbols), what we are now witnessing is
anthropomorphism on steroids.”76 The Earth-changing effects of the Anthropocene
are attributable to a collective human actor—a steroid-fuelled actor, however, that
can’t be thought or measured. The sublime is superannuated, puny man rendered
paradoxically all-powerful: “Think of it: it would be so nice to return to the past when
nature could be sublime and us, the puny little humans, simply irrelevant, delighting
in the inner feeling of our moral superiority over the pure violence of nature.”77 Those
were the days.
Our unhappy post-natural predicament would constitute one (admittedly reductive)
reading of “Mont Blanc,” the poem Latour cites at the start of his essay. The disconnect
between Nature and “Her grandest display of power” on one hand, and on the other
“the puny little humans claiming to know or to dominate Her” is for Latour “the inner
spring of the feeling for the sublime.”78 In the passage quoted by Latour, Shelley’s raving
river brings with it the perilously sublime correspondences that at once provoke and
annihilate thought:
Rhetorically speaking, one could say that Latour invokes Gaia in order to bridge
the chasm left by the collapse of the sublime as an aesthetic and epistemological
category. Gaia replaces “what used to be called ‘nature’ ” with a skittish, ticklish, not
to say tricky figure: a complex assemblage that eludes definition. “First, Gaia is not
a synonym of Nature because it is highly and terribly local.”80 Earth means Earth,
not the Universe. “Second, Gaia is not like Nature, indifferent to our plight.”81 She
doesn’t “care for us” like a Goddess or Mother Nature, to be sure, but she’s highly
sensitive—too fragile to be calming like Nature; too unconcerned to be Mother; too
incapable of being propitiated to be a Goddess. Third, “Gaia is a scientific concept,”
a concept “assembled from bits and pieces, most of them coming from scientific
disciplines.”82 Gaia has no ontological unity or unified agency. Fourth, Gaia is a trap
loaded with apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the world. The problem is
that previous doomsaying about climate change may now turn out to be true: “What
if we had shifted from a symbolic and metaphoric definition of human action to a
literal one?”83
What if! Latour’s speculation about a shift from symbolic and metaphoric to
an insistently “literal” definition of human action parallels de Man’s identification
of the disjunction performed by language (“comme”) at the end of Baudelaire’s
“Correspondances.” In Latour’s Anthropocene Age, “everything that was symbolic is
now to be taken literally. Cultures used to ‘shape the Earth’ symbolically; now they do
it for good.”84 Anthropomorphism (with the emphasis on literal shaping) means that we
must be Melancholy with Lars von Trier and abandon “Hope, unremitting hope” in our
future dealings with Gaia. Latour’s word “unremitting” carries a (co)incidental echo of
the “unremitting interchange” in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”—
“Now renders and receives . . . ” I understand this to mean, more or less, that the
passively receiving yet “rendering” mind is both shaped and shaping through “an
unremitting interchange” with the universe of things. Throughout “Mont Blanc,”
however, the question of agency is rearticulated as a question about the mind’s
relation, not to things, but to power that exceeds its grasp—a power described partly
in terms of ancient geological upheavals (earthquake and fire). Not for nothing
is Latour, a graduate of the École des Mines, drawn to a poem itself inflected by
eighteenth-century geological theory. Shelley was impressed by Buffon’s idea that
a once-fiery world might freeze over in some distant climate-cooled future.85 By
contrast, Latour’s oversensitive Earth has a (“literally”) “anthropomorphic” future—a
future of man-made global warming and melting glaciers. Reversing the flow of
186
history in a thoroughly Shelleyan fashion, Latour writes: “In the real world time
flows from the future to the present.”86
Just what kind of agency Earth should be granted concerns Latour in a more recent
essay, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” Latour observes that a form of
subjectivity (thanks to Earthlings) has been returned to the Earth. An unprecedented
form of “interchange” now takes place between humans and the universe of things: each
is (passively) subjected, subject to, the other—quasi-subjects sharing agency with
other quasi-subjects that have lost their autonomy.87 Returning to the question of
anthropomorphism, Latour himself warns us that we should be wary, not so much about
“anthropomorphizing” natural entities, as about its obverse, “phusimorphizing” them;
“that is, giving them the shape of objects defined only by their causal antecedents.”88
In response to the claim that anthropomorphism is the only way to tell stories about
[Nature], Latour replies: anthropomorphisms are better described as “actants”—and
actants are only known through their actions. The Anthropocene literalizes the morph
or shaping part of the anthropo- or phusi-morphism combination. Morphism, or
shape-changing, Latour emphatically proposes, “is a property of the world itself and not
only a feature of the language about the world.”89 And again: “Meaning is a property of
all agents in as much as they keep having agency.”90 What gives agents their meaning is
action: “As long as they act, agents have meaning.”91 Action may be captured, translated,
or “morphed” into speech. But this is not to assert that everything is just a matter of
discourse. Rather, for Latour, “any possibility for discourse is due to the presence of
agents in search of their existence.”92 I take this statement to be Latour’s underlying
theory of language. The mountain searches for its mode of existence in discourse, just
as the hiker searches for the mountain’s mode of existence in Map 3237 OT.
realism’s determination “to break the spell that descended on philosophy since the
Romantic period”—the spell “known as correlationism, the notion that philosophy can
only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate: meaning
is only possible between a human mind and what it thinks, its ‘objects’.”105 By now
this sounds all too familiar. Citing “Mont Blanc”—“The everlasting universe of things
/ Flows through the mind” (ll.1–2)—Morton comments, “The mountain acts like a
beacon in the poem, appearing, then disappearing, then reappearing: ‘Mont Blanc
yet gleams on high’ ” (l.127). “The mountain comes in and out of phase,” like the
hyperobject created by plotting simultaneous weather events, or Latour’s unscaleable
Mont Aiguille gleaming through the mist.106 With a touch of sci-fi luridness, Morton
wonders what kind of tentacular space might be produced by “the high-dimensional
object we call global warming.”107Along with global warming, his hyperobjects include
atomic radiation, mist and fog—and even the meandering blank-verse romantic
autobiographical narrative with its diffuse scale (“Suddenly a whole lot more paper
was involved”).108 Hyperobjects (like long romantic poems) constitute a special form of
the sublime that depresses rather than elevates the soul. Global warming, in particular,
brings with it an ethical conviction that we are responsible for our own future at the
very moment when we seem most unable to do anything about it, except proclaim the
need for a new political ecology.
In Latour’s words, “this ‘metamorphic’ zone is political.”109 Perforce, we share
the same “shape-changing destiny” that requires new modes of documentation and
representation. “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there” (l.127). Latour’s
“ ‘metamorphic’ zone” refers to rock that has undergone transformation by heat,
pressure, or other natural agencies (such as the folding of strata that underlies Shelley’s
alpine vision). The same might be said of “anthropomorphism,” if not geo-story itself.
Under the pressure of intense political forces, tropes like anthropomorphism are
transformed into shapes that “compose” (in Latour’s sense) provisional accounts of the
relation between agency and language, or between complex data and models. Latour
refers to the evidence about climate change as “a tapestry” with a lot of holes, but
“amazingly resilient, because of the way it is woven—allowing data to be recalibrated
by models and vice versa.”110 The text with holes in it, a text that doesn’t correspond
directly to the world—“even for the climate scientists, there is no way to measure up
directly with the Earth”—sounds like the anxious hedging that typically accompanies
linguistic reference: not that the signifier lacks reference altogether, but that it doesn’t
“measure up directly” with reality, any more than the map measures up with Mont
Aiguille.111
Picking our way from cairn to cairn, we glimpse through the mist the perilous
changes of correspondence we have painstakingly traversed: Wordsworth’s tussle with
agency; de Man’s “historical modes of language power”; the language of pan-historical
change in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”; poetry and contemporary political ecology. Whether
we re-read romanticism “with” Latour, or read Latour via the persistence of romantic
tropes in his writing, his description of “natural” language sounds recognizably,
rhetorically (not to say vocally) romantic in a passage such as the following:
189
Rather than “speaking literally,” in grunts and cries, Latour reaffirms the expressive
capacities of “natural language, the only one available to us” as it flows, descends,
advances, metamorphoses, and metaphorizes, much like Shelley’s Arve raving
(stammering?) in the ravine.113 Inarticulacy is not an option. When it comes to
“speaking well in the agora”—about global warming, about the politics of Gaia, or
about the Anthropocene—it turns out that not only are we romantic still, we are also,
definitely, no longer “after” nature, at least when it comes to language: “To tell the
truth—to tell the truths—natural language lacks for nothing.”114 To say that “natural
language lacks for nothing” allows Latour to use language, anthropomorphism and
all, as an agent to argue for change in the public and political agora, an argument that
bears nothing less than “life itself ”: “Will you say of life itself that it goes on ‘literally’
or ‘figuratively’?”115
Notes
1 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 164. Morton’s website shares
its name with his previous book, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental
Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
2 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’ ” New Literary History 41,
no. 3 (Summer 2010), 476.
3 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1964), 49. In Greek myth, the “Gigantes” were said to be the offspring of Gaia
and Uranus, and to be buried under volcanoes.
4 For an account of Latour’s recent work, see Graham Harman, Bruno
Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014). Harman suggests that
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “is probably not the best hill to climb first, since
it will make far more sense to those who are already familiar with the earlier period
of Latour’s career” (p. x); fortunately, New Latour continues to coexist with Latour
Classic (see p. 81).
5 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 71.
A virtual hyperobject in its own right, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence can be
visited online: http://www.modesofexistence.org.
6 Ibid. Recent discussions of the literary dimensions of Object-Oriented Ontology
include Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” New Literary History
190
43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 184–203; Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense
of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 205–24; and Jane Bennett,
“Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New
Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 225–33. Cf. also the essays collected in
Romanticism and Biopolitics, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Alastair Hunt and
Matthias Rudolf (December 2012). http:///www.rc.umd.edu//praxis/biopolitics/
HTML/praxis.2012.
7 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence , 69.
8 “[N]ot much less inaccessible than that mountain in the Vercors range, shaped like a
pumpkin, which as far back as memory goes has hardly ever been climbed other than
by [the] commander of King Charles the Eight’s artillery, whose used his marvelous
equipment to climb up there—and on the peak found an old ram. He couldn’t figure
out how it had ever gotten up there by itself, so they told him that, when it was just
a lamb, some eagle or great horned owl must have carried him and he then escaped
into the bushes.” François Rebelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 497–8.
9 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence , 74.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 75.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., 76.
16 Ibid., 76–7.
17 Ibid., 77.
18 Ibid., 77–8. “Mont Aiguille does not go around in the world the way the map allows
access to Mont Aiguille” (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 174).
19 Ibid., 78, emphasis in original.
20 Ibid. The reference is to William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
(New York: Dover, 2003).
21 Ibid., 79.
22 Ibid., 80.
23 Ibid.
24 The “Table” of Latour’s terminology at the end of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence
defines [REF]erence in terms of “Distance and dissemblance of forms” (Hiatus),
“Paving with inscription” (Trajectory), “Bring back/lose information” (Felicity/
Infelicity Conditions), “Constants through transformations” (Beings to Institute), and
“Reach remote entities” (Alteration).
25 “Can a subject know an object? Yes; no; not always; never; never completely;
asymptotically, perhaps; as in a mirror; only through the bars of the prison-house of
language” ( An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 92). Despite Latour’s humorous list,
Harman notices the inadvertent carryover of Kantian philosophy; for Latour, natural
objects only become accessible through the mediation of science (Harman, Bruno
Latour, 142).
26 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 86.
27 Ibid., 87.
191
28 Cf. the definition provided by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter (certainly the
best, and for me the most illuminating, recent philosophical account of lively
materiality): “Actant, recall, is Bruno Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant
can be human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both . . . An actant is neither
an object nor a subject . . . by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage
and fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, [it] makes things happen,
becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.” Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology
of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. Bennett helpfully describes
an actant as an attempt “to pry some space between the idea of action and the idea of
human intentionality” (p. 103).
29 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 87.
30 Ibid., 120.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., 114.
33 Ibid., 120–1.
34 Quotations and references in the text refer to the 1805 text of The Prelude. See William
Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams,
and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
35 See Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University
Press, 2004), esp. ch. 4, “Mind over Foot: Romantic Walking and Rambling,” 101–24;
and Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Houndmills: Palgrave
MacMillan, 1997), esp. ch 3, “William Wordsworth: Pedestrian Poet,” 89–125.
36 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 49.
37 Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism
and Language: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1984), 213.
38 As Jane Bennett puts it, “In the face of every analysis, human agency remains
something of a mystery. If we do not know just how it is that human agency operates,
how can we be so sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark
are qualitatively different?” (Vibrant Matter, 34).
39 Ibid.
40 “A touch of anthropomorphism . . . can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world
filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but
with variously composited materialities that form confederations” (Vibrant Matter,
99). Later, Bennett suggests: “Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with
anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because
it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person
and thing” (Vibrant Matter, 120). For a brief riff on “anthropomorphize,” see also
Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 207.
41 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 60. My emphasis.
42 Ibid., 64. My emphasis.
43 Ibid., 61.
44 Ibid., 64
45 Ibid., 65.
46 Ibid.
47 Ibid.
48 Ibid.
192
49 Ibid., 66
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 66–7.
52 Ibid., 184.
53 Ibid., 186.
54 Ibid., 187.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid., 255.
57 See Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds,
ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–40. Derrida’s
hedgehog curls itself in a ball when required to account for itself, refusing to bridge
the chasm between representation and reality, poetry and paraphrase. I owe this
suggestive connection to Chris Washington.
58 Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of
Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239–62. De Man’s
starting point is Nietzsche’s assimilation of truth to “an army of tropes” that includes
metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism (29–43). De Man’s essay was first
delivered at Cornell in 1983 as part of his Messenger Lectures.
59 Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston, MA: David
R. Godine, 1982), 193, 15.
60 De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 245.
61 Ibid., 246.
62 Ibid., 244.
63 Ibid., 249.
64 Ibid., 250.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid., 252.
67 Ibid., 260.
68 Ibid., 261. For readings of de Man’s essay in relation both to the genre of the lyric
and to the figure of anthropomorphism, see Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” in Yale
French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106, and Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2015), 77–83; see also Cynthia Chase, “Double-Take: Reading de
Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes,” in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield,
Romantic Circles, Praxis Series (2005). http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deman/index.
html.
69 De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 261.
70 Bennett refers to “composing and recomposing the sentences of [her] book –
especially in trying to choose the appropriate verbs” when it comes to “rewrit[ing] the
default grammar of agency, a grammar that assigns activity to people and passivity
to things” (Vibrant Matter, 119). For the application of Latourian ideas to teaching
composition, see Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul
Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2015).
71 Latour raises the objection only to refute it: “The accusation of anthropomorphism
is so strong that it paralyzes all the efforts of many scientists in many fields—but
especially biology—to go beyond the narrow constraints of what is believed to be
‘materialism’ or ‘reductionism.’ It immediately gives a sort of New Age flavor to any
such efforts, as if the default position were the idea of the inanimate and the bizarre
193
innovation were the animate. Add agency? You must be either mad or definitely
marginal. Consider Lovelock, for instance . . . .” Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a
‘Compositionist Manifesto,” 481; and cf. 483.
72 See Morton, Ecology without Nature, for a sustained reading of romantic texts to
reveal the aesthetics of “ecomimesis,” situatedness, and “ambient poetics,” with the
help of “slow” reading: “Ecomimesis is a specific rhetoric that generates a fantasy of
nature as a surrounding atmosphere, palpable but shapeless. The ambient poetics that
establishes this experience interferes with attempts to set up a unified, transcendent
nature that could become a symptomatic fantasy thing. Critical close reading elicits
the inconsistent properties of this ambient poetics” (p. 77). Morton calls his critical
approach “ecocritique” or “dark ecology” (“a form of really deep ecology” [p. 143]).
73 On a secularized Gaia—“the most secular figure of the Earth ever explored by political
theory”—see Bruno Latour’s as yet unpublished Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion,
Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, of which I have not taken
full account here. The videoed lectures are currently available on the Edinburgh
University website: http://www.ed.ac.uk/about/video/lecture-series/gifford-lectures.
74 De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 246.
75 Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Art and Politics,”
3. A lecture at the French Institute, London November 2011; in Albena Yaneva (ed.),
What is Cosmopolitical Design? (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). References refer to the PDF
posted on line at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDON-
SPEAP_0.pdf. Accessed January 15, 2016.
76 Ibid., 3.
77 Ibid., 4.
78 Ibid., 2.
79 Line references are to the B text of “Mont Blanc,” in Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin
Everest (eds.), The Poems of Shelley, Vol 1: 1804–1917 (London: Longman, 1989),
542–9. Latour emphasizes the word “everlasting,” omitting l.6.
80 Latour, “Waiting for Gaia,” 8.
81 Ibid., 9.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid., 11.
84 Ibid.
85 “ . . . Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some
future period be changed into a mass of frost.” See Letters of Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones,
2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I.499; the letter is quoted at greater
length by Ferguson, “What the Mountain Said,” 209. For Buffon, Shelley’s “Power,”
and geological deformation in “Mont Blanc,” see Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks,
Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 69–88.
86 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45,
no. 1 (Winter 2014), 13. Originally delivered as the Holberg Prize lecture in 2013.
87 Ibid., 10. “What is an object? The set of quasi subjects that are attached to it. What is
a subject? The set of quasi objects that are attached to it. To follow an experience it
would be useless to try to retrace what comes from the Subject or from the Object”
(An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 428).
88 “Phusis comes from the verb phuo, which probably mean to puff, blow, or swell up,
conveying the sense of germination or sprouting up, bringing forth, opening out, or
194
10
out significant aspects of Keats’s poetics, Keats’s own sense of plasticity affirms the
continued speculative capabilities of verse.
Joining the biological and cognitive sciences with the phenomenological tradition,
Malabou’s philosophy of material being powerfully resonates with romantic and
idealist philosophies of nature. Since the 1990s, Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817, 1827,
1830)—including the Philosophy of Nature and the “Anthropology” from the Philosophy
of Spirit—has been a constant point of reference for her. Like Hegel and his romantic
contemporaries, Malabou seeks to think past the self-enclosed subject. Through the
notion of plasticity, she conceptualizes the productive and form-giving “activity of
both intelligence and nature, of consciousness and the unconscious together.”4 It is
this that marks her thought as “speculative”: she looks beyond the vantage of the finite
subject to conceptualize the real. Thus aligned with the speculative realists, Malabou
is concerned not only with the limits of subjectivity but also with “the nature of reality
independent of thought.”5
I draw on a number of Malabou’s major texts. My focus, though, is her first book,
The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic. Beginning as a dissertation,
published in 1996, and translated into English in 2005, the book occupies a
significant place in the development of continental philosophy and arrives at the end
of a line of important postwar interpretations of Hegel in France. With its interest in
materiality and in the non- or anti-subjectivist elements of Hegelian thought, it also
anticipates the “speculative turn” taken by continental philosophy in the 2000s.6
Often engaging, if sometimes implicitly, with Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Malabou refuses their emphasis on struggle, finitude, and
the end of history.7 Instead, she asks how Hegel’s views of material nature, life, and
human embodiment might open up the supposed totality of his system. Tracing
in the Encyclopedia both a concept of and a pervasive formal plasticity, Malabou
recovers “the possibility of a structural transformation: a transformation of structure
within structure, a mutation ‘right at the level of the form.’ ”8 Thus, Malabou’s Hegel
confronts the problem of the new, or of the emergence of unprecedented forms of
life and thought.9
Over the course of her career, Malabou has gone on to study plasticity in numerous
other philosophical and scientific contexts. Defined, most basically, as the simultaneous
giving and receiving of form—a process immanent in the real itself—plasticity is
the guiding thread in all her varied work. In some ways, the concept could not be
more expansive. It characterizes everything from the single cell to complex acts of
consciousness. All is plastic, Malabou argues, and she thereby “joins the speculative
realists in bypassing previous constructivisms . . . to access what she calls the ‘malleable
real.’ ”10 At the same time, against speculative realism, she insists that any investigation
of being must return to Hegel.11 For her, there is no concept of plasticity without
Hegel. In this essay, I identify the potentials in and the difficulties with this position—
particularly as it participates in a narrative of the superseding of art by philosophy. As
we will see, the concept of plasticity is always bound up with the fate of art. I begin,
then, with a short history of plasticity in aesthetics.
199
Histories of plasticity
Malabou’s history of plasticity winds its way through the philosophies of Kant, Hegel,
and Heidegger into present-day neuroscience.12 Yet in seeking plasticity’s origin,
Malabou looks to the discourse of aesthetics. There, the term “plastic” is operative
as early as the seventeenth century. Derived from the Greek plassein, “to mould,”
the adjectival “plastic” encompasses all those arts “[c]haracterized by moulding,
shaping, modelling, fashioning, or giving form to a yielding material.”13 Sculpture and
pottery are the key instances. The later eighteenth century sees the appearance of the
substantive “plasticity.” According to the Grimms’ dictionary, Malabou’s etymological
source, the burgeoning field of classical studies, focused on the nature and history of
the arts, introduces this word into the modern languages (the Grimms cite Goethe as
evidence). “Plasticity’s native land is the field of art,” Malabou remarks.14
In aesthetics, the word generally refers to the susceptibility of matter to receive
beautiful form as well as to the creative power or impulse that gives form. Plastic
arts are defined by the process of shaping, by form’s simultaneous imposition on and
emergence from a given material. Accordingly, eighteenth-century debates about
“the sister arts,” concerned with the specificity of artistic media, often rely on the
term.15 The plastic arts are identified in this context as arts of space, rather than of
time: architecture, painting, and especially sculpture. For instance, G. E. Lessing, in
his influential Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), argues
that the plastic arts of painting and sculpture can only show “bodies with their
visible properties”—that is, as they appear in space. Time and action must therefore
be suggested, he continues, through the form and positioning of these bodies.16 For
Lessing, plastic art is defined by beautiful bodily form, frozen but also somehow vital.
Throughout the later eighteenth century, the use of “plastic” to describe the arts of
space and vision is pervasive. But there are important exceptions too, and the word
sometimes takes on a broader metaphorical significance. In such cases, “plastic” signals
aesthetic form in general. In his 1795–6 On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich
Schiller finds in the work of various modern poets both “musical” and “plastic”
elements.17 The music of poetry, Schiller says, evokes moods or states of mind, but its
plastic aspect is imitative and delineates figures rather than indeterminate feelings.
Speaking of Klopstock, Schiller contends that “[a]s superb a creation as the Messiah is
in the musical poetic sense . . . much is left to be desired from the plastic poetic point
of view in which one expects specific forms and forms specific for sensuous intuition.”18
Klopstock’s epic is peopled by “concepts” and not “living figures.”19 As an art of language
instead of marble, poetry may tend toward abstraction. Even so, it should not abandon
sensuousness. Through its living figures, its imagistic and metaphoric richness, poetry
can mirror sculpture. Unlike Lessing’s essay, Schiller’s depends on analogies between
poetry and the other arts, and it significantly expands the field of plastic. Indeed,
“plasticity” now characterizes the figurative element in all art—no matter the medium.
Twenty years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes this line of thinking to its logical
end. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he famously defines imagination as the mind’s
200
“esemplastic power,” the capacity to shape and modify perceptions for the purposes
of art.20 Such imaginative shaping, Coleridge argues, makes every act of creation
possible; there is no art that is not plastic in this sense. In a distinctively romantic
gesture, Coleridge also claims that the imagination’s plastic power exceeds the creation
of individual artworks. The “rules” of imagination, he says, are nothing but “the very
powers of growth and production” that traverse the natural world.21 We have come
a long way from Lessing’s insistence on the limits of the plastic arts. In Coleridge,
plasticity is a universal principle of formation that links artworks with natural things,
and each moment of artistic creation with the dynamic unfolding of organic life.22
Malabou does not address these particular texts. But she does insist that Hegel offers
the first philosophical treatment of such themes. This means going beyond aesthetics
and refashioning plasticity in light of speculative logic. To become a philosophical
category, plasticity cannot primarily be an aspect of artworks. Thus, Malabou explains,
“speculative Hegelian philosophy rips the concept away from its strict aesthetic ties
(or sculptural ties, to be precise), definitively conferring the metaphysical dignity of
an essential characteristic of subjectivity upon it.”23 For plasticity to come into its own,
as it does for Malabou in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, the terrain of aesthetics must be left
behind. Despite the romantic tendencies in her philosophy, Malabou seems skeptical
of art’s capacity to do intellectual work.
I will return to Hegel’s own remarks on the plasticity of art and thinking and to
Malabou’s profound interpretation of his philosophy. First, though, I consider a few of
the assumptions that structure her account. To reiterate, Malabou positions a properly
speculative sense of plasticity against its aesthetic precursors. No longer just a quality
of artworks, plasticity after Hegel signifies the form of the philosopher’s subjectivity
and indeed of philosophy itself. Plasticity is “that rhythm in which the speculative
content is unfolded and presented.”24 It defines, in formal or even stylistic terms, the
manifestation of spirit through the materiality of the world. As Hegel argues in the
“Introduction” to the Aesthetics (1823, 1826, 1828–9), art has been a crucial site for
this unfolding of speculative content. By the early nineteenth century, however, art is
“a thing of the past,” superseded in the task of presenting ideas by philosophy.25 Art
prefigures philosophical presentation, but it cannot meet the needs of our age.
On this point, Malabou frequently echoes Hegel’s “Introduction.” Describing
plasticity as the organizing concept, or the “motor scheme,” of our era,26 she implies
that it only becomes thinkable when philosophy refuses to be limited by an aesthetic
frame. Again, the transcendence of art by philosophy is the precondition for any
adequate investigation. This is why, for Malabou, “it is Hegel who will have discovered
before its discovery [by the present-day biological sciences] the plastic materiality of
being.”27 Or, according to a more recent formulation, “Hegel . . . is the first philosopher
to have made the word plasticity into a concept.”28 Malabou’s history of plasticity rests
on a division between the aesthetic and the speculative mindsets. For romanticism, as
we know, such a division is untenable.
It is debatable what Hegel meant to achieve by his diagnosis of art’s pastness.
Securing the rights of philosophy in the romantic era, Hegel contests an aestheticism
proposing “that that only is true which each individual allows to rise out of his heart,
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emotion, and inspiration.”29 He also anticipates the charge, leveled by some present-day
speculative thinkers, that an overestimation of poetry voids philosophy of determinate
ontological content.30 But there are problems with taking Hegel’s account at face
value. For one, it does not capture the actual status of art in Hegel’s thinking. Recent
commentators have traced the intimacy between poetry and philosophy in Hegel, in
ways that unsettle the separation between them.31
More important, in stating that Hegel is the first to treat plasticity as a concept,
Malabou hews rather too closely to his self-presentation. She confirms Hegel’s own
history of philosophy, according to which his work is the culmination (if not the
conclusion) of modern thought.32 Yet Hegel really belongs to a community of romantics
and idealists, many of whom are directly or indirectly invoked in his writing. In the
following sections, I attend to their romantic forms of thought, particularly as these
resonate with Hegel’s ideas. This will trouble claims about the overcoming of art by
philosophy. My goal is not just to uncover the traces of the aesthetic or the poetic in
the speculative text. Rather, I reconsider Hegel (and by extension Malabou) in terms
of a romantic plasticity predicated on the essential relation between aesthetics and
speculation. Keats will show us what this means for the practice of verse, as his “Ode
on a Grecian Urn” explores how the making and experiencing of aesthetic objects can
be a kind of philosophical investigation.
A speculative aesthetics
We have already seen Coleridge suggest that aesthetic and speculative plasticity cannot
be neatly divided. For him, the imagination’s plastic power is one manifestation of the
shaping force expressed throughout the cosmos. Similar ideas can be found throughout
romanticism. In his influential survey of romantic aesthetics, The Mirror and the
Lamp, M. H. Abrams remarks on this, as he gestures at another history of plasticity.
Assessing the term’s changing fortunes across the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, Abrams writes that “ ‘plastic’ is especially interesting because it was adopted
from cosmogonists who, in express opposition to a purely atomistic and mechanical
philosophy, had employed the word to signify a vital principle, inherent in nature,
which organizes chaos into cosmos by a self-evolving formative energy.”33 As a gloss on
the conceptual backdrop to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, this is helpful. But it also
implies that, in romantic aesthetics, “plastic” is not just a synonym for “sculptural” or
“visual” or even “figurative.” Well before Hegel, and even before Lessing, the term had
acquired a deep metaphysical significance.
Considering these roots in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, we should
not assume that “plastic” is ever free of metaphysical implications. When William
Wordsworth says in The Prelude (1805) that “[a]plastic power / Abode with me, a
forming hand, at times / Rebellious . . . but for the most / Subservient strictly to the
external things / With which it communed,” he seeks to convey the closeness between
his creative mind and the natural world.34 For Wordsworth, the relation between mind
and nature appears analogical: the poetic imagination is like an organic force of nature.
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But there are many romantic writers for whom the mind-nature relation exceeds
analogy. For romantics who insist on the real identity of mind and nature, the study
of aesthetic experience cannot be neatly distinguished from a speculative metaphysics
of nature. In this context, the plasticity of artworks is just a special case of a general
ontological plasticity.
The work of Hegel’s erstwhile collaborator and later intellectual adversary, Friedrich
Schelling, offers a powerful instance of such speculative aesthetics. Schelling’s key
insight concerns the identity of mind and nature. He has no interest in arguing for
their harmonious mirroring of each other. For Schelling, identity is distinct from
correlation; it is not static but “dynamic in precisely the sense that it is symmetry
breaking.”35 In fact, the logic of identity depends on a polarity immanent to nature
that “causes difference to proliferate.”36 Nature must be conceived simultaneously as
“productivity” and as “product,” as formative impulse and as aggregate of objects. In
this dual existence, Schelling says, nature gives rise to increasingly complex forms.
The process is far from simple. Nature’s productive forces strive for expression in ever
new forms, or “potencies.” Such expression always also occurs as a blockage, or an
“inhibition,” in the process itself. Nature as productivity is limited by its own products,
which are in turn absorbed back into the flux of things.
For Schelling, this repeating cycle of expression, inhibition, and collapse accounts
for every natural form. Yet “nature” is a surprisingly expansive category in his thought.
From the polarity of productivity and product, Schelling derives not only inorganic
and organic forms but also the entire sphere of consciousness. It is thus that nature and
the mind can be called identical. A 1799 text, “Introduction to the Outline of a System
of the Philosophy of Nature,” explains by invoking
the Plastic Arts and Nature, Schelling argues that classical sculpture and modern
painting alike can be conceived as expressions of nature’s life. Evolving “disjointedly”
across different historical moments, “the work of art, growing up from the depths of
nature, commences with determination and confinement, developes internal infinity
and fulness, and at last, purifying itself to grace, finally arrives at soul.”39 The history
of art is a natural history, even if it is presented in rather teleological terms. As the
plastic arts emerge and evolve, they follow nature’s polar logic of formation. We can
characterize this formative process as “plastic.” Indeed, in the generative antagonism
between productivity and product, expression and inhibition, Schelling captures
the precise dynamic of speculative plasticity. He also shows that the plastic arts are
not simply prefigurative. For Schelling, each potency of nature is irreducible and
autonomous. Nature’s plasticity cannot be superseded by art, just as art’s plasticity
cannot be superseded by philosophy.40
From Schelling, then, we should garner two major principles: first, the interweaving
of art and aesthetics with speculative metaphysics; and second, the proliferation in
nature of irreducible, non-hierarchical potencies. At first glance, both of these seem
decidedly non-Hegelian. But even in the Aesthetics, there are moments that resonate
with such ideas. In a passage on the artist’s “fancy,” for instance, Hegel suggests that
he has not entirely left Schelling’s influence behind. Unlike the talent for science, he
writes,
Here, Hegel points to fancy, or genius, as a mediating term between nature and
rationality. In this, fancy recapitulates the role of art generally for Hegel, enabling the
transition between material nature and the realm of spirit proper. Yet, by insisting on
fancy’s inexplicable and irreducible essence, Hegel also locates in the spiritual side
of art a material part. In other words, rather than explain art as the simple product
of sensuous matter and the artist’s mind, Hegel contends that art’s “spirituality must,
somehow, have an element of natural, plastic, and formative tendency.”42 Veering into
a naturalist register, Hegel explains the aesthetic unification of nature and spirit by
appealing to a gift of nature, or Naturgabe.43 Thus, the plastic work bursts forth from
the plasticity of nature-in-spirit.44
Such moments of complex mediation are interesting not only because they slow
spirit’s progress out of nature but also because they take on a local consistency,
distinct from the broader trajectories of Hegel’s thought. Thereby, Hegel can imagine
the production of the new without a corresponding sacrifice or obsolescence. We
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should treat these moments as modeling a romantic plasticity. Rather than take it as
given that plasticity’s conceptual force depends on the end of art, romantics such as
Schelling and (as we shall see) Keats insist that aesthetics and speculation, art and
nature cannot be divided. Hegel is ambivalent about this romantic argument. Present-
day speculative philosophers can also be resistant to seeing aesthetics as a mode of
thought. Nonetheless, this romantic idea persists in Hegel’s and Malabou’s thinking of
plasticity, in which poetry invariably emerges as a question.
Following the example of the Greek statue, the ‘plastic individual’ is not a simple
indexical or external sign of the spiritual element which is alive in it. In the plastic
individual, spirit makes itself visible not in a transparent way, but through style.
Style, the deictic or ostensive aspect of individuality, represents a distinctive
manner (façon) of being or acting that represents the universal, that brings the
ordinary and general onto the scene in a form appropriate to it.48
to something outside itself, but in its “auto-referentiality.”49 As style, habit signifies its
own process of formation. In logical terms, this is “the process whereby the contingent
becomes essential”—or the “becoming essential of the accident.”50 By fashioning a
human essence out of accreted contingencies, habit lays the groundwork for all forms
of subjectivity to come.
Of course, the possible relations between essence and accident are not exhausted
by habit. From the first stirrings, in vegetative life, of the faculty of assimilation to
the formation through alienation of the divine, the dialectic of essence and accident
unfolds across Malabou’s book. In each of its configurations, we encounter another
mode of plasticity. The aim is not just to catalogue, however, but also to consider
Hegel’s philosophy as a system—as a totality with the capacity to change. Thus, in the
later chapters of her book, Malabou turns to the question of absolute knowledge. For
Hegel, absolute knowledge is acquired when we take the perspective of philosophy or
of the system itself. What new forms of plasticity will be found at the end of spirit’s
trajectory?
Spirit’s style is again at issue. Philosophy becomes possible, Hegel contends, only
when each prior mode of knowledge has been worked through. But no part of spirit’s
past is forgotten. As Malabou explains, from the vantage of the system, “every one of
spirit’s shapes will appear retroactively, as an exteriorization which is reinteriorized,
making each a kind of imaginary presence, a spectral mode of being their past
selves. In this sense, the Aufhebung [or sublation] can be interpreted as the labor of
speculative mourning.”51 For the philosopher, such spectral presences (myth, art,
religion) are unsettling. Necessary precursors to philosophy, they linger on in ghostly
fashion. Indeed, spirit’s past shapes are not cast off but subject to “simplification” and
“abbreviation.”52 The outline and the encyclopedia become the proper genres of their
survival. Even more, philosophy must find a new language, capable of communicating
from this absolute standpoint. This will not be a language of subjective truth, but a
language that carries in it every dead form of spirit. Philosophy’s language must
therefore go “beyond the ‘I,’ ” in accord with that “speculative abrogation or letting-go”
of a stable self achieved in the moment of absolute knowledge.53 To speak of spirit now,
to do justice to all that seemed lost, philosophy must reinvent the proposition itself. In
fact, Hegel remarks, philosophy’s form must become plastic.
Malabou explains the connection of absolute knowledge with plasticity by
looking back to the famous “Preface” in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Here,
Hegel defines plasticity as a form of writing and of reading. His argument is worth
attending to directly, because it will bring us to poetry. Specifying, in grammatical and
broadly stylistic terms, the nature of philosophy’s language, Hegel insists that “only
a philosophical exposition that rigidly excludes the usual way of relating the parts
of a proposition could achieve the goal of plasticity.”54 This entails abandoning the
language of common sense, reliant on the grammatical subordination of predicates
to subjects. Why are such predicative statements unable to speak absolute truth, to
achieve plasticity? For one, the truth content of philosophy is dialectical and cannot be
expressed in univocal statements about the being or properties of things. Philosophy’s
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language, if it is true, always says more and other than we meant to say. It is not a
language of mastery we speak, but it rather speaks us. As Hegel explains,
Philosophy’s truth content suspends habitual modes of expression. But it also makes
demands on the reader. Adopting a language on the verge of unreadability, philosophy
makes statements that “oscillate” or “waver” between positions.56 As the philosophical,
or speculative, proposition wavers and doubles back on itself, so must its reader. With
the understanding unmoored, the reading subject, much like the grammatical subject,
is utterly destabilized.
In such passages, Hegel is clearly theorizing his own philosophical style. But he
does give other examples of the speculative proposition. He points, for instance, to
statements about essence such as “God is being.”57 Any reading of this statement is
immediately confronted by an interpretive difficulty: is God or being the subject? The
statement is defined by an immanent “counter-thrust,” Hegel observes, whereby each
possible interpretation seems to destroy the other. Yet we can read the proposition
plastically. This means recognizing that both terms are simultaneously subject and
predicate, essence and accident. The sentence itself wavers between these meanings,
becoming reversible in the process: God is being, being God. Only by reading and
rereading does the sentence achieve a new identity-in-difference, adequate to the
complexity of thought. In Malabou’s terms, such statements reveal “essence and
accident in mutual support.”58 They achieve a new and plastic sense without actually
losing the old.
Hegel also proposes that we consider poetry in relation to the speculative
proposition. Indeed, poetics offers another way of envisioning plasticity in writing and
reading:
This conflict between the general form of a proposition and the unity of the Notion
which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter
and accent. Rhythm results from the floating centre and the unification of the
two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and
Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of
the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The
form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent
that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance,
and that the Subject falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent
dies away.59
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With its plastic interplay of subject and predicate, the speculative sentence seems to
become poetic. The claim is surprising, considering the place of art in Hegel’s thought.
Nevertheless, he appeals to poetic rhythm, generated by a conflict between meter and
accent, as somehow akin to the wavering of the speculative proposition. In poetry,
Hegel suggests, rhythm results from the difference between an abstract metrical
scheme and the individual words that embody it. At “the floating centre” of the poem,
rhythm models a unity-in-difference like that of the speculative sentence. In other
words, the wavering of philosophy’s language, essential to its expression of absolute
truth, is rhythmic. As Hegel’s friend Friedrich Hölderlin remarked, “Spirit can only
express itself rhythmically.”60
This is not Hegel’s only investigation of poetic rhythm and speculative truth. The
celebrated chapters on poetry in the Aesthetics return to these questions. Yet they also
complicate matters substantially. In the Aesthetics, poetry appears as an eminently
problematic art. Because of its relative abstraction, poetry is the art that should bring
art to an end; it makes way for religion and philosophy as vehicles of spirit. Hegel
explains: “poetry destroys the fusion of spiritual inwardness with external existence
to an extent that begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art, with
the result that poetry runs the risk of losing itself in a transition from the region of
sense into that of the spirit.”61 Poetry risks losing itself in its loss of external reality, in
eschewing the substantiality of the other arts. Hegel is quick to add that, historically
speaking, poetry has not always been at risk. In fact, poetry does bring the external
world into view of the inner life: “in the very field of inner ideas, perceptions, and
feelings it broadens out into an objective world which does not altogether lose the
determinate character of sculpture and painting.”62 Even more importantly, the art of
poetry has its own materiality. In its rhythmic manipulation of language, poetry can
become plastic.
For Hegel, we will find, poetry’s plasticity is a matter of verse form. Thus, in a
chapter of the Aesthetics on “Versification,” he again adduces rhythm as key to poetic
language’s “living form.”63 Here too, rhythm is defined by the tension between meter
and accent. But in contrast to the discussion in the Phenomenology, it is now clear that
this definition of rhythm is also a definition of classical quantitative verse. As Hegel
explains, Greek and Latin poetry rely on “the fixed tempo of the syllables in their simple
difference between long and short and the numerous ways of fitting them together in
specific relations and meters.”64 Classical meters arise from the arrangement of long
and short syllables. Meter by itself is not rhythm, as we know. Rhythm only emerges
from a set of opposing and irregular effects: “accent, caesura, and the opposition
between verbal and verse-accentuation.”65 Again, rhythm is generated by the unity-
in-difference of a fixed tempo with the natural sounds and accents of particular words
and with the pauses between them. Constituted by a manifold of tempos and accents,
repetitions and silences, rhythmic verse wavers like a speculative sentence. Hegel
makes the connection clear when he explains how word-accents “produce a counter-
thrust to the rhythm of the line.”66 It is thus, he concludes, that “we may compare the
principle of rhythmical versification with plasticity.”67
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Plasticity’s remains
Would it be possible to think, with and against Hegel, a plasticity of poetry today? To
begin, this would require disentangling the concept from a narrative of the end of art.
That is no easy task, as my reading of The Future of Hegel has shown. In conclusion,
I turn to a poet—a contemporary of Hegel’s—whose work has long been identified
as “plastic.”71 This is John Keats, whose odes often take plastic art as a theme and also
display a plasticity of form. Since the 1950s, readers of Keats have looked to classic and
romantic aesthetics, especially to debates about the sister arts, as important contexts
for these poems.72 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” first published in 1820 in Annals of the
Fine Arts, a British journal of art criticism, offers an especially significant test case for
the plasticity of poetry. As an ekphrastic poem, describing in rich detail a classical
urn, the “Ode” inquires directly into the relation between plastic and poetic arts.
Furthermore, in meditating on art’s history and on the knowability of the past, Keats’s
poem raises similar questions to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Keats’s historical separation from
the urn chimes with Hegel’s sense of the belatedness of all art. Others have made such
observations before me.73 My claim is that Keats’s “Ode” presents a plasticity of form,
resonant with but not reducible to Hegel’s and Malabou’s thought. Specifically, Keats’s
plastic verse resists a Hegelian sense of aesthetic closure. Refusing to see aesthetic
objects as petrified and “sufficient to themselves,”74 Keats also believes that art’s history
is far from over. As the site of ongoing “speculations and surmises,”75 Keats’s poetry
uses form to hold open a future for thought.
The “Ode” begins by praising the urn. Initially, such praise appears to come at the
expense of poetry. “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more
sweetly than our rhyme,” Keats calls out to the object.76 Confronted by the “sweet”
expressiveness of the classical work, modern poetry falls short. At the same time,
we discover that Keats cannot make sense of the history that the urn depicts. The
strangely frantic scenes that cover its surface—of men, women, and gods in “struggle”
(9) and “ecstasy” (10)—are illegible to him. Posing question after question to the urn,
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Keats never discovers “[w]hat leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape / Of deities
or mortals, or of both” (5–6). Keats’s interpreters have found themselves in a similar
frustrated position. Unable to decide if the ode describes a funeral urn, a drinking
chalice, a decorative object, a cheap replica, or a mere figment of the imagination,
scholars long ago abandoned the task of finding Keats’s urn “as it really was.”77 In
several ways, the poem puts history and meaning into question.
Does the “Ode” merely gesture, then, at an unrecoverable past? Is this a poem of
absolute loss? To answer these questions, we should look once more to Hegel. Perhaps,
in a Hegelian way, Keats’s poem is concerned not with the total loss of cultures and
art forms, but with their melancholic abbreviation. If this is so, classical art would be
interiorized, and thereby remembered, by modernity. Throughout Keats’s poems, the
classical aesthetic no longer lives as it once did and yet it lingers on, remaining in cryptic
relics.78 Consider, in this context, Hegel’s well-known remarks in the Phenomenology:
The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the
hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no
spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers
the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now
lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the
crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now—beautiful
fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us, as a girl
might set the fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed,
not the tree that bore them, not the earth and the elements which constituted their
substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character, nor the cycle
of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So Fate does not
restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring
and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the
veiled recollection of that actual world.79
Keats’s “Ode” stages a remarkably similar situation. Again, the urn is not lost to history,
but it remains as a seductive, illegible fragment of a past form of life. The “ethical life”
from which the urn emerged—an entire nexus of natural and social conditions—will
never return, and that presents profound difficulties for understanding. Keats and Hegel
alike ask if we, without being of the artwork’s moment, can still find meaning in it.
In response to the veiling of the past, Hegel offers up a new world of interiority, and
Keats’s poem seems to do the same. Resigned to the urn’s illegibility, Keats imagines
for himself its meaning: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter;
therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / Pipe to
the spirit ditties of no tone” (11–14). The silence of the urn will thus be transformed
into a spiritual song, superior to music in its freedom from all sensuality. Keats, like
Hegel, points here to the inner life as the telos of art’s history. To play a song with “no
tone” is to attain a pure abstraction worthy of speculative thought. As Hegel suggests,
such a self-canceling art form—as he imagines poetry to be—would lie at the end of
art’s history, its purpose and its close.
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These lines show Keats at his most formally audacious. Nearly every line is split by
a medial caesura, as if to convey thought’s restlessness before the silent urn. If the
urn itself is silent, the “Ode” is not. Now, the poem finally gives voice to the plastic
artwork it has incorporated. The classical urn, as assimilated by the romantic poem,
becomes a conduit for knowledge. In fact, the urn’s pronouncement—“ ‘Beauty is
truth, truth beauty’ ”—takes the precise form of the speculative sentence from Hegel’s
Phenomenology. In its reversibility, the line unites subject and predicate, essence and
accident; it sets in wavering motion what appeared written in stone. To associate the
urn’s voice with absolute knowledge is not to endorse a simple equation of “beauty”
and “truth” (whatever that would mean). Rather, Keats’s speculative sentence oscillates
productively between its two terms; it unites-in-difference the aesthetic and the
intellectual, as well as the proposition with its own ironic self-reflection. The movement
of thought here, which ungrounds the reading subject, can only be described as
speculative.
Metrically and sonically, these final lines do additional speculative work. In the
penultimate line, all restraints of iambic pentameter are cast off. Uncertain myself of
how to scan such verse, I find perhaps a trochee and an iamb, followed by the line’s
first caesura; then a spondee, a pyrrhic interrupted by another caesura, and a final
iamb. Keats’s metrical experiment is more radical than anything described by Hegel;
accent and pause take precedence over any regular patterning. Further, the stanza’s
rhyme scheme pulls its meter in yet another direction. The stanza’s C rhyme is a triple
rhyme between “Pastoral” and “that is all”; as these words chime together, metrical
stress starts to fall differently, and it oscillates between “all” and “that.” Repetition also
has significant effects, as these lines feature recurrent all sounds: “pastoral,” “that is
all,” “all ye need to know,” and even “shall” and “shalt.” Thus, the poem’s concluding
statement—its apparent claim for aesthetic and intellectual closure, for all-ness—
actually opens totality to new rhythmic and sonic configurations. Rather than a stony
inscription on a monument to loss, the last words of Keats’s “Ode” stage the generative
relation between aesthetics and thought, totality and the new.
Through his verse, Keats reopens the question of the end of art and thereby of
the relationship between poetry and thinking. Against Hegel, he finds speculative
potential in the plasticity of poetry. The “Ode” resists aesthetic and intellectual closure
not because it opposes the aesthetic and not because it relegates art to the past. Rather,
Keats’s poem seeks to provide for the ongoing life of art—restless and ungrounded
as this life may be. His verse proves that even the poetry of remnants has a future of
“speculation and surmise.” As I have said, the making and experiencing of aesthetic
objects is a kind of philosophical investigation for Keats. The last lines of the “Ode”
show us that in this poem the form of such thinking and its conceptual content are the
same. In other words, Keats’s plastic verse reveals that the relation between aesthetics
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and speculation, beauty and truth is itself plastic—each term shaping and being shaped
by the other.
Inspired by Malabou’s thought, I have shown that plasticity is a key concept in
romantic aesthetics and poetics. Indeed, plasticity is an unacknowledged but formative
presence throughout romantic writing on nature and art. What Malabou demonstrates
is the philosophical richness of this concept, the way it reshapes our ideas about nature,
speculation, and even form. Her work also points toward the limits of those speculative
philosophies unable to account for the aesthetic. I have suggested that her concept
of plasticity is romantic in its capacity to rejoin the aesthetic and the speculative. By
reading Malabou together with Hegel and Keats, I have aimed to reanimate plasticity
for romanticist criticism and for contemporary literary formalism. As for romanticism
itself, plasticity was always there.87
Notes
1 For a recent survey, see Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and
Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 650–69.
2 See Robin Mackay, James Trafford, and Luke Pendrell (eds.), Speculative Aesthetics
(Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014) for a related project. Their concern is the connection
between speculative realism and contemporary art practice; I take a longer historical
view of speculative philosophy and aesthetics.
3 Cf. Andrzej Warminski, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and
Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Warminski observes that
Keats’s “Ode” seems to endorse the “doctrinal theses of Hegel’s Aesthetics and its
monumental history of art” (p. 47). He goes on to pursue a materialism in Keats’s
poem that resists aestheticization.
4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy,
trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1977), 110.
5 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative
Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 3.
6 Malabou refers to Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, Bernard Bourgeois, and
Jacques Derrida as her major precursors in Hegel interpretation. For more on “the
speculative turn,” see the essays in Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, The Speculative Turn.
7 Cf. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1980).
8 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, trans.
Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 192.
9 For a related investigation of the production of the new, see Audrey Wasser, The
Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).
10 Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury,
2014), 184.
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69 Ibid., 1023.
70 Of course, Hegel recognizes that poets do not stop writing poetry. In Christian
modernity, rhyme is the sensory material of poetry. Is rhyme plastic? Hegel
says no. But insofar as rhyme molds sensation and meaning together to make
something new, its “task” being to “emphasiz[e]the sensuous element in
distinction from domination by the accentuating and overpowering meaning”
(ibid., 1028), the answer is surely yes. To understand the thinking that rhyme does,
to explore its speculative potentials—this is left by Hegel as an unfinished project.
For more, see Simon Jarvis, “Musical Thinking: Hegel and the Phenomenology
of Prosody,” Paragraph 28, no. 2 (July 2005): 57–71; and Naomi Levine, “Rhyme
and History in Victorian Poetics,” PhD dissertation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University, 2015).
71 Cf. Hagstrum, Sister Arts. For in-depth assessments of Keats’s sculptural imagery and
the theory of the plastic arts, see Nancy Goslee, “Plastic to Picturesque: Schlegel’s
Analogy and Keats’s Hyperion Poems,” Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981); and, more
recently, Goslee, “The Visual and Plastic Arts,” in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael
O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126–35.
72 See, for instance, Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1967), 46–57.
73 On Keats and Hegel’s aesthetics, see the important study by David Ferris, Silent
Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2000); and, again, Warminski, Material Inscriptions. For a profound juxtaposition
of Keats with Hegel’s philosophy of history, see Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars
Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50, no. 2 (Summer 2011).
74 I quote from William Hazlitt’s description of classical Greek statues: “In their
faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are
raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified . . .
their forms are a reproach to common humanity.” Quoted in Charles W. Mahoney,
“Imagination, Beauty and Truth,” in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O'Neill
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 173.
75 Ibid., 168. This quotation is from a letter by John Keats.
76 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 288–9, lines 3–4.
77 On the historicist desire for the past “as it really was,” see Hegel’s discussion of his
colleague Leopold Ranke in Aesthetics, 986. On Keats’s possible sources for the urn,
see Jack, Mirror, 217–18, 221.
78 Warminski also invokes Hegel’s notion of memory as a process of internalization
“that stores up images in order to re-member and re-externalize them in the form
of works of art” (Material Inscriptions, 51). For him, the urn is a ruin or remainder
that complicates this process. Beyond the odes, poems such as “On Seeing the
Elgin Marbles” (1817–18), Endymion (1818), and Hyperion (1820) would be worth
revisiting in this context.
79 Hegel, Phenomenology, 455.
80 Cf. Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats (New York: Modern
Language Association of America, 1945), 140–1. Bate stresses sobriety rather than
sensuousness. More recently, Orrin N. C. Wang has argued that Keats’s visual
sensibility should be understood as pre-cinematic and thus as spectacular and
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11
Poe’s Black Cat
Graham Harman
To this day, it is easy to find critics who dismiss Lovecraft in similar fashion as a puerile
scribbler or hopelessly purple stylist, despite his increasingly serious cultural profile in
the United States and abroad.
Now, on those rare occasions when Lovecraft is favorably linked with the more
upscale neighborhoods of the American literary canon, the comparison is nearly always
with Poe. Is there a single counterexample? Has anyone tried to compare Lovecraft with
Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, or Hemingway instead? The frequent link with Poe is
not surprising, given that Lovecraft and Poe can both easily be classified as “horror
writers.” Another important similarity is that Poe takes regular shots from high-end
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literary critics himself. Henry James famously stated that to take Poe “with more than
a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself. An enthusiasm for Poe is
the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”2 T. S. Eliot complains about Poe’s
“slipshod writing.”3 Yvor Winters speaks with contempt of “the traditional reverence
for Poe as a stylist, a reverence which I believe to be at once unjustified.”4 Mark Twain,
in a letter to William Dean Howells, calls Poe “unreadable.”5 The theme continues
to this day, since Harold Bloom at Yale—one of our most celebrated living critics—
asserts that “Poe’s awful diction, whether [in ‘William Wilson’] or in ‘The Fall of the
House of Usher’ or ‘The Purloined Letter,’ seems to demand the decent masking of a
competent French translation.”6 We should note in passing that this last phrase from
Bloom is a sneaky rhetorical sleight-of-hand: an attempt to portray the “competent”
translators Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé as reluctant doctors of botched
English, rather than as historically great writers who lovingly spent thousands of hours
rendering Poe’s tales and verse into French.
Obviously, all of the detractors just cited are fine writers themselves. Eliot, James,
and Twain all dwell in the innermost chamber of the American Literary Pantheon,
while Bloom, Wilson, and Winters are among our most important critics. We cannot
simply dismiss their complaints as the resentment of jealous careerist underlings in
the presence of superior talent. Nonetheless, I hold that Lovecraft and Poe belong to a
higher order of stylistic merit than any of those just mentioned. Though I will begin by
summarizing my interpretation of Lovecraft’s style, those readers interested in a more
detailed assessment are referred to my previous writings on the topic.7 I will then turn
to the style of Poe, paying special attention to “The Black Cat” rather than the trio of
tales cited with disdain by Bloom.
Reviewing Lovecraft’s style
The second axis of OOO, drawn from Edmund Husserl but also found in the much
earlier philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, is the difference between unified objects and their
manifold of shifting qualities. David Hume and other empiricist philosophers deny
the existence of an “object” over and above the bundle of qualities that seem to belong
to it. By contrast, the phenomenology of Husserl and his admirers begins with the
priority of the unified object itself: its qualities are treated as servile modifications of
the object, which always stands at the center of the picture. When combined, the two
axes of real versus sensual and objects versus qualities give us a fourfold of real objects,
real qualities, sensual objects, and sensual qualities, handily abbreviated as RO, RQ,
SO, and SQ. OOO argues that objects cannot exist without qualities, nor qualities
without objects, while also claiming that the relationship between an object and its
qualities is loose rather than tight. Because of this looseness, we speak of four tensions
between the different kinds of objects and qualities: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, SO-RQ.
It is no exaggeration to say that the primary method of OOO in every field it enters is
to explore the consequences of how these tensions form and eventually break down.
Anyone who opposes OOO is intellectually obliged to show either that we ought to
reject the distinction between real and sensual, that there is no pertinent distinction
between objects and their qualities, or that OOO’s model of the four tensions is
otherwise inadequate.
Now, it turns out that RO-SQ is the tension most central to aesthetics. The gap
between ROs and SQs is especially visible in the case of a writer like Lovecraft, with
his uncanny alertness to the rift between the palpable qualities of a thing and the eerie
elusiveness of its style or overarching character. The most famous example is surely
his description of an idol of Cthulhu, that signature Lovecraftian monster. Cthulhu
is sometimes breezily defined, by both fans and critics, in such pulp horror terms as
“a dragon with an octopus-head.” Although accurate enough to bring newcomers up
to speed, summaries of this sort completely miss the tortured way in which Lovecraft
gropes toward a proper description of the idol of this beast: “If I say that my somewhat
extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and
a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing . . . but it was the
general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful” (my emphasis).9
From the standpoint of Hume’s philosophy, it would be perfectly acceptable to refer
merely to “simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature”
when describing the idol, with perhaps a few added notes of detail to round things off.
As we have seen, Hume permits nothing to be more than a bundle of tangible traits that
are capable of literal description. But Lovecraft veers in an anti-Humean direction: “the
spirit of the thing” and “the general outline of the whole” escape the narrator’s literal
power of conveyance, and hint at some ineffable reality over and above all the object’s
manifest features. Since this is Lovecraft’s most typical writerly strategy, it will be
useful to give one further example. This one comes from “The Dunwich Horror” and
describes the dead body of the half-monster Wilbur Whately, who had formerly—
though barely—passed for human: “It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say
that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be
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vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound
up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions.”10 This
passage is perfectly executed; in it, Lovecraft not only avoids the old horror-story cliché
of “I have no words to describe it” but also includes and surpasses it with a single
stroke. He does not merely negate the describability of Wilbur’s body, but also alludes
to that body: an important distinction for OOO. After all, direct access to reality is not
the only possible kind.
But there is a second typically Lovecraftian stylistic gesture as well, one that runs
perpendicular to the first. This concerns cases in which the thing described is not treated
as ineffable at all but in precisely the opposite manner: by bludgeoning the reader with
a mass of apparently literal descriptions that are so numerous and variegated that they
cannot effectively be unified in the imagination at all. The best example is surely the
description of the colossal Antarctic city in “At the Mountains of Madness,” viewed in
projected form in the sky. As the narrator feverishly puts it,
I have often compared this style to that of cubist painting, and the comparison still
strikes me as apt. During their High Cubist period, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque
attempted no illusion of a real thing occupying three-dimensional pictorial space,
nor did they allude to a thing hidden behind its depiction on the flat surface of the
painting. Instead, they replaced each thing with a simultaneous multitude of its many
different profiles as viewed from numerous angles. With his impossible piling-up of
bizarre architectural features, Lovecraft quickly undercuts any plausible depiction of
these Antarctic structures, heightening the tension between the single Cyclopean city
and its multitude of traits.
The other two tensions of OOO (RO-RQ and SO-RQ) are inherently more difficult
to grapple with, given that SQs—the basic material of human experience—are
missing from both. Nonetheless, we might expect a writer with Lovecraft’s intimate
command of the netherworld of language to find a way of evoking the elusive RQ, and
occasionally we see him pull it off. We note first that the SO-RQ tension occurs at least
twice in his stories, both times in connection with mysterious extra-worldly substances
that scientists are unable to classify. This happens first in “The Colour Out of Space,”
when the chemical structure of the ominous meteorite resists all efforts at testing. It
happens again in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” when the lead character Gilman
awakes from a supposed dream involving a small statue to find a fragment of the statue
actually in his hand. Scientists are baffled once more:
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One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to analysis, and the
results are still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum,
iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three
other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was powerless to
classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they
did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic
system.12
But while the properties of this object remain inscrutable (RQ), the object itself is not
(since it is SO, not RO). This is established further by Lovecraft’s amusing report that,
to this day, there is a public museum exhibit devoted to the puzzling object!
That leaves us with the RO-RQ tension, which might seem impossible to describe
given that both the object and its qualities are real, and for OOO to be real means to be
withdrawn from any direct access. However, it should be recalled that OOO also allows
for indirect access to the real by way of allusion. What we need to find, then, is a passage
from Lovecraft in which both an object and its qualities withdraw from any direct
description, in such a way that both must be subject to allusion rather than a literal
prose account. I see one clear candidate in Lovecraft’s writings, even if it seems at first
to fail the test of double withdrawal. The passage in question comes from “The Haunter
of the Dark,” and reads as follows: “Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind
idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless
and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac
flute held in nameless paws.”13 It might seem that this description is perfectly tangible,
no matter how strange, since Lovecraft does manage to convey some of the features of
this unearthly scene. But scratch the surface, and even this literal-seeming portrayal
turns out to be nothing more than allusion to something even darker. For there are
other references to Azathoth in Lovecraft’s tales, and they help show that no literal
description of this deity-thing is even meant to work. In “The Whisperer in Darkness,”
for instance, we read of “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which
the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth,” where the
Necronomicon is a fictitious book invented by Lovecraft and said to contain the sum
of all evils.14 Further passages could be cited, but our point is already established.
“Azathoth” is no discernible deity, but a mere name that “mercifully cloaks” a deeper
chaos “beyond angled space,” which I challenge any painter or filmmaker to convey
adequately. The claim of a “merciful cloaking” is no isolated affectation, given how
often Lovecraft’s characters are driven insane by the monstrosities they encounter.
So, assuming we have persuaded the reader that Azathoth is an RO (in the OOO
sense) rather than a sensual one, why not remain content with calling this an RO-SQ
tension? Why not say that Azathoth is the mercifully cloaking proper name for a
withdrawn nuclear chaos of such cryptic monstrosity that no one can visualize it but
that the qualities of this entity remain perfectly commensurate with language? After all,
Lovecraft does tell us that Azathoth (whatever it signifies) is surrounded by “a flopping
horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,” a description that is perfectly discernible
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even if rather odd. But here I take the liberty of inferring that Lovecraft does not mean
the flopping horde of dancers in any more literal a sense than the name “Azathoth”
itself. It is highly doubtful that the unspeakably monstrous nuclear chaos beyond
angled space could be encircled by literal dancers, however mindless and amorphous.
On this basis, I conclude that this is the best example we have of an RO-RQ tension in
Lovecraft’s fiction.
I freely admit that there is more to a writer’s style than the exemplification of
OOO’s four ontological tensions, though I do hold that the rift between an object and
its qualities is the root of all beauty, and all aesthetics more generally. But here I would
like to raise a different question. Given the argument that Lovecraft is an author who
works primarily with RO-SQ tensions (the Cthulhu example) and SO-SQ tensions
(the Antarctic city example), what should we say about the style of Poe, with whom
Lovecraft is so often compared? Does he work with the same stylistic tensions in his
depiction of objects, alternative ones, or within a different framework altogether?
This is the question I will examine by means of a brief interpretation of Poe’s “The
Black Cat.”
Interlude
The interpretation of Lovecraft in Weird Realism focused on the four basic possible
tensions between the objects depicted in his stories and the qualities that belong
to them, with a special emphasis on the two tensions that involve SQs: RO-SQ and
SO-SQ. Yet in literature there is a more basic stylistic question that precedes that of
how the author loosens the bond between object and qualities. Namely, the author
must succeed in earning the reader’s involvement in what is being said; the reader’s
conviction must be won. In all artworks of every genre, the style is a good one if it
succeeds in this respect, and a bad one if it intrudes upon our direct involvement
with the subject matter: stated in popular slang, “the wires cannot be showing.” If
we feel manipulated by an author, if he or she relies heavily on clichés or on stock
literary devices encountered a hundred boring times before, then we feel we are in
the presence of a flailing author rather than being directly embedded in the world
the author portrays. A useful term for describing a successful style is sincerity: not
in the sense that the author should be earnest, sentimental, or naïve but that we
as readers are brought into sincere relation with the work rather than smirking at
the artist’s shoddy craft. The venerable Michael Fried speaks in similar fashion of
“absorption” in the visual arts, though he always refers to the absorption of the human
figures portrayed in artworks in whatever they are doing: in a way that deliberately
excludes us, the beholders of the work.15 This remains the case even though Fried had
to concede that absorption became an ambivalent tool in French painters such as
David and Millet before eventually being almost abandoned by Manet.16 By contrast,
when OOO speaks of sincerity, it includes the beholder’s attention as an element of
the artwork itself. I should add that a style can be effectively sincere even if ironically
campy; consider Oscar Wilde, who almost always succeeds in bringing us sincerely
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into his ironic universe of arched eyebrows, enjoying his epigrammatic mockeries
as we silently mock along with him, despite his famous claim that all bad poetry
is sincere.17 Reader or viewer involvement is the key, and every skilled writer has a
different way of obtaining our involvement.
This is what OOO means with the concept of “theatricality,” which it treats in a
positive sense, unlike Fried, who treats it as nothing less than the death of art.18 Any
artwork designed primarily to provoke a reaction from the beholder is theatrical
in Fried’s pejorative sense; a better attitude, he holds, is something much closer to
(a Kantian) disinterested contemplation of an artwork independent of us. OOO
has a different view of aesthetic experience. Our reason for promoting theatricality
stems from considerations of ontology. Recall that for OOO the primary locus of
aesthetics is the tension called RO-SQ, in which an RO becomes detached from its
qualities, and in so doing withdraws to an inaccessible depth to which one can only
indirectly allude. It would seem, therefore, that we are left with nothing but free-
floating sensual qualities detached from any tangible object. But this is forbidden
by the same OOO principle that leads us to reject the “bundle of qualities” theory of
Hume. Namely, for OOO as for phenomenology (its most important philosophical
ancestor), there is no object without qualities and no qualities without an object.
Therefore, it is important to solve the puzzle of how the RO can enter our aesthetic
experience even though it supposedly withdraws from access. The solution is simple,
but has far-reaching implications. Though the RO “idol of Cthulhu” disappears
once Lovecraft succeeds in making it ineffable with his groping half-descriptions,
there is already another RO on the scene, prepared to take its place and perform
its labor. That object is I myself as the beholder of the artwork. It is I who step
in for the absent Cthulhu-idol and unify its qualities in my tortured attempt to
grasp the “spirit of the thing” or “general outline of the whole” that unifies all its
stranded SQs: octopoid, humanoid, or dragon-like. In this sense, Fried’s “beholder”
is no longer a very good term for the artistic spectator, who is far more involved
than any model of disinterested aesthetic contemplation would permit. A more
accurate term—though perhaps a more euphonious one will eventually be found—
would be “thespian,” the collateral adjective of the actor. Much like a Stanislavski-
inspired “method actor,” the reader of Lovecraft who is not bored or unimpressed
must internally play a Cthulhu-idol that acts as if it had octopus-human-dragon
qualities.19 Elsewhere I have argued at length that cases of metaphor display this
phenomenon in an especially helpful way.20
There is an additional issue in the case of literature, one that is relevant to many
of Lovecraft’s great tales and nearly all of Poe’s. Namely, in first-person narratives we
do not confront the subject matter of the story directly but through the mediation of
a narrator who must first earn our trust as a reliable presenter of things that he or she
has experienced personally. Poe’s tale “The Black Cat” is one such case. We are told at
the start that the narrator faces execution on the following day, and that he will now
tell us the story how he came to face such a punishment. Because of its use of first-
person narrative, “The Black Cat” has a special need to convince us of the narrator’s
own sincere and truthful relation to the events related in the tale, since otherwise we
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would quickly lose interest. There appear to be heavily supernatural elements at play
in this story; for this reason, much of Poe’s stylistic burden in “The Black Cat” is to
convince us tacitly that his supernatural explanations are more plausible than any
explanation according to everyday modern rationalist and materialist preconceptions.
In order to pull this off, Poe’s narrator pushes a non-supernatural explanation of the
deeds of his black cat as far as possible, even to the point of absurdity. As we will see,
he does this by endorsing a natural-causal explanation that is simply preposterous,
thereby compelling us to believe in a ghostly and superstitious world as a better
match for the facts than any rational scientific outlook. This technique is related to
but different from Lovecraft’s own. The main difference is that Lovecraft generally
renounces supernatural causes in his stories and tries instead to depict a natural world
that is nonetheless beyond all possible human comprehension. Herein lies the grain
of truth in the frequent observation that Poe prefers inner, psychological horror while
Lovecraft emphasizes outer, cosmic horror, and that whereas Poe’s narrators tend to be
psychologically intricate, Lovecraft’s are usually nondescript academic observers with
less-developed personal backstories.
The Black Cat
The plot of “The Black Cat” is relatively simple. A kind-hearted animal lover is
married young to a woman who shares his fondness for pets. They enjoy domestic
bliss among these animals, especially a black cat who loves the narrator dearly. But
gradually, alcoholism degrades his personality; he becomes peevish and violent to the
point of physically abusing his wife. Eventually, moved solely by a spirit of perversity,
he cuts out one of the eyes of his adoring black cat, who quite naturally begins to avoid
him. Soon thereafter the narrator ventures further down the road of cruelty: he hangs
the poor creature from a tree in his yard, weeping as he does so. That very night he
awakens to cries that his house is on fire, and he barely escapes alive while losing all
his worldly possessions in the blaze. The next day he returns to the ruins of his former
home to find an astonished crowd gazing at a remaining wall on the property, which
bears the uncanny outline of a cat hanged from a noose. The narrator offers an absurd
scientific explanation for this phenomenon that no reader can possibly believe, thus
proving the first supernatural element in the story by a sort of backhanded reductio ad
absurdum. It is not long before he finds himself in a debauched tavern, where he finds
a friendly black cat of unknown origin, one that looks a great deal like the pet he had
already killed. He takes it home, and on the following day is horrified to discover that
the new cat also has a missing eye, though it is distinguished from the first by a vague
white patch on its breast. Over time this patch begins to take on the definite form of
a gallows, which understandably terrifies the guilty narrator. One day he descends
to the cellar in his new and shabbier residence. The second cat, which has gradually
become abhorrent to him, runs beneath his feet and almost causes him to trip down
the cellar stairs. This awakens rage in the narrator, who immediately attempts to kill
the cat. He is prevented from doing so by his still kindly wife, which leads him to kill
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her instead, with a single blow from an axe. The narrator retains sufficient composure
to wall up his wife’s body in the basement and invent a cover story for her absence.
His alibi proves unconvincing, and the police make inquiries. After conducting a final
search of the property, they are ready to admit that no evidence has been found. But
in a fit of hubris, the narrator begins to praise the well-built character of his house,
tapping again and again on the very portion of the wall behind which his wife’s body is
hidden. A howl comes from behind the bricks, growing louder and shriller. The police
are initially stunned, but soon begin to tear down the wall. They quickly uncover the
partially decayed corpse of the narrator’s wife, with the second black cat sitting atop
her head.
The plot is well-constructed enough, and the tale does inspire genuine horror in
many of those who read it. In what follows, however, I am less concerned with the
general plausibility of the story than with the dozens of little “micro-plausibilities”
by which Poe earns our literary trust. And I do mean dozens: in a story of less than
ten pages in length, there are seventy-three places in which, I, as a reader, felt myself
give more than usual credence to certain words or actions in the story. What is
meant by “more than usual” credence? I take it to be generally well known that most
human experience, thought, and conversation has a purely perfunctory character.
It is “not news,” and does not sustain our interest; information theory would call
it “redundant.”21 Just now I took a break from writing this article and checked the
sports news at the website espn.com. A headline there reads as follows: “Rodgers: Not
Back to Save Packers’ Season.”22 As a lifelong American sports fan, the story is neither
unintelligible nor uninteresting to me. Aaron Rodgers is currently the star player for
the Green Bay Packers, one of the most storied clubs in the history of the rather violent
sport known worldwide as American football. Nearly two months ago, on October 15,
2017, Rodgers had his right collarbone broken in a game against the rival Minnesota
Vikings. In his absence, Green Bay won three games and lost four, leaving them a mere
borderline candidate for advancing into the postseason tournament (or “playoffs”)
by which sports leagues in America—unlike most of the world—generally determine
their champions. The story lets us know that the Green Bay Packers, and Rodgers
himself, are trying to downplay his ability to save a disappointing season so late in the
schedule. This was new information to me on a first reading and captured my interest,
but now that I have seen the headline five or six times this evening, it has become so
bland that I pay it little mind.
Most writing, even most good writing, consists of long prosaic segments that
merely move the reader from one place to another. If pulled off effectively, the best we
can hope for is that such passages not obstruct our movement from one micro-event
of heightened attention to another. These miniature events occur whenever we take a
genuine, if momentary, interest in something, our minds briefly absorbed in what is
happening rather than merely collecting more literal information. In need of a term
for these tiny moments of attention, let’s simply use the term “black cat,” which refers
not only to the title of Poe’s story, but to a frequently encountered entity that cannot fail
to capture our attention, whether through superstition or sheer visual interest. Poe’s
writing is unusually rich in black cats as so defined.
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When reading Poe’s story, I count seventy-three black cats in all: that is, seventy-
three moments when my attention is briefly seized by one thing or another amidst
the general flow of literal information. It is unlikely that every reader would come up
with exactly the same count, but this hardly matters. My claim is not that everyone can
or does read every story in exactly the same way, but simply that everyone’s attention
will be captured by a finite number of discrete elements in whatever they happen to
read. Now, since it would clearly be unmanageable to deal with seventy-three separate
passages in an article already at its halfway point, the first order of business is to arrange
the various black cats into categories. It seems to me that the episodes can be named
and sorted roughly as follows: Variety (3 black cats), Humor (14), the Supernatural
(7), Sudden Incidents (9), Introspection (6), and Proof (11). The remaining black cats
assigned to a category I will call Miscellaneous (23), which we will have to leave aside
in what follows.
Variety
We begin with the simplest example on the list. One way to capture anyone’s
attention is to present them with a variety of entities that provide material for the
free play of the imagination, as in the various collections assembled by especially
intelligent children. The authors of OOO do something similar with so-called
“Latour Litanies,” Ian Bogost’s term for long lists of heterogeneous objects. The goal
of these litanies is not to make an “argument,” as if that were the only mental act
worth performing, but to fix the reader’s attention rather than boring him or her
with prosaic wastelands of purported proof. I count three and only three such cases
in Poe’s story:
●● “We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.”23
●● “Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution,
I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this
I very carefully went over the new brick-work.”24
●● “In the next [instant], a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall.”25
Along with the intrinsic interest possessed by any multitude of kindred elements, each
of the three cases just listed has a subsidiary purpose. In the first, the cat is both the
equivalent of the other animals as one member of a set, but is also placed apart from
them as the sole animal mentioned in italic type. Later, we learn that the cat initially
escapes the cruel mistreatment inflicted on the other pets, though it will eventually
receive the roughest handling of them all. In the second example, the procuring of
mortar, sand, and hair forces the narrator to prepare plaster himself from these three
ingredients rather than purchasing it ready-made. This lends additional drama to his
attempt to conceal the location of his wife’s body. In the final case, probably the least
interesting of the three, the narrator lends momentary drama to the discovery of his
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wife’s body, making the dozen stout arms a kind of revealing counterweight to the
concealing force of mortar, sand, and hair.
Humor
Although humor does not immediately come to mind when speaking of Poe, any more
than when speaking of Sade, it is found in abundance in both authors. Recalling the
importance that Fried lends to the “absorption” of pictorial figures in whatever they
are doing, humor is a limit case in which the object of a character’s absorption strikes
the reader or viewer as trivial to the point of ludicrous, reminding us of Aristotle’s
definition of comedy as being about people “worse than we are.”26 Of fourteen passages
in the story that make me chuckle or laugh out loud, the following three stand out:
●● “Our friendship [mine and the first cat’s] lasted, in this manner, for several
years, during which my general temperament and character—through the
instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it)
experienced a radical alteration for the worse.”27
●● “[The white patch on the second cat’s breast] was now the representation of an
object that I shudder to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and
would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image
of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh mournful and terrible
engine of Horror and Crime—of Agony and of Death!”28
●● “The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon
the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd—by some
of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an
open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of
arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of
my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which,
with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the
portraiture as I saw it.”29
In the first case, the humor results solely from the use of prissy and stilted language,
which is not just a left-over archaism from Poe’s distant era, but the result of what I take
to be calculated literary decision. If Poe had written more directly that the narrator’s
temperament and character had decayed “due to excessive consumption of alcohol,” we
would pass through this phrase without a second thought. But the hesitant reference
to “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance” signals the narrator’s embarrassed
absorption in reflecting on the causes of his personal decay, and the effect is humorous
despite the objective sadness of the result. The second example is the sort of passage
that critics of Poe (and Lovecraft) cite whenever sneering at their supposed “bad
writing” and “purple prose.” The mistake of critics is the same in both cases: namely,
they forget that we are dealing with a first-person fictional narrator rather than with
the omniscient third-person voice of the author. That is to say, the voice that speaks
with overwrought terror of “the GALLOWS!” is not that of the writer Edgar Allan Poe,
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but that of a murderous narrator who is a character in a story by Poe. That narrator’s
description of the gallows as a “mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime—of
Agony and of Death!” is perfectly useful for conveying his desperate state of mind. It is
also extremely funny, despite the objective ghoulishness of its subject matter. The third
example is perhaps the finest in this series. In a sort of madcap parody of the usual
rationalist reduction of supernatural phenomena to sober logical explanation, Poe
manages to convince us of the supernatural by making the natural sound ridiculous.
For are we really expected to believe that someone in the crowd cut a hanged cat from
its noose, then tossed it through the sleeper’s window at just the moment when the
walls were collapsing, thereby allowing for the joint action of fire, lime, and carcass
ammonia to leave the ghostly imprint of a hanged cat on a standing wall in the ruins?
It so much easier to believe that the deceased cat used some devilish power to leave a
sign of warning and vengeance through purely supernatural means. Along with being
ominous, this is simultaneously quite funny, with both features conspiring to capture
the reader’s interest in especially intense form.
The supernatural
Though we have just touched on the supernatural in the passage describing the cat-
apparition on a wall, there are other such cases in the tale that are not the least bit
humorous. I count seven of them, though again we will only have space for three:
●● “In speaking of [the first cat’s] intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little
tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion,
which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious
upon this point—and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it
happens, just now, to be remembered.”30
●● “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the [second cat], was the discovery, on
the morning after I brought it home, that, like [the first cat], it also had been
deprived of one of its eyes.”31
●● “The reader will remember that this mark [on the second cat’s breast], although
large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees—degrees nearly
imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as
fanciful—it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline.”32
The first passage sets the table for our eventually believing in the supernatural
powers of the cat, by using a craftily weak triple alibi to deny it. Initially, the
narrator ascribes superstition only to his wife, thereby denying it in himself, thus
establishing his own impeccable materialist credentials. Next, he tells us that even
his wife was not serious in her view that cats are witches. And finally, he tells us in
unconvincing whistle-past-the-graveyard fashion that there is no particular reason
why he is even mentioning this notion at the moment, but that it simply entered his
mind at random. The second example seizes our attention by sharing the alarming
fact that the second cat is missing an eye just like the first, suggesting that it will be
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an instrument of the first cat’s vengeance, if indeed the second cat is not a direct
reincarnation of the first. The third example is the one that leads in short order to
the “GALLOWS!” passage already cited above, though here it is merely ominous
and not yet hilarious as well.
Sudden incident
Although the use of unexpected happenings in literature is easily abused, and thus
easily forfeits the credence of the reader, sudden incident is as captivating in fiction as
in everyday life. I will now quote three of the nine instances I found in the story:
●● “I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast
by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn,
I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.”33
●● “On the night of the day on which this cruel deed [hanging the cat] was done,
I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames.
The whole house was blazing.”34
●● “But this blow [against the second cat] was arrested by the hand of my wife.
Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my
arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot,
without a groan.”35
All three passages have an obvious fascination, though the first and third are particularly
horrifying. What strikes me as most skillful in Poe’s handling of the three is his
avoidance of any belaboring. Within the space of one or two sentences, the narrator’s
life is in each case irreversibly transformed. In the first, he passes from a kind-hearted
animal lover into an irredeemable animal torturer on the road to becoming an animal
killer. In the second, all his worldly wealth is destroyed. And in the third, he becomes
the murderer of his own wife and enters upon the path of capital punishment. Here,
the suddenness of his dark life-transition is emphasized by the fact that his wife falls
“dead upon the spot, without a groan,” with no discernible moment of passage between
life and the grave.
Psychology
The confessions of other humans are rare and revealing enough that we usually take an
interest whenever encountering them, even from those who may not seem objectively
interesting or practically useful to us. Poe is known for his incisive portrayal of
narrators with disturbing psychological profiles, and this holds for “The Black Cat” as
for most of his stories. What follows are three of six especially introspective passages
I found in the tale:
●● “When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the
night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the
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crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling,
and the soul remained untouched.”36
●● “For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this
period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not,
remorse.”37
●● “With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to
increase.”38
The first passage displays the narrator’s merely half-hearted guilt on the morning after
his cruel mutilation of a previously beloved pet, which had done nothing to deserve
such ill handling. The second shows us a similar half-heartedness following his later
murder of the animal by hanging. In both cases, the expected connection between a
wicked action and a gnawing sense of guilt is negated by the narrator’s report of his
relative lack of feeling in the aftermath. This gap between a cause and its expected
effect fascinates the reader, leading us to wonder about the forces at work in his psyche.
A similar thing happens in the third passage, which concerns the second cat, since
we would normally expect a disliked animal to sense our negativity and to keep away
from us as a result. Here our attention is turned to the cat itself, which either does
not recognize that it is held in low esteem, does not care, or—worst of all—actively
rewards our dislike with caresses for some unknown reason. Again, the expected bond
between cause and effect is ruptured, and we are fascinated by the juxtaposition of two
apparently contradictory attitudes.
Proof
Along with Poe’s fondness in “The Black Cat” for sudden, barely explicable incidents,
there are opposite cases in which he posits causes that seem to explain later events. Yet
at times these supposed causes are so flimsy that the effect verges on the humorous.
That is especially the case with the first two examples below, chosen from the eleven
cases I found in the tale:
●● “I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial
with my own.”39
●● “Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed
him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with
difficulty that I prevented him following me through the streets.”40
●● “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of
PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not
more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive
impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or
sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”41
The point of the first passage is to depict an affable and benevolent narrator who
joined his fate to a woman’s at a young age; it leads us directly to the young couple’s
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shared fondness for animals. All this paves the way for our heightened shock when
this animal-loving husband becomes violent toward his pets and eventually his wife.
The same holds of the second passage, in which the reader has difficulty suppressing
a smirk when learning that it was “with difficulty that I prevented [the cat] from
following me through the streets.” The cat’s unusual affection for the narrator will not
be rewarded as the story unfolds. The third example is of a different sort, and marks
the only bit of philosophizing from Poe in his tale. Perverseness, defined as “a primitive
impulse of the human heart,” is described as the wish to do things simply because they
ought not to be done. Here again, the expected bond between motives and actions is
ruptured through the positing of a crude faculty in all human hearts that leads us to do
the precise opposite of what we ought to be doing.
Concluding remarks
These examples of what I have called “black cats” in the tale—elements in this story,
and in all others, that break the prosaic flow of informative language and capture
the reader’s attention to a heightened degree—were meant to provide bulk for some
concluding observations. I do not suggest that every writer (or even every tale by
Poe) employs precisely the six types of black cats offered above. Every writer has his
or her own toolbox, and even each piece of writing by the same author has a different
character from its neighbors. But there are some general lessons to be drawn from
Poe’s case, ones that also help distinguish him from his ostensible literary cousin,
Lovecraft.
Generally speaking, I hold that there are two and only two basic ways of capturing a
reader’s attention, or indeed the attention of human beings in everyday life. We either
create a new bond between one thing and another, or we sunder an already existing
bond. The reason for this is that redundant literal experience consists of a series of
equivalences between objects and their qualities, objects and their relations, or objects
and their causal powers. (In the typical OOO manner, I use “object” here to mean
any entity: human, animal, plant, inanimate, as well as actions and events.) Only a
surprising new bond or the shattering of a familiar one is capable of standing out from
the banality of the customary links between various things in the world. As I argued in
my second book, we can steal the terms “fission” and “fusion” from nuclear physics to
describe these two processes.42
Of the six categories of “black cats” found in Poe’s tale, we can see that three of them
involve the bonding of a narrator with an object, of the reader with an object, or of one
object with another. In humor, we find the narrator bound with an object, generally
an amusing one that causes us to feel a slight sense of condescension toward him. The
GALLOWS! is not a frequent subject of everyday thought, and when it does happen to
cross our mind, we often reflect on this horrible object with the same bland mixture of
interest and jaded boredom as found in most of our thoughts. Although the narrator
has good reason to fear this particular image, and though the tale fits neatly into the
genre of horror rather than of comedy, such purposely overwrought attention to a
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“mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime—of Agony and of Death!” easily
provokes amusement.
In the category of variety, it is the reader who becomes an unwitting comic agent,
sincerely absorbed in birds, gold-fish, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and cats, or in mortar,
sand, and hair. This innate human fascination with lists of equivalent entities always
verges on a comic effect, which explains why OOO’s “Latour Litanies” so often provoke
laughter among those who do not angrily dismiss them. Just consider what is probably
Bruno Latour’s own finest litany: “Golden Mountains, phlogiston, unicorns, bald
kings of France, chimeras, spontaneous generation, black holes, cats on mats . . . black
swans and white ravens . . . Hamlet, Popeye, and Ramses II.”43 It is hard not to laugh
at this amassing of dissimilar entities on a single philosophical plane, even though the
argument behind this operation is—I hold—fundamentally sound.44
The third type of fusion is that between one object and another, remembering
again that OOO also treats people and events as kinds of objects. Poe’s tale posits causal
relations that are somewhat unusual, and which therefore capture our attention far
more than the obvious links between flame and heat, or apple and red. Early marriage
is implausibly cited as convincing evidence of good-heartedness. A cat’s affection for its
owner is displayed through its rather exaggerated tendency to follow him everywhere
through the streets, and to take nourishment from the owner alone and nobody else.
The passage on perversity is more complicated, since it could fit in the rather different
category of psychology (a type of literary fission rather than fusion). But the weight of
the passage leads more in the direction of binding the narrator with the purportedly
primal faculty of wishing to do things for the very reason that they are wrong. The
reader will be unsure if the philosophical claim is accurate, and therefore the narrator’s
claim that his life and ours are bound over to perversity captures our interest in the
manner of all unusual things.
The other three categories work in the opposite direction, by breaking the usual
bonds between things; these bonds can be described here under the general heading
of cause and effect, though there are numerous subspecies that need not concern
us for now. The three types of fission in Poe’s tale mirror the three kinds of fusion
just described: a bond that is broken can be one between the narrator and an object,
the reader and an object, or between objects themselves. In cases of psychological
introspection, though they may seem to posit a simple link between an action and
some deep inner motive, there is always something strange and ungraspable about the
posited motive, however lucidly it may be described. The narrator feels only a feeble
half-remorse after cutting out his cat’s eye or hanging it from a tree, which creates a
gap in our usual understanding of the link between action and conscience. Or in the
third psychological passage cited above, the psychological community of narrator and
cat is not a predictable feedback mechanism of mutual respect and affection, but one
in which loathing feeds love, and love in turn heightens loathing.
In the category of the supernatural, it is the reader who experiences the split between
cause and effect. Poe’s narrator cancels his own participation in this by denying
his belief in the supernatural, first blaming such beliefs on his wife’s credulity, then
refusing to see anything abnormal in the appearance of a hanged-cat outline on the
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wall of his burned-out house, and his suggestion that someone might someday explain
all the strange events in the story by purely rational means. But for us as readers, all
attempts at rationalizing the events of “The Black Cat” fail, and we are forced to join
the narrator’s wife in her superstitious demeanor. She believes cats are witches—even if
“not seriously”—and we will conclude much the same after reading the story. There is
also some occult cause at work in the second cat’s missing an eye, and in the white patch
on his breast eventually taking the shape of a gallows, even if the narrator expends a
good deal of energy in denying the significance of these facts.
As for sudden incidents, these cause us to lose faith briefly in the banal chain of
everyday and the sudden irruption of a strange event. A loving pet owner suddenly
cuts out an eye of his cat with a knife: this comes as a shock despite our already
knowing of the near-ludicrous “instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance.” His house
inexplicably burns to the ground one night, with all his worldly wealth destroyed. He
kills his once-beloved wife with a single blow of an axe, so that she passes from life to
death without the usual intermediate state of injury. All these events cut themselves off
from any gradual emergence from their preconditions.
At first glance, these two general groups of categories might seem too close to what
we already found in Lovecraft, whose two primary techniques were shown to consist of
fission and fusion: the split of Cthulhu’s “general outline” from his dragon-humanoid-
octopoid features, or the assemblage of an Antarctic city from numerous incompatible
attributes. But since I have already said that fission and fusion are the basic tools
available to all writers, this is not much of a resemblance. It is more illuminating here
to speak of the primary difference between Lovecraft and Poe as stylists.
Michel Houllebecq has remarked that Lovecraft’s narrators tend to be relatively
bland academic types who lack intricate psychologies.45 He suggests, as a result, that the
primary function of Lovecraft’s narrators is simply to observe and describe, with their
horrified reactions merely being those that anyone would display under equivalent
conditions. The fission and fusion unfold primarily on the level of the object itself,
whether it be Cthulhu, the cyclopean Antarctic metropolis, or a mysterious meteorite
in a university museum. There is a sense of disinterested contemplation, as if Lovecraft
were still a Kantian at heart, trying to separate the reader from what unfolds in the tales
themselves. By contrast, the psychological element is more noticeable in Poe, whose
narrators tend to be colorful characters—decadent aesthetes or degenerate wasters—in
a way that Lovecraft’s simply are not. In Weird Realism I suggested that Lovecraft was the
perfect OOO author, given his manner of decomposing the bonds between objects and
their qualities, which is the major theme of object-oriented thought. Yet there is a case
to be made for Poe instead. While OOO’s RO is usually taken to mean the withdrawn
and inscrutable object that recedes beyond every grasp, there is always another RO on
the literary scene: we ourselves as readers. Unlike Lovecraft, Poe uses active measures
to bring the reader as an RO into his works, as when he denounces superstition while
leading us to become temporarily superstitious ourselves. In recent years, OOO has
taken a theatrical turn through its heightened attention to the beholder’s status as an
RO, rather than focusing solely on the RO that withdraws from view. If this is the case,
then perhaps Poe is a better match than Lovecraft for what we might call OOO 2.0.
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Notes
1 Edmund Wilson, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s (New York: Library
of America, 2007), 701–2, cited in Graham Harman, Weird Realism (Winchester: Zero
Books, 2012), 7.
2 Cited in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 66, referenced by Brett Zimmerman, Edgar
Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 4.
3 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 205, referenced by Zimmerman,
Edgar Allan Poe, 4.
4 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 177, referenced by Zimmerman,
Edgar Allan Poe, 4.
5 Cited by Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 4.
6 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 4, referenced by Zimmerman,
Edgar Allan Poe, 4.
7 Graham Harman, Weird Realism; “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and
Husserl,” Collapse (2008).
8 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011).
9 H. P. Lovecraft, Tales (New York: Library of America, 2005), 169.
10 Lovecraft, Tales, 389.
11 Ibid., 508–9.
12 Ibid., 677.
13 Ibid., 802.
14 Ibid., 464.
15 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1988).
16 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, IL: University
of Chicago Press, 1992); Manet’s Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
17 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Collins, 2003).
18 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
19 Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, trans. J. Benedetti (London:
Routledge, 2010).
20 Graham Harman, “Aesthetics is the Root of All Philosophy,” in Object-Oriented
Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018).
21 Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).
22 The actual title of the story by Rob Demovsky is “Mike McCarthy: No ‘false
confidence’ because Aaron Rodgers is back.” Sony ESPN. http://www.espn.com/nfl/
story/_/id/21761588/green-bay-packers-qb-aaron-rodgers-says-coming-back-save-
team. Accessed December 13, 2017.
23 Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984).
24 Ibid., 604.
25 Ibid., 606.
26 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
27 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 598.
28 Ibid., 602–3.
29 Ibid., 600.
235
30 Ibid., 598.
31 Ibid., 602.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., 598–9.
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 603.
36 Ibid., 599.
37 Ibid., 601.
38 Ibid., 602.
39 Ibid., 597.
40 Ibid., 598.
41 Ibid., 599.
42 Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things
(Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005).
43 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 161.
44 See: Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
(Melbourne: re.press, 2009); Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology.
45 Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. D. Khazeni
(San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2005).
236
237
12
government was beginning to debate the slave trade.5 For good reason, the Narrative
is often discussed by historicist scholars interested in the tangled web of imperialism
and racism that haunts the Enlightenment and which in turn influenced Equiano’s
own narrative style and generic adaptations. But the Narrative has also met with some
controversy: biographer Vincent Carretta claimed that Equiano was born not in Africa
but in South Carolina, that his descriptions of his Igbo village, initial captivity, and
journey to America were lifted from other works, and that he fictionalized significant
parts of his life story.6 Other scholars have wondered if historical accuracy has any
bearing on Equiano’s larger moral point or literary importance.7 Srinivas Aravamudan
and Jonathan Lamb, meanwhile, have adapted Latour’s actor-network-theory and
Bill Brown’s thing-theory, respectively, to explicate Equiano’s understanding of the
complex interrelations between “humans” and “things” and on the phenomenon of the
thing-as-human.8 However, an explicit speculative-realist analysis can more pointedly
attend to Equiano’s engagements with the philosophy behind issues of personal
identity, narrative development, and spiritual understanding. My argument will focus
on Equiano’s use of a critical, but often-maligned term within empiricism that names
the ontologies and agencies that Meillassoux, Latour, and others identify as objects
of correlationist exclusion. That term is wonder. Equiano uses wonder repeatedly in
his Narrative to connect his reactions to the objects he encounters in his travels in
ways that defy the logic of the correlationist turn. Equiano’s wonder signals a counter-
phenomenological realism operating within a slave narrative tradition and running
athwart the history of philosophy.
I
Speculative realism is about the revival of wonder in knowledge; rather than erase our
wonder by way of “traditional empiricist assumptions” about how we learn to know,
we need to embrace, modestly and without judgment, how material contingency draws
us to things and inspires our curiosity. Wonder is an initial response to objects in the
universe, before I rationalize them according to existing correlationist protocols.9
In attending to the world in this preliminary way, I realize that I am already in a
relationship to it, as an object myself. This initial encounter, in which objects appear
to me more as they appear to each other and thus implicate me in their objective
relations represents the beginnings of an empathetic environmental politics that could
counter the exploitative narratives of economic growth and personal fulfillment that
undergird the modern capitalist mindset.10 What Jane Bennett calls “assemblages,” the
encounters between things or bodies, especially of the “sub-human” variety, but also
including humans, make possible configurations other than those to which empiricism
tends to ascribe legitimate existence. “Earthly bodies,” she writes, “of various but
always finite durations, affect and are affected by one another. And they form noisy
systems or temporary working assemblages which are, as much as any individuated
thing, loci of affection and allure. These (sometimes stubborn and voracious but never
closed or sovereign) systems enact real change. They give rise to new configurations,
239
discover or create links to enable us to understand the nature of the new objects in the
terms of existing categories or standards. Thus, Daston and Park suggest, Smith turns
away from wonder as a principle of knowledge and toward a restorative narrative of
reason.19
At the end of the essay, Smith illustrates that turn: Newtonian Astronomy has
upended all previous theories of spatial movement and attraction, as Copernicus’
previously did Ptolemy’s, but to the point that all wonder has now been replaced with a
confidence in the soundness of the Newtonian system. But his prose also mischievously
demonstrates the contingency of that replacement: “while we have been endeavoring to
represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect
together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature, [we] have been
insensibly drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of
this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her
several operations.”20 Smith’s “as if,” points to the suspension of judgment that Kareem
shows enables at once the recognition and the deferral of nature’s apparent discordance.
Smith also anticipates two important claims that Meillassoux makes about scientific
statements. First, all statements, according to Meillassoux, are contingent because at
any time they might be revised; but, second, by the same logic that makes contingent
statements verifiable (in Smith’s terms, language, connection, imagination), we can
also make scientifically unverifiable statements and agree that they are true. This
agreement gets to the heart of what Meillassoux calls “facticity,” the undermining of
any absolute knowledge beyond contingency as the principle underwriting reality. As
he puts it, facticity is “the absolute absence of reason for any reality . . . the effective
ability for every determined entity, whether it is an event, a thing or a law, for it to
appear or disappear with no reason for its being or non-being.”21 Smith, however,
insists that the success of any system of knowledge entails that wonder, the recognition
of contingency, is both necessary and excluded. It is necessary because in order to
formulate systems of knowledge, we must recognize the simultaneous existence and
contingency (what Smith calls the “discordance”) of our data. It must be excluded
because in order that our new system be verified as “true” we must also agree that it
is coherent rather than contingent. “Can we wonder,” Smith writes, “that [Newton’s
system] should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind, and
that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in the imagination
the phenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by
man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths,
all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have
daily experience.”22 Smith’s answer is no: we cannot wonder. Gravity, a verifiable fact,
confirms Newton’s abstract formulation of it and thus renders any other model of the
universe unreal. And yet, Smith’s conditional “shoulds” and references to the sublime
(to which I will return) suggest a less categorical disposition. The “as-if ” makes clear
the paradoxical suspension of judgment implicit in acts of verification. On one hand,
Smith’s essay records the process of general, scientific knowledge from naïve wonder
to established fact; on the other hand, it shows that this process entails protocols of
understanding that prioritize subjective comprehension. At stake in Smith’s essay, as in
241
In using the terms “wonders” and “curiosities,” Equiano invokes empirical science. But
the passage also seems to be parodying empiricism. What is actually learned here?
What utility do Equiano’s experiments serve? What new system has been discovered?
The potatoes taste terrible; the shoes are rendered utterly useless. The experiments
are not the only things in this passage that don’t quite add up. Brimstone Hill is not
on Monserrat but St. Kitts: it is the site of a large British Fort built by slave labor and
still largely under construction when Equiano was in the West Indies. The pools near
Plymouth, Monserrat are on the Souffriere Hills. Did Equiano get this wrong? Is he
intentionally misleading us?
Episodes like this, in which exploratory curiosity meets the possibility that
expected truths of empirical reality can twist unexpectedly and malignantly, abound in
Equiano’s Narrative, pointedly undermining the assurance of an empiricism that would
let slavery occur at the same time that it advocated truth and liberty. And Equiano
appears quite comfortable with the situation. He recalls his curiosity about the effects
of his experiment rather than any frustration with its inutility. Indeed, he seems to
welcome the damage the volcano does, ingesting the potatoes and collecting metals to
dip in Sulphur. Whether he gets the right mountain just doesn’t seem to matter. What
matters is a descriptive distance that without judgment reveals the logical and, we can
now add, moral inconsistencies within the narrative of empirical knowledge. It might
be overly scrupulous to suggest that when “silver” buckles are made “black” Equiano is
symbolizing his own confounded state. But the subtlety of that metaphor intimates not
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so much a direct correspondence between the tarnishing of the buckle and degradation
of African skin tone as it does the contingent but nevertheless present fact of different
states of life: bright, tarnished, black, white. Similarly, the seeming equality of “white
and black people” at this moment hardly redresses the obvious power imbalance of the
whole occasion; it nevertheless projects the possibility of a different order of empirical
understanding.
II
When he wrote the Interesting Narrative, Equiano did not know Smith’s essay on the
history of astronomy, which was only published in 1795. Still, given the radical circles
in which Equiano moved in the 1770s and 1780s, he was undoubtedly familiar with
the epistemological concerns Smith was addressing in his widely-read The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the politics attending them. In the chapter entitled
“On the Influence of Custom” Smith compares the resiliency of “savages” even in
the face of “continual danger” and death to the “humane and polished people, who
have more sensibility to the passions of others” because they “are brought up to live
in civilized societies.” His aim is to prove that human personality is a product of the
“custom and education of the country” from which each person hails.25 But Smith’s
pronouncement in the same chapter that American slavers are “wretches who possess
the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor those which they go
to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt
of the vanquished,” suggests that character is not determined by race, nationality, or
custom, but by individual experience within an open field of contingent relations.26
The historical fact of the slave trade overturns the binary between civilized European
and savage African. The fact of slavery compels us to turn what we know about the
world inside out, to recognize that the whole Atlantic Empire is an assemblage of
conflicting impulses, customs, and morals.
Smith’s remarks on slavery provide an important context for Equiano’s proto-
sociological (and indeed Smithian) use of the language of “customs” in his long
description of the Igbo community, where he was born, in the opening chapter of the
Narrative—the same description that Carretta notoriously used to question the facts of
Equiano’s autobiography. But it makes sense that Equiano took this account of the Igbo
from other sources not only because he wanted to establish his own veracity but also
because he wanted to parody empirical modes of documentation. Equiano never uses
the word “wonder” in this chapter because his aim is to show what narrative description
looks like without it. Equiano echoes Smith in stressing the general “customs and
manners” of his people and reinforcing the striking differences between European
and African cultures. Toward the end of the chapter, however, Equiano challenges
his readers to recollect that Europeans “were once, like the Africans, uncivilized and
barbarous” with much the same result as Smith’s observations that American slavers
are “brutes” who incur the “contempt of the vanquished.” General classifications are
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easily challenged by surprising local peculiarities as the “prejudices” that link culture
and temperament to complexion and climate.
By contrast, in his personal narrative, which commences after this general
description, Equiano draws attention to the way small encounters suspend rather
than confirm judgments. In one episode, Equiano has just arrived at a plantation in
Virginia and been sent to work in the master’s house; he “was very much affrighted at
some things I saw,” including a “poor creature” who “was cruelly loaded with various
kinds of iron machines” in which one “which locked her mouth so fast that she could
scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink. I was much astonished and shocked at this
contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle.”27 Astonishment
or shock is here opposed deliberately with the understanding (learning), the former
registering the initial encounter with the horror of this object and the latter registering
its use and value in the imperial context. The contrast extends into the next, and more
famous episode: “The first object that engaged my attention was a watch which hung
on the chimney, and was going. I was quite surprised at the noise it made, and was
afraid it would tell the gentleman anything I might do amiss: and when I immediately
after observed a picture hanging in the room, which appeared constantly to look at
me, I was still more affrighted, having never seen such things as these before.”28 Given
Equiano’s experience to that point, it is no wonder that he would mistake a clock and
a picture for the apparatus of imperial oppression. His fear, that is, is of a piece with
his sudden and cruel enslavement. But that is not his only understanding: “At one
time I thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when
they died, and offer them libation as we used to do to our friendly spirits. In this state
of anxiety I remained till my master awoke, when I was dismissed out of the room, to
my no small satisfaction and relief; for I thought that these people were all made up
of wonders.”29 Wonder, this sentence makes clear, produces an anxiety that cannot be
relieved until the observer is removed from it. Different conditions for understanding
are determined by proximity as much as by custom.
Such anxieties occur even when Equiano himself is the object of someone else’s
concern. Early in his captivity and unable to escape from the African family whom he
knows will soon be trading him, the young Equiano concedes that his attempt to flee
is “insupportable” and so “crept to my master’s kitchen, from whence I set out at first,
and which was an open shed, and laid myself down in the ashes with an anxious wish
for death to relieve me from all my pains.”30 This seemingly commonplace occurrence
represents a crucial philosophical point. As tragic as it may be, death is also a form
of relief from the dominating impulses of idealism. As Ray Brassier contends in Nihil
Unbound, inexistence is akin to freedom because it is the only theoretical concept
that entirely embraces material and repudiates correlationist subjectivity.31 But this is
precisely the opportunity that the slave is denied: he cannot die even as he is also denied
life.32 In the morning, an “old woman slave” lighting the fire “was very much surprised
to see me, and could scarcely believe her own eyes” that the boy could be lying in the
ashes, after which Equiano’s master “ordered me to be taken care of, and not to be ill-
treated.” The narrative enacts the process by which empiricism unsuccessfully outlaws
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wonder first by way of objective identification (surprise) and then by the imposition of
property relations that deny the right to die.
This is by no means the only moment in the text in which Equiano’s struggle to
escape his enslavement is undermined by luck, good or bad; indeed, the arbitrariness
of luck, that is to say, contingency, is the characteristic impulse of the entire narrative.
But whereas Smith attempts to incorporate wonder (both requiring and excluding it)
into a narrative of sound knowledge, Equiano shows what it means to make manifest
wonder’s contingent relations. Equiano is recreating the Enlightenment world-view
shared both by his master, the “old woman slave” and, presumably, by his informed,
abolitionist audience, but he is also inviting his readers to recognize the near-dead
“thing” that is being “taken up” into the fold of subjection. The seeming contingency of
Equiano’s narrative is thus a rebuke against the systematic consistency of an empirical,
and imperial, mindset. Equiano registers the amazing scale of the slave trade and the
vast entity called the British Empire. But his wonder also makes clear that an entirely
different comprehension of that entity is possible from his own, relatively minute
vantage point within it. In exposing the Empire in this manner—violent, discordant,
contingent—Equiano sees it not as a singular entity but as a gigantic assemblage.
Empire for Equiano is what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” that “thing” that
is too huge to measure or understand (like climate change or the whole universe) but
which we come to sense or appreciate through our micro-encounters with its palpable
manifestations (starting a car engine, feeling a snowflake but not feeling climate itself
in Morton’s examples)—in other words, wonder.33
Equiano’s descriptions of curiosities and wonders often replicate the discordances of
the natural world that Morton sees as our point of access to recognizing hyperobjects:
Many a time we were near suffocation from the want of fresh air, which we were
often without for whole days together. This, and the stench of the necessary tubs,
carried off many. During our passage I first saw flying fishes, which surprised
me very much: they used frequently to fly across the ship, and many of them
fell on the deck. I also now first saw the use of the quadrant; I had often with
astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think
what it meant. They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them, willing to
increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, made me one day look through it. The
clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they passed along. This
heightened my wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in
another world, and that every thing about me was magic.34
As in the Brimstone Hill passage, Equiano uses the empirical language of surprise,
astonishment, curiosity, and wonder to suspend rather than direct interpretation
when he is remembering his enslavement and formulating the process by which he
became habituated to its dolefully cramped conditions. Equiano recalls witnessing
the exact opposite conditions in three objects: the flying fish, the mariners’ quadrant,
and the passing clouds. Rhetorically parallel, the three objects nevertheless cannot be
configured into a single, symbolic whole. The fish fly and fall; the quadrant implies
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precision but deceives Equiano; the clouds pass, look like land, are revealed not to be
land, but then land itself appears (they arrive in Barbados). Wonder, astonishment,
and surprise thus mark Equiano’s naïve encounters with the world in which a variety
of relations, configurations, and encounters appear possible to every object (including
the human-object). The slave trade itself, the whole network of imperial travel, science,
and commerce is thus revealed in these small gestures to be a massive assemblage of
assemblages, both a fearful edifice of global dominance and, as seen through Equiano’s
revisionary narrative, a contingent, and thus changeable, configuration.
III
In the way that it offers new and potentially revolutionary configurations, Equiano’s
use of wonder in his Narrative speaks not only to empiricist conversations about
how we acquire knowledge but also to debates about how we attend to objects and
the emotions such attention elicits—in short, to aesthetics. For Kareem, wonder is an
aesthetic mechanism that enables authors to keep their readers in a state of suspended
interaction between fact and fiction, to suggest to them that fictional tales could be
true but also that truth is sometimes stranger or more interesting or, at the least, more
profitable than fiction, an attitude that, she argues, “is consistent with philosophical
skepticism.”35 Generically, as the debate over Carretta’s biography makes clear, the
Narrative seems to elide the difference between fiction and fact: its borrowings of
the wonderful, astonishing, or the marvelous from eighteenth-century philosophy
and fiction have a more polemical edge than Kareem ascribes to novels. For Kareem,
heterodox investments in the believable and the impossible, the historical and the
miraculous, purposefully stimulate readers’ apprehensions of a fictional world that is
nevertheless credible, and thus as potentially moral as it is stimulating or amusing.
But the uncertainty between fiction and fact is not exclusively, for Equiano (as indeed
for Smith), a matter of genre: rather it highlights the ways that moments of encounter
repeatedly foreground the radical contingency of any individual’s existence in a field of
interacting objects. In a brilliant analysis of Equiano’s “literary style,” John Bugg shows
how Equiano underplays these encounters as “trifles” to considerable ironic effect.
What makes Equiano’s trifles distinctive, Bugg contends, is their frequent, “cluster[ing]
around scenes of death,” showing the risks of constant sea travel not only to slaves
but also to their merchants and naval personnel, but without a sense of “anger” or
“revenge.”36 Near-death experiences, like the experiments at Brimstone Hill, never
translate into something else: they suspend judgment rather than confer meaning.
This suspension of judgment distinguishes Equiano’s literary aesthetic from
other aesthetics that emphasize emotional response, particularly the sublime. J. M.
W. Turner’s paintings, including one from 1815 of the same Souffriere Hills described
by Equiano, emphasize the fear that we should have before the awesome might of the
earth’s natural forces (Figure 12.1).
The difference between the suspended judgment that Equiano produces and the
sublime effects of Turner’s volcano can be clarified by the distinction between terror
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Figure 12.1 J. M. W. Turner, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St
Vincent, at Midnight, on the 30th of April, 1812, from a Sketch Taken at the Time by Hugh
P. Keane, Esqre, 1815, Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool (Creative
Commons).
and horror, first outlined by gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe in her posthumously
published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry.”37 Terror, Radcliffe argued, is produced
by “ambiguity and obscurity” of certain situations: we are led by our fear that we do not
know exactly what is happening, but once we are able to see and consider our own fears
(by the narrative voice, for instance, or by becoming familiar with the image) we are
able to translate that emotion into “psychological concern” which is the hallmark of the
sublime. Radcliffe’s terror is a circumscribed reaction: it depends on the distribution
of information through the reading experience enabling us to shift our attention back
on ourselves rather than the object that frightened us in the first place. In this respect,
Radcliffean terror is correlationist. Horror, by contrast, the actual witnessing of
monstrosity or atrocity, cannot, in Radcliffe’s formulation, lead to self-concern because
rather than produce reflexive thoughts it “freezes and nearly annihilates them.” Horror
can thus play no part in legitimate art or philosophy.
A different understanding of the sublime has emerged in recent and surprisingly
parallel conversations about wonder and horror. Phillip Fisher has usefully suggested
that the sublime belongs to a romanticism that insists bombastically upon the
superiority of nature over technology and of the divine over the worldly by recreating,
as Burke and Kant both urge, the “power” and “awe” of premodern religion though
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related fiction, the ocean is more frequently seen as a site of danger or labor, usually
both.42 Equiano’s plain descriptive style stresses the different agencies that make up the
decidedly modern, technological horror of the shipwreck.
A good example of this productive modesty is Equiano’s account of his return from
an ill-fated expedition to the North Pole. Rather than present the voyage to the pole as
a sublime spectacle, Equiano provides the kind of specific detail more frequently found
in naval archives and logs: “on the 28th, in latitude 73, it was dark by ten o’clock at night.
September the 10th, in latitude 58–59, we met a very severe gale of wind and high seas,
and shipped a great deal of water in the space of ten hours.”43 At the height of the crisis,
Equiano and his shipmates spy another ship “in very great distress, and her masts were
gone; but we were unable to assist her.” The slight and unadorned description, while
horrifying in implication, avoids sublime emotion. Far from inspiring fear or awe, the
second boat appears as a useless object floating in an unforgiving sea, a wasted piece of
human dross. There is no way to connect the ship’s appearance to whatever meaning
or essence, actual or otherwise, that it might have. It suspends rather than inspires
aesthetic judgment. We are left to surmise what the ship “means” from the strange
possibility that it might not mean anything, that it might not exist other than as a
contingent fact. Just as the destructive power of a volcano should not necessarily lead
us to assume that volcanoes are intentionally or necessarily hostile to us, so Equiano’s
apparent indifference to the “horrors” that he experiences signals his embrace of a
productive realization of the existence of the world, however dangerous.
IV
I have been arguing that Equiano’s narrative aesthetic is built on the suspension of
judgment signified in his time by wonder. Equiano’s wonder also has a political intent: to
expose and challenge the white, Western privilege encoded in the epistemology of
science and the aesthetic of the sublime. To conclude this essay, I want to consider how
this wonder manifests itself in one of the most important elements of the Narrative,
Equiano’s religious conversion. As many critics have noted, Equiano’s conversion
shares many traits with those depicted in conventional “spiritual autobiographies”: the
blinding light, the scene of reading, the figural death, the acceptance of grace. But
critics have never been able to agree about exactly how Equiano was using these
generic paradigms.44 While his adaptation of available theologies is clear, Equiano’s
accounts of his religious experience, like his narrative aesthetic generally, suspends
rather than confirms the subjective assurances that these theologies promise in the
name of what we might call a realist theology. Equiano’s religious conviction, I suggest,
is built on what Bruno Latour, discussing the religion versus science debate, calls
“the nearby (le prochain).”45 For Latour, the difference between science and religion
is not a matter of “knowledge vs. belief,” since, for all of its empirical pretensions, it
is science that tends to “allow access to the far away while religion, or, rather presence
. . . is what allows access to the near, to the neighbour.”46 Rather than compete with
each other or, worse, imitate each other, Latour recommends that science and religion
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divinity, but, as in Equiano’s use of horror rather than the sublime, this is a divine that
has no comprehensive hold on the experience of the believer, either as a moral law
or by the force of exclusion. Along with the frontispiece, which depicts Equiano in
European dress holding open the Bible to Acts 4:12 and names him “Olaudah Equiano,
or Gustavus Vassa, the African,” these passages present the author not as the seminal
originator of the Narrative but as the contingent and discordant assemblage procured
by the experiences the Narrative documents.
We are encouraged, that is, not to see the author as a perfect, empirical subject
but as an object of our own wonder, a recognition that is also linked to Equiano’s
understanding of divinity. The passage cited on the frontispiece (Acts 4:12)
appears again in Equiano’s account of his conversion.51 Having been rejected by the
Methodists and having no other employment, Equiano embarks on a merchant ship
bound for Cadiz where, as he says, he “heard the name of God much blasphemed”
and falls into depression: “I murmured much at God’s providential dealings with
me, and was discontented with the commandments, that I could not be saved by
what I had done; I hated all things, and wished I had never been born; confusion
seized me, and I wished to be annihilated.”52 As in the first volume, hardship leads
Equiano to wish for death, from which he is pulled out by the larger network of
imperial and trade relations. Arriving in Spain, Equiano embarks on what he calls
“a throne of grace” where he will “wrestle” with the spirit of God, “as Jacob did.” The
name is important: in first arriving in America, Equiano was given the name “Jacob,”
and it is there that he first begins to “wrestle” with the “things” that make up his
experience of slavery and Empire. Here, Equiano “becomes” Jacob again, assuming
the name metaphorically though without entirely defacing his other identities. The
experience is, in many respects, the climax of the Narrative: “reading and meditating
on the fourth chapter of the Acts, twelfth verse, under the solemn apprehensions of
eternity, and reflecting on my past actions,” Equiano writes, he ponders whether his
salvation could be the result of his “moral life” or “the sovereign gift of God.” At this
exact moment of
consternation the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright
beams of heavenly light; and in an instant as it were, removing the veil, and letting
light into a dark place, I saw clearly with the eye of faith the crucified Saviour
bleeding on the cross on mount Calvary: the scriptures became an unsealed book,
I saw myself a condemned criminal under the law, which came with its full force
to my conscience, and when ‘the commandment came sin revived, and I died,’
I saw the Lord Jesus Christ in his humiliation, loaded and bearing my reproach,
sin, and shame.53
Lifting the veil is an archetype of Christian writing in the eighteenth century, usually
pointing to the penitent’s sublime realization of the divine. But here, as Christ reveals
himself to Equiano, Equiano also sees himself in the figure of the “bleeding” and
“condemned criminal” that Christ also was. If the mast-less hulk or the blackened
shoes are representations of Equiano himself, they are also, like Christ, impossible
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for Equiano to describe other than in the most modest descriptive terms because he
cannot presume to “judge” them any more than he can judge the image of Christ. But
in this reiterated metaphorical relational—a repeated “as-ifness”—these assemblages
are all seen to open the possibility of realities other than those encoded by convention
or correlation. This, in a sense, is Equiano’s liberty, one quite different from the
manumission that, as described in the text, he can only achieve by manipulating
imperial codes and protocols. Here, Christ is revealed to be a profoundly material
“thing,” a broken body hanging on the cross, suspended, so to speak, between life and
death, existence and judgment. Equiano must acknowledge this suspension in order
to confirm his own independent thing-ness. The “talking book” of the earlier volume
is “unsealed” and in that moment, Equiano figuratively “dies,” freeing himself from the
social death that is slave life.
Equiano’s conversion by no means ends his troubles. For years afterward, Equiano
still struggled with the ubiquitous racism of America and the West Indies, where debts
from white men to black men are paid with “horse whips,” justices refuse former slaves’
testimonies, and government agents commit “flagrant abuses.”54 Equiano lived most
of his life under his imperial name “Gustavus Vassa,” and phenomenally as a “thing”
with few of the rights accorded to white subjects. But, I want to be clear, though his
conversion to Methodism helped him cultivate a new outlook and discover a new
society (which enabled him to write his memoir) in many respects in line with the
emerging ideals of eighteenth-century epistemology and aesthetics, his autobiography
also rejects the determining influence of empirical institutions such as those articulated
in Smith’s history of science or by the aesthetic of the sublime. His cause, that is, was
to activate his audience’s wonder and from that sense of wonder, compel them to
recognize the reality of their imperial condition.55
Notes
1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans.
Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 125.
2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13. Latour has especially influenced the
“descriptive turn” in eighteenth-century studies. See Heather Love, “Close but Not
Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring
2010): 371–91, and the special issue “Bruno Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary
Studies,” ed. Christina Lupton and Sean Silver, The Eighteenth Century Literary Studies
57, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 165–282.
3 The volume of important work on the importance of race and slavery in eighteenth-
century literature and culture is considerable and growing. I am particularly influenced
by George Boukulus, The Grateful Slave; The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century
British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ian
Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture
of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ramesh Mallipeddi,
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out that the Greek original and King James versions of these verses use the deictic
“this Jesus,” rendering it unclear whether “Jesus” is Christ or the beggar, an ambiguity
that points to Christ’s exclusion from the ranks of the human while underlining his
material existence. Austin Chisholm, “The Future is Black: Black Christology in The
Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” Paper submitted for Graduate
Seminar, “ENGL 530A: British Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” University of
British Columbia, April 24, 2017, 8–9.
52 Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 204.
53 Ibid., 205–6.
54 Ibid., 234–44.
55 The research for this chapter was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was inspired by and developed in two
graduate seminars which I taught at the University of British Columbia: “Romantic
Matter” (2014) and “British Romanticism and Speculative Realism” (2016): I dedicate
this chapter to the students in these classes. I also thank Chris Washington and Anne
McCarthy for their positive encouragement and critical acumen throughout the
writing and editorial processes.
256
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13
In the spirit of nineteenth-century receipts (what we now call recipes), this essay,
which may or may not coalesce into a palatable morsel by its conclusion, is comprised
of the following: Take object-oriented ontology’s (OOO’s) insistence that objects
fundamentally and irreducibly exist but withdraw from all relations and combine with
recent interest in probing the being of media, particularly, though not exclusively, with
respect to computational media’s ascendance in all realms of cultural production over
the past few decades. Season with literary criticism from the field of romanticism,
which understands its period as a signal moment in the history of mediation. Serve on
a bed of cookery books from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Here
is what you will taste. First, on the tip of your tongue will come the sensation of a media
ontology that privileges objects over processes, creating a pathway toward the slightly
bitter hint of a political, aesthetic, and ethical resistance to the logic of Singularity
which animates so much of contemporary discourse around computational media
(and which infects how we view other media in comparison with it). As those initial
notes begin to fade, lingering spicy claims regarding the sensuous character of reading
take over, with particular focus on the strategies of mediation at work in romantic-era
cookery books. Should any indigestion arise, feel free to proceed to another essay in
this collection; if the ailment persists, the author of this vile stew can be boiled and
roasted at length in other publications should you be so inclined to put in the effort.
As the above attests, I’m drawn toward play and irony when dealing with cookery
books because those strategies are so vividly on display in the discourse around them
during the romantic period. At least in part, such tendency toward ironic play results
from the discomfort food and eating raise by reminding us of the existence of objects
apart from us (and our dependence on them), as well as the fundamental objectness
of the human subject. Similarly, cookery books remind us of the inhuman core of
media objects, like books, to which we ascribe so much meaningful human presence.
The most consistent playfulness one encounters in cookery books is the conflation of
reading and eating upon which my opening paragraph also riffs. Witness, for instance,
Thomas Hood’s delectable characterization of the late-romantic period’s most famous
cookery book, William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle: “The style is a piquant sauce
258
to the solid food of the instructions; and we never recollect reading sentences that
relished so savourily. . . . If we were to be cast away upon a desert island, and could only
carry one book ashore, we should take care to secure the Cook’s Oracle. . . . Who could
starve with such a larder of reading?”1 Even if we know that readers did not literally eat
Kitchiner’s book (except perhaps an inadvertent scrap or two when used as culinary
wrapping paper),2 the conflation of reading and eating with respect to cookery books
nonetheless poses reading as something more than a disembodied, purely intellectual
experience of text. As such, these books help us examine media as embodied objects,
not merely as processes capable of replication—without transformation—in any and
all other forms.
Cookery books should thus be of interest to romanticists and philosophers alike for
what they can teach us about aesthetics. Romanticism, or at least the second-generation
Cockney version of it I focus on, models notions of aesthetics in line with how OOO-
inclined (and other speculative realist) thinkers have written about beauty. This model
treats aesthetic objects as insistently material and necessarily real, while full knowledge
of or access to those objects eludes creators and audiences alike. John Keats’s Grecian
urn silently beckons us to engage with the strange presence that “haunts about [its]
shape,” even if we ultimately remain uncertain of what it says to us, despite the poem’s
seemingly unambiguous final utterance; Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc “gleams on high,”
and even though the poet claims “the power is there,” that power remains deeply
withdrawn from human apprehension; Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s multiply-mediated
poems leave us in webs of interconnected objects, as in the “Lines Written under a
Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter,” such that access to those objects can only
ever be relational—in all these cases, we encounter notions of aesthetic experience
which privilege speculation without moving fully into idealism nor into the certitude
of a naïve realism.3 In ways similar to these romantic poetic articulations (in this
essay, exemplified by Keats), cookery books ponder the nature of aesthetics through
reflections upon textual mediation. While romanticism and speculative realism
correspond with respect to how they approach being and beauty, contemporary media
theory tends to diverge from such realist aesthetics. By thinking through romanticism
and the media-centric reflections on aesthetics offered by cookbooks, I suggest
that such a method opens a space for speculative realism to counter the anti-realist
assumptions that contemporary media theory leans toward. In short, speculative
realism helps us see the realism of romantic aesthetics. Romantic texts invested in both
mediation and aesthetics help us inject realism into our understanding of media, a
realism whose absence has significant ethical ramifications. Finally, then, my focus
on questions of beauty is about the effects produced by our ways of thinking about
aesthetics. As opposed starting points, whether or not we accord reality to aesthetic
objects significantly influences what we accept as the appropriate fields of action for
beauty—without realism the aesthetic functions as a shiny distraction from more
weighty matters; with realism the aesthetic offers possibility, futurity, and imagined
capacities we could not think to know. To ask what books and poems do, then, concerns
ethics and ontology at the same time.
259
Cookery books may not be the most obviously romantic texts out there, but they
nonetheless offer a wide range of reflections on the nature of media and mediation
during the romantic period. In the last two decades, scholars of romanticism have
increasingly argued for viewing media and mediation as central concerns constitutive
of romanticism. For instance, Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane contend that
“the study of romantic poiesis . . . belongs as much to media history as to literary
scholarship,” and they venture further that “Romantic poetry might even serve as a
synonym for what we mean by multimedia.”4 Elsewhere Langan identifies in Walter
Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel a crucial historical moment when “the medium of
print becomes recognizable as a medium.”5 Andrew Burkett explores in Romantic
Mediations how authors during the period “express[ed] diverse, flexible conceptions of
both media and mediation . . . before the media concept became distilled later in the
nineteenth century into its modern sense as the notion of the technological channel of
communication.”6 I suspect that the emergence of what some of the aforementioned
scholars have referred to as “romantic media studies” not only is about broader academic
trends but also, more significantly, points to a continuity between understandings of
romanticism past and present. The transcendence and immediacy of romantic writing
tends to be accompanied by the recognition of the necessarily mediated character of
beauty. Langan and McLane identify this tension in the titles of two landmark books
of romanticist scholarship, Geoffrey Hartman’s Unmediated Vision and Harold Bloom’s
The Visionary Company, each of which employ “terms . . . [which] yield evidence of
historically specific forms of mediation” even while arguing for the power of romantic
poetry to bypass, avoid, or eliminate the pernicious effects of other communications
technologies.7 All of this is to say that a growing interest in seeing romanticism through
the lenses of media theory and media history ultimately represents a return to what is
arguably the most crucial and defining subject of romanticism: aesthetics.
Romantic cookery books enable an explicit combined focus on mediation and
aesthetics for several reasons. As already mentioned, one reason is how consistently
they raise questions about the conflation of reading and eating. Gustatory metaphors
employed to talk about reading are, of course, not unique to the romantic period,
but the connection does have a distinctive flavor in this context. Denise Gigante
has written about this notion in Taste: A Literary History, in which she locates the
distinctiveness of romantic taste particularly in relation to class and in the broader
context of philosophical treatments of aesthetics; for Gigante, romantic writers
resist the traditional hierarchy of the senses, which places literal taste at the bottom
(where it corresponds with class hierarchies as well) and only useful as a metaphor for
aesthetic appreciation.8 If, as I contend, romanticism can be understood as producing
and emerging from a distinctive consciousness of textual materiality and mediation
alongside its more regularly recognized concerns with poetics, taste, and aesthetics,
then cookery books operate precisely at the locus of these overlapping issues.9 When
writers in the romantic period link reading with the more insistently material act of
eating, that linkage is frequently a response to and means of thinking through textual
materiality and mediation more broadly. Cookery books offer us several specific areas
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The work of OOO truly begins after the fundamental realist stance it adopts in
opposition to the post-Kantian trap of correlationism, a stance which Graham Harman
tidily summarizes in Guerilla Metaphysics (2005): “Object-oriented philosophy has a
single basic tenet: the withdrawal of objects from all perceptual and causal relations.”11
Withdrawal operates at an ontological level, so it means that while objects exist, all
interactions with them occur across a fundamental chasm. While withdrawal itself
is a crucial and generative concept in the broader movement of speculative realism,
it gains greater value from the efforts made beyond that initial recognition in order
to make sense of how anything ever happens at all, how the ontological chasm is
bridged. If all entities are “vacuum-sealed,”12 “operationally closed,”13 or “irreducibly
secret,”14 then there needs to be some accounting for how objects do interact with
one another. My interest in this essay has less to do with the philosophical viability of
specific solutions offered by Harman (“vicarious causation”), Levi Bryant (a systems-
theory-inflected answer), or Timothy Morton (locating causality in the aesthetic realm
of “interobjectivity”), than with the implications such solutions raise for how we as
literary scholars might wrestle with them. In my case I wrestle with them by suggesting
how they exist in productive tension with contemporary theories of mediation. That
tension then illuminates what speculative realism and media studies can bring to our
understanding of the study of romanticism.15
Media and mediation often linger in the background of work by OOO thinkers.
Bryant’s more recent work specifically draws on media theory (mostly McLuhan) for
his shift to “machine-oriented ontology.”16 However, I want to resist the tendency in
Bryant’s work to turn all entities into mediums (“when one entity enters into structural
coupling with another entity, it functions as a medium for that entity”).17 If entities—
or objects, or machines, or things, depending on one’s preferred vocabulary—are all
potential mediums, then the “media concept” loses all particularity of meaning.18 As
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John Durham Peters writes in the introduction to The Marvelous Clouds, when we
engage in ontological explorations of media, there is the risk of “dilut[ing] the concept
beyond the limit of utility.”19 That said, however, I share with Peters the sense that
the risk is worth taking, particularly as we exist in a moment when “media theory
faces a crisis of uncontainable relevance,”20 thanks in part to the rapid changes and
developments in contemporary media objects, devices, and environments over the
past few decades, and which we ought also to extend back to the slightly slower media
revolutions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
While speculative realism often thinks through media and mediation, recent media
studies work that edges into the realm of ontology tends to do so in tension with
speculative realism (with differing degrees of directness, ranging from the indifferent
to the openly hostile). Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds, the collaborative volume
Excommunication, Craig Dworkin’s No Medium, and Yuk Hui’s On the Existence
of Digital Objects all place the study of media (typically though not exclusively
through examinations of computational media) in the broader context of the study
of metaphysics.21 Peters points out that ontology and media studies have a history
preceding our moment, venturing that “at its most ambitious, media studies sees itself
as a successor discipline to metaphysics, as the study of all that is.”22 Two of the most
ambitious practitioners whom Peters has in mind are Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich
Kittler. The latter, in an essay written toward the end of his illustrious career, claims
that, for most of its history, philosophy has not been able to think the ontology of media
because, since Aristotle, metaphysics has “deal[t]only with things, their matter and
form, but not with relations between things in time and space.”23 Only with Heidegger,
according to Kittler, does philosophy begin to move toward a reckoning with the
being of technical media, and only in the wake of the history of computation since
the early-twentieth century can we stop “subjecting humans, beings, and machines to
the dichotomy of form and matter” and move instead toward a “new trinity made up
of commands, addresses, and data,” or alternatively, “proceedings, transmissions, and
memories.”24 As the figure of trinity suggests, Kittler’s answer is onto-theological as
opposed to strictly ontological, and he even recognizes at the essay’s conclusion that,
if our shamans and priests of computation solve the mystery of quantum computing
sometime in the future, then the gods of our current onto-theological system would
be overthrown by the Olympian qubits and whatever strange beings they instantiate.
Kittler’s answer is thus of a piece with what OOO acolytes label as one of their
(many) bêtes-noirs: process philosophy. Some other media-ontological thinkers fall
under this category as well, most notably Alexander Galloway and Craig Dworkin.
Dworkin ultimately remains agnostic on the question of the ontology of media, writing
that “media—if there are such things [my italics]—are only recognizable as collectives.”25
Galloway more forcefully swears off the question of ontology when it comes to
computational machines, suggesting that “the proper branch of philosophy one should
turn to is ethics or pragmatics, not ontology or metaphysics.”26 In the introduction to
The Interface Effect, where he engages Kittler’s essay, Galloway argues that “when Kittler
elevates substrates and apparatuses over modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest
in techniques in favor of an interest in objects.”27 By contrast, Galloway asserts: “the
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Cookery books foreground their relationship to the senses both through their
content, the objects mediated, and through their modes of mediation, the mediating
objects. One could argue that books of poetry also activate some form of embodied
sensation in their users, but cookery books more self-consciously acknowledge their
connection to sensation than typically does a book of poetry. Through their greater
degree of sensorial concern, we can develop concepts and vocabulary for theorizing
books occupying other genres and uses as well. In one of the period’s great venues
for reflections on textual and gustatory materiality, Blackwood’s Magazine, we find a
feast of such examples.32 In December 1821, for instance, we encounter an extended
description of Maria Eliza Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery. Rundell’s book
was an extremely profitable one for publisher John Murray (a fact not lost on one of
Murray’s other profitable authors, Lord Byron, who playfully writes to Murray, “Along
thy sprucest bookshelves shine / The works thou deemest most divine— / The ‘Art
of Cookery’ and Mine”).33 The Blackwood’s writer R. F. St. Barbe describes Murray’s
production process through the following extended figure: “[Murray] kneaded it up
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into one solid substance, a regular-made fat 12mo. with title-page, and tail-piece, and
index, if not actually the puff-paste of Mr Murray himself, yet at least the dresser and
rolling-pin were put in requisition under his specific direction for compounding it.”34
This bibliographic pie, as it were, draws attention to the mechanics of printing and
bookmaking (“12mo.” referring to the duodecimo size of the book), but also to the
discursive systems which support the industry (“puff-paste” referring to “puffery,” or
the practice of publishers promoting their own works in the pages of another of their
publications, such as a magazine). The book did not “actually” contain the puffery
of a positive review within it, and it appears that no such “puff-paste” ever appeared
in Murray’s magazine, The Quarterly Review. But this figure of the book’s pie-crust—
which plays with its physicality and the way in which it moves through other material
systems—suggests that we ought to take seriously the notion that the existence of the
object extends beyond its binding. St. Barbe goes on to suggest that Murray might be
better served were he to “carve down the materials of his feast, and send them up to the
snow-white monthly spread table-cloth of Maga, in the form of entremêts, not over-
much at once, but prettily dished and garnished by some of the tasteful traiteurs, who
have demonstrated their excellence in your [fictional Blackwood’s editor Christopher
North’s] employ.” The suggestion seems to be that Blackwood’s itself is a better
publishing venue for cookery than a large book; Murray’s “fat 12mo.” is contrasted
with the pristine “table-cloth of Maga” and its monthly freshness. As is always the case
with Blackwood’s, reflections on the literary and publishing worlds quickly become
opportunities to espouse Maga’s own greatness. Nonetheless, moments like these
demonstrate self-consciousness about print media specifically and about mediation
more broadly, and they allow us to imagine how readers and writers during the period
entertain the materiality and being of media.
Cookery books allow for such explorations in part because the books tend toward
self-reflexivity regarding their mediation. That is, cookery books exhibit what Jay
David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “hypermediacy.” Hypermediacy names the
tendency of mediation to make visible the particularities of mediation (as opposed
to “immediacy,” which seeks to erase all traces of mediation). It draws attention to the
medium, often for some aesthetic effect. Bolter and Grusin emphasize that these two
“logics” of (re)mediation are not universalized or stable but rather emerge from and
alter within complex negotiations over time.35 Any given medium will typically afford
elements of both logics. Take virtual reality: the “immersive” nature of seeing a virtual
environment in one’s entire field of vision attempts to achieve a feeling of immediacy,
while the bulky helmet and easily tangled wires required to create that mediated
environment certainly remind the user of the hypermediated nature of the experience.
Johanna Drucker, focusing specifically on the print medium, suggests a similar tension
between what she calls marked and unmarked texts. Whereas the unmarked text
seeks to completely erase our awareness of the space of mediation, in contrast, “the
marked text,” according to Drucker, “aggressively situates the reader in relation to the
various levels of enunciation in the text—reader, speaker, subject, author—though
with manipulative utilization of the strategies of graphic design.”36 Cookery books
certainly draw attention to their modes of mediation through their visual materials
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Figure 13.1 One of the seventy-three full-plate illustrations from the 1836 edition of Marie Antonin Carême’s French Cookery, published by John Murray
in 1836. Carême was legendary for his elaborate spun-sugar sculptures like the ones diagrammed in detail here. Courtesy of the Cookery Collection, Morse
Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.
265
(and this is true of both lavish illustrated productions and more modest varieties).
Marie-Antonin Carême’s French Cookery, published by John Murray in 1836, features
seventy-three fold-out illustrations, mostly of Carême’s famous spun-sugar sculptures
(see Figure 13.1).37
In a more restrained style, we have the strategy employed in Louis Eustache Ude’s
The French Cook (see Figures 13.2 and 13.3), which illustrates how to julienne carrots
with a printer’s mark typically used to indicate a break in a text (a horizontal bar). In
another instance it employs what is essentially an enlarged asterisk to demonstrate
how to dish up sheep tongues and cabbage leaves (the asterisk used in that same
receipt to explain in a footnote what is meant by “mask” draws further attention to the
typographical tools being used to illustrate culinary techniques as well as bibliographic
functions).38 Ude’s book thus takes line drawing as remediated through print and
uses it to convey the visual image of food items to be prepared and consumed via the
medium of the body. A final example comes from the anonymous Domestic Economy
and Cookery (1827), wherein the layouts of printed pages visualize different forms
Figure 13.2 From the sixth edition of Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook, published by
John Ebers, 1819 (source of the bill of fare used by Lord Byron in Don Juan, among other
things). Ude’s book employs typographical devices to illustrate culinary techniques, like the
slicing of carrots à la julienne depicted here. The British Library.
266
Figure 13.3 Another typographical device from Ude’s book, here an enlarged asterisk
illustrating how to dish sheep tongues with cabbage leaves. Published by John Ebers, 1819.
The British Library.
of table settings (see Figure 13.4), creating a sort of culinary precursor of Stephane
Mallarmé’s typographical experimentation in Un Coup de dés at the end of the century.
Such typographical presentations complicate a stark divide between text and image
precisely by drawing attention to the aesthetic and sensorially distinct qualities of the
printed page.
Bibliographical elements like tipped-in illustrations and typographical innovation
contribute to the rhetoric of sensuousness that characterizes the nineteenth-century
sense of what a book is and can do, and this last example, by turning the page into an
image of the table, subtly suggests the conflation of reading and eating we encounter in
267
Figure 13.4 A table setting from Domestic Economy and Cookery for Rich and Poor (1827).
The University of Glasgow Library. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, Creative Commons,
Public Domain Mark.
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cookery books in many other forms. When William Kitchiner writes in his introduction
to The Cook’s Oracle that “the author has submitted to a labour no preceding Cookery-
Bookmaker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter—having eaten each Receipt, before
he set it down in his book,” we ought to use that conflation as a way to think through
the affects produced by and through interactions with the printed page.39 As suggested
at this essay’s outset, this correspondence between tasting and reading ought to be of
interest for understanding the broader context of romantic books, and in particular of
romantic poetry. To what extent does a poem encode sensuous pleasure in a manner
akin to a receipt? To what extent do romantic poets explore that process via reflection
on the sensuousness of mediation itself?
We can find potential answers to those questions in John Keats’s sonnet, “Written
on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of ‘The Floure and the Lefe.’ ” Keats
frequently wrote poems in books belonging to him and to others. When he does so, he
typically draws attention to the processes of medial translation that make possible the
text’s eventual migration into a new print environment (in this case, an issue of Leigh
Hunt’s Examiner and then into collected editions later in the century).
Ultimately, this is a sonnet about location (see Figure 13.5): the location of reading,
of writing, of the embodied experience of imagination, of seemingly immediate sensory
experience made possible by mediation. The poem’s opening deixis, “This pleasant
Tale,” acknowledges its situatedness in a book, a position the Examiner version makes
more apparent with the explicit occasional detail in the added title specifying where
“this” points (a necessity in the Examiner version which highlights the complicated
dynamics of the poem’s relation to both manuscript and print).40 That the “Tale is like a
little Copse” figures the spatial nature of reading (i.e., reading the poem is like traveling
to another location), but what complicates the poem is how Keats collapses the poem’s
inscribed location (in a late-eighteenth-century printed edition of Chaucer) with the
spatial metaphors for poetry. The poem is like a place, and it occupies a place (in a
book), and Keats’s sonnet demonstrates that the tale’s likeness to place depends on
its place in print. For instance, the “honied Lines” that “freshly interlace” (2) seem to
refer to the “Floure and the Lefe” ’s rhyme royal stanzas, and the visual interlacing
that emerges on the page because of the stanza structure. To “keep the Reader in so
sweet a place” (3) then, would mean to arrest the reader’s eye upon the page. That kind
of readerly, spatial movement also carries with it an affective charge, since the “full-
hearted stops” (4) are not merely a consequence of lineation, but also gesture toward
the sensory jolts of aesthetic experience. At the same time, the interlacing “honied
Lines” could refer to the entangled stems and branches of the trees and shrubbery that
make up the imagined bower to which the reader has travelled, and which halt the
reader’s imagined physical movements through the landscape.
In the poem’s second quatrain, the emphasis shifts toward this kind of movement
in imagined space and the sensations produced thereby. Now the reader more clearly
inhabits this copse in which “dewy drops” (5) fall upon his face, and where, with
sonar-like precision, the reader “may trace” the movements of a bird by following
the direction of its “wand’ring Melody” (7). Keats’s use of “trace” nicely combines the
sense of physical travel and embodied movements with attention to mediation (as in
drawing, sketching, or tracing “honied Lines”). So, even though the second quatrain
shifts in emphasis from the physicality of the page to the imagined spatial landscape,
the former resonance persists in the use of “trace,” and in what Keats, the inveterate
punster, surely intended as at least a mild play on “Linnet” (8) with its echo of the earlier
“honied Lines.” Whereas earlier the lines “interlaced” to keep the reader dwelling in a
sweet place, now the reader “traces” the poem’s melody as the bird producing it “hops”
from one location to another, including the “tender-legged” (8) jump that occurs on
the page as the sonnet moves across the blank space between octave and sestet.
Keats’s poem (as so many of his do) illustrates the point Andrew Piper makes in
Dreaming in Books, that “much of what sustained and informed the identity of the
printed book in the romantic period was a variety of scriptural practices that had
predated Gutenberg.”41 Romantic cookery books likewise operate across and around
the overlapping boundaries of manuscript and print practices. Often the title pages of
cookery books advertise their originality and origin in manuscript form. For instance,
Sarah Martin’s New Experienced English Housekeeper (1795), notes on its title page that
the book is “written purely from her own practice,” and contained within is “an entirely
new collection of original receipts which have never appeared in print.”42 Although
Kitchiner in the Cook’s Oracle spurns the manuscript model, opening the book with
the declaration that “The Following Receipts are not a mere marrowless collection of
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shreds, and patches, and cuttings, and pastings,” he does share with Martin the value
of originality. Kitchiner’s insistence that his book eschews “cuttings, and pastings”
still refers to manuscript practices (cuttings from newspapers or print books which
one would place in a manuscript cookbook), but it also functions as evidence for
his originality by gesturing to the rampant plagiaristic practices with print cookery
books.43 The most egregious example of this tendency that I’ve come across is in a
small book by Thomas Mickle called Original and Select Receipts in the Art of Cookery
. . . Compiled from Manuscripts Never before Published (1828). It turns out that Mickle’s
receipts are neither “original” nor “never before published.”44 Indeed, they seem to
have been quite widely published. The first two receipts in Mickle’s book can be found,
nearly word for word, in The Universal Cook (1792), which is itself an unacknowledged
“compilation” of earlier books, supposedly compiled by Francis Collingwood and John
Woolams but actually written by a ghost writer named Richard Johnson, who wrote
several cookery books under the guise of other authors.45 More likely is that Mickle is
copying from a copy of a copy, given that The Imperial and Royal Cook by Frederick
Nutt (1809) includes the two receipts in the same order and without the intervening
material separating them in The Universal Cook.46 So we have in 1828 a small, cheaply
produced book professing to present original receipts from manuscripts never before
published, but which reproduces receipts from earlier eighteenth-century print books
that were themselves widely copied, sampled, adapted, and ambiguously authored. All
of this is to say, coexisting with the collapsing figures of texts and food in the discourse
around and in cookery books are numerous self-conscious reflections on the modes
and materials of mediation through which such figures are activated.
Of course, we know that print books do not actually convey smells and tastes, at least
not the same ones that the cookbooks supposedly conjure up in readers’ imaginations.
But there are other senses of interest in the realm of cookery books. Embedded in the
protocols operating within and through the two mediums—manuscript and print—
which the books so often reflect upon, is an acute registering of the haptics of each.
Cookery books, more so than other kinds of books, are defined by their uses, their
handling, their presence in particular spaces. It is assumed that they will be used, not
only read, and read in order to produce effects outside of themselves. In the archive we
sometimes encounter remnants of those effects, like grease stains and crumbs. We can
see a modeling of one version of these protocols in the frontispiece from a 1775 edition
of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (see Figure 13.6), arguably the most popular
and influential cookery book of the eighteenth century, which shows a lady passing
on a hand-copied receipt from the book to her servant, while the book itself remains
outside the kitchen.
The verse below the image explains, “The Fair, who’s Wise and oft consults our
Book, / And thence directions gives her Prudent Cook, / With Choicest Viands,
has thus her Table Crown’d: / And Health, with Frugal Elegance is found.” Here food
enables nourishment, sophistication, and presumably some pleasure, and it comes into
existence via the exchanges between leisure and labor, gentry and worker, parlor and
scullery, male and female (the patriarchal figure in the portrait overlooks the exchange
between mistress and servant), visual and linguistic, recto and verso, and, of course,
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Figure 13.6 The frontispiece and title page to Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery. Courtesy
of Wikimedia Commons.
print and manuscript. To what extent might we say that the servant in this image has
read this book? Used this book? Interacted with this book? In this instance, manuscript
is figured as the conduit through which print moves from the educated elite to the not
quite illiterate but certainly less-privileged (in terms of access to the book, among other
things) domestic worker. The circuit of reading and book use becomes a closed circuit
via the conductors of human hands, paper, pen, ink, class structure, gender hierarchy,
and even species distinctions (the world of elegant humans contrasted with the space
of animal slaughter lurking in the kitchen behind). The book extends its causal waves
out into the subjectivity of the humans pictured here, and it does so through a logic of
uses and transformations with and of different bodies.
The history of reading is notoriously elusive, precisely because the act of reading
itself leaves no traces. As H. J. Jackson reminds us, “The writer of marginalia acts on
the impulse to stop reading [my italics] for long enough to record a comment.”47 While
admitting this gap between “the reading mind,” as she calls it, and the related marginalia
left behind, Jackson nevertheless demonstrates compelling examples of how the latter
can suggest to us insights about the former. Leah Price offers a different answer to
this inherent limitation on the history of reading by instead attending to actions with
books other than reading in order to do what she cheekily calls “rejection history.”48
I suggest a model located somewhere in between those two, which I term a history
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of imaginary using. I pose “use” in the more obvious sense of human users and their
intentional enactments of the material on offer in a book (that is, readers engaging with
the book by reading its recipes and attempting to activate them themselves). The causal
direction of “using” moves both ways, however. I suggest reversing the polarity of the
logic of use, and insist that we can also talk about books in terms of the uses to which
they put us. The books use us to bring about some change in the world. With cookery
books, they begin the process that ends with the production of a food item, which can
then do a variety of things in the world. And of course the books create an immediate
(or, I should say, a mediate) effect: that of sensory response and perceptual activity in
the body of its user. Lastly, I stress that this is a history of imaginary using, because I’m
as much focused on, maybe even more focused on, the ways that we imagine mediums
operating, and less interested in a naïve realist version of what a medium is and does.
We all know that cookery books do not actually cause gustatory hallucinations—that
is, the medium of print lacks a robust means of conveying smells and tastes—and yet,
we nonetheless imagine that they do. That virtual component of a book’s interactivity
accounts for the way that the medium exists as much as the components we more
readily identify as material (the heft of paper, the color of ink, the style of binding, etc.).
In adopting this framework, I’m indebted to the media studies scholarship discussed
earlier in this essay, including Dworkin’s assertion that “one can never locate a medium
in isolation. Media—if there are such things—are only recognizable as collectives.”49
Books can readily be understood as media assemblages in that they require a variety of
materials and processes to produce and consume them, but, I would also add, as is the
case particularly with the cookery book, the imaginary capacities of a medium should
be a crucial part of how we define it. But again, I depart from Dworkin’s hesitancy
to affirm the existence of media. The imaginary using of media carries with it the
being of media and the necessity of withdrawal. All mediums and uses of them are
virtual (or imaginary, or speculative), because mediums withdraw. So too do human
users withdraw from the medium’s full access of those beings using them. That is to
say, media objects and their users exist, but in the process of interacting with one
another, they fail to fully plumb the depths of each other’s existence. Even so, there are
relations that occur through forms of what Harman calls “vicarious causation,” such
as his notion of “allure,” an experience with an object which “invites us into a world
that seemed inaccessible”; even though we cannot fully respond to the invitation,
it nonetheless leaves us with the sense that the object does exist behind its various
appearances to us.50 Morton calls these relations simply the processes of causality, but
a causality that occurs in the “interobjective” spaces between things, where they leave
behind impressions of one another, like dinosaur footprints preserved in mudrock.51
What these models of being and relation add to our understanding of media objects is
the reminder that those things which seem so clearly and simply present to us continue
to hold many of their own secrets. In the moment of encounter with a media object,
we speculate that some other object does exist, even as it tantalizes with its mystery
and obscurity.
The risk of abandoning the notion of some irreducible existence of media and
other objects is what results from focusing instead on pure flows and endless process
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as the things to which objects are reduced. This tendency is particularly pernicious
in contemporary new media discourse, where it reaches its fullest realization in the
notion of the Singularity, the point at which technological intelligence advances at
such a rate that conventional human intelligence will be radically eclipsed, and what
remains is technological and medial convergences which result in the abolition of any
meaningful difference. A relevant example—for the context of food and eating—of this
logic is Soylent. Yes, there is now a food product named Soylent, developed by and for
the digerati. No, it is not made of people, but the real horror of Soylent Green is not
that it is people (sorry, Charlton Heston); the real horror is that it’s not food. The actual
twenty-first-century product’s original marketing tagline, “Free your body,”52 is not only
unintentionally embarrassing, given the ingredients of its famous filmic namesake, it is
also unsurprising given the long history of techno-utopian striving to leave behind the
world of meatspace for the more rarefied environs of cyberspace. Though a common
yearning among the technocracy, it’s a vapid, tasteless notion of freedom. One way to
resist such thinking is to affirm the existence of distinct objects that are irreducible to
their components, their relations, or their algorithmic representations. Media objects
in particular are useful for taking and making this stand because it is all too easy to view
their essence as mediums as emergent properties of their uses for us. Eugene Thacker,
through his theorizing of what he calls “dark media,” suggests we think of media not in
terms of subject-object relations (i.e., human readerly subject, book object), or object-
object relations (the connection between, say, book objects and the objects that make
up the system of circulation through which books move), but rather via object-thing
relations.53 By that he means we should interrogate media as strange, paradoxical
mixtures of intentional objects-for-us and things-in-themselves that resist full access
from any other beings, human or otherwise. But to do so in a manner which resists
the logics of reducibility and process that characterize so much new media discourse,
we ought to begin from the position that media exist. From there we can contend
with the deeply inhuman core of those media objects to which we ascribe so much
human presence, hopefully without falling into illusions of complete access, control, or
knowledge. Instead, we encounter them as the things of beauty that they are.
One final cookery book example demonstrates the aesthetic realism, the necessity
of withdrawal, and the vital materiality that I call for as we attend to mediated and
mediating objects. In one of the many copies of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery held
in the Cookery Collection at Kansas State University’s Morse Department of Special
Collections, there exists a remarkable range of scriptural annotations, including the
most striking, on the flyleaf facing the book’s final page (see Figure 13.7).
There’s much here that remains unknown—who Mary Bingham was, or when she
wrote these lines; who the book’s other owners were (there are inscriptions elsewhere
in the book from Elizabeth Hasleby on October 30, 1748 and Thomas Wheelwright
from 1793, which suggest that Mary Bingham’s annotations occurred somewhere
in between); or even the origin of the phrase—but knowing seems less significant
here than speculating and feeling. Was this an exercise of penitence forced upon an
unruly, sinful child, à la Bart Simpson at the chalkboard? If so, young Mary seems to
have taken pleasure in the sensory excess of stripping these words of their discursive
274
Figure 13.7 Annotations from Mary Bingham (at bottom, “Mary Bing ham Her Book”)
in the second edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747). Courtesy of the Cookery
Collection, Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.
meaning by transforming them into units of visual meaning much more than linguistic
ones. The division of the phrase into sometimes meaningful parts on their own, but
also seemingly nonsensical fragments like “Shame isthec,” helps transform these lines
into something akin to William Blake’s wild squiggly lines that at times emerge from,
overwhelm, and undermine the alphabetic characters we tend to imbue with greater
significance than the visual pieces which comprise them. The shapes themselves do
more than the letters those shapes form. In my reading, then, this page says very little
about shame or about sin; instead, it speaks loudly to the strange inscrutability of
media objects, to their simultaneous withdrawal and insistent affective presence, and
to their potential to mediate more than the abilities we ascribe to them, if we simply
open ourselves to the speculative potential of affirming their being.
As a final return to aesthetics within speculative realism and OOO, take The
Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, Steven Shaviro’s reading of speculative
realism through the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Shaviro critiques, complicates,
compliments (and complements) many strands of speculative realism, and part of
the good will he brings to the task is informed by Whitehead’s “injunction to convert
oppositions into contrasts.” Such an impulse, Shaviro argues, animates Whitehead’s
later work, and as a result “Aesthetic questions only hinted at in the earlier work
275
Notes
1 [Thomas Hood], “The Cook’s Oracle,” London Magazine, October 1821, 439, https://
babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015033904965.
2 A common joke about the fragility of literary fame (with currency during the romantic
period and others) centers on the reuse of paper for culinary purposes. Lord Byron,
for instance, bemoans the potential future uses of Don Juan: “What, must I go to the
oblivious cooks? / Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?” (Canto 4, 861–2).
See The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980–93).
3 John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1978), 372; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary
Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 123; and
Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess
(Peterborough: Broadview, 1997), 81.
4 Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The
Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N.
McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239.
5 Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay
of the Last Minstrel,” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 70.
276
material relations occur between objects, even if at an ontological level the reality of
those objects are not fully exhausted, nor are they ontologically reducible to matter.
32 For more on Blackwood’s and these dynamics, see my “Blackwood’s Magazine and the
‘Schooling’ of Taste,” European Romantic Review 24, no. 6 (2013): 723–42.
33 Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals: ‘The flesh is frail’: 1818–1819, ed. Leslie A.
Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 6:29.
34 Fitztravesty, Blaize [R. F. St. Barbe], “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Blackwood’s
Edinburgh Magazine 10 (December 1821): 558, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/
pt?id=uc1.32106010766233. Accessed December 4, 2017. The book would have
been in the news in late 1821 because there was a long drawn out copyright dispute
between Rundell and Murray, and it had been taken up in the Court of Chancery in
November 1821. For a report of the court case concerning Murray’s injunction to
stop Rundell from publishing a new edition with Longman, see “Prosecutions and
Miscellaneous Cases,” The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1821 (Edinburgh: Archibald
Constable, 1823), 83–6, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b200973. Accessed
December 4, 2017. The following exchange demonstrates that even in court one might
encounter the conflation of reading and eating: after Rundell’s lawyer notes that “Even
the reading of [the book] did not fail to give one an appetite,” the Lord Chancellor
replies, “Then hand the book up to me.”
35 Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21. See 20–50 for their full treatment of the dynamics
at play with hypermediacy and immediacy.
36 Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–
1923 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97.
37 Marie-Antonin Carême, The French Cook, Comprising L’Art de la cuisine française;
Le Pâtisserie royale; Le Cuisinier parisien, trans. William Hall (London: John Murray,
1836), 222.
38 Louis Eustache Ude, The French Cook, 6th edn. (London: John Ebers, 1819), 44, 118.
39 William Kitchiner, Apicius Redivivus; or The Cook’s Oracle (London: Samuel Bagster,
1817), n.p. Later editions, published by Archibald Constable, removed the original
Latin title and went simply with the first edition’s subtitle. The book remained popular
throughout the century.
40 J. K. [John Keats], “Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of ‘The
Floure and the Lefe,’ ” in Examiner March 16, 1817, 173. I quote from the Examiner
version because its placement there further dramatizes the dynamics established in
the MS poem written (or copied) into the volume of Chaucer. For more on the poem’s
composition and publication histories, see Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 130–2. Stillinger suggests that the poem
in the Chaucer volume is an early fair copy from an early draft, the latter of which was
then revised for publication in the Examiner.
41 Piper, Dreaming in Books, 6.
42 Sarah Martin, The New Experienced English Housekeeper (Doncaster: D. Boys, 1795).
43 Kitchiner, Cook’s Oracle, n.p.
44 Thomas Mickle, Original and Select Receipts in the Art of Cookery (London: W.
Gilbert, 1828).
45 See Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery-Books, Cooking and Society in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Prospect Books, 2002), 148.
279
46 Frederic Nutt, The Imperial and Royal Cook (London: Mathews and Leigh, 1809),
159–60.
47 H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2002), 82.
48 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 7.
49 Dworkin, No Medium, 30.
50 Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 214.
51 Morton, Realist Magic, 71.
52 The page title for the Soylent homepage included the phrase “Free your body” until
August 2016, when it was replaced by “Healthy, convenient, affordable food.” As of
this writing (August 2017), the company has adopted the more playful (if depressing
to those who enjoy eating), “Let us take a few things off your plate.” See N. Katherine
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) for one influential
account of discourses of disembodiment in the context of computational media.
53 Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media,” in Excommunication, 119.
54 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 19.
55 Ibid., 148, 156.
56 Quoted in ibid., 19.
280
281
Notes on Contributors
and philosophy of nature, and he has additional interests in aesthetic theory and
the visual arts, contemporary philosophy, and poetics. His essays have appeared in
SubStance, Studies in Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, Syndicate, and European
Romantic Review.
Joel Faflak is Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western
University, where he was inaugural Director of the School for Advanced Studies
in the Arts and Humanities (2012–17). He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis
(State University of New York Press, 2008), coauthor of Revelation and Knowledge
(University of Toronto Press, 2011), editor of De Quincey’s Confessions, editor or
coeditor of ten volumes, and coeditor of Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and
Literary Criticism. He is currently working on two books: “Romantic Psychiatry: The
Psychopathology of Happiness” and “Get Happy! Utopianism and the American Film
Musical.”
Aaron Ottinger teaches writing at Highline College (Des Moines, WA) and has
taught literature and writing at University of Washington (Seattle, WA), where he
also completed his PhD. His other publications include an essay on Wordsworth and
283
Kate Singer is Associate Professor of English and chair of the Critical Social Thought
program at Mount Holyoke College, United States. Her book, Romantic Vacancy: The
Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation, is forthcoming from SUNY
Press. She has published widely, including in Studies in Romanticism and Essays in
Romanticism, and Jane Austen and the Sciences of the Mind (Routledge, 2018), among
others. She is also coeditor of Material Transgressions: Romantic Bodies, Affects, and
Genders, forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. She is editor of Romantic
Circles Pedagogy Commons and has written articles for the Journal of Interactive
Technology and Pedagogy and Pedagogy. Her second book project explores shape-
shifting through dynamic materiality and affect during the Anthropocene in the
works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Luce Irigaray,
Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Karen Barad.
Index
Abrams, M. H. 41, 47, 59, 68, 160, 201 apostrophe 82, 112–13, 122, 127. See also
absorption 222–3, 227 address, prosopopoeia
actants 33, 133, 178, 183–4, 186, 187, apparatus 117–20, 126–7
191 n.28 appearance 5, 120–1, 272
address 113–19. See also apostrophe, arche-fossil 3, 60, 82–3, 139
prosopopoeia Aristotle 29, 141, 146–7, 227, 261
advent ex nihilio 26, 98, 102–3, 106, 137 assemblage 112–13, 115–17, 119, 121–7,
aesthetics 7–9, 39–41, 59, 86, 197, 245–8, 178, 249–51
258–60, 262. See also beauty, sublime affective properties 46–7
affective 38, 46–7, 49–50, 51 n.14 books as 272
mediation 262–8, 273–5 cause of wonder 238–9, 244–5
and OOO 219–20, 222–4, 274–5 Empire as 242
role of plasticity 199–201 Gaia as 185, 187
speculative 202–3 astronomical number 158, 169, 170
affect 4, 57–60, 71 n.31, 114–15, 128 n.9, astronomy 240–1
247 atheism 94, 96–7, 108
distinguished from emotion 53 n.40 atmosphere 44–9, 193 n.72
Meillassoux on 95, 105–6 Austen, Jane 43, 44
nonhuman dimensions 39–50, 112–13,
123–4, 274 Badiou, Alain 23, 25, 27
Agamben, Giorgio 86–7 Barad, Karen 10, 112
agency 185–8, 239 theoretical works 117–19, 124, 126
human 32, 93–4, 96, 100, 104, 183–4 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 13, 111, 122–7
nonhuman 40–1, 43, 45–6, 48–9, 79, Baudelaire, Charles 182–3, 185, 218
180–2 beauty 7, 211–12, 222, 258–9, 262, 275.
poetic 112–13 See also aesthetics
allure 9, 261–2 n.40, 272 Behar, Katherine 9
ancestrality 60, 67, 69. See also arche-fossil Bennett, Jane 10, 123
Anthropocene 2, 33, 75, 133–4, 175, 184–7 on assemblage 112, 127, 238
anthropocentrism human–nonhuman relation 115–17, 181
alternatives to 39–40, 47, 82, 84, 140, on materiality 41–2, 47–8, 54 n.53
142, 151–2 Berkeley, George 2, 159, 163
Kantian 41 biopolitics 75, 82, 141
political 133–7 Blackwood’s Magazine 262–3
of prosopopoeia 116 Blake, William 93–106, 274
romantic discourse 1–5, 112–13, 119–21 Blanchot, Maurice 76, 82–4, 87, 174 n.47
anthropomorphism Bloom, Harold 218, 259
in poetic language, 112–13, 119–21, 175, Bogost, Ian 123, 226
181–6 Braidotti, Rosi 2
politics of 115–16, 188–9 Brassier, Ray 3, 75–6, 78, 82, 87, 159–61,
apocalypse 59, 94, 151, 181–2 163–71, 243
286
286 Index
Index 287
extro-science fiction 27, 136, 151–2 genre 217, 219–20, 224–5, 227–8, 231–2
hospitality 86–7, 148–51
facticity 240–1 Hulme, T. E. 60–1
feeling 4, 10, 39–40, 42–4, 46–50, 57–70, Hume, David 4, 23–5, 219, 223, 237
184 Husserl, Edmund 219
Ferguson, Frances 5–6, 38, 180, 187 Hyper-Chaos 3, 21, 25–7, 33, 136–40, 144.
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 159–60 See also contingency
finitude 60, 65, 69, 98, 138–42, 144, 159, hypermediacy 260, 263–6
164, 169 hyperobject 60–1, 66, 68, 188, 244–5
attributed to mind 3, 4, 17, 59
flat ontology 26, 133–4 imagination 3, 4–5, 17, 41, 69, 95, 113,
fourth World of justice. See justice, World of 142–4, 180–1, 201–2
fragility 81–2 defined by Coleridge, 199–200
François, Anne-Lise 84, 87 immortality 98, 139, 142, 144, 148, 152
Freud, Sigmund 165–6 incarnation 94–5, 104
Fried, Michael 222–3, 227 indigestion. See digestion
intra-action 117–19, 122–7
Gaia 184–5, 187, 189 Irigaray, Luce 43, 53 n.36
Galloway, Alexander 19 n.44, 133, 261–2,
277 n.31 Jameson, Frederic 22
Galt, John 23 Jankovic, Vladimir 44
gift Jerusalem (Blake) 96–7, 100–6
economy of 84, 86, 149–50 Johnson, Barbara 114, 129 n.15
of nature 203 justice
global warming 186, 188–9. See also effacement, 87
climate change fourth World of, 26, 94, 97–9, 102–3,
Goldsmith, Oliver 44–5, 49 106, 136–7, 139–40, 142, 144, 148
Gonsalves, Joshua D. 171 n.9
Gottlieb, Evan 4–6, 38–9, 107 n.4, 119, 159 Kant, Immanuel 2–7, 23–4, 43, 59, 139,
Gratton, Peter 95, 276 n.15 178, 180–3, 218, 237
gut. See digestion on the sublime 37–41, 44, 46, 187
Kareem, Sarah Tindal 239–40, 245, 247
Hägglund, Martin 90 n.31 Keats, John 5, 66–7, 197–8, 204, 261
Harman, Graham 1–3, 9, 115, 120–1, 126, material sublime 37, 41, 45
253–4 n.40, 133–4, 260, 272 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 7, 208–12, 258
on horror 247 “Ode to Melancholy” 8–9
translator of Divine Inexistence 95, 106 “Written on a Blank Space at the End of
Weird Realism 217–18, 222, 233 Chaucer’s Tale” 268–9
Hartman, Geoffrey 175, 180–2, 259 Khalip, Jacques 4–5
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Kittler, Friedrich 261–2
aesthetic philosophy 197–201, 203–8,
209 Latour, Bruno 33, 68, 123, 133–4, 175–89,
dialectic theory 27–8, 84, 86 232, 237–8, 248–9
Heidegger, Martin 43, 85–6, 218–19, 261 Levinson, Marjorie 161–2
Hemans, Felicia 119, 121–2 life 4–5, 43–4, 49, 60, 100–3, 134–44,
Hobbes, Thomas 133–6, 145–6, 153 n.9 165–70, 189, 251
horror 75, 79, 84, 170, 243, 246–8 aesthetic 209, 211
288
288 Index
Index 289
of media 261–2, 277 n.21 reason 23–7, 29, 31, 96–9, 101–3, 106, 137–
nonhuman 46, 115–16 8, 140–1, 147–8, 178, 239–40
recessive action 84, 87
passivity 84, 87 Robinson, Mary 112–13, 118–19
personification 113, 115–16, 125. See also Rose, Mitch 49
prosopopoeia Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 58, 133–7, 139–42,
Peters, John Durham 32, 261 144–52
phenomenology 83, 219, 223
Phillips, Adam 88 n.10 Schelling, Friedrich 202–4
pity 140–1, 144 Schiller, Friedrich 199
plasticity 197–212 Schmitt, Carl 133
pneumatics 42–4, 47 science fiction 26–7, 31. See also extro-
Poe, Edgar Allan 217–18, 223–33 science fiction
poetics 111, 113, 120–1 Scott, Walter 21–3, 27–33
and the inhuman 75–7, 81, 87 Scranton, Roy 133
materiality of 48–9, 197 selection 158, 160, 161–3, 164
plasticity of 204, 206–8 set theory 23, 25–6
politics 144, 188–9, 238, 247–8 Sha, Richard 58
non-anthropocentric 13–14, 41–2, 75, Shaviro, Steven 120, 253–4 n.40, 274–5
80–2, 116, 151–2 Sheldon, Rebekah 9
Rousseau on 134–7, 140–2, 145–9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 43, 58, 69, 122
of speculative realism 9, 106, 133–4 Defence of Poetry 59, 63
Popper, Karl 27 “Mont Blanc” 5–6, 78–9, 180, 184–9,
Priestley, Joseph 54 n.44, 98–9, 101, 122–3, 258, 275
125, 127, 130 n.34 Triumph of Life 64, 137
probability 21–2, 25–6 skepticism 4, 24–5, 38–9, 59
process 78–83, 85–7, 186 slavery 146–7, 237, 242–5, 247–8, 251
philosophy of 261–2 Smith, Adam 239–44
unconscious 160–3, 165–8, 171 Smith, Charlotte 48–50, 111, 113–21
progress 22, 101, 141–2 social contract 133–7, 140, 142, 144–50,
prosopopoeia 112–17, 119–22, 124, 126. 152. See also nature, state of
See also address, anthropomorphism spectral dilemma 94–5, 96–8, 100, 102, 104–6
Srnicek, Nick 1–2
quantum physics 25, 117 state of nature. See nature, state of
Quarterly Review, The 263 Stiegler, Bernard 174 n.47
subjectivity 4, 24, 40, 58, 87, 102–3, 105–6,
Rabelais, François 176, 177 111, 113, 119, 183–4, 198, 204–5, 237
Radcliffe, Ann 246–7 sublime 3, 5–6, 76, 85–6, 178–80, 184–8,
Rajan, Tilottama 83, 84, 247 240, 245–8, 250–1
reality 3, 8, 106, 143, 148, 159, 188, 241, egotistical 66, 120
247 Kantian 37–41, 44, 46, 187
nonconceptual 158, 161, 166 material 37–50, 54 n.53
romantic understanding 2, 7, 49, 58, 80, sufficient reason
105, 202 principle of 21, 97, 137–8
in speculative philosophy 25–6, 60–1, sun
120–1, 133, 136, 138, 144, 218–20 death of 75–6, 78, 82
virtual 263 supernatural 32–3, 224, 228–9, 232–3
290
290 Index