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Ecocriticism and the Symptom

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Ecocriticism and the Symptom Violent Signs: Ecocriticism and the Symptom Tim Matts This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Critical Theory at Cardiff University, Wales. November 2011 ! PG/R/06/10 Student ID Number: 0428641 Summary of Thesis: This thesis recommends that the ‘ecocritical’ turn in American Literary Scholarship be brought into contact with ‘symptomnal’ forms of ideology critique, namely after the post- Althusserian thinking of Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Žižek and Deleuze-Guattari. This recommendation is made on the basis that the ecocritical turn has neglected to apprise itself of a thoroughgoing prehistory; by bringing together the lessons of Marx and Lacan, post- Althusserian thinking enables us to address the disavowal of formal and theoretical concerns constitutive of first-wave ecocriticism, and to acknowledge this as symptomatic of North American cultural and political pluralism more broadly. Where such disavowal promoted a widespread rejection of poststructural theories of immanence in the Americanist milieu of the 1980s, we consider how it effectively blocked psychoanalytic and Marxist approaches to literary form and human subjectivity. Following an initial examination of ecocriticism after Althusser and Balibar’s thesis on ‘symptomnal reading’, our study goes on to reassert issues of subjectivity for ecocriticism. Žižek’s subjectivist approach to ideology critique therefore enables us to diagnose the legacy of modern epistemology and thereafter to analyse ecocritical motivations of sublime aesthetics. By pursuing broader, ‘valetudinary’ issues in relation to literary form, the latter half of the thesis exceeds the former’s emphasis on ideology critique, moving to engage the post-subjectivist, ‘stratoanalytic’ project of Deleuze and Guattari. Predicated upon an a- subjective philosophy of differential relations, stratoanalysis suggests an ecological extension of ‘schizoanalysis’, enabling us to reappraise eco-literary and eco-philosophical concerns, chiefly after post-symptomatological analyses of the relationship between high modern literature, pre-personal affect and the ‘eco-social’ coding of desire. It is in this way that we assert the ‘body without organs’ as the privileged clinical figure with which to address eco-social organisation, and thus, exceed the subjectivist logic of the symptom. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Robert ‘Rorschach’ Marriott (1973- 2011), one of life’s best friends, and whose untimely death in May of this year brought a renewed sense of drive and perspective to the project. ! Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction (i) Assembling the ‘Eco-Clinic’ 2 (ii) Case Studies 17 1) Symptomatic Reading: Ecocriticism and Immanent Critique (i) Prehistory 23 (ii) Immanence and Spinozism 43 (iii) Symptomatic Reading 50 (iv) Pluralism and Exclusion 57 (v) Relative Autonomy 62 2) Violent Signs I: Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Ideology (i) Symptom / Sublime 69 (ii) An Eco-Clinical Analysis of Lee Rozelle’s Ecosublime 87 3) Violent Signs II: From Symptomatology to Stratoanalysis (i) Towards an Ecological Pathos: Stratoanalysis and Sympathy 101 (ii) Proust as an Eco-Clinical Thinker? 114 (iii) Regimes of Signs / Signs of Change 128 4) Instruments of Desire: Ecocriticism, Literature and Science (i) Interdisciplinarity and Desire 144 (ii) Instrumental Reason, Nihilism and Cultural Declension 152 (iii) Evolutionary Biology and Archetypal Myth in Willa Cather 173 5) Towards an Earthly Humour: The Eco-Clinical and the Eco-Comical (i) Melancholy, Irony and Humour 187 (ii) Beautiful Soul Syndrome and the Revaluation of the Tragic-Pastoral Mode 197 (iii) Activism and the Picaresque in Edward Abbey 215 Conclusion 232 Works Cited 243 Acknowledgements I am indebted to Ian Buchanan, my Ph.D supervisor at Cardiff University, without whose expertise and patience I would neither have managed to delimit the chaos, nor striven so hard for completion. Aidan Tynan also provided keen insight during my candidature, particularly into the nature (and necessity) of the critical-clinical relation in Deleuze. Laurent Milesi and Dawn Harrington ably guided the project through the final stages of submission, showing much patience and professionalism. Sean Albiez recognised the masochist in me over a decade ago, however, first urging me to conceive of a doctoral project. Many thanks also to Mark Whalan and Morwenna Hussey and all those I worked and studied with during my time at Exeter. Without the kindness and patience of my mother Julie Norman, my brother Sam Oswin, and my sister Charlotte Matts, the prospect of finishing would have remained obscured by numerous fantasies, fallacies, and inadequate ideas. A great many other friends and relatives provided invaluable advice and support, not least by supplying much needed shelter and writing space across the UK, Germany, and the United States. ! ! vii! Introduction 1 (i) Assembling the ‘Eco-Clinic’ The works of culture come to us as signs in an all-but-forgotten code, as symptoms of diseases no longer even recognised as such, as fragments of a totality we have long since lost the organs to see. —Fredric Jameson1 The world is the set of symptoms whose illness merges with man. —Gilles Deleuze2 If the mantra of this thesis must be ‘critical theory derives from historical circumstance,’ then it is because any critical orientation worth its salt must be evaluated as a product of specific cultural ‘complexes’. This appears nowhere more necessary than in the case of the ‘ecocritical’ turn in American literary scholarship. Given more typically as ‘ecocriticism’, the specialism initially emerged at a series of conferences of the Western Literary Association in the mid-1980s, a short while prior to the establishment of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. Distinguishing itself from other literary specialisms by privileging ecological matters over social justice concerns, ecocriticism’s contribution to the subject area comes by way of its core condemnations of the ethical imperatives and critical solipsisms of the ‘anthropocene’ epoch.3 As Herbert F. Tucker would have it, by ‘claim[ing] as its hermeneutic horizon nothing short of the literal horizon itself’, 1 Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1974). p. 416. 2 Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. (London: Verso, 1998). p. 3. 3 First coined in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen, ‘anthropocene’ might be read in analogy with the ‘holocene’ (or ‘entirely recent’) geological epoch; for Crutzen, however, the term serves to denote the extent to which the human influence on the biosphere has been sufficient in recent centuries to have constituted an entirely new geological era. 2 the movement promises to reestablish the consequence of non-human determinants for literary research over those that are markedly cultural in origin.4 Of course, no tidy binary can persist between the nominally ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’ without denying long centuries of epistemological debate and conjecture. As Raymond Williams implies in his now seminal Problems in Materialism and Culture (1980), if ‘nature’ is one of the most complex and incompletely-defined words in the English language then it would seem that any critical premise that draws upon its problematic status must either risk a certain indeterminacy or suffer from over- compensation or abject reductionism. During a highly-spirited first-wave that persisted well into the 1990s, ecocritical advocates worked diligently to secure suitably ‘ecological’ epistemologies, or those that would enable robust negotiation of this much-debated but no less enduring schism as it might relate to eco-literary reception, drawing upon the rhetorical and doctrinal models of such American ‘nature writers’ as Henry David Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry to a significant extent. Diversifying in essential ways since that time, an initial ‘nation-centredness’, or almost exclusive focus on American literatures and their constitutive genealogies of ‘settler culture’ and ‘New World pastoral’, has given way to a complex interdisciplinary purview that today boasts ‘ecoglobalist’ outreach.5 Gainfully exceeding an inaugural ambit of nineteenth-century ‘Transcendentalist’ writing (Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller) and twentieth-century ‘toxic discourses’ (Carson, Leopold), ecocritical researchers have since come to submit progressive theses on such unconventional and heterodox topics as ‘ecotourist narratives’, ‘biopiracy’ and ‘acoustic ecology’ and regular colloquia on ‘ecological imperialism’, ‘queer ecology’ and ‘biosemiotics’ have made for innovative dialogue with such extra-literary disciplines as geology, climatology, population studies, and 4 In the introduction to the New Literary History special issue on ecocriticism in 1999, Tucker and the other editors of the journal described how the specialism ‘challenges interpretation to its own grounding in the bedrock of natural fact, in the biospheric and indeed planetary conditions without which human life, much less humane letters, could not exist’. See Tucker, Herbert F. ‘From the Editors.’ New Literary History 3, (1999). p. 505. 5 The ecocritical canon is quite simply vast, implicating works well beyond the ambit of Americanist literary research. As such the writers listed should simply provide some sense of the movement’s initial emergence within Americanist disciplines. Whilst literary figures are our primary concern
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