Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture

Biology and the Bildungsroman

Helena Feder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317146407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Ecocriticism and the Idea of Culture: Biology and the Bildungsroman draws on work by Kinji Imanishi, Frans de Waal, and other biologists to create an interdisciplinary, materialist notion of culture for ecocritical analysis. In this timely intervention, Feder examines the humanist idea of culture by taking a fresh look at the stories it explicitly tells about itself. These stories fall into the genre of the Bildungsroman, the tale of individual acculturation that participates in the myth of its complete separation from and opposition to nature which, Feder argues, is culture's own origin story. Moving from Voltaire's Candide to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and from Virginia Woolf's Orlando to Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy, the book dramatizes humanism's own awareness of the fallacy of this foundational binary. In the final chapters, Feder examines the discourse of animality at work in this narrative as a humanist fantasy about empathy, one that paradoxically excludes other animals from the ethical community to justify the continued domination of both human and nonhuman others.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Biology and the Idea of Culture

There is so much resistance to the idea of animal culture that one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time has come.

—Frans de Waal, The Ape and the Sushi Master

The idea of nature has long been the subject of ecocritical analysis. Ecological thinkers have amply demonstrated the dangers of a notion of nature that excludes culture and its role in ecological crisis; it positions human beings as outside ecological conditions and superior to the other inhabitants of the world. However, the idea of culture defined by this binary, the exclusive realm of human enterprise, has not been adequately considered.

When ecocritical work has discussed culture as such in the last decade and a half, it has often been in the process of contesting a view of nature as a cultural construction. As ecocritics have pointed out, though this constructionist view of nature seems to “undo” the binary of nature and culture, it often merely replaces one side of the equation with the other. Taken to its extreme, this paradigm denies the cogent reality of materiality, of an agential world apart from human culture. Yet, as postmodern, poststructuralist, Marxist, and other theorists have pointed out, isn’t everything “always already” mediated by culture? In this tired debate, ecocritics, busy refuting an erasure of nature, and other theorists, busy asserting the primacy of culture, both end up affirming the essentialist idea of culture at the core of this binary and the humanities. The persistence of this formulation of culture is the most pressing philosophical problem for ecocriticism and green studies, and critical and cultural theory generally.

In 1980, Lewis Thomas expressed frustration with cultural criticism’s fascination with physics, especially quantum mechanics. “I wish the humanists,” he wrote, “would leave physics alone for a while and begin paying more attention to biology” (70). The need for a more biologically, ecologically informed critique is, if anything, now more urgent.¹ By turning to biology, cultural biology, and related branches of the life sciences, we find the broader and more nuanced notion of culture necessary for a materialist ecocritical practice. While our experience of the world is culturally mediated and constructed, culture is itself a product of nature, and human culture is only one of many types of culture in the material world.

In light of this expansive notion of culture, discussed in this chapter, this book considers one of the most enduring of modern Western cultural forms, the Bildungsroman, not only as the novel of individual development but also as humanism’s origin story of culture. This “ecocultural materialist” approach to various examples of genre, including François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire’s Candide, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, reveals the foundational opposition of “nature” and “culture” as a tension that sometimes manifests itself as anxiety, sometimes as marked fluidity, sometimes as inversion. In these radical examples of the genre—or examples read radically—this tension suggests, however latent or denied, humanism’s knowledge of nonhuman agency and, sometimes, subjectivity. If critique is to intervene meaningfully in our historical crises, it must move beyond solipsistic (that is, solely anthropological) notions of society and culture. The purpose of attempting a broader scope for Marxist cultural analysis and a dialectical methodology for ecocriticism is not to engage debates about the nature of ideology or anthropocentrism, but to suggest a necessarily more diverse, complex field for materialist critiques that already tend to analyze systematic rationalism (industries, institutions, discourses, etc.) in terms of the domination of human and nonhuman nature.

Recognizing the existence of other animal cultures—and, in so doing, rejecting various ideologies of nature, particularly that of human supremacy—challenges structures of power that oppress both human and nonhuman animals. My project here is twofold: to consider the Bildungsroman in terms of humanism’s claim about our radical uniqueness, to see how examples of the genre reveal the cracks at the core of this claim, and to work toward an ecocultural materialism. It is at once an experiment in “immanent critique,” an examination of the form and content of ideology in the service of emancipatory knowledge,² and a participant in the recent materialist turn in theory.³ A more materialist, more “worldly” multiculturalism might intervene in forms of oppression that have long functioned by excluding some—human and nonhuman—from the realm of culture. This question of culture is, of course, not only a disciplinary but a political one. And, in the end, the very idea of politics—politics itself—is what is at stake.

Disciplinary/Politics

In May of 2010, the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, geneticist Craig Venter and his research team created what he calls “the world’s first synthetic life form”—a bacterium described as “a defining moment in biology.” Venter claims this single-celled organism with its made-from-scratch genome “heralds the dawn of a new era in which new life is made to benefit humanity, starting with bacteria that churn out biofuels, soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and even manufacture vaccines” (Sample, “Craig Venter”).⁴ This new lifeform, invention and intervention, is a source of tremendous interest and anxiety—not unlike Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, “a penetrating, page-turning tour of a post-human Earth,” twenty-six weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, Time Magazine’s number one nonfiction book of 2007, and inspiration for the 2010 television series (and IPhone App), Life After People.⁵ This novel creature’s place in material reality and, conversely, the resonance of a world after humanity in the human imagination would seem to confirm what some theorists have argued for decades, that at some point we or the world became “posthuman.” Increasingly, when we encounter the subject of biology in the media or in scholarship in the humanities, it is in the context of posthumanism.

All of which begs the question: is it we or the world, or we as the world? We imagine life after people not only because human sovereignty over the rest of life on earth continues to intensify exponentially, but also because our cultures (perhaps particularly, but not only, in the West) tell us we are the world, the pinnacle or “brain” of nature, nature’s self-reflexive agency or natura naturans⁶ (even as we render it less and less inhabitable for ourselves and many other creatures). If evolutionary thought and the ecological sciences have taught nothing else, surely it has taught us that humans are not the world. And yet we are the world too—our bodies are themselves ecosystems, our atoms the very fibers of it. In Bodily Natures, Stacy Alaimo argues that we are not so much corporeal as “trans-corporeal”: “the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world” (2).⁷ But while we and the world interpenetrate, we do not equate. As D.H. Lawrence wrote of Whitman’s pantheism, “Aristotle did not live for nothing. All Walt is Pan, but all Pan is not Walt” (Phoenix 24). While we are still here—the world is not yet without us even if it is too much with us—the apocalyptic post of posthumanism warns that the Age of “Man” may soon give way to an age without human beings (at least, as we have known them⁸) and a great many others.

While the term posthumanism may reinforce ideas of human supremacy, promoting life beyond biology (after all, we are the creators of wholly new life forms “made to benefit humanity”) and sometimes, more specifically, human life beyond the current bounds of humanity (cue the robotic and virtualized selves of the imagination), it also signals a renewed interest in the biological world, human animality, and our kinship with other creatures (as we see in the field of animal studies).⁹ Posthumanism may challenge the primacy of humanity or it may champion a humanist teleology, a race for infinite technological power over material life; it may function as a landscape of virtuality or a deeper recognition of the connections between material agencies, a reimagining of what Darwin described in Origin of the Species as “a web of complex relations.” In short, posthumanism may mean many things, some of which are mutually-exclusive: a revaluing of human animality or the desire to transcend animality; a radical, ecological sensibility; or a teleological essentialism.

While humanism is certainly far more complex than any caricature of the Enlightenment¹⁰ (as I will argue in the next chapter), there is no mistaking its essentialist legacy. In What is Posthumanism? Cary Wolfe also differentiates between the two poles of the term, between transhumanist (teleological, transcendent) and critical (materialist) posthumanisms, but argues that even critical posthumanism must move beyond “a thematic of the decentering of the human” to challenge the form of thought itself if it is to be truly “posthuman.” In the field of animal studies, the radical impact of posthumanism (“what makes it not just another flavor of ‘fill in the blank’ studies”) “is that it fundamentally unsettles and reconfigures the question of the knowing subject and the disciplinary paradigms and procedures that take for granted its form and reproduce it.” Wolfe argues that the posthuman challenge of this field is lost when “the animal” becomes simply another “object” of study (xxix).

Like animal studies, ecocriticism is in the process of contesting paradigms and considering conditions of knowledge as well as the purposes of such knowledge. We too must focus on our philosophical, disciplinary challenge to the anthropocentric orthodoxies of the humanities. Ecocriticism’s radical challenge lies not only in recognizing other forms of subjectivity and the ecological interconnectedness of biologically diverse subjects, but in recognizing that the relations between them are political—they are life and death relations. We are one animal among many in this shared world, living in interwoven interspecies communities, a series of polises themselves comprised of differing societies. This is not to say that this political work must take the form of human political relations, or that the ethical consideration of other animals¹¹ depends on how “intelligent” or like us we think they are, but that we must begin to take seriously the implications of our real similarities with and differences from other creatures. As Terry Eagleton famously argued, “Political argument is not an alternative to moral preoccupations: it is those preoccupations taken seriously in their full implications” (Literary Theory 208).

The discussion of politics is, of course, always itself political. And as Jacques Rancière suggests, what is at stake is the definition of politics itself:

“Disagreement” and “dissensus” do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as: “where are we?”, “who are we?”, “What makes us a we”, “what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?” Those paradoxical, unthinkable objects of thinking mark … the places where the question ‘How is this thinkable at all?’ points to the question: “who is qualified for thinking at all?” (116)

We are all part of a common world, but one that is changing rapidly for the immediate benefit of some at the expense of a great many others. In this context, to ask who is qualified for politics, what counts as political, is to ask who counts full stop. For humanism (and, indeed, its uncritical posts-), the question of who counts is intimately bound up with the question of what counts as culture; to think politically, to think about politics, we must contest the humanist ideology of culture still at the core of the humanities and Western culture. To do this, we must look beyond laboratory cages, computers, and cyborgs. A more “worldly” critique requires a turn to the larger world.

Cultural Biology

[I]f nature is dynamic and active, if it is not alien to culture but is the ground which makes the cultural logically and historically possible, then what would a new conception of culture, one which refuses to sever it from nature, look like?

—Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels

While some scientists continue to disagree over the use of the term “culture,”¹² Nature and other prominent journals have published the findings of dozens of studies demonstrating that many species learn socially and pass on traditions or skills. For example, a comprehensive synthesis of several long-term studies of chimpanzees in Africa (151 years cumulatively) documents thirty-nine group-specific, learned behavioral patterns (including tool usage): “[T]he combined repertoire of these behavioral patterns in each chimpanzee community is itself highly distinctive, a phenomenon characteristic of human cultures but previously unrecognized in non-human species” (Whiten et al. 682). A particularly resonant example of learned tool use was reported in 2007 by researchers in Senegal, who recorded twenty-two examples of chimps creating spears to hunt smaller primates (“Chimpanzees ‘hunt using spears’”).¹³ Primates, though, are not the only culture-makers in nature; evidence of animal cultures abounds—from Hal Whitehead’s work on orcas and sperm whales to Kevin Laland’s studies of birds and fish.¹⁴ Writing on animal cultures, primatologist Frans de Waal exclaimed, “one cannot escape the impression that it is an idea whose time has come” (13–14).¹⁵ It is also an idea that has been kicking around, even if only to be dismissed, for quite some time.

In Civilization and its Discontents, Sigmund Freud considers, albeit briefly, the existence of nonhuman cultures:

Why do our relatives, the animals, not exhibit any such cultural struggle? We do not know. Very probably some of them—the bees, the ants, the termites—strove for thousands of years before they arrived at the State institutions, the distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individual, for which we admire them today … In the case of other animal species it may be that a temporary balance has been reached between the influences of their environment and the mutually contending instincts within them, and that thus a cessation of development has come about. (83)

Freud’s question about animal culture was turned on its head (or, more accurately, stood on its feet) in 1953 when Kinji Imanishi, founder of Japanese primatology, applied ethnographic study to an animal society on the island of Koshima, creating animal cultural studies. In September of that year, Satsue Mito noticed Imo, an 18-month old macaque, carry a sweet potato to a freshwater stream and clean it before eating, minimizing wear on her teeth.¹⁶

She playfully repeated this behavior on the first day. Later, she improved her technique by going deeper in the water, holding the potato in one hand and rubbing off the mud with the other, occasionally dipping it in the water … Within three months, two of [Imo’s] peers as well as her mother were showing the same behavior. From these potato pioneers the habit spread to other juveniles, their older siblings, and their mothers. Within five years, more than three quarters of the juveniles and young adults engaged in regular potato washing. (de Waal 200–201)

This has become a rather famous example¹⁷ of the “struggle” Freud did not see in the animal world: cu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Biology and the Idea of Culture
• 2 Candide and the Dialectic of Enlightenment
• 3 Ecocriticism and the Production of Monstrosity in Frankenstein
• 4 Placing Modernity in Orlando
• 5 Consuming Culture in A Small Place and Among Flowers
• 6 Conclusion: Dehumanization, Animality, and the Bildungsroman
• Bibliography
• Index