Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century

Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, Ken Hiltner, Stephanie LeMenager, Teresa Shewry, Ken Hiltner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136710506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century showcases the recent explosive expansion of environmental criticism, which is actively transforming three areas of broad interest in contemporary literary and cultural studies: history, scale, and science. With contributors engaging texts from the medieval period through the twenty-first century, the collection brings into focus recent ecocritical concern for the long durations through which environmental imaginations have been shaped. Contributors also address problems of scale, including environmental institutions and imaginations that complicate conventional rubrics such as the national, local, and global. Finally, this collection brings together a set of scholars who are interested in drawing on both the sciences and the humanities in order to find compelling stories for engaging ecological processes such as global climate change, peak oil production, nuclear proliferation, and food scarcity. Environmental Criticism for the Twenty-First Century offers powerful proof that cultural criticism is itself ecologically resilient, evolving to meet the imaginative challenges of twenty-first-century environmental crises.

Part 1

Science

1	The Mesh Timothy Morton

Entangled

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance … ; Variability, from the indirect and direct action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequent to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms (Darwin 1996, 395–396).

Over two hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin, his ideas still appear strange, even dangerous: hence the title of Daniel Dennett’s book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. In part, this has something to do with the very form of his writing. Notice how Darwin’s prose slides from the specific—the life-forms in the “entangled bank”—to the general: the evolutionary trends and forces that determine how that bank appears to us. By the time we get to the end, we seem to have lost track of the specific “entangled bank.” Now look back at the “specific” part—just how specific is it? The description, the final paragraph of The Origin of Species, is vivid yet curiously vague: “an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Which birds? What color? It is as if we are already seeing the life-forms blurred and morphed in time, like watching the flow of turbulent currents in a stream—already, that is, before we get to the generalizations that make even this picture seem like a crisp and vivid snapshot.

Darwin’s language itself shows magnificently what the trouble is. The trouble is that when you take an evolutionary view of Earth, an astonishing reversal takes place. Suddenly, things that you think of as real—this cat over here, my cat, whose fur I can stroke—become the abstraction, an approximation of flowing, metamorphic processes, processes that are in some sense far more real than the entity I am stroking. The fact that we at present call this flow a cat is a mere matter of convenience. This is not simply about nominalism—a cat by any other name would meow as prettily. The cat as such, no matter what we call it, is not really a cat. The real thing is the evolutionary process—the cat is just an abstraction! The discovery of evolution is nothing less than a Copernican revolution, in which what we take to be immediate and real turns out to be an abstraction of a deeper reality.

There is indeed something humiliating about this reversal of immediacy into abstraction, in the same way Copernicus and Galileo brought humans down to Earth by insisting that the Universe was not rotating around us. In their era, “common sense” told you that the Sun went around the Earth once a day—this is what your eyes seem to indicate. Eyes see the same phenomenon today. It is just that Galileo and Copernicus taught us that our immediate experience is a workable approximation that makes sense only on a very limited island of meaningfulness—the island on which the word sunrise has meaning. It’s not so much that we mistrust our eyes (bad, mistrustful moderns!). It is that we are able to contextualize our immediate perception within a wider framework. What disappears is the commonsensical idea that what appears to be immediate is also real. In Galileo’s age, common sense also told you that weird old ladies offering herbal remedies who did not drown when you threw them in water should be burnt, because they’re witches. Common sense has a lot to answer for.

Evolution strikes another great nail into the coffin of common sense. It is worth pausing briefly to let this stunning conclusion sink in. We cannot see, touch, or smell evolution. It evades our perception—it takes place on spatiotemporal scales far in excess of one, or even a million, human lifetimes, and it involves processes such as DNA replication that are too small to be seen with the naked eye. Of course we might see small changes in the ears of any kittens our cat bore. But would the slightly smaller ears count as a significant variation? “Significant” in this case means that the trait is passed on—so in effect, significance is always in the future, always to come. DNA agrees with Hegel that for something to happen, it must happen at least twice (Dennett 1996, 100). Darwin systematically undermines the idea that there are thin, rigid boundaries between species, between species and variants of a species, and between variation and monstrosity (Darwin 1996, 9, 94, 109, 131, 133; Morton 2010, 60–68). The words origin and species in his title are almost jokes. If Darwin had possessed access to e-mail he would probably have written it as The “Origin” of “Species” ; ).

It gets even weirder when you realize that it is the very operation of evolution that makes it illegible. Successful species are what create gaps in the fossil record, pages torn from the book of nature—Darwin himself is fond of revising the old topos of the book of nature (Darwin 1996, 100, 141, 251). In other words, even if you assimilated all the information you could ever gather at some point in time about life-forms, your picture would necessarily be incomplete. Of course, in the time it would take you to assimilate the information, new life-forms would have evolved, but for the sake of argument let’s just imagine that we possess the ability to gather knowledge instantaneously. Even if this were the case, evolution would still be illegible in some sense. No one could predict the evolution of cats (or of humans) from a snapshot of all the evidence from a time before cats (or humans) appeared. Stranger still, and this is a major topic in The Origin of Species, there occurs no moment at which cats become totally distinct from their ancestors. This is Darwin’s version of Zeno’s paradox, which he calls the problem of “incipient species” (Darwin 1996, 44). Even stranger, if you rewound the evolutionary tape and played it back, you would not necessarily see cats (or humans) appear. DNA is a set of instructions like a recipe (an algorithm), and we all know that if you make a meal twice it would not necessarily turn out the same.

There is thus no place outside of evolution from which to view it objectively—that is, as a totally determined process whose features we can readily predict. In Lacanian jargon, this means that “there is no metalanguage,” and that the “Big Other”—some idealized reference point from which everything makes sense—does not truly exist. You simply cannot see the whole thing at once—it has no outside—yet it consists precisely in an unbroken flow of DNA (and other replicators). It’s not as if there is nothing there—there is an astonishing variety of life-forms. “Nature” is surely a good candidate for a Big Other from whose vantage point you can assess life-forms. But if you look for Nature, all you’ll find are trees, butterflies, oceans, primates … Ironically, it’s evolution and ecology that put an end to the concept of Nature (I capitalize it to make it seem strange and artificial).

Reconsider our cat having kittens. The DNA mutation visible in those slightly smaller ears is random with respect to current need. In other words, there is no adaptation to an environment in a strong sense. Of course the smaller ears might come in useful. If the kittens who have them do not die before they reproduce, their descendants can keep them: neo-Darwinist theory calls this “satisficing” (Dawkins 1999, 156). If it means anything, “fittest” (as in “survival of”) means happening not to die before you have kids. So there exists a huge variety of vestigial organs, nonfatal traces of past mutations. “Fittest” does not mean having six-pack abs or being a cunning, aggressive Wall Street cat. Ducks have webbed feet, and television natural history shows are tempted to talk about how webbed feet are beautifully adapted to water. But coots do not have webbed feet, and they also swim in water—so evolution does not care about webbed feet. Thinking that evolution does care is an error called “adaptationism” (Dawkins 1999, 30).

Furthermore, the environment to which the kitten adapts consists of other life forms, which are also adapting. The very oxygen we breathe, the concentration of iron in Earth’s crust, are the excretions of ancient bacteria. Within life-forms, all the way down to the DNA level, there are other life-forms—the fact of symbiosis (Margulis 1979, 1998). Animal cells contain mitochondria, which are bacterial symbionts, like chloroplasts (which make plants green). There exist plant–animal hybrids such as the green sea slug Elysia chlorotica, which can photosynthesize (Margulis 1998, 9–10). Life-forms refuse to stay within thin, rigid boundaries. There is no neutral, static background against which specific life-forms could become meaningful. Evolution means that this furry four-legged being that purrs is not strictly a cat … In a Darwinian world we can see around the edges of life-forms, and into their strange ambiguous depths—these shadowy hidden sides undermine the coherence of what we took to be our immediate, commonsense perception.

All of this is profoundly antiteleological. Wherever we look, up close or far away, over very short or very long timespans, we fail to find a point, goal, origin, or terminus in the process of evolution. Consider Copernicus again. Discoveries about Earth’s place in the Universe did not replace one teleology with another one, making us feel even more secure because one center was replaced with a stronger, better one. The possibility opened up that teleology as such is always an abstraction from what is the case. It is just the same with Darwin. The lack of teleology is humiliating—literally, it brings us down to Earth, which must be good news for ecology.

Notice how Darwin’s “entangled bank” suggests that we visualize interconnected life-forms as a whole—and what is ecology if not the study of the fact of this interconnection? Yet what is this whole if not a flowing, shifting, entangled mess of ambiguous entities—entities that become even more ambiguous the closer we look? Or, as I shall be arguing here, the whole is a mesh, a very curious, radically open form without center or edge.

Ecological science holds that all life-forms are interconnected, but what are the philosophical and cultural implications of this interconnectedness? The mesh is even more deeply interwoven than biocentric ideas such as the web of life imply, because it does away with boundaries between living and nonliving forms. At the same time, symbiosis ensures that boundaries between life-forms are never rigid and thin; rather, they are wide and permeable. The concept of the mesh gives rise to an ethics and politics based on (1) the utter singularity and uniqueness of every life-form and (2) the lack of fixed identity anywhere in the system of life-forms. Though they seem radically different, (1) and (2) actually entail each other.

The Interdependence Theorem

Now let’s think about ecological interconnectedness in a more formal way. Imagine an Interdependence Theorem, containing the following two axioms:

We shall gradually discover that the Interdependence Theorem tells us a lot about what we want to know about how things are interconnected in ecological systems.

Axiom 1 states that for every a, the existence of a is such that a consists of things that are not not-a. In other words, a is made of not-a’s, and thus must be defined negatively and differentially. In other words, a is a because it isn’t not-a, while not-a is only not-a because it is not a. In this sense, a and not-a are mutually determining. Axiom 1 states that things are only what they are in relation to other things.

Axiom 2 states that things derive from other things. While Axiom 1 makes statements about how things are (synchronically), Axiom 2 talks about origins (diachrony). In every case, things like a only exist such that a not-a exists. Nothing exists by itself and nothing comes from nothing.

Axioms 1 and 2 define interdependence across a range of phenomena. They summarize structural linguistics, for instance, because structuralism’s model of language is that signs are completely interdependent. The Interdependence Theorem also describes life-forms. Diachronically, no life-form exists that did not arise from another life-form. And synchronically, life-forms are different from each other in arbitrarily negative ways: there is no human-flavored DNA as opposed to daffodil-flavored DNA, for instance. In fact, since life-forms are expressions of DNA, they differ from each other negatively rather than positively, since DNA is of course a language, and can thus be modeled by structuralism.

Since life-forms depend upon each other the same way signs depend upon each other, the system of life-forms is isometric with the system of language. This means that since language as a system is subject to deconstruction, the system of life-forms must also be subject to deconstruction. What happens when we subject the system of life-forms to deconstruction?

Let’s remind ourselves what happens when we subject the system of language to deconstruction. Derrida describes this as thinking “the structurality of structure” (Derrida 1978, 280). What kind of structure? It’s open-ended: it has no center and no edge. Because language is an arbitrary system of negative difference, there is no sign that stands somehow outside the system to guarantee the meaning and stability of the other signs. This means language is infinite, in the strong sense that we can never fully account for its meanings or effects. It also means that meaning depends upon meaninglessness. And that language as a system is not a thing, not an object, but a strange infinite network that has neither inside nor outside. This is how thinking structuralism leads to the discovery of textuality. The process that makes signs manifest as appearance and meaning is différance: the process of difference (synchronic) and deferment (diachronic). The meaning of a word is another word, and strings of signs only gain significance retroactively. The meaning of a sentence is a moving target. You will never be able to know exactly what the end of this sentence is until after you have read it elephant. This means that coherence, in order to be coherence, must contain some incoherence.

We can apply exactly the same view to the system of life-forms. Life-forms are made up of other life-forms (the theory of symbiosis). And life-forms derive from other life-forms (evolution). It is so simple, and yet so profound. Because of the ecological emergency we have entered, we are now compelled to take account of this mind-changing view.

The implications of a deconstructive view of life-forms are manifold:

1. Life forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept—unthinkable as such.
2. Tracing the origins of life to a moment prior to life will result in paradoxes.
3. Drawing distinctions between life and nonlife is strictly impossible, yet unavoidable.
4. Differentiating between one species and another is never absolute.
5. There is no “outside” of the system of life-forms.
6. The Interdependence Theorem is part of the system of interdependence and thus subject to deconstruction!
7. Since we cannot know in advance what the effects of the system will be, all life-forms are theorizable as strange strangers.

Let’s sift through these implications.

(1) Life-forms constitute a mesh that is infinite and beyond concept—unthinkable as such. This is not just because the mesh is too “large” but also because it is also infinitesimally small...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Lawrence Buell
• Introduction
• Part I: Science
• Part II: History
• Part III: Scale
• Afterword, an Interview with Elaine Scarry
• List of Contributors
• Index