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Our world appears to be on the brink of disaster, an appearance that is itself disastrous. The disaster of disaster is that disaster is everywhere, all the time: while on the one hand it appears obvious that disaster should be the exception that proves the rule of a generally non-disastrous world, in actuality no non-disastrous moment arrives. Like a deer in the headlights, thinking is paralyzed by disaster. Whether this is strictly a function of modernity, beginning with the Romantic period, or whether it is a function of disaster as such remains to be seen. But what Naomi Klein accurately, but not thoroughly, calls “the shock doctrine” is the capitalist norm: the state of exception is capitalist reality. For Klein, capitalists fleece the rest of us when they need a whip-round. For Marxism, this is the normal state of affairs, the deep structure of capitalism as such, which must keep on accumulating more money in order to exist. And perhaps it is also the reality of actually existing socialism: to avert the imminent disaster in capitalism, a socialist emergency must be declared.
It is possible, argue Žižek and Badiou, that ecology is simply the latest version of capitalist disaster ideology at work.
Take plutonium for instance: a disaster that has already occurred, and one that will continue for at least 24 100 years. Just how many of those years do we think will be capitalist? Do we seriously imagine that the end of the world is more likely than the end of capitalism? Or consider global warming, the cause of the Sixth Mass Extinction Event (there have been five since the beginning of life on Earth). This is not a disaster waiting to happen. Atmospheric CO2 levels are now well above the safety ceiling of 350 parts per million (ppm). Since Neolithic times, humans have lived under about 275ppm. Current levels are around 387ppm and climbing by about 2ppm annually (350.org). Percy Shelley was already talking about pollution in 1813: “the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the exhalations of chemical processes” (Note 17 to
We can visualize a time before and a time after disaster, in which disaster remains as a fundamental category of our visualization. What about thinking beyond disaster, or is thinking forever caught in disaster's shadow? Art imagines post-apocalyptic worlds: Romanticism in particular is full of them, from Byron's
Strictly speaking, ecology is a discourse of non-disaster. Disaster is literally an unfortunate star (
In order to have disasters such as this, one needs an integrated world in which certain astral phenomena are interpreted according to a stable key. The stars spatter the edges of this world, illuminating it with their obscure but significant tracery, patterned in recognizable constellations that are given rules for conjunction and disjunction. Ecology is the collapse of astrology, and not simply because it belongs to a “secular” era. Ecology abolishes the star-studded dome of the world insofar as ecological science and ecological awareness force upon humans the collapse of any significant background or horizon against which human activity can be placed and measured (Heidegger 39–122; Morton,
In the technical literature of disaster management, an ecological disaster is precisely an event for which “inside” resources do not suffice to provide a remedy—help from “outside” must be brought in (European Environmental Agency, “disaster”).
We can only conclude, then, that “ecological disaster” is an oxymoron. To what purpose? Paul Virilio predicted a long while ago that environmental threats would allow the state to stage rehearsals for military and industrial displays of power (Virilio). This is not congruent with ecological reality. The trouble with ecological awareness is that it is drastically non-teleological. Life science has demonstrated that life as such has no fixed, rigid origin: this is the lesson of the ironically titled
There is a rhetoric of catastrophe in which the narrator overleaps apocalypse altogether. It is as if one could watch a video of one's own funeral. Of course, literature enables us to fantasize this all the time: the act of narrating in the first person is just this kind of doubling. But the totality of global ecological disaster, of which one consequence might be human extinction (as in Mary Shelley's
The ideology and the rhetoric of ecological disaster, then, have nothing to do with actual ecology. They are “environmentalist” in the same sense as some ideas about gender are sexist. That is, they set up the environment as a metaphysical construct on a pedestal, torn down, built up, worshipped, admired as an aesthetic object, and so on. Aesthetic images of the environment are predicated on disaster: we are shown we want to avert it; we are compelled to imagine it vividly. This seems like a truism: recordings of whale sounds and Douglas Adams's book
If we are going to think ecology beyond capitalism, we shall need to think beyond disaster and beyond disaster speak. It would be preferable to refer to ecological difficulty as a “drag,” in both performative and work-related senses. Ecological difficulty will beset us for the long run, perhaps forever (whatever that means). And ecology is profoundly a view that accommodates display, performance, sheer aesthetic illusion (for example in Darwin's theory of sexual selection), and so on (Darwin,
Ultimately, thinking ecology beyond disaster means thinking ecology without nature; and even thinking ecology without environmentalism. Looked at one way, evolution is a long history of disasters, such as extinction: which is to say, since disaster is everywhere, it is of no cosmic significance. Ecological awareness demands that we care for ourselves and nonhumans on time and space scales far in excess of the usual parameters, even if the parameters are based on modified forms of self interest that include greater numbers under the umbrella of “kith and kin” (Parfit, 355–357, 361, 371–377; Morton,
Are there archaeological remnants of oxymoronic “disaster ecology” in the British Romantic period? And do these remains contain anything like a critique? Percy Shelley is forever thinking of planetary and solar disaster. He favors the global over the local in a way that would scandalize the typical Romantic ecocritic. For this very reason his writing seems apt for an era of global warming. The poetry performs aesthetically what ecological damage and global positioning technology perform in the real, swallowing horizons and worlds (Morton,
A few disastrous stars appear as such in Shelley's poetry.
It's standard Shelleyan procedure to work emblematically, to depict revolution according to the operations of celestial mechanisms. In a massive expansion of the classical messenger speech (much ofLook, Hassan, on yon crescent moon emblazoned Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud, Which leads the rear of the departing day, Wan emblem of an empire fading now. See! how it trembles in the blood-red air And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent Shrinks on the horizon's edge while from above One star with insolent and victorious light Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams Like arrows through a fainting antelope Strikes its weak form to death. (337–347)
The classical tropology of the globe was already out of date: some more up to date poetry turned to what I've called the poetics of spice, the capitalist advertising language that weaves together Earth's far flung corners via trade routes and precious commodities (Morton,
Shelley, however, needed to think and imagine how it had all gone so wrong. He was deeply aware of how the poetics of spice was tainted by commerce, and often uses it perhaps rather too forcefully to make this very point. Unable to theorize fully how disaster is intrinsic to capitalism (he writes it off as a rapacious, excessive farcical repetition of aristocratic power), Shelley resorted to language that talks about the disturbing of a fundamental balance. In this he shares much with contemporary anti-capitalist writing such as Naomi Klein's. Yet Shelley is perhaps unique for the deadly seriousness with which he articulates the imbalance. This becomes a matter of scientific and philosophical positing, not just rhetorical play. For Shelley, Earth was a perpetual disaster, in the precise astrological sense: a mishap in a planetary body. Earth's axis is bent. This terrestrial disaster was caused by human injustice, including the eating of animal flesh. In the utopian future, the Earth's axis is righted and the planet orbits “straight up” around the sun. Ironically, Shelley's evidence for the disaster, and its solution, is a snapshot of what later became known as continental drift and climate change. Note 10 on two lines of his early poem
To the red and baleful sun That faintly twinkles there.
The north polar star, to which the axis of the earth, in its present state of obliquity, points. It is exceedingly probable, from many considerations, that this obliquity will gradually diminish, until the equator coincides with the ecliptic: the nights and days will then become equal on the earth throughout the year, and probably the seasons also. There is no great extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be as rapid as the progress of intellect; or that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improvement of the human species. It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health, in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man. Astronomy teaches us that the earth is now in its progress, and that the poles are every year becoming more and more perpendicular to the ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded by the history of mythology, and geological researches, that some event of this nature has taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this progress is not merely an oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers. Bones of animals peculiar to the torrid zone have been found in the north of Siberia, and on the banks of the river Ohio. Plants have been found in the fossil state in the interior of Germany, which demand the present climate of Hindostan for their production. The researches of M. Bailly establish the existence of a people who inhabited a tract in Tartary 49º north latitude, of greater antiquity than either the Indians, the Chinese, or the Chaldeans, from whom these nations derive their sciences and theology. We find, from the testimony of ancient writers, that Britain, Germany, and France were much colder than at present, and that their great rivers were annually frozen over. Astronomy teaches us also that since this period the obliquity of the earth's position has been considerably diminished. (Extraordinarily, then, borrowing from the ideas of Laplace and Cabanis, Shelley holds that a more just human society will literally rebalance Earth's axis. Shelley thus produced countless images we now associate with the photographPoems , 1.373–374)
Earth-righting justice includes proto-feminism, atheism, democracy, some form of non-capitalist economy, and vegetarianism. The sound minds in sound bodies who will enjoy this future state will live in harmony with their world, conceived not as a patchwork of localities, but as a genuine globality, as Book 9 of
The fusion of Biblical millenarianism and utterly sincere Enlightenment nonviolence and reason produces the almost psychedelic image of the baby feeding the “green and golden basilisk” with its friendly tongue (8.86). It is one of Shelley's many vivid synecdochic sketches for a peaceful world whose every corner looks like this. This is a world without disaster, whose disasters are all past. The happy future people can look up to the sky and know that everything has been set right—not by some( And where the startled wilderness beheld A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood, A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs, Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang, Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn, Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles To see a babe before his mother's door, Sharing his morning's meal With the green and golden basilisk That comes to lick his feet. Queen Mab , 8.77–87)
Yet while in Pope there is a reactionary knowingness that disaster continues, Shelley truly wants to image a time without disaster, figured as a time of no meat eating (not even for the lions) that we can achieve by not eating meat, among other things. For Shelley, the Garden of Eden is a future state. Human being is and has been a disaster, beginning with the Promethean (technological, that is) disaster of cooking animal food. Thus at the end of
(4.400–405) Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul Whose nature is its own divine controul, Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea; Familiar acts are beautiful through love; Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!
The trouble is, how do we get to the future Eden? As argued just above, this would require the very state of mind (the nonviolent, non-disastrous one) that Shelley reckons is unavailable to us in our disastrous present. All right then, try vegetarianism in the mean time. But here the problem repeats itself: in order to become vegetarian, one must be nonviolent (Morton,
What ecological thinking, emerging during his lifetime, opens up, Shelley includes in his work. Yet with another hand, Shelley domesticates the disastrous vision, turning disaster into a singularity through which human history will pass, as the rather grisly introduction to Book 8 shows: “Time! … Render up thy half-devoured babes” (8.3–5). It is hard not to think that at some level, the remarkably anti-capitalist and prescient Shelley is stuck in a capitalist ideological mode, rather like the Enlightenment
Shelley appears trapped in the tropology of disaster, like an insect beating itself against a glass window. Since what appears to be required is a dramatic inner transformation that includes transcending prejudices of all kinds, how is it possible to think the moment of change? Shelley obsesses over how to transition from the time of disaster to the time of no disaster. It is only perhaps at the very end, with
The strange beginning of Shelley's
Here is the “good disaster” of an Enlightenment sunrise, and the gears don't grind—but what acceleration! It is as if Shelley had overheard Wordsworth's paean to the French Revolution, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (11.4), and teased out the queasy horror—not of executing aristos, but the horror within bliss as such, its automatic, orgasmic otherness. De Man's reading traces the intense play of light in Shelley's poem, as blinding as it is revealing (De Man). This intensity is in part a reflex of what he calls the “brusque” artificiality of the poem's guiding linguistic act, positing. The inversion of the figure and the figured (“Swift as a spirit…the Sun” (1–2)) is one of Shelley's typical uses of what old rhetorical manuals callSwift as a spirit hastening to his task Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. (1–4)
The disruptive, fluid freefall of this poem's
Perhaps, then, there is some truth in the idea that
Perhaps the most obvious Blake “disaster poem” is his Song of Experience,
At the climax of the poem, Blake is satirizing the attitude that sees the tiger as a terrifying product of a terrifying God, akin to Hegel's beautiful soul, whose own gaze is the evil that it sees in the world at large (Hegel 383–409). The beautiful soul, for whom the world is evil, is a type of environmentalist ideology, which makesWhen the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven with their tears Did he smile his work to see Did he who made the lamb make thee?
The personified stars do not portend evil in this case as true astral “disasters” would—they witness it. Their reaction of horrified pity is in accord with the narrator's objectifying, materialistic gaze—they are the evil they see. Evil thus already haunts the Universe, in the form of an unconscious subjectivity that sees certain phenomena as material embodiments of evil, as if from a great distance. If the stars are angelic titans (Lucifer being the chief among them), then God is the exception, the one that creates an evil universe, much to their dismay. Yet evil has already manifested in the form of an evil gaze.
Blake comes close to articulating a theory of disaster that is highly relevant to this essay's proposal that we think beyond disaster. This is unsurprising, since his work is ideology critique through and through, and since the materialism and capitalism that spawn disaster, and disaster thinking, were operational by the time he was writing. Like Hegel, Blake had figured out that ideas come bundled with unconscious attitudes, and he was determined to expose them. The portrayal of the tiger as terrifying misses the uncanny familiarity of the tiger, hinted at in the cuddly toy illumination that accompanies the poem. This missing of the mark resembles the way in which sublime Nature, objectified as wilderness, is set up to loom around, beyond and behind human activity like a distant mountain range. The reified sublimity passes too quickly over the distressing intimacy and “lameness” (to use an appropriate modern adjective) of human and nonhuman interaction.
The most ambiguous disaster ecology is found, unsurprisingly, in that master of ambiguity and anticlimax, William Wordsworth. The “dream of the Arab” episode, a spot of time that occurs in the fifth book of
Wordsworth has been said to open an imaginary space in which film technology becomes significant, in his liquid long form poems. Here he appears to do something similar to the telephone. What you hear when you hold it to your ear, like a pre-recorded message from the future, is the sound of the end of the world: who recorded it, thisand “This,” said he, This other,” pointing to the Shell, “this Book “Is something of more worth.” “And, at the word, The Stranger,” said my Friend continuing, “Stretched forth the Shell towards me, with command That I should hold it to my ear. I did so, And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony; An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold Destruction to the Children of the Earth By deluge now at hand. (5.88–98)
This sound is a “blast,” sound as disaster, somewhere between an explosion and a fanfare on a brass instrument. Like a hi-fi speaker whose volume is dangerously high, the shell might cause pain: a message delivery system so potent that one becomes vividly aware of what Jakobson called the “contact,” the material medium of communication as such (Jakobson). The alarm-like blast wavers disturbingly between speech and noise and music (“harmony”): it is “loud” and “prophetic,” made of “articulate” sounds. Yet the sound is in a language the dreamer does not recognize—thus a language from a beyond, over the horizon, outside, reinforcing the notion that disaster is the outside impinging on an inside; a language that is doubly foreign, yet also a “tongue,” as if the narrator had a tongue in his ear. In the both–and logic of a dream (Freud asserts that the unconscious knows no negation), beautifully modeled in Wordsworth's description of simultaneous unintelligibility and intelligibility, the sound is both noise and meaning, recognized as such even though the words cannot be understood. Three possibilities are superimposed: the sound is inarticulate noise; the sound is articulate, meaningful yet not understood; the sound is meaningful and understood.
The telephonic shell is itself an alien technology, and the narrator's account of the Don Quixote-like Arab impressing him with shiny gadgets is reminiscent of first contact narratives. Yet the scene is inverted, as if modern technology (this is after all a highly ambiguous account of books and reading) arrived from another world onto English shores. With its shiny, iPhone-like nacre, the shell impresses, and the narrator perhaps appears to undergo the assumed embarrassment of the indigenous person who does not know what to do with the objects presented to him. Then space and time collapse in apocalyptic fashion, and suddenly the end of the world is “at hand.” One cannot help finding in this passage something that is indeed prophetic about the distance collapsing technologies of the last two centuries. It is particularly strange, this effect, considering that the entire passage is in the context of a meditation on the already existing technology of books. With their world-ending promises of instant presence, modern communication media do indeed resemble material symptoms of a disturbing new metaphysics. Many times ecological criticism has labeled technology as such disastrous, precisely insofar as it is the end of the world as a bounded place of distances and opacities and hidden corners—worlds need horizons, and global warming reduces these horizons to mere abstraction and false immediacy.
The immersive sound of the seashore, the quietness here amplified so as to threaten overwhelming (literally, over-whelming) noise, is heard throughout modern new age and environmental music as the sounds of a disaster-stricken planet: disappearing lifeworlds recorded for elegiac evocative pleasure. The innocent seeming hush of an environmental soundscape is thus a threat of imminent destruction: as if the recoding said, “I could be your last chance to hear a world such as this.” In these fragmentary voices of “real world” ambience, global capital and imperial power are audible both in their phantasmagorical energy and penetrating scientific gaze. Such fragile sonic worlds are objects of sadistic pleasure and Schadenfreude, as well as the more obvious marketing of the “oceanic feeling” that constitutes a core of the long history of consumerism (Morton,
Like Magritte's
As failure, it's the exact opposite of Freud's record of the dream of the burning boy, in which the boy signals that the dreamer must wake up and smell the real smoke. Perhaps the role of the dream in Wordsworth's poem is more like Lacan's reinterpretation of Freud: Lacan argues that to spare himself the anxiety of the murderous erotic fantasy, the dreamer awakens to the drag of the actual fire (Lacan 57–60, 68–70). The real disaster would be remaining within the dream and giving vent to one's violent fantasies. This is indeed salutary in an ecological sense. Environmentalism is perhaps nothing but the desire that one's dream—that one inhabits a meaningful and immersive “lifeworld” surrounded by familiar but not uncanny nonhumans—remain undisturbed. The persistence of this dream inhibits directly intervening in the realm of “life on Earth” for the sake of life forms. In this sense, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, environmentalism is hostile to ecology.