New Materialism
Weekly Curated references to go deeper into the topic
The Heart of Greennes post series used two main tools in criticism:
New Materialism and Sentiment Analysis.
I thought it would have been useful to introduce some short references for those interested in digging deeper into the matter.
The Heart of Greennes series used two main tools in criticism: New Materialism and Sentiment Analysis. I thought it would be useful to introduce some short references for those interested in digging deeper into the matter. The Sentiment Analysis part and in general the idea to investigate the relationships among nature, sciences and technologies in literature criticism was inspired by the work of several authors. I was introduced to the New Materialism approach by Neil Everden and his seminal essay Beyond Ecology in the Ecocriticism Reader by Glotflety and Fromm and Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), which crafted the idea that matter possesses vitality and agency.
It’s a Copernican revolution that put aside the human being as the main character in the Anthropocene novel. Matter is not inert stuff to be exploited but has its vitality. Added to the philosophical foundation of Bennett's thought (Epicuro, Spinoza, Deleuze, Guattari etc.) there is a praxis she calls ‘sensory attentiveness' that seems useful to access the vitality of matter.
“What is also needed is a cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces operating outside and inside the human body. I have tried to learn how to induce an attentiveness to things and their affects from Thoreau, Franz Kafka, and Whitman, as well as from the eco- and ecofeminist philosophers Romand Coles, Val Plumwood, Wade Sikorski, Freya Mathews, Wendell Berry, Angus Fletcher, Barry Lopez, and Barbara Kingsolver. Without proficiency in this countercultural kind of perceiving, the world appears as if it consists only of active human subjects who confront passive objects and their law-governed mechanisms. This appearance may be indispensable to the action-oriented perception on which our survival depends (as Nietzsche and Bergson each in his own way contend), but it is also dangerous and counterproductive to live this fiction all the time (as Nietzsche and Bergson also note), and neither does it conduce to the formation of a "greener" sensibility.” (Bennett, 2010)
I think that Conrad uses this sensory attentiveness in his language and transfers it to all Heart of Darkness characters, human and nonhuman, breaking this and other dualisms, master/slave, white/black, colonialists/native.
In Heart of Darkness, the jungle and ivory possess their own ‘Thing-Power’.
Following back the trajectory of Bennett’s work we found two other important concepts useful to understand New Materialism: which Evernden calls it ‘territoriality feeling’.
Evernden points out the attention on the behaviour of a small fish, a cichlid that
“ln short, it's as if he thinks he is as big as his territory. It's as if his boundary of what he considers to be "himself" has expanded to the dimensions of the territory itself. The fish is no longer an organism bounded by skin - it is an organism-plus-environment bounded by an imaginary integument.”
Kurts could have been a cichlid man.
Evernden (like Bennett) recalls Paul Shepard's work to broaden the field of man/environment relationships.
“But the only one that is relevant to a discussion of man and environment is the relation of self to setting.”
The humans + matter make the setting.
“The really subversive element in Ecology rests not on any of its more sophisticated concepts, but upon its basic premise: inter-relatedness.”
Evernden discourse is also important for an interdisciplinary approach. He claims the importance of embedding ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy in ecology discourse usually prone to a mere scientific approach.
“Environmentalism without aesthetics is merely regional planning.
Coming to the second part of the ideas dedicated to Conrad, the sentiment analysis, the idea to use it, it is rooted in the work of Posthumus, S., & Sinclair, S. (2014) published in Parham’s Green Letters. They cite the work of
“Ursula Heise and DH technician Elijah Meeks to analyze large amounts of data from IUCN Red Lists to determine the kinds of narrative templates used to frame species extinction. The co-authors of the present article have also harnessed the possibilities of (not-so) big data, using text mining, topic modelling and Gephi visualizations, to analyze themes in the environmental humanities (Posthumus, Sinclair and Poplawksi, forthcoming). In addition to digital text analysis, this fourth branch of DEH uses mapping tools to critique and explore human perceptions of place and space.”
Letteraterra itself wants to be a digital humanities example embedding all the digital tools available like dataviz, podcast, video and audio to support my research in ecocriticism. For now, these are only brief notes to test further development in my research. I hope to find collaboration to make a major effort to find an original way to do a multidimensional ecocriticism.
Conclusions
The New Materialism framework, introduced by Shepard, Sparshot, and Neil Evernden and further developed by thinkers like Jane Bennett, offers a profound shift in perspective by recognizing the vitality and agency of matter, challenging anthropocentric views that dominate the Anthropocene narrative. The concepts of - ‘Things-Power’ and ‘sensory attentiveness’ to nonhuman forces are critical to nurturing a deeper understanding of the environment.
References
Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Duke University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/j.ctv111jh6w
Evernden, N. (1978). Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, & the Pathetic Fallacy. The North American Review, 263(4), 16–20.
Shepard, P. (1977). Place in American Culture. The North American Review, 262(3), 22–32.
Sparshott, F. E. (1972). Figuring the Ground: Notes on Some Theoretical Problems of the Aesthetic Environment. Journal of Aesthetic Education, 6(3), 11–23. https://doi.org/10.2307/3331390
Posthumus, S., & Sinclair, S. (2014). Reading environment(s): digital humanities meets ecocriticism. Green Letters, 18(3), 254–273. https://doi.org/10.1080/14688417.2014.966737