Futures Worth Preserving: Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability 9783839441220

Table of contents :
Table of Content
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Juxtapose the Concepts of Nostalgia and Sustainability?
Nostalgia and the Genesis and Sustainability of Values
Between Nostalgia and the New: Turns to Ontology in Contemporary Theory
Civic Art Lab: Reflections on Art, Design, and Sustainability
Prospective Memory: Sustainability in Poetic Theory and Practice
Agente Costura: Sustainability Sounds
Considering the Values of the Past: Sustainability and (Anti)Nostalgia in the Medieval Monastery
Commoning Nostalgia: Making “Romantic Sensibility Sustainable” in Contemporary Poetry
Nostalgic Utopias: William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances (1892-1907)
Cultural Ecosystems and the Paradoxes of American Environmentalism
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Pastness: Nostalgia and Sustainability in American Post-Suburbia
Nostalgia and the Sustainable Lyric: John Burnside and the Pibroch
Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency
Value Creation in Nostalgia and Sustainability: Interacting on Behalf of the Absent
Authors

Citation preview

Andressa Schröder, Nico Völker, Robert A. Winkler, Tom Clucas (eds.) Futures Worth Preserving

Culture & Theory  | Volume 157

Andressa Schröder, Nico Völker, Robert A. Winkler, Tom Clucas (eds.)

Futures Worth Preserving Cultural Constructions of Nostalgia and Sustainability

The publication of this volume was supported by the German federal government’s Excellence Initiative.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© 2019 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Cover layout: Ana Lúcia Migowski Cover illustration: ThruTheseLines (Flickr) CCBY 4.0 Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4122-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4122-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839441220

Table of Content

Acknowledgements | 7 Introduction: Why Juxtapose the Concepts of Nostalgia and Sustainability?

Andressa Schröder, Nico Völker, Robert A. Winkler, Tom Clucas | 9 Nostalgia and the Genesis and Sustainability of Values

S.D. Chrostowska | 37 Between Nostalgia and the New: Turns to Ontology in Contemporary Theory

Elizabeth Kovach | 55 Civic Art Lab: Reflections on Art, Design, and Sustainability

Laura Scherling, Jeff Kasper | 73 Prospective Memory: Sustainability in Poetic Theory and Practice

Tom Clucas | 95 Agente Costura: Sustainability Sounds

Lisa Simpson | 111 Considering the Values of the Past: Sustainability and (Anti)Nostalgia in the Medieval Monastery

Theo B. Lap | 119 Commoning Nostalgia: Making “Romantic Sensibility Sustainable” in Contemporary Poetry

Daniel Eltringham | 139 Nostalgic Utopias: William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances (1892-1907)

Katharina Metz | 161

Cultural Ecosystems and the Paradoxes of American Environmentalism

Ioanna Kipourou | 177 Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Pastness: Nostalgia and Sustainability in American Post-Suburbia

Moritz W. Berkemeier | 197 Nostalgia and the Sustainable Lyric: John Burnside and the Pibroch

Owen Gurrey | 221 Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency

Niklas Salmose | 239 Value Creation in Nostalgia and Sustainability: Interacting on Behalf of the Absent

Afterword by Andreas Langenohl | 257 Authors | 267

Acknowledgments

The present volume stems from the international conference entitled For What It’s Worth: Nostalgia, Sustainability and the Values of the Present which took place at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the University of Giessen, Germany from 28th to 30th April 2016. The conference provided a platform for the exploration of and debate about multiple cultural aspects of the interrelations of nostalgia and sustainability through scholarly as well as artistic research. Alongside the presentation of academic papers, the conference featured a space for Creative Encounters with the contributions of artist-researchers that culminated in a small interactive exhibition and a performance. The present volume expands, however, beyond the scope of the conference and presents contributions by invited authors that were not part of the initial debate and that have enormously enriched our discussion and the content of the volume. *** The cover picture of this book is similarly based on the poster that was designed for the conference by our fellow researcher Ana Lúcia Migowski. The original photograph was taken in 1915 by Florence Elizabeth James-Wallace who worked as a nurse in a resting camp in the Lemnos Island during World War I. The current picture depicts a poetic reconstruction of the space, juxtaposing the original picture on the approximate location where it was initially taken. It is part of the project ‘Now and Then’ developed by the blog Through These Lines. 1 ***

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Blog: http://throughtheselines.com.au/. Picture and project available at: https://www. flickr.com/photos/thrutheselines/6340289604/in/ album-72157631694580010/.

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We would like to thank immensely the team that helped us conceptualize and hold the initial conference and artistic event – Dr. Alesya Krit, Dr. Sonja Schillings, Lisa Beißwanger, Katja Kirsten, Ana Lúcia Migowski, Stephanie Lavorano and Eva Raimann – as well as all the participants that contributed to a rich and engaging event. A special thanks to all the authors that accepted the challenge to board on the journey for this publication together with us and that patiently followed all the steps of hard work and long waiting during the process of creation of the present book. Additional thanks to transcript for accepting our book proposal and for supporting us during the preparation of the manuscript. We would also like to thank the Executive Board of the GCSC – Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ansgar Nünning, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Hallet, Prof. Dr. Andreas Langenohl, Dr. habil. Michael Basseler, and Dr. Jens Kugele – for the financial support granted for the conference and the publication of this volume. A very special thanks also to Ms. Ann van de Veire for her patient support with all the administrative efforts that went into the making of this book. Andressa Schröder, Nico Völker, Robert A. Winkler, Tom Clucas Gießen, September 2018

Introduction Why Juxtapose the Concepts of Sustainability and Nostalgia? A NDRESSA S CHRÖDER , N ICO V ÖLKER , R OBERT A. W INKLER , T OM C LUCAS Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. ELIOT/FOUR QUARTERS

The essays in this volume explore hidden connections between the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability. In current usage, nostalgia denotes a “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past” (OED), whereas sustainability concerns forms of human activity which attempt to minimize environmental degradation “by avoiding the long-term depletion of natural resources” (OED). At first glance, the concepts seem Janus-faced: nostalgia looks to the past, while sustainability looks to the future. As in the epigraph from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, however, the relations between “time past,” “time present,” and “time future” are interwoven in complex ways. The sustainable present becomes the locus/moment in which both notions overlap: cultures and individuals are forced to position themselves, both in relation to what they have been and to what they are becoming. This book shows how the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability intersect in cultural constructions of ‘futures worth preserving.’ Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered, and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated

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by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future. On a cultural level, the two terms are connected as well: cultures cannot envision a sustainable future without drawing on the nostalgic resources of the past. Likewise, nostalgia is fueled by a longing to sustain what has gone before, so that both notions raise similar questions of intergenerational justice. Cultures and individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of progress and development. The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the assumptions which inform them. The concepts of nostalgia and sustainability are connected by several key themes. First, they both involve the construction of complex temporal narratives about how cultures develop over time and progress from one state to another. Inevitably, the construction of these narratives includes an element of evaluation, as individuals assess whether cultural changes are a form of improvement and progress or of degradation and decline. Second, both concepts involve notions of curation and stewardship, as individuals in the present attempt to shape the environment for future generations and are mindful of their responsibility to those who will succeed them. Faced with the task of selecting which aspects of their present ways of life to preserve, the members of a culture often develop a nostalgic investment in some of its values and traditions. At the same time, they project these values and traditions into the future to imagine how that culture could and should be sustained for future generations. Third, both nostalgia and sustainability involve the utopian ideal of creating a permanent home in the world. In its original sense, nostalgia denoted an acute longing for home (nostos), a medical condition equivalent to the German Heimweh. Similarly, the ecological project at the heart of sustainability involves a desire to create a sustainable dwelling (oikos) in the natural world. At the heart of this book is the fundamental question of how this sustainable home in the world should look like. The essays in this collection analyze how individuals and cultures construct their images of ‘futures worth preserving,’ considering where they draw their inspiration from and how they project aspects of past and present cultures into the future. In the process, the chapters investigate the complex relationship between nature and culture, as well as the cultural aspects of ecology, exploring the cultural narratives and cultural memories which people use to understand the relationship between humans, other species, and their environment. The remainder of this introduction contextualizes the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability individually, before mapping out the connections between them in more detail, as well as providing an overview of the chapters.

I NTRODUCTION

N OSTALGIA I SN ’ T W HAT I T U SED C ONCEPTUAL H ISTORY

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B E : A V ERY S HORT

Since it was coined in the seventeenth century, the term nostalgia has lived through a meandering history. The term was first used in 1688 by the Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer in his medical dissertation Dissertatio Medica de nostalgia in which he characterizes it as a strong case of homesickness afflicting Swiss mercenaries (cf. Reynolds 2012: xxv; Davis 1979: 1; Boym 2001: 3). Etymologically, the word nostalgia is Greek and is comprised of the components nostos, meaning to return home, and algia, meaning painful condition (cf. Boym 2001: xiii; Davis 1979: ibid). The symptoms, according to Hofer, of those afflicted at the time were “despondency, melancholia, lability of emotion, including profound bouts of weeping, anorexia, a generalized ‘wasting away,’ and, not infrequently, attempts at suicide” (qtd. in Davis 1979: 1-2). For over a century, nostalgia’s status as a medical condition persisted to only change at the end of the nineteenth century when nostalgia “was de-medicalized” (Wilson 2005: 22). It came then to be seen rather as a psychological and social affliction. Further, due to advances made in transportation and communications technology, making the connection with one’s ‘home’ a more realistic possibility, the inherent yearning for a ‘lost place’ then made way instead for a longing for a bygone time in the concept of nostalgia (cf. ibid: 21-24). This shift from a longing for a place in one’s past to a time past further complicated the nature of nostalgia as “[t]ime, unlike space, cannot be returned to – ever; time is irreversible. Nostalgia becomes the reaction to that sad fact” (Hutcheon 1998: 19). As Svetlana Boym in her monograph The Future of Nostalgia (2001) summarizes, “[a]t first glance, nostalgia is longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (2001: xv). The concept experienced a further change of meaning in the twentieth century, as “just as nostalgia shed its seventeenth-century scientific skin to become a nineteenth-century symptom of social rather than medical malaise, so within the last few years has it lost its innocence and become a social pariah” (Lowenthal 1985: 18), or as Janelle Wilson puts it, “nostalgia has gotten a bad rap” since “the term ‘nostalgia’ typically conjures up images of a previous time when life was good” (2005: 1; 21). Boym calls it “a bad word, an affectionate insult at best” (2001: xiv), while the historian Christopher Lasch goes even further in his “diagnosis” of a “victim of nostalgia”: “To cling to the past is bad enough, but the victim of nostalgia clings to an idealized past, one that exists only in his head. He

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is worse than a reactionary; he is an incurable sentimentalist. Afraid of the future, he is also afraid to face the truth about the past” (Lasch 1979: 65). Even though Lasch’s evaluation is representative of the oversimplification of nostalgia in most twentieth-century-thought on the concept, his is nonetheless an important insight about the nature of nostalgia, namely that it says as much about the present and the future as it does about the past. Thus, nostalgia has been characterized as “the search for a simple and stable past as a refuge from the turbulent and chaotic present” (Lowenthal 1985: 21). Linda Hutcheon also makes the case that nostalgia is as much concerned with the present as it is with the past, as, by looking back nostalgically, we create a stable and harmonious past which is the complete opposite of the complex and dangerous present (cf. Hutcheon 1998: 20). Thereby, “nostalgic distancing sanitizes as it selects” and makes the past “so very unlike the present” which in turn results in the notion that “the ideal that is not being lived now is projected into the past” (ibid). Jan Willem Duyvendak is in line with this reading of nostalgia when he states that “nostalgia says more about contemporary society than it does about the past” (2011: 107). Svetlana Boym, on the other hand, departing from the historic origins of the concept and its most simplistic notions, provides a more nuanced approach to the nature of nostalgia. She distinguishes two different types of nostalgias, drawing a distinction between “restorative nostalgia” and “reflective nostalgia” which nonetheless both describe “one’s relationship to the past, to the imagined community, to home, to one’s own self-perception” (2001: 41). However, whereas “restorative nostalgia” puts the “emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps,” “reflective nostalgia” on the other hand “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance” (ibid). Of Boym’s two types of nostalgia, she traces the “restorative” type back to the (re-)emergence of the nation-state as restorative nostalgia “characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths” (ibid). This relation of (a specific type of) nostalgia and the idea of a (re)invention of the nation is seconded by Andreas Huyssen who states that “the main concern of the nineteenth-century nation-states was to mobilize and monumentalize national and universal pasts so as to legitimize and give meaning to the present and to envision the future: culturally, politically, socially” (2003: 2). Similarly, Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the “invention of tradition” denotes that “the object and characteristic of ‘traditions,’ including invented ones, is invariance. The past, real or invented, to which they refer imposes fixed (normally formalized) practices, such as repetition” (1983: 2). Boym’s ideas on the character of “restorative nostalgia” ring very much true at this current political moment of

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a right-wing backlash against immigration, ‘multiculturalism’ and the perceived loss of national identity, as she writes “restorative nostalgia is often sponsored from above, however populist, homey, and ‘grass roots’ it appears to be” (2007: 18). Boym further nuances her conceptualization of nostalgia with the inclusion of the “reflective” type. Whereas restorative nostalgia “protects the absolute truth,” reflective nostalgia “calls it into doubt” (ibid: 13). Whereas “restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoid determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion” (ibid: 18). Boym further defines the focus of her second type of nostalgia, “reflective nostalgia,” as not being “on the recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth, but on the meditation on history and the passage of time” (ibid: 15). The proponents of reflective nostalgia are concerned with the “irrevocability of the past and human finitude,” focusing on “the meditation on history and the passage of time” and thus are able to resist “the pressure of external efficiency” (ibid). Insofar, reflective nostalgia entails the potential to resist and subvert the pressures of modernization and (post-)modern capitalism (cf. Sielke 2016: 13). Another crucial insight into the complicated character of nostalgia comes from Hutcheon who writes that nostalgia has been “articulated by the ecology movement as often as by fascism” (Hutcheon 1998: 22). Here, Hutcheon points us toward the ‘transideological’ characteristics of nostalgia which far from being used exclusively by conservative or reactionary forces - as conventional wisdom might suggest - rather has transcended the conservative/progressive, left-wing/right-wing divide and has instead proven its usefulness for a variety of political actors and causes. A further characteristic which has come to fore in nostalgia’s recent history is its general productiveness (cf. Sielke 2016: 16). Nostalgia has time and again been used as a means to commodify, a tool to sell all kinds of “retro” products: “Nostalgia for the sounds, sights, and objects of the past has created a whole range of longings. And these have been excited and extended by all kinds of consumer industries” (Cross 2015: 6).1 However, it has been argued that there needs to be a distinction established between the concepts of ‘retro’ on the one hand and ‘nostalgia’ on the other (cf. Dwyer 2015; Guffey 2006). Whereas retro is mostly seen as a mere commercial endeavor, nostalgia possesses, as already suggested above, the potential to critically engage with present practices and to produce moments of resistance in which the demands of (post-)modern capitalism can be withstood. Susan J. Matt’s book Homesickness: An American History (2011) exemplifies this point by contending that today's negative attitude toward homesickness (the English loan translation of nostalgia) is “predicated on the 1

For further analyses of this point, see Reynolds (2012) and Cross (2015).

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belief that movement is natural and unproblematic and a central and uncontested part of American identity” (2011: 4). She argues that homesickness and the refusal to said mobility might be read as an act of resistance against capitalist overreach as “Americans learned habits of individualism that supported capitalist activity. Central to modern individualism is the ability to separate oneself from home and family [...] and to leave communities” (ibid). Thus, by indulging in homesickness (or nostalgia) and refusing to give in to the pressures of capitalist ideology to move in order to “support capitalist activity,” one is able to resist those exact pressures and defy capitalist exploitations. In over three hundred years of history, nostalgia first transformed from a medical condition to a psychological one, finally further developing into a cultural and economic phenomenon. Through this history it has arrived at this current moment in which the campaign slogan of Donald Trump in the USA “Make America Great Again!” and other right-wing political actors such as the Brexit proponents in the United Kingdom all appealed to an invented, idealized past and have moved us toward a point in time which Zygmunt Bauman calls “The Age of Nostalgia” (2017: 1). These current “retrotopias,” as Bauman terms it, have been emerging for some time, “visions located in the lost/stolen/abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-yet-unborn and so inexistent future” (ibid: 5). Besides its usefulness for capitalist forces on the one hand and its power to work as an “act of resistance” against those same forces on the other hand, as well as its notable “transideological” presence in recent political discourse, nostalgia has also been hailed as a “positive social emotion” that “generates positive affect, elevates self-esteem, fosters social connectedness, and alleviates existential threat” within psychological research (cf. Sedikides et al. 2008). As has become apparent in this brief sketch on the conceptual history of nostalgia so far is that no single, all-encompassing theory of nostalgia has been agreed upon. While it has also been used in a vast variety of academic disciplines, still an agreed-upon interdisciplinary theory of nostalgia is not in sight (cf. Sielke 2016: 15). Therefore, this volume takes as point of departure for its contribution to the study of nostalgia a crucial yet often unacknowledged insight into the character of nostalgia. Svetlana Boym writes that nostalgia is not “always retrospective; it can be prospective as well” (Boym 2007: 8) and thus it could be said that nostalgia is also remembers forward, being as concerned with the present as it is with idealized pasts (cf. Sielke 2016: 13-15). This notion is crucial to the main idea of this book as it aims to add to the research on a further nuanced understanding of the concept by – instead of applying nostalgia to yet another different subject matter and thus adding to the almost endless array of nostalgias for and nostalgias in – juxtaposing it with the concept of sustainability. Boym hints

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at the relatedness of the two concepts when she writes that our “fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future” (ibid). As sustainability concerns itself with the ‘realities of our future,’ juxtaposing it with nostalgia will add new complexities to both concepts. Thus, this book presents the case that nostalgia has and is being used in much more complicated and paradoxical ways than it has usually been given credit for, so that in the end, instead of curing nostalgia from its “bad rap,” this volume will nonetheless add more nuances and complexities to the conceptualization of nostalgia so as to say that ‘nostalgia isn't what it used to be.’

S USTAINABILITY H AS N EVER B EEN W HAT I T W AS M EANT TO B E : B EYOND L INEAR C ONCEPTIONS OF T IME In contrast to nostalgia, the term sustainability in the English language is argued to have a quite short history, having its contemporary definitions tracking back to the expression ‘sustainable development’ which emerged in the 1980s (cf. Mebratu 1998; Appleton 2006). This recurrent association can be explained by the popularization of the expression of ‘sustainable development’ that resulted from the publication of the final report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), Our Common Future, in 1987. The WCED was an initiative of the United Nations to identify environmental strategies that would have a long-term impact for the international community, identifying gaps in social equity and enabling the maintenance of economic growth at a global level. It became known as the Brundtland Commission, after its chair Gro Harlem Brundtland, and the report trades under the name Brundtland Report which defines sustainable development as the “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987: 43). This is the most-often-quoted definition of sustainable development used ever since, which denotes the intergenerational concern evidently present in most of the contemporary discourses and debates surrounding it. However, as indicated by historian Jacobus Du Pisani, the history of sustainability or sustainable development has a strong connection to the history of the concept of progress, “not only because it was the antecedent to notions of development, but also because it would in due course as its own antipode elicit calls for sustainability” (2006: 84). Following Georg Henrik von Wright’s critical perspective on progress as “the Great Idea of Progress” developed by French scientists in the early-Enlightenment period (cf. 1997), Du Pisani indicates an

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important relation to temporal perception among the concepts of progress, development and sustainability. He indicates that from its emergence in premodern times through the Greco-Roman period and later influenced by Hebrew and Christian theology, the Western idea of progress has been linked to a “linear conception of time” which influences our understanding of sustainable development until today. Passing through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, progress became a secularized concept, “shifting away from a notion of advancement in a divinely-ordained desirable direction to a promised land beyond the grave, to one of a better life on Earth, warranted by scientific and technological development” (Du Pisani 2006: 85). Nonetheless, the linearity inherent in the interpretations of progress was still the measurement for the secularized notion of a “better life on Earth.” Von Wright argues in the same direction: The belief that science could help us in an increasingly complex predictive endeavour is reflected in the origin and rise to prominence of a science of futurology or future studies. I cannot help myself finding the phenomenon intellectually worrying rather than hopeful. I see it as symptomatic of a need of reassessing our present which one mistakenly thinks can be satisfied by anticipating our future. (1997: 13)

Von Wright is an advocate of cyclic approaches to history; he thus emphasizes the processes of cycles of artistic styles and how they develop historically as an alternative historic perspective to understand the dimension and importance of the present (cf. 1997). Coming back to the concept of sustainability, though, one can easily identify forms in which the future-oriented discourses of intergenerational well-being (that very commonly become future-generational responsibilities) come close to the concern expressed by von Wright. More recently, writer John O’Grady also indicated his concerns with a dogmatic tendency embedded in the intergenerational equity debates within sustainability (2003: 4). We will come back to this point in the next section of the introduction. The history of the concept of sustainability also has different points of origin in other languages, as for example, in French – durabilité and durable, in German – Nachhaltigkeit and nachhaltig, and in Dutch – duurzaamheid and duurzaam (cf. Du Pisani 2006: 85). In German, it was first used in the context of forestry maintenance by Hans Carl von Carlowitz in 1713. Concerned with the exhaustion caused by the mining industry at the time, Carlowitz wrote the forestry treatise Sylvicultura oeconomica, oder Haußwirthliche Nachricht und Naturmäßige Anweisung zur wilden Baum-Zucht, in which he refers to a nachhaltende Nutzung (sustainable use) of the forest resources (cf. Du Pisani 2006). Later these concerns

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shifted to the excessive use of wood and the imbalances it caused for forestry maintenance, as well as the excessive use of coal in the 19th century, when it became one of the central sources of energy (ibid). Some arguments present in the modern definitions of sustainable development can also be traced to earlier concerns about the growing number of the human population already in the 18 th century, which was famously expressed by the English reverend Thomas Malthus in the Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society in 1798 (cf. Mebratu 1998). Similarly, the emergence of the conservation movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States reflects concerns and reasonings that can be integrated into the history of sustainability and sustainable development. John Stuart Mill, for example, argued for the benefits of establishing a “stationary state” (1848) that should counter the development of capital and population, but not necessarily of human development. Mill focused on the utilitarian value of nature and the problems that the overconsumption might bring for the human population. Similar to Mill, Gifford Pinchot, one of the founders of the American Conservation Movement, advocated for the “wise use” (1947) of forests and public lands (cf. NRC 2011). The term ‘wise use’ coined by Pinchot is an almost direct translation of the earlier conception of nachhaltende Nutzung by Carlowitz, which was not an unknown term in the forestry management in English speaking circles. John Muir, on the other hand, emphasized the intrinsic values of nature and the reasons for protecting nature independently of human development. (cf. Worster 2005). Muir is considered one of the forefathers of the environmental movement that emerged in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s and many of his ideas were picked up by the defenders of the Deep Ecology movement (cf. Drengson 2017).2 The controversies over the debates of intrinsic versus instrumental values of nature are not evident in the conventional definitions of the modern “sustainable development” concept because it includes rather anthropocentric attributes that highlight the instrumental purposes of preserving the environment. Nonetheless, some very recent approaches have also picked up on this debate and used it to challenge the conventional anthropocentric properties of sustainability (cf. Appleton 2006; Butman 2016). In the mid to late 20th century, the notion of progress as “the secularized Great Idea of Progress” (cf. von Wright 1997) and the blind belief in science and 2

The Deep Ecology emerged as an ecological and environmental philosophy movement in the early 1970s. The term was coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess who stressed the intrinsic values of nature claiming that it does not exist as a resource for human exploitation and therefore it is to be valued and preserved in its own, deep rights (and not in a shallow value as resource for future human generations).

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technology as the ultimate achievement of progress were brought into question in relation to environmental thinking. The benefits of technological and scientific development were challenged in publications such as Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962, The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, A Blue Print for Survival by Edward Goldsmith et al. in 1972, Limits to Growth by the Club of Rome in 1972, and Small is Beautiful by Fritz Schumacher in 1973. Nonetheless, the conceptualization of development in the sustainable development discourses still follows many premises of the linear-based idea of progress and the emphasis on technological and scientific development as well as continuous economic growth. As previously mentioned, most of the modern and contemporary definitions of sustainability follow the institutional guidelines provided in the UN’s Conventions and reports, which are based on a three-bottom-line, or the threepillar-model of sustainability. These pillars encompass the economic, environmental and social dimensions of development. The initial advances for the three-bottom-line model can be traced back to the publication World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1980. This report envisioned the “integration of conservation and development” in the form of a “sustainable development” (cf. NRC 2011). In this sense, the report provided the foundation to formulate the ‘environmental-pillar’ through the concerns with conservation and the ‘economic-pillar’ through the integration of development. As this report was based on the idea of intergenerational rights, it already indicated some initial concerns with the ‘social-pillar’ as well. These ideas were reformulated in the Brundtland Report and both the subsequent Earth Summits organized by the United Nations and the models of sustainable development based on its three pillars were later improved and widely circulated.3 According to the three-pillar model, sustainable development is only achievable if all facets of sustainability and development are in balance. The economic facet is identified by the per-capita income and measured by financial growth, not only encompassing the quantity, but also the quality of economic 3

The Earth Summits organized by the UN set as one of their main goals the definition of common grounds of development among the state parties without increasing the damage on the planet’s environment – the basis for a sustainable development. They were realized every ten years in Rio de Janeiro 1992, Johannesburg 2002 and again in Rio in 2012 and reflected back on the values already established in the 1972 Conference on Human Environment realized in Stockholm, which was one of the landmarks for the recognition of the entanglements of ecological management with social and economic issues (cf. Mebratu 1998: 501).

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development (since it is meant to be sustainable); it also involves the understanding of financial stability as enabling human well-being (cf. d’Ercole/Keppler: 2001). The environmental facet comprises the maintenance of the biological information and resources necessary to keep up sustainable productivity and healthy ecosystems, thus moving from the initial forestry concerns to also embracing issues like the protection of biodiversity. Finally, the social facet involves issues like human rights, employment rights, and the possibility of democratic participation in decision-making processes (cf. Baker 2006). However, these models of sustainability have often been strongly criticized for their focus on the economic dimension of sustainable development (cf. Adams 2006). This economic dimension is usually established as the means to measure ‘development’ and the concomitant definition of development is based on a lineartemporal-thinking of accumulation and growth that could be related to the ‘Great Idea of Progress’ as criticized by von Wright. Furthermore, there is a lack of space for the role of culture in the conventional models of sustainability, which according to numerous scholars should be integrated not only as one of the pillars of sustainable development but even as its main dimension (cf. Pascual: 2009; Soini/Dessein: 2016). The role of culture has been further complicated in examinations of the differences between sustainable culture, cultural sustainability, and cultures of sustainability (cf. Brocchi: 2008; Kagan: 2011), as well as in culture in, for, or as sustainable development (cf. Soini/Dessein: 2016). In such cultural critiques, values usually taken for granted in the sustainable development debates are increasingly challenged and the models of sustainability are revealed to require much more flexibility in their conceptualizations and applicability, proving that ‘sustainability has never been what it was meant to be.’ Consequently, the underlying formulation of a linear temporality, which is usually imposed on sustainability, has begun to fade, allowing instead space for the exploration of its multiple temporal dimensions, which is what this volume aims at contributing to by juxtaposing sustainability with the concept of nostalgia.

F UTURES W ORTH P RESERVING : C OMPLEX R ELATIONS B ETWEEN N OSTALGIA AND S USTAINABILITY The cultural and temporal intricacies of sustainability previously outlined lead one to challenge conventional assumptions about the past and the present when attempting to sustain something for the future. Addressing the tensions in the concept of sustainability, John O’Grady has argued that “in its privileging of

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duration or permanence as a value, sustainability runs counter to a fundamental principle in nature, namely that ‘everything is in flux’” (2003: 3). Most visions of sustainability are founded on the premise of an ideal, or at least a preferable, state of nature which needs to be preserved for future generations. However, this raises the question of how we decide which permutations within the constant state of natural flux are most ‘worthy’ of being sustained. Critics of sustainability have observed that “[w]e certainly do not sustain nature ‘in itself.’ Rather, we sustain nature as we humans prefer it. More precisely, we preserve the resources needed for human consumption” (Butman 2016: n.p.). O’Grady frames this debate in the language of “intergenerational responsibility or equity,” which has been called the “backbone of sustainability” (Meyer/Helfman quoted in O’Grady 2003: 3). When we attempt to sustain something for the future, we make an implicit assumption that our cultural values will remain constant over time. As O’Grady observes, this begs the question: “How do we know with any certainty what future generations will be like and what they will need to sustain themselves?” (ibid: 4). Following such critical shifts of focus that examine and challenge the cultural values that inform the decisions about which aspects of nature to preserve and prioritize, as well as the emotional component which inevitably influences these choices, the affective dimension of sustainability has also started to gain more visibility. Consequently, several authors have noted that the concept of sustainability is inextricably bound up with that of nostalgia, which itself operates on notions of affectivity. As stated by scholar Jeremy Davies: Sustainability describes the search for a form of collective continuity at the level of popular culture and behaviour […] Its fundamental desire is precisely that which the nostalgic yearns for: a stable home, free from the losses of time. Sustainability defines the present time and present way of life as a satisfactory home – satisfactory ethically, emotionally, culturally and politically – by positing it as the place to which the future will always recur. (2010: 264)

As the essays in this collection show, it is not always the ‘present time’ which becomes privileged as a ‘satisfactory home.’ There are many versions of sustainability which imagine past or even inaccessible, pre-human times as the locus to which they would ideally return. To this extent, sustainability attempts to evade the influence of human value judgments by imaginatively reversing the destructive effects of human agency on the natural world. However, the thought process involved in this imaginative task is still essentially a nostalgic one: in the process, we construct a value-laden vision of the past as ‘a stable home’ to which we long to return.

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Davies is not alone in identifying the nostalgic logic at the heart of the concept of sustainability. Many scholars have noticed a similar nostalgia present in the works of Martin Heidegger, who is often regarded as a forefather of certain types of ecological thinking. In his 1951 essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Heidegger posits a “primal oneness” between the “earth and sky, divinities and mortals” (1993 [1951]: 351). To make a home on earth, he argues, humans must build and dwell in such a way as to “spare and preserve […] to take under our care, to look after the fourfold in its essence” (ibid: 353).4 Many have criticized Heidegger’s philosophy for the nostalgia implicit in this essentialist vision of the natural world. Yet Jeff Malpas argues that Heidegger’s strain of nostalgia is more akin to “mythophilia – a longing not for what is remembered, but for what is known only through its retelling, through story and myth” (2012: 165). Heidegger speaks of humanity’s “homelessness” (1993 [1951]: 363) in the natural world, because humans cannot make a home in nature without disrupting the primal unity that they seek to preserve. Accordingly, dwelling in nature involves a recognition of humanity’s own disruptive and destructive presence. To this extent, Heidegger’s myth of an ideal home resembles Svetlana Boym’s conception of ‘reflective nostalgia,’ which “thrives in algia, the longing itself, and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately” (2001: xviii). This desire to make a home of the natural world explains the intricate connection between the concepts of sustainability and nostalgia. If sustainability is concerned with the creation of a ‘stable home,’ nostalgia forms the counterpart awareness that such a home might be difficult or even impossible to realize. Yet the longing for this home is not exclusively projected into a mythical past in Heidegger’s work; in his 1953 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” he conceives of a meaningful relation between humankind and technology as indispensable for any sustainable future. On the one hand, humanity still disrupts and destructs an essentialist vision of nature as becomes apparent in the essay’s famous passage on the Rhine River: In the context of the interlocking processes pertaining to the orderly disposition of electrical energy, even the Rhine itself appears to be something at our command. The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with

4

Andrew J. Mitchell provides a comprehensive interpretation of the late Heidegger’s opaque philosophy (cf. 2015). The recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks raises the question to what degree his profound antisemitism permeates his entire philosophy - including his ecological thinking; for a balanced account of the impact of said Notebooks on his philosophical oeuvre, see Mitchell and Trawny (2017).

22 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. (1993 [1953]: 321)

Within this framework, technology becomes the point of departure for both nature’s abuse and humankind’s alienation. On the other hand, Heidegger – in a nostalgic recourse to the poet Friedrich Hölderlin – ends his essay on the note that the essence of technology entails the radical potential for humankind to make a ‘stable home’ of the natural world in a sustainable future. Timothy Morton contends that a more radical form of ‘ecocritique’ needs to tie in with Heidegger’s second notion of nostalgia which is not directed at a mythical past, but projects its longing into a sustainable future: It needs to be able to argue for a progressive view of ecology that does not submit to the atavistic authority of feudalism or ‘prehistoric’ primitivism (New Age animism). It requires, instead, that we be nostalgic for the future, helping people figure out that the ecological ‘paradise’ has not occurred yet. (2007: 162)

At first, the idea of being “nostalgic for the future” may seem contradictory, but this model of a future-oriented nostalgia can be helpful to understand the temporal complexity of sustainability. In the past twenty years, those who study sustainability have increasingly accepted that the “search for past Edens is both idealist and essentialist” (Mukta/Hardiman 2000: 126). As a result, there is a need to resituate the ideal image of an enduring home inherent in the concept of sustainability. Placing this notion of home in the future – as an ideal to strive towards – is one way of enabling people to long nostalgically for a time to come, rather than reverting to an essentialist image of the past. Oriented towards the future, nostalgic longing can be transformed into the desire to create a ‘stable home’ for successive generations. As Allison Hui observes, the “dynamics of affects such as nostalgia […] are significantly shaped by the possibility of hope and a return home” (2011: 81). Recently, critics have begun to investigate this relationship between nostalgia and hope, as well as the cultural importance of narratives about returning to an ideal home in the future. In the words of psychologist Jill Bradbury: [N]ostalgic longing may provide resources for the present and for our imaginative reach toward new possible horizons. Perhaps nostalgia is not only a longing for the way things were, but also a longing for futures that never came, or for horizons of possibilities that seem to have been foreclosed by the unfolding of events. (2012: 342)

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Thus, the hopeful narrative of ‘longing for futures that never came’ transforms nostalgia from a reactionary desire to return to a former way of being into the creative impulse to realize a previously impossible future. Here, the homing impulse of nostalgia begins to sound a lot like the transformative potential of sustainability. The longing implicit in nostalgia can be directed towards the future and used to imagine sustainable narratives of working towards an ecological ‘paradise’ which has not yet existed. The transformative power of future-oriented nostalgia is currently being explored in many different fields. As already indicated in the brief conceptual history of the term presented before, besides those working in narrative and cultural studies, scholars within psychology have also come to explore the untapped potential of nostalgia. For instance, Clay Routledge and his team have shown that, on an individual level, “nostalgia can be harnessed to imbue one’s life with an overarching sense of meaning and purpose” (2011: 638). Others have suggested that nostalgia may function as an ‘existential resource’ on a social and cultural level as well, as Jennifer Ladino, who in her study Reclaiming Nostalgia, coins the term ‘counter-nostalgia’ to refer to a form of nostalgia which is “strategically deployed to challenge a progressivist ethos” (2012: 15). Her argument comes very close to the definitions of ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’ by Boym already delineated before. She argues that: [L]onging can be a personal emotion as well as a larger, collective, even national sentiment. While much nostalgia, especially at this national level, encourages its adherents to return to a celebrated origin to find both comfort and justification for the present, counter-nostalgia revisits a dynamic past in a way that challenges dominant histories and reflects critically on the present. (ibid: 16)

Ladino proceeds to show how US-American authors in the environmentalist tradition have harnessed their nostalgic longing for the natural world to imagine sustainable alternatives to present narratives of progress and expansion. In this way, the concept of nostalgia has come to play an increasingly prominent role in contemporary theories of sustainability. Along these lines, Kate Soper has argued for the importance of an ‘avant-garde’ form of nostalgia which enables individuals and cultures to imagine a ‘green renaissance’ which may be “energized through the heightened sense of what has now gone missing, but might possibly be restored in a transmuted, less politically divisive, and more sustainable form” (2011: 23). The nexus of nostalgia and sustainability, in general, and the temporal aspect of the question of how to ‘sustain’ the nostalgic longing for an absent home, in particular, have also come to structure contemporary cultural critique. Similar to

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von Wright’s critique of the linear conception of progress delineated before, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht proposes in Our Broad Present (2010) that from the Age of Enlightenment until the mid-20th century, the chronotope ‘historical thought/consciousness’ dominated our conceptualization and experience of time. It was characterized by a linear conception of time, entailing a sense of leaving the past behind in the successive unfolding of events. Furthermore, the future was accessible as an “open horizon of possibilities” (Gumbrecht 2010: 12) with the moment of the present as a point of orientation in which the Cartesian subject was able to make decisions and to have agency. After the political catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century and accelerated by the recent explosion of electronic technology and its allencompassing intrusion into daily life, the chronotope ‘historical thought/consciousness’ has been replaced by a new conceptualization of time. Whereas the past was left behind in a linear path through time, the contemporary chronotope is characterized by a general inability to ‘close’ and to leave behind the past and hence, “instead of ceasing to provide points of orientation, pasts flood our present” (Gumbrecht 2010: 14; original emphasis). In stark contrast to the formally linear experience and unfolding of time, the contemporary moment is characterized by a dimension of varying simultaneities. However, according to Gumbrecht, the new chronotope manifests itself most significantly in its relation to the future: That we no longer live in historical time can be seen most clearly with respect to the future. For us, the future no longer presents itself as an open horizon of possibilities; instead, it is a dimension increasingly closed to all prognoses – and which, at the same time, seems to draw near as a menace. (Gumbrecht 2010: xiii)

Analyzing the theoretical underpinnings of Gumbrecht’s critique reveals its peculiar relation to the nexus of nostalgia and sustainability. Gumbrecht acknowledges the nostalgia inherent in his turn towards the notion of presence and his concordant skepticism towards the current domination of rational consciousness on the one hand and electronic technology on the other (cf. 2010: 15-17).5 However, it is the consequent non-relation and non-connection of 5

Gumbrecht’s focus on ‘presence’ – both as methodological category to subvert an apparent omnipresence of hermeneutics in the humanities and as quasi-telos in the individual search for intensive experiences of being-in-the-world – is most programmatically articulated in his 2004 book Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey; for an account of Gumbrecht’s conceptualization of presence, see Kreuzmair (2012).

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nostalgia and sustainability which enables his critical diagnosis of our present moment in the first place. In accordance with his theoretical stance, Gumbrecht refuses to consider how the nostalgic longing for an absent home underpinning his cultural critique might enable a productive and progressive relation to the temporal complexities of sustainability. Consequently, Our Broad Present does not propose any progressive and sustainable political agenda.6 Within a theoretical framework in which “the future no longer presents itself as an open horizon of possibilities [but] instead, […] seems to draw near as a menace”, any notion of sustainability – be it political, cultural, or social – is made impossible. Coming from a slightly different angle, however, Mark Fisher, in the introduction to his 2014 volume Ghosts of My Life, diagnoses contemporary culture as being characterized by anachronism and lethargy. According to him, any sense of “future shock” (Fisher 2014: 8) has vanished from the popular culture of the 21st century. In stark contrast to our current state of affairs, it had been the mutations and developments in popular music which enabled its consumers to measure the transition of cultural time during the timeframe from the 1960s through the 1980s. Our present culture is thus marked by a depressing feeling of finitude and exhaustion. Fisher puts it bluntly: “It doesn’t feel like the future” (ibid: 8). Drawing on Frederic Jameson, Fisher conceives of the mode of ‘formal nostalgia’ as dominating the present cultural moment; formal nostalgia is characterized by the constant artistic and creative recourse to styles, which once were – in the past – new and modern. The current moment is thus marked by an extra-ordinary orientation toward the past, an orientation so all-encompassing that it puts into question the possibility of any clear distinction between present and past: “In 1981, the 1960s seemed much further away than they do today” (ibid: 9). Consequently, since the 1980s, cultural time has been folding back in on itself and the intuitive experience of a linear and progressive development in and of time – what Gumbrecht identifies as a quality of the old chronotope ‘historical thought/consciousness’ – has made way for a peculiar condition of permanent simultaneities. Yet unlike Gumbrecht’s nostalgia-fueled diagnosis foreclosing a productive engagement with sustainable futures, Fisher’s cultural analysis leaves open the possibility of sustainable cultural and political engagement. On the one hand, the particular melancholic and nostalgic moment pervading contemporary popular 6

For a representative example of Gumbrecht’s skepticism towards a political agenda designed for sustainable development, see Gumbrecht (2017). However, this skepticism is counteracted by Gumbrecht’s rather optimistic account of the potentialities created by the progress of electronic technology as conceived and produced in Silicon Valley (cf. 2018).

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music and cultural artifacts is perceived by him as a result of the stagnation of the present. On the other hand, Fisher insists on the emancipatory potential – both regarding democratization and pluralization – of pop cultural artifacts. It is hence this exact nostalgic moment that also sustains the desire for a different kind of future than the neoliberal-capitalistic one we are inhabiting today. 7 As delineated so far, from unlikely beginnings, the nostalgic longing for an absent home has become central to contemporary understandings of sustainability, while ideas of sustainability – especially in the form of sustaining the individual’s sense of self and their social relationships – have also become important in the psychological study of nostalgia. Furthermore, the nexus of nostalgia and sustainability in the form of a nostalgic longing for an absent home has structured and still structures cultural critique as can be seen with recourse to Heidegger, Gumbrecht, and Fisher. While it is the critique of a linear conception of progress and time, in the sense presented earlier by Du Pisani and von Wright, that is the common ground of this kind of nostalgic longing, the three positions differ with regard to the imagined ways of how “[t]ime present and time past / [a]re both perhaps present in time future [...]” (Eliot 2002: 177). Heidegger’s rather vague hope in the essence of technology as enabling the recapture of an absent home is radicalized in Gumbrecht’s general skepticism regarding the possibility to work towards any kind of sustainable future – only Fisher lays bare the potential of culture in general, and popular culture in particular, to open up horizons for a future that might escape the current regime of global neoliberalism. This also aligns with one of the fundamental ideas behind our volume which not only features academic contributions, but also creative ones to put emphasis on the potential of cultural and artistic practices to produce more sustainable futures. Hence, our earlier question returns in a different form: namely, how individuals and different social groups select which aspects of their culture and environment to sustain for the future, and which should give way to notions of ‘progress’ and ‘development.’

7

Similarly, Fisher concludes his polemic Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) on an almost utopian notion: “The long, dark night of the end of history has to be grasped as an enormous opportunity. The very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is possible again” (2009: 80-81).

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F OLLOWING C HAPTERS

Positing this overlap between nostalgia and sustainability, the essays in this collection combine perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, including literature, anthropology, cultural studies, history, philosophy and art to shed light on how cultures construct narratives of development. The following chapters seek to question common assumptions about the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability, in particular revealing the importance of replacing totalizing definitions with a series of individual and context-specific interventions in artistic and cultural practices. They thus also challenge the conventional notion of a collective global responsibility for sustaining the environment, arguing for the vital significance of focusing on local and regional inequalities in the global production and consumption of resources, and on the sites where economic and environmental injustices are perpetrated. Following this introduction, the volume begins with two insightful theoretical chapters. S. D. Chrostowska’s chapter on “Nostalgia and the Genesis and Sustainability of Values” presents an original reading of nostalgia and its crucial role in the creation of values. Chrostowska sheds light on the progressive potential of nostalgia as a driving force of social critique, working as a “model for the present” (38) that sees beyond traditional notions of nostalgia as being inherently regressive and conservative. By pointing us towards the nostalgic inflection of utopian thought instead, she reads nostalgia as opting not for “a simple return to, but a detour via, the past as part of improving on the here and now, on the way to imagining a still better future” (ibid). In a further theoretical exploration, in her contribution “Between Nostalgia and the New: Turns to Ontology in Contemporary Theory,” Elizabeth Kovach demonstrates how the contemporary proliferation of the concept of ‘ontology’ in the humanities and social sciences essentially hinges on a nostalgic longing, although not necessarily for a lost past but for a not-yet-realized future. By focusing on the influential ontologies of theorists Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, and Karen Barad, the author lays bare the common denominator of these otherwise highly differing theories being the nostalgic desire to sustain “new directions for the world’s socio-political becoming” (70) by grounding them in ‘ontology.’ The volume follows these with three creative contributions by artistresearchers that reflect on their own process of artistic practice within the framework of nostalgia and sustainability. By combining these creative contributions with the academic chapters, the volume recognizes processes of artistic thinking and creation as significant forms of research. These creative contributions demonstrate that artistic practice is infused by deep critical and

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(self-) reflective thinking that instigate alternative and often times empowering forms of re-assessing social, cultural, and environmental realities. In “Civic Art Lab: Reflections on Art, Design, and Sustainability,” Laura Scherling and Jeff Kasper present their “storefront education project.” The authors contextualize the background of the project ‘Civic Art Lab’ and perform an insightful process of self-reflection employing the experimental methodology of ‘exhibition as self-reflection’ and ‘dialogue as self-reflection.’ The chapter brings rich observations about the process of artistic creation in interaction with local communities in different neighborhoods of New York City, as well as the role of memory and nostalgic expectations that come into play in the formation of these communities’ identities and practices. The authors emphasize the transdisciplinary potentials of the participatory and hands-on forms of knowledge exchange that are enabled through Civic Art Lab. Furthermore, they indicate that such forms of exchange promote non-hierarchical sustainability practices that can be engaged with in everyday life and in nostalgic imaginaries for the future. Tom Clucas’ piece “Prospective Memory: Sustainability in Poetic Theory and Practice” is equally an artistic contribution and a theoretical reflection on ‘sustainable poetry.’ Clucas first revisits contemporary ecopoetry to lay bare its complex relations to nostalgia and sustainability. He then proposes that the older genre of the ‘prospect poem’ employs a nostalgic perspective to enable the reader to perceive nature beyond the written word it is conventionally tied to. The author puts his theoretical considerations into practice by closing with a poem of his own. Lisa Simpson’s contribution “Agente Costura: Sustainability Sounds” brings a critical reflection on the contemporary fashion industry and the relations of garment production with nostalgia and sustainability. Simpson is a ‘sewing agent’ who creates musical performances with her sewing machine, while upcycling pieces of garment brought to the performance by her audience. While reflecting on her process of creation and describing her practice, Simpson emphasizes the emotional value that is (or can be) attached or detached to pieces of clothing. The author indicates that this form of nostalgic value is a fundamental element to ‘slow down’ the fashion industry and imagine new possible sustainable relationships to textile, clothing and fashion. In the sequence, the volume comprises seven chapters that present case studies of different cultural manifestations, impacts or consequences of a sustainable application of nostalgia (and anti-nostalgia) or a nostalgic longing for a sustainable future. In “Considering the Values of the Past: Sustainability and (Anti-)Nostalgia in the Medieval Monastery” Theo B. Lap argues that the concept of ‘anti-nostalgiaʼ has been part of medieval monasteries’ strategies to devalue the monk’s memories

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of his former ‘worldly’ life. Lap provides the case-study of the 12th century Consolation on the Death of a Friend to demonstrate how this influential church document destabilizes the accountability of words to facilitate discourses of antinostalgia in order to further alienate the monk from his former existence. Lap demonstrates the ambiguous role that memory played in the premodern monastic form of life and the utopian focus of anti-nostalgia on the ‘salvation of humankind.’ He concludes by pointing to the relations that this understanding of anti-nostalgia might have with possible interpretations of cultural sustainability and cultural legacy. Daniel Eltringham’s essay “Commoning Nostalgia: Making ‘Romantic Sensibility Sustainable’ in Contemporary Poetry” examines Romantic articulations of nostalgia as sustainability through the praxis of ‘commoning.’ The author emphasizes the qualities of commoning in the late-Romanticist nostalgic longing for an idealized ‘golden age’ infused by a holistic or pastoral understanding of organic communities which unfold in the development of the “avant-garde transatlantic poetics” (142) further analyzed by him. Eltringham provides an extensive array of examples from post-war experimental poetry to the work of contemporary poets, Stephen Collis, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson. According to the author the process of “active, dynamic quality of remembering and restoration in a dialectical relationship between past, present and future” evident in his examples is what “allows nostalgia to give on to sustainability” (141). Such a process, he asserts can be “the projection of a future collective good that is maintained by the action of commoning” (ibid) as a form of sustaining nostalgia. Katharina Metz’s contribution “Nostalgic Utopias: William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances (1892-1907)” conceptually develops the nexus of nostalgia and sustainability by close reading William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances. By proposing that the genre of ‘nostalgic utopias’ “imagine[s] a nostalgic return on which [it] build[s] ideas and guidelines of a future worth realizing” (162), Metz demonstrates how the trilogies’ complex reflections upon nostalgia put into question the common perception of progress as leitmotif of and in late 19th century U.S. culture. Furthermore, according to the author, through its implication of intertextuality, the utopian novel unveils how intrinsic values of nostalgic cultural representations are critically projected into the imaginaries of sustainable futures. In her essay, “Cultural Ecosystems and the Paradoxes of American Environmentalism,” Ioanna Kipourou provides a critical reflection on what she perceives of as the paradoxes of ‘American environmentalism’ by analyzing the works of Henry David Thoreau and Herman Melville and juxtaposing them with

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contemporary ‘green politics’ in the U.S. The author begins by describing the paradigmatic sense of conservation of American landscapes in the form of culturally tamed nature with the example of the Yellowstone National Park. She follows this with an analysis of two American canonical writers and the role that their work has played in the formation of a local cultural imaginary of nature. Kipourou closes her chapter with a critical reflection on the recent reconsideration of the American Antiquities Act and the consequences it brings to the political and cultural imaginary in relation to native lands and culture. Moritz Berkemeier’s “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Pastness: Nostalgia and Sustainability in American Post-Suburbia” contributes a study of recently-built US-American master-planned suburban communities often regarded as being part of ‚post-suburbia.’ These constructions make use of the existent nostalgic sentiments for the classic “All-American small town” in order to market these supposedly sustainable visions of living in the 21st century. Berkemeier focuses his analysis on the newly-built community of Providence, Nevada delineating how the developers of Providence in their “pursuit of pastness” revert back to the nostalgic myths of the “small town” in order to sell their post-suburban development project, which speaks to the commodifying potential of nostalgia in the current U.S. cultural imaginary. In his contribution, “Nostalgia and the Sustainable Lyric: John Burnside and the Pibroch,” Owen Gurrey provides an enlightening reading of Burnside’s poem, Pibroch, filled with significant allusions to various aspects of Scotland’s biocultural history, combined with a critical reflection on the sense of national territory and identity and the contemporary ecological conditions of the Anthropocene. The author vividly defends the ecocritical value of poetry and makes it evident in his close reading of Burnside’s poem. Throughout the chapter, Gurrey leads the reader through a dense journey challenging cultural interpretations of nature, the ontological status of the ‘non-human’ and, consequently, what sustaining might mean in a scale that goes beyond the human. With Niklas Salmose’s chapter “Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency” comes another illuminating take on the complex interrelations of nostalgia, sustainability and the Anthropocene as he analyzes the ambiguous uses of nostalgic imagery in Zhao Liang’s acclaimed documentary film Behemoth (2015). He reads the film he reads as an “alternative representation of the Anthropocene to traditional cli-fi narratives” (240) and delineates how the aesthetic strategies used by Liang – instead of providing a ‘nostalgic redemption’ for humanity in the face of the climatic catastrophes of the Anthropocene (as would the blockbuster cli-fi films) – give way to “potential introspections of important contemporary concepts of posthumanity” (253) and therefore reclaim multiple forms of

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ecological agency. Thus, nostalgia, as indicated by the author, works in Behemoth as “a reminder of what is essentially human and simultaneously reveals what is challenging this humanity” (254). The volume closes with the afterword “Value Creation in Nostalgia and Sustainability: Interacting on Behalf of the Absent” by Andreas Langenohl who provides insights into the nature of value and evaluation intrinsically tied to both concepts by proposing the framework of “interacting on behalf of the past and the future.” Langenohl argues that the process of “interacting-on-behalf-of” might present itself as an answer to the paradox of the presence/absence of the past and the future. He indicates that the past interacts with the present in the form of nonactualized possibilities, while the future (in its anticipated facticity, yet constant absence) requires actualization in the present. Thus, nostalgia, instead of holding only the negative charge of aiming at a ‘better’ and therefore ‘ideological’ past, is presenting itself as “something after which the openness of the present is modelled” (263). Similarly, accepting the facticity or the “presence of the future” has “an indispensable significance in the collective valuation of present-future forms of life” (264) that consequently requires an understanding of sustainability as an interactive practice of evaluation in the present. Langenohl goes on by stating that the task remains for future research further to explore the conceptualization of “nostalgia as a mode of interaction on behalf of a past which introduces into the present an array of unfulfilled promises and possibilities” (263). By juxtaposing the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability, the essays and artistic contributions shed light on the wider questions of how cultures construct narratives of progress and how they prioritize which aspects of culture should be sustained, and which should give way to ‘progress,’ ‘change,’ or ‘development.’ The present collection of essays serves to open this debate and in no sense aims at exhausting it. Further and deeper investigations about the juxtaposition of nostalgia and sustainability and the consequences that it presents for local and global cultural imaginaries, perceptions of time and diverse processes of creating values and evaluation is needed.

R EFERENCES Adams, William M. (2006): The Future of Sustainability: Re-thinking Environment and Development in the Twenty-first Century, Report of the IUCN Renowned Thinkers Meetings, January 29-31. Appleton, Albert F. (2006): “Sustainability: A Practitioner’s Reflection.” In: Technology in Society 28/1, pp. 3-18.

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Baker, Susan (2006): Sustainable Development, London: Routledge. Bauman, Zygmunt (2017): Retrotopia, Cambridge: Polity Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Boym, Svetlana (2007): “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” In: The Hedgehog Review 9/2, pp. 7-18. Bradbury, Jill (2012): “Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future: Nostalgia and Hope.” In: Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18/3, pp. 34150. Brocchi, Davide (2008): “The Cultural Dimension of Sustainability.” In: Sacha Kagan/Volker Kirchberg (eds.), Sustainability: A New Frontier for the Arts and Cultures, Frankfurt am Main: VAS, pp. 26-58. Butman, Jeremy (2016): “Against ‘Sustainability’”, August 2, 2017. In: The New York Times, August 8 (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/opinion/ against-sustainability.html) Cross, Gary (2015): Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Capitalism, New York: Columbia UP. Davies, Jeremey (2010): “Sustainable Nostalgia.” In: Memory Studies 3/3, pp. 262-8. Davis, Fred (1979): Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, New York: Free Press. d’Ercole, Marco M./Keppler, Jan (2001): “Key Features and Principals.” In: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Sustainable Development: Critical Issues, Paris: OECD, pp. 35-54. Drengson, Alan (2017): “Some Thought on the Deep Ecology Movement,” August 7, 2017 (http://www.deepecology.org/deepecology.htm) Du Pisani, Jacobus A. (2006): “Sustainable Development: Historical Roots of the Concept.” In: Environmental Sciences 3/2, pp. 83-96. Duyvendak, Jan Willem, The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eliot, T. S. (2002): “Four Quartets.” In: Collected Poems, 1909-1962, London: Faber and Faber, pp. 175-209. Farley, Heather M./Smith, Zachary A. (2014): Sustainability: If It’s Everything, Is It Nothing? New York: Routledge. Fisher, Mark (2009): Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Fisher, Mark (2014): Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Winchester, UK: Zero Books. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2004): Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford: Stanford UP.

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Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2010): Our Broad Present, New York: Columbia UP. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2017): “Blogs Digital/Pausen: Wem kann am Überleben der Menschheit gelegen sein?” December 16, 2017 (http://blogs.faz.net/ digital/2017/12/16/wem-kann-am-ueberleben-der-menschheit-gelegen-sein1406/). Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2018): Weltgeist im Silicon Valley: Leben und Denken im Zukunftsmodus, Zürich: NZZ Libro. Heidegger, Martin (1993 [1951]): “Building Dwelling Thinking.” In: David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, pp. 343-363. Heidegger, Martin (1993 [1953]): “The Question Concerning Technology.” In: David Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, pp. 307-341. Hobsbawm, Eric (1983): “Introduction: Inventing Tradition.” In: Eric Hobsbawm/Terence Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 1-14. Hofer, Johannes/Anspach, Carolyn Kiser (trans.) (1934 [1688]): “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688.” In: Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2, pp. 376-391. Hui, Allison (2011): “Placing Nostalgia: The Process of Returning and Remaking Home.” In: Tonya K. Davidson/Ondine Park/Rob Shields (eds.), Ecologies of Affect: Placing Nostalgia, Desire, and Hope, Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, pp. 65-84. Hutcheon, Linda and Valdés, Mario J. (1998): “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.” In: Poligrafías: Revista de Literatura Comparada 3: pp. 18-41. Huyssen, Andreas (2003): Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Redwood City: Stanford UP. International Union for Conservation of Nature (1980): World Conservation Strategy: Living Resource Conservation for Sustainable Development. Gland: IUCN. Kagan, Sacha (2011): Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity, Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Kreuzmair, Elias (2012): “Hans Ulrich Gumbrechts Begriff der Präsenz und die Literatur.” In: Helikon. A Multidisciplinary Online Journal 2, pp. 233-247. Ladino, Jennifer. (2012): Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Lasch, Christopher (1984): “The Politics of Nostalgia.” In: Harper’s Magazine 11, pp. 65-70.

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Lowenthal, David (1985): The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Malpas, Jeff (2012): Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Matt, Susan J. (2011): Homesickness: An American History, Oxford: Oxford UP. Mebratu, Desta (1998): “Sustainability and Sustainable Development: Historical and Conceptual Review.” In: Environ Impact Asses Rev 18, pp. 493-520. Meyer, Judy L./Helfman, Gene S. (1993): “The Ecological Basis of Sustainability.” In: Ecological Applications 3/4, 569-571. Mill, John Stuart (1848): “Of the Stationary State.” In: Principles of Political Economy with Some of their Applications to Social Philosophy, Book 4, Chapter 6, August 7, 2017, London: John W. Parker. (http://www.efm.bris.ac. uk/het/mill/book4/ bk4ch06) Mitchell, Andrew J. (2015): The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger, Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP. Mitchell, Andrew J./Trawny, Peter (eds.) (2017): Heidegger's Black Notebooks: Responses to Anti-Semitism, New York: Columbia UP. Morton, Timothy (2007): Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Mukta, Parita/Hardiman, David (2000): “The Political Ecology of Nostalgia.” In: Capitalism Nature Socialism 11/1, pp. 113-33. National Research Council (NRC) (2011): Sustainability and the U.S. EPA, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. O’Grady, John P. (2003): “How Sustainable is the Idea of Sustainability?” In: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment 10/1, pp. 1-10. Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “Nostalgia,” (http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/128472?redirectedFrom=nostalgia). Oxford English Dictionary (OED): “Sustainability,” (http://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/299890). Pascual, Jordi (2009): “Culture and Sustainable Development: Examples of Institutional Innovation and Proposal of a New Cultural Policy Profile.” In: Agenda 21 for Culture. United Cities and Local Governments-UCLG. Pinchot, Gifford (1947): Breaking New Ground, New York: Harcourt Brace. Reynolds, Simon (2012): Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to Its Own Past, London: Faber and Faber. Routledge, Clay/Arndt, Jamie/Wildschut, Tim/Juhl, Jacob/Vingerhoets, Ad/Schlotz, Wolff (2011): “The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource.” In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101/3, pp. 638-652.

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Sedikides, Constantine/Wildschut, Tim/Arndt, Jamie/Routledge, Clay (2008): “Nostalgia: Past, Present, and Future.” In: Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, pp. 304-307. Sielke, Sabine (2016): “Nostalgie – ‘die Theorie’: eine Einleitung.” In: Sabine Sielke (ed.), Nostalgie / Nostalgia: Imaginierte Zeit-Räume in globalen Medienkulturen / Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures, Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, pp. 9-31. Soini, Katriina/Dessein, Joost (2016): “Culture-Sustainability Relation: Towards a Conceptual Framework.” In: Sustainability, 8/167, pp. 2-12. Soper, Kate (2011): “Passing Glories and Romantic Retrievals: Avant-garde Nostalgia and Hedonist Revival.” In: Axel Goodbody/Kate Rigby (eds.), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, pp. 17-29. Wilson, Janelle L. (2005): Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, Lewisburg: Bucknell UP. World Commission on Environment and Development (1987): Our common future, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worster, Donald (2005): “John Muir and the Modern Passion for Nature.” In: Environmental History 10/1, pp. 8-19. Wright, Georg Henrik von (1997): “Progress, Fact and Fiction.” In: Arnold Burgen/Peter McLaughlin/Jürgen Mittelstraß (eds.), The Idea of Progress, Berlin: deGruyter, pp. 1-18.

Nostalgia and the Genesis and Sustainability of Values S.D. C HROSTOWSKA

Values are rooted in memory. We only hold the values we have and reaffirm them by remembering them. Regardless of our ontological commitments, memory appears indispensable to the meaning and maintenance of all types of value, from the moral and the aesthetic to the political and the economic. Yet it is not on memory as a precondition for value that I want to dwell. Rather, I wish to argue something at once narrower and stronger: namely, that values derive, in part, from nostalgic memory, which is to say from recollection inspired by a present desire for alterity and meaning. Someone else got here first, of course. The root of moral conscience and thus of principles, noted Friedrich Nietzsche, is quasi-somatic memory understood as “active desire not to let go, a desire to keep on desiring what has been, on some occasion, desired, really it is the will’s memory” (Nietzsche 2006: 36). However, there is more to be said. The experience of nostalgia, or past-oriented longing, involves desirous remembrance as the imagination of, and even reflection on, the longed-for object. This object is evoked as a memory and assigned to a past that is lost and perhaps irrecoverable. Not in itself a value, but only its representative, the object is remembered and valued because desired, and desired because remembered and valued. In circular fashion, its value is recognized and reinforced by its endurance in our memory, and vice versa. In this way, nostalgic longing is implicated in the genesis or crystallization of values, which affect our actions in the present and our disposition towards the future. My case for a strong link between values and nostalgia rests on two interconnected arguments. The first is that nostalgia, rather than something inescapably regressive, is half of the arc of desire. Its extension is future-oriented affect-reflection, the “desire to keep on desiring,” and the prospect of recovering something of “what has been.” At its most emblematic, the nostalgic desire/wish

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to selectively restore a past condition considered superior to the present is cast in the “future perfect,” as a utopian horizon. This past condition may be a particular, and since lost, configuration of desire, ethos, or set of values whose reactivation in the present is taken as vital to sustaining the desire for change and to transforming that present for the better. Common to nostalgic and utopian sentiments/reflections is a certain discontent (of varying degrees, to be sure) with the status quo, judged as lacking in certain qualities attributed to the past. Utopianism draws on nostalgic attachments to effect not a simple return to, but a detour via, the past as part of improving on the here and now, on the way to imagining a different futurity. Such looping of the future through the past, holding on to the vanishing past in the shaping of a wish, though in itself not a new phenomenon, is at work in modern “social dreaming” (Sargent 1994: 3). By modern social dreams I mean temporalized utopianism, of nineteenth-century vintage; just as nostalgia underwent temporalization and translation into history, so did utopia (cf. Koselleck 2002). Values and ideals themselves became historicized, genealogized. Everything began to transpire along the vector of time, and, more specifically, historical becoming: lost time could be regained, the past reactivated in an enhanced, glorified version, and some radically new future forged thanks to the convergence of historical, progressivist, and revolutionary thinking. Still today, the collective imagination of segments of society breathes new life into the values behind the last seismic revolutionary upheaval, 1968, hoping against hope to play it again. Over the last two hundred years, this nostalgic-utopian temporal loop, answering the often-opposing needs for continuity and hope, has only become more pronounced. It fits within modernity’s notorious ambivalence, with the present increasingly stretched – permitting unprecedented traffic of ideas and actions – between past and future. It is on this tightrope of temporal experience that utopianizing nostalgia has turned its somersaults. My second argument for a strong link between value and nostalgia is that the intersection of memory, imagination, and reflection operative in nostalgia – and especially in its above-described utopian conversion – provides much of the ethical force behind social critique, and that across the political spectrum. The reason for this, as I see it, is nostalgia’s entanglement in the formation of key social-critical ideas like alienation, crisis of experience, individualism, or gentrification. Employed critically, each of these ideas can evoke a privileged anterior time as a model for the present, as aspects of the past are ascribed greater value.

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Alienation, as the term has been used pejoratively since the eighteenth century, presupposes the historical existence of a superior, nonalienated condition, whether in the form of an original or an essential human nature, or in the form of society in which the individual was not yet estranged from, because involuntarily dispossessed of, the fruits of their own labor by the systems of slavery or capitalist “wage slavery” (the first of these variants goes back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the second to Karl Marx, in whom the two could be said to combine) (cf. Williams 1985: 34-35). Implicit in the shift in values wrought by the changing nature of labor and property relations is the loss or cheapening of spiritual values and the modern tyranny of Mammon, or economic value. Similarly, in the thesis most associated with Walter Benjamin, the poverty of experience that is communicable, transmissible and hence social – the lament that this dimension of life has “fallen in value” – supposes an earlier capacity for intergenerational passing-down of past experiences, a capacity that modern phenomena like positional warfare and inflation leave in ruins in their wake.1 Individualism, for its part, can either be regretted as a liberal value or a Romantic one of individual uniqueness, and as something lost on vulgar, collectivist Marxism (as it was by Theodor W. Adorno) or, on the contrary, attacked as pernicious bourgeois ideology in the name of community. As for processes of gentrification displacing low-income inner-city residents, they can be accused of impoverishing the urban social fabric by decreasing earlier social diversity and organic bonds between members of different classes, and thereby of degrading the lot of the proletariat by banishing poverty out of sight of the well-to-do. Conversely, gentrification can be praised for preserving the architectural past from destruction and restoring social diversity to previously poor neighborhoods. Still another example of nostalgia-imbued social-critical vocabulary is environmental sustainability, condemning the mass extinction of species and ecosystems currently under way, and whose nostalgic dimension is sometimes expressed in ecological fantasies of reviving preanthropocenic nature and even prehistoric wildlife.2 1

See Benjamin (1999a). Benjamin’s thesis opens onto utopian speculation about the possibilities of technology for “making a new start,” a path he calls “barbarism” and a positive “nihilism” (1999b: 306). Benjamin returns to the theme of the destruction of experience in 1936 in “The Storyteller,” which is significantly more mournful and nostalgic.

2

See, for instance, Davies (2010). Aware of the dangers of nostalgia, Davies casts the dream and ethical imperative of sustainability as a “nostalgia for the future” that is both utopian and critical, and translates, in the face of our “[f]ull-spectrum ecological crisis,” into a global social and environmental “ethical programme” capable of embracing value pluralism (2010: 264, 266, 267).

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As is evident in these imaginative conceptual constructs, nostalgia involves affective-reflective dissatisfaction with the here and now that motivates a critical response to the one-way narrative of progress and contributes to modern cultural ambivalence. It is through such critical-nostalgic responses that values crystallize. The modernity of nostalgia’s historical recognition as a malaise and social phenomenon does not clash with the antiquity of values. In the modern conjuncture, nostalgic experience indexes anxieties around social change and is responsible for the prominence given to many social and cultural values orbiting the good life (values such as cultural heritage and tradition, authenticity, organic community, the possibility of revolutionary transformation, utopia, and sustainability as a social ideal). The variety and modular character of available moral values – detachable from a coherent set of religious or philosophical beliefs – leaves values open to critical questioning on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Strong value-attachments are criticizable precisely for making use of nostalgic energies. Thus, nostalgia and critique combine to give us not only nostalgic critique, but also the critique of nostalgia.

N OSTALGIA AND C RITIQUE The foregoing remarks stem from a broader investigation of the relationship between critique and affect, specifically nostalgic affect. What role has nostalgia played in the formation of progressive critiques of society? Occasionally, one does hear mention of the “critical value of nostalgia,” or of a modern intellectual tradition that “incorporates [a kind of] nostalgia” (which is “reflective” and good), a tradition Svetlana Boym labelled “off-modern” (cf. Boym 2001: xvi-xvii; 2231). Overwhelmingly, though, be this in casual remarks or scholarly studies, one hears nostalgia criticized. Whether it is the threatening “reactionary nostalgia,” as against “liberal hope,” or sentimental attachment to the “good old days,” as against the rapacious go-getter attitude required in today’s marketplace, it seems that to characterize something as nostalgic is enough to effectively dismiss it. Nostalgic attachments feed vain, rose-tinted illusions about the past in whose name the present is denigrated. By the same token, they are alien to clearheaded, impassioned, and incisive critical reflection. Thus, if nostalgia does have a role in critique, conservative or even progressive, it is a negative one, rendering the critique itself suspect. By suggesting “unreflected” values (in a way melancholy,

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as a mood of pensiveness, associated since Aristotle’s day with art and philosophy, does not), nostalgia casts doubt on one’s critical bona fides.3 Recent scholarship on nostalgia in the sciences and the humanities has begun to question the widespread belief in nostalgia’s inherent, inevitable conservatism. There is no consensus on whether nostalgia belongs, in some absolute or transhistorical sense, to the conservative or liberal, regressive or progressive side of the ideological spectrum. There is, however, little doubt that nostalgic memory is ideology-prone, if not always already ideologically ‘tainted.’ What is lost in focusing the question through nostalgia’s particular ideological ties is the critical edge nostalgia has long provided irrespective of political and economic loyalties. Nostalgia-critique, launched typically, though not exclusively, from the left, tends to make nostalgia-based, nostalgic criticism synonymous with reaction. By thus identifying nostalgia (reduced to a sentiment and held responsible for muddling or distorting otherwise objective critical judgment) as a major culprit, nostalgia-critique is blind to its own nostalgic resources (in contrast to, say, the resources of melancholy, empathy, or ressentiment, which it does not deny). This hostile critique of nostalgia has been a target of those who defend nostalgia’s value for us.4 Rarely, however, is that value taken to be critical value. Missing from such defenses is a substantive and sustained account of the positive 3

On melancholy, see for example Klibansky/Panofsky/Saxl (1964). Immanuel Kant – who largely defined the modern meaning of critique – has long been associated with a melancholy cast of mind, his observations on the subject in the Anthropology notwithstanding. In that work, he distinguishes, first of all, between mere propensity and condition, classes melancholy as a “temperament of feeling,” as an ailment of the cognitive faculty that he equates (as melancholia, or Tiefsinnigkeit) with “a mere delusion of misery” proper to “the gloomy self-tormentor (inclined to worry),” leading to mental disorder, which is to say to melancholy qua hypochondria (Kant 2006: 96, 107, 187). Interestingly for us, Kant also devotes a paragraph to nostalgia (homesickness), which he regards as a sensory product of the faculty of affinity, and, above all, as a curiosity (cf. ibid: 71-72). An indisputable authority on Kantian melancholy, Jean-Baptiste Botul used Kant’s nonexistent sex life as a departure point for his thesis about the means of philosophical reproduction: “Philosophers do not penetrate, they withdraw. This withdrawal has a name: melancholy,” further described as “a malady of solitude” (1999: 32; my translation). The work may have been a hoax (its real author being the philosopher Frédéric Pagès), yet the observation falls in the tradition of type-casting the profoundly thoughtful male as a melancholic.

4

On the history of the use and abuse of nostalgia as a negative critical category, see Naqvi.

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relationship between nostalgia and critique, the discursive articulation of valuecommitments, particularly the social or moral kind. That nostalgia is implicated in the development of critical practice is clear whether one tunes in to arguments for radical social change and against ‘left-wing melancholy’ or to conservative denunciations of the left’s appeal to romanticized, idealized, or fetishized pasts, as opposed to the real pasts actually worth going back to. Yet as much as Critical Theory’s affinities with melancholy and negative passions like dialectical, hopeful despair have been widely recognized (cf. Traverso 2017; Marasco 2015; Flatley 2008; Pensky 2001; Brown 1999; Rose 1978) – this thanks in large measure to the embrace of melancholy as method or disposition by the early Frankfurt School or those associated with it (notably Benjamin) – the same current’s nostalgic roots have been largely passed over in silence. And yet, as Fredric Jameson observed decades ago, “there is no reason why a nostalgia conscious of itself, a lucid and remorseless dissatisfaction with the present on the grounds of some remembered plenitude, cannot furnish as adequate a revolutionary stimulus as any other: the example of Benjamin is there to prove it” (Jameson 1971: 82). Similarly, there is no reason why a nostalgia unconscious of itself and nonetheless resolutely critical cannot provide such a stimulus: the history of radical social criticism before and since Benjamin is there to prove it. Given that, perhaps more than ever, critique relies for its resources on the work of passionate and hopeful retrieval from obscurity and oblivion of past ideas, concepts, and values – as precedents, forerunners, resources, and creative spurs – the critical value of nostalgia operating this retrieval remains woefully undertheorized.

V ALUE -G ENESIS Before returning to my thesis about the nostalgic genesis of critical-social values, let me approach the question of nostalgia’s critical function (and, by extension, its function in both conservative and progressive social critiques) via a detour through the science of nostalgia. A few years ago, I heard the psychologist Tim Wildschut, a go-to guy in empirical nostalgia studies, speak about his lab and the “function of nostalgia.” Since then, his collaboration with Constantine Sedikides et al. has received lots of media attention. One particularly sympathetic appreciation reported Sedikides comparing nostalgia, or nostalgic remembering, to “creating an inexhaustible bank account which is there for you if you want to withdraw from it” (Sedikides quoted in Adams 2014: n.p.). Of course, like any cultural currency, nostalgia is also not

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in endless supply – though perhaps, if diluted, it could hypothetically last forever – as long as we understand that this dilution would probably come at the cost of some of nostalgia’s more interesting qualities. What qualities are those? For one, something that Sedikides and Wildschut have themselves identified and interpreted as nostalgia’s ethical and political valences, its correlation with altruism, antimaterialism, and Gemeinschaft – precisely the values associated with some of the greatest German representatives of the critical tradition. Thus, “[i]n strongly nostalgic states,” reports The Observer, giving the highlights of their findings, individuals are shown to be more likely to commit to volunteering or other expressions of altruism. Their sense of the value of money is weakened, leading them to make willful purchases. Couples use shared nostalgia narratives to create and strengthen bonds between them. In group situations those with induced nostalgia not only tend to feel more closely bonded with the group but also more willing to form intimate associations with strangers and to be freer in their thinking. In one experiment, subjects in whom nostalgia had been induced were asked to set up a room for a meeting—those in a nostalgic frame of mind consistently set up the chairs closer than those in the control. In another experiment, those in nostalgic moods were asked to write essays, which were compared in a blind judging process with those of peers who’d had no induced feelings of nostalgia. The essays written in a nostalgic state were judged more imaginative and creative (storytellers, professional nostalgics, have long intuited this, not to mention poets). (Adams 2014: n.p.)

This latter tendency does not align nostalgia with critical but with creative thinking – unless you follow me in seeing the two as intertwined. Nostalgia, in other words, can do us much good, from reducing stress levels in the more immediate term to helping survive in exile. In this positive account at least, it makes us find value in what contemporary competition-driven society has degraded and is in danger of destroying.

H ISTORICAL S OUNDINGS Let us now consider nostalgia’s positive contribution to the formation and animation of critical values and standards based on its participation in the historical movement and development of critical philosophy and social theory.

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In my larger project, I juxtapose modern critical-nostalgic currents in German thought with their French contemporaries.5 In broad outline, Romanticism, ignited by the Napoleonic wars, catalyzed nostalgia’s nationalistic potential. At the same time, as a protest against industrial capitalism, it did much to align nostalgia with revolution in the name of a utopian future. Post-revolutionary France’s recurrent sense of the failure of radical political praxis put it at the frontier of utopianism. While hearkening back to that rupture in tradition (as their historical precedent, condition, and lesson), French visions of ideal society became progressively more invested in scientistic, apparently post-nostalgic futurism, such as we see in Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Louis-Auguste Blanqui. In Germany, by contrast, Young Hegelians like Max Stirner and Marx, radicalized by their counterparts on the right, worked out an increasingly systematic critique of modernization and rationalization as the proper aims of progress. They looked to the past as a quasi-mythical source of critical reflection on the alienated condition of the present and its dreams of the future (the ‘negative’ conceptualization of utopia in German letters extends from the students of Hegel through Marx to Adorno). Social utopianism came to mean, first and foremost, the transformative pursuit of counter-hegemonic modes of authenticity in social relations, inspired by the vanishing heritage of earlier days and civilizations. One could indeed colligate these nostalgic and utopian phenomena under one heading, namely, the bi-directionality of modern critical discourse’s affective investments, with nostalgia directed to idealized/romanticized pasts, and utopia to imagined idealized futures.6 It was in modernity, with the rise of industrial, “producer” capitalism, that nostalgia, romancing the vanished and vanishing past, became a potent source of critical cultural standards – or, put positively, of models for emulation. In the modern paradigm, wherein, as Hans Blumenberg surmised (cf. Blumenberg 2000), humankind finally came into its own as creator, emulation of the past replaced imitation, which, thanks to concepts like Progress and History, was 5

This is a history of modern critical thought (eighteenth to twentieth century) in relation to political economy and emerging conceptions of value. My focus in this history is on social critique’s affective dimension, the structures of feeling intertwined with the development of critical concepts and values, and their expression in the critico-nostalgic and critico-utopian currents of German and French thought.

6

This “revolutionary romanticism” is a form of “modernity’s cultural self-criticism” “in the name of certain values of the past,” a romanticism that “integrates the conquests of 1789 (liberty, democracy, equality) and whose goal is not a return in time but a detour through the communitarian past towards a utopian future” (Löwy/Blechman 2004: 4; my translation). See also Löwy/Sayre (1992).

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increasingly understood as, not just undesirable, but impossible. Arguably the clearest and most influential articulation of the distinction between imitation and emulation comes from Edward Young’s 1759 Conjectures on Original Composition: Imitation is inferiority confessed; emulation is superiority contested or denied; imitation is servile, emulation generous; […] [emulation] made Athens to succeeding ages the rule of taste, and the standard of perfection. Her men of genius struck fire against each other; and kindled, by conflict, into glories, which no time shall extinguish. We thank Eschylus for Sophocles, and Parrhasius for Zeuxis; emulation for both. (65-67)

Note that, as concerns the mode of cultural production, modern emulators still, in a sense, imitate the ancients, who were the original emulators. The passage continues: [Emulation] bids us fly the general fault of imitators; bids us not be struck with the loud report of former fame, as with a knell, which damps the spirits; but, as with a trumpet, which inspires ardour to rival the renowned. (ibid: 65-67)

The shift of emphasis from (apparently un-evaluative) imitation to emulation is a perfect example of how the (imagined, historically recovered or reconstructed) past was nostalgically “returned to” for ideas on which to erect new ideals. Imitation by successive ages may be relegated to the past, but emulation – for which we have to thank only the greatest, inspiring works of Antiquity – is key to the emergence of a new criterion for what should be done culturally in the presentto-future tense. The paradigm shift to cultural creativity – with increased need of critical discernment in drawing on the past, of criteria for improving on the past, rather than of rules to follow without calling them into question – is plain in major cultural movements like German and French Classicism and Neoclassicism, and, importantly for us, in aesthetic criticism, where the problem of “grounding modernity out of itself” is first raised: from the mere imitation of things Greek, to Griechensehnsucht, or Hellenic yearning, to the tyranny of Roman models, to the post-querelle notion of modernity, which, as Jürgen Habermas writes, “assimilat[ed] the aesthetic concept of perfection to that of progress as it was suggested by modern natural science” (Habermas 1987: 8). In his synopsis, “in opposition to the norms of an apparently timeless and absolute beauty,” the moderns “elaborated the criteria of a relative or time-conditioned beauty and thus articulated the self-understanding of the French Enlightenment as an epochal new beginning” (ibid: 8).

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It was also the beginning of a new, longing look back. For the individual psyche, recollections of the experience of “the great, the beautiful, and the significant” had to be one with the self – alive, formative [bildend], enhancing and renewing it. In love with his present and a contributor to several cultural periods, J.W. Goethe was adamant on this point: “There is no past one may wish back, there is only an eternal newness shaped by the past’s extended elements; and real nostalgia [Sehnsucht] must always be productive, create something new and better” (Müller 1870: 72; my translation). It is no doubt in this spirit that, in 1772, he proposed to ground his anti-Neoclassical theory of genius in an aesthetic version of the noble savage, der Wilde. (cf. Kaufmann 2013). Another influential discursive locus of the distinction between imitation and emulation was J.G. Herder, who also helped reconceive ahistorical Nachahmung (imitation) as historical, creative Nachfolge (emulation) and Übertragung (cultural transfer) – offering a superior alternative not only to the derivative Classicist model but also to anti-Neoclassical, Storm-and-Stress Genie-Poetik (poetics of genius) and to cultural death (cf. Herder 1768: 9-10). But the clearest articulation of the emulative critique of the present would eventually come from the pen of the young Nietzsche, with German culture as a reincarnation of preClassical values: At the same time we feel that the birth of a tragic age means the return of the German spirit to itself, a blissful reunion […] Now, at long last, having returned to the original spring of its being, that spirit can dare to walk, bold and free, before all other peoples, without the leading-reins of Latin civilization; provided, of course, that the German spirit goes on learning, unceasingly, from the Greeks, for the ability to learn from this people is in itself a matter of lofty fame and distinguishing rarity. And when was our need of these supreme teachers greater than now, as we are experiencing the rebirth of tragedy and yet are in danger of not knowing whence it comes, nor of being able to discern where it wants to go? (Nietzsche 1999: 95)

But this past is only an indirect object of longing, the true object being the future, which Nietzsche serenades rhapsodically in the same work. In the third of his “Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen,” published a couple of years later, he bemoans the comparative lack of contemporary virtuous exemplars: What has become of any reflection on questions of morality—questions that have at all times engaged every more highly civilized society? There is no longer any model or any reflection of any kind; what we are in fact doing is consuming the moral capital we have

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inherited from our forefathers, which we are incapable of increasing but know only how to squander. (Nietzsche 1997: 103)

Further, by emphasizing that thriving means striving to outdo them, he taps into the (capitalist) spirit of competition (cf. ibid: 132). 7 Striking a dialectical balance between remembering the past and forgetting it, he envisions this prospect: [A]t some time or other we might be permitted gradually to set our goal higher and more distant, some time or other we ought to be allowed to claim credit for having developed the spirit of Alexandrian-Roman culture so nobly and fruitfully among other means through our universal history that we might now as a reward be permitted to set ourselves the even mightier task of striving to get behind and beyond this Alexandrian world and boldly to seek our models in the original ancient Greek world of greatness, naturalness and humanity. But there we also discover the reality of an essentially unhistorical culture and one which is nonetheless, or rather on that account, an inexpressibly richer and more vital culture. Even if we Germans were in fact nothing but successors we could not be anything greater or prouder than successors if we had appropriated such a culture and were the heirs and successors of that. What I mean by this, and it is all I mean, is that the thought of being epigones, which can often be a painful thought, is also capable of evoking great effects and grand hopes for the future in both an individual and in a nation, provided we regard ourselves as the heirs and successors of the astonishing powers of antiquity and see in this our honour and our spur. (ibid: 103)

Nietzsche’s later works all evince a complex relationship to historical sense as a retrospective-prospective affair. The Gay Science starts off on a nostalgic-utopian note. On the Genealogy of Morality offers a history of responsibility and of “Sittlichkeit der Sitte” (the morality of custom) as the harsh school of memory and imagination. Nevertheless, the past is valorized as a source of pre-moral, ‘aristocratic’ values, before ‘good and evil,’ of ‘Roman’ ideals reclaimable for the present. Known only perspectivally (that is, willfully, emotionally), it sets a bar, rather than a positive standard, for the redemptive future. Thrown into relief by an ever-sharper sense of historical discontinuity and a rate of change threatening cultural amnesia, the past could now be longed for, be it uncritically-indiscriminately, as a whole, or critically-discerningly, in its parts. The emerging critical perspective on the past saw it not as an exemplary and “living past,” but as a time now seen as “dead and buried” (Schiffman 2011: 204), and retrievable only in that concrete, petrified form. This also made its wholesale return or reproduction more undesirable than before. Instead, what increasingly 7

See also chapters 5 and 6 of Jensen (2016).

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excited the modern imagination was a punctuated return not of but to that past (through the window of literary and visual representation, and, later, through its recreation in themed environments), without the risk of contaminating the present. Modern critique, then, was part and parcel of the modern attitude, of its affectivereflective (i.e., emotive-evaluative) conjuncture. It was a projection into the future of a desire for the best of the past. In the most general terms, it articulated a concern about the specificity of the present, its contribution to human progress relative to the past, and its prospects for improving on that past. Nostalgia thus evolved from a pathology, not of reason, but of the imagination – from a pathologized measure of longing and a response to change and the passage of time – to a malaise of dissatisfaction with the present and the direction that present was taking, to eventually providing the basis for a productive and critical cultural stance. One positive function of nostalgia is, then, to recuperate past values while transforming their function and application.

V ALUE -S USTAINABILITY Laying the basis for nostalgia’s intellectual history, including its role in the genesis and nourishment of modern social-critical values, requires an analytic that grants nostalgia a reflective dimension and structure, broadening our definition of nostalgia in the process to a positive affective relation to and reflection on the past, a thinking-feeling. The reflective dimension includes images and memories, without which nostalgia would manifest as a vague, objectless, and diffuse yearning, on the model of melancholy. We cannot begin to trace the nostalgic currents running through critical discourse without conceding nostalgia’s discursive rationality, its ability to color, structure, and orient or, in Martha Nussbaum’s view (cf. 2001), internally constitute rational value-judgment, and affect communication (which amounts to no more than that it can influence our thinking to the point of entering into it, such that we are “philosophizing from within a mood” of nostalgia).8

8

Cf. Malpas (2011). It was Martin Heidegger who drew attention to philosophy’s fundamentally nostalgic – and not only melancholy – attunement in his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (cf. 1995: 4–9). Heidegger speaks here of melancholy (Schwermut) as being in “exceptional proximity” to philosophy, at once affecting its form and “prescrib[ing] a fundamental attunement which delimits its substantive content” (ibid: 182–183). But it is homesickness (Heimweh) that he names as the “very determination of philosophy” (ibid: 5).

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Nostalgia, then, is a complex experience that involves not only value-feeling, but also value-thinking. For critics of the culture of their own time, disaffection with the present and with the future extrapolated from it has its emotional counterpart in affection for aspects of an earlier time, another form of social life, organization, etc. More basically, any appeal to values is an appeal to the past – one that often, when conscious, avails itself of a fallacy, let us call it the patheticgenetic fallacy, which goes something like this: the past forged in its own crucible criteria that reflected its organic development as its “second nature,” criteria we can reflect on but claim only “unnaturally” – not only because these criteria do not originate with us, but because it is in our “second nature” to invent, to create, rather than to appropriate. More generally, the fallacy consists in an emotionally charged attribution of greater value – most commonly truth, authenticity, organicity – to the origin rather than to what came of it, its unfolding or legacy. Put simply, it is the romanticizing of the origin, in contrast to the falseness, artifice, or poverty of what followed. The attitude is pathetically fallacious due to its picture of the origin, and genetically fallacious because of our discontent with what came later or with the present – the affective and the reflective aspects tending to reinforce each other. I see this fallacy at work in Nietzsche’s master morality or his ideal of Hellenism (in contrast to Romanity) as a victory over the past and the foreign, “culture as a new and improved physis, without inner and outer, without dissimulation and convention, culture as an unanimity of life, thought, appearance and will” (Nietzsche 2006: 123). I likewise see it in Spengler, who came up with a metahistorical distinction between natural “culture,” “permeated with soul” (e.g., that of ancient Greece), and artificial, intellectual “civilization” (e.g., the Romans) to describe cultural history as the “waxing and waning of organic forms” (cf. Spengler 1976; 1944). The pathetic-genetic fallacy, then, has it that certain past value-commitments and standards of evaluation, although far from having been realized in the past, were an authentic expression of their time, and that, secondly, however admirable they are, their simple imitation in the present will not do, not to mention be doable paradigmatically speaking. Values can be transmitted and continuous, rooted in a living tradition, but not deliberately resuscitated while still remaining credible. At the same time, their historic value qua values is upheld. The nostalgia for lost past ‘civilizations,’ ‘periods,’ or ‘spirits’ is sometimes fortified by an ‘axiological’ nostalgia for the origins of values, when the latter were pure, firm, noble, unchallenged. A seminal criticalcreative work like the Genealogy calls for historical innovation in the realm of moral values – paving the way, from the standpoint of an earlier, nobler value-

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system, for a new revaluation to undo the damage of the earlier one and the valuelessness and worthlessness that ensued.9 In this sense, one can see the historical elaboration of criticism (extending to historiographic and critical modes themselves) as being in tandem with the intensification of nostalgia. Only more recently has the nostalgic image or reconstruction of the past been subjected to critical scrutiny, and whole traditions revealed as invented (to allude to Hobsbawm and Ranger). Yet this does not make hallowed criteria and values, themselves cultural artifacts with a rich, often institutional history – criteria and values like humanity, civilization, Enlightenment, progress, autonomy – any less valuable, since we have been no mere imitators of the past; we have been critically modern. We have grasped how selectively societies remember and modernity forgets (recalling the titles of Paul Connerton’s seminal contributions), but we still cherish our sense of the past, longingly scanning the receding retro-horizon behind which it lies for inspiration and critical perspectives on (to invoke François Hartog and H.U. Gumbrecht) our “presentist present,” our “broad present” – flooded by indiscernible “pasts,” multiple simultaneities, confronted with a closed futurity (cf. Hartog 2015; Gumbrecht 2014). The case just made for nostalgia as value-genetic is a historical one, and one wonders about the impact on values of postmodern nostalgic longing in the form diagnosed by Fred Jameson three decades ago. You will recall his critique of postmodern culture’s nostalgic modality – an “omnipresent, omnivorous and wellnigh libidinal” pseudo-historicism proliferating the past-effect and the waning of affect.10 “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” an essay based in large part on his famous 1984 article, ends on a dialectical note, expressing serious reservations about postmodernism’s critical value and its ability to sustain values in the face of rampant consumer capitalism, and leaving open the question of its ability to resist capitalist logic, the obliteration of traditions, historical amnesia, and – we might add – offloaded, prosthetic memory (cf. Jameson 1998: 20). We must be prepared 9

Cf. Joas (2000), especially chapter 2. Regardless of the retrospective or objective “implausibility” (2000: 34) of Nietzsche’s account of the genesis of moral values, Joas’ account draws attention to the historical link between nostalgic sentiment (sense of waning or loss) and the problematization of values, Nietzschean questioning above all (cf. ibid: 20).

10 Jameson calls this “nostalgia mode” (1984: 66-67). Historical scrupulousness leads him to place the term nostalgia in scare quotes, since, as he admits, “Nostalgia does not strike one as an altogether satisfactory word for such fascination (particularly when one thinks of the pain of a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval)” (ibid).

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to recognize in this enduring, commercial, and largely image-centered nostalgia the possible degradation of critical discernment which was developed discursively, through systematic historical study, such as that undertaken over the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries with oft-great nostalgic effort.

R EFERENCES Adams, Tim (2014): “Look Back in Joy: The Power of Nostalgia.” In: The Observer November 9 (https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/nov/09/ look-back-in-joy-the-power-of-nostalgia). Adorno, Theodor W. (2005), Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, translated by E.F.N. Jephcott, New York: Verso. Benjamin, Walter (1999a): “Experience and Poverty.” In: Michael W. Jennings/ Howard Eiland/Gary Smith (eds.), Selected Writings, vol. 2: 1927-1934, translated by Rodney Livingstone et al., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 731-736. Benjamin, Walter (1999b): “Theological-Political Fragment.” In: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds., Selected Writings, vol. 3: 1935-1938, translated by Edmund Jephcott, H. Eiland et al., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 305-306. Blumenberg, Hans (2000): “‘Imitation of Nature’: Toward a Prehistory of the Idea of the Creative Being,” translated by Anna Wertz, Qui Parle 12/1, pp. 17-54. Botul, Jean-Baptiste (1999): La vie sexuelle d’Emmanuel Kant, Paris: Fayard. Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic. Brown, Wendy (1999): “Resisting Left Melancholy.” In: boundary 2 26/3, pp. 1927. Connerton, Paul (1989): How Societies Remember, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Connerton, Paul (2009): How Modernity Forgets, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Davies, Jeremy (2010): “Sustainable Nostalgia,” Memory Studies 3/3: pp. 262268. Flatley, Jonathan (2008): Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich (2014): Our Broad Present: Time and Contemporary Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1987): The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. by Frederick G. Lawrence, Cambridge, UK: Polity.

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Hartog, François (2015): Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, translated by Saskia Brown, New York: Columbia University Press. Heidegger, Martin (1995): Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried (1768): Ueber Thomas Abbts Schriften: Der Torso von einem Denkmaal, an seinem Grabe errichtet, Leipzig: Hartknoch. Jameson, Fredric (1971): Marxism and Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1984): “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, I/146, pp. 53-92. Jameson, Fredric (1998): “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” In: The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998, London: Verso, pp. 1–20. Jensen, Anthony K. (2016): An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, New York: Routledge. Joas, Hans (2000): The Genesis of Values, translated by Gregory Moore, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kant, Immanuel (2006): Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, edited and translated by Robert B. Louden, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kaufmann, Sebastian (2013): “Der ‘Wilde’ und die Kunst: Ethno-Anthropologie und Ästhetik in Goethes Aufsatz von deutscher Baukunst (1772) und Schillers philosophischen Schriften der 1790er Jahre.” In: Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik 4/1, pp. 29-57. Klibansky, Raymond/Panofsky, Erwin/Saxl, Fritz (1964): Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion, and Art, New York: Basic. Koselleck, Reinhart (2002): “The Temporalization of Utopia.” In: The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 84-99. Löwy, Michael/Blechman, Max (2004): “Qu’est-ce que le romantisme révolutionnaire?” In: Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle: Le Romantisme révolutionnaire 82/900, pp. 3-5. Löwy, Michael/Sayre, Robert (1992): Révolte et mélancolie. Le Romantisme à contre-courant de la modernité, Paris: Payot. Malpas, Jeff (2011): “Philosophy’s Nostalgia.” In: Contributions to Phenomenology 63/1, pp. 87-101.

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Marasco, Robyn (2015): The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel, New York: Columbia University Press. Müller, Friedrich von (1870): Goethes Unterhaltungen mit dem Kanzler Friedrich von Müller, Stuttgart: Cotta‘sche Buchhandlung. Naqvi, Nauman: “The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the ‘Critique of Nostalgia,’” C.I.R.S.D.I.G. working paper 23, (http://www.cirsdig.it/ Pubblicazioni/naqvi.pdf). Nietzsche, Friedrich (1997): Untimely Meditations, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1999): The Birth of Tragedy, edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs, translated by Ronald Speirs, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2006): On the Genealogy of Morality, edited by Keith Ansell-Pearson, translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nussbaum, Martha (2001): Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Pensky, Max (2001): Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Rose, Gillian (1978): The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, London: Macmillan. Sargent, Lyman Tower (1994): “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” In: Utopian Studies 5/1, pp. 1-37. Schiffman, Zachary (2011): The Birth of the Past, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spengler, Oswald (1944): The Decline of the West, vol. 1, Form and Actuality, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, New York: Knopf. Spengler, Oswald (1976): Man and Technics: A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, Westport, CT: Greenwood. Tannock, Stuart (1995): “Nostalgia Critique,” In: Cultural Studies 9/3, pp. 453464. Traverso, Enzo (2017): Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory, New York: Columbia University Press. Williams, Raymond (1985): “Alienation.” In: Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 34-35. Young, Edward (1759): Conjectures on Original Composition: In a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison, London: Millar and Dodsley.

Between Nostalgia and the New Turns to Ontology in Contemporary Theory E LIZABETH K OVACH

I NTRODUCTION : W HY ( THE ) T URN TO O NTOLOGY ? This paper examines the sustainability of ‘ontology,’ which endures through the pluralization of its meanings and functions across humanities disciplines. I suggest that the signifier ‘ontology’ often signals both nostalgia for something lost and the desire for new points of orientation. ‘Sustainability’ will be used in two ways: firstly, to describe the resilience/resurgence of a term rather than the sustaining of natural resources and, secondly, to refer to the way this term is strategically employed to sustain theoretical arguments. Far from solely denoting the field of metaphysics devoted to the philosophical study of being, ‘ontology’ appears in myriad capacities and contexts in political philosophy, science and technology studies, anthropology, the philosophical movements known as speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, and more. A number of scholars have taken note of this proliferation of ontologies in recent years, and some have even announced an ‘ontological turn.’1 A ‘turn,’ according to Doris Bachmann-Medick’s definition in Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, occurs when objects of study transform into analytical categories (cf. Bachmann-Medick 2016: 16-17). Most of the approaches that the ‘ontological turn’ encompasses are, for instance, disconnected from the philosophical study of being. Instead, “premises about the nature of being become lenses through which political, philosophical,

1

This discussion of the ontological turn picks up several points and quotations of theorists made in Novel Ontologies After 9/11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-American Narrative Fiction (2016), in which I situate various post9/11 novels as contributions to an ontological turn in contemporary theory.

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anthropological, sociological, and all other respective disciplinary arguments are made” (Kovach 2016: 7). Why has ‘ontology,’ of all terms, proven to not only be sustainable but also proliferate at this historical juncture? Unwavering ‘truth,’ ‘being,’ and ‘reality’ have, since the Enlightenment, shifted from signifying absolutes to denoting perspective-bound categories open to interpretation, while ontology is traditionally associated with the isolation of what is foundational, enduring, and firmly true. The so-called ontological turn might thus be seen as the nostalgic, even conservative, expression of a need for a sense of certainty, and it has been criticized from a number of angles for this reason. Such criticism varies, depending upon the instances of ontology to which it responds as well as the motives for critique. Most critiques are united by a general questioning of the impulse to turn to ontology in the first place – of why interest in the ontological, in all its variations, has gained such sway so as to comprise a full-blown turn in the 21st century. In a queer-theoretical critique, Jordana Rosenberg emphasizes the “need to ask why the lust for dehistoricization, for demediation, for a temporality outside of history, is flourishing now, and in this way” (2014: n. p.). In a chapter entitled “The Ontological Turn” in his politicalphilosophical book The Actuality of Communism, Bruno Bosteels explores what he identifies as “the ubiquitous return of the question of being in the field of political thought today,” asking “where does this politico-ontological need stem from in the first place?” (2014: 42, 43). Lawrence Grossberg, speaking from a cultural-studies perspective, observes somewhat hyperbolically that: It appears as if every investigation must now be ontological – the ontology of derivatives, of television, of the state – although I have to admit that I am at a loss to know what work the term is doing or what meaning is being assigned to it. Too often, it seems to refer to claims to understand the (universal) essence of some phenomenon, whether through appeals to science and/or materialism, and to lay claim to an unearned certainty. (2015: 162-163)

Each of these commentators, despite the fact that they define the ontological turn differently and locate its occurrence within different disciplinary fields, finds that the renewed interest in questions related to being stems from a desire for something that is missing, lost, or unattainable. Rosenberg names this desire a “lust,” Bosteels calls it a “need,” and Grossberg observes various “claims” for what he deems to be “unearned certainty.” They identify this turn as something that is motivated not simply by logical, theoretical argument but also by affects, needs, and emotions.

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My claim is that new theorizations of ontology are, indeed, devised to affect the reader not simply intellectually but also viscerally. They are fueled by both nostalgia for a seemingly lost sense of certainty and the wish for new points of orientation. The interdisciplinary turn to ontology has arguably been attentiongrabbing for this curious, often even paradoxical, set of aims: to evoke an unreturnable conceptual and intellectual past yet also establish new frameworks of thought. In what follows, I expand upon these claims by exploring three contemporary theorists’ conceptions of ontology – namely, those put forward by Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, and Karen Barad. While each of these contemporary thinkers approaches her notion of the ontological within, and in reaction to, very specific disciplinary, historical, and socio-political contexts, I suggest that they all take recourse to ontology to not only be provocative via its nostalgic implications but also to reinvent the meaning and function of ontology as a means of intervening in thought and action for the future. This examination of just three of many ontologies serves as a basis for my concluding point regarding conceptual travel, transfer, and cultural turns in general: the conceptual travel and transformation that the ontological turn exemplifies seem too often, if not always, be characterized by a tension between nostalgia and the new. This reveals that the nostalgic impulse in the case of this theoretical turn is not about returning to a specific past but can best be characterized in the sense of Jill Bradbury as “a longing for futures that never came, or for horizons of possibilities that seem to have been foreclosed” (2012: 342).2 The efforts of the theorists described below are devoted to establishing premises, dispositions, and value systems upon which new, different and sustainable futures – social, political, environmental – can be framed, imagined, and even pursued.

T HEORETICAL T URNS

AND

C ONCEPTUAL T RAVEL

Before engaging with the notions of ontology presented by Mouffe, Butler, and Barad, it is worth first considering what it means to group these as part of a greater ontological turn and, more generally, to label them instances of conceptual travel. Why should we call the current interest in the ontological a ‘turn’ and not simply a scholarly trend or academic fashion? In Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, Doris Bachmann-Medick discusses the constitution of turns in the study of culture (basing her analysis on some of the most prominent ‘cultural

2

See the discussion of Bradbury in this volume’s introduction.

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turns’ in contemporary cultural studies: interpretative, performative, reflexive, postcolonial, translational, spatial, and iconic (cf. 2016: VII-IX). She emphasizes that various turns in the study of culture “function not only as drivers of innovation, but also as signposts that appear to point to the consensual pressures of research” (ibid: 8). While such turns spring from scholars following genuinely pressing and relevant lines of inquiry, they must also be observed in terms of “the social fields of habitus, competition, struggle, positioning, commitment to tradition and formation of tradition” (ibid: 9). In other words, there is certainly a degree of trendiness, perhaps even ‘pressure’ to compete and position oneself in the intellectual field, that drives and perpetuates the formation of any cultural turn, including the turn to ontology. However, such motives, though certainly worth acknowledging, should not overshadow the sincere and productive investigations that these turns also entail. To simply discount the ontological turn as a mere fad that is followed by those seeking to position themselves professionally would be to discount a set of impulses and ideas worthy of acknowledgment and critical attention. Acknowledging the complexity of motives behind a given turn, however, does not sufficiently distinguish between a turn and mere intellectual fashion. For Bachmann-Medick, a trend or prevalent topic of interest constitutes a turn when a “new research focus shifts from the object level of new fields of inquiry to the level of analytical categories and concepts” (ibid: 16). The ‘performative turn,’ one of Bachmann-Medick’s examples, is a full-fledged turn, because a significant number of scholars began to not only focus on instances of performativity as objects of research but also applied theories, ‘categories,’ and ‘concepts’ from performance studies to the analysis of objects not traditionally associated with the performing arts. In this way, the turn is constituted by the emergence of an analytical lens applied across disciplines. This shift from object of study to framework for analysis has certainly taken place amongst scholars interested in the ontological. In much work that contributes to the ontological turn, premises about the nature of being, existence, and becoming are the lenses through which political, sociological, scientific, and many other respective disciplinary arguments are made. Convictions about respective ontological status function as the basis for approaching a given object of analysis and are not the objects under investigation proper. Another important point that Bachmann-Medick makes about cultural turns is about the way turns stand in relation to what has arguably been the most significant cultural turn of the past century: the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn, in which scholarship across disciplines began to stress the mediated nature of knowledge through language, is “the common thread running through all turns in the study of

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culture” (ibid: 23). Various subsequent turns have introduced “new focuses that heralded the return of previously suppressed elements” (ibid: 23). In other words, the cultural turns that have followed the linguistic turn function in relation to it but highlight that which the linguistic turn has “suppressed.” This could not be more true for the ‘ontological turn,’ as a renewed interest in questions about being, reality, existence, presence, and becoming signals a shift away from the tenets of symbolization, constructivism, and mediation that the linguistic turn and the paradigm of poststructuralism bring to the fore.3 As a cultural turn according to Bachmann-Medick’s definition, the ontological turn has emerged as a change in focus towards questions and propositions that the linguistic turn “suppressed” – a point that Barad most directly addresses in her formulation of ‘agential realist ontology’ discussed in the next section. One must keep in mind that such a turn never encompasses a homogeneous set of concepts and theoretical frameworks. Some might object to my discussion of the ontologies of Mouffe, Butler, and Barad for this very reason – and by pointing out their significant differences, not simply in terms of how they define and employ the term ‘ontology’ but also in terms of the disciplinary contexts in which their work is formulated and the socio-political circumstances to which their work responds. Yet my point in categorizing the contributions of these three thinkers under the umbrella of the ontological turn is not to suggest that they offer similar perspectives or even aspire towards the same aims. It is rather to show how a turn in thought can indeed encompass a range of not merely varying but conflicting viewpoints, categories, concepts, frameworks, and definitions. Specific theorizations of conceptual travel are helpful in articulating this perspective. I regard the various uses and meanings of ontology that comprise a cultural turn according the way Michel Foucault defines “the history of a concept” in The Archeology of Knowledge: not as one of “progressive refinement” but rather “of its various fields of constitution” and “successive rules of use” (1972: 4). Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari make a similar point about concepts in What is Philosophy?: “Although concepts are dated, signed, and baptized, they have their own way of not dying while remaining subject to constraints of renewal, replacement, and mutation that give philosophy a history as well as a turbulent geography” (2013 [1994]: 8). Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari stress that any given concept must be understood as a flexible and changing phenomenon that moves between “fields,” 3

See chapter 7 of Jenneth Parker’s Critiquing Sustainability, Changing Philosophy (2014) entitled “Culture and Sustainability: What has Postmodernism Ever Done for Us?” for a discussion of the limits of postmodern thought in supporting effective forms of sustainability in the environmental sense.

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transforms according to different “rules of use,” and is subject to processes of “renewal, replacement, and mutation.” To dismiss new conceptualizations of ontology as deviating from the traditional philosophical sense of ontology (the study of being) is, according to these definitions of conceptual travel, simply not the point. Deleuze and Guattari adamantly declare that: To criticize is only to establish that a concept vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu, losing some of its components, or acquiring others that transform it. But those who criticize without creating, those who are content to defend the vanished concept without being able to give it the forces it needs to return to life, are the plague of philosophy. (ibid: 28)

When scholarship is criticized for misinterpreting or appropriating a concept in a way that is untrue to how it has been originally conceived, the critique merely proves a point about the lives of concepts in general: concepts assume new meanings according to the ‘milieu,’ the disciplinary, historical, and socio-political contexts in which they are (re)formulated. To dismiss such shifts as incorrect would be to deny the further life and sustainability of concepts, not to mention – according to Deleuze and Guattari – the future of philosophy. The challenge is thus to tune into the specificity of each instance of ontology in contemporary theory, approaching such instances not as seamlessly interconnected phenomena but rather as understandable according to particular “rules of use.” At the same time, each employment of the term carries historical baggage, complex past meanings and associations, with it. To formulate a new ontology thus necessarily entails hearkening the term’s past incarnations while writing these over with new connotations. At the same time, failure to release meanings of the past or those found in other contexts will only motivate dismissals of what might actually be productive transformations, and it certainly impedes interdisciplinary exchange. As Mieke Bal stresses in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: In the cultural disciplines, a variety of concepts are used to frame, articulate, and specify different analyses. The most confusing ones are the over-arching concepts we tend to use as if their meanings were as clear-cut and common as those of any word in any given language. Depending on the background in which the object belongs, each analysis tends to take for granted a certain use of concepts. (2002: 25)

The confusion described by Bal, in which concepts are employed but their specific meanings taken for granted, leads to imprecision if not downright frustration, particularly within interdisciplinary contexts. It leads to comments like that of

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Lawrence Grossberg quoted earlier: “I have to admit that I am at a loss to know what work the term [ontology/the ontological] is doing or what meaning is being assigned to it” (2015: 162-163). In the following section, I will thus present the specific ontologies put forward by Mouffe, Butler, and Barad as concepts that must be understood according to their particular “rules of use.” I then move to the question of what unites these approaches under the umbrella of a turn: while these ontologies do not form a seamless plane, their parallel appearances nonetheless signal a common impulse to evoke both nostalgia and the new.

T HREE O NTOLOGIES P ERTAINING TO ANTAGONISM , P RECARIOUSNESS , AND B ECOMING The ontologies of Mouffe, Butler, and Barad are devised within the respective fields of leftist political philosophy, poststructuralism, and feminist technoscience studies. These theorists’ ontological claims serve as the bases for arguments pertaining to political organization, the prevention of defensive politics and war, and the location of agency in the world’s becoming. They contribute to the making of a turn in Bachmann-Medick’s sense, because their claims about being are not ends in themselves but rather serve as analytical lenses for addressing historically situated problems and concerns. As each of these contributions to the ontological turn are theoretically and historically complex, my summaries must be read as selective, abbreviated readings that zero in on the ontological claims that are made. Moving from one framework to the next is also intended as an exercise in following some of the directions in which ontology has recently travelled to understand its iterations as unique formations that do not necessarily overlap. The Necessity of Antagonism Let us begin with Mouffe’s conception of antagonism as an ontological category. Mouffe has presented her notion of the ontological dimension of politics in various publications, and I will focus on its specification in her 2013 book Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, which advocates a path for politics on a global scale but responds most pointedly to forms of political organization within contemporary Europe. As a theorist of post-Marxism, Mouffe makes efforts to adjust Marxist concepts and principles in accordance with late-20th and 21stcentury realities. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), the seminal text Mouffe coauthored with Ernesto Laclau, introduces many of the arguments and perspectives to which Mouffe has committed her scholarship. What makes their

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approach post-Marxist is the conviction that in the wake of various historical developments, most prominently “the implosion of Communism in the 1990s […] the possibility of achieving a viable noncapitalist society lost much of its credibility” (Therborn 2010: 8). Postindustrial economies and privatization have also challenged “the pillar of Marxist dialectic […] that the development of capitalism generates an even larger, more concentrated and unified working class” (ibid: 58). Such developments, for Mouffe and Laclau, demand that certain Marxist convictions and anticipations be recalibrated. In the preface to a 2014 edition of Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Mouffe and Laclau restate the salient points of their approach, stressing that the urgency of their claims has only intensified under the stronghold of neoliberalism. They suggest that neoliberal ideology and politics have ushered in a troubling situation of political consensus: [A]n increasing number of social-democratic parties have been discarding their left identity, redefining themselves euphemistically as ‘centre-left.’ They claim that the notions of Left and Right have become obsolete, and that what it needed is a politics of the ‘radical Centre.’ The basic tenet of what is presented as the ‘third way’ is that with the demise of communism and the socio-economic transformations linked to the advent of the information society and the process of globalization, antagonisms have disappeared. (2014 [1985]: xiv-xv)

In order to counter the reinforcement of consensus, they suggest “[t]he Left should start elaborating a credible alternative to the neo-liberal order,” which “requires the acceptance of the ineradicability of antagonism” (ibid: xvii). Here we encounter a hint at an ontological claim: the suggestion that a specific social dynamic – antagonism – is ‘ineradicable.’ Antagonism is, for Mouffe and Laclau, an enduring truth, because “any form of consensus is the result of a hegemonic articulation, and that it always has an ‘outside’ that impedes its full realization” (ibid: xviii). The neoliberal project of encompassing the globe within a single political-economic system is doomed, because, no matter how far-reaching it becomes, there will always be an “outside.” The presence of this outside is the site of antagonism. Instead of masking or making efforts to eradicate such sites, a futile mission in their eyes, Mouffe and Laclau advocate that antagonism function as the center of politics – as the core of democracy. In Agonistics, Mouffe bolsters these claims by suggesting that antagonism is both an ontological and political fact. She distinguishes between ‘the political’ and ‘politics,’ writing that “[b]y ‘the political,’ I refer to the ontological dimension of antagonism, and by ‘politics’ I mean the ensemble of practices and institutions whose aim is to organize human coexistence” (2013: XII). By suggesting that ‘the

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political’ is that which is enduringly true, an ‘ineradicable’ facet of any political organization, and ‘politics’ is the realm of historically situated actions and institutions, Mouffe follows a line of thought introduced by political philosopher Carl Schmidt in his 1932 publication The Concept of the Political. Peter Thomas has helpfully summarized the Schmidtian notion of ‘the political’ as follows: ‘the political’ is “not produced, constituted or even repressed by politics; rather, it is productive and constituting of it, preceding it in both a temporal and logical sense” (2009: 27). In other words, ‘the political’ taps into something essential about the very being of politics. Protocols for politics – the realm of action – should abide by the enduring truth of the political – namely, its antagonistic dimension. The dangers of consensus are arguably illustrated by the current political context of Europe since the Brexit and in which far-right parties have gained a tremendous amount of sway in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The consensual middle ground upon which both conservative and socially minded political parties have met in recent years have led to the alienation and splitting off of those on the more extreme sides of the political spectrum. In light of such developments, Mouffe writes: My suggestion is that the only solution lies in the pluralization of hegemonies. Abandoning the illusory hope for a political unification of the world, we should advocate the establishment of a multipolar world. Such a world order could be called ‘agonistic’ in the sense that it would acknowledge a plurality of regional poles, organized according to different economic and political models without a central authority. (2013: 22)

The politics of ‘agonism’ would fall in line with the political dimension, the ontological truth, of antagonism. Antagonism is presented as a fact of political being that should guide the performance of politics. The denial of the political and its antagonistic dimension is the denial of a fact of being. This is the premise upon which Mouffe founds her critique of neoliberal consensus. The question is why introduce the very notion of the ontological and not simply refer to necessary antagonism as a premise, conviction, fact, or truth? Such signifiers could certainly be used. By insisting upon the political dynamic of antagonism as an ontological fact, Mouffe consciously marks a point of grounding, foundation, and certitude. The choice to categorize her claim as ontological is, I find, about evoking a sense of argumentative security. In addition, isolating what is claimed to be foundational is certainly a nostalgic gesture, yet Mouffe does not strive for a pre-modern, pre-constructivist world. The antagonistic dimension of the political refers, after all, to the endurance of an everchanging, constantly shifting field of political fault lines. Mouffe’s ontological

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certainty pertains to the certainty of a dynamic of change. In this way, this ontology of the political is at once nostalgic in its signaling of a desire for certainty, but this certainty pertains to the persistence of contingency. The Precariousness of Being A similar claim about the enduring nature of contingency characterizes the ontology that Butler presents in much of her work, though I will focus on its articulation in Precarious Life (2004) and Frames of War (2009), which respond to U.S.-American war and foreign policy in the wake of 9/11. Like Mouffe, Butler presents her ontology as an orientation point for political thought. She addresses U.S.-America’s securitization of borders and declaration of war on Iraq and terrorism as misguided pursuits, because they are efforts to eradicate vulnerability, which, for Butler, is a fundamental premise of being. Butler introduces the concept of ‘precariousness’ to denote the permeability and constructed natures of all subjects, from human bodies to national borders: while “[n]ations are not the same as individual psyches,” both nations and bodies “can be described as ‘subjects’” (2006: 41). In its pursuit of vast securitization measures and deployments of force, the U.S. became a subject that sought “to define itself as protected permanently against incursion” (2010: 47). It is the assertion of a nation with impermeable borders that Butler claims “cannot yield the kinds of analytic vocabularies we need for thinking about global interdependency and the interlocking networks of power and position in contemporary life” (ibid.: 31). She asserts that fundamental vulnerability is a condition “with which we cannot argue” (2006: 31). This is the basis of the ontology upon which she grounds her political critique. In Frames of War, Butler draws upon her earlier work on gender and identity construction to state that “to be a body is to be exposed to social crafting and form, and that is what makes the ontology of the body a social ontology” (2010: 2-3). Her poststructuralist definition of the body is based on the conviction that being cannot be conceived of beyond the limits of socially produced discourse. Her “social ontology” must thus be read as a contribution to, not a turn against, the linguistic turn. Within this framework, the body is the product of social crafting, which from the moment of birth is fully exposed to and at the mercy of others. Being is precariousness. According to Butler’s social ontology, being is either upheld or rewritten by the discourses that construct and lend it discrete contours. It is the forever-shifting discursive environment that grants a subject, human or national, its existence: “normative conditions for the production of the subject produce an historically contingent ontology” (ibid: 4). The very notion of ‘contingent ontology’ would

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strike many as paradoxical, given that ontology in its traditional sense was committed to identifying that which endures regardless of the contingencies of history. Butler’s “historically contingent ontology” is thus a contradiction of the very notion of ontology in its traditional philosophical sense. The fact of the precariousness of being nonetheless serves as a bedrock for further political thought. It is presented as a truth from which various consequences can follow. As Butler suggests: Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery […] can fuel the instruments of war. We cannot, however, will away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of corporeal vulnerability […]. (2006: 29)

While the “denial” of vulnerability can lead to the waging of war, “[m]indfulness” of this ontological fact could also, as Butler surmises, provide a “basis” for more peaceful coexistence on personal and global scales. Butler writes in direct response to the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq and declaration of ubiquitous war on terrorism under the G. W. Bush administration, but the relevance of her argument has certainly not dissipated, given, for instance, the drone war waged throughout the Obama administration and Trump’s efforts to wall off the Mexican border. Such undertakings are efforts to protect the U.S. and its interests by eradicating, or threatening to eradicate, potential sources of harm. This denies what Butler claims to be the fundamental fact of vulnerability – the fact that precariousness is a condition of being and an ontological certainty. The political critique presented by Butler is thus premised upon her social ontology of the precariousness of being.4 Mouffe’s ontological claim of the antagonistic dimension of the political functions similarly, because it is an anchoring point for political-philosophical argument. Yet while Mouffe advocates ‘agonism,’ which is the proliferation of borders and points of opposition, Butler encourages the “mindfulness of this vulnerability” as a means of fostering peaceful coexistence. Both seek paths away from global political systems that benefit some at the expense of others as well as the implementation of defensive politics and force, but their approaches to arguing against such geopolitical trends – the ontologies to which they take recourse – are irreconcilably distinct from one another. 4

See Chandler/Reid (2016), specifically the chapter entitled “Embodiment as Vulnerability,” for a critique of Butler’s notion of precariousness based on claims that it functions in complicity with neoliberal ideology.

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Being as an Ongoing Becoming Barad approaches ontology from yet another discrete angle, though she stresses how her work builds upon the insights of Butler, among others. In her formulation of ‘agential realist ontology,’ she pursues a performative conception of being that erases the dichotomies between, for instance, representations and things in themselves, mediation and reality, and discourse and materiality. Positioning her approach in opposition to the linguistic turn, she writes: Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretive turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation. […] There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter. (2003: 801)

For Barad, who draws upon the insights of physicist Niels Bohr, ‘language’ and ‘materiality’ should not be thought of as independent realms with impenetrable boundaries. Rather, “[t]he relationship between the material and the discursive is one of mutual entailment. Neither is articulated/articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually articulated” (ibid: 822). Barad claims that the active role that she ascribes to materiality in the world’s becoming is what distinguishes her approach from Butler’s: “Butler’s theory ultimately reinscribes matter as a passive product of discursive practices” (ibid: footnote on 821). While Butler discusses the body as constructed by discourse, Barad stresses that the body itself is both material and discursive and that it actively contributes to the world’s becoming just as much as linguistic iterations and cultural representations do. For Barad, everything from bodies and representations to words and atoms are not agents in themselves but rather gain their distinction through interaction – or, what she prefers to call ‘intra-action’: “phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations – relations without preexisting relata” (ibid: 815). The ‘relata’ that comprise any given phenomenon do not produce the phenomenon in and of themselves. That is why the notion of interaction is not precise enough for Barad, as it implies a relationship between discrete parts. Rather, the component parts of a phenomenon gain distinction through the dynamic of intraaction – that is, intra-action and relations come prior to the ‘relata’: The primary ontological units are not ‘things’ but phenomena – dynamic topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations. And the primary semantic

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units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. (ibid: 818)

The being of the world is an ongoing becoming, an intra-active dynamism or continuous emergence. This attempt to parse the salient points of Barad’s ‘agential realist ontology’ cannot do justice to the depth and complexity of Barad’s theoretical framework. What it hopefully does achieve, however, is a general sense of a new approach to ontology that is fully different from those presented by Mouffe and Butler. In fact, for Barad, ‘ontology’ does not do justice to her approach. Rather, she concludes that “[o]nto-epistem-ology – the study of practices of knowing in being – is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter” (ibid: 829). Ontology and epistemology, traditionally the studies of being and knowing, are blended into an approach that places emphasis on being as a continuous becoming and in which agency is ascribed to dynamism rather than individual agents. By contrasting Barad’s ontology with those of Mouffe and Butler, one gains a sense of the striking diversity of approaches within the ontological turn. Unlike Mouffe and Butler, who present their notions of the ontological in discussions of concrete sociopolitical realities, Barad stays on a theoretical plane and does not roll out the consequences of her framework within a specific political or social context. Her approach is nonetheless of political consequence. By suggesting that knowing transforms being and vice versa, Barad advocates a posthumanist perspective on being that is to yield critical agendas and proposals for practice. Her ‘agential realist ontology’ is not merely a lens of observation but also a proposal for how to engage with the world: “Particular possibilities for acting exist at every moment, and these changing possibilities entail a responsibility to intervene in the world’s becoming, to contest and rework what matters and what is excluded from mattering” (ibid: 827). Her sense of “onto-epistem-ology” is about establishing a perspective that can be productive for thinking about how to negotiate and, indeed, influence the world’s becoming. Mouffe’s ontology of antagonism, Butler’s social ontology of precari ousness, and Barad’s onto-epistem-ology of intra-active becoming are just three of many uses, meanings, and approaches to the ontological in contemporary theory. Each of these three frameworks is based upon the conscious deconstruction and reappropriation of the term ‘ontology’ for purposes that are both conceptual and political. They collectively contribute to this term’s sustainability, and they employ the term to establish sustainable arguments. Understanding these ontologies as part of a turn requires an understanding of a cultural turn as

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encompassing divergent, even contesting, perspectives. But common aspects of these approaches can be identified as well, to which I will devote the concluding section.

C ONCLUSION : S IGNALING N OSTALGIA , S EEKING V IABLE F UTURES To continue in the vein of Barad, we could perceive the distinctions between the ontologies of Mouffe, Butler, and Barad as having been born out of a fundamental interdependence in the history of thought. For instance, by establishing an ontological basis for political argument, Butler builds upon the contributions of Mouffe and others who have maintained the distinction between the spheres of the ontological/political and the ontic/politics as a means of grounding her politicalphilosophical arguments. Barad makes a point of distinguishing her approach from that of Butler but also acknowledges the importance of Butler’s work for her own thinking. Such interdependences, or intra-actions, could be read as preceding the points of distinction that these scholars bring to articulation. I would like to conclude with three points that cast these theorists in the light of a common turn. The first point is simply that they all insist on employing the term ‘ontology’ in the first place. In his critique of ‘the ontological turn,’ Bruno Bosteels questions the very use of this signifier to describe what its authors wish to convey. Commenting directly on a 2009 volume entitled A Leftist Ontology, Bosteels finds that: Some authors […] explicitly or implicitly take ontology to refer not so much to the science of being qua being in the strict sense as to the basic presuppositions behind a given politicophilosophical stance – what we might call the bedrock of its fundamental assumptions and unshakable commitments, never mind that the term ‘ontology’ is perhaps less suited to name this value-laden and affect-imbued dimension than ‘political anthropology’ or even the good old ‘ideology’ would be. (2014: 56-57)

As I have stressed in my reading of Mouffe, Butler, and Barad, ontological claims do indeed function as “basic presuppositions” that guide “politico-philosophical stance[s].” They function as analytical lenses and not as objects of study in themselves. But why insist on ‘ontology’ instead of a term like “good old ‘ideology’”? I would suggest that the term is employed precisely for the associative baggage that it carries with it. Such baggage has a dramatic effect, and the term ‘ontology’

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is often consciously used to express a degree of boldness. It also announces theoretical commitment – the presentation of that “with which we cannot argue,” in Butler’s words, or the “dimension that can never be eradicated,” to borrow Mouffe’s phrasing (Butler 2006: 31; Mouffe 2014: 2). Theorists of such new ontologies jolt their readers to attention with a word that at first glance seems like a relic from a theoretical past. Within an intellectual field heavily influenced by the linguistic turn, the very appearance of ‘ontology’ functions as a signaling mechanism that announces a new impulse. The second point is that each of these theorists presents a deconstructed version of ‘ontology’ in which the only certitudes are of the lack of foundations. As Oliver Marchart has observed in his book Postfoundational Political Thought: [W]here we stand today, ontology is available in no other form than, to use Derrida’s term (1994), ‘hauntology’ – an ontology haunted by the spectre of its own absent ground. […] It is only in the sense of hauntology, that is to say, as an ontology lacking its very object (being-as-ground), that the term ontology may still be employed. (2007: 163)5

Derrida introduced the term ‘hauntology’ in his 1993 book Spectres of Marx to describe the absence of foundation that poststructuralist thought embraces – the fact that any kind of bedrock or point of origin perpetually recedes from view. Mouffe, Butler, and Barad, like many of the contemporary political philosophers upon which Marchart bases his observations about postfoundational thought, do indeed present their ontologies as modes of grounding that nonetheless embrace contingency. Such new ontologies represent the search for conceptual orientation, premises, and bearings that nonetheless uphold the malleability and historical situatedness of being. These contemporary ontologies refute both the absolute and an embrace of absolute relativism. They are thus nostalgic for a sense of certitude that philosophical ontology in its most traditional sense sought to identify, yet they reinvent the term to qualify and reframe the nature of this certitude. In this sense, these ontologies reflect ‘reflective nostalgia’ as defined by Svetlana Boym as a mode of nostalgia that throws absolute truth into doubt and acknowledges the irrevocability of the past (cf. Introduction to this volume, p. 12-13). These ontologies, like many others (though not all) that comprise the ontological turn, reveal a desire to reinstate a sense of grounding yet also acknowledge the mutability of all grounds. Marchart argues that this trend is not nostalgic:

5

Marchart also discusses new ontologies as legacies of Martin Heidegger, whose work within environmental sustainability discourses and nostalgia is referred to in this volume’s introduction (cf. 2007: 17-18).

70 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING [I]f we retain the notion of ‘ontology,’ we will not retain it for reasons of philosophical nostalgia but in order to maintain the radical implications of this traditional term. […] However, it goes without saying that the very term ‘ontology’ has to be deconstructed from within. (2007: 267)

Yet if the reasons for employing the term ‘ontology’ are not nostalgic, why would the term, and not another with equally “radical implications,” be employed in the first place? I would thus maintain that the term’s use does indeed indicate nostalgia for a sense of certitude that is often associated with the past yet relocated for future thought. The third point is that, as expressions of a desire for grounding, many new ontologies are not simply characterized by logical argument but are also affective and emotional. Carsten Strathausen has argued this point in an essay entitled “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology”: Ontologies literally live (i.e., they become embodied and practiced) by the credo of those who adhere to them, and this credo is not simply a matter of rational power or philosophical logic. There are other forces at work here, such as passion, unconscious beliefs and drives, aesthetics, and, above all, the way in which all of them are expressed, marketed, and ‘consumed.’ (2006: n.p.)

This point would most readily apply to the ontologies of Mouffe and Butler, who present their ontological claims in order to ground their political-philosophical arguments. Their ontologies are thus very much credos upon which they build their political critiques. While Barad’s “onto-epistem-ology” is grounded upon insights from the field of physics, she would likely agree that affects and emotions influence the dynamic becoming of the world and are certainly forces that shape to her theoretical contributions. I do not wish to make presumptions about the “unconscious beliefs and drives” of the theorists at hand, but the “passion” driving their work, the “aesthetic” dimensions of their writing, and the dismay, dissent, and desire to find new directions for the world’s socio-political becoming are central components of their ontologies. One senses that recourse is taken to ‘ontology’ to express the serious need for secure positions in a world of mutable foundations. At the same time, historical contingencies are not ignored or replaced by dogmatic stances that harken an intellectual past. The challenge is to find a middle ground. This is why a nostalgic term is newly appropriated to think and build something new – as a longing for a not-yet-realized future rather than for a lost past. Many of today’s ontologies grapple with this tension, which is perhaps similar to the tension found in

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theoretical work that deals directly with environmental sustainability, as these are equally characterized by a strong desire to maintain something for the future as well as the need to break open new frameworks for living and being.

R EFERENCES Bachmann-Medick, Doris (2016 [2015]): Cultural Turns: New Orientations in the Study of Culture, Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Bal, Mieke (2002): Travelling Concepts in the Humanities, Toronto/Buffalo/ London: University of Toronto Press. Barad, Karen (2003): “Posthuman Performativity: Toward and Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” In: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28/3, pp. 801-831. Bradbury, Jill (2012): “Narrative Possibilities of the Past for the Future: Nostalgia and Hope.” In: Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 18/3, pp. 341350. Bosteels, Bruno (2014 [2011]): The Actuality of Communism, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2006 [2004]): Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso. Butler, Judith (2010 [2009]): Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, London and New York: Verso. Chandler, David/Reid, Julian (2016): The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability, London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield. Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix (2013 [1994]): What is Philosophy?, London and New York: Verso. Derrida, Jacques (1994): Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York and London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel (1972): The Archeology of Knowledge, New York: Pantheon Books. Grossberg, Lawrence (2015): “We All Want to Change the World: The Paradox of the U.S. Left: A Polemic” (https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/ freebook/we_all_want_to_change_the_world.pdf). Kovach, Elizabeth (2016): Novel Ontologies after 9/11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-American Narrative Fiction, Trier: WVT. Laclau, Ernesto/Mouffe, Chantal (2014 [1985]): Hegemony as Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London and New York: Verso.

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Marchart, Oliver (2007): Post-Foundational Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mouffe, Chantal (2013): Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically, London and New York: Verso. Parker, Jenneth (2014): Critiquing Sustainability, Changing Philosophy, Oxon and New York: Routledge. Rosenberg, Jordana (2014): “The Molecularlization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present.” In: Theory & Event 17/2, n. p. (accessed through Project MUSE). Schmidt, Carl (1996 [1932]): The Concept of the Political, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Strathausen, Carsten (2006): “A Critique of Neo-Left Ontology” (http://pmc.iath. virginia.edu/text-only/issue.506/16.3strathausen.txt). Strathausen, Carsten, (ed.) (2009): A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Thomas, Peter (2009): “Gramsci and the political: From the state as ‘metaphysical event’ to hegemony as ‘philosophical fact.’” In: Radical Philosophy 153, pp. 27-36.

Civic Art Lab Reflections on Art, Design, and Sustainability 1 L AURA S CHERLING AND J EFF K ASPER

Picture 1: Civic Art Lab installation detail

International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen 2016. Courtesy of the authors.

1

This essay emerges out of the exhibition For What It’s Worth: Creative Encounters, in which the authors participated, held at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen between April 28 and 30, 2016.

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F OUNDATION : G REENSPACE NYC

AND

C IVIC ART L AB

Through the lens of our Brooklyn and Manhattan-based community project Civic Art Lab, held each summer between 2015 and 2017, we ask ourselves: “What are some of the most effective ways to combine sustainability with art and design?” By employing an ‘open dialogue style’ to reminisce on the project outcomes and the complex narratives that have emerged, we have continually asked ourselves this question for the past seven years since we founded GreenspaceNYC and our storefront education project, Civic Art Lab (cf. Merriam 1998: 74; Kvale 2008: 43).2 We initially wanted to make a positive contribution to sustainable development by activating empty storefronts and blighted properties in the spirit of the contemporary discourse on creative placemaking (cf. National Endowment for the Arts 2017). The strategies that we adopted embraced participatory design practices and civic engagement principles established by public space contemporary thinkers like Danish architect Jan Gehl and seminal American urbanist Jane Jacobs who both advocated for the social significance of revitalizing and preserving diverse neighborhood spaces (cf. Gehl 2013; Gehl 2011; Jacobs 1961). We were also inspired by New York City (NYC) organizations like City Atlas, IOBY, Parsons DESIS Lab, and The Center for Urban Pedagogy which make design and sustainability research and educational programming more accessible to the public. At the start of the project, we did not necessarily see that we would be the ones directly designing grassroots sustainability-focused interventions … literally from the bottom-up. We saw a lot of potential in publicly accessible datasets created by NYC Open Data (2017), which enabled us to identify vacant properties that artists, designers, activists, and sustainability professionals might access. To build out our concept, we enlisted in the civic innovation competition and hackathon NYC Big Apps (2017) sponsored by former mayor Michael Bloomberg. During the NYC Big Apps competition, we launched our beta version of GreenspaceNYC, designing and developing a prototype of a mobile application. The app listed blighted buildings and vacant lots in NYC and would put potential users in contact with property owners. Ideally, these connections would then lead to collaborative work to improve these spaces through design-led urban interventions. These interventions could be anything from designing and building a community garden

2

GreenspaceNYC and Civic Art Lab were founded in 2011 by Laura Scherling, Jeff Kasper, Raymond Manalo, and Laurence Wilse-Samson.

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to covering an old façade with yarn graffiti, or using a rehabilitated lot to host classes (cf. Debusmann 2011; Derringer 2013; Project for Public Spaces 2015). As the excitement and dynamism of competing in NYC Big Apps wound down, our newly formed group had to decide where next to take the project. Paimaan Lodhi, an urban planner from Harlem Community Board 10, reached out to encourage GreenspaceNYC to get involved in transforming the type of sites that we were interested in supporting with our mobile app prototype. He emphasized that direct, tactical, creative interventions would be beneficial to pursue. We kept our notes from the meeting with Paimaan in the March of 2011, jotting down our thoughts at the time: Paimaan gave us some excellent advice. See what others are doing… reach out to them on a grassroots level, and bring topics of advocacy back to our own network. It makes sense and it’s a great way to develop the project. This is an exciting next step. It means we can do some actual field work. GreenspaceNYC is a valid project and worth taking the next steps. (Authors’ notes)

Being invited to meet with Paimaan Lodhi was motivational and a transformative moment for GreenspaceNYC. Not long after that, we began to pivot into a nonprofit collaboration with a revised focus in developing and curating free art, design, and sustainability interventions.3 With limited funding and a group of volunteer instructors and organizers, we redesigned our initiative. We built our network on meetup.com by word of mouth and across various social media platforms. In the following years we created a series of pop-up workshops that took place in multiple venues – including in hackerspaces, parks, warehouses, and at cultural venues like New Museum's IdeasCity and The Staten Island Museum (cf. Ideas City 2018). Today, our public programs continue to take place in a range of spaces from public parks to community centers to vacant storefronts. Each project is created in collaboration with volunteer artists, designers, educators, activists, and the general public.

3

In 2012, GreenspaceNYC became fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas, giving it its status as a federally approved 501(c)(3) nonprofit. We gained material sponsorship from Materials for the Arts, a municipal program that is managed in collaboration with three city agencies, namely the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the NYC Department of Sanitation, and the NYC Department of Education.

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M AKING : C IVIC ART L AB

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After several years in operation, and with success in fine-tuning our public design and sustainability events and workshops, we wanted to increase our engagement in underserved NYC areas. This came out of our central belief that design and sustainability education should be more widely accessible to the public. We initiated Civic Art Lab as a summer-long community workshop and exhibition space located in a vacant storefront in the Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy) neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. The design and build-out of the vacant storefront was led by architects Andrew Haner and Daniel Horn, architect and designer Marcus Wilford, and sustainability researcher Grace H. Johnson. The workshop space, gallery, storage, and lounge were constructed from recycled, upcycled, reclaimed, and low-impact materials. Designed in partnership with the nonprofit Bridge Street Development Corporation, the lab was a place for neighbors to experiment, build, discuss and present sustainability and community engagement initiatives that happened both at a local and global scale.4 Picture 2: Civic Art Lab Storefront

Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York 2015. Courtesy of the authors.

The Bed-Stuy lab was sponsored through Bridge Street Development Corporation’s Pop-up Program, and we received additional support from a

4

More information about the events and workshops is given in the ‘Dialogue as selfreflection’ section of this chapter.

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Mojdeh Baratloo Urban Urge Award seed grant, Big Reuse, Materials for the Arts, and an IOBY fundraising campaign.5 The lab ran for six weeks. During this period, we offered 40 free design and sustainability-themed workshops. The lab incorporated a decentralized approach to workshop design, which allowed volunteers to assume various roles and responsibilities. After the lab concluded, we continued to pursue the project. GreenspaceNYC and Civic Art Lab, which had grown up out of a rapid prototype design, had now become embedded in our daily lives and our worldview. In its 2nd and 3rd years, Civic Art Lab took place in Alphabet City, a neighborhood of New York City’s borough of Manhattan. The lab occupied the local storefront Creations Gallery, which is adjacent to a family-owned bike repair shop in a mixed-use East Village building. Our programming continued to be free of cost thanks also to small donations by attendees and ongoing support from the city. Civic Art Lab workshops and exhibitions in 2016 and 2017 were respectively themed around the topics ‘Design + Climate’ and ‘Resistance.’ These workshops and exhibitions were produced by volunteer artists, designers, and teachers who led investigations into a diverse set of themes such as creative re-use, sustainable architecture, health and well-being, recycling, and environmental justice.6 The physical nature of Civic Art Lab as a community space in a vacant storefront and, by result, how that space informs the form of social relationships of those who maintain it, visit it, and activate it with community programs, plays into, in part, the persistent memory of yesterday’s urban spaces (cf. Scherling 2015). We have observed the current discourse in pragmatic creative placemaking methodologies as well as in radical and subversive artistic urban interventions built on the premise of ‘re-imagining’ vacant or blighted spaces. In encountering the lab, it becomes ‘a monument to itself’ and a symptom of nostalgia, associated with a new tradition of creative transformations of unused everyday spaces in postindustrial cities undergoing significant demographic and cultural change. The ‘lab’ as a spatial intervention implies notions of the future and of the past anticipating coming changes to urban life. In this light, for those who interact with Civic Art Lab, a nostalgic image of a small-scale, mixed-use community fabric of 5

Big Reuse is a New York City-based nonprofit retail outlet for salvaged and surplus building materials. Founded in 2005, its mission is to divert materials from landfills, minimize carbon emissions, and provide communities with quality, low cost building materials and home furnishings.

6

2015 Civic Art Lab Artists, Designers, and Educators: Zoey Hart, Jess Kennedy, Ryan King, Mireille Liong, Amberle Reyes, Rebecca Sherman, stic.man of dead prez, Ashley Taylor, Caroline Voagen-Nelson, Alex Alaimo, sun|tect Architecture, Operation Resilient Long Island (ORLI).

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yesteryear is present. What Civic Art Lab does is ask what type of community spaces and institutions (even provisional or temporary) we lack in our current environments. What it recalls is the classic urban standards of ‘eyes on the street’ and neighbor-led community building and socializing that seemed to have disappeared after the end of the 20th century because of many historical forces of disinvestment, a shrinking middle class, changes in policing, creation of new social technologies, neoliberalism, and economic shifts (cf. Barnes et al. 2006; Holleran/Sam 2015; Jacobs 1961).

R EFLECTION What does it mean to reflect on a body of work? The process of reflection has been an ongoing, multistep process of research, practice, critique, and self-criticism. By reflecting on the project developments of the past seven years, we consider how our earlier work (2011-2015) as the collective GreenspaceNYC culminated as Civic Art Lab (2015). This culmination was the outcome of nearly five years of practice-led, participatory research – where we created temporary educational spaces and worked with different NYC communities and neighborhoods. We then engaged in the process of reflection and exhibited in Giessen (2016), held two more Civic Art Labs (2016 & 2017), and expanded our process of reflection by incorporating dialogue as a type of reflection into this chapter (2017). To structure our critical self-reflection and collaborative dialogue, we looked at various approaches from andragogy and pedagogy. Some of the questions that helped us to formulate our process and the design of our collaborative dialogue came from the research of Frid et al. (1998). The authors outline the following: Ask why something did or did not happen. Ask what was good, why? What was bad, why? Neither good nor bad, but interesting, why? Think of alternatives; what else could have happened? Why? Look for other points of view. Look for hidden assumptions in our attitudes and beliefs. Look at something as a collection of parts but also as a set of qualities, values, and judgments. Look at the opposite viewpoint in order to challenge it. Ask who might be advantaged and who might be disadvantaged by these responses and actions. (ibid: 325-350)

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In our ‘expedition’ to reflect on GreenspaceNYC and Civic Art Lab, these insights have consistently applied. The nomadic ‘pop-up’ style of GreenspaceNYC’s interventions took us through distinctly different communities, where we are challenged to question our own assumptions, and consider diverse viewpoints (ibid: 325-350). John Dewey describes critical reflection as the “active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it and the further conclusions to which it includes a conscious and voluntary effort to establish belief upon a firm basis of evidence and rationality” (1933: 118). Thus, critical reflection involves more than pure logic; it deeply involves recognizing “the assumptions underlying our beliefs and actions” (Frid et al. 1998: 325). Through these exercises in self-reflection, as a collective, we operationalize our reasons and rationale for doing what we do: immersing ourselves in various NYC communities and cultures (cf. Brookfield 1988). Picture 3: Civic Art Lab installation detail (ephemera and text)

International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen 2016. Courtesy of the authors.

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Exhibition as self-reflection Our participation in For What It’s Worth: Creative Encounters gave us the opportunity to think about the work we have done over the past years. During the exhibition, ongoing collaborations were observed between artists, businesses, local organizations, institutions, and the community at large. Our exhibition drew from our experiences as organizers, including an outline of the engagements pursued by each of the 15 volunteer educators and artists involved with the project, as a lens into these community-based collaborations. In the exhibition, we gave a retrospective of our 2015 Civic Art Lab – a storefront project hosted through our volunteer collective GreenspaceNYC. The installation at Giessen was processoriented and we invited the exhibition audience to interact with ephemera from the 2015 storefront, including full color snapshots of activities at the lab, as well as conceptual texts, descriptions, and testimonials of each workshop and creative investigations at the storefront that were organized according to three categories: ‘exhibitions and workshops’, ‘environmental observations’, and ‘environment, health + well-being’. These themes characterized the 40 workshops and events held at the 2015 lab. Dialogue as self-reflection As a follow up to the exhibition in Giessen, we set up a time to record a semistructured dialogue. It was a focused act of reflection – a way to tap into memory, as well as feelings of nostalgia – intended to more accurately capture the full breadth of Civic Art Lab and GreenspaceNYC. As described, this became the central data collection method for this chapter because it encouraged a “flexible” and “exploratory” dialogue (Merriam 1998: 73). Furthermore, in consideration of Steinar Kvale's research on interviewing, we sought out “narrative knowledge, embodied in storytelling” with the goal of creating a lively discourse that more accurately reflects the grassroots nature of our work (2008: 42-43). The semistructured protocol was designed to include: a review of memorable workshops and events from the 1st annual Civic Art Lab (2015); an assessment of our expectations and some of the challenges we encountered; the experience of forming a large and informal collective; the relevance of the work; and, broadly, plans for the future. The dialogue (2017) was as follows:

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Laura Scherling (LS): As part of our process of reflecting on GreenspaceNYC and Civic Art Lab, we have designed an informal interview. Jeff Kasper (JK):

LS:

We will talk about some of our experiences. Civic Art Lab is now going to the 4th year.

Our 4th lab will continue to be held in New York City. For this chapter, we will start by reflecting on the 1st lab – held in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighborhood, Brooklyn. Our 1st lab was the focal point of our exhibition at the University of Giessen in Germany. Looking back to where this all started, I think we can take a moment to think about some of the memorable workshops and events from the very 1 st Civic Art Lab. One that immediately comes to mind is our sustainability film festival. 7 Our team solicited films from filmmakers from around the world, short films, and animation. These were all related to sustainability issues. I think we screened about 10 of them – from metaphorical interpretations of climate change to more interview-style documentary films on agriculture. I think that was an interesting moment to bridge local concerns with international concerns.

JK:

LS:

Our film festival had a large pool of applications … I think 120 applicants. There was a lot of critical thinking in the films and animations about how climate change and sustainability are affecting our lives. At the time we held our lab, there were a couple of pop-up theater projects in Bed-Stuy.

JK:

Another memorable part of Civic Art Lab was our exhibition about ‘African’ hair. It was called Bad Hair Uprooted.

7

GreenspaceNYC’s Sustainability Film Festival was led by organizers Andrew Haner and Dan Bourbeau.

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Picture 4: Exhibit detail, Bad Hair Uprooted by Mireille Liong

Civic Art Lab 2015. Courtesy of the authors

LS:

It was a celebration of black follicles, highlighting social injustice as it pertains to hair, featuring the work of Mireille Liong.

JK:

Yes, the exhibition looked at how Black women and Black men are forced socially to adhere to standards about hair and use particular products that are unhealthy in order to be closer to a White/Caucasian standard. These types of hair treatments can be toxic to the body and to the environment. Through this exhibition, we were introduced to our neighbors, who are involved in a lot of different issues related to sustainability and social justice.

LS:

We learned that sustainability is deeply intertwined with health issues, personal, public, and cultural. Mirielle’s exhibition really drew from the Black culture and identity of Bed-Stuy, which is deeply ingrained in the neighborhood’s history.

JK:

This was one of the benefits of having a space like this – that we were able to really use that space to amplify the types of things our neighbors wanted to talk about.

LS:

The Bed-Stuy neighbors were enthusiastic to participate in Civic Art Lab exhibitions and workshops in a spontaneous fashion, and that was exciting. Local artists, designers, and environmentalists would walk into

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the storefront with project ideas. This really supported the notion of community-based sustainability, situated in a storefront where people can visibly observe what you’re doing in the neighborhood. JK:

And to contribute, argue, and adjust that narrative.

LS:

It has been rewarding to work together in this fashion. In another case, the final event of our 1st lab, stic.man of the hip-hop group dead prez was willing to donate his time. He prepared a thorough, thoughtful presentation on sustainability and living healthily.

JK:

stic.man’s presentation on holistic living resonated with Bed-Stuy’s residents. Frequently, in communities who embrace sustainability, we only hear from particular types of people and authors. To hear a famous hip-hop artist discuss how he lives his life with concern for issues of healthy living, self-care and organic foods was really inspiring.

LS:

I was especially interested in his involvement with meditation practices and running. Stic.man creates community events to encourage running and various types of exercise. I have since taken up running in the park.

JK:

That is awesome.

LS:

There were many other notable workshops and events. For example, Yasmeen Abdallah’s tea ceremonies, where she takes discarded tea bags and reassembles them into sculptures.

JK:

Also, a crowd favorite was Zoey Hart's Studio Subway workshop, which involved engaging people during their subway commutes, transforming it into a space for mindfulness and observation. During Zoey’s workshops, participants could use the time to center themselves.

LS:

We had some traditional environmental science educational classes as well. Architect Andrew Haner led a LEED certification course at no cost.8 Dan Bourbeau created a ‘climate school’, offering walk-in climate

8

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) is a rating system devised by the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) to evaluate the environmental performance of a building and encourage market transformation towards sustainable design.

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change education twice a week for several weeks. Our 1st lab was a vibrant space and two months long. It was a lot to maintain a storefront project for two months. JK:

It was. It involved making furniture and fixing things. It was somewhere between a laboratory and a classroom. We were there almost every day for two months. It was like the family business in some sense.

LS:

Two months of offering free and low-cost education. Since the 1st Civic Art Lab, we have hosted two more.

JK:

The year after we left Bed-Stuy, we set up a shop in East Village in Alphabet City on Avenue C.

LS:

We did change locations. We moved to a more central location in Manhattan. The East Village and Alphabet City have a lively, historic identity in art, music, and in furthering sustainable causes. The neighborhood has already gone through an intense amount of gentrification. There is a distinct economic divide in the area, but it is still a culturally vibrant place.

JK:

There is much exchange of cultural practices in the area, a long history of activism from community gardens to squatting, and urban homesteading. We have been in the East Village/Alphabet City for two years, and we are going on the 3rd year.

LS:

We have considerably downsized the length of Civic Art Lab to a long weekend. It means we can offer about 13 to 15 workshops and follow the model we established in Bed-Stuy, but it is more manageable in terms of finances, grant writing, and fundraising.

JK:

By shortening Civic Art Lab from two months to around three days we have pared it down to the essential elements of what we have been doing. It was not easy to do this; however, I think it offers a different type of long-term engagement than what we had when we were in Brooklyn. People come back to visit each year.

LS:

We have had some surprises along the way. What have you been surprised to learn about with our project?

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JK:

I was surprised to learn how much issues of sustainability do register in the “everyday” lives of people. And that is not to say that I did not think that they would matter, but more so of how they manifest themselves. For example, questions of wellness and African hair. That was a very specific everyday situation that I would not have thought about. It is beyond hot topics like recycling and clean energy. If we really sit down and think about what it would take to live a sustainable life, we would also have to think about the self and the ‘cultural implications’ of things like hair or materials. That is something that continues to surprise me.

LS:

Sustainability permeates everything. From the food we buy to the clothing we wear, to the air that we breathe, to the water that we drink. I have always been impressed by the friendships that emerge out of Civic Art Lab. That has exceeded my expectations as well.

JK:

What surprised me (in practice) is that people really do know how to lead the way forward and they need more spaces to experiment with and to share resources. Community spaces help to ‘de-silo’ people.

LS:

‘De-silo’ is an interesting word. It is not on an everyday basis that an environmental scientist can network with an upcycling artist, and an architect specializing in resilience. I think Civic Art Lab encourages these connections. More and more, we also see a lot of young children and their parents registering to participate. In terms of pedagogy, the instructors do a phenomenal job with curriculum design. We have always asked for hands-on, constructivist approaches to the way these courses are taught – from going on walks to visiting city gardens to looking at shorelines or infrastructure.

JK:

These workshops also encourage participants to simply build something. In Bed-Stuy, a woman came by to reflect on one of our workshops on composting. She mentioned that her grandson had never used his hands in this way before and since then, he will not stop talking about worms and organic foods.

LS:

This year (2017), after Zoey Hart taught students to weave, they continued to weave in their free time and in between workshops. The tactility of weaving was a cathartic activity, and all the materials were upcycled. I think that is the case with a lot of GreenspaceNYC/Civic Art

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Lab workshops: complex topics in sustainability are simplified through hands-on activities. JK:

Hands-on activities about design and sustainability, in an everyday space like a storefront, situate this information at an approachable scale. I think that is incredible and continues to surprise me.

LS:

Over the years, we have managed to sustain a large, informal community of designers, artists, volunteers, educators, neighbors, environmentalists, and activists. At the start of the project we imagined that DIY (Do it yourself) spaces, and sustainability, as it became more and more of a buzz-word, would eventually fall more in line with mainstream concerns. However, climate change has become a more of a concern in the US and throughout the world.

JK:

We still need community spaces that are non-institutional, grassroots, and DIY. I think cultural traditions and ‘futures’ are completely smashing up against each other. And we have a lot of realities that people still need to talk about and work through in more informal settings. There is a lot of denial.

LS:

There’s a lot of climate denial in the Trump presidency. We are at a very specific moment in time where I feel like we are back-peddling. We are seven years into this project and we are still working through a lot of similar conversations. However, there is a new urgency … Sustainability challenges are not resolved only locally but are evermore global issues. In the United States they are gaining some recognition at the state level, but not on a federal level. It’s a little surreal for me.

JK:

We are in a space where we need to redefine what we want the future to be; we’re in a crisis period. There’s a lot of space for imagination and a need for experimentation.

LS:

NYC is home to many sustainability and art projects which are also presented with funding challenges, political challenges, etc. What do we think are some of the benefits of creating this type of informal educational space in different communities of New York City?

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JK:

With Civic Art Lab, people teach each other on a more casual basis, and they share resources. Our participants learn about sustainability together. There’s always been that type of dynamic with this project, the barriers to entry are low.

LS:

I do think informal learning encourages participants to feel more empowered to come up with their own curriculum, to really teach or share something about sustainability that they care about and feel passionate about. Civic Art Lab’s informal learning model eliminates the nitpicking, micromanaging, and it is more about delegation and support.

JK:

We do have committee meetings every year where we invite the public to join in on this project. We learn (often) that people have a lot of skills to share. You mentioned empowerment. Spaces like Civic Art Lab are empowering because it allows us to reconsider what you could do as an individual, or what your organization can do.

LS:

This idea of expanding skills to include sustainability reminds me of Andrew DeRosa’s workshop on community, data mapping, and sustainability – that he has taught for two years at Civic Art Lab. Or Sohee Koo’s workshop “Re-re-re-transforming the Ordinary” that looks at upcycling everyday objects. Andrew is a professor at Queens College while Sohee lectures at Columbia University. In their teaching, respectively, the courses are more art- and design-focused. During Civic Art Lab, they have generously designed a curriculum that integrates sustainability topics.

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Picture 5: Community Mapping workshop by Andrew DeRosa.

Civic Art Lab: Alphabet City New York 2016. Courtesy of the authors.

JK:

Beyond our lab, it is critical for educators to rethink how waste and sustainability factor into their job. In that light, you do not necessarily need to be a director of policy or sustainability to make change happen. In our everyday lives, we can adjust, contributing to the larger systematic improvement. There’s so much change that can happen …Sometimes, it is not as a big of a leap as it seems. It is easy to perceive, “Oh no! What am I going to give up in my life to switch lifestyles?”

LS:

Exactly! It is not always such a big deal. This reminds me of Agustina Besada’s Civic Art Lab lecture about the circular economy – knowing where things come from, making incremental changes for sustainability. It reminds me of one of our earliest goals together for GreenspaceNYC/Civic Art Lab … that sustainability should not be considered a luxury good.

JK:

This concept factors into some of our questions about the dangers of doing this type of work. We are all vulnerable in this process, confronting truths about where we live, ourselves, history, science, and more. There’s always going to be aspects that are uncomfortable. It is challenging to amplify the concerns of the people who live in these neighborhoods that we work in. I think we try to be as people-focused as possible. It is important to consider how we can continue to build spaces that amplify

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New Yorker’s voices, our neighbors’ voices, from different backgrounds and different directions. There are many discourses around artistic production, artists and galleries entering neighborhoods, fear of gentrification and displacement. LS:

It is a real challenge, acknowledging the relationships between art and gentrification, and reaching underserved populations in neighborhoods. I think this is something we are still learning how to do and that we are still trying to figure out …

JK:

Yes, how to reach more people through different types of barriers and how to go into a project with the support and direction from institutions, businesses, and organizations that collaborate with us.

LS:

The 1st Civic Art Lab emerged from a collaboration with Bridge Street. As we were talking about earlier in this interview, this gradually branched out into a network. In some ways, our partnership with the Norov brothers has been similar in the East Village/Alphabet City. The Norov brothers own a bike shop next door, where they do repairs. They care about the mission of sustainability and their neighbors.

JK:

Yeah, to be linked up with local business and to find collaborators who’ve been in the neighborhood for a long time can really ground you in a particularly positive way.

LS:

It would be great to eventually build more partnerships in rural parts of America. We have done a little bit of work in Detroit, but haven’t gone very far. However, I still feel that NYC will continue to be our focus. This project has been site-specific.

JK:

Aside from Manhattan and Brooklyn, we have worked on the periphery of New York City. We wanted to start on a scale that was intimate to us, relevant to us, and we have built a community for this project here … I do think more and more about how our work can travel and what it means to do work outside of our community for this particular project.

LS:

Taking the trip to Giessen is the reason why we are reflecting and why we wrote this chapter. By participating in ‘For What It is Worth: Creative Encounters’, we were able to get different perspectives and feedback. It

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was helpful to be somewhere else, thinking about Civic Art Lab, and reflecting on everything that has happened. What do you think about the experience we have had? Reflecting on our work from a totally different location, far from home, what does that do to us? JK:

I think it gives us a distance from what we do, because often we are so entangled in our daily lives and we are so exhausted from work that brings us somewhere else, mentally and physically. Reflection allows us to really boil down our ideas to the essentials and it also allows us to remember everything that has happened. It is challenging to have clarity while creating Civic Art Lab, during planning it. I am also really interested in having these types of reflection at home.

LS:

I think we mainly reflect over coffee or over lunch, or on the phone. I would really look forward to … in the next year … to continue to take the time to reflect on Civic Art Lab. It is an excellent opportunity to build another exhibition about Civic Art Labs 1, 2, and 3.

JK:

Based on our research, exhibitions are an effective tool for reflection. An exhibition can be a way of being self-critical; you’re considering what you’ve done, things that went well, and what could be better. I think it is an important practice to be self-reflective. And I’m excited to keep doing that.

LS:

Yes. I agree. I think that is a good note to end on here. On a note of selfreflection.

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Picture 6: Installing an exhibit on invasive urban flora.

Civic Art Lab: Alphabet City New York 2016. Courtesy of the authors.

C ONCLUSION As described in this chapter, Civic Art Lab aims to bridge the divide between disciplinary silos and the applied practices of artists, designers, activists, environmentalists, and everyday New Yorkers. Civic Art Lab has strived to provide a free educational community space, while continually emphasizing that sustainability is ‘not a luxury good’. Sustainability can create meaningful relationships between art, design, and grassroots social movements through the exchange of valuable skills, experiences, and expertise in a non-hierarchical way, simply through starting conversations with neighbors and learning through handson activities. Our community-based interventions and research have taught us that sustainability can be ‘accessible’. This is arguably a fundamental notion to making sustainability practices a part of our everyday lives, especially in countries like the US, where an enormous amount of waste is produced. When meaningful multidisciplinary grassroots relationships are established in favor of sustainability, these actions are also committed to memory. By carrying these memories and embracing “a way of being nostalgic for the future,” one can imagine the motivation to engage in non-hierarchical sustainability practices in all facets of everyday life (Davies 2010). Through this project, we hope that non-hierarchical exchanges will reinforce sustainability and influence participants in our projects, and others like these, to

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replicate sustainability-driven practices. Civic Art Lab will continue to promote localized, DIY, participatory interventions between neighbors, seeking to build sustainable futures through collective experimentation and creativity. As a creative project, the purpose is not limited to education in economic and political systems or environmental realities. Rather, it seeks to forge connections across networks that allow people to both recall the past and imagine realities that bring communities closer to living in a sustainable future.

R EFERENCES “Announcing the winners of the NYC BigApps 2017 competition! Winners will receive over $30,000 in cash and prizes!”, May 23, 2017 (http://www.big apps.nyc). Barnes, Kendall/Gordon, Waitt/Nicholas, Gill/Chris, Gibson (2006): “Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation: A Critique of Urban Village and Creative Class Strategies as Remedies for Social ‘Problems’.” In: Australian Geographer 37/3, pp. 24-60. Brookfield, Stephen (1988): “Developing Critically Reflective Practitioners: A Rationale for Training Educators of Adults.” In Stephen Brookfield (ed.), Training Educators of Adults: The Theory and Practice of Graduate Adult Education, New York: Routledge, pp.317-338. “Creative Communities and Arts-based Placemaking”, June 12, 2015 (https:// www.pps.org/article/creative-communities-and-arts-based-placemaking). “Creative Placemaking Resources”, 2017 (https://www.arts.gov/artistic-fields/ creative-placemaking/creative-placemaking-resources). Davies, Jeremy (2010): “Sustainable Nostalgia.” In Memory Studies 3, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Journals, pp. 262-268. Dewey, John (1933): How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process, Lexington, MA: Heath. Frid, Sandra/Reading, Chris/Redden, Ted (1998): “Are teachers born or made? Critical reflection for professional growth,” in Maxwell T., (ed.), The Context of Teaching, Armidale NSW: Kardoorair Press, pp. 325-350. Gehl, Jan (2011): Life between buildings: Using Public Space, Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Gehl, Jan (2013): Cities for People, Washington, D.C.: Island Press. Jacobs, Jane (1961): The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House. Kvale, Steinar (2008): Doing Interviews, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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“Lab City: The Limits of Pop-up Problem Solving. Dissent”, July 22, 2015 (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/lab-city-the-limits-of-popup-problem-solving-ideas-city-new-museum). “Open Data for All New Yorkers”, 2017, (https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us). Revised and Expanded from Case Study Research in Education, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Scherling, Laura (2015): “How Mapmaking Informs Placemaking Practices in Detroit Organizations,” in The Value of Design Research, 11th European Academy of Design Conference, pp. 1-20. “She’s Crafty: Yarn Bombing Pioneer Magda Sayeg”, Jun 18, 2013 (designmilk.com/shes-crafty-yarn-bombing-pioneer-magda-sayeg-knitta). “Website aims to Transform New York’s blighted areas”, March 1, 2011 (http:// www.reuters.com/article/us-web-newyork-green/website-aims-to-transformnew-yorks-blighted-areas-idUSTRE71R57620110301).

Prospective Memory Sustainability in Poetic Theory and Practice T OM C LUCAS

P OETICS OF I MMEDIACY : T HE T URN FROM N OSTALGIA IN C ONTEMPORARY E COPOETRY This essay and the poem that follows record a series of reflections on the theory and practice of writing sustainable poetry. The term ‘sustainable poetry’ was coined by Leonard M. Scigaj in his eponymous study Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets (1999), which analyses the poetry of A. R. Ammons, Wendell Berry, W. S. Merwin, and Gary Snyder. As the title implies, Scigaj proposes ‘sustainable poetry’ as a metonym for ecopoetry. In turn, he contends that “if environmental writers constitute a smaller group within the class of nature writers, ecopoets comprise an even smaller subgroup within the environmentalist group” (Scigaj 1999: 11). Offering an early definition of ‘ecopoetry’, Scigaj suggests that what distinguishes ‘ecopoets’ from the broader categories of ‘nature writers’ and ‘environmental writers’ is that they “present nature in their poems as a separate and equal other in dialogues meant to include the referential world and offer exemplary models of biocentric perception and behavior” (Scigaj 1999: 11). He then singles out this ‘referential’ approach to the natural world as the defining characteristic of ‘sustainable poetry’, which he describes as a “poetry of référance”, involving a three-stage movement from the human to the natural world: (1) reaching a self-reflexive acknowledgment of the limits of language, (2) referring one’s perceptions beyond the printed page to nature, to the referential origin of all language, and (3) in most cases achieving an atonement or at-one-ment with nature. (Scigaj 1999: 38)

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This essay occupies itself with the transition from the second to the third of Scigaj’s three steps, which constitutes the crux of sustainable poetry and its greatest challenge for readers and writers alike. Like many critics, Scigaj speaks of ecopoetry (and specifically sustainable poetry) as bridging or collapsing the divide between the ‘printed page’ and ‘nature’. The task of the poet is to move from referring the reader’s attention “beyond the printed page” to achieving or simulating an “at-one-ment with nature”. In the process, the poem must transport the reader’s imagination beyond the text into the natural world to which it refers and which it purports to represent. Scigaj recognizes the complexities of this referential leap and crafts his critical prose—as his chosen poets have honed their poetic language—to avoid any slide into linguistic essentialism. Taking A. R. Ammons’s poem ‘The Arc Inside and Out’ as an example, he argues that rather than essentializing the natural world sustainable poetry brings the reader simultaneously into an awareness of the limits of language as well as a finer appreciation of the primacy of the ‘real’ entities in the referential world. The doubling, a technique of référance, thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page toward the referential apple, drink, and sun. (Scigaj 1999: 46)

This quotation describes an aesthetic approach, common to many contemporary works of ecopoetry and ecological criticism, which may be termed a ‘poetics of immediacy’. Many of these works share an emphasis on the motion towards ‘atone-ment’, which “thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page toward the referential [world]”. The question which this essay addresses, from both a critical and creative perspective, is how writers have attempted to initiate this referential leap from text to nature using poetic language, as well as the extent to which such a leap is possible. In the process, the essay examines the historical development of the ‘poetics of immediacy’ and how its development has been informed by the simultaneous action of changing concepts of sustainability and nostalgia. First, it is necessary to define the poetics of immediacy in a little more detail, and specifically to consider why it tends to be premised on a pejorative treatment of the concept of nostalgia found in much recent ecological poetry and criticism. Since Scigaj’s collection, the genre of ecopoetry has grown to occupy an important position in the spectrum of contemporary poetry. In a relatively short time, the genre has become richly theorized and has developed a unique set of creative practices and critical debates. In the Anglo-American context, the emergence of ecopoetry was signaled by a series of influential publications,

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including J. Scott Bryson’s edition Ecopoetry: A Critical Introduction (2002), Alice Oswald’s anthology The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet (2005), Neil Astley’s edition entitled Earth Shattering: Ecopoems (2007), and Forrest Gander and John Kinsella’s Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (2012). Building on the work of earlier critics like Scigaj, these publications have helped to crystallize the generic properties of ecopoetry and set the tone for subsequent critical discussion. Though very different in their techniques of selection and emphases on the features of ecological writing, each of these collections engages to a greater or lesser extent with the poetics of immediacy. Alice Oswald presents a stark vision of this editorial ideal when discussing her principles of selection in the introduction to The Thunder Mutters: No prospects, pastorals or nostalgic poems are in here, no poem that mistakes the matter at the end of the rake for a mere conceit. The knack of enervating nature (which starts in literature and quickly spreads to everything we touch) is an obstacle to ecology which can only be countered by a kind of porousness or sorcery that brings living things unmediated into the text. (Oswald 2006: x)

This passage succinctly outlines the poetics of immediacy. In her brief introduction, Oswald uses the metaphor of a ‘rake’ (colloquially known as a ‘dew’s harp’) to describe how poets can use their chosen instrument of poetic language to write sustainably about nature. Language, she suggests, should not be a mere tool which poets use to reach out and control or merely to point at the natural world. Rather, language in the poet’s hands, like the rake in the hands of the gardener, should form a connection between the human and natural worlds, enabling the reader to “hear right into the non-human world … as if [s/he] and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake” (Oswald 2006: ix). Oswald’s injunction to those who would write sustainably is to avoid the “knack of enervating nature” which she criticizes as an “obstacle to ecology”. In order to write sustainably, she claims, poets should not turn nature into text, reducing the natural world to a “mere conceit”, but should instead encourage their language to approach the perceptual status of the natural world it refers to. By way of illustration, Oswald replicates Scigaj’s referential leap but reverses the direction of travel when she speaks of the “porousness or sorcery that brings living things unmediated into the text” (Oswald 2006: ix). This is a compelling phrase, though its key adjective ‘unmediated’ risks advancing beyond Scigaj’s careful delineation of the process of ‘référance’ into the realm of linguistic essentialism. From a writer’s perspective, one might ask how it is possible to manipulate language to such an extent that it “brings living things unmediated into the text” (Oswald 2006:

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ix; my emphasis). In this sentence, Oswald suggests that the language of sustainable poetry should become an invisible medium, collapsing the divide between word and world. The idealism of this image is signaled by the disjunctive pair of nouns – “porousness or sorcery” – which Oswald chooses to describe this process. While ‘porousness’ suggests that the poet’s language should remain receptive and open to the sensory experience of nature, ‘sorcery’ suggests beyond this that the poet’s language must make a magical leap beyond referentiality into the natural world itself. Despite this poetic license, Oswald’s vision of the poetics of immediacy accords quite closely with that of Scigaj, who proposes that: “A sustainable poem is the verbal record of the percept, of the poet’s originary perception” (Scigaj 1999: 80). Though Scigaj does not suggest that language should become an invisible medium, his emphasis on accurately recording the “originary perception” does imply that “[l]anguage in ecopoems attains neither primacy nor special ontological status” (Scigaj 1999: 80). In both cases, the medium of language exists at least partially under erasure. In this model, sustainable poetry propels the reader’s imagination beyond the act of referring towards nature itself, so that the poet’s language becomes more or less ‘immediate’. As a result of this emphasis on immediacy, Oswald excludes the genres that she associates with artificiality and the tendency to treat nature as a “mere conceit”: “No prospects, pastorals or nostalgic poems are in here” (Oswald 2006: x). This rejection of ‘prospects’ and ‘pastorals’ reflects a familiar debate in ecological criticism, especially focusing on the Romantic period. In recent years, the pastoral genre has often been interpreted as offering an anthropocentric, reductive, and idealized view of nature. The ecocritic Greg Garrard observes that the ‘classical pastoral’ is disposed to “distort or mystify social and environmental history, whilst at the same time providing a locus, legitimated by tradition, for the feelings of loss and alienation from nature” (2004: 39). Connected with this, he notes (following Raymond Williams) that the “pastoral has always been characterized by nostalgia, so that wherever we look into its history, we will see an ‘escalator’ taking us back further into a better past” (Garrard 2004: 37). For many critics, such nostalgia proves problematic, because it superimposes a layer of human affect which detracts from the immediate sensory appreciation of the non-human world. What Oswald characterizes as “mere conceit” can be described more expansively as the pastoral’s tendency to subordinate natural to human history, using nature as vehicle to explore human experience. This practice, both Oswald and Garrard imply, becomes an “obstacle to ecology”, because it prevents the outward movement of ‘référance’, which “thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page toward the referential [world]” (Scigaj 1999: 46). In

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other words, pastoral poetry does not encourage a sustainable approach to nature, because it prevents immediacy and encourages the reader to remain at a privileged, instrumental remove from the natural world. Oswald’s criticism of ‘prospects’ is also rooted in a perceived lack of immediacy. The prospect poem developed as a distinct sub-genre of topographical or place poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, influenced by the picturesque style of painting. At this time, a fashion quickly developed for painters and tourists to seek vantage points from which to reduce the landscape to an attractive composition, often using a convex mirror known as a Claude glass, named after the seventeenth-century French painter Claude Lorrain. David Marshall aptly summarizes the ‘problem’ of the picturesque when he comments that: The picturesque represents a point of view that frames the world and turns nature into a series of living tableaux … [A]nticipating an imaginative projection of self into the landscape through an act of transport or identification, it assumes an attitude that seems to depend on distance and separation. (Marshall 2002: 414)

Since sustainable poetry and the picturesque share this movement from selfhood out into the natural world, it becomes necessary to consider if and how sustainable poetry avoids the alienating distance which many critics attribute to picturesque prospects. How, one might ask, does the “imaginative projection of the self into landscape” differ from the sustainable poet’s practice of “referring one’s perceptions beyond the printed page to nature, to the referential origin of all language” (Scigaj 1999: 38)? One key difference concerns how much of that selfhood travels with the poet and/or reader in the act of projection. The “projection of self” differs from “referring one’s perceptions” (my emphases) to the extent that the former projects the entirety of anthropocentric consciousness, while the latter merely extends the senses towards the “originary perception” of nature (Scigaj 1999: 80). In other words, the picturesque projects the human onto the non-human, whereas sustainable poetry aims to extend a bare perception—as far as possible depersonalized—encouraging both poet and reader to become receptive parts of the natural ecosystem. Necessarily, writing about this experience still involves the mediation of language, but Scigaj suggests that sustainable poetry should acknowledge its imperfect immediacy by drawing the reader’s attention to the act of reference and inducing a “self-reflexive acknowledgment of the limits of language” (Scigaj 1999: 38). A second key difference between ‘projection’ and ‘référance’ thus concerns the degree of self-awareness with which the text directs the reader’s perceptions “beyond signifiers on the page” (Scigaj 1999: 46).

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According to Marshall, a “defining feature of the aesthetic of the picturesque” is that it “not only looks at nature through the frame of art … but finally breaks down the distinction between one and the other” (Marshall 2002: 419). By contrast, in Scigaj’s model sustainable poetry takes the limits of its medium (language) as a starting point for exploring the radical difference between the human and the nonhuman worlds. Sustainable poetry first draws attention to the extent to which language interferes with the “originary perception” of nature (Scigaj 1999: 80), before seeking ways to reduce this interference and refer the reader’s perceptions out towards the non-human. Paradoxically, a poem which acknowledges the inevitable mediation of its language (and which uses this awareness to point out a deliberate contrast between the human and the non-human) can prove more effective in jolting the reader out of their anthropocentric perspective than one which attempts to conceal it. The poetics of immediacy thus recognizes that there is no “sorcery” to bring “living things unmediated into the text” (Oswald 2006: x), only the “porousness” which reduces this mediation by referring the reader beyond it.

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Having considered the arguments against “prospects, pastorals [and] nostalgic poems” (Oswald 2006: x), the second part of this essay explores the prospect poem in more detail and analyses the potential role for nostalgia in sustainable poetry. Specifically, it explores the ways in which nostalgia can assist with the process of “referring one’s perceptions beyond the printed page” and “achieving an atonement with nature” (Scigaj 1999: 38). Rather than being an “obstacle to ecology” (Oswald 2006: ix), nostalgia in prospect poetry can be the means by which the text draws attention to its own referential nature and directs the reader’s attention out towards the “originary perception” in the natural world (Scigaj 1999: 80). In the process, the homesickness of nostalgia becomes the poet’s longing for the “originary perception” to which the text refers, but which it can never fully reproduce. Nostalgia signals the poet’s awareness that the text can never equal the original experience of nature and thus begins the “self-reflexive acknowledgment of the limits of language” which Scigaj lists as the first movement of sustainable poetry. To support this argument, this section incorporates research on the medical history of nostalgia. It then applies this research to examine two Romantic examples of prospect poetry: the passage entitled ‘walk in the country’ from Book

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One of William Cowper’s poem The Task (1785) and William Wordsworth’s seminal poem ‘Tintern Abbey’ (1798). Critics have observed structural and linguistic similarities between these two poems (cf. Jacobus 1976: 105). In particular, both poets recall standing in the landscape, looking out across a river valley with a female companion. This image of companionable solitude in nature recalls the end of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Adam and Eve are expelled from Paradise: “The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest, and providence their guide: / They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary way” (2007: 678, Book 12, ll. 646-9). Cowper and Wordsworth derive from Milton the idea of a “solitary” couple searching for a home in a fallen world, developing this archetypal image of exile to discuss the poet’s place in the natural world and, in the process, to refer the reader’s perceptions beyond the printed page to nature. The fact that both poems refer to the Fall in Genesis may be seen to infuse the landscape with an anthropocentric narrative which is not conducive of sustainable poetry. However, on a closer reading both poets use the trope of the Fall, in Scigaj’s words, to bring the reader into “an awareness of the limits of language as well as a finer appreciation of the primacy of the ‘real’ entities in the referential world” (Scigaj 1999: 46). Cowper and Wordsworth do this by emphasizing that it is not nature that is fallen, but the poet’s perception and the poet’s language. Both poets use the trope of the Fall to highlight the faultiness of their fallen memories through the theme of revisiting the same landscape. Cowper begins this passage of The Task by acknowledging that this is the “twentieth winter” he has climbed the hill above the River Ouse: “scenes that sooth’d / Or charm’d me young, no longer young, I find / Still soothing and of power to charm me still” (Cowper 1995: 120, Book 1, ll. 141-5). The repetition of “young” and “still” invokes a nostalgic tone, as Cowper’s language recreates the pattern of returning with a difference. The adjective “young” returns “no longer young” as the poet revisits a familiar scene and observes how “life declines” and years “speed rapidly away” (Book 1, l. 130). While the landscape has remained constant, the poet has fallen away from his younger self. Similarly, Wordsworth opens ‘Tintern Abbey’—a poem specifically about “revisiting” the River Wye—with the claim that “Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters” (Wordsworth 2008: 131, ll. 1-2), before affirming: “Though absent long, / These forms of beauty have not been to me, / As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye” (ll. 23-5). Through the repetition of “five years … five summers … five long winters”, Wordsworth implies a long, difficult absence from this spiritual home and a nostalgic yearning to return to the “originary perception” of the Wye valley, which the poem proceeds to perform.

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To understand the significance of the poets’ nostalgia for the prospects before them, it is necessary to examine Romantic conceptions of nostalgia, particularly in a medical context. From its origin in Johannes Hofer’s 1688 ‘Dissertation’, Kevis Goodman shows that during the Romantic period medical nostalgia acquired international recognition as a disability of wartime and colonial mobility, a somatic and psychological protest against forced travel, depopulation, emigration, and other kinds of compulsory movement. (2010: 199-200)

In the eighteenth century, nostalgia did not denote a sentimental yearning for an idealized earlier time, but a serious nervous disease. Wordsworth’s medical friend Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of the evolutionary biologist) described the condition in his Zoonomia as an “unconquerable desire of returning to one’s native country, frequent in long voyages, in which the patients become so insane as to throw themselves into the sea, mistaking it for green fields or meadows” (2004: 82). Similarly, the renowned doctor William Cullen associated nostalgia with “a vehement desire of revisiting” a native land or cherished place (Goodman 2010: 205). This “vehement desire of revisiting” becomes a feature of the prospect poems described above, as Cowper and Wordsworth both express a compulsion to return to a favorite scene. Furthermore, Goodman shows that this “desire of revisiting” becomes a feature of the poetry itself, as the compulsion to revisit familiar places manifests in the type of verbal repetition noted in the two poetic examples quoted above. In particular, Goodman cites Wordsworth’s famous comment—in the note to his poem ‘The Thorn’—that when faced with “the inadequateness of our own powers, or the deficiencies of language” speakers “will cling to the same words, or words of the same character” (Wordsworth 2008: 594). This tendency to “cling to the same words” is evident at the beginning of ‘Tintern Abbey’, where the speaker repeats the same stock of phrases: “again I hear / These waters …Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs … The day is come when I again repose … Once again I see / These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild” (ll. 2-17). This insistent repetition of the key word “again” demonstrates the speaker’s compulsive iteration: the need to repeat words and revisit the landscape. As in Wordsworth’s note, this repetition signals the speaker’s awareness of the “inadequateness of [his] own powers” and the “deficiencies of language”. While quibbling about the precise description of the “hedge-rows” (“hardly hedge-rows, little lines / Of sportive wood run wild”), the speaker acknowledges the inevitable mediation of language and his inability to record his “originary experience” of the Wye Valley accurately for future use.

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Both poets long to memorialize their experiences of their native landscapes but acknowledge the limitations of language to do so. Cowper, too, attributes a vital mnemonic function to the landscape in his claim that “scenes that sooth’d / Or charm’d me young, no longer young, I find / Still soothing and of power to charm me still” (Book 1, ll. 141-3). In making this claim, the speaker of The Task hinges his sense of identity on the faithfulness with which he observes the landscape before him. Like a nostalgic patient, he demonstrates an “unconquerable desire of returning to [his] native country” (1801: 82), yet he also recognizes that this poetic record can never approach the “primacy of the ‘real’ entities in the referential world” (Scigaj 1999: 46). The speaker of The Task protests that “Thou know’st my praise of nature most sincere, / And that my raptures are not conjured up / To serve occasions of poetic pomp, / But genuine” (Book 1, ll. 150-3). Yet in making this plea the speaker admits that the sincerity of his verse is in question: it can never equal the “originary experience” that it seeks to describe. As in Scigaj’s model, this “doubling, a technique of référance, thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page” (Scigaj 1999: 46). By portraying themselves as nostalgic patients and recognizing the irreversible severance of language from nature, Cowper and Wordsworth direct the reader’s attention beyond the printed page. In Goodman’s words, “the disease formerly known as nostalgia has become a recommended reading practice” (2010: 220). To this, it may be added that nostalgia becomes a sustainable reading practice which helps the reader look beyond the text towards the “originary experience” of nature which the fallen poet claims to have lost. On the surface, Cowper and Wordsworth’s nostalgic tropes depart from the practices of contemporary sustainable poets like Wendell Berry. In his poem ‘How long does it take to make the woods?’, Berry asks: “What is the way to the woods, how do you get there?” (Oswald 2006: 156). Berry’s answer is that To come into the woods you must leave behind the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes. You must come without weapon or tool, alone, expecting nothing, remembering nothing, into the ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf. (Oswald 2006: 156)

Metaphorically, Berry suggests that to achieve an atonement with nature one must reject memory, identity, nostalgia, and all of the baggage of the “six days’ world”: one must enter the woods “expecting nothing, remembering nothing”. In the process, the poet performs the act of renouncing all of the items he lists (“plans and hopes … weapon or tool”), building to the moment of direct sensory

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engagement in the poem’s final line, which Berry describes as the “brotherhood of eye and leaf”. On a closer reading, however, the poem acknowledges a continued role for nostalgia. Earlier in the poem, Berry observes that “The woods is present as the world is, the presence / of all its past and of all its time to come” (Oswald 2006: 156). In other words, “the woods” is a timeless prospect, where past, present, and future co-exist without the human narratives of progress and decay. Human concepts of time—of a nostalgic past or a sustainable utopian future—are subsumed in the landscape, and the temporal becomes spatial as Berry argues that the woods “is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning / belong to the end and beginning of all things, / the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning” (Oswald 2006: 156). The effect of the poem is to encourage the reader to renounce nostalgic thinking and the baggage of memory in favor of the immediate sensory perception that Berry describes as “ease of sight, the brotherhood of eye and leaf”. Yet, in his own words, Berry is only able to reach this experience of immediacy in the poem’s final line “By climbing up through the six days’ field, / kept in all the body’s years, the body’s / sorrow, weariness and joy” (Oswald 2006: 156). As in the prospect poems above, atonement with nature is a summit that must be reached by climbing, metaphorically, through the nostalgic memory of the “body’s years”. The work of climbing, driven by the nostalgic urge to revisit the “originary experience” of nature, is what generates in the speaker an awareness of the insufficiency of human language and memory and “a finer appreciation of the primacy of the ‘real’ entities in the referential world” (Scigaj 1999: 46). The Task and ‘Tintern Abbey’ work in similar ways to recreate the “primacy” of nature in the reader’s mind. Like Berry, Cowper catalogues the body’s “years / As life declines” (Book 1, ll. 129-30) and Wordsworth rehearses the body’s “sorrow, weariness and joy” as he revisits the Wye in memory “amid the many shapes / Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir / Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, / Have hung upon the beatings of my heart” (ll. 52-5). Having climbed spatially to reach the prospect over the landscape, the poets also climb temporally to leave behind the “six days’ world”. As in Berry’s poem, the temporal becomes spatial as the poet’s history is mapped onto the landscape and the poet’s nostalgic longing is subsumed into an immediate sensory experience. In Wordsworth’s famous phrase, “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (ll. 48-50). Once again, it is important to interpret the prospect poems in the context of Romantic medicine and psychology. Both Cowper and Wordsworth were influenced by the doctrine of ‘associationism’, based on John Locke’s model of the mind, in which sense impressions give rise to simple ideas and then, through

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the process of reflection, to complex ones. In Chapter Thirty-Three of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke argued that through repeated experience we form associations between our ideas so that “one no sooner … comes into the Understanding but its Associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang always inseparable shew themselves together” (1975: 395). Cowper refers to this theory in Book Six of The Task, where he hears the sound of church bells and claims that: Wherever I have heard A kindred melody, the scene recurs, And with it all its pleasures and its pains. Such comprehensive view the spirit takes, That in a few short moments I retrace (As in a map the voyager his course) The windings of my way through many years. (Book 6, ll. 12-18)

Wordsworth describes a similar process of retracing the “windings of [his] way” in the windings of the Wye. For both poets, the act of revisiting a nostalgic place calls forth a host of associations and allows them, quite literally, to “map” the development of their minds onto the landscape. The sight a familiar scene overlaid with the thoughts that it evokes enables both poets to take a “comprehensive view” of their minds, surveying them as if from the viewing station in a picturesque painting. It is this view which enables the “doubling” that Scigaj describes, as the poet overlays his memory of the landscape on the actual sensory experience of the original and witnesses how the memory, like its written record, pales in comparison. In turn, this comparison initiates the process of “référance”, which “thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page toward the referential [world]” (Scigaj 1999: 46). For Cowper, the “primacy of the ‘real’ entities in the referential world” (Scigaj 1999: 46) over the constructs of thought was a matter of religious conviction. As an evangelical Christian, he believed John Calvin’s claim that the natural world was a “mirror wherein we may behold God, which otherwise is in[v]isible” (Calvin 1611: 9). Cowper reasons that since the natural world was designed by God and bears evidence of this design, the sense impressions that we receive in nature must surpass the associative ideas which humans build up through the processes of reason and reflection. Wordsworth did not share Cowper’s faith, but he echoes Cowper’s description of the “blest moment” when “nature throw[s] wide / Her veil opaque” (Book 5, ll. 891-2) in his account of the “serene and blessed mood” in which “we are laid asleep / In body, and become a living soul: /

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While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony … We see into the life of things” (ll. 42-50). Both poets figure themselves as nostalgic patients whose pathological longing to revisit their native home induces a moment of sensory immediacy akin to Berry’s “brotherhood of eye and leaf” (Oswald 2006: 156). In doing so, Cowper and Wordsworth assume that this primary experience of nature meets a fundamental human need. Cowper argues that “man immured in cities, still retains / His inborn inextinguishable thirst / Of rural scenes” (Book 4, ll. 7668), while Wordsworth claims of his youth that “the tall rock, / The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood … were then to me / An appetite” (ll. 78-81). Rather than satisfying an appetite, these natural forms constituted one, in the form of a nostalgic compulsion, “a vehement desire of revisiting” a cherished place (Goodman 2010: 205). It is this compulsion which compels the prospect poets to memorialize their favorite landscapes and then, crucially, to compare the written record with the “originary experience”. In this process of scrutiny, both poets realize the insufficiency of human language and memory to record the scene. In both poems, this realization leads the poet to refer their own (and the reader’s) perceptions “beyond the printed page to nature”, leading them to achieve the “atonement or at-one-ment with nature” that Scigaj describes (1999: 38). In The Task, Cowper recalls How oft upon yon eminence, our pace Has slacken’d to a pause, and we have borne The ruffling wind scarce conscious that it blew, While admiration feeding at the eye, And still unsated, dwelt upon the scene. (Book 1, ll. 154-8)

Grammatically, the “eye” is the indirect object of this sentence: Cowper emphasizes the fact that, in this “blest moment”, the “eye” becomes passively receptive, achieving the “porousness” that Oswald describes (2006: x). Wordsworth documents a similar experience when he describes his own “eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy” (ll. 48-9). In both cases, the natural world gently takes control of the senses, with Cowper claiming to be “scarce conscious”, while Wordsworth is “laid asleep / In body” (ll. 46-7). Rather than being an “obstacle to ecology” (Oswald 2006: x), nostalgia becomes the impetus to revisit, which reveals the deficiencies of language and, ultimately, “thrusts the reader’s perceptual gaze beyond signifiers on the page” (Scigaj 1999: 46) toward the referential world. To appreciate this, and to recover a sustainable reading of these prospect poems, it is important to return the

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Romantic concept of nostalgia to its medical context, as Goodman teaches us to do.

V ANISHING D IARY Note: At the conference from which this book developed, I read some of my own poems, which attempt to induce in the reader a state like Berry’s “brotherhood of eye and leaf” (Oswald 2006: xi) and Wordsworth’s “eye made quiet” (l. 48). The following is an extract of a longer, ongoing work which attempts to describe this process, tackling some of the questions discussed critically in the essay above from a creative perspective. Start with the river, because that morning on the riverbank it was effortless, flick of a switch, to watch the self disperse like ripples on water. The mind was taut before the storm, stretched as tense as the skin on the river, but when the rain began to beat its drum, thresh its seeds in the air and hatch the water with crossed concentrics, enlightenment was there. Not the highest perfect awakening, the Buddhist’s aim and end to the cycle of re-being (though of dukkha there was an ample share), but when the raindrops stopped trampolining and the river re-mirrored the sky all pronouns had gone, flown like migrating birds. There was more of truth in the falling rain and in the beads that rebounded from each splash in slow motion, momentarily selved from the mass below, than the old mind had ever acknowledged. It saw itself imaged in that struggle—a drop flung free, bound by its viscosity, tumbling back to diffuse in the river—and dissolved in the recognition. The world so long channeled through the tunnels of these eyes burst its banks, flooding the mind in a cascade

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of coalescence. Self submerged, leaving no island, only a vanishing point, a knot of nerves and words, tutelary spirits of the patch of grass where rain dripped from the canopies and stripes of a light like fire circled the trees, glancing off waves on the water. Outwardly, nothing changed: light settled like gold-dust in the river, vapor trails drifted, unzipping the sky, trees waded knock-kneed at the water’s edge, hinged at their rippled reflections, but since that Copernican shift out of the skull the river had bristled with sensation, fractal saturation, each sense gaining admittance to this nest of perception perched by the water: the smell of wet grass, mud soft underfoot, the birds reviving their song and puddles blinding in the sun, a common sight, though it seemed to have rained firmament.

R EFERENCES Calvin, John Calvin (1611): The Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton, London: John Norton. Cowper, William (1995): The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 2. Darwin, Erasmus (2004): The Collected Writings of Erasmus Darwin, intro. Martin Priestman, 9 vols, Bristol, Thoemmes Continuum, vol. 8. Garrard, Greg (2004): Ecocriticism, London: Routledge. Goodman, Kevis (2010): “‘Uncertain Disease’: Nostalgia, Pathologies of Motion, Practices of Reading.” In: Studies in Romanticism 49/2, pp. 197-227. Jacobus, Mary Jacobus (1976): Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), Oxford: Clarendon Press. Locke, John Locke (1975): An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marshall, David (2002): “The Problem of the Picturesque.’ In: EighteenthCentury Studies 35/3, pp. 413-37.

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Oswald, Alice (ed.) (2006): The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet, London: Faber and Faber. Scigaj, Leonard M. (1999): Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Wordsworth, William (2008): The Major Works, including The Prelude, ed. Stephen Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Agente Costura Sustainability Sounds L ISA S IMPSON

Picture 1: Month of Performance Art

Berlin 2014. Photo: Iliya Noé.

Agente Costura, a Portuguese double entendre, is the term I have been using to define my practice as a composer of music and sculptural garments. Costura means sewing. A gente translates into ‘the people,’ indicating the intent of bringing people together to experience an action. Agente translates into ‘agent’ – a force or substance that causes a change. Another translation for a gente is the colloquial term for ‘we,’ so that Agente Costura is loosely translated as ‘we are a sewing agent,’ proposing a process of transformation as a way to bring discarded garments back to use as well as emphasizing the labor of garment making. With a prepared

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sewing machine, self-made contact microphones and effects, this process is amplified and turned into a sound composition, in a performative gesture of making music out of making clothes (Picture 1). Sustainability is perhaps one of the most apparent themes in my performance practice. By literally amplifying the creative process of transforming garments, I aim to draw attention to the practice of repurposing materials as an alternative to contemporary consumption habits, in an attempt to minimize textile waste as well as to question the structures of contemporary garment production. In my artistic practice sustainability is not only explored in an environmental sense – in relation to sustainable development – but also, as discussed throughout the essays in this volume, in sustaining the sense of self of individuals and their social relationships as well as in propagating the ability to change and adapt to various situations and to reinvent oneself when necessary. This stands in contrast to a massification of the self by consumerist society, led by media and advertising that tells us what to wear and how to look as a way to belong. In relation to sustaining a sense of self, nostalgia plays an important role in the participatory aspect of my work as a performance artist. 1 It is interesting to note how clothing is often charged with emotional memories – a dress reminds us of a person, a place, a particular event in our lives. Whenever I invite audience members to bring old clothing to participate in the performance, the clothes always come paired with a story, a reason why the garment is being kept, and a reason why it is no longer being used. Sometimes we keep said garments folded up in our closets for years, not being worn but kept as a reminder. My work in transforming these garments aims to sustain these nostalgic memories in a productive way, by finding a wearable solution instead of keeping the memories locked inside a drawer in our wardrobes. Another point to consider is how the sewing machine itself is an object charged with nostalgia. Many audience members that come in contact with my work mention some memory of a family member who used to be a tailor. As Tim Hunkin explains in the BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Sewing Machine (1988), the sewing machine was actually the first machine to enter the home. We share a collective memory of the seamstress working at home making her own and her family’s garments, providing them with comfort and warmth. The factories of the current textile industry stand in stark contrast to this nostalgic memory. My work links nostalgia and sustainability by thinking back on a time of slow craftsmanship, versus the current industrialized and impersonal ways we cover our bodies. 1

As indicated in the introduction of this volume, nostalgia can be defined as a “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past”.

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Picture 2: Dress Pants

Berlin 2017. Author’s collection.

Sometimes a few simple seams are enough to completely alter a garment, not only in a literal but also in an emotional sense: to personalize an industrially produced garment, originally made to fit an enormous mass of people, is to turn that object into a unique sculpted garment. Other times the clothes can be turned completely upside down and cut up, where details are left as a nostalgic reminder of what they used to be. The Dress Pants series (Picture 2) illustrates an example of two pairs of trousers sewn together to make a dress in which the former waistband turned upside down becomes the hemline. The original details are not hidden, as they would be in traditional ‘alterations;’ they are instead incorporated in the remaking of the garment. When this transformative process is performed as a musical composition, it becomes a new memory literally stitched onto the cloth. With this work I hope to inspire in the audience a habit of repairing and repurposing textiles, instead of seeing them as disposable products. The problem of excessive consumption surrounding the fashion industry is by no means a new

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discussion. Texts from the late 19th and early 20th century already bring up this debate. For example, in the book Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930 (2004) by Radu Stern – a compilation of historical texts including “A New Art Principle in Modern Women’s Clothing” (1902) in which artist Henry Van de Velde expresses his concern about the domination of the fashion industry: All of us who have been involved in creating garments with the sole purpose of dressing women as well as possible have experienced a feeling of revolt against fashion and its representatives, who have turned their backs on this simple, natural aim in pursuit of another – namely, the development of a new style for each season, so different from the previous one that the slaves of fashion feel obliged to replace their wardrobes every six months. (2004 [1902]: 138)

Though Van de Velde is writing about prêt-a-porter that first appeared in the early 1900s, his concerns are extremely contemporary and the situation has sped up exponentially. In the book Overdressed – The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Dress, journalist Elizabeth L. Cline describes the fast fashion phenomenon as “a radical method of retailing that has broken away from seasonal selling and puts out new inventory throughout the year” (2012: 96), encouraging even more consumption. Often, fast fashion products are made with materials of poor quality and under extreme working conditions which is why they can sell at such low prices. This makes for an unethical and unsustainable industry because garments are made to be disposable. Stores are able to have new stock coming in every week, instead of every season, so the ‘slaves of fashion,’ as Van de Velde remarks, can replace their entire wardrobes much faster than every six months. According to Cline, “every year, Americans throw away 12.7 million tons, or 68 pounds of textiles per person, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which also estimates that 1.6 million tons of this waste could be recycled or reused” (2012: 122). That figure alone is a reason to try to find sustainable alternatives for second hand garments, repurposing materials that would normally end up in landfills. In April 2017, I was invited by the Goethe Institute to perform one of my projects – the Duet of Amplified Sewing Machines with visual artist Stephanie Müller – at a fringe event from the itinerant exhibition Fast Fashion, the dark side of fashion in Jakarta, Indonesia. The exhibition displayed both documentary as well as artistic works that take a critical look at the dangers of an industry built on fragile and substandard working conditions, toxic and polluting materials, and a marketing strategy that only encourages the consumption of unneeded materials for pseudo-fulfillment and for profit. In turn, the exhibition presents the counter option of slow fashion:

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Slow Fashion stands for sustainable, aware and ethical fashion. It is not just simply the opposite of Fast Fashion, it is much more than that. Slow Fashion is a change in people’s way of thinking, the appropriate contemporary reaction to goods produced for the mass market, the un-controlled consumption in today’s throwaway society and the catastrophic conditions under which many textile workers must work. Deliberately thinking about the characteristics of materials, about guaranteeing that the origins of products can be transparently traced back and respectful and responsible treatment of humans, animals and the environment are more vital than ever. (Wolf, 2015: 18)

It is within the concept of slow fashion that I develop my performance practice, to reinsert value into a commodity that has become devalued by the industry. Nowadays we can buy garments for so little that they have become highly disposable, and not everyone thinks about the environmental cost of this. Instead of throwing out materials, I aim at instigating audience members to add an emotional value to these fabrics, since they have such little financial value. That is why, for example, in the I used to be pants series (Picture 3) it is obvious that a pair of pants has been re-stitched into a jacket, not to deny their former existence but to celebrate it. I see this as a strategy that again amplifies the transformative potential of clothing, by drawing attention to a time that was past, the nostalgia of the thrown away pants, and transforming it into a new wearable shape, sustaining the reuse of materials as well as imprinting a new memory onto the cloth.

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Picture 3: I used to be pants

Jacket made in performance, Berlin 2018. Author’s collection.

*** As I write my concluding remarks on this paper, a new chapter is unfolding in my practice. It looks into the future and how I see the nostalgic memory of garment making – the memory we have of how clothes used to be tailor-made – as a sustainable alternative for future generations. Parallel to my own performance practice, I have developed a growing interest in passing on my upcycling skills to the next generation. A generation of young adults who were born in the 1990s, exactly when the fast fashion phenomenon began. I share my experience in workshops where not only I pass on my sewing skills, but I also lead theoretical discussions about the politics of garment production. I tend to begin the workshop showing the documentary film The True Cost (2014) directed by Andrew Morgan. This film investigates fast fashion

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through a series of interviews, ranging from factory workers, activists, philosophers, and economists, all the way to the cotton mills where the raw materials are grown. It is highly critical of the garment industry showing how unsustainable the system is – from the use of toxic chemicals in cotton planting which can lead to many diseases to the production in developing countries under sub-standard working conditions and a distribution chain only concerned with profit, amounting to a cycle of waste. The criticism of the documentary to fast fashion largely culminates around the Rana Plaza catastrophe in April 2013 in Bangladesh. Due to structural problems, the eight-story factory building in Dhaka collapsed killing more than 1000 workers, most of them women, and it has been accounted as the fourth biggest factory disaster in history. Since the incident, a global movement entitled “Fashion Revolution” began to ask fast fashion brands: “Who made my clothes?” The movement demands transparency in the brands’ supply chains, to ensure that no other disaster of this proportion happens to garment workers. The demand for sustainability in the garment industry is highly apparent in the production stage, which is outsourced by major fashion brands to developing countries where most workers are still paid below living wages and have to work in unsafe conditions, and the brands are not held accountable for this. My intention in turning garment production into a performance piece is to remind the audience that there is a person making their clothes for them, that this has a cost of time and resources. If more people knew how to make their own clothes, they would on the one hand value this process more and on the other hand slow down their consumption of disposable products. Though I have seen The True Cost countless times, I am still moved by one of the last scenes in the film, when journalist and activist Lucy Siegel – executive producer of the film and author of the book We Are What We Wear: Unravelling Fast Fashion and the Collapse of Rana Plaza (2014) – calls to change all consumers into activists, all consumers asking ethical questions, asking quite simple questions about where their clothes are from, all consumers saying ‘I’m sorry, it’s not acceptable for someone to die in the course of a working day’ […] It’s too important, it’s too significant an industry, it has too much impact and effect on millions of people worldwide.

My performance work as well as the sculptural garments made during each performance carry this political lining: performing the nostalgic act of making the things we wrap around our bodies and hoping this becomes a sustainable alternative in the future of fashion.

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R EFERENCES Cline, Elizabeth L. (2012): Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. New York, Penguin, 2012. “Fashion Revolution”, Accessed September 12, 2018. (https://www.fashion revolution.org.) “Fast Fashion. Die Schattenseiten der Mode”, Accessed September 12, 2018. (http://www.fastfashion-dieausstellung.de/en/) Hunkin, Tim (1988): “The Secret Life of the Sewing Machine” In: The Secret Life of Machines (TV-series). Channel 4/BBC. Morgan, Andrew (2014): The True Cost (documentary). Los Angeles: Untold Creative and Life Is My Movie Entertainment. Velde, Henry Van de (2004 [1902]): “A New Art Principle in Modern Women’s Clothing.” In: Radu Stern, Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 137-142. Wolf, Miriam (2015): “Die Slow Fashion Bewegung – oder alles auf Langsam/The Slow Fashion movement – or, whoa there, not so fast!” In: Fast Fashion: Die Schattenseiten der Mode/Fast Fashion: The dark sides of fashion. Hamburg: Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg.

Considering the Values of the Past Sustainability and (Anti-)Nostalgia in the Medieval Monastery T HEO B. L AP

I NTRODUCTION 1 In the past couple of decades, the literature on nostalgia has broadened considerably (cf. Boym 2001; Howard 2012; Batcho 2013; Sedikides et al. 2015). On the one hand, this flourish signals the end of the monopoly that the (mental) health sciences held on nostalgia studies since the late 17th century (cf. McCann 1941; Rosen 1975). Since the final quarter of the 20th century, nostalgia has not only captivated the minds of writers and journalists, but also of academics in, for example, the humanities (cf. Wilson 2005), sociology (cf. Davis 1979), anthropology (cf. Farrell 2006), and consumer behavior and marketing (cf. Holak/Havlena 1998). On the other hand, it has become clear that nostalgia is ambiguous in nature and difficult to conceptualize: its origins, manifestation, and merits are all questioned. In spite of this diverse and fragmented scholarly landscape, a common belief in the existence of nostalgia, as a romanticized reminiscence on the (personal) past, prevails among the wider populace according to a social psychological study (cf. Hepper/Ritchie/Sedikides/Wildschut 2012: 102). This study formulates the following definition of nostalgia: Nostalgia is a complex emotion that involves past-oriented cognition and a mixed-affective signature [...]. One [...] reminisces about [...] memory from one’s past [...] through rose-

1

My gratitude goes out to Dr. B. S. Hellemans’ (University of Groningen) helpful and inspiring suggestions and comments over the course of our conversations concerning this chapter. I am also highly grateful for the valuable feedback and thoughts that the editors have kindly shared with me.

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This broad definition functions as an umbrella that encompasses various emotive interactions with the past, bitter and sweet, and underlines the supposed culturally universal status of nostalgia. Yet, from a historical perspective the alleged fusion of temporality and sustainability is more complicated and culturally determined than this definition suggests. By investigating the intriguing and otherworldly conceptions cultivated in medieval monasticism, this chapter reflects on the historical complexity of an affective state like nostalgia. The social-psychological definition of nostalgia is an about-turn from the definition that Johannes Hofer posed in his Dissertatio medica de ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ oder Heimwehe, which coined nostalgias as a Latinized form of Heimweh, or “the sad mood originating from the desire to return to one’s native land” (Hofer 1688: 381). An ecstatic mind, absorbed in its thoughts of returning home, could result in death (ibid: 387–388). Hofer’s hypothesis was not yet fully committed to modern empirical traditions of medicine. Rather, his idea that “animal spirits” caused the mind to “fancy nothing except of the flesh” (ibid: 384) reveals an Aristotelian understanding of how a rational soul distinguishes humans from animals (Haldane 2009: 295-303). According to Hofer’s definition, nostalgia was not a rational desire, but a lower, animalistic attachment to the soil below one’s feet. Hofer’s negative correlation between temporality and sustainability carries considerable historical weight because it is part of a long tradition of Christian detachment from the material world. Boym’s ideas of restorative or reflective nostalgia may have been completely foreign to Hofer (Boym 2001: xviii; cf. the introduction to this volume). This small glimpse of the historicity of nostalgia reveals an alien approach to the question of which elements of their environment cultures select to sustain and how they do so. To tackle this question nonetheless for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of nostalgia within a premodern context, I would like to demonstrate how modern conceptions of bittersweet nostalgia were in fact militated against in the Christian sub-culture of medieval monasticism.2 In the medieval period (roughly 500–1500), Hofer had not yet introduced the pseudo-Greek contraction of νόστος (nostos, returning home) and ἄλγος (algos, 2

It is difficult to discuss themes within the study of medieval Christianity without some degree of generalization. We cannot speak of Christianity as clearly defined phenomenon or of monasticism as a homogeneous entity. Here I have chosen to simplify the complex historical situation for the sake of this chapter’s theoretical argument.

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grief) of his nostalgias. Besides its status as a foreign concept to the medieval world, the historicity of nostalgia warrants a consideration in its own right due to the stark differences in conceptions of temporality in premodern worldviews. Modern ideas of linear development and conceptions of the finitude of existence lacked dominance (cf. Burke 2002: 17–19; Mondschein/Casey 2015: 1669). For the Book of Revelation prophesized that a new life was expected to flourish: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away” (Revelation 21:1, ESV). Likewise, our contemporary understanding of sustainability is difficult to translate to the medieval period. For example, whereas monasteries were built to last, constructed as they were out of valuable materials like stone or brick, the final goal of a religious life was to attain salvation in the eschaton (the end of the world) (cf. Bouwmeester 2014: 249). In hopes of clarifying this ambiguity, this chapter examines the dialectical relationship between nostalgia and sustainability in the medieval monastery by raising the following question: how did the pasts of individual monks compare to the persistence of the community and what does this mean for our understanding of premodern nostalgia? I will argue that the medieval monastery facilitated discourses of ‘antinostalgia’ that aimed to devalue the monk’s memory. More specifically, I use this term here to refer to the aggregate of conscious and unconscious strategies used within monastic communities to discourage monks from thinking about their previous identities outside of their settlement.3 Such discourses are the topic of the first section, which analyzes them through the concept of ‘textual communities’, referring, as we shall see, to the practice of shared interpretations of text-based knowledge. The following section takes up the monastic idea of troubling memories by examining ideals of purging memory and their implications for ostensible nostalgic reflections in medieval texts. Furthermore, the third section begins to uncover the actual practice of disseminating anti-nostalgic narratives in monastic literature. Central to this is a case-study of the 12th century literary dialogue Consolation on the Death of a Friend. Subsequently, this text’s adversity to memory is approached as an instance of meditative literature subscribing to an anti-nostalgic discourse. Finally, these findings will allow us to reflect on medieval notions of (anti-)nostalgia and sustainability. 3

Most references in this chapter go out to male communities; hence, the male term ‘monk’ is used persistently. Although there were female communities, their male counterpart was largely the norm in the early and high medieval periods (c. 500–1300). Where applicable according to historical time and place, female communities of nuns are also meant.

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T EXTUAL S USTAINABILITY In the medieval monastery, the textual medium stands at the heart of an allencompassing socio-cultural structure that governs the monk’s life in all of its aspects. Monasticism’s grip on the life of its subscribers exceeds notions of custom or habit. A more suitable label may be what Rahel Jaeggi (2013) has called ‘forms of life’. In her view, these are culturally shaped orders of human coexistence, constituting “inert bundles of social practices” (Jaeggi 2013: 8). More specifically, she describes them as implicit, normative behavioral patterns that have to be interpreted against the background of a “socially constituted realm of meaning” (ibid: 8). As we shall see, texts form the core of the monastic life form, sustaining the monk’s communal existence while simultaneously deconstructing his individual temporality. The monastic enterprise of knowledge was intended to be sustainable. Between the 8th and 13th centuries, monasteries were the predominant centers for the production, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. Monks devoted themselves to the painstaking labor of manually writing texts down on pages made of animal skins (parchment), which were subsequently stored in the monastery’s library. Books produced in this way have proved extremely resilient – some of them still reside in excellent condition, but an exorbitant impact on resources (manual labor, livestock, and money) meant that they were scarce commodities. Book sharing between religious communities and royal courts permitted some degree of frugality to be maintained. Another aspect to take into consideration is that books were usually not enjoyed privately or in silence. Most readers audibly pronounced what they were reading, either to themselves or to a group of listeners. Therefore, to compensate for the exorbitant expenses and effort involved in book production, measures were in place to ensure that knowledge could be disseminated regardless. The methodical, literate nature of monasteries has compelled historian Brian Stock to argue that they should be conceived of as ‘textual communities’, communities whose identities were founded on interpretive gatherings around texts (cf. Stock 1983: 90-92). From the literate circles of monks, there were those who memorized texts, either produced in-house or loaned from a fellow community, and they discussed their contents – with or without the presence of the text – orally during gatherings. In this setting, the textual medium was used to entertain the pragmatic knowledge required to sustain a community and to draw on examples to be used for spiritual edification. The Rule of Saint Benedict constituted the nucleus of the textually driven form of life in monasticism. This 6th century text was adopted in the 9th century

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as the standard of monastic organization in the Carolingian Empire (which included, among others, modern day France, Germany, the Low Countries, and parts of Italy), the legacy of Emperor Charlemagne (d. 814). Its introduction was considered as an impetus to homogenize the religious landscape across such a geographically spread out region. Communities were required to follow Benedict’s (d. 547) 73 chapters that stipulated the minutest aspects of living in the monastery. Times for prayer and chanting are addressed (at least eight times a day), spiritual reading, and manual labor (cf. Kerr 2009: 4). Brief breaks are scheduled for eating and sleeping between these core activities and the Rule even goes so far as to prescribe (supervised) bathroom breaks. Aside from its regulatory aspects, the Rule is a fitting example of how the written word played an important role in the cultivation of an interior life (cf. Ong 2002: 137). It decreed what should be read and when it should be read, which is significant when it comes to the schedule of progressing through the scriptures and notably the Psalms (cf. Pranger 2003: 22). Benedict required that the entire psalter of 150 psalms be completed every week over the course of the divine offices (cf. Lawrence 1984: 29). Scriptures were consulted for their moral sense, which means that biblical data were separated from their historical significance and instead interpretation was tailored to the monk’s spiritual progression (cf. Pranger 1994: 5). Although monks were confronted with a treasure trove of history across a breadth of texts, the past did not hold a singular meaning. There was decidedly less room for the facts of history in the monk’s progress to God. Implicit in the Rule’s structure is the conviction that the monk is devoted to doing away with his own individuality, not only by assimilating into a community but also by diminishing the value of personal memories. Here, the first traces of an anti-nostalgic approach can be perceived. Vigilant peer supervision meant a total surrender of privacy. With the exception of dedicated conversational timeslots, no talking was allowed; forms of sign language were the norm. Everyone shared in the collective memory upheld by the cyclical rhythm of the Psalms, starting anew every week. A collective experience was cultivated in which monks took part in the repeated commemoration of the passing of Israel and the desire for the heavenly Jerusalem (cf. Kohlenberger 2010: 411): “By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion” (Psalm 137:1, English Standard Version). Actualizations of a biblical past aim to elicit emotional responses that fix the monk’s gaze onto the metaphysical goal of the afterlife. Tears shed over the loss of Jerusalem during prayer and meditation constitute an ingredient in the enactment of a tragedy that goes beyond restorative nostalgia. The cornerstone of Judeo-Christian history is an unresolved trauma grounded in loss. More

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specifically, it is the loss of the homeland that occurred when Adam and Eve faced expulsion from the Garden of Eden, which is not the essence of bittersweet longing but of an unmitigated disaster. Continuous (weekly) re-enactment of weeping by the riverbanks sustained an active remembrance of this loss, which may have normalized material (as in worldly) deprivations suffered throughout one’s lifetime (e.g. children, spouse, home). A communal narrative arose out of the fact that all of its members shared in the same backstory about how the potential of humanity came to a fall on behalf of its own mortal weakness; nothing less than sin had cost humanity its own home. Tears shed while reflecting on this painful and traumatic memory, represented by the loss of Jerusalem, helped to maintain the twofold realization that nothing worldly deserves to be called a home and that humanity is inherently sinful. Members of monastic communities had to suffer this collective trauma again and again, shedding tears to spark an interior transformation of being devoid of earthly psychological comforts and committing to salvation (cf. Nagy 2004: 124). In short, monasticism can be approached as a form of life in which texts are an essential ingredient in shaping the social reality within which monks were able to navigate themselves and consider their existence. Monastic texts used this image of homecoming to sketch a virtual reality in which the mortal condition of humankind was lamented and juxtaposed against the fulfillment of the afterlife (cf. Pleij 1997: 19-23). Nevertheless, a crucial difference with modern utopias is that it was not a question whether the realization of this ideal world would take place at all. By contrast, the actual question was if there was in fact a place for the dwelling earthling in this utopian paradise. The end of history was perfect but it lay outside of the realm of human agency (cf. Breisach 2002: 47). The rest of this chapter will further illustrate how monks, as readers, were literally composed to enact a continuous desire for their ultimate homecoming (cf. Van ‘t Spijker 2004: 184).

T OTAL R ECALL More often than not, medieval intellectuals found little appreciation in the past for either personal or cultural fulfillment (at least, to the outside world). Ancient historical convictions about the decline of the world, such as Hesiod’s (c. 700 BC) divine genealogy of the world’s five ages spanning from the age of gold (tranquility and peace) to the present iron age (chaos and strife), were eagerly adopted in historical narratives. History in its own right held minor significance until the reign of Christ would be established (cf. Breisach 2007 [1983]: 8). Time

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did pique the interest of medieval historiographers because it was an inseparable constituent of God’s creation; they were keen on revealing clues concerning the divine plan (cf. Goetz 1997: 18; Coleman 1992: 283-294). Monasticism’s antinostalgic narratives eagerly blossomed in this fertile soil of deeply rooted skepticism toward the virtues of human memory. Memory was essentially considered to be like a blemished mirror. Because it housed remembrances of previous evils and sins, human memory was stained (cf. Coleman 1992: 181). Among the monastic orders of the 12th century, who changed their admission policy to adults only, this resulted in a sizable problem (cf. De Jong 1994: 294-295). Adults were considered a greater challenge to reform because of their worldly memories; most converts had been clerks, knights, husbands, fathers, and so forth. For this reason, the purification of memory constituted an important goal of the monastic life (cf. Coleman 1992: 181). As Verbaal has argued, this was indeed quite a utopian challenge, for humans do not ordinarily forget themselves (cf. 2008: 235-236). On a fundamental level, he continues, spiritual ascent is simultaneously grounded in the conviction that man has to remember his origins, for it is remembrance that facilitates repentance and evokes the desire for the salvific state. A key to these ambiguous conceptualizations of memory is the way in which the past was objectified. Foucault’s notion of ‘technologies of the self’ offers a helpful way to understand this process. Foucault suggests that individuals can alter bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct, and ways of being in order to transform and “to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immateriality” (Foucault 1988: 18). Monastic conversion placed the monk’s spiritual wellbeing in the hands of the community with the purpose of reaching perfection through material detachment. An important step in the progression of this form of life was the rationalization that those things which tied the monk to an earthly life were in fact false. The aforementioned repetition of liturgical readings, which were intended to provide new life narratives, played an important role in this process, as readings included the command to “forget your people and your father’s house” (Psalm 45:10–1, English Standard Version; cf. Verbaal 2008: 228). Moreover, Christian identities were based on the devaluation of family and thus marriage. Paul the Apostle envisioned baptism as offering a much-desired blank slate because it symbolized the death of one’s past identity and substituted natural kinship ties with religious kinship (cf. McDannell/Lang 1988: 33-35). Needless to say, notions of substituting ties amounted to a recurrent theme in monastic literature. Terminology used within monasteries already reveals strong clues about this: monks are brothers, living under a father (the abbot), in the house of God (cf. Clark 1995: 367). Abandoning one’s earthly family became a trope in

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devotional literature (cf. Krawiec 2003: 285–286). Hence the biography of the intellectual, abbot, and archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) asserts that he had no qualms about renouncing his “patrimony and his country” (Eadmer 1962 [12th c.]: 7). Texts like these imbued the monastery with homely qualities instead. Furthermore, monastic texts play with the idea of reminiscence and use the past in order to rearrange the categories of being-at-home and alienation within the toolkit of technologies of self. Fulfilling a political career as archbishop, the aforementioned Anselm seized every opportunity to relive his monastic days: “He ordered his life therefore on the lines of his early routine before he became abbot, which he deplored more than ever having had to give up since he became archbishop” (ibid: 107). Anselm’s deep desire for the monastic form of life greatly overshadows his dissatisfaction with his political career. Similarly, abbot, theologian, and poet Walahfrid Strabo (d. 849) wrote the Elegy of Reichenau after he had to relocate to a different monastery in 816. A sense of loss permeates the poem: “Look, tears burst forth as I recall / how good was the peace I long ago enjoyed, / when happy Reichenau gave me / a modest roof over my head” (Strabo 1985 [9th c.]: 227). Once more, the text uses a historical example in order to communicate an emotional state of despair and rootlessness. Above all, despair was one of the hallmarks of monasticism’s form of life. God’s fullness could only be experienced in the salvific state, so the monk’s attempts to recall his true nature are essentially futile. His earthly existence consists of a state of neither fully forgetting nor fully remembering. Indeed, he is suspended between his own past and the desirable outcome beyond the human existence (cf. Verbaal 2008: 236). The devout cared about dying, not living. Comfort could neither be sought in the past nor security in the future. There was literally no room for modern manifestations of nostalgia, be they reflective or restorative, in the cyclical rhythm of the monastery. Comforting memories of the outer-monastic world might prove extremely harmful to the precarious balance of monastic focus. Human shortcomings provided all the necessary incentive to develop narratives of what I would like to call ‘anti-nostalgia’.

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In his seminal sociological analysis of nostalgia, Yearning for Yesterday, Davis argues that nostalgia is wont to manifest itself at times of existential fears, discontents, anxieties, and uncertainties when the tears in the fabric of one’s life story start to become visible (cf. 1979: 34). Nostalgia offers the guarantee that it is possible to rely on good memories of the past. Social psychologists have sought

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empirical foundations for these theoretical considerations, arguing that nostalgia stimulates positive affect, self-worth, and social connectedness (cf. Hepper/Ritchie/Sedikides/Wildschut 2012: 102). Those who converted to a monastic form of life in the medieval period may have faced similar feelings of insecurity in their new lives. The foundational literature of the contemplative tradition, however, all but discouraged being taken away by reminisces on past events or people. In fact, this mental activity faced severe condemnation. The monastic aversion to retrospection was founded on deeply rooted traditions. For instance, the dangers of retrospection are stressed in Genesis 19:26 wherein Lot’s wife looks back at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and is consequently turned into a pillar of salt. On top of that, early forms of desert monasticism in the Eastern Mediterranean, which laid the foundations for Western practices of religious expression, added fuel to the fire of this tradition. Evagrius of Pontus (d. 399), who had retreated to the Egyptian deserts in order to follow Christ’s footsteps, has been credited with compiling a list of deceitful thoughts in the monk’s life. At the top of the list stood ἀκηδία (akedia, or acedia in Latin), not unlike an existential crisis that sprouted out of the collision between dissatisfaction with the present life and memories of the past (cf. Evagrius 2003: 99). The ‘noonday devil’, as Evagrius’ manifestation of acedia was known, harasses the monk when the sun reaches its zenith and scorches the shadeless desert. The monk, who is driven to despair, cultivates a strong dislike for his present environment and peers. He is plagued by memories of his former life, his family, and his friends and they compel him to abandon his quest. Favorable memories were thus postulated as the nemesis of monastic forms of life. Though not always positioned unequivocally at the top of lists of sins, acedia remained a notorious adversary to spiritual development throughout most of the medieval period (cf. Wenzel 1966: 98–101). Instead of simply trying to block out the past, monastic texts employed intricate psychological strategies as a means of undermining the supposed legitimacy of the monk’s memory. Monks should not be longing for past glories, instead, as we have seen above, their desires should be directed to the monastery and they ought to place their hopes in the eternal glory to come. Distractions, especially those caused by memories of friends, families, and places, were seen as the substance for inspiring monks to give up on their holy cause. From one of Anselm’s letters, we learn that a brother Henry sought his refuge in the local taverns to get drunk with the drunkards (cf. 1990 [11th c.]: ep. 96, 240). Others like him were similarly persuaded to such irresponsible acts by “the ancient serpent whose cunning drove our first parents out of paradise” (Anselm 1994 [12th c.]: ep. 333, 57-58). When enough members were pushed to their limits, entire

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communities could fall into disorder, threatening their continued existence. In the remainder of this section and in the following one, I will illustrate how certain narratives may have evoked sentiments of world renunciation. Lawrence of Durham’s Consolation on the Death of a Friend (Consolatio de morte amici), written in Latin in the early 1140s, offers an illustrative example of how normativity was shaped to correspond with an accepted interpretation of reality. Lawrence was born somewhere around 1114 in Waltham, Essex (cf. Classen 2013: 14). After attending primary education at Waltham abbey, he entered the monastery at Durham to study the so-called liberal arts (the common advanced curriculum) in or around 1128. He ascended the hierarchical ladder when he exchanged the priorship at Durham (obtained in the 1140s) with its bishopric in 1153. He died somewhere in France while making his way back home after a trip to the Pope in Rome in 1154. The Consolation on the Death of a Friend (hereafter abbreviated as Consolation) is written as a prosimetrum, a narrative form that alternates between prose and verse. This mode of writing was used to tell stories, give lectures, and offer social commentaries; in short, it was meant to be instructive (cf. Balint 2009: 1). It may well have been intended for the members of Lawrence’s monastic community. The Consolation is structured as a dialogue between the narrative voice of ‘Laurentiusʼ (i.e. Lawrenceʼs literary persona) and the respondent named ‘The Consoler’. Together they discuss, as the title gives away, the problem of dealing with the death of a friend, who is named Paganus. His name is of some significance, because the Latin paganus, from its root pagus (a villager), refers to an outsider, someone who does not belong to the community (cf. O’Donnell). This involves the text’s interpreter in a conversation between emotion and reason about the metaphorical death of the outside world. Its focus on coping with, and more importantly overcoming, the loss and memories of departed friends allows the text to stand as a good example of how the behavior of monks was regulated in order to deal with anxieties, grief, and past attachments. The narrative opens with an ostensibly irremediable grief that Laurentius’ persona is facing. Because of its significance, it is worthwhile to look at the full scene: I am often pressed beyond measure by many anxieties, and, devoid of joy as well as consolation, some time ago I ceased to lead a lively life. For me, the enjoyment of luxuries is no pleasure, the brightness of light is no happiness, none of the restful hours of the night are or can be restful for me. Pain, attacking without restraint, has assailed my mind; its savage enormity forces lamentations, forbids joys, and foretells that my misery will come

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to a miserable end, in such a miserable manner that I cannot confine my misery to the present. For truly I am tormented by the memory of the good things of the past, and by my fear of future evils no less than by the experience of present misfortunes; and, to make the long story of my unhappiness short, I am deprived equally of all hope and of all good fortune. And so how should I resolve to recover? Where should I go? How can I escape? To whom should I entrust myself, and what medicine of consolation should I take? (Lawrence of Durham 2009 [c. 1141]: 1.1–1.3:191)

A careful consideration and reflection, composed in a first-person perspective, draws out an identifiable psychological realism for its audience. Underlying this fragment is Laurentius’ realization that his conscience is tainted. His mind cannot detach itself from the pleasant memories of the past that he shared with his deceased friend – symbolizing the qualities of worldly life. He has to forget but he is unable to do so and he is held captive by the involuntary torment of his memories. The text is instructive because it focuses its narrative on the selfexamination of the soul by verifying what is going on and by raising questions that hopefully lead to one resolution or another – developing grief from the general to the particular. Further, this narrative focus is evident because to an outsider the text contains a flaw in terms of coherent narrative development: nowhere does this fragment allude to the actual cause of Laurentius’ grief, the death of his friend. For that is not the problem to which the text seeks to formulate an answer; death is part of the game. The Consolation offers a universal discussion on grief that is relatable to many people across time and place. Those with foreknowledge of its embedded monastic qualities, however, would have recognized in it a guideline for devotion, penitence, and in general a reminder to focus on the afterlife as opposed to the present life.

C ONSTRUCTING ANTI - NOSTALGIA The Consolation establishes dualisms between good and evil, and past and present, by exaggerating the emptiness of the future in comparison to the fullness of the past. Its challenge lies with the fact that Laurentius’ memories are good and pleasant, which is immediately juxtaposed with emphasizing his anxieties for the evils awaiting him in the future. Some of the stakes involved in this worldview have already been discussed above, such as the purification and extermination of the personal past and the uncertain pay-off at the end of a strenuous life. Certainly, such anxieties about struggles with memory, looming acedia, were well grounded,

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because worldly infestations were considered a neglect of conscience – and thus a lack of love for God (cf. Van ‘t Spijker 2004: 220). Therefore, the text is set on helping Laurentius and thus its audience to determine where and how a remedy can be found against this kind of existential crisis. The Consolation’s anti-nostalgic narrative starts out by acknowledging human processes of adaptation. On the basis of what has been discussed so far, it is possible to acknowledge that converting to the rigorous routine of the medieval monastery was no slight task. The text finds itself in agreement with this observation: [When] I was a new monastic recruit, I began to make amends for my old desire. It is not easy to describe how difficult it was for me to discard what I was used to and to think of serious matters in my lascivious mind, in obedience to the command of the prior. Indeed, it is hard to unlearn your habits, and the steep road of virtue is never delightful, relaxing, or comfortable to climb. (Lawrence of Durham 2009 [c. 1141]: 3.3:194)

Aside from the affirmation of hardship, this fragment helps to remind the reader how far he has come on the virtuous path. At the same time, it emphasizes how elusive memories can be in the sense that even a small disruption like the present could pose a substantial impact on the efforts made to forget the world of his former life outside of the monastery. Laurentius’ monologue suggests that forgetting was one of the most difficult aspects of the monastic existence. The struggle with memory can be viewed as a fear of undermining the perseverance and discipline that he has cultivated so far. Although memories of the past were not out of the ordinary, they did belong to the sphere of worldly materiality that had to be avoided. Despite recognition of the human side of the monastic existence, the Consolation does not condone Laurentius’ vicious state of mind and advances its anti-nostalgic discourse by deconstructing the fabric of his reminiscence. Laurentius is struggling to accept the finite nature of created things and the monastery is losing its grip as the pinnacle of virtue because he cannot find consolation in it on an emotional level: “Where should I go? How can I escape?” Naturally, within the scope of such a monastic text the monastery is the only proper answer. The conversational partner, the Consoler, begins to formulate this answer by pointing out that Laurentius’ supposed happiness with Paganus’ friendship was mortally flawed from the beginning: “it has been shown by his death and by your sorrow that Paganus was not immortal; so it is clear that even while he lived, you lacked the thing you hoped for the most” (Lawrence of Durham 2009 [c. 1141]: 4.25:199). Immortality is the most desirable outcome of all things,

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which makes the Consoler assume the voice of reason in trying to convince Laurentius of the need to rationally rethink his attachments. Paganus, as a material entity, and the worldly life he stands for, do not possess eternal qualities. The narrative’s rational voice is there to persuade its emotional interlocutor that Paganus could not possibly have been a genuine source of happiness for Laurentius; his mind is thus playing tricks on him. There is no point in being nostalgic. An important foundation for the textual politics of renegotiating emotional responses was the monastic practice of divine reading (lectio divina). Scriptures and other beneficial texts had to be internalized through a combination of reading, prayer, and meditation (cf. Carruthers 2008 [1990]: 154). Mary Carruthers has examined the relationship between reading and memory in the medieval monastery. She demonstrates that reading was considered as a digestive process, in which knowledge was consumed by chewing on it for the purpose of remembrance. So “the just man, eating, fills his soul. And when he is replete with sacred doctrine, from the good treasury of the memory he brings forth those things which are good” (ibid: 207). A proper digestion of texts was achieved when readers were able to be fully absorbed in them (cf. ibid: 209). Williams adds to this that the experience of doubt and questioning, both evident in Lawrence’s text, were common parts of the lectio (cf. 2009: 866). Its relatable narrative, departing from the supposition of insecurity, may indeed have positioned the Consolation in a similar tradition of divine reading. As a matter of fact, the text itself also emphasizes on more than one occasion the inadequacies of language and the significance of experience. When discussing Laurentius’ desire for friendship, it is remarked that “it is easier to express this as a kind of longing than to explain it in words” (Lawrence of Durham 2009 [c. 1141]: 3.6:195). Later, in the final sentences of the text, the Consoler concludes that “it is easier for someone to obtain this [the idea that Paganus is living well in death] than it is to teach someone that it is so. For how can a matter inaccessible to the human intellect be explained in words?” (ibid: 16.7:233) Taken together, the communicative strategy of the Consolation first attempts to remedy Laurentius’ grief with reason and then the meditative experience of the text itself. Following this line of thought, the text invites Laurentius, and thus the reader, to reconsider the authenticity of his memory and by doing so advances its antinostalgic narrative. Emotions are postulated as a deterrent to true happiness (cf. Classen 2013: 16). In fact, nothing belonging to this earth is worthy of attachment, so the Consoler argues when he confronts Laurentius with a reality check: When I imagine time with its varied courses of events, I perceive that nothing remains in it:

132 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING nothing remains, when everything subject to an end passes away. The imminent end draws everything to that same place. [...] A single ending destroys cities and countryside, and the stars pass away in the same manner and pass into nothing. [...] For nothing that exists has a long measure, nor is it right, sweet friend, that what disappears should be loved more than is proper. (Lawrence of Durham 2009 [c. 1141]: m15:221–2)

It is a grim message that the reader has to internalize, for according to the Consoler all is in vain. At the end of time, everything shall vanish and nothing of the earthly sphere matters any longer. If anything, the repetition presented in this fragment is sure to drive the point home. Laurentius’ friendship with Paganus stands as a metaphor for loving the world. This is the reason why the narrative’s climax is so brutal, because Laurentius has to be released from the snares of his uncontrollable reminisces that keep pulling him down to the earthly sphere while he should be facing upwards toward the heavens. The Consoler’s philosophical disputations about happiness, followed by the monastic ideal of renouncing the world (contemptus mundi), facilitate the experience of letting go – not just of Paganus, but also of the entire world. It is the experience of the textual journey, rather than an instruction that could have been summarized in one sentence, that matters.

C ONCLUSION This chapter started out by questioning the relationship between the individual and his community from the perspective of nostalgia and sustainability. I have used the monastery as a case-study in order to exemplify how certain cultures have very specific conceptions of sustainability and temporality. This has led me to position monasticism as a form of life, as an expression of human co-existence grounded in diverse social practices. Text played an unavoidable role in asserting regulations, which in turn fabricated a totality wherein, for the sake of preserving the heritage of a long-standing tradition, it was ordained precisely how monks should live and remember. Expressions of the written word offered a powerful tool within the scope of Foucault’s technologies of the self, a means to transform into a desired state of being, to provide entire communities with such (universal) guidelines. Yet, the purification of the past could not outweigh the complete uncertainty towards the question whether one would in fact be saved. Only at the final reckoning would that become clear. Nevertheless, the monastic form of life

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was adamant in its conception that no attachments to the past should be fostered, leading to the idea of anti-nostalgia. A more tangible grasp of this idea of monastic anti-nostalgia was developed over the course of a case-study of the 12th century Consolation on the Death of a Friend. Its emphasis on the inadequacy of words leads to an experiential reflection that points out the erroneous nature of emotions and worldly things. The protagonist’s attachment to his friend stands as a metaphor for those desires erroneously yearned for in the realm of earthly existence, which is stressed in asserting that the world will fall into oblivion at the end of times. The work can be addressed as an example of how the textual medium could be, and was, used to establish normative portraits of monastic behavior. And this behavior never included positive evaluations of the past. Significant exertions to frame reminiscence in a negative light supports the hypothesis that medieval Christianity may have been home to various antinostalgic sentiments. This anti-nostalgia, as I envision it, arises out of a disjuncture between certain histories that matter and histories that do not. Biblical history matters, for it contains useful knowledge about the creation of humankind, humanity’s relations with God, and why God sent his son to become a human. From that point onward, however, the development of time until the second coming of Christ matters only in the sense that it may betray clues about how God’s plan could unravel further. The intellectual climate that arose out of this worldview kept emphasizing the insignificance of everything that relates to the world, preaching for widespread acceptance that the world is nothing more than a virtual reality and that actual life will blossom when this simulation has come to an end. Within this view of the world, eyes have to be turned to salvation lest one may start to kindle an appreciation for certain elements of his or her personal past, losing track of what is real and what is not. In sum, anti-nostalgia is characterized by a firm utopian belief in the importance of the salvation of humankind. It does not oppose cultural sustainability, for its thought can only cultivate legacy through the existence of an identifiable body. This was probably seen as a necessary evil. Anti-nostalgia seems to be, and this is where the lines of historical substantiation begin to blur, a way of dealing with cultural psychological tendencies of commemoration. These are not necessarily nostalgic in the modern sense of the term but they may have been oriented to certain ideals on how to deal with, and respect, heritage. Naturally, further studies are necessary to determine exactly how this antinostalgia manifested itself in a broader sense and what it means for premodern conceptions of memory and the past.

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Eadmer of Canterbury / Southern, Richard W. (ed. and trans.) (1962 [12th c.]): The Life of St Anselm: Archbishop of Canterbury by Eadmer, London: Nelson. Evagrius of Pontus (2003 [4th c.]): “The Monk: A Treatise on the Practical Life (Praktikos).” In: Sinkewicz, Robert E. (ed. and trans.), Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91-114. Farrell, Patrick (2006): “Portuguese Saudade and other Emotions of Absence and Longing.” In: Peeters, Bert (ed.), Semantic Primes and Universal Grammar: Empirical Evidence from the Romance Languages, Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 235-258. Foucault, Michel (1988): “Technologies of the Self.” In: Martin, Luther H./Gutman, Huck/Hutton, Patrick H. (eds), Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 16-49. Goetz, Hans-Werner (1997): “Zeitbewußtsein und Zeitkonzeptionen in der hochmittelalterlichen Geschichtsschreibung.” In: Ehlert, Trude (ed.), Zeitkonzeptionen, Zeiterfahrung, Zeitmessung. Stationen ihres Wandels vom Mittelalter bis zur Moderne, Paderborn: F. Schöningh, pp. 12-32. Haldane, John (2009): “Soul and Body.” In: Pasnau, Robert (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 291-304. Hepper, Erica G./Ritchie, Timothy D./Sedikides, Constantine/Wildschut, Tim (2012): “Odysseyʼs End: Lay Conceptions of Nostalgia Reflect its Original Homeric Meaning.” In: Emotion 12/1, pp. 102-119. Hofer, Johannes / Anspach, Carolyn Kiser (trans.) (1934 [1688]): “Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688.” In: Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 2, pp. 376-391. Holak, S. L./Havlena, W. J. (1998): “Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories: An Examination of the Emotional Components of Nostalgia.” In: Journal of Business Research 42, pp. 217-226. Howard, Scott Alexander (2012): “Nostalgia.” In: Analysis 72/4, pp. 641-650. Jaeggi, Rahel (2013): “Critique of Forms of Life: Forms of Life as Instances of Problemsolving.” Accessed April 24th, 2018. http://cef.pucp.edu.pe/wpcontent/uploads/2014/08/Rahel-Jaeggi-Critique-of-Forms-of-Life-Brasil2013.pdf Jong, Mayke de (1996): In Samuelʼs Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West, Leiden: Brill. Kerr, Julie (2009): Life in the Medieval Cloister, London: Continuum. Kohlenberger, Helmut (2010): “The Monastic Challenge: Remarks.” In: Otten, Willemien/Vanderjagt, Arjo/Vries, Hent de (eds.), How the West was Won:

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Essays on the Literary Imagination, the Canon, and the Christian Middle Ages for Burcht Pranger, Leiden: Brill, pp. 409-414. Krawiec, Rebecca (2003): “‘From the Womb of the Churchʼ: Monastic Families.” In: Journal of Early Christian Studies 11/3, pp. 283–307. Lawrence, C. H. (1984): Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, London: Longman. Lawrence of Durham (2009 [c. 1141]): “Consolation on the Death of a Friend.” In: Balint, Bridget (trans.), Ordering Chaos: The Self and the Cosmos in Twelfth-Century Latin Prosimetrum, Leiden: Brill, pp. 191-223. McCann, Willis (1941): “Nostalgia: A Review of the Literature.” In: Psychological Bulletin 38, pp. 165-182. McDannell, Colleen/Lang, Bernhard (2001 [1988]): Heaven: A History, New Haven: Yale University Press. Mondschein, Ken/Casey, Denis (2015): “Time and Time-Keeping.” In: Classen, Albrecht (ed.), Handbook of Medieval Culture, vol. 3, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, pp. 1657-1679. Nagy, Piroska (2004): “Religious Weeping as Ritual in the Medieval West.” In: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice 48/2, pp. 119-137. OʼDonnell, James J. “Paganus.” Accessed April 24th, 2018. (http://faculty. georgetown.edu/jod/paganus.html). Ong, Walter J. (2002): Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Routledge. Pleij, Herman (1997): Dromen van Cocagne: middeleeuwse fantasieën over het volmaakte leven, Amsterdam: Prometheus. Pranger, M. B. (1994): Bernard of Clairvaux and the Shape of Monastic Thought: Broken Dreams, Leiden: Brill. Pranger, M. B. (2003): The Artificiality of Christianity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rosen, George (1975): “Nostalgia: A ‘Forgottenʼ Psychological Disorder.” In: Psychological Medicine 5, pp. 340-354. Sedikides, Constantine/Wildschut, Tim/Routledge, Clay/Arndt, Jamie/Hepper, Erica G./Zhou, Xinyue (2015): “To Nostalgize: Mixing Memory with Affect and Desire.” In: Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 51, pp. 1-85. Spijker, Ineke van ‘t (2004): Fictions of the Inner Life: Religious Literature and Formation of the Self in Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Turnhout: Brepols. Starn, Randolph (1982): Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Stock, Brian (1983): The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Verbaal, Wim (2008): “Bernard of Clairvauxʼs School of Oblivion.” In: Bruun, Mette/Glaser, Stephanie (eds.), Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 221-237. Walahfrid Strabo (1985 [9th c.]): “Elegy on Reichenau.” In: Godman, Peter (ed. and trans.), Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, London: Duckworth, pp. 225-229. Wenzel, Siegfried (1966): “‘Acediaʼ 700-1200.” In: Traditio 22, pp. 73-102. Williams, Hannah (2009): “Composing the Mind: Doubt and Divine Inspiration in Otloh of St. Emmeramʼs Book of Temptations.” In: European Review of History 16/6, pp. 855-873. Wilson, Janelle L. (2005): Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.

Commoning Nostalgia Making “Romantic Sensibility Sustainable” in Contemporary Poetry D ANIEL E LTRINGHAM

I NTRODUCTION In a short essay on the poet R. F. Langley’s Journals – life-long nature-notes modelled on Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne (1789) and on Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journal (1800-1803) – the poet and Romantic theorist Peter Larkin suggests that the continuing presence of “the Romantic” today is bound up with its ecological temporality. “[William] Wordsworth’s ‘light of common day’”, Larkin writes, “was in itself a way of trying to make Romantic sensibility sustainable” (Larkin 2008). To illustrate what he means by this, Larkin quotes a fragment from the second stanza of Langley’s sequence Juan Fernandez: “Nothing / is clearer and more simple”, the stanza concludes, “than a row of / rabbits caught outright in common light” (Langley 2015: 20). These lines by Langley are a clear reaching for, and “making sustainable” of, the opening of William Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode”, collapsing its rhyme scheme and compressing “common sight” and “celestial light” into the “common light” of ordinary observance (Wordsworth 1983 [1807]: 271). Wordsworth makes this conflation later in the poem, in the “light of common day” that is the sustainable, future-orientated recompense for the fading of the youthful “visionary gleam” (ibid: 272; 273). Such a “common” ecological temporality, I argue, is accessed and indexed by the customary praxis of commoning, standing for an array of social practices but unified by their material base in the exercise of customary rights to common, as a verb. Commoning – historically access and gathering rights to marginal pasture, woodland and waste – is active and processual. It brokers a relation between the

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affective and the material, the social and the economic, and the spatial and temporal. Peter Linebaugh notes that this connective bivalency explains some of the persistent “allure of commoning today.” It “arises from the mutualism of shared resources. Everything is used, nothing is wasted. Reciprocity, sense of self, willingness to argue, long memory, collective celebration, and mutual aid are traits of the commoner” (2008: 103). Commoning, and its negation, enclosure, are especially keyed in to Romanticera nostalgia for supposedly holistic formulations of organic community, which calibrated itself imaginatively against the material land-grab of parliamentary enclosure (circa 1770-1830). Such a community is perpetually receding over the horizon of pastoral longing, hopelessly compromised yet surprisingly efficacious: the idealisation of the golden age functions “as a stick to beat the present” (Williams 1973: 12). In her prose text “How Pastoral: A Manifesto” the poet Lisa Robertson, considered at the end of this essay, writes that “nostalgia can locate those structured faults our embraces also seek” (2002: 21). Robertson’s feminist critique of pastoral’s patriarchal structure of inheritance and ownership activates “the desuetude of nostalgia,” within the “structured faults” of that tradition’s “obnoxious, prosthetic” imaginary (ibid: 21, 22). The commoning imaginary is in this sense closely aligned with that of pastoral, as both supposedly gesture towards an “unrealistic” image of agrarian labour. Scholarship across disciplines has sought to reclaim the “realism” of what Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen (1999) call the “subsistence perspective” of commoning from the reactionary feudal imaginary, as a means of countering liberal teleologies of growth and progress that are incompatible with ecological crisis. From a liberal standpoint, what Anne Janowitz has called Romantic-era common right’s promise of a “‘futurity’ seeded in the claim of an embedded community” might seem like little more than peasant conservatism (1998: 5). However, argues Lisa Grandia, “subsistence farmers recognize the economic and ecological efficiencies of small-scale household production, which they do not lightly abandon for the vagaries of wage labor” (2012: 15). In this sense, the time of commoning is differently calibrated, since “what matters to a peasant household is not achieving record profits in one particular year but rather producing enough to eat decade after decade to keep the ghouls of famine at bay” (ibid). This is where commoning, perceived as a “lost” social ecology, bridges the backward glance of the golden age with the intergenerational futurity of non-capitalist sustainability. This essay makes such an argument about figurative resistance to developmental temporality through the poetics and prosody of commoning. Svetlana Boym’s “restorative nostalgia,” or Brian Massumi’s “remembering forwards,” set out theoretical frameworks for the work of looking back in order to

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look ahead (Boym 2001; Massumi 2015). For Massumi (taking his distinction from Kierkegaard), to “remember forwards” is distinct from recollection, which operates as “conscious remembering” in a backwards direction only. “Remembering forwards”, on the other hand, is attracted to a “futurity” that “pulls a contracted past through the crucible of the present” (ibid: 62). As the editors of this collection note in their introduction, the paradoxical labour both formulations involve – of looking back to the golden age only in order to project forwards into the future – is a necessary contradiction in order to avoid the latent essentialism or atavism within golden-age discourses. In my terms and for my purposes here, it is the active, dynamic quality of remembering and restoration in a dialectical relationship between past, present and future that allows nostalgia to give on to sustainability. That can be a specific work of reconstruction, as in Boym, or simply the projection of a future collective good that is maintained by the action of commoning. There are limits to the extent to which commoning can be seen as a purely ecological praxis, however. For Linebaugh, commoning makes the non-human constituents of social-ecological community available for use, as a resource (cf. 2014: 13). Sustainable or subsistence practices must in some sense still make use of the non-human world. Katey Castellano strives to counter even this minimal instrumentality in her ecological re-reading of Burkean conservatism (cf. 2013: 5) and in recent work on John Clare and common rights, where commoning is an interconnected web of ecosystemic processes conducted by humans and nonhumans alike in the interstices of agrarian capitalism (cf. ibid 2017: 158-159). Likewise, for Anne-Lise François, commoning articulates an extra-capitalist sustainable temporality: the “unenclosed time” of stinting and commoning practices. François glosses her development of E. P. Thompson’s seminal essay on time- and work-discipline as the persistence of a rhythm of co-operative stinting, or “taking turns on the commons.” Commoning then produces interstitial, “variably determined windows of time,” which can be thought of as temporal analogues to a spatial commons, whether of pasture, piscary, turbary, or estovers (field, pond, peatbog or wood), whose bounds and uses are empirically determinate even if they may shift at different times of year […] they exemplify something of the special kind of determinate openness – as distinct from mere vacancy – threatened by enclosures. (François 2016: 364)

Against the irregular measure of stinting on the common, enclosed time does not bind each day “to each by natural piety,” as William Wordsworth saw the chain of days constitutive of common life (Wordsworth 1983 [1807]: 206). Instead,

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François suggests, the enclosing frame of a day’s work redefines “flexibility” as post-Fordist casualization in which, as with zero-hour contracts in the contemporary politics of labour, each day does not carry the guarantee that it will resemble the last (François 2016: 369). Equally, corporate “sustainability” can all too easily shade into a capitalist futurity of infinite growth (ibid: 368). Instead, “flexibility” indicates “the impossibility of putting longevity on one side and transience, openness to chance and contingency, on the other: living from moment to moment goes hand in hand here with the obligation to endure and pass something on” (ibid: 366-367). If precarity forecloses futurity because it starts from scratch with uncertainty every morning, then commoning entails the ability to think collectively about the future. This imaginative competence is what is expropriated by the enclosures of time- and work-discipline, alongside the possibility of material and affective subsistence. Commoning’s time points towards a sustainable horizon that is both bound within the repetition of subsistence, getting one’s daily bread, but at the same time cooperatively able to conceive of a longer time frame. It expresses, François argues, “a differently lived relation to time to come, or a differently enjoyed power to adjust to varying circumstances and seize the opportune and seasonable” (ibid: 368). The pragmatic repetition of commoning builds into a cumulative affect and a prosody, which is based in subsistence economics but is more than merely material. “Subsistence,” François writes – drawing on Mies and BennholdtThomsen – “names the alternative to the capitalist economies of extraction, storage, and surplus signifying ‘development’” (ibid). It is collectively generated and maintained, allowing for flexibly determinate intervals of time that change in reference to seasonal need. These intervals remain open, but they are not openness without definition. I take this as a metrical figure, but one which does not entirely untether from its grounding in an ecological, pre- or extra-capitalist and therefore political, “subsistence perspective.” Commoning, for the tradition of avant-garde transatlantic poetics considered in this essay through the theoretical frame outlined above, is a gathering of past cultures and languages. One beginning for this practice of “remembering forwards” was the intense epistolary exchange fostered by the brief, fractious yet influential poetry ‘worksheet’ The English Intelligencer (1966-1968), edited by the poets Andrew Crozier (Series One and Three) and Peter Riley (Series Two), and produced at minimal expense due to J. H. Prynne’s access to a Xerox machine at Caius College, Cambridge.1 The English Intelligencer was a primary locus for a radically sustaining nostalgia in post-war experimental poetry, which looked back from its vantage point of the late-60s to the Romantic and eighteenth-century 1

For a full account of The English Intelligencer see Latter (2015).

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radical print networks implied by its title, and further back, to a commonality inherent in the landscape traces left by Neolithic cultures. 2 This was a deliberated “cultural nostalgia,” deployed to re-energise the poetics and politics of the present.

‘C ULTURAL N OSTALGIA ’: T HE E NGLISH I NTELLIGENCER Writing to Andrew Crozier in the summer of 1968 in the aftermath of the Intelligencer’s acrimonious dissolution, Peter Riley mused, Certainly no Vernacular can be an index to the rhythmic life of the man or the poem, any more than a vernacular usage can totally define a word. I mean where is this vernacular & who speaks it? And what does it say? Poetry is presumably an alternative language sprung out of our expedient or bodily mutterings, our incoherences […] We could look back to a time when vernacular speech and song (thus poetry) were indistinguishable from each other, but the best we could do on that now would be a sellotape job […] Beyond the vernacular ) ——

v.

is what we want to get beyond?

(Riley to Crozier, 8 Aug 1968)

Reflecting on future avenues available to the poets involved in the Intelligencer, Riley recognizes here the fundamental contradiction of its recuperative, pastoral project. The worksheet was always skirting around a plainly reductive nostalgia, by looking “back to a time when vernacular speech and song (thus poetry) were indistinguishable from each other,” but in the knowledge that “the best we could do on that now would be a sellotape job.” Riley refers in part to the Intelligencer’s project to reconstitute a “shared language” in poetic song, in Prynne’s description of the project (Prynne to Crozier 13 Sept 1966; Pattison et al. 2012: 22). This shared language would form a group vernacular comprising common reference points and heavily freighted lexis that accrued meaning as the exchange continued. “There has to be a common faith”, Riley wrote, “among all those taking part in the possibility of poetry as to whatever extent a communal activity” (Riley to Crozier 29 Jan 1967; Pattison et al. 2012: 35). Without the Intelligencer as a means of facilitating it, Riley claims, “I just don’t know how we’d begin to think in terms of poetry as an effective agent. This need to share is something more than private

2

See Eltringham (2016).

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correspondence can cope with. The language we can use has to be worked out in common” (Riley to Crozier 29 Jan 1967; Pattison et al. 2012: 37). Andrew Lawson identifies a “residual desire for community in the Cambridge pastorale” of the Intelligencer’s community, which took the “form of nostalgia” for small-scale, artisan literary production embedded within the local social, economic and ecological landscape (Lawson 1991: 41). This ideal was a response to the long history of alienation through urbanization and trade that English pastoral has always at once stressed and suppressed in the dialectic of the country and the city; John Hall argued in the Intelligencer that “displacement from the land” had abstracted the modern subject from the only possible sense of “nation”, emplacement at the base level of earth. From this stems the melancholy of English pastoral, since “What really happens to the land in [sic] this, the money we made in the city, the country lived in: the garden, the contracted Arcadia” (Pattison et al. 2012: 16). The interrogation of the contracted Arcadia – both contracted in scale and under contract – served as the impetus for the Intelligencer’s problematically English focus on the land itself, its landscapes and its histories. Gleaning such knowledge established a dialectic of recuperation between past and present. In the context of New Age revival of interest in ritual landforms and British Land Art’s process-driven interventions in the landscape, the Intelligencer conversation and practice of excavatory vision was bound up with what Peter Riley called, in an eccentric treatise on Neolithic Britain crammed with the latest archaeological findings, ‘Working Notes on British Prehistory’ (1966), what we do see now of the British Neolithic – the visible monuments, extension into the landscape. Still there NOW. Everything the Mesolithic did lies under n feet of topsoil, but not these farmers. The organisation called for thought reaching out beyond the life of one man. And the thoughts are there, over the moorlands and hillsides of Britain, as the evidence of past action. (Riley 1966; Pattison et al. 2012: 52)

Riley’s methodological example formulated a poetics congruent with the work of the Warwick Centre for the Study of Social History (founded in 1968 by commons historians E. P. Thompson, Peter Linebaugh and others) and with Raphael Samuel’s History Workshop movement at Ruskin College Oxford in the late 1960s, whose slogan was to “‘Dig Where You Stand’” (Linebaugh 2014: 150). Samuel would spend his time “tramping about villages in the vicinity and talking to the elderly” with his students in order to get to the base level of living history, of what we do “see now” (ibid: 149). The “organisation” Riley perceives in Neolithic farming traces “called for thought reaching out beyond the life of one

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man,” a structural conceptualization of futurity that commoning enables. That same persistence is what allowed these “visible monuments” to be available for the Intelligencer’s commoning of (pre)historical resources in order to constitute a transatlantic, yet problematically national, artistic commons in the 1960s. Riley’s ‘Working Notes’ attempted to register the point at which private property began, which was bound up with the “disastrous” transition to Settlement. To live in one (expanse of) place. Being special to that place, belonging (though there was a seasonal, rhythmic nomadism – winter quarters). Still, some restriction on freewandering, hence Possession. Reciprocally, the place belonging to you. (Riley 1966; Pattison et al. 2012: 50-51)

This transition from the communal to the private is also tangible, Riley claims, in the “death-houses” where “particularly [...] I get the feeling of community of flesh. A sense that the human flesh wasn’t a personal and singular private possession, but something in its nature shared” (Riley 1966; Pattison et al. 2012: 57). According to this logic, “If flesh is held in common, with man and nature […] its force is not owned by the individual but is a common property” (Riley 1966; ibid: 72). The end of flesh as “common property”, Riley contends, was marked by the emergence of individual rather than collective burial and by grave goods (Riley 1966; ibid: 62). In response, Prynne objected to Riley’s emphasis on reciprocal dwelling in place. Instead, he claims, “I take everything in Northwest Europe to have been [in a semi-nomadic condition] until some point in the Mesolithic […] The natural extension is movement, literal passage across the terrain.” Against this foregrounding of passage, the domestic is the basis for “imposed ideas of region that are foreign in pre-literate landscape […] based on common-law practice concerning land-ownership” (Prynne to Riley, 14 Feb 1967; ibid: 75). The problem with dwelling is not, Prynne contends, “that the land is occupied, but that it’s owned, possessed.” Settlement was no longer “thin, and very pure,” as nomadic prehistory had been. This stabilizing began, in Prynne’s interpretation, with cultivation (in the Fertile Crescent), so that “tillage is perhaps simply another pattern of persistence [after the nomadic]” (Prynne to Riley, 14 Feb 1967; Pattison et al. 2012: 76). Recent revisionist work on hunter-gatherer societies by the anthropologist James C. Scott bears out what were speculative projections for Riley and Prynne: that the cultivation of grain was essential for the formation of city states not because of any intrinsic efficiency, but because it was easier to store, measure and, therefore, to tax (cf. Scott 2017). This provided those in control of the food supply with the tool they needed to enforce the “disastrous” transition to

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“Settlement.” The trajectory of development as the assertion of power over those who practised “backward” gathering and commoning modes of subsistence began in the cradle of civilisation, along with large-scale agriculture itself. The implications of this for the Intelligencer community were to formulate an alternative understanding of history, value and the use of “nature”, and therefore also an oppositional politics that was facilitated by an attentive reading of the prehistorical landscape. But although “[w]hat went on before that [settlement] I prize beyond measure,” Prynne qualifies, “I could not want it back or any version of cultural nostalgia” (Prynne to Riley, 14 Feb 1967; Pattison et al. 2012: 77). Rather, for Prynne such a poetics of recovery continues to imply a stance of philological and ethical openness to the labour of the past that allows a commoning of those resources, as a sustainably future-orientated politics of nonexclusive use. What Prynne has called in a recent essay the poet’s “Mental Ears” equip them for this labour of recovery. Mental ears – a sort of metaphorical tuning or sounding device for the recuperation of historical language – “permit reconstruction of raw phonetic data, in particular across precedent historical eras, so that the alert poet can ‘tune in’ to earlier schedules of poetic composition” (Prynne 2010: 129). This trans-historical gleaning, or picking up of what is left behind, is achieved through the Wordsworthian means of “linkages of memory and retrospect, as reconstruction of what originally faced towards the undeclared future” (ibid: 133). Such well-tuned mental ears, Prynne contends, “will hear in older sounds the then new sounds of making and marking a track into forward space: a future in the past” (ibid). This dialectical “remembering forwards,” in Massumi’s formulation, is central to Prynne’s “echo chamber” method of composition, as he has reiterated in a recent interview (Dolven/Kotin 2016: 202). But Prynne’s hesitant openness to the “cultural nostalgia” of past languages and cultures has also been cautiously and critically handled by later poets, amongst them those who are the subject of the rest of this essay: Stephen Collis, Sean Bonney and Lisa Robertson. These poets differently orientate themselves towards historical language, the ideal of vernacular or common speech, and the capacity of “Romantic sensibility” to mediate between the claims of nostalgia and sustainability, past and future.

C OLLIS

AND

B ONNEY : S USTAINING R ESISTANCE

The Canadian poet Stephen Collis and the British poet Sean Bonney have both published books with the title The Commons (2008 and 2011). In different ways, each commons historical languages that mediate between subjectivity and

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collectivity, and which are brought into the present as prosodic interventions. In a dialogue between the two poets, Collis suggests to Bonney that their work is characterized by “a commoning of words and voices” that is also “a commoning of kinds of social relations, and thus of a kind of subjectivity in history” (Bonney/Collis 2015: 283). Indeed, both poets’ Commons “have less to do with land, land use and material reproduction,” and more to do “with the evocation of the voices, attitudes, and rebellious spirits of commoners throughout time” (ibid). Collis’ work of historical recovery, The Commons (2008), dredges up the ghosts of William Wordsworth, John Clare, Henry David Thoreau and their landscapes, alongside more recent spectres of the anti-globalization movement kick-started, in Collis’ reading, by indigenous revolt. The possibility of “‘common address’” was renewed by the Zapatistas’ communiqués from the Lacandon jungle, which, Collis says in the dialogue with Bonney, announced a new phase of late capitalism, in which “a multitude of voices […] spoke counter to neoliberalism’s individualist pleasure-consumption modality” (ibid: 290-291). For Collis, moreover, this commoning of historical language is twinned with a contemporary activist concern with sustainable indigenous practices. As an activist, Collis’ poetry plays a direct role in opposing extractive enclosure and resource-capture, and unwaveringly connects corporate power with the ongoing expropriation of indigenous lands. His opposition to the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil pipeline, which runs through indigenous land, is recorded by his recent collection Once in Blockadia (2016). Collis was sued by the energy giant and his poetry was used as legal evidence against him, bearing unwitting witness to the direct political efficacy of poetic language in active contention with law, state and fossil capital. In response to the extractive projects of what he calls “geophysical capitalism,” Collis proposes to extend the franchise of the common to meet the needs of a broad human and non-human community. Within geophysical capitalism, “we – the biotariat – are now enclosed in one massive factory, our bodies ground into profit” (Collis 2014). This now planetary-scaled enclosure demands new common rights for the twenty-first century: “Common of refuge” and “Common of future.” Collis glosses the latter as assured partly through “Longterm, multi-generational inhabitation of a territory, based on cultural practices geared towards a sustainable, interdependent relationship to the natural environment of that territory” (Collis 2015a). Such “Common of future” is mapped by Castellano’s account of the conservative Romantic “intergenerational moral imagination,” which “emerges as a counter-narrative to the optimistic telos of progress” (2013: 4). Her account of commoning in John Clare’s poetry also responds to Collis’ “biotariat” (an

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expansion of the anthropocentric term ‘precariat’), by stressing the “mutual vulnerability” of the extra-human and human commoners who are alike expropriated by enclosure, monoculture, and the regulation of productivity (2017: 165). This coalition of commonality recognizes both peasant labour and the antiproductivist excess they are employed by capital to eradicate – in the poems by Clare that Castellano concentrates on, the mole-catcher and the mole – as equally enclosed members of the “biotariat.” They are turned against one another by exigency, but affectively reconnected by Clare’s poetry. Within The Commons itself, “Romantic sensibility” is “made sustainable” through a found text collage technique. The sequence ‘Clear as Clare’ draws on John Clare’s anti-enclosure poetry, journals and autobiographical writing, suggesting the familiar causal relationship between the expropriation of common right and Clare’s subsequent psychological disturbance: myrtle embanked my Mary dithering blea and besomed I vanquish fences forcefully opening enclosure Quixote and shivering with cold dressed up in false finery (Collis 2008: 44)

But Collis’ handling of Clare’s disintegration of self into historical others, in which “clare will be clare no more,” emphasises the process as a gathering of the fugitive withdrawing non-identity (ibid: 40)

Poetry then becomes a substitute “echo home” – think of Prynne’s echo chamber of poetic language – a collective voicing “to press the common air with lungs” (ibid: 40). As an authorial presence, then, Collis’ editorial handling of Clare’s voice performs the meta-textual commoning the book employs as its method, but impelled by the lapsarian cliché of enclosure-as-loss. What existed before this moment then becomes a privileged locus for nostalgia, and Collis inhabits Clare’s post-lapsarain present prosodically, through negation and absence. He does this by the intensification of Clare’s familiar – in the sense of the familiarly known, the “hounding home” (2008: 33) – deictic structuring of retrospect, itself learned

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from Oliver Goldsmith’s eighteenth-century enclosure elegy ‘The Deserted Village’ (1770). Collis accentuates the indexical constructions ‘there once’ and ‘no more’: there once were springs like sheets of snow there once were brooks the brooks no more (ibid: 45)

The iambic dimeter organizes the relationship between ‘once’ and ‘no more’, in the present. In the first two lines, the stresses fall on ‘once’, ‘springs’ and, by comparison, ‘sheets’ and ‘snow’, an alliterative nominal emphasis. The third line sets out to fulfil the same pattern, stressing ‘once’ and ‘brooks’, but instead of simile, the second ‘brooks’ is cancelled by its repetition and yoking with ‘[no] more’. Run together, the sound patterning ‘-s no more’ echoes the ‘snow’ introduced as a simile in the second line, by picking up the absence it indexes. Elsewhere, starker indexical pointings in space and time – ‘there’, ‘where’ and ‘now’ – perform a similar organization: Hail humble Unlettered waste where bustling where dawning where useless where fenceless (ibid: 42)

This geographical marker is supplanted by the plangent ‘still’: Hail scenes still shall hum dear native sweet and oh those dear those golden those sports the vanished green (ibid: 42)

Finally, though, the hopeful holding-out of “still” is replaced by the realism of the post-lapsarian present: “But now / […] now all’s laid waste” (ibid). In the lines quoted above Collis echoes William Blake, for whom the sounds of recreation that

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once reverberated around the ‘The Ecchoing Green’ (Songs of Innocence and Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, 1789) are “no more seen, / On the darkening Green”, pointing to the decline of the once-happy community. For Blake, the Green’s echoic function was as a receptacle of social mingling, where church bells, bird song and the sound of “our sports” once blended. The affective commons produced by the community was formally and aurally gathered and redistributed, before being darkened by the oblique social forces of ‘Experience’ in Blake’s faux-naïve schema (Ostriker 2004: 105-106). Collis also draws on Clare’s ‘Helpstone Green’ (1821, but probably composed circa 1815 when Helpston was undergoing enclosure), which employs a powerfully efficacious “restorative nostalgia” to both mourn and symbolically reinstate Helpston’s village green after it was cut up by enclosure. Clare casts “fancys eye” back to the pre-enclosure Helpston of his youth, replaying “The well known brook the favorite tree”, before coming to “that pleasant green I see / That green for ever dear” (Robinson/Powell 2004: 62). Once it has been introduced into the familiar structure of nostalgic retrospect the green overruns its bounds, daubing the rest of the poem with its hue. This dialectic of perception and recollection is counterpointed by the rhymes ‘scene’ and ‘seen’, the prospect and its witness. By the end of the poem, the green/scene/seen rhyme takes over almost completely, supplanting the experience and memory of loss with a phonetic persistence that argues itself as present. It does this while the sense of the poem laments a final effacement so complete that the future will not know the space as itself, because its true essence as the green, as a space of common use, will be concealed: Both milkmaids shouts and herdsmans call Have vanish’d with the green The king kups yellow shades and all Shall never more be seen For all the cropping that does grow Will so efface the scene That after times will hardly know It ever was a green (ibid: 63)

The contradiction between semantic and phonetic insistences – that the green is gone for good and that the green will continue to echo as it rings through the end rhymes of the last stanza – suggests that the experience of failure can be converted to a paradoxical power-in-weakness: Robertson’s active nostalgia, which locates “the structured faults our embraces also seek” (2002: 21).

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Such a rhetoric of retrospect is not confined to the rural imaginary. In Rebel Cities (2012), David Harvey points out that attempts at a civic level to common parts of the city also often tap into such a pastoral rhetoric of activated nostalgia; selective enclosure of certain open spaces in order to prevent their appropriation by capital (usually in the form of construction and rent extraction) can be defensive commoning that helps to safeguard the common reproduction of daily life. Pedestrianized areas, by re-imagining a past without cars, attempt to “recover some aspects of a ‘more civilized’ common past” (Harvey 2012: 74). But, Harvey cautions, the nostalgic discourse that sees pastoral return to a simpler past of strong communal ties is used in urban development in order to increase the value of property, sell commodities, and so forth (cf. ibid: 75). Gestures of affective deurbanisation are equally vulnerable to expropriation as Clare’s vanished green, by trading on a “supposedly moral economy of common action” (ibid: 68). Agrarian nostalgia is employed by capital to market the countryside’s final erasure within the city too, in Sean Bonney’s slim sonnet sequence The Commons (2011), and Bonney is having none of its double-edged consolations. The “– pitched green malevolence – / – of the English countryside –”, with its “nasty little churches”, offers no affective succour to the struggle over the sorts of urban commons Harvey describes (Bonney 2011: 63). The book situates that struggle in contemporary London, but also within a historical long view that takes in the Paris Commune, Winstanley’s Diggers and October 1917 as analogous moments of commoning-as-resistance, juxtaposing English and American plebeian folk song with The Stooges, Brecht’s ‘A Reader for those who Live in Cities’ with the Department of Work and Pension’s punitive ‘Form ES4JP (Looking for Work)’, The Wicker Man with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Sifting through this historical jumble, the assiduous reader can hunt down a lot of these interpolations using the ‘Selected Resources’ included at the back of the book. Summoning the dead, speaking their language, refreshes these insurrectionary pasts. Millennial superstition, anticipations of apocalypse, fairies, zombie-workers and brain-munching, blood-sucking capital coalesce to suggest that collective popular expression, although suppressed by “police computer” rationality, can spring up between “geometric gaps / in police lines, so tender” (ibid: 40). The Commons reminds us to believe in the efficacy of popular belief, that ghosts are necessary a chart of / a collective inarticulate harmony (ibid: 62)

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For Bonney, folk song allows access to this collective voice. He clarifies the method in a note at the end of Letters Against the Firmament (2015), which collects part of The Commons, in reference to the epigraph to the first ‘set’ of the poem, a quotation from the Clarence Ashley song ‘The Coo-coo Bird’: “the cuckoo is a pretty bird, / she warbles as she flies” (Bonney 2011: 1). Unacknowledged quotations should be read in the light of the folk tradition of “cuckoo song,” Bonney advises, in which the singer will intersperse their own lyrics alongside whatever fragments of other songs come to mind, thus creating a tapestry or collage in which the ‘lyric I’ loses its privatized being, and instead becomes a collective, an oppositional collective, spreading backwards and forward through known and unknown time. (2015a: 144)

The eruption of traditional song and historical concentrations of revolutionary energy into the contemporary occurs partly through repeated, interpolated fragments of folk lyrics such as “black is the colour of my” and “cold blows the wind” (Bonney 2011: 13); “as I was out walking” (ibid: 22, 28); and Leadbelly’s ‘Gallows Pole’ (49).3 Songs can be, Bonney writes, receptacles of a revolutionary moment that was never realised […] a cluster of still unused energies that still retain the chance of exploding into the present. Play it loud in the Walthamstow shopping mall and you’ll see what I mean. (Bonney 2015a: 35)

In order to draw on those historical resources he distinguishes between two modes of temporality: “normative time” and the “antagonistic time” of “unfinished events” (ibid: 116). In the latter, he says, “time contracts” and the corporate hour “snaps back”, “like some kind of medieval alignment of planets” (ibid: 44). The rest of the time, we are anchored to the clock, to “11.58 in London […] AM & PM, both” (Bonney 2011: 61). This frozen minute reverberates through The Commons: it is not the événement, in the language of the barricades, but the subjective experience of work-time, which always seems to be stuck in the same repetitive instant. Indeed, as though proving the point, it recurs four stanzas later, in the complete sonnet quoted from above:

3

The first three are from folk standards: “Black is the Colour (Of My True Love’s Hair)”; “The Unquiet Grave”; “One Morning in May.” Bonney writes at length about Leadbelly’s ‘Gallow’s Pole’ in “Letter on Harmony and Crisis” (2015: 43-45).

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in this recent knot of days the vile prickle of pills is entirely political / these grimy days, yeh, their static preposterous symmetry / so the side effects are, well like this: it’s 11.58, precisely an entire molecular assembly a ring of executive flats a cheap solar monopoly. But, I dunno, from another angle – pitched green malevolence – – of the English countryside – o cuckoo, nasty little churches. (Bonney 2011: 63)

The nest-invading “cuckoo” might be a folk emblem for the housing crisis, whose empty homes and modern-day rack-renting are suggested by the Saturnine “ring[s] of executive flats” that are part of the city’s “cheap”, degraded cosmology. But as a motif woven throughout The Commons it also stiches the sequence’s plurivocal collective together through the implicit method of the “cuckoo song.” When considered in this way, the demonized cuckoo is a squatter, who occupies the fetishistic ‘nest’ of home-ownership and rentier-capitalism. In prosodic terms, the punctuative “yeh” suggests an upstairs-at-the-pub reading casualness, while being part of a carefully scored verbal texture that directs the performed voice. Adjectival juxtapositions power memorable imagecomplexes that are nonetheless somewhat obscure (“static / preposterous symmetry”), while jarring register transitions and disjunctive diction flicker between the bathetically arcane-sounding (“cheap solar monopoly”) and the colloquial (“I dunno”). The force of these wrenching shifts makes the familiar city a much stranger place, pulling it out of time by overlaying an older vocabulary and reference frame, without losing connection with the speaking voice. Similarly, the self-interrupting movement of line and syntax, whose imperfect seams are indicated by the backslashes cutting across the line before it gets to the enjambment, reaches for what Bonney calls, in ‘Letter on Riots and Doubt’, a “new prosody” (Bonney 2015a: 8) of rupture. This new prosody encompasses “the riot form” (ibid) of street politics, which Bonney worries about fetishizing, in counterpoint to the “fairly conventional metrical system” (ibid: 12) of a police beating. This prosody of authoritarian violence – “a class metaphor, an elegant little metrical foot: not one police officer

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in the UK has been convicted for a death in police custody since 1969” (ibid: 115) – enforces the flattened equivalence of the “normative time” of everyday life, which normalizes hierarchy as false harmony, meting out the hours and days. This temporality can only be countered by dialectical rupture, Bonney stresses, because “The violent conflicts of our age make it impossible to recollect musical emotions in tranquillity” (ibid: 35). The Wordsworthian dialectic of individuated memory and retrospect he alludes to is part of the same bourgeois structure. “Romantic sensibility” in this sense is not so much “sustainable” within the common-as-ordinary as Larkin suggests, but needs to be broken open by historical resistance. This understanding of the Romantic inheritance is more in line with that set out by Rothenberg and Robinson (2009), who delineate their sense of a more Shelleyan, open-ended, experimental, visionary, excessive Romanticism in contemporary ‘postromantic’ poets such as Bonney. 4 But a prosody of rupture can be aligned with the commons of quotidian experience. In Lisa Robertson’s work these seemingly divergent elements are brought together by a feminist politics of the ordinary.

R OBERTSON : S USTAINING THE V ERNACULAR In her collection of experimental prose essays Nilling (2012), the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson sees the commons less in terms of the poet’s relation with historical languages of confrontation and rupture. Instead, she makes a claim for the redemption of “normative time,” rejected by Bonney as inherently reactionary, as organic and experiential rather than external and imposed. She articulates two prosodies and temporalities: a “prosody of the citizen” that expands the Romantic sense of common speech as a linguistic commons arising from living use; and a prosody of the experience of historical time, in which the codex is a commons that opens its reader to “chance” meetings with the past. When delving into the historical sediment of the archive, she writes in ‘Time in the Codex’, “Thinking’s impersonality moves across the shadowed commons of the codex to be politicized by chance, where chance is a stranger” (Robertson 2012: 17). The codex is figured by Robertson as a “shadowed commons,” where traces of past cultures are met by “chance.” Robertson’s engagement with library, archive and codex is more open-ended, less hermetic, than that fostered in the pages of The English Intelligencer. Rather than a cerebral poetics of recovery, it incorporates the noise of quotidian experience into what she calls in another essay,

4

See Rothenberg/Robinson (2009).

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‘Disquiet’, the “multiply layered sonic indeterminacy that is the average, fluctuating milieu of dailiness” (ibid: 57). The entirety of space and time as subjectively apprehended, instant upon instant, forms part of “the present” as “an ideal library” made up of “Infinity, plenum, chaos, dust.” The library becomes “an agora”: a space of exchange that mediates civic, artistic and spiritual communication. Through this “total availability of the entire thick history of linguistic conviviality”, the present becomes the “disquiet” of the admixture and each instant is contingent fixity, “duration as an artefact” (ibid). Measuring present against snap-shot instant, chaos against momentary preservation in this way, Robertson arrives at a prosody. The rhythmic opacity of noise or the body or the city fails or exceeds its measure. Listening leans expectantly towards a pattern that is effacing itself […] In noise, the listener finds a rhythm, and it is discontinuous, effacing its own figuration and count even as it begins. A lurching, a jarring, a staccato surge, a blockage, a meandering, a toobrief alignment. (ibid: 61)

Robertson restores prosody’s feet to the imperfections of bodily measure. The auditory tension of pattern and its antithesis, the “opacity” or irreducibility of the experiential, cannot be contained only by “figuration and count.” Enjambment, within this “prosody of noise”, is a moment of “arrhythmia”, or “discordant temporality […] the counter-semiotic pause within the rhythmic gesture.” The “temporal unit is sprung on the refusal of the regularization of time, which must remain situated in the body, as the body’s specificity, its revolt. The prosody of noise returns discordance to time” (ibid). For Bonney, this prosody of interruption – in an interpretation of the German Romantic poet Hölderlin – is a “‘counter rhythmic interruption’, he [Hölderlin] calls it, where the language folds and stumbles for a second, like a cardiac splinter or a tectonic shake” (Bonney 2015a: 116). Indeed, what joins Bonney and Robertson, for all their evident differences, is this focus on the momentary refusal of regularity, of the “normative time” that is capital’s prosodic dominion over the ordinary, over the experienced vernacular, most of the time. But Robertson differs from Bonney in that for her such counter-metrical ‘revolt’ is located within the body. In 1968, Peter Riley’s sense of poetry as an “alternative language sprung out of our expedient or bodily mutterings” may anticipate this concern, but it is François’s “unenclosed time” of quotidian, stinted commoning that tracks it more closely, bound as it is to need, care, and an ongoing ethos of “making sustainable” within the ordinary. In ‘Untitled Essay’, Robertson

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finds such an indeterminate turn-taking in the multiple nature of vernacular speech, “in the open of language,” where The most temporary membranes serve as shelter. Amongst these membranes, speaking begins, plays its tenuous continuities near and in spite of the accreted institutions that compel anyone to obey, violate and buy, to be situated by identity’s grid. But speech is never simply single. Value moves between us or is foreclosed. (Robertson 2012: 73)

Robertson proposes a “prosody of the citizen” within this “co-movement of speech”, composed of subject; prosody (the “historical and bodily movement of language amongst subjects”); and natality, in which, following Dante, the vernacular is natal speech “transformed in open bodily exchange, irrespective of social position, gender or rank” (ibid: 74, 76). Robertson’s vernacular as collective speech allows her to formulate a model of civic value that does not divide private from public. Rather, she writes (drawing on the linguist Émile Benveniste), domus is aligned with oikos and ecology as domestic work in a broad sense, taking in “community of companionship and quotidian participation: the sharing of food, worship.” Before the division between public and private spheres, she argues, these “everyday operations were at the centre of a scaled series of collective concepts, which progressed outwards from the household to the polis” so that the “difference between them is not qualitative or oppositional, but is one of scale” (ibid: 80). The imposition of a distinction between household and polis meant that a “materially identified bordered enclosure” replaced an “immaterial circulation of reciprocity” that is vestigially present in the daily interactions of “Co-citizens”, “who speak together, and their home is the vulnerable shelter that speaking together offers them, for the duration of speech’s intensity” (ibid: 81). Within the “semantic intensities” of these lived practices, we can begin to hear a poetics, and a prosody, of the citizen. Unlawlike and exceptional, across household and city alike, a vernacular’s dispersed mediality gestures and folds into and throughout the semantic field of the collective. This continuous language of collective formations is the commons. (ibid: 82)

This living and changing “language of collective formations” is not reducible to the Romantic orientation towards the vernacular, Robertson ends by saying, in which “lexical economy and simplicity or limitation, as in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s formulation”, are formal ciphers for “misappropriation of tradition or heritage as redemptive closure.” Instead, the vernacular as reciprocal exchange –

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the affective commoning of daily life – is characterized by “excess, plasticity, admixture, surge, caesura, the wildness of newly turned metaphor, polylinguality and inappropriateness”, which together form a radical counter-polis to the masculine domain of the “linguistically bordered polity” (Robertson 2012: 82). This feminist domus-as-civis contains the “commodious, illustrious and exilic vernacular”, then, which refuses instrumentality and “evades the gridded centrism of capital” (ibid). Such a mutable “vernacular is what comes from the commons, as opposed to what is obtained through formal and institutional exchange” (ibid). If Wordsworth’s formula of universalizing exchange excludes this granular understanding of the common-as-ordinary, Robertson does not: her sense of the vernacular as common speech is porously contiguous with non-linguistic practices of care, which also constitute the commons. As well as the linguistic fabric of commonality worked out through exchange, she stresses, “food, healing, mending and other daily practices” are “carried and transmitted” in the “variable texture of daily living” rather than “embedded in an administrative superstructure” (ibid). These constitute equally important parts of her expanded revision of Wordsworthian common speech, in the light of common day.

C ONCLUSION Bonney proposes a different sense of this prosody that enacts not social reproduction but militant confrontation. Both François and Bonney, though, are concerned to experiment with modes of measure, time-keeping and the politics of repetition exterior to capitalist time- and work-discipline. Lisa Robertson’s understanding of prosody as a commons founded in the body and in affective relations between language users is also sustained, as with Collis and Bonney, by a commoning of historical resources. But for Robertson these are “chance” meetings rather than researched or ruptured interpolations, expressing instead the radical and bodily contingency of commoning nostalgia. François’ work on the time of commoning – ‘unenclosed time’ – proposes a rhythm of stinting the commons, which is somewhere between the radical porosity of Robertson’s prosody of the citizen and of noise, and the regular click of the iambic line. A prosody which transcends its own ordinariness by taking up natural gift where it is found, commoning is not just contentment within the limits of a day’s labour, in the reductive view of the subsistence perspective. Capital’s redeployment of the Wordsworthian diurnal frame – the “light of common day” and that day bound “each to each” by repetition – as “flexible” precarity warps the utopian idea of sufficiency the Wordsworthian ethic implies, and which was taken

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further by Cobbett and Thoreau. In a sense, the sort of latter-day Romantic articulations of nostalgia as sustainability discussed in this essay through commoning are ways of thinking through prosodically what Collis means by ‘Common of future’, which recognizes the need for new common rights facing an uncertain future. To elaborate such a concern with the “multi-generational inhabitation of a territory, based on cultural practices geared towards a sustainable, interdependent relationship to the natural environment of that territory” (2015), Collis draws on the Canadian experience of defining and defending Aboriginal Title. First-nation subsistence practices link past with future in a tenuous linkage that skirts the edges of agro-capitalist and imperialist developmental models of extraction and exhaustion. Rather, gathering and reciprocity together form part of an extended alternative techne of commoning’s future-directed ecological praxis, which looks back in order to conceive of the future: a sustaining nostalgia.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Peter Riley for permission to quote from his private correspondence on page 143, and Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, for the opportunity to consult The English Intelligencer Archive.

R EFERENCES Blake, William (2004): The Complete Poems, edited by Alicia Ostriker, London: Penguin. Bonney, Sean (2011): The Commons, London: Openned. Bonney, Sean (2015): Letters Against the Firmament, London: Enitharmon Press. Bonney, Sean/Collis, Stephen (2015): “We Are An Other: Poetry, Commons, Subjectivity.” In: Fred Wah/Amy De’Ath (eds.), Toward. Some. Air, Alberta: Banff Centre Press, pp. 282-93. Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Castellano, Katey (2013): The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 17901837, London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Castellano, Katey (2017): “Moles, Molehills, and Common Right in John Clare’s Poetry.” In: Studies in Romanticism, 56/2, pp. 157-176. Clare, John (2004): Major Works, edited by Eric Robinson/David Powell, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collis, Stephen (2008): The Commons, Vancouver: Talonbooks.

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Collis, Stephen (2014): “Notes Towards a Manifesto of the Biotariat.” In: Beating the Bounds: Notes on Commons, Poetry, and Climate Justice, 25 July 2014 (https://beatingthebounds.com/2014/07/25/notes-towards-a-manifesto-of-thebiotariat/). Collis, Stephen (2015): “Refugee Tales and Common Rights.” In: Beating the Bounds: Notes on Commons, Poetry, and Climate Justice, July 7 (https:// beatingthebounds.com/2015/07/07/refugee-tales-and-common-rights/). Collis, Stephen (2016): Once in Blockadia, Vancouver: Talonbooks. Dolven, Jeff and Kotin, Joshua (2016): Interview with J. H. Prynne, “The Art of Poetry No. 101.” In: Paris Review, pp. 174-207. Eltringham, Daniel (2016): “Review of Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: on the Poetics of Community by Alex Latter.” In: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry 8/1, pp. 1-7. François, Anne-Lise (2016): “Taking Turns on the Commons (or Lessons in Unenclosed Time).” In: Cal Winslow (ed.), River of Fire: Commons, Crisis & the Imagination, Arlington, MA: The Pumping Station, pp. 361-389. Grandia, Liza (2012): Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle, and Commerce Among the Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Harvey, David (2012): Rebel Cities, London: Verso. Janowitz, Anne (1998): Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Langley, R. F. (2015): Complete Poems, edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, Manchester: Carcanet. Larkin, Peter (2008): “Being Seen for Seeing: A tribute to R. F. Langley’s Journals.” In: Intercapillary Space, August 2008 (http://intercapillaryspace. blogspot.co.uk/2008/08/being-seen-for-seeing-tribute-to-r-f.html). Latter, Alex (2015): Late Modernism and The English Intelligencer: on the Poetics of Community, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Lawson, Andrew (1991): “On Modern Pastoral.” In: fragmente: a magazine of contemporary poetics, ‘Pastoral’, 3, pp. 35-41. Linebaugh, Peter (2008): The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Linebaugh, Peter (2014): Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Massumi, Brian (2015): Politics of Affect, Cambridge: Polity Press. Mies, Maria/Bennholdt-Thomsen, Veronika (2000): The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, translated by Patrick Camiller, Maria Mies, and Gerd Weih, London and New York: Zed Books.

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Pattison, Neil/Pattison, Reitha/Roberts, Luke (eds.) (2012): Certain Prose of the English Intelligencer, Cambridge: Mountain. Prynne, J. H. (2010). “Mental Ears and Poetic Work.” In: Chicago Review, 55/1, pp. 126-57. Riley, Peter (8 August 1968): “Letter to Andrew Crozier.” In: The English Intelligencer Archive, Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University, Series A: Correspondence (Box 1: Folder 27). Robertson, Lisa (2002): “How Pastoral: A Manifesto.” In: Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (eds.), Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s, Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press, pp. 21-26. Robertson, Lisa (2012): Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias, Ontario: Bookthug. Rothenberg, Jerome/Robinson, Jeffrey C. (2009): “Introduction.” In: Poems for the Millennium Volume 3: The University of California Book of Romantic & Postromantic Poetry, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, pp. 1-20. Scott, James C. (2017): Against the Grain, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Williams, Raymond (1973): The Country and the City, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wordsworth, William (1983): Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems, 18001807, edited by Jared Curtis, The Cornell Wordsworth, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Nostalgic Utopias William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances (1892-1907) K ATHARINA M ETZ

I NTRODUCTION To think of the utopian as nostalgic might at first appear counterintuitive, for utopias are usually considered to be invested in futurity and driven by a belief in progress, not by a nostalgic idealization of the past. If anything, the relationship between the two concepts has been considered to be just the opposite: two of the most influential theorizers of nostalgia have described the phenomenon as utopian in nature. Susan Stewart argues in On Longing that “[h]ostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face” (1992: 23). Nostalgia, in Stewart’s account, seems to be as much concerned with an idealization of the past as with an investment in a utopian future. Similarly, Svetlana Boym attests a “prospective” and a “utopian dimension” (2007: 8) to the phenomenon of nostalgia. However, as she further argues, nostalgia, unlike utopia, is “no longer directed toward the future” (ibid: 9). In the very first sentence of her essay, Boym claims in more assertive terms: “The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia” (ibid: 7). This statement traces not only a temporal development which informs Boym’s conceptualization of nostalgia as a decidedly modern phenomenon, but it also implies a certain oppositional relationship between the two concepts, based on the assumption that utopias must be driven towards the future.1 1

Early in her essay, Boym states that nostalgia is “not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it” (2001: 8). Sielke who also attests a future-directedness to the phenomenon of nostalgia (cf. 2017: 13-14), shows that nostalgia has been theorized primarily in the context of discussions about modernity and postmodernity (cf. ibid: 1).

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In this essay, I aim to complicate the standing assumption that utopias are per definition futuristic or progressive and argue instead that they are also directed by, arguably even defined by nostalgia, by an idealized notion of the past. Nostalgic utopias, as I define them in this essay, imagine a nostalgic return on which they build ideas and guidelines of a future worth realizing. My conceptualization of the nostalgic utopia thus also engages in a number of ways with this volume’s major thematic concern of establishing connections between nostalgia and sustainability. If cultural narratives about a sustainable future are contingent upon nostalgic returns, the same is true for nostalgic utopias: their representation of a better world, projected into a future, is likewise inextricably connected with a nostalgic look back to an imagined, storied past. This essay is structured in two parts: first, I will provide a case study for the genre of the nostalgic utopia by providing a reading of William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances (1892-1907), a trilogy written during the heyday of progressivist utopianism at the turn of the twentieth century. Howells’s novels represent somewhat of an oddity in the literary history of the genre – they do not partake in the shift from a spatial to a temporal horizon, or the displacement of utopia into history that occurred in the 18th century (cf. Vieria 2010: 9), but instead imagine the utopian space as a secluded forgotten island. In their negotiation of nostalgia – both on the level of content and form – they challenge the standing assumption about the late 19th century as an era defined solely by a preoccupation with progress.2 Howells’s Altrurian Romances perform and promote a socialist perspective and provide a harsh critique of various forms of the socio-economic crisis of the Gilded Age. In so doing, however, and unlike most contemporary literary utopias, they do not invest in imagining a future, or an ideal of universal progress. Instead, they illustrate a denouncement of capitalist industrialization, a disregard for technology, and, as I will argue, a critique of the contemporary belief in the progressive dynamics of history as such. In the second part of this essay, I will turn briefly to more general theoretical considerations about the utopian novel and its relationship with nostalgia. The first concerns the idea of intertextuality, which has been a characteristic feature of the genre tradition of the literary utopia since its formation, and which can be See also Hutcheon (1998) for a more detailed discussion of nostalgia’s relationship with the postmodern. 2

For a classical study on the progressivist character of 19th century culture and politics, see Trachtenberg (2007). The understanding of the late 19th century as an era preoccupied with historical progress has also significantly influenced utopian theory, such as, for example, Foucault’s theorization of heterotopias in his famous lecture “Of Other Spaces” (1986).

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understood as another way in which utopia can be conceived of as nostalgic. Secondly, I will discuss in which ways nostalgic longing, understood as an effort at stasis and preservation, also describes the literary form of the utopian novel. Both these arguments point, again, to the critical stance nostalgic utopias take towards the present, towards history, and towards futures worth preserving.

N OSTALGIC P ROGRESSIVISM : W ILLIAM D EAN H OWELLS ’ S A LTRURIAN R OMANCES (1892-1907) There was a notable upsurge in the production and reception of utopian novels in the United States at the end of the 19th century. About 160 to 190 literary utopias were published between the years 1888 and 1900 alone (cf. Fluck 2001: 567), and most of them imagined a new future (cf. Sargent 1979; Pfaelzer 1984). Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward (1888), set in the year 2000, is, in anthologies, on syllabi, and in literary histories, often claimed to be an exemplary text for the progressive period’s futuristic inclinations. In contrast, the novels at the center of the following analysis, William Dean Howells’s Altrurian Romances, written between the years of 1892 and 1907, exhibit a distinct skepticism towards the era’s allegedly universal belief in technological, social, and political progress. As Stanley Cooperman aptly puts it: “One might say that in Howells’s book the Dynamo is despised, while in Bellamy’s it is worshipped” (1963: 467). The Altrurian Romances exhibit a nostalgic progressivism that is as much concerned with an investment in a better future as it is with an actual commitment to looking backward, with a nostalgic negotiation and representation of an idealized past. The first part of Howells’s Altrurian trilogy, A Traveller from Altruria was first published in installments for The Cosmopolitan from November 1892 through October 1893. The novel’s plot takes place in a New England summer hotel that is described as a “microcosm of the republic” (Howells 1968: 24) by the first-person narrator Twelvemough, a writer of romantic fiction. Twelvemough and the other hotel guests, all of whom are representatives of America’s upper class, receive a strange guest from the secluded island of Altruria, the utopian traveller Aristides Homos, who proceeds to interview them about the sociopolitical situation in the United States. Homos’s rhetorical and highly uncomfortable questions are designed to expose the grievances of American life at the end of the 19th century and enable the satirical and critical effect of the text. A Traveller from Altruria was followed by a sequel, Letters of an Altrurian Traveller, which consists of a series of letters, documenting the utopian traveller’s new life in New York City, where he has moved after his stay at the summer hotel

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has ended. The Letters are critical essays, fictionalized observations of ‘real’ contemporary American life, and, since their dates correspond with the dates of their publication in the Cosmopolitan between the years of 1893 and 1894, they are provided with a contemporaneous urgency and with a journalistic stamp. 3 After a long hiatus, in 1907, Howells issued a third Altrurian novel, Through the Eye of the Needle, which continues Homos’s Letters, and ends with his return to Altruria, narrated, likewise in epistolary form, first from Homos’s own point of view, and then from that of his new American wife Eveleth. In all three parts, Altruria is described as a society that has returned to a preindustrial socio-economic and political order, which is the reverse of what is referred to as America’s plutocracy in the novels. At the end of the first novel, the reader learns that Altruria had once been an industrialized society, plagued with socio-economic crises of inequality comparable to those faced by Americans at the end of the 19th century. Following a clean-slate moment in which the Altrurians destroyed bridges and railroads and removed all signs of industrial life, there occurred an “Evolution” (Howells 1968: 154), a development which included the abolition of money, a reevaluation of the family as the basis for the utopian land’s moral and religious organization, and a return to an agrarian lifestyle and culture. Rather than imagining a better future, the Altrurian Romances are thus a return to a better past, a past that never existed in this idealized form. The process of restoration negotiated in Howells’s trilogy is an expression of nostalgic longing, understood as an attempt at “a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (Boym 2007: 13). At the same time, however, the notion of “Evolution” also evokes an idea of continuing and sustainable progress, which is reinforced by the processual character of another term used for this development throughout the trilogy: “Altrurianization” (Howells 1968: 192). It is an interdependence between progressivism and nostalgia that is at work throughout the three Altrurian fictions, and it manifests itself in three major ways: in their negotiation of Christian socialism, in their representation of arts and aesthetics, and in their celebration of the pastoral. First, nostalgia defines the moral principle of altruism, which forms the basis of Altruria’s social, economic, and moral order. In A Traveller from Altruria, Homos explains the origins of that principle as follows: 3

It is somewhat difficult to classify the Letters into a fiction/non-fiction binary. Howells transformed some of them into non-fictional, critical essays, named “Glimpses of Central Park” and “New York Streets,” both of which were republished, after extensive alterations, in his essay collection Impressions and Experiences in 1896. See the “Introduction” to the Altrurian Romances by Kirk and Kirk for further information about the publication history of the Altrurian fictions (1968: ix-xxiv).

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[A]s to whether there is or ever was really a practical altruism, […] I think it cannot be denied that among the first Christians, those who immediately followed Christ, and might be supposed to be directly influenced by his life, there was an altruism practiced as radical as that which we have organized into a national polity and a working economy in Altruria. (ibid: 93)

The sentiment or ethical perspective of altruism is thus claimed to originate from the early commune of Christ. What is more, the adjective “radical” indicates that the concept relates to the system of socialism – that which organizes both “national polity” and “a working economy” in Altruria – which is likewise claimed to have had its beginning among the “first Christians.” It was a common idea among contemporary religious reformers, especially among so-called Christian Socialists, a subgroup of the Social Gospel Movement to which Howells himself was deeply indebted at the time he wrote the Altrurian Romances (cf. Kirk/Kirk 1959), that the early community formed around Jesus Christ and his disciples bore structural and practical similarities to the political perspectives of communism and socialism (cf. MacKanan 2011: 120). In more general terms, the Social Gospelers argued that the immanence of God could be both seen in and achieved by the solidarity of men and women, an argument which formed the basis for their critique of a Puritan doctrine of individualism: personal salvation was reformulated into a social project. In the Altrurian fictions, these and other core ideas of Christian Socialism are negotiated by a nostalgic return to an ‘unspoiled’ idea of Christianity.4 While many other socialist theories, promoted by leading Marxist thinkers of the time, did not tire to stress the future-orientedness, or, in better known terms, the inevitability of socialism,5 the Christian socialism represented in Howells’s 4

Occasionally called the Third Great Awakening, the Social Gospel movement was primarily directed at societal reform. Particularly the issues of immigration, growing labor unrest, and the increase in urban poverty can be identified as the main objects for several reformist projects within and departing from Protestant denominations. The Social Gospel was not a homogenous movement; subsumed under its header were, for example, academic and reformist moves towards a more “liberal theology,” but also the more radical sub-movement called “Christian Socialism,” which was primarily concerned with opposing the politics of laissez-faire and questioning evolutionary ideologies of competition (Ahlstrom 1972: 789).

5

The most famous contemporary discussion of the European faith in the inevitability of socialism and its relative absence in the United States is still Werner Sombart’s book Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus? (1906). Sombart does not discuss in detail that many 19th century American socialist movements were

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Altrurian fictions is thus defined by a turn towards an idealized, imagined, and narrated past: the “first Christian republic,” in which a commonwealth “of peace and goodwill among us in its likeness” (Howells 1968: 146) was established, as Homos explains in a longer speech towards the end of the first novel. Homos encourages his American listeners to return to this storied past. At the same time, however, the moral basis of altruism can be contextualized not only with nostalgia, but also with contemporary progressivist tendencies: the Social Gospel Movement was first and foremost a progressive reform movement. For example, the Social Gospelers promoted a new image of Jesus as a working carpenter, a “Jesus of Labor” (MacKanan 2011: 199) that was actively instrumentalized in the church’s fight for better working conditions for the urban and rural poor. In their promotion of some of the Social Gospel Movement’s main issues, the Altrurian Romances themselves were received as examples of the thriving genre of the Social Gospel novel by contemporary readers, and thus as agents in the larger issue of social reform.6 Next to a decidedly nostalgic representation of religiosity, the progressivist creed underlying the reformist agenda of the Social Gospel movement clearly also influences the configuration of Howells’s utopian space. Secondly, there is a similar oscillation at work between representations of nostalgia and utopian progressivism in the trilogy’s negotiation of questions of aesthetics and the arts. Next to the fact that the name of the Altrurian, Aristides Homos, is in and of itself an allusion to ancient Greece, 7 the novel is filled with references to classicism: Altruria’s political structure is, at the end of the first novel, claimed to be based on an idealistic reconstruction of antiquity (cf. Howells 1968: 168). In addition to these references to classical political theory, it is especially in discussions about architecture and urban planning that the classicist influences are played out. In one of the Letters, for example, Homos recounts his visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago and praises its centerpiece, the White City, for its ability to unify the arts “for the first time since the great ages, since the beauty of antiquity and the elegance of the renaissance” (ibid: 200). The White City’s ability to consolidate a variety of artistic expressions – reinforced by Homos’s listing of periods of artistic achievement – the great ages, antiquity, the renaissance – is claimed to be based in the architectural dedication to symmetry and proportion (cf. ibid: 216-218). The White City was built according to the decidedly religious in nature, however, a fact which might complicate some of his core assumptions and possibly provide additional answers to the question his essay poses. 6

See Suderman (1966) for a general overview of the genre of the Social Gospel novel, and Jackson (2009) for a more detailed account of 19th century religious reform fiction.

7

Aristides of Athens was a 2nd century Christian Greek writer and Homos might allude both to an idea of humanism or to the notions of equality and sameness.

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architectural principles of classicism (cf. Bieger 2007: 18) and is, throughout Homos’s account, praised not only for its perfect beauty, but also for its relationship with ancient Greece, which, according to Homos’s reading of the space, implies a “preference given […] to the intellectual over the industrial, to art over business” (Howells 1968: 218).8 The last quote already indicates that aesthetics and art have socio-political relevance in the Altrurian Romances. The alienating effects on the arts brought about by industrial capitalism are redeemed by a nostalgic look back to a time of alleged unity of form and content, politics and art, a look back which, however, has a utopian dimension as well: in his next letter, Homos posits the White City as an educative “vision” (ibid: 220), as an ideal for the United States to strive for. It is meant to create an image and an idea of America’s unfulfilled potential and it is, consequently, called “[a] bit of Altruria” (ibid: 220) in the United States. Importantly, the educative ability of “Altrurianization” Homos ascribes to the White City is here achieved not only by aesthetic effects, but, more importantly, by the social and political function this space inhabits. Contrary to New York City, whose “deformity,” untidiness and disorder is repeatedly considered to be an expression of the city’s “essential immorality” (ibid: 236) in Homos’s previous letters, the White City is considered exemplary because of its dedication to aesthetic principles of symmetry and proportion, which, in turn, are viewed as interdependent with social and economic equality (cf. ibid: 218). Truly an Altrurian space, the White City thus functions both as an emblem of progress and as a symbol for nostalgic retreat. Finally, and arguably most overtly, the Altrurian Romances also negotiate issues of nostalgia in their veneration of the pastoral. Throughout the trilogy, the land of Altruria is described as a romantic, pastoral idyll and promises a simple life in a fresh, green, undisturbed landscape. As Hans Ulrich Seeber notes in the introduction to his chapter on A Traveller from Altruria: “One can characterize the history of utopian thinking as a continual conflict between the image of the ideal city state and the image of the beautiful garden” (2003: 102). Even though Homos’s praise of the White City in the second part of the trilogy clearly indicates that the imaginary island Altruria inspires reflections on both the merits and the disadvantages of urban structures and architecture, it is primarily the myth of the Arcadian garden that defines Howells’s utopian space. There are at least two major implications of this turn towards the pastoral. In The Machine in the Garden, Leo 8

In her study Ästhetik der Immersion, Laura Bieger shows that the bourgeois beauty of the White City’s design was inextricably connected to its “educative effect” (2007: 11); it represented a vision of an urban future (ibid: 40) and, in so doing, can also be read as a piece of national propaganda.

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Marx famously claimed that “[t]he pastoral ideal has been used to define the meaning of America ever since the age of discovery” (1964: 3).9 One the one hand, then, Howells’s use of the metaphor of the pastoral emphasizes his endeavors to juxtapose the utopian land Altruria with a nostalgic national-cultural imagination of Americanness. On the other hand, however, the idealized vision of the primitive society promoted throughout the Altrurian fictions is always linked to their reformist agenda: a critical reflection on inequality, and especially on rural poverty, as Jean Pfaelzer also notes (cf. 1984: 57). The evocation of the pastoral is thus not only used to juxtapose an ideal, quiet, and restful rural landscape with the noisy and chaotic institutions of industrial capitalism, but always linked to questions of labor and poverty as well. This connection is made most productive in the third part of the trilogy, in which the reader is finally provided with extended descriptions of the imaginary island. In a scene that takes place towards the end of the novel, Eveleth, Homos’s American wife who narrates the second half of Through the Eye of the Needle (and who therefore inhabits the function of the utopian traveller in the third part of the trilogy) describes to her friend in New York how her mother, who has accompanied her and Homos to Altruria, is getting accustomed to the Altrurian way of life. Eveleth’s mother is contributing to Altruria’s cooperative economy, where “[n]obody works for his living […]; he works for others’ living” (Howells 1968: 53), by doing her daily share of communal work: she is washing dishes when she observes that Altruria reminds her of “the America she used to know” (ibid: 383). It is important that Eveleth’s mother feels compelled to nostalgically reminisce about her own past, growing up in an America prior to industrialization, 9

For a revision of Marx’s seminal study, see Erbacher/Maruo-Schörder/Sedlmeier: Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture (2014). Throughout the trilogy, Howells also makes use of the romantic trope of the pastoral to ironically comment on the literary conventions of the romance, a genre he was famously critical of. Howells’s definition of the realist novel was contingent on an expressed demarcation and often a polemic devaluation of the preceding, but still highly popular literary mode of the romance. In his 1887 essay “Pernicious Fictions”, for example, Howells discusses the potentially “injurious” (1950: 360) effects of literary fiction, particularly the harm that lies in the reading of romantic and sentimentalist novels, which he claims to be “idle lies about human nature and the social fabric” (ibid: 360). The differentiation between romance and realism has not only been crucial for Howells’s definition and promotion of the form of the realist novel, but it was also formative for the emergence and development of the field of American Studies. For an overview of this critical trajectory, see, for example, Pease (1991: 1-2) and Fluck (1997: 8-9).

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while engaging in a menial activity. It relates the theme of the American pastoral to the arena of work and to a socialist conceptualization of labor, which, in Altruria, is not yet (or no longer) removed from its means of production. Altruria’s negotiation of the pastoral thus also has a reformist or progressivist agenda, one that is closely tied to contemporary socialist theories of labor. In these and other scenes, the Altrurian Romances also debate positions about the separation of fine art from craft put forward by representatives of the Arts and Craft Movement. The Altrurian Romances, both in theme and form, exhibit significant similarities to William Morris’s 1890 novel News from Nowhere, a text which is also referenced in the first part of the trilogy and in Howells’s foreword to the third part (cf. ibid: 157; 273). Morris, like John Ruskin and other members of the reform movement, likewise promoted a reconciliation of the pastoral and the utopian in the context of a critical discussion about the effects that the division of labor had on the production and reception of art and literature on society (cf. Shriner 2001: 237-238). As in the discussion of the White City, Howells uses the metaphor of the pastoral to pledge his allegiance to the Arts and Craft Movement, and therefore to reflect on the role of arts and aesthetics in the context of industrial capitalism. The three motives introduced above, the Christian socialist reading of the “first Christian republic,” the references to (neo)classicism, and the politicized understanding of the pastoral, indicate the ways in which the Altrurian Romances conceptualize nostalgia and progressivism as interdependent perspectives. It should be noted that the instances of nostalgic longing presented above cannot always be neatly disentangled from one another and often overlap in an eclectic manner. For example, all three, albeit in different ways, provide a romanticized image of the working man and promote an idea of virtuous poverty. The most crucial way in which these forms of nostalgic utopianism are bound together, however, is their criticism of important founding myths of the United States: the discussion of the first Christian republic is posited as an alternative to the Puritan founding story of the City Upon a Hill, the references to classicism evoke the early national republic’s use of Federal neoclassicist architecture and the educative promises this national style entailed, and the relation of the pastoral to socialist theories of labor complicate origin myths accompanying contemporary theories of American exceptionalism. The connections between the myths that lay the foundation of the island Altruria and the originating narratives that underlie a cultural, literary, and national imagination of Americanness are repeatedly spelled out over the course of the three novels, for example in a longer discussion Homos has with the hotel guests about the text that serves as a basis for both countries, the Declaration of

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Independence (cf. Howells 1968: 13). Continuously, the Altrurian Romances therefore emphasize the co-presence of an older and a newer American order and mediate the passage between those two: “America prophesies another Altruria” (ibid: 164), as Homos closes a speech at the end of first novel. The imaginary island Altruria is the utopian future in so far as it is posited as America’s full potential as yet unachieved. At the same time, that which defines Altruria is an idealized past: “Nostalgia, like any form of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative” (Stewart 1992: 23). This means, ultimately, that the Altrurian Romances look to an invented past in order to imagine a second American revolution, an alternative future for America.

C ONCLUDING T HOUGHTS In conclusion, I want to consider the idea of nostalgic utopias in more general terms and relate these theoretical observations to my reading of the nostalgic progressivism performed in Howells’s Altrurian Romances. From Thomas More’s founding text Utopia (1516) onward, utopists have taken recourse to ‘old news,’ to pre-existing literary, political, and philosophical traditions in their imagining of perfect social and moral orders. In a discussion on the lasting influence, both in terms of form and content, of Plato’s moral and political dialogues on utopian literature, Frank E. Manuel and Fritzie P. Manuel convincingly claim that “utopian fantasies are […] dependent on an eternal dialogue with forerunners” (1979: 110). This is also true for the founding text of the genre of the utopian novel itself: Fredric Jameson reads Thomas More’s Utopia as a “synthesis” (2005: 25) of four “raw materials,” that is, of four central political or social issues or influences, namely “Greece, the medieval, the Incas, Protestantism” (ibid: 24). Jameson’s reading emphasizes that even the founder of the utopian tradition was looking backward to past myths and narratives for inspiration. Utopias thus always refer to utopias that preceded them. In a critical essay on the oft-declared end of utopia in socialist political theory, Judith Shklar argues that the classical utopia can therefore be described as nostalgic. 10 Ultimately, she explains, utopias are always indebted to “an anguished 10 The ‘end of Utopia’ has been proclaimed analogously with the ‘end of history’ in the by now almost formulaic saying that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (Jameson 2003: 76). The diagnosis attests that a viable alternative to the capitalist order, i.e., a socialist utopia has become unimaginable, even in fiction, over the course of the 20th century.

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recollection of antiquity, of the polis and of the Roman Republic of virtuous memory” (Shklar 1965: 371). There is, actually, little “future-directed hope” in utopias (ibid: 372-373), but their critical potential lies exactly in their nostalgic return to classicism. Shklar also claims, however, that this recurrence to the ancient republic and “[t]he ideal of its unity, of its homogenous order” (ibid: 375) disappeared in the late 19th century. The transformation of the classical (and nostalgic) utopia into “future-directed activism” (ibid: 376) that Shklar ascribes to the 19th century progressivist utopia can be traced back to a shift in socialist and Marxist conceptualizations of history, by new demands on the representation and reflection of social reality brought forward by science and democracy, both of which are progressive in nature (cf. ibid: 373). Listing Bellamy’s Looking Backward as an example, Shklar calls the 19th century utopian novel’s literary representation of the future a “vulgarization” (ibid: 375) of the classic utopian form. Aside from the fact that this harsh judgment on popular 19th century utopianism betrays a fair amount of nostalgia on Shklar’s own part, her argument about an inherent nostalgic element in utopian and political thought is, of course, well taken. But is it true for the Altrurian Romances, which, as has been established above, are clearly skeptical of a socialist-progressive conceptualization of history? That they uphold the restorative quality of nostalgia can, not least, be seen in their intertextual references to past utopian novels and theory, which are made a point of reflection throughout the trilogy. At the end of A Traveller from Altruria, for example, one of Homos’s listeners expresses skepticism about the utopian traveller’s authenticity and voices his disbelief about the actual existence of Altruria by asking: “Isn’t this the greatest rehash of Utopia, New Atlantis, and City of the Sun, that you ever imagined?” (Howells 1968: 164) In this and other ironic concessions to their intertextual relationship with the literary tradition of the utopian novel, Howells’s Altrurian Romances reflect on nostalgia as a defining feature of the genre. The argument reiterated throughout this essay, namely that utopias can be considered nostalgic because they perform a critique of the contemporary belief in the progressive dynamics of history as such, also concerns the ways in which time and history are dealt with on the level of narrative. Generally, utopian novels have an ambiguous relationship with novelistic form: in their dialogical form, they are closely related to other genres, such as satire, allegory, the political manifesto, political theory, or even to textbooks of socialist or communist propaganda. Utopian novels are not primarily designed to tell a story. Plot is a vehicle and only takes place at the very margins of the text; the core of the utopian novel is

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description – an enumeration, a map, or a “guided tour” (Jameson 2005: 213) – of the institutions, the features of daily life of Utopia. Jameson, in line with this thought, characterizes the utopian novel as one that is not interested in “diachronic narrative,” but rather in representing a “synchronic system” (ibid: 92). A utopian novel aims at fanning out various facets of the new society – customs, morals, institutions – but nothing really happens: time stands still in Utopia. Stasis is thus a defining feature of the form of the utopian novel, and not only on the level of narrative. A utopia, considered as a final or definitive social ideal, is a work that posits the end of history. The notion of the utopian space as a safe haven against the contingencies of historical progress has already been observed by Ernst Bloch: “Keine frischen Fragen, keine anderen Länder erscheinen weiter am Rand, die Insel ist, obwohl selber zukünftig, gegen Zukunft weitgehend abgedichtet”11 (1986: 14-15). It is not possible to imagine progress or evolution from a utopian stance. Northrop Frye sums this point up concisely: “Considered as a final or definitive social ideal, the utopia is a static society” (1965: 31). Jameson mentions the “fundamental contradiction between the timeless placidity of the achieved Utopias and the enormity of the social ills and evils that lends the Utopian solution its urgency and its passion” (2005: 188), and he also points out that utopias are characterized by an “opposition between temporalities” (ibid: 213). Bloch, Jameson, and Frye conceive of utopias from vastly different theoretical and political standpoints, of course, and yet they seem to agree on this crucial point: utopias are at once exhibiting an extreme idea of progress, while they, at the same time, have no conceptual or logical room for progress once they have been achieved. A resistance to progress is, of course, also that which defines the narrative called ‘nostalgia.’ Boym states that nostalgia is a “rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (2007: 8); Stewart concurs by arguing that nostalgia is “[h]ostile to history” (1992: 23). Both nostalgia and utopia, then, are invested in ideas of standstill, of holding fixed in place something that is volatile and fleeting. In other words: both utopia and nostalgia are concepts that describe efforts at preserving order, or of fixing history. The genre of the nostalgic utopia, as conceptualized in this essay, finally, formally encompasses the interdependent relationship between nostalgic preservation and the cultural imaginations of a sustainable future. Howells’s Altrurian Romances perform this type of stasis both on the level of content and of form. The largest parts of the trilogy consist of letters or of dialogue, 11 The translation reads: “No fresh questions, no other countries appear in the margin any longer, the island, although set in the future itself, is largely sealed up against the future.”

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and even in the second part of Through the Eye of the Needle, where the reader is finally allowed a glimpse of Altruria, it is not the plot that matters. As with most utopias, it is not always easy to place the Altrurian fictions firmly within a fiction/non-fiction binary. In fact, they were received as sociological studies by Howells’s readership; they were not read primarily for their literary value, but for their “social function” (Henderson 1894: 47). Not despite of, but because of their negotiation of nostalgia, finally, the Altrurian Romances were able to provide a very timely diagnosis of their contemporary moment – and also about how this contemporary moment thinks about time. May it be in the form of their ChristianSocialist reformulations of Protestant doctrine, in their presentation of new and more sustainable ideas about urban planning, or in their socialist critique of art and labor in the context of the Arts and Craft movement: the Altrurian Romances themselves were understood as agents in – or at least as documents of – a general spirit of reform by their readers. The Altrurian fictions are thus a testament to the critical potential of utopias that are nostalgic.

R EFERENCES Ahlstrom, Sydney E. (1972): A Religious History of the American People, New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bieger, Laura (2007): Ästhetik Der Immersion: Raum-Erleben Zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City, Bielefeld: transcript. Bloch, Ernst (1986): Freiheit und Ordnung: Abriß der Sozialutopien, Berlin: Suhrkamp. Boym, Svetlana (2007): “Nostalgia and Its Discontents.” In: The Hedgehog Review 9/2, pp. 7-18. Cooperman, Stanley (1963): “Utopian Realism: The Futurist Novels of Bellamy and Howells.” In: College English 24/6, pp. 464-467. 
 Erbacher, Eric/Maruo-Schröder, Nicole/Sedlmeier, Florian (2014): Rereading the Machine in the Garden: Nature and Technology in American Culture, Frankfurt and New York: Campus. Fluck, Winfried (1997): Das kulturelle Imaginäre: Eine Funktionsgeschichte des amerikanischen Romans 1790-1900, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Fluck, Winfried (2001): “Realism in Art and Literature.” In: Mary Kupiec Cayton/Peter W. Williams (eds.), Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, New York: Charles Scriber’s Sons, pp. 565-572. Foucault, Michel (1986): “Of Other Spaces.” In: Diacritics 16/1, pp. 22-27.

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Frye, Northrop (1965): “Varieties of Literary Utopias.” In: Daedalus 94/2, pp. 323-347. Henderson, C. R. (1894): “Recent Studies in Sociology.” In: The Charities Review 4/1, pp. 46-52. Howells, William Dean (1909 [1896]): Impressions and Experiences, New York: Harper and Brothers. Howells, William Dean (1950 [1887]): “Pernicious Fiction.” In: Clara Kirk/Rudolf Kirk (eds.), William Dean Howells: Representative Selections, with Introduction, Bibliography, and Notes, New York: American Book Company, pp. 359-363. Howells, William Dean (1968 [1892-1907]): The Altrurian Romances, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hutcheon, Linda (1998): “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern”, January 19, 1998 (http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html). Jackson, Gregory S. (2009): The Word and Its Witness: The Spiritualization of American Realism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric (2003): “Future City.” In: New Left Review 21, pp. 65-79. Jameson, Fredric (2005): Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London and New York: Verso. Kirk, Clara/Kirk, Rudolf (1959): “Howells and the Church of the Carpenter.” In: The New England Quarterly 32/2, pp. 185–206. Kirk, Clara/Kirk, Rudolf (1968): “Introduction.” In: Clara Kirk/Rudolf Kirk (eds.), The Altrurian Romances, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. ix-xxiv. MacKanan, Dan (2011): Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition, Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Manuel, Frank E./Manuel, Fritzie P. (1979): Utopian Thought in the Western World, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Marx, Leo (1964): The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford University Press. Morris, William (2004 [1890]): News from Nowhere and Other Writings, London: Penguin. Pease, Donald E. (1991): “Introduction.” In: Donald E. Pease (ed.), New Essays on The Rise of Silas Lapham, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1– 28. Pfaelzer, Jean (1984): The Utopian Novel in America 1886-1896, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Sargent, Lyman Tower (1979): British and American Utopian Literature, 15161975: An Annotated Bibliography, Boston: G.K. Hall.


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Seeber, Hans Ulrich (2003): Die Selbstkritik der Utopie in der angloamerikanischen Literatur, Münster: Lit Verlag. Shklar, Judith (1965): “The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia.” In: Daedalus 94/2, pp. 367-381. Shriner, Larry (2001): The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Sielke, Sabine (2017): “Nostalgie – ‘die Theorie’: eine Einleitung.” In: Sabine Sielke (ed.), Nostalgie / Nostalgia: Imaginierte Zeit-Räume in globalen Medienkulturen / Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 1-33. Sombart, Werner (1906): Warum gibt es in den Vereinigten Staaten keinen Sozialismus?, Tübingen: Mohr. Stewart, Susan (1992): On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press. Suderman, Elmer F. (1966): “The Social Gospel Novelists’ Criticism of American Society.” In: Midcontinent American Studies Journal 7, pp. 45-60. Trachtenberg, Alan (2007 [1982]): The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, New York: Hill and Wang. Vieria, Fátima (2010): “The Concept of Utopia.” In: Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3-27.

Cultural Ecosystems and the Paradoxes of American Environmentalism I OANNA K IPOUROU

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The Yellowstone National Park is the oldest one in the U.S. and one of the most well-known ecotourism destinations around the world.1 Since its foundation, the Yellowstone National Park has survived the human footprint tightening around its borders through modern practices of industrialization, extraction of natural resources, and maldistribution of profits. As Yellowstone was initially created with no legal framework regulating or protecting its wildlife, this legislative fluidity allowed for hunters, tourists, or collectors to act of their own volition for the purposes of financial profit or entertainment or under the pretense of fear apparently veiling the ever-encroaching human footprint. This changed when the park was designated as a UNESCO biosphere in 1976 and as a World Heritage Site in 1978, and today, it has developed into one of the most iconic natural parks inviting millions of visitors per year as it paradoxically offers an escape from urbanness and “provides a place where people can glimpse primitive America” (National Park Service 2018a). As the birthplace of the U.S. National Park System, Yellowstone symbolizes both the transcendentalist awe of nature as well as the industrialist enterprise to conquer wilderness. David Quammen insightfully explains the inherently contradictory institution of national parks using Yellowstone as a symbolic paradigm: “This is the paradox of Yellowstone, and of most other national parks 1

The 8,991 km² park, sprawling across the states of Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho, was created by an act of Congress and then signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.

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we have added since: wilderness contained, nature under management, wild animals obliged to abide by human rules. It’s the paradox of the cultivated wild” (Quammen 2016: n.p.). In other words, Yellowstone embodies the paradoxes of American environmentalism both as a physical and as an ideological space constructed to regulate nature within a man-made framework. On the one hand, the institution of national parks was conceived within the legal framework of the federal government’s claim to preserve and protect nature. On the other hand, the authority that the government decided to claim for itself was based on dedicating allegedly unclaimed land to the service of nature itself. The national park system cannot therefore be merely considered as a public-spirited institution since it paradoxically serves governmental interests as well as regulates capitalist practices. As an institution, it represents the hegemonic ideology and governmental control regarding owning and cultivating land, mining, ranching, fishing, hunting, and so on, and therefore, regulates human access to nature and manages the presence of wildlife. Certainly, the establishment of the national parks system as an institution acknowledged the value of wildlife and wildland, and responded to the modern concern for ecological consciousness at the beginning of the 19th century. The very foundation of the Yellowstone National Park as the first national park in the U.S. and the world signaled a new era for American environmentalism that focused on re-examining the interaction between humans and nature. Redefining the dynamics of humans and nature revealed the necessity to reconsider the modern role of society as a cultural ecosystem. Following the doctrine of “cultural ecology” (Steward 2006: 5-9) as a theoretical framework that explores similarities and differences occurring in culture through its relation to the environment, the redefinition of society as a cultural ecosystem refers to its innate ability to adapt and thus, evolve as a super-organic entity (cf. Kroeber 1917). As an organism, society makes use of certain mechanisms that enable its adaptation and subsequent evolution of its ecosystem. Such an interaction between nature and culture that triggered a survival mechanism for society was the modernization process at the beginning of the 19th century. Modernization brought about unavoidable challenges and demanded an organic adaptation that would allow for a symbiosis between the human desire for capitalism as well as the nostalgic longing for a preindustrial, bucolic past – a paradoxical effect of modernization on the cultural ecosystem of society. The institutionalization of the national parks system was therefore an effort to negotiate the national imagination and its connection to the land as a physical space representing the country’s history and people being in tune with nature while simultaneously forming a control mechanism regulating capitalism enterprise and redefining hegemonic boundaries.

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Despite the initiative to ecologically and legally preserve the area by labeling it as the first national park, the human factor irreversibly altered the food chain and therefore the organic sustainability of its ecosystem. For decades, human intervention has disrupted the Yellowstone wildlife habitat irreversibly and, as a result, by 1926 wolves had become extirpated and their absence as predators in the park had a dramatic impact on the sustainability of its ecosystem; from 1926 until 1995, the ecological impact of the wolves’ absence was tremendous for the park (cf. Robbins 1997). The extirpation of wolves led to the uncontrollable growth of the elk and coyote populations as well as the disappearance of a number of vegetation species and the erosion and sedimentation of the park’s land that also happens to include a super-volcanic hotspot (cf. ibid). After many efforts to make amends, in 1973 the Endangered Species Act authorized species preservation efforts and offered a framework for wildlife management listing a number of endangered species, including the gray wolf.2 After more than seventy years of gray wolves’ absence in the Yellowstone park and scientists’ strenuous efforts to convince the public and the officials that wolves were falsely demonized as merely vicious predators while their contribution to the ecosystem’s health would be highly significant, the reintroduction of the gray wolf was finally allowed. In an attempt to restore the park’s food-chain balance by adding the predator back to the park’s biodiversity in 1995, a small number of gray wolves was reintroduced in the Yellowstone National Park as a means of experimental efforts to balance the park’s ecosystem (cf. National Park Service 2018b). Indeed, after studying in detail the existence of gray wolves in the park, scientists recorded that their reintroduction gradually triggered a so-called trophic cascade, an ecological process starting from the top of the food chain and affecting all the organisms linked up to the bottom of the chain, a surprising development that helped sustain the health and function of the park’s ecosystem (cf. Yellowstone National Park 2011). As scientists and environmental activists had hoped, the existence of this small pack of wolves not only altered the biodiversity of the park’s ecosystem but also its geographical morphology; not only did a number of animal and plant species reappear in the park but also its landscape, habitat conditions, and even the local economies surrounding the area were drastically altered; a paradoxical effect on both humans and nature triggered by the modernization process and made evident after more than a century since the foundation of Yellowstone (cf. Yellowstone National Park 2011). The Yellowstone paradigm of ecological thinking described above is representative of the emergence of ecocriticism as a movement during the 1990s. 2

Cf. United States (1983): The Endangered Species Act as Amended by Public Law 97304 (The Endangered Species Act Amendments of 1982), Washington: U.S. G.P.O.

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Ecocriticism, in the form of both individual as well as group initiatives, introduced human attitude as a decisive cultural factor for the pursuit of sustainability given contemporary challenges like sustainable development, food safety, extreme urbanization, and cultural heritage preservation (cf. Buell 1999: 699). Researchers, scientists, and activists started becoming more visible as they addressed the interconnections between humans and nature as essential to sustainability. Hubert Zapf explains the role of ecocriticism “and its rise as the cultural problem of the 21st century” with “the emergence of an ecocentric thought as the humanities’ response to the ever changing economic and technologically expanding civilization that causes global environmental crises” (2016: 39). It seems then only reasonable to organically connect culture and sustainability as these two notions have been long intertwined as powerful concepts contributing to the foundation and development of mainstream political narratives and national discourses on the environment.3 Soini and Birkeland, for instance, underscore the role of culture and sustainability, or cultural sustainability, from a rather holistic perspective. By applying cultural sustainability as an interconnecting concept within political and ideological discourses, it is made evident that it is an essentially modern concept that re-defines and re-contextualizes a number of storylines including “heritage, vitality, economic viability, diversity, locality, ecocultural resilience, and eco-cultural civilization” (Soini/Birkeland 2014: 213) – all central themes when it comes to discussing ecological concerns and the human factor. Within the context of American storylines, it is important to note that the very notion of Americanness and the New World was founded upon the concepts of Puritanism and the colonial quest, breaking away from the restrictions of the Old World and exploring new horizons of imperialism. In fact, the rhetoric of Puritanism as a natural religion was based upon the premise that the westward colonial journey was a quest for “order and harmony in the universe” away from the limitations and decadence of the Old World (White 2009: 158). By promoting this notion of self-determination as an ideological means of cultural sustainability, the United States of America was founded as a nation on supposedly vacant land in this New World. By assigning nature a political function with a religious purpose, a modern redefinition of the Garden of Eden and its chosen people made up the center of capitalism across the pond. The exploration of the American continent and the imperialist conquest of this terra nullius was therefore a materialized pursuit of economic, political, social, and cultural development, a project of sustainable living following the rules of capitalism. 3

For more specific information regarding the interconnections between culture, sustainability, and politics, see UNESCO World Report (2009).

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Defining sustainability within this context, then, intrinsically includes notions of nature, land, civilization, society, community, and ways of living ⎯all modified to serve the purposes of human activity and sustain human culture in line with the modernization of human societies. As a concept, sustainability in the New World served both the ideological and materialistic purposes of the colonial enterprise, a means of achieving self-determination, redefining human values, and exploring new connections between nature and the human factor within the framework of rising capitalism. However, as environmental and economic interests can only be contradictory, there is a need to find common ground and re-evaluate the values of human society (cf. Appleton 2006: 3). By defining sustainability as a postcapitalist concept, it not only refers to a need for human society to be in tune with nature but it also generates green ethics, environmentalist ideologies, and ecopolitics within a culture of green politics (cf. Barry 2014: 16). Ecopolitics or “green political thinking,” as Barry explains, is therefore a way of living by advocating for both public spaces and private rights to have many applications; from “the ‘romantic’ and negative reactions to the Industrial Revolution, from working class and peasant resistance to capitalism, mechanization and the factory production system, the enclosure of the commons, and the despoliation of the countryside” to “a negative reaction to ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a related concern with global ecological injustice” as well as “the integration of progressive social, political and economic policies with the politics of transition to a sustainable society” (ibid: 2). As an environmentalist ideology with socio-political applications, then, green politics articulates environmental ethics not just by promoting ways to protect the wilderness and prevent climate change but also by having an anthropocentric focus in terms of politicizing sustainability as a way of modern living. Following the above-mentioned applications of cultural sustainability and ecopolitics, this article has a twofold goal: to re-evaluate the foundational ideological framework of American environmentalism during the 19th century through the writings of Thoreau and Melville as an act of resistance towards the hegemonic practices of colonial capitalism, and to unravel the ideological and materialistic aspects of cultural nationalism in the re-formation of the U.S. society today. This article also examines how balancing between individual environmental and socio-economic interests affect literary production, and how the discourse of green politics or ecopolitics is reflected in literature. By reading literary depictions of sustainability as a way of living and by analyzing the implications of political decisions on the relationship between society and nature, it is made evident that the existing hegemonic practices of systematizing nature and humans in order to achieve sustainable societies serves the modernization

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process of capitalism, and affect the relationship between humans and nature irrevocably.

S USTAINABILITY M ADE IN AMERICAN L ITERATURE : H ENRY D AVID T HOREAU AND H ERMAN M ELVILLE Within the context of American literature and culture, sustainability has always played a diachronically significant role as a survival mechanism amidst the wilderness of the New World. The exploration of the American continent itself indicates the interconnection between culture and sustainability as integral parts of the colonial enterprise as well as of the American literary tradition; starting with Cristopher Columbus’s voyage journal of 1492 to John Winthrop’s “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630), to Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), to John F. Kennedy’s declaration in his acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1960 stating: Today some would say that those struggles are all over – that all the horizons have been explored – that all the battles have been won – that there is no longer an American frontier. […] and we stand today on the edge of a New Frontier – the frontier of the 1960s – a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils – a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom promised our nation a new political and economic framework. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal promised security and succor to those in need. But the New Frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises – it is a set of challenges. (Kennedy 1960)

As an integral part of the U.S. society – evident in President Kennedy’s reference to the ongoing challenges – the socio-political aspects of sustainability are primarily evident in American nature writing. Turner’s frontier thesis focused on the interconnections between geographical, social, political, economic as well as cultural aspects of the colonial enterprise and regarded the frontier as a challenge for building a modern and sustainable nation (cf. Turner 1894: 5). Within this framework, Going West remains an all-American theme in nature writing as it has developed into a cultural medium and a testament to a nation-in-the-making; from narrating the colonial quest, to the nature/wilderness versus culture endeavor, to the civilizing process of the indigenous savage, to the geopolitical importance of an endemic nation and its global role in contemporary times of new frontiers.

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Despite nature’s thematic importance for the cultural establishment of the New World, environmentalism as a social movement and an activist ideology was established much later. Since its foundation in the late 19th century, American environmentalism has advocated for a sustainable management of natural resources along with public policies and individual choices to fundamentally alter the new frontiers of modernization (such as the concept of the U.S. National Park System). Modernization brought about radical changes that required redefining the New World: the abolition of slavery and the decline of the Southern plantation economy, the influx of European immigrants, and the Westward expansion to name a few. This zeitgeist was articulated by Thoreau whose experiment to lead his life with simplicity resulted in a philosophy of alternative economics, as he recorded his challenging experience in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Walden is a literary work reflecting on the human struggle for self-reliance as well as a sort of manual on simple living. Thoreau’s intention can be seen as a social experiment on sustainable ways of living in the U.S.: on the one hand, testing the structures of society itself outside the limitations of modernization, and on the other, rediscovering human nature in relation to nature itself, as he explains: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, […] I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Thoreau 1854: 98-99)

As this well-known excerpt shows, Thoreau recorded his concerns about the modernization of life and the illusion of progress generating materialism and trivializing the U.S. values of self-reliance to instead reimagine the structures of human civilization through establishing a New World all over, a sort of New Eden, free from the restrictions of the parochial Old World. His outward movement and his choice of self-isolation was an act of self-reliance and of resistance towards the constraints of civilized American life as well as a quest for a simple life in compliance with nature – an act of civil disobedience. His writings on technology, food, working hours, clothing, shelter, comforts, luxuries and tools, all present an alternative value-system for a more efficient, sustainable way of life in accordance with nature.

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As a New Adam in the New World, Thoreau’s physical engagement with nature and his agricultural venture led him to believe that “[t]he earth […] has a certain magnetism in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us” (1854: 176). Having thus found an environmental meaning of life, Thoreau ended his hermitic retreat and self-imposed austerity after spending two years, two months, and two days in a cabin near Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts. His withdrawal from society was not only an attempt to record a lived pastoral experience (cf. Sweet 2002: 2) but to also contemplate social constructions and ways of creating a world economically viable and sociopolitically equitable with modernized concepts of identity, nation, citizenship and sovereignty. Thoreau was deeply concerned with the human role in modern society and its limitations of freedom and self-determination. In “Life without Principle,” Thoreau invites his readers to contemplate the new reality that modernization has brought about and its consequences on their daily lives as well as on the relationship between citizen and state: Let us consider the way in which we spend our lives. This world is a place of business. What an infinite bustle! I am awaked almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath. It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work. (1863: n.p.; emphasis mine)

Thoreau’s critique here focuses on the discrepancies of equality, justice, and ethics as he highlights the monetized triviality of human communication exchange that had transformed humans into machines. During this era, the U.S. was undergoing the process of modernization and urbanization caused by the Industrial Revolution. The rapid growth of population and mass industry production, the advent of new technologies (such as the telegraph and the railroad), the automatization of agriculture, a new social stratification, the new market-oriented ethics, all of these components were signaling the dehumanization of American values and the socio-political shift of focus on profit as motivation (cf. Mariotti 2009: 409). Thoreau’s almost anarchistic response to these new cultural practices of American ideology was a strike against “the very core principles of democracy” – both as perceived and practiced at that time – that proposed an alternative cultural ecosystem free from socio-political restrictions and monetary policies; consequently, a simple sustainable life would allow for humans to reconnect and live within the limits of nature (cf. Leigh 2009: 76). Thoreau simultaneously

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expressed his nostalgia for the nation’s glorious past and vehemently opposed slavery and territorial expansion (cf. Thoreau 1863: n.p.), as well as technological developments, business enterprises, and everything that supposedly makes America great – a recurring, all too familiar motif diachronically haunting the U.S. national imagination. As a transcendentalist, Thoreau’s environmental responsibility resorts to naturalist practices with the desire to restore past values, reminiscing about the good old times when his sleep patterns were not interrupted by the annoying sound of the trail horns signaling the locomotive clearing the crossings ahead. However, his recollections make no reference to the colonization and settlement period as, in fact, the U.S. had not abandoned its foundational belief of Manifest Destiny during the 19th century. Despite his moral objection to the predatory socio-politics of the time, Thoreau expresses a paradoxical response to these changing times for American democracy: his yearning for a simple American life and his suggestion for a sustainable lifestyle away from the hustle and bustle of the urban metropolis can only be practiced as an act of civil disobedience against the state’s growing control over personal choice and freedom.4 The paradox of Thoreau’s ideology is the very fact that he has a choice to withdraw from society and to become part of nature; he can make a choice to control his way of living yet the farmers facing the industrialization of agricultural production, for instance, do not have a similar option. As a philosopher, Thoreau has the privilege to bemoan the practices of land expropriation and exploitation of natural resources by the government, but the farmers struggling against the modernizing practices of agriculture have to come up with pragmatic solutions for their survival. After all, Thoreau chose to return to civilization proving the inescapable reality of modernization despite his rebellious writings and anti-hegemonic ideology. Although Thoreau articulates the issue of the power of personal freedom against the hegemonic encroaching on the rights of the individual, it is a fact that modernity took place as a precondition for humanity’s ongoing progress. Indeed, the modernization of U.S. society and its values might have had a severely negative impact on nature and morals, but it revolutionized all its structures, stirred up changes in the nation’s social stratification, marketplace, and put the U.S. on the map as a nation with global leadership potential. During this so-called American century, American literature flourished just as the national expansion 4

It is important to note that Thoreau’s initial inspiration for his civil disobedience was his opposition to the socio-economic system of slavery in America, as well as to the imperialistic war of the U.S. against Mexico (1846-48), which followed the annexation of the Republic of Texas that resulted in the U.S. establishing its sovereignty and its territorial expansion changing the continental power dynamics (cf. Thoreau 1863: n.p.).

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enterprise reached its peak before the Civil War (1861-65) (cf. White 1996). And while Thoreau may romanticize America’s past, Herman Melville – another canonical writer − presents a sarcastically hypercritical perspective compared to Thoreau’s utopian experimental ideas in particular, and American environmentalist ideology in general. Melville has been characterized as a major contributor to U.S. literary production. First published in 1851, Melville’s MobyDick was published just three years before Thoreau’s Walden, and labeled a classic masterpiece of American literature. Yet Melville’s fiction did not attain immediate success; the posthumous evaluation of his literary oeuvre has resulted in discovering features of a literary genius and a chameleonic mastermind as his social commentary expresses a progressive skepticism towards institutionalized ideologies, artistic and cultural trends as well as the intellectual and socio-political American way of life. Moby-Dick can be approached as a text that employs such mechanisms as an exaggeration of the realism of frontier adventure accounts to reveal the contradictions of the modernization era in the U.S.; the romantic setting of the novel contrasts its naturalist plot with characters like Ishmael, the down-to-earth happy-go-lucky narrator, with the whaling voyage, and with the ship’s crew as general microcosm of U.S. society. 5 Melville sets his novel during the 1850s – when Manifest Destiny and westward expansion controlled the U.S. national narrative – yet so far away from the Western frontier to mock this American myth and its edenic horizon with its obsession of taming wilderness in the New World. Melville debunks the Puritan ideology of Americanness to go West and instead drives away his ship towards the East. The difference between Melville’s sarcastic response to the nation’s colonial expansionism and Thoreau’s idealism becomes clear when reading Thoreau’s letter to Harrison Blake in February 1853 explaining his indignation and disapproval of the westward expansion enterprise: The whole enterprise of this nation, which is not an upward, but a westward one, toward Oregon, California, Japan, etc., is totally devoid of interest to me, whether performed on foot, or by a Pacific railroad. It is not illustrated by a thought; it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it which one should lay down his life for, nor even his gloves, – hardly which one should take up a newspaper for. It is perfectly heathenish, – a

5

Captain Ahab as the white male egomaniac hunting after Moby Dick, Starbuck the Quaker harpooner, Queequeg the mixed-race cannibal harpooner, Daggoo the African harpooner, Fedallah the oriental mate, Tashtego the Native American harpooner, Pip the African American cook, Captain de Deer the German, Captain Boomer the English – just to name a few.

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filibustering toward heaven by the great western route. No; they may go their way to their manifest destiny, which I trust is not mine. (Thoreau 1895: 251)

While evidently Thoreau seems to disregard the illusion of the westward movement in a statically resistant manner, Melville twists the narrative, and in a rather cynical way unravels the challenges and the new frontiers that U.S. society is faced with. All in all, Moby-Dick is a novel that celebrates an all-American theme through the character of Ishmael as the downtrodden, the pariah, the orphan and sub-sub librarian, the sailor, and only survivor who lives to tell a grand story of nature vs. culture and capitalism. Yet this common adventure of a common man functions as a cautionary tale that signifies the country’s unavoidable future in the modernization era: the rampant practices of whaling and the hubristic exploitation of the environment can only lead to tragedy, as Melville’s narrative foreshadows. Thoreau, however, has a more idealistic perspective that focuses on his individual response to capitalism, advocating for a nostalgically remembered past without celebrating the common man and coming to terms with a post-capitalist reality: in stark contrast, Ishmael is the only common man who survives the capitalist enterprise of whale-hunting, and as a reborn modern American Adam he has to face the challenges of the hegemonic system by conveying the didactic value of his experience through his narrative. For this reason, the importance of reading Melville’s text as means of sociopolitical critique towards American environmentalism can only be understood when contextualized with the mid-19th century developments in science and technology and the rapid industrialization normalizing a voracious appetite for wealth and power in the New World. Unlike Thoreau’s romanticized allusion to the nation’s nostalgically-remembered noble past, Melville’s critical stance towards the advent of a new era focuses on the dangers of committing hubris; his writings caustically support the anti-hero as a survivor of complex sociopolitical, economic, and environmental networks. In addition, Melville’s criticism oscillates between a nostalgic longing for the pastoral idealism of the past and an enthusiasm for exploring new horizons by reinventing the American self. Leo Marx summarizes this same feeling that Melville expresses in his novel: [C]an men hope to find a green field, a place or condition in which they are not in danger of being nailed to workbenches or cooked in fleshpots? Is it possible to mediate the claims of our collective, institutional life and the claims of nature? Here greenness is a token of earthly felicity akin to the pastoral hope. But its meaning cannot be understood apart from the rest of the Melvillean world. By the time he begins work on “The Whale,” Melville has delineated a symbolic setting adequate to the complexity and clarity of his thought. It is

188 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING divided, provisionally at least, into three realms: (1) a ship, mobile replica of a technically advanced, complex society; (2) an idyllic domain, a lovely green land that figures a simple, harmonious accommodation to the conditions of nature, and (3) a hideous, menacing wilderness, habitat of cannibals and sharks located beyond (or hidden beneath the surface of) the bland green pastures. To answer his question (“Are the green fields gone?”) Ishmael must reconcile the apparent contradiction between these two states of nature. Like Shakespeare's American fable, Moby-Dick is an exploration of the nature of nature. (Marx 2000 [1964]: 285-286; emphasis mine)

As Marx explains, Moby-Dick explores ontological and existential questions as well as issues of spiritual belief, artistic experimentation, and political ideologies, all pertaining to the paradoxes of American environmentalism beyond the simple longing for a long gone past. Melville celebrates passive individual resistance and turns the tragedy of the Pequod into a comedy, thereby revealing the irony underlying the hubris of the catastrophic endeavor to tame nature on a capitalist whim: If Captain Ahab, for instance, embodies the fierce manifest determination of the imperial male American, Melville's famous work about this sea-captain sinks the man, and his entire enterprise, in a whirlpool of self-destruction. It is the lowest paid man, Ishmael, the quintessential sub-sub, who is the lone survivor of the disaster, and he is hardly a role model for machismo, American or otherwise. (Mushabac 2009: n.p.)

Therefore, the radical thinking in Melvilles’s novel was widely misunderstood and overlooked as he narrated mundane stories transpiring in places that had not yet been imagined as a new territory of the United States’ capitalist endeavor. It is remarkable that within just two decades before Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) articulates the desire of the “imperial make American” (ibid) anew, as a diametrically different one than that in Twain’s literary works; the desire to go West and light out for the territory ahead of the rest that Huck expresses at the end of the novel has been geopolitically and economically repositioned far away from the picturesque West and the frontier tradition in Ishmael’s story. Unlike Twain’s regional sense of humor and local color tradition, Melville’s Moby-Dick includes many diverse ways of celebrating Americanness in a pre-modern manner that foreshadows the capitalist power of the United States to overcome new frontiers beyond the Western horizon. In chapters 24 The Advocate and 25 Postscript, for example, Ishmael deconstructs the idea of whaling “as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit”

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and regards this American capitalist business as a deed of high purpose and national excellence, as a cultural tradition (and not a colonial one as in Europe), as a grand American theme connected to Benjamin Franklin’s antecedents, and as a service of high importance even for “ye loyal Britons!” who need sperm oil for their “coronation stuff:” “[H]ow comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world […] our heroic Nantucketers” (Melville 2009 [1851]: 119-123). This concept of American exceptionalism Melville celebrates in his novel emphasizes the role of the working-class in making Americanness, as without it the capitalist ecosystem would collapse together with the catastrophic exploitation of nature. Ishmael represents Americanness, an amalgam of intellect and experience, the survivor of a clash between nature and capitalism who records his experience as a didactic example regarding American capitalism during the 19th century – this is indeed quite a progressive approach to be easily digested by his contemporary readers. Both Thoreau and Melville celebrate the true spirit and inherent paradoxes of U.S. environmentalism through their writings: both writers view the United States as a cultural ecosystem in which the citizen plays the leading role. Thoreau tends to romanticize American values and calls for a nostalgic return to a state of premodern innocence while Melville acknowledges that the U.S. must face the challenges of the new era and therefore narrates a cautionary tale; Pequod is the ship that sails into catastrophe in Moby-Dick because, as a metaphor referring to the cultural ecosystem of American society, it fails to reach a state of equilibrium and is left to the mercy of Captain Ahab, the symbol of America’s white male predatory capitalism. Nevertheless, Melville’s novel was posthumously recognized as an all-American novel proclaiming Americanness as a qualitative value based on economic progress, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, and future orientation. These themes are widely explored in American literature as the hegemonic socio-political order tends to sabotage the ecosystem of American society; ideal Americanness is based on its components being equally active participants in its democracy and social, political, and economic structures so as to avoid an ecological anomaly (such as the example of the Yellowstone National Park) or a human catastrophe at the expense of the environment caused by the pursuit of economic profit (the Pequod shipwreck in Melville’s Moby-Dick). In conclusion, both Thoreau and Melville acknowledge with their critical writings that sustaining the U.S. society as a cultural ecosystem depends on its progress and development as a concept primarily based on the human factor, with a focus on sustaining its cultural heritage for future generations.

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The following section of this paper focuses on the ideological and materialistic aspects of cultural nationalism in contemporary U.S. society by reflecting on the controversies around recent political projects targeting indigenous tribes and land. In June 2017 the United States of America withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, opting for sovereignty and economic growth by entering a selfsufficient and separationist mode that caused global surprise and disapproval. In April 2017 President Trump ordered the Department of the Interior to review the Antiquities Act and 27 national monuments specifically (these include: Bears Ears in Utah, Gold Butte in Nevada, Berryessa Snow Mountain in California, and Rio Grande del Norte in New Mexico), causing a stir across the nation over public spaces, private rights, the role of the government and federal protectionism.6 This prompted several environmental groups to take precautions in preparation of suing President Trump if his administration tried to revise the Antiquities Act and its purpose of protecting public land from commercial exploitation, mineral extraction, and agricultural expansion. By disregarding the significance of the Antiquities Act per se as well as the role of these monuments, the administration’s attempt to re-evaluate nature and its value affects much more than national pride or tourism and local economy. In fact, these national monuments sustain American “storylines” (Soini/Birkeland 2014: 213) as well as nature and human populations, both essential components of the American cultural ecosystem. The Bears Ears National Monument is one of the geographic regions in Utah that protects one of the most significant cultural landscapes for Native American tribes. By reviewing the Antiquities Act, the Bears Ears had to be minimized so as to allow for agricultural development, livestock breeding, and petroleum extraction (cf. Steinmetz 2017). Not only would such a change in legislation create an unprecedented ecological disturbance to the local ecosystem, but it would also affect the land and resource-related rights of the indigenous peoples of the area. This land historically belongs to the indigenous peoples and Native Americans of the area, and stripping them of their sacred rights to the land of their ancestors would be a renewed nationalizing effort to limit their socio-political power. Furthermore, it represents an effort to erase historically unique archaeological sites by violating an ancient cultural ecosystem and landscape which borders the

6

Cf. White House (2017): Presidential Executive Order on the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act, April 26 (https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/ presidential-executive-order-review-designations-antiquities-act).

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Navajo Nation and the White Mesa Ute Reservation. The remaining Navajo and Ute people still practice their own spiritual ceremonies and customs, hunt and forage the area for food supplies, as means of fulfilling their duty to their ancestors.7 The tribes had established a unique way of co-existing in harmony within nature until the colonization era, that subsequently led to a number of efforts by the U.S. government to control the land. In 1868 reservation areas were established for the local tribes and in 1895 the Hunter Act resulted into further displacement as the Ute strip area was marked as a marketable land for settlement for non-Indians.8 The Southern Ute tribe of Colorado was particularly affected and deprived of its rights to the land until 1992, when the tribe founded the Red Willow Production Company.9 By making use of the available resources of gas and oil as well as the changes in federal energy policy in 1982 that resulted in the Indian Mineral Development Act, the Ute initiative transformed southwest Colorado into one of the richest energy deposits in the United States. Despite the financial success of the company, many local residents and members of the tribe have expressed their concern as the modern use and exploitation of the land has brought not only a billion-dollar industry but also problematic cultural and lifestyle changes (cf. Thompson 2010). Bizarre as it may seem, this is not an unusual situation; in 2014 the Dakota Access pipeline project, a controversial multi-billion Dollar oil pipeline crossing near the Standing Rock reservation of the Sioux tribe, was launched to transport oil to American consumers in a safer and more cost-effective way.10 The Sioux tribe filed a complaint against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers as the construction violated the National Historic Preservation Act and disregarded a number of environmental and historic preservation statuses. As of June 2017, however, the Dakota Access Pipeline started operating as one of the most efficient and technologically advanced energy pipelines in North America promoting progress and economic growth, disregarding the fact that the water source for the Standing Rock reservation is only approximately 70 miles away. Despite wide tribal opposition and many protests drawing international attention, the Dakota Access Pipeline functions efficiently yet the issue remains disputable as there is 7

For information on the Bears Ears, see https://bearsearscoalition.org/proposal-over view/ancestral-and-modern-day-land-users.

8 For the history of the Southern Ute Indian Tribe, see https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/ history. 9

For more information on the Red Willow Production Company, see https://www.rwpc. us/about-us/.

10 For more information on the Dakota Access pipeline project, see https://daplpipeline facts.com.

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neither in-depth environmental planning nor an analysis regarding its impact on the Standing Rock reservation. However, treating indigenous tribes and Native Americans as mere occupants of the New World is not a new hegemonic practice. Already in 1832 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia ruled that the U.S. government had the right to treat Native Americans as “domestic dependent nations” and thus, land use and ownership, railroad construction, water rights, etc. were all in the hands of the government (cf. Okihiro 2016: 52). Therefore, launching the Dakota Access Pipeline can be regarded as another hegemonic intervention opposed to the United Nations Declaration on Rights of Indigenous Peoples established in 2007 and to the United States’ own pledge in 2010 to allow indigenous peoples “their political status within the framework of the existing nation-state and [to be] free to pursue their economic, social, and cultural development” (Coulter quoted in Okihiro 2016: 55). The examples of the Bear Ears Monument and the Dakota Pipeline as well as the Yellowstone paradigm show that the management of wildlife, wildland, and national monumental sites can irrevocably change the biodiversity of an ecosystem and its components, and result into transforming its cultural ecology and the human factor. This symbiosis of capitalist endeavors and environmentalist practices creates precisely the paradoxes of American environmentalism. The subsequent changes within the cultural ecosystem are caused by the changing role of modern society as both humans and nature are assigned new forms of belonging. Farmers, hunters, anglers, extractors, energy developers, represent economic interests based on natural resources that are regulated by federal management as well as sociopolitical conservatism. However, this sociopolitical and economic arrangement has nothing to do with U.S. environmentalism and ecological consciousness. Ecological activism and green politics are focused on the harmonious coexistence of humans as elements of nature, not as managers of its resources for materialistic profit – a goal that seems merely idealistic and unattainable in the modern era. The notion of nature-philia – when employed to fulfill the purposes of a socio-economic system – results in a pursuit of happiness for the few who profit most from the global applications of U.S. capitalism. Given its foundational credo as a society with a future-oriented outlook that aims at the pursuit of sustainability for both humans and nature, U.S. society should be interested in redefining itself anew as co-depending component of the global ecosystem.

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This article explores cultural ecosystems in literature and socio-politics as case studies to investigate the paradoxes of American environmentalism. Sustaining the American cultural ecosystem today is of critical importance for the nation’s role as a global leader. As the United States is currently facing a new national identity crisis in an attempt to make America great again, the selective removal of its organisms/cultures/populations might have devastating effects on its social, political and economic ecosystem and its cultural sustainability. Under Donald J. Trump’s presidency, there is a noticeable nostalgic return of the nation to its past traditions, ways of living, parochial thinking and practices, all of which suggest the hegemonic fear that the national imagination is fading away. It is this blend of fear and desire that empowers conservatism; on the one hand, the fear that new power structures will result in traditional means of control becoming decadent relics of the past, and on the other hand, the desire for sustaining national ideals and cultural values that awakens romanticized versions of a glorious national past. This paradoxical recourse to redefining the national imaginary of the United States could either be proven to be a mere illusion or a reliable source for national morale in order to face new frontiers like the challenges of globalization. The common factor in both cases is the human: acknowledging the leading role of humans as defining factors in today’s world overcomes materialism and cold calculation. The Anthropocene era (or the age of humans) places humans at the very center of this new geologic age, as it is the unmistakable impact of the human species that is drastically shaping the planet’s shift. The human factor affects plant and animal populations, the landscape, the climate, and even humans’ lifestyle itself yet modernization had only employed humans serving certain political ideologies as pawns of socioeconomic profit. The anthropogenic effect on nature’s processes cannot be ignored when it is beyond doubt that capitalism is to blame; it is high time that humans self-transform from puppets of capitalism in the Capitalocene era into self-conscious actors in the Anthropocene era (cf. Haraway 2014). However, the U.S. cultural ecosystem requires the activation of all its contradictions, so that all of its components function efficiently; when the natural ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park or the cultural ecosystem of the ship Pequod in Melville’s Moby-Dick are not functioning, catastrophe is inevitable and sustaining life and culture are thus projects doomed to fail unless the cultural ecosystem of society assigns equally complementary roles to all its members. After all, the United States is a country founded upon the declaration that it is a society of diversity and mutual acceptance. This article shows its paradoxical

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nature of Americanness as a uniquely innate feature that allows for a culturally sustainable society, provided that the role of anthropos is in the spotlight of its environmental idealism promoting the protection of nature as well as of alternative tourism, the feeling of being American within a sovereign nation with ecumenical roots, which thus embodies the paradox of sustainability from an anthropocentered perspective. Therefore, by maintaining the paradoxical aspects of cultural ecology, the United States’ only way forward in the Anthropocene era is through balancing between idealism and pragmatism, between national imagination and global networking.

R EFERENCES Appleton, Albert F. (2006): “Sustainability: A Practitioner's Reflection.” Technology in Society 28, pp. 3-18. Barry, John (2014): “Green Political Theory.” In: Vincent Geoghegan/Rick Wilford (eds.), Political Ideologies: An Introduction, London: Routledge: pp. 153-178. Bears Ears Coalition (2018): “Native American Connections” (https://bearsears coalition.org/proposal-overview/ancestral-and-modern-day-land-users). Buell, Lawrence (1999): “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” New Literary History 30/3, pp. 699-712. “Dakota Access Pipeline Facts,” 2016 (https://daplpipelinefacts.com). Haraway, Donna (2014): “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble,” May 9 (http://vimeo.com/97663518). Jenco, Leigh Kathryn (2009): “Thoreau’s Critique of Democracy.” In: Jack Turner ed.), A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, Lexington: U of Kentucky P, pp. 68-98. Kennedy, John F. “Historic Speeches: Acceptance of Democratic Nomination for President,” July 15, 1960 (https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historicspeeches/acceptance-of-democratic-nomination-for-president). Kroeber, A. L. (1917): “The Superorganic.” In: American Anthropologist 19/2, pp. 163-213. Mariotti, Shannon L. (2009): “Thoreau, Adorno, and the Critical Potential of Particularity.” In: Jack Turner (ed.), A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau, Lexington: U of Kentucky P, pp. 393-422. Marx, Leo (2000) [1964]: The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, New York: Oxford UP.

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Melville, Herman (2009) [1851]: Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, New York: Penguin. Mushabac, Jane (2016): “Ishmael or Ishfemale: Gender and Humor.” The Columbia Journal of American Studies (www.columbia.edu/cu/cjas/ish female.html). National Park Service (2018a): “Summer Use Planning,” May 15 (https://www. nps.gov/yell/getinvolved/summeruseplanning.htm). National Park Service (2018b): “Wolves,” July 18 (www.nps.gov/yell/learn/ nature/wolves.htm). Okihiro, Gary Y. (2016): Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation, Durham: Duke UP. Quammen, David (2016): “Yellowstone: Wild Heart of a Continent.” In: National Geographic May 2016 (www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/05/ yellowstone-national-parks-short/). Red Willow Production Company (2018): “About Us” (https://www.rwpc.us/ about-us). Robbins, Jim (1997): “In 2 Years, Wolves Reshaped Yellowstone.” In: The New York Times, December 30 (https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/30/science/in2-years-wolves-reshaped-yellowstone.html). Soini, Katriina/Inger Birkeland (2014): “Exploring the Scientific Discourse on Cultural Sustainability.” In: Geoforum 51: pp. 213-223. Southern Ute Indian Tribe (2018): “History” (https://www.southernute-nsn.gov/ history). Steinmetz, Katy (2017): “A Monumental Fight.” Time August 24 (time.com/amonumental-fight/). Steward, Julian (2006): “The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology.” In: Nora Haenn/Richard Wilk (eds.), The Environment in Anthropology: A Reader in Ecology, Culture, and Sustainable Living, New York: New York UP, pp. 5-9. Sweet, Timothy (2002): American Georgics: Economy and Environment in Early American Literature, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. Thompson, Jonathan (2010): “The Ute Paradox.” In: High Country News July 12 (https://www.hcn.org/issues/42.12/the-ute-paradox). Thoreau, Henry David (1854): Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston: Ticknor and Fields. Thoreau, Henry David (1863): “Life without Principle.” (xroads.virginia.edu/ ~hyper2/thoreau/life.html). Thoreau, Henry David (1895): Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, Boston: Houghton Mifflin (archive.org/details/familiarletters00thoruoft).

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Turner, Frederick Jackson (1894): “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin. UNESCO World Report (2011): Investing in Cultural Diversity and Intercultural Dialogue, Paris: United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization, 2009. (www.un.org/en/events/culturaldiversityday/pdf/ Investing_in_cultural_diversity.pdf). United States (1983): The Endangered Species Act as Amended by Public Law 97-304 (The Endangered Species Act Amendments of 1982), Washington: U.S. G.P.O. White, Donald W. (1996): The American Century: The Rise and Decline of the United States as a World Power, New Haven: Yale University Press. White, Eugene E. (2009): Puritan Rhetoric: The Issue of Emotion in Religion, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. White House (2017): Presidential Executive Order on the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act, April 26 (https://www.whitehouse.gov/ presidential-actions/presidential-executive-order-review-designationsantiquities-act). Yellowstone National Park (2011). “Gray Wolves Increase Tourism in Yellowstone National Park.” June 21 (www.yellowstonepark.com/2011/06/ gray-wolves-increase-tourism-in-yellowstone-national-park). Zapf, Hubert (2016): Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts, London and Oxford, Bloomsbury.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Pastness Nostalgia and Sustainability in American Post-Suburbia M ORITZ W. B ERKEMEIER In a simpler time, children played at the park on the walk home from school. Grandparents held hands on evening strolls. And your neighbors often became your very best friends. […] At Providence, the new Focus Property Group master-planned community, great care has been taken to make these memories reality. […] even the signs and mailboxes… every detail has been conceived to create an emphatic American tradition. PROVIDENCE 2009

In the very upper Western corner of ever-sprawling Las Vegas, Nevada, there is a new, master-planned, suburban community called Providence. According to its developer Focus Property Group, Providence covers 1200 acres and once completed will have 7500 homes in 30 so-called “neighborhoods” (Providence 2009). Its motto is: “Once there was a time. Now there is a place. Inspired by tradition” (ibid.). Here, in the barren desert, architectural remnants of the nostalgic All-American small town of the past re-emerge in a new suburban community that has only been under construction since the mid-2000s: a white picket fence surrounds the signpost pointing the way to the information center designed to evoke the look and feel of a traditional soda fountain shop, wooden gazebos grace intersections and parks, traditional homes line the streets. The community is “built on the notion that some things are just too good to leave in the past” (ibid) as the developing company suggests on its website, where black-and-white photographs of idealized small-town life are merged with colorful depictions of life in

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Providence: a boy is polishing a vintage car, kids are selling homemade lemonade in front of a historic brick house (black-and-white, signifying the past); a ponytailed girl is sitting on a swing, kids are playing soccer (color, signifying the present and future). In a promotional video for Providence, potential homebuyers are informed that here, the “comforts of modern living meet the values and traditions of a simpler, more innocent time. […] From the moment one enters Providence, the spirit of tradition can be found. In the air, on the streets, and in the hearts of every resident” (ibid). Picture 1: Providence’s information center

Providence 2009. Author’s collection.

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Picture 2: A typical row of townhouses in the Liberty Square

Providence 2009. Author’s collection. Liberty Square is a neighborhood of the masterplanned community.

Present-day Providence and a large part of American post-suburbia, one of the terms frequently used when discussing the sprawling outskirts of America’s metropolitan regions that are characterized by their independence from any traditional urban core, reveal a pervasive pursuit of pastness that is taking place in a space only made possible by technological progress, as Fishman (1987) argues. The marketing strategy and design of the community hint at the hidden connections between nostalgia and sustainability which this volume explores: values and traditions of a supposedly simpler and more innocent but lost past are restored and combined with the comforts of contemporary living in a community built for tomorrow. This article looks at this pursuit of pastness in contemporary post-suburbia in order to analyze which cultural narratives and collective memories inspire it. A closer look at Providence, which represents just one of many new, nostalgically-themed communities in American post-suburbia, will add to the investigation of cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered, and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future, as the complex ways in which past, present and future are interwoven become especially manifest in post-suburbia. After all, it is here where home-buying individuals position themselves in relation to what has been and to

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what will be. But can a nostalgic, small-town themed suburban community be a sustainable home after all? In order to address this question and critically discuss Providence in more detail, a few theoretical thoughts concerning nostalgia need to be entertained. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Svetlana Boym suggests that nostalgia “inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals” (Boym 2001: xv). Nostalgia, as evident in the theming of post-suburbia, is at “first glance […] a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (ibid). But she argues that in fact “two kinds of nostalgia characterize one’s relationship to the past […]: restorative and reflective” (ibid: 41). Restorative and reflective nostalgia are “tendencies” and “ways of giving shape and meaning to longing” (ibid). Restorative nostalgia becomes manifest in the reconstruction of lost monuments of the past in order to evoke the “national past and future” and “collective pictorial symbols and oral history,” whereas reflective nostalgia is “more concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude” (ibid: 49). Providence can be read as an example of restorative nostalgia. Here, individuals long for small-town America, representing a vanished national past - a mythical truth - which is part of a collective cultural memory. Providence’s developers promise to reconstruct the past and “the lost home,” thereby sustaining a specific set of values and traditions. In Monochrome Memories (2002), Paul Grainge adds another dimension to the concept of nostalgia. He discusses theories of nostalgia in order to analyze the increased usage and meaning of monochrome photography used in The Gap and Apple advertisements and news magazines such as Time during the 1980s and 1990s. Grainge opens his study with the observation that in 1997, when he began his project, “it appeared that no self-respected café bar could do without a blackand-white print on the wall; monochrome was the signature of designer chic for the likes of Armani and Calvin Klein” (2002: xii). He argues that black-and-white images were utilized in marketing as a “cultural style” and as “the archival legitimacy of particular histories and versions of heritage” (ibid: 121). Therefore, he claims with regard to the popularity of monochrome photography, and by referring to Fred Davis (1976), that if “nostalgia has developed as a cultural style in contemporary American life, it cannot be explained through any single master narrative of decline, crisis, longing or loss” (ibid). Grainge wants to avert a “critical reduction where nostalgia modes become the reflex result of anxieties and

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dissatisfactions with the present” (ibid: 58). To Grainge this “stylistic code,” however, does not exclude the possibility that modes of nostalgia have not developed in the context of crisis, or that longing and loss are not powerful and operative narratives within certain kinds of discourses. As a cultural style, nostalgia has developed in accordance with a series of political, cultural, and material factors that have made ‘pastness’ an expedient and marketable mode. (ibid)

The kind of “restorative nostalgia” which defines post-suburbia must be seen in this context as well. It is about longing for a different time, but it also represents a “stylistic code” that articulates and legitimizes “particular histories and visions of heritage” (ibid: 121) which are attempted to be reconstructed in the present to be taken into the future. The specific type of nostalgia at work in post-suburbia can be summed up in what Providence’s developers refer to as a “small-town Americana theme” (Providence 2018). The Focus Property Group website states that in a simpler time, children played at the park on the walk home from school. Grandparents held hands on evening strolls. And your neighbors often became your very best friends. […] At Providence, the new Focus Property Group master-planned community, great care has been taken to make these memories reality. […] Even the signs and mailboxes… every detail has been conceived to create an emphatic American tradition. (Providence 2009)

This marketing text alleges that the community turns the memories of a simpler, more innocent time in small-town America into a reality in suburban Las Vegas. An emphasized sustainable ideal that this “simpler time” in small-town America promises is being able to walk and being part of a community. The lack of both in suburbia is a major point of critique targeted at the suburban settlement pattern (cf. Calthorpe 1993; Duany, Plater-Zyberg/Speck 2000; Katz 1994; Kunstler 1994). This nostalgic rhetoric and aesthetic intended to convey values of sustainability in post-suburbia is no single occurrence. America is dotted with themed subdivisions like Providence that promise to be walkable communities. Additionally, new open-air shopping centers are built in the image of historic, walkable main streets and older shopping centers are redeveloped into themed town centers.

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Picture 3: Small-town signifiers in Hiddenbrook

Master-planned community in Vallejo, CA 2009. Author’s collection.

Picture 4: Nostalgic townhouses at Hilltop Mall

Richmond, CA 2009. Author’s collection.

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Picture 5: Peninsula Town Center, Hampton

Hampton, VA 2012. Author’s collection. The center opened in 2009 and it was designed to look like a traditional town.

Picture 6: Residences in the East Beach master-planned community

Norfolk, VA 2012. Author’s collection. East Beach was planned according to New Urbanist principles by Duany and Plater-Zyberg.

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Many communities in post-suburbia heavily employ nostalgia both rhetorically and architecturally to sell houses. The following examples show that there is a pattern in promoting these places as sustainable. The developers of Kitts Creek, North Carolina, for example, ask the future homebuyer Have you ever imagined yourself living in a simpler time? What about in a small town? In a neighborhood known for its southern hospitality and charm. A place where the community gets together, where people know your name and wave when they see you. Can you picture yourself there? Then picture yourself at Kitts Creek. Where the spirit of small-town America lives on. Where all the neighborliness and days gone by can be found waiting for you in the middle of all the conveniences of today. Kitts Creek was designed to take you back in time. To tree-lined streets that connect you with all your neighbors. To spacious parks that connect you with the joys of small-town living. (Kitts Creek 2013)

Another example is Longleaf, Florida, which is portrayed as A true small town where neighbors laugh. Children play. Families love. A new home community with a unique character and a warm spirit. With village greens. A town meeting hall. Tree-lined streets with wide sidewalks. Roomy front porches with swings and rocking chairs. White picket fences. Ball fields. If you long for the warmth of hometown living, the character of a small town, the comfort of coming home to peace, privacy, and community, come join us in Longleaf. A town to call home. (Long Leaf Town 2013)

According to its developers, Baxter Village, South Carolina, features Everything you remember from where you grew up. Great neighbors and strong community connections. A Village Green, YMCA, parks, festivals and wide open places to play. A Town Center where you can shop, eat and get ice cream, plus an elementary school and public library right in the neighborhood. But Baxter also offers new generation innovations like homes wired for technology, wireless hot spots, and a neighborhood network, walking trails and a childcare center. Plus fast interstate access and big city conveniences just minutes away. Come rediscover the way things were, only better, in our next generation American small town. (The Village of Baxter 2013)

These texts enumerate identical, recurring keywords such as small town, simpler time, neighborhood, community, white picket fence, children, family, and treelined streets. They all suggest that these places bring back memories of a simpler time in small-town America. The commodified kind of nostalgia manifest in these texts and pervading post-suburbia, can be read as “the product of a suburban

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building tradition in which commercial builders are finely attuned, and readily adapt, to consumer taste” (Harris/Dostrovsky 2008: 167) and that it is part of a complex “historicist revival” (ibid 2008a: 16) in the suburbs of Canada and the United States. This “revival of historicist styles […] signaled a change in the zeitgeist” (ibid) with the greatest challenge being able “to understand the zeitgeist that the domestic architecture” (ibid) reveals. The marketing texts gathered here propose that this “historicist revival” is not only about architectural styles, but that these styles need to be seen as physical expressions of restorative nostalgia, indicating further which values, traditions and qualities are considered sustainable: walking, community and family togetherness. Picture 7: Aerial view of a section of Leesburg

Leesburg, VA 2012. Author’s Collection. Illustrating the car-centeredness of post-suburbia.

The car-centered landscape of post-suburban America, which has expanded drastically since the end of World War II, is often themed to resemble a walkable, close-knit small town from the past despite being anything but walkable and despite not fostering a sense of community. The developers of Providence and others use a narrative of the good life in small-town America despite - or, because of - the fact that this community is located in suburbia, a landscape that has been the target of harsh critique exactly for its lack of walkability, community and sustainability. Since the late 1980s, it has been argued that suburbia’s massive expansion has made it independent from the central downtown, as all functions of

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the city have been dispersed throughout suburbia in mono-functional zones, thus the “single-focus metropolis disappeared and was replaced by an amorphous sprawl of population” (Teaford 2006: 3). This has created a new, themed landscape that is difficult to grasp. There is no definitive term for it either. Joel Garreau (1988) has called it “Edge City,” while Robert Fishman (1987) introduced the term “Technoburb.” Other names for the space in question are “Zoomburb” (Hayden 2006), “Boomburb” (Land/LeFurgy 2007), or “Metroburbia” (Knox 2008). Edward Soja (2000) introduced “Exopolis” as one term in what he refers to as the “Postmetropolis.” He regards the “formation of Exopolis” as “a process that, on the one hand, points to the growth of Outer Cities and Edge Cities […], on the other, to a dramatic reconstitution of Inner Cities” (Soja qutd. in Bridge/ Watson 2000: 192). According to Soja, the “radical deconstruction/reconstruction of the urban fabric has stimulated many other neologisms for the new forms emerging in the postmetropolis” such as “post-suburbia, metroplex, technopoles, technoburbs, urban villages, country-cities, regional cities, [or] the 100-mile city” (ibid: 193). It seems as if the vaster and more decentralized post-suburbia (the term I prefer to use) turned, the more nostalgic its architecture had to become in order to give it meaning in its amorphous context. Post-suburbia is themed to convey meaning and it is designed to resemble a sustainable small town. The marketing texts and themed communities such as Providence suggest that today’s Americans collectively remember and long for a small-town America and, on the other hand, that small town America is gone but once was real in “a different time” and that it can and should be recreated in post-suburbia today and taken into the future. Small-town America represents what seemingly is considered worth preserving by the majority of Americans. But what exactly is small-town America? Small-town America has to be understood not as a place but as a rather complex and utopian idea. The notion of “small-town America” relates to the dominant small town, existing side by side with thousands of individual and very different material small towns. In Main Street and Empire, Ryan Poll illustrates the importance of distinguishing between the dominant small town (singular) and material small towns (plural). He argues that the dominant American small town, and especially its main street is not “a real, material place. Rather it is an abstract, a historical national imaginary” (2012: 2). To Poll, the dominant small town - that is, the imagined small town - is an “American nation form” (ibid: 8). According to him, any nation form “structures what is recognized as reality” (ibid). He suggests that “the dominant small town” is “a complex ideological form that frames and shapes the U.S. identity and imagination throughout modernity” (ibid: 5). Poll claims that the small town has become “a national icon that widely

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circulates in literary, cultural, and political discourse as an authentic American space and signifier” (ibid: 2). On the other hand, there are, of course, the many material small towns dispersed throughout the country. Miles Orvell states in The Death and Life of Main Street that a main street “is the essence of the small town and synonymous with it” and that every “town or settlement in the United States has a central artery running through it” (2012: 13). Richard Francaviglia’s observes in Main Street Revisited - Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America that there “are several thousand small towns in the United States, and, by definition, as many Main Streets” (1996: xix). The community’s main street does play a pivotal role in defining material small towns. While the layout of the commercial cores of small communities has remained rather varied and followed regional patterns, the American small-town streetscape took on a very stylized, and highly standardized, appearance by the 1880s. This is true from coast to coast and from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Viewed in context, the Victorian-era commercial storefront should be recognized as the first truly national building form in the history of American architecture. Although its design roots are traceable to Europe, in the hands of American entrepreneurs it became a characteristically American form: attractive, affordable, easily constructed, easily installed and, most importantly, standardized. (ibid: 35)

The distinction between dominant small-town America and material American small towns shows that Americans did not actually grow up in small-town America. However, the marketing texts successfully allude to homebuyers’ memories. The developers of Baxter Village, for example, claim that “It’s got everything you remember from where you grew up”. So, how can Americans presumably be taken back in time to the town they remember if this town never existed in the first place? One needs to consider then what these memories are about. If small-town America is an idea, Americans remember and long for an idea and accordingly the idea has to be examined. The dominant small town that is “remembered” is a product of popular culture and not a lived experience or historical fact. In The Lost Continent - Travels in Small Town America (1989), Bill Bryson remembers watching old movies after school as a child. Among them were such films as The Best Years of our Lives, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Never Give a Sucker an Even Break and It Happened One Night. He observes that The one constant in these pictures was the background. It was always the same place, a trim and sunny little city with a tree-lined Main Street full of friendly merchants (‘Good morning, Mrs. Smith!’) and a courthouse square, and wooded neighborhoods where fine houses

208 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING slumbered beneath graceful elms. […] The background was always this timeless, tranquil place. […] And it wasn’t just in the movies. Everybody on TV - Ozzie and Harriet, Wally and Beaver Cleaver, George Burns and Gracie Allen - lived in this middle-class Elysium. So did the people in the advertisements in magazines and on the commercials on television and in the Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post. In books it was the same. (1989: 37f.)

Bryson’s personal imagination, which in part sounds like another promotional text for another newly-built nostalgic post-suburban community, matches the recollections of Miles Orvell. Even though Orvell, like Bryson, did not grow up in a small town, he was on the mythical level, […] acutely aware of what small-town America was like, at least in the television version; for [his] small town was the people and families [he] saw on American TV in the fifties, and who is to say they did not embed themselves deeply in [his] psyche? (2012: x)

On the homepage of a realty agency unaffiliated with the developer of Baxter Village it is euphorically proclaimed to potential buyers that the community is “almost like a movie set in its perfection” (Arbie Turner Realtor 2015). This claim and Orvell’s and Bryson’s statements suggest a more convincing source of inspiration for Baxter and other communities than the developers’ dreamy reference to childhood memories. The nostalgic communities in post-suburbia make use of a constructed dominant image of small-town America created and propagated by popular culture, and have no relation to any material small town, let alone to lived experiences in actual small towns. Americans, the majority of whom have never actually lived in a material small town but grew up in suburbia, do not relate the many nostalgic developments to personal lived experience. The nostalgic small town has entered the collective memory and imagination through texts of popular culture. Most memories of the small town are memories of the dominant small town in cultural texts such as movies and TV shows. Frank Roost adds Disney’s Main Street, USA, the entrance section of Disneyland, which is themed to look like the dominant small town, to the discussion and argues that Neotraditional communities […] are planned primarily for those Americans who have spent most of their lives in suburbia. Having grown up with postwar single-family homes, highways and shopping centers, their experience with traditional urban environments is sometimes very limited. But while their perceptions of today’s urban environments may be

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harmed by stereotypes about cities’ social and economic problems, their positive images of ‘historic’ small-town places are likely to derive from experiences in Disney’s theme parks. Few places have influenced the collective memory of America’s middle class in the past decades to the extent that Disneyland did. (Roost 2005: 278)

In an essay titled Nostalgie in thematisierten Welten: “Main Street, USA”, Celebration (Florida) und der Mythos der US-amerikanischen Kleinstadt, JanErik Steinkrüger also argues that Main Street, USA represents the “Fantasie einer Rückkehr in eine Zeit vor der modernen Konsumkultur” and that it is a nostalgic “Ideal einer meist weißen, suburbanen Mittelklasse” (Steinkrüger 2017). In Consumed Nostalgia Cary Cross (2015) observes the same: “Even if many adults did not grow up in Disney’s small town, as over time fewer had, they often adopted Disney’s fantasy of his youth as their own. Memory of a mediated past may have been more real than the one they actually knew” (ibid: 209). To him the “nostalgia for a romantic version of small town” is also “repeatedly reinforced in the movies and reruns on TV” (ibid). Stephen Rowley recognizes these romantic aspects in “notional places” such as “film and television depictions of small towns and suburbs” as well (2015: 9). These places are “formed by overlapping representations from multiple sources” (ibid). He refers to these positive aspects as “the physical and social properties of Hollywood’s movie towns” and organizes them like this: a distinctive retail and social hub; strong community institutions; locally owned and socially integrated businesses; classic architecture; fluid interface between the public and private realm; a highly walkable community; an intimate and well-connected social structure; and family units as the essential building blocks of the community (ibid: 22ff.). The marketing texts for the postsuburban nostalgia communities actually do not refer to lived experiences, and, in doing so, reveal what is considered worth preserving. Rowley’s list of positive aspects sums up what is considered good about the past today and what collectively is seen as worth preserving. But the texts also serve to activate the “memory of a mediated past” (Cross 2015: 209) and to tell a narrative of the dominant small town as a “notional place” (Rowley 2015: 9). Consequently, the nostalgia that is apparent throughout contemporary suburbia does not reflect a longing for any material small town but for the dominant small town as a collectively perceived ideal and the embodiment of what is considered sustainable. Peter Calthorpe states in The Next American Metropolis – Ecology, Community, and the American Dream that the traditional American town is “timeless […] in the sense that human needs and human scale do not change with the advent of each new technology and that certain traditions express fundamental characteristics of

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place and culture which should be preserved” (Calthorpe 1993: 21). But can a timeless ideal be sustained in post-suburbia? Picture 8: Aerial view of Providence

Providence 2014. Photo: Ken Lund, Creative Commons. The view reveals that it is not a walkable small town.

Providence and other communities activate the “memory of a mediated past” (Cross 2015: 209) that conveys sustainability by randomly scattering small-town signifiers, such as white picket fences and gazebos, throughout the development. As already described in the introduction, a large billboard, in front of which a white picket fence has been placed, points the way to the information center of this master-planned community. The information center was designed to emulate “a classic small-town soda fountain and ice-cream shop” (Providence 2009). Gazebos are located at every major crossing. Moreover, the residential areas are referred to as “neighborhoods” (ibid). But the so-called neighborhoods of Providence are isolated compounds of mostly identical houses built in traditional styles and in a similar price range. They can only be accessed by car through a single, sometimes gated, entrance. Garages face the residential streets. Each neighborhood is developed by a different homebuilder and according to a different price range. Among them are KB Home, Lennar, or Toll Brothers.

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Picture 9: Garages face the streets in Providence

Providence 2009. Author’s collection.

Picture 10: One of the entrances to Providence

Providence 2009. Author’s collection. The entrance features rose arches, an entry sign and traditional architecture

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The neighborhoods in Providence have evocative names such as Emerson, Madison Grove, Arbor Ridge, Hampton Glen, or Somerset. The Liberty Square section of Providence boasts rows of townhouses which recall a historic streetscape typically not found in Nevada but rather in New England. The names and architecture of the homes thus do not relate to their desert environment, but to the community’s predominant small-town theme and to the sustainable ideal of small-town America and to sustainable architecture and urban planning. The community is designed and marketed to seem like an example of New Urbanist planning which represents an architectural movement that took shape in the early 1990s (cf. Katz 1994: ix). According to Bressi, New Urbanism “represents a rediscovery of planning and architectural traditions that have shaped some of the most livable, memorable communities in America” such as “traditional small towns where life centers around a courthouse square, common plaza, train station or main street” (Bressi qtd. in Katz 1994: xxv). While suburban planning is “isolating people in houses and cars,” New Urbanism is based upon one principle: “Community planning and design must assert the importance of public over private values” (ibid: xxx). A famous example of New Urbanist planning is Seaside, Florida. This community was designed by New Urbanists Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg in order to “reverse a trend toward alienation that the designers have observed in many aspects of contemporary suburban life” (Katz 1994: 4). Providence’s emphasize on community, parks and tree-lined boulevards with sidewalks intend to convey public life, as New Urbanist projects do. But the 30 neighborhoods are isolated in a geometrical grid consisting of four-lane boulevards. The community is clearly planned on suburban and not on New Urbanist principles. The infrastructure in Providence does not connect people. The small trees – palm trees are forbidden in Providence according to the Master Homeowner Association (Providence Master Homeowner Association 2017: 5) - offer no shade and the endless sidewalks are rarely used. This also might have to do with the massive scale of Providence. New Urbanist Peter Calthorpe developed what he refers to the ‘transit-oriented development:’ “A mixed-use community within an average 2,000-foot walking distance of a transit stop and core commercial area” (1993: 56). This is by no means the scale of Providence. Here, trees and sidewalks join the plethora of small-town signifiers and merely communicate, but do not actively encourage, actual “walking to school” and “evening strolls.” Visitors to Providence will hardly see anybody on the sundrenched streets as, even though Nevada’s climate may be to blame for this, there are no places to walk to anyhow. The community’s Knickerbocker Park and Huckleberry Park which are “reminiscent of the classic American literary theme

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of westward expansion,” as the Providence Master Homeowner Association proclaims on their website (Providence Master Homeowner Association 2018), are not in walking-distance to most of its residents. The same is true for the elementary school and “The Shoppes at Providence,” a small strip mall at the edge of the property. For a “town” this size, the provided stores (among them Subway, Smoke Shop, Pink Nails, Pit Stop and Fitness 24) are insufficient. Just as everything else, these shops are there to tell the mythical and nostalgic narrative small-town America, but not to build a sustainable place of living. They are not meant to create an actual material small town or New Urbanist community. In all of themed post-suburbia, the symbolic props do not have to be useful. The information center that resembles an ice cream shop but does not sell ice cream, the empty sidewalks, the allusive names of the neighborhoods, the pointless gazebos that are found everywhere, the decontextualized white picket fence in front of a billboard, and the themed houses with glued-on window shutters are all are there to activate what Cross calls the “mediated memory” of small-town America and of simpler and supposedly more innocent times. They are there to sell homes. Picture 11: Norman Rockwell Lane in Centennial Springs

Author’s collection.

But the mythical small town is not recreated in this post-suburban setting. The residents of Providence have to leave their “all-American small town” and drive

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to nearby Centennial Springs another new community where some larger stores are located, to run errands. Additionally, Centennial Springs also has a newly built main street with small-town themed facades: Norman Rockwell Lane, the artist Norman Rockwell being famous for re-creating the “dream of America at a simpler time, of a small-town world of pig-tailed kids and their parents” (Bauer 1996: burb). The irony of Providence and many other communities in postsuburbia is that they are designed to evoke this dream of sustainable small-town life but at the same time promote a completely suburban, car-dependent lifestyle that is not sustainable at all and goes against everything associated with smalltown America and sustainable urban planning, denying the fact that they are in fact located in post-suburbia. In the 1950s, when the rush to suburbia was in full swing, Levittown and the Modernism-inspired Eichler homes were distinct from contemporary alternatives by their near complete absence of nostalgia. The security of gated communities and the reassuring familiar imagery of today’s New Urbanist designs suggest a rather defensive posture in response to the changing realties of contemporary residential conditions, whereas the Eichler tracts exhibit a straightforward acceptance of the suburban condition on its own terms. (Adamson/Arbunich 2001: 23)

Today’s nostalgic communities replace their innate suburban condition with a new, fabricated history. In doing so, these post-suburban communities and their vital connection to popular culture reveal a very selective way of deciding which aspects of a culture should be sustained and which should be replaced. In an essay entitled “The Cultural Meanings of the Leave It to Beaver House” Holley Wlodarczyk makes a noteworthy point concerning this selection process. She observes that this 1950s family sitcom’s setting “visually registers as an oldfashioned neighborhood filled with classic pre-World War II suburban architecture, a sharp contrast to the many monotonous ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky’” (2014: 15) defining postwar suburbia during the time Leave It to Beaver premiered. She continues to claim that at “a time when more modern, ‘contemporary’ homes were increasingly incorporated into new suburban living environments, postwar television instead focused attention on the aesthetic and ideological forms of more ‘homey’ traditional typologies” (ibid: 28) and the accompanying gender setup. Wlodarczyk connects the Leave It to Beaver house, a product of popular culture, to the built American landscape and states that this traditional house “continues to influence cultural norms directing what actually gets built and bought in suburbia today” (ibid). She concludes that in

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the popular imagination as in the built environment, the ‘Leave It to Beaver house’ still stands for a certain kind of suburban domestic dream and the popular media and images, cultural meanings and values we turn to over and over again when trying to (re-)construct it for ourselves. (ibid)

The nostalgia for an America known from Leave It to Beaver becomes manifest in suburban residences that recall the Beaver Family house, Wlodarczyk argues. This “certain kind of suburban domestic dream” is part of larger a dream of smalltown America. Stephen Rowley argues that the “communities presented in these shows were a modified version of the ideal small town” (2012: 59). David Marc further suggests that television showed “nominal” small towns which, however, “represented suburbs and ‘sold’ an aspirational image of the suburbs” (1997: 44). To him, the “domestic sitcom romanticized the suburb as an idyllic small town” (ibid). This underlines that “the suburb and the small town were always blurred together on television” (Jones 1992: 100). Rowley concludes that the “national suburb of the 1950s sitcom is therefore something of a transitional community, blending traditional small towns and the emerging postwar suburbs to emphasize the links to the former and create an idealized depiction of the latter” (2015: 60). Television’s “perfectionist ideal of the perfect home and family appealed to the middle-class suburbanites in the 1950s” despite “the reality of choosing among different housing alternatives” (2015: 60) in postwar suburbia. Today, Providence and other such nostalgia communities in post-suburbia attempt to offer Americans the perfect home for the perfect family which, in the wake of criticism targeted at suburbia and negative representations of suburbia in the media, are not connected to suburbia any more, but to the mythical dominant small town. Its portrayed quality of life revolves around what is considered worth recreating and preserving: around what Rowley refers to as “the physical and social properties of Hollywood’s movie towns” (ibid: 22ff.). This invented place of the past that never was determines what is built today and reveals what is considered worth sustaining in a landscape fundamentally different from the ideal pursued. Themed post-suburbia is an attempt to balance nostalgia and sustainability, but it fails at being sustainable, because what is being considered sustainable and worth preserving is a fabrication stemming from popular culture. This raises questions about the cultural need for this fabrication and the cultural function that nostalgia in post-suburbia serves. Ann Sloan Devlin concludes in her 2010 study What Americans Build and Why that physical locations that encourage connections to other people are “more likely to be small than large” (281). This conclusion corresponds to the New Urbanist principles discussed previously. Moreover, Devlin assumes that today

216 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING Americans crave something they think they have lost, and that they aren’t sure how to retrieve it. What they seem to have lost is a sense of togetherness, and perhaps a sense of safety that comes from that connection. The absolute size of our nation has to do with that loss, as does the infrastructure of roads and highways, and the creation of suburbia. (ibid.)

Today, there is a cultural need for community and togetherness associated with the fabricated American small town. However, this need is not a contemporary phenomenon as Ross Miller has argued about Euro Disneyland stating that “Disney [in 1950s California] provided a displaced urban setting for a suburban generation threatened by the disorder and violence of the post-war city” (1990: 94). He contends that Disney’s “formula owes its success, in large part, to the fact that [Disneyland] came as close as sprawling Los Angeles had ever come to the density and excitement of a real city” (ibid: 94). Disneyland emphasized the absence of togetherness and community in everyday suburban life in the 1950s as it does today and thus exemplified by its entrance section Main Street, USA became the much-needed “architecture of reassurance” (cf. Marling 1998) in a physically changing America. Harris and Dostrovsky use the same word – reassurance – and suggest that the theming of post-suburbia must be seen as a “search for reassurance in an uncertain world” (Dostrovsky/Harris 2008: 168). The nostalgia evident in post-suburbia – the post-suburban pursuit of pastness – therefore must be interpreted as a yearning for a different, supposedly simpler, reassuring time.

R EFERENCES Adamson, Paul and Marty Arbunich (2002): Eichler Rebuilds the American Dream, Layton: Gibbs Smith. Arbie Turner Realtor (2015): “Baxter Village in Fort Mill, Sc.”, Accessed July 1, 2018 (http://blog.fortmillhomesforsale.com/blog/baxter-village-in-fort-millsc/). Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bridge, Bary/Watson, Sophia (2002): The Blackwell City Reader. Malden: Blackwell. Bryson, Bill (1989): The Lost Continent - Travels in Small Town America. New York: Harper and Row. Budd, Mike/Kirsch, Max H. (2005): Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press.

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Calthorpe. Peter (1993): The Next American Metropolis - Ecology, Community and the American Dream, New York: Princeton University Press. Cross, Gary (2015): Consumed Nostalgia - Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Davis, Fred (1976): Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Dostrovsky, Nadine/Harris, Richard (2008): The Suburban Culture of Building and the Reassuring Revival of Historicist Architecture since 1970. In: Home Cultures, 5/2, pp. 167-196. Duany, Andres/Plater-Zyberg, Elisabeth/Speck, Jeff (2000): Suburban Nation. The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press. Fishman, Robert (1987): Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York: Basic Books. Francaviglia, Richard (1996): Main Street Revisited. Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Garreau, Joel (1988): Edge City. Life on the Frontier. New York: Anchor Books. Grainge, Paul (2002): Monochrome Memories. Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. Westport: Praeger. Hayden, Dolores (2006): A Field Guide to Sprawl. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Jones, Gerard (1993): Honey, I’m Home!: Sitcoms: Selling The American Dream. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Katz, Peter (1994): The New Urbanism - Toward an Architecture of Community. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc. Kitts Creek (2013): “Welcome to Kitts Creek”, Accessed March 23, 2013 (http:// www.kittscreek.com). Knox, Paul (2008): Metroburbia, USA. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Kunstler, James H. (1993): The Geography of Nowhere - The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lang, Robert/LeFurgy, Jennifer (2007): Boomburbs. The Rise of America’s Accidental Cities. Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press. Lasansky, D. Medina (2014): Archi.Pop - Mediating Architecture in Popular Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Long Leaf Town (2013): Welcome. Accessed March 23, 2013 (http://www. longleaftown.com). Marc, David (1997): Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture, 2nd ed., Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell.

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Marling, Karal Ann (1998): Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance. Paris: Flammarion. Miller, Ross (1990): “Euro Disneyland and the Image of America.” In: Progressive Architecture 10, 1990. Orvell, Miles (2012): The Death and Life of Main Street. Small Towns in American Memory, Space and Community. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Poll, Ryan (2012): Main Street and Empire. The Fictional Small Town in the Age of Globalization. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Providence (2009): “Welcome to Providence”, Accessed April 15, 2009 (http:// providencelv.com). Providence (2018): “Parks and Trails”, Accessed July 1, 2018 (http:// providencelv.com/community/parks-trails/). Providence Master Homeowner Association (2017): Amended and Restated Design Guidelines. Las Vegas: Providence Master Homeowner Association. Providence Master Homeowner Association: “About Us”, Accessed July 1, 2018 (http://www.providencelvhoa.com/Default.aspx?p=DynamicModule&pageid =10&ssid=100025&vnf=1). Roost, Frank (2005): “Synergy City: How Times Square and Celebration Are Integrated into Disney’s Marketing Cycle.” In: Mike Budd/Max H. Kirsch (eds.), Rethinking Disney: Private Control, Public Dimensions. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 261-298. Rowley, Stephen (2015): Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs - Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillion. Soja, Edward (1997): Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis. In: Bridge 2002. Sielke, Sabine (2017): Nostalgie/Nostalgia: Imaginierte Zeit-Räume in globalen Medienkulturen/Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures. Frankfurt: Peter Lang 2017. Steinkrüger, Jan-Erik (2017): Nostalgie in thematisierten Welten: “Main Street, USA” Celebration (Florida) und der Mythos der US-amerikanischen Kleinstadt. In: Sabine Sielke (ed.), Nostalgie/Nostalgia: Imaginierte ZeitRäume in globalen Medienkulturen/Imagined Time-Spaces in Global Media Cultures. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, pp. 233-48. Teaford, Jon C. (2006): The Metropolitan Revolution - The Rise of Post Urban America. New York: Columbia University Press. The Village of Baxter (2013): “Welcome to the Village of Baxter”, Accessed March 23, 2013 (http://www.villageofbaxter.com/).

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Wlodarczyk, Holley (2014): The Cultural Meaning of the Leave It To Beaver House. In: D. Medina Lasansky (ed.), Archi.Pop - Mediating Architecture in Popular Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, pp. 15-28.

Nostalgia and the Sustainable Lyric John Burnside and the Pibroch O WEN G URREY What we need now is distance and local tradition; the breve of italic; the minim of untold love; a new vocabulary of now-or-never: names for the things we have lost, so we know what to mourn. JOHN BURNSIDE/AMOR VINCIT OMNIA

Acclaimed poet and novelist John Burnside occupies a unique place in contemporary British writing. His poetry explores metaphysical states of being by longing for and dreaming with a compulsion to search for an adequate way in which to dwell on the earth. Whether his poetry is conjuring a spectral presence that haunts this worldly life or pushing the lyric into an indeterminate zone by which things become half-seen and half-remembered, Burnside’s lyric is searching for access to a tussle between possible worlds both real and imagined. It is a poetry which acknowledges a certain mysticism to our existence, coupled with a creaturely awareness of how thinking with animals entails an ecological, ethical consciousness born from a shared destiny of nonhuman and human beings. There is always in Burnside a sustained engagement with religious themes, notably an eschatological interest in how things come to pass. This preoccupation has found special resonance in what Tom Bristow calls “a post-secular translation of what ‘is’ for ‘how’ things are […] feeling for how animals, plants, humans are coming to be” (2015: 48). If poiesis is to do with ‘bringing-forth’ – concerned with how things are made or brought about – then it is on the other side of that

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ontological bargain, namely how things come to an end in which Burnside’s poetry delves. According to Fiona Sampson, Burnside is part of a group of poets coming to the fore in the speeded-up, “overwhelming era of globalization” (2012: 246) and his stepped lines gesture towards a kind of “topple, something utterly removed from the steady gait and equalizing tensions of pentameter.” She finds in Burnside a poetry of “surrender”, in flight from certainty “as if from a false consciousness”, and it is within this suspended vision where Burnside’s poetry gestures towards ecological care in a sundered environment (ibid: 248). Maintained in his work is the idea that the construction of worlds is a provisional affair; there are no fixed proprieties and no loyalty to money, property, or authority with which to take the measure of things. It is not that his poetry doesn’t speak to these frail, human abstractions, but in revealing how flimsy, temporary and artificial many of our human projects are, his is a poetry of rescue, salvage and recovery. Balancing the concepts of nostalgia and sustainability in the current climate crisis implies that they have become charged with political urgency in the context of the politics of nationalism and the ever-growing awareness of the ethics of consumption. Their formal dexterity when applied widely to the study of culture involves an understanding of how they structure ideas about the present in relation to a past and vice-versa, and that these concepts can inform ideas about place and belonging which have immediate consequences in the context of today’s deracinated models of nationhood. Constructions of place to which we may say we belong are constantly shifting, particularly with respect to the growing tension between one’s political and one’s ecological self. That conflict could be said to involve the conditioning of identity positioned within historical borders and territories facing a new ontological question of survival that disrespects such delineations. Something oblique is at stake when in this febrile state there are new borders and fault lines thrown up by issues of self-governance and autonomy, some of which display various appeals to a nationalistic sense of identity and territory and to the rights of access to the provisions between peoples within that circumscribed place. Sustainability, perched beside nostalgia and momentarily released from its new-found ecolexical status, suggests that the urge to nostalgic reflection and myth-making may also be a contemporary cultural way to chart the connection to older cultural practices and identity by the wish to see a re-balancing of that relationship articulated by a language of place-making. In this article, these terms are contextualised through a particular poem by John Burnside. They apply to a critical impasse that exists today in terms of how people understand the lost cultures that have been eroded by that “overwhelming era of globalization”, as well speaking to a present culture that risks losing it all to

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planetary degradation. To recover something implies that something has been or is being lost. That loss is experienced through environmental damage explored through Burnside’s poetry of “surrender”, a word that sets in equipoise the idea of renunciation and a willingness to give-in and follow. To do this, Burnside creates a space in which to work against a particular flavour of nostalgia towards an old Scottish cultural practice, not to renounce it, but to rescue it from commodification by the very culture responsible for its demise. Sustaining connections to these practices through a positive nostalgia is a powerful way of reconditioning a relationship to one’s place within a place. In his essay Poetry and a Sense of Place, we find an articulation of what it means to construct a lyric space in which his poetics operates. This lyric space acknowledges a continuum on which various human and non-human ontologies exist, accessible through a suspension of predisposed subject/world formulations. His definition of place explains how that idea comes about: ‘Poetry of place’ concerns itself with specific locales, not to create a sense of local colour, or of any Romantic effect, but to set up a kind of metaphysical space, which is essentially empty, a region of potential in which anything can happen. (1998: 203)

Here, the “place” within a “metaphysical space” seems ponderously abstract, but place, rendered as metaphysical affects the concept of time as it relates to human presence and experience. This, however, is not to say that “poetry of place” has to be some described environs, only that it gestures towards the ontological possibility of a different kind of access to the physical world, ultimately endowing objects and phenomena with a new non-anthropocentric context and time-scale. Rendered in such a way, objects can begin to shift in form, allowing colliding social, physical, and animal bodies to be changed through an encounter somehow outside of the descriptive limits of the here and now. In this thrown condition, a deeper schism of time can gape open, as “the lyric says, in other words, that the flow of time is an illusion: the reality is that things change, things unfold and decay, in the standstill of eternity” (ibid: 205). The lyric space is testing the dynamics of human-oriented temporality and reckoning with new ecological barriers and boundaries. Prompted by the ecological crisis in our midst, one which under the aegis of the Anthropocene charges the present with a new temporal axis on which the history of the nonhuman heaves into view, my engagement with Burnside’s poetry is to trace how that lyric space connects the folk histories of local traditions to the much bigger idea that earlier forms of cultural practice were far less destructive to the environment than our own. The intention is to find a connective tissue through

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the mnemonic element of poetry as an echo of a much earlier tradition of words and music as sustained songs of a culture within an environment. That enrolment to place in the 21st century entails a much larger cultural field from which to draw inspiration, but also a divergence from the modern map where identities are contested as little more than economic or bureaucratic, drawn by degrees of status. Burnside works at Hanseatic latitudes and to read his work is to find the crepuscular coastlines of Edvard Munch and Harald Sohlberg, as much as Hendrik Avercamp or Pieter Breughel’s earlier wintry scenes. These are environs of change where a frozen lake gifts a temporary space like a momentary stage, or the gloaming catches something fleeting, only glimpsed in passing. Within this is a poetic vision rooted in a larger imaginative realm which involves circumventing the normative distinctions of what we mean when we say we are at home, let alone when we say that we belong in a place, that space is contested: To take one example: the Celts, or at least those Celts who once inhabited the British Isles, and informed much of what still remains as identifiably Scots/Irish/Welsh/Cornish culture, recognised space which they called, (in Irish), idir eathara, that is, a boundary that is neither one place nor another, but the space between the two. (1998: 203)

These borders and boundaries could be physical (rivers, glens, north/south borders) or they could be temporal (Halloween, new year, dawn/dusk, day/night), but it is in these slippages, “the points at which one thing becomes another: the old year becomes the new, Summer becomes Autumn, day becomes night” (ibid), that the idea of permanent change drives this vision of loss and renewal. In this article I present and introduce a new 15-stanza poem “Pibroch”. I break up the poem into five parts and invite the reader to step back from the text occasionally to see the poem as a whole.1 The decision to run alongside the poem for the entirety of the article is to see how the various stanzas incorporate the major themes under discussion and build towards a final ecocritical reckoning. Beginning with the local, moving outwards to the numinous possibility of something much larger at stake in the landscape, the sustainability of inherited folk traditions that root a people in a land and a landscape is a starting point for a discussion of cultural practice and identity within a place. Moving beyond the disappearance of older cultural practices to the disappearance of the wild animals that informed much of that culture, I see how the poem pulls away with a longer, planetary lens in the context of nostalgia for a lost culture to chart the consequences of a creaturely sympathy for the lives we have lost and the landscapes we are losing. As the poem develops, the site at which the local and 1

The poem can be found in full at the end of the chapter by kind permission of the author.

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fixed give way to a distant numinosity shows Burnside’s art of uncovering the locus of change without ever being able to pinpoint the exact moment. It is a clever echo of T.S. Eliot’s lines from “Burnt Norton”, the opening section of The Four Quartets which mediates on the material and the spiritual aspects of experience to blur the delineation of place, “I can only say, there we have been / but I cannot say where” (1948: 16).

S COTLAND

AND THE

P IBROCH

Pinning words on to music is fundamental to the development of national traditions. In Scotland of the early 18th century, the dominant ballad form was traditionally a narrative poem set to music. Crucially in oral traditions, lyrics set to music would have a mnemonic quality, their simple repetitive melodies aiding in the process of memorialisation, allowing stories and memories to be passed on and kept alive without the need of notation or classical training. The connection between the mnemonic and sustainable nostalgia finds a link through the abstract nature of this inheritance. Songs which evoke nostalgia towards a history of a people in a place cannot but become the object of that loss itself. In other words, nostalgia is a disclosive, ambivalent mode in that the words and melodies cannot but evoke the time that is now lost. But keeping this connection to the past open or sustained in a place is one way of rescuing nostalgia from its lament of the condition of loss itself, it provides an audial bulwark against encroachment, acting as a kind of frontier between centre and province. Among the themes of the ballads as narrative poems set to song particularly in Scottish music was the longing for the return of the dead as an act of rescue or continuance (cf. Corke 1910). With the elusive resonance of the funereal Pibroch from where it takes its title, the following poem begins in media res: We were talking about the hills when the land fell silent. By that time, the deer were cartoons, soft focus in the rear-view

226 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING mirror, the hare in our headlamps brotherly to nothing but the rain.2

When we are speaking, we are not listening. Furthermore, when we describe something, we are ‘humanizing’, bringing something into being through language; we are calling-forth. Here, the first noun is “hills” and the calling forth comes in to focus by that singular nomination. The “land” from which the hills come forth is then withdrawn in spite of its being called forth by the poem. It does so as an appearance of disappearance, silenced by human speech that has drawn attention to only one aspect of it, the hills. The “deer” as “cartoons” give a first clue about the animist ambition of the poem. In Italian, ‘carta’ is paper and ‘one’ refers to whole or single. ‘Cartone’ is a term recognised as a Renaissance painterly technique which involves first tracing an image in full either by pricking thousands of tiny holes and then covering it with charcoal or using the image on carbonpaper so as to be pressed or transferred on to the canvas. The original cartoon becomes defiled or abandoned. Crucially any cartoons that survive do so by way of their being unused, an almost literal trace of the original before it becomes destined by the human hand and formed as the final art. The cartoon technique involves a process of transferal, or reversal. The latent image leaves something vestigial as an indivisible remainder between man and animal. Burnside incorporates techniques of observation here, as he does with the distortion of the mirror or the pull of the frame to institute the question concerning technology and how it frames our relationship to Nature. This process of withdrawal is one of the consequences of modern technology which sets the world as a series of raw materials like stocks or asset. This ‘equipmentality’ turns things in to what Heidegger calls “Bestand” (1977: 17) or ‘standing-reserve’ where the land becomes a resource for human consumption. 3 Jonathan Bate sees this ocular version of tourism’s hungry consumption with the eye as a parallel to modern industry’s “relentless consumption of matter” (2000: 254). But here, something has happened, the silence becomes deafening, operating as the metaphysical space to be temporarily filled. A world is folding inwards, 2

The poem is headed by an epigraph: “To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before … At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs.” Neil Munro, ‘The Lost Pibroch’

3

“The name "standing reserve" assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object” (Heidegger 1977: 17).

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distance and perspective become distorted through a frame like a pull-zoom of a camera where the line break before ‘mirror’ is a reflection of a diminishing space, setting the poem as focusing in from a position of retreat. Burnside’s warped chronology of the hunted deer – now a Bambi-like anachronism – decommissions the human view of the here-and-now in favour of a reversal of the frame, leaving “the hare in our headlamps” no longer on Whitmanian “brotherly” terms. A distended, reified Nature is caught in the flash of light. It is a momentary freezeframe or fresco, the animal stunned by the artificial rays becomes more than itself in the Zeitlupe of the spotlight.4 The poem continues: Before I came in, I stood in the drive to listen: an owl called, down in the woods by Gillingshill, then nothing, but for a drone I could not parse as music.

These opening lines arrest at the point where we contemplate the abstraction of the local environment by first speaking and then listening in a call and response, and where the language we use is inadequate and faintly imperialistic, silencing the earth’s acoustics by human glossolalia. The word “parse” here functions as limitation in language as an attempt to ‘place’ the music gives over to the incoherence of an imponderable drone. Firstly, parsing a sentence means resolving it into its component parts to analyse its syntactic structure, emphasising the divisions between subject and predicate which here become blurred. Secondly, it is a term from computing whereby code is rendered or ‘parsed’ in order that it can be appropriately ‘translated’ to its destined script. A contemporary example of this is the way search-engines parse words to allow for a broader sweep of the terms as they appear. The drone could be read as something untranslatable by modern technologies, a sustained sound not giving way to syncopation, effectively enchanting it as something pre-technological; an obsolete format for modern sound systems, as mute as a smoke-signal over radio. The deployment of this term is one example in Burnside’s work of a slippage where thought is always in 4

Zeitlupe; literally ‘time-magnifier’. German term for ‘slow-motion’ as cinematic technique: Zeit – ‚time’; Lupe – ‘magnifier’. I am opting to use this term as it gets closer to the phenomenological effects of retarded motion in terms of distance and proximity of the viewer’s position than ‘slow-motion’.

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process and never quite fully achieved, tested between one realm and the next. It is an unsettling condition but one in which he finds a freedom for exploring what he calls “the missed world” (Burnside 2008: 93). As we shall see, this drone could be a projection of our own inclined sound into a landscape, and here, using the quasi-mythical sounds of the Pibroch creates a heightened ephemerality, calling the listener in to a place with a troubling expectation as much as an inclination. The momentary opening in which the words of the poem combine with the music tests the unity the sense of self within a place as an historical lineage of cultural belonging, reaching through time on the sustained notes of the Highland bagpipes (cf. Gelbart 2012: 81-108). According to ethnomusicologist Peter Cooke “the Pibroch is an extended composition in theme and variation form for the Scottish Highland Bagpipe” (1975-76: 93).5 Encountering a stark lack of historical documentation on the Pibroch, Cooke writes of the attempts over the last two centuries to maintain and standardize the rigour with which the player learns the technique. He shares the generally held view that the Pibroch is the “classical music” of the bagpipes and seeks to see the meaning of the term “classical” in a non-European sense. He cites a definition from Asian music as when performed must exhibit learned discipline in an authentic mode, one which must stretch back at least two centuries from master to teacher as “disciple succession is a sine qua non” (ibid: 93). It is a way of at once disclaiming the idea of Scottish ‘folk’ music history as being unique to the history of narrative impulse in song, but by also drawing the comparison with non-Western musical heritages, he positions the history of the Pibroch as one of careful cultural preservation in the face of more dominant musical and cultural modes of the later 18th century and beyond. One of the heaviest blows to the spread of its influence was the battle of Culloden; a word that could be shorthand for Scottish enmity towards the English. The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 brought with it the standardization of imperial rule as Juliet Shields remarks, “the rebellions hastened the demise of feudalism in the Highlands as Parliament enacted legislation to bring the wayward northern periphery under the centralized authority of British government” (2012: 766). Rather than seeing this decisive shift as a case for the loss of Highland culture, Shields instead seeks to see how in to the 19th century, Gaelic poets’ interest in English Romanticism contributed to the very idea of Highland culture rooted by its own sentimental mythology. Shields cites a definition of this literary taxonomy as “a site of Romantic production” rather than a “Romantic object or commodity” (ibid: 766). She sees the Highland clearances leading to a diaspora of Highland 5

“The Pibroch – derived from Scots Gaelic pìòbaireachd, ‘piping’” (Cooke 1975-76: ibid).

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culture and the evolving concept of nostalgia as moving from “pathology to sentiment” (ibid: 767) over the last century and a half. In seeking to cross this ontological divide in poetry’s unit of analysis, Burnside’s folkloric landscape enrols an emotional connection to its own appearance, in this case the longing for a place which is on the other side, sliding into mythology like the sirens’ song. Such appeals to enduring mythic sounds in the landscape risk a sentimental atavism, and the Highland bagpipe here is not a wholly welcome memory: The pibroch, I might have said; but I’ve never felt native so much as local and brief like the stone chill crossing the sands when the haar moves in.

There is an inclination here to imagine the sound as some form of enrolment into local stewardship. As if recognising it would qualify one to speak of the environment in which it is historically situated. But knowledge of a thing is not the experience of a thing. The Pibroch figures somewhere between imaginative resonance and proprietorial anthem and it speaks to the idea of ownership of space as always a form of call and response. But claiming a space is also a defiant political act, and the one who controls the airwaves controls the audience in a misted world. This testing of people and place connected through the absent space as a reverberation could be an unexplored musical tradition in Western harmonics, becoming a way of achieving some liminal status as an historical drone. In facing down the invention of tradition, teetering with the temptation to claim a nostalgic ownership as the ‘piper of place’ he dangles the word ‘might’ as if to chide himself of this sentimental urge. The iconography of the Highland diaspora is not immune to reification as anyone who has ever visited Edinburgh will know. But here, Burnside is questioning this nationalistic hold on his own sense of self in a place he calls home, effectively registered in the ‘haar’, a unique form of fog that rolls in to the east coast of Scotland creating a temporary weather event; its beauty in its locality as it hovers, curiously, a few feet off the ground, not quite claiming the land. Why the summons of ‘the pibroch’? Is it a ready access to the land through sound that cuts through the local mist; the poet as the piper; the lyric poet who stirs the soul of a people in the way the piper of the Pibroch would summon men by its martial call? This falls short by being some kind of self-conscious retreat into a neo-feudalism, fostering sentimental urge into vestigal nationalism. The

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Pibroch is a portent on the wind, one which is “local and brief,” and in pausing momentarily before entering the house, it reminds us of the susceptibility with which we reconstruct Nature at moments when it may please us by Romantic allusion or some imagined pride. Shields documents this particular flavour of nostalgia as it pertains to the Highlands: People from remote or mountainous areas were supposed to be peculiarly susceptible to nostalgia both because their isolated situation fostered stronger attachments to home and because displacement required greater cultural and psychological adjustments for them. Highlanders in particular were “notorious for their susceptibility to nostalgia,” and rumors circulated of entire Highland regiments that fled the battlefield after the sound of bagpipes reminded them of home. (2012: 767)

Reading it as a projection of mawkish sentimentalism, Shields is quick to see how the taxonomy of appropriating such a distinct and alien culture has paid a backhanded compliment to the idea of retaining a connection to the local in the technological age of the despoliation of Nature. With the arrival of the 19th century individual aesthete, many of those ties to other kin in Nature are disappearing, and it is from here where the nostalgia for a Highland sound moves from a question of space to a question of time. Shields traces this pathological conversion through the Romantic recycling of the Gaelic vision, “Whereas Highlanders’ homesickness was caused by spatial or geographic distance from the homeland, Romantic nostalgia depended upon temporal distance, whether historical and communal or psychological and individual, from an irrevocable past” (ibid: 768). Acknowledging a similar scarcity of available writing on the cultural significance of the Pibroch, in effect confirming this historical severance from the past, and perhaps in want of retrospectively accounting for its place in later discourses of ethnomusicality, Cooke identifies one source in Joseph McDonald’s Compleat Theory of 1762 that describes the role of the piper: The original design of the bagpipe . . was to animate a sett of men approaching an enemy and to solemnise rural diversions in fields and before walking companys. To play amidst rocks, hills, valleys and coves where echoes rebounded and not to join a formal regulated concert. (c.1762: 804)

Belonging to oral traditions and coming much later as a cultural mode in Cooke’s analysis, the Pibroch is a sound that rings through the glens and mountains where “echoes rebounded”, distilling the effect of there being no identifiable source for the music. It is a clever ‘echo’ of its own history in Western music where in the

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search for the origin of the sound, it could be said that it is the landscape itself that transmits and reverberates the sound; there is no concert hall, no spotlight on the piper and no domesticated space for the acoustics to find more subtle registers. The elusiveness of the Pibroch as ‘classical’ art is one reason why it is of interest to ethnomusicologists. Another reason for music’s late appearance in native assertions of cultural Scottishness is the fact that music is more ephemeral than literature or other expressive arts particularly at the time – as if such appropriation of an art form could render it in need of apologetic clarification. But this retreat into the present exonerates the poet’s naivete toward registering a sound that lies beyond description. The lyric poet is at odds with the alluring sound in his environment he cannot fathom, poised at the threshold of home and the outside. The following stanzas situate the final part of the poem in the wider context of the Anthropocene as it relates to contemporary theories of sustainability and cultural preservation in the face of a widening ecological crisis that disrupts notions of time as well as space. The incongruity of such a “poetry of place” finds rhetorical resonance as a form of ecocriticism when pitched on a decidedly non-human scale.

T HE W OLF

AT THE

D OOR

The Anthropocene provides the backdrop for talking about non-human ontologies, yet in opening up history on a non-anthropocentric scale it also edifies the condition of time itself. By going to objects in poetry through the nexus of the Anthropocene, the lyric becomes an operational space in which to confront ecological thought. The urgency of the project of a radical realist philosophy that speculates on the autonomy of objects is to answer the ecological crisis that now pervades contemporary thought. The writing of poetry as an ecological register of the comportment of Nature has its roots in British Romanticism where a sublime object is somehow ‘out there’ as an aesthetics of natural beauty to counter the denigration of the landscape of the late 18th century and the concomitant forms of industrialised, alienated labour. Lifting a definition of ‘green Romanticism’ from Kevin Hutchings’s 2007 survey of the ecocritical field, Vince Carducci broadly asserts that it stands to mean “the representation in poetry and other texts of humankind’s position vis-à-vis the natural world” (2009: 634). Careful to warn against appropriating forms of writing that in today’s criticism can be seen as markedly ecologically concerned, Carducci reads ‘green Romanticism’ as an index in finding the beginnings of a reified Nature in the age of capitalist consumption, arguing instead that the modern interpretations of these older texts is to see the conditions for their appearance as “foreshadowing conditions that now

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extend worldwide” (ibid: 634). The Pibroch’s fate is not without historical comparison in this regard. The concern for Carducci is one of an ethics of consumption, so the extent to which issues of sustainability affect studies of literature can find no better rhetorical mode than ecocriticism. In tracing this, Carducci follows Timothy Morton’s work very closely to explore his notion of ‘dark ecology’, defining it as “an aesthetic category”, a way of “healing that which modernity has damaged” (ibid: 634). The ‘dark’ comes from an acknowledgement of failure, after the fact. Writing becomes a process born of consolation, even grief, seeking to ameliorate or radically redefine the paradigm of ecology after Nature. Writing about environment and landscape should aim for what Morton calls ecomimesis, “the poetics of ambience” (2009: 33), the immanent force contained within writing about Nature. It is a way of bypassing the enframing of Nature through language in order to get to the thing being described, as if writing itself draws attention to its own artificiality in order that the subject matter be all the more real. As Morton states in Ecology Without Nature, “ecomimesis aims for immediacy” (2009: 151), and as such has an ecocritical urgency contained within it. It is a form of interpretation of the appearance of Nature (here and previously capitalised to highlight its artificiality), and how writing about Nature contains within it the story of how we identify our place within it. So far in the poem, Burnside has conjured a concatenation of objects both figurative and oblique that interweave a metaphysical operational space. His “poetics of ambience” is the gulf between the present and the timeless that traverses the ontological divide between self and place in the same way Morton’s ecological thought demands a willingness to trespass in to Nature’s ‘standing reserve.’ Running alongside this is the concept of the Anthropocene which according to Jeremy Davies, is “a way to help us get a grasp on the fact that green politics now has to confront the role that human societies play in deep time itself” (2016: 59). The Anthropocene is in one sense an acknowledgment of failure that our precarious material world of supply and demand is beginning to buckle under its own excess, killing off the source of its strength. But to insert the Anthropocene as catch-all way of referring to carbon capitalism as the prima facie case for global warming “in some ill-defined slice of the recent past” (2016: 110) is an error in the judgement of scale that Davies believes is where the urgency of its appearance resides. The ecocritical value in attending to poetry is to delve into this deep time where mysticism comes unbridled from dogma. I pick up the poem halfway through stanza nine, at the turn of the poem following the ‘haar’, and here the poem ushers towards this new temporality, a register to locate the mysterious

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drone of the Pibroch, a waveform that lies beyond human frequencies. To do this, Burnside turns to lost wild animals that once roamed Scotland: Curious, now, to think of the wolf as gone, as if it had once been loose in the slink of a mind that thinks itself home, if only by knowing the seasons;

The wolf here figuring as an historical feature of the Scottish landscape with its own howling drone is framed as a way of pulling the ‘mirror’ further back through time. A pack of wild wolves is certainly a danger to humans but having now disappeared from Scotland due to human hunting, it could be that the human is now the prime threatening force in Nature. It is difficult to tell if the latter two stanzas refer to the wolf or the speaker of the poem, such is the shared mammalian instinct to think home by the seasons. The preternatural reading of home by the cyclical attunement to the seasons places the wolf and the human on older temporal lines, allowing the poem to be read in the context of a longer planetary scale which the Anthropocene affords. Despite its proliferating interpretations, the indeterminacy of the Anthropocene concept could be driven simply by the question of knowing how powerful we are as a species. This poem in some ways charts that historical journey at once through the preservation of human cultural practices in light of domineering, globally imperialist forces, but also in the personal psychological drama of one’s political and ecological self as it relates to the idea of home. The poem ends in questioning this unearthly music, figuring as some inner parallel universe offering an escape clause to the reified nostalgia of what once was, and the choice to see one’s own life as sustainable with and codetermined by the mute register of animated life. It is a reckoning for humanity as the custodian of all living things: and what would it make of the dog who stands at our door, how he seems to have waited months for a sound we can’t fathom,

234 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING somewhere between a pulse and the song of the earth, beguiling him out of the warmth to his shadowless brother?

The dog-wolf is a recurring animal. A liminal creature caught between wilderness and the human shadow. At what point does one become the other, and does the domestication of the hound represent a step on the road to the domination and domestication of Nature? There’s no halloo of the hunting party baying the dogs to pursue the quarry, just puzzlement remains as the silence from the opening line calls the man and his hound to the fathomless sound that the poem has tracked so closely. The dog-whistle, inaudible to human ears carries sound waves at such a higher pitch as if to prove this ephemeral register lies beyond range, just as dog years passively shorten the scale once more, disclosing the limitations of human perceptibility. Here we can say that the referential element of the Pibroch figures as representative of a sound of a natural order, one that has been fatefully muted by the human-made world. The ephemerality of music as opposed to literature highlights here the sonorous quality to the earth’s natural timbres: a cacophony of sounds underwritten by a time-stamped “pulse” before the poetic “song of the earth”, a Heideggerian flourish which cannot go unreferenced to Jonathan Bate’s new-millennium poetics of the same name from 2000. The wonder at which the sound calls the speaker is one that “beguiles”, as if only something so mysterious could affect him to come away from his “warmth”, the gradual warming of the earth in exchange for a domesticated peace. The sonorous quality of sound across a landscape has an immaterial quality to it, in other words it cannot be placed. In Burnside’s lyric it is a connective, literal, sustained note in the form of the classical bagpipes, and with its funereal and martial resonance, it signifies universal loss and the call to protect in the spirit of a unity in nature. It is a warning that speaks for mankind in the form of a memorial toll, recalling John Donne, “never send to know / for whom the bell tolls.” The expanded lyricism of this poem takes us from local place to global time eschewing the seduction of nostalgia for a sustained sound that carries into the present and must, for causes that lie beyond human scales, remain undisturbed.

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P IBROCH J OHN B URNSIDE

To the make of a piper go seven years of his own learning and seven generations before … At the end of his seven years, one born to it will stand at the start of knowledge, and lending a fond ear to the drone, he may have parley with old folks of old affairs. Neil Munro, ‘The Lost Pibroch’

We were talking about the hills when the land fell silent. By that time, the deer were cartoons, soft focus in the rear-view mirror, the hare in our headlamps brotherly to nothing but the rain. Before I came in, I stood in the drive to listen: an owl called, down in the woods by Gillingshill, then nothing, but for a drone I could not parse as music.

The pibroch, I might have said; but I’ve never felt native so much as local and brief like the stone chill crossing the sands when the haar moves in. Curious, now, to think of the wolf as gone,

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as if it had once been loose in the slink of a mind that thinks itself home, if only by knowing the seasons; and what would it make of the dog who stands at our door, how he seems to have waited months for a sound we can’t fathom, somewhere between a pulse and the song of the earth, beguiling him out of the warmth to his shadowless brother?

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R EFERENCES Bate, Jonathan (2000): The Song of the Earth, London: Picador. Bristow, Tom (2015): The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, and Place, London: Palgrave Pivot. Burnside, John (1998): “Poetry and a Sense of Place.” In: Nordlit. Arbeidstidsskrift i litteratur, 1, 201-222. Burnside, John (2008): “A Science of Belonging: Poetry as Ecology.” In: Robert Crawford (ed.), Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 91-106. Burnside, John (2009): The Hunt in the Forest, London: Cape Poetry. Burnside, John (2017): “Pibroch.” In: The London Review of Books, 39/17. p. 38. Carducci, Vince (2009): “Ecocriticism, Ecomimesis, and the Romantic Roots of Modern Ethical Consumption.” In: Literature Compass, 3/3, pp. 642-646. Cooke, Peter (1975-1976): “The Pibroch Repertory: Some Research Problems.” In: Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 102, pp. 93-102. Corke, A.T. (1910): “The Romance of the Pibroch.” In: The Musical Times, 51/811, pp. 578-580. Davies, Jeremy (2016): The Birth of the Anthropocene, Oakland: University of California Press. Eliot, T.S (1948): The Four Quartets, London: Faber & Faber. Gelbart, Matthew (2012): “Allan Ramsey, The Idea of ‘Scottish Music’ and the Beginnings of ‘National Music’ in Europe.” In: Eighteenth-Century Music, 9/1, pp. 81-108. Heidegger, Martin (1971): Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, London: Harper and Row. Heidegger, Martin (1977): The Question Concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt, New York: Garland Publishing. MacDonald, Joseph (c.1762): “A Compleat Theory of the Scots Highland Bagpipe.” In: Edinburgh University Library, MS La. 3, p. 804. Morton, Timothy (2009): Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Morton, Timothy (2012): The Ecological Thought, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Sampson, Fiona (2012): Beyond the Lyric: A Map of Contemporary British Poetry, London: Chatto & Windus. Shields, Juliet (2012): “Highland Emigration and the Transformation of Nostalgia in Romantic Poetry.” In: European Romantic Review, 23/6, pp. 765-785.

Behemoth, Nostalgia and Ecological Agency N IKLAS S ALMOSE

How effective are Hollywood representations of the Anthropocene? Inherent in the generic format of Blockbuster cinema is undeniably its nostalgia. The construction of narrative based on conflict and resolution obligates a dénouement that ends with resolution and a return to the ordinary after a climatic and tense dramatic curve. The conservatism in these films regarding religion, humanity, family, colonialism, Euro-centricity forces the cinematic ends to confirm these nostalgic values. Nostalgia, thus, in Hollywood films on ecological crises is reactionary and not an effective instigator for what could be termed ecological agency. Mike Hulme has analyzed five different reception studies of The Day After Tomorrow, one of the earliest and most discussed cli-fi films.1 His conclusion is that the film “cannot be said to have induced the sea-change in public attitudes or behaviour that some advocates had been hoping for” (2009: 214). One complication might be that the spectacle film in its fantastic format makes true identification with the subjects and situation impossible: “[T]he taste for massive scale tends to dissolve the sense of personal responsibility,” writes GuinardTerrin, “potentially fostering a form of cynicism due to an inability to project oneself into the future. Finally, this strident aesthetic, like any sensationalist mode, will in the end lose its ability to shock” (2016: 185). Maybe another complication is related to the very concept of apocalyptic narratives. Grimbeek offers a few very plausible explanations for the failure of these narratives in her analysis of Margaret Atwood’s environmentalism:

1

The usual definition of climate fiction (cli-fi) is fiction representing the consequences of man-made climate change and global warming. In addition, the term cli-fi could be interpreted more freely since it deals with climate change, and climate change per definition is not only a man-made condition, but can also be caused by volcanic eruptions, plate tectonics, and solar radiation.

240 | FUTURES W ORTH P RESERVING [R]epeated ringing of doomsday bells may engender a sense of fatalistic resignation, rather than action. It is further problematic that many of these apocalyptic visions rely on a variety of nostalgia that implicitly advocates a return to what is seen as a more benevolent past, before the widespread use of pesticides or when anthropogenic climate change still could be reversed, and by implication to a time when humans had little perceptible impact on nonhuman nature. […] [I]t deprives most of humanity of agency, leaving it at the mercy of some deus ex machina […] (Grimbeek 2017: 20)

Depriving humanity of agency seems contradictory to both the potentials and the aspirations of cli-fi narratives, but the nostalgia involved in these narratives, as Grimbeek argues, tend to construct a retrograde and conservative narrative structure. This chapter will analyze Zhao Liang’s activist documentary/cinematic poem Behemoth (2015) in terms of ecological agency as an alternative representation of the Anthropocene to traditional cli-fi narratives. Behemoth also works with nostalgic imagery, but in a more complex, critical and ambiguous way than blockbuster films. This is a film about the apocalypse of our society, our social relations, our economy and progress, our interaction with machines, and our dreams and futures, without a single frame depicting the fictive end of the world or dwelling on the sublimity of ecological disaster. Situated in the real and local, the end of the world imagery is more intimate. I will designate the trajectories of this analysis more in detail in the end of this section. First I will discuss some preliminary but important concepts for the analysis: the critical discourse of the Anthropocene, art as climate-activism, recent critical work on cli-fi, solastalgia and its relation to nostalgia, cli-fi and conservative nostalgia in Hollywood, and finally, what is ecological agency? The hegemonic status of humanity, the anthropocentricity of human discourse and its effects and impact on biogeology, as well as the critical disquisition of these issues, is at heart in what we now call the Anthropocene. Taking the recent Anthropocene challenge of the place of humanity in the world seriously leads to reinvestigations and wide-ranging re-appreciations of basic concepts of humanity and conventional dichotomies like, for instance, history versus prehistory, culture versus nature, human time versus geological time. This de-stabilization of classic dichotomies can be called a “reset of modernity,” using Bruno Latour’s words, where we are forced to understand the world as unified “us” rather than “we” and “them” if the planet is to last beyond this century (2016: 12). Less observed, the dichotomy between man and nature is also an essential trope of modern nostalgia; nostalgia playing an important part in representations of the Anthropocene, especially in conservative blockbuster cli-fi films.

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Sublime images of the awe and horror involved in the human/nature trajectory need to situate an audience in a balanced conceptualization of the relation between humanity and nature, not in the escapist spectacle of ecological disaster. This obviously goes beyond the traditional delightful horror of the Kantian sublime in that the sense of the apocalyptic grants the sublime an immediate existential angst where diegetic humans are not only observers but also victims. The increased tendency in contemporary art to react to and comment on the Anthropocene situation in a movement referred to as art as climate-activism, yields a desire to erase the boundary between nature and human. Two such art works can illustrate the new concepts of Anthropocene sublimity. Hanna Ljungh explores the relationship between Sweden’s highest mountain Kebnekaise and humans in the video I am mountain, to measure impermanence (2016). The small humans crawling up the mountain peak are literally absorbed by nature, rather than being observers. The unbroken five and a half hour take recreates the human real time experience of the melting southern peak of Kebnekaise and as such rejects, at least superficially, the isolated human perspective of the mountain and regains nature’s powerful aura and the insignificance of human endeavor. Similarly, Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson created headlines during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris 2015 with his art work Ice Watch when he freighted 12 ice blocks from Greenland and positioned them in melting fashion at the Place du Panthéon in a circle resembling the ticking doomsday clock. These illustrative examples of artistic climate-activism build on a reinterpretation of the sublime: nature is still awe and horror, but now implemented with a sense of concern and care, an in-nature balance between subject and object. Cli-fi is more popular than ever; ecological disasters and post-apocalyptic scenarios satisfy a narrative lust in the twenty-first century. As a genre, it is also a highly lucrative business. The recent body of critical analyses of the cli-fi genre are, thus, most welcome. Not only because of the popularity of these media products, but more so because of the alarming situation of the Anthropocene. These discussions have affective, aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions. Alexa Weik von Mossner (2017) examines ecological narratives’ affective dimensions in Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative focusing on reception from a cognitive perspective. Adam Trexler (2015) in Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change investigates how the novel has become an essential tool to construct meaning in an age of climate change. Central to Trexler’s examination is how the novel transmediates abstract scientific facts to tangible, fictive experiences. Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann have published several books on fiction and ecology, most notably Ecology and Popular Film (2009) and Film and Everyday

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Eco-disasters (2014). In the latter book, they pay attention not to the spectacular but the often insignificant and less discussed aspects of sustainability, such as water and clothing. The monograph also questions how environmental activism and Hollywood can cooperate, the conclusion explicitly stressing this issue: “Can the Film Industry and the Environmental Movement Mix?” (Murray/Heumann 2014: 146) These samples of critical books all deal with popular media and their overall framework is positioned within popular culture, normative criticism, Foucauldian analysis and ecocriticism. Timothy Morton (2007) takes a more philosophical and aesthetical approach to fiction and ecology in Ecology without Nature, Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics where he introduces two important concepts: dark ecology and ambient poetics. The concept of dark ecology is an attempt to de-romanticize our idea of nature, to incorporate the classic duality of man and nature into an interconnectedness, while ambient poetics is a tool in fiction, and in all environmental rendering, to accomplish this theory. Overall, these eco texts constitute a small selection of a burgeoning mass of critical material on environmental issues and fictional representation and their respective depths are important and overwhelming. However, they do not discuss nostalgia, either as an aesthetic modality or as political entity, to any extent, which is remarkable since nostalgia is an integrated part of any discourse of man/nature and ecological temporalities. Further, their focus, with the exception of Morton, on popular culture neglects other modes of artistic communication of Anthropocene issues. Glenn Albrecht’s introduction of the term solastalgia at the Ecohealth Conference in Montreal in May 2003, has added an important and appreciated emotional and individual dimension to ecological discussions and issues: “As human impacts on the planet increase, it should come as no surprise that in addition to bio-physiological pathology induced by environmental pollution, there should be psychological illness linked to a negative relationship between humans and their support environment” (Albrecht et al. 2007: 95). Albrecht et al. categorize solastalgia as a somaterric illness (body and earth-related) and file it under psychoterratic illnesses (ibid: 95-96). As such an illness, according to them, it is close to nostalgia which is an “old form of psychoterratic illness” (ibid: 96). Their definition of nostalgia is, unfortunately, antiquated since, according to them, nostalgia results mainly from displacement in space such as refugees or migrants (ibid). This is close to Johannes Hofer’s original definition from 1688 but does not take into consideration Immanuel Kant’s radical reinterpretation of nostalgia a century later. In his Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View] (1796/97) he asserts that nostalgia is not curable, since

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one’s longing is not for the place of childhood but the childhood itself, therefore the loss is absolute: The homesickness of the Swiss (and, as I have it from the mouth of an experienced general, also the Westphalians and Pomeranians from certain regions) that seizes them when they are transferred to other lands is the result of a longing for the places where they enjoyed the very simple pleasures of life – aroused by the recollection of images of the carefree life and neighborly company in their early years. For later, after they visit these same places, they are greatly disappointed in their expectations and thus also find their homesickness cured. To be sure, they think that this is because they cannot bring back their youth there. (Kant 2006: 71)

Albrecht et al.’s definition of solastalgia being different from nostalgia is by virtue of how those “who are still in their home environs can also experience place-based distress in the face of the lived experience of profound environmental change” (Albrecht et al. 2007: 96). The modern definition of nostalgia is exactly about a distress in the present triggering strong sentiments for another place or time. Time being irrecoverable and place being unreachable is the essence of nostalgia. The bittersweet character of nostalgic experience is a result of the charm of the dream and the bitter pill of its futility. The nostalgic longings can be subjectively temporal, such as for one’s childhood, or spatiotemporal, for a utopia, paradise, another world – in short what could be called ontological. The nostalgic home has to be interpreted freely as any space/time that one identifies with and longs for. In those terms, the longing away (such as the German Sehnsucht) also belongs to the nostalgic category. I would also sort solastalgia into the overall nostalgic sentiments as a precision, and subcategory, of a nostalgia that is triggered by an environmental change and distress. These longings that result from this distress are chiefly of a desire either for past, rural, pre-industrial times or for utopian, unEarthly spaces. Furthermore, these longings are not in any way exclusive to our immediate, contemporary times of a heightened awareness of climate change and the potential destruction of our planet, but can be traced back to the Romantics’ reactions to early industrialization and modernity as a whole. Kimberly K. Smith argues that nostalgia actually is the “product of – and indelibly shaped by – nineteenth- and twentieth-century conflicts over the political significance of the past” and as such is related to progress as a “progressive paratheory” (2000: 505506). Likewise, Svetlana Boym’s modern concept of nostalgia originates in its reaction to modernity: “I realized that nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of

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our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress” (2001: xv). Obviously, the notion of past time is essential in any discourse on ecological issues and sustainability. Either a world preserved or a world imagined needs to be reassessed in terms of past experience, dreams and memories. Providing one example of how a contemporary blockbuster adventure film, Geostorm (2017), situates itself in a nostalgic discourse we can turn to the end of the film. Hannah, the daughter of chief architect and protagonist Jake Lawson – the rescuer of the world in Geostorm – becomes the moral center at the end of the film: “You can’t undo the past. All you can do is face what is ahead,” she says, “One planet, one people. As long as we remember that we share one future, we will survive.” Although this is a future-directed epilogue, it stills acknowledges the past both as an unredeemable past necessary to forget in order to move on, but also as a concrete remembrance of a global, universal project. Taking this a step further, what Geostorm actually communicates is not real change, but a status-quo (or revival) where the global, capitalist concept of the world, anthropocentric in essence, still prevails. This too is a firm nostalgic and conservative notion of nuclear families and a Eurocentric worldview, enforced on us partly because of the generic structure of a character-driven Hollywood narrative. In the end of Geostorm, man and nature are portrayed as conqueror and romance in the pathetic construction of a fishing scene. Michael Svoboda elegantly puts words to Hollywood’s incapability to update its narrative systems: “Thus, far from dealing with the challenges posed by living in the new geological epoch that is the Anthropocene, these films reboot the Holocene” (2014: 19). In the end, narratives about the Anthropocene should promote ecological agency of some kind. How can we be inspired to act on what reportedly are bleak and catastrophic facts about our planetary and biological future? How do we deal with what has been referred to as the crisis of humanity? Ecofeminist Val Plumwood emphasizes our own role in the future of the planet: “If our species does not survive the ecological crisis it will probably be due to our failure to imagine and work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves and our high energy, high consumption, and hyper-instrumental societies adaptively […] We will go onwards in a different mode of humanity or not at all” (2002: 1). Furthermore, we cannot solely depend, as McKenzie Wark explains, on three common resolutions: (1) the Market will take care of everything, (2) we need a new technology, or, the worst (3) a romantic, nostalgic turn away from the modern (cf. Wark 2016: xv). Making the Anthropocene entertainment and spectacle (Capitalist realism or Capitalist romance/nostalgia in Wark’s terms) is not an alternative. Cinema as a sensual and dominating art plays an essential part in this

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collaborative effort of ecological agency. With great power comes great responsibility. With Zhao Liang’s Behemoth we are closing in on that responsibility. Liang himself has addressed doubts about cinema’s role in terms of ecological agency: “I have my own aesthetic views and my opinions about life, but I don’t think that artistic works can change society,” he says in an interview in The New York Times. “They are very weak. I’ve made a lot of documentaries, but most are only available in film libraries for scholars to study. It’s disappointing” (Qin 2015). Nevertheless, narratives about the Anthropocene have to challenge the fundamental human attitude in order to succeed. The concept of a post-humanity where the rigid anthropocentric binaries and boundaries are questioned follows the crisis of humanity. This analysis of Behemoth investigates how the film negotiates three different albeit related, acute conditions: the Anthropocene condition (present), the Posthuman condition (future), and the Nostalgic condition (past). It is within the interplay of these three positions that Behemoth, I argue, instigates an ecological agency so essential in the project of sustainability. Behemoth utilizes a modernist nostalgic dichotomic strategy to emotionally engage spectators in contemporary Anthropocene issues with the potential to create an ecological agency that Hollywood nostalgic cli-fi narratives are not able to do. Despite Liang’s doubts about the impact of his film, its aesthetic form still validates the necessary moral responsibilities and emotional consequences in Anthropocene film making. Hence, we need do discuss Behemoth in the same category of art as climate-activism.

B EHEMOTH : ART ACTIVISM

IN

C INEMATIC F ORM

Behemoth opens with a blast! A tranquil long take of a coal pit, sandy and dry as a wasteland, is interrupted by a detonating explosive charge. The effect on the viewer is tremendous, shocking and unsettling since the sound of the explosion dynamically is as far from the preceding silence as possible. The emotional effect is physical, revolting, and fearful. Even the camera tripod, situated far away, moves during the explosion, revealing a material connection of what happens in the mine with the filmmaker and his audience. Two more explosions follow from different angles; all of them expose black and reddish clouds coming from the interior of Earth. This feels like a war on nature. However, it is also a war, more metaphorically, on those simplistic nostalgic devices celebrating utopian spaces and western humanities we find in popular cli-fi cinema and thus is a detonation against simple solutions and escapist cli-fi fiction as well. After the third explosion

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there is an emerging non-diegetic music – Tuvan throat singing (the voice of the people who are explicitly affected and exploited by this toxic enterprise) – and a super slow motion take on fragments dancing in the sky from the explosion. This ends the prologue, which sets the polemic and poetic tone of the whole film. The image of Earth here is entirely the opposite of the coherent globe in Hollywood spectacles. The image of a coherent Earth in many cli-fi films can be traced back to the first photo taken of Earth, Earthrise, from the moon in 1968. The vision of Earth from space is the “emblem of a humanity which apparently has conquered the planetary limitations and can observe itself from outside, seemingly objective,” writes Johan Fredrikzon apropos Earthrise (2017: 45; my translation).2 Fredrikzon argues that Earthrise could be considered as one of the first narratives of the Anthropocene. He refers to the photo as “a planetary selfie which superficially showed a vulnerable Earth but whose very representation demanded a dominant species capable of shaping and controlling it according to its needs” (ibid; my translation).3 This potent, melancholic emblem of humanity turned out to be not an image of the future but a lamenting fantasy of the past. The image of the beautiful, lonely planet is also what sojourns at the end of several epic cli-fi catastrophe films, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and 2012 (2009) being two notable examples. The Day After Tomorrow ends with a view of Earth from an international space station providing an extraordinary sense of hope, and even satisfaction that Earth still prevails, after the tremendous, devastating and rapid superstorms that create a new ice age. In 2012, the protagonists approach a new world and home. In the final sequence, three colossal, rescuing submarines move steadily and determinedly towards the home of modern humans on the African continent, in pursuit of a home similar to the one they have lost. The camera zooms out and we embrace the coherent, albeit changed, planet Earth. Behemoth approaches this image of human coherence antithetically; this is human domination of a different kind – of destruction, madness, capital, the inhuman – blowing our planet to pieces. Ultimately, in contrast to the cli-fi spectacle, Behemoth’s blast is very reminiscent of two other films. The first, and most obvious, is Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983) whose title means unbalanced life in the Hopi language. The film criticizes our modern world and investigates the complex relationship between nature, society and technology. The 2

“Emblem för en mänsklighet som tycks ha övervunnit de planetära begränsningarna och kan observera sig själv utifrån, tillsynes objektivt” (original Swedish citation).

3

“En planetär selfie som ytligt sett visade en sårbar jord men vars själva framställning fordrade en dominerande art kapabel att forma och kontrollera den efter sina behov” (original Swedish citation).

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slow motion sequence of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis is rendered in a similar way as the sequence in Behemoth with Philip Glass’ mesmerizing music as an echo of the Mongolian overtone singing. Both these films distrust verbal language and their audio-visual effects are very similar and allude to primitivist narratives of the apocalypse. The scene is also reminiscent of the penultimate scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970) where Antonioni literarily blows up capitalism and materialism in slow motion synchronized with the furious Pink Floyd song “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” Several critics, most notably Jason W. Moore, challenge the term Anthropocene since they claim that it is not all humanity that is responsible for the climate change but rather actors within the industrial capitalist system. “From this standpoint, we may ask,” writes Moore, “[a]re we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene – the ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital?” (2017: 596). In the Capitalocene sense, the poised fury of Behemoth is not pointed at humanity as a whole, but towards those who are responsible for the Anthropocene condition. The film being mostly about the victims of Chinese exploitation of land and humans, nostalgia, as we will see, operates in a very different mode in this film compared with more traditional clifi narratives, but, as in Koyaanisqatsi, non-Western concepts of nature and the world form a framework in its dichotomic representation of nature and culture. Behemoth is a very intertextual work and the many associations and allusions to past texts – filmic, literary, mythic – position the film in a recycled and mythical orbit. The very title of the film is the name of a mythical beast found in various forms and meanings from the Book of Job (40:15-24) to Jewish eschatology, such as the Book of Enoch (60:7-8) and its etymology can be traced back to Egyptian and Hebrew. Without being too specific, the title connotes through its mythical significance monster, beast, destruction and chaos. In the film this alludes to the monster of modernity, progress, industrialization and profit. This monster, the film informs us in its very last image through its voice over, is none other than ourselves: “This is who we are. We are that monster. The monster minions.” We destroy ourselves and the world surrounding us, the film suggests, and our lack of agency makes us nothing but a beast’s servants. The other potent intertextual reference is Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320). The structure of the film is loosely based on Dante’s work, moving through for the most part Inferno, and then, briefly in the end, Purgatory and Paradise. In the film, we are guided by an unknown man and a narrative voice over giving us short poetic complements to the images. There is nothing overtly didactic about these fragments of words; however, in the context they are read in it is impossible not

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to be influenced by how they portray change, destruction and the immorality of the coal and steel corporations. This guide, then, has on a superficial level the role of both Virgil and Beatrice. If one would like to make a comparative reading of these two texts, I am sure it would be informative, but it would not change the overall experience of the film. The chronological structure of Inferno and Paradise is significant for the film as well as the imagery of hell in Inferno, which provides an auditory and visual background to how the film approaches its depiction of the mines as a metonymy of hell, not mythically, but as a real hell on Earth. The mythical intertext also illustrates the hopeless venture in looking back and learning from history and art. Much like modernist poet T.S. Eliot’s mythical method it enables a dialogue with the past but, unlike Eliot, it simultaneously denies it any value. Additionally, the past is further represented by the many mirrors in the film, symbols of retrospection as well as individual introspection. Significantly, our guide carries a mirror on his back, constantly showing what is behind him. In the final scene of the film, he is walking in one of these horrific, desolate Chinese ghost towns with his mirror. In the mirror reflection we see one of the mining workers walking with his green plant in a pot; in an instant, he is gone, vanished. Liang appears to show us in this potent final image that even the idealism involved in trying to find fertile ground for this desolate plant as well as dreaming of past glories, is a chimera. We need other action. In a way, the most emotionally troublesome part of the film is the ending sequence in the enormous ghost town. Liang informs us in the ending titles that there are more than one hundred unused towns in China, built during an economic boom and then deserted before inhabited. On the surface, everything seems perfect, an idyll, and a paradise. The streetlights are changing colors, proper traffic signs everywhere and roads in perfect shape. Towering up on the sides of the highway are tall, majestic apartment buildings; their red color, though, betrays the idyll and hints that this is, indeed, the work of the devil. The color red is used throughout the film to represent hell: the mining trucks, safety helmets, the fire beneath, are all red. This city is form without content, technical structure without life. This is what all the suffering of the workers has mounted to, Liang seems to suggest, a meaningless construction of nothingness, material without spirit. In a brilliant image, we see the fresh green grass in the foreground and the ghost city in the background. In the grass, we notice our guide, naked, vulnerable. The narrator asks if this is our dream, or our paradise? The utopian configuration is thus reversed from how Hollywood films instigate the hope of either a gentler future or a recovery of a past world before industrialization. In Behemoth, there is no such dream place; paradise is empty. There is only death as shown by all the

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tombstones in front of the steel factories creating an explicit linkage between industry and death. The overall emotional impact of Behemoth is a result of how elegantly and diversified the film juxtaposes classic modern dichotomies: man/nature, man/machine, nature/culture, paradise/hell, utopia/dystopia and so on. It sets up these dichotomies from the beginning with the image of our naked guide, lying down in foetal position against the dark and smoky coal pits. The discord of that contrast, the naked skin, the reference to the child, the vulnerability of the human, against the effects of the industrial beast is striking. The nostalgic implications come immediately thereafter with the narrator’s assurance that “Once upon a time” this pit’s edge of the inferno, “gushed with mountain springs” and now it is “a land of deadly silence.” The generic fairy tale opening ironically places this film in reality rather than fiction – but it also signals how important the past is, not as a utopian dream, but as a strategy to measure what we have lost, and what we will lose. The deadly silence is also a stark contrast to the images of the past/dreams in blockbuster films, where, as for example in Waterworld (1995), the image of birds and their sounds is an important metonymy for a healthy mother nature. Rather, the death of nature and life is represented by an eerie image of stone sheep in front of the steel factories; animals that from a distance look real. These dichotomies should not be seen as contradictory to the film’s posthuman ambitions; rather, they add a critical perspective to the very distinction between, for example, man and nature, showing the absurdity in separating the two. As in many cli-fi films, the color green is indicative of nature, ecology, hope, past, and connotes the ecological movement and dreams of a green world. In Waterworld and also in Interstellar (2014), for example, the color is hopeful, soothing, whereas in Behemoth it becomes only a past forever gone, a reminder of a lively planet. In this sense, the use of green is more overtly nostalgic since it triggers the essential aspect of nostalgia’s temporal irreversibility. The recurring apposing images of nature and man effectively implant these sentiments. The dichotomies exist in the stark visual and auditory disparity between montage of nature or human activity and industry, fires of the mines, machines. They exist, as the only moments of glimpses of hope, in a couple of scenes figuring Mongolian families and a horse rider on the green steppe where industry and destruction are temporarily missing. Usually Liang fuses the contrasts in the same image, such as the scene of the sheep running down the coal pit slopes to the vanishing green pasture, or in metonymic images of a single green bush and a dead tree in the workers’ shantytown. Suffocation is the best description of the experience of the film; almost nowhere are spectators allowed a glimpse of fresh air or hope. Humans are intimately represented through eating, cleaning, dressing, examining

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their wounds, but their humanity is successively related to machines. The way they travel down the pits in elevators or tracks, working in the furnaces, picking coal, recalls the stylized and alienated workers in Fritz Lang’s expressionist silent classic Metropolis (1927). Like the workers in Lang’s film, the workers in Behemoth are equated with machines. Suffering from pneumoconiosis, black lung disease, these migrant workers are hospitalized and connected to machines in order to survive. Bottles with distilled black fluid from their lungs are piled up next to each other. One worker adjusts something on his three wheeler; in one image he has to lean his head towards the motorcycle and machine and man merge into one through their respective grey color. In another scene a worker gathers small metal objects from his hands and a series of close ups of black faces epitomizes both nature and machine: their magnified wrinkles and shapes resemble miniature landscapes but the blackness of their skin echoes the destroyed landscapes they temporarily inhabit. Liang does not in a Michael Moore fashion try to give the industry itself a voice; its invisibility represents its lack of transparency, ethics and empathy. Behemoth offers an emotional experience, but it is a complex emotional response different from polemic and propagandistic cinema. Furthermore, bodies are frangible, mortal and not heroic and immortal as in adventure films. The nostalgic dichotomic strategy Liang uses echoes the essence of nostalgia – its melancholic and bitter aftertaste rather than, as in Hollywood, its initial phase of joyfulness and opportunity. The juxtaposing strategy is also highly reminiscent of modernist nostalgic aesthetics. Initially during modernity, nostalgia as an emotion was considered highly suspect. If being modern was to be part of a universe in which, as Karl Marx said, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air” (Marx/Engels 2012: 37), then being nostalgic was a symptom of poor adaptability to the modern way, and as such was a despicable ‘disease’ in the eyes of progress. Kimberley Smith writes that nostalgia “silence[d] the victims of modernization […]” and made their emotions “suspect” (2000: 507). Nostalgia was considered conservative and reactionary in the age of rationalization. Psychologists and sociologist attempted to see nostalgia as an effect of modernity. For example, Georg Simmel, in his groundbreaking dissection of modern life, asserts in “The Metropolis and Mental Life” that there was an aspect of modernization that interfered with human well-being (cf. 1971 [1903]: 324-339). The age of modernization was thus a time of contrasts, of conflicts between the old and the new. Maybe this time could even be described as “schizophrenic” as Karin Johannisson argues: an interior break as a result of living in two different worlds at the same time, alienation to the new urban world and modernization (cf. 2001: 133). A potent, and illustrative, image of this “schizophrenia” is Walter

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Benjamin’s famous and almost apocalyptic description of Paul Klee’s Angelos Novus: A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (1968: 257)

The dichotomy between progress and longings for the past so inherent in modernity is expressed elegantly by the “angel of history” who reluctantly moves towards the future without any opportunity to stop, reflect, and heal what has been lost in the past. Immanent in this dichotomy is a strong longing for times past and “the slower rhythms of the past, for continuity, social cohesion and tradition” (Boym 2001: 16). For the writers of the modernist era, nostalgia became a tactic for expressing anti-progress sentiments, nihilism, alienation and misanthropy. Since, as we have seen above, nostalgia was associated with anti-rational feelings and expressions, the use of nostalgia became, in fact, a rebellion against ideas of progress and the project of rationality. It also became a highly personal strategy to handle a loss of faith in humanity as a whole and a sense of transcendental homelessness (cf. Lukacs 1974: 41). In a post-Nietzschean world without values, there was a strong need to find tradition and stability. Either the spiritual homes were in the past or in utopia, which in one sense could be the same thing. These reactions necessitated an aesthetic that could handle nostalgic emotions in a profound way. Since the modern writers were also very aware that they were modern they invented, or reworked, a style that suited their thematic concerns. Liang’s use of nostalgia as an objection to modernity and progress using animatedly contrasting images to influence the spectator to join the narrative’s lust for nature (past times/spaces) is often also explicit in D. H. Lawrence’s works. The strategy of juxtaposing the natural and the cultural is evident in The Rainbow (1915) in a series of montages in section two of chapter one. Lawrence moves between the idyllic, pastoral, natural landscape and the effects of the industrialization and civilization in a way that creates a strong impression of anti-

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modernity and longing back to a natural state. It is not only the montage itself that is effective, but also the choice of words in describing the narrator’s different attitudes to the past and present. Civilization is represented by “red, crude houses plastered on the valley in masses […]” and “the dim smoking hill of the town” whereas nature intrudes with its “bushes of lilac and guelder-rose and privet […]” (Lawrence/Kinkead-Weekes 1989: 14). The “sulphurous smell of pit-refuse burning” is contrasted with the “daffodils […] thick in green and yellow” (ibid). Lawrence’s juxtaposing style is carried on in the famous scene with the mare and the locomotive in Women in Love (1920), where Lawrence effectively creates the image of now and then, or rather now and there, since this ‘then’ is in its utopian, natural way, rather spatial than temporal: But he sat glistening and obstinate, forcing the wheeling mare, which spun and swerved like a wind, and yet could not get out of the grasp of his will, nor escape from the mad clamour of terror that resounded through her, as the trucks thumped slowly, heavily, horrifying, one after the other, one pursuing the other, over the rails of the crossing. The locomotive, as if wanting to see what could be done, put on the brakes, and back came the trucks rebounding on the iron buffers, striking like horrible cymbals, clashing nearer and nearer in frightful strident concussions. The mare opened her mouth and rose slowly, as if lifted up on a wind of terror. (1996 [1920]: 133)

The horse, representing the natural, is also associated with such words as “wind” (twice) and verbs that echo natural events, “spun and swerved” and “rose,” while the train, as a cultural and modern phenomenon, is described with forceful alliterations and words that are identified with the modern: “striking,” “cymbals,” “clashing,” and “concussions.” The contrasting image is potent and convincing enough for the reader to feel the repulsion for the modern. The deterministic quality of modernity, its repetitions and conformity, is situated in the trucks that come “one after the other.” Liang’s aesthetic strategy is very similar to Lawrence’s. Nostalgia and longings for nature, past, a new future, utopias, paradise, are rendered within an audiovisual construction of the horrors of modern industrialization, not in an effort to suggest the contingency of these dreams but in an attempt to create an emotional experience that can trigger ecological agency. In “Why Ambient Poetics? Outline for a Depthless Ecology” (2002) Morton outlines his concept of ambient poetics in the context of the Anthropocene. His ambition is to find a proper poetics for the nondual awareness in the age of global warming that provides a collapse of the subject-object dualism. To Morton, this collapse involves a human inclusiveness for a “world without center or edge that includes everything” (Morton 2002: 52). Morton believes that ambience exists in

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dialectical images and refers to Walter Benjamin (cf. ibid: 52). Just like Benjamin’s description of Paul Klee’s Angelos Novus, as seen above, ambient imagery is Janus-faced according to Morton and “offer a sort of gate into another dimension, a dimension that turns out to be none other than the nowness that is far more radically ‘here’ than any concept of ‘here’ …” (ibid). Morton continues by describing how these dialectical ambient images “at once mask and open up the possibility of a more profound view, shocking to the egotism that separates human being and its life world” (ibid). In my opinion, Liang’s film comes close to Morton’s albeit somewhat ambiguous concept of ambient poetics in how his film opens up this space for an alerted nowness and a subject-object upheaval. The past in Liang’s film is not, as in Hollywood’s representations of the Anthropocene, an option; instead, it is indeed a past, an irrecoverable temporality. The doomsday clock has been set and every chime is another lost green pasture. Liang’s nostalgic aesthetics creates potential introspections of important contemporary concepts of posthumanity through its man/machine, man/nature imagery, suggesting holistically that everything is all.

*** Critically assessing the effects of the modern world of progress is part of the whole project of modernity and postmodernity, and it is why we can see a heightened interest in anti-progressive nostalgia both in theoretic consciousness and art in the age of modernity and beyond. “Modernity and modernisms,” writes Boym, “are responses to the condition of modernization and the consequences of progress. This modernity is contradictory, critical, ambivalent and reflective on the nature of time; it combines fascination for the present with the longing for another time” (Boym 2001: 22). Johannisson presents three reactions to the modern demand of rationality: (1) a critique of modernity based on that longing for home/past that confirms that man is un-rooted from his origin and sense of value; (2) a loyalty to modernity, which finds new ways in the modern world to express and experience the past in more institutionalized external ways (museums, living history museums and societies); (3) and finally, an adaptable strategy, in which man finds new ways, within modernity, to create new foundations for roots and social interventions within modern society (cf. 2001: 134). Johannison’s three reactions are easily applicable to many Anthropocene narratives where nostalgia functions as longing, a eurocentric institution, and as a design for a retrospective future. Although the motive behind the strong reactions during the industrial era to the sense of alienation due to late industrialization are slightly different from the Anthropocene

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era, the affective dimensions are very similar: the desire for coherence, order and tradition, in short nostalgic affections. Svoboda summarizes his analysis of Anthropocene films and makes the following conclusion: “In fact, in at least seven of the twelve movies discussed in this series, the healing or strengthening of family relationships (husband-estranged spouse, father-children) is one of the emotional subplots. Adverse climate change brings families together” (2014: 18). This recollection of classic humanism and conservative values is at odds with the real challenges of the posthuman condition. In fact, Hollywood proposes, in Svoboda’s terms, a reboot of the Holocene rather than dealing with the issues of the Anthropocene (ibid: 19). Behemoth, on other hand, uses nostalgia for emotional effect in order for us to understand what is at stake. Nostalgia here is not a redemption of what is lost; it is rather a reminder of what is essentially human and simultaneously reveals what is challenging this humanity.

R EFERENCES Albrecht, Glenn/Sartore, Gina-Maree/Connor, Linda/Higginbotham, Nick/Freeman, Sonia/Kelly, Brian/Stain, Helen/Tonna, Anne/Pollard, Georgia (2007): “Solastalgia: the Distress Caused by Environmental Change.” In: Australasian Psychiatry 15, pp. 95-98. Alighieri, Dante (1935): The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno, Purgatory, Paradise, New York: The Union Library Association. Antonioni, Michelangelo (1970): Zabriskie Point. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin, Walter (1968): “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In: Hannah Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Knopf Doubleday. Boym, Svetlana (2001): The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Devlin, Dean (2017): Geostorm. Warner Bros. Pictures. Eliasson, Olafur (2015): Ice Watch. Paris. Emmerich, Roland (2004): The Day After Tomorrow. 20th Century Fox. Emmerich, Roland (2009): 2012. Colombia Pictures. Fredrikzon, Johan (2017): “Fotot som blev hela mänsklighetens selfie.” In: Svenska Dagbladet September 16, pp. 44-45. Grimbeek, Marinette (2017): Margaret Atwood's Environmentalism. Apocalypse and Satire in the MaddAddam Trilogy, Ph.D., Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Karlstad University. Guinard-Terrin, Martin (2016): “Which Sublime for the Anthropocene?” In: Bruno Latour (ed.), Reset Modernity!, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 184-188.

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Hulme, Mike (2009): Why We Disagree About Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johannisson, Karin (2001): Nostalgia: En känslas historia, Stockholm: Bonniers. Kant, Immanuel (2006): Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated by Robert B. Louden, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lang, Fritz (1927): Metropolis. Parufamet. Latour, Bruno (2016): “Introduction.” In: Bruno Latour (ed.), Reset Modernity!, Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 11-23. Lawrence, D. H. (1996) [1920]: Women in Love, London: Penguin. Lawrence, D. H./Kinkead-Weekes, Mark (1989): The Rainbow. The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liang, Zhao (2015): Behemoth. Ljungh, Hanna (2016): I am Mountain, to Measure Impermanence. Lukacs, George (1974) [1920]: Theory of the Novel, Cambridge: MIT Press. Marx, Karl/Friedrich Engels, (2012): The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, London: Verso. Moore, Jason W. (2017): “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” In: The Journal of Peasant Studies 44/3, pp. 594-630. Morton, Timothy (2002): “Why Ambient Poetics? Outline for a Depthless Ecology.” In: The Wordsworth Circle 33/1, pp. 52-56. Morton, Timothy (2007): Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Mossner, Alexa Weik von (2017): Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press. Murray, Robin L./Heumann, Joseph K. (2009): Ecology and Popular Film: Cinema on the Edge, Albany: SUNY Press. Murray, Robin L./Joseph K. Heumann (2014): Film and Everyday Eco-disasters, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Plumwood, Val (2002): Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason, Abingdon & Oxon: Routledge. Qin, Amy (2015): “As China Hungers for Coal, ‘Behemoth’ Studies the Ravages at the Source.” In: The New York Times December 28 (https://www.nytimes. com/2015/12/29/world/asia/china-film-zhao-liang-inner-mongolia-coalbehemoth.html). Reggio, Godfrey (1983): Koyaanisqatsi. New Cinema. Reynolds, Kevin (1995): Waterworld. Universal Pictures.

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Simmel, Georg (1971) [1903]: “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In: Donald N. Levine (ed.), On Individuality and Social Forms: Selected Writings of Georg Simmel, London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 324-339. Smith, Kimberly K. (2000): “Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory.” In: Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3/4, pp. 505-527. Svoboda, Michael (2014): “A Review of Climate Fiction (Cli-Fi) Cinema … Past and Present,” October 22, 2014 (https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/dl/ YCC_2014_Svoboda_TheCompleteCli-FiSeries.pdf) Trexler, Adam (2015): Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change, Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Wark, McKenzie (2016): Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene, New York: Verso.

Value Creation in Nostalgia and Sustainability Interacting on Behalf of the Absent A FTERWORD BY A NDREAS L ANGENOHL

I NTRODUCTION : V ALUE ACHIEVEMENT

AS A

C OOPERATIVE

This volume thematizes nostalgia and sustainability as particular modalities of valuation. Both concepts imply that what is past and bygone, or threatened in its survival into the future, is worth being remembered, actualized, and protected. I take this fundamental argument as a point of departure for some short remarks on how to interrelate conceptions of value to nostalgia and sustainability in the study of culture. Today, ‘value’ is a concept whose ubiquity at times tends to gloss over the conceptual vagueness in the ways it is mostly used. We say that things have a certain value, but also that people have certain values, and mean very different things by that. While the value of things, understood as economic value, indicates a relationship of equity – a thing equals this and that sum of money, for instance – in the case of people having certain values the relationship is not one of equity, but one of adherence – people cherish and pursue certain values. The notion of value, shuttling between calculative reduction and normative appeal, thus interconnects questions of what things are worth with such of “what people ought to want” (Graeber 2001: 3). In this productive vagueness, the concept of value might thus be a good company for concepts like nostalgia and sustainability which also invoke both dimensions of valuation, namely, that of assessment and that of appreciation. Anthropological and sociological discussions over value and valuation have highlighted the cooperative character and the institutionalization of understandings and rankings of value. Anthropologists have pointed out that value

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is a qualifier attached to certain things, artefacts, or also persons, which is worked out in practices that require social coordination (cf. Graeber 2001; Munn 1992; Weiner 1992). David Graeber, following Nancy Munn (cf. 1992), argues that an anthropologically convincing concept of value ought to relate value to the intensity of effort that people invest in certain activities, as opposed to others. Value, thus, is the result of the intensity with which social actions become not only individually meaningful but also collectively coordinated: “One invests one’s energies in those things one considers most important, or most meaningful” (Graeber 2011: 45). Valuation is thus intrinsically connected to decisions of what ought to be valued, for instance, through being remembered (as in nostalgia) or through being rescued for the future (as in sustainability): Rather than value being the process of public recognition itself, already suspended in social relations, it is the way people who could do almost everything (including, in the right circumstances, creating entirely new sorts of social relations) assess the importance of what they do, in fact, as they are doing it. This is necessarily a social process; but it is always rooted in generic human capacities. (ibid: 47)

From this perspective, both nostalgia and sustainability can be seen as empirical idioms of social valuation whose function is to grasp what individually as well as collectively is, or ought to be, held valuable. These anthropological notions of value (as well as sociological ones, which insist on the social constitution of parameters of value but have to be addressed separately in another article) were not developed in a conceptual vacuum. Rather, they critically refer to economic concepts of value, especially the ‘neoclassical’ strand of economic theorizing, which performs a doubly reductive gesture regarding the notion of value. First, it is based on a social ontology according to which value is always a subjective utilitarian assessment corresponding to the “calculus of pleasure and pain” (Jevons 2013 [1871]: 23), that is, the calculus of utility and cost. Second, neoclassical economics, in making a distinction between its utilitarian ontology and its functioning as a model of the world, reduces the value of things to the prices they can achieve on competitive markets populated by utilitarian subjects. Precisely because value is purely subjective, it can be disregarded in a dynamics of market exchange that produces objective values – that is, prices – through interrelating subjective desires. Against this theorization, anthropologists have long been pointing out that value is not identical with individual desire, but socially constituted; that price is no shorthand version for value because there are values which cannot be priced; and, most crucially, that exchange might be based not on a utilitarian tit-for-tat logic but that it is embedded

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within an overarching set of social and cultural institutions that prevent people from becoming egoistic and ‘rational’ homines oeconomici (cf. Graeber 2001; 2011). Thus, anthropological conceptions of value were developed in a bid to rescue the notion of value through conceiving of exchange in alternative ways. One of the most important contributions in this regard was the argument that exchange does not, as neoclassical economics would have it, result in a zero-sum game called ‘equilibrium’ (namely, between supply and demand of a certain commodity), but that exchange is productive, maybe even constitutive, of value. Inasmuch as exchange is a practice that people put effort into – for instance, through ceremonially staging it, through framing it by expensive festivities, even through running oneself into the ground in the exchange (cf. Baudrillard 1996: 122-142; Bataille 1967) – it may create a strong sense not only of what people desire but also of what they should desire, and why. The locus classicus of this strand of theorizing is, of course, Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le don (cf. Mauss 1925), where he argued, on the basis of the presentation of a broad tableau of anthropological research on exchange ceremonies, that gift giving is a fundamental social practice to create social obligations, cultural notions of the desirable, and individual motivations to engage with that which obliges and is constituted as desirable (cf. Adloff/Mau 2005). Mobilizing the concept of gift, it has been asked in this debate how exchange can be understood not as individualistic utility maximization, amounting to a zero sum game in equilibrium, but as something collectively valuable that can be created. Understanding both nostalgia and sustainability as potential idioms of value constitution and creation, the anthropological discussion of how value gets constituted is therefore an important reference point for the sum of the contributions in the present volume, which seeks to extend the concept of nostalgia to an as yet unfulfilled future, while at the same time cautioning against a notion of sustainability that makes the future depend on present value choices. In other words, we might be able to see behind the seemingly conservatory undertone in both nostalgia and sustainability and begin to reconstruct their value-constitutive and generative dimensions.

V ALUATION ABSENT

AND

E XCHANGE

WITH THE

S PATIALLY

Nostalgia and sustainability, however, also pose a fundamental challenge to anthropological understandings of value, as both unfold a sense of value and

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valuation in a context that is conspicuously absent. Notwithstanding the more recent discussions over those concepts, as summarized in the introduction of the present volume, nostalgia refers to a modality of valuation that attributes worth to something that is no more. Even if we accept the argument that nostalgia might refer to a positive future not yet attained (cf. Introduction to this volume), the basic parameters of this absence do not change. Practices of valuation may well refer to a bygone past or a hoped-for future as an object to be valued and cherished, but this value can never be attained together with that absent object. The same holds true for sustainability. One of the most important criticisms of that concept, as pointed out in the introduction, refers to a decision about what is supposed to be valuable and thus protected by the present generations on behalf of future generations. Even as the concept of sustainability has significantly contributed to revaluing certain natural and cultural proprieties such as heritage, climate, biological richness etc., those revaluations have not been able to incorporate the future, which must remain absent as partner-in-valuation. Seen from this angle, anthropological theories of value, highlighting the social collaboration in the production of value and valuableness, must be critically scrutinized whether – through putting the emphasis on practices of valuation typically under conditions of situational co-presence – they do not risk succumbing to a presentism, or even transactionalism, similar to that of neoclassical economics. Reducing value to price and seeing price as the outcome of momentary and instantaneous exchanges (often referred to as ‘arbitrage’, see Langenohl 2018), neoclassical theory in principle boils down to spotting price, and thus value, in a present transaction. The contributions in this volume, engaging with historically diverse and culturally multiple mediatized interrelations of nostalgia and sustainability from various (inter-)disciplinary perspectives, present a profound and impressive challenge to such reduction of valuation to presentism and transactionalism. Here, my take on the research agenda opened up with this volume is to ask how anthropological theories of value, having made an immensely important contribution to understanding value in terms of sociality, can also provide us with a non-presentist and non-transactionalist understanding of valuation and value creation in nostalgia and sustainability. One way to further such theorizing might be to look at how anthropology has dealt with absences in terms of space. While Malinowski’s work on the Trobriand islanders and their Kula ring exchange has entered the critical anthropology textbooks as a paradigmatic example of an anthropology whose main authority results from the duration of the ethnographer’s stay ‘on the spot’ (cf. 1922), it is also true that this study explicitly thematized the translocality of the exchange practices involved here. It is therefore no surprise that, several decades later, the

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Kula ring became once again the site for a study in translocal practices of valuation, this time, and with more theoretical rigor, by Nancy Munn (cf. 1992). Her concept of ‘fame’, referring to the reputation of the inhabitants of Gawa, one of the Trobriand islands, gained, among other things, from their craft of canoe making and their position in the Kula exchange, spells out a theory of valuation and value creation which, as I would suggest, provides an entry point into the discussion on embracing the absent in valuation. Fame, according to Munn, emanates not directly from the dyadic relation involved in the gift exchange transaction, but from “a third party observer outside the immediate transaction parties” (Munn 1992: 115). Citing J.D. Leroy (1979: 185) that this third party “‘does not even have to be present [witnessing the transaction] for his influence to be felt; imagination and memory may represent him’”, Munn explains that “fame itself must be a process that goes beyond this relative immediacy [between the two transaction parties]” (Munn 1992: 115). Value, thus, is a dimension of significance in the sense that it increases the potentiality of engaging in relationships with absent others, to be effective for, and in the eyes of, those others. To be renowned for one’s artifacts and one’s transactions even among those who have not participated in the exchange of those items – that is, by those who are absent from the concrete exchange – is, in fact, one of the most important fame boosters. One’s actions affect even those that are not an immediate part of their horizon; and conversely, those beyond the horizon do have a repercussion on valuation among the co-present. ‘Fame’, rather than being a simple attribution, indicates a practice of valuation: it reaches even to those who are not part of the interaction or transaction, but at the same time is validated and increased by those absent others, who gain in significance precisely as they are absent from the exchange because they imbue that fame with a dimensionality that exceeds its spatial circumscription. Munn’s argument is important because it addresses the question of how the constitution of value can conceptually imply and incorporate even those who are absent from the exchange proper – at least in terms of spatiality, although her reference to Leroy already indicates that absence may also be understood in terms of ontology or temporality (“imagination and memory”, see above). The question is, thus, whether there is a path from Gawa’s fame to nostalgia and sustainability, understood as referential arrays of valuation which crucially invoke the absence of temporally significant others – the past bygone, the future not yet there. How can an exchange-based practice of valuation be extended to those that cannot be reached by any concrete exchange not because of spatial, but temporal absence?

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T HE P ROBLEM

OF THE

T EMPORALLY ABSENT

If value creation, as anthropological studies point out, is about interaction and interdependencies, then there is a fundamental problem of temporality involved: nostalgia and sustainability as vernacular idioms of value creation invoke the presence of something or somebody that is absent, and yet has to be made present in that valuation. Undoubtedly, this invokes the work of representation as that craft which alone is able to give the absent a presence; yet, representation, as discourse theory tells us (cf. Said 1979), functions without a reference or a correlate, that is, without a relationship of correspondence to that absent. As a possible theoretical concept to imagine the making present of an absent that still implies a relationship of correspondence one might turn to the concept of the fiduciary, meaning the acting on behalf of another actor (cf. Parsons/Platt 1973). Especially in the realm of economic value, fiduciary relationships, like that between a notary and a client, enable the representation of a client’s interest, which she would not be able to pursue alone, through a social actor acting on behalf and in the absence, and yet in close relationship, with the represented actor. Might acting-on-behalf-of thus serve as a conceptual blueprint to imagine a relationality of the absent past and future in value creation together with a given present? The problem with the concept of fiduciarity is that it has been developed on the model of a rather isolated relationship between client and professional actor. As such, it has also become the starting point for concerns about the so-called ‘principal-agent dilemma’ in economic transactions, according to which fiduciary agents are in the ‘moral hazard’ to sideline their client’s (‘principal’) interests to the advantage of their own. Seen from a value anthropological standpoint, this conceptual isolation of the fiduciary relationship – in actuality, its reduction to a transaction as in the principal-agent dilemma – flies in the face of the argument that value is created collectively and, as Munn’s study about the fame of Gawa stresses, within a potentially open horizon of interaction and sociality. This calls for bringing together the logic of the ‘on behalf of’, as a precondition for thinking the presence of the absent in a relationship, with the logic of interaction, rather than that of transaction. To this end, and by way of conclusion, I will probe the proto-concept of interacting-on-behalf-of as a category that might help understand the particular conditions of valuation introduced by nostalgia and sustainability, as discussed in this volume.

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Interacting on behalf of a past bygone or a future as yet inaccessible would need to conceptually differ from a mere invocation of a past or a future. Instead, it would require a type of interaction that, as it were, rescues the past from its bygoneness and provides the future with an outreach into the present. Is it possible to think of nostalgia and sustainability as commanding these extraordinary, almost metaphysical capacities? The theme of a past that is not finished and done with has been the concern of philosophies of history, from which one of the most prominent is arguably that in late classical critical theory. Instead of seeing the past as something that is irrevocably lost and can be retrieved only as a represented absence, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer have argued that it might rather be seen as a reservoir of unfulfilled promises, chances and possibilities (cf. Adorno 1973: 13; see Langenohl 2004). The past is able to speak into the present on the basis of an array of unused and non-actualized possibilities that makes it enter into a productively tense relationship with the present; it is thus not, as one critique of nostalgia as a concept has it (cf. Mukta/Hardiman 2000), something essentially ‘better’ than the present but something after which the openness of the present is modelled. Thereby, what has often been depicted as an inclination toward a negative philosophy of history, in the sense of a narrative of catastrophe and decline, since the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment in 1944 (cf. Honneth 1985: 12-42), might rather have to do with the absence of a dimension of interaction in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critical reconstructions, who tend to see the practices of philosophy and aesthetics, as opposed to other social practices, as rescuers of the past’s unactualized potentialities. Coming back to the question of value and valuation, a task for research following the present volume might be to conceptualize nostalgia as a mode of interaction on behalf of a past which introduces into the present an array of unfulfilled promises and possibilities. Nostalgia might be seen as enabling a mode of valuing the past through giving it a presence that, as it were, responds to the present. To think of the future as something which does not wait for its actualization but claims actuality in the present has been a recurring concern in political and cultural theory. In political theory, the notion of prefigurative politics, building on earlier work in the anarchist strands of Marxist thinking, has been discussed as heralding a mode of political agency which attempts to build a new society amidst the catastrophic presence of the current one (cf. Breines 1989; Day 2005; Polletta 2014; Sitrin/Azzellini 2014). The point about prefigurative politics is not so much

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to give a model of a potential future society through exemplary agency, but to act as if an unavoidably better future needed to be accounted for in the present. For Arjun Appadurai, who studied marginalized neighborhoods in Mumbai and witnessed their practices of social coordination, these practices, far from any naïve optimism, maintain a strategic relationship to the presence of a better future encapsulated in those practices’ motivational structures and the practitioners’ aspirations (cf. 2013). Herein we may see a conceptual exemplification of a future interacted on behalf of – as Appadurai puts it, “mov[ing] away from wishful thinking to thoughtful wishing” – and becoming valued as a driver enabling current practices that thus “can be given meaning, substance, and sustainability” (2013: 193). It is the presence of the future itself that claims an indispensable significance in the collective valuation of present-future forms of life. However, interaction on behalf of the future might also take the form of the interaction between narrative structures and the readers engaging with them, a point recently addressed by Leslie Adelson (cf. 2017). In her analysis of short prose texts by Alexander Kluge, invoking Adorno, she points to moments in the narrative form of those works which in their textures establish a future viewpoint – for instance, a narrator position – that confront the reader with “a poiesis of futurity” (Adelson 2017: 17; cf. Langenohl forthcoming). If the concept of sustainability is to be retained in spite of the technocratic, if not ideological, undertones that it has acquired in recent political rhetoric, it might be through rethinking sustainability as an interactive practice of valuation that allows the future in not as a utopia or a potential, but a “social fact” (Adelson 2017: 64), that is, as a cognitive, normative and motivational structure informing the constitution of the present itself.

R EFERENCES Adelson, Leslie A. (2017): Cosmic Miniatures and the Future Sense: Alexander Kluge’s 21st-Century Literary Experiments in German Culture and Narrative Form, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Adloff, Frank/Mau, Steffen (2005): “Giving Social Ties, Reciprocity in Modern Society.” In: European Journal of Sociology 47, pp. 93-123. Adorno, Theodor W. (1973): Negative Dialektik. Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 6, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Appadurai, Arjun (2013): The Future as Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition, London and New York: Verso.

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Bataille, Georges (2001 [1967]): Die Aufhebung der Ökonomie, München: Matthes & Seitz. Baudrillard, Jean (1996): For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, London: Verso. Breines, Wini (1989 [1982]): Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1969: The Great Refusal, New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press. Day, Richard J. F. (2005): Gramsci is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements, London: Pluto Press. Graeber, David (2001): Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Graeber, David (2011): Debt: The First 5000 Years, New York: Melville House. Honneth, Axel (1985): Kritik der Macht, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp. Jevons, William Stanley (1995 [1871]): The Theory of Political Economy, Charlottesville: Lincoln-Rembrandt. Langenohl, Andreas (2004): “Die Dialektik von Vernunft und Natur und ihre bestimmte Negation: Zum Motiv des Bilderverbots in der kritischen Theorie.” In: Bettina Bannasch/Almuth Hammer (eds.), Verbot der Bilder - Gebot der Erinnerung. Mediale Repräsentationen der Shoah, Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, pp. 61-80. Langenohl, Andreas (2018): “Sources of Financial Synchronism: Arbitrage Theory and the Promise of Risk-free Profit.” In: Christian Klöckner/Stefanie Müller (eds.), Financial Times. Special issue of Finance & Society 4/1, pp. 2640. Langenohl, Andreas (forthcoming): “The ‘Future Sense’ and the Future of the Study of Culture.” In: Doris Bachmann-Medick/Jens Kugele/Ansgar Nünning (eds.), The Future of the Study of Culture, Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter. Leroy, John D. (1979): “The Ceremonial Pig Kill of the South Kewa.” In: Oceania 49/3, pp. 179-209. Malinowski, Bronislaw (1922): Argonauts of the Western Pacific, London and New York: Routledge/Dutton. Mauss, Marcel (1954 [1925]): The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, New York: W.W. Norton. Mukta, Parita/Hardiman, David (2000): “The Political Ecology of Nostalgia.” In: Capitalism Nature Socialism 11/1, pp. 113-133. Munn, Nancy (1992 [1986]): The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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Parsons, Talcott/Platt, Gerald M. (1973): The American University, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Polletta, Francesca (2014): Freedom Is an Endless Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward D. (1995 [1979]): Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, London: Penguin. Sitrin, Marina/Azzellini, Dario (2014) (eds.): They Can’t Represent Us! Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy, Oakland and Edinburgh: AK Press. Weiner, Annette B. (1992): Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of KeepingWhile-Giving, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Authors

Berkemeier, Moritz W., is a teacher at Europaschule Gymnasium An der Stenner, Iserlohn. He also teaches Fachdidaktik Englisch at TU Dortmund where he studied Arts and English. In his Erste Staatsarbeit (2008) he explored gender and suburbia in postwar Doris Day movies. He joined the SpaceCollective in 2008. After that he continued researching suburbia in the United States. He finished working on his thesis titled “Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Pastness – A Cultural Analysis of Nostalgic Architecture in American Post-Suburbia” in July 2018, arguing that post-suburbia has been themed to resemble the dominant small-town known fabricated and propagated in texts of popular culture. Chrostowska, S.D., teaches in the Department of Humanities and the Graduate Program in Social & Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is, most recently, co-editor of Political Uses of Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2017). Her articles have appeared in New German Critique, Diacritics, New Literary History, SubStance, Public Culture, and elsewhere. New work is forthcoming in Constellations and Common Knowledge. Clucas, Tom, completed his B.A., M.St. and D.Phil. in English Literature at the University of Oxford, where he also taught at several of the Colleges. Subsequently, he worked as a researcher at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture and Deputy Professor of English and American Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University, Giessen. He has published articles on Romantic Poetry in journals including Notes and Queries, The Wordsworth Circle, The Cowper and Newton Journal, Textual Cultures, The Review of English Studies, European Romantic Review, and The Coleridge Bulletin. He now lives and works in London. Eltringham, Daniel, completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London in 2017, and teaches at the University of Sheffield. In 2018 he published articles on J. H. Prynne, agro-chemical pastoral and ‘Tintern Abbey’ in Green Letters, and on Peter Riley and Romantic excursus in Textual Practice. His poetry and translations have recently appeared in the anthologies Wretched Strangers:

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borders movement homes and The World Speaking Back…To Denise Riley (both Boiler House Press, 2018), and in Datableed, Cumulus, Plumwood Mountain, Colorado Review and Zarf. In 2017, he collaborated with artist David Walker Barker on the text-image cabinet installation Searching for Jossie (In The Open, Sheffield Institute of Arts) and published Cairn Almanac, a book of poems about field-work, time and climate change (Hesterglock Press). He edits Route 57, the University of Sheffield’s creative writing journal, co-edits Girasol Press and coruns the reading series Electric Arc Furnace. Gurrey, Owen, is currently studying for a PhD in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Owen works as a hotel duty-manager, a musician both live and in-studio, and has worked as a voice-over artist for gaming companies, universities, and charities. He co-edited the volume The Humanities between Global Integration and Cultural Diversity (De Gruyter, 2016) and worked as a researcher and editor on A World of Populations (Berghahn, 2014). His paper on “Edgelands” and the poetry of Paul Farley was published in The Poesis of Peace (Routledge, 2017). His current work is about a (de)nature of perspective. This involves, among other things, poems, artworks, gardens, hunts, and mushrooms. Kasper, Jeff, is an artist and educator based in New York (U.S.A.). His multiform artistic approach bridges research, pedagogy, and social engagement. Kasper’s long-term public project Civic Art Lab, co-founded with Laura Scherling, provides a platform for artists, neighbors, and environmental advocates to experiment with and share homegrown sustainability and civic engagement initiatives in New York City. Kasper has been the recipient of a CUE Art Foundation Public Programs Fellowship, Art & Disability Residency from Art Beyond Sight, and SHIFT Residency from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Project Space, served as a mentor for New York Foundation for the Arts' Immigrant Artist Program and Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute. Currently, he teaches disability culture, community-based practice, and media design at The New School, Fordham University, and CUNY. Kipourou, Ioanna, is a doctoral candidate at the Justus-Liebig-University of Giessen and the Karl-Franzens-University of Graz. She completed her MA in American Literature and Culture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and has conducted research in Austria, the Netherlands, and the USA. Her research interests include American literature of all periods, race, ethnicity, and gender studies in popular culture, and political philosophy. Kovach, Elizabeth, is the Coordinator of the International PhD Programme (IPP) and a postdoctoral researcher in American literary studies at the University of Giessen. Her most recent publication is Novel Ontologies after 9/11: The Politics of Being in Contemporary Theory and U.S.-American Narrative Fiction (2016

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WVT Trier). She is currently working on a habilitation project that deals with representations of the U.S.-American work ethic in literature from industrialization to the present. Langenohl, Andreas, is professor of sociology with a focus on general comparative studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen. He held research and teaching positions at Konstanz University and Ghent University. His research foci include economic sociology and the sociology of finance, social and cultural theory, transnationalism, and the epistemology of the social sciences and economics. For his monograph Finanzmarkt und Temporalität: Imaginäre Zeit und die kulturelle Repräsentation der Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Lucius & Lucius, 2007) he received the Karl-Polanyi-Award of the research stream Economic Sociology in the German Sociological Association. More recent publications include “Securities markets and political securitization: The case of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone”, in Security Dialogue 48(2), 2017, 131-148, and Town Twinning, Transnational Connections, and Trans-local Citizenship Practices in Europe (New York/Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Lap, Theo B., is a medieval historian with a strong interest in the cultural psychological dimensions of religiosity, especially manifestations of asceticism and monasticism. He completed his Research Master’s degree in Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance studies at the University of Groningen in 2015. Since 2016, Theo has been working on a PhD dissertation “Homesick Monks and Reluctant Bishops: Communicating World Renunciation in Twelfth Century Letter Collections” that examines the communicative dimensions of normative behavior in medieval letter collections. Special attention in this thesis is given to the premodern cultural psychology of home, homesickness, and nostalgia within the wandering intellectual circles of monks who became (arch)bishops. Metz, Katharina, finished her doctoral studies at the Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on the language of altruism in late nineteenth-century reformist culture and literature in July 2017. In the fall of 2015/2016, she was a fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. She studied at Universität Freiburg, at Indiana University, Bloomington, and at the John F. Kennedy Institute (FU Berlin). Until June 2018, she was a Postdoc researcher at the Graduate School of North American Studies, FU Berlin. Salmose, Niklas, is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Linnaeus University, Sweden. He is an active member of the Linnaeus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS). He is part of the international research project “Nostalgia in Contemporary Culture” and is currently guest editor for a special issue on contemporary nostalgia for the journal Humanities. His recent

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publications include work on F. Scott Fitzgerald, animal horror, translation, nostalgia and modernism, Nordic Noir, Alfred Hitchcock, and the Anthropocene. Scherling, Laura, is a senior interactive designer and researcher. She is a doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University and an adjunct associate faculty member at Columbia University. Recent projects include her forthcoming edited collection Ethics in Design and Communication: New Critical Perspectives (2019) and How Mapmaking Informs Placemaking Practices in Detroit Organizations (2015). She also founded GreenspaceNYC, a volunteer non-profit collaborative that develops and curates free educational programming, hands-on workshops, and public design projects that encourage dialogue, enliven public spaces, and promote the future of more equitable and sustainable cities. Her work can be viewed at laurascherling.info. Schröder, Andressa, is a PhD researcher at the Giessener Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften (GGK) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. The working title of her thesis is “Affective Sustainabilities in Alternative Art Festivals: An Aesthetic Approach to Sustainability Ethics.” Andressa has written and coordinated different artistic projects funded by the Brazilian Ministry of Culture in 2011 and 2014 and worked as a curator for various art exhibitions at the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin in 2014, 2015 and 2018. She has also written articles focusing on the role of arts-based research and environmental aesthetics for sustainability debates, among them: “Aesthetics as a ‘middle way’ in Sustainability Ethics” and “Aesthetic strategies to explore beyond the models of sustainable development: An analysis of Lisa Simpson’s Musical Sewing.” Her research interests include environmental aesthetics, arts-based research, sustainability ethics, alternative art and psychedelic culture. Simpson, Lisa, is a sewing agent. She has been playing the Singer, a sewing machine, since 2003. She has a Bachelor degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná, a Master of Applied Arts Degree from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and is currently enrolled in the Institut für Kunst im Kontext master program at Universität der Künste Berlin. Her research focuses on musical sewing, where the creative process is amplified and audience participation is the source of inspiration. Lisa has performed extensively on an international level, including The Vancouver Art Gallery, Month of Performance Art-Berlin, Bimhuis Amsterdam, Curitiba Fashion Week, Schneidertempel Istanbul, among others. She lives and works in Berlin, collaborating with a range of different artists, musicians, and interested audiences. Völker, Nico, is a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His dissertation is a cultural narratology of gentrification in 21st-century Brooklyn for

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which he has conducted research in New York City in 2015 and 2017. He graduated with a BA in English Studies and German Studies as well as with a MA in North American Studies from the University of Bonn. In 2013, he received the Ambassador’s Award of the Embassy of the United States for America for his MA thesis entitled “‘The Wound that Will Never Heal’: Professional Sports, Nostalgia, and the Battle for Brooklyn.” Winkler, Robert A., is currently finishing his PhD thesis, which is entitled ‘Generation Reagan Youth: Representing and Resisting White and Neoliberal Forms of Life in the US Hardcore Punk Scenes, 1979 – 1999’ at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. His project, founded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation, deconstructs male and white privilege in the US hardcore punk scenes of the 1980s and 90s. He has studied American Cultural and Literary History, as well as Philosophy in Munich, Germany, and Istanbul, Turkey. Further research interests include cultural theory and continental philosophy.

Sighard Neckel et al.

Die Gesellschaft der Nachhaltigkeit Umrisse eines Forschungsprogramms

Januar/2018, 150 Seiten, kart., 14,99 €, ISBN 978-3-8376-4194-3, Open Access, E-PDF/EPUB

  Nachhaltigkeit ist zu einem Leitbegriff des gesellschaftlichen Wandels geworden, mit dem sich unterschiedliche Zielvorstellungen verbinden – sei es ein grüner Kapitalismus, der auf ökologischer Modernisierung beruht, oder eine sozial-ökologische Transformation, die eine postkapitalistische Ära einläuten könnte. In dieser Programmschrift von Sighard Neckel und seinem Hamburger Forschungsteam werden die gesellschaftlichen Dimensionen von Nachhaltigkeit aufgezeigt, aber auch die Paradoxien, die mit einer nachhaltigen Entwicklung im globalen Kapitalismus verbunden sind. Grundlegende soziologische Perspektiven auf Nachhaltigkeit sind ebenso Thema wie Ausblicke in konkrete Felder einer kritisch-reflexiven Sozialforschung zu den gesellschaftlichen Konflikten um Nachhaltigkeit.