Romanticism and Speculative Realism 9781501336386, 9781501336416, 9781501336409

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Literature and philosophy in the world without us
1 Of Meillassoux’s contingencies and Scott’s plots: Rethinking probability in a world of unreason
2 Affect and air: The speculative spirit of the age
3 Feeling as hyperobject in Wordsworth’s The Prelude
4 Blank oblivion,condemned life: John Clare’s “Obscurity”
5 Speculative enthusiasm: William Blake’s Jerusalem and Quentin Meillassoux’s divine ethics
6 Surfing the crimson wave: Romantic new materialisms and speculative feminisms
7 Romantic postapocalyptic politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux in a world without us
8 Astral guts: Thenemocentric self in Byron and Brassier
9 A perilous change of correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature]
10 Plasticity, poetry, and the end of art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats
11 Poe’s Black Cat
12 Objects taken for wonders in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative
13 An object-oriented media studies: The case of romantic cookery books Brian Rejack
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Edited by Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Chris Washington, Anne C. McCarthy, and Contributors, 2019 Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover design by Emma J. Hardy Cover images © Rucksack Magazine / Unsplash.com; Nathan Anderson / Unsplash.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Whilst every effort has been made to locate copyright holders the publishers would be grateful to hear from any person(s) not here acknowledged. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Washington, Chris (David Christopher), 1980- editor. | McCarthy, Anne C., editor. Title: Romanticism and speculative realism / edited by Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy. Description: New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. | Includes bibliographic references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018058902 | ISBN 9781501336386 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501336409 (epdf) | ISBN 9781501336416 (xml-platform) | ISBN 9781501336393 (ebk.) Subjects: LCSH: Romanticism. | Realism. | Literature—Philosophy. | Romanticism. | Ontology. | Aesthetics, Modern. Classification: LCC B835 .R66 2019 | DDC 141/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058902 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3638-6 PB: 978-1-5013-6673-4 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3640-9 eBook: 978-1-5013-3639-3 Typeset by Newgen KnowledgeWorks Pvt. Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Figures Introduction: Literature and philosophy in the world without us Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy

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1 Of Meillassoux’s contingencies and Scott’s plots: Rethinking probability in a world of unreason Evan Gottlieb

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2 Affect and air: The speculative spirit of the age Michele Speitz

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3 Feeling as hyperobject in Wordsworth’s The Prelude Joel Faflak

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4 Blank oblivion, condemned life: John Clare’s “Obscurity” David Collings

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5 Speculative enthusiasm: William Blake’s Jerusalem and Quentin Meillassoux’s divine ethics Allison Dushane

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6 Surfing the crimson wave: Romantic new materialisms and speculative feminisms Kate Singer

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7 Romantic postapocalyptic politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux in a world without us Chris Washington

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8 Astral guts: The nemocentric self in Byron and Brassier Aaron Ottinger

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9 A perilous change of correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature] Mary Jacobus

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10 Plasticity, poetry, and the end of art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats Greg Ellermann

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11 Poe’s Black Cat Graham Harman

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12 Objects taken for wonders in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative Alexander Dick

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13 An object-oriented media studies: The case of romantic cookery books Brian Rejack

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Notes on Contributors

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Index

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Figures 12.1

J. M. W. Turner, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St Vincent, at Midnight

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Full-plate illustrations from the 1836 edition of Marie Antonin Carême’s French Cookery

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From the sixth edition of Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook

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From Ude’s The French Cook, published by John Ebers, 1819. The British Library

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A table setting from Domestic Economy, and Cookery, For Rich and Poor (1827)

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Keats’s poem as first published in The Examiner, March 16, 1817

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The frontispiece and title page to Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery

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Annotations from Mary Bingham (at bottom, “Mary Bing ham Her Book”) in the second edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747)

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Introduction: Literature and philosophy in the world without us Chris Washington and Anne C. McCarthy

The essays in this collection map the territory produced by the conjunction of the two terms in the title. Although this is not the first publication to identify important resonances between the literature and philosophy of the romantic era and the paradigms advanced under the banner of speculative realist philosophy, the “and” in our title signifies something at once more bold and more complex:  the necessity of romanticism for understanding the world revealed by speculative realism; the horizons opened up for both romanticism and speculative realism when they are read with each other; and the possibility that perhaps they are only foils for one another, critiques that rebuff and curtail as much as they advance. If speculative realism provides a conceptual framework for reexamining anew the “romantic ideology” stereotyped as anti-realist and preoccupied by the human mind, then romanticism enables a radical rereading of speculative realism that reminds it of the aesthetic, the political, and the ethical dimensions that, in some accounts, it supposedly flees. Romanticism and Speculative Realism thus aims to provide substantially new readings of romantic-era texts that can emerge only from an engagement with speculative realism when the singularity and multiplicity of both the romantic subject and object are taken into focus. The “and” of this volume’s title, then, does not strictly conjoin the terms but rather lets them communicate their intimacies and extimacies as they discover them in an “unremitting interchange,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley might describe it. To put it another way, this is a collection that is speculative in the sense that it is determined to speculate about its own reasons for being and romantic in that it acknowledges that it is perhaps romantically destined to fall short of realizing any ambitions it harbors. Romanticism has long been characterized as preoccupied with anthropocentricism, the human subject, and their ability to transcend the material world around them, whereas speculative realism is apparently at odds with such a preoccupation. Speculative realist thought took shape in the first decade of the twenty-first century, against the background of what three of its main thinkers, Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman, describe as “looming ecological catastrophe, the increasing infiltration of technology into the everyday world (including our own bodies),” and

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a burgeoning sense that it was time to mount a broad critique of “humanity’s place in the world”—and of notions of reality that remained “the correlate of human thought.”1 More than simply the antihumanist critique of language and culture associated with late twentieth-century philosophy, speculative realism aimed to reject the so-called anti-realism of Immanuel Kant, without thereby returning to simplistic or naïve forms of materialism.2 For Harman, Bryant, and Srnicek, the post-Kantian tradition that culminated in deconstruction—and, more generally, in a philosophical preoccupation with anthropocentric topics such as language, consciousness, and human subjectivity—leaves us ill-equipped to confront the existential challenges and temporal distensions of the Anthropocene, where “not only do we have to swallow the news that our very recent development has modified a state of affairs that is vastly older than the very existence of the human race … but [we] have also to absorb the disturbing fact that the drama has been completed and that the main revolutionary event is behind us.”3 Attempts to deconstruct notions of the human amount, in this reading, to an expansion and, in some sense, the reification of what Rosi Braidotti calls a “compensatory humanism.”4 Given its historical association with the boundlessness and power of the human imagination, romanticism and speculative realism would seem to be diametrically opposed. It is perhaps all the more strange that, in the opening pages of After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2006; English translation 2008), Quentin Meillassoux proposes that it is time for philosophy to go play outside in what is, essentially, a romantic terrain. “[I]t could be,” he argues, that contemporary philosophers have lost the great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers: that outside which was not relative to us, and which was given as indifferent to its own givenness to be what it is, existing in itself regardless of whether we are thinking of it or not; that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.5

For Meillassoux the “great outdoors” signifies the vast territory that Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy had largely excluded from its anthropocentric worldview. Since the human mind, according to Berkeley, Kant, and their successors, cannot access the thing-in-itself, its knowledge-claims must be limited to what Meillassoux names the “correlation”—“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term apart from itself.”6 On Meillassoux’s telling, Kant did not deny the existence of an absolute, but he did place limitations on our ability to “know” it. Correlationist thinking dictates that there can be no object in itself, existing independently of the subject that perceives it—and no independently existing subject either. Some two centuries of Western philosophical thought had, in Meillassoux’s estimation, remained in this “correlationist slumber,” even as science and mathematics possessed the “ability to discourse about the great outdoors, to discourse about a past where both humanity and life are absent.”7 Philosophy, in other words, had remained resolutely asleep, while science—beginning, arguably, with

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James Hutton’s investigations into deep time that were roughly contemporaneous with Kant’s Critiques—had consistently expanded its vocabulary to talk about notions of the real far beyond the human. It is worth noting, then, that Meillassoux is talking about a discursive problem: we make statements about reality outside the correlation but can only affirm them via correlationist discourse.8 And so while exiting the correlation entire remains impossible, as Meillassoux concedes, he nevertheless recommends abandoning the false modesty of the mind’s finitude in order to approach once again the absolute of being and thereby rediscover the “great outdoors.” But the great outdoors also feature a flipside. As Meillassoux writes, “the arche-fossil,” evidence of the world’s existence before and after human existence, pushes “us to discover” what philosophy claims is impossible, “to get out of ourselves, to grasp the in-itself, to know what is whether we are or not.”9 Granted, not every speculative philosopher agrees on the specifics of how best to conceptualize this world without us, radically independent of mind. Certain thinkers, notably Ray Brassier, the English translator of After Finitude, have even distanced themselves from the term “speculative realism” altogether. Meillassoux is, to some extent, alone in his insistence on the necessity of contingency and his adherence to the principle of noncontradiction; object-oriented ontologists such as Harman and Timothy Morton, on the other hand, take the self-contradictory status of objects as fundamental.10 Not every speculative realist, for that matter, elevates the critique of correlationism to the same importance.11 Still, when Meillassoux writes about whether or not we can get outside the correlation, or when object-oriented philosophers criticize the anthropocentrism of the linguistic turn, they are all engaged in a rejection of a philosophical and cultural edifice associated—rightly or wrongly—with a concept of “romanticism”:  an obsession with the power of human consciousness and the imagination and their correspondent yearning for a sublime transcendence over a world at the disposal of said individual consciousness and imagination. Meillassoux, in fact, specifically criticizes what he calls “the logic of romanticism,” because it aspires to merge the human and the natural world so that it “collapses under the weight of illusions … which can survive only in the form of various irrational and amoral vitalisms.”12 Contrary to this view, the essays in this collection aver, in many different ways and from many different perspectives, that romantic-era authors have long tarried in the real. For these reasons, the version of romanticism laid out in this collection is profoundly aware of the precarity of its own identity, ideology, and ontology. From the political shocks of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars to scientific discoveries that posed quandaries about human extinction to the rise of the autonomous subject of the romantic imagination, the years 1780–1830 offered myriad opportunities for reflecting upon contingency of the kind Meillassoux presents in After Finitude. It has long been a commonplace reading, for example, that all of these romantic events, discoveries, and nonanthropocentric concerns did not seem to conform to existing political or scientific laws but rather to have emerged, to use Meillassoux’s term, “ex nihilo,” marking them as in line with Meillassoux’s ideas about a world that functions via the absolute contingency of Hyper-Chaos. Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods (2005),

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along with Mary Favret’s War at a Distance (2009) and Joel Faflak’s and Richard Sha’s collection, Romanticism and the Emotions (2016), for instance, all show how feeling or affect worked at the time to cleave the subject from its very self. Affect has agency before feeling or emotion, and as such operates prior to the subjective recognition of one’s own bodily processes.13 In a more immediate sense, this collection builds upon the insights and arguments laid out by Evan Gottlieb in his pathbreaking Romantic Realities. Gottlieb begins his analysis with the reminder of the historical contingency of romanticism itself, particularly when it comes to its philosophical underpinnings; romanticism arrives, he writes, “at a moment that is neither post-Humean, since the force of Humean skepticism was very much alive and well for the romantics, nor post-Kantian, since the latter’s ideas were just beginning to be widely disseminated in Britain in the 1790s.”14 Granted, Kant’s influence, or at least the correlationist problem Meillassoux identifies as Kant’s primary bequest to us, surfaces in Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the later Shelleys (among others). Yet, Gottlieb crucially identifies a divergence between Kant’s argument that the mind’s finitude limits its transcendental capabilities and the romantic notion that knowing the absolute might indeed be imaginatively possible. Indeed, he writes, “it is a classroom commonplace that the Romantic poets were uniquely interested in the powers of the human imagination,” yet “such interest was frequently directed toward seeing how far the powers of human imagination could carry the mind out of itself.”15 This is not to say that romantic-era writers had themselves escaped the correlationist circle; poets like Wordsworth were ultimately ambivalent about whether it is possible to see into the life of things, to access the object-in-itself. Nevertheless, we contend, along with Gottlieb, that a persistent anthropocentric reading of romanticism has long overstated the movement’s preoccupation with individual subjectivity. Romantic writers were hardly the ineffectual angels of idealism and Satanic apostles of anthropocentrism that they are often made out to be.16 Romanticism’s awareness of the possibility of a broader subjective extinction is now often invoked in order to obliterate the traditionally anthropocentric concerns of literature and philosophy. Such an insight is at the center of David Collings’ Stolen Future, Broken Present (2014), which marshals the cognitive and philosophical tools of romanticism to confront the consequences of climate change and the attenuation of a human future.17 His collection, “Romanticism and Disaster,” with Jacques Khalip provides a host of different views of human annihilation in the period.18 In fact, Khalip has recently argued that extinction is internal to romanticism itself. Khalip’s definition of romantic extinction resists its anthropocentric negativity, contending that it “speaks less to privation than it does to a revision of ‘life’ under other terms—non-life, worklessness, a life that is not the self-reflexive ground and measure of the human.”19 Romanticism, he concludes, “is the extinction of the ongoing; it is the lifelessly reiterated extinction of a life that endures through inscriptions promising ‘man’ survival through reiteration.”20 Chris Washington, meanwhile, argues that romantic post-apocalyptic “texts work counterintuitively and paradoxically, facing down extinction as the limit of life to show that it is this very extinctual limit that makes life possible, both in the now and in whatever future may come.”21 In this sense romanticism reveals “life’s possibility

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within the crucible of extinction” and “post-apocalyptic romanticism engenders hope rather than despair” because “in order for hope to be, it must emerge from and exist despite its inexistence, despite hopelessness, or otherwise it is not hope.” For both Khalip and Washington, familiar accounts about the romantic subject and the human imagination are disavowed by a romanticism whose idea of life extends beyond the human, to things and nonhumans that populate a world that is not necessarily for or even with us. To “see into the life of things,” as William Wordsworth said in “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” (1798), then, is not to repose in certainties about the human imagination and humans’ place in the world. Or, as Gottlieb puts it, “an object-oriented perspective helps . . . us to see” how the poem—and romanticism more broadly—unveils “the world’s unknowable plenitude” even as it may also reserve judgment on whether the mind has “inherent limitations.”22 Such perspectives confront a romantic mise en scène every bit as contingent, every bit as weird, as the “weird realism” promoted by speculative philosophy. The seeing that Wordsworth describes is a kind of visionary experience that has long been understood to be, as Gavin Budge has recently observed, “so woven into [romanticism’s] texture as to blur any dividing line between the imaginary and the real.”23 Speculative realism offers a language and a framework for articulating something that many of us have long suspected: that the “blur” is not a distortion caused by the operations of the human mind but rather is itself the real—the constitutive condition of a world of contingency, always already riven by the aporetic relation between appearance and essence. As literary scholars—and, more specifically, as romanticist literary scholars—we are perhaps uniquely positioned to accept that the “rift between appearance and essence,” as Morton argues, obtains “within the object itself,” so that “we should accept some kind of paraconsistent, possibly dialetheic logic that allows things to be what they seem, and not what they seem, simultaneously.”24 Faced with the “weird realism” unveiled— in many different and sometimes contradictory ways—by speculative philosophy, romantic notions such as Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief ” and Keats’s “negative capability” can no longer be seen as merely aesthetic practices, confined to the reading of supernatural poetry or the appreciation of paradox and illusion.25 They are nothing less than habits of mind that enable us to live and think within a world of contingency, even if those possibilities were only dimly intuited by the originators of these phrases. That is, both the suspension of disbelief and negative capability register and respond to the radical—and constitutive—alterity of the world and the conscious mind’s dehiscence from itself.26 Recent critical work on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816) demonstrates the ways that the “and” of Romanticism and Speculative Realism can serve a transformative function. “Mont Blanc” has long been read by scholars like Frances Ferguson as the canonical expression of a traditionally romantic—and, again, fundamentally anthropocentric—conception of the sublime where what Shelley calls “the human mind’s imaginings” (l. 144) can soar above the slings and arrows of the physical world and align itself with something akin to Burkean awe or Kantian pure reason. In so doing, as Ferguson argues, the poem “makes an implicit argument for the transcendent

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existence of man—not because man is able to survive the threat posed by the power of the material world but because he is able to domesticate the material world for the purposes of the aesthetic.”27 But more recently, the poem has been a central text in the dialogue between romanticist and speculative realist thinking.28 Speculative romanticist readings of “Mont Blanc,” however, challenge the assumption that Shelley ultimately reifies the correlationist circle. Following Shelley’s declaration, to repeat, that “the everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind” (ll. 1–2), scholars including Gottlieb, Anne C. McCarthy, Greg Ellermann, and Washington have offered readings of “Mont Blanc” that displace the correlation of the mountain to the human mind.29 Indeed, the aporia “Mont Blanc” confronts—“and what were thou, and stars, and sea, and earth / if to the human’s mind’s imaginings / silence and solitude are vacancy?” (ll. 143–5)30 —is a version of the fundamental challenge of this collection’s approach to romanticism: how to think what there is when we are not, all the while negotiating how to live with and outside ourselves in a world without us. Affirming that “Mont Blanc” presents a paradigmatic articulation of the romantic sublime, McCarthy argues that its center is not the “remote, serene, and inaccessible” mountaintop, but the cacophonous Ravine of Arve, where Shelley’s attention is focused for nearly half of the poem (l. 97). Drawing upon Meillassoux’s discussion of the “great outdoors” and his argument that contingency governs the real, wherein everything could become otherwise without reason, McCarthy concludes that the sublime that emerges in Shelley’s poem is one “whose telos is not stability but contingency, an undoing or suspension of telos.”31 Gottlieb’s reading dovetails with McCarthy’s in that it, too, draws on Meillassoux, locating in the poem Shelley’s realization of the correlationist dilemma. This awareness allows Shelley to perceive what Gottlieb describes as the Meillassouxian absolute—the world that exists without us. Shelley knows, Gottlieb writes, that “he is in the presence of something that holds at least the promise of an enlightenment or clarification that exceeds the human” even if he can only finally term this a “Power” that “remains both objectively present and impossible for us to apprehend directly.”32 Ellermann, like McCarthy, sees the poem designating that “contingency functions as a general ontological principle for Shelley” wherein contingency “displays itself through language without being confined to it.”33 However, this does not affirm the absolute in the sense of transcendence but rather that “absolute contingency in ‘Mont Blanc’ is nothing but the form that events take.”34 Washington’s reading follows Meillassoux as well, but with an explicitly existential bent: “it is the mountain’s surface that itself indicates reality’s radical inaccessibility and human eradicability.”35 For Washington it thus “stands as the nexus of Romantic post-apocalyptic temporal vortices, an attempt to think being outside of thought, to ground consciousness in the falseness of an exteriority hyper-aware of its own illusory, and hence ironic, dissimulation, what divides itself from the world outside it.” None of these explications of noncorrelationist romantic thought, then, conform to Meillassoux’s version of a romanticism built on a cohesive illusion or divided vitalism, but are instead a speculative romanticism that unveils our own blindness to a world always already without us.36

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Indeed, Romanticism and Speculative Realism argues that romanticism has always been embedded in a “universe of things”—a universe where “things that have never spoken fall silent and things that have never moved acquire strange motion,” to borrow Mary Jacobus’s description of Wordsworth’s poetry.37 The romantic world is one of radical alterity that both does and does not conform to our expectations. It is a world that, as Robert Browning wrote in his Essay on Shelley (1852), “is not to be learned and thrown aside, but reverted to and relearned.”38 The process of “relearning” this world without us requires a commitment to reality as a form, without necessarily predetermined content, and a responding to a world of contingency with the rigorous openness of both a speculative philosopher and a romantic poet. Furthermore, we affirm that the romantic real was not and never has been fully reducible to an anthropocentric conception of “Nature.” We find in the romantic tradition a long-standing resistance to anthropocentrism, hearing in Wordsworth’s admonition to “Come forth into the light of things, / Let Nature be your teacher” the anticipation of speculative realism’s insistence that, in an era of anthropogenic climate change, it is more necessary than ever to think beyond the limitations of human consciousness.39 Somewhat against the mainstream of speculative philosophy and its stated impatience with the “the now-tiresome ‘Linguistic Turn,’ ” the essay in this collection maintains a commitment to the particularity and the exemplarity of the literary object as well as to the practices of close reading forged in the momentous crossing of romanticism and deconstruction in the work of Paul de Man and the Yale School, as well as, to a somewhat lesser extent, that of Derrida.40 Even Morton, whose early scholarship focused on Percy Shelley, and who continues to resist some of the more strident calls to render literature one object among many, has in many ways moved away from the field itself, insofar as the field supposedly remains committed to Kantian philosophies of transcendence and the emphasis on the individual mind as the nexus of world-making. As this story goes, in a posthuman world of mysteriously operating objects, the literary object can no longer be said to possess the same kind of privileged access to structures of consciousness as it did in the heyday of deconstruction. We argue, by contrast, that romantic literary objects function as privileged sites for expanding speculative realism and object-oriented ontology beyond their central concerns with finite subjects, the Kantian absolute, and the withdrawn object. In this respect, this volume is not simply about rereading romanticism through speculative realism; it also concerns rereading speculative realism through romanticism. Rather than skew us toward a realism that excludes the supposed anti-realist literary object, romanticism (and deconstruction) and speculative realism, it turns out, remain committed to the literary object—even as they expand what we mean by “literary.” Joined together, they also maintain the central importance of close reading to the speculative realist project and simultaneously champion the continued relevance of critical theory. And, for the most part, too, the contributors to this volume share a belief in the value of the aesthetic—a belief that is always already inseparable from beauty, as Keats declared in the “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” (l. 49)—the statement is as simple and as dizzyingly complex as it ever has been. Take, for instance, de Man’s striking comment in “The Resistance to Theory”:

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space, time or especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word “day,” but it is very difficult not to conceive of the pattern of one’s past and future existence as in accord with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world.41

The “resistance to theory” de Man diagnoses turns on the difference between the real and the linguistic, but affirms that confusing the two gives rise to ideological aberrations that forestall any understanding of the real. Most of us have long since absorbed the lesson that the connection between the signifier and the signified is conventional rather than phenomenological, a product of ideological practices. But de Man’s hypothetical, resolutely realist vigneron nonetheless reminds us of how easily we fall back onto ideological and ontological fictions about our independence from the spatiotemporal reality of the world. The danger is not in the fictions themselves, that is, but in taking those fictions—de Man’s “temporal and spatial schemes”—as constitutive of reality’s great outdoors. De Man’s example recalls us to another ideological aberration that speculative realism struggles with: the nature of aesthetic phenomenalism and the aesthetic real, which many of the essays in this volume take in myriad new directions. Keats’s “Ode on Melancholy” illustrates the intersection of these modes of critical thought and reading concerning the aesthetic: She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die; And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips: Ay, in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine; His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung. (ll. 21–30)42

Melancholy’s “sovran shrine” remains unseen—withdrawn even, we might say—from human sight “save” those with tongues strong enough to “burst Joy’s grape.” This metaphysical metaphor exhibits all of the qualities of ideological aberration that shields the real from human access. The personified Joy and the figurative grape conspire to aestheticize a real emotion, drawing it into a shrine whose inner sanctum no one can enter since, in the real world of grapes and tongues, no such bursting is possible (just try it) even as the burst grape signals the return of metaphor—grounding grapes into wine for lips so sad they thirst for drunkenness. Paradoxically, the wine-stained lips synecdoche grapples with the distance between a physical human trait and the whole

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human, whatever that might be. Lack of phenomenal access to melancholy and joy makes both affective states withdrawn objects, which are disclosed only by means of an aesthetic ideology that bars our mind from our own experience via the befuddling of the literary and the real. This is why de Man says the self is always divided from the self—the self is yet another object withdrawn. Rewritten in object-oriented parlance, the oenophilic lips become another withdrawn object that blasts the “self ” apart into parts and objects. As de Man says, we are not so much confusing the literary with the real but nor, as Harman would point out, are we able to know the core of the object. Instead, we are left with the nonreal grape posited as a real object forever removing itself from us even while this aesthetic process and the object’s bling—what Harman calls the “allure” of the object—is also, on de Man’s terms, what shields the object’s essence and gives rise to ideological blurring.43 And yet, de Man allows us to see that it is this same process that reveals its own withdrawing process, which is somewhat akin to Harman’s ocean-floor objects, unable to make contact yet still making contact but nonetheless resolutely linguistic as well. Romanticism thus affords speculative realism the opportunity to break free of its representations of the world as objects all the way down. In turn, speculative realism lets romanticism close its eyes and see the ontological world of things without us, the stars, the sea, the earth, in new lights. Ultimately, readers of this volume will find that the nexus of romanticism and speculative realism produces several multidirectional avenues for further thought that crisscross the essays. We might, very broadly, categorize these avenues as:  materialism, ethics, and aesthetics. In this spirit, the essays in conversation here enrich these networked yet disparate fields, bringing new, often unexpected, topics and concerns to both the romantic and speculative realist tables. Nevertheless, we should invoke a caution about what this volume does not want to suggest. While it is true that various critiques have been launched against speculative realism, many of which misunderstand it or intentionally misrepresent it, often attacking straw men rather than honestly engaging with its central thesis, certain concerns bear mentioning.44 Scholars of various feminist and new materialist stripes have opened dialogues with speculative realism even when finding much to critique.45 As Rebekah Sheldon perceptively writes, “OOO has been so provocative for feminist theorists because of its cannily unknowing usurpation of the energies of feminist thought and its relegation of that history to footnotes within its own autobiography.”46 And, as Katherine Behar similarly notes, speculative realism has largely been apolitical, perhaps, she wonders, because of its primary orientation in the writing of a small number of white men. Although a number of speculative philosophers— Morton in particular—have attempted to answer these critiques, speculative realism continues to have a reputation as being patriarchal, heteronormative, anti-language, and aligned with discourses of Western imperialism.47 Parallel to Behar’s notion of an object-oriented feminism, romanticism’s intervention in this collection shows how speculative realism can acquire political, social, and cultural capital and textures. These are energies romanticism, born in the crucible of revolution, has always cultivated and circulated.

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At the same time, perhaps due to speculative realism’s increasing popularity, thinkers—often dismissively gathered together under the category of “feminist new materialists” to begin with—like Catherine Malabou, Jane Bennett, and Karen Barad (to name only a few) have become—and are often invoked here—associated with the movement despite the fact that some of them have never openly avowed any positions remotely similar to speculative realism (and whose thought and published work, in any event, precede the coalescence of speculative realism). While these thinkers make substantial appearances in several essays in this book, the authors in this collection are always aware of the danger of lumping these figures in under a label they do not ascribe to. This tendency to “lump in” commits acts of erasure against feminist thought whereas this collection’s authors seek to nurture and embolden speculative realism’s sociopolitical and intersectional ambitions and prevent it from acceding to the caricature some paint of it as a philosophy of Latourian flattened ontological ambivalence. A word, then, about the collection’s organizational schema. The essays are arranged to showcase how they speak to each other both directly and indirectly as well as how they illustrate both the intersection of romanticism and speculative realism and the divergences and disagreements between the two fields. The essays can, of course, be read separately but only when read together does one experience the full power of their rereading of romanticism and speculative realism. If it were only somehow possible, though, it would be better to read them all at once, not back-to-back, but to instead somehow read them all at the same time to derive their complete cumulative endeavor. Failing that, perhaps one might toggle back and forth between them, reading a few pages here from an essay, then a few pages there from another, and then onward to a third before circling back and continuing with the essay from which one began this curvilinear path. For the essays speak to each other in curious, circumnavigatory ways that are overt and announced and simultaneously clandestine and conspiratorial. Precisely for that reason, the following chapter descriptions can only seek to highlight a few of the larger themes that were mentioned above as well as a few of the ways that the essays crisscross: materialism, aesthetics, and ethics. Emotion, or feeling, for one, possesses a strange immaterial materiality. As Joel Faflak writes, “feeling is, as it were, everywhere, like the ocean in which one swims— the bonding agent of all personal and social exchanges and obligations.” Faflak thus connects speculative realism to affect studies to show how, for romantic poets like Wordsworth, our own feelings of mortal fear—our very affect—might be forever beyond our reach, an object much like a tidal wave, a tornado, or what Morton calls a “hyperobject.” In this sense, “feeling at once embeds us in the world and makes us strangers to it and to ourselves”—it marks, he says, drawing on Rei Terada’s work, “the nonhuman within the human.” The subject, a being both itself and more than itself, turns out to look very similar to the delocalized phenomena of Morton’s hyperobject, a disconnected self from the panorama view of our individual self we all tend to possess. In turn, he argues that “feeling in Wordsworth … ‘thinks’ after the finitude of correlation, which in turn, and contrary to notions of The Prelude as producing the happy subject … leaves us on the ‘foreign territory’ of feeling itself.” “To be human,” he

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writes, “is not just to be ecologically interconnected with a world of things, but also to be radically disconnected from that world.” The subject, we might say, is found precisely nowhere, yet still felt “along the blood,” as Wordsworth puts it—an overarching claim of the whole collection. Writing on sound, wind, and air, Michele Speitz proposes a related insight:  that affect takes place in nonhuman forms of materiality. Speitz’s electrifying essay shows how the electrochemical experiments of Humphry Davy are demonstrative of air and ether’s material effect on the human subject as well as how Charlotte Smith’s nonhuman affects snowball into a material agency. For Speitz, romantic writers “depict a material world rife with reverberating interrelations and contingencies, replete with sublime ecologies that might outpace the reach of human minds but nonetheless reside in and among the earth and all earthly bodies. In essence, they render a materially sublime world made both possible and wondrous by virtue of being mediated by nonhuman affective agencies.” Speitz, like others in this volume, links the materiality of affect to aesthetics and in so doing reminds us how mundane everyday facts like air, oxygen, and respiration are actually profoundly weird and, to use her word again, sublime. Yet here this type of material sublimity carries over to the textual and the aesthetic as well since “human words and marks share space with the nonhuman page and once uttered aloud, they take shape in not-exclusively human sounds, sounds made manifest by contingent collaborations of earth, air, verse, and versifier.” By rethinking aesthetics in the light of such nonhuman agencies, the romantic sublime thus becomes, in Speitz’s hands, more than anthropocentric terror—boundless ecology and ontology. Her essay, then, has powerful ethical implications. Indeed, her study of romantic aerography and acoustics underscores how “romantic affect and aesthetics can dampen human exceptionalism while amplifying nonhuman ontologies.” Again, we can see how an essay captures an overall aim of the whole of the collection in that the amplification of nonhuman ontologies occurs throughout. Like these two, Rejack’s essay is another stunning reflection and reading of how the intersection of romanticism and speculative realism rethinks aesthetics and ethics. But like all the other essays in the collection, it is unique in its subject matter and style. Writing on romantic-era cookery books, Rejack’s essay strikes a playful tone, inviting us in for a four-course dinner, in part to help illustrate one of his claims:  “cookery books,” Rejack argues, “ponder the nature of aesthetics through reflections upon textual mediation.” By analyzing how romantic cookbooks preoccupy themselves with aesthetic self-reflection (a defining trait of romanticism in general), Rejack connects these texts to speculative realism “to counter the anti-realist assumptions which contemporary media theory leans toward.” In turn, “speculative realism helps us see the realism of romantic aesthetics” and “inject realism into our understanding of media.” For Rejack, rereading romantic media like cookbooks alongside speculative realism refashions contemporary media theory that tends to endorse a view of media that disinvests it of ontological concerns in favor of pragmatics or process philosophy, the latter of which are both anathema to speculative realism. Rejack suggests that this elision of ontology in media erases ethics from the study of media since it also obscures conversations about beauty, which is, he argues, a necessary category in discussing

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ethics since without beauty we fall into an indifferent criticism about how things work rather than how they signify and sing to us. In this sense, aesthetics are about both beauty and being, just as Rejack’s essay puts into motion with its playful style that does not match the staid and tired confines of the academic essay—a recurrent aesthetic theme that we will see in several other essays in this collection. Other essays push speculative realism differently, into a politically aware arena fully invested in social justice and ethical awareness.48 In these essays, we see lines of flight that place speculative realism into intersectional conversation with critical race studies, postcolonialism, democratic theory, new-wave feminism, and eco-theory. In this vein, Alexander Dick contends that the correlationist turn is linked to the white privilege of middle- and upper-class male Enlightenment authors. On this account, correlationism is not an abstruse philosophical problem but a wide-ranging historical one that has contributed to the ongoing atrocities that have defined humankind. Correlationism has more to answer for than simply its post-Kantian phenomenology since a direct result of this legacy is that “discussions of slavery and other ‘monstrous’ historical events have, in contrast to language, emotion, and imagination, been marginal to philosophical and literary studies.” Recovering this discourse, Dick reads Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself, a founding text in the slave narrative genre, as inspiring in us a speculative realist “wonder” that “is an initial response to objects in the universe, before I rationalize them according to existing correlationist protocols.” It “both draws us to things and inspires our curiosity.” Wonder, Dick argues, allows Equiano to liberate himself from the death-in-life of slavery, and his narrative, in turn, can break us out of our own stultified unawareness of our own “imperial condition.” An important, wondrous reading of Equiano and slave narrative studies in its own right, the piece also adds the crucial underexplored topics of race, imperialism, and empire to the speculative realist conversation. Allison Dushane and Chris Washington also invoke a speculative romanticism with an explicitly ethical dimension—or at least the possibility of an ethics- or justiceto-come—by thinking through some of the claims and implications of Meillassoux’s as-yet unpublished L’Inexistence divine. Dushane’s discussion of how Blake and Meillassoux invoke a liminal spectrality that collapses yet reifies the distinction between the living and the dead while providing a new theory of justice, connects to Washington’s, which looks to Rousseau’s state of nature aporia to similarly think about Meillassoux’s fourth “World of justice.” Dushane argues that, “like Blake … Meillassoux repurposes the structural features of eschatological narratives and deploys the rhetoric of prophecy in order to reimagine the limits and potential of human agency in relation to the rest of the material world.” She reads Blake’s prophetic books to show how “Blake’s equivalence of ‘Poetic Genius’ with the ‘Spirit of Prophecy’ can illustrate how Meillassoux’s insistence on the eventual incarnation of a God that does not exist works to transform conceptions of human subjectivity in the present.” But whereas Meillassoux’s idea recalls Blake’s visions of a world-to-come of justice, on Dushane’s reading Blake leads Meillassoux by the prophetic hand into realms he cannot imagine. Blake’s Jerusalem affirms Meillassoux’s contention that contingency is the fundamental principle governing life, which allows for a totally wild concept of justice—it will only

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eventuate once we can reclaim the dead from death. But to her, Blake’s work “can be read as the expression of the eternal hope of Meillassoux’s vectorial subject, which refuses to accept the structures of reason that support the self-enclosed, self-generating autonomous subject of modernity without succumbing to the gesture of negation that tends to underwrite materialist explanations of reality and history.” Washington’s reading of Rousseau argues that his state of nature thought experiment augurs a life-to-come based on a nonanthropocentric social contract.49 Returning to Rousseau in a complementary but counter-reading of Derrida’s Of Grammatology, he claims that Rousseau’s state of nature shares much with Meillassoux’s “extro-science fiction,” a place in which the laws of our world no longer apply, and anything can happen since it is a world governed by Hyper-Chaos. On Washington’s reading, Rousseau’s extro-science fiction state-of-nature offers a space for thinking radical modes of politics and an alternative to Meillassoux’s proposed fourth World of justice where the dead are returned to life. Rousseau’s strange paradoxical state-of-nature/ society aporia is one in which the impossible occurs: humans realize they have never yet been alive because they remain stuck in the double bind of a finitude that forces us to continually imagine how to die but not how to live. Instead, we must create a nonanthropocentric social contract focused on all life rather than one determined to prevent our death. But whatever the virtues of Washington’s reading of Rousseau as a thinker transgressing a universalist patriarchal Enlightenment, we should also be wary that Rousseau, however his texts may help theorize a nonanthropocentric politics, repeats an Enlightenment white privilege coeval with correlationism that Dick’s essay outlines. Singer broaches this same concern elsewhere in this volume. She both invokes and critiques speculative realist insights in order to investigate long-standing assumptions about prosopopoeia in Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith. In this, we return to the merger of aesthetics and ethics that characterize so many of the essays in this volume. Singer shows how romantic women poets mobilize a nonhuman poetics that models for us a feminist politics. In doing so, she brings to bear a new materialist critique of what she reads as speculative realism’s masculinist ethos and Wordsworthian egocentric isolationism by braiding together Jane Bennett’s vibrant matter and Karen Barad’s theoretical physics quantum entanglement. She finds in Barbauld, for instance, that “unlike Barad’s ‘cuts,’ which enact decisive, if violent, splits of ontology, or Bennett’s gathering or identifying of things into relation, Barbauld shows that both things occur.” The result is that women romantic poets “show us not only how language’s patterns actively shape materiality but also how new material forms might, even more imperatively, erupt new tropes that portend poetry as a testing ground for other ways of being and becoming.” The romantic object of poetry proves to be at once discursive and material, a site of linguistic and real transformation that escapes the ideological aberrations de Man identifies through a constant iteration of new entangled assemblages. Singer’s searching, mixtape remix of these poets and contemporary feminist theorists culminates in an intense, field-defying and fielddefining analysis against heteropatriarchy, a rowdy and rousing nonanthropocentric feminist romanticism.

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Connecting with all of these material, aesthetic, and ethical concerns, David Collings finds that particular natural objects, trees, in unstudied poems of John Clare resist a totalizing environmental collapse into finitude mandated by anthropocentricism. Clare’s work, in Collings’s poetic, poignantly mournful reading, is “a locus through which to mediate several leading concerns of those who seek to address the import of the human relation to the nonhuman” and “to decipher the political implications of this relation.” Collings finds in three short Clare poems—“Obscurity,” “Old times forgetfull,” and “Where are the citys”—a writing of the disaster that hearkens backward from recent speculative writings by Eugene Thacker and Ray Brassier to Maurice Blanchot. Although Collings reads this cluster of poems as effacing the concept of justice, it “does not leave the reader without recourse,” but rather, in opposition to Brassier’s nihilism (concepts Ottinger also discusses), invokes a “radical passivity” that resists the anthropocentrism that remains at the heart of nihilistic disaster. Collings’ radical passivity proposes a startling and empathic form of a justice-to-come that departs from Meillassoux’s resolutely anthropocentric Fourth World of justice. Aaron Ottinger’s essay crosscuts Collings’s argument, although it finds a positivity in Brassier’s ideas about extinction that underlines a different type of disaster, one that is mathematical and material. As Ottinger explains, to Brassier, “from the perspective of extinction … the world has already unfolded, everything has already happened, and therefore the universe, including human thought, can be outlined according to propositional logic.” For Brassier, we are all already dead. Ottinger turns to Byron, whose investments in extinction in poems like “Darkness” are well known; but Ottinger finds a similar, yet more surprising, interesting and mathematical existential theme in Don Juan. In fact, “for Byron, the mind is geometrical, while the gut belongs to astronomical numbers” and “the significance for Byron is that digestion and cognition operate according to two separate mathematical domains.” In “Byron’s geo-historical outlook, extinction precedes life, and the latter (life) does not produce but feeds on the former (death). Geological history proceeds according to a strange, backwards, axiomatic history, in which humans are only an iteration of inorganic matter.” As Ottinger argues, Byron’s narrator attempts to return to this kind of primordial chaos of extinction that precedes life—but at the same time, the mathematical distinction between the mind and the gut in the poem undoes the self in a manner that is similar to what Brassier calls the nemocentric self, the dissolution or disappearance of the self. Like the collection as a whole, Ottinger’s essay observes a subject whose nemocentricism counters romanticism’s supposed long-standing anthropocentricism. While Morton has argued that causality is aesthetic since objects relate to each other via external appearances, romantic aesthetic forms complicate this picture in Ellermann’s reading. Like Singer does with Bennett and Barad, Ellermann turns to a thinker who is not a speculative realist stricto sensu: Catherine Malabou. For Ellermann, Malabou’s study of Hegel’s aesthetics provides a theory of plasticity—art’s open-ended possibility—that can be applied to the study of poetry. He turns to Malabou’s theory of plasticity in art because “plasticity, understood as the reciprocal giving and receiving of form, already belongs to the aesthetic analysis of poetry.” He cites the “association

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between plasticity and the material forms of poetry: rhythm, meter, caesura, rhyme.” For him, “this theory of plastic verse reveals an intimate, and often overlooked, relation between aesthetic forms and speculative thought.” “Malabou’s work,” then “offers a corrective to speculative realist philosophies that are inattentive or hostile to the aesthetic.” But on Ellermann’s reading, it is precisely this same plasticity, exemplified for him in Keats’s famous “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” that resists Hegel’s theory of the end of art and instead proves a staging ground for poetry’s speculative future, a merger of the aesthetic and the real that belies Hegel’s linear historicism and instead instances a version of what this volume underlines:  a speculative historicity defined more by contingency than telos. In an extensive reading of Meillassoux’s various dense texts—this is the essay to start with in this collection if one knows nothing about speculative realism—Evan Gottlieb also turns to form, drawing on Meillassoux’s L’Inexistence divine, as Dushane and Washington do, and, like Washington, brings in Meillassoux’s Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, to think about how Walter Scott’s novels exemplify the law of Hyper-Chaotic contingency. Looking at what he characterizes as a bizarre Walter Scott text, Waverley’s “Postscript which should have been a Preface,” Gottlieb finds that “frequent eruptions of randomness that occur outside the realm of human agency” in Scott’s novels disrupt Lukácsian notions of narrative forms, and are instead a Meillassouxian type of Hyper-Chaos that reinforces Ellermann’s contention that romantic aesthetics is about possibility. As he puts it, “putting Meillassoux in dialogue with Scott creates an opportunity not only to highlight what the French philosopher’s version of speculative realism says about narrative probability, but also to shed new light on what Scott brings and bequeaths to the romantic-era novel, as well as to generic successors like science fiction.” Putting these two into dialogue questions our longstanding “assumptions about Scott’s supposed commitments to historical progress and narrative causality.” And so while “romanticists have embraced Lukács’ vision of Scott as the great chronicler of historical conflict … it may now be time to think again about the roles of contingency, randomness, and probability in Scott’s plots.” For Gottlieb, those possibilities might just arise randomly in a fashion that proves Scott is perhaps the first novelist of Hyper-Chaos, of extro-science fiction. Gottlieb’s absorbing essay opens an unexpected and wide-ranging possibility that maps onto the whole collection:  romanticism, as the authors here read it, may be extro-science fiction, a thoroughly nonanthropocentric writing not focused on the human imagination and subject. And here we should note, then, that while on the surface Romanticism and Speculative Realism appears to be primarily concerned with British romanticism, the volume transgresses this seeming limitation insofar as Washington discusses French romanticism, Ellermann German romanticism, and Harman American romanticism. In fact, given speculative realism’s deep-dive Kantian investments, one could argue that all the essays, dealing implicitly or explicitly with Kant as they do, are focused on German romanticism. In that sense, all of the essays can be said to be about not only British romanticism but also romanticism as we are only beginning to come to terms with it as a transnational, multiauthored, polyglot, conceptually amorphous,

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boundariless, constantly moving field that continues to desire to breach and even dispel romanticism of the kind we used to call Big-Six romanticism. Graham Harman’s essay is remarkable in this regard because he begins by recurring to his reading of H. P. Lovecraft in Weird Realism before suggesting that perhaps Poe “is a better match than Lovecraft for what we might call OOO 2.0.” Although, as he notes, the authors frequently get lumped together since “Lovecraft and Poe can both easily be classified as ‘horror writers,’ ” this transatlantic linkage by one of speculative realism’s defining figures reminds us of how romanticism—in all its nationalities and guises— continues to fuel definitions of the speculative field. For those in need of a crash course in OOO, Harman’s essay serves as a great primer. There is a crucial difference between the real and the sensual, which Harman carefully explains, connecting this essay to the others that focus on aesthetics. As he writes, “OOO holds the real to exist definitely in the plural, whereas neither Kant nor Heidegger is sure that the real is many rather than one, and Heidegger openly tends to doubt it. By contrast with the real, the sensual consists of that which exists only as a correlate of experience.” object-oriented ontology’s (OOO) uniqueness from Meillassouxian speculative realism stems from many things. But as Harman points out here, OOO “gives the sensual a cosmic scope, so that even inanimate entities make contact with the sensual rather than the realm,” meaning that living and nonliving nonhumans participate in the aesthetic as well as humans—think of Keats’s urn or the airs and affects in Speitz and Singer, the trees in Collings, Rejack’s cookbooks, or what Harman here calls “black cats.” Harman reads Poe’s “The Black Cat” as defining this literary object black cat as “a frequently encountered entity that cannot fail to capture our attention, whether through superstition or sheer visual interest.” In doing so, Poe’s work illustrates how OOO literature works because these black cats “bring the reader as a real object into his works, as when he denounces superstition while leading us to become temporarily superstitious ourselves.” Ultimately, Harman’s essay continues to sketch out not only what OOO 2.0 is but what OOO literary criticism looks like and will look like in the future. Mary Jacobus’s essay turns back to deconstruction even as her essay executes a critical re-evaluation of the field by reading Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory alongside Geoffrey Hartman’s and de Man’s deconstruction of Wordsworth. Her essay adds to the growing compendia of speculative-realist-tempered analyses of “Mont Blanc,” a “plausible reading” of which, she suggests, “would be that it is Latourian avant la lettre.” Jacobus’s essay exemplifies the crossroads of deconstructive romanticism and speculative thinking. She “find[s] Latour’s notion of a composite actant . . . surprisingly helpful for thinking about poetry—an alternative to de Man’s evisceration of subjective agency in the name of machine-like linguistic agency with all its potential for accidents.” Nonetheless, she also thinks we should “be turning the tables and asking what ‘romanticism’ has to tell us about Latourian [Nature].” For her, however much “Mont Blanc” might read as Latourian in its actants of rivers, winds, seas, and snow storms, it retains the formal awareness of how entangled ontology and epistemology are through language, in networks like Latour’s that are themselves linguistic—an argument that, read alongside others in the volume, showcases the farreaching implications of romanticism as developed in this collection. In this entangled

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sense, we are “no longer ‘after’ Nature, at least when it comes to language.” Like Marx did with Hegel, Jacobus’s argument ultimately turns Latour on his head: “if ‘we’ have never been Modern, it turns out that we may be romantic still,” a claim that wittily and stylishly captures this collection’s overarching revelation. If speculative realism continues romanticism’s objective of setting the subject rolling outward from our anthropocentric notion of it as the center of the universe, then these essays add layers to this by giving us a romanticism ready to go into bold and wild new territories. Romanticism has long speculated on selves split from selves, on other worlds, worlds housed and hidden within worlds, of a world(s) separate from our own, disguised in our phenomenological correlationism in plain sight as mountains and stars and seas and, even, minds. But romanticism, we might say, also has the ability to break with the finitude of the mind and journey into the ontological realm without leaving the vaunted romantic individual imagination behind. Instead, we must imagine that imagination anew—and the fields of romanticism and speculative realism as well. If the Kantian slumber was never complete, if we always claimed to be interested in the great outdoors, this is our time to fully embrace speculative thought and see what new realities await—or do not await—us in whatever romantic future there may yet be without us.

Notes 1 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.), “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 2–3. 2 See Lee Braver, A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 3 Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 1. 4 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 76–81. 5 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 7. 6 Ibid., 5, 26. 7 Ibid., 26. 8 Hutton disseminated his ideas in print between 1785 and his death in 1795. His influential theory of deep time was popularized by John Playfair’s Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802). Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason in 1781, followed by the Critique of Practical Reason in 1788 and the Critique of Judgment in 1790. For a concise overview of Huttonian theories and their influence on science and poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century, see Nigel Leask, “Mont Blanc’s Mysterious Voice: Shelley and Huttonian Earth Science,” in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 182–203. 9 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 27. 10 “[T]he qualities of the object are not the object. Objects then are both themselves and not-themselves. In defiance of the Law of Non-contradiction—a law that has never

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14 15 16

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19 20 21 22 23 24 25

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism been properly proved—objects present us with the following paradox: objects are both objects and non-objects.” Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities, 2013), 27. This is particularly true of Harman. See his critique of correlationism in “Meillassoux’s Virtual Future,” Continent 1, no. 2 (2011): 79–81. For a critique of Meillassoux’s commitment to the law of noncontradiction, see Robert S. Lehman, “Toward a Speculative Realism,” Theory & Event 11, no. 1 (2008): para. 16. Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224–87, 250. Thomas Pfau, Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790–1840 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); John Bugg, Five Long Winters: The Trials of British Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014). Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: British Romanticism and Speculative Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 5. Ibid., 8. The familiar story of the taming of Romanticism by the Victorians has been given new life and a material interest by Tom Mole’s What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). David Collings, Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change (Ann Arbor, NY: Open Humanities Press, 2014). Jacques Khalip and David Collings, “Romanticism and Disaster,” Romantic Circles Commons. https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/disaster/index.html. Accessed December 1, 2017. Jacques Khalip, “Contretemps: Of Extinction and Romanticism,” Literature Compass 13, no. 10 (October 2016): 629. Ibid., 635. Chris Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 30. Gavin Budge, Romanticism, Medicine and the Natural Supernatural: Transcendent Vision and Bodily Spectres, 1789–1852 (Houndmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 213. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 2 vols., ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 2:6; John Keats, Selected Letters, ed. Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 41. For a longer discussion of Coleridgean suspension of disbelief as a means of confronting a world of contingency, see Anne C. McCarthy, Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 46–84. On negative capability, see Brian Rejack and Michael Theune (eds), Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, forthcoming). Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 213.

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28 For a brief speculative realist take on the poem, see Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 29 Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 161–70; Greg Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 154–74; Anne C. McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things’, or, ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 355–75; Chris Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (September 2015): 448–60. 30 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vol. 3, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 79–90. 31 McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency,” 358. 32 Gottlieb, Romantic Realities, 166. 33 Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” 169. 34 Ibid. 35 Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 455. 36 Washington, Romantic Revelations: Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 37 Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3. 38 Robert Browning, An Essay on Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. W. Tyas Harden (London: Reeves and Turner for the Shelley Society, 1888), 14. 39 William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130–1, lines 15–16. 40 Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” 1. 41 Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 11. 42 John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard (New York: Penguin, 1988), 349. 43 Graham Harman, Quadruple Object (Washington, DC: Zone Books, 2010). 44 Four prominent examples are Ray Brassier, Alexander Galloway, Peter Wolfendale, and Nathan Brown. Brassier, “Interview with Ray Brassier,” Kronos. http://www. kronos.org.pl/index.php?23151,896. Accessed February 1, 2014. Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39 (2013): 347–66. Wolfendale, Object-Oriented Ontology: The Noumenon’s New Clothes (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014). Nathan Brown, “The Nadir of OOO: From Graham Harman’s Tool Being to Timothy Morton’s Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality,” Parrhesia 17 (2013): 62–71. 45 See, for instance, various essays in: Richard Grusin (ed.), The Nonhuman Turn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Katherine Behar (ed.), ObjectOriented Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Richard Grusin (ed.), Anthropocene Feminism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). 46 Rebekah Sheldon, The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 204. 47 See, for instance, Morton, “Queer Ecology,” PMLA 125, no. 2 (March 2010): 273– 82; Morton, “All Objects are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy,” in

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Object-Oriented Feminism, ed. Katherine Behar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 65–82. 48 As Harman writes “as philosophers we tend to favor very slow-moving arguments. Other fields do not have this luxury—there are urgent problems to which they are trying to respond. Philosophy is the least urgent discipline because we’re dealing with long-term, subtle, slow conceptual changes that might not have much impact for a long time.” Liesbeth Koot and Menno Grootveld, “Interview with Graham Harman on the Anthropocene,” Sonic Arts Series #10, Sonic Arts. http://sonicacts.com/portal/ anthropocene-objects-art-and-politics-1. Accessed November 12, 2017. 49 Quentin Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 265.

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Of Meillassoux’s contingencies and Scott’s plots: Rethinking probability in a world of unreason Evan Gottlieb

Which is the more terrifying prospect:  a universe without ultimate meaning, or a universe without infinite possibility? If you’re more alarmed by the former, you likely subscribe to some kind of metaphysics—the type of thinking, as Quentin Meillassoux puts it in After Finitude, “that claims to be able to access some form of absolute being, or access the absolute through the principle of sufficient reason.”1 If the latter fills you with dread, you’re more likely to reject the existence of necessary beings, much less a necessary Being, and to embrace instead an ontology of immanent contingency and potentiality, which Meillassoux calls “Hyper-Chaos, for which nothing is[,] or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.”2 Believing in a universe imbued with intrinsic meaning—an effectively closed universe, populated by necessary beings or at least governed by eternal natural laws—is in line with most forms of traditional thinking, whether explicitly religious or simply philosophically conservative. By contrast, accepting a universe that is fundamentally unfinished—governed by nothing but contingency, void of any intrinsic meaning, and open to radical change—is one of the ineluctable conclusions of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism. Exploring Meillassoux’s unorthodox ideas regarding contingency, Hyper-Chaos, and related concepts is one of the goals of this chapter; the other is to explore what Hyper-Chaos and its many ramifications suggest about literary representations of probability. Here, my focus will be on the extraordinarily influential Waverley novels of Walter Scott. Granted, Scott initially seems like an odd pairing with Meillassoux: the nineteenth-century novelist with the twenty-first-century philosopher, the master storyteller with the apostle of contingency, the Presbyterian-turned-Anglican with the committed albeit highly unorthodox atheist. Beyond these superficial differences, however, lies a series of intellectual continuities regarding what counts as probable and believable that this chapter will seek to trace. Ultimately, putting Meillassoux in dialogue with Scott creates an opportunity not only to highlight what the French philosopher’s version of speculative realism says about narrative probability but also to shed new light on what Scott brings and bequeaths to the romantic-era novel, as well as to generic successors like science fiction. More specifically, Meillassoux’s radical

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reworking of concepts of necessity and probability allows us to rethink our assumptions about Scott’s supposed commitments to historical progress and narrative causality. The most famous modern analysis of Scott’s narratives is still Georg Lukács’s in The Historical Novel. According to Lukács, the archetypal Waverley Novels plot embodies the dialectical core of a Marxist vision of history, in which the clash of socioeconomic structures – typically, the rising bourgeoisie versus the older feudal order – drives the engine of historical progress. As Lukács puts it, if Scott’s main tendency in all his novels—and which forms of them in a sense a kind of cycle—is to represent and defend progress, then this progress is for him always a process full of contradictions, the driving force and material basis of which is the living contradiction between conflicting historical forces, the antagonisms of classes and nations.3

Lukács sees that Scott has great sympathy for the “losers” of history, especially those remnants of feudalism who by choice, chance, or clan find themselves bound to its increasingly outdated codes and structures. But the winners of most Waverley Novels are not those for whom Scott shows the greatest feeling—be they Highlanders, gypsies, Covenanters, or Jews—but rather those who prove themselves ethnically, ethically, or nationally flexible enough to navigate their way toward British modernity. In other words, Scott’s plots generally rehearse the Enlightenment logic of stadial history that Marx drew on for his own dialectical materialism. This Lukácsian version of Scott has been highly influential—even if, as Fredric Jameson has observed, the historical novel as a vehicle for authentic (i.e., Marxian) historical consciousness is now mostly an “impossible form or genre . . . that is still assiduously practiced”4—not least because it helped counter the Victorian and early Modernist disparagement of Scott as little more than an author of adventure stories fit for consumption only by boys and invalids. The great flowering of critical interest in Scott that has taken place in the past decades owes much to this paradigm, such that most of the major critical initiatives put forward continue to assume its basic functionality. The masculinizing of the novel genre described by Ina Ferris, the generic dialectic of romance and realism identified by Ian Duncan, the absorption and redeployment of Scottishness identified by Katie Trumpener, the zeitgeist-forming power of the historical novel identified by James Chandler, Caroline McCrackenFlesher’s deconstructive examination of Scott’s nation-building work, Alison Lumsden’s investigation of Scott’s surprisingly unorthodox language usage, and even my own study of multiple critical theorists’ applicability to the Waverley Novels—each of these modifies the terms of Lukács’s original paradigm, to be sure, but leaves its totalizing structure intact.5 The assumption is that, consciously or not, Scott’s novels represent history as a totality, one that can be apprehended as a whole—from the outside, as it were—such that its patterns can be recognized and regularized, even when fictional elements (e.g., invented characters and events) are introduced. Recently, Matthew Wickman has employed a similar approach, taking Scott’s self-reflexive “Postscript which should have been a Preface” at the end of Waverley;

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Or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since as exemplary of the novelist’s claim “to be able to grasp these [historical] developments in their complexity.”6 But Wickman contrasts Scott’s methodology, which is both indexed and facilitated by “the narrative closure which Waverley . . . seems to provide,” with the more open-ended approach of Scott’s fellow countryman and sometime literary competitor, John Galt. Galt’s refusal to treat history as a totalizable entity, especially in his acknowledged masterpiece Annals of the Parish (1821), leads him away from Scott’s chosen genre of the historical novel and toward more experimental styles of writing; hence his insistence that Annals be received as a “theoretical history” or even a “fable” rather than as a historical novel. In Wickman’s analysis, Galt’s alternative vision of history can best be understood via the mathematical ontology of Alain Badiou, who has staked his career on the proposition that mathematics—especially set theory, more recently supplemented by topography—is first philosophy.7 According to Badiou, the radical ontological potential of number qua number has been stolen from us; he aims to restore it by showing how every set conceals the arbitrariness of its own “count as one” and represses the point of its own void:  a point that, when discovered or manifested, can become the ground for a new count, or truth, to whose realization the newly formed subject must pledge itself. Galt, in Wickman’s analysis, is best understood as a novelist in this mold, one who bursts open the seemingly closed set of early modern Scottish and British history. The relation Wickman develops between Galt and Badiou provides a partial template for how in this chapter I want to reconsider Scott in light of Meillassoux’s theories. I say “partial,” however, because the relation between the latter couple will prove to be more fractious than Wickman’s ingenious Galt–Badiou pair, and also because Meillassoux’s ideas differ in some important respects from Badiou’s. Like his mentor, Meillassoux accepts mathematics as first philosophy; unlike Badiou, he primarily uses set theory not to help describe the emergence of new truths but to indicate the limits of probabilistic thinking. Although the main target of After Finitude is Kant’s insistence that we can never have direct knowledge of the essence of things, Meillassoux frequently approaches this problem by returning to earlier questions raised by Kant’s great predecessor, David Hume. For Meillassoux, “Hume’s problem” names the difficulty of explaining causality. Famously, in section IV of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume uses the example of colliding billiard balls to highlight the extent to which our reason in fact depends on experience and cognitive habit; although we think we know what happens when one billiard ball strikes another, we only really know the surface effect—one ball strikes another and the latter moves—while the underlying cause is left obscure. Moreover, our so-called knowledge that the same effect will occur time and again under the same conditions is just a form of heavily vetted prediction:  we “know” what will happen when one billiard ball strikes another because we’re in the habit of expecting that, in the arena of natural phenomena at least, the future will follow the same course as the past. Rather than rehearse the entirety of Hume’s well-known thought experiment, let’s look, instead, at his subsequent deductive summary, which is worth quoting at length:

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism In a word, then, every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary, since there are always many other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experience. Hence we may discover the reason why no philosopher who is rational and modest, has ever pretended to assign the ultimate cause of any natural operation, or to show distinctly the action of that power, which produces any single effect in the universe. It is confessed, that the utmost effort of human reason is to reduce the principles, productive of natural phenomena, to a greater simplicity, and to resolve the many particular effects into a few general causes, by means of reasonings from analogy, experience, and observation. But as to the causes of these general causes, we should in vain attempt their discovery … These ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry.8

It was passages like this that famously interrupted Kant’s “dogmatic slumber,” prompting him to respond to Hume’s skepticism with a theory of transcendental idealism in which space and time become precisely those a priori forms through which human consciousness operates to make our shared experience of the world possible. In effect, in order to solve Hume’s problem, Kant requires that human subjectivity becomes a permanent feature of the world. This in turn is what Meillassoux calls “correlationism”: the presumption that the world can only be meaningfully talked about in relation to human consciousness, never on its own terms. Most of After Finitude is thus concerned to demonstrate not only that correlationism is incompatible with modern science—hence Meillassoux’s increasingly well-known thought experiment regarding “the arche-fossil”9—but also that by its own logic, the correlate allows us to make certain positive, albeit necessarily speculative, statements about the nature of reality. In essence, these boil down to two conjoined assertions:  first, that there is no such thing as a necessary entity; second, that as a result the only necessity is the contingency of everything. For Kant, we might say, the in-itself is thinkable but unknowable; for Meillassoux, the in-itself is both thinkable and knowable, but only as “chaos—which is the only in-itself.”10 Restating the gist of the critique of correlationism, Anna Longo notes that “by accessing the contingency of thought … Meillassoux can establish the contingency of natural laws since, if thought is in-itself contingent, then any other thing in-itself must be contingent.”11 This is worth dwelling on because it’s precisely the continuity of these natural laws—the assumption that they can be regarded as permanent features of our existence—that, even before Kant’s transcendental analytic, Hume’s skepticism leaves intact. In Hume’s famous billiard-ball thought experiment, we recall, there is no way to know why the collision of a moving ball with a motionless one produces a predictable movement; we can only know that, based on past observation and the law of noncontradiction (which in this case dictates the impossibility of the second ball

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moving and remaining still simultaneously), this appears to be the nature of reality. But as Meillassoux observes, if Hume had taken his skepticism regarding causality to its logical conclusion, then the behavior of everything surrounding those billiard balls would need to be called into question as well: “This is why Hume’s imaginary scenario of the billiard balls is impossible—for in this scenario it is only the billiard balls that escape causality, not the table upon which they roll, or the hall containing the table.”12 That Hume does not imagine such possibilities, says Meillassoux, confirms that the earlier philosopher retains an underlying commitment to a stable, Newtonian-style universe of universal, ahistorical natural laws. Of course, modern scientific discoveries in fields like quantum physics have demonstrated that such “laws”—especially, in this case, those of motion and gravity— are neither stable nor timeless; on scales both incredibly tiny and outrageously vast, reality is indeed “weird,” as proponents of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) like Graham Harman and Timothy Morton regularly remind us.13 Unlike these other speculative realists, Meillassoux generally prefers to work out his philosophical vision via numbers; moreover, his speculations regarding the nature of Hyper-Chaos are less concerned with space than with time. Nevertheless, certain analogies between the two approaches may be helpful. For just as theorists of OOP assert that the underlying weirdness of reality must be allowed to shape our understanding of “normal” objects and their relations, so Meillassoux claims that our theoretical knowledge regarding infinity and temporality must be allowed to inform our understanding of probability. Under normal conditions, we might not be wrong to assume that if the laws of the universe were actually as unstable as Meillassoux makes them out to be, we would live in a Heraclitean world of constant flux. The absence of such flux—the seeming permanence of the natural laws that govern our universe—is then taken as evidence of their necessity, just as (to take an example from Meillassoux) a gambler would be correct to assume that a die that repeatedly only lands on one of its sides must be loaded.14 But does this model scale up? We tend to assume so, blithely reasoning that if the laws governing nature could change, then they would always be changing—just like the gambler expects that a non-loaded die will, with enough throws, regularly land with each of its sides facing up.15 As Meillassoux points out, however, this is a faulty analogy because the logic of probability only works within a measurable totality. You can only predict the chances of something taking place, that is, by setting constraints within which the event in question may or may not happen—for example, using a six-sided die and limiting the number of times it is thrown. In other words, as Meillassoux puts it, “probabilistic reasoning is only valid on condition that what is a priori possible be thinkable in terms of a numerical totality.”16 Cantorian set theory, however, teaches us that number is inherently unquantifiable. In brief, as Meillassoux explains, if you take any set, count its elements, and then count the possible groupings of those elements, the latter number will always be bigger than the former; and this holds true even if the set in question contains an infinite number of elements.17 (One can also count the empty set—what Badiou calls “the void”—as one of these sets.) What set theory demonstrates, in other words, is that number is not just infinite but transfinite; translated into ontological terms, says Meillassoux, modern set theory

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compels us to accept “a fundamental uncertainty regarding the totalizability of the possible.”18 Before turning to Scott and the narrative implications of the above, let’s note briefly a second Meillassouvian critique of the “frequentialist logic” that assumes that the absence of flux in our natural laws is positive proof of their permanence. This line of argument is developed most explicitly in The Divine Inexistence, Meillassoux’s stillunfinished masterwork, of which After Finitude represents only a partial reworking. Here, among many other themes, Meillassoux takes up the implications of HyperChaos for our understanding of probability. Given that the only necessity is the contingency of everything, and given in turn that the only law governing reality is that of noncontradiction (since a contradictory entity, able to both be and not-be simultaneously, would effectively be necessary), then anything other than a necessary entity is theoretically possible:  “For in no way is it illogical (i.e., contradictory), to think a becoming always capable of breaking with the laws that currently determine its possibilities, thereby establishing a novelty that was nowhere before coming into being.”19 In fact, there have already been at least three instances of what Meillassoux calls “advent ex nihilo,” in which what was previously impossible according to prior conditions nevertheless came into existence:  the advent of matter from what was previously nothing (i.e., the Big Bang), the advent of life from what was previously dead matter, and the advent of thought or consciousness from what was previously merely alive.20 The logic of this argument clearly follows the use of set theory in After Finitude: just as any set contains the principle of its own excess, so the hyper-Chaotic nature of temporality is immanently capable of bringing forth novelty—or destruction, or stasis—at any moment, since “the sole necessity to which becoming is subordinated is its own eternal power of the advent or abolition of each thing.”21 Let’s note, too, that the focus on the “novelty” of human thought sets Meillassoux apart from most of the other speculative realists, who are generally loath to grant humans a special place in the cosmos and tend rather to endorse the nonanthropocentrism of Levi Bryant’s “flat ontology.”22 It also leads Meillassoux to an unexpected thesis regarding a fourth World of justice that, he argues, not only remains an ontological possibility (after the Worlds of matter, life, and thought) but also remains that toward which we should actively dedicate ourselves.23 In this way, starting from the principle of the unreason of everything derived from his critique of correlationism, Meillassoux creates a vision that combines an immanent ontology with an ethical program that is remarkably messianic in its orientation.24 This return of the (religious) repressed in Meillassoux’s thought continues to generate no small amount of controversy. For our purposes, however, the more direct ramifications of Meillassoux’s reopening of “Hume’s problem” are of greatest interest, especially as they’ve led him to reflect on the nature of narrative. In his recently translated short book, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, Meillassoux lauds the genre of speculative fiction for its propensity to imagine worlds substantially different from our own. Nevertheless, most science fiction stops well short of embracing the full implications of advent ex nihilo that, as we’ve seen, follow from Meillassoux’s deduction of the necessity of contingency from correlationism. As extrapolations of

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possible futures, says Meillassoux, “in science fiction we generally inhabit a world where physics (theoretical, natural) differs from ours, but in which laws are not purely and simply abolished—i.e. in which everything and anything cannot happen in an arbitrary way or at any moment.”25 In other words, even when science fictional worlds differ radically from our own, for example featuring new planets with different laws of physics or new technologies that radically break with current understandings of what is physically possible (e.g., “Beam me up, Scotty!”), they nevertheless usually abide by the principles of continuity and constancy that in turn facilitate Karl Popper’s theory of falsifiability—which holds that any truly scientific knowledge must be open to being disproven, at least in theory—as the main criterion for judging the legitimacy of experimental results.26 Continuity within a framework of overall causal logic, in fact, seems to be a necessary principle not only of the content of most science fictional representations but also of the very possibility of their representation as a series of actions; in Meillassoux’s words, “Stories can thus be told because we are still dealing with worlds, with ordered totalities, although they are governed by another order.”27 But if the defining representational feature of “regular” science fiction is a high degree of logical continuity and repeatability within its conditions—exemplified in Meillassoux’s essay by Isaac Asimov’s short story, “The Billiard Ball”—then by extension another genre becomes possible, which Meillassoux provisionally calls “extro-science fiction.” Here, the ramifications of the principle of unreason would be taken to their logical conclusions, says Meillassoux, such that “we start from what normally has to be excluded from narrative:  not only pure arbitrariness, but an arbitrariness that can be reproduced at any moment.”28 Not surprisingly, given the extreme damage such “unreason” would do to conventional practices of narrative continuity, Meillassoux is hard-pressed to find too many examples of pure extro-science fiction; he does, however, locate several partial examples in the fictions of Philip K.  Dick, Douglas Adams, and Robert Charles Wilson.29 In works by these authors, Meillassoux finds evidence of our ability to imagine worlds characterized by the semi-inoperability of Popperian scientific knowledge—or, to put this another way, a partial suspension of the usual frequentialist logic that allows us the comfort of a predictable future. If the future is radically unpredictable for Meillassoux—hence his description of Hyper-Chaos as “time without Becoming,” since the future is under no more obligation to bring forth novelty than it is to remain consistent with the present—the past, too, must be rethought.30 Here we can begin to connect Meillassoux to Scott via the figure of Hegel, whose theory of the dialectic famously informs Marx’s materialism, and hence Lukács’s rehabilitation of Scott. Meillassoux’s philosophy, like that of Badiou, is (or at least attempts to be) profoundly and intentionally non-dialectical. In an interview, when asked whether he dislikes Hegel, Meillassoux clarifies that his philosophy of radical contingency was prompted by a break with the German idealist: I read Hegel fervently as a student, and can say without exaggeration that the love of dialectic ‘consumed me from within’ during youth. I  abandoned this mode of thinking once I  understood the profound reason why there could never be contradictions in reality. There could be tensions, conflicts, and collisions, certainly;

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism but contradictions, never . . . for dialectics, if there is an absolute necessity it ought to harbor a contradiction that is simultaneously real and always already on the way to being outstripped. For me, the necessity of contingency entails that there cannot be contradiction, since a contradictory entity, being always already that which it is not, is destined to be revealed as ultimately necessary.31

History is not inherently dialectical, says Meillassoux, because if it were it would be built from necessities—contradictory entities that must be, since by already being contradictory they cannot become truly otherwise—when even the briefest glance at the historical record tells us otherwise. Scott, of course, is the great romantic-era novelist of the past. His career-long fascination with the genre of romance, however, means that his fictional use of historical materials is almost always inflected by a sense of what might have been, thus providing (in Ian Duncan’s words) “a vital margin of refuge between fatal historical fact and extravagant spiritual possibility.”32 In Scott’s historical romances, possibilities emerge that exceed the factual even as they (usually) fall short of the miraculous. As Meillassoux reminds us, the Latin word contingere means “to touch” or “to befall.” What is contingent, in other words, is what touches us or befalls us—but only because it chanced to happen in a way “which, in its irreducibility to all pre-registered possibilities, puts an end to the vanity of a game wherein everything, even the improbable, is predictable.”33 Meillassoux is talking about the unpredictability of real events here, of course, but his statement bears comparison to several of Scott’s descriptions of his own writing style. The best known of these is certainly Waverley’s “Postscript which should have been a Preface,” but before returning to Waverley, let’s consider one of Scott’s more fanciful prefaces: the dialogue between Captain Clutterbuck and the authorial Eidolon in the preface to The Fortunes of Nigel (1822). When Clutterbuck chastises him, repeating the criticism—frequent even in Scott’s own day—that he should make his plots more streamlined, he receives the following response: Author. That is a sore point with me, my son. Believe me, I  have not been fool enough to neglect ordinary precautions. I  have repeatedly laid down my future work to scale, divided it into volumes and chapters, and endeavoured to construct a story which I  meant should evolve itself gradually and strikingly, maintain suspense, and stimulate curiosity; and which, finally, should terminate in a striking catastrophe. But I think there is a demon who seats himself on the feather of my pen when I begin to write, and leads it astray from my purpose. Characters expand under my hand; incidents are multiplied; the story lingers, while the materials increase; my regular mansion turns out a Gothic anomaly, and the work is closed long before I have attained the point I proposed.34

Even allowing for Scott’s habitual self-deprecation, this doesn’t sound like the work of an author who thinks in terms of inevitabilities, closed sets, or totalities. Instead, it suggests that in the name of rehabilitating Scott as a Lukáscian dialectician, we’ve been

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too quick to dismiss his own accounts of his (lack of) method, and the possibilities they open for the intrusion or eruption of unpredictability—contingency—in Scott’s plots. Following this lead, what should we make of the Eidolon’s rueful admission slightly later in the same prefatory dialogue that “I cannot form a plot”?35 Scott is likely thinking here of plot in the classical sense, as in Aristotle’s famous defi nition of plot as “the arrangement of the particular actions” of a given representation, or mimesis; one, moreover, with “a beginning, a middle, and an end” connected by some combination of necessity and probability.36 To admit to being unable to “form” a “plot,” then, doesn’t mean an inability to write a story; even E. M. Forster knew that storytelling was Scott’s forte (although he didn’t mean this as a compliment, of course).37 Rather, especially when considered in light of Meillassoux’s critique of probabilistic reasoning, it seems to point to Scott’s awareness that the sequences of events in his novels do not always meet or measure up to the requirements of perfect necessity. Instead, “the materials increase,” as Scott puts it, and “the story lingers” until the intervention of the author, who artificially imposes limits on it. This, of course, is Aristotle’s point when he observes that the great difference between history and poetry is that “the one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen.”38 Yet speculating about what would happen in a given situation requires invoking precisely the kind of probabilistic reasoning that Meillassoux shows is little more than a comforting fiction at best. For example, in Volume 2, Chapter 7 of Waverley—the rough center of the novel— the course of Edward Waverley’s future is literally changed accidentally when his guide’s horse loses a shoe. The chain of events here is both routinely causal and entirely contingent. Presumably, within Scott’s fictional world, Waverley could have stopped at a different inn, where the proprietor would have been someone other than Ebenezer Cruikshanks, whose horse might not have lost a shoe, who might have taken him to a village other than Cairnvrecken, whose blacksmith might not have had a Jacobitical wife, where Waverley might not have been mistaken for the Bonnie Prince Charlie, after which he might not have pulled out his pistol, been attacked by the angry blacksmith, shot him, and been arrested. This arrest, however, is what leads to Waverley’s forced march toward Stirling, his subsequent rescue by Jacobite forces, and his subsequent introduction to the Bonnie Prince in occupied Edinburgh. There is obviously a fair bit of string-pulling going on behind these scenes:  Fergus MacIvor, his sister Flora, Rose Bradwardine, Donald Bean Lean, even the Bonnie Prince himself have all been manipulating Waverley from close up and afar alike—and their strings, of course, are pulled in turn by the author of Waverley himself. But the lost horseshoe that sets off the chain of probabilistic events that follows is a moment of complete nonnecessity— an eruption of contingency on which both sides of the novel’s plot (before and after) arguably rest. As Hilan Bensusan observes in his study of nonnecessity, “Contingencies coincide to weave a plot that makes some events more likely than others.”39 Improbable plot twists, belief-stretching coincidences, and other elements usually considered to be flaws in Scott’s fabric (even by his original readers) are, in this sense, the more or less random twigs from which the nest of Waverley’s plot is formed.

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Characterizing Waverley as a kind of nest is justifiable, furthermore, not only because its many contingent elements ultimately yield a plot whose architecture is far from random but also because many other Waverley Novels follow the pattern it establishes: a cipher-like protagonist, caught between rival factions or forces, successfully negotiates his way between them, eventually emerging on the “winning” side while in the process winning (or winning back) his fortune, reputation, and heteronormative love interest. As Alexander Welsh pointed out some time ago, moreover, in these prototypical Scott productions, the Waverley Hero’s primary attribute is usually “prudence”—a highly prized virtue in Scott’s own, early nineteenth-century moment of early industrialization, if frequently somewhat anachronistic with regard to the historical settings of individual novels.40 In this sense, Scott’s most characteristic Waverley Novels don’t embody a dialectical historical logic as much as they do a classically humanist one, in which the randomness of what happens is tempered by the sovereign presence of humanity, operating in turn within a supposedly closed and therefore predictable world-system. The prudential Waverley Hero thus functions in Scott’s historical fictions like the constancy of natural laws in Meillassoux’s category of conventional science fiction: both allow the story to proceed according to certain logical, predictable lines of development, even as a variety of contingencies swirl around them. In this vein, although the best-known and most-quoted lines of Waverley’s “Postscript . . . Preface” are those describing how much present-day Scotland has changed from the version represented in the novel, and how few if any Jacobites remain, the passage that follows deserves our attention, too. Here, Scott first explains in his own voice that “It was my accidental lot, though not born a Highlander (which may be an apology for much bad Gaelic) to reside, during my childhood and youth, among persons of the above description,” before asserting that “the most romantic parts of this narrative are precisely those which have a foundation in fact.”41 These “facts,” in turn, generally have a shared provenance, as the following passage makes clear: The exchange of mutual protection between a Highland gentleman and an officer of rank in the king’s service . . . is literally true. The accident by a musket-shot, and the heroic reply imputed to Flora, relate to a lady of rank not long deceased. . . . The account of the battle of Preston, and skirmish at Clifton, is taken from the narrative of intelligent eye-witnesses . . . The Lowland Scottish gentlemen, and the subordinate characters, are taken not from any individual portrait but from the general habits of the period, of which I have witnessed some remnants in my younger days, and partly gathered from tradition.42

Here, Scott plainly stakes the legitimacy of the plot he’s just woven, especially the believability of many of its individual strands, on his access to eye-witness accounts of the events in question.43 At least two ramifications of this move are worth noting. First, the emphasis is clearly on the authenticity of the individual events portrayed in the novel, rather than on the (frequently quite doubtful) necessity or even probability of their occurring in the order or manner depicted. Second, and following from this point, this logic again entails a reduction of history to human-sized elements.

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Of course, this kind of narrative humanism is hardly unique to Scott. In a pair of recent articles, Mark McGurl argues that the modern realist novel was essentially interested in scale, especially the scale of the human in relation to what appears larger or smaller than it.44 In McGurl’s alternative history of the novel, the giants of medieval romances and (for example) Book One of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels are slowly but surely relegated to children’s fiction and genre literature, which retain an interest in the enormous and the microscopic even as these extremes are rejected by the realist novel in general, which has continued to embrace the idea of “man as the measure of all things” well into the Anthropocene. Although McGurl doesn’t mention Scott, the latter fits into his story quite well, playing a similar function to that assigned to him by Ina Ferris in her critical story of the consolidation of literary authority.45 There, Scott adds history to romance to make novel-writing (and novel-reading) a respectable masculine pursuit; likewise, in the schema proposed by McGurl, Scott’s Waverley Novels would contribute to the growth of modern realism by establishing a paradigm for shrinking history to a manageable size, one governed by the supposedly stable category of “human nature.” This, of course, is one of the main points of Waverley’s introductory chapter, in which Scott justifies his decision to “thro[w] the force of my narrative upon the characters and passions of the actors;—those passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day.”46 What we would now call “human nature,” in other words, acts as the equivalent in Scott’s plots of the supposedly stable natural laws that allow for probabilistic reasoning in Meillassoux’s account of the world. The irony here, however, has already been alluded to: the prudential Waverley Hero holds together the plots of Scott’s historical novels only by being a signally anachronistic figure. This is problematic, moreover, not because such anachronisms threaten to ruin our suspension of disbelief—Scott’s plots already accomplish that quite effectively— but because their ubiquity further problematizes the Lukácsian depiction of Scott as a proto-Marxist thinker. Dialectical materialism, after all, is committed to revealing as a bourgeois invention the very figure of “Man” that Scott takes to be an ahistorical, universal truth.47 As the late Susan Manning has demonstrated, however, a “poetics of character” dominated Anglo-American fiction writing throughout the long nineteenth century. In Scott’s case, moreover, such a commitment clearly formed part of his larger investment in the civic humanism of his era, which “worked on the assumption that (in John Pocock’s words) ‘the integrity of the polity must be founded on the integrity of the personality’ ” at an individual level.48 Scott’s commitment to character is not unique, then, either to his era or his vocation. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, it’s not even entirely consistent within his own oeuvre. Just as Meillassoux describes several examples of science fiction that come close to abandoning the logic of probability, so too some Waverley Novels edge toward a greater awareness of the pure contingency of history, including the contingency of the very conditions that helped produce and sustain Scott’s commitment to character as the equivalent of general natural laws around which more or less contingent plot elements can be woven. Although Waverley establishes a paradigm for many of Scott’s

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subsequent historical novels—especially those that take up similar issues of British nation-building, and take as their spatiotemporal purview the Anglo-Scottish domain of the long eighteenth century—it is not as dominant in this regard as is often assumed.49 Even among the “Scotch novels” that followed most directly from it, the humanist perspective that is made to contain history’s contingencies is frequently supplemented and occasionally challenged by eruptions of inhuman illogic. Many of them, to be sure, take similar forms to the coincidences and happenstances of Waverley, which is to say “random” events, encounters, and coincidences that Scott ultimately subordinates to his overall plots. But there are also frequent eruptions of randomness that occur outside the realm of human agency, and in them we may discern at least traces of what Meillassoux memorably calls “the omnipotence of chaos.”50 Let’s consider just a few. First, it’s hard to ignore the regular appearance of supernatural elements in Scott’s fiction, from the haunted “green room” of The Antiquary (1816) to the curse of the Ravenswoods in The Bride of Lammermoor (1819). These irrational elements have certainly not been overlooked by scholars and critics— although Lukács makes no mention of them, except perhaps when he dismisses Scott’s touches of “local colour”—but the way in which they regularly leach agency from the novels’ characters and direct it instead toward impersonal, sometimes literally inhuman energies and forces bears repeating. Second, there is the role of geography, which frequently plays as active a part in shaping the destinies of characters as the socioeconomic contradictions of which Lukács is so fond.51 Here, we must include obvious elements like the Shetland setting of The Pirate (1822), but also the roles of smaller geological entities: the shifting sands of Solway Firth in Redgauntlet (1824), which confuse Darsie Latimer into accidentally crossing the border between Scotland and England, and the Salisbury Crags outside Edinburgh in The Heart of Mid-Lothian (1819), whose proximity to the city allows George Staunton to encounter Jeanie Deans at a pivotal moment.52 Third, there is the role of climatological events in Scott’s fiction. Both weather and climate have recently received renewed attention in romantic studies generally, including the indirect ripple effects of the Tamboran eruption and the influence of the growing meteorological sciences on methods of literary as well as military composition.53 In theoretical realms, moreover, not only has climate change become a nearly omnipresent topic, but more restricted views of weather have also entered the scene, from John Durham Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds, with its genealogy of weather phenomena as media phenomena, to Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture, which investigates how “weather patterns” always contain “the generative force that opens the field of experience to the way it both comes together and subtly differentiates from itself.”54 Here, again, the possibilities for investigation within Scott’s corpus are intriguing. To take just one example, consider the many roles that inclement weather plays in the Waverley Novels, from storms that force characters to take shelter in unexpected places (e.g., when Lucy Ravenswood and her father must stay the night at Wolf ’s Crag in The Bride of Lammermoor) or cause accidents (e.g., the storm at sea that deposits Cleveland on Shetland’s shore in The Pirate) to smaller but no less important weather events, like the intermittent moonlight that dooms Fergus’s attack on the English (in Waverley’s Volume 3, Chapter 12) but conveniently allows Edward

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to slip away after he’s cut off from his Highland comrades. No doubt the most famous “weather event” in Scott’s early novels is the quickly rising tide in The Antiquary (1816) that cuts Isabella Wardour off from safe passage back to land and requires a daring cliffside rescue by Neville—an event made all the more contingent by the fact that Scott famously confuses coastlines in this scene, depicting the sun setting off the eastern coast of Scotland. To his credit, Scott never changed this error even when he revised The Antiquary for the magnum opus edition of the Waverley Novels—a tacit admission, perhaps, of the futility of attempting to control for all contingencies in a fundamentally unreasonable world. Supernatural or irrational forces, geography, geology, and climate-weather: these are just a few of the nonhuman actants, as Bruno Latour would call them, that have begun to play increasingly important roles in both the theory and practice of critique. Given that we live in the Anthropocene—an era of entangled and increasingly unpredictable agencies—this is not surprising; indeed, the pressing need for new frameworks of understanding and interpretation has played no small part in popularizing speculative realism across a range of disciplines. Meillassoux’s ideas, in particular, lend themselves to rethinking our understandings not only of the world at large but also of the modes and methods by which we tell ourselves stories about our world (and perhaps also about possible worlds to come). As the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century—and one whose critical reputation is now higher than at any time since his death in 1832— Scott’s oeuvre continues to define the historical novel and, via that sub-genre’s ongoing influence, many other varieties of genre fiction, including the science fiction of which Meillassoux is understandably fond. Romanticists have embraced Lukács’s vision of Scott as the great chronicler of historical conflict, a supreme scribe of the rise of bourgeois modernity, and for good reason: the critical rehabilitation of Scott’s reputation as a serious author has rested in large part on it. But having achieved that critical rehabilitation, it may now be time to think again about the roles of contingency, randomness, and probability in Scott’s plots. To do so might indeed necessitate revising above all the long-cherished notion of Scott as a great dialectician. Meillassoux’s revisionary understanding of temporality as HyperChaos, “Time without Becoming,” provides the right methodological opportunity for this operation. Freed by Meillassoux’s radical philosophy of contingency from having to remain within the correlationist circle, it remains for us now to take full advantage of the possibilities he opens up for rethinking what we think we know about literature, as well as about existence tout court. By way of a provisional conclusion, then, let me end with a suggestion—and with apologies to William Godwin—for a new subtitle for Scott’s first novel:  Waverley; Or Things as They Happened to Happen, Speculatively Speaking.55

Notes 1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 34.

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2 Ibid., 64. 3 Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 53. 4 Fredric Jameson, “Is the Historical Novel Still Possible?,” in The Antinomies of Realism (New York; London: Verso, 2015), 260. See also Ian Duncan, “History and the Novel after Lukács,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 50, no. 3 (November 2017): 388–96. The runaway success of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series is exemplary of this situation, viz., the historical novel leached of historical consciousness. 5 Ina Ferris, The Achievement of Literary Authority: Gender, History, and the Waverley Novels (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL; London: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Caroline McCracken-Flesher, Possible Scotlands: Walter Scott and the Story of Tomorrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Alison Lumsden, Walter Scott and the Limits of Language (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010); Evan Gottlieb, Walter Scott and Contemporary Theory (New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 6 Matthew Wickman, “Of Tangled Webs and Busted Sets: Tropologies of Number and Shape in the Fiction of John Galt,” in Romantic Numbers, special issue of Romantic Praxis, ed. Maureen McLane, Romantic Circles (2013): www.rc.umd.edu/print/praxis/ numbers/HTML/praxis.2013.wickman. Accessed June 9, 2014. 7 See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London; New York: Continuum, 2006); Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (London; New York: Continuum, 2009). 8 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd ed., introduction L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed. P. H. Nidditch (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30. 9 See Meillassoux, After Finitude, 9–27. 10 Ibid., 111. 11 Anna Longo, “The Reality of the End of the World,” in Breaking the Spell: Contemporary Realism Under Discussion, eds. Sarah de Sanctis and Anna Longo (Fano, Italy : Mimesis International, 2015), 41. 12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 89. 13 See, for example, Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012); Timothy Morton, Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2013). For an early study of how quantum physics intervenes in earlier theories regarding motion and matter, see Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), esp. 147–66. 14 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 96. 15 Meillassoux’s interest in probability and numerology receives its fullest expression in his wonderfully idiosyncratic study, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés, trans. Robin Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2011). 16 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 101.

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17 For example, the set A, where A = (1, 2, 3), contains the following sets: itself, (1), (2), (3), (1, 2), (2, 3), (1, 3), and the empty set (). If you then construct a set of the sets contained in A, it too will contain more sets than elements—and so on! Which means, as Meillassoux puts it, that “for any set whose existence we assume, we also assume its quantitative surpassing by the set of its parts” (After Finitude, 135n11). 18 Ibid., 105. 19 Meillassoux, “Appendix: The Divine Inexistence,” trans. Graham Harman, in Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 176. 20 Ibid., 188–9. 21 Ibid., 176. 22 See Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011). 23 Meillassoux, “Divine Inexistence,” 215–16. 24 This p World, moreover, is related to the advent of God—a God who must not exist now, given the current injustices of our World, but in whom we must believe nonetheless to be worthy of the World of justice to come. In addition to the relevant passages in Divine Inexistence, see also Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” Collapse IV (May 2008): 261–75. 25 Quentin Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, trans. Alyosha Edlebi (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015), 23. 26 Ibid., 11–17. 27 Ibid., 23. 28 Ibid., 43. 29 Ibid., 45–56. 30 See Quentin Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (Fano, Italy : Mimesis International, 2014). 31 Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making, 168. 32 Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel, 15. 33 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 108. See also Robin Mackay’s observation that “the necessity to think contingency spells the ruin of all such . . . systems of thought which would subordinate the events that befall us to some kind of predestined necessity.” Mackay, “Introduction: Three Figures of Contingency,” in The Medium of Contingency, ed. Mackay (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2015), 1. 34 Scott, The Fortunes of Nigel (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1900), 16. 35 Ibid., 17. 36 Aristotle, Poetics, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 60–1. 37 E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1927), 51. 38 Ibid., 62. 39 Hilan Bensusan, Being Up for Grabs: On Speculative Anarcheology (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2017), 23. 40 Alexander Welsh, The Hero of the Waverley Novels: With New Essays on Scott (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 112–17. See also E. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph, 20th anniversary ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On Scott’s strategic use of anachronism, see esp. Richard Maxwell, “Inundations of Time: A

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41 42 43

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45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Definition of Scott’s Originality,” ELH 68, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 419–68. Not all of Scott’s contemporaries approved wholeheartedly of prudence; see, e.g., Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s arguments against it in Aids to Reflection, ed. H. N. Coleridge (New York: Tibbals and Son, 1872). Scott, Waverley, 363. Ibid., 363–4. For more on the relationship between Scottish history and eye-witness testimony, see Matthew Wickman, The Ruins of Experience: Scotland’s ‘Romantick’ Highlands and the Birth of the Modern Witness (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). See Mark McGurl, “The Posthuman Comedy,” Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (Spring 2012): 533–53; and McGurl, “Gigantic Realism: The Rise of the Novel and the Comedy of Scale,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 2 (Winter 2017): 403–30. See Ferris, Achievement of Literary Authority. Scott, Waverley, ed. P. D. Garside, intro. Ian Duncan (London; New York: Penguin, 2011), 5. See, for example, Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1978), 192. Susan Manning, Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters, 1700–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 123–4. On the tendency to overstate Waverley’s status as the model for all the Waverley Novels, see, for example, Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 100–1. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 71. Lukács, Historical Novel, 50. Going beyond the Scottish Waverley novels would allow consideration of many more geographical and geological features of Scott’s fiction, including the alternating deserts and oases of The Talisman (1825) and the Swiss Alps of Anne of Geierstein (1829). See, for example, Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Warfare (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 119–44. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, ON: Duke University Press, 2016), 64. Cf. William Godwin, Caleb Williams, or Things as They Are, ed. Gary Handwerk and A. A. Markley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2000).

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Affect and air: The speculative spirit of the age Michele Speitz

When John Keats evokes a “material sublime” in his verse epistle to John Hamilton Reynolds (1818), the poet draws inspiration from effervescing, ethereal hues of the heavens, from a changeling world wherein “We jostle,” wherein “Things” exist unsettled and “cannot to the will / Be settled.”1 Under the rubric of romantic material sublimity neither human will nor mind triumphs over the rhetorically figured naturescape. Alternatively, regardless of human will or mind, here the material world is characteristically unsettled if not volatile, always already interacting and transforming. Departing from the dualist accounts of sublimity penned by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, which endure as the “two most influential accounts . . . of the sublime as an aesthetic category,”2 Keats and various romantic writers envision a competing world of sublime aesthetics. They depict a material world rife with reverberating interrelations and contingencies, replete with sublime ecologies that might outpace the reach of human minds but nonetheless reside in and among the earth and all earthly bodies.3 In essence, they render a materially sublime world made both possible and wondrous by virtue of being mediated by nonhuman affective agencies, and wherein we necessarily “never hear a voice as such, only a voice carried by the wind.”4 As Timothy Morton’s essay on “Sublime Objects” rightly suggests “air and gravity make humans speak certain words in certain ways. Valleys encourage yodeling.”5 Often taking recourse to topographies of oscillating winds, vaporous airs, spuming gases, and ethereal spheres in the same breath as embodied voice and incarnate verse, romantic writers figure an important counter-sublimity to that of Burke or Kant: the material sublime.6 By way of romantic-era aerography they locate an unavoidable material sublimity at work within and without the human body. Furthermore, their representations of aeriform activity intimate a material sublimity that is extant and at play within nonhuman life-forms and even inorganic bodies from which humankind cannot distance itself (necessary for Burkean sublimity), and from which humanity cannot imaginatively or rationally rescue itself (as in Kant’s transcendental idealist account of sublimity). Ever-motile material ecologies reciprocally manifest ever-animate and always-material affective relations which precipitate and make possible the very real stuff of earth and poetry, of graspable things and waning sunsets.

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As opposed to entertaining fantasies of transcending materiality or distancing oneself from its reach, the material sublime aestheticizes operations of the material world that might pertain to human existence but which by no means stop or start with humankind. As an aesthetic category marking ineluctable if not intimate material relations and elusive physical transformations, the material sublime recalls pre-Kantian accounts of aesthesis. This older term marks an aesthetics grounded in all manner of primary sensory experience and affective interaction—resembling an aesthetics grounded in what David Collings calls “primary affect,” or “a state of pure receptivity and affective respiration” related to mere being.7 In place of Kantian transcendental idealism and aesthetics, then, we encounter here something more akin to a sublime Wordsworthian realist aesthetics qua aesthesis. For Wordsworth, as Frances Ferguson contends, “the only world and self which we can know is a residue of an unfathomably extensive chain of affections which have led us all to imagine the possibility of meaning in the face of all evidence to the contrary.”8 The crucial point is that by postulating humanity’s primary affective relations with the material world while simultaneously recognizing humanity’s necessarily limited epistemological grasp of that world, the romantic material sublime knits together the speculative realist’s insistence that the natural world exists regardless of and beyond human thinking with the new materialist’s espousal of active if not agential vibrant materialities heterogeneously attributed to humans and nonhumans, granted alike to earthly life-forms and nonliving entities.9 Given that speculative realism entails mounting a case for everyday objects and ecological entities that exist regardless of human epistemology and meaning-making, romantic literature’s aesthetic representations of nature might seem out of place, particularly because such figurations are assumed to arise by way of human-oriented experience and expression. Although Levi Bryant doesn’t address this problem in relation to romanticism, his account of the ontology of objects addresses this hurdle that, for epistemologists, threatens where it does not hamper all speculative realist thought. Simply put, for Bryant “[t]he being of objects is an issue distinct from the question of our knowledge of objects.” More broadly, Bryant holds that questions of ontology are both irreducible to questions of epistemology and that questions of ontology must precede questions of epistemology or questions of our access to objects. What an object is cannot be reduced to our access to objects. And…that access is highly limited. Nonetheless, while our access to objects is highly limited, we can still say a great deal about the being of objects.10

But romantic literature did indeed have a lot to say about the being of objects, or as Wordsworth memorably put it, about “see[ing] into the life of things.”11 Illuminating such points of contact, Evan Gottlieb observes how the “Romantics anticipate some of [speculative realism]’s methods and concerns . . . [including a] desire to explore reality itself . . . [and a] yearning for knowledge of the absolute.”12 Gottlieb is right to point out the value of romantic literature’s representations of the natural world and the things in it, given its unique “historical positioning at a moment that is neither postHumean, since the force of Humean skepticism was very much alive and well for the

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romantics, nor post-Kantian, since the latter’s ideas were just beginning to be widely disseminated in Britain in the 1790s.”13 The way to proceed, then, is not to throw out romantic representations of sublime nature because of their epistemological tarnish, but, alternatively, to investigate how romantic aesthetics might help us to rethink the nature of ecological systems in less anthropocentric terms, and most especially, to prize those moments when a materially sublime aesthetics presses us to acknowledge how “questions of ontology must precede questions of epistemology or questions of our access to objects.”14 The present essay considers how the romantic material sublime borrows from and extends romantic-era speculative sciences, particularly those that study the physical yet protean dimensions of air. Moreover, I reveal how the material sublime as an aesthetic category moves beyond issues of taste, aesthetic judgment, and human emotion while still being very much involved with these questions. As Sianne Ngai observes, “the sublime is still western philosophy’s most prestigious example of an aesthetic category that derives its specificity from mixed or conflicting feelings.”15 But contrary to the performative acts of judgment built into the aesthetic of the merely interesting, as she calls it, where “[j]udging something interesting is often a first step in actually making it so,” the “reverse” is true “for [the] material sublime.”16 Ngai recognizes that, in the case of the material sublime, “we don’t make it sublime via judgement but the judgement reflects sublime being.”17 Heralding something approaching a new materialist’s rendition of Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling, the material sublime’s figurations of all-pervading affective relations make available nonanthropocentric accounts of a speculative realist world that is before us, beyond us, or without us.18 This model of material relations ultimately has bearing on thinking nature independently of humanity because it assumes the antecedent “sublime being” of “mountains, water, air.”19 Two hallmarks of romantic literature—waxing and waning affective states and portraits of puzzling, daunting natural phenomena—effectively usher in and become the preconditions for the kinds of ontological findings or hypotheses championed by speculative realism’s forerunners and practitioners. In this sense, romantic affect and aesthetics can dampen human exceptionalism while amplifying nonhuman ontologies. This claim is admittedly counterintuitive since affect and aesthetics are generally regarded as problematic children of phenomenological experience.20 However, the presumed epistemological and phenomenological, and, hence, ostensibly anthropocentric bases for aesthetic experience and judgment has lately come under fire. Ngai reminds readers of the “widespread and broadly diffused nature of the ‘aesthetic relation,’ which [only] some philosophers have adopted Kant to generalize as a special kind of attention paid solely to an object’s appearance or ‘aspect’ (as opposed to its origin, identity, or function) accompanied by an appraisal based on the positive or negative feeling that its apperception elicits.”21 More particularly, Ngai observes how for “George Santayana, Gérard Genette, and others these values are ‘objectified’ or projected back into the object, treated ‘as if ’ they were one of the object’s own properties or ‘an objective property, like any other.’ ”22 In the same vein, Timothy Morton has set out to reclaim the sublime for object-oriented ontology. Proposing a speculative sublime, Morton contends that the “kind of sublime we need doesn’t come

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from some beyond, because this beyond turns out to be a kind of optical illusion of correlationism, the reduction of meaningfulness to the human–world correlate since Kant. . . . The sublime resides in particularity, not in some distant beyond. And the sublime is generalizable to all objects, insofar as they are . . . alien to themselves and to one another in an irreducible way.”23 Ngai’s diffuse account of aesthetic relations resists simple subject–object dualisms, harmonizing with Morton’s ecocentric model of sublimity. Morton finds sublimity to be manifest within the particularity of “all objects,” which, for him, extends to include all earthly entities, even so-called human subjects. Last but not least, “[a]ffect,” as Brian Massumi gnomically suggests, “is the whole world: from the precise angle of its differential emergence.”24 Massumi’s strongly nonsubjectivist version of affect pivots away from anthropocentricism’s prioritization of human subjective experience, suggesting that “emotion requires a subject while affect does not,” which, among other things, allows for a more materially distributed understanding of affective agency grounded primarily within ontologies of substance and physical matter rather than strictly by way of the sensate human being.25 When gathered together within figurations of the material sublime, romantic affect and sublime aesthetics mark ontological states that themselves precondition speculative thinking about modes of existence and materialities well beyond the realms of human experience. With this claim, I knowingly court Meillassoux’s correlationist circle and evade it by degree. Where for Meillassoux modern thought narrows and rigidifies due to a long-standing inability to consider thinking and being apart from one another, I turn to romantic thought to foreground the aesthetic and affective properties ascribed to romantic nature that are especially valuable to the speculative realist project of decentering humanity and taking more seriously those realities bestowed upon the more-than-human world, including modes of being that may or may not overlap with human ontologies. The romantic sublime (material or not) is the aesthetic category par excellence that manifests first as a human response to the unknown or unknowable in nature which then prompts speculation beyond established epistemological boundaries. Furthermore, it is the aesthetic concept most caught up with fundamental questions of nonhuman being:  at times contending with earthquakes, lightning, or volcanic eruptions—on other occasions attempting to reconcile how stars and oceans move and exist across time and space. By speculating about nonhuman feeling, sensation, and affect and by orienting ontologies of the planet through the aesthetic registers of the material sublime, romantic figurations of nature arrive with crucial tools for rethinking the essence of nonhuman entities and the world in itself.26 The material sublime differs markedly from idealist versions of Kantian sublimity that ultimately privilege the human mind over whatever it is that initially inspires the sublime’s telltale reactions of wonder and terror, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion. Moreover, during the romantic period, the concept of the material sublime blended early physiography (which often framed earthly patterns and process in terms of chemical condensation and evaporation) with something vaguely approaching contemporary affect theory (which at times does indeed examine human emotion as it relates to affect, but more broadly studies emergent and waning material states and agencies not exclusive to human being).

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Underscoring this point, M.  H. Abrams’s analysis of Keats’s material sublime resonates with my own from the opening of this essay. While Abrams’s study only implicitly acknowledges the material sublime’s coupling of speculative aesthetics and a kind of distributed, all-pervading affective agency, his work makes explicit the material sublime’s debt to romantic sciences studying the matter of air: Keats imported “essence,” “spirit,” “spiritual,” “ethereal,” and related terms not from [idealist] Platonizing literary theorists, but from a very different [materialist and realist] linguistic domain. In Keats’ time, they were standard terms in a natural science, chemistry, in which Keats had taken two courses of lectures during his medical studies at Guy’s Hospital in the years 1815 and 1816. In the chemical experiments of the early nineteenth century, the terms were applied to various phenomena, and especially to the basic procedures of evaporation and distillation. When a substance was subjected to increasing degrees of heat (for which the technical term was “intensity”), it was said to be “etherealized,” or refined; in this process, it released volatile substances called “spirits” and was purified into its “essences,” or chemical components. The crucial fact, however, is that the products at the end of this process remain, no less the substance at its beginning, entirely material things, except that they have been refined into what Keats called the “material sublime.” . . . (“Sublime” and “sublimation,” as [Stuart] Sperry points out, were the terms for “a dry distillation”). The technical vocabulary of chemistry, that is, provided for Keats’ quick intelligence unprecedented metaphors for poetry—metaphors that made it possible to represent what he called the “silent Working . . . ” of the poet’s imagination as a process of refining, purifying, etherealizing, spiritualizing, and essentializing the actual into the ideal without transcending the limits and conditions of the material world.27

Unlike the Kantian sublime, the Keatsian material sublime privileges material relation and transformation—not transcendence. It grants substance even to “spirits” and conceives of refined and rarefied “essences” in terms of chemical components. Running counter to Kant’s anthropocentric transcendental philosophy, it affords little room for idealist notions of superseding material existence by virtue of great feats of mind. Even Keats’s celebrated poetic imagination could never outdo “the limits and conditions of the material world.” According to the logic of the material sublime, then, the physical world’s unseen or “silent Working[s]” make possible agencies of an embodied human mind, not vice versa. Keats’s chemically routed figurations of sublime nature resist Kant’s transcendental idealism by insisting upon an agentic material world full of nonhuman affective intensities. The material sublime furnishes a nondualist account of humanity and nature that points to inescapable material contingencies and nonhuman affective agencies, an account that anticipates Jane Bennett’s account of the world in itself in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Bennett “articulate[s] a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change

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if we gave the force of things more due.”28 For Bennett, the “image of affective bodies forming assemblages . . . enable[s her] to highlight some of the limitations in human centered theories of action . . . [and to conceive] a theory of action and responsibility that crosses the human-nonhuman divide.”29 In similar fashion, the politics inherent in the aesthetic of the material sublime implicitly suggest that we have a moral obligation to recognize the limits of human-centered accounts of action and affect and it encourages readers to experiment with thinking nature independently of humanity—to imagine ecologies that do not exist for us, but rather with us and in themselves. Delineating such alignments within speculative, romantic, and new materialist thought, what follows is a case study of material sublimity couched within romantic aerography, one especially attuned to the affective and aesthetic registers of a wide range of romantic-era writing about airs, gases, breath, and wind.

Romantic aerography: Pneumatics, affect, and the forgetting of air You may laugh, Sister, but let me tell you the speculative philosophy of the present age is too sublime for our feelings, till they let the spirit of them evaporate— —Henry Ryder Knapp, The musical farce of Hunt the slipper. In two acts. As performed at the Theatre-Royal. Smoke-Alley (1792)30

During the romantic period, pneumatology encompassed no less than the “science, doctrine, or theory of spirits,” the “[s]peculative part of the philosophy of the mind,” and “any of several branches of science dealing with air and other gases, esp. [regarding] their physiological properties and effects.”31 Knapp’s romantic-era farce captures the degree to which evolving programs of speculative philosophy eclipsed empirical science and pressed well beyond the realm of the visual. As the joke from the play runs, practitioners of speculative philosophy dabble in the absurd:  they would venture to study the very evaporation of our feelings. In this approximation, Knapp’s charge that speculative thought might dissolve human feeling and affect into a kind of transcendental sublimity misses the mark. The more telling adumbration of speculative philosophy, and of romantic-era pneumatic affect in particular, exists in Knapp’s qualifying remarks. There he attributes an elastic, almost fluid physical property to the unseen “spirit” of “feelings” that might only later dissipate into the ether in manifestations of attenuating affect. “Feelings” and states of primary affect here alluded to as “spirits” could only cease to hold their presumed pneumatic materiality in the overzealous imaginings of the human mind. In truth, romantic pneumatology did not consign feeling or even affect to nothingness; nor did it relegate feeling and affect to mind and body alone. Rather, it borrowed from speculative approaches to meteorology, chemistry, and biology to liken passing psychic and physical states to mutable atmospheric bodies and gaseous cocktails that in turn permeated the human subject, albeit only for a time and not always for the better.32 Pneumatic affect made near analogs of breathing and feeling and, by extension, yoked the vibrating air to

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the impassioned, enlivened word. By this logic, affective materialities of wind, airs, and gases all animated the basic operations of body and mind, all powered humanity’s finite range of inspiration, articulation, and expression. While critics have long mused over a romantic preoccupation with improvisation, spontaneity, and the affective force of spoken utterance, speculative philosophy suggests that part of this enduring puzzle is more or less wrapped up in our forgetting of air, particularly in our forgetting of air’s material sublimity and affective agency.33 Or to put this more squarely in terms of contemporary speculative realist thought, in place of falling prey to Kant’s “transcendental method [which] ultimately prevents us from engaging with nature other than as it is shaped by the conditions of human knowledge,”34 we might be better served by contemplating the more alien natures and material components of existence that make human knowledge and being possible in the first place—that shape the conditions of human knowledge rather than being shaped by it. The forgetting of air is no small charge. It is not a new charge either, but one that Luce Irigaray mounted against Heidegger and, in so doing, against the larger preoccupations of Western philosophy. For Irigaray, Heidegger and others laudably questioned human being, spirit, thought, and thought’s relationship to a technologically, architecturally enframed world.35 But Irigaray could not overlook how Heidegger seemed to begin in medias res, leaping into questions on the nature of life before examining the requisites for life, prior to exploring the conditions necessary for being, spirit, world, or thought.36 Her question is deceptively simple: she asks, “Can man live elsewhere than in air?”37 Her words echo Percy Shelley’s in Prometheus Unbound where he writes of “the all-sustaining air.”38 They recall Humphry Davy’s discourse on the invisible, elastic atmosphere, the “oxygene” required by each and “Any seed,” by “All animals, from the most to least perfect classes.”39 By extension, and more pointedly for the purposes of this collection, we might then ask: Can feeling live otherwise than with air? Such a question forces us to proceed quite slowly, to speculate more deliberately within the nonhuman arenas of affect studies.40 It asks us to consider more carefully the not-necessarilyhuman requisites for the kinds of affective interactions precipitating feeling—or, better still, it suggests we scrutinize the not-necessarily-human requisites for affective phenomena writ sublimely large, which might lead to a “better discernment of the active powers issuing from nonsubjects.”41 It compels us to look again at Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park where “The season, the scene, the air, were all favourable to tenderness and sentiment.”42 Austen’s phraseology invites further scrutiny not least because romantic aerography places such a statement at a far remove from the pathetic fallacy, with its naïve sentimentalism that reductively humanizes all of nature by rendering it little more than a backdrop for human emotions. Instead, could it not be that Austen detects how affective materialities of the external world routinely encourage and shape human being and feeling? Romantic writers and experimenters help us to remember what Irigaray feels Western philosophy is in peril of forgetting: that “Life is cultivated by life itself, in breathing”; or, as she puts it: “I can breathe in my own way, but the air will never simply be mine.”43 If air is all-sustaining, we, our thinking and our feeling, our world and our works, all rely upon it. Such a sentiment became the consensus during the romantic period.44 Alternatively, to forget air is to forget an invisible yet

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ubiquitous dependency; to forget air is to forget the necessary preconditions and ongoing requirements for life and affect, for art and utterance—for the entire world. In this sense, romantic aerography foregrounded an ecopoetics built upon primary affective community and interrelation, but not having access to today’s more nuanced taxonomies of affect, romantic writers such as Austen and others often made such contingencies legible through available vernaculars of feeling and sublime discourse.45 The familiar romantic conceit of correspondent breathing and feeling found a parallel in pneumatic thought with its enduring fusion of embodied affect and sublime air.46 Historian Vladimir Jankovic details how romantic-era atmospheric inquiry “increasingly associated meteorology with chemical expertise” as it followed eighteenth-century findings that often surmised aerial passions or presumed some equivalent of a kind of airborne bodily sensorium.47 Undeniable agencies ascribed to changeling vapors and electric fluids found a fitting home in aesthetic registers of the material sublime that routinely showcased astoundingly powerful and protean physical substances, and which, in contradistinction to Kantian transcendental sublimity, leaned heavily upon long-standing meanings attributed to the verb sublime, which had “possessed chemistry connotations dating back to alchemical texts from the late middle ages.”48 By the middle of the eighteenth century Newton’s “theories of subtle [and] (imponderable) fluids” had been posthumously published; Boyle had conducted and documented his well-known experiments with the air pump; the appearance of the Leyden jar had done much to popularize electrical experiments, and Benjamin Franklin had issued his quickly authoritative letters on the paradigmatically sublime phenomena of lightning.49 In his cultural history of English weather, Jankovic observes how “Almost universally, electrical fluid became a central explanatory concept in meteorology. . . . Consequently, the electrically governed oscillations of vapors were [accepted as] the prime causes of the wind.”50 Electrochemical life now seemed a prime mover of air with its attendant affective charge. Notably, the chemical turn in meteorology soon propagated an electrical turn of its own, each bearing out lasting affective legacies. Previous atmospheric systems imagined a pastiche of volatile if impalpable aerial embodiment. For instance, M.  Hinde’s late-eighteenth-century contribution to A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences defines the “[a]tmosphere [as] a perfect chaos of different effluvia, consisting of all kinds of corpuscles . . . confusedly jumbled together.”51 Oliver Goldsmith’s neo-Lucretian amalgam of air becomes a body we can’t feel: In [our atmosphere] all the bodies of the earth are continually sending up a part of their substance by evaporation, to mix in this great alembic, and to float a-while in common. Here minerals, from their lowest depths, ascend in noxious, or in warm vapours, to make a part of the general mass; seas, rivers, and subterranean springs, furnish their supplies; plants receive and return their share; and animals, that by living upon, consume this general store, are found to give it back in greater quantities, when they die. The air, therefore, that we breathe, and upon which we subsist, bears very little resemblance to that pure elementary body which was described in the last chapter; and which is rather a substance that may be

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conceived, than experienced to exist. Air, such as we find it, is one of the most compounded bodies in all nature. Water may be reduced to a fluid every way resembling air, by heat; which, by cold, becomes water again. Everything we see gives off its parts to the air, and has a little floating atmosphere of its own round it. . . . A thousand substances that escape all our senses, we know to be there; the powerful emanations of the load-stone, the effluvia of electricity, the rays of light, and the insinuations of fire. Such are the various substances through which we move, and which we are constantly taking in at every pore, and returning again with imperceptible discharge! This great solution, or mixture of all earthly bodies, is continually operating upon itself; which perhaps, may be the cause of its unceasing motion.52

Far from offering a reductionist account of the world in itself modeled upon a monolithic body of air that all too closely resembles human embodiment, here differing earthly bodies of all sorts “float a-while in common.” All things that exist have once touched or now intermix with the “Air . . . one of the most compounded bodies in all nature;” hewing closely to the physiography of distillation and evaporation grounding the Keatsian material sublime, Goldsmith imagines an heterogeneous external world that may “escape[s] all our senses,” but nonetheless harbors affective agencies including “the powerful emanations of the load-stone, the effluvia of electricity, the rays of light, and the insinuations of fire.” Anticipating contemporary speculative materialisms, he urges readers not to overlook the often imperceptible world that is. And by styling the natural world in terms of “This great solution, or mixture of all earthly bodies, [which] is continually operating upon itself,” here ecological systems of the planet assume a high degree of autonomy, working upon themselves, as it were, rather than being worked by human agents of change. This speculative account of a materially sublime planet in flux prefigures contemporary systems theory assuming the world in itself to be ineluctably interrelated, interdependent, and changeling by nature.53 Later studies assume the sublime materiality of atmospheric bodies, yet markedly expand the weather’s affective force by again ascribing emotions and passions to the more than human world. For instance, in a general study of the air’s affective relations in 1774, naturalist William de Brahm “combined electrical and mineral theories,” seeking to “complete a ‘physic-systematic’ picture of the atmosphere and its ‘passions from different meteors’ using electrical fluid as the primary cause and the vertical motion of air as the secondary one.”54 In late-eighteenth-century investigations of the air, the physicality of the atmosphere bears the potential not only to alter human experience but also to alter itself from within itself. In this case, it is as if the skies themselves move by way of cooperative affective materialities—the skies convulse or more calmly subsist by the work of interfused chemical, electrical, physical, and other relational affective forces here characterized as meteoric “passions.” Such aerography suggests a diffuse, transformative material agency home to the material sublime which here invites the contemplation of atmospheric being in itself, in its collectively instantiated self. What could today count as glaringly anthropomorphic terms (body, passion) operate quite differently here, much more expansively and pervasively. Indeed, in these

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contexts, “passions” are not the exclusive provenance of human phenomenological experience. They instead call to mind Massumi’s nonsubjective “affect” and Bennett’s not-necessarily-human “affective assemblages.” Thus, when Humphry Davy, the poster child for romantic pneumatics, joined the Medical Pneumatic Institution in Bristol in 1799, it provoked little surprise that he was charged with a “duty to investigate the physiological effects of the aëriform fluids.”55 Famously, from May to July of 1799 Davy “habitually breathed” nitrous oxide, interacting closely and routinely with it.56 Recording the broader effects of regular inhalation, he attributes powerful affective agencies to the gas which he cannot help but frame in terms of sublime aesthetics and emotion: “Sometimes I had the feelings of intense intoxication, attended with but little pleasure; at other times, sublime emotions connected with highly vivid ideas; my pulse was generally increased in fullness but rarely in velocity.”57 Intriguingly, “feelings of intense intoxication” add up to no more than “little pleasure.” But once Davy experiences so-called “sublime emotions” he’s met not only with “highly vivid ideas” but also records a “pulse . . . generally increased in fullness.” Invisible yet detectable, motile yet diffuse, for Davy, wavelike affective agencies ring sublime. Further attesting to the commanding affective agency ushered in by the gas, Davy marks a mild aphasia. When he notes a loss of communicative and descriptive agility in the face of the unknown agencies of these chemically altered airs, he acknowledges his own limitedness, his incapacity to know—a realization made possible by such moments of overpowering affect and aesthetic experience from which there is no safe Burkean or Kantian remove. Granted, to those familiar with traditional generic protocols of sublime discourse, this may appear to be no more than a written rehearsal of the formulaic trope wherein authors fabricate a sense of urgency by narrating sublime encounters with what is only purportedly unknowable or indescribable. Indeed, Davy resolutely attempts to catalogue whatever it was that had transpired as he reckoned with sublime materiality. But the key difference is that the especially ubiquitous and intimate material sublimity of air does not allow Davy any safe distance from which to aestheticize as Burke or Kant would have it, compelling the chemist to shift gears from those narratives of sublime nature that rescue the agency of the human mind to one that speculates instead upon agencies of air. He repeatedly admits that his engagement with the gas is “extremely difficult of description; nor can I well discriminate between its agency and that of other physical and moral causes. . . . pervious to my sleep, my mind was long occupied by visible imagery. I had a constant desire of action, a restlessness, and an uneasy feeling about the praecordia analogous to the sickness of hope.”58 That Davy cannot “discriminate between its agency and that of other physical and moral causes” is to grant the gas a degree of its own affective-agentive autonomy, and with this, its own ontology. At the same time, this statement makes room for the possibility that the very being of such chemically rarefied air, like the ontology of the air of the atmosphere we breathe, is perhaps impossible to separate from other earthly substances and the gamut of human being not excluding moral or ethical frameworks such as those leveraging questions of hope. Yet again the affective-aesthetics of the material sublime makes possible contemplating the world in itself. More than this, here it forces

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questions of ethics, morals, even politics previously and all too neatly organized by an assumed human–nonhuman divide. Striking a chord with Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Davy’s work in the field of pneumatics foregrounds an imbricated affective network where one’s bodily sensations, thoughts, and imaginings all seem to run according to an electrochemically spiked mélange of air. And as Davy was quick to point out, and as Bennett would again remind us, this affective network is derived from the agencies of the human being (both body and mind) when mixed with the agencies of air—affective agencies work in tandem, reside where we might least suspect. While Abrams is right in his classic observation that for romantic poets the “windharp” perhaps too easily stood in for the “poetic mind” or that they made a stock figure of “air in motion, whether it occurs as breeze or breath, wind or respiration—whether the air is compelled into motion by natural forces or by the action of the human lungs,” these metaphoric relations signify more than what Abrams calls “an emblem of the free Romantic spirit,” with “nature’s breeze [becoming] the analogue of human respiration . . . [promising finally to] fuse materially, as well as metaphorically, the ‘spirit’ of man with the ‘soul’ of nature.”59 Much more than this, as Davy’s and countless other pneumatic studies attest, for the romantic imagination neither wind, nor air, nor atmosphere is without a material body—the spirit of them never evaporates. And so it should go without saying that of course Davy’s occasionally poetic and sometimes intoxicated mind was lodged in affective if not living bodies—bodies, plural, inclusive of earthly and aerial bodies other than his human body.60 Rather than free spirits, we find bidden bodies insofar as they are sublimely empowered and limited via inescapable material interdependence. This is not to suggest a crude material determinism but rather to posit romantic aerography’s relation to evolving geographies of earthly interinvolvement “where there is no distinct surface separating earth and sky, but an interinvolvement of land and air,” and further still, interinvolvements of permeable human beings and all manner of affective assemblages.61 Routinely cast in the oblique, unknowable aesthetic of the sublime, romantic aerography indexes what might be an earthling sort of affective restlessness, an essential motility rehearsed by chemical, electrical, and physical forces in the air, an essential material exchange where feeling and breathing mark the intimate movements and shared affective relations of earth’s ethereal-corporeal bodies.

Conclusion: Charlotte Smith’s Living Atoms and viewless Æronauts The speculative materialisms imagined across romantic nature, and perhaps most crucially, those representationally manifest in the material sublime’s “all-sustaining” airs, conceptualize nature independently of humanity and recognize the force of nonhuman things, to paraphrase Bennett.62 In this essay I have endeavored to show how, regardless of any rightly or wrongly attributed epistemological or phenomenological connections, affect and aesthetics contribute substantially to the project of countering anthropocentric modes of thinking that likely contribute to human rituals of ecological

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decadence and degradation. As Peter Adey suggests, “in relation to a theory of affect, elements like air could be thought not merely as substances but as gathering tendencies towards structures of feeling, such as practices, thoughts, ideas and sensations” which are, at least in part, structured by the atmosphere.63 The material sublime grants air its affective agency and autonomy, albeit a necessarily qualified autonomy given that air, like all things earthly, functions within the limits, conditions, and interinvolvements of the material world. To draw out how the material sublime qualifies human agency and autonomy by foregrounding the affective agencies of air, I’ll close with a brief close reading. Charlotte Smith’s aerographic sonnet takes a page from the material sublime, reminding us that it is not simply that we feel the air, but moreover, that the air makes itself felt regardless of our feelings. The poem “To the Insect of the Gossamer” addresses barely perceptible insect life cradled by air. At the same time, it is a poem about human being and emotion as much as it discourses upon pervasive agencies and affective intensities belonging to air, breath, and wind. In the sonnet, Smith trades “dull realities” for “Living Atom[s]”: Small, viewless Æronaut, that by the line Of Gossamer suspended, in mid air Float’st on a sun beam—Living Atom, where Ends thy breeze-guided voyage;—with what design In Æther dost thou launch thy form minute, Mocking the eye?—Alas! before the veil Of denser clouds shall hide thee, the pursuit Of the keen Swift may end thy fairy sail!— Thus on the golden thread that Fancy weaves Buoyant, as Hope’s illusive flattery breathes, The young and visionary Poet leaves Life’s dull realities, while sevenfold wreaths Of rainbow-light around his head revolve. Ah! soon at Sorrow’s touch the radiant dreams dissolve!64

The sonnet conjures material sublimity and something of Bennett’s vibrant, affective materiality via references not only to the circumambient ether but also to rainbow light, both of which harbor or surround, sustain and support the poem’s living beings. The arachnid resident in Smith’s lines exists in “mid air,” or in other words, lives amid the air, floating and guided by the wind. For all the activities attributed to Smith’s “viewless Æronaut” (suspension, floating, flying, launching, sailing) none of them would be possible without the air. The spider’s interinvolvement with the atmosphere furthermore plays out in Smith’s nod to the weather, to aerial movements of dense clouds charged with either exposing the insect or hiding it from view, perhaps for a time concealing it from the predatory eyes of “keen Swift” and Smith’s reader alike. Adeptly manipulating poetic form, Smith’s verse becomes as mercurial as the atmospheric dynamic that holds and mediates the spider’s fate, and by extension, the fate of humanity (here represented explicitly in the figure of the poet and later

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tacitly as the arachnid’s fellow Æronaut). The sonnet’s opening quatrain is Petrarchan, bearing out the form’s long-standing link to love poetry, and embraced by these lines is Smith’s “Living Atom,” notably not a living Adam mythically made of earth or clay, but an animalian Æronaut whose being is here made possible and borne out by aerial materialisms of light and air. The following elegiac quatrain fittingly rehearses a trauma fantasy of the spider’s loss of life at the hand of winds and skies that are always both “Destroyer and Preserver.”65 The final quatrain assumes still another form, a block of lines all ending on the same sound, binding together works of art (“weaves,” “wreathes”) with life giving breath ever destined to depart (“breathes,” “leaves”). Again Smith’s rhyme scheme is apt, using the affective intensity and materiality of insistently repeated sounds to braid together the work of art and the human artist qua poet. Affective and aesthetic endeavor helps the visionary poet to shed notions of a dull reality, of a world in itself that might seem to dissolve at sorrow’s touch. But for Smith, a world replete with awe-inspiring material sublimity nonetheless remains, vibrantly endures and revolves, here figured in terms of “sevenfold wreaths / Of rainbow-light [moving] around [the poet’s] head.” By these lights, “To the insect of the gossamer” hearkens back to Goldsmith’s neo-Lucretian speculations about air and water, where “Everything we see gives off its parts to the air, and has a little floating atmosphere of its own round it.” Less whimsically perhaps, Smith’s sonnet anticipates not only Bennett’s vital materialist account of the world in itself but also Mitch Rose’s investigations into contemporary geography. Rose describes something akin to romantic nature’s aerographies of material sublimity, wherein it becomes nearly impossible to forget that air preconditions human being, feeling, affect, art, and thought, where the air might exist beyond or without us—but never the reverse. “The wind,” writes Rose, “appears from nowhere. Its presence forces itself upon us and we are at its mercy. We mourn the loss of warm sun on our skin or ache for the appearance of a cooling breeze. We want these things but have no recourse or claim on their coming and going. Life itself is the unattainable source that bequeaths such things or takes them away. It signals those elemental features of our being that are wholly beyond our grasp.”66 Air holds us, supports us, its pressures press upon us, and “as a result of explicating air, we come more and more to merge with it.”67 We conceive of a nature not for us but with us. Romantic aerography’s material sublime foregrounds a weak version of speculative realism finally able to relinquish reductive naturalisms that would reduce the natural world to a monolith, to no more than a nature for us, for humanity. By dint of its resolutely ecological and hence interrelational and interdependent topos, romantic aerography proposes “contiguous forms of conversant matter” that at once open up and delimit human agency and being, nonhuman agency and being.68 Discourses of sublime aesthetics have long entertained questions of power, agency, freedom, and liberty, but romantic aerography’s materialist sublimity instantiates an aesthetic of co-constituted abilities and limitations, of contingent systems, existences, and extinctions. Smith’s figurations of material sublimity perhaps best capture romantic aerography’s ecocentricity. As Kate Singer rightly suggests, Smith’s sonnets challenge “anthropomorphic tendencies . . . [wherever] the speaker gives way to a more material transliteration of affective force, as the interlocking motions of bird songs, growing

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flowers, the Arun river, the ocean, the coastal winds, and human strains act upon each other in minute particularities.”69 Any aesthetic representation in verse demands a human voice, or at the very least, human words or marks, but through such figurative and always already affective means, human words and marks share space with the nonhuman page and once uttered aloud, they take shape in not-exclusively human sounds, sounds made manifest by contingent collaborations of earth, air, verse, and versifier. Not solitude and the sublime, but plenitude, if we follow the material sublime which is tantamount to following Smith, “eschew[ing] the ascendancy of human feelings in favor of the concurrent creation of various forms of matter . . . moving in all sorts of ways.”70 Living, breathing, feeling, and departing in air, embodied and enworlded lines of verse take flight as vocalized words; so too, in a materially sublime air the arachnid’s “filmy Gossamer is lightly spread; / Waving in every sighing air that stirs.”

Notes 1 John Keats, “[Dear Reynolds, As Last Night I Lay in Bed],” in Keats’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2009), 133–6, lines 69, 72, 76–77. 2 Frances Ferguson, “Reflections on Burke, Kant, and Solitude and the Sublime,” European Romantic Review 23, no. 3 (2012): 313. 3 Here I draw from Rachel Carson’s notion of entangled earthly and bodily ecologies where “problem[s] of ecology . . . [are always problems] of interrelationships, of interdependenc[ies]” and where “there is also an ecology of the world within our bodies.” At the same time, my thinking builds upon speculative realism’s ontological investigations positing a material world that is (to a degree) separate from the thinking, feeling subject, and the phenomenological conditions of human knowledge. In this and many regards, speculative realist thought is indebted to Quentin Meillassoux’s rendering of Kantian thought in terms of correlationism, which is the “idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” This is not to advance notions of a humanity divorced from earthly existence. Here humanity is less the issue. Rather, this is to postulate a world whose being doesn’t require life or any perceiving mind. Existing not only beyond us as an absolute and thus existing in many ways without us, the earth of the speculative realist is not given to us—to access fully via perceiving mind, or otherwise. See Carson, Silent Spring, 4th edn. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1994), 189; Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), 5. 4 Timothy Morton, “Sublime Objects,” Speculations II (2011): 209. 5 Ibid. 6 I am not alone in revisiting the politics of sublime aesthetics in the light of speculative realism or its offshoot, object-oriented ontology. Timothy Morton similarly calls for a “speculative sublime” that might override the “two dominant theories of the sublime” authored by Burke and Kant. But while I foreground romantic-era discourses of material sublimity contemporaneously relevant to romantic literature, Morton

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investigates the ancient ur-text of sublime aesthetics, Longinus’s Peri Hypsous, to argue that the “Longinian sublime can . . . easily extend to include non-human entities—and indeed non-sentient ones. Rather than making ontic distinctions between what is and what isn’t sublime, Longinus describes how to achieve sublimity. Because he is more interested in how to achieve the effect of sublimity rhetorically than what the sublime is as a human experience, Longinus leaves us free to extrapolate all kinds of sublime events between all kinds of entities.” Morton, “Sublime Beginnings,” in Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (London: Open Humanities Press, 2013), para 2, 4, 8-9, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/ohp.13106496.0001.001. David Collings reads early Wordsworth alongside the Jena romantics, underscoring a Wordsworthian “attention to feeling as such [that] eventually leads him to conceive of an affective state without emotional content, a state of pure receptivity and affective respiration, of primary affect, which arises in response to mere being.” Collings, “Emotion without Content: Primary Affect and Pure Potentiality in Wordsworth,” in Romanticism and the Emotions, ed. Joel Faflak and Richard Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 172. Frances Ferguson, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 154. On questions of not-necessarily-human material affect, agency, and interrelation, see Jane Bennett’s compelling account of the affective agencies of materiality broadly conceived in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 18, original emphasis. William Wordsworth, “Lines Written A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798,” in Lyrical Ballads (London: J. & A. Arch, 1798), line 50. Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 5–6. Ibid., 5, original emphasis. Tellingly, Percy Shelley’s poem Mont Blanc has been central to criticism inaugurating romantic studies’ speculative-realist turn; Shelley’s iconic example of and response to the affective-aesthetic discourse of the sublime stands as a primary object of study in essays by Anne C. McCarthy, Chris Washington, and Greg Ellermann, each at the vanguard of what Ellermann dubbed “Speculative Romanticism.” Gottlieb’s monograph provides a substantive engagement with the poem, arguing that “its philosophy is neither as purely object-oriented as Steven Shaviro argues nor as radically speculative materialist as Ellermann would have it.” The canon of speculative romanticism was born with Mont Blanc’s sublime aesthetics and affective intensities clearing the way. To my mind, Mont Blanc’s routine treatment within speculative romanticism is not coincidental, nor simply a matter of deferential or citational academic custom. The recent interest in speculative readings of Mont Blanc is symptomatic of a larger issue having to do with the sublime that has not been fully worked out in the aforementioned criticism. The poem’s recurrent focus puts pressure on an investment in reading a Kantian sublime into a British romantic tradition that has led to undervaluing the material sublime. Ultimately, the poem’s appeal indicates how certain affective and aesthetic contours of romantic literature’s figurations of the material sublime serve as entry points into speculative ontologies and materialities.

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism See McCarthy, “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 355–75; Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (September 2015): 448–60; Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 154–74; Gottlieb, Romantic Realties, 169. Adam Jasper and Sianne Ngai, “Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai,” Cabinet, Issue 43: Forensics (Fall 2011). DOI: http://cabinetmagazine.org/ issues/43/jasper_ngai.php. Ibid. Ibid. Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling,” in Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. On the place of ontologies antecedent to human life in speculative realist thought, see Meillassoux’s accounts of ancestrality and the arche-fossil in After Finitude, which point to a nature thought independently of humanity. See, for example, Ellermann’s speculative realist critique of sublime aesthetics and its analyses within romantic studies: “Indeed, romantic studies is afflicted by an antiphysics of its own. For example, when humanist scholars of the 50s and 60s tried to account for the interplay between the human mind or imagination and the natural world, they drew on the theory of the sublime. Deconstruction and new historicism, even when most critical of humanism’s mind-nature dialectics, continued to leverage the sublime as a way to theorize the breakdown of correspondence between mind and world. In relying on the discourse of philosophical aesthetics, humanist, deconstructive, and new historicist critics alike conceived of nature in relation to human experience (no matter how fraught or mystified the relation). The sublime invariably reduced nature to a set of epistemological or phenomenological problems and made it impossible to think about nature in itself.” Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” 155. Sianne Ngai, “The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 4 (Summer 2005): 813, emphasis added. Ibid. Morton, “Sublime Beginnings,” para 1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique no. 31 (1995): 105, original emphasis. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 25. On the material sublime, see M. H. Abrams, “Keats’ Poems: The Material Dimensions,” in The Fourth Dimension of a Poem: and Other Essays (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 2012), 30–52; Onno Oerlemans, Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); John G. Pipkin, “The Material Sublime of Women Romantic Poets,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 38, no. 4 (1998): 597–619; Steve Vine, “Blake’s Material Sublime,” Studies in Romanticism 41, no. 2 (2002): 237–57. Abrams, “The Material Dimensions,” 39, emphasis added. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, viii. Ibid., 24. Henry Ryder Knapp, The Musical Farce of Hunt the Slipper. In two acts. As performed at the Theatre-Royal. Smoke-Alley (Dublin, 1792), Act I, p. 13.

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31 “pneumatology, n.1.a,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017); James Beattie, Elements of Moral Science (Edinburgh: William Creech; London: T. Cadell, 1790–1793); “pneumatology, n.2,” OED Online (Oxford University Press, June 2017). 32 On the double-edged-sword quality of romantic airs, gases, and winds, see for example, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s celebrated Ode to the West Wind where the wind is both “Destroyer and Preserver” (line 14) or John Keats’s prominent rhyming of breath and death in such works as Ode to a Nightingale (lines 52, 54) and “Bright Star” (lines 13–14). 33 See, for example, Angela Esterhammer, Romanticism and Improvisation, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Michael Macovski, Dialogue and Literature: Apostrophe, Auditors, and the Collapse of Romantic Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Maureen McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice 1780–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Jeffrey C. Robinson, “Romantic Poetry: The Possibilities for Improvisation,” The Wordsworth Circle 38, no. 3 (2007): 94–100. 34 Ellermann, “Speculative Romanticism,” 155. 35 See Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). 36 Although Graham Harman initially takes issue with Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger, he later mounts a case for thinking along similar lines: “Does the air become air only when someone breathes it? The tool-analysis [Harman proposes through his account of Heidegger] is nothing but a refutation of this kind of deflationary realism. If our encounter with all such entities is thoroughly determined by our own projections, this is still only half of Heidegger’s ‘temporality.’ ” Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002), 6, 184. 37 Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), 8. 38 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Neil Fraistat and Donald H. Reiman, 2nd edn. (New York: W. W. Norton [1820] 2002), 1.754. 39 Humphry Davy, Elements of Agricultural Chemistry: In a course of lectures for the Board of Agriculture (New York: Eastburn, Kirk & Co.; Boston, MA: Ward and Lily, 1815), 190, 192. 40 On developing a more careful vocabulary within affect studies, Massumi distinguishes emotion from affect in these terms: “An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that it has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique.” Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88.

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41 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, ix. 42 Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Claudia L. Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998). 43 Luce Irigaray, “From The Forgetting of Air to To Be Two,” in Feminist Interpretations of Martin Heidegger, ed. Nancy Holland and Patricia Huntington (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 309. 44 Andrew Kay likewise observes how by the early nineteenth century there was “a growing certitude that particular elements in the atmosphere were necessary to sustain life. In keeping with the age’s concern with vitalism, scientists such as Joseph Priestley and Antoine Lavoisier identified that portion of the air which was useable by the human lungs. Where Lavoisier discovered that a mere sixth of the air was capable of supporting respiration and combustion, Priestley, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, and Humphrey [sic] Davy – who called this useable air, variously, ‘oxygen,’ ‘vital air,’ and ‘dephlogisticated’ air – showed how it came to be transmuted during respiration into a substance suitable for absorption into the bloodstream.” Kay, “Conspiring with Keats: Toward a Poetics of Breathing,” European Romantic Review 27, no. 5 (2016): 567. 45 Mary A. Favret’s War at a Distance also acknowledges romanticism’s yoking of affect to air. But in place of considering romantic literature in conjunction with speculative realism as I do here, her work explores a more squarely anthropocentric or human “history of affect” precipitating the “climate we call modern wartime.” Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 122. 46 For the definitive account of this trope, see M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism (New York; London: W. W. Norton, 1984). 47 Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650– 1820 (Chicago, IL: University Press, 2000), 146. 48 Kay, “Conspiring with Keats,” 569. 49 Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 146. For a recent and compelling consideration of the centrality of sublime accounts of lightning and electricity in romantic literature, see Susan Wolfson, “ ‘This is my Lightning’ or; Sparks in the Air,” SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 55, no. 4 (Autumn 2015): 751–86. 50 Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 147. 51 Thomas Cooke, A New Royal and Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; or, Complete System of Human Knowledge, 2 vols. (London: J. Cooke, 1771–2), n.p. 52 Oliver Goldsmith, “An Essay towards a Natural History of Air,” in A History of the Earth and Animated Nature (London: R. Edwards, 1819), 257–8. 53 Bennett notably departs from object-oriented ontologists such as Bryant, Harman, Morton, and others who reject relational models of the reality of things reminiscent of romantic nature’s figurations of the material sublime. It is safe to say that Bennett would welcome the material sublime’s deeply relational conceptions of reality, and human existence therein, given how she defends relationality and systems or process theory, suggesting that these approaches attempt “to do justice both to systems and things, to acknowledge the stubborn reality of individuation and the essentially distributive quality of their affectivity or capacity to produce effects, to remain philosophically and (especially) politically productive—for consumerist culture still needs reminding of the fragile, fractious connectedness of earthly bodies.” Jane

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Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 228. Jankovic, Reading the Skies, 147. Humphry Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration (London: J. Johnson, 1800), 454. Ibid., 462. Ibid. Ibid., 463. M. H. Abrams, “The Correspondent Breeze: A Romantic Metaphor,” The Kenyon Review 19, no. 1 (Winter 1957): 113, 114, 129. On Davy’s poetic endeavors, which famously included editing the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, see Catharine E. Ross, “ ‘Twin Labourers and Heirs of the Same Hopes’: The Professional Rivalry of Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth,” in Romantic Science: The Literary Forms of Natural History, ed. Noah Heringman (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), 23–52. Peter Adey, “Air’s Affinities: Geopolitics, Chemical Affect and the Force of the Elemental,” Dialogues in Human Geography 5, no. 1 (March 2015): 57. Jane Bennett, “The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter,” Political Theory 32, no. 3 (June 2004): 347–72. Peter Adey, “Air’s Affinities,” 61; Adey here loosely alludes to Raymond Williams’s Marxist reading of human emotion and affect. Charlotte Turner Smith, “To the Insect of the Gossamer,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66–7, lines 1–14. Percy Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in The Poems of Shelley 1819–1820, ed. Jack Donovan, Cian Duffy, Kelvin Everest, and Michael Rossington (London: Longman, 2011), 3:204–12, 206, line 14. Mitch Rose, “Negative Governance: Vulnerability, Biopolitics and the Origins of Government,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 39, no. 2 (April 2014): 218. Steve Conner, The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 14. Kate Singer, “Limpid Waves and Good Vibrations: Charlotte Smith’s New Materialist Affect,” Essays in Romanticism 23, no. 2 (2016): 175–92, 181. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181.

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Feeling as hyperobject in Wordsworth’s The Prelude Joel Faflak

I Our sensate response to the world—sentio ergo sum—spurred romanticism’s feeling enterprise as a part of its critical response to feeling.1 Put another way, romanticism struggles to understand affect as expression, cognition, and cogitation. For instance, in his Preface to the 1800 Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth tempers the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” by recollecting emotion in tranquility.2 This cognitive latency (feel first, think later) demanded a measured response to feeling’s autonomous rhythms, the symptom of any number of enthusiasms—religious, political, sexual, and so on—that excited concern. Scholarship has long shared this (strangely passionate) distrust of feeling, such as Wimsatt and Beardsley’s attack on affective criticism as romantic subjectivism.3 Spurred by, among other things, a return to the body in feminist and queer theory and the transformation of emotion into a scientific object, we are now rethinking feeling in romanticism as a complex matrix of representational and cognitive possibilities. Feeling and thinking are far more interrelated than previously felt or thought, and feeling itself is anything but ancillary to being—although at the same time oddly dissociated from being, as this essay will argue. That is to say, feeling at once embeds us in the world and makes us strangers to it and to ourselves.4 Rei Terada distinguishes emotion as “a psychologically, at least minimally interpretive experience whose physiological aspect is affect,” from feeling, “a capacious term that connotes both physiological sensations (affects) and psychological states (emotions).”5 By parsing the difference, Terada reminds us of emotion’s difference from itself. For Brian Massumi, this self-difference marks feeling’s “zone of indistinction” (p. 66), affect materialized as virtual existence, which he reads as a kind of political ecology. Affect is a “system” of “autonomic responses” that the cognition of emotions “may seize upon . . . [in order to] . . . ‘qualify’ or name them, but in doing so it ‘dampens’ their force or ‘resonance.’ ” Emotion “is affect ‘owned and recognized’; it translates affect into ‘conventional, consensual’ form, where it can be given ‘function and meaning.’ ”6 Or as Michael Hardt argues, feeling transforms the “ontology of the human” by “illuminat[ing] . . . both our

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power to affect the world around us and our power to be affected by it, along with the relationship between these two powers.”7 The above cases speak implicitly to a romantic impulse to understand and thus name feeling and to give it free rein as a kind of psychochemical radical transferring between and transforming relations between subjects and their world.8 What we feel along our pulses registers the natural and preternatural (uncanny) psychosomatics of our sensorium as it touches and withdraws from the world. For instance, Julie Carlson reads Percy Bysshe Shelley’s use of simile as embodied thought, unlike metaphor, which subordinates reality. Simile registers language’s affective pull as the feeling of relationality among selves as others. By enacting their difference from reality, similes offer a nondefensive, noncoercive response to the very antagonism they stage.9 Richard C. Sha reads this relation in terms of the motion or force of emotion as a “metalepsis” of the human and nonhuman (both mechanical and divine). Our subjectivities materialize this unstable but productive relational matrix:  “emotions . . . literally matter because of the force they contain,” Sha writes, “the mechanism by which the mental becomes somatic and emotion is communicated.”10 Emotions lack agency, but not intentionality, and thus confuse the “border between matter and sociality,” so that “affinities are necessarily multiple, and by implication, transient” and “fungible.”11 This paradoxical transfer informs Terada’s sense of how passion undoes “intentional subjectivity” to mark the “nonsubjectivity within the very concept of the subject,”12 the nonhuman within the human. What does feeling “mean” as a form of nonhuman cognition that at once locates us in and beyond the world? This essay meditates on feeling as both immediate and recessive ecology in which the human at once finds, loses, and eclipses itself as human. Within this context, and given our critical fascination with feeling, it seems we are only beginning to understand the stakes of what romantic feeling “means,” which is to take us past the human and the world as we think we understand it. My present concern is to address a text that epitomizes romantic feeling because of its attempt to epitomize feeling:  The Prelude, primarily in its earliest two-book form of 1799 but also in its later thirteen-book (1805) and final fourteen-book (1850) iterations. If no longer at the center of a now much-diversified romantic canon, even now roaming about in a cultural field unmoored from any notion of a canon (or of any fixed notion of romanticism itself), The Prelude pays visitation precisely for these reasons. Already in texts such as Rousseau’s Julie; or the New Heloise (1761) or Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), we find a particularly acute and complex attention to feeling in “an age compelled by affect’s intimate and extimate (re)cognition.”13 Feeling had long been an anxious concern of and for romantic criticism, beginning the period’s reactions to its own enthusiasms. Studies by Jerome McGann and Adela Pinch, however, got us to rethink feeling as one of the more enlightening and disconcerting shadows romanticism casts on our future.14 As Terada argues, feeling indicates how to think the subject after her death; it locates the subject in the sensorial but labile interstices between mind and body, self and world, where we are at once grasped, found, and lost to ourselves and one another. Again, we find the romantics preternaturally caught in, and attempting to think their way out of, this bind. What in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth

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calls “sensations sweet / Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart, / And passing even into [our] purer mind / With tranquil restoration,”15 are at once constitutive of being and an essential register of knowledge about the human and its relationship to the world that we accept unreflectively at our peril, a spontaneity whose overflow needs to be less curbed or recollected than delineated for our inability to delineate it. My focus is the romantic period, although my inspiration comes from our current ongoing obsession with feeling in the form of mindfulness or wellness as avatars of an easily diagnosed and diagnosable pathogens of what John Locke called the “uneasiness” of empirical existence.16 Elsewhere I  call this condition the “psychopathology of happiness,” in which the rise of psychiatry, coupled with the emergence of the neoliberal state, shapes the post-Enlightenment, capitalist subject, for whom self-improvement, self-fulfillment, and thus self-determination drive social and civil progress.17 Within this process, how one feels about one’s place in the world becomes as important as what one thinks about or how one believes in this acclimatization. For this essay, I set aside this broader sociopolitical or ideological context to focus on how The Prelude, arguably the ur-text of how to overcome adversity, wrestles with the spectres of what Quentin Meillassoux calls “correlationism”—“the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”18 Correlationism entails the Kantian idealism that we can think the Ding an sich of being, but only from the perspective of thought. Wrestling thinking from being, however, demands that we think a being beyond our thought of being, on its own terms, as it were, which is to say prior to its own “givenness.” In Meillassoux’s wording, this is to locate “the great outdoors . . . that outside which thought could explore with the legitimate feeling of being on foreign territory—of being entirely elsewhere.”19 Feeling in Wordsworth, I  want to argue, “thinks” after the finitude of correlation, which in turn, and contrary to notions of The Prelude as producing the happy subject—the therapeutic value of Wordsworthian verse exemplified in John Stuart Mill’s point that reading Wordsworth saved him from the soullessness of utilitarianism—leaves us on the “foreign territory” of feeling itself. This is what makes feeling itself a rather strange locus. While Chris Washington reads Meillassoux’s project as allowing us to think a “post-apocalyptic state that takes place ulterior to human finitude” that thus “pitches humans headlong into a heedless future,”20 I  would argue that Wordsworthian feeling indicates an apocalypse now— though not in M.  H. Abrams’s sense of the secular Christian paradigm of a world renovated by feeling.21 Feeling is, as it were, everywhere, like the ocean in which one swims—the bonding agent of all personal and social exchanges and obligations. It defines the thrust and work of the aesthetic as Wordsworth’s “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Echoing Terada’s sense of how “feeling” tracks ambiguously between psychology and physiology, we can read “feelings” here as a generative, overpowering, and unbidden affective force, the origins of which are, as Shelley reminds us in A Defence of Poetry (1821), immediate, inaccessible, and unknown. The time’s overweening concern for and distrust of affect produces both an idealism and a skepticism born from an inability to make visible and thus knowable a fundamental psychosomatic register of human being. The very place where the body’s sensual

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apparatus touches the world and thus brings it home to us is precisely where the world withdraws itself, and takes us with it. So, when Wordsworth argues that “we cannot chuse but feel / That [man’s works] must perish,”22 he rather ambivalently prefers feeling to rational determination and marks feeling as our unavoidable lot tied to a death that we unavoidably must feel. Our “works” are rather beside the point, for feeling is our work, whether we like it or not.23 How, then, to speak of the very thing that at once locates us in the world—the thing that “worlds” our world for us—and is symptomatic of what Meillassoux calls “dia-chronicity”? Dia-chronicity indicates the “temporal discrepancy between thinking and being,” which speaks “not only [to] statements about events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species.”24 Meillassoux contemplates the existence of what he terms the “ ‘arche-fossil’ or ‘fossil-matter,’ ” which “indicat[es] the traces of past life . . . but [also] materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event,”25 like the luminescence of a star reaching us after billions of years of light travel. This ancestrality, in Washington’s powerful summation, “reveals an aporia that exists in both philosophy and science: our inability to account for a world outside of us without, paradoxically, accounting for it.”26 Something of the attempt to write an account of a “world devoid of humanity” that speaks as if outside of humanity itself informs the strange affective labor of Wordsworth’s verse.27 Feeling in The Prelude thus constitutes what Timothy Morton, in the vein of objectoriented ontology, an offshoot of speculative realism, calls a “hyperobject”:  a thing, such as climate, that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.”28 Washington explains the hyperobject as something that “remains nowhere at all in empirical reality, an object with thousands, perhaps millions, of qualities with no actual concrete manifestation of itself in its totality.” In this way “[r]eality therefore suddenly becomes radically inconsistent with human experience.”29 For my present purposes this inconsistency marks the weirdly proleptic moment of feeling itself, the way in which we always understand things after we’ve initially felt them. As Massumi argues, this feeling thought—this thought of feeling—arrests and polices our constant attention to a future state that never comes or, one that, as Morton reminds us, makes us miss attending to the realities of the present at our peril. Which is to say that the ambient effects or environmental milieu of affect, like the ocean in which the whale swims, deeply concerns our survival. For Wordsworth in The Prelude, it would seem that the stakes are just that high.

II In his 1912 essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” T.  E. Hulme pits the carefully delimited finitude of classicism (tradition, organization, etc.) against the formless infinity of romanticism. Discussing what happens when the “normal religious attitude” that is “the fixed nature of man”—that is to say, “belief in the Deity”—gets repressed, Hulme writes,

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By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don’t believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don’t believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get Romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.30

Hulme’s condemnation, like Arthur O. Lovejoy’s discrimination of romanticism as a multiple personality, takes us back to Matthew Arnold’s account of a period that felt too much but thought, and most importantly acted, too little. Hulme evokes what we might call, borrowing a term from Morton, the “viscosity” of romanticism itself as hyperobject. This sense of its “threatening proximity” surely explains the long critical defense mechanism against the immediacy and intensity of a romantic spontaneity of feeling.31 Morton speaks of the “simultaneous dissolution of reality and the overwhelming presence of hyperobjects, which stick to us, which are us. The Greeks called it miasmus, the way bloodguilt sticks to you. What Husserl noticed—that objects can’t be exhausted by perception—has a viscous consequence.”32 Or as Wordsworth writes toward the end of the 1799 version, “my thoughts / Were steeped in feeling” (2.447–8).33 Something of this consequence informs Wordsworth’s awareness that in writing The Prelude he was always taking a detour from the task at hand, which, via Coleridge’s prompting, was the writing of his philosophical verse masterwork, The Recluse. Rather than training his eye on the “fixed nature” of man, which allowed for a kind of objectifying correlationist distance, Wordsworth couldn’t keep his hands off The Prelude. At the same time, writing it induced a kind of shame about taking the poem so much in hand. That is to say, thinking of The Prelude as a work instantiated through its multiple versions says something about feeling’s distended process and effects. In the 1799 version, Wordsworth writes that he has “lengthened out / With fond and feeble tongue a tedious tale” (2.646–7), a dilation that produced five, thirteen, and eventually fourteen books. Wordsworth accounts for this prodigal tendency in a May 1805 letter to Sir George Beaumont, in which he seems desperate to “resume [his] poetical labours” after the death of his brother John: “Time was stealing away fast from me and nothing done and my mind still seeming unfit to do any thing.” Attempting to write of his brother’s memory, he began to “give vent to [his] feelings” but “was overpowered by [his] subject and could not proceed”: I composed much, but it is all lost except a few lines, as it came from me in such a torrent that I was unable to remember it; I could not hold the pen myself, and the subject was such, that I could not employ Mrs Wordsworth or my Sister as my

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism amanuensis. This work must therefore rest awhile till I am something calmer. . . . Unable to proceed with this work, I turned my thoughts to the Poem on my own life. . . . It will not be much less than 9,000 lines . . . ; an alarming length! and a thing unprecedented in Literary history that a man should talk so much about himself. It is not self-conceit, as you will know well, that has induced {me} to do this, but real humility; I began the work because I was unprepared to treat any more arduous subject and diffident of my own powers. Here at least I  hoped that to a certain degree I should be sure of succeeding, as I had nothing to do but describe what I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered. . . . If when the work shall be finished it appears to the judicious to have redundancies they shall be lopped off, if possible. But this is very difficult to do when a man has written with thought, and this defect, whenever I have suspected it or found it to exist in any writings of mine, I have always found incurable.34

The romantic effusion (“torrent”) of romantic emotion (in this case, grief) indicates that memory cannot adequately process what Cathy Caruth calls “an experience that is not fully assimilated as it occurs.”35 In this “complex relation between knowing and not knowing . . . the language of literature and the psychoanalytic theory of traumatic experience precisely meet.”36 Put another way, the passage marks trauma as trauma: the trauma isn’t the death of Wordsworth’s brother, it’s the inability to witness the event of his attempt to properly remember—to record—the event of his attempt to remember. And part of the complex knowing that is the trauma of signification and representation (“I could not hold the pen myself ”) comes with its possible address to the other, most immediately Mary and Dorothy. As Caruth also notes, “trauma and its uncanny repetition” are at the heart of psychoanalysis “as it listens to a voice that it cannot fully know but to which it nonetheless bears witness.”37 But in Wordsworth’s case the trauma is so overwhelming that it precludes others altogether, leaving Mary and Dorothy “unemployable” in the work of working-through. “Unable to proceed with this work,” Wordsworth turns to another task, his “Poem on my own life.” This labor seems less arduous because he “had nothing to do but describe what I had felt and thought, therefore could not easily be bewildered,” although it produces an “incurable” inability to ‘lop off ’ “redundancies” of thought and feeling. The Prelude thus presents a subsequent problem via its “unprecedented” attention to one subject’s feelings. The poem locates Wordsworth in the miasma or viscosity of its “spilt” negotiation with the world that is the work of feeling itself. This is how we have traditionally understood Wordsworth’s verse as an account of the human’s fundamental interaction with nature transacted through the primal meeting between infant and mother. But as David Collings reminds us, Wordsworth’s autobiography is less a retreat from than a libidinal response to history as trauma and disaster, a series of interactions with the world that are instead disjunctive but nonetheless constitutive.38 One of Wordsworth’s paradigmatic statements about this disjunction comes in the 1805 version of The Prelude. Attempting to assess the “mystery of man,” he writes: “The days gone by / Come back upon me from the dawn almost / Of life; the hiding-places of my power / Seem open, I  approach, and then they close” (11.333–6). Although

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Wordsworth can glimpse “in simple childhood something of the base / On which [man’s] greatness stands,” he is nonetheless “lost” in and to the “depth” of the “mystery” (11.328–31). By the time he undertakes revisions that would eventually produce the poem’s final 1850 version, the path becomes both more certain and less distinct. Now the doors “open” rather than “seem open,” and the poet’s approach is an oddly bifurcated moment that expresses at once the conditional mood of an imagined event and the feeling of something radically past: “I would approach them, but they close” (12.280). And rather than the active sequence of open and “then close,” in which the poet tarries with the possibility of failure, or worse with getting burnt by the passion of curiosity, we have a foregone conclusion that acknowledges but avoids the plague of fantasy altogether: look but don’t touch. Yet, regardless of whether things advance, retreat, or stay the same, one thing remains in both 1805 and 1850 versions, which is how events affect him:  “but this I  feel” (11.331, 12.275). That is to say, what he feels is what he knows he can never possess wholly, what from the 1799 version he calls “days disowned by memory” (1.445, 1.643 [1805]; 1.615 [1850]). Giving power a wide berth in 1850, as if in eternity, fits with Wordsworth’s desire to leave the mystery well enough alone in a state of grace that delimits the human reach beyond limits. This is less to mark out what is for Meillassoux the “correlationist circle” that yokes thought to being than, as Washington notes, to account for “our inability to account for a world outside of us without, paradoxically, accounting for it.” For Wordsworth, the world is at once beyond his capacity to grasp its being, a world of being beyond the givenness of his own being, and also the world itself within his grasp as itself beyond the givenness of his own being. Like an experience of the Lacanian Real, as that which “resists symbolization absolutely,”39 the world is at once immediately present to our senses’ capacity to sense it, and at the same time absolutely resistant to this capacity. Like Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost, the world is all before him; he just can’t take it in. To locate this impossible locus of feeling is less to buck the trend that Wordsworth does nothing in his poetry but feel than to account for his account of feeling as an encounter with radical alterity as an inability less to understand the unknowable than, as Morton says, to “un-know what we know.”40 To borrow the opening line and title of Wordsworth’s sonnet from Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), “The world is too much with us,” which suggests a call to unknow what we know (“to imagine that which we know,” as Shelley writes in A Defence of Poetry) in order not to account for the world.41 Despite his prolonged attachment to The Prelude and the notion that his later revisions for the final 1850 version produced a conservation of the earlier versions’ apparently more radical insights, the poem never moves beyond the pattern of how Wordsworth feelingly responds to the world set out in the first two-part Prelude. Written between October 1798 and February 1799, the poem begins, Was it for this That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved To blend his murmurs with my nurse’s song, And from his alder shades and rocky falls,

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Like the sun that springs forth at the opening of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life (1822), Wordsworth’s sudden opening stages the aftershocks of some unknown event, like the work of resummoning trauma itself. The text manufactures its own symptom, which it then seeks to diagnose, as if to analyze the same feelings it manufactures by opening as it does. Later versions of the poem embed the question in Book I  after the Glad Preamble, which registers the force of Wordsworth’s solitary imagination as “tempest” or “redundant energy” within the “corresponding mild creative breeze” that is the mind’s meeting with Nature (1.43, 46[1805]). Now “this” refers to the “vain perplexity” (1.268) and “hollow thought” (1.261) of his inability to write The Recluse, what by then he calls his “philosophic Song / Of truth that cherishes our daily life, / With meditations passionate from deep/ Recesses in man’s heart” (1.230–3 [1805]). This failure already to feel in 1799 dilates in 1804–5 to five and eventually thirteen books, and beyond that to fourteen by 1850. After 1798–9, the opening question as a symptom without origin gets attached to a possible trauma the reading of which offers a possible access to the hiding places of power. Instead, Wordsworth translates this swerve through the missed encounters of various spots of time whose possible analysis and cure form what we think of as the matrix of Wordsworthian vision: man’s habitual return to nature’s nurturing presence. What is earlier eruptive, disruptive, or restless is transposed through a transforming relationship rooted in a kind of eighteenth-century Common Sense empiricism that pragmatically and firmly locates man in the world of his perceptions, beyond skepticism and speculation. It also expresses this transformation through the finer, visionary tone of nature’s pantheistic future, which binds man to nature in a community born of love and holy sacrifice. At some level, that is to say, what “this” is becomes a moot point. What matters is how the briefer text becomes a prelude to a longer case history that shapes Wordsworth as what the later eighteenth century would deem the “morally useful man,” which thus prepares him to write The Recluse. The phrase “was it for this?” frames a psychological beginning in medias res in terms of a philosophical question that determines the text’s longer analysis. Yet the end of the text, when Wordsworth has ostensibly worked through its opening sense of “redundancy,” takes us back to its beginning with the poet ready to write The Recluse, which gives the poem’s trajectory from symptom to crisis and resolution a rather more recursive and interminable shape.42 It also speaks to something atavistic about the encounter with power, like his later “reverie” (12.320 [1805]) on Sarum plain in which he “called upon the darkness, and it took – / A midnight darkness seemed to come and take – / All objects from [his] sight” (12.327–9). In 1850 the “reverie” becomes a “waking dream” (13.343) and “vision clear” of “Our dim ancestral Past” (13.320), and the unbidden advent of fantasy that “seemed to come and take” away the “objects” of the empirical world becomes instead a conscious act of remembrance. In 1805, the “intricate profusion” (13.342) of the Druid “mystery of shapes” (13.340) inscribed on the “untilled ground” (13.343) figures

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the startling disjunction between a recessive past and an “untilled” present that is unwilling but also unable to resist the imprint of the “ancestral.” In 1850 what is earlier called an “infant science, imitative forms / By which the Druids covertly expressed / Their knowledge of the heavens, and imaged forth the constellations” (12.344–7) has become how they “represent / Their knowledge of the heavens, and image forth / The constellations” (13.340–1). Now the ineluctably queer transference of the past through the uncanny effects of a secreted mimesis becomes a kind of synchronous transmission in which the nascent experimentations of knowledge are laid bare and thus transformed as a timeless projection of the “divine” order of things. As early as the 1799 Prelude, Wordsworth speaks of “the ghostly language of the ancient earth” (2.358 [1799]) that marks, as it were, the place where his love of nature has gone. The Prelude’s Norton editors parse “ghostly” as “spiritual,” then add, “but also disembodied” (23n3), which sidelines but almost reluctantly acknowledges an alternate embodiment with which Wordsworth resists tarrying. Wordsworth speaks of his earliest negotiations with nature as the “props of [his] affections” that, once “removed” in later life, left the “building” of his feeling life “as if sustained / By its own spirit” (2.324–6). Yet it is an “interminable building” (2.432), which suggests at once the continuity of a self-sustaining emotional life, eternally recollected in tranquility, and an existence, to borrow Meillassoux’s designation, after finitude that extends far beyond human sway. From having an immediate but unconscious interchange with objects in the world, one arche of which is the infant babe’s wordless converse of feeling with its mother, Wordsworth is left at once within and apart from the world around him. Nature at once takes him in and challenges him with “Low breathings … / Of indistinguishable motion” (1.47–8). In the boat-stealing scene, the first of the spots of time he describes in the 1799 Prelude, such movements confront him with autonomous “huge and mighty forms that do not live / Like living men” (1.127–8), such that the “surface of the universal earth / With meanings of delight, of hope and fear, / Work like a sea” (1.196–8). Wordsworth’s progress out of adolescence into adulthood leaves him with a “trouble [that] came into [his] mind / From obscure causes” (2.321–2). Nature encloses Wordsworth by coming after him, which is to say that the after-feeling nature engenders in him produces a feeling of belonging with nature, but tracks him as a being apart from the very thing that engenders him, which means that feeling is now his own best enemy. All of which is to say that Wordsworth is suspended at once in finitude and after finitude. Wordsworth’s time with nature nurtures his archetypal life, the “Poetic spirit of our human life” that is the “Great birthright of our being” (2.306, 317). All such interchanges are “spectacles and sounds to which / [He] often would repair, and thence would drink / As at a fountain” (1.367–9). Yet, there is a “subtler origin” (1.381) that materializes how his “infant veins are interfused” by “The gravitation and the filial bond / Of Nature that connect him with the world” (2.292–4). In this “one beloved presence—nay and more, / In that most apprehensive habitude / And those sensations which have been derived / From this beloved presence—there exists / A virtue which irradiates and exalts / All objects through all intercourse of sense” (2.285–90). This irradiation that is at the same time the feeling (exaltation) of the “intercourse of sense”

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that both creates and sustains it at once immerses Wordsworth in the “one life . . . that was joy” (2.460) and marks him separate from its pantheistic, panentheistic grip, leaving him an “inmate of this active universe” (2.297). Recalling the “dead man” who “Rose with his ghastly face” (one of the most defamiliarizing moments in romantic verse), Wordsworth notes that the occasion “impressed [his] mind / With images to which in following years / Far other feelings were attached—with forms / That yet exist with independent life, / And, like their archetypes, know no decay” (1.283–7). Again, Wordsworth is at once embedded within nature, irrevocably tied to its “archetypal” ground, yet at the same time its “inmate,” endowed because of his foreign locus within nature, with an equally foreign nature or “independent life” that both is and is not in his possession. Indeed, his stubbornly passionate attachment to nature exists only because he is dispossessed—“disowned”—by nature itself. Hence in the ensuing recounting of the “gibbet-mast” (1.310), all Wordsworth can do is recount his “inability to account for a world outside” of him, “without, paradoxically, accounting for it.” Unable to describe a scene whose historical vitality departed the scene long ago, Wordsworth immediately turns to the more present, “ordinary sight” of “A girl who bore a pitcher on her head” (1.317, 320). Yet even the more recent past leaves Wordsworth wanting “Colours and words that are unknown to man / To paint the visionary dreariness” (1.321–2) that “invest[ed]” the scene in its entirety. Remarkable in his connection of these scenes is both a latency and lapse in feeling cognition, which foreshadows Wordsworth’s sublimely missed encounter while crossing the Simplon Pass in Book VI. The same “passions that build up our human soul” and tie us to “eternal things” (1.134, 136) also reflect the soul’s “fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation” (2.361–2), like the “tumult” or “alien sound / Of melancholy” (1.166–7). But like nature’s “investment,” as opposed to Wordsworth’s investing in nature, the “melancholy,” signifying irretrievable loss, is the sound nature gives, not necessarily the feeling Wordsworth receives, what he calls nature’s “extrinsic passion” (1.377). Or as Wordsworth says of the soul’s vertiginous work, “Remembering how she felt, but what she felt / Remembering not— retains an obscure sense / Of possible sublimity” (2.364–7). The soul is all that remains of feeling. Or rather, all that remains is feeling to remind subjects they are or were here, which is also to tell them how to, or how they will, go on, which evokes existence as an oddly suspended state of being beyond both thought and feeling. Setting aside how Wordsworth genders the soul, although that itself is telling, we can note how Wordsworth speaks of his own soul in the third person. The objectification reads like a projection of Keats’s sense of the Wordsworthian egotistical sublime, but it also weirdly dislocates the process of Wordsworthian feeling, as if to locate the poet in the world by not locating him. Put another way, to cite Morton, “the process” of feeling here is “simply an object,”43 an objectification of feeling that is not at the same time a projection of Wordsworth’s ego onto nature, less a correlation with it than an alien positioning within it. Objects become the feeling of objects, or put another way, feeling is the object as the “viscosity” of hyperobjects. Which may be why Wordsworth says it is a “Hard task to analyse a soul” which “Hath no beginning” (2.262, 267): “How shall I trace the history, where seek / The origin of what I then have felt?” (2.395–6). Feeling is a “plastic power” and “forming hand” that is “At times / Rebellious, acting in

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a devious mood” (2.411–13). Which leaves Wordsworth bifurcated within the ecology of his own affective life: A tranquillizing spirit presses now On my corporeal frame, so wide appears The vacancy between me and those days, Which yet have such self-presence in my heart That sometimes when I think of them I seem Two consciousnesses—conscious of myself And of some other being. (2.25–31)

The “tranquillizing spirit” echoes both a sense of poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility and what in “Tintern Abbey” Wordsworth calls the “Abundant recompense” that will lighten “the burden of the mystery.”44 Yet it also leaves him as he began with his earliest negotiations with the world around him, “A stranger, linking with the spectacle / No body of associated forms” (The Prelude, 1.405–6 [1799]).

III For Washington, Morton’s brand of object-oriented ontology counters the “bleakness” of Meillassoux’s vision of a future without hope, apocalypse without millennium. For Morton, Keats gazing upon the Grecian Urn is the poet’s account of the strange thingyness of objects. The urn’s ancestrality, its appearance in the present as if a visitant from some other historical galaxy, evokes what Meillassoux calls the absolute “time of science” from which “humanity is absent.”45 Morton suggests that Wordsworth, for whom the mind’s sovereignty over the life of things seemed preeminent, was likely threatened by Keats’s thing-y “apprehension” of the object.46 Given Wordsworth’s struggle with the thingy-ness of feeling itself, however, I’m not so certain. “The Thorn,” for instance, describes a bush on a hilltop beside a “little muddy pond” and a “beauteous heap . . . of moss” that is “like an infant’s grave in size.”47 Between them, if “You . . . take care and choose your time (58), you will find “A woman in a scarlet cloak,” Martha Ray, who “to herself . . . cries, / ‘Oh misery! Oh misery!’ ” (63–5). But what starts as mere observation circumscribes all of society, including future readers, within its sphere of cognition and seems to guarantee that our empirical surveillance, including a telescope to bring the scene into perspective, will make sense of things. But, never told what happens to the child, we are left with speculations by the narrator, the poem’s addressee, “Old Farmer Simpson,” the community, including “some” who “had sworn an oath that she / Should be to public justice brought,” except that any attempt to find “the little infant’s bones” makes the hill of moss “stir” and the grass shake “for full fifty yards around,” which apparently frightens the Law itself into submission (149, 233, 234, 237, 239). “In truth you’d find it hard to say,” the poem begins, whether the thorn “could ever have been young / It looks so old and grey” (2–4). This inability to “tell” structures the poem’s unfolding:  “I cannot tell, I  wish

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I could” (89); “I’ll tell you everything I know” (105); “I’ll give you the best help I can” (111); “No more I  know  – I  wish I  did” (155); “There’s no one that could ever tell” (160); “I thought I saw” (192); “I cannot tell, but some will say” (214). Within nature the narrator thinks he witnesses supernatural occurrences: a “fresh and lovely” mound that is uncannily “beauteous” (35); a patch of earth that shakes when the wind, which “Cuts like a scythe” (25), blows over the pond; a woman in scarlet moaning for her lost lover or dead child; the image of a baby’s face in the pond staring back at the viewer; “plainly living voices” (171) like “voices of the dead” (173) mingling with Ray’s cries. Observation itself, like the shuddering ground, renders indeterminate the mooring points of perception, understanding and rational communication. The more one peers into the everyday, the more this perception contrives to make the world appear real. The poem is “steeped,” and steeps us, in feeling. But it leaves the time of feeling, of experience itself, at once absolutely immediate and absolutely resistant to being. The Prelude would seem to offer abundant correlationst recompense for the diachronicity of “The Thorn” and certainly otherwise conforms to Abrams’s secular Christian eschatology. But feeling also has the texture of what Bruno Latour calls a “tangled” as opposed to a “smooth” object. Smooth objects are “risk-free,” with “clear boundaries, a well-defined essence.”48 “Tangled” objects, on the other hand, are “ ‘quasiobjects’ [that] do not have an impact of the social or political world in the sense that they affect it from without; they are themselves . . . part of that new sociality,” which is to claim how “ ‘nothing’ is, by itself, either reducible or irreducible to anything else”: Latour traces the network of associations and transformations that link humans and nonhumans, facts, and values in the circulatory system of science that fabricates a machine or fact or object. Treating objects as things opens them to deliberation and dispute and returns us to the possibility of a viable political ecology.49

Reading Latour back to the viscosity of feeling as hyperobject, we see in Wordsworth a desire to treat feeling smoothly, but inevitably caught up in its tangledness. Feeling attaches, detaches, and re-attaches him to the world, again less as its subject than as its “inmate” in a land that, by animating its existence via the work of his sensorium, is at once contained by and alienated within its affective network of “fleeting moods / Of shadowy exultation” (2.362). Being “steeped in feeling” leaves Wordsworth perpetually prepared to take in and on the world. It also suggests, in another designation of the term, that feeling gives his being a “precipitous face or side” that in its very act of apprehending the world leaves the world unapprehended, and thus uncouples thought from being.50 If we couple Abrams and the insights the present essay gleans from speculative realism or object-oriented ontology, we might say that Wordsworth’s account of feeling offers less a redemptive than a radically secular theology of feeling, a sense of being in the world without possessing it: dispossessed in the world. In another context I referred to Wordsworth’s “The Baker’s Cart” and “Incipient Madness,” the earliest fragments of writing toward The Recluse, as constituting that anticipated work’s primal scene.51 Like the opening of the 1799 Prelude, these fragments indicate the eruptive trauma

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of a past origin inaccessible to and thus incommensurate with, yet interminably and irrevocably projecting itself toward, an indeterminate future. In “The Baker’s Cart,” the speaker approaches a “wretched hut” with five children who appear “not born to live.” A “loaded wain” has just passed by, suggesting a social abundance at odds with their abject poverty. He watches “with involuntary look” as the cart disappears and is addressed by a woman, who says, “ ‘That waggon does not care for us.’ ”52 Expressing the destitutions and social neglect brought about by wartime, the poem offers an affective response to the insidious socioeconomic bargain Britain made with its inhabitants on the eve of the second British Empire. But not caring also speaks to the speaker’s inability to account for the very experience he is recounting, a taking in that is at the same time not even a letting go. Like the woman who addresses the speaker, the speaker himself has no place in the world around him. In “Incipient Madness,” the narrator, compulsively returning to a cottage that, with each visit, entropies further into nature itself, experiences a grief that “Become[s] an instinct, fastening on all things / That promise food,” and “doth like a sucking babe / Create it where it is not.”53 In both poems, at the very beginning of Wordsworth’s verse, we find an unavoidably feeling response to the world that is feeling’s response to its own incompossibility, an acknowledgement of the radical ancestrality of feeling from within feeling itself. The title of one of Morton’s earlier books, Ecology without Nature, preludes his account of the hyperobject of climate change to this end: to care more for the planet, its future, and our place in and on it, we have to care less about nature.54 Our care for nature implies our possession of a being whose existence we have only borrowed, not owned. In his Prospectus to The Recluse, Wordsworth remarks “How exquisitely the individual Mind / (And the progressive powers perhaps no less / Of the whole species) to the external World / Is fitted; and how exquisitely, too— / Theme this but little heard of among men— / The external world is fitted to the mind.”55 This is to mark our philosophical “great consummation” between the “discerning intellect” and “this goodly universe / In love and holy passion.”56 Yet in The Prelude, his affective account of the growth of the mind leaves the poet “steeped in feeling,” and so unable, like Coleridge’s Mariner, to get to the wedding, he is waylaid by “something evermore about to be” (6.542 [1805]). Of course, Wordsworth ascribes to this future after finitude “clearest insight, amplitude of mind / And reason in her most exalted mood” (13.169– 70 [1805]), which signifies the potentiality of the imagination’s unconscious within the otherwise “steadiest mood of reason” (5.1 [1805]). Reason’s “mood,” however, implicitly manifests the unsteadiness of its idea. Given reason’s often “rebellious” and “devious” nature, Wordsworth encounters how feeling leaves thought and being stuck to and with one another, yet paradoxically across an alien divide that finds feeling a stranger to itself. That in the “Prospectus” he writes nature large to include “perhaps no less the whole species” evokes the ancestral sweep of a history and evolution incommensurate with the very feeling that manifests its reach beyond the human. Like the radical physics of Shelley imagining how the earth looks from the moon in Queen Mab (1813), Wordsworthian feeling evokes “the legitimate [human] feeling of being on foreign [non-human] territory”—a human world incompossible with its nonhuman existence—a human world made inhuman because of its incompossibility with itself.

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And yet, for Wordsworth, as for the ecocritical and (more profoundly) ecological awareness he helped to foster, we may yet be saved by feeling less about what we feel too much for.

Notes 1 I thank Chris Washington and Anne McCarthy for their kind invitation to contribute to this volume this essay, and for their endless patience in waiting for its arrival. Two paragraphs of this essay were first published in different form in Romantic Circles Praxis; “Romanticism and Affect Studies,” ed. Seth Reno, 2018, Romantic Circles, https://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis. Accessed May 15, 2018. With thanks to Seth, Steve Jones, and Orrin Wang. 2 William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson; rev. edn. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 740. 3 Mary Favret reminds us of this “attack” in “The Study of Affect and Romanticism,” Literature Compass 6, no. 6 (2009): 1159–66. 4 See Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha, “Introduction: Feeling Romanticism,” Romanticism and the Emotions, ed. Joel Faflak and Richard C. Sha (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 1–18. 5 Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the “Death of the Subject” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 14–15. 6 Cited in Favret, “Study of Affect and Romanticism,” 1159. 7 Michael Hardt, “Foreword: What Affects Are Good for,” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia T. Clough with Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xi. 8 See Richard C. Sha, “The Motion behind Romantic Emotion: Towards a Chemistry and Physics of Feeling,” Romanticism and the Emotions, 19–47. 9 See Julie Carlson, “Like Love: The Feel of Shelley’s Similes,” Romanticism and the Emotions, 76–97. 10 Sha, “The Motion behind Romantic Emotion,” 22, 23. 11 Ibid., 31. 12 Terada, Feeling in Theory, 4–5. 13 Faflak and Sha, “Introduction: Feeling Romanticism,” 2. 14 See Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Jerome McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Poetic Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 15 William Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” Poetical Works, ll, 28–31. 16 John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 217. For Locke, happiness becomes the prime mover of human desire by encountering the “uneasiness” of the will as an autonomous spur to action, the check ensuring that humankind stays focused on its own amelioration. Happiness only counts once “our desire . . . makes us uneasy in the want of it” (p. 234), and thus encrypts the pain of potential loss, even the impossibility of happiness altogether. Locke’s ambivalence evokes thereafter the struggle to account for the intangible quality of happiness. That he discusses happiness, not in Two Treatises

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17

18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

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of Government (1689) but in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), thus rooting its sociopolitical aim in the cognition and epistemology of desire, makes uneasiness symptomatic of broader anxieties about minds exceeding their own grasp, a somewhat different version of the nonhuman nature of being I explore otherwise in the present work. See my “Can’t Buy Me Love: Psychiatric Capitalism and The Economics of Happiness,” The Economy as Cultural System: Theory, Capitalism, Crisis, eds. Todd Dufresne and C. Sacchetti (London: Continuum, 2013), 35–49. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 5. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7. Cited in Chris Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (2015): 450. My understanding of speculative realism and objectoriented ontology is especially indebted to Washington’s account. M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). William Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, eds. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), book 5, l. 20. References to the 1799, 1805, and 1850 versions of The Prelude are taken from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically in my main discussion by part and line number for the 1799 edition, and book and line number for the 1805 and 1850 editions. For Jacques Khalip, the passage suggests a sheerly inhuman automaticity expressing an “extreme kind of purposiveness without purpose—a zero-degree relation of carelessness, a relation without relation.” Jacques Khalip, “Contretemps: Of Extinction and Romanticism,” Literature Compass 3, no. 10 (2016): 631. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 112. Ibid., 10. Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 450. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 127. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1. Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” 451. T. E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 59–73. Morton, Hyperobjects, 26. Resisting this defense, we might note the queer resonance of affect’s matrix of being, which is everywhere but goes nowhere. In this sense emotion has, to borrow Lee Edelman’s phrase, no future. To avoid the reproductive futurism that replicates hetero-patriarchal normativity, Edelman calls for a future-to-come that doesn’t anticipate or promise its outcome, but leaves the future open to its own queer (i.e., utterly heterogeneous) possibility. I would argue that emotion, pitched toward its imcompossibility with itself, is similarly projected into and through the negativity of its materialization beyond finitude. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). Morton, Hyperobjects, 36. By 1850, Wordsworth changes “my thoughts” to “every thought” (2.389–9), as if to extract thought itself from the miasmus of feeling and objectively correlate it to its own thoughtful praxis.

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34 William Wordsworth, The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. Ernest de Selincourt, 2nd edn., Volume 1: The Early Years, 1787–1805, rev. Chester L. Shaver (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 586–7. 35 Cathy Caruth, “Introduction,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 5. 36 Caruth, “Introduction,” 3. 37 Ibid., 9. 38 See David Collings, Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), esp. 118–56, 180–206. 39 Jacques Lacan, Seminar One: Freud’s Papers on Technique, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 66. 40 Morton, Hyperobjects, 180. 41 Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much With Us,” Poetical Works, l. 1; Percy Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 502. 42 For an account of the poem as case study, see my Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 75–114; and “ ‘Was it for this?’ Romantic Psychiatry and the Addictive Pleasures of Moral Management,” Romanticism and Pleasure, ed. Thomas H. Schmid and Michelle Faubert (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 61–82. 43 Morton, Hyperobjects, 72. 44 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ll. 38, 88. 45 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 26. 46 See Morton, Hyperobjects, 181. This does not discount Morton’s own apprehension, throughout Hyperobjects, of Wordsworth’s own radical insight into the life of “things,” which apprehension is one of my present essay’s key inspirations and touchstones. See esp. 51. 47 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ll. 30, 35, 52, 61. All subsequent references are cited parenthetically in my main discussion. 48 Cited in Carl G. Herndl and S. Scott Graham, “Getting Over Incommensurability: Latour, New Materialisms, and the Rhetoric of Diplomacy,” Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2015), 49. See Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). According to Tilottama Rajan, “fram[ing] his distinction between smooth and tangled objects within the issue of ecology,” Latour speaks to a “ ‘crisis’ of ‘objectivity’ rather than ‘nature’ per se (18): a shift in how we understand material and intellectual objects.” “The Vitality of Idealism: Life and Evolution in Schelling’s and Hegel’s Systems,” Marking Time: Romanticism and Evolution, ed. Joel Faflak (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 242. 49 Herdl and Graham, “Getting Over Incommensurability,” 49–50. 50 Oxford English Dictionary, definition of “steeped,” accessed at: http://www.oed.com. proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/view/Entry/189585?rskey=tIunVQ&result=3#eid. 51 See Faflak, Romantic Psychoanalysis, 75–85. 52 William Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ed. James Butler (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979), ll. 3–16.

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Feeling as hyperobject in Wordsworth’s The Prelude 53 Wordsworth, The Ruined Cottage and The Pedlar, ll. 9–11. 54 Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Re-Thinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 55 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ll. 63–71. 56 Ibid., ll. 53–4, 58.

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4

Blank oblivion, condemned life: John Clare’s “Obscurity” David Collings

Few poets could promise more than John Clare to those interested in the intersections between romanticism and recent developments in object-oriented ontology (OOO), vibrant matter, and speculative realism.1 Over the course of his career, Clare composed hundreds of poems on nonhuman modes of being, ranging across the lives of birds and mammals, the vibrancy of grass and trees, and the tangled flourishings of fields, lanes, and meadows. Moreover, he forcefully registered the broader political and philosophical stakes of such a poetics; as Katey Castellano argues, he celebrated the “inhuman will to variation” in the natural world “that ranges from caprice to monstrosity,” leading him to advocate for a “politicized ‘neglect’ that opposes the appropriation of nonhuman life.”2 Such a project committed him to exposing biopolitical attempts to subjugate human and nonhuman lives and to advocate instead for a broadly conceived politics of the commons.3 His work can thus serve today as a locus through which to mediate several leading concerns of those who seek to address the import of the human relation to the nonhuman, to decipher the political implications of this relation, and to think through these concerns with regard to the era we are beginning to call the Anthropocene. Within the context of this vast corpus of writing, however, another concern emerges. In one sonnet and two short lyrics, Clare evokes a dimension one step further out from the human—one outside even objects and nonhuman lives. These poems exemplify what Eugene Thacker describes as “horror,” the “non-philosophical attempt to think about the world-without-us philosophically.”4 The formulations in these poems are so radically conceived that it is difficult for readers to find a suitable language in which to theorize their achievement. Only the most adventurous thinkers in certain strands of postwar continental philosophy can begin to formulate the terms with which one might begin to do these texts justice. One such moment appears within recent speculative realist writing, the final chapter of Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound. In pages that remain distinctive, even unique, within the speculative realist archive, Brassier follows up on a suggestion by JeanFrançois Lyotard and reflects on the significance for human beings of the eventual death of the sun.5 For Brassier, that death is a catastrophe “because it blots out the terrestrial horizon of future possibility relative to which human existence, and hence

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philosophical questioning, have hitherto oriented themselves.”6 Moreover, this event is “something that has already happened,” for it is “the aboriginal trauma driving the history of terrestrial life as an elaborately circuitous detour from stellar death.”7 Accordingly, he argues, “Everything is dead already.”8 For Brassier, then, any rigorous conception of the human place within these strikingly nonhuman processes constitutes a definitive disaster within all our traditions of thought. Brassier’s argument, however, operates in close proximity with a text it does not cite, Maurice Blanchot’s Writing of the Disaster, one of the most subtle texts in twentieth-century continental theory, whose early pages map with exemplary force the contours of a similarly devastating but unheralded event.9 While Blanchot explicitly includes events such as the Shoah within his notion of the disaster, he does so not to narrow the range of his concern but to deploy such events as indicators of a more subtle, pervasive catastrophe, one that undoes virtually every dimension of experience. In effect, Blanchot ultimately leaves the historical or temporal location of that event unspecified, allowing his concept of disaster to bear on many possible domains. As a result, his articulation of that event is capacious enough to elucidate many features of Brassier’s argument; indeed, one can justly conclude that the latter ultimately exemplifies a general problematic Blanchot evoked some decades before—a possibility that goes far toward displacing some of the authority speculative realist thought has begun to exercise in the domain of contemporary reflection. Bringing these reflections to bear on Clare’s small cluster of poems enables a reader today to find within romantic poetics proper a lucid, provocative rendition of subtle annihilation. The range of such resonance is broad. Insofar as this poetic cluster locates its writing of oblivion in relation to its sense of life, memory, time, and presence, as well as shelter and hospitality, inscription and its erasure, knowledge and ignorance, and sovereignty and the sublime, it allows us to conceive of a certain disaster within a surprisingly capacious range of conceptual and figural contexts, enabling us to trace how that event unsettles a series of conceptual orientations and opens up the possibility of unsuspected alternatives. However brief Clare’s intervention may be, however tentative its suggestions, it opens the way not simply toward aligning romanticism with speculative realism but of conceiving how romanticism proleptically embeds that realism within a broader problematic that exceeds it, interpreting it within the context of a range of questions it has not yet begun to ask. Clare explores his formulations of this quiet disaster in a group of three texts: one complete sonnet, “Obscurity,” written in the early 1830s, shortly before his move to Northborough and intended for the ill-fated and, in his life, unpublished collection, The Midsummer Cushion; and two nine-line poems, written in 1845, early in his stay at the Northampton Asylum—poems that, in their shared meter and nearly identical rhyme scheme, constitute a diptych, an exploratory pair.10 “Obscurity,” the central text in this cluster, like hundreds of Clare’s other poems, focuses on a certain form of nonhuman life; here again one may note the poet’s wellknown preoccupation with the obscure, the marginal, the forgotten, the neglected— with all those aspects of the lifeworld that ordinary attentiveness might overlook. But within that context, the sonnet pushes well beyond Clare’s familiar practice, for

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it puts something else at stake, the strange possibility that nonhuman life might be condemned by oblivion. Given the uniqueness of this exploration, the sonnet retains the power even today to provoke a response beyond the range of familiar contexts, demanding a sustained effort of close reading and resourceful speculation across related texts and theoretical traditions—an effort to which I will devote the remainder of this essay. Here is the sonnet itself: Old tree oblivion doth thy life condemn Blank & recordless as that summer wind That fanned the first few leaves on thy young stem When thou wert one years shoot — & who can find Their homes of rest or paths of wandering now So seems thy history to a thinking mind As now I gaze upon thy sheltering bough Thou grew unnoticed up to flourish now & leave thy past as nothing all behind Where many years & doubtless centurys lie That ewe beneath thy shadow – nay that flie Just settled on a leaf – can know with time Almost as much of thy blank past as I Thus blank oblivion reigns as earths sublime. (1–14)11

On first impression, the sonnet’s reference to this tree’s condemned life may implicitly evoke a strong contrast between Clare’s failure to notice this tree and his more typical practice of attending to the lifeforms surrounding him in the landscapes he knew intimately over the first several decades of his life. On this score, the poem might seem to point back to the establishing framework of human witnessing. Yet the poem is not merely attempting to acknowledge the prior absence of Clare’s witnessing; it attempts to apprehend what transpires without reference to him. It sets out to register not his own affect but what happens, has happened, and will happen apart from him—except for his encounter with this happening. By recording Clare’s response to a process that transpires without reference to him, the sonnet enters that apparently paradoxical terrain familiar in our moment. Here too, as in speculative realism, one asks how one can begin to apprehend real things or events that take place without our apprehension. In registering this nonhuman happening, are we not already bringing it within the zone of human witnessing? How might one recognize and bear the impress of what takes place without us? In this most basic concern, the sonnet  already takes its place alongside recent speculative realist thought, posing for itself an array of questions we are once again attempting to address. We can thus register the force of this sonnet’s intervention best if we sense in that implicit reference to human consciousness in its opening lines not a privileging of that consciousness but a deliberate turn away from it, a turn that foregrounds and privileges a radically different mode of relation.12 That turn, as I have suggested, also takes Clare beyond the poetics of living things and into a new problematic, for it shifts focus from

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the attributes of the tree’s life to its oblivion, from its place within the interrelation of living things to its radically evacuated condition. Here Clare dwells on how a form of life, buffeted by a force as blank as itself, does not register, comes to seem as nothing; without witnesses, its life, now “condemn[ed],” disappears. As it formulates this initial sense of blankness, the poem relies on a complex figural construction. On one level, the poem states that the tree’s life is blank and recordless as the wind, thereby linking the tree’s life and the wind through a simile and suggesting that the blankness of that life is only figured through the wind’s blankness, that the empty and invisible movement of an oblivious wind serves as an apt comparison to an oblivion already characteristic of the tree’s life. Yet in this figural register, the poem also hints at a causal relation, suggesting that because of the wind’s blankness and disappearance, none could possibly recover the impress of the life of that tree. As a result, the poem suggests that the blankness of the tree’s life is simultaneously figurally prior to the wind’s blankness and brought about by the latter. The sonnet resolves this apparent paradox, however, by suggesting that the significance of a life depends on its place within the field of recording, reception, or inscription; in a logic familiar from intersubjective relations, the intrinsic here is knowable only through the extrinsic, through being acknowledged by other objects, lives, processes. The blankness of the latter, then, speaks of—and more radically, brings about—the blankness of the former.13 In that case, the sonnet’s foregrounding of the figure of the wind is central to its import:  where the relations between objects is a key feature of OOO speculation, especially around the problem of what remains available to other objects and what is withdrawn from them, here the wind’s invisibility figures a process that makes some aspects of relation impossible and in consequence effaces at least one level of the tree’s inner life.14 No doubt the wind, as a physical, nonhuman process, may still be regarded as an object, even if a subtle one, but insofar as the poem treats the wind as a figure for “oblivion,” it refuses the reduction of its themes to the field of objects, thereby insisting on an aspect of nonhuman activity that is at once beyond or outside objects per se and that through its blankness evacuates their import.15 In effect, the sonnet proleptically intervenes into OOO, treating the wind’s radical nonreceptivity as a figure for what one might call a process-oriented non-ontology, a movement of ongoing erasure that leaves no trace. In foregrounding the figure of the wind, the sonnet evokes not phenomena from the prehuman past or posthuman future—Quentin Meillassoux’s arche-fossil or Brassier’s death of the sun—but a perpetual, nameless process that, extending across all temporal sites, incorporates them into an indifferent, devastating flow that bears upon the apparent present as well.16 On first impression, the poem’s rendition of the wind’s movement over the tree’s young shoots might seem to echo “Mont Blanc,” a poem crucial to how we think romanticism’s anticipations of speculative realism. When in that poem the “chainless winds still come and ever came / To drink” the odors of the “giant brood of pines” (20) and “their mighty swinging / To hear—an old and solemn harmony” (22–24), in effect the winds, listening to the sound that they cause, serve as a remarkably efficient metaphor for Shelley’s theory of perception, according to which “All things exist as they are perceived:  at least to the percipient.”17 But in

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Clare’s sonnet, the wind registers nothing, effacing the import of what it moves. The sonnet thus evokes the opposite prospect, that of nonreceptive, radically indifferent movement over the world’s life-forms. By implying that the wind could register what it moves yet emphasizing that it does not, the sonnet starkly effaces the process Shelley encapsulates, suggesting that where perception is blank, nothing exists; the tree is condemned to inexistence, to wasted life.18 Moreover, since the sonnet nowhere proposes that the narrator’s encounter salvages the tree from its ruined state, it implies one further step: when one witnesses the life of a tree, one does not give that tree existence; on the contrary, one discerns the incapacity of perception to give that life existence. The sonnet might thus seem to explore a stance radically unlike Shelley’s. Yet insofar as Shelley writes that all things exist as they are perceived at least to the percipient, he hints that things may exist outside the domain of perception, perhaps outside the arena of human concern, anticipating one of the cardinal themes of speculative realist thought. As if granting this possibility to Shelley, the sonnet nevertheless radicalizes it, transforming the unperceived into a “recordless,” unperceiving force; in doing so, it displaces the centrality of human perception, depicting an agency to which that mode of perception, and its effects, are subordinate. Human perception, it seems, cannot overcome the effects of a process that transpires without regard to human concerns. Yet in the next lines the sonnet displaces these provisional inferences. This process of recordless passage gives way to another erasure, the utter disappearance of those winds. The process of effacement itself disappears, for “who can find / Their homes of rest or paths of wandering now” (4–5)? The wind that figurally effaced the life of the tree has no proper place, no stable position that one might decipher to understand its work; what subjects the tree to oblivion has itself entered a similar state. The work of the erasure redoubles itself, cancels even cancellation. If we are unsure as to whether Clare would wish to carry out such a philosophically radical step, we need only turn to the paired lyrics he composed over a decade later, for they amply confirm his capacities in this regard, testifying again to what Thacker calls “horror.” The first poem, to which I will refer as “Old times forgetfull,” makes more explicit a logic already present in the sonnet: Old times forgetfull memories of the past Are cold & drear as snow upon our graves In books less then a shadows doom will last But Fragments there each stranded volume saves Like some rich gems washed up from ocean waves But now no summer dwells upon the spot Nor flower to blossom—the eternal blast Oblivion leaves the earth in which they rot Darkness in which the very lights forgot. (1–9)19

Here the fragments thrown up from a disastrous inundation are effaced once again by an “eternal blast / Oblivion [that] leaves the earth” only a “Darkness in which the

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very lights forgot” (7–9). Such a double negation appears as well when snow and flowers, winter and summer, as well as the earthly life that revolves through those seasons, are all subjected to an eternal blast, as if absolute “Darkness” can condemn the life of the earth itself. Furthermore, the forgetting with which this poem begins is itself erased by a darkness that forgets the light, that forgets even what memory— or indeed forgetfulness—might be.20 A similar logic is at work in the second poem, which I will call “Where are the citys,” which at once confirms and varies the logic of the first: Where are the citys Sodom & Gomorrah The marble pallaces upon the plain Citys to day & a dead sea tomorrow & what they was they ne’er will be again That earth is lost & all its city slain By the oerwhelming waves entombed & gone Search for its ruins now is void & vain & but one witness saw that ruin done— The ever burning bright eternal Sun. (1–9)21

The devastating process wipes out not only the “citys” but the earth, carrying out in an initial blow the full sequence at play in “Old times forgetfull.” This is not a story of mere slaying or death, nor of ruins or entombment, but of the erasure of any ruin that one might find. This second negation, in turn, takes place before the witness of an “ever burning bright eternal Sun” (9), an apparent counterpart to “the eternal blast / Oblivion,” though taking the form of an eternally scorching brightness (7–8). Absolute darkness, absolute light: either way, this scorching, blasting process destroys all, rots the earth, and erases any memory or residue of that devastation as well. The sweeping annihilation of the second negation makes clear that pure process bears not only on the life of a tree but also on all life, all objects, indeed on the matrix that can sustain any particularity, for it rots the earth and annihilates even the memory of light. These short poems thus foreground what is already present in the sonnet, the realization that oblivion condemns the life of human beings as well. But it would be a mistake to claim that these double negations bear primarily on human self-regard. The second negation cuts against any such implication. Insofar as that first erasure is a blow to human narcissism, it retains a tacit reference to the latter, still enabling a nostalgia for human significance. The second negation, however, insists that the logic of pure process erases any memory of human centrality, any resentment regarding its loss. These poems thus do not merely decenter the human from its apparent pride of place; they speak instead of a voiding of the human, an erasure so absolute that it would be vain ever to seek it. Without question, in these moments Clare participates in a writing of the disaster, conceived here not as anything one could witness in empirical reality or historical time but one that, in its hyperbolic force, erases any trace of such an event. This erasure of history or the event might thus seem to take these poems far beyond political terms;

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after all, the leap beyond empirical experience into an absolute darkness threatens to become a suspect leap outside the political as well. But the references to Sodom and Gomorrah and certain “marble pallaces” in “Where are the citys” allude to themes Clare broaches in one of his more political lyrics, “The Flitting,” written in 1832, shortly after the sonnet (and after his move to Northborough). This poem proposes that the familiar molehills, weeds, and blossoms of his former landscape are “All tennants of an ancient place,” “Coeval . . . with adams race,” as if they remain perpetually at the origins and keep alive the primordial freshness of the world (129, 131).22 That emphasis culminates in the final stanza, where the opposition between marble cities and enduring grasses captures Clare’s disdain for all pomp and grandeur, all claims to human privilege: Time looks on pomp with careless moods Or killing apathys disdain —So where old marble citys stood Poor persecuted weeds remain She feels a love for little things That very few can feel beside And still the grass eternal springs Where castles stood and grandeur died (209–16)

According to this poem, time carelessly accepts the shattering, levelling effects of history, cultivating instead a unique affection for those “persecuted weeds” that history neglects and protecting them from its own ruinous effects. Here a certain endless temporal process protects and sustains the earth, exempting it from the historical process that lays waste to all human constructions. In this conception of nonhuman process, the apathy of time does not condemn life but sustains it, making it “coeval” with “adams race” (129) affirming whatever form of life, human or nonhuman, that finds its place with “little things” (213), with what is marginal to history. Here the politics of the commons becomes one of what the human and nonhuman commons share, a politics of the persecuted. These final stanzas of “The Flitting” elucidate well what is at stake in recent thinking that contests human privilege and emphasizes instead a shared vibrant life or a democracy of objects.23 But “Where are the citys,” invoking the stance of “The Flitting,” at once sustains and exceeds it. It takes the step of the second negation, pushing beyond a politics of the marginal, erasing that erasure of a certain human privilege, and yet, through the very logic of that negation, remaining continuous with the first, redoubling its gesture on another level. The “eternal blast / Oblivion” (7–8), it seems, erases the eternal grass; its pure process began before and will continue after any reference to “adams race” (129). In that case, through this gesture the poem undermines the claim that “little things” are given a perpetual flourishing outside history, in this respect anticipating the ubiquitous recent arguments that expose the costs of an idealizing notion of Nature (213). Thus “Where are the citys” undercuts a poetics of the earth, a poetics through which even an apparently humble humanity may anchor claims to a more-than-historical origin. In consequence, a more capaciously conceived political stance becomes clear:  this

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cluster of poems outlines a politics of radical fragility—a fragility not of Dasein (which experiences its thrownness within a distinctly human temporality) nor of “little things” (which despite their vulnerability are guaranteed endurance) but rather of entities that endure a nullity held in common, a shared inexistence. It conceives of a politics well outside the reach of any biopolitical regime or indeed of any human sovereignty—one that arises in a condition of shared oblivion.24 The tenderness for such fragile entities is not explicit in these short poems but is evident at once in the sonnet, which begins with an apostrophe to the tree that seems to express a certain nonanthropocentric solidarity with its condition: “Old tree oblivion doth thy life condemn” (1).25 It might seem odd for the sonnet to develop this tone of tenderness in a context so devastating, for the oblivion bestowed by pure process could be understood to erase any basis for concern. Yet the sonnet makes clear that, despite the process that has condemned the life of the tree, it continues to flourish; the nullity that has befallen it does not bring its thriving to an end. Somehow, then, its life continues in the void of that life’s undoing; it belongs to an earth that is long forgotten yet somehow persists. The panoply of relations embedded in shared life, in the interobjectivities and intersubjectivies of the commons, apparently remains intact, as do the affective and political possibilities it perpetually generates. What might this strange conjunction of oblivion and persistence suggest? Here it may be best to note the strong resonances between the sonnet and Maurice Blanchot’s theory of disaster, whose initial articulation lingers with a similarly elusive theme. The tree, no trace of whose earlier life can be found, has grown up “to flourish now” (8); it follows that oblivion, in Blanchot’s words, “ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact.”26 The tree’s life is condemned, yet the tree thrives; to borrow from Brassier, one might say that like everything else, the tree is dead—yet it lives on.27 The event, then, is indeed obscure, beyond any ordinary concept of condemnation or destruction. “When the disaster comes upon us, it does not come,” writes Blanchot; “it does not happen.”28 Disaster’s advent is so elusive we cannot arrive at any knowledge of it, for it is “related to forgetfulness—forgetfulness without memory, the motionless retreat of what has not been treated,” or the disappearance of a wind that never registered the significance of the “young stem” in the first place.29 The sonnet thus seems to anticipate Blanchot’s disaster precisely, except that by discerning a disaster that has befallen a tree, rather than a human being, it expands his rendition of disaster to include all entities over which a wind might flow. How might Blanchot’s articulation of this quiet disaster bear on the renditions of such an event in speculative realism? For Brassier, as for Clare and Blanchot, the condemnation comes not in a distant future but has already transpired. Brassier makes clear that the empirical death of the sun is ultimately a figure for a contingency that underlies all physical realities, one that is radically intimate to any living thing. The arche-fossil does similar work for Meillassoux; as he argues, the category of the ancestral that it captures “designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself.”30 One could thus surmise that the chronological distance of any ancestral thing or terminal event figures the elusiveness of this perpetual process, its taking place below the threshold of ordinary perception. Whatever produced the

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arche-fossil or will kill the sun is already rotting the earth and condemning the life of a tree; that process operates already in every conceivable time or place. But even this formulation falls short; as both Clare and Blanchot suggest, one can never locate that event in time, for as an event that cancels even forgetfulness, one that wipes out the attributes of any temporality—as one that “does not happen”—it befalls every entity through a constitutively self-erasing dimension of temporality itself. The sonnet captures this complex structure through its figure of the wind, which flows over the tree in a movement that can take place only in time while erasing the significance of any difference between past and present. The disaster “does not happen” because it evacuates a happening that nevertheless continues to flow.31 This reading of temporality in “Obscurity” might seem to cut against its formulations, for in lines seven and eight it twice invokes the term “now,” as if for a moment it proposes counting the past as nothing in relation to a present in which the tree flourishes and the speaker gazes upon it. But the poem’s insistence both on blank oblivion and its equally blank reception highlights instead the utter erasure of that “now,” its incapacity to escape or evade the obliterating flow of the indifferent wind. Within that context, the sonnet’s use of the word “now” at least in part makes explicit how this reiterated blankness produces what Blanchot describes as a “time without present,” a time without a now that could count itself as such—a time that is not time, that erases itself.32 Such an insight, however, bears on the notion of eternity as well, and especially on the notion of an “eternal blast / Oblivion” (7–8). If oblivion wipes out every temporal location, even the present, does life subsist under the impress of an eternal now, an endless present that is sovereign over all moments? On the contrary, this sonnet works out the temporal consequences of living under oblivion, ultimately suggesting that one can never be present in, for, or with that oblivion, that it is precisely the effacement of any present—even an eternal present—and thus constitutes what one might call a noneternity, a perpetual capacity to void time. Here again this small cluster of poems bears on a question of central, vexing concern within speculative realist thought, how and whether to think time outside or beyond human reference.33 Such gestures radically undermine nearly any category crucial to phenomenology, carrying the sonnet not only into post-phenomenology, to which, as Tilottama Rajan argues, many “poststructuralist” theorists belong (including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard), but beyond such theorists into a mode of nonphenomenological writing, sharing and extending this feature of speculative realism.34 In this broad terrain, one might provisionally argue that the obliteration of the tree’s life puts it in a zone that, in Blanchot’s words, “escapes the possibility of experience,” for without a present, the self-evidence of experience—or the priority of experience as an explanatory framework—is subtly condemned.35 One might say as well that the sonnet evokes what Blanchot describes as a condition “outside being”—a state not of antibeing, which still invokes the possibility of being, but one in which the very possibility of being is effaced.36 How might a living thing thrive in the midst of such a quiet but severe disaster? The sonnet implicitly addresses this question when it depicts how the tree receives its

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mode of inexistence: “Thou grew unnoticed up to flourish now / & leave thy past as nothing all behind” (8–9). That past, the poem suggests, is indeed nothing, as blank as a disappeared wind; but in treating that blank past as nothing, the tree abandons that blankness, fails to record the fact of that recordless fate. Because of its blank receptivity, the tree endures these obliterations without reference to what it seems to have lost. To follow Blanchot once again, it endures in a mode of a “radical passivity” so severe it no longer sustains any link to the possibility of action.37 This passivity—its erasure of the very possibility of action—should remind us of the second negation, in which darkness erases the very memory of light. The tree’s passivity repeats that negation again, replicating it in a third register. In effect, the wind’s absolute indifference to the life-forms over which it flows is replicated in the tree’s absolute indifference to that indifference. The tree does not notice that it grew up unnoticed. If the wind utterly effaces the tree’s history, the tree in turn utterly effaces that effacing. By bringing forward this aspect of the tree’s life, the sonnet goes far toward deprivileging the potentially disabling weight of oblivion. It gives us a moment of horror, a certain negative revelation, pointing to the sheer inconsequence of life under the movement of a pure blankness, but just as quickly turns its back on its own insight. In doing so, it spurns one possible response to condemned life, the cultivation of anguish over such a condition, and explores a nonanthropocentric alternative. It instances instead what Anne-Lise François terms “recessive action,” whereby one might encounter such a revelation and not take it up, not accept it as a determining gift. Invoking Wordsworth’s line, “Stop here, or gently pass,” François suggests that it “scandalously grants permission to pass, implying an indistinct continuity between the act of stopping to listen and that of letting lapse or fall behind.”38 Wordsworth’s “or” may hint at a choice between two options, but as François proposes, it may also highlight the fact that each option may stand in for the other. Clare’s sonnet addresses a similar question in another vein: suggesting that the tree is capable of responding blankly to the blankness of the wind, it points to another continuity, this time between the negative revelation and its reception. In identifying how the logic of a renewed negation is replicated yet again, the sonnet may remind us of a Hegelian dialectic whereby the negation of the negation sublates spirit into a higher level. But in this sonnet, no such sublation takes place; on the contrary, each further cancellation makes more severe the initial erasure, making more apparent a radical nullity. The renewed negation happens, as it were, not through Hegel but through Blanchot, where the opposition between light and dark leads not to a synthesis but a renewed cancellation through which the very possibility of the first term disappears. The poem underlines this logic in its reiterations of the term “blank,” which it first introduces in the key phrase “Blank & recordless,” then replicates twice in the final two lines as it refers to the tree’s “blank past” and the “blank oblivion” that condemns it (2, 13, 14). In this way, the poem’s figurations respond, as it were, to the productive capacities of Hegelian negativity through a workless counterpart, what Rajan calls in another context “unusable negativity,” which evacuates the temporal sequence of self-consciousness toward

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absolute knowledge through an a/temporal sequence toward a nonknowledge, an anonymous receptivity without consciousness.39 Such a severe procedure operates as well in the poem’s anticipatory engagement with phenomenological reflection, not only in its subtle erasures of temporality and being but also of further key categories in Heideggerian speculation, such as the notion of dwelling. In this regard, the poem extends an emphasis that pervades Clare’s work; indeed, within the English language tradition, there may be no better utterance of the poetics of the local than can be found in his poetry. Thus in this sonnet, as in hundreds of other poems and biographical episodes associated with Clare, one senses that for him, as for Heidegger, space is not given a priori but arises from the power of a specific location. Here, as in the later philosophical text, there inheres in the conditions of life a certain dwelling, along with the relation to place, things, and space. “To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations,” Heidegger writes; one might say as much of the tree, except that, in leaving its past as nothing all behind, it hardly claims to persist where it is found, even over centuries, and thus abandons its claim to be.40 Furthermore, in the sonnet, as in Heidegger’s essay, dwelling implies a mode of protection, a capacity for sheltering the fly in its branches or the ewe in its shade; something is made possible under the tree, some sustaining provision of life, except that neither the fly nor ewe nor even the speaker can claim anything about it, suggesting that no mode of being has any privilege in its domain. In this sonnet, at least, these apparently local forms of life have been subsumed under a process that moves without reference to any ground or moment that could anchor it or make it legible: here even place is displaced, location unlocatable, the ground groundless. But is this rendition of the sonnet’s sequence of negations too hasty? What about the sonnet’s speaker, who apparently does notice what the tree does not and surveys the past years, “doubtless centurys,” that lie behind (10)? What difference does the intrusion of this “thinking mind” make as it sees that none can find those stray winds that once fanned the tree in its youth (6)? No difference at all: while the human subject might register the wind’s recordless movement, that act does not undo the fact that time’s nonpassage, like that of the wind, is blank, that the tree endures under a regime other than the poet’s gaze. Furthermore, by suggesting that the ewe and fly can know almost as much about the tree’s blank past as the speaker, the poem meditates on the uselessness of human witnessing. The poet beholds a process that transpires identically with or without his observation—under the witness, as “Where are the citys” would have it, of the ever-burning sun. One might object that such a reading runs aground on the poem’s final line—“Thus blank oblivion reigns as earths sublime”—which seems to evoke the aesthetic payoff of the sublime. But what, after all, is earth’s sublime? Perhaps it is not a sublimity for the speaker, not a payoff for human consciousness, but rather a sublimity afforded to the earth, one that “condemns” earthly life while leaving it intact—giving it, through that intervention, access to something other than its immediate condition. A sublime proper to the earth, of course, would not be filled with a plenitude provided by the human mind’s imaginings; on the contrary, it would remain utterly vacant in a mode

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best described as “blank oblivion.” Much as the poem sketches the non-dwelling proper to a tree, in this reading it also maps out a contrary analytic of the earthly sublime, whereby natural forms, passing through a violence that interrupts merely biological life, would ultimately gain access to a more effaced condition. Such a sequence would rehearse within the aesthetic register the unusable negativity of a counter-Hegelian descent toward the more severe nullity sketched above. What significance does this earthly sublime then bear for the poet who inscribes it? As I  have suggested, for the most part, the poem thematizes its concerns by attending to the consequences of a stunningly nonhuman pure process; nevertheless, it acknowledges that its addressee must be human, separating the speaker from the ewe and the fly with that minimal word “almost” (13) and thereby hinting at the human relevance of what it captures. But rather than subsuming its themes under the sovereignty of human response, the poem subjects the speaker to oblivion’s reign, locating him not so far from the ewe and fly under the shelter of the tree. In doing so, it suggests that the domain of human time, whose pages—including those of the poem itself—are apparently not blank, relies on the protection of natural oblivion. Evidently, the tree offers not a hospitality to disaster, of which Scott J. Juengel unforgettably writes in another context, but a hospitality of disaster, so that the human and the poetic find shelter under what is rendered blank, as if to receive a pointless care from the process of obliteration itself.41 Here the sonnet proleptically intervenes into the speculations of the late Derrida, suggesting that the notions of pure gift and absolute hospitality do not apply to human beings, for which even in his account they are impossible, but rather to a process that operates without regard for us.42 To any human gift, after all, one may respond with gratitude, an affect that at least in small measure cancels out the absoluteness of the initial gesture and thus disqualifies it from Derrida’s understanding of pure hospitality. No human act, it seems, can entirely overleap its place within the field of mutual relations. In contrast, a pure process may well be capable of carrying out the gesture of bestowing an absolute hospitality to the life of a tree, ewe, fly, or poet, for it remains absolutely indifferent to any gratitude that might return. Pure process may therefore enable and condemn any life in the same gesture, in which case disaster and flourishing are two faces of the same flowing—a possibility that goes far toward unpacking Blanchot’s account of disaster. This reversal of sovereignty, whereby the poet takes shelter under the sign of disaster, applies to the poem as well. While the sonnet does leave a record, it registers a disaster to which it is subject, proposing that it too is buffeted by a process that will eventually efface its frail form. Thus ultimately even a poetic witness to that process is only marginally distinct from the response of a ewe or fly, knowing very little more than they about the nontemporality to which all of them are subject.43 In placing the human alongside nonhuman animals outside our familiar phenomenological concepts, the sonnet may seem to exemplify the stance of one who, according to Giorgio Agamben, in an argument responding in part to the work of Heidegger, has learned not merely to let the animal be, but also “to let it be outside of being,” in a zone “beyond both knowing and not knowing . . . beyond both being and

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the nothing.”44 This gesture, Agamben tentatively proposes, might enable as well the arrival of a certain ignorance which suspends the hiatus between human and animal and lets both be, outside of being.45 Clare’s sonnet seems to pick up these threads of Agamben’s argument, but it does so not because it finds a place of suspension between the human and nonhuman, as Agamben ponders, but rather subjects both to a radically non-Heideggerian process, a nontemporality indifferent to the human and nonhuman alike. The sonnet marks not a moment of messianic suspension, nor of the condition of bare life one might overcome through it, but of subtle disaster, of wasted life, which flourishes in a state none can overcome.46 If the sonnet effaces even those renditions of justice or of transformation proposed by recent speculation—such as absolute hospitality or messianic suspension—it does not leave its reader without recourse. In its third repetition of effacement, it opens up yet another, seldom considered response to the possibility that all life transpires under the sign of disaster:  it leaves its own nullity “as nothing all behind” (9). The contrast between this sonnet and the stance of Brassier, who elaborates such insights into a version of nihilism, suggests that the latter still clings too closely to subjectivity’s privilege, its search for an ultimately rewarding framework for existence. The turn away from such expectations, in contrast, exposes the privilege of such demands by abandoning them. Here nothingness ceases to remember a prior claim and makes possible instead a radical passivity in the face of an unredeemable inexistence. This turn away from the seductions of annihilating affect or searing insight leads the sonnet in the direction of a rather surprising minimalism—one that contrasts sharply with the lavish attention that speculative realism and OOO provide to these concerns. The poet does not give the insights of these poems too great a weight; on the contrary, he enacts what one might call, following François, a recessive mode of writing, taking it so far that on these matters he cultivates near-silence. The fact that Clare included the sonnet within scores of poems on other themes for The Midsummer Cushion and returned to these concerns only in two short poems over the rest of his career suggests that he knew how he might “gently pass.” Like the tree, he could treat his sense of oblivion as nothing. If Coleridge explores a mode of “blank attachment” in his Dejection Ode, as Noel Jackson proposes—a state of receptivity without prospect— here Clare attributes to the wind, the tree, and himself a state of blank nonattachment, a receptivity that abandons what it apparently receives.47 In doing so, he authorizes us as well to extend this gesture in our turn, to recognize that we may best acknowledge our place under the shelter of oblivion by turning away—by evoking that sheltering briefly, implicitly, or in silence. Nevertheless, the emergence of the outlines of a rigorous poetics of oblivion in this small cluster of poems also makes clear that the formulations of Blanchot and Brassier, arising as they do in later historical moments, articulate a quiet disaster that had already taken place on the threshold of the nineteenth century, one brought about by the new awareness of those physical and biological processes that, operating over vast reaches of time, provided the alien, if necessary, preconditions for human flourishing.48 While speculative realism may seem to exemplify a moment arising after the postmodern, it may instead suggest that we are only now beginning to grapple with the import of an

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event that took place at the onset of a certain modernity—an event that, apparently buried under Kantian critical philosophy, romanticism, and historicism, in fact, at times found its articulation through them. In confronting a condition outside being, perhaps we are only now beginning to contend with a barely suspected feature of the romantic legacy.

Notes 1 I presented a much earlier version of this essay at the seminar “Wasted Life” at the American Comparative Literature Association conference at Brown University in early April 2012. I wish to thank Jacques Khalip for organizing the seminar and the seminar’s participants for their many astute comments on the essay. 2 Katey Castellano, The Ecology of British Romantic Conservatism, 1790–1837 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 159. 3 For recent, compelling accounts of Clare’s opposition to his moment’s biopolitical imperative, see Chris Washington, “John Clare and Biopolitics,” European Romantic Review 25, no. 6 (December 2014): 665–82; and Sara Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopoetics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 4 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of the Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Zero Books, 2011), 9. 5 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 8–23. 6 Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 223. 7 Ibid., 223. 8 Ibid. 9 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986). 10 In one of the very few discussions of “Obscurity,” Adam Phillips cites its exploration of obscurity to specify what he considers Clare’s resistance to exposing himself as a poet to the public, reading it as “one of his finest poems, or anti-poems” that uniquely dares to celebrate oblivion; see Adam Phillips, “The Exposure of John Clare,” in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 187. But his reading understates how Clare, rather than seeking obscurity, long attempted to cultivate an audience on whatever terms were available to him; for a lucid treatment of these concerns, see Alan Vardy, John Clare: Politics and Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 11 John Clare, Poems of the Middle Period: 1822–1837, vol. 4, general ed. Eric Robinson, ed. Robinson, David Powell, and P. M. S. Dawson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 256. Further references to this poem will be cited by line number in the text. 12 In anticipating the gambit of speculative realism, the sonnet challenges the formative tradition, outlined by Thomas Pfau in Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), which rests on the idea that “object and concept . . . are mutually constitutive” and that as a result one cannot separate fact and value; see

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Pfau, 31 and 311. This lucid argument, however, does not consider how human beings should respond to the fact that certain objects (such as Meillassoux’s arche-fossil) arose eons before human beings appeared and thus on some level existed and exist apart from the concept. An attempt to answer this question would require a rigorous intervention into the tradition Pfau espouses—inherited from Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas—and speculative realism both. The sonnet thus touches on a problematic broached in the late lyric “I Am,” where the absence of an other effaces the speaker’s identity; Clare, Major Works, ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 361. On Clare’s attempt to craft a notion of identity that could subsist apart from another, see Guyer, Reading with John Clare, 57–77. For a formative discussion of this problematic in OOO theory, see Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002). In its emphasis on process, Clare’s cluster of poems may seem to share much with the stance of the foremost exponent of process in speculative realism, Iain Hamilton Grant, especially in his Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (New York: Continuum, 2008) and “Mining Conditions: A Response to Harman,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 41–6. But where Grant, following Schelling, emphasizes the productive aspects of process in its capacity to generate objects, these poems focus on its condemning them to oblivion. On the arche-fossil see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), especially 8–27. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 2nd edn., ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 96–100; “A Defence of Poetry,” 533. For a discussion of these lines on which I build here, see also Earl R. Wasserman, Shelley: A Critical Reading (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 225. On “Mont Blanc” and speculative realism more generally, see, among others, Greg Ellerman, “Speculative Romanticism,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 166–70; Anne C. McCarthy, “ The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or ‘Mont Blanc’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 355–75; and Evan Gottlieb, Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 161–81. In this regard, the sonnet anticipates Emily Dickinson’s “Four Trees,” which as Lily Gurton-Wachter suggests, “presents a landscape with no one watching it,” except for one who might pass by; it thus complicates the thematics of attention she finds throughout important strands of romantic poetics. See Gurton-Wacher, Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 188. John Clare, The Later Poems of John Clare, 1837–1864, vol. 1, general ed. Eric Robinson, ed. Robinson and David Powell, associate ed. Margaret Grainger (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 211. The loose syntax of the passage gestures toward still further implications, for it suggests that the lights “forgot”—perhaps that they forgot to shine, or forgot that they were lights at all, and thus participating, even where they shine, in what doubly negates them. The passage inscribes a double negation within the apparently positive

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism regime itself, hinting that disaster might befall in a way that may remain seemingly invisible—in a logic to be explored below. Clare, Later Poems of John Clare, 211. John Clare, “The Flitting,” in Major Works, ed. with an intro. Eric Robinson and David Powell, intro. Tom Paulin (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004), 250–6. In “Songs Eternity,” nonhuman song is depicted as similarly coeval with Adam and Eve and surviving far longer than cities or books. See Major Works,122–4. See Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010) and Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011). This shared condition may be captured best in two texts regarding disfigured community: Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor and others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) and the response in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans. Pierre Joris (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1988). The French title of Nancy’s text, La communauté désoeuvrée, invokes the term désoeuvrément, or worklessness, central to Blanchot’s thought; on this question, see Joris, “Translator’s Preface” to The Unavowable Community, xxii–xxv. This instance raises key questions about the figure of apostrophe, for analyses of that figure rely on the assumption that nonhuman lives share a condition clearly distinguishable from that of human subjects. OOO theory thus opens the way to new understandings of such rhetorical figures, a rewarding problematic I do not have space to explore here. For an extended treatment of apostrophe and related figures in Clare, see Guyer, Reading with John Clare, 11–24. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 1. For considerations of the Blanchotian resonances of the phrase “living on” relevant in the present context, see Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” in Parages, trans. James Hulbert, ed. John P. Leavey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 103–91. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 1, 5. Ibid., 3. Meillassoux, After Finitude, 20. Such a rendition of temporality suggests that this sonnet’s stance shares much with Derridean deconstruction’s account of the radical destructibility intrinsic to temporality, especially in the logic of the trace; for an exemplary account of the latter, see Martin Hägglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008) and “Radical Atheist Materialism: A Critique of Meillassoux,” in The Speculative Turn, 114–29. In effect, the sonnet gives time the name of oblivion, showing how its process subjects the tree to the logic of the trace, evacuating its presence. But by using the metaphor of a disappearing wind to designate time, the sonnet explores as well how time itself may not be found, even in the trace. While this treatment is broadly consistent with Derrida’s argument, it nevertheless foregrounds a theme that Derrida himself does not emphasize. Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 15. Tim Chilcott makes a related point, writing that in “Obscurity,” “even time itself seems subject to the greater force of oblivion”; see Chilcott, “A Real World & Doubting Mind”: A Critical Study of the Poetry of John Clare (Hull: Hull University Press, 1985), 126. On this theme, see Meillassoux, “Time without Becoming,” at https:// speculativeheresy.files.wordpress.com/2008/07/3729-time_without_becoming.

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pdf. Accessed July 20, 2015, and Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), esp. 210–16. For an approach that explores the “temporal undulations” of quantum time and the non-present of the relations of interobjectivity, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 55–68, 81–95. Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). For a discussion of how speculative realism challenges core aspects of the phenomenological tradition, see Tom Sparrow, The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Blanchot, Writing of the Disaster, 7. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 13. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 10. Tilottama Rajan, “Mary Shelley’s ‘Mathilda’: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” Studies in the Novel 26, no. 1/2 (Summer 1994): 46. Over the course of its reiterations of blankness, the sonnet thus figures with unusual rigor the theme of anonymous life; for an exemplary treatment of the latter, see Jacques Khalip, Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 335. Scott J. Juengel, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Perpetual Disaster,” in Romanticism and Disaster, ed. Jacques Khalip and David Collings, Romantic Circles Praxis 2012, http:// www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/disaster/HTML/praxis.2012.juengel.html, para. 31. For representative statements along these lines, see Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 28–9, 34–70; Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and The Gift of Death, 2nd edn. and Literature in Secret, trans. David Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). The poem emphasizes the absence of knowledge through a fine irony, suggesting that a fly might know almost as much as the speaker about a blank past “with time”—that is, with the lifespan of a fly—and thereby reinforces in another way the theme of a self-cancelling temporality. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 91. Ibid., 92. For Agamben’s reflections on bare life in the context of the human and animal, see The Open, esp. 33–8, 75–7. I am grateful to David Clark for pointing out the relevance of these passages to the present argument. Noel Jackson, “Coleridge’s Criticism of Life,” Coleridge Bulletin n.s. 37 (Summer 2011): 21–34. For an attempt to evoke the contours of this event, see my “After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 345–61.

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Speculative enthusiasm: William Blake’s Jerusalem and Quentin Meillassoux’s divine ethics Allison Dushane

William Blake’s illuminated books, which explore alternative avenues for being and becoming through a distinct eschatology that coincides with his unconventional conceptions of causality and temporality, offer a rich archive for the pursuit of connections between romanticism and speculative realism.1 Like Blake, speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux repurposes the structural features of eschatological narratives and deploys the rhetoric of prophecy in order to reimagine the limits and potential of human agency in relation to the rest of the material world. In the final sentence of After Finitude, Meillassoux assumes the stance of a prophet of contemporary thought; he expresses his hope that his work will succeed in “waking us from our correlationist slumber, by enjoining us to reconcile thought and absolute.”2 Meillassoux’s brief but provocative text critiques what he sees as the dominant thread of post-Kantian philosophy, a “correlationist” perspective that claims that we only ever have access to truth through a “relation of thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.”3 Scholars of British romanticism have begun to engage with the major concerns of speculative realism, in particular Meillassoux’s challenge to the hegemony of correlationism, in order to argue for the relevance of romantic-era texts to critical conversations about nature, subjectivity, and ontology.4 In this essay, I take these shared aesthetic strategies as an invitation to read Meillassoux as a prophet in the Blakean tradition. I argue that an understanding of Blake’s work can illustrate the significance of an area of Meillassoux’s philosophy that has received less attention from literary scholars:  Meillassoux’s formulation of an “immanent ethics,” which relies upon a faith in the possibility of the arrival of an as yet inexistent God who will inaugurate a truly just world populated by the resurrected bodies of humanity as immortal beings.5 For contemporary scholars drawn to Meillassoux’s alignment of philosophy with science and mathematics, the eschatological dimension of his thinking appears to be at odds with his insistence on the intelligibility of material existence. However, an understanding of what Meillassoux calls an “eschaology,” which serves as the foundation for his divine ethics, is both thoroughly consistent with his thesis on radical contingency and crucial to understanding its ethical possibilities.6 The distinct

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philosophical innovation of Meillassoux’s insistence on the logical possibility of a future “World of justice” inhabited by the reconstituted bodies of the dead comes into view when read alongside romantic-era treatments of apocalypse and millennium, especially in Blake’s later prophetic books. For scholars of romanticism, Meillassoux’s speculative materialism aids in delineating the features of Blake’s eschatology that set him apart from his contemporaries and makes a case for the continuing relevance of his work to critical conversations about affect, subjectivity, and the limits and possibilities of human agency. Specifically, Meillassoux’s insistence on radical contingency as the only avenue to reunite human thinking with the absolute can reveal the method within the apparent madness of Blake’s refusal to accept Enlightenment conceptions of causality and his relentless “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems” (11.5).7 Meillassoux and Blake both demonstrate that human agency and social justice depend not on an instrumental vision of progress, but on a continuous hope for a novel incarnation of the divine that subverts the teleological orientation of traditional eschatology: “a God who is not only the agent of eschatology, but also its result: a God who is no longer the first and necessary cause, but rather the last contingent effect—a God who is no longer absolute . . . but who is nevertheless ultimate.”8 Read in conversation, Meillassoux and Blake call for the cultivation of a speculative enthusiasm, an affective stance that works in opposition to the ontological stagnation of modernity. Meillassoux’s articulation of the spectral dilemma as the central problem in philosophy serves as the foundation for his divine ethics, and his proposed solution to this problem is the most controversial aspect of his work. This concept first appeared in English in an article titled “Spectral Dilemma” in the 2008 issue of Collapse IV. According to Meillassoux, history has been haunted by the presence of “essential spectres,” figures whose sudden death by inexplicable natural disaster or human atrocity leave indelible marks on historical memory.9 He begins by contemplating the phenomenon of the spectre, “a dead person who has not been properly mourned,” and the essential spectre, one whose manner of death, either in its incomprehensible violence or randomness, exceeds our capacity for mourning.10 The figure of the essential spectre exceeds the representation of a specific individual as it signifies the horrific excess of violence that characterizes human and natural history alike. The unresolved deaths of essential spectres weigh heavily on the living: “Whoever commits the imprudence of lending an ear to their call risks passing the rest of his life hearing their complaint.”11 In response, he proposes a process that he calls “essential mourning,” which involves theorizing a relationship with the dead that circumvents the “hopeless fear that we feel when faced with their end.”12 This problem prompts the question: “How to think a bond between the living and the dead which extracts itself from the twofold distress of the atheist and the religious believer?”13 The spectral dilemma, then, consists of the “aporetic alternative of atheism and religion” that serves as an impasse to confronting and processing the grief produced by nature’s indifference to humanity as well as the inhumanity of modern institutions.14 Is it possible, Meillassoux asks, to fully resolve this form of widespread cultural grief?15 His insistence that essential mourning calls upon us to “make these spectres live rather than becoming, in hearing their voices,

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the mere shadow of a living being,” is not merely elegiac, but meant as a radical theological claim.16 As Peter Gratton puts it in his introduction to and commentary on the major ideas of speculative realism, “Meillassoux’s discussion of this—there’s no way around saying it—is where he likely loses many readers, even those who were willing to follow him to the edge of the hyper chaos.”17 The very elements that make Meillassoux’s work attractive to contemporary audiences appear to work against the ends to which that work leads. Graham Harman addresses this apparent contradiction in the introduction to his translation of selections from The Divine Inexistence, a work that began as Meillassoux’s 1997 doctoral thesis and is currently in preparation as a multivolume magnum opus:  “Here, in a twenty-first century work of French philosophy that is ostensibly materialist in spirit, we are led by a rational argument to a concept of incarnation.”18 However, these ideas both predate and intersect with the key interventions of the more widely read After Finitude and are intrinsic to an understanding of the ethical possibilities of radical contingency. Although the central role of the incarnation in Blake’s work comes as no surprise, the manner of its implementation also frustrated the theological categories available to his contemporaries. The romantic-era diarist Henry Crabb Robinson records a conversation with Blake in which he declared:  “We are all coexistent with God— Members of the Divine body—We are all partakers of the divine nature . . . He is the only God—But then he added—And so am I and so are you.” Robinson, who begins the entry by questioning Blake’s sanity (“Shall I call him Artist or Genius—or Mystic— or Madman?”), remarks that he had difficulty in attempting to “fix Blake’s station between Christianity Platonism & Spinozism.”19 Blake’s insistence on the coincidence of the human and the divine align him with the radical religious discourses of antinomianism and popular enthusiasm, which surfaced with renewed fervor in the political unrest and millennial anticipation of 1790s Britain. In his study of Blake’s relationship to these traditions, John Mee traces the discourse on “enthusiasm” from its origins in the Greek, where it was “associated with the inspiration to the poet and the seer,” to its development over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries into “species of mania or delirium” produced by a disordered “relationship between the imagination and the animal spirits.”20 Enthusiasm, as an accusation of religious error, encompasses any position that would equate the human imagination, particularly in its more materialist interpretations, with the wisdom of God. The puzzlingly messianic dimension of Meillassoux’s speculative materialism can shed light on the challenge to necessity that drives Blake’s enthusiastic vision; conversely, Blake’s equivalence of “Poetic Genius” with the “Spirit of Prophecy” can illustrate how Meillassoux’s insistence on the eventual incarnation of a God that does not exist works to transform conceptions of human subjectivity in the present (E 1). Blake’s work is consistently occupied with the process of Meillassouxian essential mourning. His spectral figures range from the child laborers and slaves in Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789–94) to the soldiers and citizens who shed their blood in the French and American revolutions in America:  A Prophecy (1793) and Europe:  A Prophecy (1794). In Jerusalem (1804–21), Blake confronts the violence of the Terror that followed the promise of the French Revolution and calls attention to

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the dehumanizing tendencies of Industrial Revolution. Jerusalem opens with a vision of the fallen Albion, a mythical representation of Britain at war with itself. One of the outcomes of Albion’s fall is the appearance of multiple Spectres that represent isolated and amplified aspects of the various characters in the text, including Albion, its citizens, and Blake himself. Los—the figure of the artist, the prophet, and arguably, Blake himself—is divided from his reasoning power. This alienated aspect of self assumes the form of a Spectre, to whom Los declares: “I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Mans. I must not Reason & Compare, my business is to Create” (10.20–1). Throughout Jerusalem, Los compels his Spectre to work beside him, assisting with the “terrible eternal labor” of building Golgonooza, the regenerative city of art (11.24). Golgonooza initially appears, however, not as a corrective to but as a mirror of the present state of things. Within the “Looms & Mills & Prisons & Work-houses,” and the “Churches ever consuming & ever building,” individuals remain “meer possibilities” frozen within static institutions (13.56–66). Human agency comes to a halt as these structures become “Vegetated,” taking the shape of a “Mighty Polypus” that threatens to overwhelm Albion and spread throughout the world (15.1–5). A vast network built from actors and events drawn from Blake’s London, the initial vision of Golgonooza depicts an atmosphere in which oppressive systems of labor, religion, and politics work continuously to compartmentalize and regulate, extinguishing the potential of its future inhabitants just as they have consumed the lives of the past. The central action of Jerusalem centers on Los’s struggle to begin the process of essential mourning for the shattered lives of an entire nation, as he works to liberate the human casualties of modern institutions of labor, politics, and knowledge production through a critique of the philosophical premises that ground and perpetuate them. The “Mighty Polypus” that Blake depicts in Jerusalem evokes the dialectic of Enlightenment, in which institutions that were put in place to enable human freedom only serve to shut down human potential. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, “Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly Enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”21 Standing in as a figure for Blake’s own artistic labors, Los works simultaneously through and against philosophical systems in order to locate the sources of the despair that looms over modernity in order to forge new ways of being and becoming. Los continually attempts to harness the Spectre’s power to heal the fallen state of Albion without succumbing to the compartmentalization and dehumanization that tend to accompany Enlightenment forms of reason. Through the conversations that Los has with his Spectre and the multiple dialogues between the other inhabitants of the fallen Albion, Blake demonstrates that established religious doctrine has only served to restrict human potential. Blake’s Spectres are distinct from Meillassoux’s conception of the spectre and the essential spectre; instead of representing the unmournable dead themselves, they draw attention to opposing yet reciprocal perspectives that constitute the spectral dilemma. Meillassoux locates the cause of the spectral dilemma in the false assumption that an orientation to the divine is limited to the perspectives of theism or atheism as presently conceived: “either God exists, or he doesn’t.”22 That is, “either

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a merciful spirit, transcending humanity, is at work in the world and its beyond, bringing justice for the departed; or such a transcendent principle is absent.”23 Both positions—the religious and the atheistic—“are paths to despair when confronted with spectres.”24 He explicates the source of this despair through a hypothetical dialogue between a believer and a nonbeliever. The believer insists on the existence of a God precisely on account of the terror invoked by the unresolved deaths of essential spectres; a life lived devoid of hope for the eventual justice for such deaths is simply too much to bear. In response, the atheist argues that an afterlife where justice for the dead is distributed by the same God who allowed, or even commanded, their earthly suffering must be a hell of the first order. This conversation illustrates the perversely reciprocal nature of the spectral dilemma, as each participant “masks his specific despair by exhibiting his avoidance of the other’s despair.”25 That is, each position works by pointing to the unacceptable condition inherent in the other, but is also dependent upon the terms of the opposing position. The believer retains a faith in God because the thought of confronting essential spectres without the promise of an afterlife is unfathomable, and the atheist cannot imagine taking comfort in an afterlife facilitated by the same terrible God that produced suffering from which the religious hope to be liberated. In “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” Meillassoux expands on the claims in “Spectral Dilemma,” offering three theses that link his proclamation of the Godto-come to the rest of his philosophical project. The first two theses, “speculation is possible only insofar as it is non-metaphysical” and “irreligion is possible only by being speculative,” are linked to the central aim of After Finitude:  “to revive the idea of a speculative yet non-metaphysical philosophy.”26 The process of beginning to think the absolute instead of resigning to the deadlock of correlationism begins with a reevaluation of one of the central premises of metaphysics: “our inability to prove why there is something rather than nothing . . . is not the mark of our ignorance of the true reason for things, but an indication of our ability to come to know that there are, effectively no reasons for anything.”27 His insistence that “radical contingency is the very truth of all things” counters the power that the principle of sufficient reason has held over metaphysical speculation.28 Meillassoux’s call for new forms of irreligion is distinct from atheism and other previous attempts at secularization of the absolute, which, in their insistence on primacy of the principle of reason, only ends up defending the impossibility of definitively proving the nonexistence of God. This distinction is crucial to his third thesis:  “immortality and access to the divine, are the possible conditions of immanence—thinkable and livable—arising only from irreligion.”29 The apparently opposed positions of the spectral dilemma are actually united through their insistence on philosophical necessity. A commitment to a philosophy of immanence grounded in the necessity of radical contingency is the only way to “untie the atheistreligious knot between God and necessity (God must either exist or not) in order to reconnect him with the virtual (God can exist).”30 The existence of the virtual God is merely one possibility among others, and is itself contingent, or “eternally eventual.”31 If contingency is truly necessary, then anything is possible, including an event that would bring about an entirely new God that is innocent of the history of human suffering.

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This God could be capable of providing justice for the dead, and, via the hope of its eternal possibility, serve as a source of subjective transformation for the living. The resolution of the spectral dilemma, then, begins with a wholesale revision of assumptions governing causation and the stability of natural laws and looks toward the opposite of finitude—immortality. In the first excerpt included in the English translation of selected fragments from The Divine Inexistence, Meillassoux argues that the starting point for a rethinking of causality and the development of life is “an irreligious notion of the origin of pure novelty,” which he calls “advent ex nihilo.”32 He mobilizes this concept to critique prevailing materialist approaches to the origin of life and thought, which rely on the presence of a vital potential within matter that necessarily awakens as a result of its organization or environmental interactions. Instead, Meillassoux insists on the utter lifelessness of matter itself.33 He argues that the emergence of life is not caused by matter’s inherent potential but, instead, is the effect of radical contingency, an event utterly without cause, an advent “accompanied by the simultaneous advent of material configurations that rupture with the physical laws in the midst of which they emerge.”34 What he calls the order, or World, of life arises without reason from the previous World of matter, a qualitative leap that results from the absolute contingency of physical laws and establishes a new set of laws through its appearance. Likewise, the World of thought emerged as an advent in the previous World of life. The resolution of the spectral dilemma lies in the possibility of a fourth advent, “the World of justice, a World where humans acquire immortality, the sole life worthy of their condition.”35 The World of justice is not an afterlife as conventionally conceived. As an alternative to a heaven that exists in a transcendent relation to the present world or a period of millennium that will take place after the present world’s end, Meillassoux conceives of the World of justice as the product of an advent that ruptures present physical laws completely, inaugurating an entirely new, and as yet inconceivable, set of laws. He conceives of the World of justice as an absolute novelty; it will surpass this World, the World of thought, just as the World of life once surpassed the World of matter. The “rebirth of bodies” that he proposes, then, is not a strange detour into the Book of Revelation, but an event that is entirely consistent with radical contingency through a conception of advent as distinct from the traditional duality of chance and finality, a possibility “that would be no more astonishing than these latter advents that have in fact taken place.”36 The “recommencement of the human” is the only way to make “universal justice possible, by erasing even the injustice of shattered lives” without recourse to the transcendence that grounds both the atheist and religious terms of the spectral dilemma.37 Meillassoux’s claim that the possibility of obtaining justice for essential spectres involves the resurrection of the dead in reconstituted bodies, startling as it is in the context of the usual concerns of speculative realism, would have fit readily into the religious discourse of eighteenth-century Britain.38 In one striking example, Joseph Priestley, a scientist and Dissenter associated with Blake through the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, issued a series of treatises that attempt to reconcile his materialist philosophy with Biblical prophecy. For Priestley, the duality of matter and spirit must be collapsed in order to support a rational reading of Christianity. In his “Introductory

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Essays” to Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind (1775), Priestley seeks to assure those who would be opposed on religious grounds to the assertion “so much of the business of thinking should be made to depend upon mere matter” with a version of materialism that would “not at all alarm those who found all their hopes of a future existence on the Christian doctrine of a resurrection from the dead.”39 This claim sets the stage for Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), in which Priestley authors a materialist eschatology that proceeds through a meticulous reading of the Scripture as evidence. In the Disquisitions, the possibility of an afterlife is not precluded by, but rather depends upon, the resurrection of the material body independent of a superadded immaterial spirit. Priestley quickly published The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity (1777) as an appendix to Disquisitions to clarify his argument as a commitment to a philosophical necessity: natural laws, as the product of a benevolent God, tend toward perfection and support a progressive view of politics.40 Priestley and Meillassoux both make claims about the afterlife in the interest of developing a thesis about causality; however, Priestley’s system exemplifies the traditional materialism that Meillassoux critiques in The Divine Inexistence. Priestley’s insistence on matter as living potential is derived from an impulse to accommodate divinity to the existing laws of the natural world, leading to a vision of the afterlife that would horrify Meillassoux’s atheist. An afterlife necessitated by a God that included the suffering and incomprehensible death associated with essential spectres as part of a so-called benevolent plan from the beginning cannot provide justice for the dead. Blake’s prophecies, likewise, are consistently occupied with dismantling the doctrine of necessity assumed in Enlightenment philosophy. His vehement rejection of deism and “Natural Religion” centers on a critique of the insistence on empiricism and adherence to the principle of reason that dominated Enlightenment discussions of religion. The letter that precedes the third book of Jerusalem, “To the Deists,” not only casts them as “Enemies of Christianity” and “Enemies of the Human Race & of Universal Nature” but also names deism as the agent of the historical and contemporary violence attributed to religion: “All the Destruction therefore, in Christian Europe has arisen from Deism, which is Natural Religion” (E 200–1). In his first two sets of illuminated plates, All Religions Are One and There is No Natural Religion (1788), Blake contrasts the empiricism of Natural Religion with a “Poetic Genius” or “Spirit of Prophecy,” which serves as the source of “the body or outward form of Man” and likewise generates the “form of all things” (E 1). Blake argues that limiting the sphere of knowledge to what can be derived from the senses, or “organs of perception,” will reduce human “desires & perceptions” to the limited realm of “objects of sense.” Likewise, he argues that the “Philosophic & Experimental,” dominated by an adherence to the principle of reason, “would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again” (E 2–3). These limits, felt by the individual as a desire for an infinite he is “incapable of possessing,” leave the human race in a state of perpetual “despair” (E 2). Thinkers such as “Voltaire Rousseau Gibbon Hume,” in their efforts to liberate religion from the tradition of received authority, end up calcifying human potential within the confines of necessity: “Man is Righteous in his Vegetated Spectre: an Opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to Man” (E 200–1). For Blake, the

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anguish of the religious becomes coincident with the anguish of the atheist through the assimilation of Enlightenment discipline into religious discourse. In Jerusalem, Blake dramatizes the despair perpetuated by the atheist and religious interlocutors of the spectral dilemma through his depiction of the patterns of violence and suffering that result from Albion’s fall and ensuing divisions. In the opening of the first book, this fall is precipitated by Albion’s rejection of a call to participate in the “Divine Vision,” dictated to Blake by the “Saviour” himself (4.4, 13). Albion dismisses this vision as a “Phantom of the over heated brain!” attempting to seduce him with the empty promise of transcendence: “shadows of immortality! /Seeking to keep my soul a victim to thy Love” (4. 24–5). Arguing that “By demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith,” Albion vows to “build [his] Laws of Moral Virtue” while “dissembling/ His jealousy before the throne divine, darkening, cold!” (4.31, 34–35). Later, as Albion fully succumbs to the “Sleep of Ulro” (4.1), a worldview dedicated to and constrained by knowable and measurable material existence, he voices the despair at the lack of human agency that arises in the absence of the divine: Oh what is Life & what is Man, O what is Death? Wherefore Are you my Children natives in the Grave to where I go? Or are you born to feed the hungry ravenings of Destruction To be the sport of Accident! to waste in Wrath & Love a weary Life in brooding cares & anxious labours, that prove but chaff. (24.12–16)

Human lives, experiences, and emotions have become simultaneously subject to the random and unfathomable causes of nature and fated to become waste products of the relentless activity of the institutions of modernity. From Albion’s strict materialist perspective, which rejects the absolute as irrational, life appears to be coterminous with perpetual death, as “Man”—or “Life” itself—emerges as Jerusalem’s essential spectre. The impassioned speeches between Los and his Spectre in the first book dramatize the terms of the atheist and religious positions that generate the spectral dilemma. The Spectre, “A horrible Shadow of Death,” first attempts to sway Los from his efforts to regenerate Albion through faith, art, and imagination with the discourse of Enlightenment rationality:  “he sought by other means, To lure Los:  by tears, by arguments of science & by terrors” (7.4–7). He describes the atrocities committed in the name of faith, the “webs of war & of/ Religion” that consume the Sons and Daughters of Albion in the ongoing efforts to “separate a Law of Sin, to punish thee in thy members” (7.44–50). Later on, as Los compels the Spectre to labor with him, the Spectre gives voice to his despair: I said: ‘now is my grief at worst: incapable of being Surpassed’: but every moment it accumulates more & more It continues accumulating to eternity; the joys of God advance For he is Righteous: he is not a being of Pity & Compassion He cannot feel Distress: he feeds on Sacrifice & Offering:

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Delighting in cries & tears & clothed in holiness & solitude. But my griefs advance also, for ever & ever without end. O that I could cease to be! Despair! I am Despair! Created to be the great example of horror & agony! Also my Prayer is vain. I called for compassion: compassion mockd. Mercy & pity threw the grave stone over me & with lead And iron, bound it over me for ever: Life lives on my Consuming: & the Almighty hath made me his Contrary to be all evil, all reversed & for ever dead: knowing And seeing life, yet living not: how can I then behold And not tremble; how can I be beheld & not abhorrd? (10.44–59)

The Spectre’s lament proceeds on the terms of Meillassoux’s atheist, who asks the believer:  “To live under the reign of such a perverse being, who corrupts the most noble words—love, justice—with his odious practices: isn’t this a good definition of hell?”41 A God that “feeds on Sacrifice & Offering,” who not only allows terrible deaths but also revels in the “cries & tears” of his subjects and makes a mockery of “Pity & Compassion” is incapable of granting justice for the dead. William Paley’s reading of Jerusalem argues that the Spectre of Albion “takes the ideological form of the worship of authoritarian Reason,” whereas the Spectre of Los “manifests itself as an obsession with a God who damns His subject creatures irrevocably and without reason.”42 Both of these perspectives are aspects of Blake’s vehement rejection of deism and natural religion. The Spectre of Los, who has become “Despair,” serves as an example of a believer who perceives human life as “Contrary” to the “Almighty.” This form of belief eats away at the currently living as it corrupts the possibility of a truly redemptive afterlife, manifesting itself as a deeply conflicted subject who moves through the world “all reversed & for ever dead: knowing and seeing life, yet living not.” Blake’s refusal to assimilate Enlightenment discourse into religious prophecy also informs the narrative strategy of his illuminated books, which refuse to conform to the necessitarian vision of apocalypse and millennium visible in thinkers like Priestley. Jerusalem does not adhere to the conventions of eschatological narratives, which assume the teleological progression of providential history. In Jersualem, Blake repeatedly pits the labor of Los and his Spectre against institutions founded by empiricism and abstract reason: They build a stupendous Building on the Plain of Salisbury; with chains Of rocks round London Stone: of Reasonings: of unhewn Demonstrations In labyrinthine arches (Mighty Urizen the Architect) thro which The Heavens might revolve & Eternity be bound in their chain. Labour unparallelld! a wondrous rocky World of cruel destiny Rocks piled on rocks reaching the stars; stretching from pole to pole. The Building is Natural Religion & its Altars Natural Morality A building of eternal death: whose proportions are eternal despair (66.1–9)

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Here, Blake aligns “Natural Religion” and “Natural Morality” with “eternal despair,” critiquing deism in the same terms that Meillassoux’s atheist uses to counter the religious position of the spectral dilemma. The deist’s altar is built on “Reasonings,” “Demonstrations,” and the unavoidability of human suffering; the deist God rules over a “wondrous rocky World of cruel destiny” and promises only “eternal death.” Los’s efforts to dismantle and interrupt the construction of institutions that support the worship of this terrible God are repeatedly unsuccessful; over and over again in Jerusalem, the well-intentioned activity of the revolutionary artist is assimilated repeatedly into the discourse of Enlightenment as “at the sight of the Victim, & at sight of those who are smitten, / All who see become what they behold” (66.35–6). Throughout Jerusalem, Blake casts deism as an insidious and communicable disease. This particular passage is one of many that recur throughout Chapters 2 and 3, as Blake stages scenes that repeat this process, in which the despair perpetuated by “Natural Religion” and “Natural Morality” spread, and individuals “Stricken with Albion’s disease . . . become what they behold” (39.33). The events of Jerusalem frustrate the narrative progression of an eschatological narrative as they “repeat the same dull round” of the spectral dilemma. Meillassoux contends that the way to break free of the cycle of “eternal despair” perpetuated by the religious and atheist positions is through a “factial ontology” that follows from the concept of advent ex nihilo. In the available fragments of The Divine Inexistence, he constructs an argument to support what he calls a “divine ethics” that “rests on the real possibility of immortality.”43 His insistence that this immortal life must involve the rebirth of the human follows directly from his conception of advent. If the fourth World of justice were to appear—and its appearance is both entirely possible and never a certainty—it would require a rupture with the current World of thought as profound as that between the earlier Worlds of matter and life. If humans are able to access the absolute through their grasp of radical contingency, then they cannot be surpassed by anything except an all-powerful God. This being, brought into existence through the radical leap of an advent, would accompany a completely new set of physical laws, eliminating the most significant injustice that affects the human in the present: death. Meillassoux writes, What advent could produce something other than a variant of former Worlds (some new law of matter, new living species, or new creation of thought) since no being can be incommensurable with humans in the same manner as humans are with life or life with matter? The response follows naturally from this question: namely, the sole possible novelty surpassing humans just as humans surpass life would be the recommencement of the human. That is why the fourth World ought to be called the World of justice: for it is only the World of the rebirth of humans that makes universal justice possible, by erasing even the injustice of shattered lives.44

How, then, does a conception of the fourth World translate into an ethics for the present? According to Meillassoux, the aim of his project is to “make the fourth world a possibility which can enhance, in our own world, the subjectivity of human beings

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living in our day by profoundly transforming the private lives of those who take seriously such a hypothesis.”45 This transformation awaits those who actively desire it: “If the fourth world can have an effect upon present existence, it can do so only in the case of an eschatological subject, moved by the desire for universal justice. I call such a subject a vectorial subject—that is to say one magnetically attracted by the vector of the emancipation to come.”46 It is precisely through a realization of the gap between the laws of the World of Justice and the laws of the present that the ethical possibilities of advent begin to come into view. Blake’s vision of the afterlife appears as the advent of an entirely new World in the Meillassouxian sense, which appears suddenly, at the moment “Time was finished,” driven by a vibrant conversation between the previously fallen aspects of Albion: And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and of Intellect, Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine Of Human Imagination, throughout all the Three Regions immense Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age, & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying According to the subject of discourse & every World & every Character Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or Opakeness of Nervous fibres. Such was the variation of Time & Space Which vary according as the Organs of Perceptions vary & they walked To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen And seeing: according to fitness & order. (98.28–40).

Blake’s vision heralds the rebirth of human life, but also of the particulars of previous worlds of thought, life and matter: “All Human Forms identified even Tree Metal Earth & Stone.” The specific literary, scientific, and philosophical figures that once warred with one another in an unceasing cycle of violence, including “Bacon & Newton & Locke, & Milton & Shakspear & Chaucer,” reappear as participants alongside the rest of Albion’s citizens in a vibrant and perpetual conversation (98.9). The laws of the current world no longer apply as Blake exposes their contingency through a series of paradoxical juxtapositions. “Time & Space” themselves “vary according as the Organs of Perceptions vary,” as humanity (or the recommencement of humanity) is no longer constrained by the ratio of Reason. Death no longer serves as the greatest injustice or a source of despair, as the “all tremendous unfathomable NonEns / Of Death” itself appears in continual “regenerations terrific.” Using Meillassoux’s terms to read Blake’s prophetic rhetoric reveals that the prophet of the World of Justice is not a cause of the advent of the new world or a sign of its inevitable arrival, but an effect of its eternal possibility. It is possible to read the labors of Los as the activity of what Meillassoux calls a “vectorial subject.” In first book of Jerusalem, Los first assumes the stance of a prophet in his struggle with the Spectre

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to regenerate Albion, prophesying a future state in which Albion will be united through pity: Comfort thyself in my strength the time will arrive, When all Albion’s injuries shall cease, and when we shall Embrace him tenfold bright, rising from his tomb in immortality. They have divided themselves by Wrath, they must be united by Pity: let us therefore take example & warning O my Spectre, O that I could abstain from wrath! O that the Lamb Of God would look upon me and pity me in my fury. In anguish of regeneration! in terrors of self annihilation: Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn in sunder, And the Religion of Generation which was meant for the destruction Of Jerusalem, become her covering, till the time of the End (7.54–64).

In this protracted moment, Los projects a unified Albion into a nonspecific future time and prophesies an End. In his state of separation and fury, he casts the process of “regeneration” and “self-annihilation” in terms of “anguish” and “terror.” With the allusion to a time that “will arrive,” and the ambiguous placement of that time with the repetition of “shall,” Los locates the regeneration of Albion in an uncertain point in the future, suspending time while simultaneously calling attention to the moment of utterance. This uncertainty and temporal disruption serve as incitements to action. Jerusalem answers the questions that it poses about the agency of individuals within systems through its constant refusal to follow a predetermined narrative trajectory; through a series of prophetic moments, Blake explores the means through which the hope for the afterlife can transform those that await it. The final plates of Jerusalem break the cycle of the spectral dilemma with Blake’s idiosyncratic version of the incarnation: Then Jesus appeared standing by Albion as the Good Shepherd By the lost Sheep that he hath found & Albion knew that it Was the Lord the Universal Humanity, & Albion saw his Form A Man, & they conversed as Man with Man, in Ages of Eternity And the Divine Appearance was the likeness & similitude of Los. (96.3–7)

By envisioning the Divine Appearance as a material transformation of its prophet Blake refuses the intervention of the transcendent (and terrible) God of the deists. Los appears as the sign of the possibility of the Divine Appearance rather than the agent of his transfiguration. In Jerusalem’s initial apocalyptic moment, Los declared that those divided “must be united by /Pity,” asserting that “Pity must join together those whom wrath has torn in sunder” (7.57–62). The “pity” that Los calls for is realized in the final plates of the fourth chapter of Jerusalem through the incarnation, as Jesus, “the Divine Appearance,” in “the likeness & similitude of Los,” addresses Albion:

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Wouldest thou love one who never died For thee or ever die for one who had not died for thee And if God dieth not for Man & giveth not himself Eternally for Man Man could not exist. for Man is Love: As God is Love: every kindness to another is a little Death In the Divine Image nor can Man exist but by Brotherhood (96.23–8).

The society that emerges in Jerusalem is built on conversation, as “The Four Faces of Humanity,” formerly separated, converse “together in Visionary forms dramatic” and commune “In the Forgiveness of Sins according to the Covenant of Jehovah” (98.12–46). The “pity” that moves it, “every kindness” figured as “a little Death,” works through moments of self-annihilation, no longer figured as “terror” and “anguish.” Instead, acts of mutual forgiveness, recognition of the other, and intellectual exchanges dissolve boundaries between individuals and constitute moments of benevolent selfannihilation that regenerate and transform. The community that emerges from these iterative acts of love, pity, forgiveness, and death is instantiated through an ongoing, dynamic process. Blake’s speculative enthusiasm encourages an affective stance that operates through openness to and reciprocal exchange with the other in order to embrace radical contingency. In “After the Covenant:  Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence,” David Collings asks scholars of British romanticism to consider the ramifications of the narratives of secularization that have justified the field within the canon of literary studies and the university. These secular narratives, which ground their explanations of humanity in materiality to secure their legitimacy are actually, like modernity, founded on a “gesture of negation, on whose (anti)basis it can build not only its idea of material process but also its notions of historical aimlessness (shaped by the absence of a telos), scientific investigation (of a reality stripped of ontological import), the delimitation of any ‘culture,’ the philosophical critique of metaphysics, and the literary supersession of the religious.”47 Collings proposes a challenge that invites not only romanticists but also practitioners of the humanities and the arts more generally, to embrace the vulnerability of human subjectivity in a universe lacking the certainty of a divine covenant rather than proceeding with “modernity’s intricate practices of self-construction.”48 For Collings, “The challenge is not to perfect a new guarantee but to reconstruct something like symbolic exchange itself as a mode of subtle relation between parties neither of which can finally master the other, neither of which is ultimately final or sovereign.”49 Meillassoux defines his solution to the spectral dilemma as “speculative” in contrast to both the religious and the atheist perspectives as a form of hope that breaks through the despair of modernity, which “aims at the liberation of the power of action present in the subject.”50 In Jerusalem, individuals can initiate action, but can only effect change through acts of exchange between human beings, through what Collings calls “an incalculable reciprocity, a radically vulnerable telos that is given to and received from the other.”51 Both Blake and Meillassoux, though ostensibly working through a religious framework (eschatology/eschaology), establish

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distinct models of subjectivity that both eschew covenantal guarantee and challenge the gesture of negation on which modernity is founded. At the conclusion of the currently available fragments of The Divine Inexistence, Meillassoux articulates the four links that humans can establish with God, associating each with an affective state. The first, the atheist position, leads to “sadness, tepidity, cynicism, and the disparagement of what makes us human,” or, as he characterizes it in his discussion of the spectral dilemma, “despair.”52 The counterpart to atheism, believing in the existence of a transcendent God, leads to “fanaticism, flight from the world, the confusion of sanctity and mysticism and of God as love and God as power.”53 He characterizes the third position as a monstrous hybrid of the atheist and religious positions. “Not believing in God because he exists” takes the form of a “demoniacal revolt in the fact of all the disasters of existence,” which draws its power from “indifference” and “apathy” and results in “cynicism, sarcasm toward every aspiration, hatred of self.”54 The fourth position, “believing in God because he does not exist,” is the only one to offer an “immanent form of hope.”55 This not-yetexistent God and the fourth World of justice reinforce Meillassoux’s philosophical insistence on the necessity of contingency. To truly redeem the lives of those who are already passed requires the resurrection of the dead not only to avoid a sacrificial politics that subordinates the dead to the living, but also because it is philosophically consistent with the operation of advent ex nihilo. The rebirth he proposes is not necessary, but possible, “and not only is rebirth possible; it cannot be deemed either probable or improbable.”56 In a 2010 interview with Graham Harman, Meillassoux clarifies the political significance of what Harman calls “the strange but fascinating concept of a virtual God.”57 Meillassoux claims that a faith in this “eternal possible” separates radical politics from its own messianic impulses, frees individuals from the paralyzing despair of the spectral dilemma, and allows for more productive investment of “energy in an egalitarian politics that has become conscious of its limits.”58 He argues that human beings can “expel the eschatological desire from politics only by allowing this desire to be unfolded openly in another sphere of existence.”59 For Meillassoux and Blake, affective transformation is a key component of revolutionary radicalism. Blake makes an impassioned case for the centrality of artistic creativity and intellectual dialogue—the labor of the humanities—to the revolutionary process. Blake’s “Poetic Genius,” coincident with the “Spirit of Prophecy,” can be read as the expression of the eternal hope of Meillassoux’s vectorial subject, which refuses to accept the structures of reason that support the self-enclosed, self-generating autonomous subject of modernity without succumbing to the gesture of negation that tends to underwrite materialist explanations of reality and history. To combat the “Mighty Polypus” of modernity that Blake depicts in Jerusalem, every individual is called upon to be a prophet of the Divine Appearance, to combat the myriad temptations to fall into “despair,” to avoid becoming ensnared, rooted, and fixed in unproductive habits of thought and feeling, whether they are built and maintained through systems of labor, politics, religion, or nature itself.

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Notes 1 For example, Saree Makdisi makes a case for what he calls Blake’s “ontological antinomianism.” He reads Blake’s illuminated books as “constituting a new kind of body, and anticipating a new kind of being, one no longer subject to the law, and especially to the laws of necessity and of regulation.” William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 262. Christopher M. Bundock observes that Blake’s prophetic writing, through its repeated failures to fulfill the expectation of eschatological narrative, “dilates the sense of actual life’s impossibility: the realities of limitation, depression, and failure” in order to “reformulate our most basic expectations about time, probability and impossibility.” “Auguries of Experience: Impossible History and Infernal Redemption” in Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 167. 2 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London; New York: Continuum, 2008), 128. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Greg Ellermann argues that “speculative realism helps us unearth a less-familiar vein of romantic nature philosophy—according to which nature can be conceptualized without being inevitably annexed to notions of will, thought, or vitality.” “Speculative Romanticism,” SubStance 44, no. 1 (2015): 156. Likewise, Anne McCarthy, in a reading of Percy Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” points out that Shelley anticipates what Meillassoux calls the “great outdoors, the absolute outside of pre-critical thinkers” in a poem that dramatizes “the catastrophic realization of his own vulnerability and a subject-position that is characterized first and foremost as a relation to contingency.” “The Aesthetics of Contingency in the Shelleyan ‘Universe of Things,’ or ‘Mont Blanc,’ without Mont Blanc,” Studies in Romanticism 54, no. 3 (2015): 357. Evan Gottlieb makes a forceful case that the relevance of British romanticism and speculative realism to each other (and their mutual relevance to the concerns of the present) is rooted in their shared commitment to “exploring ontological questions of the first order.” Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 7. 5 Quentin Meillassoux, “Appendix: Excerpts from L’inexistence divine,” trans. Graham Harman, in Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 189. 6 Quentin Meillassoux, “The Immanence of the World Beyond,” in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition, and Universalism, ed. Connor Cunningham and Peter Candler (London: SCM Press), 463. 7 All references to Blake’s poetry and prose refer either to plate and line number or “E” followed by the page number according to William Blake, The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman and Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1982). 8 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 463. 9 Quentin Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” Collapse IV (2008): 262. 10 Ibid., 261. 11 Ibid., 262. 12 Ibid.

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13 Ibid., 266. 14 Ibid., 265. 15 Peter Gratton includes a discussion comparing Meillassoux’s formulation of “essential mourning” to Derrida’s work on mourning. He locates the key difference in Derrida’s “Heideggerian conception that our lives are lived in our being-towards-death,” versus Meillassoux’s refusal to choose “for or against God’s existence, as the theists and atheists do, but follow the proposition that ‘God does not yet exist.” Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloosmbury, 2014), 79–81. 16 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 263. 17 Gratton, Speculative Realism, 65. 18 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 115. 19 Gerald E. Bentley (ed.), Blake Records (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), 309–312. 20 John Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25, 29. 21 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1. 22 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 263. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 265. 26 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 444–5. 27 Ibid., 446. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 445. 30 Ibid., 449. 31 Ibid., 460. 32 Meillassoux, “Appendix,” 179. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 183. 35 Ibid., 189. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 190. 38 Ibid., 187–93. 39 Joseph Priestley, “Introductory Essays to Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas,” in The Theological and Miscellaneous Works &C. Of Joseph Priestley, Ll.D F.R.S. &C. (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1972), 181. 40 Joseph Priestley, Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2005); and The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated: Being an Appendix to the Disquisitions Relating to Matter and Spirit. to Which Added an Answer Theory of the Mind (London: J. Johnson, 1977). 41 Meillassoux, “Spectral Dilemma,” 264–5. 42 Morton D. Paley, The Continuing City: William Blake’s Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 245. 43 Meillassoux, Divine Inexistence, 188. 44 Ibid., 190. 45 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 463–4. 46 Ibid.

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Speculative enthusiasm 47 David Collings, “After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 350. 48 Ibid., 346. 49 Ibid., 359. 50 Meillassoux, “Immanence,” 464–5. 51 Collings, “After the Covenant,” 359. 52 Meillassoux, Divine Inexistence, 237. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid., 238. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 189. 57 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, 162. 58 Meillassoux, “Appendix,” 162. 59 Ibid.

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Surfing the crimson wave: Romantic new materialisms and speculative feminisms Kate Singer

In the current speculative materialist debate about subjects and objects, romantic women writers might well have something significant to say, if only because their own struggles in becoming speaking subjects have for so long—now and in their own time—been seen as natural and unnatural objects themselves. Recent scholarship has lauded the expressly feminine subjectivities of poets such as Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson, and Anna Letitia Barbauld, and has likewise been attentive to their representations of an empirical body cultured through Enlightenment discourses of taste and sensibility, their understanding of the sciences of geology, botany, and medicine, and their eloquent resistance to an array of gendered ideologies.1 Women writers, however, may make their most valiant objections to an Enlightenment that has left them behind when they shirk subjectivity altogether, when they describe nature as a series of encounters between materiality and humanbound poetic discourse. Their attention to the nonhuman world reveals them to be already entangled with it, without their romantic subjectivities, and sometimes even in spite of poets’ own tendencies to represent nature for their own ends. Our own close regard for nightingales, waves, light, wind, bubbles, and the moon in romantic writing can help us to complicate the debates within the so-called “speculative turn” about the ethical withdrawal of objects from humans, particularly regarding feminism, subjectivity, and the potential actions of politicized subjects and objects. This essay suggests how humans, bodies, and objects exist in relation to one another without simply privileging the human. Women’s things dissolve the separateness of human subjectivity, particularly the exceptionalism of the feminine subject, by incorporating them as a body among bodies, a thing among things. What is more, romantic writers reveal both the isolation of the human subject and withdrawn objects to be forms of egocentric masculinity. While I  concentrate on Smith and Barbauld to make these claims, we can see that Robinson, Wollstonecraft, and even Wordsworth, when they think through gendered subjects and objects, end up thinking beyond bodies and things to more nebulous materialities that undo gendered subjects and discrete objects all at once.2

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In contrast to philosophers who tend to emphasize ontologies of the real over and against socially constructed discourses and representational practices that distance us from that real, romantic poets tend more toward something like Jane Bennett’s notions of assemblages of things that are both matter and energy, tied together through “impersonal affect,” the Lucretian and Spinozan shared threads of atomic or affecting materiality.3 Yet, unlike Bennett’s ontology, which gives literary studies short shrift in its attempts to think about how allegedly “human” language would irrevocably anthropomorphize its descriptions of nature and the world outside the human psyche, poets pointedly include language in the mix of human and nonhuman matter.4 In so doing, they help us to put Bennett’s assemblages into conversation with Karen Barad’s attention to the entanglements of language and materiality.5 Such an opportunity is compelling for feminist new materialists and romantic scholars alike, as Bennett’s and Barad’s theories still have not been mingled together as they might be. It is romantic poets—particularly women poets most interested in the mobility of gendered bodies and in philosophical thinking about dynamic forms of language and materiality— who give us the startling opportunity to do so. They ask some of the most prescient questions facing any nonanthropocentric theory: how are materialities dynamic? How do these materialities intertwine with language that is doubly human and nonhuman? How does materiality reveal problems with philosophies of discrete objects that replicate masculinist ideologies? And perhaps most importantly, how do materialities provoke ontological change: how does it start and what does change look like? As poets raise these questions, they show us not only how language’s patterns actively shape materiality but also how new material forms might, even more imperatively, erupt new tropes that portend poetry as a testing ground for other ways of being and becoming. In this sense, romantic poets move beyond even Bennett and Barad because they show how change does not simply result from additive assemblages or differential cuts but from self-created shape-shifting that inaugurates transfiguring revolution.

“What to say when you see me”: Prosopopoeia’s moony assemblages and apparatuses Romantic poets’ complicated use of prosopopoeia and apostrophe, two tropes that, since Paul de Man, have become representative of romantic poetry and the lyric more generally, alters the grounds of our assumptions about how feminine subjects became human by grasping at this vocative agency. Rather than mimicking the Enlightenment subject positions of either rational man or the man of feeling, romantic writers stage a confrontation between human subjects and nonhuman things such as the moon in order to reconfigure the status of both. Women poets, however, do not easily reject those subject positions that eighteenth-century women novelists, as well as philosophers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Wollstonecraft, had so long fought to obtain. Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets (1784–97) and Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796)—two volumes written in conversation—both appear to construct speakers who

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struggle with the desire to heighten their subjective positions with a poetic agency that only seems to grant the moon and the sea anthropomorphic status. In both Smith’s “To the Moon” and Robinson’s “Address to the Moon,” the distressed speakers cannot help but ask for the comfort of the “fair planet.” These acts of imagination might at first appear to transmute nonhuman persistence into mental respite, a brazen if not banal anthropocentric use of the moon to adumbrate the tides of sensibility within and without the speaker. Yet, as I hope to show, the impossible inverse occurs: the materiality of the nonhuman infects and affects the speaker’s own body, such that the speaker, her environment, and the language of nature together become tied in a confederation of things that share and exchange a series of shifting materialities, including human breath and voice, light, wind, and gravitational force. Poets arrive at the primacy of things and the natural world only after an intense, poetic negotiation of relations between the human and nonhuman. More resolutely, Robinson and Smith reveal how modes of address do not animate the nonhuman at the cost of the impairing human subject and her colonizing thought. Their lines serve as a corrective to classic arguments about apostrophe and prosopopoeia that understand figures of address to personify and enliven their objects. Rather, tropes of address, on my reading, become a transformative means of bringing into being new human–nonhuman alliances and assemblages that radically sidestep the binaries of life and death, lyrical voice and silence. Their mytho-poetics bend classical rhetoric into a myth-making venture, where all humans are already fictive characters created by their nonhuman terms of address. “To the Moon,” the fourth sonnet in Smith’s collection, engages a bifurcating technique by first addressing and personifying the moon as a fellow subject, but then turning in the last eight lines to a different conception of the moon that undoes, or at the very least questions, Smith’s compulsive anthropomorphism. The poem begins with a direct address:  “QUEEN of the silver bow!” immediately characterizing the moon as Diana, that virginal, protective, feminine mytho-poetic force (1).6 At first such personification prompts us to read the lunar rock as an anthropomorphic analogue for the idealized woman who, unlike the speaker, has great power over herself and over nature. The speaker arguably attempts to understand and categorize nature as something illuminated by subjective, cultural categories that, as object-oriented ontologists tell us, falsely relate everything in the real world back to human subjectivity and its knowledge systems. Yet, the poem’s supermoon effects a gravitational pull that reverses the weight of the lyric’s seemingly anthropomorphic animation. Whatever we might want to say about Smith’s invocation of Greek myth and the classical world’s personification of scientific forces, this humanistic shout out converts the moon into an object that does not idly listen to the melancholy speaker but affects her in return. The silver bow not only represents the material world in a state of potentiality but also marks a medium of technology that will enable the moon to move and communicate itself, through arrows of light. Smith is dancing on a very thin line here when she describes how the moon’s light both figuratively and literally affects the speaker:

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by thy pale beam, Alone and pensive, I delight to stray And watch thy shadow trembling in the stream, Or mark the floating clouds that cross thy way, And while I gaze, thy mild and placid light Sheds a soft calm upon my troubled breast. (1–6)

While the metaphor of the moon as “Queen” might tempt us to read this description as part of an extended metaphor for maternal soothing or even female aristocratic patronage such as that Smith received from the Duchess of Devonshire, in fact the description registers more profound material transactions between two moving objects, both subjected to the force of movements that express their very natures.7 The speaker—in definitive and simple monosyllabic verbs—strays, watches, marks, and gazes, until finally the moon sheds the light upon her. Smith’s speaker is no Swiftian gullible traveler, marking observations with the ideology of empirical truth; her own embodied motion and affective attention give up affect to the natural world, as it emits its material energy to her. The moon’s “mild and placid light” tempers the speaker’s “troubled breast” with “a soft calm,” as if the light itself, its calm vibrations, alters the speaker’s own body. Such an affect, akin to Spinoza’s formulation of one body affecting and moving another, has already been anticipated by the speaker’s watching, marking, or gazing at the stream, clouds, and light. Thus the affective activity and response that seems to be dialogic—the speaker watches nature, that in turn aids her emotional state—is actually nearly simultaneous:  “And while” she gazes the moon is already acting upon her. The poem might seem to enliven the “suspended animation” that Barbara Johnson famously claimed is endemic to lyrical address, whether through the “self eternal possessed by the other” or the address that attempts to make the poem’s object human (32–34). Yet, the poem’s first six lines actually demonstrate an entwining of speaker and object that the final eight lines unravel. And oft I think—fair planet of the night, That in thy orb, the wretched must have rest: The suffers of the earth perhaps may go, Released by death—to thy benignant sphere; And the sad children of Despair and Woe Forget, in thee, their cup of sorrow here. (8–12)

Once the phrase “oft I think” disrupts the gentle interplay between the speaker’s gaze and the moon’s light, the positing of the shared space of materiality becomes conditional upon the death of the sufferers and the children. The speaker, too, in her final vocative couplet places herself in eternal transit between this world and that of the moon: “Oh! That I  soon may reach thy world serene, / Poor wearied pilgrim—in this toiling scene” (13–14). The speaker longs to put herself to death, if only through a figural transcendence to a more heavenly scene, in a reversal of prosopopoeia’s animating

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force. This reversal, however, signals more than the impossibility or limits of this trope’s powers of vitality and its anthropomorphism. The sighing “Oh” represents neither the vocative “O” that calls the moon into a pure presence nor the “Oh” of the speaker’s pure expression of subjectivity that would, in the end, countermand the moon’s power by reminding us that the speaker, after all, continues to survive and to feel more strongly than the moon ever could. The speaker is not simply de-animated nor even put to rest with a lyrical nap; if we pay closer attention to Smith’s language, which undercuts such vocatives, the speaker becomes one more material thing conversant with another. In an ironic twist, it is the figure of sight and light, so often the trope of rationality and the white-lighted supremacy of the Enlightenment subject, that offers a ubiquitous form of address, a relationality that transverses humans and nonhumans. Not an instance of anthropomorphic prosopopoeia, the moon is neither animated nor anthropomorphized so much as located as a series of dynamic material movements:  “queen of the silver bow”; “fair planet of the night”; “thy benignant sphere”; “thy world serene.”8 The moon is a silver bow (an arched sliver of light with the potential for casting itself upon others), a planet (not a transcendent heaven but an astrological body), a sphere that mildly rather than harmfully affects others, and, finally, another world, a calm one. Meanwhile the speaker herself becomes a “poor wearied pilgrim—in this toiling scene”—a body in transit amid bodies overtaxed by movement—working, tramping, and struggling. Here we have two bodies in movement—one gently without rough affect, the other too busy, looking to the moon as a model for slow and calm movements (and rests).9 What begins as a material exchange becomes a relation of two bodies that move each other even as they reveal their differential motions within a material, affective ecosystem. Rather than replaying the binaries of subject and object, life and death, human and nonhuman, Smith’s poem moves us toward what Bennett in Vibrant Matter describes as the material relations among human and nonhuman subjects. Bennett—and new materialists more broadly—intervenes into speculative realist and object-oriented ontologies by insisting, unlike Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, that objects are not the basic ontological unit, and they do not primarily exist alone, resistant to the world that tries to know them. Instead, humans and nonhumans need to be seen in a larger assemblage of materials and objects. As Bennett argues, anthropomorphism in small doses “can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations.”10 Thus we might say that the glimmers of personification (“Queen,” “fair,” “benignant”) in Smith’s descriptions of the moon are swept away and engulfed in the moon’s material motions as well as her own, which put moon and speaker on similar terrain of conversant material exchange. Similarly, Smith’s sonnet twelve, “Written on the Seashore,” ends when the speaker posits herself as a shipwreck’d mariner whose “feeble cries” become more and more faint, “ ‘Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies” (14).11 When Smith’s speakers envision their own death, they do not simply die a hysterical death of sublime woe. Instead, Smith depicts a union between those “cries” and the “tide,” as wind and water unite in a sort of semiotic-material haze. Boundaries between subject and object dissolve

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inside the liminal, choric materiality of the ocean. The speaker enables a purer sort of pilgrimage, a movement that disintegrates the human into a dispersed materiality that can ascend to heaven particle by particle. Smith intensifies her heterogeneous ocean-cliff-wind-human assemblage into what Bennett describes as “living, throbbing confederation” with a “swarm of vitalities at play.”12 Assemblages form a complex body or mode that “maintain[s] the specific relations of ‘movement and rest’ that obtains between its parts.”13 To “form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others” in a confederate body of jointly participating elements.14 Now a unit of sorts, a confederate body, the lunatic and tides are both moved unaccountably by the moon. If this shared materiality provides an alternative form of ontology between speaker and moon, is it nevertheless muted and subverted by the very human description that sets out to evoke it? Critics have tended to consider prosopopoeia, as a figure of thought, ultimately anthropocentric; however, it may invoke a more complicated relationality of human and nonhuman.15 Bennett, in her characteristically elliptical comments about the politics of anthropomorphism, writes, “an anthropocentric element in perception can uncover a whole new world of resonances and resemblances—sounds and sights that echo and bounce far more than would be possible were the universe to have a hierarchical structure. We at first may see only a world in our own image, but what appears next is a swarm of ‘talented’ and vibrant materialities (including the seeing self).”16 While skeptics of Bennett’s philosophy have taken such short asides as a lack of extensive political thinking, such sparing rhetoric may be entirely the point, as it is in Smith’s sonnet. The almost unavoidable personifications give way to more flatly material, nearly scientific descriptions of the moon (“bow,” “planet,” “sphere”), until the speaker ends only with her own affective and physical movement, leaving the vibrancy of the moon, at least in part, to its own devices. Lest I overstate Bennett’s case, Smith, it may be safer to say, reveals some of the undiscovered country of Bennett’s argument that the rest of this essay will seek to explore: namely, how is it that things come into an assemblage, how do they share specific kinds of materiality, what are they, and, perhaps most importantly, how do such assemblages create (or emerge from) both ontological and ethical change? That is, how do they change the nature of our being and our living? Part of answering these questions, however, is returning to Smith’s particular techniques of language and how they create what Bennett calls “resonances and resemblances” between human and nonhuman things. From the very first couplet of “To the Moon,” “by thy pale beam, / Alone and pensive, I delight to stray,” Smith sets up not so much a correlation between subject and object but a resonance of sound and a diffraction of light. Like the bow of light and the pale beam, the speaker strays. These consecutive end words have long vowel sounds (ee and ay) that are similar although not rhyming. Rather than becoming—as in a metaphor—a beam of light, the speaker strays as a beam does. The phrase “Alone and pensive,” which is placed between nonhuman beam and human speaker, acts as a liminal space of descriptive ambiguity, in that it can literally go both ways. A beam can be solo and “absorbed,” another word for pensive, as can the weary traveler.

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In this descriptive practice, words can pertain to both human and thing in transit, and, in fact, entangle them together—the speaker is yet one more solo beam emanating from the silver bow. This subtle poetics suggests a more radical tropic technique, using words to cocreate bodies and things. Rather than simply, loosely tracking “resemblances,” Smith’s prosopopoeia acts as what Barad calls an apparatus, a phenomena shaped by both material and discursive forces, which itself is iteratively reconstituted and reconfigured. Barad’s philosophy, based in theoretical quantum physics, theorizes a new materiality that allows us to get at the double aspect of address, its material-discursive face. And it suggests that in these poems, human and nonhuman are not merely placed in material confederation, as in Bennett’s assemblage where different things—separate but somehow allied through shared material streams and beams—converse and relate. Rather, the speaker’s mode of calling out and being lit up accentuates the prior relations of materiality and poetry that create the speaker and moon as entities in the first place. In this way, prosopopoeia might reveal that in fact all subjects are constructions of address, not only as subjects by other subjects but as objects by objects as well. Barad’s theory of becoming suggests that no entities exist before they are brought into being by an apparatus, a form of measurement composed of both material items, such as the mirrors and lasers physicists use to measure electrons, but also the ways humans use them, the discursive practices that shape those materials and their use. As Barad writes, “apparatuses are not assemblages of humans and nonhumans; they are open-ended practices involving specific intra-actions of humans and nonhumans . . . . That is, human bodies, like all other bodies, are not entities with inherent boundaries and properties but phenomena that acquire specific boundaries and properties through the open-ended dynamics of intra-activity.”17 Unlike the idea of interaction, where individual elements come together to produce interaction, during intra-actions entities are only distinct in a relational and not absolute sense, only in relation to their mutual entanglement. Barad’s focus on science studies—her own apparatus—entails scientific practices (the art of using Hadron colliders, sonograms) and sometimes more quotidian things we do with bodies (touching). I want to suggest that figuration, some forms of it at least, is an apparatus. In the most basic sense, language is a nonhuman thing, words on a screen, breathy tones and vibrations in the air across fiber optic cables, that humans alter—and are altered—through their shifting discursive practices. Rather than reading Smith’s and Robinson’s addresses to the moon, the stars, the sea and earth, as obsessive and neurotic pleas to a contiguous natural source to animate them (or calm their overabundance of sensibility’s excessive animation), instead, it is an apparatus’s iterative intra-actions that draw and redraw the relationality between human and nonhuman. Matter comes into being only as subjects, objects, or things addressed and configured through language—and it does so multiply and iteratively, with all the polysemy language can eventuate. Barad calls this repetition “diffraction,” an attention to minute patterns of difference (both metaphorical and ontological) that attends to “genealogical analyses of how boundaries are produced rather than presuming sets of well-worn binaries in advance.”18 Smith’s spooling description of the moon is one good example, as it becomes “Queen of the silver bow”—archetype and tool; “fair

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planet”—heavenly sphere, beautiful wench of gravitational pull, and astrological body; “benignant sphere”—a zone of human sympathy and an unharmful, dull locale; and finally “world serene”—transcendent heaven and a Newtonian static object. With each recursion, the figure creates moon and speaker anew and also new categories that subtend and reconfigure human and nonhuman, as ever-moving, emerging and itinerant phenomena, as bows, planets, spheres, worlds. Robinson’s addresses to the moon create an apparatus that doubles such intraactions in her sonnets, where nature might almost exist on its own, according to its own terms—if not for the discourse of love that both frames and actuates women’s nature as over-passionate and uncontrollable. In her own “Address to the Moon,” she pictures the “meek Orb” as similarly beaming down its light, stillness, and coolness onto night owls, once again providing a material form of soothing, literally transmitting its slow vibrations to other things (1).19 Robinson’s poem is slightly more radical in refusing the classical gendering of the moon, thereby offering the space of materiality as one that has the possibility to become non-gendered, a materiality that pervades all of nature. Here is the sestet of that poem: O, Night! all nature owns thy temper’d pow’r; Thy solemn pause, thy dews, thy pensive beam; Thy sweet breath whisp’ring the moonlight bow’r, While fainting flow’rets kiss the wand’ring stream! Yet, vain is ev’ry charm! and vain the hour, That brings to madd’ning love, no soothing dream! (24.9–14)

Sappho, perhaps at her most logical here, is able to see lucidly that “all nature owns” these qualities of materiality easily realized at night:  thoughtful, slow, pervasive whispers of light and wind. If the flowers kiss the stream, they do so not out of humanistic love but more literally as things whose flexible bodies can bend and touch others without detriment. For Barad, touching is a quintessential form of intra-action, as touching and being touched occur reciprocally. Yet, like Robinson’s bower of diverse pleasures earlier in the sequence, such mutual materiality eventually cannot compete with “madd’ning love”; calm, shared materiality cannot compete with a mind fixated on soothing dreams. These descriptions work in the reverse of the earlier poems discussed by placing the materiality first and then reforming that materiality with discursive constructions. This reversibility, working both ends by the middle, reveals the double-sided coin of matter and poetry: one works to materialize discourse, the other to reveal the discursive performativity of matter. The constant conjunction of language and matter in Smith’s and Robinson’s poems, as it cuts different types of phenomena again and again, at times seems to posit another notion of materiality, a pure relationality, or perhaps a formless dynamism of matter that occurs before and after subject and object, human and nonhuman are necessarily split from one another. Accordingly, this type of relating offers a materiality without boundaries always about to be cut in different ways: whether it is actuated from an

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affective materiality or virtual primordial stew or whether space, time, and matter only come into existence with each discursive–material entanglement. Barad’s theories suggest that matter itself only comes into being through intra-actions, what she calls the “cut” of an apparatus’s measurement. Whatever the form of relationality, these writers resist both masculine subjectivity and any poetics or philosophy that would privilege the object as the basic unit of materiality. By prima facie entangling matter as a dynamic materiality, romantic writers—Smith and Robinson but also Wollstonecraft, Felicia Hemans, and Barbauld—offer a theory of materiality that, subsequently, allows us to critique current Object-Oriented Ontology’s own isolationist and masculinist theories of matter.

Withdrawn objects, the feminine mystique, and dynamic things Where Smith and Robinson’s pensive beams of lunar prosopopoeia exact a mutual pull on humans and nonhumans, William Wordsworth’s sonnet “The World Is Too Much with Us,” which works from their poems, begins with the problem of anthropocentrism but ends with the anthropomorphic Proteus and with Triton blowing his horn for ontic, epistemological change. His Object-Oriented poetry, as Evan Gottlieb has termed it, reveals an alternative speculative realist position—but one in conversation with the women sonneteers and their new materiality from which Wordsworth took so much.20 The possibility that both positions reside in this poem—and other works by Wollstonecraft, Smith, and Hemans—suggest in fact that figures of address create both a masculine object-oriented ontology predicated on isolationist tumescence and new material fluidity thought to be feminist in its relationality, sometimes at the same time. Rather than understanding this as a classic romantic trait of figural (and deconstructive) ambiguity, it might instead be read as an apparatus that creates ontologies in assemblage with, or as diffractions of, each other. Assemblages, like the bosom with the sea and the salty breeze, amass the potential to activate prosopopoeia’s apparatus. Such an ontological multiplicity intimates a masculine ontology of objects that tries but cannot cede itself to a more feminist fluidity, or perhaps an androgynous assemblage of self-altering ontologies that seeks to get beyond gendered beings by putting them in impossible proximity. In the poem, Wordsworth remarks on humans’ “getting and spending” that separates us from nature, the “[l]ittle we see in nature that is ours” (3).21 Presented with such an anthropocentric problem, the octave of the poem lounges in a dynamic materiality quite redolent of his predecessors: “This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon; / The winds that will be howling at all hours, / And are up-gathered now like sleeping flower / For this, for everything, we are out of tune” (4–7). Despite humans’ tendencies to get and spend in a fast modernity that places everything in commodity relation, the sea and moon are nevertheless still involved in a vibrant, material exchange or connectivity that underlies different seemingly stolid objects. As neither objects

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nor clear personifications, the sea and moon sit in the Smithian human-nonhuman material space. The apparatus of the poetic bosom animates an interchange with hints of queer love, the second sex divulging herself to another, unearthly second, entangled in a naked, fluid exchange. Yet, ultimately, “It moves us not”:  humans cannot hear or see the figuring tunes of this particulate exchange, and as a result, the speaker’s only recourse is to become Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn, something like Steven Shaviro’s panpsychism or Harman’s and Morton’s Object-Oriented Ontology (9).22 When Proteus rises from the sea, then Triton with his horn, the poem’s prosopopoeia “cuts” two anthropomorphic gods, masculine mythopoetic figures, the latter of which blows his horn to enunciate their existence. The sea becomes an object animated by the poet’s lyrical subjectivity, and the final quatrain re-instantiates a subject (“So might I, standing on this pleasant lea” [11]) and object (“the sea” and the “wreathed horn” [5, 14]). These anthropomorphic and heraldic allegories juxtapose masculine masturbation—the object blowing its own horn to reify his hard, objective status—with breast-baring, a fluid, sexual exchange between sea and moon. Both Harman and Morton have attacked this new materialist line of thinking for its realist apostasy:  relation.23 As a main off-shoot of speculative realism, ObjectOriented Ontology posits objects as the basic unit of materiality. Objects may have a phenomenological existence, but their true natures are always partially withdrawn from their appearance in the world, a “weird essentialism,” as Morton terms it, that gives them a depth or reservoir unknown to human observers.24 We, too, are objects whose own depths are inaccessible.25 One great impasse, which occurs not incidentally along gender lines in speculative realism is the agon between relation and object— one which we could translate in any number of ways familiar to romanticists: process and product, exchange and commodity, vitalist fluid and materialist structure, poetic improvisation and form. The solitary masculine subject cathects its grand isolation into an ontological state of all beings, matched by objects who replicate the subject’s longedfor supremacy in isolation, even as they mimic an untouchable allure that provokes our gaze. As Wordsworth’s poem suggests, an Object-Oriented position risks resolutely landing us back in an anthropocentric, masculinist viewpoint, while new materiality irrevocably bears us more intrinsically to the nonhuman. As objects unmoved by the sea, we can only watch the nature we have lyricized in our own image. When we deny the sea’s and moon’s queer vital cohabitation, we are forced to recapitulate masculine anthropocentric subjects and their opposite, nonhuman objects. Although Morton expressly argues that everything is an object, Wordsworth’s poem suggests how the resort to object-oriented positions can all too easily resurrect an egotistical sublime. The doubled ambivalence in the figure—as both an anthropomorphic manifestation of the sea that cannot move us and as the withdrawn reality of the ocean or moon—obviates the sea’s new materiality, which is there but for the reality we are out of affective frequency with. In this new “cut,” Proteus and Triton evince the egotistical sublime of the writer who must displace and disfigure the vibrant matter of sea-moon-sky-human with human-like gods whose power is derived from the lyricism that evinces a tune that can finally unify sea and human through

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prosopopoeia. They replicate what Stacy Alaimo describes in Exposed as “a kind of separatist thinking that shirks transcorporeality . . . exactly the kind of phallologocentric ‘I am a rock; I am an island’ behind anthropomorphic blindness to others.”26 And yet, submerged in Wordsworth’s intensification of prosopopoeia, nests the unlegislated capacity of mytho-poetics to diffract the sea anew, a missed opportunity to yoke its agencies through the latent oceanic materiality that remains puissant, especially when remade by language’s own nonhuman force. Although it would be irresistible to critique Morton and Harman’s masculine insistence on the distinction between appearance and essence, however weird and nonhuman, it may be more helpful to look at a few other passages that simultaneously raise the question of objects and fluid materiality, in an attempt to double-cut mythopoetics less anthropocentrically. If any poem details the disappearance of a variety of humans into a dynamic landscape, it is Smith’s Beachy Head, which begins with smugglers and shepherds traversing England’s stark, chalky white cliffs and ends with the disappearance of both the poet-stranger and the hermit. But, as Morton has passingly noted, Smith has many passages that focus on nature’s hard reality as a series of objects, which also become a series of materialities as involuted as the mysterious fossil record of the sedimentary rock.27 With a hinting personification of Nature, Smith simultaneously evokes Ceres and Pan while expressly detailing something extremely mobile: “An early worshipper at Nature’s shrine; / I loved her rudest scenes—warrens, and heaths, / And yellow commons, and birch-shaded hollows, / And hedge rows, bordering unfrequented lanes” (346–9).28 The speaker’s love is voiced through her tracing—whether in botanical sketches or the lilting feet of blank verse—of such lanes, commons, hollows, and rows, evoking a sanguine yet sinuous movement within and among a series of spaces (and eventually types of flowers and other landscape features). In Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft undoubtedly quotes Smith’s formulation, adumbrating and adding to the assemblage of human-nonhuman intermixture in her own lyrical addresses to Nature. “With what ineffable pleasure have I not gazed—and gazed again, losing my breath through my eyes—my very soul diffused itself in the scene—and, seeming to become all senses, glided in the scarcedly agitated waves, melted in the freshening breeze . . . I pause, again breathless, to trace . . . and, imperceptibly recalling the reveries of childhood, I bowed before the awful throne of my Creator.”29 What Wollstonecraft, like Smith, traces is not simply the objective, mountainous throne but likewise the diffusion of breath and soul into the lilt of the breeze and, later, the mist of the mountains. The juxtaposed presences of Nature and Creator evoke a more mystical union provoked by the addresses composed by the discursive traversing of the “impetuous tide” of emotions that Wollstonecraft cannot stem: “I must love and admire with warmth.”30 In both Wollstonecraft and Smith, the gently personified deities open up other possibilities, or diffractive forms, for materialities in ontic movement. When Hemans comments, in “The Widow of Crescentius,” “There the wild fig-tree and the vine / O’er Hadrian’s mouldering villa twine” so much so that “Nature hath resumed her throne / O’er the vast works of ages flown” (9–10, 17–18), rather than the voluntary dissolution of the human body or human-made things into nonhuman

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Nature, we have the opposite.31 Nature conquers the vast works of human empire with its own persistent materiality. Fig tree and vine are counterposed to human objects like Hadrian’s villa (or, later in the poem, the statues submerged in the Tiber). The image of the enthroned vine, like those of flames and lava through her oeuvre, presents a puissant materiality alternative to the trees and swords of patriarchal power often allied to her male figures—rousing ontologies that are both object-based and relational. What Hemans sketches for us in the tracings of her flexible figures of nature is a metamorphic materiality that, unlike the sandy, de Manian negation of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” presents a curvature of change at once political and ontological. These heart pulsings and fluid contours alight through a kind of gender critique not so different from Wordsworth’s poem, where the shape of the feminine arrives to converse with a staunch and separate objective masculinity.

Shape-shifting into an onto-politics These poems raise perhaps a larger, underlying question:  Does putting objects into assemblage or continually re-cutting their materiality create ontological change— change that might advance new organizations of and conversations among beings in cohabitation? Barbauld’s “Washing Day”—with its domestic accouterment, its bubbles, and, finally, the image of the hot air balloon—allegorizes a quotidian assemblage whose confederation has been engaged through a figural apparatus—beginning with an apostrophe to the domestic muse and ending with the prosopopoeia of the “silken ball.”32 Barbauld intimates here not only a series of intra-actions but also a series of things that shift their shapes. Arms become red, meaty, filled with blood; clothes become wet, clean, then dry; soap moves from powder to liquid to, most stunningly, bubbles; and all of these objects, real and discursive, eventually produce the poembubble that is “Washing Day.”33 Assemblages and intra-actions become diffractions of each other, and rather than cutting ontologies different ways, they instigate a process of morphing from one thing to another, one ontic system to another. If these things, and their transformations, still seem too discrete, it may be that we are encountering a problem that surfaces for both romantic poets and new materialists when they consider how objects relate to one another and how change actually happens—how one thing might become another, with all the revolutionary undertones of the period’s attention to revolution of all kinds. Barbauld offers another, thorough answer in her list poem, “An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study.”34 We might at first assume that Barbauld’s inventory ostensibly gives us insight into Joseph Priestley’s scientific brilliance or his unique scientific-literary methodology by moving through his study’s books (he uses the pile method of organization and contemplation), objects (bottles, jars, phials, thermometer), papers, maps, and other emblems (all the British kings and Fathers). In fact, the inventory gives us less the subject “Priestley” or his “furniture” than a map of objects in relation. The poem begins obliquely but provocatively, “A map of every country known, / With not a foot of land his own” (1–2).35 Perhaps there was a map so large in Priestley’s study to warrant its top billing

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at the start of the poem, yet the couplet seems to intimate that the poem itself will be a map of every country, or object, known but not possessed by Priestley—that is a map of the withdrawn objects that are held and seen yet remain partially inaccessible to human understanding and indeed existential ownership. We could call the first two-thirds of this list poem “carpentry,” what Ian Bogost describes as “constructing artifacts that illustrate the perspectives of objects.”36 Different objects are placed one after another in such a manner that they tell us more about the objects themselves rather than Priestley or his anthropocentric scientific thought. The list proceeds quite ordinarily with discrete objects—until we arrive at “Papers and books, a strange missed olio” (29). With the word “olio,” suddenly we have not a single object but an assemblage of heterogeneous things. How have we moved from objects into a more ragout assemblage? The simple answer might be that the olio is formed from books and papers placed adjacent, merely touching, perhaps altering the phenomenology but not the ontology of its constituent parts. This purview, ironically, is how Bennett’s methodology—Vibrant Matter’s philosophical olio—has most often been read. She, it has been alleged, too quickly and superficially stacks Adorno, Derrida, Latour, Spinoza, and Lucretius next to each other. Yet, like Barbauld’s own poem, Bennett’s text, as both discursive and material, enacts assemblage in theory and practice. And what occurs in Bennett’s olio is a transformation of an archive of different things into an assemblage where constituent parts alter themselves through relation. Derridean “messianicity,” to take one example, is not simply, as Bennett would have it, “the open-ended promissory quality of a claim, image, or entity,” a fullness or future on the wing, but a more complicated sense of the future that has not fully—cannot fully—arrive.37 Readers of Bennett who might balk at her simplistic use of Derrida have strikingly misunderstood her writing as philosophical exegesis rather than what it is: an enactment of assemblages in practice. What comes before her use of Derrida’s future-to-come is her notion of “a swarm of vitalities at play”; what comes after is her contemplation of emergent causality. Derrida’s notion of “the future-to-come” becomes a way to talk about trajectories or directionality without telos or purposiveness but within the context of swarming vitalities whose ontic movements are emergent. Derrida is the way to figure movement and force without solidified substance, as both Pheng Cheah and Derrida himself suggest.38 Bennett reshapes Derrida, as Barad also tries to do, into an ontic lack of origin that propels a force of vital materiality.39 Bennett does not merely stack Derrida and Latour into a randomly selected olio that may become forgotten like a graduate school seminar paper; rather, as they affect and are affected by one another, they are converted into an assemblage mod(e)ified by Bennett’s words. Bennett enacts what she does not quite theorize: how words can put things into motion and relation, as perhaps the most viscous, porous things. And it turns out, her compositional verve enacts the intra-action of those material-discursive “things” we call Derrida, Adorno, and Latour by placing them together in an affective relation that shares the same rate and kinds of “movements and rests.” Bennett shows us how some assemblages, perhaps especially the excessive ones that put many things in motion at once, can heat and cook up a new intra-action.

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By labeling this assemblage an “olio” and then “a mass of heterogeneous matter,” Barbauld stacks up two different intra-actions—one shaped by the discourse of cooking and the other by scientific measurement. She likewise reveals that what Hartman lambasts as a “primordial lump of indeterminate flux,” a nebulous form of heterogeneous relationality, is itself always already a material-discursive coming into being, one which can occur iteratively.40 Moreover, it is the shift from one to the other— the affective movement between “olio” and “mass” that entails the ontological change. Subsequently, it is as if the weight of those objects, now moving in relation, compress and convert the matter in Barbauld’s poem (and the poem’s matter) into a form of heterogeneous relationality that spawn Baradian apparatuses, which both measure and enact shape-shifting: Papers and books, a strange mixed olio, From shilling touch to pompous folio; Answer, remark, reply, rejoinder, Fresh from the mind, all stamped and coined here; Like new-made glass, set by to cool, Before it bears the workman’s tool. A blotted proof-sheet, wet from Bowling. —“How can a man his anger hold in?”— Forgotten rimes, and college themes, Worm-eaten plans, and embryo schemes: — A mass of heterogeneous matter, A chaos dark, nor land nor water; — (29–40)

The papers and books seem to multiply, as do the forms of address, the “Answer, remark, reply, rejoinder.” It is not simply, however, that the discursive argumentation of the books and their rhetoric create new bodies or things through a citational practice. Rather, Barbauld is quick to collect these all as different sorts of becomings— the “new-made glass” before it has been etched or shaped, the “blotted proof-sheet” not yet become a “paper” or “book,” and the more general “embryo schemes.” These waxing, incipient, formless shapes of matter are not privileged as Barbauld likewise includes “worm-eaten plans,” those maps waning from form riddled with holes that have become vague plans. Barbauld’s meta-assemblage collects into relation different modes of becoming, different types of change.41 All at once we arrive elsewhere than Harman’s loathed primordial stew, which he says undermines Barad’s philosophy by creating stasis or idle differences.42 The assemblage, rather, has been converted into a milieu of vibrant matter: the transparent, liquid glass, the embryo scheme, planless plan, a materiality on the move. Each is its own material-discursive formation yet with different rates of change, different contours, different figures that enact different, though conversable forms. Barbauld’s allusion to chaos, Christian and classical, raises again questions of prosopopoeia and the enactment of ontic change. As the oldest of the gods and the first being to exist, Chaos is matter personified; but as a gaping void of pre-creation,

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Chaos reverses the lingering personification, denuding matter even of its initial forms, land or water, solid or liquid. Barbauld marks the birth of new partially formed objects but through figural turns that inaugurate new shapes and new ontologies: New books, like new-born infants, stand, Waiting the printer’s clothing hand;– Others, a motley ragged brood, Their limbs unfashioned all, and rude, Like Cadmus’ half-formed men appear; (41–5)

The passive voice seems to give rise to the idea that the mass, the shifting relationality that Barbauld has created and evoked, now irrupts with new forms—human, nonhuman, and some combination of both in Cadmus’s half-formed men. These things are “unfashioned” or half-formed, as if revealing their own becoming: One rears a helm, one lifts a spear, And feet were lopped and fingers torn Before their fellow limbs were born; A leg began to kick and sprawl Before the head was seen at all, Which quiet as a mushroom lay Till crumbling hillocks gave it way; And all, like controversial writing, Were born with teeth, and sprung up fighting. (46–54)

In this description, Barbauld makes meta-poetic what we have seen intimated in other writers: the entanglement of intra-action and assemblage. Her motley crew is doubly made from the heterogeneous mass but also, we later learn, from planted dragon’s teeth that spring up as half-men. Cadmus famously buried dragon’s teeth in the soil to create warriors that, in the end, fought themselves before founding Thebes. In Areopagitica (1644) Milton compares books to dragon’s teeth that instigate the springing up of armed men. In Barbauld’s re-cutting of this double mytho-poetics, the olio of books and things in the study creates—or recreates—a choratic space of chaos, even as it also generates those books-and-things that, when planted, spring up to form new things. We could say that these books together—Milton, the Bible, Priestley, “controversial writing” more generally—amass their materiality and discourses together to repeatedly produce different diffractions of the same matter—books, infants, mushrooms, teeth, and limbs—all without the recourse to subsuming all as “men” or manly fighting words. (Men, too, are assemblages of discursive-material parts we bring into and out of being.) Using the Cadmus myth, Barbauld continues to imbricate human and nonhuman, masculine aggression and feminine fertility, not simply as two intra-actions of the same material or as an androgynous assemblage but as one continuous material becoming. Not merely akin to Barad’s “cuts,” which enact decisive, if violent, splits of ontology, or to Bennett’s gathering or identifying of things into relation, Barbauld shows that

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both things occur and in relation alter each other. New agglomerations of bookish materiality amass, “New books, like new-born infants,” cut differentially as humans and nonhumans but also as incipient beings with still great potential for change, even as they begin to stand for something, about to be clothed by the printer for the world. Such “controversial writing” was already born with teeth—a hard materiality that cuts through the earth to birth another form of matter, half-formed men. Rather than ontic change having a genesis in accumulation or in a type of identification that severs one ontic form for another, Barbauld seems to suggest that all being, even lacerating masculinity, is always half-formed, “Their limbs unfashioned all, and rude,” effected by toothsome words and things already confabulated: cutting, conversing, amassing, and growing at once. These accounts of ontic change, of generation and becoming, suggest two interesting developments in new materialist thought. First, assemblage and intraaction may be diffractions of each other because when named or identified in any way, they participate in a confabulation of discursive-materiality that rehearses matter and poiesis anew. Second, Barbauld evinces something like Barad’s intra-actions, where different combinations of discourse and material can produce different phenomena and different ideas of how phenomena are produced. Yet, unlike Barad, who suggests that the way to new-fangle matter is by recutting it, or unlike Morton and Harman who suggest we find the allure of new objects, she resists the “cut” by posing more liquid motions that rearrange relations. There is no cut that slices and dices matter into new objects or things; rather, things accumulate and shift and blur into a simmering ragù untendered by violence. Things may fight to become something else, but they do so without ceasing to be, without the ontological death of their kind, nor without even a Keatsian “dying into life.” For Barbauld, these changes occur either when an assemblage smushes into a heterogeneous mass of matter or through a retroactive planting of matter that produces an unseen genesis of new forms, perhaps an autogenesis of sorts. Where Smith, Robinson, and Wordsworth’s use of prosopopoeia as an apparatus to shape human and nonhuman intra-actions (woman/goddess/thing), Barbauld’s subtle mythography allows for a morphing through a relational contiguity whereby things gather into an assemblage that itself has already been seeded with a mythographic prosopopoetic apparatus, the teeth of dragons. The book/teeth/dragon/baby/ mercenary would seem to exclude the feminine from the genesis myth of aggressive books and men, except it lies more subtly as the powering affectivity of alteration that knows masculinity is only always half-formed and infantile, especially with respect to the larger process of change. Even though the heads of mushrooms and tumescent limbs rise from a giving ground, seeming to become an apparatus for new phenomena, they are born of dragon’s teeth, and as long as language turns, so the shapes of the world shift. This is exactly what occurs in the extremely mysterious final lines of the poem: “But what is this,” I hear you cry, “Which saucily provokes my eye?” ’– A thing unknown, without a name, Born of the air, and doomed to flame. (55–58)

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The poem ends with “a thing unknown, without a name / Born of the air, and doomed to flame” (57–58). It would be easy to revert to an object-oriented view that Barbauld resurrects the withdrawn object as the entity that first and last exists, as the end all and be all. Things are always unknown, in excess of their sensuous qualities, whether born of air or extinguished by flame. Yet, the couplet turns to remind us that even the quintessential unknown object, in a new material alchemy, coalesces from Priestley’s chemistry of air manifested by the materiality of the flame.43 Michele Levy claims that the “this” of apostrophe is Priestley’s discovery of oxygen. If it is, even at the early date of 1767 when Barbauld composed the poem, then it is the thing that is made and then unmade. Not simply what Steve Mentz has described as phlogiston’s missing element of “fire-air combination” that is “both substance and process,” Barbauld cocreates dynamic materialities that alter themselves and their processes of change.44 This “weird essence of things,” Barbauld tells us, is to be made and unmade both through the apparatus of the nonhuman apostrophe and an intra-action that entangles air and flame through an assemblage that doctors continuous ontological change. The reverse of Wordsworth, Barbauld begins with what seems to be an objectoriented view of the scientist’s study, only to reject such a masculinist isolation for a revolutionary shape-shifting that demands a more supple, feminist account of materiality. Feminist relationality is what allows ontological change to occur, to recur:  when assemblages are put into relation or when discursive practices recut matter, transformations have teeth, fire, and alchemy. Although Marxist Christopher Nealon has exhorted that the ontological turn is distinctly anti-hermeneutic, antiphilosophic, and anti-humanist, in fact, assemblages and intra-actions entangled together make meaning in the most activist sense possible, by bringing it into being— again and again.45 Nealon denigrates assemblages as bad poetry that purposefully does not mean anything, but Barbauld—if not Bennett herself—creates assemblages that mean through their contingent proximity, through their shared affect, through their ability to instigate transformations in matter and through language’s own entangling power. Meaning through effectivity of matter and poiesis. Romantic poets reveal their new materialism as especially equipped to encourage new discursive-material hermeneutics through shape-shifting that repeatedly revamps matter, affect, meaning, and us, in the pursuit of all the different relations, already partially nonhuman in our alliances, our bodies, our affects, our alien and thankfully re-composing beings.

Notes 1 Selected examples might include Jacqueline M. Labbe’s monograph on Smith’s feminine performativity, Charlotte Smith: Romanticism, Poetry and the Culture of Gender (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); Theresa Kelly’s “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 3 (December 2004): 281–314; Kevis Goodman on the georgic in “Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present,” ELH 81, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 983–1006; Donelle Ruwe on the microscopic sublime in “Charlotte

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Smith’s Sublime: Feminist Poetics, Botany, and Beachy Head,” Prism(s): Essays in Romanticism 7, no. 1 (1999): 117–32; and Charlotte Sussman’s essay on settler colonialism and The Forest Sanctuary, “Epic, Exile, and the Global: Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65, no. 4 (March 2011): 481–512. I am, in part, following the lead of Jane Bennett’s critique of both Timothy Morton’s and Graham Harman’s work in object oriented ontology on the question of whether objects must remain completely hidden, reticent, and immune to human relation. Bennett suggests, in a direct response to both philosophers, that the relation between objects and humans should not be so easily dismissed. This essay attempts to find both a literary language and philosophical vantage of such relationality while preserving the special status of objects and indeed, in many cases, their privilege over human subjectivity in giving form to literary and political movements. See Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 225–33. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). While Bennett is more interested in materializing a Lucretian-Spinozan form of dynamic matter, Amanda Jo Goldstein’s recent book suggests how Lucretius—and especially his Romantic interlocutors—were interested in a mutual dynamics of matter and language. See her Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2017). Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Charlotte Smith, “To the Moon,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15. See Kari Lokke, Tracing Women’s Romanticism: Gender, History, and Transcendence (New York: Routledge, 2004); and Adriana Craciun and Lokke’s Rebellious Hearts: British Women Writers and the French Revolution (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) for Smith’s moon imagery and its connection to female forms of patronage. Neither what Michael Riffaterre calls a lending of “voice to the voiceless,” which privileges the difference between human voice and non-human sound, nor what J. Douglas Kneale describes as “another turning of voice,” Smith’s address offers something both material and linguistic. Michael Riffaterre, “Prosopopoeia,” Yale French Studies, no. 69 (1985): 107–23; and J. Douglas Kneale, Romantic Aversions: Aftermaths of Classicism in Wordsworth and Coleridge (Kingston: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1999). Here I am blending Brian Massumi’s definition of affect as “movements and rests” with what Bennett terms “impersonal affect” to “equate affect with materiality . . . a power [that] is not transpersonal or intersubjective but impersonal, an affect intrinsic to forms that cannot be imagined (even ideally as persons)” (xii). See Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99. Charlotte Smith, “To the sea-shore.—October, 1784,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 20. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 23.

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13 Ibid., 22. 14 Ibid. 15 Chris Washington, for example, terms the trope “an inexorable relationality [that] . . . blurs the boundary between both the human and the animal, the living and the dead” but in ways that remind us of the violence such relationality can exact upon the nonhuman (“John Clare and Biopolitics,” in European Romantic Review 25, no. 6 [2014]: 675). Barbara Johnson suggests that any address animates its object and attempts to make it human in some way (“Anthopomorphism in and the Lyric and Law,” in Persons and Things [Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010], 188–208). Sara Guyer, too, with her deconstructive parrying of death, considers “the capacity of the human to survive the human” and retains the frame of humanity (“Testimony and Trope in Frankenstein,” Studies in Romanticism 45, no.1 [Spring 2006]: 100). 16 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 99. 17 Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 171–2. 18 Ibid., 30. 19 Mary Robinson, Sappho and Phaon, in Mary Robinson: Selected Works, ed. Judith Pascoe (Ontario: Broadview Literary Press, 2000), 169. 20 See Evan Gottlieb “Seeing into the Life of Things: Re-Viewing Early Wordsworth through Object-Oriented Philosophy,” in Beyond Sense and Sensibility: Moral Formation and the Literary Imagination from Johnson to Wordsworth, ed. Peggy Thomson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2015): 145–62; see also his discussion of Keats for an Object-Oriented take on Bennett in Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism an British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). For accounts of Wordsworth, women poets, and sensibility, see Duncan Wu, “Wordsworth and Sensibility,” in The Oxford Handbook of William Wordsworth, ed. Richard Gravil and Daniel Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 467–81; and Christopher Nagle, Sexuality and the Culture of Sensibility (Houndmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 21 William Wordsworth, “The World Is Too Much with Us,” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 271. 22 Steven Shaviro, “Consequences of Panpsychism,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 19–44. 23 Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 205–24; Graham Harman, “Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad’s Ontology,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 30 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/030.e10. 24 Timothy Morton, “All Objects are Deviant: Feminism and Ecological Intimacy,” in Object-Oriented Feminism, ed. Katherine Behar (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 65–82. 25 Harman argues that Barad, and other new materialists working from assemblage theory, both “undermine” and “overmine” matter. They insist on breaking all things down into constituent parts, and, at the same time, they understand all matter as made of a “primal goo” which flattens ontology into a pervasive but static form of matter than has no secret reservoir from which to activate change. Harman, “Agential and Speculative Realism: Remarks on Barad’s Ontology,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 30 (2016). http://www.rhizomes. net/issue30/harman.html.

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26 Stacy Alaimo, Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 149. 27 See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2011): 163–90. 28 Charlotte Smith, “Beachy Head,” in The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Stuart Curran (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 217–50. 29 Wollstonecraft, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, ed. Tone Brekke and John Mee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 50. 30 Ibid. 31 Felicia Hemans, “The Widow of Crescentius,” in Felicia Hemans: Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 71. 32 Sonia Hofkosh has argued that the poem poses an object-oriented ontology that alters and destabilizes subject-object relations by dint of the quotidian and more rare objects coming into the domestic setting. Hofkosh, “Materiality, Affect, Event: Barbauld’s Poetics of the Everyday,” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, ed. William McCarthy and Olivia Murphy (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014), 83–106. Elizabeth Kraft argues the balloon is a resolute metaphor, a by-product of imaginative inspiration. See Kraft, “Anna Letitia Barbauld’s ‘Washing Day’ and the Motgolfier Balloon,” Literature and History 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 25–41. 33 Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Washing Day,” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview Literary Press, 2002), 143. 34 We need go no further than the title to suggest that Barbauld was thinking intently about the issues of extension and action at a distance that Priestley studied in his pursuit of modern chemistry. Scholars have been thorough in probing the extensive relationship she had with both the scientist and his wife, not only when they all lived at Warrington, when Barbauld’s father and Priestley taught at the academy together, but also when she visited them at Leeds in the summers of 1771 and 1772. This poem is dated from around that time, when she was known to have observed or helped Priestley with his experiments and his studies on the properties of gases, and thus had access to his study. Surprisingly, while scholars have attested to the religious and pedagogical arguments Barbauld had with this mentor, they have not thought to explore her ideas about his ontology or science. See William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); and Isobel Armstrong, “Anna Letitia Barbauld: A Unitarian Poetics?” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: New Perspectives, 59–82. McCarthy and Kraft tentatively date the poem’s composition to her 1771 visit to Leeds (73). 35 Anna Letitia Barbauld, “An Inventory of the Furniture in Dr. Priestley’s Study,” in Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Ontario: Broadview Literary Press, 2002), 143. 36 Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology: or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012) 109. 37 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 32. 38 See Jacques Derrida, “Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink 2 (‘within Such Limits’),” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 277–360; and Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,”

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in New Materialisms, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 70–91. See Barad’s interesting but problematic article on Derrida, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come,” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (November 2010): 240–68. See Harman, “Agential,” para. 20. Unlike Manuel DeLanda’s “flattened ontology,” where all things exist equally with the same ontological status, Barbauld’s lists should be seen in a slightly different light, as allowing for change without reducing objects to smaller parts or their effects in the world. Harman, “Agential,” para. 22 and 23. See Priestley: “But what surprized me more than I can well express, was, that a candle burned in this air with a remarkably vigorous flame, very much like that enlarged flame with which a candle burns in nitrous air, exposed to iron or liver of sulphur; but as I had got nothing like this remarkable appearance from any kind of air besides this particular modification of nitrous air, and I knew no nitrous acid was used in the preparation of mercurius calcinatus, I was utterly at a loss how to account for it” (II.iii). Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air. https://archive.org/ details/experimentsobser01prie. Steve Mentz, “Phlogiston,” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water, and Fire, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 56. Christopher Nealon, “Infinity for Marxists,” Meditations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group 28, no. 2 (Spring 2015): 47–63. http://www.mediationsjournal.org/ files/Mediations28_2_05.pdf. My many thanks to Iyko Day and Wesley Yu for this citation and their social relations that enabled the discussion of this article.

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Romantic postapocalyptic politics: Reveries of Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux in a world without us Chris Washington

Alive enough to have the strength to die Contrary to a currently in-vogue idea, we do not need to learn how to die in the Anthropocene.1 Roy Scranton, who has brought this idea into the mainstream, argues that we must accept death since we are, in effect, already dead as a result of the imminent disasters climate change will bring. However, to embrace such a proposition, as some speculative realists have, is to reanimate an Enlightenment legacy of Hobbesian, nihilistic, hopeless thanatopolitics.2 Modernity’s other dominant policy prescription— Enlightenment social-contract politics—might seem to offer an alternative, a model for a politics not obsessed with death. Yet, because it inscribes politics within a social structure centered on anthropocentrism, it too fails to surmount thanatopolitics, particularly in the time of the Anthropocene. Enlightenment politics, it seems, are either hopelessly outdated or ironically irrelevant in this time of planetary crisis. Meanwhile, speculative realism’s attempt to think reality as other than phenomenologically human would seem to offer promising alternatives to anthropocentric politics. Many critics of speculative realism have, in fact, argued that despite its philosophical value in finally allowing us to surpass theory’s linguistic turn, thinking anew about a material reality that social-discourse theory has dismissed, it has little political relevance because it sputters indefinitely when it comes to gender, racial, class, and ethnic issues. Alexander Galloway, in one of the best-known critiques along these lines, claims that speculative realism is simply the philosophical version of big-business-as-usual, the reflection of a global neoliberal hegemony.3 But perhaps, as Graham Harman suggests, speculative realist philosophy—like any philosophy—is and should be incapable of thinking politically.4 Harman’s ambivalence about speculative realism’s potential for political intervention may, in fact, stem from his own sense of a rightward, “might-makes-right” strain of thinking that he has recently identified in the work of Bruno Latour.5 Harman finds that Latour’s thought, at least in his work prior to 1991, tends to affirm the thanatopolitics of Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Latour’s actornetwork theory is a flattened ontology, privileging networks of humans, nonhumans, and objects alike (what Latour calls “actants”).6 Yet, Harman argues, even as Latour

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considerably advances politics by endorsing the nonhuman as a vital player in any climate-change politics, his early tendencies align him with a Hobbesian individualistic libertarianism.7 Such thinking, as Latour himself says, blithely dismisses thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau as inconsequentially leftist.8 However, as I want to show, a reading of Rousseau as a speculative realist political thinker sketches a third alternative to either conservative or leftist politics and their attendant thanatopolitics. Rousseau, who is explicitly adverse to any “might-makesright” thanatopolitics ever-hurtling toward death, offers a political romanticism freed from a Hobbesian libertarian conservative view of the state of nature as the war of all against all. More importantly, and unexpectedly, the politics he develops departs from the social-contract leftist, liberal humanism Rousseau is himself associated with that Latour finds irrelevant.9 Rousseau’s texts help us to see that we remain trapped by the dueling anthropocentric forces of both politics. As long as believe in these anthropocentric political delusions, I argue, we are not yet alive because we remain stuck in a forced political choice obsessed with death, and so life remains as yet a condition-to-come. “Teach him to live rather than to avoid death,” Rousseau entreats us in Émile (1762), when speaking of Émile’s education.10 Instead of spending life learning how to die, Rousseau’s writing, in its own political paradoxes, fashions an affirmative politics that can help us learn how to live through the thanatopolitics of the Anthropocene. Along these lines, Rousseau’s work connects to speculative realist critiques of anthropocentricism, specifically to what Quentin Meillassoux terms “correlationism,” the idea that the world is irrevocably linked to human beings. As Rousseau writes in A Discourse on Inequality (1755):  “let us not conclude with Hobbes” that a human “madly imagines himself to be the sole owner of the universe.”11 Or, as he puts it, in Émile, in the state of nature “everything is good in the hands of the Author of things” and once humans enter society, “everything degenerates in the hands of man. He forces one soil to nurture the product of another, one tree to bear the fruits of another. He mixes and confuses the climates, the elements, the seasons . . . ”12 From Rousseau’s perspective, human-world correlationism generates anthropocentricism because the world’s climactic fate is a product of the human mind’s belief that whatever it thinks to do with the literal earth, the soil beneath its feet, is natural and right. Rousseau’s state of nature thought-experiment is designed to address this human social degeneracy. The thought-experiment is very alienating though. The state of nature throws humans forward into a society that we are told, paradoxically, humans do not, and cannot yet, inhabit. Rousseau describes how this paradox works in the second Discourse: in the state of nature people must live alone or they will go to war, the latter event shuttling them into society; then, once people enter society, they must agree to leave each other alone through agreed-upon pacts or go to war. In other words, in this society humans must choose between two politics—conservative, anarchic libertarianism or leftist social-contractualism.13 On my reading, though, in Rousseau’s thought-experiment, the state of nature and society amount to a constitutive spatiotemporal aporia. It is through this aporia that is neither the state of nature proper nor the society of the social contract proper that Rousseau limns a

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politics of life. Methodologically speaking, though, Rousseau’s process is confusingly opaque in that, to borrow an apt line from Derrida, “Rousseau describes what he does not wish to say.”14 Rousseau strives to depict that to which he cannot give voice: the aporia created by the nebulous speculative interaction between society and the state of nature that allows each to exist even while each, if they should operate as he describes, would prevent or annul the other’s existence. The reading of Rousseau in this essay, then, should be recognizable in its deconstructionist contours yet it should also uncomfortably unsettle us since this is also a speculative, much weirder Rousseau than the one to which we are accustomed. We have traditionally not seen him as a speculative thinker but as a theorist working within the mainstream confines of political debate that divides the state of nature from society—the very division that, according to the terms of his own demonstration, cannot possibly happen. We have, in fact, previously understood him to favor some leftist form of social-contract governance whose anthropocentricism finds expression variously in the Discourse on Inequality’s individual human and, eventually, social subject, or the Social Contract’s (1762) “general will” (volonté générale) that binds human subjects into a collective community. I want to argue instead, though, that Rousseau’s work decenters and displaces humans from both the state of nature and the society that supposedly follows after. One of his most famous opening lines exemplifies the paradoxical state-of-nature/ society aporia that is the center of his political thinking:  “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”15 Ontologically, being born free means that each individual enters the world in the natural state of at-birth, denuded liberty, absolutely free from the encroachments of other people and from all social institutions. In the state of nature, humans, who are solitary, exist solely for themselves but are, precisely for that reason, fundamentally good until the evils of society arrive and create inequality, as he argues in the second Discourse. At the same time, in Rousseau’s account, once humans meet each other, they become corrupt and evil. They begin to form societies based on covenants designed to protect them from the new problems that arise from society: namely, the warfare that Hobbes had, contrarily, located in the state of nature. Both the state of nature and society turn on the same aporetic structure. While we remain free in the state of nature, we nevertheless need a social contract to keep that very freedom because we would need to agree to remain in that state even as it is the very lack of a social contract that guarantees that freedom in the first place. In other words, we must have a social contract to maintain the peaceful idyll of the state of nature but, paradoxically, that idyll can only exist in the absence of a social contract. Similarly, society needs to maintain the lolling peacefulness of the state of nature, but can only do so by instituting a binding social contract, the very agreement that unravels the state of nature’s perpetual peace. It would appear that the impossible is necessary: the state of nature requires a social contract and a social contract requires a state of nature. Both depend on what they must abjure and exclude in order to constitute and protect themselves as independent states. Whether we could choose Hobbsean libertarianism or social-contractualism, we, in making a choice, would be choosing the very opposite of what we are choosing:  free life needs chains and the chains of society need free

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life. To choose libertarianism would be to choose the social contract; to choose the social contract would be to choose libertarianism. Rousseau’s thinking, that is to say, corkscrews far beyond the predominant representation of it as a leftist theorization of social-contract republicanism. Rousseau evaluates this aporia of the state of nature and social-contract society as a failure of the Enlightenment’s project of reconciling individuals and social collectivity.16 As Rousseau writes in the fragmentary and little-noticed “The State of War” (ca. 1750), we continue, when in society, “living in both the social order and the state of nature” and “are subject to the inconveniences of both without finding safety in either.”17 Worse still, we discover that war arises from that which is meant to forestall it, peace. Rousseau slams “the horrible system of Hobbes” because, he says “the state of war is far from being natural to man,” and “war is” instead “born of peace, or at least of the precautions men have taken to assure themselves a lasting peace.”18 Society and the state of nature are irreducibly coimplicated, and therefore we remain in a state of postapocalyptic politics, facing down endless war in what looks like, simultaneously, a world at peace and a peace that is all-out warfare. Only the speculative nature of the aporia can circumvent the inevitability of war, precisely because of the state of nature’s speculative impossibility:  “it is no small undertaking . . . to have a proper understanding of a state that no longer exists and perhaps never did and probably never will, but about which we should nevertheless have accurate notions in order to judge our present state properly.”19 We must have, it transpires, according to Rousseau, accurate notions about an inexistent state, a place that exists in nonreality, a speculative space for thinking outside of human thought. In other words, Rousseau’s texts imply that in order to live we have to think beyond our own existence, to think a place that is neither the state of nature nor society but the aporia produced by their impossible crossing. It is from this aporia that Rousseau’s work enables us to extrapolate a speculative politics that ventures beyond the alternatives of libertarianism and social contractualism, beyond a left or right position, and beyond the individual subject and its social collective incorporation, beyond the looming specter of immanent war that looks—bizarrely—exactly like peace. Rousseau’s aporia functions much like Meillassoux’s “extro-science fiction,” a fiction which defies all known laws and depicts a reality that operates on Hyper-Chaos’s irrational contingency, the idea that anything can happen for any reason, or for no reason, at any time.20 Because the state of nature does not exist, and because society is wrapped up in this inexistent state, in Rousseau’s work we enter Meillassoux’s playing ground, a fiction that is “real” yet decidedly different from our own perceived reality. Unlike the anthropocentric politics we continue to debate, Rousseau’s speculative politics veers completely away from Enlightenment logocentricism and intersects with Meillassoux’s irrational “Hyper-Chaos,” the absolute contingency that governs the world. Reality, in the form of the social, derives its politics from the extro-science fiction of Rousseau’s state-of-nature aporia. Like extro-science fiction, Rousseau’s work imagines the unimaginable:  a nonanthropocentric social contract. Moreover, as we will see, this nonanthropocentric contract offers an alternative to what Meillassoux calls, in his later project, the fourth “World of justice,” in which the dead are reclaimed

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from death.21 For Meillassoux, there have been three “Worlds,” each of which occurred via what he calls “advent ex nihilo,” sudden contingent changes that bring about new forms of being: matter, life, thought. The fourth World of justice will emerge once the human dead can be restored to life. On my reading, Rousseau’s nonanthropocentric social contract allows for life for the first time, at least politically speaking, for humans and nonhumans alike.

Learning to live Ever since Paul de Man’s “Shelley Disfigured” (1984) called our attention to what Orrin Wang calls “the monumentalization” of Rousseau in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life” (1822), romanticism has struggled to exorcise the ghost of Rousseau and the deconstructive readings perpetuated by de Man.22 According to many exponents of speculative realism, meanwhile, deconstruction is simply incorrect, a philosophy of the past whose anti-realist obsession with language renders it unable to think speculatively about nonhuman ontology. Despite these critical divergences, though, and unbeknown to each, deconstruction and speculative realism occupy twin peaks when it comes to spooky apparitions of alien otherness. Both Derrida and Meillassoux are working through the same ontological aporia as Rousseau, possessing similar commitments but radically different conclusions. Rousseau, the original thinker of the ontology of alien weirdness, therefore helps us reread Derrida and Meillassoux even as rereading them helps reread Rousseau because Rousseau, Derrida, and Meillassoux all have constitutive blind spots that can only be seen when the three are read in triangulation. Derrida underestimates how speculative différance is; Meillassoux undervalues how deconstructive his speculative realism truly is; and Rousseau cannot know how speculative and deconstructive his aporia is. It is something like Jacques Lacan’s ostrich metaphor: Derrida sticks his head in the sand, Meillassoux leans over him to have a look-see, and Rousseau calmly plucks him on the rear.23 To accomplish this post-Kantian noncorrelationist thinking, Meillassoux develops what he terms “Hyper-Chaos,” the idea, as I said above, that anything can happen at any time. According to Meillassoux, the principle of sufficient reason, the idea that there is a reason a thing is only itself, has long been philosophical dogma. This presents something of a problem on Meillassoux’s analysis because the absolute holds that it must be one thing and one thing only even while, simultaneously, change must also be able to happen since change clearly does occur in the world. As he points out, if something is always absolutely what it is, then a person, say, would be and not-be at the same time (already containing both their life and death) and so unable to change. For Meillassoux, this would mean that everything that is “is already everything and its contrary.”24 Clearly, this cannot be the case or humans would never die. To be cannot mean to not be, Hamlet. The principle of sufficient reason therefore also violates the principle of noncontradiction. This leads Meillassoux to uphold the unreason of Hyper-Chaos as the absolute rather than the principle that there is sufficient reason to believe in the absolute: “we are no longer upholding a variant of the principle of

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sufficient reason, according to which there is a reason why everything is the way it is rather than otherwise, but rather the absolute truth of a principle of sufficient unreason. There is no reason for anything to be or to remain the way it is; everything must, without reason, be able not to be and/or to be other than what it is.”25 If life followed the principle of sufficient reason, then all life would be static and always already fully formed; therefore, life must follow the principle of sufficient unreason, or Hyper-Chaos. For this (un)reason, Meillassoux argues that reality operates via Hyper-Chaos, even that Hyper-Chaos or becoming can be eradicated by the contingency that structures life. As Meillassoux explains, By chaos we usually mean disorder, randomness, the eternal becoming of everything. But these properties are not properties of Hyper-Chaos: its contingency is so radical that even becoming, disorder, or randomness can be destroyed by it, and replaced by order, determinism, and fixity. Things are so contingent in Hyperchaos that time is able to destroy even the becoming of things.26

Since everything is contingent rather than necessary, as Meillassoux argues, the only true necessity is, paradoxically, the principle of contingency itself. As he puts in an interview with Harman, “the necessity of contingency entails that there cannot be contradiction, since a contradictory entity, being always already that which it is not, is destined to be revealed as ultimately necessary.”27 In contrast, because it is based on the principle of noncontradiction, wherein an entity can change into something it is not already, in Hyper-Chaos “nothing is or would seem to be, impossible, not even the unthinkable.”28 For this reason, the necessity of contingency allows us, Meillassoux claims, “to do what correlationism says is impossible: to know what there is when we are not.”29 Meillassoux’s idea about contingency resembles Derrida’s initial insight: the trace “contingently” makes possible “What is” by breathing, so to speak, initial life into life, differentiating it from death as well as performing, instituting, differentiation in general. Derrida writes that “the trace . . . must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity,” or, we might add, the state of nature and society.30 The trace, we can say, for Derrida, exists before us and after us, when we are not. For Derrida différance, or the trace, is always already evanescent, neither epistemological nor ontological: “what the thought of the trace has already taught us is that it could not be simply submitted to the onto-phenomenological question of essence. The trace is nothing, it is not an entity, it exceeds the question What is? and contingently makes it possible.”31 While Derrida’s assertion that the trace exceeds any ontology— that its “present-absence” iterates ontology—ostensibly departs from speculative realism’s ontological project, the trace’s contingency actually anticipates Meillassoux’s grand philosophical ambition to think “after finitude.”32 Contingency, then, connects Derrida’s and Meillassoux’s projects as both deconstructive and speculative, about life not only before and after, but beyond finitude. Meillassoux himself refers to his project in After Finitude as deconstructive, and Derrida, for his part, writes that “différance is also something other than finitude.”33 Différance is, because before and beyond and

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nowhere, “after” finitude, before and after ontology itself since the trace “extends well beyond humanity.”34 And yet, the “ghost” that is différance is not alive. Nor is it dead. It participates in life only in life’s interstices, but it does so before life. In this sense, the trace is a literal ghost, neither alive nor dead, but it was also never alive nor dead to begin with and as such is the ghost of a ghost, an immortal ghost that precedes and postdates mortality. It is Derrida’s nonlinguistic equivalent of Meillassoux’s nonlinguistic “arche-fossil,” which represents the scientific claims we make about life anterior and posterior to human life that contradict Kantian correlationism—and this is the aporia Meillassoux, like Rousseau and Derrida, tries to resolve; like Derrida, Meillassoux is also making a linguistic claim via the nonlinguistic. Meillassoux’s unpublished L’inexistence divine provides a snapshot of what he calls “an immanent ethics” that differs from yet dovetails with (one almost wants to say “defers to”) the trace’s ghostly immortality: it would thus be an ethics that . . . would not promise some other life than ours . . . but an ethics that manifests on the contrary such a desire for this life that it wishes this life to be immortal. Immortality is the philosophical desire for life, the desire that this human life and no other should again and always be lived. Philosophy wants a life without a beyond, and that is why philosophical ethics must be an ethics of immortality: that is to say, an ethics of life with no elsewhere [Meillassoux’s italics].35

Meillassoux’s proposed ethics seeks immortality not beyond this life, as in religion, but rather immortality of this life’s mortality only: that is, a focus on this earthly life and not some life in the afterlife. In Meillassoux’s conception of the World of justice, all that is immortal would be mortality itself because it endures past the transcendent desire for an immortal life beyond our mortal one that will perish.36 Immortal mortality outlasts immortal immortality. This form of “after finitude” coheres with Meillassoux’s work in After Finitude where he proposes trying to traverse Kant’s claim that the mind is finite in order to be truly able to think the absolute of transcendence. For both Meillassoux and Derrida, contingency always precedes and exceeds our life. The goal of each thinker is to think life beyond its relation to the finitude of a death from which we have not yet started to live. To this end, Meillassoux and Derrida grapple with an ontological space of inexistence that leads to existence, the same aporia Rousseau’s theory of the state of nature and society breaches. On one hand, Rousseau’s work exemplifies the contingency of Meillassouxian ontology. On the other, his state-of-nature/society aporia mirrors the ontology of the nonontology of Derrida’s trace. As in Meillassoux’s account of Hyper-Chaos, and per Derrida’s account of the trace as precessional to ontology, Rousseau’s state-of-nature/ society aporia is an ontological space that cannot be thought by any epistemology because being exceeds correlationism’s anthropocentricism. This aporia is a space that exists but does so without existing, a space that Rousseau thinks by discussing it, speculating about its inexistent existence, while being unable to clearly say what he is describing because a trace of the state of nature exists in society and vice versa without ever being fully present in either. It is this feature of his work that sidesteps

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the correlationist circle because this aporia limns a genuine nonanthropocentric space, wherein, to borrow positively from Meillassoux’s negative evaluation of Rousseau, “values come to be corporeal, natural, animal, and human, rather than a mere social invention.”37 Read from the purview of speculative thinking and Derridean différance, we can identify in Rousseau’s postapocalyptic aporia not only “what there is when we are not” but what might come-to-be. In this land of not Rousseau’s work shows us that, because we have not yet begun to live after finitude, paradoxically, we have never yet been alive to begin with. For Rousseau we are as yet a-mortal, frozen in our lifelessness, unable to live but nonetheless subject to immanent death. Contra Meillassoux’s projected fourth World of justice in which those who are dead will be returned to life (hence justice is done to them) we first have to live. Rousseau’s nonanthropocentric social contract helps us glimpse the impossible event of humans, to appropriate Derrida’s phrase, “learning to live finally.”38

“You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby, you gonna die!” In Rousseau’s state of nature there is no inequality at the ontological level of being and species, human and animal. Like Meillassoux, who sees the world structured by the irrationality of Hyper-Chaos, Rousseau’s fabulistic state of nature establishes the nonhuman as central to any egalitarian social-contract politics precisely on the basis of how irrational reality is. Pity, the elemental emotion of the state of nature, appears to precede reason’s manifestation, even its existence: pity becomes stronger as the animal looking on more closely identifies itself with the animal suffering. Clearly, this identification must have been immeasurably more powerful in the state of nature than in the state of reasoning. It is reason that breeds vanity and reflection that strengthens it; reason that turns man inward; reason that separates him from everything that troubles and afflicts him.39

Prior to reason’s rise, humans and animals shared a mutual, affective capability to feel pity. Pity, it seems, levels the playing field in Rousseau’s state of nature, whereas society differentiates via essentialist reason (which is, we will see, tied to speech). But despite their similarities regarding nature’s irrationality, Meillassoux differs from Rousseau regarding pity. He claims that Rousseauvian romanticism eliminates justice from the world because “the human community” rules the world and among humans “pity is no more common in the living than are war, violence, or cruelty.”40 However, pity is emblematic of Rousseau’s aporia in that pity exists in the state of nature while war only arises in society. By conflating them, Meillassoux inadvertently underscores the aporia I’ve been tracing—pity and war, reason and peace, feature in both the state of nature and society even while Rousseau insists on the impossibility of such a chiasmus despite that his texts demonstrate this chiasmus. As Derrida has famously demonstrated in his

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reading of Rousseau’s texts, pity and reason—pitted against each other—supplement the other as but one of the endless chain of supplements these concepts rely on for their own signification. And yet, for Derrida (and Paul de Man for that matter) inequality in Rousseau’s state of nature is linguistic and epistemological. But when it comes to life and death, Rousseau’s state of nature is just as concerned with ontology, with a state of being that does not differentiate the human from the nonhuman.41 Inequality in the state of nature is not ontological; in the state of nature humans and animals are not eschatologically different. Neither can originally die in the state of nature although they subsequently will in society: “an animal will never know what it is to die, and a knowledge of death and its terrors is one of man’s first acquisitions upon leaving the animal condition.”42 Being both permanent and imperishable precludes the possibility of death, eliding the difference between animals and humans, neither of whom can experience death unless they leave the state of nature.43 But animals never enter society, whereas humans inevitably will: “an animal will never know what it is to die, and a knowledge of death and its terrors is one of man’s first acquisitions upon leaving the animal condition,” an event that occurs simultaneously with the advent of capitalism, which leads to war and mass death.44 But Rousseau’s picture is more chiasmatic than the opening pages of the Discourse might lead us to believe. Animals will never exit paradisiacal life, a place without death. Humans graduate into the death sentence they call society. Society produces death; the state of nature, life. The former makes dead what can never die; the latter makes live what is not alive. In these terms, in society, unlike in the state of nature, humans “live” without life because they “live” only in death. They are not alive—but nor are they dead, strictly speaking. Rousseau’s state of nature deflates the modern biopolitical propulsion to, as Foucault says, “make live or let die” by revising historical progress as neither backward-facing nor forwardlooking but rather caught within the confused and confusing vicissitudes of a human existence whose progress leads to death and whose life in the state of nature can never lead to societal progress.45 According to Rousseau, if humans are to live one day in society, then they must first be alive to do so, free from the fears and reality of finitude that immediately structure their not-alive lives in any civil polity. For it is politics—an artificial social construct, as much for Rousseau as Aristotle before him—that creates human/animal ontological differentiation even as, in Rousseau’s thinking, politics can eventually move us beyond these differentiations, after finitude and paradoxically toward being alive. Whereas both humans and animals have self-love, a preservationist sense “from everything likely to distress or annihilate it,” it is nature that operates the animal “machine” while human “machines” are “free agents.”46 Only the human machine has the capacity for self-improvement, which “constitutes the distinctive characteristics of man among all other animals” that Rousseau identifies as speech, the bottom rung on the ascendant ladder of logocentricism, and the beginning of politics (“speech differentiates man from other animals”).47 The perfectibility of the human species, Rousseau writes, is “a faculty that, with the help of circumstances, successively develops all the others and that in man inheres as much in the species as in the individual, whereas an animal at the end of a few months already is what it will remain all its life, and its species will be at the end of a thousand years what it was

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in the first of those thousand years.”48 Progress, which occurs only when one human bumps into another in the state of nature and uses this faculty of speech, begins the drive toward forming civilizations to protect the species, to make it live, live longer, live better, by means of a social-contract politics that ironically leads to the species’ death. Human language use creates a distinction between humans and animals since animals, now, are a different species, one to be guarded from, and used for food and fuel for the human individual and the human species. It is only with this progress— what Rousseau calls society—that animal death and inequality manifest. But there is, as with everything in Rousseau, a paradoxical corollary: animals are put to death for human sustenance even as efforts to preserve human life lead to human death. The capitalist climate change and degeneracy of the earth Rousseau speaks of in Émile take place when land is claimed for personal use: “the true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘this is mine,’ and came across people simple enough to believe him.”49 Meanwhile, animals, when they lived in the state of nature, did not engage in extending their life due to a desire for a perfectibility that elevates them as a special species and therefore they could not die. Animals, for Rousseau, have always already fulfilled the immanent ethics of the World of justice Meillassoux craves: they achieve the immortality of their mortality in the life they live, in that life and no other. In Rousseau’s texts, then, animals exemplify how to live for humans who do not yet know how to be alive. Humans, that is, will only decide how to “live” in society, a decision that entails putting to death the nonhuman, animals and the earth— and, thereby, as we know from contemporary climate science wherein large-scale, mechanized animal slaughter is destroying the parameters that make life livable for humans, themselves as well. Rousseau’s politics are thus unexpectedly progressive but only in their retrogression: a roadmap for a civil politics originates with the nonhuman in the state-of-nature/society aporia and not with the human. Consequently, as I said above, it turns out that the social contract is necessary to preserve the state of nature and the state of nature necessary to preserve a social contract. In the state of nature, humans and animals both seek to preserve themselves (what Rousseau calls self-love), even though neither can die, but not as species (into which they are not yet organized) but as individuals. And meanwhile, human self-improvement, which already can, and will (but won’t) differentiate them in this undifferentiated state, demarcates them further when they form a political union to preserve themselves as a species. But humans do so because they could not die in the state of nature and feel the need to protect against this inability to be otherwise than immortal. For Rousseau, this aporia models a new nonanthropocentric social contract not based around a life exclusively devoted to not dying. It is this social-contract politics that allows for what Meillassoux seeks, the immortality of this mortal life rather than the immortality of a transcendent life obsessed with infinitude, with life after death. This immortal morality is what he terms, again, the fourth World of justice. Key to this new contract for Rousseau is a resistance to an anthropocentric romanticism. Rousseau deplores the all too human faculty of imagination by associating it with the malignant forces of society. In Émile, he writes of the eponymous pupil:

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In this condition, nature, who does everything for the best, has placed him from the first. To begin with, she gives him only such desires as are necessary for selfpreservation and such powers as are sufficient for their satisfaction. All the rest she stored in his mind as a sort of reserve, to be drawn upon at need. It is only in this primitive condition that we find the equilibrium between desire and power, and then alone man is not unhappy. As soon as his potential powers of mind begin to function, imagination, more powerful than all the rest, awakes, and precedes all the rest. It is imagination which enlarges the bounds of possibility for us, whether for good or ill, and therefore stimulates and feeds desires by the hope of satisfying them. But the object which seemed without our grasp flies quicker than we can follow; when we think we have grasped it, it transforms itself and is again far ahead of us. We no longer perceive the country we have traversed, and we think nothing of it; that which lies before us becomes vaster and stretches still before us. Thus we exhaust our strength, yet never reach our goal, and the nearer we are to pleasure, the further we are from happiness. On the other hand, the more nearly a man’s condition approximates to this state of nature the more the difference between his desires and his powers is small, and happiness is therefore less remote. Lacking everything, he is never less miserable; for misery consists, not in the lack of things, but in the needs which they inspire. The world of reality has its bounds, the world of imagination is boundless; as we cannot enlarge the one, let us restrict the other; for all the sufferings which really make us miserable arise from the difference between the real and the imaginary.50

Émile has been given, in this pedagogical attempt to reproduce the state of nature, selflove, only that which is needed for “self-preservation.” Imagination, rhetorically posed as capable of leading to good or ill, is held in “reserve” and, following Derrida’s logic, is therefore a supplement both natural and unnatural. It will correspondingly lead to the love of self that society engenders and therefore to a lack of life since it ejects Émile from the state of nature into society, which is a death sentence. The imagination, which is “boundless,” requires “restrict[ion]” since reality, the state of nature, is unchanging. The real of the fictional state of nature produces happiness; the unreal of nonfictional society produces unhappiness. However, that the difference between “the real and the imaginary” occurs in the “between” of these states signals something different altogether. The “between” between the real and the imaginary is a “between” because the boundlessness of the imagination provides the boundary of the state of nature that is itself imagination-less. If “a lack of things” inspires “needs,” it does so, in this description, on the basis of distance between the objects of lack and need that always eternally keeps trying to close in order for the not-met lacks and wished-for needs to know they are not meeting. “Lacking everything,” Émile is “never less miserable” but, via negation, he contains the reserve of misery that only “arise[s]” from a double lack: he already lacks everything but that lack gives rise to a lack of the very things it lacks in order to lack. Misery, like lack’s lack, must have the imagination to know what it really lacks in its imagination.

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The imagination and love of self (material acquisitiveness, capitalism) both appear when one enters into society. They combine to erase pity—that mainstay of Rousseauvian ethics that Meillassoux deplores—and to instantiate imagined lacks which convert to miserable needs. This whole process further differentiates humans and animals. Love of self and the imagination operate in society to twist the human with no initial fear of death in the state of nature into someone afraid to die and thus unhappy. Like animals, humans have no concept of death in the state of nature, and thus “happiness is therefore less remote.” It is only when humans imagine that they need things—need life—that they become miserable. Unhappiness over death sends humans in society into philosophizing on the transcendent, the infinite, a consideration of death and surviving it, not in life but beyond it, in a kind of ecclesiastical afterlife. Society allows us to imagine how to surmount the inevitability of death. It sends us in the opposite direction from Meillassoux’s World of justice in which humans discover immortal mortality; humans want instead to transcendent mortality. In this fashion, it leads us away from the bounded-down real and into the imagination (in contrast to realist extro-science fiction like the state-of-nature aporia), away from life and into death. It allows us to imagine how to live beyond death, which paradoxically takes us away from life and thus makes us die. It corkscrews in opposition to what comes after finitude: life. Defying “life” for life, Rousseau’s aporia presages Meillassoux’s contingency. It is precisely that humans can change, can enter society, can become a species that self-conceptualizes as beings that die and are hence mortal that comports Rousseau’s thinking with Meillassoux’s irrational Hyper-Chaos. After all, as Rousseau describes but cannot quite say, it is irrational for humans to leave a state of being in which one is immortal because death does not exist in exchange for a world where death defines life itself.51 And this is where the hope for immortality of this life rather than immortality in some life after registers in Rousseau: humans remain, for now, perpetually stuck in the state of nature/society double bind, unable to stop hoping for immortality in the afterlife and so unable to start living as mortals in this immortal life. To live in society, humans need to live like animals do in the state of nature: without conceiving of life based on finitude, life no longer obsessed with death. Humans would glean how to be immortal mortals, the very state Meillassoux describes as justice. The principle of Hyper-Chaotic contingency as the arche-texture upholding reality theoretically allows for the transition from the state of nature into society. And yet, as we have seen, society and the state of nature are, like speech and writing in Derrida’s reading of Rousseau, irreducibly connected. Freedom in the state of nature now seems akin to the chains we wear in social life, and these same chains under the social contract begin to look like unshackled freedom in the state of nature. Hence we return to the aporia between libertarian anarchism and social-contract politics, the choice between reckless individualism and restrictive communalism, political indecisiveness that continues to govern us by contradictorily having it both ways and not being able to make up its mind.

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The upside down The solution to this impasse between libertarian anarchism and social-contract politics occurs in two previously mentioned, relatively ignored works of Rousseau. The first is “The State of War” that functions in opposition to what he describes as “the dangerous reveries of the likes of Hobbes.”52 The second is a record of Rousseau’s own reveries, Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782).53 A short, intense fragment on death and destruction, “The State of War” delineates Rousseau’s postapocalyptic vision of societal life, the cross-hatching of war and peace that he reconciles by dissolving the state of nature and the social contract. He begins with a terrifying picture that will defy readers’ expectations: I see fire and flames, countrysides deserted, and towns sacked. Wild men, where are you dragging these poor wretches? I hear a horrible racket. What an uproar! What cries! I draw near. I see a scene of murders, ten thousand men slaughtered, the dead piled up in heaps, the dying trampled underfoot by horses, everywhere the image of death and agony. This is the fruit of these peaceful institutions!54

While this feverish vision might seem to foretell events like the French Revolution and the Terror, Rousseau instead metaphorically depicts the compact humans make to create society and its institutional safeguards like a social contract. The metaphor is complicated and functions much like the giants do in Rousseau’s Essay on the Origin of Languages (1781). In that text, Rousseau writes that humans, when they first encounter other humans, view them as giants, a literalization of a metaphor that Derrida, in Of Grammatology (1976), reads as upending speech acts since, for Rousseau, language begins in metaphor and yet the literality of vision unravels into the firm reality that these giants are human beings possessing average height. Rousseau pulls a similar trick here. Human beings are not literally running wild through the nation’s landscape, burning down country houses and torching towns while committing acts of profligate homicide. And yet it is a metaphor for the literal in that Rousseau finds the social contract and the institutional governments it gives rise to actually do instrumentalize death. War, he writes, is only possible between nation states, which equate to society. Individuals have no power to declare war or wage war: “I therefore call war between one power and another the effect of a mutual, steady, and manifest inclination to destroy the enemy state, or at least to weaken it, by all means possible. This inclination put into action is war properly so called.”55 It is the very opposite of Hobbes, who thought war reigned in the state of nature and peace in society. In Rousseau’s eyes the peaceful transactions of the everyday conceal the actual war that is society—why he yearns for the peace of the state of nature to which humans can never return. Peaceful society is, literally, to Rousseau, a state of war. This again unveils the aporia. Society centers on a social-contract theory that he thinks is only another form of anarchy whereas the libertarian anarchy of the state of nature would constitute peace—if humans could agree to leave each other alone in the state

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of nature, which would mean they had a social contract. Which means they would have, in other words, society. “The state of war is far from being natural to man,” Rousseau writes, because humans in the state of nature by definition have no social contract and are, as we know from the second Discourse, naturally good.56 Society, in this sense, would institute the state of war. However, in rhetorically dismissing Hobbes, Rousseau notes that the state of war, or society, does not exist:  “what a strange animal he must be who would believe his good is bound up with the destruction of his species.”57 In the state of nature, because humans have no wants, only needs (lacks) like food and shelter, they have no reason to wish to kill anyone as doing so would gain them nothing—it is irrational to seek to kill animals even since there are no species distinctions. But species, as we saw above, is a conceptual categorization that occurs with society and the wants and pleasurable desires it brings out in people. Rousseau presages later romantic postapocalyptic last-man poems and novels (like Byron’s “Darkness” [1816] and Mary Shelley’s The Last Man [1826]) in his analysis of war’s impossible existence:  “The unbridled desire to appropriate everything is incompatible with that of destroying all of one’s fellowmen; and the victor who, having killed everyone, had the misfortune to remain alone in the world, would enjoy nothing in it for precisely the reason that he would have everything.”58 If society begins with the first man who declares property his and his alone and this leads to a material acquisitive impulse in the whole species, then only in society can the advent of war for goods and power and riches happen. But even then, as Rousseau reasons, no one would wish to eradicate the whole human species because then they “would have everything” and could derive no pleasure from acquisitive stockpiling of capital and goods since this want would be sated to the point that it no longer existed. If one owns everything there is nothing left to want to own. The victor’s spoils of war are spoiled by his perfectly pyrrhic victory. War, it turns out, will not occur in society because it would erase wants, leaving nothing but needs, lacks. Paradoxically, then, this imagined last-man victor would return to the state of nature, alone, friendless, and with only his basic needs like food and shelter to fulfill. The same double bind of the state of nature and society plays out: humans “living in both the social order and the state of nature are subject to the inconveniences of both without finding safety in either.” At the same time, while the last man’s victory might look like peace, because, as Rousseau claims, no one would ever slaughter his or her fellow humans, society nonetheless remains permanently in a state of impossible war in peace. It is precisely this double bind that proves so pernicious. Rather than seek species extinction this victor, according to Rousseau, would stop short, put everyone in shackles instead, converting them into slaves—hence this scenario avoids a return to the state of nature and cul-de-sacs instead into the opening line of The Social Contract: people are born free but live everywhere in chains. Rousseau’s fragment correspondingly ends on a curious analogy that equates slavery with the state of war, driving home the point that the chains of The Social Contract are a metaphor that Rousseau, as the opening pages of this text demonstrate, means literally. Referencing Aristotle’s Politics, Rousseau opines on the relations between the

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Lacedaemonians in Sparta and the helots, their serfs or slaves, in Greek antiquity, and the ephors, a five-person council that shared powers with the Spartan kings. Rousseau claims that Aristotle wrote that the “ephors, on taking charge, solemnly declared war on [the helots],” though, actually, Aristotle did nothing of the sort.59 Regardless, Rousseau argues that any such declaration would be “superfluous” and “barbarous.”60 While the barbarity of slavery is left to stand as obvious, Rousseau explains the superfluity by the fact that “the state of war necessarily existed between them solely because they were the masters and the others were the slaves.”61 The ephors and helots, by virtue of their master-and-slave relationship, are already in a state of war just as, by implication, any systemic slaving society would be in a state of war. Such a system justifies death: “without doubt, since the Lacedaemonians killed the helots, the helots had every right to kill the Lacedaemonians.”62 The victor, then, in abjuring his last-man potential to kill everyone, by enslaving his defeated fellow humans, recreates the state of war even in his actions to curtail it through the forced peace of a slave society that, ostensibly, is a cessation of warfare. This circle appears to be unbreakable and the state-of-nature/society aporia an impossibility that traps humans in a war-and-peace never-land. Instead of seeking to massacre everyone “we [would] now,” he writes, “enter into a new order of things,” enchained social life.63 But even in this new order, meant to prevent mass species death, “we will see men, united by an artificial concord, assemble to cut one another’s throats and all the horrors of war arise from efforts made to prevent war.”64 No lasting peace can ever be had in society for the very fact that the social contract, Rousseau’s supposed enduring contribution to liberal politics, proves to be the countervailing force that impels war since society introduces capitalism, the desire to accumulate things, which, in turn, illusorily leads back to the peace of the state of nature but in reality leads to the illusion of society (“land, money, men, all the spoils that can be appropriated thus become the principal objects of mutual hostilities”).65 The state of nature, after all, never existed and probably never will. But it turns out society never has and maybe never will either. Rousseau’s response to the aporia is, surprisingly, to discard the social contract entirely. If, as he says, “people have taken on the task of turning upside down all true ideas of things,” part of the solution is to flip things from the upside-down back right side up. Given that “it is from the social pact that the body politic receives its unity and its ‘common self,’ ” then at issue is this social pact and the common self that divides the soil and material goods. He writes, If we look at things solely in terms of a strict understanding of the social pact, then land, money, men, and everything included within the confines of the state belong to it without reservation. But since the rights of society, being founded on those of nature, cannot abolish them, all these objects need to be considered in a twofold relation, namely, the soil as both public territory and as the patrimony of private individuals; goods as belonging in one sense to the sovereign and in another sense to the owners; the inhabitants as citizens and as men. Basically, since the body politic is only a moral person, it is merely a construction of reason.

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Take away the public convention, and right away the state is destroyed without the slightest change in all that comprises it; and never will all the conventions of men know how to change anything in the physical makeup of things. What then is it to wage war on a sovereign? It is to attack the public convention and all the results from it; for the essence of the state consists exclusively in that. If the social pact could be broken with a single stroke, right away there would be no more war; and with that single stroke the state would be killed, without a single man dying.66

This passage evinces the same state-of-nature/society aporia in that under the “social pact” or contract the state owns everything within its compass, including human beings (everyone is in chains). However, given that society and the state are predicated on “nature,” then everything within the state’s compass is divided, belonging to both the individual who possesses it and to the sovereign. “A construction of reason,” the body politic can be said to only exist insofar as humans believe in and agree to it and its erasure will lead to, presumably, a state of unreason like in Meillassoux’s vision for the World of justice. To accomplish this goal, society, rather than humans, must be killed by “a single stroke” that severs the social compact. By this point, we know the end of this story:  this strike will cut the aporia, divide society and the state of nature and re-deposit everyone back into that latter state. Now “there is no more war.” Unfortunately, given that “the object of all the evil that is inflicted on one’s enemy by war is to force him to endure having even more evil done to him by peace”—the scene of fiery death this text opens with—this recourse to the state of nature’s peace merely restarts the endlessly circling circle—especially as we recall that society exists in this nonexistent state in that only a social compact, that which is fundamentally at odds with the state of nature, allows the state of nature to maintain itself.67 But if the solution is dissolving the aporia by purging the social compact, and yet that social compact is a necessity for peace, then how can society square this circle that correlates humanity, “this strange animal,” with reality?

Dead enough to have the strength to live In his last book, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau envisions a social contract based on a form of radical Derridean hospitality to the other in contrast to self-love in the state of nature (amour propre) or love of self in society (amour de soi-même). The former, again, Rousseau defines as a simple individual drive to satisfy one’s basic wants and the latter as a selfish investment in the myriad properties, goods, and pleasures one can accrue in society like we saw with the victor in “The State of War.” Without this radical hospitality, humans are not alive because self-love drives them to do nothing more than feed and shelter themselves while societal love of self seeks only pleasure and makes them fear death in society and look for transcendent immortality. As Rousseau writes of those imprisoned by love of self in Émile:  “the wretch has neither life nor feeling, he is already dead.”68 These “dead souls” are “alive only to self-interest.”69 With

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self-love and love of self we discover another version of the same aporia, wherein what is juxtaposed to it’s supposed opposite ends up requiring that opposite to exist. The centerpiece of Rousseau’s new social-contract politics is this rethinking of hospitality.70 As Derrida defines it, hospitality, to truly be hospitable, would have to escape from the general economy of the gift, which is impossible because any act of hospitality is inscribed within an economy of debt.71 To give to someone depends on the notion of a giving back, however unwarranted or unwanted such a return gift might be, because a gift contains the built-in expectation of return, even if that return is something as simple as “thank you.” For it to exist, pure hospitality, given freely with no expectation, must escape that which it claims it does not inhabit (gift as both oikos, munes, and Heideggarian es gibt) and that which does not inhabit it: the economy of the gift. As such, according to Derrida, hospitality, etymologically and conceptually, does not yet exist. It always locates the host as welcoming the guest in a double bind in which the host must give to the guest even if the guest is hostile. True hospitality must welcome the inhospitable. The guest, meanwhile, however much a rampager he might be, must accept the host’s hospitality without accepting it; the guest must be inhospitable, for if he accepts, then their relationship becomes one of exchange and, therefore, the guest becomes the host of the host who, in turn, becomes his guest, a violent and seemingly inescapable whirligig. Thus Derrida’s deconstruction:  being hospitable, in the true sense of the word, would mean escaping this violence to the other by being inhospitable to them, by not allowing the guest entrance over the threshold, in order to be hospitable—which is no hospitality at all. As Peter Melville argues in his remarkable book on the subject, it is only when we accept the violence of hospitality that we can be hospitable, “and only then, when we can begin, without ending, to be responsible to and for the exclusions by which we proceed.”72 Pure hospitality would then be a singular event, one to come from the future, but one also unanticipatable and impossible, for if it were either anticipatable or possible, then it would already be inscribed within this gift economy. It is here that Rousseau pushes hospitality further than Derrida by replacing the social compact of society with a hospitality that limns a future-to-come of social-contract politics. In Reveries, hospitality precedes the social contract of society as well as the state of nature since no gift giving transpires therein. He writes, “I know that there is a kind of contract, indeed the most sacred of contracts, between the benefactor and the recipient; together they form a kind of society, which is more closely knit than the society which unites men in general, and if the recipient tacitly promises his gratitude, the benefactor likewise commits himself to continue showing the same kindness.”73 While this is as yet a gift economy, Rousseau gestures to a different type of hospitality here. As a contract more important, more sacred, than the social contract, hospitality, if it can reject its benefactor-and-recipient circle, will return to a pre-state-of-nature that exists before the social contract and hence hospitality can redefine society since hospitality will escape the aporia I have been tracking. A contract based on hospitality can ground politics in our postapocalyptic world because it does not hinge on how to avoid death and transcend this life. While Rousseau, as Melville says, was previously

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interested in being the guest who receives hospitality, in Reveries, he now refuses the role of either host or guest and so sidesteps the circle of hospitality altogether and envisions a Derridean hospitality-to-come.74 By stepping outside of its circle, neither “the benefactor” nor “the recipient,” Roussseau becomes, now outside of hospitality’s double entrapment of its own hospitable violence, hospitable. The difference between benefactor-and-recipient hospitality and a hospitalityto-come for Rousseau centers on renouncing both self-love and love of self (which correspond to the state of nature and society) by refusing the pleasure derived from gift giving. In Reveries Rousseau writes, “when I pay a debt, I am performing a duty; when I make a gift, I am indulging in a pleasure.”75 But Rousseau is aware of the perils of hospitality, how a gift can as quickly become a debt: “a purely voluntary good deed is certainly something I like doing. But when the recipient uses it as a claim on further favours and rewards me with hate if I refuse . . . then charity becomes burdensome and pleasure vanishes.”76 This conversion of payment into debt redounds badly to Rousseau “who reproach[es] myself inwardly for doing good against my will.”77 After these lessons in gratitude, he “often abstained from a good deed . . . fearing the enslavement which I would bring upon myself if I gave way to it unthinkingly.”78 In this most important of contracts, a contract that binds people even more closely than the social contract, we can see a repeat of the same economics that can develop from the social contract: an endless cycle of capitalism wherein “good” or acts “purely good” become impossible in a market that, to borrow a phrase from A Game of Thrones, always pays its debts. Indeed, Rousseau’s language of “enslavement” recalls the chains of society. Rousseau realizes that he performs these acts in an economy that always demands a return gift or payment for the gift: a hospitality that is not pure hospitality. Forcing him to do good against his own will, Rousseau halts the process in the only avenue possible: he stops doing good deeds altogether, stops giving, and in this respect freely gives the ultimate gift. As he says in Émile, “it is the free gift which is beyond price.”79 It is a gift that is not a gift, giving nothing, and in this sense it gives giving itself. It gives to Rousseau no gift, which is the opposite of the expectation installed in gift-giving. He gets nothing from any exchange, not even pleasure. Thus he removes himself from the circle of gift and debt, of violence to the other based on the expectation of the inability to purely give. Rousseau de-links hospitality from pleasurable recourse, from the thank you, from any economy that powers society or the state of nature. Rousseau has exceeded, even, the society of the northerners Julie’s St. Preux meets in the mountain passes of upper Valais, who live unhindered by human exchange and rely, instead, on hospitality’s emancipatory non-economy.80 In doing so, in relinquishing pleasure, he abandons society’s love of self. Giving up on “good deeds” and the involuntary pleasure it causes also sidesteps selflove, preservation of one’s life at the expense of others, giving one’s own life in exchange for another. “Whatever our situation,” he writes, “it is only self-love that can make us constantly unhappy.”81 This abdication of preservation is very contrary to his claim in the second Discourse, wherein, to repeat, humans are alone and perforce good. In the state of nature self-love coheres with that solitary, individual goodness. The only way to reach true happiness is to give the gift of giving up the concept of self-love and happiness

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altogether, to forget our wants, to live in a present beyond the metaphysical desire for full presence (“I am content as long as I am not suffering today”) and “learn to regard life and death, sickness and health, riches and poverty, fame and slander with equal indifference.”82 Giving up self-love as well as the nihilism of love of self ’s pleasure, of self-enrichment, moves beyond the economics of capitalism and hospitality and of life and death. It achieves a pure hospitality for it gives everything, even life, and expects nothing, for it is not possible to return something to the impossible, to the subjectless human indifferent to pleasure, to the self, to death. We can now hear Rousseau’s opening pronouncement in the The Confessions (1782) differently, not as some kind of self-aggrandizement or self-preservationism, but as the achievement of a speculative world outside the state of nature/society aporia: “I am unlike any one I have ever met; I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world.”83 He is like no one because he has no will to either self-preservation or species extinction; he exists in a postapocalyptic world of political and ethical possibility. No longer dead in society, he is now in an extro-fictional state that subscribes to no mores, laws, or reality that we know, a contingent state in which anything can happen, even life.

Romantic postapocalyptic politics Like agents Mulder and Scully, the star-obsessed lovers in The X-Files who “want to believe” in a different world, in different ontologies of beings, Rousseau’s work explores alternate alien realities in its reimagining of this aporia. Such beliefs occur, on Rousseau’s telling, only once humans leave the Garden of Eden and enter the state of nature. He configures his version of the state of nature as explicitly postapocalyptic, divorced from romanticism’s traditional, apocalyptic yearning for a newly revealed paradise borne of revolution (apocalypsis means “revelation”). Romanticism, for Rousseau, exists after biblical apocalypse: “it is clear from the Holy Scriptures that the first man [Adam in Eden], having received his understanding and commandments immediately from God, was not himself in such a state [of nature].”84 In eschewing romantic apocalypse, the notion of refinding paradise, Rousseau avoids Meillassoux’s correlationist trap by engaging in romantic postapocalyptic thought experiments that remove anthropocentricism as the axiological Enlightenment guarantee for the success of any political social contract.85 Contingency is key. In his discussion of fiction in the Reveries, Rousseau writes that “to lie to one’s own advantage is an imposture, to lie to the advantage of others is a fraud, and to lie to the detriment of others is a slander—this is the worst kind of lie. To lie without advantage or disadvantage to oneself or others is not to lie; it is not falsehood but fiction.”86 He goes on, “fictions which have a moral end in view are called parables or fables.”87 The irony of Rousseau’s final fable, its extro-science fiction—a fiction where anything can happen however unlikely—of giving up on the self totally, the self ’s importance, the self ’s happiness, and embracing a complete indifference to self, seeking no advantage or disadvantage, is that the time when we give up on the self is the very moment when the world becomes more with us precisely when it is

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most without us—speculative realism par excellance. For politics is only a human belief predicated on humans’ own ability to fabulize, to fictionalize a society that lies about life and how to keep it living. This politics acts to our great disadvantage in that death is the only possible end, unlike Rousseau’s extro-science fiction aporia in which anything can happen, even a reprieve from death by thinking in terms of the immortality of this mortal life. Rousseau’s extro-science fictional speculative space, free of the fictions of any self-regard, begins to glimpse a genuine event, the appearance of a self-less social contract, one that locates the object of its politics as more than human, as focused on more than the death we are living in society, concerned neither with human species preservation or human pleasure derived from wealth, commodities, land, or even the power wielded by the slaving victor. If extro-science fiction envisions worlds that function radically different than the reality we have inherited from the Enlightenment, then a politics predicated on a self-less social contract would complete the project of postapocalyptic romanticism’s nonanthropocentric dream. A  selfless social-contract politics would allow us to do more than just live on, as it were, by perpetually dying in society. Death becomes a nonissue, not included as a clause in this radically hospitable social contract that is, rather, focused on the immortality of this life, for humans and the nonhuman other. The final irony of such a politics shows us that it is not even possible to learn how to die in the Anthropocene because, having inhospitably maintained an anthropocentric social contract, we have never yet been alive.

Notes 1 Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” The New York Times, November 10, 2013. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/learninghow-to-die-in-the-anthropocene/. See also his book: Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2015). Accessed October 15, 2017. 2 Timothy Morton endorses Scranton’s idea. Ecology without Nature. http:// ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2015/12/i-cant-stand-it-no-more-i-have-to-say. html. Accessed October 15, 2017. 3 Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (Winter 2013), 347–66. 4 For Harman this is a problem with philosophy in general: “As philosophers we tend to favor very slow-moving arguments. Other fields do not have this luxury—there are urgent problems to which they are trying to respond. Philosophy is the least urgent discipline because we’re dealing with long-term, subtle, slow conceptual changes that might not have much impact for a long time.” Liesbeth Koot and Menno Grootveld, “Interview with Graham Harman on the Anthropocene,” Sonic Arts Research Series #10, Sonic Arts. http://sonicacts.com/portal/anthropocene-objects-art-and-politics-1. Accessed October 15, 2017. The editors of The Speculative Turn wonder the same: “A more serious issue for the new realisms and materialisms is the question of whether they can provide any grounds or guidelines for ethical and political action. Can they justify normative ideals? Or do they not rather evacuate the ground for all

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intentional action, thereby proposing a sort of political quietism? What new forms of political organization can be constructed on the basis of the ideas emerging from this movement?” (p. 16). Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.), “Towards a Speculative Philosophy,” in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re:press, 2011), 1–18. Whether this “might-makes-right” idea recurs in Latour’s later work is beyond the scope of this essay. Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014). Ibid., 18. Ibid., 19. Latour writes, “reactionary thinkers are more interesting than the progressive ones . . . in that you learn more about politics from people like Machiavelli and Schmitt than from Rousseau.” Quoted in Bruno Latour, 133. I use “Hobbes” as something of a stand-in for libertarianism throughout this essay. Hobbes obviously thinks that we must form a strong monarchical government. But “Hobbes” here serves as a descriptor for his view that humans in the state of nature are all at war—the libertarian view of unrestrained individualism freed from any government restraint. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, Or Treatise on Education, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1997), 11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, trans. Franklin Philip (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 37. I have modified this translation (E, 5). In the state of nature, by contrast, humans are “accustomed from infancy to bad weather and the harshness of the seasons, inured to fatigue . . . and develop a robust and nearly inalterable constitution” (DI, 27). Once they leave the state of nature and alter the climate everything goes to hell and this is why, in Émile, Rousseau advocates physically preparing students to deal with the weather, the climates, the seasons. Maurice Cranston also refers to that state as “anarchic” and notes how much of the Discourse is a direct response to Hobbes. Rousseau’s little-known text “The State of War” helps clarify his intensive engagement with Hobbes. Rousseau, “The State of War,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), 253–65. Cranston, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Early Life and Work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1754 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 294–5. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 229. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. Christopher Betts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 45. This is Derrida’s conclusion about Rousseau’s dream-work: “To the extent that he belonged to the metaphysics of presence, he dreamed of the simple exteriority of death to life, evil to good, representation to presence, signifier to signified, representer to represented, mask to face, writing to speech. But all such oppositions are irreducibly rooted in that metaphysics. Using them, one can only operate by reversals, that is to say by confirmations. The supplement is none of these terms. It is especially not more a signifier than a signified, a representer than a presence, a writing than a speech.” Derrida, Of Grammatology, 255–68.

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17 Rousseau, “The State of War,” The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), 253–65, 256. 18 Ibid., 256. 19 Rousseau, Discourse, 15. 20 Meillassoux, Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015). 21 Quentin Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 224–87. 22 Paul de Man, “Shelley Disfigured,” The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 93–123. “The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida’s Reading of Rousseau,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 102–41. For its monumentalization, see: Orrin Wang, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 37–68. 23 Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, eds. John P. Muller and William J. Richardson (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 28–54, 32. 24 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (London: Mimesis International, 2014), 28. 25 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Bloomsbury, 2006), 60. 26 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 25. 27 Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 168. 28 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 64. 29 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 19. 30 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 70. 31 Ibid., 75. 32 “The presence-absence of the trace, which one should not even call its ambiguity but rather its play . . . carries in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and soul, and all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, 71). 33 Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, 3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 68. 34 Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Point…Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 255–87, 280–1. 35 Excerpts of Meillassoux’s unpublished L’Inexistence divine, where he makes this claim, can be found in Harman’s book, L’Inexistence divine, 236–7. 36 Ibid., 265–6. 37 Ibid., 250. 38 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Melville House, 2011). 39 Rousseau, Discourse, 47. 40 Meillassoux, L’Inexistence divine, 250. 41 See Derrida, Of Grammatology. De Man, “Metaphor (Second Discourse),” in Allegories of Reading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979).

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42 Rousseau, Discourse, 34–5. Rousseau similarly writes, “so does the child become man when he opens himself to “the consciousness of death.” (Émile, p. 2o) [p. 15]. 43 It is language, Rousseau writes, that distinguishes human from animal. Derrida has already pointed out the deconstructive aporia at work in such a claim in Of Grammatology. 44 “[T]he true founder of civil society was the first man who, having enclosed a piece of land, thought of saying, ‘this is mine,’ and came across people simple enough to believe him” (Rousseau, Discourse, 55). 45 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:136. 46 Rousseau, Discourse, 32–3. 47 “Speech differentiates man from other animals.” Rousseau, Essay on the Origin of Languages, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 247–99, 248. 48 Rousseau, Discourse, 33. 49 Rousseau, Social Contract, 55. 50 Rousseau, Émile, 52. 51 Derrida, Of Grammatology, 229. 52 Jean Jacques-Rousseau, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” in The Basic Political Writings, 2nd edn., trans. Donald A. Cress (New York: Hackett, 2011), 1–26, 23. As David Wooten remarks, this text is necessary to understand how Rousseau’s project stems from a direct engagement with Hobbes. “State of War,” 254. 53 Rousseau, “State of War,” 254. 54 Ibid., 255. 55 Ibid., 264. 56 Ibid., 256. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 258. 59 Ibid., 265. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid., 259. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 264. 66 Ibid., 265. 67 Ibid., 263. 68 Rousseau, Émile, 300. 69 Ibid., 300. 70 Peter Melville has shown us how hospitality crisscrosses all of Rousseau’s thinking. Melville, Romantic Hospitality and the Resistance to Accommodation (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2007). 71 On hospitality and the gift, see: Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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72 73 74 75 76

Melville, Romantic Hospitality, 47. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker (London: Hackett), 97. Melville, Romantic Hospitality, 23–4. Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 98. Ibid., 97. As he writes later in this text, this exchange is strictly Eurocentric: “I have noticed that only in Europe is hospitality put up for sale” (Ibid., 151). Ibid., 97. Ibid., 98. Rousseau, Émile, 234. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise, trans. by Philip Stewart and Jean Vache (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 1997), 30–31. Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 130. Ibid., 130–1. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin, 1953), 17. Ibid., 24. Rousseau was adamant that his thinking was not utopian. Cranston, The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1754–1762 (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991), 311. Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker, 69. Ibid.

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Astral guts: The nemocentric self in Byron and Brassier Aaron Ottinger

Between zero and Juan Lord Byron refers to the eponymous hero of Don Juan (1819–24) as “real or ideal,— / For both are much the same” (10.20.153).1 This equivocation between real and ideal calls to mind the relationship between objects and their formal or mathematical concepts, a connection Byron reinforces when he claims, regarding Dante, that Beatrice was “Meant to personify the mathematics” (3.11.88). Accordingly, I take the reference to real and ideal as indicative of the poem’s central problem:  If a figure changes, is this change only a difference in the human mind, or is the figure’s formal essence also subject to change? It was an important distinction in the long eighteenth century, for even nominalists held, without recourse to abstract Platonic forms, that a square is the same in all times and places.2 Indeed, it is a problem at the heart of the nature of representing, representation, the human self, and time. Byron’s position on the real/ideal divide can be further extrapolated from his protagonist’s name. The first two lines of the poem establish the well-known pattern forcing “Don Juan” simultaneously to obscure and rhyme with the number one:  “I want a hero: an uncommon want, / When every year and month sends forth a new one” (1.1.1). In the fifth stanza, the name follows the word “none” and precedes “one,” locating Don Juan on a number line between zero and one. The metrical rhyme reinforces Juan’s fuzziness. As Jim Cocola recounts, Byron varies the sound of Juan, from “Joo-uhn” to Joo-wan”: “the indeterminate sonic structure of Don Juan’s name rests somewhere between the traditionally ascribed English mispronunciation ‘Dahn Joo-uhn’ and the more conventional Spanish pronunciation, ‘Don Hwan.’ ”3 No doubt, the difference in the figure of Don Juan implies a change in the word, and the difference appears to follow from Byron’s adaptation. Yet Don Juan emerges, not from the past alone, but also from the underworld, “Sent to the devil, somewhat ere his time” (1.1.8). In his reintroduction, Don Juan breaches the divide between life and death, and it is on account of this rupture that Don Juan changes on a conceptual level. Accordingly, the first half of my argument is that Don Juan is conceptually mathematical and indeterminate. Don Juan neither identifies with nor fits his referent,

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which equates to the difference between a geometrical figure (a square) and its mathematical concept (four right angles). A  difference in the representational Don Juan does not imply a necessary difference in the concept. But it also does not preclude the possibility that Don Juan the concept is multiple and changing. This claim is tantamount to a disavowal of Platonic forms, which Byron references (15.5.40). And yet, as I will demonstrate, this disavowal does not commit Byron to reducing concepts to the human sense of words. Rather, concepts are something in between. Arriving at this view requires a darker look at the epistemological origins of Don Juan, or put another way, the figure’s relationship to the self. As represented in the text, one might explain Don Juan’s appearance as coinciding with the cognitive act of selection, reflection, or some version of intellectual intuition. But, as the second part of my argument stresses, Byron links his representation with the horror of the gut.4 It is an altogether different sensorium upon which the mind depends, not the other way around: “who / Would pique himself on intellects, whose use / Depends so much upon the gastric juice?” (5.32.254–6). My position is indebted in part to recent work by Elizabeth Wilson, who espouses a scientific approach to the gut and its role in determining the human psyche and behavior.5 Moreover, Philip Martin emphasizes the role of the gut in Don Juan, arguing that the mind is subordinated to the body.6 Byron goes farther still, suggesting that, if a conceptual framework of thought was opened up to the gut, what emerges at first only as a split representation (Dahn Joo-uhn and Don Hwan) does not necessarily evince a coincident split in the subject, between a present, naïve self and a removed, contemplative self. Rather, on account of Don Juan’s ongoing change, the conceptual framework might link to something altogether more chaotic: “mind is lost in mighty contemplation / Of intellect expended on two courses [immanence and transcendence]; / And indigestion’s grand multiplication / Requires arithmetic beyond my forces” (15.69.545–8). For Byron, the mind is geometrical, while the gut belongs to astronomical numbers. The significance for Byron is that digestion and cognition operate according to two separate mathematical domains. And Don Juan, I contend, is an expression of the more chaotic realm which aims to render the latter (consciousness) concomitant with the former (mindless processes). Indeed, as the present essay articulates, Don Juan is not the result of the narrator’s discerning powers of selection, but the unconscious manifestation of the gut’s nonconceptual reality, which functions as the disturbance overwriting the structure of knowing that the concept/object identity would otherwise reinforce. In linking the figure of Don Juan to the structure of the subject, my reading of “Don Juan” intersects with recent responses to the post-structuralist interpretation of romanticism, of the kind following Paul de Man’s link between allegory and the self. De Man’s well-known subordination of symbol to allegory as the dominant figure of romanticism marks an attempt to cut through the conflation of concepts and objects by including time. But when de Man rejects the “reconciliation between the ideal and the real as the result of an action or the activity of the mind,” he only objects to the final synthesis, preferring instead an endless dialectic.7 Thereby, de Man inaugurates an optimistic view of romanticism, which Jerome Christensen claims in his study of Byron, “will never amount to a final word.”8 However, several romanticist scholars have

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applied renewed pressure on this post-structuralist outlook in light of recent speculative theories investigating the problems finitude poses for a never-ending dialectic.9 In Evan Gottlieb’s view, Ray Brassier “uses contemporary materialism as grounds for embracing a nihilism so complete that there is no remainder.”10 Additionally, Chris Washington links the lineage briefly outlined above to Quentin Meillassoux’s “correlationism,” or the idea that we only have access to objects through our representations of them.11 In the present essay, I  find a stronger affinity between Byron’s Don Juan and Brassier’s link between the concept/object divide and his “radicalization of eliminativism,” or the fulfilment of the self ’s demystification.12 Still, it is worth fleshing out the differences between these two theorists before proceeding, especially on account of the many parallels between de Man and Meillassoux. As explained by Brassier, who translated Meillassoux’s Après la finitude (2006) into English, correlationism is “the philosopheme according to which the human and the non-human, society and nature, mind and world, can only be understood as reciprocally correlated, mutually interdependent poles of a fundamental relation.”13 This endless chain of reciprocal signification—a hallmark of postmodern culture and theory since the work of de Man—in fact, stretches back to Descartes’s belief in the separation between mind and body, Locke’s claim regarding primary and secondary qualities, and the immaterialism of George Berkeley, of whom Byron writes: “When Bishop Berkeley said, ‘there was no matter’, / And proved it  – . . . What a sublime discovery ‘twas to make the / Universe universal Egotism! / That all’s ideal—all ourselves” (11.1.1-2, 11.2.1–2). Indeed, for eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, Berkeley represented the paragon of idealism:  Everything is reduced to mind. Brassier also critiques Berkeley on this point, yet he stresses that Meillassoux’s correlationism coincides less with Berkeley and more with Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Despite the similarity of their immaterialist ends, Fichte is the mature “architect of the correlationist circle,” writes Brassier, because [by] construing the correlation as a self-positing and thereby self-grounding act, Fichte seals the circle of correlation against any incursion of dogmatically positive exteriority—in other words, he eliminates the thing-in-itself. For Fichte, the non-I through which the I  is affected is merely the posited residue of the absolute I’s free and spontaneous act of self-positing. Thus, it is Fichte who uncovers the full idealist potency of transcendental reflection by tracking the power of positing back to its source in the unobjectifiable activity of the absolute ego.14

Denying anteriority and exteriority, Fichte lays out the conditions for a self-enclosed reality, where anything posited by the self is also for the self. Thereby, the stage is set for death’s transcendence and the concomitant never-ending story critics have detected in Byron’s Don Juan and romanticism more generally. Likewise, for Meillassoux, there is no way out of this Fichtean (correlationist) model of the self. Rather, he stresses that the “self-grounding act” is a “free act,” which is “to recognize, after Descartes, that our subjectivity cannot reach an absolute necessity.”15 Thus the distinction between concepts and objects is upheld—the correlationist is actually a realist but only with

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respect to the power of the postulate, “or act of self-positing”—and our knowledge of the latter (objects) ensues from an act independent of both (objects and concepts). Brassier singles out for critique the privileged act of self-reflection (the postulate). For scholars of romanticism, this rebuke should be regarded as an indictment of Fichte, his theologically oriented analogue in England, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and to a lesser extent, William Wordsworth. My purpose in the present essay is to determine if Byron also belongs to this list, and if not, what alternative can he offer speculatively invested images of romanticism today. In other words, “What can Byron teach us about speculative philosophy?” a question entirely ignored in M. H. Abrams’s philosophical reading of the period.16 And the criterion guiding this investigation is, to start, Brassier’s criticism of correlationism: the refutation of transcendental realism cannot rest on the ambiguous division between the mathematical and formal conditions underlying a reflective human subject and the laws of nature.17 In short, human acts do not operate according to a special set of laws irrespective of the universe. But without privileging human construction, how does one distinguish between words/things and concepts/ objects? And what are we to make of those discoveries which seem to disrupt these binaries, represented today by efforts to demystify the mind, thereby reducing selfhood to objecthood. To some extent, Byron anticipates answers to these questions. To appreciate his more realist and vatic outlook, it is necessary to examine in greater detail Don Juan’s epistemological source, thereby addressing the nerve of Brassier’s project: “why [are] those who are so keen to attribute absolute or unconditional reality to the activities of self-consciousness . . . so loath to confer equal existential rights upon the unconscious, mindless processes through which consciousness and mindedness first emerged and will eventually be destroyed.”18 Given Brassier’s indictment, it behooves us to revisit the narrator’s selection of Don Juan in greater detail. Through this exploration, I will demonstrate that Don Juan is not a figure “for” the narrator, acquitting Byron of fostering an anti-realist tendency. Figuration is no less an act, but as Brassier would insist, after Sellars, it is an act of inference, irrespective of volition or the will.19 The asymmetrical relationship between narrator and figure, ultimately negates the former (narrator) in a process of mapping the underlying complexities of the latter (figure).20 Put another way, Don Juan is a representation that rewrites the relationship to the formal and mathematical underpinnings from which a narrator/self emerges. Last, I will turn to the consequences of this revision and outline Byron’s aspirations for a new, “astral” level of sapience, resulting from a strange relationship between the conceptual domain and the blood and guts undergirding it—without synthesizing them “for us”— thereby inaugurating a conceptual, temporal difference.

Eaten by his own dinner Byron’s narrator appears to occupy what could be construed as a “view from nowhere.” He traverses the length of the poem, addressing matters inside and out, from the present and retrospectively, and he even joins in the action, as in the dinner scenes in

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England (15.66). More revealing, as Leslie Marchand observes, are those comments from the narrator that belong not to a “persona” but to “Byron himself, which he takes no pains to disguise.”21 No doubt, as a conduit for characters unrevealed within the text (and where is the narrator at these moments?), and operating in different registers and from different points in time, the narrator is unconstrained by the normal laws of where, when, and who one can be. For Brassier, this view from nowhere implies the ability to traffic between versions of the self, from a first-person perspective to something approximating a thirdperson or “first-object” perspective.22 It is a “nemocentric” view of selfhood, or a “non-phenomenologically centered model of reality,” a role Brassier reserves for the philosophical subject:23 [Philosophy] should exploit the mobility that is one of the rare advantages of abstraction . . . to shuttle back and forth between images, establishing conditions of transposition, rather than synthesis, between the speculative anomalies thrown up within the order of phenomenal manifestation, and the metaphysical quandaries generated by the sciences’ challenge to the manifest order.24

At first, the closest comparison to Brassier’s idea of a nemocentric view would seem to be the narrator of Euclid’s Elements. According to James Harris, in Hermes or a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751), the text contains “neither First person, nor Second” and “the reason is, that neither Speaker nor Party addressed . . . can possibly become the Subject of pure Mathematics, nor indeed can anything else, except abstract Quantity, which neither speaks itself nor is spoken to by another.25 Harris pinpoints an eighteenth-century version of the nemocentric perspective. But Brassier’s updated version is more complicated because it includes the “mindless processes” supporting this conceptual domain without synthesizing them. Thus, if there is a comparison to be made between Brassier’s nemocentric self and Byron’s narrator, it is incumbent upon us to illustrate how the narrator shuttles back and forth between images without separating this plane of abstraction from the body, but also without identifying them. Such an inquiry requires a look into the fundamental structure of identifying and differentiating, a power afforded to the narrator in selecting his hero. Ultimately, outlining these steps will provide a clearer explanation as to how the narrator migrates across registers and the temporal repercussions that follow. Marjorie Levinson elucidates the act of selection in her reading of romantic fragment poetry: “All speech—and certainly all poetry” she posits, with respect to Wordsworth, “delineates arbitrarily, wantonly, a circle of significant representations and pretends to discover what it in fact produces by its curtailments.”26 Levinson means that the poet necessarily excludes other representations in the construction of a figure. Byron differs from other romantic-era writers, according to Levinson’s reading of The Giaour (1813), in that the narrator selects a tale from history to translate.27 Similarly, in Don Juan, the narrator pulls Juan from history but not before sorting through a list of contemporary candidates:  “Vernon, the butcher Cumberland, Wolfe, Hawke, / Prince Ferdinand, Granby, Burgoyne, Keppel, Howe, Evil and good, have had their tithe of talk” (1.2.9–11).

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Excluding these would-be heroes, the narrator nominates Don Juan, and as Levinson might offer, what is really excluded are not the would-be contemporary heroes but the historical context surrounding the traditional Don Juan figure. It could certainly be argued that in the act of selection, the narrator self-reflexively incorporates the object and in reflection, distances himself from it, achieving the sense of a “moment,” or a form of reflection often represented as a scene severed from history. No doubt, Don Juan’s nomination removes him from the meaningless rubble of history (a thing turned word) and reactivates him as a figure with existential properties. This is the reading Levinson critiques, all in the name of historicism. However, this interpretation assumes that the narrator actually selects Don Juan and that Don Juan is a figure “for” the narrator. In the dinner scene of canto 15, Byron qualifies the narrator’s earlier selection of Don Juan, namely when the narrator selects a bite to eat. For several stanzas, the narrator lists the foods on display, “Fowls à la Condé, slices eke of salmon” and so forth (15.65.513). The listing recalls the narrator’s enumeration of contemporary figures at the poem’s beginning, and once again, the narrator enters the process of selection. But in surveying his options, the guiding metaphor’s implication of bounty and life, recalls a grimmer link to eating. “To be or not to be” the narrator claims, is bound up with “digestion” and “Indigestion”: “that inward fate / Which makes all Styx through one small liver flow” (9.14.105, 9.15.116–17). The allusion to a hellish seascape is less surprising if “that inward fate” splits the subject, thereby relocating the void behind the self to the stomach. More impressive is the power Byron ascribes to the gut. Rather than a passive reservoir to be filled, it is a strange muse, whose own “stomach’s not her peccant part: this tale / However doth require some slight refection, / Just to relieve her spirits from dejection” (15.64.510–12). The pun on “peccant” is a bawdy distraction from the more abject point that Byron’s muse resides in the river of hell separating life and death—and still needs to be fed. No doubt, Byron’s image of the muse—a diseased border figure—is vampiric. For the narrator, eating thereby becomes more like forcefeeding. The narrator acquiesces at mealtime against his better judgment, ingesting “things I can’t withstand or understand, / Though swallow’d with much zest upon the whole” (15.66.523–4). The dinner party scene then turns a shade more nightmarish, as it becomes difficult to distinguish the dinner from the diner: “The guests were placed according to their role, / But various as the various meats display’d” (15.74.587–8). The narrator carries it well, but he has already admitted to his passive role. He is a vessel through which a vampiric gut operates, and in this state, the appearance of selection must be something altogether different, less like digestion and more like indigestion, or the inability to process external-sense data from beyond the grave. For Byron, the process of selection serves as a step toward the gradual dissolution of the egocentric model of self-consciousness. This gesture toward the self ’s dissolution anticipates an additional feature yoking together the speculative realists: the human subject’s removal from a central position within a philosophical outlook. It is part of a project of demystification stretching back to Hume and extending to contemporary brain science.28 Thomas Metzinger, a point of reference among speculative realists, claims that the first-person perspective, or the “phenomenal Ego is not some

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mysterious thing or little man inside the head but the content of an inner image— namely, the conscious self-model.”29 Metzinger concludes that there is no self: it’s an illusion. Of course, we have a sense of self, and in this regard, it serves as an important historical point of reference in the evolution of consciousness. But against a much larger evolutionary background, it may be negligible. “Don Juan,” if it can be regarded as an image of the self-model, indexes a stage in which the self stands on unstable ground, for the so-called self ’s postulating mechanism is grounded in the mathematical maelstrom of the gut. Thereby, the self that selects takes a backseat to the vampire that chews/chooses through him. Brassier, to be clear, is not interested in the gut—at least not explicitly. He is interested in the processes according to which representations are made, and the binding of representing to representations (without reducing them to the same). In joining mindless processes and abstract conceptual framework, there is no room for the personal, subjective histories normally attributed to the self. Brassier’s solution to the mind/world divide thereby differs from the binding of sense and being.30 This route was already the path of eighteenth-century empiricists and nominalists. For the likes of Berkeley and Hartley, following Locke, the language of nature could be shaped according to the artificial language of humans, namely mathematics, as mediated by the senses.31 Plus, because this process begins axiomatically from a tabula rasa, everything becomes human from the ground up, thereby securing an image of idealism and the indefinite or ongoing dialectic between mind and nature. Thus, if Byron’s narrator could access the gut, forcing it to conform to conventional language, it would become yet another thing for us. But by maintaining its inscrutable mathematical complexity, Byron treats it as wholly other. Still, this qualification does not explain the gut’s power over the self and its strange relationship to representations (Don Juan). In the next section, I want to explore what powers the gut and establishes its hold on the conceptual framework of the narrator, rendering the act of selection into a form of ingression.

Into darkness In canto 9, Byron further complicates the relationship between the word that becomes a thing and the self that recovers it as a figure. After scorning Britain’s imperial efforts, the narrator interrupts the Don Juan narrative several more times before acknowledging that he’s lost his train of ideas, hastening to add: “But let it [the thought] go”: —it will one day be found With all the other relics of a “former world,” When this world shall be former, underground, Thrown topsy-turvy, twisted, crisped, and curled Baked, fried, or burnt, turned inside-out, or drowned, Like all the worlds before, which have been hurled First out of and then back again to Chaos, The Superstratum which will overlay us. (9.37)

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For Byron, the universe is layers upon layers of elements, matter, and even thoughts, punctuated by black holes and held together by a “Superstratum,” or “Chaos.” The link I am trying to establish is between this image of a thought “hurled” inside and out of chaos, and the relationship between Don Juan and the gut. The mediator tying them together, as I have argued, is a variation on selection, one that makes an instrument out of the narrator’s self. Now I wish to suggest that the comparison between the gut and death or an abyssal chaos be taken more seriously. The comparison modifies the act of selection by extending the poles between recent history and Don Juan to extinction and a thought that “will one day be found.” This scalar change rewrites the structure of selection, qualifying the relationship between narrator and figure, mind and nature. It is also a step on the way to defusing any charge of fostering an eternal dialectic between mind and nature and decisively sidestepping the correlationist circle. To include chaos in the act of selection anticipates Brassier’s response to the mind/nature correlate. As Brassier points out, “roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion (101728) years from now,” the universe will expand beyond its ability to sustain life of any kind.32 And thus, he stresses the parameters separating being and nothing, the annihilation of space and time as we know it, or what he refers to as “being-nothing” (the real, or an unobjectifiable essence).33 What Brassier takes as scientific fact is a truth rendering philosophy (and thus the philosopher) “the organon of extinction.”34 Extinction, as a concept, seizes or grips the subject.35 It does so by introducing a wholly other temporal element into the picture of the mind. Because this death marks the end of all ends, extinction can never be incorporated within a correlationist circle, and instead, “extinction indexes the thought of the absence of thought.”36 In my view, this maneuver reverses Locke’s position that personal identity begins with a tabula rasa, and that human consciousness thus proceeds axiomatically. Instead, from the perspective of extinction, Brassier insists, the world has already unfolded, everything has already happened, and therefore the universe, including human thought, can be outlined according to propositional logic. Accordingly, the self as an existential being, replete with feelings, an inner-life, and memories, is reduced to the same information as other things. As Brassier announces, rather more baldly than lugubriously, we are “already dead.”37 The question is, does Byron’s image of a universe swallowing and spitting back ideas conflict with Brassier’s axiomatic look at a universe with a definitive end? If so, Byron may be accused of harboring an image of eternal recurrence. The question can be laid to rest by turning to Byron’s “Darkness” (1817), in which everything perishes, for “Darkness had no need / Of aid from them—She was the universe” (81–2). This response is unsatisfying though because it dismisses the narrator’s comment in “Don Juan” that the idea will return. Rather, it is worth considering how Byron can maintain an image of finitude and an image of repetition without the pitfalls of idealism. As a testing ground, it is worth turning to Byron’s image of previous extinctions here on earth. In canto 9, Byron provides an image in between cosmic extinction and the earth’s accretion:  terrestrial extinction. Citing the geologist George Cuvier, the narrator explains that a “new Creation” will arise from “our” wasted remains. He imagines a

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human-like culture, but one that looks back on present-day relics like “monsters of a new Museum” (9.40.320). With a similar retrospective view, he assesses the humans that already occupy the earth: (For they themselves will be but of the least: Even worlds miscarry, when too oft they pup, And every new Creation hath decreased In size, from overworking the material— Men are but maggots of some huge Earth’s burial). (9.39.308–12)

Entire worlds beget miscarriages and humans emerge from the refuse, not as willful creatures oriented according to future progress but as creatures of reaction, feeding on death’s remains. So in Byron’s geohistorical outlook, extinction precedes life, and the latter (life) does not produce but feeds on the former (death). Geological history proceeds according to a strange, backward, axiomatic history, in which humans are only an iteration of inorganic matter. Byron’s reference to a future race coupled with the image of humans as the remainder of some distant extinction, emphasizes the fact that humans are artifacts of history, and that any existential thing is an accident in the algorithm of the universe. The compulsion to repeat is not synonymous with eternal recurrence, in Byron or in Brassier’s work, because the agent of repetition is not the act of a willful poet but the result of inorganic processes, churning up the dead, and in its indigestion, life hurls forth. Indeed, for Brassier, extinction marks a kind of backward birth, providing the conditions for an “organism’s ability to reproduce and die.”38 The process, which extinction inaugurates, motivates the “compulsion to repeat,” despite the impossibility of being “satisfactorily repeated,” because this birth occurs prior to life.39 But the process is inscribed into our very cellular makeup, a speculative biological notion Brassier borrows from Freud: A primitive organic vesicle [a cell] becomes capable of filtering the continuous and potentially lethal torrent of external stimuli by sacrificing part of itself in order to erect a protective shield against excessive influxes of excitation [which] effects a definitive separation between organic interiority and inorganic exteriority . . . Thus, individuated organic life is won at the cost of this aboriginal death whereby the organism first becomes capable of separating itself from the inorganic outside.40

For Brassier, humans are in a continual process of shielding themselves at the molecular level, which takes the form of a drive toward inorganic matter, the “death drive” that is made manifest in the “will to know.” Byron shares this double-edged sword. It reveals itself on a precipice, looking into the abyss below, a “lurking bias, be it truth or error, / To the unknown; a secret prepossession, / To plunge with all your fears—” (14.6.45–7). This “prepossession” for Brassier is captured in Freud’s dictum that “the aim of all life is death.”41 But, qualifying this would-be telos of life, Brassier

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posits that death “is not a past or future state towards which life tends,” rather “the only temporality commensurate with it is that of the ‘anterior posteriority’ proper to physical death as that which seizes organic temporality, but which cannot be seized by it.”42 Death, “round him, near him, here, there, every where” (14.5.33) is representative of noumenal time, unconstrained by sense perception’s chronological time, which is only a burp, yawn, or “Pooh!” interrupting oblivion:  Apparently, “All present life is but an interjection,” even on a cosmic scale (15.1.7, 5). But the process does end, for it is the end that conditions these chance happenings in between. In other words, neither Byron nor Brassier can be charged with fostering hopes of an eternal or infinite recurrence. Chaos is the superstratum. Ultimately, the process of the dead ushering in life on meso- and macroscales can inform how the narrator’s postulate works and how Don Juan becomes separate as well as multiple. Brassier provides an additional clue, tying the knot between the gut and extinction. Drawing once again on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Brassier claims that extinction is a trauma registered by the unconscious, and only as the “un-dampened excess of excitation.”43 The phrase recalls Byron’s view of the gut producing multiplicities of information beyond the power of arithmetic to render knowable. Indeed, the indigestion of the vampiric and inaccessible agent behind the narrator’s actions is compatible to Brassier’s image of “the originary traumatic scission between organic and inorganic” matter, which “demands to be integrated into the psychic economy of the organism but which cannot.”44 It cannot, Byron and Brassier would say, because this scission occurs at the intersection of life arising from dead matter, or at the meso-point of terrestrial extinction, the macro-point of the cosmic extinction, and at the local point of Don Juan’s appropriation from history. Accordingly, indigestion, the inability to process organic matter “for us,” is the material manifestation of the trauma tracing the separation between organic and inorganic matter, and Don Juan is the result. He is the figure the narrator appears to select from a historical point in time, but as a figure from the dead, he more adequately fits the impossible bond between the geological ages extinction punctuates and the gut materializes. Therefore, he is already multiple (“Joo-uhn” and Joo-wan”), not on account of a difference in the narrator but on account of the “un-dampened excess” from which he emerges. This figure, though, is disastrous.45 He springs from the chaotic indefinite quantities of the bowels, and in the compulsion to repeat, to this chaos he attempts to return. This drive to relive the trauma of being plucked from history moves the poem ever closer to a new bond, between the realm of abstraction and the nonconceptual processes that produce it. In this drive forward, “Don Juan” rewrites the structural relationship to nonconceptual reality. The evidence is in the narrator’s transpositions from within the poem. As the narrator’s location becomes increasingly open and loose, it evinces Don Juan’s restructuring of the narrator’s conceptual framework that is the poem’s form. The narrator bears witness to this process. But because he also belongs to it, as representation and representing are drawn together, it is the narrator who will be torn apart.

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(G)astronomical difference Don Juan’s trajectory charts the rewriting of the poem’s fundamental structure and thus the narrator’s self-model. In his pursuit of his own formal reality, the immeasurable quantities undergirding his existence, Juan pushes the poem forward achieving a new kind of knowing. Byron elucidates the enterprise in his meditation on Newton’s demystification of cosmic forces: Man fell with apples, and with apples rose, If this be true; for we must deem the mode In which Sir Isaac Newton could disclose Through the then unpaved stars the turnpike road, A thing to counterbalance human woes; For ever since immortal man hath glowed With all kinds of mechanics, and full soon Steam-engines will conduct him to the moon. (10.2)

Byron refers to Newton’s explication of gravity, which refigured the motion of the planets as a mechanical and mathematized process, thereby raising the power of humankind to think things in a formalized way. Byron imagines something similar for humans. The stanza recalls canto 3 of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1816), where Byron exaggerates the image of “steam engines” conducting people to the “moon,” referring instead to stars as “the poetry of heaven! . . .  —‘tis to be forgiven, / That in our aspirations to be great, / Our destinies o’erleap their mortal state” (3.88.824– 8). These techno-rational visions imply an aspiration that goes beyond “looking at stars forever.”46 Rather, Byron wishes to be astral.47 If his self-model is to “o’erleap” the mortal state of humankind, then the aim is an eternal-like state, as represented by a celestial object, like a star (“man hath glowed”). This position should not be mistaken for an avowal of “eternal life,” in a Christian, theological sense. It should be regarded as the end of human life as it is currently recognized and the introduction of a fundamental difference, not an “ontological” difference but, as Brassier would offer, a “methodological” one.48 To aim for such a futuristic, techno-rational image of the self is to fulfill a potential outcome of speculative realism, which Brassier outlines. Brassier claims that the main challenge for philosophy is to construct rules for thinking based on an understanding of the physical universe, bearing in mind that as human understanding changes, these rules require updating.49 Moreover, rules for thinking ought to change according to an updated understanding of the “ways in which we change the world.”50 Brassier recognizes that human actions, like the introduction of a “golem,” or an artificial life, can inaugurate “another kind of difference.”51 Accordingly, philosophy must struggle to grasp “the stratification of immanence, together with the involution of structures within the natural order.”52 This involution in Byron, begins with the selection of Don Juan:  the representation of a concept which reopens conceptual possibilities (Don

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Juan’s relationship to representing). And because Don Juan’s fundamental essence is tied to the rupture separating life and death, representing and represented, he is himself scarred by the break, rendering him multiple and changing. Rather than an inert and fixed figure then, Don Juan is hurled around the globe in search of that unknown from which he sprang. In the process, he also changes the world he inhabits, which has consequences for the structure of the self-model that gave rise to his initial appropriation. At issue is how Don Juan revises this structure or the poem’s form and the completion of Byron’s nemocentric self. The first ingredient Byron needs is speed. At the center of attention and at the height of his popularity, Juan “lived (not Death, but Juan) in a hurry / Of Waste, and haste, and glare, and gloss, and glitter” (10.26.201–2). The parenthetical reinforces the connection between Juan’s protean existence and his appropriation from a dead domain. But Juan is also becoming increasingly indefinite and changing, a shift exacerbated by adding movement and accelerating the model: Now there is nothing gives a man such spirits, Leavening his blood as Cayenne doth a curry, As going at full speed—no matter where its Direction be, so ’tis but in a hurry, And merely for the sake of its own merits: For the less cause there is for all this flurry, The greater is the pleasure in arriving At the great end of travel—which is driving. (10.72)

If there is a way to make the process of indigestion more explosive, add “Cayenne.” More to the point, as the pace accelerates, the scale of Don Juan’s travels widens (he covers multiple cities and states, from Poland to Holland, within the span of stanzas 60–3 in canto 10). This tendency to move at ever-greater speeds across the globe is significant because, the more nodes or points are connected, the more the world is reduced to an objectified whole.53 Indeed, Don Juan collapses here and there, now and then, like a train joining cities (or a steam engine linking celestial objects). To be present and absent simultaneously renders self-conscious existence, not exactly essential, but even more spontaneous. The process coincides with Brassier’s clearest explication of the emerging nemocentric self, that is, the “subject of a hypothetically completed neuroscience in which all the possible neural correlates of representational states have been identified [providing] an empirically situated and biologically embodied locus for the exhaustively objective ‘view from nowhere.’ ”54 This perspective is not a view from “outside” of reality. Rather, it implies a new stage in human evolution, in which the demystification of mind is won. This speculative view belongs to a legacy that encourages demystification through unification, albeit of a different kind for Brassier. Brassier limits himself to a tighter bond between sub-personal representing structure (“neural correlates”) and conceptual superstructure, separated only by the unincorporated rift extinction writes into their relationship. For Byron, Don Juan plays an essential feature in this collapse

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by altering the relation between locales, thereby tightening the parameters between representing and represented. It is worth emphasizing here that Don Juan does not reduce consciousness to a fixed or essentialized thing. Consciousness remains finite, but this—as Meillassoux’s title (After Finitude) suggests—is the liberating force, raising the question:  what kind of finitude? Jerome McGann points out that the poem was to end with Juan’s death in France.55 Even with this end in sight, Juan’s actions make the path to the poem’s final termination unpredictable. As Byron reminds us, whether Juan does this or that, “Is yet within the unread events of time. / Thus far, go forth, thou Lay! Which I  will back / Against the same given quantity of rhyme” (11.90.712–13). He then ends the succeeding canto with, “When the body of the book’s begun, / You’ll find it of a different construction / From what some people say ‘twill be when done” (12.87.689–90). The poem will “go forth,” not without end but also not ending within any foreseeable future. Furthermore, it will change, defying “construction[s]” based on what is already known: it is becoming what is unknown. And yet, the poem will remain formally consistent (“Against the same given quantity of rhyme”) in terms of the ottava rima, the mathematical form providing the objective framework for Byron’s epic. So, in at least one regard, the poem is read in the events of time. The unforeseen continuation of the poem, combined with the consistency of the form’s metrical or mathematical backbone, introduces a different difference. Byron at one point refers to an “in-difference,” which he calls wisdom, or the quelling of the passions (13.4.30). If this definition of indifference has any bearing on the poem, it could variously imply the diminution of the narrator’s passions, or the affective-ego; or it could imply the indefinite extension of the poem—at least, up until a point. It could also suggest the conjoining of these two ends, for the indefinite elongation of the “same quantity of rhyme” is none other than the axiomatization of the gut’s indigestion— that inscrutable chaos of astronomical numbers. Byron hints at his purpose when he compares what “Troy owes to Homer [to] what whist owes to Hoyle” (3.90.813): the former gave narrative to a historical event while the latter mathematically formalized a game of chance. If Byron sees himself in this lineage, it is because he is formalizing the history of the development of consciousness. He does not ground consciousness in an immediate present, the hic et nunc. Nor does he envision consciousness as part of an eternal paradise. Instead, Byron sees an algorithm of the gut, indefinitely churning its infinite quantities of information and expanding accordingly, thereby realizing rather than identifying with this dark underbelly. The gut is an astral figure, (almost) eternally feeding the algorithm that consciousness becomes. Don Juan, a datum sprung from hell, is the first crack inaugurating this weird formalization.56 If Newton’s mechanical illustration of planetary orbits disenchanted some with the stars (or rainbows, in the case of Keats), Byron’s axiomatization of the gut likewise runs the risk of disenchanting some with ourselves. Realizing consciousness in these mathematical and formal terms—despite the conceptual ability to change—seems to dampen the splendor of human life and its accompanying affections. It is important to remember though that Byron is on the earlier side of this history, closer to Newton than digital algorithms and artificial intelligence. Brassier is on the later side and his figure

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of the self ’s dissolution, taken from entomology, gets at the real horror of extinction’s grip on consciousness: “Mimicking the death of that from which it draws nourishment, the Phyllium [a leaf insect] becomes the living index of its food’s decay for its own vital appetite.”57 While the Phyllium is a natural-born zombie, it illustrates how, through a weird form of ingression, the subject becomes a thing through which the object thinks.58 That being the case, Byron’s portrait of the narrator is historically instructive, for he is certainly not a zombie, and maintains the qualities of an emotional-affective person. However, the narrator shows the early signs of a centralized ego being submerged in his own guts’ realization. He claims, for instance, to only begin the poem in canto 12 (“ ‘Tis / Perhaps a little strange, if not quite new, / That from the first of Cantos up to this / I’ve not begun what we have to go through” (12.54.425–8). This interruption is one of many, and it has been argued in the past that the narrator’s increasing interruptions evince a more centralized narrator.59 More likely, given the trajectory outlined here, the “beginning” in canto 12 indicates that the conceptual structure through which the narrator navigates is becoming increasingly fluid—and not fragmented in the sense of The Giaour’s indefinite fragmentation60—but almost achieving a round boundlessness, like a bubble: Between two worlds life hovers like a star, ‘Twixt night and morn, upon the horizon’s verge: How little do we know that which we are! How less what we may be! The eternal surge Of time and tide rolls on, and bears afar Our bubbles; as the old burst, new emerge, Lash’d from the foam of ages; while the graves Of Empires heave but like some passing waves. (15.99.785–92)

Guinn Batten, who examines the creative explosions emanating from Byron’s impossible in-betweenness, also lands on Byron’s bubbles: “A bubble, the very image of nothingness, may stray and even survive to lead . . . a nation into freedom, but it may also vanish or go astray and . . . become tyrannical.”61 The bubble is one of possibility and (almost) nothing, a blip on the screen of the cosmos in either case. But like a representation that touches, however lightly, the chaos of its ground, the bubble captures the image of realized consciousness. It is star-like, extending for an astronomical length, and it is also boundless, defying the normal (Euclidean) rules of space. It sounds strangely optimistic. Indeed, on its surface, where can one not go? The trouble amounts to the same: the bubble is impossibly oriented. If the poem maximally realizes consciousness, A will lack that geographical difference from B so ineluctably tied with our sense of here and there, now and then. Therefore, the narrator’s increasing interruptions may signify less the coalescence of a centralized self and rather the image of an ego teetering on the cusp of knowing that there is no now. Brassier asks in a recent review, “if reason’s self-understanding (or selfconsciousness) is decisive for its self-realization, can one cleanly separate the

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objectivity of concepts, i.e. what concepts are, from the history of the senses through which we grasp them?”62 All indications from Brassier’s project point toward the affirmative. For Brassier, any change in a concept is on account of our relationship to it, and not because the concept has altered—at least, not from the perspective of the end of the cosmos. But our conceptual framework can change radically, and that change depends on a tripartite relationship between the cosmos, the meaningless processes of our biological makeup, and representations. What Brassier stresses is that any resulting change in our conceptual framework reinforces the point that concepts are not “for us,” because it is precisely the shift in conceptual framework that negates the self. Likewise, Don Juan opens a door to an altogether different relationship to time, where the teeming explosiveness of indigestion once punctuating our relationship to reality utterly reorganizes the narrator’s conceptual landscape, leaving little room for the narrator. It is according to a similar process that Brassier can claim, “Thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living; indeed, they can and have been pitted against the latter.”63

Notes 1 Lord Byron, Don Juan (DJ) in Byron (The Oxford Authors), ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). All citations from Byron’s poetry refer to this edition. Citations correspond with the canto, stanza, and line numbers, respectively. I would like to thank the editors of this volume for their tireless efforts to aid me in crafting this essay. I would also like to thank the anonymous reader at Bloomsbury. Last, I would like to thank Henry Staten for suggestions early on and encouraging conversation throughout the summer of 2017. All errors and missteps are my own. 2 See David Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism in Seventeenth-Century Mathematical Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 78. 3 Jim Cocola, “Renunciations of Rhyme in Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ ” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 49, no. 4 (Autumn 2009): 848. 4 Ray Brassier calls the “cancellation of sense, purpose, and possibility . . . the point at which the ‘horror’ concomitant with the impossibility of either being or not-being becomes intelligible.” Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007), 218. 5 See Elizabeth Wilson, Gut Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 5ff. 6 Philip Martin, “Reading Don Juan with Bakhtin,” in Don Juan, ed. Nigel Wood (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), 112–15. 7 See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Interpretation: Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 201. 8 See Jerome Christensen’s Lord Byron’s Strength (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 220. 9 To my knowledge, Joshua D. Gonsalves offered the earliest account in print on the links between romanticism and speculative realism. See “The Encrypted Prospect: Existentialist Phenomenology, Deconstruction, and the Speculative Realism in ‘To Autumn,’ ” European Romantic Review 24, no. 3 (2013): 287–95. On the selection of the phrase “speculative realism” and its fate, see Graham Harman,

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17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 77–85. See Gottlieb’s Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 145. See Chris Washington, “Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” Literature Compass 12, no. 9 (September 2015): 448–60. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 31. Brassier, “Concepts, Objects, Gems,” in Theory After Theory, ed. Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 2011), 281. Brassier, “Concepts, Objects, Gems,” 287. Ibid. See Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), 13. Emily Bernhard Jackson’s image of Byron, in The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 7, offers a strong counterview, illustrating how Byron adopts a model of epistemological skepticism, affording the individual new knowledge that is ultimately productive and practical. See also Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of the Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). For Howe, “Byron wants to trace poetry to its source . . . Poetry, in such deep places, is chaotic, undecided, uncontrolled; it lurches into definition, lucidity, and ideation” (125–6). Brassier, “Concept, Object, Gem,” 289–90. Ibid., 290. See Brassier, “The View from Nowhere,” Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, 8, no. 2 (2011): 9. In his reading of Don Juan’s “gay narrator,” Jonathan Gross also detects a nonreciprocal relationship between narrator and representation. Byron: The Erotic Liberal (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 148. Leslie Marchand, “Narrator and Narration in Don Juan,” Keats-Shelley Journal: Keats, Shelley, Byron, Hunt and Their Circles, 25 (1976): 27. Brassier credits Thomas Metzinger for the phrase “first-object” position, in “The View from Nowhere,” 18. Ibid. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 231. James Harris, Hermes, or a Philosophical Enquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (London: H. Woodfall, 1751), 69, Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). Gale Group. http://find.galegroup.com/ecco/infomark.do?&source=gale&prodId=ECCO& userGroupName=wash_main&tabID=T001&docId=CW120305295&type=multipag e&contentSet=ECCOArticles&version=1.0&docLevel=FASCIMILE. Accessed August 31, 2014. Marjorie Levinson, The Romantic Fragment Poem (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina University Press, 1986), 72. Ibid., 115–28, esp. 118. See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1.4.6.164–71. For a discussion of the connections and disconnections between contemporary cognitive and neurobiological theories of the self and romantic and psychoanalytic approaches, see Slavoj Žižek’s

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30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 715–37. Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 6–7. While Metzinger plays an important role in Brassier’s philosophy, his reception is mixed among the thinkers under consideration in this collection. For a counterview, see Graham Harman, “The Problem with Metzinger,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 7, no. 1 (2011). http://www.cosmosandhistory. org/index.php/journal/article /view/231/322. Accessed June 1, 2018. See Brassier, “Transcendental Logic and True Representings,” Glass Bead 1 (2016): 17. See Sepkoski, Nominalism and Constructivism, 1ff. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 228. Ibid., 138. Ibid., 239. The self must be discriminated from the subject or agent, and the latter is, according to Brassier, in “The View from Nowhere,” a physical being “gripped by concepts,” which he also regards as historically determined but not identical with “socially instantiated and historically mediated linguistic practices” (p. 23). It is also important to bear in mind that “concepts are not phenomena” (p. 22). As Peter Gratton helpfully explains, “concepts for Brassier . . . are not representations of real objects but, as Kant held, rules for combining and separating representations.” Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 154. And as Brassier claims, “there is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept. Yet the real itself is not to be confused with the concepts through which we know it.” (“Concepts, Objects, Gems,” 47). Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 229–30. Ibid., 238–9. Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 238. Ibid. Ibid., 237. Ibid., 236. Ibid. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 238. See David Collings, “After the Covenant: Romanticism, Secularization, and Disastrous Transcendence,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 345–61. Collings explores figures of the romantic realization that human consciousness does not rest on a stable ground. One major difference between Rei Terada’s Keats, in “Looking at Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 275–309, and my Byron is the emphasis on “looking” in Keats, which Terada associates, by way of Bergson, with selection (281n.22). Byron’s narrator certainly looks, but he looks in greater measure from the gut, thereby disrupting any illusion of the dyadic relationship the eye establishes between self and other. And accordingly, looking from the gut opens the way for the kind of action I describe in what remains, which is not a form of reticence, but a vision of Prometheanism.

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47 The idea of becoming astral comes from Blanchot, who has in mind the harnessed power of stars through atomic energy, and as Bernard Stiegler elucidates, thus begins a new age of humans, characterized by the total “mobilization” of terrestrial and even celestial energy. Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 88–91. Brassier responds to this Heideggerian lineage in “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, ed. R. Mackay and A. Avanessian (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014), 467–87. 48 Brassier, “Transcendental Logic,” 17. 49 Ibid., 17–18. 50 Brassier, “Prometheanism and Its Critics,” 486. 51 Ibid., 485. 52 Ibid., 486. 53 Eric Strand helpfully ties figuration in Don Juan to Immanuel Wallerstein and Fernand Braudel’s model of a world-system. “Byron as Global Allegory,” Studies in Romanticism 43, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 503–36. 54 Brassier, “View from Nowhere,” 18. 55 Jerome McGann, in “The Book of Byron and the Book of the World,” The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 265–6. 56 Here, I am importing an idea from Luciana Parisi, Contagious Architecture: Computation, Aesthetics, and Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Parisi studies a digital world where “algorithms are no longer or are not simply instructions to be performed, but have become performing entities: actualities that select, evaluate, transform, and produce data” (p. ix). 57 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, 43. 58 Ibid., 140–1. 59 Marchand, “Narrator and Narration in Don Juan,” 35. 60 Evan Gottlieb compares Byron’s middle-period poem The Giaour to an infinite set, “a set, moreover, built around and out of a void” (Romantic Realities,115). It is an important precursor to Don Juan because, every time a section in this fragment poem begins, “or a different narrator picks up the thread of Leila’s murder and the Giaour’s subsequent revenge on Hassan, the elements of the set—the parts of the poem itself— increase in number.” 61 Guinn Batten, The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 71. For an extensive discussion of the role of bubbles in the eighteenth century and their influence on romanticism, see Sarah Tindal Kareem, “Enlightenment Bubbles, Romantic Worlds,” The Eighteenth Century 56, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 85–104. 62 Ray Brassier, “Comments on Danielle Macbeth’s Realizing Reason: A Narrative of Truth and Knowing,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 145. 63 Brassier, Nihil Unbound, xi.

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A perilous change of correspondence: Romanticism after [Nature] Mary Jacobus

The romantic period has been called “the very advent of the Anthropocene, when a layer of carbon is deposited by human industry throughout Earth’s top layers of crust.”1 What if we reread romantic poetry from the vantage point of the Anthropocene? In particular, what is the fate of that quintessentially romantic figure, Nature? Or rather, as Latour has it, in parentheses, “[Nature],” now definitively end-stopped by the advent of ecology, science studies, feminist theory, and environmentalist movements:  “In brief, ecology seals the end of nature.”2 The route I plan to take will proceed via some reversed signposts, a few crumbling cairns, and a trio of hard-to-access mountains. As well as revisiting the romantic sublime, I will revisit the well-worn map of romantic (mis)reading provided by Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man—late twentieth-century critics whose monumental work is synonymous, respectively, with Wordsworth’s poetry and with the rhetoric of romanticism. Hartman writes, “Mountains . . . are former heroes . . . they have giants in or below them.”3 In literary studies, the work of Bruno Latour is widely seen as superseding the old Titans when it comes to confronting the perilous changes wrought by the Anthropocene. By way of provocation, I will ask how rereading this particular strand of romantic studies, the so-called Yale critics, may provide an unexpected route to approaching Latour’s recent writing.4 Specifically, I hope to suggest that rereading Latourian [Nature] brings into view the work done by romantic tropology—especially the trope of anthropomorphism—when it comes to the question of “CORRESPONDENCE” (Latour’s capitalized term for the relation of statements about the world to the world “itself ”).5 “Everything,” he writes, “hinges on the question of the CORRESPONDENCE between the world and statements about the world.”6 If “we” have never been modern, it turns out that we may be romantic still.

The mountain and the map My title comes from chapter  3, entitled “A Perilous Change of Correspondence,” of Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence:  An Anthropology of the Moderns (2013 [2012]). Each chapter comes with an engaging synopsis, like an old-fashioned

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picaresque novel: “in which our heroine confronts” (Latour refers to his Investigator as “she”). Chapter 3 begins “with what is most difficult, the question of Science.” It contains a “Description of an unremarkable itinerary: the example of a hike up Mont Aiguille.” Its stated aim is to “define chains of reference and immutable mobiles by showing that reference is attached neither to the knowing subject nor to the known object.”7 Mont Aiguille is the dramatic limestone mesa whose ascent in 1492 (quite a year for historic encounters!) was said to mark the birth of mountaineering (“L’alpinismeest né dans le Mont-Aiguille en 1492”). Its name means “needle” or “crag” (“Mount Crag”). Known to Rabelais as “Mont Inaccessible,” it features in Book IV, chapter  57, of the comic adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1552), where Rabelais compares it to a pumpkin.8 What could be more intriguing than Latour’s “hiking metaphor”— especially when he clearly has his tongue in his cheek.9 His “unremarkable itinerary” conceals a romantic trope: “The Blocked Ascent.” Latour’s aim—throwing a spanner in the Kantian works—involves disabusing his readers of the idea that there is any necessary correspondence between minds and things; his theme is neither the knowing subject nor the known object. Not philosophy, then, but ecology. Since his argument, he says, is “frightfully difficult,” he starts with a deceptively matter-of-fact account of “what will not be a simple little stroll for our health.”10 Like any hiker in unfamiliar terrain, his first step is to consult the French geological survey map with which he has fore-thoughtfully equipped himself: As I was having trouble finding the starting point for the path leading to the Pas de l’Aiguille, I unfolded the map and, by looking from the plasticized paper to the valley, located a series of switchbacks that gave me my bearings despite the clouds, the confusion of my senses, and the unfamiliarity of the site. I was helped by the yellow markers that punctuated the route, and by the fact that the tourist office was kind enough to associate those markers with the map so carefully that one can go back and forth and find the same words, the same distances and times, and the same turns on both the map and the landscape—although not always.11

While enjoying what he calls “the privilege of being ‘outdoors,’ ‘in fresh air,’ ‘in the bosom of nature,’ ‘on vacation,’ ” and so on, our hiker keeps his bearings with the help of map 3237 OT (“Glandasse: Col de la Croix-Haute”): “I was definitely inside a network whose walls were so close together that I chose to lean on them every ten minutes or so, verifying whether the map, the markers, and the approximate direction taken by other hikers were indeed in correspondence, forming a sort of coherent conduit that would lead me up to the Pas de l’Aiguille.”12 For the anthropologist who invented ANT (Actor Network Theory), this is a busman’s holiday. The experienced hiker knows that the high plateau of the Vercors contains perils that include getting lost in the fog and falling into crevasses: “If you doubt that I needed to stay within a network (‘Don’t leave the marked trails!’), you’re welcome to go get lost up there in my wake, some foggy day when you can’t see the tips of your shoes.”13 The hiking metaphor is no joke—really! The storyteller in Latour can’t resist recounting his difficulties in aligning the twodimensional paper map with “the wooden signposts painted yellow, the trail marked

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by trampled grass and blackened leaves, the landmarks spotted (cairns or just piled-up stones? I hesitated at every turn).”14 Still, he knows more or less where he is, thanks to his sturdy pocket-sized map (“mobile, foldable, tear-proof, waterproof ”) and the network of intersecting relations that it establishes with signposts and landmarks, creating a reliable set of “geometrical liaisons” or “constants”—constants produced by “three centuries of geographers, explorations, typographical inventions, local development of tourism, and assorted equipment.”15 The result is a strange mix of resemblance and dissimilarity: “nothing looks less like Mont Aiguille than the map of Mont Aiguille.” Since he can refer to both map and mountain (so long as there’s no fog, the signposts point the right way, and the cairns haven’t been kicked over), he hikes on in relative safety, saying to himself: “I am not lost. I know where I am. I am not making a mistake.”16 Combining two seemingly incompatible elements, immutability and mobility, Latour’s network consists of “CHAINS OF REFERENCE” covered over with “IMMUTABLE MOBILES.” We become aware of the multiplicity of means—scientific technologies of visualization and inscription, Greek geometry and trigonometry, modern GPS—by which he is able to move safely between map and mountain. If Latour is right, we’re always totally networked, wherever we are, and whatever the weather. For Latour, neither of his chains of reference [REF] would be “clarified in the least if we introduced into their midst the presence of a ‘human mind.’ ”17 Not for nothing is Latour the Rabelais of Modernity—a satirical traveler showing us the profound un-reason that inhabits the seeming rationality of the Moderns. Unless we stick to the map and keep checking our coordinates, we’ll never reach the top: We gain access to the emotions elicited by the High Plateau of the Vercors only if we do not stray an inch from the composite network formed by the roads, paths, maps, tourist offices, hotel chains, hiking boots, backpacks, and the walkers’ habits introduced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, along with the clichés developed during the nineteenth century expressing admiration for the heights. Without mediation, no access.18

What matters is precisely the map’s non-resemblance to the mountain: “It is through loss of resemblance that the formidable effectiveness of chains of reference is won” (Latour’s emphasis).19 The network “works,” not because it establishes relations between thing and mind (res and intellectus) but because it links one inscription to the next, in what Latour refers to as William James’s “ ‘deambulatory theory of truth’ ”—instead of leaping between words and things, it crawls painstakingly “from one document to another” (one reference point, signpost, or cairn at a time), without ever passing through the perilous Subject/Object defile in which philosophy has traditionally lost its way.20 This “back and forth movement along a fragile cable” establishes the connection between one network and another, as the map becomes charged by the mountain, and the mountain is quarried for its signs, while the climber hangs onto the fragile cable of reference. Latour sees this process of “charging” as almost miraculous, “a form of transubstantiation” as sign becomes body.21 His mass-derived (messe/massif)

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terminology suggests that he is being reverent about something—not so much the mountain as scientific technological endeavor (atomic clocks, satellites, GPS): “Even the splendid view that one embraces from the Vercors plateau fascinates me less, in the end, than the humble effectiveness of map 3237 OT.”22 Modern mapping technology replaces mountain sublime. “Reason” (reinserted into the landscape as discontinuous chains of reference) consists of networks that can be rearticulated in terms of other networks. But we are no longer allowed to cling to the familiar notion of “correspondence” (“The lines traced by these chains will now allow us to unsettle the ordinary notion of correspondence”)—that is, to the Kantian correspondence between “knowing mind” and “known object.” Instead, we have “the progressive result of the extension of chains of reference.”23 The extended “chain” produces, on one hand, a usable hiking trail; and on the other, the hiker who uses it. Rather than being connected by ropes strung across the gulf between mind and mountain, they grow further and further apart. What separates them is a step, leap, or pass (“the Pas de l’Aiguille”). Stretching his hiking metaphor to its limit, Latour identifies a “bifurcation” on the path of his inquiry. The mountain still remains. Not so much because of the properties that constitute a chain of reference [REF] but because of the distinct modes of existence for which it has come to stand—but which can never stand in its place.24 Latour’s anti-Kantian hike refuses formulations about things unknowable-in-themselves (accessible only so far as language and thought can reach).25 Knowledge-systems crisscross without falling back on a transcendental beyond (but Latour never ditches mediation). Dismissing the idea of correspondence between “human mind” and “world,” Latour takes a more risky track:  “a tense, difficult, rhythmic correspondence full of surprises and suspense.”26 No more “humans” versus “world,” or “words” versus “things.” Instead, we encounter incommensurable “modes of existence.” At this juncture, Latour returns to the landscape of the Vercors: “it seems to me that the example of the Pas de l’Aiguille is going to allow us to cross a col that overlooks the entire Plateau. In fact, I have attempted to invert the inversion and to re-describe the landscape”—how? By means of two distinct kinds of displacement, “the one through which the mountain goes its own way and the one, just as venerable, just as interesting, of equal dignity, but quite different, through which we know the mountain . . . The two respond to each other sometimes—but not always.”27 Mountain and map are actants in an assemblage that produces action, without necessarily “corresponding.”28 Latour asks his readers whether it is too frightening, too violent an assault on our intuition, to hold apart mountain and map, itinerary and the crag that it makes accessible. His language evokes the terror of the unfamiliar—not just the narrow pathway along which reference circulates, but the network along which an entire mountain must make its way. This formulation brings with it a sense of “profound obscurity” while allowing Latour to identify the different “modes of existence” of mountain and map “without having to reduce one to the other.”29 Returning for another bout with the mountain in his next chapter, Latour offers a sideswipe at “Romantic” approaches to Nature:  “the spectacle of sublime landscapes suited to

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elevate the soul by imitating moral law,” or else brutally indifferent to human feeling. He has no wish, he says, “to make [his] reader resonate with the warmth of [his] feeling for Mont Aiguille.”30 The achievements of cartography, geology, and trigonometry are “just as warm, just as respectable, as worthy of attention as my pale expressions of admiration, as my emotions as an amateur hiker and the shiver I feel when the wind comes up and chills the sweat running down my chest.”31 Neither transcendence nor indifference—just mental and physical exertion, ignoring the map’s color-coding and even the fifteen-point type “Mont Aiguille” that in no way resembles the mountain peak disappearing into its cloud. But there’s a mountain out there, and what’s more, it doesn’t seem to be cooperating: Mont Aiguille, which I am going around on my hike, stubbornly continues not to resemble in the slightest the map that I unfold from time to time. It continues to bear down with its full weight, to veil itself in the scattered mist, to gleam intermittently with colors that the map does not register, and, especially, it continues to exist at scale 1: there is no way I can fold it up or make it change scale.32

We glimpse the reducibility of Mont Aiguille—“its own way of persisting, and, equally, the various sciences that have striven to know it.”33 How can we make room both for the mountain and for the perilous defile through which we approach it?

The hedgehog and the moon For romantic readers, Latour’s hiking metaphor and cloud-capped summit inevitably recall Wordsworth’s account of climbing Mount Snowdon in the last book of the 1805 Prelude (xiii.1–65).34 Latour—a knowing repository of the tradition associated in France with Rousseau and in England with picturesque walking-tours—is retreading a well-worn track, one that nonetheless often includes an element of surprise.35 In this pedestrian history, thinking and walking, meditation and mountain sublime, are inextricably linked. The Snowdon episode unfolds not unlike Latour’s map, made for the literary reader. A network of prior texts (as the Norton edition helpfully reminds us) links Wordsworth’s Welsh mountain to other picturesque texts—Wordsworth’s own earlier description of the Lake District in Descriptive Sketches (1792), James Beatie’s The Minstrel (1771), and Clarke’s Survey of the Lakes (1787). This chain of reference [REF] argues not so much for the “lived experience” of Wordsworth’s ascent, as for the precursor-texts that make it possible for him to “access” the mountain sublime in the guise of an eighteenth-century pedestrian tourist. Early on in the Prelude narrative, a barking sheepdog unearths a hedgehog; Wordsworth calls it “a small adventure”—“for even such it seemed / In that wild place and in the dead of night” (xiii.26–7). This is the kind of detail you don’t invent. Or is it? We believe in Latour’s hike for similar reasons—his unfolding of the plastic-coated map, the shiver he feels when the wind chills the sweat on his chest, his uncertainty about the cairns. Wordsworth and his friend Robert Jones follow a local shepherd up

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the mountain path, unable to see beyond their feet because of the fog, each lost in “commerce with his private thoughts.” The “commerce” here—“private thought” or “musings”—isn’t at all the same kind of self-communing as Latourian “correspondence” (French:  communication, match, similarity, resemblance). Wordsworth’s pedestrian tourists are grounded in another fashion: lost in their own thoughts, unable to see a thing. All the more startling, then, when the climbers suddenly emerge from the mist and experience a kind of revolution: “instantly a light upon the turf / Fell like a flash.” As Geoffrey Hartman declares: “It is often the ‘secret top’ of a mountain which turns the man about.”36 The suddenly visible moon is the harbinger of transformation:  “Lo / The moon stood naked in the heavens . . . ” (xiii.40–2). The dramatic inversion (from earth to heaven) turns everything around, not just the man. Mountain becomes seashore: On the shore I found myself of a huge sea of mist, Which meek and silent rested at my feet. A hundred hills their dusky backs upheaved All over this still ocean, and beyond, Far, far beyond, the vapours shot themselves In headlands, tongues, and promontory shapes, Into the sea, the real sea, that seemed To dwindle and give up its majesty, Usurped upon as far as sight could reach. (xiii.43–51)

Charged with its own energies and activity, the mutable cloudscape has its own nonhuman viewer:  “Meanwhile, the moon looked down upon this shew / In single glory . . . ” (xiii.52–3) But who really commands the show? Not the nonhuman, for sure. Frances Ferguson puts it succinctly, apropos of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (1816): “What the sublime does for nature is to annex all that is material to the human by appropriating it for aesthetics.”37 Nature provides the model for art’s usurpation on nature (“the sea, the real sea”). But we are not done yet. A rift in the mist discloses “a blue chasm, a fracture in the vapour, / A deep and gloomy breathing place” through which mounted—what?—“the roar of waters, torrents, streams / Innumerable, roaring with one voice” (xiii.56–8). The human onlooker confronts unmistakable evidence of natural agency: “in that breach . . . had Nature lodged / The soul, the imagination of the whole” (xiii.62–5). Agency—or analogy? Did Wordsworth really mean to say that animated Nature has a shaping imagination of its own? His invisible pun (“whole” or “hole”?) signals a breach of a different kind—the intrusion of Kantian philosophy. The visionary redescription that follows (“A meditation rose in me that night”) refashions the self-transforming cloudscape into “The perfect image of a mighty mind, / Of one that that feeds upon infinity” (xiii.66, 69–70). Either Nature “images” the mind, or else it possesses its own powers of self-transformation. Or both. The passage supplies a plurality of terms— “resemblance,” “counterpart,” “brother”:

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The power . . . . . . which Nature thus Thrusts forth upon the senses, is the express Resemblance—in the fullness of its strength Made visible—a genuine counterpart And brother of the glorious faculty Which higher minds bear with them as their own. (xiii.84–90)

“The power is,” or “The power is like”? Does it take a mighty mind to recognize itself in the spectacle? Or is the cloudscape endowed with a mighty mind? As often in Wordsworth’s poetry, the crux is left unresolved. Wordsworth runs the obvious risk of falling back on the Kantian categories of Subject/Object, while hedging his bets by implying that mind and Nature are actual “counterparts” to each other. The slippery language of resemblance holds open questions of natural agency—mysterious at best, even for humans.38 Poetry unlocks the power of figurative language to anthropomorphize and name. Anthropomorphism, the philosopher Jane Bennett writes, “can uncover a whole world of resonances and resemblances.”39 As she puts it, “a chord is struck between person and thing.”40 Hartman’s classic reading of the Snowdon episode cautiously insists on likeness rather than identity:  “though nature on Snowdon points to imagination . . . what [Wordsworth] sees is still a Power like nature’s.”41 Noticing that the climbers gradually mount through the mist “as if already in imagination’s landscape,” Hartman avers: “It is as if the poet, in passing through the mist, had passed his own imagination unawares.”42 The poet has missed a signpost, but the mountain hails him with abyssal resonances. For Hartman, the climbing of Snowdon is “Wordsworth’s most astonishing avoidance of apocalypse.”43 His (missed) encounter is with self-consciousness, the via naturaliter negativa that usurps on Nature in likeness of a cloud. In this case, however, “The attributes that define imagination figuratively . . . are still a literal part of the landscape.”44 Hartman’s account of the ascent of Snowdon sees in this figural/literal doubling an escape from fixity that informs “even the properties of things and the relationship between thing and symbol.”45 The mist is like a sea, but “solid” like the mountains; the mist “hung” low but the moon above “hung naked.”46 Despite (or because of) the hanging moon and vocal chasm, Hartman’s Wordsworth “is unable to make a sharp ‘symbolic’ identification of the imagination with moon or sounding abyss.”47 Hartman ends upon unexpectedly Latourian terrain: “Snowdon . . . does not project the image of an agent but at most the image of an action.”48 Abandoning the question of agency, he focuses instead on the subtle shifts and transfers (“trafficking”) that weave a linguistic web: “Wordsworth’s greatest poetry is such a web of transfers, which are not showy or patently metaphorical, and are rarely felt as unusual turns of speech.”49 The web is “naturalized” via this un-showy transfer that can sound like everyday speech, creating “a dizzy openness of relation between the human mind and nature.”50 Instead of having to decide whether the poet is “participating in or striving to break with nature,” Hartman argues that the import of the Snowden episode is “analogy” or “resemblance.”51 Nature

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lives a parallel life. And yet, he concludes, “Wordsworth is of the mind’s party without knowing it”—a good Kantian despite himself.52 Hartman reads the Snowdon episode in terms of a “potentiality of interchange [that] points to the ethics of metaphor and perhaps of poetry as a whole.”53 It thus foreshadows modern poetry’s reliance on what he calls “nonobjective (syntactical) forms.”54 This “transcendence of object-consciousness” dissolves fixities, much as the mist (a consummate mimic of properties) dissolves the “real” sea.55 What becomes visible from the top of Mount Snowdon, for Hartman, is the circulation between worlds (or should one say words?)—the “subtle intercourse” of Wordsworth’s animist Alfoxden poetry, with its vital interchange between man and Nature. Not apocalypse, then, but “naturalized vision,” enmeshed in the web of linguistic transfer.56 Poetry’s distinctive action, its “nonobjective (syntactical) forms,” complicates ideas about agency. Like Derrida’s hedgehog, la poesia (“Che cos’ è la poesia?”) rolls itself up into a defensive ball if we try to read it literally.57

(De) Man and [Nature] Paul de Man’s essay, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism underlines the power of naming; that is, the power of anthropomorphism to freeze tropes into proper names.58 De Man’s example is a sonnet by Baudelaire called—what else?—“Correspondances.” He reads the poem as a response to an implied question: “Qu’est-ce que la nature?” Baudelaire’s answer begins, La Nature est une temple où de vivants piliers Laissent parfois sortire de confuses paroles (ll.1–2) (The pillars of Nature’s temple are alive and sometimes yield perplexing messages)59

De Man’s question, however, concerns the quandaries posed by language and the “relational” (as distinct from “relative”) trope of truth. He pays special attention to the word “like” (“comme”). Capable of functioning as both comparator and enumerator, “like” may introduce a trope of resemblance, or a list of examples (“such as”). In Baudelaire’s sonnet, de Man argues, the unexpected shift at the end of the poem, from metaphor to example, signals a disjunction or rhetorical mishap. For de Man, the sonnet is about “language as the stage of disjunction,” that is, language regarded as “a chain of metaphors” capable of breaking or breaking down.60 Baudelaire’s “forests of symbols” designate “the verbal, the rhetorical dimension within which we constantly dwell.”61 The poem’s “perplexing messages” (“de confuses paroles”) constitute a “dialogical exchange that takes place in mutual proximity to a shared entity called nature.”62 All goes well with the repeated word “comme” (the figure of resemblance) until the sonnet’s final stanza, where de Man drops into mock-shocked French to observe, “Ce comme n’est pas un comme comme les autres”:63

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Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoinet l’encens, Qui chantent les transports de l’espritet des sens. (ll.13–14) (as incense, amber, benjamin and musk, to praise the senses’ raptures and the mind’s).

Exemplification is not the same as analogy; it risks mere lists of attributes and entities— obsession rather than metamorphosis. Why should this matter? De Man puts it like this: “Instead of analogy, we have enumeration”—“Enumerative repetition disrupts the chain of tropological substitution at the crucial moment when the poem promises . . . to reconcile the pleasures of the mind with those of the senses and to unite aesthetics with epistemology.”64 It is as if Wordsworth’s Kantian union of aesthetics with epistemology were to have ended up substituting a list of cloud-forms, rather than referring to “like transformation” or “like existence.” De Man accentuates the shift at the close of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” as “too striking a coincidence not to be, like pure chance, beyond the control of author and reader.”65 The sonnet’s combination of sensual and mental raptures (“transports de l’esprit et dessens”) puts de Man in mind of a form of transport more like the French transport systems (trolley-cars) where the word “correspondance” approximates to the English word “transfer” (i.e., connecting to different lines of the Paris Métro on the same ticket). Having successfully imported public transportation systems into the temple of Nature, de Man reaches his destination: “Within the confines of a system of transportation—or of language as a system of communication—one can transfer from one vehicle to another, but one cannot transfer from being like a vehicle to being like a temple.”66 (By a nice coincidence—“beyond the control of author and reader”— Latour’s Aramis studies the circumstances surrounding a failed mass-transit system whose actants are as much nonhuman as human). With this syntactical train wreck, Baudelaire’s “Correspondances” comes to an abrupt halt. De Man’s analysis allows the reader to glimpse the work done by networks of agent-less (driver-less?) tropes and transfers within and between poems. His reading is itself, he suggests, “a process of translation or ‘transport’ that incessantly circulates” between texts.67 His undoing of lyric genre (“Correspondances,” he asserts, counterintuitively, is “emphatically, not a lyric”) requires him to view it as “one name among several to designate the defensive motion of understanding.”68 A term of resistance and nostalgia like (“like”!) “romanticism,” the designation “lyric” reveals the twin violence of tropology and periodization. One might ask what is gained and lost (apart from “lyric” and “romanticism”) by de Man’s rigorously de-subjectified reading. If we lose the lyric, considered as “the instance of represented voice,” he argues that we may gain something more worthwhile: the possibility of enumerating “non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, noncelebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say prosaic, or better, historical modes of language power.”69 Some list. This brings me abruptly to a fork in my own path. Despite what I  have learned from the practice of rhetorical reading, I  find Latour’s notion of a composite actant (both human and nonhuman) surprisingly helpful for thinking about poetry—an alternative to de Man’s evisceration of subjective agency

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in the name of machine-like linguistic agency with all its potential for accidents.70 But, on the other hand, for all that I have learned from reading Latour—turning the Moderns upside down, reversing the signposts, redefining “modes of existence”—I want to ask, stubbornly:  what about “historical modes of language power”? Isn’t a “network” already a trope? And how are we to read the anthropologist’s own patent resort to anthropomorphism?71 Now that ecological criticism has put “ecology without nature” (to use Timothy Morton’s phrase) firmly on the romantic agenda, shouldn’t we be turning the tables and asking what “romanticism” has to tell us about Latourian [Nature]?72 Or rather, as Latour has renamed it, “Gaia” (James Lovelock’s Gaia designates the interaction of organic and inorganic elements in a self-regulating organism).73 I don’t want to make the chiastic claim that “romanticism” offers a handy map for (mis) reading Latour’s epistemological hike. Nor do I intend to make the sufficiently obvious point that Latour himself necessarily, knowingly, even enthusiastically, inhabits tropology—what de Man calls the “rhetorical dimension within which we constantly dwell.”74 Latour would doubtless agree, while regarding tropology as just one among other forms of network and transfer (mapmaking, tourism, GPS, and all the rest) by which the man circles around the mountain. Nevertheless, I  want to scrutinize the work done in Latour’s writing by the linked tropes of anthropomorphism and naming, and specifically by Gaia. Conveniently for my purposes, Latour himself has on occasion summoned romantic poetry to his aid in the form of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” another mountain that plays hard to get. In his 2011 lecture, “Waiting for Gaia,” Latour refers to the “scaling up of history,” not in terms of the post-human but rather with “what should be called a post-natural twist!”75 He continues, with his customarily energetic rhetoric: “If it is true that the ‘anthopos’ is able to shape the Earth literally (and not only metaphorically through its symbols), what we are now witnessing is anthropomorphism on steroids.”76 The Earth-changing effects of the Anthropocene are attributable to a collective human actor—a steroid-fuelled actor, however, that can’t be thought or measured. The sublime is superannuated, puny man rendered paradoxically all-powerful: “Think of it: it would be so nice to return to the past when nature could be sublime and us, the puny little humans, simply irrelevant, delighting in the inner feeling of our moral superiority over the pure violence of nature.”77 Those were the days. Our unhappy post-natural predicament would constitute one (admittedly reductive) reading of “Mont Blanc,” the poem Latour cites at the start of his essay. The disconnect between Nature and “Her grandest display of power” on one hand, and on the other “the puny little humans claiming to know or to dominate Her” is for Latour “the inner spring of the feeling for the sublime.”78 In the passage quoted by Latour, Shelley’s raving river brings with it the perilously sublime correspondences that at once provoke and annihilate thought: The everlasting universe of things Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—

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Now lending splendor, where from secret springs The source of human thought its tribute brings (ll.1–5)79

Rhetorically speaking, one could say that Latour invokes Gaia in order to bridge the chasm left by the collapse of the sublime as an aesthetic and epistemological category. Gaia replaces “what used to be called ‘nature’ ” with a skittish, ticklish, not to say tricky figure: a complex assemblage that eludes definition. “First, Gaia is not a synonym of Nature because it is highly and terribly local.”80 Earth means Earth, not the Universe. “Second, Gaia is not like Nature, indifferent to our plight.”81 She doesn’t “care for us” like a Goddess or Mother Nature, to be sure, but she’s highly sensitive—too fragile to be calming like Nature; too unconcerned to be Mother; too incapable of being propitiated to be a Goddess. Third, “Gaia is a scientific concept,” a concept “assembled from bits and pieces, most of them coming from scientific disciplines.”82 Gaia has no ontological unity or unified agency. Fourth, Gaia is a trap loaded with apocalyptic pronouncements about the end of the world. The problem is that previous doomsaying about climate change may now turn out to be true: “What if we had shifted from a symbolic and metaphoric definition of human action to a literal one?”83 What if! Latour’s speculation about a shift from symbolic and metaphoric to an insistently “literal” definition of human action parallels de Man’s identification of the disjunction performed by language (“comme”) at the end of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances.” In Latour’s Anthropocene Age, “everything that was symbolic is now to be taken literally. Cultures used to ‘shape the Earth’ symbolically; now they do it for good.”84 Anthropomorphism (with the emphasis on literal shaping) means that we must be Melancholy with Lars von Trier and abandon “Hope, unremitting hope” in our future dealings with Gaia. Latour’s word “unremitting” carries a (co)incidental echo of the “unremitting interchange” in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”— My own, my human mind, which passively, Now renders and receives fast influencings, Holding an unremitting interchange With the clear universe of things (ll.37–40; my emphasis)

“Now renders and receives . . . ” I understand this to mean, more or less, that the passively receiving yet “rendering” mind is both shaped and shaping through “an unremitting interchange” with the universe of things. Throughout “Mont Blanc,” however, the question of agency is rearticulated as a question about the mind’s relation, not to things, but to power that exceeds its grasp—a power described partly in terms of ancient geological upheavals (earthquake and fire). Not for nothing is Latour, a graduate of the École des Mines, drawn to a poem itself inflected by eighteenth-century geological theory. Shelley was impressed by Buffon’s idea that a once-fiery world might freeze over in some distant climate-cooled future.85 By contrast, Latour’s oversensitive Earth has a (“literally”) “anthropomorphic” future—a future of man-made global warming and melting glaciers. Reversing the flow of

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history in a thoroughly Shelleyan fashion, Latour writes:  “In the real world time flows from the future to the present.”86 Just what kind of agency Earth should be granted concerns Latour in a more recent essay, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” Latour observes that a form of subjectivity (thanks to Earthlings) has been returned to the Earth. An unprecedented form of “interchange” now takes place between humans and the universe of things: each is (passively) subjected, subject to, the other—quasi-subjects sharing agency with other quasi-subjects that have lost their autonomy.87 Returning to the question of anthropomorphism, Latour himself warns us that we should be wary, not so much about “anthropomorphizing” natural entities, as about its obverse, “phusimorphizing” them; “that is, giving them the shape of objects defined only by their causal antecedents.”88 In response to the claim that anthropomorphism is the only way to tell stories about [Nature], Latour replies: anthropomorphisms are better described as “actants”—and actants are only known through their actions. The Anthropocene literalizes the morph or shaping part of the anthropo- or phusi-morphism combination. Morphism, or shape-changing, Latour emphatically proposes, “is a property of the world itself and not only a feature of the language about the world.”89 And again: “Meaning is a property of all agents in as much as they keep having agency.”90 What gives agents their meaning is action: “As long as they act, agents have meaning.”91 Action may be captured, translated, or “morphed” into speech. But this is not to assert that everything is just a matter of discourse. Rather, for Latour, “any possibility for discourse is due to the presence of agents in search of their existence.”92 I take this statement to be Latour’s underlying theory of language. The mountain searches for its mode of existence in discourse, just as the hiker searches for the mountain’s mode of existence in Map 3237 OT.

“Power in likeness of the Arve” A plausible reading of “Mont Blanc” would be that it is Latourian avant la lettre. Everything acts (lightning, rain, earthquake, flood, hurricane); in this Lucretian world of process and flow (including from the future to the present), materiality moves, breathes, lives, dies, revolves, subsides, or swells, teaching the observer who is willing to learn a fundamental lesson: “these primeval mountains / Teach the adverting [i.e. observing] mind” (ll.98–9). There is every reason to think that Shelley subscribed to (then) radical scientific ideas about animated matter and that he extended them to language.93 Today’s “Ecologist” would have been part of his vocabulary, like his selfdesignation when signing into Alpine hotel registers (“Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist”—and “Ecologist”). But perhaps the lesson taught by Shelley’s mountain is not so much post-human or “post-natural” as post-historical—positioned after an earlier deforming cataclysm, but before an apocalyptic political reformation that may yet succeed in transforming the world. Like the Arve, this transformation seems to flow from future to present. Shelley’s geophysical sublime is animated by power: “Power in likeness of the Arve comes down / From the ice gulfs that that gird his secret throne” (ll.16–17).

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What is this power? Is it language, or rather the unspeakable? “The wilderness has a mysterious tongue” (l.76).94 Shelley makes hard-to-understand nature (nature without Divinity) into the voice of impending world-historical transformation, as difficult for humans to grasp as the remote being named Mont Blanc: “Thou has a voice, great Mountain, to repeal / Large codes of fraud and woe” (ll.80–1).95 Still relatively unclimbed in 1816 (another “Mont Inaccessible,” like the elusive Mont Aiguille), cloud-covered Mont Blanc keeps its own council:  “Power dwells apart in its tranquility /Remote, serene, and inaccessible” (ll.96–7).96 In her elegantly argued classic essay, “What the Mountain Said,” Frances Ferguson observes that the mountain “says nothing.” It remains “the ultimate example of materiality, of the ‘thingness’ of things.”97 Thing—or “blank”? (an unthought thing, something that abolishes thought). Shelley is at pains to refute any suggestion that Mont Blanc is a Baudelairean temple of Nature (“La Nature estune temple”). But, according to Ferguson, he “counter[s] the myth of natural religion,” not by destroying the mountain’s symbolic value, “but merely inverting it.”98 One might say the same of Latour, whose objections to the modern opposition of (inanimate) materiality versus (animating) mind recovers animism for his own times—cooking up a heady nouveau-Latourian brew, a blend of animated materiality and the recomposed assemblage that he names “Gaia.” With similar insistence, Ferguson notes, Shelley repeatedly “names” the Ravine where the Arve raves (“Arve raves in the Ravine”) in an inadvertent pun that seems to pay its own tribute to the unpredictable materiality of language.99 Ferguson’s argument strikingly anticipates Latour’s emphasis on actors and actants. As she puts it, “there is a ravine—and a ravine this deep—because there is a mountain— and a mountain this high—and vice versa.”100 The “transfer of attributes” between water and air, water and earth, “provide instances of action without representing agency.”101 Both her shrewd linguistic point (“a technological trick with language”) and her riverine example jive with Latour’s account of the Mississippi River, whose catastrophic flow into the lower riverbed of the Atchafalaya (as described by John McPhee) is only prevented by a man-made dam.102 What strikes me most about Ferguson’s essay, reread from a post-Latourian (Anthropocene) perspective thirty years later, is the extent to which it not only views Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” through the lens of the Kantian sublime, but also—in its Yale-critical (re-)formation of romantic reading—privileges language above all else. It is not just that human thought introduces the sublime into the representations of nature, in approved Kantian fashion.103 Epistemology and ontology are thoroughly entangled, as knowledge struggles to come to terms with the real existence of what one “knows.” In the revised scenario proposed by Ferguson, loving postulates an I-Thou relation, supplanting the impossibility of knowing “things as they are” and converting epistemological language into love-language—the language of relationality and entanglement. The attribution of speech to a mountain places it in a conversation, albeit one-sided. “What the mountain said” turns out to be something like this: Mont Blanc discovers its mode of existence in discourse.104 Fast forward to Timothy Morton and object-oriented ontology (OOO). Morton’s Hyperobjects:  Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, defines speculative

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realism’s determination “to break the spell that descended on philosophy since the Romantic period”—the spell “known as correlationism, the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate: meaning is only possible between a human mind and what it thinks, its ‘objects’.”105 By now this sounds all too familiar. Citing “Mont Blanc”—“The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind” (ll.1–2)—Morton comments, “The mountain acts like a beacon in the poem, appearing, then disappearing, then reappearing:  ‘Mont Blanc yet gleams on high’ ” (l.127). “The mountain comes in and out of phase,” like the hyperobject created by plotting simultaneous weather events, or Latour’s unscaleable Mont Aiguille gleaming through the mist.106 With a touch of sci-fi luridness, Morton wonders what kind of tentacular space might be produced by “the high-dimensional object we call global warming.”107Along with global warming, his hyperobjects include atomic radiation, mist and fog—and even the meandering blank-verse romantic autobiographical narrative with its diffuse scale (“Suddenly a whole lot more paper was involved”).108 Hyperobjects (like long romantic poems) constitute a special form of the sublime that depresses rather than elevates the soul. Global warming, in particular, brings with it an ethical conviction that we are responsible for our own future at the very moment when we seem most unable to do anything about it, except proclaim the need for a new political ecology. In Latour’s words, “this ‘metamorphic’ zone is political.”109 Perforce, we share the same “shape-changing destiny” that requires new modes of documentation and representation. “Mont Blanc yet gleams on high:—the power is there” (l.127). Latour’s “ ‘metamorphic’ zone” refers to rock that has undergone transformation by heat, pressure, or other natural agencies (such as the folding of strata that underlies Shelley’s alpine vision). The same might be said of “anthropomorphism,” if not geo-story itself. Under the pressure of intense political forces, tropes like anthropomorphism are transformed into shapes that “compose” (in Latour’s sense) provisional accounts of the relation between agency and language, or between complex data and models. Latour refers to the evidence about climate change as “a tapestry” with a lot of holes, but “amazingly resilient, because of the way it is woven—allowing data to be recalibrated by models and vice versa.”110 The text with holes in it, a text that doesn’t correspond directly to the world—“even for the climate scientists, there is no way to measure up directly with the Earth”—sounds like the anxious hedging that typically accompanies linguistic reference: not that the signifier lacks reference altogether, but that it doesn’t “measure up directly” with reality, any more than the map measures up with Mont Aiguille.111 Picking our way from cairn to cairn, we glimpse through the mist the perilous changes of correspondence we have painstakingly traversed: Wordsworth’s tussle with agency; de Man’s “historical modes of language power”; the language of pan-historical change in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”; poetry and contemporary political ecology. Whether we re-read romanticism “with” Latour, or read Latour via the persistence of romantic tropes in his writing, his description of “natural” language sounds recognizably, rhetorically (not to say vocally) romantic in a passage such as the following:

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Speech flows, it descends, it advances, it turns against itself—in short, it reproduces exactly the movement of what it is talking about and what it is seeking to capture by following its course . . . To say something is to say differently, in other words, it is to comment, transform, transport, distort, interpret, restate, translate, transpose, that is to say metamorphose, change form, yes, if you insist, “metaphorize.” To speak literally one would either have to keep totally silent or else settle for stammering uh, uh, ah, ah, uh . . .112

Rather than “speaking literally,” in grunts and cries, Latour reaffirms the expressive capacities of “natural language, the only one available to us” as it flows, descends, advances, metamorphoses, and metaphorizes, much like Shelley’s Arve raving (stammering?) in the ravine.113 Inarticulacy is not an option. When it comes to “speaking well in the agora”—about global warming, about the politics of Gaia, or about the Anthropocene—it turns out that not only are we romantic still, we are also, definitely, no longer “after” nature, at least when it comes to language:  “To tell the truth—to tell the truths—natural language lacks for nothing.”114 To say that “natural language lacks for nothing” allows Latour to use language, anthropomorphism and all, as an agent to argue for change in the public and political agora, an argument that bears nothing less than “life itself ”: “Will you say of life itself that it goes on ‘literally’ or ‘figuratively’?”115

Notes 1 Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 164. Morton’s website shares its name with his previous book, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 2 Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’ ” New Literary History 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010), 476. 3 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 49. In Greek myth, the “Gigantes” were said to be the offspring of Gaia and Uranus, and to be buried under volcanoes. 4 For an account of Latour’s recent work, see Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political (London: Pluto Press, 2014). Harman suggests that An Inquiry into Modes of Existence “is probably not the best hill to climb first, since it will make far more sense to those who are already familiar with the earlier period of Latour’s career” (p. x); fortunately, New Latour continues to coexist with Latour Classic (see p. 81). 5 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 71. A virtual hyperobject in its own right, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence can be visited online: http://www.modesofexistence.org. 6 Ibid. Recent discussions of the literary dimensions of Object-Oriented Ontology include Graham Harman, “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer,” New Literary History

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 184–203; Timothy Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 205–24; and Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 225–33. Cf. also the essays collected in Romanticism and Biopolitics, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, ed. Alastair Hunt and Matthias Rudolf (December 2012). http:///www.rc.umd.edu//praxis/biopolitics/ HTML/praxis.2012. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence , 69. “[N]ot much less inaccessible than that mountain in the Vercors range, shaped like a pumpkin, which as far back as memory goes has hardly ever been climbed other than by [the] commander of King Charles the Eight’s artillery, whose used his marvelous equipment to climb up there—and on the peak found an old ram. He couldn’t figure out how it had ever gotten up there by itself, so they told him that, when it was just a lamb, some eagle or great horned owl must have carried him and he then escaped into the bushes.” François Rebelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 497–8. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence , 74. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 75. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 76. Ibid., 76–7. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 77–8. “Mont Aiguille does not go around in the world the way the map allows access to Mont Aiguille” (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 174). Ibid., 78, emphasis in original. Ibid. The reference is to William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (New York: Dover, 2003). Ibid., 79. Ibid., 80. Ibid. The “Table” of Latour’s terminology at the end of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence defines [REF]erence in terms of “Distance and dissemblance of forms” (Hiatus), “Paving with inscription” (Trajectory), “Bring back/lose information” (Felicity/ Infelicity Conditions), “Constants through transformations” (Beings to Institute), and “Reach remote entities” (Alteration). “Can a subject know an object? Yes; no; not always; never; never completely; asymptotically, perhaps; as in a mirror; only through the bars of the prison-house of language” ( An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 92). Despite Latour’s humorous list, Harman notices the inadvertent carryover of Kantian philosophy; for Latour, natural objects only become accessible through the mediation of science (Harman, Bruno Latour, 142). Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 86. Ibid., 87.

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28 Cf. the definition provided by Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter (certainly the best, and for me the most illuminating, recent philosophical account of lively materiality): “Actant, recall, is Bruno Latour’s term for a source of action; an actant can be human or not, or, most likely, a combination of both . . . An actant is neither an object nor a subject . . . by virtue of its particular location in an assemblage and fortuity of being in the right place at the right time, [it] makes things happen, becomes the decisive force catalyzing an event.” Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. Bennett helpfully describes an actant as an attempt “to pry some space between the idea of action and the idea of human intentionality” (p. 103). 29 Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 87. 30 Ibid., 120. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 114. 33 Ibid., 120–1. 34 Quotations and references in the text refer to the 1805 text of The Prelude. See William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979). 35 See Joseph A. Amato, On Foot: A History of Walking (New York: New York University Press, 2004), esp. ch. 4, “Mind over Foot: Romantic Walking and Rambling,” 101–24; and Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 1997), esp. ch 3, “William Wordsworth: Pedestrian Poet,” 89–125. 36 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 49. 37 Frances Ferguson, “Shelley’s Mont Blanc: What the Mountain Said,” in Romanticism and Language: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 213. 38 As Jane Bennett puts it, “In the face of every analysis, human agency remains something of a mystery. If we do not know just how it is that human agency operates, how can we be so sure that the processes through which nonhumans make their mark are qualitatively different?” (Vibrant Matter, 34). 39 Ibid. 40 “A touch of anthropomorphism . . . can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composited materialities that form confederations” (Vibrant Matter, 99). Later, Bennett suggests: “Maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing” (Vibrant Matter, 120). For a brief riff on “anthropomorphize,” see also Morton, “An Object-Oriented Defense of Poetry,” 207. 41 Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 60. My emphasis. 42 Ibid., 64. My emphasis. 43 Ibid., 61. 44 Ibid., 64 45 Ibid., 65. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid.

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Ibid., 66 Ibid. Ibid., 66–7. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 187. Ibid. Ibid., 255. See Jacques Derrida, “Che cos’è la poesia?,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 221–40. Derrida’s hedgehog curls itself in a ball when required to account for itself, refusing to bridge the chasm between representation and reality, poetry and paraphrase. I owe this suggestive connection to Chris Washington. Paul de Man, “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239–62. De Man’s starting point is Nietzsche’s assimilation of truth to “an army of tropes” that includes metaphor, metonymy, and anthropomorphism (29–43). De Man’s essay was first delivered at Cornell in 1983 as part of his Messenger Lectures. Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1982), 193, 15. De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 245. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 244. Ibid., 249. Ibid., 250. Ibid. Ibid., 252. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 261. For readings of de Man’s essay in relation both to the genre of the lyric and to the figure of anthropomorphism, see Jonathan Culler, “Reading Lyric,” in Yale French Studies 69 (1985): 98–106, and Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 77–83; see also Cynthia Chase, “Double-Take: Reading de Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes,” in Legacies of Paul de Man, ed. Marc Redfield, Romantic Circles, Praxis Series (2005). http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deman/index. html. De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 261. Bennett refers to “composing and recomposing the sentences of [her] book – especially in trying to choose the appropriate verbs” when it comes to “rewrit[ing] the default grammar of agency, a grammar that assigns activity to people and passivity to things” (Vibrant Matter, 119). For the application of Latourian ideas to teaching composition, see Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, ed. Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 2015). Latour raises the objection only to refute it: “The accusation of anthropomorphism is so strong that it paralyzes all the efforts of many scientists in many fields—but especially biology—to go beyond the narrow constraints of what is believed to be ‘materialism’ or ‘reductionism.’ It immediately gives a sort of New Age flavor to any such efforts, as if the default position were the idea of the inanimate and the bizarre

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innovation were the animate. Add agency? You must be either mad or definitely marginal. Consider Lovelock, for instance . . . .” Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,” 481; and cf. 483. See Morton, Ecology without Nature, for a sustained reading of romantic texts to reveal the aesthetics of “ecomimesis,” situatedness, and “ambient poetics,” with the help of “slow” reading: “Ecomimesis is a specific rhetoric that generates a fantasy of nature as a surrounding atmosphere, palpable but shapeless. The ambient poetics that establishes this experience interferes with attempts to set up a unified, transcendent nature that could become a symptomatic fantasy thing. Critical close reading elicits the inconsistent properties of this ambient poetics” (p. 77). Morton calls his critical approach “ecocritique” or “dark ecology” (“a form of really deep ecology” [p. 143]). On a secularized Gaia—“the most secular figure of the Earth ever explored by political theory”—see Bruno Latour’s as yet unpublished Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, of which I have not taken full account here. The videoed lectures are currently available on the Edinburgh University website: http://www.ed.ac.uk/about/video/lecture-series/gifford-lectures. De Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 246. Latour, “Waiting for Gaia. Composing the Common World through Art and Politics,” 3. A lecture at the French Institute, London November 2011; in Albena Yaneva (ed.), What is Cosmopolitical Design? (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). References refer to the PDF posted on line at: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/124-GAIA-LONDONSPEAP_0.pdf. Accessed January 15, 2016. Ibid., 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 2. Line references are to the B text of “Mont Blanc,” in Geoffrey Matthews and Kelvin Everest (eds.), The Poems of Shelley, Vol 1: 1804–1917 (London: Longman, 1989), 542–9. Latour emphasizes the word “everlasting,” omitting l.6. Latour, “Waiting for Gaia,” 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid. Ibid., 11. Ibid. “ . . . Buffon’s sublime but gloomy theory, that this earth which we inhabit will at some future period be changed into a mass of frost.” See Letters of Shelley, ed. F. L. Jones, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), I.499; the letter is quoted at greater length by Ferguson, “What the Mountain Said,” 209. For Buffon, Shelley’s “Power,” and geological deformation in “Mont Blanc,” see Noah Heringman, Romantic Rocks, Aesthetic Geology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 69–88. Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014), 13. Originally delivered as the Holberg Prize lecture in 2013. Ibid., 10. “What is an object? The set of quasi subjects that are attached to it. What is a subject? The set of quasi objects that are attached to it. To follow an experience it would be useless to try to retrace what comes from the Subject or from the Object” (An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 428). “Phusis comes from the verb phuo, which probably mean to puff, blow, or swell up, conveying the sense of germination or sprouting up, bringing forth, opening out, or

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism hatching. Phusis thus speaks of a process of morphing, or formation and deformation . . . the becoming otherwise of things in motion as they enter into strange conjunctions with one another” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 118). Latour, “Agency,” 12. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. For Shelley’s revival of De rerum natura, see Amanda Jo Goldstein, “Growing Old Together: Lucretian Materialism in Shelley’s Poetry of Life,” Representations 128, no. 1 (Fall 2014), 60–92. Arguing that animist science also inflected Shelley’s views on language and figuration, Goldstein suggests that his writing “demonstrates a nineteenth-century possibility of exercising materialisms we would now distinguish as natural, historical, and linguistic together” (p. 63). Goldstein includes a roundup of work on the impact of Lucretius during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (83–4n10) and describes Shelley’s under-explored debt to Lucretius’s materialist theory theories (84n11). In an early draft, Shelley wrote: “There is a voice not understood by all . . . ”. He later cancelled the line “Mountains ye have a voice not understood . . . ”. See Matthews and Everest, The Poems of Shelley, I.533, 546. “[Shelley’s] experience of the Mountain in its landscape produces a conviction that institutionalized forms of political and social oppression, and their human effects (large codes of fraud and woe) may be challenged by those who realize they have no sanction in a Divinity which may be inferred from nature.” See ibid., I.546. Shelley’s journal letter to Peacock of July 22–August 2, 1816: “Mont Blanc was before us but was covered with cloud, & its base furrowed with dreadful gaps was seen alone. Pinnacles of snow, intolerably bright, part of the chain connected with Mont Blanc shone through the clouds at intervals on high. I never knew I never imagined what mountains were before.” See ibid., I.532. Ferguson, “What the Mountain Said,” 202. Ibid., 203. Ferguson wittily observes that the sequence “Arve,” “raves,” and “Ravine” constitutes a “species of relational punning” that accentuates “the symbiosis of things and mind” (ibid., 206)— not unlike Wordsworth’s heard-but-unseen pun in the Snowdon episode, “the Soul, the imagination of the whole” (xiii.65). “[T]he course and shape of a riverbed may be said to be determined by the waters that flow through it just as much as the riverbed may be said to determine the course of the river” (Ferguson, “What the Mountain Said,” 205). Ibid., 213. The Longman editors note that Shelley’s “defiantly atheistical response to the supreme experience of Alpine scenery . . . merges with his epistemological uncertainties concerning the characteristics and mode of existence of a causal power which, not itself knowable, yet determines matter and intelligence.” See Matthews and Everest, The Poems of Shelley, I.534–5. See “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” 8–9. Latour’s source is John McPhee, The Control of Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1980). “. . . we must seek a ground external to ourselves for the beautiful of nature, but seek it for the sublime merely in ourselves and in our attitude of thought, which introduces sublimity into the representations of nature.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of

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Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner, 1966), 84; see Ferguson, “What the Mountain Said,” 213. For a fuller discussion of relationality and “entanglement” in relation to Latour’s work, see Ian Hodder, “The Entanglements of Humans and Things: A Long term view,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 19–36; and Graham Harman, “Entanglement and Relation: A Response to Bruno Latour and Ian Hodder,” New Literary History 45, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 37–49. Morton, Hyperobjects, 9. The term “correlationionism” comes from Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008). Morton, Hyperobjects, 72. “What horrifyingly complex tentacles would such an entity have, this highdimensional object we call global warming?” (ibid., 71). Ibid., 11. Latour, “Agency,” 14. See Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Positioning himself at an angle to “the ecology movement” Latour argues in this book that “political ecology . . . has to let go of nature” (I.9). Latour, “Waiting for Gaia,” 6. For the worrisome implication of a Schmittian all-out war against climate change sceptics in Latour’s recent Gifford Lectures, see Harman, Bruno Latour, 141–7; on Latour’s relation to the political left, see Bruno Latour, 108–32. Latour, “Waiting for Gaia,” 6. For an interesting version of this problem, see Wendy HuiKyong Chun, “On Hypo-Real Models of Global Climate Change: A Challenge for the Humanities,” Critical Inquiry 41, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 675–703. Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 139. Unlike the Moderns who believe “in language as an autonomous domain that is carrying on in the face of a mute world” (p. 145), Latour aims to bridge “the supposed chasm between words and things,” abandoning “the trope of a distinction between world and language” (p. 146). For his summary dismissal of “the arbitrariness of signs” as opposed to “natural language,” see p. 257. “And yet the LITERAL is nothing but the disciplined and domesticated replaying of the flight of figures” (Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 252). Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 139. Ibid., 377.

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Plasticity, poetry, and the end of art: Malabou, Hegel, Keats Greg Ellermann

This essay concerns the work of contemporary speculative philosopher Catherine Malabou. I argue that her ongoing study of “plasticity,” based on an innovative rereading of Hegel, finds echoes in literary critical conversations about form, and that Malabou’s thought can be a resource for those of us interested in such debates.1 To show how, my essay situates Malabou in relation to a broader literary and philosophical romanticism. Malabou is not primarily concerned with poetics. Yet implicit in her thinking, and explicit in the Hegel texts from which she draws, is an association between plasticity and the material forms of poetry: rhythm, meter, caesura, rhyme. Attending to these links, I draw out a latent account of romantic poetics in Malabou’s Hegelian investigations. This theory of plastic verse reveals an intimate, and often overlooked, relation between aesthetic forms and speculative thought. Read in such a way, Malabou’s work offers a corrective to speculative realist philosophies that are inattentive or hostile to the aesthetic.2 Now, I  am not proposing a new theory of form. Nor am I  applying ideas from contemporary philosophy to the study of poetry. Rather, I aim to show that plasticity, understood as the reciprocal giving and receiving of form, already belongs to the aesthetic analysis of poetry. The concept of plasticity shapes romanticism, particularly when it considers form in nature and in art. To acknowledge plasticity’s influence on romanticism is also to acknowledge its ongoing influence, because romanticism articulates many of our most important ideas about form. Seeking to understand plasticity in verse, I  turn to a well-known romantic poem that addresses directly the plastic arts:  John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820). In the “Ode,” Keats experiments with verse in ways that anticipate—but also trouble—Malabou’s thought. Keats’s poem exhibits a formal plasticity that corresponds closely to Malabou’s account of plasticity in Hegelian philosophy. In its focus on the historical life of artworks, the “Ode” also evokes Hegel’s Aesthetics,3 particularly its narrative of the “end of art”—a narrative which I propose conditions Malabou’s concept of plasticity. Keats’s use of form, however, ultimately unsettles any story about the end of art. For the poet, plasticity resists the closure of Hegelian aesthetics and opens up a future for verse as a way of thinking. While Malabou’s interpretation of Hegel helps draw

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out significant aspects of Keats’s poetics, Keats’s own sense of plasticity affirms the continued speculative capabilities of verse. Joining the biological and cognitive sciences with the phenomenological tradition, Malabou’s philosophy of material being powerfully resonates with romantic and idealist philosophies of nature. Since the 1990s, Hegel’s Encyclopedia (1817, 1827, 1830)—including the Philosophy of Nature and the “Anthropology” from the Philosophy of Spirit—has been a constant point of reference for her. Like Hegel and his romantic contemporaries, Malabou seeks to think past the self-enclosed subject. Through the notion of plasticity, she conceptualizes the productive and form-giving “activity of both intelligence and nature, of consciousness and the unconscious together.”4 It is this that marks her thought as “speculative”: she looks beyond the vantage of the finite subject to conceptualize the real. Thus aligned with the speculative realists, Malabou is concerned not only with the limits of subjectivity but also with “the nature of reality independent of thought.”5 I draw on a number of Malabou’s major texts. My focus, though, is her first book, The Future of Hegel:  Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic. Beginning as a dissertation, published in 1996, and translated into English in 2005, the book occupies a significant place in the development of continental philosophy and arrives at the end of a line of important postwar interpretations of Hegel in France. With its interest in materiality and in the non- or anti-subjectivist elements of Hegelian thought, it also anticipates the “speculative turn” taken by continental philosophy in the 2000s.6 Often engaging, if sometimes implicitly, with Alexandre Kojève’s lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, Malabou refuses their emphasis on struggle, finitude, and the end of history.7 Instead, she asks how Hegel’s views of material nature, life, and human embodiment might open up the supposed totality of his system. Tracing in the Encyclopedia both a concept of and a pervasive formal plasticity, Malabou recovers “the possibility of a structural transformation: a transformation of structure within structure, a mutation ‘right at the level of the form.’ ”8 Thus, Malabou’s Hegel confronts the problem of the new, or of the emergence of unprecedented forms of life and thought.9 Over the course of her career, Malabou has gone on to study plasticity in numerous other philosophical and scientific contexts. Defined, most basically, as the simultaneous giving and receiving of form—a process immanent in the real itself—plasticity is the guiding thread in all her varied work. In some ways, the concept could not be more expansive. It characterizes everything from the single cell to complex acts of consciousness. All is plastic, Malabou argues, and she thereby “joins the speculative realists in bypassing previous constructivisms . . . to access what she calls the ‘malleable real.’ ”10 At the same time, against speculative realism, she insists that any investigation of being must return to Hegel.11 For her, there is no concept of plasticity without Hegel. In this essay, I identify the potentials in and the difficulties with this position— particularly as it participates in a narrative of the superseding of art by philosophy. As we will see, the concept of plasticity is always bound up with the fate of art. I begin, then, with a short history of plasticity in aesthetics.

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Histories of plasticity Malabou’s history of plasticity winds its way through the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger into present-day neuroscience.12 Yet in seeking plasticity’s origin, Malabou looks to the discourse of aesthetics. There, the term “plastic” is operative as early as the seventeenth century. Derived from the Greek plassein, “to mould,” the adjectival “plastic” encompasses all those arts “[c]haracterized by moulding, shaping, modelling, fashioning, or giving form to a yielding material.”13 Sculpture and pottery are the key instances. The later eighteenth century sees the appearance of the substantive “plasticity.” According to the Grimms’ dictionary, Malabou’s etymological source, the burgeoning field of classical studies, focused on the nature and history of the arts, introduces this word into the modern languages (the Grimms cite Goethe as evidence). “Plasticity’s native land is the field of art,” Malabou remarks.14 In aesthetics, the word generally refers to the susceptibility of matter to receive beautiful form as well as to the creative power or impulse that gives form. Plastic arts are defined by the process of shaping, by form’s simultaneous imposition on and emergence from a given material. Accordingly, eighteenth-century debates about “the sister arts,” concerned with the specificity of artistic media, often rely on the term.15 The plastic arts are identified in this context as arts of space, rather than of time: architecture, painting, and especially sculpture. For instance, G. E. Lessing, in his influential Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), argues that the plastic arts of painting and sculpture can only show “bodies with their visible properties”—that is, as they appear in space. Time and action must therefore be suggested, he continues, through the form and positioning of these bodies.16 For Lessing, plastic art is defined by beautiful bodily form, frozen but also somehow vital. Throughout the later eighteenth century, the use of “plastic” to describe the arts of space and vision is pervasive. But there are important exceptions too, and the word sometimes takes on a broader metaphorical significance. In such cases, “plastic” signals aesthetic form in general. In his 1795–6 On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, Friedrich Schiller finds in the work of various modern poets both “musical” and “plastic” elements.17 The music of poetry, Schiller says, evokes moods or states of mind, but its plastic aspect is imitative and delineates figures rather than indeterminate feelings. Speaking of Klopstock, Schiller contends that “[a]s superb a creation as the Messiah is in the musical poetic sense . . . much is left to be desired from the plastic poetic point of view in which one expects specific forms and forms specific for sensuous intuition.”18 Klopstock’s epic is peopled by “concepts” and not “living figures.”19 As an art of language instead of marble, poetry may tend toward abstraction. Even so, it should not abandon sensuousness. Through its living figures, its imagistic and metaphoric richness, poetry can mirror sculpture. Unlike Lessing’s essay, Schiller’s depends on analogies between poetry and the other arts, and it significantly expands the field of plastic. Indeed, “plasticity” now characterizes the figurative element in all art—no matter the medium. Twenty years later, Samuel Taylor Coleridge takes this line of thinking to its logical end. In his Biographia Literaria (1817), he famously defines imagination as the mind’s

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“esemplastic power,” the capacity to shape and modify perceptions for the purposes of art.20 Such imaginative shaping, Coleridge argues, makes every act of creation possible; there is no art that is not plastic in this sense. In a distinctively romantic gesture, Coleridge also claims that the imagination’s plastic power exceeds the creation of individual artworks. The “rules” of imagination, he says, are nothing but “the very powers of growth and production” that traverse the natural world.21 We have come a long way from Lessing’s insistence on the limits of the plastic arts. In Coleridge, plasticity is a universal principle of formation that links artworks with natural things, and each moment of artistic creation with the dynamic unfolding of organic life.22 Malabou does not address these particular texts. But she does insist that Hegel offers the first philosophical treatment of such themes. This means going beyond aesthetics and refashioning plasticity in light of speculative logic. To become a philosophical category, plasticity cannot primarily be an aspect of artworks. Thus, Malabou explains, “speculative Hegelian philosophy rips the concept away from its strict aesthetic ties (or sculptural ties, to be precise), definitively conferring the metaphysical dignity of an essential characteristic of subjectivity upon it.”23 For plasticity to come into its own, as it does for Malabou in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, the terrain of aesthetics must be left behind. Despite the romantic tendencies in her philosophy, Malabou seems skeptical of art’s capacity to do intellectual work. I will return to Hegel’s own remarks on the plasticity of art and thinking and to Malabou’s profound interpretation of his philosophy. First, though, I consider a few of the assumptions that structure her account. To reiterate, Malabou positions a properly speculative sense of plasticity against its aesthetic precursors. No longer just a quality of artworks, plasticity after Hegel signifies the form of the philosopher’s subjectivity and indeed of philosophy itself. Plasticity is “that rhythm in which the speculative content is unfolded and presented.”24 It defines, in formal or even stylistic terms, the manifestation of spirit through the materiality of the world. As Hegel argues in the “Introduction” to the Aesthetics (1823, 1826, 1828–9), art has been a crucial site for this unfolding of speculative content. By the early nineteenth century, however, art is “a thing of the past,” superseded in the task of presenting ideas by philosophy.25 Art prefigures philosophical presentation, but it cannot meet the needs of our age. On this point, Malabou frequently echoes Hegel’s “Introduction.” Describing plasticity as the organizing concept, or the “motor scheme,” of our era,26 she implies that it only becomes thinkable when philosophy refuses to be limited by an aesthetic frame. Again, the transcendence of art by philosophy is the precondition for any adequate investigation. This is why, for Malabou, “it is Hegel who will have discovered before its discovery [by the present-day biological sciences] the plastic materiality of being.”27 Or, according to a more recent formulation, “Hegel . . . is the first philosopher to have made the word plasticity into a concept.”28 Malabou’s history of plasticity rests on a division between the aesthetic and the speculative mindsets. For romanticism, as we know, such a division is untenable. It is debatable what Hegel meant to achieve by his diagnosis of art’s pastness. Securing the rights of philosophy in the romantic era, Hegel contests an aestheticism proposing “that that only is true which each individual allows to rise out of his heart,

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emotion, and inspiration.”29 He also anticipates the charge, leveled by some present-day speculative thinkers, that an overestimation of poetry voids philosophy of determinate ontological content.30 But there are problems with taking Hegel’s account at face value. For one, it does not capture the actual status of art in Hegel’s thinking. Recent commentators have traced the intimacy between poetry and philosophy in Hegel, in ways that unsettle the separation between them.31 More important, in stating that Hegel is the first to treat plasticity as a concept, Malabou hews rather too closely to his self-presentation. She confirms Hegel’s own history of philosophy, according to which his work is the culmination (if not the conclusion) of modern thought.32 Yet Hegel really belongs to a community of romantics and idealists, many of whom are directly or indirectly invoked in his writing. In the following sections, I attend to their romantic forms of thought, particularly as these resonate with Hegel’s ideas. This will trouble claims about the overcoming of art by philosophy. My goal is not just to uncover the traces of the aesthetic or the poetic in the speculative text. Rather, I reconsider Hegel (and by extension Malabou) in terms of a romantic plasticity predicated on the essential relation between aesthetics and speculation. Keats will show us what this means for the practice of verse, as his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” explores how the making and experiencing of aesthetic objects can be a kind of philosophical investigation.

A speculative aesthetics We have already seen Coleridge suggest that aesthetic and speculative plasticity cannot be neatly divided. For him, the imagination’s plastic power is one manifestation of the shaping force expressed throughout the cosmos. Similar ideas can be found throughout romanticism. In his influential survey of romantic aesthetics, The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams remarks on this, as he gestures at another history of plasticity. Assessing the term’s changing fortunes across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Abrams writes that “ ‘plastic’ is especially interesting because it was adopted from cosmogonists who, in express opposition to a purely atomistic and mechanical philosophy, had employed the word to signify a vital principle, inherent in nature, which organizes chaos into cosmos by a self-evolving formative energy.”33 As a gloss on the conceptual backdrop to Coleridge’s theory of imagination, this is helpful. But it also implies that, in romantic aesthetics, “plastic” is not just a synonym for “sculptural” or “visual” or even “figurative.” Well before Hegel, and even before Lessing, the term had acquired a deep metaphysical significance. Considering these roots in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, we should not assume that “plastic” is ever free of metaphysical implications. When William Wordsworth says in The Prelude (1805) that “[a] plastic power / Abode with me, a forming hand, at times / Rebellious . . . but for the most / Subservient strictly to the external things / With which it communed,” he seeks to convey the closeness between his creative mind and the natural world.34 For Wordsworth, the relation between mind and nature appears analogical: the poetic imagination is like an organic force of nature.

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But there are many romantic writers for whom the mind-nature relation exceeds analogy. For romantics who insist on the real identity of mind and nature, the study of aesthetic experience cannot be neatly distinguished from a speculative metaphysics of nature. In this context, the plasticity of artworks is just a special case of a general ontological plasticity. The work of Hegel’s erstwhile collaborator and later intellectual adversary, Friedrich Schelling, offers a powerful instance of such speculative aesthetics. Schelling’s key insight concerns the identity of mind and nature. He has no interest in arguing for their harmonious mirroring of each other. For Schelling, identity is distinct from correlation; it is not static but “dynamic in precisely the sense that it is symmetry breaking.”35 In fact, the logic of identity depends on a polarity immanent to nature that “causes difference to proliferate.”36 Nature must be conceived simultaneously as “productivity” and as “product,” as formative impulse and as aggregate of objects. In this dual existence, Schelling says, nature gives rise to increasingly complex forms. The process is far from simple. Nature’s productive forces strive for expression in ever new forms, or “potencies.” Such expression always also occurs as a blockage, or an “inhibition,” in the process itself. Nature as productivity is limited by its own products, which are in turn absorbed back into the flux of things. For Schelling, this repeating cycle of expression, inhibition, and collapse accounts for every natural form. Yet “nature” is a surprisingly expansive category in his thought. From the polarity of productivity and product, Schelling derives not only inorganic and organic forms but also the entire sphere of consciousness. It is thus that nature and the mind can be called identical. A 1799 text, “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature,” explains by invoking an unconscious productivity in its origin akin to the conscious, whose mere reflection we see in Nature, and which from the standpoint of the natural view must appear as one and the same blind drive that exerts its influence from crystallization upward to the highest point of organic formation . . . only acting on different planes. [Thus] what we call ‘reason’ is a mere play of higher and necessarily unknown natural forces. For, inasmuch as all thinking is at last reducible to a producing and reproducing, there is nothing impossible in the thought that the same activity by which Nature reproduces itself anew in each successive phase, is reproductive in thought through the medium of the organism.37

Today, we might describe Schelling as offering a naturalistic account of the emergence of consciousness. Significantly, this theory also explains the creations of the mind— effects of the “producing and reproducing” that Schelling calls “thinking.” He therefore seeks, as one commentator puts it, “to understand aesthetic phenomena through the explanatory framework of naturalism.”38 For Schelling, aesthetic objects and experiences come from nature, construed as the ground of all reality. In his 1807 popularization of these themes, a speech to the Royal Academy at Munich later published as The Philosophy of Art; An Oration on the Relation between

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the Plastic Arts and Nature, Schelling argues that classical sculpture and modern painting alike can be conceived as expressions of nature’s life. Evolving “disjointedly” across different historical moments, “the work of art, growing up from the depths of nature, commences with determination and confinement, developes internal infinity and fulness, and at last, purifying itself to grace, finally arrives at soul.”39 The history of art is a natural history, even if it is presented in rather teleological terms. As the plastic arts emerge and evolve, they follow nature’s polar logic of formation. We can characterize this formative process as “plastic.” Indeed, in the generative antagonism between productivity and product, expression and inhibition, Schelling captures the precise dynamic of speculative plasticity. He also shows that the plastic arts are not simply prefigurative. For Schelling, each potency of nature is irreducible and autonomous. Nature’s plasticity cannot be superseded by art, just as art’s plasticity cannot be superseded by philosophy.40 From Schelling, then, we should garner two major principles: first, the interweaving of art and aesthetics with speculative metaphysics; and second, the proliferation in nature of irreducible, non-hierarchical potencies. At first glance, both of these seem decidedly non-Hegelian. But even in the Aesthetics, there are moments that resonate with such ideas. In a passage on the artist’s “fancy,” for instance, Hegel suggests that he has not entirely left Schelling’s influence behind. Unlike the talent for science, he writes, Fancy has in it a mode of instinct-like productiveness, inasmuch as the essential plasticity and sensuousness of the work of art must be subjectively present in the artist as natural disposition and natural impulse, and, considering that it is unconscious operation, must belong to the natural element in man, as well as to the rational. Of course, natural capacity leaves room for other elements in talent and genius, for artistic production is just as much of a spiritual and self-conscious nature; we can but say that its spirituality must, somehow, have an element of natural, plastic, and formative tendency.41

Here, Hegel points to fancy, or genius, as a mediating term between nature and rationality. In this, fancy recapitulates the role of art generally for Hegel, enabling the transition between material nature and the realm of spirit proper. Yet, by insisting on fancy’s inexplicable and irreducible essence, Hegel also locates in the spiritual side of art a material part. In other words, rather than explain art as the simple product of sensuous matter and the artist’s mind, Hegel contends that art’s “spirituality must, somehow, have an element of natural, plastic, and formative tendency.”42 Veering into a naturalist register, Hegel explains the aesthetic unification of nature and spirit by appealing to a gift of nature, or Naturgabe.43 Thus, the plastic work bursts forth from the plasticity of nature-in-spirit.44 Such moments of complex mediation are interesting not only because they slow spirit’s progress out of nature but also because they take on a local consistency, distinct from the broader trajectories of Hegel’s thought. Thereby, Hegel can imagine the production of the new without a corresponding sacrifice or obsolescence. We

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should treat these moments as modeling a romantic plasticity. Rather than take it as given that plasticity’s conceptual force depends on the end of art, romantics such as Schelling and (as we shall see) Keats insist that aesthetics and speculation, art and nature cannot be divided. Hegel is ambivalent about this romantic argument. Presentday speculative philosophers can also be resistant to seeing aesthetics as a mode of thought. Nonetheless, this romantic idea persists in Hegel’s and Malabou’s thinking of plasticity, in which poetry invariably emerges as a question.

“The laws of spirit are metrical . . . Spirit can only express itself rhythmically” Now I  return to Malabou’s rich reinterpretation of Hegel. In her comments, in particular, on the form and reading of speculative propositions, I  discern a latent poetics of plasticity. This leads me to consider Hegel’s own remarks on the relation, closer than we might have expected, between speculative and poetic plasticity. Again, Malabou defines plasticity in Hegel as “that rhythm in which the speculative content is unfolded and presented.”45 In general, it characterizes the way in which the real gives new forms to itself. The Future of Hegel develops this definition by attending to the particular modes of plasticity operative in Hegel’s Encyclopedia. Each belongs to a distinct stage of spirit’s development. Moreover, each mode of plasticity also has its own style. “Habit” is the book’s starting point, as the mode of plasticity proper to classical culture. Preceding the emergence of modern subjectivity, habit is the slow, sculptural molding of character by embodied practice. Drawn out over time, predicated on constant repetition, never complete or fully present, and therefore “virtual,”46 habit is an art of the self. Indeed, Hegel describes the human character formed by habit as “the soul’s work of art.”47 Like living sculptures, the plastic individuals of classical Greece make possible the union of the psychic and the physical. The soul is formed by actions whose contingent effects are internalized; these actions are re-formed in turn by the developing soul. Malabou goes on, suggestively, to link habit with artistic style: Following the example of the Greek statue, the ‘plastic individual’ is not a simple indexical or external sign of the spiritual element which is alive in it. In the plastic individual, spirit makes itself visible not in a transparent way, but through style. Style, the deictic or ostensive aspect of individuality, represents a distinctive manner (façon) of being or acting that represents the universal, that brings the ordinary and general onto the scene in a form appropriate to it.48

Rather than communicate an external spiritual content, habit presents spirit as immanent to figure. Like style in the artistic and literary sense, habit cannot be said to have content apart from the form it takes. It is therefore “deictic” not because it points

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to something outside itself, but in its “auto-referentiality.”49 As style, habit signifies its own process of formation. In logical terms, this is “the process whereby the contingent becomes essential”—or the “becoming essential of the accident.”50 By fashioning a human essence out of accreted contingencies, habit lays the groundwork for all forms of subjectivity to come. Of course, the possible relations between essence and accident are not exhausted by habit. From the first stirrings, in vegetative life, of the faculty of assimilation to the formation through alienation of the divine, the dialectic of essence and accident unfolds across Malabou’s book. In each of its configurations, we encounter another mode of plasticity. The aim is not just to catalogue, however, but also to consider Hegel’s philosophy as a system—as a totality with the capacity to change. Thus, in the later chapters of her book, Malabou turns to the question of absolute knowledge. For Hegel, absolute knowledge is acquired when we take the perspective of philosophy or of the system itself. What new forms of plasticity will be found at the end of spirit’s trajectory? Spirit’s style is again at issue. Philosophy becomes possible, Hegel contends, only when each prior mode of knowledge has been worked through. But no part of spirit’s past is forgotten. As Malabou explains, from the vantage of the system, “every one of spirit’s shapes will appear retroactively, as an exteriorization which is reinteriorized, making each a kind of imaginary presence, a spectral mode of being their past selves. In this sense, the Aufhebung [or sublation] can be interpreted as the labor of speculative mourning.”51 For the philosopher, such spectral presences (myth, art, religion) are unsettling. Necessary precursors to philosophy, they linger on in ghostly fashion. Indeed, spirit’s past shapes are not cast off but subject to “simplification” and “abbreviation.”52 The outline and the encyclopedia become the proper genres of their survival. Even more, philosophy must find a new language, capable of communicating from this absolute standpoint. This will not be a language of subjective truth, but a language that carries in it every dead form of spirit. Philosophy’s language must therefore go “beyond the ‘I,’ ” in accord with that “speculative abrogation or letting-go” of a stable self achieved in the moment of absolute knowledge.53 To speak of spirit now, to do justice to all that seemed lost, philosophy must reinvent the proposition itself. In fact, Hegel remarks, philosophy’s form must become plastic. Malabou explains the connection of absolute knowledge with plasticity by looking back to the famous “Preface” in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Here, Hegel defines plasticity as a form of writing and of reading. His argument is worth attending to directly, because it will bring us to poetry. Specifying, in grammatical and broadly stylistic terms, the nature of philosophy’s language, Hegel insists that “only a philosophical exposition that rigidly excludes the usual way of relating the parts of a proposition could achieve the goal of plasticity.”54 This entails abandoning the language of common sense, reliant on the grammatical subordination of predicates to subjects. Why are such predicative statements unable to speak absolute truth, to achieve plasticity? For one, the truth content of philosophy is dialectical and cannot be expressed in univocal statements about the being or properties of things. Philosophy’s

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language, if it is true, always says more and other than we meant to say. It is not a language of mastery we speak, but it rather speaks us. As Hegel explains, The philosophical proposition, since it is a proposition, leads one to believe that the usual subject-predicate relation obtains, as well as the usual attitude towards knowing. But the philosophical content destroys this attitude and this opinion. We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning compels our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way.55

Philosophy’s truth content suspends habitual modes of expression. But it also makes demands on the reader. Adopting a language on the verge of unreadability, philosophy makes statements that “oscillate” or “waver” between positions.56 As the philosophical, or speculative, proposition wavers and doubles back on itself, so must its reader. With the understanding unmoored, the reading subject, much like the grammatical subject, is utterly destabilized. In such passages, Hegel is clearly theorizing his own philosophical style. But he does give other examples of the speculative proposition. He points, for instance, to statements about essence such as “God is being.”57 Any reading of this statement is immediately confronted by an interpretive difficulty: is God or being the subject? The statement is defined by an immanent “counter-thrust,” Hegel observes, whereby each possible interpretation seems to destroy the other. Yet we can read the proposition plastically. This means recognizing that both terms are simultaneously subject and predicate, essence and accident. The sentence itself wavers between these meanings, becoming reversible in the process:  God is being, being God. Only by reading and rereading does the sentence achieve a new identity-in-difference, adequate to the complexity of thought. In Malabou’s terms, such statements reveal “essence and accident in mutual support.”58 They achieve a new and plastic sense without actually losing the old. Hegel also proposes that we consider poetry in relation to the speculative proposition. Indeed, poetics offers another way of envisioning plasticity in writing and reading: This conflict between the general form of a proposition and the unity of the Notion which destroys it is similar to the conflict that occurs in rhythm between meter and accent. Rhythm results from the floating centre and the unification of the two. So, too, in the philosophical proposition the identification of Subject and Predicate is not meant to destroy the difference between them, which the form of the proposition expresses; their unity, rather, is meant to emerge as a harmony. The form of the proposition is the appearance of the determinate sense, or the accent that distinguishes its fulfillment; but that the predicate expresses the Substance, and that the Subject falls into the universal, this is the unity in which the accent dies away.59

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With its plastic interplay of subject and predicate, the speculative sentence seems to become poetic. The claim is surprising, considering the place of art in Hegel’s thought. Nevertheless, he appeals to poetic rhythm, generated by a conflict between meter and accent, as somehow akin to the wavering of the speculative proposition. In poetry, Hegel suggests, rhythm results from the difference between an abstract metrical scheme and the individual words that embody it. At “the floating centre” of the poem, rhythm models a unity-in-difference like that of the speculative sentence. In other words, the wavering of philosophy’s language, essential to its expression of absolute truth, is rhythmic. As Hegel’s friend Friedrich Hölderlin remarked, “Spirit can only express itself rhythmically.”60 This is not Hegel’s only investigation of poetic rhythm and speculative truth. The celebrated chapters on poetry in the Aesthetics return to these questions. Yet they also complicate matters substantially. In the Aesthetics, poetry appears as an eminently problematic art. Because of its relative abstraction, poetry is the art that should bring art to an end; it makes way for religion and philosophy as vehicles of spirit. Hegel explains: “poetry destroys the fusion of spiritual inwardness with external existence to an extent that begins to be incompatible with the original conception of art, with the result that poetry runs the risk of losing itself in a transition from the region of sense into that of the spirit.”61 Poetry risks losing itself in its loss of external reality, in eschewing the substantiality of the other arts. Hegel is quick to add that, historically speaking, poetry has not always been at risk. In fact, poetry does bring the external world into view of the inner life:  “in the very field of inner ideas, perceptions, and feelings it broadens out into an objective world which does not altogether lose the determinate character of sculpture and painting.”62 Even more importantly, the art of poetry has its own materiality. In its rhythmic manipulation of language, poetry can become plastic. For Hegel, we will find, poetry’s plasticity is a matter of verse form. Thus, in a chapter of the Aesthetics on “Versification,” he again adduces rhythm as key to poetic language’s “living form.”63 Here too, rhythm is defined by the tension between meter and accent. But in contrast to the discussion in the Phenomenology, it is now clear that this definition of rhythm is also a definition of classical quantitative verse. As Hegel explains, Greek and Latin poetry rely on “the fixed tempo of the syllables in their simple difference between long and short and the numerous ways of fitting them together in specific relations and meters.”64 Classical meters arise from the arrangement of long and short syllables. Meter by itself is not rhythm, as we know. Rhythm only emerges from a set of opposing and irregular effects:  “accent, caesura, and the opposition between verbal and verse-accentuation.”65 Again, rhythm is generated by the unityin-difference of a fixed tempo with the natural sounds and accents of particular words and with the pauses between them. Constituted by a manifold of tempos and accents, repetitions and silences, rhythmic verse wavers like a speculative sentence. Hegel makes the connection clear when he explains how word-accents “produce a counterthrust to the rhythm of the line.”66 It is thus, he concludes, that “we may compare the principle of rhythmical versification with plasticity.”67

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Of course, Hegel’s speculative sentence is not poetry. It is rhythmic, but it speaks from a moment in the history of spirit when poetry has been superseded. In terms of plasticity, Hegel even suggests, philosophy’s language may be more poetic than modern poetry. The plasticity of poetry is lost in our unclassical age:  “to make the beauty of the rhythm audible is a matter of great difficulty for our modern ear.”68 The rhythmic system of verse is incompatible with modern languages, in which syllables do not have fixed duration and words do not have a natural accent. The wavering of language described in the Phenomenology, plastic and vast in its capabilities, no longer belongs to poetry but to speculative philosophy. “[T]he more inward and spiritual the artistic imagination becomes, the more does it withdraw from its natural aspect which it cannot any longer idealize in a plastic way,” Hegel remarks.69 Poetry loses itself, in other words, guaranteeing its own irrelevance through its progress toward the immaterial.70 Poetry is the art that brings art to an end.

Plasticity’s remains Would it be possible to think, with and against Hegel, a plasticity of poetry today? To begin, this would require disentangling the concept from a narrative of the end of art. That is no easy task, as my reading of The Future of Hegel has shown. In conclusion, I  turn to a poet—a contemporary of Hegel’s—whose work has long been identified as “plastic.”71 This is John Keats, whose odes often take plastic art as a theme and also display a plasticity of form. Since the 1950s, readers of Keats have looked to classic and romantic aesthetics, especially to debates about the sister arts, as important contexts for these poems.72 “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” first published in 1820 in Annals of the Fine Arts, a British journal of art criticism, offers an especially significant test case for the plasticity of poetry. As an ekphrastic poem, describing in rich detail a classical urn, the “Ode” inquires directly into the relation between plastic and poetic arts. Furthermore, in meditating on art’s history and on the knowability of the past, Keats’s poem raises similar questions to Hegel’s Aesthetics. Keats’s historical separation from the urn chimes with Hegel’s sense of the belatedness of all art. Others have made such observations before me.73 My claim is that Keats’s “Ode” presents a plasticity of form, resonant with but not reducible to Hegel’s and Malabou’s thought. Specifically, Keats’s plastic verse resists a Hegelian sense of aesthetic closure. Refusing to see aesthetic objects as petrified and “sufficient to themselves,”74 Keats also believes that art’s history is far from over. As the site of ongoing “speculations and surmises,”75 Keats’s poetry uses form to hold open a future for thought. The “Ode” begins by praising the urn. Initially, such praise appears to come at the expense of poetry. “Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A  flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” Keats calls out to the object.76 Confronted by the “sweet” expressiveness of the classical work, modern poetry falls short. At the same time, we discover that Keats cannot make sense of the history that the urn depicts. The strangely frantic scenes that cover its surface—of men, women, and gods in “struggle” (9) and “ecstasy” (10)—are illegible to him. Posing question after question to the urn,

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Keats never discovers “[w]hat leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape / Of deities or mortals, or of both” (5–6). Keats’s interpreters have found themselves in a similar frustrated position. Unable to decide if the ode describes a funeral urn, a drinking chalice, a decorative object, a cheap replica, or a mere figment of the imagination, scholars long ago abandoned the task of finding Keats’s urn “as it really was.”77 In several ways, the poem puts history and meaning into question. Does the “Ode” merely gesture, then, at an unrecoverable past? Is this a poem of absolute loss? To answer these questions, we should look once more to Hegel. Perhaps, in a Hegelian way, Keats’s poem is concerned not with the total loss of cultures and art forms, but with their melancholic abbreviation. If this is so, classical art would be interiorized, and thereby remembered, by modernity. Throughout Keats’s poems, the classical aesthetic no longer lives as it once did and yet it lingers on, remaining in cryptic relics.78 Consider, in this context, Hegel’s well-known remarks in the Phenomenology: The statues are now only stones from which the living soul has flown, just as the hymns are words from which belief has gone. The tables of the gods provide no spiritual food and drink, and in his games and festivals man no longer recovers the joyful consciousness of his unity with the divine. The works of the Muse now lack the power of the Spirit, for the Spirit has gained its certainty of itself from the crushing of gods and men. They have become what they are for us now—beautiful fruit already picked from the tree, which a friendly Fate has offered us, as a girl might set the fruit before us. It cannot give us the actual life in which they existed, not the tree that bore them, not the earth and the elements which constituted their substance, not the climate which gave them their peculiar character, nor the cycle of the changing seasons that governed the process of their growth. So Fate does not restore their world to us along with the works of antique Art, it gives not the spring and summer of the ethical life in which they blossomed and ripened, but only the veiled recollection of that actual world.79

Keats’s “Ode” stages a remarkably similar situation. Again, the urn is not lost to history, but it remains as a seductive, illegible fragment of a past form of life. The “ethical life” from which the urn emerged—an entire nexus of natural and social conditions—will never return, and that presents profound difficulties for understanding. Keats and Hegel alike ask if we, without being of the artwork’s moment, can still find meaning in it. In response to the veiling of the past, Hegel offers up a new world of interiority, and Keats’s poem seems to do the same. Resigned to the urn’s illegibility, Keats imagines for himself its meaning: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; / Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d, / Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone” (11–14). The silence of the urn will thus be transformed into a spiritual song, superior to music in its freedom from all sensuality. Keats, like Hegel, points here to the inner life as the telos of art’s history. To play a song with “no tone” is to attain a pure abstraction worthy of speculative thought. As Hegel suggests, such a self-canceling art form—as he imagines poetry to be—would lie at the end of art’s history, its purpose and its close.

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In Keats’s poem, however, the sensual is never overcome. As commentators have long observed, despite its cultivated “sobriety” and “classical restraint,” Keats’s “Ode” displays a striking density of image and sound.80 Thus, in the instant when eternal stillness and “ditties of no tone” are claimed as aesthetic ideals, the poem’s sensory effects become increasingly ostentatious. The poem moves from one graven scene to the next and the urn itself almost seems to spin; Orrin Wang suggests that such “revolving figures” and “perpetual motion” evoke “a lanterne vive or another revolving optical toy.”81 Visual and aural sensations also blur together throughout this second stanza. Juxtaposing “heard” and “unheard” music, the text is saturated with visible and audible ears: “[h]eard melodies” (11), “unheard” (11), “sensual ear” (13), “more endear’d” (13), and later “near the goal” (18).82 The repetition draws us back from spirit to word and sound, especially given the evocation of the organ of hearing. Keats’s language resists sublimation into spiritual song; the generative materiality of the letter asserts itself in these lines. Even as the poem interiorizes or assimilates the urn, it insists on its own material being. Stone does not give way to spirit so much as the plastic artwork’s incorporation by the poem demands that language take on new forms. Keats depends on poetry’s capacity to generate sensory and intellectual experience, even out of unmeaning remnants. In fact, he is always alive to the manifold forms that language gives and receives. Thus, in a memoir on the poet, Benjamin Bailey describes the careful sculpting of sounds essential to Keats’s practice. His “principle of melody in verse,” Bailey writes, required a precise “management of open & close vowels” in alternation.83 Only thereby, Keats thought, could sound be “wrought into melody.”84 Bailey’s account is important, as it reveals a poet attuned to the melodics of verse. More than that, it suggests Keats conceived of modern languages as equally plastic to the antique. The principle of the alternation of vowel sounds, sculpturally wrought into music, seeks to join together the several arts: sculpture, music, poetry. In its attention to sound and accent, it also evokes the rhythmic versification of Greek and Latin poetics. Keats’s poetry is not classical, of course, but a modern experiment in making plastic verse. To call Keats’s poetry “plastic” is not metaphorical. His ekphrastic poem describes a work of plastic art and it is a sculpted work itself, built up out of word, sound, and breath. The classical urn is not lost or superseded, but it survives in the form of the poem. For Keats, poetry does not belong to a linear progressive history.85 Instead, it generates new forms of experience from the material remains of the past. These forms of experience are always sensuous; in a copy of William Hazlitt’s essays, Keats marks approvingly the claim that poetry effects “the alternate contraction and dilatation of the soul.”86 At the same time, poetry is a form of thinking. Keats, nearer to Schelling than to Hegel now, insistently refuses the separation of aesthetics from speculation, sensation from thought. The final lines of the “Ode,” in all their formal virtuosity, demonstrate the thinking such sensuousness makes possible: Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste,

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Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st, ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (41–50)

These lines show Keats at his most formally audacious. Nearly every line is split by a medial caesura, as if to convey thought’s restlessness before the silent urn. If the urn itself is silent, the “Ode” is not. Now, the poem finally gives voice to the plastic artwork it has incorporated. The classical urn, as assimilated by the romantic poem, becomes a conduit for knowledge. In fact, the urn’s pronouncement—“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ ”—takes the precise form of the speculative sentence from Hegel’s Phenomenology. In its reversibility, the line unites subject and predicate, essence and accident; it sets in wavering motion what appeared written in stone. To associate the urn’s voice with absolute knowledge is not to endorse a simple equation of “beauty” and “truth” (whatever that would mean). Rather, Keats’s speculative sentence oscillates productively between its two terms; it unites-in-difference the aesthetic and the intellectual, as well as the proposition with its own ironic self-reflection. The movement of thought here, which ungrounds the reading subject, can only be described as speculative. Metrically and sonically, these final lines do additional speculative work. In the penultimate line, all restraints of iambic pentameter are cast off. Uncertain myself of how to scan such verse, I find perhaps a trochee and an iamb, followed by the line’s first caesura; then a spondee, a pyrrhic interrupted by another caesura, and a final iamb. Keats’s metrical experiment is more radical than anything described by Hegel; accent and pause take precedence over any regular patterning. Further, the stanza’s rhyme scheme pulls its meter in yet another direction. The stanza’s C rhyme is a triple rhyme between “Pastoral” and “that is all”; as these words chime together, metrical stress starts to fall differently, and it oscillates between “all” and “that.” Repetition also has significant effects, as these lines feature recurrent all sounds:  “pastoral,” “that is all,” “all ye need to know,” and even “shall” and “shalt.” Thus, the poem’s concluding statement—its apparent claim for aesthetic and intellectual closure, for all-ness— actually opens totality to new rhythmic and sonic configurations. Rather than a stony inscription on a monument to loss, the last words of Keats’s “Ode” stage the generative relation between aesthetics and thought, totality and the new. Through his verse, Keats reopens the question of the end of art and thereby of the relationship between poetry and thinking. Against Hegel, he finds speculative potential in the plasticity of poetry. The “Ode” resists aesthetic and intellectual closure not because it opposes the aesthetic and not because it relegates art to the past. Rather, Keats’s poem seeks to provide for the ongoing life of art—restless and ungrounded as this life may be. His verse proves that even the poetry of remnants has a future of “speculation and surmise.” As I have said, the making and experiencing of aesthetic objects is a kind of philosophical investigation for Keats. The last lines of the “Ode” show us that in this poem the form of such thinking and its conceptual content are the same. In other words, Keats’s plastic verse reveals that the relation between aesthetics

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and speculation, beauty and truth is itself plastic—each term shaping and being shaped by the other. Inspired by Malabou’s thought, I  have shown that plasticity is a key concept in romantic aesthetics and poetics. Indeed, plasticity is an unacknowledged but formative presence throughout romantic writing on nature and art. What Malabou demonstrates is the philosophical richness of this concept, the way it reshapes our ideas about nature, speculation, and even form. Her work also points toward the limits of those speculative philosophies unable to account for the aesthetic. I  have suggested that her concept of plasticity is romantic in its capacity to rejoin the aesthetic and the speculative. By reading Malabou together with Hegel and Keats, I have aimed to reanimate plasticity for romanticist criticism and for contemporary literary formalism. As for romanticism itself, plasticity was always there.87

Notes 1 For a recent survey, see Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian, “Form and Explanation,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 3 (Spring 2017): 650–69. 2 See Robin Mackay, James Trafford, and Luke Pendrell (eds.), Speculative Aesthetics (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2014) for a related project. Their concern is the connection between speculative realism and contemporary art practice; I take a longer historical view of speculative philosophy and aesthetics. 3 Cf. Andrzej Warminski, Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). Warminski observes that Keats’s “Ode” seems to endorse the “doctrinal theses of Hegel’s Aesthetics and its monumental history of art” (p. 47). He goes on to pursue a materialism in Keats’s poem that resists aestheticization. 4 G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1977), 110. 5 Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (eds.), The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 3. 6 Malabou refers to Alexandre Koyré, Alexandre Kojève, Bernard Bourgeois, and Jacques Derrida as her major precursors in Hegel interpretation. For more on “the speculative turn,” see the essays in Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman, The Speculative Turn. 7 Cf. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 8 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005), 192. 9 For a related investigation of the production of the new, see Audrey Wasser, The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 10 Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 184.

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11 For a detailed consideration of her divergences from speculative realism, see Malabou’s Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016). 12 See especially Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); and Malabou, Before Tomorrow. 13 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “plastic.” 14 Malabou, Future, 8. 15 Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 16 G. E. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, in Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics, ed. J. M. Bernstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 81. 17 Friedrich Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1966), 133. 18 Ibid., 134. 19 Ibid. 20 S. T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, in The Major Works, ed. H. J. Jackson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 306–7. 21 Ibid., 361–2. For more on Coleridge’s metaphysics of imagination, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953), 167–77. 22 In her recent book, Sara Guyer draws the connection between Coleridge’s imagination and Malabou’s concept of plasticity. See Guyer, Reading with John Clare: Biopolitics, Sovereignty, Romanticism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 34–5, 106. 23 Malabou, Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 13. 24 Malabou, Future, 10. 25 Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 11. 26 Malabou, Dusk, 14–15. 27 Malabou, Future, 193. 28 Malabou, Brain, 80. 29 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 5. Knox’s notes suggest that Hegel has Friedrich Schlegel in mind. 30 Cf. Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2007), 9–10 on “poetic ontology.” 31 On Hegel’s incorporation of the poetic into absolute knowledge, see Rebecca Comay, “Hegel’s Last Words: Mourning and Melancholia at the End of the Phenomenology,” The End(s) of History: Questioning the Stakes of Historical Reason, ed. Joshua Nichols and Amy Swiffen (London: Routledge, 2013), 141–60. 32 For a critical assessment of Hegel’s history of philosophy, see Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 10. 33 Abrams, Mirror, 162. 34 William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), II.381–7.

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35 Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008), 172. 36 Ibid. 37 F. W. J. Schelling, “Introduction to the Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature,” in First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature, trans. Keith Peterson (Albany : State University of New York Press, 2004), 194–5. 38 Daniel Whistler, “Naturalism and Symbolism,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 21, no. 4 (2016): 91. 39 Schelling, The Philosophy of Art; An Oration on the Relation between the Plastic Arts and Nature, trans. A. Johnson (London: John Chapman, 1845), 29. 40 Cf. Whistler, “Naturalism,” 95. 41 I quote here from Bernard Bosanquet’s translation. See Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 46. Knox’s translation of this passage speaks about “figurativeness” and “natural picturing and shaping” rather than plasticity. Cf. Hegel, Aesthetics, 40–1. 42 Hegel, Introductory Lectures, 46. 43 Ibid., 45. 44 For this language of bursting forth, see Malabou on Hegel’s Natural Law essay, in Malabou, Future, 201–2. 45 Ibid., 10. 46 Ibid., 54–6. 47 Ibid., 68–71. 48 Ibid., 72. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., 74–5. 51 Ibid., 146. 52 Ibid., 146–51. 53 Ibid., 156. 54 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 39. 55 Ibid. 56 Malabou, Future, 178. 57 Hegel, Phenomenology, 38. 58 Malabou, Future, 162–4. 59 Hegel, Phenomenology, 38. 60 I draw Hölderlin’s remark, which is also my section title, from a piece by filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, two of the most profound critics of romanticism. See “Cézanne / Empedocles / Hölderlin / von Arnim,” in Writings, ed. Sally Shafto (New York: Sequence Press, 2016), 212. 61 Hegel, Aesthetics, 968. 62 Ibid., 960. 63 Ibid., 1013. 64 Ibid., 1014. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 1019. 67 Ibid., 1022. 68 Ibid., 1019.

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69 Ibid., 1023. 70 Of course, Hegel recognizes that poets do not stop writing poetry. In Christian modernity, rhyme is the sensory material of poetry. Is rhyme plastic? Hegel says no. But insofar as rhyme molds sensation and meaning together to make something new, its “task” being to “emphasiz[e] the sensuous element in distinction from domination by the accentuating and overpowering meaning” (ibid., 1028), the answer is surely yes. To understand the thinking that rhyme does, to explore its speculative potentials—this is left by Hegel as an unfinished project. For more, see Simon Jarvis, “Musical Thinking: Hegel and the Phenomenology of Prosody,” Paragraph 28, no. 2 (July 2005): 57–71; and Naomi Levine, “Rhyme and History in Victorian Poetics,” PhD dissertation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2015). 71 Cf. Hagstrum, Sister Arts. For in-depth assessments of Keats’s sculptural imagery and the theory of the plastic arts, see Nancy Goslee, “Plastic to Picturesque: Schlegel’s Analogy and Keats’s Hyperion Poems,” Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981); and, more recently, Goslee, “The Visual and Plastic Arts,” in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O’Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 126–35. 72 See, for instance, Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 46–57. 73 On Keats and Hegel’s aesthetics, see the important study by David Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and, again, Warminski, Material Inscriptions. For a profound juxtaposition of Keats with Hegel’s philosophy of history, see Rei Terada, “Looking at the Stars Forever,” Studies in Romanticism 50, no. 2 (Summer 2011). 74 I quote from William Hazlitt’s description of classical Greek statues: “In their faultless excellence they appear sufficient to themselves. By their beauty they are raised above the frailties of passion or suffering. By their beauty they are deified . . . their forms are a reproach to common humanity.” Quoted in Charles W. Mahoney, “Imagination, Beauty and Truth,” in John Keats in Context, ed. Michael O'Neill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 173. 75 Ibid., 168. This quotation is from a letter by John Keats. 76 Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 288–9, lines 3–4. 77 On the historicist desire for the past “as it really was,” see Hegel’s discussion of his colleague Leopold Ranke in Aesthetics, 986. On Keats’s possible sources for the urn, see Jack, Mirror, 217–18, 221. 78 Warminski also invokes Hegel’s notion of memory as a process of internalization “that stores up images in order to re-member and re-externalize them in the form of works of art” (Material Inscriptions, 51). For him, the urn is a ruin or remainder that complicates this process. Beyond the odes, poems such as “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles” (1817–18), Endymion (1818), and Hyperion (1820) would be worth revisiting in this context. 79 Hegel, Phenomenology, 455. 80 Cf. Walter Jackson Bate, The Stylistic Development of Keats (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1945), 140–1. Bate stresses sobriety rather than sensuousness. More recently, Orrin N. C. Wang has argued that Keats’s visual sensibility should be understood as pre-cinematic and thus as spectacular and

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism intoxicating. See Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), esp. 250–80. Ibid., 262. See Susan J. Wolfson, Reading John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 99. Bate also notes these “ear” sounds; cf. Bate, Stylistic, 61, 64. Benjamin Bailey, “Letter to R. M. Milnes,” in The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers 1816–78, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948), 2:277. Ibid., 278. Keats’s letters often touch on the shape of history. In an 1818 letter to J. H. Reynolds, Keats praises the “grand march of intellect” (Major Works, 398). Yet one year later, in the famous letter to George and Georgiana Keats, he writes that “in truth I do not at all believe in this sort of perfectibility – the nature of the world will not admit of it” (ibid., 472). Keats, “Marginalia on Hazlitt’s ‘Characters of Shakespear’s Plays,’ ” in Poetical Works of John Keats and Other Writings, ed. H. Buxton Forman (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 5:282. Thanks to Naomi Levine, who read and commented on every version of this chapter.

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Poe’s Black Cat Graham Harman

Some readers may consider it a stretch to include an article on American romanticist Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) in a collection that is largely made up of essays on British romanticism, but Poe is the literary figure most occupying my attention these days, and his writings provide an important stimulus for object-oriented ontology (OOO) in its ongoing engagement with literature. This essay will require that I go a bit further afield historically and spend some initial pages on H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), who, of course, is neither an American nor a British romantic writer but whose tales of horror certainly have roots in both literary periods. Whatever else their similarities and differences may be, I will stick my neck out here and say that Poe and Lovecraft are two of the finest stylists in the history of American letters. This verdict is strongly opposed, of course, by some of our nation’s most eminent authors and critics. In Weird Realism, my book-length study of Lovecraft’s style, I began with the devastating assessment of Lovecraft by no less a figure than Edmund Wilson. It is worth repeating in abridged form here: [Lovecraft’s story “At the Mountains of Madness” concerns] semi-invisible polypous monsters that uttered a shrill whistling sound and blasted their enemies with terrific winds. Such creatures would look very well on the covers of the pulp magazines, but they do not make good adult reading. And the truth is that these stories were hackwork contributed to such publications as Weird Tales and Amazing Stories, where, in my opinion, they ought to have been left.1

To this day, it is easy to find critics who dismiss Lovecraft in similar fashion as a puerile scribbler or hopelessly purple stylist, despite his increasingly serious cultural profile in the United States and abroad. Now, on those rare occasions when Lovecraft is favorably linked with the more upscale neighborhoods of the American literary canon, the comparison is nearly always with Poe. Is there a single counterexample? Has anyone tried to compare Lovecraft with Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, or Hemingway instead? The frequent link with Poe is not surprising, given that Lovecraft and Poe can both easily be classified as “horror writers.” Another important similarity is that Poe takes regular shots from high-end

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literary critics himself. Henry James famously stated that to take Poe “with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness oneself. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”2 T. S. Eliot complains about Poe’s “slipshod writing.”3 Yvor Winters speaks with contempt of “the traditional reverence for Poe as a stylist, a reverence which I believe to be at once unjustified.”4 Mark Twain, in a letter to William Dean Howells, calls Poe “unreadable.”5 The theme continues to this day, since Harold Bloom at Yale—one of our most celebrated living critics— asserts that “Poe’s awful diction, whether [in ‘William Wilson’] or in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ or ‘The Purloined Letter,’ seems to demand the decent masking of a competent French translation.”6 We should note in passing that this last phrase from Bloom is a sneaky rhetorical sleight-of-hand: an attempt to portray the “competent” translators Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé as reluctant doctors of botched English, rather than as historically great writers who lovingly spent thousands of hours rendering Poe’s tales and verse into French. Obviously, all of the detractors just cited are fine writers themselves. Eliot, James, and Twain all dwell in the innermost chamber of the American Literary Pantheon, while Bloom, Wilson, and Winters are among our most important critics. We cannot simply dismiss their complaints as the resentment of jealous careerist underlings in the presence of superior talent. Nonetheless, I hold that Lovecraft and Poe belong to a higher order of stylistic merit than any of those just mentioned. Though I will begin by summarizing my interpretation of Lovecraft’s style, those readers interested in a more detailed assessment are referred to my previous writings on the topic.7 I will then turn to the style of Poe, paying special attention to “The Black Cat” rather than the trio of tales cited with disdain by Bloom.

Reviewing Lovecraft’s style In Weird Realism I considered Lovecraft’s style from the standpoint of object-oriented ontology (abbreviated OOO, pronounced “Triple O”). Central to OOO’s model of reality is a pair of intersecting axes or dualisms.8 While this is true of numerous philosophies, the OOO dualisms are of a peculiar sort. The first is an opposition, drawn from Martin Heidegger but descended from Immanuel Kant, between the real and the sensual. The real is what exists in its own right, regardless of whether or not it is being perceived, much like Kant’s thing-in-itself or Heidegger’s withdrawn Being. The main difference is that OOO holds the real to exist definitely in the plural, whereas neither Kant nor Heidegger is sure that the real is many rather than one, and Heidegger openly tends to doubt it. By contrast with the real, the sensual consists of that which exists only as a correlate of experience. This makes the sensual comparable to Kant’s phenomena or Heidegger’s presence-at-hand, with the crucial difference that whereas Kant and Heidegger only consider cases of what appears to human experience, OOO gives the sensual a cosmic scope, so that even inanimate entities make contact with the sensual rather than the real.

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The second axis of OOO, drawn from Edmund Husserl but also found in the much earlier philosophy of G. W. Leibniz, is the difference between unified objects and their manifold of shifting qualities. David Hume and other empiricist philosophers deny the existence of an “object” over and above the bundle of qualities that seem to belong to it. By contrast, the phenomenology of Husserl and his admirers begins with the priority of the unified object itself: its qualities are treated as servile modifications of the object, which always stands at the center of the picture. When combined, the two axes of real versus sensual and objects versus qualities give us a fourfold of real objects, real qualities, sensual objects, and sensual qualities, handily abbreviated as RO, RQ, SO, and SQ. OOO argues that objects cannot exist without qualities, nor qualities without objects, while also claiming that the relationship between an object and its qualities is loose rather than tight. Because of this looseness, we speak of four tensions between the different kinds of objects and qualities: RO-RQ, RO-SQ, SO-SQ, SO-RQ. It is no exaggeration to say that the primary method of OOO in every field it enters is to explore the consequences of how these tensions form and eventually break down. Anyone who opposes OOO is intellectually obliged to show either that we ought to reject the distinction between real and sensual, that there is no pertinent distinction between objects and their qualities, or that OOO’s model of the four tensions is otherwise inadequate. Now, it turns out that RO-SQ is the tension most central to aesthetics. The gap between ROs and SQs is especially visible in the case of a writer like Lovecraft, with his uncanny alertness to the rift between the palpable qualities of a thing and the eerie elusiveness of its style or overarching character. The most famous example is surely his description of an idol of Cthulhu, that signature Lovecraftian monster. Cthulhu is sometimes breezily defined, by both fans and critics, in such pulp horror terms as “a dragon with an octopus-head.” Although accurate enough to bring newcomers up to speed, summaries of this sort completely miss the tortured way in which Lovecraft gropes toward a proper description of the idol of this beast: “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing . . . but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful” (my emphasis).9 From the standpoint of Hume’s philosophy, it would be perfectly acceptable to refer merely to “simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature” when describing the idol, with perhaps a few added notes of detail to round things off. As we have seen, Hume permits nothing to be more than a bundle of tangible traits that are capable of literal description. But Lovecraft veers in an anti-Humean direction: “the spirit of the thing” and “the general outline of the whole” escape the narrator’s literal power of conveyance, and hint at some ineffable reality over and above all the object’s manifest features. Since this is Lovecraft’s most typical writerly strategy, it will be useful to give one further example. This one comes from “The Dunwich Horror” and describes the dead body of the half-monster Wilbur Whately, who had formerly— though barely—passed for human: “It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be

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vividly visualized by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and the known three dimensions.”10 This passage is perfectly executed; in it, Lovecraft not only avoids the old horror-story cliché of “I have no words to describe it” but also includes and surpasses it with a single stroke. He does not merely negate the describability of Wilbur’s body, but also alludes to that body: an important distinction for OOO. After all, direct access to reality is not the only possible kind. But there is a second typically Lovecraftian stylistic gesture as well, one that runs perpendicular to the first. This concerns cases in which the thing described is not treated as ineffable at all but in precisely the opposite manner: by bludgeoning the reader with a mass of apparently literal descriptions that are so numerous and variegated that they cannot effectively be unified in the imagination at all. The best example is surely the description of the colossal Antarctic city in “At the Mountains of Madness,” viewed in projected form in the sky. As the narrator feverishly puts it, There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange, beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath. There were composite cones and pyramids either alone or surmounting cylinders or cubes or flatter truncated cones and pyramids, and occasional needle-like spires in curious clusters of five.11

I have often compared this style to that of cubist painting, and the comparison still strikes me as apt. During their High Cubist period, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque attempted no illusion of a real thing occupying three-dimensional pictorial space, nor did they allude to a thing hidden behind its depiction on the flat surface of the painting. Instead, they replaced each thing with a simultaneous multitude of its many different profiles as viewed from numerous angles. With his impossible piling-up of bizarre architectural features, Lovecraft quickly undercuts any plausible depiction of these Antarctic structures, heightening the tension between the single Cyclopean city and its multitude of traits. The other two tensions of OOO (RO-RQ and SO-RQ) are inherently more difficult to grapple with, given that SQs—the basic material of human experience—are missing from both. Nonetheless, we might expect a writer with Lovecraft’s intimate command of the netherworld of language to find a way of evoking the elusive RQ, and occasionally we see him pull it off. We note first that the SO-RQ tension occurs at least twice in his stories, both times in connection with mysterious extra-worldly substances that scientists are unable to classify. This happens first in “The Colour Out of Space,” when the chemical structure of the ominous meteorite resists all efforts at testing. It happens again in “The Dreams in the Witch House,” when the lead character Gilman awakes from a supposed dream involving a small statue to find a fragment of the statue actually in his hand. Scientists are baffled once more:

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One of the small radiating arms was broken off and subjected to analysis, and the results are still talked about in college circles. Professor Ellery found platinum, iron, and tellurium in the strange alloy; but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high atomic weight which chemistry was powerless to classify. Not only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic system.12

But while the properties of this object remain inscrutable (RQ), the object itself is not (since it is SO, not RO). This is established further by Lovecraft’s amusing report that, to this day, there is a public museum exhibit devoted to the puzzling object! That leaves us with the RO-RQ tension, which might seem impossible to describe given that both the object and its qualities are real, and for OOO to be real means to be withdrawn from any direct access. However, it should be recalled that OOO also allows for indirect access to the real by way of allusion. What we need to find, then, is a passage from Lovecraft in which both an object and its qualities withdraw from any direct description, in such a way that both must be subject to allusion rather than a literal prose account. I see one clear candidate in Lovecraft’s writings, even if it seems at first to fail the test of double withdrawal. The passage in question comes from “The Haunter of the Dark,” and reads as follows: “Ultimate Chaos, at whose centre sprawls the blind idiot god Azathoth, Lord of All Things, encircled by his flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers, and lulled by the thin monotonous piping of a daemoniac flute held in nameless paws.”13 It might seem that this description is perfectly tangible, no matter how strange, since Lovecraft does manage to convey some of the features of this unearthly scene. But scratch the surface, and even this literal-seeming portrayal turns out to be nothing more than allusion to something even darker. For there are other references to Azathoth in Lovecraft’s tales, and they help show that no literal description of this deity-thing is even meant to work. In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” for instance, we read of “the monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space which the Necronomicon had mercifully cloaked under the name of Azathoth,” where the Necronomicon is a fictitious book invented by Lovecraft and said to contain the sum of all evils.14 Further passages could be cited, but our point is already established. “Azathoth” is no discernible deity, but a mere name that “mercifully cloaks” a deeper chaos “beyond angled space,” which I challenge any painter or filmmaker to convey adequately. The claim of a “merciful cloaking” is no isolated affectation, given how often Lovecraft’s characters are driven insane by the monstrosities they encounter. So, assuming we have persuaded the reader that Azathoth is an RO (in the OOO sense) rather than a sensual one, why not remain content with calling this an RO-SQ tension? Why not say that Azathoth is the mercifully cloaking proper name for a withdrawn nuclear chaos of such cryptic monstrosity that no one can visualize it but that the qualities of this entity remain perfectly commensurate with language? After all, Lovecraft does tell us that Azathoth (whatever it signifies) is surrounded by “a flopping horde of mindless and amorphous dancers,” a description that is perfectly discernible

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even if rather odd. But here I take the liberty of inferring that Lovecraft does not mean the flopping horde of dancers in any more literal a sense than the name “Azathoth” itself. It is highly doubtful that the unspeakably monstrous nuclear chaos beyond angled space could be encircled by literal dancers, however mindless and amorphous. On this basis, I conclude that this is the best example we have of an RO-RQ tension in Lovecraft’s fiction. I freely admit that there is more to a writer’s style than the exemplification of OOO’s four ontological tensions, though I do hold that the rift between an object and its qualities is the root of all beauty, and all aesthetics more generally. But here I would like to raise a different question. Given the argument that Lovecraft is an author who works primarily with RO-SQ tensions (the Cthulhu example) and SO-SQ tensions (the Antarctic city example), what should we say about the style of Poe, with whom Lovecraft is so often compared? Does he work with the same stylistic tensions in his depiction of objects, alternative ones, or within a different framework altogether? This is the question I will examine by means of a brief interpretation of Poe’s “The Black Cat.”

Interlude The interpretation of Lovecraft in Weird Realism focused on the four basic possible tensions between the objects depicted in his stories and the qualities that belong to them, with a special emphasis on the two tensions that involve SQs: RO-SQ and SO-SQ. Yet in literature there is a more basic stylistic question that precedes that of how the author loosens the bond between object and qualities. Namely, the author must succeed in earning the reader’s involvement in what is being said; the reader’s conviction must be won. In all artworks of every genre, the style is a good one if it succeeds in this respect, and a bad one if it intrudes upon our direct involvement with the subject matter:  stated in popular slang, “the wires cannot be showing.” If we feel manipulated by an author, if he or she relies heavily on clichés or on stock literary devices encountered a hundred boring times before, then we feel we are in the presence of a flailing author rather than being directly embedded in the world the author portrays. A useful term for describing a successful style is sincerity: not in the sense that the author should be earnest, sentimental, or naïve but that we as readers are brought into sincere relation with the work rather than smirking at the artist’s shoddy craft. The venerable Michael Fried speaks in similar fashion of “absorption” in the visual arts, though he always refers to the absorption of the human figures portrayed in artworks in whatever they are doing: in a way that deliberately excludes us, the beholders of the work.15 This remains the case even though Fried had to concede that absorption became an ambivalent tool in French painters such as David and Millet before eventually being almost abandoned by Manet.16 By contrast, when OOO speaks of sincerity, it includes the beholder’s attention as an element of the artwork itself. I should add that a style can be effectively sincere even if ironically campy; consider Oscar Wilde, who almost always succeeds in bringing us sincerely

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into his ironic universe of arched eyebrows, enjoying his epigrammatic mockeries as we silently mock along with him, despite his famous claim that all bad poetry is sincere.17 Reader or viewer involvement is the key, and every skilled writer has a different way of obtaining our involvement. This is what OOO means with the concept of “theatricality,” which it treats in a positive sense, unlike Fried, who treats it as nothing less than the death of art.18 Any artwork designed primarily to provoke a reaction from the beholder is theatrical in Fried’s pejorative sense; a better attitude, he holds, is something much closer to (a Kantian) disinterested contemplation of an artwork independent of us. OOO has a different view of aesthetic experience. Our reason for promoting theatricality stems from considerations of ontology. Recall that for OOO the primary locus of aesthetics is the tension called RO-SQ, in which an RO becomes detached from its qualities, and in so doing withdraws to an inaccessible depth to which one can only indirectly allude. It would seem, therefore, that we are left with nothing but freefloating sensual qualities detached from any tangible object. But this is forbidden by the same OOO principle that leads us to reject the “bundle of qualities” theory of Hume. Namely, for OOO as for phenomenology (its most important philosophical ancestor), there is no object without qualities and no qualities without an object. Therefore, it is important to solve the puzzle of how the RO can enter our aesthetic experience even though it supposedly withdraws from access. The solution is simple, but has far-reaching implications. Though the RO “idol of Cthulhu” disappears once Lovecraft succeeds in making it ineffable with his groping half-descriptions, there is already another RO on the scene, prepared to take its place and perform its labor. That object is I myself as the beholder of the artwork. It is I  who step in for the absent Cthulhu-idol and unify its qualities in my tortured attempt to grasp the “spirit of the thing” or “general outline of the whole” that unifies all its stranded SQs: octopoid, humanoid, or dragon-like. In this sense, Fried’s “beholder” is no longer a very good term for the artistic spectator, who is far more involved than any model of disinterested aesthetic contemplation would permit. A  more accurate term—though perhaps a more euphonious one will eventually be found— would be “thespian,” the collateral adjective of the actor. Much like a Stanislavskiinspired “method actor,” the reader of Lovecraft who is not bored or unimpressed must internally play a Cthulhu-idol that acts as if it had octopus-human-dragon qualities.19 Elsewhere I  have argued at length that cases of metaphor display this phenomenon in an especially helpful way.20 There is an additional issue in the case of literature, one that is relevant to many of Lovecraft’s great tales and nearly all of Poe’s. Namely, in first-person narratives we do not confront the subject matter of the story directly but through the mediation of a narrator who must first earn our trust as a reliable presenter of things that he or she has experienced personally. Poe’s tale “The Black Cat” is one such case. We are told at the start that the narrator faces execution on the following day, and that he will now tell us the story how he came to face such a punishment. Because of its use of firstperson narrative, “The Black Cat” has a special need to convince us of the narrator’s own sincere and truthful relation to the events related in the tale, since otherwise we

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would quickly lose interest. There appear to be heavily supernatural elements at play in this story; for this reason, much of Poe’s stylistic burden in “The Black Cat” is to convince us tacitly that his supernatural explanations are more plausible than any explanation according to everyday modern rationalist and materialist preconceptions. In order to pull this off, Poe’s narrator pushes a non-supernatural explanation of the deeds of his black cat as far as possible, even to the point of absurdity. As we will see, he does this by endorsing a natural-causal explanation that is simply preposterous, thereby compelling us to believe in a ghostly and superstitious world as a better match for the facts than any rational scientific outlook. This technique is related to but different from Lovecraft’s own. The main difference is that Lovecraft generally renounces supernatural causes in his stories and tries instead to depict a natural world that is nonetheless beyond all possible human comprehension. Herein lies the grain of truth in the frequent observation that Poe prefers inner, psychological horror while Lovecraft emphasizes outer, cosmic horror, and that whereas Poe’s narrators tend to be psychologically intricate, Lovecraft’s are usually nondescript academic observers with less-developed personal backstories.

The Black Cat The plot of “The Black Cat” is relatively simple. A  kind-hearted animal lover is married young to a woman who shares his fondness for pets. They enjoy domestic bliss among these animals, especially a black cat who loves the narrator dearly. But gradually, alcoholism degrades his personality; he becomes peevish and violent to the point of physically abusing his wife. Eventually, moved solely by a spirit of perversity, he cuts out one of the eyes of his adoring black cat, who quite naturally begins to avoid him. Soon thereafter the narrator ventures further down the road of cruelty: he hangs the poor creature from a tree in his yard, weeping as he does so. That very night he awakens to cries that his house is on fire, and he barely escapes alive while losing all his worldly possessions in the blaze. The next day he returns to the ruins of his former home to find an astonished crowd gazing at a remaining wall on the property, which bears the uncanny outline of a cat hanged from a noose. The narrator offers an absurd scientific explanation for this phenomenon that no reader can possibly believe, thus proving the first supernatural element in the story by a sort of backhanded reductio ad absurdum. It is not long before he finds himself in a debauched tavern, where he finds a friendly black cat of unknown origin, one that looks a great deal like the pet he had already killed. He takes it home, and on the following day is horrified to discover that the new cat also has a missing eye, though it is distinguished from the first by a vague white patch on its breast. Over time this patch begins to take on the definite form of a gallows, which understandably terrifies the guilty narrator. One day he descends to the cellar in his new and shabbier residence. The second cat, which has gradually become abhorrent to him, runs beneath his feet and almost causes him to trip down the cellar stairs. This awakens rage in the narrator, who immediately attempts to kill the cat. He is prevented from doing so by his still kindly wife, which leads him to kill

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her instead, with a single blow from an axe. The narrator retains sufficient composure to wall up his wife’s body in the basement and invent a cover story for her absence. His alibi proves unconvincing, and the police make inquiries. After conducting a final search of the property, they are ready to admit that no evidence has been found. But in a fit of hubris, the narrator begins to praise the well-built character of his house, tapping again and again on the very portion of the wall behind which his wife’s body is hidden. A howl comes from behind the bricks, growing louder and shriller. The police are initially stunned, but soon begin to tear down the wall. They quickly uncover the partially decayed corpse of the narrator’s wife, with the second black cat sitting atop her head. The plot is well-constructed enough, and the tale does inspire genuine horror in many of those who read it. In what follows, however, I  am less concerned with the general plausibility of the story than with the dozens of little “micro-plausibilities” by which Poe earns our literary trust. And I do mean dozens: in a story of less than ten pages in length, there are seventy-three places in which, I, as a reader, felt myself give more than usual credence to certain words or actions in the story. What is meant by “more than usual” credence? I take it to be generally well known that most human experience, thought, and conversation has a purely perfunctory character. It is “not news,” and does not sustain our interest; information theory would call it “redundant.”21 Just now I  took a break from writing this article and checked the sports news at the website espn.com. A headline there reads as follows: “Rodgers: Not Back to Save Packers’ Season.”22 As a lifelong American sports fan, the story is neither unintelligible nor uninteresting to me. Aaron Rodgers is currently the star player for the Green Bay Packers, one of the most storied clubs in the history of the rather violent sport known worldwide as American football. Nearly two months ago, on October 15, 2017, Rodgers had his right collarbone broken in a game against the rival Minnesota Vikings. In his absence, Green Bay won three games and lost four, leaving them a mere borderline candidate for advancing into the postseason tournament (or “playoffs”) by which sports leagues in America—unlike most of the world—generally determine their champions. The story lets us know that the Green Bay Packers, and Rodgers himself, are trying to downplay his ability to save a disappointing season so late in the schedule. This was new information to me on a first reading and captured my interest, but now that I have seen the headline five or six times this evening, it has become so bland that I pay it little mind. Most writing, even most good writing, consists of long prosaic segments that merely move the reader from one place to another. If pulled off effectively, the best we can hope for is that such passages not obstruct our movement from one micro-event of heightened attention to another. These miniature events occur whenever we take a genuine, if momentary, interest in something, our minds briefly absorbed in what is happening rather than merely collecting more literal information. In need of a term for these tiny moments of attention, let’s simply use the term “black cat,” which refers not only to the title of Poe’s story, but to a frequently encountered entity that cannot fail to capture our attention, whether through superstition or sheer visual interest. Poe’s writing is unusually rich in black cats as so defined.

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Organizing seventy-three black cats When reading Poe’s story, I  count seventy-three black cats in all:  that is, seventythree moments when my attention is briefly seized by one thing or another amidst the general flow of literal information. It is unlikely that every reader would come up with exactly the same count, but this hardly matters. My claim is not that everyone can or does read every story in exactly the same way, but simply that everyone’s attention will be captured by a finite number of discrete elements in whatever they happen to read. Now, since it would clearly be unmanageable to deal with seventy-three separate passages in an article already at its halfway point, the first order of business is to arrange the various black cats into categories. It seems to me that the episodes can be named and sorted roughly as follows:  Variety (3 black cats), Humor (14), the Supernatural (7), Sudden Incidents (9), Introspection (6), and Proof (11). The remaining black cats assigned to a category I will call Miscellaneous (23), which we will have to leave aside in what follows.

Variety We begin with the simplest example on the list. One way to capture anyone’s attention is to present them with a variety of entities that provide material for the free play of the imagination, as in the various collections assembled by especially intelligent children. The authors of OOO do something similar with so-called “Latour Litanies,” Ian Bogost’s term for long lists of heterogeneous objects. The goal of these litanies is not to make an “argument,” as if that were the only mental act worth performing, but to fix the reader’s attention rather than boring him or her with prosaic wastelands of purported proof. I count three and only three such cases in Poe’s story: ● ●

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“We had birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.”23 “Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick-work.”24 “In the next [instant], a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall.”25

Along with the intrinsic interest possessed by any multitude of kindred elements, each of the three cases just listed has a subsidiary purpose. In the first, the cat is both the equivalent of the other animals as one member of a set, but is also placed apart from them as the sole animal mentioned in italic type. Later, we learn that the cat initially escapes the cruel mistreatment inflicted on the other pets, though it will eventually receive the roughest handling of them all. In the second example, the procuring of mortar, sand, and hair forces the narrator to prepare plaster himself from these three ingredients rather than purchasing it ready-made. This lends additional drama to his attempt to conceal the location of his wife’s body. In the final case, probably the least interesting of the three, the narrator lends momentary drama to the discovery of his

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wife’s body, making the dozen stout arms a kind of revealing counterweight to the concealing force of mortar, sand, and hair.

Humor Although humor does not immediately come to mind when speaking of Poe, any more than when speaking of Sade, it is found in abundance in both authors. Recalling the importance that Fried lends to the “absorption” of pictorial figures in whatever they are doing, humor is a limit case in which the object of a character’s absorption strikes the reader or viewer as trivial to the point of ludicrous, reminding us of Aristotle’s definition of comedy as being about people “worse than we are.”26 Of fourteen passages in the story that make me chuckle or laugh out loud, the following three stand out: ●

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“Our friendship [mine and the first cat’s] lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character—through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance—had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alteration for the worse.”27 “[The white patch on the second cat’s breast] was now the representation of an object that I shudder to name—and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared—it was now, I say, the image of a hideous—of a ghastly thing—of the GALLOWS!—oh mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime—of Agony and of Death!”28 “The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd—by some of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it.”29

In the first case, the humor results solely from the use of prissy and stilted language, which is not just a left-over archaism from Poe’s distant era, but the result of what I take to be calculated literary decision. If Poe had written more directly that the narrator’s temperament and character had decayed “due to excessive consumption of alcohol,” we would pass through this phrase without a second thought. But the hesitant reference to “the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance” signals the narrator’s embarrassed absorption in reflecting on the causes of his personal decay, and the effect is humorous despite the objective sadness of the result. The second example is the sort of passage that critics of Poe (and Lovecraft) cite whenever sneering at their supposed “bad writing” and “purple prose.” The mistake of critics is the same in both cases: namely, they forget that we are dealing with a first-person fictional narrator rather than with the omniscient third-person voice of the author. That is to say, the voice that speaks with overwrought terror of “the GALLOWS!” is not that of the writer Edgar Allan Poe,

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but that of a murderous narrator who is a character in a story by Poe. That narrator’s description of the gallows as a “mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime—of Agony and of Death!” is perfectly useful for conveying his desperate state of mind. It is also extremely funny, despite the objective ghoulishness of its subject matter. The third example is perhaps the finest in this series. In a sort of madcap parody of the usual rationalist reduction of supernatural phenomena to sober logical explanation, Poe manages to convince us of the supernatural by making the natural sound ridiculous. For are we really expected to believe that someone in the crowd cut a hanged cat from its noose, then tossed it through the sleeper’s window at just the moment when the walls were collapsing, thereby allowing for the joint action of fire, lime, and carcass ammonia to leave the ghostly imprint of a hanged cat on a standing wall in the ruins? It so much easier to believe that the deceased cat used some devilish power to leave a sign of warning and vengeance through purely supernatural means. Along with being ominous, this is simultaneously quite funny, with both features conspiring to capture the reader’s interest in especially intense form.

The supernatural Though we have just touched on the supernatural in the passage describing the catapparition on a wall, there are other such cases in the tale that are not the least bit humorous. I count seven of them, though again we will only have space for three: ●

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“In speaking of [the first cat’s] intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point—and I mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered.”30 “What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the [second cat], was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like [the first cat], it also had been deprived of one of its eyes.”31 “The reader will remember that this mark [on the second cat’s breast], although large, had been originally very indefinite; but, by slow degrees—degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Reason struggled to reject as fanciful—it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline.”32

The first passage sets the table for our eventually believing in the supernatural powers of the cat, by using a craftily weak triple alibi to deny it. Initially, the narrator ascribes superstition only to his wife, thereby denying it in himself, thus establishing his own impeccable materialist credentials. Next, he tells us that even his wife was not serious in her view that cats are witches. And finally, he tells us in unconvincing whistle-past-the-graveyard fashion that there is no particular reason why he is even mentioning this notion at the moment, but that it simply entered his mind at random. The second example seizes our attention by sharing the alarming fact that the second cat is missing an eye just like the first, suggesting that it will be

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an instrument of the first cat’s vengeance, if indeed the second cat is not a direct reincarnation of the first. The third example is the one that leads in short order to the “GALLOWS!” passage already cited above, though here it is merely ominous and not yet hilarious as well.

Sudden incident Although the use of unexpected happenings in literature is easily abused, and thus easily forfeits the credence of the reader, sudden incident is as captivating in fiction as in everyday life. I will now quote three of the nine instances I found in the story: ●

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“I took from my waistcoat-pocket a pen-knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity.”33 “On the night of the day on which this cruel deed [hanging the cat] was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of fire. The curtains of my bed were in flames. The whole house was blazing.”34 “But this blow [against the second cat] was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan.”35

All three passages have an obvious fascination, though the first and third are particularly horrifying. What strikes me as most skillful in Poe’s handling of the three is his avoidance of any belaboring. Within the space of one or two sentences, the narrator’s life is in each case irreversibly transformed. In the first, he passes from a kind-hearted animal lover into an irredeemable animal torturer on the road to becoming an animal killer. In the second, all his worldly wealth is destroyed. And in the third, he becomes the murderer of his own wife and enters upon the path of capital punishment. Here, the suddenness of his dark life-transition is emphasized by the fact that his wife falls “dead upon the spot, without a groan,” with no discernible moment of passage between life and the grave.

Psychology The confessions of other humans are rare and revealing enough that we usually take an interest whenever encountering them, even from those who may not seem objectively interesting or practically useful to us. Poe is known for his incisive portrayal of narrators with disturbing psychological profiles, and this holds for “The Black Cat” as for most of his stories. What follows are three of six especially introspective passages I found in the tale: ●

“When reason returned with the morning—when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch—I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the

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crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched.”36 “For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half-sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse.”37 “With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase.”38

The first passage displays the narrator’s merely half-hearted guilt on the morning after his cruel mutilation of a previously beloved pet, which had done nothing to deserve such ill handling. The second shows us a similar half-heartedness following his later murder of the animal by hanging. In both cases, the expected connection between a wicked action and a gnawing sense of guilt is negated by the narrator’s report of his relative lack of feeling in the aftermath. This gap between a cause and its expected effect fascinates the reader, leading us to wonder about the forces at work in his psyche. A  similar thing happens in the third passage, which concerns the second cat, since we would normally expect a disliked animal to sense our negativity and to keep away from us as a result. Here our attention is turned to the cat itself, which either does not recognize that it is held in low esteem, does not care, or—worst of all—actively rewards our dislike with caresses for some unknown reason. Again, the expected bond between cause and effect is ruptured, and we are fascinated by the juxtaposition of two apparently contradictory attitudes.

Proof Along with Poe’s fondness in “The Black Cat” for sudden, barely explicable incidents, there are opposite cases in which he posits causes that seem to explain later events. Yet at times these supposed causes are so flimsy that the effect verges on the humorous. That is especially the case with the first two examples below, chosen from the eleven cases I found in the tale: ●

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“I married early, and was happy to find in my wife a disposition not uncongenial with my own.”39 “Pluto—this was the cat’s name—was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difficulty that I prevented him following me through the streets.”40 “And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man.”41

The point of the first passage is to depict an affable and benevolent narrator who joined his fate to a woman’s at a young age; it leads us directly to the young couple’s

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shared fondness for animals. All this paves the way for our heightened shock when this animal-loving husband becomes violent toward his pets and eventually his wife. The same holds of the second passage, in which the reader has difficulty suppressing a smirk when learning that it was “with difficulty that I  prevented [the cat] from following me through the streets.” The cat’s unusual affection for the narrator will not be rewarded as the story unfolds. The third example is of a different sort, and marks the only bit of philosophizing from Poe in his tale. Perverseness, defined as “a primitive impulse of the human heart,” is described as the wish to do things simply because they ought not to be done. Here again, the expected bond between motives and actions is ruptured through the positing of a crude faculty in all human hearts that leads us to do the precise opposite of what we ought to be doing.

Concluding remarks These examples of what I have called “black cats” in the tale—elements in this story, and in all others, that break the prosaic flow of informative language and capture the reader’s attention to a heightened degree—were meant to provide bulk for some concluding observations. I  do not suggest that every writer (or even every tale by Poe) employs precisely the six types of black cats offered above. Every writer has his or her own toolbox, and even each piece of writing by the same author has a different character from its neighbors. But there are some general lessons to be drawn from Poe’s case, ones that also help distinguish him from his ostensible literary cousin, Lovecraft. Generally speaking, I hold that there are two and only two basic ways of capturing a reader’s attention, or indeed the attention of human beings in everyday life. We either create a new bond between one thing and another, or we sunder an already existing bond. The reason for this is that redundant literal experience consists of a series of equivalences between objects and their qualities, objects and their relations, or objects and their causal powers. (In the typical OOO manner, I  use “object” here to mean any entity:  human, animal, plant, inanimate, as well as actions and events.) Only a surprising new bond or the shattering of a familiar one is capable of standing out from the banality of the customary links between various things in the world. As I argued in my second book, we can steal the terms “fission” and “fusion” from nuclear physics to describe these two processes.42 Of the six categories of “black cats” found in Poe’s tale, we can see that three of them involve the bonding of a narrator with an object, of the reader with an object, or of one object with another. In humor, we find the narrator bound with an object, generally an amusing one that causes us to feel a slight sense of condescension toward him. The GALLOWS! is not a frequent subject of everyday thought, and when it does happen to cross our mind, we often reflect on this horrible object with the same bland mixture of interest and jaded boredom as found in most of our thoughts. Although the narrator has good reason to fear this particular image, and though the tale fits neatly into the genre of horror rather than of comedy, such purposely overwrought attention to a

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“mournful and terrible engine of Horror and Crime—of Agony and of Death!” easily provokes amusement. In the category of variety, it is the reader who becomes an unwitting comic agent, sincerely absorbed in birds, gold-fish, dogs, rabbits, monkeys, and cats, or in mortar, sand, and hair. This innate human fascination with lists of equivalent entities always verges on a comic effect, which explains why OOO’s “Latour Litanies” so often provoke laughter among those who do not angrily dismiss them. Just consider what is probably Bruno Latour’s own finest litany:  “Golden Mountains, phlogiston, unicorns, bald kings of France, chimeras, spontaneous generation, black holes, cats on mats . . . black swans and white ravens . . . Hamlet, Popeye, and Ramses II.”43 It is hard not to laugh at this amassing of dissimilar entities on a single philosophical plane, even though the argument behind this operation is—I hold—fundamentally sound.44 The third type of fusion is that between one object and another, remembering again that OOO also treats people and events as kinds of objects. Poe’s tale posits causal relations that are somewhat unusual, and which therefore capture our attention far more than the obvious links between flame and heat, or apple and red. Early marriage is implausibly cited as convincing evidence of good-heartedness. A cat’s affection for its owner is displayed through its rather exaggerated tendency to follow him everywhere through the streets, and to take nourishment from the owner alone and nobody else. The passage on perversity is more complicated, since it could fit in the rather different category of psychology (a type of literary fission rather than fusion). But the weight of the passage leads more in the direction of binding the narrator with the purportedly primal faculty of wishing to do things for the very reason that they are wrong. The reader will be unsure if the philosophical claim is accurate, and therefore the narrator’s claim that his life and ours are bound over to perversity captures our interest in the manner of all unusual things. The other three categories work in the opposite direction, by breaking the usual bonds between things; these bonds can be described here under the general heading of cause and effect, though there are numerous subspecies that need not concern us for now. The three types of fission in Poe’s tale mirror the three kinds of fusion just described: a bond that is broken can be one between the narrator and an object, the reader and an object, or between objects themselves. In cases of psychological introspection, though they may seem to posit a simple link between an action and some deep inner motive, there is always something strange and ungraspable about the posited motive, however lucidly it may be described. The narrator feels only a feeble half-remorse after cutting out his cat’s eye or hanging it from a tree, which creates a gap in our usual understanding of the link between action and conscience. Or in the third psychological passage cited above, the psychological community of narrator and cat is not a predictable feedback mechanism of mutual respect and affection, but one in which loathing feeds love, and love in turn heightens loathing. In the category of the supernatural, it is the reader who experiences the split between cause and effect. Poe’s narrator cancels his own participation in this by denying his belief in the supernatural, first blaming such beliefs on his wife’s credulity, then refusing to see anything abnormal in the appearance of a hanged-cat outline on the

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wall of his burned-out house, and his suggestion that someone might someday explain all the strange events in the story by purely rational means. But for us as readers, all attempts at rationalizing the events of “The Black Cat” fail, and we are forced to join the narrator’s wife in her superstitious demeanor. She believes cats are witches—even if “not seriously”—and we will conclude much the same after reading the story. There is also some occult cause at work in the second cat’s missing an eye, and in the white patch on his breast eventually taking the shape of a gallows, even if the narrator expends a good deal of energy in denying the significance of these facts. As for sudden incidents, these cause us to lose faith briefly in the banal chain of everyday and the sudden irruption of a strange event. A loving pet owner suddenly cuts out an eye of his cat with a knife:  this comes as a shock despite our already knowing of the near-ludicrous “instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance.” His house inexplicably burns to the ground one night, with all his worldly wealth destroyed. He kills his once-beloved wife with a single blow of an axe, so that she passes from life to death without the usual intermediate state of injury. All these events cut themselves off from any gradual emergence from their preconditions. At first glance, these two general groups of categories might seem too close to what we already found in Lovecraft, whose two primary techniques were shown to consist of fission and fusion: the split of Cthulhu’s “general outline” from his dragon-humanoidoctopoid features, or the assemblage of an Antarctic city from numerous incompatible attributes. But since I  have already said that fission and fusion are the basic tools available to all writers, this is not much of a resemblance. It is more illuminating here to speak of the primary difference between Lovecraft and Poe as stylists. Michel Houllebecq has remarked that Lovecraft’s narrators tend to be relatively bland academic types who lack intricate psychologies.45 He suggests, as a result, that the primary function of Lovecraft’s narrators is simply to observe and describe, with their horrified reactions merely being those that anyone would display under equivalent conditions. The fission and fusion unfold primarily on the level of the object itself, whether it be Cthulhu, the cyclopean Antarctic metropolis, or a mysterious meteorite in a university museum. There is a sense of disinterested contemplation, as if Lovecraft were still a Kantian at heart, trying to separate the reader from what unfolds in the tales themselves. By contrast, the psychological element is more noticeable in Poe, whose narrators tend to be colorful characters—decadent aesthetes or degenerate wasters—in a way that Lovecraft’s simply are not. In Weird Realism I suggested that Lovecraft was the perfect OOO author, given his manner of decomposing the bonds between objects and their qualities, which is the major theme of object-oriented thought. Yet there is a case to be made for Poe instead. While OOO’s RO is usually taken to mean the withdrawn and inscrutable object that recedes beyond every grasp, there is always another RO on the literary scene:  we ourselves as readers. Unlike Lovecraft, Poe uses active measures to bring the reader as an RO into his works, as when he denounces superstition while leading us to become temporarily superstitious ourselves. In recent years, OOO has taken a theatrical turn through its heightened attention to the beholder’s status as an RO, rather than focusing solely on the RO that withdraws from view. If this is the case, then perhaps Poe is a better match than Lovecraft for what we might call OOO 2.0.

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Notes 1 Edmund Wilson, Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s & 40s (New York: Library of America, 2007), 701–2, cited in Graham Harman, Weird Realism (Winchester: Zero Books, 2012), 7. 2 Cited in Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 66, referenced by Brett Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe: Rhetoric and Style (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 4. 3 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 205, referenced by Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 4. 4 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 177, referenced by Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 4. 5 Cited by Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 4. 6 Cited in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 4, referenced by Zimmerman, Edgar Allan Poe, 4. 7 Graham Harman, Weird Realism; “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl,” Collapse (2008). 8 Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011). 9 H. P. Lovecraft, Tales (New York: Library of America, 2005), 169. 10 Lovecraft, Tales, 389. 11 Ibid., 508–9. 12 Ibid., 677. 13 Ibid., 802. 14 Ibid., 464. 15 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 16 Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality; Courbet’s Realism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Manet’s Modernism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 17 Oscar Wilde, Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Collins, 2003). 18 Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 19 Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor’s Work, trans. J. Benedetti (London: Routledge, 2010). 20 Graham Harman, “Aesthetics is the Root of All Philosophy,” in Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (London: Pelican, 2018). 21 Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 22 The actual title of the story by Rob Demovsky is “Mike McCarthy: No ‘false confidence’ because Aaron Rodgers is back.” Sony ESPN. http://www.espn.com/nfl/ story/_/id/21761588/green-bay-packers-qb-aaron-rodgers-says-coming-back-saveteam. Accessed December 13, 2017. 23 Edgar Allan Poe, Poetry and Tales (New York: Library of America, 1984). 24 Ibid., 604. 25 Ibid., 606. 26 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 27 Poe, Poetry and Tales, 598. 28 Ibid., 602–3. 29 Ibid., 600.

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Ibid., 598. Ibid., 602. Ibid. Ibid., 598–9. Ibid. Ibid., 603. Ibid., 599. Ibid., 601. Ibid., 602. Ibid., 597. Ibid., 598. Ibid., 599. Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005). 43 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 161. 44 See: Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press, 2009); Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology. 45 Michel Houllebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. D. Khazeni (San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2005).

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Objects taken for wonders in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative Alexander Dick

As a contribution to the history of philosophy, speculative realism challenges the choice that eighteenth-century philosophers made to restrict thought to what can be thought, to limit understanding to subjective cognition. The advent of what Quentin Meillassoux calls Kantian correlationism amounted to a “denaturing” of ontology to “the conditional knowledge of our relation to the world.”1 During the European Enlightenment, Bruno Latour similarly argues, philosophers distinguished subjective knowledge from the “proliferation” of “things, or objects, or beasts,” agencies, networks, and monsters, that its own curiosity unleashed.2 The purification of philosophical discourse coincided with efforts of philosophers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant to limit the category of the subject to white European males and to privilege their right to exploit ecologies, cultures, and peoples, especially Africans, who were classified as nonhuman. The correlationist turn was so effective in this regard that discussions of slavery and other “monstrous” historical events have, in contrast to language, emotion, and imagination, been marginal to philosophical and literary studies.3 Slavery seldom registers in speculative realists’ conversations about ontology, aesthetics, and politics, the latter of which have been primarily ecological, in line with Meillassoux’s efforts to open philosophy to “the great outdoors.”4 But such an effort could also be directed toward some of the more unsavory aspects of human (and “nonhuman”) history. The coincidence between the advent of correlationism and the theorization of European capitalism at the end of the eighteenth century represents an important opportunity to correct this oversight. To illustrate what this correction might look like, I bring the critical approach offered by speculative realism, the same approach that has inspired important analyses of eighteenth-century poetry and romantic philosophy, to a reading of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Ouladah Equiano, Written by Himself, a founding text of the slave narrative tradition. Published in 1789, the Narrative is an autobiography of a man born in what is now Nigeria, who is transported to the Americas and frees himself before becoming a leading figure in the English Evangelical abolitionist movement. The Narrative also offers a political and theological justification for abolition, appearing just as the British

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government was beginning to debate the slave trade.5 For good reason, the Narrative is often discussed by historicist scholars interested in the tangled web of imperialism and racism that haunts the Enlightenment and which in turn influenced Equiano’s own narrative style and generic adaptations. But the Narrative has also met with some controversy: biographer Vincent Carretta claimed that Equiano was born not in Africa but in South Carolina, that his descriptions of his Igbo village, initial captivity, and journey to America were lifted from other works, and that he fictionalized significant parts of his life story.6 Other scholars have wondered if historical accuracy has any bearing on Equiano’s larger moral point or literary importance.7 Srinivas Aravamudan and Jonathan Lamb, meanwhile, have adapted Latour’s actor-network-theory and Bill Brown’s thing-theory, respectively, to explicate Equiano’s understanding of the complex interrelations between “humans” and “things” and on the phenomenon of the thing-as-human.8 However, an explicit speculative-realist analysis can more pointedly attend to Equiano’s engagements with the philosophy behind issues of personal identity, narrative development, and spiritual understanding. My argument will focus on Equiano’s use of a critical, but often-maligned term within empiricism that names the ontologies and agencies that Meillassoux, Latour, and others identify as objects of correlationist exclusion. That term is wonder. Equiano uses wonder repeatedly in his Narrative to connect his reactions to the objects he encounters in his travels in ways that defy the logic of the correlationist turn. Equiano’s wonder signals a counterphenomenological realism operating within a slave narrative tradition and running athwart the history of philosophy.

I Speculative realism is about the revival of wonder in knowledge; rather than erase our wonder by way of “traditional empiricist assumptions” about how we learn to know, we need to embrace, modestly and without judgment, how material contingency draws us to things and inspires our curiosity. Wonder is an initial response to objects in the universe, before I  rationalize them according to existing correlationist protocols.9 In attending to the world in this preliminary way, I  realize that I  am already in a relationship to it, as an object myself. This initial encounter, in which objects appear to me more as they appear to each other and thus implicate me in their objective relations represents the beginnings of an empathetic environmental politics that could counter the exploitative narratives of economic growth and personal fulfillment that undergird the modern capitalist mindset.10 What Jane Bennett calls “assemblages,” the encounters between things or bodies, especially of the “sub-human” variety, but also including humans, make possible configurations other than those to which empiricism tends to ascribe legitimate existence. “Earthly bodies,” she writes, “of various but always finite durations, affect and are affected by one another. And they form noisy systems or temporary working assemblages which are, as much as any individuated thing, loci of affection and allure. These (sometimes stubborn and voracious but never closed or sovereign) systems enact real change. They give rise to new configurations,

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individuations, patterns of leanings, and affections.”11 These new configurations begin with wonder. Recent work on the “descriptive” aspects of eighteenth-century writing similarly stresses its “modesty and provisionality,” the way in which “interpretations are proposed, doubted, and left hovering, while multiple, even conflicting meanings” and “dynamic interactions” offer themselves in ways that anticipate Latour’s idea of networked agency.12 But eighteenth-century philosophers also found the captivating effect of wonder problematic, which helped inspire the correlationist turn. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Parker have shown at length that wonders (including curiosities, surprises, and marvels) were both the driving energy of eighteenth-century science and the object of its critical gaze.13 To be curious was to be entrepreneurial, adventurous, and tolerant; to be a curiosity was to be marked as arrogant or monstrous. Wonder registers the openness of this curiosity even as it marks the collector as outside the pale of social propriety. In early empirical writing, such as that of Descartes and Bacon, wonder is the “seed of knowledge”: as Sarah Tindal Kareem notes, in this early context wonder was identified as the faculty that “aids the acquisition of knowledge by heightening one’s capacity for attention.”14 Because it compels knowledge, wonder represents a state of uncertainty that epistemological narratives were meant to dispel but could not entirely. This is the speculative dynamic of wonder. The suspense and uncertainty of wonder produces an experience which Kareem calls “ifness . . . in which recognition (of the familiar) and disbelief (of the untrue) is deferred” so that I can “temporarily receive those impressions as if they were new and true.”15 The task of empirical philosophy, in this perspective, was to adapt wonder to a narrative of verification while also deferring or even expelling it from the categories of cognition that ground knowledge. A key example of this problematic is Adam Smith’s “Principles that Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” written in either 1754 or 1755. Smith outlines the stages of scientific knowledge from surprise to wonder to admiration and historically from primitive superstition through ancient and scholastic rationalism to Newtonian science. “Whatever,” Smith writes, “occurs to us we are fond of referring to some species or class of things, with all of which it has a nearly exact resemblance; and though we often know no more about them than about it, yet we are apt to fancy that by being able to do so, we show ourselves to be better acquainted with it, and to have a more thorough insight into its nature.”16 There are times, though, “when something quite new and singular is presented, we feel ourselves incapable of doing this. . . . It stands alone and by itself in the imagination, and refuses to be grouped or confounded with any set of objects whatever” while the faculties of reason and memory “fluctuate to no purpose from thought to thought, and we remain still uncertain and undetermined where to place [the object], or what to think of it.”17 “Wonder,” Smith says, provokes a dizzying seasickness: it “occasion[s] that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart, which we may all observe, both in ourselves and others, when wondering at some new object, and which are the natural symptoms of uncertain and undetermined thought.”18 However, our recognition of these symptoms compels us, Smith says, to

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discover or create links to enable us to understand the nature of the new objects in the terms of existing categories or standards. Thus, Daston and Park suggest, Smith turns away from wonder as a principle of knowledge and toward a restorative narrative of reason.19 At the end of the essay, Smith illustrates that turn:  Newtonian Astronomy has upended all previous theories of spatial movement and attraction, as Copernicus’ previously did Ptolemy’s, but to the point that all wonder has now been replaced with a confidence in the soundness of the Newtonian system. But his prose also mischievously demonstrates the contingency of that replacement: “while we have been endeavoring to represent all philosophical systems as mere inventions of the imagination, to connect together the otherwise disjointed and discordant phenomena of nature, [we] have been insensibly drawn in, to make use of language expressing the connecting principles of this one, as if they were the real chains which Nature makes use of to bind together her several operations.”20 Smith’s “as if,” points to the suspension of judgment that Kareem shows enables at once the recognition and the deferral of nature’s apparent discordance. Smith also anticipates two important claims that Meillassoux makes about scientific statements. First, all statements, according to Meillassoux, are contingent because at any time they might be revised; but, second, by the same logic that makes contingent statements verifiable (in Smith’s terms, language, connection, imagination), we can also make scientifically unverifiable statements and agree that they are true. This agreement gets to the heart of what Meillassoux calls “facticity,” the undermining of any absolute knowledge beyond contingency as the principle underwriting reality. As he puts it, facticity is “the absolute absence of reason for any reality . . . the effective ability for every determined entity, whether it is an event, a thing or a law, for it to appear or disappear with no reason for its being or non-being.”21 Smith, however, insists that the success of any system of knowledge entails that wonder, the recognition of contingency, is both necessary and excluded. It is necessary because in order to formulate systems of knowledge, we must recognize the simultaneous existence and contingency (what Smith calls the “discordance”) of our data. It must be excluded because in order that our new system be verified as “true” we must also agree that it is coherent rather than contingent. “Can we wonder,” Smith writes, “that [Newton’s system] should have gained the general and complete approbation of mankind, and that it should now be considered, not as an attempt to connect in the imagination the phenomena of the Heavens, but as the greatest discovery that ever was made by man, the discovery of an immense chain of the most important and sublime truths, all closely connected together, by one capital fact, of the reality of which we have daily experience.”22 Smith’s answer is no: we cannot wonder. Gravity, a verifiable fact, confirms Newton’s abstract formulation of it and thus renders any other model of the universe unreal. And yet, Smith’s conditional “shoulds” and references to the sublime (to which I will return) suggest a less categorical disposition. The “as-if ” makes clear the paradoxical suspension of judgment implicit in acts of verification. On one hand, Smith’s essay records the process of general, scientific knowledge from naïve wonder to established fact; on the other hand, it shows that this process entails protocols of understanding that prioritize subjective comprehension. At stake in Smith’s essay, as in

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Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, is the ascription of the facticity of statements to their epistemological utility. What gets left behind, is the “fact” of the contingent relations leading to different comprehensions of any general state. Equiano’s prose replicates the protocols and philosophical assumptions underlining Smith’s essay even as it draws attention to the contingent dynamics of wonder lurking within those assumptions. Consider, for instance, this passage from the opening of chapter  6, where Equiano, generalizing about his travels through the West Indies, writes that “in the variety of departments in which I was employed by my master, I had an opportunity of seeing many curious scenes.”23 But the scene he was “struck with . . . above all” was a celebrated curiosity called Brimstone-Hill, which is a high and steep mountain, some few miles from the town of Plymouth in Montserrat. I had often heard of some wonders that were to be seen on this hill, and I went once with some white and black people to visit it. When we arrived at the top, I saw under different cliffs great flakes of brimstone, occasioned by the steams of various little ponds, which were then boiling naturally in the earth. Some of these ponds were as white as milk, some quite blue, and many others of different colours. I  had taken some potatoes with me, and I put them into different ponds, and in a few minutes they were well boiled. I tasted some of them, but they were very sulphurous; and the silver shoe buckles, and all the other things of that metal we had among us, were, in a little time, turned as black as lead.24

In using the terms “wonders” and “curiosities,” Equiano invokes empirical science. But the passage also seems to be parodying empiricism. What is actually learned here? What utility do Equiano’s experiments serve? What new system has been discovered? The potatoes taste terrible; the shoes are rendered utterly useless. The experiments are not the only things in this passage that don’t quite add up. Brimstone Hill is not on Monserrat but St. Kitts: it is the site of a large British Fort built by slave labor and still largely under construction when Equiano was in the West Indies. The pools near Plymouth, Monserrat are on the Souffriere Hills. Did Equiano get this wrong? Is he intentionally misleading us? Episodes like this, in which exploratory curiosity meets the possibility that expected truths of empirical reality can twist unexpectedly and malignantly, abound in Equiano’s Narrative, pointedly undermining the assurance of an empiricism that would let slavery occur at the same time that it advocated truth and liberty. And Equiano appears quite comfortable with the situation. He recalls his curiosity about the effects of his experiment rather than any frustration with its inutility. Indeed, he seems to welcome the damage the volcano does, ingesting the potatoes and collecting metals to dip in Sulphur. Whether he gets the right mountain just doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is a descriptive distance that without judgment reveals the logical and, we can now add, moral inconsistencies within the narrative of empirical knowledge. It might be overly scrupulous to suggest that when “silver” buckles are made “black” Equiano is symbolizing his own confounded state. But the subtlety of that metaphor intimates not

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so much a direct correspondence between the tarnishing of the buckle and degradation of African skin tone as it does the contingent but nevertheless present fact of different states of life: bright, tarnished, black, white. Similarly, the seeming equality of “white and black people” at this moment hardly redresses the obvious power imbalance of the whole occasion; it nevertheless projects the possibility of a different order of empirical understanding.

II When he wrote the Interesting Narrative, Equiano did not know Smith’s essay on the history of astronomy, which was only published in 1795. Still, given the radical circles in which Equiano moved in the 1770s and 1780s, he was undoubtedly familiar with the epistemological concerns Smith was addressing in his widely-read The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and the politics attending them. In the chapter entitled “On the Influence of Custom” Smith compares the resiliency of “savages” even in the face of “continual danger” and death to the “humane and polished people, who have more sensibility to the passions of others” because they “are brought up to live in civilized societies.” His aim is to prove that human personality is a product of the “custom and education of the country” from which each person hails.25 But Smith’s pronouncement in the same chapter that American slavers are “wretches who possess the virtues neither of the countries which they come from, nor those which they go to, and whose levity, brutality, and baseness, so justly expose them to the contempt of the vanquished,” suggests that character is not determined by race, nationality, or custom, but by individual experience within an open field of contingent relations.26 The historical fact of the slave trade overturns the binary between civilized European and savage African. The fact of slavery compels us to turn what we know about the world inside out, to recognize that the whole Atlantic Empire is an assemblage of conflicting impulses, customs, and morals. Smith’s remarks on slavery provide an important context for Equiano’s protosociological (and indeed Smithian) use of the language of “customs” in his long description of the Igbo community, where he was born, in the opening chapter of the Narrative—the same description that Carretta notoriously used to question the facts of Equiano’s autobiography. But it makes sense that Equiano took this account of the Igbo from other sources not only because he wanted to establish his own veracity but also because he wanted to parody empirical modes of documentation. Equiano never uses the word “wonder” in this chapter because his aim is to show what narrative description looks like without it. Equiano echoes Smith in stressing the general “customs and manners” of his people and reinforcing the striking differences between European and African cultures. Toward the end of the chapter, however, Equiano challenges his readers to recollect that Europeans “were once, like the Africans, uncivilized and barbarous” with much the same result as Smith’s observations that American slavers are “brutes” who incur the “contempt of the vanquished.” General classifications are

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easily challenged by surprising local peculiarities as the “prejudices” that link culture and temperament to complexion and climate. By contrast, in his personal narrative, which commences after this general description, Equiano draws attention to the way small encounters suspend rather than confirm judgments. In one episode, Equiano has just arrived at a plantation in Virginia and been sent to work in the master’s house; he “was very much affrighted at some things I saw,” including a “poor creature” who “was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines” in which one “which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink. I was much astonished and shocked at this contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle.”27 Astonishment or shock is here opposed deliberately with the understanding (learning), the former registering the initial encounter with the horror of this object and the latter registering its use and value in the imperial context. The contrast extends into the next, and more famous episode: “The first object that engaged my attention was a watch which hung on the chimney, and was going. I was quite surprised at the noise it made, and was afraid it would tell the gentleman anything I might do amiss: and when I immediately after observed a picture hanging in the room, which appeared constantly to look at me, I was still more affrighted, having never seen such things as these before.”28 Given Equiano’s experience to that point, it is no wonder that he would mistake a clock and a picture for the apparatus of imperial oppression. His fear, that is, is of a piece with his sudden and cruel enslavement. But that is not his only understanding:  “At one time I  thought it might be some way the whites had to keep their great men when they died, and offer them libation as we used to do to our friendly spirits. In this state of anxiety I remained till my master awoke, when I was dismissed out of the room, to my no small satisfaction and relief; for I thought that these people were all made up of wonders.”29 Wonder, this sentence makes clear, produces an anxiety that cannot be relieved until the observer is removed from it. Different conditions for understanding are determined by proximity as much as by custom. Such anxieties occur even when Equiano himself is the object of someone else’s concern. Early in his captivity and unable to escape from the African family whom he knows will soon be trading him, the young Equiano concedes that his attempt to flee is “insupportable” and so “crept to my master’s kitchen, from whence I set out at first, and which was an open shed, and laid myself down in the ashes with an anxious wish for death to relieve me from all my pains.”30 This seemingly commonplace occurrence represents a crucial philosophical point. As tragic as it may be, death is also a form of relief from the dominating impulses of idealism. As Ray Brassier contends in Nihil Unbound, inexistence is akin to freedom because it is the only theoretical concept that entirely embraces material and repudiates correlationist subjectivity.31 But this is precisely the opportunity that the slave is denied: he cannot die even as he is also denied life.32 In the morning, an “old woman slave” lighting the fire “was very much surprised to see me, and could scarcely believe her own eyes” that the boy could be lying in the ashes, after which Equiano’s master “ordered me to be taken care of, and not to be illtreated.” The narrative enacts the process by which empiricism unsuccessfully outlaws

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wonder first by way of objective identification (surprise) and then by the imposition of property relations that deny the right to die. This is by no means the only moment in the text in which Equiano’s struggle to escape his enslavement is undermined by luck, good or bad; indeed, the arbitrariness of luck, that is to say, contingency, is the characteristic impulse of the entire narrative. But whereas Smith attempts to incorporate wonder (both requiring and excluding it) into a narrative of sound knowledge, Equiano shows what it means to make manifest wonder’s contingent relations. Equiano is recreating the Enlightenment world-view shared both by his master, the “old woman slave” and, presumably, by his informed, abolitionist audience, but he is also inviting his readers to recognize the near-dead “thing” that is being “taken up” into the fold of subjection. The seeming contingency of Equiano’s narrative is thus a rebuke against the systematic consistency of an empirical, and imperial, mindset. Equiano registers the amazing scale of the slave trade and the vast entity called the British Empire. But his wonder also makes clear that an entirely different comprehension of that entity is possible from his own, relatively minute vantage point within it. In exposing the Empire in this manner—violent, discordant, contingent—Equiano sees it not as a singular entity but as a gigantic assemblage. Empire for Equiano is what Timothy Morton calls a “hyperobject,” that “thing” that is too huge to measure or understand (like climate change or the whole universe) but which we come to sense or appreciate through our micro-encounters with its palpable manifestations (starting a car engine, feeling a snowflake but not feeling climate itself in Morton’s examples)—in other words, wonder.33 Equiano’s descriptions of curiosities and wonders often replicate the discordances of the natural world that Morton sees as our point of access to recognizing hyperobjects: Many a time we were near suffocation from the want of fresh air, which we were often without for whole days together. This, and the stench of the necessary tubs, carried off many. During our passage I  first saw flying fishes, which surprised me very much:  they used frequently to fly across the ship, and many of them fell on the deck. I  also now first saw the use of the quadrant; I  had often with astonishment seen the mariners make observations with it, and I could not think what it meant. They at last took notice of my surprise; and one of them, willing to increase it, as well as to gratify my curiosity, made me one day look through it. The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they passed along. This heightened my wonder; and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that every thing about me was magic.34

As in the Brimstone Hill passage, Equiano uses the empirical language of surprise, astonishment, curiosity, and wonder to suspend rather than direct interpretation when he is remembering his enslavement and formulating the process by which he became habituated to its dolefully cramped conditions. Equiano recalls witnessing the exact opposite conditions in three objects: the flying fish, the mariners’ quadrant, and the passing clouds. Rhetorically parallel, the three objects nevertheless cannot be configured into a single, symbolic whole. The fish fly and fall; the quadrant implies

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precision but deceives Equiano; the clouds pass, look like land, are revealed not to be land, but then land itself appears (they arrive in Barbados). Wonder, astonishment, and surprise thus mark Equiano’s naïve encounters with the world in which a variety of relations, configurations, and encounters appear possible to every object (including the human-object). The slave trade itself, the whole network of imperial travel, science, and commerce is thus revealed in these small gestures to be a massive assemblage of assemblages, both a fearful edifice of global dominance and, as seen through Equiano’s revisionary narrative, a contingent, and thus changeable, configuration.

III In the way that it offers new and potentially revolutionary configurations, Equiano’s use of wonder in his Narrative speaks not only to empiricist conversations about how we acquire knowledge but also to debates about how we attend to objects and the emotions such attention elicits—in short, to aesthetics. For Kareem, wonder is an aesthetic mechanism that enables authors to keep their readers in a state of suspended interaction between fact and fiction, to suggest to them that fictional tales could be true but also that truth is sometimes stranger or more interesting or, at the least, more profitable than fiction, an attitude that, she argues, “is consistent with philosophical skepticism.”35 Generically, as the debate over Carretta’s biography makes clear, the Narrative seems to elide the difference between fiction and fact:  its borrowings of the wonderful, astonishing, or the marvelous from eighteenth-century philosophy and fiction have a more polemical edge than Kareem ascribes to novels. For Kareem, heterodox investments in the believable and the impossible, the historical and the miraculous, purposefully stimulate readers’ apprehensions of a fictional world that is nevertheless credible, and thus as potentially moral as it is stimulating or amusing. But the uncertainty between fiction and fact is not exclusively, for Equiano (as indeed for Smith), a matter of genre: rather it highlights the ways that moments of encounter repeatedly foreground the radical contingency of any individual’s existence in a field of interacting objects. In a brilliant analysis of Equiano’s “literary style,” John Bugg shows how Equiano underplays these encounters as “trifles” to considerable ironic effect. What makes Equiano’s trifles distinctive, Bugg contends, is their frequent, “cluster[ing] around scenes of death,” showing the risks of constant sea travel not only to slaves but also to their merchants and naval personnel, but without a sense of “anger” or “revenge.”36 Near-death experiences, like the experiments at Brimstone Hill, never translate into something else: they suspend judgment rather than confer meaning. This suspension of judgment distinguishes Equiano’s literary aesthetic from other aesthetics that emphasize emotional response, particularly the sublime. J.  M. W. Turner’s paintings, including one from 1815 of the same Souffriere Hills described by Equiano, emphasize the fear that we should have before the awesome might of the earth’s natural forces (Figure 12.1). The difference between the suspended judgment that Equiano produces and the sublime effects of Turner’s volcano can be clarified by the distinction between terror

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Figure  12.1 J. M.  W. Turner, The Eruption of the Souffrier Mountains, in the Island of St Vincent, at Midnight, on the 30th of April, 1812, from a Sketch Taken at the Time by Hugh P.  Keane, Esqre, 1815, Victoria Gallery and Museum, University of Liverpool (Creative Commons).

and horror, first outlined by gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe in her posthumously published essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry.”37 Terror, Radcliffe argued, is produced by “ambiguity and obscurity” of certain situations: we are led by our fear that we do not know exactly what is happening, but once we are able to see and consider our own fears (by the narrative voice, for instance, or by becoming familiar with the image) we are able to translate that emotion into “psychological concern” which is the hallmark of the sublime. Radcliffe’s terror is a circumscribed reaction: it depends on the distribution of information through the reading experience enabling us to shift our attention back on ourselves rather than the object that frightened us in the first place. In this respect, Radcliffean terror is correlationist. Horror, by contrast, the actual witnessing of monstrosity or atrocity, cannot, in Radcliffe’s formulation, lead to self-concern because rather than produce reflexive thoughts it “freezes and nearly annihilates them.” Horror can thus play no part in legitimate art or philosophy. A different understanding of the sublime has emerged in recent and surprisingly parallel conversations about wonder and horror. Phillip Fisher has usefully suggested that the sublime belongs to a romanticism that insists bombastically upon the superiority of nature over technology and of the divine over the worldly by recreating, as Burke and Kant both urge, the “power” and “awe” of premodern religion though

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in a secularized, even “kitsch” form.38 Wonder, Fisher explains is a modern aesthetic that takes in the amazing though counterintuitive “facts” of science and technology, such as we might find in the towering but also seemingly fragile presence of steel and glass skyscrapers:  they should not exist and yet they do. Horror has similar effects. For Graham Harman, one important purpose of horror is to reveal “everyday reality . . . undercut from within, by subverting the background conditions assumed by” our normal interactions with it.39 He connects H.  P. Lovecraft’s horror aesthetic to cubism because in both the various components that make up “everyday reality” are exposed as a set of correlationist assumptions that deny the possibility of any other reality. Horror, then, is our response to new configurations—of bodies and machines, plants or animals—when our assumptions about what constitutes “normal” or possible reality are suddenly jolted into suspension by the realization of that thought-to-beimpossible alterity. As Harman says, horror is “productive” because it attends to new or different insights that a “reductionist” or correlationist aesthetic (based, for instance, on fear or redirection) would not allow.40 Of course, the affective stimulations that horror produces—disgust, outrage, and yes, fear—cannot necessarily persist without some kind of adumbration. Such anxiety is precisely the impetus for the correlationist turn:  making the suspension of judgment equivalent to a negative psychological reaction compels precisely the distinction Radcliffe assumes between “annihilation” and “concern.” If it can be untangled from its affective dimensions without jeopardizing its productivity, then horror might provide the aesthetic basis for a political rather than psychological concern. Horror demands that we embrace a more modest epistemology, one that accepts even if it does not condone the possibility of inexistence. The word “horror” appears frequently in the Narrative in ways that enhance Equiano’s deployment of wonder. Near the beginning of Book II, Equiano recounts an ill-fated journey to New Providence, in the Bahamas, shortly after achieving his manumission. Equiano agrees to help transport 20 slaves to Georgia; his misgivings cause recurrent dreams that the ship will wreck. Awoken from one of these dreams by a crewman who believes that there is a “grampus” (an orca) in the water, Equiano sees that it is a large rock and, failing to raise the captain, watches as the ship strikes it. “In a moment,” he says, “a scene of horror presented itself to my mind, such as I had never conceived or experienced before.” Like the scenes of “wonder” that fill Book I, this experience combines novelty with shock, revulsion, and remorse—without much in the way of resolution. Ultimately, Equiano saves the crewmen and the slaves by persuading the captain not to batten the hatches, which would have trapped the slaves in the hold and caused the ship to capsize. They finally make land on a Bahamian island and, having conquered their fears that the inhabitants are cannibals (which proves to be untrue anyway), plan their rescue, though not before Equiano plants orange and lemon trees as gratitude for their salvation. The blend of factual information and maritime convention registers the hybridity that Kareem argues is paradigmatic of narrative wonder. But in this instance, the blending of generic elements, fictional and autobiographical, what Tilottama Rajan calls “autonarration,” has some interesting thematic correlation.41 As Cannon Schmidt has argued, while the ocean was frequently used in the period to connote sublime experience in most maritime writing and

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related fiction, the ocean is more frequently seen as a site of danger or labor, usually both.42 Equiano’s plain descriptive style stresses the different agencies that make up the decidedly modern, technological horror of the shipwreck. A good example of this productive modesty is Equiano’s account of his return from an ill-fated expedition to the North Pole. Rather than present the voyage to the pole as a sublime spectacle, Equiano provides the kind of specific detail more frequently found in naval archives and logs: “on the 28th, in latitude 73, it was dark by ten o’clock at night. September the 10th, in latitude 58–59, we met a very severe gale of wind and high seas, and shipped a great deal of water in the space of ten hours.”43 At the height of the crisis, Equiano and his shipmates spy another ship “in very great distress, and her masts were gone; but we were unable to assist her.” The slight and unadorned description, while horrifying in implication, avoids sublime emotion. Far from inspiring fear or awe, the second boat appears as a useless object floating in an unforgiving sea, a wasted piece of human dross. There is no way to connect the ship’s appearance to whatever meaning or essence, actual or otherwise, that it might have. It suspends rather than inspires aesthetic judgment. We are left to surmise what the ship “means” from the strange possibility that it might not mean anything, that it might not exist other than as a contingent fact. Just as the destructive power of a volcano should not necessarily lead us to assume that volcanoes are intentionally or necessarily hostile to us, so Equiano’s apparent indifference to the “horrors” that he experiences signals his embrace of a productive realization of the existence of the world, however dangerous.

IV I have been arguing that Equiano’s narrative aesthetic is built on the suspension of judgment signified in his time by wonder. Equiano’s wonder also has a political intent: to expose and challenge the white, Western privilege encoded in the epistemology of science and the aesthetic of the sublime. To conclude this essay, I want to consider how this wonder manifests itself in one of the most important elements of the Narrative, Equiano’s religious conversion. As many critics have noted, Equiano’s conversion shares many traits with those depicted in conventional “spiritual autobiographies”: the blinding light, the scene of reading, the figural death, the acceptance of grace. But critics have never been able to agree about exactly how Equiano was using these generic paradigms.44 While his adaptation of available theologies is clear, Equiano’s accounts of his religious experience, like his narrative aesthetic generally, suspends rather than confirms the subjective assurances that these theologies promise in the name of what we might call a realist theology. Equiano’s religious conviction, I suggest, is built on what Bruno Latour, discussing the religion versus science debate, calls “the nearby (le prochain).”45 For Latour, the difference between science and religion is not a matter of “knowledge vs. belief,” since, for all of its empirical pretensions, it is science that tends to “allow access to the far away while religion, or, rather presence . . . is what allows access to the near, to the neighbour.”46 Rather than compete with each other or, worse, imitate each other, Latour recommends that science and religion

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recognize their common participation in a wider field of “encounters” each involving “a completely different type of mode.”47 Equiano’s theology similarly acknowledges the truth and revelation of the Divine but does so in the full cognizance that this divinity is also a product of the mesh of the institutions, things, and people who participate in it. His experience is not religious in a conventional sense at all, but creative, a process of meaning-making that, Latour argues, is an aptitude shared by all “organisms.”48 Equiano’s theology plays a larger role in Book II of the Narrative than it does in the first, though there are clear signs in Book I of the kind of experience that the second will theorize in religious terms. Christianity is first introduced in the “talking book” incident that occurs during Equiano’s first voyage to the Americas not long after Equiano is “amazed” at his first sight of snow which he initially believes to be salt and then, “surprised beyond measure” at its cold and taste, is told that it is “made” by a “great man in the heavens, called God.” To understand what this means, Equiano turns to his friend Dick who instructs him in “white customs,” at which Equiano is “amazed” and “surprised.” In other words, Equiano’s early engagement with theology is not the superstructure for his experience but rather is presented as only a possible explanation of his material engagement with the world. This is the context for the encounter with the talking book:  “I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading: and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning; for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent.”49 Henry Louis Gates famously used this passage to explain how Equiano inaugurates the slave narrative as a genre: the Narrative is, Gates argues, the literary form that emerges when its authors are not allowed to participate in the standard relations of reading and writing.50 But what interests me here is not the silence of the book per se, but rather the possibility of phenomenal relations that it opens up. Equiano’s curiosity and hope are not the ironic imaginings of a doomed man: rather they signal precisely a disposition that empiricism, which demands silence, denies and which none of the characters here actually entertain. This is not, in other words, a scene of failed reading, but one of speculative reading. Equiano’s encounters with spirituality and magic, documented especially early in the Narrative, anticipate his theology in Book II. The Book begins with a series of Biblical citations from Equiano’s two favorite books, Acts and Job, books that are both about spiritual awakening in the face of mortal peril and about the perception of the Divine as an immeasurable power. What Equiano’s citations from these books have in common, though, is the way they explicitly encode the divine in local encounters: “Howbeit, we must be cast upon a certain island,/ Wherefore, sirs, be of good cheer, for I believe God, that it shall be even as it was told me” (Acts 27:26, 25); “Now a thing was secretly brought to me, and mine ear received a little thereof. / In thoughts from the vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth on man” (Job 4:12–13). These references form a distinctive assemblage while each also narrates an encounter or assemblage in themselves, one in which circumstance, belief, information, vision, ecology, and divinity, are all implicated into each other. They are all experiences of

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divinity, but, as in Equiano’s use of horror rather than the sublime, this is a divine that has no comprehensive hold on the experience of the believer, either as a moral law or by the force of exclusion. Along with the frontispiece, which depicts Equiano in European dress holding open the Bible to Acts 4:12 and names him “Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,” these passages present the author not as the seminal originator of the Narrative but as the contingent and discordant assemblage procured by the experiences the Narrative documents. We are encouraged, that is, not to see the author as a perfect, empirical subject but as an object of our own wonder, a recognition that is also linked to Equiano’s understanding of divinity. The passage cited on the frontispiece (Acts 4:12) appears again in Equiano’s account of his conversion.51 Having been rejected by the Methodists and having no other employment, Equiano embarks on a merchant ship bound for Cadiz where, as he says, he “heard the name of God much blasphemed” and falls into depression:  “I murmured much at God’s providential dealings with me, and was discontented with the commandments, that I  could not be saved by what I had done; I hated all things, and wished I had never been born; confusion seized me, and I wished to be annihilated.”52 As in the first volume, hardship leads Equiano to wish for death, from which he is pulled out by the larger network of imperial and trade relations. Arriving in Spain, Equiano embarks on what he calls “a throne of grace” where he will “wrestle” with the spirit of God, “as Jacob did.” Th e name is important: in first arriving in America, Equiano was given the name “Jacob,” and it is there that he first begins to “wrestle” with the “things” that make up his experience of slavery and Empire. Here, Equiano “becomes” Jacob again, assuming the name metaphorically though without entirely defacing his other identities. The experience is, in many respects, the climax of the Narrative: “reading and meditating on the fourth chapter of the Acts, twelfth verse, under the solemn apprehensions of eternity, and reflecting on my past actions,” Equiano writes, he ponders whether his salvation could be the result of his “moral life” or “the sovereign gift of God.” At this exact moment of consternation the Lord was pleased to break in upon my soul with his bright beams of heavenly light; and in an instant as it were, removing the veil, and letting light into a dark place, I  saw clearly with the eye of faith the crucified Saviour bleeding on the cross on mount Calvary: the scriptures became an unsealed book, I saw myself a condemned criminal under the law, which came with its full force to my conscience, and when ‘the commandment came sin revived, and I  died,’ I saw the Lord Jesus Christ in his humiliation, loaded and bearing my reproach, sin, and shame.53

Lifting the veil is an archetype of Christian writing in the eighteenth century, usually pointing to the penitent’s sublime realization of the divine. But here, as Christ reveals himself to Equiano, Equiano also sees himself in the figure of the “bleeding” and “condemned criminal” that Christ also was. If the mast-less hulk or the blackened shoes are representations of Equiano himself, they are also, like Christ, impossible

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for Equiano to describe other than in the most modest descriptive terms because he cannot presume to “judge” them any more than he can judge the image of Christ. But in this reiterated metaphorical relational—a repeated “as-ifness”—these assemblages are all seen to open the possibility of realities other than those encoded by convention or correlation. This, in a sense, is Equiano’s liberty, one quite different from the manumission that, as described in the text, he can only achieve by manipulating imperial codes and protocols. Here, Christ is revealed to be a profoundly material “thing,” a broken body hanging on the cross, suspended, so to speak, between life and death, existence and judgment. Equiano must acknowledge this suspension in order to confirm his own independent thing-ness. The “talking book” of the earlier volume is “unsealed” and in that moment, Equiano figuratively “dies,” freeing himself from the social death that is slave life. Equiano’s conversion by no means ends his troubles. For years afterward, Equiano still struggled with the ubiquitous racism of America and the West Indies, where debts from white men to black men are paid with “horse whips,” justices refuse former slaves’ testimonies, and government agents commit “flagrant abuses.”54 Equiano lived most of his life under his imperial name “Gustavus Vassa,” and phenomenally as a “thing” with few of the rights accorded to white subjects. But, I want to be clear, though his conversion to Methodism helped him cultivate a new outlook and discover a new society (which enabled him to write his memoir) in many respects in line with the emerging ideals of eighteenth-century epistemology and aesthetics, his autobiography also rejects the determining influence of empirical institutions such as those articulated in Smith’s history of science or by the aesthetic of the sublime. His cause, that is, was to activate his audience’s wonder and from that sense of wonder, compel them to recognize the reality of their imperial condition.55

Notes 1 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2008), 125. 2 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13. Latour has especially influenced the “descriptive turn” in eighteenth-century studies. See Heather Love, “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 371–91, and the special issue “Bruno Latour and Eighteenth-Century Literary Studies,” ed. Christina Lupton and Sean Silver, The Eighteenth Century Literary Studies 57, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 165–282. 3 The volume of important work on the importance of race and slavery in eighteenthcentury literature and culture is considerable and growing. I am particularly influenced by George Boukulus, The Grateful Slave; The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Ian Baucom, Spectres of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Ramesh Mallipeddi,

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9 10 11

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016). Meillassoux, After Finitude, 7, 29. See, for instance, Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (London: Open Humanities Press, 2011) and Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2014). Jane Bennett comes from political science and the materialist thesis of her Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), is explicitly oriented toward discovering an ontology for environmental and other political ethics. The government eventually abolished the slave trade in 1807, a decade after Equiano’s death. Vincent Carretta, “Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa? New Light on an EighteenthCentury Question of Identity,” Slavery and Abolition 20, no. 3 (1999): 96–105; “Three West Indian Writers of the 1780s Revisited and Revised,” Research in African Literature 29, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 73–86; Equiano, the African: Biography of a SelfMade Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). For an overview of Carretta’s claims and the controversies that followed, see Brycchan Carey, “Introduction to Special Feature: ‘Olaudah Equiano: African or American’ ” 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early-Modern Era 17 (2008): 229–46. For a substantive rebuttal of Carretta’s position, see Cathy Davidson, “Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40, no. 1/2 (Fall 2006–Spring 2007): 18–51. These critics show that slave narratives perform a defiant form of agency, neither idealist nor transcendental, amid the Empire’s legal, religious, educational, and imperial apparatuses. See Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 274; and Jonathan Lamb, “Authors Owning Nothing” in The Things Things Say (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 231–52. See Meillassoux, After Finitude, 42, for Heidegger’s use of the word “wonder.” This is elaborated by Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” New Literary History, 43, no. 2 (Spring 2012): 231. It is worth noting that in this essay, more deliberately than in her book Vibrant Matter, Bennett suggests that she, Harman, and Morton are all working toward similar political, if not strictly philosophical ends. Courtney Weiss Smith, “Finch’s Descriptive Turn,” The Eighteenth Century 57, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 262. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001). Sarah Tindal Kareem, Eighteenth-Century Fiction and the Reinvention of Wonder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 36. Kareem, Reinvention of Wonder, 38. Adam Smith, “The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries; Illustrated by the History of Astronomy,” in Essays on Philosophical Subjects, ed. W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce, The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith

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17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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34 35 36 37 38 39

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Vol. III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1795] 1980, rpt; Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), 38–9. Ibid., 39. Ibid. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 326–7. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 105. Quentin Meillassoux, Time without Becoming, ed. Anna Longo (Fano: Mimesis International, 2014), 23. Smith, “History of Astronomy,” 105. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, Written by Himself, ed. Angelo Costanzo (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), 128. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 128–9. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie, The Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, rpt; Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1982), 206. Smith, Theory, 206–7. See also 282–3 for Smith’s remarks on slavery, added to the Theory in 1790. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 77–8. Ibid., 78. Ibid. Ibid., 65. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) is the most thorough account of the thesis that slavery, as a form of biopolitical ownership, denies the slave the rights of both life and inexistence. See Morton, Hyperobjects, 19: “Hyperobjects provoke irreductionist thinking, that is, they present us with scalar dilemmas in which ontotheological statements about which thing is the most real (ecosystem, world, environment, or conversely, individual) become impossible.” Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 74. Kareem, Reinvention of Wonder, 152. Jon Bugg, “Equiano’s Trifles,” ELH 80, no. 4 (Winter 2013): 1059. Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 16 (1826): 145–52. Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero, 2012), 22. For a more expansive reading of the way horror attends to the background conditions of “normal reality,” see Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1 (Winchester: Zero, 2011). Harman, Weird Realism, 23. In a critique of Harman’s object-oriented ontology—on the subject, conveniently, of volcanoes!—Steven Shaviro connects Harman’s sense of a “something deeper, something hidden and inaccessible” behind the qualities of and relations between objects with the sublime. Harman objects that the sublime is “a theory about human experience” whereas sensual relations or “allure” belongs to

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism objects themselves. Like Harman’s, Equiano’s is an aesthetic in or of the “inhuman,” that is, one outside the paradigms of “human” emotional response as defined by the philosophy of his day. Equiano does not go as far as Harman to suggest that there is a “deeper reality” behind their relations. But he does resemble Harman in making horror challenge the anthropocentrism of the sublime. See Shaviro, “The Actual Volcano: Whitehead, Harman, and the Problem of Relations,” and Harman, “Response to Shaviro,” both in The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism, ed. Levi Bryant, Nick Srnicek, and Graham Harman (Melbourne: re.press, 2011), 279–303. Tilottama Rajan defines auto-narration as “a textually self-conscious work that draws upon personal experience as part of its rhetoric, so as to position experience within textuality and relate textuality to experience.” See “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 149. See Cannon Schmidt, “Tidal Conrad (Literally),” Victorian Studies 55, no. 1 (Autumn 2012): 7–29. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 193. As Adam Potkay shows, Equiano and other slave writers formed their narratives around the generic conventions of “spiritual autobiographies” modeled on Christian salvation. See Potkay, “Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 677–92; following the publication of Tropicopolitans, in “History, Oratory, and God in Equiano’s Interesting Narrative,” Potkay criticizes Aravamudan’s postcolonial argument that Equiano was subverting rather than endorsing the Christian conversion myth. Aravamudan replied to Potkay’s argument in “Equiano Lite,” suggesting that viewing Equiano’s sense of salvation only in terms of the Calvinist evangelical theology of his Church is too limiting: his Narrative demonstrates that acceptance into a belief community was for Equiano and other African slaves and merchant seamen, an often highly ambiguous experience in which a subject could be both liberated and oppressed at the same time. The articles appeared together in Eighteenth Century Studies 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 601–14 and 615–19. See also Samantha Manchester Earley, “Writing from the Centre or the Margins? Olaudah Equiano’s Writing Life Reassessed,” African Studies Review 46, no. 3 (December 2003): 1–16. Bruno Latour, “Can Non-Humans Be Saved?,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15, no. 3 (September 2009): 465. Ibid., 464. Ibid., 466. Ibid., 469. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 83. Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 20. In an unpublished work, Austin Chisholm contends that Equiano’s theology, latent in the Bible, is of the “dishonoured God,” the enslaved Christ. The passage occurs when Peter and John are arrested for healing a beggar. Peter explains that Jesus healed the beggar: “This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become to cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Chisholm points

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out that the Greek original and King James versions of these verses use the deictic “this Jesus,” rendering it unclear whether “Jesus” is Christ or the beggar, an ambiguity that points to Christ’s exclusion from the ranks of the human while underlining his material existence. Austin Chisholm, “The Future is Black: Black Christology in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano,” Paper submitted for Graduate Seminar, “ENGL 530A: British Romanticism and Speculative Realism,” University of British Columbia, April 24, 2017, 8–9. Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 204. Ibid., 205–6. Ibid., 234–44. The research for this chapter was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It was inspired by and developed in two graduate seminars which I taught at the University of British Columbia: “Romantic Matter” (2014) and “British Romanticism and Speculative Realism” (2016): I dedicate this chapter to the students in these classes. I also thank Chris Washington and Anne McCarthy for their positive encouragement and critical acumen throughout the writing and editorial processes.

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An object-oriented media studies: The case of romantic cookery books Brian Rejack

In the spirit of nineteenth-century receipts (what we now call recipes), this essay, which may or may not coalesce into a palatable morsel by its conclusion, is comprised of the following:  Take object-oriented ontology’s (OOO’s) insistence that objects fundamentally and irreducibly exist but withdraw from all relations and combine with recent interest in probing the being of media, particularly, though not exclusively, with respect to computational media’s ascendance in all realms of cultural production over the past few decades. Season with literary criticism from the field of romanticism, which understands its period as a signal moment in the history of mediation. Serve on a bed of cookery books from the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Here is what you will taste. First, on the tip of your tongue will come the sensation of a media ontology that privileges objects over processes, creating a pathway toward the slightly bitter hint of a political, aesthetic, and ethical resistance to the logic of Singularity which animates so much of contemporary discourse around computational media (and which infects how we view other media in comparison with it). As those initial notes begin to fade, lingering spicy claims regarding the sensuous character of reading take over, with particular focus on the strategies of mediation at work in romantic-era cookery books. Should any indigestion arise, feel free to proceed to another essay in this collection; if the ailment persists, the author of this vile stew can be boiled and roasted at length in other publications should you be so inclined to put in the effort. As the above attests, I’m drawn toward play and irony when dealing with cookery books because those strategies are so vividly on display in the discourse around them during the romantic period. At least in part, such tendency toward ironic play results from the discomfort food and eating raise by reminding us of the existence of objects apart from us (and our dependence on them), as well as the fundamental objectness of the human subject. Similarly, cookery books remind us of the inhuman core of media objects, like books, to which we ascribe so much meaningful human presence. The most consistent playfulness one encounters in cookery books is the conflation of reading and eating upon which my opening paragraph also riffs. Witness, for instance, Thomas Hood’s delectable characterization of the late-romantic period’s most famous cookery book, William Kitchiner’s The Cook’s Oracle:  “The style is a piquant sauce

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to the solid food of the instructions; and we never recollect reading sentences that relished so savourily. . . . If we were to be cast away upon a desert island, and could only carry one book ashore, we should take care to secure the Cook’s Oracle. . . . Who could starve with such a larder of reading?”1 Even if we know that readers did not literally eat Kitchiner’s book (except perhaps an inadvertent scrap or two when used as culinary wrapping paper),2 the conflation of reading and eating with respect to cookery books nonetheless poses reading as something more than a disembodied, purely intellectual experience of text. As such, these books help us examine media as embodied objects, not merely as processes capable of replication—without transformation—in any and all other forms. Cookery books should thus be of interest to romanticists and philosophers alike for what they can teach us about aesthetics. Romanticism, or at least the second-generation Cockney version of it I focus on, models notions of aesthetics in line with how OOOinclined (and other speculative realist) thinkers have written about beauty. This model treats aesthetic objects as insistently material and necessarily real, while full knowledge of or access to those objects eludes creators and audiences alike. John Keats’s Grecian urn silently beckons us to engage with the strange presence that “haunts about [its] shape,” even if we ultimately remain uncertain of what it says to us, despite the poem’s seemingly unambiguous final utterance; Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc “gleams on high,” and even though the poet claims “the power is there,” that power remains deeply withdrawn from human apprehension; Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s multiply-mediated poems leave us in webs of interconnected objects, as in the “Lines Written under a Picture of a Girl Burning a Love-Letter,” such that access to those objects can only ever be relational—in all these cases, we encounter notions of aesthetic experience which privilege speculation without moving fully into idealism nor into the certitude of a naïve realism.3 In ways similar to these romantic poetic articulations (in this essay, exemplified by Keats), cookery books ponder the nature of aesthetics through reflections upon textual mediation. While romanticism and speculative realism correspond with respect to how they approach being and beauty, contemporary media theory tends to diverge from such realist aesthetics. By thinking through romanticism and the media-centric reflections on aesthetics offered by cookbooks, I  suggest that such a method opens a space for speculative realism to counter the anti-realist assumptions that contemporary media theory leans toward. In short, speculative realism helps us see the realism of romantic aesthetics. Romantic texts invested in both mediation and aesthetics help us inject realism into our understanding of media, a realism whose absence has significant ethical ramifications. Finally, then, my focus on questions of beauty is about the effects produced by our ways of thinking about aesthetics. As opposed starting points, whether or not we accord reality to aesthetic objects significantly influences what we accept as the appropriate fields of action for beauty—without realism the aesthetic functions as a shiny distraction from more weighty matters; with realism the aesthetic offers possibility, futurity, and imagined capacities we could not think to know. To ask what books and poems do, then, concerns ethics and ontology at the same time.

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Cookery books may not be the most obviously romantic texts out there, but they nonetheless offer a wide range of reflections on the nature of media and mediation during the romantic period. In the last two decades, scholars of romanticism have increasingly argued for viewing media and mediation as central concerns constitutive of romanticism. For instance, Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane contend that “the study of romantic poiesis . . . belongs as much to media history as to literary scholarship,” and they venture further that “Romantic poetry might even serve as a synonym for what we mean by multimedia.”4 Elsewhere Langan identifies in Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel a crucial historical moment when “the medium of print becomes recognizable as a medium.”5 Andrew Burkett explores in Romantic Mediations how authors during the period “express[ed] diverse, flexible conceptions of both media and mediation . . . before the media concept became distilled later in the nineteenth century into its modern sense as the notion of the technological channel of communication.”6 I suspect that the emergence of what some of the aforementioned scholars have referred to as “romantic media studies” not only is about broader academic trends but also, more significantly, points to a continuity between understandings of romanticism past and present. The transcendence and immediacy of romantic writing tends to be accompanied by the recognition of the necessarily mediated character of beauty. Langan and McLane identify this tension in the titles of two landmark books of romanticist scholarship, Geoffrey Hartman’s Unmediated Vision and Harold Bloom’s The Visionary Company, each of which employ “terms . . . [which] yield evidence of historically specific forms of mediation” even while arguing for the power of romantic poetry to bypass, avoid, or eliminate the pernicious effects of other communications technologies.7 All of this is to say that a growing interest in seeing romanticism through the lenses of media theory and media history ultimately represents a return to what is arguably the most crucial and defining subject of romanticism: aesthetics. Romantic cookery books enable an explicit combined focus on mediation and aesthetics for several reasons. As already mentioned, one reason is how consistently they raise questions about the conflation of reading and eating. Gustatory metaphors employed to talk about reading are, of course, not unique to the romantic period, but the connection does have a distinctive flavor in this context. Denise Gigante has written about this notion in Taste:  A Literary History, in which she locates the distinctiveness of romantic taste particularly in relation to class and in the broader context of philosophical treatments of aesthetics; for Gigante, romantic writers resist the traditional hierarchy of the senses, which places literal taste at the bottom (where it corresponds with class hierarchies as well) and only useful as a metaphor for aesthetic appreciation.8 If, as I contend, romanticism can be understood as producing and emerging from a distinctive consciousness of textual materiality and mediation alongside its more regularly recognized concerns with poetics, taste, and aesthetics, then cookery books operate precisely at the locus of these overlapping issues.9 When writers in the romantic period link reading with the more insistently material act of eating, that linkage is frequently a response to and means of thinking through textual materiality and mediation more broadly. Cookery books offer us several specific areas

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to investigate: through their “hypermediacy”10 they teach us about the sensory character of reading and of mediation more broadly; they teach us about the relation between manuscript and print at a moment when print was supposedly the only game in town; because they are so promiscuous, borrowing with wild abandon from one another and from all niches of the broader media ecology, they teach us about the milieu in which they exist, operate, transform, and persist; and they teach us how to conceive of what it means to use a book, or any other medium, and they do so in a historical moment when such use had not been as naturalized through the dominant media concept that would solidify by the end of the nineteenth century. In addition to proceeding through those lessons, I  will also gesture toward how cookery books’ relevance for mediahistorical and media-theoretical work dovetails with some of the more traditional aspects of what constitutes literary romanticism. But first I offer a brief overview of the tensions between contemporary media studies and speculative realism, which will set up the stakes for the essay’s treatment of cookery books thereafter.

The being of media The work of OOO truly begins after the fundamental realist stance it adopts in opposition to the post-Kantian trap of correlationism, a stance which Graham Harman tidily summarizes in Guerilla Metaphysics (2005): “Object-oriented philosophy has a single basic tenet: the withdrawal of objects from all perceptual and causal relations.”11 Withdrawal operates at an ontological level, so it means that while objects exist, all interactions with them occur across a fundamental chasm. While withdrawal itself is a crucial and generative concept in the broader movement of speculative realism, it gains greater value from the efforts made beyond that initial recognition in order to make sense of how anything ever happens at all, how the ontological chasm is bridged. If all entities are “vacuum-sealed,”12 “operationally closed,”13 or “irreducibly secret,”14 then there needs to be some accounting for how objects do interact with one another. My interest in this essay has less to do with the philosophical viability of specific solutions offered by Harman (“vicarious causation”), Levi Bryant (a systemstheory-inflected answer), or Timothy Morton (locating causality in the aesthetic realm of “interobjectivity”), than with the implications such solutions raise for how we as literary scholars might wrestle with them. In my case I wrestle with them by suggesting how they exist in productive tension with contemporary theories of mediation. That tension then illuminates what speculative realism and media studies can bring to our understanding of the study of romanticism.15 Media and mediation often linger in the background of work by OOO thinkers. Bryant’s more recent work specifically draws on media theory (mostly McLuhan) for his shift to “machine-oriented ontology.”16 However, I want to resist the tendency in Bryant’s work to turn all entities into mediums (“when one entity enters into structural coupling with another entity, it functions as a medium for that entity”).17 If entities— or objects, or machines, or things, depending on one’s preferred vocabulary—are all potential mediums, then the “media concept” loses all particularity of meaning.18 As

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John Durham Peters writes in the introduction to The Marvelous Clouds, when we engage in ontological explorations of media, there is the risk of “dilut[ing] the concept beyond the limit of utility.”19 That said, however, I  share with Peters the sense that the risk is worth taking, particularly as we exist in a moment when “media theory faces a crisis of uncontainable relevance,”20 thanks in part to the rapid changes and developments in contemporary media objects, devices, and environments over the past few decades, and which we ought also to extend back to the slightly slower media revolutions of the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While speculative realism often thinks through media and mediation, recent media studies work that edges into the realm of ontology tends to do so in tension with speculative realism (with differing degrees of directness, ranging from the indifferent to the openly hostile). Peters’s The Marvelous Clouds, the collaborative volume Excommunication, Craig Dworkin’s No Medium, and Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects all place the study of media (typically though not exclusively through examinations of computational media) in the broader context of the study of metaphysics.21 Peters points out that ontology and media studies have a history preceding our moment, venturing that “at its most ambitious, media studies sees itself as a successor discipline to metaphysics, as the study of all that is.”22 Two of the most ambitious practitioners whom Peters has in mind are Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler. The latter, in an essay written toward the end of his illustrious career, claims that, for most of its history, philosophy has not been able to think the ontology of media because, since Aristotle, metaphysics has “deal[t] only with things, their matter and form, but not with relations between things in time and space.”23 Only with Heidegger, according to Kittler, does philosophy begin to move toward a reckoning with the being of technical media, and only in the wake of the history of computation since the early-twentieth century can we stop “subjecting humans, beings, and machines to the dichotomy of form and matter” and move instead toward a “new trinity made up of commands, addresses, and data,” or alternatively, “proceedings, transmissions, and memories.”24 As the figure of trinity suggests, Kittler’s answer is onto-theological as opposed to strictly ontological, and he even recognizes at the essay’s conclusion that, if our shamans and priests of computation solve the mystery of quantum computing sometime in the future, then the gods of our current onto-theological system would be overthrown by the Olympian qubits and whatever strange beings they instantiate. Kittler’s answer is thus of a piece with what OOO acolytes label as one of their (many) bêtes-noirs:  process philosophy. Some other media-ontological thinkers fall under this category as well, most notably Alexander Galloway and Craig Dworkin. Dworkin ultimately remains agnostic on the question of the ontology of media, writing that “media—if there are such things [my italics]—are only recognizable as collectives.”25 Galloway more forcefully swears off the question of ontology when it comes to computational machines, suggesting that “the proper branch of philosophy one should turn to is ethics or pragmatics, not ontology or metaphysics.”26 In the introduction to The Interface Effect, where he engages Kittler’s essay, Galloway argues that “when Kittler elevates substrates and apparatuses over modes of mediation, he forfeits an interest in techniques in favor of an interest in objects.”27 By contrast, Galloway asserts: “the

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computer is not an object, or a creator of objects, it is a process or active threshold mediating between two states.”28 Although Galloway has accused OOO (and speculative realism more broadly) of embracing the process-based logic of late capitalism in their accounts of realism, I daresay he may protest too much.29 Here we arrive at the caveat that I am not a philosopher, which I raise only to stipulate that I do not particularly care about the truth or value or success of philosophical arguments qua philosophical arguments; I care more about beauty, and about the effects of aesthetics. I care about how beauty and our discourse around beauty might inform a better future, how they might, to quote Keats advocating for a particular notion of aesthetic process, “let the warm Love in.”30 My concerns with the effects produced by process philosophy in the realm of media studies are precisely the concerns that Galloway locates with respect to speculative realism.31 The massive corporations in control of the entities that do the most to define media today would love nothing more than to have a broad cultural impact, and the like are the grounds of media being. While we split hairs over whether we are talking about epistemology or ontology, materialism or realism, process or object, media continue to do their work. As the digital peasants dream of existence without bodies or without matter, the lords of the realm keep prospering materially, deploying the same old tricks of accumulation by dispossession, exploitation of human labor, poisoning of the ecosystem, and adding in some new ones just for good measure (like the financial instruments devised and administered by the very media machines that we peasants like to think exist for our personal pleasures). In short, it seems worth risking bad philosophy if the result is a consistent refrain affirming the existence of entities in resistance to the fantasies of process which merely obscure the material and existential realities out of which they emerge. Let us turn, then, to some of those objects in all their mediating and mediated beauty.

The aesthetics of cookery books Cookery books foreground their relationship to the senses both through their content, the objects mediated, and through their modes of mediation, the mediating objects. One could argue that books of poetry also activate some form of embodied sensation in their users, but cookery books more self-consciously acknowledge their connection to sensation than typically does a book of poetry. Through their greater degree of sensorial concern, we can develop concepts and vocabulary for theorizing books occupying other genres and uses as well. In one of the period’s great venues for reflections on textual and gustatory materiality, Blackwood’s Magazine, we find a feast of such examples.32 In December 1821, for instance, we encounter an extended description of Maria Eliza Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery. Rundell’s book was an extremely profitable one for publisher John Murray (a fact not lost on one of Murray’s other profitable authors, Lord Byron, who playfully writes to Murray, “Along thy sprucest bookshelves shine / The works thou deemest most divine— / The ‘Art of Cookery’ and Mine”).33 The Blackwood’s writer R. F. St. Barbe describes Murray’s production process through the following extended figure: “[Murray] kneaded it up

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into one solid substance, a regular-made fat 12mo. with title-page, and tail-piece, and index, if not actually the puff-paste of Mr Murray himself, yet at least the dresser and rolling-pin were put in requisition under his specific direction for compounding it.”34 This bibliographic pie, as it were, draws attention to the mechanics of printing and bookmaking (“12mo.” referring to the duodecimo size of the book), but also to the discursive systems which support the industry (“puff-paste” referring to “puffery,” or the practice of publishers promoting their own works in the pages of another of their publications, such as a magazine). The book did not “actually” contain the puffery of a positive review within it, and it appears that no such “puff-paste” ever appeared in Murray’s magazine, The Quarterly Review. But this figure of the book’s pie-crust— which plays with its physicality and the way in which it moves through other material systems—suggests that we ought to take seriously the notion that the existence of the object extends beyond its binding. St. Barbe goes on to suggest that Murray might be better served were he to “carve down the materials of his feast, and send them up to the snow-white monthly spread table-cloth of Maga, in the form of entremêts, not overmuch at once, but prettily dished and garnished by some of the tasteful traiteurs, who have demonstrated their excellence in your [fictional Blackwood’s editor Christopher North’s] employ.” The suggestion seems to be that Blackwood’s itself is a better publishing venue for cookery than a large book; Murray’s “fat 12mo.” is contrasted with the pristine “table-cloth of Maga” and its monthly freshness. As is always the case with Blackwood’s, reflections on the literary and publishing worlds quickly become opportunities to espouse Maga’s own greatness. Nonetheless, moments like these demonstrate self-consciousness about print media specifically and about mediation more broadly, and they allow us to imagine how readers and writers during the period entertain the materiality and being of media. Cookery books allow for such explorations in part because the books tend toward self-reflexivity regarding their mediation. That is, cookery books exhibit what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call “hypermediacy.” Hypermediacy names the tendency of mediation to make visible the particularities of mediation (as opposed to “immediacy,” which seeks to erase all traces of mediation). It draws attention to the medium, often for some aesthetic effect. Bolter and Grusin emphasize that these two “logics” of (re)mediation are not universalized or stable but rather emerge from and alter within complex negotiations over time.35 Any given medium will typically afford elements of both logics. Take virtual reality: the “immersive” nature of seeing a virtual environment in one’s entire field of vision attempts to achieve a feeling of immediacy, while the bulky helmet and easily tangled wires required to create that mediated environment certainly remind the user of the hypermediated nature of the experience. Johanna Drucker, focusing specifically on the print medium, suggests a similar tension between what she calls marked and unmarked texts. Whereas the unmarked text seeks to completely erase our awareness of the space of mediation, in contrast, “the marked text,” according to Drucker, “aggressively situates the reader in relation to the various levels of enunciation in the text—reader, speaker, subject, author—though with manipulative utilization of the strategies of graphic design.”36 Cookery books certainly draw attention to their modes of mediation through their visual materials

Figure 13.1 One of the seventy-three full-plate illustrations from the 1836 edition of Marie Antonin Carême’s French Cookery, published by John Murray in 1836. Carême was legendary for his elaborate spun-sugar sculptures like the ones diagrammed in detail here. Courtesy of the Cookery Collection, Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.

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(and this is true of both lavish illustrated productions and more modest varieties). Marie-Antonin Carême’s French Cookery, published by John Murray in 1836, features seventy-three fold-out illustrations, mostly of Carême’s famous spun-sugar sculptures (see Figure 13.1).37 In a more restrained style, we have the strategy employed in Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook (see Figures 13.2 and 13.3), which illustrates how to julienne carrots with a printer’s mark typically used to indicate a break in a text (a horizontal bar). In another instance it employs what is essentially an enlarged asterisk to demonstrate how to dish up sheep tongues and cabbage leaves (the asterisk used in that same receipt to explain in a footnote what is meant by “mask” draws further attention to the typographical tools being used to illustrate culinary techniques as well as bibliographic functions).38 Ude’s book thus takes line drawing as remediated through print and uses it to convey the visual image of food items to be prepared and consumed via the medium of the body. A final example comes from the anonymous Domestic Economy and Cookery (1827), wherein the layouts of printed pages visualize different forms

Figure 13.2 From the sixth edition of Louis Eustache Ude’s The French Cook, published by John Ebers, 1819 (source of the bill of fare used by Lord Byron in Don Juan, among other things). Ude’s book employs typographical devices to illustrate culinary techniques, like the slicing of carrots à la julienne depicted here. The British Library.

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Figure  13.3 Another typographical device from Ude’s book, here an enlarged asterisk illustrating how to dish sheep tongues with cabbage leaves. Published by John Ebers, 1819. The British Library.

of table settings (see Figure  13.4), creating a sort of culinary precursor of Stephane Mallarmé’s typographical experimentation in Un Coup de dés at the end of the century. Such typographical presentations complicate a stark divide between text and image precisely by drawing attention to the aesthetic and sensorially distinct qualities of the printed page. Bibliographical elements like tipped-in illustrations and typographical innovation contribute to the rhetoric of sensuousness that characterizes the nineteenth-century sense of what a book is and can do, and this last example, by turning the page into an image of the table, subtly suggests the conflation of reading and eating we encounter in

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Figure 13.4 A table setting from Domestic Economy and Cookery for Rich and Poor (1827). The University of Glasgow Library. Courtesy of the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Public Domain Mark.

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cookery books in many other forms. When William Kitchiner writes in his introduction to The Cook’s Oracle that “the author has submitted to a labour no preceding CookeryBookmaker, perhaps, ever attempted to encounter—having eaten each Receipt, before he set it down in his book,” we ought to use that conflation as a way to think through the affects produced by and through interactions with the printed page.39 As suggested at this essay’s outset, this correspondence between tasting and reading ought to be of interest for understanding the broader context of romantic books, and in particular of romantic poetry. To what extent does a poem encode sensuous pleasure in a manner akin to a receipt? To what extent do romantic poets explore that process via reflection on the sensuousness of mediation itself? We can find potential answers to those questions in John Keats’s sonnet, “Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of ‘The Floure and the Lefe.’ ” Keats frequently wrote poems in books belonging to him and to others. When he does so, he typically draws attention to the processes of medial translation that make possible the text’s eventual migration into a new print environment (in this case, an issue of Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and then into collected editions later in the century). Ultimately, this is a sonnet about location (see Figure 13.5): the location of reading, of writing, of the embodied experience of imagination, of seemingly immediate sensory experience made possible by mediation. The poem’s opening deixis, “This pleasant

Figure 13.5 Keats’s poem as first published in the Examiner, March 16, 1817.

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Tale,” acknowledges its situatedness in a book, a position the Examiner version makes more apparent with the explicit occasional detail in the added title specifying where “this” points (a necessity in the Examiner version which highlights the complicated dynamics of the poem’s relation to both manuscript and print).40 That the “Tale is like a little Copse” figures the spatial nature of reading (i.e., reading the poem is like traveling to another location), but what complicates the poem is how Keats collapses the poem’s inscribed location (in a late-eighteenth-century printed edition of Chaucer) with the spatial metaphors for poetry. The poem is like a place, and it occupies a place (in a book), and Keats’s sonnet demonstrates that the tale’s likeness to place depends on its place in print. For instance, the “honied Lines” that “freshly interlace” (2) seem to refer to the “Floure and the Lefe” ’s rhyme royal stanzas, and the visual interlacing that emerges on the page because of the stanza structure. To “keep the Reader in so sweet a place” (3) then, would mean to arrest the reader’s eye upon the page. That kind of readerly, spatial movement also carries with it an affective charge, since the “fullhearted stops” (4) are not merely a consequence of lineation, but also gesture toward the sensory jolts of aesthetic experience. At the same time, the interlacing “honied Lines” could refer to the entangled stems and branches of the trees and shrubbery that make up the imagined bower to which the reader has travelled, and which halt the reader’s imagined physical movements through the landscape. In the poem’s second quatrain, the emphasis shifts toward this kind of movement in imagined space and the sensations produced thereby. Now the reader more clearly inhabits this copse in which “dewy drops” (5)  fall upon his face, and where, with sonar-like precision, the reader “may trace” the movements of a bird by following the direction of its “wand’ring Melody” (7). Keats’s use of “trace” nicely combines the sense of physical travel and embodied movements with attention to mediation (as in drawing, sketching, or tracing “honied Lines”). So, even though the second quatrain shifts in emphasis from the physicality of the page to the imagined spatial landscape, the former resonance persists in the use of “trace,” and in what Keats, the inveterate punster, surely intended as at least a mild play on “Linnet” (8) with its echo of the earlier “honied Lines.” Whereas earlier the lines “interlaced” to keep the reader dwelling in a sweet place, now the reader “traces” the poem’s melody as the bird producing it “hops” from one location to another, including the “tender-legged” (8) jump that occurs on the page as the sonnet moves across the blank space between octave and sestet. Keats’s poem (as so many of his do) illustrates the point Andrew Piper makes in Dreaming in Books, that “much of what sustained and informed the identity of the printed book in the romantic period was a variety of scriptural practices that had predated Gutenberg.”41 Romantic cookery books likewise operate across and around the overlapping boundaries of manuscript and print practices. Often the title pages of cookery books advertise their originality and origin in manuscript form. For instance, Sarah Martin’s New Experienced English Housekeeper (1795), notes on its title page that the book is “written purely from her own practice,” and contained within is “an entirely new collection of original receipts which have never appeared in print.”42 Although Kitchiner in the Cook’s Oracle spurns the manuscript model, opening the book with the declaration that “The Following Receipts are not a mere marrowless collection of

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shreds, and patches, and cuttings, and pastings,” he does share with Martin the value of originality. Kitchiner’s insistence that his book eschews “cuttings, and pastings” still refers to manuscript practices (cuttings from newspapers or print books which one would place in a manuscript cookbook), but it also functions as evidence for his originality by gesturing to the rampant plagiaristic practices with print cookery books.43 The most egregious example of this tendency that I’ve come across is in a small book by Thomas Mickle called Original and Select Receipts in the Art of Cookery . . . Compiled from Manuscripts Never before Published (1828). It turns out that Mickle’s receipts are neither “original” nor “never before published.”44 Indeed, they seem to have been quite widely published. The first two receipts in Mickle’s book can be found, nearly word for word, in The Universal Cook (1792), which is itself an unacknowledged “compilation” of earlier books, supposedly compiled by Francis Collingwood and John Woolams but actually written by a ghost writer named Richard Johnson, who wrote several cookery books under the guise of other authors.45 More likely is that Mickle is copying from a copy of a copy, given that The Imperial and Royal Cook by Frederick Nutt (1809) includes the two receipts in the same order and without the intervening material separating them in The Universal Cook.46 So we have in 1828 a small, cheaply produced book professing to present original receipts from manuscripts never before published, but which reproduces receipts from earlier eighteenth-century print books that were themselves widely copied, sampled, adapted, and ambiguously authored. All of this is to say, coexisting with the collapsing figures of texts and food in the discourse around and in cookery books are numerous self-conscious reflections on the modes and materials of mediation through which such figures are activated. Of course, we know that print books do not actually convey smells and tastes, at least not the same ones that the cookbooks supposedly conjure up in readers’ imaginations. But there are other senses of interest in the realm of cookery books. Embedded in the protocols operating within and through the two mediums—manuscript and print— which the books so often reflect upon, is an acute registering of the haptics of each. Cookery books, more so than other kinds of books, are defined by their uses, their handling, their presence in particular spaces. It is assumed that they will be used, not only read, and read in order to produce effects outside of themselves. In the archive we sometimes encounter remnants of those effects, like grease stains and crumbs. We can see a modeling of one version of these protocols in the frontispiece from a 1775 edition of Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery (see Figure 13.6), arguably the most popular and influential cookery book of the eighteenth century, which shows a lady passing on a hand-copied receipt from the book to her servant, while the book itself remains outside the kitchen. The verse below the image explains, “The Fair, who’s Wise and oft consults our Book, / And thence directions gives her Prudent Cook, / With Choicest Viands, has thus her Table Crown’d: / And Health, with Frugal Elegance is found.” Here food enables nourishment, sophistication, and presumably some pleasure, and it comes into existence via the exchanges between leisure and labor, gentry and worker, parlor and scullery, male and female (the patriarchal figure in the portrait overlooks the exchange between mistress and servant), visual and linguistic, recto and verso, and, of course,

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Figure 13.6 The frontispiece and title page to Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

print and manuscript. To what extent might we say that the servant in this image has read this book? Used this book? Interacted with this book? In this instance, manuscript is figured as the conduit through which print moves from the educated elite to the not quite illiterate but certainly less-privileged (in terms of access to the book, among other things) domestic worker. The circuit of reading and book use becomes a closed circuit via the conductors of human hands, paper, pen, ink, class structure, gender hierarchy, and even species distinctions (the world of elegant humans contrasted with the space of animal slaughter lurking in the kitchen behind). The book extends its causal waves out into the subjectivity of the humans pictured here, and it does so through a logic of uses and transformations with and of different bodies. The history of reading is notoriously elusive, precisely because the act of reading itself leaves no traces. As H. J. Jackson reminds us, “The writer of marginalia acts on the impulse to stop reading [my italics] for long enough to record a comment.”47 While admitting this gap between “the reading mind,” as she calls it, and the related marginalia left behind, Jackson nevertheless demonstrates compelling examples of how the latter can suggest to us insights about the former. Leah Price offers a different answer to this inherent limitation on the history of reading by instead attending to actions with books other than reading in order to do what she cheekily calls “rejection history.”48 I suggest a model located somewhere in between those two, which I term a history

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of imaginary using. I pose “use” in the more obvious sense of human users and their intentional enactments of the material on offer in a book (that is, readers engaging with the book by reading its recipes and attempting to activate them themselves). The causal direction of “using” moves both ways, however. I suggest reversing the polarity of the logic of use, and insist that we can also talk about books in terms of the uses to which they put us. The books use us to bring about some change in the world. With cookery books, they begin the process that ends with the production of a food item, which can then do a variety of things in the world. And of course the books create an immediate (or, I should say, a mediate) effect: that of sensory response and perceptual activity in the body of its user. Lastly, I stress that this is a history of imaginary using, because I’m as much focused on, maybe even more focused on, the ways that we imagine mediums operating, and less interested in a naïve realist version of what a medium is and does. We all know that cookery books do not actually cause gustatory hallucinations—that is, the medium of print lacks a robust means of conveying smells and tastes—and yet, we nonetheless imagine that they do. That virtual component of a book’s interactivity accounts for the way that the medium exists as much as the components we more readily identify as material (the heft of paper, the color of ink, the style of binding, etc.). In adopting this framework, I’m indebted to the media studies scholarship discussed earlier in this essay, including Dworkin’s assertion that “one can never locate a medium in isolation. Media—if there are such things—are only recognizable as collectives.”49 Books can readily be understood as media assemblages in that they require a variety of materials and processes to produce and consume them, but, I would also add, as is the case particularly with the cookery book, the imaginary capacities of a medium should be a crucial part of how we define it. But again, I  depart from Dworkin’s hesitancy to affirm the existence of media. The imaginary using of media carries with it the being of media and the necessity of withdrawal. All mediums and uses of them are virtual (or imaginary, or speculative), because mediums withdraw. So too do human users withdraw from the medium’s full access of those beings using them. That is to say, media objects and their users exist, but in the process of interacting with one another, they fail to fully plumb the depths of each other’s existence. Even so, there are relations that occur through forms of what Harman calls “vicarious causation,” such as his notion of “allure,” an experience with an object which “invites us into a world that seemed inaccessible”; even though we cannot fully respond to the invitation, it nonetheless leaves us with the sense that the object does exist behind its various appearances to us.50 Morton calls these relations simply the processes of causality, but a causality that occurs in the “interobjective” spaces between things, where they leave behind impressions of one another, like dinosaur footprints preserved in mudrock.51 What these models of being and relation add to our understanding of media objects is the reminder that those things which seem so clearly and simply present to us continue to hold many of their own secrets. In the moment of encounter with a media object, we speculate that some other object does exist, even as it tantalizes with its mystery and obscurity. The risk of abandoning the notion of some irreducible existence of media and other objects is what results from focusing instead on pure flows and endless process

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as the things to which objects are reduced. This tendency is particularly pernicious in contemporary new media discourse, where it reaches its fullest realization in the notion of the Singularity, the point at which technological intelligence advances at such a rate that conventional human intelligence will be radically eclipsed, and what remains is technological and medial convergences which result in the abolition of any meaningful difference. A relevant example—for the context of food and eating—of this logic is Soylent. Yes, there is now a food product named Soylent, developed by and for the digerati. No, it is not made of people, but the real horror of Soylent Green is not that it is people (sorry, Charlton Heston); the real horror is that it’s not food. The actual twenty-first-century product’s original marketing tagline, “Free your body,”52 is not only unintentionally embarrassing, given the ingredients of its famous filmic namesake, it is also unsurprising given the long history of techno-utopian striving to leave behind the world of meatspace for the more rarefied environs of cyberspace. Though a common yearning among the technocracy, it’s a vapid, tasteless notion of freedom. One way to resist such thinking is to affirm the existence of distinct objects that are irreducible to their components, their relations, or their algorithmic representations. Media objects in particular are useful for taking and making this stand because it is all too easy to view their essence as mediums as emergent properties of their uses for us. Eugene Thacker, through his theorizing of what he calls “dark media,” suggests we think of media not in terms of subject-object relations (i.e., human readerly subject, book object), or objectobject relations (the connection between, say, book objects and the objects that make up the system of circulation through which books move), but rather via object-thing relations.53 By that he means we should interrogate media as strange, paradoxical mixtures of intentional objects-for-us and things-in-themselves that resist full access from any other beings, human or otherwise. But to do so in a manner which resists the logics of reducibility and process that characterize so much new media discourse, we ought to begin from the position that media exist. From there we can contend with the deeply inhuman core of those media objects to which we ascribe so much human presence, hopefully without falling into illusions of complete access, control, or knowledge. Instead, we encounter them as the things of beauty that they are. One final cookery book example demonstrates the aesthetic realism, the necessity of withdrawal, and the vital materiality that I call for as we attend to mediated and mediating objects. In one of the many copies of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery held in the Cookery Collection at Kansas State University’s Morse Department of Special Collections, there exists a remarkable range of scriptural annotations, including the most striking, on the flyleaf facing the book’s final page (see Figure 13.7). There’s much here that remains unknown—who Mary Bingham was, or when she wrote these lines; who the book’s other owners were (there are inscriptions elsewhere in the book from Elizabeth Hasleby on October 30, 1748 and Thomas Wheelwright from 1793, which suggest that Mary Bingham’s annotations occurred somewhere in between); or even the origin of the phrase—but knowing seems less significant here than speculating and feeling. Was this an exercise of penitence forced upon an unruly, sinful child, à la Bart Simpson at the chalkboard? If so, young Mary seems to have taken pleasure in the sensory excess of stripping these words of their discursive

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Figure 13.7 Annotations from Mary Bingham (at bottom, “Mary Bing ham Her Book”) in the second edition of Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery (1747). Courtesy of the Cookery Collection, Morse Department of Special Collections, Kansas State University Libraries.

meaning by transforming them into units of visual meaning much more than linguistic ones. The division of the phrase into sometimes meaningful parts on their own, but also seemingly nonsensical fragments like “Shame isthec,” helps transform these lines into something akin to William Blake’s wild squiggly lines that at times emerge from, overwhelm, and undermine the alphabetic characters we tend to imbue with greater significance than the visual pieces which comprise them. The shapes themselves do more than the letters those shapes form. In my reading, then, this page says very little about shame or about sin; instead, it speaks loudly to the strange inscrutability of media objects, to their simultaneous withdrawal and insistent affective presence, and to their potential to mediate more than the abilities we ascribe to them, if we simply open ourselves to the speculative potential of affirming their being. As a final return to aesthetics within speculative realism and OOO, take The Universe of Things:  On Speculative Realism, Steven Shaviro’s reading of speculative realism through the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Shaviro critiques, complicates, compliments (and complements) many strands of speculative realism, and part of the good will he brings to the task is informed by Whitehead’s “injunction to convert oppositions into contrasts.” Such an impulse, Shaviro argues, animates Whitehead’s later work, and as a result “Aesthetic questions only hinted at in the earlier work

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now become a central speculative focus.”54 Through Whitehead, Shaviro’s version of speculative realism “focuses not on epistemological questions at all but rather directly on aesthetics, for aesthetics is the realm of immanent, noncognitive contact.” He goes even further, arguing that “the world is indeed, at its base, aesthetic. And through aesthetics, we can act in the world and relate to other things in the world without reducing it and them to mere correlates of our own thought.”55 Shaviro’s “speculative aesthetics” is, as his title (taken from Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc) suggests, indebted to romanticism. I  hope that my reading of romantic cookery provides one example of what engaging in speculative aesthetics looks like when paired with a focus on romantic-era approaches to media and mediation. I  also hope that my arguments in favor of objects over process when it comes to media and mediation, in the spirit of Whitehead, come across as less oppositional to those of other scholars than as contrasting. The differences between contrast and opposition are aesthetic, formal, and ethical. Opposition proposes an ethics of competition and of hierarchy: one thing in the opposing pair must die, or at least suffer, and if you want to play the game, you need to be ready to impose suffering on the other or experience it yourself. Instead, let us engage in the work of establishing what Whitehead refers to as “patterned contrasts.” These create relations that privilege beauty over truth: as Whitehead puts it, placing his words in patterned contrast with Keats’s, “Beauty is a wider, and more fundamental, notion than Truth.”56 Opposition creates sublimity, contrast beauty. There’s enough of terror in the world; let’s instead embrace the embarrassing sincerity of Keatsian beauty in all of its joyous profusion. Aesthetic encounters with media objects and the objects they mediate represent one particularly valuable conduit for beauty.

Notes 1 [Thomas Hood], “The Cook’s Oracle,” London Magazine, October 1821, 439, https:// babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015033904965. 2 A common joke about the fragility of literary fame (with currency during the romantic period and others) centers on the reuse of paper for culinary purposes. Lord Byron, for instance, bemoans the potential future uses of Don Juan: “What, must I go to the oblivious cooks? / Those Cornish plunderers of Parnassian wrecks?” (Canto 4, 861–2). See The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–93). 3 John Keats, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 372; Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works, ed. Zachary Leader and Michael O’Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 123; and Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Peterborough: Broadview, 1997), 81. 4 Celeste Langan and Maureen N. McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. James Chandler and Maureen N. McLane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239. 5 Celeste Langan, “Understanding Media in 1805: Audiovisual Hallucination in The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Studies in Romanticism 40, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 70.

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6 Andrew Burkett, Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 3. 7 Langan and McLane, “The Medium of Romantic Poetry,” 240. 8 Denise Gigante, Taste: A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 9 In addition to the media studies examples cited above, book historical scholarship has also illuminated the distinctiveness of Romantic-era textual media with respect to material practices, social and cultural attitudes, and what Andrew Piper calls a “bibliographic poetics.” See Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 11. Also see Ina Ferris and Paul Keen (eds.), Bookish Histories: Books, Literature, and Commercial Modernity, 1700–1900 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); and William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 10 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 5. This concept and its relation to what Bolter and Grusin term “the double logic of remediation” is discussed further below. 11 Graham Harman, Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2005), 20. 12 Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 2002), 283. 13 Levi R. Bryant, The Democracy of Objects (Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press, 2011), 153. 14 Morton, Realist Magic, 30. 15 From the outset I should emphasize that my interest here is not in litigating the sometimes contentious debates within and without speculative realism about the viability of different positions and concepts. The extent to which OOO effectively accounts for causation and other forms of relation is one such debate. See, for instance, Peter Gratton, Speculative Realism: Problems and Prospects (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 100–7. Gratton’s treatment of the issue (mostly with respect to Harman) represents one clear and compelling critique, particularly as Gratton does so while refraining from the rancor too often spewed by critics and defenders of OOO alike. While the philosophical merits of arguments about how causation can happen in a realist context while real objects always withdraw are certainly worth litigating, I’m not the one to do so. My purpose in this essay is simply to tease out how the notion of withdrawal and the models of relation emerging out of it can inform media-ontological investigations like the ones I entertain with respect to romantic-era cookery books. 16 Levi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 15. 17 Ibid., 30. 18 For a thorough genealogy of the media concept across several centuries, see John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 321–62. 19 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3. 20 Ibid., 9.

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21 Peters, Marvelous Clouds; Alexander R. Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark, Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Craig Dworkin, No Medium (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); and Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). If these works represent the category of the big-O Ontological explorations of media, or those works which focus on the Being of media, there also exists the related and not mutually exclusive category of little-o ontological explorations of the beings of media. Chief among these are materialist analyses of media objects and systems including the following: Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006); Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008); Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); and Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). 22 Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 27. 23 Friedrich Kittler, “Towards an Ontology of Media,” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 2–3 (March/May 2009): 24. 24 Ibid., 30. 25 Dworkin, No Medium, 30. 26 Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 23. 27 Ibid., 18. 28 Ibid., 23. 29 Galloway, “The Poverty of Philosophy: Realism and Post-Fordism,” Critical Inquiry 39, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 347–66. For an insightful take on Galloway’s lack of a “generous reading” of SR/OOO, see Eileen Joy, “This is Not My (or, Our) Time, so Please Take Ecstasy With Me: The Necessity of Generous Reading,” In the Middle: Peace, Love & the Middle Ages (blog), December 18, 2013, http://www.inthemedievalmiddle. com/2013/12/this-is-not-my-or-our-time-so-please.html. Accessed August 15, 2018. As Joy insists, generous reading does not mean we cannot disagree. I respect, admire and owe much to the work of scholars like Dworkin and Galloway, while also departing from them on the issue of the Being of media (and whether or not it matters to affirm the fundamental existence of media). 30 Keats, Poems, 366. 31 In “The Poverty of Philosophy,” Galloway argues that “recent realist philosophy mimics the infrastructure of contemporary capitalism” (p. 348). While I am sympathetic to his concern that ontological explorations risk divorcing themselves from politics, his reading of contemporary realisms overstates the extent to which they necessarily disavow the political (Galloway’s critique seems primarily aimed at Harman, and it is less convincing as a critique of realisms writ large). A more nuanced critique of OOO from the perspective of media studies can be found in Brenton J. Malin, “Communicating with Objects: Ontology, Object-Orientations, and the Politics of Communication,” Communication Theory 26, no. 3 (August 2016): 236–54. Malin advocates for an “onto-materialist approach,” by which he means an approach which accounts for the ontological and the social together when probing the being of objects. Such an approach is actually in line with Bryant’s work in Onto-Cartography (in which he calls himself a materialist) and in Morton’s Realist Magic; even though Morton spurns the materialist label, his analyses show that he understands that

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Romanticism and Speculative Realism material relations occur between objects, even if at an ontological level the reality of those objects are not fully exhausted, nor are they ontologically reducible to matter. For more on Blackwood’s and these dynamics, see my “Blackwood’s Magazine and the ‘Schooling’ of Taste,” European Romantic Review 24, no. 6 (2013): 723–42. Lord Byron, Byron’s Letters and Journals: ‘The flesh is frail’: 1818–1819, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 6:29. Fitztravesty, Blaize [R. F. St. Barbe], “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 10 (December 1821): 558, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/ pt?id=uc1.32106010766233. Accessed December 4, 2017. The book would have been in the news in late 1821 because there was a long drawn out copyright dispute between Rundell and Murray, and it had been taken up in the Court of Chancery in November 1821. For a report of the court case concerning Murray’s injunction to stop Rundell from publishing a new edition with Longman, see “Prosecutions and Miscellaneous Cases,” The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1821 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1823), 83–6, https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b200973. Accessed December 4, 2017. The following exchange demonstrates that even in court one might encounter the conflation of reading and eating: after Rundell’s lawyer notes that “Even the reading of [the book] did not fail to give one an appetite,” the Lord Chancellor replies, “Then hand the book up to me.” Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 21. See 20–50 for their full treatment of the dynamics at play with hypermediacy and immediacy. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909– 1923 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 97. Marie-Antonin Carême, The French Cook, Comprising L’Art de la cuisine française; Le Pâtisserie royale; Le Cuisinier parisien, trans. William Hall (London: John Murray, 1836), 222. Louis Eustache Ude, The French Cook, 6th edn. (London: John Ebers, 1819), 44, 118. William Kitchiner, Apicius Redivivus; or The Cook’s Oracle (London: Samuel Bagster, 1817), n.p. Later editions, published by Archibald Constable, removed the original Latin title and went simply with the first edition’s subtitle. The book remained popular throughout the century. J. K. [John Keats], “Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale of ‘The Floure and the Lefe,’ ” in Examiner March 16, 1817, 173. I quote from the Examiner version because its placement there further dramatizes the dynamics established in the MS poem written (or copied) into the volume of Chaucer. For more on the poem’s composition and publication histories, see Jack Stillinger, The Texts of Keats’s Poems (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), 130–2. Stillinger suggests that the poem in the Chaucer volume is an early fair copy from an early draft, the latter of which was then revised for publication in the Examiner. Piper, Dreaming in Books, 6. Sarah Martin, The New Experienced English Housekeeper (Doncaster: D. Boys, 1795). Kitchiner, Cook’s Oracle, n.p. Thomas Mickle, Original and Select Receipts in the Art of Cookery (London: W. Gilbert, 1828). See Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery-Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Prospect Books, 2002), 148.

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46 Frederic Nutt, The Imperial and Royal Cook (London: Mathews and Leigh, 1809), 159–60. 47 H. J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 82. 48 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 7. 49 Dworkin, No Medium, 30. 50 Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics, 214. 51 Morton, Realist Magic, 71. 52 The page title for the Soylent homepage included the phrase “Free your body” until August 2016, when it was replaced by “Healthy, convenient, affordable food.” As of this writing (August 2017), the company has adopted the more playful (if depressing to those who enjoy eating), “Let us take a few things off your plate.” See N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999) for one influential account of discourses of disembodiment in the context of computational media. 53 Eugene Thacker, “Dark Media,” in Excommunication, 119. 54 Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 19. 55 Ibid., 148, 156. 56 Quoted in ibid., 19.

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Notes on Contributors David Collings is Professor of English at Bowdoin College, where he contributes to programs in Environmental Studies and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies. He is the author of Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change (Open Humanities Press, 2014); Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 (Bucknell University Press, 2009); and Wordsworthian Errancies: The Poetics of Cultural Dismemberment (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), as well as the coeditor (with Jacques Khalip) of a special issue on Romanticism and Disaster (2012) and, with Michael O’Rourke, of another on Queer Romanticisms (2004–5). He has written articles on such topics as affect without content, anti-biography, the ethics of the impossible, economies of disaster, the impasses of utilitarianism, workless prophecy, and the post-covenantal sublime. He is currently at work on a new project, “Disastrous Subjectivities: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Real.” He serves as a member of the Executive Board of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism. Alexander Dick is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Romanticism and the Gold Standard: Money, Literature, and Economic Debate in Britain 1790–1830 (Palgrave, 2013) and of many articles and chapters on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, philosophy, and political economy. He has also coedited two collections of essays, including (with Angela Esterhammer) Spheres of Action: Speech and Performance in Romantic Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2009) and (with Christina Lupton) Theory and Practice in the Eighteenth Century: Writing between Philosophy and Literature (Pickering and Chatto, 2008). He is currently pursuing research on literary culture and agricultural improvement in Romantic-era Scotland, especially concerning the Highland Clearances and laboring-class writing. Allison Dushane is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Languages at Angelo State University. Her research and teaching interests include eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, aesthetic theory, science studies, and posthumanism. She has published articles on Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the relevance of Romantic-era aesthetics to contemporary environmental concerns. She is coeditor, with Adam Komisaruk, of a scholarly edition of Erasmus Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (Routledge, 2017). She is finishing a book manuscript titled “The Romantic Event: Matter, Agency, and Aesthetic Form.” Greg Ellermann is Lecturer in the Department of English at Yale University; he has also taught at Rutgers and Concordia. His research concerns the romantic poetry

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and philosophy of nature, and he has additional interests in aesthetic theory and the visual arts, contemporary philosophy, and poetics. His essays have appeared in SubStance, Studies in Romanticism, Essays in Romanticism, Syndicate, and European Romantic Review. Joel Faflak is Professor in the Department of English and Writing Studies at Western University, where he was inaugural Director of the School for Advanced Studies in the Arts and Humanities (2012–17). He is author of Romantic Psychoanalysis (State University of New York Press, 2008), coauthor of Revelation and Knowledge (University of Toronto Press, 2011), editor of De Quincey’s Confessions, editor or coeditor of ten volumes, and coeditor of Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. He is currently working on two books: “Romantic Psychiatry: The Psychopathology of Happiness” and “Get Happy! Utopianism and the American Film Musical.” Evan Gottlieb is Professor of English at Oregon State University. He is the author of four monographs, including Romantic Globalism: British Literature and Modern World Order, 1750–1830 (Ohio State University Press, 2014) and Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism (University of Edinburgh Press, 2016). He has also edited three collections of essays and the Norton Critical Edition of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Graham Harman is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (on leave from the American University in Cairo). His most recent books are Speculative Realism: An Introduction and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. He was recently named General Editor of the journal Open Philosophy. Mary Jacobus is Grace II Professor of English Emerita, University of Cambridge, and Professor Emerita, Cornell University. Her recent books include Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Romantic Things: A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud (University of Chicago Press, 2012). She is currently working on a collection of essays on translation, migration, and displacement. Anne C. McCarthy is the author of Awful Parenthesis: Suspension and the Sublime in Romantic and Victorian Poetry (University of Toronto Press, 2018), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on Romanticism, Victorian literature, and popular culture. Her PMLA article, “Reading the Red Bull Sublime,” was awarded the Best Essay Prize for 2017 by the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Her current project, “Catastrophic Intimacies: Looking for Love at the End of the World, 1780– 1830,” examines the convergence of personal and planetary disaster at the turn of the nineteenth century. Aaron Ottinger teaches writing at Highline College (Des Moines, WA) and has taught literature and writing at University of Washington (Seattle, WA), where he also completed his PhD. His other publications include an essay on Wordsworth and

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geometry in Essays in Romanticism and an essay on Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and the mathematics of associationist psychology in The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Mathematics (forthcoming). He was a 2017–18 Communications Fellow for the Keats-Shelley Association, and currently he curates a social media account dedicated to the history of literature and mathematics from around the globe (@mad_mathesis). At present, he is working on a book entitled “Mathematizing the Mind in British Literature of the Long Eighteenth Century.” Brian Rejack is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. He has published widely on Romanticism in journals including European Romantic Review, Romanticism, and Romantic Circles, and he is coeditor, with Michael Theune, of the forthcoming essay collection, Keats’s Negative Capability: New Origins and Afterlives. He is also one of the cofounders of the Keats Letters Project (keatslettersproject.com). He is currently at work on a monograph on John Keats and media theory and history, titled “John Keats and Romantic Imaginary Media: The Secrets of Wondrous Things.” Kate Singer is Associate Professor of English and chair of the Critical Social Thought program at Mount Holyoke College, United States. Her book, Romantic Vacancy: The Poetics of Gender, Affect, and Radical Speculation, is forthcoming from SUNY Press. She has published widely, including in Studies in Romanticism and Essays in Romanticism, and Jane Austen and the Sciences of the Mind (Routledge, 2018), among others. She is also coeditor of Material Transgressions: Romantic Bodies, Affects, and Genders, forthcoming from Liverpool University Press. She is editor of Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons and has written articles for the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and Pedagogy. Her second book project explores shapeshifting through dynamic materiality and affect during the Anthropocene in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, the Shelleys, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Luce Irigaray, Jane Bennett, Jacques Derrida, and Karen Barad. Michele Speitz is Associate Professor of English at Furman University and Affiliate Faculty Member of the David E. Shi Center for Sustainability. She is the author of a number of articles appearing in SEL Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900, Restoration and Eighteenth Century, Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Essays in Romanticism, and The Keats-Shelley Review. In 2013, she received the Trent R. Dames Fellowship in the History of Civil Engineering from The Huntington Library’s Munger Research Center. She is at present completing a book entitled “Technologies of the Sublime” as well as developing a new project on Romantic soundscapes, ecoacoustics, and ensounded worlds. Chris Washington is Assistant Professor of English at Francis Marion University. His monograph, Visions of Post-Apocalyptic Life and Hope in the Anthropocene, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press (2019). His work concerns Romanticism, environmentalism, animal studies, speculative realism, and posthumanism. His current book project, “Quantum Extinction: Love and Life in British Romanticism,” deals with Romanticism, feminism, and quantum science

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studies. He has published essays in Essays in Romanticism, European Romantic Review, Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, and Literature Compass. He is editor of the collection, “Teaching Romanticism in the Anthropocene,” for Romantic Circles Pedagogy Commons, which includes his own essay on Mary Wollstonecraft and sexuality. In addition, he has several more essays forthcoming in scholarly journals and book collections.

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Index Abrams, M. H. 41, 47, 59, 68, 160, 201 absorption 222–3, 227 actants 33, 133, 178, 183–4, 186, 187, 191 n.28 address 113–19. See also apostrophe, prosopopoeia advent ex nihilio 26, 98, 102–3, 106, 137 aesthetics 7–9, 39–41, 59, 86, 197, 245–8, 258–60, 262. See also beauty, sublime affective 38, 46–7, 49–50, 51 n.14 mediation 262–8, 273–5 and OOO 219–20, 222–4, 274–5 role of plasticity 199–201 speculative 202–3 affect 4, 57–60, 71 n.31, 114–15, 128 n.9, 247 distinguished from emotion 53 n.40 Meillassoux on 95, 105–6 nonhuman dimensions 39–50, 112–13, 123–4, 274 Agamben, Giorgio 86–7 agency 185–8, 239 human 32, 93–4, 96, 100, 104, 183–4 nonhuman 40–1, 43, 45–6, 48–9, 79, 180–2 poetic 112–13 allure 9, 261–2 n.40, 272 ancestrality 60, 67, 69. See also arche-fossil Anthropocene 2, 33, 75, 133–4, 175, 184–7 anthropocentrism alternatives to 39–40, 47, 82, 84, 140, 142, 151–2 Kantian 41 political 133–7 of prosopopoeia 116 romantic discourse 1–5, 112–13, 119–21 anthropomorphism in poetic language, 112–13, 119–21, 175, 181–6 politics of 115–16, 188–9 apocalypse 59, 94, 151, 181–2

apostrophe 82, 112–13, 122, 127. See also address, prosopopoeia apparatus 117–20, 126–7 appearance 5, 120–1, 272 arche-fossil 3, 60, 82–3, 139 Aristotle 29, 141, 146–7, 227, 261 assemblage 112–13, 115–17, 119, 121–7, 178, 249–51 affective properties 46–7 books as 272 cause of wonder 238–9, 244–5 Empire as 242 Gaia as 185, 187 astronomical number 158, 169, 170 astronomy 240–1 atheism 94, 96–7, 108 atmosphere 44–9, 193 n.72 Austen, Jane 43, 44 Badiou, Alain 23, 25, 27 Barad, Karen 10, 112 theoretical works 117–19, 124, 126 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 13, 111, 122–7 Baudelaire, Charles 182–3, 185, 218 beauty 7, 211–12, 222, 258–9, 262, 275. See also aesthetics Behar, Katherine 9 Bennett, Jane 10, 123 on assemblage 112, 127, 238 human–nonhuman relation 115–17, 181 on materiality 41–2, 47–8, 54 n.53 Berkeley, George 2, 159, 163 biopolitics 75, 82, 141 Blackwood’s Magazine 262–3 Blake, William 93–106, 274 Blanchot, Maurice 76, 82–4, 87, 174 n.47 Bloom, Harold 218, 259 Bogost, Ian 123, 226 Braidotti, Rosi 2 Brassier, Ray 3, 75–6, 78, 82, 87, 159–61, 163–71, 243

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Browning, Robert 7 Bryant, Levi 1–2, 26, 38, 260, 277 n.31 Burke, Edmund 37, 46, 50 n.6, 246–7 Byron, George Gordon Lord 157–60, 262 “Darkness” 164 Don Juan 160–71, 265, 275 n.2 capitalism 141, 147, 150–1, 237, 261–2 Carretta, Vincent 238, 242, 245, 252 n.7 Carson, Rachel 50 n.3 Caruth, Cathy 62 causality 78, 272 narrative 22, 27, 29, 224 philosophical 23, 25, 94, 98–9, 123, 231–2, 260 chaos 124–5, 163–4, 166, 201, 221–2. See also Hyper-Chaos Christianity 249–51 Clare, John 75–88 climate change 4, 7, 133, 142, 185, 188. See also global warming as hyperobject 69 cognition 23, 57–8, 66–7, 158 cognitive science 162–3 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4–5, 36 n.40, 87, 160 on the imagination 199–200, 201 Collings, David 4, 38, 105 computational media 257 consciousness 2, 7, 24, 26, 77, 84–5, 158, 160, 162–3, 169–70, 198, 202 contingency 3–5, 7, 21, 24, 26–9, 31, 33, 97–8, 102–3, 136, 138, 144, 151, 245 compared to différance 138–9 death of the sun as figure for 82 ethics 93–5, 105–6 theme in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” 6 and wonder 238, 240 cookery books as aesthetic objects 262–8, 270–1, 273–4 hypermediacy 260, 263–6 manuscript practices 269–70 correlationism 3, 17, 24, 26, 50 n.3, 97, 138–9, 188, 241, 260 anthropocentrism 40, 134 historical emergence 237 philosophical genealogy 59, 159–60

Davy, Humphry 11, 43, 46–7 death 100–5, 122–3, 133, 141–5, 147–8, 151–2, 164–6 distinguished from oblivion 80 essential spectres 94–5, 97 as finitude 139 politics 134 as right 243–4 romantic discourse 58, 60, 61–2 of the sun 75–6, 78, 82 as transcendence 159 deconstruction 2, 7, 137–9, 149 de Man, Paul 7–9, 112, 137, 140, 158–9, 182–5, 188 Derrida, Jacques 7, 90 n.31, 108 n.15, 123, 135, 137–41, 143–5 on hospitality 86, 149 Descartes, René 159, 239 différance 137–40 diffraction 117, 119, 122, 126 digestion 158, 162–66, 168–71 disaster 76, 80, 82–3, 86–7 Dworkin, Craig 261–2, 272 ecology 176, 184, 188 Edelman, Lee 71 n.31 Ellermann, Greg 6, 51 n.14, 107 n.4 emotion human 39–40, 43, 48, 100, 121, 170, 200–1, 245–6 pity 140 as scientific object 45–6, 57–8, 100 empiricism 99, 101, 163, 238, 241–2, 243–4 Enlightenment, the philosophy 99–102, 115, 237–8 political legacy 96, 133, 136 and women writers 111–12 enthusiasm 95, 105 epistemology 38–9, 183–5, 187, 239, 242, 247 Equiano, Olaudah 237–8, 241–5, 247–51 eschatology 68, 93–4, 99, 101–3 essential mourning 94, 95–6, 108 n.15 essential spectre 94–9 ethics 11–14, 93–4, 102–3, 139, 142, 258, 261–2 extinction 3, 4–5, 164–6, 168, 170

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Index extro-science fiction 27, 136, 151–2 facticity 240–1 feeling 4, 10, 39–40, 42–4, 46–50, 57–70, 184 Ferguson, Frances 5–6, 38, 180, 187 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 159–60 finitude 60, 65, 69, 98, 138–42, 144, 159, 164, 169 attributed to mind 3, 4, 17, 59 flat ontology 26, 133–4 fourth World of justice. See justice, World of fragility 81–2 François, Anne-Lise 84, 87 Freud, Sigmund 165–6 Fried, Michael 222–3, 227 Gaia 184–5, 187, 189 Galloway, Alexander 19 n.44, 133, 261–2, 277 n.31 Galt, John 23 gift economy of 84, 86, 149–50 of nature 203 global warming 186, 188–9. See also climate change Goldsmith, Oliver 44–5, 49 Gonsalves, Joshua D. 171 n.9 Gottlieb, Evan 4–6, 38–9, 107 n.4, 119, 159 Gratton, Peter 95, 276 n.15 gut. See digestion Hägglund, Martin 90 n.31 Harman, Graham 1–3, 9, 115, 120–1, 126, 253–4 n.40, 133–4, 260, 272 on horror 247 translator of Divine Inexistence 95, 106 Weird Realism 217–18, 222, 233 Hartman, Geoffrey 175, 180–2, 259 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich aesthetic philosophy 197–201, 203–8, 209 dialectic theory 27–8, 84, 86 Heidegger, Martin 43, 85–6, 218–19, 261 Hemans, Felicia 119, 121–2 Hobbes, Thomas 133–6, 145–6, 153 n.9 horror 75, 79, 84, 170, 243, 246–8

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genre 217, 219–20, 224–5, 227–8, 231–2 hospitality 86–7, 148–51 Hulme, T. E. 60–1 Hume, David 4, 23–5, 219, 223, 237 Husserl, Edmund 219 Hyper-Chaos 3, 21, 25–7, 33, 136–40, 144. See also contingency hypermediacy 260, 263–6 hyperobject 60–1, 66, 68, 188, 244–5 imagination 3, 4–5, 17, 41, 69, 95, 113, 142–4, 180–1, 201–2 defined by Coleridge, 199–200 immortality 98, 139, 142, 144, 148, 152 incarnation 94–5, 104 indigestion. See digestion intra-action 117–19, 122–7 Irigaray, Luce 43, 53 n.36 Jameson, Frederic 22 Jankovic, Vladimir 44 Jerusalem (Blake) 96–7, 100–6 Johnson, Barbara 114, 129 n.15 justice effacement, 87 fourth World of, 26, 94, 97–9, 102–3, 106, 136–7, 139–40, 142, 144, 148 Kant, Immanuel 2–7, 23–4, 43, 59, 139, 178, 180–3, 218, 237 on the sublime 37–41, 44, 46, 187 Kareem, Sarah Tindal 239–40, 245, 247 Keats, John 5, 66–7, 197–8, 204, 261 material sublime 37, 41, 45 “Ode on a Grecian Urn” 7, 208–12, 258 “Ode to Melancholy” 8–9 “Written on a Blank Space at the End of Chaucer’s Tale” 268–9 Khalip, Jacques 4–5 Kittler, Friedrich 261–2 Latour, Bruno 33, 68, 123, 133–4, 175–89, 232, 237–8, 248–9 Levinson, Marjorie 161–2 life 4–5, 43–4, 49, 60, 100–3, 134–44, 165–70, 189, 251 aesthetic 209, 211

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emotional 65–7 ethics and politics 150–2 nonhuman 37–8, 76–87 World of 26, 98 Locke, John 59, 70–1 n.16, 159, 163, 164 Longinus 51 n.6 Longo, Anna 24 Lovecraft, H. P. 217–24 compared to Poe 233 Lukács, Georg 22, 27, 31, 32, 33 Lyotard, Jean-François 75 lyric 112–15, 120–1, 182–3 Malabou, Catherine 10, 197–212 Marx, Karl 22, 27 Massumi, Brian 40, 46, 53 n.40, 57, 60 materialism 2, 159 dialectical 22, 27, 31 speculative 21, 45, 47, 49, 94–5, 99 materiality 38, 105, 111, 116–27, 186–7, 200, 262–3, 273 sublime, 45–6 textual 8, 49, 112–14, 210–12, 259 vibrant 41–2, 48 matter 40, 50, 115, 117–19, 124–7, 165–6, 203, 261–2 and emotion 58 vitality 41, 47, 98–9, 112, 120, 186 World of 26, 98, 102, 137 McCarthy, Anne C. 6, 51 n.14, 107 n.4 McGurl, Mark 31 McLuhan, Marshall 261 media ontology 258, 260–2, 272–3 theories of 258–60, 272–3 mediation 258–62, 269–74 Meillassoux, Quentin 21, 93 on ancestrality 82 compared to Derrida 138–9 critique of correlationism 2–3, 23–4, 40, 59–60, 63, 67, 134, 159, 169, 237–8 on extro-science fiction 26–7, 30–1, 136–7 fourth World of justice 26, 98, 101–3, 106, 139–40, 142, 144, 148 on Hyper-Chaos 26, 32, 137–40, 144 necessity of contingency 3, 24–9, 33, 139, 240–1

and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” 6 on the spectral dilemma 94–9, 105 Melville, Peter 149–50 memory 80, 82, 84, 94 messianism 26, 87, 95, 106, 123 metaphor 8, 145–6, 182, 185 metaphysics 97, 105, 201–3, 261 Metzinger, Thomas 162–3 Milton, John 125 Morton, Timothy 3, 7, 63 on ecology 69, 184 on hyperobjects 60–1, 244 on objects 5, 66, 67, 115, 120–1, 126, 272 on Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” 187–8 on the sublime 37, 39–40 Murray, John 262–3, 265, 278 n.34 nature 111–14, 201–4, 212, 240 dialectic with mind 163–4 philosophy 198 romantic conceptions 7, 38–43, 45–7, 49, 62, 64–9, 118–22, 178–84 state of 134–6, 138–51 theorized by Latour 175, 184–7 Nealon, Christopher 127 necessity 24–30, 97, 99, 106, 138 negative capability 5 nemocentric self 161, 168 new materialism 9–10, 38–9, 112, 115, 120, 122, 126–7. See also materialism Newtonian science 25, 44, 118, 167, 169– 70, 239–41 Ngai, Sianne 39–40 noncontradiction, principle of 3, 24–6, 137–8 object-oriented ontology 3, 7, 9, 39–40, 75, 78, 87, 226, 257–8, 260–2, 274–5 and literature 217–23, 231–3 object-oriented philosophy. See objectoriented ontology ontology 26, 38–40, 112, 119, 122, 125–7, 137–41, 237–8 entanglement with epistemology 187 erasure 78 flattened 10, 26, 131n41, 133–4 mathematical 23, 25

Index

of media 261–2, 277 n.21 nonhuman 46, 115–16 passivity 84, 87 personification 113, 115–16, 125. See also prosopopoeia Peters, John Durham 32, 261 phenomenology 83, 219, 223 Phillips, Adam 88 n.10 pity 140–1, 144 plasticity 197–212 pneumatics 42–4, 47 Poe, Edgar Allan 217–18, 223–33 poetics 111, 113, 120–1 and the inhuman 75–7, 81, 87 materiality of 48–9, 197 plasticity of 204, 206–8 politics 144, 188–9, 238, 247–8 non-anthropocentric 13–14, 41–2, 75, 80–2, 116, 151–2 Rousseau on 134–7, 140–2, 145–9 of speculative realism 9, 106, 133–4 Popper, Karl 27 Priestley, Joseph 54 n.44, 98–9, 101, 122–3, 125, 127, 130 n.34 probability 21–2, 25–6 process 78–83, 85–7, 186 philosophy of 261–2 unconscious 160–3, 165–8, 171 progress 22, 101, 141–2 prosopopoeia 112–17, 119–22, 124, 126. See also address, anthropomorphism quantum physics 25, 117 Quarterly Review, The 263 Rabelais, François 176, 177 Radcliffe, Ann 246–7 Rajan, Tilottama 83, 84, 247 reality 3, 8, 106, 143, 148, 159, 188, 241, 247 nonconceptual 158, 161, 166 romantic understanding 2, 7, 49, 58, 80, 105, 202 in speculative philosophy 25–6, 60–1, 120–1, 133, 136, 138, 144, 218–20 virtual 263

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reason 23–7, 29, 31, 96–9, 101–3, 106, 137– 8, 140–1, 147–8, 178, 239–40 recessive action 84, 87 Robinson, Mary 112–13, 118–19 Rose, Mitch 49 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 58, 133–7, 139–42, 144–52 Schelling, Friedrich 202–4 Schiller, Friedrich 199 Schmitt, Carl 133 science fiction 26–7, 31. See also extroscience fiction Scott, Walter 21–3, 27–33 Scranton, Roy 133 selection 158, 160, 161–3, 164 set theory 23, 25–6 Sha, Richard 58 Shaviro, Steven 120, 253–4 n.40, 274–5 Sheldon, Rebekah 9 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 43, 58, 69, 122 Defence of Poetry 59, 63 “Mont Blanc” 5–6, 78–9, 180, 184–9, 258, 275 Triumph of Life 64, 137 skepticism 4, 24–5, 38–9, 59 slavery 146–7, 237, 242–5, 247–8, 251 Smith, Adam 239–44 Smith, Charlotte 48–50, 111, 113–21 social contract 133–7, 140, 142, 144–50, 152. See also nature, state of spectral dilemma 94–5, 96–8, 100, 102, 104–6 Srnicek, Nick 1–2 state of nature. See nature, state of Stiegler, Bernard 174 n.47 subjectivity 4, 24, 40, 58, 87, 102–3, 105–6, 111, 113, 119, 183–4, 198, 204–5, 237 sublime 3, 5–6, 76, 85–6, 178–80, 184–8, 240, 245–8, 250–1 egotistical 66, 120 Kantian 37–41, 44, 46, 187 material 37–50, 54 n.53 sufficient reason principle of 21, 97, 137–8 sun death of 75–6, 78, 82 supernatural 32–3, 224, 228–9, 232–3

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suspension of judgment 5, 240, 245–8 symbol 158, 181, 185, 187 taste 259–60 Terada, Rei 57–9, 173 n.46 Thacker, Eugene 75, 79, 273 trace 138–9 transcendence 1, 3, 4, 7, 24, 38, 41–4, 97–8, 114–15, 139, 144, 159–60, 200 trauma 62, 64, 166 Turner, J. M. W. 245–6 unreason. See also reason principle of 26–7, 138, 148 vectorial subject 103, 106 vicarious causation 272 Wang, Orrin, 210 war 134–6, 140–2, 145–8 Washington, Chris 4–6, 59–60, 63, 67

weather 32–3, 45, 48, 188 weird realism 5, 25, 120, 127 Wickman, Matthew 22–3 Wilde, Oscar 222–3 Williams, Raymond 39 wind 44, 47–50, 78–9, 82–5 withdrawal of being 218 of media 272–4 of mind 58, 208 of objects 7, 9–10, 60, 78, 111, 120, 123, 127, 221, 223, 233, 257, 260 witnessing 62, 77–80, 85–6, 166, 246 Wollstonecraft, Mary 121 wonder 238–42, 244–51 Wordsworth, William 4–5, 7, 38, 57, 58–60, 68–70, 84, 111 The Prelude 61–7, 179–82, 201–2 “The world is too much with us” 119–22 World of justice. See justice

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