Further musings on the 'Green Reader' - Lit Crit - sometimes it's just plain infuriating!

One of the consolations of being involved in academia, for all its 'ivory tower' reputation is that you are constantly reminded that you are part of some larger community of scholarship. Sometimes the experience can be salutary. The simple truth is, no matter how apparently unique, idiosyncratic or even erroneous any thought you might have had, about any topic, the chances are, someone else has already thought it, probably published a paper about it, and more than likely, is better qualified than you are to think great thoughtsabout the matter in the first place.

Take the question of post-modernism, for example. When I was an undergraduate in the mid-1970's even semiotics and structuralism, though by that time well established ideas, had not escaped the confines of particular departments - Cultural Studies in Birmingham - for example, to influence mainstream undergraduate teaching in the humanities. I encountered structuralism and socio-linguistics in the 80s, on various staff development conferences to do with teaching A level Communication Studies, then later became aware of thinkers like Foucault, Derrida and Barthes, partly through programmes such as In Our Time, but mainly through conversations with my children who studyied History and Comparative Literature in the mid 'noughties'.  My reaction to the various 'turns' - linguistic, semiotic or cultural - has been consistently sceptical: 'hmmm. interesting, thought-provoking, ingenious, but..'. My 'yes but' has always been the same, and may not be a valid response, for it is an affective reaction more than a cognitive one, and, as we all now know, somewhere in the latter third of the last century, 'affect' along with the 'author' was pronounced dead.

My problem is, that I find much of post-modern thought clever, but uninspiring. It feels hermetic and solipsistic, a philosophy of despair; is all human agency really just a cultural product, Wordsworth's 'rocks and stones and trees' nothing but encoded text, which I simply or (complexly!) re-code? As a poet, this does not seem right to me. Language feels more like a tool than a sign-system, something that helps mould and change the world, not simply represent it. It exists 'in the world' rather than being a simulcra of it, or a simucra even of something which no longer exists at all.

So, when I came across the following passage written by Laurence Coupe in his introduction to The Green Studies Reader (2000)  I should have felt some satisfaction that what I had taken as personal reservation was shared and forms a core of ecocritical approaches to literature:

..Beyond duality, beyond the opposition of mind and matter, subject and thing, there is the possibility to 'realise' nature. Rudy suggests that the word 'realise' may be read simultaneously as 'actualise' and 'understand'.: our ability to perceive things means that the 'realise' (actualise) themselves in us, and this in turn is the only way way we can 'realise' (understand) the fact that these things are realising themseves in us. But of course, though nature needs human minds to 'aciece 'self realisation', and though at that moment all notions of seperation appear redundant, the process implies that something is already there, asking to be actualised or understood.

Since the mid-1970's, much critical theory seems to have been dedicated to repudiating any such 'realisation'. In various schools - formalist, psychanaytical, new historicist, deconsructionist, even Marxist - the common assumption has been that what we call 'nature' exists primarily as a term within a cultural discourse, apart from which it has no being or meaning [...] To declare that there 'is no such thing as nature' has become almost obligatory in literary and cultral studies. [...] In seeking to avoid naivety, it has cammitted what might be called the 'semiotic fallacy'. In other words, it has assumed that because mountains and waters are human at the point of delivery, they exist only as signified within human culture. Thus they have no intrinsic merit, no value and no rights. One function of green studies is to resist this disastrous error. (pp 1 -2)

This point is taken up directly in Betty and Theodore Rozak's contribution 'Deep Form in Art and Nature'.

In a time when so many artists have learned to confabulate with extremes of horror and alienation, the most daring thing an artist can do is fill a book, a gallery or a theatre with joy, hope or beauty. [...] As the degredation of the planetary environment worsens, we are being forced to recognised that a culture divorced from the biological foundations of life is simply not sutainable. Both environmental ignorance and aesthetic atrophy are rapidly approaching terminal status. To refuse despair has become an ecological imperative.
       In her provocative survey of the outer limits of modernism, the art critic Suzi Gablik asks: 'After the avante arde what? Her answer can be found in the title of her book: The Re-Enchantment of Art. There she writes hopefully of a new art 'ushered in by twentieth century physics, ecology and general systems theory with its call for intergrative and holistic modes of thinking'. The terminology Gablok uses is drawn fro modern science, but the re-enchanted sensibility she calls for takes us back to the shamanic roots of art.  (pp223-224)

If we accept the urgent need to 're-enchant' art, where then does that leave criticism and academic discourse? An effect of the 'semiotic' fallacy has been to promote a  mode of academic writing which seems technocratic, jargon-laden and ideologically obsessed; readability semes a low priority. Examples are easily found, indeed I have probably lapsed into this style at times myself, partly out of lazinesss but also through the influence of peer pressure - 'so that's how you write about literature.....'. Here's an example of what I mean, taken from the Green Reader, Chapter 35, Patrick D Murphy, Ecofeminist Dialogics:

In marked contrast to the critical maladies of enervated humanism, solipsistic scepticism and paratytic undecidability, a triad of (re)perceptions has appeared, which, if integrated, can lead towards an affermative praxis: the Bakhitian dialogical methos, ecology and feminisms. 
       Dialogics enables the differential unification of ecology and feminisms, which is to say a conjoining that does not conflate particularities or subordinate one to the other. Such an integration can produce a new perception of the relationship of humanity and the world, and a praxis that works towards the decentering dealienation of andro/anthropocentric humanism and the regenerative, affirmative dissolution of the intellectual isolation of radical scepticism. (p. 193)

So, in our new green utopia we will have re-enchanted art. Surely we must also re-invent how we discuss it - a discourse which is uncluttered, has clarity, and maybe, if we are lucky a bit of panache and elegance. If we have decided to afford rights to rivers, streams, badgers and dandelions - I wish to make a stand on behalf of sentences and paragraphs. After all, even if we have just pushed Language off the central spot on the podium, it does not mean that we immediately treat her as an impoverished minority. So in a greener world, never again will sentences have to endure the indignity of staggering around under weight of phrases such as 'paralytic undecidability' or 'decentering dealienation'. I don't expect academic writing to have to be 'enchanting', that is not its purpose, but it does need to be readily understood, to aspire towards clarity even when discussing difficult or new ideas. So, my plea is to eco-critics, don't infuriate the reader, mind your language, words have rights too.