Ecocriticism

Two books that might come in handy with reference to the ecocritical section of the CoP course.

Ecocriticism (New Critical Idiom)

The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology

Žižek!

Žižek is one of the most prolific theorists of our times. Not to mention his immense popularity. Because of the vast range of his interests, and because unlike other intellectual greats who we follow or reject in our studies, Žižek is a contemporary, it makes it easier for his subscribers/detractors to trace the evolution in his thought and also to get his responses to present-day situations without having to speculate. His approach too appears to be less elitist, more inclined towards making people think through deliberate provocation.

This video is a bit from a Žižek lecture. I've made a rough transcription of what he says because the audio isn't too good and some might find it difficult to understand what he says because of his accent. And what he says, I think, is worth thinking about.



Transcription:

I was asked, ‘How should we fight racism?’ I said with progressive racism. We should adopt racism. They looked at me like - ‘Are you crazy? - And I gave them my own example - no, sorry (laughs), my own ex-country. Don’t you agree that there is a way to practise - I wouldn’t say racist jokes because precisely they are no longer racist - take my own country: till the 80s in ex-Yugoslavia, we all the time exchanged dirty jokes about one and the other nation. And I loved them. But this didn’t function as racist jokes but as a kind of a shared obscenity which meant a way of solidarity. Like I remember I met Monte- my classical story, sorry to repeat it - for example, I meet a guy from Montenegro. And again, you know it from ten times, we immediately start to tell to each other dirty jokes about the other and about ourselves. Like, okay, sorry if you know it, it’s boring - but the standard Montenegro story, Montenegrans are supposed to be lazy and they are an earthquake, earthquake country. So how does a Montenegro guy masturbate? He digs a hole in the earth, puts the penis in and waits for the earthquake. (Audience laughs) Because he is too lazy even to - but what I want to say is that this we talked about all the time and it absolutely wasn’t racism, it was solidarity. The message was: we are not just this, you know, cold, politically correct - ooh, what nice food you have, what nice ethnic dances. I don’t care about your stupid, ethnic dances! I want dirty jokes, you know! I don’t like this Santa Cruz - I was there - politically correct jokes. They told me, ‘Oh we have better jokes. They are funny but nobody is hurt.’ I asked them, ‘How?’ They told me, ‘For example, what happens when a circle meets a triangle?’ I told them - uh (points middle finger) - I don’t care. (Audience laughs) I don’t care what happens when, you know. But what I want to convince you is that it can function, it is absolutely not racism, it is shared solidarity. This is where again, you see, this is what - what interests me - what interests me, this how, even the struggle against - can serve as means to - to, to reproduce. This is why my lifetime experience was meeting a Ms. Sula Montana, Native American - so called. She hated the name. And he (sic) was right, he told me, ‘I absolutely prefer to be called Indian.’ He said, ‘Native American for me is much more racist. Native American, ha ha, so you’re cultural Americans and we are native - part of nature’ he said, ‘You call me Indian, at least my name is a monument to White man’s stupidity. (Audience laughs) You know, you know Amerigo Vespucci thought that, you know. I mean here, I think things have to change in some way. There is something so debilitating, immobilising in all this. So again only - I know I didn’t answer your question precisely - but you see, along what lines I try to think.

CoP Two: H. D Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' and Hannah Arendt's 'Reflections on Violence'

A well annotated version of the essay and of Thoreau’s other writings. Plus, an essay (biographically) locating “Civil Disobedience” in the context of his life and another examining its theory, practice and (tremendous) influence- here.

The key idea is to not think of it as an isolated piece of political writing by a loner Christian transcendentalist, a number of organizations and individuals were actively seeking ways to protest at this time. Who were these people? Find out yourself.

ND suggests comparing Thoreau’s account of jail with Gandhi’s- there’s a Gandhi reader in the DL.

Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Violence borrows its name from and is a critique of Georges Sorel’s essay by the same name- full text here. Another writer she critiques extensively in Frantz Fanon. Her essay was written in the sixties so maybe we’ll discuss it further when we speak extensively about that time. Here is an essay critiquing her separation of power and violence ( I haven’t read it). The DL has a copy of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, have fun.

CoP One : 'Backgrounds'

At some point during the ‘background’ lectures ND asked us to visualise a contemporary G8 meeting taking place, with an anticipated number of protestors controlled, managed, and allowed to occupy fixed spaces by the police. For no particular reason I’ve selected the 2007 G8 meeting. In this article documenting the protests at this particular conference, Toby Pfulger, MEP for the the left faction (GUE/NGL) of the European Parliament is quoted as saying:

[...] Those who invite the G8, also invite the legitimate protest. The expression of protest has to be comprehensively protected, at the least to bring the message of the critique of the [political content] of G8 [policies] across [to the general public].

Do google and google image search ‘G8 meeting protest’ once to see how this pattern of protests and supervision/ control of protests has been played out in every recent G8 meeting. Returning to the 2007 meeting, here is a map circulated by some of the protestors online-

Some photos

A video

Why do these protests take the shape they do?

The key idea we touched upon, I suppose, is that protests function with inherited vocabularies, rhetoric, ‘styles’. I’ve tried to pin down some of the stuff ND was talking about during the first week onto a timeline at the bottom of this post. Keep in mind that this isn’t a list of ‘important’ movements or such.

If you wish to read up on modern history- I posses Eric Hobsbawn’s brilliant three volume survey of the ‘long nineteenth century’ (from the French revolution to the world war I) which I recommend to anybody who talks to me. If you let me know about books you own or can access I could list them here and that might be of use to everybody.

I believe the course aims to primarily trace the emergence of protest cultures as a modern phenomenon- we’ve got to be thinking critically about the idea of the nation state. ND recommended Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. I have a copy, Arshdeep has a copy, the SDL has (I believe) two copies- but if you want I can summarize it for you. If you have access to another book which you’d like more people to read- let me know please. (Here's a summary I haven't read, which also mentions criticism by Partha Chatterjee and so on and refers to a revised edition I haven't read). I also have a copy of The Politics of The Governed which is basically a critique of Anderson's text by Partha Chatterjee, its good.

ND spoke about the importance of the body of the protestor etc and shook the class up a bit by speaking of how we were going to find Foucault’s work very important. I see only two options: either we do some tough reading or we don’t. I own a copy of Discipline and Punish that you can borrow.

Though she mentioned this in a later class, here is a transcript of a conversation between Foucault and Deleuze ‘Intellectuals and Power’ that I think fits into this segment, asking us to think critically about our relation as university students to the cultures of protest we are ‘studying’.

While I'm at it, here's another essay I found, by Aditya Nigam on Thinking about 'the Contemporary': Between Interdisciplinarity and Indisciplinarity. Personally speaking, I think as a twenty year old university student in a third world country studying english bloody literature if you haven't been waiting waiting waiting for a course like this there isn't much hope for you in life, but that's just one man's opinion of course. BASIC TIMELINE

[This is VERY basic. I'm considering making a timeline the old fashioned way, using pen and paper, I'll type it in if and when I complete it]

This is a scattered and absolutely non comprehensive timeline- these are NOT the most important events selected.

Also, I should ideally have entered publishing dates of texts. Knowing when Locke is born doesn't quite tell you when his ideas emerge in the public sphere. If this is of real help to people I will make the effort to redo it, if not we'll let it be.

c. 5 BCE Jesus b.

c. 30 CE Jesus d.

6th century CE Bhakti movement begins in the south

12th to 17th century CE Bhakti movement

"Pre modern protest movements tend to be religious, modern protests often retain religious vocabulary and rhetoric. Gandhi is an especially fuzzy case."

?what about peasant rebellions?

1623 CE Locke b. 'No government is possible without the consent of the governed'. Wikipedia calls him Father of Liberalism.

1757 CE Blake b. artist as activist?

Why does romanticism resonate so strongly in protest cultures today?

1776 CE American Deceleration of Independence. Frederick Douglass would later call it a 'pro-slavery document'

1783 CE Petition for abolition of slavery brought before Parliament. The Abolitionist movement becomes model for collaboration between privileged and victim.

1787 CE Society for abolition of slave trade formed

1789 CE French Revolution

late eighteenth century Latin-American wars of indepence begin

1817 CE Thoreau b. Civil Disobedience is not an isolated piece of political writing! Think about tax resistence in general

1833 CE Slavery abolition act

1848 CE 1848 revolutions in Europe

1871 CE Paris Commune

1886 CE Haymarket Affair: The condemned men shouted 'Germinal' as they were led to the gallows

1917 CE Russian Revolution. Hobsbawm- as important to the 20th c as the french revolution to the 19th

--- I notice one name strikingly missing here- what about Marx? If you're interested, I have an Introducing series book on Marx (which is basic, DL is a better option) and another on Political Philosophy (which you can borrow if the idea of such guides doesn't turn you off). I also have a book called Wobblies and Zapatistas: Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism and Radical History that primarily attempts to find meeting points in modern history where anarchism and marxism have come together- in the words of Staughton Lynd, one of the U.S's most influential leftists. Borrow it if you like.

This is to welcome Vikrant, eager young blood from UG 2, who's joined the JUDEmergency crew. A big 'Ai Ai' to you, Mr. Dadawala =) 

Fancy Vs. Imagination

Coleridge, in Chapter 13 of his Biographia Literaria, makes a distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Fancy, Coleridge states, is the faculty that receives images from the senses and reassembles them into a different order of time and space, without transformation. In his own words, it 'has no counters to play with, but fixities and definites.' Fancy is visualised by Coleridge as a primarily mechanical process.

Imagination, on the other hand, is heralded as a more creative process. Coleridge claims that it:

dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Coleridge, therefore, attributes to Imagination a 'vital', creative faculty.

Later, in Chapter 14, Coleridge tries to answer his own question: 'What is poetry?' His explanation of Shakespeare's 'genius' further expands on his theory of poetic creation.

For Coleridge, poetry arises from the internalised knowledge of the world. Coleridge asserts that the world must be studied and understood till it becomes 'habitual and intuitive'.

What this implies is that although Coleridgean and the general Romantic conception of Imagination centralises the poet's authority, it also in a way negates it. By suggesting that poetry is an unconscious, intuitive act, this Romantic idea of the Imagination takes away some of the poet's conscious agency.

This view of poetic creation, therefore, is not as simplistic as later critics and denouncers of it might seem to make it.

Sources:

M.H. Abrams: A Glossary of Literary Terms.
Patricia Waugh (Ed.): Literary Theory and Criticism
Samuel Coleridge: Biographia Literaria

Criticism: Theories of Authorship

Theory of Expressivity:

Expressivity is one of the theories of authorship. It was most in vogue during the Romantic era. Expressivity posits the role of the author as central to the creation of a literary text. It views language as a translation of thoughts, desires, feelings arising primarily within the author. One implication of this theory then, includes viewing language as a copy, an expression, of the inner thoughts and feelings of those who use it. Another implication of this view is that language presupposes two intrinsic, dependent entities of (i) an original idea and, (ii) its formulation or utterance (rough correlation to signifier-signified relationship).

Foucault (all-hail) has suggested that this reflects a larger movement in thought, towards a newer conceptualisation of language and its expression: from 'imitation and duplication of things' (mimesis?) to a direct expression of 'the fundamental will of those who speak it' (Foucault, The Order of Things).

M.H. Abrams's famous analogy of the Mirror and the Lamp explains this in a similar way. Poetic creation which was largely seen as a mirror of society before, is re-conceived as a source of light; as a lamp. This change happens during the 18th century, aided by theorisations of Coleridge, Wordsworth and other champions of Romanticism.

This author-centric view of poetic/linguistic creation however comes under multiple attacks in later times.

• Modernism insisted on the objectivity (not Wordsworthian spontaneity of emotion) of the author as his (read: Eliot's) paramount virtue.
• Marxism claimed that the author's subjectivity was not as innocent as a bounding roe but was instead shaped by class and economic forces.
• Structuralist and later derivative critical theories rethought language as a discourse and gave it an autonomous position, making the author redundant.
• New Criticism too attacked the author-centric view by denouncing the 'intentional fallacy' or the mistake of giving priority to the author's intent while reading a text.