Sara Ahmed has, I think correctly, identified this opposition to “the linguistic turn” as the “founding gesture” of new materialism. [2] To take cite just one example, Karen Barad, to me one of the most compelling theorists of new materialism, opens her discussion of “Posthumanist Performativity” with the assertion that “Language has been granted too much power. The linguistic turn, the semiotic turn, the interpretative turn, the cultural turn: it seems that at every turn lately every ‘thing’ – even materiality – is turned into a matter of language or some other form of cultural representation.” [3] As Ahmed observes, this formulation suggests an opposition between language and matter that seems problematic for a thoroughgoing philosophical materialism, which would presumably claim both language and culture as, themselves, material. Pheng Cheah identifies as implicit in this view “a metaphysical concept of matter” that “regards materiality either as the end point of [the] movement of referral or as an external presence that sets off and secures this movement.” [4]
In this way, the philosophical sense of materialism seems at odds with the most pronounced feature of the new materialisms, the force of their newness, which is often expressed as a desire to “give matter it’s due,” [5] a formulation that seems implicitly to privilege matter over something understood as non-matter which has till now been overemphasized – namely, “culture,” “discourse,” “representation” or “language.” As Ahmed writes, “By turning matter into an object or theoretical category in this way, the new materialism reproduces the binarism between materiality and culture that much work in science studies has helped to challenge. Matter becomes a fetish object, an ‘it’ that we can be for or against.” [6]
Inspired by Lance Newman’s work [7] to think about the relation between new materialist approaches and historical materialism, I want to stay for a moment with Ahmed’s description of new materialist treatments of matter as a kind of “fetishization” and think about the commodity value of newness, the market logic of new and improved that it seems implicitly to reflect. Suppressed in the fetishization of thought is, as Marx suggests, the human relations that underlie and create it. To speak broadly here about a new materialist tendency to repress its indebtedness to the past would be, of course, to reproduce the critical dynamic I’m concerned about, so rather than spend this time (by which I mean both the time of my writing and the time of my speaking to you, both of which are marked out and delimited by a white space of a certain size, a finite number of pages to be filled with a finite number of words)—rather than spend this time critiquing the logic of the “turn,” I wish to perform a sort of reconciliation, which will also be a rethinking of what I mean by the words materiality and materialism, what these words can do or say within the context of a written text responding to a series of other written texts, each of which is similarly relationally embedded.
It is no doubt my own investment in writing as a mode of relation that urges me toward such an effort at reconciliation. I undertake this project out of an admittedly personal, perhaps even sentimental desire to understand critical writing as an exchange more like friendship than like commerce. In the hope of this kind of exchange, I want to ask: Might not the insights of the new materialism, in particular its robust and useful thinking about relationality, be meaningfully be brought to bear on textual matters? And might not such thinking look back as well as forward, or rather prompt us to reconsider the logic by which we designate thought as “new”?
Though I’d like to offer here something like what my abstract promises, some sort of sketch of a genealogy of a linguistic materialism beginning with Lucretius and coming to Thoreau in a
roundabout way via Bergson, the constraints of this paper (now already two pages and at least two minutes in) demand that I only quote these lines from “The Nature of Things” as a way of signaling or standing in for such a possibility:
So each thing needs its own kind of material to grow.
Consider that without a certain season of rain, the earth
Could not put forth her gladdening fruits. Nor could creatures give birth
Or stay alive deprived of their food. It makes more sense,
Therefore, to think that many things have common elements,
As words share letters, rather than assume that anything can
Exist without them. [8]
Lucretius’s materialism is, of course, everywhere linguistic, is itself a poem, a series of complex reconfigurings and transformations of Epicurean atomistic philosophy into Latin dactylic hexameter and then again, in my Penguin Classics edition, into English rhyming fourteeners. Lucretius draws the analogy between atoms and letters several times in the poem and also performs this principle in several places, for example when he points to the small compositional change required to convert lignis (wood) into ignis (fire). [9] The poem represents, as Julia Kristeva notes, a sort of translinguistic and transcultural bequest, a survey of Greek materialist thought, translated, composed, and transplanted into Roman culture. [10]
With this example of linguistic materiality in mind, I want to think through the way writing as a material practice both mediates and constitutes relation—gives us to one another—in a species of what Stacy Alaimo calls “transcorporeal” exchange.11 My continual starting point for thinking about writing as a mode of relation, the place I begin and begin again, is Thoreau’s Journal, a text so unwieldy in both its volume and its sprawling web of relations to other texts that it seems almost to forbid the objectifying habits of critical analysis. In thinking about the Journal I am guided by Jane Bennett’s description of texts as belonging to “a distributive network of bodies: words on the page, words in the reader’s imagination, sounds of words, sounds and smells in the reading room” [12] and by Vicki Kirby’s explorations of “the body itself as a scene of writing.” [13]
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To Fair Haven Pond--and across to RR
As I passed the S shed at the depot—observed—what I thought at first a tree sparrow on the wood in the shed--a mere roof open at the side—under which several men were at that time employed sawing wood with a horse-power. Looking closer I saw, to //my surprise that it must be a song-sparrow it having the usual marks on its breast & no bright chestnut crown— The snow is 9 or 10 inches deep & it appeared to have taken refuge in this shed where was much bare ground exposed by removing the wood. When I advanced, instead of flying away, it concealed itself in the wood, just as it often dodges behind a wall. [pencil –“V. Jan 22d”]
What is there in music that it should so stir our deeps? We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation--such is our life-- oft times it drives us to suicide. To how many--perhaps to most--life is barely tolerable & if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide—but let us hear a strain of music—We are at once advertised of a life which no man had told us of which no preacher preaches-- Suppose I try to describe faithfully the prospect which a strain of music exhibits to me—The field of my life becomes a boundless plain— glorious to tread--with no death nor disappointment at the end of it. All meanness & trivialness disappear— I become adequate to any deed— No particulars survive this expansion— persons do not survive it. In the light of this strain there is no thou nor I. We are actually lifted above ourselves—
The tracks of the mice near the head of well-meadow were particularly interesting…The snow was so light that only one distinct track was made by all four of the feet^ 5 or 6 inches apart —but the tail left a very distinct mark
…Such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow— where other creatures sink— and night too being the season when these tracks are made--they remind me of a fairy revel. It is almost as good as if the actors were here— I can easily imagine all the rest— hopping is expressed by the tracks themselves— Yet I should like much to see by broad day light a company of these revellers hopping over the snow—... How snug they are somewhere under the snow now, not to be thought of—if it were not for these pretty tracks—and for a week or fortnight even of pretty still weather the tracks will remain to tell of the ^ nocturnal adventures of a tiny mouse—{wo} was not beneath the notice of the Lord. So it was so many thousands of years before Gutenberg invented printing with his types—& so it will be as many thousands of years after his types are forgotten--perchance. —the deer-mouse will be printing in the snow of Well-meadow to be read by a new race of men. … [14]
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This journal entry was likely written on the morning of January 16, 1857, so very nearly one hundred and fifty-eight years from the day a few weeks from this writing when I will be delivering this paper. Thoreau’s practice at the time of his writing was to read and write in his attic room in the mornings and walk in the surrounding woods for several hours in the afternoons, his morning writing recording the observations of the previous day’s walk. That both this entry and the next begin with the temporal marker “Pm” suggests that this particular entry conforms to that pattern. Part of my interest in the journal is the way that for Thoreau, the day itself, as a unit, was composed of a series of interrelated material practices that together spanned more than a calendar day. We are all dispersed in this way, of course; my typing these words in my office in Maine projects me forward to an afternoon in early January in Vancouver. But Thoreau’s modes of navigating these intervals were both habitual and precise, a regular practice of constituting himself, of writing himself into (at least) two temporal locations at once.
For simplicity’s sake we can identify walking and writing as the fundamental modes of this practice, but in fact each mode was more complex than this division suggests. Walking entailed the writing of fieldnotes that were later transcribed, and writing involved revisiting these notes and reconstructing the previous day’s walk. It is worth noting that a heavy line appears though the central paragraphs of the manuscript—a mark likely made by HGO Blake, who had inherited the notebooks comprising the journal from Sophia Thoreau, to signify their inclusion in a series of published excerpts that appeared in the decades after Thoreau’s death. [15] The text also bears signs of Thoreau’s own revisiting of the text after the time of writing, a common feature of the journal manuscript. A double line appears next to the surprising appearance of the song sparrow, a migrating bird, in January, which likely marked the passage for inclusion in Thoreau’s lists and charts of seasonal phenomena. A penciled note, “v. [vide] Jan. 22” next to the description of the bird’s behavior invites comparison with a later journal entry about another song sparrow that “took up its quarters in his grist-mill and stayed there all winter.” [16]
The manuscript thus bears the signs not only of his writing, but of the whole “ecology of practices,” to borrow a term from Isabelle Stengers, that constituted his journal-keeping. [17] There is no easy way of delimiting where in these practices the “writing” begins and ends: he wrote what he observed and in anticipation of observing again; the Journal and its related lists and charts were not only records of but also promptings to observation. To read the Journal in the light of these practices is to see it as a tracing of transmissions and crossings, a living record, a participant in an ongoing series of material and temporal exchanges. The particular interest of this entry to me is Thoreau’s concern within it with such questions of transmission and exchange, a concern that traverses the boundaries of both mode (the oral or auditory as against the written or visual) and species.
The shift from the encounter with the song-sparrow to the description of the effect of music seems utterly unmotivated, except by the word “song” and the association of this particular bird with music. Thoreau’s pivot here between the (unheard) birdsong and music is characteristic of his treatment of human-non-human relations and resists characterization as either an anthropomorphization of the animal or a “naturalizing” of the human, but instead suggests a relation that is traversed both ways. The act of identification, the recognition of the bird as a song sparrow, suggests its own history of both ornithological study and habitual neighborly engagement with birds. This simultaneous preservation or recognition of nearness and of irreducible difference is reflected in many of Thoreau’s descriptions of animals, for example in this description, written a few years later, of a bream (a freshwater fish): “In my account of this bream I cannot go a hair’s breadth beyond the mere statement that it exists,-—the miracle of its existence-—my contemporary and neighbor-—yet so different from me! I can only poise my thought there by its side—and try to think like a bream for a moment.” [18] Similarly, the encounter with the song sparrow registers both acquaintanceship—familiarity with its habits and its markings—and the way such identifications and approaches are always incomplete: the sparrow’s presence in January is surprising; it conceals itself when approached.
The undescribed and indescribable music of the second paragraph is recorded only in its effect, which is to obliterate the boundaries of identity. This effect is pictured visually as a field or plain, an open space or expansion that is contracted with particulars, trivialness, and persons particularly I and thou. The synesthetic phrase “in the light of this strain” likewise converts music to a visual phenomenon, but this is a light that prohibits, rather than enabling, identification of the sort that Thoreau engages in in the previous paragraph—which is to say, engaged in the previous day and now perhaps reconsiders, “in the light” of heard or unheard strains of human or more-than-human music. (Are the musings on music also retrospective? Did he think them on his walk, or are they real-time renderings of a thought that presently interrupts a recollection?)
Like the sparrow’s name conjuring his unheard song, the mouse tracks Thoreau observes at the head of the well meadow mark both presence and absence, the “delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow” a material trace of “the airy lightness in the body that impressed them.” As the unheard birdsong prompts a musing about music, so the textual, but not audible, presence of music prompts an association with printing that is made manifest in a looping back to the observed world, to the experience of the previous day’s walk and the encounter with mouse tracks. The tracks themselves speak to both the completeness of their expression— “hopping is expressed by the tracks themselves” —and to the vanished presence of the mice— “Yet I should like much to see by broad day light a company of these revelers hopping over the snow.” The closing gesture of the paragraph, “So it was so many thousands of years before Gutenberg invented printing with his types—& so it will be as many thousands of years after his types are forgotten—perchance. —the deer-mouse will be printing in the snow of Well-meadow to be read by a new race of men” reverses the idea that written language, and specifically the technology of printing, represents an advance over animal modes of marking and communication and suggests that the human capacity to “read” such markings will require a yet-unattained literacy in the more-than-human.
Thoreau’s thinking about this encounter, at once material and imaginary, inscribed in both kinds of print, traversing past and future, may be usefully thought in terms of Karan Barad’s framework of “agential realism” within which “the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather phenomena” which “do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of the observer and observed,” but rather “are the ontological inseparability/entanglement of intraacting agencies.” [19] In Thoreau’s depiction the “new race of men” will be brought into being in relation to its capacity to read mouse-print, that is, in relation to the non-human. But it seems worth noting, too, how text mediates this intra-action, is the matter through which the relation takes shape, both in its “present” and in its future iterations. To trace both the materiality of this journal entry and Thoreau’s engagements with materiality in the entry is to engage language and textuality in ways that do not divorce them from the material but rather attend to the traces left by material practices of writing and reanimated by material practices of transcription, publication, and reading.
While Barad’s ontology of agential realism is helpful in thinking through Thoreau’s relations to the non-human, I want to supplement that thinking with particular attention to language as the principle mode of the intra-action described in this passage. What is most striking to me about Thoreau’s writing and his depiction of writing here is that both are essentially transcorporeal: marks made by the bodies of the mice and travelling by way of electrochemical impulses to Thoreau’s body; marks made by Thoreau’s body travelling by way of various print technologies to my own eye and brain; my hands moving across these quietly clicking white squares to produce this sequence of letters. Here my thinking about Thoreau’s writing and about writing in general, approaches (from the other “side”) Vicky Kirby’s concept of corporeography, which understands the body as a “scene of writing…that both circumscribes and exceeds the conventional divisions of nature and culture…a shifting scene of inscription that both writes and is written.” [20]
In my downloaded digital reproduction of a photocopy of the manuscript of Thoreau’s journal I follow the evidence of his particular bodily movements in writing: the strong lateral slant, and, particularly, the continuity of the line of ink between words—the frequent continuation of the cross of a T, for example, into the downward stroke of the first letter of the next word, as in the words “multitude and” on this manuscript page—are suggestive of both fluidity and rapidity of movement. A small tadpole-shaped ink smudge on the left margin of the right hand page near the words one distinct track has imprinted itself on the facing page, producing a twin tadpole (with a less pronounced tail) on the right margin of the left hand page, suggesting the notebook was shut while the ink was not quite dry. I imagine the pages sticking slightly, for a moment, when he opened them next, perhaps the next day, to record the previous afternoon’s walk. In these gestures, his and mine, across these intervals of time, I come to what feels like a sort of neighborliness with Thoreau, a ghostly kind of friendship. It hardly needs saying that the transfer isn’t perfect: the manuscript speaks also to his absence, the very presence of his journal in the form in which I read it is both an effect and a confirmation of his death. Like the sparrow, he inevitably withdraws when I approach. But so it is in friendship.
-- Kristen Case, University of Maine at Farmington
Notes
[1] Iris Van der Tuin, “New Feminist Materialisms,” Women’s Studies International Forum 34, no. 4 (2011): 217.
[2] Sara Ahmed, “Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of
the ‘New Materialism,’ European Journal of Women’s Studies 15, no. 1 (2008): 23-19.
[3] Karen Barad. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, vol. 28, no. 3
[4] Pheng Cheah, “Non-Dialectical Materialism,” in New Materialisms. ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 73.
[5] See for example, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s introduction to New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics: “We believe it is now timely to reopen the issue of matter and to once again give material factors their due in shaping society and circumscribing human prospects” (33).
[6] Ahmed, “Imaginary Prohibitions,” 35.
[7] Lance Newman, Our Common Dwelling: Henry Thoreau, Transcendentalism, and the Class Politics of Nature. (London: Palgrave, 2005) and “Thoreau’s Materialism and Environmental Justice” in Thoreau at Two-Hundred: Essays and Reassessments. ed. Kevin Van Anglen and Kristen Case, forthcoming, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017).
[8] Lucretius, The Nature of Things. trans. A.E. Stallings. (New York: Penguin, 2007), I: 191-98.
[9] Lucretius, The Nature of Things. I:910-914.
[10] Julia Kristeva, Language: The Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. trans. Anne M. Menke. (New York: Columbia UP, 1989), 121-4.
[11] Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2010), 2.
[12] Jane Bennett, “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton,” in New Literary History 43, no. 2 (2012), 232.
[13] Vicki Kirby, Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. (New York: Routledge, 1997), 56.
[14] Henry David Thoreau, Online Journal Transcript, manuscript volume 22, September 7, 1856-
April 1, 1857. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. Davidson Library, University of California,
Santa Barbara. Accessed on December 10, 2014. <http://www.library.ucsb.edu/thoreau/writings_journals.html>.
[15] Walter Harding and Michael Meyer, The New Thoreau Handbook. (New York: NYU Press, 1980), 69.
[16] Henry David Thoreau, Journal IX, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis Allen. (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 230.
[17] Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010), 42.
[18] Thoreau, Journal IX, 358-9.
[19] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. (Durham: Duke UP, 2007), 139.
[20] Kirby, Telling Flesh, 61.
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