As ecocriticism expands and deepens in scope (of subject matter & media examined), extent (internationally), and diversity (in approaches, connections with other schools of thought, etc.), its interactions with non-literary fields such as cinema studies, theatre/performance studies, and musicology (as I posted about recently) are starting to develop in healthy ways. The ASLE conference had several sessions devoted to film — four panels, several papers within other panels, and a pre-conference session on film and media — which, I believe, is more than the conference has ever had. Since then, an Ecomedia Studies Wiki has been started, as has an Ecomedia listserv (with very little activity yet, only because I started it and I’ve been too preoccupied to get any conversation going). Among related ventures, the Media Ecology Association‘s 2010 convention will be on “Media Ecology and Natural Environments” (e-mail Paul Grosswiler for further info on that). A group of us are hoping to make a little splash at the Society for Cinema & Media Studies conference next year. If you have any interest in such things, feel free to e-mail me directly, but expect a slow response during the summer, as I’m on the road through much of it (between the cabin where I’m blogging from in Vermont and Amsterdam the week after next, then the west coast of British Columbia & Alaska, then New Mexico in mid-August).
Among the papers I heard and was impressed by at ASLE were ecocritical takes (which can mean many different things) on Luis Bunuel (particularly the lovely scene in The Phantom of the Liberty where he reverses the culture of eating with that of defecating), There Will be Blood, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, WALL-E, Werner Herzog, Manufactured Landscapes, Winged Migration and its making, and much else. Our theoretical panel included David Ingram’s perceptive ecocritical assessment of rival theoretical paradigms (the Althusserian-Lacanian, cognitivist, and phenomenological). My own paper presented the model of cinema analysis I’m developing in my forthcoming book ‘Ecologies of the Moving Image’. Here’s the extended version of the paper’s abstract:
“In The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben (2004) refers to the ongoing cultural construction of ‘the human’ in contradistinction to ‘the animal’ as the ‘anthropological’ or ‘anthropogenic’ ‘machine.’ This “optical machine,” he writes, “is constructed of a series of mirrors in which man, looking at himself, sees his own image already deformed in the features of an ape. Homo is a constitutively ‘anthropomorphous’ animal (that is, ‘resembling man’ […]), who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to become human” (26-27). Starting from this notion of an ‘anthropological machine,’ and from Martin Heidegger’s description of the human (Dasein) as a world-bearing being and of language, poetry, and art as ‘world-disclosing,’ this article proposes a model of cinema as an “anthro-geo-animamorphic machine,” a machine that produces worlds. This machine is, at once, anthropomorphic in that it produces a cinematic version of or resemblance to the human, thereby generating an apparent social or ‘subject-world’; animamorphic in its production of an apparent world of animate, life-like and interperceptive forms, which are shown to see and be seen, hear and be heard, at the same time as we, the viewers, see and hear them and learn how to see and hear them; and geomorphic in that it produces a spatially organized or territorialized material ‘object-world,’ an apparent geography distinguished by hereness, thereness, and distances and relations between the ‘pieces of world’ displayed. In effect, cinematic worlds are held together by the dimensions of space (the territorialization of objective materiality), time (the temporal experience of narrative process), sociality (distinctions and relations among social subjects), and animacy (relations among inter-perceptive forms and substances).
“Each of these relational dimensions variously reflects, refracts, comments on, and reverberates within the world outside the film. Cinema, in this sense, adds a refractive or diffractive overlay of meanings onto a world that pre-exists it, and sets up an interactive oscillation between the two in the process. The relationship between the cinematic world and the extra-cinematic world is the relationship most amenable to a form of analysis that, following a related movement in literary and cultural studies, can be called ‘ecocritical.’ Various forms of film theory interrogate aspects of this set of relations: phenomenology its perceptual and embodied dimensions, psychoanalysis its intra-psychic dimensions, cognitivism its neuropsychological correlates, Marxist and feminist analysis its class and gender politics, and so on. Ecocritical film theory, I argue, can place all of these within the broadest frame of our relationship to the world at large. Through an ecocritical, ‘world-making’ analysis of an exemplary film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), I argue here that cinema ‘stalks’ the real world, and that our appreciation of its potentials should similarly involve a ‘stalking’ of its effects in the material, social, and perceptual dimensions of the world from which cinema emerges and to which it returns.”
This tripartite framework (geomorphic, animamorphic, anthropomorphic) is intended to correspond to the three ecologies (Felix Guattari’s term) within which cinematic production and consumption can be located: its material ecologies, social ecologies, and perceptual ecologies. My goals here are two-fold:
(1) To be able to situate film forms and meanings within a set of broadly ecological contexts that include the material world as well as the social world. The inclusion of a third element, the perceptual, is intended to break up the dichotomizing tendency that segregates the natural from the cultural (Latour’s ‘Modern constitution’). Human perception, while distinctive, is caught in the grasp of a world that is perceptual and communicative “all the way down,” as it were, with a ‘subject’ pole and an ‘object’ pole emerging out of the relations that constitute communicative and perceptual interaction. The ‘anthropomorphic machinery’ works at the subject pole, distinguishing between those who will count as subjects and those who will not; the ‘geomorphic machinery’ (the spatialization and territorialization of relations within the object-world) works at the object pole; and the ‘animamorphic machinery’ works in between the two.
(2) To allow for an examination of the ways in which film, alongside other art and media forms, disclose the world in specific ways. “World-disclosure” is Heideggerian language, though Heidegger was too caught up in his own metaphysical narrative about western history and its destiny. I’m more interested in specific ways of “worlding”, including cinema worlding, in a world that is characterized by many levels and scales of interactive dynamism and techno-perceptual change (i.e. globalization, new media ecologies, etc.).
Why Stalker? There are a number of films I could have chosen to focus on, but Stalker‘s creation of a cinematic world — a geography (consisting of a Zone set apart from the everyday world and that world itself, with a relationship of desire, fantasy, projection, affective investment, and interdependence between the two), an anthropology (this part requires a bit more work to summarize, so I’ll leave it for now), and an animacy (primarily related to the Zone itself) — and the multiple resonances between that world and the extra-filmic world (for instance, the way in which its depiction of a post-nuclear-like landscape captures the late Soviet toxic-industrial imaginary, including the ways in which that imaginary was set into motion several years later in the wake of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, with its resultant depopulated ‘Zone,’ its ‘stalkers,’ its biblical-apocalyptic interpretations of ‘wormwood,’ etc.; or the way in which the making of the film itself registered environmental toxins and anomalies on and in the bodies of the filmmakers themselves, resulting in several illnesses and premature deaths) makes the film paradigmatic of the (material, social, and perceptual) relationship between cinema and reality — that is, between a projected ‘zone’ of dreams, desires, fantasies, and fears, and a real, inhabited world of dreams, desires, fantasies, fears, and material engagements and interdependencies. (Forgive the run-on sentence.) I’ll come back to the film in a future post…
Paul Ennis at anotherheideggerblog has posted a reply to this (see http://anotherheideggerblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/path-of-eco-critics.html ).
Paul takes me up on my comment that “Heidegger was too caught up in his own metaphysical narrative about western history and its destiny”, and argues instead that a metaphysical narrative “is precisely what Heidegger does not have,” adding that he hopes I’m being ironic in my post. My answer to that is that I am being ironic, but that the irony is deserved. It’s precisely because Heidegger made so much of wanting to “overcome metaphysics” that his failure to do so is all the more profound. Derrida and others have made that case, so I won’t repeat it. (One of my favorite iterations of it is John Caputo’s, though I don’t remember where he makes it.) The point for me, though, is less that Heidegger failed to overcome metaphysics than that in his efforts to do that, he smuggled in some pretty large historical assumptions about the ostensibly singular and monolithic nature of the western tradition – e.g., that it extends back, in a single line, to the ancient Greeks, as if there weren’t a variety of forms of constitutive otherness – both internal and external to ‘the West’ – within which that tradition evolves.
A different version of that narrative recurs in Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, a book I’m currently reviewing, and I’ll share some notes from my conference paper/article on it in a future post.
As for Stalker, I will post more on it eventually, but I’m happy to share drafts of my paper on it upon request.
”The point for me, though, is less that Heidegger failed to overcome metaphysics… ‘the West’ – within which that tradition evolves.”
I very much agree with you here, and I think the SR guys do as well. Harman, for one, seems to excise the tool-analysis from the overcoming of metaphysics. In fact one can read the entire response to Heidegger as more or less an act of ignoring the story, but selecting the best chapters. I’ll make this the topic of my next big post. Thanks for the response.
“This tripartite framework (geomorphic, animamorphic, anthropomorphic) is intended to correspond to the three ecologies (Felix Guattari’s term) within which cinematic production and consumption can be located: its material ecologies, social ecologies, and perceptual ecologies.”
I’m still trying to decide what to do about Wilber, but I find a resonance with his idea of “all quadrants, all levels,” which is to say that any study should look at four quadrants, three of which are covered by Guattari. The other one I’d add would be culture and worldview (which is part of Wilber’s schema). I think this is an important dimension that is slightly different than social system and environment. For example, the Native American students I once taught were being educated by the dominant social system, but they were also culturally influenced by their tribal practices, which were disengaged (for the most part) from the dominant system. I’d like to think of the social system as the “world system,” and the perhaps the culture system the “local system.” They would interpret a film from both an inculturated view, but also from the context of their home environment.
Antonio – I agree that it’s important to make distinctions between the social/world system and the cultural/local system (as you’ve called them), and I like the way you describe the ‘double hermeneutic’ of your Native American students.
My approach to this has been to assume that there will always be diversity within the social – there are rival networks (to use Bruno Latour’s term) competing against each other, and connecting or overlapping with each other, none of which are exclusively local or global (the local and the global being not predetermined but, rather, arising out of practices, technologies, etc.), and all of which are necessarily intertwined with the perceptual and material-ecological, though their manner of intertwining may be quite different. In situations where people feel themselves to be part of two radically different worlds, we need ways to articulate the differences.
That said, I think a lot of people around the world experience different forms of ‘biculturalism’ or ‘multiculturalism’ – being caught between or operating within different cultural worlds – and even what Latour calls ‘multinaturalism,’ a term that tries to get at the very different ways that ecologies and cultures get intertwined or ‘networked’ together. I’ve tended to follow cultural anthropologists’ and political ecologists’ take on this, with their emphasis on scale and on multi-scalar dynamics of different political-ecological systems — especially those, like Arturo Escobar, who are sensitive to what might be called “radical ecocultural difference.” A book I like very much that gets at this difference is Valerie Kuletz’s “Tainted Desert: Environmental Ruin in the American West.”
This issue is one I’ve given some thought to (and I’ve written about it in a few places) and continue to try to think through, so I really appreciate your comments on it. The last thing I’d want to do is to give the impression that the ‘three ecologies’ are separate and distinct entities or even discrete levels. I think of them as a continuum, with the ‘social’ being at the subject end (where ‘subjectivity’ and ‘society’ get shaped and articulated), the ‘material’ being at the object end, and the ‘perceptual’ referring to a lot of the processes that go on in the middle, but where there is a constant criss-crossing and level-jumping occurring as ecocultural relations (Latour’s networks and ‘collectives’) are formed and transformed. Does that make sense?
As for Wilber, I haven’t followed his more recent work, so I’m not sure how he’s defining ‘culture and worldview.’ There had been a fair bit of debate between Wilber and a few other transpersonal philosophers (Michael Washburn, Stan Grof, et al) back in the 1990s, and I tended to side with the other guys, finding Wilber a bit too hierarchical and earth/body-denying, but he’s always been admirably good at replying to critics and interlocutors, so I should read some of his more recent work.
I’ve been meaning to read Michael Zimmerman’s co-authored book ‘Integral Ecology,’ a mammoth tome that tries to bring Wilber to ecophilosophy. (Zimmerman is a prominent ecophilosopher who used to be a Heideggerian, but has gradually shifted into orbit, it seems, around Wilber’s integral/transpersonal philosophy.) In fact, I’ve considered starting a reading group to discuss it. Let me know if you’d be interested. It’s huge and probably a daunting task, so I should read some of it before I try to convince others to do that.
Adrian, thanks for your response. I’d be interested in doing a reading group for Integral Ecology (and even make that part of my proposed project we discussed previously). I actually bought the beast!
Your response to my four quadrants comment is exhaustive– I haven’t read most of the authors you site, but the bits you touched upon with biculturalism (I really like “multinaturalism”– although I misread it at first to say, “multifuturism”– which works, too). Arturo Escobar keeps popping up on my radar. We’ll need to chat more about this later. Thanks!
Thanks for the great article.