Or, process-relational ecocriticism 2.0
Two of the courses I’m currently teaching — the intermediate-level “Environmental Literature, Art, and Media” and the senior-level “The Culture of Nature” — require introducing an eco-critical framework appropriate to a wide range of artistic forms, from literature to visual art, music, film and new media.
The process-relational framework developed in Ecologies of the Moving Image is synthetic and holistic in its scope, but it is too advanced for introducing in itself — accompanied by the philosophical underpinnings it requires — in these undergraduate classes. So I’ve been forced to rethink its categories to make them both more accessible and more broadly applicable.
EMI‘s PR framework is loosely encompassed as a “triad of triads” built from Peirce’s and Whitehead’s categories and Guattari’s “three ecologies.” It expands beyond the usual forms of ecocriticism found in literary studies, which have generally tended to focus on “the text,” with some reference to real people (authorial intents, biographies) and places (usually the places written about), but with only rare exploration of production relations, media materialities, sensory-perceptual interactions, and the like.
For the sake of a broader and more accessible “triadic” approach to the arts, what I’ve done with these categories in my current teaching is to render them as follows:
1. MATERIALITY
Resources, substances, arrangements, assemblages, organization of production and labor, etc.
2. EXPERIENCE
Sensation, perception, affect/emotion, aesthetics, phenomenology
3. REPRESENTATION
Images, markings, emphases, narratives, metaphors, rhetorics, identities and differences
— with each of these being considered in process-relational terms, that is, as relations unfolding in SPACE (location, place, site, region, globality) and over TIME (organicity, rhythm/periodicity, interactive processuality).
(See diagram above.)
All of this loosely follows the Peircian framework of firsts (virtualities, or what’s “really there” in its givenness), seconds (encounters, or the actual experience of entities encountering other entitities), and thirds (the representations, symbolic meanings, and social constructs arising from such spatially and temporally patterned encounters). The three categories are, in effect, the three “layers” by which an artwork, text, or natural or cultural object can be interpreted.
So, for instance, when examining the work of an artist or musician like Joseph Beuys, Maya Lin, the Critical Arts Ensemble, Brian Eno, or Current 93, one can ask: (1) What materials are the artists working with, and what material impacts and production relations are assembled and reassembled through their work? (2) What experiences does their work draw on, elicit, and enable? (3) What meanings, metaphoric connections, and identities and differences are evoked, proposed, critiqued, transformed, etc. in their work?
Ultimately, all of the questions I ask about film in Ecologies of the Moving Image — summarized in the Appendix, “Doing Process-Relational Media Analysis” (pp. 341-5) — can be asked using this new model of categories regarding any art form or media practice, though they may require some tweaking, adding or subtracting, and clarifying here and there.
Comments welcome.
have you taught them anything along the lines of reader-response theory?
It factors into the mix… We don’t really teach these things as “theories” (devoting any time to the theorists who developed them, for instance). But we do present approaches to understanding art (etc.), and focusing on audience responses (via ethnography, reception studies, etc.) is an important part of the picture.
I say “we” because I’m co-teaching the Lit/Art/Media class with Buddhist ecologist and environmental writer Stephanie Kaza. In my Culture of Nature class, I always introduce the “cultural circulation” model developed by cultural studies scholars (Stuart Hall, Richard Johnson, and others), which focused on three “moments” – production, exhibition (or the text), and reception/consumption – in the cultural cycle. Then I build on that model to deepen and “ecologize” it.
gotcha, guess my only concern is that many of the folks working along these lines tend to drift quite quickly (to the degree that they really attend to) from the evolving particularities of responders/environs/assemblages to something more generalized/abstracted social and so lose the kinds of improvisational characteristics that ethnographers like Ingold&Haraway foreground and of course that the post-structuralists tried (and largely failed) to remind us of.
3 strata : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Panofsky
Panofsky’s approach is an interesting hermeneutic for artistic interpretation – I like the deepening level of engagement as you move from primary to secondary to tertiary. But for me it mainly applies to the level of representation – i.e., how to make sense of what a picture means – and largely leaves the other two (materiality in itself, and experience in itself) out of the picture. I suspect that each of them could have their own sequence of primary/secondary/tertiary interpretation (which is what I try to do, but with a different logic underlying the sequence).
yeah, just an interesting precursor of sorts, not really sure what to do with the “in itself(s)” when it comes to recollecting in general and writing/critique in particular, but than I could never make much of 1stness (and maybe even 2ndness) in Peirce either, more of a unitarian (in a kluged-darwinian-phenomenological sort of way) I guess than a trinitarian…
Interesting stuff.
You write: “The three categories are, in effect, the three “layers” by which an artwork, text, or natural or cultural object can be interpreted.”
It strikes me that this is a rich approach to criticism because it mirrors the creative process itself. So your sentence could be rewritten substituting “created” for “interpreted”.
I’ll have to buy you book.
You’re right – I think it does mirror the creative process (as did Peirce). I’ve had a few of students try to apply the framework to their own creative work. That said, the three “layers” follow a logical order (which I take from Peirce’s triadic metaphysics/phenomenology), but they aren’t necessarily a temporal order, since they interact with each other all the time.
So as part of the interpretive process, we might investigate how the artist related to the layers. Some artists might approach their work quite logically in a creative process that closely resembles the interpretive. Others might not intellectually consider the layers much using a more intuitive approach in which the layers interact as you say all the time.
And it matters for many artists where they are in the evolution of their careers overall, and within a specific stage/period of their work.
Great, Adrian! It seems that these questions can be posed to perhaps any practice. I’m thinking specifically in terms of anthropology, of course, but it occurs to me that the layers apply as much to the critique and interpretation of art as it does to the production of art.