When, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth insisted that an “overbalance of pleasure” entails the “circumstance of meter,” he confirmed a philosophical assumption far older than Kant’s theory of the sublime. The pervasive assumption—which, today, can be tracked in an on-going “affective turn” (necessarily entangled in matters of form and style)—is that the artificial makes possible an understanding of the natural.
But Wordsworth was writing in the twilight of the Industrial Revolution—or what is arguably the dawn of the Anthropocene. For this reason alone, we might be justified in dismissing his romantic conception of poetry as mere “correlationism”—what Ian Bogost caustically defines as the “the tradition of human access that seeps from the rot of Kant.” Faced with the impending consequences of climate change, withering biodiversity, proliferating microplastics, etc.—is it not finally time (as various “new materialists” have asserted) to undo Kant’s “Copernican revolution” and, thus, the primacy of human perception within the nature of things? But what are the alternatives? To approach Quentin Meillassoux’s “great outdoors” we must employ very human tools, such as carbon dating and mathematics. To know and describe Bogost’s various non-human “things” we must resort—à la romanticism—to “metaphorism.” As in Aristotle, phúsis remains inextricable from tékhnē: from art, from technology. Or, to follow Derrida, the latter persists as an inescapable supplement.
In our efforts to surmount the problem of “human access,” do we therefore risk repeating (even more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism? If so, is our only option to re-approach nature paradoxically via its antithesis: solar panels and wind turbines that can save us from green-house gases; virtual simulations that can measure distance better than any animal eye; digital photography and narrative structures that might preserve the nature of indigenous life; genetic engineering that can dissolve the distinction between nature and its others? Should we then re-consider the moral roadblocks embodied in our narrative and philosophical efforts to imagine the posthuman—from Mary Shelley’s monster and Philip K. Dick’s androids to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and Octavia Butler’s aliens?
Surrounded by the sublime weight and majesty of the Rocky Mountains in Banff, Canada, these are the questions we hope to address—as we attempt to “think” (yet again) Nature: Animal, Moral, Technological.
Claire Colebrook is the author of New Literary Histories (Manchester UP, 1997), Ethics and Representation (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 1997), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge 2002), Understanding Deleuze (Allen and Unwin 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska UP, 2002), Gender (Palgrave 2003), Irony (Routledge 2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum 2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum 2010), and William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (Routledge 2011), and co-edited Deleuze and Feminist Theory with Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (Edinburgh 2008), Deleuze and Gender with Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh UP 2009) and Deleuze and Law (Palgrave) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin. She is the co-editor, with Tom Cohen, of a series of monographs for Open Humanities Press: Critical Climate Change. She has written articles on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture. She recently completed two books on extinction for Open Humanities Press: The Death of the Posthuman, and Sex After Life, and has co-authored (with Jason Maxwell) _Agamben_ (Polity, 2015) and (with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller) Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016). She is now completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive and the earth).
Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. It is playing at MoMA until January 30, 2022.
Dr. Tracey Lindberg is a Full Professor and Research Chair in Indigenous Laws, Legal Orders and Traditions at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law. She is a citizen of the As'in'i'wa'chi Ni'yaw Nation / Kelly Lake Cree Nation. She studied Indigenous Studies in her undergrad and also holds an LLB from the University of Saskatchewan, an LLM from Harvard University and an LLD from University of Ottawa. In Ottawa she received the Governor General's Gold Medal for her dissertation, "Critical Indigenous Legal Theory." Her novel Birdie was a finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Award and the 2016 edition of CBC's Canada Reads. From 2010-15, Dr. Lindberg held the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Legal Orders, Laws and Traditions at Athabasca University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists, and her research interests include traditional Indigenous governments, Cree laws and the translation between Canadian and Indigenous laws, Indigenous women and legal advocacy and activism by and for Indigenous peoples. Her current research and creative interests are engaged in her completion of a documentary, novel and non-fiction text all of which engage Indigenous legal orders, teachings and knowledge.
