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The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics by Joshua Schuster

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/0041462x-3654239

2325-8101

Brandon Jones,

American Literature and Culture

Joshua Schuster’s The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics may prove to be one of the definitive works on the relationship between American modernist poetics and the environment. It not only combines the methods of American modernist studies and ecocriticism but also has significant contributions to offer both fields. On the one hand, Schuster’s analysis of how modernist aesthetics represents early to mid-twentieth-century environments offers a unique approach to periodizing American modernism. By assessing the continuities and discontinuities between modernism and modernity, he situates modernism’s methods for framing nonhuman environs (both rural and urban) after nineteenth-century romanticism and organicism, but before the environmentalist activism of the late twentieth century. Industrial waste and polluted environs serve as invigorating sources of aesthetic production for many modernist works—a phenomenon Schuster refers to as “toxic refreshment” (2). The aesthetics of toxic refreshment intentionally departs from romantic and pastoral images of inviolate nature. However, it often does so without developing an activist, ethical orientation of care toward the environment—which would mean imagining efforts to correct environmental harm, conserve resources, preserve habitats, and hold parties responsible for ecosystem degradation. While modernist artists devote much attention to the environmental consequences of modernity, they do not usually undertake a critique of those consequences in order to identify and fix the processes and institutions of modernization that are responsible.On the other hand, by avoiding reading environmental ethics into texts that actively resist environmentalist commitments, Schuster seeks to critique and depart from what he sees as the overly moralistic reading practices that dominate the field of ecocriticism. To attend to the gap that opens up in modernist literature between the representation of environs and a sense of care and concern for those environs is to diverge from ecocritical practices that have “often involved promoting a reading strategy whereby the critic parses an archive in search of clear statements of environmental ethics in an artwork” (157). The problem Schuster finds with this strategy, and that he articulates most clearly in his conclusion, is that it leaves out those archives that are interested in ecological representation but are ambiguous about advancing any form of environmental ethics. By attending to this ambiguity in modernism, Schuster engages in an effort to open the canon of ecocriticism to “works of art that are aesthetically dissonant with contemporary reading methods and moral expectations.” That is, The Ecology of Modernism uses an ecocritical lens to make the case that literary critics should not neglect certain pieces of art just because their representational methods do not align well—that is, they are “aesthetically dissonant”—with a single ethical or political standard. By thus intervening in debates on critical reading practices, Schuster’s work ends up making a broader contribution to literary studies at large.Schuster particularly frames his argument about critical reading practices as an intervention in debates surrounding what Leo Bersani refers to as “the culture of redemption” (Bersani 1990). A redemptive method assumes “that art can and should perpetuate humanist values of relief from suffering, strive to document and correct social injustices, and bring a sense of meaningfulness to situations that appear empty” (158). However, Schuster, following Bersani, advocates a method that does not decide in advance what the capabilities of art might be—arguably the aim of reparative and redemptive approaches (see Sedgwick 2003)—but rather attends to the way art is able both to relieve social strife and to tarry with “experiences of loss, damage, frustration, negativity, and destruction” (Schuster 158).Schuster uses the story of Fredric Clements’s invention of the “quadrat” to prime the reader for his argument in the preface. The quadrat is a square with one-meter sides that can be placed on any landscape. In the early twentieth century, Clements proposed its use as the fundamental unit of ecology. Schuster sees a strong resemblance between the insights the quadrat brought to ecology and those that modernist forms brought to art. Namely, both the quadrat and modernist forms of representation self-reflexively highlight how framing environments in new ways, under new rubrics, means making those “environments legible in new ways” (x). But it also means obscuring those aspects of an environment that do not fit within the frame. This dynamic of self-consciously framing certain features of an environment while concealing others drives each of the artistic styles Schuster analyzes. These styles include Marianne Moore’s animal fables, Gertrude Stein’s ambient approach to environmental surrounds, the geographical wanderings of early blues music, John Cage’s use of new sonic media technologies to capture the traffic of human and nonhuman sound, and the rhetorical immersion in rural and urban toxicity that figures centrally in Rachel Carson’s writings and punk music lyrics. As his archive demonstrates, Schuster broadly conceptualizes modernism’s ecological poetics as cutting across different forms of print and aural media. The artists and avant-garde traditions he investigates “grapple with multiple media that befit a pluralist field of modernist aesthetic devices” (4). Such an open approach to representational media, Schuster argues, serves the ecological impulse to “convey the variety of players and perspectives in any actual environs.”In the introduction, Schuster clarifies the unique historical position and development of modernist experimentations with different media-based strategies for framing environs. He distinguishes the environmental impurity captured by avant-garde poetics in the early twentieth century from organicist and transcendentalist aesthetics of nature in the nineteenth century. Schuster grounds his theory of “American organicism” in Emerson’s transcendentalist vision of nature as eternally bountiful, harmonious, and bestowed with an inexhaustible vital energy. The early twentieth century, however, witnessed a transition from organicism to ecology, as the former’s emphasis on beauty, wholeness, and teleology was replaced by an emphasis on discord, chance, and contingency. It is precisely in this transitional phase that Schuster situates modernism. Without completely replacing organicist “Nature” with “ecology,” modernist artists exhibit a self-conscious use of avant-garde techniques in order to instill representations of environs with conflict, irony, and artifice. And the exploration of diverse media frameworks is a central component of this method. By thus enlisting highly stylized and heavily mediated forms that undermine the idea of nature as indelibly beautiful and harmonious, the artists Schuster discusses corroborate the skeptical outlook on organicism that was central to the early development of ecology as a scientific discipline.Marianne Moore’s experimentation with animal fables serves as Schuster’s first case study in chapter 1. He begins by commenting on the connection between the dearth of animal representations in modernist literature and the increased rate of species extinction and biodiversity loss at the start of the twentieth century. Some critics, Schuster writes, see the “literal depletion of animals” in modernity as “compounded by a figurative loss—the vanishing of animal imagery” (22). Schuster complicates such accounts by arguing that while the absence of represented animals may have been an aesthetic response to diminishing numbers of animals and species in modernity, it was certainly not the only response. There was also a proliferation of print culture that, while not representing animals directly, conveyed artificial styles of animal livelihood that compensated for the disappearance of actual animals. In the case of Moore’s animal fables, for example, this meant not pretending to be able to capture the immediate lived worlds of animals but being formally self-conscious about the always-already mediated exchange between animals and human representations of them. While such a method became a way of encountering animal life despite its contemporary precarity, Moore’s lyrical treatment of animals never achieves the status of environmental care; her poems do not provide a “model for animal activism” (25). In poems such as “Black Earth” and “My Apish Cousins,” Moore uses highly stylized tropes of the fable—such as anthropomorphic speech, political trickery, and morality—to investigate how “mediation is the means by which we share our human-animal worlds in the first place” (46). And yet, Moore “eschews militancy, does not espouse vegetarianism,” and ultimately leaves species extinction and violent histories of human-animal interaction uncommented upon (26).In chapter 2, Schuster investigates how a scientifically minded poet like Stein conveys a sense of environmental ambience. Schuster argues that it is not necessarily advantageous to read Stein’s work according to standard practices of close reading. Instead, her writing seems to demand a practice of glossing, scanning, and skimming that evokes visual and aural delight rather than semantic depth. Such a practice of “reading ambiently” elucidates Stein’s ability to immerse the reader in different environmental surrounds rather than placing the reader at a distance. She achieves this through her avant-garde experimentations with grammar, rather than through overt environmental themes. As a result, she turns the artifice of writing itself into an ecological matter: “Stein makes an art of immersion by making an environment out of the artifice of writing, rather than pretending that artifice disappears to reveal the tangible world out there” (52). Schuster takes the poems in Tender Buttons as characteristic examples of Stein’s ambient style. Influenced by William James’s radical empiricism, which considers experience to be, as Schuster describes it, “a moment of immersion among events, with no particular subject around which this immersion is happening,” Stein’s poems in this volume use unconventional grammatical structures to defer semantic judgment, constantly making and unmaking sense in order to suspend the reader in a perpetual state of indeterminate dwelling (60). However, Schuster is, as always, attentive to how such a nuanced aesthetic ecology does not necessarily translate into an environmental politics. Stein’s ambient poetics does not present a program for environmental care, and, in fact, it has a conservative tendency to ground a person’s essence, thought, and writing in a static sense of place, using pastoral visions to convey a nostalgic yearning for primitive relations between humans and landscapes.Schuster shifts medium from poetry to song in chapter 3, a shift that continues to inform his final chapters. Here he argues that whether they are concerned with urban or rural landscapes, blues songs tend to abstract motion from place, employing rhythmic chanting and the repetition of chords, grammar, and diction to convey a sense of movement across American regions. Schuster situates his ecocritical analysis of early blues music within a growing body of scholarship on African American environmental histories and experiences. In doing so, he highlights how the geographic abstraction of movement from place in blues songs registers the ambiguous and troubled relationship black people have to an environmental ethics of care and conservation due to the violent histories of their being associated with nature and animality. Scenes of environmental hardship rather than harmony are common in blues songs, as early blues artists use geographically oriented sonic ecologies to represent the relationship between the Jim Crow system and environmental distress. For example, Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” uses a wandering style to dramatize the trials of black refugees displaced by the Mississippi Delta flood of 1927. Josh White’s “Low Cotton” uses puns and repetition to lament the oppression of a black farmer harvesting a cotton plant that is itself suffering under monocultural agriculture in the South. Schuster points out that despite their melancholic awareness of the environmental burdens black people endure due to oppressive land management regimes, such early twentieth-century blues songs are clearly not turning grief into grievance. These dirges are mourning rather than protesting conditions of environmental injustice.The fourth chapter on John Cage serves as a turning point. By the mid-twentieth century, modernist avant-garde aesthetics began to take on more environmentalist characteristics. That is, the artistic investment in representing ecological conditions began to merge with an ethical investment in caring about the state of the environment. Cage’s silent piece, 4′33″, serves as Schuster’s paradigmatic case study of this shift. He begins by noting how the piece continues Moore’s, Stein’s, and blues music’s efforts to move beyond organicist concerns with natural balance and pastoral beauty. 4′33″ allows for a high degree of sonic entropy and noise through the clashing of human and nonhuman sounds coming from the space of performance; the piece’s silence “includes traffic and trees, disgruntled audiences and the wind, machines and rain, brings together a wider variety of ecological concerns than just an auditory presentation of pastoral repose” (105). In assessing this discordant feature of the piece, Schuster discusses how Cage draws on cybernetics—and its application to ecology in Eugene Odum’s work on the “ecosystem” concept—in his appreciation of the complex emergence of dissonance, noise, and chaos from aural environmental immersion. However, with 4′33″, Cage explicitly departs from the cybernetic emphasis on the ability to control the function of information systems. He instead practices an aesthetics of nonintentionality whereby human authority is expelled from the space of performance in order to make room for the traffic of noise from unexpected forms of elemental, arboreal, animal, and machinic agency. By thus relinquishing authorial control, Cage adds an ethical component to his entropic sonic ecologies that is absent from the work of his modernist predecessors. That is, he turns a poetics of chance and contingency into “an environmental ethics of nonproprietary stewardship” (116).In the final chapter, Schuster evaluates the modernist aesthetics he finds in the writings of Rachel Carson. Central to Schuster’s effort here is a recuperation of the analysis of Carson’s Silent Spring from dismissive readings of her Cold War rhetoric. Such readings consider, for example, how the text’s paranoia about unseen chemical agents symbolizes fear of Soviet espionage. Schuster, however, is more interested in the potential of reading Silent Spring through the lens of biopolitics, which is to say, assessing how the text calls attention to pesticides that control human and nonhuman life on various scales, from the level of the individual to that of the population. Schuster’s biopolitical argument is that Carson’s response to the power of pesticides is not to advocate for the purification of toxic bodies and landscapes. Rather, he claims, she draws on the trope of toxic refreshment to create a “disaster poetics,” which refers to the use of “lyrically charged language” and “modernist poetic devices of harsh juxtaposition” to render pollution, toxicity, and contamination as fundamental conditions of modern life (138, 137). Carson does not turn the awareness of ubiquitous toxicity into a debilitating sense of pastoral loss; instead, she uses it to “call people into action, paradoxically generating new forms of agency, giving rise to a multiplicity of responses and coalitions” (146). Indeed, Schuster shows how Carson went on to inspire “a new generation of avant-garde artists who carried dystopian realist tendencies and antisocial leanings, from cyberpunk to beat poetry to the Black Arts Movement to punk” (149). Schuster thus considers punk music’s rage and submersion in environmental grime and decay as indebted, if only indirectly, to Silent Spring. Punk bands such as the Dead Kennedys employ a negative, critical outlook—rather than mainstream environmentalism’s cheery approach of working with institutional power—in order to continue Carson’s work of activist coalition-building through toxic refreshment.After a conclusion in which he articulates the stakes of his reading practice for literary studies as a whole—which I outlined earlier in the interest of foregrounding Schuster’s field contributions—Schuster ends with an afterword in which he reflects on the curious absence of oil from modernist art. Upton Sinclair’s Oil! may be the only notable work from the modernist period that explicitly concerns the relationship between modernity and petrocapitalism, but Schuster argues that the global influence of oil extraction and trade can be indirectly felt through what he calls the modernist “commodity poem.” The commodity poem “situates a resource accumulated or extracted from the earth into a meditation on labor, literary craft, and the facticity and aesthetic impact of elemental materials” (168). By closing with a note on modernism’s oblique figuration of oil’s politically charged industrial history, Schuster reminds the reader what his goal has been since page one: to investigate the ways in which avant-garde poetics register the experience of modern ecosystems but are ambiguous about taking a stance on environmental topics that are ethically and politically fraught.I would like to conclude with a cautionary note regarding Schuster’s method of reading for gaps between ecological aesthetics and politics. Schuster is ultimately calling for ecocritics to achieve a higher degree of critical distance and objectivity—to disinvest themselves from their own subjective reasons for interpreting a text (e.g., to advance a political agenda for combating environmental degradation and injustice). According to Schuster, ecocritics too often let their personal environmentalist commitments cloud their judgment. As a result, they tend to promulgate inaccurate interpretations that make artworks seem more political than they actually are. Schuster makes a strong case for why we should take ecocritics to task for this propensity to misinterpret, but in doing so he commits a problematic idealization of objectivity. Feminist science studies has for decades been reminding scientists and cultural studies scholars alike that their practices necessarily have implications for political epistemology—even those practices that appear most objective and unbiased. To assume a position of objectivity is to make a claim for epistemological superiority; my arguments and findings are more valid than yours if I have shielded my research from the influence of personal bias and you have not. One can wield objectivity, in other words, as a tool for exercising power over and silencing those who do not distance their arguments from emotion and opinion. By endorsing critical distance as his core methodological principle, Schuster thus runs a high risk of perpetuating an epistemological “gaze from nowhere” that dissociates “the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the interests of unfettered power” (Haraway 1988, 581). If we adopt Schuster’s method of reading for aesthetic dissonance as a default practice of ecocriticism, we should be aware that doing so can promote and generalize objectivity in a way that is complicit with traditionally repressive structures of knowledge and power.