Comments for Romantic Circles Blog

Comment on What are you teaching? (Neil Fraistat) by Acknowledgments on Syllabi « triproftri

Acknowledgments on Syllabi « triproftri — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 04:11:40 +0000

[...] really wish I’d made those acknowledgements because, as it turns out, Neil Fraistat taught a version of this course back in 2003! He and Andrew Stauffer are reprising the course this semester (Spring 2012) but as networked [...]

Comment on The ecological thought—ecologocentric insert by Ron Broglio

Ron Broglio — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 00:56:03 +0000

I wonder if taking up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of “flesh of the world” may help as the concept is engaged in a mode of interconnection between ‘subject’ and ‘object.’ It is one way of beginning to think this connectedness… and perhaps it is related to ambiance. In terms of Merleau-Ponty, even more interesting is his late claim in Visible and Invisible. Here he sees even phenomenology as too inscribed in the subject-object dichotomy and turns to thinking of the invisible of things, their opacity and worlds other than the human.

Comment on The ecological thought—ecologocentric insert by starlelite

starlelite — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:54:28 +0000

got me thinking a bit…
i think that the issues of ‘nature over there’ instead of ‘nature everywhere’ have a lot to do with the way that how we – and i want to clarify the ‘we’ as the anglo-tradition, especially US, australia, canada – think of nature as wilderness. wilderness as a nature untouched, something somehow pure.
this in turn probably has a lot to do with ideas of the sublime, which were in great currency at the time when (again, the US, canada, australia) nation building was happening. and thus also ideas of difference. which were based to an extent on environment, and thus nature…
and it also probably has something to do with the bible.
it is going to be difficult, i think, to think about nature given these traditions but trying to come to terms with a more interconnected idea of nature. particularly in those contexts where nature is part of an idea of wilderness.
(afterthought: even ideas of pastoral nature tend to romanticize rural life and are often distanced from the work involved. a function, perhaps, of writing about something vs. doing something?)
interested in other people’s ideas though, will keep an eye on this thread.

Comment on Romantic Ecomorphism by Ashton Nichols

Ashton Nichols — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 17:35:23 +0000

Tim: Perhaps I meant silicon for the memories and silicone for the sex lives?!

Comment on Romantic Ecomorphism by TimothyMorton

TimothyMorton — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:33:19 +0000

Ash—“silicone” implants means things you put in your body made of soft rubber.

Are these the kinds of implant of which you speak?! If so we are now talking prosthetics, sex toys, non-heteronormative ecology…

(Or do you mean “silicon”)?

Comment on Question up for comments: Ecology and Nostalgia by TimothyMorton

TimothyMorton — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:21:02 +0000

Okay–I was haunted by the uncanny…

Respect to Ash–but our man Freud specifically says that the “canny” is itself uncanny. German heimische means unheimlich in certain senses. That’s the point.

What is most intimate is most strange.

I’m almost tempted to translate into Rumsfeldian: un-canny = un-known.

Un-known, hence unknown known. The un-conscious.

Things we know–but we don’t know we know them.

These are the strange strangers. (I abstain from using “animal” or even “life form” at this level.)

We know them–we are them. DNA: You are 98% chimp–also 35% daffodil…(dancing with them and as them).

So nostalgia would be what?

How about this: a yearning for a safe comfortable distance from these strange strangers. A warding off of intimacy.

Craving an essence, a whole, an organicism above ands beyond organisms.

I would argue then that ecology is fundamentally anti-nostalgic.

Therefore nostalgic environmentalisms are anti-ecological. Wow.

Comment on Question up for comments: Ecology and Nostalgia by Ashton Nichols

Ashton Nichols — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 12:10:30 +0000

What Marx could not have predicted was a capitalist democracy is which a worker–in this case a professor–works until May 11 each year before he sees a single centime of his salary. So wealth undergoes redistribution not through worker ownership of the means of production but through a capitalist government’s willingness to impose “social” taxation of all sorts up to the point where over a third of a worker’s earnings disappear into the mysterious maw of government spending. In a related way, the “capital” of personal experience (memory, nostalgic moments ["I hope I never forget this day"], the sense of the contents of memory as “mine”) is an illusion created, as Hume taught us, by the random bundling of one set of sense-data within one mind-brain. But my memory is no more “mine” than my house is “mine.” When the state wants to build a highway, my private property disappears into the socialist good of condemnation. Likewise, when the state of “nature” (with Tim’s reservations about this word) wants to take back the “home” of personal identity, it does so. When the oxygen stops flowing smoothly to my brain, my memories stumble, then fade, and then completely disappear. My selfhood stops as soon as my synapses stop firing, even if my body–my self’s material capital–last for decades. Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be because it never “was” in the first place. Just another illusion of the ever-acquisitive bourgeois dream factory. –A.N.

Comment on Question up for comments: Ecology and Nostalgia by TimothyMorton

TimothyMorton — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:24:07 +0000

PPS—a paragraph from my previous:

Ecocriticism in this sense is a recent version of F.R. Leavis’s and T.S. Eliot’s “dissociation of sensibility.” For them, literature lost the plot during the English Revolution (surprise surprise). Before then, especially in the so-called “metaphysical poets,” thinking and sensing were organically intertwined.

I should have added:

For ecocriticism, the period before the Fall is the Romantic period. This was the moment, ironically, at which for many philosophers poetry became decisively sentimental (i.e. ironic—Schiller) or philosophical-reflexive (Hegel). The moment at which it mourns a forever-lost naiveté.

Ecocritical nostalgia is thus recursive: it expresses a nostalgia for nostalgia.

Nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be.

Comment on Question up for comments: Ecology and Nostalgia by TimothyMorton

TimothyMorton — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:18:45 +0000

PS—from my previous, “Ecocriticism thus sustains the possibility of living in a non-socialist relationship to present social relations, a relationship that is at best mildly critical.” I should have added:

And at worst, distressingly authoritarian.

Comment on Question up for comments: Ecology and Nostalgia by TimothyMorton

TimothyMorton — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 00:14:15 +0000

Ecocriticism is definitely nostalgic in its longing for a green language where words meant what they said and said what they meant. (I’m one of those people who think that not only is this language strictly nonexistent, but also that this longing is the ideological mode of modernity.)

In effect, this form of ecocritical nostalgia performs two things:
(1) A “return to nature” not just as a return away from modern ennui and artifice, but also as a return to a moment “before” literary theory (you know, the dreaded deconstruction) had occurred. The bugbear here is “postmodern theory”—a phrase that almost defines ecocritical texts as such.
(2) A return to a moment just before socialism was articulated as such—the Romantic period.

Ecocriticism thus sustains the possibility of living in a non-socialist relationship to present social relations, a relationship that is at best mildly critical. Perhaps the environmentalist attitude could be added to the humanitarianism and animal rights that Karl Marx describes in the Communist Manifesto as “bourgeois socialism”:
“The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems.
…
It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois—for the benefit of the working class.”