John Clare's Dark Ecology

Abstract

I am here, sitting by tire, wearing a dressing gown, holding this page in my hand (1) PLACE, AND IN PARTICULAR, THE LOCAL, HAVE BECOME KEY TERMS IN Romantic ecocriticism s rage against machine. This rage is as impotent as it is loud--indeed rhetorical affect is here in direct proportion to marginalization. (2) Moreover, this impotent rage is itself an ironic barrier to a genuine (sense of) interrelationship between beings--the kind desired, posited and/or predicted by ecological thinking itself. Elsewhere I have called it beautiful syndrome after Hegel's brilliant characterization of Romantic subjectivity as a beautiful soul that perceives a chasm between consciousness and world. This chasm cannot be fully bridged; not, at any rate, without compromising beauty of itself. (3) Ideas such as and the local, let alone nation, entail subject positions--places from which Romantic ideas of place make sense. For this reason, it is all more important for us to consider deeply idea of place, and in general Romantic attitude to nature prevalent today (we are still, in effect, within Romantic period). We should not throw baby of place out with Romantic bathwater. Instead of wondering how to bridge unbridgeable gap, ecological thinking might pose another kind of question. Indeed, to pose a question is to reveal how our sense of place and what we mean by terms such as question, aporia, of wonder, are interconnected. What if globalization, via an ironic negative path, revealed that place was never very coherent in first place? Notice difference between stating that place as such does not exist at all, and saying that its existence is not as an independent, definable object over somewhere. Place, if anything, is slippery because it exists, but not in way in which, conventionally, mathematical axioms or empirical objects, or, indeed, ideals structurally beyond our reach, exist. Globalization compels us to rethink idea of place, not in order to discard it, but indeed to strengthen it, and to begin to use it properly in a yet more thorough critique of world that brought about mass hunger, monocultures, nuclear radiation, global warming, mass extinction, pollution and any number of harmful ecological phenomena. Place is always caught up in a certain question, assuming form of a questioning, or questioning attitude. (Notice, incidentally, that place, when properly considered, undoes distinction between subject and object.) Phenomenology has come closest to understanding place as a provisional yet real thing (thing in its original sense, and some of its more recent ones, implies place as meeting place). Martin Heidegger powerfully described place as open and in some ways opaque. But Heidegger, infamously, solidifies this very openness, turning history destiny and leaving way open for an extreme right-wing politics, which can easily assimilate ecological thinking to its ideological ends. Instead of running away from Heidegger, scholarship should encounter him all more rigorously in seeking to demystify place, in very name of a politics and poetics of place. In short, we must put idea of place question. Hence idea of depthless ecology: an ecological criticism that resists idea that there is a solid metaphysical bedrock (Nature or Life, for instance) beneath which thinking should not delve. In rush to embrace an expanded view, plangent, intense rhetoric of localism, form of ecological thinking that seems most opposed to globalization and most resistant to modern and postmodern decenterings and deconstructions, must not be left on shelf and allowed to fall hands of reactionaries. Instead, scholarship must examine central fixations upon which localism bases its claims. A left ecology must get even further into place than bioregionalism and other forms of Romantic localism. …

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