Ecotheory often comes in threes and fours. An article titled “The Four Ecologies of the Anthropocene” Mathevet, Raphaël. “Les quatre écologies de l’anthropocène.” The Conversation, January 13, 2021. http://theconversation.com/les-quatre-ecologies-de-lanthropocene-152490. specified four overlapping phases in ecological thought: obstinacy, reconciliation, renunciation, and the wild. Obstinacy correlated to an attitude prevalent during the 1970s and 80s that tried to resist species extinction by promoting a “stubborn” program of wildlife preservation. Reconciliation aligned with a 1990s trend toward resource management activism. Renunciation, which took hold in the 2000s, placed responsibility for ecosystemic dysfunction squarely on humans, and sought remediation through a partnership model of cooperative biodiversity. And finally, the wild, valued as a concept of nature beyond or without humans, proceeding on due course with its own autonomous expressive forms
This fourfold ecology competed with a more familiar threefold counterpart. A 2021 post “Why Three Ecologies?” by Adrian J Ivakhiv, (a geophilosopher whose topics range across “ecorealism,” “digital ecologies, and “ecologies of the moving image”),Ivakhiv, Adrian J. “Why Three Ecologies?” Immanence (blog), January 15, 2021. https://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2021/01/15/why-three-ecologies/. distinguished materialist, subjective and perceptual ecologies grafted from the Guattarian triad of “subjectivity, mutating socius, and “environment in the process of being reinvented.” These were set out in his groundbreaking broadside manifesto Les trois écologies, (published in 1989 in French, 2000 in English).Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies. Collection L’Espace critique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989. ; Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. London ; Athlone Press, 2000. They matched with what he characterized as the ecosophical “new deal,” built on an ally coalition of ecologists, feminists, and antiracists. Together they constituted the foundation of his projection of a new “social ecology.”
Guattari’s text could perhaps have been more aptly titled “les trois écosophies” since the treatise was centered on what he called an ecosophical ethics geared toward imagining “the creation of new animal and vegetable living species; new calibrations of the order of relation among oxygen, ozone and carbon; and new modes of cosmic and human praxis no longer beholden to the war machine and its ecocidal modes of production. Interestingly, though, ecosophy ethics was in turn qualified by four characteristics or forms divided into two pairs: “applied and theoretical, ethicopolitical and aesthetic.” These “two twos” were designed to replace three old forms of commitment: political, religious and associative. Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies. London ; Athlone Press, 2000, p.67. Which takes precedence in this instance, three or four? The question isn’t entirely frivolous, since part of what made ecosophy radical and dynamic, especially as Guattari practiced it, was the desire to unprise it from the dictatorship of the count, irrevocably compromised by its ties to capitalist, technoscientific neorationalism. So with this in mind, there’s something recidivist and contradictiory in Guattari’s recourse to three ecologies; it feels like specters of the old “three” classical unities underwriting the Trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), the Holy Trinity, (God, Father the Holy Ghost) and the three modalities of affirmation, negation and resolution in Hegelian dialectics.
I certainly do not want to overdo this fixation on tics of three and four. But I can’t help but see the vying among them as symptomatic of the intractability of number choices within programmatic thinking, especially (and strikingly often) in post-anthropocenic thought. I wouldn’t go so far as to say this formal/mathematical unconscious is hardwired into the psyche or must be treated as an insurmountable condition of cognitive architecture, but I do see ecosophy defining itself as a struggle with thinking by numbers and against what Gary Genosko calls the “risk of decay back into seriality.” We could say that Guattari’s numeracy undercut but also spurred his great venture in post-media ecological thinking. His efforts to think beyond paradigms, without categories, and across mental grooves of propositio expositio, and justificatio are productively constrained by threes and fours, if not the zeros and ones of the algorithm. In this context les trois écos of my title are an ironic nod to the tripartivity of Guattari’s “les trois écologies,” and an “echo” of my own relapse into triple-think on formulating a paper organized around the interrelation of three topoi - ecosophy, ecopoiesis, and ecocide. Each is embedded in the other not only by virtue of their common prefix (eco, from Greek oikos, signifying household, family, economy, kinship and affinity and appropriation), but also by virtue of their connection to a strong poiesis that taps into historically disparate traditions of Naturphilosophie, dark pastoral, and dystopian technoscience.
My focus here is on how écosophie becomes legible as an ecocidal ecopoiesis within a theoretical field increasingly oriented to transsensible and transfinite unfoldings within existential territories, to fungibilities of scale with respect to orders of the micro and the macro (as in Guattari’s “micropolitics of desire” or Foucault’s “microphysics of power”), and to “Universes of virtuality” relevant to the metaphysics of matter.Guattari, Felix, Chaosmosis: An ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Translated by Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Sydney: Power Publications, 1995, p. 126. Further references to this work will appear in the text abbreviated C.) What these aspects of the ecosophical field share is an impetus towards the transumption of those quantitatively organized regimes of time and space that zone thought into capitalist workspaces. This, I think is the force behind the “trans” in Guattarian transversality, which wants to change the nature and vertical directionality of thought as such without destroying subjectivities or nature itself. It was and remains a tall order, but it carries the implication that, at the current pass of planetary precarity, there is no philosophy without ecosophy at its core.
Today’s ecophilosophy harks back to 1970s theories of “unstable flows” (characteristic of work by Serres, Deleuze and Irigaray), and looks ahead, in Frédéric Neyrat’s estimation, to a multinatural, “relational and intensive field of life and nonlife.”Neyrat, Frédéric, The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation. Translated by Drew s. Burk, New York: Fordham University Press, 2019, pp. 10, 11, 17. It is involved in the critique of anthropocenic temporal orders qualified by Kathryn Yusoff as “a geo-logics of existence, simultaneously hacking and re-syncing the planet and its temporal structures to produce an arrangement of the future that looks decidedly irrational and unthought.”Kathryn Yusoff, “Epochal Aesthetics: Affectual Infrastructures of the Anthropocene,” e-flux 2017. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/accumulation/121847/epochal-aesthetics-affectual-infrastructures-of-the-anthropocene/ In the sphere of global language justice it taps into indigenous phenomenologies of native cosmos as well as contemporary idioms of “digital vitality.” cf. Liu, Lydia He. Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. The bibliography of the ecosophical field, spanning the work of Gregory Bateson, Arne Naess, André Gorz, Sylvia Wynter, Edouard Glissant, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stenghers, Rob Nixon, Eugene Thacker, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kathryn Yusoff, Dipesh Chakravarty, Malcolm Ferdinand, Andreas Malm, Rosalind Morris, Karen Barad, Elisabeth Povinelli, Gilles Clément, Patrice Maniglier, Baptiste Morizot, Pierre Charbonnier, Emanuel Coccia (among many others), increases by the day, with studies devoted to the sentience of plants, the kinship networks of trees, the biomes of marine life, air and forest zomia.
Much of this output, especially the most recent, elides the work of Guattari. As I’ve argued elsewhere, I think it is to Guattari that we owe the term écosophie in some of its most theoretically adventurous and creative uses.Apter, Emily, “Traduire l’écosophie”, RELIEF – Revue électronique de littérature française, 16(1), 2022, p. 227–247. https://revue-relief.org/article/view/12383. He began deploying it in a local context to ward off the tendency, in the French ecology movements of his time to turn the defense of species into a kind of nature identity politics all too easily appropriated by Romantic vitalism and the political right.“Vertige de l’immanence” in Guattari, Félix. Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie? Archives de la pensée critique. France? Lignes/IMEC, 2013, pp. 325-26. Translation my own. Guattari saw society as a collection of atomized individuals turned in on themselves, alienated by “capitalist homogenesis,” infantilized by mass media and riven by inter-ethnic conflict. His major texts - Chaosmose, Les trois écologies and Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie?, written against the backdrop of Chernobyl, the AIDS crisis and the first Gulf War –frequently arose out of talks or interviews and this lends them an immediacy and urgency of occasion that makes them all the more interesting to interact with today.
For Guattari, there was, of course, no one écosophie. At times it was synonymous with subjective cross-speciation, at other times with urban nomadism and affective responses to “strange attractors” in the city (see “Pratiques écosophiques et restauration de la cite subjective” in Guattari, Félix. Qu’est-ce que l’écosophie? Archives de la pensée critique. France? Lignes/IMEC, 2013, p.53ff.). As an ecology of mind, écosophie was identified with the dense mass of psychic experience and aleatory memory that goes missing in structural theories of the event. It puts out feelers to the phenomenal world producing what Guattari called “vertigos of immanence.” It relies on a sixth sense of the power of ordinary words or deterritorialized expressions to suddenly become available politically, springing into action from the mental habitus or environmental surround.
In Les trois écologies, an important philosopheme is heterogenesis, identified with “processes of continuous resingularization” that are initialized by subjectivities which issue forth from “the landscapes and fantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual.” (Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies. Collection L’Espace critique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989, p.69). This phrase appears in the last paragraph of the text: “La subjectivité, à travers des clefs transversales, s’instaure concurrement dans le monde de l’environnement, des grands Agencements sociaux et intitutionnels et, symétriquement, au sein des paysages et fantasmes habitant les sphères les plus intimes de l’individu.Guattari, Félix. Les trois écologies. Collection L’Espace critique. Paris: Editions Galilée, 1989, p.72. It is this “landscape,” this paysage (glossed by Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi as a “visionary cartography”) that interests me particularly. What forms does it assume? Where can intimations of it be found? My own inclination is to identify this subjectively expansive landscape with an ecopoiesis that speaks through particulates of oxygen, ozone, and carbon while resisting reduction to just another version of the romantic myth of “Nature’s script,” (historically compromised by its deep ties to ontonationalism). It is rather, a kind of ethico-aesthetic praxis involving experiments with linguistic materialisms and forms of storytelling that report on processes of decreation, devolution, reverse ontogenesis, autoimmunity, and the subsidence of life-support systems.
Ecopoiesis stands apart from conventional ecocriticism of the kind found, say, in Timothy Clark’s Ecocriticism on the Edge; The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept. A perfectly good book, it is over-reliant in my view on “green readings” of nature poets like Gary Snyder or Henry Lawson, the latter an iconic early twentieth-century Australian novelist whose landscapes captured the ravages of a drought-stricken outback.Clark, Timothy, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p. 49. Ecopoiesis exceeds and even bypasses theme-driven ecocriticism because it is not a theme-defined genre ; it is closer, as I see it, to a heuristic, or to a transmedial poeisis, that translates raw datum and material desiderata into cuneiform and scripted logos. This ecosophical transmediation crosses dimensions of space-time and history, it is at once archaic and futurally speculative. As a mode of experimental aesthetics, it can be glimpsed in Donna Haraway’s analysis of “crystal and fabric” metaphors;Haraway, Donna, Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields: Metaphors That Shape Embryos, Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004.) in the lush garden coaxed from the inhospitable environment of Dungeness, Kent by the late British filmmaker Derek Jarman in his final years; in the “decolonial ecologies,” aligned with Malcolm Ferdinand’s work on le Négrocene (a version of the Anthropocene that factors “le passé esclavagiste” into ecocidal history–from the Caribbean plantation to nuclear testing in Polynesia),Ferdinand, Malcolm, Interview on “Ecologie décoloniale”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKKz2yJ29VI. and in the “necropastoralism” that Claudia Rankine, borrowing the term from Joyelle McSweeny, applies to forms of “racial enclosure:”
“a political-aesthetic zone in which the fact of mankind’s depredations cannot be separated from an experience of ‘nature’ which is poisoned, mutated, aberrant, spectacular, full of ill effects and affects. The Necropastoral is a non-rational zone, anachronistic, it often looks backwards and does not subscribe to Cartesian coordinates or Enlightenment notions of rationality and linearity, cause and effect. It does not subscribe to humanism but is interested in non-human modalities, like those of bugs, viruses, weeds and mold.”As cited by Rankine, Claudia, Just Us: An American Conversation, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2020, pp. 88-89.
I will turn now to an example of necropastoral poetics drawing on the work of John Kinsella, an anarchist vegan Australian writer whose work is inextricable from his protests against mining, draining and agro-desertification. Since the early phase of his career in the 1980s Kinsella has been forging a genre of dark pastoral – he names it “the pastoraclasm” –that harks back to Theocritus’s Idylls, Virgil’s Bucolics, Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calendar and The Faerie Queen, and most pointedly, Sir Phillip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, a 16th century pastoral romance laced with political satire. Pastoral is typically constructed from dialogues between shepherds engaged in praising the felicities of rural life and bemoaning the corruption and court intrigue of society’s higher echelons. In Sydney’s Arcadia the shepherds’ idyll is interwoven with violent scenes of jousts, political betrayal, kidnapping, rape, and social disorder. Kinsella borrows this structure of ironic juxtaposition to set the stage for a war between the ancestral biome and Big Agriculture.
An epigraph from Sydney’s The New Arcadia leads off Kinsella’s collection of eclogues of the same title published in 2005. Sydney aligns the “sweetness of the air and other natural benefits,” with “well-tempered minds.” “True contentation,” he maintains, is achieved only through the refusal to chase after glory in posterity at a neighbor’s expense. “Quiet thinking” is the path to peaceful coexistence, preventing subjects from “wasting life in ravening.” “Ravening,” a particularly striking gerundive, underscores the ferocious hankering and hungering for profit animating core capitalist drives.
Sydney is quoted again in the opening of Kinsella’s “An Eclogue of Presence,” set up as a shouting match between “the Farmer,” murderously possessive of his land and hostile to all trespassers, (“I’ll come after you, and blood will run in the gullies”) and “the Young Bloke,” who claims his right to sojourn on open land and defends the cause of wildlife habitats: “And no matter what you’ve done to choke the gullies/they’d speak out in a language that’d just be noise to you/but my dad and cousins would enter the evening/with the spirits behind them, and the morning/would be filled with a lament heard often through scrub/and it would wind like smoke and swallow the hills.”. (Kinsella, John. The New Arcadia: Poems. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2005, p.98.) This dialogic tension carries over to “The Rural Stage,” where “the rural” is cleaved by the opposing forces of plant life and development. Nature’s elements speak in a lingo of toxicity, stunted vegetation, and environmental court cases looming on the horizon as a real estate agent tries to dissimulate the appearance of a building site wasted by crop-dusting:
…a gravel-pit reclaiming itself
and sandplain thinning crops across the dividing
median of road, a snapping futchel, differential
split, custos, this court-case
to determine flows beneath our wheels,
indeed our feet, oubliette households
…teleports for Mercedes-Benz,
but in fact obsession and a knowing
that has them lashing out, that will
see them thin on the ground
when there are no varieties
of wheat hardy enough
to sustain encomiums,
the rural. Kinsella, John. The New Arcadia: Poems. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2005, p.19
In « The Shitheads of Spray » Kinsella takes the violence wreaked on unwanted species further still, conjuring a scene of “seed vengeance” in which the combat moves of Bruce Lee are invoked against the destructive showers of “seed-spray,” those “haters of weeds” who are equally haters of all species of poetic language that protect the vocabulary of plants and parrots by means of language-play, as in the case of “broadleaf-outrage” which spawns the image of an angry plant species, or “dead gum lovers,” where “gum” stands in for “gun,” aimed at the killing of parrots.
Under-ode, antediluvian reprisal,
Seed vengeance, broad-leaf outrage,
Seed-spray head kick, the pressure point
Rumoured to have dropped Bruce Lee
In his tracks; haters of weeds,
Haters of any more words
Than needed: say it straight,
Vandals, poofter-bashers, migrant baiters,
Dead gum lovers, parrot killers,
Worshippers of spray-drenched fruit
That smiles without blight,… Kinsella, John. The New Arcadia: Poems. 1st ed. New York: Norton, 2005, p.114
Kinsella’s ecopolitical aesthetic speaks through the flora and fauna native to Australia’s wheatlands. It is a language of “Weird Melancholy,” Gordon Marcus Clarke’s generic term for the grotesque and weird contours of the desertified Australian outback and for “the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write.”Kinsella, John, Introduction to the poetry of Michael Dransfield, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 2002, p. Ix. Kinsella is citing Marcus Gordon Clarke’s In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning how to write. Some see beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness… the phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland called the Bush interprets itself, and he begins to understand why free Esau loved his heritage of desert-sand better than all the bountiful richness of Egypt.”) What is innovative about Weird Melancholy, Kinsella observes, is that it “does not sit on a Western timeline of historic change. It doesn’t fit the dialectic. Extending back tens of thousands of years through indigenous habitation, it is a poetry of song, surfaces, paint, sand, the body, trees and plants, and texture. It is of water and air and fire, of a dreaming that works beyond the linear.”Ibid. This language of the elements and of ancestral time approximates a new Natursprache, an Ur-language whose origins recur to Jakob Böhme’s mystical doctrine of natural language, and to efforts, in the language societies of seventeenth-century Nuremburg to recover, in the wake of Luther’s vernacular translation of the Bible, the force of an “Adamic or natural language capable of naming divine or immanent essences.” As Jane O. Newman has shown, this “Greco-Roman philosophical discussion of the natural versus the conventional origins of linguistic meaning (phusei/thesei), gave rise to debates over “whether names inhered in objects or were posited by humans” and whether “first causes” of divine language could be found in vernacular speech. At stake was vernacular German’s qualification as a language “both transcendent and immediately available in society usage” that would allow it to accede to the status of ‘principal’ scriptural tongue” on the plane of Greek, Hebrew and Latin. Now while it is easy to see, as Newman demonstrates, how Natursprache became a political instrument, hastening modern German’s dispatch onto the road of nationalist language theory, it is anything but nationalist in Kinsella’s hands. Newman, Jane O. Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 72-73.. Rather, Natursprache becomes a cipher of multinaturalism (decolonial, non-anthropocentric, attuned to native cosmos) and alternatively, an idiom of necropastoral tied to an era of anthropocenic industrialization and memorialized by the Lake District poets that qualifies as a “calamity form” – Anahid Nersessian’s term for “the great prestidigitation by which capital disguises its logic.”Nersessian, Anahid, The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2020, p. 3. The calamity form plots the coordinates of affective response; not just the “cloudfeel we find in “eco-georgics, whether lyrical ballads or the sky-paintings of Turner and Constable, but also the “pulse points,” the “mushrooming sum of a phenomenon’s harms.Ibid., p.20.” Such harms are intimated in Wordsworth’s landscapes, recorded as unsettling traces of forced relocation in the wake of the enclosure movement, or as the gridded outlines of agricultural production and property ownership that strafe the earth’s surface and divide its nomos, as Schmitt would argue, into patchworks of bordered sovereign territory.
A landscape consumed by social conflagrations and extractivist devastation comes fully into view as a calamity form in Kinsella’s hyper-translation of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer, Building on Delmore Schwartz’s literal English version from the 1930s, Kinsella treats translation with the greatest latitude; a medium of decoloniality and ecosophy that brings forth the latent ecocidal narrative already germinating in Rimbaud’s original. Composed in 1873, the year Belgian King Leopold II had his portrait minted on the currency of the Congo (which he had turned into a massive labor camp and penal colony) and also the year of the “Panic of 1873,” a global financial crisis precipitated by massive agricultural industrialization, the overexpansion of capital markets, bank failures and railway strikes, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell forms a natural pendant to Kinsella’s parallel history of decoloniality and the great unraveling of the Anthropocene in the Capitalocene. Taking aim at “the endgaming of life on earth by rapacious governments, companies, and individuals,” and “the exploitation of rurality for industrial wealth-building” Kinsella states clearly: “I have tried to create a consciously decolonising text,…aware of its own colonial antecedents and contradictions (and contra-indications).”On ecology and decoloniality cf. Ferdinand, Malcolm, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking From the Caribbean World. Translated by Anthony Paul Smith. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022. Ferdinand’s focus on what he calls “colonial inhabitation,” as a form of “othercide” defined as the “refusal of the possibility of inhabiting the Earth in the presence of an other, of a person who is different from a “self” [moi] in their appearance, their social affiliations, or their beliefs.” (p. 29). See too, Elizabeth DeLoughrey which looks at how military technologies and nuclear testing sites in and native land, have historically reinforced the alignment of coloniality and environmental impact.) Avoiding the trap of “declensionist” narratives that, according to Ursula Heise, rely on the predictable arc from the awe of the natural sublime to the foreboding of looming destruction, Kinsella channels the “`howl’ of Rimbaud’s original into a stream of imprecations.Kinsella, John, “Aftering Delmore’s Season in Hell [Rimbaud] translation,” See Heise, Ursula K. , Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016, p. 7. Interestingly, for all her cogent mapping of ecopolitical genres – as in “elegy and comedy in conservation stories – and professed attention to “cultural meanings,” the book treats meaning monolingually, as if the actual particular languages of its inflection had little to no bearing on its interpretation.)
Written in the immediate wake of his violent break-up with Paul Verlaine and under the influence of absinthe and opium, Rimbaud’s Season in Hell gave full thrush to a Satanic agency that Kinsella aligns with the fate of the dying Anthropocene. In his wildly free translation, he rewords Rimbaud’s Coleridge-inspired hallucinations of a hellfire world, featuring “visionary abjection arising from the mixing of solids and liquids of red & black.” High on “high-grade heroin” and partially blinded by “earth-eating light,” Kinsella’s Jesus walks “on lakes of boiling plastic… the polypropylene emerald curve of the corporate waves gathers his light in its powerhousecrypt, his brown locks tattered….”Ibid. In the rush of these “corporate waves” we experience not only “the toxic splurge of damnation,” but also something on the order of what Alain Badiou, writing on the theme of “desperate love” in Rimbaud’s Illuminations, characterized as the dissolution of intensities “in the icy waters of egoistical calculation.”Badiou, Alain, “Badiou Reads Rimbaud (2): the death of intensity/Agent Swarm in https://terenceblake.wordpress.com/2016.12/19/badiou-reads-rimbaud-3-the-death-of-intensity/.
Rimbaud’s narrator is an anarchist and revolutionary; self-presenting as a Black slave and continually testifying before an absent court of law against the ravages of colonial oppression, white supremacy and the environmental damage wreaked by extractivism. Kinsella does not embellish; he simply infuses this narrative voice with accents of actuality, emergency and cruel optimism: “I daily watch the illegal timber milling operation, using logs from mine sits in The Hills as part of a symbiosis of extraction — debranching unbarking treating chopping — in which red saps runs over the oilstained soil below the mill.] Bonanza, I’d bellow out with my failed irony.” Fully activating the jarring effect of anachronism, Kinsella’s translation turns Rimbaud’s dyspeptic, anti-establishment rumblings into system-toppling attacks on crony capitalism and racial extractivism. Rimbaud’s “Je suis lépreux, sur les pots cassés et les orties, au pied d’un mur rongé par le soleil,” rendered literally by Delmore Schwartz as “I, leprous, seated myself on broken pots and nettles, at the foot of a wall devoured by the sun,” is radicalized by Kinsella with the phrase: “Bodyrot of the Age, parked on trashed cell-phones, tentacles of circuitry slowly (de)composed by the sun.” Rimbaud ‘s evocation of perpetually incarcerated convicts and roving bands of out-of-work rural laborers, is counterpoised in Kinsella’s version to “billionaires who swan through the foyers of goldleaf hotels glittering their smiles over the land they spoliate,” oblivious to “the poisoned agri-workers.” Here, primitive accumulation and technological resource exploitation, co-constitutive of planetary injustice, are given full force of expression as Natursprache, albeit in necropastoralist vein.
Kinsella’s necropastoral – a foray into the aesthetics of ecosophy – responds to and transforms a pastoral genre tradition spanning Greek and Latin classicism, the French and Italian Renaissance, the German seventeenth century, which saw the appearance of language societies dedicated to the sacralization of vernacular speech, and, in the critical literature, Erwin Panofsky’s extraordinary essay “Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition” (which opens with Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson quibbling over whether the Latin tombstone inscription should be rendered “I am in Arcadia” or “death is even in Arcadia”), and William Empson’s 1935 classic Some Versions of Pastoral. Kinsella’s version of pastoral is culled from Australia’s wheatlands, a counterpart to Aimé Césaire, Derek Wolcott and Eduard Glissant’s island landscapes standing on the ruins of plantation economies, and to Michel Deguy, Lisa Robertson and Forrest Gander’s inventories of species despoiled by carboniferous byproducts. Not a theme poetics, this necropastoral Natursprache is closer to a critical praxis, a practice of translating earthly destruction into live language. To the onrush of ecosophical thought on resource justice, quantum entanglement, and temporal imaginaries of terranean finitude, we can add Kinsella’s ecopoiesis, a poetics that keeps its ear to the ground and its eye on “on the shitheads of spray.”