Week 10: (Digital) humanities - meaning in the humanities

Even a short break to the 'outside' world served as a plentiful reminder that academia is truly insulated and insular - a bubble that many struggle to understand - and one that now more than ever has work to do, minds to change, and meanings to impart.

Alan Liu's The Meaning of Digital Humanities didn't explicate the genre/study/field as much as I would have liked, but it did result in inciting some significant feelings about how people conceive of the humanities and what that might mean for us. But let's set that aside for now and look at the article...

Liu posits that the effort to suss out the purpose or meaning of digital humanities is really a process of questing the meaning of humanities as a whole, and it all comes down to who and what is meaningful in society. "Here we reach the crux of the meaning problem in the digital humanities:"

[A] computer should be able to read texts algorithmically and discover word cohorts or clusters leading to themes without acting on an initial concept from an interpreter looking to confirm a particular theme...however, tabula rasa interpretation puts in question Heuser and Le-Khac's ultimate goal, which is to get from numbers to humanistic meaning.

And so we have set up a dichotomy between digital and human (fact and interpretation, science and literature, data vs. analysis, etc.). (Because we need more of those right?) Liu identifies a type of hybridity that digital humanities might achieve by borrowing features from neighboring fields: a mix between empirical and semantic and even acknowledges the 'postmodern' branch of STS that understands the impure, entangled, unstable relationship between human and machine, especially in the process of making and locating meaning. But then rounds out his article by reiterating the crisis facing the humanities and posing ways for the digital humanities to vouch for its overly-sentimental sister field.

I could be vastly misunderstanding the article, but it seemed like another argument for digital as necessarily opposed to humanist, and that humanities are also necessarily/solely humanist. Now, as an ecocritic, plenty of what I do has a post-human feel, and I think that as a whole, many other scholars are comfortable with the fact that nonhuman factors are at play in society, history, and literature. I also get the idea that digital humanities is not about validating the humanities through method, or scientizing literary research to be cool or savvy or up to date, which is what this article makes it out to be.

The question of whether machines and modeling and digitization can do the work of analysis is one that isn't cleared up. We should opt for a mix! Isn't a good enough answer for me, either. I also don't think that if it's a purely 'human' endeavor, it is a necessarily humanist or athropocentric one.

My entire paper is tackling the notion of looking outside the anthropocene, and technology and digitization plays a big part in that. But those creatures or ideas or meanings that exist beyond humanism are not purely empirical or data-driven. The mixture has to be intentional and validating for both sides. I don't think this article took a subtle or nuanced approach, and left me feeling agitated but uninformed. Did anyone else get a better grip on this?

Week 10: Thoreau, "Walking," and Kates

Patrick Chura, in Thoreau the Land Surveyor (2010), identifies the triad of landowner, surveyor, and squatter crucial to the development and history of American property and land law in the mid-19th century. To secure and profit from his property, the American landowner relies on strong property rights of enclosure, exclusive use, and protection guaranteed by the state. At the same time the landowner profited from these guaranteed rights, the state worked through them to extend its authority westward into areas where it had yet to establish control. The surveyor was integral to making and marking the land into legible, abstract forms that could be subject to legal frameworks and property guarantees. The surveyor deployed trigonometric and measuring tools to create maps, boundaries, and territories that were necessary for the landowner to secure his land and for the state to extend its control. However, landownership and the surveying it required displaced inhabitants who occupied land but did not have title ownership to it. Although they inhabited and improved the land, they did not possess certain rights and legal guarantees afforded to a title holder. Squatters without title contested landownership by transgressing the same maps, boundaries, and territories that the surveyor, as an agent of the state and the landowner, charted out. They claim their rights through making improvements to land abandoned by the title holder, taking advantage of property law contradictory to the framework of which the landowner takes advantage.

According to the above triad, the relations between each of the three subjects—the landowner, the surveyor, and the squatter—appear straightforward: the landowner, with help from the surveyor’s instruments, imposes his rights at the expense of the squatter who resists displacement through counter-imposing his own rights. In this struggle, legal precedent is made as cases between squatter and landowner are decided, and boundaries are contested and reformed in response to the struggle.

However, Thoreau, as a squatter at Walden Pond (among other places) and as a commercial surveyor, complicates this triad. Chura describes Thoreau, in terms of this triad, as “an individualistic squatter and nascent literary figure” who was “surveying the Walden woods for conspicuously anti-materialistic motives, not wanting to get his ‘fingers burned by actual possession’” and “whose surveying cleansed rather than created land boundaries” (Chura 9). Although Chura goes on to argue in his book just how Thoreau as a land surveyor cleanses boundaries, he does not touch upon Thoreau as a squatter. I am interested not just in Thoreau’s anti-materialistic surveying but how he deploys it in the service not of the landowner but of the squatter. If Thoreau enlists a surveyor’s perspective to strengthen a squatter’s mode of possession, what new kinds of relationships with the land and ownership emerge from this peculiar alliance? How do these relationships fit into Thoreau’s political and transcendental project, if they do at all?

Thoreau’s essay, “Walking,” satirizes the alliance between landowner and surveyor and advocates for a radically new relationship with the land. Because the landowner is so eager to establish and secure the boundaries of his acquired property with the help of the surveyor, his place-sense is blinded so that he cannot see the paradise he has purchased and finds himself in. Thoreau satirizes the “worldly miser” slogging through a “boggy, stygian fen” with his surveyor just to find a stake that marks the boundary of his property. The miser’s surveyor is none other than “The Prince of Darkness” himself (Thoreau 230). In this scene, the surveyor’s staking off threatens to abstract place in such a way that diminishes the landowner’s capacity to see the place for what it is: a paradise dense with opportunity for encounters with Nature. Thoreau is arguing here that the traditional relationship between the surveyor and the landowner inhibits self-culture and is in fact dangerous to the moral health of civilization.

Thoreau reclaims the stygian swamp from the abstractions of land surveying and links the fertility of its muck and soil, merely a contour of limited use to the surveyor, to the moral growth and fortitude of civilization. Thoreau writes that “A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages” (242). Thoreau argues that the salvation of civilization depends on the preservation of swamps and undeveloped wildernesses because a town is a part of wilderness ecology and benefits from its processes of reproduction and renewal. By creating boundaries and drawing lines across the land, civilization is severed from wilderness and is no longer manured by its fertile moral soil.

However, Thoreau retools the instruments that create boundaries and draw lines to enlarge his place-sense. By widening his aperture of perception, with the help of his surveying ability, Thoreau is able to perceive exactly the ways in which “A man’s health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospects as his farm does loads of much” (242). He can gather an immense descriptive archive of sense data that includes botanical and meteorological details, various historical anecdotes, thousands of his own personal encounters with human and non-human inhabitants, technical descriptions about a particular trade. Thoreau situates and relates the material in the archive in such a way that enables him to make the moral abstraction necessary to argue that encounters with Nature and wilderness result in improved moral health.

There are many moving parts in my seminar paper, many different discourses that I insist intersect with each other in Thoreau’s writing. I’m working with a legal history of squatting and adverse possession, the literary history of Thoreau’s writing itself (one riven with contradiction and inconsistency), and the history of surveying, boundaries, and landownership, to say nothing of the botanical, scientific, historical, and personal material Thoreau includes in his writing. With so many histories running through my project, I’m struggling to organize them all in a meaningful way.

Joshua Kates’ critique of the period might illuminate a model of relating the moving parts of my paper to each other. First, I need to resist regarding the histories of squatting, Thoreau’s writing, surveying, et al as though they were temporally situated in a sort of homogeneous continuity. Kates explains that this notion conceives of time as an enclosed, homogeneous field of “Past, Present, Future” on which temporal segments can be isolated, arranged, and sequenced. I’m tempted to situate the 1840s-1860s as Thoreau’s historical “Present” and then draw on the “Past” to determine, for example, what case precedent informed land law during the 1840s-1860s and then parallel that past with the history of landownership in Concord. However, I’m assuming I’m free to arrange these two different histories as relational parallels to begin with. Althusser/Kates might object to that historiographical move.

Second, I should also resist regarding the histories operating in my paper as though they were simultaneous to Thoreau’s writing, as though just because a surveyor’s map of Walden Pond was drawn up the same time Thoreau squatted there doesn’t mean that simultaneity conveys a particular or automatic relation. Althusser/Kates warns against viewing history in terms of contemporaneity: an assumption that temporal contents that occupy the same slice of time in a given field exist simultaneously to each other and operate within the same “historical bandwith,” as though simultaneity were an automatic, given relation, as though no other temporal relation were possible (Kates 138). I could slice up time into an 1840-1860 portion and stack up each historical item and then relate them by virtue of their contemporaneity, but that would foreclose the possibility of different histories operating on different temporal scales. The history of squatter’s rights reaches back all the way to the Middle Ages, whereas the history of American landownership reaches back at most 200 years. The two different timescales may unfold differently and produce different “presents” because they are drawing on different fields of historical material.

Althusser offers a model for regarding multiple histories together that avoids the pitfalls of homogeneous continuity and contemporaneity. He imagines, Kates writes, “A proliferation of histories and temporalities […] each independent, even as each maintains the mark of its relation to the others within itself. Althusser thus conceives ‘of an economic history, a political history, a history of religions, of ideologies’ (Althusser and Balibar 100)” (Kates 141). According to this model of history, the theoretical work of my paper would primarily involve composing each history operating within my argument (even its temporal difference) and then tracing the relational mark that each history leaves on the other. My paper would point out the complexity and depth of these marks. I’m not sure what this would look like, but I imagine it might look like Foucault’s exploration of the gaps and discontinuities between colliding discourses. The marks on each history might take the form of a gap or discontinuity.

Three Types of Game Theory and Their (Mis)Uses in Literature

(Here’s my post, finally—please forgive the lateness)

I’ve started to work on the preliminary reading and research for my seminar paper, and I wanted to use this post to talk through two of the articles that I’ve looked at on aesthetic game theory, and whether or not that’s really an appropriate angle.

As I mentioned in another post, part of my idea is to look at tests of love and chastity as games. However, as I’m reading through papers I’m realizing that there are three very distinct “game theories” being discussed, and that it’s important to delineate these in order to make any kind of clear argument. They are roughly, as follows:

1.   Economic/behavioral game theory. This is the type of game theory that pertains to situations in which players may choose to cooperate or to defect, and often have imperfect knowledge of the state of the game. Chance and probability can be involved here (either for Bayesian updating as new information becomes available, or to determine expected utility). The objective of these games is to maximize utility. Utility is determined by the needs and wants of the individual player.
   
2. Combinatorial game theory. This is a branch of discrete mathematics. I hadn’t really expected it to come up but in the article “What Maggie Knew: Game Theory, "The Golden Bowl," and the Possibilities of Aesthetic Knowledge,” Jamesian scholar Jonathan Freedman (purposefully or otherwise) confuses combinatorial and economic game theory and begins comparing the situation in “The Golden Bowl” to a game of tic tac toe. This actually has interesting rhetorical implications, since combinatorial games—especially trivial ones like tic tac toe—often have a predetermined winner based on which player has the first move, assuming that all play is optimal. Combinatorial games are not probability based and generally afford all players complete knowledge of the state of the game. They also lack the moral or ethical component of economic games, which may entail the option to cooperate or to defect. The goal here is to obtain a mathematical victory.
   
3.  Game studies. This is the study of games as literature, most often applied to digital media (video games, interactive fiction, etc.) While game studies may involve examining or producing computer code, it is rarely mathematical. This field looks at the elements of the game, the conditions for winning/loosing, and the constraints of the game among other things. One of the defining concepts here is procedural rhetoric—the idea that the options made available to the players and the moves that they are either allowed or forbidden to make are rhetorically significant.

These are very different theoretical frameworks and, I’m realizing that there is a real danger of letting these things get tangled up in one another because they are similarly named and all pertain—broadly—to games as a medium.

In my paper, I will not be concerning myself with combinatorial games. While the ideas of a mathematically predetermined outcome and optimal play might actually be worth exaining, for what I’m trying to discuss (the unviability of love tests, and the rhetorical moves that must be made in order to make them viable) I don’t believe that this is relevant. If anything, it leads to something of an oversimplification.

I am still in the process of deciding whether or not economic game theory makes sense as a model here, and that’s part of what I’m trying to work out in this post. In some ways, it fits. The husband has the option to test his wife, or not to test her. The wife has the option to be faithful or unfaithful. However, by this model, the love test actually is a viable option. Setting this up as a two player game suggests that there actually is a reasonable utility in performing the test. Constructing a more nuanced model that accounts for the intricacies of the situation would require quantitative measures of utility and the probability of any given situation. Since all the data here is qualitative, any attempt to assign such values strikes me as arbitrary and unmathematical. While a multistep game and updating probability could be used to discuss the ongoing nature of the test and the inability to produce positive evidence of chastity (which is a negative trait, being the absence of extramarital sex), this would also need to be done in broad strokes. There may be a way to model this situation using behavioral/economic game theory, but at the moment I’m not quite grasping it. More so, I haven’t decided whether or not trying to model the possible outcome in a pseudo mathematical form actually adds value to my argument.

As such, it seems that this is not actually a combinatorial or economic game theory but game studies that provides the best model for looking at the love test. This model moves the focus onto the actual procedures of the game in a way that would make it possible to ask questions about the lack of an endpoint and what each side must do to “win.” It also opens up the fact that the set of possible outcomes changes when the game is initiated. It is only by starting the love test that it becomes possible for Lear or Posthumus Leonatus to lose, since neither one actually doubted the faith of the women receiving the test prior to initiating the test.

(TLDR: I’ve been reading the wrong articles.)

What is ethnic literature?

I didn't always want to do ethnic literature. For most of my academic career, I've been focused on the American Renaissance writers and print culture, fascinated by their attempts to shape American thinking and how new mass print production was to the country. It wasn't really an issue-I wasn't disinterested in race and ethnicity; I just was more focused on other things at the time and most ethnic lit classes at my school were geared towards contemporary literature. Then I took a Chicanx lit class and we read The Squatter and the Don and The Collected Stories of Maria Cristina Mena, the former published in the late nineteenth century and the latter at the turn of the century. The stories themselves weren't so impressive (the Mena is definitely worth reading, but the Ruiz de Burton is a rough time), but I was fascinated by the political history surrounding the recovery of both texts. The Squatter and the Don, about the complicated landscape of race and land rights during California's annexation, was autobiographical-Ruiz de Burton herself was embroiled in a long court battle to retain her husband's land after he died. Mena, though a successful writer during her time, published under her husband's name (Chambers) and so, for a long time, was denied being labeled an ethnic writer and then further marginalized for stories that weren't "political." I then realized that there was more. It just had never occurred to me that, in the 2000's, we would still have to "recover" texts and argue that they were deserving of study.

Reading Kirsten Silva Gruesz's article reminded me of the complicated history of ethnic lit, especially when periodized. There's a tendency (as I've proven) to think that ethnic lit doesn't start until the mid-20th-century because POC just weren't writing or were not allowed to publish or whatever. Frank Chin et al. once argued that Chinese Americans have no literacy legacy because the first Chinese who came to America did so by force and thus, hated their time in America so much that they burned their journals, letters, etc and tossed them into the sea, believing that at least those ashes could make it back to their home country. When Gruesz discusses the types of texts included in the Norton anthology, mostly nonfiction, but not revolutionary texts or texts "inspired by the 1846-8 war with Mexico, which had world-shaping effects on California and Texas," you can see this instinctual protection of a white supremacist American canon (339). I don't mean it's a conscious neo-Nazi promoting move, but there is a troubling lack of attention towards racial issues other than slavery during the 19th century.

Gruesz provides a sharp contrast to the treatment of "Latino literature" with African American literature: "periodizing the African American past was crucial, almost sacral, to the project; the anthology aimed not only to stake a black presence far back in the nation's colonial prehistory but also to put pressure on the default period markers of mainstream American literature" (337). African American literature is predicated on reminding America that black people have been influential in its "inception" (so to speak) and it also critiques periodization itself. Yet, as we can see in the quote I used in the previous paragraph, there isn't the same impulse for Latinx or Asian American literature that people have with African American or even Native American literature. Sui Sin Far, a prolific and "out" Chinese author (she's only 1/4 Chinese, but published under a Chinese name) and Maria de Ruiz Burton aren't taught, even though their stories revolve around California's formation. Why don't we want to "legitimize" these ethnic groups, argue for their presence in the deep time of our literary canon? It's weird, right? It definitely feels like we don't want to admit that there was any more racial violence after Native genocide and African American slavery, even though there was.

Gruesz' other insights about the trouble with Latinx lit in that it's hemispheric, but we like to focus on Latin America, that the anthology is driven by class perception (this is what middle-class Latinx want to read or whatever), and that its multiple languages trouble their inclusion in the canon also resonates with Asian diaspora etc. Many want to reject the ethnic literature category and labeling separate canons, not wanting to be reduced to a "minority," but they seem to implicitly accept canonicity in general. I don't know how to get rid of the canon or if it can be done at all. But, I do know that my future projects are geared towards recovering more ethnic experiences in the 19th century so we can gain a fuller knowledge, a more thick description, of the time and the country.

P.S. There's an archive here at Davis about the South Asian presence in 19th cent California!

Latino Literature and Biopolitics

The canonization of Latino literature is complicated because it does not follow a linear pattern of historcization. Kristen Silva Gruez reviews the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature (NALL) in an effort to demonstrate how canonocity cannot apply. The primary reason for this failure is that there is no prior anthology to compare it with. Gruez maintains that periodicity and canonicity generally evolve simultaneously, or in a chicken and egg relationship, but with NALL, there is only an egg (Gruez 336). Gruez effectively highlights the difficulties that NALL contends with by comparing the development of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (NAAAL). NAAAL, she articulates, operates through periodicity and canonicity because it is organized around a main event: slavery. Furthermore, establishing a literary African American presence in the past is essential to its legitimacy.

            Latino literature, as opposed to African American, resists the need to stem from one major episode. Latino history stems from two hemispheres and is in “constant mututation” (Gruez 337). Due to the complex, multi-dimensional history it is difficult to organize in the traditional Norton model. To deal with this predicament, the editors divided it up into two parts: United States and Latin America (which has 21 parts), and then into subcategories of “Colonization” and “Annexation.” This method presents further problems as it lacks revolutionary texts and others that would function more effectively as delineators. Moreover, the anthology is aimed towards an American market and many of the texts are translated to English, but much of the integrity is lost in translation. Ultimately, Gruez determines that despite these moments of inadequacy, the NAAL serves as a marker for “middle class acceptance” and similar to the NAAAL, it is symbol of Latino existence in literary history: “the unanswered question of what it was seems besides the point” (Gruez 340).

              In thinking about the institution within Bleak House, I am reminded of Nancy Armstrong’s article “Gender Must Be Defended” in which she discusses the function of biopolitics. The practice during Victorian England emerged through the management of disease and the government’s sentiment that there were those who were permitted to live, and those who were let to die. Dickens challenges this apparatus by having Esther contract smallpox. Although she survives, it temporary blinds--and permanently disfigures her. Armstrong points out: “Like the fog and sewage, disease connects those protected by domestic enclosures with those excluded from them. In so doing, the contagion that disfigures Esther displaces the discourse of class warfare with what Foucault describes as a biological and medical recoding of race” (Armstrong 538). The institution that deems certain members acceptable or unacceptable is altered by the contagion that spreads among all social classes within the novel. However, even though the domestic space ceases to protect Esther from disease, the novel contradicts this notion. Jo, who is Esther’s diseased counterpart but social opposite, does not survive the illness, arguably, because of poverty. Esther, on the other hand, has round the clock care and a comfortable home to aid her recovery. Indeed, Dickens shows the essence of contagion, but ultimately restores the individuals to their respective social classes.

            To connect Dickens' complication of biopolitics to Gruez’s article, the attempt to canonize Latino literature demonstrates an effort to resist the subordinate position within American literature as a whole. Yet, as Gruez points out, Latino literature cannot fit into the confines of the Norton structure. By failing to take into account language barriers and pertinent events, the effort falls short. Similarly, disease among all classes disrupts the biopolitical structure, but resumes its authority when the domestic space provides safety to thwart its grasp. 

It came from the Red Deeps: Methodology of a Living Bog Woman in George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss

I'm nearing the end of my paper and that's where these paragraphs come in. I still have a little more ground to cover and need to bring in some specific secondary sources related to Eliot/Mill on the Floss since my resources are queer theory heavy and also 19th century sources as well. At this point in my paper I suggest Maggie has come into contact with the Red Deeps and has basically been moved out of heteronormative production and into the organization of ecological assemblage via the Red Deeps which includes symptoms such as: the thick present (not thinking about the future. indefinitely in process, unfinished/incomplete), nonproduction, relationships not built within heterosexual terms (wife, mother, woman--making domestic objects), and no longer using the organizing principles of life and death but animacies. Once Maggie leaves the Red Deeps, these symptoms crop up in such a way that we can no longer understand her relationships with men through the language of heteronormative production. As the living bog woman of the Red Deeps (the embodiment of the above symptoms), Maggie's relationships are no longer built within the language of heteronormative production, but in the language of ecological assemblage.

Not merely a newly acquired entity within the Red Deeps assemblage, described, made, and animated by others, Maggie actually animates the thick present herself, into a mode of hetero-linear refusal through her authorization of The Pirate’s Minna Troil as a bog woman role model. While reading, Maggie wants “to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones” (Eliot 348). By consulting Walter Scott’s The Pirate (1822) and denying its linear wholeness, Maggie authorizes incompleteness as a modality not just for Minna, but for herself. When she first encounters Philip Wakem, he happily offers the second volume of The Pirate so that she can finally get on with finishing it. However, Maggie refuses: “O, I began that once; I read to where Minna is walking with Cleveland, and I could never get to read the rest” (Eliot 323). Rather than finish the novel and accept whatever ending Scott chooses for Minna, Maggie simply stops reading.[1]  I argue that Maggie’s refusal to finish The Pirate is a queer-feminist form of serial engagement. Maggie’s choice to stop reading, offers a means of refusing the tropic narratives of women like her. By maintaining the scene of Minna and Cleveland walking by the rough sea, the story remains indefinitely in the present and incomplete—Cleveland never dies and Minna never refuses her passion and imagination for a long life of familial duty and “saintly renunciation” (Lovesey 323). In refusing to follow the rules and read the novel in its entirety—from beginning to end, Maggie co-opts Scott’s narrative and instead authorizes her own bog woman blueprint.

On this blueprint, Maggie not only refuses to authorize the development of Scott’s ending but also re-locates happiness in the present, offering up her own definition of what bog woman happiness looks like. Without finishing the novel, Maggie easily anticipates the ending for a woman after her own bog: “I went on with it in my own head, and I made several endings; but they were all unhappy, I could never make a happy ending out of that beginning” (Eliot 323). Each time she attempts her own ending for Minna, “they were all unhappy,” presumably because they could not and did not maintain that present and unfinished image of Minna and Cleveland walking together. Now let’s do what Maggie could not do. Let’s use her lens as a feminist methodology—one in which happiness is defined by Minna, and her in media res relationship with Cleveland—to read Scott’s ending of The Pirate:

The high-minded and imaginative Minna, she, gifted with such depth of feeling and enthusiasm, yet doomed to see both blighted in early youth, because, with the inexperience of a disposition equally romantic and ignorant, she had built the fabric of her happiness on a quicksand instead of a rock,—was she, could she be happy? Reader, she was happy. (Scott 335)

Minna does not maintain her “depth of feeling and enthusiasm,” those original qualities that characterize her, through the end of the novel. The narrator ends this point with the firm, declarative, “she was happy” as an attempt to convince us, the reader, that in spite of building “her happiness on quicksand” he is certain of Minna’s final condition as happy and alone, with her beloved dead. With Maggie’s methodology in mind, I do not buy his reading of Minna. The narrator makes a moralistic call for the environmental material Minna should have used to build her happiness: stone. Stone is something secure and stable. It is not sticky. It does not latch onto, change, or transform, compared to quicksand, an unstable and thick compound of sand and water.

Lo and behold then, Minna emerges from the thickness, a Maggie-authorized bog woman whose mode of existence establishes a blueprint for Maggie’s own feminist methodology. Minna’s happiness materializes as a boggy compound that causes one to be stuck and unable to move forward, putting Minna, metaphorically, in an interdependent relationship with her quicksand happiness: one characterized by sympoiesis.[2] To define Minna in a sympoietic relationship with her quicksand happiness suggests that those properties of quicksand—to stay stuck and to stay present—are ones attached to Minna and extend her and from her, rather than from the narrator or her hetero-patriarchal society’s moralistic judgments. Through Maggie’s lens, Minna’s happiness is not “saintly renunciation,” but the non-ending Maggie authorizes for her, allowing Minna to stay with her “feeling and enthusiasm” and with Cleveland near the rough sea. Maggie’s reading of Minna becomes the ultimate blueprint for her own life. Maggie builds a feminist methodology for resisting her hetero-linear society through the act of reading novels without finishing them. Her boggy lens re-locates happiness in the unfinished and incomplete present, within Minna, and by extension, within herself.

Much like her engagement with Minna and The Pirate, Maggie does not simply devolve into a mode of stasis, of nonprogression, and nonproductivity—she does not merely fall in repose, but actively and willfully refuses to produce and/or produce properly as a woman in St. Ogg’s society. Of course Maggie cannot camp out forever with the Scotch firs, the stone quarry, and Philip Wakem. Eventually she must leave the Red Deeps. And she does. Tom bans her secret meetings with Philip Wakem, and the Red Deeps themselves seem to almost retreat and disappear entirely from the novel, except for the carrier, Maggie. She seems fine. No itch or rash or irritation, yet, Maggie remains affected and I would argue, metaphorically infected by her contact with the Red Deeps’ thick present. She is a living bog woman, uprooted from the Red Deeps and planted firmly in the ground of the hetero-linear trajectory that St. Oggs and Dorlcote Mill portend. In a sentence later omitted from publication, Eliot’s narrator aptly frames Maggie as an unbounded subject: “a girl of no startling appearance, and who will never be a Sappho or Madame Roland or anything else that the world takes wide note of, may still hold forces within her as the living plant-seed does, which will make a way for themselves, often in a shattering, violent matter” (Eliot 262; my emphasis). In this way, the transplant metaphor is made real. Maggie gains an ecological multiplicity as a “living plant-seed”; it’s dispersal, and by extension, Maggie’s own, recalls the languages of sympoiesis, assemblage, and animacy previously associated only with the Red Deeps.

Maggie’s re-entrance into St. Ogg’s society then no longer makes sense within heteropatriarchal terminology and relational organizations. Without Maggie’s living bog woman methodology incubated within the Red Deeps, readers cannot come to understand her relationships with Philip Wakem and Stephen Guest. In other words, these relationships, read through the language of the heteropatriarchy come to be understood as scandalous, while read through the language of ecological assemblages and animacies come to no longer be understood as dependent.[3] When Tom releases Maggie from her promise to not see Philip Wakem, he explains why: “while my father was living, I felt bound to use the utmost power over you…But now I must leave you to your own choice. You wish to be independent; you told me so after my father’s death. My opinion is not changed. If you think of Philip as a lover again, you must give up me” (Eliot 400). Tom attempts to use heteropatriarchal language to not only define Maggie’s relationship with Philip but also to separately threaten her relationship with himself. Though he suggests Maggie desires to be “independent,” he re-locates Maggie’s dependency elsewhere—not on himself, but on Philip, “as a lover,” thus maintaining her within her proper social placement. Yet, Maggie no longer interacts within this heteropatriarchal economy of exchange—of a progression towards male dependency. Her relationship with Philip never seems to get anywhere: as Stephen Guest points out for confirmation, “You are engaged to Philip Wakem,” Maggie responds in a different register: “I consider myself engaged to him—I don’t mean to marry any one else” (Eliot 452). Rather than simply confirm Stephen’s point in the affirmative, she qualifies it in a way that indefinitely prolongs completion of the marital process. As readers know, Maggie never marries Philip or Stephen. By remaining engaged but never married, she never completes the heterosexual process that defines gendered relations. Instead, Maggie’s answer collapses distinctions between the heteropatriarchal categories of “engagement” and “marriage,” resulting in those categories as no longer disparate, singular, and linear. Within her living bog woman methodology, Philip comes to exist in relation to Maggie in an entirely new way. Not a brother, husband or friend, but as an indefinitely present lover/nonlover, a category of no means within the organizing principles of heteronormative re/production and yet a category very legible within Maggie’s new language of assemblage.

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[1] As an illustrative anecdote, over the past year in serial television, the trope, “bury your gays” went viral. The trope defines the common practice of unnecessarily killing queer characters more often than white, hetero, cis characters. Although not a new trope, new ways of resisting the trope have also surfaced, including simply refusing to continue to watch. By refusing to watch these deaths, I argue that viewers are able to maintain a living present for queer characters the show. See, Williams: “How Kids On The Internet Are Rejecting The ‘Bury Your Gays’ Trope.”

[2] Donna Haraway describes sympoiesis as ‘“making with.” Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing…Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it” (58).

[3]The anonymous writer of “Women and Children in America” in the 1867 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine infers that “nothing in the world—at least to the male eye—equals in pleasantness the face and form of a bashful virtuous woman, looking up to a man for support and guidance,” and that nothing is more disagreeable than a woman who is “too ignorant…to accept the place that properly belongs to her in the social system” (82-23). Contemporary readers can understand that Rather than a social system then, Maggie now belongs to an ecological assemblage and any attempt to organize her within those previous terms of heteropatriarchal dependence no longer make sense.  

Thinking through Thoreau’s Temporal Disobedience and Pneumachroncitiy with Kates and Althusser

Joshua Kates’ illuminating analysis of the possibilities and shortcomings of Althusser’s 1965 Reading Capital offers some unexpected resonance with my current research project exploring the ways that Thoreau resists homogenous temporal continuity across his oeuvre, and more specifically in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. As Kates outlines, Althusser complicates the cleanly segmented monoliths of periodization by atomizing the society into disparate aspects (arts, politics, law, economy, religion, etc.), which exhibit their own temporalities founded on the modes of production responsible for their own historical becomings, apart from the whole, allowing “society to be molded as a differential unity” (140). These aspects, though autonomous with their own internal governing principles, nonetheless, maintain a relation to the whole of society. The differences inherent within these social aspects exist simultaneously, in one sense, though, in another sense, they resonate on varying temporal planes because they themselves propagate a distinct, singular temporality, resulting in “multiple histories and multiple historical temporalities [that] become concretely articulated” (141). According to Kates (if I’ve understood him correctly), Althusser’s model of history as fundamentally heterogeneous, populated with a multitude of dissonant modes of production and temporalities, represents a rupture out of (and in) which theory first emerges as a viable epistemological field of inquiry, one whose very existence depends on the discontinuous temporal schemata latent in history. Theoretically, for Kates, Althusser’s historiographical departure into the realm of theory supposes a new kind of knowledge (147). Ultimately, in Kates’ estimation, Althusser fails to establish a theoretical mode because he cannot evade his structural, and therefore historical, presuppositions. Kates notes, however, that “Althusser already recognized, any truly revolutionary transformation of historiographical thinking extends far beyond the field of history itself” (157). That is, perhaps, into the un-temporal? Not the timeless per se, but into a conception of time that has not yet been conceived.

Like Althusser, Thoreau, in his own way, expresses a profound distrust in the notion of homogenous time and contemporaneity in A Week. In what I’ve deemed a sort of temporal disobedience, he attempts to destabilize and reconfigure history via the personal, spiritual experience. This temporal reorganization is what I’m calling pneumachronicity, which privileges the trans-temporal over the immediately historical present in order to locate oneself across time rather than merely in it. Consequently, mythology emerges as a key component of Thoreau’s pneumachronic imagination. For Thoreau, “mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far as being false or fabulous in a common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, and I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it” (A Week 49). The Thoreauvian, and Transcendental, imperative to privilege the self over the collective, the social, comes to bear here because I do not think he implies that everyone should subscribe to his notion of time, adopt his particular temporal scheme as their own. But rather, he seems to suggest that each person exists at once a historical and eternal being, both within and without time: the body being anchored and bounded in the present and the spirit being perennial and timeless. Thoreau’s personal temporality emerges as a composite of varying spiritualties and mythologies, which correspond mainly to what he has read, studied, and experienced. He identifies with a number of spiritual systems and mythologies across time and sees himself as situated among them and not necessarily after them in the present. Thoreau’s concept of history, like Althusser’s, breaks history open. As Thoreau disrupts western historical flows and narratives of linear progress, he does not so readily differentiate between the past, present, and future. But rather, he entreats each to seek their own mythology, their own pneumachronicity by resisting the stringencies of hegemonic and mono-temporal history through temporal disobedience that develops around the self and not the collective.