First of all, how uncanny was the Mbembe article??? As I was reading, all I could think about is that this was an accurate description of what is happening right now in the aftermath of the election. Terrifyingly accurate. And it didn't really offer a whole lot of hope; the discussion of freedom didn't seem particularly appetizing.
Ok, so now for the real meat of my post. Truthfully, I don't really feel like any of the articles are really connected to my current projects, but I don't feel like I really get the Armstrong and the Moten, so I figure I'll do a little reaching and see what happens. My major analytical work right now is on one of Thoreau's unpublished manuscript, published with some ephemera under the title Faith in a Seed. The manuscript is a difficult one to work with, but a rather lovely read. It's basically a description and meditation on how Nature rejuvenates itself by spreading seeds around. My research thrust is to posit that Thoreau is describing a non-human infrastructure and subordinating human progress to it (Nature is often regarded as being more effective at circulation than the Postal Service, Nature turns humans into unwitting couriers as she scatters seeds on their clothing, etc) and that this is a kind of rhetoric that is emerging concomitantly (or perhaps in response to) the settlement of the frontier. However, this is a pretty lofty project and involves a lot of research that I don't even know how to start (have an appt with a librarian-my second one) and my backup plan is to propose that Faith in a Seed is an alternative discourse to growing anxieties about the "desert" of the Great Plains. Basically, Americans thought the Great Plains were a hellhole, barren and deadly. My main problem is (I laugh, now that I realize I regard this, and not the immense archival work I'm going to attempt to do in like 2 or 3 weeks, as the biggest problem) figuring out what the stakes are for this project. My hope is that I'll discover the "so what" along the research way, but Mike reassured me that it doesn't have to be a super polished, "finished" product, so if I can just point to a future "so what"...well, I'm trying to convince myself it'll be ok.
As you can see, Faith in a Seed doesn't really seem to extend itself to the conversations about biopower/politics that our authors this week are having. But I think Mbembe's exploration of death as sovereignty could be the absent presence in Thoreau's discussion of Nature's ability for generation and growth, the upside down, to bring in a Stranger Things reference. In Thoreau's observations, death always lurks as the possibility that this seed will not mature fully into a tree and planting/farming was actually a huge colonizing tool during this period. Colonists once were mandated to grow orchards on their properties if they were a certain size and one of the most popular fruiting trees was non-native to America-the apple tree. Basically, I read an article about how the Johnny Appleseed myth was about colonization and came up with the idea for this project. So, seed dispersal then could be seen as a form of biopower? Maybe. Let's find out.
When Mbembe describes the colonial project, he says "Space was therefore the raw material of sovereignty and the violence it carried with it" (26). Colonizers literally transformed space, through organizing, building, evicting natives etc., enacting both literal and metaphorical violence. This is also the goal of Nature, to transform space and perform a kind of acquisitive action. One of the primary colonizing agents for Thoreau is the squirrel. He's almost obsessively occupied with observing the squirrel, particularly during October, when the squirrel is gathering seeds. He says "In this way even the squirrels may spread the pine seed far over the field. I frequently see a pitch-pine cone far out in an open field, where it was dropped by a squirrel when on its way toward some tree or wall or stump...and there it will sometimes be covered by the snow all winter, and not expand and shed its seeds till the snow goes off and it feels the heat of the sun" (Faith in a Seed, 30). Before I can connect these two pieces, I must say that this analysis doesn't carry the same kind of dangerous intent present in colonialism, obviously, but there is still a kind of violence in this act. The squirrel rips the pine seed from its home on the tree and carries it away with the intention of consumption, which can be seen as opposite to what the seed's purpose is-to drop, to grow, to flower, and to repeat this process. The squirrel's meal is a theft of the life of a future pine tree. However, in the squirrel's consumption of the tree's reproductive resources, it becomes its unknowing agent. Along the way to seed death, the squirrel may drop a seed here and there, ensuring that the pine's reach is extended "far over the field" (30). There the seed lies in wait until it can utilize the resources of the land, sprout, and drop seeds that will populate that patch of field. This seems nice, but again there is a kind of inherent violence as that seed will prevent other seeds from growing and stretch its roots to consume water and nutrients that could have gone to the flora that once populated that area. That's why we designate some flora and fauna as "invasive"-they move in, kill others, and dominate.
So clearly, we can perform this kind of interpretation. But what came first, the discourse of invasion and power or the discourse of the tree? In nature, species are constantly in competition with one another, but does it count as colonization? I think Thoreau would attribute colonial agency to plants, if only to demonstrate the kind of deep time that is at play in this scenario. Can you colonize the colonizer? The settlers arrived in a space that is always already the site of conflict, and while Thoreau acknowledges that human intervention has changed the natural landscape, he also acknowledges that pine trees (some kind of nature) will still be engaged even after humankind has died.
I don't really know if I did this exercise right and I fully realize that it's kind of ridiculous to be comparing seeds to genocides and enslavements and what have you, but if we acknowledge the environment's presence and agency as entangled with ours, then there must be something fruitful in comparing the two discourses right? Or am I just anthropomorphizing and being super problematic? I don't know what I'm doing anymore. The pine cone is a suicide bomber. But a generative one. I like trees a lot. I'm just going to let things percolate on this paper, ok? Thanks for reading!
No comments:
Post a Comment