Feeling What You See: Objectivity and Reflexivity
in Thoreau’s Lively Science
Thoreau Annual Gathering 2014
Roundtable “Thoreau and the Material Turn”
Cristin Ellis, University of Mississippi
Thoreau may or may not be
a proto-new materialist but he was certainly a cranky materialist: he made no
secret of his frustrations with the empirical science of his day. Indeed, even as
his lifelong practice of observing nature became more conventionally empirical
over his last decade, his objections to the dry and dusty lifelessness of
scientific writing remained as pointed as ever. As scholars, we have tended to
account for Thoreau’s unorthodoxies by calling him a romantic scientist. Thus critics like James McIntosh, John
Hildebidle, and Laura Dassow Walls (among others) variously propose that “Thoreau
saw his task to be the joining of poetry, philosophy, and science into a
harmonized whole” (Walls 7). Instead of pure objectivity, then, Thoreauvian
natural history is a blended practice that anticipates N. Katherine Hayles’
desire to see “literature and science as two mingled voices” (in Walls 8). On
this view, scientific materialism needs
the supplement of poetry in order to produce a satisfyingly vibrant portrait of
the phenomenal world.
Today
I propose to tweak that understanding a bit by suggesting that, at least in
some instances, Thoreau’s beef with scientific objectivity was not that it is
too materialist—not that its vision is impoverished without poetry—but rather
that it was not yet materialist enough. That is, I’ll be suggesting that at
least one distinguishing characteristic of Thoreau’s observational practice is his
effort to chart a more comprehensive materialism that would account materially for the subjective textures—the
sense of elevation, significance, or wonder—of aesthetic experience. Consider,
for example, the following Journal entry from July of 1851 (3:592-4):
When I am against this bare promontory
of a huckleberry hill, then forsooth my thoughts will expand. Is it some
influence as a vapor which exhales from the ground, or something in the gales
which blow there, or in all things there brought together agreeably to my
spirit? The walls must not be too high…the trees must not be too numerous nor
the hills too near bounding the view…
Moments
like this one have served as examples of how Thoreau punctuates his natural
history with “transcendental” or “poetic” eruptions. But of course, this assumes
that the phenomenon Thoreau is observing here—that his “thoughts will expand”
every time he stands just so upon a certain hill—is categorically different
from the other natural phenomena (the leafing out of trees, the arrival of
songbirds) with which the Journal is concerned. And to be sure, that’s not a
crazy assumption—to this day, few if any ecologists report the felt shape of
their thoughts in the field.
Nonetheless, it seems clear to me that
the impulse of this passage is analytical more than it is poetic. Although he’s
ostensibly describing an experience of natural inspiration (that’s so Thoreau!), what fascinates him
here isn’t the content of that inspiration but rather its mechanicity: this
happens every time. Instead of
painting us a visionary picture of this landscape, then, he proceeds to rather
prosaically anatomize the arrangement of walls, trees, hills, and negative
space in an effort to put his finger on precisely what about the composition of
this site—what single element or combined assemblage—keeps triggering this
dilation of his thoughts. And though the identity of that trigger proves more
complicated than the local vapors or winds he first suspects, that those are
his initial guesses clearly indicates that Thoreau understands the landscape’s
influence to be material (on the order
of vapors) rather than subjective or spiritual in nature. In other words the
causes are, at least in theory, both physical and specifiable.
In this sense, this passage experiments
with something like a science of poetic or aesthetic experience. Another
memorable journal entry from later the same year makes Thoreau’s experimental
science even more explicit. On Christmas Day, 1851 (3:155-6), Thoreau writes,
I witness a beauty in the form or
coloring of the clouds which addresses itself to my imagination, for which you
account scientifically to my understanding, but do not so account to my
imagination…You tell me it is a mass of vapor which absorbs all other rays and
reflects the red, but that is nothing to the purpose, for this red vision
excites me, stirs my blood, makes my thoughts flow, and I have new and
indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of the influence.
Once
again, this passage’s overt critique of the poverty of the scientific account
of sunset has been widely read as an argument for the necessity of
supplementing science with poetry.[i]
And once again, the inflection I’d like to put on that reading is to suggest
that where they draw a bright line between objective (scientific) and
subjective (poetic) observation, this passage seems more interested in the
possibility of articulating the objective, physiological causes of aesthetic
experience. In other words, the problem with science’s explanation of the
sunset isn’t that it lacks poetry but that it fails to specify the physics by
which sunsets trigger aesthetic trembling in human bodies. “I witness a beauty…
which addresses itself to my imagination,” Thoreau observes; “this red vision
excites me, stirs my blood makes my thoughts flow.” The autonomic physiological
responses he describes (the excitation, the increased blood flow, the stimulated
cognition) are, he suggests, no less objectively real effects of the light’s striking his eye than is the absorption
and reflection of that same light as it bends through the body of the clouds.
So why shouldn’t science be accountable
to these physical dimensions of the phenomenon we call sunset? So long as
objectivity means refusing to acknowledge, let alone examine, the physical
dimensions of subjective experience, Thoreau argues, science will be condemned
to taking a woefully partial view of material phenomena. But however damning
this critique of science may be, it is also a profession of faith in it. For by
calling science out for failing to live up to its own materialist philosophy,
Thoreau is not proposing that we reject or supplement empiricism, but rather
that we double down on it. And these passages tentatively show us how,
envisioning a more thoroughgoing empiricism that will observe the world not as
an inventory of inert and alien objects, but as the site of dynamic and
mutually transformative relations between our own and other bodies.
In this commitment to investigating the
material conditions of subjective experience, Thoreau suggests at least one of
the points of affinity between his unorthodox empiricism and the varieties of
new materialisms emerging out of the academy today. As Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost broadly define them, the new materialisms are unified in their effort to
remind us of “the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary
experiences” (1). To that end, they challenge our tendency to draw stark
distinctions between material phenomena (huckleberries, sunlight, global
warming) that have been designated the proper objects of science, and those
“immaterial” phenomena (mind, imagination, feelings) that have been designated
“fundamentally different from matter” (2) and, as such, the proper objects of
the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Thus one of the things this new
materialist reorientation can help to light up in Thoreau’s late work is the
consistency with which he, too, systematically undermines this distinction.
From the phenological studies of the Journal, to the late naturalistic essays
and his unfinished manuscript for Wild
Fruits, Thoreau’s late naturalistic work sets out to anatomize the materialization
of phenomena we might otherwise assume to be immaterial: things like aesthetic
wonder (as at that sunset), the cruelty of April (see Kristen Case’s fine essay
here), and even evangelical extremism (“Show me two villages, one embowered in
trees…the other a merely trivial and treeless waste,” Thoreau writes in
“Autumnal Tints,” “and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the
most starved and bigoted religionists”). In this sense, I think the new
materialisms will be very productive resources for Thoreau scholars by
encouraging us to recognize the materialism of this late work—to let that work
step out, as it were, from the long shadow of the Thoreau we all fell in love
with at Walden, the young
transcendentalist ever squinting at nature to make out the symbols of its
occult poetry.
Of course, we might wish to posit even
closer correspondences to particular new materialist concepts. Thus for
instance, Karen Barad’s concept of “intra-action”—which holds that phenomena
are “relations without preexisting relata” (815)—might be useful for
illuminating Thoreau’s fundamentally dynamic and relational approach to the
phenomenon of the sunset. Or again, Jane Bennett’s vocabulary of agential
assemblages could help give new emphasis to the efficacy of that huckleberry
hill—drawing out Thoreau’s sense that his experience of inspiration there is
not his precisely, but really belongs
to the site at that moment, as an emergent dimension of the assemblage
“wall-trees-hill-emptiness-human.” As a literary scholar, however, I am always
acutely aware of the pitfalls of translation. Transposing Thoreau’s thought
into this latest critical vocabulary risks distorting or attenuating the
specificity of his thought. For instance, the difference between what Bennett
means by an “assemblage” and what Thoreau means when he refers to “all things
there brought together” on that huckleberry is potentially considerable, for
Bennett’s term bears the full freight of a philosophical apparatus (Deleuzian
ontology) under which Thoreau’s sense—entirely unacquainted with Deleuze’s
philosophy—may quickly get lost. Moreover, beyond their work with philosophical
ideas, studies like Barad’s and Bennett’s tend to share philosophy’s aspiration
to build out comprehensive theories of ontology—to provide a view as if from
nowhere from which we might, if not transcend, then at least, as Bennett puts
it, “stretch ourselves” (230) to comprehend a material system so unimaginably
(or not) larger than ourselves. And while Thoreau’s journalizing can and has
been read as a technology for acquiring just such a post-human-scaled vision of
nature, it seems equally clear to me that his interests remained ineluctably
tied to the intimate scale and aesthetic textures of human experience. His
materialism was, in other words, a method, even an epistemology, but it was not
a theory in the sense that it never aspired to the systematicity, to the
god’s-eye view, that constitutes the explanatory power of the new materialisms.
Thus while I embrace this comparative
work, and can’t wait to see how it will make once-overlooked aspects of
Thoreau’s work begin to vibrate with new resonance, I also approach it with
caution. I want to preserve the still tentative, speculative, and inconsistent
character of Thoreau’s largely private empirical practice from becoming lost in
the more rigorously systematic, if still speculative, materialist philosophies
put forward under the auspices of the new materialism. Advancing, then, with
trepidation but also in the open-ended spirit of discovery, I look forward to
this backward glance, and to discovering, once again, just how far back the
roots of even our newest “new” insights might actually run into cultural (and
material) history.
[i] See for instance Irving Hodder’s reading of this
moment as exemplary of the “symbiotic” relationship between Thoreau’s
“spiritual quest” and his “interest in natural facts” (277-8). In a similar
vein, David Robinson describes Thoreau’s practice of “participatory
observation” as a method for balancing the “complementary roles” of “empirical
observation and metaphysical conceptualization” in his project (178).
Works Cited:
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How
Matter
Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of
Women in Culture and Society 28:3
(2003).
Bennett,
Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43:2 (Spring 2012),
pp. 225-233.
Coole,
Diana and Samantha Frost. New
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.
Hildebidle,
John. Thoreau: A Naturalist’s Liberty.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983.
Hodder, Irving. Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness. New Haven:
Yale UP 2001.
McIntosh, James. Thoreau as Romantic Naturalist: His Stance
Toward Nature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1974.
Robinson,
David. Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2004.
Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau:
Journal, Volume 3: 1848-51. Ed.
Robert Sattelmeyer, Mark Patterson, and William Rossi. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
UP, 1991.
—“Autumnal
Tints.” The Natural History Essays.
Ed. Robert Sattelmeyer. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980.
Walls,
Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century
Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
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