What Does Reading Do in the Anthropocene?

Antoine Traisnel's Capture and Jennifer Wenzel's The Disposition of Nature are two new publications in animal studies and postcolonial ecocriticism respectively that chart very different paths for environmental scholarship in the wake of the nonhuman turn, yet they are both shaped by a context that exceeds their stated methodological frames. My aim here is to give short accounts of each work before addressing a broader shift in the field of literary studies, which I describe as a reconsideration of texts' political and material efficacy in the face of anthropogenic climate change and species extinction. I suggest that a unique set of institutional factors, including neoliberal austerity measures underwriting the turn to "postcritique," as well as the rise of environmental justice–oriented ecocriticism, have rendered the fields embracing the nonhuman turn newly uncertain about what texts (and the work of studying texts) do in the Anthropocene. The different tracks Traisnel and Wenzel take in addressing this uncertainty can nevertheless put them in a fruitful conversation with one another about the future of ecological approaches to literature despite their significant divergences in focus and method.Traisnel's Capture is a densely theoretical but impressively pithy exploration of the changing shape of animality in nineteenth-century US literature and culture. Moving chronologically through the works of John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Eadweard Muybridge, Capture tells the story of what Traisnel calls "the shift from the hunt regime to the capture regime" over the course of the nineteenth century (2). Hunt and capture, for Traisnel, name two modalities of apprehending animality that correspond obliquely to the distinction between sovereign power and biopower traced by Foucault: whereas the logic of the hunt presumes an aleatory encounter with an individuated animal whose only options are to escape or to die, capture takes as its object not individual animals but the animal as such, a technologically mediated abstraction that can never be encountered directly but only apprehended as an intangible and perpetually vanishing essence to be administered and regulated as resource. "Capture's ability to present itself as a mere taking—of the animal's likeness," writes Trainsel, "in fact conceals a making—of what I call a new animal condition—a making that is all the more efficient because it appears nonintrusive" (3). The book's chapters address a wide array of capture technologies that illuminate this imbrication of taking and making. Opening with a reading of a patent for the 1883 Kilburn Gun Camera (a shotgun with a camera mounted at the end that promised to photographically "bag" animals at the moment of their escape), Traisnel moves through Audubon's ornithological still life drawings, Cooper's speculative settler land management techniques in The Prairie, Poe's representation of decryption as a mode of biopolitical detection in "Murders in the Rue Morgue," Hawthorne's critique of Georges Cuvier's taxonomies in The Marble Fawn, and Muybridge's use of trip wire cinematography for recording animal motion. Sequentially, the chapters make a persuasive case for the historical eclipse of the logic of the hunt by the regime of capture at the close of the century: Audubon's fantasies of strenuously subduing and memorializing individual birds of prey eventually give way to Muybridge's efforts to grasp the abstraction of horsepower through the cinematic freeze-framing of domesticated horses, which would then be repurposed for the expansion of capital and industry in the settler-colonial development of the railroad.While its cast of literary and theoretical characters will be familiar to many, reading Capture produces the enormously satisfying experience of watching a single powerful thesis—the shift from hunt to capture—develop in a way that feels both surprising yet inevitable. As both a concept and a keyword, capture is ubiquitous in Traisnel's archive. (The contexts he highlights it in range, for instance, from nineteenth-century legal debates over "rules of capture" and the poetry of Emily Dickinson all the way to Benjamin and Deleuze.) One of the manuscript's central achievements is to retroactively synthesize such disparate traces into a coherent and motivated logic. Traisnel's proclaimed intervention in the field—what he calls a "displacement" of "Foucauldian biopolitics' center of gravity from Man to the animal and the European metropolis to the U.S. settler territory" (3)—understates the project's accomplishments, which show how the development of a new, technologically mediated ontology of animal existence created the material and epistemological conditions for some of biocapitalism's constitutive phenomena: colonial land enclosures, factory farming, anthropogenic species extinction, and the expropriation of Black life during and in the wake of slavery. Traisnel is a gifted explainer and rhetorical signposter (his account of Sylvia Wynter's critique of Foucault's Eurocentrism is particularly lucid). The study is consistently attentive to the reader's situatedness in the argument (the introduction contains a helpful axiom chart marking the distinctions between hunt and capture), and its prose is characterized by economy and precision. (The footnotes to Capture comprise a full quarter of the manuscript; much, in other words, has been strategically buried so that the chapters remain polished and brisk).Where Capture's analyses are ultimately in the service of a theoretically informed historicist elaboration of a concept, The Disposition of Nature undertakes the construction and deployment of a method—what Wenzel calls "reading for the planet." The prepositional ambiguity in the phrase is purposeful: this is a method that seeks both to uncover the signs of a shared and precarious planetary ecology in a range of global media, as well as to read on behalf of the planet, for the cause of collective environmental justice. I will have more to say about the second sense of the phrase later, but here I will cover the fundamental principles that Wenzel sees animating "reading for the planet." Building on the work of theorists like Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ursula Heise who have pushed for rethinking the concept of scale in the Anthropocene, Wenzel describes her method as a "multiscalar reading practice": "Reading for the planet is not disembodied 'global,' cosmopolitan, or universalist reading from nowhere," she writes, "but reading from near to there: between specific sites, across multiple divides, and more than one scale" (2). The Disposition of Nature addresses a wide variety of forms and genres, including documentary filmmaking (Hubert Sauper's Darwin's Nightmare on the catastrophic introduction of perch fish into the Nile's ecosystem), global anglophone fiction (Indra Sinha's Animal's People, a fictionalization of the aftermath of the 1984 Dow Chemical gas leak in Bhopal, India that killed three thousand people and left three hundred thousand injured), and contemporary Nigerian poetry (Ogaga Ifowodo's The Oil Lamp, which addresses the violence of corporate petrocultures in the Niger Delta), each of which stages the necessity and difficulty of thinking ecological crisis across scalar discontinuities of time and space.One oft-repeated motif provides a helpful through line for the book's wide-ranging chapters: "A world is not the world," meaning that the benefits accrued for some through extractive infrastructures always come at the expense of immiseration for others, and that such unequal distributions of harm and risk are by no means self-evident. Indeed, Wenzel's practice of multi-scalar reading is informed by a premise she takes from her Columbia University colleague Rob Nixon regarding the "uneven universality" of environmental catastrophe: that it is "conditioned by biological parameters at the species level, yet inflected by social inequalities" (Wenzel 9). Wenzel is particularly interested in scenes of what she calls "world-imagining from below," where subaltern subjects seek to reframe their local experiences of environmental degradation within global networks of pollution, trade, and textual circulation. Examining these marginalized perspectives through art, argues Wenzel, is crucial for avoiding the two most common traps of liberal environmentalist narratives: "quarantines of the imagination" and "gentrifications of the imagination," the former enabling the fantasy that climate catastrophe "over there" could never happen "over here," and the latter facilitating the fantasy of easy universalism, "a gesture toward new forms of community that is blind to the displacements it causes" (33). Because, for example, Western media and corporate narratives surrounding the Bhopal gas leak were able to toggle seamlessly between the logics of localization and universalization—claims that the Indian plant was uniquely ill-equipped to deal with malfunctions sat comfortably alongside humanistic platitudes like "we all live in Bhopal"—Wenzel sees literature's capacity for world-imagining from below as uniquely powerful for critiquing such sleights of hand.What does "reading for the planet" look like in practice on the page? Where Capture's style is subtractive, distilling its complex historical contexts into brief, illuminating vignettes and tucking away its asides in footnotes, The Disposition of Nature's is accretive and recursive. Averaging fifty-plus pages each (footnotes comprise only one tenth of the manuscript), Wenzel's chapters shuttle between multiple geographical sites and timelines, often looping back to pick up dropped threads and then moving forward in a new time and place. Critical conversations in postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and world literature sit alongside what Wenzel calls modes of "thick contextualization" (43), long and detailed excurses into the political histories of the Niger Delta, Jamaican tourism, and Dow Chemical. The effect can be both invigorating and disorienting. The book's third chapter, "From Waste Lands to Wasted Lives: Enclosure as Aesthetic Regime and Property Regime," for example, begins with a comparative analysis of John Locke and Garrett Hardin's differing views of the commons, shifts to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history of British colonial forestry in India, introduces a 1979 short story by Bengali writer activist Mahasweta Devi, moves to a discussion of W. J. T. Mitchell and Ralph Waldo Emerson on colonial landscapes, relocates to John Ruskin's "Of the Pathetic Fallacy," takes up the early environmental history of the Indian subcontinent, introduces Sanskrit etymology through the structuralism of Francis Zimmerman, and returns to Devi's short story via Ruskin and Mitchell before ending with a discussion of twenty-first century Anthropocene scholarship. "This is what it means to connect the dots from near to there," Wenzel notes in the introduction (44).Both the pleasures and difficulties of this approach are the results of Wenzel's scholarly commitments. The Disposition of Nature makes a persuasive case for its necessity at the intersection of three fields, each of which lacks something the others can provide. To put it a bit simply: world literature gives us the necessary thinking of global totality but without environmentalism, "regard for the living substrate and political ecology of its world" (Wenzel 28); Anthropocene discourse gives us the necessary thinking of environmental justice but without sufficient attention to colonial histories of power; meanwhile, postcolonial literary studies gives us those missing critical resources but is too reliant on ecological literalism, reading texts for the "nature bits" instead of seeing environmental crisis encoded at the level of literary form and genre history. Adding to the complexity of triangulating these discourses and addressing their respective lacunae is Wenzel's new materialist tendency to view agencies as horizontally distributed across the ontological spectrum: "What happens to narrative when setting becomes character, plot becomes setting, objects become subjects, and part becomes whole?" she asks (19). Wenzel is aware that readings of a single text can spiral out into a proliferating network of spatiotemporal relations because of the unstable ontologies those texts assemble; indeed, the language of redistributed agency inflects her work's self-description: "These chapters record what it means to be troubled by a text, with an eye toward making trouble" (44).What does it mean for a work of literature or literary criticism to make trouble? And how should we understand the lexical correspondence above between a reader's experience of being troubled by a text (say, by the complexity of the relations it mediates) and its potential to make trouble in the world (say, for the beneficiaries of extractive capitalism)? In different ways, both Capture and The Disposition of Nature are preoccupied by these questions: Traisnel through his turn to an "ethics" of capture in the book's closing chapters, and Wenzel through her simultaneous incredulity and insistence that reading can be a mode of climate justice. The first sentences of the latter work—"Reading for the planet? How nonsensical is it to think that reading might help 'save the earth'?" (1)—dramatize a tension that runs through much new ecocriticism today: that literature's agency to save the planet is at once obviously nil and requires reestablishing. Both this assertion of obviousness and its subversion need some historicizing.Not too long ago—let's say, the turn of the millennium—it would have been uncontroversial in literary studies to state that literary and cultural texts produce concrete material effects in the world. This premise could have come under a variety of names: some might have referred to a work's performative "force," its potential to not merely describe existing states of affairs but instantiate new ones; others might have cited a text's interpellative powers, its capacity to produce subjects through embodied acts of "hailing"; others could have alluded to the materializing effects of a text's "discourse," its system of enunciations that lend intelligibility to a problem or concept; and others might have referred to the text's hegemonic function, the "spontaneous consent" it elicits on behalf of the powerful. Many of the arguments that clustered around this assumption of continuity between textuality and materiality are almost too well-known to gloss: the lyric address animates the unborn fetus, the novel form engenders bourgeois interiority, the social sciences establish the category of the homosexual, the European canon produces the "reality" of the Orient, and so forth. One of the governing methodological assumptions of literary studies, until recently, was that texts do things, make things, possess material efficacy, and that the work of studying them was crucial for redirecting those effects toward different, more salutary social and political ends.But something has changed, such intuitiveness is waning, and the black box of textual instrumentality has been reopened. The shift can be felt most acutely at the intersection of two institutional currents that have gained increasing momentum over the last twenty years. The first is the consolidation of what has been termed a "postcritical" sensibility in literary studies, the intuition that the demystifying practices of ideology critique have "run out of steam" and that students of the humanities would be better served turning their attention away from the work of revealing a text's imbrication with its social and political contexts toward other, more quotidian "modes of textual engagement," in Rita Felski's phrasing, such as its analyzing the text's capacities to enchant, inform, and shock (14). In Uses of Literature—the title already problematizing the issue of literature's efficacy as an agential force—Felski questions the ease with which scholars have made such grand gestures in the past: "When we look at many of the works that literary critics like to read," she notes, "it is often far from self-evident what role such works play in either initiating or inhibiting social change" (8). Where literature's ability to change the world is, for Felski, more tenuous than its proponents maintain, its power to affect individuals at the site of their encounter with the text remains undertheorized. Moreover, she argues, addressing this gap is a professional mandate, a move that literature departments must make to justify their existence and save themselves from budget cuts, precaritization, and diminishing enrollments. As "our students . . . are migrating in droves toward vocationally oriented degrees in the hopes of guaranteeing future incomes to offset skyrocketing college-bills," literary scholars need to "come up with rationales for reading literature and talking about books without reverting to the canon-worshipping of the past" (2). What's required, then, is an expanded vocabulary of agency to describe the multiplicity of ways texts "hook" everyday readers. Instead of embracing the role of paranoid demystifiers, "forever on guard against the hidden agendas of aesthetic forms," scholars should attend more closely to "the mysterious event of reading," the forms of "attachment" texts solicit, and the "intellectual or affective responses . . . involved" (11). Overstating a text's material potency, it seems, now poses a material threat to the profession, whereas cataloguing a text's more modest capacities for affect might prove to be its salvation.The second current of thought signaling the erosion of confidence in the efficacy of literary works is, as we have already seen, the growing prominence accorded to ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, which seek to imple