A way with nature: notes on methodology1

Noam Gal

Abstract
This essay inquires into the status of the category of nature in contemporary critical theory of culture, as well as the possible environmental consequences of the interpretation of nature representations. By introducing environmental issues to literary analysis, I wish to draw attention to alternative approaches to the natural in the frame of our critical methodologies and pedagogic practices. I borrow Antonio Gramscis formulations of the organic intellectual in order to suggest connections between teachers and the concept of nature, and between Marxist conceptions of nature/culture and contemporary environmental decline. What could the natural be for the present theory of culture? What could be considered natural in the ways we teach, interpret and teach interpretation? Keywords: cultural studies, environmentalism, Gramsci, intellectual history, Kafka, literary eco-criticism, Marxism, nature, pedagogy

From his prison cell in Bari, Antonio Gramsci cautioned us some 80 years ago against a wholesale dismissal of the notion of the natural, even within the Marxist materialistic conception of historical progress:
One of the commonest totems is the belief about everything that exists, that it is natural that it should exist, that it could not do otherwise than exist, and that however badly ones attempts at reform may go they will not stop life going on, since the traditional forces will continue to operate and precisely will keep life going on. There is some
Noam Gal is writing his doctoral thesis, Fictional inhumanities: animals and personification in the Second World War, in the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University. noam.gal@yale.edu
ISSN 0256-0046/Online 1992-6049 pp. 120136 Critical Arts Projects & Unisa Press

26 (1) 2012 DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.663170

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Here, Gramsci underscores the necessity of adhering to the idea that a universal, inborn, organic ability exists in all human beings for understanding and sharing meaning, who then become organic intellectuals educators whose mission emerges from their particular position in a given environment. Reading Gramsci retrospectively, we can see some vitalistic reason behind his revolutionary notion of organic intellectuals, or, natural teachers as I will suggest. Having just begun teaching in my own right, I have begun to intuit a new relevance that attaches to Gramscis considerations of intellectual labour and natural forces. Yet it is not only in my personal context working on nature, working as a teacher that this is apparent to me. Looking further afield, it is indeed clear that recent so-called natural disasters engender educational and intellectual agendas that encourage us to acknowledge human (unnatural) responsibility for these disasters. Furthermore, the appearance of the word disastrous in Gramsci reminds me of the indivisible indeed, organic connection between culture and nature: a critical approach to culture, or even to revolutionary ideology, must acknowledge this base of culture. Culture is a word that gradually transformed into a metaphor, such that the tending of natural growth was extended to a process of human development, as Raymond Williams (1985: 87) put it. By indicating that it would be disastrous to undermine the natural, Gramsci reminds us that the syllabi of critical theory of culture and literature in the 20th century accept the assumption of deteriorating Man/ Nature relations as part of an all-encompassing process of commodification, while they simultaneously avoid or refute the notion of the natural or the organic in the background of language, of body, of community and so on. Something must be natural, Gramsci stresses, which means that the critical message nothing is natural may indeed be a disastrous one; that is to say, a message which trains us in a kind of broad acquiescence in the idea that the commodity has replaced the organism and that any attempt to retrace this replacement is too nostalgic, too demagogic or too religious. In other words, if the natural equals mere illusion hence it does not exist we are facing a natural disaster, or more accurately, a disaster with the natural. Can the natural be given a new role in the experience and in the profession of teaching our students to engage with the critical theory of culture? To be sure, Gramscis retention of the natural aspect of intellectual commitment has not led cultural criticism to neglect his writings. What is the natural, then, for the interpretation of cultural artefacts and for contemporary teaching of cultural theory? Can we sustain the Gramscian idea of the organic intellectual within the framework of a larger suspicion regarding the organic? These questions shape our current mappings of culture and nature. I wish in this article to revisit them while looking in the opposite direction as it were, namely by asking how nature shapes or

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can potentially shape our teaching, our very conception of teaching and our reading of a literary piece or a photograph in the classroom. Generally, given the prevalent structure of academic education, what one takes to be a natural phenomenon is usually the subject of scientific inquiry on the far bank of the natural sciences. This is a tenacious commonplace. Applying mathematic models to cognitive research of literary readership is one example of breaching this commonplace, but simulating scientific measurability is another form of reification, as Vico (1993: 1011) already warned his students as far back as 1699. Otherwise, the critical theory of culture might still stand close to the border between the humanities and the natural sciences because it takes this border and its naturalisation as its subject of inquiry. Maybe we could even speculate that whatever method might not be used to study nature in the sciences, would be used in eco-critical studies of the arts? What might still be disastrous following Gramscis term is that neither in the sciences nor elsewhere do we teach organically, as participants in broader environmental processes in which we play a central role with our fellow-actants (to use Jane Bennetts adaptation of Bruno Latour), that is, our students (Bennet 2010: 94). In other words, teachers are seldom interested in, or aware of, that which may really be natural in what they do in class, or in what they read for class. I will therefore move here from a discussion of the conception of nature in critical theory (and elsewhere) to a discussion of the conception of nature in teaching, with the hope of finding some connection between the two. In drawing out these links, I will attempt an eco-critical reading of a minimal literary piece by considering current responses to environmental processes in the ways we deal with fiction. My intention is not to recite the intellectual history of nature-negation in cultural theory, nor to deconstruct the concept of the natural by retrieving its genealogies. That is to say, I will attempt to follow the traces of a missing concept rather than map out a misconception. I wish to align myself with a recent defence of the oft repeated question: How can we re-incorporate our impact on, and life under, the forces and phenomena of nature in the ways we read and teach the elements of cultural theory, such as narrative, image, ideology, identity, labour, interpretation, feeling and text? I will engage with the precedent of several scholars whom I would like to follow in such questions, so that the methodology of this essay might be said to follow a certain path, rather than breaking a new one. There are surely so many ways of investigating how far both nature and Nature have been distanced from culture or literature or our appropriation, in critical theory, of say, Karl Marx. Yet, to take up this route one has to confront the assumptions that cultural studies aims to work on what culture is made of, and that culture is always a made thing, a cultivated matter rather than a given one. In the frame of this article, however, I will try to avoid reworking the loop which ensures the negation of nature in cultural criticism and in the anthropocentric philosophy of the human and the world. At least for now,

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I will sidestep the debate of humanism versus post-humanism, though it has surely grown from conceptualisations of nature that are similar to those with which this essay is in dialogue. *** In his Paris manuscripts, Marx famously dismantled the division of knowledge that renders the natural a different object from that of the natural sciences: One basis for life and another basis for science is a priori a lie. [] Natural science will in time incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science (in Burkett 1999: 242). As some Marxist environmentalists would argue, this one science is another form of Marx and Engels idea of metabolism [Stoffwechsel] of Man and Nature (Dickens 2000: 43). Later, in The German Ideology, Marx would write: One can look at history from two sides and divide it into the history of nature and the history of men. The two sides are, however, inseparable; the history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist (in Burkett 1999: 294). Human history, for Marx, devours natural history to the point that nature has no history without the men who make it. The studies Marx had read about environmental changes as a result of certain agricultural trends served to fortify that determination: in 1868 he read Fraas Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit (Dickens 2000: 43). I am not sure how relevant this Marxian notion of one science is to critical theory today, but it is interesting to see how such irrelevance correlates with the problems cultural criticism has with the category of the natural. The lived experience that was a crucial methodological basis for Richard Hoggart in the birth of cultural studies in Birmingham is exactly what one cannot find in the natural sciences. According to Georg Lukcs (1971: 104), natural scientists underlying reality is, methodologically and in principle, beyond their grasp. While the subjects of the natural sciences were sharply dissociated from that critical lived experience, uses of literacy or simply reading were thought to have nothing to do with climate changes or clean-water supply. Even today, most of us would agree that the subjects and interests of cultural criticism are produced and consumed objects and signs as well as their making, and it is the causative links we draw between the making of these objects and signs and their function in making us that motivate much of our research. Furthermore, there is also the effort to reveal the ways in which the so-called natural substances from which objects are produced and consumed are already, themselves, made rather than given. That tremendous scepticism towards the natural might have led us away from the natural element in both natural and human histories, despite the emerging green-titling in contemporary academia. What might the contribution of this conceptual scepticism be to the current environmental decline?

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From considerations of the alienation from nature as a result of the division of the means of production, through to considerations of the exploitation of natural resources in its global, yet overtly uneven form, intellectual work on nature has rarely taken into account the disquietingly widening division of knowledge into the natural and unnatural sciences. Nor has it adequately addressed the fact that both camps stand dumbfounded in the face of exponentially increasing natural decline. Once again, nature has come to signify, on its own terms, with we geological agents (in Naomi Orsekes terms, in Chakrabarty 2009) leaving it methodologically untended. The current ecological crisis is not the cultural crisis that cuts into and through the humanities from beginning to end [] summoning them to the barricades to defend an old project as Stuart Hall (1990: 20) explained with respect to the emergence of cultural studies some 20 years ago. Although the wide public discussion on global warming began around the same time, this current ecological crisis was already an old project when Hall sent his important essay to Octobers editors. One cannot even call it the current crisis, since its history, instead of concurring with academic crises or with the recent crisis of the Left, cannot be easily registered without taking Marx for a short visit to the laboratories of geologists, for instance. Surprisingly, some environmentalists map this ecological crisis as nothing but a cultural one. In the words of Sylvia Mayer (2006: 113), to call the environmental crisis a cultural crisis is to claim that the culturally most formative texts largely texts of Western capitalist and socialist/communist societies whose global spread has affected the planet most heavily during the modern era have conceptualized nature, culture and the human in an environmentally detrimental way. Therefore, if this environmental crisis is a cultural one, it challenges the very episteme of culture that makes it a crisis, most forcefully in disciplines such as cultural studies. Following Dipesh Chakrabartys (2009: 8) recent proposal of reuniting human history with geological time, we are called now to reread Marx but also Rousseau, Adam Smith and Kant as the first critics of the Anthropocene, the geological epoch supplementing the Holocene that started in late 18th century with the beginning of growing global concentrations of carbon-dioxide and methane. Early in their history, Western languages linked nature to being-born (the Latin nasci) as if to secure the place of humans as both the given and the made. In the language of cultural criticism the idea of nature is still either the made visible (by language) or the visibly given, instead of being reconsidered as the unseen changing. Following Rachel Carson who already in 1962 (Silent spring) passionately argued for shifting the unavoidable human responsibility towards nature from a question of quantity to a matter of the quality of this involvement (not what are we responsible for in the world but how to enact that responsibility) I find it irresponsible to signify any cultural process as absolutely unnatural. Dividing events into natural and cultural is a challenge for that kind of responsibility, as the following

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examples may show. Floods caused by rising sea temperatures in Australias Victoria state resulted, last January, in thousands of people being forced to evacuate their homes and in some 13 billion dollars worth of damages. On the financial level alone, this unanticipated and indeed unimaginable cost had to be covered by already stretched banks and treasuries, thus causing more lay-offs in communities whose residents would now be forced to move to peripheries with even less infrastructure. Similarly, the recent turmoil in Egypt was related to the booming prices of wheat: Egypt is the worlds largest importer of this commodity. The replacement of wheat with corn-for-ethanol in the United States directly puts in danger the lives of poor citizens in places like Cairo, New Mexico, Calcutta and Lagos, while aggravating global water shortages (due to the volumes necessary to process grains into biofuel). In many cases these victims of green politics might find themselves forced into one of the overloaded mass cages we call refugee asylums where political refugees take shelter. But, in what sense are these refugees political? Where do we locate the natural in these narratives of survival? And how can one not mention, or when exactly does one cease to mention, the 300 000 deaths in Haitis earthquake 17 months before Fukushima? Is it only once we comprehend the death toll 300 000 as the outcome of a very specific machinery, that we can argue against aligning the event with previous industries of mass death? Will we one day be able, and in a single gesture, to join the thinking of the event to the thinking of the machine? asks Derrida in Without alibi (in Wolfe 2010: 9). Following that question and the events mentioned above, we can still regard the chimney as the dominant image of what humanity does to itself (the two meanings mass production and mass destruction become one hole). But how can we de-anthropo-centralise these tragedies? It is not enough to point to the non-naturalness of what we are educated to call natural disasters; rather, we should also inquire how such rhetoric of Leftist criticism reaffirms the logocentric boundary between natural disasters and, say, crimes against humanity, and question what other alternatives in reading these criticisms are available. There has been an interesting debate in the last two decades around the question of Marxs attention to the ecological prospects of his socio-economic theory. Whether we go with the Promethean interpretation of Marx as he envisions a general material abundance and provides no basis for recognising any interest in the liberation of nature from human domination (McLaughlin 1990, in Burkett 1999: 223), or take the opposite view, stressing Marxs systematic approach to nature and to environmental degradation (particularly in relation to the fertility of the soil [in capitalist agriculture]) (Foster 1999: 372), we may still ask what we do with these interpretations in the classroom. One of the texts involved in this fascinating debate is an early essay Marx published in October 1842 in Reinische Zeitung, entitled Debates on the Law on Theft of Wood (Debatten ber das Holzdiebstahlgesetz). The essay was, according to Marxs later accounts, his first step in political theory.

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Here, Marx attacks a new penal law against peasants who collect fallen wood in aristocracy-owned forests:
It would be impossible to find a more elegant and at the same time more simple method of letting the right of human beings fall down under the right of young trees. On the one hand, after the adoption of the [new law], it is inevitable that many people not of a criminal disposition are cut off from the green tree of morality and cast like fallen wood into the hell of crime, infamy and misery. On the other hand, [by] rejection of the [new law], there is the possibility that some young trees may be damaged, and it needs hardly be said: the wooden idols triumph and human beings are sacrificed! (Reinische Zeitung 298, 25 October 1842)

More than any possible environmental awareness, we see here the employment of environmental issues in a particular rhetoric: the felled trees are not only a metaphor for the victims of feudalism, but also the raw material needed for human life. This raw material is taken away from a certain group in society along with their humanity, for the sake of using it in other work: that of making members of a different sect idols that exist above humanity. The question raised by reading ecological consciousness in Marx today is: Can we sustain Marxist ideology if we extract from it its anthropocentric perspective which consists in the prevalent inability to see humanity (and the humanities) other than polis versus physis? This question is challenged by Marxs treatment of wood as the raw material of literary expression; the felled trees are the peasants for whose rights Marx argues. But is there a connection between that rhetorical figure and the environmental issue at hand? Maybe finding such connections is the task behind addressing environmental questions in our syllabi. Trying to draw causative trajectories from the man-made to the natural without tagging the latter as simply another product of the former seems to me to constitute a central concern of teaching criticism. The delineation of Western culture through the lens of leftist anti-positivism has had a way with the natural that I cannot sufficiently outline within the limits of this essay. There are so many ways to emerge empty-handed in the search for a non-dismissive approach to nature: I might route this through De Saussures notion that there is nothing entirely natural about speech, then proceed to Levi-Strauss or Barthes very different yet adjacent demythologies, where objects and histories are both required to be stripped of their natural appearance, or circle back to Adorno and Horkheimers (2002: 6) critique of Enlightenment under which nature is stripped of qualities [and] becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification. Alternatively, I could turn to Benjamins earlier idea that our natural senses were subject to modification during the course of the mechanical age through the intervention of mass media, then move to Foucaults archaeology of knowledge according to which nature, since the 18th century, has been

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moulded under ideological pressures, as continuity, into a set of representations that would make it as amenable to ordering as any other language. I might also consider Derridas claims that metaphor as the basis of philosophys truth-telling relies on exclusively human mimetic naturalisations of otherwise natural phenomena, or move backwards again to the hermeneutic division of natural world as objective necessity versus the individuals capacity to subject everything to thinking, as Dilthey would have it, before pausing over Heideggers notion of being-in-the[given]-world. This sketch may be incomplete but it nevertheless represents a nearly finite, canonical bibliography that keeps operating upon our teachings, especially in literary and visual studies. I by no means wish to compress all these contributors into one eco-friendly corridor as if to update their consumption. Rather, it is what we choose to bring from these writers into our classes that might require alternative highlighting (as some of the names I mentioned did write seminal eco-critical texts). Generally speaking, as Hubert Zapf puts it, to reflect on cultures relationship to nature was considered politically questionable and epistemologically nave in the pansemiotic universe of poststructuralism in which every apparent reference to nature was deciphered as linguistic-cultural construct that served only to hide the socio-political interests and ideologies from which it originated (2006: 50). Feminist and postcolonial theory partly by responding to some of these canonised writings have shaken this bibliography, powerfully complicating its contact with the natural, either through Butlers formulation in which the human body is nothing more than a set of performative rituals, or through Spivak who reads the scars on the body of the black woman slave in Morrisons Beloved as a friction in nature, concluding that culture is one of many names that one bestows upon the trace of being othered from nature, and by so naming, effaces the trace (Spivak 1992: 775). As one of the leading thinkers in eco-critical literary studies, Lawrence Buell, ascribed (2011), cultural criticism has, in the last three decades, gradually opened to ecological commitments. Beyond the narrow yet crucial interest in naturepreservation, environmental discourse has been trying to enter cultural studies through various shared interests, such as reconsidering the interdependence of national identity and natural rights (the idea of bioregions, for instance), or through feminist theories which expanded the term exploitation to include all otherthan-white-masculine-technology-infused-living-beings (and such uncomfortable formulae define some of the rhetorical subversion of this approach). In addition, a growing body of work has emerged which rereads the canon of critical theory with the question of nature as a leading methodological tool, either by extracting it from the canon itself (as in the previous texts on Marxs conception of nature) or by de-anthropocentralising the canon towards posthumanist alternative readings (as in the works of Donna Haraway or Cary Wolfe, although reformulating the loci of man in nature is not identical to rethinking the loci of nature as such). In short,

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these recent intellectual developments aim to juxtapose a suspicion towards the natural with a counter-suspicion towards the cultural exploring the non-man-made matter of culture, that is, the given, natural, organic features of cultural processes and products. One troubling example of the recent routes towards reintegrating the problems of nature into philosophies of Western culture is Slavoj ieks (2008) controversial essay Nature and its discontents where, influenced by radical thinkers like Bill McKibben and Timothy Morton, he eventually expels the concept of nature from our cultural future. For iek, to think about nature is only to maintain a conservative politics of consumerism and terror: Nature is no longer natural; it now appears as a fragile mechanism which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction (2008: 50). When iek says that ecology is the new opium for the masses he takes us back to Marx and he brings us back to that same tendency in the critical canon, negating nature and the natural. For iek any concept of nature and natural environment is fictive and stands in our way of saving ourselves. Therefore, the last ethical resort exists in abandoning, once and for all, the notion of nature. We could posit this approach in contrast to that of ecocritics and posthumanists, or, alternatively, we could try and see them connected within wider systems of exchange and relation. While wishing to reuse rather than jettison these texts and ideas, I still wish to remain attuned to Gramscis call that this dismissal of the natural from our tool-box is disastrous, since it fuels broader, physical disasters. As we can see, even if environmentalist awareness has gained publicity thanks to the development of cultural criticism and cultural studies, nature and the natural in the canonical syllabi of literary and cultural criticism seem to me to be cultivated as lost. ***
The trees For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie sleekly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it cant be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance. (1978: 382) Die Bume Denn wir sind wie Baumstmme im Schnee. Scheinbar liegen sie glatt auf, und mit kleinem Ansto sollte man sie wegschieben knnen. Nein, das kann man nicht, den sie sind fest mit dem Boden verbunden. Aber sieh, sogar das ist nur scheinbar. (2006: 59)

How can we read and teach-back the natural in the canonical products and texts of Western culture? Franz Kafkas shortest (100-year-old) parable might show us, if we read texts that do not overtly focus on nature or the environment, that systems in nature still preserve the potential for shifting our attention in every type and moment of reading. In The trees this method, this way (Weg), onto which we could have

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been pushed (wegschieben), is hidden and/or lost. What is there, under the trees, that weds them to the ground as Kafkas poetics imply (Boden/-bunden)? It seems to me to be a question for a sub-reading, which means that we are dealing with something deeper than the horizontal surface of metonyms, yet without digging vertically to extract ores of meanings, thus leaving nothing but holes. As the narrator tells us, we are, eventually, not like trees. What initially attracted the narrator in the felled tree-trunks as anthropo-id happens to be misleading. In other words, the tree-trunks are not entirely trees in the way we usually perceive them, that is, inanimate, finite, comfortably-metaphoriseable. We should then take another route, this time not to the referent of the human that stands next to the tree due to the rules of allegory, but rather to whatever spreads on a certain space just under the tree and not only there and then. We realise that what is down there is not simply the ground; it is not simply what has been transformed from the natural surface of fertility into ground-rent, in Marxs terms (Foster 1999: 375379). So what is it, then? Visibility is once again insufficient for our knowledge of both nature and man, and appearance is nothing but a frozen film (Schnee/Scheinbar) through which the world appears as if it consists only of active human subjects who confront passive objects in their law-governed mechanisms (Bennett 2010: xiv). Reality does exist independently of our perception. The reason for the narrators difficulty in kicking the dead trunk away is an organic matter called mycelium. In the words of American mycologist, Paul Stamets,
the myceliums are interface organisms between life and death, as they decompose the woods they generate soil; this cobwebby growth grows into a mushroom and satellite communities sprout from this mushroom; the result of endless cycles of renewal and decomposition with fungi and soil and other successions of foliage and shrugs until soil becomes thicker and its ability to support biodiversity increases. (in Benenson and Rosow 2009)

This piece of scientific description has literary qualities and should be read accordingly in our classrooms, as it is welcomingly comparable with Deleuze and Guattaris method of the rhizome. What we are dealing with here is not with roots as essence, nor with a leaf as life (as they both plot a point and fix an order, according the idea of the rhizome), but with fungi, with mould, that rhizomorphically grow on trash, just as they do under a dead tree, thereby exposing what Deleuze and Guattari called arborescent pseudo-multiplicities (1987: 79). In Kafkas parable there is one moment of explanation the tree trunk cannot be pushed because it is stuck to the ground, which then can be supported by a rhizomatic-mycological intervention. Why, then, is this explanation also false? Why is the key for understanding the parable not hidden under the tree, ultimately? I believe that we should take a further step here in our environmentalist-Marxian reading and let the text direct us outside, where capitalist commodification fuels

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deforestation. Indeed, no myceliums can evolve once the felled tree is carried across continents, far from the needs of local communities: the self-organisational forces (regenerative capacity) of nature are declined by cultural (colonial) conception of life as terra nullius, says Vandana Shiva in Biopiracy (1997: 46). If deforestation can explain today why felled tree-trunks are no longer wedded to the ground, we understand that the very continuity between the fictional and the natural is severed by the economic, even while the latter retains a certain natural appearance. An ecocritical attention, which is encouraged by ecological changes that uncover whatever the sciences may hide from us, still opens alternative reading in canonical texts like Kafkas. In Kafka, what hides from us is why we can kick the trunk away and why we cannot move our reading from the clutch of allegory. It has been suggested, in recent literary ecocriticism, that metonymy (rather than metaphor) might be the trope through which the relations between bodies and spaces remain crucial today insofar as they make visible the invisible risk factors associated with deindustrialization, transportation inequality and environmental toxicity (Hsu 2011: 148). While I agree that artistic manipulations arise from whatever is available and visible in the artists policed and engineered environment, I believe we ought to consider the problem as being broader than one that only applies to texts that overtly address environmental issues. Known literary conventions might not be sufficient in deciphering current culture/nature dynamics, specifically because these tropes bypass the parallelism of mechanical annihilation of invisible natural forces (like the mycelium and its potentials) and the devastation of our ability to understand our forces and potentials (like that imagined failed kick of Kafkas narrator). This parallelism is not relevant solely to green works of art. To take Kafkas instructive point of departure seriously is to understand that like (wie) which connects us (wir sind) to trees (Baumstmme) as the core of biocentric equality, that is, the idea that all organisms and entities in the ecosphere, as parts of the interrelated whole, are equal in intrinsic worth (Devall, in Mikulak 2007: 5). Reviving environmental potentials in traditional materialist theories, Jane Bennett bases her critique of our all-too-rigid divisions of things and beings on the claim that the insinuation that deep down everything is connected and irreducible to a simple substrate resonates with an ecological sensibility (2010: xi). Bennett visits numerous sites of mutual transformations between humans and other agentic matters (such as electricity, trash, metal, food etc.), including the fiction of the vital materialist Franz Kafka. Following Bennett, Shiva, Deleuze and Guattari and others who consider wider cultural-natural living assemblages, we may argue that, as regards literature, next to interpreting every like as a simile or a mimesismark lies another possibility, that of the deep-ecological or ecocritical interpretation. The signs we and trees are brought into equivalence by the sort of statements which Bennett offers us: I am a material configuration [as] the pigeons in the park (ibid: 122), and she further dares to see both as members of a certain public (ibid:

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94). Back to Kafka: if read ecocritically, his allegorical proposal implies that we have the option of foreseeing what happens to allegory-obsessed humanity once it cannot even decompose; no time is left to be left and organically turn into another Being. Nevertheless, this biospheric sort of like-sign falls short in Kafkas parable, which means that the human ceases to exist as the basis for every metaphor; the false promise of metaphor-based human communication leaves us out of that picture of declining flora. I wonder how we can allow that hidden level into our reading of things that seem to be dead or inanimate or nature-less? Or, how can we read texts such as Kafkas parable not simply as illustrating false consciousness but also as pointing to what could still be living under our literary tropes or between our theories? Can the idea of bioequality be absolutely and exclusively incorporated into an ecocritical analysis of metaphor and displace the human fundament under any literary trope? This is definitely not the only problem that deep-ecology has applied to literary analysis, but as a whole we could still try and opt for what Michael Mikulak (2007: 12) calls theoretical cross-pollination between deep ecology and Marxism through the act of discursive recycling [such] that Marxism needs to (re)consider the environment, and deep ecology needs to (re)consider the human. To understand the mimetic movement of the literary in terms of deep ecology (i.e., allegory as the sign of bioequality) may be one task among several relative tasks. We should also understand the art-medium as matter: just as photography is also something that happens between us and the sun (and therefore is directly affected by global warming and air pollution), so literature is something that occurs between us and trees or, gradually, between us and e-ink and other technologies of the present phase of reading (which are nevertheless sunlight-dependent, too). Letting the work of art re-orientate our relation to its natural placement does not mean we must hug every tree-trunk before it turns into a passage by Kafka. Yet, intimations of the natural forces included in (every) artistic representation can lead us indeed teach us to enact our personal and collective responsibilities differently; not letting the mycelium into our literary and visual interpretation is a path that we are no longer privileged to take; if we fail to see this possibility altogether, our imaginative capacities are probably already devastated as a result of a much broader environmental decline (Buell 1995; Gilcrest 2002). *** Against the paralysis between what iek condemns as ecology of fear and Stamets (2006) denunciation of mycophobia, we should first resist the dichotomy of the natural versus the fictional, so alternative teaching of cultural artefacts can open up. The other part of my earlier question about teaching-back the natural is: What might such a move mean for pedagogy, or what kind of pedagogy does this

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teaching-back-the-natural constitute? I began by quoting Gramscis emphasis on the disastrous outcome of dismissing the possibility of acknowledging the natural force behind cultural reality and cultural conceptions. Gramsci believed that the evolution of the intellectual power of the working class should have a natural form, since serving as an ideological leader or simply as an educator is an option available to all. In other words, there must be a universal, natural human propensity for teaching and educating: All men are intellectuals, one could therefore say: but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals (1971: 140). This radical proposition is then translated to a pedagogic commitment:
One of the most important characteristics of any group that is developing towards dominance is its struggle to assimilate and to conquer ideologically the traditional intellectuals, but this assimilation and conquest is made quicker and more efficacious the more the group in question succeeds in simultaneously elaborating its own organic intellectuals. The enormous development of activity and organization of education [] is an index of the importance assumed in the modern world by intellectual functions and categories. [] School is the instrument through which intellectuals of all levels are elaborated. (ibid: 142143)

Interestingly, Gramsci takes this division of traditional educators versus organic ones into a geo-economic typology of urban versus rural intellectuals; this pairing of the natural form of awareness-growth and knowledge-accumulation with the landscape where these are made possible is essential. In a manner that recalls the language of Marx in his aforementioned 1842 essay, Gramsci uses organic matter from the actual scene he investigates as the literary trope of his prose:
One can understand nothing of the collective life of the peasantry and of the germs and ferments of development which exist within it, if one does not take into consideration and examine concretely and in depth this effective subordination to the intellectuals. Every organic development of the peasant masses, up to a certain point, is linked to and depends on movements among the intellectuals. (ibid: 149)

As we read on in his prison notebooks, we can see Gramscis theory of agri-intellectual growth evolving into a theory of education. The natural for Gramsci is not simply included in his critique of culture but rather provides the reason for what culture can be, for the way in which it could be pushed further by its regenerative capacity (to use Shivas terms once again). In Gramscis idea of organic intellectuals as a revolutionary evolution of knowledge, something is also implied about what is natural in being a natural teacher and hence, about the natural in general. However, the problem of naturalising intellectual capital lurks behind this way of thinking: the claim that every peasant can become an intellectual could be accused for naivety and universalism. This universalism may already underlie Gramscis note with

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which I opened this essay, as well as thwart the ethical integrity of some of the environmental theses mentioned above. Even when Kafka says we are like trees one can observe this simile as blind to differences, especially when the parable is read where there are no (more) trees in evidence, either naturally or historically. But the question as to whether naturalisation is a problem of making the natural a universal issue in critical theory as well as in physical environments should not rule out the reconsideration of eco-critical teaching of cultural and literary theory. To learn from the natural rather than to negate it may not necessarily be a universalistic aspiration, nor should it be an entirely posthumanist one (in that it is, eventually, a non-self-referential gesture towards the meaning of something in nature). In Kafkas simile, at least, there are several offers for that kind of learning; we are like trees can refer by eco-critical intervention to any of the following: we=teachers/ we=readers/ we=critics/ trees=teachers, trees=readers, critics, and so on and so forth, as long as the sign of equivalence is taken organically, that is, in nature. Of course, in an anthropocentric conception of culture, like is not identical to equals: since it is, eventually, a word in language, it could always disappear and the epistemological pathology which differentiates between the teacher who is reading The trees aloud in class and a tree would not change. The idea is simply to use the literary simileconstruct in order to place the teacher, the class and the text (including the materials of chairs, tables, tablets, bones, air, light etc.) on a wider web of natural-historical phenomena in constant reaction to numerous following acts, just as Kafka may have followed the state of a tree-trunk in the snow or Marx the prohibited Prussian wood. If we agree to re-incorporate the natural in a critical approach to culture, maybe natural teaching is not an exaggerated extension of the concept of the organic intellectual; in contrast, if we keep on doing away with nature in syllabi of cultural theory, no (bio)equality sign but signs which separate humans are assumed. Reading literary tropes as exclusively human-oriented is, among other things, something that teachers are especially capable of changing, in a similar way to the operation of Kafkas parable: the narrator begins from a casual we, which includes him in the community of those who use such trivial metaphors as people are like trees, but then he swiftly moves to a different position aside from that community (Aber sieh), trying to shake it from its blindness. This blindness is oblivious to the casual use of the always-anthropocentric metaphor, but even more, oblivious to the natural phenomena occluded through such a casual metaphor despite the fact that these phenomena (felled trees, hidden mycelium, etc.) gave way to such metaphors in the first place. Something in the biosphere of (and in) the parable The trees should seem connected to its readers; acknowledging this is a pedagogic choice derived from the dire need to survive a larger natural crisis which takes humans as its supposedly central catalysts. This pedagogic choice of re-assigning the natural (as-signing, re-incorporating the natural in our signs-systems, wherever we sign

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as) is only partially what makes this kind of teaching organic ecopedagogy is still theoretically underdeveloped and empirically un-researched, as we learn from Gregory Garrard (2010: 1). But what also makes this kind of teaching organic (in the Gramscian sense) is that it grows from a current, urgent, common, down-toearth, local-in-the-widest-sense concern for the material conditions of a particular environment around many people, including teachers. When Lawrence Buell turns in his short history of ecocriticism to what may lie ahead, he first mentions Stacy Alaimos idea of transcorproreality, that is, body as environmental construct. Buell concludes: I suspect that ecocritics also concerned with the relations between bodies and physical environment will continue to struggle with versions of this issue, whether the topic be the microcosm of the toxified body or the macrocosm of climate change (2011: 9798). I think we can walk this way thrice: first, towards a fuller understanding of the natural in the stories of those refugees from Cairo and Fukushima side-by-side with the stories we regard as canonical texts; second, towards reassigning the natural in the legends of literary interpretation and cultural analysis; and, finally, towards reformulating what could still be organic about teaching. Instead of taking the organic aspect of intellectual labour to be some kind of inborn quality, we can understand it as coming to terms with human embeddedness in techno-biotic actuality (ibid: 98). Interrogating nature and the natural should remain a serious methodological task as we consider what else there could be in literary texts like Kafkas parable or as we investigate the material conditioning, in class, of our reading and teaching. It should persist, in the very common, shared sense of methodos, as a way.

Acknowledgements
The writing of this article was generously supported by the Shpilman Institute of Photography. I would also like to offer special thanks to Geoffrey Hartman, Louise Bethlehem, Mark Stricker, Tara Menon and Alexandra Shreiteh for contributing to the conversation behind this project, and to the anonymous readers of Critical Arts for their careful reading of this article. I am grateful to Louise Bethlehem and Ashleigh Harris for bringing the text to its publishable version.

Note
1 An abbreviated version of this article was presented as a paper at the 2011 International Conference of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I am grateful for all the insights and comments made by the conference participants.

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