Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth

"Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley, Wordsworth"
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"Romantic Disaster Ecology: Blake, Shelley,

Wordsworth"
January 2012
Romanticism and Disaster
Romanticism and Disaster

Timothy Morton
University of California, Davis
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1.Our world appears to be on the brink of disaster, an appearance that is itself
disastrous. The disaster of disaster is that disaster is everywhere, all the time: while on the
one hand it appears obvious that disaster should be the exception that proves the rule of a
generally non-disastrous world, in actuality no non-disastrous moment arrives. Like a deer
in the headlights, thinking is paralyzed by disaster. Whether this is strictly a function of
modernity, beginning with the Romantic period, or whether it is a function of disaster as
such remains to be seen. But what Naomi Klein accurately, but not thoroughly, calls the
shock doctrine is the capitalist norm: the state of exception is capitalist reality. For Klein,
capitalists fleece the rest of us when they need a whip-round. For Marxism, this is the
normal state of affairs, the deep structure of capitalism as such, which must keep on
accumulating more money in order to exist. And perhaps it is also the reality of actually
existing socialism: to avert the imminent disaster in capitalism, a socialist emergency must
be declared.
2.It is possible, argue iek and Badiou, that ecology is simply the latest version of
capitalist disaster ideology at work. [1] For instance, to ward off what is still seen (weirdly)
as an imminent disaster of global warming, it is entirely likely that a green bubble based on
derivatives of the existing carbon trading market will eventually eclipse the recent
implosion of global capital. (This is weird because science keeps telling us that the
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disastrous climate change has already occurred and that we are now living in its
aftermath.) Nevertheless, truly to think what I call the ecological thought (and I believe that
there is a thinking that is truthful here) is to recalibrate what we mean by disaster, such
that ecological thinking and practice must entail dropping the imminence of disaster, with
its resulting states of exception. This thinking would be non-disastrous both in content and
in form.
3.Take plutonium for instance: a disaster that has already occurred, and one that will
continue for at least 24 100 years. Just how many of those years do we think will be
capitalist? Do we seriously imagine that the end of the world is more likely than the end of
capitalism? Or consider global warming, the cause of the Sixth Mass Extinction Event
(there have been five since the beginning of life on Earth). This is not a disaster waiting to
happen. Atmospheric CO levels are now well above the safety ceiling of 350 parts per
million (ppm). Since Neolithic times, humans have lived under about 275ppm. Current
levels are around 387ppm and climbing by about 2ppm annually (350.org). Percy Shelley
was already talking about pollution in 1813: the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities; the
exhalations of chemical processes (Note 17 to Queen Mab, 1.40623 (411)). Or take
petroleum: the product of whatever disaster wiped out the dinosaurs (iek, Defense,
441442). Thinking of past disasters causes thinking to leak out around the threat of
imminent disaster, like water seeping through a badly constructed dam. In the language of
fighter pilots, disaster cones down our attention to focus on a singularity that is strictly
unthinkable.
4.We can visualize a time before and a time after disaster, in which disaster remains
as a fundamental category of our visualization. What about thinking beyond disaster, or is
thinking forever caught in disaster's shadow? Art imagines post-apocalyptic worlds:
Romanticism in particular is full of them, from Byron's "Darkness" to The Last Man. Is
poetry, as Allen Grossman puts it, the postponement of the end of the world, and how
Romantic is this postponement (Grossman and Halliday 336)? Or is there another way to
think, without disaster, a non-disastrous thinking, that isn't just postponement? And is
there any Romantic literature that can help us think this way? In this essay, I shall consider
three writers who adopt three quite different positions concerning disaster. Percy Shelley,
argues the essay, is fundamentally disaster-prone: despite his proclaimed anti-capitalism,
and indeed his objective usefulness to progressive and socialist thinking, his poetry even
anticipates some of the more recent moves of global capital. I shall argue that Shelley did,
to his credit, eventually figure out (at least on the level of artistic form) that his poetic
language was trapped in disaster mode. William Blake satirizes the subject position from
which disaster becomes visible, in his special mode of ideology critiquepart of his larger
project of trying to change the attitudes that come bundled with ideas such as disaster.
William Wordsworth emerges as a genuine poet of non-disaster, or post-disaster: his
poetry is perhaps the only one of the three still capable of performing something like
thinking while caught in disaster's headlights.
The Disaster of Disaster
5.Strictly speaking, ecology is a discourse of non-disaster. Disaster is literally an
unfortunate star (dis plus astron), an astrological misfortune. This accident is a portent of
things to come on Earth:
Stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
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Disasters in the sun; and the moist star,

Upon whose influence Neptunes empire stands,
Was sick almost to dooms-day with eclipse.
(Hamlet 1.1.118)
In order to have disasters such as this, one needs an integrated world in which certain
astral phenomena are interpreted according to a stable key. The stars spatter the edges of
this world, illuminating it with their obscure but significant tracery, patterned in
recognizable constellations that are given rules for conjunction and disjunction. Ecology is
the collapse of astrology, and not simply because it belongs to a secular era. Ecology
abolishes the star-studded dome of the world insofar as ecological science and ecological
awareness force upon humans the collapse of any significant background or horizon
against which human activity can be placed and measured (Heidegger 39122; Morton,
Ecology 94101). Astrology turns the stars into significant documents, legible texts.
Ecological disasters are precisely not caused by the action of a beyond, for in ecology,
there is no beyond, no elsewhere, no yonder, however remote. Life forms are made from
their environments, including sunshine and chemicals from exploding stars. There is no
way rigidly to separate the biosphere and the non-biosphere. If the Earth had no magnetic
field, for instance, life forms would be sizzled by solar winds: one good sign of extraterrestrial life is planets with magnetic fields. As if life, once it gets going, includes all that
goes around it and before it: terrestrial oxygen and iron are bi-products of bacterial
metabolism, and hills are made of crushed shells and bones.
6.In the technical literature of disaster management, an ecological disaster is
precisely an event for which inside resources do not suffice to provide a remedyhelp
from outside must be brought in (European Environmental Agency, disaster). [2] This
rather elegantly encapsulates the problemthere remains no inside, or everything is
inside in the sense that there is no longer a beyond, since the beyond is only legible on
the horizon of a here and now.
7.We can only conclude, then, that ecological disaster is an oxymoron. To what
purpose? Paul Virilio predicted a long while ago that environmental threats would allow the
state to stage rehearsals for military and industrial displays of power (Virilio). This is not
congruent with ecological reality. The trouble with ecological awareness is that it is
drastically non-teleological. Life science has demonstrated that life as such has no fixed,
rigid origin: this is the lesson of the ironically titled The Origin of Species, in which Darwin
successfully undermines every possible biological distinction (species versus species,
species versus variant, variant versus monstrosity, and so on) (Darwin, Origin, 34, 94,
100, 109, 131, 133, 141). The rhetoric of disaster is the tropology of an absolute end, a
sudden misfortune. How sudden is the half-life of plutonium: what is the span of that
disaster? Does it have peaks and troughs? When did the disaster called global warming
begin? Is it at all possible to say with a straight face that on a certain date at a certain
time, a threshold will have been crossed that guarantees the arrival of apocalyptic
catastrophe?
8.There is a rhetoric of catastrophe in which the narrator overleaps apocalypse
altogether. It is as if one could watch a video of one's own funeral. Of course, literature
enables us to fantasize this all the time: the act of narrating in the first person is just this
kind of doubling. But the totality of global ecological disaster, of which one consequence
might be human extinction (as in Mary Shelley's The Last Man), means that there is strictly
no one around in the future to watch any videos whatsoever. The ghostly presence of
ourselves, spectators to a future in which we do not strictly exist, can only be vicarious at
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best and is often sadistic. Elegies for deaths that have not yet occurred, they mourn for the
still living in a way that only repeats the dreaded dualism of subject and object that many
environmentalists see as public enemy number one. For the subject who is reading the
elegy is different from the subject whose death is being witnessed, even if they have the
same name, and are to some extent the same person. Radically different: separated by an
ontological firewall, indeed, such that ecological elegy is a form of the Cretan liar paradox
(I am lying). [3] Byron's "Darkness" manages this uncanny doubling by staging disaster
as a dream. Shelley's The Last Man imagines a further future in which some people come
across the story. Nevertheless, in both cases, part of the pleasure of works such as these
is that one can't help thinking for a moment that one is voyeuristically privy to a future in
which one does not exist.
9.The ideology and the rhetoric of ecological disaster, then, have nothing to do with
actual ecology. They are environmentalist in the same sense as some ideas about
gender are sexist. That is, they set up the environment as a metaphysical construct on a
pedestal, torn down, built up, worshipped, admired as an aesthetic object, and so on.
Aesthetic images of the environment are predicated on disaster: we are shown we want to
avert it; we are compelled to imagine it vividly. This seems like a truism: recordings of
whale sounds and Douglas Adams's book Last Chance to See would not have appeared if
human-caused extinction were not on the cards (see Works Cited). It is always
unfortunate when reality coincides with fantasy. The trouble is not so much the quite
legitimate wish to preserve species from dying out through human misuse. The problem is
in the attitude engendered in the disaster narratives we keep telling ourselves. For at least
one of these attitudes happens to provide some strong cement for the maintenance of an
oppressive status quo.
10.If we are going to think ecology beyond capitalism, we shall need to think beyond
disaster and beyond disaster speak. It would be preferable to refer to ecological difficulty
as a drag, in both performative and work-related senses. Ecological difficulty will beset
us for the long run, perhaps forever (whatever that means). And ecology is profoundly a
view that accommodates display, performance, sheer aesthetic illusion (for example in
Darwin's theory of sexual selection), and so on (Darwin, Descent). Take the evolutionary
notion of satisficing. A rabbit is not really a rabbit. It is not that a rabbit by any other name
would act as nose-twitchy. All the way down, there is no rabbit, no rabbit flavored DNA.
And all the way up: rabbits act like rabbits, and thus pass on their genome. This is called
satisficing, a form of performativity (Dawkins 156). If a life form does its thing without
dying, its descendant can keep whatever it does. The fact that homosexuals exist across a
vast array of sexually reproducing life forms, for instance, indicates that evolution has no
problem with them. In fact, heterosexual behavior floats on top of a vast ocean of cloning,
transgender switching, homosexuality and intersexuality (Roughgarden). A genome could
not care less if its vehicle acts like someone else's idea of a rabbit. This includes having
mutations that not all rabbits might have. There is no essence called race, or gender, or
speciesor environment. Thus there is no fixed gender against which deviations are
measured as disastrous.
11.Ultimately, thinking ecology beyond disaster means thinking ecology without
nature; and even thinking ecology without environmentalism. Looked at one way, evolution
is a long history of disasters, such as extinction: which is to say, since disaster is
everywhere, it is of no cosmic significance. Ecological awareness demands that we care
for ourselves and nonhumans on time and space scales far in excess of the usual
parameters, even if the parameters are based on modified forms of self interest that
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include greater numbers under the umbrella of kith and kin (Parfit, 355357, 361,
371377; Morton, "Hyperobjects" ). It just does not make sense to try and find
self-interest-based reasons to care for a hyperobject such as plutonium 239, which has a
half-life of 24 100 years: what a drag. The kind of excitement demanded by disaster
tropology will not serve us well. We need something like Wordsworth with his adverse
reaction to the gross and violent stimulants of his literary age (Wordsworth, "Preface,"
746).
Percy Shelley
12.Are there archaeological remnants of oxymoronic disaster ecology in the British
Romantic period? And do these remains contain anything like a critique? Percy Shelley is
forever thinking of planetary and solar disaster. He favors the global over the local in a
way that would scandalize the typical Romantic ecocritic. For this very reason his writing
seems apt for an era of global warming. The poetry performs aesthetically what ecological
damage and global positioning technology perform in the real, swallowing horizons and
worlds (Morton, "Shelley's Green Desert" ). This disorientation is indeed disastrous, a
symptom of a general collapse of local reference points.
13.A few disastrous stars appear as such in Shelley's poetry. [4] Of the rather few
astrological (rather than astronomical) ones, most are favorable. [5] Yet there are
disasters closer to home, having to do with the Sun and Moon, taken as figures for the
brute ideological force of geocentric common sensethe cosmology of despotic theism.
These fluctuate somewhere between the pathetic fallacy and an earlier, classicist
tropology of nature echoing human weal and woe, as when in elegy the mountains
resound with echoes of loss. In Hellas Hassan describes the sky as if it were the Muslim
flag:
Look, Hassan, on yon crescent moon emblazoned
Upon that shattered flag of fiery cloud,
Which leads the rear of the departing day,
Wan emblem of an empire fading now.
See! how it trembles in the blood-red air
And like a mighty lamp whose oil is spent
Shrinks on the horizon's edge while from above
One star with insolent and victorious light
Hovers above its fall, and with keen beams
Like arrows through a fainting antelope
Strikes its weak form to death. (337347)
It's standard Shelleyan procedure to work emblematically, to depict revolution according to
the operations of celestial mechanisms. In a massive expansion of the classical
messenger speech (much of Hellas works this way), the workings of history are played out
as astronomical portents. Hassan curses Greece using the hyperbolic language of
disaster: Famine and Pestilence / And Panic (439440) will ensue wherever dews fall,
or the angry sun look down / With poisoned light (438439). Naturally, this language is
framed by the encompassing vision of Enlightenment, of stars beyond sun and moon
threatening the heliocentric world of a corrupt God and the dark theodicy of The tempest
of the Omnipotence of God / Which sweeps all things to their appointed doom (449450).
14.The classical tropology of the globe was already out of date: some more up to
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date poetry turned to what I've called the poetics of spice, the capitalist advertising
language that weaves together Earth's far flung corners via trade routes and precious
commodities (Morton, Spice 39108). Shelley was well aware of this new menu of poetic
devices, and used them frequently and knowingly in allusions to Milton, one of their first
great exponents. The poetics of spice is significantly not a poetics of disaster but of
continued and undisturbed flow: a fantasy of luxury that airbrushed the ongoing disaster of
slavery and colonialism out of the global picture, rather like an Archer Daniels Midland
"Supermarket to the World" advert today. Although knowing this may upset the
environmentalist apple cart, the first stirrings of global awareness came from the heart of
commercial capitalist fantasy, not from within opposition to capitalism.
15.Shelley, however, needed to think and imagine how it had all gone so wrong. He
was deeply aware of how the poetics of spice was tainted by commerce, and often uses it
perhaps rather too forcefully to make this very point. Unable to theorize fully how disaster
is intrinsic to capitalism (he writes it off as a rapacious, excessive farcical repetition of
aristocratic power), Shelley resorted to language that talks about the disturbing of a
fundamental balance. In this he shares much with contemporary anti-capitalist writing such
as Naomi Klein's. Yet Shelley is perhaps unique for the deadly seriousness with which he
articulates the imbalance. This becomes a matter of scientific and philosophical positing,
not just rhetorical play. For Shelley, Earth was a perpetual disaster, in the precise
astrological sense: a mishap in a planetary body. Earth's axis is bent. This terrestrial
disaster was caused by human injustice, including the eating of animal flesh. In the
utopian future, the Earth's axis is righted and the planet orbits straight up around the sun.
Ironically, Shelley's evidence for the disaster, and its solution, is a snapshot of what later
became known as continental drift and climate change. Note 10 on two lines of his early
poem Queen Mab (6.4546) establish this:
To the red and baleful sun
That faintly twinkles there.
The north polar star, to which the axis of the earth, in its present state of obliquity, points. It
is exceedingly probable, from many considerations, that this obliquity will gradually
diminish, until the equator coincides with the ecliptic: the nights and days will then become
equal on the earth throughout the year, and probably the seasons also. There is no great
extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be
as rapid as the progress of intellect; or that there should be a perfect identity between the
moral and physical improvement of the human species. It is certain that wisdom is not
compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health,
in the true and comprehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civilized man.
Astronomy teaches us that the earth is now in its progress, and that the poles are every
year becoming more and more perpendicular to the ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded
by the history of mythology, and geological researches, that some event of this nature has
taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this progress is not merely an
oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers. Bones of animals peculiar to
the torrid zone have been found in the north of Siberia, and on the banks of the river Ohio.
Plants have been found in the fossil state in the interior of Germany, which demand the
present climate of Hindostan for their production. The researches of M. Bailly establish the
existence of a people who inhabited a tract in Tartary 49 north latitude, of greater antiquity
than either the Indians, the Chinese, or the Chaldeans, from whom these nations derive
their sciences and theology. We find, from the testimony of ancient writers, that Britain,
Germany, and France were much colder than at present, and that their great rivers were
annually frozen over. Astronomy teaches us also that since this period the obliquity of the
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earth's position has been considerably diminished. (Poems, 1.373374)

Extraordinarily, then, borrowing from the ideas of Laplace and Cabanis, Shelley holds that
a more just human society will literally rebalance Earth's axis. Shelley thus produced
countless images we now associate with the photograph "Earthrise," the image of a fragile
blue Earth from the Moon popularized by Al Gore. Shelley wants desperately to achieve a
point of view that is big enough in time and space to account for disaster: as Archimedes'
epigraph to Queen Mab puts it, Give me somewhere to stand and I will move the Earth.
And he means it. He literally means that Earth's axis can be corrected through progressive
cultural and political praxis. The trouble is Shelley finds it almost impossible to imagine
transformation without disaster: the fortunate disaster of the moving of Earth itself is sure
to be tremendous, shuddering life forms, not a peaceful working out of some inner logic.
Transitions from disaster to peace resound with the grinding of rhetorical gears. Thus in
Laon and Cythna everyone fights everyone else until someone yells for it to stop;
immediately following the carnage, the people stage a pacifist, vegetarian festival (Morton,
Shelley 110116). This implies that everyone has within them the capacity to hear the
compassion and reason within the yelling, and the capacity to turn on a dime to act on
these impulses. Yet these capacities are precisely not there: why else would Earth's axis
be so kinked? Shelley wants transitions that are precisely un-kinky, but what he gives us
is, on the figurative level at least, maximal kink.
16.Earth-righting justice includes proto-feminism, atheism, democracy, some form of
non-capitalist economy, and vegetarianism. The sound minds in sound bodies who will
enjoy this future state will live in harmony with their world, conceived not as a patchwork of
localities, but as a genuine globality, as Book 9 of Queen Mab makes clear: Oh Happy
Earth! Reality of Heaven! (9.1). Shelley's somewhat future-primitive imagery imagines the
future state as a blissful global village in which nonhumans sport around human
habitations, in a rewriting of Isaiah 11 that strikes us now as rather New Agey (The
Daemon of the World, 444). For instance, the following passage strikingly situates the
future humans on a republican lawn, level and smooth like the metaphorical level playing
field:
And where the startled wilderness beheld
A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood,
A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs
The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs,
Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang,
Sloping and smooth the daisy-spangled lawn,
Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles
To see a babe before his mother's door,
Sharing his morning's meal
With the green and golden basilisk
That comes to lick his feet.
(Queen Mab, 8.7787)
The fusion of Biblical millenarianism and utterly sincere Enlightenment nonviolence and
reason produces the almost psychedelic image of the baby feeding the green and golden
basilisk with its friendly tongue (8.86). It is one of Shelley's many vivid synecdochic
sketches for a peaceful world whose every corner looks like this. This is a world without
disaster, whose disasters are all past. The happy future people can look up to the sky and
know that everything has been set rightnot by some deus ex machina, to be sure, but by
their own hands and brains. The world has a centerthe human habitation, represented
minimally by the mother's door (8.84), around which spreads the rest of Earth's
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inhabitants in what appear to be concentric circles derived from Pope's Essay on Man
(3.27, 4952). Vegetarianism serves as a hook (in Lacanian, a point de caption) that
links individual impulses to social welfare, and human society to nature, seeming to
ground the future in something we can practice right now (3.14767).
17.Yet while in Pope there is a reactionary knowingness that disaster continues,
Shelley truly wants to image a time without disaster, figured as a time of no meat eating
(not even for the lions) that we can achieve by not eating meat, among other things. For
Shelley, the Garden of Eden is a future state. Human being is and has been a disaster,
beginning with the Promethean (technological, that is) disaster of cooking animal food.
Thus at the end of Prometheus Unbound the Earth herself is finally able to articulate how
disastrous violence is transfigured:
Man, one harmonious Soul of many a soul
Whose nature is its own divine controul,
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea;
Familiar acts are beautiful through love;
Labour, and pain, and grief, in life's green grove
Sport like tame beasts, none knew how gentle they could be!
(4.400405)
18.The trouble is, how do we get to the future Eden? As argued just above, this
would require the very state of mind (the nonviolent, non-disastrous one) that Shelley
reckons is unavailable to us in our disastrous present. All right then, try vegetarianism in
the mean time. But here the problem repeats itself: in order to become vegetarian, one
must be nonviolent (Morton, Shelley 126169). Vegetarianism also presupposes the
mindset it claims to generate. This recursion is evidence of ideology at work. Shelley is in
a bind because he cannot think past disaster. How do you convince the unconscious
(Demogorgon), which has no sense of time, to behave differentlyto imagine things
differently? Shelley's progressive political view wants this difference to be possible, but his
poetics creates enormous difficulties.
19.What ecological thinking, emerging during his lifetime, opens up, Shelley includes
in his work. Yet with another hand, Shelley domesticates the disastrous vision, turning
disaster into a singularity through which human history will pass, as the rather grisly
introduction to Book 8 shows: Time! Render up thy half-devoured babes (8.35). It is
hard not to think that at some level, the remarkably anti-capitalist and prescient Shelley is
stuck in a capitalist ideological mode, rather like the Enlightenment philosophes he so
admired and whom Marx later criticized for being as fetishistic, in their way, as the
primitive believers they undermine.
20.Shelley appears trapped in the tropology of disaster, like an insect beating itself
against a glass window. Since what appears to be required is a dramatic inner
transformation that includes transcending prejudices of all kinds, how is it possible to think
the moment of change? Shelley obsesses over how to transition from the time of disaster
to the time of no disaster. It is only perhaps at the very end, with The Triumph of Life, that
he opts for the judo-like approach of staying with the moment of disaster, inventing a
poetics of disaster appropriate to this staying. Yet it isn't quite right to call this incomplete
text a judo move. It's more as if Shelley was at last content to see the implications of his
poetic imagination through to some conclusions that might be uncomfortable for the kinds
of progressive box into which he fitted his politics. For The Triumph of Life is incomplete
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both as literary text, and in terms of thinking through and beyond the political and
philosophical ramifications of disaster.
21.The strange beginning of Shelley's The Triumph of Life, elucidated in Paul De
Man's essay Shelley Disfigured, is a poetics of disaster, literally a dis-astron, since the
sun's weirdly sudden rising is the basis for De Man's deconstructive essay. Talk about a
disaster in the sun as Horatio puts it:
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task
Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth
Rejoicing in his splendour, and the mask
Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. (14)
Here is the good disaster of an Enlightenment sunrise, and the gears don't grindbut
what acceleration! It is as if Shelley had overheard Wordsworth's paean to the French
Revolution, Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive (11.4), and teased out the queasy
horrornot of executing aristos, but the horror within bliss as such, its automatic,
orgasmic otherness. De Man's reading traces the intense play of light in Shelley's poem,
as blinding as it is revealing (De Man). This intensity is in part a reflex of what he calls the
brusque artificiality of the poem's guiding linguistic act, positing. The inversion of the
figure and the figured (Swift as a spiritthe Sun (12)) is one of Shelley's typical uses of
what old rhetorical manuals call obscurum per obscures, describing something in terms of
something less clear (Morton, "Shelley, Nature and Culture" ). This device spells disaster,
separating the figurative from the signified levels while making the signified moot: poetry
achieves escape velocity from pointing to things outside of language, exploding beautifully
in successful failure, like fireworks. The first four lines dispense with measurably slow
empirical dawns and the depth of poetic tradition about the sun in a stroke (a sunstroke?):
The impossible position is precisely the figure, the trope, metaphor as a violentand not
as a darklight, a deadly Apollodisaster (De Man 117118). Light starts to become
nuclear radiation. It is as if it's beginning to dawn on Shelley that disaster is intrinsic to his
poetics.
22.The disruptive, fluid freefall of this poem's terza rima enacts disaster at a textural
level: you can feel it in the disorienting interweaving of negation upon negation. Finally,
Shelley appears content to court disaster. The vertiginous way in which visions and
dreams appear caught within one another in a non-teleological parody of medieval
allegory leaves the narrator trapped within the glass of disaster, against which we saw
Shelley's earlier work to be beating itself. For to discover oneself in a dream, only to find
that the exit from the dream is another dream, puts in peril the neatly teleological story of
disaster transcended or averted. When everything is a disaster, it is not that nothing is a
disaster: rather, we enter a world of risk assessment without an exit, and find ourselves
unable to shake the monkey of too much consciousness off our backs (Beck).
23.Perhaps, then, there is some truth in the idea that The Triumph of Life is
deliberately unfinishedat least this intuition is congruent with some of the conclusions
the poem forces upon us. I prefer, however, to think of this poem as radically impossible to
finish by Shelley at the time of his death. Where do you go once you've figured out that the
future (and the future of your poem) leads you into another ream of disaster? In this sense
the unresolved poetic problem is also an unresolved philosophical and political problem.
Shelley's palpable boredom with old solutions, however, should not lure us into concluding
that he had given up on revolution. Quite the opposite: the unhappiness with fake endings
is a reflex of a continued revolutionary project.
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William Blake
24.Perhaps the most obvious Blake disaster poem is his Song of Experience, "The
Tyger." The tiger itself is burning (1) like an asteroid fallen to Earth, In the forests of the
night (2). It's thus no surprise that stars appear at a crucial moment:
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears
Did he smile his work to see
Did he who made the lamb make thee?
At the climax of the poem, Blake is satirizing the attitude that sees the tiger as a terrifying
product of a terrifying God, akin to Hegel's beautiful soul, whose own gaze is the evil that it
sees in the world at large (Hegel 383409). The beautiful soul, for whom the world is evil,
is a type of environmentalist ideology, which makes "The Tyger" even more apt for our
purposes (Morton, Ecology 109123). The narrator's description of the stars throwing
down their spears arrives at the climax of a series of industrial and infernal images of the
tiger's physical construction. The description serves as a kind of establishing shot that puts
the artificer's handiwork in perspective, a wide-angle lens on the Universe. The narrator
wishes to convey the cosmic dismay felt at the arrival of the tiger.
25.The personified stars do not portend evil in this case as true astral disasters
wouldthey witness it. Their reaction of horrified pity is in accord with the narrator's
objectifying, materialistic gazethey are the evil they see. Evil thus already haunts the
Universe, in the form of an unconscious subjectivity that sees certain phenomena as
material embodiments of evil, as if from a great distance. If the stars are angelic titans
(Lucifer being the chief among them), then God is the exception, the one that creates an
evil universe, much to their dismay. Yet evil has already manifested in the form of an evil
gaze.
26.Blake comes close to articulating a theory of disaster that is highly relevant to this
essay's proposal that we think beyond disaster. This is unsurprising, since his work is
ideology critique through and through, and since the materialism and capitalism that
spawn disaster, and disaster thinking, were operational by the time he was writing. Like
Hegel, Blake had figured out that ideas come bundled with unconscious attitudes, and he
was determined to expose them. The portrayal of the tiger as terrifying misses the
uncanny familiarity of the tiger, hinted at in the cuddly toy illumination that accompanies
the poem. This missing of the mark resembles the way in which sublime Nature,
objectified as wilderness, is set up to loom around, beyond and behind human activity like
a distant mountain range. The reified sublimity passes too quickly over the distressing
intimacy and lameness (to use an appropriate modern adjective) of human and
nonhuman interaction.
William Wordsworth
27.The most ambiguous disaster ecology is found, unsurprisingly, in that master of
ambiguity and anticlimax, William Wordsworth. The dream of the Arab episode, a spot of
time that occurs in the fifth book of The Prelude, is strictly about an apocalyptic flood; and
about poetry as the medium, the telephone, down which this telos is heard. Wordsworth's
image within the dream of the book as telephonic shell is remarkably phonocentric:
intriguingly spiraled and opaque, silent and mysterious, you don't even read it with your
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eyes, you have to put it to your ear:

and This, said he,
This other, pointing to the Shell, this Book
Is something of more worth. And, at the word,
The Stranger, said my Friend continuing,
Stretched forth the Shell towards me, with command
That I should hold it to my ear. I did so,
And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue,
Which yet I understood, articulate sounds,
A loud prophetic blast of harmony;
An Ode, in passion uttered, which foretold
Destruction to the Children of the Earth
By deluge now at hand. (5.8898)
Wordsworth has been said to open an imaginary space in which film technology becomes
significant, in his liquid long form poems. Here he appears to do something similar to the
telephone. What you hear when you hold it to your ear, like a pre-recorded message from
the future, is the sound of the end of the world: who recorded it, this phonos of the telos?
This sound, heard in the present moment of the beach as a hugely amplified ambient
whisper like the sound of soft swirling waters in a seashell turned up high, is profoundly
environmental in form as well as in content. The disturbingly evocative voice without a
body is a floating sound coming from nowhere: in the term invented by Pierre Schaeffer,
the pioneer of musique concrte, it is acousmatican automated sound that appears to
come from no identifiable source (Morton, Ecology 4143).
28.This sound is a blast, sound as disaster, somewhere between an explosion and
a fanfare on a brass instrument. Like a hi-fi speaker whose volume is dangerously high,
the shell might cause pain: a message delivery system so potent that one becomes vividly
aware of what Jakobson called the contact, the material medium of communication as
such (Jakobson). The alarm-like blast wavers disturbingly between speech and noise and
music (harmony): it is loud and prophetic, made of articulate sounds. Yet the sound
is in a language the dreamer does not recognizethus a language from a beyond, over
the horizon, outside, reinforcing the notion that disaster is the outside impinging on an
inside; a language that is doubly foreign, yet also a tongue, as if the narrator had a
tongue in his ear. In the bothand logic of a dream (Freud asserts that the unconscious
knows no negation), beautifully modeled in Wordsworth's description of simultaneous
unintelligibility and intelligibility, the sound is both noise and meaning, recognized as such
even though the words cannot be understood. Three possibilities are superimposed: the
sound is inarticulate noise; the sound is articulate, meaningful yet not understood; the
sound is meaningful and understood.
29.The telephonic shell is itself an alien technology, and the narrator's account of the
Don Quixote-like Arab impressing him with shiny gadgets is reminiscent of first contact
narratives. Yet the scene is inverted, as if modern technology (this is after all a highly
ambiguous account of books and reading) arrived from another world onto English shores.
With its shiny, iPhone-like nacre, the shell impresses, and the narrator perhaps appears to
undergo the assumed embarrassment of the indigenous person who does not know what
to do with the objects presented to him. Then space and time collapse in apocalyptic
fashion, and suddenly the end of the world is at hand. One cannot help finding in this
passage something that is indeed prophetic about the distance collapsing technologies of
the last two centuries. It is particularly strange, this effect, considering that the entire
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passage is in the context of a meditation on the already existing technology of books. With
their world-ending promises of instant presence, modern communication media do indeed
resemble material symptoms of a disturbing new metaphysics. Many times ecological
criticism has labeled technology as such disastrous, precisely insofar as it is the end of the
world as a bounded place of distances and opacities and hidden cornersworlds need
horizons, and global warming reduces these horizons to mere abstraction and false
immediacy.
30.The immersive sound of the seashore, the quietness here amplified so as to
threaten overwhelming (literally, over-whelming) noise, is heard throughout modern new
age and environmental music as the sounds of a disaster-stricken planet: disappearing
lifeworlds recorded for elegiac evocative pleasure. The innocent seeming hush of an
environmental soundscape is thus a threat of imminent destruction: as if the recoding said,
I could be your last chance to hear a world such as this. In these fragmentary voices of
real world ambience, global capital and imperial power are audible both in their
phantasmagorical energy and penetrating scientific gaze. Such fragile sonic worlds are
objects of sadistic pleasure and Schadenfreude, as well as the more obvious marketing of
the oceanic feeling that constitutes a core of the long history of consumerism (Morton,
Ecology 111112). World is strictly a function of modernity, like the idea of the Middle
Ages.
31.Like Magritte's La condition humaine, a painting of a painting of a landscape
placed within the landscape it has painted, such that the actual landscape overlaps with it,
Wordsworth's narrator hears apocalyptic ambience on the seashore itself. This
coincidence of fantasy and reality takes place within a dream whose dreamer is himself
situated on a seashore. The dreamer awakens: the ocean is the same; disaster has been
framed by the drag of the real. It's a typically Wordsworthian anticlimax, a spot of time, a
record of weakness, failure and collapse. Wordsworth is enabling thinking to carry on
around and through disaster.
32.As failure, it's the exact opposite of Freud's record of the dream of the burning
boy, in which the boy signals that the dreamer must wake up and smell the real smoke.
Perhaps the role of the dream in Wordsworth's poem is more like Lacan's reinterpretation
of Freud: Lacan argues that to spare himself the anxiety of the murderous erotic fantasy,
the dreamer awakens to the drag of the actual fire (Lacan 5760, 6870). The real
disaster would be remaining within the dream and giving vent to one's violent fantasies.
This is indeed salutary in an ecological sense. Environmentalism is perhaps nothing but
the desire that one's dreamthat one inhabits a meaningful and immersive lifeworld
surrounded by familiar but not uncanny nonhumansremain undisturbed. The persistence
of this dream inhibits directly intervening in the realm of life on Earth for the sake of life
forms. In this sense, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, environmentalism is hostile to
ecology.
Works Cited
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Adams, Douglas. Last Chance to See. [n.p.]: Ballantine Books, 1992. Print.
Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Trans. Mark Ritter. London: Sage,
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1992. Print.
Blake, William. The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V Erdman.
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Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. Ed. Gillian Beer. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996. Print.
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: Penguin,
2004. Print.
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De Man, Paul. "Shelley Disfigured." The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia
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European Environmental Agency. Web. November 17, 2009.
Grossman, Allen, and Mark Halliday. The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for
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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. Ed. J.N Findlay. Trans.
A.V Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany, N.Y: State U of New
York P, 1996. Print.
International Disaster Database. Web. November 17, 2009.
Jakobson, Roman. "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics." Style in Language. Ed.
Thomas A Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1960. Print.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador,
2008. Print.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton,
1998. Print.
Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.
Morton, Timothy. Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. Print.
Morton, Timothy. The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic.
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Morton, Timothy. "Shelley's Green Desert." Studies in Romanticism. Ed. Jonathan Bate. 3
(Fall, 1996): 40930. Print.
Morton, Timothy. "Shelley, Nature and Culture." The Cambridge Companion to Shelley.
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Ed. Timothy Morton. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Morton, Timothy. "The Dark Ecology of Elegy." The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Ed.
Karen Weisman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Print.
Morton, Timothy. "Hyperobjects and the End of Common Sense." The Contemporary
Condition. Web. Mar. 2010.
Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984. Print.
Payne, Roger S. Deep Voices: The Second Whale Record. [n.p.]: Capitol Records, 1977.
Payne, Roger S, and Frank Watlington. Songs of the Humpback Whale. [n.p.]: Capitol
Records, 1970.
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Twickenham Text, with Selected Annotations. Ed. John Butt. London: Routledge, 1989.
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Roughgarden, Joan. Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and
People. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. Print.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Poems of Shelley. Ed. Kelvin Everest and Geoffrey Matthews.
3 vols. London: Longman, 1989. Print.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Donald H Reiman and Neil
Fraistat. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Print.
Virilio, Paul. Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York:
Semiotext(e), 1990. Print.
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 17971800. Ed. James Butler
and Karen Green. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992. Print.
Wordsworth, William. The Major Works: Including the Prelude. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 2008. Print.
iek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, then as Farce. London: Verso, 2009. Print.
iek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008. Print.
iek, Slavoj. "Ecology without Nature." http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm;
http://www.lacan.com/zizekecologyvideo.html
Notes
[1] See for example iek, Tragedy; http://www.lacan.com/zizecology1.htm;
http://www.lacan.com/iekecologyvideo.html. BACK
[2] The International Disaster Database defines a disaster such that at least one of the
following occur: ten or more people are reported killed; one hundred people are reported
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affected; a state of emergency is declared; a call for international assistance is made.

BACK
[3] For further discussion see Morton, "Dark Ecology." BACK
[4] A brief search of ABELL confirms this. BACK
[5] There is too little space to discuss "A Vision of the Sea" with its watery plain, / Where
the death-darting sun cast no shadow at noon (4647); or "Homer's Hymn to the Sun."
BACK
Authored by (Secondary):
Morton, Timothy
Parent Section:
Praxis Series
Person:
Naomi Klein
William Wordsworth
William Blake
Allen Grossman
NINES Discipline(s):
Literature
NINES Type(s):
Typescript
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