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Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern

Framework: Mangled Matter, Meaning, and Agency
SERPIL OPPERMANN
One of the major reasons why ecocriticism has initially rejected alliance with postmodernism is the linguistic turn associated with postmodern theory at a time when ecocriticism itself was emerging.1 Ecocriticism was born of a desire to speak literally of an embodied or material engagement with the world. It was often concerned with the question
of literary and cultural representations of nature, focusing, inevitably, on referential
properties of texts, which then, one can say, culminated in a project of reviving the very
literary realism which had been put to rest by the linguistic turn. Hence, the most
sustained and influential pronouncements of the return of the real came from ecocriticism when it resolutely styled itself against postmodernism, eventually building a reputation for blaming our environmental problems on postmodern thought. For many ecocritics, as Will Slocombe contends, postmodernism re-creates the world as text,
destroying the world in the process (494). Slocombe makes a compelling point about
how ecocriticism advertises itself as a return from linguistic text to referential work
of the landscape; he also states that there is little in the way of actual communication
being conducted between postmodernism and ecocriticism (494). In this essay, I will
attempt to show that ecocriticism and postmodernism are actually more closely related
and converge in more ways than the alleged schism assumed by both sides would
suggest.
As SueEllen Campbell has pointed out, both sides begin by criticizing the dominant
structures of Western culture and the vast abuses they have spawned (127). Though
Campbell has focused on the similarities between poststructuralist theory and nature
writing, her argument has parallels with the common points that exist between postmodernism and ecocriticism.2 For example, they endorse renewed forms of imaginative
1

This essay came into being during my stay in Reno, Nevada, as my Fulbright grant has allowed
me the time and freedom to peacefully compose it. It also owes its materialization to the friendly
welcome I have received from my academic host, Scott Slovic, at UNR from September 2011 to
February 2012.
2
Although there are significant overlaps between poststructuralism and postmodernism, they
cannot be used synonymously, because basically poststructuralism is recognized as a theory of
knowledge and language while postmodernism is seen as a theory of culture, literature, and
society (see Agger 93-113). Brenda K. Marshall explains, only within the postmodern moment
do the questions raised by poststructuralists have currency. Moreover, these poststructuralist
concerns and questionsabout language, texts, interpretation, subjectivity, for example
specifically lend themselves to larger historical, social, and cultural questions which inhabit the

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Serpil Oppermann

interaction with the material world, and they both search for conceptual and practical
tools of emancipation from anthropocentric thought. Moreover, each places a high value
on cultural and biological diversity and difference; each privileges pluralism in political
and social contexts; and above all, ecocriticism and postmodernism are both characterized by their mission to find ways of dissolving the hierarchical dualisms associated
with Cartesian, mechanistic thought associated with modern ideas of economic progress.
That postmodernism tends more towards finding adequate conceptual ways, and ecocriticism more towards lived experience, especially in its first stage of development,
does not necessarily pull them apart; it strengthens their complementarity in their
similar interrogation of the core modern value of progress and the ensuing schism
between nature and culture, human and nonhuman natures. Therefore, both sides would
benefit if a better communication could be established in ways that would reveal their
similar efforts to introduce liberation tools, to deconstruct dichotomies, to promote more
sustainable lifestyles and non-anthropocentric discursive and material practices to contribute to the worlds transformation. To achieve this goal, postmodernisms arguments
should be accorded merit, and its ecological theories acknowledged.
Given the unfashionable status of postmodernism in ecocritical circles, however, it
is understandable that ecocritics do not want to bother with what they believe tends to
issue in linguistic constructionism, relativism and nihilism. The view that reality is entirely constructed in language is not, of course, the path to properly theorize the multilayered complexities of the global environmental crisis and its local socio-cultural and
economic outcomes. But the insinuation that postmodernism rejects any sense of the
real distorts its position badly, as postmodernism never questions or debates the existence of the real but the confidence in its representation (Gough and Price 24). What
postmodernism actually rejects is the language/reality dichotomy. As Richard Rorty
bluntly puts it, there is no way to divide the world up into lumps and squishy texts
(98); and Linda Hutcheon convincingly explains, [p]ostmodern discourses assert both
autonomy and worldliness (46). More importantly, postmodernism today can be defined as an attempt to remake the codes that have shaped our civilization in its present
form and that have largely created the ecological crisis (White 23). It brings a new
vision of reality based on awareness of the essential interdependence of all phenomenaphysical, biological, psychological, social, and cultural (Capra 285).
In many of the most influential arguments of postmodernism (such as those advanced by Linda Hutcheon, Arran Gare, Daniel R. White, and Steven Best and Douglas
Kellner) one can discern the desire to challenge the dichotomous vision of the world and
to interrogate to what extent our representations can yield accurate accounts of the real.
Therefore, questioning whether we can postulate access to a point from which reality
would speak without discursive mediation remains at the heart of postmodern rhetoric,
which then leads to the problematic question of whether there is an extra-discursive
ground from which a critique of ecology could proceed. Hans Bertens, for example,
maintains that the attempt to define nature, or the wilderness in any objective way,
leads us back to the constructedness of our concepts, to their discursive character (202).
Our connection to the natural world remains discursively, socially, and culturally medipostmodern moment (8). In my own understanding, postmodernism is a mode of thinking while
poststructuralism is a method of reading.

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

37

ated, but this is not say that the world itself is a textual construct. In a word, to say that
language structures how we apprehend the ontological (Hekman, Constructing 98),
should not be taken as a message of threat. After all, postmodernism does not take our
discourses of the real to be sublimely external to the outer world with no firm grounding.
Rather, it acknowledges the problematic interrelations between the ontological and our
knowledge practices, but does so with critical self-reflection. It draws attention to the
constitutive engagement of human discursive systems with the material world, and it
also critically reflects upon the complicity between our discursive formulations and the
global capitalist desire for overproduction, which has unmistakably caused an unprecedented environmental degradation. In other words, postmodernism radically challenges
the conceptual language of literary and cultural discourses, subverting the essentialist
conceptions of the human subject as possessing epistemological superiority and the
ability to reduce natures basic units into exploitable objects in order to manipulate the
natural environments. Postmodernism does not celebrate the disappearance of historical
reference, as Fredric Jameson thinks (79), but holds up a mirror to that impending
reality by way of a warning that we should be aware of the simulated reality production.
Jamesons concern that aesthetic production today has become integrated into
commodity production generally (65), thus making aesthetic creation and commodity
production complicit in postmodern aesthetics, is, therefore, not an accurate representation of postmodernism. Rather, postmodernism seeks to bring this concern into the
scope of ethical considerations in literary and cultural studies. It remains deeply skeptical of the notion that a fundamental transformation in our relations with the world, in
our thinking and acting, can be effected through existing ethical, social, and biopolitical
discourses.
Although postmodernism continues to pose questions on the grounds of our moral
attitudes and of how they are built into our language (Elliott 160), far from emphasizing the discursive to the exclusion of the material, it is also resolutely focused on the
integral ways of thinking not only discourse and matter, but also human and nonhuman
natures together. Deleuze and Guattaris contribution to this development needs to be
acknowledged here.
We make no distinction between man and nature: the human essence of nature and the
natural essence of man become one within nature in the form of production of industry,
just as they do within the life of man as a species man and nature are not like two
opposite terms confronting one another rather, they are one and the same essential
reality, the producer-product. (4-5)

In Deleuze and Guattaris view nature and culture, reality and language, are mutually
constituted in a network of rhizomes and thus cannot be dichotomized. They suggest
that the model of the rhizome is a better conceptual tool to understand human (social,
cultural, political systems) and nonhuman (natural or ecological systems) realities and
discourse (narratives, literary and cultural representations) than the hierarchically
oriented arborescent models that dominate our thought. Deleuze and Guattari claim that
if we can imagine a multiplicity of realities and narratives mutually constituting themselves like a tangle of rhizomes (Gough and Price 26), we can better understand how
human and nonhuman realities interchange and transform one another. This is an ecolo-

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Serpil Oppermann

gical understanding of non-anthropocentric relationships between human and nonhuman

natures that also constitutes a key approach in ecocriticism. It is, in fact, the most
explicit motivation ecocriticism shares with postmodernism. Cheryll Glotfeltys call on
us to become both-and thinkers attest to this:
Problems such as climate change, clean-water scarcity, and loss of biodiversity will require that people around the world work together, imagining the whole earth as our
collective backyard. At the same time, I think, we should not underrate the value and
environmental efficacy of a local sense of place I believe we need to become bothand thinkers, capable of multi-scaled responses to the problems and opportunities of our
time. (44)

Taking the ecological crisis as the crisis of traditional epistemologies, postmodernism,

in its final stage of development, signals the emergence of a post-Cartesian paradigm
and seeks for new knowledge practices in order to overcome the crippling opposition
between human beings and the natural world (Best and Kellner 267). Ecocriticism
focuses on similar epistemological and ontological concerns, and therefore, as Karla
Armbruster has suggested, by confronting postmodern thought (though she refers to
poststructuralism in her essay) it does stretch its capacities (23), becoming more
critically self-conscious and acquiring a wider conceptual framework. In postmodernecocritical contexts, the solution to the ecological crisis calls for a radical epistemic shift
in perspective from a mechanistic to an ecocentric paradigm. The principal task of a
postmodern imagination, as Suzi Gablic argues, is to restore health and aliveness
through an empowered new vision (179). This new vision, which is also the principal
source of motivation for ecocriticism, is one that such postmodern thinkers as David
Ray Griffin, Charlene Spretnak, and Jim Cheney, among others, associate with postmodernisms ecological turn that opposes the mechanistic model of nature and seeks to
replace it with a better worldview, one that recognizes the vitality of things in all
natural-cultural processes. In his Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought, Griffin, for example, calls attention to the ecological devastation of
the modern world and argues that this devastation is providing an unprecedented
impetus for people to see the evidence for a postmodern worldview and to envisage
postmodern ways of relating to each other, the rest of nature, and the cosmos as a
whole (xii). Similarly, Charlene Spretnak emphasizes the significance of embracing a
postmodern worldview as it provides the best understanding of the deeply relational
nature of reality. According to Spretnak, The failure to notice that reality is inherently
dynamic and interrelated at all levels has caused a vast range of suffering (Relational Reality 1).
As human intervention with ecosphere processes (such as exploitation of non-renewable sources, and pouring toxic products to air, soil, and water) continues to feed the
global environmental crisis, it becomes quite evident that ecologically destructive
human practices directly imply a fundamental error in the discourses regulating these
practices and, thus, the relationship between the human and the non-human realms.
Grounded in the Cartesian model of rationalism with its mind/matter dualism, its
modernist legacy of subject/object split, and the social, cultural and linguistic models of
constructivism, these discourses are wholly anthropocentric and continue to inform our

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

39

understanding of nature in their economic, political, cultural, social, and ethical forms.
At a fundamental level such models define the basic constituents of nature as objects
that are devoid of all experience, intrinsic value, internal purpose, and internal relations (Griffin, Whiteheads 8). The major legacy of this approach is the inability to see
humans as part of their environment. Indeed, as has been repeatedly argued, these
models of knowledge that describe nature either as a lifeless mechanism or as a mere
textual construct, have legitimated not only the devastation of the worlds fragile ecosystems in the name of economic progress, but have also resulted in many oppressive
social practices such as racism, sexism, and speciesism.3 In short, all manner of familiar
consequences follow from this mechanistic model. Its most tragic consequence,
however, as Charlene Spretnak points out, can be seen in the entire planets disequilibrium:
the entire planet is now imperiled by climate destabilization and ecological degradation,
resulting from the modern assumption that highly advanced societies could throw toxic
substances away somewhere and could exude staggeringly unnatural levels of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases into our atmosphere without ill effect. (Relational
Reality 1-2)

Quite simply, the only logical explanation for this illogical investment in ecological
devastation lies in the dualism that has shaped modern civilization: that all entities in
the natural world, including us, are essentially separate and that they function through
mechanistic ways of interacting (4).
Ecological postmodernism offers an alternative to this view of nature with its main
objective of reanimating nature. Without resorting to a nave form of holism, ecological postmodernism maintains that we need to produce new interpretations of the natural
environments because as Griffin explains, the denial to nature of all subjectivity, all
experience, all feeling has encouraged fragmentary perception leading to objectification and exploitation of the natural environments (Introduction: The Reenchantment
2). In contrast to this disenchantment of nature, ecological postmodernism redefines
nature in terms of its intrinsic value, its interacting entities, and their internal relations.
It is in this sense that ecological postmodernism aims to re-enchant nature, claiming that
all material entities, even atoms and subatomic particles, have some degree of sentient
experience. This view enables us to see all living things as effective agencies capable of
acting purposefully.4
An early example of this new approach is found in the work of Charles Hartshorne,
one of the leading exponents of the process philosophy developed by Alfred North
Whitehead. In his Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970), Hartshorne
claimed that [t]here can be an all-inclusive form of reality within which every contrast
falls (90). Anticipating the new materialist approach to nature, and considering reality
3

For comprehensive arguments on the Western hegemony over nature and for critiques of Enlightenment ideas such as economic progress and the mechanistic worldview, see Mathews; Merchant; and Plumwood.
4
See Montag 23-24 for a more compact discussion of Griffins ideas and the reenchantment of
nature.

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Serpil Oppermann

as a creative becoming (13), Hartshorne argued that we have no conceivable ground

for limiting feeling to our kind of individual, say the vertebrates, or even to animals
(144), because, as he put it, atoms, molecules, and still more nerve cells, seem to
exhibit signs of spontaneous activity (8). He suggested that we sympathize with the
universal life of things, the ocean of feelings, which is reality in its concrete
character (144). Imagining the universe as a vast system of experiencing individuals
(6), Hartshorne claimed that all nonhuman entities possess creative experience and some
degree of feeling. For him creative freedom that is found on this planet (190) emerged
from what Whitehead had called compound individuals (individuals compounded out
of simpler entities). Expanding on this idea, Hartshorne discerned more complex life
forms having a higher degree of cohering experience, which enables them to express a
unity of feeling or purpose. A compound individual can be high-grade, such as an
animal, or low-grade, such as a molecule. The concept of experience in this context
extends into less complex entities, such as molecules and cells, which do not have consciousness, but which nevertheless have internal relations as they respond to their environment. In Hartshornes cogent argument, the cells of ones body are constantly
furnishing their little experiences or feelings which, being pooled in our more comprehensive experience, constitute what we call our sensations (7). Against the objections
raised to his claim that molecules and atoms also possess creative experience and some
degree of feeling, Hartshorne responded by stating that [i]f atoms respond to stimuli
(and they do), how else could they show that they sense and feel? And if you say, they
have no sense organs, the reply is: neither do one-celled animals, yet they seem to
perceive their environments (6).
This vision is also supported by biologists. In his discussion of this approach, Australian biologist Charles Birch makes a salient point:
The idea of internal relations is that a human being, let us say, is not the same person
independent of his or her environment. The human being is a subject and not simply an
object pushed around by external relations. To be a subject is to be responsive, to
constitute oneself purposefully in response to ones environment. The postmodern view
that makes most sense to me is the one that takes human experience as a high-level
exemplification of entities in general, be they cells or atoms or electrons. All are subjects.
All have internal relations. (70-71)

The project of ecological postmodernism itself has emerged from this view, especially
through Griffins efforts to develop an ecological form of postmodernism called reconstructive postmodernism which, according to him, provides support for the ecology,
peace, feminist, and other emancipatory movements of our time, while stressing that the
inclusive emancipation must be from modernity itself. It moves beyond the modern
world and transcends its individualism, anthropocentrism, nationalism, and
militarism (Introduction to SUNY Series xi). Other ecological postmodern thinkers
concur that the world and all its entities are best understood in relational terms. They
aver that humans and nonhumans should be regarded as enlivened, or animated beings
interacting with what Jane Bennett calls the vibrant matter itself. The image of the
nonhuman world as inert, passive, and inanimate, Bennett contends, feeds human
hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption (ix), whereas

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

41

acknowledging the vitality, creativity, and effectivity of nonhuman entities enables us to

detect a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human
bodies (ix). Even though Jane Bennett does not call herself an ecological postmodern
thinker, her aim to theorize a vitality intrinsic to materiality (xiii) and her discussion
of the material vitality (55) of all nonhuman forces evoke ecological postmodern
visions. The radical ecologist Charlene Spretnak, who has played a major role in
postmodernisms ecological turn, conveys a similar sentiment regarding life processes:
Animate or inanimate, our relatives are all around us, lighting the sky, rushing through
a river bed, thrusting upward through Earths crust (Resurgence 183). Spretnak alleges
that postmodernisms ecological orientation acknowledges our constitutive embeddedness in subtle bodily, ecological, and cosmological processes (Resurgence 73). Likewise, the work of such environmental thinkers as J. Baird Callicott, Jim Cheney, Michael E. Zimmermann, Carolyn Merchant, Daniel R. White, and Arran E. Gare has been
quite effective in bringing ecological postmodernism to the forefront of discussions.
Their vision has been crucial in breaking down the binaries of language/reality, culture/
nature, discourse/matter, human/nonhuman, and the like.
It is important to note that in the globalized horizons of contemporary reality, multiple global networks make it impossible to separate matters of environmental and social
concern from the discursive ones. As Bruno Latour notes in his meticulous examination
of political ecology: From now on, instead of opposing reality and representation, we
will oppose the representation of multiplicity and the unification, through due process,
of this multiplicity (Politics 40). He claims that the distinction between ontological and
epistemological questions is now removed, a distinction that obliged us either to move
closer to things, while distancing ourselves from the impressions humans had of them,
or to move closer to the human categories, while progressively distancing ourselves
from things themselves. It was this distinction that imposed the impossible choice
between realism and constructivism (41). Latours words clearly indicate that key
contemporary theorists today analyze discourse and language as worlds of meaning not
divorced from social and natural environments.
Postmodern thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Michel Serres, Emmanuel Levinas, Luc Ferry, Donna Haraway, and Cary Wolfe have complicated easy
divisions between the human and the more-than-human world and have deconstructed
the separation of human and natural orders. Having overcome the crippling opposition
between the human and the nonhuman realms, between realism and constructivism, and
between discourse and matter, their perspectives have important implications for ecocritical praxis and theory, providing a useful philosophical framework for the post-Cartesian paradigm. Subsequent theorists, such as Karen Barad, Vicki Kirby, Susan Hekman,
Stacy Alaimo, Jane Bennett, David Abram, Manuel DeLanda, Diana Coole, and Samantha Frost have taken a further step in formulating a more ecologically viable approach to
the relationship of language and reality, and to discourse and matter, especially in the
fields of science studies and feminist theory. They turn our attention towards issues of
embodiment, corporeality, biology, and the agency of the nonhuman (animals, machines,
environments)and perhaps most importantly, to posthumanist concerns for things
outside of human control and language, such other organisms (for example the bacteria
in our bodies) that co-constitute our existence. These thinkers endorse a new type of
theorizing by recasting postmodern thought and its arguments and categories from an

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Serpil Oppermann

ecological perspective. They offer an engaged philosophical platform with ethical commitments to the more-than-human world. Stacy Alaimo, for instance, argues for new
conceptions of materiality that are neither biologically reductive nor strictly social
constructionist (Bodily 7). Even though she would not subscribe to such labeling, what
can be a better postmodern approach than this? Making a similar point, and indicating
the mutual emergence of ontology of life and its representations, Vicki Kirby claims
that [t]he difference between ideality and matter, models and what they purportedly
represent, or signs of life and life itself, is certainly difficult to separate here (75).
Indeed, as the new theorists emphatically express it, the very ontology of the entities
emerges through relationality (Kirby 76), that is, through kinship and entanglement of
the human and the nonhuman. Entanglement means that everything in life comes into
being through a relational process. Jane Bennet suggests that we should proceed with
careful forbearance in life, because the environment is actually inside human bodies
and minds, making us inextricably bound to every possible life form (116). In other
words, neither humans nor nonhumans can exist outside this pattern, and therefore there
can never be any divide between cultural forces and natural processes. In Bennetts perception, this is a world of lively matter where biochemical and biochemical-social
systems (112) form a complex whole. In Karen Barads compelling formulation: We
are part of the world in its differential becoming (Posthumanist 147). Another
exponent of the new materialist paradigm, Manuel DeLanda, represents the dynamics of
life in a similar way:
In a very real sense, reality is a single matter-energy undergoing phase transitions of various kinds, with each new layer of accumulated stuff simply enriching the reservoir of
nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear combinatorics available for the generation of novel
structures and processes. Rocks and winds, germs and words, are all differential manifestations of this dynamic material reality; or in other words, they all represent the different
ways in which this single matter-energy expresses itself. (21)

Consistent with the relational understanding of life is the strong emphasis placed on the
vital dynamism of the physical world, the resurgence of the real so to speak, that
ecological postmodernism has frequently underlined. In keeping with the major premises of ecological postmodernism, the emerging material turn, or more precisely the new
materialisms, intrinsically entail a radical trajectory for environmental thought in order
to open up the re-enchantment of the world in its pure vitality, relationality, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This is what Jane Bennet calls the onto-tale of the material
vitality (117, 120) in and around us. In other words, this approach invites empathy with
all objects, human and nonhuman entities, forces, and things, such as rivers, rocks, wind,
storms, flowers, insects, forests, snakes, humans, mountains, cats, soil, water, etc., that
constitute the matter of Earth within which human and nonhuman natures intertwine in
complex ways. David Abram explains it as entering a felt rapport with another entity
(44). He claims that all our knowledge is carnal knowledge, born of the encounter
between our flesh and the cacophonous landscape we inhabit (72). Vicki Kirby encourages us to embrace the notion that Nature is articulate, communicative, and in a very
real senseintentional (82). Diana Coole and Samantha Frost offer another compelling account of the new materialist stance. They write that the human species is being

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

43

relocated within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest

certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened (10). In the light of these views, and following Latour,
we can say that ecological postmodernism has reconceived the physical world by working through thingy qualities of matters of concern (Why Has Critique 237).
Invoking the material turn in science studies, Latour states that things have become
things again, objects have reentered the arena Things are gathered again (236). In
this gathering, where things and ideas have become inseparable, the new materialisms
acknowledge the existence of correlations and symmetries in the field of existence, and
thus subvert the previous illusions about the nature of reality as a field of separately
existing elements. It is in this regard that the material paradigm can be understood as an
extension of ecological postmodernism. In the context of the conceptual models drawn
mostly from postmodern theoretical frameworks that have propelled the material turn,
many thinkers have opened new vistas toward producing greener forms of human
culture (Bennett x). For instance, in science studies, Andrew Pickering has formulated
the concept of the mangle to express the interchange between human and nonhuman
agents. Pickering explains the mangle as constitutive intertwining between material
and human agency (15). He maintains that [t]he world of intentionality is constitutively engaged with the world of material agency (20). What defines scientific practices, for him, is a mangle of practice (21) within which the human actors are inextricably
entangled with the nonhuman agents. This dance of agency (21) emphasizes the
connectedness of the observed and the observer, the cultural and the natural, mind and
matter, and material and social elements that are all mangled in practice (23). The
metaphor of the mangle also represents the reciprocal interchange between matter and
meaning. The mangle of practice has ecocritical resonance as well. Ecocritic Patricia
Yaeger, for example, has defined nature as mingled matter in the way it is represented
in postmodern art. By exploring postmodern representations of nature as dirt and debrisan old opposition between nature and culture has been displaced in postmodern
art (The Death 323)Yaeger argues that there is no nature exempt from culture, as
is perceptively highlighted by postmodern art, which mangles meanings of detritusproducing culture and the physical properties of nature.
The ecocritical implications of mangled matter and meaning are such that once
bodies (human and nonhuman) are recognized as signifying agents with vitality of their
own, and as interrelated forces that can shape our strategies of meaning-making, it
becomes impossible to divorce discourse from matter. In other words, there are no
boundaries between human semiotic processes, knowledge practices, and the very material world itself. All the entities of this world act together, producing multiple constellations, and whether these are geological, biological, social, or linguistic, they seem to
map our discursive as well as material reality. In this perspective, materiality becomes,
as Katherine Hayles maintains, an emergent property created through dynamic interactions between physical characteristics and signifying strategies (3). In such a radical rethinking of the environment as a dynamic co-mingling of discursive and material flows,
the world comes to be seen clearly as a multiplicity of complex interchanges between
innumerable agentic forces. Acknowledgement of such multiplicity and of heterogenesis
that is now more fully recognized to be the defining property of the world connects the
new materialist paradigm more closely with ecological postmodernism. What emerges

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Serpil Oppermann

from this constellation is the fact that the linguistic, social, political and biological are
inseparable (Hekman, Material 25), and that in a profound sense the biological and the
textual, the ecological and the socio-cultural, are engaged in what Timothy Morton calls
an enactive dance (28) in which the nonhuman is intimately instated into the human
fields. This is the onto-tale in which everything is, in a sense, alive (Bennett 117)
because we participate in a worldly embodiment, as Donna Haraway reminds us
both semiotically and bodily (176). In an ecocritical context, we are compelled to ask,
as Patricia Yaeger does with regards to the tragedy of the commons, how we think about
the human-nonhuman or discursive-material entanglements in their metaphoric and
symbolic intensity without transforming literature into ecology (Sea Trash 526).
Hence the re-thinking of ecocriticism in an ecological postmodern framework, because
this framework provides palpable answers as it encourages both-and thinking. In its
new materialist framework, this re-thinking shows how matter and discourse are integral
to the nature of knowing and being (Barad, Meeting 37), and it does so by providing
effective conceptual models.
Concerning the mutual emergence of human and nonhuman agency, and similar to
Pickerings metaphor of the mangle, Latour has developed actor network theory to
account for the ways in which the human and the nonhuman actors (or actants as Latour prefers to call the material components) are semiotically and materially interrelated
(Reassembling 1-17). Another attempt to model the interconnectedness of discourse and
matter, human and nonhuman, nature and culture, comes from Deleuze and Guattari,
who have proposed the concept of assemblage. It signifies the material, semiotic and
social entanglements of humans and their (social, legal, linguistic) constructions as
well as the active and powerful nonhumans: electrons, trees, wind, fire, electromagnetic fields (Bennett 24). Responding to the potential dynamics of matter, Donna Haraway also draws attention to the role of agents, which can be human beings or parts of
human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts
of entrained things (176) that mutually constitute each other. This interplay of agentic
forces creates what Stacy Alaimo calls a field of trans-corporeality in which the
human is always intermeshed with the more-than-human world (Bodily 2). By overcoming dualisms affected by Cartesian thought, all of these conceptual models profess
to deconstruct the underlying basic dualism between language and reality. It is precisely
for this reason that they can be considered as the new materialist expressions of ecological postmodernism.
If ecocriticism is to function as an effective intellectual response to ecological and
political urgencies, it should recognize its affinities with these new strands of postmodern thought based on relational ontologies, as they have important implications for
ecocriticisms current stage of development. One can even claim that the most accurate
description of ecocriticism is embodied in the new postmodern model of materiality,
which compels us to change our basic assumptions about environmental and social
realities and our ecologically defunct economic and social practices. Ecocriticism, too,
attempts to theorize a dynamic world of becoming, comprised of non-totalizable multiplicities, assemblages, and rhizomatic formations in biological and social life spaces. In
this regard, ecocriticism is quite postmodern in its attempts to dismantle the anthropocentric and logocentric hegemony of present discursive formations. It seeks a performative engagement with the world of becoming and meaning-making. What postmodern

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

45

ecocriticism, as I call this new form of ecocriticism, attempts to do, then, is to forge a
unique non-anthropocentric perspective that considers the mutual constitution of human
and nonhuman realities in a network of rhizomatic formations. Ecocriticism is engaged
today in a web of multiple threads that resembles the rhizome which, as an apt metaphor,
exemplifies the non-hierarchical mode of postmodern thought that valorizes difference
and multiplicity. The postmodern model of the rhizome, then, also marks the hermeneutic horizon of ecocriticism as ecocriticism has taken a quite obvious rhizomatic trajectory itself. This is a multi-directional trajectory, as I have argued in The Rhizomatic
Trajectory of Ecocriticism, which, analogous to the growth of a rhizome, inevitably
incorporates diverse theoretical approaches drawn from cultural, literary, as well as
science studies (Oppermann 18). Ecocritics mostly celebrate this diversity. Critical diversity is a sign of health in an intellectual field, says Cheryll Glotfelty, just as biodiversity is in a tall-grass prairie (44). Scott Slovic calls this development a polymorphously activist tendency with scholars and teachers finding new and old ways to
connect their work to social transformation (7). Notably, then, the multiperspectival
and diversifying standpoints of ecocriticism coalesce around the very similar viewpoints
of ecological postmodernism which presents powerful theoretical tools that can deal
with matters of concern, as Latour states, whose import will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care (Why Has Critique 232). Ecocriticism also stimulates
such new thinking by engaging with the emerging new ontologies of matter and discourse, the new materialisms and their promissory note on transformation of ecological,
social and cultural practices. 5 Serenella Iovino, for instance, perceptively notes that
former dualisms today represent a co-presence and interdependence, which means to
see reality as a system of co-existing entities (Human Alien 54).
With these new critical ontologies, the nonhuman and human systems cannot be
understood in any narrowly ecocritical way that only focuses on nave representations of
natural environments in cultural and literary texts. Rather, as postmodern ecocriticism
indicates, they should be treated as multitude of interconnected phenomena and processes that sustain creativity, productivity, complex material interchanges, and unpredictable but interrelated nature-culture manifestations. Characteristic of such efforts is Karen Barads proposal of a new onto-epistemology that insists upon the complementarity
of material (natural) and discursive (cultural) processes. She reminds us of how being in
the world always has been both embedded and discursive. Barad contends that discourse
and reality are entangled in what she calls intra-active ways. Intra-action, according to
Barad, designates a phenomenon of inseparability of matter and discourse, objects and
subjects, and texts and contexts. Intra-action, she writes, signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual interaction, which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the
notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge
through, intra-action (Meeting 33). In order to underline the epistemological inseparability of observer (subject) and observed (object), Barad proposes a theory of agential
realism which foregrounds a new ontology where everything is inextricably intertwined
in an intra-activity of becoming, knowing, and valuing. In other words, the subjects
5
Recent ecocritical publications attest to this development. See, for example Estok; Iovino, Naples 2008; Morton; Yaeger, The Death of Nature.

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Serpil Oppermann

ontology is linked to epistemology in a unique manner. Barad proposes a dynamic

topology whereby no priority is given to either materiality or discursivity; neither one
stands outside the other (Meeting 177). She emphasizes the symmetrical engagement
of the human and the nonhuman with the material world, and insists that agency is not
restricted to human action, human subjectivity or intentionality, nor is it something
humans grant to nonhuman beings. Rather agency signifies an enactment, not
something that someone or something has It is not an attribute but, as she puts it,
agency is doing or being in its intra-activity (Meeting 178). The concept of intraaction brings together the conceptual and the material into a single process in the
dynamic topology of the so-called phenomena, a primary ontological unit. In Barads
words, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies (Meeting
333). In such an ontological unit discourse is always in an intra-active relationship with
material praxis. Discourse actually signifies a site at which matter is invested with
meanings and where materiality enters: what Judith Butler has called the field of intelligibility (35), which endows the materiality of the subjectboth human and nonhumanwith meanings. Material practices (all physical forces in natural and social life
spaces) are thus coextensive with discursive practices (power, race, gender, class, ethnicity, identity, etc.). The corporeal dimensions of human and non-human agencies, their
cultural representations, are inseparable from the very material world within which they
intra-act. Matter is conceived not as a passive substance, but as an actively formative
and productive agent that shapes discursive practices. Jane Bennett cites an interesting
example of such intra-actions which highlights the active role of nonhuman materials
in public life (2). She writes that one sunny morning she came across a black plastic
glove, oak pollen, a dead rat, a plastic bottle cap, and a stick of wood, stuff that commanded attention in its own right, as existents in excess of their association with human
meanings, habits, or projects (4). This stuff, which we conceive as inert, had thingpower that manifested as an energetic vitality (5). Bennett asserts that these things
(not objects) cannot be reduced to contexts in which human subjects see them, never
entirely exhausted by their semiotics (5). Taking them as vibratory, she explains the
vitality of matter and reminds us that humans are also composed of vital materials
(11). She goes on to highlight the inseparability of the human and material agency, as
well as human discourses and the world, in this field of vital materialities. The ethical
dimensions of this new material approach are of crucial importance as well, for it allows
nonhuman beings to exist in a moral space. Furthermore, it helps us understand and
remedy the proximate causes of ecologically irrational but economically profitable
characteristics of industrial societies by showing why the preservation of biotic integrity
and the needs of humans should be given equal consideration.
The parallels of these views with the current phase of ecocriticism are evident. Stacy
Alaimo convincingly points to the new material paradigm with its models and methods
that further enhance the ecocritical project:
These emerging models of materiality are crucial for developing an ecocriticism that does
not replicate nature/culture dualisms or reinscribe nature as a blank slate for the imaginings of culture, but instead, seeks to account for the ways in which nature and environment, as material forces, act, interact, and profoundly affect cultural systems, texts, and
artifacts. Indeed, it becomes impossible to separate nature and culture when we focus

Rethinking Ecocriticism in an Ecological Postmodern Framework

47

on the intra-actions of discursive and material forces. Even as most science studies
scholarship is not, itself, environmentalist, it may provide theoretical and methodological
models that foster the ethical and political project of ecocriticismto do intellectual work
that matters not only to humans, but to the more-than human world. (Material
Engagements 71, her emphasis)

In a basic sense, all these sometimes implicitly but quite materially grounded postmodern attempts to remake the codes, to recalibrate the traditions, and to re-configure
the discursive formations in a fusion of horizons that foster what Karen Barad has called
material-discursive practices make postmodernism a natural resource for ecocriticism.
In another sense, the very fact that ecocritics in discussing questions of ethics and morality, matter and agency, have been drawing on the works of postmodern philosophers
discloses the fact that postmodern thought has been at work, albeit in unarticulated ways,
in the discourse of ecocriticism for longer than may have appeared.6 Therefore, ecocriticisms main objective of forming embodied relations with the world, its rhizomatic trajectory and multiplicity of viewpoints, as well as its emphasis on both the local and the
ecoglobal sense of inhabiting the world, resonate at similar frequency in ecological
postmodernism. In this broad conceptual horizon, with its contestation of totalizing forces of mass culture and uniformity, and of centrisms and closures, ecocriticism exhibits
all the signs that are also postmodern in character. But above all, ecocriticism shares the
key insight of postmodernism: thinking in terms of both-and. Hence the research field
postmodern ecocriticism, which now investigates how the very dynamics of environmental degradation lie not only in our social and economic practices and imperialist
attitudes to nature, but in the very structures of our discursive formations themselves
that have led to such destructive mechanisms in the first place.
If the manifest shift toward explorations of the globalizing mindset in ecological
contexts inevitably raises questions about how such a rhizomatic field as ecocriticism
can be theorized in ways to enable ecocritics to imagine the world very differently, then
the quest leads to postmodern formulas in the way they are now embedded in the new
materialist models. That is one of the reasons why one can posit that ecocriticism is
becoming postmodern and making us rethink our basic assumptions about the environment, the textual and the biological, and above all about the nature of reality, as well as
our methods and modes of practice in our social, cultural, and ethical relations with the
world. Since postmodern ecocriticism encourages a praxis that embraces materiality and
discursivity without subsuming either one to the other, it directly intersects with
ecological postmodernism. The ideas of postmodernism and those of ecology are, after
all, as Daniel White observes, complementary halves of a new multidimensional ethic
6

Such as Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and also Latour, whose work, in my opinion, is more
postmodern-oriented than he himself would admit. There is a growing interest within ecocritical
circles in the emerging material turn in the fields of science studies, feminism, environmental
philosophy, and the humanities. Several ecocritics have begun to advance these ideas into the
field of ecocriticism. ISLE, for example, is preparing a Special Cluster on Material Ecocriticism:
Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter, ed. Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips
(forthcoming in 2012), and Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermanns collection of essays,
Material Ecocriticism, is forthcoming from Indiana UP.

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Serpil Oppermann

and practice (32-33). And at present, these ideas converge on the new ontologies of
matter and agency, as well as on the new ethics that considers the mutuality between
physical/non-physical, technological/natural, and human/nonhuman aspects of life in
contemporary reality. These perspectives constitute the praxis of postmodern ecocriticism, whose hermeneutic horizons now extend to the literary, artistic, and cultural
dimensions of materiality. Therefore, by navigating the intra-actions of highly complex
social and natural environments in both local and global spaces, ecocriticism is relocating its activist and academic orientation on the conceptual grounds of contemporary
postmodern thought. It is bringing matter into relation with theory via the new postmodern approaches that link multiple layers of conceptual culture and human practices.
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