"Mont Blanc" and the Sublimity of Materiality

Abstract

"Mont Blanc" and the Sublimity of Materiality Louise Economides (bio) One of the ironies of poststructuralism's critique of logocentrism, a project that has the potential to progressively deconstruct anthropocentric subjectivity, is that it often fails to fully actualize this potential due to a problematic conflation of materiality and linguistic différance. A critical focus on language as the chief means of subverting dominant paradigms frequently has the effect of rewriting the subject as an ideally free-floating "text" existing in a purely cultural field, independent from, yet simultaneously constructing the material world via language games. Contemporary critics such as Brian Massumi observe that in the process a certain "cultural solipsism" is inadvertently reproduced whereby nonhuman domains (and subjects) are seen as significant only in terms of how they are linguistically constructed by humans.1 Thus, "theoretical moves aimed at ending the Human end up making human culture the measure and meaning of all things, in a kind of unfettered anthropomorphism" (Massumi, 100). During the past decade, dissatisfaction with unresolved traces of philosophical idealism in poststructuralist thought has been fueled by a growing awareness of ecological decline occurring in the earth's physical biosphere. Global warming, melting of the polar icecaps and glaciers, ozone depletion, unprecedented extinction rates in nonhuman species, and explosive human population growth all seem to demand more sustainable constructions of "nature" and materiality that do not simply construe the real as a domain that is wholly determined by human beings but that in turn has no appreciable effect on the evolution of culture. This is not to advocate an unmediated bridging of the gap between material and linguistic systems, what Paul de Man associates with the unifying impulse of the symbolic in Blindness and Insight. Rather, this essay [End Page 87] will explore Niklas Luhmann's theory of communication as a possible framework for thinking issues of materiality that avoids the extremes of absolute constructivism on the one hand and naive realism on the other. Today's ecocritics must find more productive ways to address language's constitutive role in establishing the contours of meaning even as they maintain that signs do not exhaust (or fully determine) our ways of experiencing nature as an "outside" to communication systems. As a complex account of communication's autopoiesis (self-generation) in response to potentially infinite ways of processing meaning in the world, systems theory provides not so much an escape from the "prison house" of language as a way to rethink its limits, the way linguistic closure necessitates blindness and multiple observation but also leaves open the world as a material domain that necessarily exceeds our cultural constructions.2 Furthermore, a systems-theoretical approach to communication sheds new light on an already existing discourse that addresses the limit between language and its outside: the romantic sublime. As one of the most famous (and infamous) articulations of the boundary between culture and nature in the modern era and the project of bridging this divide, it is not surprising that critics have frequently turned to this aesthetic as evidence of a proto-ecological awareness among nineteenth-century poets. Jonathan Bate, for example, considers the romantic sublime to be ecologically progressive because, as evidenced in Wordsworth's poetry, it succeeds in its aim to unproblematically bridge human culture and nature, language andits material referent. During the early nineties, Bate called for a re-evaluation of the romantic sublime as an ethos that could provide contemporary society with an ethical grounding for environmental praxis. In "Toward Green Romanticism," he claims that nature today must be regarded as it was by the Romantics, "with wonder and reverence, not rapaciousness" (67). In this regard, he feels the romantic sublime is instructive because it "conveys a sense of the insignificance, the smallness, of man. It offers a necessary humbling, a first step toward the knowledge that humankind is not self-sufficient." Unfortunately, this reading overlooks the fact that what might be termed the "anthropocentric sublime" operating in Wordsworth's texts represents a dialectic wherein the subject is only temporarily "humbled" before nature; the second moment in this exchange is [End Page 88] typically one in which the subject's mind and/or imagination isexalted above...