River and Mountain, Land and Sea: The Political Topography of Finnegans Wake

Abstract

River and Mountain, Land and Sea:The Political Topography of Finnegans Wake Caleb Fridell (bio) bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntqnnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1.15–17 The growing storm of climate crisis demands a new politics of soil, Bruno Latour argues. In his terms, a maelstrom of oncoming climate invaders—"erosion, pollution, resource depletion, habitat destruction"—whom no walls will keep out requires reconceptualizing our political relation to earth beyond worn ways of thinking like the opposition between right and left or, particularly, the Marxist conception of class struggle—scorned as an idealistic materialism that must be replaced by the new materialism.1 His identification of migration crisis, global expansion of capital, and climate change as three inseparable aspects of the same deep, difficult question about the organization of human life on earth states the problem correctly. And Latour's suggestion that an adequate response would compose, rather than assume, a new universalism that reconciles the imperatives of "attaching oneself to a particular patch of soil on the one hand, having access to the global world on the other," while repudiating both blood-and-soil ideology and the abstract homogenization of the world market, seems plausible (Latour, Down to Earth, 12). However, the underlying assumptions of his new materialism seem to work against the task he sets himself. [End Page 741] Latour's characteristic move is to turn the reader's attention from abstract political categories to the real material substrate of human life, typified by soil. The reactionary fear of le grand remplacement of white Europeans by migrants from the global south is for him misrecognition of the more material anxiety born of a literal great replacement of the soil, enacted by climate.2 The "migratory crisis" has been too narrowly assumed only to include refugees from the global south, Latour implies; it is instead "the symptom, to more or less excruciating degrees, of an ordeal common to all: the ordeal of finding oneself deprived of land" (Down to Earth, 6). For him, expropriation of land by violent colonial conquest or imperial war exemplifies the generalized, if uneven, condition of all humans who recognize climate's forceful agency, for "how do we occupy a land if it is this land itself that is occupying us?" (41) The "ground is giving way beneath everyone's feet at once," leaving all in the same predicament. "But actually, no, it upsets the former colonizers much more, as they are less accustomed to the situation than are the formerly colonized" (8–9). By collapsing incommensurable inequalities into one common struggle, Latour seems not to heed his own advice that "if we want to have a political ecology, we have to begin by acknowledging the division of a human species that has been prematurely unified."3 He adopts Carl Schmitt's idea that even physical-scientific spatial representation of earth is always a political action in itself, not a depiction of the objective background setting of politics. But under the assumption that the unprecedented Anthropocene requires categorically new terms, Latour draws his enemy-friend distinction between the still-Holocenic Humans and the Earthbound—those who imagine themselves to take the earth, and those, properly sensitive to the Anthropocene, who imagine themselves taken by it (Latour, Facing Gaia, 229–32, 248–53). Far removed from the existential stakes of such line drawing for Schmitt, the drama takes place at the level of denial and belief.4 Latour's division supplants the existing border lines of sovereignty that define the conditions of refugees, movement of global capital, and possibility of climate change action, as if this old terrain, surpassed in theory, no longer exists as the arena of political conflict. The real magnitude of the task to conceive a new spatial order that reorganizes social metabolic reproduction at the global level is disguised as long as the deeply-rooted system of nation-states that constrains all political action can be so easily wished away. This article will be an attempt to read in the topography of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake a political imagination that grounds a perspective that can "displace and estrange the world"—the condition of imagining a viable alternative—in the sedimented history of material interchange...