The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary by Jason Groves Bernhard Malkmus The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary. By Jason Groves. New York: Fordham University Press. 2020. x+208 pp. $105. ISBN 978-0-8232-8810-6. Human civilization's geological agency in transforming the biosphere has been reframing the epistemologies of all academic disciplines, in particular in the humanities. Reflection on what it means to be human no longer takes place on a stage for which the natural world is a mere backdrop; it is complicated by the myriad feedback loops between human cultures and anthropogenically transformed natures that mark our human condition today. The geological imaginary in the Anthropocene is closely tied to the history of Earth systems sciences that emerged during the hottest phase of the Cold War and to the epistemic construction of a global environment by the United Nations and international diplomacy. It is thus a form of planetary thinking, for which the Austrian writer and polymath Raoul Schrott has forged the new literary genre of a 'scientific epic' in his Erste Erde Epos (Munich: Hanser, 2016). However, as Jan Volker Röhnert reminds us in his Über das Gehen im Karst (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2021), the geological imaginary has a much longer history, in particular in German-language letters. Geology is, of course, the discipline that revolutionized the human sense of time; it opened up the vista of unimaginable natural histories that allowed humans to conceive of life as an evolutionary development. Geology has also provided a plethora of metaphors for rethinking the human on the threshold to modernity; it has offered ambivalent imagery between the biotic and the abiotic, the latent and the manifest, the exploitable and the uncanny. Grounded in this ambivalence, geology in modern German literature functions also as a mode of thinking about alternative modernities. This is evident in Jason Groves's new study, which traces the signs of a planetary ecological reflexivity in the archive of German literature in modernity, aiming to unearth 'those imaginaries in which other earths emerged' (p. 1). His close readings of a 'mineral imaginary' add up to a genealogy of the discovery of a climatologically volatile and unreliable Earth. In the process, the study becomes a cryptogram of a planetary imagination that enables us to consider alternative genealogies of modernity and trace the roots of Anthropocene thinking. His point of departure is the observation that the climax of modern Subjektphilosophie coalesces with an unprecedented fecundity of scientific and imaginative thinking about minerality and geology. He thus complicates the conventional narrative of an intrinsically teleological post-Enlightenment concept of the subject by revealing the degree to which the reflection on human subjectivity around 1800 was modulated by creatureliness—and the degree to which that creatureliness encompassed both [End Page 308] animality and minerality. Intense efforts to imagine deep earth and deep time reframe the standardized genealogy of the modern subject. The Germanic obsession with foundlings, in particular, and the multiple attempts to reassemble historical narratives around these erratic witnesses to Earth's history offer a particularly compelling way of rethinking modern human self-reflection through the lens of 'the lithic' (p. 6). Groves is engaging in an exercise of ichnology; he is reading what was never written, he is tracking traces such as foundlings to piece together the hidden geology of intellectual history. In claiming a 'geophilological turn', however, he is probably overstating the case. In his Introduction one gets the impression that Groves wanted to synthesize his considerable theoretical acumen as early as possible. However, a more gradual argumentative approach that links theoretical inferences to concrete close readings and thus creates a narrative momentum would have been more reader-friendly. In spite of the apparent theoretical ambition, some of the references remain underexplored, for example trauma theory and colonialism. Some readers might find Groves's choice of authors somewhat eclectic and wonder why, for example, there are no in-depth discussions of Jean Paul and E. T. A Hoffmann or Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin. Others might bemoan the fact that the book does not strictly adhere to the format of a traditional academic...