Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Editor)

Emphasizing sustainability, balance, and the natural, green dominates our thinking about ecology like no other color. What about the catastrophic, the disruptive, the inaccessible, and the excessive? What of the ocean’s turbulence, the fecundity of excrement, the solitude of an iceberg, multihued contaminations? Prismatic Ecology moves beyond the accustomed green readings of ecotheory and maps a colorful world of ecological possibility. In a series of linked essays that span place, time, and discipline, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen brings together writers who illustrate the vibrant worlds formed by colors. Organized by the structure of a prism, each chapter explores the coming into existence of nonanthropocentric ecologies. “Red” engages sites of animal violence, apocalyptic emergence, and activism; “Maroon” follows the aurora borealis to the far North and beholds in its shimmering alternative modes of world composition; “Chartreuse” is a meditation on postsustainability and possibility within sublime excess; “Grey” is the color of the undead; “Ultraviolet” is a potentially lethal force that opens vistas beyond humanly known nature. Featuring established and emerging scholars from varying disciplines, this volume presents a collaborative imagining of what a more-than-green ecology offers. While highlighting critical approaches not yet common within ecotheory, the contributions remain diverse and cover a range of topics including materiality, the inhuman, and the agency of objects. By way of color, Cohen guides readers through a reflection of an essentially complex and disordered universe and demonstrates the spectrum as an unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives. Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, U of Texas at Arlington; Levi R. Bryant, Collin College; Lowell Duckert, West Virginia U; Graham Harman, American U in Cairo; Bernd Herzogenrath, Goethe U of Frankfurt; Serenella Iovino, U of Turin, Italy; Eileen A. Joy; Robert McRuer, George Washington U; Tobias Menely, Miami U; Steve Mentz, St. John’s U, New York City; Timothy Morton, Rice U; Vin Nardizzi, U of British Columbia; Serpil Oppermann, Hacettepe U, Ankara; Margaret Ronda, Rutgers U; Will Stockton, Clemson U; Allan Stoekl, Penn State U; Ben Woodard; Julian Yates, U of Delaware.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Research, Ecology, Environment, Criticism, Essays

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

how fun and written with such a playful spirit... my favorite chapters are grey, blue, and maroon. all this tempered though by a critical lack of engagement with indigenous epistemologies 🤔

[Pais · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, a critical volume of essays edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, takes as its premise the question: what if our approach to ecology took other colors besides green? It's an intriguing one, and Cohen's introduction poetically sets up the rest of the book for a diverse exploration of ecological thinking, distributed agency, and blending of nature-culture. (It also includes the exquisite riff that could only be funny in academia, "It's not easy being viridescent.") The introduction, while beautiful and useful for thinking through the problems with "green" thought, doesn't give an outline of what the chapters actually discuss, besides their informing color. Here's a brief overview, in order; annotate your table of contents accordingly. Many of these chapters deal, in some way, with breaking down the nature-culture binary, but others offer some pretty unique viewpoints. Many try to cover a lot in a very short space, some more successfully than others. I've added stars by standout essays.

- White, by Bernd Herzogenrath: An "ecology that encompasses many different ecologies." This chapter discusses white in terms of creation myths, both Biblical and Nietzschean, as well as ice, snow, Thoreau, and contemporary music.

-Red*, by Tobias Meneley and Margaret Ronda: This chapter covers a tremendous amount of ground, from the Cavel West slaughterhouse in Oregon to blood's symbolism to Marxist thought to the Environmental Liberation Front--mostly successfully, to make the point that a red ecology is one that pays attention to the waste byproducts created by capitalist exploitation of nature.

-Maroon, by Lowell Duckert: Taking the aurora borealis, Bruno Latour, indigenous peoples, and the Arctic explorer Samuel Hearne as starting points, Duckert uses the image of "dancing flames" as a way to illuminate how "humans and nonhumans forge new relations" and that "the human is not the motherboard but only one chip in an electrical network of complex interrelations." This chapter is one of the most focused, but it does take a while to expand from the specific examples to what, exactly, maroon thinking could do for ecological thought.

- Pink, by Robert McRuer: A well-known queer and disability rights thinker, McRuer begins with the assertion that like the color pink, gay people are "not exactly natural," then critiques LGBT-oriented consumerism and tourism for ignoring the environmental and human costs of that tourism, then turns to Eli Clare as a way into "minor pinks." Some good points made in this chapter, but some major leaps, as well. (I'd just read Clare.)

- Orange*, by Julian Yates: This chapter wins the award for Most Academia Buzzwords in One Sentence: "Color itself might best be modeled as a multispecies sensory process or network that generates biosemiotic-material effects that then take on a metaphorical life of their own as they are translated to different registers." Otherwise, Yates discusses grammatology, the introduction of the word "orange" in England, the introduction of actual oranges to England, children's rhymes, and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel The Tropic of Orange. Dense, but very interesting.

-Gold*, by Graham Harman: Harman, who is known for coining the phrase "object-oriented ontology" (or OOO, a hilarious acronym), traces one object--gold--in terms of geological history, human history, and its object-specific agency. I'm a big fan of Harman's work and enjoyed this chapter; I just wish it were longer, like book-length.

- Chartreuse, by Allan Stoekl: There are some amazing leaps in this chapter, which begins with describing the lifestyle of the Carthusian monks, then jumps to autism spectrum disorder, then to Kantian ideas of sublime pleasure, then to critiques of deep/dark green and shallow/light green ecology, then to Chartreuse liquor (produced by, you guessed it, Carthusians) and the agency of matter. Whew.

- Greener*, by Vin Nardizzi: Using Ward Moore's Greener Than You Think," grass, and Occupy Wall Street, this chapter posits that sustainability and the "green revolution" are actually overly-optimistic, unattainable dreams of homeostasis dreamed up by the market for economic profit. Potentially, the attempt to create "green" economies might trigger ecological catastrophe; "greener" pays attention to those precarious environmental conditions ignored by capitalism.

- Beige, by Will Stockton: Stockton uses beige to focus on how "humans sexually inhabit [the] natural world," using Edelman's No Future and apocalyptic rhetoric to read Delany's The Mad Man. This chapter is worth reading just for the delightful portmanteau "pornapocalypticism." He raises some interesting points, but I'm not sure that they can easily expand beyond Delany's provocative novel.

- Brown, by Steve Mentz: For Mentz, "brown is the color of intimate and uncomfortable contact between human bodies and the nonhuman world," and he uses three studies: dry sand, wet swamp, and shit. Respectively, he discusses Edmund Spenser's Amoretti 75, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to explore the relationship between humans and nonhuman matter.

- Blue, by Eileen A. Joy: Joy boldly proclaims in its first sentence, "This chapter is an attempt, and perhaps a failed one, to think about depression as a shared creative endeavor, as a transcorporeal blue (and blues) ecology that would bind humans, nonhumans, and stormy weather together." While it didn't strike me as particularly successful, others may find this strange mix of Nordic poetry, contemporary fiction, and depressive affect interesting or useful.

- Violet-Black*, by Stacy Alaimo: Here, Alaimo discusses the abyssal zones--how they confound language or scientific attempts to know it fully, how various people try to bring awareness of its inhabitants (and fail, to an extent), and how they reject an anthropocentric, even heliocentric, model of thought. Very thought-provoking.

-Ultraviolet, by Ben Woodard: Taking the idea of Naturphilosophie, defined as the "dynamics of nature coupled with the dynamics of the idea," Woodard posits an ultraviolet ecology as one that considers unseen entities and connections between them. Most of this chapter focuses on FWJ von Schelling's philosophy and Johann Wilhelm Ritter's discovery of ultraviolet, but it takes an interesting detour into Lovecraft, as well.

- Grey*, by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: In this chapter, Cohen looks at grey as a way to decenter the human (who may see grey as a mournful waning) a way to explore the in-human (which, paradoxically, still includes the human): "Grey is the human in the microbe and the stone as well as the virus and the rock in the human." Then, he turns to a fascinating discussion of monsters and zombies. I'd never read Cohen before this volume, but his prose is so beautiful and his work so interesting that I want to pick up his other works.

- Black*, by Levi Bryant: One of the clearest articulations in this entire volume, Bryant systematically outlines a black ecology as one that confounds ideas of nature as homeostatic, as inherently comforting or connected, as meaningful, as anthropocentric, and so on. He also discusses relations, wilderness, and the absorptive quality of black; the only thing I wanted more of was a raised potential of how race fit into Bryant's idea of a black ecology. Perhaps my favorite chapter in the volume.

-X-Ray, by Timothy Morton: The most radically in the camp of object-oriented ontology (besides Harman's), Morton's chapter examines the agency of the nonhuman, taking x-ray waves and radiation as a primary object of meditation. Morton examines what it would look like to get "beneath nihilism" and take a radically OOO approach: "[it] would be to accept the finitude of the human-world correlate, but not its exceptionalism." Like Morton's other work, it's dense but enjoyably thought-provoking.

As you can see, these chapters are pretty diverse! Some are bangers; some are interesting but stretch too far to make their points. Such is the nature of the color constraint. Overall, this volume is worth checking out if you want to expand your thinking of ecology beyond the green.

[Laurel Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most thought-provoking anthologies I've ever read, "Prismatic Ecology" uses the lenses of philosophy, literary criticism, politics, and eco-theory to touch on a frankly intimidating range of topics— contemporary musical scoring, gold mines, religious orders, slaughterhouses, aurora borealis, coprophilia (yep), zombies to name a few. No matter the subject, each essay asks us to consider a world that is radically-porous, to observe and appreciate the chaos inherent to natural ecologies, so often flattened into an anthropocentric narrative. This collection blew my mind over and over again. It's also pretty wildly entertaining and made me consider if I should get a degree in ecology after I finish my MFA in poetry?? Jury's still out.

[Cal Desmond-Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cutting edge environmental theory. By way of colour (each chapter corresponds to a different colour), the text is a reflection of an essentially complex and disordered universe. It demonstrates the spectrum as an unfinishable totality, always in excess of what a human perceives.

[Luther Cobbey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good collection brought together by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996); Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects (2012)). Contributors were invited to respond to the idea of "green" ecology and ecotheory, using another color as a metaphor/frame for their responses.

The theorists would likely not all agree about many particularities related to this broad topic, and some of their differences are evident in their pieces in this collection. Perhaps the most frequently appearing conflict could be described as an ontological one -- that between the object-oriented-ontology (OOO) approach that stresses the independent existence of all "objects" (including ideas, concepts, etc.) and the new materialist focus that emphasizes the transcorporeality of objects (that boundaries are all permeable).

Though none of the short chapters in this collection will likely ever be considered seminal, this is a nice book to have because it brings together these two camps (OOO and new materialist). Three of the writers most frequently labeled OOO have pieces in this book (Graham Harman, Levi Bryant, and Timothy Morton), as does the "the high priestess" of "the material turn," Stacy Alaimo (labeled that by Serpil Oppermann).

It would have been nice to have seen some writers who come more directly from a science background (e.g., Karen Barad, Donna Haraway), but that continues to be a gap that some of these theorists in the (post)humanities are trying to bridge (including Haraway and Barad, whose audience is generally on the humanities side). Not all of the chapters will appeal to every reader, but this book, including the notes and bibliography, is another great jumping-off place for readers interested in ecological, posthumanist political and ethical ideas.

[Perry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The premise of this book is: what happens when you take ecological issues/premises/thinking and either view them through the lens of critical theory or try to use them as a basis for a new breed of critical theory? The possible audience for a book like this is very small, of course, since very few people are interested in critical theory. As one of those persons myself, I must say that I found this book a little disappointing. Many of the essays seem to be bridging this gap: if knowledge (or fill in here "meaning" if you'd like) is a social/linguistic construct, how can it address the problems of a physical ecosphere? Or, as Kate Soper succinctly put it in an essay (not one of the ones in this collection): "it's not language that has a hole in its ozone layer" (she said this back when the hole in the ozone layer was a more pressing concern than it is now). I found many of the attempts to bridge this gap to be, if provocative, mostly unsatisfying.

[Joe]

Worth reading BECAUSE many of the essays are provocative enough to make their flaws stupefying. Stacy Alaimo talking about the deep-seas, the difficulty of imagining total ecological alterity on this planet...and then referencing TED talks and spending pages on basically the nuances of a glossy coffee table book. What? Menely and Ronda unpacking a spectacular ELF bombing of a slaughter house as a viable strategy of resistance then amazingly leaping to Ariana Reines THE COW only to sum up what its up to in a few sentences. Ok. Working with an editorial constraint (ecology through a color) and deadline--under its pressures the seams show, the arguments turn over themselves or the essays simply become diffuse-- threads to pick up, obvious rejoinders.

[Ellie Botoman · Rating 5 out of 5]

there's nothing to say that could encompass all of my thoughts of this wide-ranging collection of essays but my god was it beautiful and fascinating to read