Natura Naturans and the Organic Ecocritic: Toward a Green Theory of Temporality

Abstract

If ecocriticism has been a form of scholarship that is integrated with an activist practice, that activism has most often taken the form of rhetorical appeals to conservation and to valuation of a specific place (or “place” as such), a species, or even a privileged mode of representation such as the pastoral, the work of the bioregionally-grounded poet, or green themes in middlebrow novels (Garrard, 2005). Ecocriticism-as-advocacy assumes a particular view of time. An active present is taken as a means of forestalling an undesirable future, with little account for the past; the critic is in a race against time to explicate the water images in this or that poem, and heated debate concerns the limits of an appropriate canon for such an enterprise . Meanwhile, historically-informed and materialist approaches to ecocriticism, have been proposed, which look to the past as a field of determinations and limits on the present: the present as the given product, finished or not, of past causes . Both these approaches, and the Utopian mode—so promising in its ability to imagine a positive political program in addition to the earnest advocacy we already have of the conserve this and care for that type—are all predicated on two unspoken and contradictory a priori: time as a matrix of causality, and hence the objects of time as legible in space in the present, on one side; time as a transhistorical and transcendent Now of reflection and contemplation or another. The former, in that it supports a view of nature as a time-produced and time-bound formation vulnerable and impermanent in its complexity, is appropriate to an activist stance as something to defend; the latter predicates a certain kind of criticism, specifically a detached and aesthetically-oriented gaze. Both positions have merit. However, neither is wholly or solely adequate, and there remains between them a conceptual tension if not contradiction between the political and critical engagements characteristic of ecocriticism since the 1980s.