(Dis)enchanted Elementalities Free

“Elemental” thinking is one way of approaching the relationship between human beings and their ecological surroundings. It is increasingly the only way to experience, if not fully comprehend, this relationship. Having passed through the enlightened disenchantment of nature, whereby nature was brought into a scientific regime of knowledge, with science representing humankind’s intellectual and technical mastery of its perimeters, we are currently experiencing an ecological crisis that is putting to the test any such mastery, and indeed is proving what was always known but conveniently forgotten, namely that nature is the master of the human world.

At this moment, humankind is being exposed to natural forces on a scale and with an intensity that has never before been witnessed. We have been brought face to face with our elemental Other. Human and natural causes are mingled together in a humanatural or naturecultural environment both from without (through anthropogenic climate change) and within (through chemical intrusions into our bodies, whether man-made or released into our bodies as a result of human encroachments on the environment). This is not the first time that humanity has felt itself to be proximate to or invaded by the elements. Pre-Enlightenment cultures across the globe were attuned to this condition. The past, once thought to have been overcome, is now returning with a kind of vengeance. And we sense this return most prominently as an elemental exposure. The “elemental” here is a shorthand and a metaphor for a far more complex process that is being distilled for us in our phenomenological experience of the natural world. We do not experience “nature.” We experience its forms and impacts. At a molar level, we experience it in its elemental expressions (earth, air, water, fire).

To be sure, elementality has another connotation. It suggests the idea of building blocks (another metaphor), the fact that bodies are composites, not integers: they are constructed out of elementary parts. What counts as a part or a whole depends on the analytic framework that is brought to bear. And, here, elemental analysis becomes a bottomless regression that exceeds phenomena and even rational comprehension. It is abyssal and vertiginous. Whether we call this analysis a re-enchantment of the elements (they seem to accrue near-mystical status: witness the categories of “strange” or “charmed” quarks) or a disenchantment of the processes of enchantment themselves (disenchantment here registering disillusionment, the loss of rational control, and even a sense of a return to a precivilized and primordial condition) likewise depends on the perspectives we bring to bear. Either way, the (dis)enchantment of the elements cuts to the quick. It undoes our naturalized frames of reference and demands of us a radical recalibration of them. It dissolves the boundaries between every conceivable domain. It leaves us vulnerable to intrusion and the world to extrusion. It reorganizes our relationship to what lies “outside” ourselves. It enchants us (if that is what it means to be at one with this outside) and disenchants us (for the same reasons).

The point is not that we must choose between enchantment and disenchantment of the elements but that we have no choice but to (dis)enchant them. How to make this condition critical? The first step is to acknowledge the dilemmas but also the fact that we are hardly the first in the world to have done so. The problem reaches back to early antiquity, not only in the West but also in the non-West.¹ More recently, Friedrich Nietzsche put his finger on the paradoxes that confront us in our post-Enlightenment age, a stance that he embodies in his writings as its living contradiction. In places, he is the great disillusioner of nature and, in consequence, of ourselves. In other places, he suggests how difficult it can be to disenchant the world completely and without remainder.

As he writes in The Gay Science, in order to rid ourselves of the gods and their “shadows,” we must “de-deif[y] nature” and “naturalize humanity with a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature.”² The de-deification of nature is a strong desideratum. It is not enough to banish the gods from nature. We must recognize that our very idea of nature is a “poem that we have invented” (GS 301) and that “the total character of the world” has no discernible features: beauty, order, organization, and form are “aesthetic anthropomorphisms” (GS 109). And, yet, to look upon a featureless world is an impossibility for us; its consequences would be fatal: “We possess art lest we perish of the truth,” for “the truth is ugly.”³ That is why we find Nietzsche so often lingering on the dangerous boundary between enchanting (“redeeming”) nature and disenchanting it (recognizing its fundamental irredeemability). He is inhabiting our dilemma. A further passage from The Gay Science illustrates the point. It also happens to be one of the more hauntingly beautiful moments in his writings:

Is not the one secret that Nietzsche shares with the waves the knowledge that each party in this spoken and unspoken dialogue exists only by betraying the other. The oceanic wave (Welle) personifies Nietzsche's theory of the depersonifying will (Wille). All that separates the two concepts is a pair of elements: a mere e and an i. Each is the (dis)enchanted version of the other. And while it may be the case that, to speak with Jane Bennett, “the mood of enchantment or that strange combination of delight and disturbance” has an “ethical relevance,” so too does the mood of disenchantment. Bennett is channeling the Lucretian combination of horror ac divina voluptas that comes from imagining atoms swirling in the void.⁴ But the next step beyond Lucretius, the one taken by Nietzsche, is to recognize that the very ontology of atomism is a fiction, merely one more way of daubing reality with a human paintbrush. For even “matter [itself] is as much of an error as the god of the Eleatics” (GS 109). The truth may be ugly, but not to face up to it is ethically hazardous.

Elemental thinking confronts us with this mutual betrayal of human and nonhuman realities. A critical elemental thinking works in both directions at once. It enchants and disenchants in the same gesture.⁵ Take the example of Georges Bataille, who strategically deploys elemental thinking in order to disrupt our ordinary patterns of sense-making, even if this disruption takes place at the level of unverifiable hypotheticals and as-if thinking:

The last quoted line from Inner Experience, which is echoed elsewhere in his writings (for instance, in “The Limit of the Useful” and “Economy at the Scale of the Universe”), underscores the value of thinking the human through the elements: individuality is revealed as an arrogance; differences exist but are immaterial at an ontological level; and communication among all the constituents of elemental beings captures the totality of their activity, which takes place at a frequency inaudible to human hearing.⁷

In a recent essay, Byung-Chul Han supplies a novel definition of the “disenchantment of the world,” Friedrich Schiller’s phrase, which Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, as well as Max Weber, famously used to theorize the condition of modernity.⁸ Apparently reversing the truism that in our post-truth epoch facts have been wiped out by the vortex of narrative, a perverted, manic enchantment, Han suggests that we live in a disenchanted world, which cannot be narrated because it “consists exclusively of facts,” enumerable and explainable but impossible to fold into the magic flow of storytelling. Scientific explanation is pitted against narrative—a problematic opposition that, as we would argue, is itself indicative of the spellbinding power of disenchantment. “The digital disenchantment of the world goes far beyond the disenchantment that Max Weber attributed to scientific rationalization,” Han says.⁹ A novel form of “transparency” has been brought about by “the informatization of the world,” which Han calls the “new formula of disenchantment.” Because of a bare facticity, whose transparency translates into a resistance to affabulation, the world “loses narrative tension.” In Han’s words, “Disenchantment can be reduced to the formula: things are, but they are mute.”¹⁰ The correlationist gap between phenomenon and language turns into the uncrossable expanse posited by object-oriented ontology, a desert in which the oasis of explanation only enhances the sense of desolation.

Han makes these points by recounting a short story by children’s author Paul Maar, in which a child seeks the ability to tell stories when he is unwittingly thrown by his parents into a complex of surreal events on a rainy day.¹¹ The impossibility of grasping these events, of reducing them to an explanatory paradigm, is precisely, for Han, the condition for a reconnection with the possibility of narrative. What is the relation between this merely external detail and our own loss of narrative, a manifestation of the paralyzing disenchantment of our times? Han’s advocacy for a return to enchantment is strongly elemental. The “de-auratization” that expresses the disenchantment of the world, its loss of “radiance,” is presented as an interruption of a symbiotic relation between the human and elementality that is enacted in metaphor. Describing auratization in Proustian and Benjaminian tones, Han says that “when they are submerged in the fluid medium of mémoire involontaire, things become fragrant vessels in which what was seen and felt is condensed in narrative fashion.” He adds that “information…cannot hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine” and that “the tsunami of information destroys narrative inwardness”—the implication being that narrative, with its own refusal of transparency, its own sometimes bewildering opacity, can reproduce or absorb elemental roughness or dazzlement.¹² There seems to be an implicit connection between the meteorological context of Maar’s story—the rainy day—and its protagonist’s mission, to (re)acquire the opacity of narrative, to become rain(y), that is, to appropriate into human craft (an aspect of) elemental ontology. The rhythm of rain is the lost flow that human knowledge, even when realized in the mysterious, inexplicable form of narrative, seeks to make its own. The wish for a re-enchantment that would water the desert of transparent facticity could, however, disguise the desire for mastery and appropriation intrinsic to disenchantment as theorized by Horkheimer and Adorno.

Mainstream environmental and ecocritical discourse, in its liberal, redemptive orientation, tells us that we need to renew a sense of “aura” in our approach to the externality we call nature—that is, we need to step back, applying the distancing filters of mystery and mythologization to develop a reattachment to the elements beyond immediacy and transparency.¹³ This stepping back, meant to bring about the required ecological re-enchantment through the emergence of new—more-than-human, post-human—bonds and relationalities, cannot entirely be extricated from the quintessential markers of modern disenchantment (first and foremost, colonialist subjection) if the primary goal of environmental thought and activism remains the survival of the human; if the planet in the phrases “defense of the planet” or “future of the planet” is assumed to coincide with the human world or, even more narrowly, with the privileged minority unscathed by the racializing stigma of humanization; and if we are not ready to refrain from our explicit or implicit efforts to otherize the elements, to tame their inhuman violence through narrative and otherwise.

The disenchanted enchantment, or enchanted disenchantment, that the papers of this special issue, ranging from Empedocles to contemporary eco-thriller, propose and model is defined by the hermeneutic and pragmatic suggestion that we refuse to temper the double-edged vitality of the elements, the destructiveness indissociable from their power of generating life. The elemental catastrophes by which we feel victimized are the consequences of our own disenchantments, whose violence we attempt to cover up by retrospectively resorting to the language of enchantment, a cathartic performance of innocence and naivete.¹⁴ The “radiance” that we ascribe to natural elements can amount to a cute disavowal, in the sense of “cute” theorized by Sianne Ngai, in which a threat to late capitalism is neutralized by replacing fear with endearment, conflict with patronizing affection.¹⁵ “Radiance” is a sublimation of the aggressive curtailment of elemental force and fierceness that we need to practice to maintain the illusion that there is room for the human on this planet, that the earth wants us.

In this framework, we can perhaps reconsider the terms of the distinction between information and narrative posited by Han. The collapse of narrative, replaced by the pure facticity of information, by an epistemic language incapable of holding “dazzling sunshine,” is a falling apart of our defensive attempts to infantilize the elementalities that have been temporarily forced to tolerate our desire to move (or settle) in, rather than more modestly fitting in. The enchanted relationalities that Han names “narrative” are exercises in precarious self-legitimization, experiments in self-deluding “extirpation.” This is not the “extirpation of animism,”¹⁶ to use Horkheimer and Adorno’s phrase for disenchantment, but rather an extirpation of the awareness that elementality in its fullness is fundamentally incompatible with the human. When narrative disappears in the ruins of chronic crisis, in the rubble of a perennial state of emergency, the eerie facticity that remains is not explanatory or transparent—it is rather the threatening Real of earth, air, fire, and water, the untamable lifedeath of hyperobjects whose rough surfaces refuse to be smoothed out or away (the etymological meaning of “explanation”).¹⁷ According to Adorno and Horkheimer, disenchantment engendered a transformation of humans into abstract statistics. The re-enchantment that we might need is not a simple reversal—humans turned back into subjects, and elements into numbers and statistics—but a novel form of disenchantment by which we stay with the unbearable and precariously cohabit with the elemental forces capable of expropriating the right to possession and permanent survival that we take for granted. One way to embrace this stance is to disenchant disenchantment itself, its desire to extricate itself from its own magical rituals and procedures. It is to recognize, with Horkheimer and Adorno, that “just as myths already entail enlightenment, with every step enlightenment entangles itself more deeply in mythology.”¹⁸ Elemental thinking is a way of exploring without shunning such entanglements.

Thinking of elementality through new conceptualizations of (dis)enchantment is the opposite of nihilistic thought, even if, following recent interventions by Axelle Karera, Claire Colebrook, and Steven Swarbrick and Jean-Thomas Tremblay, it does break the taboo of casting doubt on the continuation of human existence as a non-negotiable given.¹⁹ Pushing against the nihilism of our times through a re-engagement with Weber, Wendy Brown criticizes the disenchanting maneuvers that Weber himself produces when he demands that “miracles” and “mystery,” figurations of enchantment, be removed from academic discourse. This demand, as Brown observes, is a pharmakon against nihilism that equally yields nihilistic results:

We propose that addressing the elements in their radically undomesticated form, in forms of unbearability that might alter, unsettle, or displace the human, is a (dis)enchanted means of ecocritical re-enchantment. The gravest nihilism is the one that would sacrifice the planet to the nourishment and reproduction of its destroyers, the ones whose disenchanting drive is its own form of enchantment.

The essays collected here work to hold true to this difficult balance and suggest further ways in which to explore the problematic nexus of enchantment and disenchantment that, explicitly or implicitly, is central to any critical-theoretical approach to the elements. While usually focused on one specific element, all the essays bear on the ontological, ethical, and political implications of elementality as such. Water and especially air occupy a prominent thematic place in the concerns of what is presented here. COVID-19 has forced us to reckon with the fact that we perpetually live in pandemic times, that virality is consubstantial with our lives.²¹ The current war on Gaza—which is implicated with a chronic practice of elemental necropolitics carried out by Israel (aerocide, aquacide, geocide)—challenges the complacent to look at blood with harrowingly disenchanted eyes as an element, an internal-external fluid, the animate matter expropriated from the enlivening breath we call anima.²²

Jim Porter explores Empedocles’s view of catastrophic elementality, of “a more-than-human universe that is ceaselessly making and unmaking itself and…ceaselessly enchanting and disenchanting the human view of reality.” Deeply aware of the intertwinement between life’s exuberance and its violence, Empedocles, as Porter sees him, uses elementality to “rail[] against scientific epistemology, which desiccates and impoverishes the human mind.” Anneka Lenssen writes about a body of work produced by Arab intellectuals during the 1960s to 1980s (Etel Adnan, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Kamal Abu Deeb) in the wake of destruction across the Middle East on a scale that was felt to be apocalyptic, vertiginous, and cosmic—an elemental devastation. Expressive media followed suit but on a smaller scale. Etching the violent and “elemental mutability of forms” in the atomized particulate matter of words and images, their work could only bear witness to the unspeakable, like sand thrown in the eyes. Louise Hornby asks about the strange attraction that the elements exert on the self in Virginia Woolf’s broodings on the weather and in Roni Horn’s annotated photographic collections on weather and water. To radically give oneself over to the elements is to think the “world without a self, ceding the ‘I’ to atmosphere and light.” The results can be fatal or productive. Either way, the elements are all-inclusive, even “androgynous.” They tolerate and erase difference. And that is part of their allure. Mario Telò offers a new tool for “thinking about lists, catalogs, and archival accumulations” of the sort found in Bob Dylan’s messianic lyrics and in the Bronze Age tablets from Mycenae that survived amid elemental catastrophe. To view these latter records as “aspirational containers and constrainers of fire, water, air” is to recognize the double function of archives: they shore up inscriptions of power against potential losses. The world we inhabit is one such archive. It is replete with losses told and yet to be told. Extinction cinema like John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, an anarchival epic documentary about “Alaska’s frozen landscape,” is a vivid illustration of this logic. Dora Zhang discusses narrative (dis)enchantment in relation to viral catastrophe in Ling Ma’s Severance (2018)—“not only a novel about an environmental crisis, but also a novel about what happens when a crisis becomes an environment,” where “racialization, epidemiology, and toxicity” converge. In his analysis of Todd Haynes’s eco-thriller Dark Waters (2019), “a character study of liberal enchantment and disenchantment,” Jean-Thomas Tremblay shows how, dramatizing an environmental intoxication spilling over into the couple and the family, this film “awkwardly shoves into a narrative structure the distinctly nonnarrative (repetitive, not evolutive) comixing of life and death.” In his moving account of his personal involvement in ACT UP, Shane Butler reports that “the air we breathed too was quickened with ashes that threatened to suffocate and bury us all.…In fact, I would go so far as to say that the most important fluid exchanged there was air.” A space of collective (dis)enchantment opens up on the threshold between life and death: “We…asserted our humanity, not by moving, but by becoming immobile, by becoming rock, around which others flitted in fear and wonder.” At a time when the genocidal siege of Gaza—where Western disenchantment morphs into an ongoing plan of obliteration—turns into an all-encompassing ecological catastrophe, Salar Mameni invites us to consider blood as an element, an organic substance at the intersection between the vegetal (or, more specifically, the floral) and the atmospheric, through suggestive connections between the classical tradition and Islamic thought.