Ecocritical Potentials of Lithonarration

Conference. 

This conference is part of the Carlsberg Semper Ardens research project Grey Matters: Ecocritical Potentials of Lithic Aesthetics. Aiming at an expansion of the green transition by a “grey turn” to rocks and stones, Grey Matters seeks new aesthetic approaches to the lithosphere, which is a major site of environmental destruction. We are especially interested in approaches that take into account material peculiarities of rocks and stones and acknowledge their difference and separation from humans and other living beings. The project embraces a twofold emphasis: 1) attempting to unsettle cultural imaginaries that devaluate rocks and stones based on strictly drawn hierarchical dualisms between living and non-living entities through investigations of art and literature, while 2) insisting on differences between organic and inorganic matter in dialogue with questions of aesthetics. By fleshing out genuinely inorganic aesthetics, Grey Matters seeks to develop and conceptualize less anthropocentric, non-appropriative, ethical sensitivities for stones through works of art and literature. We are especially interested in the question of how specific aesthetic approaches enable relationalities that secure distance. To foster “stonier” aesthetic sensitivities and grasp the sensory impact of works of art and literature, it is not sufficient to focus on thematizations of lithic matter. We thus center on potentially defamiliarizing moments in which literature or art and lithic matter intersect based on structural, processual, or material qualities, and are interested in overlaps of what Caitlin DeSilvey designates as artefacts (“relic[s] of human manipulation of the material world”) and ecofacts “relics of other-than-human engagement with matter, climate, weather”. At the Grey Matters conferences, we aim at negotiating how lithic artefacts and ecofacts are made (by different forces and agents, from human creativity or exploitation of mineral resources to weather, time, and geological processes), and how such literal poieses in their intersections can amount to a specific aesthetics. In a further step, we invite explorations of the ecocritical potentials of lithic aesthetics.

Within this framework, this conference especially focuses on lithonarration (three further events will be dedicated to lithomateriality, lithomorphology, and lithoaisthesis). Lithonarration designates relations and intersections between histories and stories archived in rocks on the one hand, and literary or artistic storytelling on the other. Such intersections can, for example, involve the following:

• Overlaps or tensions between lithic and literary or artistic archiving and storytelling on a material, medial, and metaphorical basis: How do rocks record (hi)stories (e.g. stone as “storied matter” [Jeffrey Jerome Cohen]), how does literature do so (on paper and in digital forms)? And what about different visual artforms (painting, sculpture, film, etc.)? What about Indigneous earthworks as “forms of Indigenous writing” (Chadwick Allen)? How are lithic archiving and storytelling used as metaphors for forms of writing and artistic creation (e.g. Walter Benjamin’s comparison of the transformation of epic forms to geological transformations), or the other way round (e.g. writing as metaphor for rock records, Thomas H. Clark and Colin W. Stern’s image of earth history as a book with torn and missing pages)?
• Questions of narrative, dramaturgy, plot: What stories do rocks tell, trigger, or block? What stories are stones involved in, and what function do they have in these stories? What narratives are tied to lithic matter? If stone is an archive that contains stories, how are these structured in terms of tempo (acceleration, deceleration) and narrative gaps? How can one read lithic landscapes in terms of sequence and events?
• Questions of perspective and gaze: What points of view do rocks elicit? What kind of gazes, perspectives and visibilities are negotiated in relation to stone? Can we imagine stone returning the human gaze (cf. Jacques Lacan, Maurice Merleau-Ponty)? In some cases, rocks seem to go hand in hand with an indifferent narrative perspective (i.e. Cormac McCarthy) or a dull gaze (comparable to what Peter Szendy observes about the animal gaze in Béla Tarr’s films), in others their visibility is marked by hyperclarity (cf. the cut and polished stones of Roger Caillois).
• Questions of voice: What kind of voice do rocks call for? Inscriptions on stones often take the form of prosopopoeia, giving voice to the stone, or apostrophe, addressing the stone. Is this pure anthropomorphizing? Could we imagine the circumscription of the stone’s voice as something like a mute tone, or a voice that does not tell (cf. Esther Kinsky’s Rombo)?

We are looking for contributions that address these (or related) points from an ecocritical perspective; this can be through discussion of works that that explicitly negotiate lithic matter in relation to unsettled environments, the climate crisis or the Anthropocene, or through ecocritical readings. Each contribution should address the ecocritical potentials inherent in the specific form or instance of lithonarration focused on. Such potentials might lie in stone’s alternative, non-anthropocentric stories, temporalities, points of view and voices—or the mute “Mitlaut” (con-sonance, or sounding together) negotiated by Paul Celan, opening to conversations with alterities, remote times, and unspeakable losses. Moreover, tracking the “unsettled inscriptions” of mineral matter in a time when “the lapidary” becomes “increasingly erratic” (Jason Groves) enables other ways of “staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway). Those forms of trouble might include the exploration in queer and trans studies of “trans/material attachments” to stone (Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen) or the contestations by Black and Indigenous Studies of the settler colonial division between sea and land, as in Tiffany Lethabo King’s analytic of the Black shoal. We encourage participants to think about what ecological awareness might add to poetological reflections of lithonarration, and we are interested in potentially redeeming the non-animated and non-vital qualities of lithic matter as an alternative to stories of action and vital growth.