Ecocritical Potentials of Lithoaisthesis

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 lithoaisthesis (three further events will be dedicated to lithomateriality, lithomorphology, and lithonarration). Lithoaisthesis designates relations and intersections of sensory qualities of lithic matter and those of literature and art: How do literature and art evoke sensory qualities of stone like color, sound, touch, smell or taste? And how does this relate to the sensory dimensions of the respective artwork or text, and the sensory qualities of the respective medium and materiality? Such intersections can, for example, involve the following aspects and questions:

• How do depictions, descriptions and evocations of acoustic, visual, haptic and olfactory qualities of stone relate to sensory qualities of literature and art? For example when Beckett compares Molloy’s sucking stones to the voice as medium of spoken language; when lithic qualities resonate with the visual and sonic dimension of words (typesetting and typography; alliteration, assonance, rhyme, rhythm), the color, brushstrokes and texture in painting, or sensory qualities of sculpture and installation art; when performance art engages perception and the senses; or when mixed artistic media and lithic materialities meet multi-sensory experiences, e.g. the reflection on and staging of intertwining visual and auditory scales in Smithson’s film and essay Spiral Jetty.
• How do stones and works of art and literature invite sensory engagements like smelling, touching, tasting? And what kind of sensations or modes of perceptions are evoked? Some stones look tasty, their texture might invite touch, and ringing rocks resonate when struck; the pastuous color of certain paintings resemble food or tempt touching it; you might feel compelled to smell the pages of a book or listen to their rustle. How do these stranger allures meet, for example when when the glazed mineral pigments of Vermeer’s paintings made one critic (Jean Louis Vaudoyer) think of ‘jade’ or ‘icing’ he wants to lick; or when Abramović actually licks vulcanic rock in a video installation. In turn, works of art and literature concerned with lithic matter might exude a resistance to touch, or impassivity.
• How are acoustic, visual, haptic and olfactory qualities of stone alluded to or made perceptible through form and style (cf. Genette’s claim that style is the perceptible side of language)? This might happen precisely when particular sensible qualities of stone are absent in the respective work (e.g. while literature does not share certain haptic or olfactory qualities of stone, the way a text is stylistically ‘formed’ can still make these qualities perceptible ex negativo). Which stylistic traits can be tied to lithic qualities (e.g. Döblin’s “steinerner Stil” [stony style])?
• Poetological, theoretical or methodological discussions of sensory aspects of art, literature and stone. For example, when lithic sensory qualities are discussed as poetological tropes (e.g. the negotiation of memory and writing along with violent touches and sounds of an earthquake-shaken mountain in Kinsky’s Rombo). Or when stone or mineral matter is used as an image for sensory, perceptual, or phenomenological approaches to literature and art (e.g. Shklovsky’s idea that “art exists … to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”).

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 lithoaisthesis focused on. Such potentials might, for example, lie in cultivating non extractive and non-intrusive relations through “just” perceiving (e.g. merely listening or watching). The medialization of art allows to maintain a distance. Following Shklovsky, sensing the stone through art involves making the sensory quality of art (its mediality and materiality) perceptible: you don’t have to grab the stone in order to feel its stoniness. Art makes one perceive, and it can make us perceive rocks differently: What could the ecocritical potentials of such different modes of perceptions be—from defamiliarization (Shklovsky), to redirecting or heightening attention (Ponge), or modes of ‘becoming sensor’ (Meyers).

We encourage contributors to consider ecocritical inputs from non-Western engagements with lithoaisthesis and are interested in ecocritical potentials beyond New Materialist sympathies, entanglements and kinships, for example via Colebrook’s ideas about non-human perception, Lacan’s concept of the Real, Zupančič’s object-disoriented ontology, Deleuze’s percepts, or Rancières distribution of the sensible. We also invite reflections on the nexus of queer affect, queer ecologies and lithoaisthesis.

The conference is open to everyone.