Ecocritical Potentials of Lithomorphology

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/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”. This second Grey Matters conference aims 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 lithomorphology (three further con-ferences will be dedicated to lithomateriality, lithonarration, and lithoaisthesis). Lithomorphology designates relations and intersections of lithic and artistic processes of formation and deformation, for example correspondences between geological processes (e.g. erratics, teconics, stratification, crystallization, erosion) and aesthetic forms, creative processes and literary composition.

The premise of “lithomorphology” turns against a set of ideas about rocks which precede the emergence of geology as a science in the late 18^th century (but which in transformed manners sometimes still tinge the way in which rocks are thought): the notion that rocks and stones lack form, that their forms are random or emerged without any structuring principles, and the argument that morphology is reserved for living organisms (e.g. Goethe). Rocks are formed according to structural principles, but their morphology is different from that of organic entities. Combining questions of morphology and poieisis—how forms come to be, and how artefacts and ecofacts are made—is crucial for fleshing out distinctions between aesthetics informed by inorganic matter and aesthetics based on organic entities. Organicist aesthetic theories are often based on proliferation and harmonic and dynamic relations between connected parts. In contrast to living beings, rocks do not procreate and geological processes “neither create nor destroy” materials (LaBerge); they operate in very slow cycles of formation, layering, and deformation. Whereas aesthetic forms modelled on the organic tend to be tied to principles of growth, lithic morphologies of breaking down and decomposition are central for inorganic aesthetics. When it comes to rocks and stones, decomposition and form-building processes cannot be neatly distinguished. Hence, lithomorphology upsets the dualisms of formation and deformation, creation and decreation, composition and disintegration.

The conference will focus on the following intersections between geological and aesthetic formation and deformation processes:

• Relations between writing processes or artistic creation processes and geological processes. E.g. Cormac McCarthy’s tectonic composition of desert descriptions; Per Kirkeby’s layering technique in painting that imitates stratification and sedimentation; coagulation in painting and petrification; sculpting (removing material) and erosion or weathering, or erosion and weathering as sculpting forces (Marguerite Yourcenar).
• Overlaps or tensions between lithic forms and formal aspects of visual art and literature: artworks and texts formed like rocks or minerals (e.g. Inger Christensen’s “Frostkrystal”, petrification and composite composition in Annette von Droste Hülsthoff’s “Mergelgrube”), or rocks formed like texts or works of art (e.g. Roger Caillois).
• Lithic morphologies that are negotiated poetologically, i.e. when a text or artwork reflects on geological processes and relates them to the form or composition of the work, or poetological readings. E.g. metamorphism and fracturing in Esther Kinsky’s Schiefern; quaking, breaking and crystallization in Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty; Samuel Beckett’s “lithic vocabulary” drawing attention to textual stratifications like compositional layers, etymology and intertextuality (as analyzed by Mark Byron).
• Lithic morphologies as metaphors for linguistic or artistic processes, or for approaches to literature and art. E.g. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s phrase “language is fossil poetry”; etymology or interpretation understood as in geological terms, for example as excavating; petrification and crystallization as descriptions for creative processes.

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 lithomorphology focused on. Such potentials might lie in the non-anthropocentric gesture of looking at how geological processes form or inspire cultural products, in contrast to human acts of forming and utilizing rock. We aim at an inorganic expansion of the current ecocritical vocabulary, which is heavily informed by organic forms and morphology, and seek alternatives to prevalent eco-aesthetic models centered on life and movement: what, for example, could be gained from focusing on phases of immobility? We are interested in expanding questions of form with questions of formlessness, for instance in potentially redeeming qualities of arrested form, immobility, and stillness. Thus, we invite contributions exploring the ecocritical potentials of desoeuvrement, i.e. uneconomic aesthetic forces of inertia, passivity, decomposition, destruction, or undoing in lithic artworks. Finally, we want to negotiate the forms of resistance to production- and progress-oriented capitalist logics that might emerge from a lithomorphology that involves transformation but is unconcerned with creating something new.