tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post154605440897908472..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: FireCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-37745660723465626742012-04-24T20:34:48.766-04:002012-04-24T20:34:48.766-04:00And "agency" is a huge umbrella word I&#...And "agency" is a huge umbrella word I'd want to resist as encompassing all the different kinds of involvement of material elements in human narratives. The narrative voicing of these fictions and histories is certainly crucial here, I agree.This old world is a new worldhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11567163294720510335noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-34484114982370447972012-04-24T14:12:47.438-04:002012-04-24T14:12:47.438-04:00Thank you so much, Ashby. One thing that has impre...Thank you so much, Ashby. One thing that has impressed me throughout my fire research is the ethical investments those who study the element bring to their work. Stephen Pyne's magnum opus on world fire is consistently underwritten by a quiet commitment to environmental justice, for example.<br /><br />Nathaniel, you're right: no prophecy, no human hands, no human words, no chickweed agency. BUT a web of agency comes into being that distributes agency among weeds and humans and materials that can burn and fires. Agency is distributed. Yes, without the humans it won't happen in the case of the burning of Njal's house. And the same with the Australian bush: it is a managed landscape. But that management unfolds through a multi-participant alliance. Some of the agents are humans; most are not. All are part of the web of activity. Causality is typically distributed, not singular -- much as we'd like to pin a whole blaze on, say, a single cow in Mrs O'Leary's barn. <br /><br />We will never fully escape anthropocentrism: agreed. We're human. We have severe limits. But that doesn't mean we can't push at them.Jeffrey Cohenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17346504393740520542noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-22982485216209318262012-04-24T12:21:31.327-04:002012-04-24T12:21:31.327-04:00As a scholar of medieval religion (often focused o...As a scholar of medieval religion (often focused on neo-platonic influences), I have frequently struggled with the materialist paradigm that you and your colleagues have frequently articulated on this blog and elsewhere. This should be taken as a compliment--you challenge me to think in ways radically different from what I'm used to.<br /><br />But it also leads me to critique, in that it frequently seems to me that you have gotten so wrapped up in investing non-human objects with agency that you forget the profound role of human agency that pervades the texts you are reading.<br /><br />Thus, while I greatly appreciate your meditations in this paper (especially from the perspective of someone whose family lives in Rocky Mountain forests and experiences the same fraught relationship with fire described by Ashby Kinch in the comment above), I have to quibble specifically with your investment of the driftwood and chickweed with their own agency. After all, the driftwood does not travel against the current of its own agency but <i>because of the curse placed upon it by human agency</i>. Likewise, the chickweed only has "agency" insofar as it has been identified ahead of time by the old prophetic woman. Had there been no such prophecy, the chickweed would not have the significance it does.<br /><br />In other words, it is <i>human</i> action and the <i>human</i> investment of meaning and causation that makes these objects "agents". I think we mislead ourselves if we ignore such inherent human agency.<br /><br />At the same time, that may simply mean that, however much we try thought experiments in decentering the human, we are still doomed always to anthropocentrism. (That sounds more pessimistic than I intended.) Or to quote your own essay, "We have a difficult time imagining a world that does not exist for us, one in which objects enjoy their own relations, or withdraw into unreachability."Nathaniel M. Campbellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01835009706332559978noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-79147048274360922632012-04-24T11:28:19.917-04:002012-04-24T11:28:19.917-04:00I don't have any substantive comments to add, ...I don't have any substantive comments to add, just a note of appreciation about the resonance of this piece. I live in fire country (Missoula, Montana), where the dialectic of fire and ice is powerfully literal: each winter, we cautiously watch as the snowpack mounts (or fails to mount), knowing the consequences for fire season in August. Right now, fires ring the valley as landowners and the Forest Service engage in the ritual sacrifice of trees for the appeasement of the new gods of uncontained fire. For decades, the official fire suppression policy, under the auspices of "resource management," has allowed the forest density to increase, while arguments over timber sales have meant that few trees have been cut. The result has been massive wildfires, mostly "natural" (in the sense of cause) but really "unnatural" (in the sense that they are human-created firebombs that previous centuries of fire ecology would have avoided with more annual conflagrations). All of this is better-understood, but the values that might underpin a shift in policy hard to agree upon in a modern, pluralistic society. So fire--the elemental force of human culture, without which it is hard to imagine culture--lurks ominously at the margins. Here, too, race also plays a role, as the Blackfeet and Nez Perce in this area managed their resources under very different principles, densities of population, agricultural needs, and migration patterns. Anyway, all just to say: thank you for a spark of thought, linking Iceland, Australia, and Montana (and elsewhere) in the ring of fire...Ashby Kinchnoreply@blogger.com