Ecocriticism's Theoretical Discontents

Abstract

This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism's investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discursivity and materiality, experience and representation.

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Mosaic 44/2 0027-1276-07/153018$02.00©Mosaic
Ecocriticism’s
Theoretical Discontents
SERPIL OPPERMANN
Despite the strong impulse in the latest phase of ecocriticism to establish connec-
tions with the major theoretical paradigms in cultural and literary studies, “the-
ory” is a contested issue in the ecocritical field. The main reason lies no doubt in
the foundational objectives of ecocriticism. Since one of its central rationales was to
“restore significance to the world beyond the page” (Rigby 154–55), ecocriticism confi-
dently styled itself against the poststructuralist strand of contemporary literary theory
that had conversely restored significance to the “word,” resulting in the linguistic turn in
the humanities. Ecocriticism’s development as a project that conjoins environmental
issues with the study of literature, however, is decidedly configured upon a pronounced
reaction against this turn, and reflects itself in its investment in cultivating environmen-
tal consciousness at a distance from critical reflexivity. Although ecocriticism has opened
a much broader front before us, with new directions of interdisciplinary research “into
ecofeminism, toxic texts, urban nature, Darwinism, ethnic literatures, environmental
justice and virtual environments” (Gifford 15), and with studies on numerous other
This essay both reflects upon ecocriticism’s investment in cultivating environmental consciousness at a distance
from critical reflexivity and explores its theoretical discontents. Arguing for the necessity of bringing theory into
praxis, the essay suggests that ecocriticism needs to cross the threshold between discursivity and materiality,
experience and representation.
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socio-ecological topics, themes, and issues that demand special attention,1it has
diversified without making any recourse to the problems posed by the representations
of the outside world in the text. That is why ecocriticism coheres, as Ursula Heise rightly
concedes, “more by virtue of a common political project than on the basis of shared the-
oretical and methodological assumptions” (506). It produces various methodologies
that diverge quite substantially in the ways in which they relate literary studies to the
environmental humanities and sciences. Indeed ecocriticism’s heterogeneity has
become its identifying epithet. Apparently, a general picture of ecocriticism today
resembles what Felix Guattari calls in The Three Ecologies a “processes of heterogenesis”
(34). This term signifies “a becoming that is always in the process of adapting, trans-
forming and modifying itself in relation to its environment” (95), a definition that
applies well to the present expansion of ecocriticism in its pluralist orientations and
inclusiveness. The heterogenous activity in the field can be examined along many other
pathways, but in its greatest extension, diversification of the field’s content and inter-
pretive methods pushes ecocriticism into a kind of relativism that makes it “less a
method than an attitude,” as John Tallmadge and Henry Harrington have defined it (x).
If “a constellation of approaches having little more in common than a shared concern
with the environment” (Mazel, Introduction 2) is considered as a projected alternative
to a valid ecocritical theory, then we are left to ask how exactly such a polymorphous
praxis, defined ironically as “strategic intangibility” (Estok, “Bridging” 198), can sustain
an academic field’s intellectual inquiry. Indeed, any ecocritical engagement with socio-
cultural framings of increasingly complex environmental issues requires an in-depth
engagement with contemporary intellectual trends. The postcolonial and environmen-
tal justice ecocriticisms, for example, have efficiently demonstrated such an engagement
in their appropriation of cultural and social theories, of sociobiology, phenomenology,
theories of globalism and transnationalism, cognitive sciences, and environmental
ethics.2Practitioners of these critical approaches have all used theoretical paradigms to
generate new modes of inquiry. Since today’s ecocriticism is also part of this general
inquiry, it must broaden its aims to formulate a set of new theoretical principles to
address the heterogeneous nature of its praxis. Just as ecocriticism’s socio-political
engagements with the pressing issues of local and global ecological crises are driven by
relevant theories, its analyses of the textual representations of these issues in literature
should also be theoretically informed. A new theoretical paradigm is a necessity in the
ecocritical reflections on discursive practices and on the role of language, textuality, and
critical theory. This essay explores the ecocritical reactions to the discursive construc-
tions of the world. Specifically, the essay contends that new horizons for investigations
in ecocritical studies should go beyond the resources of earlier paradigms.
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The fundamental problem facing ecocriticism, I argue, concerns representations of
the material world as the realm of the extra-textual. Part of the problem here has
to do with “the value and the limitation of the inescapably discursive form” of knowl-
edge of the world (Hutcheon 127). Within mainstream ecocriticism’s debates, this has
been mistakenly perceived as an erasure of the relation of reference to the world. The
main point of contestation about theory in ecocriticism, then, is specifically about the
referent’s discursive nature, because it is often associated with its erasure. It is impor-
tant to note that, by interrogating the possibility of unmediated access to reality, post-
structuralism has irrefutably challenged the realist notion of representation that
presumes a natural link between word and world. Ecocriticism’s reaction to theory is
generally premised on this denaturalization of literary realism’s assumed trans-
parency. For ecocritics, this challenge is often confused with reducing reality to lin-
guistic constructivism, or with the idea that reality is constructed only in language.
That is why we need to advance a critical perspective in which both discursivity and
materiality (in other words, discursive practices and material phenomena) can be
integrated in a relational approach. The accountability of such an approach must,
however, lie in a correct identification of the ethical, epistemological, and ontological
concerns of ecocriticism’s wider interest in human and non-human systems. What is
needed is a new framework that can integrate ontological and epistemological con-
siderations in ecocritical studies, so that it becomes possible to reframe, as Wendy
Wheeler concurs, “critical understandings of the relationship between signs, texts,
languages, and world” (“Postscript” 139). But, if ecocriticism is to offer a non-anthro-
pocentric transformation of the human discourses of this planet (and all of its inhab-
itants), “perhaps the most important thing it can do,” as Karla Armbruster suggests,
“is to confront and explore the very aspects of [. . .] poststructuralist thought that
mostly challenge it and stretch its capacities” (23).
Confronting the postmodern and poststructuralist problematizion of the pre-
sumed realness of the referent3should not be understood as an expectation that eco-
criticism, with its worldy grounding, would have to ride on the same wave, but as a
way to rethink its epistemological quandaries of literary theory. From this perspective,
let me reiterate that the main ecocritical suspicion of theory is rooted in the claim that
we can know the world only through its textualizations, and specifically through the
cultural, political, social, and scientific discourses. Consequently a common misun-
derstanding regarding the nature of discourse has come to inform much of ecocriti-
cal practice. Discourse is conceived of as a linguistic realm, which is a reductionist
conception of discourse, as the post-Marxist thinkers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe have pointedly argued in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. According to their
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In the light of this explanation, can we really see theory (in the sense of literary and
critical theories) as “poststructuralist nihilism?” (Love 236). Yet, to some extent eco-
criticism did, because from such an ecocritical perspective discursive conceptualiza-
tions of nature presumably put its existence into question. That is why the “first wave
of ecocriticism,” as Lawrence Buell guardedly calls it (17), confused the epistemolog-
ical question of how we know the world with the ontological question of the status of
that world. Moreover, the common mistake ecocritics often made was in confusing (if
I may borrow a phrase from Paul de Man), “the materiality of the signifier with the
materiality of what it signifies” (11). Indeed de Man’s famous answer to the question,
“what is it about literary theory that is so threatening that it provokes such strong
resistance and attacks?” (11) provides important pointers for the same quarrelsome
attitude to theory in ecocriticism. Although de Man does not even consider the objec-
tions raised against theory because they are always, he says, “misinformed or based on
crude misunderstandings of such terms as mimesis, fiction, reality, ideology, reference
and, for that matter, relevance” (12), his claim that resistance to theory is actually a
resistance to the “introduction of linguistic terminology” (8) also holds true for eco-
criticism. This problematic issue constitutes the unresolved tensions about theory in
the ecocritical field. “The resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language
about language,” writes de Man. “It is therefore a resistance to language itself or to the
discourse theory, there can be no distinction between the discursive and the non-dis-
cursive. The semantic aspects of language, they insist, interweave with the pragmatic
aspects of real world properties, objects, actions, and movements. Today this approach,
namely the idea that discourse is always co-extensive with the social, is widely recog-
nized in discourse studies. By the same token, the idea of the world as text—suggested
by Jacques Derrida in his famous essay “Différance,” when he asks, “How to conceive
what is outside a text?” (25)—is misunderstood as dispensing with reality. But
Derrida himself, in Limited Inc, has made it perfectly clear that the concept of text
implies both the discursive and the non-discursive. Derrida recalls that
what I call “text” implies all the structures called “real,” “economic,” “historical,” socio-insti-
tutional, in short: all possible referents. Another way of recalling once again that “there is
nothing outside the text.” That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or
enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naive enough to believe and to
have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality, has the struc-
ture of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this “real” except in an interpretive
experience. The latter neither yields meaning nor assumes it except in a movement of dif-
ferential referring. That’s all. (148)
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possibility that language contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intu-
ition” (13). It is in this framework that we can understand ecocriticism’s accentuated
theoretical discontents.
Despite its transition into a polycentric field of remarkable diversity with the
manifold complexities transdisciplinary research elicits, ecocriticism operates, in its
literary space, from shifting perspectives on what Kate Soper has called the “nature-
endorsing” ecological approach. But this approach has led to a naïve realist concept of
representation, mostly in ecocriticism’s developmental stage. Perhaps that is why eco-
critics such as Robert T. Hayashi argue that “ecocritical inquiry still remains rooted in
American environmentalism and constrained by limitations that stifle its evolution”
(60). Hayashi’s interpretation foreshadows some of the concerns about ecocriticism’s
overemphasis on the ontology of nature outside of human reflection. While acknowl-
edging the inclusion of the larger perspectives of postcolonial theory into the ecocrit-
ical inquiry, Hayashi notes that “ecocriticism’s common focus on natural environments
can still limit these innovative explorations” (61). He also draws attention to the impor-
tance of T.V. Reed’s call for “a critical self-exploration of rhetorics and epistemology
within environmental studies” (61). In her 2009 article “The Sound of a Robin after a
Rain Shower,” Sabine Wilkie articulates similar concerns. “For a newcomer to the field
of environmental criticism in literary and cultural studies,” she writes, “the debate
about the relationship between the natural world and its literary representation raises
a central question about the direction in which the discipline is developing” (90). She
goes on to demonstrate that there are two camps in ecocriticism: the nature camp of
ecocritics who explore the relationships between the natural and the cultural processes,
and the constructionist camp with its focus on the historical construction of nature.
But as a newcomer to the field she also recognizes that ecocriticism is dominated by
the American tradition of nature writing. By reflecting on this tradition as repre-
sented by Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease, Glen A. Love, and Karl Kroeber as her
exemplary cases, Wilkie claims that these ecocritics’ exclusive focus on the theme and
content of literary texts reduces ecocritical inquiry to “the level of content invoca-
tions” (94). This approach, Wilkie posits, “thematically, and referentially, is a model
that simply assumes the unproblematic existence of an un(re)constructed nature as
allegedly described by the sciences” (94). As she tactfully reminds them, “Texts do
indeed present their meanings on levels other than plot and invocation—which is
what deconstructive models of literary criticism have so eloquently pointed out over
the years” (95). Her following striking question posed against the nature camp with
regards to the deconstructive mode of literary criticism sums up the general anxiety
felt by those more theoretically oriented ecocritics: “Maybe they can be put to good
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use by environmentally conscious criticism in that they could discover aspects of the
environment in and of a text without having to resort to pre-critical referential mod-
els of reading?” (95).
Timothy Morton has expressed the same concern, stating that “ecocriticism has
either not engaged with, or has positively shunned, ‘theory’—notably deconstruction”
(Ecology 161). In his most recent essay, “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Morton asks
us to think text more rigorously in deconstructive terms. “When we zoom into life
forms,” he claims, “we discover textuality” (5). He indicates “the genome—DNA and
other replicator molecules” as the textuality of life forms (5) and demonstrates with
specific references to the latest research in biological science that the text/context
divide “is only an interpretive convenience” (2). According to him, texts cannot be
thought separately from their environments, which are made of signs. “There is more
than a neat chiasmic symmetry here,” he says, “a strange entanglement in which we
cannot distinguish between what counts as an entity ‘in’ an environment and an entity
‘in’ a text” (3). The postcolonial ecocritic Susie O’Brien foregrounds similar persuasive
contentions. In her cogently argued essay “‘Back to the World’: Reading Ecocriticism
in a Postcolonial Context,” O’Brien acknowledges how ecocriticism has “altered the ter-
rain of literary criticism in some profound and useful ways” (185), but she also notes
the field’s limitations and suggests that “instead of trying to ‘get back to the world’ [. . .]
ecocriticism needs to get back to theory, if it is to negotiate the difficult cultural place
in which it now finds itself” (194). David Mazel also suggests that “ecocriticism needs
theory to gain academic legitimacy” (“Ecocriticism” 39).4Such arguments now prolif-
erate within ecocritical studies. The main reason behind them is obvious: they result
from the desire to see ecocriticism as a field that sustains intellectual inquiry and con-
tributes to the advancement of knowledge in environmental humanities.
The challenges that have taken ecocriticism to task centre on why ecocriticism has
privileged representationality in literature, and why it has not yet sufficiently
addressed the controversial issue of representation of the physical environments in
the medium of language, and thus the referent’s problematic nature. The question,
then, is not whether ecocriticism has theoretically engaged with ethical, cultural, and
socio-political dimensions of ecological problems, but why it has not yet confronted
the epistemological problem of the language of textuality, which is of equal impor-
tance in dealing with literary and cultural texts. Properly understood, ecocriticism as
a form of literary criticism has yet to develop an ecologically viable perspective of how
it connects with the critical self-consciousness of theory’s discursive thrust. By “the-
ory” I refer to “the self-conscious awareness of the methodological approaches one
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uses” (Gilman 384). In a wider sense, theory provides conceptual frameworks in which
we think about and formulate the world. In literary studies, theory has come to be
associated with poststructuralist philosophy and has been used to nominate a series
of language-based theories resulting in the linguistic turn. This line of thought chal-
lenges “theories of knowledge and meaning which privilege representation in whatever
guise” (Norris 152). Derrida, for example, exposes figurative language as a source of
delusion, and his critique of Western logocentrism deconstructs the idea that “knowl-
edge of the world can be achieved undistorted by the figural snares of language”
(Norris 15). In science studies, theory is identified in world-modellings (Wheeler,
“Postscript”), and as a result of the impact of poststructuralist thought scientific
inquiries have come to be viewed as social and ideological constructions.5In animal
studies, theory is associated with bioethics (Cavalieri) and is discussed in posthuman
contexts (Wolfe).6It specifically addresses the question of the animals’ capacities for
“knowing” their world even though they cannot reflect critically and aesthetically
upon it. Drawing upon the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, Jacob von Uexküll,
Yuri Lotman, and Thomas A. Sebeok, Wendy Wheeler, for example, develops a
biosemiotic theory that considers both human communication and “the commu-
nicative nature of all living organisms as they forge (as they have since the earliest bac-
terial life) meanings in their environments” (140). The biosemiotic study of the
communicative and significational nature of living organisms and systems offers a
groundbreaking approach that removes the anthropocentric tag from “theory” and
sees the environment as a biological-semiotic realm in which all human and nonhu-
man animals create world-modelling systems. Wheeler claims that semiosis, or lan-
guage, is not just a human attribute, and that just as there is a cultural world
modelling or world making (human), there is also a natural one (non-human), which
needs to be studied in a wider conceptualization of discursive systems (natural and
cultural). In her The Whole Creature, Wheeler emphatically argues that biosemiotics
allows us to see how the relations between world, agent, and sign participate in a dis-
course community, or in her words, “complex biological systems and their intrinsic
relation to complex social systems and relations” (34).7
Unlike scientific theories that are unified by common theoretical objects, theory
in the humanities has divergent objects: culture, semiotics, linguistics, literature, etc.
Generally speaking, however, it focuses on our conceptual and linguistic repertoires,
which are always predicated upon general epistemological and ontological views.
Theory as such produces a framework that is initially independent from experience
and is prior to contact with the material world. It is in this sense (with strong empha-
sis on the central importance of language and discourse in the construction of reality)
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that theory has become a highly controversial and a contested issue in ecocriticism,
which, by contrast, draws inspiration from its activist impulse grounded in a firm
belief of actual experience with the world. Therefore, several ecocritics have repeated
the most erroneous clichés against theory, such as labelling it “poststructuralist
nihilism” (Love, “Revaluing” 236), “obscurantism or idiosyncracy” (Tallmadge and
Harrington xv), and “esoteric abstractedness” (Kroeber 1). These ecocritics mostly
privilege the mimetic concepts of literature’s representation of nature, the result of
which is that ecocritical practice falls back on referential fallacy. This becomes
inevitable when representations of actual experience are naively perceived to be truth-
ful. Needless to say, such a form of application also obscures the attempts to bring a
theoretical distinction to the field.
But we need to think more intensely about how a wider ecocritical engagement
with the questions of narrative, textuality, representation, materiality, and discursiv-
ity can be accomplished. And significantly, a truly eco-theoretical engagement with
the natural world will always be intertwined with actual practices. Gilles Deleuze’s
formulation here may also help ecocriticism develop a relational understanding of
theory: “Practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is
a relay from one practice to another,” he says (206). Likewise, the postmodern theo-
rist and critic Linda Hutcheon provides an eloquent argument about this point; she
emphatically underlines the situatedness of all theoretical discourses in “a reflection
on actual praxis.” These discourses “continue to derive their critical force from their
conjunction with that social and aesthetic practice” (16). It is precisely in such an
understanding that we also need an ecocritical practice of reading textualites. A liter-
ary theory of the text should also be a matter of concern for ecocriticism, and it would
require “both the methodological interests of philosophy and the theoretical practice
of literary concerns” (Silverman 70). To address this problematic issue, ecocriticism,
in my view, must integrate theory more effectively into an ecocritical methodology
that uses and revises the workings of textuality and the problematic of representation.
The flight from theory in this specific framework has led to an unintentional polar-
ization between theory and praxis. The binary thinking concerning the communica-
tive function of literature and its significative function denies engagement with much
of the complexity of contemporary critical self-consciousness in its resistance to the
philosophical conceptuality that allegedly comprehended it. However, ecocriticism
can play a more effective role in the global arena of academic inquiry by incorporat-
ing the questions of discursivity and materiality from a sound theoretical basis. It is
indeed important to emphasize, as Susan Hekman does, that “what we need now is an
understanding of reality informed by all we have learned in the linguistic turn” (88).
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Theory in this sense implements a form of engagement with both the material world
and the world of discourse. In fact, it provides the conditions for an intelligible expe-
rience of the natural phenomena. Since this is what Simon Estok has also articulated
in his essay in the Spring 2009 issue of ISLE, titled “Theorizing in a Space of
Ambivalent Openness,” I will reflect upon his proposal to initiate theoretization in the
field and his concept of “ecophobia.” I have chosen this critical model as an exemplary
case precisely because Estok’s provocative thesis on ecophobia has attracted some seri-
ous hostilities against theory in general, as exemplified by S.K. Robisch’s essay in the
following Autumn 2009 issue of ISLE. This piece, which goes against the very spirit of
ecocritical notions of engagement, places praxis in opposition to theory in the name
of embracing the active side of life, which ironically leads to the nature/culture
dichotomy ecocriticism has persistently sought to avoid.
The various ecocritical resistances to theory often rely on the assumption that theory
will subordinate ontology of nature to pure textuality and will instantiate a hege-
monic discourse. Though an ecocritical theory might presumably play with such ten-
sions, this is the exact contrary of the truth of theory in general. It has therefore become
essential to expand on the role of theory, its meaning and its relation to praxis, with the
recognition that theory does not mean pure abstraction, but signifies a critical self-con-
sciousness that exposes the illusions behind the representationalist understanding of lan-
guage. While acknowledging the ontological primacy of the natural world, and the
descriptive value of nature representations that marked the emergence of ecocriticism, I
suggest that instead of translating “ecological crisis into a program for reading texts,” as
Morton has complained (Ecology 161), ecocriticism can generate a field-defining eco-
critical theory without necessarily falling back on the realism/constructivism dichotomy.
It is essential to recognize that “constructivism and realism are not necessarily incom-
patible” (Levine 7). Regis Débray, the founder of mediation studies, better clarifies these
often confused terms: “it does not follow from the fact that the objective world is insep-
arable from the practical representations that a society has of it that the latter can con-
struct all its objective references. That a map contributes to the formation of a territory
does not mean that the territory is the invention of the cartographer” (qtd. in
Vandenberghe 465). In other words, ecocritics cannot lose time in seeking, in Levine’s
words, “a mode of knowledge in which ontology precedes epistemology” (8) and then go
on to shuffle arguments against theory for making reality a textual construct. This form
of binary thinking needs to be avoided if ecocriticism is committed to making change.
Can we postulate access to a point from which nature would speak without dis-
cursive mediation? Estok provides a consonant response: “If contact with the world is
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the central preoccupation of ecocriticism, then negotiating the tension between
scholarship and activism will necessarily mean re-visiting the question of mediation,
of acknowledging that there is no unmediated ‘nature’ in anything we produce”
(“Diethylstilbestrol” 35). This insight should serve as the starting point for a responsi-
ble ecocritical rethinking of the relations between nature, language, literature, and cul-
ture. However, as Morton’s criticism of the ecocritical desire to produce “a vision of the
text as a pristine wilderness of pure meaning” (Ecology 122) reveals, and as O’Brien also
points out, what stands out in practical analyses is that realist epistemology and realist
texts are assigned high priority. Drawing attention to ecocriticism’s “marked prefer-
ence” for the realist texts as one limitation in the ecocritical repertoire, O’Brien writes:
“Stemming partly from ecocriticism’s privileging of texts that seem to offer a straight-
forward conduit to the world is its unsurprising preference for texts that give thematic
prominence to aspects of nature” (184). Then, ecocriticism comes to be distinguished
by a set of restrictive strategies, because this set exclusively privileges thematicism.
Nancy Easterlin has compellingly stated that such an approach is “more instrumental
than intellectual,” producing a kind of “tidy sameness” (4). Contradictory though it
may seem, this happens when reading strategies focus on thematic properties of texts,
no matter how diverse the field has become in engaging with environmentalism’s cul-
tural and social dimensions. In spite of the undeniable value of analyzing a literary
text’s relationship to the natural world that enabled early ecocritical studies to bring
attention to the global urgency of the environmental problems, interpretations of the
nonhuman environment in terms of a text’s representational accuracy today is likely to
be viewed with suspicion, especially at a time when all debates about referentiality have
become quite dated. But the tendency to revert to it constitutes the basic problem. In
the result of this conflict, the emblematic emphasis on praxis reveals an immanent
weakness of the ecocritical project, which becomes more a symbolic fiction than a truly
activist intellectual endeavour to make a change. In other words, there is no advantage
in untheoretical environmental or cultural descriptions, or uncritical politics and
poetics of experiencing the world without the necessary tools of theory. The evidently
disgruntled Robisch, in his inimical response to Estok’s essay on ecophobia, provides
the best example: “We write about literature under the influence of ecology. It’s really
not that complicated. So please stop obfuscating it and thinking that merely by doing
so you’re unearthing a great truth, to paraphrase Valery. You might just be bugging the
hell out of the bird while you think you and your flute are ‘making music’ with it”
(701). Such statements indeed validate what, for example, scholars like Easterlin have
articulated as a persistent problem. Some ecocritics enjoy, writes Easterlin, “celebrating
the field’s under-theorization in the name of pluralism and activism” (3). Obviously,
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this celebration takes knowledge to be external to the natural world with no firm
grounding than that of theory-phobia.
It was perhaps this state of ecocritical nonchalance that prompted Estok to pub-
lish an article with an aim to radically rethink the ecocritical ambivalence toward the-
ory: “Ecocriticism needs, as many have noted, more structural and methodological
definition, less ambivalence and ambiguity, and more direction” (211). That his
provocative questioning of the expanding boundaries of ecocriticism attracted
polemical debates, and finally Robisch’s fierceness, is a clear sign of an epistemic cri-
sis in the field. The obsolete assumptions and the absurd claim of Robisch beg the
question of common sense: “‘Theory’ regularly indicts itself as a participant in the
destruction of biospheric health by promoting a thought process that renders the
biosphere an immaterial idea subject to the laboratory of abstraction—a characteris-
tic shared with economic ‘theories’ that have contributed to monoculture and the era-
sure of ecosystems. This in turn contributes to a politics and practice of contentment
with loss—of species, of wilderness areas (in which the theorist never believed in the
first place), and of diversity” (702–03). This barrage of convoluted outbursts is an
indictment of the author’s misunderstanding of theory. First of all, by reducing state-
ments about ontology to statements about knowledge, he falls into an obvious “epis-
temic fallacy.”8Secondly, he assumes that theory-oriented ecocritics follow the line of
radical constructivist thought, questioning the existence of the natural world. Any
ecocritic, he should know, would challenge such claims on the grounds of common
sense, but also would bring to attention the latest theoretical discussions about how
text and world seem to interpenetrate as if they are made up of the same fabric.
Indeed, today text, discourse, matter, and world are theoretically and experientially
proven to be entwined, because each is inclusive of the other.9Therefore, the necessity
of theorizing ecocriticism cannot be off-handedly associated only with an exclusive
focus on pure discursivity. I must repeat that any attempt to define nature leads us
back to conceptualizations, not to absurd claims about the nonexistence of the real
world. The call for a coherent ecocritical theory does not mean we should not recog-
nize the independent, ontological existence of nature out there, but that we should
revise our conceptualizations that are highly responsible for the way nature was
abused and continues to be so since the advent of instrumentalist reason. To find
rational remedies to the ecological challenges we need both theory and praxis; both
activism and philosophizing; both laws (effective public policy) and environmental
education. We should not forget that theory is always effective in constructing a cul-
tural space that in turn creates political spaces for governments to take action, and
that it is as effective as activist attempts to do so.
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In this context, Estok’s theory of ecophobia-in-development, perhaps too
provocative a thesis for the present ecocritical climate, is a responsible attempt on the
part of a concerned ecocritic who argues for the significance of bringing theory into
praxis for new and effective conceptualizations. Estok’s critical observation in the fol-
lowing extract offers a salient blueprint for the present crisis: “Our continued failure
to deal either theoretically or practically with the activist challenges of ecocriticism
bode well neither for the field nor for the environment. We labor under the delusion
that theory is incompatible with praxis, that theory cannot lead to changes in public
policy, that theory is no good for the ‘real world’” (“Theorizing” 206). Obviously, no
ecocritic would want to hear the fact that so far, for example, no worldly grounding of
ecocriticism has enabled any reduction of carbon emissions in the real world, or that
no thematic readings of any literary text has motivated anyone to adopt a more sus-
tainable lifestyle. The effects of theory, however, in terms of change, are far more com-
pelling than ecocritics who are against theory would admit. The significance of this
point is aptly stated by Jonathan Culler: “Theory is defined by its practical effects, as
what changes people’s views, makes them think differently about their objects of
study and their activities of studying them” (4). It seems to me absolutely essential
that we engage with theory in this interested sense while maintaining also a strong
sense of the contexts and environmental values that any legitimate ecocritical theory
would readily embody. Estok’s specific emphasis of this fact, and his explanation of
why we need “a theory that is practical rather than a watered-down theory that seems
practical” (“Theorizing” 216), must be taken into consideration. The “confluent theo-
rizing,” Estok reiterates, can indeed move ecocriticism towards more productive dis-
cussions “of environmental issues” (217). According to him, this can be done by
theorizing ecophobia as ecocriticism’s central matter of concern (211). He further
expands on his view in his short essay in Ecozon@, where he explains what reading eco-
phobia means in terms of theory:
Reading ecophobia means looking afresh at things. Reading ecophobia means having the
willingness to theorize for ecocriticism rather than backing away from it and seeing all the-
orizing as a lapse into obscurantism, poststructuralist nihilism, dizzying spinning off, eso-
teric abstractedness, wrangling, or mesmerization, to cite just a few shrill anti-theoretical
pronouncements, each from a prominent ecocritic. [. . .] Reading ecophobia means identi-
fying the affective ethics a text produces, means having the willingness to listen to, to think
about, and to see the values that are written into and that work through the representations
of nature we imagine, theorize and produce. (“Reading” 76)
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Serpil Oppermann 165
Estok’s proposal of ecophobia, in this regard, is a theoretical model for ecocriti-
cism that needs to be properly discussed. Estok’s aim is to open up ecocriticism’s con-
ceptual boundaries to question the very foundations upon which Western
environmental thought has progressed. Quite ironically, Estok’s proposed theory
instead resuscitated the dormant eco “phobias” about theory in the field, and more
precisely it provoked some ecocritical disequilibriums. Deleuze explains that this is
what happens when theory moves into its proper domain: “from the moment a theory
moves into its proper domain, it begins to encounter obstacles, walls, and blockages
which require its relay by another type of discourse” (206). Interestingly, Estok’s
attempt foreshadows this move of theory into its proper domain; that is, in today’s
state of epistemological reflection, “ecophobia” compels us to take note of the inherent
logic of the socio-cultural system that begets the present ecological crisis. What Estok
means by ecophobia is the idea that Western culture is shaped by fear and “an irrational
and groundless hatred of the natural world” (“Theorizing” 208); thus, he argues for the
urgency of theorizing this phobia: “If ecocriticism is committed to making connec-
tions, then it is committed to recognizing that control of the natural environment,
understood as a god-given right in western culture, implies ecophobia, just as the use
of African slaves implies racism, as rape implies misogyny, as ‘fag-bashing’ implies
homophobia, and as animal exploitation implies speciesism. If ecocriticism is com-
mitted to making connections, then it is committed to recognizing that these issues
(ecophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia, speciesism) are thoroughly interwoven
with each other and must eventually be looked at together” (“Theorizing” 207–08).
This is an important point that demands theoretical responses, responses that would
consider the historicity of the natural phenomena as well as their discursive formula-
tions in cultural texts. There is a need in ecocriticism to theoretically articulate the
specificities of the discursive formulations of environmental issues and to explain the
discursive formations behind the social and cultural forces that fashion these forma-
tions and are fashioned by them. We must pitch our theoretical allegiances with the
intellectual tradition that has helped critique the very foundations of Western meta-
physics, which has given rise to such formations as ecophobia, speciesism, racism, and
sexism—all of which, Estok maintains, are interwoven. What is important here is to
address how representational practices have played a crucial role in shaping our
binary thinking that produced such undesirable isms. Therefore, more theoretically
engaged analyses of the discourses that govern and order our representations of nat-
ural and cultural environments should focus on the ways in which these discourses
have contributed to the massive ecological crises. Both in this particular case and in a
general sense, the important critical model offered by the New Historicist scholar
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Louis Montrose can be very useful. Referring to the “intellectual ferment” of the 1970s
and 1980s concerning “theory,” Montrose wisely suggested a “chiastic formulation” (25)
as a solution to the fierce debates in the discipline of historiography: “The Historicity of
Texts and the Textuality of History” (23), by which he means and acknowledges both
“the cultural specificity, the social embedment, of all modes of writing,” and the impos-
sibility of real access to “a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual
traces of the society in question” (20). Similarly, ecocriticism must recognize both the
discursive nature of the referent in texts and its material reality. All discourses of nature
and the nature of discourse itself intersect through a mutually coalescent experience of
the physical world. This is the way we can collapse the artificial distinctions between
nature and culture, experience and representation, knowledge and being, and discourse
and the natural world. With such a critical approach, ecocriticism can legitimately cross
the threshold between discursivity and materiality, experience and representation.
NOTES
1/ Today, ecocriticism has concentrated more on such new trends as posthuman visions of human experi-
ence of the environment, translocality, ecoglobalism, animal subjectivities, speciesism, green queer theory,
and material ecofeminism. See Scott Slovic’s “The Third Wave Ecocriticism: North American Reflections
on the Current Phase of the Discipline” (Ecozon@ 1.1 [Spring 2010]: 4–10), and Greta Gaard’s “New
Directions for Ecofeminism: Toward a More Feminist Ecocriticism” (ISLE 17.4 [2000]: 643–65).
2/ For studies that deal with theories of globalization, transnationalism, and postcolonial ecocritical
approaches, see Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment (London: Routledge, 2010); Lawrence Buell’s “Ecoglobalist Affects: The Emergence of U.S.
Environmental Imagination on a Planetary Scale,” in Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World
Literature (Ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Buell. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. 227–48); Ursula Heise’s Sense
of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford UP, 2008);
and Patrick Murphy’s “Toward Transnational Ecocriticial Theory: The Example of Hwa Yol Jung,” in
Ecocritical Explorations in Literary and Cultural Studies: Fences, Boundaries, and Fields (New York:
Lexington Books, 2009).
3/ While it must be admitted that in poststructuralist theory there occurred reductionist claims to erase
the referent, which were in themselves misunderstandings of Derrida’s statements about the world as text,
postmodern discourses, as Linda Hutcheon concedes, “assert both autonomy and worldliness. Likewise
they participate in both theory and praxis” (46).
4/ This sceptical stance is brought to light by the critiques by Dana Phillips and Michael P. Cohen that
challenge ecocriticism’s emphasis on realism. See Cohen’s “Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under
Critique” (Environmental History 9.1 [2004]) and “Reading After Darwin: A Prospectus,” in Coming into
Contact: Explorations in Ecocritical Theory and Practice (Ed. Annie Merrill Ingram, Ian Marshall, Daniel J.
Philippon, and Adam W. Sweeting. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007. 221–33), and Phillips’s “Ecocriticism,
Literary Theory, and the Truth of Ecology” (New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation
30.3 [1999]) and “Ecocriticism, Ecopoetics, and a Creed Outworn” (Earthographies: Ecocriticism and
Culture. Spec. issue of New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics 64 [Spring 2008]).
5/ The earliest examples include Donna Haraway’s study of primatology in “Animal Sociology and a
Natural Economy of the Body Politic” (Signs 4 [1978]: 21–60); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s
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Serpil Oppermann 167
research on the sociology of Boyle’s laboratory in Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the
Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985); Bruno Latour’s “black boxes” in Science in Action: How
to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Milton Keynes, UK: Open UP, 1987); and Katherine
Hayles’s “Constrained Constructivism: Locating Scientific Inquiry in the Theater of Representation,” in
Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problems of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature, and Culture
(Ed. George Levine. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1993. 27–43), in which she discusses the realist and anti-
realist debates in science studies. See also David Demeritt’s “What is the ‘Social Construction of Nature’?: A
Typology and Sympathetic Critique” (Progress in Human Geography 26. 6 [2002]), which examines “con-
struction as philosophical critique” (769), “phenomenological constructionism” (771), and “discursive con-
structionisms” (773).
6/ Posthumanist theories of animality foreground the dissolution of the human subject and the erasure of
animate/inanimate distinctions. Wolfe, for instance, deconstructs the essentialist definitions of human and
nonhuman animals in “Thinking Other-Wise: Cognitive Science, Deconstruction and the (Non) Speaking
(Non) Human Subject” (Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World. Ed. Jodey Castricano.
Cultural Studies Series: Environmental Humanities. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. 125–42),
which offers some important insights.
7/ In my use of the concepts of discursivity and textuality, I have avoided a biosemiotic approach, simply
because I address only the question of why ecocriticism should, first of all, face the poststructuralist chal-
lenge of referential realism in literary studies. The next step will be to broaden the focus towards a new
“ecosemiotics.”
8/ I borrow the term from Frédéric Vandenberghe, who draws attention to the distinction between existen-
tial intransivity (nature exists out there) and the “principle of the socio-historical transivity of the knowl-
edge of the object,” stating that nature can be known under certain descriptions that are “socially and
historically variable” (465). He then goes on to point out that the epistemic fallacy assumes that statements
about being can be reduced to statements about knowledge.
9/ Explanatory models of the universe point to a body of interwoven information, and interactivity of sign
systems from astronomical bodies to living organisms. This semiotic interrelation manifests itself in a new
conceptuality that collapses text/world distinction in strange entanglements, installing textual involvement
across all modes of knowledge and being. The idea of a text loses its rigid boundaries to be more inclusive
of all life forms. Inspired by the plant scientists’ study of plant algorithms, Morton, for example, provides
an apt description of how trees follow an order of algotrithms and states: “An algorithm is a script—a
text—that automates a function […] and in this case the script is encoded into matter” (“Ecology” 4).
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SERPIL OPPERMANN is a Professor of English at Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey. She is the
author of Postmodern Theory of History: Historiography, the New Historicism and the Novel (in
Turkish, 2006). Her publications on ecocriticism appeared in such journals as The Trumpeter, ISLE,
and Critique. She was one of the organizers of Turkey’s first ecocriticism conference, “The Future of
Ecocriticism: New Horizons” in 2009.
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