Jason Groves
My work looks at how writers since the nineteenth century have contended with the implications of the discovery of geologic time for, and in, narrative. I'm currently completing two projects: a book manuscript, Mineral Imaginaries: German Literature and the Geologic Unconscious, which articulates the shared “minerality” of the human and the earth in literature since 1800, and a translation of Sonja Neef’s The Babylonian Planet, a wide-ranging study of language and planetary in a time of mass migration.
Current collaborations include co-editing Feedback, a curated blog in critical and cultural theory hosted by Open Humanities Press, and co-organizing a cross-disciplinary research cluster on the Anthropocene (2016-2018) at the University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities. For the Fall of 2018 I will be a fellow of the Simpson Center Society of Fellows.
I'm also collecting recent and forthcoming essays on the politics and poetics of walking and peripataticism in literature, art, and film into a book, Walking Out.
Current collaborations include co-editing Feedback, a curated blog in critical and cultural theory hosted by Open Humanities Press, and co-organizing a cross-disciplinary research cluster on the Anthropocene (2016-2018) at the University of Washington's Simpson Center for the Humanities. For the Fall of 2018 I will be a fellow of the Simpson Center Society of Fellows.
I'm also collecting recent and forthcoming essays on the politics and poetics of walking and peripataticism in literature, art, and film into a book, Walking Out.
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Books by Jason Groves
Through a series of careful readings of Romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named.
These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human–mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.
Articles by Jason Groves
Das Formgesetz der Literatur Robert Walsers, sein Ergo-Nomos, lässt sich auf ergonomische Prinzipien beziehen, im Falle Walsers ihre Vernachlässigung im Büro. Die Figuren seiner Geschichten arbeiten zumeist an Schreibpulten, an denen sie sich krumm machen müssen, um überhaupt schreiben zu können. Um zu sich selbst Stellung beziehen zu können, müssen sie zunächst stellenlos werden. Walsers Ergonomie entsprechend arbeiten sie, während sie von der Arbeit pausieren: in einem Intervall des Nicht-Arbeitens und Nichts- Schreibens, einem Intervall des Gehens.
Book Chapters by Jason Groves
Talks by Jason Groves
In response to the widespread arguments that the literary arts are inapt to convey or otherwise contend with the spatial and temporal scales of the Anthropocene, this talk embraces their humiliation as a way of figuring the intimate relationship between what pertains to literature and what pertains to the earth in a time of mutual dilapidation. To think through this relationship, I turn to two poems, by Bertolt Brecht and Paul Celan, whose lapidary commemoration of the violence and dispossession associated with the Holocaust also implicates that history and that literature in the broader colonial and imperial histories accounted for in recent articulations of the Anthropocene.
II. Existing Strategies of Presentation (in no particular order): The Art of L’informe: Intermittancy. Rhythmic Difference. Cumulative Effect (R. Krauss). Cinematic: Dilations of real or cinematic time (Warhol: Sleep and Empire; Fluxus Film No. 9 Eyeblink; Martin Arnold’s Cinemnesis); “Dead Time”; Michael Haneke’s “glaciation” trilogy. Discursive / Rhetorical: drifts, flows, spills, sinks, slumps, dispersion, depletion, leaching, fatigue, erosion, creep. Literacy: What is philology? Slow reading (Jakobson). “Besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book” (Nietzsche, Daybreak); Loiterature (Ross Chambers) Literary: the geopoetics of deep-time around 1800 (Novalis, Goethe, Tieck); Shelley’s Mont Blanc (glaciers “creep / Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains / Slow rolling on [...] Vast pines are strewing / Its destined path, or in the mangled soil / Branchless and shattered stand”); State-as-glacier and “striated space” (Deleuze and Guattari, AMP); coldness in the literary imagination; “Débacle” (Michel Leiris) in Documents; The Crystal World (J.G. Ballard); Celan’s Breathcrystals; “silent mutations” (Sebald); boredom (Langeweile) as threshold
III. Conclusion: Toward a Lituraterre.
Through a series of careful readings of Romantic, realist, and modernist works by Tieck, Goethe, Stifter, Benjamin, and Brecht, Groves elaborates a geological unconscious—unthought and sometimes actively repressed geological knowledge—in European literature and environmental thought. This inhuman horizon of reading and interpretation offers a new literary history of the Anthropocene in a period before it was named.
These close readings show the entanglement of the human and the lithic in periods well before the geological turn of contemporary cultural studies. In those depictions of human–mineral encounters, the minerality of the human and the minerality of the imagination become apparent. In registering libidinal investments in the lithosphere that extend beyond carboniferous deposits and beyond any carbon imaginary, The Geological Unconscious points toward alternative relations with, and less destructive mobilizations of, the geologic.
Das Formgesetz der Literatur Robert Walsers, sein Ergo-Nomos, lässt sich auf ergonomische Prinzipien beziehen, im Falle Walsers ihre Vernachlässigung im Büro. Die Figuren seiner Geschichten arbeiten zumeist an Schreibpulten, an denen sie sich krumm machen müssen, um überhaupt schreiben zu können. Um zu sich selbst Stellung beziehen zu können, müssen sie zunächst stellenlos werden. Walsers Ergonomie entsprechend arbeiten sie, während sie von der Arbeit pausieren: in einem Intervall des Nicht-Arbeitens und Nichts- Schreibens, einem Intervall des Gehens.
In response to the widespread arguments that the literary arts are inapt to convey or otherwise contend with the spatial and temporal scales of the Anthropocene, this talk embraces their humiliation as a way of figuring the intimate relationship between what pertains to literature and what pertains to the earth in a time of mutual dilapidation. To think through this relationship, I turn to two poems, by Bertolt Brecht and Paul Celan, whose lapidary commemoration of the violence and dispossession associated with the Holocaust also implicates that history and that literature in the broader colonial and imperial histories accounted for in recent articulations of the Anthropocene.
II. Existing Strategies of Presentation (in no particular order): The Art of L’informe: Intermittancy. Rhythmic Difference. Cumulative Effect (R. Krauss). Cinematic: Dilations of real or cinematic time (Warhol: Sleep and Empire; Fluxus Film No. 9 Eyeblink; Martin Arnold’s Cinemnesis); “Dead Time”; Michael Haneke’s “glaciation” trilogy. Discursive / Rhetorical: drifts, flows, spills, sinks, slumps, dispersion, depletion, leaching, fatigue, erosion, creep. Literacy: What is philology? Slow reading (Jakobson). “Besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book” (Nietzsche, Daybreak); Loiterature (Ross Chambers) Literary: the geopoetics of deep-time around 1800 (Novalis, Goethe, Tieck); Shelley’s Mont Blanc (glaciers “creep / Like snakes that watch their prey, from their far fountains / Slow rolling on [...] Vast pines are strewing / Its destined path, or in the mangled soil / Branchless and shattered stand”); State-as-glacier and “striated space” (Deleuze and Guattari, AMP); coldness in the literary imagination; “Débacle” (Michel Leiris) in Documents; The Crystal World (J.G. Ballard); Celan’s Breathcrystals; “silent mutations” (Sebald); boredom (Langeweile) as threshold
III. Conclusion: Toward a Lituraterre.
In “For—Philology,” both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively and non-discursively, the desire for language. Desire—philía—is the insatiable affect that drives the movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that. Desiring language—logos—means to respond to an alien utterance that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead, accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others, cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language and those who live by it.
This seminar will be preoccupied primarily with the following questions: What happens when we shift from a local to a global to an extraterrestrial sense of capital? If modernity can be indexed to capital, if postmodernity can be indexed to neoliberal capital, can we link the future to alien capital? How has alien capital been imagined and can it offer an alternative to the ravages of terrestrial capital? Can alien capital indicate not only the extraterrestrial origin of capital but also a new order of capital?
What are some of the forms of alien capital— including but not limited to Bataille’s solar economy, the meteors Marx ruminates over in his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, the militarization of space in Kluge— and how do they implicitly critique capital? Why does alien capital increasingly matter, and how has it been materialized?
Schedule
Friday, March 21, 11:00AM – 12:50PM
Alien Capital: A Montage of Attractions—Josh Alvizu, Yale U
Alien Capital: A User’s Guide—Jason Groves, Yale U
The Spice Must Flow: Commodification, Insurrection, and Ecology in Frank Herbert’s Dune—Matthew Englund, Binghamton U
Saturday, March 22, 11:00AM – 12:50PM
Elementa Eumenidum: Tantalum Ore and the Physics of Finance—Robbie Cormier, SUNY Stony Brook
The Flint of Prometheus: Geo-Cosmic Complicity and the limits of Capital—Ben Woodard, U of Western Ontario
Xenochronic Rhythmanalysis—Paradromic Sonic Practices in Colloidal Capitalism—Marc Couroux, York U
Sunday, March 23, 11:00AM – 12:50PM
Conscious Planets: an Ecological Reading of an Asteroid Novel—Christina Svendsen, Harvard U
Cloud Capital: Paul Scheerbart, Alfred Kubin and Other-Worldly Perception—Michael Powers, Brown U
Transitional Surplus: Benjamin and Poetic Mourning—Kathleen Eamon, The Evergreen State College
A Private Sort of Privacy: Goldin+Senneby and The Place of the Headless Novel in Cracking Closed Systems—Nina Wexelblatt, Yale U