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 Affective Materialities

University Press of Florida

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton
Florida Gulf Coast University, Ft. Myers
Florida International University, Miami
Florida State University, Tallahassee
New College of Florida, Sarasota
University of Central Florida, Orlando
University of Florida, Gainesville
University of North Florida, Jacksonville
University of South Florida, Tampa
University of West Florida, Pensacola
 AFFECTIVE
MATERIALITIES
Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature

Edited by
Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall,
and Robin Hackett

University Press of Florida

Gainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton
Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota
Copyright 2019 by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

24 23 22 21 20 19 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Watts, Kara, editor. | Hall, Molly Volanth, editor. | Hackett, Robin,
1963– editor.
Title: Affective materialities : reorienting the body in modernist literature
/ edited by Kara Watts, Molly Volanth Hall, and Robin Hackett.
Description: Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2019. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018029687 | ISBN 9780813056289 (cloth : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Literature) | English literature—History and
criticism. | Literature and science. | Affect (Psychology) | Ecocriticism.
| Ecology in literature.
Classification: LCC PR888.M63 A44 2019 | DDC 820.9/3561—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029687

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System
of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast
University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida,
University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South
Florida, and University of West Florida.

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 CONTENTS

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgments ix
1. Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations 1
Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts
2. Flesh over Granite: Walt Whitman’s Embodied Presence in William
Carlos Williams’s “History” 33
Karen Guendel
3. E. M. Forster among the Ruins 55
Stuart Christie
4. “‘I’m not sick,’ I said. ‘I’m wounded’”: Disrupting Wounded
Masculinity through the Lyrical Spaces of War 79
Cheryl Hindrichs
5. Frustrated Energies in Modernism’s Female Arrangements 103
Judith Paltin
6. “Things were in people, people were in things”: Language, Ecology,
and the Body in H.D. 123
Kim Sigouin
7. Cold Crystal: The Ecology of Affect in Herbert Read’s The Green
Child 147
William Kupinse
8. “I wanna be your puppy”: Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood and the Queer
Cute Body 172
Anna Christine
9. The Brain and the Living World in Janet Frame’s Faces in
the Water 192
Mary Elene Wood
10. “Becoming Animal, Becoming Other”: Modernism, Millennial
Jurisprudence, and the Limits of Materialist Subjectivity 213
Kathryn Van Wert
11. Black Girls and Lady Police: Blank Affect and the Ecology of the
Gym 236
Robin Hackett

List of Contributors 255

Index 259
 FIGURES

1.1. Man as Industrial Palace (Der Mensch als Industriepalast), by Fritz

Kahn, 1926 15
1.2. Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), by Marcel Duchamp, 1912 16
3.1. Hand-drawn map of Alexandria, by E. M. Forster 62
3.2. Kom es Chogafa, by E. M. Forster 65
11.1. Gym sign, no age limits, photo taken by Robin Hackett 247
11.2. Gym sign, age limit of two, photo taken by Robin Hackett 248
11.3. Gym sign, age limit of four, photo taken by Robin Hackett 248
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The impetus for this collection came from our double panel session,
“Touching the Body in Pieces,” at the 2016 meeting of the Northeast
Modern Language Association. The work herein would not have been
possible without the provocative scholarship and debate that began
there, so to those original panelists and audiences, we offer sincere
thanks. We also wish to thank our editor at the University Press of Flor-
ida, Stephanye Hunter, for taking on our project and supporting it at
every stage, as well as Marthe Walters, and the entire team at UPF. We
are grateful as well to the two anonymous readers whose encouraging
comments and helpful recommendations invariably made this volume
stronger.
We are indebted to the University of Rhode Island’s Center for the
Humanities, which gave financial support for this project in the form of
a generous subvention grant. We owe much to the University of Rhode
Island and the University of New Hampshire, whose support along
with that of our English Department colleagues makes research an even
greater pleasure. Finally, we wish to thank profusely our contributors for
their patience and hard work—their provocative ideas have made this
collection an exciting example of what modernist scholarship can do.
We thank New Directions Publishing for allowing us to reproduce
portions of works by William Carlos Williams, H.D., and Herbert Read;
the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society
of Authors as the literary representatives of the E. M. Forster Estate for
allowing us to reproduce portions of works by E. M. Forster; the Estate
of Langston Hughes, Penguin Random House, and David Higham As-
sociates for allowing us to reproduce a portion of Langston Hughes’s po-
etry; the Author’s League Fund and St. Bride’s Church for granting us
the ability to reproduce portions of Djuna Barnes’s works; and the Janet
x · Acknowledgments

Frame Literary Trust and Wylie Agency for allowing us to reproduce

portions of Janet Frame’s work.
We are grateful to a number of entities that have generously granted us
the ability to reproduce images for this volume. The cover image, Samuel
Joshua Beckett’s [Loie Fuller Dancing], is in the public domain, but we
would not have been able to discover it had it not been for the Metro-
politan Museum of Art’s online collections. Marcel Duchamp’s Nude De-
scending a Staircase (No. 2) is reprinted with permission by the Philadel-
phia Museum of Art and the Artists Rights Society; and Fritz Kahn’s Der
Mensch als Industriepalast is reproduced with permission of Kosmos/Von
Debschitz. Images that appear in chapter 3, “E. M. Forster among the
Ruins,” are reproduced with the permission of the Provost and Scholars
of King’s College, Cambridge, and the Society of Authors as the literary
representatives of the E. M. Forster Estate.

* * *
Man as Industrial Palace © Fritz Kahn: Der Mensch als Industriepalast, 1926, Kosmos/von Debschitz,
www.fritz-kahn.com
Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), Marcel Duchamp, 1912, Oil on Canvas; Philadelphia Museum of
Art, the Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950; 1950-134-59; © Association Marcel Duchamp /
ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2018
“History” By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: Volume I, 1909–1939, copyright ©1938
by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Selected Letters: Volume 1 1879–1920, hand-drawn map of Alexandria, and hand-drawn “Kom es Chogafa”
by E. M. Forster. Reprinted by permission of the Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and
the Society of Authors as the E. M. Forster Estate.
“Cross” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes by Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad
with David Roessel, associate editor, copyright ©1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes. Used by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of
Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Any third party use of this material, outside of this
publication, is prohibited. Interested parties must apply directly to Penguin Random House LLC for
permission. Territory granted: United States, its territories and possessions, Republic of the Philippines,
Canada, and Open Market (Including European Union). Reprinted by permission of Harold Ober
Associates Incorporated. Reprinted in the UK and British Commonwealth by permission of David
Hingham Associates Limited.
HERmione, copyright ©1981 by The Estate of Hilda Doolittle. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp.
The Green Child, copyright ©1935 by Herbert Read. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corp.
Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts by Djuna Barnes. © The Authors League Fund and
St. Bride’s Church, as joint literary executors of the Estate of Djuna Barnes.
Faces in the Water by Janet Frame copyright ©1961 Janet Frame Literary Trust. Reprinted by permission
of The Wylie Agency LLC.
 1
Into the Ether
An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations

Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

Literary studies has recently experienced two distinct theoretical

“turns”—one toward affect and feeling, and the other toward the envi-
ronment and ecology. Codified as affect theory and ecocriticism, respec-
tively, scholarship in both fields shares a similar ambition to assess the re-
lationships among individual ethics, politics, and a surround. Both fields
conjure figures of the human body through a language of a material, yet
elusive, relational environment in which the body, to use new materialist
theorist Karen Barad’s phrase, “intra-acts.”1 Yet, these fields rarely speak
to each other with intentionality. Few studies exist that place these fields
in tandem within literary studies.2 Studies that do, we find, are “haunted”
by what we would deem the ghost of the early twentieth-century—or
modernist—body.
Scholarship’s abandonment of modernism’s varied, incongruous, and
mutational conceptions of bodies has meant that contemporary theorists
assume that the body, prior to contemporary understandings, was sin-
gular and petrified.3 The modernist body was far from stable, however,
functioning instead as what we may recognize today as both ecocriti-
cism’s fleshly, material site and affect’s processual “becoming.” Much of
the literal and metaphorical modernist literary landscape composed bod-
ies as variously nationed or politicized, (dis)empowered, (non)agentive,
raced, sexed, gendered, sexualized, pathologized, enabled or disabled,
2 · Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

ethnicized, colonized, animalized, interned, gassed, institutionalized,

and classed by and through emotions and sensations, objects and atmo-
spheres. Such embodiments and the puzzles therein are where we cen-
ter our collection. Our contributors ask how feeling, environments, and
bodies relate to, co-constitute, and undo one another, and what the “mat-
ter” is with modernist bodies. This collection therefore aims to initiate
a historicization of the body, returning affect and ecocriticism to bod-
ies at—to paraphrase Michael North—“the scene of the modern,”4 and
tracing the ways in which modernist literature itself theorizes the body
rather than simply (re)presenting it. We suggest, then, that affect theory
and ecocriticism have something to gain from modernist literature.
We argue that by performing such a historicization of the body, this
collection also remedies the impasses that both affect theory and eco-
criticism are experiencing at present. The feeling-acting body in ecocriti-
cism and the material-relational body in affect theory are each typically
perceived as a point of contention in contemporary scholarship. When
these debates are placed within the logic of the modernist body, however,
emotions and matter may exist not causally, but contemporaneously. The
modernist body therefore allows ecocriticism and affect theory to speak
together to these fields’ shared critical limitation—the affective body or
the ecological body, respectively—and productively engage an ethics
of embodied subjectivity. The body inherited by the contemporary era
would then take into account the impact of the highly formative period
of modernism itself, presenting an actionable, though processual, ethics
in its iterations as both contact and becoming—or the intra-action that
encompasses these. While we use the terms materialism and intra-action,
our project is not strictly new materialist. Rather, the collection employs
these new materialist concepts and ideas as part of a diverse theoretical
network driven primarily by affect theory and ecocriticism. Placing all
these fields together, Affective Materialities looks newly to bodies as re-
lational, divergent, and affected, replete with urgent political and ethical
implications.
Affective materialities is our large-scale term intended as meaningful
replacement for the terms society and ecosystem. The term refers to that
which constitutes the modernist body’s surrounds, including the body
itself. Using the term thereby avoids the false assumption of a division
 Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations · 3

between nature and culture, the physical and the social. Affective ecology
is our operative term that asserts the relation of the body and its affective
materialities, or surrounds. This term names the quality of the modern-
ist body as constituted by interior and exterior realms without division.
We practice no boundaries between the long-theorized separation of im-
material mind or emotion and the material body or environment. The
affective refers to the capability to affect and be affected, to be influenced
by and to exert influence upon others through the felt or emotional. We
are using ecology to indicate the body-in-context,5 as “multidimensional
hypervolume.”6 In other words, ecology is the quality of the body in time
and space. It exists in and as this multidimensional hypervolume. The
whole of all relations contained therein, together with the body itself, ex-
ceeds the sum of their addition. This departs from the term’s traditional
usage within the sciences, where ecology is defined solely as a branch
of biology that studies relationships between organisms and surround-
ings, and also these relations themselves.7 Affective ecology is how the
modernist body matters—affective ecology is a quality of the modernist
body that feeds our collection’s emphasis on materiality. The modernist
body matters in the sense that its literary representation evokes both un-
derstandings of the word: having meaning and representing materiality.
We evoke matter at the intersection of its instantiation as verb and noun.
Matter is “[a] thing, affair, concern,” “physical objects, vaguely character-
ized,” and the state of being “something of great importance or signifi-
cance.”8 Matter is also “to care or be concerned about; to regard, heed,
mind,” and “to be of importance; to signify.”9 The body in this sense has
the quality of the elementally physical such as concretized flesh, rock,
plant, or organism. These matters also and by virtue of their physicality
have magnitude, by which we mean significance, capability, or force. The
sense of movement in these forces—to act on or be acted upon with,
against, or through other entities in both a social and physical sense—
means that some ecological and affective registration of change is always
present within the mattering of the body. We now turn with new atten-
tion to how the literary texts of the modernist period give rise to affective
ecology.
4 · Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock”: An Affective Ecology of the Modernist Body

To explore what such a theoretical and historical juncture may look

like—an affective ecological study of the modernist body—we look to
T. S. Eliot’s famed work of modernist literature “The Love Song of J. Al-
fred Prufrock” (1917). Following the middle-aged, titular neurotic figure
through a suggestive landscape, the poem tracks Prufrock’s failed roman-
tic encounters alongside his aging body. His life—a life made middling
with “coffee spoons”10—gives rise to a common interpretation of the
poem as evincing the modernist era’s anxiety over the failures of both
the human body and Western intellect to adapt to pressures of a rapidly
developing modernity. Prufrock’s body is often seen as pieced or para-
lyzed in the poem: from a crablike “pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across
the [ . . . ] seas”; to an insectoid “sprawling,” on “a pin, / [ . . . ] wriggling
on the wall”; to Lazarus and “arms and legs” growing “thin,” the bodies
with which Prufrock is explicitly associated are devolved, fragmented,
conscious-unconscious forms.11
Bodies in the poem, however, are not in pieces, we argue, but rather
represent a working through of the phases of matter. The poem’s use of
ether, fog, and smoke—at the border of the immaterial—reconfigures
preconceptions of what bodies are and do. “Let us go then, you and I,”
the poem begins, beckoning readers into an uncertain landscape, “When
the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a
table.”12 As the body of the patient becomes the etherized “evening,” the
sky becomes the “table” on which the body “spread[s].” The poem’s ini-
tial lines create an analogy, the axis of which turns on the ether: “the eve-
ning is spread out against the sky” like the patient’s body, “etherised upon
a table.” While the syntax seems to associate the “spread” of evening with
the ether’s spread through the patient’s body, a macabre image, we find
that the lines more precisely indicate ether causing the patient’s body it-
self to spread across the table, a suggestive animation. Though the body
lies flaccid as material flesh, it is also animated upward in this formula if
we test the image’s proposed mathematical equivalence. Structurally, this
poetic form casts the ether as catalyst, the connective tissue that makes
the lines mean or matter (to bring into material being, as well as to hold
interpretive significance or pull), and the only force in the analogy that
has any action or agency, equated to the “spread[ing].” We would like to
 Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations · 5

linger with this image of the etherized body as Eliot’s poem beckons, ask-
ing as our contributors do for other modernist literary texts, what if we
more gravely considered the work’s forays through bodily reorientations?
If we consider Eliot’s poem to be an invitation to us to reread the bodies
of modernism, what new affective and ecological matterings would we be
able to see?
Eliot’s “ether” and its physiological effects, we find, become ecological
and affective, standing as metonym for the affective ecology that is the
modernist body. The ether behaves and intra-acts as a body that is eco-
logical by being both material (a liquid compound with form and mass)
and relational (an intangible atmospheric substance taking on the shape
of its environment and interacting with objects therein). It is affective in
being made possible by relations of responsivities and receptivities, an
unsettled existent between consciousness and unconsciousness.13 Ether
is an organic compound that, with the exception of nitrogen, is made up
of the same elements as the human body: oxygen, carbon, and hydro-
gen. Ether is also itself a catalyst, used to create new compounds out of
other materials through the reaction it generates. The analogy created—
the evening is to the sky as the patient is to the table—aligns the body
of the patient with the “etherized” “evening,” the “sky” with the “table”
on which the body “spread[s].” The ether is more than a metaphor, then,
and does not just reorient the grammar of these initial lines. It actually
changes the way that we register the syntax of all the other images that
we encounter in the poem. Through this analogy, a body—like ether—is
able to function as both affect and ecology. Ether reorients the body sky-
ward. Taken separately, the spreading seems to cast the relation of eve-
ning/sky and patient/table each as a horizontal orientation, suggestive
of a linear causality. Yet, the relationality created by the simile conjoining
these two pairs also reorients the patient’s body vertically, through the
upward animation, generating an invitation to read the body otherwise.
By drawing out the “ether” in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”
and by recasting the etherized body as animated rather than sedated,
our reading of Eliot’s poem invites the reader not to muse on the neu-
rotic failures of Prufrock, but to reconsider one’s own responsiveness
to Prufrock’s series of “othered” bodies; readers are invited to imagine
their own relationship to bodily alterity through the speaker’s encounters
with various fragmented, estranged, dead, and nonhuman matters within
6 · Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

the poem. For example, Prufrock considers the tie tack on his “rich and
modest” tie to be a pin that “formulates” him, pinning him “sprawling”
and “wriggling” like a biological specimen on the wall.14 This relational
becoming between human bodies and nonhuman materiality asks that
we reanimate our notions of how bodies matter and what bodies can do
in modernity.15 Prufrock allows dead matter and entomological being to
define him as human without losing agency. Like those victims of Dar-
win’s entomological hobbying, he ought to be dead, lifeless, immobile.
Yet, unlike the victims of Darwin’s pins, Prufrock imagines himself alive
and wriggling, conscious of his own paralysis like an “etherised patient.”
A series of matterings and becomings, he exists in a “not yet” of his own
body.
Continuing to develop the notion of the ether is ether’s echo, the per-
vasive fog. The fog itself is figured both as body and as intangible force
or inorganic matter; it is both the ether at the poem’s start and the po-
tentially toxic or ominous “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke”—the rela-
tionality of a substance caught between phases of matter. The “cat-like”
fog has body, “rubs its back” and “its muzzle” along windowpanes, able
to “leap,” “se[e],” and “f[a]ll asleep.”16 Beyond personification, the feline
fog reorients the body again, so that it may engage differently with its
environment. The fog body is alternately alive and dead, itself deadly or
enlivening, mobile and fixed, a precarious “betweenness.” The fog seems
lively in its ability to exist within responsive contingencies—neither air
nor water, suspended, unliving and yet in motion. “Prufrock” is not pos-
iting merely the substitute of a crustacean or insect body for a human
body; indeed, it does not limit our reimaginings to “a body” at all but
rather proposes a series of bodily responsivities. In other words, Pru-
frock’s body confuses what it means to have a body.
Let us go, then, into the ways in which twentieth-century literary
modernists addressed critical aesthetic, political, and philosophical con-
cerns as convergent on the body, the re- and deconceptualizing of which
became a multimodal project. We do not attempt to conclude with a sin-
gular theory; rather, we find the questions and analyses posed within the
following pages to productively revitalize or “flesh out” current trends in
critical theory and within literary modernist studies.
 Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations · 7

Why Affect Theory and Ecocriticism

Affect theory has been largely characterized as a response to the seem-

ingly irreparable fracture of theory in the academy. By the 1990s, post-
structuralism—or, theory’s “linguistic turn”—had effectively erased the
material body in favor of its discursive surfaces. Affect’s turn away from
language contributed to the revitalization of cultural studies over and
against literary studies. Constructed by discourse and interpellated by
power, the body was only a subject, and the subject was dead.17 In re-
sponse, scholars began to return to the body by reengaging with object
relations, political feelings, and social-sensorial responses.18 Early theo-
rists of affect began to deliver a reparative to fleshless post-structuralism,
returning theory to bodies that feel real. Such a theory of feeling sys-
tems matters, many have argued, because it accounts for the “tone and
texture” of the lived in critical theory, as affect theory postulates revised
approaches to embodiment, power, and material agency.19 At its best as
well as its most problematic, affect theory is profoundly optimistic that
we have not yet understood—to paraphrase Baruch Spinoza—all that a
body can do.20
Initially, ecocriticism also attempted a revision to post-structuralist
dominance in the 1980s and 1990s. By setting its sights on recuperating
the material environment within literary studies, however, ecocriticism
seemed to cultivate a misanthropic ethos that backgrounded the human
body.21 Scholars such as Lawrence Buell and Cheryll Glotfelty sought
to codify a field that would read literary environments as more than a
backdrop, decentering the human. They found that the post-structuralist
emphasis on textuality did not allow space for reference to a real, mate-
rial world, in much the same way that affect theory resisted the elision of
the lived, feeling body. Ecocriticism began to interrogate how representa-
tions of the environment affect and reflect human emplacement in the
world as well as pay closer attention to the aesthetics of the nonhuman.
The former produced a myriad of ways to understand the constitution
and deployment of “the natural” as coextensive with or in opposition to
the human or cultural, and the latter decentered traditional notions of
Enlightenment subjectivity and its sublime transcendence of nature. The
body in this critical paradigm is located more and more in the material
8 · Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

environment, as the erosion of anthropocentrism deprivileges the feel-

ing, acting human in favor of an ecocentric subject.
Though theoretical developments within both affect theory and eco-
criticism have rendered a range of potential models of ethical engage-
ment and epistemology—from the ecocritical imperative to negotiate
an ethics of environmental care and species survival to affect theory’s
concern with how feeling may make bodies appear, disappear, or effect
change within politics and histories—each field has independently run
into limitations that recur across its disciplinary iterations.
A central tenet of affect theory is how a body registers the body itself.
This includes the body as material and relational. As theorists of feminist,
racial, and queer formations of affect make clear, feeling does normative
work to structure human relations. Because emotions—including shame,
disgust, melancholy, and happiness—have a publicness, they function as
regulators of what it means to be a recognizable subject. This kind of mat-
tering, insofar as emotion is a mode of navigating sociopolitical effects, is
critical to the affective body. Yet, by the time affect thinks through physi-
cal matter, a paradox forms in the basis of its ethics. As Clare Hemmings
explains, if affective subjects perform ethical work on the basis of “em-
pathy,” for example, then such empathy is “always marked by that which
cannot be empathized with,” thereby marking the limit of the human and
nonhuman.22 This becomes a “self-evident boundary”23 that determines
what and who can be included in such a project, rendering affect theo-
ry’s boundless body as paradoxical when it comes to actual ethical work.
Mel Y. Chen observes that things in the material realm outside the body
and the thingness of the body are difficult to characterize through affect
theory “by their uneven agency, by their uncertain capacity to affect, by
their unlikelihood of being ‘the effector of,’ by their uncertain possession
of (human) life.”24 Brian Massumi explains why this paradox exists: “It is
meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human to the nonhuman
if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness.”25
Refusing to engage with this problematic construct, Massumi seeks a re-
working of the concepts of nature and culture, in echo of Bruno Latour’s
similar call. While affect theory does well to imagine a boundless body
through a sociocultural environment or reimagine the body’s potential-
ity when conceptualized as inorganic and indeterminate, aspects of the
material real outside of such a body are often left undertheorized or even
 Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations · 9

disavowed. Massumi attempts a workaround: affect’s co-constitutive re-

lationality may help find “a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of
the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice
versa. Let matter be matter, brains be brains, jellyfish be jellyfish, and
culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection.”26 Yet
Massumi, along with many other affect theorists, pauses on the preci-
pice. Asking what a body can do displaces the question of how a body
does—how a body may enact real change in the world, change that first
requires a recognition of the nonbody. Because of the theory’s emphasis
on infinite connective potentiality and virtuality, it has become difficult
to imagine affect theory as able to entertain an actionable ethics. Law-
rence Grossberg astutely notes, “Not only is the world changing around
us, but those changes are characterized by the differing and multiple
temporalities of different forms of effectivity. . . . The reality is that quite
often the virtualities we discover and imagine opening up to be realized
are not actualized, and the task of analysis and imagination goes on.”27 In
other words, the change that can be effected by or through affect’s bodily
becomings has yet to assess the body’s nonsocial relations. Without this,
the body in affect theory will struggle to impact a larger world that ap-
pears to have no actionable connection to it.
Ecocritical interrogations of environmental aesthetics and rhetorics
prioritize the connectivity of humans to their material environs. Yet,
they consistently encounter limitations precisely at the place where at-
tempts to theorize an actionable environmental ethics become most im-
perative—the feeling, acting body. Since its inception, ecocriticism has
critiqued its own early attempts to define the literary engagement with
the environment as too dependent on privileging mimetic and realist en-
vironmental representation. As Dana Phillips has argued, this prevents
ecocriticism from developing “tropes enabling it to come to terms with
the fractured (and fractal) realities of nature,” including human respon-
sivity to it.28 Furthermore, Timothy Morton asks us to consider how
foregrounding nonmimetic aesthetics dispenses with “nature” but recov-
ers an ecological “view,” for aesthetics are central to our apprehension
of environments, “establishing ways of feeling and perceiving [one’s] ex-
perience [of] their place in the world.”29 Yet this distancing of text from
world risks putting environmental materiality under erasure, replacing
it with only a new subjective perception rather than a more ecological
10 · Molly Volanth Hall and Kara Watts

model for subjectivity. Scholars have asked what such a subject might
look like; Lee Rozelle has responded by locating a subjectivity that
would possess an “ecosublime” affective orientation toward its environ-
ment, an orientation that constitutes an epistemology “emotively and
materially relocat[ing] the human self as ecological niche,” prompting
“responsible engagements with natural spaces, and [recalling] crucial
links between human subject and nonhuman world.”30 While this seems
to turn more to the material emplacement of the body in its environs, it
is not clear how such affects necessarily arise from the cognitive stance
of the sublime—a feeling often said to engender a divorce of mind from
the sensory body—and yet manage to relocate the self physically. This
rhetoric seems, in fact, to circumvent the issue of the body entirely. Any
ethics depends upon a subject—however diffuse, relational, coherent, or
agential—to enact, deploy, or participate in a world ethically through the
subject’s material form.
Affect theory is readily able to aid ecocriticism’s problems with the
feeling body. Affect tends to operate with a body that is not strictly
material; yet, theorists also want the body to have some form that can
undergo change and becoming.31 Bodies should think, Massumi has ar-
gued, a paradox that we must accept because “there is an incorporeal di-
mension of the body . . . Real, material, but incorporeal,” a real-material-
incorporeal body that, “as a positioned thing,” is “mutually composed”
by both the corporeal and the incorporeal.32 Because of the difficulties
in navigating this paradox, affect theory tends to have a fraught relation-
ship with the biological, which operates more largely within the corpo-
real.33 As Ruth Leys has noted, affect has neglected the biological, or as
Leys puts it, the role of “corporeal-affective dispositions.”34 The risks of
entertaining Massumi’s material-incorporeal body are quite real and have
serious ethical implications for the affective body’s relationality. If the af-
fective body is unbounded and therefore yields no distinction between
the human and nonhuman, little seems to be left of the discretely human
body. It often seems that only empirical measures of emotionality such as
pupil dilation, heart rate, or skin responses remain. This measurable body
that perceives—a skin that is “faster than the word”35—however, be-
comes problematic. It carries with it the problems of perception—both
what is perceived as within the body and what is perceived as outside
the body, or again, what constitutes alterity. Because affect is tasked with
 Into the Ether: An Invitation to Bodily Reorientations · 11

understanding and being affected by alterities to advance a new ethics,

what constitutes such alterity is difficult to discern as distinct, since it is
already alleged to be inseparable from the affective body, an “inventory
of shimmers” that seems to flout material boundaries.36 Lauren Berlant
critiques the material body’s capability for ethical relationality further.
Interrogating the value of bodily responses, she asks what it may mean
for collective life as a political and social unit when a politics of “true”
feeling seems to dominate as the basis for the mediation of personhood,
analysis, fantasy, and the critiquing of power. How can we say that “the
shock of pain,” for example, can produce a useful, ethical clarity, when
we all know that “shock can as powerfully be said to produce panic, mis-
recognition” and underscore “the shakiness of perception’s ground”?37
Perhaps we cannot so readily trust human bodily feeling to guide ethi-
cal engagements, and we must theoretically account for the fact that our
autonomic responses seem always already to be stuck in the container of
the material body.
The ecocritical subject is well positioned to shed light on the affective
body’s material limitations. Not just concerned with revaluing what has
been misapprehended as an external material environment, the ecocriti-
cal subject is always already itself a material subject in the sense that it
is a subject in and as a body, and a body in and as the material world or
environment that surrounds and subsumes it. The material relationality
of the ecocritical body exists beyond its corporeal and incorporeal regis-
ters alone.38 The nonhuman corpus with which the affective body intra-
acts also helps to constitute the impetus for its actions—the feelings that
we assume happen in responsive networks that give rise to agency. Eco-
materialists Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino write, “the world’s
material phenomena . . . are knots in a vast network of agencies, which
can be ‘read’ and interpreted as forming narratives, stories.”39 Though
materialists can read the agential matter of the world as narrative—weav-
ing body and environment together as a single text—such imbrications
still do not necessarily address the felt experience of this entanglement.
The feeling or affective dimensions of the body, then, present a particu-
lar problem to the new materialist environmental ethical project even as
that project takes up the issue of agency. As we note above, Barad’s femi-
nist materialism describes the human as a product of this “immanent
enfolding of matter and meaning,” through the “intra-actions” of body
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