Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green

Orange

83 Waxing lyrical on the figure of the rainbow, bringing us back from the brink of an abstracting adulthood to a childhood in which color manifests as substance, Walter Benjamin posits something on the order of a prismatic materialism in these lines. Color morphs and moves. Insector angel-like, it “flits from one form to the next,” rendering each lively if not alive. This undifferentiated relation to color as substance radicalizes perception. It ties color to the objects that play host to it such that the visual becomes tactile. Color becomes transitive or transactional. Color happens. It happens to you, through you. For Benjamin, this orientation to color migrates to the gestures and habit world of children’s toys and games. Fold the paper; place, press, and peel the decal; blow the bubble until its prismatic sheen pops; prance like a chicken; flit like a butterfly; allow a world to spill forth in foldout pages J U L I A N Y A T E S The rainbow is a pure childlike image. In it color is wholly contour; for the person who sees with a child’s eyes, it marks boundaries, is not a layer of something superimposed on matter, as it is for adults. The latter abstract from color, regarding it as a deceptive cloak for individual objects existing in time and space. Where color provides the contours, objects are not reduced to things but are constituted by an order consisting of an infinite range of nuances. Color is single, not as a lifeless thing and a rigid individuality but as a winged creature that flits from one form to the next. Children make soap bubbles. Similarly, games with painted sticks, sewing kits, decals, parlor games, even pull-out picturebooks, and, to a lesser extent, making objects by folding paper—all involve this view of color. —Walter Benjamin, “A Child’s View of Color” Orange 84 Julian Yates in your lap. And if you do, then know that you are taking on the colors of these objects or creatures and lending your body and voice to their forms in an ongoing becoming with the world. Benjamin wants this orientation to color to be primary. But in this brief unpublished thought-piece he is not able to say quite why, not sure what name to give to this phenomenology of color. He reaches therefore into the discourse of an uncertainly theological aesthetics and writes, “Color is something spiritual.”1 His words constitute color as primary; render it prior to calculation; insist that it comes prior to the sum of “intellectual cross-references” that stultifies the adult. Almost immediately, this desire for firstness seems to turn sentimental: “children see with pure eyes”—“colorfulness does not stimulate the[ir] animal senses because the child’s uncorrupted imaginative activity springs from the soul.”2 But such moves belie the way the figure of the child stands here with a cast of skilled mimetic operators, the insect and the plant, to insist on the tactile affect of color as a stimulus response. Aesthetics stands here, for Benjamin, as a discourse on sense perception, on the phenomenology of relations between variously animate objects. You are in the world; the world within you. By this color you are captured thus, so the flower says to the bee. Buzz. Buzz. Yearslater,in“OntheMimeticFaculty”(1933),Benjaminwillnamethis orientation the “powerful compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically,” in sympathy with an object.3 And this insight stands surety for what becomes, in the Passagenwerk, an auto-archiving of consumer capital’s broken or discarded goods become uncertainly temporal fossils, things, which, having lost the sum of their “cross-references,” offer a perceptual jolt or “shock” to the viewer.4 Hovering at the edge of our vision, Benjamin’s rainbow provides a rubric for modeling color by way of its contours, by way of the objects that host it in a built world. Here the phrase built world should be heard to include the reproductive technologies of plants; the camouflage rhetoric of insects; all manner of creaturely display; as well as the mineral efflorescence of rock formations.5 Color phenomena qua color phenomena exist only by and in their apprehension by variously animate creatures. But the patterns that constitute them exist in and for themselves operating according to still other codes than we are able to perceive directly. It is to this Orange 85 elaborated world...