Poems, Eyelashes, and other Nonhuman Objects

Meaning is a form of embodiment.

—Serenella Iovino

In the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman claims that "all beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain" and famously goes on to promise his reader that by following his instructions "your very flesh shall become a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."¹

It is familiar to read this characteristically Whitmanian promise metaphorically or associatively—to see it as, at least implicitly, a part of his larger seductive design on the reader and the scene of reading, placing his poetry on the sweet spot where the erotic names its energetic intersection of mental and bodily experience. While such an approach to the passage would seem to intermingle the linguistic and the physical, it doesn't do so for long, mainly because it's nearly impossible to know what it would mean for flesh to be a poem or a poem to be flesh. And so, somewhat ironically, the passage generally resolves interpretively in a way that subtly, but definitively, reestablishes the mind/brain, poem/flesh, thought/matter binaries. As the reader's body and the reader's mind rub up against each other, the poem and the body slowly drop out—we feel good, we feel good about ourselves, we like this poem . . . and we're back with a body that's a physicalized (and lovely) metaphor for a transcendent narcissism, back with the implicit but profound distinction between the poetry and the reader that was the necessary condition for the thrilling, but momentary, collapse between them. Once again hidden in plain sight, a network of silent, and silenced, materialities—book, setting, same old flesh—resume their inert status, dead matter that sits camouflaged in the colors of unimportance, merely a base for the mind and the words it thrills to.

Given this forum's focus on the nonhuman, I want to treat this passage as exemplary of broader questions about agentic matter raised by contemporary new materialist theories and use it to suggest, however briefly, what means we might employ to prevent the material from simply disappearing into the symbolic, of having (human) language trump everything, including what it means to be human. Such an examination depends from the start on seeing the distinction between "human" and "nonhuman" as a richly ambiguous problem rather than a self-evident ontological classification. Indeed, it is just that rich ambiguity that Whitman is exploiting here (and throughout his poetry) in his assertion of a fungibility between poetic text, human identities, bodies, and other material forms. And it is just this fungibility that is central to the "material turn" in ecocriticism and other scientifically engaged forms of critique, recently described by Serenella Iovino as "the search for new conceptual models apt to theorize the connections between matter and agency on the one side, and the intertwining of bodies, natures, and meanings on the other side," a search that leads to what seems to me an intriguingly Whitmanian understanding of "matter and bodies as combinations of material-discursive or 'material-semiotic agencies.'"² Growing in part out of Latourian actor-network theory and Deleuze and Guattari's writing on assemblages, such approaches invite us to see human identity and agency as constitutively and inseparably part of larger material systems that dynamically entwine a variety of human, nonhuman, and inorganic agents. Networks of distributed intelligence and agency replace the (to me, and I think to Whitman as well) reductive focus on individual human subjects as the sole locus of activity, a focus that depends upon an absolute, naturalized, and mistaken anthropocentrism.

Approaching Whitman's promise from this perspective works against the narcissistic trajectory of the more familiar reading of the passage. In the place of an interpretive resolution that ultimately subsumes matter (including the reader's body) into language, we might instead see Whitman establishing a sort of materialist ecosystem here, a terrain or circuit where a variety of...