Low-Tech Thoreau; or, Remediations of the Human in The Dispersion of Seeds

However diverse recent posthumanist and ecocritical projects have been, those focused on the imbrication of humans and nature have generally been organized as recognitions or disclosures of the integration of the human with the nonhuman as an always, already, abiding condition. Insofar as this is the case, these projects are essentially continuous with the major literary critical accounts of Henry David Thoreau’s canonical works (from R. W. B. Lewis through Sharon Cameron and Laurence Buell) that configure the Thoreauvian problematic of naturalizing the human in terms of recognizing, disclosing, or otherwise actualizing an extant continuity of the human with nature.¹ The argument of this essay, however, is that Thoreau’s unfinished manuscript The Dispersion of Seeds (1862) features a naturalization of the human that does not resolve into a realization of such continuity.² From the outset of the manuscript, it is apparent that the task of “show[ing] how the seed is transported from where it grows to where it is planted” entails an overhauling of the observer: in order to document and display the modes, means, and mechanisms of seed dispersal, the observer needs to be calibrated to the spatial and temporal intervals that separate a seed’s growth from its planting (D, 24). As the manuscript proceeds, it becomes clear that, for Thoreau, this overhauling of the observer does not constitute an actualization of the potential naturalness or inhumanity of the human; nor does it constitute a nonactualization, materialization, or iteration of such a potentiality.³ Rather, what this overhauling of the observer resolves into is a modification of the human that makes it natural: a conversion of the human-writing into nature’s recording function.

Accordingly, this essay has two main tasks. The first is to elucidate the specific remediation of writing featured in The Dispersion of Seeds As Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin define it, remediation is the process by which new and old media constitute and reconstitute themselves by “appropriat[ing] the techniques, forms, and social significances” of other, competing, media.⁴ In The Dispersion of Seeds the overhauling of the observer—the conversion of the human-writing into nature’s recording function—entails a remediation of writing whereby writing adapts a central aspect of the emerging media of photography. In so doing, writing reconfigures itself as a medium that is capable of capturing the too-slow-to-be-perceived motions of a nature that works “systematically” (D, 151), at “a geologic pace,” and “over the greatest distances” (D, 36).⁵ As is explained in the pages that follow, this remediation of writing appears as a refunctioning of photographic automaticity that converts the human-writing into an apparatus that can produce desubjective representations of nature. In the now standard critical optic installed by Jonathan Crary’s and Friedrich Kittler’s poststructuralist accounts of nineteenth-century media culture, such a conjunction of writing and technological media can be understood as an aspect of the general supplantation of agency that coincided with the advent of modernity.⁶ However, insofar as Thoreau’s remediation of writing derives from an intentional reorganization of action, the particular conjunction of writing and technological media in The Dispersion of Seeds resolves into an instantiation of modern literary agency.

The other main task of this essay is to detail how The Dispersion of Seeds presents this remediation of writing as a thoroughly technological mode of naturalizing the human. The Dispersion of Seeds thereby reconfigures a problematic that has recently emerged as an important feature of both ecocriticism and posthumanism and has long been central to Thoreau criticism. At least since R. W. B Lewis’s The American Adam (1955), critics have registered Thoreau’s interest in integrating the human into nature; at least since Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964), critics have routinely noted that, for Thoreau, the development of modern technology threatens—and thereby makes more urgent—the possibility of effecting the sort of “total immersion in nature” that would “bring into being the natural man.”⁷ Contemporary Thoreau criticism most often considers the ways in...