Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens’s Birds by Cary Wolfe (review)

In his new book, Cary Wolfe, a scholar of poetics in the American grain turned bioethicist and thought leader in the new field of posthumanism, cogently and often brilliantly rereads Wallace Stevens as a practitioner of what we might call second-order ecopoetics—a poetry that is less interested in describing the natural world than it is in demonstrating and enacting on a stylistic level what Timothy Morton has called “ecological thought.” For Wolfe, the otherness of “nature” in Stevens’s late work, as in Emerson’s, is a phantom, a reified and ideological image that conceals the environmental thinking of a poetics constantly returning to an insight disclosed by systems theory: “what look like opposites on the surface of things—subject vs. object, let’s say, or mind vs. nature—turn out, upon closer inspection, to share a deeper, paradoxical unity. They are two sides of a distinction that gives form to the world, but here ‘form’ is indissociable from function, enaction, and performativity” (ix; italics in original). As Stevens said in a quotation to which Wolfe often returns, “it is not [the poet’s role] to lead people out of the confusion in which they find themselves. . . . His role . . . is to help people to live their lives” (CPP 660–61). Living poetically, for Wolfe’s Stevens, takes place in and through the confusion or fusion of imagination and reality, the observer and the observed, the human and the inhuman.

This comparatively short book is dense with divergent discourses masterfully handled by Wolfe, who proves himself as familiar with canonical Stevens criticism (by Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, and others) as he is agile with the terminology of theoretical biology, Derridean deconstruction, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, and Peter Sloterdijk’s wildly ambitious philosophical trilogy Spheres. At the center of Wolfe’s argument is “a nonrepresentationalist understanding of poiesis: whether we are talking about the poiesis of ‘life’ and the evolution of the biosphere in theoretical biology, or the poiesis of worlding and world-making in deconstruction, or the poiesis of Stevens’s poetic practice” (61; italics in original). Wolfe’s third chapter demonstrates morphological similarities between Derridean deconstruction and theoretical biology, both of which critique models of representational truth and propose instead, in the words of sociologist Vicki Kirby, that “the one who knows, the measuring apparatus and the object to be interpreted are strangely involved” (qtd. on 62). Building upon the work of Christopher Johnson, whose System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida outlines some of the “crosstalk between deconstruction and the life sciences” (69), Wolfe argues that the object of knowledge in deconstruction behaves like a living organism that derives its activity from the interchange with its environment, its meaning irreducible to and unexhausted by our understanding of that environment; he writes that “Derrida gives us a theory of something like the relationship of the genetic (or systemic, formally code-bound) and the epigenetic factors (the environmental or contextual setting in which the code is deployed)” (72).

Deconstruction, in other words, is an evolutionary discourse. Wolfe cites Matthias Fritsch’s summary of Derrida’s key neologism, différance: “The term is to encompass difference and deferral—that is, situation in context but without final determinability, anticipation of future environments (for not anything goes), but also exposure to the open-ended future the elements in an ongoing system cannot know” (qtd. on 71). From here it is but a short step to the key Darwinian concept of exaptation, by which a trait developed by a species in response to environmental conditions shifts its function, as in the example Wolfe adapts from Stuart Kauffman of the swim bladder in fish: “The Darwinian exaptation whereby some early versions of fish had lungs, enabling them to bounce from puddle to puddle, led in time to the biological function of a ratio of air and water in fish that now live wholly in water that allows neutral buoyancy in the water column” (79...