Outside Form: On Writing within the Environmental Humanities

When I wake up in the morning, I spend an hour or two reading a book before I open my laptop. From then until the end of the day, my work is situated in front of a screen. When Donna Haraway famously argued for a "view from [the] body … [an] always complex, contradictory, structuring, and structured body"—I'm pretty sure she didn't mean this kind of view from the body.¹ While the pandemic has narrowed the sensorial range of our daily lives—I lock eyes with the screen more than with another human—in a prepandemic world, the imperative to lock myself in my office was fueled by the same disciplinary mechanism. For my words to take the required form, my body must also conform.

There is, of course, a capaciousness to the phrase "a view from the body." It encompasses my situated knowledge as a two-time college dropout, my position as a first-generation college graduate, and now, as a graduate student. But it also includes the fact that as a scholar within the environmental humanities, I spend most of my time reading about what's outside without actively learning from what's outside. I want to press on this contradiction. Time spent outdoors need not rest on constructions of wilderness, remote corners of pristine landscapes, and unpeopled spaces. Whatever we might call "nature" is already "as close as one's own skin," and when I go for a walk, I am not looking for a particularly sublime experience.² However, there are moments of encounter with places and objects beyond the page that I do learn from and feel compelled to articulate. Which is to say, I question how situated and embodied knowledge might come to bear on writing within the environmental humanities.

The incongruence between embodied and received knowledge that I am foregrounding is often magnified by the fact that the disciplinary field in which I work is shadowed by my experience working in actual fields. Here, I stumble. When I write about the ways in which a narrative obfuscates racialized labor, I cannot gesture to how this occurred in the commercial vineyards in which I was employed. When I write about the violence of neoliberal economies that displace local communities, I cannot center or cite the voices of people from my hometown. Generic conventions have broad implications. While the university makes clear the imperative to claim epistemological territory, the efficacy of claiming epistemological territory—made visible by gaining proficiency in a specific genre of writing—defamiliarizes embodied knowledge.

Behind my attempts to appear legible to an academic audience, there are embodied citations at play. What I learned vending produce or monitoring irrigation systems looms behind my current commitment to grappling with climate catastrophe, histories of extraction, and any other hotspot of the Anthropocene. But while my academic research and work experience overlap—on the page, they are often irreconcilable. To undiscipline this double bind, I would have to invite my "structuring and structured" body back into play. To begin, I would likely have to change the way I write, encouraging unexpected interlocutors to dig up and reseed my writing.

Gesturing to the role embodied knowledge might play in undisciplining genres of academic writing, Leila C. Nadir homes in on the politics of citation in autotheory. She asks us to attend to stories that lack "authoritative names," while averring that "readers don't read until they see the road signs announcing that these pages have referenceable merit, that they [the readers] are collecting fractionated shares of academic capital."³ Within so much scholarship and even within its recuperative, more radical offshoots, the embodied view is legitimated by entering "the conversation"—which is to say, bartering and bootlegging the right names in the right places. Attuned to "fractioned shares" and a system of exchange, this is the "scholarly gaze" Nadir sketches. When I have tried to locate this gaze, I find it fixed on the soft blue light of a screen.

Thinking through vision and orientation, Sara Ahmed writes, "what we can see in the first place...