I will give here the sketch of a work in progress that addresses a diffuse category of matter figuring with increasing urgency in our imaginaries of the sea, its subsurfaces, and its landfalls – estuaries, nearshore, foreshore, backshore – all the places of contact between water, earth, and the human: mobile, formless phenomena that are among the most devastating and unsettling evidence of our planetary ecological crisis. These include, among others: hypoxic dead zones, current and weather-disrupting temperature anomalies known as “blobs” because of their appearance on satellite imaging, E. coli-laden rafts and deep-sea clouds of marine mucilage (“sea snot”), phytoplankton, algal, sargassum, and jellyfish blooms, upwellings of microplastics from deep-sea hotspots, great trash gyres (“garbage patches”), massive oil slicks from drilling, pipeline, and tanker accidents, and spills on land that make their way to the sea. And so on. We could extend this list more widely and more distressingly¹.

A common trait of these menaces is that they may flow inland, thus dissolving the distinction between solid and liquid, or press, insistently, against barriers we would mount against them to preserve the distinction. However we define this contact zone, it’s not a hard border – that’s a geographical concept, not a hydrological or imaginative concept – because the shore is also a mutable surface, as much in motion and in transformation as what it holds back². Efforts to hold back or hold fast are in this regard only temporary measures to plug openings that are always-already vulnerable to the deep shapelessnesses enacted at the contact zone. Which is to say, they are momentary distractions from larger specters of frightful mutability. When we focus on the image of a beach dotted with tens of thousands of tarballs, we look away from the archaic horror of the ungainly blob from which the tarballs were spawned. Surveying the bathtub ring stain of a red tide on the sand, the shapes of satellite images of temperature anomalies, or of the widening spans of trash gyres (Lebreton), is to look away from featureless interiors and restless heterogeneity. This is what is limiting in inventories of the restless and the shapeless, such as the one I began with: one fixates on partitioning shapeless things into series of discrete menaces or parades of menaces, and misses the general character of their undifferentiated flow and pressure.

transgressive passions of our ecological imaginaries.

II. Quelque chose qui flotte

The Burning World (1964) – the novel’s global drought is the effect of a layer of industrial polymers deposited on the oceans’ surfaces, preventing evaporation – and the Cadillac-desertic dreamscapes of Las Vegas of his Hello America! (1981), or the Amargosa, the vast hallucinatory inland desert sea of Claire Vaye Watkin’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015), would qualify for inclusion on this list.

Exodes is probably the bleakest of the series. It recounts the mostly unsuccessful efforts of a half-dozen characters to find refuge from the accelerating savagery of the late XXIst century. Among them are a married couple, Olaf and Risten Eriksson, who flee the social collapse of their native land, the Lofoten archipelago of Norway, and sail their trawler Ragnarok southward over the drowned cities of Northern Europe in search of safe harbor, improbably, in the Kerguelen Islands – aka les Îles de la Désolation – of the sub-Antarctic⁴.

As the trawler approaches Dunkirk Harbor, abandoned and mostly submerged, Risten, who is watching from the bow, calls to Olaf to come see something she cannot describe –

Il stoppe le moteur et, laissant le Ragnarok filer doucement sur son erre, rejoint sa femme à l’avant. Elle est penchée au-dessus de l’eau – il se penche donc à son tour.

À première vue, il trouve juste à l’eau des reflets roses, pense qu’ils sont dus aux ultimes feux du couchant. Puis il remarque que, non, ce ne sont pas des reflets. Quelque chose colore l’eau en rose. Quelque chose qui flotte, qui bouge… qui grouille. Sa vue accommodant, il distingue soudain ce que c’est.

Des milliers – des millions de méduses. Toute la rade en est couverte, à perte de vue.

Olaf émet un ricanement nerveux. C’est le premier signe de vie qu’il découvre dans cette mer depuis des lustres – et il faut que ce soit quelque chose de potentiellement mortel. La mer en est tellement saturée qu’elle est devenue comme une espèce de soupe rosâtre frémissante, dégageant un relent acide. Il a entendu parler d’une mutation des méduses, devenues plus corrosives que de l’acide chlorhydrique, parvenues – faute de prédateurs – au sommet de la chaîne alimentaire marine et capables de liquéfier toute matière organique, voire minérale. Elles ne sont pas encore montées jusqu’aux Lofoten, mais, l’eau se réchauffant à vitesse grand V, cela ne saurait tarder…

[He stops the engine and, letting the Ragnarok gently drift along, joins his wife at the front. She is leaning over the water – so he leans in too.

At first glance, he finds only pink reflections in the water, thinks that they are due to the last fires of the sunset. Then he notices that, no, they are not reflections. Something is coloring the water pink. Something that floats, that moves… that swarms. His vision adjusting, he suddenly sees clearly what it is.

Thousands – millions of jellyfish. The whole harbor is covered with them, as far as the eye can see.

Olaf lets out a nervous chuckle. It’s the first sign of life he’s seen in this sea in ages; of course it would be something potentially deadly. The sea is so saturated that it has become a kind of pinkish soup, simmering with an acidic smell. He has heard of a mutation in jellyfish, making them more corrosive than hydrochloric acid and placing them – for lack of predators – at the top of the marine food chain, able to liquefy any organic matter, even minerals. They have not yet reached the Lofoten Islands, but as the water warms…] (390–91)

Stung!)⁵. More numerous and widespread blooms are a recognized peril of worsening global warming: many jellyfish species flourish under conditions of eutrophication, rising temperatures, and increased ocean acidity that kill other marine life. Scientists predict a more “gelatinous” future for some ocean ecosystems, in which cartilaginous and bony fish will cease to be apex predators (Richardson, et al.).

6. They are a clotted, barely-differentiated solution of mobile flesh, their numberless bells less like individual animals than bubbles rising thickly to the surface of an ocean in the process of becoming gelatinous. What arrests the gaze here – Olaf’s gaze, our vicarious gaze – is the shameful movement of these heralds of a featureless abyss in the process of turning over: a suffocating heterogeneity that travels, repellantly, under its own power.

It seems to be a subjectless heterogeneity, though perhaps it is not unreactive or unaware. Jellyfish lack the brain and central nervous system of other animals, though they possess neural nets that control their movements and connect to sensory receptors (Gershwin, Jellyfish). There is intriguing evidence that at least some jellyfish species exhibit distinct waking and sleeping states (Nath, et al.). Their experiences of mind, such as they are, must be more diffuse and more marginally subjectified than we can imagine. If the pink soup of Dunkirk Harbor can then be said to act or to think with even the slimmest of purposes it must do so otherwise than we do: agency and thought as pure operations of unquiet matter. It’s all uncannily a little too efficient for us to bear, except with a nervous chuckle of the kind elicited by stories of slime molds – affectionately referred to as “blobs” by their devotés – navigating a maze (Dussutor), or the clumsily pouring bodies of the molds’ science fiction film precursors (Fredo and Bava, Yeaworth). The very idea of this, not an altogether-thoughtlessness but a headless-thoughtlessness, is offensive to members of our species, living as we do in brain-centered, melancholy isolation from one another, moving about with confidence that the spaces between our bodies define us. In Ligny’s unsettling/unsettled image, countless gelatinous individuals are congealing into a plenum, prodigally and continuously becoming the same substance. The water is wrong all the way to the horizon – à perte de vue – and, we assume, it is in the process of becoming wrong all the way down.

III. The Flow of the Formless

It’s tempting to characterize all this churning of surface and below-surface as the production of abject materiality. Certainly the yuck factor, on a very grand scale, suggests the disorienting affects that Julia Kristeva attaches to the abject. The repulsive sensation of a crossing of boundaries that menaces integrities on each side is close, as well, to the insistent mobility of the image. And, comparable to Kristeva’s inventory of the abject upwellings of the body – vomit, urine, blood, sperm, shit, pus – Ligny’s roiling horizon of pink soup, moving outward and downward from the gaze, is fundamentally interfacial. Recall the paradigmatic example of abjection that Kristeva cites in the opening pages of Pouvoirs de l’horreur:

Lorsque cette peau à la surface du lait, inoffensive, mince comme une feuille de papier à cigarettes, minable comme une rognure d’ongles, se présente aux yeux, ou touche les lèvres, un spasme de la glotte et plus bas encore, de l’estomac, du ventre, de tous les viscères, crispe le corps, presse les larmes et la bile, fait battre le cœur, perler le front et les mains.

[When this skin on the surface of milk, inoffensive, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, puny as a nail clipping, presents itself to the eyes, or touches the lips, a spasm of the glottis and even lower, of the stomach, of the belly, of all the viscera, tenses the body, squeezes the tears and the bile, makes the heart beat, the forehead and the hands bead.] (10)

In the moment of the gaze alighting on or the lips briefly touching the surface of the milk, a simultaneous fixing and crossing of a margin between us and the other side matters in every sense of the word. It makes no difference that you could hold a glass of clotted milk at arm’s length or below your nose and mouth, what is decisive is that the surface of the milk that you can’t, or don’t want, to touch or taste is materially transforming beyond you, toward the bottom of the glass. The skin is a featureless something that limns the threshold between the subject and something else, neither subject nor object (Kristeva 9). It could only be worse – this is implied by the process of clotting – if the skin went all the way down.

Kristeva’s emphasizing of our repugnance to daily reminders of abjection – how we are compromised by traces of a primordial fractioning off of the ab-ject from the subject as such – that, at least the primordiality and the recurrence of the experience, are also partly right for my purposes, in that they specifically attach anxiety and disgust to a traversal of boundaries. But I think that the sensation elicited by the Kristevan abject – though it is closely allied with the sensation elicited by unquiet matter – may be too narrowly defined by the subject’s self-interests. It doesn’t address the full range of transgressive passions of an encounter with, not only an abject something, but also a clotted everything that is provisionally not the subject, and which works to absorb the subject into its undifferentiated field.

I think I prefer Georges Bataille’s version of this encounter.

Un dictionnaire commencerait à partir du moment où il ne donnerait plus le sens mais les besognes des mots. Ainsi informe n’est pas seulement un adjectif ayant tel sens mais un terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce qu’il désigne n’a ses droit dans aucun sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l’univers prenne forme. La philosophie entière n’a pas d’autre but : il s’agit de donner une redingote à ce qui est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirmer que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est qu’informe revient à dire que l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat.

[A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks [besognes]. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.] Georges Bataille, “L’Informe” (1929)

La Ressemblance informe (2019) and related observations by Pierre Fédida, Paul Hegarty, and others, that the work of Bataille’s formless was never the negation of form, or the disclosure of a beyond of form, but rather form’s ineluctable, unresolved precarity and active transgression in art and in life more generally, and what this means for our experience of transgression. That is where the matter of the formless matters – in the sense of process, not state or import – precisely in terms of what Bataille calls base matter, stubbornly resistant to idealization and flattening all impostures of dressing it up in absolutes (Bataille, “Matérialisme,” “Le Bas matérialisme”). A universe becoming spider, worm, spittle, and pink goo fills us with anguish because it won’t hold still in place of something else, and it won’t stay only itself. Bataille’s observations in this regard are among the most brutal and incendiary criticisms of a cultural dominant that elevates mimesis in alliance with a rational vision of the world in which humans are upright, at the world’s pinnacle and not, horizontally, in the muck with everyone else (Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance). “In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal.” The unfinished varieties of the formless force a leveling of anthropomorphism: the undoing of anthropos as the privileged shape, not merely the privileged center, of things.

IV. Transgressive Passions of the Formless

The viscosity of water in general? Isn’t it the universal element of life?]
– Jean-Baptiste Bory de Saint-Vincent (c. 1822), in Jules Michelet, La Mer (1861), in Gaston Bachelard, L’Eau et les reves (1942)⁷

Exodes: humans who feed on other humans for lack of other prey. It is, to be sure, an alarming and heartbreaking turn of the plot.

But it’s also true to the challenge that Ligny’s compassion poses for us throughout the series and in this case especially – to love his characters enough to obscure their awful deaths but also to not spare them their suffering – and it’s true as well to the formless’s tasks (besognes) in imagery of the Anthropocene’s decline: the unsparing foreclosure of a naïve anthropomorphism, consonant with the lacerating dimensions of Bataille’s thought, and an opening toward utopian post-anthropology that his thought might prefigure.

The latter assertion – that there is a utopian task for the formless, even in the muck and the goo – needs more unpacking and nuance that I have space for here. But I would say this with, appropriately, Olaf’s nervous chuckle in mind: in a general ecology, a human might learn to live with and among others more fluid than itself, as in a soup, a continous flow, a viscous blob: in the world in which the human is more like water in water (l’eau dans l’eau) – or jelly in jelly – than Bataille imagined us capable of being⁹. Or if we seek a more solid footing, in an immanently vital compost (Haraway) of tragic and convivial heteronomy, and not in an illusory and melancholy autonomy, from which we cannot see the moving whole that draws us into its undefined field.

The transgression of anthropomorphism by the formless, its smearing into an endless series of roiling surfaces at the conjunction of anguish and laughter, and something equally extreme and akin to ecstasy – points to an extending of a Bataillean left-handed sacred, unlucky, taboo, and improductive¹⁰, on the outer edge of the Anthropocene: more leveling than elevating, more lacerating and dispersing of forms than holding them together and holding them fast. Such a formulation of a path forward in this crisis would be more about experiencing our transgressive passions as authentic, tragic, and unfinished responses to the prospects of loss and extinction, and new ways of making kin and keeping with the trouble, as Donna Haraway might put it, in the ruins of the near future. More about those things than the feckless confidence games of denial and assured survival, or the hollow consolations of righteous indignation and bitter grief.

e siècle (la Grande-Bretagne) et du XX^e siècle (les États-Unis) [laquelle] témoigne du lien fondamental entre la crise climatique et les entreprises de domination globale » (135).

Le Monde publiée le 25 mars 2020 fut diffusée le jour suivant dans une traduction anglaise sur le site de Critical Inquiry).

artivism.

Ce n’est pourtant que plus tardivement, sous l’impulsion de ces pratiques contemporaines, que s’est matérialisé un tournant écocritique qui était appelé de leurs vœux par des historiens de l’art soucieux de combler le retard pris par la discipline dans le champ des humanités.

1. L’oeil écologique : une question d’attention

chappé le domaine des Andrews ne pouvaient être que ces braconniers ou autres intrus qui auraient été battus ou encore déportés s’ils s’étaient aventurés sur cette propriété privée. Berger, dont les travaux sont traversés par cette articulation entre façons de voir et prise de possession, renverse ce propos pour faire des propriétaires terriens les corrupteurs de l’unité humaine, capables d’apprécier la Nature à la seule condition que celle-ci leur appartienne.

Mr and Mrs Andrews, a fait l’objet de révisions pour y inclure des présences et des absences animales (notées en particulier par Kean, 14). Le nouveau mode d’attention écologique souhaité par Patrizio vient donc aujourd’hui rencontrer les préoccupations féministes, décoloniales et antispécistes pour ajouter le changement climatique et la crise environnementale à la liste des agents corrupteurs qui s’offrent enfin au regard, rejoignant ainsi et croisant l’appropriation, la soumission, l’apprivoisement et l’extraction.

me année, The Procession, dans laquelle, comme Donald Rodney (1961–1998) avant lui, Hew Locke relie l’histoire coloniale de la commercialisation du sucre et celle de la famille Tate et sa philanthropie artistique.

chelle impériale, puis celle des contours des îles britanniques. Le Royaume-Uni, agrégat insulaire de quatre nations dont l’empire, à son apogée, ne voyait jamais se coucher le soleil, est en effet lesté d’une histoire qui encourage cette lecture changeante de ses échelles.

2. Pour un “angloseen” écologique

Non seulement Hamerton n’y laissera pas la vie, mais il y retournera l’année suivante, à bord cette fois d’une étrange structure flottante, un bateau constitué de deux flotteurs tubulaires reliés par un pont plat sur lequel il avait fixé une tente lui servant d’atelier. Ce n’était plus les paysages de l’intérieur qu’il souhaitait désormais s’approprier de la sorte, mais plutôt ce qu’il considérait de fait comme étant ce que les îles britanniques offraient de plus beau au regard : leurs côtes, réputées imprenables et dont l’érosion avait pourtant commencé à changer l’aspect.

humilité, même, face à des forces naturelles qui se moquaient de ses efforts pour se protéger du vent, de la pluie et des fameux midges écossais déjà redoutés par le peintre John Everett Millais (voir son dessin de 1853 conservé au Yale Center for British Art, Awful Protection against Midges).

^{appréhension d’un monde en rapide évolution. Les expériences dangereuses menées par Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) dans son désir d’enregistrer la luminosité du soleil sur sa propre rétine afin de mieux la retranscrire en peinture témoignent bien de cette obsession victorienne d’écraser la distance entre le corps et le milieu externe, organique ou non, et de s’immerger pleinement dans le flux d’un monde matériel ici brûlant et sec, ailleurs humide et venté.}

fluctuante, étrange et subjective de l’atmosphère londonienne, qui le fit mener à bien les expérimentations formelles (sur des formes naturelles, liquides, urbaines et/ou industrielles) qui annonçaient le passage à l’abstraction et l’émancipation du regard. C’est en partie aussi à Whistler que l’on doit l’attirance des artistes abstraits britanniques, de Vanessa Bell (1879–1961) à Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017), pour un environnement organique et climatique auquel ils se sentaient liés, comme l’a montré Rosalind Krauss dans The Optical Unconscious (1993), par des processus physiologiques de perception subjective.

I’m interested in the interplay between an understanding of eco-centrism in the political sense, as a strand of activism if you like, and that of a more general system of connectivity – of connections through time and space, across economic and social systems. While some projects refer directly to an activist sense and tap into the language or spirit of protest, all of the works engage with the more general eco-centric notion by connecting places, production technologies, flows of material, energy etc. Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006) is perhaps a good example of the former, with its origins in the protest culture of the anti-nuclear movement that has dogged the activities of the nuclear submarine bases on the west coast of Scotland for decades now, while a work like Three Birds, Seven Stories, Interpolations and Bifurcations (2008) could be understood in terms of the latter with its sweeping connections through time and space. But in both instances the core notion of ‘action’ or perhaps ‘gesture’ as a generative, ‘political’ tool is established through processes of transformation, production, destruction, travel, etc.

anglocène et les nouveaux modes d’attentions qu’elle nécessite dans le domaine des arts visuels, tout en confirmant la possibilité d’identifier et d’historiciser une vision nationale de la question environnementale.

3. Le climat en partage

me, siège d’un pouvoir temporel jadis sans partage, apparaissent soudain presque futiles sous la voûte immense d’un ciel menaçant.

Dans une composition prise elle aussi entre terre et ciel, la météorologie post-apocalyptique de The Fields of Waterloo (de même peint l’année de la publication de Frankenstein) a pour effet de faire miroir au drame qui se déploie sur le sol, mais semble aussi replacer cette représentation d’une humanité et d’une nature ravagées dans un drame plus vaste, hors cadre et de mauvais augure pour une Angleterre à l’impérialisme agressif. Quelque cinquante ans plus tôt, Burke semblait déjà commenter les effets produits par ce type de représentation insoutenable, quand il écrivait au sujet des causes du sublime :

The noise of vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation […] The shouting of multitudes has a similar effect; and by the sole strength of sound, so amazes and confounds the imagination, that in this staggering, and hurry of the mind, the best established tempers can scarcely forbear being borne down, and joining in the common cry […] (68).

Ce cri de douleur, cette plainte qui s’élevait du champ de bataille dévasté de Waterloo, paraissait bien, grâce au génie de Turner, avoir été lancé dans un même temps par les hommes, les éléments et les animaux (dont le philosophe remarquait un peu plus loin à quel point les sons de détresse sont de nature à impressionner l’âme et le corps), dans une tragique communauté d’expérience sensorielle.

It always blows tremulously, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness which gives them—and I watch them this moment as I write—an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may see the kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in the gusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is more panic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of a wail.

Rocks and Ferns in a Wood at Crossmount, Perthshire), lecture encouragée par un passage de The Elements of Drawing (1857) où est évoquée cette leçon :

a perpetual lesson, in every serrated point and shining vein which escapes or deceives our sight among the forest leaves, how little we may hope to discern clearly, or judge justly, the rents and veins of the human heart; how much of all that is round us, in men’s actions or spirits, which we at first think we understand, a closer and more loving watchfulness would show to be full of mystery, never to be either fathomed or withdrawn. (15.120)

La leçon, comme le soutient Hughes, est à la fois exaltante et tragique aux yeux du Presbytérien qu’était Ruskin, et signale le manque tout autant que la communion.

occupé en cette fin du XIXème siècle par des questions d’efficacité et de duplication rapide) derrière la couleur, qu’il associe, non seulement au féminin, mais aussi à l’amour, avec tous les dangers que cette double affiliation peut renfermer. Finalement, comme Hughes le montre avec finesse, Ruskin finira dans ses derniers écrits par refuser toute dichotomie facile entre couleur et dessin, féminin et masculin, lui préférant l’ambivalence radicale des genres, des sexualités et des techniques comme seul moyen d’accéder à la vérité de la nature.

Whistler, quant à lui, envisageait le pouvoir de métamorphose du crépuscule londonien, avec ses fameux effets de brouillard, comme un pouvoir magique, transformant la ville en un pays de conte de fées. La Nature y prenait des allures de sirène, envoûtante, insaisissable, et chantant sa mélodie pour les seules oreilles de l’artiste élu par elle, alors que les derniers voyageurs égarés avaient retrouvé la sécurité de leur foyer (cité par Valette, 51) :

When the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil – And the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky – And the tall chimneys become campanile – And the warehouses are palaces in the night – And the whole city hangs in the heavens, And fairy-land is before us – Then the wayfarer hastens home […]. And Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artists alone(Ten O’clock lecture, February 1885, 14).

Conclusion

Question, rethink or even neglect the needs of the work of art. If the climate crisis is challenging our daily lives, art should also be able to exist in precarious, unstable conditions. (Formafantasma, How to think about curating and exhibiting contemporary art in the light of the climate crisis, 2022)

Dans le même temps, les historiennes et historiens de l’art qui travaillent sur le Royaume-Uni ont accueilli ces nouveaux modes d’attention pour offrir des lectures et des relectures de tableaux, de sculptures et de nombreuses autres productions à l’aune de la prise de conscience actuelle de la crise. Voilà pourquoi ce nouveau projet écocritique de l’histoire de l’art est un projet de décloisonnement des espaces, trop longtemps envisagés, c’est-à-dire compris et vus, comme sociaux, genrés, hétéronormés et spécistes.

, se présente comme un nouveau mode d’attention écocritique spécifiquement national, justifié par le rôle exceptionnel, car premier et d’ampleur, joué par le Royaume-Uni et plus spécifiquement par l’Angleterre, dans le déclenchement de la crise. Synthèse entre la notion géologique d’anglocène et les nouveaux modes d’attentions qu’elle nécessite, l’angloseen justifie que soit adoptée une approche sur une échelle nationale de l’histoire de l’art et de la question environnementale pour offrir un point de vue privilégié sur les origines industrielles du trouble.