This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Agency in the material objects of the human umwelt

This is a fascinating reading of 'To the Lighthouse', and one that I think provides a rich provocative insight into the ways that a deconstructive eco-critical approach allows us to de-centre human subjectivity from dominant cultural forms. I'd like to suggest that the work of two eco-theorists helps us to conceptualise the 'ecological' implications of such a reading further.

First, I suggest that a recognition of how the material objects in our surroundings irrevocably shape human experience is an argument in favour of extending the idea of the human umwelt. As theorised by Jacob von Uexküll, the idea of the umwelt was to understand an organism's distinct perceptual world (ie, their sensory and motor perceptions) in order to understand how they view the 'outer' objective world. By outlining the causal role of furniture in the human experience, I think we can extend the parameters of the human umwelt beyond the biological to those inanimate objects, and appreciate their distinctive role in subjective human experience.

However, Uexküll used this theory to argue that humans actively transcribed their own environments, which therefore elevated their 'thinking power' . I think the true nuance of your reading of Woolf, though, is to emphasise how an appreciation of the role of inanimate objects serves to emphasise our precise lack of authorial agency over our material environments and therefore existence.

The work of Jane Bennett provides a valuable reminder of the limits and finitude of the human umwelt. She emphasises the active role of nonhuman materials in public life, and ascribes them their own especial vitality: thing-power (2). In doing so, she disavows the 'tropological work entailed in the human production of materiality' (19) and speculates that such theory has implications for politics, by lessening blame on individuals and instead focussing attention on the web of forces affecting situations and events . This kind of eco-philosophy has a clear resonance with your own reading; which seeks to highlight how unspoken forces in our domestic sphere - something as simple as a chair - can alter human subjectivity.

- Amelia Loughland
References:
Chien, Jui-Pi. "Of Animals and Men: A Study of Umwelt in Uexküll, Cassirer, and Heidegger". Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 32, no 1, 2006, pp. 57–79.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2009.

This page is referenced by:

CLOSE READING CLOSE READING: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927)

Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, which charts the dissolution of the Ramsay family in twentieth century Britain, is widely heralded as a classic portrait of familial belonging and loss in the midst of World War I. However, employing the theoretical framework of ‘deconstruction’ – conceived by French semiotician Jacques Derrida in his seminal 1972 essay Plato’s Pharmacy (Derrida, 1972) – effectively eschews the traditional critical inclination towards a human-oriented focus of Woolf’s text, in favor of an eco-critical approach. A comprehensive and deconstructive analysis of To the Lighthouse, that is bereft of the textual intentions of its author, subsumes the popular anthropocentric focus on domestic drama between human actors, thus unveiling the influential and unconventional motif of furniture in the everyday lives of Woolf’s protagonists. By examining the manner in which recurring fixtures of the material world constitute a discourse between human and environmental spheres, To the Lighthouse contributes to the growing assemblage of eco-critical literature.

In her 2012 article States of Suspension: Trans-corporeality at Sea, University of Texas at Arlington professor Stacy Alaimo dismantles the contemporary global capitalist dichotomy of active consumers and passive commodities, in order to conceive the material interchanges that occur between humans and objects. Alaimo’s perspective is reinforced by American feminist theorist Karen Barad’s assertion that the individual human’s immersion in a “dynamic process of intra-activity” (Alaimo, 2012, p. 479) with the material world evokes our post-humanity. Essentially, this notion revises the traditional perspective of humans as makers and creators of the material world, instead focusing on the “(post)human” (Alaimo, 2012, p. 479) as a progressive model, which is continuously “part of the world in its becoming.”

In To the Lighthouse, the ideas of Alaimo and Barad are reflected by the manner in which pieces of furniture enact as pervasive forces that infringe on the interiority of the human characters who utilise them. This is illustrated in a scene where Mrs. Ramsay sits on a chair whilst knitting. The standard chair is conventionally perceived as a human capitalist construct, in the sense that it is derived and created from features of the natural world – leather, metal, plastic, wood – and subsequently labeled in terms of its value in the economic marketplace. However, an examination of Woolf’s text questions the capacity of chairs to subversively escape the human-oriented role prescribed to them via their ability to expose seated subjects to unforeseen vantage points. For example, positioned on her chair, Mrs. Ramsay gazes at the beams of the lighthouse clashing against the vast, impenetrable ocean and is suddenly struck by the realization of, “[h]ow could any Lord have made this world […] [in which there is] no reason, no order, no justice.” (Woolf, 1927, p. 54) Mrs. Ramsay’s incidental epiphany highlights the potential of the material world – passive objects, generally considered submissive to the active consumer – to structure and restructure humanity’s place in the ecosphere. This coincides with the perspectives of Woolf, herself, who believed that genuine meanings existed behind the appearance of the material world, which occasionally revealed itself to “shock” humans, highlighting how “beneath the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean, all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art.” (Chun, 2012, p. 53)

Another way in which intra-activity between the human and the material can be conceived in To the Lighthouse is evident in the manner in which objects effectively chart the political, social and cultural events which inflict their human owners. American marine biologist Rachel Carson’s correlation “temporal and oceanic expanses” (Alaimo, 2012, p. 485) is employed by Alaimo to explicate the extent to which the human and non-human combine in affairs of “science, politics, ethics, and the mundane.” (Alaimo, 2012, p. 489) In To the Lighthouse, the manner in which the human protagonists’ attempts to understand each other are effectively articulated and modulated by the furniture that surrounds, structures and comforts them. This idea achieves further resonance via the potential of furniture to express the novel’s divergent themes of peace and conflict. For example, Woolf’s central message of human connections being undergirded by material values – most prevalent in Mrs. Ramsay’s belief that the family legacy will thrive via the inheritance of antiques and heirlooms – is subsumed by a table subversively scripting the social sphere of a Ramsay family dinner. In chapter seventeen of ‘The Window’, the wooden dining table transcends into a resolute patriarch holding the fragmented family, or disembodied “faces on both sides of table,” (Woolf, 1927, p. 79) together, thus achieving stability within the human social sphere. Moreover, this concept of furniture as family – the inanimate object as animate human – is reinforced by “bare legs of tables”, “empty wardrobes” and “mattresses” (Woolf, 1927, p. 105-106) evoking the disintegration of the Ramsay family via the material mirroring and mimicking human emotion. Furthermore, American academic Christopher Watkin’s delineation of objects as “co-producers” in human society, due to the role of “nonsocial, non-human resources” in the creation of “gods, machines, sciences, arts and styles” (Watkin, 2018) can be extended to toy with the idea of the material as a close family member of the human, thereby strengthening the mutual ties between furniture and the Ramsays in To the Lighthouse.

Overall, a close reading of the role of furniture in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, in conjunction with a wide range of scholars, theorists and philosophers – such as Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, Rachel Carson and Christopher Watkin – highlights the manner in which the material autonomously infringes on the social sphere of humanity. Subsequently, the potential of the natural world to speak, comfort and strengthen the human subject effectively allows the environmental sphere to transcend into an 'eco-skeleton' which supports and structures the routine, existence and conscious of humanity, thus highlighting its invaluable role in our lives.

REFERENCES

Derrida, J. (1972). Chapter 11: Plato’s Pharmacy. Retrievable from http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/derrida_platos_pharmacy.pdf.

Chun, M. (2012). Between Sensation and Sign: The Secret Language of the Waves. Journal of Modern Literature 36 (1): 53-70. Doi: 10.2979/jmodelite.36.1.53.

Watkin, C. (2018). To the Lighthouse Archives – Christopher Watkin. Retrievable from https://christopherwatkin.com/tag/to-the-lighthouse/.

Woolf, V. (1927). To the Lighthouse. New York, United States: Oxford University Press.