Inherent Enchantments

Tracy Lassiter (bio)
University of New Mexico-Gallup

A review of Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. U of Minnesota P, 2015.

Stone is a book to engage with on one of those days: a day when something happens to make you feel your age, or when a series of mundanities is sufficient to wear you out, or when banality or harsh weather makes you crave something poetic and imaginative. Read some passages from Stone and before long you compare your human age against lithic formation. Or read it to recognize that the mundanities that wear on you are even more fleeting than your life, and question whether they’re truly worth your exhaustion. Pick up Stone to ponder lines such as this one: “A dense nexus of unpredictable relation-making, stone discloses the enchantment inherent to things, the powers of which cannot be reduced to history, use value, contextual significance, or culture” (165). Decide for yourself if you agree that this is so, and to what degree.

How wonderful, to pause at the idea of the enchantment inherent to things. Cohen’s lyrical style makes its way into your thinking with statements like these, and soon you find yourself taking life’s matters at a slower, more considered pace. More importantly, Stone is, as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen admits, “something of a thought experiment, attempting to discern in the most mundane of substances a liveliness” (6). A Medievalist by training, Cohen mobilizes the belief in rock as a living entity to which we are connected in holistic ways:

Medieval writers knew well that the world has never been still . . . [H]umans may dream a separation from nature, may strive to exalt themselves from the recalcitrance of stone, but remain earth formed from earth, living upon the earth through alliance with earthen matter, returning at death to earth again. (6)

In contrast with contemporary literary scholarship that focuses on the post-human, the cybernetic, and the dystopic, Stone reminds us of our fundamental terrestrial and lithic connection, a connection that begins with the very composition of our bones. In this and other ways, Cohen wishes to remind us that stone is never completely inert. It remains a living substance in some regards, even though our comparatively short lifespan alongside lithic formations means we often fail to apprehend this. Cohen’s book follows similar object studies he has undertaken, such as those included in Inhuman Nature, an anthology of essays based on an “ecologies of the inhuman” roundtable held in 2012.

Stone‘s text is often as dense as its namesake. It forces you to move through it slowly, in a style reminiscent of glacial creep or of the time it takes water to erode a rock face. This is no accident. As Cohen states in the introduction, “Because of its density, extensiveness, tempo, and force, there is something in rock that is actively unknowable, something that will not surrender itself to stabilities…. In that reproach inheres a trigger to human creativity and a provocation to cross-ontological fellowship” (8). Departing from other texts like Manuel DeLanda’s “Inorganic Life,” Cohen is interested in recognizing stone as an ally in humanity’s long history of material production; Stone wants to remind us that nature is not separate and apart from human life. Thus, in Stone we see the geological, the ontological, the material, and the epistemological. It’s a large undertaking, but one that Cohen handles thoughtfully, using literary and cultural-studies analyses to help readers gain a perspective of geologic time and relative human existence.

Earth’s cosmological history is difficult to grasp beyond the superficial understanding that its age contains a lot of zeroes. It’s like trying to get one’s head around the national debt: thinking in terms of trillions is rather abstract until the figure is fully written out, down to the fourteenth digit. Likewise, it’s difficult to apprehend Earth’s formation and evolution from the perspective of our own comparatively recent emergence from the primordial soup. Cohen uses cultural references, including to literature and architecture, to help us realize that long view because he connects human experience with the terrestrial. While geology as a field attempts to give us a sense of Earth’s ancient past by demarcating epochs, strata, and materials, Cohen’s approach is humanistic, not scientific. He moves from the teleologic to the ontologic, linking stone’s history with moments from human history, so our sense of the eons becomes more discernible. Reckoning with such scales of time can be unsettling, as Cohen acknowledges when he writes, “Stones are the partners with which we build the epistemological structures that may topple upon us” (4). Cohen believes it’s important to showcase “an aeonic companionship of the ephemeral and the enduring, the organic and the material” (17). Cohen offers us an important reminder that the earth will survive long past us. Scientists and others¹ argue that considering the Anthropocene and its consequences requires an epistemological shift, one that notes that climatic and other environmental processes, as well as geopolitical borders, are irrelevant. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have made an irreversible mark on the global biosphere. Stone reminds us that lithic materiality is largely immune to this impact, despite our interaction with and use of it.

As we ponder the lithic, so much that makes us human becomes evident. We use stone to build houses and cathedrals; we use stone to heal and to punish; we mine stones; we use stones for exchange, memorials and recreation; to sculpt, to dam waters, to pave roads. So many things that reflect our cultural–our human–values begin with stone, yet this book reminds us that stone will endure beyond us and any human society that interacted with it. Cohen’s study presents examples that reveal the myriad ways we have connected with stone throughout our history. He sets up the book’s chapters not chronologically or by genre but according to poetic ways he considers stone–in a chapter subtitled “the weight of the past,” for example, or “a heart unknown.” I especially enjoy his analysis of events or stories we’ve long heard about but never paid particular attention to with regard to stone’s role. For example, in his chapter “Soul,” Cohen analyzes Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales, noting the scholarship that connects the ancient rocks in the tale to the Welsh people whom Chaucer never acknowledges; instead, he relegates them to a past that pre-dates him. Such instances of “Chaucerian appropriations occur only to petrify the British history from which they are plundered . . . What stirred for a moment—geological and indigenous history, the possibility of enduring geological and indigenous life—is stilled into drowned stone” (199-200). The erasure of the Welsh from Chaucer’s text is one example of how cultures have been written out of—or used to “petrify”—literary or cultural history. In another essay, Cohen explains that, to medieval citizens, minerals and gems were far from inert or immobile; rather, stones could influence the world and even sought alliances with organic beings (“Stories” 59). In the example above, Cohen revives Chaucer’s stone from its “drowned” past by reminding us of stone’s “in/organic alliance” with the human and, thus, the latent stories it may contain (Stone 198).

Other of Cohen’s arguments leave me less interested as when, for example, he uses his personal travel as an opportunity to discuss stone. In the book’s conclusion, Cohen describes visiting Iceland, because to “journey Iceland is to traverse a landscape thick with story, a topography known already through medieval sagas” (253). Cohen has visited Iceland, he claims, in order to finish writing the book, but besides noting that the “[h]uman trace is far more recent” there than in landscapes in Ireland, Britain, and France, he concludes that due to its volcanic activity and mountains of ice, “Iceland reminds that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient” (255-56). Cohen references volcanic activity because it suggests stone’s “liveliness,” and he sees in the rocky terrain “art catalytic to the project’s instigation” (255). However, his analysis ends here without providing a literary connection–to, say, one of the Icelandic sagas he mentions–that makes reading the book so informative. Instead, the connection of the human to the lithic is glossed, with Cohen remarking simply: “Except for the occasional remains of a farmstead’s hearth, fire and stone collaborating to send story forward, the landscape holds few lithic communication devices” (256). After insisting so long that the lithic seeks alliance with the organic in “cross-ontological fellowship,” it seems odd that Cohen would focus on where that connection is absent. Here, stone is simply a remnant, marking its temporary usefulness in a home.

Additionally, Cohen strays from his purpose with some of his analyses. For example, he includes a scene from History of English Affairs where a passerby hears a party taking place inside a small hill. The traveler is welcomed into the party by the revelers, and as soon as he drinks the cup that’s offered to him, he flees, taking the goblet with him. Cohen poses a series of rhetorical questions concerning the narrative—e.g., “What would have unfolded if the drunken traveler had joined the celebration instead of pilfering the tableware?”—yet the episode has little to do with stone per se except that the celebration is held underground (204). The goblet is made of an unknown material, which perhaps could be a reference to an unusual clay or other earthen material, yet the passage seems to focus on “otherworldliness” and the subterranean as a potential portal to such a place. In contrast to many other instances where Cohen makes the lithic central to the literary or cultural encounter, it seems the role stone plays in this event is oblique. He is retelling the story and so has no control over its content. However, had the goblet been created from a particular stone that was believed to contain certain powers, or had it included precious gems, it would have seemed more in line with earlier examples. Cohen uses the scene to suggest that the hillock has been transformed “from a local landmark of no great significance to a space at once alien and racialized” given the multiplicity of partiers (205). Yet this seems a tenuous connection to stone, which otherwise features so substantially in his other analyses.

Stone appears at a literary time when humanity’s connection to natural and virtual worlds is diversely fictionalized and analyzed. As Cohen states, Stone can, therefore, serve as “an interlocutor in some lively critical conversations: ecotheory and environmental studies, posthumanism, medieval studies, and the new materialism” (16). The recent Dirt: A Love Story also focuses on material earth. The scientists, authors, artists, and others who contributed to that anthology consider soil from myriad perspectives, just as Cohen does with the lithic. Like Dirt, Stone‘s various perspectives provide scholars with multiple ways to academically, morally, and philosophically consider the natural world that surrounds us yet remains unseen. A similar text is Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, a transdisciplinary anthology that invites readers to “encounter ants, lichens, rocks, electrons, flying foxes, salmon, chestnut trees, mud volcanoes, border zones, graves, radioactive waste” and other forms humans share the planet with in this environmental stage. But scholars have studied the relationship between organic and inorganic life for decades, analyzing how they work together in the sort of alliance medieval citizens envisioned. In “Nonorganic Life,” for example, DeLanda describes the “[s]elf-organizing processes [that] drive the geological cycle,” and argues for taking the time to study rocks, which appear to remain stable and permanent but really contain “migrating atoms” and fissures that constantly form and propagate (142). Studying these processes is said to allow us to gain the “‘wisdom of the rocks,’ a way of listening to a creative, expressive flow of matter for guidance on how to work with our own organic strata” (143). What distinguishes Stone from DeLanda’s work is Cohen’s sole focus on stone and his emphasis on the organic-inorganic alliance. He combines his knowledge of Medieval paradigms with scientific scholarship to show how this alliance might be manifest, such as with crystals or other stones that have healing powers. The scope of Cohen’s material, from biblical texts to modern film, demonstrates how much work like this remains unexplored.

Roger Caillois published The Writing of Stones in 1970, two decades before DeLanda’s work. In Writing, he analyzes rock samples and cross-sections and ascribes to them an ability to tell stories, create microcosmic landscape “paintings,” and depict planetary orbits. Caillois offers what he calls “a series of reflections on what I have learned from familiarity with certain stones,” interpretations that seem to be based less on rationality than on “mysticism”—or the simple human impulse for pattern recognition (ix, xiv). Cohen’s work is more rational than Caillois’s in that he shows the long interconnection between the human and the stone through minerals and elements, but also through history and culture. He doesn’t impose humanistic interpretations on geologic formations, like seeing a “landscape painting” in mineral formations, as Caillois does. However, he does seem to take from Caillois a sense of the poetic. While Caillois states, “Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so” (1-2), for Cohen “the lithic offers passage into action, a catalyst, a cause” (5). It is easy to believe that Cohen took inspiration from Caillois, and indeed his text, like DeLanda’s, appears in Stone‘s bibliography.

If the future is more cybernetic, our connection with the earth will become even more profound as metals and elements-based wiring support human life systems more fundamentally and organically than they do now. As scholars consider the Anthropocene, the posthuman, the virtual and the natural worlds, Stone reminds us of our connection to the lithic—its presence in our life and our alliance with it. If one were to ask Cohen about our human-lithic connection, I imagine he would say it’s a beautiful thing. After all, as he notes, “We love stone, and the marks we make upon stone, and the marks stone makes upon us. Stone insists not because it is so different from we who build families of whatever kind against cataclysm, but because of its deep affinity, its enduring tectonicity . . . its strangely inhuman (I don’t know what else to call it) love” (73).

Footnotes

1. For example, see Crutzen and Stoermer and Schellhuber (cited in Peter Verburg, et al.) and Louis Kotzé.

Works Cited

• Caillois, Roger. The Writing of Stones. Translated by Barbara Bray, U of Virginia P, 1985.
• Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Stories of Stone.” Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1-2, 2010, pp. 56-63. doi:10.1057/pmed.2009.1.
• DeLanda, Manuel. “Nonorganic Life.” Incorporations. Edited by Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone, 1992, pp. 129-167.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, Heather Anne Swanson, Elain Gan, and Nils Bubandt, editors. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. U of Minnesota P, 2017.