Introduction to “Field Theory”

Jeff Diamanti, Guest Editor (bio)

This special issue of Postmodern Culture gathers scholars in the environmental and critical humanities developing advanced, practice-based methodologies and critical theories of field research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. That data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but verifiably not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and it is for this reason that “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit, even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning. Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains an under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom from the stylistics of disciplinary habit—in short, the world and what we make of it? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretive apparatus, as for instance in the work of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Thomas Nail, Isabelle Stengers, and Elaine Gan? The occasion of this special issue of Postmodern Culture on “field theory” is to reflect on the emergent position that environmental theory ought to recur to a situated field of inquiry, such as a geo-physical and historically determined place, and that this in turn inflects the disciplinary bounds of a given field, whether for reasons involving interdisciplinarity, the character of the objects of inquiry, or epistemological pragmatism. This position involves, among other important shifts in teaching and writing, adapting humanistic and post-humanistic inquiry to the complex challenges unleashed by anthropogenic climate change and its contested political ecologies in medias res. The normative impulse to particularize theory in concert with the animate ecologies, polyphonic voice, and vernaculars of a field requires an immersive and often creative research ethic that attends to what in philosophical biology has long been understood as the blurred distinction between organism and milieu (Margulis 13; Canguilhem 7), or what in a humanities vocabulary is the figure and ground relation.

More typical in environmental humanities historically has been an orientation toward particular places as they register in cultural representations that are either about the ecology of a place or take on signature features of that place. This has included analyses of voice, mood, and tone in poetic and narrative texts grounded in a particular ecology and inquiries into the affordances and limits of visual media in holding ecological dynamics to form. But while scholars turning to fieldwork as the grounds of both their objects and theoretical frameworks still centralize cultural history and representation in their analyses, the question of how to make theoretical presuppositions and analytic procedures commensurate with the lived realities of the field also asks for an attunement to the character of those responsible for, and to the field of forces encountered and sought out in, fieldwork. Immersion in a place takes time and requires participatory modes of reading and understanding that often frustrate orthodox expectations, especially when the object of inquiry is sedimented into the environment of the field and the various infrastructures that channel energy, resources, and conflicts to a place but might not originate there. Because of this multi-sensory, creative, and critical character of interpretation in the field, theoretical reflection in the environmental humanities has come to include sustained engagement with environmental and decolonial anthropology, infrastructure and logistics studies, and elemental media studies, among other frameworks attentive to the many currents that subtend a field.

Grounding theory in the field might seem at face value like a description of what all disciplines do anyways. Some version of this commitment can be found in arguments about empirical observation in the physical sciences between inductivist and deductivist strains of logic. But the debate between Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper over the question of what distinguishes theory from observation always involved a more fundamental disagreement about the relationship between the motivation for observation and the means by which observation takes on meaning. Such questions plaguing the empirical sciences might seem far removed from the more critically oriented analysis of cultural texts and contexts in the humanities, but just as powerful in the humanities has been the fraught question of how to analytically account for the location of meaning, especially since, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphatically argues, the “presence effect” in experience is conjoined with but never reducible to a hermeneutic of “meaning effects” (106). The paradox in today’s environmentally-coded context is that so much of what expresses in the present of the very air we breathe is an inherited exhaust of previous years of industrial modernity: empirically in what suspends chemically in the atmosphere, and emphatically in the historicities that inhere in those chemicals. The carbon dioxide accumulated in what Tobias Menely calls “Anthropocene Air” is heavy with causation and conflict, permeating what poet Anne Boyer terms the “inhalations of a capitalist profane.” So many of the most generative accounts of what subtends the durée of the present involve critical attention to the logic of the very terms by which deictic placement in the here and now, or there and then, works beyond our attempts to capture that placement linguistically. They show how what gives weight to the present and places us in a planetary horizon of ecological catastrophe occurs in a complex assemblage of planetary forces, physical infrastructures, and semiotic frames. The biogeochemistry of our contemporary world laces together real, structuring forces more familiar to the nomenclature of the present—whether by century, decade, or mode of production—but with distinct enough diegetic presence to have forestalled consensus on dating the end of the Holocene by at least a decade. Grounding theory in the field of these forces and frames means spending time in the places where they are most legible: environments signalling ecological precarity; infrastructures of extraction and dispossession; fields of struggle and emancipatory desire. It also means addressing ongoing epistemological questions: When and where does theory happen? Where ought it happen?

The expansion of “the field” of environmental humanities to include various kinds of fieldwork asks for methodological reflection, especially for scholars trained in literary and cultural analysis whose reading lists have long included anthropological ethnographies. All of the scholars invited to reflect on the emergence of this position have their own disciplinary and political interests in maintaining the alignment of “field” and “theory,” and do so through literary, poetic, visual, logistical, and anthropological analysis. And while the reason for the rise of fieldwork in the environmental humanities does not require a lot of explanation, the status of theory amidst that rise does.

The dominant thread of environmental theory in the past two decades has been “relationship,” specifically within a modal framework that centralizes the symbiotic nature of worldbuilding between human and non-human actors, epistemologies, and semiotic logics. In Donna Haraway’s classic formulation, “[s]pecies interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect” (19). This crux of theoretical energy can be found in the work of Eduardo Kohn, too, in the Peircean semiotics marshalled to understand communication logics in botanical culture, and perhaps most canonically in Anna Tsing’s work on palm oil in Indonesia and the lifeworld of the matsutake mushroom. Practically speaking, this theoretical impulse involves a descriptive ethic that decenters the human as the locus of meaning making. At a more philosophical level, it has also generated efforts to redefine ontology, agency, ethics, and indeed the historicity of theory itself.

The redefinition of theory’s horizon is not restricted to science and technology studies or anthropology. Across the social and humanistic sciences in the past few years, it has become something of an epistemic doxa to acknowledge and pursue the methodological “arts of noticing,” which is also the title of the opening chapter of Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. Not just anthropology, but literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, creative and artistic research, media studies, and a range of disciplinary idioms are drawn into renewed attachment to the precarious lifeworlds given to thoughts in and about the environmental conditions of our present. Like many scholars analyzing the political ecologies of the present, Tsing convincingly weds several of the normative horizons of critique to the mostly latent narratives of progress that underwrite them. In the same gesture, she posits a more immanent horizon to “the dilemmas of collaborative survival” populating the many landscapes and wakes supposedly evidencing this or that concluded meta-narrative (25). In a single day, one might encounter artists, colleagues, comrades, and students signaling agreement that we now practice these arts of noticing in cities all over the world, and that this practice is in opposition to a different way of doing things. It provides and entails a different way of satisfying the practical business of research, always in relation to the meta-historical framework within which that research is tasked with making sense. No longer embedded in the self-satisfying sway of progress (or modernity, or revolution, or . . .), this new doxa carries with it a number of powerful concepts, ethical modalities, and styles of writing. Their epistemic point of convergence in situ is “the field” as such, and more empirically the theoretical orientations immanent, instead of antecedent, to that field. But do we all mean the same thing when we acknowledge the shifting horizon of our normative judgements from “progress” to “polyphonic assemblage” (24), and might the latter retain the grounds for the former?

The stakes of tracking these material and multi-species assemblages is in keeping with a larger epistemic shift underway in the humanities and social sciences in the last decade or so—a shift very often cited in the conceptual constellation gathered in works by Tsing, Haraway, and Bruno Latour—and there are a number of counter tendencies and powerful arguments against this epistemic shift.¹ But it has become difficult for scholars studying the ongoing phenomena of anthropogenic climate change to interpret their objects of study without adapting older methods of inquiry to the liveliness and complexity of the scenes, landscapes, and situations in which those objects do their work in the world. Biotic agents read milieu; ecological entities like forests and watersheds bear and make meaning; and symbiotic solidarities form beyond the categories of humanist reason available for recognition. These assemblages and processes require an immersive, creative, and compassionate ethic of research commensurate with the shifting norms that occasion that research. And without too quickly effacing the important difference between the close reading of cultural objects and the “arts of noticing” what is only ever partially discernible to the human, there is a clear bridge connecting the respective orientations of reader and researcher in this mode of environmental inquiry. That bridge is itself a theoretical proposition, and it depends on creative and critical experimentation with shared methods in the field.

Where does this signal gesture find its accountability? In part, the location of situated theory is recursive to the creative modes of study increasingly marking the methods and prose of environmental humanities research. Field theory sounds what can and cannot register in the mediatic apparatus of experience in the field and what occurs as a superimposition at the level of conceptual abstraction. Learning with and from the field, it opposes the god’s-eye view but not as the next stage of theoretical accomplishment. There is something compelling about how gentle and attentive theory becomes when it tends to what orients bodies and their historicities, even if there remains a critical tension in how to locate the normative grounds of fieldwork, or, how to field normative grounds. In addition to the experimental anthropology of the Aarhus school, as for instance in the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and the Stanford University produced Feral Atlas, two uniquely influential resources helping scholars reorient humanistic inquiry to the environmental drama of a warming world, the early 2020s have also seen a number of creative and artistic approaches to fieldwork that help codify and distribute techniques for this gentle orientation. In Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, for instance, Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton suggest a necessary relation between experimental forms of writing and recording and the unexpected direction of research over time in the field (14). Distinguishing creative research in the field from an observational or data-gathering practice that leans toward nomothetic concepts, they argue that “artwork is often co-produced with the multiplicities of the environment” and that this multimedia commitment to “co-production” helps address fraught questions of “ethics, reciprocity and care” occasioned by precarity (12). In its strongest form, fieldwork as a creative and collaborative practice involves a reflexive and generative ethic that blurs the lines between interpretive reading and collective composition; or put differently, it blurs the line of demarcation between ethnographic positions and situations summoned by solidarities. Ethnography in this creative turn becomes not just a moment of translation between epistemic cultures but a semiotic blending, or what the FieldARTS collective terms a brackish methodology, exposed to the visual, sonic, and corporeal field of media (Field Docket 10).

Motivating much fieldwork in the environmental humanities has been the effort to map the often remote geographies drawn into intimate relation through extractive industries and complex supply chains. In this special issue, we collect encounters with a number of logistical infrastructures connecting seaborne trade to financial markets and landscapes sourcing many of the raw materials that congeal into commodities and the built world. Michaele Büsse’s ongoing research into the cultural and elemental geographies of sand extraction takes us to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam in an effort to challenge preconceived conceptions of environment, resources, and research ethics in the extractive field underwriting the supply chains of the built world. Sand is the second most utilized resource in the world and is central for the production of cement, glass, and the expansive demands of urbanization more generally. Crucially, however, its availability in bindable form is limited to a few landscapes on earth. Thinking with the granularity of scales congealed into the ecologies of sand, Büsse utilizes visual and embedded forms of ethnography in order to read “the messiness of sociomaterial practices”—an orientation to the elemental, economic, and ecological flows of a field “that focuses not only on extractive dimensions but also on contingencies, ruptures, and alternative openings.”

The question of how to rethink the place of the field in contemporary theory and philosophy has extended through the social sciences and humanities more broadly. In their introduction to the 2018 special issue of Parallax, for instance, Brett Buchanan, Michelle Bastian, and Matthew Chrulew rehearse the formative claim for a recursive relation between the field and philosophy charted through the work of the late Michel Foucault to Paul Rabinow and Pierre Bourdieu for anthropology and sociology, respectively. While the expansion of the pedagogical repertoire in the environmental humanities occasions the question of their special issue and ours, this recurrence of an immersive orientation toward the terms of philosophy helps explain why the most sophisticated and polemical edges to field theory are knotted to the ethical strain of ethnography as well as the correlate concern: Who reads and who writes? After all, as the authors of “Field Philosophy” suggest, philosophy always presupposes a relation to a field—even if this relation is too often assumed to operate extradiegetically (Buchanan et al. 384)—but the responsibilities wedded to ethnographic practice involve a ceaseless interrogation of one’s own assumptions about the relationalities involved in any experience, including those to which you do not have access.

In anthropology, the ethics of observation and the reification effect of ethnography have long asked for ongoing disciplinary reflection—both as questions students are expected to struggle with before conducting fieldwork, and as methodological practice that can only be fully wrestled with in the field. Asking for a shifting of terms from “protection or predation” to “collaboration and compromise,” Mareike Winchell argues in this issue for a notion of the field that is already suffused with theoretical practices that do not depend on the ethnographer’s translation for traction. Indeed, recent shifts both toward multispecies ethnography and away from salvage anthropology and its colonial inheritances have been described as efforts to collaborate with and be drawn into the ongoing community in a field, instead of identifying and studying objects of inquiry at a distance. The changing “field” has been crucial to these shifts in ethnographic practice: both a “where” of research and a formation of commitment. Always central to the analytic parameters of theory, commitment carries the weight of an interpretive horizon central to research, even when it goes unremarked or implicit in a given doxa. In Winchell’s account, “to ‘stand with’ builds answerability to such concerns not only into what researchers do, including field methods and collaborations, but also into broader interdisciplinary debates about what counts as knowledge, why its pursuit is worthwhile, and for whom.”

Hence the aim of this special issue, which is to put pressure on the mostly implicit claim in the post-critical origins of recent field theory that a reading practice oriented by the field, instead of the hylomorphic fetish of the object, is logically extensive with a renunciation of critique and the normative horizon recursive to it. Reconsidering the place of labor struggle in the concept of the field, Fred Carter’s contribution to this issue tracks the cartographies of extraction and poetics of worker’s inquiry in the Durham Coalfield of Northeast England. Taking us to the seam interlocking fossil-fueled modernity, Carter’s sensitivity to the energies and promises of the field involve “an attempt to trace the interlocking practices of open-form poetry, partisan knowledge, and collective autonomy that come to militate against fossil capital’s dominant modalities of reading and rendering the field.” Bringing together a range of anti-capitalist currents of inquiry knotted to 1970s and 80s energy fields across Europe, Carter’s research helps reconceptualize the extractive valence of “field” as a basin of geological resource inoculated against contestation and appropriation. To read the cartography of capital’s energic gaze as convergent with a poetics of labor struggle means recasting the field as a contingency, a project, and a terrain of struggle.

Inviting students to get outside of the classroom and to think through conventions and concepts of scholarly research in the field is an opportunity to encounter many of the spaces, infrastructures, and ecologies that are already implicitly intimate to the lives we bring to the classroom. With humanities programs in particular, this analytic attention to fields also involves a reencounter with cultural media with an attention to how a text is itself a field of theoretical impulses and forces, both embedded in the historical context of their emergence and in the imaginaries they formalize. But a field is also a field, or what is more commonly associated in English with a meadow, and it will turn out in Maria Sledmere’s contribution to this issue that the figure of the meadow in recent eco-poetics asks for an expanded notion of the poetic field in order to witness the frequencies of ongoing commoning. In readings of Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim, Sledmere offers a powerful précis for what it means to read against a regime of enclosure and to cultivate sensibilities shaped by the porosity of meadows. A carbon sink with blurred boundaries, the meadow becomes a strong case for a field theory composed between the epistemic certainties that would otherwise define a given field in descriptive terms—an invitation to draw our analytic concepts, styles of thought, and interpretive horizons from a creative and attentive practice of reading with and in the field.

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021), tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research on Bloom Ecologies details the return to natural philosophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences, studying the interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean.

Works Cited

• Boyer, Anne. “The Heavy Air: Capitalism and Affronts to Common Sense.” The Yale Review, 1 Dec. 2020, https://yalereview.org/article/anne-boyer-capitalism-heavy-air.
• Buchanan, Brett, et al. “Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments.” Parallax vol. 24, no. 4, 2018, pp. 383–391. Taylor & Francis Online.
• Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu.” Grey Room, no. 3, Spring 2001, pp. 7–31, translated by John Savage. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1262564.
• Carter, Fred, and Jeff Diamanti eds. Field Docket. Sonic Acts Press, 2023.
• Crone, Bridget, et al., editors. Fieldwork for Future Ecologies. Onomatopee, 2022.
• Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2004.
• Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Posthumanities.
• Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. U of Chicago P, 2013.
• Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso, 2020.
• Margulis, Lynn. The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Phoenix Press, 1999.
• Menely, Tobias. “Anthropocene Air.” The Minnesota Review, no. 83, 2014, pp. 93–101. Duke UP.
• Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. Athlone Press, 1999.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015.
• Yusoff, Kathryn. “Mine as Paradigm.” e-flux architecture, June 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/381867/mine-as-paradigm/.

Footnotes

1. One of the strongest opponents to this epistemic shift, and its implicit position on the aims of theory, is Andreas Malm, who in The Progress of this Storm critiques Latour’s hybridism and Jane Bennett’s new materialism for their shared disdain for collective struggle and class-based analysis of environmental injustice.