Recently I interviewed Aidan Tynan about his book The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy, an excellent new addition to the Edinburgh University Press Crosscurrents series.
Chris Watkin: What first drew you to contemplate the desert? Was there one book or encounter that originally led you to the importance of this motif?
Aidan Tynan: The desert that really grabbed my attention and convinced me I needed to write this book was the one that haunted Nietzsche’s vision of the future. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he proclaimed that ‘the desert grows / Die Wüste wächst’. This is not simply an apocalyptic vision, a vision of mere disintegration, but one filled with possible futures. The furthest Nietzsche ever got to an actual desert was Italy, and his imagination was full of the kinds of orientalism we find in Goethe’s West–östlicher Divan, for example, but there is something in the Western imagination of the desert as a space of alterity that tells us a lot about the crisis of the European self that Nietzsche not only described in his work but lived as an ordeal. His eventual breakdown was itself a desert experience, in a very real sense. This is why that Zarathustra line is immediately followed by ‘woe to him who harbours deserts / weh Dem der Wüsten birgt’. These Nietzschean ‘refrains’ of the desert were the most important for the genesis of my book. They resounded in my head for years before I even attempted to writing anything on this topic. They suggested to me that the fascination with deserts that arises with Romantic culture and which continues on into modernism, postmodernism and beyond, is bound up in important ways with what Deleuze, following F. Scott Fitzgerald, called a ‘crack-up’ of the self. Deleuze quoted Fitzgerald to provide a desert image for this: ‘it’s much better to say that it’s not you that’s cracked—it’s the Grand Canyon.’ This notion of a geological crack in subjectivity drove much of my research.
CW: Beyond their own intrinsic fascination, why are deserts in literature and philosophy important? What do they help us understand, what do they challenge, what do they refigure?
AT: The deserts I look at all pose some kind of a challenge or problem for the philosophical and literary authors I deal with. We are perhaps used to the desert as an object of contemplation, a place of healing or calm or retreat, a place where an untouched nature might still be found. There is a whole body of American desert writing, often in the form of memoir, that contemplates the desert in this way. But I am more interested in deserts that challenge and frustrate, that offer a critique of life. This is why I focus a lot on writers such as Cormac McCarthy, whose views of the desert are not always in line with a liberal environmental or contemplative view. As I put it in the introduction, the desert has the power to scramble the codes by which we understand life, death, the never-living, and the relations between all of these. As concrete environments, deserts of all kinds pose life with specific challenges and life responds in various ways, giving us the remarkable biological diversity that we find in desert ecologies. The desert as an aesthetic and conceptual category likewise poses challenges for subjectivity, thought, and feeling. Deserts provoke a remarkable array of responses from disgust to joy.
For more posts and interviews relared to the Crosscurrents series, please click here.
CW: What work is being done by the definite article in “the desert”? Is it a stable concept, and are all literary and philosophical deserts the same?
AT: No, there is a lot of diversity in literary and philosophical deserts. Scientists are often troubled by the lack of a single concept capable of subsuming all of the places regarded as desert environments. At the same time, people tend to recognise a desert when they see one. As a non-scientist and non-geographer, it is interesting for me to try to make sense of this instability. In many ways, the desert is a highly unstable concept, which accounts for its remarkable diversity and plasticity. A desert can be found almost anywhere. Medieval culture regarded the forests of Europe as deserts because they provided places of solitude and penitence. Eighteenth century Britain saw uncultivated, unproductive or ‘unimproved’ landscapes as wasteland and thus places signifying sin. T. S. Eliot’s London is one of the most famous deserts in literature. Today, we speak of food deserts and cultural deserts. Desertification is the standard term for the erosion and degradation of soil from unsustainable farming and drought, even though desertified land is very different from desert ecologies, which are themselves endangered. We tend to associate desert landscapes with aesthetic sublimity, but prior to the nineteenth century, one of the main aesthetic and affective responses to the desert was disgust. In Christian culture, the desert is a site of both sin and potential salvation, fallenness and transcendence. In speculative fiction, deserts can be the environments of utopias or dystopias. Indeed, there is long tradition of utopian communes in the desert, from the Desert Fathers of antiquity to the hippies of twentieth century America and the apocalyptic visions of Charles Manson. Despite this great diversity, we often have a single intuition of the desert—we know one when we see one. Perhaps the inescapability of this singularity lies in how the desert is used—for example, by Margaret Atwood and E. O. Wilson—to think about the prospect of an Earth that has lost most of its biodiversity. Much of my book is an exploration of this tension between the singular and the multiple.
CW: Is the desert of this book the desert as imagined by those who do not live in a desert or, more pointedly, the desert of contemporary affluent metropolitan Westerners? Who is the “we” of the book?
AT: What we call ‘modernity’ has been defined by Westerners responding, often brutally and violently, to spatial and temporal alterity. The blood-drenched history of the American West that McCarthy describes so powerfully in Blood Meridian emerges from this process. The environmental emergency has arisen in much the same way. Capitalism swallows up and absorbs geographical difference, but also somehow lives precariously within that difference, which it cannot resolve. The desert cities of California, Nevada and Colorado are monuments to this, as Baudrillard understood as he drove through those regions. When Nietzsche, in the late nineteenth century, invoked the desert as the terrain where European nihilism might consummate itself, I think he had in mind, to some degree at least, the ugly and violent passions of colonialism and the related will to become ‘master of the Earth’. This is why much of my discussion relates to the history of colonial expansion and globalisation, to figures such as T. E. Lawrence, for example, who sees in the deserts of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War One an image of European selfhood’s spiritual omega. The desert is a surface on which the European mind is reflected back on itself and forced to contend with its terminus. The deserts of Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega, a meditation on the aftermath of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, plays this role in ways that are similar to Lawrence. I devote a chapter to desert islands in which I discuss the Robinson Crusoe myth and the desert planets of authors such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin. In many ways, I feel that these intersections of the Western mind, the global onslaught of capitalist desire, and the geographical alterities of deserts can tell us a lot about the environmental condition of the Earth today. The contemplative, highly aestheticised view of the desert is like the flipside of the West’s violent colonial encounters. The nineteenth century French orientalist painter Eugène Fromentin spent time in Algeria and was one of the first to argue for the desert’s beauty. The art critic John C. Van Dyke’s early twentieth century book on the desert was the first text to offer an aesthetic appreciation—influenced by John Ruskin— of the deserts of the American Southwest. Fromentin and Van Dyke’s views rested on the atrocities of settler colonialism and were its direct ideological products. The aesthetic doctrines these figures extol are an attempt, however unconscious, to redeem the colonial project through some supposedly unmediated encounter with the landscape. But this is something I challenge.
CW: I was intrigued by the claim that “the crisis of the Western subject can be understood from a post-psychoanalytic perspective as an energy crisis.” Could you briefly explain what you mean by that.
AT: Deserts, wastelands and similar kinds of landscapes often appear as cultural analogues of entropy, the tendency for energy to be dissipated in an irreversible process. As industrial society became increasingly based around the transformation of heat into work during the nineteenth century, there emerged a moral panic that the whole world would decline towards the absolute zero of ‘heat death’. This fear impacted on much twentieth century literature, from Eliot to Thomas Pynchon, Angela Carter and DeLillo. Psychoanalysis developed along these lines too. Freud’s understanding of neurosis and psychosis is based on how a subjective libidinal energy is invested outwards and inwards. For Freud, neurosis was a reaction to the excessive and troubling instability of energy in the psyche. Lacan developed this with this concept of ‘jouissance’, a form of enjoyment that borders on suffering. The body reacts against its own enjoyment, which is why Lacan says the body becomes ‘a desert of jouissance’. In psychosis, on the other hand, Freud thought that libido is withdrawn from the outer world altogether. Many psychotic delusions are about the end of the world. We can speak here about a kind of libidinal apocalypticism. Psychoanalysis, then, offers ways of thinking about energy in a society that feels deep panic over scarcity, excess, and the possibility of an absolute dissipation. Deleuze and Guattari rescue this critique of energy from the reactionary elements of psychoanalytic theory, its tendency to take the side of the repressive law of the Father. They develop the concept of the body without organs, which they call ‘a desert’, based on the writings of schizophrenic authors such as Daniel Paul Schreber and Antonin Artaud. The psychotic withdrawal of libidinal energy from the world creates a type of desert-body, but not the kind Lacan described. This body is able to pose a critique to its social environment and its logics of energy. The libidinal apocalypse of schizophrenia can thus be drawn on as a conceptual model for thinking beyond the energy crises inaugurated by industrial society. To politicise desire in this way, it is necessary to dispense with the familial or oedipal framework of subjectivity. This post-psychoanalytic path seems to me a really fruitful way of theorising connections between subjectivity and the environment at a time when our environmental condition seems genuinely apocalyptic. As Deleuze and Guattari say, the schizophrenic ‘rediscovers’ the Earth.
CW: What does a focus on the desert bring fresh to existing eco-theoretical debates in authors like Timothy Morton and Kate Rigby?
AT: In her book Topographies of the Sacred, Rigby is critical of Jonathan Bate’s accounts of Green Romanticism. Bate’s works were crucial to the establishment of ecocriticism, especially in the UK, but it lead to a certain conception of aestheticised nature that emphasised notions of harmony and unity. Rigby provides a corrective by pointing to Romantic experiences of extreme or inhospitable nature. Morton, going further, suggested that the harmonious view of nature that emerged with Romantic aesthetics was itself an ideological image of the industrial capitalism that emerged around the same time. His Ecology without Nature was my first encounter with ecocriticism, and I work with many of his concepts in my book. Even though he is critical of Deleuze and Guattari, I try to synthesise their approach with Morton’s. The desert of the body without organs provides a ‘nomadic’ conception of subjectivity which is not tied the kinds of Eurocentric notions of ‘dwelling’ that Bate and a lot of other ecocritics deploy. Another thing I take from Morton is a critique of the notion of ‘world’ and the way world and environment often seem cognate (this is another Romantic inheritance). Ecology without nature is also an ecology without world. World too often functions as an aesthetic frame which we place around nature in order to appreciate or contemplate it. But our environmental emergency demands that we dispense with these ways of framing nature. The desert, as I’ve already indicated, has been framed in this way, but by rejecting this framing I try to bring out how the desert resists the aesthetic modes that have been imposed on it by the colonising, Western eye. My goal here is in part to challenge tendencies within ecocriticism to privilege concepts such as place, world, belonging, dwelling and the local. The prefix ‘eco’ comes from the Greek word ‘oikos’, which means home or house. The term ‘ecology’, introduced by Ernst Haeckel in 1866, conceptualises life in its various ‘dwelling places’. But environmental crisis today demands that we attend to how life is increasingly detached from the security of a home. Our global environmental condition is one of terrestrial life, human and nonhuman, in flight. Ecocriticism needs to engage with the Earth not simply as the home of life but as a site in which life ceases to be at home. My analyses of the desert are motivated by this way of thinking about life.
CW: In the conclusion you argue that the Anthropocene spells the end of philosophies of difference. How does it do that?
AT: The biologist E. O. Wilson has suggested that the Anthropocene—the epoch in which humans leave indelible traces on the Earth—can also be regarded as the ‘Eremocene’, the epoch of deserts. The Greek word ‘eremos’ means desert or solitude, so Wilson’s point is that the mass extinctions currently underway are threatening to give rise to an Earth in which the diversity of life is annihilated, leaving humanity alone with itself. Other scientists have more recently conceived of extinction as ‘biological annihilation’. Some speak of a ‘homogenocene’ because of how the planet has been homogenised by a very narrow kind of human life in which the economic flourishing manifested by capitalism entails a destruction of human and nonhuman difference on an immense global and epochal scale. Philosophies of difference must contend not only with difference itself but these forms of epochal, planetary destructions of difference. Heidegger, a key figure in the philosophy of difference along with Nietzsche, Levinas, Derrida and Deleuze, said in the 1950s that the growth of the desert of nihilism can go hand in the hand with a rise in living standards and economic flourishing. There is no necessary contradiction between the devastation of Earthly being and capitalist flourishing. From Nietzsche to Deleuze, philosophy has focused on the desert as a conceptual topos, a place of thought, in which meaningful difference is both destroyed and reclaimed. For Nietzsche, nihilism needed to be ‘completed’ before a new form of global life could appear. Heidegger argued much the same: the technoscientific, capitalist worldview devastates difference, but difference can survive this and emerge in a new epoch. The apocalypticism that Deleuze and Guattari see in the desert of the body without organs similarly promises what they call a ‘New Earth’. These philosophies of difference, then, though in many ways unique to their intellectual atmosphere, appear strangely relevant to thinking our own time and the prospects for a post-Anthropocene, post-capitalist future.
