Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman 9781478009290

Citation preview

influx & efflux

Jane Bennett

Duke University Press Durham and London  2020

influx & efflux writing up with Walt Whitman

© 2020 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞ Designed by Aimee C. Harrison Typeset in Portrait Text and Canela Text by Copperline Book Services Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bennett, Jane, (date) author. Title: Influx and efflux : writing up with Walt Whitman / Jane Bennett. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019036376 (print) | lccn 2019036377 (ebook) isbn 9781478007791 (hardcover) isbn 9781478008309 (paperback) isbn 9781478009290 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Whitman, Walt, 1819–1892—Criticism and interpretation. | Sympathy in literature. | Human ecology in literature. | American literature—19th century—History and criticism. Classification: lcc ps3242.s95 b46 2020 (print) | lcc ps3242.s95 (ebook) | ddc 811/.3—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036376 lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036377

Cover art: A mass of doodles by Jane Bennett.

contents

acknowledgments • vii • prologue. influx and efflux • ix • one. position and disposition • 1 • two. circuits of sympathy • 27 • three. solar judgment • 46 • refrain. the alchemy of affects • 63 • four. bad influence • 75 • five. thoreau experiments with natural influences • 92 • epilogue. a peculiar efficacy • 113 • notes • 119 • bibliography • 173 • index • 189 •

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acknowledgments

In 2005, when I had just joined the faculty of Johns Hopkins, my colleague Michael Moon gave me a copy of the Norton Critical Edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which he had edited. (How pleased I was to find it inscribed to “Camerada”! ) Michael’s gift set me afloat toward what would become influx & efflux more than a decade later. There have been so many vital winds, storms, and safe harbors. My sisters: Susan Bennett (with me on every little and big thing since 1960), Mary Marchand (together we find vistas), Deb Youngblood (steering me toward life, because work isn’t everything), Kathy Ferguson (mimesismimosas, we sail through conferences), Jennifer Culbert (whirls of coffee, class notes, understanding, poiesis), Katrin Pahl (walking and noticing things that I wouldn’t have without her), Emily Parker (OWC and Atwaters, navigating philosophy, feminism, family), Betsy Tomic (demonstrating how to swim against the tide), Sophie von Redecker (planting radishes and queer enchantments). The bracing weather of Mom, Dad, Don, tossing me where I would not otherwise go. The politics undertoe from the brilliant-and-kind: Rom Coles, Anatoli Ignatov, Jairus Grove, Aletta Norval, David Howarth, Steve Johnston (who once won a trophy). Stellar orientation (in the New York sky) from Jack Halberstam, Liz Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse, Marisa Prefer, and Lori Marso (who also rescued me, in a visit to Baltimore, from despairing that there was no way to turn drifts into a book).

Waves of Lorenz Engell and Christiane Voss (ontography, a liberating spring in Weimar), Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson (thinking with movement and sound in Chicago), Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (neighbors, we glimpsed other worlds on twilight walks), Nidesh Lawtoo (tilting me toward Caillois and bad influence), Tom Dumm (courage and beautiful writing). Whitman-laden, effortless conversations with Mort Schoolman, Upstate and along the midAtlantic. Breaths of fresh air from members of the sct seminar on “Ecomaterialism.” And from Jake Greear (thinking, making, wondering), Stephanie Erev (fern from a seed!, feeling vibrations), Chad Shomura (revealing atmospheres and impasses), Cara Daggett (this is what energy is), Katherine Goktepe (acting matters!), Bill Dixon (demotic politics with nature photography), Nathan Gies (candor + Whitmanian sensitivity + what would be good for me to read next), Willy Blomme (color of winter, glide of skate, pie of apple), J Mohorcich (making infrastructure great again), Nicole Grove (subtle alchemy of gender, technology, ir), Suvi Irvine (Diogenes and dogs), Dot Kwek (dancing with Spinoza and Zhuangzi), Stefanie Fishel (intrepid explorer of micro- and macro-biomes). Swells and gales: Cristin Ellis, Lida Maxwell, Laura Oulanne, Lars Tønder, Libby Anker, Davide Panagia, Bonnie Honig, PJ Brendese, Raviv Ganchrow, Martin Crowley, Bhrigu Singh, Anna Grear, Branka Arsić, Naveeda Khan, Marina Ludwigs, Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson, Matt Scherer, Marcus Boon, Anand Pandian, Lisa Baraitser, Stephen Campbell, Sacra Rosello, Michael O’Rourke, Eileen Joy, Jeff Dolven, Brooke Holmes, Nicolas Jabko, Rochelle Johnson, Kristen Case, William Rossi, Wai Chee Dimock, Jennifer Gurley, Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Paola Marrati, J. D. Dewsbury, Char Miller, Fiamma Montezemolo, Derek McCormack, Moe Beitiks, Marissa Benedict, Lindsey French, Barry Flood, Jamie Lorimer, Jeffrey Cohen, John McClure, James Lilley, Stephen White, Þóra Pétursdóttir, Sigurður Gylfi Magnússon, Karl Steel, Joshua Corey, Judith Mueller, Samantha Spyridakos. The book was also propelled by Sheharyar Imran, who assembled the bibliography; by Jiyoung Kim, who crafted the index; by the art design of Aimee Harrison; by the astute commentary of Mary-Jane Rubenstein (and another unnamed reviewer); and by the generous intelligence (and subtle criticism) of my editor, Courtney Berger. Throughout it all: the funny, warm, intense, and shimmering atmosphere that is Bill Connolly—dilator of thought, partner in life, remedy for seasickness.

• viii • acknowledgments

prologue

influx & efflux

I doodle, pretty much any time there is pencil in hand and paper nearby. Lines flow down arm, fingers, length of pencil, to exit at graphite tip and mingle with predecessors already on the page. “Lo, a shape!”1 I say to myself (quoting Walt Whitman) as it emerges.

Lo, a shape

Doodles don’t need a lot of space; they make landfall on margin of text, corner of napkin, upside down is fine, though they do like to roam. Is the doodle following rules of a geometry or perhaps a “protogeometry”?2 Or do doodles emerge in real time without a plan, each vague shape engendering a next on the fly? And what is my role in doodling? It seems I add something to the aesthetic of what also has the feel of automatic writing.3 The doodle brings obscure news of a netherworld in which I partake; it is somehow subjective without being the expression of an interiority all my own.4 This book was prompted by years of doodling — in meetings, in seminar rooms and lecture halls, on the phone, while trying to read. Doodling helps people to think, to process ideas, concepts, tones, and figures of speech.5 But doodling sparked the book in another way, too: the peculiar experience of self that comes to the fore while doodling — an “I” at once carried along and creative — became a key theme to explore. Indeed, doodling enacts a formative process that, following Whitman, I call “influx and efflux.” The phrase appears in this passage from “Song of Myself,” which features a sea breathing itself in and out as waves and an I partaking in that process: Sea of stretch’d groundswells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-­ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux I.6 “Influx and efflux” invokes that ubiquitous tendency for outsides to come in, muddy the waters, and exit to partake in new (lively/deathly) waves of encounter. The process might also be called Impression-­a nd-­Expression, Ingestion-­a nd-­Excretion, Immigration-­a nd-­Emigration  —  d ifferent names for the in-­and-­out, the comings and goings, as exteriorities cross (always permeable) borders to become interiorities that soon exude. The “and” of influx-­and-­efflux is also important: it marks the hover-­time of transformation, during which the otherwise that entered makes a difference and is made different. “And” is the interval between influx and efflux, in the sense in which Thoreau says that “poetry puts an interval between the impression & the expression.” 7 Poetry is here defined as an array of words able to induce a stutter or lag, a delay before a vibratory encounter becomes translated into a bite-­sized nugget of (human) experience. Influx-­and-­efflux is the way of Whitman’s world, a world of Urge and urge

• x • prologue

and urge, Always the procreant urge of the world.8 This book highlights affinities between Whitman and a tradition of process philosophy for which metamorphosis, and not only its entities or congealments, is a topic of great interest. “Process,” writes Kathy Ferguson, “is not the same as sequence; it is not a parade of already-­formed entities past our eyes. It is a ‘fluency of becoming.’ ”9 Whitman, along with the book’s other touchstone, Henry Thoreau (and also by way of Harold Bloom, Roger Caillois, Gilles Deleuze, Cristin Ellis, Dorothy Kwek, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, Erin Manning, Michel Serres, and Alfred North Whitehead), sets his sights both on cosmic process and on a shape called I. Shape is a Whitmanian term of art — it names a formation less stable than entity, less mentalistic than concept, more haptic than literary figure. If for Whitman body names a creative agency that readily makes itself seen, heard, felt, and so on, and if soul names a set of less sensible, virtual powers, shape is a term for what has both those kinds of efficacy.10 Whitman, I will suggest, offers a distinctive model of I: it is a porous and susceptible shape that rides and imbibes waves of influx-­and-­efflux but also contributes an “influence” of its own. It is no easy matter to parse what is involved in that influential effort. It is especially tricky after contemporary theory has taken a nonhuman turn that locates the human on a continuum of lively bodies and forces — a continuum that elides conventional dichotomies of life and matter, organic and inorganic, subjective and objective, agency and structure.11 My last book, Vibrant Matter, accented the efforts of non-­or not-­quite-­ human shapes, arguing that the modern habit of parsing the world into passive matter (“it”) and vibrant life (“us”) had the effect of understating the power of things — for example, the way landfills are, as we speak, generating lively streams of chemicals and volatile winds of methane, or the way a diet infiltrates brain chemistry and mood. Whether or not such materialities rise to the level of (panpsychic) “life,” it seems clear that they do modify the developmental paths taken by human flesh, affections, thought, identities, and relations. Their influx has that peculiarly subtle mode of causation known as influence. A swarm of nonhumans are at work inside and as us; we are powered by a host of inner aliens, including ingested plants, animals, pharmaceuticals, and the microbiomes upon which thinking itself relies. Indeed, during the process of writing Vibrant Matter, I came more and more to experience “my” efforts as a writer as but one vector within a much larger group of conative influences.



influx and efflux

• xi •

Dividuals

The task before me now is to return to the question of I, to try to depict, amidst a world of diverse efforts and trajectories, that particular set that is experienced as most local, most personal. How to bespeak an I alive in a world of vibrant matter? How to write up its efforts and endeavors? Now —  inspired especially by Whitman, for whom “Personality” persists as a theme even as he affirms cosmic dimensions of self — I consider more closely the value-­added, the extra oomph, impetus, or effort, of the human dividual, partaker of influx and efflux. By “dividual,” I follow McKim Marriott’s notion of “persons — single actors — [who] are not thought . . . to be ‘individual,’ that is, indivisible, bounded units. . . . To exist, dividual persons absorb heterogeneous material influences. They must also give out from themselves particles of their own coded substances — essences, residues, or other active

• xii • prologue

influences — that may then reproduce in others something of the nature of the persons in whom they have originated.”12 Influx & Efflux explores the experience of being continuously subject to influence and still managing to add something to the mix. There lives in Leaves of Grass, for example, an I who is both creative writer — locus of a distinctive poetic effort — and sensitive receptor liable to myriad “sympathies”: Mine is no callous shell, /I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop.13 This I, which cohabits with a more familiar model of American individuality,14 is traversed by ambient sounds, smells, textures, words, ideas, and erotic and other currents, all of which comingle with previously internalized immigrants and become “touched” by them, until some of the incorporated and no-­longer-­quite-­alien materials are “breathed” out as positions, dispositions, claims, and verse. The influx variegates the I: I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-­threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots, / And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over.15 And this pluralized I returns the favor by enriching the mix with new words and winds: Earth! you seem to look for something at my hands. . . . Behold, . . . I dilate you with tremendous breath, I buoy you up.16 I breathes in and buoys up: in “partaking,” I alters and is altered. In what follows, I celebrate Whitman’s attempts to sing himself and his audience into generous I’s and to “promulge” the best of what America might become — a n egalitarian public culture. I don’t endorse all of Whitman’s claims, ideals, or political tendencies. I recoil from his America-­ centrism and have much less faith than he does (though he too has his doubts) that providential forces are at work in the cosmos. I am ambivalent about his notion of “manliness,” even if there is today a pressing need to develop laudable models of masculinity. Whitman takes steps in the right direction when, for example, he seeks to combine “the strength of Homer, and the perfect reason of Shakespeare”17 with a “manly attachment” called “sympathy.”18 But though Whitman tries to be “the poet of women as well as men,”19 the “vigor” of men is too often paired only with the noble motherhood of women.20 Neither do I share Whitman’s belief, coexisting alongside his criticisms of moneygrubbing and monopoly, in the essentially egalitarian trajectory of markets.21 And then there is the matter of his cosmic appetite, his tendency to embrace and incorporate — or is it just to eat up? — all that he encounters. The famous line I am large, I contain multitudes does support a magnanimous I experiencing itself as but one of many, many configurations of lively, earthly matter:



influx and efflux

• xiii •

I am he that aches with amorous love; Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know.22 But such lines can also lean into the presumption that every mode of existence is, without remainder, available for I to feel and absorb. This sense of entitlement can be heard in Section 33 of “Song of Myself,” with its long, detailed catalogue of things encountered, including a quail (not any quail but the one “whistling betwixt the woods and the wheat-­lot”), a cataract (not the generic geological formation but “Niagara, the cataract falling like a veil over my countenance”), and the singular “hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat.” Whitman’s portrayal of each item on the list exhibits his talent for poetic contraction — I refer here not to his elision of letters (“ebb’d,” “wash’d,” “suffer’d”) but to his knack for capturing the specificity of a thing by naming its essential posture (“the judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-­ sentence,”23 “the inbound urge and urge of waves,”24 “the treacherous lip-­ smiles” of antidemocrats).25 And yet his attention to the exquisite singularity of each body can sometimes seem less about its intrinsic value and more like the care with which a chef plates up his meal: I help myself to material and immaterial; All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine, / I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.26 Here and elsewhere, what may come to the fore is less an ecological sensibility than an American conceit of cultural superiority and entitled consumption. Does Whitman’s earthy love and impeccable attentiveness to other persons, places, and things encourage a more wondrous, respectful mode of interaction between dividuals and other living materials? Or do they feed into powerful currents of anthropocentrism, whiteness, colonialism, consumerism, and exploitation of “natural resources”? No doubt they do both, for only a thin and porous membrane separates a love of matter that is nondiscriminatory and radically egalitarian (“flush” in the quotation below) from a consuming lust. Whitman seems aware of this doubleness: I know perfectly well my own egotism, Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less, And would fetch you whoever you are flush with myself.27 It is amid such reservations that I ride and inflect Whitman, whose poetry is the guiding thread of Influx & Efflux. The book is as much about a • xiv • prologue

process-­oriented self — a model of subjectivity consonant with a world of vibrant matter — as it is about Walt Whitman. I draw upon Whitman’s adventures into sympathy, affection, gravity, and nonchalance, and upon his fascinating experiments with a process-­oriented syntax, and I carry them into insights and techniques from other writers, times, and places. Storyline

The book begins its exploration of dividuality by asking what all those depictions of bodily postures are doing in Whitman’s poems — for example, “crouch extended with unshut mouth,” “side-­curved head,” “arm hanging idly over shoulder,” “elbow stretching, fingers clutching,” “rigid head and just-­open’d lips.” Chapter 1, “Position and Disposition,” explores Whitman’s discernment of a sympathetic current linking outward posture and gait to inner character and disposition. Here we see him going beyond a conventional model of self, wherein physiognomy and physique (“phiz”) are but epiphenomenal expressions of an inner, animating Personality. Whitman’s innovation is to affirm a productivity proper to phiz, a power to shape moods and alter states of mind. Giving a twist to an American variant of phrenology that was more about self-­improvement than racial hierarchy, Whitman suggests that people can alter their moral and political character in part by working upon their mien, posture, gait. The desired comportments are, for Whitman, those disposed toward a very pluralistic democratic culture. After exploring intrabody sympathies — relays between posture and mood — in chapter 1, chapter 2, “Circuits of Sympathy,” turns to an examination of the complexities of Whitman’s use of the term sympathy. The word marks for him not only a moral sentiment linking one person to another but also an atmospherics of indeterminate eros; it is also the name he gives to the earth’s utterly impartial acceptance of each and every one of its elements or inhabitants; it appears also as a biological organ (like lungs or heart); and it even emerges an apersonal physical force (akin to sunlight or gravity). With the last image, Whitman seems keen to locate sympathy within the very infrastructure of the cosmos. But here difficult questions arise: as sympathy’s theater of operation expands into the geosphere, would it not also take on the moral indifference of gravity, electricity, or tropism? And, as such, can appeals to sympathy retain their persuasive force in political life? Those are important questions, especially because Whitman’s various invoca-



influx and efflux

• xv •

tions of sympathy (alongside its agonistic twin “pride”) are so interwoven with his larger political project: his lyrical songs of more-­than-­human sympathies are attempts to induce, from out of an America polarized into two hostile camps, a public disposed toward a democracy that is multicolored and extraordinarily diverse (“variegated”) and yet still a functioning whole. He expresses his aspiration to that difficult combination in a conversation with Horace Traubel: “Still debating whether he would write a preface for November Boughs [Whitman says this:] ‘Why should I? — the book itself explains all I wish explained: is personal, confessional, a variegated product, in fact — streaks of white and black, light and darkness, threads of evil and good running in and out and across and through, achieving in the end some sort of unity.’ ”28 Chapter 3, “Solar Judgment,” takes up Whitman’s strange call for the poet to judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing. I read this as a call to inhabit more fully the “float” between impression and expression, the “interval” between influx and efflux. To linger in that “and” is to postpone judgment, that is to say, to hold off the sorting discrimination often assumed to be the very essence of ethical action. Whitman explores — indeed, pushes to the limit — the idea that one very valuable effort of the democratic dividual consists in the active elision of discriminating perception, in a “judgment” as nonjudgmental and magnanimous as the dispensation of light offered by the sun. As we “loafe” in the interval, we are unconsciously feeling things out — receiving and responding to signals operating at what Alfred North Whitehead called the “visceral” level. The chapter turns briefly to Whitehead’s attempts to craft a conceptual vocabulary — “prehension,” “ingression,” “affective tone” — appropriate to that very subtle kind of experiencing. Whitehead helps us to name what is at stake in Whitman’s call to “judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing.” Between chapters 3 and 4 is inserted a “Refrain: The Alchemy of Affects.” As a refrain, it repeats themes developed in the first three chapters, this time by extending them into contemporary issues (the neoliberal contraction of public goods, civic practices of egalitarian culture, and antiracist strategies). “Refrain” explores several attempts to engage politically at the level of affects by performing an alchemy by which, for example, a depoliticizing anxiety may be transmuted into anger or into a sympathy that opens new avenues for action. I try to show how what may at first appear as an exclusively aesthetic set of practices can exercise a political efficacy.

• xvi • prologue

For Whitman, intrabody and interbody currents, even when felt as a personal sentiment or mood, are streams within a more-­than-­human process of “influx and efflux.” He tends to celebrate these atmospheric currents — as enrichments and energizations of an I, as a “joyous electric all” that variegates a self-­striving to become as diverse as cosmos.29 Although Whitman was hardly oblivious to dangerous, ugly, or ignoble forms of influence, they are deliberately understated elements of his poetics. Chapter 4 takes up three stories that focus more overtly and exclusively on the darker sides of influence. While there are many worthy contenders for the role of challenger to Whitman’s joyful model of influx and efflux, I choose these three stories because their scope and audacity approach Whitman’s cosmic purview, and because they, like Leaves of Grass, highlight the fraught and fragile nature of individuation. The first story is Roger Caillois’s, who, writing under the influence of surrealism and claiming to practice a cross-­species form of “comparative biology,” figures influence as an innate tendency of the organism to give in to the “lure” of undifferentiated “space.” Caillois’s eerie tale, of individuals swallowed up by milieu, seems to affirm D. H. Lawrence’s response to Whitman’s call to “dilate” and take in all there is: “I don’t want all those things inside me, thank you.”30 Caillois explores the threatening “lure of space” by turning to the insect world, where the organism’s tendency to become generic, to mimic its surroundings — a tendency also operating within human beings — is starkly apparent. Caillois highlights a phase of the process of influence that operates below consciousness: an automatic biomimesis working to destroy individuation. This means that influx needs to be filtered if any I (Cartesian, cosmic, or otherwise) is to persist. (Chapter 5 will turn to Thoreau and some specific techniques of filtration.) In a second story, about hoarders and their hoards, I consider how people with a particularly “sensitive cuticle”31 in relation to objects can be so affected by them that the boundaries of self are experienced as extending beyond the skin. What is at issue here is more the I’s fungibility than its fragility. The third tale comes from the literary critic Harold Bloom, who famously confronted the “anxiety” engendered by the influences poets receive from other writers, an anxiety tied to the quest for an individuality that speaks with a voice of its own. Bloom focuses on the efforts of “great poets” to manage the influx, to deploy literary techniques to cope with an irreducible degree of subjection to the influence of precursors. Chapter 4 ultimately compares and contrasts the different ideals of self offered by Caillois, hoarders, Bloom, and



influx and efflux

• xvii •

Whitman. What comes to the fore are Whitman’s own hesitations about the desirability of a full-­on “merge” with the cosmos. Chapter 5 turns to Henry Thoreau’s take on that subtly intrusive flow called “influence” — in particular, upon his efforts to quarantine some currents and to inflect others by writing them up. Like the sympatico Whitman, like hoarders and like Bloom’s poets, Thoreau too has a sensitive cuticle: “My body is all sentient — as I go here or there I am tickled by this or that I come in contact with — as if I touched the wires of a battery.”32 But more assiduously than Whitman, and in ways that exceed Bloom’s focus on literary tactics in order to include outdoor practices such as walking, Thoreau experiments with ways to minimize his exposure to interpersonal currents and to maximize his contamination by the not-­quite-­human sparks of the Wild. He actively courts influences arriving from air, water, plants, and animals because their potential to refresh and revitalize is great, in contrast to those all-­too-­human influences whose primary effect is to reinforce stale concepts and percepts.33 The chapter looks at three encounters with natural influences that Thoreau stages and writes up, with an eye toward how such practices affect the strength and quality of the dilated but also idiosyncratic (“eccentric”) I that Thoreau wants to be. Chapter 5 raises once again the question of just how much the Thoreauian and Whitmanian figures of I depend upon a faith in a cosmos that is providential. Thoreau, like Whitman, often assumes a benevolent or meliorative tendency at work in the process of influx-­and-­efflux — often, but not always. Just as Whitman occasionally stumbles over evidence at odds with his picture of cosmos as “joyous electric all” — his figure of sympathy as a natural force akin to gravity, for example, troubles his attempt to enlist sympathy as the glue to repair a broken society — so too does Thoreau stumble. I highlight those occasions when Thoreau acknowledges the limits of a providential imaginary and affirms the presence and power of natural influences even when they do not harmonize with human interests. The question thus becomes how to live well in an apersonal cosmos. In an epilogue, “A Peculiar Efficacy,” I gather together elements of a poetics appropriate to a world of influxes and effluxes and try to sketch a model of action appropriate to that world. The effort is to extract from the book’s various explorations of subtle “influences,” atmospheric “sympathies,” and solar “judgments” some conceptual resources for thinking anew about “human agency” or the efforts of dividuals to sift through and add to influences and to inflect outcomes. What can, in a lively, more-­than-­human world, re-

• xviii • prologue

occupy the place of the willful individual positioned above the fray? And how best to describe such a model of self and action? Here I explore the use of “middle-­voiced” verbs as a linguistic practice, as a way to “write up” processual agencies. To bespeak from within an ongoing process, rather than from an external vantage where the subject of a predicate can either direct activity (active voice) or be acted upon (passive voice) — that is what verbs in the middle voice do. The task is to explore what “writing up” does and how it works. Calling Out/Calling Toward

As I write up this book, American politics is marked by upsurges of hate, racism, misogyny, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, disdain for the rule of law, private and corporate greed and unprecedented concentration of wealth, officially s­ anctioned indifference toward the suffering of others, and bellige­ rent denial of that profound, and unequally distributed, precarity that is climate change. All of this finds a powerful advocate in a corrupt president who spins them as forms of national defense. These repellent stances and efforts are met by forceful and livid opposition, by a prodemocratic, anti­racist counterpolitics of direct action, mass protest, legal challenge, electoral strategizing, and militant calling out of entrenched structures of privilege and domination. Antidemocratic and fascist flows must be met with strong and unrelenting opposition, both antagonistic and agonistic. “Agonism,” says Bonnie Honig, “names the commitment to the permanence of conflict among would-­be equals, but it doesn’t only — a nd this is really important — it doesn’t only name conflict. It also names cooperation and mutuality that are always already ridden by strife. So never only the consensual, but also never only the conflictual.”34 I agree with Honig. In what follows, however, I try to highlight the role of yet another set of prodemocratic practices and tactics: those that lean into moods other than outrage, revulsion, and even agonism — not as replacements but as complements to inject into the scene where possible. Following Whitman, I label these other moods “affections” and “sympathies,” as those terms become stretched beyond a human-­centered, sentimental frame to include apersonal, underdetermined vital forces that course through selves without being reducible to them. I am keen to explore, for example, the ways in which a (vague, protean, ahuman) tendency for bodies to lean, make connections, and form attachments can be harnessed on behalf of



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• xix •

a more generous, egalitarian, and ecological public culture. Neglect of such efforts has, I believe, made its own contribution to the rise of the neofascist, earth-­destroying politics now threatening to become hegemonic. Again, the effort is not to supplant antagonism or agonism, but to offer an indispensable supplement to them. Thus, the dominant rhetorical groove in what follows is more calling in than calling out. For some audiences, this may seem to disqualify the effort from counting as “political.” In response, I am tempted to yield the term politics to the realm of agon and then to float the idea that “politics” alone cannot get us where we want to go. But if the political is acknowledged to include all the affects and energies — a ffirmative and negative — with the potential for societal transformation, then Influx & Efflux can qualify as (among other genres) a political work.35 It is clear to me that even a poetic, Whitmanian America would continue to generate and absorb sinister waves of influence in need of vigorous opposition. It is worth noting that is hard not to be infected by the toxic plumes one vigorously opposes and that the trick is to find ways to counter them without adding to their impetus. Indispensable today are studies devoted to assessing and resisting new waves of fascism.36 But I share Whitman’s intuition that it is also important to detect and inflect the more positive inflows and outflows. To the extent that a democracy ignores or downplays these, it becomes ever more susceptible to noxious infections. This is thus an untimely book: it offers a strangely apersonal figure of self and a nonagonistic set of practices to add to the democratic mix.37 The work of change always needs a discordant chorus, says Ferguson, “because we have multiple audiences, because different trajectories work together in unexpected ways, because we should never put all our eggs in just one basket.”38 Writing Up

My discussions of sympathies and influences — of transfers at the borders of outdoors and inside — accent the “influx” phase of process. Also woven throughout the book is a concern with the “efflux” that is a writing up of such encounters. By “writing up,” I mean the arrangement of words that repeat, imperfectly and creatively, events that exceed those words but also find some expression in them. It is a writing up when it amplifies and elevates ethically whatever protogenerous potentials are already circulating.39 What are the characteristics of a rhetoric suited to this task? What grammar, syn-

• xx • prologue

tax, tropes, and tricks are most pertinent to a linguistic and ethical inflection of a process that includes ahuman, alinguistic influences? (That question is a twenty-­first-century echo of Thoreau’s nineteenth-centry quest to “speak a word for Nature?”)40 Such a poetics would try to give these forces their due while placing them in a wordy, normative milieu that is not really their home. Thoreau’s writing, like that of Whitman and the others I rely upon in what follows, tends to float between genres — part political theory, part mythmaking, part poetry, part speculative philosophy, part political and existential diagnosis. Perhaps this hovering enables it to see more clearly the contributions made by actants whose first language is not human, to write, for example, as “the scribe of . . . the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing,”41 and to induce the feeling that, at the very moment you are reading the text, you are amidst a bevy of active forces, some human and many not. Here is one example of that kind of rhetoric, from Thoreau’s journal on July 23, 1851: You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. Your mind must not perspire. True, out of doors my thought is commonly drowned as it were & and shrunken, pressed down by stu­ pendous piles of light ethereal influence — for the pressure of the atmosphere is still 15 pounds to a square inch — I can do little more than preserve the equilibrium & resist the pressure of the atmosphere — I can only nod like the ryeheads in the breeze. I expand more surely in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure were taken off; but here outdoors is the place to store up influences.42 That passage, an efflux in response to the inflow of “stupendous piles of light ethereal influence,” acknowledges the force of atmosphere, of barometric pressure plus breeze, plus heat and sun, and perhaps also the mesmerizing hum of summer cicadas. These “influences,” with a vitality depicted as more than what is usually meant when one speaks of the weather, are lively participants in an encounter with Thoreau. They face, flow into, and alter the man: in the example before us, his power of thought is suspended, as a more vegetal faculty becomes enhanced: Thoreau now nods like the ryeheads in the breeze. Nodding supplants thinking — but only for a while. Later, back in his chamber, the possibilities for expressing the inflow “expand” — to include not only



influx and efflux

• xxi •

vegetal but literary and poetic iterations. Inside the house, Thoreau is again able to ruminate his encounters — indeed, we hear news of these stupendous, ethereal influences only by way of the thoughtful words he later writes up. Chapter 4 explores in detail this and other of Thoreau’s encounters with “natural influences.” My focus now is on the effort of writing up, on the paradox of personal endeavoring in a world of pervasive influence. Thoreau sways back and forth between a nodding and an inventive self, with each circuit engaging different conjunctions of outdoor and indoor, internal and external, powers. Language will always be an anexact repetition of the press of the outdoors; every wordy composition will be more or less untrue to stupendous, ethereal influences that signal without words. What is more, each writer will contaminate the influences she targets for expression with unchosen influences embedded in her perceptual, ideological, social-­positional, and body-­ capacity styles.43 At least some dimensions of these will remain unmarked, unconscious, vague to their bearer. Attempts to unearth these, and to confess to their influence, is an invaluable part of postcolonial, antiracist, antipatriarchal, and neurodiversifying strategies. But another important task, I think, is to carry those efforts forward without losing the capacity to sing better alternatives, to give the virtual its due, to write up. What would be a poetics of writing up? It would have to be able to display how writers as they write continue to ride the momentum of outside influences. It would dramatize how metaphors remain infused and fueled by the physical forces more obviously at work when one is out in the sun on a really hot day. Such writing could show, for example, how the throat-­and-­ chest feeling of breathing and the texture of wind on your face still vibrate inside the word inspiration, or how hearing the phrase “on the one hand . . . on the other hand” induces a subtle rocking to-­and-­fro of your body.44 Such a rhetoric might also push the “metaphorical” to the point where it becomes uncertain whether a sentence speaks in a descriptive or an aspirational voice, and also uncertain whether the speaker is positioned outside the scene (like a bird or a god from above)45 or a body swimming in a processual sea. Such a rhetoric might also try, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, to bring sentences to life, showing not only how sentences express the humanist, societal life of their writer, but also press forward a vitality proper to ahuman shapes. Such sentences would “light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it.”46 They would ac-

• xxii • prologue

Sentences to life

knowledge that (what Thoreau calls) “natural influences” linger in the language enlivened by them. Whitman also seeks such a poetics when he calls for utterances that are “done with reviews and criticisms of life” and are “animating now to life itself.”47 To animate to life is to throw oneself heartily into an ongoing, creative process. It is neither to “take” a decisive action (as in “to act more animatedly”) nor to endure as a patient of an external force (as when Frankenstein’s monster is “animated” by electricity). Thoreau makes a similar point in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. . . . It is as if a green bough were laid across the page, and we are refreshed as by the sight of fresh grass in midwinter or early spring. You have constantly the warrant of life and experience in what you read. The little that is said is eked

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Bough sentences

out by implication of the much that was done. The sentences are verduous and blooming as evergreen and flowers, because they are rooted in fact and experience.48 Such a rhetoric might even try to speak with a tongue that is ramified (many-­branched), like a huge old tree or a neural network. Or perhaps with a voice that is rhizomatic in the sense of being all branches and no trunk. “The two of us wrote Anti-­Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd,” say Deleuze and Guattari.49 Such a rhetoric would be roomy enough to accommodate a heterogeneous swirl of agents, some human, some not. It would find workarounds to the grammar of subjects and objects — in order to display how “writing up” consists in overlapping waves of expressive effort, some mine, some yours, and some apersonal. It might also sometimes indulge in the “pathetic fallacy,” prosopopoeia, or other anthropomorphizing tropes — thus affording voice to vibrant materials whose first language is not words. When Whitman writes up the “blab of the pave,” or when Caillois invokes the “lyrical force” of the praying man-

• xxiv • prologue

Rhizomatic speech

tis, they allow natural entities, forces, and processes to inhabit and deform the grammatical place of the doer. They release them from the confinement of being merely the “context” or “material conditions” that undergird exclusively human powers of action. The techniques just listed, plus the use of middle-­voiced verbs (to partake, to inaugurate, to promulge, to inflect) are on display in what follows.



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• one •

position & disposition

In the August 1856 issue of Life Illustrated: A Journal of Entertainment, Improvement, and Progress (a monthly that would become the American Phrenological Journal), there appeared a column entitled “New York Dissected: V. — Street Yarn.”1 In it, Walt Whitman, writing anonymously, offers readers various humorous descriptions of New Yorker types: the Episcopal deacon, the Wall Street banker, the “third-­rate artist,” the harlot, the gambler, etc. These caricatures are interesting for the glimpses they provide of midcentury Manhattan street life, and, I want to note, they also work to draw attention to a not-­fully-­historicizable current of influence flashing between personality and what Whitman calls “phiz,” a shorthand for physiognomy + physique.2 Here are a few examples from the article:

Mild, foolish, dough-­colored, simpering face; black cloth suit — shad-­bellied, single-­breasted coat, . . . vest buttoned close to the throat, knees a little bent, toes turned out, and chin down. Episcopalian deacon.

Toes turned out

Dress strictly respectable; hat well down on forehead; face thin, dry, close-­shaven; mouth with a gripe like a vice; eye sharp and quick; brows bent; forehead scowling; step jerky and bustling. Wall Street broker.

Jerk and bustle

Heavy moustache; . . . Big breast pin; heavy gold chain; . . . Hat down over brows; Loafing attitude on corner; Eye furtive, glassy, expressionless; Oath; tobacco spit. Gambler. Loafing

Alert step • 2 •

A straight, trim-­built, prompt, vigorous man, well dressed, with strong brown hair, beard, and moustache, and a quick and watchful eye. He steps alertly by, watching everybody. Charles A. Dana, chief editor of the New-York Tribune, a man of rough, strong intellect, tremendous prejudices firmly relied on, and excellent intentions. chapter one

Tall, large, rough-­looking man, in a journeyman carpenter’s uniform. Coarse, sanguine complexion; strong, bristly, grizzled beard; singular eyes, of a semitransparent, indistinct light blue, and with that sleepy look that comes when the lid rests half way down over the pupil; careless, lounging gait. Walt Whitman, the sturdy, self-­conscious microcosmic, prose-­poetical author of that incongruous hash of mud and gold — “Leaves of Grass.”3

Careless lounge

Two years later, in the September 12, 1868, issue of the Sunday newspaper the New York Atlas, there appeared a series of articles entitled “Manly Health and Training.” In them, Whitman, now writing under the name Mose Velsor, again attends to the conjunction of personality and phiz. He writes of an “inevitable and curious conjunction, or rather resultance, of a fine manly moral character, out of a perfect physique.”4 Moral character, Whitman here affirms, can be the “resultance” of physique: not only does personality express itself on phiz, phiz impresses on personality5 — outer changes in a body’s shape or movement style can induce inner changes of feeling. Whitman’s serialized manual on “health and training” is premised on the productive power of phiz: readers are called to engage their flesh as lively matter whose generative force can, through careful diet and exercise, be put to the task of moral self-­improvement.6 For Whitman, demeanors of the body comport with attitudes of the mind, in something like the way different yoga poses are said to stimulate a corresponding set of spiritual states. There is, in other words, a natural (“inevitable”) and somewhat obscure (“curious”) conjunction between position and disposition.7 Whitman’s interest in this conjunction helps to explain what all those depictions of bodily posture, carriage, and gait are doing in his poetry. Leaves of Grass repeatedly highlights the geometry of a body in space and the rhythms of a body in motion:

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Crouch

the “crouch extended with unshut mouth” (“So Long!”) the “roll head over heels” (“Song of Myself ”) the “walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic” (“A Song of Joys”) the “rise and fall of the arms” (“Song of the Broad-­A xe”) the “stand and lean on the rail” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”) the standing “plumb in the uprights” (“Song of Myself ”) the “left hand” hooked “round the waist” (“Song of Myself ”) the “arm hanging idly over shoulder” (“Spontaneous Me”) the “arms slanting down across and below the waist of the other” (“Spontaneous Me”)

Arm hang

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the “upper hold and under-­hold” (“I Sing the Body Electric”) the “crooked inviting fingers” and “fingers across my mouth” (“Song of Myself ”) the “elbow stretching, fingers clutching” (“We Two Boys Together Clinging”) the “rigid head and just-­open’d lips” of a reclining body (“Song of Myself ”) the “bent head and arms folded over the breast” (“I Sing the Body Electric”) the “dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide” (“Look Down Fair Moon”) the “half-­shut eyes bent sideways” (“Song of Myself ”) the “lightly closed fists and arms partially rais’d” (“The Runner”) the “half-­closed hand” (“Germs”) the “side-­curved head” (“Song of Myself ”) the “curv’d limbs, Bending, standing, astride the beams” (“Song of the Broad-Axe”) the “lean and loafe” (“Song of Myself ”) the “press of my foot to the earth” (“Song of Myself ”) This chapter will take a closer look at the last four on that list, with the aim of highlighting how Whitman, invoking the influence of posture upon mood, tries to harness that influence to induce in his readers a specifically democratic disposition or “manner.” Democracy, Whitman insists, is more than a regime of governance: “Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners.”8 In speaking of “manners,” Whitman is not simply repeating that old adage of political philosophy according to which formal laws are effective only if they become installed in social mores. That adage appears, for example, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s claim that “manners” (defined as “the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people”) are “one of the general causes to which the maintenance of a democratic republic in the United States is attributable.”9 It is not that Whitman disagrees with Tocqueville — manners are indeed the outgrowths (“flower and fruit”) of democratic institutions and norms. One difference, however, is that for Whitman, the sprouting of democratic manners is but one instance of a broader natural tendency to produce offspring: by likening political life to vegetal activity, Whitman, more than Tocqueville, accents the materiality of manners and locates democracy within a natural ecology. As Robert Leigh Davis puts it, Whitman attends to “forms of microcitizenship,” or the ways in which “culture enters the body

position & disposition

•5•

through barely visible habits of appetite, disposition, and posture: a certain way of holding one’s chest or eyes, a fondness for certain kinds of food or music or reading (and a distaste for others), a learned repertoire of physical gestures and expression.10 What I add to Davis’s reading is this: in addition to being alert to the subtle ways in which “culture” infiltrates the everydayness of the body, Whitman also explores the efficacy of physical postures: postures are more than expressions of culture — they are shapers of it. Whitman helps us to hear the word manner in the sense of phiz — as in “the halting manner of an old man,” “the shifty manner of a fox,” or “the wobbly manner in which the egg rolls on the counter.” The “manners” of democracy supplement electoral and party politics not only because they add a democratic cast of mind but also because they enlist the egalitarian potential of certain bodily configurations and movement-­styles. This chapter will also place what Whitman has to say about infra-­body eddies of influx and efflux in the context of two other explorations of relays between position and disposition: twenty-­first-­century theories of embodied cognition, and mid-­nineteenth-­century American advocates of “self-­ improvement” that enlisted elements from phrenology. What Whitman’s poetry, contemporary neuroscience, and this peculiar phrenology shared was a recognition of that curious conjunction between position and disposition. The chapter ends by returning to Whitman’s vision of a multilayered, highly sensuous, and egalitarian democracy. Side-­Curved Head/Nonchalance

In several poems and the 1855 Preface, “nonchalance” is mentioned favorably, as a mood to be courted: O to speed where there is space enough and air enough at last! To be absolv’d from previous ties and conventions. . . . To find a new unthought-­of nonchalance with the best of Nature!11 or A Southerner soon as a Northerner, a planter nonchalant and hospitable down by the Oconee I live, A Yankee bound my own way ready for trade, my joints the limberest joints on earth and the sternest joints on earth.12 or • 6 •

chapter one

O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted! To be entirely alone with them, to find how much one can stand! To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face! To mount the scaffold, to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!13 or Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night . . . . Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes. . . . Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.14 Such celebrations of “nonchalance” may seem odd given Whitman’s predilection for an egalitarian pluralism and the term’s conventional reference to aristocratic condescension and flaunting of social privilege. This latter entails the sprezzatura described in Castiglione’s 1528 guide to courtly behavior.15 Sprezzatura signaled the carriage of carefree effortlessness befitting royal bodies freed from “external bodily movements like labor, [and] . . . internal bodily movements like emotionality and awkwardness. . . . The upper classes constructed for themselves an aristocratic body purged of those elements it shared in common with other classes.”16 Van Dyck painted Charles I in the model of Castiglione’s courtier, with a posture that Anthony King describes as one of “(studied) relaxation; . . . a graceful pose, with the left arm set akimbo, or bent from the hip, and the hand turned back.”17 Charles’s pose is strikingly similar to the one assumed by Whitman on the 1855 frontispiece of that “hash of mud and gold,” Leaves of Grass: again, the hand-­on-­hip, the slightly bent knee, the tilted head:18 Looking with side-­curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders, I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.19 Arm akimbo

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What is going on here? I contend that Whitman is restaging the courtier’s calm, composed bearing and neutral gaze as the stance of an ordinary citizen capable of keeping her cool (nonchalance: present participle of nonchaloir, from Latin calere, “be hot,” roused with zeal or anger) in the face of the variegated foliage (“feuillage”) of a messy democratic culture and the many daily challenges it poses to the primacy of any one lifestyle.20 The pose of the frontispiece retains the temperate temperature of Charles I while reversing its political valence: nonchalance becomes a democratic disposition. And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes;21 walk at your “ease through and out of that custom or precedent or authority that suits [you] not.”22 Nonchalance provides an affective detour around what might otherwise solidify as fear and antagonism; nonchalance impedes the process whereby exposure to differences crystallizes into a feeling of affront. Nonchalance buys time for more subtle and complex responses to emerge. Like the “matter-­of-­fact” voice of Whitman’s lists,23 and like the way an effective soldier will “advance[s] to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance,”24 so too can the egalitarian pluralist encounter her fellows with apersonal curiosity and nondefensive affect: I have no mockings or arguments. I witness and wait.25 We know that Whitman was intrigued by phrenology, especially by its intuition of a link between the composition of character and the comportment of body. Of particular interest to our theme is Whitman’s engagement with that branch of phrenology known as pathognomy, which focused on the relationship between personality and posture, carriage, or gait rather than on the less plastic geometry of nose, ear, or skull. We can discern the influ-

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ence of pathognomy on Whitman in these lines from the 1855 Preface: “the attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots. The turn of their neck, the sound of their feet, the motions of their wrists, are full of hazard to the one and hope to the other.”26 And in these lines from “I Sing the Body Electric”:

the expression of a well-­made-­man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees.27

Hip and wrist

Pathognomists of Whitman’s time tended to accent expression (efflux) over impression (influx), that is to say, to present bodily postures as effects of the creative power of “passions or states of mind.”28 Whitman’s own pictorial and poetic practice of pathognomy, however, played with the possibility that the causal arrow could go the other way too, that postures could be triggering causes of changes in mood and, ultimately, character.29 Would not readers looking at Whitman’s stance on the frontispiece, for example, start to feel a bit more nonchalant themselves? And would not this nascent feeling resonate with the lines of poetry that twist nonchalance into a democratic stance — that is to say, one slow to be alarmed or threatened by encounters with unfamiliar persons, places, things? (Anti-­immigrant racisms might find it hard to flourish in nonchalance.) But just how does hand-­on-­hip-­with-­side-­curved-­head induce insouciance? Can more be said about the causality of the influence of position upon disposition, of phiz upon mood? Soon we will consider some more recent studies, from behavioral psychology and cognitive science, that tackle this question. For now, we might look to ordinary experience for a hypothesis: the cooling, calming effect could be a function of the slow tempo of nonchalance, wherein small fidgets and the restlessness of sensory attention take a pause.30 With hand-­on-­hip and side-­curved head, the “I” is both active and receptive: attentively alert but quiet and still enough to “absorb” the affects of other bodies

position & disposition

•9•

and atmospheres. Looking with side-­curved head curious what will come next, / Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.31 So arranged into this calm but not slack posture (neither “hurried [n]or retarded”),32 a body may be more disposed to receive others with egalitarian equanimity and “poetical” curiosity, rather than with the quick judgment of “the judge with hands tight to the desk, his pallid lips pronouncing a death-­sentence.”33 In “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” we find a second posture of nonchalance. Alongside the standing lean of Charles and Walt, there is the relaxed seated position of a motherly woman who “glances as she sits, inviting none, denying none.” This woman, like the “liberty” described in the 1855 Preface, “sits in calmness and light, is positive and composed.”34 She is earth, and she is glancing at her reflection in a mirror, at, that is, the multiple versions of herself that are the dividuals of the creative process (the natura naturata of natura naturans). Her regard is nonchalant, contentedly impartial: “The earth does not exhibit itself nor refuse to exhibit itself,” she is “delaying not, hurrying not.”35 Her slightly unfocused gaze, unaccompanied by any specific intention, resembles a look recommended today for the practice of meditation: “Sit comfortably on the floor in . . . a kneeling position in which the gluteals rest on the heels. Rest your hands in your lap. Find a point on the floor approximately 6 feet in front of you, and look at it with unfocused gaze.”36 “The gaze should be large and broad. . . . Perception is strong and sight weak . . . it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things.”37 The slight, gentle movement of glancing might also be compared to “sweeping,” which is described by François Jullien (in his exploration of Daoism) as “moving in a way that is . . . neither hurried nor fatigued, cleaving to the form of things without pressing on them or breaking away from them.”38 Earth’s expansive glance also resonates with what Jullien calls “decanting.” To decant experience (or a bottle of wine) is to aerate and thereby intensify (by allowing to bloom) its subtle flavors, shades, tones, scents.39 Decanting is a mode of action that obtains without striving; it follows “a logic of refinement and transformation” rather than goal-­seeking. It has the “adequacy” specific to “floating.”40 “A Song of the Rolling Earth” encourages the reader to take on, to mimetically reenact, the nonchalance of earth: “I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth”! “No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account” unless it compares with the “amplitude” and “impartiality” of the earth.41 This is also the “insouciance” of the “open countenances” of animals, inanimate things, the landscape, waters, and “the • 10 •

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exquisite apparition of the sky.”42 It is also “the unimpeachableness of the sentiment of trees in the woods and grass by the roadside.”43 The sentiments of plants, too, are expressed by postures, as in the “tall leaning of sunflowers on their stalk”44 or, as we shall see in chapter 5, by a movement-­style, as when Thoreau’s ryeheads “nod.” Whitman’s men and women, themselves natural bodies and themselves part vegetal (I find I incorporate . . . long-­threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots),45 can, with the help of poetry, induce the insouciance they harbor within. Consider nonchalance, then, as a stance in both the attitudinal and spatial sense. Whitman’s poems juxtapose descriptions of bodily configurations (of hand, hip, head, legs, eyes, stalks, and roots) with names for dispositions (insouciance, amplitude, impartiality). In so doing, he writes up — gives poetical inflection to — already circulating currents of influence. And he does so in order to encourage readers themselves to really feel nonchalance, to experience that disposition more intensively, as readers mimetically reproduce in their own bodies protoversions of the stances described. Bent Back, Curv’d Limb/Pluck

In the short poem “Sparkles from the Wheel,” we meet a knife-­grinder absorbed in his task: Bending over, he carefully holds it to the stone — by foot and knee, With measured tread, he turns rapidly — As he presses with light but firm hand. Forth issue, then, in copious golden jets, Sparkles from the wheel. This poem salutes both the excited sparkles of its title (“diffusing, dropping, sideways-­darting, in tiny showers of gold”) and the less ecstatic position of a body “bending over” and following a “measured tread.” A similar posture of bent back hard at work, with a similarly repetitive rhythm (this time of the “rise and fall of the arms” of construction workers), appears in “Song of the Broad-Axe”: The blows of mallets and hammers, the attitudes of the men, their curv’d limbs, Bending, standing, astride the beams, driving in pins, . . . the floor-­men forcing the planks close to be nail’d, Their postures bringing their weapons downward on the bearers.46

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Bent back

In these lines, Whitman seems to be engaged in what Derek McCormack (following Henri Lefebvre) calls “rhythmanalysis”: the attempt to provide an account of the body “as a set of rhythmic relations through which the spatiotemporal turbulence of everyday life registers as so many intensities of feeling.”47 Whitman names the mood associated with the muscular repetitions of bent back and curved limbs pluck: “Muscle and pluck forever!”48 The muscle-­and-­pluck combo reappears in “I Sing the Body Electric”: Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve, They shall be stript that you may see them. Exquisite senses, life-­lit eyes, pluck, volition, Flakes of breast-­muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby, good-­sized arms and legs, And wonders within there yet. “Pluck” is a combination of assiduousness (willingness to work hard), thrift, prudence, and the independent-­mindedness of men and women who “think lightly of the laws” and for whom “outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority.”49 Pluck is the self-­respecting self-­ discipline of a citizen up to the task of self-­rule. Pluck links Whitman to what Max Weber will describe as the Protestant work ethic. It is noteworthy that Whitmanian “pluck” is not an exclusively human attitude or stance. Just as “Sparkles from the Wheel” attends to the assiduousness of man and things, “Song of the Broad-Axe” celebrates not only the crafter and wielder of axes but also the shape and movement-­style of the axe.

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Its material composition — heavy metal on top, lighter wood below — conjoins with gravity to encourage the downward swing:

Weapon, shapely, naked, wan! Head from the mother’s bowels drawn! Wooded flesh and metal bone! Limb only one, and lip only one! Gray-­blue leaf by red-­heat grown! helve produced from a little see sown! Resting the grass amid and upon, To be lean’d, and to lean on.50

Broad-­axe

The mobile axe enables and cooperates with the pluck of men, which is a vitality emanating from “the limber motion of brawny young arms and hips.”51 And so, while the poem celebrates homo faber, it also makes clear that the real source of endeavoring is multiple and ontologically diverse. The wooded flesh, the metal ore, the broad-­a xe tool, and the human miners and loggers and wielders together form the collective agency of pluck. And it is by virtue of this conjoint efficacy, distributed across many cooperating bodies, that “shapes” continue to arise: The shapes arise! The shape measur’d, saw’d, jack’d, join’d, stain’d, The coffin-­shape for the dead to lie within in his shroud, The shape got out in posts, in the bedstead posts, in the posts of the bride’s bed, The shape of the little trough, the shape of the rockers beneath, the shape of the babe’s cradle, The shape of the floor-­planks, the floor-­planks for dancers’ feet, The shape of the planks of the family home, the home of the friendly parents and children, The shape of the roof of the home of the happy young man and woman.52 and then, finally,



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Shapes of Democracy total, result of centuries, Shapes ever projecting other shapes . . . Shapes bracing the earth and braced with the whole earth.53 Democracy, for Whitman, consists not only in a set of institutions of governance but in a set of postures and moods of rhythmic bodies (human and not). Leaning/Dilation

In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” we meet commuters “who stand and lean on the rail.” In “Spontaneous Me,” two sleepers lay close, each with “arms slanting down across and below the waist of the other.” The I of “Song of Myself” likewise appears at an angle off the perpendicular: “I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” 54 Nonhuman bodies too appear aslant, as, for example, the “firelock lean’d in the corner” in the house of a sympathetic white I where “a runaway slave” finds shelter. The gun, aimed at fugitive slave hunters, adds to the trajectory of the enslaved man’s line of flight.55 And when the leaning and loafing I eyes a blade of grass, the grass too tilts toward him — for how could there even be the sight of grass were there not also a certain vegetal leaning in favor of human perception? The grass provokes attention, presses upon human senses — even if it is impossible to determine whether we or it was the first to engage in the

Loafing

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circuit of influence. In a world of tendential materials, “whether you are a mover or . . . a relay for flow processing . . . is never quite clear.”56 Whitman’s poems are full of bodies, body-­parts, and objects that are on the bias and biased, leaning and luring. Famous for his poetry of lists, we here note that Whitman also explores “list” as a verb: like a ship that lists to one side, “Song of the Open Road” speaks of “Going where I list,”57 just as, in “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” “I wend to the shores I know not, / . . . I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck’d.”58 Whitman’s outgoing, inclined bodies — f ull of “adhesiveness”59 — present a sharp contrast to what Adrianna Cavarero has identified as a Kantian I on guard against “inclination:” “the Kantian moral I, in whom verticality and autonomy co­ incide, manifests a motivated alarm for the phenomenon of inclination and therefore fiercely contrasts with either the various inclinations — passions, impulses, desires — that affect the human animal or the stereotypical attitude of mothers and women to incline toward the vulnerable creature depending on them, the newborn, the child.”60 What disposition corresponds to a tilted position? It might be called “dilation,” Whitman’s term for a body’s capacity to open its pores to the outside, to (in the example given by Michael Moon) “dilate the throat in utterance, in speech, ‘chant,’ or song.”61 To be dilated is, as Whitman says in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” to be “unclosed to good and evil” alike.62 Dilated, one is vulnerable to affections, to being affected by the world: “My limbs, my veins dilate; The blood of the world has fill’d me full.”63 The dilated self encourages more of the outside to seep in — even as more of its insides ooze out. “Dilation,” the complement to the more detached witnessing that is “nonchalance,” is a presumptive friendliness. This effusive affability is at the same time a becoming-­diffuse and trans-­individual;64 it is to inhabit a personality that is distributed and distributive; it is to live an existence that goes beyond the human being experiencing it.65 Before turning to a fourth and final Whitmanian pose — that of a footfall — let us look at how the idea of an “inevitable and curious conjunction” between position and disposition has been taken up in two other genres: twenty-­first-­century cognitive science and a nineteenth-­century discourse of self-­improvement. Sciences of Embodied Cognition

At roughly the same time that Whitman was engaged in poetic experiments with sympathies between phiz and mood, Darwin was pursuing his own em

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pirical studies of the topic in The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). As that title makes clear, Darwin figured that relationship as the expression of mind upon body: a proud man, for example, “exhibits his sense of superiority over others by holding his head and body erect. He is haughty (haut), or high, and makes himself appear as large as possible.” Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton took up the task of finding ways to quantify the bodily expression of emotion. He noted, for example, that the correlation between a leaning posture and a feeling of affection could be specified by measuring the distribution of weight along the legs of two people sitting side by side: “when two persons have an ‘inclination’ to one another, they visibly incline or slope together . . . and they then throw the stress of their weights on the near legs of their chairs.”66 Since then, a large body of research in social psychology and cognitive science (under the banners of “embodied,” enacted,” and “extended” cognition)67 has continued to try to measure how “emotional states affect the somatovisceral and motoric systems (e.g., mood affects posture).”68 Early waves of this experimental science aimed, as did Darwin and Galton, to confirm scientifically the testimony of ordinary experience that inner feelings and states of mind were expressed in corresponding body-­postures and movement-­styles. These studies demonstrated that an already established sense of pride manifests in an erect posture, that a preexisting mutual affection expresses as an inclined or leaning pose, that an extant fear displays itself as a trembling limb, that amusement presents as a smile, and that a feeling of power is conveyed by “widespread limbs and enlargement of occupied space by spreading out.”69 More intriguing, however, is the next wave of experiments, which inquire into the “bidirectional influence” between posture and mood. These suggest what Whitman seemed to intuit, that is, that not only is mood exhibited or expressed in muscular configurations, those configurations (the “somatovisceral and motoric systems”) can generate moods. Not only do frowns indicate sadness, “botox injections to reduce frown lines . . . reduce depression in people with major depression.” 70 Not only does a feeling of power “exhibit” itself as a haughty posture, the posture has generative power of its own: it can “actually produce . . . feelings of power, elevation of the dominance hormone testosterone, lowering of the stress hormone cortisol, and an increased tolerance for risk.” 71 Adopting “an upright seated posture in the face of stress can maintain self-­esteem, reduce negative mood, and increase positive mood compared to a slumped posture. Furthermore, sitting upright increases rate of speech and reduces self-­focus.” 72 The angle of the seated body has also been shown to affect the

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“memory bias” of persons with depression, who tend to have “enhanced encoding and recall of negative self-­referent material and . . . a reduced processing of positive information.” Depressed patients “in a slumped posture recalled more negative than positive words in comparison with upright-­sitting patients. . . . Bodily aspects such as posture or movement patterns (e.g., gait characteristics) might be more than epiphenomena of psychopathology but also might contribute to an escalation of distorted process in psychological disorders.” 73 What is more, not only do smiles betoken amusement, but participants who were “asked to contract the zygomaticus major muscle, which is involved in the production of a human smile, by having a pen between their teeth, enjoyed cartoons more than those who were prevented from contracting the zygomaticus.” 74 Not only do Galton’s lovers express their mutual attraction by shifting their weight toward each other, an “approach” posture (leaning forward) induces a mood of generous receptivity, just as an “avoidance” posture (leaning away) promotes negative feelings toward an external object.75 Finally, not only is “side-­to-­side movement . . . a physical expression of ambivalence,” but the inverse is also the case: “when people are made to move from side to side, their experiences of ambivalence are enhanced” 76 — the ambivalence of hula-­hooping. Body postures have also been found to affect persistence in tasks or motivation — in what Whitman calls pluck. For example, participants positioned in a slumped posture showed lower persistence on insolvable puzzle tasks than participants positioned in an upright posture.77 In a related experiment, participants assumed one of three different seated postures: leaning forward with hands on knees, sitting normally, and reclining with feet elevated. These postures had been shown to be associated with different de-

Hooping



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grees of “approach-­motivation,” or the intensity of felt desire for an object and with different amounts of cortical activity. Researchers then recorded the electroencephalographic activity of participants in each of these three postures, and they found that “leaning forward with arms extended, a posture indicative of reaching out and acquiring a desired object, led to greater relative left frontal cortical activity than reclining backward,” 78 even in the absence of any physical object of desire. The authors of the study conclude that while others “have focused on how physical actions can be transferred to knowledge concepts via mirror neuron responses (Gallese 2009), our results demonstrate that body position alone can influence underlying cortical activity associated with more than just physical movement. . . . In summary, posture influences how we think and feel, as well as underlying cortical activity.”79 There are also many convincing studies by scholars in the humanities critical of the unacknowledged and contestable assumptions — about gender, race, neuro-­typicality — embedded in these and other studies in cognitive science. Gabriel Abend, for example, argues that scientists ought to consider the relevant literatures in philosophy, social science, and the humanities in order to “better conceptualize and operationalize the social-­psychological phenomena they are interested in — and thus better . . . specify how experimental results might speak to the real social world, and clarify what exactly neural correlates are neural correlates of.”80 I cite some studies from cognitive theory not to offer scientific “proof ” of Whitman’s “poetic” claims, but rather to underscore how both refuse to confine activeness to mind and receptivity to body. The psychophysiological studies affirm that an affinity between position and disposition cannot be understood exclusively in terms of the imprints of a set of preexisting “mental” states upon “an otherwise neutral . . . bodily clay.”81 Rather, for them as for Whitman (and me), that “clay” has some impressive agency of its own. Also notable in the studies is their lack of consensus about just how to name the curious efficacy of phiz. Some researchers speak of “causal power” in the robust sense (“postural interventions causally affect mood, behavior, and physiology in response to a short-­term stressor,” “leaning forward with arms extended . . . caused greater left frontal cortical activity”).82 Others speak of a catalytic capacity of a pose to “initiate” a mood that did not exist prior to it.83 Yet others, wary of “endowing a strong mapping between specific emotions and specific embodiments,” will speak only of a posture’s ability to “modulate” or “cue” an affective state,84 and of the need for explicit knowledge (“noetic information”) associated with

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the emotion also to be present.85 The epilogue will return to the thorny matter of causality or efficacy. American Pathognomy

“By the middle of the nineteenth century, phrenology held a place in the American mind not unlike that occupied by psychiatry in the 1930s. Its terminology and tenets entered the language of daily conversation.”86 Whitman himself had a phrenological exam in 1849, which identified Friendship, Sympathy, Sublimity, and Self-­Esteem as his leading traits.87 As already noted, Whitman’s exploration of channels of communication between disposition and position was influenced by the idea of a pathognomic relationship between personality, on the one hand, and posture, carriage, and gait, on the other. The phrenology Whitman knew (in particular from his association with the Fowler brothers, publishers of his “Street Yarn”) operated within a broader American discourse of “self-­improvement.” As such, it was not quite identical to more thoroughly racist versions known to Hegel or to European discussion of “scientific racism.” Phrenology was popularized in antebellum America as a hands-­on form of popular science: anyone could, with a little training, learn how to examine the shapes of one’s body and movement-­style, tune into the characterological propensities associated with them, and then alter the latter by making changes in the former.88 Phrenology’s orientation to the body as a text to be read by touch surely resonated with Whitman’s poetry of the body: Divine I am inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch’d from.89 Mind and body connect and communicate, and it is by virtue of this profound and dynamic affection that each could be altered by making changes in the other. One of the things that phrenological measurements measured, then, was the malleability of the human personality, a malleability that Catherine Malabou would much later describe as “brain plasticity.”90 Or, as Orson Fowler put it, the “science of mind not only teaches us our characters, but also, what is infinitively more important, how to improve them. . . . It shows us in which perfection consists, and how to form character and mould mind in accordance with its conditions.”91 Fowlerian phrenology did not treat the interior faculties as fixed endowments imprinting themselves upon a flesh that was passive matter. Quite to the contrary, changes in the surface could and would “stimulate” changes in the interior. This meliorism, however, had to contend with phrenology’s taxonomical



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drive — its quest for a definitive, scientific schema of the human “faculties” (such as Sympathy, Adhesiveness, Destructiveness, Self-­Esteem, Firmness, Veneration, Imitation, Mirthfulness, Causality, Comparison, etc.) and of the personality-­t ypes formed by differentially weighted compositions of faculties. The fixed categorization required for a phrenological science was at odds with the malleability of form required for a phrenological practice of self-­ improvement. The egalitarianism of phrenology as a diy regimen of physical and moral health was also in tension with the tendency for taxonomies to become organized hierarchically. This tension is apparent in the Fowlers’ writing on “Self-­Esteem” (the faculty that creates “in the bosom of its possessor, a good opinion of himself; of his own character and opinions, and of whatever belongs to, or proceeds from, himself.”)92 On the one hand, the Fowlers invoked the universality of “Self-­Esteem” to make a case for democracy as the most “natural” form of social order: [Because] the feeling or principle of liberty and of equal rights, is inalienable, and inherent in the very nature and constitution of man [and] . . . can no more be destroyed than hunger, or love; . . . a purely republican and democratick form of government is the only one adapted to the nature of man.93 On the other hand, however, they claimed that even though every faculty is present in each human being, every faculty is not equally developed in size or strength in each person. Thus emerges the racism still operative within a phrenology of the improveable body. Indeed, the Fowlers also claimed that, as a group, “the European race (including their descendants in America) possess a much larger endowment of these organs [of intellect and morality], and also of their corresponding faculties, than any other portion of the human species. Hence, their intellectual and moral superiority over all other races of man.”94 Even if the Fowlers’ racism was diluted by their democratic appeal to self-­improvement, it retained and maintained the violent conceit of a developmental superiority of European peoples and civilizations.95 Though the larger “endowment” of intellect and morality in Europeans was a historically fortuitous development rather than a fixed biological inheritance, the ideal toward which the developmental process aimed was nonetheless the mind and body of (what Kafka’s ape called) “the average European.”96 Whitman tilted that model — the ideal became the robust body of the working-­class American fluent in nonchalance, pluck, and dilation. And while his poetry is certainly not free of Euro-­A merican conceits, it also includes

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elements that push against civilizational (and ontological) hierarchies. Open-­ ended, horizontal lists occupy sites where vertical taxonomies would normally be expected, and a process-­forward grammar competes well with one seeking to demarcate clearly between bodies, and between activity and passivity. Such a poetics help to induce, however subtly and incompletely, an I experienced as always in-­process and as capable of inflecting the direction of the flow. In short, what Whitman took from phrenology was the idea to craft a regime of self-­improvement that was “in principle available to all.”97 As he himself says in “Manly Health and Training,” though there is a habitual configuration of faculties within each individual, this is no fixed and final arrangement: faculties could be selectively strengthened by exercise, just as muscles could be by targeted training. There is, in other words, an “inevitable and curious conjunction, or rather resultance, of a fine manly moral character, out of a perfect physique.”98 According to Nathaniel Mackey, “Practical phrenology marketed the idea that a person could change his or her character. . . . A belief in the changeability or, even, perfectibility of personality was crucial to phrenology’s program of self-­improvement and social reform.”99 Like the Fowlers’ booming business in self-­help pamphlets and trinkets, Leaves of Grass would offer techniques for enlarging and reshaping the self. As Anton Borst notes, Whitman’s line (from “Song of Myself ”) I show that size is only development refers “directly to two phrenological doctrines: that the size of mental faculties indicates their strength and that their size can be increased through cultivation. They also suggest other correspondences between interior character and physical exterior. [Whitman’s reference to] ‘Ducking and deprecating’ connects bodily posture to character.”100 Readers today might be surprised to learn that several African American performers and lecturers of the time, including Dr. Henry H. Lewis, Simon Foreman Laundrey, Lucretian Mott, and Frederick Douglass, also drew upon phrenological terms and practices as resources for an antislavery politics.101 Taking a Step/Apersonal Affection

I return now to a final example of Whitman’s pairing of position and disposition: the lean of a walker whose lifted foot nears the ground and a coresponding mood of a gravitational affection. They appear together in these lines: The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. They scorn the best I can do to relate them.102

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Press of foot

What these lines invoke is less a taking of a step than an encounter between foot and ground, for earth too is a player — it draws the foot down to it and prompts “a hundred affections.” As Kathy Ferguson notes, walking is “always already packed with falling. Each step hosts the lift as well as the fall. Our body’s goal is not to actually fall, but to always almost fall.”103 Footstep is footfall. Notable also is that the “affections” named are irreducible to any sentiment belonging to walker. They are also apersonal, atmospheric — springing up between a sensitive foot and a gravity-­saturated, vibratory earth. The affections are, moreover, multiple, arising as a swarm that “scorns” rational comprehension: attempts to identify a stable system of relations between the “hundred affections” get bounced back. The hundred affections affect without passing through the understanding. In these two lines, The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections. They scorn the best I can do to relate them, Whitman marks a gossamer mood that accompanies every step we take. Operating way, way in the background of awareness is a cloud of protosensations that “seem to want to stay below the threshold of visibility and experience” and “whose survival depends, . . . virus-­like, on lying low.”104 This vague cloud or mist nonetheless colors experience — it strikes what Alfred North Whitehead might call an “affective tone” in the walker. Much of the influx of the world is “felt” by us, says Whitehead, below the level of sense-­perception, at the “visceral” level of an “affective tone” with “the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland.”105 One of the effects of Whitman’s lines seems to be to highlight this more-­than-­human or earthy mode of affection, and to interpolate readers as earthlings — as geo-­beings. Whitman thus locates the mundane step within a much larger and even more complex ongoing process of influx and • 22 •

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efflux: from the movement downward of a foot springs a swarm of affections, and from this, “other becomings will link up . . . , molecular-­becomings in which the air, sound, water are grasped in their particles at the same time as their flux combines with mine.”106 The two lines come at the end of this passage: The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, Ya-­honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation . . . The sharp-­hoof ’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-­sill, the chickadee, the prairie-­dog, The litter of the grunting sow . . . I see in them and myself the same old law.

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections, They scorn the best I can do to relate them. What have we here? A gander leans in, sounds down, and ya-­honks as if in invitation. Gander, I, moose, cat, chickadee, prairie-­dog, sow appear as discrete entities, and yet enmeshed in the “same old law” — they are, in the words of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme.” What is this “same old law”? That the passage lands on those apersonal “hundred affections” suggests that the law invoked is that of gravity, of the “press” of foot to ground.107 At work in the ya-­honk, grunt, quiet cat, and moose, then, is an impersonal and usually unremarked-­upon gravitational leaning. Foot falls to earth (so what? happens every day) and yet (amazingly!) a hundred affections spring. Noteworthy also is the odd syntax of the springing affections: not “ from the press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections” but rather “the press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.” The absence of the usual “from” confounds the reader’s attempt to distinguish sharply between cause and effect: had the “from” been there, the pressing foot would have been positioned as the source of the resulting affections; without the “from,” there can be no clear delineation between what does the springing and what is being sprung. The “press of my foot” is mine — or is it the pulling down of gravity? Likewise, the “spring” is a function of foot lifted by walker and the (spring-­back) resistance offered by the ground. What the line suggests, then, is that foot, earth, and affections are sprung together, quickened into life by virtue of the encounter and its diffracting waves of influence. And what about these peculiar “affections”? They can be read as personal

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sentiments of love or gratitude for the solid earth (as when the Pope kisses the ground after getting off a plane). But their explosive and alien character —  a hundred affections spring, scorning efforts to relate them (to understand the logic or structure of their relations) — also suggests that they are affects more than emotions, which “go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.”108 These footed but not-­quite-­human affections recall the “screaming electric” Whitman describes in “So Long!”: Screaming electric, the atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious envelop’d messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal down in the dirt dropping.109 Like the pedestrian affections that elude comprehension, these electric “messages” are “curious” and “ethereal.” They are not clearly present to us. But they have influence. The process of “influx and efflux” is always “tickling” at the “bellies” of dividuals.110 Whitman inflects what is (for a typically bodied human being) a banal footstep into a most curious encounter. In singing out a strange affectivity sprung with each footfall, he renders more visible a subtle kind of love whose object is not anything in particular but is rather earthly life itself. This affection is apersonal — not only because earth does not qualify as a person but also because the attachment taps into the apersonal facets of the I. This is what I have elsewhere described as the it in the I: the material vitality of a flesh composed of, among other things, iron, calcium, silica, trace minerals, etc. Perhaps it is this geo-­materiality within that is activated when my foot meets the ground. In this reunion, I can experience an uncanny belonging —  not a belonging to a civilization, or nation, or class, or even race, but the radically egalitarian belonging of earthlings to earth. Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.111 Manners and the Phiz of Democracy

Let us review Whitman’s four (dis)positions. First, there is the “side-­curved head” with hand-­on-­hip, paired with a mood of cool and impartial observation. Whitman calls this “nonchalance,” as he shifts the political valence of the term from aristocratic disdain to democratic tolerance for a cultural variegation that is the natural result of vibrant porous bodies. Second, there are the characteristic shapes and speeds of workers’ bodies — curv’d limb, • 24 •

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bending, standing astride, etc. — which resonate with a mood of “pluck,” that vitality of the disciplined, productive body. Third, there is the posture of the “lean and loafe,” which tends toward a friendly disposition that is open to direct, sensuous contact with other bodies. The fourth and last posture, that of taking a step, also induces an affectionate mood, but this time it is an apersonal geo-­a ffection, whose object is no particular person or thing but the planet and the life it affords. As already noted, these postures and moods are for Whitman valuable elements of what he calls, in Democratic Vistas, the “manners” of democracy. To understand what he means by “manners,” let’s look at another of Whitman’s newspaper articles, this one published on the fourth of July in 1878 in the New-York Tribune. Titled “A Poet’s Recreation: Gossipy Letter from Walt Whitman,” it describes Whitman’s recent three-­week visit to New York. He attended the funeral of William Cullen Bryant, took a “jaunt” up the Hudson, “circumnavigated” Staten Island, ate a breakfast of currants and raspberries (“I pick ’em myself ”) at the cottage of John and Mrs. Burroughs, and encountered in the countryside the mother of a “tramp” family whose “figure and gait told misery, terror, destitution” and whose “eyes, voice and manner were those of a corpse, animated by electricity.” Near the end of the letter, Whitman identifies “what these offhand descriptive sketches are for”: they corroborate his “dream” of a robust, democratic America. “Today I should say — defiant of cynics and pessimists and with a full knowledge of all their exceptions — an appreciative and perceptive study of the current humanity of New-­York gives the directest proof yet of . . . Democracy, and of the solution of that paradox, the eligibility of the free and fully developed Individual with the paramount Aggregate.” He then describes the “interior and exterior” of that democratic Individual, who is characterized by “alertness, generally fine physique, clear eyes that look straight at you, a singular combination of reticence and self-­possession, with good nature and friendliness.” It is Whitman’s concern with the “interior and exterior” of persons, and with the mode of influence at work between them, that has been the focus of this chapter. It was because Whitman believed that democracy was a matter not only of political institutions but also of “phiz” and “manners” that his poems played around with the intuition that the shapes taken on by the flesh could make a difference to the contours of attitude. R. P. Blackmur, describing Whitman’s poetics as that of a “barbarian” of spontaneity without “composition,” says that “Nobody ever learned anything but attitude or incentive from Whitman.”112 To this one might respond: Yes, — but do not underes

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timate the political efficacy of “attitude” and “incentive”! Whitman is reported to have said, “I have long teased my brain with visions of a handsome little book, a dear, strong, aromatic volume like the Encheiridion, as it is called, for the pocket. That would tend to induce people to take me along with them and read me in the open air: I am nearly always successful with the reader in the open air.”113 Such a public performance would allow all of the potencies within the Leaves — the sound and sense of its words and visual images,114 as well as the lively attitudes of people, places, and things — to do their thing, to help readers begin to morph into egalitarian democrats. Political institutions + social and ethical norms + a repertoire of phiz and mood (including the bent arm and tilted head of nonchalance, the pluck of bent back and curv’­d limbs, the friendly inclination, the foot planted in a field of sprouting affections) — all of these must be operative if America is to realize the especially diverse and pluralistic kind of democracy that Whitman thought was its best bet.115

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circuits of sympathy

Sympathy was an important term in the political lexicon of nineteenth-­century America. Regularly invoked in debates about abolitionism, the dignity of the white working man, and the inhumanity of the death penalty, Christian sympathy for the suffering of others was thought to have the power to disrupt prejudices, soften antagonisms, and render explicit the common ground between groups separated by differences in appearance, manners, circumstance, or fortune.1 “And the stream of sympathy still rolls on,” wrote William Lloyd Garrison in 1836, “its impetus is increasing; and it must ere long sweep away the pollutions of slavery.”2 The term was often figured as a moral sentiment, that is to say, as a cultivar of Rousseau’s natural pitié, that “first and simplest operation of the human soul,” which “hurries us without reflection to the assistance of those we see in distress.”3 But though the sentiment of sympathy was understood to be a virtue that had to be cultivated — it was less spontaneous than pitié — the word nevertheless also carried a sense that its bearers were bodies naturally susceptible to affective infusion. Alongside the sense of sympathy as an interiorized moral virtue, then, there subsisted (as Garrison’s invocation of a “stream” that “rolls on” may suggest) an older figure of sympathy as a vital force operating upon bodies from without.4 And it is sympathy as a more-­than-­human atmospheric force that greatly interested Whitman. Moral Sentiments and Atmospheric Currents

Contemporaneous discussions of Mesmerism, animal magnetism, or O. S. Fowler’s “spirituo-­sexual magnetism” also highlighted the presence of sympathetic currents, winds, or clouds.5 So did “neuromimesis” and “nervous

mimicry,” terms used by Sir James Paget in 1875 to name the process whereby a healthy person involuntarily takes on the symptoms of an organic disease after having witnessed or heard about them. Athena Vrettos describes how neuromimesis was used to explain the audience reaction to a Sarah Bernhardt performance of La dame aux camélias in 1881: as Bernhardt, playing the part of a woman dying of consumption, coughs dramatically, “ ‘an epidemic of coughing filled the auditorium, and during several minutes, no one was able to hear the words of the great actress.’ ”6 The audience, taken up in a circuit of contagion, joined forces with atmospheric flows of sympathetic repetition. Mesmer, Fowler, Paget, and others offered various names for a “sympathy” broader than individual sentiment. That latter, more interiorized notion of sympathy is traceable to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), reprinted three times in northern American cities by 1822.7 For Smith, the imagination of the sympathizer plays the dominant role in producing a sympathetic sentiment. Taking little notice of material transmissions or infusions between bodies, Smith’s primary concern was to mark the self-­enclosed, subjective character of sympathy. Sympathy is, he says, but our own “conception” of the sensations of another, an “idea” generated by “imagination,” and it is capable of generating only a weak facsimile of the pain of another: Though our brother is upon the rack, . . . our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never . . . can carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. . . . By the imagination we . . . enter as it were into his body and . . . form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”8 Although the impact of this scene of torture surely must have included influences exterior to the viewing self — for example, the impress of colors, groans, and odors leaking from “our brother . . . upon the rack” — Smith barely acknowledges these affective provocateurs. Instead, he highlights a nearly endogenous space of “imagination.” On this model of sympathy, the atmosphere is not, as it will be for Whitman, a field of forces tending to infuse themselves into porous bodies; it is, rather, a void between bodies that only a leap of imagination can cross. Only by way of a detour through one’s own reflective interior is it possible to “enter into” the feelings of another — and then only “as it were.” (“As it were” is a phrase to which we shall return. ) Whitman did draw upon the Smithian tradition of sympathy, but not exclusively. He mixed it with more vitalist experiences of magnetism, neuromi• 28 •

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mesis, etc., wherein sympathetic currents in the atmosphere seeped into and enlisted the living bodies of persons — and also of things. Here we might cite the scarlet cloth of Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), whose narrator remarks on the imprint made by the red shape upon his flesh: It seemed to me,  — the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word,  — it seemed to me, then, that I experienced a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, a sensation of burning heat; as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-­hot iron. I shuddered, and involuntarily let it fall upon the floor.9 Elizabeth Barnes cites this passage as an example of “fleshly sympathy,”10 but given the participation of the red embroidery threads in the sympathetic circuit, it could be described more broadly as a material sympathy. The notion of impressive threads — like nervous mimicry, spirituo-­sexual magnetism, neuromimesis — expresses the lingering sense that there exists a protean tendency toward affiliation that is broader than any imaginative construct. This is “sympathy” as a more-­than-­human flow of communicative transfers, a flow that is the indispensable precursor to the interiorized sentiment that bears the same name.11 The historian Seth Lobis makes a convincing case that even as sympathy was, via Smith and others, coming to be understood as a matter of “the moral, social, and psychological experience” of human individuals, “it remained significantly in contact with natural and magical traditions.”12 In what follows, we will see how Whitman creatively discloses this latter, more naturalistic notion of sympathy in his poetry and prose. Sympathy named for him not only a human mood but also currents of “affection” circulating in the atmosphere to connect different types of beings and things.13 Sympathy can appear as a current of contagious pain by which one is “possessed.” Or, if the charge of the current reverses from negative (pain) to positive (pleasure), sympathy can manifest as erotic attractions between bodies, each of which sends out “mad filaments, ungovernable shoots”14 into a “screaming electric” atmosphere: Screaming electric, the atmosphere using, At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing, Swiftly on, but a little while alighting, Curious envelop’d messages delivering, Sparkles hot, seed ethereal down in the dirt dropping.15 That human participation in such currents is often unconscious is a point Whitman underscores by including “sympathies” on a list alongside body-­parts

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or organs: heart-­valves, lung-­sponges, stomach-­sac, sympathies. Here sympathy is a responsiveness as automatic as heartbeat, respiration, or digestion. In yet another figure of sympathy, Whitman highlights its nonjudgmental quality. The current of sympathy connecting “Nature” to human beings does not discriminate, for example, between sinner and saint; the sun and meadows and streams accept all without preference. And in the last inflection of the term that I will discuss, Whitman flirts with the idea of a sympathy so impartial that, akin to gravity, it exhibits not even an anthropocentric preference. In this limit-­concept, sympathy departs not only from moral sentimentalism but also starts to break free from the providentialism of American transcendentalism.16 The chapter proceeds by examining each of those five figures of sympathy: sympathy as the transmission of pain across animal bodies; sympathy as erotic transfers between people, places, and things; sympathy as a biological organ of unconscious affection; sympathy as Nature’s capacity for impartial love; and sympathy as a physical force with the amorality of gravity or electromagnetism. Whitman’s favorite way to respond to sympathies, each of which involves but also exceeds the partaking I, is to sing them. My mode of representation is more theory-­oriented, as I parse sympathetic flows into a set of modes or figures. The chapter ends by returning to the political problems and hopes that propel Whitman’s attempts to enumerate sympathy’s multiple spheres of operation. Contagious Pain

About halfway into “Song of Myself,” a being who is as diverse as the universe and yet still a local New Yorker is named: Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son. This creature is susceptible to influences, for he is turbulent, fleshy, sensual. But he is no sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart from them.17 This refusal of sentimentalism is important if we are to understand what is going on in Whitman’s various invocations of “sympathy.” In contrast to sympathy as pity, as, that is, a sentiment formed by a self-­referential mind imaginatively re-­creating the suffering from which it stands at a distance, Leaves of Grass will sing sympathy as a direct affective transfer, as a spark along an electric current. Earlier in his career, when Whitman was editorializing against the death penalty or writing the temperance novel Franklin Evans, his writing was more squarely sentimentalist. Paul Christian Jones notes that the Whitman of the 1840s, when accused of “sentimentalism” or

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“mawkish sympathy,” would affirm those labels in the name of the Savior’s own exemplary act of pity.18 But by the time of “Song of Myself,” Whitman is developing an I who, while still imitating Christ’s love for the poor and weak, appears not so much to be performing a voluntary act of pity as to be physically “possess’d” by the circuit of pain already encircling convicts, invalids, and paupers: I am possess’d! Embody all presences outlaw’d or suffering, See myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain.

For me the keepers of convicts shoulder their carbines and keep watch, It is I let out in the morning and barr’d at night.

Not a mutineer walks handcuff’d to jail but I am handcuff’d to him and walk by his side, (I am less the jolly one there, and more the silent one with sweat on my twitching lips.)

Not a youngster is taken for larceny but I go up too, and am tried and sentenced.

Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp, My face is ash-­color’d, my sinews gnarl, away from me people retreat.

Askers embody themselves in me and I am embodied in them, I project my hat, sit shamefaced, and beg. The I, “possess’d” by myriad others, is a body touched and infused by a painful suffering arriving from abroad. Departing from a sentimentalist figure of sympathy as a “projection” or act of “imaginative identification,”19



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Whitman here lays claim to much less self-­enclosed processes of transmission. The pain of the other participates in an atmospheric current that jumps across space to connect bodies, causing lips to “twitch” and sinews to “gnarl.” It is clear that his poetry also calls readers to acts of imagination, but the phenomenology of sympathy pursued proceeds less by a logic of projection than of dilation — the opening wider of the pores of the body so as to receive more of the outside. Take, for example, this passage in his notebook where Whitman explicitly rejects — crosses out — the (Smithian) “as it were” status of sympathy in favor of an image of it as an actual physical “wave” or “flood”: Sometimes there come to one’s a man’s or woman’s heart, and fill and radiate one as it were him or her from head to foot, such waves, floods of abstract mortal sympathy love, for our humankind.20 Here and elsewhere, we see Whitman gently inflecting the moral sentimentalism of his time toward an older definition of sympathy as a physics of attractions (and antipathies) between porous bodies, an impersonal network in which persons participate but do not initiate or direct. That the loci of sympathetic circuits are multiple is marked by the peculiar formulation I am he attesting sympathy. What is being attested to is a sympathy that is both an external pressure upon an I and a human comportment or way of responding and adding effort to the “influx and efflux.” And so, I am he attesting sympathy is simultaneously descriptive and performative. Influx-­and-­efflux, as process, already proceeds sympathetically, as the I, in partaking of this cosmic tendency, adds to its volume and introduces a twist.21 Another example of Whitman’s inflection of a sentimental sympathy appears in his anti-­gallows editorial in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. There Whitman calls upon readers to sympathize with both the victims and the perpetrators of crimes. While the rhetoric includes elements typical of sentimentalist narratives (e.g., the assertion of a universal humanity “duplicated” in criminal, victim, and observer alike), it also takes care not to present sympathy as exclusively a function of a self-­contained individual’s imaginative projection. Rather, the pain itself, as a kind of vital force, appears as actually traversing one body to another, akin to the way electrical impulses pass along messages on the telegraph.22 Whitman cites two instances of this relay of suffering. In the first, the suffering of the (imprisoned) murderer infects, saddens, and ultimately chastises those who call for his death (“Good God! We are almost shocked at our own cruelty!”); in the second, the suffering of

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the murderer’s victim infects, agonizes, and, presumably, begins to redeem the murderer. Is it not enough that a fellow being . . . however black his crimes, . . . should be dragged away from the presence and communion of his kind, condemned to painful servile labor, dressed in the badges of degradation, his mouth deprived of its loved office of speech, his ears never more to hear the accents of kindness, respect or approbation, kept from the blessed sunshine or free air and when night comes, to be shut in alone with darkness and silence and the phantoms of his past crimes for his only companion? . . . Good God! We are almost shocked at our own cruelty . . . ! Looking only at the criminal in connection with the great outrage through which we know him, we forget that he is still a duplicate of the humanity that stays in us all. He may be seared in vice, but if we could stand invisible by him in prison and look into his soul, how often during those terrible nights might we not see agony compared to which the pains of the slain are but a passing sigh!23 Sympathy as a sentiment has democratic potential, but as much recent criticism has shown, “our receptive capacities are themselves profoundly directed, shaped, and limited — variously amplified and diminished — by the very topographies of inequality and subjugation that radical democrats seek to change. This generates profound paradoxes for those who seek a democratic politics of transformation.”24 Sentimental narratives have also been criticized for the way their proclamation of a universal, shared humanity (said to be more profound than social differences and dominations) nevertheless locates the (white, middle-class) sympathizer in the position of moral superiority: the sympathizer is the active subject facing the passive object of pity. Or, to be more precise, the charge is that the sole mode of activeness allowed the pitiable slaves, inebriates, immigrants, paupers, or criminals is their animal body’s emission of provocative signs of pain.25 In the passage above, however, Whitman adds a twist to that narrative by presenting the criminal as sympathizer. What it means to be a sympathizer is to partake, both consciously and unconsciously, in an atmospheric of mimetic inflection — that is to say, to partake of influx and efflux. And so it is that Whitman’s criminal, by virtue of exposure to the sight, smell, or sound of the pain of his victim (or sensuous memory of it), is claimed to be, at some level, affected and afflicted by the victim’s own “agony.” And this encounter with an other’s pain is said to engender, in the criminal as in the moral wit-



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ness, not a vicarious but a firsthand pain. This immediate and personal pain calls loudly and insistently for remediation.26 This pain might very well pass over into a reflective form and become a sentiment of guilt, remorse, or self-­ exculpation, but not unless the influx has first left its mark. Whitman does acknowledge that sympathy — as sentiment and as its protean, natural-­force precursor — will always face competition. In another article for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for example, he decries the fact that sympathy may be overcome by affects of vengeance, as it is in another newspaper’s “bloodthirsty” call for a hanged man’s body to be “buried like the carcass of a dog”: It is very likely that notions of the kind we are now giving utterance to, will be scouted by not a few as puerile as the fruit of “mawkish sympathy.” This is the stale cant of the day. It is considered a very manly thing to press with ferocity every advantage which the arrayed potency of the law can give against one frail, quivering wretch (it is somewhat new, however, to carry that ferocity out upon the dead earth of his body! ) but your conservator, of “justice,” feels it horrible and blasphemous, and dangerous to the land, to utter one word of sympathy and pity for him whom society has thrust out from it. Pah!27 In a notebook, Whitman likewise admits that sympathy or “love,” which is the soul’s “north latitude,” must vie with “Pride,” its “south latitude.”28 He repeats the point in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”: “The soul has that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its pride.”29 And finally, in another notebook entry, Whitman confesses that “most people” will turn away from feelings of sympathy with “weariness, or vacancy, or perhaps a curl of the lip.”30 The sensitivity that goes with having a porous body may or may not translate into a comportment of curious sympathy. Curious sympathy is always possible, Whitman insists, but it can remain below an actionable level, or be countermanded or overwhelmed by vengeance, pride, fatigue, distraction, disgust. Sandra Bartky, writing a century later, says something similar about the project of building feminist solidarity: sympathy can all too easily be blocked by “culturally entrenched figurations of despised, different others.”31 Romand Coles makes the intriguing alternative claim that antipathy is not external to sympathy but an intrinsic dimension of it, that a bit of antagonism is already immanent in the ecology of sympathies explored in Leaves of Grass:

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To attest sympathy as a multiphasing sea is to acknowledge and cultivate the antipodal characteristics and the antagonisms within it, too, because, I believe, Whitman thinks that certain kinds of radical strife are an immanent dimension of sympathy itself; an integral condition of sympathy’s vitality, temper, and range; an indispensable figure within sympathy’s ecology of leanings. . . . On the one hand, antagonism is often immanent in affiliative sympathies insofar as the latter draw us into antagonism toward others who are antagonistic toward those with whom and that with which we sense affiliation. On the other hand, antagonism has an immanent relationship with the ecology of affiliative sympathies insofar as it is often a condition of the latter’s emergence, amplification, and durability.32 Clearly, the sentiment and practice of generous responsiveness does not always carry the day: as one force within a complex affective ecology, it confronts, triggers, and comingles with other, complicating sentiments, memories, moods, and atmospheres. But the “greatest poet” works with these multiple forces so that “neither can stretch too far while it stretches in company with the other.”33 We will return to the “how” of Whitman’s attempts to increase the chances of a response of egalitarian generosity in the next chapters. Erotic Attraction

In the circuit of sympathy discussed above, what is transmitted is pain, or what Gilles Deleuze via Spinoza might call a “sad passion.”34 In a second circuit, the affective tone of the conduction shifts from pain to pleasure, in particular, to the pleasure of shedding the burden of individuation. The softening of the membrane between dividual and milieu is depicted, for example, in this passage from “Song of Myself ”: If I worship one thing more than another it shall be the spread of my own body, or any part of it, .... Breast that presses against other breasts it shall be you! Trickling sap of maple, fibre of manly wheat, it shall be you! Sun so generous it shall be you! Vapors lighting and shading my face it shall be you! You sweaty brooks and dews it shall be you! Winds whose soft-­tickling genitals rub against me it shall be you!35



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“My own body” begins to “spread” into what it “touches,” becoming the breast of another, a trickle of sap, a fibre of wheat, a generous sun, a sweaty brook, a lusty wind. Dianne Chisholm describes American nature-­writing as exhibiting “an earthy curiosity for the erotic vitality of life” and a “philia more physical than ideal.”36 Such traits characterize Leaves of Grass. And it is worth considering the possibility that they belong not only to the writing but also to the outsides (the percepts and affects) that prompt it. The curious affection, the sympathetic tendency that Whitman detects and cultivates, inhabits not only words but porous bodies and connecting membranes. The figure of erotic sympathy highlights the powerful allure of oneness and the thrill of letting go of the efforts required to maintain the perimeter of a self. Who need be afraid of the merge? 37 asks one version of “Song of Myself,” a sentiment repeated in “Proto-­Leaf ”: O adhesiveness! O the pensive aching to be together — you know not why, and I know not why.38 This particular circuit of sympathy is “erotic” in the sense of Freud’s definition of eros as the “instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units.”39 Like cream stirred into coffee, fluids and flesh comingle past the point of disaggregation. D. H. Lawrence objected to Whitman’s flirtation with what Lawrence called the “awful pudding of One Identity.” Lawrence does, however, also acknowledge that Whitman experimented with a variety of other figures of sympathy, which did not lead to the fantasy of being able to “sink into” the very souls of slaves, prostitutes, and criminals. Lawrence affirms, for example, a Whitmanian sympathy that appears not as a merging without remainder (not “That negro slave is a man like myself. We share the same identity. And he is bleeding with wounds, oh, oh, is it not myself who is also bleeding with wounds?”) but as a feeling-­with that respects the distance, and preserves the differences, between each being. This is the Sympathy that says, “That negro slave suffers from slavery. He wants to free himself. . . . If I can help him I will: I will not take over his wounds and his slavery to myself. But I will help him fight the power that enslaves him . . . if he wants my help, since I see on his face that he needs to be free.”40 Chapter 4 will return to this issue, showing how Whitman’s syntax marks a need for a kind of seawall around an I immersed in a ocean of influx and efflux. There is a rich body of scholarship that explores connections between Whitman’s erotic figure of sympathy and the politics of his and our times. For David S. Reynolds, Whitman is participating in antebellum debates about “free love,”41 and for Michael Moon, Whitman is trying work out the complicated relationship between homoerotic desire and “American practi-

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cal life.”42 For James Martel, Whitman hoped that “a nonspecific collective love” could serve as the public sphere itself;43 for Jason Frank, Whitman offers the restless erotic currents of cruising as a model of citizenship appropriate to an urbanizing, multicultural demos;44 and for M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s eroticism is an affirmation of “the primacy of physical life as a moral force: from the body springs human sympathy, which defies the corruption of social institutions like slavery and prostitution and which justifies indulgence of . . . instincts of sex and procreation.”45 Yes. What I would add is that Whitman’s model of collective life and of eros is multi-­ specied. He discloses crosscurrents of affectivity that infuse, but also exceed, specifically human experience; he thus affirms what Deleuze will describe as “affects [that] are no longer sentiments” but “go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.”46 Or, as Catherine Keller puts it, the eros of Leaves of Grass is “planetary in scale.”47 In addition to the erotic but nonhuman entities already named as participants in sympathetic atmospherics — shaded ledge, sun, vapors, muscular fields, branches of live oak, sparkles from the wheel — there is also the eros between a human foot and the mineral earth that was explored in chapter 1: The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections.48 Or consider the “hankering” of a man for his food: Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? 49 And sometimes no human is required at all, and erotic sympathy appears as a tendency of “matter” per se: Does the earth gravitate? does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know.50 Body-­Part

Whitman’s invocations of sympathy as an explicit feeling (of pain or erotic pleasure) exist alongside attempts to mark a sympathy operative at the very edge of sensory detection. In what Michael Moon describes as the “remarkable anatomical inventory” at the end of “I Sing the Body Electric,”51 “sympathies” appear as body-­parts operating with the emotional indifference of an “elbow-­socket” and as undetectably as a “heart-­valve” or “lung-­sponge”: Upper-­arm, armpit, elbow-­socket, lower-­arm, arm-­sinews, arm-­bones, Wrist and wrist-­joints, hand, palm, knuckles, thumb, forefinger, finger-­balls, finger-­joints, fingernails, ....



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All attitudes, all the shapeliness, all the belongings of my or your body or of any one’s body, male or female, The lung-­sponges, the stomach-­sac, the bowels sweet and clean, The brain in its folds inside the skull-­frame, Sympathies, heart-­valves, palate-­valves, sexuality, maternity.52 That inventory was added to the poem in 1856. Some years earlier, in the “Talbot Wilson” notebook entry, Whitman had tried out a more dramatic image of sympathy as an automatic biological function.53 Here sympathy is figured as an unborn fetus lodged in an autopsied brain: Among murderers and cannibals and traders in slaves Stopped my spirit with light feet, and pried among their heads and made fissures to look through And there saw folded foetuses of twins . . . Mute with bent necks, waiting to be born. —  And one was Sympathy and one was truth.54 By way of the rather gruesome image of entwined and “folded” foetuses exposed to view by a hole drilled into the skull, Whitman again seems to be trying to mark a universal, even if unfelt, physical susceptibility to outside bodies and forces. This sympathy, stowed away in the human body amidst its other organs and functions, makes a difference to the self even if it is not explicitly discerned by it.55 Whitman also may be playing with, by exaggerating, a phrenological notion of a parallel between the characterological and the physiological. O. S. Fowler’s best seller Practical Phrenology had, for example, described “sympathy” as a “moral organ” that occupies “the most prominent portion of the head, and the greatest surface.”56 Barometric Sensitivity

In September 1846, when he was still Walter Whitman, editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Whitman published one of his own stories. “One Wicked Impulse! A Tale of a Murderer Escaped” tells of a sensitive young man Philip, who, ensnared and enabled by a swirl of complex influences, kills the lawyer who had sexually assaulted his sister and cheated them out of their inheritance. Philip’s homicidal act was linked, we are told, to his “sharp sensitiveness to all that is going on . . . he noticed . . . the various differences in the apparel of a gang of wharf-­laborers — turned over in his brain whether they received • 38 •

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wages enough to keep them comfortable, and their families also,  — and if they had families or not, which he tried to tell by their looks.”57 Philip’s sensitive cuticle not only allows him to detect subtle social cues, it also renders him highly susceptible to the “whirl of influences” of the weather. The murder happens during a storm: The very turmoil of the elements, the harsh roll of the thunder, the vindictive beating of the rain, and the fierce glare of the wild fluid that seemed to riot in the ferocity of the storm around him, kindled a strange sympathetic fury in the young man’s mind. . . . All this whirl of influences came over Philip with startling quickness. The murder thus occurs not only because Philip was inflamed by injustice and affected by his sister’s pain, but also because he was caught up in “sympathetic fury” with the wind, and also because he was under the influence of alcohol, and also because he was moved by a lively knife whose “long sharp blade, too eager for its bloody work, flew open.” As he will in “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” Whitman here notes the distributed quality of agency: the stabbing of the lawyer is an act whose agents and impetuses are multiple.58 Philip is acquitted of the crime but remains horribly plagued by guilt —  until one morning he awakens to find himself infused with a calm that arrives from without, from the “gleam of the Hudson river,” from “the young grain bent to the early breeze,” from the “intoxicating perfume” of apple trees. He is once again under the influence of the day’s weather, and once again its mood repeats in his body-­soul. Sympathizing this time not with the fury of a storm but with the calm of a beautiful sunny day, Philip partakes in a current of unconditional acceptance: As Philip gazed, the holy calming power of Nature — the invisible spirit of so much beauty and so much innocence, melted into his soul. . . . No accusing frowns showed in the face of the flowers, or in the green shrubs, or the branches of the trees. They, . . . distinguishing not between the children of darkness and the children of light —  . . . treated him with gentleness. . . . Involuntarily, he bent over a branch of red roses, and took them softly between his hands — those murderous, bloody hands! But the red roses neither wither’d nor smell’d less fragrant. And as the young man kiss’d them, and dropp’d a tear upon them, it seem’d to him that he had found pity and sympathy from Heaven itself.59



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But to describe the influx of gleaming river, waving grain, or fragrant roses as a current of “pity” may not have been the best choice of term. I say this because those influences do not stand above Philip, looking down and feeling sorry for him: rather, they take him aboard, accept him without judgment as a complex entity in no need of pity or pardon. In the words of “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” they “judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing.” This solar judgment (theme of chapter 3) or nonchalance (chapter 1), is also practiced by the magnanimous Earth of “A Song of the Rolling Earth”: she is not pathetic, . . . Makes no discriminations, . . . Closes refuses nothing, shuts none out.60 The weather too has learned this “profound lesson of reception,” which is to respond with neither “preference nor denial.”61 In “One Wicked Impulse!,” then, sympathy is not exclusively an exchange between humans but between men, knife, alcohol, furious wind and rain, gleaming river, gently nodding leaves of grain, and scented flowers. On a good day, Philip enters into what Whitman elsewhere calls “the universal and affectionate Yes of the earth.”62 On a bad day, he kills the lawyer. We can again see Whitman’s shifting from sympathy as moral sentiment to a more naturalistic, not-­exclusively-­human kind of affectivity when we trace the evolution of his use of the phrase “a curious kind of sympathy.” A variant of the already mentioned “strange indescribable sympathy with all suffering, crime, ignorance, deformity,”63 the phrase “a curious kind of sympathy” appears at least three times in Whitman’s writings. In an 1846 editorial for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, it refers to brotherly and sisterly love: “There exists a curious kind of sympathy . . . that arises in the mind of a newspaper conductor with the public he serves. He gets to love them. Daily communion creates a sort of brotherhood and sisterhood between the two parties.” By 1860, when the phrase appears in the poem “Enfans d’Adam” #3, the site of this “curious sympathy” has migrated from the human “mind” to the “hand” and the “naked meat” of bodies: O my body! I dare not desert the likes of you in other men and women, nor the likes of the parts of you. . . .

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Barometric sensitivity

Head, neck, hair, ears, drop and tympan of the ears, Eyes, eye-­fringes, iris of the eye, eyebrows, and the waking or sleeping of the lids, Mouth, tongue, lips, teeth, roof of the mouth, jaws, and the jaw-­hinges, Nose, nostrils of the nose, and the partition, Cheeks, temples, forehead, chin, throat, back of the neck, neck-­slue. . . .

The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of his own body, or another person’s body. That last line reappears, finally, in the 1891 – 92 edition of “I Sing the Body Electric.” And this time, “the naked meat of his own body, or another person’s body” has been replaced by the more abstract and impersonal “the body”: “The curious sympathy one feels when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body. The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out.” Sympathy has now become like a circuit of water, breath, or electricity

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passing between bodies. The scene of its operation includes much more than the sentimental self of compassion. Giuseppe Nori has argued that Adam Smith’s treatment of sympathy broadened the range of its operation from the narrow confines of pity to include “ ‘fellow-­feeling with any passion whatever.’ . . . Through imaginative projection, the self was able to experience a loss and a fusion of identify at the same time. This process of identification rested on the power of the sympathetic self, exactly because that self enclosed the potential for its own psychological effacement into the other.”64 Whitman, one could say, expands the scope of sympathy even further, beyond the boundaries of the self, beyond “imaginative projection” or psychological “identification.” The barometric sensitivity Whitman highlights in “One Wicked Impulse!” cannot be described through those notions: both because it is more bodily and material, and because the parties to the relation include not just people but climatic forces and small, everyday objects. Gravitational Pull

Whitman often associates sympathetic currents with divinity: there is, for example, the exemplarity of Christ’s love and pity, or the erotic bodies that “make divine” whatever they touch, or the “holy calming power” of Nature. In addition, in several passages where sympathy or its synonyms are evoked, “soul” also appears as its receptacle or vehicle (or both): the anti-­gallows editorials ask the reader to look into the “soul” of the criminal; the notebook entry on “Sympathy” says that the “Soul goes forth with such yearning for all Humanity — such pensive anguish”; it is Philip’s “soul” that is suffused with the nonjudgmental embrace of the roses.65 Even granting that Whitmanian “soul” is not a disembodied spirit but is, he insists, the same thing as “body,” there remains a sense that the sympathetic currents he sings reverberate with a Christian image of a cosmic order that proceeds to the good of humanity.66 Yes, Whitman was wary of churches (preferring the “aroma of armpits” to prayer), and it is true that Nature for him was more creative process than preconceived design.67 Still, he often presents the flow of sympathy, the “influx and efflux,” as tending in a beneficent direction: “We know that sympathy or love is the law over all laws because nothing else but love is the soul conscious of pure happiness, which appears to be the ultimate resting place and point of all things.”68 It is this very assumption, however, that is put under pressure when

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Whitman stumbles upon an affinity between sympathy and gravity. Take, for example, this passage in the 1855 Leaves where the poet experiences a sympathetic merge with his suffering fellows, a merge described as a being swept up in a “true gravitation”: I become any presence or truth of humanity here, And see myself in prison shaped like another man, And feel the dull unintermitted pain. .... Askers embody themselves in me, and I am embodied in them, I project my hat and sit shamefaced and beg. I rise extatic through all, and sweep with the true gravitation, The whirling and whirling is elemental within me.69 The association is repeated in “I Am He That Aches with Love”: Does not all matter, aching, attract all matter? So the body of me to all I meet or know.70 It seems likely that the intention of such lines was to mark the profound, ontological depth of sympathy: as that “old, eternal, yet ever-­new” quality of adhesiveness.71 In a society riven by racial and regional hatreds and violence, the special vocation of the poet is to sing this protean current, to tap into it and channel it, as a kite does for lightning. But in invoking a sympathy rooted as deeply as the geologic of gravity, Whitman and reader find themselves face to face with an affectivity that was not only profound but impersonal — not predisposed toward humans. Here what crops up is a nonbenevolent force of attraction: beyond a certain point, gravity will be impervious to human effort — legislatures cannot alter it,72 he says. And unlike the impartial but beneficial acceptance of a loving Mother Earth, the impartiality of gravity radicalizes to the point of indifference: Does the light or heat pick out? Does the attraction of gravity pick out?73 No, they do not. This last current of sympathy named by Whitman troubles the presumption that the atmospheric currents we breathe  — and which encircle and infuse all things —  will have a positive ethical valence. Currents of attraction might not discriminate in favor of abolitionism, might not advance the extension of democratic rights, might not improve us morally. This poses a profound challenge to the political task Whitman assigned to the poetry: its extension of sympathy from the narrow confines of sentiment to the ubiquity of a physical force was for the sake of intensifying the reader’s capacity for sympathy qua benevolent affection. But with the notion of gravitational sympathy, the word sympathy drifts into amoral territory. If the sympathy



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Gravitational sympathy

of “One Wicked Impulse!” could rely upon a kind of pantheism,74 readers are now made darkly aware of a force of attraction that is both profoundly natural — deeply embedded in flesh — and yet not providential. With gravitational sympathy, Whitman exposes what Deleuze calls a “line of flight” from American transcendentalism.75 That same movement is apparent in Whitman’s treatment of “judgment” and “the application of morals” — the topics of the next chapter.

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solar judgment

In the 1855 Preface, and then again in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” Whitman attributes to the poet this impressive skill: he has learned how to judge “not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing.” Here is the passage: He is no arguer, he is judgment, (Nature accepts him absolutely,) He judges not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing. As he sees the farthest he has the most faith, His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things, In the dispute on God and eternity he is silent, He sees eternity less like a play with a prologue and denouement, He sees eternity in men and women, he does not see men and women as dreams or dots.1 To judge as falling sunlight? What could it mean to do that? And why try? Why, on some occasions, avoid disputes and practice silence? And how is that to see the farthest? And what is this strange temporal space that has no prologue or denouement? This chapter takes up these questions, the responses to which will sharpen the picture of “I, partaker of influx and efflux”; return us to the art of nonchalance; and explore the intriguing possibility of a democratic ethos that operates without “the applications of morals.”2

Going Solar

Judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing. Let us postpone attention to the word judge, and to any “critique of judgment” in the tradition of Kant, and attend to the falling round of the sun. According to nasa, the sun is “a yellow dwarf star, a hot ball of glowing gases” that “holds the solar system together, keeping everything from the biggest planets to the smallest particles of debris in its orbit. Electric currents in the sun generate a magnetic field that is carried out through the solar system by the solar wind — a stream of electrically charged gas blowing outward from the Sun in all directions.”3 The poet is to become sun — a tall order for a small, short-­lived, terrestrial being! It may help to put the question of solarity in the terms introduced in chapter 1: What would be its (human) posture and mood? What is the position and disposition of falling round — stances whose effects include lighting up and holding things together by way of an electrically charged wind? Maybe it looks like Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man (ca. 1487, Collection Gallerie dell’Academia, Venice, artwork in the public domain), or like this: Such a radial, radiating stance — open-­armed, palms out — helps to induce (as it also may express) a disposition that is as accepting of things as Nature is of the poet — and Nature accepts him absolutely.4 To go solar, then, might be to call forth from the flesh a moment of elemental catholicity, an other-­ orientedness free of “ignominious distinctions,”5 a receptivity to whatever

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or “whoever you are!” — enslaved man or woman; farmer’s wife; workman; son or daughter of China, Slavic empire, Damascus, Rome, Naples, Persia, Greece; prisoner; helpless infant or old person; tires of carts, boot-­soles, horses, snow-­sleighs, rous’d mobs, stones.6 To go solar would be to inhabit a moment of unalloyed impartiality, to acknowledge presences without ranking them, to hear testimonies from people, places, and things without preference. Solarity as a radically ecumenical kind of “praise.” His thoughts are the hymns of the praise of things. This expansive solarity is not quite the same as love, even if the passage from “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” does resonate with Jesus’s injunction to judge not, as in this passage from Luke 6:27: “But I say this to you who are listening: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. . . . Be compassionate as your Father is compassionate. Do not judge, and you will not be judged yourselves; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned yourselves; grant pardon, and you will be pardoned.” Whitman seems to be tilting an ideal of Christian love (as an interhuman and also human-­divine relationality) toward a more cosmic, apersonal kind of self-­dispersion, a solar fall or atmospheric dissemination. Solarity — a generic curiosity, an anexact perusal — lacks the depth psychology of what is usually meant by love. Like Earth in “A Song of the Rolling Earth” who Glance[s] as she sits, inviting none, denying none,7 the solar poet plays no favorites, and her level attraction to things is less emotional than gravitational. Its wellspring is not a shared divine patrimony (as when Whitman the young journalist had called readers to “forget not that the same God who made us, made them — and that his sunshine and blessings come alike to them as to us”)8 but a common physics. We are made of the same stuff as stars, as Karen Baker-­Fletcher says.9 To go solar, to judge not as the judge judges, is also to see the farthest. The poet, standing by the shore of Lake Ontario, gazes way, way off into the distance and the future, in a looking that falls over the edge of what the human eye can normally register. What then starts to appear is not a landscape dotted with discrete entities but an iterative eternity — an ongoing process that Whitman elsewhere describes as “the endless finalés of things.”10 Whitman’s poet is not Harold Bloom’s poet who (as we shall see in chapter 4) seeks “the ecstasy of priority, of self-­begetting, of an assured autonomy.”11 Whitman’s poet instead endeavors to call forth from its electric body a bright beam of light: I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-­threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots — and sunlight.12 This poet does not so much imitate the sun outside as she taps a sunny apersonality that is already afloat in and through her. Daz-



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zling and tremendous how quick the sunrise would kill me, If I could not now and always send sunrise out of me, says “Song of Myself.”13 Like the currents of “affection” sprung between Whitman’s foot and ground, and, as we shall see in chapter 5, the “sympathies” between Thoreau’s body and pine needles, this inner solarity testifies to a more-­than-­human consistency of the I. Processual Judging

Judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing. Now let us now turn to this peculiar “judging” and to the question of how an uncritical falling of light could possibly qualify as such. Is not discrimination the very essence of judgment? Ed Folsom has suggested that what Whitman is doing here is developing a new edge to the word “discrimination,” a word that was undergoing important changes in connotation in the second half of the nineteenth century, shifting from meaning simply “the making of a distinction” to suggesting something significantly more sinister in a democratic society, where the very act of making distinctions in respect to quality, of setting up hierarchies of value, came to be perceived as an antidemocratic process that “discriminated against” those who did not share decision-­making authority.14 I think Folsom is right. And I would add this: part of what enables Whitman to develop this “new edge” to the word discrimination is his propensity to accent (ongoing) process over (always temporary) result. For Whitman, judging, like any act, partakes in an underdetermined movement of influx-­ and-­efflux. Judging, he reminds us, is irreducible to the categorical discriminations, social distinctions, and judicial decisions asserted or invoked — and this is because the condition of possibility of all such determinations is to have already been susceptible to a powerful set of influences. These influences include not only the societal but also the cosmic and more-­than-­human. Even if the judge rejects, denies, or pushes aside some or even most such influences, they will have already made an impression. They will have had the strange efficacy of what Alfred North Whitehead calls “negative prehensions,” a concept to which we shall return later in the chapter. From a process-­forward perspective, then, a decision is not the apex of judgment but a (more or less useful) blockage of its course. To judge as the judge judges is to • 48 •

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dote on the dot-­time of decision; to judge as the sun falling round is to hover in the interval between influx and efflux — between taking note and pronouncing verdict, between shedding light and seeing the light. To judge as the sun falling round is to take a time-out from the effort of rank-­ordering, and to trade the pleasure of closure for the pleasure of float.15 The poet is no arguer. He is judgment — or perhaps here the middle voice is more apt: “I be judgment.” To judge as falling round, then, would be to engage with full equanimity, to “witness and wait.”16 We encountered a version of this already in the democratic stance of nonchalance: the democrat, in response to an encounter with the ostensibly alien, has cultivated an ability to “pause, listen, and count”17 or to “join a group of children watching.”18 To assume the position/​ disposition of democratic nonchalance is, we can now add, to inhabit a specific kind of time: not a time that moves from prologue to denouement but a time of suspense (eternity). To judge as the sun judges is to hover in that interval. The Interval

Think of this solar interval as an existential given rather than as something the poet-­judge inserts or installs. The interval is the perceptual float —  Something there is in the float of the sight of things19 — antecedent to any intentional effort or even perceived image. It is from within this “diffuse float,”20 this “measureless float,” that an I and its characteristic positions and dispositions can “bubble up.”21 The interval is like the aerial float — the balanced motionless — of these eagles: Four wings, gigantic — two beaks — Downward gyrating —  splendid swift loops — over and over turning revolving circling falling Close to the river pausing — balanced motionless.22 It is the time of “oscillation” of these seagulls: Watched the twelfth-­month seagulls, saw them high in the air floating with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies.23 Or, think of the solar interval as the “limen” (threshold) described by the anthropologist Victor Turner: “an interval, however brief, when the past is momentarily negated, suspended, or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles



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in the balance.”24 Or, picture it as Erin Manning’s “infrathin,” that “potentiation of a relational field that includes what cannot be quite articulated.”25 Or imagine it as the pause between inhalation and exhalation called kumbhaka in a yoga practice.26 The interval — float, limen, potentiality, pause — forms virtual material that can be taken up in a Whitmanian art of nonchalance. It is the spontaneous phase of hover preliminary to the practice of lean[ing] and loafe[ing] at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.27 The interval is the “and” of influx-­and-­ efflux, the time-­space during which (it could happen, but maybe not) solarity “forms the consistence”28 of democratic nonchalance. The interval is ubiquitous, and yet gossamer, almost too subtle to be real. Very, very lightly experienced, it is the light precursor to (the practiced stance of) nonchalance.29 If nonchalance is a democratic virtue to pursue, solarity is the apersonal hover out of which may grow that virtue. If nonchalance is the art of not-­sorting influences, solarity is the condition of possibility of nonchalance. In chapter 5, we will see how Thoreau too encounters the interval. He tells of a hot summer’s day when the interval was intensified to the point where it suspended his ability to think for a noticeable duration. On this occasion, the elongated interval prevented the denouement that is a thought; there was a longer-­than-­usual pause in the processing of influences-­received into assertions-­expressed. Thoreau describes another time, at the dentist, where ether prolonged such a hover to the point where he experienced the interval more overtly: “by taking the ether . . . I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. . . . The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another.”30 In a third encounter with the interval, it is (reading, hearing, or writing) poetry that intensifies Thoreau’s awareness of the interval. Like the intoxications of heat and ether, poetry slows the metabolization of inflow into output: “Do not tread on the heels of your experience. Be impressed without making a minute of it. Poetry puts an interval between the impression and the expression,  — waits till the seed germinates naturally.”31 Here, poetry is not the linguistic expression of an author’s ideas and feelings but an array of words that delays the landing. Poetry buys time for anexact, inarticulate percepts and influences to weigh in. Whitehead and Affective Tone

Inhabiting the eternal interval, we are unconsciously feeling things out. We are animating to one of the less accessible layers of the process that yields ex• 50 •

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perience, or what Whitman calls “life” (Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself? 32) Whitman tries to heighten our awareness of this operative, elusive layer by evoking such images as “sun falling round” and by calling readers to assume that stance themselves. Whitman practices what Audre Lorde calls “poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless —  about to be birthed, but already felt.”33 Alfred North Whitehead, in a practice of writing up that is more philosophical than poetic, shares Whitman’s desire to find words for those especially vague but not insignificant experience.34 When Whitehead was asked “who in American culture had made the most durable contribution to the world, Whitehead replied: ‘Walt Whitman. . . . Whitman brought something into poetry which was never there before. Much of what he says is so new that he even had to invent a form for saying it.’ ”35 Like Whitman, Whitehead invented and enacted neologisms in a quest to mark subtle existential states and impressions. Whitehead’s lexicon for this includes “negative prehension,” “affective tone,” and a “feeling” defined as having both sensed and insensate registers. In employing such terms, Whitehead helps to expose the operation (in our “cosmic epoch”)36 of a peculiar kind of causality that is effective because it is so subtle. Some inflows lend themselves to bodily responses that take the form of discrete ideas, words, images, emotions, or moods. But many, many more percepts arrive as extremely diaphanous influences. These etherialities, says Whitehead, are “felt” without explicitness; they register with “affective tone.” A brief excursion into Whitehead’s lexicon can, I think, enhance our understanding of the efficacy of “influence,” an efficacy at work when we judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round. Let’s begin with “prehension,” of which “negative prehensions” are one type. Prehension names a responsiveness to the world “which may or may not be cognitive.” Whitehead is especially interested in the cloudy and obscure, given that “we certainly do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit cognition. We can even have a cognitive memory of the taking account, without having had a contemporaneous cognition.”37 Prehension, in other words, is the diverse set of ways that any “actual entity” partakes in the lively pulse of reality. Reality is to be understood as a recursive series of encounters between (what Whitman names) influx and efflux,38 and “actual entity” refers to anything (I, daffodil, atom, etc.) with a relatively high degree of coalescence of “concrescence.” (In affirming that no entity is ever truly an isolate but remains “an element contributory to the process of becoming,”39 Whitehead echoes Whitman’s celebration of a pro

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cessual, sympathy-­strung cosmos.) Also important is Whitehead’s insistence that prehensions are not psychically endogenous but “referent to an external world”40 that is always “ingressing” or entering into and influencing us. (Ingression, we could say, names a kind of communicative effort on the part of a creative cosmos.)41 Whitehead highlights the fact that prehensions come with different degrees of awareness: sometimes, we sense the impress of our prehensions, but the vast majority of prehensions prompt only the most subtle degrees of “feeling” — “ felt” at an unsensed, “visceral” level. Whitehead distinguishes between “physical prehensions,” which entail relations between already formed bodies, and “conceptual prehensions,” or encounters between an actual entity and virtual potentialities (atmospheric forces without the consistency needed to become one of Whitman’s “shapes”). But that distinction between physical and conceptual is heuristic, given that, to Whitehead, every actual entity continues to include within it a swarm of countless unactualized potentialities.42 To further specify the very subtle quality of some influences or ingressions, Whitehead introduces the notion of “negative prehension.” In contrast to those prehensions that make a “positive contribution to the subject’s own real internal constitution,” negative prehensions are flash-­impressions of ingressions — they are received but then immediately rejected or screened out.43 For Whitehead, experience is necessarily subtractive; not noticing some things is a condition of noticing anything. “Negative prehension is what must be actively excluded in order for the event to have consistency,” writes Manning. “To achieve consistency, there must be elimination.”44 But Whitehead also insists — and this is a key point — that even “negative prehensions” inflect the character of experience.45 They strike a faint tone that makes a difference to the subjectivity of feeling: “The negative prehensions have their own subjective forms which they contribute to the process. A feeling . . . retains the impress of what it might have been, but is not.”46 There are infinite gradations of feeling, where feeling is a capacity dispersed throughout the universe and not the special province of human or other sentient creatures.47 Whitman’s poetry dotes on those prehensions that arrive sensuously via an explicit touch, sight, scent, sound, or taste. Here is one example among so many: The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-­root, silk-­thread, crotch and vine, • 52 •

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My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs, The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-­ color’d sea-­rocks, and of hay in the barn, The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind, A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms, The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag, The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hillsides, The feeling of health, the full-­noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.48 Whitehead, however, warns against restricting the “avenues of communication with the external world” to “the five sense-­organs.” (A “second error,” he says, is “the presupposition that the sole way of examining experience is by acts of conscious introspective analysis,” but the poetics of Leaves of Grass could not be said to fall prey to that error.) Sensation and introspection are clearly useful, says Whitehead, but each also “cloaks the vague compulsions and derivations which form the main stuff of experience.” His speculative philosophy aims to uncloak even these non-­sensuous vagaries, to invent “linguistic expressions for meanings” unexpressed in sensations and inaccessible through first-­person introspection.49 “Affective tone,” one of those linguistic expressions, is not sensed, for it “depends mainly on the condition of the viscera which are peculiarly ineffective in generating sensations. . . . We prehend . . . more primitively by . . . tone, and only secondarily and waveringly by . . . sense.”50 Regardless of whether the influx is registered sensuously or viscerally, what is happening, says Whitehead, is that a “private quality is imposed on the public datum.”51 As an example of the physiology of affective tone, we might turn to recent studies of “olfactory receptors” in and on the human body. Every milli­ second, you and I receive an influx of countless “odor molecules” that do not reach the threshold of smell: our skin and internal organs (and not only our noses) “bristle” with “olfactory receptors,” specialized chemical detectors on the surface of cells that sense, ingest, and are altered in response to their odor molecule counterparts. “Think of olfactory receptors as a lock-­and-­key system, with an odor molecule the key to the receptor’s lock. Only certain mole­ cules fit with certain receptors. When the right molecule comes along and alights on the matching receptor, it sets in motion an elaborate choreography

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of biochemical reactions.” One study shows that exposing olfactory receptors to a “sandalwood odor . . . sets off a cascade of molecular signals that appears to induce healing in injured tissue,” another that “a primary odor compound in violets and roses . . . appeared to inhibit the spread of prostate cancer cells by switching off errant genes,” and a third that a “fragrance redolent of lily of the valley, promoted the regeneration of muscle tissue.”52 For Whitehead, then, sense-­perception and conscious thought tap only a very few dimensions of experience: “Conscious discrimination . . . is a variable factor only present in the more elaborate examples of occasions of experience”;53 “On the fringe of consciousness, and yet massively qualifying our experience”;54 is a “vast background and foreground of non-­sensuous perception with which sense-­perception is fused, and without which it can never be.”55 This nonsensuous tone has “the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland.”56 Like Whitman, who absorbs the sights, sounds, and sparks of his milieu and exhales them as the figures of (democratic) “nonchalance,” (apersonal) “sympathy,” and (solar) “judgment,” Whitehead too tries to bespeak his encounters with unworded influences. What a reviewer said of Whitman’s November Boughs applies also to Whitehead’s efforts: “The things you have vaguely felt are here uttered, and then for the first time perhaps you recognize that you have felt them.”57 Ethos without the “Application of Morals”

The moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum has also paid attention to Whitman’s lines about judging like the sun, and she too acknowledges that judging is a process. But Nussbaum translates Whitman’s enigmatic call to activate one’s inner stardust into a more commonsense adage: Best not to rush to judgment, best to make a verdict based on careful consideration of all relevant evidence. Her Whitman follows Aristotle’s moderating footsteps to advocate for a “flexible, context-­specific judging” rather than one based on a “reductive reliance on abstract principles.” Nussbaum converts the call to “judge as the sun falling” into a sentencing guideline: judges should have first examined “every curve, every nook,” every “qualitative difference,” and all “the historical and human complexities of the particular case.”58 Nussbaum’s theory of judgment retains the priority of the moment of decision, a decision positioned as the culmination of a process whose purpose is to serve as the route to decision. The difference between my reading and Nussbaum’s is the difference between a call to hover in the interval between

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impression and expression because the hover reveals the ontological multiplicity of an I, and a call for a moral subject to take her time with the evidence in order to make a better decision. The act of decision is likewise central to Nussbaum’s model of self, a model for which “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” too provides some evidence. A few lines before the poet is said to “judge not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round,” Whitman describes the poet as “the equable man” who “bestows on every object or quality its fit proportion” and is the “arbiter of the diverse.” Indeed, Nussbaum does a fine job of identifying how Leaves of Grass might contribute to a more humane, less coldly rationalistic practice of jurisprudence. But Nussbaum misses the more radically (new) materialist implications of the sun-­human encounter affirmed in the poem. She misses Whitman’s effort to learn how to inhabit more richly a cosmic or “atomic” strata of human experience. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Lingering with the interval, and with its accompanying affective tone, can indeed help to foster a practice of liberal impartiality, but it is also the moment when gravitational sympathies can reverberate and resonate in human bodies. Nussbaum’s ideal self is a composed moral agent oriented toward making careful, deliberative decisions: that is quite a different shape than the “partaker of influx and efflux, I.” Nussbaum’s judge seeks more complete information; the solar poet valorizes moments when thought and feeling are in suspense and an ahuman echelon of existence edges toward the foreground of perception. Nussbaum’s judge, a moral subject in a world of objects, does not inhabit a world of vibrant matter. Nussbaum cannot imagine a “judgment” outside of a juridical frame of moral rankings. Whitman clearly can, and his poems will dote on a responsiveness that “makes no discriminations”59 and “is done with reviews and criticisms.”60 Such solarity is surely a dangerous game, insofar as the sun falls equally upon deadly viruses, torture equipment, slaveholders, authoritarian leaders, and other noxious bodies and forces, and not only on lovely, enriching, vital, or “helpless things.” But Whitman seems to think that the practice of solarity is worth the risk, perhaps because a sense of cosmic connectedness is so fragile and the veridical reflex and its judgmental pleasures are so strong. Prolonged suspension of normative categories and discriminating perception is incompatible with social order, justice, and sanity. But the practice of loafing in the interval remains a valuable element within democracy. For one thing, it holds open more time for the emergence of new voices, claims, or rights that have not yet settled into the sensibility of the judicious



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man or woman. For another, it helps to fold some nonchalance into the disposition of encounter. Solarity is, in other words, an important element of a Whitmanian ethos. Ethos is the operative word here, for there is no doubt that Whitman judges (in the normal sense of that word) the practice of solarity to be good, a valuable element within the broader “religion of democracy” espoused by Leaves of Grass. This public culture clearly leans egalitarian, is partial to sympathy and affection for the earth, esteems people who are plucky but “generous beyond all models” and, because they are egalitarian, are free of “despair or misanthropy or cunning or exclusiveness or the ignominy of nativity or color or delusion of hell.”61 Whitman, moreover, ranks pluralism above dogmatism, a project that many political theorists today continue to pursue.62 He thinks it is better to refrain from theological disputes than to engage in them, to practice nonchalance when it comes to ultimate (religious) values: “Did you suppose there could only be one Supreme? We affirm there can be not one Supreme but unnumbered Supremes, and that one does not countervail another any more than one eyesight countervails another.”63 In the Preface to the 1855 edition, Whitman lays it all out in a civic riff on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount: This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.64 All this brings us to the question of how the overt “normativity” of Whitman’s writings coexist alongside his eschewal, and even distaste, for (nonsolar) judgment. He tries to square this circle with a practice of valuation that avoids “the application of morals”: “the greatest poet does not moralize or make applications of morals” is a line that appears soon after the “this is what you shall do” passage.65 What does “moralizing” entail for Whitman, such that his public ethos is not an “application of morals”? Is he calling for • 56 •

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Flesh poem

a situational ethics in lieu of an absolutist morality? Nussbaum highlights how this is indeed part of his project. But I think that Whitman is also calling us to consider this less familiar possibility: that what ought to make us pause about moralizing is its tendency to colonize human sensibility such that too wide a swath of experience becomes subjected automatically to the ranking operation called judgment. It is crucial to be able to distinguish between harmful and healthy, bad and good, painful and pleasurable, wrong and right; but “morality” tends not only to be too confident about where lines are to be drawn, it tends also to overestimate the size of the sphere in which it is appropriate to prehend by hierarchizing. Whitman suggests instead that 1) there is a large share of actions and events that do not need that kind of judgment and for which “the application of morals” is inappropriate and 2) the overextension of moral judgment has produced a lot of unnecessary exploitation, social conflict, hostility, distrust, and ill will. If in the history of Western philosophy morality is often figured as a disciplined check on a tendency toward excess intrinsic to the passions or appetites, Whitman uncovers a propensity for excess within the “application of morals.”66 That is why it is so important to affirm with a light touch, to strike a tone of “suggestiveness”: “the word I myself put primarily for the description” of Leaves of Grass is “Suggestiveness.”67 Note to self: “In writing, [apply] the same taste and law as in personal demeanor — that is never to strain, or exhibit the least apparent desire to make stick out the pride, grandeur and boundless richness —but to be those, and let the spirit of them vitalize whatever is said.”68

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Solar judgment

Morality is, in short, judgment-­happy, and, as a result, trigger-­happy —  moralists too often and too quickly look for a fight. Especially in a pluralistic society with diverse normative commitments and moral sources, the effect of moral appeals can be more to offend and antagonize than to elevate and ameliorate. Because moralism is often used to attack pluralism in the name of an unquestioned authority, Whitman suggests this: before entering the agon of contesting moralities, see first if nonchalance may apply. When an idea or practice or persona “insults your own soul,” see if it is possible and wise to “dismiss” it in order to redirect your finite energies to these tasks: “Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God.” The application of moral judgment encourages disagreements and arguments; Whitman wants to make sure that added to the mix of political postures is one of calm cool: • 58 •

chapter three

“Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through fog with linguists and contenders; I have no mockings or arguments — I witness and wait.”69 For Whitman, to repeatedly practice the “application of morals” is at the same time to inculcate a particular regime of perception. This regime sensitizes us to the presence of differences, and, what is more, the contrasts and variegations it lights up are sensed as things to be ranked. Whitman calls his white audience to improve instead their detection of “sympathetic” currents between bodies sharing a common pool of atoms. To enhance detection of such anexact and invisible flows will produce new blind spots, in particular what will in the twenty-­first century be described as the operation of unconscious racial bias. But if the application of morals is good at lighting up vertical hierarchies (of white privilege, heteronormativity, anthropocentrism), Leaves of Grass is good at exposing the possibility of a world where every body, “always vibrating” with “living and buried speech,” might stand “abreast.” 70 There is no doubt at all that there are times when rage and war and moral condemnation are what are needed most, but one can also, alongside that recognition, appreciate Whitman’s call to see the undersides of righteous militance. Hone also the skill of judging not as the judge judges but as the sun falling round a helpless thing.



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refrain

the alchemy of affects

Chapters 1, 2, and 3 have emphasized how Whitman homes in on an ethereal strata of influence and experience, and it is there, in that virtual sphere or layer, that he applies his poetic efforts. He uses poetry to enhance his own and his audience’s capacity to detect inchoate flows and signals, to sense them more strongly. But the poetry seeks also to alter those currents, to compose them into specifically democratic postures and moods. The subliminal gravitational pulls and electric flows that Whitman highlights seem themselves to be apersonal and amoral. They are waves of underdetermined affect that do not tend toward either the good or the evil. They form a realm of real incipiencies, vague affects, and protodesires or sensations, of not-­quite-­lived potentials of futurity. Any Whitmanian effort today to engage this realm now faces some serious competition from “capitalism.” As Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman have argued, capitalist power has come to operate not only in a juridical mode of punishment and prohibition, not only as a biopolitical management of life, but also through the deployment of “affective networks that envelop sensations” and tap into “their virtuality by investing preemptively” in it and in the futurity they house. Like the egalitarian poet, the profit-­obsessed capitalist too tries to inflect “the intangible, virtual world lurking behind any specific perceivable pattern.”1 One lesson I draw from Leaves of Grass is that it is important not to relinquish this atmospheric realm to the capitalists.

Anxiety into Anger

Let us move from antebellum America to the year 2009 in Britain, where the government has just rolled out a series of neoliberal policies: austerity cuts in public spending, a steep rise in university fees, pro-­corporate-­profit revisions to labor and environmental rules, tax breaks for the rich. The plan generates protests, some neo-­Keynesian, some revolutionary Marxist — and one from the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, whose manifesto affirms a political ideal close to Whitman’s own. Titled “Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It Is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It,” the manifesto seeks a radically egalitarian democracy. It also highlights, as a key obstacle to that goal, a powerful atmospheric current: not of sympathy but of anxiety. It proclaims that what we have been encouraged to experience as a personal neurosis is in truth more-­than-­personal — it is a public mood fueled by and serving to intensify an unjust distribution of power and wealth. Anxiety, in other words, functions as a tactic of neoliberal governance: Keep the populace anxious — Your job is on the line! Your health benefits are precarious! Terrorist attacks are on the rise! Immigrants are invading! Crime is up! Competition is fierce and only the most productivist selves survive! Public water supplies are unsafe! The government is thoroughly corrupt! — and you will have induced a citizenry too fatigued, distracted, and demoralized to conjure up the considerable energy needed to object to policies that redistribute public wealth into private hands and destroy institutions of democratic self-­governance.2 (There is also considerable anxiety, I would say, around global warming and the dislocations, wars, and famines accompanying it — but to include that set of threats in the litany of alarms would not have a procapitalist effect.) “Six Theses” exposes high anxiety as one of the ways that the redistribution of public wealth into private hands and the shift from democratic to oligarchic rule are shielded from the outrage they would otherwise provoke. It identifies the need to address the affective dimensions of domination entangled within economics, and it pursues an alchemy of affects wherein individualized feelings of anxiety are transmuted into a shared mood of political anger. This anger is “militant” but not “insurrectionist.” Why? Because an insurrectionist model of activism wrongly presumes that the most politically potent acts will be directly oppositional, dramatic, and explosive ones — a model that requires people to willingly increase their exposure to high-­ anxiety behaviors and situations. When anxiety-­inducement already functions to support an unjust order, the insurrectionist model can perversely • 62 • refrain

work against the emergence of a mass movement of empowered activists. A key claim of “Six Theses” is that the oppositional strategy of the Left needs updating. Whereas the tried-­and-­true tactics of unionization, strikes, disruptive eros, and revolutionary fervor are still powerful tools, new modes of resistance targeted at the affective register — of capitalist-­induced anxiety — are also needed.3 That is why “Six Theses” calls its audience to build a “machine for fighting anxiety.” This machine is to induce a radically democratic “I” that is confident, resolute, energetic — and angry. This machine is to create local forums, modeled on feminist consciousness-­raising groups, where people share experiences and learn to identify the economic structures and ideological narratives by which anxiety is first induced and then psychologized. A counternarrative can then be generated and repeated, a new story of the genesis of anxiety through which what had appeared as a personal problem within a fixed social order is depersonalized, depathologized, and repoliticized. What was felt as a debilitating sentiment can start to take form as an energizing, collective outrage. Rhetoric for Transformation

“Six Theses,” qua manifesto, is itself part of the machine for fighting anxiety. It too qualifies as a political act. If writing counts too, it is worth taking a closer look at the rhetorical style of “Six Theses” and the counternarratives it seeks to spark. One notes that these counternarratives follow a path of direct critique aiming to demystify structures of domination. They are, moreover, impelled by and carry forward a hot mood, a sense of injustice akin to what the ancient Greeks called thumos, or that swirling sensation in the chest, like hot smoke or smoldering fire. (No nonchalance here!) Early in his writing career, Whitman, too, experimented with hot polemics: as a columnist for the New York Aurora, for example, he lambastes the corrosive influence of economic inequality upon American democracy: “each large American city . . . swarms with rascals of rank. The law, instead of punishing, encourages them. . . . Even though their evil doings become at length too glaring for concealment, they, either by their wealth, or by identifying themselves with some political clique . . . laugh to scorn the complaints of justly indignant public opinion.”4 Likewise, his essay “The Eighteenth Presidency” expresses outrage that “the berths, the Presidency included, are bought, sold, electioneered for, prostituted, and filled with prostitutes.”5 And his “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness” angrily lampoons the tyranny of money, ignorance, greed, and racism in American politics: “Let the sympathy that waits in everyman, wait! . . .

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Let freedom prove no man’s inalienable right! . . . Let the few seize on what they choose! Let the rest gawk, giggle, starve, obey! . . . Let the white person tread the black person under his heel!”6 In such writings, Whitman relies heavily, as does “Six Theses,” upon the transformational might of the exposé. But neither that faith nor its militant tone of voice becomes the hallmark of Whitman’s writing. Indeed, he never publishes “The Eighteenth Presidency,” and he will drop “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness” from the final version of Leaves of Grass. It is as if Whitman had decided that outrage and critique — the “heroic anger” 7 of “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” — is indispensable but not enough, that such a rhetoric is not as mighty or as all-­purpose as its users hope. In the alchemy of affects marking Leaves of Grass, the goal is more to make sympathy a precipitate of anxiety. This is possible at all because anxiety and sympathy both depend upon a condition of bodily porosity, plasticity, participation in influx and efflux. An “I” existentially open to outsides is both a profoundly relational being suffused with apersonal “affections” and a profoundly fragile being susceptible to an anxious attempt to close its pores. Freud’s quite physicalist definition of anxiety — “The name anxiety — angustia [Latin] — narrowness, emphasizes the characteristic tightening of the breath”8 — highlights how anxiety entails a narrowing of the conduits between inside and outside. Anxiety, in other words, enacts an operation the reverse of what Whitman cele­ brated as “dilation.” The greatest poet hardly knows pettiness or triviality. If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.9 Leaves of Grass is what Whitman calls a “chant of dilation” because elastic receptivity is, as Matt Miller puts it, “the effect Whitman intended for his audience: to be dilated by their engagement with his poems so that they may include others in themselves, realizing them in sympathy and understanding.”10 Not even the behemoth Capitalism is able to produce anxiety ex nihilo: it can only educe anxiety in porous bodies also susceptible to sympathy. What neoliberal capitalism can and has done is make porosity feel more and more dangerous and exhausting, in more and more realms of life. As it erects the various “economic” structures of precarity named in “Six Theses” (job insecurity, consumer debt, withdrawal of public funding for education, health, transportation, housing), capitalism has also been building a machine for fighting sympathy. Whitman and allies in this book help us to identify the affective styles and storylines of a countermachine. Directing attention at the level of everyday postures and moods, they experiment with techniques by which a vague sense of being exposed to outside influences — “a dim suspicion of • 64 • refrain

something or other”11 — can be transmuted into feelings of egalitarian sympathy. Not always and not on every occasion, but more often than is the neoliberal norm. It is good to inject some such off-­key notes into the collective fury of militant protest, to combat the danger of becoming as closed, dogmatic, and cruel as the adversaries we must oppose. One key technique here is what Whitman called “doting.” Doting

Horace Traubel, who kept detailed notes of his conversations with Whitman, recounts Whitman’s praise of a friend’s “sensitive cuticle, which is quick to respond to the right irritations.”12 Whitman also compliments some boat hands he met as “sensitive to influences —  . . . wonderfully.”13 We met another admirable snowflake in chapter 1: the highly absorptive killer Philip from “One Wicked Impulse!,” with his “sharp sensitiveness to all that is going on.” Whitman clearly admires sensitivity as a form of unthought intelligence: it is how a body reads the scene. A more sensitive cuticle, compared to a less sensitive one, is more dilated, and as such provides access to a fuller range of the elements at play in the atmosphere and discerns more of their actual details and virtual potentials. Whitman’s poems repeatedly try to tap into and enhance such sensations: I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. However helpful it is to be born with a sensitive cuticle, doting requires more than a highly receptive physiology of sensation. Doting is the art of rendering sensitivity into a sensibility. What is needed is a response to “the right irritations” in the right way, for not everything calls for sympathy. (After Traubel mentions “Tennyson’s protest against the introduction of a railroad near him on the Isle of Wight,” Whitman replies that he does “ ‘not sympathize with such sensitiveness’ — did not ‘fear the age of steam.’ ”)14 As a cultivated practice of perception, doting pays slow attention to ordinary things in ways that accentuate our existence as earthlings. Cristin Ellis places Whitmanian doting within a tradition of British Romanticism, in particular Wordsworth. “It becomes clear,” she continues, “that Whitman does not exemplify but rather reinvents Romantic doting and, in doing so, profoundly revises the democratic politics of sympathy Romantic doting had enframed. . . . Whereas Romantic doting humanizes individual figures — lighting them up as moral subjects — W hitmanian doting dismantles individuals into processual assemblages of material relations and historical forces.”15 Doting is a stylized mode of encounter, in real time and face-­to-­face with

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things. But it is also a particular kind of linguistic description. It solicits a language-­practice that shapes and elevates — writes up — lived impressions. Such a description is both closely detailed and also condensed by poetic elisions, as in the following passage: I dote on myself, there is that lot of me and all so luscious, Each moment and whatever happens thrills me with joy, I cannot tell how my ankles bend, nor whence the cause of my faintest wish, Nor the cause of the friendship I emit, nor the cause of the friendship I take again. That I walk up my stoop, I pause to consider if it really be, A morning-­glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.16 The site of “doting” might be oneself, but the objects of doting include a morning-­glory as well as ankles, wishes as well as the stoop. And also these things: The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-­soles, talk of the promenaders, The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor, The snow-­sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snowball, The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous’d mobs, The flap of the curtain’d litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital, The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall, The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd, The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes, The groans of overfed or half-­starv’d who fall sunstruck or in fits, What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes, What living and buried speech is always vibrating here.17 Pave and promenader, clinks and jokes, metal badge and excited crowd, impassive stones and exclaiming women — each is worthy of dote. To dote is to expand and refine the pursuit of contacts and attachments. To dote is to note that things “speak” — or sometimes “sting” with the

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(painful, disruptive, disorienting) stings that sights, people, objects, sting me with.18 Things also “seize and affect”: The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me!19 And, in general, “impress”: Elemental drifts! O I wish I could impress others as you and the waves have just been impressing me.20 Whitman brings to the fore something like what Hans Ulrich Gombrecht calls the “presence effects” of things;21 his poetics works to highlight the physicality of “impression.” An impression is never solely a mental or psychological image, but also an outside pressing in and making a dent — as typeface impresses its three-­dimensional shapes on paper.22 Such lively materials also “vibrate”: O the joy of my soul leaning poised on itself,  receiving identity through materials, and loving them,  observing characters, and absorbing them, My soul, vibrated back to me, from them . . . .23 “Materials” vibrate my soul “back to me”: the key point here, I think, is that this detour through nonhuman shapes is what bestows the veritable “identity” of the soul. The productivity of nonhuman things also comes to the fore through the close attentiveness of “Song of the Open Road.” The poem highlights the ability of objects to “give shape” to vague human intuitions and to give determinacy to (“call from diffusion”) those (proto-­)“meanings”: You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.

You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges! You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! . . . You rows of houses! you window-­pier’d facades! you roofs! . . . .

You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings! From all that has touch’d you I believe you have imparted to yourself,

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and now would impart the same secretly to me, From the living and the dead you have peopled your impassive surfaces.24 If that passage above seems to land with a conventional image of objects as mere repositories of the traces of human lives and actions, a closer reading can suggest something else. The odd locution — “You stones . . . have imparted to yourself ” — rescues stones (and paths, curbs, ferries, roofs), just in the nick of time, from the status of pure passivity. The stones et al. are themselves partakers of influx and efflux, which means that they too are engaged in translating it. They “impart . . . to me” some of the qualities or tenor of their own experience of what has touched them. Stones partake and in turn impart something new. They add a twist. Whitman exploits the tiny semantic space between passive and impassive in his off-­kilter claim that stones actively people their impassive surfaces. Paths and paving stones are “impassive” not in the sense of inert but in the sense of practicing a nonjudgmental, nondiscriminating (nonchalant!) receptivity. These objects are not frictionless channels for the transmission of human meaning: rather, they initiate contact (“call”), and they inflect (“shape”) a person’s vague leanings into meanings: You objects call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! Later in the poem, objects also “provoke” human wisdom: Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the soul.25 Doting enables what Deleuze and Guattari will call the power of the “little detail that starts to swell and carries you off,”26 a power that Tim Clark links to Deleuze’s own project of sympathy: “it is the impersonality of the little detail that provokes the extension of a sympathy, the stretching of a passion beyond a given identitarian boundary.27 Leaves of Grass dotes and dotes and dotes, in the hope that the practice will infect the reader’s own style of perception and description. A sensitive body’s response to influx and its irritations could just as easily be hostility, fear, anger, disgust, anxiety, as it could be democratic nonchalance. But it is possible to learn to tilt sensitivity in the direction of a sensibility marked by “generosity and affection and for encouraging competitors.”28 I turn now to one more example of doting: Whitman’s (controversial) depiction of a slave auction in “I Sing the Body Electric.” Here I will try to show how what may appear as an exclusively aesthetic practice (doting) can also qualify as political.

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The little detail

A Body at Auction

Whitman, I have suggested, came to favor an inspirational over a polemical rhetoric. He often eschewed direct critique in order to foreground a “vista” of what America could and should become, and to float an alluring figure of a “partaker of influx and efflux” kind of I. In “I Sing the Body Electric,” for example, in lieu of an overt repudiation of the moral horror of a slave auction, the poem shamelessly shines a light on the wondrous quality of the human bodies on display, on their “exquisite senses, life-­lit eyes, pluck, volition,” and on the astonishing fact that “matter has cohered together from its diffuse float” for them as much as for you and me. As Cristin Ellis puts the point, the poem offers a “natural history” of the body more than a direct critique of slavery. Here the poet opposes slavery by elaborating an insistently tacit contrast between the beauty of bodies and the horror of the social institution: The polemical force of this move is that it allows Whitman to underscore how deeply entangled this ostensibly solitary figure in fact is in the material



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fabric of the shared world. . . . If the slave auction scene is uncomfortable —  and it is in a number of ways — this is not least because Whitman’s critique of slavery refuses to explicitly condemn the immorality of selling persons.29 If the abolitionist defends the sacredness of human life by distinguishing it sharply from an unremarkable, instrumentalizable “matter,” Whitman links the value of each body-­soul to the inestimably great worth of the “diffuse float” from which each has “cohered.” I too Paumanok, / I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores.30 The man or woman at auction “balks account,” Ellis continues, because each “is the temporary individuation of an unfolding cosmos, the momentary instantiation of a material and social process so awesomely boundless that it enfolds both his and our pasts and futures in its vast transhistorical sweep.”31 To augment and vitalize the abolitionist argument, then, “I Sing the Body Electric” invokes the presence of a material kind of (apersonal) sympathy. Whitman touches readers by interpellating them as dividuals entangled in protean currents of material affinities. “The sympathy that waits in every man” appeared as personal sentiment in “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness.” But in “I Sing the Body Electric,” it is a less localized, sensuous intuition of partaking in an egalitarian physics — Every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you — that is never fully tamed or destroyed by violent societal divisions. I think of the generic, vitalistic flow of “sympathy” as the protean precursor, or the cloud of possibility, of the various psychological and spiritual acts of “identification” across the color line that go by the same name. It also provides some of the motive energy for direct critiques of slavery, insofar as a vague but ubiquitous attraction to and by other bodies is itself an inkling of a virtual otherwise to the current system of unjust suffering. It may help to render the racialized violence of that system more palpable in a way that detours around entrenched racist prejudices.32 Whitman was sensitive to the cruelty of slavery and to the noxious effects of nineteenth-­century American capitalism upon democracy. Slavery, civil war, and an entrenched bias against the working class had exacerbated blind hatreds, desires for revenge, real and paranoid anxieties, and feelings of vulnerability. The public culture was organized almost completely by its antagonisms. And although Whitman seemed to have a cheerful temperament, especially before his stroke, he was not himself immune to negative feelings and forces. They were the targets of his poetry, whose political project • 70 • refrain

was to rebalance the ecology of public affects by giving slightly more impetus to curious sympathy. “Unlike his Unionist friends,” says M. Jimmie Killingsworth, “Whitman could never be satisfied with the unification through exertion of power. . . . His scheme [instead] . . . called for unity through expanding sympathetic responses to one’s brothers and sisters.”33 Whitman seemed to think that the most effective way to do this at the particular time he was writing was less by outraged critique than by a poetic writing up of a sympathy both cosmic and personal in operation. With regard to the personal aspect of sympathy, Whitman says late in his career that “the profoundest service that poems or any other writings can do for their reader is . . . to give him good heart as a radical possession and habit.”34 In the 1855 Preface, Whitman described the poet’s job as an expressly political one: “Of all nations the United States with veins full of poetical stuff most need poets and will doubtless have the greatest and use them the greatest. Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.” For Whitman, writes Karen Swallow Proir, “poetry constitutes the practice of what robust pluralism requires.”35 For me, Whitman’s poetic inducements to sympathy enact an affective alchemy: through the magic of words some of the impetus of antagonism could be redirected into sympathetic tones — and into a militant commitment to the laws, practices, and institutions also needed for an egalitarian society. It is possible today to view Whitman’s rhetorical tack as expressive of a naive optimism or a “disavowal” of race or class, where disavowal names an unacknowledged, selective blindness to social suffering, a self-­serving po litical cowardice, an elision of the hard facts of domination that can only exacerbate the harm.36 But it is also possible to receive Whitman’s poetics as a political strategy — one aimed at enlivening the will to keep going during dark times and exploring the ways in which indirect responses to social evil can supplement the tactic of head-­on opposition.37 “The indirect is always as great and real as the direct,”38 he says. A more egalitarian, less hateful, more pluralistic, more forward-­seeing version of American democracy, for example, will depend not only upon demystification of structures of domination, not only upon militant demands for good government and just laws, but also upon the “radical possession and habit of good heart,” upon, that is to say, a “sympathetic” cast to the way people perceive and encounter the world. Such a disposition cannot be legislated or produced by demand, but requires inducements that are slow, subtle, indirect, persistent, and often more poetic than polemical. I am he attesting sympathy can, of course, only be an ex-



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perimental claim, one “always modified in the process of coming into being, betrayed in the process of being hollowed out, like banks which are disposed or canals which are arranged in order that a flux may flow. . . . [Create] not manifestos . . . but . . . reference points for an experiment which exceeds our capacities to foresee.”39

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• four •

bad influence

The I of Whitman’s sea of influx and efflux is presumptively open to outside influences — to the limber motion of brawny young arms and hips, the shapely naked wan of the broad-­a xe, the sweat of armpits, the blab of city streets, the hopeful green of grass, the nonchalant Earth, and, indeed, “every atom.” Leaves of Grass gives pride of place to encounters whose effect is to enhance health or vitality. Influence, in other words, appears most often as enrichment: I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop / They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me. Occasionally, however, Whitman does express doubts about that harmlessness. “This Compost,” for example, considers the possibility that the press of foot to ground will spring not the “hundred affections” of “Song of Myself ” but the repulsive fumes of corpses. Something startles me where I thought I was safest; I withdraw from the still woods I loved; I will not go now on the pastures to walk; I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea; I will not touch my flesh to the earth, as to other flesh, to renew me. O how can it be that the ground does not sicken? How can you be alive, you growths of spring? How can you furnish health, you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain? Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you? Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?1 It is true that “This Compost” also includes the comforting thought of a wonderful natural “chemistry” by which putrid materials become fecund com-

post: Earth distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor.2 But what Stephanie Erev describes as “a mood of suspicion” persists alongside, rather than is supplanted by, wonder.3 And even “Song of Myself” is not completely sanguine about influx: the grass is both a divine gift (the handerkechief of the Lord / A scented gift . . . designedly dropt) and a flag of death (the uncut hair of graves).4 This chapter explores three models of influence that accent, more stridently and unequivocally than does Whitman, its dangers, in particular threats posed to individuality. The first model appears in Roger Caillois’s eerie tale of influx as the “lure” of an atmospheric “space,” a lure that activates an urge already within the organism to abandon efforts to maintain its borders.5 Caillois is here inflecting Freud’s “death drive,” and from this perspective, the alluring “sympathies” traversing the cosmos are threats not only to individuals but to individuation as such. For Caillois, who writes from the fringes of surrealism in 1930s Europe, Whitman’s dilation is tantamount to dissolution. I draw out a second model of influence from the practice of hoarding, and from the experiences of people who are most often understood as having a compromised capacity for individuation, as too easily overwhelmed by the influences of everyday objects. I tell this story not, however, with an eye not toward pathology but toward the alternative model of self — a being with an unusually sensitive cuticle — that some hoarders inhabit and affirm. A third model of influence comes from Harold Bloom, who, writing from the center of literary criticism in 1970s America, explores the threats to a poet’s quest for distinction posed by the literary influences he imbibes. Of the three tales, Bloom’s model of self is the most individualistic: it is an I devoted to making a name for itself by standing out from the crowd. But because every great poem requires the inspiration supplied by predecessor-­poems, every great poet must cope with “the anxiety of influence, each poet’s fear that no proper work remains for him to perform.”6 Bloom addresses himself to the question of how best to filter and process the influx upon which great poetry depends, and he directs our attention back to the activity of writing up — to the literary techniques through which some poets successfully manage the tension between the necessity of influence and the desire to say something else. Influence and Phagocytosis

One day, while walking in a small woods in Baltimore City, my friend and I were stopped in our tracks at the sight of a praying mantis perched on the top rail of a fence. What a strange and affecting creature! We were under the spell of what Caillois called the mantis’s “lyrical force.” Lyrical force is • 74 •

chapter four

the power of certain objects — a poem, coin, insect — to “act directly on the emotions to an exceptional degree,” 7 and to make an impression that does not need to have passed first through consciousness and the mediation of cultural symbols.8 If Whitehead invents the concept of “affective tone” to mark the efficacy of influences too subtle to be registered by consciousness, Caillois does so by invoking the automaticity of “lyrical force.”9 In “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis” (1934), Caillois explores the mantis as a “magnificent example” of lyrical force. The salient vectors of this force are physical shapes: the upright stance of the mantis, its large size (as insects go), its bent and raised arms, skinny legs, and the slight, inquisitive tilt of its triangular head — all these had activated in me and my friend that “half-­ physiological, half-­psychological . . . inclination” of organisms to attend more acutely and with longer duration to “anything whose external configuration suggests his own body.”10 Most if not all people, says Caillois, will be arrested by the anthropomorphic mantis, and, in the time of hesitation, will unwittingly take in and take up something of its rhythms, postures, and attitudes.11 Fascinated, we repeat its refrains, in a becoming-­insect.12 The violent character of mantis sex enhances the insect’s lyrical force: the female decapitates her mate and then “completely devours him after copulation.”13 Caillois views this deadly encounter as emblematic of a larger dynamic between individual (coded masculine) and milieu (coded feminine): a man, like the male mantis, is fatally attracted to a female who, more an atmosphere than an individual, wants to eat him up. A generic and voracious void seeks to encompass any individuated (male) entity. Many years after the publication of “Praying Mantis,” Caillois described its aspiration this way: “I thought I could compare the habits of the praying mantis . . . with the fear of the toothed vagina (a fear often found in certain types of neuropaths) and with the myths of goddesses and femmes fatales whose embrace proves deadly. This is certainly a bold approach, but does that mean it should be rejected out of hand?”14 The horror of having one’s ego consumed becomes a central theme of Caillois’s 1935 “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” That essay explores the phenomenon whereby organisms “homomorphically” blend into their proximate environment, physically taking on the outside’s colors, shapes, postures, or movement-­styles. Fish assume the form of “tattered seaweed”;15 “box crabs resemble pebbles; the octopus reconfigures its body to the form of a stone; . . . the wings of the Kallima butterfly moisten its surfaces to achieve the look of torn leaves.”16 The death’s-­head moth, whose haunts are “ceme­ teries, . . . dumps, and scaffolds and gallows,” has body-­and-­wing markings

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that resemble a white human skeleton floating in darkness.17 And, of course, the mantis: it can curl its feet to look like petals and “imitate the effects of the wind on [petals] . . . with a gentle mechanical swaying.”18 After rejecting functionalist explanations of homomorphy as a survival strategy of camouflage —  it turns out that some insects are so good at looking like leaves that they eat each other — Caillois entertains another “risky hypothesis”: there once had been a camera-­like organ on the surface of the insect, an organ of mimesis capable of “sculptural photography.” Such an organ would have reproduced in the animal’s flesh a three-­dimensional image of the outside: “Morphological mimicry could then be genuine photography, in the manner of chromatic mimicry, but photography of shape and relief, on the order of objects and not of [merely two-­dimensional] images.”19 Caillois’s invocation of a kind of organic 3-­d printer resonates with Whitman’s tale of sensitive bodies amidst influential atmospheres.20 To further account for the process of homomorphy, Caillois posits a “lure of space” corresponding to an instinct d’abandon innate to the individual. A singular specimen, fascinated by an irresistible milieu, “abandons” its borders and “succumbs” to space.21 Caillois figures “space” as undifferentiated, indifferent, vague: it has no up or down, no landmarks by which a body might orient itself; it is a dark space into which things cannot be put. It is not, however, empty: the darkness “has some positive quality. . . . [It] is ‘thick,’ it directly touches a person, enfolds, penetrates and even passes through him.”22 Space, in other words, has lyrical force: it lures and infects a body before any mind has time to register the action or experience. “Space chases, entraps, and digests” the individual “in a huge process of phagocytosis.”23 Caillois here borrows a biological term: “phagocytosis” is the process wherein a globular cell with expandable volume engulfs (and kills) a pathogen that had been enjoying an independent existence outside the cell.24 For Caillois, the cell is the milieu and the pathogen the individual ego. In contrast to Whitman’s tendency to present atmospheric infusions as enrichments of a self, Caillois marks a process of degenerative devitalization: “the assimilation into space is inevitably accompanied by a diminished sense of personality and vitality.” People devolve into animals, animals to plants, plants to rocks, rocks to the ultimate vagueness of matter. The telos of homomorphy is the inertia of the elan vital.25 Caillois describes his own experience of this in The Necessity of Mind: “I become a piece of material, a kind of sponge; . . . I am all perforated and icy liquids penetrate me through and through.”26 “Homomorphy” exists because porous bodies are mimetic; they tend to become similar to what surrounds them. When Caillois describes homomor• 76 •

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phy as a “drive at the level of the organism toward likeness,” he is inflecting Freud’s notion of a (death) drive to return to inorganic matter, itself a nontheistic twist on the “pantheist conception of a fusion with nature.”27 Pantheistic mimesis is egalitarian and multidirectional: people imitate plants, and they also ape upward toward God; plants become “confused with stones,” and veins of iron themselves imitate fine “tapestries with decorative designs.”28 In contrast, the direction of homomorphy is always downward, toward less and less life. With “homomorphy,” Caillois is also generalizing to the human condition the psychological pathology that Pierre Janet diagnosed in 1903 as “psychasthenia.” Psychasthenia is an extreme form of “mental depression characterized by a drop in psychological tension” wherein “one’s sense of personality . . . is quickly, seriously undermined.”29 If we apply Caillois’s methodological postulate of a great “continuity” between human, animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds (“man is a unique case only in his own eyes”),30 we see that the reduction in psychic tension participates in the same process whereby the surface tension of a drop or a bubble lessens to the point where dividuation fails and there is dissemination back into water or air as such. Whitman tells a related story of diffusion in “Sparkles from the Wheel,” albeit in a key of wonder at an electric atmosphere, not horror at the prospect of being swallowed whole. The poem features sparks (“tiny showers of gold”) thrown by a knife-­grinder’s wheel. As these hit and “seize and affect” the witnessing human, it starts to “effuse.” Its edges soften, until it becomes “a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested.”31 These lines from the end of “Song of Myself ” also invoke a lovely effusion: I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun, / I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.32 Caillois explores a darker version of that effusion, a “becoming unbounded.”33 His mode of inquiry, part comparative biology, part speculative philosophy, part Freudian psychology, and part auto-­ethnography, is eclectic, and his concepts “bold” and “risky”: the “lyrical force” by which objects with similarities in shape attract each other’s special attention; the “lure of space” that provokes “homomorphic” transformations between insect and leaf or between lichen and stone or between person and environs; and a “phagocytotic” absorption of specificity into indistinction that is operative at the levels of cell, psyche, society, and cosmos. Caillois inhabits a world characterized by “multiple, subterranean interdependence,”34 a claim that a pantheist, and also Whitman, could endorse. But for Caillois, influence is not the delicious enrichment of a diversifying self but an ominous vagueness on the prowl for fragile, porous singlets. “I felt myself beginning to resemble, not to resemble

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anything, but just to resemble. Millions of infinitesimal particles whirled about and swirled together and I was connected to all of them as if on axes that turn above circular voids. I felt the pressure of the strings.”35 If Whitman accents the ecstatic joys of merge, Caillois investigates its existential horrors. Inter-­Objectivity

Alvin is a man who collects things, so many that it is difficult to move around in his house. When asked why he has all this stuff and keeps accumulating more, he simply says “The things speak out.”36 The experience of being hailed by “inanimate” matter — by objects beautiful or odd, by a refrain, by a piece of cake or a buzz from your phone — is widespread. Everyone is in a complicated relationship with things. The ties that bind are formed and re-formed in human postures, norms, and (biochemical, psychic, political) habits. But is the influence of things upon people exclusively a matter of intra-­and inter-human circuitry? Of course not, for something is added by the things themselves, an affecting oomph issuing from shape, color, texture, rhythm, or weight — from the idiosyncratic style of inhabiting space of each, an emergent style that is irreducible to the design of artist or the shaping power of the imagination of an audience.37 To attend to that influence might afford us a better sense of the new postures and comportments that we are taking on in our engagement with (these now avowedly) influential things — things “which have a kind of directionality to them, which orientate the body, which point us in this way or that, and which to a certain extent must be followed.”38 Some people are better than others at detecting this thing-­power. People who hoard really feel what Caillois called “the pressure of the strings,” strings tangling them up with their “possessions.” Like Janet’s psychaesthenic, the hoarder’s experience of being a bounded individual is lighter than average. Caillois, influenced by ego psychology and Surrealist fascination with the unconscious, tends to present this lightness as a pathological dissolution of self. But if we eschew the frame of mental illness, the hoarding I might be described as distributive and inter-­objective, rather than dissolute and victim of the voracious indeterminacy of “space.” People-­who-­hoard could be said to inhabit an I that includes in a very intimate way the nonhuman objects of their home-­space, as having a “cuticle” that is highly sensitive to the tones of thingly ingressions and material vibrations. This would be a story of people preternaturally attuned to the call of things, who have “extreme perception,”39 who are especially affected by the impress of objects. “When most of us look at an object like a bottle cap, we think, ‘This is useless,’ but a hoarder • 78 •

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Impress of objects

sees the shape and the color and the texture and the form. All these details give it value. Hoarding may not be a deficiency at all — it may be a special gift or a special ability.”40 Henri Bergson’s theory of perception as an essentially substractive process is helpful here. Most of the swirl of activity amidst us, he says, is screened off or allowed simply to “pass through” our bodies; only a very few phases of the encounter are isolated for attention — to “become ‘perceptions’ by their very isolation.”41 The principle of selection is typically pragmatic: discarded are those dimensions of the ongoing process that have “no interest for our needs,” so that what is detected “is the measure of our possible action upon bodies.”42 Normal perception is biased toward instrumentality rather than vibrancy, simplification rather than open-­ended reception. If Bergson is correct, then we could say that the hoarder is bad at screening for utility but

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good at doting on forces that subsist in objects and are otherwise to the useful. What nonhoarders view as piles of trash, the hoarding person sees as exquisite arrangements of form: “I was born with an overwhelming curiosity about everything and anything.” She hears more clearly than is usual the call of things and becomes so attuned to stuff that the perimeter of the I expands to include it. Hoarders conjoin their sensitive bodies with their hoard, which is why they often cannot bear to part with any item. Hoarders seem to be extrasensitive not only to the outward shapes that nonhoarders too can detect but also to the more subtle ingressions of a thing’s potentialities. This is what Deleuze would call “virtual intensities,” which are real in the sense of capable of making a difference to the scene even if that efficacy does not pass into the phase of more discernible phenomena. Intensities are, for the most part and for most people, experienced too lightly to be identified as causal forces; instead they simmer in the interval between impression and expression; they subsist as what Michel Serres calls energetic noise.43 Sometimes, hoarders describe themselves as passive objects under the control of extremely powerful objects: “things just took over” and “overwhelmed” them. Other times, however, they struggle to find the words for the sense of being integral to a grouping of interlaced bodies and as partaking in an agency that is distributed across the cache or hoard. Partaker of influx and efflux I. Like Whitman and his poets, boat hands, and friends, hoarders are acutely aware of their porosity and of intra-­, inter-­, and trans-­corporeal flows. They describe the things with which they live in close physical proximity not as possessions but as pieces of themselves: “I can’t even imagine getting rid of my tapes. They are a part of me,” says Beverly of Kansas, whose house is filled with thousands of videocassette recordings of the television shows that were broadcast on each day of her life since the 1980s. The hoarded object is like one’s arm, not a tool but an organ, a vital member. A friend of another hoarder explains why she, the hoarding person, resisted discarding the rotten food packed into her malodorous and slimy refrigerator: “to her it felt like you removed layers of skin.” Nonhoarders recoil at the strong scents of cat urine, mold, and decay in the hoarded house, but the hoarder does not smell it any more than anyone can detect the scent of their own flesh. “I don’t mind it,” says Ingrid, an acceptance made possible by her usually strong sense of connectedness to milieu. When a therapist has to leave the kitchen of another hoarder, Karen, because the smell is too strong, Karen becomes upset and insulted. When the therapist explains, “This is not a personal reflection of you,” Karen is adamant in a way that is both ashamed and proud:

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“Of course it is.” “But this isn’t you,” the therapist says soothingly. “Of course it is,” Karen repeats with annoyance.44 Outside influences have become I. Influence, Anxiety, and Misprision

Though the literary critic Harold Bloom confines his scope to the ins-­and-­ outs of poetry, he would agree with Caillois that individuation is a fragile achievement always threatened by the lure of outside influences. He would also agree with the hoarding person that this allure is ubiquitous: indeed, Bloom’s poet can no more escape infection by literary influences than a man can live a full life without ever getting the flu: “Influence is Influenza — an astral disease. If influence were health, who could write a poem?”45 But in describing the disease as “astral,” as a “flowing from the stars upon our fates and our personalities,”46 Bloom also acknowledges a heavenly aspect of literary infection: it is not only contamination but inspiration. The poet is weighed down but also spurred on by it. Despite the title, Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence says very little about anxiety as a mood or about the workings of that strange efficacy called influence. The book pursues neither a phenomenology of anxiety nor a genealogy of the larger cultural processes involved in its emergence as an affect. Nor is the book interested in explicating how influence, as an essentially vague causality, is nonetheless able to make such a strong impression upon the would-­be poet. (Is, for example, the mere act of reading a “great poem” sufficient to catch the infection-­inspiration?) Bloom simply states that in order to make poetry, one had to have been pressed upon and illuminated by predecessor poems, that to be a poet is to have an overriding desire to sing one’s own song and appropriate the stage for oneself, and as a result any new poem will in fact embody “immense anxieties of indebtedness.”47 What Bloom does explicate closely, what he does say a lot about, are the linguistic practices of “misreading” by which predecessor poems might be transmuted into a startling and profound new poem. Whereas most aspiring poets (“ephebes”) manage only to repeat the momentum of influences received, a few “strong or severe” poets twist and impersonate these influences in ways that extract new performances from them.48 By “strong” Bloom means “the German streng, and perhaps should be rendered ‘strict.’ The strength or strictness is a paradox, a fantastic assertion of the will that both accepts the weight of tradition and battles against it by misreading.” Whitman, says Bloom, is one of the very “strongest poets in the English language of the past four centuries.”49



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The greatness of a poem depends upon how well it misreads the predecessor-­poems, how well it metabolizes the infection: Does it merely echo or creatively misread? Bloom outlines six such techniques of misreading or “misprision.” In the first, clinamen, the ephebe misreads precursor-­poetry by taking an unanticipated swerve from it: the new poem follows a familiar path until, like a Lucretian atom, it suddenly, “at times quite undetermined and at undetermined spots,” veers off.50 In a second technique, tessera, the misreading retains the terms of the parent-­poem but means “them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough.” In kenosis, the ephebe “seems to humble himself ” before the old master, but “this ebbing is so performed . . . that the precursor is emptied out also.” In daemonization, the ephebe “opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent-­poem that does not belong to the parent proper, but to a range of being just beyond that precursor.” Here the new poet detects and exploits the virtual forces of inspirational predecessors. In askesis, the ephebe voluntarily “yields up part of his own . . . imaginative endowment, so as to separate himself from . . . the precursor.” And by means of a last technique, apophrades, the ephebe performs this magic: influences enter into his own poems in a way that makes it seem that “the later poet himself had written the precursor’s characteristic work.”51 These six techniques all serve the aspiring poet’s quest to “clear imaginative space for himself ”52 and to “unname the precursor while earning one’s own name.”53 To put the point in psychoanalytic terms (a move that Bloom resists), the “anxiety of influence” can thereby be sublimated into the creativity of a new, great poem. Bloom tends to present this transfiguration of impression into expression as a linear (more than recursive) movement: poetic influence → techniques of misprision → new poems. A phase of reception (ephebe absorbs influx) gives way to a phase of engagement (influences confront ephebic efforts) and then to a phase of expression (efflux of new poem). But I do not think that Bloom would object to an account of the process as following, to use a phrase from Michel Serres, “the complicated curves” of “the flight of the fly.” The “extremely complex design” of such a process is, says Serres, “made admirably understandable by the movements of the baker kneading his dough. He makes folds; he implicates something that his movements then explicate. The most simple and mundane gestures can produce very complicated curves.”54 Serres sets his sights not on Bloom’s specifically literary process but on the process of “genesis” per se, that is, on the movements through which any protean field of generativity (noise) self-­differentiates and forms dividuations. Serres names several (nonlinear) phases within this process, by • 82 •

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Flight of fly

which a fluctuating and noisy “ado” (influx and efflux) gives birth to discrete things.55 At a very early phase, for example, there may emerge a tiny intensification or “surge” in the noise, as in that ever-­so-­slightly-­higher whine audible above the background sound of wind or that barely perceptible dance of saltwater that turns out to have been a premonition of a swell. If a surge repeats enough times, it may become a “fluctuation.” But maybe it won’t. The logic of “it depends” or “it could happen” is the Dao of the process: sometimes noise expresses “a welter of aborted beginnings,” but sometimes it burps out “a tiny little cause, which, making its way through the intersections, tries its luck at living, heads to the left, tails to right.”56 A “fluctuation” may (or may not) become “vectoral” and branch out, as in the forking of trees or the cascade of an epidemiological contagion. If it does, and if the directionality of “bifurcation” intensifies, perhaps a “rhythm” will form, which, if it persists and gains

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strength, could become a “vortex” that carves out a region amid the pandemonious noise.57 From this, maybe a sufficiently lively swirl will form to the point of becoming “turbulence,”58 a phase in which noise thickens into lumps of “phenomena” kept upright by the vortex even as they remain in motion, as a child’s spinning top. Noise, surge, fluctuation, bifurcation, rhythm, vortex, turbulence, phenomena: these are phases of genesis. As the figure of a buzzing fly and its erratic flight pattern suggests, any account of such a process can only be a rough schema. For phases overlap, repeat with a difference, arise out of turn, and form feedback loops that confound attempts to identify a clean sequence of cause and effect. Or, to shift metaphors, each phase, like a pebble thrown into a pond, makes waves that persist beyond their heyday and seep backward into their before. And this means that there is no perfect way to tell the story of process. If you begin your tale of poiesis, for example, with influx, emphasizing the momentum of outside influences as they impact and propel an aspiring poet, you will slight what is special about the poet’s artistic effort. If you begin instead with the efflux of a strong poem, emphasizing its innovative twist or splash, you will understate the contributions of outside influences (including those of “weak” poetry). Bloom himself begins in the middle of the process, with misprision. This has the advantage of highlighting relationality or what happens in the encounter between influx and efflux, even if Bloom’s exclusive focus on the human and the linguistic must underplay the role of nonpoetic influences, such as the right “phiz” and congenial (meterological or political) atmospheres. Bloom’s tale of influx and efflux carefully explores the “and” of misprision. But it also claims that the great poet ultimately extricates himself from the flow and “clears an imaginative space” for his ego. And so while Bloom acknowledges that “greatness absolutely requires outside influences,59 he defines the “great” poet as he who has achieved “the deepest pleasure, the ecstasy of priority, of self-­begetting, of an assured autonomy.”60 The great poet outdoes his influential rivals, and wins the “struggle for supremacy.”61 If Caillois emphasizes an “instinct d’abandon” within the human, Bloom’s philosophical anthropology features “a drive that wants us to return to the ego’s narcissistic investment in itself.”62 And it is this “drive” that seems to be responsible for the feeling of anxiety accompanying the experience of influence.63 But is Bloomian anxiety a feeling and is the influence of his title an experience? Bloom says no: anxiety is not an inner state of the poet; it “hardly matters” whether a great poet ever feels anxious — that is merely a matter of “temperament and circumstance.”64 But, one might ask, must not there be some • 84 •

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point in the poetic process at which the restless energy of anxiety enters the poet’s body? Is this not necessary if the process is to continue its momentum? Here a reader might hear Bloom’s refusal to define anxiety as a feeling as a claim about an anxiety operating in the unconscious (or perhaps even in Whitehead’s “viscera”). But again Bloom says no: “I have spent a lifetime trying [to avoid Freud]” (and he displays little interest in the biophysics of the affective body). What Bloom does affirm is this: the site of anxiety is the text, an anxiety “achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay.”65 Anxiety is a “movement, in the sense of a poem’s carriage and gestures.”66 Bloom’s attempts to explain these intriguing claims, to specify the sense in which anxiety is “more textual than human,”67 are not fully successful. Take, for example, this clarification from “Literary Love”: I wish to be clear that influence anxiety, in literature, need not be an affect in the writer. . . . It always is an anxiety achieved in a literary work, whether or not the author ever felt it. . . . Great literature [does not emancipate] us from anxiety. That idealization is untrue: greatness ensues from giving inevitable expression to a fresh anxiety.68 Those lines say that anxiety is “achieved in a literary work,” but they do not say who or what achieves it, or how. They say that anxiety is achieved “in” a literary work, but they do not say whether the literary work is the generator or merely a repository for anxiety (or both). They say that the greatness of a text “ensues from giving inevitable expression to a fresh anxiety,” but they do not specify who or what is doing the giving, or how giving is enacted. They speak of “expression” but remain silent about the origin from which something is expressed. If it is the great poet who “gives expression,” why does Bloom describe it as “inevitable”? Is it in order to distance himself from a model of poetry as a willed artistic product? Indeed, Bloom seems to be trying to mark an apersonal dimension of poiesis. I discern in the lines above an imperfect effort to bespeak an anxiety that, rather than being fully locatable in a text (as he avers), in truth has no stable locus. Now anxiety becomes a current of energy, or a “nebulous” affect that is “more sensed than sensible, indefinite in its origins and ends, psychically and spatially dislocated,”69 or Whitehead’s vague but agitating “hum of insects in an August woodland.” 70 Bloom opens the door (but does not step through) to a concept of anxiety as an atmospheric energy irreducible to the bodies or texts it affects, a current whose movements are as erratic and sensitive to small changes as are those of Serres’s fly.71 This anxiety is a more-­than-­human force, kin to gravity or barometric pressure, operating within and without poets. Bloom

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flirts with such a figure of anxiety. But to affirm it explicitly he would have to set anxiety (and influence) free from the confines of metaphor and include within poiesis a biophysical dimension. And those things Bloom is not ready to do. He acknowledges interhuman influences and trans-­poetic techniques of misprision but not other weirder and more wayward energies flowing in and out of poetry. He seems anxious about those. Whitman’s Seawall

Bloom’s model of the (poetic) self accents the quest for “priority”; Whitman’s dividual is no stranger to “pride,” but only if it is balanced by an unfiltered openness (“sympathy”), which Bloom deems incompatible with artistic excellence and which Caillois links to madness. Bloom and Whitman both seek greatness; though for Whitman this entails becoming-­heterogeneous rather than attaining priority. His cosmic I is great to the extent that it absorbs more and more of the variety of the various. Bloom’s great poets (e.g., Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Whitman) have achieved priority and gained a (permanent) seat in the pantheon, whereas Whitman’s I has the temporality of intermittence. It survives to the extent that it can persist in bobbing, in bubbling up as “froth” of a sea.” In the following lines from “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” Whitman compares the I to the float of Long Island (“Paumanok”) upon the Atlantic: I too Paumanok, I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores .... Me and mine, loose windrows, little corpses, Froth, snowy white, and bubbles . . .72 “Song of Myself ” has already introduced us to this aquatic self whose encounter with influence is not an agonistic struggle between egos but a “partaking” of influx and efflux: Sea of stretch’d groundswells, Sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths, Sea of the brine of life and of unshovell’d yet always-­ready graves, Howler and scooper of storms, capricious and dainty sea, I am integral with you, I too am of one phase and of all phases. Partaker of influx and efflux I . . .73 • 86 •

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I lives as froth or brine, as an effervescence “integral” to sea. But this is a very peculiar kind of integration, in that it stops just short of the dissolution of self feared by Caillois. In an earlier version of “Song of Myself” Whitman had affirmed such a dissolution: Who need be afraid of the merge?74 But the passage above walks instead the line between one and all: the I is not merely a “phase” of the sea but “of one phase and of all phases.” The two “of’s,” I contend, function as a small but sturdy seawall around the dividual. If the line had read “I too am one phase and all phases,” it would have affirmed a full-­on merge of I and sea. But to say “I too am of one phase and of all phases” seems to preserve a precious slender space of dividuation. To partake is now a quaint verb, though we can still detect the special quality of the activity in the phrase “I partake of a good meal.” Different from saying “I ate a good meal” or “I consumed something delicious,” to partake is a more egalitarian encounter: it is to procure — obtain with care or effort — edible materials and allow them to mingle with a prior store of flesh. This taking in is also a being taken up by virtues specific to the edibles. Partaking, in other words, marks a distributed agency by which diner and food are each altered (not necessarily symmetrically) in the encounter. It is because I am “of ” the “sea breathing broad and convulsive breaths” that I exercise a wind-­like capacity to urge on or slow down the emergence of the next “groundswell” ( wave of events). To partake is to transform by making oneself vulnerable to inception. And, as the next few lines in the passage proclaim, a similar practice of agency is at work in “extolling” and “attesting”: Partaker of influx and efflux I, extoller of hate and conciliation, Extoller of armies and those that sleep in each others’ arms.

I am he attesting sympathy, (Shall I make my list of things in the house and skip the house that supports them?) Extolling and attesting transduct ambient tones of milieu into sounds of human words. To partake, to extol, to attest — these are middle-­voiced, process-­ forward verbs, a theme taken up in the epilogue. Such verbs bespeak an efficacy that both receives and twists, an efficacy that no singlet could own. Whitman’s I lacks the “assured autonomy” of Bloom’s great poet, and yet it makes a difference, in the way that a pattern of effervescence can alter a seascape.



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I am “of one phase and of all phases.” I am distinguishable and amidst. I am “both in and out of the game.” 75 To be both inside and outside is a difficult idea to entertain, especially if we allow the familiar, insistent logic of either/or to obtain. This implicit logic demands either a singular I or a generic milieu, either the specificity of a human intention or the vagueness of influence. Partaking is “both/and”: according to its logic, acts involve collaborative exposure to a sea of strivings that, through the collective play of counter-­pressures, form dividuations. This chapter has explored several takes on the power of influence in relation to a porous self in need of filters if it is to persist. Its broader aim is to make some progress toward a model of self that gives human endeavoring its due without undervaluing the indispensable agency of apersonal influences. Caillois does a good job of highlighting the fragility of a mimetic self that remains attracted to the flow from which it bubbles up; hoarding throws into relief the inter-­objective (rather than only intersubjective) dimension of self; Bloom accents the tension between the desire for individuation and our constitutive dependence upon influence, a tension to be managed by mis­prision. Bloom’s worry about standing apart from the crowd turns our attention to Whitman’s own management technique: the use of an odd syntax to insert a protective seawall around his dilated I. There is no exit from influx-­and-­efflux, but some walls and filters are needed. There are, as Dorothy Kwek notes, “better and worse ways of being-­ affected,” enriching and damaging forms of influence. “We often cannot know beforehand which ways of being-­a ffected will harm us. Yet, it is precisely this fraught relation that calls for more, not less, receptivity to out milieu,” so that we can identify dangers and experiment with different kinds of filters.76 Chapter 5 turns next to Thoreau, and to his sophisticated program of experimentation.

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thoreau experiments with natural influences

Henry Thoreau was a man of influence. I don’t mean that he wielded political or literary influence over his neighbors or future readers, although that is also the case. I mean that he seemed to be “more than usually sensitive to influences operating around him,”1 to the effervescent shapes, sounds, rhythms, and moods in his vicinity. Like Whitman, Thoreau was dilated to, and dialed into, the “vibrating speech” of things. Thoreau, however, was more vocal about the need for discrimination, for letting some but not all influences in. He is, most famously, wary of those originating from people, believing that the most common effect of interpersonal exchange is a deadening conformity: “Yesterday I was influenced with the rottenness of human relations. They appeared to me full of death and decay.”2 Thoreau was presumptively welcoming, however, to the influx of the out of doors, where the wild and the eccentric circulate more freely: “Open all your pores and bathe in all the tides of Nature. . . . Miasma and infection are from within, not without”;3 “If I am too cold for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences.”4 Thoreau most often presents the influx of “natural influences” as a beverage that refreshes: “Let me have a draught of undiluted morning air,” he exclaims in the “Solitude” chapter of Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. “Morning air! If men will not drink of this at the fountainhead of the day, why, then, we must even bottle up some and sell it in the shops.”5 But even the “undiluted” air calls for some filtering: it is put through the sieve of words as Thoreau writes up his encounters in ways designed to maximize the refreshment-­effect. The beverage of morning air needs to be decanted in texts — to be written up in journals, essays, books in ways that highlight,

exaggerate, and intensify its salutary effects. A poetics allows the flavors of natural influences to bloom. The figure of “natural influence” is one of the ways that Thoreau tries to mark the operation of a more-­than-­human force entering and affecting human and other bodies. His figure of “the Wild” is another.6 Defined as the surprise, excess, or errancy simmering within even ordinary objects, the Wild disrupts human habits of perception, alters the usual targets of affection, and derails trains of thought. There is wildness in old books, the railroad, foreign tongues, and even one’s own “winged thoughts,” whose “current” makes “as sudden bends” as does the Merrimack River.7 But the Wild is most readily experienced in encounters with uncultivated and nonhuman things, such as the relentlessly buzzing mosquito, the disconcerting geology of Mt. Katahdin, the dank fecundity of swamps, the bracing “tonics and barks” of trees, and, as we shall see later in the chapter, the hallucinogenic powers of plants, gases, or rain.8 The Wild is but a step away from what Jack Halberstam calls the “ferox”: though both terms mark forces that exceed human classification, the ferox or feral accents a “ferocious indifference” of nonhuman life to people and to “the symbolic functions that humans mete out.”9 While Thoreau’s figure of the Wild gives a nod to the indifference of Nature, it tends instead to emphasize its allure. People are attracted to the Wild because it enlivens as it disrupts: “We need the tonic of wildness, —  to wade sometimes in marshes where the bittern and meadowhen lurk . . . to smell the whispering sedge where . . . the mink crawls with its belly close to the ground.”10 When Thoreau invokes “natural influences,” he is again pointing to a power of disruptive refreshment. But whereas “the Wild” tends to direct attention to that power as it operates in individual entities, the figure of “natural influences” highlights the effusive/infusive efforts of an ongoing process. Take, for example the influence of Quebec’s “Great River” (the St. Lawrence), which Thoreau visited in the fall of 1850 and describes in “A Yankee in Canada.” Thoreau says he had initially apprehended the river through its anthropocentric name, through reference, that is, to “human relations.” But such a framework of human history was soon “swept away . . . by an influence from the wilds and from nature, as if the beholder had read her history, — an influence which, like the Great River itself, flowed . . . with irresistible tide over all.”11 There exists, Thoreau insists, a tale told by rivers, plains, promontories —  a riparian history, a fluvial history, a limnological history, a sweeping-­ grasslands history, a mineral history. Natural bodies speak and impress upon

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Thoreau, entering into and inflecting his postures and moods (to be, in turn, adjusted and expressed as the stories he writes up). It would thus be inaccurate to describe Thoreau’s nature-­writing as poetic but not historical: the presence of the past is always on his radar. When he historicizes, however, he goes beyond the “muddy and dusty ruts”12 of human acts and artifacts, in order to highlight the ongoing past — the present influence — of rivers, ponds, mountains, plants, stars, woodland animals, and the living landscapes they compose with and upon us. Influence: a tendency for outsides to ooze, drift, seep, incur across the perimeter of insides; the propensity to cross over an edge; to cause to flow in; to infuse, inspire, or instill, as the spread of liquid or emanation of stars. Whitman too spoke of this: Room to me stars kept aside in their own rings, They sent influences.13 In this chapter, we will examine three occasions when Thoreau wades deep into the great river of natural influence — into what he also calls the “circulation of vitality beyond our bodies.”14 We will follow him as he is impressed by, digests, and decants that vitality. In the first occasion, the influences of the summer sun and a field of rye elicit in Thoreau his own inner vegetality, a faculty usually eclipsed by the ordering activity of thinking. Too hot to think, what is activated instead is his plantlike capacity to receive outside impressions with equanimity and without judgment — for, as he notes in Walden, “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”15 Thoreau abides the influence of that summer atmosphere without rushing to name or process it intellectually; he lets it pervade, as he himself “nod[s] like the ryeheads in the breeze.” In this first occasion of natural influences, Thoreau’s experiment is to assume a stance akin to Whitman’s nonchalance. In a second occasion, Thoreau feels the presence of a cross-­species current of “sympathy” conjoining him to pine needles and alder leaves. The effect here is that the hold of Thoreau’s species-­specific identity is relaxed; he now comes to feel himself to be less a human individual than a natural element within an ecological process. In a third kind of encounter with natural influences — this time involving dentistry-­grade ether, a hallucinogenic plant called the thorn-­apple, and repetitive sound and shape of drops of rain —  Thoreau experiments with intoxication. What is now staged is the nonbenevolent, even toxic potential of natural influences. The Wild becomes more ferox. As Thoreau drinks up outside influences to the point of intoxication, he imbibes a vitality unaligned with moral ideals and social norms, or even human survival. Natural influences, he now sees, have the effect not only of refreshing the stale thoughts of society and not only of exposing enchant-



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ing mimetic relays between people and plants but also of challenging faith in a Nature that is providential. Might providence itself be one of those stale thoughts? “Significant but Not Efficient”

One final philosophical stop before we turn to each of Thoreau’s experiments in more detail: a brief discussion of the peculiar kind of efficacy that is “influence.” It is a capacity to induce effects quietly and indirectly, without fanfare, and often at the very margins of cognitive or even sensuous detection.16 Such, for example, is the unexpected potency of the soft luminosity of “Night and Moonlight”: “It must be allowed that the light of the moon . . . is very inferior in quality and intensity to that of the sun. But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends to us, but also by her influence on the earth and its inhabitants.”17 In distinguishing between the bright intensity of the sun and the unassuming illumination or “influence” of the moon, Thoreau tries to acknowledge the everyday presence of streams of inflow that make their mark, as “moonshine” does, by way of a a subtle showering. He reiterates the point later in the essay when he cites Sir Walter Raleigh’s claim that the stars are “significant but not efficient”: that is to say, stars have an indirect and ethereal, but not therefore negligible, power to produce effects. Other examples of this sly efficacy include the “secret of influence” of a “crimson cloud on the horizon” that “boots” the imagination of the observer — “this red vision excites me, stirs my blood — makes my thought flow” by means of “something unexplainable — some element of mystery,”18 or “the silent influence which flowers exert, no less upon the ditcher in the meadow than the lady in the bower,”19 or “the finest influence” of “electricity in the air.”20 Or “the occult relation implied” between skunk cabbage and man: “What a conspicuous place nature has assigned to the skunk cabbage — first flower to show itself above the bare ground! What occult relation is implied between this plan & man? . . . Why should just these sights & sounds accompany our life? Why should I hear the chattering of blackbirds — why smell the skunk each year? I would fain explore the mysterious relation between myself & these things.”21 In general, Thoreau will use the word influence when he wants to highlight a recursive causality whose operation remains somewhat vague but whose effects are quite salient. Thoreau affirms the presence of natural in-

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fluences, and he also iterates them — translating them into words that decant (explicate, inflect, redirect) their disruptive refreshment. Experiment 1: “Light Ethereal Influence”

One hot day in late July, Thoreau really feels the weight of the atmosphere. Here is what he writes up in his journal after he goes back inside: You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. Your mind must not perspire. True, out of doors my thought is commonly drowned as it were & and shrunken, pressed down by stupendous piles of light ethereal influence — for the pressure of the atmosphere is still 15 pounds to a square inch — I can do little more than preserve the equilibrium & resist the pressure of the atmosphere — I can only nod like the ryeheads in the breeze. I expand more surely in my chamber, as far as expression goes, as if that pressure were taken off; but here outdoors is the place to store up influences.22 The pressure of the 15 pounds has the weird heft of “stupendous piles” of “light ethereal” layers, a formulation that reminds me of Meret Oppenheim’s phrase an enormously tiny bit of a lot.23 It would in another season have gone unnoticed, encountered not as an active force but only as a background condition. On that particular summer day, however, Thoreau does sense the vitality of atmosphere: it feels heavy on his skin, and it passes through his pores to alter the relative strengths of his “faculties.” One of these, the power to form “thoughts,” is “shrunken” by the influx of atmosphere, leaving him in a kind of vegetal state. Now he “can only nod like the ryeheads in the breeze.”24 Writing in his journal later that day, Thoreau recalls and revisits his experience. Out in the heat, he could “do little more than preserve the equilibrium,” and because he was expending so much of his energy on boundary-­maintenance, he couldn’t think. Once inside, he realizes just how much effort it takes to maintain the boundaries of individuality in the face of atmospheric pressures always clamoring to get in. A suspension of the power of thought was not, however, the only adjustment of faculties induced by that ethereal influence. There was also the enhancement of his noncognitive, vegetal intelligence. We can see this if we attend to the first line of the journal entry: if you want “to hear the finest sounds” that the world has to offer, you must walk “gently” and have faculties that are “in repose.” And that is precisely the gait and comportment of “the



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Too hot to think

ryeheads in the breeze.” Thoreau’s own nod, a mimetic response to ryeheads, is both a cognitive disability and a boost in his capacity for refined hearing, for a mode of receptivity that acknowledges without rushing to judge, that listens without filtering the sounds through conventional standards of good and bad. Thoreau couldn’t think, but he could “store up influences.” There is a shift in the balance of his faculties, away from cognitive judgment and toward a nondiscriminating equanimity. Once back inside, however, the balance again readjusts. “I expand more surely in my chamber, as far as expression goes.” Thoreau expands the outdoor impressions into poetic expression: he writes them up. Later that year, in a journal entry from September 1851, Thoreau returns to the question of the difference between outside and inside, and again notes that each locale encourages a different arrangement of human faculties. To stay outside too long is to nod off; to stay inside too long is to overthink, to have a head that “stands out too dry, when it should be immersed. A writer, a man writing, is the scribe of all nature; he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”25 For Whitman too, there was such a thing as too much thinking: Too incessant a strain of the Mind — continual alacrity of thought — a never-­quiet lambency of brain — too restless an Intellect — That is it — “too restless an intellect” — the wearer out of life — It is not Soul — it is Intellect. — Soul • 94 •

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Nodding

is longeve, good, — it helps, sustains, makes sane — but too restless an Intellect and Brain action wears out life.26 Thoreau takes up a nodding attitude once more on August 23, 1853, when his journal entry calls for him to “resign” to “the great influence that Nature is,” in particular to the influence of each season. Nature is presented here as benevolent, as “doing her best each moment to make us well” (though, as we shall see with regard to his psychedelic experiment, this is not the only image of Nature he invokes): Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. . . . In August live on berries. . . . The invalid, . . . instead of imbibing only the great influence that Nature is, drinks only the tea made of a particular herb, while he still continues his unnatural life. . . . Grow green with spring, yellow and ripe with autumn. Drink of each season’s influence as a vial, a true panacea of all remedies mixed for your especial use. . . . Drink the wines, . . . not kept in goatskins or pigskins, but the skins of a myriad fair berries. . . . For all Nature is doing her best each moment to make us well. She exists for no other end. Do not resist her.27 “Resign yourself to the influences”: to resign can mean to submit but also to re-sign or resignify. And Thoreau does refigure himself, as one natural —  porous, sensitive — body among others: he too, like berries, herbs, goats, and pigs, is the fruit of a season. Thoreau receives and exudes influences, he drinks in impressions and writes them up as a story informed by them. Such

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a receptive creativity pertains as well to other organic bodies: a fox running “across the pond in the snow” reveals its “visible sympathy” with sun and earth;28 a pond, “sensitive” to the stormy weather, responds with a “thundering” of its own;29 air, even “more fine and sensitive” than water, is shaken by the sound of voices;30 “the wind has fairly blown me out doors — the elements were so lively & active — and I so sympathized with them that I could not sit while the wind went by”;31 the earth itself “is all alive and covered with papillae.”32 Indeed, for Thoreau, “there is nothing inorganic.”33 This first of Thoreau’s experiments with natural influences suggests that it is good to give Nature the nod, even if that nod, unwitted and induced by the atmosphere, it not exactly his own to give. But then again, it is Thoreau’s: the nod, induced not produced by atmosphere, relies upon the fact that nodding is already one of the potential postures of the configuration of “flesh and blood and bones”34 that is Thoreau. The nod is Thoreau’s, even if not an act of will in the strong sense; the nod is the atmosphere’s, even if it activates a plantlike posture already within Thoreau’s somatic repertoire. Thoreau and atmosphere each contribute strivings and tendencies to a much larger recursive, creative process. At work in the scene of cognition-­suspension and nod-­activation is an agency distributed across a variety of bodies and forces. Experiment 2: Cross-­Species Sympathy

A second encounter between Thoreau and natural influences occurs not on a hot day but a cool, cloudy, windy evening. And it also involves alder and poplar leaves. When Thoreau writes up the event in the (ironically named) “Solitude” chapter of Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, what comes to the fore is the presence of an invisible current of sympathy that had also been there: This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself. As I walk along the stony shore of the pond in my shirt sleeves, though it is cool as well as cloudy and windy, and I see nothing special to attract me, all the elements are unusually congenial to me. . . . Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled.35 Thoreau’s sympathy with the fluttering leaves “almost takes away my breath”: his gaspy shortness of breath mimetically salutes the quick back-­ and-­forth movement of vegetal flutter. The repetitions proliferate, as Tho• 96 •

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reau finds that his own “serenity,” like the contour of the lake’s surface (which itself repeats the waves of wind) is “rippled but not ruffled.” As the walk proceeds, we are also free to imagine that Thoreau’s gait starts to keep pace with the rhythm of flutter or lap of waves,36 just as “the note of the whippoorwill” repeats the tempo of “the rippling wind.”37 The stances, rhythms, and paces of Thoreau sympathize with other natural bodies. But the current of sympathy also flows the other way too: “every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me.”38 In play here is a non-­species-­specific current of sympathy, a rippling process. Thoreau’s lyrical description in that passage helps us to glimpse a sympathizing that is more-­than-­personal — is a kind of ontological infrastructure that makes possible the subjective sentiments of one Henry Thoreau. Thoreau eschewed person-­to-­person sympathizing because the risk of infection by the moral sentiments of the day was therein dangerously high.39 Such “compassion is a very untenable ground,” he writes, and ought to be rendered as brief or “expeditious” as possible.40 The kind of sympathizing Thoreau prizes instead is, like Whitman’s gravitational Sympathy, an apersonal current of attractions and repetitions. What repeats are less societal ideals or moral values than bodily postures, movements, sounds, and rhythms. These less normalized, more physical repetitions sweep across humans and nonhumans alike: “I warn you, my sympathies do not always make the usual philanthropic distinctions.”41 What prompts any deliberate pathos of sympathy, then, is this apersonal mimesis always already in play. This process, at work in the walking scene in “Solitude,” cannot be reduced to a purely imaginative act of projection made by Thoreau or to an intrapsychic process of sympathetic identification. The resonance between vegetal flutter and human breath does not begin and end with the man. Thoreau makes it clear, for example, that the plant’s sympathies come to his notice only after his breath is taken and his serenity is rippled by outside forces. Thoreau, in other words, lets us know that he has already been affected by outside vitalities prior to having registered a thought about them or a personal sentiment of sympathy for them.42 As Branka Arsi´c says, “We are in the midst of things that affect us even before we get to know them, and things continue to affect us even though they remain unknown to us. We are, in other words, affected by the world and through this affection we acknowledge the world before, or independently of our knowing it.”43 Thoreau’s walking body had already gravitated toward and redounded-­rebounded with the fluttering leaves, just as the whippoorwill’s note had repeated the ripples of wind. Every act can only emerge from, even as it adds to and filters, an eco

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morphic process of iteration: “ ‘How vast and profound is the influence of the subtile powers of Heaven and Earth!’ ”44 While his practice of writing up is never wholly free from conventional “forms and clichés,” it is also accessing a virtual “plane of intensities” copresent with them.45 Material Leanings

Is there a purpose behind these unsolicited, unwitted attractions and repetitions? It is true that Thoreau often presents “natural influences” as signals of divine providence: “The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature,  — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter,  — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! and such sympathy have they ever with our race.”46 Or, again: “My profession is always to be on the alert to find God in nature, to know his lurking places.”47 And so, when he says that “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me,”48 the reader justifiably may conclude that pine trees and people are kin because each is a creature of the same divine parent. But it is also noteworthy that there are times when Thoreau does not seem interested in the question of purpose or divine design, and is content simply to give natural influences the nod, or to enjoy the sensations they induce, or to acknowledge that they affect him in ways too subtle to analyze. On these occasions, Thoreau heeds his own prayer to “not be in haste to detect the universal law, let me see more clearly a particular instance.”49 One could say that he allows his providentialism to become “ruffled” by the idea of a material creativity. An example of this is when Thoreau, right after effusing about Nature’s sympathy with the human race, explains his kinship with nonhuman bodies in these more physical terms: “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”50 The “intelligence” between man and pine needles now appears, perhaps, as a function not of divine design but of a certain overlap in materials. Indeed, it is as if, as Thoreau walked along the stony shore of the pond, the vegetal within him — all the plants he has eaten, breathed in, or otherwise incorporated over the years, and from which he has absorbed nutrients, colors, textures, tempos, scents51 — leaned toward and gave a nod to its counterparts on the outside. This sympathy is an apersonal material process where like seeks, meets, and greets like. The word now names encounters between amenable materials. The materialist strands in the fabric of Thoreau’s “transcendentalism” come

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Ailanthus altissima

to the fore, and the edges of his pantheism blur into a philosophy of vibrant matter. If we were to expand upon Thoreau’s half-­winking claim that his inner “mould” has “intelligence” with vegetal kin living abroad, we might describe what happened that delicious evening as a trans-­species nod. This is not the intersubjective recognition pursued by Hegel, wherein two human individuals become self-­conscious of themselves in the process of recognizing “themselves as mutually recognizing” that the other being is, like itself, more than an object in its capacity to reflect upon its own existence.52 We would have here instead a species-­crossing acknowledgment that gives witness not to shared personhood but to asubjective affinities between resonant materials. This “recognition” is more like heliophilia than an interhuman recognition initiated and enacted in psyches.53 On one delicious summer afternoon, as I walked along the hot alleyways of Baltimore, I saw a tree whose every little branch expanded and swelled with sympathy for the sun; I was made distinctly aware of the presence of something kindred to me. It was tree-­of-­heaven or Ailanthus altissima, which thrives in cities, germinates easily in cracks in the cement, and is happy to live in the toxin-­rich soil along the train tracks from DC to Boston. Originally from China, it is considered around here to be an invasive weed — and indeed it is very good at suppressing the growth of vegetal competition by emitting allelopathic chemicals. The specimen I met had first taken root in the shade of an elevated road, but it then reached over and up, up and over and up — altissima — to the sunny side of the street above. Ailanthus sympathizes with the sun, emitting from the tips of its branches tentacles of indeterminate longing. At the same time, the sun casts down rays that warm the tree as it expands its branches, and it does the same to the concrete of the bridge. The bridge lends itself as a lean for the tree, as if to express an inner affinity between its flat white concrete and the smooth paleness of the bark. I too, along with Ailanthus, bridge, and sun, am leaning and longing, casting and connecting, radiating and being radiated: standing under the road, I feel an involuntary surge upward, as I repeat the upward thrust of the tree, my tilted head aligning with the plant’s crooked yearning. This happens as my stance — two feet firmly planted — is resonating with the hard soil on which I stand. My flesh includes vegetal, stony, mineral, and solar solids, liquids, and gases: all these nod to Ailanthus, sun, concrete, dirt. Leo Bersani describes such an attraction between similars as “homoness,” a “solidarity not of identities” but of bodily shapes, forms, and tendencies, a solidarity that ignores the boundary “between the human and the nonhuman.”54 “All being moves toward, cor• 100 •

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responds with itself outside of itself,”55 says Bersani. “Every tree sends forth its fibers in search of the Wild,”56 says Thoreau. Amen to shared materials. In another century on another continent, Paracelsus (1493 – 1541) also wrote up his encounters with vegetal influences. An herbalist and plant physiognomist, Paracelsus sympathized with plants, doting on the shape, color, texture, and scent of, for example, the satyrion (orchis), thistle, or chicory: Behold the satyrion root, is it not formed like the male privy parts? No one can deny this. Accordingly . . . it [is] . . . revealed that it can restore a man’s virility and passion. And then we have the thistle; do not its leaves prickle like needles? Thanks to this sign, the art of magic discovered that there is no better herb against internal prickling. . . . The chicory stands under a special influence of the sun; this is seen in its leaves, which always bend toward the sun as though they wanted to show it gratitude. Hence it is most effective while the sun is shining. . . . Why, do you think, does its root assume the shape of a bird after seven years?57 If you don’t know why the chicory root assumes the shape of a bird after seven years, “try to find out,” says Paracelsus, an investigation that will require that you allow your inner plant to resonate more freely with the rhythms and styles of chicory.58 The physical attributes of plants are here written up as hints left by God of its potential usefulness to human beings. As hints, they do not indicate directly but act as prompts for the herbalist to engage in the close observation, speculative thinking, and practical experimentation that could decant the larval “virtues” of the plant. Like the subtle influence of Thoreau’s moonlight, the power of Paracelsus’s herbs comes to fruition only with the help of some human artistry. Thoreau: “What a conspicuous place nature has assigned to the skunk cabbage. . . . What occult relation is implied between this plan & man? . . . Why should just these sights & sounds accompany our life? . . . I would fain explore the mysterious relation between myself & these things.” Paracelsus: “Why, do you think, does its root assume the shape of a bird after seven years? . . . Try to find out.” Paracelsus’s cosmology is complex: it includes a God who exhibits Christian benevolence, but who is also, via a pantheism stronger than Thoreau’s, immanent in Nature.59 It includes, in addition, “animist” elements: every natural object is said to exercise a liveliness not quite reducible to divine intention, and this underdetermined material vitality is itself a force in the universe. The variegated nature of Paracelsus’s thought enables even someone like Caillois, who clearly rejects “the knowing providence of the cele

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Satyrion root

brated God whose benevolence encompasses all of nature,”60 to identify with Paracelsus’s quest to discern an obscure but real “subjacent” order of things. “My starting point,” says Caillois, “is the object. I pay sustained — nearly tedious attention to it,” and “I, like Paracelsus, . . . readily imagine that there are kinds of signatures for things — patterns that vary but are constant. . . . While their appearances first surprise us because of their variety, if the universe is countable, they must necessarily recur.”61 Literary Influences

Paracelsus and Thoreau were sensitive to plants. They lifted the presence of vegetal influences out from the oblivion of the ordinary, highlighting the subtle causality by which, in Thoreau’s words, a potato farmer is affected by his “long intercourse with potatoes.”62 There are also at work literary efforts and effects. Thoreau and Paracelsus walk a fine line between, on the one hand, affirming a preliterary existence of natural influences, and, on the other hand, using words to conjure it up. To conjure, to evoke, to invoke — all verbs that suggest a shared and distributed kind of agency: Thoreau evokes a reader’s memory of occasions when she too may have sensed the presence of natural influences, as he invokes an enchantment-­power proper to the literary images he crafts in honor of those occasions. The latter appears in such lines as these: “Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath,” “Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy,” and “Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” Thoreau’s ecopoetic compositions encourage himself and his readers to linger a bit longer with any vague feelings of vegetal friendship that may arise. “I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extravagant enough. May not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of my daily experience, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced,” he says in “Conclusion,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. He strives to entertain the thought of an earth that “is not a dead inert mass” but “the most living of creatures.”63 If for a long time in literary criticism such claims would be dismissed as instances of the pathetic fallacy, today the “antipathetic reaction to the Romantic investment in the vitalism of the natural world”64 must contend with renewed affirmations of the creative agency of bodies and forces. Sounding a minor chord within the Euro-­American tradition, various neomaterialisms have highlighted a vitality that need not rely upon divine design. The reading of Thoreau I am offering is part of such an effort: it tries to pull the materialist threads out of the creationist fabric, weaving them into an onto-­

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ethics of a nature that is wondrous and mimetic, all alive with papillae, even if the human species is not its center or apex. Thoreau flirted with this kind of materialism. But even when he reverts to a providential framework, his depictions of transspecies “nods” continue to enhance sensitivity to a less guaranteed kind of material vitality. “If it is possible that we may be addressed, it behooves us to be attentive,” Thoreau writes in his journal.65 Once such vitality is brought to the foreground of attention, even if by way of a religious transcendentalism that one may not share, it is difficult to un-­feel it. Thoreau reminds us that there is something amazing about physicality. His nature-­ writing is also valuable because it shows that there is no need to understate the efficacy of “natural influences” in order to celebrate the creativity of humans: “What is called genius is the abundance of life or health,” but genius is itself a function of the “circulation of vitality beyond our bodies.”66 Experiment 3: Psychedelia

In a third kind of encounter with natural influences, the effect upon Thoreau is more intoxicating than comforting, and more difficult to link to divine benevolence.67 As Thoreau takes swigs of these, his thoughts become “winged”: they fly off into psychedelia. If the 15 pounds to a square inch of air pressure had “drowned and shrunk” Thoreau’s thought, we now encounter nonhuman influences that wildly accelerate its flow. “We know that Thoreau usually deplored drunkenness,” writes Mary Elkins Moller, and believed “that one could be more truly intoxicated by the marvels of Nature and day-­to-­day experience. But it is important to recognize that he did not deplore ‘intoxication’ itself. Indeed, a kind of intoxication —  euphoria, ecstasy — was valued by Thoreau above all things.”68 As an example of his fascination with intoxication, Moller points to Thoreau’s experience with ether during a dental procedure, described in a journal entry of May 12, 1851. What is revealed while under the influence of ether, says Thoreau, is the existence of a part of himself able to separate from his “organs” and from the usual repertoire of “sense” they afford. In this drugged state, “You are a sane mind without organs,  — groping for organs,  — which if it did not soon recover its old sense would get new ones.” The gas exposes “an interval between one life and another,” an interval always there if not always noticed. Moller, accenting Thoreau’s mention of a “mind” that can travel to “another life,” reads Thoreau as flirting with mysticism. Even more notable to me is the way Thoreau presents this mind as plantlike: “You are a sane mind without organs, — groping for organs, — which if it did not soon recover its old sense • 104 •

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would get new ones. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in winter.”69 Under the influence of ether, the mind again reveals its inner vegetality. Its “groping” toward the plants outside is a nod of affinity: under the pressure of atmosphere, under the spell of pine needles, and now under the influence of ether, Thoreau’s inner plant rises to the surface. One could say that on May 12, 1851, Thoreau wrote up what Richard Doyle calls as an “ecodelic” experience: the ecodelic is that which provokes in people a sharper sense of the “inhuman or transhuman presences in . . . consciousness.” 70 Later that year, on September 7, Thoreau mentions another “pot of ether,” this one administered not by a dentist but by some fruits: “the juices of the fruits which I have eaten the melons & apples have ascended to my brain — & are stimulating it. They give me a heady force.” These “forceful” plants, which leave an “indelible impression,” produce in Thoreau an “exstatic” state wherein he is infused with a “fulness of life” that seems to have no purpose. But like a “pot of pure ether,” this “superfluity of wealth” nonetheless has great value — for poets: it induces a kind of writing that can “overrun and float itself,” that gets at the truth by a practice of “exaggeration.” 71 As an example of such writing, we might turn to Thoreau’s account, in Cape Cod, of another intoxicating plant, the thorn-­apple: The Datura stramonium, or thorn-­apple, was in full bloom along the beach; and, at sight of this cosmopolite, — the Captain Cook among plants, — carried in ballast all over the world, I felt as if I were on the highway of natures . . . this Viking, king of the Bays, . . . is not an innocent plant; it suggests not merely commerce, but its attendant vices, as if its fibres were the stuff of which pirates spin their yarns. I heard the voice of men shouting aboard a vessel, half a mile from the shore. . . . As I looked over the water, I saw the isles rapidly wasting away, the sea nibbling voraciously at the continent. . . . On the other hand, these wreck of isles were being fancifully arranged into new shores . . . where everything seemed to be gently lapsing into futurity.72 The thorn-­apple, itself having been subjected to the influences of human traders and explorers, repeats and transmits those “not innocent” tendencies back to Thoreau: in their presence he hears voices, and is provoked into a hallucinogenic vision of Vikings, pirates, a “sea nibbling voraciously at the continent,” and a cosmos of multiple forms morphing and “lapsing into futurity.” Further evidence of the wild influence of this plant upon men is provided in a footnote, where Thoreau cites Beverly’s History of Virginia: “being an early plant,” the thorn-­apple was gathered for a salad by soldiers in Virginia who, after eating it, “turned natural fools”:

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one would blow up a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions, and sneer in their faces. . . . A thousand such simple tricks they played, and after eleven days returned to themselves again, not remembering anything that had passed.73 Yet another instance of intoxication is the “mesmerizing” effect of a woodchuck whose path Thoreau crosses. Alongside the natural influences of atmosphere, vegetal sympathies, and the “influence of gravity,” 74 there is also the current of “mesmeric influence.” It was the latter that bound him and a woodchuck together on April 16, 1852: As I turned round the corner of Hubbard’s Grove, saw a woodchuck . . . in the middle of the field. . . . When I was only a rod and a half off, he stopped, and I did the same. . . . We sat looking at one another about half an hour, till we began to feel mesmeric influences. . . . I walked round him; he turned as fast and fronted me still. I sat down by his side within a foot. I talked to him quasi forest lingo.75 As a final example of Thoreau’s poetic filtering of an encounter with intoxicating natural influences, let us consider his extended discourse on dripping drops in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government. One rainy day, Thoreau becomes “suddenly sensible” of an “unaccountable friendliness” between himself and the “pattering of the drops.” 76 In a long, and famous, passage in the “Spring” chapter, Thoreau stages a psychedelic encounter with rain, sand, leaves, and clay on the side of a railroad embankment, again taking “delight” in Nature’s practices of repetition and iteration. This time the mimesis is more volatile than the friendly resonances between Thoreau and pine needles, or the sympathetic redounding of pond and thunder. It is the weirder and wilder repeat of a shape — of lobe or drop that repeats in the way an image multiplies in a funhouse of mirrors. As the lobe or drop repeats itself with a twist, a series of strange and inexplicable “hybrids” take shape. “Few phenomena gave me more delight,” writes Thoreau, “than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village.” It was an early spring day, and the snowy banks were starting to give way to ejaculates of sand, which “flow down the slopes like lava. . . . Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace . . ., exhibiting a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the law of currents, and half way that • 106 •

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of vegetation.” These drops or globules of water-­sand continue to morph, now into “the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth.” Both the water-­sand and the “sand foliage” had erupted suddenly, as if Thoreau had witnessed an “excremental” bursting of the “vitals” of the earth. Thoreau here in “Spring, in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, witnesses a repetition that is fractal without being a perfect (what Gilles Deleuze calls “bare”) repetition: Innumerable little streams overlap and interlace, . . . As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or veins . . . resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or . . . coral, . . . leopard’s paws or birds’ feet, of brains or lungs or bowels and excrements of all kinds. It is a truly grotesque vegetation, . . . a sort of architectural foliage . . . destined perhaps . . . to become a puzzle to future geologists. . . . What is man but a mass of thawing clay? The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed. The fingers and toes flow to their extent from the thawing mass of the body. . . . The nose is a manifest congealed drop of stalactite. The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face. The cheeks are a slide from the brows into the valley of the face. . . . Each rounded lobe of the vegetable leaf, too, is a thick and now loitering drop . . . ; the lobes are the fingers of the leaf. These repetitions, which ignore distinctions between animal species, or between animals and plants, or between biology and geology, are linked to a divine source. But in contrast to what Thoreau experiences while nodding and sympathizing, this source appears less as a God-­person than as an onto-­ experimental process. It is, it seems, creativity per se, and not determined by a design that would have preceded it. “I am affected as if I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me — had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.” In this passage, says Michael Ziser, “natural phenomena are viewed as the fruit of experimental aesthetic labors.” 77 Thoreau encounters an open-­ended, “sporting” creativity, of an Artist in the midst of making, who, overtaken by the creative process, allows new inventions to proliferate on the fly. His text here raises the question of whether such a process can still be described as reliably “beneficent.” Clay, water, sand, vines, lichens, coral, leopard’s paw, birds’ feet, brains, the flesh of fingers and toes and noses — all these materials repeat the shape of the droplet or “moist thick lobe.” What at first appears to be a discrete entity —  a nose, a chin, a leaf — reveals itself to Thoreau to be a congealed drop of the

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flow of nature. Thoreau goes so far as to say that the letters of the word lobe reiterate the shape of a “moist thick lobe”: “the radicals of lobe are lb, the soft mass of the b (single lobed, or B, double lobed), with the liquid l behind it pressing it forward.” As if on an lsd trip, Thoreau finds that alphabetic letters are “suddenly severed” from their conventional context,78 as everything becomes a riff on the phenotype of a drop falling out of a protean, viscous substance.79 This riffing moves Thoreau closer to Bersani’s notion of an “inaccurate repetition” that is both universal in scope and imperfect, insofar as each thing “reoccurs [slightly] differently everywhere.”80 At the embankment, Thoreau’s sympathies go mad, and his thoughts become “winged” as they take psychedelic flight: “You find . . . in the very sands an anticipation of the [shape of the] vegetable leaf ”; the leaf “sees its prototype” in the shape of a “moist thick lobe”; “The ball of the human finger is but a drop congealed”; “The chin is a still larger drop, the confluent dripping of the face”; “What is man but a mass of thawing clay?” Caillois describes a similar experience of “mental inebriation” during his meditations with stones: the “extended world suddenly ceases to be, as philosophy would argue, the incompatible opposite of thought. It becomes its natural environment . . . [and thought becomes] . . . the questionable and vague approximation of the subjacent order.”81 For Thoreau, the extravagant experience of recognizing himself in an apersonal process has the effect of troubling the providential order of nature that he also imbibes. Thoreau now experiences a “ruffled” conjunction between reflective subjectivity and vegetal nonchalance. He feels himself less an intersubjective being and more an intratwined shape. By means of these trips, Thoreau allows himself to glimpse not only his inner vegetable but also a cosmos that exceeds the limits of beneficence. Like Whitman, Thoreau faces an affectivity that is not only profound but also apersonal and not predisposed first and foremost toward humans.82 To Thoreau, it is worthwhile to experiment with different styles of encountering natural influences — to find out how they work upon moods, propensities to action, and tendencies toward judgment before, during, and after we become attentive to them. This helps to quiet the human conceit that everything said or felt about the nonhuman is but a product of our imagination, or construction, or projection, or deployment of metaphors. It is unlikely that our attentiveness will ever be equivalent to or capable of mastering the flows of influence. Nonetheless, Thoreau, writing in ways that decant or exaggerate or dramatize those influences, hopes to encourage the beneficial ones to play larger roles in our lives.

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epilogue

a peculiar efficacy

“Only Zeus is free,” says the henchman Might in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. I, Zeus is immune to reasonable argument, unmoved by pity for Prometheus and Io, and unaffected by the bleak atmosphere of the Caucasus, where Prometheus stands chained and tortured and where Io, relentlessly goaded by the daemon, must roam and roam. Zeus, at least as Might understands him, is impervious to influence: he has, Whitman would say, “that measureless pride which consists in never acknowledging any lessons but its own” and lacks the indispensable counterweight of a “sympathy as measureless as its pride.”1 If Whitehead is right that even Zeus is touched by “negative prehensions” of influx and by “affective tones,” Zeus exhibits no sign of this. His acts appear as bolts from the blue, interventions thrown down from above. The allegedly sovereign self of Zeus offers an exaggerated contrast to the cosmic, processual self that we have been exploring. This dividual has a highly sensitive cuticle: it takes a lot in, dotes on things, feels subtle shifts in atmosphere. It is large, it contains multitudes, though it does not and can not include everything. By trial and error, it develops postures and moods that resist, filter, or deflect aspects of the inflow. And the sensitive writers I have leaned upon — W hitman, the Institute for Precarious Consciousness, Thoreau, Caillois, Serres, Bloom — are each also skilled in using literary techniques to process and transform the influences they inhale, doing so to amplify their salutary effects. They write up. In what follows, I examine some of Whitman’s literary techniques of writing up. I hope to show how they not only support a model of self but

highlight a kind of efficacy that lacks the drama of the thunderbolt but is not thereby weak in effect. This is on the way to developing a model of action that does not define effectiveness exclusively in terms of directness, drama, or overt might.

Whitman often writes parataxically, that is to say, by placing words and phrases side-­by-­side — “abreast”2 — in lists that imply no subordination among elements and no linear causality to the order of appearance.3 Parataxis counters tendencies to hierarchize the ongoing parade, and it draws attention to each and every member of the band without “preference, privilege or discrimination of kind or degree.”4 If syntax arranges items on behalf of a larger purpose or meaning, parataxis dotes on each specimen — on each beautiful dripping fragment.5 Lawrence Buell helps us to focus on the peculiar style of movement that parataxis performs: The “rapid picking up and laying aside of various alternative glosses”6 imparts to the reader “an impression of vigor and excitement, but also of rambling and redundancy. It seems everything moves parallel, nothing moves forward.” 7 Theodor Adorno finds a similar trajectory in the compositions of John Cage: a “succession in time that denies its own progressivity.”8 Buell also calls this “evanescence,” a bubbling up that, despite the brevity and delicacy of each bubble, nevertheless alters the seascape. And Whitman’s lists, I want to say, sensitize the reader to this subtle kind of efficacy. This is not the striking efficacy of Zeus’s thunderbolt but a delicate change in phase-­states. Evanescence is an “ethereal influence,” which, in Whitman’s “Sparkles from the Wheel,” seeps into the “unminded” dimensions of the crowd as it “seizes and affects”: Where the city’s ceaseless crowd moves on the livelong day, Withdrawn I join a group of children watching, I pause aside with them. By the curb toward the edge of the flagging, A knife-­grinder works at his wheel sharpening a great knife, Bending over he carefully holds it to the stone, by foot and knee, With measur’d tread he turn rapidly, as he presses with light but firm hand, Forth issue then in copious golden jets, Sparkles from the wheel. The scene and all its belongings, how they seize and affect me, • 110 • epilogue

The sad sharp-­chinn’d old man with worn clothes and broad shoulder-­band of leather, Myself effusing and fluid, a phantom curiously floating, now here absorb’d and arrested, The group, (an unminded point set in a vast surrounding), The attentive, quiet children, the loud, proud, restive base of the streets, The low hoarse purr of the whirling stone, the light-­press’d blade, Diffusing, dropping, sideways-­darting, in tiny showers of gold, Sparkles from the wheel.9 When Whitman lists elements of a scene, he is not so much offering a sociological description as giving “ultimate vivification” to ordinary objects by “endowing them with the glows . . . which belong to every real thing.”10 He is, in other words, writing things up — toward the egalitarian and sympathetic energies within them. Whitman’s mode of attention is not empirical in the sense of a neutral accounting, but neither is it quite “idealization,” given its close-­to-­the-­ground doting and its indiscriminating inclusion of the high and the low.11 François Jullien’s notion of “decanting” again seems apt: the effort is to decant an I fit for a democratic public culture. The action of decanting consists in an intensification of the subtle flavors, shakes, tones, scents, rhythms already on the scene, underway, underfoot. This is a doing that “variegates.” The figure of decanting helps (non-­Daoist) selves to overcome Zeus-­envy and to better discern the multiple modes that action can take. To decant and write up are practices of language that, says Whitman, “form the consistence of what is to be from what has been and is.”12 To form the consistence: It’s not that the poet, as a subject of action, gives form to an inert object; it is rather that she arranges words to mark the cooperation of the many formative efforts of varieties of vibrant matter.13 Some of these efforts, like the blab of the pave, come from outside, and others are added specifically through a poetics. “To form the consistence” is to have loafed in the interval and received and absorbed “what has been and is,” and, resonating with that, to have called forth some of its virtual potentials and tilted them toward a different present. It is not, then, that Whitman disparages consolidations in favor of undifferentiated flow. Many “shapes” do and should be formed. It is rather that Whitman draws attention to the shared and distributed quality of the agency of consolidation. In addition to parataxis and doggedly horizontal lists, Whitman deploys apposition, deixis, borrowed foreign words (kosmos, debouch, Paumonok), and

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a slightly off-­center syntax that disrupts readerly expectations of where the words will “land” (The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections).14 But the element of word-­working that I will explore most closely is his liberal use of verbs that elide an either/or logic of subjects and objects and bespeak of efforts proceeding from within an ongoing process. Such verbs include to write up, to partake, to sing, to corroborate, to bespeak, to inaugurate, to float, to animate to, to attest to, to promulge. They accent a multispecied and distributive kind of agency in which dividuals participate. They also mark the peculiar efficacy of complex, recursive processes, which is a subtle might, “an enormously tiny bit of a lot,”15 that is otherwise easy to miss. Let’s begin with to promulge: to set forth, declare, and publicly affirm something (a claim, image, word, rhythm, sound, notion), where what is affirmed is not fully formed in advance of its affirmation. Every condition promulges not only itself. . . . it promulges what grows after and out of itself,  / And the dark hush promulges as much as any.16 To promulge is to take a roll call (“tally”) of all present, including both already-­formed things and virtual incipiencies in the air. To promulge is to bespeak and make alterations from within the fray; it is not to stand outside and intervene, as Zeus does when he throws lightning. To promulge (or inaugurate, sing, partake, etc.) is to act amidst in order to amplify, inflect, or tilt what is already underway. This “middle voice” is marked formally in classical Greek and Sanskrit but not in English. It designates performances undertaken within a field of activities, rather than decisions of subjects who enter a field either to do something (the active voice) or to be acted upon (the passive voice). According to linguist Émile Benveniste, the dominance of two voices (active and passive) was a relatively late development in the Indo-­European verb form. It transformed an older linguistic order in which the key difference was between activities in which an actor stands outside the activity, and thus is not changed by it (“external diathesis”), and activities in which an actor is inside, and thus also altered by, the process (“internal diathesis”). Internal diathesis would only later be (mis)presented as a voice that is midway between active and conditioned verbal forms. It is more accurate, contends Benveniste, to understand the middle voice as an effectivity amidst. Any acting I “effects while being affected, in the middle.”17 For example, in the Greek middle-­form verb oimai (to think), what later becomes the essence of the Cartesian subject (to think) here appears as “an activity that speaks in its own sphere and reverts to itself of itself prior to a subject’s taking charge of it. Thinking in this case would be an activity that enacts itself out of its own processes.”18 Middle-­ voiced action is prompted and sustained by stupendous, ethereal influences • 112 • epilogue

(Thoreau), “vibratory strings” (Caillois), or gravitational “affections” (Whitman). Its effects are often radiating, reverberating, slow-­release. Gavin Parkinson emphasizes how hard it is to hear the middle voice in “a language like English which has almost entirely eradicated” it. The “sheer difficulty and awkwardness” of attempts to do so call attention to the power of grammar to circumscribe what can be sensed at all.19 But this circumscription is not complete: linguistic forms that nod to the way “my” agency is always distributed across a field persist. Take, as another example, “I sing the body electric,” whose I is enmeshed in a process with flesh, electricity, sound. If there is any choosing-­to-­sing on the part of that I, it is best understood as what Angus Fletcher calls “a passage through an intermediate state of cohesion, a sense of apprehending a presence, so that only in that rather indirect way is he active.”20 Or consider a phrase from another poem: “It sails me, I dab with bare feet.” Here the I is suspended between the status of something passively windblown and a volitional toe-­tapper, and the movement of dabbing and sailing is likewise neither personal nor alien: I hear the train’d soprano. (what work with hers it this?) The orchestra whirls me wider than Uranus flies, It wrenches such ardors from me I did not know I possess’d them It sails me, I dab with bare feet I am cut by bitter and angry hail.21 One more example of middle-­voiced activity comes from these lines in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”: “Are you done with reviews and criticisms of life? animating now to life itself?”22 The effort that is “animating to life” is a throwing-­oneself-­more-­heartily into an iterative process (“life”), rather than either taking a decisive action (as in to act more animatedly) or enduring as a patient of an outside force (as when Frankenstein’s creature is animated by electricity). Consider, finally, these more recent examples of middle-­voiced phrases: “It sounds good”23 and “I be going along.” Each is a difference-­ making inflection of happenings that precede and enlist the speaker. To promulge, to sing, to dab and sail, to animate to — such verbs bespeak the distributive quality of human effort; they express and expose the conglomerate nature of any act. The more one writes and thinks with process-­oriented verbs, the more one might discern the presence of the non-­self and even nonhuman efforts in the milieu. Middle-­voiced verbs do not subscribe to the usual distinction between an unwilled “operativity” of a structure and the bona fide “action” of an intentional author.24 Middle-­voiced verbs do not presumptively bestow agentic priority upon the human beings in the

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mix, even as they acknowledge the weight of human efforts in tilting the trajectory of the assemblage. The voice-­amidst positions us as involved in creative flows before we feel ourselves deciding to “take action.” Involvement in apersonal process precedes and informs any personal endeavoring: we are middle-­voiced “partakers” more than either actors or recipients.25 This onto-­ condition means we can absorb fascist and racist and other hateful currents —  a danger to be combatted not only by applying filters or turning away but also by widening the entry-­points for laudable flows of affect — for these can serve as insulation against vicious modes of influx in absorbent bodies. Middle-­voiced verbs name not-­quite-­intentional but still directional efforts — I have used the word effort to mark this vector-­quality that is neither wholly aimless nor strongly purposive. Because such efforts are multispecied and conglomerate, their effects may develop over a period of time longer than that expected within a singular-­agent model of (human) action. How powerful or impactful are these effects? They have the quiet efficacy of influence. You can throw down a fatal bolt, but you can also act through and by a below-­ the-­radar, “ethereal” mode of causality, which proceeds not in a straight line but in the way that moonlight pervades a scene. Notions of the infrathin, the virtual, the anexact, the incipient, the atmospheric are also helpful. To such a lexicon might be added Steve Mentz’s notion of “seep”: When things seep together, they infiltrate each other but don’t merge. . . . By the time you notice any movement, it has seeped its way all through one thing to another, inch by inch. . . . What was once a stain or the slightest tangent of contact seeps into mutual contamination. There’s no way to keep these things out once they’re in, and no way to stop them getting in.26 And also James Miller’s “pervasion,” a word he draws from one tradition within Daoism. A translation of the Chinese tong, pervasion is the movement of going-­through, as “a tunnel ‘pervades’ a hill by connecting one side with the other.” Pervasion names that unassuming manner by which the “liquid vitality” of the cosmos infuses bodies, and, in so doing, transforms them and itself. The “experienced Daoist practitioner” has learned how to enhance its susceptibility to pervasion: the more sensitized the cuticle, the more one might “perceive things that lie beyond the common sensory powers of the ordinary person,” things such as “internal landscapes within the body,” “subtle communications” between bodies, and “karmic causes and effects.”27 Freud offers his own example of a peculiar efficacy that proceeds slowly • 114 • epilogue

and relentlessly, by way of obdurate pervasion or relentless persistence. He associates it with “intellect,” contrasted to the loud and tyrannical “instinct”: We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is feeble in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless, there is something peculiar about this weakness. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. Finally, after a countless succession of rebuffs, it succeeds.28 Intellect became a site of Freud’s ethical hopes, just as the out of doors and the electric flesh were for Thoreau and Whitman. Even if none of these sites automatically lean toward the good or the ethical, their energies remain available for inflection in that way. Indeed, it is because such influences are so pervasive and persistent that Whitman, Whitehead, Thoreau, Freud (and I) seek to bind them more often and reliably to positive public virtues.29 This is what you shall do. Take up the power of the ethereal, ride apersonal currents, engage in influence-­operations by way of your own evanescent, underdetermined waves, signals, pressures, vibrations, affects. Work gets done, a difference is made, not only by direct means but also by persistent spark and pervasive seep. It “seriously underestimates” the influence of anarchism, writes Kathy Ferguson, if we “count only those few thousand individuals who . . . participated directly in the anarchist movement. Anarchism spread on the surface of communities, moving along their capillaries,” inducing effects “that exceeded its specific parts.”30 Some more examples: • a mood shifts slightly in response to the influence of a bodily posture or movement-­style • a public, responding to images of immigrant children caged at the border, finds itself sympathizing with them and against the xenophobic policy • a walker’s foot, influenced by gravity, feels a touch of affection for the earth that it usually ignores • a plant, influenced by sunlight, perks up and leans toward it • a surrealist, influenced by a mantis, feels himself beginning to resemble, not to resemble anything, but just to resemble; he feels the pressure of cosmic strings • a poet, influenced by poetry, is moved to write another line • a hoarder, influenced by objects, gathers them round more tightly • a student, pervaded by a refrain, is distracted from the task at hand

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• an American, persistently exposed to the seep of fascist norms, begins to feel less jarred by aggressive chants of “Lock her up!” and “Send her back!” • Freddie Gray, exposed to the gradual effectiveness of lead paint, is poisoned • dispossessed and disenfranchised earthlings, amidst the slow violence of climate change, are displaced, sickened, or killed.31

Prometheus “thought to sack the sovereign tyranny of Zeus; but upon him came the unsleeping bolt of Zeus, the lightning-­breathing flame, down rushing.”32 I, Zeus am free; my thunderbolt is powered solely by a sovereign will. My acts are surgical strikes, without collateral damage or reverberations that touch me. The tragic plays repeatedly show, however, that Zeus is mistaken: blinded by the flash of his own lightning, he misses a lot, he is oblivious to many subtle and not-­so-­subtle agencies and is easily tricked. (He would surely have overlooked the evanescent efficacy of Whitman’s “Sparkles from the Wheel.”) The Zeusian model of action — which ignores emergent causality and presumes that the most effective act will be the most explosive and direct — has been subjected to centuries of critique, from African philosophers, feminists, ecologists, First Nation thinkers, poststructuralists, queer theorists, and others. And yet the story of sovereign self and decisive act lives on in Euro-­American culture, its appeal revived each time we face a monumental threat, such as climate change today.33 Influx & Efflux has sought to sketch another mode of subjectivity and action, wherein the forces of nonhuman agencies and the ubiquity of stupendous, ethereal influences are acknowledged, become more felt, and, given more of their due, become slightly more susceptible to being inflected, for example, toward an egalitarian politics. This I is absorbent and creative. Absorbent in that it is continuously ingressed, ensnared, and informed by an outside, from, say, a broad-­a xe or a hoarded object, a leaf of grass or book of poems, but also from vitalities more protean and fizzy than things, from, say, cosmic sympathies, literary influences, gravitational pressures, compost vapors, reverberating strings, and other intensities that, to quote Lucretius, “ride the sky, fluid, free-­moving.”34 The dividual in a world of vibrant matter is like “woman” in Greek tragedy — “open to the breeze that darts through the womb in pregnancy” and to the torrents of eros.35 If this I acts, it is always in part by virtue of the virtual, by virtue of what is not I, not quite us, not quite anything. • 116 • epilogue

Partaker of influx and efflux, I

This I is creative in that it alters and inflects what is taken in, taken on, taken up. Dividuals, as selves and as (even more) complex assemblages, ride but also tilt and deform outside influences; they are pushed by and pluckily deflect atmospheric trajectories; they inhale charismatic milieux and repeat them with a twist; they are driven by an anxiety of influence upon which they exercise misprision. Yes, I too have bubbled up from the Atlantic and floated the measureless float;36 yes, I is possessed by possessions, irradiated by sunlight, caught by the sympathies of pine needles, intoxicated by drops, and is a mass of thawing clay — and yet I makes a difference. “Animating now to life itself,” I doodles, decants, attests, sings, and, in so doing, inaugurates new configurations and effects. New consolidations emerge, to become settled or loosened on later occasions. It is not that such middling action is sufficient —  it must at times be conjoined with more direct and dramatic forms of might,

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which will themselves be more informed for having had concourse with subtler sensibilities and efforts. What kind of I is alive in a world of vibrant matter? Awash in influences and yet also a very local site of efforts irreducible to them, it is one that inflects, iterates, induces, adds a twist, even if volition-­centric descriptors for this kind of contribution do not quite apply. If dividuals are among the lucky, they can also try to write up, that is to say, to lift up a few degrees the sorts of positive influences that can in turn lift us. The lucky, one could even say, have an obligation to write up promising positivities afoot. The project of finding a language apposite to influx-­and-­efflux is daunting. The task of articulating an accompanying model of self and action is fledgling. Efforts toward rhetorics and experiences of self that exceed anthropocentric propensities are uncertain. But we be trying.

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prologue

1  •  Walt Whitman, “Europe, the 72nd and 73rd Years of These States,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 224, line 17. 2  •  Doodles could be described as what Deleuze and Guattari call “anexact” creatures: they are the subject of a protogeometry concerned specifically with “vague, . . . vagabond, or nomadic, morphological essences. These essences are distinct from sensible things, as well as from ideal, royal, or imperial essences. Protogeometry, the science dealing with them, is itself vague, in the etymological sense of ‘vagabond’: it is neither inexact like sensible things nor exact like ideal essences, but anexact yet rigorous (‘essentially and not accidentally inexact’).” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 367. 3  •  “Automatic writing is the most direct of Surrealist techniques. Sit at a table with pen and paper, put yourself in a ‘receptive’ frame of mind, and start writing. Continue writing without thinking about what is appearing beneath your pen.” Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding, eds., A Book of Surrealist Games (Boulder, CO: Shambhala Redstone Editions, 1995), 17. 4  •  A doodle, writes Matthew Battles, is “about anything but expression. Its joys are sensuous and immediate: the dry catch of the pencil point as it tangles in the fibers of the page, the gelid smoothness of the ballpoint unrolling a fat swath of ink, the pliant bouquet of crayons and the stink of coloring markers.” Matthew Battles, “In Praise of Doodling,” American Scholar 73, no. 4 (autumn 2004): 108. Battles notes that Russell M. Arundel, an early theorist of the doodle, claimed that “civilized man’s natural state is one of ‘pixilation’ — a condition of pixie-­like enchantment that, though concealed by the lumber and business of modern life, emerges most clearly in the ‘automatic writing’ he calls ‘doodling’ ” (105).

5  •  For a useful summary of recent work on the topic, see Steven Heller, “The Cognitive Benefits of Doodling,” Atlantic, August 2015, https://www.theatlantic .com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/doodling-­for-cognitive-benefits. 6  •  Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 22. David Reynolds describes how Whitman borrowed “influx and efflux” from Swedenborg, for whom communications with God happen “through particular parts of the body. . . . The ‘divine breath,’ also called the ‘influx’ or ‘afflatus,’ was taken in from the spiritual atmosphere through the lungs, which in turn emanated an ‘efflux’ of its own into the atmosphere. . . . [Whitman combined] . . . the notion of efflux with the ‘charge’ and universal fluid of animal magnetism.” David Reynolds, Walt Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 94. 7  •  Henry Thoreau, July 23, 1851, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, ed. H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin 1993), 126. 8  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 44 – 45. 9  •  Kathy E. Ferguson, “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking,” Political Research Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 714. 10  •  The meaning of the term shape appears in “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” as discussed in chapter 1. 11  •  See, for example, recent work by Sophie Von Redecker, Willy Blomme, Samantha Frost, Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jaime Kruse, Ben Anderson, Chas Phillips, Natasha Myers, Anatoli Ignatov, Chad Shomura, Jairus Grove, Anand Pandian, Iris van der Tuin, Derek McCormack, Char Miller, Jeffrey Cohen, Branka Arsic, Stacey Alaimo, Stephanie Erev, Rosi Braidotti, and Lars Tønder, to name just a few. 12 • McKim Marriott, Hindu Transactions: Diversity without Dualism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1976), 111. 13  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 614 – 16. 14  •  In “Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” George Kateb highlights a Whitman who bespeaks a more individualized American self, with an inner core that persists despite all the cominglings in which it partakes. Kateb draws to the surface Whitman’s subtle advocacy of democratic individuality, of a self who can be “alone” with a unique, “interior consciousness.” George Kateb, “Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” in Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John Seery (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 35. My approach comes closer to that of Morton Schoolman, who presents Whitman as practitioner of an “aesthetic education” in which the “individual as ‘variety’ and the mass as ‘contrasts of lights and shades’ ” tend to converge. Morton Schoolman, “Democratic Enlightenment: Whitman and Aesthetic Education,” in Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John Seery, 318. 15  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 670 – 71. 16  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 40, 64 – 65. 17  •  Walt Whitman, in the “George Walker” notebook under the heading “Combination,” in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 1 (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 233. Whitman here has in mind Jean Paul Richter (1763 – 1825), char-

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acterized as having “tenderness and trembling sympathetic manliness” (vol. 1, 233) and “perennial fireproof joys” (vol. 1, 379). 18 • Walt Whitman, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 4, 1515. He also speaks of “manly tenderness” in the 1855 Preface, 617. Whitman’s admirer John Addington Symonds appreciates Whitman’s celebration of what Symonds names as “the free currents of manly sympathy.” Letter to Horace Traubel, March 5, 1891, http://www .whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/8/med.00008.23.html. See also Shane Butler, “Homer’s Deep,” in Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, ed. Shane Butler (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 21 – 48. 19  •  Walt Whitman, “Talbot Wilson,” in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 1, 73. 20  •  For example, “The analogy holds in this way — that the soul of the Universe is the genital master, the impregnating and animating spirit. — Physical matter is Female and Mother, and waits barren and bloomless, the jets of life from the masculine vigor, the undermost first cause of all that is not what Death is.” Walt Whitman, “The Analogy,” in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier, vol. 1, 176. 21  •  Andrew Lawson, in Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), presents Whitman’s “affirmative statements about the market” as typical of the views of the Jacksonian lower middle class. But Whitman also expressed “doubts and anxieties” about the market “through the poetry’s unsettling eroticism, its foregrounding of the destabilizing effects of desire” (4). Lawson describes Whitman’s views on political economy this way: the “ideal form of sociability [would] have the fluidity of marketplace exchanges without the buffeting anxieties they generate, the equalitarian solidarities of the artisan system without its restrictive hierarchy” (26). According to Betsy Erkkila, “Whitman wrote from an essentially eighteenth-­century view of commerce. . . . Envisioning the commercial spirit as an essentially benign, civilizing, and unifying force, Whitman never carried his critique of capitalism to an attack on the concept of free enterprise itself.” Also: “Like Marx, he recognized that the economics of capitalism ‘enters every transaction of society’ and ‘taints its soundness,’ but by focusing on the problem of monopoly and corporate wealth, he avoided the potential contradiction between the free-­enterprise society he lived in and the harmonious and egalitarian democratic society of his dreams.” Betsy Erkkila, Whitman: The Political Poet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 37 – 38. 22  •  Walt Whitman, “I Am He That Aches with Love,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 93. Whitman’s “materialism” also has affinities with a Thoreau-­like naturalism or pantheism, as in lines 663 – 66 from “Song of Myself ”: “I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-­work of the stars, / And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, / And the tree-­toad is a chef-­d ’oeuvre for the highest, / And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven.” See M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005).



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23  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 590. 24  •  Walt Whitman, “From Montauk Point,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, 426. 25  •  Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, line 6. The role of bodily postures in the poems is a theme of chapter 1. 26  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 33, lines 801 and 831. I return to this issue when discussing the slave auction section of “I Sing the Body Electric.” 27  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 1083 – 85. 28  •  Walt Whitman, as reported by Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (March 28 – July 14, 1888) (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1906), my emphasis, https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/2/med .00002.28.html. 29  •  Walt Whitman, “As They Draw to a Close,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, 420. 30  •  D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman,” in Studies in Classical American Literature (New York: Penguin, 1977), 150. 31  •  The phrase is Whitman’s, as reported by Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (March 28 – July 14, 1888), http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism /disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1/whole.html. 32 • The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Online Journal Transcripts, vol. 19, December 11, 1855, http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals19.html. 33  •  “What we have touched & worne is trivial our scurf — repetition —  tradition — conformity — ,” writes Thoreau. So much better “to perceive freshly.” The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Online Journal Transcripts, vol. 19, December 11, 1855, http://thoreau.library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals19.html. 34  •  Janell Watson, “Feminism as Agonistic Sorority: An Interview with Bonnie Honig,” Minnesota Review 81 (2013): 115. 35  •  Speaking of the power of the kind of poet that “is wanted,” Whitman says that “The power to destroy or remould is freely used by him, but never the power of attack.” Walt Whitman, Preface 1855 — Leaves of Grass, First Edition, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon, line 185. Moon notes that in later editions, never is changed to seldom. 36  •  Examples here include Georges Bataille and Carl Lovitt’s classic study, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” New German Critique, no. 16 (1979): 64–87; the more recent work of William E. Connolly’s Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Nidesh Lawtoo, “The Power of Myth (Reloaded): From Nazism to New Fascism,” L’Esprit Créateur 57, no. 4 (winter 2017): 64 – 82; Steven Levitky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Crown, 2018). 37  •  Sometimes these practices take place in “private life,” but it is also important to include them in engaging the strife of public contestations. Romand Coles has developed a conceptual vocabulary and a set of practical techniques (for example, the art of pluralizing and moving the “tables” around which democracy takes

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place — from church basements, to community centers, to living rooms, to community gardens, to workplaces, to assemblies in the streets). See his Visionary Pragmatism: Radical and Ecological Democracy in Neoliberal Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Beyond Gated Politics: Reflections for the Possibility of Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 38  •  Kathy Ferguson, private correspondence, December 2018. 39  •  As Romand Coles puts it, “the style of one’s rhetorical engagement with others is one of the deepest aspects of our ethical and political practice. Style is ethical and political because it is powerfully entwined with the constitution of vision — what one can and cannot see — and what those who hear us are enabled and disabled from seeing. Contents, structures, and modes of perception play an integral role in the dynamics of power relations insofar as perception tends to reinforce or resist present power patterns by rendering their operations, damages, dangers, as well as alternative possibilities visible or invisible. Rhetorical-­perceptual styles are entwined with the play of power most profoundly because they variously enact and/or disestablish its everyday flows. They perform in the subtlest of innumerable ways a readiness for the present order of things — a readiness to continue seeing things as one expects or as an order demands, or, alternatively, and to varying degrees, a readiness to experiment with or undergo a certain perceptual shifting that involves unwonted transformations, a cultivated vulnerability to reformation that is at the heart of radical democratic engagement and the possibility of more generous relations.” Romand Coles, “Democracy, Theology, and the Question of Excess: A Review of Jeffrey Stout’s Democracy and Tradition,” Modern Theology 21, no. 2 (April 2005): 302. 40  •  “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions and Poems: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 5 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 205. 41 • Henry Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 1851, edited by H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin, 1993), 188. 42 • Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 1851, 126. 43  •  By “body-­capacity-style,” I am trying to mark how health and the bodily configuration, and also how differences in neurological styles, function to delimit what one can feel and say about outside influences. For an excellent discussion of the politics and philosophy of neurodiversity, see Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016) and “Me Lo Dijo Un Pajarito: Neurodiversity, Black Life and the University As We Know It,” Social Text 36, no. 3 (2018): 1–24. The “trans-­humanist” point I am trying to make, with the help of Manning and others, is a development of the claim, characteristic of the linguistic turn, that the writer is not to be understood as only directing language but as also affected by the force of the writing, of a language irreducible to any deployment of it, as when



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Roland Barthes says that in the verb “to write the [human] subject is immediately contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it.” Roland Barthes, “To Write: Intransitive Verb?” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and “To Write: An Intransitive Verb? Discussion,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard A. Macksey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 134 – 56. 44  •  Iris K. Schneider, Anita Eerland, Frenk van Harreveld, Mark Rotteveel, Joop van der Pligt, Nathan van der Stoep, and Rolf A. Zwaan, “One Way and the Other: The Bidirectional Relationship between Ambivalence and Body Movement,” Psychological Science, 24, no. 3 (2013): 319–25. 45  •  Donna Haraway speaks of “the God trick of seeing everything from nowhere,” in “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (autumn 1988): 581. 46  •  “I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes —  all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightening of possible storms.” Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954 – 1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 323. 47  •  Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 189 – 90. 48 • Henry Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. Odell Shepard (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1921), 73. 49  •  Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 3. chapter one. position and disposition

1  •  “The phrenologists Orson Squire Fowler (1809 – 1887), Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811 – 1896), and Samuel R. Wells (1820 – 1875) published Life Illustrated: A Journal of Entertainment, Improvement, and Progress between 1854 and 1861, after which the newspaper merged with the American Phrenological Journal.” Jason Stacy, Life Illustrated, in The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. 2  •  Sean Ross Meehan says that “the word ‘physiological’ is one that Whitman offered late as the ‘impetus-­word’ for Leaves of Grass.” Sean Ross Meehan, “ ‘Nature’s Stomach’: Emerson, Whitman, and the Poetics of Digestion,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 28, no. 3 (2011): 97 – 121. 3  •  Walt Whitman, “New York Dissected: V. Street Yarn,” Life Illustrated: A Journal of Entertainment, Improvement, and Progress, August 16, 1856, in The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Folsom and Price, http://whitmanarchive.org. In an earlier install-

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ment, “New York Amuses Itself — The Fourth of July,” Whitman had also noted the link between outward phiz, including posture, and interior temperament: “Union Place, 8 ½. The statue of Washington is unveiled, with applause and military salutes. The great commander and statesman is represented sitting on horseback, extending one arm as if in command, with the well-­known look of firm and grave benignity upon the composed features, and the characteristically upright posture.” Walt Whitman, “New York Amuses Itself — The Fourth of July,” Life Illustrated: A Journal of Entertainment, Improvement, and Progress, July 12, 1856, in The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Folsom and Price, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. 4  •  Mose Velsor [Whitman’s pseudonym], “Manly Health and Training, With Off-­Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 33, no. 3 (2016): 203. For a good discussion of Whitman’s techniques of the body, in the context of surrounding debates about diet, see Tripp Rebrovick, “ ‘The Great American Evil — Indigestion’: Digestive Health and Democratic Politics in Walt Whitman,” in Gut Feeling and Digestive Health in Nineteenth Century Literature, History, and Culture, ed. Manon Mathias and Alison M. Moore (London: Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 2019), 15–35. 5  •  As Ed Folsom notes, the physicality of impression was important to Whitman. In a review of the 1992 facsimile printing of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was produced using the old printing technique whereby “’the physical pressure of type on paper . . . leaves a permanent mark on the surface to hold the ink,’ ” Folsom celebrates the fact that the reader can once again “feel the words pressed onto these pages, and you become aware why the word ‘press’ was so vital for Whitman: ‘The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections’; ‘This is the press of a bashful hand’; ‘I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy’; ‘O truth of the earth? I am determin’d to press my way toward you.’ ” Ed Folsom, “Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, Collectors Reprints facsimile of 1855 [review],” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (winter 1993): 160 – 62. 6  •  Or — to war, as Jairus Grove shows in Savage Ecology. Grove examines “warfare as a form of life, that is, an ordinary practice for many people rather than the ways we often characterize war as an anomalous or rare event that suddenly breaks out.” And he explores “what kind of body a human body must be if the extremity of war can become normal. Considering warfare as an embodied becoming rather than an abnormal break, I hope, draws our attention to how geopolitical orders are written into the very musculature of our bodies, practices, and communities.” Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 6. 7  •  Disposition is the name I ultimately chose for this “inner” tendency by which a style is given to a body’s shape and movements. I also considered character, temper, temperament, and mood. What is needed is a term that (1) acknowledges that inner tendencies are somewhat plastic; (2) applies not only to human bodies but to the characteristic vitality forms of other bodies and shapes; and (3) names a push or an under-­determined conative effort that is less individualized than implied in notions of “will” and “intention.” My thanks to Brian Massumi for think-



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ing with me about these various concepts. I think of “disposition” as that which gives what Richard Flathman called “adverbial” force to an activity; it encourages the undertaking of an action in one (say, vengeful) way rather than another (say, adamant) way. On adverbial force, see Richard Flathman, Reflections of a Would-­Be Anarchist: Ideals and Institutions of Liberalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 71 – 75. 8 • Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (Amsterdam: Fredonia Books [reprinted from the 1888 edition], 2002), 35, emphasis added. 9  •  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, chapter XVII: Principal Causes Maintaining the Democratic Republic — Part II, at http://www.gutenberg .org/files/815/815-­h/815-­h.htm. 10  •  Robert Leigh Davis, “Democratic Vistas,” in A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald Kummings (New York: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2006), 549. Political theorists today continue to engage both macropolitics and micropolitics. Micropolitics names, following Foucault, efforts to alter the architecture of everyday experience. Micropolitical efforts are predicated on the belief that the cumulative effect of small but steady modifications in the distribution of sensory and aesthetic attention (concerning modes of eating, dwelling, walking, talking, reading, singing, praying, etc.) may help to ignite or induce macro-­level shifts (in policy or legislation or public will). According to Melissa Orlie, while those on the Left must devote a significant portion of energy to opposing national and international structures that produce and reproduce inequality, unnecessary violence, and ecological destruction, “we must not kid ourselves that these fights will yield democratic power or anything approximating it. The rebirth of democracy as something more than an ideological cover for power politics . . . [cannot happen without] actions aimed at achieving change in our daily lives. Such change will entail our withdrawal of consent and complicity at every juncture we can imagine and achieve. It will require the creation of new forms of association and enterprise, new ways of meeting our needs and of relating to the places in which we live.” Melissa Orlie, “Mass Support for Power Politics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 105, no. 1 (winter 2006): 235. 11  •  Whitman, “One Hour to Madness and Joy” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), lines 11 – 13. Being “absolv’d from previous ties and conventions” is less an overt challenge to norms than the inhabitation of a space where they no longer apply. An example of this nonchalant elision is the kiss between men of “Behold this Swarthy Face”: Yet comes one a Manhattanese and ever at parting kisses me lightly on the lips with robust love, And I on the crossing of the street or on the ships deck give a kiss in return, We observe that salute of American comrades land and sea, We are those two natural and nonchalant persons. (lines 4 – 7) 12  •  Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 16.

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13  •  Whitman, “A Song of Joys,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 147–50. 14 • Whitman, Preface 1855—Leaves of Grass, First Edition, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 616. 15  •  Sprezzatura is the product of “an art which does not seem to be an art,” which makes “whatever is done or said appear to be without effort” (Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch [New York: W. W. Norton, 2002]). 16  •  Thomas A. King, “Performing ‘Akimbo’: Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (London: Routledge, 1993), 21. 17  •  King, “Performing ‘Akimbo,’ ” 22. 18  •  Harold Aspiz (“Science and Pseudoscience,” in A Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. Donald D. Kummings, 379) speaks here of the “bearded rough.” 19  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 77 – 80. 20  •  In “Our Old Feuillage,” Whitman speaks of “the free range and diversity —  always the continent of Democracy.” On “mess,” see Katrin Pahl, who explores and defends “mess” as a style of thinking that “relaxes the imperative to produce clean and clear distinctions” and proceeds in ways otherwise than either the logic of the simple or the complex (529). Katrin Pahl, “What a Mess,” mln 130, no. 31 (April 2015): 528 – 53. 21  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 1277. 22 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 624 – 25. 23  •  Mort Schoolman describes Whitman’s lists as “matter-­of-­fact registers of the continually unfolding diversity of the all.” Morton Schoolman, A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 131. 24  •  Whitman, “A Song of Joys,” line 150. 25  •  In 1892, Edward Dowden, professor of literature at the University of Dublin, noted that in Whitman “there is a manner of powerful nonchalantness. . . . [He] seems to say, ‘Take me or leave me, here I am, a solid and not inconsiderable fact of the universe.’ ” Edward Dowden, “The Poetry of Democracy,” in Studies in Literature 1789 – 1877 (1892; Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1906), 473. 26 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 627. 27  •  Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 12–14. 28  •  Whitman copied this definition from Webster into one of his notebooks: “pathognomy — the expression of the passions — the science of the signs by which the state of the passions is indicated — the natural language or operation of the mind, as indicated by the soft and mobile parts of the Body.” Walt Whitman, Daybooks and Notebooks, vol. 3, Diary in Canada, Notebooks, Index, ed. William White (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 815. 29  •  Harold Aspiz cites William Reich on this point: not only were bodily postures “vital indicators of bioenergetic patterns and clues to psychic harmony or disharmony,” those bioenergetic and psychic states can also be ‘indicators’ of



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postures and movement styles.” Harold Aspiz, Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 133. 30  •  Consider “all the manners and postures of keeping still: sitting, standing, lying, none of which are ever merely still, but are forms of holding back from movement.” Steven Connor, “The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor,” Senses and Society 3 (2008): 26. 31  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 78 – 79. 32 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 626. 33  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 590. 34 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 628. 35  •  Whitman, “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 212. 36  •  Sandra K. Anderson, The Practice of Shiatsu (St. Louis, MO: Mosby Elsevier, 2008), 75. This is a description of a preparatory “centering” exercise for a practitioner of shiatsu. 37 • Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (Coterie Classics 2016), 4. 38 • François Jullien, Vital Nourishment (London: Zone Books, 2007), 28. 39 • Jullien, Vital Nourishment, 102. 40 • Jullien, Vital Nourishment, 115. In contrast to a Greek philosophical tradition in which action is most often figured as a quest toward an exterior goal, Jullien finds in the Zhuangzi activity presented as the energizing of and from within a world of “liquid vitality” — a world already “endowed with the ability to communicate its effect” (25 – 26). The figure of “decanting” opens a path, a new way to conceive of that which is distinctive to the effort of a dividual. 41  •  Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” lines 92 – 95. Whitman aspired to “A poem in which all things and qualities and processes express themselves — the nebula — the fixed stars — the earth — the grass, waters, vegetable, sauroid, and all processes — man — animals.” Walt Whitman, “[med Cophósis],” The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Folsom and Price, accessed April 13, 2017, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. 42  •  Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 59 – 60. 43 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 624. 44 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, 624. 45  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 669. 46  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 49 – 54. 47 • Derek McCormack, Refrains for Moving Bodies: Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 42. 48  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” line 94; “I Sing the Body Electric,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 104–8. 49  •  The ideal America is a place Where thrift is in its place, and prudence is in its place; Where the men and women think lightly of the laws; Where the slave ceases, and the master of slaves ceases; • 128 •

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Where the populace rise at once against the never-­ending audacity of elected persons; Where fierce men and women pour forth, as the sea to the whistle of death pours its sweeping and unript waves; Where outside authority enters always after the precedence of inside authority; Where the citizen is always the head; Where children are taught to be laws to themselves, and to depend on themselves. (Whitman, “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” lines 118 – 25). The fierce independence described above is a civic version of the soldiers who, in “Song of Myself ” (line 887), refuse to obey “the command to kneel.” “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” (line 95) speaks of a “gait” of persons “who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors.” Whitman celebrates pluck as a public mood necessary for a citizenry capable of self-­government, even if entrepreneurship and the pursuit of wealth are not good-­in-­themselves. Horace Traubel attests to this: “W. spoke of material successes in civilization. ‘What do they show?’ Not necessarily much: . . . after all the main question is, what is all this doing for all the men, women, children of America? The goods are worthless alone: they might demonstrate failure as well as success.” Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, May 13, 1888, http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1 /med.00001.46.html. For a fuller discussion, see Andrew Lawson, Walt Whitman and the Class Struggle (Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2006). 50  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” lines 1 – 6. 51  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-Axe,” lines 58 – 65. 52  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” lines 216 – 23. 53  •  Whitman, “Song of the Broad-Axe,” lines 249 – 52. 54  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 4 – 5. 55  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 198. My thanks to Caleb Smith for this example of a nonhuman “leaning.” 56  •  Lars Bang Larsen, “Introduction,” Networks Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2014), 17. 57  •  Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” line 54. Whitman plays with the etymological connection between list (as yearning) and lust, and between list and listen. A good example of Whitman employing all these senses of list — as catalogue, leaning-­toward, lusting, and receptive listening — is a section of “Song of Myself ” where he first offers a long list of the endeavorings of ordinary folk (they walk, ordain, retreat, are carried, tied, and sold, drive, hoe, call, set traps, make fast, trot, count, beat time, sweat, recline, jeer, cross the plains, sleep) and then depicts the items on that list as “tending” toward him: “And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself,” lines 327–29. 58  •  Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 18 – 19.

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59  •  Whitman distinguishes between adhesiveness or comradeship and amorous (heterosexual) love. The Fowler brothers (Phrenology Proved (New York: W. H. Coyler, 1837], 64) describe adhesiveness as “susceptibility of attachment — propensity to associate.” The radically pluralist society that Whitman seeks is not composed of individuals, each asserting its stable of interests, but a more fluid composition held together by a changing set of attachments between bodies that touch and are touched — and then go on their way. Jason Frank makes this point when he says that “Whitman rejected nonaesthetic bases of political attachment, most notably tradition, race, rationality, or interests,” substituting for them a “democratic affection and public eros” that draws upon a “phrenological understanding of ‘adhesiveness.’ ” Jason Frank, “Promiscuous Citizenship,” in The Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John Seery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 162 – 63. 60  •  Adriana Cavarero, “Rectitude: Reflections on Postural Ontology,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 27, no. 3 (2013): 229. My thanks to David Craig for this reference. See also Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of the “upright nature of the faculties” in his book on Kant. Whitman’s lean also diverges from the “leaning in” of the 2013 bestseller Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, in which the lean is paired not with the loaf but with a relentless form of pluck characterizing the corporate entrepreneur: it is a call for American women to “lean way into your career . . . find something you love doing, and . . . do it with gusto. . . . Do not lean back; lean in. Put your foot on that gas pedal and keep it there.” Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer, Facebook, Barnard College Commencement, Tuesday, May 17, 2011. 61 • Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 209. 62  •  Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” section 6. 63  •  Whitman, “A Song of the Banner at Daybreak,”“Drum-Taps.” In a letter to the editor of a Scandinavian journal interested in writing an article about Whitman, Whitman describes his poetry thus: “My verse strains its every nerve to arouse, brace, dilate, excite to the love & realization of health, friendship, perfection, freedom, amplitude. There are other objects, but these are the main ones.” “Walt Whitman to Rudolf Schmidt, 16 January 1872,” http://whitmanarchive.org /biography/correspondence/tei/rlc.00001.html. 64  •  In “Democratic Vistas,” Whitman parenthetically invokes the “ensemble-­ Individual,” a being whose singularity partakes of an “idiocrasy of universalism.” Whitman, Democratic Vistas, paragraph 68. For discussions of the phrase idiocrasy of individualism, see Morton Schoolman, Reason and Horror: Critical Theory, Democracy, and Aesthetic Individuality (New York: Routledge, 2001), 245; Kenneth Burke, “Policy Made Personal: Whitman’s Verse and Prose-­Salient Traits,” in Walt Whitman, updated edition, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 2006), 31; James Perrin Warren, Cultures of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 191. 65  •  Connor, “The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor,” 205 – 20. 66  •  Francis Galton, “Measurement of Character,” Fortnightly Review 43 (1884): 184.

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67  •  “The main idea underlying all theories of embodied cognition is that cognitive representations and operations are fundamentally grounded in their physical context. Rather than relying solely on amodal abstractions that exist independently of their physical instantiation, cognition relies heavily on the brain’s modality-­ specific systems and on actual bodily states. One intuitive example is that empathy, or understanding of another person’s emotional state, comes from mentally ‘re-­ creating’ this person’s feelings in ourselves.” Paula M. Niedenthal, Lawrence Barsalou, Piotr Winkielman, Silvia Krauth-­Gruber, and Francois Ric, “Embodiment in Attitudes, Social Perception, and Emotion,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, no. 3 (2005): 186. The article notes that “some of the more recent philosophical predecessors of embodiment theories can be found in writings of Ryle (1949), Merleau-­ Ponty (1963), and Heidegger (1962). For further discussion, see Prinz (2002).” 68  •  Johannes Michalak, Judith Mischnat, and Tobias Teismann, “Sitting Posture Makes a Difference — Embodiment Effects on Depressive Memory Bias,” Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy 21 (2014): 519 – 2 4. 69  •  Dana R. Carney, Amy J. C. Cuddy, and Andy J. Yap, “Power Posing: Brief Nonverbal Displays Affect Neuroendocrine Levels and Risk Tolerance,” Psychological Science 21 (10): 1364. 70  •  Shwetha Nair, Mark Sagar, John Sollers III, Nathan Consedine, and Elizabeth Broadbent, “Do Slumped and Upright Postures Affect Stress Responses? A Randomized Trial,” Health Psychology 34, no. 6 (2005): 632. The article is here citing a study by Hexsel et al. (2013). The participants were not told that the experiment concerned the effects of posture on mood but were given “a cover story about the effects of physio-­therapy tape” in order to reduce “the likelihood that the observed effects were simply due to expectations or the placebo effect” (639). 71  •  Carney et al., “Power Posing,” 1363. See also Michalak et al., “Sitting Posture Makes a Difference”: “experimentally induced high-­power poses caused power related physiological changes (i.e., elevants in testosterone) in addition to psychological and behavioural changes” (519). 72  •  Nair et al., “Do Slumped and Upright Postures Affect Stress Responses?,” 632. “The research is consistent with embodied cognition theories that muscular and autonomic states influence emotional responding.” 73  •  Michalak et al., “Sitting Posture Makes a Difference,” 523. 74  •  Michalak et al., “Sitting Posture Makes a Difference,” 519. 75  •  Niedenthal et al., “Embodiment in Attitudes,” 189. In this study, non-­ Chinese-­speaking participants who were told to push upward on a table from underneath (an action that will make a body tilt forward) rated a “completely novel stimuli — Chinese ideographs” more positively than ideographs viewed while in an “avoidance” posture induced by pushing downward on the tabletop. 76  •  Iris K. Schneider, Anita Eerland, Frenk van Harreveld, Mark Rotteveel, Joop van der Pligt, Nathan van der Stoep, and Rolf A. Zwaan, “One Way and the Other: The Bidirectional Relationship between Ambivalence and Body Movement,” Psychological Science 24, no. 3 (2013): 319. 77  •  J. H. Riskind and C. C. Gotay, “Physical Posture: Could It Have Regula-



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tory or Feedback Effects on Motivation and Emotion?” Motivation and Emotion 6 (1982): 273 – 98. 78  •  Tom F. Price and Eddie Harmon-­Jones, “Approach Motivational Body Postures Lean Toward Left Frontal Brain Activity,” Psychophysiology 48, no. 5 (2011): 720. 79  •  Price and Harmon-­Jones, “Approach Motivational Body Postures Lean Toward Left Frontal Brain Activity,” 721. It might be worth noting here that since posture often reflects the influence of external prompts, research on the “physical action” and research on “mirror neurons” may be more complementary than oppositional. 80  •  Gabriel Abend, “What Are Neural Correlates Neural Correlates Of?” BioSocieties 12, no. 3 (2017): 415 – 38. 81  •  Connor, “The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor,” 205. 82  •  Price and Harmon-­Jones, “Approach Motivational Body Postures Lean Toward Left Frontal Brain Activity,” 718. 83  •  Nair et al., “Do Slumped and Upright Postures Affect Stress Responses?,” 632. 84  •  Niedenthal et al., “Embodiment in Attitudes,” 192, 184. 85  •  “To feel proud, it is not sufficient to adopt an upright posture. Rather, specific noetic information (e.g., that of success in a difficult task) needs [also] to be activated.” Sabine Stepper and Fritz Strack, “Proprioceptive Determinants of Emotional and Nonemotional Feelings,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 64, no. 2 (1993): 219. 86 • Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: Univeristy of North Carolina Press, 1997), 23. For another useful and engaging account of Whitman’s relationship to phrenology, see Thomas David Lisk, “Whitman’s Attic,” Massachusetts Review 47, no. 1 (spring 2006): 154 – 67. 87 • Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 150. Loving notes also that “Although in the Eagle of 1846 [Whitman] had criticized Orson S. Fowler’s lecture on the pseudoscience as a ‘conglomeration of pretension and absurdity,’ he revised his opinion in the next year, saying ‘there can be no harm, but probably much good, in pursuing’ its study.” According to Colbert, “The following lines from Walt Whitman [from the 1855 Preface], for example, are best read with a phrenological chart nearby: ‘Extreme caution or prudence, the soundest organic health, large hope and comparison and fondness for women and children, large alimentiveness and destructiveness and causality, with a perfect sense of the oneness of nature and propriety of the same spirit applied to human affairs . . . these are called up of the float of the brain of the world to be parts of the greatest poet” (A Measure of Perfection, 23). 88  •  This phrenology “sparked curiosity among people across the economic class spectrum.” Carla Bittel, “Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in 19th-­Century America,” Centaurus 55 (2013): 105. 89  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 524. See also Christopher Hanlon, “O. S. Fowler and Hereditary Descent,” in A House Divided: The Antebellum Slavery Debates in America, ed. Mason L. Lowance Jr. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 285.

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90 • Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 91  •  Cited in Cynthia S. Hamilton, “ ‘Am I Not a Man and a Brother?’: Phrenology and Anti-­slavery,” Slavery and Abolition 29, no. 2 (June 2008): 175. See also Erika Janik, “The Shape of Your Head and the Shape of Your Mind,” Atlantic, January 6, 2014. 92  •  Fowler and Fowler, Phrenology Proved, 113. 93  •  This conclusion is extended to argue for the unnaturalness of slavery: “the subjugation of man by his fellow-­man” is “an open violation of the principles of human nature. If our rulers only understood this principle of our nature, and if all the landmarks and all the regulations of government only proceeded upon it, subjection and servitude, in all those ten thousand forms which they assume in society, would be at once abolished” (Fowler and Fowler, Phrenology Proved, 118). 94  •  Fowler and Fowler, Phrenology Proved, 26. 95  •  For an excellent summary of these debates in the antebellum American context, see Cristin Ellis, “Douglass’s Animals: Racial Science and the Problem of Human Equality,” chapter 1 of Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-­ Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 23 – 60. 96  •  An ape caught in the wild and caged learns how to speak by aping his captors: “With an effort which up till now has never been repeated I managed to reach the cultural level of an average European. In itself that might be nothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of my cage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity.” Franz Kafka, “A Report to an Academy,” in The Complete Stories, trans. Willia and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 290. 97  •  Carla Bittel, “Woman, Know Thyself: Producing and Using Phrenological Knowledge in 19th-­Century America,” 106. Bittel makes this point with reference to phrenological treatment of males and females. 98  •  Mose Velsor [Whitman’s pseudonym], “Manly Health and Training, with Off-­Hand Hints toward Their Conditions,” 203. 99  •  Nathaniel Mackey, “Phrenological Whitman,” Conjunctions 29 (fall 1997), http://www.conjunctions.com/print/article/nathaniel-mackey-c29. 100  •  Anton Borst, “A Chant of Dilation: Walt Whitman, Phrenology, and the Language of the Mind” 201 – 2 (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2014). 101  •  Britt Rusert, “The Science of Freedom: Counterarchives of Racial Science on the Antebellum Stage,” African American Review 45, no. 3 (fall 2012): 291. The idea, says Rusert, was to work upon and against racist proclivities and institutions: “While phrenology may be allied with craniology and scientific racism in our historical imaginary, African Americans, women, and others excluded from the national body politic latched onto phrenology as a radically inclusive, if even democratic science throughout the antebellum period. First, phrenology held that anyone could become a practitioner of the science. Furthermore, phrenology’s focus on personal reform made a natural link the American social reform movements, including the abolitionist movement. And finally, phrenology’s emphasis on



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physiological and psychological adaptability as well as the individual’s power for self-­transformation posed a serious challenge to racial science’s attempts to make racial traits fixed and immutable”(303 – 4). See also Bittle,“Woman, Know Thyself,” 120 – 22, and Ellis’s discussion of Douglass in Antebellum Posthuman, chapter 1. 102  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 253 – 54. 103  •  Kathy E. Ferguson, “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking In,” Political Research Quarterly 70, no.4 (2017): 709. 104  •  Connor, “The Shakes: Conditions of Tremor,” 205. 105  •  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press), 176. I explore this more closely in chapter 3, “Solar Judgment.” 106  •  Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-American Literature,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 7, no. 3: 48. Deleuze is referring to the “procedure” of becomings enacted in Carlos Casteneda’s books. 107  •  Roger Caillois, a quasi-­Surrealist who will be discussed in chapter 4, describes his own “singular sensation of gravity” in The Necessity of Mind: An Analytic Study of the Mechanisms of Overdetermination in Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in the Individual Consciousness, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 104: one night, as he was trying “in vain to fall asleep consciously without seeing that I might as well have gone in search of darkness carrying a lamp, I was the locus of the most astonishing tactile hallucinations. I had such a singular sensation of gravity that I could only remain aware of my recumbent body with what was in truth an imperceptible effort. . . . These kinds of ground swells attacked me insidiously and rendered me in a sense formless.” 108  •  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 164. 109  •  Whitman, “So Long!” in Moon, Disseminating Whitman, 423. 110  •  In his account of a Fourth of July parade in Life Illustrated, Whitman invokes the vitality of a process “always tickling” the underside of any given thing: “Last of all come the Cartmen, in great force, armed with whips and umbrellas, mounted upon their own heavy, strong horses, worn and marked with harness; stout, sun-­burned men, able-­bodied and hard-­featured. At the hinder lower corner of each saddlecloth is a gay, red tassel, which swings to and fro, and plays tickle, tickle, tickle, under the bellies of the horses, who don’t know that under all grandeur, both human and equine, there is always something tickling, and who squirm and fret about it.” Walt Whitman, “New York Amuses Itself — The Fourth of July,” Life Illustrated, July 12, 1856, ed. Jason Stacy, The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Folsom and Price, accessed March 28, 2017, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. 111  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 3. 112  •  R. P. Blackmur, Anni Mirabiles 1921 – 1925: Reason in the Madness of Letters (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1956), 33. 113 • Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, Tuesday, August 21, 1888, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/2 /med.00002.38.html.

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114  •  For a good account of Whitman’s interest in the sonority of language, see Michael West, Transcendental Wordplay: America’s Romantic Punsters and the Search for the Language of Nature (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000), chapter 11. 115  •  See Noortje Marres’s related notion of the “physique of the public.” For a discussion, see Noortje Marres and Javier Lezaun, “Materials and Devices of the Public: An Introduction,” Economy and Society 40, no. 4 (2011): 489–509. chapter two. circuits of sympathy

1  •  See Elizabeth Barnes, Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 3: “In American literature . . . sympathetic identification takes on a particular political significance. In writing spanning nearly a hundred years, and including authors as diverse as Tom Paine and Harriet Beecher Stowe, sympathy — expressed as emotional, psychological, or biological attachment — is represented as the basis of democracy, and therefore as fundamental to the creation of a distinctly ‘American’ character.” 2  •  William Lloyd Garrison, “Harsh Language — Retarding the Cause,” in Selections from the Writings and Speeches of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 3 (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1852), 131 – 32. Also: “In the long, dark struggle with national injustice, through which I have been called to pass, I have been cheered and strengthened by the knowledge of the reformatory change which has taken place in the sentiments of thousands, through . . . the Liberator,” which has “enlarge[d] the spirit of human sympathy” (181). 3  •  Rousseau discusses the role of pitié (compassion) in On the Inequality among Mankind, cited from the Harvard Classic edition, 1909 – 1 4, www.bartleby.com /34/3/1.html. Whitman’s notebooks contain several references to Rousseau; see Walt Whitman, Notebooks, vol. 5, 1843 – 52 (New York: New York University Press, 2007). According to Bliss Perry, in Walt Whitman: His Life and Work (New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1906), “Whitman’s religion resembles the sentimental Deism of the eighteenth century, as exemplified in the famous Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau” (266). 4  •  Brandon Gordon contrasts a sentimentalist model of sympathy with that of a “physical sympathy” that he and James Baldwin detect in Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro.” Brandon Gordon, “Physical Sympathy: Hip and Sentimentalism in James Baldwin’s Another Country,” Modern Fiction Studies 57, no. 1 (spring 2011): 75 – 95. Anna Gibbs uses the related notion of the “corporeal unconscious,” which “is animated by sympathy, a putative affinity between certain things —  including bodies and organs — which makes them liable not only to be similarly affected by the same influence, but more especially to affect or influence one another.” Anna Gibbs, “Panic! Affect Contagion, Mimesis and Suggestion in the Social Field,” Cultural Studies Review 14, no. 2 (September 2008): 135. 5  •  According to O. S. Fowler, a phrenologist with whom Whitman associated, “spirituo-­sexual magnetism” was a force “that circulated not only through the individual bodies of the engendering pair but also between them as the spark that ig-



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nited their love.” Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 295. 6  •  “Incidents like the Bernhardt performance seemed to reveal,” says Vrettos, “a fundamental permeability not only between body and mind but also between self and other.” Neuromimesis was not considered to be a purely “psychic phenomenon,” for it could “produce palpable effects on the body.” Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 81 – 83. From within a Whitmanian onto-­story of influx and efflux, neuromimesis might be understood as a kind of too-­pure repetition of influx, one that fails to engage sufficiently in a creative twist. Or, according to the theory of mimesis developed by Nidesh Lawtoo, neuromimesis could be described as a manifestation of that “elusive sphere of intersubjective, psychosomatic, and contagious forms of communication that are not under the control of consciousness and lead the ego to reproduce, share, and assimilate the qualities of privileged others.” Nidesh Lawtoo, Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2016), xxxvii. 7  •  Mary G. De Jong, “Introduction,” in Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-­Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices, ed. Mary G. DeJong (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 1. 8 • Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 9, emphasis added. Like sentiment, “imagination” exists at the intersection of mind and body: it is, as Kant will say, a “faculty” or power or capacity in but not quite of the body. 9  •  There are, of course, many layers of mediation at work in what I am calling a sympathy between colored cloth and human flesh. To name just some important ones, there is the mediation of Hawthorne’s novelistic depiction, the mediation by a culturally specific set of meanings surrounding femininity and adultery, the mediation of the psychological projection (by narrator and perhaps reader) of the “heat” produced by a body-­engaged-­in-­sex upon the less motile letter A. All these layers help to produce the red-­hot effect or “sensation of burning heat.” But it is important not to leave out, as another element within the mix, the physicality of the fabric of the A — its scarlet color, haptic texture, and even perhaps its pointed shape. These have a kind of material force that, while entangled with the cultural, psychological, and narratological, is not wholly reducible to them. It matters, for example, that the A is red, a color that, as Merleau-­Ponty and others have shown, carries and expresses a distinctive affective charge. Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2013), 209 – 28. 10 • Barnes, Seduction and Democracy, 7. 11 • In The Letters of the British Spy (1803), a book whose popularity in America prompted ten editions by 1835, William Wirt offers a description of sympathy that captures both its moral and material dimensions: by “sympathy . . . I mean not merely that tender passion which quavers the lip and fills the eye” at the sight of “the sorrows and tears of another” but also “that still more delicate and subtile quality by which we passively catch the very colours, momentum and strength”

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of the one to whom we are attending. The Letters originally appeared in the daily newspaper the Virginia Argus; an 1832 review in American Monthly Review describes Wirt as “Baltimore’s grand old man of letters.” 12 • Seth Lobis, The Virtue of Sympathy: Magic, Philosophy, and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 312. Lobis makes this point in the context of England in the seventeenth century, but, via Whitman, it applies also, I think, to nineteenth-­century America: “Standardly affiliated with ethics, sympathy, I want to argue, needs to be understood more generally in terms of dynamics, as a principle of mobility, communication, and exchange, of matter and spirit as well as thought and feeling” (4). Michel Foucault famously discussed that older sense of sympathy as key to the sixteenth-­century European episteme of similitudes and resemblances, the “prose of the world.” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). 13  •  D. H. Lawrence, focusing on sympathy in its sentimental sense, called it Whitman’s “watchword.” D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman,” in Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Penguin Classics, 1990), 182. 14  •  Walt Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), section 5. 15  •  Walt Whitman, “So Long!,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 423. 16  •  One further step, which Whitman does not take, might be to affirm what Steven Johnston calls a “tragic sensibility,” which faces “the arbitrary, fragile aspects of social and political existence” as “permanent features of life.” This need not result, says Johnston, in “political resignation, a docile acceptance of damnable results,” but can “foster new bursts of innovation that previously escaped the imagination.” Steven Johnston, American Dionysia: Violence, Tragedy, and Democratic Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 3. 17  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 24, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. 18  •  Paul Christian Jones, Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment (Des Moines: Iowa University Press, 2011), 109 – 13. D. H. Lawrence found Whitman’s equation of sympathy with “Jesus’s love, and with Paul’s charity” to be a big mistake. Lawrence prefers the more individualistic figure of sympathy of Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” This is, for Lawrence, a receptivity that is free of religion, contingent upon circumstance, and subject only to the morality of the individual (“the soul judging for herself ”). Lawrence, “Whitman,” 182, 185. 19  •  “To understand sympathy” in the sentimentalist tradition, writes Susan Toth Lord, “one must focus on the collaborative relationship between the author, who creates imagined selves, and audience members, who project their sentiments onto these selves, thereby transforming them into familiar beings.” Susan Toth Lord, “Lydia Maria Child’s Use of Sentimentalism in Letters from New York,” in Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-­Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices, ed. Mary G. DeJong (Vancouver: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013), 90, my emphasis. The “as it were” quality of sympathy’s connection between bodies pervades the thoughtful essays of that collection.



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20  •  Walt Whitman, “Sympathy,” in Notebooks, vol. 3, 963. The editors note that the date cannot be earlier than January 1876. 21  •  Something similar might be said of this line from “A Song of Joys” (1881 – 82): “O the joy of that vast elemental sympathy which only the human soul is capable of generating and emitting in steady and limitless floods” (23). Sympathy there appears as more-­than-­human or “vast and elemental,” even as the participation of the human “soul” in the sympathetic process is distinguished by the steadiness and limitlessness of its (joy-­inducing) contributions. 22  •  Klatt argues that Whitman was fascinated by the 1857 construction of the first transatlantic cable and aspired for his poetry to induce a sympathy with the telegraph’s ability to communicate swiftly and almost immediately across spatial distance. L. S. Klatt, “The Electric Whitman,” Southern Review 44, no. 2 (2008): 321 – 31. 23  •  Walt Whitman, “Our Answer to a Reasonable Question” [March 24, 1846], in Gathering of the Forces: Editorials, Essays, Literary and Dramatic Reviews and Other Materials Written by Walt Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846 and 1847, vol. 1, ed. Cleveland Rogers and John Black (New York: G. P. Putnam’s and Sons, 1920), 104. See also Paul Christian Jones, “ ‘That I Could Llook . . . on My Own Crucifixion and Bloody Crowning’: Walt Whitman’s Anti-­Gallows Writing and the Appeal to Christian Sympathy,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 27 (summer 2009): 1 – 27. For Jones, “This acknowledgement of the humanity of the criminal, the awareness of his pain, and the move toward a sympathetic understanding of his plight are striking aspects of Whitman’s writing about specific criminals as well” (2). See Jones, Against the Gallows, chapter 2, note 5, for a good discussion of the scholarly debates on Whitman’s editorials. 24  •  Romand Coles, “The Neuropolitical Habitus of Resonant Receptive Democracy,” Ethics and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2011): 273 – 93. 25  •  One influential version of this critique is Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), which presents sympathy and empathy as forms of narcissism (“Empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead” [20]) or as in the service of masochistic pleasure (“what about the pleasure engendered by the embrace of pain — that is, the tumultuous passions of the flighty imagination stirred by this fantasy of being beaten?” [21]), or as a veil for racism (in empathy, “the white body [is] . . . positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible,” but “in making the other’s suffering one’s own, this suffering is occluded by the other’s obliteration” and “the sympathizer’s very focus on bodily suffering tends to “reinforce the ‘thingly’ quality of the captive” [19]). 26  •  This meliorative demand made by pain helps to explain why Whitman sees the enhancement of sensitivity to be a good in and of itself. He claimed, for example, that even though his anti-­gallows writings failed to achieve legislative abolition, they nevertheless “increased sensitivity on the part of the public toward any useless harshness in the treatment of criminals,” and “the real good resulting out of the opposition . . . was [in] . . . elevating the range of temper and feeling.” Walt Whitman, “Capital Punishment,” Brooklyn Daily Times, May 22, 1858.

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27  •  Whitman, “Orthodox but Sanguinary” [September 9, 1846], in Gathering of the Forces, 101 – 3 . 28 • Walt Whitman, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Grier, vol. 1, 131. 29  •  Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 320 – 22. 30  •  Whitman, “Sympathy,” in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Grier, vol. 3, 963. 31  •  Bartky also notes that one of the impediments to sympathetic responsiveness is “the anxious fear” that too much sensitivity to human suffering will plunge one “into the abyss that has claimed so many others.” Sandra Lee Bartky, “Sympathy and Solidarity,” in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Diana Tietjens Meyers (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 193. 32  •  Romand Coles, “Walt Whitman, Jane Bennett, and the Paradox of Antagonistic Sympathy,” Political Research Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2016): 621 – 25. 33 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 296 – 323. 34  •  Sad passions diminish a body’s capacity to act, in contrast to the joyful passions that energize a body’s agency insofar as they encourage collaboration with other bodies and their powers. According to Deleuze, “Spinoza traces, step by step, the dreadful concatenation of sad passions; first, sadness itself, then hatred, aversion, mockery, fear, despair, morsus conscientiae, pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, self-­abasement, shame, regret, anger, vengeance, cruelty. . . . His analysis goes so far that even in hatred and security he is able to find that grain of sadness that suffices to make these the feelings of slaves. . . . Spinoza is not among those who think that a sad passion has something good about it.” Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 26. The frame of sad/joyful passions is Spinoza’s “way of posing the political problem to himself: how does it happen that people who have power [pouvoir], in whatever domain, need to affect us in a sad way? . . . Inspiring sad passions is necessary for the exercise of power . . . : sadness is the affect insofar as it involves the diminution of my power of acting.” Gilles Deleuze, lectures, “On Spinoza,” accessed June 1, 2016, http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.com/2007/02/on-­spinoza.html. Deleuze’s discussion of “sad passions” might be extended to an ethical critique of pity or a sentimental model of sympathy. 35  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 527 – 4 1. While these lines may invoke plants and other elements of the landscape as not-­so-­veiled metaphors for parts of another man’s body, the poetry continually blurs the line between metaphor and animism. James Miller has analyzed how this “cosmo-­eroticism” also appears in “From Pent-­up Aching Rivers”: “The rhythmic urgency of the poem, beginning with the ‘pent-­up aching rivers’ seemingly at flood-­tide, has something of the urgency of the universal sexual drive. . . . — ‘The mystic deliria, the madness amorous, the utter abandonment.’ The poem embraces autoeroticism (‘From native moments, from bashful pains, singing them’), homoeroticism (‘From exultation, victory and relief, from the bedfellow’s embrace in the night’), heteroeroticism (‘The



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female form approaching, I pensive, love-­flesh tremulous aching’), and what might be called cosmo-­eroticism (‘Of the mad pushes of waves upon the land, I them chanting’).” James E. Miller Jr., “Children of Adam [1860],” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_11.html. 36  •  Dianne Chisholm, “Biophilia, Creative Involution, and the Ecological Future of Queer Desire,” in Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. C. Mortimer-­ Sandilands and B. Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 359–82. 37  •  Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 1855 edition, line 136. 38  •  Walt Whitman, “Proto-­Leaf,” in Leaves of Grass, 1860 edition, https:// whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1860/poems/1, section 64. 39 • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 77. 40  •  D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman,” 174, 184. 41  •  Reynolds argues that though Whitman rejected the antimarriage stance, he celebrated the naturalness and inevitability of what the reformers called “passional attraction.” David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 111 – 12. 42 • Michael Moon, Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in Leaves of Grass (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 13. 43  •  James Martel, “States of Indifference: Rousseau, Whitman, and Bersani,” Quinnipiac Law Review 28, no. 3 (2010): 625 – 58. Martha Nussbaum follows this approach, arguing that Whitmanian sympathy is not simply a sorrowful sentiment but a “sympathy with teeth,” that is, “one coupled with a . . . call to . . . justice.” Martha Nussbaum, “Democratic Desire,” in A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, ed. John Seery (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011), 100. 44  •  Jason Frank, “Promiscuous Citizenship,” in Seery, A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, 155 – 85. 45  •  M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xvii. 46  •  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 164. 47 • Catherine Keller, The Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 197. She also describes this, on p. 208, as an “apophatic polyamory.” 48  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 14, lines 253 – 54. 49  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 20, lines 289 – 9 0. 50  •  Walt Whitman, “I Am He That Aches with Love,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 93. Here we can also think of how “olfactory sensors” widely distributed in the human skin and between the organs enter into sympathetic communication. See chapter 3 for a discussion, and also William E. Connolly, “Distributed Agencies and Bumpy Temporalities,” in Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 51 • Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 81n4.

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52 • Sherry Ceniza’s Walt Whitman and 19th-Century Woman Reformers (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998) draws attention to Whitman’s association of sympathy with “attitude.” See especially her discussion of Pauline Wright Davis, 134 – 36. 53  •  Sharon Krause, speaking of Hume’s understanding of the automatic (and impartial) operation of sympathy, says that Humean sympathy “is not primarily a disposition or a virtue but rather a faculty of the mind with an informational function, much like imagination or memory. Like them, it operates automatically within consciousness not simply as the result of individual will or character.” Sharon Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Deliberation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 79. 54  •  Whitman, “Talbot Wilson,” in The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, ed. Grier, vol. 1, 73. In “Unfolded Out of the Folds,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (1856), Whitman again speaks of the enfolded quality of sympathy, this time explicitly gendered female: “Unfolded out of the folds of the woman man comes unfolded. . . . / Unfolded out of the justice of the woman all justice is unfolded, / Unfolded out of the sympathy of the woman is all sympathy” (lines 1 – 10). See also Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, chapter 6 on Whitman and the fold. 55  •  Brian Massumi offers a version of “animal sympathy” that he distinguishes from sentimental/empathetic sympathy in What Animals Can Teach Us about Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 81 – 83. 56  •  O. S. Fowler, Fowler’s Practical Phrenology (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1849), gives a concise elementary view of phrenology (155). The discussion of “sympathy, compassion, kindness, fellow-­feeling” appears in chapter 19, on the “faculty” of Benevolence. For a succinct account of Whitman’s relationship to the Fowler brothers, see Madeleine Stern, “Fowler, Lorenzo Niles (1811 – 1896) and Orson Squire (1809 – 1887),” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998). 57  •  Walter Whitman, “One Wicked Impulse! A Tale of a Murderer Escaped,” https://whitmanarchive.org/published/fiction/shortfiction/per.00368.html. 58  •  This may be why, compared to Elisabeth Anker’s emphasis on melodrama as “a powerful political discourse that intensifies suffering and galvanizes national sentiment to legitimate state violence,” Whitman here highlights its countercultural, democratizing potential. Elisabeth Anker, Orgies of Feeling: Melodrama and the Politics of Freedom (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 59  •  Whitman, “One Wicked Impulse! A Tale of a Murderer Escaped.” 60  •  Walt Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 31–35. 61  •  Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 18. 62  •  Whitman, “Talbot Wilson,” in Grier, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 1, 64. 63  •  Whitman, “Sympathy,” in Grier, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 3, 963.



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64  •  Giuseppe Nori, “The Problematics of Sympathy and Romantic Historicism,” Studies in Romanticism 34 (spring 1995): 7. 65  •  “And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?” (“I Sing the Body Electric,” section 1). D. H. Lawrence highlights Whitman’s somocentrism: “ ‘There!’ [Whitman] said to the soul. ‘Stay there!’ Stay there. Stay in the flesh. Stay in the limbs and lips and in the belly. Stay in the breast and womb. Stay there, o soul, where you belong.” Lawrence, “Whitman,” 180. 66  •  As John Irwin notes, nature often appears in Leaves of Grass as an intrinsically meaningful order, a divine design: “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” for example, says this: “A song of the rolling earth, and of words according, / Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines? those curves, angles, dots? / No, those are not the words. . . . / Air, soil, water, fire — those are words . . . / All merges toward the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth.” According to Irwin, “there is reason to believe that at one point, Whitman conceived of Leaves of Grass as a kind of hieroglyphic Bible,” which would again make detectable to us the signifying forces or hints embedded in a thing’s material shape. Such a poetry would “recapture the original language of objects,” a language in which “significances shone through their material shapes,” or were “pictographic ideograms” in which “form was their content. Whitman’s attempt to regain the original language of natural signs, his effort to replace ‘audible words’ with ‘the presentation of the unspoken meanings of the earth,’ involves the paradoxical uses of phonetic signs to restore the unspoken (nonphonetic) language of pictographic ideograms” (870). By highlighting Whitman’s attempt to translate into poetic words the “unspoken meanings of the earth,” Irwin reveals for me an affinity between Whitman’s cosmos and Paracelsus’s world of sympathies and resemblances. John Irwin, “Hieroglyphic Bibles and Phallic Songs,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 863 – 72. 67  •  Janice Law Trecker positions Whitman’s cosmology between Darwin and Hegel: Existence for Whitman, she argues, “is dynamic and cyclical, as opposed to the then-­conventional monotheistic view of life as a one-­time progression ruled by providence. ‘Urge and urge and urge, / Always the procreant urge of the world.’ . . . To Whitman, the universe is an ever-­changing system, producing new ideas and forms that will combine, a la Hegel, into every new and better life. The force behind this process . . . is . . . biological, a matter of lusts and urges as it was for Darwin” (12 – 13). Janice Law Trecker, “The Ecstatic Epistemology of Song of Myself,” Midwest Quarterly 53 (fall 2011): 11 – 25. 68  •  Whitman, “Poem Incarnating the Mind,” in Grier, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 1, 107, emphasis added. 69  •  Walt Whitman, 1855 Leaves of Grass, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 696, lines 941 – 54. 70  •  Whitman, “I Am He That Aches with Love,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 2. 71 • Walt Whitman, Preface, 1876 edition of Leaves of Grass, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 657n2.

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72  •  Whitman, “Talbot Wilson,” in Grier, The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, vol. 1, 80. In the edited notebook passage cited earlier, we see that Whitman had at one point described sympathy as “abstract,” but then crossed the word out to replace it with the more palatable notion of a “love” for “humanity.” But the specter of an abstract, amoral, and impersonal sympathy returns to haunt him. 73 • Whitman, Notebooks, vol. 1, 330. 74  •  Or what Edmond Holmes in 1902 described as the transference of the “glory, the splendor, the divinity, which we instinctively ascribe to the ideal” to “every detail of the actual. Frankest and most consistent of Pantheists, he deifies Nature, not in her totality . . . but in all the minutiae of her phenomenal existence.” Edmond Holmes, Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Study and A Selection (London: Richard Folkard and Son, 1902), 28, accessed June 1, 2016, http://www.archive.org /details/cu31924022225985. In 1990, George Kateb offered a similar, but secularized version of that reading: Whitman alerts us to “the beauty that any person or thing has just by being there, or has just by force of wanting to be looked at rather than turned away from.” George Kateb, “Whitman and the Culture of Democracy,” in Seery, A Political Companion to Walt Whitman, 31. 75  •  See Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-­A merican Literature,” in Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 36 – 51. That Whitman the man retreats from the possibility of cosmic indifference in his old age does not erase its performative presence in his texts. Horace Traubel reports a May 13, 1888, conversation with Whitman and a man named Moorhouse: “W. speaking of the idea of immortality, of the ‘fact’ as he prefers to call it, added: ‘When I say immortality I say identity — the survival of the personal soul — your survival, my survival.’ Moorhouse: ‘It could not be otherwise with a man of your optimism. It would be impossible for a man of your optimism to have any other belief.’ To which W. replied: ‘Optimism — pessimism: no one word could explain, enclose, it. There is more, much more, to be canvassed than is included in either word, in both words. I am not prepared to admit fraud in the scheme of the universe — yet without immortality all would be sham and sport of the most tragic nature. I remember, also, what Epictetus said: What is good enough for the universe is good enough for me! — immortality for the universe, immortality is good enough for me!’ ” Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 1, www.whitmanarchive.org. chapter three. solar judgment

1  •  Walt Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), lines 147 – 54. 2  •  Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 318 – 19. 3 • See https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-­system/sun/overview/. 4  •  Anand Pandian notes the impartiality of water: “water meant to irrigate a field of paddy will also water the weeds growing along its banks.” Pandian is ex-



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plicating a verse from Muturai, “a collection of didactic poems attributed to the twelfth-­century poetess Auvaiyar,” in Crooked Stalks: Cultivating Virtue in South India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 199. 5 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 788 – 89. 6  •  This is a composite list drawn from “Salut au Monde,” “I Sing the Body Electric,” and “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings.” 7  •  Here is the passage: With the fascinations of youth and the equal fascinations of age, / Sits she whom I too love like the rest, sits undisturb’d, / Holding up in her hand what has the character of a mirror, while her eyes glance back from it, / Glance as she sits, inviting none, denying none, / Holding a mirror day and night tirelessly before her own face. “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 50 – 53. 8 • Walt Whitman, The Journalism, vol. 1 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1819), 258. 9  •  Karen Baker-­Fletcher affirms, with Patrisse Khan-­Cullors and asha bandaele, that “We are star dust. . . . The very atoms and molecules in our bodies are traceable to the crucibles in the centers of stars that once upon a time exploded into gas clouds. And those gas clouds form other stars and those stars possessed the divine-­right mix of properties needed to create not only planets, . . . but also people. . . . Whether speaking of her brother’s experience of being terrorized for years in the State of California prison system for having a serious mental illness while poor and black, or writing on her biological father’s imprisonment for struggling with drug addiction while black, Khan-­Cullors’ eyes are on the stardust she sees everywhere.” Karen Baker-­Fletcher, “Dust and Spirit in Creative Synthesis: Womanist Wordings in Process,” paper presented to the Theology and the Natural World Colloquium, Union Theological Seminary, April 12 – 13, 2019. Baker-­Fletcher is citing Patrisse Khan-­Cullors and asha bandaele’s When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 1 – 5. 10  •  Whitman, “Song at Sunset,” line 54. 11 • Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 116. 12  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 1326. 13  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 560 – 61. 14  •  Ed Folsom, “Democracy,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), reproduced by permission at https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_429.html. “Judgment” is a topic important to recent debates in social and political theory: for a good summary, see Linda Zerilli, “Judgment,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T. Gibbons (London: Blackwell, 2014). See also Jennifer Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), which explores judgment as process and focuses on the curious absence of grounds for decision inside every verdict. 15  •  Anne Carson invokes this pleasure as “The Eras of Transfiguring the

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Physical Body Atom by Atom into a Creature Able to Float at Ease through Silken Space.” Anne Carson, “Eras of Yves Klein,” in Float (New York: Knopf, 2016), 49. 16  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” line 80. 17  •  Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” line 32. 18  •  Whitman, “Sparkles from the Wheel,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 2. 19  •  Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 6, line 82. 20  •  Whitman, “I Sing the Body Electric,” line 93. 21  •  “I too Paumanok, / I too have bubbled up, floated the measureless float, and been wash’d on your shores.” Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” lines 41 – 4 2. 22  •  Manuscript draft of “The Dalliance of the Eagles,” from late 1870s or 1880, http://whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/transcriptions/uva.00092.html. 23  •  Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” line 28. 24 • Victor Turner, Process, Performance, and Pilgrimage (New Delhi: Concept, 1969), 41, cited in Joan R. Wry, “Liminal Spaces: Literal and Conceptual Borderlines in Whitman’s Civil War Poems,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26, no. 4 (spring 2009): 198. Wry explores how Whitman’s Civil War poems, by dwelling with the limen or threshold between life and death, were able to “find the human face of war.” This wonderful essay was the inspiration for me to see Whitman’s invocation of the sun as an attempt to live the interval. 25  •  Erin Manning, “For a Pragmatics of the Useless, or the Value of the Infrathin,” Political Theory 45, no. 1 (2017): 99. 26  •  The practice of pranayama includes the control, elimination, or expansion of the pause (kumbhaka) between breathing in and breathing out. For a good discussion, see Ram Bahahur Singh et al., “Pranayama: The Power of Breath,” International Journal on Disability and Human Development 8, no. 2 (June 1, 2009): 141 – 53. Thanks to Laura Oulanne for this insight. 27  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 4 – 13. 28 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 306 – 7. 29  •  Like the “dark precursor” of Gilles Deleuze (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 119], the interval of solarity is akin to what Chad Shomura describes as “a force-­field that gathers a system whose path of actualization can only be seen after the fact.” Chad Shomura, “The Bad Good Life: On the Politics of the Impasse” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2016), 133. For Franziska Strack, “the dark precursor constitutes a force or an agent that puts heterogeneous (coexisting) series of differences in a communicative relation with one another without mediation.” Franziska Strack, “Talk About Sound: Creative Communication in a World of Noise and Uncertainty” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2020). 30  •  Henry Thoreau, May 12, 1851, in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, ed. H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin 1993), 126. 31 • Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 126.



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32  •  Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” lines 189 – 90. 33  •  Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 36. My thanks to Nathan Gies for linking Whitman to Lorde on these points. 34  •  Whitehead appreciates the special access afforded by (Romantic) poetry to a nature that is processual and more-­than-­human. He affirms, for example, that because Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” lingers with “the mysterious presence of surrounding things, which imposes itself on any separate element that we set up as an individual for its own sake,” it is able to grasp “the whole of nature as involved in the tonality of the particular instance.” Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1925), 83. 35 • Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as recorded by Lucien Price (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 22. My thanks to Stephanie Erev for this reference. 36  •  “The arbitrary, as it were ‘given’ elements in the laws of nature warn us that we are in a special cosmic epoch. Here the phrase ‘cosmic epoch’ is used to mean that widest society of actual entities whose immediate relevance to ourselves is traceable. This epoch is characterized by electronic and protonic actual entities, and by yet more ultimate actual entities which can be dimly discerned in the quanta of energy. Maxwell’s equations of the electromagnetic field hold sway. . . . But there is disorder in the sense that the laws are not perfectly obeyed, and that the reproduction is mingled with instances of failure. There is accordingly a gradual transition to new types of order.” Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 91. 37 • Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 69. 38  •  “Prehension,” writes Luciana Parisi, is “an indeterminate process of mental and physical contagions,” involving “the intrusions of elements” from one thing into another. Luciana Parisi, “Cutting Away from Smooth Space: Alfred North Whitehead’s Extensive Continuum in Parametric Software,” in The Lure of Whitehead, ed. Nicholas Gaskill and A. J. Nocek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 270. 39  •  Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 133; and Process and Reality, 28. “In the philosophy of organism it is assumed that an actual entity is composite” (Process and Reality, 147). According to Whitehead’s “principle of universal relativity,” “an actual entity is [always] present in other actual entities. In fact, if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity” (Process and Reality, 50). William Connolly describes an “actual entity” as “any formation that has some tendency toward self-­maintenance, such as, differentially, a rock, a cell, a tornado. . . . The creative processes, at its most active, occurs in teleodynamic searches within and between entities whose relative equilibrium has been disturbed, and it draws upon the noise within and entanglements between entities.” William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 156.

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40 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 19. 41 • Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 134. Ingression plays the “role of a conceptual lure for feeling” (Process and Reality, 86). The external “datum” for prehensions has a tendency to ingress, that is, to provoke prehension. Datum “is nothing else than the actual world itself in its character of a possibility for the process of being felt” (Process and Reality, 50). 42  •  Whitehead’s (controversial) term for these virtualities is “eternal objects.” See Process and Reality, 23. 43 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 41. 44  •  Manning, “For a Pragmatics,” 99. 45  •  Here is Steven Shaviro’s elegant summary of the point: “Positive and negative prehensions are the way that any entity constitutes itself in the process of responding to other entities that precede it. In every encounter, you either feel whatever it is that you have encountered, or else you actively reject it from feeling. Most importantly, an entity encounters, feels, and picks up from, its own state of being in the immediate past, which is to say in ‘time-­spans of the order of magnitude of a second, or even of fractions of a second.’ But an entity also encounters other entities in its vicinity. And ultimately, an entity encounters — at least to some extent, though quite often this extent is ‘negligible’ — its entire world, which is to say, in the terminology of physics, everything within the light cone of the entity.” Steven Shaviro, “Whitehead on Feelings,” The Pinocchio Theory, June 8, 2015, http://www .shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1309. 46 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 226 – 27. Even negative prehensions “express a bond” with an outside, that is to say, the influx always overflows any effort of exclusion (41). A negative prehension “hold[s] its datum as inoperative” (23). Brian Massumi links negative prehension to “microperception.” “Microperception is bodily. There is no fright, or any affect for that matter, without an accompanying movement in or of the body. . . . [T]he body . . . carries tendencies reviving the past and already striving toward a future. In its commotion are capacities reactivating, being primed to play out, in a heightening or diminishing of their collective power of existence. . . . The world in which we live is literally made of these reinaugural microperceptions, cutting in, cueing emergence, priming capacities. Every body is at every instant in thrall to any number of them. A body is a complex of inbracings playing out complexly and in serial fashion. The tendencies and capacities activated do not necessarily bear fruit. Some will be summoned to the verge of unfolding, only to be left behind, unactualized. But even these will have left their trace. In that moment of interruptive commotion, there’s a productive indecision. There’s a constructive suspense. Potentials resonate and interfere, and this modulates what actually eventuates. Even what doesn’t happen has a modulatory effect. Whitehead had a word for this. He called it ‘negative prehension.’ ” “Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi,” Inflexions (2009): 5. 47 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 177. In contrast to the general thrust of modern European thought, Whitehead does not “tacitly [take] . . . human experi-



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ence as . . . the generalized description” of experience per se. Neither is “the process by which experiential unity is attained [to be] conceived in the guise of modes of [human] thought” (113). 48  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 21 – 29. 49 • Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 225 – 27. 50 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 141, my emphasis. 51 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 41; and Adventures of Ideas, 290. 52  •  Alex Stone, “Smell Turns Up in Unexpected Places,” New York Times, October 13, 2014, http://nyti.ms/1sJaJ1p. 53 • Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 176. Whitehead also says in Process and Reality that “consciousness, thought, sense-­perception . . . are unessential ingredients in experience” (36). 54 • Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 163. 55 • Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 81. Whitehead may here gesture toward the neuroscientific notion of “anoetic” experience, which “consists of a continuous underlying stream of . . . autonomic and organic state processes, arising from viscerally enriched subcortical circuits. . . . Anoetic self-­experience influences . . . the affective tone of . . . behavior.” Marie Vandekerckhove, Luis Carlo Bulnes, and Jaak Panksepp, “The Emergence of Primary Anoetic Consciousness in Episodic Memory,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 7, article 210 (January 2014): 2, 6. 56 • Whitehead, Process and Reality, 176. 57  •  William S. Walsh, “Review of November Boughs,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine 43 (March 1889): 445, http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/tei /anc.00127.html. 58  •  Martha Nussbaum, “Poets as Judges: Judicial Rhetoric and the Literary Imagination,” University of Chicago Law Review 62, no. 4 (autumn 1995): 1478 – 79. 59  •  Whitman, “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” line 34. 60  •  Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” lines 189 – 90. 61 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 790 – 91 and 190 – 93. For a discussion of the operative ethos in “Democratic Vistas,” see Morton Schoolman, A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics, chapter 1 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 62  •  See, for example, the collection of William E. Connolly’s essays in William E. Connolly: Democratic Pluralism and Political Theory, ed. S. Chambers and T. Carver (London: Routledge, 2008); Stephen K. White, A Democratic Bearing: Admirable Citizens, Uneven Injustice and Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Stephen K. White, The Ethos of a Late-­Modern Citizen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). White describes Connolly’s “presumptive generosity” as “a disposition that neither automatically scripts the emergence or becoming of an other as alien and hostile nor flees from an encounter with it. Connolly calls this disposition ‘critical responsiveness’ ” — or, perhaps, “curious sympathy.” Stephen K. White, “Uncertain Constellations,” in The New Pluralism: William Connolly and the Contemporary Global Condition, ed. David Campbell and Morton Schoolman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 159.

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63 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 369 – 80. 64 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 242 – 55. Cristanne Miller describes that famous passage as Whitman’s “recipe for becoming a poem.” Cristanne Miller, “Drum-­Taps: Revisions and Reconciliation,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 26, no. 4 (2009): 175. Whitman offers the reader a veritable religion, albeit a civic one, a theme he continues in “Democratic Vistas,” where he describes the “third stage” of democracy as “a sublime and serious Religious Democracy”: “after two grand stages of preparation-­strata, I perceive that now a third stage . . . (and without which the other two were useless). . . . The First stage was the planning and putting on record the political foundation rights . . . in the organization of republican National, State, and municipal governments. . . . The Second stage relates to material prosperity, wealth, produce, labor-­saving machines, iron, cotton, local, State and continental railways, . . . The Third stage, rising out of the previous ones, to make them and all illustrious, I, now, for one, promulge, announcing a native expression-­ spirit . . . to be evidenced by . . . poets to come . . . and by . . . growths of language, songs, operas, orations, lectures, architecture — and by a sublime and serious Religious Democracy . . . dissolving the old . . . and from its own interior and vital principles, reconstructing, democratizing society.” Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” lines 519 – 52, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 769. 65 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 318 – 319. 66  •  For example, in Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates (in his first speech) says that “in each one of us there are two ruling and impelling principles,” a “desire for pleasure” that naturally tends toward excess or wantonness (hubris), and an “acquired judgment” that is self-­modulating and “causes us to aim at excellence.” Plato, Phaedrus and Letters 7 and 8, trans. Walter Hamilton (New York: Penguin Classics, 1973), 36 – 37. 67  •  Whitman, “A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 480. 68  •  Here is the full entry from Whitman’s notebook, probably written between 1852 and 1854: “In writing, the same taste and law as in personal demeanor —  that is never to strain, or exhibit the least apparent desire to make stick out the pride, grandeur and boundless richness — but to be those, and let the spirit of them vitalize whatever is said In writing, give no second hand articles — no quotations — no authorities — give the real thing — ready money —  A poem in which all things and qualities and processes express themselves — the nebula — the fixed stars — the earth — the grass, waters, vegetable, sauroid, and all processes —  man — animals.” Walt Whitman, The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Ed Folsom and Kenneth M. Price, accessed April 13, 2017, http://www.whitmanarchive.org. For a detailed discussion of the poetics of Whitman, see Erik Ingvar Thurin, Whitman Between Impressionism and Expressionism: Language of the Body, Language of the Soul (Lewisburg: PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995). 69  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 77 – 80. In the introduction to our edited volume The Politics of Moralizing (London: Routledge, 2002), Michael Shapiro and I share Whitman’s objection to the dogmatic tendency of moralizing. We also



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objected to the way moraline discourses tend to ignore the injustices accompanying the pursuit of beautiful moral ideals, such as “universal” human rights (still imbricated in white racism) or the “exceptionalism” of an America (that required the elimination of native American cultures) or the patriotic love of nation (tied inevitably to militarism and senseless wars). Several of the essays in that volume pursue a counterstrategy consisting in the exposé of constitutive violence, an exposé framed as replacing the moral with the political, with, that is, a healthy democratic agon. (See in particular, Steven Johnston’s “Political not Patriotic” and Michael J. Shapiro’s “Affirming the Political.”) Whitman’s own counter to moralism, however, is not primarily one of exposé or agonistic engagement. His opts for a countercultural practice of persistent and ostensibly implausible affirmations of a virtual America: its roads not taken and the subtle cosmic sympathies still circulating. 70  •  “I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth” (Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” line 291). refrain: the alchemy of affects

1  •  Luciana Parisi and Steven Goodman, “Mnemonic Control,” in Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse (Durham: NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 163, 164. My thanks to Nathan Gies for alerting me to the link between Whitman’s project and the critique of affective capitalism offered by Parisi and Goodman. Parisi and Goodman develop their argument in terms of “mnemonic control,” or the modes by which capitalism seeks to produce “unlived memory, a preemptive memory of the future that does not oppose, but rather allies itself with, uncertainty and indeterminacy. . . . This mode of power compels us to interrogate the achronological nexus of past and future, and the complex unfolding of time in the present. . . . From the interventions of branding into microcultural memory, to nanopolitical interventions into the molecular memory of matter, we will map modes of control that go beyond the biopolitical engagement with genetic memory and the governance of the living, to point to the virtual governance of the unlived” (165). 2  •  Institute for Precarious Consciousness, “Six Theses on Anxiety and Why It Is Effectively Preventing Militancy, and One Possible Strategy for Overcoming It,” http: //www.weareplanc.org. Brenda Cossman, drawing upon Foucault’s notion of governmentality and writing within a framework that is, compared to the “Six Theses,” more associated with progressive liberalisms than neo-­Marxisms, describes this as “anxiety governance.” Brenda Cossman, “Anxiety Governance,” Law and Social Inquiry 38, no. 4 (fall 2013): 892 – 919. Naomi Klein makes a related argument in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2008). See also Thomas Princen on the “treadmill” of production and consumption that, in the name of economic “growth,” renders everything and everyone always on the way to obsolescence, essentially trash-­in-­the-­making. Thomas Princen, Treading Softly: Paths to Ecological Order (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2010); the Debt

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Resistors’ Operations Manual (Creative Commons, 2012); and Cornel West’s discussions of “weapons of mass distraction” (“A love supreme,” http://expotera-ceo .blogspot.com/2012/03/love-supreme.html). 3  •  Each “wave” of capitalism, they continue, used a different mood to depoliticize the experience of structural harms. In the nineteenth century, it was the feeling of misery (an overworked, underfed proletariat was to take its weariness as a biological given rather than a political effect), and the oppositional tactics tailored to misery were strikes, party organizations, and mutual aid societies. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, the affective landscape of the old capitalist states had changed. Boredom now became a key system-­maintaining mood, as Fordist workers in deadening jobs, clerks in cubicles, and housewives in the suburbs were encouraged to accept boredom as a necessary cost of economic security. Now the tactic of dissent drew upon the power of eros, play, and art to overcome ennui and repoliticize the people. We might think here of the Situationist practices of dérive and détournement, feminist consciousness-­raising or affirmation of the body in popular books like Our Bodies/Our Selves, Herbert Marcuse’s quest to replace a society governed by the “performance principle” with one “in which reason is sensuous and sensuousness rational” (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization [New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 180], or Norman Mailer’s attempt to “re-­wire the central nervous system” through jazz, Negro slang, and the uninhibited expression of male heterosexuality (Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” Dissent, 1957). Acknowledging the persistence of misery and boredom today, and the still-­valuable tactics of dissent designed for them, “Six Theses” calls also for political practices designed specifically against anxiety. 4  •  Christopher Castiglia and Glenn Hendler cite Whitman’s column in the New York Aurora from February 28, 1842, in the “Introduction” to Franklin Evans, or the Inebriate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), xli. 5  •  Walt Whitman, “Eighteenth Presidency,” accessed at http://www.whitman archive.org/archive1/works/supplementaryprose/frameset.html. According to the entry on “The Eighteenth Presidency” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, edited by Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1307–25, the text “offers compelling insight into the political anger and anxiety Whitman felt in the 1850s.” For a good account of Whitman’s shifting attitude toward the American presidency, see Nathan Faries, “Whitman and the Presidency,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 22, no. 4 (2005): 157 – 78. 6  •  Walt Whitman, “Poem of the Propositions of Nakedness,” Leaves of Grass, Brooklyn, New York, 1856, http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1856 /whole.html. The poem was renamed “Respondez!” in 1871. Sam Abrams argues that the poem “has received major attention because it so starkly contrasts with Whitman’s usual strategy of future idealizing and universal sympathy: it is his one poetic excursion into profound and general negativity, in Burke’s lapidary phrase, his ‘outlaw moment.’ ” Sam Abrams, “ ‘What Is This You Bring My America?’ The Library of America Whitman,” Modern Language Studies 36, nos. 2/3 (spring –  summer, 1996): 32.



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7  •  “Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea, the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?” (Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” lines 186 – 87). 8 • Sigmund Freud, “Part Three: General Theory of the Neuroses; XXV. Fear and Anxiety,” in A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. G. Stanley Hall (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1920), accessed at bartleby.com. 9  •  Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). 10 • Matt Miller, Collage of Myself: Walt Whitman and the Making of Leaves of Grass (Omaha: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 153 – 154. Whitman says, “I chant the chant of dilation” in section 21 of “Song of Myself.” 11 • Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol. 1, March 28 – July 14, 1888 (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co, 1906), 364, http://whitmanarchive.org /criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1/whole.html. 12 • Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 90. 13 • Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 366. See also Ed Folsom, “Horace L. Traubel,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998). Zoe Heller suggests that “having or appealing to tender feelings” was an “18th century definition” of sentimentality different from the “idealizing and prettifying” version of the nineteenth century. “Bookends,” New York Times Book Review, September 28, 2014, 35. 14 • Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, 365. 15  •  Cristin Ellis, “Numb Networks: Race, Identity, and the Politics of Impersonal Sympathies,” Mini-­Symposium: Walt Whitman (The 2015 Maxwell Lecture), Political Research Quarterly 69, no. 3 (2016): 627. 16  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 24. 17  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 8, lines 153 – 63. Ed Folsom describes these lists as Whitman’s “data digestion”: “Whitman’s poems . . . keep shifting from moments of narration to moments of what we might call data ingestion. In ‘Song of Myself,’ we encounter pages of data entries that pause while a narrative frame takes over again, never containing and taming the unruly catalogs and always carrying us to the next exercise in incorporating detail.” Ed Folsom, “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives,” pmla 122 (October 2007): 1571 – 79. 18  •  Whitman, “Spontaneous Me,” Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 23. 19  •  Whitman, “Sparkles from the Wheel,” line 9. 20  •  These lines first appeared in “Bardic Symbols,” a poem published in Atlantic Monthly 5 (April 1860), 445 – 47, and then in “Elemental Drift” in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass, https://whitmanarchive.org/published/LG/1867/poems/154. 21  •  Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), xv. 22  •  Ed Folsom says that Whitman, trained as a printer and bookmaker, “prob-

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ably never composed a line of poetry without, in his mind’s eye, putting it on a composing stick.” Ed Folsom, Whitman Making Books/Books Making Whitman: A Catalog and Commentary (Iowa City, IA: Obermann Center for Advanced Studies, 2005), https: //whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/anc.00150. html). 23  •  Whitman, “A Song of Joys,” lines 98–99. For a discussion of Whitman’s use of “absorption,” see Sean Ross Meehan, “ ‘Nature’s Stomach’: Emerson, Whitman, and the Poetics of Digestion,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 28, no. 3 (2011): 97 – 121. Meehan argues that Whitman takes the term from the science of physiology because it suggests a porous “rather than singular or complete identification” (101). 24  •  Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 3, line 26. 25  •  Whitman, “Song of the Open Road,” section 6, line 82. 26  •  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986), 292, cited in Tim Clark, “The Politics of Sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty,” Radical Philosophy 147 (January/February 2008): 33 – 4 4. 27  •  Clark, “The Politics of Sympathy in Deleuze and Rorty,” 39, emphasis added. 28 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 381 – 83. 29 • Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-­ Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 128. 30  •  Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 41–42. 31 • Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman, 129. 32 • In Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), David W. Blight exposes the (morally and politically) objectionable elements within Whitman’s attempts to detour and practice solar judgment after the Civil War: “Whitman was certainly a Yankee partisan, but while he cheered the Union cause, the horror scenes he almost unrelievably witnessed gave rise to his own spirit of reconciliation. Whitman hated the war’s capacity to mangle the bodies of young men, but he made few distinctions between the combatants themselves, or between their leaders. . . . He nursed, wrote letters for, and admired black troops, but only within the narrowly racist confines of his views on black capacities, and as a peculiar poetic subject. Whitman’s ‘real war’ did not ultimately include the revolution in black freedom of 1863; his own myriad uses of rebirth metaphors did not encompass black equality. This poet of democracy, whose work can and has been used to advance an antiracist tradition, never truly faced the long-­term implications of emancipation” (20 – 21). I concur with Blight that Whitman failed to acknowledge sufficiently the racialized distribution of suffering, that he should have included “the revolution in black freedom” in his democratic vista, and that there was a racist filter obscuring his reception of the extent of the violence of racism. Alongside such criticism, however, I acknowledge the value of Whitman’s attempts to induce from out of a subliminal register of energies on behalf of a more egalitarian



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ethos. The tonal quality of relations within and between constituencies remains important to explore if you find an egalitarian democracy a worthy goal and if you find macrolevel policies and formal political institutions necessary but insufficient to it. For a reading of Lincoln’s role in race relations during this period that is more critical than that presented by Blight, see Steven Johnston, Lincoln: The Ambiguous Icon (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2018). 33 • M. JimmieKillingsworth, Whitman’s Poetry of the Body (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 134. 34  •  Walt Whitman, “A Backward Glance,” lines 408 – 1 4, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 481. 35  •  Karen Swallow Proir, “Why Walt Whitman Called America ‘The Greatest Poem,” Atlantic, December 25, 2016, accessed at https://www.the atlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/12/why-­walt-­whitman-­called-­the -­america-­the-­greatest-­poem/510932/. 36  •  See Grace Kyungwon Hong, Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), especially 17 – 31. Kurt Newman says that to disavow is “to retain the pleasures of innocence, but still maintain contact with reality.” “Disavowal and Capitalism, Continued,” https://s-usih.org/2014/10/disavowal-­and-­capitalism-­continued/. 37  •  Lawrence Buell offers this take on the seeming optimism of Whitman’s poetry: its catalogs “move so fast through the circuit of forms” that it is as if “no catastrophe can touch” us and “the spirit” can thus “triumph over chaos by sheer energy.” Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 186. 38 • Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 629, 631. A note in Whitman’s handwriting says, “America has been called proud and arrogant — It may be, but she does not show it. . . . It is indirect, and therefore more effective.” In like manner, perhaps, the sympathetic mood might be rendered more effective by the indirect path of poetry. In Whitman’s Hand, 1850, whitmanarchive.org/manuscripts/marginalia /annotations/duk.00109.html. 39  •  Gilles Deleuze, “On the Superiority of Anglo-­A merican Literature,” in Dialogues II, by Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 36. chapter four. bad influence

1  •  Walt Whitman, “This Compost,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002, lines 1 – 10. 2  •  Whitman, “This Compost,” lines 42 – 45. 3  •  Stephanie Erev, “Earthly Considerations: Transfigurations of Thought during the Anthropocene” (Ph.d. diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2019). In contrast to Erev’s reading of the poem as keeping both doubt and hope afloat, David S. Reynolds argues that Whitman’s doubt is resolved by his appeal to the chemist Justus

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Liebig’s view that nature cleanses as it transforms materials. David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 79. 4  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 99 – 110. 5  •  Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 99. 6 • Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 148. 7  •  Roger Caillois, “The Praying Mantis: From Biology to Psychoanalysis,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 69. 8  •  Lyrical objects “act upon each individual separately and, so to speak, secretly, in the absence of any symbolic character that would essentially derive meaning from its social use and the greater part of its emotional effectiveness from its role within the community.” Roger Caillois, The Necessity of Mind: An Analytic Study of the Mechanisms of Overdetermination in Automatic and Lyrical Thinking and of the Development of Affective Themes in the Individual Consciousness, trans. Michael Syrotinski (Venice, CA: Lapis Press, 1990), 68. 9  •  Caillois also speaks in this regard of the “ideogram” that is provoked by an object which, “as a result of a particularly significant form or content, enjoy[ed] a greater lyrical potential than others. This potential is valid for a very large number of individuals if not for everyone” (The Necessity of Mind, 67). 10  •  Caillois, “The Praying Mantis,” 81. 11  •  “This force affects many, if not all, people, and so it seems to be . . . an integral part of the given phenomenon” (Caillois, “The Praying Mantis,” 69). We can see that “mankind has been highly struck by this insect” in the prevalence of images of the mantis on ancient coins, in folk sayings and myths in Europe, Africa, and China (73). 12  •  For a rich discussion of becoming-­insect and of the ways in which “insects are powerful indicators of the decentering of anthropocentrism and point to posthuman sensibilities and sexualities,” see Rosi Braidotti, “The Cosmic Buzz of Insects,” in Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 105. 13  •  Caillois, “The Praying Mantis,” 77. 14  •  Roger Caillois, “Diagonal Science,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 345. 15  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 93. 16  •  Caillois offers several pages of examples of animal homomorphy in “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia.” I am here quoting the partial summary offered by Melanie Marino in “Body as Place: Vito Acini’s Gaze,” paj: A Journal of Performance and Art 21, no. 1 (January 1999): 63 – 74. 17  •  Caillois quotes Strindberg in “Note on the Scientific Activities of August Strindberg around 1896,” in The Necessity of Mind, 117.



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18  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 93. 19  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 96. 20  •  Caillois’s invocation of an organ of “sculptural photography” or “teleplay” also chimes with a claim made by Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait about a similar capacity of the atmospheric ether: “ether . . . has the power of transmitting motion from one part of the universe to another. A picture of the sun may be said to be traveling through space with an inconceivable velocity, and, in fact, continual photographs of all occurrences are thus produced and retained. A large portion of the energy of the universe may thus be said to be invested in such pictures.” Balfour Stewart and P. G. Tait, The Unseen Universe or Physical Speculations on a Future State, third edition (New York: Macmillan, 1875), 95. 21 • In The Necessity of Mind, Caillois also speaks of “outside pressures” (105). Jennifer L. Roberts describes this as a “classic discussion of the ontological implications of camouflage.” Jennifer L. Roberts, “Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatán,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 544 – 67. See also James Ash, “Teleplastic Technologies: Charting Practices of Orientation and Navigation in Videogaming,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 35, no. 3 (July 2010): 423. 22  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 100 – 101. As Jussie Parikka says, “The space itself is swarming with flows of energy and matter, which not only attracts and seduces the subjects but also poses a frightening threat.” Jussie Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Insects and Technology (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2010), 100. Caillois is here drawing upon the fascinating work in psychopathology of Eugene Minkowski. For an excellent introduction to his work, see Annick Urfer, “Phenomenology and Psychopathology of Schizophrenia: The View of Eugene Minkowski,” Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 8, no. 4 (December 2001): 279 – 89. 23  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 100. 24  •  In phagocytosis, a cell (such as a macrophage) changes its shape and sends out projections called pseudopodia, which surround a bacterial or viral particle after having been drawn to it by a chemical attractant. The particle is ingested or absorbed. 25  •  Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 101 – 2. 26 • Caillois, Necessity of Mind, 106. 27 • Caillois, Necessity of Mind, 83. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), chapter 6: “Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually opposing action of these two instincts” (77 – 78). 28  •  Caillois cites Flaubert’s pantheistic vision in La Tentation de Saint-­Antoine:

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“ ‘Now there is no longer any distinction between plants and animals. . . . Insects resembling rose petals adorn a shrub. . . . And plants have become confused with stones. Pebbles look like brains; stalactites like breasts; and outcrops of iron veins like tapestries with decorative designs’ ” (“Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 101). For a lively account of pantheism and its relationship to various materialisms, see Mary-­Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 29  •  “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” 100. Janet’s “studies of unconscious automatism were well known in Surrealist circles.” Frank, “Introduction,” in The Edge of Surrealism, 67. According to Catherine Ingraham, “The loss of morphological specificity, of classifiable differences (which has everything to do with the way we see, and place ourselves in, the world), is the triumph of space. . . . Mimicry, then, puts the distinction between subject and surroundings in danger. The danger is that individuation will be obliterated and/or a certain inversion of dominance will take place.” Catherine Ingraham, “Animals 2: The Problem of Distinction,” Assemblage 14 (April 1991): 27 – 28. 30  •  Caillois, “The Praying Mantis,” 69n1. For a discussion of Caillois’s interest in “the common root” of biological and psychological forms of mimicry, and in Pythagoras’s idea that “nature is everywhere the same,” see Simonetta Falasca-­ Zamponi, Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the College de Sociologie (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2011), 148 – 51. Claudine Frank’s thoughtful introduction to The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader underplays the trans-­species dimensions of his work, presenting a Caillois who restricts himself to intra-­human influences or “intellectual associations”: “The Necessity of Mind . . . sought to explore the latent determinism of intellectual associationism. He imagined a universal, overdetermined network of ideograms: automatic crystallizations of representations, driven by the mechanisms of Freudian dreamwork and of obsessional, ‘psychasthenic’ thought, as theorized by Pierre Janet and linked to the outlook of Le Grand Jeu” (12). Frank is surely right about ideograms, though there are also elements in Caillois’s weird texts that exceed a humanist frame. I have emphasized the minor chord in his work that resonates with a “nonhuman turn” in contemporary theory. 31  •  Whitman, “Sparkles from the Wheel,” Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 328, line 11. 32  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 1337 – 38. 33  •  Scott Richmond shows how Caillois continued to develop his interest in “modalities of becoming unbounded, processes of an unraveling of the ordinarily self-­possessed human” in later works, in particular through the notion of “ilinx” in Man, Play, and Games. Scott C. Richmond, “The Exorbitant Lightness of Bodies, or How to Look at Superheroes: Ilinx, Identification, and ‘Spider-­Man,’ ” Discourse 34, no. 1 (winter 2012): 113 – 4 4. On Caillois’s method, see Caillois, “A New Plea for a Diagonal Science,” in Frank, The Edge of Surrealism, 343 – 47. 34 • Caillois, Necessity of Mind, 19. The interdependence includes even stones, which, Caillois writes, “reconcile me for a moment with a syntax that extends be-



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yond me everywhere.” Roger Caillois, Le Fleuve Alphee (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), 219. See also Marina Warner, “The Writing of Stones,” Cabinet 29 (spring 2008), http:// cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php; and Jeffrey Cohen, “Roger Caillois Among the Nonhumans,” In the Middle, July 2, 2008, www.inthemedievalmiddle .com. 35 • Caillois, Necessity of Mind, 106. 36  •  Alvin, a hoarder, is quoted in Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee, Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 211. My story of hoarding is compiled from this and other sociological studies, and from the six seasons of the reality television show Hoarders (2009 – 13). That documentary-­style program, insofar as it presents the first-­person voices of the people who hoard, exposes something of the pleasures and sufferings accompanying an extremely intense human attachment to things. The voices of the therapists and of the official narration proceed by way of a strict divide between active human agents and passive inanimate objects, which I do not myself affirm. The insights of the therapists on the show are confined to those available within a psycho-­pathological framing of hoarding, focused, naturally enough, on how to ameliorate the socially dysfunctional effects of a “mental disorder marked by an obsessive need to acquire and keep things, even if the items are worthless, hazardous, or unsanitary.” My account of hoarding also draws upon an earlier essay of mine, which discusses hoarding as a symptom of a hyperconsumptive body politic. See Jane Bennett, “Powers of the Hoard: Further Notes on Material Agency,” in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics and Objects, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Goleta, CA: Punctum Books, 2012), 237 – 69. 37  •  Matt Edgeworth makes a similar point in the context of the archaeological specimen: “an archaeological site is a space where artefacts and structures from other times and places break out into the open. . . . [Our] ideas and models can influence what is perceived, to be sure, but there is also something that pushes through beyond the boundaries of our social milieu, which our models of reality are forced to assimilate. Theories are applied to shape the evidence that emerges, but there is the corresponding emergence of matter that resists and re-­shapes us and our ideas.” Matt Edgeworth, “Follow the Cut, Follow the Rhythm, Follow the Material,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 45, no. 1 (2012): 77. I discuss how art-­ objects express thing-­power in “Encounters with an Art-­Thing,” Evental Aesthetics 3, no. 3 (winter 2014): 91–110. 38  •  Edgeworth, “Follow the Cut,” 78. See also Tom Yarrow, “Artefactual Persons: Relational Capacities of Persons and Things in Excavation,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 36, no. 1 (2003): 65 – 73: “the material properties of the site act to modify the thought and actions of the people who excavate them” (71). 39  •  Corinne May Botz, as quoted in Penelope Green, “Documenting Accumulation and Its Discontents,” New York Times, November 3, 2010. 40  •  Randy O. Frost, author (with Gail Steketee) of Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things, interview by Thomas Rogers, Salon, April 25, 2010, http:// www.salon.com/2010/04/25/hoarding_interview_stuff.

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41 • Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), 28 – 29. To perceive is to “attain” only to “certain parts and to certain aspects of those parts” of all the “influences” of matter; there is a “necessary poverty” to perceiving (31). Mark Hansen puts the point this way: for Bergson, “the body functions as a kind of filter that selects, from among the universe of images circulating around it and according to its own embodied capacities, precisely those that are relevant to it.” Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2004), 3. 42 • Bergson, Matter and Memory, 31. Bergson acknowledges that perception cannot be described in purely physiological terms: “In fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we then retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images” (28 – 29). 43  •  See James Williams, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 8. See also our discussion of “powers of the false” in Jane Bennett and William Connolly, “The Crumpled Handkerchief,” in Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London: Continuum Press, 2012), 153–72. 44  •  These examples all come from the television show Hoarders. Relevant here is Derek McCormack’s distinction between “thinking-­spaces” and thinking-­about spaces. See “Thinking-­Spaces for Research-­Creation,” Inflexions 1, no. 1 (May 2008). 45 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95. 46 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 95, xii. 47 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 5. Bloom cites Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray: influence makes one “an echo of someone else’s music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him” (6). 48  •  “Poets, by the time they have grown strong, . . . can only read themselves. For them, to be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is to be not elect” (Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 19). 49 • Harold Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 251. 50  •  Lucretius, “De Rerum Natura,” in The Epicurean Philosophers, Book II, ed. John Gaskin (London: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 216. 51 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 14 – 16. 52 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 5. 53 • Bloom, The Anatomy of Influence, 10. 54  •  Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Dearborn: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 65. For a more detailed account of Serres’s process philosophy, as he pursues it in The Birth of Physics and Genesis, see Bennett and Connolly, “The Crumpled Handkerchief,” 153 – 72. 55  •  Serres discusses the figure of a “phase” in Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 112. He also



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sometimes speaks of links in a sticky “chain” that is like a stream of flotsam that “slide over one another, as though viscous. . . . This is not a solid chain, it is simply a liquid movement, a viscosity, a propagation that wagers its age in each locality” (71). 56 • Serres, Genesis, 69, 58 – 59. Nature abounds with examples of the logic of “it depends”: “The seed-­corn dies, and it dies. The seed-­corn dies, and it sprouts. It sprouts and it is meager. . . . It sprouts and it multiplies, exponentially, it overruns the place” (60). 57  •  “The expansive fizzle of sea noise is broken up into fluctuations. A given one of them, dwarfish, singular begins gathering followers.” And the direction-­less fluctuation becomes vectoral. We cannot know why or when a vector will form but we should be on the lookout for them because there is a natural tendency toward “redundancy, echo, imitation” (Serres, Genesis, 69) intrinsic to noise, a “fractal breeze” within (63). 58  •  Turbulence is that “irregular bombardment of circumstances” wherein the force of repetition, the force of formed forms, and the force of decay have achieved a certain “synchrony” (Serres, Genesis, 109). 59  •  “Great writers cannot start out fresh” because inspiration is indispensable and “inspiration means influence” (Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 10). 60 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 116. “A poet’s stance, his Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish, as a poet” (71). 61  •  Harold Bloom, “Literary Love,” Yale Review 99, no. 1 (2011): 18 – 19. Bloom characterizes this struggle not as aiming toward total annihilation of an enemy but as a sharpening of one’s “power of invention” against that of worthy rivals. 62 • Bloom, Anatomy of Influence, 14. Bloom restricts his claims to “Western poetry,” which “perhaps unlike Eastern, is incurably agonistic” (335). 63  •  Garber describes Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence as a “brilliant inversion of the idea of influence, turning it from a benign outflowing to an anxious indwelling.” Marjorie Garber, “Over the Influence,” Critical Inquiry 42, no. 4 (summer 2016): 737. 64 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, xxiii. Whitman happened to have a cheerful disposition, but Bloom counts him among the “greatest” poets. 65 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, xxiii. 66 • Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 105, emphasis added. Is Bloom here engaged in a misprision of Whitman’s experiments with relays between position and disposition? 67  •  Bloom, “Literary Love,” 25. 68  •  Bloom, “Literary Love,” 18. 69  •  Lisa Hinrichsen, “A Defensive Eye: Anxiety, Fear and Form in the Poetry of Robert Frost,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 3 (2008): 44 – 57. 70  •  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 176. 71  •  This would also be to approach a Deleuzian notion of “affect” as a vitality in excess of the subjectivity with which it may interact: “Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. . . .

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[They] are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man . . . is himself a compound of percepts and affects.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 164. Or, in Brian Massumi’s words, “affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture — and of the fact that something has always and again escaped.” Brian Massumi, The Power at the End of the Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 106. 72  •  Walt Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, lines 41 – 4 2 and 57 – 58. 73  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, section 22. 74  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 1855 edition, line 136. 75  •  One might also read the last line of this passage from “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as affirming the I’s condition as being both “struck from the float” and “forever held in solution”: I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine, I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters around it, I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me, In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon them, I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution . . . It is also possible, however, to read the line as restricting the quality of being held in solution to the “float” and not also applying to the I struck from it. 76  •  Dorothy H. B. Kwek, “Power and the Multitude: A Spinozist View,” Political Theory 43, no. 2 (2015): 162. chapter five. thoreau experiments with natural influences

1  •  H. A. Page, Thoreau: His Life and Aims (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 110, emphasis added. 2  •  Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 4, May 1, 1852 – February 27, 1853, ed. Bradford Torrey (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 472. Thoreau notes his own propensity for imitation: “I find myself disposed to review that acts . . . of governments, and the spirit of the people, to discover a pretext for comformity.” Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Owen Thomas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 240. 3  •  Henry David Thoreau, “August 23, 1853,” in The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1961).



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4  •  Henry David Thoreau, “April 11, 1852,” in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Journal, vol. 4, 1851–1852, ed. Leonard N. Neufeldt and Nancy Craig Simmons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 435, emphasis added. The next line reads: “It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other.” 5  •  Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, ed. William Rossi (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 93. 6 • Jane Bennett, Thoreau’s Nature (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), xxii. For more recent discussions of the wild, see Jack Halberstam, “Wildness, Loss, Death,” Social Text 121 32, no. 4 (winter 2014): 137 – 48; and Jos Smith, “The Wild,” in The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place (London: Bloomsbury Press, 2017). 7  •  Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, ed. C. F. Hovde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 339. Thoreau also invokes “winged thoughts” in “Walking”: “We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste . . . and there is scarcely a twig left for them to perch on. . . . Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They no longer soar.” Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions, ed. Joseph Moldenhauer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 219. 8  •  People seek out the Wild, but so do other living things: “Every tree sends forth its fibers in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.” Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions, 202. 9  •  Jack Halberstam, “Becoming Feral: Sex, Death and Falconry,” ch. 3 of Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020). 10  •  Thoreau, “Spring,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 211. 11  •  Thoreau, “A Yankee in Canada,” in Excursions, 152 – 53, emphasis added. 12  •  Henry David Thoreau, “September 15, 1851,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 2, ed. Bradford Torrey (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 9. 13  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), lines 1160 – 61. 14  •  Thoreau, “May 1, 1852 – February 27, 1853,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 4, 219. 15  •  Thoreau, “Spring,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 93. Whitman’s own joyful proclamation of an inner minerality and vegetality — I find I incorporate gneiss, coal, long-­threaded moss, fruits, grains, esculent roots — echoes that of Thoreau. Whitman, “Song of Myself,” lines 670 – 71. 16  •  For a discussion of the term influence that focuses on its use in statecraft and military strategy, see Howard Gambrill Clark, “Defining Influence,” Narrative Strategies Journal 2 (January 31, 2019): 1 – 6.

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17  •  Henry David Thoreau, “Night and Moonlight,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1863, 579 – 83. Thoreau’s essay draws upon a September 21, 1851, journal entry: “But the moon is not to be judged alone by the quantity of light she sends us, but also by her influence on the earth. No thinker can afford to overlook the influence of the moon any more than the astronomer can. . . . Even the astronomer admits that ‘the notion of the moon’s influence on terrestrial things was confirmed by her manifest effect upon the ocean,’ but is not the poet who walks by night conscious of a tide in his thought which is to be refereed to lunar influence — in which the ocean within him overflows its shores and bathes the dry land.” Henry David Thoreau: A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, ed. H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 229. 18  •  Thoreau, “December 25, 1851,” in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 319. 19  •  Thoreau, “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 22. 20  •  Thoreau, “December 15, 1851,” in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 18. 21  •  Thoreau, “April 18, 1852,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal, vol. 4, 1851–1852, 467 – 68. 22  •  Thoreau, “July 23, 1851,” in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851, 126. 23  •  Meret Oppenheim, “Without Me Anyway,” in Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: mit Press 2002), 321. Here is the poem in full: “Without me anyway without way I came near without bread / Without breath but withkith withkin with Caspar / with a cake so round but somewhat square / but without growth of grass with scars with warts with fingers / With sticks with many O’s and few G’s / but an enormously tiny bit of a lot / Oh fall you down into your hole oh bury you yourself and your longwinded hope / give your ego a kick give your id its reward / and whatever is left of you fry it like little fishes in oil / you can peel off your shoes.” 24  •  In this state, writes Branka Arsić, Thoreau “bypass[es] the human obsession with ideation and metaphorization” to become one of the “things and beings” that “generate meaning by affecting other beings, or, as Thoreau has it, by imprinting themselves on other beings, thus literally or materially altering them.” Branka Arsić explores this “semiosis of imprints” in Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). 25  •  Thoreau, “September 2, 1851,” in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 188. 26  •  Walt Whitman, “Morbid Adhesiveness — To Be Kept Down,” unpublished manuscript found by William White, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4, no. 1 (summer 1986): 49, http://ir.uiowa.edu/wwqr. 27  •  Thoreau, “August 23, 1853,” in Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals 5, March 3–November 30, 1853, ed. Bradford Torrey (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 394. 28  •  “When I see a fox run across the pond on the snow, with the carelessness of freedom, or at intervals trace his course in the sunshine along the ridge of a hill, I give up to him sun and earth as to their true proprietor. He does not go in the sun, but it seems to follow him, and there is a visible sympathy between him and it. . . . When the ground is uneven, the [fox’s] course is a series of graceful curves,



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conforming to the shape of the surface.” Thoreau, “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” in Excursions, 16. 29 • “The pond does not thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no difference in the weather, it does. Who would have suspected so large and cold and thick-­skinned a thing to be so sensitive?” Thoreau, “Spring,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 199. 30  •  “Water is so much more fine and sensitive an element than earth. A single boatman passing up or down unavoidably shakes the whole of a wide river, and disturbs its every reflection. The air is an element which our voices shake still further than our oars the water.” Henry David Thoreau, “September 19, 1850,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journal 2, 1850–September 15, 1851, ed. Bradford Torrey (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 71. 31  •  Thoreau, “July 23, 1851,” in A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 126. 32 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 203. Thoreau also writes, “All material things are in some sense man’s kindred. . . . Even a taper is his relative — and burns . . . only a certain number of his hours.” Henry Thoreau, Journal, Fall 1846, at Walden Pond, in Material Faith: Henry David Thoreau on Science, ed. Laura Dassow Walls (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 9. I am grateful to Rochelle Johnson for alerting me to this passage. 33 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 207. The claim appears in the “sand-­foliage” passage of “Spring,” which I discuss later in this chapter: “There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is ‘in full blast’ within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, . . . but living poetry like the leaves of a tree.” 34  •  Thoreau invokes the phrase in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 148 (“Higher Laws”). The “atmospheric” influences affecting Thoreau on that July day are themselves subject to or affected by emanations coming from Thoreau. In the case of neither internal nor external influences is their efficacy reducible to Thoreau’s ability to think them. 35  •  Thoreau, “Solitude,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 87. 36  •  Also relevant here is the sound of the fluttering leaves. As Rochelle Johnson notes, Thoreau “indicates his own unsound state when he fails to heed sound: that is, his own soundness, like that of nature, depends on sound.” Rochelle Johnson, “ ‘This Enchantment Is No Delusion’: Henry David Thoreau, the New Materialisms, and Ineffable Materiality,” isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21, no. 3 (summer 2014): 606 – 35. 37 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 87. 38 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 89. 39  •  As Milette Shamir notes, the kind of sympathy characteristic of the social reformer has for Thoreau “dyspeptic connotations.” It is a “’loosening of the emotional ‘gates.’ ” Milette Shamir, “Manliest Relations,” in Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narrative of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S., ed. M. Shamir and Jennifer Travis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 73. The “Solitude” chapter of

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Walden and Resistance to Civil Government affirms a better kind of sociality, one that is inter-­species: “I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture” (92). Thoreau “admired plants and trees: truly, he loved them.” William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: Poet-­Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 202. 40 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 210. Thoreau’s call to make compassion “expeditious” overlaps somewhat with Nietzsche’s claim for the virtue of “brief habits” in The Gay Science: “Brief habits. — I love brief habits and consider them an inestimable means for getting to know many things and states, down to the bottom of their sweetness and bitternesses; my nature is designed entirely for brief habits. . . . Enduring habits I hate, and I feel as if a tyrant had come near me and as if the air I breathe had thickened when events take such a turn that it appears that they will inevitably give rise to enduring habits; for example, owing to an official position, constant association with the same people, a permanent domicile, or unique good health. Yes, at the very bottom of my soul I feel grateful to all my misery and bouts of sickness and everything about me that is imperfect, because this sort of thing leaves me with a hundred backdoors through which I can escape from enduring habits. Most intolerable, to be sure, and the terrible par excellence would be for me a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia” (Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann [New York: Vintage, 1974]), 295. 41 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 141. 42  •  Linda Ross Meyer speaks of a “being-­with outside ourselves” that is “prior to any particular emotional experience of sympathy.” Meyer, The Justice of Mercy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 33. 43  •  Branka Arsi´c, “Letting Be: Thoreau and Cavell on Thinking after the Bhagavat Gita,” Belgrade Journal for Media and Communications 7 (2015): 21. 44 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 90. 45  •  Anatoli Ignatov, “Practices of Eco-­sensation: Opening the Doors of Perception to the Nonhuman,” Theory and Event 14, no. 2 (2011). What Ignatov here says in reference to Francis Bacon’s figurative paintings is also an apt description of Thoreau’s nature-­writings. 46 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 93. 47 • Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 2, 469. See also Thoreau’s description of these as manifestations of “infinite beauty,” in Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Journal, vol. 4, 1851–1852, 52. 48 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 89. 49 • Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 4, 223. 50  •  Thoreau, “Spring,” in Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 93. 51  •  In “Walking,” Thoreau notes that bodies take on the odors of the materials they eat: “the skin of the Eland, as well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious perfume of trees and grass,” just as “the trapper’s coat emits the odor of musquash.” Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions, 203. 52 • G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), para. 178 – 9 0.



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53  •  It would be interesting to compare Thoreau’s claim to an apersonal kind of “recognition” to Caillois’s invocation of a thought-­process of recognition that never achieves or even passes through a phase of clarity. Recognition for Caillois consists in the “straying” of thought toward an “indecipherable” order which is “subjacent,” that is, both outside and one’s own: “Thought . . . seems to be the questionable and vague approximation of the subjacent order, which at times it recklessly, almost misguidedly, extends and also attempts to reach. As far as it strays, it can sense or recompose the dismantled and indecipherable order in which it recognizes itself.” Roger Caillois, “Extracts from Pierres réfléchies,” SubStance 47, no. 2 (2018): 150. I am grateful to Madeline Wells for highlighting Caillois’s notion of “subjacent.” 54 • Leo Bersani, “Gay Betrayals,” in Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 43 – 4 4. For Bersani, the humans who are in the best position to discern the kind of cross-­species communication he called homoness are “failed subjects,” a descriptor that Thoreau, I believe, would have embraced for himself: “At his or her best, the homosexual is a failed subject, one that needs its identity to be cloned, or inaccurately replicated, outside of it. This is the strength, not the weakness, of homosexuality, for the fiction of an inviolable and unified subject has been an important source of human violence” (43). Thus, failure is not a virtue in itself but a first step in reconstituting atomistic notions of self and agency. Failed subjects both fail to reach and fail to strive for conventional selfhood, and their inward sense of being alive develops instead through a process of being inaccurately replicated in the sounds, shapes, and scents of outside materials. I am grateful to Nathan Gies for alerting me to these passages from Bersani. 55  •  Bersani, “Sociality and Sexuality,” in Is the Rectum a Grave?, 118. 56  •  Thoreau, “Walking,” in Excursions, 202. 57 • Paracelsus, Selected Writings, ed. Joland Jacobi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 122 – 23. 58  •  There might be an echo of Paracelsus in Thoreau’s claim that “there is something witch-­like in the appearance of witch-­hazel . . . in its irregular and angular spray and petals like furies’ hair . . .” Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 355. 59  •  “For the Holy Ghost and nature are one, that is to say: each day nature shines as a light from the Holy Ghost and learns from him, and thus this light reaches man, as in a dream” (Paracelsus, Selected Writings, 181). On the peculiar Christianity of Paracelsus, see also Walter Pagel, From Paracelsus to Van Helmont, ed. Marianne Winder (London: Variorum Reprints, 1986). Related to Thoreau’s claim to a “circulation of vitality beyond our bodies” is Paracelsus’s notion of “Iliaster,” which Pagel glosses as “a kind of primordial matter, but not matter in the ordinary corporeal sense. It is rather the supreme pattern of matter, a principle that enables coarse visible matter and all activity of growth and life in it to develop and exist” (112). 60  •  Roger Caillois, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,”in The Edge of Surrealism: A Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 91.

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61  •  Caillois, “Extracts from Pierres réfléchies,” 149. 62 • Thoreau, The Writing of Henry David Thoreau, Journals, vol. 2, 282 – 83. 63  •  Thoreau, cited in David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2005), 224. Did Thoreau himself underestimate vegetal agency when, in Walden, he reduced his beans to the status of the raw material for writing, saying that he hoed beans not in order to eat them “but, perchance, . . . only for the sake of tropes and expression, to serve a parable-­maker one day (“The Bean-­Field,” 109, my emphasis). Sean Ross Meehan has argued that such passages present us not with a set of stable entities engaged in relations with each other — pine needles, the wind, the man Thoreau — but instead different phases of a shared process of natural influences undergoing metamorphosis. For Meehan, because no descriptor can avoid being “literary in medium” (301), it is best to choose a literary trope —  metonymy — to name that peculiarly earthy quality of Thoreau’s writing. “Metonymy . . . is without metaphor, but not without figure. . . . Metonymy speaks to the literal instead of the metaphorical sense of words, but the literal sense, of course, is still a matter of words” (312). Sean Ross Meehan, “Ecology and Imagination: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Nature of Metonymy,” Criticism 55, no. 2 (2013): 299 – 329. 64 • Michael Ziser, Environmental Practice and Early American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 2 – 8. 65  •  Thoreau, “September 7, 1851,” in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Journal, vol. 4, 1851–1852, 53. 66 • Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 4, 219. 67  •  Was Thoreau influenced by Emerson’s warning not to be too quick to project friendliness into Nature? In the 1836 version of his essay “Nature,” Emerson says this: “The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. . . . Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Collected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol.1: Nature, Addresses and Lectures (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 197), 10. 68  •  Mary Elkins Moller, Thoreau in the Human Community (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 79. 69  •  Emphasis added. Here is the whole passage, from Thoreau’s journal, May 12, 1851: “If I had got false teeth, I trust that I have not got a false conscience. It is safer to employ the dentist than the priest to repair the deficiencies of nature. By taking the ether the other day I was convinced how far asunder a man could be separated from his senses. You are told that it will make you unconscious, but no one can imagine what it is to be unconscious — how far removed from the state of consciousness and all that we call ‘this world’ — until he has experienced it. The value of the experiment is that it does give you experience of an interval as between one life and another, — a greater space than you ever travelled. You are a sane mind without organs, — groping for organs, — which if it did not soon recover its old sense would get new ones. You expand like a seed in the ground. You exist in your roots, like a tree in winter. If you have an inclination to travel, take the ether; you



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go beyond the furthest star.” Henry David Thoreau, A Year in Thoreau’s Journal, 1851, ed. H. Daniel Peck (New York: Penguin, 1993), 39. 70 • Richard Doyle, Darwin’s Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 21. 71 • Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals, vol. 4, 1851–1852, 50 – 52. 72  •  Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (Orleans, MA: Parnassus Imprints, 1984), 16. 73 • Thoreau, Cape Cod, 17. 74  •  Henry David Thoreau, The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Journals 12, March 2, 1959–November 30, 1859, ed. Bradford Torrey (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 85 [March 27, 1859 entry]. 75  •  Henry David Thoreau, “April 16, 1852,” in The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, ed. Odell Shepard (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1961), 85. H. A. Page said in 1877 that Thoreau felt “a dim but real brotherhood” with nonhuman animals. H. A. Page, Thoreau: His Life and Aims (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1877), 62. 76 • Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government, 92. 77 • Ziser, Environmental Practice and Early American Literature, 172. 78  •  Diedrich Diederichsen, “Animation, De-reification, and the New Charm of the Inanimate,” e-­flux journal 36 (July 2012). 79  •  The drop is, one could say, the last (or first) moment in a cosmic process of individuation-­deformation. The drop is a “fall” back into a well of indetermination, but it is also a fall out of the protean sky into a world of actual things. My thanks to Jeff Dolven for this point. 80  •  Bersani, “Sociability and Cruising,” in Is the Rectum a Grave?, 55. Relevant also is Deleuze and Guattari’s “refrain” in A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 322. 81  •  Caillois, “Extracts from Pierres réfléchies,” 149 – 55. 82  •  Does Thoreau edge toward the “dark ecology” of Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o? “Encounters with wildness are intimate and bewilder all sovereign expectations of autonomous selfhood. To be wild in this sense is to be beside oneself, to be internally incoherent, to be driven by forces seen and unseen, to hear in voices, and to speak in tongues. By abandoning the security of coherence, we enter a dark ecology, where . . . nature can no longer be good.” Jack Halberstam and Tavia Nyong’o, “Introduction: Theory in the Wild,” South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (July 2018): 453. Theory in the wild, they continue, “might revisit and expound further on the wild as a concept as it was important to nineteenth-­century anarchist thinkers, from Henry David Thoreau to Pyotr Kropotkin” (459). epilogue

1  •  Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface, in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), lines 320 – 22. 2  •  “I am for those who walk abreast with the whole earth” (Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 291). Whit-

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man’s catalogues enact a nonanthropocentric poetics: the “prodigious particularity” of Leaves, writes Randall Fuller, conjures a world “where emotion is subordinate to the presentation of the aggregate relations of all participants, rather than the striking enhancement of singular or single heroes or heroines.” Randall Fuller, “Ecopoeisis,” a review of Angus Fletcher’s A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination, Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 202. Mattie Swayne describes the “catalogue form” as “necessary to a fulfillment of Whitman’s theory of the purposes of poetry. [In “Specimen Days”] he wished to ‘bring men back from their persistent strayings and sickly abstractions, to the costless average, divine, original concrete.’ ” Mattie Swayne, “Whitman’s Catalogue Rhetoric,” Studies in English 21 (1941): 163. 3  •  For a discussion of the effects of such lists in the context of Gertrude Stein’s work, see Laura Oulanne, “The Tender Being of Something Else: Geography and Lists in Gertrude Stein’s Ida,” in Posthumanist Modernism, ed. Alberto Godioli and Carmen Van den Bergh (Amsterdam: Brill Publications, 2020). 4  •  Denis Donoghue, “Leaves of Grass and American Culture,” Sewanee Review 111, no. 3 (2003): 359. 5  •  Walt Whitman, “Spontaneous Me,” line 7, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 89. 6 • Lawrence Buell, Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 178. Buell notes Homer and the Book of Psalms are also examples of the literary use of catalogues, “but the catalogue was never much more than a stylized form of incantation . . . until it was absorbed . . . by the Transcendentalist world-­view” (168). Buell, writing before the “affective turn” in the humanities, may here have underestimated the power of “incantation” to produce effects on the bodies involved that are irreducible to the (ideological, metaphysical) content it also carries along. 7 • Buell, Literary Transcendentalism, 166. 8  •  Theodor Adorno, 1961 lecture “Vers une musique informelle,” cited in J. Wierzbicki, “Inventive Listening: The Aesthetics of Parataxis,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 45 (2014): 31. For a discussion of the political valences of the poetic use of parataxis, especially regarding its pro-­or anticapitalist potential, see Pawel Kaczmarski, “The New Sentence: June Jordan and the Politics of Parataxis,” Text Matters 8, no. 8 (2018): 278 – 95. 9  •  Walt Whitman, “Sparkles from the Wheel,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 328. 10  •  Whitman, “Backward Glance,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, 474. 11  •  Here is Robert Louis Stevenson on this point: “The gospel according to Whitman . . . has this advantage over the gospel according to Pangloss, that it does not utterly disregard the existence of temporal evil. . . . Instead of trying to qualify it in the interest of his optimism, [the honest Whitman] sets himself to spur people up to be helpful.” And again, Whitman accepts “without shame the inconsistencies and brutalities that go to make up man, and yet [treats] . . . the whole in a high,



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magnanimous spirit” that aims to “encourage people forward.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Gospel of Walt Whitman,” New Quarterly Magazine 10 (October 1878): 461 – 81, https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/reviews/tei/anc.01077.html. 12  •  Walt Whitman, 1855 Preface, lines 306 – 7. 13  •  For a Hegelian twist on the notion of “forming the consistence,” see Catherine Malabou’s discussion of the brain’s plasticity: a dual capacity to “give form” and to resist or “annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create. . . . To talk about the plasticity of the brain means to see in it not only the creator and receiver of form but also an agency of disobedience to every constituted form, a refusal to submit to a model.” Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5 – 6. 14  •  See James Perron Warren, “Style and Technique,” in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, ed. J. R. LeMaster and D. Kummings (New York: Garland, 1998). Apposition is the placement of words or phrases such that the units are grammatically parallel and have the same referent. Deixis is the use of words or expressions that point out or point toward (here, you, me, now, that one there, today, etc.) and which create the sense of immediate presence and spoken voice. See C. Carroll Hollis, “Linguistic Features of ‘Song of Myself,’ ” in Approaches to Teaching Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass,” ed. Donald D. Kummings (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), 49 – 55. Allison Prasch says that “such indexicals anchor and punctuate the text’s internal progression, display or show forth certain pieces of evidence, and make cognitive demands on the listener to ocularly, imaginatively, and historically ‘track’ with the speaker as the narrative unfolds.” Allison M. Prasch, “Obama in Selma: Deixis, Rhetorical Vision, and the ‘True Meaning of America,’ ” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 1 (2019): 47 – 67. Prasch offers, without naming it as such, a strikingly Whitmanian reading of President Obama’s speech of March 7, 2015, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. 15  •  Meret Oppenheim, “Without Me Anyway,” in Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2002), 321. 16 • Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855 edition, lines 1180 – 81, in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. The oed says that “promulge” is “now rare,” though “ frequently in extended use in and with reference to the writings of Walt Whitman.” Other instances of “promulge” include this simple exclamation from “Apostroph”: To promulge real things!, and this exhortation from “On Journeys through the States”: We say to ourselves, Remember, fear not, be candid, promulge the body and the soul, / Dwell a while and pass on, be copious, temperate, chaste, magnetic, / And what you effuse may then return as the seasons return, / And may be just as much as the seasons. 17  •  Émile Benveniste, “Active and Middle Voice in the Verb,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1971), 149 – 50. See also Hayden White, “Writing in the Middle Voice,” in The Fiction of Narrative (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 255 – 62. 18  •  Charles E. Scott, “The Middle Voice of Metaphysics,” Review of Metaphysics 42, no. 4 (June 1989): 748. 19  •  Gavin Parkinson, “(Blind Summit) Art Writing, Narrative, Middle Voice,”

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Art History 34, no. 2 (April 2011): 277. Charles Scott also notes how “the dominance of the active and passive voices [in modern European languages] makes inevitable the priority of the spectator-­subject for philosophical thought, whereas the middle voice yields a different way of thinking.” This different way is marked by a partaking of a movement — Scott says “undergoing” a movement, but I think “partaking of ” is less susceptible to being read in a passive voice — “rather than by either active assertion or passive reception.” Charles E. Scott, The Question of Ethics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 18 – 19. 20 • Angus Fletcher, A New Theory of American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 168. 21  •  Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 606. 22  •  Whitman, “By Blue Ontario’s Shore,” line 190. 23  •  Languages such as “classical Greek, Sanskrit, or modern Hungarian” do register “middle marking . . . in verbs that might more usually be considered passive. Constructions such as the German . . . ‘es hort sich gut an’ [it sounds good] use middle forms . . . to de-­emphasize the agent.” Elizabeth Barry, “One’s Own Company: Agency, Identity and the Middle Voice in the Work of Samuel Beckett,” Journal of Modern Literature 31, no. 2 (2008): 116. Barry uses “It sounds good” as an example of a sentence that is “agentless but not devoid of agency” in the context of a discussion of the rhetoric of Samuel Beckett. In the light of Thoreau’s plant encounters, it is interesting that she cites Louis Barjon’s description of the language of En attendant Godot “as evoking a vie vegetative, impersonnelle” (116). 24  •  Lorenz Engell, “The Agents of Time and the Time of the Agents: The Action of Timepieces in Christian Marclay’s The Clock,” Cultural Studies 30, no. 4 (2016): 581. Here is the passage in full: “Actions can be differentiated from mere operations when intention can be ascribed to them (Davidson 1980). It is possible that there are conceptions of action, such as Arendt’s, which largely manage without the motivation of intentionality. But once a purpose has been ascribed or imputed, it is clear that an operation has become an action. Operations — complexly distributed, as always, across diverse relations — proceed from multiple relations of causation and are describable as the unwilled effects of material or medial orderings (Anordnungen). Actions, by contrast, are marked, and can be qualified as actions through the minimal condition of the attribution of some kind of authorial intention to them. More precisely: actions are only observable under certain conditions, namely, that an authorial intention has been attributed to them, an intention that, naturally, need not come to fruition, but can and will in such cases be read as failed, latent, confused, or broken. Actions are operations that are observable as a consequence of constantly changing intentions, intentions realized or frustrated, effective or inconsequential, accomplished or failed, completed or aborted. In the investigation of the turning of mere operations into actions, our aim will therefore be to determine the conditions under which intentionality can be observed in materially effectual operations (Mersch 2010).” 25  •  Eberhard calls this a condition of being “incorporated in a process that



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carries us along, a process in which and especially of which we partake.” Philippe Eberhard, “The Mediality of Our Condition: A Christian Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 2 (1999): 420. Eberhard makes a distinction between partaking in (active voice) and partaking of (middle voice): “ ‘To partake in’ indicates an active participation in some activity. ‘To partake of,’ by contrast, involves an ontological bond between the subject and the event, as in the Christian Eucharist. . . . The middle voice conveys . . . the inclusion of the subject in the process of which he or she is subject” (413). 26  •  Steve Mentz, “Seep,” in Veer Ecology, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 282 – 83. 27 • James Miller, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 79 – 80. 28 • Sigmund Freud, Future of an Illusion, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 68. 29  •  Audre Lorde: aim at “altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams” rather than “merely moving you to temporary and reactive action.” Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 38. 30  •  Kathy Ferguson, “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking,” Political Research Quarterly 70, no. 4 (2017): 708 – 19. 31 • Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 32  •  Aeschylus, “Prometheus Bound,” trans. David Grene, in The Complete Greek Tragedies, vol. 1, Aeschylus, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 324, lines 358–60. 33  •  This can be seen in the resurgence of faith in exclusively geo-­engineering solutions, even as changing climate conditions have also highlighted a human-­ nature entanglement so profound that it is not clear what would count as a lightning bolt that did not fry us too. 34  •  Lucretius, “De Rerum Natura,” in Lucretius: On the Nature of Things, trans. Frank O. Copley (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), lines 129 – 35. For another example of the “lyrical force” of this apersonal, vibratory hum, check out the movement-­ style of Kafka’s Odradek in “Cares of a Family Man.” Odradek has the slowness of one who “lurks by turns in the garret, the stairway, the lobbies, the entrance hall” and yet the haste of one who “can never be laid hold of.” I explore this strangely apersonal vitality in “The Shapes of Odradek and the Edges of Perception,” in Textures of the Anthropocene: Grain, Vapor, Ray, ed. Katrin Klingan, Ashkan Sepahvand, Christopher Rosol, and Bernd Scherer (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2014), 13 – 28. 35  •  Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” Representations 11 (summer 1985): 70. I am here giving an affirmative, Whitmanian spin on Zeitlin’s discussion of Euripedes’ Hippolytus and the tragic Greek image of woman as dustropos harmonia. 36  •  Walt Whitman, “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” in Moon, Leaves of Grass and Other Writings, line 42.

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index

Page numbers followed by f indicate figures. Abend, Gabriel, 18 activity, xix, 21, 87, 112 – 1 4; as decanting, 10, 134, 111, 128n40; as sweeping, 10; Zeusian model of, 109, 111 adhesiveness, 15, 30, 36, 129 – 30n59 Adorno, Theodor, 110 affection, xi, xix, 15, 73, 97, 112 – 13; apersonal, 21 – 23, 40, 43, 48; vs. emotion, 24, 29 – 30, 37, 160n71 affective networks, 61 affective tone, xvi, 22, 35, 50 – 55, 75 agency, xi, xviii, 111; of bodies, 18, 113, 139n34; conjoint/distributed, 13, 39, 80, 87, 96, 103, 112 – 13 agonism, xix – x x, 86 Ailanthus altissima, 99f, 100 alchemy, of affect, xvi, 62, 64, 71 anger, xvi, 8, 139n34; militant, 62 – 64 antagonism, 8, 34 – 35, 70 – 71 anxiety, xvi, 117; capitalism and, 62 – 63, 151n3; Harold Bloom and, xvii, 74, 81 – 86; machine for fighting, 63 – 64 Arsić, Branka, 97, 163n24 attitude, 2, 9, 11 – 12, 25 – 26, 95, 141n52. See also disposition

Baker-­Fletcher, Karen, 47, 144n9 Barnes, Elizabeth, 29, 135n1 Bartky, Sandra Lee, 34 Bataille, Georges, 122n36 Battles, Matthew, 119n4 becoming-­heterogeneous, 86 becoming-­insect, 75 Benveniste, Émile, 112 Bergson, Henri, 79 Bersani, Leo, 100 – 101, 108 Bittel, Carla, 132n88, 133n97 blab: of the pave, xxiv, 66, 73, 111 Blight, David, 153n32 Bloom, Harold, xvii – xviii, 47, 74, 81 – 88, 109 body, 3, 6 – 59, 69 – 70, 76, 85, 114, 139nn34 – 35, 158n41; definition of, xi; and microperception, 147n46; movement of, 3, 6 – 7, 10 – 1 4, 16 – 19, 75, 97, 115, 125n7, 147n46; vegetal, 11, 14, 91, 98 both/and: logic of, 88 Braidotti, Rosi, 120n11, 155n12 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 34, 40, 138, 187 Buell, Lawrence, 110, 154n37

Caillois, Roger, xi, xvii, 81, 84, 86 – 88, 103, 108, 113, 134n107, 155nn21 – 28, 157n30, 165n53; “lyrical force,” xxiv, 74 – 78, 155n8 call of things, 78 – 80 capitalism, 70, 121n21; and affect, 62 – 64, 150n1; neoliberal, 64 causality, 9, 51, 103, 110, 114; emergent, 116; recursive, 92, 112. See also influence Cavarero, Adriana, 41 clay, 18, 106 – 8, 117 cognition, 51, 96; embodied, 6, 15 – 21, 130n67, 131n72 Cohen, Jeffrey, 120n11, 157n34 Coles, Romand, 34, 122n37, 123n39, 138n24 Connolly, William E., 146n39, 148n62 Connor, Steven, 128n30, 130n65 cosmic order, 42 cosmos, xvii, 52, 70, 74, 105, 114; apersonal, xv, xviii, 108; providential, xiii, xviii Cossman, Brenda, 150 creativity, 96, 98, 104, 107 critique, 64; as demystification, 63; vs. writing up, 69, 71 curiosity, 8, 10, 36, 73, 89 cuticle, sensitive, xvii – xviii, 39, 65, 74, 78, 109, 114 Daoism, 10, 83, 114 Darwin, Charles, 142n67; and phiz, 15 – 16 Datura stramonium, 105 decanting, 10, 93, 101, 108, 111, 128n40 De Jong, Mary G., 136n7 Deleuze, Gilles, 35, 37, 68, 80, 119, 130n60, 139n34, 143n75; “bare” repetition, 107; and Félix Guattari, xxiv, 68, 119n2, 160n71; “line of flight,” 44 demeanor, 3, 57, 149n68. See also gait; phiz; posture democracy, xv – xvi, xx, 14, 20, 56, 63,

70 – 71, 123n37, 126n10, 135n1, 153n32; as a disposition, 59 – 60; egalitarian, 6, 26, 62; and manners, 5 – 6, 24 – 26 Diederichsen, Diedrich, 168n78 diet, xi, 3, 125n4 dilation, 14 – 15, 20, 64, 74; logic of, 32; vs. nonchalance, 15 discrimination, xvi, 40, 54 – 55, 89; Whitman’s “new edge,” 48 disposition, xv, xxiii, 3 – 25, 46, 49, 71, 148n62, 160n64, 160n66; adverbial force, 126n7; definition of, 125n7; of dilation, 14 – 15; of geo-­a ffection, 25; of nonchalance, 7 – 11; of pluck, 11 – 13. See also attitude dissolution, of self, 74, 78, 87 dividual, xiv – xvi, xviii, 10, 24, 35, 70, 86 – 87, 109, 112, 116 – 18, 128n40; definition of, xii doodle, ix – x; and the anexact, 119n2; as not expression, 119n4 doting, 65 – 66, 80, 101, 111; Romantic, 65; Whitmanian, 65 – 68 drops, 91, 106 – 7, 117 eagles, 49 Edgeworth, Matt, 158nn37 – 38 efflux: bodily, 9, 120n6; creative I, x, xiii, 116 – 17; expression and, 9, 82; and “writing up,” xx – x xv. See also expression; language; shape effort: added by the dividual, xi – xii, 32, 118, 128n40; of boundary maintenance, 36, 74, 93, 147n46; democratic, xvi; nonhuman/cosmic, 52, 90, 113; poetic, xiii, xvii, xxiv, 61, 84, 111 electric, 24, 29, 30, 32, 46, 47, 61, 77, 92, 113, 115; “joyous electric all,” xvii – xviii Ellis, Cristin, 65, 69 – 70, 133n95 encounter(s), x, xx – x xii, 8 – 9, 22 – 25, 33, 49 – 56, 73, 75, 79, 84, 87, 147n45; as doting, 65; Thoreau’s, xviii, xxi – x xii, 90 – 107, 168n82, 171n23 Engell, Lorenz, 171n24

• 190 • index

Erev, Stephanie, 74, 120n11 Erkkila, Betsy, 121n21 eros, xv, 37, 63, 116, 130n59; Freud, 36, 156n27. See also adhesiveness ethos, 45, 54, 56 – 57, 149n61, 153n32 experiment, 15 – 16, 50, 64, 72, 89 – 108 expression, x, xx – x xii, 50, 55, 82, 85, 93 – 94, 161n71; and phiz, xv, 6, 9, 16 – 17, 127n28 fascism, xix – x x, 114, 116 Ferguson, Kathy, xi, xx, 22, 115 Flathman, Richard, 126n7 Fletcher, Angus, 113 “flight of the fly” (Serres), 82 – 84 Folsom, Ed, 48, 125n5 foot, 5, 15, 21 – 2 4, 26, 37, 48, 73, 115 Frank, Claudine, 157n30 Frank, Jason, 37, 130n59 Freud, Sigmund, 85, 114 – 15, 156n27, 157n30; anxiety and, 64; “death drive,” 74, 77; eros and, 36, 156n27 friendship, 19, 66, 89, 103, 130n63; presumptive friendliness, 15, 73, 89, 148 Foucault, Michel, xxii, 124n46, 126n10, 136n12, 150n2 gait, xv, 3, 8, 17, 19, 25, 93, 97, 129n49. See also phiz; posture; demeanor Garber, Marjorie, 160n63 Garrison, William Lloyd, 26, 135n2 Gibbs, Anna, 135n4 grass, xxi – x xiii, 11, 13 – 1 4, 50, 73, 74, 94, 116, 121n22 Grove, Jairus, 120n11, 125n6 Halberstam, Jack, 90, 162n6, 168n82 Haraway, Donna, 124n45 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 29, 136n9 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 19, 100, 142n67, 169n13 hoarding, 74, 78 – 81, 88, 158n36 homo faber, 13 homomorphy, 76 – 77, 155n16

Honig, Bonnie, xix hover, x, xxi, 49, 50, 54 – 55 hula-­hoop, 17 I: Cartesian, xvii, 112; cosmic, xii, xvii, 47, 86 – 87, 109, 116; creative, x – xiii, 10, 116 – 17, 146n39; the hoarding I, 74, 78 – 80; “the it in the I,” 24; Kantian, 15; Nussbaum’s model, 55; personal endeavor, xii, xxii, 13, 88, 114, 129; porous, xi, 30 – 4 4, 88. See also dividual; shape Ignatov, Anatoli, 120n11, 165n45 imagination, 30 – 32, 42, 78, 82, 84, 108, 138n25; and Adam Smith, 28 – 29, 32, 42, 136n8 impression, 9, 48, 50, 52, 66 – 67, 75, 81 – 82, 91, 94 – 95, 105, 110, 125n5 influence: bidirectional, 16; ethereal, xxi – x xii, 51, 110, 112, 116; and Harold Bloom, xvii, 74, 81 – 86, 88, 159n47, 160n59. See also Thoreau: “natural influences” influx, xi, xiii, xx, 9, 34, 40, 68, 84, 114; absorbent I, 114, 116; anxiety caused by, xvii, 74, 81 – 86, 117; doting and receptivity to, 52, 55, 68; filtering of, xvii, 74, 88, 114; prehensions and affective tone, xvi, 22, 53, 109; Thoreau and natural influence, 89, 93. See also impression; sympathy inspiration, xxii, 53, 69; Harold Bloom and, 74, 81 – 82, 160n59 Institute for Precarious Consciousness, 62, 109 intelligence: unthought, 65; vegetal, 93, 98, 100 inter-­objectivity, 78 interval, xvi, 54 – 55, 80, 104, 145n24, 145n29, 167n69; and poetry, x, 49 – 50, 55, 111 Jesus, 47, 56, 137 Johnson, Rochelle, 164n36

index • 191 •

Johnston, Steven, 137n16, 150n69 Jones, Paul Christian, 30, 138n23 judgment, 10, 30, 42, 44 – 45, 91, 94, 108, 124n46, 144n14, 149n66; critique of, 46; moral, 54 – 55, 57 – 59, 149n69; solar, xvi, xviii, 40, 45 – 59, 153n32 Jullien, François, 10, 111, 128n40 Kafka, Franz, 20, 133n96, 172n34 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 46, 130n60, 136n8 Kateb, George, 120n14, 143n74 Keller, Catherine, 37, 140n47, 141n54 Krause, Sharon, 141n53 Kwek, Dorothy, xi, 88 language, xxii, 118, 127n28, 135n114, 149n64; of doting, 66; force of, 124n43; the middle voice and, 113, 170n19, 171n23; of nonhuman actants, xxi, xxiv, 142n66; “writing up,” 111. See also rhetoric Lawrence, David Herbert, xvii, 36, 137n13, 137n18, 142n65 Lawtoo, Nidesh, 122n36, 136n6 list, xiv – xv, 5, 8; senses of, 129n57; vs. taxonomy, 21; as a verb, 15; Whitman’s, 8, 29, 87, 110 – 11, 127n23, 152n17, 168n3 Lobis, Seth, 29, 137n12 love, xiv, 24, 30 – 43, 47, 56, 58, 142n72; vs. amorous love, 129n59; sympathy and, 30 – 37, 40 – 43, 137n18 Lucretius, 82, 116 lyrical force, xxiv, 74 – 77, 155nn8 – 11, 172n34; definition of, 74 – 75 Mackey, Nathaniel, 21 Manning, Erin, 50, 52, 123n43 Marriott, McKim, xii Martel, James, 37, 140n43 Massumi, Brian, 141n55, 147n46, 160n71 McCormack, Derek, 12, 120n11, 159n44 Mentz, Steve, 114 Mesmerism, 27 – 28, 106

microcitizenship, 5 micropolitics, 126n10 middle voice, xix, xxv, 49, 87, 112 – 1 4, 170nn17 – 19, 171n25 Miller, James, 114, 139n35 Miller, Matt, 64 mimesis, xvii, 76, 97, 106; neuromimesis, 27 – 29, 136n6; pantheistic, 77 mimicry, 28 – 29, 75 – 76, 157n30 Moller, Mary Elkins, 104 Moon, Michael, 15, 36 – 37 moral sentiment, xv, 27 – 30, 32 – 33, 40, 97, 136n8 neurodiversity, 123n43 neuromimesis, 27 – 29, 136n6 nod, xxi, 11, 91, 93 – 94, 96, 98, 105, 167n67; trans-­species, 100 nonchalance, 6 – 11, 15, 24 – 26, 54 – 58, 63, 68, 91, 108, 126n11, 127n25; and solarity, 40, 45, 49 – 50, 54, 56, 58; vs. sprezzatura, 7, 127n15 Nori, Giuseppe, 42 norms, 5, 26, 55 – 56, 58, 78, 91, 116, 126n11 Nussbaum, Martha, 54 – 55, 57, 140n43 odor, 28, 53 – 54, 165n51 Oppenheim, Meret, 163n23, 170n15 Paget, Sir James, 28 Pahl, Katrin, 127n20 pantheism, 44, 77, 100 – 101, 121n22, 156n28 Paracelsus, 101 – 3 , 166nn58 – 59 parataxis, 110 – 11, 169n8 Parisi, Luciana, 61, 146n38, 150n1 Parkinson, Gavin, 113, 170n19 pathetic fallacy, xxiv, 103 pathognomy, 8 – 9, 19 – 21, 127n28 perception, xvi, 14, 55, 90, 123n39, 147n46; Bergson’s theory of, 79, 159n42; cultivating, 59; as doting, 65; perceptual float, 10, 49 – 50; sense-­

• 192 • index

perception, 22, 54, 148n53, 159n42, 161n71 phagocytosis, 74 – 77, 156n24 Philip (Whitman character), 38 – 40, 42, 65 phiz, 15, 24 – 26, 84, 125n4; definition of, 1; efficacy of, xv, 3, 6, 9, 18. See also demeanor; gait; posture phrenology, 6, 133n97; Fowler brothers, 19 – 21, 38, 129n59, 133n93, 135n5, 141n56; pathognomy, 8 – 9, 19 – 21, 127n28; and racism, 19 – 20, 133n101; and social reform, 20 – 21, 133n101 pity, 40, 42, 139n34; pitié, 27, 135n3; vs. sympathy, 30 – 3 4 pluck, 11 – 1 4, 20, 25 – 26, 56, 69, 117, 129n49, 130n60; nonhuman, 12 – 13; persistence and, 17; self-­discipline and, 12, 25 poetry, xxi, 3, 6, 9, 11, 15, 20, 29, 32, 115, 121n21, 139n35, 142n66, 152n22, 154nn37 – 38, 164n33, 172n36; Bloom and the twist of, 74, 81 – 86; the interval, x, 50 – 52, 61, 145n34; task of, 43, 61, 70 – 71, 130n63, 138n22, 168n2 poiesis, 84 – 86 porosity, 64, 80 posture, xiv – xv, 3 – 25, 58, 75, 78, 91, 96 – 97, 115, 122n25, 125n3, 127n29, 128n30, 131nn70 – 72, 131n75, 132n85; cultivating, 5, 21, 61, 64, 109; as expression, 9; of leaning, 12 – 18, 14f, 25; of side-­curved head, 6 – 11, 8f; of solarity, 46. See also demeanor; gait; phiz praying mantis, 74 – 76, 115, 155n11 prehensions, 48, 50 – 53, 109, 146n38, 146n41, 147nn45 – 46; definition of, 51 pressure: barometric, xxi, 85, 93, 104 – 5; of the strings (Caillois), 78, 115 process: creative, xxiii, 10, 42, 96, 107; of genesis, 82 – 84, 159n55; of judging, 48 – 54; oriented grammar, syntax, and verbs, xv, xix, xx – x xi, 21, 87,

112 – 1 4; philosophy, xi, 159n54; recursive/ongoing, xix, xxiii, 22, 47 – 48, 79, 90, 96, 112 – 13; self as in-­, xv, 10, 21, 32, 109; story of, 84; of sympathy/ identification, xx, 32, 42, 76, 97 – 98, 107, 138n21 Prometheus, 109, 116 Rebrovick, Tripp, 125n4 recognition: apersonal, 100, 165n53; Hegel, 100 repetition, xxii, 28, 96 – 97, 106 – 8, 160n58; too-­pure, 136n6 Reynolds, David S., 36, 120n6, 140n41, 154n3 rhetoric, xx – x xiv, 32, 63 – 65, 69, 71, 118, 123n39, 171n23 rhythm, 75, 78, 83 – 84, 89, 101, 111 – 12, 139n35; of bodily movement, 3, 14, 97; of pluck, 11 – 12 rhythmanalysis, 12 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 27, 135n3 ryeheads, xxi, 11, 91, 93 – 94 satyrion root, 101, 102f Schoolman, Morton, 120n14, 127n23, 172n36 Scott, Charles, 170n19 self-­esteem, 16, 19 – 20 sensitivity, 34, 139n31; barometric, 38 – 4 2, 41f; enhancement of, 65, 68, 104, 138n26 Serres, Michel, 80, 82, 85, 109, 159n54 shape, ix – xi, 12 – 1 4, 52, 68, 73 – 80, 89, 100 – 101, 111, 125n7, 142n66, 156n24; definition of, xi, 120n10; of drops of rain, 91, 106 – 8; human body, 3, 19, 24 – 25, 55; nonhuman, xxii, 67; Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne), 29, 136n9 “Six Theses,” Institute for Precarious Consciousness, 62 – 64, 150n2 slowness, 9, 50, 65, 71, 87, 172n34; slow efficacy, 113 – 16

index • 193 •

smiles, xiv, 16 – 17 Smith, Adam, 28 – 29, 32, 42, 136n8 solarity, 46 – 50, 55 – 56, 145n29; vs. love, 47; and nonchalance, 50, 56 soul, 27, 34, 36, 42, 67 – 68, 94, 121n20, 138n21, 142n65; body-­soul, 39, 70; definition of, xi Spinoza, Baruch, 35, 139n34; natura naturans, 10 sprezzatura, 7, 127n15 Stern, Madeleine, 141n56 Strack, Franziska, 145n29 subjectivity, xv, 52, 108, 116, 160n71 suggestiveness, 57 sun, xxi – x xii, 30, 35 – 37, 53, 115, 117, 145n24, 155n20; falling round, xvi, 40, 45 – 48, 51, 54 – 55, 59; influence on Thoreau, 91 – 92, 96, 98, 100 – 101 Surrealism, xvii, 74, 78, 115, 119n3, 134n107, 157n29 sympathy, xiii, xv – xvi, xviii, 27 – 4 4, 52, 54, 63 – 71, 86, 103, 135nn1 – 2, 136n9, 140n43, 141n52, 141n54; cross-­species, 37, 91, 96 – 98, 164n39; imagination and, 28, 31 – 32, 42, 141n53; sentimental model of, 27, 30 – 33, 135n4, 137nn12 – 13, 137n19, 139n34, 141n55 thing-­power, 78, 158 things: call of, 78, 80 Thoreau, Henry David, x, xvii, 50, 89 – 108, 161n4, 162n7, 162n15, 162n17, 163nn24 – 30, 164nn32 – 40, 165n45, 165n51, 165n53, 166n54, 166nn58 – 59, 166n63, 167n67, 167n69, 168n82, 171n23; “natural influences,” xxii – x xiii, 89, 90 – 108, 109, 113, 115, 121n22; “the Wild,” xviii, 90 – 91, 101, 123n40, 162n6, 162n8 time, 142n67, 150n1; of the interval, x, 8, 49 – 50, 110; linear, 49. See also hover Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5

transcendentalism, 98, 104; American, 30, 44 Traubel, Horace, xvi, 65, 129n49, 143n75 Trecker, Janice Law, 142n67 twist, xv, 9, 32, 33, 68, 77, 81, 84, 87, 118, 169n13; repetition with a, 106, 117, 136n6 vegetal: activity, 5, 96; humans as part-­, xxi – x xii, 11, 91, 93, 98, 105, 162n15; influences, 14, 96 – 108, 166n63 vibrant matter, xi – xii, xxiv, 24, 55, 100, 111, 116, 118; vs. instrumentality, 79 virtual, xi, xxii, 50, 52, 61, 65, 70, 80, 82, 98, 111 – 1 4, 116, 149n69, 150n1 Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci, 46 Vrettos, Athena, 28, 136 weather: sympathy with, xxi, 39 – 40, 96, 163n29 Weber, Max, 12 White, Stephen K., 148n62 Whitehead, Alfred North, xi, xvi, 22, 48, 50 – 54, 75, 85, 109, 115, 145n34, 146nn36 – 4 1, 147nn42 – 47, 148nn53 – 55. See also affective tone; prehensions Whitman, Walt: and critique, 64, 69, 70 – 71; “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 4, 14, 23, 161n75; on economics, 121n21; “I Sing the Body Electric,” 5, 9, 12, 37, 41, 68 – 70, 113, 122n26; “Manly Health and Training,” 3, 21, 125n4; “New York Dissected,” 1, 124n3; and nonchalance, 6 – 11, 15, 24 – 26, 40, 45, 50, 54 – 58, 91; “One Wicked Impulse! A Tale of a Murderer Escaped,” 38, 40, 42, 44, 65; and phrenology, 6 – 8, 19 – 21, 38, 130n59, 132nn86 – 87; “A Poet’s Recreation: Gossipy Letter from Walt Whitman,” 24; Preface, 1855 edition (Leaves of Grass), 6, 9 – 10, 45, 56, 71, 121n18, 122n35, 154n38; “Song of My-

• 194 • index

self,” x, xiv, 4 – 5, 14, 21, 30 – 31, 35 – 36, 48, 73 – 74, 77, 86 – 87, 121n22, 129n49, 129n57, 139n35, 149n69, 152n17; “Song of the Broad-­A xe,” 4 – 5, 11 – 12, 39, 120n10; “Sparkles from the Wheel,” 11 – 12, 37, 77, 110 – 11, 116; “Talbot Wilson” notebook, 38, 141n54, 142n72

writing up, xii, xix, xx – x xv, 11, 51, 66, 71, 74; Thoreau, 91, 94 – 96, 98; Whitman’s techniques of, 109 – 13 yoga, 3, 50 Zeus, 109 – 12, 116

index • 195 •

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