NonfictioNow 2015, Flagstaff, Arizona

Theorizing Nonfiction:
Sidestepping Boundaries Between the Theoretical and the Creative

Corinna Cook

Corinna Cook is chipping away at a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. Her nonfiction appears in Flyway, Alaska Quarterly Review, and is anthologized in Whereabouts: Stepping Out of Place.

Beth Peterson

Travis Scholl

Joanna Eleftheriou

Introduction to "Theorizing Creative Nonfiction"

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Corinna Cook
​Eating Our Neighbors: Giorgio Agamben, Animality, and Essaying North

I write about Alaska
I think and write about Alaska. It’s a big place with few people. Home base is the rainforest in Southeast; it’s an archipelago all cut up by glacial fjords. Yes, there’s packaged food and there are trashcans and white bread, but still: we eat a lot of salmon, and king crab, and we eat a lot of venison, and blueberries, and we really like it that way.

But, before I define “we,” let me note that a bunch of indigenous people who were very recently (partly) displaced (and largely) joined and crowded by the western industrialized masses of which I am a part—have a very, very long pre-industrialized history, in this same rainforest, of eating a lot of salmon, and king crab, and eating a lot of venison, and blueberries, and really liking it that way.

So who is this “we” that does all this eating? Maybe “we” is that which needs clean water for healthy fish and rich forests for deer habitat? If yes, there’s a sense in which “we” means every single thing bound in communal exchange with the world around it.
It’s important to me to be brash--we eat a lot of salmon and we like it that way—because the brashness exposes the ambiguity, in this case, of the pronoun “we.” And ambiguities are humbling. Who-all, and what-all, is bound in communal exchange? Perhaps it’s a cosmological question.

Yet cosmology does not, in the context of my writing, quite transcend politics.

Because part of that “we” involves people who participate in institutions that don’t seem bound, at least not in any easy sense, to clean water and rich forests. Think about the cash economy: in my region of the state, for example, corporations made bank clearcutting in the eighties; if you had a share in the corp, good for you on payday—you could then buy the bullets you needed to fill the freezer with venison, you could thus maintain your physical, bodily connection to the biome by eating wild foods, and you could also check in with your spirit on some wind-beaten ridgeline where you’d trekked up into the alpine during buck season to use those bullets—unfortunately, the clearcut zone (that financed this hunting trip I’m constructing) would be a chunk of not-forest, and no-deer, and its streams would probably be clogged so let’s just say, no fish spawning either. The connections between destructiveness, and connectivity, are perverse, and intimate.

I’m still saying “we” is that which needs clean water for healthy fish and rich forests for deer habitat, but there’s a sense in which some of “we” is also inherently destructive—of what it needs, and thus, of itself, of its own collectivity.

Theorist Giorgio Agamben comes in here for me, because he writes about the caesura: the divide, the boundary, between us and them, between human and animal, the very concept of dis-connectivity, of separation—and ultimately he says the caesura doesn’t work. That we have to think without it; we have to forego the very notion of separation. And since I can’t figure out how to separate any of what I write about, spiritually, ecologically, financially—Agamben is helpful to me.
 
A Map
So here’s a map to the rest of my talk.

I’ll give a one-minute history/explanation of posthumanism, because Agamben is considered to be a posthumanist.

Then I’ll tell you what Agamben thinks of humans and animals.

Then I’ll tell share an anecdote from my earliest thinking life—as a five year old—it’s an anecdote that involves a couple Alaskan animals and, being really bummed out, and yet very compelled, invested, and sort of helplessly bewildered.

Then I’ll confess to you that I’m not, at heart, an activist, that my writing isn’t activism, and that Agamben is one of very few voices that, I think, occupies and opens this kind of space: that in which real, fiery passion about actual beings and existing places, doesn’t have to translate to advocacy, to policy, but has the option of leading to a kind of poetic intervention.
 
Posthumanism as Act of Revision
Which brings me to the human, and the emergence of posthumanism.

Much of the western intellectual tradition presumes to be saying something clear, something obvious, when it refers to “the human.” But I must be explicit: western thought works—and historically, has worked—with the Cartesian, or liberal, human subject, which I would like to describe to you. He is an autonomous individual. He is conscious and rational. The Cartesian, or liberal, human subject is a white guy, but not of too low a socioeconomic status, and he doesn’t have anything we’d recognize as a disability.

Theorizing the human in this way makes it possible, for example, for a budding young union to declare liberty and freedom for all, and to mean by that, all white land-owning men.

So a little bit of theory can hurt a lot of people. I’ve alluded to it as a political problem, but it’s also crucially a thinking problem.

Now feminist theory pipes up: women are humans too.

And critical race theory pipes up, post-colonial theory pipes up, queer theory pipes up, environmental ethics and disabilities studies also join in—all making their respective contributions to the massive and urgent task of revising the historically dominant (western) concept of “the subject.”

Posthumanism is the watershed that has come of this effort: recently, theorists have taken these various revisions to the idea of “what is a human” (that is…who’s in the moral community, and who’s out) they’ve taken “what is a human” as starting point—and when they’re eventually compelled to doubt that “human,” as a category of thought, as a mode of separation, of containment—when they’re compelled to doubt it works at all…then we call them posthumanists.
 
Critics of posthumanism object immediately, saying what is this, if you dissolve the category of “human” then who has voting rights? Chimpanzees? Rocks and ferns? How are you going to run a political system?

And here’s my (provisional) answer: the voting booth is perhaps very good habitat for the concept of “human” (as long as “human,” by definition, includes me—because I want my vote).

But here’s why I’m still reading posthuman thinkers: a voting booth does not the world make. The way I see it… we’re still all eating each other. Reaching out, and getting life.
 
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben often hits home for me because he writes posthuman theory out of a kindred political-urgency-gone-poetic. I’ll close by talking about how Agamben navigates the notions of “human” and “animal” and how, in my way, I lean on him.
Atrocity (think Auschwitz) is the spark, for Agamben: he writes, “perhaps concentration and extermination camps are … an experiment …, an extreme and monstrous attempt to decide between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin” (The Open, 22).

That is, genocide depends on a logic of us-as-humans, them-as-animals, but paradoxically, it also exposes how human is the ‘them’ (they’re suffering)—and thus how bestial is the ‘us’ (if they are suffering, we are tormentors). In other words, genocide depends on a clear human/inhuman boundary, and it makes that boundary totally untenable.

Agamben’s conclusion? He argues that contemporary politics demand we recognize—and manage—the animality within humanity. The more I read, the more I imagine Agamben’s idea as this scribble [show audience; let them squint], which is basically illegible: neither humanity nor animality appearing before, or apart, from the other, but superimposed.

Now, I don’t write holocaust literature. But the structure of this problematic is compelling: how roles, expressed as a binary, undo themselves. Us/them. …Or predator/prey. Or hunger/grief. So I’ll tell you about the woman I saw screaming in the sea.

She was a mother, a sea otter. I was five. An eagle picked her pup out of the water. My dad and I saw the eagle’s glide, its dive, and later found the bright bloody patch in the snow where the eagle had landed, gotten a better grip. The mama otter swam back and forth offshore, back and forth, screaming. We mourned for her loss and went back to that stretch of road the next day, and the next, to see if she was still screaming, and she was. But we kept going back because my dad was teaching me to perceive something: that, had the eagle missed its target, brought no food back to the nest—there would be a bereaved mother not in the sea, but in the trees.

We began a conversation then. It’s one that refuses either narrative: the one in which an otter’s grief reigns, and the one in which an eagle’s hunger trumps that grief. It’s a conversation in which grief and hunger, hunger and grief, cannot be arranged hierarchically, ought not even be uttered one-first-the-other-second. It’s a conversation in which the notions are superimposed, written in the same pen, each word retaining the richness of its meaning, yet rendered illegible—the kind of embededness Agamben sees.

I draw on Agamben’s tilt toward abstraction because it’s a tilt rooted in political concreteness and historic specificity, and those seem to be elements I can’t do without. Still, when I make essays, when I handle contemporary Alaskan cultures and ancient ones, and wildlife (or forget “wildlife”—when I handle the wild other), alongside social institutions, I see set relationships always, somehow, undoing themselves; if I see ecological collectivity, social collectivity, spiritual collectivity—each ends up undoing the others. I shy very much away from the voice of the advocate, away from assuming the intent to “enact positive change.”

And you know? Agamben contains this same gap: critics point out the same thing again and again: he claims to set out “crucially political” thought, but, they answer “Agamben’s is thought that will never be developed in law schools” meaning, no matter how deeply engrossed in genocide, in the genome project, in the world economy—no matter how engrossed Agamben is in truly concrete political affairs, that arena is too narrow for him—he ends up back in this realm [show scribble 2nd time], that of illegible superimpositions.
 
We’re All Still Eating Each Other
And where does that lead?

To transformative exchange. Or, to be blunt: it leads to sex. And it leads to food. It leads to eating, and killing, and all the other ways in which we create and maintain ourselves by reaching out, taking hold, and drawing in. And if that resonates with your experience of the world, if it’s a kind of merciless zone of continual merging and irreconcilably violent interdependence that compels you to make essays…Agamben is a good friend to have.

Or, more formally, if you work with fragments, with image, with juxtaposition and white space—that is, if your prose foregoes the traditional narrative arc and structurally demands the reader experience a kind of merging and tacit interpenetration of fragments, then maybe you’re building, over and over, a Rosetta stone by which the rest of us can begin to decipher the concreteness, the immediacy, and the accuracy, expressed in this scrawl.

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Theorizing Nonfiction, Continued.

Joanna Eleftheriou
Theorizing Creative Nonfiction: The Essay Was Always in Between

Travis Scholl
Theorizing Nonfiction: My Friend Wally Benjamin

Beth Peterson
Theorizing Nonfiction

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