Material Ecocriticism:

Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics

SERENELLA IOVINO

One cause would send all things wholesale to their demise

If they weren’t knit together, loosely or tightly, from their ties
Of everlasting matter
1
(De rerum natura I, 238-40)

With these words, inspired by the Epicurean tradition, the Latin poet Lucretius depicted
a universe in which matter, eternal substance of interconnected forms, was to be consid-
ered as the core of every existing thing.2 In a world inhabited by indifferent gods and
melancholic humans such as the poet himself, a materialistic metaphysics was seen by
Lucretius as a response to superstitions and a remedy to fear: fear about death, about the
passions, about the weakness of humankind.
Almost two millennia after the poem De rerum natura was composed, the material
constitution of nature, and the nature of matter, are at the center of the so-called ‘mater-
ial turn,’ an interdisciplinary debate involving environmental philosophy, ecological
humanities, and ecocriticism. Even though different from a metaphysical vision such as
the one that enthused ancient philosophers and poets, a reflection on matter continues to
be a reflection on the universe in which we live and on the ways we interact with its
processes and forms.
In fact, matter is everything but a conceptual abstraction. From the standpoints of
environmental thought, ‘materiality’ is the condition through which bodies act with and
relate with each other, shaping other bodies; it is the condition whereby the health of
living beings is mirrored and mutually determined by the ecological balances or
imbalances of their environments or, in other words, the condition by which a toxic
place determines toxic bodies and toxic life-styles determine toxic places. Reflecting on
matter means reflecting on the modes of production and consumption of nature(s) as
reservoirs of usable elements; it means reflecting on the way the matter of the world is

1
“Denique res omnis eadem vis causaque vulgo / conficeret, nisi materies aeterna teneret, / inter
se nexus minus aut magis indupedita.” English translation by A.E. Stalling (Lucretius 10).
2
I am deeply indebted to the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, whose generous support enabled
me to work on my research project “Material Ecocriticism and Literature of Liberation.” This
essay, which was conceived in that framework, has benefitted from the constant exchange of
ideas I had with Serpil Oppermann and Maurizio Valsania. To Hubert Zapf, my scientific host at
the Universität Augsburg (Fall 2010-Summer 2012), and to all the students and young researchers
of the Oberseminar Amerikanistik, my deepest gratitude for sharing this theoretical exploration in
classes and conversations.
52 Serenella Iovino

embodied in human experience, as well as in human “mind.” A mind that, to quote

ecophenomenologist David Abram, “arises, and dwells, between the body and the
Earth” (Becoming 111). But thinking materiality in environmental terms also reveals the
nonhuman and posthuman realm of other material sources of action—those entities
Bruno Latour calls “actants”: electric grids, polluting substances, chemicals, energy,
assemblages, scientific apparatuses, cyborgs, waste, the things themselves with their
vibrant force and “deviant agency.”3
Challenged by the many ways literature and other forms of cultural representation
give voice to the issues of materiality and shape ‘narratives of matter,’ this theoretical
paper is an invitation to examine the effects of the ‘material turn’ on ecocritical theory
and practice. After describing the conceptual features of the ‘new materialisms,’ I
propose a theoretical paradigm for ecocriticism as an analysis about the levels of what
can be called a ‘material textuality.’ In the final part, I argue that the reappraisal of
materiality will enhance both ecocriticism’s epistemology and its ethical stances,
providing the conceptual tools for an ecological horizontalism and an extended moral
imagination.

1. The Renaissance of Matter

The ‘material turn’ has a very broad and multidisciplinary scope. Inaugurated by fields
of research across the social sciences, and in particular by a recent debate in feminism
and feminist science studies, it touches a vast array of disciplines, from political and
economic sciences to epistemology, disability and interspecies studies, gender and
queer theories, geography, and the research on technology and new media. In these and
other interested areas, the reconsideration of materiality is associated not much with
Marxism or existential phenomenology, but rather with the twentieth-century develop-
ments in the natural sciences and with the radical changes that have affected our
material environments in the last decades, such as globalization processes, the ecologi-
cal crisis, and the revolution in technological and communication systems. Especially in
the humanities and in the social sciences, this neo-materialist renaissance comes after a
period of abandon or dismissal of matter and materiality, which was the main result of
the so-called ‘linguistic turn.’ One of the key points of the ‘material turn’ is in fact its
reaction against some radical trends of postmodern and poststructuralist thinking, which
it regards as “dematerializing” the world into linguistic and social constructions. In
these fields the new attention paid to matter has, therefore, emphasized the need of
recalling the concreteness of existential fields, with regard to both the bodily dimension
and to non-binary epistemological object-subject structures. In cognitive terms, this
entailed questioning the mind-body dualism. Inspired by approaches such as Maturana
and Varela’s ‘autopoiesis’ and Gregory Bateson’s ecology of mind, some strands of the

3
On the concept of “actant,” as an “entity that modifies another entity in a trial,” see Latour, Poli-
tics 237. In Vibrant Matter Jane Bennett has deployed this concept in her analysis of the post-
human material agency of electric grids, waste, inanimate objects, etc. On “deviant agency” as the
negative and harmful “intra-action” of toxic chemicals and chemically reactive bodies, see
Alaimo, Bodily Natures 113-40.
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 53

new materialisms interpret the world not as a set of objective processes, but as a
“densely intertwined … tissue of experience” (Abram, Becoming 143), disclosing new
perspectives in fields of meaning connected to nonhuman systems of signs as well.
These initial considerations suggest the complexity of this cultural horizon, thus
justifying the choice of putting the word “materialism” in the plural form. This plurality
of visions also discloses, as we will see, a large number of ethical implications. As
Diana Coole and Samantha Frost put it, the new materialisms represent indeed “a
challenge to some of the most basic assumptions that have underpinned the modern
world, including its normative sense of the human and its belief about human agency,
but also regarding its material practices such as the ways we labor on, exploit, and
interact with nature” (4).

In environmental debates the material turn has assumed many forms and perspectives.
A determining moment can be identified in the discussion about ‘material feminism.’
Edited by Susan Hekman and Stacy Alaimo, the essays included in the volume Material
Feminisms (2008) put the emphasis on two points that recurred in the further
development of eco-materialism. The first of these points is the need to retrieve the
body from the dimension of discourse, and to focus the attention on bodily experiences
and bodily practices (where ‘body’ refers not only to the human body but to the
concrete entanglements of plural ‘natures,’ both human and more-than-human). The
second point is the need to respond to the linguistic turn with practical-theoretical
strategies that attempt to overcome the chasm between cultural constructionism and the
materiality of natures and bodies. These issues can be reformulated in the following
terms: how do we define the field of our experience of material natures? And, secondly,
how do we correlate discursive practices (in the form of political categories, socio-
linguistic constructions, cultural representations, etc.) with the materiality of ecological
relationships? In what measure is it possible to connect these two levels—the material
and the discursive—in a non-dualistic system of thought?
While feminist theorists shift their analyses from biological matter and linguistic
constructionism to a cultural theory informed by the insights of natural sciences and
politic economy, other thinkers propose to question the boundaries of agency, and to
reconceive the human-nonhuman mutual infiltrations in ways that take into account
matter’s “inherent creativity” (DeLanda 16). The idea that matter is filled with agency is
what the new materialisms oppose to a vision—dating back to seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century science—of agency as connected with intentionality and therefore to
human (or divine) intelligence. The claim for the creative power of things is, therefore,
a way of “absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or
mechanism” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 3): the true dimension of matter is not that of a
static being, but of a generative becoming. This is evident for instance in the theory of
‘agential realism,’ developed by feminist thinker and quantum physicist Karen Barad—
one of the key-figures of the new materialisms—in her groundbreaking work Meeting
the Universe Halfway (2007). Reality, Barad maintains, is a symmetric entanglement of
material and discursive processes. Here the word ‘matter’ “does not refer to an inherent,
fixed property of abstract, independently existing objects; rather, ‘matter’ refers to
phenomena in their ongoing materialization” (Meeting 151). In other words, matter “is
not a blank slate,” or “immutable or passive,” but “a doing, a congealing of agency”:
54 Serenella Iovino

“Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizing process of iterative intra-activity” (151). And,

as Barad clarifies, it is “neither fixed and given nor the mere end result of different
processes. Matter is produced and productive, generated and generative. Matter is
agentive, not a fixed essence or property of things” (137).
On the premise of an intrinsically ‘agentive’ matter, agential realism is an ontologi-
cal vision of reality as a continuous process that involves simultaneously (‘intra-active-
ly,’ in Barad’s terminology) matter and meanings, and where embodiments and forms
co-emerge onto a unitary field of existence.

In eco-philosophical debate the issue of the material interactions of bodies and natures
has been addressed by a number of challenging publications. Besides the already
mentioned collection Material Feminisms and Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway,
these publications include Andrew Pickering’s The Mangle of Practice (1995), Jane
Bennett’s The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001), Joseph Rouse’s How Scientific
Practices Matter (2002), and Freya Mathews’s For Love of Matter (2003). More recent-
ly, this thematic trend has been enriched by new titles, such as Diana Coole and Saman-
tha Frost’s New Materialisms, Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant
Matter, Susan Hekman’s The Material of Knowledge, David Abram’s Becoming Animal
(all published in 2010), and Vicky Kirby’s Quantum Anthropologies (2011).
The cultural horizon to which these works refer is multifaceted. In some cases,
though expressly skeptical about certain extreme forms of cultural reductionism, the
project of re-conceptualizing materiality engages in a critical but constructive conver-
sation with postmodernism. Even if linguistic constructionism has ultimately failed to
“bring the material dimension into theory and practice” (Hekman 2), the turn to the
linguistic and the discursive has proved “enormously productive” in that it “has fostered
complex analyses of the interconnections between power, knowledge, subjectivity, and
language” (Alaimo and Hekman 1). Postmodernism therefore has to be considered as
the target of a challenge and the bearer of a legacy. The challenge, taken on by material
feminism in particular, consists in “building rather than abandoning the lessons
learned in the linguistic turn,” trying to accomplish the very project of postmodernism:
“to deconstruct the language/reality dichotomy by defining a theoretical position that
does not privilege either language or reality but instead explains and builds on their
intimate interaction.”4 On the other side, the legacy of those postmodern theorists who,
like Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari, “accommodate the material in their work” is an
inspiration for studies that put emphasis on ontology and politics (Alaimo and Hekman
3).
But the theoretical perspectives and the historical references of the material turn
reach far beyond its relationship to postmodernism. In fact, the above-quoted works
variously reinterpret important traditions of thinking that include Greek atomism,
Renaissance philosophy, Spinoza, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, and quantum physics, along
with contemporary theorists such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Ulrich Beck, and
Manuel DeLanda.

4
Hekman 3; see also Alaimo and Hekman 6. On postmodernism and the material turn, see the
contribution by Serpil Oppermann in this volume.
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 55

One of the main characteristics of the neo-materialist horizon is the attempt to

develop a unitary theoretical framework for issues related to being, knowing, and doing.
The conceptual constellations that have “solidified” in the galaxy of the new material-
isms are therefore ontology, ethics/agency, and epistemology, and they are all in differ-
ent ways interconnected. Three books among the abovementioned titles can be quoted
as representative of these trends: Stacy Alaimo’s Bodily Natures, Jane Bennett’s Vib-
rant Matter, and David Abram’s Becoming Animal.
A path-breaking expression of the ‘turn,’ Bodily Natures plays an essential role in
drawing the intellectual map of material ecocriticism. It introduces the notion of ‘trans-
corporeality,’ a concept that points to the reciprocal interferences of places and living
organisms in terms of environmental health and policy, and that proves especially
valuable for ‘reading’ bodily configurations in the context of ecological risk. Along
with Alaimo’s work, Bennett’s Vibrant Matter is an original conceptualization of politi-
cal theory that displaces the focus of agency from human subjectivity to the “force of
things” (1). Thinking over the interplay between human life and other “actants” (electric
grids, food, stem cells, debris), Bennett redesigns non-linear and posthuman patterns of
materialization and causality (10). Finally, Becoming Animal is an account of the
‘elemental’ embodiments of the self and of the permeability of experience as a more-
than-human practice that involves imaginative and biological processes.
Exemplifying the extent of the material turn’s theoretical references, these books
enter into dialogue with different thinkers and lines of thought. Bodily Natures and
Vibrant Matter, in spite of their different theoretical frameworks, propose a vision of
materiality that evokes “ecological postmodernism”5 and stirs up questions of ontology
and politics as they are conveyed, for example, by Bruno Latour’s non-modern onto-
epistemology (We Have Never Been Modern). Among others, Bennett engages in a
conversation with Deleuze and Guattari, Spinoza, Dewey, and Bergson, whereas
Alaimo shapes her vision in a theoretical exchange with Barad, Haraway, Pickering,
and Beck. Abram approaches the question of materiality from a quite different angle.
As in The Spell of the Sensuous, the main theoretical referent is phenomenology. But
here the horizon is somehow richer: more or less explicitly, Abram’s mind-body
monism entails conceptualizations from Bateson’s ecology of mind, from Damasio’s
neurological theory of consciousness, from Lakoff’s theory of metaphors, and from
Varela and Maturana’s autopoiesis, among others. From a non-dualistic perspective
Abram stresses the concrete links between life and language, mind and sensorial
perception, allowing for the kinship between out-side and in-side, the mind and the
world.
The conceptual sky of multiple constellations exemplified by these three books is
the horizon of a methodological hypothesis here called ‘material ecocriticism.’ This
hypothesis follows and in some way radicalizes Alaimo’s consideration that “ecocriti-
cism must develop modes of analysis that do not continue to emphasize the ‘distinction
between text and world’ … but instead reveal the environmental traces within all texts”
(Bodily Natures 8). The abovementioned works and perspectives constitute a source of

5
On “ecological postmodernism” see Serpil Oppermann, “Theorizing Ecocriticism,” and her
contribution to this volume.
56 Serenella Iovino

conceptual references that, enriched with further considerations on narrative ethics and
cultural ecology, can impact environmental literary studies in an unprecedented way.6

2. A Material Turn in Ecocriticism

Along with the philosophical conceptualizations of the material turn, material ecocriti-
cism heeds materiality as the constitutive element of ecological relationships, exploring
the entanglements between material configurations and the emergence of meanings. As
an interpretive practice, it concentrates on the links between matter and text, and in so
doing it shifts its focus from nature to matter.
Such an approach appears decisive in reshaping ecocritical directions. In fact, the
turn to the ‘material’ potentially brings ecocriticism not only ‘beyond nature writing,’
but also ‘beyond nature,’ namely beyond a vision associating nature by and large with
human-centered and often dualistic concepts such as the ‘other-than-culture,’ ‘wilder-
ness,’ or the ‘environment.’ In this vision, the notion of ‘environment’ (a surrounding
materiality in which individuals beings arise) is displaced by the interplay of material
subjects. For material ecocriticism ‘nature’ is rather equated with substance, the nature
of things, and a continuing process of dynamic materialization and differentiation over
time and space: it is what Alfred North Whitehead saw as a “continuous stream of
occurrence” (172), and Deleuze and Guattari defined as a “pure plane of immanence …
upon which unformed elements and materials dance” (255).7
In this framework, ecocriticism acquires apt theoretical tools to read authors and
works that have long been ‘resisting’ an ecocritical interpretation, for example the
‘narrative of immanence’ in writers such as Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Italo Cal-
vino, Clarice Lispector, etc. Or, again, the ancient tradition of Perì Physeos, physico-
philosophical narratives that, describing nature as a substance and as process of becom-
ing (physis from phyein, “to become,” natura from nasci, “to be born”), cannot be
adequately interpreted within the conceptual horizon of first-wave ecocriticism. We can
also add to these examples the scientific works of the classical German Naturphiloso-
phie: Goethe, Novalis, Herder, Blumenbach—authors who attempt to redefine the
dialectical relationships between forms and forces in nature, introducing new premises
for a holistic ontology.
Also interesting in this perspective is a discourse about matter and imagination.
Connected to the ancient vision of the ‘phantasia’ as a generative property of bodies, the
idea of imagination as a ‘mode’ of matter is a key topic in proto-scientific narratives
like those of the Renaissance or eighteenth century scientific poetry. In Erasmus
Darwin’s poems, for instance, imagination appeared as a “spontaneous and God-free
stream of self-representation, a formative drive that exists in things, or an ‘objective
imagination’” (Valsania 344). This theme is also crucial in David Abram’s phenomeno-

6
For an overview on the new materialisms and a discussion of the recent publications about this
topic, see my bibliographic essay, “Steps to a Material Ecocriticism.”
7
As Karen Barad posits, matter-nature “is always already an ongoing historicity,” and the world
itself is “an open process of mattering” (Meeting 151, 141). In other words, nature is a metaphysi-
cal ground of generativity that emerges in single events.
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 57

logical ecology. According to this approach, imagination, like mind or psyche, is a

“visceral experience of the world,” an “impersonal awareness” in which “our variously
sensitive bodies are situated” (Abram, Becoming 288, 272). In this all-encompassing
material-ideal dimension, intelligence is not “a strictly centralized” human phenomenon
but “a luminous quality of the earth,” and the earth itself is “a terrain filled with
imagination” (188, 132, 270-71). This provides us with an original interpretive key to
understanding the discourse of wilderness, of nature writing, of place narrative.8 In fact,
tracing the embodiments of mind in the “wildness of things” (111), a material-ecocriti-
cal approach proposes a vision of wilderness as a more-than-human entanglement of
bodies, a “state of mind” (82) in which we are “carnally immersed”: “What if mind is
not ours, but is Earth’s? … What if like the hunkered owl, and the spruce bending above
it, and the beetle staggering from needle to needle on that branch, we all partake of the
wide intelligence of this world?” (123).9
Capturing ontology into the orbit of ecocriticism and shifting the focus from ‘nature
as an essence’—whether a wilderness opposed to culture, or a natural normativity—to
‘nature as a substance’ (cf. Morton 16-18) sheds light on an important difference to
some essentialist tendencies of first-wave ecocriticism: the essentialist ontology of
nature might be dualistic, while the ontology of matter is per definition non-dualistic.
Material ecocriticism assumes an ontology that does not postulate moral normativity in
nature, thus not incurring naturalistic fallacies. In fact, unlike some first-wave affinities
for a tradition of nature writing (from John Muir to Edward Abbey, to quote but two
names) instrumental to creating a chasm between ‘wild’ and ‘cultivated,’ and as a result
between nature and the human, the ontological turn of material ecocriticism stays on a
philosophical and epistemological ground that implies horizontality as an actual feature
of existence: “The task at hand for humans is to find a more horizontal representation of
the relation between human and nonhuman actants in order to be more faithful to the
style of action pursued by each” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 98). This is a response to an
anti-anthropocentrism built on rhetorical essentialisms about nature and on romanti-
cized views of ecology as a scientific mirror of nature’s supposedly moral ‘laws.’

3. Matter as Text: Embodied Reality as a Site of Narrativity

In the previous section I have tried to outline the conceptual implications of material
ecocriticism along with its possible applications to narrative texts that can be defined as
‘narratives of matter’: poetical and philosophical texts about nature, and narratives
about the material dynamics of reality. But material ecocriticism questions, in a way,
the very idea of ‘narrative text.’ In fact, beside the interpretation of matter in texts,
material ecocriticism concentrates on matter as a text. At this further and more
theoretically relevant level of critical analysis, reality is read as a material text, as a site

8
For an application of ‘material imagination’ to bioregional narratives, see Iovino, “Restoring.”
9
Besides being poetically evocative, this image of a materially “diffused mind” resonates with
recent research in biological sciences, like that of a ‘wood-wide web,’ according to which plants
create networks, exchange electrical and chemical signals, and enter in co-operative arrange-
ments. See Giovannetti et al.; Helgason et al.
58 Serenella Iovino

of narrativity, a storied matter. If discourse and meaning are co-extensive in the con-
stitution of matter, reality can be discovered as an array of stories, an “onto-tale” in
which “everything is … alive” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 117). This “onto-tale,” which
we could explain as an auto-biography, a self-representation of matter-nature in its
multifaceted embodiments, is at the same time an “alter-tale.” It is a “counter-story”
intended to redeem the inner “enchantment” of things, whose vitality—suppressed by
the “cultural narrative of disenchantment”—can inspire in the human subject a deeper
(ethical, emotional, cognitive) participation in the worldly emergences of forms and
bodies (see Bennett, Enchantment 8, 4).
Material ecocriticism adapts this vision by regarding material configurations as
texts. This is explicitly a reversal of a deconstructionist perspective. Considering
matter-nature as a process of embodied dynamical emergences in which a field of
meaning is entailed, material ecocriticism proposes “to interpret ‘there is no outside of
language’ as ‘there is no outside of nature’” (Kirby 83). Material ecocriticism amplifies
and enhances the narrative potentialities of reality in terms of an intrinsic performativity
of elements. At the same time, it broadens the range of narrative agencies, making it a
“posthuman performativity,” whereby “posthuman” replaces the human/nonhuman du-
alism and overcomes it in a more dialectic and complex dimension (see Barad, “Posthu-
manist”). Posthumanism is a way of seeing agency that does not emphasize the single
agents but their inextricable connection in “a new relational ontology” (Oppermann,
“Feminist Ecocriticism”). Material ecocriticism sees this performativity at work in the
“thick of things”: stories, bodies, landscapes, bacteria, assemblages, quantum entangle-
ments, waste dumps, animal testing, cyborgs, cheese, nuclear sites, art, time, nature. It
is, we could also say, a posthumanist performativity in its narrative disclosures (Picker-
ing 8; see also Iovino, “Toxic Epiphanies”).
This co-extensive map of being and narrativity implies a reconfiguration of the
ethical and political space. As suggested by Jane Bennett’s “vital materialism,”
complementing the anthropocentric idea of “agent” with Latour’s notion of “actant” and
switching from causal linearity to “emergent causality” opens a more co-operative and
horizontal vision of reality, reducing the ontological distance between the human and
the nonhuman: “Materiality is a rubric that tends to horizontalize the relations between
humans, biota, and abiota” (Bennett, Vibrant Matter 112). The political consequences
of this horizontalism are co-dependency, enlargement of the horizon of accountability
beyond the linear visions of human intersubjectivity, and awareness of the complex
landscape of actants in which human action is situated:

Vital materialism … reminds humans of the very radical character of the (fractious)
kinship between the human and the nonhuman. My ‘own’ body is material, and yet this
materiality is not fully or exclusively human. … In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not
enough to say that we are ‘embodied.’ We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different
kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes. If more people marked this fact more of the
time, … could we continue to produce and consume in the same violently reckless ways?
(Bennett, Vibrant Matter 112-13)

This leads us to a further consideration. If embodiment is the site where “vibrant mat-
ter” performs its narratives, and if human embodiment is a problematic entanglement of
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 59

agencies, the body is a privileged subject for material ecocriticism: Opening the patterns
of agency to the structural interplay between the human and the nonhuman, corporeal
matter is crucial to overcoming the idea of an ‘inert’ matter positioned as antithetical to
free human agency.
In a more specific eco-narrative sense the body, revealing the reciprocal interferen-
ces of organisms, ecosystems, and humanly made substances (“xenobiotics,” see Alai-
mo, Bodily Natures 113-40), is a material palimpsest in which ecological and existential
relationships are inscribed “in terms of flourishing or … illness” (Wheeler 12). This
becomes strikingly evident when “individuals and collectives must contend not only
with the materiality of their very selves, but with the often invisibly hazardous
landscapes of risk society” (Alaimo, Bodily Natures 17). Alaimo’s idea of “trans-
corporeality” is crucial here (see her “Trans-corporeal Feminisms”). Trans-corporeality
is a model of dynamic concurrence, permeability, and “interconnected agencies” of
material substances and discursive practices. Highlighting the role of the often
undetectable material forces, or “flows of substances … between people, places, and
economic/political systems” (Bodily Natures 21, 9), trans-corporeality conveys an
interesting vision of the ecological model of interconnections.
The image of the ‘toxic body’ epitomizes this discourse, and is also useful for
disclosing the socio-ontological implications of environmental justice. As Alaimo
explains, casting discriminatory practices like racism “as environmental exposes how
sociopolitical forces generate landscapes that infiltrate human bodies” (Bodily Natures
28). An exploration of the “physiological effects” of class (and racial) oppression
demonstrates that “the biological and the social cannot be considered separate spheres”
(28). In the foreground here is not the organic nature of these bodies and practices, but
their inextricable coexistence, and their co-presence in the same (more or less visible,
recognizable, or predictable) causal complex: “the material self cannot be disentangled
from networks that are simultaneously economic, political, cultural, scientific, and
substantial” (20). The body, in this perspective, is “an open system” whose interplay
with its environment shapes “the trajectory of disease and health” that correlates with
material-discursive patterns of social behavior and social unevenness (Coole and Frost
18).10
Trans-corporeality, and the attention paid to corporeal interchanges in general, thus
offers a conceptual framework for analyzing ‘toxic discourse,’ at the same time pro-
viding a broader set of critical concepts for understanding the environmental justice dis-
course and environmental risk literature.11 In fact, it seconds a shift from a still
anthropocentric and dualistic model (one that hypostatizes political practices or
concepts like ethnicity, and takes ‘the environment’ as a juxtaposed externality in which
humans dwell and conflict) to a model that includes a wider number of subjects and

10
Coole and Frost refer to studies pointing to the “suggestive correlations between the demo-
graphics of criminal behavior and the geographic distribution of industrial pollutants. Inasmuch as
the aggregated effects of environmental toxins can be shown to have deleterious effects upon
judgment and behavior, the implication is that cleaning up the environment or changing diet may
be more efficacious than incarcerating disaffected urban youth” (18).
11
On “toxic discourse” as a critical model of interpretation for narratives of environmental justice
and ecological risk, see Buell, “Toxic Discourse”; Future 15.
60 Serenella Iovino

causal agents, introducing issues of ontology, epistemology, and posthuman ethics. In

this context, the ‘body politic’ also stretches its field of meaning beyond the metaphoric
dimension. The political body is a material-discursive construction, a physical and
cultural body composed of other bodies that interact, interplay, and affect each other in
multiple ways. On this bodily landscape of manifold agencies, ecological risk and crisis
appear with their many faces, some of them directly connected to a country’s social
structures and material power relations, others concretely incorporated in the forms such
structures and relations assume within the historically stratified ecologies of places.
Extending the famous first law of ecology (“everything is connected to everything
else”12) beyond the realm of eco-systemic relationships, the notion of trans-corporeality
recognizes the co-extensiveness of multiple ecologies (nature, society, politics, culture),
confirming Guattari’s assumption that “nature cannot be separated from culture” (29):
in the contemporary world, social ecology, the ecology of ideas, and the health of eco-
systems are structurally entangled. If, as Guattari concludes, “in order to comprehend
these interactions … we must learn to think transversally” (29), trans-corporeality as a
“thinking across bodies” highlights the transversal dynamics of these entangled
ecologies, putting them in a material-narrative framework. Material ecocriticism traces
these material narratives not only in literary works (for example in literary works about
ecological catastrophes, environmental illness, and risk society), but also in the bodies
themselves, and in the intersections between bodies and places.
Besides narratives of matter, conveyed in bodies and things, material ecocriticism
focuses on languages of matter. Not only does it scrutinize the mutual influence be-
tween linguistic constructs and material practices, but it sees matter as a site of produc-
tion and embodiment of signs. Hence the importance of disciplines that, like bio- and
eco-semiotics, investigate signs and meanings as material properties of organisms. For
instance, ecosemiotics, “the study of the semiotic interrelations between organisms and
their environments” (Noth 333), assumes that the relationship between organisms and
their environments (whether organic or non-organic) is always of a semiotic nature; in
other words, there are “natural” (we could also say, “material”) signs mediating
between an organism and its environment. This view questions and even rejects the
concept of the “semiotic threshold” and shifts attention from a “homo semioticus” to an
“organismus semioticus” (Noth 332-43).
The idea of “natural” systems of signs inscribed in the material fabric of organisms
and environments makes ecosemiotics a potentially interesting field of inquiry for
material ecocriticism, one endowed not only with theoretical but also with ethical
reverberations. Analyzing “signs and significance” in all living forms, eco- and bio-
semiotics offer us a “new language” (Wheeler 19), an entry into “the speech of things”
(Abram, Becoming 159). As Wendy Wheeler posits, our evolution is coded in a material
“process of symbio-genetic co-operative communication (from the cell all the way up)”
(13). This “co-operative communication” occurs amongst our “bodyminds—… whole
creatures embodied in an environment which also is really a part of us” (18). The more
the language/agency of these bodyminds is “socially and physically recognized,” the
more “semiotic freedom” there is (18). In other words, material-semiotic freedom is

12
“Everything is connected to everything else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms
and what affects one, affects all” (Commoner 33).
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 61

related not to humans only, but rather to the collective association of humans and
nonhumans. This freedom is subordinated to the possibility of realizing systems of “co-
operative communication,” and has therefore ethical and cognitive implications. As
Timo Maran observes: “we live together in relation with other semiotic subjects. By
being able to create meaningfully organized subjective worlds of their own, which may
be rather different from ours, they hold the position to address us, to question us, and to
enter into dialogical relations with us. These relations are essential for making us hu-
man” (470). The horizon of material ecocriticism is that of a material-semiotic freedom,
of an ecology of mind and of imagination understood as embodied processes that are
created and re-created in essential co-implication with nonhuman subjects and forms.
Another important analysis of “matter as text” comes from considering the environ-
mental relationships between humans and land as material “choreographies of becom-
ing” (Coole and Frost 10). As a set of signs embodying the mutual modifications of
human and non-human life, the landscape is an atlas of these relational choreographies.
In that it conveys the entanglements of social and power relations, biological balances,
and the material shaping of spaces and territories, the landscape is, in fact, a set of
material-discursive configurations. Material ecocriticism relates therefore to landscapes
as material narratives of a society’s physical and cultural transformations. Artistic ex-
pressions like landscape and land art can also be framed in this conceptual horizon.
Finally, a material perspective becomes a very fruitful exegetical device for reading
concretely “dissonant” agencies and presences: for instance, waste. Like landscape,
waste is a text signaling a society’s material and discursive relations of power, and can
therefore be analyzed as a form of “material text.”13

4. Text as Matter: The Text in Its “Dynamic” Materiality

The final level of the interpretive paradigm proposed by material ecocriticism is related
to the text taken in its materiality: the text as matter. This has a double meaning: on the
one side, in fact, the text—the book, the film, the work of art, any cultural product in
general—is evidently a material object, and as such it is entrenched in a system of
material relationships of creation, production, and consumption. Like all the activities
connected to “the ways we … produce, reproduce, and consume our material
environment” (Coole and Frost 3), the material impact of texts can be examined and
measured in social, economic, and ecological terms, according to processes that can be
situated in the global industrial horizon of resource consumption, energy
transformation, waste production, market distribution, and the social connotations of
labor. But, on the other side, the materiality of the text is related to another ecological
aspect of a society’s life: its knowledge, its cultural representations, and its lifestyles.
From this standpoint, the text acts as an instrument apt to ‘fluidify’ ideas and cultural

13
For the importance of waste and dirt for material ecocriticism—a topic too broad to be further
investigated in this essay—see the forthcoming ISLE Special Cluster on “Material Ecocriticism:
Dirt, Waste, Bodies, Food, and Other Matter,” co-edited by Heather Sullivan and Dana Phillips.
On the ontology of waste, and its reverberations on a narrative ethics, see Iovino, “Naples 2008.”
62 Serenella Iovino

processes in a society’s life and material relations. And, in so doing, it becomes part of
a material-discursive epistemology.
Material ecocriticism considers the text in its material dynamics with the world—a
world seen both as bodily and cultural. Ecology of mind and cultural ecology provide
the theoretical framework for this vision. Based on a system of ‘cybernetic’ interactions
and causal loops between material world and textual reality, ecology of mind and
cultural ecology indicate a possible direction for bridging that gap between material and
discursive whose eradication was a foundational project of the new materialisms. In
their different methodological applications both ecology of mind and cultural ecology
reject the rigid dichotomy of material and discursive in all its classical forms: culture/
nature, mind/body, spirit/matter, self/nature.
Gregory Bateson, in particular, investigates cultural processes in their structural
coevolution and symmetry with natural processes. In a perspective that considers the
complexity of cultural processes as interdependent with the dynamics of life, but not as
substantially equivalent to them, Bateson sees the material and conceptual levels of
reality as unified in a “recursive communicative order”: the organization of the bio-
sphere, of interpersonal relationships and of cognitive mechanisms, are all part of a
feedback system that turns elementary information into complex structures. What
Bateson calls “ecology of mind” is therefore the fundamental unity of the human self
and the broader system of ecological organization. Here the mind is evidently not
considered as a subjective power operating inside our brain; it is seen instead as an
ecological function that mirrors the ineludible material interrelatedness between the self
and the environment (Bateson, Steps; Mind and Nature). This ‘ecological epistemo-
logy’—on which our survival depends—interprets the structure of natural order as a
communicative order, an order that has both material and ideal elements. In place of
subjective notions of creativity, Bateson introduces therefore a science of communi-
cation.
In the framework of a material-discursive epistemology, this has noteworthy impli-
cations. No science of communication “can avoid the ways in which information exhib-
its a combination of these two levels, material and ideal. In one sense, all information is
material in that news is carried by a sense-perceivable event.” As a result, our own
survival “depends on our understanding that not only are we coupled to how we
conceptualize ecological order but also to how we have embodied in our patterns of
relationship our epistemological ideas of nature.”14
Peter Finke’s and Hubert Zapf’s work on “cultural ecology” is a further articulation
of ecology of mind. Without falling into reductionist interpretations of cultural
phenomena as purely bio-evolutionary dynamics, cultural ecology sees discourse and
matter (“text and life”) as elements of a complex relation of “interdependence-yet-
difference” (Zapf, “Literary Ecology” 847, 851). The idea of culture as working
“functionally” and “structurally” as an ecosystem (Finke 189-92) and of literature as an
“ecological principle” and a “sensorium for the deficits and imbalances” within larger

14
These comments refer to Bateson’s The Pragmatic of Human Communication, and are taken
from one of the most accurate analyses of Bateson’s epistemology, namely Harries-Jones (75,
123). The chapter from which the quotation is taken is meaningfully entitled “Communication
and Its Embodiments.”
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 63

cultural discourses (Zapf, “State” 55, 49) involves a substantial continuity between
‘material’ and ‘ideal.’ As Hubert Zapf has written, cultural ecology “considers the
sphere of human culture not as separate from but as interdependent with and transfused
by ecological processes and natural energy cycles. At the same time, it recognizes the
relative independence and self-reflexive dynamics of cultural processes” (“Literary
Ecology” 851).
Even though the evolution of cultural processes is distinct from that of biological
systems, literature and other cultural forms can exercise a ‘material’ function in diffe-
rentiated cultural ecosystems because in these very cultural ecosystems the material and
the discursive are co-implied and interconnected. Only in a ‘continuous’ reality—one
characterized by the systemic reciprocity of material and conceptual elements—can the
language of literature directly impact society, its dynamics and the world, setting up
material-discursive dynamics in the evolution of cultural systems. We can therefore
imagine literature as a “balancing” ecological force, and as the ecological and ethical
“site of a constant, creative renewal of language, perception, communication, and
imagination” (Zapf, “State” 56). The continuity of discursive cultural practices and

ture, to an ‘ethics of textual cultures’: “This ecological function of literature involves
material ecological systems, of text and matter, leads to an ethical dimension of litera-

an ecological ethics … since it posits the interconnectedness of mind and body, text and
life, man and the nonhuman world as a necessary context of human responsibility”
(“Literary Ecology” 853).
Another development of Bateson’s theory useful for shedding light on material-
discursive dynamics is the interpretation of cultural ecology provided by Gernot and
Hartmut Böhme, who complement Bateson’s cultural ecology of the mind with a
cultural ecology of the body. In their view, cultural ecology concentrates on the
“triangular” bond between bodily experiences, their physical conditions (e.g. elemental
forces and cycles of nature), and their “translation” into linguistic expressions and
textual representations. Following a pathway indicated by Lakoff and Johnson, this
“cultural ecology of the body” focuses “on the ways in which human experiences are
expressed in language and discourse through elemental images, metaphors, and symbols
derived from the sensory intimacy of the human body’s exchange and interaction with
the environment” (Zapf, “Literary Ecology” 852; see Böhme; Böhme and Böhme).
Gernot Böhme has developed this approach into an “ecological aesthetics of nature”
which, as Zapf reminds us, “has an ethical dimension in the revaluation of the body and
of bodily perception and emotion as opposed to the dominant rationalistic, utilitarian
program of modernization that marginalizes such values and experiences” (852).
Considering it as a complex of ecological functions, cultural ecology ‘materializes’
literature, encouraging therefore a sort of de-spiritualization of culture and cultural
artifacts. This is conducive not only to a more horizontal and inclusive ecological
vision, but also to enabling processes of self-awareness, and thus of liberation and
social evolution. From this standpoint, the text plays a crucial role in conveying cultural
values into a society’s life and material relations. This does not mean simply that
literature has to be seen, as Marxist literary theory did, as the outcome of material
structures and productive systems. It means rather that literature and cultural forms can
exercise a ‘material’ function because they act in a differentiated cultural ecosystem in
which the material and the discursive are co-implied and interconnected. Viewed in this
64 Serenella Iovino

perspective, cultural ecology can help material ecocriticism to see the many levels in
which material and discursive elements are connected in the way literary texts impact
socio-cultural dynamics, at the same time pointing to the strategic effectuality of cultur-
al products in the structuring of reality.
Focusing on the ‘materiality’ of cultural processes and on its socio-ethical implica-
tions is also the premise for considering ‘narratives of matter’ in terms of narrative
ethics. If, as cultural practices, narratives are a site in which ethical meanings become
recognizable as part of a complex of material and discursive elements, in an ethical
perspective they are instrumental to shedding light onto meanings and values, and to
implementing an ethically constructive relationship between the reader and the world.
By revealing the inner discursivity of material reality, narratives not only discursively
enable our understanding of that reality, but interact in a non-deterministic way with it
and are useful tools for envisioning a strategy of recovery for material and ideal
dynamics.15 If we consider material ecocriticism as a complex of embodied practices
that thinks “the discursive and the physical, knowledge and being, and texts and
contexts together in a confluent way” (Oppermann, “Ecocriticism’s Phobic Relations”
770), narrative ethics becomes finally a way to incorporate values into actions. Through
their representation in narrative forms, these values are in fact essential to transforming
words into the world or, as Paul Ricœur would say, to move from text to action.

5. Extending the Moral Imagination

Coherent with these premises, the ethical model that emerges from the material turn is a
‘material ethics.’ It is an ethics based on the co-extensive materiality of human, nonhu-
man, and natural subjects, in a perspective which necessarily implies moral horizont-
ality; and it is an ethics focused on the way discursive constructions and material bodies
interplay in given socio-political contexts. All this opens up a very ‘concrete’ dimen-
sion—‘concrete’ in the Hegelian sense of the mutual merging of idea and reality. A
material ethics is an ethics that considers the levels of embodiment of the concept into
material reality, and vice versa: the way matter (as bodies, natures, forms of existence)
is conceptualized in and modeled by discursive practices. It analyses the way intercon-
nected agencies and interconnected discourses shape a material reality in which “elabo-
rate, colossal human practices, extractions, transformations, productions, and emis-
sions” are inextricably entangled (Alaimo, Bodily Natures 21). In its moral stance,
material ecocriticism takes this entanglement as the very cipher of existential
configurations, and re-elaborates the horizon of human action according to a more
complex, plural, and interconnected geography of forces and subjects.
Another point is worth a closer examination here. Talking of ‘materiality’ also
involves a resurgence of praxis, a shift of the hub of ethical rationality from principles
to practices. As Alaimo and Hekman explain, practices are by definition “embodied,
situated actions” that “unfold in time and take place in particular contexts” (7-8). Unlike
abstract principles, they “do not seek to extend themselves over and above material

15
For a more detailed discussion of “narrative ethics,” see in particular Iovino, “Ecocriticism,”
“Naples 2008,” and “Restoring.”
 Material Ecocriticism: Matter, Text, and Posthuman Ethics 65

realities, but instead emerge from them, taking into account multiple material conse-
quences” (8). Working on various forms of ‘narratives of matter,’ material ecocriticism
puts emphasis on the ethical dimension of the bonds between language and matter, for
example in terms of representation of political values, citizenship, and different social
agencies. As a consequence, the discourse of materiality signifies a potential interaction
with ‘social matter’ by way of education, stimulating awareness and conscious percep-
tion. Material ecocriticism, in this framework, has the ethico-cognitive potential to
upgrade our sensitivity to, and to refine our understanding of, what we call ‘nature’ and
what we call ‘society’ by showing the multiplicity of subjects involved in this big
pattern of material-discursive agencies. This kind of approach points to the role of
material agents in the way we understand political and cultural processes: no adequate
cultural discourse that aims to provoke a change in society “can ignore the importance
of the bodies in situating empirical actors within a material environment of nature, other
bodies, and the socioeconomic structures that dictate where and how they find
sustenance, satisfy their desires, or obtain the resources necessary for participating in
political life” (Coole and Frost 19).
Re-negotiating the boundaries of narrative agency has momentous consequences for
the ethical discourse of posthumanism. In fact, it encourages a better understanding not
only of the human place in evolution—“we are walking, talking mineral” (Vernadsky,
qtd. in Bennett, Vibrant Matter 11)—but also of matter as a form of emergent agency
that is combined and interferes with every intentional human agency: none of our
intentional acts is limited to the sphere of pure intentionality, but such acts always
situate themselves within a setting of co-emerging material configurations.16 The aware-
ness that no intentional action is ever outside this world of material configurations can
help us refine our ethical categories. It can provide the conditions for a “more hospita-
ble” posthuman ethics emerging “from evolutionary paradigms that recognize the ma-
terial interrelatedness of all being, including the human” (Alaimo, Bodily Natures 151).
Material ecocriticism provides a literacy for an evolved political ecology based on an
extended understanding of our being, knowing, and acting. It aims to enlarge the bran-
ches of our family tree, retracing more extended genealogies, and therefore enriching
our stories with more stories, with meanings emerging from the material configurations
that preceded our existence or that are with our existence in a relation of mutual
conditioning. In this sense, showing and speaking the connections and ‘family-ties’
within material realities, material ecocriticism becomes a good response to ecophobic
cultures, namely, to cultures that posit and practice a radical contempt for every form of
otherness, and that are characterized by a “pathological inability to see connections”
(Estok 9).
The ontological vision of the material turn is the picture of a world of inter-connect-
ed dynamics. It is a real—concrete, material—posthumanist picture, in which different
forms and sources of agency feed each other, resulting in constellations of things, lives,
events, and concepts. From this picture, a different image of the human emerges, more
similar to a process than to an accomplished reality. As Vicky Kirby has written, being

16
Patterns of material agency follow what can be called “emergent causality,” a “dicey” process
“irreducible to efficient causality,” and by which “new entities and processes periodically surge
into being” (Connolly 179; see 178-200).
66 Serenella Iovino

human results from “queer entanglements” (93): far from being isolated and ‘pure,’ it is
always mixed with the nonhuman, always in progress. In fact, the more the human
interacts with the nonhuman, whether producing scientific apparatuses or eating GM
food, the more the ‘nature’ of humanity changes.
Considered in ethical terms, being human is a project rather than a standpoint. For
this reason we do need to rethink humanism. We do need to reshape the categories of
humanism, not only recognizing the inescapable role of the nonhuman in the making of
the human, but also the impossibility of being, acting, and thinking in isolation from the
nonhuman. In this universe, we are already and always posthuman in the sense of
“ontologically relational,” and this has ethical implications: “the more nonhumans share
existence with humans, the more humane a collective is” (Latour, Pandora’s Hope 18).
Material ecocriticism is a posthumanist cultural practice that implies a welcoming
humanism, one in which “the space of agency is not restricted to the possibilities for
human action” (Barad, Meeting 178) and in which “every being that matters is a
congeries of its formative histories,” a site full of “permanently emerging things”
(Haraway 2).
With its sense of agential kinships, material ecocriticism wants to “help build on-
going stories rather than histories that end” (Haraway 1). This vision entails a sense of
ontological and historical humility, an ethics of social hope, and a new moral imagina-
tion. On this open ground, humans share their narrative horizon with other subjects and
other things, aware that the effort to listen to the world in the entirety of its voices is
essential to the very project of being humans. This, too, is a possible remedy to the fears
that concerned Lucretius in his poem on the power of “everlasting matter” to save all
things from their demise.

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