Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature

Front matter

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Literatures, Cultures, and the Environment

Contents

1 Introduction: African American Environmental Knowledge at Niagara

PartI Foundations: Antebellum African American Environmental Knowledge

2 Claiming (through) Space: Topographies of Enslavement, the Literary Heterotopia of the Underground Railroad, and the Co-agency of the Non-human

CHAPTER 1 Introduction: African American Environmental Knowledge at Niagara

After his escape from slavery in 1838, Frederick Douglass not only turned himself into the mystically brilliant orator we celebrate until today, but also became widely travelled in the northern and mid-western parts of the United States. Settling down in the fugitive haven of New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he changed his name, joined the AME Zion Church, and subscribed to William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, Douglass began working as a general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1841. While his ensuing travels, which took him as far as Ohio, Indiana, and ultimately across the Atlantic to Great Britain, have been welldocumented by biographers and historians, what has largely escaped notice so far is a visit Douglass paid to Niagara Falls in 1843.' Apparently fascinated with this icon of “Nature’s Nation,” Douglass recounts his first impression of the cataracts in an “Anti-Slavery Album of Contributions From Friends of Freedom” of the Western Abolitionist Society in a handwritten note dated “Aug 2d 1843” as follows:

When I came into its awful presence the power of discription [sic!] failed me, an irresistible power closed my lips completely, charmed I stood with eyes fixed, all, all absorbed.—Scarcely conscious of my own existence, I felt as I never felt before. The heavy trees all around me quivered the ground trembled,—the mighty rocks shook!—as its awful roar gave them its terrible mandate. My courage quailed. In unison with tree rock hill and water, I trembled totally subdued I stood in solemn reverance. The awful God—was there! (Douglass, “Niagara” 184)?

© The Author(s) 2023 1 M. Klestil, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American

The passage, at first sight, appears strikingly similar to the responses of Douglass’s Euro-American contemporaries. It is oozing with sublime rhetoric, as it includes the common reference to God, displays stock vocabulary of a multi-sensorial experience that witnessing the cataracts entailed (“awful roar”; “with eyes fixed”), and involves a rhetoric that presents Niagara Falls as transcending representability (“the power of discription [sic!] failed me”). Moreover, Douglass’s note exposes a typical reflection on preconceptions while or before witnessing Niagara’s monumental nature:

I went to this wonderful place with the most lofty expec[ta]tions. I had heard—read—thought and felt much in regard to it. I had frequently gazed with extreme delight upon its mini[a]ture I longed to go behold the original. In my imagination, I had often seen its broad-blue waters rushing on amidst the dim-dark gloom of its own creation—toward the awful cataract—threatening total distruction [sic!] to any power interposing a barrier to its onward progress. Its in[s ]piration of beauty—grandness—wonder and terror (long before I saw it) danced sportively in my soul [...]. (183)

These lines reveal not only how quickly and impressively Douglass had familiarized himself with dominant aesthetic conventions of his day. Moreover, they highlight his engagement with the idea of the visitor’s (and his own*) preconceptions, which was characteristic of a Niagara discourse that began to flourish from the 1830s on. As the site lost its remoteness with the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, travelers’ accounts increasingly came to weigh their witnessing of the natural spectacle against their anticipatory imaginations and assessed their actual experience both positively in terms of exceeding admiration and negatively in terms of disappointment.* Even as Douglass’s text moves exclusively in the former, more appreciative, direction, his note in this respect embraces yet another characteristic facet of Niagara writing. It seems, so far, a prototypical example of antebellum sublime discourse on Niagara Falls.

Significantly, however, Douglass adds a distinctive element to his portrayal by inserting a game-changing sentence: “As I approached it [Niagara Falls] I felt somewhat as I did at the approaching how [sic!], when for the first time I was to stand on free soil. And breath free air” (183). At the interstice between revealing his preconceived idea of Niagara Falls and representing his encounter of the cataracts, Douglass thereby explicitly draws attention to his former enslavement by analogizing the experience of overcoming slavery with a sublime experience of Niagara. The distinctiveness in perspective that results from this strategy of adding a more self-referential dimension to his record of encountering Niagara interrupts a process of transcendence and a universalism characteristic of the sublime as a concept, which was “not restricted to value judgments,” but also described “a state of mind” (Shaw 1). The sublime, after all, emerged as a category and marker of enlightened humanity and implied a form of humanizing universalism that “naturalized” the sublime experience of sites like Niagara Falls as characteristically human experience." In his note, Douglass sets himself apart from this (supposed) universalism of the sublime by introducing the particular perspective of one who had been enslaved and whose enslavement had been justified by a de-humanizing racialization. Likening the experience of “standing on free soil” for the first time to experiencing Niagara’s sublime nature marks sublime sentiment and language as socially conditioned. Douglass’s intervention deflates a supposed universalism, de-naturalizes the sublime with respect to Niagara Falls, and grounds the sublime within social experience, hinting at its constructedness and “whiteness” as a rhetorical mode and aesthetic category that racialized experiences of nature. By inserting his experience within the social as significantly shaping his experience of the non-human natural, and implying that an unmarked and seemingly universal but thereby privileged position postulated in the sublime must also always be a construed one, Douglass’s note signifies on the sublime, strategizes its rhetoric, and simultaneously celebrates and politicizes Niagara’s nature from an African American perspective.

Almost 60 years later, another African American writer, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, places Niagara Falls at the center of one of his texts. In “The Passing of Grandison,” part of the celebrated short story collection The Wife of His Youth (1899), the North Carolinian author of mixed racial heritage employs Niagara not merely as background and setting, but as a vital part of his narrative strategy. The story, a trickster narrative set in antebellum times, proceeds straightforward enough, as a seemingly omniscient voice relates how a well-off adolescent Southerner, Dick Owens, attempts to win the heart of a belle, Charity Lomax, by secretly running off one of his father’s (Colonel Owens) enslaved to the North. As Charity dares him to do “something heroic,” Dick sets out for the Free states with Grandison, a trusted enslaved individual whom the Colonel deems “abolitionist-proof” (111, 116). They travel through New York and Boston where every effort to entice Grandison to take his freedom fails, and finally reach Niagara Falls, where, Dick hopes, once they arrive on the Canadian side, Grandison will realize “that he is actually free” and will “stay” (120). He seems, however, mistaken once more as Grandison’s response to his young master’s “raising his voice above the roar of the cataract” to propose the enslaved’s legally being free, is a mere uneasy “Let’s go back ober de ribber, Mars Dick” (121). As a last resort, young Owens, the text suggests,° pays locals to abduct Grandison while sound asleep on Niagara’s shore. Dick’s last view of Grandison before setting out for his journey home is “the familiar form of his servant stretched out on the ground, his face to the sun, his mouth open sleeping the time away oblivious alike to the grandeur of the scenery, the thunderous roar of the cataract, or the insidious voice of sentiment” (122).

At this point, Chesnutt’s story portrays an enslaved African American’s relation to Niagara that seems almost diametrically opposed to Douglass’s openly revering perspective. Here is an individual apparently perfectly unimpressed by Niagara’s sublime nature; Grandison is depicted as “turning his eyes away from the grand and awe-inspiring spectacle that lay close at hand, [...] looking anxiously toward the inn where his master sat cursing his ill-timed fidelity” (122). Looking after the master appears to negate the capacity of recognizing and appreciating the beauties of (sublime) nature. In representing a denial of visual and aural contact as a sign of Grandison’s supposed obliviousness to the magnificence of Niagara as well as a human urge for freedom, Chesnutt’s text, on the one hand, echoes a racialized antebellum discourse that categorically excluded African Americans from representing Niagara Falls—and non-human nature generally—in terms of the sublime.” Reaching back to Jefferson’s infamous claim that there was “no poetry” in blacks, this longstanding violent discourse insinuated not only a black body and mind’s incapacity of “culture” and “civilization,” but by extension also of “cultured” or “civilized” perceptions of nature, a view that is entangled with the Colonel’s “faith in sable humanity” as an “obedient” race in need of guidance (126). On the other hand, it is exactly this notion that Chesnutt’s story exposes in its falseness by presenting an unforeseen plot development: after his abduction (or perhaps better, in light of Chesnutt’s ambivalence, his “disappearance”) at Niagara, Grandison initially returns to the South only to escape with his entire family to Northern territory three weeks later. The story ends with a first-rate deception of a slaveholder; Colonel Owens first rejoices in the (supposed) “rescue” of Grandison from abolitionists, only to shake “his fist impotently” at a band of fugitives aboard a steamboat headed for Canada in the closing scene (125; 127).

Chesnutt’s narrative strategy both undermines the knowledge of the master and suggests a hidden knowledge of the enslaved that, in this text, centrally involves Niagara’s nature. The story’s play with the masters’ and the enslaved’s knowledge works via creating a specific relation between the text’s levels of discours and histoire. On the level of discours, Chesnutt employs a voice that appears to be omniscient yet turns out to be limited as it focalizes solely through the master’s perspective. As readers encounter a heterodiegetic narrative voice that sounds reliable and objective, also because it seemingly satisfies (yet eventually mocks) generic conventions of the romance and the plantation tradition (cf. Cutter 51-53), they are tricked into perceiving the story exclusively from the point of view of Colonel Owens and his son. On the level of histoire, however, the last turn of events marks the existence of a knowledge of the enslaved that has been there all along but has remained veiled and silenced so far. In perplexing ways, it becomes clear to readers only in the end that Grandison was pursuing an ingenious scheme all along, as he could not bear leaving his family enslaved. Neither was he afraid of contact with abolitionists, whom he probably collaborated with in New York and Boston (possibly even earlier) to engineer collective liberation, nor did he feel contented in slavery. And by no means, Chesnutt implies, did he feel oblivious to the nature of Niagara, which is revealed as a significant place at last: here, Grandison for the first time gains the legal freedom that he envisions not only for himself but employs for attaining collective freedom for his extended family. Thus, Grandison’s escape, on the plot level, not only complicates passing into freedom as more than a binary, legal matter, but also highlights a broader epistemological conflict at the heart of the text and reveals what Chesnutt actually has to say, namely that antebellum masters—and those late-nineteenth-century readers who take their perspectives to be objective and reliable—have a very limited point of view and know only one side of the story. The other side is a hidden knowledge of (formerly) enslaved blacks that, through a narrative technique that involves the tricksterism of Chesnutt’s narrator as much as that of his titular character, suddenly bursts into visibility through a last turn of events and an ambivalent moment on Niagara’s shores.

In “The Passing of Grandison,” Niagara Falls therefore figures as a meaningful liminal space between bondage and freedom that emphasizes the intricate nature (in a double sense) of Emancipation precisely because it is mot visible as such from the perspective of the oppressor whose assumed dominance the story echoes through its focalization. It is significant, however, that Chesnutt’s text, by not addressing Niagara Falls through Grandison in the vocabulary of the sublime, goes beyond demonstrating a one-sidedness and inadequacy of the master’s knowledge, as it becomes complicit in hiding Niagara and its meaning and reflects the strategic veiling of Niagara as part of the secret network known as the Underground Railroad through its form. Eventually, it is in large part because Grandison went to Niagara and cunningly employed its hidden meanings and beauty that his escape becomes possible. Niagara is what helps open up his flight space and enables making arrangements for a collective flight, as “the underground railroad seemed to have had its tracks cleared and signals set for this particular train” (126).* The story is thus not only a prime example of how Chesnutt sought to realize his famous dictum to strategically “accustom the public to the idea” of racial equality (Chesnutt, Journals 140), but also becomes what Lawrence Buell calls an “environmental text” not by overt description of Niagara as sublime nature but by subversively ascribing central meaning to this place (cf. Imagination 6-8). Niagara Falls figures indeed “not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history,” yet it does so precisely because that “presence” is mot openly described from Grandison’s perspective in conventional terms or aesthetic frameworks such as the sublime (7). Paradoxically, Chesnutt’s text signifies through a strategic silence on a hidden African American knowledge about Niagara’s nature.

I begin with these two examples, representatives ofa broader nineteenth-century African American tradition of writing about Niagara,’ because they point to a host of broader questions that are central to this book, questions such as: how did nineteenth-century African American writers relate not only to Niagara but to the non-human natural world more generally? By what means did writers express relationships with non-human nature in a (written) literary tradition that emerged in the context of racial slavery and racialized discourses of “nature” and the “human” that sought to exclude them from the realm of the latter? Which aesthetic modes were employed, which literary spaces and tropes engaged, created, or transformed? How and where did the African American literary tradition, in other words, create its own places and patterns through which writers articulated and intertextually developed epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic ideas about and relations to nature, and how can we make those places and patterns visible?

Raising such questions, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s Niagara writings help clarify the scope and aims of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature as they represent the time frame and (some of) the kinds of material considered, and suggest how I wish to understand my primary texts and their engagements with the non-human natural world. First, they reflect the breadth of narrative texts considered in this study both historically, as they correspond with its two main parts on the antebellum period (Part I) and the latter decades of the nineteenth century (Part II), and with respect to treating material ranging from understudied texts (such as Douglass’s manuscript) to well-known ones (such as Chesnutt’s story). In Part I, I turn to antebellum African American writing (pamphlets, fugitive slave narratives) to sketch foundations of an African American environmental knowledge in a broader discourse analytic manner. Part II proceeds in a slightly different way by considering texts of the post-Emancipation era, in order to spotlight how writers like Charlotte Forten, William Wells Brown, Booker T. Washington, and Charles W. Chesnutt “signified” (Gates) on foundational African American environmental knowledge to articulate their ideas about the future of African America. Through material ranging from fugitive slave narratives and pamphlets, to a mid-nineteenth-century journal, autobiography, and fiction, this book suggests new places for recovering an African American ecoliterary tradition as well as some lines along which such a tradition developed, in order to provide new directions and input for further research in both ecocriticism and African American studies. While ecocriticism (still) needs to further expand its canon (and it is my belief that African American literature and literary theory will have to play a vital role in this), this study also demonstrates how African American studies may benefit from ecocritical approaches to uncover new facets of canonical and find value in understudied texts in ways that at the same time do not draw attention away from central issues of race and social justice.

Second, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s texts hint at how I view the primary texts treated in this study in the context of what could broadly be called the relation between (racial) politics and nature. Some of the general problems of reading African American literature from an environmentally oriented perspective have to do with the ways in which, from an African American studies perspective, writing about nature has oftentimes been taken either as a trivial or accommodationist form of art that directed attention away from the issue of racial justice, while, from an (often still too “white”) ecocritical perspective, ideas about what counts as environmental writing have left something of a suspicion against too “politically oriented” texts that (over-)emphasize trauma or alienation from nature at the expense of its appreciation. By contrast, Douglass’s and Chesnutt’s Niagara writings, like the other texts I consider in this study, reveal that nineteenth-century African American writing was often both (a form of) nature writing as well as political writing. Douglass’s antebellum critique of the sublime as well as Chesnutt’s late-nineteenth-century play with racialized perspectives both celebrate Niagara’s non-human nature in its own right and simultaneously expose and employ a strategic potential of writing about the non-human natural world. While paying close attention to forms of alienation stemming from the traumatic experiences of slavery or racism and to the ways in which they shaped writing about non-human nature, my treatment of the texts in this study therefore aims to show the many things nineteenth-century black writing about nature could be: it could be just that, a form of nature writing; it could be a vehicle for political thought; or it could be (as I found in most cases) both, in intricate ways adding strategic dimensions to environmental literary discourse. Accordingly, one important objective of Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature is not to read African American texts as concerned either with “race” or with “nature” (or as “natureless” or “raceless”). Rather, this book is driven by the perceived need to overcome such either-or thinking patterns, which, at a closer look, have more to do with (thereby potentially exclusionary) (eco)critical traditions than with an African American literary tradition itself. More often than not, the texts I consider do not envision depicting nature and writing about race as “competing” issues, but emphasize their importance as intertwined aspects that inform one another.

To achieve my aims of spotlighting places of environmentally oriented writing in nineteenth-century African American narrative literature and offering new directions for both ecocriticism and African American studies, the six thematic chapters of this book explore nineteenth-century African American writing through the lens of “environmental knowledge.” I combine ecocritical, Foucauldian, and African American literary theory, in particular Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s concept of signifying, to trace foundations and transformations of such knowledge in a literary tradition that, for a long time, has not been read as significantly concerned with nature, and that may not easily be read as “environmental” when looking through a traditional ecocritical lens. As one of the pioneering ecocritical studies on African American literature, Kimberly K. Smith’s African

American Environmental Thought (2007), puts it: “We may not discover a black Thoreau—nor should we expect to” (4). The latter part of the phrase is illuminating in the context of this project, in the sense that my research through the lens of environmental knowledge has been driven by an impulse mot to “expect” an African American literary tradition that would be easily identifiable as “environmental” in a conventional sense. How could we possibly assume that a nineteenth-century African American literary tradition would use frameworks, concepts, or genres commonly associated with environmental writing in the same way as mainstream writers, if such frameworks, concepts, and genres were intertwined with the culture that produced the violent de-humanizations that formed the backbone of slavery and racism?

To contribute to refuting the idea that this by extension means that there was no environmental literary tradition or that there is something of a “deficit” in this respect in nineteenth-century African American writing is the overall aim of this book. For this, Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature proposes to change the perspective, read against the grain, look with a difference. It proposes, to use Camille T. Dungy’s words, to “change the parameters of the conversation” in order to fulfill the imperative task of “bring[ing] more voices into the conversation about human interactions with the natural world” (xxi), by reading through the lens of environmental knowledge. The Niagara-texts by Douglass and Chesnutt, for example, highlight that an ecocritical reading of nineteenth-century African American literature must pay close attention to how writers strategically signified on dominant environmental literary modes and rhetoric, and must take into account how African American literature may speak environmentally with a difference, through silences, forms of strategic veiling, through what is at times half-hidden. It must ensure, in other words, a critical distance that allows for going beyond traditional ecocritical models and concepts in order to discover alternative African American frameworks, places, and patterns for expressing relations to non-human nature. To play with Toni Morrison’s succinct phrase from Playing in the Dark (1992), such an approach must “romance the green shadows” of this literary and cultural tradition to uncover literary African American environmental knowledge.'® If Morrison has proposed “reading black in white,” in the sense of tracing a Euro-American literary tradition for a subversively hidden Africanist presence, this book suggests ways of “reading green in black.” It explores an African American writing tradition for literary forms of environmental knowledge shaped by the history of race, mainstream environmental writing traditions, and distinctly African American forms of expression and intertextuality.

FOUCAULDIAN ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

Environmental Knowledge, Race, and African American Literature breaks new ground by employing Foucauldian theory to offer an alternative ecocritical perspective on nineteenth-century African American literature. Apart from using specific concepts such as heterotopia or panopticism, and tracing an environmental consciousness in nineteenth-century African American literature through Foucauldian dimensions, a Foucauldian ecocritical approach is rooted in a set of general premises. I want to slow down for a moment to briefly introduce these by providing a definition of “environmental knowledge.” In the context of this book, “environmental knowledge” means such formations of power-knowledge that negotiate and constitute the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions. Thus, three clarifications concerning terminology. Firstly, “environmental” in “environmental knowledge” is not to be confused with “environmental(ist)” in the sense in which the term is broadly used today. I do not mean to suggest, in other words, an African American “environmental(ist) activism” or “movement” for the period under consideration. Rather than that, I employ the term “environment/al” in its more general and more original sense of non-human and not humanly built material “surroundings” or “conditions.”!!

Secondly, “environmental knowledge” is not the same as what has sometimes been referred to as “indigenous” or “local” knowledge, that is, forms of knowledge that developed in response to specific regions or that were developed by a particular, largely homogeneous, group of people.” African American environmental knowledge did develop (and was expressed in the writing tradition) to a significant extent in response to specific locales in the New World, especially, as will be seen, in the context of the U.S. South. However, to think in this respect of an “indigenous” knowledge would not only be outright cynical to the extent that it refers to a forcibly displaced, enslaved, ethnically and culturally diverse diasporic group. Moreover, referring to African American environmental knowledge as “local” knowledge would falsely imply discursive formations and practices largely separated from broader contexts, when tracing African American /iterary environmental knowledge in this study in fact reveals

1 INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN AMERICAN ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE... ll that such knowledge emerged as an inter-discursive part of larger epistemological processes, exchanges and struggles around the question of what it means to be (or become accepted as) human.

Thirdly, and here is a core assumption of a Foucauldian ecocritical framework, it is crucial that the given definition of environmental knowledge does not speak of “non-human natural” but of “non-human non-discursive material” conditions. In other words, what I mean by “environmental knowledge” is not a “knowledge of nature,” although historically changing conceptions and discourses of “nature” are most often central to formations of environmental knowledge. Significantly, however, environmental knowledge in a Foucauldian sense turns to “nature/the natural” as an object of discourse analysis, not as a stable or positivistically knowable essence, although it does not deny the existence of such a (non-human, non-discursive material) essence and its “real” effects and mutual interactions with the discursive within knowledge formation. Hence, when referring in this study to “nature,” I do not mean an absolute or stable entity but a discursive category, a signifier that has fulfilled historically changing functions within the production of forms of power-knowledge of the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions. Such a perspective is particularly valuable in the context of African American culture, where environmental dimensions of the writing tradition have been shaped not only by articulating relations to various kinds of non-human non-discursive materialities but also by challenging harmful discourses that employed concepts of “nature” to devalue and dehumanize blacks.

In designating this use of central terms, I am drawing from insights of scholarly work over the past decades that has increasingly come to recognize the potential of Foucauldian theory for environmental thought. For some time, environmentally oriented scholars tended to perceive Foucault not only as impracticable, but also as problematic, as too radically constructivist and denying agency through the idea of the “death of the subject.” An anthropocentric stance of Foucault’s analytics, the general hostility towards poststructuralist and postmodernist theory in early ecocriticism, and the fact that Foucault was “far from being an environmental thinker” and mentioned environmental concerns only marginally," are some of the main reasons for this traditionally problematic relationship between Foucauldian and environmental thought (Alberts 544). The situation has somewhat changed over the past two decades, however, as environmentally oriented scholarship and ecocriticism have come to revalue once despised “high theory,” including Foucauldian thought. While pioneering work, for instance by Darier (1999), Goodbody (2009), and Alberts (2013) more generally proposes the usefulness of Foucault for environmental thinking, two classic Foucauldian concepts in particular have triggered responses from environmentally oriented literary and cultural critics, sociologists, and historians, namely “biopolitics” and “governmentality.” Studies by P. Rutherford (1994, 1999), Darier (1996), Luke (1997, 1999), Agrawal (2005), Backstrand and Lovbrand (2006), S. Rutherford (2007, 2011), and M. Smith (2011) have productively taken up this part of Foucauldian theory in the environmental humanities, while, in ecocriticism, Greg Garrard has suggested the rise ofa “Foucauldian ecocriticism” (“Introduction” 2). By now, environmentally interested scholars across disciplines have begun to find their way with Foucault, especially with his “genealogical” work of the 1970s, recognizing that Foucault’s “concepts can be made highly relevant to environmental thinking, whatever attitude to ‘nature’ Foucault himself might have held” (Darier “Foucault” 6).

This recognition and body of scholarship have inspired my definition of “environmental knowledge” to the extent that using a Foucauldian lens in this study not only means thinking knowledge in terms of formations, discourse, and power, but also tracing the manufacturing of knowledge as multi-dimensional. Two insights captured in the notions of “non-discursive material” and “non-human” dimensions of environmental knowledge are particularly important at this point. First, there is the observation that the involvement of what we may call the non-discursive material dimension of the production, distribution, and circulation of knowledge was never irrelevant to, and, more importantly, never categorically denied in Foucauldian thought. Although there have been (mis-)perceptions along those lines, Foucault is not radically constructivist in this sense, as scholars such as Susan Hekman have suggested. Rather, as Hekman points out in The Materiality of Knowledge (2010), Foucault in many of his studies “far from emphasizing discourse to the exclusion of the material or ‘reality,’ is, on the contrary, always acutely aware of the interaction between discourse and reality” (48).'* True, one of the premises of Foucault’s analytics is that we cannot analyze and historicize knowledge manufacturing apart from discourse. However, this does not automatically mean a denial of the interrelations between the discursive and the non-discursive material within processes of knowledge formation. This is especially true, if we take seriously Foucault’s emphasis on the ways in which discourse, in an imagined primal state (cf. “Order” 66), was fundamentally marked by material threats as an “action situated in a bipolar field of sacred and profane, lawful and unlawful, religious and blasphemous,” i.e. as a material “gesture charged with risks” (“Author” 124). In its imagined Urzustand, the discursive has always been seen as emerging within and in relation to “really” existing external, non-discursive materialities that could be as much as life threatening, and there is no indication of Foucault’s ignoring of such materialities in his genealogical work on specific bodies of knowledge, e.g. regarding the penal system or sexuality. A Foucauldian analysis of knowledge therefore always turns to both the discursive and the non-discursive material.!®

A second important insight is that this implies the possibility of recognizing non-human dimensions of knowledge formation. While a discursive dimension of knowledge formation pertains to the realm of the human— speaking of a “human knowledge” would be tautological from a Foucauldian perspective—a non-discursive material dimension within a Foucauldian-inspired framework potentially involves both the human and the non-human. On the one hand, there are human non-discursive materialities interacting with the discursive in the production of knowledge, which can be traced through political, economic or institutional events and the human body to the “material reality” of the human product discourse itself, as “a thing pronounced or written” (“Order” 52). On the other hand, the non-human non-discursive material dimension, too, becomes a potential, intersecting part of knowledge formation, as it figures in events such as non-anthropogenic catastrophes or disasters (e.g. the breakout of the plague, cf. Discipline 195-199), or, more generally, in the conditions provided by non-human surroundings including what we would commonly refer to as “nature.” In both cases, the relations between the discursive and the non-discursive material as well as the human and the non-human are regarded as mutually constitutive within the process of knowledge formation (implying that the modern “human” itself is not regarded as an essence); Foucault posits their relation as neither one of determination nor of expression. Therefore, even if a discourse analysis works from the premise that one may only access formations of knowledge via discourse, its aim can also be to trace forms of the non-human non-discursive material in the production of a knowledge surfacing in this discc course. When read not as a radical constructivist or relativist but as “a l4 M.KLESTIL contextualist of the statements of observers of ‘objective reality,’” Foucault has the potential to enable an analytics that aims to identify interdependencies between the discursive and the non-human non-discursive material (Darier, “Foucault” 10).