How Romanticism Lost Its Edge

 

Growing up in Britain means encountering a certain kind of early 19th-century culture as a given. Address book, china mug or wall calendar, the decoration is sure to be that overloaded harvest wagon, The Hay Wain (1821), painted by John Constable. Elsewhere, riffing comedians and headline writers crank out pun after pun on the first line of William Wordsworth’s lyric poem, ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ (1804).
 
I vividly remember the teenaged sense of cultural claustrophobia that can result. These clichés were what we believed Romanticism to be, and they represented a past whose continuity we wanted to break. They belonged among the knitted teapot covers and potpourri sachets on the side tables of other generations’ lives. High school had taught us roughly when Romanticism was: from 1770, when Ludwig van Beethoven, G W F Hegel and Friedrich Hölderlin were born, to 1850, by which time Honoré de Balzac, Frédéric Chopin, Edgar Allan Poe and Mary Shelley had died. But the curriculum made zero connection between the artefacts it called ‘Romanticism’ and the realpolitik and real-life battles of Napoleonic imperialism, the Italian Risorgimento, the nation-building that culminated in 1848’s Year of Revolutions across Europe and Latin America, or the gradual abolition of slavery. Nor did we have any clue that Romanticism spoke directly to debates that raged – and still rage – around our own lives, whether about the violent resurgence of nationalism, or about identities and their associated rights.
 
So of course we had no sense of affinity with the radicalism and feelingful impatience of those youthful iconoclasts, the Romantic protagonists themselves. Their precocity passed us by: Felix Mendelssohn composing masterpieces as a teenager – the Octet Op 20 at age 16, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture Op 21 at 17 – or Mary Shelley writing her second book, Frankenstein, when she was 19. Admittedly, that great trio of second-generation poets – John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Gordon, Lord Byron, all dead by 36 – would probably have seemed old to us. (Mick Jagger may have read from Shelley’s Adonais at the start of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 Hyde Park gig: but for my generation, this too was antediluvian.)
 
And yet a belief – not always fully rationalised – in the value of the direct and unfettered underlay the movement, and could serve as a rallying call to a new generation. Romanticism itself eschewed conventional pieties, from marriage to the monarchy, in favour of immediate, intuitive thought; second-hand scholarship for risk-all radicalism. Freshness of thought was the ‘blithe Spirit’ with ‘unpremeditated art’, the ‘Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere; / Destroyer and preserver’ of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘To a Skylark’ and his ‘Ode to the West Wind’, written in June 1820 and October 1819 respectively.
 
How could such vibrancy have been reduced, within two centuries, to a genteel wallpaper for life in the global North?
 
One answer must be commodification, with its diminishing circle of repetition. It’s an irony that arguably the most radical movement in European thought should have been appropriated by the conservative forces of the market, but it’s also predictable. Among the market’s instincts is to monetise proven success, (literally) capitalising on already prepared appetites and cutting the costs of risk. And Romanticism has been, put simply, a global success: ‘let me count the ways,’ as that late Romantic, the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, puts it, in Sonnets from the Portuguese #43. (Itself another of those Romantic fragments to have attained the cultural reach of cliché.)
 
Romanticism was the engine of the French revolution, of the more-or-less pro-democratic revolutions of 1848, and of the successive formation of nation-states that continued for another century to ripple across Europe to the borders of Russia – and across every other continent where Romantic ideas about selfhood and self-determination forced the retraction of European imperialism: as far as Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent. Romanticism was the starting point of experimental science. Much of today’s world – its cities and its countrysides – are shaped by the agricultural and industrial revolutions that science informed.
 
The German philosophers who were the movement’s patron saints, among them Hegel and Immanuel Kant, shifted the terms of Western engagement with the world and its understanding of the nature of experience. Artists and writers developed genres of expressive realism – from the Bildungsroman to confessional verse – that are still in mainstream use today, far beyond Romanticism’s European cradle. Above all, in its regicidal turn from divinely ordained jurisdiction to authority earned by the exercise of reason, Romanticism placed the human individual at the centre of its universe. That human individual – not yet either a citizen or a subject but an actor defined by their thoughts and actions – contained the seeds of that other world actor without a hinterland, the 21st-century consumer.
 
 
This global reach is exceptional. On the other hand, it outreaches what we might call brand recognition. While the movement itself embraced radical political, cultural and intellectual transformation, brand Romanticism has been reduced to products appropriated by a culture of nostalgia, reiteration and risk-less familiarity. Tablemats reproduce landscapes by Constable and his great contemporary, J M W Turner. Biopics retell the love lives and tragic deaths of Keats and Lord Byron. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and his creature schlock their way across popular culture, from graphic novel to comic movie turn. While – and because – these have become cultural clichés, the revolutionary force of the ideas underlying them has dropped away.
 
For example, the affinities between Frankenstein’s naked creature, that literal sans-culotte, and the peasantry whom the French Revolution was originally intended to rescue from abjection have been forgotten, along with their author’s early formation by her parents’ pro-Revolutionary philosophies. Yet how audible it is:
 
“I felt cold also, and half frightened, as it were, instinctively, finding myself so desolate. Before I had quitted your apartment, on a sensation of cold, I had covered myself with some clothes, but these were insufficient to secure me from the dews of night. I was a poor, helpless, miserable wretch …””
 
 
A generation earlier, the ‘roofless Hut; four naked walls / That stared upon each other’ in Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined Cottage’ (1797), the poem that eventually became Book I of The Excursion (1814), is not Gothic picturesque, but a metonym for the failed lives of the desperately poor. Constable painted underpopulated landscapes not for aesthetic reasons but because the people who had lived there until recently had been cleared away by the nation’s landowners. The infamous emigrations that resulted from the era’s Scottish Highland Clearances and that genocide by starvation, the Irish Potato Famine, were echoed in smaller scale across Britain.
 
Still, there’s nothing to indicate to the Sunday afternoon visitor, browsing the gift shop at the exit of some English mansion, that its reproduction telescopes, or glossy postcards of the parkland folly, are traces of violent social, political and intellectual rupture: let alone of a period of historical shame. On the contrary, they seem comfortingly to suggest a robustly established culture – the one in which Jane Austen’s ever-popular novels, for example, are set.
 
These comedies of manners acknowledge, and so illustrate for us today, the influence Romantic thought was having on Austen’s contemporaries. Both her first published novel Sense and Sensibility (1811) and the posthumous Northanger Abbey (1817) – whose title alone signals gleeful Gothic pastiche – mock the effects of Romantic ideas about love and emotion, or ‘sensibility’, on young women in a marriage market that traded sexual charm for financial security. But in Austen’s world Romanticism is a mere fashion, which will be long outlasted by the economic self-protection and dynastic marriages that characterise what Noël Coward could still, a century later, call ‘The Stately Homes of England’. (As the economist Thomas Piketty has pointed out, Austen introduces her male characters by their incomes, so defining – and fixed – are they.)
 
Of course, Coward’s song, from his show Operette (1938), is waspish camp, as when he trills:
 
The Stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand,
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand
 
 
we should not only note the sting in that last line, but hear behind it the 1827 original by the Romantic-era poet Felicia Hemans:
 
The stately Homes of England,
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O’er all the pleasant land.

 

 

When Hemans published ‘The Homes of England’, in the widely read and influential Blackwood’s Magazine, she gave it an epigraph from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field (1808): ‘Where’s the coward that would not dare / To fight for such a land?’ (A grace-note: Scott’s verse-novel formed part of the Celticism that made him famous across Europe.)
 
 
The thrust of Hemans’s poem – there’s something special about ‘British values’ that is worth fighting for – is familiar in today’s post-Brexit archipelago, where an unpopular British prime minister can expect to seduce the electorate by reintroducing pre-metric measurements, the aptly named imperial system. In her essay ‘American Originality’ (2001), the US Nobel Laureate Louise Glück calls this:
 
  “the language of appeal that links Churchill to Henry V, a language that suggests the Englishman need only manifest the virtues of his tradition to prevail. These appeals were particularly powerful in times of war, the occasion on which the usually excluded lower classes were invited to participate in traditions founded on their exclusion.”
 
 
Hemans’s poem had already embraced this doublethink. She brackets the idea that England is ‘free’ and ‘fair’ with its polarisation of wealth – ‘hut and hall’ is the tidy alliteration she comes up with – as if, far from a contradiction, this were the correct order of things:
 
The free, fair Homes of England!
Long, long, in hut and hall,
May hearts of native proof be rear’d
To guard each hallow’d wall!
 
 
In other words, like Austen (1775-1817), Hemans (1793-1835) was more Romantic-era than Romantic. That distinction is conveniently missable today, when her florid language sounds of a piece with the decorative role to which the movement is relegated. Hemans had been born late enough to benefit from the radical ideas about education and gender roles that Mary Wollstonecraft expounded in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).
 
This complex, metamorphosing and unstable social world was very different from the fictional givens of Austen’s social round. Wider questions about society were being pressingly posed by the French Revolution, just 20 miles away across the English Channel; and by the work of political philosophers such as Wollstonecraft’s soon-to-be husband William Godwin, whose An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in the year Hemans was born, advocated direct action against traditional structures of Church and state, including the repudiation of marriage. Such changeable social relations perhaps made it easier for a woman to have a career as a published poet than hitherto. That it did not produce an answering radicalism within Hemans’s work may mean nothing more than that she was already taking a radical step in living as a writer.
 
But there’s something else setting the teeth on edge here: something much more like false consciousness, even denial. Hemans continues:
 
The Cottage Homes of England!
By thousands on her plains,
They are smiling o’er the silvery brooks,
And round the hamlet-lanes.
 
Thro’ glowing orchards forth they peep,
Each from its nook of leaves,
And fearless there the lowly sleep
As the bird beneath the eaves.

Yet, as she would have known perfectly well, early 19th-century cottages were unlikely to ‘smile’ even through the mask of a transferred epithet. The Romantic era arrived in a perfect storm of hardship for the British poor. Wealth inequalities, already enshrined in the class system, were being underscored by the onset of imperial expansion, which may have brought the wealth of the world to Britain, but did not yet bring it to the majority of the population, whom it instead impoverished relatively further still: when the rich have more money to pay for things, the price even of staples rises. Underscored too by new manufacturing and business wealth. The era’s fortune-making industrial revolution was built on discoveries by the new Romantic science, from map-making (the Ordnance Survey was established in 1791) to James Watt’s 1776 adaptation of a steam engine suitable for use in industrialisation. But the labour that fuelled the industrial revolution was supplied by mass migration of the rural poor, in a process that became the model for world industrialisation.
 
Peculiarly British, though, was the application of Romantic ideas to an already-accelerating para-legal process of Enclosure by estate landlords (aka, the aristocracy), which now cleared ordinary people off the common land on which their traditional subsistence farming had relied. Its twin motors were the agricultural revolution, and the fashion for picturesque, sublime and beautiful parkland. Once the gentry began to invest in the era’s new agricultural methods and machinery – such as seed-drills and horse-drawn hoes after the designs by Jethro Tull – they became eager to protect that investment. Between 1815 and 1846 a series of tariffs on imported wheat and all grains, the infamous Corn Laws, were enacted in the British Parliament: whose Members were drawn from this class. The resulting cost and scarcity of the staple food of the poor led to widespread destitution and starvation across Britain.
 
Meanwhile, since the 18th century, the same class had surrounded their ‘stately’ homes with newly landscaped parks, conspicuous consumers of agricultural land that formerly supported whole villages. Despite the social injustice this involved, Romanticism aided rather than resisted the process. In 1757, Edmund Burke, that Whig politician with a politically conservative legacy, had published his influential essay in aesthetics, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Adopting these categories, British Romanticism might have remained content to see them act upon the newly significant, sensitive individual, were it not for a pair of Herefordshire landowners.

 
In the mid-1790s, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight joined the artist-pioneer William Gilpin in advocating the picturesque, hitherto a principle of French gardening, as a quality that could be discovered and arranged within the landscape itself. Their legacy was to be not only the rise of the ultimately democratic tourist industry, but also numerous newly enclosed parks that imposed vistas of trees and lakes on the old ruled landscapes of strip farming.
 
It’s as if the process of drawing the teeth of Romanticism’s radical ideas was underway from the very outset. Real life sullied and seemed to contradict Romanticism’s ideals. After being sent down from Oxford in 1811, the 18-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley stayed in mid-Wales with an uncle who had created just such a landscape on his property:
 
Rocks piled on each other to tremendous heights, rivers formed into cataracts by their projections, & valleys clothed with woods, present an appearance of enchantment—but why do they enchant, why is it more affecting than a plain, it cannot be innate, is it acquired?
 
 
The very next year saw the young radical in Ireland, pamphleteering for Irish autonomy and the franchise for Roman Catholics; in 1813, with the publication of Queen Mab, his Notes advocating pacifist vegetarianism appeared. Yet his lifelong reliance on money from his Sussex estate-owning family meant complicity in the era’s agricultural reforms, and in the aristocratic privileges surrounding the baronetcy to which he was heir. Nor was his reliance on such social inequity to enable his Romantic activity unique in what was also the era of Lord Byron’s literary celebrity. A little later still, the abolitionist Barrett Browning’s own family had profited from slavery.
 
And yet. As individuals, we do our best among the contradictions of situatedness. Barrett Browning used her literary fame to become a mouthpiece not only of abolitionism in the United States, but of the Italian republican struggle. For this, Florence buried her with full civic honours.
 
Five years after that formative encounter with the picturesque in the mountains of the Elenydd, we find Shelley composing ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1817), one of the first poems of his maturity, in which not only picturesque principles but the nature of experience itself are being worked out:
 
The awful shadow of some unseen Power
Floats though unseen among us; visiting
This various world with as inconstant wing
As summer winds that creep from flower to flower;
Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
It visits with inconstant glance
Each human heart and countenance …
 
 
 
For Romanticism saw itself as not only a kind of High Table talking shop, but an actual agent of change. Witness Shelley’s fury at the older Wordsworth, fabulised in his 772-line Peter Bell the Third (1819), for selling out to the status quo:
 
To Peter’s view, all seemed one hue;
He was no Whig, he was no Tory;
No Deist and no Christian he, –
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.
…
He hired a house, bought plate, and made
A genteel drive up to his door,
With sifted gravel neatly laid, –
As if defying all who said,
Peter was ever poor.
 
 
Yet in settling their households in neighbourly community in the Lake District, Dorothy and William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey and Thomas De Quincey created the precursor of those more radically reformed ideal communities – from Portmeirion on the Welsh coast, to Uri in Switzerland – with which the Shelleys and, to an extent, the Leigh Hunts and James Hoggs, experimented – and to which 20th-century hippies and today’s off-grid communities are heir. And it was Wordsworth’s collaborative friendship with Coleridge that had from 1795 helped sew the ideas of German Idealist philosophers including Hegel and F W J Schelling into the culture that Shelley’s generation absorbed. Shelley’s reaction against the British poet laureate who was his Romantic predecessor is itself a nice fit with Hegel’s idea of history as dialectical progress.
 
 
And it is Wordsworth, the elder poet, whose ecological and political awareness remains most directly legible to us today: from ‘On Seeing Miss Helen Maria Williams Weep at a Tale of Distress’ (1787), the poem he published at 16 declaring his adherence to the new principle of ‘sensibility’, to his posthumous masterpiece The Prelude (1850) – that portrait of the artist as a village. Drawing the sting of psychological insight from Wordsworth’s ‘I wandered lonely’ or denying Constable’s insight into the linked conditions of climate and labour leaves us with little more than wildflowers in the English Lake District, or a cottage by an East Anglian ford. Prettiness: that most vacuous of principles.

 
An irony, then, to appropriate Romanticism to represent as a national specific, let alone as some version of a ‘timeless’ rural Britain. Romanticism records not the cosy continuity for which it is so often recruited: but the very moment when that continuity was broken. But it’s not just the muddle of individual human compromise that creates the vacuum in place of radical intention. The rise of the alt-Right reminds us how politically dangerous it is to base a nation’s view of itself on some version of a past that was white, feudal, Christian. At the very least, a disarmed Romanticism resembles that anaesthetic of political conservativism that the UK’s former prime minister John Major sought to apply to the Conservative Group for Europe in 1993, when he notoriously evoked:
 
long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers, and – as George Orwell said – old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.
 
 
Which, given Orwell’s own political vision, is a pretty bold reappropriation. But the de-radicalisation of Romanticism hasn’t been achieved only by political process. The market, too, has something of the conservative about it. Though it trumpets the new, it thrives on settled habits of consumption. Repeating the familiar suits it just fine. It may even prefer its consumers a little bored, as they sleepwalk back to the gift shop.
 
Sleepwalk to the gift shop.  Romanticism once radically challenged conventional pieties. Now it’s little more than marketable schlock. What happened?  By Fiona Sampson. Aeon, July 8, 2022.

The Legacy of Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Bicentary of the Great Radical Writer’s Death

 

 
Friday marked the bicentary of the great radical writer who wanted culture to spark the imaginations of ‘ordinary’ people
 
“Shall rank corruption pass unheeded by,
 
Shall flattery’s voice ascend the wearied sky;
 
And shall no patriot tear the veil away
 
Which hides these vices from the face of day?
 
Is public virtue dead? – is courage gone?”
 
No, not a description of the moral void of contemporary Britain, but lines from Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things, an excoriation of the moral devastation wreaked in late Georgian Britain two centuries ago. It was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley and published anonymously in 1811, in support of the radical Irish journalist Peter Finnerty, who had been imprisoned for seditious libel after accusing the Anglo-Irish politician Viscount Castlereagh of the torture and executions of Irish rebels challenging British rule.
 
Shelley’s poem was “lost” for nearly 200 years, before a single copy of the pamphlet was “rediscovered” in 2006, and a decade later bought by Oxford’s Bodleian Library, so finally it could be read by the public again. A poem that speaks to our age as much as it did to the Britain of two centuries ago.
 
Friday marked the bicentenary of his death. He was drowned after his boat, carrying him home after visiting his friend and fellow poet Lord Byron in the Italian town of Livorno, capsized in a storm. He was a month short of his 30th birthday.
 
Wordsworth said of Shelley that he was “one of the best artists of us all; I mean in workmanship of style”. He is also one of our most significant political essayists, “the relentless enemy of all irresponsible authority, especially the irresponsible authority which derives from wealth and exploitation”, as Paul Foot, whose 1981 work Red Shelley helped restore the significance of Shelley’s political work, observed.
 
Shelley’s greatest gift was in the deftness with which he interwove the poetical and the political. Poetry had, for Shelley, of necessity to appropriate a political dimension. And politics required a poetical imagination. That was why, as Shelley put it in a celebrated line from his essay A Defence of Poetry, “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”.
 
Poetry did not stand aloof from the world but sought to engage with it and to transform it. We live in an age in which working-class politicians can be mocked for attending the opera. For Shelley, the measure of high culture lay in the degree to which it could spark the imaginations of ordinary people.
 
Born into landed aristocracy, educated at Eton and Oxford, Shelley seemed destined for a life at the heart of the British establishment. However, he was also born into an age of tumult, a maelstrom, both intellectual and political, unleashed by the French Revolution.That tumult helped Shelley find his voice. And Shelley, in turn, tried to give voice to it. He was, as his most insightful biographer Richard Holmes put it, like his poetry, not ethereal as literary tradition would have it, but “darker and more earthly”.
 
Shelley’s first significant work – The Necessity of Atheism – published in his first year at Oxford, led to his expulsion from the university and strained his relationship with his father to breaking point. Living precariously as an itinerant writer, Shelley found his home instead on the radical edge of British politics, a crusader against moral and political corruption, a campaigner for republicanism and parliamentary reform, for equal rights and the abolition of slavery, for free speech and a free press, for Irish freedom and Catholic emancipation, for freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
 
His political ideals were often contradictory, his revolutionary spirit clashing with his Fabian instincts for gradual, non-violent change. Yet, unlike fellow Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley never abandoned his radicalism, his disdain of authority or his celebration of the voices of working people.
 
His personal life was tumultuous, too. He left his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, who later took her own life, to live with, and eventually marry, Mary Godwin, daughter of radical philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. He was forever trying to find refuge from debt collectors and eventually he and Mary left Britain to live in Italy. Mary Shelley would create, in Frankenstein, one of the great explorations of the contradictions of modernity and of what it was to be human.
 
Despised by the literary and political establishments, Shelley wrote for the working-class autodidacts for whom learning and culture were means both of elevating themselves and of challenging those in power. Fearful of the consequences, his work was suppressed by the authorities, either through direct censorship or through threatening publishers with the charge of sedition.
 
As a result, much of Shelley’s work was published only after his death. The Masque of Anarchy is perhaps the most famous political poem in the English language, written in furious anger after the Peterloo massacre of 1819, when at least 15 people were killed as cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 who had gathered to demand parliamentary reform and an extension of suffrage. Shelley sent it to his friend, the radical editor and publisher Leigh Hunt. But Hunt did not publish it, for to do so would have been to invite immediate imprisonment for sedition. Not until 1832 was the poem, with its celebrated last stanza, finally published:
 
“Rise like Lions after slumber
 
In unvanquishable number –
 
Shake your chains to earth like dew
 
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
 
Ye are many – they are few.”
 
In the decades that followed Shelley’s death, his poetry became an inspiration across generations and borders. Queen Mab became known as the Chartists’ Bible, read aloud at working-class meetings. The Suffragettes’ slogan, “Deeds, not words”, is taken from The Masque of Anarchy. And that final stanza has been on the lips of many who have “shaken their chains”, from striking Jewish garment workers in early 20th-century New York to protesters 80 years later in Tiananmen Square and a century later in Tahrir Square.
 
And most of all, perhaps, it is in his insistence that we question the claim to power of those in authority that we most need Shelley’s voice today. For, as he put it in Queen Mab:
 
“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man;
 
The subject, not the citizen…
 
… and obedience,
 
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
 
Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame
 
A mechanized automaton.”
 
 
Long gone, but speaking clearly to our age – Shelley, the poet of moral and political corruption. By  Kenan Malik. The Guardian, July 10, 2022. 

It is 200 years since the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned at sea at the age of 29. At the time, his life and works were considered scandalous, due in part to his reputation as a sexually liberated, vegetarian atheist, living in a reported ménage à trois. He did not achieve literary fame during his lifetime, but today he is one of the most celebrated British poets.
 
Shelley was writing during what is now called the Romantic period, which lasted from around 1780 to 1840. This was a time of innovative thinking and new ideas which took place in science, industry, the arts, and particularly in literature. Other Romantic writers include William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and Shelley’s friend, Lord Byron.
 
Shelley’s notoriety began when he was publicly expelled from Oxford University for publishing an atheist pamphlet. Four years later, he courted scandal again, when he abandoned his pregnant wife and eloped with the 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later the famous author of Frankenstein) along with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. His poetry reflected his personal notoriety. In particular, the poem Laon and Cythna was criticised due to its attacks on religion and descriptions of a brother-sister incestuous relationship.
 
Together with Mary and Claire, Shelley lived a nomadic existence, moving around the UK and across Europe, before settling in Italy. It is here that Shelley wrote some of his best-loved poems, including Adonais and began his final, unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life. It is also where Shelley died. His sailing boat, the Don Juan, sank near the Gulf of Spezia. All three passengers drowned and washed ashore days later.
 
Angel in death
 
The response to Shelley’s death was phenomenal. A leading Tory newspaper, the Courier, ran an obituary which read: “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.” His death became a Romantic myth that steadily grew and his poetry became increasingly popular. His wife, Mary, began this Shelleyan legacy, describing him as an “angel”, a description that endured throughout the 19th century.
 
By 1889, the continued fascination around Shelley’s death meant that his cremation became the subject of a painting; Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley. The painting depicts a remarkably preserved corpse on a pyre, surrounded by his friends, including Lord Byron (who in reality went swimming in the sea during his funeral) and Mary Shelley kneeling in the background (she did not attend the funeral at all).
 
Shelley’s heart famously did not burn and was given to Mary. Modern physicians believe it may have calcified due to a bout of tuberculosis. Reportedly, it was found wrapped in a sheet of Shelley’s poetry after Mary’s own death in 1851 and was buried in Bournemouth alongside her.
 
During the Victorian period, Shelley became an inspiration to fellow literary figures, including Robert Browning, George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Shelley’s reputation was sanitised to such an extent that even his old college in Oxford forgave his rebellious past and installed a monument dedicated to him in 1893. Sculpted by Edward Onslow Ford, a graceful, angelic Shelley lies on a sacrificial altar, guarded by a weeping woman.
 
Shelley’s Romantic reputation today
 
Interest in Shelley waned in the early 1900s and it wasn’t until the latter half of the century that his writings became respected due to the varied and many far reaching concerns found within them. His complex and fascinating personal life has also been the subject of a number of biographies and a source of endless fascination.
 
Perhaps his biggest claim to fame today is his marriage to the “mother” of science fiction, Mary Shelley. It is known that Shelley assisted his wife with her Frankenstein manuscript and the two had a collaborative literary relationship. This work, alongside the recently popular The Last Man, are certainly wider read than Shelley’s poetry, which are often limited to educational settings.
 
In popular culture, it is mainly through Shelley’s relationship to Mary and other Romantic figures that he is remembered. The 2017 film, Mary Shelley, starred Douglas Booth as the poet. As the title suggests, Shelley’s role is depicted as secondary to that of his wife, whose life is the centre of the story. Doctor Who, the most popular science fiction show in the UK, included Percy and Mary in their 2020 episode The Haunting of Villa Diodati. Again, the focus was placed on the genesis of Frankenstein. Even the popular comedy series Drunk History’s 2016 segment on Shelley identified his relationships with his wife and friend, Lord Byron, as central to his appeal.
 
But the 200th anniversary of Shelley’s death is am important literary bicentennial. International events have been happening over the past year to mark key moments in his life, including #Shelley200. Exhibitions, including at Horsham Museum and the Shelley Conference in London, taking place this weekend, demonstrate the lasting appeal and ongoing interest in his works. For many, Shelley’s legacy lives on.
 
Ozymandias or To A Skylark are a great introduction to Shelley’s poems if you want to read his works.
 
 
Percy Bysshe Shelley at 200 – how the poet became famous after his death. By Amy Wilcockson. 
The Conversation, July 8, 2022.

 

Percy Bysshe Shelley: poet, atheist, and determined opponent of the over-powerful. What would he have made of the dramatic resignation this week by Boris Johnson after weeks of his authority ebbing away? A flight of fancy of course, but an irresistible one for me, whose working life these last days and weeks has been dominated by the disintegration of Johnson’s credibility. All the while I’ve been preparing – in my downtime – to commemorate 200 years since the death of a titan of English poetry and a political radical.
 
Like the outgoing prime minister, Shelley went to Eton, but the common ground stops there. He was a rebel at heart, distrustful of authority, and raged at abuses of power by what he saw as the unaccountable and heartless establishment. Perhaps his most famous poem, Ozymandias, mocks the empty legacy of a puffed-up despot. Meanwhile England in 1819, written in the last year of the reign of George III who had for years been mentally incapable, tells of “Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting Country cling”.
 
The Mask of Anarchy satirises the government of the day as the epitome of anarchy and injustice, and ends with an impassioned appeal for ordinary people to rise up: “Ye are many, they are few.” Shelley was thrown out of Oxford in connection with his essay The Necessity of Atheism, and he strongly believed in poetry as a powerful force for political good. “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he wrote. For Shelley, the poetic was political.
 
Part of Shelley’s allure is the people who surrounded him. His wife was Mary Shelley, daughter of another political radical, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, generally recognised as the mother of British feminism. At the age of 18, Mary wrote Frankenstein, an astonishingly mature work about the hubris of an irresponsible inventor who creates the first of a new race but denies its human needs – with catastrophic consequences. At this time, Percy and Mary were living and travelling with Lord Byron and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont, a formidable ménage of literary creativity.
 
Shelley’s politics were progressive, as were his political attitudes towards women. He was an ardent supporter of female emancipation and of gender equality, and had a profound respect for the work of Mary Wollstonecraft. His personal relations with women were less respectful. Shelley abandoned his 19-year-old wife, Harriet Westbrook, and their two children in 1814 to elope with the 16-year-old Mary. Two years later Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London. In the two years before he died – a dark and difficult time when Mary endured repeated miscarriages and the death of their small son – he wrote tender poems about Jane Williams, the wife of his friend Edward. Whether this infatuation would have led anywhere will remain unknown; Shelley and Edward both drowned off the coast of Liguria in north-west Italy on 8 July 1822 after a violent squall hit their small boat. Shelley’s body was identifiable only by the collection of Keats poems found in his jacket pocket.
 
They all died young, these second-generation Romantic poets – Shelley at 29, Keats at 25, Lord Byron at 36. As I was growing up, it was Keats’ work that was the most compelling – a yearning and eager poetry that had a youthfulness about it, much of it focused on the process of desire, and with an aesthetic wish to capture and fix desire through art. But Shelley fascinates through his complexity – his reformist zeal is matched by a strong sense of personal gloom and pessimism, which he works through in his poetry, using nature as a counterpoint to his human suffering. If Keats was a first love, Shelley is a mature one.
 
A few weeks ago, a group of us went on a visit to the Italian resort of Lerici, where Percy and Mary had their last home in the Casa Magni before his untimely death. Shelley was haunted by visions of himself – a doppelganger he saw from the balcony of the Casa Magni – and in a park next to the house we listened to readings of his poetry by, among others, the poet laureate Simon Armitage, and imagined him there. In a few weeks’ time, we will go to the non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, where Shelley and Keats are buried, to commemorate him once again.
 
Ozymandias, “king of kings”, left no legacy whatsoever; the opposite is true of the man who created him.
 
 
‘For him, the poetic was political’: how Shelley stands tall as a great Romantic poet.  By Reeta Chakrabarti. The Guardian. July 8, 2022.  

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Percy Bysshe Shelley, clothed in black, lies on the branches of the funeral pyre; his pale face might be sleeping, his hair is swept back, his hand has fallen to his side. He still has on his leather shoes. Like the “blithe spirit” in “To a Skylark”, he is ready to transcend his physical form. Smoke billows across the barren wastes of Viareggio, Italy, the sky is autumnal and overcast and the sea in which he drowned is a blade of silver on the horizon. To the left we see a watch tower, a waiting carriage, a bare and solitary tree and, in the foreground, three Heathcliffian figures: Lord Byron, his necktie blowing raffishly in the wind, Byron’s “bulldog” Edward John Trelawny, and the poet and journalist Leigh Hunt, clutching a white handkerchief. Behind them the poet’s widow, Mary Shelley, kneels in prayer. The scene might be a mockery of the central tableau in her novel Frankenstein, where the creature the scientist has pieced together is stretched along the bench, waiting to be jolted into life.

 
 
Shelley did a great deal to mythologise himself, but the public’s myth of Shelley, which began with his funeral, and Louis Édouard Fournier’s 1889 painting – copies of which, said WB Yeats, hung on the wall of every art class – bears little relation to the reality of the event. When Byron died fighting for Greek independence in 1824, England collapsed into the kind of mourning we would not see again until the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, but Shelley’s death aged 29 in July 1822, like that of Keats in 1821, was not at first regarded as a national tragedy. Before he was sanctified Shelley was dismissed – if he was spoken of at all – as an atheistic, anti-establishment, vegetarian anarchist who believed that a poem was a radical instrument. “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,” reported The Courier when the news reached England. “Now he knows whether there is a God or not.”
 
 
Setting sail from Livorno on 8 July, Shelley’s sailing boat got caught in a squall off the Bay of Spezia. When he washed ashore on 18 July his hands and face had been eaten by dogfish; he was identified by the edition of Keats in his pocket. The decomposing body was buried in the sand before being dug up for the cremation, which took place on 16 August. Rather than being a blustery day, the combined heat of the sun and the fire, wrote Trelawny in his Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron, “was so intense that the atmosphere was tremulous and wavy”.
 
Trelawny, who was prone to exaggerate, described how the corpse, doused in more wine than Shelley had consumed in his lifetime, “fell open and the heart was laid bare. The frontal bone of the skull… fell off; and as the back of the head rested on the red-hot bottom bars of the furnace, the brains literally seethed, bubbled and boiled as if in a cauldron, for a very long time.” “Is this a human body?” Byron apparently declaimed. “Why, it’s more like the carcass of a sheep.” Women were excluded from funerals and so Mary Shelley stayed at home while Hunt, the last person to see his friend alive, was too distraught to leave the carriage. So it was only Byron and Trelawny who watched Shelley burn. When it was over, Byron went for a swim and Trelawny grabbed the heart from the flames and passed it on to Hunt, who reluctantly gave it to Mary. She kept it on her writing desk for the rest of her life.

It suits Shelley’s self-image to see him as a lonely sailor in a storm, but he was not alone when his boat went down; he was accompanied by his friend Edward Williams, whose own body was cremated the day before. The two men had been to visit Hunt who had just arrived in Italy with the aim of starting a journal called The Liberal. Williams and his common-law wife Jane had been living with the Shelleys in a former boathouse called Casa Magni in Lerici, where the sea came up to the front door.
 
The previous month Mary, having already buried three of her four children, nearly bled to death during a miscarriage. “No words can tell you how I hated our house & the country about it,” she recalled of that time. Casa Magni had become a personality to be feared and Shelley, addicted to laudanum and infatuated with Jane Williams, had started to hallucinate. In one vision he saw a naked child rising from the water, his hands clasped in joy. “There it is again!” he told Edward Williams, pointing to the sea. “There!” In another vision he saw Jane and Edward covered in blood, and in another a man with his own face was strangling Mary. He would be happiest, Shelley told a friend, if the past and future could be obliterated and he, Jane and her guitar could simply float away in a boat.

 
During Shelley’s lifetime, it was Byron – flash, cynical, and satirical – who was in the ascendance. The Corsair – dashed off, Byron bragged, between dinners – sold 10,000 copies on the day it was published, while Shelley’s print-runs never exceeded 250. The transformation from infidel poet to “ineffectual angel” (the term is Matthew Arnold’s) began with the publication of Leigh Hunt’s Lord Byron and Some of his Contemporaries (1828) and Trelawny’s Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858). Hunt, the first critic to recognise the genius of Shelley and Keats, reminded the reader that not only was Shelley “a baronet’s son” with the taste and manners of his rank, he was also too fine for this world.
 
By the 1860s Walter Bagehot would describe Byron’s verse as “a metrical species of the sensation novel” and Shelley’s “as a serious and deep thing”. If Byron was a melancholy dandy, Shelley was an instrument of spontaneity. “Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is,” Shelley wrote in “Ode to the West Wind”. A self-playing instrument, the lyre (whence “lyric”) is the quintessential metaphor for Romantic inspiration, and “for the poet to yield himself to and be borrowed by the wind”, as Merle Rubin puts it, “is almost the Shelleyan stance”. So when Will Ladislaw (the idealist modelled on Shelley) explained in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871) that a poet was a recipient of external and internal impressions, he was singing from Shelley’s songbook:
 
  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with a finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantly into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
 
 
In 1891 Shelley was fictionalised again as Angel Clare in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and in 1893 Edward Onslow Ford’s lavish marble reclining sculpture The Drowned Man was put on display in University College, Oxford, the alma mater from which the poet had been expelled 80 years earlier for publishing a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism.
 
What would have happened to Shelley’s reputation had he died an old man in Surrey rather than a young man in the Tyrrhenian sea? If dying young was proof of sensibility, doing so in the Mediterranean was a guarantee of deification. Was Shelley’s best work behind him in 1822? Now recognised as the heir to Dante and Milton, Shelley gave us some of the loveliest lyrical poems in the language (“To a Skylark”, “Ode to the West Wind”, “Ozymandias”); “Adonais”, the elegy to Keats read by Mick Jagger in the concert at Hyde Park after the death of Brian Jones; the dramas, “The Cenci” and “Prometheus Unbound”; the conversational poem “Julian and Maddalo” and the sublime “Epipsychidion”. But it is “The Masque of Anarchy”, written in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre in August 1819 when cavalry charged at campaigners for parliamentary reform in Manchester’s St Peter’s Field, for which he is best remembered.
 
 
Paul Foot, whose book Red Shelley (1981) turned the poet from a representative of the Romantic imagination to a mascot of the left, could recite the whole of “The Masque of Anarchy”, as could his uncle, Michael Foot, and his three sons. Jeremy Corbyn did recite it – or at least its final stanza – in front of a crowd of 120,000 at Glastonbury Festival in 2017:
 
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number –
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.
 
The same lines were chanted in Tiananmen Square in 1989, in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian revolution in 2011, and at the Poll Tax marches; “The Masque of Anarchy” is not only the greatest protest poem in English but in any language. 
 
 
What would have happened to Mary Shelley had her husband been around for the next 50 years? She had more peace as a widow than as a wife. “We have now lived five years together,” she wrote in 1819, “and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy.” Before Shelley fell in love with Jane Williams there had been Sophia Stacy, and before that there was Emilia Viviani, and Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont. Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, was 15 when she met him, 16 when she married him, 18, and pregnant with her second child, when he abandoned her for Mary, and 21 when, pregnant with her third child, she drowned herself in the Serpentine in December 1816. Two months earlier, Mary’s half-sister, Fanny Imlay, also in love with Shelley, had swallowed a fatal dose of laudanum. Loving Shelley was lethal because Shelley idealised love. The notes to “Queen Mab” outlined his philosophy: “Love withers under constraint… Love is free: to promise for ever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.”
 
 
Shelley learned his doctrine of free-love from the radical philosophy of Mary’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin’s anti-marriage, anti-ownership treatise, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, paved the way for the Romantic experiment in communal living, and Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died giving birth to Mary Godwin, took on for her daughter and her generation a legendary status. When Shelley and the 16-year-old scion of these two extraordinary figures ran away together in 1814, they assumed they would win Godwin’s approval; he had, after all, raised his daughter to be “a philosopher” and “a cynic”. But in the time-worn fashion of fathers, Godwin was appalled by what he saw as the poet’s seduction of his daughter. It was not Shelley, however, who had seduced Mary, but Godwin who had seduced Shelley. Poor Harriet Shelley realised this straight away: “The very great evil that book has done is not to be told,” she said of Political Justice. Meanwhile, Harriet saw that Mary had “heated [Shelley’s] imagination by talking of her mother [and] going to the grave with him every day”. Despite being disowned by Godwin, Mary and Shelley scoured the pages of his writing for guidance on how to lead their future lives, which were to be spent in voluntary exile in Italy with no home, no income, no certainty.
 
Two hundred years after his death, Shelley is no longer stigmatised, mythologised, or even, beyond being chanted at protests, much read or understood. He was a revolutionary poet, but his sense of revolution involved an expansion of the concept of love which came from deep inward reflection. “We want,” he explained, “the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life.”
 
Perhaps he will be cancelled and disappear from the university curriculum, and future generations will not hear what Shelley had to tell us about tyranny and freedom and how best to live. Or perhaps he will be read again, closely and carefully, in his full complexity. Shelley was “emphatically”, as William Rossetti put it, “the poet of the future” and it is to Shelley’s sonnet, “England in 1819”, that we might turn when we consider the “old, mad, blind, despised and dying” Vladimir Putin:
 
Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.

 

The last days of Percy Bysshe Shelley : It was 200 years ago that Shelley drowned, aged 29 – but his poems of tyranny and freedom speak to our own darkening age. By Frances Wilson. The New Statesman, July 6, 2022.

Queer Ecology

Ecology is a relatively recent science. The term was coined in 1866, by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, barely 30 years after Darwin’s famous travels aboard the HMS Beagle. Ecology, like all sciences, is a product of its social world, but especially. But given its interest in complex, interactive systems, the science of ecology derived its systems of knowledge as much from politics, theories of international relations, and ethical philosophy as from its big sister biology.

Over the course of history, ecology has evolved along with other philosophical trends, or been used as a metaphor to political ends. In Metamorphosis by the Institute of Queer Ecology, the tools of ecology are queered and decolonized to expose the fractures of our current petro-capitalist world order so that we can reimagine new connections between epistemologies, species, and worlds. A collaborative, decentralized collective of artists, scientists, and activists who subversively frame themselves as an “institution,” the Institute of Queer Ecology uses exhibitions, art, and direct action to agitate for an inclusive, decolonial, multi-species future.

The consequences of the traditional Western notion of a “nature” apart from culture, becoming everyday clearer. And ecology’s potentials and limits in grappling with our vast interconnectedness is increasingly relevant. Today, we hear mostly about ecological destruction. About mass species die off. About the decimation of landscapes. About new microbes trying to kill us. As the climate crisis accelerates, it’s clear that we must challenge our assumptions.

The Institute of Queer Ecology is proposing a metamorphosis. In these videos, the lifecycle of holometabolous insects—bugs who undergo a “complete metamorphosis”—is proposed as a revolutionary paradigm for transforming ecology and capitalism. Queerness serves as a type of ecological visioning, a way of proposing an alternative, utopic world. Each video—featuring voiceovers from Mykki Blanco and Deli Girls’ Danny Orlowski—is a mini-manifesto, proposing new ways of becoming strange, becoming less human, to create a multispecies world in which we all might survive and thrive.

The Institute of Queer Ecology

Prelude.  Serotiny.

 Around 3.5 billion years ago life began. A single ancestor of the nearly trillion living species today bubbled up from a harsh and primordial earth. We are all and have always been, entangled. Each ecological disaster and each extinction, rather than an individual tragedy, is a collective loss and exposes the almost incomprehensibly enmeshed systems of power that rule our lives.

In this prologue to the Institute of Queer Ecology’s Metamorphosis series, an overview of the current ecological crisis is given with a voice-over by Danny Orlowski of the band Deli Girls.

The ongoing ecocide is intimately tied to colonial genocide. In Brazil, slash and burn fires decimate the Amazon rainforest many indigenous peoples call home to make room for cattle to be raised by laborers who work to produce money for their capitalist bosses. Climate change-induced forest fires are put out by prisoners caught in a system of ongoing slavery in California—unless you’re so well-off that your insurer guarantees you a privatized fire service.

Economic imbalances are creating a less and less habitable earth, while consolidating wealth for the top few. Industrial capitalism and colonialism are helped by and perpetrate near-willful extinctions. Climate control is preparing us for a new doomsday economy, where even a green response could be a capitalist or ecofascist wolf in environmentalist sheep’s clothing.

For an equitable, habitable world, we need to organize: not just for resilience, but for regeneration.

Dis Art

 Episode 1. Grub Economics.

Metamorphosis is a nature show that undoes assumptions about the world and our place in it. Treating humanity’s systems like little bugs, in Grub Economics, the Institute of Queer Ecology along with Mykki Blanco map a proposal for a post-human, post-fossil fuel future.

There is a myth that nature can always right itself to a state of equilibrium, that all slight deviations will eventually correct themselves back to the status quo. This misunderstanding of ecological interconnectedness has been warped by many, not just as it relates to the so-called environment, but even to the ends of “scientific” racism or classism.

These beliefs have relied on a half-reading of Darwin, whose evolutionary theories relied in no small part on a notion of constant competition. We need a new understanding of nature that would go beyond competition to recognize queer relations like symbiosis and co-evolution as necessary for collective survival. And, while this myth led early environmental movements to focus on a fabled balance, perhaps the only constant is change, even chaos.

While we talk often of evolution in ecosystems, we don’t talk so much of revolutions. But all revolutions—even human political ones—take place in the sphere of biology. What would today’s ecological revolution look like?

Currently, the global economic order is in a sort of larval stage. Like hungry caterpillars, capitalists unyieldingly extract and extract. They’re grubs thriving on a petromodernity that manufactures products known to be toxic while supporting a system that needs those toxic things, all the while perpetuating extreme economic stratification.

To cope with the danger of planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution of our extractive, capitalist world, some of the more privileged—primarily scientists and technocrats from the global north—have proposed large-scale geoengineering projects, like releasing massive amounts of sulfur dioxide, essentially intentional pollution, that would act as a shield to help cool the planet. Or, perhaps, like a smokescreen to prevent us from imagining other ways of changing our world, such as fundamentally rethinking the economic order, and liquidating assets to redistribute our resources to create something more just and altogether new.

Dis Art

Episode 2.  Liquidation.

Capitalism hides its shape from us, so let’s give it one. Perhaps of the caterpillar, that voracious larva that, like the extractivist or petro-capitalist, feeds endlessly. Of course, if they survive, caterpillars eventually become something else. They turn into a cocoon, then a pollinating butterfly. Today’s oligarchs would like to be able to live somewhere between the consumptive larval stage and the protective cocoon, an ideal limbo for them. They live in a separate world, barricaded by private police and militarized borders.

However, in a real cocoon, a radical, transformative process takes place: there is the liquidation of organs to clumps of cells that reorganize themselves, however, all matter is conserved, and some structures are too. Liquidation in the Pupal State, as described by the Institute of Queer Ecology along with Mykki Blanco, represents not erasure, but redistribution.

If extractive capitalism takes the shape of the caterpillar, then perhaps we can induce its inevitable liquidation, reformation, and metamorphosis so that our world might take a shape that is queerer and more equitable, for all species.

Dis Art

 Episode  3.  Emergence. 

In Emergence, the final chapter of the Institute of Queer Ecology’s Metamorphosis, Mykki Blanco guides us out of our straight, fossil-fuel soaked cocoon.

The mode of “reproduction” integral to cis-heterosexuality and the traditional family and thereby to capitalism is unsustainable. The biopolitical control exercised by capitalism’s investment in heteropatriarchy—by maintaining clear gender roles, clear family orders, limiting reproductive rights, and so on—only allows for the reproduction of the world in which we already live. It posits reproduction as a useful tool to regenerate its ideas and to generate laborers it sees as disposable. It limits the passing of knowledge, the building of kinships across traditional boundaries of age, geography, and kinship. It limits the imagination. But to build a new world, we must first imagine a way towards it. Queerness has long made families and shared knowledge in alternative ways. queerness introduces desire as a world-building tool.

Utopic thinking is not about queering capitalism but leveraging queerness to mutate capitalism, to dissolve it, . and transform it. Where petro-capitalism produces things to be disposed of—including human beings—a heliosocialist or hydrosocialist system would force us to move with earth systems—the sun, the water—to be in constant balance with the earth’s movements and the many species that inhabit the planet.

This is not opposed to “reproduction,” but opposition to the reproduction of the world as is, a world that limits desiring, imagining, connecting, learning, and growing. Similarly, indigenous philosophies—many of which have long grappled with the post-human, object-oriented, or ecocentric turns new to western thought for years—and struggles promote and promise anti-capitalist, anti-extractive alternatives. A queer utopia would be one of indigenous sovereignty.

Currently, we are reproducing for a world that cannot continue without end, a world that does not make space for genuine desire and that is not generable. Rather than reproducing, we might produce something altogether new.

Dis Art