Review: Stone Voices: Geomaterialism in the Ecohumanities

Reviewed Work(s): Stone: An Inhuman Ecology by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: Making the
Geologic Now: Responses to the Material Conditions of Everyday Life by Elizabeth
Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse: Ossianic Uncomformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial
Age. by Eric Gidal: Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life by Christine
Gillis: Ecocriticism and Italy by Serenella Iovino: A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka:
Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Capitalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli
Review by: Steve Mentz
Source: Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities , Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter
2019), pp. 118-125
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/resilience.6.1.0118

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 Stone Voices
Geomaterialism in the Ecohumanities

Steve Mentz

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. Stone: An Inhuman Ecology. Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, eds. Making the Geologic Now:
Responses to the Material Conditions of Everyday Life. Brooklyn:
Punctum Books, 2013.

Eric Gidal. Ossianic Uncomformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age.

Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.

Christine Gillis, Writing on Stone: Scenes from a Maine Island Life.

Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2008.

Serenella Iovino. Ecocriticism and Italy. London: Bloomsbury, 2016.

Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2015.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli. Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Capitalism.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Stones invite stories. The impulse to inscribe human meanings onto

rock faces emerges from the material’s durability in time and solidity
in space. Here, if anywhere, humans can make lasting marks. From
the ochre handprints in Neolithic cave paintings to the anthropic
signatures studied today by the scientists in the Working Group on the

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Anthropocene, humans have always marked stone. Recent scholarship
in what we might call the “geohumanities” or “geomaterialist
ecocriticism” takes the complex bonds between humans and geological
formations to represent the ecological paradoxes of the present era. To
be human in the twenty-first century entails recognizing the wounds
our species has carved into geologic strata. Rocks and stones appear not
as the “senseless things” that Shakespeare called them in Julius Caesar
but instead as receptive and emotive measures of human entanglements
with more-than-human entities.1

Humanizing Stone: Cohen, Iovino, Gidal, Gillis

“The world is not for us,” writes Jeffrey Cohen in his René Wellek Prize–
winning book Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman.2 His alienating point
insists that the meanings we build out of stones and carve onto stones
do not belong to humans alone. The forms and pressures of nonhuman
elements enwrap themselves around us through a process he names
“geophilia,” the love of stone. This “intimate alien” marks the presence
of the inhuman near the center of human experience.3 The supposed
deadness and still nature of rock, at least within human time spans,
serves in Cohen’s reading as a spur to story; the phrase “stories of stone”
operates in the book as a semirefrain that shows how humans respond
to stone, from the medieval theologians Albertus Magnus and John
Trevisa to ecomaterialist theorists, including Stacy Alaimo and Bruno
Latour. The repeated narrative presence in this book of the travels of
the present-day Cohen family visiting meaningful rocks from Bordeaux
to Paris to Scotland to Iceland also insinuates human experience into
posthuman theory. In Stone rocks move and speak and flow, in ways
that surprise us with their physical dynamism and emotional potency.
Serenella Iovino, who has collaborated with Cohen in multiple edited
volumes, concludes her MLA award-winning Ecocriticism and Italy:
Ecology, Resistance, and Liberation with a shocking juxtaposition of two
products of the Italian ecoscape: the wines of Piedmont, “Nebbiolo and
its nobler descendants, Barolo and Barbaresco,” and cancer-causing
asbestos fibers, disseminated by the Eternit factory near the Piedmont
vineyards.4 The rich cultural heritage of Italian wines and the industrial
“slow violence” of asbestos drive home her ecological argument about
human entanglements with the nonhuman world: “Wine breathes,

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and so do humans—and they do it much better without asbestos in
their lungs.”5 Iovino’s study builds from her ecocritical commitment to
what she calls “narrative scholarship” and, to use a term she developed
with her collaborator Serpil Opperman, “storied matter.”6 Reading
the “material eloquence of the world” in the Italian landscapes and
textual histories surrounding the Bay of Naples, Venice, Piedmont,
and a series of earthquake sites in Campania, Sicily, and Abruzzo,
Iovino unearths, in ways that resonate with Cohen’s “stories of stone,”
textual and material “stories of resistance and creativity that transcend
their local reality.”7 As the prizes awarded to these two excellent books
indicate, one prominent aspect of the geological turn in ecostudies
has been toward what Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter influentially
terms “strategic anthropomorphism,” which seeks to entangle human
experience with nonhuman landscapes and objects.8
A somewhat more oblique approach to the geohumanities appears
in Eric Gidal’s study of James Macpherson’s publication of the poems
of Ossian, an invented Caledonian bard supposedly from the third cen-
tury, whose verses were actually composed by Macpherson himself in
the eighteenth century. In Ossianic Uncomformities: Bardic Poetry in
the Industrial Age Gidal connects Macpherson’s faux-editorial labors to
then-contemporary geological ideas about the age of the earth. Gidal
suggests that the “speculative geography” of this period amounts to a
form of engaged reading, in which the “conjectural mappings of bardic
poetry combined science and sentiment with an increasingly poignant
sense of loss as they came to echo Ossian’s lamentations not only for a
culture passed out of time but for a natural environment whose perma-
nence could no longer be assured.”9 Through his key term “unconfor-
mities,” Gidal links together the intellectual discovery of deep time by
geologists and the “rapid temporal shifts of the industrial age.”10 Devel-
oping a method he calls “biblio-stratigraphy” enables Gidal to build to
an innovative description of the Anthropocene as itself a form of “un-
comformity” in which an “incipient self-enfolding [gets written] into
the geological record.”11 While Cohen and Iovino humanize stones and
landscapes, Gidal geologizes poetry. Taking the fraudulent Ossian as an
enigmatically central text of late eighteenth-century English poetics,
he finds in Macpherson’s urge to write himself into antiquity a symp-
tomatic response to coal-fired capitalism and its ecological progeny, the
Anthropocene.

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 Perhaps no stone carries more emotional punch than a child’s grave
marker. The critical efforts of Cohen, Iovino, and Gidal to humanize
the geological record sent me back to Christina Gillis’s heartbreaking
memoir of living on the granite starkness of Gott’s Island off the coast of
Maine and responding there to the death of her son in an airplane acci-
dent in 1991. Gillis’s narrative interweaves her own loss with the history
of Gott’s Island, which somewhat mysteriously depopulated itself in the
1920s and which today is home to summer residents only. Her intimate
memoir of pain and place shows human lives marking stones and us-
ing stones as markers. Her story of the rocky island oscillates between
her son’s grave in the village cemetery and the town dock that inter-
mittently, depending on season and tide, connects island to world. She
writes that Gott’s Island, “a place of stone remnants, is [also] a place of
accommodation.”12 The painful acts of mourning and accommodation
that Gillis narrates speak also to the efforts of geomaterialist ecocrit-
ics, whose theoretical analyses and imaginative entanglements forge ac-
commodations between living and nonliving things, between wine and
asbestos, stone and time.

Petrifying the World: Parikka, Povinelli

An alternative to humanizing geological strata by locating vital dyna-
mism and human emotions in nonhuman landscapes is imagining the
geologic to overwrite the human itself. Among the most striking efforts
in what we might call a redoubling of the “matter” in ecomaterialism is
Jussi Parikka’s “moral geology,” as elaborated in his book A Geology of
Media. Parikka’s project, he emphasizes, contains “more mining than
data mining.”13 He digs down into real material matter, including the
copper that electrified the Industrial Revolution and the rare earth ele-
ments inside our smartphones. In this mode, “geology becomes a way
to investigate the materiality of the techno-biological media world. It
becomes a conceptual trajectory, a creative intervention to the cultur-
al history of the contemporary.”14 Through a semi–Deleuze and Gua-
tarrian “geology of thought” and by means of his previous coinage of
the “Anthrobscene,” Parikka allows the material structures of the earth
to guide what he terms a “metallurgical way of conducting theoreti-
cal work: ambulant flows, transversal connections, and teasing out the
materiality of matter in new places, in new assemblages of cultural life

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in contemporary technological media.”15 By insisting that even (or es-
pecially?) new media consists of “the archaic materials of the planet,”16
Parikka redoubles the presence of nonhuman matter in our built- and
lived-media environments. It’s not that he’s less interested in human or
artistic forms than other ecomaterialists but rather that his methods di-
rect our attention to the way that aesthetics and narrative create them-
selves atop matter wrested from the earth.
A different but equally radical turn comes in Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s
Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Capitalism. Her conception of geon-
tology or geontopower extends itself out from the Foucauldian trio of
sovereignty, disciplinary power, and biopower into a figuration that re-
quires “late liberalism to maintain or shape the coming relationship of
the distinction between Life and Nonlife.”17 Into the conceptual space
of geontology, she inserts three figures, each with its own central imag-
inary: the Desert, accompanied by Carbon; the Animist, accompanied
by the Indigene; and the Virus, accompanied by the Terrorist.18 Draw-
ing on her fieldwork with the Karrabing people in the Northern Ter-
ritory in Australia and examining the legal and cultural claims of ob-
jects such as a rock formation known locally and legally as Two Women
Sitting Down, Povinelli considers geontopower as both successor to
and reconfiguration of the biopolitical structures of late liberalism. The
current moment, she argues, is generating a “reorganization and crisis
of the governance of Life and Nonlife.”19 Beyond the sixth mass extinc-
tion, the Anthropocene, and the climate crisis she calls “Meteorocene,”
she glimpses “a meta-extinction, that occurs when Life itself becomes
extinct.”20 In neo-Foucauldian cadences, she wonders if this reversal,
which is also a return to the pre-Life condition of our planet as geo-
logical entity, represents possibility: “Nonlife is what holds, or should
hold for us, the more radical potential. For Nonlife created what it is
radically not, Life, and will in time fold this extension of itself back into
itself. . . . Life is merely a moment in the greater dynamic unfolding of
Nonlife.”21 In this expanded chronology, the current moment, in which
“geology and meteorology are devouring their companion discipline,
biology,”22 represents a rupture that is also a return. It’s in the context
of this return to Nonlife that Povinelli articulates the “requiem” of her
book’s subtitle; the idea of “geontologies” represents an insight into and
prospective vision of loss.

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The Vulcan Option: Ellsworth and Kruse
What changes when we invite geos to join the once-private space
of bios? The shared insight of Bennett’s “vital materialism,” Cohen’s
“geophilia,” Iovino and Opperman’s “storied matter,” Povinell’s
“geontology,” and in varying keys nearly all the work we might group
under the category of “geomaterialism” recognizes an entangled
community that embraces life and nonlife and may be most visibly
seen in the cultural meanings of stone. But after the invitation is issued
and we recognize the vibrancy, narrative pull, and emotional force of
the lithic, how then must we live now? What happens next? Many of
these thinkers respond to that question through artworks both modern
and ancient. A striking attempt to use art to reengage with humanity
and the geologic appears in a collection of essays and images created
by over forty scholars, writers, artists, and activists. This collection
was assembled by New York–based artists and designers Elizabeth
Ellsworth and Jaime Kruse and is published as an open-source volume
with Punctum Books under the title Making the Geologic Now. The book
and its companion website (geologicnow.com) constitute an aggressive
response to geologic entanglement and an effort by its contributors
“to site themselves as emergent material phenomena.”23 Writing across
multiple geologic events from the 1997 discovery of the Great Pacific
Garbage Patch to Superstorm Sandy in 2012, the book imagines “an
entirely new relationship to time” through what poet-contributor Don
McCay, borrowing from geologist Harry Hess, names “geopoetry.”24
Can humans read stone poetry, and are we being read by stones in the
Anthropocene?
The animating spirit and imaginative force behind Making the
Geologic Now is Jane Bennett, and the gambits of “vital materialism”
buttress the book’s interweaving of geological, political, and cultural
events. In an epilogue, “Earthling, Now and Forever?,” Bennett closes
the volume by speculating about a “new economy of discernment” and
the “enriched understanding of ‘self ’” that a geoinfused humanities can
provide.25 “A keener cultural sensitivity to the deep and periodically
explosive time of the geologic” suggests to her that the Anthropocene
itself might be productively imagined not as human mastery or even
defilement of the stratigraphic record but as revealing that “there is
little reason to posit a hard, ontological dichotomy between human and

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ahuman forces.”26 Stones and humans, nonlife and life, we all embrace
each other all the way down.

****

Taking these seven volumes as representative of geomaterialism or a

geologic turn in environmental humanities scholarship might seem to
imply that there was previously something like a nongeological “hu-
manities” that was unencumbered by the lithic. No such stoneless era
appears available after reading these books. These writers, from medi-
evalist Jeffrey Cohen to twenty-first-century theorists and artists, insist
that stones and humans, geologic and experiential time, are produc-
tively and inextricably entangled. Sometimes these modes define each
other by the contrast between soft flesh and hard stone, but often they
reveal continuity and cohesion in mortal relationships with petrous
matter. Rock is hardly the only inhuman element to see a spike in eco-
materialist analyses in recent years—much has been and continues to
be said for water, air, and fire also. But the rapid changes in geological
thinking since the eighteenth century suggest something crucial about
the relationship between humans and stone. As Ellsworth and Kruse
put it in the introduction to Making the Geologic Now, “something is
happening” with geothinking today.27 Stone voices have much to tell us
about that “now” and its possible futures.
Steve Mentz is a professor of English at St. John’s University in New York
City. His most recent book is Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization,
1550–1719 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). He is the author
of two earlier monographs, At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean (London:
Continuum, 2009) and Romance for Sale in Early Modern England (Aldershot,
UK: Ashgate, 2006), and also editor or coeditor of four collections: The Sea in
Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Literary Culture (Abingdon, UK: Routledge,
2017), Oceanic New York (Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2015), The Age of
Thomas Nashe (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013), and Rogues and Early Modern
English Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). He has writ-
ten numerous articles on ecocriticism, Shakespeare, and maritime literature
and curated an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Lost at Sea: The
Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550–1750 (2010). He blogs at The Bookfish
(www.stevementz.com) and occasionally tweets @stevermentz.

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Notes
1. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, David Daniell, ed. (London: Bloomsbury/Arden 3,
1998) act 1, scene 1, line 36, 158.
2. Cohen, Stone, 63.
3. Cohen, Stone, 249.
4. Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy, 150, 152.
5. Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy, 153.
6. Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy, 4.
7. Iovino, Ecocriticism and Italy, 1.
8. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2010).
9. Gidal, Ossianic Uncomformities, 4.
10. Gidal, Ossianic Uncomformities, 9.
11. Gidal, Ossianic Uncomformities, 183, 184; emphasis in original.
12. Gillis, Writing on Stone, 2.
13. Parikka, Geology of Media, viii.
14. Parikka, Geology of Media, 4.
15. Parikka, Geology of Media, 23.
16. Parikka, Geology of Media, 137.
17. Povinelli, Geontologies, 4.
18. Povinelli, Geontologies, 16–20.
21. Povinelli, Geontologies, 172.
20. Povinelli, Geontologies, 176.
21. Povinelli, Geontologies, 176.
22. Povinelli, Geontologies, 176.
23. Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 9.
24. Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 24, 46.
25. Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 244, 245.
26. Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 245.
27. Ellsworth and Kruse, Making the Geologic Now, 6.

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