Camera Work

In his recently translated Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology, biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber describes ecological relationality as essentially erotic: Ecology is “every description of reality that understands it as an interconnected system of reciprocal inspiration, dependency, penetration, and the persistent search for freedom,” and that “centers on the principle of erotic attraction” (Weber 2017, 7). Weber's definition of ecology brings forward a set of related questions that this essay aims to historicize: How have the descriptive practices of ecologists produced this understanding of eros as both a drive for connection and—even more importantly—a striving for freedom and autonomy? How does erotic, ecological description function, on the page, across the screen, as it finds footing within the epistemologies of modernity? What does an erotic ecology look and feel like, and how might it also instruct this form of seeing and feeling? For Weber, the stakes of these questions are high: “Every scientific description of the world that lacks this [erotic] center ignores our central life experience,” he states (7).Nested within this special issue exploring the seemingly unbounded, while necessarily limited, scope of ecological thought, this article considers the (in)finitude of contact among beings and bodies coexisting within relationships termed ecological. I am interested here in historicizing ecology's erotic practices of description, rooted in its scientific practice and the mediatization of that practice. I demonstrate throughout this discussion how the descriptive practices of ecologists and ecology communicators strive to suggest (in)finite connections among organisms and environments. I aim to do so with particular emphasis on moments where connections among bodies become finite: loosened, slackened, even severed. I take up this emphasis on the finitude of ecological eroticism partly in response to voices within environmental writing that advocate for an ecological thought defined by unbounded proximity—and that are critical of knowledge work and media representations that assert distances between the human and nonhuman world. Timothy Morton's definition of “the” ecological thought is one such example: “Everything is intimate to everything else,” he asserts in a descriptive statement of infinite potential connection (Morton 2010b, 78). Elsewhere, their ecological thought brings our awareness to the “strange strangers” that live in close proximity to ourselves, “nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet” (78). And in contrast, Morton's artificial, highly mediated Nature is always “over there” (Morton 2007, 8).Weber, too, rejects as “ecological” any form of scientific inquiry that asserts a spatial or temporal distance between researcher and environment: In a rather sweeping statement, he claims that “the idea of being cut off from the other, as laboratory researchers are from their objects of inquiry, is perhaps the fundamental error of our civilization” (Weber 2017, 26). The strong rhetoric of these claims contrasts sharply with the fact that both writers also demonstrate an awareness of the fact that ecology also includes efforts on the parts of organisms to distance themselves from each other, or to end attachments that bind them. Weber accounts for the striving of bodies to retain freedom and autonomy in his definition of ecology, and Morton, too, insists upon the distinctive alterity of his “strange strangers.” This suggests to me that it is not, in fact, the concept of species sovereignty itself that threatens Morton's and Weber's definition of ecology as much as it is mediated representations of ecology that, by nature of their own formal, epistemological, and ontological affordances, seemingly “cut off” human observers from the environments that both attract and rebuff humans as participants. In grappling with the impact of media on the descriptive work of ecological thinking, Morton and Weber put ecological eroticism at the very center of this special issue's concerns about how mediation both encourages the proliferation of an ecological worldview and puts its fundamental qualities at risk.1I turn to perhaps an unlikely set of materials to answer these questions by examining the descriptive practices of two conversant works of ecological eroticism in 20th-century modernity: the beloved British science film series Secrets of Nature and its source text, a foundational work of ecological writing, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne (1789/1834).2 One of the “few bright spots’’ of the British Film industry in the 1920s–1930s (to use Rachel Low's description), the 144 short films that comprise Secrets of Nature were screened for popular and avant-garde audiences alike and were celebrated for their innovative techniques and instructive editing by such moderns as Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, and, of course, the editorial team at Camera Work.3 For viewers like Shaw, the cinematography and editing are also dazzingly erotic, administering a bristling attachment to the bodies of bees, flowers, and insects that constructs a longing for both attachment and autonomy. When read in conversation with contemporary theoretical works at the intersection of media and eroticism, the films demonstrate ecological eroticism via a form of mimetic description, sourced from science, that relies upon acts of both distancing and proximity. Bringing theories of eroticism, media, and film to bear on these works of science communication, I show that modern ecological science and its media were vehicles for teaching an eros that brings all life into communion, while respecting, too, the alterity among us.My discussion begins with Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne. Published in 1789, the text demonstrates how eroticism lives in scientific knowledge work: Scientists’ close, but also often distanced, perspective is critical to the construction of this form of feeling in prose. The text has seen numerous renaissances since its publication, and its descriptive style was celebrated by a variety of moderns, including the ecologist Charles Elton, Virginia Woolf (who needs no introduction), and Mr. Bruce H. Woolfe, the director of British Instructional Films, who credited the text as his inspiration for Secrets of Nature. Woolfe directly cites White as the inspiration for production of Secrets: Woolfe writes that White's letters “made me consider the possibility of putting the lives of some of these creatures on the screen. Surely there must be a large number of people who would be interested in seeing something of the life that is lived all round them” (Woolfe 1934, 10).But Elton and Virginia Woolf make perhaps more interesting conversants for the purposes of this article. In citing this passage from White on the very first page of Animal Ecology, Elton echoes White's earlier efforts to ground ecological description in fieldwork, practices rooted in proximity, and attentive to animal behavior, as opposed to form: Faunists, as you observe, are too apt to acquiesce in bare descriptions and a few synonyms; the main reason for this is plain because all that may be done at home in a man's study, but the investigation of life and the conversation of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be obtained but by the active and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country. (White, quoted in Elton 1927, 1)For her part, Virginia Woolf finds in White a gender-bending paragon of scientific description, “the image of science at her most innocent and most sincere” (Woolf 1939, 461). Indeed, Woolf goes on to say that as a scientist, White's “own description fits him best: ‘the kestral or wind-hover,’ he says ‘has a particular mode of hanging in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated’” (461). Interestingly, both writers point toward White's descriptive practices and fieldwork posture in tandem, suggesting a relationship between the comportment of fieldwork and its representation on the page. It is this relationship, and the vacillating comportment between near and far that is inscribed within it, that this article explores next. White's prose models a form of mimetic description that constructs ecological eroticism, and that informs our understanding of Secrets of Nature's erotic pedagogy on screen.Like Weber, White often refers to love and desire in describing the relationships among his nonhuman subjects throughout The Natural History of Selborne, but he also discusses fieldwork in amorous overtones, consistently referring to moments of scientific encounter as desirous and pleasurable. The prose style of one letter describing varying species’ survival instincts—“an affection that sublimes the passions”—is a prime example of how scientific desire is embodied throughout this text (White 1789/1834, 182): A further instance I once saw of noble sagacity in a willow wren, which had built in a bank in my fields. This bird a friend and myself had observed as she sat in her nest, but were particularly careful not to disturb her, though we saw she eyed us with some degree of jealousy. Some days after, as we passed that way, we were desirous of remarking how this brood went on; but no nest could be found till I happened to take up a large bundle of long green moss, as it were carelessly thrown over the nest, in order to dodge the eye of any impertinent intruder. (183)White's prose has a particular rhythm in its placement of nouns and verbs, accompanied by consistently interrupting phrases and clauses, and it takes us a moment to get our bearing in its distinctive form. When we do, we start to see this mildly affecting moment—“remarking” the brood's development—as an erotic encounter, and especially if we take contemporary theories of eroticism, which emphasize both proximity and distance, connection and moments of disconnection, into account. For Laura U. Marks and Luce Irigaray, eroticism is engendered by a vacillation between distance and closeness, between “near and far,” as Marks argues (Marks 2002, 136). For Irigaray, an eroticism that respects the sovereignty of both partners—or that respects survival instinct—depends upon an essential degree of separation; the erotic caress “would begin at a distance” (Irigaray 136). This is rather a that informs the of and to on the of the or the would to each other, at first from far A of across form in and and a variety of media but echoes erotic of For is a relationship between and where to and the to be seen from a distance” (Marks 2002, Marks first describes a of that is of the relationship, in which the up to the to with and which is by that she does not the of the because to Marks also argues that distance, via is for the of this encounter, and the survival of the within as the needs the the must to the distance is to the of to all distance from the world is to a to become from the of the world. is by the to close, close What is erotic is being to become an with and for the and to to being a in the world. is how one in by being to turn from objects that so that both may live in communion, in and by and eroticism for Marks and is a of lives within both Marks and bodies each across and such that the among the of and become One further from to the of to this form of erotic In she states that image is always also in a mimetic to the world we This posture accounts for a of or among It is “the and of in a of with the that this to of a world the sovereignty of the is The of which I read as both spatial distance and from and it to become a for the if of nonhuman and human subjects passage this erotic life by teaching a style of description a fieldwork that while the of his The to this erotic description, as has in his in the and that White throughout his that those he in the the one the often brings researcher and into close proximity. The the to the of the into contact with its in White's prose the of the and the in this the White's and also distance between researchers and White and his friend are not to disturb their distance in the as in the construction of this the as opposed to the And the careful the from the bird on her these a distance between and a The statement of distance also the of itself into the its efforts to White's the of is as being between seeing from and close to his vacillation between distance and the own White's prose to toward and from the nest, the it with her own like the also to be the of contact among White and the White this in the with a It is not the is by eye or White and the nest, or does the nest at The passage this point of Indeed, his suggests as both the she sat on her and the of we passed that White's use of close, but point of contact between the and the The describing the of the moss, it were carelessly thrown over the describes the work that the own the researcher even as it between White and put a point on White's the work of the moss, the contact between and that the of this are moments of eros to in The Natural History of Selborne, but we Gilbert White and his by a a researcher up to a wren, her at a I turn to the The to demonstrate how White's prose informs ecological the film says about which is itself among the its White's own practices of description, life by to turn toward the between ecologists and these the for film as an for ecological even if the life that this among the of film has a relationship with descriptive practices that species survival and as one of the science and nature Secrets of Nature is perhaps one of the this relationship in the first How much via is point do efforts to closer to viewers upon the sovereignty of the subjects How film descriptive practices that both and their longing the of life a to an to that that so in his of for all a between and film over the to and that its also has this in to nature that the to by efforts to even while to these nature by ecological awareness and, to an by human of also to and to and with such the response of the is to see it as a to be with the of by is how animals be with the as to animals be at puts much mediation is a suggesting that consistently the of nonhuman in their very might be Secrets of Nature's production is with for its consider it the of the the and of to on film to the the and director as a of the even suggest to how might about for the descriptive of ecological a species of ecological within the one that mediation in the of nonhuman is a source of not a an ecological eroticism in of the a perspective that we Secrets of Nature's by understanding its scientific and ecological be of this mediation in the of life upon and in and upon the The The is a of the its viewers into the in search of this if It does not this the of the is often Indeed, The often to that we not, perhaps even could not see its more the of our The and the beloved an film that the of fieldwork as being into and by the of The explores how film might not us toward a more relationship with but might the eroticism that work Indeed, The is a in how this a work that, as Marks by viewers close, and close by who the Secrets of Nature's and by The is for its of the a near the an image so beloved that it was in and 1934, in a and on the by this is for its close encounter with a bird who has for most of the film particularly from human and The is to often among by the of like the of the and make the most of the in as long and long this And as in White's writing, these also the to their in that to and rebuff the the brings and into a close mimetic relationship that both the among and to be is an of the in a and are to the the A cut between and our with the that we the us by to the in that are not in this and this of we of The for and long us short of upon but us time to look at the his first is the bird takes off as the to a long take of the him in the of and of him toward the end of this long not in but by the of the central in the of the hanging toward the An even take of about the us to see the bird as it the of the toward the a on The is so of and and this moment of the bird our from the of and the of in the and to the bird The into the which we the as search for and no the eroticism of White's prose. editing viewers between and long close to the even as the in upon some The of each between near and takes in this toward further Indeed, the suggest that the is as a researcher would do, to the in that might a into contact with a in these we that this is the The from to for on as in the to for the bird among the The one of understanding this moment of between and particularly as the film asserts its environmental The does to as in this as the from the and its for us and time in long takes of to do the of is to the theories of erotic encounter that I have toward she also aims to for the in teaching erotic For the and the film are two but perhaps in or perhaps at with each other, but always in to each are not in this we may be into the film and also even by it, but at the we might closer to the film or and its relationship describes here is a mimetic relationship, the the and the each and comportment and the we use the as a of this is a descriptive in that it does not and but encourages a of the editing and of the to the and of by is an in the the posture of interested and that posture to its The and search among with of The the work as to something on the ground their the of into of the Some is by the for image and in descriptive in number from to and are a which with their and the image of the nest into of the search and 1934, This with some in the film the of “the and of the of a and of nest, which is rather is built about two the ground in a This once the between researcher in and of nest, the hands of the the of the to the nest editing in this the if of the researchers with of their us to and as for in this work encourages viewers to the posture of at a distance the being this moment of mimetic description, the the and the researcher each in response to the of the Indeed, distance is critical to as For as much as the may as we have in we may over as the has is a critical distance inscribed within this mimetic relationship via the which is most often in far from the in which is The mimetic of film and to the in of feeling with the film and where I a within work that is erotic in its across time and Indeed, this erotic is inscribed within the very of as films are to the of the and the to the to the work of the into the not to there be this is the nature of the as it to as of nature always us from even as us into contact with The mimetic is particularly interested in distances within the of its viewers to with this species if at a if work distances in order to it also viewers how to within a that includes and White's The work in this Marks describes as an erotic of to become an with and for the and to to being a in the to be to or something to take you this and to be to do the for the to do this Timothy Morton on but also Gilbert might this the or the of that an image into a that us to read a descriptive moment embodied as a scientific as a or even as the that are (Morton 2007, In Morton's as in of the is built into the of description an fact that brings a variety of bodies into a The relies upon this critical distance in its inscribed by moments where the for how to within its the This series the of both like and our own and to the of eroticism that White's prose here in The between the nest where the bodies in the and to of are the descriptive that work as an erotic that that eroticism to viewers in the the long to the bodies to be about so that viewers their posture within the the the bodies begin to into the image of the nest as it with the that for a short their bodies within the The is especially as the from a to a is over a of that her the is that for a the the image of the it to be on Camera work and to both upon and from each this moment of posture between researcher and In a to White's efforts to the researcher how to the wren, The researchers to the of as of in the of this is that viewers become not like but like researchers up to in their distance in which to this of the film on the and of a for most of the of the film the of a very with the of fieldwork in the the first long take of a to the bodies of as into nest such that we see her at all the us to her at the of the screen, the from the of and with this who to the the scientist, her does the the her This is the at in understanding the editing of The which from as much as it from the bodies of its Indeed, the which between and and could also be read as the of the bird as it among The is that the an erotic encounter between the of and viewers that encourages viewers who into the to be by the nonhuman while The as in particularly those by the science is celebrated as a for to organisms and both in its time and in our an ecological description of the film us into a to with a species that consistently and our efforts to see and a between and into the film by the and descriptive practices of ecology The film viewers that science is and that its own of with a comportment for and being in the world. And the series demonstrates that we science and we the of relationships among humans and that have so often within ecological and, how ecologists us to world

Autonomy · Biology · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Feeling · Reciprocal · Sociology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory · Ecology

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