Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer argue that the ‘Anthropocene’ is a geological epoch that reveals the centrality of human actions in affecting an environmental catastrophe and anticipates the possibility of annihilation of humans and nonhumans alike, shrouding the earth’s future in mystery and uncertainty and admitting humanity’s failure. In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch goes beyond the enlightenment’s understanding of hope as a way of transcending the fear of failure and annihilation to recognise its immanence as part of the world’s processual and indeterminate becoming. Drawing on Bloch, Ben Anderson argues that hope emerges from catastrophic encounters that ‘produce diminishment’ and unsettle the boundaries that separate subject from object. In highlighting human limitations and failures, the Anthropocene unsettles modernity’s fixed hierarchical dualities to create conditions for the emergence of hope.
But hope is not the only emotion the Anthropocene generates: melancholy could be seen as ‘an affective release of the energies and frustrations pent up during the slow implosion of modernity’ as David Chandler writes when explaining the affective dimension of the Anthropocene. Melancholy, in the Anthropocene, is produced by two inseparable epistemological and ontological realities. First, we realise that our epistemological belief in humans as the central site of meaning-making and reason, detached from nature, cannot be sustained. Second, a negativity that sees humans as progressing toward nonbeing and/or the possibility of being otherwise comes to define our existence as we realise our entanglement in a process of collective becoming with other nonhuman entities.
Melancholy has historically been associated with the Romantic period. Irving Babbitt argues that melancholy was a way to seek happiness. The Romantics’ intentional quest for ideal happiness always ended with disillusionment since, eluded by ‘superlative bliss’, the Romantics become ‘superlative in woe’. Simon Swift, in Romanticism and Unhappiness, explains how melancholy becomes a state of being ‘both lost and retained and […] a site both of identification and disavowal’ to underscore a dynamic, as opposed to fixed, relationality between loss and gain, identity and difference. In an earlier article, Shahira Hathout points out that Jane Austen is one Romantic author who recognised the entangled and dynamic nature of reason and emotion, human and nonhuman. Austen reveals a reality of ‘no-thingness’ that Karen Barad later, in Meeting the Universe Halfway, explains as a condition that ‘doesn’t presume the separateness of any- “thing,” [including] spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinctions that set humans apart.’ Instead, Austen advocated practices that centre flexibility and kinship in experiencing life and attune us to uncertainties.
Like Austen, John Keats’ philosophy of negative capability deviates from the Romantic tendency to idealise human reason. For example, in The Preface to Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth celebrates the poet as someone who is gifted with an ‘organic sensibility’ through which ‘feeling[s] are modified and directed by …thoughts’. Keats describes Wordsworth’s perspective as a form of egoism and sought to forego it by refraining from reaching out for the ideal through an anthropocentric faith in reason.
In the Anthropocene, intentionality is problematised further. Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that ‘the Anthropocene […] has been an unintended consequence of human choices’, suggesting that focusing only on the intentionality afforded by the human mind obscures the adverse effects of our actions. Keats affirms the capacity of melancholy to produce hope inasmuch as this melancholy emerges from unintentional embodied and differential experiences that constitute humans, nonhumans, and the more-than-human. Evidently, negative capability is enacted by the figure of an animal, the chameleon, performing as Keats’ poetic persona to emphasise differential becoming.
A further critique of Enlightenment models comes from Karen Barad, a physicist and feminist philosopher, who draws on Neil Bohr’s radical challenge to representationalism, associated with Newton’s physics and Descartes’ rationalist perception of epistemology, to articulate their philosophy of ‘agential realism’. This article locates an affinity between Keats’ Negative capability and Barad’s philosophy of Agential Realism that unsettles excessive anthropocentrism by acknowledging animal (nonhuman) intelligence and thus re-articulates melancholy and hope as mutually constituted practices that enable different social, political, and environmental possibilities to emerge.
Negative capability and the chameleon persona
In a letter, Keats describes negative capability as the ability to live ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. The belief that reason can achieve absolute happiness or delay pain amounts to a form of ‘intoxication’. Instead, for Keats, embodied experiences like ‘breathing, vision’, pain, and suffering, better attune us to the world around us and can complement the work of reason. As we shall see, Barad describes these experiences as ‘inhuman’ to unsettle the term’s etymological connection to emotional detachment and indifference. Keats describes the individual’s soul as ‘intelligence without identity’, arguing that identity is always in a process of becoming ‘through the medium of the heart.’ In this sense, negative capability recasts dualities like mind/body, culture/nature as dynamic relationalities that produce the individual’s soul and identity through unintentional responsiveness to particular encounters.
Ultimately, the unintentionality associated with negative capability transforms poetry from a condensation of representations to a performativity that admits the agency of the nonhuman. Poetry is recontextualised as a phenomenon that constitutes the poet, the poetic material, experiences that inspired it, and the emotions it produces in the readers from different times and places. Keats writes that ‘we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us’ since design and over-reflection might drive one into deceiving oneself with ‘half-truths’. Alternatively, natural inspiration or unintentionality unsettle boundaries between ‘intelligence [mind]…the human heart … [and] the [w]orld or [e]lemental space’ and flattens the human-nonhuman hierarchy to affirm their co-emergence. Poetry, therefore, merges and emerges with the soul of the author and readers to induce a familiarity that amounts to a sense of collective remembering. Non-intentionality is as important for Keats as it is an important aspect for Barad’s agential realism. As we shall see soon, both philosophies underscore the emergence of intentionality and identity from specific human-nonhuman entangled practices.
Ontology and epistemology come together in negative capability. Keats maintains that humans are ‘subject[ed] to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or other’. In his philosophy, Keats refused to intensify human ego. Instead, Keats proposed the chameleon persona to enact negative capability and affirm the co-emergence of human identity with the other as we negotiate life and be physically marked by experience.
The chameleon poet constitutes the differences that make up the world as it overcomes many dualities enacted by modernity. Keats describes the chameleon persona as enjoying ‘light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fain high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated’. The chameleon poetic persona thus has no fixed identity; it blends with its environment. The boundaries that separate and connect it to its surroundings are flexible as it simultaneously hides and is subsumed into its environment. In its embeddedness amongst others, the chameleon subject either flourishes or runs the risk of annihilation with the other.
This anti-anthropocentric perspective grounds negative capability in an awareness of the ontological entanglement of all beings in time and space. This ontological entanglement is also evidenced in the Anthropocene in which hope emerges from the possibility to bring the ‘world’ built around the traditional subject of modernity to an end and instead affirm the subject’s situatedness within a web of human-nonhuman-more-than-human relationalities.
Here, reading Barad’s agential realism alongside Keats’ negative capability could highlight the nature of these differential (human and nonhuman) relationalities and the political, social, and environmental valences that constitute affective practices of melancholy and hope.
Agential Realism, Negative Capability, and the Chameleon Persona
Agential realism draws on insights from quantum physics as it integrates material and discursive practices in re-thinking the world’s contingent ontology. Karen Barad argues for a ‘posthumanist performativity’ that recognises human participation in the nonhuman world, unsettling the boundaries between mind and body, meaning and matter. For Barad, recognising our unintentional entanglement with the nonhuman is key to the emergence of situated knowledge and meanings attuned to changes and limitations.
In agential realism, loss is a way of relating to the nonhuman world. In Meeting the Universe, Barad approaches loss as ‘a marked presence, or rather a marking that troubles the divide between absence and presence’. Experiences like mourning, suffering, and yearning attune us to the changes in the world through practices like active remembering, in which loss haunts the melancholic subject, calling to be addressed and refigured. The nothingness associated with loss is a ‘material presence’ in which ‘the dying is within the living within the dying’, activating different material and discursive practices that map how we navigate the future. In this performativity, melancholy emerges as a phenomenon where neither the ‘past nor the future is ever closed’. This approach to loss opens a space for hope to emerge.
Whereas Keats’ negative capability is enacted by the chameleon persona, for Barad, practices of primitive creatures like the brittlestar better express agential realism. The brittlestar is an eyeless, brainless sea creature that belongs to the starfish family. Its body is covered with tiny lenses that allow it to reflect light and hide to evade predators. Responding to its environment, the brittlestar can separate body parts attacked by predators and later regrow them, transforming itself into ‘a visualising system […] in an ongoing reworking of its bodily boundaries’ that separate it from its surroundings. The cuts in the body of the brittlestar mark its entangled ontological (being) and epistemological (knowing) practices among other creatures; it restructures the boundaries that simultaneously separate and connect it with its environment through actions of dis-membering and re-membering. The brittlestar is a model that allows Barad to dissociate intelligence and the ability to reason from the presence of a human brain. The brittlestar’s manoeuvres in the ocean suggest a form of intelligence that does not require the existence of a brain but an intelligence that emerges from iteratively suffering the loss of degeneration (melancholy) and regeneration (hope).
The ability to be a chameleon subject and achieve negative capability reveals the greatness of the subject/poet. William Shakespeare, for example, could resist the lure of certainty encouraged by reason. William Hazlitt saw in Shakespeare humility and openness that allowed him to perceive himself as ‘nothing […]; but […] all that others were, or that they could become’. Keats found Hazlitt’s description fitting with his chameleon persona that ‘has no self… no character … no identity’, and (e)merges with other entities. Keats, in an anti-anthropocentric vein, admits the subject’s emerging nature and identity out of a negativity in which ‘not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature’ because when he is with people ‘the identity of everyone in the room begins to so press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated.’ Keats’ negative capability resonates with the loss and melancholy experienced in the Anthropocene and the realisation that in its quest for progress, humanity ends up progressing towards death and potential nothingness. This form of negativity affirms our shared vulnerability with the other and, as Chakraborty argues, compels us to ‘rethink humans as a species, united not by their origin but by their current global imbrication’. The chameleon persona, in this negativity, iteratively risks its sense of self in its embodied entanglement in time and space amongst other creatures as it oscillates between possibilities of being and nonbeing.
This self-effacing quality of negative capability makes it political and ethical as it allows the author/narrator to advocate a world founded upon what Beth Lau describes as ‘overcom[ing] selfishness and experience[ing] compassion for others’ as one becomes capable of ‘negat[ing] one’s own personality, project[ing] oneself into the thoughts and feelings of others and remain open to a variety of points of view’. This productive negativity constitutes all creatures sharing the same surroundings to reveal a ‘bio-ethical’ imperative that illuminates a ‘sustainable, ecological or relational construction of subjectivity’ where relations, circumstances, feelings, and other different practices and responses define the indeterminate nature of the subject’s agency.
Conclusion
Negative capability, like agential realism, appears to be a radical philosophy appropriate to rethinking life in the Anthropocene, where melancholy and disillusionment unsettle humans’ sense of identity to enact ‘a differential sense of being’. In freeing agency from its fixation on the subject of modernity, poetry, like science and philosophy, becomes a phenomenon that constitutes entangled human and nonhuman practices as well as inhuman desires and thoughts realised through involuntary actions like touching, breathing, seeing, etc. The inhuman, in this context, transforms from a state of being detached, unfeeling, and indifferent to become ‘the very condition of possibility of feeling the suffering of the other, of literally being in touch with the other, of feeling the exchange of emotion in the binding obligations of entanglements’. This entanglement sees relations as sites where melancholy can be dislodged by its mutually constituted hope.