Regarding the possibility of a politics of weather, mentioned in my previous post: Walter Benjamin hints at one point in the Arcades Project that weather might be an object of historical materialist analysis. Adapting Marx’s commodity fetishism, Benjamin writes in the Exposé of 1939 that “phantasmagoria” constitutes a nineteenth century “History of Civilization,” “a viewpoint according to which the course of the world is an endless series of facts congealed in the form of things” (Arcades Project 14). Phantasmagoria, the dream of the collective, takes the form of fashion, of architecture—and of the weather. 

[A]rchitecture, fashion—yes, even the weather—are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are inside the individual. And so long as they preserve this unconscious, amorphous dream configuration, they are as much natural processes as digestion, breathing, and the like. They stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges. (389-390) 

Architecture, fashion, and weather appear as “natural processes”  because of their “amorphous dream configuration”; phantasmagoric, they seem as “eternally selfsame” as “digestion, breathing, and the like.” This passage ends on a note of “good” Marxism (“until the collective seizes upon them in politics …”), but weather presents a challenge to historical materialism. It is more difficult to fathom weather’s phantasmagoria than that of architecture or fashion, two “things” explicitly belonging to what Benjamin calls “humanity’s life forms and creations” (14). What lies behind our dream of weather? What will weather look like once “history emerges”? I suspect that Benjamin makes this rather surprising assertion in part to insist that nothing lies outside ideology; that weather seems so evidently outside the dream of the collective suggests that it is all the more decidedly within it. Anything that “just is” is ideological. But in spite of its appearance alongside architecture and fashion, weather is largely unexamined in the Arcades. It appears several times in Convolute D, “Boredom, Eternal Return,” but in the beguiling, immaterial form of so many of Benjamin’s “dream configurations.” “Only someone who has grown up in the big city can appreciate its rainy weather, which altogether slyly sets one dreaming back to early childhood,” he writes. “Rain makes everything more hidden, makes days not only gray but uniform. From morning until evening, one can do the same thing—play chess, read, engage in argument—whereas sunshine, by contrast, shades the hours and discountenances the dreamer” (104). Or simply, “On the double meaning of the word temps in French” (106). Or, since “Boredom” is his topic here, “Among all the subjects first marked out for lyric expression by Baudelaire, one can be put at the forefront: bad weather” (111). Unexamined it may be, but this sense of weather as phantasmagoria is compelling. A passage from Brierre de Boismont suggests likewise that phantasmagoria behaves like weather. “Sufficient attention has not been bestowed on this misty phantasmagoria in which we live,” writes Boismont. “Those undecided forms, which approach and retire unceasingly, with a thousand tantalizing smiles, and after which we run with so much ardor, travel through our brains, emerge from their clouds, and become clearer and clearer …” (quoted in Terry Castle “Pantasmagoria” 57-58, my emphasis). 

Or as Michel Serres argues in The Birth of Physics, 

Meteorology is the repressed content of history. Of great histories and small, of the sciences and of philosophy. I don’t mean the climate, but meteora: clouds, rain and waterspouts, hailstorms or showers, the direction and force of the wind, here and now. And I don’t mean the prevailing wind. Meteors are accidents, occurrences. A chance proximity, an adventitious environment of the essential, the stance. This only interests those in whom the learned have no interest: peasants and sailors. Those whom the learned meet on holiday, when the things that they consider serious are put off until tomorrow. They scornfully deign to speak about it with the doorman, on the street. The time of meteora does not match up with the time of history, and their kind of order and disorder has only recently begun to be of interest to scientific rationality. (67)

Can something be at once accidental and historical? Perhaps weather is accidental only insofar as it is of interest to “peasants and sailors,” and not considered “serious” by “the learned”; it appears accidental because “[t]he time of meteora does not match up with the time of history”—“history” in this case designating the hegemonic history of the learned, as opposed to the (seemingly) accidental series of occurrences of the peasant, the sailor, the doorman, “on the street.” What may appear accidental or irrational from the perspective of power may indeed register as historical from another point of view, or when, in Benjamin’s words, “the collective seizes upon [it] in politics and history emerges.” Again and again we find that those “on the street” (in the Lower Ninth Ward) are far more vulnerable to the weather than those who can afford to escape it. We might read George Bush’s lax response to the flooding of New Orleans as a failure to acknowledge “the time of meteora.”

My brother recently passed along this clip of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell discussing the weather on the Daily Show. The formula is simple: parody myopic Fox News-style outrage by "debating" the weather. Conventional right-wing formulas on taxes ("Today [the government is] controlling the weather and tomorrow, who knows, federal income tax."), guns ("If tornadoes are outlawed, only outlaws will have tornadoes."), immigration ("Clearly we must close our borders to undesirable foreign weather."), drugs ("If people can't get tornadoes here, they're just going to go down to Mexico where there's no regulation at all."), and guns, again ("Tornadoes don't kill people. Flying debris kills people.") seem absurd when the topic is "weather" rather than, say, "the liberal agenda." The audience's reaction is telling: the first big laugh comes when Colbert and Carell start bleating "baad" and "goood" at one another. Arguing over whether the weather is "good" or "bad" seems about as useful as arguing over the virtues of breathing: it just is, so what's to argue about? That weather just is calls attention to the empty pretensions of media punditry (two words that Jon Stewart points out "mean almost nothing"), but haunting this parody is the suggestion that weather might in truth be just as "political" as taxes, guns, immigration, drugs and so on. It's not simply that weather mirrors politics, or that weather performs political work (destroying seats of power, defeating armies, "punishing" Florida counties implicated in the 2000 election debacle). As Hurricane Katrina made so appallingly apparent, the weather is "about" economics, class, culture, law, property, race, infrastructure, and any number of other things that we tend to consider far less inevitable than tornadoes. Understanding how exactly weather is "about" such things requires some work.

Two recent novels, Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen and Lowboy by John Wray, revolve around clinically paranoid characters who are obsessed with the weather. Wray's Will "Lowboy" Heller is a paranoid schizophrenic teenager who, released from residential treatment and off his meds, spends most of a day and night on the New York subway; certain that global warming will end the world in a matter of hours, he becomes convinced that "cooling down" his own body will hold it off. To a homeless woman he meets on a subway platform, Lowboy says, 

I want to tell you something ... I want to tell you something about the world. ... Everyone knows what's happening to the air--what we're doing to the air, I mean. The air is changing every single minute. It's thickening and flattening and building up speed. The air is getting hotter every day. ... But everyone knows it's not happening on a straight line--not at all. The air is getting hotter on a curve.

He returns to these themes repeatedly over the course of the narrative: everyone knows the world is getting hotter. It's getting hotter on a curve. Later in the novel, in a free-associative monologue to his girlfriend, Emily, we learn that Lowboy discovered his role in global warming with the help of his psychiatrist:

How have you been feeling Will? he asked me. I'm fine Doctor but right now I feel just a little hot. ... Would you like me to modify your regimen? Is that something you might like? I shut my eyes and mouth I didn't answer. Beyond that there's not much I can do he said. The whole world's getting hotter they say. I opened my eyes and looked at him. The whole world's getting what? ... The world was in my body and my body was hidden deep inside the world. In its guts Emily. It was the most interesting thing. I could feel it getting hotter even on the coldest days the windows fogging up from the degrees.

Seizing on the doctor's offhand remark, Lowboy realizes that the world and his body enclose one another. ("When the feeling came on of Too Many Degrees I'd put snowballs in my hands to make it colder. ... This past January was The Coldest In Recent Memory I'm quoting from the New York Daily News.") If only he can cool down, "he could keep the world from ending."

I won't go into how he manages it. Lowboy is an exceptionally good novel right up to its disappointing conclusion, which makes the whole weather-and-paranoia thing seem suddenly gimmicky. I really don't think this is a gimmick. Pairing paranoia--the sense of an indeterminately significant surround--with (altered) weather makes sense. Will's belief that "the world was in my body and my body was hidden deep inside the world" illustrates a scalar anxiety that is native to weather and climate. What I like about Galchen's novel, which is not as tightly written nor as finely observant as Wray's, is that it takes this anxiety seriously. We are never quite certain if her narrator, Doctor Leo Liebenstein (also a psychiatrist), is mentally ill. We do know that one of his patients, Harvey, believes that he controls the weather in Manhattan (it's interesting that both novels take place there) on behalf of the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

Weather in Atmospheric Disturbances is both the content and form of paranoia. Like his patient directing winds on the Hudson, Leo comes to suspect that he may be at the center of the weather: "Maybe I am the proverbial butterfly." He reads his condition in fellow of the Royal Academy Tzvi Gal-Chen's theory of single Doppler radar, and sees in Gal-Chen's diagram of a storm images from his life. He describes his predicament as the "Dopplerganger Effect," a doubled distortion "that, properly understood, [might] enable a more accurate understanding of the real world."

The narrator of Atmospheric Disturbances, and by extension the reader, is immersed in a climate of such indeterminate significance. This meeting of weather and paranoia is Galchen's tacit acknowledgement that anxiety about climate is itself a kind of climate. Anxiety surrounds, as Freud suggests; climate takes on the uncertainty of the subject, or as Jakobson writes of metonymy, our understanding of climate is always "digress[ing] ... from the character to the setting." Thus the weather takes on the texture of Leo's mind. Or is it the other way around?

"Nice day." "Looks like rain." "Hot enough for you?"

In his introduction to Romantic Weather, Arden Reed calls attention to

the sheer fact that the weather should be, as [Leslie] Brisman puts it, a "topic of conversation," that it should translate with apparently little difficulty into language so as to become the subject that "everybody talks about." Indeed, the propensity to discuss the weather seems to be strong enough that it can overrule good sense: "It is commonly observed," said Samuel Johnson, "that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what they must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm." His lightly mocking tone notwithstanding, Johnson here points to something crucial, for he allows that, however trivial a "topic of conversation" it may seem, the weather can generate language independent of any significant referent; in fact, its very triviality attests to its power to produce discourse. Whatever else it may prove to be, then, the weather has a linguistic dimension.

This "power to produce discourse" (discourse whose content is presumably beside the point) appears in DeLillo's White Noise as well, when Howard Dunlop, the reclusive German instructor, describes reengaging with the world after the death of his mother through talk about the weather. "I began to come out of my shell, talk to people in the street," he says. "'Nice day.' 'Looks like rain.' 'Hot enough for you?' Everyone notices the weather." Roman Jakobson would categorize such utterances as "phatic," expressing the fact of communication.

Weather is a common subject of phatic speech. At the bus stop or in line at the bank, among strangers, weather offers a way to speak. I would also argue that weather is prosaic, in the sense of prose developed by M. M. Bakhtin in "Discourse in the Novel." Bakhtin argues among other things that prose is a "heteroglossia" of lived discourse, continually circulating, spoken, in use. One might add that prose in everyday use is frequently boring, tired, clichéd. Saul Bellow's lament for American language gets at this, I think:

In public life everybody uses the same formulas--presidents, former presidents, senior statesmen, secretaries of state, leaders of the legal and other professions, celebrity financiers, talk-show hosts, university presidents, disc jockeys, leaders of the various liberation movements, star athletes, rock musicians, artists, singers, Hollywood personalities, publishers, the clerics of all churches, environmentalists … Sportscasters, rap musicians, university rightists, university leftists, all employ the same language.

(I find this observation delightful, although I doubt Bellow was delighted by what he observed.) In advertisements and public service announcements, in the workplace or over a shop counter, prose is put to use--very often, in the form of talk about the weather.

To begin, in an interview shortly before the publication of Three Poems (1972), Ashbery describes his decision to write three long prose poems (totaling over one hundred pages) thus: "the poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create a much more--I hate to say environmental because it's a bad word--but more of a surrounding thing like the way one's consciousness is surrounded by one’s thoughts." Frequently cited, rarely is this (really quite curious) statement interrogated. (Is one's consciousness surrounded by one's thoughts?) But what interests me most here is Ashbery's hesitation over "environmental." (This is an instance of paralipsis, an offering in the guise of denial.) Why is it a "bad word"?

Consider that by 1970, when Ashbery was beginning work on Three Poems, "environmental" was ideologically marked. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published in 1962; eight years later, the Environmental Protection Agency was established, and Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, deep ecology, the Endangered Species Act, and James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis soon followed. Ashbery may express a distaste for such developments when he calls "environmental" a "bad word"; but I suspect that this designation has more to do with its being "marked" than with the beliefs and politics it entails. "Environmental" is a "bad word" for Ashbery in 1971 in the sense that "terrorism" is a "bad word" after September 11, 2001. It is overdetermined; it induces a constellation of association that overwhelms any simple denotative power the word might possess. One could argue that developments in environmentalism, and especially ecocriticism, have since marked even "surrounding," rendering it too a "bad word" But at the time of the interview, "surrounding" struck Ashbery as a good enough word for the effect of his long prose poems; and he implies, in exchanging the bad word for the good, that "surrounding" in this case means "environmental"--minus the ideological mark.

"Environmental" before environmentalism describes rooms as well as "natural spaces." As a synonym for "surrounding," environment denotes the space in which you find yourself and the air circulating around you, not to mention the sounds and smells, the light, other people, animals and things, even, arguably, your thoughts, sensations, utterances, and so on.

I mean here to suggest that trying to think "environment" beyond (before and/or after) environmentalism is useful and maybe even necessary to thinking the dimensions of the "environmental crisis," dimensions that, as a recent New York Times Magazine article argues, prove stubbornly unthinkable.

Here lies my attraction to weather, as well. "Weather," I believe, is not quite yet a "bad word." It's getting there. Depending who you talk to, that timeless pleasantry, "Nice day," may invite a reply along the lines of, "Yep. Global warming." But the fact that weather's relation to other things--climate, pollution, global warming--is still largely undefined means that it opens space for inquiry into environment's undecidability.

Don DeLillo's White Noise is by far the best work on weather's uncertain relations that I have read.

What This Is For

My graduate work is on environment (specifically weather) and the poems of John Ashbery. In my research, I run across a lot of material peripheral to my present work; this blog is thus a peripheral space (like the space of weather) (I'll explain that at some point) to work on such material. I love thinking about weather. My next project will pursue "our" ways of imagining climate change, and what I write here will allow me to keep this "in mind" (as Slavoj Žižek suggests we do with "environment") while I churn out my dissertation. So that's it.

I have a radio show of the same name on KDVS 90.3 fm in Davis, CA.