You are on page 1of 14

Against Anthropocene: Transdisciplinarity

and Dionysus in Jungian Ecocriticism

SUSAN ROWLAND

For literary studies I propose the necessity of the unconscious in ecocriticism.


More specifically, this article will show how a Jungian psychoanalytic approach
could overcome some of the limitations of the Anthropocene as a framework
for the humanities as well as for the environmental sciences.
The new humanism of the Anthropocene is based on the contention that no
part of the planet’s ecosystem is untouched by manmade climate change. We
therefore enter an era of human planetary sculpting. Such a powerful notion in
ecology and ecocriticism deserves the tribute of opposition. On the one hand,
this new humanism will be contested like the old humanism for its legacy in
Western discourses of colonialism. These are enshrined in the theories that
remain mired in the binary separation of human culture versus nonhuman nature,
and include dualisms of rational/irrational, masculine/feminine, culture versus
nonhuman nature, self versus other and a hegemonic subordination of the other
as “natural resources.” For while the Anthropocene may emerge from envi-
ronmental perspectives deeply critical of industrial polluting practices, it is
nonetheless liable to encode the philosophical structures underpinning them.
Alternatives to the Anthropocene are found in non-Western epistemologies
that do not assume that human beings are intrinsically “other” to nature. My own
position is to test the Anthropocene from within Anglophone theory that seeks
to recuperate what has been historically marginalized: the feminine, the body,
the nonhuman and the unconscious. This article will seek an ecocriticism that
evades the heroic masculinist overtones of the Anthropocene by dis-membering
him. Using two apparently discrete modes of fracturing the historic discourses of
reason — the psychoanalysis of C. G. Jung1 and the transdisciplinarity of Basarab
Nicolescu —,2 I will suggest a dismembered body of knowing that leaves room
for the other as that which cannot be rationally known or controlled. Dionysus

1. All references are, by volume and paragraph number, to the edition of The Collected Works of C.G.
Jung (CW), edited by Sir Herbert Read, Dr Michael Fordham and Dr Gerhard Adler, translated
by R.F.C. Hull (1953-91) (London: Routledge & Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press).
2. Basarab Nicolescu, “Transdisciplinarity — Past, Present and Future.” Available at http://cetrans.
com.br/textos/transdisciplinarity-past-present-and-future.pdf. Accessed October 2016.
402 SUSAN ROWLAND

in his bisexual dismemberment can help us re-member a different kind of rela-


tion to our planetary home. We begin with Jung’s psychology for ecocriticism.

Jung for Ecocriticism


Jung’s core attitude to knowledge makes a fundamental challenge to the Anthro-
pocene as a dominant idea.
Nobody drew the conclusion that if the subject of knowledge, the
psyche, were in fact a veiled form of existence not immediately acces-
sible to consciousness, then all our knowledge must be incomplete, and
moreover to a degree that we cannot determine. (Jung, CW8: para. 358)

The existence of parts of the mind not fully knowable or controllable, what
Jung called “the unconscious,” means that no one rational system can claim to
subordinate all knowledge to its paradigm. We cannot know how much we are
missing or misconceiving by applying only a part of ourselves to understanding
the world and human beings. Moreover, the way we approach knowing has
ecological implications.
The moment one forms an idea of a thing […]. One has taken posses-
sion of it, and it has become an inalienable piece of property, like a
slain creature of the wild that can no longer run away. (Jung, CW8:
para. 356).

There is no standpoint outside the psyche from which to view it with scien-
tific detachment. If there is a nature of the psyche, it is one in which we are
always caught up. Our conscious faculties do not encompass all that is real
nor all that we are. Hence there is no epistemological boundary between
the unknown human and the nonhuman. Situating the Anthropocene as a
knowable and measurable intervention into nature is a privileging of part of
human beings; it is a theory based on cutting out what is wild and unmap-
pable in ourselves.
Jung’s metaphor of the slain creature says more than that psychologists stalk
the psyche from within. Like all metaphors it is a comparison that problema-
tizes as well as likens. Here the various parts of the metaphor are the “idea of
a thing,” “inalienable piece of property,” and “slain creature of the wild.” The
metaphor spans the meaning making about psyche (idea), culture (property)
and nature (creature). To seize upon a definitive idea about the psyche is to
grasp it proprietarily. Such a greedy manoeuvre is equivalent to killing a wild
animal that has no means of escape.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 403

What is striking about this metaphor is the link it makes between control of
meaning and despoliation of the natural world. In this, it represents an insight
that is more than ecological; it is ecocritical, in the sense of the body of criti-
cism and theory that addresses how literature carves up the world into “natural”
and “cultural” categories. To raid the psyche in the form of claiming an idea as
fully known, to claim ownership of a psychic idea, does two things. It slaughters
indigenous creatures then insists that the dead creature represents some psychic
truth. To imagine that one knows something absolutely about psychic nature
is to stake one’s claim to a dead land.
For Jung something extraordinary happens to writing and images that evokes
the deep unconscious. Such cultural signs — Jung calls them symbols3 — are
so imbued with psychic energy that they burn through the systems of commu-
nication we believe keep human language separate from nature. Rather, the
Jungian symbol gestures towards ecocritical and scientific theories that nature
speaks to us through the body and the imagination. This paper will show how
Jung’s work can aid a revisioning of human creativity as deeply embedded
within non-human reality.

Ecocriticism
Ecocriticism is a branch of literary studies that puts a critical focus on the rela-
tionship between culture and nature in a textual context. It contains a number
of controversies and debates. For some ecocritics these include the rejection
of the term “nature” itself as too ideologically saturated. I take the contrary
view in suggesting that infusing the political drive of the word “nature” is a
mythical substrate that embodies an “otherness” to culture worth retaining and
excavating.
Moreover, ecocriticism struggles with the question of what is “natural” in
products of the imagination. Could all examples of artistic media exhibit a
connection to the environment? In such a framework, a red plastic sculpture
in a windowless gallery could be read symptomatically for its overt disguise
of ultimately planet-extracted materials that we call “raw”. By this attitude, all

3. For symbols are images that point to something not yet fully known, or not knowable in any
other way (Jung 1921, CW6: para. 819). Jung called symbols “living” when they manifest some-
thing not accessible to consciousness except by means of this pregnant expression (CW6: 816).
Symbols are also remarkably pervasive. “Since every scientific theory contains an hypothesis,
and is therefore an anticipatory description of something still essentially unknown, it is a symbol.
Furthermore every psychological expression is a symbol if we assume that it states or signifies
something more and other than itself which eludes our present knowledge.” (ibid.: 817).
404 SUSAN ROWLAND

literature throughout history has some sort of link, even if it strenuously denies
it, to non-human nature.
An important counter to the possible all-pervasiveness of ecocriticism is to
stress its critical focus. Historically, the emergence of radical and theoretical
writing about nature and literature owes much to the publication of The Ecocriti-
cism Reader edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm in 1996.4 This
work marks a major development in the rise of ecocriticism within literary
and cultural studies.
Ecocriticism expands the notion of ‘the world’ to include the entire
ecosphere. If we agree with Barry Commoner’s first law of ecology,
‘Everything is connected to everything else,’ we must conclude that
literature does not float above the material world in some aesthetic ether,
but, rather, plays a part in an immensely complex, global system, in
which energy, matter, and ideas, interact.5

Ecocriticism makes ethical demands stemming from concerns with literary


texts. In particular, ecocriticism challenges the assumption that literature is a
self-sufficient entity. Rather, what is innate to ecocriticism is the proposition
that literature, like all cultural expression, cannot be wholly separated from the
non-human world. In that literature exists within a culture that is destroying
itself by eroding non-human and necessary sources of sustenance, studying
literature might help us to understand, and even reverse, exploitation of the
wild. In order to stop destroying the planet, we might need to examine the
writing that underpins those societies that erected such a fundamental denial
of our reliance on the “other” as nature.
William Rueckert, who coined the term “ecocriticism” in 1978, expresses in
The Ecocriticism Reader an evocative and revealing way of regarding litera-
ture as part of the ecosystem of life on the planet: “A poem is stored energy,
a formal turbulence, a living thing, a swirl in the flow. Poems are part of the
energy pathways which sustain life.”6 In this framing of ecocriticism, the role
of the critic may be to study literature, but also to see the activity as an intrinsic
part of ecological campaigning. Ecocriticism may mean volunteering to protect
a wilderness area as well as write a scholarly article. However, Rueckert’s
wonderful phrases also return us to the problem of language and nature.

4. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, eds., The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary
Ecology (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1996).
5. Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xix.
6. William Rueckert, ‘Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism’ [1978], in Glotfelty
and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, 108.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 405

In fact, both Glotfelty and Rueckert are making the important assumption
that language is corporeal, of the body. It is important because much of literary
theory argues that language is a system that is ultimately self-referential: it is
not connected to anything outside itself.7 Although some literature claims to
represent “the world”, or “nature”, such claims are a fallacy to those assuming
that language is exclusively culture.
What such critics fail to consider are ideas of language rooted in the body.
Implied in such a figuring of language are notions of signifying as not an exclu-
sively human property. After all animals call to each other, whales make music
so why do we not credit them with language? Here Jung’s ethical vision of the
slain creature again has something to offer. What if the creature talked back?
What exactly can Jungian psychology do for ecocriticism?

Jung for Ecocriticism


Jung believed that psychic energy was essentially neutral. We possess an inner
domain that could manifest as sexuality, as desire, or it could exhibit spirituality
as a genuine expression of psychic being. Religious feeling and spirituality were
authentic types of unconsciousness, although they did not necessarily entail a
sacred reality beyond the psyche.
What follows is that both devout belief and atheism are equally compatible
with Jungian psychology. Jung suggested that the psyche was innately structured
by inherited creative principles he called archetypes. These are not inherited
images, nor inborn meanings. Rather an archetype helps to produce a dream
image or creative expression, known as an archetypal image. These archetypal
images are also strongly influenced by a person’s historical and individual life.
My dream image of a mother is an archetypal image because it reflects my
actual mother and it also has a special resonance from the symbolic power of
mothering channelled by the archetype.
No one knows how many archetypes exist. Of particular importance are arche-
types of gender. Somewhat conservative in this area, Jung saw the conscious
part of being, the ego, as unproblematically gendered according to bodily shape.
A woman has a female ego and vice versa. Yet, this simplification is swept

7. Postmodern and poststructuralist literary theory has tended to adopt the assumption of the non-
signifying “other” while dismantling its claim to epistemological authority. My work argues that
poststructuralism needs to be seen in the mythical context of a return to animism consequent upon
the rise of evolutionary theories based on an emergent Earth (evolution as a theory being a return
to ancient myth of a divine planet where matter and spirit co-exist together). See The Ecocritical
Psyche: Literature, Complexity Evolution and Jung (New York & London: Routledge, 2012).
406 SUSAN ROWLAND

aside by the implications of Jung’s most important principle, the creativity and
unknowability of the unconscious. Jung thought that the unconscious actively
tried to engage the ego in a lifelong relationship that he called individuation. The
unconscious typically engages the ego via compensation of ego biases. There-
fore it enlists the passions of the “I”, by compensating for its bodily gender.
The “anima” is the term Jung gave to a man’s unconscious femininity; the
“animus” to the unconscious masculinity of a woman. One falls in love with
members of the opposite sex when they incarnate aspects of one’s own inner
“other”. Although Jung assumed heterosexuality, what is crucial to individua-
tion is complementarity. So that there is no intrinsic reason why a woman might
not possess an anima and/or find “otherness” in other women or vice versa.
Complementarity, or compensation, also has a darker side. Evocatively, Jung
gifts humanity with a “shadow”. This unconscious archetypal figure is formed
through what we repress, what we do not want to be. Such discarded material
meets the innate creativity of the archetypal unconscious and produces a dark
energy. Animas, animuses and shadows stalk our dreams. They dis-member the
completeness that the ego likes to pretend to. A dream for Jung is a concrete
picture of a psychic situation. It is not a disguise; it offers no hidden message.
Rather, as communication from the unknown powers of the unconscious, it is
to be trusted for itself. So it is not surprising that Jung suggested that literature
inspired by the archetypal unconscious has a social and collective compensa-
tory function: it acts within the culture like a dream to the individual (CW15:
para. 161).
Individuation is a process of subjectivity. It is the way we make conscious-
ness by learning to attend to the source of being in the unconscious. It also
has a goal. Jung saw the psyche as teleological, goal-oriented. The ego is
moving towards an ever greater relationship with a superior archetype he
called the self.
Ultimately, Jungian ideas portray the psyche as rooted in the body and to the
unknown nature inside us, the unconscious. In fact, the sum of his notion of
archetypes and teleology is to posit a creative nature within human beings. My
argument is that Jung’s work on the human unconscious as nature is poised to
expand possibilities for literature and ecology.
To Jung, non-human nature is connected somatically and psychically to us
through the unconscious that is also our body. We have limited rational senses
of our bodies; much is beyond our everyday intimations. Jung saw the unknown
psyche as materialized in the body as well as having immaterial properties. In
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 407

this sense, his archetypes encompass the fundamental workings of the body
and its creaturely existence on the planet and in the cosmos.
Indeed, Jung came to see a deeper unconscious connectivity between psyche
and cosmos that he named synchronicity. When dreams appear to predict events,
or the psyche intuits truths it cannot possibly know, such as sensing a catas-
trophe before it happens, or as it happens too far away to apprehend it by usual
means, these events are linked by meaning rather than causality are synchro-
nous. Such a theoretical construct gives voice to very ancient stories of human
ecology that have returned to us disguised as evolution.
For documented in books such as The Myth of the Goddess by Ann Baring
and Jules Cashford is a structuring of modern consciousness predicated on
the unequal relationship of two mythical structures.8 From the monotheistic
religions we have the channelling of dualism into a disembodied divine mascu-
line creator who forms all creation as separate from himself. Consciousness
as a consequence is based upon difference, rendered by psychoanalysis in the
generation of identity in the baby’s separation from the mother’s body.
However, a contrary structure of consciousness based on connection stems
from pre-monotheistic and animistic religions that regard nature or the planet
herself as divine. Here matter is inspirited, dualism gives way to a network
of interconnected being, or, as we might call it, an ecology that includes an
ecocritical psyche. Arguably the theory of evolution itself is a return of this
principle of the sacred, all-generative (and so divine) planet. Humans need
both types of consciousness. To exist at all, we have to separate from a primal
pre-consciousness bond to the mother. Yet to make meaning we are urged to
connect to others, including those others within us as the unconscious, to the
planet as our home and therefore to see ourselves ecocritically.
Jung’s psychoanalysis is here invaluable in tracking both the thorough
severing from the unconscious other in modernity and in offering pathways to
re-connection. What is exciting in his work is how perceptively he enacts that
spirit of reconnection in his writing that draws on the non-rational, the mythic,
poetic, and dramatic in order to re-plot modern consciousness.9 Very concretely,
Jung’s theories and the writing that germinates them is a plot in both narrative
and trickster modes. His writing re-plots our approaches to the nature we cannot
fully or rationally know, in our bodies and in the nature that sustains them.

8. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (New York
and London: Vintage, 1993).
9. See my book, Jung as a Writer (New York & London: Routledge, 2005) for Jung enacting his
psychology in writing.
408 SUSAN ROWLAND

What unites ecocriticism and Jung therefore are three insights that challenge
the way the Anthropocene continues the disastrous tradition of nature as other.
Firstly, that the earth is ecological or simply so inter-penetrated as to make no
sense to see humans as separate from nature. There is no objective nature “out
there”; we are always within her embrace. Secondly, our language does not
describe nature; it intervenes in it. Our metaphors penetrate the very stuff of
life. Thirdly, Jungian synchronicity posits the living world as mutually commu-
nicating, with an unconscious processing.
So I am suggesting that Jung offers a plot or a framework that provides ways
into writing and nature without pre-scribing the outcomes. He does so because
his core principles entail an epistemology that has to be open to the unknown
life of the other if it is not to kill it. The Anthropocene, by contrast, belongs too
thoroughly within the monotheistic myth of consciousness based on division.
By designating the planet as fundamentally changed by human actions, it erects
yet again a dualist structure, here of humans versus planet.
The assumption of the Anthropocene matters because it ignores other under-
standings of matter, that our bodies may be forms of knowing deeply inter-
woven with the planet. Thinking of the earth animistically is to see multiple
consciousnesses of which we are only one of many varieties. Here we envision
the imagination stemming from the unconscious as a way of knowing imbued
with nature and not always divided from it.
Rather than leave the Anthropocene mired in dualism and simply propose
Jungian psychoanalysis as a possible means of also including a holistic or
network model, I want to develop an arguably related mythical paradigm
emerging in new theories of transdisciplinarity. For there are Jungian and
archetypal understandings of myth that offer an ecological rejuvenation of the
academy itself.

Transdisciplinarity
“Transdisciplinarity” has been most helpfully theorized by Basarab Nicolescu.10
He proposed a framework at the Congress of Transdisciplinarity in Brazil
in 2005, later published as “Transdisciplinarity — Past, Present and Future”
(Nicolescu 2005). Nicolescu rejects the totalizing project inherent in some
other constructions of transdisciplinarity and dismisses any possibility of a

10. See Nicolescu’s Manifesto of Transdisciplinarity, trans. by Karen Claire-Voss (Albany SUNY
2002). In this article I take details from the Congress Address: “Transdisciplinarity — Past,
Present and Future” (Nicolescu 2005).
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 409

hyperdiscipline, one capable of subsuming all human knowing into a system


of perfect knowledge or ultimate truth. Rather Nicolescu prefers to stress what
he calls “beyond disciplines” in his transdisciplinarity, which appears to mean
“beyond” the pretensions of any one epistemological construct for all types of
learning and being.
Nicolescu is particularly persuasive in situating transdisciplinarity on the
post-quantum human subject and in endorsing complexity theory, which sees
evolution as happening via the interpenetration of complex environments in
a non-causal or non-linear manner. Arguing that quantum discoveries end
the supremacy of the traditional scientific method of repeatable experiments,
Nicolescu introduces a new human subject for all research. Quantum physics
discovered that some reality cannot be evaluated objectively or by absolute
separation between the observer and the observed because the way phenomena
are measured changes the results radically.
Transdisciplinary therefore aims for a sense of human knowledge as a unity
but an “open” unity by which Nicolescu means accepting that humans live on
several levels of reality at the same time: it will never be possible to ration-
ally know all of them. These realities cannot be eroded or simplified.11 Such
a recognition of irreducible differences indicates that transdisciplinarity must
be deployed in three modes as theoretical, phenomenological and as experi-
mental. Nicolescu sets out three axioms of transdisciplinary to replace those
of traditional science that go back to Galileo.
Hitherto, many scientific disciplines adhered to the following axioms or
fundamental principles:
i) “The universe is governed by mathematical law.
ii) These laws can be discovered by scientific experiment.
iii) Such experiments, if valid, can be perfectly replicated.” (ibid.: 5)
As Nicolescu shows, such privileging of “objectivity” has the unfortunate
effect of turning the human subject into an object by excluding feeling and
values (ibid.). Objectivity objectifies because we have no connection to the
object of knowing. The problem lies in the positing of one level of reality as
foundational to all others. This single way of structuring knowing then subsumes
realities, like the social or psychological, to its objectivizing paradigm.
By contrast, Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity explicitly rules out mathematical
formalism because of the human subject’s complexity in both simple and theo-

11. Nicolescu, “Transdisciplinarity,” 4.


410 SUSAN ROWLAND

retical senses, as we will see. Nicolescu’s fundamental principles, or three


axioms for the methodology of transdisciplinarity, are given below.
i) “The ontological axiom: There are, in Nature and in our knowledge of
Nature, different levels of Reality and, correspondingly, different levels
of perception.
ii) The logical axiom: The passage from one level of Reality to another is
insured by the logic of the included middle.
iii) The complexity axiom: The structure of the totality of levels of Reality
or perception is a complex structure: every level is what it is because
all levels exist at the same time.” (ibid.: 6)
This approach to what we know and how we know it amounts to a trans-
formation of how we view the universe. We now see it as multidimensional.
Reality is now complex. So are human beings. Nicolescu is emphatic that
no one level of reality, such as sight perception, for instance, can constitute
a dominant position for knowing. No sense organ or academic discipline is
capable of total understanding of all the other levels of reality. Knowledge in
any of its modes is necessarily incomplete or “open” (ibid.: 7). It follows that
academic disciplines cannot justify a hierarchy where one is privileged above
all the others. Moreover, such an approach does away with the interior/exterior
boundary of knowing.
“Knowledge is neither exterior nor interior: it is simultaneously exterior
and interior. The studies of the universe and of the human being sustain
one another.” (ibid.: 8)

As Nicolescu reiterates, his transdisciplinarity crucially undoes the classical


subject/object division to be replaced by the ternary: subject, object, and hidden
third that is both subject and object (ibid.). This “included middle,” explicitly
ruled out by the previous rational paradigm where A could not be also non-A,
does not, he notes, dispense with those types of logical knowing that do insist
that A cannot be non-A. Rather, it shows them to be incomplete: they are one
level of reality, not a foundational truth framing all of them. Traditional objec-
tive science has its place as one part of the dismembered body of academic
knowing that we call “disciplines.”
“Complexity” too is a necessary ingredient in Nicolescu’s transdiscipli-
narity. Some theorists are looking for a mathematical rendering of complexity,
which would, in this notion of transdisciplinarity, limit the levels of reality
that it could encompass. So Nicolescu offers the structure of horizontal and
vertical axes.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 411

“It is therefore useful to distinguish between the horizontal complexity,


which refers to a single level of reality and vertical complexity, which
refers to several levels of Reality.” (ibid.: 13)

Symptomatically Nicolescu notices the ancient lineage of complexity theory


as interdependence. Everything really is connected to everything else in a
complexity understanding of evolution (ibid.: 13). Literature, for example, is
part of a creative web of connections including the nonhuman. Transdiscipli-
narity regards the three axioms as intrinsically values-generating. The hidden
third or included middle emphasizes the interdependence of the model. Where
humans and the universe are regarded as interdependent, then we either have
values or chaos.
For this reason, higher education ought to be governed by transdisciplinarity
so that it can develop the three main types of intelligence: rational-analytical,
feeling and of the body (ibid.: 15). These intelligences require complexity, in
both epistemological and evolutionary senses, on the question of meaning. So
here “horizontal meaning” is what most traditional academic disciplines do;
they situate meaning at one level of reality as in traditional literary studies. By
contrast, a transdisciplinary education would envision meaning vertically, at
several levels of reality without privileging any one (ibid.: 17). If transdisci-
plinarity can see literary studies as a road to realities that are textual, cultural,
psychological and ecological, then might the Jungian approach to myth provide
another kind of map?
We approach the Jungian ecological paradigm of the academy via Nicolescu’s
vision of education that is remarkably similar to the ethos of Earth Mother
consciousness.
The transdisciplinary education, founded on the transdisciplinary meth-
odology, allows us to establish links between persons, facts, images,
representations, fields of knowledge and action and to discover the Eros
of learning during our entire life. The creativity of the human being
is conditioned by permanent questioning and permanent integration.
(Nicolescu 2005: 14)

Here is education in the domain of complexity theory that positions the human
within and part of the creativity of non-human nature. Nicolescu’s Eros is Earth
Mother in knowing and synchronous in epistemology. And yet, I suggest that
even more significant to transdisciplinarity than the Earth Mother creation
myth is the fate of the god who spans energies human, natural and supernatural:
Dionysus the dismembered.
412 SUSAN ROWLAND

Dionysus and Jungian Ecocriticism


We return to Jung with the point that myths to him are plots in consciousness, of
which his own set of concepts forms yet another. Unlike Freud who prioritized
one myth in the human psyche, Jung regarded myth as systems of being, stories
that live us through the inherent patterning of energies of the body, psyche
and cosmos. It was the Jungian, James Hillman, who noted the importance
to the contemporary psyche of Dionysus being torn apart and re-assembled.12
Dionysus re-membered, or remembered, offers a new, invigorated body-based
consciousness that prioritises differences.13
Rather the crucial experience would be the awareness of the parts as
parts distinct from each other, dismembered, each with its own light, a
state in which the body becomes conscious of itself as a composite of
differences. The scintillae and fishes eyes of which Jung speaks […]
may be experienced as embedded in physical expressions. The distribu-
tion of Dionysus through matter may be compared with the distribution
of consciousness through members, organs, and zones.14

I would suggest here that Dionysian dismemberment is what has happened to


academic disciplines. Re-membering them is Nicolescu’s transdisciplinarity.
It is important because re-membering the disciplines could offer a new type of
consciousness to learning itself.
“The movement between the first and second view of dismemberment
compares with crossing a psychic border between seeing the god from
outside or from within his cosmos.” (ibid.).

Here we find ourselves in Jung’s realm of synchronicity, of “acts of creation in


time” or as Eros knowing, connected, feeling, relational, embodied, Dionysian.
Symptomatically, Hillman notes that zoe, the life force of the body in Eros is
awakened by this process of divine dismemberment (Hillman: 29). This new
consciousness or zoe is an intimation of wholeness that does not erode differ-
ences, the different realities, incarnated in the practice of the disciplines. The

12. James Hillman is best known as a pioneer of a post-Jungian psychology he called “Archetypal
Psychology.” The main departure from Jung is to argue for a more fluid, protean polytheistic
psyche of goddesses and gods. See Hillman’s Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper &
Row, 1975).
13. James Hillman, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings,” Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture,
1972, 191-205; reprinted in Mythic Figures: Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman,
Vol 6.1 (Putnam, Connecticut: Spring Publications Inc., 2007), 15-30.
14. Hillman, “Dionysus in Jung’s Writings,” in Mythic Figures, 28.
AGAINST ANTHROPOCENE: TRANSDISCIPLINARITY AND DIONYSUS 413

new enlivening zoe is animistic in a particular way of awareness of its own


partial consciousness, aware of itself as parts.
Dionysus instead of Anthropocene would rejuvenate being through learning.
It is a plot that likewise has designs on our being and knowing. For Dionysian
transdisciplinarity is made of what Jung called symbols, fragments of the body
of a dismembered aging over-anthropomorphic god. Dismembered, that old
god of our hyper-rationality is re-found, founded again, as divinely ecstatic
energies that span human, nonhuman and superhuman. He is Dionysus, ecology
in its wild state. Here ecocriticism and the creative psyche are energised in a
re-membered relationship as members of one body that does not conflate the
differences between the members. The Jungian symbol is the matter that matters,
the portal to multiple realities in Nicolescu’s vertical model.
The Anthropocene, if left to reign alone, risks stagnant anthropomorphism.
Torn apart and re-membered in Dionysian transdisciplinary, an ecocriticism
that is ecologically imbued with zoe, instinctual life, is only one possibility for
rejuvenation in our learning and being.

Conclusion: the Jungian-Dionysian Symbol for Ecocriticism

Symbols connect the conscious ego to the archetypal collective unconscious.


They therefore are prime examples of Nicolescu’s “vertical”, or multiple levels
of reality, being at one level perceptual and on another intuitive, and on yet
another spiritual, in the sense of pertaining to the immaterial unknown. For
Jungian symbols are far from icons of disconnection from the embodied world.
Given that Jungian archetypes are inherited potentials, they have a bodily as
well as spiritual pole (Jung, CW8: para. 367). For literary criticism, symbols
propel us within and beyond the text. In transdisciplinary terms, symbols derived
from archetypes operate vertically to manifest diverse yet related, re-membered
realities of body, intellect, feeling and spirit.
In this way symbols can activate all Nicolescu’s intelligences of body, feeling
and analytical intelligence. They are the third term between the epistemological
realities of subject and object. In terms of literature, the symbol of a rose in a
love poem can be felt somatically and erotically as well as analytically. This
symbol is also an idea about love in ways that are profoundly human and
connecting, as well as transcendent and divine.
A Jungian symbol connects the psyche to what matters. The symbol is the
included middle. It breaks down the separation of subject versus object as the
414 SUSAN ROWLAND

only basis for knowing. It is psyche activated by words in touch with the body,
feeling, imagination, and spirit.
Finally, we must notice that this symbol as included middle is an engine
of complexity in the sense that it is a portal between human and non-human
nature. Jungian symbols are scraps of the dismembered Dionysian body. They
materialize zoe. They are the animated sparks that embody rejuvenation of
being in literature and culture, in dreams, and intuitions. With symbols we
know as Dionysus’s human bride, Ariadne, experiencing with him the fullness
of instinctual life in more than ecocriticism, as all our learning is renewed. I end
by suggesting that the Anthropocene model be enlivened by transdisciplinary
Dionysus.
Pacifica Graduate Institute

You might also like