“The True State of Our Condition,” Or, Where are Robinson Crusoe’s Insect Companions?

Extract

In The Matter of History, Timothy Le Cain reminds us that “embodied human beings interact with material organisms and things that have lives, histories, and trajectories of their own” (14). The import of Le Cain’s approach lies in the specific words “material organisms” and “things,” terms that take us beyond human-to-human connections now familiar to us through fields like postcolonial criticism, to explore vast interconnected, material terrestrial networks. In many ways, his project participates in wider new materialist movements that—in the words of Iovino Serenella and Serpil Oppermann—“analyze language and reality, human and non-human life, mind and matter, without falling into dichotomous patterns of thinking” (2).¹ For Le Cain as for critics like Iovino and Oppermann and others, the networks in question must include both animate and inanimate material substances. (See Morton and Alaimo.) Le Cain, for instance, connects human history to livestock, to silkworms, and to copper. His overall objective is to explore how “humans are both far more embedded in material things than we had previously realized and … these things with which we are entangled are far more dynamic and creative than we once had understood” (8). In this way, his book is among the earliest attempts to deploy new materialist themes and methods in the context of a traditional, humanist field like history, often to yield surprising and powerful results.