Ecocriticism, since its origins in the late 1980s, has tried to distinguish itself from other veins of criticism through its central emphasis on action, becoming known as "an activist criticism". As a student of Iberian Studies, I find this claim to distinction fascinating and problematic. Language departments (among others) have long maintained allegiances to various political causes. In Hispanic and Lusophone studies, many scholars have notably followed and disseminated developments (and emergencies) of human rights, feminist movements, civil rights and, most recently, environmentalist movements.
Due to its relatively late transformation from North American environmentalism as an academic trend (as opposed to feminism and race studies from feminist and civil rights movements), its institutionalization in academia is relatively new and in many ways still in process. This late arrival to university discourses is interesting because environmentalism itself has fractured, splintered and mutated into different modes of thinking throughout different regions of the world. Ecocriticism, then, often appears to lack a central methodology or critical tendency. Except perhaps the two related tendencies of action and place-based criticism.
First, ecocritics place an importance on reading specific texts in conjunction with their site of origin. Reading becomes an action that re-introduces us to a place. Ecocriticism has been jokingly referred to as "a backpacker's criticism," one that desires to blend together the classroom atmosphere with the out-of-doors. Cultural production becomes a mechanism to access a world ("Nature") previously severed from the reader's viewpoint. Ecological texts, then, perform the action of regaining this lost space. In my view, this sort of approach severely limits the kinds of texts one would examine as "ecofriendly" texts.
In particular, there is a disdain and borderline dismissal of arte por el arte, art (supposedly) working only for its own sake (whether it be Modernist, vanguard, neovanguard etc. etc.). I'm less interested in texts that should take us back to some lost origin and more fascinated by those that take us forward into a haunted, weirder future. This requires a certain amount of (problematic) autonomy for experimentation and a critical openness towards this process. That is to say, though experimentation may not overtly contain a social purpose or message, its end goal is precisely to alter (human) consciousness in some form or fashion.
Following poet Jorge Riechmann's homage to Martin Buber in Cántico de la erosión:
La dolorosa tarea inaplazable de recomponer el mundo a partir de
estos añicos cada vez más indóciles, tan menudos e hirientes
como vidrio molido.
Y de repente, la fuerte mano extenta que con lumbre escribe en el
aire: «el objeto de estudio es hacer».
Enunciación exacta de nuestra verdad. Pero ni por soñación
conoceremos a uno de los treinta y seis tzadikim ocultos que
sustenan el mundo.
Buber writes "el objeto del estudio es hacer" with fire and light, delivering a clear point of enunciation. But for Riechmann (and I follow him here), despite the exactitude of this statement, it does not follow that we are given some special access point to "indocile fragments" that compose the world. Not even in dreams (ni por soñación i.e. experimentation) can we exhaust (in Graham Harman's words overmine) these surroundings.
What needs to be elaborated on is the action itself, to weave together heterogenous elements into a single artistic event. (Artist Perejaume also refers to una acción as a nuclear fusion between alien objects, which means to question our disavowal of other beings.) I would suggest, then, that ecocriticism needs experimentation and supposedly "disavowing" works of art in order to diagnose their (lack of) attention to ecological crises unfolding all around and inside us.
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