Introduction to “Field Theory”

• Published in: Postmodern culture Vol. 33; no. 1
• Main Author: Diamanti, Jeff
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2022
• Subjects: Anthropology; Archives & records; Biology; Epistemology; Ethics; Exegesis & hermeneutics; Field study; Humanities; Infrastructure; Media studies; Philosophy; Postmodernism; Reading comprehension; Semiotics
• ISSN: 1053-1920; 1053-1920
• DOI: 10.1353/pmc.2022.a915389

The normative impulse to particularize theory in concert with the animate ecologies, polyphonic voice, and vernaculars of a field requires an immersive and often creative research ethic that attends to what in philosophical biology has long been understood as the blurred distinction between organism and milieu (Margulis 13; Canguilhem 7), or what in a humanities vocabulary is the figure and ground relation. Immersion in a place takes time and requires participatory modes of reading and understanding that often frustrate orthodox expectations, especially when the object of inquiry is sedimented into the environment of the field and the various infrastructures that channel energy, resources, and conflicts to a place but might not originate there. Because of this multi-sensory, creative, and critical character of interpretation in the field, theoretical reflection in the environmental humanities has come to include sustained engagement with environmental and decolonial anthropology, infrastructure and logistics studies, and elemental media studies, among other frameworks attentive to the many currents that subtend a field. [...]questions plaguing the empirical sciences might seem far removed from the more critically oriented analysis of cultural texts and contexts in the humanities, but just as powerful in the humanities has been the fraught question of how to analytically account for the location of meaning, especially since, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphatically argues, the “presence effect” in experience is conjoined with but never reducible to a hermeneutic of “meaning effects” (106). The dominant thread of environmental theory in the past two decades has been “relationship,” specifically within a modal framework that centralizes the symbiotic nature of worldbuilding between human and non-human actors, epistemologies, and semiotic logics.