Chapter 4
Christian P. Haines
As thought occurs, the brow wrinkles, furrows, creases. Or the brow wrinkles, and then thought occurs. Or thought occurs, and then the brow wrinkles. These formulations orbit around what for a long time now has been called the mind–body problem: the enigma of how mind and body interact, or how mind and body maintain a certain unity (person, self, subject), or how the one determines the other. At the same time, these formulas speak to another point of conceptual consternation, one that doesn’t so much solve the mind–body problem as displace it by calling its terms into question, namely, the materiality of thinking. I don’t mean the materiality of thought, per se, but the materiality of the act of thinking insofar as thinking involves the brain’s operations without being reducible to them. In other words, the materiality of thinking belongs to the brain and its neurons, but it exceeds the kind of physical reductionism that would make the mind a mere by-product of the brain. From this perspective, the wrinkle of the brow is a figure for the problem of how thinking implicates the body without abandoning its speculative character.
Herman Melville’s fiction exhausts thought. It does so not only because it proposes so many ways of thinking about the world but also because it pushes thought toward the limit at which it betrays its material origins. In works such as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities, and “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville doesn’t simply mull over different philosophical systems; he crafts figures of thought that break these systems open, materializing the origin of thought as a metaphysical scandal—an abhorrent zone in which affect, sensation, cognition, and impersonal material forces mingle to the point of indistinction. Ahab is exemplary, for though he claims to forgo thought in favor of feeling (“but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity”), his feelings themselves take on a speculative bent, as if to chase the white whale, it were necessary to rearrange the relations between thought and feeling: “Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turn to ice, and shiver it.”1 I return to this passage below, but it’s worth noting that Ahab’s fiery pursuit of the whale includes within itself, as a paradoxical but necessary condition, a cerebral coolness that cracks the skull. This coolness is at the core of speculation—philosophical and commercial—but this speculation is resolutely embodied and embedded in the world.
Ahab’s brow wrinkles with thought, as does the whale’s. Hunched over the sea charts in his cabin, projecting the possible locations of his prey, Ahab’s “wrinkled brow” comes to be traced by “shifting gleams and shadows of lines” until it seems “some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead” (198). In turn, the “white-headed whale” is possessed not only of a “crooked jaw” but also a “wrinkled brow” (162). The twinned figures of Ahab and Moby Dick share heads cracked by thought. The wrinkles that crease their brows invite thought; they ask readers to interpret the play of light and shadow, flesh and spirit, material texture and metaphysical depth, as if truth were something folded into pleats of bone, flesh, and brain. This endeavor to locate truth in bodily realities takes on scientific (or pseudoscientific) form in the nineteenth-century fields of phrenology and physiognomy, the former locating a cipher for the ontological value of forms of life in the shape of the skull, the latter doing so in the arrangements of the face. As Samuel Otter has detailed, both discourses organized themselves around and contributed to a racializing and racist classification of social being.2 At the same time, Moby-Dick’s wrinkles frustrate attempts to decipher meaning, because they register how the abyss of thought—the speculative perturbance of material identity—enfolds the surface of material existence into itself. In terms defying easy distinction between the literal and the figurative, the heads and brains of Melville’s thinking figures suggest not some austere truth but rather the messy material origins of thinking.
Studies of Melville have spent a great deal of energy teasing out the philosophical speculations embedded in his writings. Scholars such as Mark Anderson, Branka Arsić, Sharon Cameron, Cesare Casarino, and K. L. Evans demonstrate that Melville’s fiction doesn’t simply reflect or parody philosophical positions but, more important, performs its own philosophical labors, including speculations concerning epistemological (un)certainty, the relationship between language and knowledge, and the ontological contingency of the world. Although I draw on this invaluable work, I’m less concerned with staking out a specific philosophical Melville than with asking how Melville’s thinking figures—especially Ahab—might build on and complicate what’s come to be called the new materialisms. More specifically, I’m interested in the vortex of old and new materialisms, the confused nexus where Ahab’s speculations conjure up but also disturb certain methodological principles of new materialist thought, including the dissolution of the boundaries between persons and things, the substitution of a generalized notion of agency for a narrower understanding of causality, and the impulse to let (nonhuman) things speak for themselves. Jane Bennett exemplifies these principles when she calls for a transition from epistemology to ontology, subjects to objects, and dialectics to immanent materialism.3 It would be a mistake to reduce the new materialisms to Bennett, but her theorization of “thing-power” not as a constitutive remainder of discourse (to use poststructuralist parlance) but as a positive, productive, and omnipresent force speaks to the ultimate fantasy of the new materialisms: a thinking that wouldn’t simply deconstruct the subject but would be synonymous with matter, much as wind belongs to the air or waves to the ocean.
Melville’s fiction identifies the material landscape with a generalized animacy, but it distinguishes the animation of matter from the event of thought. Although Melville’s fiction sometimes seems to suggest that mind is completely coextensive with the material universe (panpsychism), it nevertheless holds to the specificity of thinking, understood as a relatively rare activity requiring duration, symbolic efficacy, and physical vulnerability. This essay focuses on one of the crucial metonymic instances of thinking in Moby-Dick: the brain. While Moby-Dick never resolves the question of who or what can think, it does offer the brain as a nexus for the traffic between the speculative element of thought and its material organization.
The brain is a funny thing. Not only does it think, not only does it think itself thinking, it also thinks the difficulty of thinking itself a thinking thing. The new materialisms tend to sidestep this difficulty for fear that dwelling on the act of thinking would not only reinscribe the subject of man but would also reproduce the anthropocentric standards that linger on in humanistic inquiry. In short, the new materialisms are anxious not to get stuck on thought; they fret over idealism’s traps. There are exceptions, of course. The one on which I’ll focus here is the philosophy of Catherine Malabou. Malabou’s investigations into neuroscience do not simply hazard a theory of thinking things. They argue for a “new materialism that would precisely refuse to envisage the least separation, not only between the brain and thought but also between the brain and the unconscious.”4 Like the new materialists, Malabou wants a monism—a methodology premised on the universe consisting of a single material substance—but instead of making a detour around the specificity of thinking, she obsesses over its source, the brain. Malabou argues that “what neurobiology makes possible today through its increasingly refined description of brain mechanisms and its use of increasingly effective imaging techniques is the actual taking into account, by thought, of its own life.”5 Malabou doesn’t suggest that neurobiology explains away the question of how matter thinks. To the contrary, she makes the case for a conceptual elaboration of brainy things. In this essay, I argue not only that Moby-Dick shares Malabou’s project of narrating the material origins of thought but also that the figure of Ahab balances a sense of the human as a porous arrangement of matter with an acknowledgment of the organic vulnerability of thought.
The Shiver of Thought
It’s the third day of the chase, the final chapter before Moby-Dick’s epilogue, and Ahab stops to think about what it takes to think. Or rather, he doesn’t so much stop as sink into the “infallible wake” of the white whale, allowing his modes of thinking and feeling to become one with his prey (563). Ahab sinks into Moby Dick’s wake, into the whale’s watery traces, and these traces are not innocent for Ahab, because they track “that unexampled, intelligent malignity,” “the White Whale’s infernal aforethought of ferocity” (183). Moby Dick isn’t some brainless creature. His intellect can’t be boiled down to the present tense of pure instinct or to the immediacy of reflex actions. The white whale has a ferocious kind of foresight, anticipating his hunter’s movements, playing with his pursuers. It’s only natural, then, that in taking stock of the situation, Ahab asks what it takes to think. Moby Dick’s malign intellect won’t spare the crew, this Ahab knows, and so Ahab measures his own intellect against the “intelligent malignity” that is the white whale:
Here’s food for thought, had Ahab time to think; but Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels; that’s tingling enough for mortal man! to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege. Thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness; and our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that. And yet, I’ve sometimes thought my brain was very calm—frozen calm, this old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turn to ice, and shiver it. And still this hair is growing now; this moment growing, and heat must breed it; but no, it’s like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthly clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava. (563)
This passage presents Ahab with “food for thought” even as it acknowledges that Ahab may not have the time to digest an intellectual meal. Thinking requires time, because it “is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness.” Consumed by his pursuit, Ahab is all fire and unrest—a persistent state of agitation that has time only for one thing: Moby Dick, the infernal white whale. The passage seems to suggest a framework not all that different from Descartes’s method: thinking should be slow and methodical, cool and collected; it demands the kind of patient analysis that separates the wheat from the chaff, or in this case, intellectual things (“food for thought”) from bodily feeling (Ahab “only feels, feels, feels”). Whereas Descartes, in the Meditations on First Philosophy, removes himself from worldly matters in order to get at the heart of thought—that which makes thought properly thought—Melville throws Ahab into worldly matters and, in doing so, makes the brain inseparable from the heart (“our poor hearts throb, and our poor brains beat too much for that”).6
Ahab turns out to be a thinking figure, after all, but one for whom thinking is inextricable from “tingling,” immersed in the energetic movement of matter. The passage generates a point of indistinction between the fire of pursuit and the coolness of thought, so that even in the midst of the chase, Ahab can imagine his “old skull cracks so, like a glass in which the contents turn to ice, and shiver it” (563). The passage draws an analogy between the act of thinking and the process of phase change (the process whereby matter changes state from liquid to gas or solid to liquid): water exhibits the rare property of expanding when it freezes, so that a glass filled with water is likely to crack when it cools to four degrees Celsius. The simile between Ahab’s skull and the freezing glass of water suggests that the event of thought not only belongs to the material realm but also involves a kind of exposure—vulnerability to physical change (in this case, a shift in temperature). “Shiver” is thus the verb-image of thought as it moves through matter; it translates thought as potential into thought as action.7 In undoing the distinction between feeling and thinking, in locating speculation within the throbbing and beating of heart and brain, the passage suggests that time doesn’t need to stop for thought to occur, that an idea might tingle its way through matter at its own pace. Posing the question of how one manages to think becomes synonymous with the act of thought. Thinking is “like that sort of common grass that will grow anywhere, between the earthly clefts of Greenland ice or in Vesuvius lava,” which is to say that philosophy doesn’t know its place, that reflection—like a weed—is itinerant.
Anticipating the new materialist investment in nonhuman animacy, Melville’s thinking figure, Ahab, dissolves into an impersonal wash of sensation. Thinking doesn’t disappear; instead it becomes omnipresent, less a subjective capacity than a material process traversing myriad genres of existence. It emerges from what might be termed the modal nonidentity of material beings—the constitutive plurality of beings in terms of how they are in the world. (Think, for example, of how the Pequod consists not only of wooden planks and cloth sails but also of whale blubber, men singing while they work, and Ishmael’s melancholy.) One might parse this blur of thinking and feeling in different ways. Branka Arsić describes it as
[a] thinking that grows in between: between the cliffs of a mountain valley, between the sparks and mud of lava, between the clefts of Greenland ice. Just like the grass. But it is “like the grass” also because it is not rooted. The very “support” of it, its very material substance, the brain, turns into grass; the brain grows out of itself. That is how Melville turns ontology into geology (the Greenland ice, the Vesuvius lava) and then turns geology into geography, into a writing on the body of the earth that will, however, vanish the moment it is drawn, for the wild wind will come to erase it.8
In this analysis, thinking escapes audacity—the charge of overstepping the boundary between God and humankind (Ahab: “to think’s audacity. God only has that right and privilege”)—by adopting an impersonal force: thinking doesn’t belong to human figures, it explodes them, and in doing so, it converts the language of being (ontology) into the flowing together of earth (“cliffs of a mountain valley”), water (“Greenland ice”), fire (“Vesuvius lava”), and wind (“wild wind”). The ancient elements thus constitute the medium of thought; distinctions between subject and object, between immaterial force and material vessel, become inconsequential, if not altogether meaningless. Arsić again: “If the fear of our skulls cracking is what keeps us in the domestic atmosphere of the cave of our brains, then to think requires those very cracks out of which the grass (of our thoughts) will grow. It requires nothing less than being out of one’s skull, abandoning the very form of one’s personal identity.”9 Like Gilles Deleuze, Arsić dissociates the event of thought from psychological interiority, associating it instead with the potential for difference in itself, that is, with the kind of change that is impersonal insofar as it radically transfigures the identity of (thinking) things rather than simply tweaking them.10
Michael Jonik likewise emphasizes the impersonal nature of thought in Moby-Dick, explaining, “More than a mere analogizing of disparate mental, sensory, and physical processes, however, Melville diagrams a set of relations, so to model the dynamic of a passive impersonal thinking-feeling. . . . He shows thinking-feeling as operating within a milieu of surrounding material transformations.”11 Thinking is transindividual in the sense that it cuts across individual subject-objects, not a fixed property of discrete beings but a modification of existence that thrives on leakages between different genres of matter. For Jonik, as for Arsić, the wind serves as the measure of thought, the gauge of thought’s capacity to overcome its roots in the embodied person. “Ahab’s self-positing as an Aeolian harp of sensibility extends into a subjunctive musing in which he puts himself in the subjective place of the wind,” and in doing so, Ahab becomes “caught up in a broader movement from the ‘organic to the anorganic,’ and likewise from the personal to the impersonal or human to the inhuman.”12 Intangible yet forceful, specific in its effects but indiscriminate in its transit, the wind enjoys a kind of free-floating animacy—an aliveness that eschews the boundaries between person and thing, as well as between spirit and matter, and that acts as a vehicle through which thinking might surrender the last of its organic limitations. It’s in the wind that the new materialist fantasy of a thinking entirely synonymous with matter achieves its perfect consistency, and it is in service of this fantasy that Arsić and Jonik convert Ahab into an airy creature, always on the verge of dissolution into the impersonal wash of existence.
Moby-Dick allows for another reading of the wind whipping through Ahab’s hair, however. This reading acknowledges the immanence of thought to matter, while maintaining the organic specificity of thinking. For Ahab, the wind is indiscriminate in its movements (“A vile wind that has no doubt blown ere this through prison corridors and cells, and wards and hospitals, and ventilated them, and now comes blowing hither as innocent as fleeces.”); an unbeatable force (“In every fight it has the last and bitterest blow. Run tilting at it, and you but run through it.”); bodiless as an object but not as an agent (“Would now the wind but had a body; but all the things that most exasperate and outrage mortal man, all these things are bodiless, but only bodiless as objects, not as agents. There’s a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference.”); and, finally, material support for life at sea (“These same Trades that so directly blow my good ship on; these Trades, or something like them—something so unchangeable, and full as strong, blow my keeled soul along!”) (564). Only a fool, like Don Quixote, “run[s] tilting at” the wind as if he were on the same footing as it. The impersonal material existence of the wind (“bodiless as an object but not as an agent”) means a thinking figure can only negotiate it in terms of its effects: hoist a sail or fly a kite, but do not confuse riding the breeze with mastering it. Ahab terms this distinction “a most special, a most cunning, oh, a most malicious difference,” trading one superlative for another in an effort to reckon with the exposure of the human being to nonhuman forces. In so doing, Ahab suggests his own gauge for what makes a thing a thinking thing: the ability to discern the difference between being an impersonal (“bodiless”) agent and being involved with one. Thought is irreducible to the person or subject; it involves itself with a seemingly endless variety of material beings, from sperm whales to stars. At the same time, thought is inextricable from the embodied person, requiring a brainy thing as the fragile medium of its operations. Ahab’s skull cracks with thought, but the material act of thinking—the “shiver”—doesn’t so much depart from the body as draw the outside into it: “Thinking always comes from the outside,” Deleuze writes of Foucault: “To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside.”13 Thinking doesn’t necessarily demand, in Arsić’s words, “being out of one’s skull, abandoning the very form of one’s personal identity,” though it does require a loosening of the person, a constitutive leakiness of the thinking figure. Ahab isn’t Shakespeare’s Ariel; his wisdom consists not in abandoning the flesh for the elements but rather in merging the speculative element of thought with the vulnerability of organic being.
Although I’ve mostly focused on a single scene of braininess, Moby-Dick offers a number of other instances in which the process of thinking materializes through the figure of the brain. In Chapter 44, “The Chart,” Ahab sleeps uneasily because his “exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams,” “resuming his own intense thoughts through the day,” whirl “round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish” (201). In Chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” the novel describes the development of Ahab’s monomania, after “Moby Dick had reaped away Ahab’s leg,” as a process that “cracks the sinews and cakes the brain” (184). Nor does the novel confine its material account of thought to Ahab—or for that matter to human beings. Ahab’s control over his chief mate involves an exercise of influence—of magnetic force—on the brain: “Starbuck’s body and Starbuck’s coerced will were Ahab’s so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck’s brain” (212). Meanwhile, the novel devotes one of its chapter-length cetological disquisitions—Chapter 80, “The Nut”—entirely to the puzzle of the sperm whale’s brain and its connection to the spinal cord. However, Ahab remains the novel’s key figure for dissecting thought as a material process or brainy activity. Ahab’s centrality has to do not only with the way that monomania brings the obsessive cogitations of the brain to the surface of the text but also with the material fact of pain. By the end of the novel, Starbuck contrasts the “immortal infancy, and innocency of the azure”—the bright and cheerful fancies associated with the sky—with “Ahab’s close-coiled woe” and the “burnt-out crater of his brain” (543). The figure of the brain doesn’t simply materialize thought; it also specifies it as an organic process, one that leaves living beings exposed to suffering as much as it grants them power over their surroundings. In Moby-Dick, thinking is neither a transcendent activity hovering over matter nor a generalized principle of material animacy. Instead, it’s the exercise of a vulnerable arrangement of matter that could burn out or crack like ice at any moment.
The Brain as Transcendental Matter
Melville’s Moby-Dick and Catherine Malabou’s philosophical writings share a premise when it comes to the material act of thinking: no thinking without a brain.14 Malabou conceptualizes the brain in terms of plasticity. Plasticity names the brain’s capacity to shape and reshape itself in response to experience, but for Malabou it’s also a general ontological principle: “the capacity to receive form (clay is called plastic, for example) and the capacity to give form (as in the plastic arts or in plastic surgery)” but also “the capacity to annihilate the very form it is able to receive or create.”15 Neuroplasticity is a special case of this principle, but as Malabou explains, it’s a case that rebounds onto ontology, changing how we think about life in the process: neurobiology enables “the actual taking into account, by thought, of its own life. Reason not only sees itself in the mirror of the living being, it also sees its own life: it sees itself living. . . . Indeed, the fact that reason sees itself living has effects on reason, thereby provokes thought, calls for critique, and never amounts simply to an observation.”16 Malabou distinguishes between “thought” (or “critique”) and “observation,” specifying, in an explicitly Kantian fashion, that the material act of thinking is irreducible to registering or recording phenomena because thinking presupposes a framework—the transcendental—through which the world becomes sensible to the subject. Malabou echoes the new materialisms in insisting on the excess of matter over language, representation, and epistemology, but she pushes back against the new materialist tendency to abandon the subject as the site of thought.17 Thinking, Malabou contends, requires a brainy thing: the neuronal subject.
To be clear, Malabou doesn’t suggest that thinking is reducible to the physical operations of the central nervous system. For Malabou, the transcendental (the categorical framework of thought) is material and symbolic. Whereas the new materialisms tend to dissolve the symbolic into matter, anxious that to do otherwise would mean falling prey to the limits of language, Malabou crafts “a new materialism asserting the coincidence of the symbolic and the biological”: the symbolic is “the locus of plasticity, something that allows play within the structure, that loosens the frame’s rigidity—the frame being biological determinism. . . . This symbolic biological dimension is the transformative tendency internal to materiality, the self-transformative tendency of life.”18 Malabou revises the transcendental so that it is no longer a permanent ground of reason but rather an “epigenetic structure”: “In biology, epigenesis designates the growth of the embryo through the gradual differentiation of cells—as opposed to preformation, which assumes that the embryo is fully constituted from the start. I develop the thesis that far from being simply a rhetorical artifice, epigenesis applies to the transcendental itself. The transcendental grows, develops, transforms, and evolves.”19 To describe the transcendental as epigenetic implies not only its plasticity but also its constitutive exposure to what lies outside the subject, its immersion in material experience:
Our brain is in part essentially what we do with it. . . . Plasticity, between determinism and freedom, designates all the types of transformation deployed between the closed meaning of plasticity (the definitive character of form) and its open meaning (the malleability of form). It does this to such a degree that cerebral systems today appear as self-sculpted structures that, without being elastic or polymorphic, still tolerate constant self-reworking, differences in destiny, and the fashioning of a singular identity.20
In sum, Malabou’s new materialism deconstructs the antinomy between material existence and symbolic structure. It then goes on to articulate a neurobiological form of reason that fuses the determination of thought by matter with the material agency of thought: thinking isn’t simply a material object alongside other material objects; it is matter’s immanent excess over itself—its constitutive fissure. In Malabou’s terms, it consists in the operations of the symbolic, understood not as spiritual principle or élan vital but as the reflective self-differentiation of matter over the course of organic history.
The consequences of Malabou’s recuperation of the transcendental become abundantly clear in her discussion of neurological injuries. Like the new materialisms, Malabou wants to theorize the material contingency of the human, but unlike them, she does so not by turning toward the object but rather by considering the fundamental exposure of human beings to material accidents. Accidents aren’t simply events that happen to subjects; they also name the possibility of “radical metamorphosis,” “the fabrication of a new person, a novel form of life, without anything in common with a preceding form.”21 Accidents are defined by destructive plasticity—the annihilation of forms of life. With reference to traumas such as brain injuries, Alzheimer’s, and PTSD, Malabou writes, “We must all recognize that we might, one day, become someone else, an absolute other, someone who will never be reconciled with themselves again, someone who will be this form of us without redemption or atonement, without last wishes, this damned form, outside of time.”22 The accident testifies not only to the fragility of the self but also, more generally, to the fragility of thought: because thinking depends on a brainy thing, it remains exposed (at least potentially) to the irreparable destruction of transcendental matter, to the annihilation of that which makes thought materially possible. For Malabou, destructive plasticity is paradigmatic, because it demonstrates the methodological necessity of “cerebrality,” which she defines as “an axiological principle entirely articulated in terms of the formation and deformation of neuronal connections. The ‘symbolic’ is obviously not far away, since the elementary form of the brain is the emotional and logical core where the processes of auto-affection constitute all identity and all history.”23 Malabou doesn’t reduce thinking to the brain. Instead, she recognizes the brain as a form of transcendental matter, vulnerable to destruction but also open to change, to possibility. In a sense, thought itself is an accident—a material process in and of the embodied subject that exposes the subject to material change, including the possibility of becoming another form of life. To put it in terms of Melville’s fiction: Ahab was never the same after his first encounter with Moby Dick, just as Ishmael became a different person after coming into contact with Ahab and his pursuit of the white whale.
Wrinkled Brows
Conceptualizing subjects as brainy things implies neither the reduction of thought to neuronal activity nor the inviolable integrity of the thinking creature. To the contrary, thinking happens to subjects as much as subjects exercise a capacity for thought. Indeed, the brain composes itself from discrepant kinds of matter as they pass into and out of the lives of subjects; material experience reprograms the brain, neural networks functioning less like autonomous machines than like semiporous membranes through which the human opens itself to the world. In this respect, Melville and Malabou concur with the new materialist decentering of the human subject, specifically, with the way in which new materialist theory undoes the sovereignty of the subject with respect to the material universe. At the same time, Melville and Malabou insist on the material nonidentity of subjects and objects in contrast to the fantasy of a thinking that would be entirely synonymous with material animation. In other words, they insist on thinking’s attachment to the vulnerable, organic creature. What results is not a return to “old materialism” but instead a new materialism that combines an openness to nonhuman matters with an acknowledgment of the specificity of thought as a material act.24
In Moby-Dick, thinking wrinkles the brow. It requires strenuous effort, and this effort produces visible signs—the signature of an idea on the face or forehead. Chapter 44 of Moby-Dick, “The Chart,” sees Ahab hunched over his sea charts, tracking the periodical migrations of whales in order to decide where next to pursue his prey. Ahab’s study of whale habits follows several famous chapters in the novel, not least of all Ahab’s electrifying performance of leadership in Chapter 36, “The Quarter-Deck,” and Ishmael’s ruminations on whiteness in Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale.” The low-key tenor of “The Chart,” which takes place “after the squall that took place on the night succeeding that wild ratification of his purpose with his crew,” speaks to the methodical dimension of Ahab’s mad pursuit (“his delirious but still methodical scheme”) (198, 200):
While thus employed, the heavy pewter lamp suspended in chains over the head, continually rocked with the motion of the ship, and for ever threw shifting gleams and shadows of lines upon his wrinkled brow, till it almost seemed that while he himself was marking out lines and courses on the wrinkled charts, some invisible pencil was also tracing lines and courses upon the deeply marked chart of his forehead.
But it was not this night in particular that, in the solitude of his cabin, Ahab thus pondered over his charts. Almost every night they were brought out; almost every night some pencil marks were effaced, and others were substituted. For with the charts of all four oceans before him, Ahab was threading a maze of currents and eddies, with a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul. (198–199)
For Ahab, thinking takes place in his cabin, in a tangle of shadow and light, as a pewter lamp swings back and forth to the motion of the waves. This scene leaves little room for division between mind and matter, because Ahab’s “pondering” is inextricable from wrinkles and vibrations in matter (the rocking of waves, the creases in the Pequod’s charts, the migratory paths of whales). Thinking is a modification of material substance, though one that distinguishes itself by channeling material flows toward a specific end (“a view to the more certain accomplishment of that monomaniac thought of his soul”). The interiority of thought emerges from a folding of the outside, the metaphysics of mind–body dualism giving way to ontological origami. On the one hand, the wrinkles on Ahab’s brow are signs of the effort required to engage in speculative thought. They testify to thinking as a concerted, if oftentimes unconscious, endeavor. On the other hand, these wrinkles are also material indices of the transcendental framework of thought, manifestations of what Malabou terms “cerebrality”: the brow wrinkles not simply as a sign of thought’s occurrence but as the nexus where the brain (the transcendental matter of thought) meets the world (the organism’s environment and the objects populating it).25 In short, Melville doesn’t so much dissolve the subject into a sea of objects as rearticulate the subject as the wrinkle that emerges when matter studies itself.
Melville’s and Malabou’s brainy creatures suggest that materialism—old or new—cannot dodge the stumbling block of thought. The event of thought contradicts the reduction of matter to thingliness, even as it betrays the material origins of thought. This claim suggests the need for critical self-reflection—an acknowledgment of the particularity of the subject positions represented in fiction and philosophy, as well as of those occupied by scholars themselves. Jordy Rosenberg, for example, has argued that the new materialisms tend to reiterate settler colonial logics in their emphasis on the exotic wonders of matter, and Andreas Malm contends that the new materialisms dissolve human responsibility for environmental catastrophe at the moment when it’s most needed.26 In both cases, what’s being criticized is the fantasy of a universe of objects without subjects, the dream of a pure identity between matter and thought. What my readings of Melville and Malabou suggest is that such dreams eclipse the vulnerability of the thinking being; they elide the specificity of organic being as a medium of thought. In contrast, Ahab invites readers to feel the shiver of thought, to let their brow become wrinkled by the audacity of thinking a thing. He asks not so much that we dissolve into the material world as that we sink to those depths where the sea impinges on our very brains.
Notes
1. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1988), 563. All further quotations of this text are cited parenthetically in the essay.
2. See Samuel Otter, “Getting Inside Heads in Moby-Dick,” in Melville’s Anatomies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 101–71.
3. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), chaps. 1 and 2.
4. Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage, trans. Steven Miller (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 211–12.
5. Catherine Malabou, Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 180.
6. For extended discussions of how Melville brings together affection and cognition, see Birgit Mara Kaiser, Figures of Simplicity: Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011).
7. There is an entire system of fluid dynamics tracking the course of Ahab’s monomania. In Chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” for example, Ahab’s “full lunacy” gets compared to the Hudson River as it flows through a gorge; the mighty breaking of the earth by a river, the carving out of an unstoppable course of thought, is in stark contrast to the way Ahab’s brain buckles and breaks by the end of the novel (“like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil” [545]). All of which is to say that the mutual imbrication of matter and thought in Ahab’s head is a complex affair, and what I’ve tried to offer in this essay is only a snapshot of the process of thinking a thing (or of being broken by thinking a thing as weighty as a whale).
8. Branka Arsić, Passive Constitutions; or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 6.
9. Arsić, Passive Constitutions.
10. See especially Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), chap. 1.
11. Michael Jonik, Herman Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 35.
12. Jonik, Melville and the Politics of the Inhuman, 35–36.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 117–18.
14. In this context, the brain should probably be understood as the figure for a more general category of organic matter capable of cognition, a category that might, for example, include plant intelligence.
15. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 5.
16. Malabou, Before Tomorrow, 180.
17. More specifically, Malabou pushes back against the critique of correlationism, as articulated most notably by Quentin Meillassoux in After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). See Malabou, Before Tomorrow, 129–54.
18. Catherine Malabou, “One Life Only,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 42, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 438.
19. Malabou, Before Tomorrow, xiv.
20. Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 30.
21. Catherine Malabou, Ontology of the Accident: An Essay on Destructive Plasticity, trans. Carolyn Shread (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 18.
22. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, 2.
23. Malabou, The New Wounded, 212.
24. This version of new materialism already exists in the work of scholars who do not so much abandon the subject, epistemology, or language as recuperate them in a broader, nonhuman material universe. See, for example, Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012); Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); and Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (London: Polity Press, 2013). In the field of American literary studies, see especially Matthew Taylor, Universes without Us: Posthuman Cosmologies in American Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Christopher Breu, Insistence of the Material: Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Mark Noble, American Poetic Materialism from Whitman to Stevens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Cristin Ellis, Antebellum Posthuman: Race and Materiality in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018).
25. In a longer essay, I would discuss the ways in which the emergence of the symbolic (qua transcendental matter) dovetails with the mapping of the body performed by the brain (understood in terms of autoaffection). On autoaffection and body mapping, see Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (San Diego: Harcourt, 2003).
26. See, respectively, Jordy Rosenberg, “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present,” Theory and Event 17, no. 2 (2014); and Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (New York: Verso, 2018), chap. 3.