Numb Networks

Doting as Poetic Practice

Although we may ultimately wish to call it a political act, doting is first and foremost an aesthetic practice, and one particularly closely aligned with—and theorized by—the Romantic lyric. In defining doting as the practice of “paying slow attention to ordinary things,” Bennett echoes the founding statement on Romantic poetry outlined in Wordsworth’s 1800 preface to Lyrical Ballads. Outlining the program of what we now call Romantic poetry, Wordsworth argues that modern poets should “choose incidents . . . from common life . . . in the language really used by men . . . and present [them] to the mind in an unusual aspect” (Wordsworth [1800] 1974, I:124). This aesthetic program is an outgrowth of Wordsworth’s then revolutionary democratic politics. The democratic aim implicit in his poetics was that by carefully observing “common” persons and scenes, and by studiously registering the empathetic feelings they elicit in the poetic observer, Romantic poems could help to “excite rational sympathy” for the dignity and rights of ordinary men and common life.

The political force of Romantic doting is perhaps most evident in what Frederick Garber (1971) terms Wordsworth’s “poems of encounter.” ¹ These are poems that narrate the poet’s encounter with a person or natural object from “common life”—a peddler, a leech gatherer, a disabled boy, a secluded bower of hazelnut trees ravaged annually for its crop. By training our attention on these overlooked figures and crafting portraits that are particularizing rather than broadly brushed or stereotypical, these poems nominate their humble subjects as candidates for our sympathy, admiration, and, by extension, greater moral or even political recognition. Consider, for example, the following excerpt from “The Prelude,” in which Wordsworth ([1850] 1985) describes coming upon a discharged soldier resting beside the road:

Stiff, lank, and upright;—a more meager man

Was never seen before by night or day.

Long were his arms, pallid his hands;—his mouth

Looked ghastly in the moonlight. From behind,

A mile-stone propped him; I could also ken

That he was clothed in military garb,

Though faded, yet entire. Companionless,

No dog attending, by no staff sustained

He stood; and in his very dress appeared

A desolation, a simplicity

To which the trappings of a gaudy world

Make a strange background. From his lips erelong

Issued low muttered sounds, as if of pain

Or some uneasy thought; yet still his form

Kept the same awful steadiness;—at his feet

His shadow lay and moved not. From self-blame

Not wholly free, I watched him thus; at length

Subduing my heart’s specious cowardice,

I left the shady nook where I had stood,

And hailed him . . . . (IV, lines 407–36)

Here, Wordsworth describes an evolution in his feelings as he studied this unknown figure. Initially seized with fear at the man’s “ghastly” gauntness, the poet’s dread shifts to “self-blame” as he realizes the man’s “meager” form is a sign of suffering, and finally, his shame resolves into sympathy, enacted in his decision to greet the stranger. In the lines following these, the poet will prompt this man to tell his story as he escorts him to the home of a local villager who agrees to take him in for the night.

As a whole then, this episode models the activation of sympathy through an effort of careful attention. It is the details the poet patiently observes that transform his initial fear into sympathetic recognition. For instance, it is upon noticing this man’s “military garb/ . . . faded, yet entire” that the speaker loses his fear—the uniform explains that frozen stiffness that had alarmed him—and begins to suspect this man’s tragic circumstances. The carefully preserved state of his uniform subtly attests to the pride and care this soldier has taken in preserving this last remnant of his service to an army that has evidently discharged him to die in poverty. Indeed, his abandonment has been so complete that the narrator now remorsefully notes his lack of so much as even a dog for companionship or a staff for support. Thus, this single, vivid detail—the proudly preserved uniform—triggers a revolution in the poet’s sentiments toward the soldier. By the end of the passage, the poet’s sympathies have become so closely aligned with the soldier that when the man begins to mutter—behavior that might otherwise seem alarming—the poet sees it as a sign of the soldier’s anguish and admiringly notes his brave stoicism—the “awful steadiness” he maintains outwardly despite his inner turmoil. The transformation of the soldier (or really, the poet) is thus complete: this gaunt stranger’s abject “desolation” no longer inspires fear but now only sympathetic outrage at the “gaudy world” that so brutally forsakes its veterans. And it is doting that works this transformation. By extending the generosity of his attention, the poet takes the time to really see the man in front of him, and the particularizing details he observes work to humanize the discharged soldier, unleashing the poet’s sympathy and solidarity, and, finally, his resolve to help.

Written half a century later, Whitman’s poetry not only deploys this Romantic tradition of doting but also reinvents it in fascinating ways. Like Wordsworth, Whitman ([1855] 2002, line 430) consecrates poetry to the task of studying “real men and women, taken as they are,” in his preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass. As his gaze voraciously roams the streets and ferries of New York or surveys the forests and prairies of the expanding nation, it often seizes on a particular figure or scene and dotingly brings it to life. Thus, in the first edition’s fifth poem (later titled “I Sing the Body Electric”), Whitman ([1855] 2002, lines 29–36) lingeringly recalls,

I knew a man . . . . he was a common farmer . . . . he was the father of five sons . . .

He drank water only . . . . the blood showed like scarlet through the clear brown of his face;

He was a frequent gunner and fisher . . . he sailed his boat himself.

Or again, he recalls, “The march of the firemen in their own costumes—the play of the masculine muscle through cleansetting trowsers and waistbands/The slow return from the fire . . . . the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again” (Whitman [1855] 2002, lines 24–25). Vignettes like these regularly interrupt the restless sweep of Whitman’s catalogs with a leisurely dilation, and as with Wordsworth’s portraits, these miniatures elicit our sympathy by pausing to particularize—to vivify and humanize—the face suddenly plucked from the crowd.

But there is also a different kind of doting we can find in Whitman, and one that is closely bound up with what makes Whitman’s poetry so distinctive in the literary tradition. In the moments I am talking about, instead of lingering upon details of a particular subject’s appearance or activity, Whitman enumerates things metonymically or contiguously related to his subject. These portraits, then, are indirect: instead of constructing an image of the figure itself, Whitman dotingly enumerates the web of material agencies that intersect and flow through this figure. Perhaps the most spectacular instance of this mode of doting is the 470-line self-portrait in the edition’s first poem, later titled “Song of Myself,” which is launched by the announcement that our author is “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos” (Whitman [1855] 2002, line 499). The catalog that ensues is ostensibly an exhaustive description of Whitman (“I dote on myself,” he explains; line 545), and yet, by the time we have made our way through this heroic self-portrait, we are no closer to being able to pick Walt Whitman out of a lineup than when we started. What have we learned? We have learned about things the poet hears: “[I] accrue what I hear into myself . . ./I hear the bravura of birds . . . . The bustle of growing wheat . . . . Gossip of flames . . . . Clack of sticks cooking my meals” (lines 585–86). We have learned about voices that communicate through him: “Through me many long dumb voices/Voices of the interminable generations of slaves/Voices of prostitutes and deformed persons . . .” (Whitman [1855] 2002, lines 509–11). We have learned about natural history that gives rise to his existence:

I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,

And am stucco’d with quadrupeds, and birds all over . . .

In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach,

In vain the mastodon retreats beneath its powdered bones . . . . (lines 670–75)

Meanwhile, in the rare lines of this catalog devoted to his person, Whitman describes his own body and mind as alien agencies: “I cannot tell how my ankles bend . . . . nor whence the cause of my faintest wish/Nor the cause of the friendship I emit” (lines 547–48). These personal features thus prove to be just as tangentially related to him as the proximate sounds and objects the rest of the catalog lists.

Clearly, this Whitmanian mode of doting carries us far afield from Wordsworth’s example. To be sure, Whitman pays slow and painstaking attention to himself here, but he does not portray himself as a discrete person with whom we might sympathize. There are no telling details that crystallize the poet’s particular character for us; instead, we get a curiously faceless sketch, a centrifugally exploding portrait of the artist as a dynamic assemblage of sensations, affinities, and material dependencies. Or, to borrow from Bennett’s lexicon, what Whitman gives us here is a portrait of onto-affectivity—he portrays himself as a site of sensuous exchange and communication, an almost impersonal junction through which sights, sounds, and material histories flow. “Through me the afflatus surging and surging,” he proclaims, and indeed, the specificity of his embodied identity dissolves here as that afflatus—a dynamic assemblage of global agencies—surges to the foreground and effaces the individual it constitutes.

With this, I think we are closing in on the idiosyncrasy of doting in Whitman and of the kind of doting Bennett means to recommend. When she writes that “The aim . . . of doting is to find oneself more present to surroundings and more attuned to entanglements,” Bennett (2016) indicates that the doting she has in mind does not simply pay “slow attention to ordinary objects” but moreover pays slow attention to our constitutive relationality, to our onto-affective condition (615). The end of this practice is in turn not simply the activation of sympathy for another being but, more specifically, a heightening of appreciation for the porous connectivity that mingles our selves with other selves, our bodies with the world. This kind of doting on onto-affectivity produces portraits that do not particularize and humanize individuals but rather explodes them, unravels them, tracing their lineaments out through myriad material affinities that both are and are not them. Indeed, this relational imagination is so depersonalizing (“I cannot tell how my ankles bend . . . . nor whence the cause of my faintest wish”) that it might be fairer to say that instead of making us more “present to surroundings,” Whitmanian doting makes presence start to look like a cognitive illusion—the egotistical mistake of a self that is actually cosmically diffused and alien to itself. By the same token, whereas Wordsworth’s doting portraits interpolate us into an ethical encounter by animating the figure of the other, Whitman’s faceless portrait here does not incite me to recognize him (how could I?) so much as it enjoins me to feel encroached upon, even subsumed into, his spiraling expanse. He is a world, and I am of it, and our entanglement collapses the distance across which ethical recognition passes.

Race and the Limits of Whitmanian Sympathy

I would like to examine the politics of this epistemological shift from individuals to systems, but first, I would like to look at one more example of Whitmanian doting that, I think, helps to light up the peculiar strengths and limitations of its relational imagination. In this passage, which comes at the end of the poem later titled “I Sing the Body Electric,” Whitman produces another exploding, digressive portrait, this time depicting a slave at auction. In the scene, the speaker is exasperated at an auctioneer’s lame efforts and clambers up onto the auction block to take over the work of describing the man who is for sale. “Gentlemen, look on this curious creature,” he begins. “Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for him” (Whitman [1855] 2002, lines 85–86). Whitman proceeds to minutely itemize—to dote upon—the enslaved man’s features:

For him the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,

For him the revolving cycles truly and steadily rolled . . .

Examine these limbs, red black or white . . . . they are very cunning in tendon and nerve; . . .

Within there runs his blood . . . . the same old blood . . the same red running blood;

There swells and jets his heart . . . . There all passions and desires . . all reachings and aspirations . . .

This is not only one man . . . . he is the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,

In him the start of populous states and rich republics,

Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments . . . (lines 87–101)

Once again, we would be hard-pressed to say what this man looks like—Is he tall? Short? Old? Young? In place of an individualizing portrait, Whitman gives us a generic natural history of this man’s flesh. The polemical force of this move is that it underscores how this ostensibly solitary, even wretched, figure is in fact deeply entangled in the very fabric of our shared world. Thus, Whitman reminds us that his body is the product of a global history—first, the earth cohered from a nebula, and soils crumbled from bare rock, and then myriad stages of development finally brought us the “cunning” design of his limbs and the passions of his blood. This slave’s story, then, is a branch of our collective material history as a species and the larger material history of earth. Moreover, if this asserts the shared history of our bodies, it also suggests each body’s limitlessness: in Whitman’s eyes, this man indexes an unimaginably long history converging to him and an equally unimaginably long future exfoliating out from him. Thus, Whitman concludes, “This is not only one man”; he is an integral part of a recombinatory and creatively unfolding physical cosmos. No bid could be high enough for him because no one could say precisely where he begins or ends: he is part and parcel of an infinite and ongoing world.

I would like to offer this passage as a paradigmatic example of the practice Bennett has in mind when she recommends doting as a means of turning the forces of onto-affectivity to political ends. Moreover, I choose this passage because I think the enslaved body at its center helps to highlight both the potential strengths and the political costs of the revised politics of sympathy that onto-affectivity enframes for us. It should be fairly obvious that the logic of sympathy works rather differently for Whitman in this passage than it did for Wordsworth in his portrait of the discharged soldier, or indeed as it does in most of the abolitionist rhetoric of Whitman’s day. In fact, the sentiment of sympathy arguably does not even enter into Whitman’s portrait: instead of cultivating a feeling of sympathetic recognition for the slave, Whitman’s description aims to elicit our wonder at him. Indeed, the priority of wonder over recognition is so strong that Whitman is willing to render this man all but unrecognizable as a person. Instead of offering up humanizing personal details, Whitman describes this man as a temporary individuation of a larger phenomenon, the momentary instantiation of an ongoing material process so awesomely boundless that it enfolds both his and our pasts and futures in its vast transhistorical sweep.

Critics have not always looked kindly on this liquefying and emulsifying vision. D. H. Lawrence ([1923] 2014) famously accuses Whitman of substituting the sloppiness of “merger” for the delicate mutuality of interpersonal sympathy. Somewhat more recently, Karen Sanchez-Eppler (1993, 56) has argued that Whitman’s description of the slave at auction fails in the end to inspire interracial sympathy because instead of acknowledging the slave’s embodied specificity, Whitman simply “dissolves the bodies” of both slave and spectator into an undifferentiated whole. Criticisms like these may remind us that the syntax of sympathy involves an implicit “although” statement: “although I can see you are different, I recognize something of myself in you”; “although you are not me, I recognize something of you in myself.” Sympathy, that is, asks for both recognition and a respectful acknowledgment of difference. In the politics of pluralism—the politics most closely allied with discourses of sympathy today—the struggle of activists working to end exclusions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability, or species has therefore typically been a struggle at once for inclusion and against a kind of chauvinistic universalism that ignores or denies embodied difference.

The challenge of this sympathetic politics then is to insist upon individual embodied specificity while asserting the universality of certain rights. Wordsworth’s Romantic doting manages this by eliciting sympathy through particularity: I start to feel the discharged soldier’s moral claim on me when I begin to recognize him as a man with an interior life like my own. The details of his life and history bring this interiority to life for me, and thus, even though they may point up our differences—I am not starving, haunted, or a stoic veteran like he is—it is by observing these particulars that I come to recognize our more fundamental similarity as beings who think, feel, and suffer. By contrast, Whitmanian doting does not trade in particularity, and this is because the relationality he means to highlight is not my similarity to the other but my material connection to the other. In Whitman’s description of the slave at auction, I find myself bound to this racial and social other not by recognizing our shared humanity but by recognizing our mutual entanglement in a shared physical world. The question of our similarities and differences is simply irrelevant to the fact of our physical interinvolvement. In this sense, then, the politics of (onto)Sympathy that Whitmanian doting enframes for us simply does not translate into the politics of representation and sympathetic recognition—the politics of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and species rights as we currently know them.

In fact, my sense is that the politics of Whitmanian doting is not only distinct from the pluralist politics of sympathetic recognition but may even work against the latter. The very facelessness of Whitman’s centrifugally expanding portraits demonstrate how doting on our onto-affectivity—focusing on the porousness and liquid indeterminacy of our physical borders—undermines the notion of individual identity upon which the pluralist politics of sympathy depends. As the body itself ceases to function as a designator of identity—as my own features and desires come to look like alien agencies rather than defining facets of the person I am—embodied difference loses its significance. The interdependencies of onto-affectivity thus remove me from the fiction of my identity and restore me to the entangled materiality Whitman refers to as “the ocean of life,” but by this restoration, my life becomes immune to the individualizing political syntax of identity and difference, sympathy and recognition.

But if the practice of doting on ontological interconnection seems uncongenial to a politics of sympathy and recognition, I would now like to suggest this misalignment may help to light up the limitations of sympathy’s political sensibilities in an era of climate change. As Bennett notes, critics of sympathy’s politics often point out that this sentiment is unequipped to recognize and address the structural causes of the suffering to which it so feelingly responds. Thus, for instance, Wordsworth’s poem to the discharged soldier is likely to inspire us to take in homeless veterans for the night, but it is less clear that the poem will incite us to agitate for more comprehensive changes in the way the army does business. Perhaps no political crisis has made the liability of sympathy’s localism so acute as the present crisis of ecosystemic collapse. Efforts to translate this crisis into the language of sympathy have given us things like “charismatic megafauna”—those brand ambassadors to threatened habitats, and even here, we can see how sympathy’s demand for a personafor a face for ethical regard to attach to—misrepresents the nature of the problem we are up against. Ecosystemic collapse is unmistakably structural: it has no center, its flashpoints of suffering cannot be remedied in isolation but require concerted and simultaneous action on multiple fronts, and the dense interleavings of the variables involved means that it can be hard even to predict the outcomes and externalities of policies intended to help. This political crisis thus confronts us with the challenge of thinking systematically and of mobilizing the force of our sentiments toward concern for networks and dynamic processes, rather than toward the suffering of individual beings and classes.

In the end, then, “doting” may be a somewhat misleading term for the epistemological shift that onto-sympathies solicit from us and that climatological crisis requires. “Doting” suggests an uncritical affection, whereas the practice of attention Bennett is describing yields, more specifically, a heightened awareness of porous interconnectivity and mutual vulnerability. And the immediate political value of this heightened awareness is that it confronts us with the necessity of cultivating a sensitivity to systemic complexity, an ability to look at sites of suffering, and see the compound and impersonally far-flung structure of its sources.

This habit of vision is a challenge to the economy of our affections, which like to singularize rather than generalize—which pick out (dote) on one face in the crowd. But as theorists like Bruno Latour (2004) and Roberto Esposito (2008) suggest, it is also a challenge to the very constitution of the political community. In Latour’s “political ecology” and Esposito’s community of “the flesh,” the polis is expanded to include all things—human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. But crucially, these theorists do not conceive of this as an expansion of sympathy, or ethical recognition, so much as it is a renunciation of sympathy as the standard prerequisite for political inclusion. For Latour and Esposito, the argument for a radically inclusive political community has as much to do with recognizing the objecthood of humans as it does with sensing the sympathetic subjecthood or humanity of nonhumans. And the point of expanding the polis beyond the bounds, or despite the bonds, of sympathy is to make politics more capable of adequately responding to the mercilessly entangled condition of material existence—a condition that has perhaps never been more obvious to us (or more obviously elusive to us) than today. We may resent this baffling intricacy, and in Latour and Esposito’s hands, the task of even acknowledging this state of affairs involves accepting our materiality and relinquishing humanity’s sense of special entitlement as uniquely sentient, sympathetic beings. But I think what Bennett’s voice rather wonderfully adds to this conversation is an invitation to try to feel our way into these faceless networks—to smuggle something of the personal back into this personless field. Indeed, without the fiction of identity to divide the world into discrete individuals to which rights might attach, the urgency of care arguably intensifies as we come to recognize the contingency of our own well-being upon the flourishing of others-who-are-also-us. And though there is no doubt something distinctly alienating about finding oneself shot through with vibrant materialities and foreign agencies, Bennett reminds us that we need not find this dispossession dehumanizing. For after all, these networks are us, these strange and fuzzy assemblages are all that persons ever were. And so why not dote on this unruly and overlooked cosmos even if—or because—doting and selfishness, for such cosmic selves, are all but indistinguishable activities? Why not call the hunger of one body for another love; why not be grateful for gravity? Can we, by doing so, turn the considerable energies of our sentiments, of our sense of being one self among others, toward the work of preserving the precariously relational assemblage that we (they) are?