Poetic cartographies and ecosophic thought

Abstract

This thesis is about the relationship between poetics, sense, and the geos. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophical problem of how to think with the earth, the thesis elaborates an understanding of sense as an intensive milieu of variation, excessive of both states of affairs and what can be said of them. It is because sense constitutes the emergent conditions for thought, language, and subjectivity, that one’s capacities for grasping its operation correspond to a capacity to take hold of the world. Understanding this problem as ‘ethico-aesthetic’, this thesis turns to poetry to develop novel techniques for sense-making. Taking inspiration from the ecosophic thought of Félix Guattari, as well as Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, and others, the thesis develops a conceptual grammar for a non-representational poetics, emphasising poetry’s affective, a-signifying capacity to destabilise the ordering tendencies of language and produce novel virtual conjunctions for sense-making. Through encounters with several contemporary poets (including Jen Hadfield, Roseanne Watt, Sophie Herxheimer, and Chris McCabe) the thesis enacts a series of cartographic experiments in poetic sense. Together, they gesture to how encounters with poetry might be taken up as an aesthetic practice productive of new refrains – new rhythms of inhabitation across social, subjective and environmental ecologies. A geopoetics of sense emerges in which both ethics and politics become problems concerning the cultivation of an immanent aesthetics; a participation in the ongoing, differential movement of the earth’s forces.

Date of Award	27 Sept 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Joe Gerlach (Supervisor) & Franklin Ginn (Supervisor)