Gerard Passannante - Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster

Gerard Passannante

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61221-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-61235-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226612355.001.0001

This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Passannante, Gerard Paul, 1978 author.

Title: Catastrophizing : materialism and the making of disaster / Gerard Passannante.

Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018036448 | ISBN 9780226612218 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226612355 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Catastrophizing. | Catastrophical, The. | Catastrophical, The, in art. | Catastrophical, The, in literature.

Classification: LCC BD375 .P37 2019 | DDC 146 /.3dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036448

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

for David Carroll Simon

Catastrophizing is at once something the mind does to itself and a thing that befalls it. It is a way of seeing and feeling beyond the world of the sensible. When I use the word catastrophize in this book, I am drawing upon the increasingly familiar sense of the word (a habit of leaping to the worst possible conclusion, of making something of nothing), but I am also seeking to recover the philosophical and affective history of the making of disaster in the early modern mind. In these pages, catastrophizing refers to the imaginative and often involuntary creation of speculative disasters as an expression of and response to materialist philosophies and forms of explanation.

That the catastrophist, whose making of disaster can sometimes feel like superstition, and the materialist, whose reasoning aims to debunk superstitious thoughts, have something in common might at first seem counterintuitive. The best-known of the ancient proselytizers of materialism, Epicurus and Lucretius, Nor is it far from compulsion. As we will see, the making of catastrophe is both a vehicle by which materialism aims to represent the world and the most telling symptom of the malady it sometimes becomes.

Materialism is a way of knowing that carries the mind from the world of the sensible to the insensible, reaching for physical principles that render the notion of intention or divine agency unnecessary. It relies on the assumption that the mind might arrive at the hidden world of matter by means of its own devicesthat is, by the joint effort of reason and sensory perception. Its paradigmatic form is atomism, which begins with our experience and bounds precipitously toward a basic unit or conceptual minimum.

For some early moderns, I will argue, the experience of materialism did not involve the deliberate adoption of a philosophical paradigm or an intellectual commitment but was instead a reflexive style or habit of thought.

To speak of materialism in these terms is to consider its form as well as its content, and to look at the tradition in terms of what it does in addition to what it claims to do. It is to pay attention to the distinct shape of images and the feelings they elicitand to understand the making of images itself as a form of argument.

My focus in this book is what I call catastrophic materialism, which is characterized by the following features: a reasoning from the sensible to the insensible, a precipitous shift or collapse of scale and perspective, a temporal compression of beginning and end, and an act of imaginative making that feels paradoxically like the evacuation of agency. One need not be an atomist to be imaginatively invested in (or captured by) the form of a materialist thought or imageeven when one cant accept its principles or finds them hard to believe. Materialisms critical potential, I will argue, lies less in its ability to persuade anyone of its positive truth (e.g., the existence of atoms) than in the ways it foregrounds the production of seemingly necessary thoughts that occur without our conscious participationthat is, the way it stages catastrophe.

But in what senses can we call materialism catastrophic? In antiquity, earthquakes were commonly imagined in mythological terms, as the Giants and the Titans trying to escape from Here, reasoning itself assumes the force of a catastrophea theme to which we will return throughout this book.

Disaster presents the mind with an occasion for questioning its most fundamental ideas about the world (e.g., the providential order of things, Gods justice) and for speculating about the nature of hidden causes. At the same time, the image of disaster is also a gateway into the insensible world, an instrument of thought that makes visible hidden natural processes, and a figure of the experience of the passage into the imperceptible. We experience the imagined catastrophes of materialism as if they were happening now.

That this sounds like a doomsday prophecy is not a coincidence. The seemingly autonomous violence of the materialist image closely links it with the idea of prophetic vision. While Epicurus, for example, famously argues against the practices of prophecy and divination (not to mention poetry), he describes his own philosophy in oracular terms.

The primary vehicle of the materialists horror is analogy. In his discussion of Lucretius, Gian Biago Conte has hinted that materialist analogies have a strange capacity to think ahead of us (or for us): Analogy is the structured form of thought that knows. The ambiguity captures the blur of the thought. By the click and whirl of the analogy, small things collectively become great and flood the imagination. In this case, catastrophe serves as a name for the sudden collapse of perspectives as thought outpaces our capacity to manage it.

An early modern reader might have come upon the image of dust in sunlight in any number of familiar sources, including the works of Aristotle, the writings of the church father Lactantius, and the medieval encyclopedia of Isidore of Seville, to name only a few.

Lactantiuss question calls to mind our more familiar sense of catastrophizinghow even the smallest or most inconsequential of things might set the mind into motion and also how precipitously such a frenzy might befall you. Who is invulnerable to such thoughts? In De natura deorum, Cicero suggests that not even the Epicurean gods enjoyed that privilege: And yet I cant see how this happy god of yours is not to fear destruction, since he is subjected without a moments respite to the buffeting and jostling of a horde of atoms that eternally assail him, while from his own person a ceaseless stream of images is given off. Your god is therefore neither happy nor eternal. Instead of producing a state of