Thank you, Colleague Altmann.

C. P. SNOW IDEA: MATERIALS SCIENCE meets RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Update: Please consider this a call for a team to use this method to analyze a corpora of novels through the lens of waste management and living in varying degrees of proximity to waste treatment plants.

Using word clusters related to waste management, living conditions and trash materials, ans disposal or invisibility of waste in some places more than others.

Snow said many global scale problems went unsolved because of the inability of science and the humanities to collaborate.

I had an idea that also embodies this separation over "nature" and "the environment" as signs of social privilege. There is a luxury aspect to the environmental movement that Thorstein Veblen probably would have recognized as some kind of conspicuous consumption in terms of virtuous selectivity--organic foods, living among forest and sea animals, etc.

None of these are possible in the more industrial zones. And that causes a rupture of the self. The person is supposed to leave the industrial zones because employment is so limited, but also to shed a sense of self from there, molded by that setting. I wrote in a question about using Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) for literary analysis. An important illustration is the huge secret that Gatsby is concealing: his father lives in The Valley of Ashes, a dumpy New Jersey town where solid waste is burned nearby. So we could look through many novels via the lens of management of solid waste, just as some scholars have been re-reading novels as to type and rates of fuel consumption.

Rhetorical analysis of novels regarding solid waste management can give a look at how the physical "discussion" is framed in terms of the rhetoric of place and things. I don't know if I'll have time to do a major study of this issue, but this method will reveal much about the growing separation of the classes, as well as emulation and "eye aversion" avoidance. Although all classes generate solid waste, almost all waste (that isn't placed on water) stays in the industrial or rural poverty areas.

I made a poster for our project that involves The Great Gatsby that can run below whatever we call this project. SEE FILE.

Brilliant, compassionate use of Spivak's theory! I haven't read her essay in quite a while, but intend to return to it and contemplate your idea. If memory serves (and it seldom does any more) I think her intervention, very much in the context of deconstruction, was that the texts available for the subaltern to speak effectively silenced them, that there was no language for the subaltern. Your creative return to the essay's main point, the erasure and negative framing of the "rust belt" subject, gives it a new life and a different perspective.

This would be novel to me; it would be turning the focus of the theory on its head. However, I am seeing that much has been done on the Rust Belt Phenomenon which though is a region is a more or less an imagined region with common conditions but shifting and not necessarily contiguous locations. Whatever number of works can be done on this phenomenon to bring more focus on it would be important and critical. This would not be for the current Rust Belt cases but because this is a general human condition as the boom centers of today can become the Rust Belt locations of tomorrow.

Thanks, Colleague Ajayi,

I wrote this to a college writing professionals group and it may shine a light on the issue:

QUOTE

Looking at where writing is being published in major journals, I think this is a deeper issue of what people feel is worth reading about.

There is little to recommend any writing from a "flyover zone."  Also industrial jobs are not all green and people become welded to job in the imaginatorium.

Look at the hot water Charles Dickens got into when he wrote about "Coketown" in Hard Times.  And he was Charles Dickens and rather sure of himself by his--what?--tenth novel. 

From sources recapping the reception of t Dickens' slim novel on the Victorian "Rust Belt."

Reviews of Hard Times marked it as a rare failure by Dickens.  Numerous scholars, beginning with David Masson in his British Novelist and Their Styles (1859) and extending through Eleanor Graham's Story of Charles Dickens (1952) simply ignored Hard Times altogether in their discussions of Dickens, with others mentioning the novel in brief, sometimes chronologically inaccurate, asides.

In the midst of its perpetual critical drubbing, Ruskin's remark was recurrently held up for curious examination, receiving no support until Bernard Shaw, in his preface to a 1913 edition, used Ruskin's comment as a springboard from which to find in Hard Times an "enormous" increase in Dickens's strength and intensity as a writer, adding that "the power that indicts a nation so terribly is much more impressive than that which ridicules individuals."

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay, FRS FRSE PC (25 October 1800 – 28 December 1859) was a British historian and Whig politician branded it "sullen socialism", on the grounds that Dickens did not fully comprehend the politics of the time.

Thanks Gloria, it’s just so loaded against those on the wrong side of the establishment. But I wonder, is green economy the new domain of power? I thought it is an ameliorative technology.

Yes, Adewale--if I may,

I agree with all the goals of the green movement. I only ask them not to behave like some financiers who cannot mention human beings when thousands are out of work, talking instead about "market forces" and "market corrections."

In Dickens' day, he saw this rhetorical style starting and as a writer who had a high sense of empathy, he wrote against the monetarizing and accountants' narrative style about people.

I guess this is like checkers game vs. chess. There are two dimensions at least. People come to ecology from various situated class and other identities. They are not blank slates, just a regional people in the so-called Rust Belt(s) have class, race, gender identities. Keep this in mind that the ecology movement has its socio-economic foundations. It is far easier to forego heavy industry if one's family has not been involved in working in it for generations, yes?

And it is also easier to dismiss places as uninteresting to read about in fiction if one's whole life is not / was not there. James Joyce lived 45-odd years in Trieste but always found his material in Dublin because its culture and mores shaped him.

A metallurgical chemist and poet from India who works and Arcelor-Mittal Steel (East Chicago) is interested in why steel workers are currently so shunned in US media. He thinks that there are signs of a forming "untouchable" caste.

This man has been coming to our coffee hours at libraries. He gave us a poem called "The Volcanoes of NW Indiana" about the unspoken daily usefulness of steel and gently tries to push the idea that we all use these products of industry and to recognize humanity in the people who make the material.

LINK to an article that details the Indian "untouchable" college experience:

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/bringing-dalit-voice-poor-indian-universities#survey-answer

These kinds of events are not outside my own college experience.

Specifically,

“This (college class) is the first time they are hearing themselves and their own voices represented by books that they read, rather than just looking at representations of themselves by higher castes and higher classes."

(I never experienced a class that good!)

"They can also be marginalised by fellow students and lecturers if they manage to obtain places at university and often find it difficult to have their voices heard within the wider culture."

(Sounds familiar to me.)

So I take it that my analogy holds some weight.

Of course I do, I think it's interesting to relate Spivak's theoretical approach to research on gangs as subordinates, see in particular People and folks: gangs, crime, and the underclass in a rust-belt city, by John Hagedorn and Perry Macon.

Thanks, Colleague Cerbino. I know some take a view that only her original colonial caste system is what should be considered in her method. However, the element of invisibility in the US culture and so on make a case that some aspects of a permanent caste is showing up in the "flyover zone." nice to know I am not way out of line asking this.

That would be an interesting take on things. As some authors (generally without a decent theoretical reflection) claim, social exclusion is taking over even in the Global North. So, progressively excluded workers (or unemployed) that cannot access decent jobs, decent education, and so on, and, with the time, cannot access any jobs, education, healthcare... would become subaltern in the sense of Spivak. They are outside politics and politics (and other spheres of society) does not care about them at all. In this sense, they cannot speak (because nobody cares enough to listen) and cannot be understood (because their language is lost along with ideas of work-rights, unions, industrial production). Even worse, their communications can be embedded almost only in what is considered bad in nowadays discourse - such as ideals of masculinity or nationhood that were acceptable in the 1970s but are considered toxic now (by some, at least).

Thank you, Colleague Altmann.

C. P. SNOW IDEA: MATERIALS SCIENCE meets RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Update: Please consider this a call for a team to use this method to analyze a corpora of novels through the lens of waste management and living in varying degrees of proximity to waste treatment plants.

Using word clusters related to waste management, living conditions and trash materials, ans disposal or invisibility of waste in some places more than others.

Snow said many global scale problems went unsolved because of the inability of science and the humanities to collaborate.

I had an idea that also embodies this separation over "nature" and "the environment" as signs of social privilege. There is a luxury aspect to the environmental movement that Thorstein Veblen probably would have recognized as some kind of conspicuous consumption in terms of virtuous selectivity--organic foods, living among forest and sea animals, etc.

None of these are possible in the more industrial zones. And that causes a rupture of the self. The person is supposed to leave the industrial zones because employment is so limited, but also to shed a sense of self from there, molded by that setting. I wrote in a question about using Thorstein Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899) for literary analysis. An important illustration is the huge secret that Gatsby is concealing: his father lives in The Valley of Ashes, a dumpy New Jersey town where solid waste is burned nearby. So we could look through many novels via the lens of management of solid waste, just as some scholars have been re-reading novels as to type and rates of fuel consumption.

Rhetorical analysis of novels regarding solid waste management can give a look at how the physical "discussion" is framed in terms of the rhetoric of place and things. I don't know if I'll have time to do a major study of this issue, but this method will reveal much about the growing separation of the classes, as well as emulation and "eye aversion" avoidance. Although all classes generate solid waste, almost all waste (that isn't placed on water) stays in the industrial or rural poverty areas.

I made a poster for our project that involves The Great Gatsby that can run below whatever we call this project. SEE FILE.

In addition to literary sources on 'subalternity,' we also may need to consider the MIT journal Global Environmental Politics. What is happening in the so-called "Rust Belt" is also happening around the world. "Absentee ownership" of polluting industries where "internal displacement of social cost" takes precedent to concern over the common good. These are complex issues and a study of ingrained attitudes about the distance from dirt can be most useful in raising awareness among the more priviledged that they are connected in ways they never suspected to those who are in more polluted places.

RE: "Race, Class and the Global Politics of Environmental Inequality" Global Environmental Politics Volume 5 | Issue 3 | August 2005 p.70-94