include Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014).Houser applied the “Page 99 Test” to Infowhelm and reported the following:
From page 99:Learn more about Infowhelm at the Columbia University Press website and visit Heather Houser's website.In short, the new naturalist arts manage environmental data to manage loss. Yet, as the next chapters insist, writers and visual artists revive natural history not out of nostalgic yearning or to unleash a zombie Enlightenment. Rather, they rework naturalist epistemologies and cultural forms to salvage a future out of the past; they produce ways of knowing that variously accommodate, contain, or diminish emotions of loss.... Their questions chime with another that I paraphrase from Paul Farber’s history of natural history: What responsibilities do our knowledge and our knowledge systems confer on us?At page 99, readers are one-third of the way through Infowhelm: Environmental Art and Literature in an Age of Data. More specifically, they're in the preface to part 2, "The New Natural History." Each of the book's three parts—the others being "Cultural Climate Knowledge" and "Aerial Environmentalisms"—opens with a preface in which the poetry of Juliana Spahr inspires the questions driving the next two chapters. One of those questions—"What responsibilities do our knowledge and our knowledge systems confer on us?"—appears on page 99 but pulses through the entire book. With this question and a central point about the affective dimensions of scientific information, page 99 gives someone browsing the book an accurate taste of the whole.
Infowhelm explains how the environmental arts take up scientific information—data as well as methods and explanations—to relay consensus facts about crises like climate change and species extinction but also to reflect on how environmental knowledge comes to be. Certainly, eco-knowledge arises from Eurowestern science, but it also arises from traditional ecological knowledge practices; it arises from emotions and embodied understanding; it arises from speculation and uncertainty. The question on page 99 gets at these varieties of knowledge while acknowledging that certain knowledge systems are bound up in practices of domination, extraction, and exploitation, while others promote cohabitation, reciprocity, renewal, and resilience to ongoing crises (Kyle Powys Whyte's "Indigenous climate change studies" is an inspiration here). The positivist epistemologies of classical natural history, which I'm referencing on this page, are often aligned with practices of domination and mastery. Contemporary artists challenge the colonial and exploitative currents of science by repurposing naturalist methods into a new natural history. They reimagine natural history to feel the losses of environmental crises and to envision alternative relations between humans and the more-than-human.
The Page 99 Test: Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction.
--Marshal Zeringue
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