Abstract: “The Value of Mediation and Time in the Environmental Art of John Constable”
As John Durham Peters, Jussi Parikka, and other eminent media studies scholars have recently shown, two major orientations have emerged within the new scholarly terrain of environmental media studies. On the one hand, significant research has been directed to theorizing and understanding the value of conceptualizing environments as mediums, while, on the other hand, an equally substantial strain of scholarship in this field has arisen to evaluate the complex entanglements of environmental and medial matters and concerns. In this talk, I address both orientations probing the valuation of environmental media theory, which I argue were themselves anticipated in a range of Romantic-age medial interventions. The value ascribed in this scholarship to theorizing environments as mediums is, I suggest, a repetition and continuation of what was already an originally Romantic project to expose mediation as something that is both primary to the human experience of environments, whether natural or artificial, and, moreover, always primal to the ontological conditions of the complex ecologies of environmental systems.
Developing from and deepening a particular line of research begun in my GER 2023 keynote address on “Romanticism’s Environmental Media” delivered at the University of Leipzig, this GER 2025 talk will explore primarily the latter of these orientations—the complex entanglements of environments and media— and examine how the imaginative cultural production of the Romantic period came to envision and articulate a version of what Parikka and other scholars working in this field might today refer to as the value (and reevaluation) of media materialism. To do so, I adopt the media archaeological method of the case study and examine the landscape painting of John Constable. As I argue, this artist responds to the period’s natural history, and especially the abyss of time opened by the early earth sciences of his age, to create Romantic responses to natural history that lead him to aesthetic (re)evaluations of complicated environmental worlds of subjects and objects entangled in what Reinhart Koselleck would explain as “the contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous” (Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen), or the “diversity of temporal strata which are of varying duration, according to the agents or circumstances in question, and which are to be measured against each other” (Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time 94). Constable’s landscape art depicts a staggering mix of time domains located in sites of complex environmental spatial ecologies. As demonstrated through readings of Constable’s art, the prospect of Romanticism’s valuation of environmental media centers on and creatively draws attention to natural environments, their deep histories, and their material resources, which characterize this period’s intricate media ecologies.
Bio: Union College, New York, USA
Andrew Burkett is Professor of English at Union College, where he specializes in British Romanticism, and is Co-Director of the Templeton Institute of Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Science, Technology, and Society Program. He is the author of Romantic Mediations: Media Theory and British Romanticism (SUNY P 2016). Additionally, with James Brooke-Smith he co-edited the Romantic Circles Praxis volume Multi-Media Romanticisms (2016), and with Roger Whitson he co-edited the Romantic Circles Pedagogies volume William Blake and Pedagogy (2016). He is currently at work on a new book project tentatively titled Romanticism’s Environmental Media.