Gerard Passannante, Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2019. 293 pp. ISBN: 9780226612218. $25 hardback.
Few books could be more relevant than Gerard Passannante’s Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster. In this 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize winner, Passannante examines the human inclination to imagine sudden, all-consuming destruction. In pandemic times, we all witness our minds taking us to cataclysmic ends, and with this book, Passannante helps us step back from the precipice to observe some of the key through lines of, and applications for, our catastrophising proclivity.
‘[C]atastrophizing’, he explains, ‘serves as a name for the sudden collapse of perspectives as thought outpaces our capacity to manage it’. In practice, ‘“small” things collectively become “great” and flood the imagination’ (7), such as when seeing a single ant suddenly and profoundly suggests to the mind the vulnerability of all material things, animate and inanimate alike. Passannante shows that a number of canonical artists and philosophers practiced catastrophising to ignite the process of innovation. Some did so with greater intent than others, and their stories figure in the chapters that follow.
In Chapter One, ‘Leonardo’s Disasters’, Passannante shares the riddling prophecies of DaVinci’s notebooks. There the artist practiced ‘observ[ing] the mind when it approaches the imperceptible’ (29). These writings, like many of DaVinci’s sketches, advance the prospect of calamity to agitate the mind toward a point of no return that never comes but that results in the freeing of thought from prior confines. Current readers will find a version of this process in a recently popularised form of therapy for panic attacks. In the treatment, a panic-attack sufferer watches a horror movie that simulates his or her panic and takes it beyond its imagined ends. This leaves the viewer unharmed and returned to a place of existential security. A version of catharsis, to be sure, this therapeutic practice is not quite what Passannante would spot as DaVinci’s catastrophising, but it comes close. Where the two differ is in the purpose beyond the process. DaVinci uses it for innovation, to move beyond the imaginable status quo, whereas the panic-attack averter uses it to regain grasp of the status quo. The process, nevertheless, is the same, whereby, in Passannante’s words referring to DaVinci’s black chalk drawing ‘A deluge’ (plate 1), ‘the disaster shuttles between the local and the global, threatening to fill the imagination’ (72). Humans become as insignificant as ants, water comes to act as wind, and all things large and small, near and far, are equalised in the commotion. This is ‘catastrophizing’.
In Chapter Two, ‘Earthquakes of the Mind’, Passannante considers the degree to which thinkers from English mathematician Thomas Digges to German Lutheran Reformer Philipp Melanchthon and English poet and divine John Donne appear to have struggled to keep the catastrophising proclivity in check. For the first two thinkers, it was imperative to balance the promised potential for soaring on learning’s wings toward an understanding of the divine with the potential for losing faith and firm grounding and thus risking a melancholic disposition at best and hell at worst. Passannante finds that Digges, for example, was ‘haunted’ by the materialist notion of infinity, but in the balance he ‘attempted to reimagine infinity in Christian terms’ (102). This balance gone awry is what Donne represents in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions. Passannante calls it a ‘mental earthquake’ (107) in which there are ‘sudden leap[s] from the “little” [discussing atoms] to the body instantly dissolved in the mind, the movement from the sensible to the insensible, and a seeming loss of agency’ (104). Donne willingly dwells in this commotion for a time, as DaVinci did.
In Chapter Three, ‘Shakespeare’s Catastrophic “Anything”’, Passannante examines the phrase quidlibet ex quolibet, popular in the period: ‘To make quidlibet ex quolibet is to transpose one thing by interpretive violence into another’ (115). To claim one can make ‘anything of anything’ is to make ants from people, wind from water, cats from dogs, devils from angels, ‘an apple of an oyster’ (120). They are all made of atoms, but in this move, the atoms of one very particular form are violently pressed into a new and specifically delineated form, hence the violence required. As Passannante explains ‘When Othello responds to Iago’s deliberately vague insinuations with the phrase “Thou dost mean something,” he too is making anything of anything’ (127). He has made Iago’s suggestion into Desdemona’s betrayal; later he will make a handkerchief into a smoking gun. King Lear and King Leontes also suffer tragically from exercising quidlibet ex quolibet catastrophising, but Passannante ends the chapter with a turn to the positive through a 1610 reading of The Winters Tale by John Boys. In this reading, the power of love at the end of the play emerges to transform interpretive violence into interpretive art, replacing destruction with creation. It appears our catastrophising too can lead us to one extreme or another.
Passannante adds nuance to the discussion in Chapter Four ‘The Earthquake and the Microscope’. Texture, he explains, plays a leading role in this emergence. Early microscopes seemed to demonstrate that natural objects such as an ant’s leg are varied in texture, but the surfaces of human-made objects, as in the case of a pin, appear smooth (161). The mind of a careful observer like Robert Hooke led him to wonder at what point ‘the essential distinction between the natural and the artificial began to break down’ (162) such that ‘an ideal microscope would show little difference between organic and inorganic life’ (163). Later in his career, Passannante explains, Hooke became fascinated by earthquakes, focusing his study of them by paying special attention to the fossils they exposed in their shaking. The ‘holding [of fossils] in his hands’ was for Hooke a way to keep himself on solid ground, even as his mind opened to earthshaking materials and the contemplations they generated (187).
In Chapter Five, ‘Disaster Before the Sublime; or, Kant’s Catastrophes’, Passannante jumps ahead more than a hundred years to argue that Kant too used the contemplation of extensive natural disaster to advance his philosophical speculations. Doing so gave shape, in Passannante’s words, to Kant’s ‘mature philosophy, helping us understand what Jean-Francois Lyotard meant when he suggested that the sublime might be construed as a “philosophical neurosis”’ (193). Specifically, Passannante looks at Kant’s philosophy ‘“before and after” […] the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which Kant observed from a distance in Königsberg’ (193). Before the earthquake, Passannante asserts, Kant is drawn to catastrophising, but ‘[l]ike Melanchthon’, he fears the materialist extremes of indulging in the process and seeks to use catastrophising as a study in contrasts, the better to recognise ‘what certainty feels like’ (200).
In this chapter, Passannante emphasises another of the book’s main through lines, that catastrophising appeals to the mind because of its sudden, and therefore striking, onset (217). As Donne had written, quoted by Passannante, ‘this minute I was / well, and am ill, this / minute’ (110). Passannante reads Kant as advocating for the calm certainty of having undergone the catastrophising even while one is approaching or enduring it; Passannante sees this as Kant ‘want[ing] it both ways’ (232), as if it were possible to rest in the confidence of an after-time even when one is undergoing violence. This, Passannante says, is the ‘precise irony’ in the operation of the Kantian sublime, in that it ‘effects a kind of philosophical amnesia: a forgetting of the history of disaster’s making and a burying of Kant’s own disasters’ (234).
Passannante implies in an Afterword on ‘Catastrophizing in the Age of Climate Change’ that we ought not to adopt Kant’s prescriptions. Because we will continue to catastrophise (even as Kant did, he suggests), we would do better to study rather than passively accept, fearfully avoid, or wilfully repackage our catastrophising. Catastrophizing: Materialism and the Making of Disaster gives us a foothold in that effort, providing an (inadvertent?) place of calm from which to consider the history of our catastrophising even as we catastrophise over climate change, COVID-19 and future threats surely to come.
Advocating for advancing Passannante’s work, including for its addition to graduate student reading lists, this reviewer sees natural pairings between Catastrophizing and a number of previously published, cutting edge works (none referenced by Passannante): for starters, Shakespeare and Ecocritical Theory by Gabriel Egan (especially his treatment of the catastrophising word ‘undone’ [2016; 65]); Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation by Rebecca Totaro (examining early modern popular culture and identity-shifting reactions to the 1580 Dover Straits earthquake [2018]); Disknowledge Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England by Katherine Eggert (examining from another perspective a history of irrational thought related to that which Passannante calls ‘catastrophizing’ [2015]); and Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse, 1400–1700 edited by Jennifer Spinks and Charles Zika (containing essays on individual and collective responses to natural disaster, many of them trending as the title suggests to the apocalyptic as a form of ‘catastrophizing’ [2016]). Passannante’s book also has productive implications for the study of catastrophising evidenced in the art and philosophy of early modern women and in popular and personal writing, including early modern ballads and manuscript letters. A useful study shows itself in just this range of potential applications, though to have included some voices beyond the pale of canonised, educated, white, male figures, would have made it stronger still. Catastrophizing is eruditely layered, ensuring a rich readerly experience following this review’s summary. It is recommended for advanced graduate students and scholars of art, philosophy and theory.
Rebecca Totaro
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I am most honored that this chance meeting led Professor Ryzhik to invite me to respond to her excellent essay!
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