Residues of Categorization: Thinking with Nonhumans in Nineteenth-Century Natural History

In “Natural History of Intellect,” Emerson asks if “laws and powers of the Intellect” could reflect the science’s “exhaustive accuracy of distribution,” calling attention to a cognitive ordering that human minds... [ view full abstract ]

In “Natural History of Intellect,” Emerson asks if “laws and powers of the Intellect” could reflect the science’s “exhaustive accuracy of distribution,” calling attention to a cognitive ordering that human minds increasingly applied to nature’s variety in nineteenth-century America. This variation, occurring outwardly in nature’s diversity and inwardly in the innate proliferation of human thoughts, is both stifled and homogenized by categorization. I argue that in their attempt to classify and describe natural phenomena, natural histories leave behind a literary representation of the mind, both human and nonhuman, that resists categorization. This residue offers a method of disorderly thinking that illuminates a cultural climate of knowledge working to de-classify as it classifies, and it offers a method for grappling with the effects of the Anthropocene, an event whose beginnings coincide with the nineteenth-century explosion of data and systemized thinking.