Performative Ground

Volume 46 | November 2015
DIG
The New Inquiry Magazine is licensed
under a creative commons license [cc-by-nc-nd
3.0]
thenewinquiry.com
@newinquiry
Editor-in-Chief
Ayesha Siddiqi
Co-Founder and Publisher
Rachel Rosenfelt
Executive Editor
Rob Horning
Creative Director
Imp Kerr
Senior Editor
Max Fox
Features Editor
Willie Osterweil
Editors
Aaron Bady
Anwar Batte
Jesse Darling
Malcolm Harris
Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
Miranda Trimmier
Contributing Editors
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Rahel Aima
Alexander Benaim
Adrian Chen
Emily Cooke
Nathan Jurgenson
Sam Lavigne
Sarah Leonard
Sarah Nicole Prickett
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Alix Rule
Derica Shields
Special Projects
Joseph Barkeley
Editor at Large
Tim Barker
3
Old Bones
Anna Zett interviewed by Max Fox
16
Anthropocene Realism
by Morgan Adamson
22
Can She Dig It
by Elizabeth Newton
26
Settled History
by Molly Oringer
29
Print on Demand
by Heather Holmes
34
Performative Ground
by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi
56
A Dark City
by Maaza Mengiste
61
Holing Up
by Mairead Case
65
Media Matters
by Karen Gregory
69
Coal Comfort
by Miranda Trimmier
editors’ note
LET
this sink in: The stability of the earth is a
physical fiction that we only experience thanks to its
unceasing speed. Trippy, huh? There’s more. After the
young molten planet began to cool and the first solid
land formed, there was no atmosphere to speak of. That
took millions of years of volcanic activity spewing the
ionized innards of the earth outward before liquid water
could pool and oxygenating algae could bloom. In a poetic reading of that chronology, the air we breathe is the
breath of the rock we stand on. Perhaps that’s why, when
we expire, we reach back for the ground.
Living well is generally figured as sprouting from
the earth, the result of a fertile interplay between a root
system and strong soil. Fortifications, public works
projects, and toddlers at the beach all enjoy an aura of
accomplishment at having burrowed well. Despite a
species-wide tendency to reside in the fresh air, tunneling underground still taps a wellspring of approval, as
if roaming far and wide laterally is just a substitute for
where we really would like to be going: down.
Of course, the subterranean has its bad associations
too—hellish mines, eerie crypts, pits and trap doors and
trenches. But the recurring obsession with journeys to
the underworld across cultures suggests an underlying
desire for deeper intimacy with the deep. In climatically
and geopolitically seismic times like these, somewhere
solid to stand is more than reassurance: If the ground is
shaking around us, it’s no surprise that we might want
to find its ultimate stable base below. And so, for our
46th issue, we direct our eyes downward and consider
the ground beneath the ground beneath our feet. From
Palestine to North Dakota, this issue is an open dig site.
Karen Gregory and Miranda Trimmier review two
new books that delve beneath the surface of the present
moment for their analysis. In Jussi Parikka’s A Geology of
Media, Gregory finds a materialist account of the media
devices so fundamental to the contemporary on-demand
economy, tracing the rare earths and underwater cables
and disputed environmental resources that make “immaterial labor” possible. And Trimmier tackles Andreas
Malm’s new Fossil Capital, which explores Britain’s adoption of coal during its reconfiguration of the global economy in the 19th century. Instead of a natural, inevitable
fit with expanding industrialization, fossil fuels’ centrality,
the book shows, records workers’ struggles and explosive
strikes. This perspective points toward a way out of the
haze of fossil-fuel-based surplus value extraction.
Maaza Mengiste writes of Hamid Ismailov’s new
novel, The Underground, reading it against the letters
she exchanged with her cousin, who left Ethiopia in the
1980s to study in Moscow. Ismailov’s protagonist too is
a young black man lost in the labyrinthine metro system
under the capital city, but unlike Mengiste’s cousin, he
has no “home where everybody is like us.” The elegiac
novel is a haunted map of Russian identity and belonging, though it gives readers “bursts of light to guide us
forward.”
Elizabeth Newton writes about the gendered practice of crate-digging and sifts through her own history of
exclusion at the hands of male musicians and collectors.
And Mairead Case explains why she cherishes the children’s classic Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, that
rare fable that privileges staying settled and digging your
heels in over world-conquering exploration.
Other political sentiments bubble up from the
ground. Morgan Adamson reads the promotional material developed by Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the Bakken shale fields, and coins the term “an-
thropocene realism” to describe such material’s aim of
suspending the contradictions of fracking and “energy
independence.” Ideological justifications for fracking,
Adamson shows, are bound up with the fantasy of reproducing white suburbia, despite everybody knowing
well that “the American Dream” are relics of an exhausted way of life, running on fumes. And in Maryam Monalisa Gharavi’s series of photographs, “Performative
Ground,” political insecurity and administrative violence appear as denatured, unsettled ground around her
home in Ramallah.
Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne AbouRahme take the “nomad bandit” nature of what might
otherwise be their national archive and run with it. Their
exhibition, “The Incidental Insurgents,” demonstrates
the political efficacy of newness in opposing a visual
system that depicts them as overwhelmed by their landscape, under rubble. Their “freshly printed archive is as
much an act of creation in the face of a legacy of destruction as it is a reminder of that history,” writes Heather
Holmes in “Print on Demand.” From the other side, Molly Oringer takes stock of Israeli settlements’ use of recent
history rather than ancient archaeology—bunkers, short
films, “immersive” experiences—to build a “museum
without images” that justifies their upside-down sense of
being under siege.
In an interview with filmmaker Anna Zett, she discusses This Unwieldy Object, her filmic essay that traces
the relation between early American animated dinosaur
films, the colonial frontier they virtualized, and the “end
of history,” among other things, fashioning a surprising
guide to the American West’s monuments and monsters.
Unearthing the past always reveals the shaky ground
official narratives stand on. The soil is in fact continually
renewed, the product of decomposition, seep, and drift.
To have any hold on this earth, to stake any sort of claim,
it’s necessary to get your hands dirty. We had better dig,
before we end up buried.
7
ANNA ZETT INTERVIEWED BY MAX FOX
Old Bones
ANNA ZETT interviewed by MAX FOX
ANNA
Zett’s videos handle the absurdity of science, technology, and history with a deadpan
gravity that can make their subject’s tragicomedy even
more striking when you catch it. Zett’s reverence for her
objects of inquiry—the afterwords and underworlds of
modernity, in her words—extends to treating them playfully. Born in Leipzig in 1983 and trained in philosophy,
she works across cinema, radio, installation, and dance
to investigate the dramaturgy of science. Her latest essay
film, This Unwieldy Object, traces the relation between
early American animated dinosaur films, the colonial
frontier they virtualized, the “end of history,” and the
Berlin Wall, among other things. It’s a tightly constructed
road movie, following the interstates between Rapid City
and Los Angeles, with Zett making a wry and inquisitive
tour guide to the American West and its monsters and
monuments. I met her at her apartment in October to
talk about the film.
Legend Of Dinosaurs And Ominous Birds, 1977
Paleontology was a surprisingly crucial part of settling the American West
8
OLD BONES
a lot of emails and made connections beforehand. So I
knew we had to go to Denver, because there was a fossil
show happening, and then you have to go a really long
way there and back so you have to make plans around it.
But within that a lot of it was spontaneous.
You said the trip was kind of spontaneous. Did
you plan out your meetings with various people? Obviously you had experts that you were talking to and
places that you wanted to go. Did you have an idea
that “I want this person to deliver this component of
the argument,” or did it just evolve out of how you
encountered them?
We had very little time—maybe that’s usual in film,
but I needed to rely on my intuition, because decisions
had to be made quickly. I couldn’t think from the edit
because I didn’t have an edit, I didn’t even have a script.
It was like shooting a documentary, although I knew
that the outcome would not be a documentary, but still
you shoot it like one: “What is this character?” “What
is this situation?” “What could this situation become?”
“What do we associate with this place, this people, this
situation, and what is their expertise?” And I also asked
myself: What is the surreal part of them? So I would
try to shoot in front of backgrounds that are a bit over
the top. For example, I put a research paleontologist on
top of a hill with a giant concrete dinosaur in the background, you know? It’s probably too cheesy, but I didn’t
think of the film as an argument. What I am interested in
is the overall concept for the film, and that concept was
really just a network of associations. I had already made
the argument around monsters of modernity and the dinosaur as a symbol for U.S. American culture and colonialism in DINOSAUR.GIF and I didn’t need to make a
film that would just repeat the same thesis, so I thought
I could just follow intuition, that if I had to rely on that I
would find a way to put it all together. Of course, the actual route through the country was planned beforehand.
It took a long time to plan the trip. I researched and sent
In your films, dinosaur fossils become a surprisingly useful object for talking about colonialism and
the ideological production of American history, as
the paleontologists find something in the ground that
matches the stories they’ve already told themselves—
they discover the proof of their own narratives in the
soil, in the dirt, in the rock.
Yes, dinosaurs in a weird way became some form
of a replacement history, a replacement for the history
that the U.S. destroyed. That’s why I was interested in
going to the United States, because in my earlier film I
could analyze this and make points, and there were references to cowboys and the Wild West and all that, but
in the end it’s not the same as going there and trying
to find out how people still related to that history. The
interesting thing about the dinosaur bone is that it is
a combination of mythology and science, a combination which was necessary in the States. Maybe because
of the U.S.’s lack of history, they produced it through
capitalism, through colonialism, and since there was a
need for mythology they found it in science. Which is
ironic, of course, because the West always claims that
science and mythology are separated—that is one of
the main ideas of modern science.
The idea that science abolishes mythology so that
it can be a true object of belief?
Yes, that the West has objectivity, that it can access
the object as it is, whereas, you know, “primitive cultures”
always mix up culture and nature, and so they don’t have
access to the object as such. That’s how western science
has operated for hundreds of years now. It’s this Kantian
ANNA ZETT INTERVIEWED BY MAX FOX
thought in the end. Bruno Latour has written a lot of interesting things about this in We Have Never Been Modern,
which was an important book for the research that I did
for this film. And so I was also interested in the question
of if there is perhaps a difference in how Native American
research institutions deal with these scientific questions,
and so I visited one.
Did you find a difference?
I did, but in the beginning I was a little bit disappointed as it seemed to be only about money, until I realized that that is exactly what these bones are now used
for: some form of reappropriation of science, but also
some form of reparations. It is a way of organizing your
own reparations by claiming the resources that are on
the deserted land that you were sent to against your will,
resources that no one knew were there. And a lot of other natural resources are obviously exploited without the
tribe making any money from it—they get the pollution
and the destruction, and the mining or oil company just
extracts the value. It’s very similar with fossils, but there’s
this one exception, which is due to the Oglala Lakota
College. They are a college that has really fought for establishing its own paleontology, and I think that is a very
interesting example of how they manage to reappropriate
the power of science, not so much in order to claim some
form of specific mythological access to these bones. It’s
more about like, “We are claiming a right to also make
science.”
It’s an assertion of their contemporaneity, or a
rejection of their being relegated to the landscape or
the past that can also be mined and extracted from.
Yeah, and a lot of people that we met there are very
interested in natural sciences. They have a strong program in geology and paleontology, and for a lot of the
kids in the area, because it’s a desert, everyone is collecting stones. It’s an easy thing to get into, fossils, so it
9
is really something that totally can give the kids there a
­perspective.
And I realized that I also had these weird ideas
about how mythology gives Native Americans a different
kind of access, until I realized it’s still about dealing with
objects and it’s also what western scientists do, collecting an object and making a story out of it and in some
sense there is no difference, except the scientists assert
that they have found a higher objective truth. I talked to
this young paleontologist in Rapid City who said, “What
we are doing here is mythology anyway.” In that sense
I didn’t have to locate the mythology with the Native
Americans at all. That would just be a repetition of that
western Kantian division. In shooting the film, I already
had inklings of this idea: that the scientific institutions
and the fossil hunters and all that—they are just making
mythology with these objects, while a lot of the people
in the reservation are just basically interested in science.
What is the use that the paleontologists put their
mythology toward? Are they making mythology now?
They’re constantly updating it, like now we know
that dinosaurs have feathers or were colored in these
­patterns…
That’s not really mythology. To me the mythology is
this idea that there’s this specific time of the dinosaurs, and
that is very much part of the American imaginary of different historical eras. For example, have you seen the Tree of
Life by Terrence Malick? In it you have three different eras:
You have the era of the creation of the earth, which looks
very biblical, and then you have the next era, which is the
era of the dinosaurs, and then the next era you’re in 1950s
suburbia. That is mythology, you know? It has nothing to
do with science, it has nothing to do with history. And that
is the mythology that has been pushed for more than 100
years in the U.S., that before white America there was not
much else, there was the dinosaurs, and before that there
was the creation of the earth.
10
In that sequence I remember the dinosaurs are
how the question of evil enters the world. It’s a potential murder scene. I don’t know if you remember the
scene—
It’s a crime scene. Yeah, that’s interesting, but to
me it’s more like they introduce the moral decision to
not kill. One of the dinosaurs decides randomly to not
eat the other injured dinosaur. This morality is legitimized by the science of the dinosaurs. Productions
always hire a paleontologist for these movies to work
on them, and the newspapers and the media also say
“science shows,” etc. Scientists can say “well, that is not
proper science, because proper science is done in the
lab, and the other stuff is just application.” But I think
the application often came before the actual science,
and the science follows as a tool for legitimizing all
kinds of things. Especially in the history of colonialism,
science was a major legitimization agent.
Why do you think it had to be dinosaurs and not,
say, Ice Age megafauna, the mammals that humans
did actually live with? You could more readily imagine
they have some direct relation to human history. Why
were dinosaurs the vehicle for this mythologization
and not these other animals?
The interest with paleontology in the U.S. started
with the “American monster,” the mastodon. Thomas Jefferson was actually a paleontologist, and he installed a
bone room in the White House. They realized early on,
even before the discovery of the dinosaurs, that the country’s national imaginary needed this, because we don’t
have history. But it didn’t really work in the same way
with the mammoths, although they were also spectacular.
Many people have written about this, that when the dinosaurs were discovered was at the same time that the ideology of progress kicked into full force. Dinosaurs could
also be associated directly with technological progress,
which happened in the ’30s with the Sinclair exhibition
OLD BONES
in the World Exposition in 1933 in Chicago. Sinclair decided to link the dinosaur with fossil fuel, and that kind of
sparked the 20th century cult of the dinosaur.
The dinosaur stands for progress and extinction,
because progress and extinction belong together in this
way—that progress will inevitably lead to destruction,
progress is similar to evolution and evolution produces
extinction, but then the extinct object kind of reappears
in the future —so we expect to see, as a proof of progress,
that which is extinct! It is kind of a utopian link, which
is why W.J.T. Mitchell said that everywhere the modern
world goes, it already finds the dinosaurs waiting for it.
Dinosaurs are on the planet wherever you go. That is reflected in the history of the early 20th century film industry: the dinosaurs are on foreign continents and far away
planets, they are in the jungle, they are in the bottom of
the sea, they are everywhere. Jules Verne goes to the center of the earth and finds dinosaurs on the way! And so
they can populate this kind of imagery of the modern idea
of the absolutely utopian imaginary future that is yet to
be discovered.
I think it was probably also their otherness which
made them even more suitable to associate with the time
of foreign giants that is definitively over—mammoths still
look like elephants, so they don’t have this aspect, there’s
not this direct break. They’re not as alien and they’re not
as extinct as dinosaurs are. You can find their relatives and
you obviously see the relationship when you see the elephant. Though now they say, of course, that birds are basically dinosaurs. But they are too small! I think it’s a very
nice discovery that came up in the 1990s, after the “end of
history,” right—“by the way, dinosaurs are not extinct.” I
think it’s very nice that this idea came, so the dinosaur appears everywhere; after history is over, the dinosaur finally
appears and it will never leave again, because every bird is
a dinosaur according to our new classification.
But then you have the giant dinosaurs as well—they
are bigger than anything else, you know? In America you
have this obsession with size, and especially when the U.S.
became a huge empire in the beginning of the 20th century, size could be appropriated for an ethno-mythology. Dinosaurs are huge and they are completely different, seemingly, to anything that lives now, and in that sense they are
the perfect projection surface for all kinds of things you
need to put in the past as a way of imagining the future.
That’s what’s so interesting with the T. rex, because
the T. rex is also an emblem of the U.S. There’s almost an
obsession with this monster that can embody so many
contradictions at the same time: that it’s a monster that’s
going to eat you. The T. rex is kind of perfect for the consumer culture of the U.S. Susan Buck-Morris once said that
the communist bloc was a kind of utopia of production,
and the capitalist U.S. empire a utopia of consumption. So
the perfect U.S. monster is also a monster that is consuming you or eating you because you are eating everything.
That is what the capitalist wants, to eat everything, to consume everything, and that’s exactly what’s mirrored onto
the monster, the monster is just wildly eating everything
that comes in front of it.
11
So they’re sympathetic or admirable in a way?
They are not necessarily admirable, they’re evil.
Maybe it’s that the aggression that is present in the culture itself is projected onto the other. That is a very normal
psychological mechanism: if you don’t want to acknowledge your own aggression you put it onto the other.
I wanted to ask you about this really interesting moment, right in the middle of the movie. You’re
standing in front of these two sections of the Berlin
Wall that are in a park in South Dakota, and you sort
of lose your thread, about the end of history.
Yeah that’s my favorite part.
It’s really incredible. You grew up in East Germany, and your childhood saw this “end of history” happen. Did these dinosaur mythologies have the same
kind of circulation in your childhood? Or was it more
like a symbol of what the west had and believed?
Even in the west, dinosaurs were a bit forgotten in the
’80s, and they reappeared when Spielberg made J­urassic
Anna Zett, This Unwieldy Object, 2015
ANNA ZETT INTERVIEWED BY MAX FOX
12
Park. The dinosaur cult goes in waves. The ’10s, the ’30s—
actually the whole time up until the Second World War,
there was a big dinosaur cult going on in the U.S. but also
in Europe, and then there was another boom in the ’60s
and then again in the ’90s. There were not so many dinosaur films being produced in the ’70s and ’80s.
That’s right—there was this children’s film that I
remember seeing with dinosaurs in the ’90s; I think it
was called We’re Back—it’s all about return.
Exactly, the return. So the ’90s was about the return
of the dinosaurs, and there is an obvious connection to
the end of history, because dinosaurs are monsters of
progress and monsters of extinction, monsters of a radical break in time, and that’s why it makes them so perfect
for modern thought, because modernity is this paradox of
progress and breaks in time. We can only experience time
by a radical break between before and after, and 1989–90
was one of those radical breaks. Maybe it happened again
with 9/11 in our own western imaginary, but ’89 was even
more radical for many people because they had to completely change their perspective on the world.
And for people in Western Germany, the shift in
1989–90 wasn’t experienced in the way that people in the
East experienced it, because in the East it actually meant
that history started again. It really wasn’t an end of history; it was more like a beginning. So when later we heard
about the “end of history,” I think a lot of people were
quite confused. And the unemployment, the structural
problems, and the humiliation by West Germans actually led to a long low point and a sense of humiliation and
defeat. There is the feeling of being on the losing side, not
only in East Germany but many other former Eastern Bloc
countries—you are kind of running after history. History
has left you behind, you have to jump into it, but you are
always going to be late, because what you were taught or
what you learned is now completely invalid. That is what I
experienced as a kid, and what led to what has been called
OLD BONES
the “generation of the untaught,” that is, for the young East
Germans, there are those who had no advisors or mentors
growing up because the adults were totally busy with finding their own position in society.
They also had to become adults?
Yeah, they couldn’t convincingly embody any form
of Vorsprung, like, to be ahead. They had to learn along
with the children—and sometimes the children were
quicker in realizing what was going on. So in a way, they
didn’t have so much authority over us children. Of course
there’s positions of power that give you authority, but it
wasn’t really convincing. And so I saw Jurassic Park in the
movie theater, I was a little bit too young for it, I think I
was a bit under 12, but I went anyway, and it was a really
impressive film.
Why was that piece of the wall there in the middle
of South Dakota?
It’s in Rapid City, and I knew it was there. When we
prepared the film I knew Rapid City would be the perfect
place to stay a long time and try to connect all these different threads together. There’s the exhibit of the Berlin Wall,
and then there’s this dinosaur park on a nearby hill that
has these concrete dinosaurs that appear a couple of times
in the film. They were built by workers in the Great Depression, and they’re these absurd forms, not really based
on actual dinosaurs, because the people who built them
were not skilled sculptors in any way. They were just built
by random people put to work by the New Deal. And then
there’s also the Crazy Horse memorial. I wanted to connect these three things together. For me, the Berlin Wall is
a symbol for this break in history, this kind of break in this
idea of linear time, which the dinosaur also relates to, but
how the wall is exhibited in Rapid City it is also a symbol
for the victory of the U.S. American empire.
I always bring my own history and my own stories
and imaginations to a place where I am shooting a film. If
ANNA ZETT INTERVIEWED BY MAX FOX
I go there and make transparent that I’m actually drawn to
my own history, the idea that you find yourself when you
go far away, and that my struggle with this break in time is
also very much connected to the arrival of the U.S. American empire in my life and in everyone else’s life around
me, whereas before it wasn’t so present. And I think that
influenced me a lot, and I wanted to put it in the film, as
I think a personal film is more interesting than someone
who speaks only about things and above things.
The dinosaur
stands for progress
and extinction,
because progress
and extinction
belong together. We
expect to see, as a
proof of progress,
that which is
extinct.
13
How did it make you feel that there was this piece
of your personal history on display?
I don’t think I’m so personally connected with the
Berlin Wall itself in that sense. But I find it absurd—most
of the pieces of the Berlin Wall are actually in the U.S.
In terms of amount of concrete, there’s probably more in
Berlin, but in terms of pieces that were separated and exhibited in different places, most of them are in the U.S.
Like trophies or something.
Yeah, they’re trophies. I didn’t put it in the film, but
there’s a little exhibit on the back of the wall in Rapid
City. It’s just an image of a big firework, and it says “Victory!” Just like that. Just victory and fireworks, that is
what the Berlin Wall stands for in America. I don’t feel
hurt by that, but it’s telling about this moment of empire.
I think it’s part of this whole other story as well, about
how in East and West Germany, cowboys and what they
called Indians then were mythological figures used for
enacting the East versus West conflict.
How so?
Many of the colonizers and many of the people active
in the Wild West as settlers and adventurers came from
Germany. Especially in the Northwest, in the Dakotas,
there were a lot of Germans. And so there were a lot of stories being sent back, and in Germany for a long time there
was a big obsession with Wild West stories. Karl May was
a big author at the end of 19th century who wrote all these
stories about these Native American heroes and their homoerotic love stories between this white man or this German man. These stories were already there and very popular. But then after World War II they kind of split, so in the
West they were doing identifying more with the cowboys,
and in the East people were identifying with the Native
Americans, because they associated the cowboys with U.S.
American empire. They wanted to be on the side both of
the victims, but also on the side of the solidarity with the
14
colonized. There were a lot of films made by the DFA called
Indianerfilme—I originally thought I’d put some in my film
but I didn’t in the end because they’re really mediocre. The
Wall kind of split the obsession with American history into
two sides, but that’s a thing I didn’t want to explain and get
into too much in the film.
But before that you have this really ambitious
thesis that you put forth about Frederick Jackson
Turner and Eadweard Muybridge and the “virtual afterlife of the frontier” continuing on in cinema right at
the moment when it closes geographically—
I’m not so sure that I would ever formulate it as a
thesis if I had to defend it, but I like the connection between the running horse as the origin of cinema—the
horse as moving animal as the symbol for film as science,
technology, magic, entertainment—and at the same the
images of the horse run which represent the final privatization of the land. That’s the great thing with film, you
can just put it together. You can associate things with
each other and then you can make that link and I don’t
have to prove it you know, that there is a link, I just make
the link.
I’m very interested in the continuation of the American frontier as a logic, because it has globalized since the
90s, and the ideal of progress is now very much connected
to technology. And this is strong with imaging and mapping technology and it’s always this same idea: when we
are able to simulate something, when we are able to make
a 3-D animation of it, then we have power over it. At least
when it comes to medical and neuroscience, there’s this
belief that just the diagnosis, just the image production itself will somehow benefit humanity in terms of progress.
I’m very skeptical of that. But it also relates to my interest in understanding the specificities of film as a medium.
I’m very much drawn to the early times of cinema, where
somehow via animation magic enters science again, or it is
one of the times that magic enters science, or is conjoined
OLD BONES
with it and it becomes this paradoxical mix of creating
what never was and somehow also capturing reality. Between photography and animation you have this combination, and I’m really interested also in how it was created in
specific political moments.
It’s interesting what you said about the imaging,
and the going inside or going deeper, because it’s at
the point of closing the frontier that people start really
digging, building the extractive industries, but at the
same time you get these virtual dimensions for expansion with film and representation and the discovery of
the unconscious. In the context where U.S. imperialism is sort of blocked on a geographic scale then they
start digging or extracting in a different way to keep
moving.
There’s this point in the 19th century, at least according to Turner, at which Americans had to find a new
frontier. “Well, we are good at exploring, that’s our identity, that’s what we white American men can do. Our nation is about settling, and about transformation in the experience of being close to nature. By being very intimate
with nature, we turn it into civilization.”
That mythology was really powerful, and it was
turned into a whole geopolitical strategy: we have to find
the wilderness somewhere else. In film it’s a little bit of
a joke, too, because the wilderness in animation is obviously a fiction. You animate creatures that you cannot
film, and you civilize the dinosaur, even though it’s not
even wild: you civilize it by making it wild. The whole
wilderness of the dinosaur is a technological product,
and I think that interested me in DINOSAUR.GIF most
of all. In that work, I was focused on this contradiction
that somehow we believe that the dinosaur is natural
because we see it realistically animated—it’s moving a
lot—but of course for the animators and for the whole
movie industry, this is evidence for the power of technology. So in that sense, in the end, the wilder nature is, the
ANNA ZETT INTERVIEWED BY MAX FOX
stronger technology proves to be. And that is very much
a frontier idea.
At one point in the film, you describe a lot of
these different processes with a really great phrase,
about the way that property relations were trying to
wrap themselves around these objects.
Yeah that’s where the title comes from. It’s actually
a quote from Patricia Nelson Limerick, an American historian who says western history is the effort to wrap the
concept of property around unwieldy objects. She tries
to deconstruct the myth of the American frontier and
Turner’s mythology and says that they weren’t all these
wild frontiersmen out in the wilderness; the agents of the
frontier were real estate agents! They were salespeople,
all these people trying to privatize. All these businesspeople, bankers, accountants, that we don’t talk about
being in the Wild West. The bank is one of the first things
that gets established. It’s all about private property. The
idea of private property is the main system to be established in colonization and still is maybe the only content
of capitalism—private property is the only thing to be
protected, everything else is kind of negotiable.
I thought it was interesting though because the
rest of the movie talks about dinosaurs and fossils
and they fit so snugly in whatever the system of private property wants to use them for! They don’t seem
that unwieldy actually. They seem ideal or perfect.
Yeah, it’s interesting that you say that, but I think
in some sense I like to just connect this quote to the dinosaur because the dinosaur is in one sense an unwieldy
object: It’s giant, we can’t really handle it, and so on. But
they are trying to be made wieldy for history. I think it’s
a process. I don’t think the dinosaur itself is perfectly fitting. You have to make it fit, whatever kind of bone you
find. First you appropriate it, and then you have to find
a way to integrate it into something that makes sense, if
15
it’s just a fossil fragment for example. But then, maybe
in some ways, it’s a little bit of a joke. The first part of
the film—it ends with the very tiny dinosaur inside the
plaster egg, this one here, [she takes the little dinosaur
she has on her desk and brings it to where we are sitting]
I still have it. So there’s a big dick, this giant object, it represents this giant empire, the giant capitalist power, the
dinosaur, and then I’m like, well, you’re so small! So it’s a
little bit this joke, and it’s super wieldy, handy, and so in a
way the film ends with this object that is not unwieldy at
all, because that is the product. That is what comes out of
that whole digging and dealing with contradictions and
using them and projecting aggression and fear onto this
mythological object and trying to cut them together and
copy them and put them all over the world and in the
end you have this—and it’s a finished product, and it has
nothing to do with the animal that once lived.
Except for the fact that it’s made out of plastic,
right? At the level of material it totally has something
to do with it.
Yeah, exactly—I had this connection very vaguely in
my head that I wanted this film to be about fossil fuels and
the product of it, which is plastic, but I didn’t focus on it
completely. But it stayed in the film, and I found a way to
make it a strong point. I read the book Synthetic Worlds by
Esther Leslie when I was editing, and it all made sense to
me, and I was really happy because she kind of gave me this
association—she writes about how from coal tar and then
also from oil, from these black, poisonous products there’s
this rainbow of colors of the plastic empire. It’s made of the
toxic byproducts of industry in the beginning. So that really made another piece fall into place. I knew already that I
wanted plastic things in there but I was actually surprised,
because I didn’t know what would be inside the egg, you
know? We were filming as I broke it open and then there
just happened to be this plastic dinosaur inside, so it wasn’t
really my construction.
16
Anthropocene Realism
ANTHROPOCENE REALISM
By MORGAN ADAMSON
WILLISTON,
North Dakota,
the epicenter of the Bakken shale oil boom, has launched
a new campaign branding itself “the last great place for opportunity.” This slogan comes at the end of a promotional
video that features hard-working entrepreneurs testifying to
the limitless opportunities that await you in western North
Dakota. The radiating exclamation point punctuates the slogan by exploding over a spare grid, connoting a clean slate
ready to be filled with a brighter future. If history leaves its
traces in punctuation marks, as Theodore Adorno argues,
then the overzealousness of this exclamation point, casting
a warm glow over our future prospects, might also signal a
menacing threat rather than an auspicious omen. Similarly,
the “last” in “last great place for opportunity” seems to indicate that we have entered into an end times of sorts, having
crossed over a threshold from which there is no return. But
Stills from Williston Economic Development 2015 Video
If human-made climate change is irrefutable, why are we still fracking?
What teaches us to believe there is no alternative to oil?
MORGAN ADAMSON
never mind these paranoid readings; for now let’s focus on
the video’s upbeat message about possibility in this place of
wholesome renewal.
Deploying what has become a standard set of conventions for promotional videos and advertisements—DSLR
cinematography with shallow focus, upbeat pop music, flat
gestures toward multiculturalism, etc.—the video attempts
to counter the boomtown narrative perpetuated about Williston in the national media. In that narrative, Williston is
dangerous, full of male oil workers and prostitutes, and
enjoying an impermanent prosperity, subject to the same
boom and bust cycles that have plagued the region since the
first oil-exploration projects in the 1950s. The video counters the boomtown story by positioning Williston as a place
of certain and stable economic growth.
What does it feel like to live in the last great place for
opportunity? “It’s almost like, whenever you think of the
American Dream, that’s what it’s like to be in Williston,” a
young woman tells us as the video commences while b-roll
17
of an American flag flaps in the wind. In a world full of
missed opportunities, dead ends, and foreclosed dreams,
Williston is a place where hard work still translates into stability and security. It is simultaneously a place where the entrepreneurial spirit is allowed to flourish. “Anybody who has
any potential who wants to work can make it here” we are
told by an elderly woman; “everybody’s here because they
want to succeed, they want to change their life…they want
to start over” a middle-age man reiterates; “this town has
given anybody who wants to try to open up their own business a great opportunity,” an owner of a Culver’s restaurant
explains as he laughs with his employee. The words growth,
opportunity, exciting, and succeed pop from the mouths of
Williston residents as they describe what makes their home
great. Williston is a place where everyone is invited to participate in abundance, and this abundance is shared among
the town’s residents in an equitable manner. Opportunity is
there for the taking, that is, for those enterprising go-getters
willing to sweat in the pursuit of a better life.
18
Central to the video’s vision of the thriving American
dream is the growth of the town and the development of
housing stock to suit its utopian vision: suburban-style tract
homes. In the wake of the subprime market crash and the
decimation of the American middle class, these homes offer
a nostalgic comfort, a promise to extend the suburban project, imagining Williston as a microcosm for the repetition
of the post–World War II boom. The video celebrates the
measured symmetry of the landscape currently under construction as an index of the normalized family units that live
within them. After sweeping footage of newly minted suburban sprawl, we are told by a housing developer that Williston residents “want to be a family structure, and that’s what
the real dream is all about.” The fixation on the development
of tracts of single-family homes by Williston’s city planners
is fed by the notion that they must establish permanence
in a transient city by settling the population and promoting social reproduction. The single-family home becomes a
biopolitical measure that serves as the counterpoint to the
ANTHROPOCENE REALISM
instability and perceived danger of the man camp. “Williston, the last great place for opportunity!” thus replaces the
Williston Economic Department’s previous slogan that celebrated the virility of frack drilling: “Rockin’ the Bakken.”
One of the most striking things about the Williston
video is (despite its attempts to present a diverse face) the
sheer abundance of white children that populate its new vision of opportunity. “Thousands of babies are being born
each year in the community,” a member of the Williston
Economic Development team tells us as a toddler is pushed
on a swing. Of these thousands of babies, the only ones we
see are white. The promise of renewal in the last great place
for opportunity is thus coded not only as the renewal of the
middle class but the renewal of white America itself. This
is not surprising, given that in the U.S. the promise of freedom and self-determination through homeownership has
historically been predicated on racial exclusion and the violent marking of suburban spaces of social reproduction as
white. It’s an essential point to draw out, though, because
MORGAN ADAMSON
it parallels the tradition of homesteading by white settlers
so central to the establishment North Dakota as a frontier
space that erased histories of racial injustice, genocide, and
the continued brutalization and expropriation of Native
land and communities. This history has only been extended
by the current boom, the most extreme example being the
spike in violence against Native women since it began.
The version of social reproduction inherent to suburban development cannot be separated from the rise of petrocapitalism in the 20th century, according to geographer
Matthew Huber. Moreover, in Lifeblood, his recent book
on the quotidian politics of oil, he argues that the entrepreneurial subjectivities we associate with neoliberalism are
impossible
without the material transformation of everyday life centered upon reproductive geographies of single-family
home ownership, automobility, and voracious energy consumption. The dense, versatile fuel of petroleum fuels a
particular lived geography—a “structure of feeling”—that
allows for an appearance of atomized command over the
spaces of mobility, home, and even the body itself.
Huber locates the emergence of neoliberal policies and
practices in the suburbanization of the American landscape
of the postwar era, claiming that the mobility fueled by petrocapitalism was also central to the capacity of the American subject to understand her life as capital. Moreover,
the necessity of purchasing the implements of this “fractioned” subjectivity—namely the car and the single-family
home—“also immediately extends the mass of living labor
into circuits of credit, debt, and financial markets.” In other
words, neither the emergence of entrepreneurial subjectivities nor the related financialization of daily life can be separated from the suburbanization of American life enabled by
the abundance of cheap oil.
Just as the politics of racial exclusion are rendered
invisible in Williston’s branding campaign, so are the ways
that oil itself functions as the unspoken yet ever-present
force behind the burgeoning entrepreneurial subjectivities
in the video. Participating in these double erasures, the vid-
19
eo does more than simply counter the boomtown narrative
by repeating tropes of lily-white suburban life. Instead, in
the process of branding Williston as the “last great place for
opportunity,” the video both participates in and furthers a
genre I would like to call anthropocene realism. Drawing on
Mark Fisher’s diagnosis of the neoliberal era as the establishment of a dominant genre he calls “capitalist realism,” or
the active production of the sense that, in Margret Thatcher’s words, “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal agenda,
I suggest that anthropocene realism is a genre that substantiates a similar sense that there is no alternative to the socalled energy revolution currently taking place in the U.S.
In The Boom, Russell Gold, senior energy reporter for
the Wall Street Journal, gives an account of the implementation of fracking technologies since 2010, arguing that it has
transformed the discursive practices and material politics
around oil in the U.S. and globally. In a few short years, the
anxiety around peak oil has been erased, and the geopolitics
of American oil consumption has been transformed into
nominal “energy independence.” As fracking technologies
open untapped fossil fuel reserves to extraction, U.S. oil
production is expected to reach 11.1 million barrels a day by
2020, surpassing production rates in Saudi Arabia, currently
the world’s highest. At its peak in June 2015 the output of
oil from the Bakken alone reached 1.2 million barrels a day.
The emergence of anthropocene realism is based on the
coincidence of this advancement of fracking technologies
with two major historical events. The first is the widespread
acceptance of human-driven climate change as irrefutable
scientific fact, especially with the publication of the 2007 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change that established incontrovertible evidence
of anthropogenic causality in the literature. The Bakken oil
boom began in 2008 at a time when ­climate-change denial, the primary tool by which both politicians and the oil
industry refuted the legitimacy of claims linking the burning of fossil fuels to global warming, was increasingly untenable. At a moment when climate scientists insist that the
only viable way to prevent catastrophic climate change is to
leave the world’s oil reserves in the ground, the acceleration
of oil extraction requires the same “structure of disavowal” that Fisher finds central to capitalist realism. Following
Žižek’s understanding of disavowal as central to ideology
in postmodernity, Fisher writes, “So long as we believe (in
our hearts) that capitalism is bad, we are free to continue
to participate in capitalist exchange.” In the structure of disavowal, belief and action are separated. Yes, yes, we know
climate change is a real, terrible thing, but we act as if the
extraction of oil is necessary, the only viable solution to secure a sustainable future. As a society, we may have come to
accept that climate change is a real and terrifying prospect,
but we don’t complain when, for instance, our 401(k)s rebound, thanks in part to the fracking-inspired gold rush in
the American fossil-fuel industry.
ANTHROPOCENE REALISM
This leads me to the second major historical event
with which the Williston fracking boom coincided, which
is, of course, the 2008 financial crisis, or what Duménil and
Lévy call “the crisis of neoliberalism” and the widespread
collapse in the belief that the unbridled expansion of financial capitalism, deregulation, and union-busting would
lead to long-term prosperity. In addition to supplying a
stream of indebted laborers to the Bakken who lost their
homes and jobs, the financial crisis also allowed the prosperity of the new fracking revolution to stand in stark contrast with the devastation of the rest of the country. This
juxtaposition positioned the “energy revolution” as the
beacon of hope for a beleaguered population, an alternative—perhaps the only alternative—to precarity and economic devastation. This is the perfect storm that let Williston emerge as the last great place for opportunity. “We’ve
Photo by Morgan Adamson
20
MORGAN ADAMSON
moved from a boomtown to a business model. Everyone
is coming here to call Williston their home.” These words,
from a Williston Economic Development representative,
tell the story of an inevitable transition from instability to
perpetuity. It is a perfect piece of anthropocene realism:
a home for “everyone” built by a vague “business model”
predicated on the endless but invisible flow of oil (a model
that has, in the case of Williston, become increasingly flimsy since the recent drop in global oil prices).
In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes genre as
that which organizes attachments and expectations as experience unfolds. Genre, for Berlant, is a set of pre-established forms that provides a structure to narrate both the
present and the future, and she shows that the attachments
organized by specific genres can be, and often are, perverse
and destructive. Naming anthropocene realism, or the
sense that there is no end and no alternative to petrocapitalism, requires more than recognizing our “addiction” to
oil, a point that Matt Huber makes very clear. Instead, it re-
21
quires identifying the ways that our attachments to certain
versions of the good life are tied to geographies of racial
exclusion and bound up in petrocapitalism.
If the mood of capitalist realism is depression, as
Mark Fisher argues, than the mood of anthropocene realism might be read as anxious exuberance. This exuberance presents itself in comforting tropes that, in their
“impotent bigness” (to use the words of Jacqueline Rose),
feel both worn thin and lacking in confidence. On closer
look, the exclamation point looks desperate, as do all the
forced smiles and awkward testimonials in the Williston
promotional video. It is tempting to dismiss its pathos as
the futile efforts of a culture in decline, but that would
be too easy. We know there are other, less suicidal visions
for the future than those offered by anthropocene realism. But to access them we must first assess the ways our
sense of opportunity and our vision for our individual futures are tethered to petrocapitalism, whether we like it
or not.
22
CAN SHE DIG IT
Can She Dig It
By ELIZABETH NEWTON
“Unearthing lost gems” often reinforces the gendered principles
that have excluded women from cultural canons
No one worth possessing
Can be quite possessed.
—Sara Teasdale
MY
former saxophone teacher offered me three
scraps of advice: Drugs don’t help, men make it worse, and
music makes it better. I should try drugs, he said, but nothing injected, and they would never help me play better.
Second, as a girl, I should be wary of male musicians trying
to take advantage of me. Finally, if I wanted to play well,
I should diligently study the masters, in true jazz fashion.
Heeding the last bit, I spent months working through
Charlie Parker transcriptions, inhabiting the sneaky contours of his solos. Soon I found my way to Miles Davis,
whom I preferred to imitate because his sparse, elegant
phrases made space to climb inside. I bought all his records, even the weird ones—On the Corner, Agharta. When
I learned that both Bird and Miles had been womanizing
heroin users, I let it slide, allowing my teacher’s third tenet
to trump the other two.
I play jazz, in part, because my saxophone teacher introduced me to jazz vocalist Sarah Vaughan. He claimed
that male instrumentalists he knew imitated her exquisite
sense of phrasing, which made perfect sense to me—who
but her had ever moved so freely in time? In reality, most
men overlook her, but my teacher exaggerated Vaughan’s
influence for my benefit, concocting a canon with room
for me. He knew that I had not yet gathered the tools to
disregard male approval altogether.
Around that time, my real-life liaisons with a musician were meticulous and exhausting, with each of
us pouring over into the other’s bumbling sense of self.
I memorized every lyric he had ever written, I gleefully
promoted his music in my zine, and I bought his band’s
records with money I’d earned pulling espresso shots and
cleaning toilets, and prized them. I was convinced we were
23
ELIZABETH NEWTON
soulmates, maybe even equals. As it turned out, to him I
was a groupie, a flower, a toy. Only later did I realize that
he never even asked me which instrument I play, let alone
why I play it.
AFTER
one too many jam sessions at
which I was regarded either as an ornament or a nuisance,
I accepted that I would never cut it as a jazz saxophonist.
I developed a coping mechanism in response. If I cannot
create, I thought, then I will curate: I will construct canons
myself.
The “jazz tradition,” though still appealing, seemed in
need of serious revision. Digging through archives, I learned
that jazz history is replete with gendered inequalities. In college, my friends worshipped Sun Ra, the psychedelic jazz
musician who purported to be from Saturn. Sun Ra’s quirky
space humor has helped entice one generation of hipster listeners after another, but I was hung up on something I’d
read in historian Valerie Wilmer’s book As Serious as Your
Life: Sun Ra had excluded Carla Bley, a pianist and composer in his circle, from his Jazz Composer’s Guild—a society Bley helped found. Citing sailor lore, Sun Ra claimed it
was bad luck to bring a woman aboard the ship. Bley, meanwhile, had to beg Sun Ra’s label to record her.
Sun Ra is admired because he fabricates his cosmic
origins with such conviction. By contrast, Bley’s origins
are without myth; they are all too real. Born in Oakland,
California, she moved to New York City and worked as a
cigarette girl at the Blue Note, serving jazz musicians whom
she tried, for years, to persuade to play her compositions.
Eventually, she was recognized within the city’s avant-garde scene, collaborating with such musicians as Steve Lacy,
Jack Bruce, and Charlie Haden and co-leading the Jazz
Composer’s Orchestra. In 1971, she released her eclectic
jazz opera Escalator Over the Hill.
The further I delved into jazz history, the more it
became clear how thoroughly women have been written
out of its dominant narrative. Their absence tends to be
taken for granted, as in the way historians have interpreted the career of Billy Tipton, a swing-era musician and
bandleader. Upon his death in 1992, it was discovered
that Tipton was female-bodied, despite performing as a
man. As Judith/Jack Halberstam notes in In a Queer Time
and Place, Tipton’s choice to present as a man has often
been characterized as a coping strategy to deal with female musicians’ lack of involvement in swing music. But
as historian Sherrie Tucker has recently demonstrated,
hundreds of all-women big bands were active in the 1930s
and 1940s, hiding in plain sight. Assumptions made about
Tipton’s inner life—the truth of which remains unknown
to us—have worsened historical erasures rather than resolving them.
Whether joining dominant narratives or confounding
them, musicians and historians alike have grappled with
gendered injustice and amnesia by whatever means necessary. Guitarist Annie Clark, performing as St. Vincent,
sometimes covers the Beatles’ song “Dig a Pony.” She turns
Lennon’s cryptic, evasive lyrics back on themselves. “We
can celebrate everything we see,” she sings, transforming
the imperative pronoun you of the original lines into the
inclusive we. Time and time again, Clark’s intervention is
to expand our archives, making room for everyone—even
those who have routinely effaced her.
FOR
many listeners, jazz is synonymous with innovation. But the originality essential to the musical style is
circumscribed by the rigid reproduction of jazz lore: familiar memories, stories, and standards of appreciation passed
down like fossils. As a result of this emphasis on inheritance,
critics have often used the fact that women and transgender
musicians are missing from the historical record as proof of
their supposed inability to properly understand the music.
24
When historical accounts don’t overlook women’s participation entirely, they frequently marginalize
or minimize it, producing a feedback loop of invisibility and disregard. For example, in 1956, André Hodeir
wrote in Jazz: Its Evolution and Essence, “To be understood, jazz seems to require a fresh, still unsatisfied sensibility, a kind of person who is overflowing with energy
and searching for an outlet. …There is nothing surprising in the fact that young people of both sexes—but particularly boys rather than girls—have in a way made jazz
their own.”
Participation, exactly what jazz history has made
difficult for women, is often understood as a prerequisite for the truest type of jazz appreciation. “Digging
isn’t just liking, it’s about getting involved,” writes Phil
Ford in his erudite history Dig: Sound and Music in Hip
Culture. He chronicles the emergence of digging as a
practice of insider appreciation, stressing the importance of intimate engagement. But while women writers and musicians were abundantly present in the New
York City jazz circles Ford traces, they are buried deep
in his narrative’s endnotes.
Record collecting, as the foremost practice through
which relics of jazz history circulate and accrue value, reinforces in material culture the gender-based misrepresentations of the culture at large. “I’ve been to record fairs
where I’ve been the only woman in the room, which is a
strange feeling,” said Rebecca Birmingham, one of few female collectors featured on the blog Dust and Grooves:
Vinyl Music Culture. Though women have collected vinyl
since the inception of the medium, female collectors, like
the women musicians being collected, often lack representation in public space that is commensurate with their actual involvement.
Crate digging, through the thrifty celebration of happenstance, has the potential to undo such woeful neglect,
allowing music lovers to stumble upon hidden luminaries
they otherwise might have missed. A copy of Carla Bley’s
CAN SHE DIG IT
Escalator Over the Hill, long omitted from “best-of ” lists,
might appear by chance in the discount box of a stoop sale;
its cover, glistening in the sun, suddenly warrants being dug
through sheer coincidence of place.
Some music hunters make such corrective collecting
a deliberate goal. As collector Rich Medina said in Eilon
Paz’s book of interviews Dust and Grooves: Adventures in
Record Collecting, “I guess filling holes always comes before
anything else when I see a large stash of records. There’s
something fulfilling about walking away from a long digging session with missing pieces of catalogs or genres.”
This practice might seem to elevate historically marginalized musicians and connoisseurs alike, but obscurity itself
remains defined within masculinized domains.
What constitutes a hole is already a gendered delineation. In the words of Will Straw, “To collect is to valorize
the obscure, and yet such valorization increasingly stands
revealed as dependent on the homosocial world of young
men.” As Straw and many others have suggested, acquiring collections can be a way for men to harness power. The
standards of connoisseurship, however accepting of the
rare and hidden, cannot be separated from these gendered
power relations.
The possibility of a full, attractive record shelf—the
lure of a tidy whole—is premised upon the fiction of a stable canon in the first place. When collecting is seen as filling gaps, it equates completion with appreciation. Musical
canons, in this milieu, are less meaningful sets of objects
of aural delight than satisfying puzzles to be solved. To admit that there is no ideal discography and never was would
threaten to leave the crate digger aimless, forced to concede
that his hunt is not a matter of the objective historical archive but a kind of luxury consumption, which he uses to
legitimize his pretenses to authority.
And yet, digging of both kinds—whether appreciating jazz or searching for jazz records—has always been
enabled by the very gaps it claims to fill. Only by confining
his collection within limits can the collector achieve the
25
ELIZABETH NEWTON
mastery he seeks. Logistical constraints, necessarily producing exclusions, make the collector’s mission possible.
More often than not, these necessary omissions are rationalized and rendered acceptable through recourse to tacitly
gendered norms.
Collector Sheila Burgel, featured in Dust and Grooves,
elucidates these norms, characterizing record collecting as
a boys’ club. “Quantity matters. So does rarity. And your
knowledge about what you collect,” she said. She continued
to collect on her own terms, resisting these norms: “What
girl wants to bother with being held to such silly standards
when we’re already judged on just about everything else in
our lives?”
Women collectors who tend record shops have noted
that men regularly challenge their knowledge of historical
minutia, doubting a woman’s ability to appreciate appropriately. In August, when music critic Jessica Hopper invited
women to share stories of marginalization within the music industry on Twitter, hundreds of female connoisseurs
weighed in. One responder, @samorama, expressed what
seems to be a common experience: “Working at a record
store men ignore me & seek out other men to answer questions. Then they’re referred back to me.” Discussing an attempt to enter a music venue, @GIRLEMPOWER pointed out the dangers of restrictive borders of musical taste:
“Was hassled/not allowed in until I ‘proved’ my knowledge
of the scene/bands. Occasionally assaulted/groped once
‘allowed’ inside.”
Disparaged for lacking expertise that turns out to
be a moot point, women interested in digging music often encounter this double bind. Women are pressured to
inhabit male practices of appreciation, only to regularly
be doubted and shamed for trying to impress men. Exemplifying such contradictory demands, another responder,
@rebecca_faith, wrote, “If I said I liked certain bands, I
wouldn’t be believed and I was apparently pretending to
like the band for male attention.” Damned for what she
does and doesn’t know, the female record collector em-
bodies our struggle to possess knowledge, even as we are
possessed by it.
DURING
bouts of feminist ennui, I’ve
considered burning all men’s work in a heap to the ground,
destroying every folder, fragment, and file in retribution.
Destroy all trace of him, I think on occasion, ejecting men
and their impulse toward mastery. In the 1940s, they melted
vinyl records down to puddles to gather shellac for the war.
Just last month I fleetingly considered smashing my computer, mining my hard drive for its mineral contents, scraping the tantalum and coltan into vials with which to poison
every man who has ever made me compromise.
In this spirit of dismissal, when my hard drive crashed
last year, I didn’t mourn the loss of every MP3; I was grateful for the clean slate. These days, I build canons that aspire
not to completion, nor thoroughness, nor exhaustion of any
kind. Instead, I practice a mode of appreciation that eschews
mastery and exclusive expertise, in favor of a collection that
is expansive, anyway—one that moves freely in time, untethered to myths masquerading as authoritative fact.
When I lost my music, there were a few men I missed:
Elliott Smith, his poetry praising our maker with the pronoun she. And Kind of Blue, which I wish I could carry with
me wherever I go. Mostly for Cannonball Adderley’s saxophone solo on “All Blues,” which must be accessed regularly
and felt in real time. Me, finding my own joy in his singing
without a voice. If only I could keep them and not the rest.
My mother, an accountant, taught me material and
emotional thrift—techniques of digging through bins and
racks for latent treasures, hiding good deals at the bottom
of the pile and returning for them later. When my investment in searching exceeded my returns, she taught me ways
of saying goodbye too. “Time to let go,” she would say, of
shoes, lovers, and false notions. Holding objects lightly, we
welcome more.
26
SETTLED HISTORY
Settled History
By MOLLY ORINGER
Tourist attractions in contested settlements use local history to project
Israeli nationalism into the future
HISTORY
makes for good drama.
Considering the expansive output of nationalist-driven
television and film—from the movies of the Weimar Republic to Zero Dark Thirty—the power of historical re-­
creation to evoke emotional attachment to national identity is self-­evident. But historical recreation projects go
well beyond simply visual media. Israel, as a relatively new
member in the collective of nation-states, is eager to bolster
not only its legitimacy but a uniting national historical narrative, and so produces historical dramas both within and
outside of traditional entertainment arenas. Though Israel
has a range of mass-media hasbara (“public diplomacy”),
it also ­harnesses support for its contemporary settler projects through new museums and “immersive” tourist expe-
riences. All of these techniques of historical narrative production aid the internalization of state narratives, both for
Israelis and international tourists.
Israel’s recent boom in tourism, both domestic and
from abroad, has resulted in the redevelopment of its sites
and infrastructure. In the search for new tourist itineraries,
places of intense political conflict, such as residential settler colonies, have emerged as “off-the-beaten-path” holiday
destinations, offering winery tours, boutique desert excursions, dig-your-own archaeology sites, and outdoor adventures. Alongside these perks, visitors are encouraged to
spend time at the local kibbutz (collective farm), meet with
religious leaders, and stop by the visitors’ center, which often includes a site-specific museum outlining local history.
MOLLY ORINGER
Archaeological digs and artifacts have long been
used as empirical evidence for a Jewish history in the Land
of Israel. In Israel’s natal stage, archaeological relics from
the period of Hebrew rule served to support the concept
of a return to the land and to offset claims of a growing
settler-colonial state. Today, digs, and the infrastructure
that accompanies them, act as stakes-in-the-ground in Israel’s continuing expansion and whitewash creeping settler projects with the guise of historical science. However,
as settlement activity is contested even in many political
Zionist circles, these settlements, with their less well-­
established political and territorial claims, need more than
just ancient history. So the Hebraic past takes a backseat
to more modern, local stories.
A crop of new museums and tourist exhibits in these
settlements aim to support the need for, and the future of,
a (militarized, expanding) Jewish state. Rather than displaying the local findings of Hebrew archaeology, these
regional museums focus on the visitor’s multisensory experience through short historic melodrama and site-specific experiences designed to highlight the settlements’
symbolic histories as they align with the discourses of
state history.
Gush Etzion, a settlement bloc sandwiched between
Jerusalem and Hebron, is home to a recent history full of
nationalist aspirations and colonizing battles. First settled
in the 1920s, these plots of land caught the interest of the
Jewish National Fund ( JNF) in 1943 following two decades of small scale settlement. In the following years, four
kibbutzim would join in confederacy with the mission of
increasing Jewish presence south of Jerusalem, calling
themselves Kfar Etzion. (Poststate, the settlement would
absorb nearby locales, taking on the name Gush, or bloc.)
Attempting to cultivate arid land outside the confines of
the city, Etzion’s first residents imagined themselves as
Zionism’s pioneers, gatekeepers of the southern frontier
of Judaism’s ultimate city. Following the 1947 UN resolution on the partition of Palestine, Jewish military forces
27
and settlers in Kfar Etzion staved off westward advancement of the Jordanian Legion for six months. Considering
its strategic geography, the Jewish paramilitary Haganah
chose to evacuate only women and children, relying on
the settlement’s strategic location to secure a Jewish presence in the region, should the partition hold. Coming under constant attack, military caravan contact with the Kfar
was eventually completely severed, forcing the settlers to
surrender on May 13, 1948—one day before the creation
of the State of Israel.
Following the 1967 war and the subsequent occupation of the West Bank, the children evacuated in 1948—
many of whom had lost a parent or been orphaned by the
killing of over 300 kibbutzniks when the settlement was
captured by the Jordanian Legion—petitioned the Israeli government to support their efforts in returning to the
Etzion territory, thus becoming the first settlement east of
Jerusalem.
Now, nearly seventy years later, Gush Etzion is attempting to transform that violent history into a tourist
attraction. In the midst of a full renovation and rebuilding,
Gush Etzion’s visitor center will, on reopening, be what anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj dubs a “museum without
images.” Such a museum, El-Haj argues, relies not on the
relics of artifacts it hosts, but on forming a visceral connection with visitors through temporal recreations, personal
narratives, and opportunities to virtually place one’s self in
the ostensible experiences of historical actors.
A visitor’s journey to the JNF-supported museum will be a sojourn through the history of the Gush at
battle. One will wander through the center’s three halls,
each offering a separate architectural and multimedia
method of experiencing the narratives of the fallen settlers. As described on the project’s website, visitors will,
in the first hall, hear individual stories of those who lived
through the Gush’s final seizure, including personal narrations—listened to through individual headphones, as
if the story is retold personally for each individual—of
28
the events leading to Israeli statehood. Tourists will next
move through a subterranean trench, reconstructed to
simulate those used by Gush Etzion’s defenders against
the Jordanian Legion, en route to a theater where a
film—based on the letters that those who stayed to defend the settlement wrote to their evacuated families—
will provide a sense of drama and emotional immediacy.
Guests will next view a short film about the post-’67 returnees—descendants of the Gush’s original residents—
from within the (rebuilt) bunker in which the fallen soldiers hid. A final station will illustrate the contemporary
achievements of the settlement and offer opportunities
for purchasing locally made goods.
Considering their audience’s appetite for historical
drama, the museum’s highlight is the JNF-created eulogy
to the “heroic” men and women of Gush Etzion’s past:
the aforementioned film detailing the letters of those
who stayed to fight. A trailer released on the JNF’s project website views much like a Hollywood preview, complete with lofty production techniques and an increasing
dramatic appeal and sympathy for the plight of the settlers who “refuse to be refugees again,” with no mention,
of course, made to the looming refugee crisis. (While
settlements like Gush Etzion encourage further support
and settlement, Palestinians continue to be displaced. In
addition to refusing Palestinians expelled from the country the right of return, the Israeli government refuses
shelter to an ever-growing body of Syrians uprooted by
the civil war.)
Bridging generational gaps, the trailer ends with the
returnee children—courageously carrying on their parents’ pioneering spirit—asking one another that, since
they know the “end of the story” (presumably statehood
and a posited return to the Gush; less obviously racial
and military supremacy), don’t they “want to know how
it started?” The short film’s characters, in their persistence
despite environmental and political odds—not to mention their eagerness to return—weaves a pioneer, colo-
SETTLED HISTORY
nialist attitude. The film streamlines a continued sense of
frontier guardianship both past and present, and aligns the
Gush’s future with Israeli national agenda.
Though the visitor’s center remains unfinished, the
work it will do connecting emotional accounts of the ’48
battles with a reenactment of the Jewish pioneer experience is already apparent. Important, too, is the overall
structure in which all exhibits will be housed: melding
concrete and bunkerlike features with a modernist and
sleek glass-panelled entrance hall, the architecture serves
to connect Gush Etzion’s pioneer history with its contemporary image as a site of both Israeli innovation and frontier defense. Dedicated to a resident killed in army drills
in the occupied Golan Heights in 2009, the center streamlines the past and present by guiding visitors through
historical stories and reenactments before providing the
chance for guests to purchase luxury products, drink Israeli wines and coffee, and appreciate the settlement as is
stands today.
Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land—
and the subsequent resistance against land appropriation
and entrenched systems of apartheid—furthers the image
of settlements like the Gush as frontline defenders of the
state. Encouraged by the pull of “war tourism,” visitors
draw excitement from the apparent constant threat of terror, and often see their itinerary as a defiant stand against
not only Palestinian resistance but also Israeli voices calling for a withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.
An understanding of Israel and its position in the
greater Jewish world is often posited as incomplete without having visited. Through excursions such as Birthright
and organized tours providing travel opportunities to diasporic Jews, projects like Gush Etzion’s museum attempt
to animate a nationalist future by an ideological reenactment of the recent past. If Israel’s right to existence has
been buttressed by archaeological site visits, an enlivened,
“immersive” local history becomes a tool for a continued
statecraft that transcends borders.
29
HEATHER HOLMES
Print on Demand
As Palestinian history is erased, its archive becomes a nomadic war machine
PERHAPS
the central paradox of
the archive is that archival material gets in the way of the
archive itself. Acquiring masses of paper ephemera, taming
them, creating a legible narrative, digitizing the whole collection: these are the tasks of the contemporary archivist.
Buried beneath material. The clutter itself poses a problem.
State-run archives are overburdened by material; as
the process of whittling down is always unseen, what is actually a curatorial narration of the past appears neutral, a
mere coincidence of the right documents interacting with
one another in time and space to tell the story we already
knew. Palestinian archival work poses a much different set
of questions. The state archive—more or less inaccessible,
its mechanisms rendered invisible and steeped in age and
history—sees its foil in The Incidental Insurgents, an ongoing multimedia installation by the Palestinian artists Basel
Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.
The Incidental Insurgents—both the product of the
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, The Incidental Insurgents: The Part about the Bandits, 2012, video still. Courtesy of the artists and Carroll/Fletcher Gallery
By HEATHER HOLMES
30
artists’ archival research and an archive in and of itself—
complicates spectatorial notions of what an archive is,
how it should look and feel, the material it should contain. More importantly, though, Basel and Ruanne treat
the materiality of the archive centrally, rather than as an
impediment or an afterthought. The Incidental Insurgents
resembles a cluttered workspace with no intention of becoming one day more organized. The installation spills:
across time frames, across mediums, over walls and chairs
and tables. Records are left spinning or they lie dormant,
waiting for a passing visitor to activate the sound.
In a weekend-long publishing workshop run by Basel
and Ruanne earlier this year, I was taken with the newness
of their archive, especially compared to some of the material they encountered in their research. That weekend,
we handled 18th century Islamic manuscripts and 20th
century leftist pamphlets with the utmost care: more or
less falling apart, the texts teetered between the workshop
participants as we cringed to leaf through them. A few
rooms over in the gallery space where The Incidental Insurgents was displayed, however, I rifled eagerly through the
writings of Roberto Bolaño and Victor Serge; printouts
of film stills from Godard and from the artists’ own video
work; and pictures of historical Arab “bandit” figures, like
the outlaw Abu Jildeh. My fascination with the exhibition
was not so much with the notion of touching it in the first
place—tactile engagement alone can’t dismantle institutions like perhaps we thought it could—but with the feeling of the paper itself. I recognized it. It was the feeling of
paper freshly run through an inkjet printer. It was new.
Basel and Ruanne’s physical archive, smooth to the
touch, resists the illusion of history. It’s an artistic refusal
that foregrounds the sociopolitical reality of violence and
erasure: how does one mine an archive already hollowed
out by war and occupation? What happens when the colonial archive, with its deletions and partial erasures, tells
a story that clashes so intensely with lived history? When
the archive actually obfuscates the past instead of elucidat-
PRINT ON DEMAND
ing it (a fantasy we entertain of the recording of history),
newness becomes a political strategy. Basel and Ruanne’s
freshly printed archive is as much an act of creation in the
face of a legacy of destruction as it is a reminder of that
history.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari understand areas of smoothness as spaces in which nomads—who move through space independently of the
state—­operate. (Two particularly striking examples of organisms that move through space nomadically are rats and
­v iruses.) Marked by the sporadic and “free” movement of
nomads rather than a rational system of organization, this
smooth space is “a space of affects, more than one of properties.” Alternately the bandit, a figure central to Basel and
Ruanne’s work, becomes legible as such precisely because
their actions are outlawed; their antagonistic relationship
to laws and conventions—rather than their existing outside them—puts bandits in dialogue with the state. Basel
and Ruanne seem to posit a coming-together of these two
figures, a nomadic bandit whose strategies borrow from
the legacies of both.
The materials within Basel and Ruanne’s installation
are literally smooth to the touch, but the installation itself
is a space that’s both smooth and striated, both of the state
and apart from it. The Incidental Insurgents is not beholden to the organizational systems of the state archive, but
its meaning may be fixed and frozen anyway by its position within the art institution and the museum’s tendency toward distillation (through wall text, through press
summaries, through lectures, etc.). It’s an installation that
resides in a single institution for several months, but also
circulates globally without a permanent home.
It makes sense, then, that the materiality of The Incidental Insurgents encourages movement and even lines of
flight. Basel and Ruanne’s avoidance of archival paper and
deckled edges in their documents foregrounds not only
smoothness but newness; one does not handle their archive with gloves. The thinness and casually composed na-
HEATHER HOLMES
ture of Basel and Ruanne’s inkjet-printed archive calls to
mind paper material deployed in public space, like those
of IDF leaflet campaigns warning Gazans of impending
bombardment.
But where Israel drops leaflets in anticipation of
state violence, Basel and Ruanne weaponize their paper
ephemera against the state. Their installation is merely a
materialization of an entire digital archive: it appears precarious, but is actually comprised of PDFs sturdier than
a centuries-old document. The Incidental Insurgents seems
to anticipate its imminent destruction, the material as easily disposable as IDF leaflets—the Palestinian print-ondemand archive may endlessly regenerate. The romance
of history and one-of-a-kindness is reserved for the colonial archive, whose security concerns are distant and hypothetical. While the colonial archive in its physical form
now faces the vast labor of digitization; the digital Palestinian archive is deployed physically at will. Its materialization serves as a warning signal.
Yet The Incidental Insurgents is not assembled with recorded history as its central organizing principle. Rather,
it is an archive organized affectively: characters and narratives meet thanks to a shared spirit. Grounded in the figure
of the bandit, Basel and Ruanne have created a conceptual
archive in which excerpts from The Savage Detectives mingle with newspaper clippings, Godardian film stills, and
slogans from the memoir of Victor Serge. In our workshop,
Basel cited the “identical feelings” between revolutionaries
in Paris in 1910 and Palestine in 2011. Is this the new archive: one that feels? The Incidental Insurgents is an archive
whose materials swirl around a nucleus: not an event, a nation, a religion, or a language, but a strategy of resistance.
In this space, unlikely characters interact. In Part
Two of the installation, The Part About the Bandits, what
begins as a narrative of the outlaw Abu Jildeh’s capture is
interrupted by the fictive outsider-poets of The Savage Detectives. “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists,” the text—in side-by-side English and Arabic—reads.
31
“I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony.
It was better that way.” This foregrounding of fiction in the
archive actively pushes against the notion of a monolithic history that is objectively recordable. The documents
constantly toggle between pronouns. As a methodology,
it reinscribes and reaffirms the personal narrative as a document worthy of inhabiting an archive.
The archive that intermingles the fictive with the
“real” also recalls Golda Meir’s famous assertion—repeated before and since in so many different ways—that
Palestine does not exist. It seems that these Palestinian
artists, instead of taking an oppositional stance to the sentiment, actually agree with Meir. Her statement is an utter
negation of a state and a people, but Basel and Ruanne’s
relationship to that erasure is generative. Instead of linking Palestinianness essentially to statehood, Basel and Ruanne assemble an imaginative archive in which Palestine
is understood through actions and emotions rather than
citizenship or lack thereof. Palestine has been denied the
right to exist, its paperwork destroyed, so a Palestinian
archive may as well include the account of an anarchist
in Paris in the early 20th century, or of fictional poets in
Mexico City. Why not?
A line from Part Two of The Incidental Insurgents
reads, “Unwilling to be MASTERS or SLAVES, they became bandits.” For Basel and Ruanne, banditry arises from
the limitations of this binary. It seems the only way to opt
out is to intentionally exist on the margins. In their installation, Basel and Ruanne bring together bandits who often worked autonomously—Victor Serge, Abu Jildeh, the
Visceral Realists—under the sign of a Palestinian archive.
It’s a recontextualization of these various figures as having
pertinence to the Palestinian narrative, but perhaps more
significantly, it underscores the shifting coordinates of Palestinian national identity itself.
In organizing an archive around the figure of the nomad-bandit as one that elucidates Palestinian history, The
Incidental Insurgents maps the figure of the nomad onto
32
Palestinianness itself. Stateless by definition, the nomad
migrates through smooth space in spontaneous and unplanned ways. Palestinians, as opposed to Deleuze and
Guattari’s theoretical nomad, are strictly policed and surveilled by the state whose tactical-military arm infamously looks to weaponize the very same theories. However,
we might understand the Palestinian archive as one that
migrates, a deterritorialized collection of affinitive bodies
that exists outside highly rational systems of organization.
AS
Palestinian artists, Basel and Ruanne are also
confronted with binary systems that allow them to speak
and be heard only in certain ways, just like the bandits they
highlight. Western media, which traffics alternately in disaster pornography and anti-Palestinian fearmongering,
knows these binaries well. As consumers of these images,
the Western audience is familiar with images of Palestinians
accompanied by the endless material of their landscape. Visual representations of Palestine are dominated by detritus,
material, rubble. A quick Google search of “Gaza” yields
images only of destruction, the endless gray-brown of ruin
and the Palestinians trapped beneath it, running from it,
screaming at it. In this demolished landscape, Palestinians
are portrayed either as helpless victims buried in debris or
suicide bombers, perpetrators of the kind of violence that
forces others to dig themselves out of the ruins.
This visual tradition can be found not only where
we expect it—Western media sources—but also in mainstream films made by Palestinian writers and directors.
Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now, perhaps the most internationally popular Palestinian film of the 21st century,
chronicles the daily lives of two suicide bombers preparing to self-detonate in Tel Aviv. Annemarie Jacir’s Salt of
This Sea, on the other hand, features young Palestinians
trapped in Ramallah, burdened by the physical artifacts of
a pre-1948 Palestine, objects imbued with so much politi-
PRINT ON DEMAND
cal and nostalgic significance they threaten to halt forward
momentum entirely.
The demands of neoliberal spectatorship require the
Palestinian artist to perform the roles of creator and translator both, all with a measured cadence, composure, and a
neatly packaged politics that neither sympathizes with Israel nor makes frightening interventions in western liberal
ideology. Tone exists at the heart of this issue; the protagonist of Salt of This Sea was lambasted in an NPR review as
being “little more than a mouthpiece for history lessons on
the injustices perpetrated on the Palestinian people.” Elia
Suleiman’s Divine Intervention, equally forthright about the
necessity of violent resistance, nonetheless enjoyed more
nuanced critique from Western spectators because of its
art-house aesthetic and almost nonexistent dialogue. It’s a
matter of what kind of didacticism is appropriate, when it
is warranted, and what kinds of resistance prove to difficult
for the western audience to fully embrace.
Basel and Ruanne seem to share more in common
with Suleiman than they do with Jacir; as multimedia artists who translate their work in anticipation of Western
spectatorship and who challenge the status quo without
uprooting it, Basel and Ruanne do not pose a threat to
their spectator. Furthermore, The Incidental Insurgents is
neither static, nor is it merely an archive; it is an installation, and circulates as such in the international art market.
There are different expectations of an installation like The
Incidental Insurgents than of a state archive, and its relationship to capital also differs greatly: Basel and Ruanne
won both the 2015 Sharjah Biennial Prize and the 2016
Abraaj Group Art Prize, a $100,000 award. (This kind of
reception from the Gulf states is significant: it’s not just
the western world that is taken with Basel and Ruanne’s
not-explicitly-confrontational approach to art and archival work.)
Circulation both local and global is significant for an
installation of this kind, which issues forth from a nation
whose archives are widely scattered. Many historic Pal-
HEATHER HOLMES
estinian documents are housed in the British and Israeli
national archives, hopelessly inaccessible to Palestinian
citizens. An archive created and curated by Palestinians is
a new phenomenon in a landscape dominated by state-run
colonial archives on the one hand and small, individual
collections of paper ephemera on the other. In its ability
to move and rematerialize as a work of art, The Incidental
Insurgents might be far more accessible than any centralized database.
Moreover, Basel and Ruanne’s detournement of the
archive, which remixes history and collapses boundaries
of real and fictitious, represents a paradigm shift not only
in archival practices, but also in the Palestinian relationship to paper ephemera. It seems the Palestinian is always
either buried or burying, destroying or destroyed. The
Incidental Insurgents finds no comfortable home within
these binaries that dominate visual representations of Palestinianness. The materiality of the installation becomes
an all-important subject of its own, the sheets of paper
themselves rewriting a history of Palestine just as much as
the tales of Abu Jildeh’s exploits. The Incidental Insurgents
not only accepts but embraces piles of clutter and sprawl;
likewise, its material newness complicates its relationship
to more traditional archives, which are generally only curated, not created anew.
Within this visual tradition of the buried or burying
Palestinian, Basel and Ruanne, unwilling to align unproblematically with either creation or destruction, instead
enact a banditry of their own. Their sampling of material
from various cultural instances of banditry is a piece-bypiece method of understanding Palestinian identity; these
various sources, linked by a revolutionary spirit, interact
in the archive to iterate the slipperiness of Palestinian nationality in the face of statelessness and occupation.
IN
The Savage Detectives, Roberto Bolaño poses a ques-
33
tion, iterated three times: What’s outside the window? This is
how his novel ends, with three questions and three small
pictographs alongside the text, simple rectangles. They
could be windows, but they also look like sheets of paper
aligned horizontally. The border of the third rectangle is a
dotted line. Each time I look at it, I’m tempted to cut out
the shape. My copy of The Savage Detectives is warped from
an afternoon spent outdoors in a rainstorm, its pages like
dead leaves, and I imagine the sound the final page would
make if confronted with a pair of scissors.
Bolaño’s question—which both literalizes and abstracts the window—is a question central to Palestinian
visual and cultural production. One recalls Vivian Sobchack’s theory of cinema as serving the function alternately of a window, frame, or mirror. This tripartite model has
a stranglehold on othered artists; they’re forced to play the
role of tour guide, or to up the relatability factor in their
work for western audiences. Basel and Ruanne’s refusal
to engage with that violent form of spectatorship involves
not smashing the window but covering it up with something just the right shape and size: a piece of paper.
There are times when the corpus of the archive converses with the human body in ways that are almost sublime. Ruanne recalls that at some point in their research
for The Incidental Insurgents, the two ended up searching
for the bandit Abu Jildeh’s grave: “We learned that Abu
Jildeh’s grave was unmarked. He was buried in an unmarked grave. His family members told us his body had
been moved at some point…I was shocked and said, ‘If
anyone comes searching for AJ, they won’t be able to find
his grave.’” She then recalls, “When we came back 10 days
later, they had made a proper grave for AJ, with his name
and an inscription.” In Basel and Ruanne’s workshop, the
artists shared pictures they’d taken of that second visit as
they bore witness to the official recognition of Abu Jildeh’s
buried body. All that digging had led them there, to an unassuming, sloping backyard in a Palestinian village. Perhaps they felt a momentary weightlessness.
34
Performative Ground
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
By MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
No security but in desecurement, no nature but in denaturing
THE
photographic series and installation Performative Ground by Maryam Monalisa Gharavi consists of images
the artist captured with an iPhone camera in a walkable radius from her home in Palestine over the course of one year. The
project grew out of a concern with the ground as a site of care, or cura. The historical turn in which the ground ceased to be
taken for granted as solid matter and appeared instead as a space of constant agitation, transience, and mutability coincides
with the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. In connecting the ground—both a permeable and impermeable site of earth, concrete,
wood, sidewalk, and found objects—with instability, the photographs reveal “nature” constantly denaturing itself and, in
doing so, enacting a performance of both ruin and rejuvenation.
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
35
36
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
37
Arum palaestinum, also known as Palestine Arum or Black Calla. Considered a toxic plant and emitting a strong, rotten odor, it flowers with feminine
features on the bottom and masculine features on top. Location: Jaba’. 38
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
“The age of the earth’s desecurement that began with Galileo’s notorious declaration, Eppur si muove! (And yet it moves!), no longer simply applied
to our planet’s relegated position in the cosmos but now referred to the very ground below our feet.”
—John Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care, p. 210 MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
39
40
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
“Varying views of the world—either as the perpetual object of care exhibited by a perfect, benevolent deity
(the world as garden) or as a wonderful mechanism carefully produced by a divine craftsman and then left to operate automatically
(the world as clock) were by the 18th century becoming increasingly difficult to validate.”
—–Hamiton, p. 242
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
Administrative violence cannot be visualized or photographed
41
42
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
As photography was not yet invented, no photographs of the Lisbon earthquake exist
43
44
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
In both earthquake and plant container, grounding and ungrounding emanate from materiality—the vibration of matter
45
46
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
47
48
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
“Both the natural disaster of an earthquake and the human made disaster from the Israeli Occupation,
create fairly identical related secondary stressors and adversities after the fact of the experiences.”
—Dr. Khaleel Isa, “The Psychological Symptoms Profile of The Palestinian: Exposure to Political
and Environmental Trauma-Related Stressors,” Palestinian Counselling Centre, Jerusalem, 2003 MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
49
50
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
We witnessed the bombing of cemeteries, rows and rows of depressions
made in the ground to bury entire families, and people made twice,
three times,
four times refugees MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
51
52
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
53
54
Someone once told me that photographs of a landscape without a person have no worth
PERFORMATIVE GROUND
MARYAM MONALISA GHARAVI
55
56
A Dark City
A DARK CITY
By MAAZA MENGISTE
An Afro-Russian boy searches for hope and love in the labyrinthine Moscow metro in
Hamid Ismailov’s The Underground
THE
first word G. learns when he arrives in
Russia is chornyi, or black. The next, the most frequent, is
obezyana, or monkey.
It was just one word, he assures me. But repeated so
many times, it accumulated weight and developed sharp
edges. At least he wasn’t alone, he says. There were other
guests of the Soviet Union, funded by and living under the
protection of the government, students from many countries: Vietnam, Laos, Yemen, Cameroon, Angola, South Africa, Guinea, Mali, Congo, he names a long list. They treated us well, he adds; they were afraid who might be KGB.
We were sheltered from the bluntest impact of racism by
the Russian people’s wariness of each other, their own internalized fears and distrust. And remember, he continues,
as bad as it was, we knew we had a home where everyone
was just like us. When someone called me chornyi, I learned
the word for white, biely, and shouted it back.
My cousin G. is speaking of his years as a student,
when he left Ethiopia to attend first the Moscow Conservatory of Music, and then what used to be called the Leningrad Cultural Institute, where he would study photography
and film. He kept a daily journal, he says, pages piling up as
MAAZA MENGISTE
one year bled into the next. He wrote every day in Amharic,
before stepping outside to slip into his Russian life.
I ask him about the Moscow metro system, because
I have heard of its stunning beauty. Because I have read
Hamid Ismailov’s elegiac and powerful novel, The Underground, I wonder what it was like to go deep beneath the
city of Moscow and travel through a metro system that
some have called one of the most complex ever built. I
wonder what it was like to be a foreigner and black in the
confined spaces of the station and the trains.
G. tells me of the underground, of its vastness and
breathtaking architecture. If one did not know the system
well, he says, it was easy to get lost in the labyrinth of tunnels. There were days when he wandered unsure beneath
the city, so disoriented that he went hours without seeing
daylight. I imagine this: G., still struggling with this new
country, this new language, this new underground terrain,
riding the metro from one stop to the other, one path snaking into the next, sending him in endless, looping circles
while he tries, first in Amharic, then in his broken Russian,
to make himself understood without inviting hostility and
fear, without inviting ridicule and racism.
It starts to make sense that he switched out of the music conservatory to study photography and film: It was one
way to feel like he belonged, to communicate with a degree
of fluency in at least one kind of language, a visual language.
He was afraid to speak English, he tells me, and until his
Russian improved, he was reduced to using gestures. An
image comes to mind: a black man in the Moscow metro
pantomiming and gesticulating, movements growing larger
and more exaggerated as one hour blends into the next and
he finds himself again at the wrong station.
G. is a gentle man, with a sharp intelligence and soft
eyes. He is the chronicler of our family history; he was writing long before I was. I do not want to imagine him lost. I
do not want to think of what kinds of responses he might
have gotten that kept him in the underground, wandering,
for so long. It is better to think of him in Leningrad, car-
57
rying his Kiev camera around his neck, focusing his lens,
capturing a moment, fully in control.
Things got much worse during the transition, G. continues. He is talking about the days of perestroika, glasnost
and Gorbachev, which many associate with the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the rush of new freedoms. Those days when
everything started to loosen, when a society that had once
been held in a tight-fisted grip found room to breathe. Pentup resentments no longer had to be contained, and the fine
balance between the calm instilled by a secret police and a
fearful public was ruptured. The formalities that had protected African and Asian students suddenly became tenuous. Police protection disappeared. Racial violence escalated at a startling pace, with a shocking intensity.
G. knew he had to leave. By 1991, he was able to get out.
It’s hard to imagine what it might have meant to be
black in those days when a whole way of life was unraveling.
Difficult to fathom where he could find refuge when nothing seemed to be standing still. I see this: G. in the Moscow
metro system, disoriented and lost, descending deeper into
a bottomless city as seismic shifts rumbled above. It plays
out in my mind like a clip from an old black-and-white
film, cinematic and nightmarish, a tense scene unspooling
against a roiling political backdrop. It feels unreal and surreal, vivid and also lonely. But when I look again, I see my
cousin maneuvering his way out, climbing from darkness to
light, breathing the fresh air of the city, then when the turmoil escalates, escaping out of it altogether. Safe.
What could it mean to be Russian and black, with
nowhere to go? Hamid Ismailov sets his heartbreaking The
Underground in this reality. The narrator, Kirill, nicknamed
Mbobo, also sometimes called Pushkin, tells us of his life
in a voice speaking from the dead: “I am Moscow’s underground son,” he says, “the result of one too many nights on
the town.” He is the offspring of an African athlete and a
young Siberian woman, conceived during the 1980 Moscow Olympics and born nine months later. His father returned home; his mother (nicknamed “Moscow”) died
58
A DARK CITY
when he was eight. With brutal frankness, he tells us that
he, too, died four years later, at the age of 12. “That is all
there is to my Moscow life. The rest is just decaying, lateblown blooms of memories.”
His dead voice leads us through the novel, each chapter bearing the name of one of Moscow’s metro stations.
As we follow Mbobo through the underground system,
his story unfolds against one of the most beautiful underground systems in the world. Ismailov’s tale of intense
loneliness is linked together by Moscow’s subterranean
city. Every significant memory, every pivotal event in
Mbobo’s life occurs in the rhythm and rattle of the metro
station. And as the story progresses, we begin to understand that the narrative is also about this boy’s search for
enduring love. We know he will eventually die, but what
matters is whether he will ever experience the deep sense
of belonging that he seeks.
Never in my life, my life on the other side, on the surface, had I seen such beauty, such splendor…This world
entered my pounding heart in tremors, and I felt that no
one would be able to drag me back from this world or this
world back out of me…
When the idea to build an underground system in
Moscow was first proposed to the city council in 1902, it
was met with fierce resistance. Rumors say that its failure
was due in part to the Russian Orthodox Church’s strenuous objections to tunnels beneath its churches. They argued that it would be the work of the anti-Christ. It isn’t
difficult to guess what might have been the Church’s hesitation. Tunneling beneath sacred ground could disrupt the
hallowed resting place of the dead; it might inadvertently lead to the construction of a kingdom of evil, a middle
ground where unsettled shadows could wander through
the darkness seeking light.
Decades later, when the subject was broached again,
there were other, more immediate reasons it should have
been impossible for Russia to build a metro system. For
starters, no one knew how to build one. The USSR was also
experiencing a severe shortage of labor and building mate-
rials. Construction machinery was so difficult to get that it
could be considered nonexistent. There was no reason to
think that the plan would work. It was an irrational dream
that bordered on the audacious.
When construction moved forward in 1931, it was
slow, uneven, and came at a tremendous human cost. But
when it was completed, the Moscow metro system would
be one of the most spectacular in the world, each station a
stunning architectural and engineering achievement, a testament to an artistic vision that should not have succeeded.
The beauty of these Stalin-era stations lures young
Mbobo to the underground. Aboveground, he is the target of racist cruelties, both passive and aggressive; below,
he imagines that he can ease into the dark pockets of the
subway system and blend in. He stands, impressed, before
the mosaics and statues, and lingers in the golden light of
intricate lamps. It is magnificent enough for him to believe
in the impossible, to believe that in the darkness of the underground he can leave himself and his black body behind.
That in the metro, he can simply exist: neither Mbobo nor
monkey, neither Pushkin nor fatherless. Just a boy sliding
through a space that carries no judgment with it.
It is what he would like to imagine, but Ismailov does
not offer easy compromises. He asks difficult questions
about belonging and identity: there is racism, still, in the
metro, and Mbobo cannot leave any part of himself behind.
But there is also freedom, a sense that he can travel beyond
his everyday existence; that he can escape into the world
of his imagination. It is a young boy’s dream, an idealist’s
ambition: to travel fast and far and arrive, always, in a place
of beauty and greater safety. And Ismailov’s decision to set
this story in a space that crisscrosses Moscow, a place firmly
rooted in Russian history and pride, is a radical statement
about Mbobo’s claim to his identity. This boy, this black
boy born of an African and a Siberian, is very much the son
of Moscow. He does not need to be anything other than
what he is.
But where do you go to see a likeness of yourself, your
MAAZA MENGISTE
Russian self, when there is no one else like you? Mbobo
finds some relief in the fact that a statue of Russian writer
Maxim Gorky is chiseled from brown stone and “so, the color of his face was similar to mine.” But it is the ever-looming
presence of Alexander Pushkin in the Russian imagination
that has become a burden for Mbobo. Pushkin is, to him,
a “most painful secret: starting from kindergarten, people
didn’t nickname me Blackie… not Monkey or Macaque
and not even Chocolate, but…Pushkin.” Mbobo contends
that Pushkin is not Russian enough, and he rebels against
this too-easy comparison to someone who is less Russian
than he: “just as he was an Abyssinian by his great-grandfather, Ibrahim Gannibal, so I was a Russian by my grandfather, Colonel Rzhevsky.” When he looks into his own
face, he sees his Russian features, he sees his mother’s eyes
staring back at him. Her identity, her lineage, declares his
own. And when she dies, as we know from the beginning
she will, she must, we begin to also sense what her absence
means for Mbobo and his future.
I did not so much understand as guess…that we hadn’t
lost our way among those three stations, nor among three
trees, but among our lives: among body, legal codex, and
spirit.
Mbobo’s mother has been coughing for months before anyone realizes that her illness is a result of the “radioactive alien intrusion” from clouds from Chernobyl. And
it is as they rest in the alcove of a pillar in the hall of Ploshchad Sverdlova Station, the coolness of the marble soothing Moscow’s lungs, that Mbobo guesses for the first time
that one of them is going to die soon.
Here is the chapter that comes soon after that, in Taganskaya Station:
And suddenly Mommy wasn’t there…
And here is Mbobo in Ploshchad Nogina Station:
…and Mommy wasn’t there…
And the following chapter, set in Ploshchad Nogina Interchange, contains the unspeakable as it becomes a
­realization:
59
60
Ismailov balances moments of startling clarity with a
child’s inability to articulate devastating loss. It is one of the
hallmarks of his writing in this novel, this deft handling of a
wry, speaking-from-beyond-the-grave voice—a ghost with
nothing left to lose—and the visceral, unfathomable emotions of a lost child. Evocative details, coupled with a worldworn irony, lend Ismailov’s prose a razor-sharp perceptiveness that is both weighted and symbolic. As chapter after
chapter progresses and incident upon incident piles up in
Mbobo’s life, we, too, begin to yearn for a thread of hope. We,
too, wander the underground with him, searching for points
of illumination that can withstand the glare of daylight.
There are always
bursts of light to
guide us forward
When Mbobo begins to feel the first tugs of love in
the form of a girl named Zulya, the momentum of the novel
surges, and it is easy to believe that Mbobo might overcome
his own tragic end; that the voice that speaks doesn’t come
from a place beneath the earth, where dry bones quiver
with the reverberations of another train zooming by, far below. And even when the world Mbobo knows begins to disintegrate in the era of political transitions and u­ pheavals—
those days of perestroika and glasnost—Ismailov renders a
narrative so rich and complex that we give ourselves license
to believe that there will be something left after it ends,
something worth all the pain.
A DARK CITY
If redemption is there, Ismailov suggests, then it rests
in the literary and the imagination. Midway through the
book, Mbobo examines the lives of Alexander Pushkin,
with his Abyssinian background, and Leo Tolstoy. Which
one is more Russian? No matter no matter who they were,
he decides, in the end, “what is left is literature, a heroic
attempt to balance an unbalanced life, an unbalanced soul.”
I’m reminded of something else G. said. The Russians were
readers, and they had a deep and profound connection
to literature that he admired. Even his residence in Leningrad, he points out, was across the street from a metro
station, Chernaya Rechka, named in honor of the place
where Pushkin fought his last duel. The Underground, too, is
steeped in Russian, and Soviet, literary tradition. The structure of the novel echoes Yerofeev’s Moscow to the End of the
Line, and Ismailov seems almost gleeful with his many sly
literary allusions, from Abkahazia’s Fazil Iskander to Nobel
laureate Ivan Bunin. “Fathers and sons…” Mbobo says, referencing Turgenev’s novel, Fathers and Sons, “but for me it
was Fatherlessness and Orphanhood.”
At the planning stages of the Moscow metro system,
many stations were designed to conquer the claustrophobic sense of being underground. Stations were built to give
the effect of light streaming from above, to allow subway
passengers to believe that the sun could brighten the subterranean city. Ismailov’s novel, despite its tragic tenor, also
offers glimmers of respite. It is a testament to the book’s
grand vision that through to its wrenching and inevitable
end, we are never left to wander long in its stretches of darkness. There are always bursts of light to guide us forward, to
allow us to imagine while illuminating all the possibilities
that await those who never give up on hope.
After we talk, G. sends me a short note. You have reminded me of those good old days, he jokes. And he tells
me of the beauty of the parks and the architecture, of the
astounding culture and the museums. Then he adds, I am
searching the complicated web of the Moscow metro lines
to remember more things.
MAIREAD CASE
Holing Up
61
By MAIREAD CASE
AS
a kid I loved Virginia Lee Burton’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel for its simplicity: Its hero, Mike Mulligan, spends one whole day digging a hole to save his life. Unlike the real-life men I knew who dug, Mike doesn’t care about
horizons or wives or beer, or anything but his work. Best, the book’s tone tells us that if Mike can do this work, everything
will end well—happily, even. Reading it offered me a simple, true relief. I never fantasized about my wedding day. Like Mike,
I just wanted a job that made me happy and gave me a home.
Left: Louis Lozowick, Steam Shovel, 1930. Right: Virginia Lee Burton, Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, 1939
In Virginia Lee Burton’s classic children’s book Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
burrowing is a way of settling into the ground, not taming it
62
In the book, Mike and his steam-shovel friend, Mary
Anne, have spent a whole life traveling and working together, until new technologies threatened to make them
obsolete. Stuck but not wanting to chuck his darling into
the scrap heap, Mike hatches a practical but theatrical
plan: The new town hall in Popperville needs a cellar, and
Mike promises that he and Mary Anne can dig it in a day.
He doesn’t sign a contract or plan anything beforehand;
he just makes a promise like a kid crossing his heart on the
playground. And because Mike and Mary Anne “always
work faster and better / when someone is watching us,”
the whole town comes out to stare. It was an entirely new
strategy to me back then: If you’re stuck, just dig.
I loved Mike Mulligan too because when Beverly
Cleary’s Ramona Quimby starts kindergarten, her teacher
reads this story to the class and Ramona asks, But when
did Mike Mulligan use the bathroom? This guy digs and
digs while the sun climbs to noon, faster and faster with no
bathrooms anywhere, let alone a private corner. That was
the first time I thought about work in a narrative, and bodies, and bodies and narratives locked in time. (Also capital letters as noise and speed. In the hole, Mike and Mary
Anne go “BING! BANG! CRASH! SLAM! / LOUDER
AND LOUDER, / FASTER AND FASTER.”)
But first times aren’t always important. Maybe what’s
important isn’t that Mike was the first, but that I was really
young. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel is in the children’s corner of many doctors’ waiting rooms and almost
every Barnes and Noble children’s section. It’s everywhere,
and it’s beautiful and secretly weird and, especially for a
book featuring a steam shovel with eyeballs, hearteningly
nonmagical. Girls are told to read it, and boys, and my one
friend who used to identify as a fire engine. Most significantly, Mike Mulligan was the first story I read where the
hero digs himself a home: where he burrows to maintain
and stay gold instead of climbing or conquering or some
other penis-shaped thing.
Mike is a hero with one face, and his victory is believ-
HOLING UP
ing in that face. It’s a solid message, made truer through its
simplicity, yet much more complicated than say, Mike Mulligan and His Big Dream. Burton saw children as collaborators—as generators—in a more immediate way than contemporaries like The Carrot Seed’s Ruth Kraus, who would
bring notebooks into schools to copy down what children
said. Though both women saw deep wisdom in children
and children’s literature, and both women wrote books I
love fiercely and tenderly (and maybe you do too), Kraus
seems to see herself as an interloper, an anthropologist,
whereas Burton actually entered into conversation. In part
this was because she was anxious about the value of her
work, especially in the lonely early stages of a new book,
but more pragmatically, the kids just made her stories better, and she worked better working with them.
One of my favorite photos of Burton is of her on a
lawn full of children in 1964. She stands in the middle of
everyone in bare feet, a striped skirt, and a light wide-neck
blouse. Not only are the kids almost all straight enrapt,
but this rapture appears in many different expressions on
their faces. One girl has her eyes closed. Another looks at
the grass, one finger in her mouth. Burton knew that good
stories need different entry points for different brains, and
perhaps casting a net this widely is a kind of digging too. It’s
certainly given her books life across multiple generations.
Mike Mulligan begins arrow-like: “Mike Mulligan had
a steam shovel, / a beautiful red steam shovel.” I’m quoting it as poetry because Burton wrote it like that. Music
and space were crucially important to her, a dancer who
wrote by filling the corner of the barn where she worked
with a maelstrom of sketches and technical diagrams.
Even her teaching style was a circular, nonbinary system
focusing primarily on changing gradients and proportions. ( Just like comics do, though Burton actually hated the funnies, and wrote Calico the Wonder Horse (or the
Saga of Stewy Stinker) to dissuade her kids from reading
them.) Mike Mulligan is told with sweeping but even line
and tone across almost 50 pages, all punctuated and an-
MAIREAD CASE
chored by Mary Anne’s red, particularly the parts where
everyone else is shadowed in soot and dirt. When work
gets sparse, advertising appears in all-black caps on Mary
Anne’s back: “MIKE MULLIGAN / DIG / ANYTHING
/ ANY TIME / ANY PLACE.”
Most likely, Mary Anne’s name is a slant version of
Marion Steam Shovels, a company founded by Henry
Barnhart, Edward Huber (of revolving-hay-rake fame), and
George W. King in Marion, Ohio, in the late 1800s. Marion built heavy equipment for construction and mining,
and twice, crawler-transporters for NASA. The company
set multiple world records for moving cubic feet of earth
in a specific time frame, thanks in part, it advertised, to
the solid iron rods supporting its shovels’ booms. In 1997
the company folded, and split its paper archive between
Bowling Green’s Historical Construction Equipment Association and the Marion County Historical Society. In a
way, its story is the macro version of Mike Mulligan’s story,
only more tragic because even new technologies or a sympathetic illustrator couldn’t save it. The entire company
became obsolete. That Mike and Mary Anne went ghost.
On the other hand, throughout Mike Mulligan and
His Steam Shovel Mike is proud of this steam shovel he
owns. The cover shows Mary Anne bursting, grinning,
through a banner like a super goofy sports-team mascot.
Burton’s illustrations virtually always place her at the center, surrounded by sun and robins and looking solidly at
Mike. She is alive but dedicated and owned, and she works:
“He always said that she could dig as much in a day / as a
hundred men could dig in a week.” Charmingly, Mike has
never actually checked this but he’s pretty sure it’s true.
Their relationship is more essential than romance—it’s
a happiness from having solid worth and purpose across
a lifetime. Mary Anne is elegant and functional, and her
presence in Mike’s life gives him purpose too. They “dig
together.” They get it. Their relationship isn’t sexual,
though it is definitely loving. Plus “Mike Mulligan took
such good care / of Mary Anne / she never grew old.” I
63
remember being terrified by this, as a child. If she doesn’t
grow old, can she still learn? Will she die young? Will she
rust up when Mike dies, or will he live forever too? (The
latter seemed unlikely, as, again, for all Mike Mulligan’s illustrations, the reader never doubts his world is ours too.)
All told, Mike Mulligan is probably the first time I read
about a man taking care and a woman’s purpose making
her ageless. One of these stories is still fairly rare, the other near omnipresent. I wish for a sequel where Mary Anne
is a crone, maybe friends with smudged-up toasters and
old fried electric blankets.
The illustrations in Mike Mulligan are all of work, of
digging, in such bird’s-eye detail that all people become
the same size and occasionally Mary Anne loses facial
expression. Burton, who founded and led the all-female
Folly Cove Designers group in Gloucester, Massachusetts,
practiced and taught drawing with three tenets—“subject,
sizes, tones”—all components present in this work, which
came early on in her publishing career. The diplomas she
handed out to graduating Folly Cove students showed a
woman triumphantly printing a question mark in sequential frames. These are still on display at the Cape Ann Museum, which is near Our Lady of Good Voyage Church,
whose Marian statue holds a ship and shows up in T.S. Eliot’s “Dry Salvages.” (My favorite intersection in the town
is Spring Street, a one-way, and Fears Court.) Together,
Mike and Mary Anne dig canals, tunnels, highways, landing fields, and cellars for skyscrapers. Sometimes people
stop to watch and again, when they do Mike claims the
digging happens faster and better.
When people watch, they mix and meet: the selectmen, the constable, the postman, the telegraph boy, the
milkman, the milkman’s horse. By holing up and digging,
Mike and Mary Anne are making a stage in reverse. All
these people are defined solely by their work too, save Mrs.
McGillicuddy, though her husband never appears and she
is wearing the best outfit: a pretty ruby dress with pockets.
These illustrations in particular are perhaps in dialogue
64
with Burton’s life as a professional dancer and aquarium
keeper, because nobody talks but they do walk and they
shift. Movement is primary, but not as character development. Because if these characters don’t move, they become
sad and sit and freeze. They become not-themselves. If
Mike and Mary Anne don’t move, there is no story. They
must keep digging.
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel was Burton’s
third book, published in 1939, two years after Choo Choo,
the story of a train engine. Her first story, Jonnifer Lint,
was about a piece of dust. After Jonnifer was rejected by
13 publishers, Burton got the manuscript back and read
it to her son Aris, who fell asleep before she could finish.
From then on Burton drew and told stories for children—
usually her own, Aris and Mike—expressly to give them
what they liked and wanted. “Children are very frank critics,” she said, but they are also eager and open-minded
collaborators, for the most part. Burton shared a birthday with her son Mike, who also shared his name with
this book, his face—he’s the little yellow-haired boy with
“good ideas”—and later, with Aris, the copyright. (Today
Mike m
­ anages amusement parks in California and China,
including Marine World/Africa USA—now a Six Flags—
and I­ntra-Asia.) Plus there is the awesomely weird footnote on page 39, where Burton acknowledges her young
neighbor Dickie Birkenbush, who solved the book’s ending at dinner one night. Mike can stay in the cellar and be
the janitor, and Mary Anne can be the furnace! (This was
the first time I saw a footnote too.)
But all this movement and collaboration doesn’t
mean Mike Mulligan can’t hit direct emotional notes.
When after all these years of digging holes and passageways and fields, there is no more work for Mike and Mary
Anne to do, Burton shows how bad it is through purple
earth and capital letters and two lines of tears falling from
Mary Anne’s steel face. The issue, dramatically, isn’t that
Mary Anne and Mike are less professional or even that
“the new gasoline shovels / and the new electric shovels /
HOLING UP
and the new Diesel motor shovels” are more efficient, but
that new technology “took all the jobs away.” Burton never
really explains this in text or image, though the new shovels have sad-looking eyes and mountain-shaped-mouths.
Nobody seems particularly stoked on the change. Without
jobs, Mike and Mary Anne can’t move and so they don’t
exist. “No one wanted them anymore.” And in turn, they
don’t want to transform or expand, or retire, or hire new
shovels, or anything. They just want to work. To dig.
Burton dug, too. She found her home and so her
seven (eight, counting the Jonnifer-dust) books are rooted there, most spectacularly her last, Life Story, which includes everything from the actual apple tree outside the
house she shared with Mike and Aris and her husband,
George Demetrios, to sea creatures and dinosaurs. Most
neatly, to me, she’s not cute about any of it: Admittedly
her characters are pretty much all children or coupled-up
adults, but also Burton writes about female snow shovels
and dipper sticks and trip lines. She believes people can
change and live full lives inside the four walls where they
make home and space for others. On the one hand this is
fairly typical “women’s work,” yet still Burton subverts because she’s so democratic about it. In Mike Mulligan and
His Steam Shovel, everyone has work and purpose and feelings, and the moment comes not when someone changes
roles but after they’ve successfully completed their job.
Final happiness arrives not when a new relationship
is solidified or new discovery made, but when the characters literally get to sit peacefully in a hole and chill. Sometimes the little boy comes over for stories, or the selectman
comes over for stories, or Mrs. McGillicuddy in her ruby
dress will bring a pie. Otherwise Mike and Mary Anne just
heat the hall and read. This kind of freedom is antithetical
to what I’ve been taught over and over again, and so the
book ends not only happily but questioningly: What if, instead of transformation or fire or constant reinvention, we
just dig a home and make sure it’s warm and private and
welcoming? What then?
65
KAREN GREGORY
REVIEW
Media Matters
BY
KAREN GREGORY
Silicon Valley’s rhetoric of magical innovation relies on a hidden abode
of rare earth mining and hydro-cooled server farms
Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press. 2015. 224 pages.
“Media materiality is not contained in machines,
even if the machines themselves contain a planet.”
BEFORE
you continue reading this
review, sit for a minute. Take stock of the device you are
using to read these words. Are you reading on a laptop, on
a smartphone, or a tablet? How did this particular device
arrive in your life? Can you visualize the supply chains that
carried it along? Whose hands fashioned it before it arrived
in yours? Do you know what chemicals, minerals, and raw
materials were involved in making it? Can you imagine the
ways that such a labor process lingers on in workers’ bodies
and in the effects it has on environments? Our devices have
become part and parcel of our everyday, intimate lives, and
the more that they become data sensors for an increasingly hungry digital capitalism the more they know about us.
Yet what do we know about the lives (and afterlives) of our
devices?
These are the questions that media scholar Jussi
Parikka would like you to ask while reading his new book,
A Geology of Media. Parikka’s invaluable book will prompt
a myriad of important conversations within his discipline
over the nature of media and technology. But A Geology
of Media should be read widely outside media studies as it
speaks directly to the material conditions of contemporary
life and to the current belief that digital technologies are
somehow less encumbered by the weight of human labor.
The book makes undeniably clear the deep implication of
bodies, environments, and the earth itself in the production and consumption of precisely the kind of media that
is often presumed to be “immaterial,” to be “cost-cutting,”
“efficient,” “disruptive,” or even more “democratic” and “accessible” or “transparent” than existing social institutions.
66
Parikka’s work simply starts in a different place than
most accounts of the social life of media: with the raw material components that make a specific technology possible. Here we find an interest in dirt and dust, in the very
chemicals, minerals, and metals that each make a technological object, like a smartphone or laptop, possible. “Instead of networking,” he writes, “we need to remember
the importance of copper or optical fiber for such forms of
communication; instead of a blunt discussion of ‘the digital,’ we need to pick it apart and remember that also mineral
durations are essential to it being such a crucial feature that
penetrates our academic, social, and economic interests.”
In a time when we hear so much about the economic potential of “disruptive” technologies and media platforms—such as educational technologies that are going
to bring “access” to the masses or platforms like Uber or
Airbnb that claim to give customers greater power and convenience, Parikka’s book is a necessary reminder that there
is no such thing as free, cheap, or easy media. While venture capital may seem to be the prime mover, technological innovations are dependent on raw materials, resource
extraction, environmental exploitation, and often obscured
forms of human labor. Our “wireless” society is dependent
on ocean cables. Google servers require chilled-water cooling coils. The smartphone that enables the notion of an
“on-demand economy” is actually the end of a supply chain
that has its roots in rare earth minerals. In A Geology of
Media, Parikka pushes the notion of the supply chain even
a step further—to supplies of energy. Minerals, chemical
processes, and human labor are not only stops along the
way in the chain, but they become, as they are assembled
together, the fuel that gives life to their larger technological system. As he writes, “the microchipped world burns in
intensity like millions of tiny suns.“ Whatever device you’re
reading this on or calling your Uber from entails a whole
universe—and Parikka’s analysis shows how that is not a
glib overstatement.
While it is true that a digital capitalism is growing in
MEDIA MATTERS
and through the exploitation of human cognitive abilities
and emotional and affective capacities, Parikka asks for a
much broader view of what is fueling the developments of
techno-capitalism. That view is both cosmological and geological, looking both to solar energies and to nonhuman
materials and their temporalities of renewal and decay. Yet
it is also a view fully shot through with human labor. This
double movement is what makes A Geology of Media necessary reading beyond media studies, particularly for social
scientists and humanities scholars. The book will encourage
you to dismantle your devices to better understand their
components, circuitry, and assemblage—and in the process,
think broadly about those very real, material supply chains.
A Geology of Media also prompts a concept of labor
that is open to a complex materiality. Machines, for example, according to Parikka are best thought of not as mere
assemblages of raw materials, nor simply as human inventions, but rather “vectors across the geopolitics of labor, resources, planetary excavations, energy production, natural
processes from photosynthesis to mineralization, and the
aftereffects of electronic waste.” While Parikka refers to his
perspective as “neo-materialist,” this is a fundamentally entangled perspective that begins from the geophysical and
moves quickly between layers of earthly strata, elemental
forces, nonhuman entities, and human actors.
While Parikka’s goal is not necessarily to develop
a new theory of technology per se, he is adamant that we
have overlooked the fundamental role that the geological
plays in the very conception and production of technology.
It matters where we begin in our theorization of technology, media, and data. Relocating media theory in the material and environments that come before media, Parikka
puts the lie to any debased versions of “immaterial labor”
that might be mobilized in the service of digital theorizing.
While notions of data are currently threatening to upend
almost every social institution (often with the explicit goal
of “restructuring” labor processes in those institutions),
for Parikka there is no easy conceptualization of data apart
KAREN GREGORY
from the material conditions that make such data possible.
“Data demand their ecology,” he writes, “one that is
not merely a metaphorical technoecology, but demonstrates dependence on climate, the ground, and the energies circulating in the environment. Data feeds off the environment both through geology and the energy-demand…
Data mining is not only about the metaphorical big data repositories of social media.” Yet while the phrase “big data”
seems to be capable of whirling research funds into being
and setting institutional agendas, rarely are those funds or
agendas linked to understanding the effects of server requirements on local lands, ecologies, or labor markets.
These concerns are secondary to the purportedly infinite potentials of the data set. Yet, data do not emerge out
of thin air; rather, as Parikka puts it, “data need air.” This
fundamental condition of dependence is a complex web
of social relations, environmental conditions, and labor
arrangements. That data emerge from both material and
legal “territories” is largely (and conveniently) obscured,
particularly in the gold rush to capitalize on the promise
of free-flowing data. What might it mean for corporations
to have to account for such territories before grabbing hold
of data’s presumed value? For starters, I would suspect it
would mean the end of the overblown language of disruption, but it would also force corporations to include the
local environments, ecologies, and communities who they
depend upon for their wealth in their balance sheets.
Parikka doesn’t quite push his analysis toward answering that question. Instead, the book offers a number
of useful concepts. The first is a notion of “medianatures,”
which draws from Donna Haraway’s concept of “naturecultures.” Here, Parikka intends to maintain Haraway’s commitment to nonbinary thinking and to working with entanglement, but he also wants to move us toward a theory of
media that can account for nonhuman actors—chemicals,
minerals, and micro-organisms. The notion of a medianature is meant to encourage us to not only think in terms of
entanglement of the human and nonhuman, but to become
67
very specific about what materials have been assembled
and why.
For an example, we can look at aluminum dust, which
is a byproduct of the process of polishing iPad cases. As
Parikka writes, “the minuscule dust particles already carry with them a double danger: they are highly inflammable and, more importantly, they can cause a variety of lung
diseases among workers. Here, dust entangles any sense of
media not only in the process of labor, but in the very labor
of the biological body to withstand or metabolize such a
process.” Riffing on Franco Berardi’s work, Parikka rightfully asks if we “should we speak of the exploitation of the soul
through the contamination of the lung.” Such a perspective
brings a vital attention to the materiality of bodies that have
been fundamental to the development of supposedly “cognitive” capitalism. What you experience as the glow of your
screen is for the worker who assembled it a carcinogen that
can cause leukemia or nerve damage.
Parikka’s medianature concept not only brings the
human body into the theorization of media, but it also inserts geography and locality. Taking up the computation of
data, Parikka writes that if data demand the “cool air” of the
North to be computed, they also simultaneously demand
the cheap, flexible, and nonunionized labors of the proverbial South to be brought into being. Additionally, his notion of the “underground” helps further articulate links between the geological, the geographic, the human, and the
nonhuman. By working with this concept, which is both a
space of hidden labor as well as a geological repository of
potential energy and minerals, Parikka is able to bring us
close to the some of the hell that has been so far removed
(both spatially and conceptually) from the development
and analysis of a digital capitalism.
While much of the talk of techno-solutions and the
abundance of data is often underwritten with the claim that
such infrastructures will liberate us from the messiness of
labor, A Geology of Media disabuses us of such notions.
Any thought of a post-labor technotopia of on-demand and
68
flexible services is willfully in denial of the hidden abodes
of production required to even give life to the fantasy. For
Parikka, there is something radically obscene about the
time that we live in, in part because such fantasies of lightweight or ethereal media and technology rely on just such a
denial. Coining the phrase the “anthrobscene,” Parikka links
theories of the anthropocene with the obscenities of contemporary capitalism—the sulfuric hellishness of the underground environmental crisis and seeming economic and
political inability to confront either in any meaningful way.
While the entire book is worth reading, the fourth
chapter, entitled “Dust and the Exhausted Life,” is an almost stand-alone chapter that could be taught in a wide
range of classrooms or read in a range of contexts. Without
falling into the trap of preciousness, Parikka writes “there
is something poetic about dust.” Dust is serious business,
particularly when we think of the dust of pollution, as
chemical residue, or the “tons and tons of cosmic dust” that
reminds us “we breathe in the otherworldly, the outer planetary.” Here, he makes clear how the physical body (of both
human and animals), the geological, and labor are bound
up together by a trace element.
While we might simply think of dust in terms of health
risks, what Parikka points us towards transcends any sort of
risk analysis. Dust is our kinship with both the cosmic and
the earthly. What seems like something to be merely blown
away could actually be a grounds from which to begin what
Parikka calls a “trajectory for theory,” or a way to work
with traces themselves. Faced with the obscene techno-­
solutionist theories of data without its underground, of media without a sense of complex materiality or medianature,
this other trajectory appeals because it would mean that
theory would, from the start, imbricate us in labor, economies, and ecologies. It means we would learn to work with
and through the traces that connect each of those elements.
Yet, it is also with such a trajectory that I would caution readers of A Geology of Media. As Parrika writes, “we
need to be able to find concepts that help the nonhuman
MEDIA MATTERS
elements contributing to capital to become more visible,
grasped and understood—as part of surplus creation as
well as the related practices of exploitation.” I am simply
not convinced that such visibility, grasping, or understanding leads us where we want to go. Making visible is not the
same as refusing to be absorbed into the surplus or exploited. While material and local analyses of labor are fundamental work that must be done, there is a sense in which A
Geology of Media never quite affords the notion that some
things (both human and nonhuman) may simply refuse
or be outside mediation. Without that perspective, one
must wonder where all our tracings will lead. Will we simply provide better maps for capital’s designs? If anything,
neo-­materialist turns must ask what we are offering up our
research to, our deep and slow tracings of hidden abodes?
If we can’t answer, we’re going to have to go even slower, or
maybe beyond our comfort zones of reading.
For a work that is interested in the deep strata of geological time and the ways in which temporalities animate
media beyond death, A Geology of Media is a book that is a
bit haunted by its own ancestors, or the work that has come
before it. That work is feminist labor theory, postcolonial
theory, critical race theory, and eco-feminism—work that
might be more comfortable with outright refusal or with a
rejection of the idea that all can or should be absorbed into
media. While the book does not aim to be a labor analysis,
it leads us so closely to one and then refuses the specifics,
often simply using the term “bodies.” Yet, as Parikka has so
aptly told us, it does matter where you start and it does indeed matter to be specific, particularly about which bodies,
and when and where and why. Here we have a book that
leads us so close to the edge of asking these questions, but
then shies away. Nonetheless, this is also the strength of the
work, as it will inspire conversation, adaption, and a critical response. Read the book in tandem with everything else
you are reading, including this essay, and let us begin to have
a much more honest, transparent, and critical conversation
about what the language of disruption really means.
69
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
REVIEW
Coal Comfort
BY
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
Understanding capitalism’s use of fossil fuels to control labor
puts us in a better position to fight it
Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso. 2016. 496 pages.
“HOW
did we get caught up in this mess?”
asks Andreas Malm, a historian at Sweden’s Lund University, getting quickly to the crux of it in the opening pages of
his forthcoming Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and
the Roots of Global Warming. The subtitle captures the gist
of the problem and his answer, one common-sense enough
to any assorted number of observers: this mess—the climate crisis—began with fossil fuels. Malm doesn’t waste
time staking out the more specific space of his inquiry. By
the end of the brisk eighteen-page intro, a reader has in
hand Malm’s starting assumptions, central terms of inquiry, general methodologies, and broad-stroke understanding
of timeline and stakes. In sum: we need history if we are
to respond to the climate crisis with a clear-eyed sense of
obstacles and stakes. We need to be able to account for the
most foundational ways in which today’s weather “is [the]
product of yesterday’s emissions.” “This tempest is eminently temporal,” he writes; and thus primed, off we go.
Central to this history is the emergence of the fossil
economy, “an economy of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumption of fossil fuels.” By now this
describes most economies, of course, and global capital is
working hard to strong-arm those it doesn’t into the fold;
the backdrop of the climate crisis is an economic momentum that will burn increasing amounts of fossil fuels if left to
its own devices. Fossil Capital argues that this dependence
was born in the particularities with which 19th century
Britain switched out water power in favor of coal and steam;
not, as other histories would have it, the first moment a human struck two stones together to make fire, nor during any
of the many previous historical periods of subsistence-level
coal and oil use, nor as a magical simultaneity to the eighteenth-century invention of the steam engine. A materialist,
Malm opposes any history that treats the rise of fossil fuels
as natural or inevitable. His account is about labor and the
contingencies that allowed fossil fuels to emerge as an indispensable tool in capital’s struggles to control it. In one of the
book’s most evocative asides, Malm points out that though
the English word power describes both energy currents and
hierarchical structures between people, there’s no similar
70
drift in French, Spanish, or German, the languages of other
centers of capitalist development. “Why” he asks, “did the
two poles collapse into one in English?”
THOUGH
the steam engine is often
treated as a straightforward metonym for the Industrial
Revolution, Malm argues that its adoption was far from given. It entered into a British economic landscape already being remade by factories and mechanization. Water-powered
cotton mills were driving down the time and cost of textile
production, generating unheard-of profits, and owners were
investing those profits back into mills, stoking further cycles
of mechanization and growth. Malm doesn’t analyze the
ways colonialism intersected with British industrialization,
but it’s the obvious background to this moment: the cotton
boom was being underwritten with the land, bodies, labor,
and raw materials stolen through colonialist expansion and
the slave trade.
In the years following the 1784 patenting of the steam
engine, James Watt and his business partner, Matthew
Boulton, targeted the increasingly powerful mill owners,
knowing their approval would be crucial to the machine’s
success. But they didn’t approve, at least not at first. Most
of the engine’s first adopters found it decidedly inferior to
water power. Steam engines required frequent repair, sometimes exploded, and had an unreliable lifespan; waterwheel
technology was time-tested, and a good iron wheel might
last one hundred years. Coal “vomit[ed] forth smoke, polluting earth and air for miles around,” in the words of one
engineer; water didn’t. And most importantly, water was
free whereas coal was expensive. Watt and Boulton themselves kept waterwheels at their business ventures well into
the nineteenth century, epitomizing the general trend. For
years, mill owners stayed uninterested in steam.
By 1825, their disinterest began to wane. That year
the Combination Laws, which outlawed strikes and unions,
COAL COMFORT
were repealed. Workers responded with a fierce series of uprisings, including Lancashire’s in 1826, the Swing Riots of
1830, the South Wales rebellion of 1831, 1831–32’s Reform
Crisis, 1832–34’s sustained unionism, and the Chartist
push from 1838–42. “The [working] population…is hourly increasing in strength and breadth,” reported journalist
William Cooke Taylor. “There are mighty energies slumbering in those masses.” The year 1825 also saw the first in
a crippling run of panic-recession cycles (set off in part by
overproduction in cotton, aided by easy credit and financial
speculation) that lasted into the late ’40s. Beset by increasingly militant worker demands as profits plummeted, British industry spent those two decades perpetually terrified.
Cotton was no exception. Spinners sat in a particular position of strength: In 1825, the job was highly skilled
and an excellent chokepoint for disruptive work stoppages.
Even weavers, who by and large worked from their homes
and were too fragmented a force to really organize, became
a headache. Far from the surveillance of a factory, they delivered cloth late and pinched thread to sell on the black
market to supplement their bare wages. What ten years before was a nuisance became, in an era of economic depression, an intolerable drain on an owner’s resources.
So those owners turned to mechanical solutions to
help control workers and rescue profits, and it was amidst
this pushback that steam power took irrevocable hold.
Again, though, this round of mechanization needn’t have
implied a turn to coal. Since the late 1700s, mill owners had
made continual improvements to waterpower technologies
(multiple-wheel set-ups, new techniques for building aqueducts and reservoirs, self-regulating sluices); by the 1830s
(the years coal first accounted for a majority of Britain’s energy usage), engineers were finding further ways to maximize those technologies through planned communities and
resource-sharing arrangements, and government and private backers were funding the experiments at high-profile
test sites—including, poetically, James Watts’ hometown.
The choice between steam and water power was made,
71
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
crucially, as cotton barons also weighed the relative benefits
of urban and rural factories. That decision proved less simple than it might seem, too. On one level, rural spaces insulated owners from growing labor unrest; workforces were
isolated, and the damage when they rebelled more contained. But those workforces were also less expendable than
in cities, where owners had large labor pools to draw from.
And the incentives rural mill owners devised to retain workers—nice houses, cows and gardens, schools—meant they
had more sunk capital than urban owners. When workers
went on strikes that broke machines, shattered windows, or
damaged roads, rural operators bore the entire cost. Such
costs made water power more and more untenable.
As industry gravitated towards urban set-ups, coal allowed capitalists to remake space to even better suit their
needs. They could throw up dense clusters of factories that
didn’t need to be located along prime stretches of river.
Coal further maintained its edge as swelling unions forced
labor law reforms that included a ten-hour workday. Water-powered mills were at the mercy of irregular flows that
could stop production for hours. Traditionally workers
were forced to make up the time later that night or on another day; this practice became illegal under the new laws,
which specified exactly when workdays could start and end.
Coal could be counted upon to produce a steady stream of
energy, and its intensity was more manipulable, allowing
owners to maintain (and raise) production rates within the
shortened workday. In this way, Malm argues, coal gave capital an unprecedented ability to remake not only space, but
time according to its needs—and in the process became an
inextricable part of the way it grows. Power became dual:
Power became capital’s ability to leverage fossil fuels to
manage unruly workers while constantly seeking out new
profit; power became fossil capital.
FOSSIL
Capital spends 330 of its 400 ­pages
documenting Britain’s emergence as a fossil economy, its
thesis being that this is the first step in understanding today’s
spiraling cycles of growth and emissions. And fair enough:
in the 1830s, as coal was becoming irrevocably tied to British capitalist expansion, Britain emitted eighty percent of
the world’s carbon. But a lot happened to allow for British
hegemony, and a lot has happened since then. Other countries—most noteable to the history of climate change, the
United States—developed their own fossil economies as
coal changed the face of naval warfare and became intertwined with imperialist projects. Later, the physicalities of oil
extraction proved better for managing workers and sparked
a capitalist war to control global oil supplies that enlisted
Western governments and militaries while setting the template for the “development” of other states, and more recently, new fracking techniques unleashed a natural gas boom
that has further expanded and complicated global fossil economics. Half of CO2 emissions between 1751–2010 were
produced after 1986 in an exponential growth spiral that saw
post-2000 emissions triple those from the 1990s; this took
place, furthermore, in an era of hyper-mobile capital far beyond the scope of anything nineteenth-century British capitalists might have dreamed. Fossil Capital doesn’t promise a
comprehensive history of fossil fuels, nor of the evolution of
global capitalism, but it does promise a theory of fossil capital
that can be applied beyond the nineteenth-century British
context. To that end, Malm spends thirty-five of his last seventy pages sketching some key dynamics connected to the
emergence of China’s fossil economy.
The choice of example is obviously not random. China became the world’s top extractor of fossil fuels and the
top carbon emitter in 2004 and 2006 respectively. During
those years, some researchers estimate that nearly half China’s emissions were linked to manufactured exports, the majority of which were being traded in the West. Many of the
ensuing debates about who should be held responsible for
such “emissions embodied in trade” (EETs) have focused
on consumption in an approach that, in Malm’s words,
72
COAL COMFORT
view[s]…the Western consumer as an absolute sovereign who
sends CO2 packing to other parts of the world, presumably by
standing in front of shelves and picking cheap Chinese commodities rather than expensive domestic ones, the owners of the
means of production being passive, neutral, and out of sight.
Malm takes particular issue with the approach when
it fails to differentiate between the lifestyles, habits, and array of consumption options afforded rich and working-class
consumers. Against this mode of analysis, he attempts to
trace the machinations of fossil capital in China.
Globalized fossil capital is first and foremost defined
by the ability to move across national borders at will to
find what it needs. In industry—the sector is still percentage-wise most responsible for worldwide carbon pollution
and, accordingly, Malm’s focus throughout—that means
cheap, pliable workforces and reliable access to fossil fuels
plus the infrastructure to find, transport, and process them.
China joined the WTO and removed most of its remaining
barriers to foreign investment in 2001. Around the same
time, the Chinese government deregulated coalmines and
invested heavily in transmission lines and transportation to
the coastal cities where foreign factories liked to set up shop;
by 2007, it began importing huge amounts of coal and oil
to keep up with demand. It also put down nascent unionism amongst workers streaming from rural areas into the
industrializing cities. Transnational corporations (TNCs)
promptly flocked there, sparked competition between Chinese cities to build bigger and better infrastructural incentives, and soon accounted for somewhere between fifty and
seventy percent of the export economy helping drive the
emissions spike. In short, Malm asserts, China became the
world’s biggest carbon emitter just as “globally mobile capital seized upon it as its workshop.”
It’s worth taking a moment to underline the dynamics
at work in a scenario like this. Malm breaks the process into
three phases: expansion, intensity, and integration. Expansion is any initial investment undertaken to build up energy
grids, usually undertaken by state governments under pres-
sure from TNCs that can easily take their capital elsewhere.
Intensity refers to the fact that the nations with the most
attractive workforces—i.e. poor countries—generally have
less efficient energy grids, because their tax base limits what
they can buy and build; hence foreign companies that follow cheap labor into poor countries generally increase emissions even if their production rates stay the same. And integration describes emissions related to the construction and
operation of the trains, buses, trucks, planes, and cargo ships
used to shuttle people and goods back and forth between
various homes, factories, logistics hubs, and stores; not to
mention the necessary highways, rails, airports, and so on.
These cycles tend to get locked into feedback loops
that only deepen capital’s reliance on fossil fuels. And when
labor mucks up those cycles, as it still sometimes manages
to do, the workarounds generally involve more fossil fuels.
When Chinese workers erupted in massive countrywide
strikes in 2010, TNCs began looking to move their Chinese
operations elsewhere. Many did, feeding emission cycles
in these new labor markets. Others found that they’d developed carbon-intensive habits that couldn’t be quickly
accommodated by more rudimentary energy grids. Slowed
in their departures from China, they turned to robotics and
new waves of mechanization, to similar and predictable effect: yet more emissions. Meanwhile, mainstream climate
politics can’t find the courage to link carbon to capitalist
growth, and hyper-mobile owners of the means of production stay passive, neutral, and out of sight.
“CAPITAL
is not being endowed
with a will and a mind, a cabal, an almighty conspiracy,”
writes Malm. “It is a blind process of self-expansion…
More often than not, the products are unintended.” Many
experts in mitigation scenarios believe there’s still a window
to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, albeit a very, very narrow one, in which a full transition to
MIRANDA TRIMMIER
renewable energy would need to be reached in a matter of
decades. The technology is available. The first and biggest
obstacles to such a transition are the vested interests of fossil capital. Those interests grow physically and logistically
more entrenched every day and are all the more dangerous
for being ad-hoc. If it’s most profitable to manage workers
across fragmented supply chains full of carbon-intensive redundancies, that’s what fossil capital will keep doing.
In Malm’s words, the timeline of the climate crisis both
“compels revolutionaries to be a little pragmatic” and “obliges others to ponder revolutionary measures.” There isn’t
time to build a world socialist order before tackling emissions, but there isn’t time to fritter away hoping market solutions will work, either—leaving, realistically, government
planning to drag capitalists through a renewable transition.
A successful planning agenda would need to be massive and
comprehensive in a manner historically unprecedented save
for World War II. It would have to (just for instance) maintain or take back public control of energy grids, end fossil
fuel subsidies, set new taxes, establish public investment
banks, direct research efforts, issue contracts, create jobs
programs, build infrastructure that bundles power sources
to create more reliable energy flows, sequester global fossil
stock, regulate the financial industry, and set sharp emission
reduction targets that acknowledge differential historical responsibility for climate change and actually get met. Most
governmental bodies haven’t shown anything close to the
political will necessary to do any of this; most are still actively abetting fossil capital’s continued expansion.
The ghost haunting this discussion, of course, is resistance. Malm acknowledges that no transition will materialize unless people force the political will for a renewable
transition into being, but he leaves the specifics of how that
fight should look to other critics. For inspiration, he raises
the memory of the Plug Plot Riots, a fierce wave of 1842
work stoppages whose central act of sabotage was pulling
out steam engines’ plugs to drain their water and halt production. “What is needed today, if not some global version
73
of the Plug Plot Riots? Go and stop the smoke!” By his own
analysis, though, “recent decades of globalization have…
caused a structural debilitation of labor.” The 2010 Chinese
work stoppages involved thousands of workers, resulted in
wage hikes, and cost the companies involved a lot of money; they were effective, for a time. But fossil capital has better workarounds than it used to, and TNCs in China and
elsewhere are busily enacting theirs as carbon-wastefully as
is necessary to keep extending profits. In such a landscape,
labor won’t do it alone. It will need to be joined by people
hitting fossil capital on all fronts—through Blockadia-style
direct actions; legal invocations of indigenous treaty rights;
economic, racial, and gender justice work; divestment advocacy; fights to keep energy grids public; campaign finance reform pushes; fracktivism; etc—while articulating
concrete platforms for a transition and pressuring governments to adopt them. The Canadian Leap Manifesto, for
one example, lays out a full transition agenda that begins
in indigenous communities and in those most devastated by fossil capital’s environmental destruction, and ends,
through a program of wealth redistribution and infrastructural investment, with a carbon-free Canada by 2050.
To be sure, capital has workarounds for activists as
well. In one high-profile example, Malm reports that though
Keystone resistance has dragged the pipeline project out
well past its planned rollout date, its investors have been
quietly constructing a network of pipelines to snake from
Alberta to each of the Canadian coasts to ensure tar-sands
oil gets to market. It’s easy for resistance to seem pointless,
fossil fuels inevitable, the future an unavoidable apocalypse.
But that will be for later historians to decide for certain. In
another evocative bit of etymology towards the end of Fossil
Capital, Malm notes that apokalyptein, the Greek source for
the English apocalypse, means to lift a veil. That strikes me
as the only real option in the face of climate crisis: to keep
resisting while keeping our eyes trained on the fossil capital
that’s put us here, making sure it does anything but stay passive, neutral, and out of sight.