Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 6

It glints dully on the side of a branch of cobbled pathway that passes through a gap in a straggly hedge. It is a strip of metal sheeting—laterally ribbed, punched with an even array of holes, a long piece of mattly rusted steel not quite flush with the ground so that a sort of malaise emanates from its patently temporary presence. It’s a metre-long length of so-called Marston Matting, or Perforated Steel Planking (PSP), which has migrated down the hill from the erstwhile French military training areas around the Wankheimer Täler, to the residual hippy trailer park that we call the Wagenburg—a now more-or-less permanent settlement of construction-workers’ caravans converted into a sort of a commune-cum-trailer park. This sheet of Marston Matting is probably of American origin. The stuff was first manufactured during the Second World War for use in the Pacific campaign and the invasion of continental Europe. The prefabricated matting was intended to provide an easily assembled road or runway surface to stabilize muddy or marshy ground. The individual elements were perforated to reduce weight, given lateral corrugations to stiffen them, and were equipped with a hook-and-slot system on opposite edges to allow each sheet to be connected to its neighbours. The modular units were designed to provide an artificial ground more permanent that the shifting soil they covered. But by the same token, they could be transported easily, laid quickly, and if necessary, ripped up equally rapidly to be rebuilt elsewhere.

Typically, the steel matting has always been geographically mobile, also being used in Germany, for instance, to strengthen the runways at Tempelhof and Tegel airports during the Berlin airlift. This is perhaps the ‘origin’, if one can use this term at all for such ephemeral building material, for the matting that I am photographing here. Marston matting has been frequently reused for more peaceful purposes than originally intended: as fencing material, as door strengthener, or in one of my favourite examples, as wine rack (you can slot a lot of bottle necks into a slab of Marston!). Symptomatically, when I went back to the Wagenburg to take more photos of this material, I discovered that it was no longer where I had last seen it. It had migrated onwards on its trajectory of serial temporarinesses.

The steel matting was produced with a high manganese content, so that it was resistant to corrosion, as the reasonably good state of the sheeting I found showed. This means that, paradoxically enough for a building material designed for the construction of temporary runways and road surfaces and frequently transported to new sites and re-used for diverse projects, it is itself endowed with a considerable degree of permanency. A recent clean-up of the now decommissioned military zone (one of a series that has progressively removed old munitions and military junk from up on the hills) dredged up quantities of this steel matting in pretty good nick. It is entirely plausible that the sheet that I photographed has an eighty-year history of repeated usage in various theatres of war or mock-war, from the Second World War through the Cold War, into the post-Cold-War era—a concatenation of epochs that has seen so many low- and high-tech conflicts around the globe. The steel matting, in its very material existence, or perhaps more appropriately, existences, is an embodiment of the dialectics of temporariness and permanence that is a core preoccupation of this book.

This relic of numerous wars, non-wars or proxy-wars, lying about in a hippy commune on the edge of a South German university town, fascinates me. It seems emblematic of the relationship to place that John Kinsella and I explore in these pages. The sheet of matting lies on the ground, propped lightly against the base of a tree trunk, half in contact with the earth, half floating in the air around it—displaying its readiness to go elsewhere at the drop of a hat. The matting is a prosthetic analogy for the ground, porous like the soil and its latticework of crystalline particles, constructed of minerals drawn from the earth, of it but not of it. It is a modern technological hybrid, derived from but somehow alien from the ground. It is both related to the soil, yet oddly remote from that with which it so intimately snuggles.

The matting creates around itself a palimpsestic, laminated configuration of elements—earth and air, perhaps also water and fire—which might be construed as a concrete metaphor for the very nature of the temporality of the earth and our modern relationship with it. Indeed, the iconic similarity between our title, tɛmp(ə)rərɪnəs (‘Temporariness’)—transcribed into International Phonetic Alphabet in a gesture towards the contingent singularity of the verbal speech act itself—and the perforated steel matting is not coincidental. If language, for Heidegger (1949: 24), was the house of being, we implicitly suggest in this way, that temporariness, in its material and linguistic forms, is the latticework of becoming.

Coeval with the ground, the steel matting both connects and separates the earth and those who stand upon it. The matting migrates, like those who walk or work upon it. The metal sheeting exists in an uneasy semiotic relationship with its environment. Is both an icon of the surface of the ground and a metonymy of it, and in my recycling of it here, a metaphor for the complex relationship between temporariness and permanency that John and I explore in this book. It is also an artefact of war, which destroys many of the relationships that language depends upon and that it seeks to illuminate. So close to nature in its intended capacity of lying layered upon the earth, but so immensely indicative of what Sebald (2004) has called ‘a natural history of destruction’, this sheet of matting is an index of the annihilation of the earth of which John and I are constantly reminded—not unlike Sebald himself, who discovers on his walk through Norfolk and Suffolk ‘traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’ (2002: 3).

I am fascinated by this material—I say it again. It exerts a powerful attractive force upon me. Inert, passive, but at the same time absolutely interactive (any one sheet of Marston matting is designed to slot into others), it also interacts with me. Like a dumb interlocutor, its perforations so many mute interrogations, it coaxes me into speech when I encounter it. An unnatural prosthesis of nature, it behaves, indeed, like any other inhabitant of the natural environment, giving me, quite literally, ground to stand upon in my own capacity as a walker and wordsmith. To the extent that it is there and calls to me, speaks with me, it gives birth to me in this particular instant and instance of my own series of temporary moments of existence.

The matting is a living entity—yes, living: it moves, it acts, it interacts, it signifies, indeed, it is also a site of feeling. It is an emblem of affect—that powerful attractive force that operates at the somatic, visceral level and connects entities, alive or half alive, human or nonhuman, to each other, in ways that cause them to change in the course of the encounter—if only then to disengage, transformed, ready to enter into a new transformative dialogue with a new interlocutor, and on and on, in an endless creative process of connections, deconnections, reconnections. The matting I have photographed is both a visual metaphor of the affect-ridden, affect-driven world we live in and an indexical manifestation of its ‘relational pull’ (Eckstein 2017) because I have been drawn to photograph it.

Yet at the same time, it is also an index of the no-less powerful forces in our world that seek to exploit, divert, pervert and destroy the immense fabric of creative relationships that make up the cosmos: war, environmental destruction, the necropolitical annihilation of humans, animals, the forests and the earth itself. These forces also exert a powerful, sinister and unsettling fascination, meaning, if nothing else, that we can never claim we are not complicit in these ubiquitous processes of destruction (Sanders 2001)—even if that uneasy knowledge founds and fuels our dogged resistance to such forces. This play of positive and negative affects means that even our moral stances, our political engagements, are not permanent places to stand, but temporary site of resistance that in this ongoing war of manoeuver must constantly be reassessed and renewed. No theory, no manifesto, no work of art, is permanent or eternally sufficient. Each of them serves a purpose for a period of time and then, as circumstances change, must be replaced by another one that is more appropriate.

That is why, in writing this book, John and I have implemented the genre of the collage of micro-essays. The book is made up of units that, not unlike the steel matting, can be combined and recombined at will with other units. We have chosen a particular sequence, but of course you can take the fabric of matting apart and put it back together in another sequence or collage as you wish. Indeed, in the process of writing, we have constantly tried out new permutations and combinations of the units making up this book, slotting them together in ever new configurations.

Similarly to the sheets of steel matting, each of the textual units is porous. The perforations reduce the weight of the steel matting. Likewise, the essay has a certain lightness that eschews monumental and the exhaustive modes of academic writing—attributes highly valued in the Germanic academic system in which I work, where the essay, according to Adorno (1991: 3-4), is a subaltern and subversive genre. This lightness arises from the fact that the essay seeks to maintain an open structure that communicates with its environment. Iconoclastically, the essay refuses the customary distance between scholarly observer and the object of commentary. It thus threatens, however discretely, a tradition of ‘science’ (‘Wissenschaft’) that legitimizes its gravitas on the basis of objectivity, that is, non-involvement with its objects of study. It’s a good century since quantum theory recognized that no scientific experiment can take place without the necessary precondition of the ‘entanglement’ of, respectively, observer, scientific instrument and the natural phenomena under investigation (Barad 2007). Yet the essay still creates a stir by virtue of its mixing of the distanced mode of academic commentary and the participatory mode of creative connection—by virtue of its contamination of academia with art.

In its very generic features, the essay is a hybrid genre, thereby advertising, performatively, the nature of its task. Adorno (1991: 14-15) identifies the essay as a genre that is inherently inimical to Descartes’ dictates about the functioning of analytical reasoning at the dawn of the modern—and beyond, right up to the present day. Analysis, for Descartes, divides the problem into a number of atomized elements that can then be addressed one by one. The principle of divide and rule in the world of polemical thought. Or the principle of the anatomy lesson, that violently takes the body apart in order to understand its workings. The essay, itself at first glance a fragment rather than a whole, does none of this, says Adorno. It addresses an issue in its entirety, in its complexity, without seeking to dissect it and thereby reduce its living, organic complexity. By the same token, it renounces any form of totality or exhaustiveness, contenting itself with the contingent, the provisional, the temporary—in other words, the only sort of encounter that can be had with a dynamic, actantial Other.

In this book, our essays, themselves dynamic entities, enter into a dialogue with one another. Within that conversation, the essays, apparently stable in their black and white adhesion on the page, are in fact transformed by the manifold and shifting connections that the intelligent and alert reader, if she listens carefully to their subterranean or submarine murmur, will hear them making among themselves. Indeed, although we have orchestrated these pieces in a certain configuration, John and I have constantly been surprised by what the micro-essays get up to among themselves when our backs are turned. Accordingly, we have been reminded, time and again, of Thoreau’s (1908: 8) words: ‘We are made to exaggerate the importance of the work we do; and yet how much is not done by us!’ We are aware that our own configuring work leaves ample space for the essays to work their own magic and weave their own connections without our help.

But that is not all. The essays seek to engage in turn with their environment, to be open to the world. One might imagine the steel latticework as a material icon or a very objective correlative of the written text—its lateral corrugations mimicking the lines on the page and the perforations the chain-like sequences of the words themselves. Conceived of thus, it is striking that in this visual simile both lines and words are staged as absences: the lines are long open grooves and the words have literally been punched out on the production line. Both are open to the air. The steel matting provides a literal visual metaphor of what Eco (1989) called ‘the open work’. Literary poesis, and by extension, intellectual creation, does not result in an autotelic, autonomous work of art or a hermetically sealed work of scholarship. Rather, from the outset it is engaged in a constant dialogue, from the smallest unit of the letter or the phoneme, with its neighbours. The visual metaphor of the steel latticework, even though it portrays an artefact that is independent and may travel, suggests a notion of creation that eschews the paradigm of Saussurean difference. Rather, it imposes a notion of interrelationship as the driving force and the underlying precondition of artistic creation and inquiring thought. Each of these essays seeks to communicate with its neighbours and could not exist alone. Each one entertains a myriad of vital connections to the earth, to the forest, to animals, to other walkers, to the wind and the clouds.

To that extent, this collage of essays stands, in the manner of a complex synecdoche, for a worldliness that we believe is the only viable mode of being for the humanities if they are to survive as part of the educational institutions of the future. This book is a plank—modular, open-ended, dialogical, contingent—in a programme for a temporal (as opposed to spiritual) humanities that has yet to be invented, but we believe to be our only chance for saying something of relevance in the era of multiple global crises that forms our dangerous Now.

RWP

Atomic Swans, Neckar River, Germany

River rising out of Black Forest is the river

you walked past and will walk past again, again,

Neckar rising and falling all the way to the Rhine

at industrial Mannheim, flowing with swan

families keeping zones, maintaining half lives

in the dip of seasonal sheddings and re-applications,

wingspread to hold warmth, to harbour

the cores of their legacies, codes we stumble

around, taking photos. And then, downriver

from Tübingen, on a train to Stuttgart,

later approaching Kirchheim, across

the waters, hook of the river, swans familiar

but different, chain of being, or reaction

against corruption of fundamentals.

Across there, summer family, Schwäne,

Gemeinschaftskernkraftwerk, GK N2

with its hybrid cooling tower suppressed

volcano eruptive as the Börse Frankfurt

doesn’t want to be, steady steady

goes the hebephrenic—broody reactor

in its oven nest reminds you of Frost’s

‘American’ ovenbird, but this can’t be enclosed

in a sonnet reactor vessel, can’t be shielded

against its wild prosody when life goes on

and on all around, cheap land for wealthier than-

usual families who don’t maintain

anxious states, who let the becquerels

wash over them in health denial.

The big flood of extra warm water

in 2004, the heating river with happy

expanding fish, the Simpsons laugh-off

at mutating presence, those drones

out of Stuttgart, the ongoing states

of warfare. Wonder if the mines in Western

Australia on stolen land stealing spirits

and unbalancing will feed its last years,

the swans’ white labours in the wastes,

the ‘historic hiking path’, the respect

a Mayor has for tradition and rites

of way, trek on to Heidelberg escorted

through the plant by ‘guard and German

shepherd’. Matrix of traversal. Swan spectres.

Wondering how people could live within

a few hundred metres of the plant, of Unit 2

itself, how? Benign as ‘Wouldn’t know anyway’,

and ‘Better dying first than lingering longer

being further away’. Quid pro quo choice

exchange not likely to rouse as much interest

as Boris Becker’s financial solvency or Bernard

Tomic’s ‘un-Australian’ statement of fact: ‘little bit bored’,

shattering a sponsor’s illusions of a too busy to

notice enculturation. Radiation gets places,

works its way in, speaks its mind. And white swans

mute and full of voice, the songs of culture pledge

benefits of plant, and company’s people-skills,

localising instillation. Benefits. Privileges.

Of ‘German Engineering’. Safe as houses.

But what do flight and song and Hölderlin

have to do with violence of matter, of a split

in the forest’s fabric, the potatoes bulging

in the fields right up to the ramparts,

tours through a ‘sterile’ environment:

clean is unseen. So who’s to watch CNN

on atomic television, or atomic rail past steam

rising or the quiet hum of plant transpiration?

These networks of empowerment, these liberations

of carbon futures, carbon credit slaughterhouse?

Incongruous change of tone, shiftback phonemes,

almost passive observation recollection

data collation—stay safe within the poem.

All these voices that make schematics, make

policy for energy to cloak the wor(l)d, to screensave

and dilate our spectres. Late day travelling

past, even in summer light with the risk

of a shower, your swans show the way,

cygnets trailing, blazing a generational

pathway; for no Reactor Birds are alone

for long, and even diminishing, register

strong—what does it mean outside

the ancient sources, the languages

that have gone into making up the grid?

And to cap it off, waste from elsewhere

arrived on a barge, a ghost-train passes

on the other side, on the far bank, shielding you?

Or—later, later—on the intercity express from Mannheim

to Frankfurt, the ball in play, everything in motion,

the Rhine enabling Biblis plant, the Rhine in role

of co-dependent, the Rhine regurgitating loops leaks

breaks quad cooling tower symmetry to placate

Unit A and Unit B pressurised water reactors,

gloriously twinned with Balakovo’s pride,

ovens warming to swan silhouettes, a Lotte

Reiniger manic design Ordnung, the Neckar

warm water merged with the Rhine warm water

fed as wedding party bliss! O, but stymied with decommission,

that slow trek towards non-existence as if it never was,

wish-fulfilment a trace in cabbage fields. But good ol’ GKN2

back up the tributary will stay hot under its collar!

True, true... Neckarwestheim is not on the railway

but from across the river you join its pseudo

symbiosis with plant, with the history

of atomic birds: Höckerschwan, Graureiher,

Bussard, Kohlmeise, Gartenbaumläufer,

and with lists keening through glass

you absorb becquerels to add to your stockpile,

weaponised psyche to expand human

consciousness, ingenuity of refusal and acceptance

gathering as the train slows at Kirchheim,

Neckar still rising out of the Black Forest far back,

as you always travel facing forward if given a choice.

These zero-sum gains in which spectral swans

are winners averting glances, GPS propositions.

JK