MUCK (Must Use Critical Knowledge) and aTE have collaborated to bring together a number of textual prompts to instigate questions around the possibility of the Earth’s recovery, the inevitability of mans’ eventual demise, connectivity, hope and isolation. Artists from around the world were invited to provide accompanying sound works reflecting on their own territories, the fantasy of other places and the exitements and restrictions of proximity and distance, prior to and beyond time of Covid 19.
LISTEN TO THE SOUNDWORKS HERE AND READ THE TEXTS BELOW>
What might the shape of global culture look like today if there were no exotic cultures to discover or faraway places to explore?
Okwui Enwezor “Intense Proximity: Concerning the Disappearance of Distance – Disorientations: Negotiating the Near and the Far,” in Intense Proximity: An Anthology of the Near and the Far – La Triennale 2012. Paris: Centre national des arts plastiques, 2012. Read more.
The present ecological mutation has organized the whole political landscape for the last thirty years. This could explain the deadly cocktail of exploding inequalities, massive deregulation, and conversion of the dream of globalization into a nightmare for most people. What holds these three phenomena together is the conviction, shared by some powerful people, that the ecological threat is real and that the only way for them to survive is to abandon any pretense at sharing a common future with the rest of the world. Hence their flight offshore and their massive investment in climate change denial. The Left has been extremely slow to turn its attention to this new situation. It is still organized along an axis that goes from investment in local values to the hope of globalization—and just at the time when, everywhere, people dissatisfied with the ideal of modernity are turning back to the protection of national or even ethnic borders.
This is why it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national. Belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge. Bringing us down to earth is the task of politics today.…
This essay uses the occasion of Donald Trump's election on November 8, 20I6, to bring together three phenom-ena that commentators have already noted but without always seeing their connection. Thus, they fail to see the immense political energy that could be generated by drawing them together. In the early I990s, right after the victory over Communism symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, just as some observers were claiming that history had run its course/ another history was surreptitiously get-ting under way. This history was initially marked by what is called "deregulation," a term that has given the word "glo-balization" an increasingly pejorative cast. The same period witnessed, everywhere at once, the start of an increasingly vertiginous explosion of inequalities. These two phenomena coincided with a third that is less often stressed: the beginning of a systematic effort to deny the existence of climate change -"climate" in the broad sense of the relations between human beings and the material conditions of their lives. This essay proposes to take these three phenomena as symptoms of a single historical situation: it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as "the elites") had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was pointless to act as though history were going to continue to move toward a common horizon, toward a world in which all humans could prosper equally. From the I98os on, the ruling classes stopped purporting to lead and began instead to shelter themselves from the world. We are experiencing all the consequences of this flight, of which Donald Trump is merely a symbol, one among others. The absence of a common world we can share is driving us crazy.
Read more from Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime by Bruno Latour.
The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.
The meadows were green, and so was the rising wheat which had been sown, but which neither had nor would receive any further care. Such arable fields as had not been sown, but where the last stubble had been ploughed up, were overrun with couch-grass, and where the short stubble had not been ploughed, the weeds hid it. So that there was no place which was not more or less green; the footpaths were the greenest of all, for such is the nature of grass where it has once been trodden on, and by-and-by, as the summer came on, the former roads were thinly covered with the grass that had spread out from the margin.
In the autumn, as the meadows were not mown, the grass withered as it stood, falling this way and that, as the wind had blown it; the seeds dropped, and the bennets became a greyish-white, or, where the docks and sorrel were thick, a brownish-red. The wheat, after it had ripened, there being no one to reap it, also remained standing, and was eaten by clouds of sparrows, rooks, and pigeons, which flocked to it and were undisturbed, feasting at their pleasure. As the winter came on, the crops were beaten down by the storms, soaked with rain, and trodden upon by herds of animals.
Next summer the prostrate straw of the preceding year was concealed by the young green wheat and barley that sprang up from the grain sown by dropping from the ears, and by quantities of docks, thistles, oxeye daisies, and similar plants. This matted mass grew up through the bleached straw. Charlock, too, hid the rotting roots in the fields under a blaze of yellow flower. The young spring meadow-grass could scarcely push its way up through the long dead grass and bennets of the year previous, but docks and thistles, sorrel, wild carrots, and nettles, found no such difficulty.
Footpaths were concealed by the second year, but roads could be traced, though as green as the sward, and were still the best for walking, because the tangled wheat and weeds, and, in the meadows, the long grass, caught the feet of those who tried to pass through. Year by year the original crops of wheat, barley, oats, and beans asserted their presence by shooting up, but in gradually diminished force, as nettles and coarser plants, such as the wild parsnips, spread out into the fields from the ditches and choked them.
Aquatic grasses from the furrows and water-carriers extended in the meadows, and, with the rushes, helped to destroy or take the place of the former sweet herbage. Meanwhile, the brambles, which grew very fast, had pushed forward their prickly runners farther and farther from the hedges till they had now reached ten or fifteen yards. The briars had followed, and the hedges had widened to three or four times their first breadth, the fields being equally contracted. Starting from all sides at once, these brambles and briars in the course of about twenty years met in the centre of the largest fields.
Hawthorn bushes sprang up among them, and, protected by the briars and thorns from grazing animals, the suckers of elm-trees rose and flourished. Sapling ashes, oaks, sycamores, and horse-chestnuts, lifted their heads. Of old time the cattle would have eaten off the seed leaves with the grass so soon as they were out of the ground, but now most of the acorns that were dropped by birds, and the keys that were wafted by the wind, twirling as they floated, took root and grew into trees. By this time the brambles and briars had choked up and blocked the former roads, which were as impassable as the fields.
No fields, indeed, remained, for where the ground was dry, the thorns, briars, brambles, and saplings already mentioned filled the space, and these thickets and the young trees had converted most part of the country into an immense forest. Where the ground was naturally moist, and the drains had become choked with willow roots, which, when confined in tubes, grow into a mass like the brush of a fox, sedges and flags and rushes covered it. Thorn bushes were there, too, but not so tall; they were hung with lichen. Besides the flags and reeds, vast quantities of the tallest cow-parsnips or "gicks" rose five or six feet high, and the willow herb with its stout stem, almost as woody as a shrub, filled every approach.
By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.
Read more of After London or Wild England by Richard Jeffries.
Ghosts of My Life by the late Mark Fisher. Fisher uses sound and music as a means to place hauntology within contemporary culture. The chapter entitled 'Stains of Place: "Always Yearning for the Time that Eluded Us" is Introduction to Laura Oldfield Ford's Savage Messiah (Verso, 2011). Fisher speaks of the liminal cityscape through the lens of Oldfield Ford's psychogeographic fanzine.
This sombre place is haunted by the sounds of lost acid house parties and the distant reverberations of1986. Test Department. 303. 808. Traces of industrial noise. The roundhouse was easy to get into, and the depot itself, disused for years is lit up with tags anddubs.You can hear these deserted places, feel the tendrils creeping across the abandoned caverns, thederelict bunkers and broken terraces. Mid summer, blistering heat under the concrete, ArmagideonTime(s), a hidden garden, to be found, and lost again.
Superficially, the obvious tag for Savage Messiah would be psychogeography, but the label makes Ford chafe, ‘I think a lot of what is called psychogeography now is just middle-class men acting like colonial explorers, showing us their discoveries and guarding their plot. I have spent the last twenty years walking around London and living here in a precarious fashion, I’ve had about fifty addresses. I think my understanding and negotiation of the city is very different to theirs.’ Rather than subsuming Savage Messiah under the increasingly played-out discourses of psychogeography, I believe it is better understood as an example of a cultural coalescence that started to become visible (and audible) at the moment when Ford began to produce the zine: hauntology. ‘The London I conjure up...is imbued with a sense of mourning,’ Ford says. ‘These are the liminal zones where the free party rave scene once illuminated the bleak swathes of marshland and industrial estates.’ So many dreams of collectivity have died in neoliberal London. A new kind of human being was supposed to live here, but that all had to be cleared away so that the restoration could begin. Haunting is about a staining of place with particularly intense moments of time, and, like David Peace, with whom her work shares a number of affinities, Ford is alive to the poetry of dates. 1979, 1981, 2013: these years recur throughout Savage Messiah, moments of transition and threshold, moments when a whole alternative time-track opens. 2013 has a post-apocalyptic quality (in addition to being the year of the London Olympics, 2012 is also, according to some, the year that the Mayans predicted for the end ofthe world). But 2013 could also be Year Zero: the reversal of 1979, the time when all the cheated hopesand missed chances are finally realised. Savage Messiah invites us to see the contours of another world inthe gaps and cracks of an occupied London:
Perhaps it is here that the space can be opened up to forge a collective resistance to this neo liberal expansion, to the endless proliferation of banalities and the homogenising effects of globalisation. Herein the burnt out shopping arcades, the boarded up precincts, the lost citadels of consumerism onemight find the truth, new territories might be opened, there might be a rupturing of this collective amnesia.
Read more here.
‘The home is not first of all experienced as “equipment.” Home is an “inside space” to which I retire after work and thus can be interpreted as an “implement”, much as the hammer or pen is an implement. The home protects me from rain and sleet. Yet home is not an end in the ultimate sense; it is the beginning. The privileged place of home is that it is the condition of possibility for life and action. We engage the world and live life out of a home, out of interiority. We do not “constitute” objects a priori, we recognize home as having dwelt in it as concrete being. In other words, we are only able to represent or conceptualize home as an implement by the already concrete experience of dwelling, and this dwelling marks the interiority produced in enjoyment. Thus, thinking about the world presupposes dwelling, the separation of the self from the elements and the recollection of the elements in the intimacy of the home. This recollection “designates a suspension of immediate reactions the world solicits in view of a greater attention to oneself, one’s possibilities, and situation” (Levinas, 1969, p. 154). Recollection produces distance between me and that which I recall.’
Read more Friendship Otherwise - Toward a Levinasian Description of Personal Friendship - by Jack Marsh
The outlines of this particular disaster are familiar. At 5:12 in the morning on April 18, 1906, about a minute of seismic shaking tore up San Francisco, toppling buildings, particularly those on landfill and swampy ground, cracking and shifting others, collapsing chimneys, breaking water mains and gas lines, twisting streetcar tracks, even tipping headstones in the cemeteries. It was a major earthquake, centered right off the coast of the peninsular city, and the damage it did was considerable. Afterward came the fires, both those caused by broken gas mains and chimneys and those caused and augmented by the misguided policy of trying to blast firebreaks ahead of the flames and preventing citizens from firefighting in their own homes and neighborhoods. The way the authorities handled the fires was a major reason why so much of the city — nearly five square miles, more than twenty-eight thousand structures — was incinerated in one of history's biggest urban infernos before aerial warfare. Nearly every municipal building was destroyed, and so were many of the downtown businesses, along with mansions, slums, middle-class neighborhoods, the dense residential-commercial district of Chinatown, newspaper offices, and warehouses.
Rea More from Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell.
The rest of the furniture of the cavern consisted of piles of leaves, fragments of bark, and a white filmy substance, resembling the inner part of the green hood which shelters the grain of the unripe Indian corn. We were fatigued by our struggles to attain this point, and seated ourselves on the rocky couch, while the sounds of tinkling sheep-bells, and shout of shepherd-boy, reached us from above.
At length my friend, who had taken up some of the leaves strewed about, exclaimed, "This is the Sibyl's cave; these are Sibylline leaves." On examination, we found that all the leaves, bark, and other substances, were traced with written characters. What appeared to us more astonishing, was that these writings were expressed in various languages: some unknown to my companion, ancient Chaldee, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, old as the Pyramids. Stranger still, some were in modern dialects, English and Italian. We could make out little by the dim light, but they seemed to contain prophecies, detailed relations of events but lately passed; names, now well known, but of modern date; and often exclamations of exultation or woe, of victory or defeat, were traced on their thin scant pages. This was certainly the Sibyl's Cave; not indeed exactly as Virgil describes it, but the whole of this land had been so convulsed by earthquake and volcano, that the change was not wonderful, though the traces of ruin were effaced by time; and we probably owed the preservation of these leaves, to the accident which had closed the mouth of the cavern, and the swift-growing vegetation which had rendered its sole opening impervious to the storm. We made a hasty selection of such of the leaves, whose writing one at least of us could understand; and then, laden with our treasure, we bade adieu to the dim hypaethric cavern, and after much difficulty succeeded in rejoining our guides.
During our stay at Naples, we often returned to this cave, sometimes alone, skimming the sun-lit sea, and each time added to our store. Since that period, whenever the world's circumstance has not imperiously called me away, or the temper of my mind impeded such study, I have been employed in deciphering these sacred remains. Their meaning, wondrous and eloquent, has often repaid my toil, soothing me in sorrow, and exciting my imagination to daring flights, through the immensity of nature and the mind of man. For awhile my labours were not solitary; but that time is gone; and, with the selected and matchless companion of my toils, their dearest reward is also lost to me—
Di mie tenere frondi altro lavoro
Credea mostrarte; e qual fero pianeta
Ne' nvidio insieme, o mio nobil tesoro?
Read more from The Last Man Mary Shelley 1826.
The village stretched beside the western border of town. Once upon a time, there were cottages here, gardens, fruit orchards, and the summer residences of city officials and factory administrators. There were lovely green spaces, small lakes with clean sandy banks, trans- parent birch groves, and ponds stocked with carp. The factory stench and acrid factory smoke never reached here, although neither did the city sewer system. Now, everything was deserted and abandoned, and throughout the drive they only saw one occupied house—the curtained window was yellow with light, rain-soaked laundry hung on the line, and a giant dog had rushed out of the yard, barking furiously, and chased the car in the clouds of dirt thrown up by the wheels.
Redrick carefully drove over another old crooked bridge, and, when the turn to the western highway appeared ahead, stopped the car and turned off the engine. He climbed out onto the road, without look- ing at Burbridge, and walked forward, shivering and stuffing his hands into his damp jumpsuit pockets. It was now light out. The world was wet, quiet, and sleepy. He reached the highway and cautiously looked out from behind the bushes. From here, it was easy to see the police outpost: a little trailer on wheels, three windows shining with light, and smoke rising from the tall narrow chimney. A patrol car was parked nearby, with no one inside. For some time Redrick stood there and watched. The outpost was completely still; the patrols were prob- ably cold and weary from the night’s vigil and were now warming up in their trailer—nodding off, with cigarettes stuck to their lower lips.
“Toads,” Redrick said quietly.
Read more from Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky 1972.
I was under the stairs when I decided to walk. In that moment, I hadn’t carefully considered walking 630 miles with a rucksack on my back, I hadn’t thought about how I could afford to do it, or that I’d be wild camping for nearly one hundred nights, or what I’d do afterwards. I hadn’t told my partner of thirty-two years that he was coming with me.
Only minutes earlier hiding under the stairs had seemed a good option. The men in black began hammering on the door at 9 a.m., but we weren’t ready. We weren’t ready to let go. I needed more time: just another hour, another week, another lifetime. There would never be enough time. So we crouched together under the stairs, pressed together, whispering like scared mice, like naughty children, waiting to be found.
The bailiffs moved to the back of the house, banging on the windows, trying all the catches, looking for a way in. I could hear one of them climbing on to the garden bench, pushing at the kitchen skylight, shouting. It was then that I spotted the book in a packing box. I’d read Five Hundred Mile Walkies in my twenties, the story of a man who walked the South West Coast Path with his dog. Moth was squeezed in next to me, his head on his knees, his arms wrapped around in self-defence, and pain, and fear, and anger. Above all anger. Life had picked up every piece of ammunition possible and hurled it at him full force, in what had been three years of endless battle. He was exhausted with anger. I put my hand on his hair. I’d stroked that hair when it was long and blond, full of sea salt, heather and youth; brown and shorter full of building plaster and the kid’s play dough; and now silver, thinner, full of the dust of our life.
I’d met this man when I was eighteen; I was now fifty. We’d rebuilt this ruined farm together, restoring every wall, every stone, growing vegetables and hens and two children, creating a barn for visitors to share our lives and pay the bills. And now, when we walked out of that door, it would all be behind us, everything behind us, over, finished, done.
‘We could just walk.’ It was a ridiculous thing to say, but I said it anyway.
Read longer extract from The Salt Path, Raynor Winn.