Category: Volume 33 – Number 1 – September 2022

Michaela Büsse (bio)

Abstract

This essay discusses the author’s experience doing field work in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, and suggests that the messy entanglements between sand mining, real estate development, and local life afford an analysis that is both situated in and attentive to the global economies of sand. Thinking along the ecological, social, economic, and political dimensions of shifting sands not only challenges systematic analysis; it also affects how we conceive of ourselves as researchers and the responsibility that comes with doing research.

Situating this Contribution

In 2018, I participated in a research residency organized by the Goethe Institute, Museum of Contemporary Arts and Design in Manila, and NTU Centre for Contemporary Arts in Singapore.¹ Titled “Nature and Urbanity: Acts of Life,” the residency explored the entanglements between nature and urbanity. Over the period of one month, split among Manila, Singapore, and numerous field visits, fifteen other residents and I tackled questions such as “What is the impact of technology on the urban and natural environment?” and “How has technological development affected both the visual arts and what it means to be human?” The residency marked my first stay in Southeast Asia and was a crucial experience in the formation of my multi-year research project on the material politics of land reclamation.

Upon arrival in Manila, my theoretically-informed research interests were challenged by my experience of being in this megacity, witnessing its ongoing violent transformation and attuning myself to the material processes on site—specifically, the contested nature of sand mining and trading. The local curator often joked that my systematic mode of thinking, the static camera frames I seem to prefer, and my desire for an orderly everyday life (crossing the street without the feeling of danger, for instance) were “so Western.” She predicted that once we reached our second destination, Singapore, I would feel “at home” again. She was right. I must admit, never did I feel so German (or Western if you will) as during this residency. Escaping the hectic life of Manila and venturing into the manicured island that is Singapore, I felt a relief that was also a revelation. This experience of alienation—observing oneself from the outside, or at least to the extent that this is possible—allowed me to question the assumptions I had not recognized before.

The often alarming situations with which I was confronted while visiting mining and construction sites and talking to people involved in or affected by reclamation processes transformed the abstract concepts of which I was aware before my field trips. This experience was important, but also made me question my role as an observer of and potential intruder into the livelihoods of others. I am deeply grateful for the trust and the openness with which I was welcomed and to everyone who generously shared their stories with me. While these personal encounters have been essential for my research project, I resist portraying individuals and their struggles, focusing instead on the socioeconomic and political processes with which these struggles are entangled.

The fieldwork has taught me many things. First and foremost, it taught me about my responsibility as a researcher not to cement narratives of exploitation and victimhood, thereby denying others agency. While I am not neglecting the power asymmetries at play, or my own privileged position, I choose to highlight those encounters that I perceived as hopeful. In conjunction with dominant global structures of power, other lifeworlds flourish, enabled by them, in resistance against them, or in cooperation with them. In her research on resource extraction, anthropologist Macarena Gómez-Barris notes: “if we only track the purview of power’s destruction and death force, we are forever analytically imprisoned to reproducing a totalizing viewpoint that ignores life that is unbridled and finds forms of resisting and living alternatively” (3). Inspired by what she refers to as a “decolonial queer and femme episteme and methodology” (9), the selected vignette from my fieldwork is an invitation to engage with the ambiguous and situated nature of sand mining and land reclamation in the Mekong Delta.

Thinking with and through Sand

Sand, next to water, is the second most-used resource in the world (Peduzzi). It makes for seventy-nine percent of all aggregates extracted and traded every year, providing the building ground for human infrastructure around the world (Torres et al.). In the form of glass, steel, concrete, and most fundamentally, land, sand is the main ingredient of urbanization. Different kinds of processing result in different kinds of material: coarse sand for construction, medium-sized grains for reclamation, fine-grained sand for building mass. The granular nature of sand enables its smooth processing, whether transported in bags, via trucks, through pipes, or via ships. As a so-called common-pool resource (Torres et al.), sand is considered “free” and thus cheap to extract. Only its procurement and transport produce costs, which is why sand is usually extracted in the vicinity of its processing site (Lamb et al.). Furthermore, sand is constantly moving via the forces of wind and water, making it nearly impossible to quantify and regulate ownership. Mined more than any other material, it is surprising that there are only sparse records of the exact number of aggregates extracted every year. Rapid urbanization, especially in Southeast Asia and Central Asia, and the development of large-scale flood protection infrastructure are projected to lead to a steadily rising demand (Torres et al.).

The huge consumption of sand and its fundamental role in society have only recently gained attention. Numerous journalistic (Beiser) and scientific accounts warn of the “looming tragedy of the sand commons” (Torres et al.) as well as of environmental concerns related to dredging and mining such as pollution, biodiversity degradation, and soil disturbance (Bendixen et al.; Larson), and illicit practices associated with the trading of sand (Magliocca et al.). The reality of sand mining is both dirty and messy. Legal and illegal activity are closely related to national and transnational politics. The exploitation of sand goes hand in hand with exploitative labor and environmental abuse. Furthermore, the creation of artificial land is as much an engineering effort as it is a political project, ensuring progress and economic growth above all. These messy realities often conflate climate change mitigation, real estate development, and speculation and cannot be navigated in any systematic manner.

In the context of this research, sand acts as an “interscalar vehicle” that allows me to make connections between scales of activity that are usually thought of as separate (Hecht). According to anthropologist Gabrielle Hecht, “[w]hat makes something an interscalar vehicle is not its essence but its deployment and uptake, its potential to make political claims, craft social relationships, or simply open our imaginations” (115). Such a nonscalable, partial account attempts to avoid determinism when describing phenomena (Tsing, “Nonscalability”). Instead, the emphasis is placed on situated and nonlinear narratives that traverse historical facts, cultural significance, geological specificity, and economic and political forces alike.

The “global assemblage” (Collier) of sand is constituted by the uneven and at times contradictory forces through which extractive capitalism unfolds and by which it is challenged. Political scientist Stephen Collier writes that “global assemblages are the actual configurations through which global forms of techno-science, economic rationalism, and other expert systems gain significance” (400). They persist across multiple social and cultural settings and transgress dichotomies of local and global. In the introduction to their edited volume on global assemblages, Collier and anthropologist Aihwa Ong point out that the composite concept “suggests inherent tensions: global implies broadly encompassing, seamless, and mobile; assemblage implies heterogeneous, contingent, unstable, partial, and situated” (12). Global assemblages therefore allow us to problematize entangled processes across different scales, bodies, and geographies.

By bringing together Hecht’s material analytics with Ong and Collier’s analysis of the dynamics of global processes, I attempt to provide a perspective attentive to the specificities of place and their role within the economy of sand. Heather Swanson, Anna Tsing, Nils Bubandt, and Elaine Gan write that “somehow, in the midst of ruins, we must maintain enough curiosity to notice the strange and wonderful as well as the terrible and terrifying” (M7), suggesting that an ethnographic attentiveness is required both to challenge extractivism and to cultivate curiosity for the world around us. Emphasizing sand’s shifting state, physically and symbolically, allows us to see dominant structures and alternative openings in conjunction, not as mutually exclusive but entangled.

By visiting mines, reclamation sites, planning departments, and engineering labs, I have gained the important insight that there exists no strict separation between registers of activity. Political ambitions and economic desires often guide extraction and development, but histories, geographies, and material activity pay their respective tolls. This messiness can never be fully captured or represented, but there are ways to engage inherent frictions that resemble stories rather than theories.

Figs 1-2. Aerial view of a dredging site on the Mekong River close to Sa Đéc. Film still, Michaela Büsse and Konstantin Mitrokhov, 2019.

Ends and Beginnings in the Mekong Delta

The Mekong Delta in the South of Vietnam is not only the third largest river delta in the world but also a notorious site for illegal sand mining activities (Jordan et al.; Bravard et al.). A delta is an intertidal zone where a river reaches the sea and therefore salt and freshwater intermingle. It is a highly dynamic environment influenced both by seaborne and landborne processes: changes in sea level and river load, storms, floods, and erosion (Welland 97). Sand in the delta has been mined for centuries and exported to Singapore where it was—and, some claim, still is (Global Witness)—utilized as fill material to extend the city-state’s national territory. Since the early 2000s, stimulated by its economic growth, Vietnam began to invest in its own infrastructural development (Bravard et al.). It does so with the help of Dutch engineers for whom Vietnam, especially the low-lying delta, is a promising overseas market.

The Mekong River originates in Tibet and flows through China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Cambodia until it eventually enters the ocean in Vietnam. The delta extends over an area of forty thousand kilometers (Biggs and Cronon) where the river branches into several arms crisscrossing the landscape, making it into one of the most fertile grounds in the country but also highly prone to flooding and groundwater salinization. Locals also speak of the Mekong Delta as Nine Dragons (Cửu Long), referring to the number of its entry points into the South China Sea. However, this description fits the morphology of the Mekong Delta of about 1910. Since then, erosion, siltation, and flooding have altered the course of the Mekong and the number of its mouths.

Sand dredging happens all along the Mekong, but the delta sees an especially high number of legal and illegal dredging operations because of its proximity to the sea and thus to the international market (Jordan et al.). While in some parts of the delta sand is being dug away in the secrecy of the night and sold at high prices to middlemen in Singapore (Global Witness), dredging boats operating just a few meters away might supply one of Vietnam’s official reclamation sites, at lower prices but driven by the promise of progress (Bravard et al.). Fueled by these simultaneous processes, the delta is steadily sinking, floods are occurring more frequently and livelihoods of the local communities are endangered. Both Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia officially banned the export of sand in 2009, but illegal trade continues to flourish (Nga; Nguyen and Pearson; Anh). Most of Vietnam’s sand resources have ended up in Singapore (Tuoi Tre News).²

In their 2010 report Shifting Sand, NGO Global Witness revealed the corrupt nature of sand trading between Cambodia and Singapore. They particularly emphasize the mismatch between import and export in both countries, obscuring illegal practices and amounting to many times higher extraction than officially reported. There is no comparable report for Vietnam, but because of its geographical proximity and centuries of reported sand trade with Singapore, it can be assumed that Singapore’s growth had its toll on the delta. In more recent years, high demand for internal development and construction fuels ever more sand extraction (Bravard et al.). As a result of Vietnam’s economic growth, and as a means for further growth, the demand for infrastructure development rises. The resulting ecological and social implications are not to be taken lightly. While it is the specific morphology of the Mekong that accumulates plenty of sand and turns it into a paradise for miners, mining accelerates flooding in the low-lying intertidal zone (Jordan et al.). Intensified human use of the land, that is, the building of bridges, roads, and residential and commercial structures, further restrains the movement of matter. The Mekong Delta is thus steadily sinking while at the same time the sea level is rising. It is projected that the delta will be regularly flooded by 2050 (Kulp and Strauss).

In Cần Thơ alone, a tourist hub in the Mekong Delta, almost twenty thousand people fear displacement because their houses are in danger of collapse (Vietnam News Agency, “Over”). After several years of eroding land, collapsing houses, and forced displacement, the government initiated the development of a warning system based on remote sensing (Vietnam News Agency, “Remote”). Still, repair work is slow, and ironically sandbags are deployed to fortify the riverbank. News reports of the silent disappearance of several strips of land frequently appear in the press (Nguyen and Pearson). There is also continuous reporting of illegal miners who come at night and disappear in the morning (Reed). As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing regulations the situation has worsened, as miners could operate their business without getting spotted (Nga). Locals also suggest that it is the involvement of politicians in mining activities that leads to little or no prosecution at all (L. Hoang). Thus, they are resolved to fight sand extraction themselves by organizing night patrols and building weapons such as slingshots with which to hit intruders with stones and bricks (N. Hoang). While some resist sand extraction, others join forces with sand buyers. The high demand for sand in Southeast Asia makes the mining business much more lucrative than tourism or farming—the primary sources of income in the Mekong Delta (Anh).

On my visit to the region, I encountered multiple dredging boats spread across a section of only a few kilometers. According to my local host, Yennie Nguyễn, sand dredging is so omnipresent that people do not even notice it anymore.³ The constant humming in the air has become a background noise as consistent as the smoke ascending from the kiln in her neighborhood—pottery-making is the specialty of this region. Yennie knows from reports in the press that the Mekong Delta is projected to sink rapidly, and she knows the shores are eroding. In fact, the bank across from her house on the other side of the river is eroding. She also knows about neighboring villages and their initiatives to stop illegal sand mining. Still, she returned to her home in Vĩnh Long after finishing university in Ho Chi Minh City to open a homestay at her parents’ place. Tourism in the Mekong Delta almost exclusively relies on this form of accommodation, which is also supposed to give visitors the authentic experience of staying with a Vietnamese family. Her family’s existence depends on this business and the business depends on Yennie. She taught herself English by watching TV. Pottery designed by her mother lends her homestay a special touch. Yenie was excited when I told her about my project, because she hopes someone will put a halt to sand exploitation. She feels she does not have any agency to bring about change herself. Instead of leaving the region and looking for a life elsewhere, she did what felt most obvious: join the tourist industry and contribute to the continuous urbanization of the delta. I feel very conflicted when I meet people like Yennie because of the asymmetries that brought us together. My research signals to them international awareness and raises hope that there will be pressure on the government to stop the mining and selling of sand. At the same time, the livelihoods of Yennie and her family are already intertwined with these practices, posing the need for much more complex solutions than just stopping the mining.

On the day I left Vĩnh Long, Yennie arranges a skipper to bring me upriver to Sa Đéc. I chose this route because a geological survey indicates that this section of the river features heavy dredging activities (Jordan et al.). The river curves sharply approximately halfway along—a promising sign that sand will settle here. And in fact, once I reached the curve, there were so many dredging boats and sand storage vessels that I could hardly count them. The dredgers operate in small teams; one person runs the machine, while one or two others arrange the excavated sand in a pyramid shape, flattening the sides with shovels or by walking up and down the slopes. They use stationary dredgers attached to a floating platform with a grab head that can be released all the way down to the riverbed. When the dredger pulls the head out of the water, sand pours out of the slits in the grab head, lowering the effective volume of sand extracted and causing turbulence in the water. As a result, the water is brown, and patches of seagrass float atop the river.

Most of the dredgers seem to leave their boats rarely. They work and live on their vessels that hold both the platform for the dredging machine and a shed for themselves. Some even keep plants on the boat. On other boats, I observed colorful laundry hanging on clotheslines stretched around the shed. Business requires them to stay mobile, able to follow the river to wherever sand deposits occur. It is unlikely that these are the men who make big money with sand. Like Yennie, they are just trying to make a living off the Mekong Delta, and the steady demand for sand secures their jobs. Those who extract illegally usually work under the cover of night and sell abroad at much higher prices. Both activities cause equal trouble but on different fronts. Legal or illegal are concepts to which sand is oblivious, that only matter in relation to the consequences extraction has on people in the region and Vietnam’s economy. Unregistered sand deprives Vietnam of potential revenue, draining the country of sand and thus of money (Global Witness).

Figs 3-4. Dredgers operating on the Mekong River. Film still, Michaela Büsse and Konstantin Mitrokhov, 2019.

The dredgers I encountered most likely supply sand for Vietnam’s own reclamation projects such as those in Ho Chi Minh City, the country’s largest city both in population and size, located at the gate to the Mekong Delta. In 2011, the Vietnamese and Dutch governments initiated a strategic alliance that would help redesign Ho Chi Minh City’s waterfront based on the example of Rotterdam. The homepage of the Vietnam Climate Adaptation Partnership (VCAPS) says: “The VCAPS consortium offers process management, advice on key issues and part of the outputs. In addition, the project provides possibilities for knowledge transfer and business development” (VCAPS Consortium, “Ho Chi Minh City”).⁴ The alliance focuses on the similarity between the two cities—port cities located in deltas—leaving largely untouched the significant differences between their political systems and living conditions. The climate adaptation strategy developed as part of the alliance copies many features of Rotterdam’s urban design strategy in order to promise not only a safe but also prosperous future for Ho Chi Minh City (VCAPS Consortium, Climate).

As is the case in Rotterdam, Ho Chi Minh City will move its harbors outside the city center and towards the sea. This way, precious space will be freed for development. One of the recently cleared spaces includes Thủ Thiêm, a 647-hectare peninsula on the Saigon River across from the historic center of Ho Chi Minh City. Service workers with day jobs in the historic center used to live here amidst swamps and farmland (Yarina). In the early 2000s, Thủ Thiêm was drained in order to relocate the Central Business District away from the overcrowded District 1 and to a more presentable site—Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area. This “forgotten” piece of land, as it is described by urban researchers, had a central role to play in supporting the historic center, yet it was not recognized as urban (Phu Cuong et al.).

In the Netherlands, waterfronts are seen as prime locations for commercial development, but Ho Chi Minh City, according to the consultants, was not yet leveraging this potential:

The city’s river banks have a potential to contribute to the attractiveness of the city. In many metropolitan cities river fronts are the most attractive public spaces offering recreational areas to stroll and enjoy river views. River panoramas also often include bridges which can serve as icons for the city. At some locations in HCMC today, river fronts already offer great views over the Saigon and Nha Be rivers but this potential largely remains undeveloped. The river system currently contributes very little to a positive image of the city. Public access to the river is often blocked due to private property and motorways, and in some areas slums and unofficial housing make waterfronts unattractive places to spend time. To transform high quality river front areas into accessible public spaces will require appropriate city planning and support from key stakeholders and local communities.

(VCAPS Consortium, Climate 40)

From the Dutch point of view, the peninsula, understood as undeveloped land, thus offers opportunities to combine flood protection with commercial and residential facilities: seemingly a win-win solution. To this end, an already existing plan for Thủ Thiêm was reworked into a “future landmark” that combines sustainability, multifunctional usage, and iconic design (Sasaki Associates). The vision statement of the climate adaptation strategy gives an outlook of the imagined future of the site and its inhabitants:

The year is 2100 and Ho Chi Minh City has become a true metropolis. Its pleasant living environment has throughout the century attracted a multitude of multinationals, talented people and investments. This is a great achievement considering the huge competition that exists between cities in the region. Providing a safe and pleasant environment proved to be of key importance in the 21st century, as natural threats from climate change had an ever-increasing impact on coastal and delta cities. Not the strongest cities of the 20th century have had most success in the 21st century. It was the cities best capable to adapt to changing circumstances that have become the most livable with vibrant economies.

(VCAPS Consortium, Climate 5)

Figs 5-6. Aerial view Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area in Ho Chi Minh City. Film still, Michaela Büsse and Konstantin Mitrokhov, 2019.

Silent Resistance

Construction at Thủ Thiêm started in 2005 and has so far included the building of three bridges linking the east, north, and the historic center of Ho Chi Minh City. In preparation for my visit, and because I need a geolocated site to use Grab, the local driving app, I browsed Google Maps for a promising location. A quick glance at the map revealed several sites already occupied by projects such as Eco Smart City, Empire City Viet Nam, The Metropole, or Lake View. The picture selection for these entries features a mix of renders and impressions from construction sites, making it difficult to assess whether these sites do in fact exist physically. But their existence as digital landmarks fulfilled my purpose. Their virtual presence in the form of a geotag on Google Maps allowed me to navigate the space—a space that I otherwise would not have been able to address through the interface of Grab. I randomly chose Lake View as my destination.

As I entered the peninsula via the linkage at District 1, I was astonished to see such a vast plot of untouched land just across from the buzzing downtown area. Having been slightly overwhelmed by the intensity of the city center—like Manila, Ho Chi Minh City is way too busy for me—I caught myself feeling relieved because of the openness of the space. The driver took me along perfectly straight and smooth streets that were surprisingly big and uncrowded. Construction sites popped up here and there, but there was nothing to be found that would resemble one of the buildings from the rendered pictures. When we approached Lake View, a problem occurred: our car was not able to access any of the junctions that were supposed to lead to the development sites. They were blocked by barricades. I decided to hop out of the car and explore the area on foot. I spotted several people hanging out on their scooters on the other side of the barricades, which assured me that there was no immediate trouble to be expected from crossing the barricades. On the other side of the fence, a network of streets unfolded, intersecting each other orthogonally and by doing so framing perfectly square parcels of land. Some of the squares were swampy, others completely dry. In Sasaki’s master plan I found that the parceling of land selects some parts to be used for development while others become strategic watersheds (Sasaki Associates). The open system they promote transforms the irregular form of the peninsula into a grid, a structure that seems to provide easier management. On the parcel where I expected Lake View to be, I did not find a construction site. Instead, I discovered a group of locals, mostly middle-aged men, gathered to fly dragon-shaped kites. They were not alone. On the corner between two streets, I spotted some mobile food vendors selling lemongrass juice and colorful sweets to teenagers equipped with kites. At a crossing further along the street, another vendor sold kites. I was at an informal gathering for kite enthusiasts.

As I curiously walked between the parcels, the site started to get busy. Entire families arrived, each squeezed together on a single scooter, and more men of all ages arrived with their kites on the backseat. More and more street vendors rushed by to cater to the crowd, announcing their presence by honking and shouting. It soon became noisier and more hectic, also because younger people who joined the gathering started to play music from their phones. Taken by this sudden change of scenery and the feeling that something special was unfolding around me, I decided to buy a lemongrass juice, walked around, and observed the kiters. Next to me, five men were busy trying to lift a huge kite into the air. Three of them were holding the kite while one started running, pulling the string attached to the kite, and the last one shouted something that I interpreted as commands for the runner. They failed at first, but when they managed to lift the kite into the sky everyone applauded. Children jumped across the street in excitement and teenagers posed casually for selfies with the flying kites in the background. A crowd of youngsters slurping colorful drinks observed me suspiciously while I observed them. One of them casually held a kite while the others browsed their phones and discussed funny clips they found on the Internet. I felt a bit like an intruder, because no one there spoke my language, nor did I speak theirs, and there was not a single tourist around. And while the spot cannot be a secret—there are numerous Instagram posts of the event—none of my local interlocutors mentioned the site as worthy of a visit.

Lacking the right words to put this surprising experience into language, I resort to calling it magical. Amidst the barren land and a grid of streets that led to what is to become an opera house, a convention center, a marina complex, and a sports stadium, locals were embracing the opportunity to enjoy themselves and the open space. The colorful kites stood in stark relief to the cleared land with its empty streets; they brought back a sense of vibrancy that must have resided here once but is no more. At the same time, the playfulness of the scenery carried a hopeful connotation.

As darkness fell, I tried to find my way back to one of the locatable spots on the map on the other side of the fenced area. Walking towards the main street, I passed by the construction site for The Metropole. Not much was to be found there aside from a poster promoting the project with the catchy slogan, “Tomorrow’s dreams today.” Whose dreams these are becomes obvious when looking at the project’s homepage. SonKim Land, awarded Best Boutique Developer in Vietnam, operates in the high-end real estate market, describing its clients as having “a strong financial background, aesthetic taste and personality” (SaigonRealty). Who exactly these clients are remains to be seen, but SonKim Land, Sasaki, and the climate adaptation strategy agree who are not their clients—the informal community that previously lived here. Maybe there is nothing special about people flying kites on a reclamation site in the middle of Ho Chi Minh City, but to me this informal gathering felt very special. Once the land has been settled, the barricades removed, and development continues, the kiters will be gone, too. Thus, flying their kites could be interpreted as a silent and peaceful form of protest, an act of temporarily reclaiming the space before others will claim it as Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area. I am grateful for this accidental encounter, because it makes me believe that despite the repeating patterns of domination, people continue to inhabit the cracks, if only for a short time.

Figs 7-8. Kiters on the construction site of Thủ Thiêm New Urban Area. Film still, Michaela Büsse and Konstantin Mitrokhov, 2019.

Conclusion

My fieldwork in the Mekong Delta describes the complex simultaneity of gain and loss, development and exploitation, and human and non-human processes. It shows the persistence of dominant forms of urban design across geographies, yet elucidates the specificities of each site and their importance for place-making. Whereas land reclamation projects are driven by economic ambitions first and foremost, an emphasis on their specific histories and continuous material transformations provides ground to imagine lifeworlds differently. Tracing the flows of sand alerted me to instances that are easily overseen because they do not fit neat descriptions. Instead, the messiness of sociomaterial practices affords an analysis that focuses not only on extractive dimensions but also on contingencies, ruptures, and alternative openings (Tsing, Mushroom). Maybe it is in these temporary openings that we can locate transgression, and as Isabelle Stengers suggests, “slow down” reasoning. “How can I present a proposal intended not to say what is,” she asks, “or what ought to be, but to provoke thought; one that requires no other verification than the way in which it is able to ‘slow down’ reasoning and create an opportunity to arouse a slightly different awareness of the problems and situations mobilizing us?” (994).

Sand’s ambiguous nature provides the backdrop that these stories and histories unfold upon, against, and through. And it is apparent that my encounters are only snapshots of a process continuously doing and undoing itself. As sand is shifting, so is the political climate. Rising sea levels will accelerate decomposition, rendering ephemeral the imaginaries attached to reclaimed land. While some will continue to fight this realization, others will be more pragmatic and inhabit the cracks. These relationships are not even, yet they are contingent in such a way that pinning them down to either/or is reductive. They exist with and at the expense of each other, their lifeworlds entangled, stretching beyond clear-cut separations.

Michaela Büsse is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden working with the Chair of Digital Cultures, and Associated Investigator in the cluster of excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on sociomaterial transformations in the context of speculative urbanism, climate change mitigation, and energy transition. Drawing on elemental anthropology as well as feminist science and technology studies, she investigates how design practices and technologies govern environments and define who and what is rendered inhuman. Michaela’s interdisciplinary practice is research-led and involves filming, editorial, and curatorial work.

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• Reed, John. “The Mekong Delta: An Unsettling Portrait of Coastal Collapse.” Financial Times, 5 Jan. 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/31bf27a4-1c0e-11ea-9186-7348c2f183af.
• SaigonRealty. “The Metropole.” SaigonRealty, 22 Oct. 2021, https://saigonrealty.net/themetropole/.
• Sasaki Associates. “Thu Thiem New Urban Area.” Sasaki, 2022, https://www.sasaki.com/projects/thu-thiem-new-urban-area/.
• Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Translated by Robert Bononno. U of Minnesota P, 2010.
• Subramanian, Samantha. “How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself.” The New York Times, 20 April 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/magazine/how-singapore-is-creating-more-land-for-itself.html.
• Swanson, Heather, et al. “Bodies Tumbled into Bodies.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, et al., U of Minnesota P, 2017.
• Torres, Aurora, et al. “A Looming Tragedy of the Sand Commons.” Science, vol. 357, no. 6355, 8 Sept. 2017, pp. 970–71.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton University Press, 2015.
• ———. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales.” Common Knowledge, vol. 18, no. 3, 2012, pp. 505–24. Duke UP.
• Tuoi Tre News. “Tracing Vietnamese ‘Sand Drain’ to Singapore –P1: Where Do the Ships Go?” Tuoi Tre News, 2 March 2017, https://tuoitrenews.vn/news/features/20170302/tracing-vietnamese-‘sand-drain’-to-singapore—p1-where-do-the-ships-go/18247.html.
• VCAPS Consortium. Climate Adaptation Strategy Ho Chi Minh City. Moving towards the Sea with Climate Change Adaptation. Vietnam Climate Adaptation PartnerShip, 2013.
• ———. “Ho Chi Minh City Moving towards the Sea with Climate Change Adaptation.” Vietnam Climate Adaptation Partnership, 2021, http://www.vcaps.org/en/.
• Vietnam News Agency. “Over 18,400 People Need to Be Relocated in Can Tho Due to Erosion Risks.” VietnamPlus, 8 September 2018, https://en.vietnamplus.vn/over-18400-people-need-to-be-relocated-in-can-tho-due-to-erosion-risks/137854.vnp.
• ———. “Remote Sensing Applied to Monitor Erosion in Mekong Delta.” VietnamPlus, 14 December 2021, https://en.vietnamplus.vn/remote-sensing-applied-to-monitor-erosion-in-mekong-delta/218113.vnp.
• Welland, Michael. Sand: The Never-Ending Story. U of California P, 2009.
• Yarina, Lizzie. “Your Sea Wall Won’t Save You.” Places Journal, March 2018.

Footnotes

1. The residency has been documented online at https://www.goethe.de/prj/aol/en/index.html.

2. Singapore’s rather questionable sand policy has been the focus of many investigations and inquiries by activists and journalists. See Global Witness; Milton; Subramanian.

3. Yennie Nguyễn and her mother operate a small homestay business in Vĩnh Long, right next to the Mekong River and a couple of local dredging sites. During my stay I had several informal conversations with her about my research project and she was incredibly supportive and welcoming. I am very grateful for her hospitality and for the many little favors that eased the logistics of travelling the Mekong Delta off the beaten track.

4. As of August 18, 2022, the homepage of VCAPS is no longer accessible.

Mareike Winchell (bio)

Abstract

The boundaries of fieldwork not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility. This essay proposes a return to the whereness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. Linking classic critiques of social science’s mapping of nature and culture, of the authors and subjects of research, to contemporary debates about the ethics of field research and anthropology’s complicity with colonial systems of rule, it offers a reappraisal of the field as a ground from which to build new solidarities across incommensurable political and scholarly commitments. By approaching fields not as empty retainers but as comprised of and defined by research interlocuters and their politics, scholars can better account for global slippages and dispersals without subtly reviving the figure of an inert nature under duress, in/organic or otherwise.

How do the boundaries of fieldwork—often known as “the field”—not only define the scope of research but also circumscribe and delimit the bounds of responsibility? This essay proposes a shift to such fields of commitment centered upon the entanglements that bind researcher and researched while also co-defining each in ways that neutralize fantasies of unmitigated access. Parting ways with poststructuralist critiques of subjectivism and objectivism alike, I propose a return to the where-ness of the field as an antidote to treating the powers of description and historical dispersal as absolute and uncontested. This requires fostering attunements to relations that exceed the facile positing of an object of study but stop short of imagining the domain of expertise, and global distribution, as limitless and without obstruction. Collaboration and compromise, rather than protection or predation, can offer routes of ethical relation that do not reproduce the model of the ethnographer as savior or intellectual vanguard who alone guards against absolute loss.

Fieldwork, or human research as unfolding in a field of inquiry, spans back at least to the late nineteenth century. Writing in 1871, Edward Burnett Tylor specified the distinctiveness of a “field of inquiry narrowed from History as a whole to that branch of it here called Culture, the history, not of tribes or nations, but of the condition of knowledge, religion, art, custom, and the like among them” (5). Borrowing from natural history, including efforts to draw organic and inorganic nature into a comparative, evolutionary frame, Tylor insisted that “Culture” too could be traced through various stages and fields. Hence, “[j]ust as certain plants and animals are peculiar to certain districts, so it is with such instruments as the Australian boomerang, the Polynesian stick-and-groove for fire-making, the tiny bow and arrow used as a lancet or phleme by tribes about the Isthmus of Panama, and in like manner with many an art, myth, or custom, found isolated in a particular field” (8). Field here connotes the where of evolutionary culture, the more modest and particular place where “inorganic nature” can be classified and its laws of cause and effect recognized (2).

Taking stock of this genealogy of fieldwork as a distinctive method and episteme of knowledge of Culture begs the question of whether there is something recuperable about this method. If the notion of a field as an object where research unfolds has historically been premised upon the colonial-era collapsing of landscapes, tools, and non-Western peoples, as Tylor’s words lay bare, is fieldwork worth defending? Is there something distinctive about such a method that could stand up against charges of obvious ethnocentrism? Can the slippages of subject and object, of researcher and researched, be rethought not as lines to be guarded but rather as a domain of relation that could afford a new, arguably urgent, reorientation to research at large (TallBear)? My approach emphasizes forms of accountability that emerge out of groundedness in a specific place of research. Rather than holding fast to the refusals of commitment that have defined the ethnographic method, could the field be reoriented as privileged sites of competing commitments, alliances, and compromises? Following TallBear, I call for “standing with” interlocuters, not as passive objects to be surveilled, but as political actors whose demands transform the research endeavor. Reorienting ethnographic research toward “compromise” can allow scholars to navigate field obligations in light of incommensurate ethical and political commitments while nonetheless remaining grounded by and accountable to specific places and research partners (Liboiron; Tuck and Yang 35).

Questions about the ethics of “the field” and of “fieldwork” continue to spill beyond academic debates. On January 14, 2023, for instance, National Public Radio reported that the University of Southern California (USC) was to remove the word “field” from its curriculum, as well as named buildings on campus. USC’s School of Social Work decided to rename the Office of Field Education as the Office of Practicum Education. The article cites a USC memo as explanation: “This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language” (Heyward). It continued, “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign” (Heyward). The decision received mixed support, including by USC students. Students reportedly told the campus newspaper Daily Trojan that “they were unsure whether the term ‘field’ truly had racist connotations” (Heyward).

This essay attends to the history and temporalization of “the field”—whether absolutely colonial in its trappings, or perhaps rather a response to colonial hubris and colonial destruction—in order to rethink its fraught ethics as a methodological where (Malinowski; Boas; Simpson, “Why”). Part 1: Culture as a Field of Inquiry attends to the transformations of the field and field methods in the wake of early social science and “ethnological” critiques of arm-chair anthropology. I then consider how the project of “salvage anthropology” was rooted in a recommitment to the field: to take stock of the losses of colonial expansion and cultural displacement, anthropologists would have to go to the field and collect the artifacts of destruction (Boas).¹ As George W. Stocking points out (Race 212), with Boasian anthropology the humanist view of culture as absolute, progressive, and singular became the plural cultures of modern anthropology. Boas highlighted difference as indicative of cultural plurality rather than developmental inferiority. His work on the relative “plasticity of human types” sought to discredit racial (hierarchical) formalist approaches which presumed that race could be linked to mental capacity (Stocking, Race 170, 194). In staging this intervention, US ethnographers like Boas often appeared as virtuous proponents of cultural relativism, contravening racist and racialized depictions of non-Western peoples as incapable of adaptation and change.

As Audra Simpson argues, that project of salvage went hand in hand with a “grammar of Indigenous dispossession” (“Why” 166). She points out that even as U.S. anthropologists sought to recover the rubble of colonial destruction, they also erased that destruction and their complicity in it to appear as sympathetic allies uniquely positioned to collect and record the shards of dying cultures. This was achieved in part through a definition of culture that suspended the researchers’ own complicity and their embeddedness in the historical formations they were ostensibly only studying. In this move, the political appeared as objectlike—as systems of governance and hierarchy that could be named and sorted (Simpson, “Consent’s”). But the ongoing settler colonial violence that led to the fragmentation of traditions and elicited Indigenous efforts to revive religious and political systems in order to reclaim sovereignty over people and land were left uninterrogated. This violence constituted a condition of possibility for the anthropological pursuit; it was, to use Edward Said’s language, what allowed the researcher to be there.² And all this required and took place through a re/turn to the field. As other contributors to this special issue make evident, such questions of complicity and critique take on renewed urgency in the context of scholarly engagements with climate disasters the world over. Disasters like these urgently require new modes of scholarly attention and attunement. However, that attunement also risks further ensnarement in the fieldwork heroism and settler innocence against which Simpson warns.

Given the yoking of field methods and Indigenous and Black dispossession, what of anthropological and social scientific methods? Whither fieldwork? What of the where of research? Part 2: Ethnography as Theory examines efforts to recast ethnography and the place of fieldwork in it. I focus on debates about the end of ethnography, including calls for methodological innovations that part ways with fantasies of objectivism that continued to guide ethnographic approaches to the field into the early twenty-first century (Clifford; Rosaldo; Ingold). While some scholars have called for abandoning the presuppositions of field and fieldwork, others have turned instead to a rethinking of ethnography as a mode of grounded theory that flourishes within the uncertainties and slippages of subject and object, researcher and researched (Haraway, “Situated”; Nader; Bonilla and Rosa; Marcus). What if researchers’ milieu is the field? What of digital ethnography? What of ethnographic approaches to fields that have no discrete where, such as ethnographies of world systems or global surveillance or the dispersals of matter responsible for climate change?

With Part 3: Fields of Commitment, the essay closes by asking whether the field is overdetermined by its colonial origins. In dialogue with efforts to account for grounded sites (and fields) of refusal (lewallen), can the where of research be redeployed not to shore up discrete notions of place, ethnos, race, or objecthood but rather as an insistence on answerability to the political and ethical concerns that saturate a given problem-space at a given time. Doing so takes us a step beyond the ethics of witnessing, which maintains the observer’s partial distance and authority of moral judgement (Behar; Huang), to ask rather about vulnerabilities and grounded commitments that underlay all research, whether they are conceded by the researcher or not. While attunement to how research interlocuters’ concerns disrupt liberal formations of subjectivity and justice has been a key insight of critical ethnography (Mahmood), one that takes us beyond abiding tendencies to dismiss interlocuters’ opinions and perspectives as suspect,³ collaboration additionally points to modalities of inquiry that supplant a version of fieldwork based on the researcher’s exemplary spatial, relational, and political distance from the field.

What answerability is opened by rearticulating, rather than abandoning, the field as such a scene of commitment?⁴ In closing, I propose a reorientation to the field, and fieldwork, that begins from the premise that interlocutors’ practices and activities articulate their own conceptual stakes. What kind of research unfolds from relations of “standing with” (TallBear) interlocutors, both as a spatial situatedness in a shared texture of relation and as a commitment to write from the place of that entanglement, what I elsewhere call the researcher’s “knotting” into the research (Winchell, After)? How can the claims that research interlocuters place upon scholars be accounted for not just as a retrospective process of giving-back but rather as integral to fieldwork design? This moves us toward understanding theory as already immersed in worlding practices in ways that do not depend for their revelation on the ethnographer’s magic (for instance, as the conjuring of theory from raw data, or as an intellectual or political vanguard). Allowing this slippage of field and theory into research holds the power to reframe scholarly commitments, disrupting tendencies toward depoliticizing the field as an expression of timeless Culture or, more common today, as an inexorable outcome of a corrosive, late capitalist present.

Part 1: Culture as a Field of Inquiry

For many social scientists, it seems obvious that “the field” is not natural: it is not inert matter but rather something generated in part through the activity of research. But this has not always been so, and indeed contemporary researchers, especially in the fields of geography, science and technology studies, and environmental anthropology, have pushed for a return to the nonhuman as a site of research. Tylor, discussed in the opening paragraph above, proposed the field to methodologically specify the study of “inorganic nature” by grounding philosophies of history in each site of inquiry. Culture here is not necessarily coterminous with tradition, but it is still singular: Kultur as an evolutionary arc of knowledge whose movement through stages anticipated and confirmed the exceptionality of modern man. This produces a conundrum: if “the field” can be extended to account for “inorganic nature,” how to distinguish that nature from that of the ethnographer? Or, put differently, if there is already more than one nature (organic and inorganic) and culture (here Kultur) is not universally shared among humans (Latour), how to distinguish object from subject, researched from researcher, in the tangle of an emerging ethnological research design?

In fact, if human relation is not a priori, then intimacy becomes a problem for the ethnographer as the scientist of inorganic nature. Hence, Malinowski recounts: “I remember the long visits I paid to the villages during my first weeks; the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply me with any material” (4). Fieldwork is premised on the field not only as culture but also as a practice of being “close to a native village” as well as (frustrated) efforts to get “into real touch with the natives” (4). Eventually, of course, Malinowski discovers the “secret of effective field-work,” what he calls the “ethnographer’s magic” (6): “As usual, success can only be obtained by a patient and systematic application of a number of rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles, and not by the discovery of any marvellous short-cut leading to the desired results without effort or trouble” (6).⁵ The ethnographer’s magic hinges on his capacity—not only as ability but also as authority—to insert himself within “touch,” physical and relational, of “the natives.” The shared culture that could be posited through such ethnographic work relied upon predacious forms of imposed sociality and touch. Unsurprisingly, Malinowski’s piece reads like an anthropologist’s coming of age story, in which adolescent frustrations and childish faux pas give way to successful fieldwork.⁶ Later he writes: “With this, and with the capacity of enjoying their company and sharing some of their games and amusements, I began to feel that I was indeed in touch with the natives” (8). Mimicking this training of sensibilities of conduct, Malinowski descries learning to apply “deeper conceptions and discarding crude and misleading ones,” thereby “moulding his theories according to facts” (9). Fieldwork arises as transformation, both of the ethnographer’s bodily dispositions and theoretical attachments. Thus, he concludes, “the field worker relies entirely upon inspiration from theory. Of course, he may be also a theoretical thinker and worker, and there he can draw on himself for stimulus. But the two functions are separate, and in actual research they have to be separated both in time and in conditions of work” (9).

Malinowski’s insights reveal how the study of non-Western people as “inorganic nature” is forged through the positing of the field not just as an empirical where, but as a site of the white man’s transformation: his reduction to childlike ignorance and his eventual formation as a different kind of person. Despite this, Malinowski defines the field as atheoretical, as a place of “rules and regularities” that must be “soberly” attended to (ii). Ethnography requires fieldwork be “taken up by men of science” (12) who commit themselves to the “collecting of concrete data” (13). In this way, the relational components of fieldwork—of imposed intimacy and refuted touch alike—fall away in lieu of a more materialist definition in which people are figured mainly through the idiom of a place: as elements of geography. Critical attention to this geographic formation of difference as achieved through the positing of “the field” is especially important today. Ecological debates are defined by climate change denialism and opposition to science both from the right and left, leading some scholars to explore alternatives to the poststructural critique of empiricism (Green). Moreover, in the turn to empiricism in the study of climate change, social scientific narratives at times erase oppositional subjectivities by recentering ruinous geographies in new materialisms. Here, as Max Ajl discusses, fields or rural hinterlands emerge as solutions to unsustainable urbanism. In this move, do unpeopled landscapes—the field as inorganic nature—slip back into our methodologies? What fantasies of access and capture underwrite such methodological designs and desires?

Since its early enunciation, appeals to a science of the concrete presumed fieldworkers’ access both to the structure and to the spirit of the studied. Alongside collecting information about rules and regulations, tribal constitution and structure (what Malinowski calls the “skeleton”), the anthropologist has also to glean its “flesh and blood” or spirit: “the natives’ views and opinions and utterances” (22).⁷ This worried Malinowski, who thus asked whether this is possible given that “certain psychological states” cannot be put into words by actors themselves (22). “Without trying to cut or untie this knot, that is to solve the problem theoretically,” Malinowski turns to the “question of practical means” to overcome these difficulties. The question of knowability—of whether the white ethnographer can truly get “in touch” with the natives—is resolved through and as method. Ethnography, and scientific fieldwork in particular, offers the answer. The opacities of native life to ethnographic transparency are to be resolved through fieldwork, particularly by the white ethnographer’s forced physical and relational insertion into the field of the researched. This move erases the violent, colonial force that underlays such a method, instead celebrating the virtues of empiricism as an exemplary attunement to the object of study. Empiricism, even or precisely where shot through with “affective impulses” to arrange and order culture (Bunzl 17 citing Boas), offered a language by which to naturalize fieldworkers’ authority: their ability to be there.

In her critique of Franz Boas and his fetishized place within American cultural anthropology, Audra Simpson challenges Boas’s The Mind of Primitive Man not as liberating Indigenous peoples from colonialism but rather as establishing a “dualistic binary regarding the value of cultural and bodily differences and their presumed vitality and value as well as their suitability for state and settler absorption” (“Why” 167). This binary determines how lines are drawn between “who will live and who will die within a new political state: who will be worthy of salvage, sympathy, and, ultimately, incorporation—enfranchisement and equality” (167). Boas works within the tide of the destruction of Indigenous life, which he sees as inevitable, a foregone conclusion. By positioning himself as an ally who recovers or salvages shards of culture before they are lost, Boas conceals that he “worked in concert with a settler state that sought to disappear Indian life and land in order to possess that land and absorb that difference into a normative sociopolitical order” (167). Simpson brilliantly clarifies what Malinowski conceals as the “scientific” method of fieldwork, premised upon proximity to “the natives.” Not only is this method abetted by colonial economic and political pursuits in those places, but ethnography itself in some ways buttressed the project of erasure. It promised to recover what was taken as valuable—the native’s place as illuminating global patterns of culture and human adaptation—thereby making ethnocide less appalling to Western eyes, as lost objects could nonetheless be catalogued and classified to advance Western scientific knowledge (Tuhiwai Smith). Proximity of method is also the proximity of colonial power, and empiricism is possible because “the natives” cannot refuse the “touch” of both colonialism and colonial era anthropologists. But where such touch dissolved into acculturation, anthropologists like Boas had little interest: it was only in their “primitive” state, and certainly not as politicized actors mobilizing for the survival of their traditions or political orders, that anthropologists took interest (Simpson, “Why” 175).

Even as ethnographers reveled in the promise of proximity to the native, natives’ proximity to ethnographers emptied them of their “value” to Western science. This secured the ethical claims to ethnographic distance as empiricism while allowing ethnographers like Boas to dispense with unsavory topics of resistance and refusal, both of anthropology and colonialism. Indigenous opposition to the ethnographer’s (imposed) magic and to the accompanying infiltration of (settler) colonial projects of land dispossession and forced assimilation alike could thus be framed as outside the scope of inquiry. By appealing to an ideal of ahistorical culture or tradition, ethnographers like these dismissed interlocuters’ assessments of the stakes of their own practices as insignificant, as external to anthropology. This acted to close down obligations, but also reaffirmed the ethnographer and his field, culture and (inorganic) nature, as objects in the world outside of the dynamics of forced access and intimacy guiding ethnographic research.

Part 2: Ethnography as (Field) Theory

The integrity of the “field” of research and its relation to specific fields of inquiry, especially anthropology, has faced robust critique since at least the 1970s. Questions have emerged about the relation of fieldwork to colonial geography, “field studies,” geopolitical hierarchies and state violence, and the slippages of the virtual and the real, the digital and the material, as sites of inquiry. These debates might be read as neurotic turns toward self-reflexivity and doubt about the discipline, but they can also be reread as points of insight into shifting ideas about ethnography and, or as, a kind of (field) theory. What kind of a field does ethnography produce? What ideas of theoretical production within or after fieldwork undergird such methods?

In “Some Reminiscences and Reflections on Fieldwork,” Evans-Pritchard challenges ideas of the absolute separation of theory and “data.” As he writes, “what one brings out of a field-study depends on what one brings to it” (2). Moreover, while “the layman’s [pre-conceived ideas] are uniformed, usually prejudiced, the anthropologist’s are scientific” (2). That is, they are biased by theoretical dispositions. This was not so much lamentable as a condition for research in the first place, for one “cannot study anything without a theory about its nature” (2). At the same time, Evans-Pritchard insists that one “must follow what he finds in the society he has selected to study” (2). This requires researchers to “live the life of the people among who they are doing their research” (3). And even as one “remains oneself” (3) one also comes to “believe” what one encounters.⁸ By “entering into the thought of another people,” the anthropologist is “transformed by the people they are making a study of, that in a subtle kind of way . . . they have what used to be called ‘gone native’” (5). This theory of self-transformation through an encounter with alterity constitutes a theory of the field that has been definitive of modern anthropology as an ethnographic activity. Yet this narrative of rapport-building and self-transformation has often elided the fact that ethnographers rely for their experience upon the servitude and labor of native informants. Evans-Pritchard admits that he “relied mostly on my two personal servants and on two paid informants” (6). Care must be taken in selecting such labor, for “it is only a particular sort of person who is prepared to act in this capacity, possibly a person who is ready to serve a European as the best way of escaping from family and other social obligations” (6). Informants could also be sneaky and subversive, prevaricating on “secret matters about which an informant does not wish to speak” or pretending “to know nothing about them” (3, 6). At the same time, he is aware of what he terms an “entanglement” with colonialism, specifically missionary violence. In this regard, the anthropologist, like the missionary, is “part of what he is supposed to be studying” (8).⁹

This ensnarement in research would seem to go against the ideas of a priori fields described in the preceding section. How, then, to reconcile these two contrasting impulses? We have, on the one hand, the positing of a field of transformation that draws in and remakes the anthropologist as subject, believer, person, and that relies on what are taken as optimal mediators, those who themselves occupy marginal positions vis-à-vis their culture and hence are well-positioned to accept positions as servants for white anthropologists. On the other hand, there is the insistence—here on the part of Evans-Pritchard—that this field cannot and does not exist outside of the “total entanglement” of the researcher and the researched, but also anthropology and the colonial and missionary encounter.¹⁰ Indeed, he notes that in Kenya, where anthropologists were loathed just as British officials and settlers were, it was “difficult for a white anthropologist to gain their confidence” (11). Downplaying the imposed nature of such entanglement, he asks: “Why should anybody object since one does no harm and is a guest?” (11). Moreover, Evans-Pritchard implicitly defends this activity for its salvage potentials. What is not written down is “forever lost—the picture of a people’s way of life at a point of time goes down into the dark unfathomed caves” (12). Despite opposition and against local hostility, he defends fieldwork as a method of inscription against loss.

Erasure of the violent conditions of research through an appeal to a naturalized field have faced robust critique. Among other works, George Stocking’s The Ethnographer’s Magic challenged the idea of ethnographic fieldwork as an ahistorical and atheoretical methodological exercise that makes anthropologists what they are (see Gupta and Ferguson 1). Nonetheless, Gupta and Ferguson argue that the “idea of ‘the field’ . . . remains a largely unexamined one” (2). Despite robust critiques of notions of culture and ethnography as a genre of writing about it, “the field” as “the place where the distinctive work of ‘fieldwork’ may be done, that taken-for-granted space in which an ‘Other’ culture or society lies in waiting to be observed and written . . . has been left to common sense” (2). Against that naturalization, the authors insist that the field is complicit in notions of locality whose spatial and conceptual policing secure territoriality not just as the methodological where of ethnography but as a value system that implicitly sanctions the violence that produces it: the “field is a clearing whose deceptive transparency obscures the complex processes that go into constructing it” (5).

The authors link the emphasis on territoriality to anthropology’s origins as a field science, what I have insisted is the production of some forms of human life as “inorganic nature.” Drawing on Henrika Kuklick’s The Savage Within, Gupta and Ferguson write: “Like other ‘field sciences,’ such as zoology, botany, and geology, anthropology at the start of the century found both its distinctive object and its distinctive method in ‘the detailed study of limited areas’” (6). Echoing languages of primatology, those “living outside their native state” were “less suitable anthropological objects because they were outside ‘the field’” (7). In this way, ideas of appropriate sites of “the field” reveal “unspoken assumptions of anthropology” (8). Yet, I disagree with the idea that this where has been atheoretical or merely a matter of “common sense” or “unspoken assumptions.” In the writings of Tylor, Malinowski, and Evans-Pritchard, the field might appear as a priori, merely some vague where of a colonial country that is optimal for fieldwork, but it does contain a theory. The field must be available to the researcher. It must not offer dramatic resistance to the ethnographer’s magic as proximate touch. And it must be sufficiently different, that is, capture some sort of “pure” primitivity that thereby allows the anthropologist to escape charges of complicity for colonial violence and globalized acculturation (Simpson, “Consent’s”; Appadurai 191). At its broadest, then, modern fieldwork relies upon an epistemic faith in an empirical outside that good ethnographers can separate from inherited theory and from their own grounded cultural sensibilities. That exposure produces not only a researcher but also a kind of liberal, relativistic subject that comes into ethical being through an encounter with (racialized) difference.¹¹ All of this is definitive of ethnography as a theory of the field.

In fact, while territorial approaches to the field have been robustly critiqued (Haraway, “Situated”; Bonilla and Rosa; Marcus), the broader appeal to fieldwork as an empirical correction to abstract and ungrounded theories—and theories of the political—remains strong (Nader; Mahmood), leading to continued methodological calls to align figure and ground (Fortun 2017).¹² Alongside rethinking territoriality, there has been an insistence on positioning the ethnographer as part of the formations they were previously thought only to study (Collins; Haraway, “Situated”).¹³ Like Evans-Pritchard’s emphasis on “entanglement,” such approaches expose the researcher but they have not always asked how the broader commitments of anthropology can follow suit. For instance, Gupta and Ferguson propose a rethinking of fieldwork as purposeful “dislocation” based on “interlocking of multiple social-political sites” (37). They also call for ethnographic attention to “acculturation” (21), to global processes such as diffusion and destructive change (20), and for examples of “action anthropology” (24). Such studies would rethink the field not as “bounded localized community” but rather as “a multistranded transatlantic traffic of commodities, people, and ideas,” or what Fernando Ortiz, quoted in Gupta and Ferguson, calls “intermeshed transculturations” (28). Against boundedness, they argue, the field should be treated as expansive and imploding, mimicking the traffic and flows of global systems (Choy et al.; Marcus).

While this recasting of the field to include global flows and slippages has been celebrated as new, it in fact inhabits a similar conceptual foothold to earlier salvage anthropology. The field is in a state of loss and disorder, and it was the fieldworkers’ job to try to fix it or, where that was impossible, to record the loss. Like narratives of cultural ethnocide (Kaunui; Simpson, “Consent’s”), shifting the field from a bounded state to a site of inevitable acculturation risks naturalizing a set of violent dislocations and dispossessions as mere qualities of a “global” present. This suggests there might be something worthwhile about retaining an orientation to the field that does not take for granted and thereby neutralize a telos of flows. Instead, we must be attentive to where and when such traffic occurs and to the normative stakes of such dis/locations from the position of research interlocuters. Even in digital spaces and with online protest movements, actors inhabit material and relational worlds that shape their politics (Bonilla and Rosa). How to account for forced flows as well as the refusals of movement such flows elicit, including grounded efforts to stave off the conversion of places into land that is available, or disposable, not only to capital but also for climate action?

By fetishizing the field, anthropologists have claimed for themselves not only regional expertise that operates to naturalize “cultural difference as inhering in different geographical locales” (Gupta and Ferguson 8; Strathern) but also, more broadly, a form of mastery over culture imagined as the “inorganic nature” of non-Western worlds. But a question remains: Does this split remain intact today? Present scholarly interest in mapping out the ruinous landscapes of late capital often leads ethnographers instead to narrate locales imagined as thoroughly mediated by capital, climate, histories of plantation violence and monoculture, or other expressions of forced acculturation or global toxicity. There can be no discrete field anymore. Or if there is, it is a field that needs to be made available to offset carbon emissions or for renewable energy (Ajl). In this scene, efforts to posit absolute where-ness may seem naïve, romantic, stilted, backward. But where does that leave ethnographers? How does one map not only radiating leakages—those presumptions of land’s disposability that underwrite capital and green alternatives alike (Liboiron; McCarthy)—but also people’s abiding insistence on locality and on bounded whereness as a mode of contesting such unwilled intimacies? How does the erasure of the field also erase possibilities for accountability that do not take the global as their frame or referent? And how might an implosion of the field (Dumit) unwittingly facilitate the proliferation of new abstractions: to whom is anthropology accountable when it dispenses not only with the possibility but with the very existence of an unmediated ground?

Part 3: Fields of Commitment

Kim TallBear has suggested that ethnographers think past the imperatives of “giving back” or of reciprocal exchange, notions that rely on a binary understanding of researcher and researched, and, with it, firm boundaries between “those who know versus those from whom the raw materials of knowledge production are extracted” (2). This means that a researcher is not only willing to “stand with” a community of subjects but also “to be altered, to revise her stakes in the knowledge to be produced” by virtue of that standing (2). Within this vision, research questions, subject populations, and knowledge production inhabit a “shared conceptual ground” (2). TallBear’s provocation powerfully intervenes in fieldwork as an empiricist paradigm based on bifurcating raw data and (theoretical) knowledge. Instead, scholars should participate in research defined by a “co-constitution of one’s own claims and acts of the people(s) who one speaks in concert with” (4). Moreover, as Sophie Chao insists, “ethnographically grounded examinations,” including of the patchiness of plantations, urgently intervene in the inexorability implied by theoretical abstractions, including of the plantation as ideology (169).

TallBear and Chao’s interventions urge a return to ground that resonates with feminist critiques of distance as the methodological standard for empirical research (Haraway, Simians).¹⁴ In lieu of celebrating this gap or turning away from grounded sites of struggle, Max Liboiron has asked about “compromise” as that which emerges when you have “obligations to incommensurabilities” (136; Tuck and Yang), such as to an anticolonial science as a project of moving forward “with, in, and around impossible bedfellows” (137). What do such difficult and overlapping commitments mean for anthropological ideas of “the field”? How might a field as a set of recurrent relationships across varied obligations entail a weaving or “knotting” of researcher and interlocuters (Winchell, After), rather than a discrete field that the researcher enters and exits, perhaps to return through future visits or promises of “giving back”? How to allow these webs of knowledge production, in which theory or knowledge is not discovered by the researcher after the fact but rather braided into research design and interlocuters’ speech and practices, to reshape ideals of objectivity (raw data) and territoriality (locality, region, ethnos), giving way instead to fields of commitment? Such fields illuminate contemporary formations of devastation and loss as shot through with alternate scenes of attachment and grounding that can be mobilized to push back against abstracting narratives of planetary apocalypse.

In an article about multispecies ethnography, Kirksey and Helmreich call for attention to “becomings” as “new kinds of relations emerging from nonhierarchical alliances, symbiotic attachments, and the mingling of creative agents (546). These are “contact zones where lines separating nature and culture have broken down” (546). But, as the authors indicate, this slippage is hardly new. Lewis Henry Morgan, too, worked “across boundaries later secured against traffic between the social and natural sciences” (Kirksey and Helmreich 549), and the Humboldt brothers, often credited as the creators of field-based social sciences, sought to extend a natural science model to non-Western peoples and landscapes. The risk, then, is that the “savage slot” is smuggled back into efforts to rethink fields, as anthropologists search for new frontiers of alterity—“alterworlds of other beings” that have not (yet) been narrated as fully entangled with human socialities (553). Hence, the authors ask: “How can or should or do anthropologists speak with and for nonhuman others?” (554). How are fields defined by forms of ventriloquism that can only succeed where their interlocutors are treated as fundamentally mute, as incapable of articulating their own commitments? Here, “[n]ature begins to function like ‘exotic’ culture” (qtd. in Kirksey and Helmreich 562).

This essay has taken up this problem of compromise to examine the challenge of combining accountability to discrete places and their politics on the one hand, and historical attunement to the violent production of the field as the production of difference and indifference (the refused accountability to the predations that have historically defined field research) on the other. These are problems for which there are no easy solutions. But I have emphasized the urgency, and difficulty, of reconceptualizing fields in ways that do not reproduce either naturalized telos of acculturation, ethnocide, and contact, or the hubris of the sympathetic anthropologist who is willing to risk life and limb to be transformed by the field even while retaining a privileged position as the defender of or spokesperson for such alterity. Following Berry, Argüelles, Cordis, Ihmoud, and Estrada, there is a need to develop a “decolonial research praxis that advances a critical feminist ethos” (538). This ethos requires “flight from an intellectual garrison, in which the idealized radical subject within leftist struggles figures as a martyr for the movement,” an ideal of a “self-sacrificing subject [that] coincides with the institutionalized notion of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage or an exercise of one’s endurance” (Berry et al. 538). Such a model continues to reproduce the idea of the fieldworker as savior, if not in a salvage role then as an agent of radical political transformation.

I have suggested that we begin instead from the premise that interlocutors’ practices and activities carry their own conceptual stakes—they are doing theory. Theory, then, does not depend on the ethnographer or his distance from or transformation by the field. The trick is to allow this slippage of commitments, the theoretical stakes already built into a given set of practices, into research design as a recurrent threading rather than entry into and exit from a bounded field. These recurring commitments neither begin or end with a writing project nor do they depend upon academic outputs alone as a measure of good or bad relation. Instead, they enable ongoing collaboration, compromise, and indeed refusals to collapse multiple obligations or to assume that the researcher’s political stakes must or even can map onto those of interlocutors.¹⁵ In ongoing collaborative research about how Chiquitos ancestors inhabit landscapes ravaged by Bolivian wildfires, I have had to reassess the idea that climate change is experienced as thoroughly mediated by the global, and that the planetary is the only world toward which actors (and ancestors) must be accountable (Winchell, “Climates”).

Where an earlier field method relied upon ethical claims to ethnographic distance to dispense with the violences of anthropology and colonialism, fields of commitment recenter the difficult and at times uncomfortable alliances of researcher and researched. These are spaces that do not exist naturally, as relational counterparts to empiricist approaches to the field, but rather are created through recurrent methodological vigilance and conceptual compromise. To engage in this work is to take stock of the field’s constitutive haunting by colonial-era field methods and epistemic faith in an odd mixture of nominal distance and forced intimacy (Gordon). This reorientation to the field interrupts an instrumental approach to methods as “tools” standing outside of prior commitments and ongoing entanglements. It was this assumed separation of content and form, of instrument and knowledge, that allowed anthropologists like Evans-Pritchard to recognize their entrenchments in ongoing colonial histories of violence while also defending fieldwork as a methodology innocent of that violence (Tuck and Yang; Berry et al.). To “stand with” builds answerability to such concerns not only into what researchers do, including field methods and collaborations, but also into broader interdisciplinary debates about what research is, and why and for whom its pursuit matters.

Standing with is not a project that affords a smooth synthesis; the just cannot be imported as an empty metaphor but rather must be gleaned from a specific field of political practice, one that is often disruptive, unsettling, and incompatible with more universalist, rights-based definitions of emancipation as awakening. As Tuck and Yang write, “These are interruptions which destabilize, un-balance, and repatriate the very terms and assumptions of some of the most radical efforts to reimagine human power relations. We argue that the opportunities for solidarity lie in what is incommensurable rather than what is common across these efforts” (28). Forging scholarly answerability to anthropology’s complicity in histories of violence by building such “opportunities for solidarity” across the incommensurable requires rethinking inherited distinctions of nature and culture, of the authors and objects not only of research but of the global histories to which fieldwork belongs. Solidarities like these cannot dispense with the affordances of the field as the limit or obstruction to the temptations of universalism that define research and politics alike. Approaching fields not as empty retainers but as made up of and defined by research interlocuters and their politics can allow for forms of solidarity that account for global slippages and dispersals without subtly reviving the figure of an inert nature under duress, in/organic or otherwise.

Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022). Winchell’s research focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, and how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with climate change, especially wildfires.

Footnotes

1. As Matti Bunzl points out, it would be simplistic to view the “culture turn” as a mere product of Franz Boas’s arrival and subsequent correspondence with leading evolutionary anthropologists in the U.S. at the time (24). Boas was heavily influenced by German Romantic thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried von Herder. Humboldt’s influence is evident in Boas’s work on Inuit languages; he argues that linguistic practices reveal the social/psychologized nature of a people (for instance, the multitude of words for snow that he attributed to them). Rather than insist that non-European cultures “adopt the standard of ‘European civilization,’ especially in the face of the ‘unimaginable suffering’ that had been brought upon the Naturevölker when exposed to ‘our cultural standards,’ German anthropology at this time was influenced by Herder’s humanistic relativism” (Bunzl 46).

2. As Edward Said writes, “The scientist, the scholar, the missionary, the trader, or the soldier was in, or thought about, the Orient because he could be there, or could think about it, with very little resistance on the Orient’s part” (15).

3. For instance, Malinowski comments on the challenges of “depicting the Constitution” of Trobriand society, given that “the ‘natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them’” (11–12, quoted in Sillitoe 2). As Paul Sillitoe points out, “It seems odd that an anthropologist should declare that he could not engage with what was of interest and concern to the people he lives with, because it is not relevant from his research perspective” (1). Why has a discipline that claims to further understanding of other cultural ways produced “work in which the subjects themselves cannot recognize their behaviour or ideas”?

4. See Bharat Venkat’s insistence on commitment as constitutive of ethnography.

5. These include three central “principles of method” including “real scientific aims,” “good conditions of work” based on living “without other white men, right among the natives,” and finally, “special methods of collecting, manipulating, and fixing his evidence (6).

6. “Over and over again, I committed breaches of etiquette, which the natives, familiar enough with me, were not slow in pointing out. I had to learn how to behave, and to a certain extent, I acquired ‘the feeling’ for native good and bad manners” (8).

7. For, rather than being separate, these “ideas, feelings, and impulses are moulded and conditioned by the culture in which we find them, and are therefore an ethnic peculiarity of the given society” (22).

8. “In their culture, in the set of ideas I then lived in, I accepted [Zande notions of witchcraft]; in a kind of way I believed them” (4).

9. “I am not going to pursue this matter further now beyond saying that in the end we are involved in total entanglement, for having chosen in a native language a word to stand for ‘God’ in their own, the missionaries endow the native word with the sense and qualities the word ‘God’ has for them” (8).

10. In fact, Evans-Pritchard attends to what he calls “a hostile attitude to anthropological inquiries” in (non-Western) countries where “there is the feeling that they suggest that the people of the country where they are made are uncivilized, savages” (9).

11. Gupta and Ferguson eloquently describe this paradigm, drawing from Kuklick, in terms of “Romantic notions of (implicitly masculine) personal growth through travel to unfamiliar places and endurance of physical hardship (17). For questions of racial fixing and fetishization, see also Trouillot and Tuhiwai Smith. On the refusal of ethnography, see Simpson (2014).

12. For a critical review, see Ingold.

13. See also Behar; Bird; Jacobs-Huey; Pels.

14. This critique of distance between researcher and researched, theory and data, belongs to what TallBear calls a “feminist objectivity” that emerges from co-habitation and from recognizing the conceptual and theoretical stakes of the activities of research interlocutors.

15. Max Liboiron points to this challenge of the shared: “how do we write and read together with humility, keeping the specificity of relations in mind? How do we recognize that our writing and reading come out of different places, connections, obligations, and even different worldviews, and still write and read together?” (31). Compromise arises as one answer to this question of how, approached not as a limit but as an invitation or opening to experimentation with new relations across divergent political and epistemological commitments.

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Jeff Diamanti, Guest Editor (bio)

This special issue of Postmodern Culture gathers scholars in the environmental and critical humanities developing advanced, practice-based methodologies and critical theories of field research. Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. That data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but verifiably not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and it is for this reason that “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit, even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning. Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains an under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom from the stylistics of disciplinary habit—in short, the world and what we make of it? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretive apparatus, as for instance in the work of Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Thomas Nail, Isabelle Stengers, and Elaine Gan? The occasion of this special issue of Postmodern Culture on “field theory” is to reflect on the emergent position that environmental theory ought to recur to a situated field of inquiry, such as a geo-physical and historically determined place, and that this in turn inflects the disciplinary bounds of a given field, whether for reasons involving interdisciplinarity, the character of the objects of inquiry, or epistemological pragmatism. This position involves, among other important shifts in teaching and writing, adapting humanistic and post-humanistic inquiry to the complex challenges unleashed by anthropogenic climate change and its contested political ecologies in medias res. The normative impulse to particularize theory in concert with the animate ecologies, polyphonic voice, and vernaculars of a field requires an immersive and often creative research ethic that attends to what in philosophical biology has long been understood as the blurred distinction between organism and milieu (Margulis 13; Canguilhem 7), or what in a humanities vocabulary is the figure and ground relation.

More typical in environmental humanities historically has been an orientation toward particular places as they register in cultural representations that are either about the ecology of a place or take on signature features of that place. This has included analyses of voice, mood, and tone in poetic and narrative texts grounded in a particular ecology and inquiries into the affordances and limits of visual media in holding ecological dynamics to form. But while scholars turning to fieldwork as the grounds of both their objects and theoretical frameworks still centralize cultural history and representation in their analyses, the question of how to make theoretical presuppositions and analytic procedures commensurate with the lived realities of the field also asks for an attunement to the character of those responsible for, and to the field of forces encountered and sought out in, fieldwork. Immersion in a place takes time and requires participatory modes of reading and understanding that often frustrate orthodox expectations, especially when the object of inquiry is sedimented into the environment of the field and the various infrastructures that channel energy, resources, and conflicts to a place but might not originate there. Because of this multi-sensory, creative, and critical character of interpretation in the field, theoretical reflection in the environmental humanities has come to include sustained engagement with environmental and decolonial anthropology, infrastructure and logistics studies, and elemental media studies, among other frameworks attentive to the many currents that subtend a field.

Grounding theory in the field might seem at face value like a description of what all disciplines do anyways. Some version of this commitment can be found in arguments about empirical observation in the physical sciences between inductivist and deductivist strains of logic. But the debate between Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper over the question of what distinguishes theory from observation always involved a more fundamental disagreement about the relationship between the motivation for observation and the means by which observation takes on meaning. Such questions plaguing the empirical sciences might seem far removed from the more critically oriented analysis of cultural texts and contexts in the humanities, but just as powerful in the humanities has been the fraught question of how to analytically account for the location of meaning, especially since, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, emphatically argues, the “presence effect” in experience is conjoined with but never reducible to a hermeneutic of “meaning effects” (106). The paradox in today’s environmentally-coded context is that so much of what expresses in the present of the very air we breathe is an inherited exhaust of previous years of industrial modernity: empirically in what suspends chemically in the atmosphere, and emphatically in the historicities that inhere in those chemicals. The carbon dioxide accumulated in what Tobias Menely calls “Anthropocene Air” is heavy with causation and conflict, permeating what poet Anne Boyer terms the “inhalations of a capitalist profane.” So many of the most generative accounts of what subtends the durée of the present involve critical attention to the logic of the very terms by which deictic placement in the here and now, or there and then, works beyond our attempts to capture that placement linguistically. They show how what gives weight to the present and places us in a planetary horizon of ecological catastrophe occurs in a complex assemblage of planetary forces, physical infrastructures, and semiotic frames. The biogeochemistry of our contemporary world laces together real, structuring forces more familiar to the nomenclature of the present—whether by century, decade, or mode of production—but with distinct enough diegetic presence to have forestalled consensus on dating the end of the Holocene by at least a decade. Grounding theory in the field of these forces and frames means spending time in the places where they are most legible: environments signalling ecological precarity; infrastructures of extraction and dispossession; fields of struggle and emancipatory desire. It also means addressing ongoing epistemological questions: When and where does theory happen? Where ought it happen?

The expansion of “the field” of environmental humanities to include various kinds of fieldwork asks for methodological reflection, especially for scholars trained in literary and cultural analysis whose reading lists have long included anthropological ethnographies. All of the scholars invited to reflect on the emergence of this position have their own disciplinary and political interests in maintaining the alignment of “field” and “theory,” and do so through literary, poetic, visual, logistical, and anthropological analysis. And while the reason for the rise of fieldwork in the environmental humanities does not require a lot of explanation, the status of theory amidst that rise does.

The dominant thread of environmental theory in the past two decades has been “relationship,” specifically within a modal framework that centralizes the symbiotic nature of worldbuilding between human and non-human actors, epistemologies, and semiotic logics. In Donna Haraway’s classic formulation, “[s]pecies interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect” (19). This crux of theoretical energy can be found in the work of Eduardo Kohn, too, in the Peircean semiotics marshalled to understand communication logics in botanical culture, and perhaps most canonically in Anna Tsing’s work on palm oil in Indonesia and the lifeworld of the matsutake mushroom. Practically speaking, this theoretical impulse involves a descriptive ethic that decenters the human as the locus of meaning making. At a more philosophical level, it has also generated efforts to redefine ontology, agency, ethics, and indeed the historicity of theory itself.

The redefinition of theory’s horizon is not restricted to science and technology studies or anthropology. Across the social and humanistic sciences in the past few years, it has become something of an epistemic doxa to acknowledge and pursue the methodological “arts of noticing,” which is also the title of the opening chapter of Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World. Not just anthropology, but literary and cultural analysis, philosophy, creative and artistic research, media studies, and a range of disciplinary idioms are drawn into renewed attachment to the precarious lifeworlds given to thoughts in and about the environmental conditions of our present. Like many scholars analyzing the political ecologies of the present, Tsing convincingly weds several of the normative horizons of critique to the mostly latent narratives of progress that underwrite them. In the same gesture, she posits a more immanent horizon to “the dilemmas of collaborative survival” populating the many landscapes and wakes supposedly evidencing this or that concluded meta-narrative (25). In a single day, one might encounter artists, colleagues, comrades, and students signaling agreement that we now practice these arts of noticing in cities all over the world, and that this practice is in opposition to a different way of doing things. It provides and entails a different way of satisfying the practical business of research, always in relation to the meta-historical framework within which that research is tasked with making sense. No longer embedded in the self-satisfying sway of progress (or modernity, or revolution, or . . .), this new doxa carries with it a number of powerful concepts, ethical modalities, and styles of writing. Their epistemic point of convergence in situ is “the field” as such, and more empirically the theoretical orientations immanent, instead of antecedent, to that field. But do we all mean the same thing when we acknowledge the shifting horizon of our normative judgements from “progress” to “polyphonic assemblage” (24), and might the latter retain the grounds for the former?

The stakes of tracking these material and multi-species assemblages is in keeping with a larger epistemic shift underway in the humanities and social sciences in the last decade or so—a shift very often cited in the conceptual constellation gathered in works by Tsing, Haraway, and Bruno Latour—and there are a number of counter tendencies and powerful arguments against this epistemic shift.¹ But it has become difficult for scholars studying the ongoing phenomena of anthropogenic climate change to interpret their objects of study without adapting older methods of inquiry to the liveliness and complexity of the scenes, landscapes, and situations in which those objects do their work in the world. Biotic agents read milieu; ecological entities like forests and watersheds bear and make meaning; and symbiotic solidarities form beyond the categories of humanist reason available for recognition. These assemblages and processes require an immersive, creative, and compassionate ethic of research commensurate with the shifting norms that occasion that research. And without too quickly effacing the important difference between the close reading of cultural objects and the “arts of noticing” what is only ever partially discernible to the human, there is a clear bridge connecting the respective orientations of reader and researcher in this mode of environmental inquiry. That bridge is itself a theoretical proposition, and it depends on creative and critical experimentation with shared methods in the field.

Where does this signal gesture find its accountability? In part, the location of situated theory is recursive to the creative modes of study increasingly marking the methods and prose of environmental humanities research. Field theory sounds what can and cannot register in the mediatic apparatus of experience in the field and what occurs as a superimposition at the level of conceptual abstraction. Learning with and from the field, it opposes the god’s-eye view but not as the next stage of theoretical accomplishment. There is something compelling about how gentle and attentive theory becomes when it tends to what orients bodies and their historicities, even if there remains a critical tension in how to locate the normative grounds of fieldwork, or, how to field normative grounds. In addition to the experimental anthropology of the Aarhus school, as for instance in the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and the Stanford University produced Feral Atlas, two uniquely influential resources helping scholars reorient humanistic inquiry to the environmental drama of a warming world, the early 2020s have also seen a number of creative and artistic approaches to fieldwork that help codify and distribute techniques for this gentle orientation. In Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, for instance, Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton suggest a necessary relation between experimental forms of writing and recording and the unexpected direction of research over time in the field (14). Distinguishing creative research in the field from an observational or data-gathering practice that leans toward nomothetic concepts, they argue that “artwork is often co-produced with the multiplicities of the environment” and that this multimedia commitment to “co-production” helps address fraught questions of “ethics, reciprocity and care” occasioned by precarity (12). In its strongest form, fieldwork as a creative and collaborative practice involves a reflexive and generative ethic that blurs the lines between interpretive reading and collective composition; or put differently, it blurs the line of demarcation between ethnographic positions and situations summoned by solidarities. Ethnography in this creative turn becomes not just a moment of translation between epistemic cultures but a semiotic blending, or what the FieldARTS collective terms a brackish methodology, exposed to the visual, sonic, and corporeal field of media (Field Docket 10).

Motivating much fieldwork in the environmental humanities has been the effort to map the often remote geographies drawn into intimate relation through extractive industries and complex supply chains. In this special issue, we collect encounters with a number of logistical infrastructures connecting seaborne trade to financial markets and landscapes sourcing many of the raw materials that congeal into commodities and the built world. Michaele Büsse’s ongoing research into the cultural and elemental geographies of sand extraction takes us to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam in an effort to challenge preconceived conceptions of environment, resources, and research ethics in the extractive field underwriting the supply chains of the built world. Sand is the second most utilized resource in the world and is central for the production of cement, glass, and the expansive demands of urbanization more generally. Crucially, however, its availability in bindable form is limited to a few landscapes on earth. Thinking with the granularity of scales congealed into the ecologies of sand, Büsse utilizes visual and embedded forms of ethnography in order to read “the messiness of sociomaterial practices”—an orientation to the elemental, economic, and ecological flows of a field “that focuses not only on extractive dimensions but also on contingencies, ruptures, and alternative openings.”

The question of how to rethink the place of the field in contemporary theory and philosophy has extended through the social sciences and humanities more broadly. In their introduction to the 2018 special issue of Parallax, for instance, Brett Buchanan, Michelle Bastian, and Matthew Chrulew rehearse the formative claim for a recursive relation between the field and philosophy charted through the work of the late Michel Foucault to Paul Rabinow and Pierre Bourdieu for anthropology and sociology, respectively. While the expansion of the pedagogical repertoire in the environmental humanities occasions the question of their special issue and ours, this recurrence of an immersive orientation toward the terms of philosophy helps explain why the most sophisticated and polemical edges to field theory are knotted to the ethical strain of ethnography as well as the correlate concern: Who reads and who writes? After all, as the authors of “Field Philosophy” suggest, philosophy always presupposes a relation to a field—even if this relation is too often assumed to operate extradiegetically (Buchanan et al. 384)—but the responsibilities wedded to ethnographic practice involve a ceaseless interrogation of one’s own assumptions about the relationalities involved in any experience, including those to which you do not have access.

In anthropology, the ethics of observation and the reification effect of ethnography have long asked for ongoing disciplinary reflection—both as questions students are expected to struggle with before conducting fieldwork, and as methodological practice that can only be fully wrestled with in the field. Asking for a shifting of terms from “protection or predation” to “collaboration and compromise,” Mareike Winchell argues in this issue for a notion of the field that is already suffused with theoretical practices that do not depend on the ethnographer’s translation for traction. Indeed, recent shifts both toward multispecies ethnography and away from salvage anthropology and its colonial inheritances have been described as efforts to collaborate with and be drawn into the ongoing community in a field, instead of identifying and studying objects of inquiry at a distance. The changing “field” has been crucial to these shifts in ethnographic practice: both a “where” of research and a formation of commitment. Always central to the analytic parameters of theory, commitment carries the weight of an interpretive horizon central to research, even when it goes unremarked or implicit in a given doxa. In Winchell’s account, “to ‘stand with’ builds answerability to such concerns not only into what researchers do, including field methods and collaborations, but also into broader interdisciplinary debates about what counts as knowledge, why its pursuit is worthwhile, and for whom.”

Hence the aim of this special issue, which is to put pressure on the mostly implicit claim in the post-critical origins of recent field theory that a reading practice oriented by the field, instead of the hylomorphic fetish of the object, is logically extensive with a renunciation of critique and the normative horizon recursive to it. Reconsidering the place of labor struggle in the concept of the field, Fred Carter’s contribution to this issue tracks the cartographies of extraction and poetics of worker’s inquiry in the Durham Coalfield of Northeast England. Taking us to the seam interlocking fossil-fueled modernity, Carter’s sensitivity to the energies and promises of the field involve “an attempt to trace the interlocking practices of open-form poetry, partisan knowledge, and collective autonomy that come to militate against fossil capital’s dominant modalities of reading and rendering the field.” Bringing together a range of anti-capitalist currents of inquiry knotted to 1970s and 80s energy fields across Europe, Carter’s research helps reconceptualize the extractive valence of “field” as a basin of geological resource inoculated against contestation and appropriation. To read the cartography of capital’s energic gaze as convergent with a poetics of labor struggle means recasting the field as a contingency, a project, and a terrain of struggle.

Inviting students to get outside of the classroom and to think through conventions and concepts of scholarly research in the field is an opportunity to encounter many of the spaces, infrastructures, and ecologies that are already implicitly intimate to the lives we bring to the classroom. With humanities programs in particular, this analytic attention to fields also involves a reencounter with cultural media with an attention to how a text is itself a field of theoretical impulses and forces, both embedded in the historical context of their emergence and in the imaginaries they formalize. But a field is also a field, or what is more commonly associated in English with a meadow, and it will turn out in Maria Sledmere’s contribution to this issue that the figure of the meadow in recent eco-poetics asks for an expanded notion of the poetic field in order to witness the frequencies of ongoing commoning. In readings of Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim, Sledmere offers a powerful précis for what it means to read against a regime of enclosure and to cultivate sensibilities shaped by the porosity of meadows. A carbon sink with blurred boundaries, the meadow becomes a strong case for a field theory composed between the epistemic certainties that would otherwise define a given field in descriptive terms—an invitation to draw our analytic concepts, styles of thought, and interpretive horizons from a creative and attentive practice of reading with and in the field.

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021), tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research on Bloom Ecologies details the return to natural philosophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences, studying the interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean.

Works Cited

• Boyer, Anne. “The Heavy Air: Capitalism and Affronts to Common Sense.” The Yale Review, 1 Dec. 2020, https://yalereview.org/article/anne-boyer-capitalism-heavy-air.
• Buchanan, Brett, et al. “Introduction: Field Philosophy and Other Experiments.” Parallax vol. 24, no. 4, 2018, pp. 383–391. Taylor & Francis Online.
• Canguilhem, Georges. “The Living and Its Milieu.” Grey Room, no. 3, Spring 2001, pp. 7–31, translated by John Savage. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1262564.
• Carter, Fred, and Jeff Diamanti eds. Field Docket. Sonic Acts Press, 2023.
• Crone, Bridget, et al., editors. Fieldwork for Future Ecologies. Onomatopee, 2022.
• Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2004.
• Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Posthumanities.
• Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. U of Chicago P, 2013.
• Malm, Andreas. The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso, 2020.
• Margulis, Lynn. The Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. Phoenix Press, 1999.
• Menely, Tobias. “Anthropocene Air.” The Minnesota Review, no. 83, 2014, pp. 93–101. Duke UP.
• Strathern, Marilyn. Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. Athlone Press, 1999.
• Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton UP, 2015.
• Yusoff, Kathryn. “Mine as Paradigm.” e-flux architecture, June 2021, https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/381867/mine-as-paradigm/.

Footnotes

1. One of the strongest opponents to this epistemic shift, and its implicit position on the aims of theory, is Andreas Malm, who in The Progress of this Storm critiques Latour’s hybridism and Jane Bennett’s new materialism for their shared disdain for collective struggle and class-based analysis of environmental injustice.

Fred Carter (bio)

Abstract

Grounded in the material and historical specificity of the Durham Coalfield, this essay engages two unlikely modes of field theory: the vein of radical poetry associated with the “open field” in the 1970s, and the parallel resurgence of a vernacular Marxism committed to reorienting the critique of capital “from below.” Tracing the intersection of open field poetics and partisan knowledge through Barry MacSweeney’s Black Torch (1978) and Bill Griffiths’s Coal (1990–91) as practices that come to militate against dominant methods of reading or rendering the coalfield, field theory is recast against a critical terrain of struggle over labor, energy, and infrastructure in the twentieth century.

Two years ago, following a sustained campaign of protests and blockades, the last remaining opencast mine on the Durham Coalfield was decommissioned. Now cast into relief as a “terminal landscape” of hydrocarbon dependency by the chiaroscuro of climate collapse and energy crisis (Diamanti 10), this finite field of geophysical resource is a decisive historical terrain across which the parameters of our present calamity were contested. Unearthing upwards of fifty-six million tons per year at the peak of production, the coalfield was among the first sites of industrial coal extraction and continued to operate as the epicenter of the fossil economy in Britain until the late 1970s, when oil began to flow from Forties Field and pit closures accelerated under Thatcher’s administration. Extending more than six miles under the North Sea, seams of lignite and bituminous coal stretched southeast along the Tyne past Newcastle to ports in Seaham and South Shields, embedded in a dense latticework of inland waterways and offshore supply lines. Situated here, in intimate relation to expanding centres of domestic production and an ever-extending contrapuntal cartography of colonial resource dispossession, the demands of industrial capitalism took the coalfield as geophysical grounds for the labor-intensive and unevenly distributed transition toward fossil-fueled accumulation.

Fig. 1. T.Y. Hall, Map of the Great Northern Coalfield. 1854, courtesy of The Common Room.

Circulated in 1854 to evidence the region’s energy density, T.Y. Hall’s Map of the Great Northern Coalfield reflects the work of surveying carbon-rich deposits sunk within the sediment as a matter of rendering the cross-hatching of coal seams, transport routes, and labor reserves legible to capital as an abstracted “field” of energy resource. As Cara New Daggett’s The Birth of Energy (2019) demonstrates, the concept of abstract “energy” in thermodynamic theory had “arrived on the scene in the 1840s,” at the exact moment in which “coal-fed steam engines were multiplying, remaking landscapes, labor, cities, and imperial processes” (33). In lockstep with the rapid refinement of this combustive and extractive apparatus, the mid-nineteenth century also saw the institutionalization of geologic, geographic, and anthropological fields into disciplinary coordinates through which fieldwork became a testing ground for the theoretical tenets of research conducted, like Hall’s cartographic perspective, “from above” (Gómez-Barris 8).

In drawing this specific field into focus, however, I am preoccupied with unpacking the specific nexus of work, energy, and theory that materializes across a decade of labor struggles on the coalfield between 1972 and 1984. Taking up the critical orientations and commitments of field theory in this context, I engage two modalities of countermapping that rarely come into contact: the vein of radical poetry associated with the “open field” (Olson 1950; Mottram, “Open” 1977) in the 1970s and the parallel resurgence of militant research committed to reorienting the critique of capital “from below” (Thompson 1966). If this cluster of essays asks us to read the field as both the object and the ground of theory, then the cycle of struggles over energy extraction and distribution that followed the miners’ strikes and petroleum crises of 1972–74 recasts this field not only as the terminal limit of an industrial-era coal regime but also, to resuscitate an idiom of that period, a critical terrain of struggle. What follows, then, is an attempt to trace interlocking practices of open-field poetry and partisan knowledge that come to militate against fossil capital’s dominant modalities of reading and rendering the field.

No Energy Compromise

If the fight against fossil energy now demarcates this open-cast mine as a frontline of decarbonization, the Durham Coalfield was equally central to social and energetic transitions through which the political antagonisms of coal-fueled industrialization gave way, over a decade of fuel shortages and strikes, to our current petrocultural impasse. For Marxist literary theory, 1973 appears as a juncture time-stamped by petroleum dependency, logistical expansion, and spiraling financialization, demanding, as Fredric Jameson writes in 1984, “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” (89). More recently, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy (2011) has traced the contemporaneous dismantling of “rigid regional energy networks carrying coal” and expansion of “transoceanic energy grids” (153) for the circulation of oil as an uneven transition between fuel regimes and their attendant political machineries. While these correlative propositions have emerged as theoretical coordinates for mapping transition in the energy humanities,¹ this article is an exercise in “grounding” the spatial metaphor of mapping in the specificity of a material field (Smith and Katz 78). In tracing how these social, metabolic, and macroeconomic shifts both contoured with, and were contoured by, escalating struggles over coal, I look to two poets whose work interrogates the limits of aesthetics in this cartographic mode by staging an encounter between open-field poetics and partisan research on the Durham Coalfield.

In the work of Barry MacSweeney and Bill Griffiths, poetry stitches together discrete forms of inquiry—archival fragments, oral history, and fieldwork—to map this site of contestation over labor power, fossil fuels, and workers’ control. Written during the calamitous National Union of Miners (NUM) strike of 1984–85, Griffiths’s “In the Coal Year” (1992) offers a concise index of the collective tactics by which mechanisms of coal extraction and capillaries of energy circulation were brought to a halt:

Work is blockaded from the mines,
coal is blockaded from the steel-worx,
the coal-trains are halted as they go,
the lorries are fired in the haulage yards,
they sit in the pits, block the bridges and towns with cars
and the centres of the dominion are ringed round,
occupied 
                                                                                    (305)

This strategy of blockading work from the coalfield—a “dominion,” here, in the sense of both material territory and contested sovereignty—appeared in 1984 as the culmination of tactics first developed in the nineteenth century, when the combination of fossil energy and labor power afforded unprecedented openings for the exercise of workers’ control. As Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy contends, “coordinated acts of interrupting, slowing down or diverting” the movement of energy had “created a decisive political machinery, a new form of collective capability built out of coalmines, railways, power stations, and their operators” (27). If the emergence of fossil capital had locked together multiple valences of power—at once “a current of energy, a measure of work,” and “a structure of domination” (Malm 17–18)—Griffiths’s tactical cartography reveals the inverted affordances of mining infrastructure as a mode of counterpower manifest through strikes, slowdowns, and sabotage.

In the wake of drastically effective NUM strikes in 1972 and 1974, Barry MacSweeney’s collection Black Torch (1978) adopts strategies from a long durée of coal disputes stretching back to the Durham miners’ lockout of 1844. If, as Mitchell demonstrates, “the socio-technical worlds built with the vast new energy from coal” (Carbon 8) were uniquely vulnerable to such disruptions, the simultaneous blockage of fuel and labor described by Griffiths’s “In the Coal Year” appears throughout Black Torch as a trenchant refusal of this work-energy nexus:

no energy compromise

smoke LOCK-OUT tobacco until
death of energy
circled in your selves
                                                                                    (149–50)

Setting the strikes of the twentieth century against this historical convergence of fossil energy, labor power, and refusal in the nineteenth century, Black Torch casts the Durham Coalfield as a terrain on which this energy regime and its political formations would both originate and terminate. In the decade between the success and failure of NUM actions depicted by Griffiths and MacSweeney, the attenuation and decomposition of organized labor that attended the transition from coal to oil had become ever more apparent. This article traces how these writers take up the formal methodologies of open-field poetics and workers’ inquiry to map these shifts across the 1970s. To this end, it casts parallel genealogies of “partisan research” (Woodcock 506) and “composition by field” (Olson 239) against the critical orientations that have shaped this issue before returning to MacSweeney’s Black Torch and Griffiths’s pamphlet series Coal (1990–91) to situate poetic inquiry against the coalfield and its discontents. This fulcrum of poetics, praxis, and situated inquiry, I argue, poses formative questions for field theory. What does it mean to take “the field” as both the grounds of site-specific composition and a material terrain of struggle? And what might it mean to reframe research militancy as theory grounded in the field?

Partisan Perspectives, Open-Plan Fieldwork

To read the field as a terrain is to cast this issue’s claim that the practice of theory is materially shaped by its milieu against Mario Tronti’s insistence, in his 1966 Workers and Capital, that knowledge is fundamentally tied to struggle. Taking the tools of workers’ inquiry and the demands of workers’ control as its grounding principles, Operaismo—or “workerism”—sought to radically reorient Marxist theory from “the point of view of partisan collectivity on and against this world” (Roggero). This “shift in perspective,” Matteo Polleri insists, had pivoted on “the role of the field inquiry (enquête de terrain)” as the foundation for “a subterranean current of critical and materialist thought” (441). While the early field inquiries [inchiesta] conducted with workers by Romano Alquati and Raniero Panzieri were situated in the factory, Marxist-feminist and post-workerist inquiries have stretched these methods to the “social factory” of social reproduction (Dalla Costa and James 22) and the so-called hidden factory of logistical circulation (Bologna). Nonetheless, the effort to map these shifting terrains from an “irreducibly partial point of view” (Roggeri) has remained grounded by the epistemic promise of Tronti’s “partisan perspective” (Farris 29).

If this subterranean materialism offers an unlikely correlative to the “partial perspective” (Haraway 584) that has come to orient the critical lexicon of fieldwork, field philosophy, or field theory (see Diamanti, this issue), its claim to partisan knowledge offers a similarly situated research practice. Critiquing the sociological “view from nowhere” as a form of bourgeois “objectivity” (Farris 29), Tronti’s partisan perspective anticipates Donna Haraway’s distinction between the “objectified fields” produced by research “from above, from nowhere,” and the “politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating” from beneath (589).² In Fieldwork for Future Ecologies, editors Bridget Crone, Sam Nightingale, and Polly Stanton turn to Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “open-plan fieldwork” to describe field practice as theory “situated within material conditions, material processes and their urgencies such that it cannot be presumed in advance” (9). To unpack the critical inheritances of field theory, then, is to recognize the extent to which the current uptake of fieldwork finds its origins in a Marxian tradition of “practical philosophy” and materialist critique conducted “from below” (Spivak 36).

Where open-plan fieldwork reverses the teleology according to which preformed tenets are tested against the field, workers’ inquiry might be understood as a comparable reorientation of Marxist theory. Tracking backwards from the Operaist practice of conricerca, or “co-research” (Alquati 472), Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi trace the genealogy of research militancy to a questionnaire circulated by Marx in La Revue Socialiste in 1880, titled “A Workers’ Inquiry.” Departing from his prior dependence on factory inspectors’ reports, Haider and Mohandesi argue that Marx’s questionnaire constituted a radical departure from inquiries which “treated workers as mere objects of study,” instead adopting vernacular knowledge of the social and technical organization of production as “groundwork for collective action.” Where field theory turns the object of study into the milieu of research—reversing ground and figure—workers’ inquiry marks a similar reorientation toward lived terrains of struggle. “With this brief intervention,” Haider and Mohandesi insist, “Marx established a fundamental epistemological challenge.” For Crone, Nightingale, and Stanton, “fieldworking” names “a process . . . grounded in and shaped by the site or situation” (8). Strikingly, we find this same insistence on the inseparability of theory from practice animating Tronti’s Workers and Capital, in which Marxism is “theory which lives only in a function of the working class’s revolutionary practice, one that provides weapons for its struggle, develops tools for its knowledge,” and magnifies “the working-class point of view” (xv).

Open Terrain

Addressing the Marx Centenary Symposium in 1983, Stuart Hall offered an account of theoretical shifts that had taken place in the previous decade, spurred by the demands of ongoing struggles for women’s liberation, decolonization, and the disarticulation of materialism from Soviet orthodoxy. Where Tronti’s Workers and Capital had announced its departure from the “fossilized forest of vulgar Marxism” (xx), for Hall the “fabric of historical materialism” was its capacity to “ground” theory in these shifting terrains (39). If materialism had hitherto operated “on a closed terrain”—circumscribed by its adherence to theoretical principles—then the only Marx worth taking forward was “the Marx who is interested in thinking and in struggling on an open terrain” (43). Hall had spent the 1970s in proximity to the History Workshop, which counted Raphael Samuel, Sheila Rowbotham, and E. P. Thompson among its core members, and which had dedicated itself to the project of reorienting historical materialism “from below” (Thompson 279).³ Rather than focusing on the factory, as Workers and Capital had done, the workers’ inquiries circulated by the History Workshop sought to uncover otherwise-unarchived histories of preindustrial “social insubordination” (Hill 22); to map the circuitries of social reproduction as an emergent “ground of struggle” (Cox and Federici 3); or, returning us to the field from which we first began, to situate the miners’ strikes taking place across the Durham Coalfield within a longer history of workers’ control.

Published at the height of the first NUM strike, Pit Life in Co. Durham: Rank & File Movements & Workers’ Control (1972) was the first in a series of pamphlets written by David Douglass, a coal miner and militant researcher from Tyneside. Setting Douglass’s account against the official history of the coalfield, Samuel’s editorial introduction underscores that this account, “by contrast, is written from the point of view of the agitator” situated “in the individual seam, or face, or pit” (i). Tracing how dispositions of geology and labor left multiple choke points along the mineshaft and supply chain vulnerable to blockage, Pit Life recounts “the ways in which the miner was able to escape, or to resist, the grosser disciplines of the factory system” (2). As Mitchell contends in Carbon Democracy, this much-cited “militancy of the miners” lay in “the fact that moving carbon stores from the coal seam to the surface created unusually autonomous places and methods of work” (20). Anticipating Mitchell’s account of the relation between the material geographies of the coal and its social forms, Pit Life affirms this correlation of the mineshaft’s geological disposition with the self-organization of work and its refusal at the coalface. Far from the managerial gaze, the coal seam came to operate as “an embryo of workers’ control” set deep “within the capitalist system” (26). Subterranean materialist inquiry, here, becomes the groundwork for collective action.

The capacity of mineworkers to mobilize spontaneous action, from the “restriction of work” through sabotage or slowdowns to the “outright refusal” of the walkout or the mass strike, was an “offensive weapon against the management” (Douglass 35, 56, 23). At the same time, Pit Life refuses to fetishize the material topography of the choke point as the determining condition of workers’ agency, tracing both the structural power afforded by the technical composition of the coalfield and the social composition of the rank-and-file movement that operated within, and often against, the union bureaucracy. Operating on the militant left of the NUM, Douglass’s work contrasts partisan knowledges of the mine with the “social-structural determinants” of fossil energy to trace “the dialectical relationship between this structure and the self-activity of the work force” (Rutledge 429). Like Bill Watson’s Counter-Planning on the Shop Floor (1971) or Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici’s subsequent Counter-Planning from the Kitchen (1975), Douglass’s History Workshop pamphlets saw in workers’ self-organization both the de-structuration of capital and the delineation of a Marxist theory grounded in the practice and demands of struggle. Below the surface, in the closed space of the coalface, we encounter theory on an open terrain.

Fig. 2-3. Left, Jarrow Colliery, (1839); right, Coal Pits and Chutes on the Tyne, (ca. 1870). Reproduced in Douglass’s Pit Life.

Open Field

Beside this seam of subterranean materialism, another line of inquiry cuts transversally across the coalfield in the 1970s. Namely, the poetics of the open field. If Hall’s call to ground theory on an open terrain had been articulated as a break with the closed terrain of materialist orthodoxy, the expression of poetics “in the open” had defined itself equally against the “closed verse” of the postwar period (Olson 240, 239). Casting modernist poetics against breakthroughs in modern physics, William Carlos Williams’s 1948 lecture “The Poem as a Field of Action” had outlined the prosodic innovations of late modernism as “a new measure or way of measuring that will be commensurate with the new social, economic world in which we are living” (283). Taking up Williams’s provocation two years later, the interdisciplinary scholar Charles Olson—then rector of Black Mountain College—would elaborate a theory of poetics oriented around the opening of the page, the poem’s prosody, and the process of composition to the situated contingencies of their milieu or field. The claim for poetry as a mode of inquiry—a practice, in Williams’s terms, of measuring or mapping socioeconomic terrains—was expanded in Olson’s seminal “Projective Verse” toward a methodology of “COMPOSITION BY FIELD” (239). The spatial metaphor of the field, first taken by Williams from unified field theory, now drew together a series of relations that expanded outward from the spatial arrangements of the typewriter to its environment. To compose “by field,” for Olson, was to embed the poem within a mesh of socioecological relations; to frame the space of the page itself as a kinetic field energy transfer; and, perhaps most critically, to cast the practice of composition in the open against methods of geological, archaeological, and anthropological fieldwork.

“In what is commonly called ‘open form’ poetry and poetics,” Harriet Tarlo reflects, “a field both is and is more than trope or metaphor” (117). At once “a structure, a form, a philosophy, and ethics,” the field also names the ecological, material, and historical specificity of “a bounded and scarred and worked space” within which the poem is grounded (Tarlo 117, 114). Across Maximus Poems (1960–75), Olson set out to track the intersection of geomorphology, logistics infrastructure, and maritime shipping along the shores of Massachusetts, folding archival materials, fieldnotes, and topographic records into its fragmentary spatial composition. If Olson’s own articulation of the field remained freighted by the colonial methodologies of fieldwork, not least in the narration of his own archaeological forays, the milieu-specific orientation of his work and theory has been continually resituated and repurposed toward less cartographic and more politically astute modalities of poetic encounter in the field.⁴ “In the years preceding the first oil crisis,” Angela Hume and Gillian Osborne reflect, open-field poetry offered an aesthetic mechanism for metabolizing social, ecological, and energetic shifts as “new material realities and forms of consciousness” found reflection in “composition by field, projective verse, and other modernist-influenced renovations of form” (3–4). For Griffiths and MacSweeney, whose work had emerged out of encounters between the Black Mountain School and the British Poetry Revival of the late 1960s (Latter 8; Roberts 30), open-form poetics offered a methodology for mapping struggles on the coalfield.

Pit Justice: Black Torch

Set, as Tom Crompton suggests, in “the combustive heart of British fossil capitalism” (7), Black Torch is concerned with tracing the geology of the coalfield as a terrain of labor struggles from the Durham miners’ lockout of 1844 to the NUM strike of 1974. Conceived in the immediate wake of effective strikes in 1975 and completed in the upswell of a second oil crisis in 1978, MacSweeney’s project appeared alongside a spate of works that sought to reground open-field poetics in the topographical and economic landscape of postindustrial Britain. Collections such as Peter Riley’s Tracks and Mineshafts (1983) or the serial poem Place (1974) by Allen Fisher, whose New London Pride Editions would first publish Black Torch, were indicative of a collective effort to situate the opening of the field against the deindustrialization of the economy, combining archival research with fieldwork across disused mineshafts and docklands.⁵ In his introduction to an early draft, MacSweeney described Black Torch as a “political and geographical” account of the coalfield that remained oriented, like Douglass’s Pit Life, toward the horizon of “workers’ controlled pits” (327–28). The poem itself stages an extended encounter between the geologic, cartographic, and archival aesthetics of the open field and the partisan perspective offered by the History Workshop, reconstructing the 1844 strike action from a bricolage of Marxist theory, mineworkers’ dialect, and “found” fragments of fictitious records. As Crompton contends, the polyvocal shifts and dialectical juxtapositions of MacSweeney’s “combinatory poetics” offer a formal correlate for the “revolutionary combination” of mineworkers’ trade unions in the nineteenth century (2).

Restlessly traversing political and geographical terrains, MacSweeney’s evocation of this “carbonised resting black heart” (139) of the fossil economy shifts restlessly between the geomorphology and labor history of the Durham Coalfield. Stitching together dialectically opposed accounts of coal’s rise and decline—both from above and below—the field of Black Torch appears transformed by the apparatuses of extraction and accumulation indexed by Daggett’s Birth of Energy or Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital (2016):

the Jenny & the locomotive    
“the most important tool of progress”  
is coal    
pistons go as we recall    
reduced demand for coal    
& the fall in wages    
a recession which brought    
near-revolution    
refusal of agreements    
pits of the north east    
came to a halt

                                                                                    (141)

Behind the evident didacticism of this passage, which offers a condensed diagram of Malm’s case for an emphasis on the coupling of fossil energy to labor rather than the steam engine as a prime mover of the transition to coal, there remains the more open question of precisely what coal is, as a field; a tool of “progress”; a machinery of mass refusal. Taking its name from the vernacular geological terminology of Durham mineworkers, Black Torch is committed to elaborating a grounded account of this material resource:

If you get the intellectual notion      
of coal  
there will be a filthy
armchair theorist    
hewing carboniferous seams

                                                                                    (157)

The carefully stepped spatial arrangement of this passage, in which Black Torch most closely echoes Olson’s Maximus, suggests a mimetic relation between the stratigraphy of the coalfield and the formal mapping of the page, insisting on the primacy of field over form; practice over armchair theory. Against the abstraction of resources and anticipated profit margins that delimit the attenuated “intellectual notion / of coal” legible to the industrial surveyor, Black Torch turns toward the coalfield from another angle:

beyond Hartfell    
spines knot
under millstone  
iron & lead    
coal    
nearer the sea      
on a final shelf    
is 280 fathoms at Pemberton’s Colliery    
under magnesian      
into the German Ocean      
(there are signs      
on      
the map
                                                                                    (157)

Here, a cartographic mode collides with the material conditions of the mineworkers. If the dominant register is geologic, tracing the disposition of coal seams and mineral veins from inland millstone to the unexhausted coal reserves under the North Sea, “spines knot” is more than just a metaphor. If there are “signs / on / the map” that demarcate the morphology of the coalfield, it is only from this partisan perspective—this subterranean materialism—that the backbreaking labor of extraction becomes legible.

If Black Torch adopts the counter-cartographic compositional practices of the open field, the work is first and foremost an attempt to rewrite histories of coalmining in Durham from below. Identifying this structuring tension, Luke Roberts’s Seditious Things: Barry MacSweeney & the Politics of Post-War British Poetry (2017) offers an astute account of MacSweeney’s ambivalent relation to the influence of open-field poetics on the British Poetry Revival while simultaneously tracing a poetics of “radical dissent” in Black Torch that “situates the work as a contribution to the work of New Left historians and critics such as [E. P.] Thompson” (63). As Roberts notes, the collection wears its debts to the History Workshop on its sleeve, not least the poem “Black Torch Strike,” which is composed almost entirely from Thompson’s seminal study of industrial-era resistance, The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Shaped by MacSweeney’s reading of Thompson, as well as his experience covering the miners’ strikes and organizing for the National Union of Journalists in 1974, the politics of Black Torch are entrenched firmly in workers’ autonomy and self-organization. The closing lines of the title sequence offer a succinct reformulation of Douglass’s insistence on workers’ control:

there’ll be no pit justice  
until the pits  
are in the hands of the real owners  
the pitmen

                                                                                    (162)

Stitched together from composite resources that include reported speech, archival research, and apocryphal “found-text,” several passages closely resemble Douglass’s partisan account of rank-and-file demands and labor disputes at the coalface, pitting oral histories in Northumberland dialect against the managerial language of a hegemonic archive. Adopting a polyvocal mode of open-form poetics, Black Torch positions its readers as “observers among the workers” (Roberts 69) as it shifts between the miners’ own accounts of labor struggles beneath the field and the official narrative composed above the surface. Rendered in the miners’ dialect of pitmatic, MacSweeney’s strikers offer caustic critiques of working conditions, piece-rates, productivity, and property as an appropriation of “profit / without work” (150). As Roberts and Crompton foreground in their readings, this juxtaposition of hegemonic and vernacular voice is often employed to dramatize a form of epistemic antagonism between bourgeois objectivity and partisan knowledge. In one passage, the workers’ account of “black dust doon ya lungs” as the common cause of respiratory disease is cast against the “scientific truth” that

coal is vegetable in origin
therefore it is organic
therefore unharmful
                                                                                    (149)

Here, the production of knowledge regarding the geochemical properties of the coalfield appears ineradicably tied to struggle. As Douglass reflects in Pit Life, the subterranean condition of the “mine necessitates a different attitude of mind” expressed in vocabularies, solidarities, and knowledges “peculiar to that environment” (1). Another apocryphal archival fragment, in the form of a letter left for the mine owners by a miner following strike riots in 1831, makes explicit this claim to partisan knowledge:

I dinna pretent to be profit, but I naw this, and lots of ma marrows na’s te, that we’re not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw we ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan to get se much o yor own way, we gan have some of wors now . . .

(165)

Articulating partial knowledge as a condition of partisan objectivity, Black Torch holds up these situated knowledges and vernacular cartographies of the workers as a means of representing the materiality of coal, tracing the technical reorganization of coal production since the nineteenth century, and historicizing struggles over energy in the 1970s.

As the poet Andrew Duncan has it, Black Torch depicted the political landscape of 1978 as “a mine, from which we can only exit when led by someone who holds the illuminating torch – of Marxist theory, perhaps” (63). Yet by the time MacSweeney’s sequence reaches its final section, “Black Torch Sunrise,” the trajectory of the coming struggles nonetheless remains unclear. Here, the bright flame of the miners’ strike first lit in 1844 and seemingly reignited by the NUM actions of 1972 disperses into the fragmentary prospect of “individual consciousness, local energy / & mass development” as “TUC inner cadres make closed door pacts with the Govt” under the pressure of rising inflation and energy costs (170, 169). If Black Torch had sought to combine “Marxist historiography, trade union activity, and the forces of poetic production” to map a counter-history of the coalfield, Roberts reflects that, in this final gesture, “the political conditions of the 1970s exceed the poem’s grasp” (68, 74). Tracing themes of petroleum dependency and isolation through “Black Torch Sunrise,” Roberts reads this closing poem as a critical assessment of the project as a whole. For MacSweeney, he suggests, the formal combination of open-field poetics and history from below had “falsely accumulate[d] its power from a form of solidarity and a history of dissent which was being outmanoeuvred” from both sides by 1978, even before the “comprehensive crisis of Thatcherism” (75).

Fig. 4. Barry MacSweeney and Michael Chaplin, Ode to Coal, 1978. Courtesy of Michael Chaplin.

To frame this reading of the formal limitations of Black Torch as a limit point for a certain aesthetic of mapping, we might turn to another work published by MacSweeney in the same year: Ode to Coal. Omitted from the Trigram Press collection Odes: 1971–1978, Ode to Coal remains anomalous within MacSweeney’s work. Composed in collaboration with Michael Chaplin, the poster-poem is so formally and tonally distinct from the Odesthat it appears, instead, as a potential culmination of the vein of work initiated by Black Torch. Tracing the “gradation of ancient forests” into carbon’s “structureless matrix” beneath a cross-section outline of the mineshaft, this work clearly reflects the subterranean trajectories and geological concerns of MacSweeney’s open-field project. Yet where Black Torch had offered a dense, combinatory bricolage of historical, vernacular, and tactical knowledge, Ode to Coal merely lists the categories of coal found on the Durham field: “lignite bituminous anthracite.” Stuck in a slag heap of “dull coal” rather than illuminated by the black torch of theory, the monotone recital of geological knowledge is so utterly devoid of the partisan perspectives that shaped Black Torch that the ode appears skeptical of poetry’s capacity to carry any form of knowledge, let alone map a terrain. Read alongside Black Torch, however, the cascading parataxis of “fracture / structure / destroyed” takes on another resonance, invoking a labor movement fragmented by rising inflation, anti-union laws, and the complicity of union bureaucracy with state officials. The coalfield of 1978 is not so much a combustive terrain of class antagonism but a mute geology in which “no volatile matter” remains. Where Williams saw the poem as a physical field of action, “atoms have greater affinity / for each other” than MacSweeney’s fractious left.

If the composition of carbon deposits refracts the decomposition of organized labor and social life after 1973, the formal composition of Ode to Coal also reflects the specific conditions of the field’s declining productivity. According to Chaplin’s recollection, MacSweeney had originally composed the poem over a graph of the coalfield’s output after nationalization in 1947 (Bevington 405). If we assume that each line corresponds to the productivity of a given year, then each of the three stanzas turned on its side offers a mapping of the field’s exhaustion and the downward trajectory of production. In this poetic map of failure, fragmented and discontinuous, the decline of the coal industry and the decimation of organized labor appears as a ghostly imprint; the promise of composition by field as a measure of social and economic conditions becomes an all-too-literal representation of political terrains. In place of the partisan perspective from below, we find a slanted view of the infrastructural transition and the geological field that subtend this poetic form.

Perpetual Kidnap: Coal

If “In the Coal Year” recorded a moment of militant optimism before the defeat of the NUM in 1985, by the time Bill Griffiths moved to the port town of Seaham at the end of the decade that political milieu would have been near-unrecognizable. Griffiths was an anarchist, prison abolitionist, and dialect historian who had met MacSweeney through Writers Forum in the early years of the British Poetry Revival. In Seaham, he produced an extensive body of work on coal mining and mineworkers’ dialect that bridged linguistics, people’s history, and open-field poetics. In both his dialect dictionaries, most notably Pitmatic: The Talk of the North East Coal Field (2007), and his poetry, such as The Coal World: Murton Tales Reworked as Dialect Verse (1995) or the three-volume series Coal (1990–1991), Griffiths draws on the same local archives and autonomist tendencies as Douglass’s History Workshop pamphlets. Like Black Torch, his poetry is trenchantly vernacular, formally radical, and grounded in the language of the coalfield. Yet if Coal follows the methodological orientations outlined above in its commitment to documenting this field from below, it also reflects profound shifts in the social, energetic, and material conditions that had taken place in the 1980s. Black Torch took the coalfield as the carboniferous heart of fossil capital. This same “coal-heart” appears in Griffiths’s work in the early 1990s as a “long-lasting negative” of its extractive history (230, 229). While the decline of mining in the northeast had been the culmination of successive governments’ attempts to “eliminate the coal industry in favour of imported oil” (Rutledge 415), pit closures had accelerated under the Thatcher administration and, by 1990, the terminally declining coal industry was on the verge of privatization. Griffiths’s “North Scenes” offers a blunt account of the effects of offshoring and deindustrialization on social life in Seaham: “Stakes were all dead ship-building was. . . . And In this silence, / only the tankers off to the sea” (298).

In the 1972 pamphlet Fools Gold, MacSweeney had offered a glimpse of the envisioned resource future that emerged glimmering on the horizon in

  tiny sparklets
of optimism along the sea-
gas pipes

                                                                                    (72)

Throughout Griffiths Coal trilogy, the energy output of the North Sea oil fields comes to eclipse a subterranean expanse of coal shafts now crossed by “tanker-lanes” instead of “coal-barges” (250, 234). The exhausted coalfield, in the opening sequence of Coal, is no longer a site of workers’ struggle but a field site for “industrial archaeology” (229, 232). The initial brevity of Griffiths’s lines and the plunging trajectory of the poems’ stanzas offer a spatial mimicry of the “vertical shaft” (231), but the sequence swiftly moves its focus from the material form of the coal seam to the syntactic articulations of logistical networks that accompany and encircle fossil fuel extraction. First the mine, as Griffiths puts it,

Then the trains.
Link, arrangement, movement;
brightly banded commas
click up

                                                                                    (233)

Where “In the Coal Year” had framed transport infrastructures as a tactical opportunity for workers, Coal registers the far-reaching impacts of logistical transformations in energy supply chains that had accompanied the transition from coal to oil. As Jasper Bernes has argued, the rise of logistics in the 1970s had been “one of the key weapons in a decades-long global offensive against labour” in which the globalized supply chains “effectively encircled labour, laying siege to its defensive emplacements such as unions and, eventually, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, completely crushing them” (186). The possibility of intervention on the terrain of energy was increasingly circumnavigated by “stretching out the thin line of oil production” and dispersing its labor force across neocolonial extraction sites and strategically situated refineries (Mitchell, Carbon 5).

Alongside the dismantling of workers’ control, the combination of the logistical and financial circuitries of oil’s lubricity presented “even greater challenges, or full-blown blockages, for representation and orientation” after 1973 (Toscano and Kinkle 14). Reflecting on the legacy of partisan research in the wake of the 1970s, Polleri describes the workers’ inquiry as a cognitive map essentially correlative with the factory, moving from the immediate terrain of struggle outward to the social factory and, finally, a map of totality: “From the singular fragment of social life, from its situated gaze, it becomes possible to achieve a collectivization of experience, and even the augmentation of the potential for resistance and struggle” (442). If the methodological reorientations of co-research and the advances of partisan knowledge were situated in contrapuntal relation to Ford-Taylorism as a method of mapping, structuring, and extracting value from the circuits of assembly-line production and unwaged social reproduction, 1973 had marked the end for the hegemony of this postwar model. As Polleri articulates, the “neoliberal transformations beginning at the end of the 1970s called for a new reflection,” and “the perspective of inquiry ha[d] to be modified in turn; the pluralization and complexification of the ‘point of view’ must follow those of the space of experience of contemporary proletarians” (442). Put simply, the opacity of the petroleum pipeline or the supply chain, alongside the increasing unemployment of an industrial working class, presented a critical problematic for the factory-floor inchiesta as a means of mapping class antagonism or articulating the perspective of the worker to a critique of totality. In what remains of this essay, I argue that across the prismatic forms and logistical sites of Coalopen-field poetics encounters a comparable impasse.

Eric Mottram describes Griffiths work “a language of elisions and disjunctures” that scatters poetry across a prism of perspectives (“Every” 10). Throughout Coal, the socioecological ruptures of petrocapitalism find expression in linguistic surfaces rent by the pressures of carbon-fueled growth and its eventual decline. If the extraction of coal, in Griffiths’s shattered language, appears as a systemic “ab-use” of the field’s extensive hydrocarbon reserves, then it is an apparatus that deindustrialization has summarily “dissembled” (237). Put simply, both the material infrastructure of the pits and the social substratum of Seaham collieries have been rapidly dismantled. In the wake of this disassembly, the promise of exponential growth turns out to have been a lie. If Black Torch turned the poetic resources of the open field and the methods of history from below toward a rendering of the social formations that manifest across the coalfield in the nineteenth century, Coal instead reflects the decomposition of the working class and the dispersal of struggles of energy from the site of production across disparate sites of circulation and consumption. In place of the distinctive perspectival orientations of the armchair theorist and the subterranean worker, Griffiths’s work reflects the pluralization and complexification of the partisan perspective in its prismatic collision of vocal registers, phonemic fragments, and extractive sites. Attempting to index a ground shift from coal’s “great in-draught / of energy” as the foundation of social life to the increasingly fractal experience of economic downturn in which this nexus of labor and energy is contorted in “a muddle of / work-content, novelty, and demand,” Coaladopts a paratactic and often asyntactic register to trace the repurposing of mines and dockyards into “places of collection and disposal” (238). Cast adrift in the circuitries of the logistical field, the open form of poetry is “turned to a list / an incomprehension” (241).

In expressing this shift away from an industrial organization of the work-energy nexus, Griffiths’s logistical poetics takes on a specific valence in relation to the resource aesthetics of the open field. Throughout “Projective Verse,” Olson had framed the page as a field of energy transfer and cast the open-form poem, in turn, as a “high-energy construct” transmitting kinetic energy along the “lines of force” afforded by the typewriter (240, 250). Extending Williams’s idiom of theoretical physics, the concept of the poem as an “energy discharge” of linguistic “particles” reflects the distinctive nuclear energy unconscious of mid-century modernism (241, 240). As Will Rowe reflects, Griffith’s work is likewise shaped by “an acute awareness of the historical energies in the language” it inherits (163). Across Coal, however, the splitting of the atom gives way instead to the “carbon halo” that radiates from “excitable engines” (248) of fossil fuel combustion and circulation: Where Olson had seen the poetic line as a vector of energy transferred to the reader, Coal returns us to the kinetics of the open field:

and the seeds of matter
the indivisibles,
specks and spiral
turned out to energy, omega,
and the knot is found simply
to go back to LINE.

                                                                                    (237)

This capitalized return to the “LINE” consciously adopts an Olsonian idiom and typographic inflection, but it also diverges along two critical trajectories. Here, the composition of “matter” or the “knot” of industrial and energetic metabolisms appear as “indivisibles,” resistant to metaphors of nuclear fission or social division. This knotted relation between the form of poetry and the material form of fuel “turned out to energy,” Griffiths suggests, is irresolvable. At the same time, “LINE” has changed its meaning. Across Coal’s three volumes, the line of the poem takes on a correlative relation to “the line of supply” (238), through which the circulation of oil comes to encircle, or outflank, organized labor. Stretching outward from the dockyards and the subsea coalfield to the drilling platforms of the Forties Field, the abandoned infrastructures of coal and the ascendant logistical networks of oil come to dominate the field of the poem as “the dead and living march all equally / by lines of cable, track and pipe” (239). Returning to the lines of force that crossed the field of the 1950s, Coal finds a dense meshwork of pipelines, power grids, and shipping tankers that dislocate the historical processes of energy transition from any horizon of pit justice. In place of the kinetic poetics of transfer and fission, we encounter an aesthetics of supply lines and blockades.

For Mottram, this mapping of resource injustice is “a recurrent Griffiths theme: the unnatural and natural formations of energy, the voluntary and involuntary conversions of energy into form, including those of justice and poetry” (“Every” 17). Coming to the fore in the final sequence of Coal, this transformation of fossil energy into social and poetic form appears far removed from the collective refusal of any energy compromise in Black Torch. Where the 1974 strike had capitalized on petroleum shocks to choke the state’s supply of coal, energy crisis appears in Coal as an apparatus that enables the extraction of surplus value from those populations deemed surplus to capital in the period of long downturn:

the only route to profit is terror.

Are you cold?
Pay us for more heat.
The rightprice –
The profit price.
(What littlest you can give,
what most you can get.)
Perpetual kidnap.

                                                                                    (251–252)

Here, energy has shifted from a site of potential sabotage in the machinery of fossil capital to a mechanism of debt and destitution that extracts value from the barest substratum of social reproduction: the perpetual kidnap of depending on British Petroleum or Shell PLC for heat. Where Pit Life and Black Torch rendered the coalfield as a site of critical disputes over the social and material conditions of energy production, the three volumes of Coal chart a shift toward the spheres of energy’s circulation and consumption. As if in response to the choking of the national coal supply by the NUM in 1972, the poem captures the violence with which privatized energy companies exert their monopoly on oil and gas supply as a mode of social domination. Griffiths might no longer look to the open field to chart a pathway out of perpetual dispossession, yet Coal resituates the politics of refusal on this terrain of circulation. Describing geophysical and millennial processes by which “sea-weeds tire into oil” beneath the surface of the North Sea, the ending of the second volume heaves itself toward an exhortation: “Let us have no more obedience. / Not words, but teeth” (245, 246).

Taking Stock

If, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “the only purpose of doing any of this analysis at all is figuring out where and how to fight,” then Black Torchand Coal offer poetic inquiry as an attempt to situate contemporary crises of energy, capital, and climate against the shifting terrain of energy struggles after 1973. As these overlapping projects reflect, the offshoring of energy extraction and circulation across increasingly dispersed networks of supply presents a certain historical impasse for open-field poetics or militant research as field theory in the Durham Coalfield. Nonetheless, they might still offer us a tool for mapping where and how to confront flows of energy and finance that appear ever more opaque and further removed from our capacity to intervene. As Bernes reflects, echoing Polleri, the partisan perspective comes up against the totality of logistical circulation as a seemingly impassable horizon of thought:

It is a view from everywhere (or nowhere), a view from space, that only capital as totalising, distributed process can inhabit. Only capital can fight us in every place at once, because capital is not in any sense a force with which we contend, but the very territory on which that contention takes place. Or rather, it is a force, but a field force, something which suffuses rather than opposes. Unlike capital, we fight in particular locations and moments – here, there, now, then. To be a partisan means, by necessity, to accept the partiality of perspective and the partiality of the combat we offer.

(199)

If capital appears simultaneously as the target and terrain of struggle—a “field force” that suffuses social life—then this insistence on the deictic coordinates of theory makes a claim comparable to the modalities of thought and fieldwork outlined above. More than this, the forms of fracture and dispersal that demarcate Griffiths’s accounts of the coalfield bear a striking resemblance to Bernes’s description of counter-logistical theory as a situated mode of mapping; a methodology for “taking stock of things we encounter in our immediate environs,” not so much “the standpoint of the global totality, but rather a process of bricolage from the standpoint of partisan fractions” (201).

Confronted with the field force of capital in motion, Bernes’s levity regarding the limits and capacities of this “difficult view from within” (174) articulates a condition that Black Torch or Coal repeatedly come up against in their attempts to combine partisan research and open-field poetics, taking the coalfield as both the field of study and terrain of struggle. The formal difficulties and limitations of this work stage a comparable ambivalence regarding the capacity of open-field poetry to carry the same forms of knowledge to which historical materialism lays claim; in other words, to produce legible cartographies of capital. At the same time, both collections insist on the inextricability of theory and poetics from the field, tracing the contours and the limits of a knowledge tied to struggle. In doing so, they maintain the centrality of the partisan perspective to the methodologies of field theory. In Coal, the littoral between the Durham Coalfield and the North Sea appears in a cascade of echoic homonyms, energetic propulsions, and cartographic horizons:

See the seam,
scorched with its moving,
and a long map

                                                                                    (230)

This seam of black torch, ignited by the combustive force of circulating capital, comes to stand for a subterranean line of inquiry below the surface of the coalfield. It is a partial map of energy and capital flows, situated from below. As Gigi Roggero reflects, the attempt to orient ourselves within the current crisis returns us to the militant theory of the 1970s in order “to overturn it against the present: not to contemplate it but to set it alight.” Revisiting the clandestine fires, prismatic forms, and fragmentary maps that come to occupy the partisan poetics of the coalfield, we might similarly reground theory on this open terrain.

Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher with the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow, and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre, Munich. His current monograph project, Poetry & Energy After 1973, traces the emergence of a poetics of exhaustion and a politics of refusal against intersecting crises of petroleum, productivity, and social reproduction. With Jeff Diamanti, he is co-director of the practice research residency FieldARTS. His first poetry chapbook, Outages, is forthcoming with Veer2.

Works Cited

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• Crone, Bridget, et al., editors. Fieldwork for Future Ecologies: Radical Practice for Art & Art-Based Research. Onomatopee, 2022.
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• Mackey, Nathaniel. “Breath & Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics.” Poetics & Precarity, edited by Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller, SUNY Press, 2018, pp. 1–30.
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• ———. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. Verso, 2011.
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• Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia UP, 2005.
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• Thompson, E. P. “History from Below,” Times Literary Supplement, 7 April 1966, pp. 279–80.
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• Tronti, Mario. Workers and Capital. Translated by David Broder, Verso, 2019.
• Watson, Bill. Counter-Planning from the Shop Floor. New England Free Press, 1971.
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• Woodcock, Jamie. “The Workers’ Inquiry from Trotskyism to Operaismo: A Political Methodology for Investigating the Workplace.” ephemera: theory & politics in organization, vol. 14, no. 3, 2014, pp. 493–513.
• Yépez, Heriberto. “The Opening of the (Transnational Battle) Field.” Poetics and Precarity, edited by Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller, SUNY Press, 2018, pp. 161–68.

Footnotes

1. See Bellamy, O’Driscoll, and Simpson; and Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy at Ten.”

2. If Haraway now appears more frequently alongside countervailing materialist tendencies, her insistence that “only partial perspective promises objective vision” (583) proceeds explicitly from Nancy Hartsock’s “standpoint of the oppressed” as an “epistemological device . . . on which to ground a specifically feminist historical materialism” (287, 284).

3. Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down (1972) is an archetypal example of this perspectival shift. Inspired by Sven Lindqvist’s Dig Where You Stand (1978), the History Workshop followed a comparable trajectory to that of co-research, taking the partisan perspective as the basis of historical inquiry.

4. See Fraser; Mackey; Yépez.

5. For much of his early life, MacSweeney had lived in immediate proximity to both the mineworks of Northumberland and the coal terminals of Newcastle, yet found himself working in the southeast as a journalist in 1974, covering the NUM strikes from afar and embroiled in the National Union of Journalists’ (NUJ) strike of the same year.

Maria Sledmere (bio)

Abstract

Building on Daniel Eltringham’s notion of the “kinetic commons,” this essay offers “meadowing” as an experiment in putting to creative-critical work the multi-sensory dreamscape of abundance, desire, exposure, and biodiversity signified by meadow. Through close readings of contemporary texts by Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim, and drawing on Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and other critical concepts, it explores how meadowing works as a poethic practice. It proffers a lyric architecture whose fieldwork of study and dream is ongoing, whose bounds are messily incomplete, and whose orientations are improvisatory and immersive.

Worldseed

That’s the thing about meadows. There’s so much to see, you have to keep coming back time and time again. It’s up to all of us to make sure there is something left to come back to.

—Alistair Whyte, “The Meadows of Scotland”

In a meadowing ballad my sprit points blissTo plough in the rivering air of her footpath songs.

—W. S. Graham, “The Seven Journeys”

Elaine Gan observes that “It takes a world to make a seed. But it takes more than a seed to make a world” (91). No cellular unit, distinct, makes a world alone. The question of Gan’s “more than” is dependent on “how we distinguish a seed and a world, a drop of water and an ocean, a leaf and a landscape” (94). “Where,” Gan asks, “does one end and another begin?” (94). I want to go all in, I can’t toggle between anymore. I am between where the sunlight touches that phone screen slant of refraction; rustling thought between all of us. I am the free indirect discourse of the meadow. As the quote above from Alistair Whyte, Head of PlantLife Scotland, suggests, the time of the meadow is one of ceaseless return, and in that return a caretaking. A thickening of discourse to know what world is. I want to do something with the “so much,” the “more than” that characterizes our sense of the meadow: hay-giving grassland, indeterminate lieu de mémoire, precarious yet resilient site of biodiversity, supportive of life.

As we tell each other to “touch grass,”¹ meaning “go outside” on the internet, we implore one another towards a temporary digital egress offered in some imaginary open field beyond our screens.² I want to offer meadowing as a gerund for the provisional, expansive fieldwork of poetic opening, inflected by the immersive, in medias res quality of dreaming—which dispossesses us of mastery and stable perspective. In my use, meadowing becomes a practice-led poethics³ of sounding out more-than-human worlds and histories through the dense and replenishing figure of a meadow. David Farrier has praised lyric’s ability to capture the “thick time” of the anthropocene,⁴ putting “multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to ‘thicken’ the present with an awareness of the other times and places” (9). Instead of “frame,” I want to think primarily about lyric poetry as an architecture of distributed, more-than-human sociality in which reading might be called meadowing. Whereas W. S. Graham employs the laborer’s tool of the “plough” as a figure for poetry’s romantic pursuits of “bliss” (5), Whyte reminds us that the meadow isn’t endless, and its beauty requires the work of collective return.⁵ Evoking the static pastoral ideal of languor, a place of return and retreat, the meadow is also a site of exposure, risk, abandonment, and melancholy. The meadow is where Man shoots the mother deer in the Disney classic Bambi(1942). It is a site of slag heaps, fly tipping, wild and opportunistic overgrowth; the edge land between industrial estates sprung up with buddleia against the odds. To meadow is to go into mourning and dream.

Meadowing resonates with what Daniel Eltringham has recently called the “kinetic commons” (69), whose ideal landform is the ragged meadow, constantly open to regeneration, biodiversity, and shared abundance. Eltringham situates the “kinetic commons” within a complex historical lineage of commoning, which goes beyond the agrarian, from “the parliamentary enclosures of the Romantic period” to the Commons Act of 2006, which has protected urban spaces such as London’s skatepark, The Undercroft, from private redevelopment (5, 1). Like Eltringham, I prefer “the verb form, ‘to common’, and its gerundial noun ‘commoning’, to deployments of ‘the commons’ as an abstract, universalizing discourse of governance or rights” (4). This accords with Peter Linebaugh’s conceptualizing of the commons as “not a thing but a relationship,” something which “must be entered into” (18, 14). Meadowing is a verb-gerund that also encapsulates the associative dimension of meadow as overgrowth, dreamscape, working land, commons, and memory site. A good example of work that performs kinetic commoning is Budhaditya Chattopadhyay’s Landscape in Metamorphosis (2008), which Chattopadhyay describes in The Auditory Setting as “an auditory mediation of place created through the artistic transformation of an acoustic landscape into an electroacoustic environment” (89). As a phonographic assemblage combining narrative with audio ambience, the work invites us into a multidimensional memoryscape in its traversal of Eastern India. The birdsong, crunchy footprints, or fire crackles walk us into a continuous and unfolding sense of time’s field—the machinic and organic, the sung and disrupted, are repeated and interspersed. The changing metamorphoses of landscape are decidedly, as the title suggests, synchronous, open, and plural.

Through meadowing, I want to track possibilities for field theory that converse with an ongoing history of commoning, and reorient the poetic, by which I mean creative and critical, work of ecological response towards a reparative ethic of openness, incompleteness, and play. I undertake this primarily through readings of poems by Verity Spott, Tom Raworth, and Myung Mi Kim. As the call for papers for this issue prompts reflection on the relational dynamics of “field frequencies” and the “stylistics of disciplinary habit,” here I want to foreground poetics as a crucial modality through which meadowing is put into practice as a logic of rehearsal or wager. As Charles Bernstein argues, “One of the pleasures of poetics is to try on a paradigm . . . and see where it leads you” (161). If the basic principles of meadowing follow a logic of openness, biodiversity, and indeterminacy, then to follow its tentative “paradigm” is to explore what an experimental linguistic practice might do to our embodied thinking and feeling within the sited “worlds” of research. This is not to conflate the meadow with the commons: the former is essentially an area of unkempt grassland, the latter a historical idea that may be tied to specific instances such as the “‘village commons’ of English heritage or the ‘French commune’ of the revolutionary past” (Linebaugh 13). While I make reference to commoning, I seek not to align with it a historically specific concept, but rather use meadowing as a “material heuristic” for attuning to ecologies of ongoingness and multiplicity (Jue and Ruiz 1).

So what exactly is a meadow? Outlining the accretive or diminutive process by which an assemblage of plants and animals become or stop being a meadow, Timothy Morton identifies the fuzzy boundaries of definition: “There is no single, independent, definable point at which the meadow stops being a meadow” (Dark Ecology 73). We can’t identify a precise moment when, perhaps through the decline in biodiversity or the stripping of vegetation, a meadow ceases to be meadow. The continual striving for metaphysical distinction, while imprecise, has material implications. To choose a local example, documented on The Children’s Wood website, the space which occupies the North Kelvin Meadow and Children’s Wood in Glasgow’s West End have been variously, since the early nineteenth century, a cricket ground, open space, home of shift huts for soldiers, sports ground, drug den, and community space. In the past two hundred years, there have been various struggles to keep the land out of the hands of property developers, and all the while the idea of land as being for the people was just as important as the iterative practice of its common use—as documented in various testimonials that highlight the land’s intrinsic benefit as, in the words of Tam Dean Burn, “a wilderness for the community to flourish in” (“History”). While the land didn’t always resemble a wildflower enclave, its representative ongoingness as public space constitutes an active form of commoning, which is nevertheless also dependent on precarious legal and commercial battles.

I approach meadowing also through Silvia Federici’s idea of commoning as “the production of ourselves as a common subject” (254). This “common subject” is a community united by “a quality of relations, a principle of cooperation, and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals” (254), a far cry from gated or otherwise exclusive communities of identity. Meadowing is not the totalizing, be all and end all of ecological relation—it does not substitute for campaigning for structural change, energy policy reform, and state interventions in corporate ecocide—but as with commoning, “it is an essential part of our . . . recognition of history as a collective project, which is perhaps the main casualty of the neoliberal era” (Federici 254). As neoliberalism seeps through climate discourse, the casualties of environmentalism tend to be on the one hand the antihumanist embrace of apocalypse as our deserved fate and on the other greenwashing capital and the individualizing of blame and climate responsibility—as if the anthropocene could be solved or abated through consumer choice. Meadowing yearns beyond this: it stumbles into an open, unruly space where we root through the weeds of the world together, seek nourishing resources and possibilities, cross paths. To arrive at the meadow by accident or pursuit is to arrive at the open field of error: to look for this im/possible space.⁶

The gerund meadowing means that our sense of what constitutes the meadow, and our place within it, is always contingent, contextual and shifting. The “it” that Bernstein posits as our lead is the pronominal indeterminacy of meadowing in motion. Since the bounds of a meadow are contested—overspill of weeds and private interests—to attune to paradigms of meadowing is to submit to permeability, conceptual indeterminacy, and the freedom to play on common land. I dream meadowing as an unlimited virtual (non)site, whose locality and specificity is akin to the shapeshifting of the “I” in a lyric poem. As we shall see, it often manifests in a present-tense, deictic poetry of density, touch, and synchrony. As a work of poetics, this article grants itself the license of “setting forth,” thereby “resist[ing] rigidity & closure” in its discourse in the hope of conceptual fertility (Rothenberg 3). Meadowing as a handing over, an opening up. I will explore the work of meadowing across issues of atmosphere, morphology, density, lyric architecture, and poetics of attention, while negotiating the dense thickets of history and making desire paths across the works of various authors.

Taking Root

Meadowing is immersive business. Images and sensations cross-pollinate across us, here in the text. Meadowing is a way of reading as wandering, not for the plot of land or story but for the mutual germination that is writing’s messy, often unpredictable intimacy. Meadowing is excess: mosses betwixt bricks, hidden messages wedged between cell blocks, the wildflower strain of the motorway verge. Meadowing sustains with what capitalist efficiency and market logic discards. How do we cultivate space for nourishment and resilience—again the ardent buddleia—amidst that sense of waste and abandonment? In a world of ongoing enclosures, meadowing makes portable that former fantasy of the open pasture, this place to roam among poppy seed and mycelia. In short: meadowing pursues a lyric architecture of surrounds. I borrow this sense of architecture from Peter Sloterdijk’s “republic of spaces” (23), where architectures are relational structures of possibility, sociality, and hospitality.⁷ Meadowing, at once verb and gerund, participates in the imaginary distributions of such structures and in doing so moves towards a biodiverse, abundant logic of poetic practice.

I am thinking here with David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope (2000), where the architect’s imaginative expenditure and their doing as “an embedded, spatiotemporal practice” (204) offers a way of thinking what Mark Fisher, in Capitalist Realism (2009), calls “the alternative.” The architect, Harvey writes, “has to imagine spaces, orderings, materials, aesthetic effects, relations to environments”—he could surely be describing the lyric poet—“and deal at the same time with the more mundane issues of plumbing, heating, electric cables, lighting.” Their decisions are constrained by “available materials and the nature of sites,” as well as the powerful input of “the developers, the financiers, the accountants, the builders, and the state apparatus” (204). Meadowing approaches the field environment through iterative, accretive practice, sensitively attuned to the agents, tools, and contexts at hand—often through poetic focalisation. We need the practicalities of craft, the energetic summons of imagined spaces, a real sense of the material conditions of possibility. We need what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a “reparative reading” of the field, where meadowing is an irreducible figure for wanting “to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self” (149). Rather than resolving the contradictions of that “inchoate” self, meadowing offers an abundant, stylized logic of free exchange, not dissimilar to Sedgwick’s notion of camp, which constitutes “the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices” (150). It constitutes the medial relation of criticism’s remote fieldwork, an insistence on the attentive sway of the senses. Meadowing is less a concept than an ecopoetic orientation, an invitation towards associative thought and possible nurture: where reading may participate in the spatiotemporal idiosyncrasies of a particular site or landscape.

The possibilities for such nurture, however, are bundled uneasily within those of capitalism. “The dialectic of the imaginary and its material realisation . . . locates the two sides of how capitalism replicates and changes itself,” Harvey points out, and if “such fictitious and imaginary elements surround us at every turn [from advertising to investment capital to speculative enterprise to the relentless ideological machine of Hollywood], then the possibility also exists of ‘growing’ imaginary alternatives within its midst” (206). With “growing,” Harvey uses the language of organic life, intervening in the capitalist tendency to also do so—the market commonly being described in terms of organic health, or green shoots. Humans may cultivate growth but it also just happens—sometimes seeds escape our mastery and interference. Upwards, sideways: they grow im/possibly. Something unexpected taking root.

Ongoing Exposures

What if meadowing could metabolize ecological hopelessness into ongoing song? Meadowing is a poethic practice that takes inspiration from the commoning described in Harvey, Federici, and others. Here, I trace its contradictions through a contemporary lyric example published in the UK. Verity Spott’s Hopelessness (2020) is a hybrid affair of poetry, prose, and absurdist theatre, where the grand themes of love, loss, and death play out in a world that isn’t exactly utopia or dystopia. There’s a hollowness to the book, where dialogue attains the high pitch of caricature and landscape appears barren, the half-memory of an unpleasant dream. Barely discernible characters fuzz in and out of focus. Affective gestures swerve into darker territory in the overlay of intensities, the echoing haunt of England’s green and pleasant lands. To read it, we find ourselves meadowing within multiple architectures of lyric hope and hopelessness.

Hopelessness seems to take place in the non-site of many different meadows, which proliferate and are held in the song that is premised upon breath. There are fifty-four mentions of “meadow” in Hopelessness.

Somewhere you have never been, a meadow
and near to it this arid hum of wires.
Smashed flowers.
Chewing at a wounded floor,
a song to sing to you with.

(43)

In Hopelessness, you literally can’t unplug nature from the wiring of techne. What might be a paranoid dystopia of wires replacing organic rhizomes, theories about Covid and 5G, the damage of electromagnetic signals upon ecosystems, just is this sprawling world. The song of Spott’s lyric cascades through the open meadow of this future we have already fallen upon. The space between the lines, crumpled flowers. A trace of the place you (never) went to once. Meadows in Hopelessness are not utopian places of solace, retreat, or pastoral consolation in a world of exposure to harm. They are radically elsewhere, provisional, or impossible. Five times across the book, when mentioning a meadow, Spott repeats the phrase “Somewhere you have never been” (39, 43, 60, 77, 78).⁸ What does this novelty of place hold for the hailed reader? The ambience of these meadows is spooky and destitute: a field of environmental destruction, with “smashed flowers” and “a wounded floor.” It reminds me of the weed-sprung edgelands of peri-urbanism, places of capital’s abandonment. The austerity of Spott’s meadows serves as synecdoche for the austerity of England itself: felt in the literal austerity measures of successive Conservative governments as much as capitalist realism’s austerity of the imagination.

The meadows in Hopelessness are somewhat spectral and denied the distinctive spirit of place. There is rarely any specific detail to denote this meadow from that meadow. Meadows generate—“the new gaping meadow”—and can also be bleak places to wither, “so tired that you’d like to die” (77, 79). At least once, “Meadow” is capitalized, as if to indicate a kind of agglomerated ur-Meadow of return, which

. . . becomes a station in prayer, an oath to
the silos, abandoned slag heaps, unlistening feelings,
protecting the hobbies of the meadow.

(80)

The meadow in Hopelessness is a cipher as much as any real field site. Spott dramatizes the processes by which more-than-human elements of atmosphere and place are constructed through speech acts that place nature elsewhere—the im/possible spaces of life and death, sacrifice zones that beat through the book. By anthropomorphizing the “hobbies” of the meadow, referring to its “abandoned slag heaps” and “silo,” Spott characterizes the meadow by way of an industrial past, defamiliarized with the catachresis of “hobbies” for what we might otherwise deem extractive labor. The presence of this ruined agricultural and industrial infrastructure feels strange, even uncanny, among the wire-filled world of the book’s modernity.

With its obsessive description of wires, tubes, and nozzles, Hopelessnessoffers a charnel ground of the internet displaced outside, singing at the zoom-pace of highspeed broadband and exposing the entangled infrastructures of twenty-first century connectivity through a vascular imaginary of lines that replicate and mutate throughout the poem. Vascular because the wires, tubes, and nozzles are deeply related to the body, and often seem to bear medical purpose—held to the face, “the tube / in your sad hanging mouth” (86), as if to offer oxygen or nourishment. Here, there are no wild meadows untouched by humans; all the land is teeming with unexplained infrastructure. Those cylindrical tubes and cords that coil through the book are transporting something unspeakable. In lieu of energy or lifeforce, their carriage is bathetic and hollow. Perhaps, then, meadowing, they carry the echo of song.

As a long poem with hybrid moments of dialogue, I envision the lyric architectures of Hopelessness as constantly assembling and reassembling in the durational mode of song, flowing rhythmically and also erratically (think of lyric energy spent, surged, distended, stormed) over the gape of a world below, into whose dissolve or plenum it is to have gone (to ask, who has gone?). A song of the gone occurs right before the image of a tube whimpering underground, and seemingly from nowhere, this sense of gone is personified in a glitching time:

What would Gone have thought. Gone would shake
their head. Gone in absence is better. Gone is cured:
Not here.

(82)

The danger of thinking meadows is to reify them as the “gone” time of a static, pastoral of yore, or to commit an eco-fascist move of seeing real places, each one a unique convergence of multiple habitats, as interchangeable, abstract blocks, a problem with which Spott deliberately plays: these meadows are nameless and filled with nonlife. Browsing and cruising through their twisted descriptions, how should we learn to care about them?⁹

What does it mean to go tell the meadow? Interlocution has at least partially failed in Spott’s meadows of anthropic and more-than-human presence. The meadow, remember, has “unlistening feelings” (80), which we can attribute to those whose lives were desiccated by Margaret Thatcher’s closure of the mines (see reference to abandoned slag heaps) and systematically ignored or denigrated by subsequent generations of politicians—and indeed extrapolate to the perennial missed climate targets and welfare failings of the UK’s right-wing government and state. To be unlistening is to be in a state of explicitly, and continuously, not listening, unravelling the very act of listening. An ecopoetics based on ambience would do its best to listen, even to voices and sounds of the human and more-than that are almost buried, but still steal out via desperate tubes and wires, these media of connectivity and attunement, underground. An ambient poetics is one of surrounds and suspension; crucially, it is “a materialist way of reading texts with a view to how they encode the literal space of their inscription” (Morton, Ecology 3). Spott’s ambient poetics of meadowing encode what is at stake in the multiply distributed necropolitics of postindustrial capitalism.¹⁰ Hopelessnesspromises a state of ongoing despair in which presence and life are fraught ideas.

The poem’s formal emphasis on song, resonance, and refrain, not only through folk citation but also in its own lyric structures, renders Hopelessness a moving present of the coming and going. The book is suspended in this dialectic: its hymnal refrain of the coming light in relation to the gone; this coming to presence alongside the sense of what is beyond presence, departed, used-up, depleted, or extinct. Spott has spoken of the refrain as elegiac: “Several friends, all dying quite close together, was a lot of the impetus for writing the book, and that refrain is . . . in a way, to our friend” (Spott, “Conversation”). I want to think of meadowing in Hopelessness as elegia’s holdspace or topos for grief—when the constant refresh and entropic distraction of late capitalism would have us move forward on some ceaselessly progressive axis. Spott uses the openness of lyric, such as the gaping field between their “I” and the “you,” entities that exist in the poem without defined gender, to expand an ethics of fellowship, care, and relation that cannot easily be reduced to those of heteronormative intimacy, familial, or wage obligation.

The work of meadowing in Hopelessness is distinct from the abstract meadows it depicts. I want to think here with Achille Mbembe, who in Necropolitics argues for a critical poethics of “transfiguration”: “a figural style of writing that oscillates between the vertiginous, dissolution, and dispersal” so that the reader grasps how “language’s function in such writing is to return to life what had been abandoned to the powers of death” (8). In Hopelessness, we meadow through both waste and regeneration, beauty and abandonment. Spott describes the recurrent meadow figure as “this beautiful pastoral place . . . a kind of dreamscape, this meadow where basically there’s no consequences” (Spott, “Conversation”). Wild, untamed, and belonging to no one, the meadow disrupts capitalist imperatives to enclose, monetise, or own by way of property and law. This proximity to abandonment and abstraction also renders the meadow a site of abuse without consequence. But the lyric architectures of Hopelessness, their generous movement of song, are constantly transposing moments of harm, care, and even wonder that commit us to the ongoing possibility that is sown in dream. “Look up my / love. Open your eyes. Here is the kinder sky!” (83). The hyperbole of light’s generosity, “the kinder sky,” is offered as a blessing. The book’s cross-pollination of references and fractal moments (many micro scenes, often around an anonymous face, come up variously again and again) resembles an algorithmic or unconscious deep state, where machine learning or the neural residues of memory replicate, regenerate, and discover forms and patterns. As Spott puts it: “the meadow, in the deep dream state you pollen the horizon” (78). Meadowing might be “pollen[ing] the horizon,” the lyric art of distributing possibility among the epochal foreclosures of the anthropocene, offering more than an echo from the end of the world: this song to you, in the light that is coming. What is left are these lines and surfaces: “Tubes. Wires. Windows on the / World” (108), gleaming and bouncing the light that is coming, had carried a surge.

These tubes, wires, and revealing windows are a kind of interface through which the book processes energy and waste. Spott’s invocation of slag heaps metonymically calls up the material waste sites of post-Thatcherite Britain into a poem whose dystopias occupy an ambiguous, seemingly abandoned future, where the over-wired world becomes, entropically, the static austerity of these meadows. But how to occupy these sites, how to revive them? I’m thinking here with Jonathan Skinner’s term “entropology,” which “includes the study in words of entropy at work on a fractured continuum from words to things. It is thoughts on things in things” (24). If entropology is the study of entropy at work in language, meadowing involves the state of différance at play in this process.¹¹Meadowing, with its porosity, veritable overgrowth, and tangle, is the ongoing introduction of difference (diversity, otherness, cross-pollination) and deferral (a suspended time of play, a state of indeterminacy whose very indeterminacy threatens essentialized definitions of land, ownership and belonging). How to cultivate possibilities of commoning surplus and expenditure from what Anna Tsing might call late-capitalist ruins? Meadowing lies in the overgrowth of the question. I seek structures of sensing by way of accident or the unexpected transformation contained within the living, precarious yield of meadow: its “heartbeat of contingency” in which play occurs (Sedgwick 147).

Desire Paths

I turn now to the poethics of play within meadowing, that tug of desire which bewilders the senses and forges new paths through excessive meadow stimulus, “the deep dream state” (Spott, Hopelessness 78) that is ever expanding and receding. A poetics of meadowing is inclined to the swerve of distraction, a change of course. To stay with the meadow is not to be in stasis. Mandy Bloomfield has noted the movements of capitalism’s transformation of nature in the “tangible” motions of Tom Raworth’s poetics. I am drawn to Raworth as a poet of immense speed, yet capable of recalibrating the spaces through which poetry regenerates its field. A poet, happily, with a long poem called “Meadow” (1999) that is striated with contradiction, logical leaps, and stumbling enjambement. Lines like “it is as it is / in fact it is not” tug out the ground beneath the poem, so we are left “following the edge / of a strange attractor” (13). This is a perfect description of the intensified desire economies of hypercritique, spilling with contradictory flickers of presence and absence to get somewhere in the act of departure, of always going. Elsewhere in the poem, Raworth writes:

to milk a taste of the past
the word sombre stretched
tearing loose suction cups
from the scree
of complement deficiency
back from infinity
so soon itself a limit
to objects forced into subdivision
as if words named themselves
permitted walks

(21–22)

Against the ecopoetic tradition of “dwelling” (Bate), this is a poetics that eddies speedily on the frisson of “infinity” and its assonant trail. The language of permission recalls, perhaps wryly, Robert Duncan’s “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” from The Opening of the Field(1960), a poem that yearns for “an eternal pasture folded in all thought” (7). In Raworth’s “Meadow,” “permitted walks” suggest the language of restriction, power, and privacy; the agency of words cannot pass smoothly into imaginative units but rather stay in the suggestive realm of “as if.” The poem careers with subtle sound effects and materialities of language, “the word sombre stretched”; language as a landslip of “scree” along which the speaker scrambles. I can hear the urgent action in the assonance of “stretching” and “tearing,” wondering if words are the very “objects forced into subdivision,” splintered into sounds like rubble or “scree.” The image of suction cups torn from stones is oddly reminiscent of Spott’s imagery of nozzles and tubes, and “to milk” suggests a prosthetic and supplementary relationship between landscape and (human) animal bodies—some reach towards a pastoral nourishment we experience as a bittersweet flicker of “taste.” The word “sombre” crops up again in the poem to describe “sombre moors” (19), suggesting atmospheres of sadness and shadow that permeate the lyric body of the land. This is a poem without an “I,” and there is no single thread of authoritative guidance to draw us through its patchy associations, thickets of description, and hidden depths. Meadowing here is a cascade of sound effects and sites of meaningful entrance: to make sense of the general field of the poem is to see everything and nothing at once, flitting amidst competitive detail.

Darting between abstractions, the language of nature, and machinery, Raworth’s poetry traces the aperture of poetic edgeland: meadowing all the way. As Joan Retallack remarks of his work:

One of several geometries of attention suggested by this poetics resembles that invited by the form of any meadow, linguistic or botanical: absent a footpath, there’s no single logic of entry or departure. One can frame any section and notice more and more ecodetail.

(257)

In the case of Raworth, meadowing performs a poethics of close reading the work for its “ecodetail.” “Meadow” begins in medias res with an image of “working on the hull” which is “delicately wrought” (13). In the Graham quote that opens this essay, the word “sprit” also exists in a maritime vocabulary, as a spar connecting the mast and sail of a ship. The convergence of oceans and meadows suggests a lyric architecture of significant expanse: a desire to cast one’s course to the elements. The key features here are entanglement and the in medias res quality of arriving never at the start or end but always to find oneself somehow immersed, in the middle, in the ceaseless tracing of ripples and folds. As Lyn Hejinian says of composition by field work, “Any reading of those works is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract attention repeatedly” (44). Meadowing is not to enter the field, approach the poem from above or outside, but to find yourself already caught by it in the affect field of elemental saturation, of sensory stimulus set out in poetry.¹²

While there is evidently a forward momentum in the short lines and speed of Raworth’s poetry, I want to suggest, in accordance with Retallack, this is less an unspooling of linear duration than a spatializing of atmospheric flicker. Line breaks also perform an imperfect connective function, setting up thickets of association: images of “typhoid,” “exploding,” and “pistol shots” set violence and war amidst “pollen, spores, hair,” “the body’s defences,” so we are forced to meadow our way through a dense interface of memory and history, their spreading particulate matters—“relics from industrial air” (16–18). The stakes of the poem’s atmospheric meadowing: “release a collective breath,” with that prosodic stress on “breath” a kind of elocutionary force for navigating the “violent eddy patterns” of the poem (19). This culminates in the poem’s last line, with its overt political message: “force the destruction of wealth” (28), springing forth like coming upon a surprise in the landscape, a clearing or sudden drop of seven syllables—the same number as “release a collective breath.”¹³ “Meadow” asks its readers to body forth meaning by a meadowing attention, rich with allusion and accretion. Nothing may be watertight, blocked, completely delineated to serve ownership of meaning. Parallelisms in images or prosody create a sense of synchrony: as Lyn Hejinian says of Gertrude Stein’s landscapes, Raworth’s are similarly “resolutely synchronous,” a noticing field of “analogies and coincidences, resemblances and differences, the simultaneous existence of variations, contradictions, and the apparently random” (116–117). As I have demonstrated above, the arbitrary framing of one section is less the setting down of a quadrat for intense close reading than the impulsive and associative tug of a synchronous moment in which multiple possibilities flicker at once with poethical claim. The meadow may be a geographical location, but it is also a diverse set of “linguistic or botanical” content, into whose field we are invited to take many directions. The poem is not prescriptive or linear, but rather embodies the ecological poethics of meadowing in its very meandering, overgrown form. It exists in Farrier’s idea of lyric’s “thick time.”

Where Raworth meadows by way of the short line, Myung Mi Kim’s Commons (2002) makes use of the long prose line, wedged into short stanzas, to articulate a meadow logic of something grown sideways and the foregrounding of negative, roaming space. From the very first page, Kim articulates a logic of presence and loss, particulate matters, filtering:

In what way names were applied to things. Filtration. Not every 
word that has been
applied, still exists. Through proliferation and differentiation. 
Airborn. Here, this speck
and this speck you missed.

(3)

To begin with a question, “in what way,” is to begin with an opening. As in Raworth, “names” or words are part of a material process of coming to meaning, here expressed as “[f]iltration” and its effects of “proliferation and differentiation.” There is wild growth, there is taxonomy. Names implicitly are the pollen and dust of “this speck,” where “this” gestures to something present in the atmospheric surrounds of the poem. The long lines with careful caesura follow the trajectory of a walk, one which must negotiate “things” as both solid and aerated features of poetic landscape. Kim’s book attends to the granular of daily life, and works by accumulation, abstraction, and association to express war, colonization, and disease through its manifestation in trauma and silence, in the atrophying of first-language. The reader negotiates a pliable and damaged ground where meaning works by fragment, increment, refusal: an image of “[c]utworms in tomato beds” folds into “pinecones burning” (6); growth parallels destruction. What sort of belonging or lyric identification, what flicker of beauty, is constantly tugged asunder by prosaic reality, “mills and farms,” “the levelling of the ground” (7), another blank page to trace across.

The section “Pollen Fossil Record” culminates in a meadowing materiality of the book itself as uncertain, reflexive, bodily commoning:

COMMONS elides multiple sites: reading and text making, discourses and disciplines, documents and documenting. Fluctuating. Proceeding by fragment, by increment. Through proposition, parataxis, contingency—approximating nerve, line, song

(Kim 107)

Fossil pollen, taken from pollen grains, can be used to interpret the climate and vegetation records of past millennia. The book then anticipates itself as such a fossil, artefact of pollen words and their wounding. The passage above speaks to the “[f]luctuating” logic of the verb and gerund inherent in the book’s procedural yet displacing, digressionary, flickering unfold. It asks to be read as such an unstable record, one that approximates units of meaning and sensation—“nerve, line, song.” Further on the same page, Kim writes: “The inchoate and the concrete coincide” (107). Harkening back to Sedgwick’s use of “inchoate” (149), we might think of meadowing again here as the offering of resources to a perspectival chaos, the hardening of the “concrete” coinciding with the soft “inchoate” moment—form and content. That Kim’s book contains its own statements of poetics, “The contrapuntal, the interruptive, the speculative” (108), invites the reader to approach the production of meaning with a similar procedure of plurality, digression, and “speculative” possibility. Between the continuous and the disconnected we might find the stop-start of forking, instinctive paths in the lyrical wilderness.

Meadowing has that overlapping, iterative logic of the desire path. It is a mutual impression of presence and landscape, akin to Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst’s reflections on paths, footprints, and duration in Ways of Walking (2008):

Paths that have been worn in vegetation through the regular passage of feet, as on a grassy meadow, are revealed not as an accumulation of prints but in the stunted or bent growth of trampled plant stems. Actual, distinct footprints show up most clearly in surfaces that, being soft and malleable, are easily impressed, such as of snow, sand mud or moss. Yet precisely because surfaces of this kind do not readily hold their form, such prints tend to be relatively ephemeral . . . . Footprints thus have a temporal existence, a duration, which is bound to the very dynamics of the landscape to which they belong: to the cycles of organic growth and decay, of weather, and of the seasons.

(7–8)

From this, we might envision our path through the poem—as through a meadow—as not just reparative and accretive but also traceable in the effects of “trampled plant stems” and other “easily impressed” surfaces. What do we do to the arrangement of the poem we pass through or play inside? The interpretative apparatus of meadowing might then be seen as a negotiation of poetic surface and surfeit, the textures of terrain and its wild excess. The emphasis on softness—mud, moss, snow—in the above passage resonates with Esther Leslie’s notion of “soft matters”: “interstitial, fuzzy, indeterminate entities” that manifest in actual architectures, infrastructure, forms of social control, from “data cloud[s]” to “the dense particulate air of tear gas that has saturated frequent protests,” as well as in the morphological tendencies of metaphor. Bringing this back to field theory, meadowing “softens” the hard terrain of the critical body. It seeks a sensuous and saturated attention to the environment of writing, to its spatiotemporal “dynamics.” This involves not a diluting of critical logic but an attention to the porous relation between writing body and writing world. Instead of looking for discursive frames, the hyperbolically capitalized “Windows on the / World” (Spott, Hopelessness 108), we might meadow our way, softly dissolving into the reciprocal flicker of being-in-landscape. We access desire paths through striated bruises in the soft matter of vegetation: regrowth erases our traces, if the field recovers. We leave the poem, the meadow, irrevocably changed; the poem, the meadow, is left changed also.

Meadowing clusters words by sound and texture, a kind of soft play—performance—that attends to the life of entities in time—it is to weather in language, its wetness, its circadian occasion.¹⁴ Soft is a lyric gesture of the descriptive; soft is the pliant material of lyric architecture, holding us in a changing, ongoing moment. Soft is dangerous if misused, if it is merely compensatory or even complicit. As Leslie aptly puts it, writing in the aftermath of the first wave of COVID-19 and its associated social distancing bubbles: “We must learn to separate the froth, the media bubbles that puff and pop, from the substance of things, to turn the foam into protection, not suffocation.” Against the hard terrain of enclosure, meadowing offers the environmental responsiveness of textual “crossbreeding”:

I sense that in each book words with roots hidden beneath the text come and go and carry out some other book between the lines. Suddenly I notice strange fruits in my garden . . . . And what words do between themselves—couplings, matings, hybridizations—is genius. An erotic and fertile genius.

(Cixous 121)

The word “genius” here is put to work with resonance of both “genus,” a taxonomic category often used in plant identification, and “genius loci,” which comes from Latin, literally “spirit of the place.” The garden of a text is not exactly walled, and the “erotic and fertile” energy of words and sentences makes of language a “strange” fruiting body, yielding im/possibilities in the transfer of nutrition between texts. This poethic of attunement, “I sense,” is the starting logic for approaching the field by way of a meadowing textuality. As in a meadow, much of the life is “beneath” the ground; much of its existence remains impenetrable to humans and might be felt more as an erotics of mystery. Assenting to the work of this “genius” is also to open one’s imagination to cross-pollination and desire beyond taxonomic logics. The risk of “genius loci” is absolution and essentialism, but an ethic of contingency and regeneration—“what words do between themselves”—displaces stability and human control over meaning. The spirit of meadowing brings Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” (17) directly into the creative-critical field and its desire paths of momentum, its carriage of “foothpath songs” (Graham 5). We must write, as Sarah Wood says in her book of the same name, “without mastery.” It is the surrender to a certain unpredictability and excess (of loss, desire, joy), a labor of both ambience and affect, that distinguishes meadowing from otherwise fieldwork.

Loving Porosity

“I love what grows,” writes Cixous, “[a]ll that grows to ripening and dying” (122). Meadowing offers a postcapitalist sense of excess that seeks to metabolize, as plants do, the atmospheric and material excesses of capitalist production into a more generous and replenishing abundance. It does not shy away from the complex affects and ethics of place, but rather attunes to both the melancholic, lost, or wasted and the joyous, fertile, or playful—“ripening and dying.” At stake in meadowing is a poethics of the loving and the porous. I want to offer it as a mode for imagining postcapitalist abundance: oscillating between real sites of commoning possibility and the cautiously utopian; offering a logic of impossibility alongside the necessary dreamwork of cultivating biodiversity, livable habitats, and unpredictable cross-pollinations. As Fred Moten writes:

There’s a more-than-critical criticism that’s like seeing things–a gift of having been given to love things and how things look and how and what things see . . . . This necessity and immensity of the alternative surrounds and aerates the contained, contingent fixity of the standard.

(183)

If the field requires a certain predetermined delineation, meadowing might present this “alternative” of “surrounds” and common air, an ethic of atmosphere and overgrowth that overspills the boundedness of binaries such as inside/outside, field/theory, creative/critical, technology/nature, subject/object. In a time of intense mediation and digital interfacing, meadowing resists the structural frames and interfaces of platforms and opens onto a “commodious sensation” of “being lost,” which makes form itself malleable (Robertson 13). In the case of Myung Mi Kim’s Commons, the meadowing of language has a decolonial poethic of linguistic ecology. The speaker asks “How to practice and make plural the written and spoken” in a world of “mass global migrations, ecological degradations, shifts and upheavals in identifications of gender and labor?” (110). Meadowing might be a constant rehearsal of that plurality the idea of a meadow embodies, a willingness towards errancy.

There are many other examples of meadowing in practice: the cross-pollinating abundance of Sylvia Legris’s Garden Physic (2022), which casts taxonomic plant archives into sensuous cacophonies of play; the watercolor gestures, collages, and illustrations that interleave many works by Maggie O’Sullivan; the immersive, shimmering quality of Margaret Tait’s poetic moving images. In Tait’s film HAPPY BEES (1954), her voiceover, “The children are not far away, the children live here,” connects images of crashing waves to earlier footage of children playing in a wildflower meadow. It is not that the children live directly in the sea,¹⁵ but that that sense of the children’s proximity, their belonging, connects us to a wider ethic of rechilding in which our sense of placing the “here” of the film is poetically extended to oceanic feeling. Meadowing takes the desire for kinetic engagement with the more-than-human, implicit in the viral phrase “touch grass,” to the level of grasping that feeling in common, unfolding towards some kind of openness or abstracted outside. Its densities of linguistic excess, spread on the internet, are just one way towards porosity.

Meadows are literally carbon sinks, capable of storing carbon in their soil and deep-rooted grasses, but they are also traceable archives of more-than-human dreamings, the pure or childlike imaginary of “no consequences” in which alternative futures might be sustained or mourned (Spott, “Conversations”). To work in the descriptive, accretive mode of meadowing is not merely to memorialize the (almost) lost, but to rewild the text itself with the reparative desire for “plenitude” (Sedgwick 149). Meadowing can be a documentary ethic inflected by dream, a lyric architecture for magical thinking. It can channel material concerns through the exposures and atmospherics of a recognizable or obscure place. It might suggest maintenance, care, or productive neglect that gives life back to the meadow itself. Bernadette Mayer, in her book Works and Days (2016), ends a poem co-written with Niel Rosenthalis, “The Clandestine Celandine”: “the gubofi’s / decided to let the lawn go back to being a field” (84).¹⁶

Maria Sledmere is a writer, critic, and artist. They were recently named as one of the Saltire Society’s “40 under 40” list of “outstanding Scottish creatives,” having authored over twenty books of poetry, including Cocoa and Nothing with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023) and Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022). Maria is Managing Editor of SPAM Press, a member of A+E Collective and Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, where they teach contemporary poetry and experimental literatures. Their critical work can be found in the Journal for Innovative British and Irish Poetry, post45, Coils of the Serpent and MAP Magazine, among other places. www.mariasledmere.com.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Alexandra Campbell, Fred Carter, Colin Herd, and fred spoliar for discussion on earlier drafts of this article. Thanks also to Jeff Diamanti, Annie Moore, and my reviewers for their time and consideration.

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• Wood, Sarah. Without Mastery: Reading and Other Forces. Edinburgh UP, 2014.

Notes

1. A memetic phrase, popular in recent years, meaning a person’s time online has reached a certain saturation and it’s time to go outside, to reconnect. The phrase appeals to a normative idea of wellbeing premised on time afk (away from keyboard), framed here as time in the sensory field of nature: grass in binary opposition to screens.

2. See also Charles Olson’s poetics of the “open field,” which borrows from theoretical physics. I have chosen to largely sidestep Olson’s theory of field composition, mostly because similar terrain is already excellently covered in Eltringham’s Poetry and Commons. My efforts with this essay are less a form of historical and conceptual ground clearing and more a performance of what the notion of meadowing contributes, reparatively, to ongoing discourse around field composition, theory, and commoning.

3. I borrow this term from Joan Retallack as a portmanteau of “poetics” and “ethics,” which suggests a commitment to the “wager”: that which “recognizes the degree to which the chaos of world history, of all complex systems, makes it imperative that we move away from models of cultural and political agency lodged in isolated heroic acts and simplistic notions of cause and effect” (Poethical 3). My use of poethics here is part of an ongoing project of “hypercritique,” in which the orientations of “towards” within the suffix “hyper” thinks ecology through the im/possible, reflexive “coming” of the dream (Sledmere 54). I offer meadowing as an experimental wager for entering and conceptualizing inchoate poetic fields.

4. I decapitalize anthropocene to acknowledge “wariness over the totalising authority ascribed to an epochal term, and to recognise its viral agency and mutation within a burgeoning cultural vernacular around climate crisis” (Sledmere and Williams 16).

5. I refer to Graham’s lines here partly because it is the only instance of the term “meadowing” I have so far been able to find in literature.

6. I want to acknowledge here Saidiya Hartman’s work on errancy and waywardness as “the practice of the social otherwise,” a way of being in the world that puts into material play new possibilities and narratives, forging paths of “utopian longing” and “refusal” (227, xvii).

7. I borrow the idea of sociality as a field of performative relation, a living “ensemble” (136), from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s The Undercommons (2013).

8. In one of these instances, the line is enjambed to “Somewhere / you have never been. A meadow” (60).

9. For more on fascism and “block” imaginaries, see Danny Hayward. In their interview with fred spoliar, Spott talks about the dangers of abstraction in pastoral, where “[i]f you leave it open and abstract, then everyone can make up their own minds about what that means . . . . It’s like ‘taking Britain back’ from the Europeans or whatever. What does that actually mean? . . . I wanted to put these notions under loads of pressure.”

10. In the context of rising nationalism and racialized essentialism across the democratic world, Achille Mbembe offers necropolitics as a way of describing how “[n]early everywhere the political order is reconstituting itself as a form of organization for death” (7).

11. Also relevant here is Bernard Stiegler’s notion of “negentropy,” or negative entropy: “Différance is always negentropic,” because “negentropy is always what differs and defers entropy” (103).

12. I am thinking here with Melodie Jue and Rafico Ruiz and their conceptualization of saturation as a “material imaginary where the elements are not a neutral background, but lively forces that shape culture, politics, and communication” (1).

13. It’s worth noting that the whole book is dedicated to “my friends in Ticino and the Zen Communist Party: high in the mountains” (Raworth, np).

14. See Neimanis and Hamilton.

15. Though of course, underwater meadows exist, in the form of seagrass meadows.

16. An explanation of “gubofi” can be found elsewhere in Mayer’s book:

GBF – guy who bought the field

Jennifer told me it had to be a word, like radar, or snafu, to be a real acronym, so I put the appropriate vowels. I’m hoping gubofi will enter the language, as in everybody has her or his gubofi.

(50)

I include this coinage in the spirit of meadowing’s conceptual fertility.

Michaela Büsse is a postdoctoral researcher at the Technische Universität Dresden working with the Chair of Digital Cultures, and Associated Investigator in the cluster of excellence “Matters of Activity. Image Space Material” at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research focuses on sociomaterial transformations in the context of speculative urbanism, climate change mitigation, and energy transition. Drawing on elemental anthropology as well as feminist science and technology studies, she investigates how design practices and technologies govern environments and define who and what is rendered inhuman. Michaela’s interdisciplinary practice is research-led and involves filming, editorial, and curatorial work.

Fred Carter is a postdoctoral researcher with the Infrastructure Humanities Group at the University of Glasgow, and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre, Munich. His current monograph project, Poetry & Energy After 1973, traces the emergence of a poetics of exhaustion and a politics of refusal against intersecting crises of petroleum, productivity, and social reproduction. With Jeff Diamanti, he is co-director of the practice research residency FieldARTS. His first poetry chapbook, Outages, is forthcoming with Veer2.

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum: Locating Terminal Landscapes (Bloomsbury 2021), tracks the political and media ecology of fossil fuels across the extractive and logistical spaces that connect remote territories like Greenland to the economies of North America and Western Europe. His new research on Bloom Ecologies details the return to natural philosophy in the marine and atmospheric sciences, studying the interactive dynamics of the cryosphere and hydrosphere in the North Atlantic and Arctic Ocean.

Maria Sledmere is a writer, critic, and artist. They were recently named as one of the Saltire Society’s “40 under 40” list of “outstanding Scottish creatives,” having authored over twenty books of poetry, including Cocoa and Nothing with Colin Herd (SPAM Press, 2023), An Aura of Plasma Around the Sun (Hem Press, 2023) and Visions & Feed (HVTN Press, 2022). Maria is Managing Editor of SPAM Press, a member of A+E Collective and Lecturer in English & Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, where they teach contemporary poetry and experimental literatures. Their critical work can be found in the Journal for Innovative British and Irish Poetry, post45, Coils of the Serpent and MAP Magazine, among other places. www.mariasledmere.com.

Mareike Winchell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of After Servitude: Elusive Property and the Ethics of Kinship in Bolivia (University of California Press, 2022).Winchell’s research focuses on the racialization of property in light of ongoing histories of Indigenous land dispossession, and how such formations find new expression in contemporary engagements with climate change, especially wildfires.