March 10, 2015
March 10, 2015
The Barren Tree
1954
Edward Bawden
b. March 10, 1903
Hans Blumenberg -- Care Crosses the River
flowerville
Only by taking detours can we exist. If everyone took the shortest route, only one person would arrive. There are an infinite number of detours from point of departure to destination, but only one shortest way. Culture consists in detours - finding and cultivating them, describing and recommending them, revaluing and bestowing them. Culture therefore seems inadequately rational, because strictly speaking only the shortest route receives reason's seal of approval. Everything right and left along the way is superfluous and can justify its existence only with difficulty. It is, however, the detours that give culture the function of humanizing life. In the strictness of its exclusions, the supposed "art of life" that takes the shortest routes is barbarism. ...(more)_______________________
_______________________from In This World of 12 Months
Marcella Durand
Your voice carries easily through liquid; bridge is
halved by fog, as your tongue is divided in mist.
The fog of machinery augmented by steam.
Powered and then not powered, below a line, dark.
Cold, the weather has turned and out there, turbines still.
Water has divided, soft things and diverse: what
seemed one broke. Two cities and more. Lines reappear.
Across there is a wall also a door or steam
turns into fog. The bridge is two; light is taken.
People enjoy themselves, looking at glittering
potential floods. It is so nice to have a view.
The Bird’s Nest
Edward Bawden
Toward Critical Posthumanities For the Anthropocene Astrida Neimanis, Cecilia Åsberg, Johan Hedrén
Abstract_______________________ Molecular Red:Taking into account intersecting trends in political, academic, and popular engagements with environmental issues, this paper concerns the development of environmental humanities as an academic field of inquiry, specifically in this new era many are calling the Anthropocene. After a brief outline of the environmental humanities as a field, we delimit four problems that currently frame our relation to the environment, namely: alienation and intangibility; the post-political situation; negative framing of environmental change; and compartmentalization of “the environment” from other spheres of concern. Addressing these problems, we argue, is not possible without environmental humanities. Given that this field is not entirely new, our second objective is to propose specific shifts in the environmental humanities that could address the aforementioned problems. These include attention to environmental imaginaries; rethinking the “green” field to include feminist genealogies; enhanced transdisciplinarity and postdisciplinarity; and increasing “citizen humanities” efforts.
Theory for the Anthropocene (On Alexander Bogdanov and Kim Stanley Robinson)
McKenzie Wark
e-flux
(....)_______________________Addressing the Anthropocene is not something to leave in the hands of those in charge, given just how badly the ruling class of our time has mishandled this end of prehistory, this firstly scientific and now belatedly cultural discovery that we all live in a biosphere in a state of advanced metabolic rift. The challenge then is to construct the labor perspective on the historical tasks of our time. What would it mean to see historical tasks from the point of view of working people of all kinds? How can everyday experiences, technical hacks and even utopian speculations combine in a common cause, where each is a check on certain tendencies of the other?
Technical knowledge checks the popular sentiment toward purely romantic visions of a world of harmony and butterflies—as if that was a viable plan for seven billion people. Folk knowledge from everyday experience checks the tendency of technical knowledge to imagine sweeping plans without thought for the particular consequences—like diverting the waters of the Aral Sea.7 Utopian speculations are that secret heliotropism which orients action and invention toward a sun now regarded with more caution and respect than it once was. There is no other world, but it can’t be this one.
What the Carbon Liberation Front calls us to create in its molecular shadow is not yet another philosophy, but a poetics and technics for the organization of knowledge. As it turns out, that’s exactly what Alexander Bogdanov tried to create. We could do worse than to pick up the thread of his efforts. So let’s start with a version of his story, a bit of his life and times, a bit more about his concepts, from the point of view of the kind of past that labor might need now, as it confronts not only its old nemesis of capital, but also its molecular spawn—the Carbon Liberation Front. Here among the ruins, something living yet remains.
...(more)
The Rookery
Edward Bawden
Marcella Durand interviewed by Sina Queyras
(....)_______________________It’s debatable to me whether the term “eco-poetics” should be a defining term at all. It’s convenient and catchy, but poetry concerned with ecological issues needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the stream of information and rethinking and renaming that is ongoing around ecology, culture, science at the moment. Ecologically minded poetry may be more interesting, more investigative when there isn’t so much a predetermined manifesto, when it is not congealed into a sort of school with dictums to follow and practitioners. I realize this is rather hypocritical of me to say, since I did lay out a kind of schematics back in 2002 (“The Ecology of Poetry”), but I did from the start intend those to be possibilities only. I also meant that talk to be an alternative to the nature poetry I had been steeped in, but I didn’t want it to replace as the next de rigueur mode or whatever. Actually, the more I dig and think and research, the more all poetry seems like it could be read ecologically, as so much of writing deals with relations between self and other, re-engineering language subject, perception and exterior, where we fit into larger systems, landscape, history, culture—where and how we inhabit and how we negotiate with others inhabiting the same spaces.
...(more)
The Road to Thaxted
Edward Bawden
1956
Issue No. 97 / March 2015 "Bohemia" Bohemia = Utopia?
Douglas Coupland
Whenever I bring up the subject of bohemianism, the collective reaction is so uniformly: “What do you mean by bohemian! Define your terms! Forget it, I don’t even want to discuss this!” that it tells me that I seem to have pushed a button. But we all already know what bohemianism means. And so it makes me wonder what it is about its common definition that we dislike so much – this freedom to live outside the mainstream, eking out a living preferably doing something creative, an existence lacking roots but affording the freedom to travel and live with other bohemians. Doesn’t this basically describe most self-employed people in the art world – all those kept afloat by occasional sales, grants, residencies, discount flights to and from Berlin, London, and NYC, the odd teaching gig, as well as by their partners’ or family’s income? The button I think I’ve pushed is the collective realization that the middle class, like an Antarctic ice shelf, is vanishing at a shocking rate and will, within 15 to 20 years, most likely be gone. In its stead we will have, it seems, a new class structure – one that will alter the notion of what bohemian freedom is, while simultaneously reducing its possibility._______________________
This scenario was easy enough to predict back in the late 1980s. What’s been more difficult to handle has been watching the middle class disintegrate in real time. But since few are in denial about the middle class’s impending doom, the magic thing about the present moment is that everyone everywhere is, with great anxiety, trying to figure out what comes next. What comes next I would call the “blank-collar class.” It’s not Fordist blue-collar. It’s not “Hi! It’s 1978 and I’m a travel agent!” white-collar. Blank collar means this – and listen carefully because this is the rest of your life – if you don’t possess an actual skill (surgery, baking, plumbing) then prepare to cobble together a financial living doing a mishmash of random semi-skilled things: massaging, lawn-mowing, and babysitting the children of people who actually do possess skills, or who own the means of production, or the copper mine, or who are beautiful and charismatic. And here’s the clincher: The only thing that is going to make any of this tolerable is that you have uninterrupted high-quality access to smoking hot Wi-Fi. Almost any state of being is okay in the twenty-first century as long as you can remain connected to this thing that turns you into something that is more than merely human.
...(more)
Cornish Well
Edward Bawden c. 1977
In This World Previous to Ours
Marcella Durand
conjunctions
Divided as half of me is small and distant.
The other tongue talks of exterior objects,
while this one speaks of water and limitation.
Neither understands the other and while looking
for a translator the street ends the clock changes.
Drummers gather, crowd like a meteor, a crush.
Tongue only delivers, does not listen, stone deaf.
All talking makes a crowd plural agitation.
Stand here and see the river an entirely
different way: Under water is air and through
air, passage. Color is another wave that takes
sand, rocks, bridge. Water will reflect everything but
what is inside it. It is like that, trying to
describe it. Like that, I scramble along a shore
catching up to the crowds, people standing there, each
one a stranger, what do I have to say to them?
I want to tell them, but language has divided;
we stand divided, each another point, a line.
...(more)
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