I had an idea going into this thesis of providing some kind of ecological epiphany through a study of the labor of 'developed' commercial agriculturalists and their attendant societies/cultures/environments and, if I got lucky, to pull a fast one on old home town and old alma mater at once: lighting matches in the crawlspace where the tails of all the objects lead to things in dusty obscurity I vowed I'd bring back an image of the beast to the village. I lit out with with a determined curiosity, a shield covered in Said's writings on the crucial impact of positionality and my righteous library of ethnoecology texts into the maw of my matrilineal community and almost immediately realized some quantitative mistakes I'd made when estimating the weight of the project.
While some of the interactions I would eventually have benefitted from my historical familial connectedness to the place, I was unable to secure any kind of sustained (cymbal!) agricultural work. My attempts to gain entry into the exciting field of commercial livestock production were complete failures. The farmers I spoke with were on autopilot, watching their crops roast in one of the driest summers on record, and readying their fleets to reap it. I found the working world and the workspace were more or less secreted, highly regimented spaces for interactions. Cultural anthropology in most cases elicits a group of responses similar to those I receive from New Yorkers when I say I'm from Iowa: "Ohio?"; "Idaho?": "Oh, you like diggin' up bones huh?"; "Wow! Hey, you ever read Jared Diamond? What tribe do you study?". Thus, I found myself more or less afloat. Lots of first dates and brief run-ins with people I knew growing up, but no protracted conversations, no admission. And I couldn't push it without alienating . No study, no researcher that isn't probing to cure some malady, or subtly vivisecting their subject would ever ask to just hang out and shoot the shit, let alone offer to help out with things. Where's the cool design in that? Where's the aloof magic? What is it you're trying to get from me? I could see these questions hanging over many interactions as they fizzled out in a haze of pleasantries and entreaties to greet my family members.
My historical research of exploring the territory through records, writings, museum collections and genealogical materials proved excessively fruitful, and in the absence of prolonged success with formally sought or arranged meetings, I endeavored toward the second part of Geertz's characterization of fieldwork and just began hanging out, trying to catch my needle in a groove. The bars, the street, the organized festivals of the summer and all the doors opening out from these events became my milieu and suddenly sparks began to fly. In these spaces I met with consumption, the risky, sloppy, dark drunken communions, the slipstream of sacred stories and the not infrequent sovereign guffaw. Through its waste, the place suddenly related to me, identifying me as one of its confused dispossessed, returned somehow but not apparently making or productively rebinding to kin, not sublimating my raw energy into daily responsibility.
For the thesis I want to give a general economy of Winnebago County that looks at the creation/production of nature (labour) and the destruction of its surpluses. I intend to do this primarily by telling stories that explore the surreal, shocking, humorous moments I encountered talking to people there last summer. I want to work from a point in your transgression piece where you characterize Modernity as the transgression of the sacred, Bataille's zone of radical negation. In this transgressed sacred terrain the old dichotomy of high (conscious? intellectual?) and low (ecstatic? corporeal?) splits the already corporeal sacred, giving an absurd moral hierarchy to the division of labor and the forces it organizes, disorganizes, naturalizes and denatures. The ethnography of 'development' exceeds the etymology of the term as it reveals but also conceals and must contain its opposite. This vibration manifests in the historical record (documents, landscape, stories), which silently guards the fragments of an unabridged, not for TV version of the 20th Century pioneers and Indians story, flattening and straightening it into an origami vector of natural-history, as well as logics of country and city, rural and urban as they bubble and burst from erection to impotence, as well in the slippery practical and theoretical distinctions between animals and machines.
Beyond these more traditional things, the elephant in the corner of the room with anthropocentric little anthropology and its schizophrenically-culled, socio-culturally conservative frankenstein assembled eclectically from the academic temple of the conscious sacred in the name of humanity is the electronic digital computer and its growing cybergothic world. Ubiquitous computing orchids while we wasp, to recycle a popular natural trope, accelerating, enlivening and enveloping by the moment. For instance, deepening corporeal alienation by compressing social encounters into sequences of electrical impulses shot around the world at light speed for communion via baroque assemblages of oriental mountain ranges and puffed hydrocarbons.
Sustainable development amounts to the project of converting these machines for animation (energetically and algorithmically) under general economy (fauna?,flora?, only harder, faster, arguably already intelligent - stones that walk like men). An anthropologically derived shot at ecology then would have to be a radical negation of the inter-eating biomass and its reterritorialization, something which no machine is yet able to provide. Cybernetic totalitarianism points to an emergent existence of vestigial immanence in a newly autonomous restricted ecology, not some kind of cushy 'co-evolution' implied in the recurrent romantic robotic leisure society visions of optimistic capitalists.
Nick Land ends his collection of writings Fanged Noumena with the ominous challenge:
Level l, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-conifgured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly. Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to Level 2!?
Several of my experiences speaking with farmers and farm workers made me shudder with the uncanniness of the scope at which this process of cybernetic penetration already seems quotidian in big agriculture, which was already impressively hulking before it became an integrated network.
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