Clearing Land, pt. 1

Romanticism, Sod, and the Reenchantment of the World

I

14. Transactions on the whole / More on the unusual indication concerning the
differences between theory and praxis. Praxis should become more theoretical.

The period we refer to as the Enlightenment ended with two nearly concurrent events: the Haitian Revolution and Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment. The former was the third of a series of revolutionary periods that were founded on the ideals of the era, such as liberty, equality, individualism, and the universal nature of rational thought. The American revolution and the first phase of the one that began in France a decade later had interpreted these concepts in a restricted, bourgeois mode which largely viewed the market as the new arbiter of power and justice. In these revolutions, equality was not fully equal, liberty not truly free, and universalism restricted to just a few. The Haitian Revolution, begun two years after that of the French, extended these principles to all people, and in this sense took the ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusions. Not only that, it forced the French to do the same, leading to the rise of the Jacobins and the beginning of the movement towards the abolition of the slave trade in Europe. For all of these reasons, it both horrified and inspired the European intelligentsia in the 1790s. In it, they saw the end of the Enlightenment, both in the sense of its temporal closure and the reality towards which it tended. For some, it laid bare the violence of Reason that had been concealed in the ideals of the century, while others saw in it the will towards freedom at all costs, the spirit of the age as the destruction of the old world. What it gestured to, in fact, was the contradictory nature of the Enlightenment’s conception of Reason itself. For some, Reason gestured in one direction towards the necessity of universal liberation, and in another to the necessity of radical equality, both of which were bounded by the material contradictions of both freedom and egalitarianism. Nevertheless, regardless of interpretation, all agreed that these revolutions heralded the beginning of a new age, the reaping of the fruits of the era, and the need for a new philosophy that could meet the coming world spirit.

The other marker of the end of the Enlightenment was the work of Immanuel Kant. The sage of Königsberg had famously attempted to reconcile the two trends that had dominated the philosophy of the period, rationalism and empiricism. Both agreed, for the most part, in the role that thought–however it was construed–played in humanity’s relationship to the world. Because we possess the same faculties, they argued, we are essentially equal in our capacity to understand it; because of this equality of understanding, we are all free to direct our own actions within it; and because we are all free, we all deserve the same amount of dignity afforded to rational beings. What they disagreed upon was nearly everything else. Rationalism held that pure reason was the only sure source of knowledge, focusing on the mathematical sciences in their examination of the world; Empiricism, on the other hand, argued that the senses are the only sure source of information, that reason was merely a tool for organizing and clarifying our perceptions, and that thought overstepped its boundaries when it claimed to have direct access to the world itself independent of sensual data. Kant’s contribution to this debate was to argue that while all information about the world does indeed come from the senses–and therefore exists only a posteriori, “after the fact”–, we must nevertheless presuppose the existence of a priori rational structures in consciousness that allow this sense data to appear to us in a comprehensible manner. In a series of Critiques written between 1781 and 1790, Kant attempted to characterize the relationship between the various faculties of the rational mind, and found precisely what we noted above, that there existed an aporia between the necessity of the material world and the duty we have to ideal morality. In the final Critique, concerning “The Power of Judgment,” Kant attempts to mediate the contradictions by investigating subjects where the difference between freedom and necessity is much more ambiguous, and as a result, the contradiction between them is less absolute. That is, in the case of Art, and that of Organic Life.

Art is a strange case in which although it seems that a universal principle must have guided the artist in her production (and therefore produced something that can be enjoyed by any rational being), no such rule can ever be found, meaning that therefore we must assume the work to be produced through freedom (and that we can only enjoy art freely as well); in other words, in art we at once hold that the things we enjoy are ‘objectively good,’ while at the same time admitting that ‘everyone has their own taste.’ Organic life, likewise, is a case in which although the beings under consideration (e.g. plants and animals) behave according to absolute natural laws, they nevertheless appear  to act according to a free will. In fact, we cannot understand neither Art nor Organic Life without assuming the absolute coexistence of both freedom and necessity, and in such a way that the two do not contradict one another. The manner of differing that exists between freedom and necessity in the first two Critiques (which are decidedly ‘Enlightenment’ era texts), is different from the cases given in the third Critique insofar as while the former cannot coexist while remaining comprehensible, the latter must in order them to make any sense at all. 

This book was published in 1790, and immediately affected the philosophical landscape. It emerged at almost the exact same moment that the contradictions of the French Revolution became apparent, at the very same time that the factory system was dehumanizing workers across the channel, and in the same decade that the cotton gin set the stage for the birth of industrial agriculture. In this text, the Romantics saw that the way through the contradictions of the Enlightenment was with the creation of art and alongside nature, with poetry and vitality. The Enlightenment had left Europe in a state of alienation because of its very principles. The manner in which it conceived of Reason was one that was essentially alienated and alienating. Kant’s final Critique gestured to a manner of philosophizing that both cleared the field for new approaches to thought and life, and at the same time hinted at a foundational unity underlying difference. Whereas the Enlightenment had been predicated on the subject/object divide, the distinction between the freedom of man and the necessity of nature, the Romantic period would begin with this divide and dig down into the ground of being to the soil from which differences ultimately spring. The way through the Enlightenment, in other words, was through poetry, into the writhing unity of the living earth.

It is in this context that we should consider the work of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a mine inspector, poet, and philosopher from Saxony. Hardenberg was most closely associated with a circle of writers often called the Jena Romantics, or the movement called Frühromantik. Although every individual in the circle had a different approach to understanding the world, they were united in general by two ideas: 1) that in order to articulate a full vision of the world, rationality had to be accompanied by the spirit of poetry, which meant that ethics and aesthetics were to be considered at least as important as (and in some cases more important than) metaphysics; and 2) that Kant’s critical philosophy had done exactly what was needed in the wake of the French Revolution by clearing the ground for radically new approaches to grasping reality. For the Frühromantik, the distinction between practice and theory, ethics and metaphysics, art and reality, had been too rigid in Enlightenment philosophy and the politics it engendered. In the philosophy to come, the praxis of ethics, art, poetry, and public religion was as necessary and intrinsic to the liberation of humanity as was the ideal forms of Reason and the Absolute. Theory had to become Practical, and Practice had to become Theoretical, the two realms married together so that each nourished the other and raised the combination of the two above what they could have achieved separately.

Perhaps the most radical of the group in taking these two principles seriously was Hardenberg, who took the pen name Novalis when he began to publish his own work. The name was chosen both in homage to his ancestors, whose estate had been called Novalis, and because the word means “new land” or “fallow land that is newly tilled”. In choosing the name, Hardenberg captured both the impulse to begin anew, as well as the romantic associations that came with the agrarian lifestyle it implied. Like newly tilled land, however, Novalis’ work not only clears space for new beginnings, but also works with what already exists. Newly tilled land is not the invention or creation of something absolutely disconnected from the past, from nature, what already is, but a metamorphosis of the old into the new, the marriage of past and future as a production of the present. To till new land means to mine and loose the porous boundaries that exist between things: between the sky and earth, past and present, nature and culture, interior and exterior, man and the gods. 

II

78. THEORY OF THE FUTURE. (COSMOLOGICS) Nature will become
moral—when out of a genuine love of art—it devotes itself to art—does what art
wishes—and when art, through a genuine love of Nature—lives for Nature, works in
accordance with Nature. Thus both must act at the same time, out of their own
choice—and for their own sakes—and out of this foreign choice for the sake of the
other. They must encounter the other in themselves, and themselves in the other.
If our intelligence and our world harmonize—we are on par with God.

A square tipped shovel works better than one that is rounded when cutting sod. The straight edge leaves a clean line that can be linked together in a continuous chain that runs from one end of a field to the other. Although many round-edged spades are more solid and sturdy since a curve is less liable to bend, as soon as you get the movement figured out, it’s worth it to stick with the square because of the clean line it produces. When the area you’re cutting out has a series of curved edges at its border, the sod doesn’t pull out as cleanly, leaving little fragments along the length of the area where roots remain and will grow back before it is time to plant.

The trick is to pay attention to the grass itself as you work your way along the field. When the sod is thin, it is best to leave one foot on the ground and place the other on the step of the blade. Then, as if you were a patient using a crutch, step down firmly on the line you’d like to cut with the shovel using your dominant foot, then rock back onto the other while pulling out with the handle, shifting six inches or so to the side and then pushing down again beside the first cut. Continue for as long as you need. This method doesn’t work as well when the ground is thick with crabgrass. When you find clumps of it, you will have to place both feet on the step and jump on the blade to cut through the roots, which can be several inches deep or more. The resistance they offer can be significant. It may feel very similar to that of stones, in fact, but they are quite distinct when you get the feel for them.

Like any technology, a shovel is at once an extension of the body and an autonomous entity. It is a technique of the human being, an artificial organ made from the earth for the purpose of cleaving it in two. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty explains the process of ‘incorporation’ by describing a blind person using a cane to navigate the world. To the blind woman, it is not as if the cane were a separate thing which mediately conveys information from the street to the hand as a third thing in between them. Rather, the cane becomes part of the body, it in-corpor-ates it and perceives the world immediately, as if the cane were just a long arm and its tip a finger. In this paradigm, which some call ‘appropriate technology,’ the relationship between myself and nature is simply augmented by the tool. The cane, although materially independent, has no means of moving itself. So while it is a third thing, the system or circuit it creates makes a synthesis in which three become one. In this cane, and in the shovel, the line between nature and artifice is porous. Nature and art, matter and culture, body and technology are part of a unitary system such that the body becomes artificial at the same time that the cane becomes flesh. When the shovel hits a rock along the line you are cutting, the reverberation of the stone beneath the soil also extends the chain of sensation from embodied mind to tool to stone to earth.

You will want to cut out squares with edges that are no more than a foot and a half long. Any more than that and the sod becomes too heavy to carry. The roots of all plants are much longer than you might imagine. Each visible root is covered in what are called ‘root hairs’ that greatly extend the length and expand the surface area of the plant in order to maximize water and nutrient uptake. Through a fractal effect, in an average square foot of grass there are more than six hundred feet of these micro-roots. They cling tightly to the soil, and when wet, even just this small amount of sod can weigh between ten and twenty pounds. In a field with an area of 2,000 square feet, such as the one we cleared, this adds up to about 40,000 pounds, or approximately 20 tons of earth. There were times when we tried to cut larger sections of sod, but doing so is exhausting. You must see the project as an exchange of matter and energy, distributed over time and space. You must view it as an economy in which the resource flowing through the system is life itself.

Although it has lost almost all reference to its origin, an ‘economy’ refers to the administration of the act of dwelling on earth. In ancient Greece, economics signified the art of directing the flow of resources within a home in order to extract productive power according to means, and distribute resources according to need. Aristotle distinguishes it from the art of making money (chresmatics) although the two have been confused in modernity. Economics, instead, signifies the techniques of transforming one kind of thing into another for the purposes of life. The economist must know how to metamorphose dirt into plants, money into goods, produce into meals, calories into the power of a human body, human labor into the projects of the home, and so on. It is about taking account of where the resources are accumulated at any given point, and where that limited store of life and matter must move in order for the organism of the home as a whole to continue existing. It signifies the techniques of leveraging matter, energy, time, and tools to allow for a flourishing existence.

The individual human body is limited in its capacity to supply the productive power needed to operate such an economy on its own. With the right technology, however, such as a tractor or livestock, or the cooperation of many bodies, the individual’s powers can be expanded, multiplied, sutured to the power of other beings in the world, capable of incorporating the rest of the cosmos into its projects. At the scale of a human and a shovel, clearing a single bed for growing proceeds at a rate of about 15 square feet an hour, 300 pounds of dirt every sixty minutes. It is an inconceivably slow process compared to the speed that is necessary to create the produce we encounter in grocery stores at the cost we expect to find there. There, land clearing and the planting of seeds must occur at the scale of square miles. As a species, we have developed technologies for cutting the earth open for our nourishment that would have been inconceivable to our ancestors. Think of it. Agriculture developed roughly 12,000 years ago, and until the 19th century, the technology to carry it out hardly changed. We had the power to produce at perhaps a few degrees of magnitude beyond what a person with a shovel can do for 98.75% of all agricultural history. And then in about 1% of the total time we have nourished ourselves by toiling in the soil, everything changed.

Technology is no longer just an extension of the human body, but a system with its own desires and impulses. Or rather, the machines which form the systems of production, circulation, and distribution are moved not just by the projects of human nourishment, but the spirit of growth and accumulation that we still sometimes call capitalism. In the capitalist mode of production, machinery becomes the crystallization of accumulated wealth, the metamorphosis of soil, plant and animal bodies, and other physical matter by means of labor, i.e. “the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles, &c.,” which gives it value. In the economy of modernity, the one produced by the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th century, machinery tends to become autonomous. Artificial Intelligence is simply the clearest expression of this. Like the shovel above, technology has always had a certain degree of independence, but it not often had the power to act independently until modernity. For most of the history of human labor, it was the immediate relationship between ourselves and the natural world that machinery and technology created. In the present, the autonomy of machinery has made that relationship increasingly distant, mediated. The machine is like a middle-man between my body and the world that I act upon. The food I eat now comes from hundreds of miles away, the plants out of which my clothing is produced is grown thousands of miles away, and is put together sometimes even further than that. Machinery and the autonomous spirit of capital has, in other words, created what Marx calls a ‘metabolic rift’, a separation from the means of production by the means of production.

In the same period of time that technology has become autonomous and unbelievably powerful, the portion of the global population engaged in agriculture has undergone a shift that is no less dramatic. Before 1800, roughly 80% of humans were farmers; today, the global population has fallen to 27%, and in the United States, the figure hovers around just 1%. Imagine that for every percent of increased collective productivity in this one percent of agricultural history, one percent of the population moves away from the farm, escapes toiling with the earth, walks away from the soil. If this trend were stretched out over the course of the entirety of our agricultural history, then the change would be imperceptible, almost negligible. But instead, it has occurred all at once. In the blink of an eye. An entire species with its hands in the dirt transformed into something else entirely in the span of a cosmic millisecond.