Rumbling Chiasmus investigates rumours of subterranean, chemical dynamics, speculating upon the manner in which they may come to inform and shape the surface. In combination with this interest in what lies beneath the surface of many once industrial cities, this project approaches the problem of how the architectural and chemical residue of an industrial past might be used as a political asset in the production of alternate politico-economic occupations of civic space. The story is a common one: a once prosperous industrial area falls into confused and unsightly abandon after the collapse of a localised industrial economy faced with the truth of ceaselessly dissipating capital according to the mechanics of globalisation. Amidst the ensuing confusion anterior to the reorganisation that must occur after such a shift, an area of land—highly organised to accommodate the needs of industrial production—provides an unwieldy, expensive and stubborn opposition to the City’s planned economic reformation: the highly organised architectonic terrain that had supported the specific requirements of industrial production is insufficiently `smooth’ to accommodate a newly globalised outlook and the formation of a `knowledge’ based economy partially informed through `immaterial labour’. Amidst this temporary deadlock a permissive economy of neglect opens up within the previously industrial area of the city and an `organic’, `creative quarter’ emerges. The mills, warehouses and factories of an industrial past become the hosts of an inchoate `creative industry’. The perceived uselessness of this land, in its state of temporary abandon and confusion, contributes to a permissive neglect that affords a certain creative potential through occupation and appropriation.
1. Industrial Creativity
Suspicion first arose at the point where the tracks broke the surface, indicating a past hastily covered and poorly hidden, a superficial solution to a persistent problem either too troublesome or expensive to remove. Questioning our guide, this brief enquiry revealed the site’s industrial history:“these tracks lead into the old fabric”, he paused and then corrected himself, “factory”. Sixty years of industry had left the ground heavily contaminated. Petroleum, cleaning products and solutions had rendered the ground useless, too polluted for development and habitation, too risky to sell. The ground would have to be neutralised, but this is an expensive and lengthy procedure so a compromise was reached. Contamination affords cheap rent and so `creative occupations’ became possible: it would seem that a peculiar allegiance was formed, between the artefacts of an industrial past and an inchoate `creative industry’. The residue of an industrial past which provides an obstacle to `regeneration’ begins to function as a political asset in the production of an alternate politico-economic occupation of the surface. The uselessness and ambiguity of land bearing ruins, spectres of an industrial past, affords a continuation of synthetic production analogous to that which would appear to have seeped into the ground from above; so frequently we find these `cultural quarters’ built atop the trace remnants of an industrial past. Both the residue of exhausted labour and that which continues at the surface retains an essential and reciprocally sustaining uselessness, the former of no value due to its progressive decrepitude and the latter due to its relative obscurity and lax attitude towards the necessity of accumulating capital.
A line of influence stretching from the earth to the tactics of those operating on its surface is not conceived as a linear progression, as if from the core outwards, as the contamination that presently drives or sustains synthetic creativity at the surface—while allowing lateral architectures to crumble—is easily understood as a human accident, as having been injected into the earth wherein it could thrive and prosper, patiently undermining plans made at the surface regarding future topographical divisions. Accident or otherwise, upon reaching the surface, these sublimated contaminants and solutions realise their own desires through the medium of humanity, and so the question of antecedence remains obscure. Through patient undermining the ground is not so much hollowed out by persistent contamination as saturated by chemical dynamisms that conspire beneath the surface, figuring alternative movements and forming allegiances according to an independent subterranean information. To ally with a chemical insurgency that throws a spanner in the works of developers is to adopt the `absolute empiricism’ of an inhuman creativity that sets a space apart from commercially developed centres, with persistent wilderness that breaches the uniformity and otherwise smooth distribution of tarmac; it is to ally with the dynamic imbalances and objective occlusions of a productive and synthetic political ecology. Uncovering these dynamics reveals the strange kind of `freedom’ the contaminated earth permits: a degree of freedom from the obligations of capital and a permissive economy left with little choice but to make room for labour considered useless by developers, repulsed by the slimy depths allied with in sustaining the actions of a creative or synthetic surface occupation. A peculiar freedom is attained through allegiance with a chemical insurgency conspiring beneath the surface; its darkly imaginative capacity for alternative methods of infrasomatic organisation and economic sabotage yields certain rewards while its own motives remain obscure and may never be known. A truth not so much stated or spoken as observed, tested and verified reveals that an insurgency indifferent to that forming a trailing allegiance with it on the surface, yet it nonetheless finds itself plugged or routed into the mechanics of an inchoate politico-economic reorganisation of the surface, which itself conspires against the City.
A sense of familiarity, recognition or apparent repetition in surveying the surface, its architectural decay and the labour of its occupants, provokes suspicion of a chemical insurgency, of industrial residue as both asset and agent informing the operations of the surface. Signs, significant impressions are followed up by way of an `absolute’ or `industrial empiricism’, calling upon the diffusive sensations and peculiar expressions of objects thought otherwise as dumb or inert.1 A method sympathetic not only in name to the recent history of many regenerated sites—an industrial past prior to the monetization of `cultural capital’ that drives so much desire for gentrification from within the City—`industrial empiricism’ taps into not only ubiquitous sensation but equally prevalent creative production, seeking influence and allegiances with the inhuman towards an imaginative expansion of political, praxical alternatives to the current state of things. Industrial or `absolute’ empiricism claims that `where there is chemistry, there is sensation, and since there is nowhere in nature an absence of chemical activity, then sensation must be universally immanent’.2 This universality entails a radical expansion of the thinking of sensation beyond anthropic horizons, where sensation must be thought in relation to the inhuman and that which appears inert. This method requires a descent from the elevation of the anthropic in the sense of an ontological redress, but also a descent into the dark and synthetic obscurity of the infrasomatic, yet it is the diffusive influence or function of this universality that unbinds empiricism from anthropic conservatism that is of preliminary importance, in similarly unbinding the industrial from human labour power and its division. Unbinding sensation into the universally diffuse performs a consequent gesture of unbinding an industrial creativity from the space allotted to it under the division of labour, insofar as sensation is recognised as synthetic and therefore productive. Industrial empiricism unbinds not only sensation but production, which we take as the general term identifying an unbound creativity.
Absolute empiricism is presented as diffusive concept recognising sensation and locating objects of study well beyond anthropic horizons according to the requirements of speculative thought; it is herein adopted as a method in investigating the lingering subterranean traces of industrial production contributing to the contaminated earth and in particular its information of surface activities. Here it should be noted that information is understood in the first instance as a productive or synthetic process rather than consumable chunks of knowledge, as ontological function anterior to epistemological operation, less something to be known than something to be subject to. This industrial, absolute or unconditioned empiricism entails a praxical openness to `syntheses that “make themselves felt”;3 where chemistry is equated with sensory dynamics, sensation is located within both the inhuman and inorganic. A consequence of this absolutism is ubiquitous sensation, but also the eruptions of this exteriority within anthropic horizons, so exercising an influence through the ungrounding functions of an unconscious anteriority.
The ubiquitous distribution of sensation as a result of its being unbound in thought from the anthropic sphere occurs where one recognises sensation as a synthetic production occurring wherever there are chemical interactions. Sensation is thus production and product of interaction and production creation; we thereby arrive at a notion of industrial creativity as a diffusive conception of influential or informational productivity. Having amidst its dependencies Iain Hamilton Grant’s developments of Schellingian absolute and industrial empiricism, this industrial creativity defines creativity not as the preserve of the arts but as a diffusive concept distributed throughout all production, anthropic and otherwise. Recognition of a diffusive and inhuman creativity forces an imaginative exercise upon thought, the importance of which cannot be underestimated within our current state of political crisis defined as such through the absence of any imaginative alternative to the necrotic state of party politics bent upon recitation of the dictums of capitalist realism. Industrial creativity forces recognition of an inassimilable inhuman creativity, the productivity of a radically extimate alterity, what Negarestani has called the `treacherous Insider’.4 Industrialising the thinking of creativity is of primary importance to the re-ignition of an imaginative politico-economic praxis, as the creativity of inhuman exteriority forces a thinking of the other within humanistic solipsism that accelerates the presently unfolding global catastrophe. That all production should be politically implicated is utterly uncontroversial where politics opens onto the inhuman already at work within it. In this way we consider the politico-economic consequences of an artistic practice that seeks allegiances with inhuman indifference, as all production has such consequences despite attempts at their infinite deferral within thought. Through exploiting the ambiguity of industrial ruin, occupation of the contaminated earth by way of an industrial creativity forms an allegiance with the subterranean alterity and industrial residue that informs the politico-economic organisation of the surface through providing an objective problem to gentrification and architectural imposition. The anti-capitalist occupation of the surface contains amidst its dependencies the peculiar eruptions of a contaminated and contagious plutonism that interrupts the production of `smooth space’ essential to the erections of developers and their regimes of gentrification. The contaminated earth subsists the permissive economics of the area that keeps rents low and sustains the productivity of a synthetic ecology, a chemical insurgency—requiring that the City turn a blind eye—allied with the industrial creativity of the surface, which is not to be confused with the creative industries. The industrial corresponds with synthetic production, with fabricaction and not simply exchange value or representational operations: fabrication being the modality of an industrial creativity and the latter terms more applicable to the creative industries. Industrial creativity, building upon the ubiquitous productivity of absolute empiricism, is taken as naming a productivity in general, and so where the `creative industries’ entail a division of labour that occludes the productivity of Ideas that do not observe such disciplinary discretion—but rather move `horizontally’ by means of a contagion that informs from within through infectious propagation (the tactics of the treacherous Insider)—industrial creativity is seen as tapping into an diffusive productivity catalytic of labour rather than effecting its division. The postponement of the division of labour cannot be endured indefinitely, as a division is necessary if this work is to attain significance or the actualisation of a radical alternative; rather, this division should be resisted until its necessity is forced from within by the production of the Idea itself, rather than imposed according the necessity of exchange and dissemination that would foreclose the extremities of any alternatives it may harbor or inform. To be clear, Ideas are referred to here not in a sense concomitant with the tradition of transcendental idealism but in a sense synonymous with an informative material continuum or the `ultimate elements of nature’.5 Concomitant with a praxical generalisation complicit with the productivity of Ideas, industrial creativity is understood as extending beyond a common sense of the industrial, insofar as this is defined through a division of labour that presently appears as given. Just as a restriction of creativity to the arts appears banal, the industrial is not thought as bound to the common sense definition of industry. While the capital the regenerative City seeks through the gentrification and redivision of the industrial is to be attained through establishing quarters for the `creative industries’—which appear opposed to the industrial creativity that often occupies and informs both the surface and subterranean—the sterility of gentrification appears at odds with the synthetic and contagious earth within which the industrial creativity thrives. The neutralisation of the earth will precede the gentrification of the surface, and so those presently working above ground must sustain and continue to be sustained by the industrial and synthetic creativity that teems—or at least lingers, leaving a trace—beneath.6
2. Sous les Pavés …
Uncovering the trace elements of a chemical insurgency entails a minimal descent into the dark, synthetic depths of this contaminated territory in order to exhume whatever might remain of its contagious and contaminant productivity. Digging beneath the surfaces of the city that informs much psychogeographical practice, enquiry beneath the pavement entails a shift from the interpretation of the city as a set of signs to the experimental investigation of its affective and material substrates—an approach that yields just as many projectiles.
Debord’s call for critical engagement with the city `by means of […] experimental d\’erives, [through which] a cartography of influences can be drawn up’ is here realised not as a smooth flow or drift across the surface but as an action punctuated by requirement to mine.7 With each pause and descent a little more of `the objective field of passion in which d\’erive is propelled’ is uncovered.8 The mining of influential substrates—contrary to the Situationists’ assumption that beneath the authoritarian surfaces of the city lies the freedom of the beach—uncovers a deeper ecological determinism and subliminal substrata that subsists its political conscription and participation within the material practices of ideology. Through digging, mining and drilling a `cartography of influence’ extends beyond the outlines and architectonic organisation of the surface towards informative subterranean dynamics, a cartography of influence that includes substata and not simply a topographical overview.
Further notes from Oldenburg.
- Grant, `Chemistry of Darkness’, 42-3. These objective expressions are, in this instance: the decomposition of cabbage in the acquisition of anthocyanin, the consequent saturation of a coffee filter in the production of Ph paper for use in preliminary analyses—the method of which will be familiar to anyone who attended even a handful of chemistry lessons at school.
- Iain Hamilton Grant, `Chemistry of Darkness’, 44.
- See Iain Hamilton Grant, The Chemistry of Darkness
- Reza Negarestani, `Drafting the Inhuman’, 200.
- See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, probably somewhere in chapter 4.
- We can find a similar tactical allegiance in an entirely different context: Weizman has described how in the most extreme situations an allegiance has been formed with surfacing sewerage which in this instance becomes a political asset. Where the present argument concerns itself with sustaining and developing an existing occupation and its incubation of a nascent politico-economic occupation of the surface, tactically comparable allegiances have been formed in order to accelerate the essential temporality and necessary dissipation of an effective imprisonment within Gaza’s refugee camps: “When sewage overflows and `private shit’, from the underground, invades the public realm, it becomes a private hazard but also a political asset. In some places, efforts by UN departments to replace existing systems of infrastructure with permanent underground plumbing have been rejected. The raw sewage affirm’s the refugee camp’s state of temporariness and with it the urgency of claim for return”. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land, 21. An allegiance is formed at the surface with the eruption of the otherwise subterranean flow of shit and sludge, rendered an asset in determining the political status of the surface as a necessarily temporary organisation to be reconfigured.
- Guy Debord, The Situationists and The City, 84.
- Debord, Situationists and The City, 78.
