Land+as+Discourse

Most of my work this semester is centered around practices of resource extraction, particularly mining in the U.S. This subject, of course, just screams power relations, and at all sorts of levels. (I am under the impression, incidentally, that what Foucault means by "power" is not the same as what we mere mortals mean by the term, but how Foucault's usage is different is not at all clear to me. Perhaps someone could clarify? Perhaps Edel, the Great Theory Explicator might illuminate?) The reading from Foucault (and perhaps also Derrida) suggest to me an additional way of looking at the power structures in each of two of my projects.

The first project begins with collecting narratives of members of Save Our Schoharie (S.O.S.), a group who is protesting the expansion of an aggregate quarry in Schoharie, NY. There are all sorts of standard power issues as related to access to money, information, and language-related skill sets. But there is another issue that I hadn't previously been thinking of specifically in terms of power that perhaps I should. One of the things I am trying to discover is to what extent members of this group fit this specific struggle into more global concerns, networks, systems related to environment, localism, consumption, etc. Although I am still in the early stages of this project, my current sense is that people are very much aware that mining can't just be done away with without some kind of alternative; however, thus far, the alternative seems to be always considered something as far away, vague and abstract. The alternatives aren't, typically, things that these individuals can themselves enact. So what might this mean if I think about in terms of power and discourse? If the dominant relevant discourse is capitalism, for instance, then it makes some sense to allow for small, localized protests (rebellions?) against particular aspects of the capitalist system—they function as steam vents without actually threatening the whole system. (This makes me think of... oh, cryptography guy... who talks about the need for security systems to have flexibility and redundancy. The premise is that some part of the system will eventually fail, and therefore, accommodation for failure must be built into that system). In other words, localized protests that are not fully connected to some kind of protest against the larger system/discourse can't effect any kind of fundamental systemic change. And in fact, you hear elements of the capitalist discourse reproduced within the protest discourses: we're not opposed to business, to jobs, to production; just to x method. Nevertheless, these localized protests are not without any effect at all. As Brent nicely said: "nodes must be pushed and pulled a little at time, the effects measured and evaluated, the tweaking revised. This can only be done from within." Perhaps any discourse flexible enough to respond to attempts at counter-discourses by absorbing or otherwise negating them as counter-discourses, has also the tools for its self-destruction as an inherent characteristic. (Could a completely brittle discourse function for very long?)

The second project is looking at the landscapes of exhausted/abandoned mines and reclaimed mines as reflecting/challenging/shaping culture. This is based on the idea that the concept of landscape is a cultural concept. (Without culture to tell you what constitutes a "landscape," you just have land.) There are all kinds of semiotic readings possible here, which I will save for another time, but again here, there are some interesting issues of power and discourse (which two ideas I am finding impossible to disassociate). Of particular interest is the growing interest among landscape architects to design reclaimed lands in new ways. One element of the developing theories of reclamation design is the acknowledgement that in (re)shaping mined-out landscapes, designers have the opportunity to shape social behaviors and understanding. In most cases, what this might actually look like is yet very vague, but there are interesting possibilities (and quite a few actual experiments with reclamations of brownfields). For example, Alan Berger, a landscape architect at Hahvahd has argued that at least some exhausted mines should be left as is; others should be reclaimed, but the the reclamation design should not try to hide the history of the land—the landscape should indicate that mining had once taken place there. The writer of one U.S. Geologic Survey suggested that bus tours of national parks should include the active mines sited within those parks and that the connection between those mines and the road on which the bus drives should be made very clear. These kinds of proposals seem examples of those "nodes" which get "pushed and pulled". On the pushing hand, such overt connections between resource use and resource extraction might make people question the value of the system that requires such destruction in order to function. On the pulling hand, those overt connections might justify the destruction as people realize that it is necessary in order to provide the resources they need/desire. In other words, what appears to have the potential to begin a counter-discourse is very likely to be kneaded into a shape that just fits right back into the dominant (capitalist) discourse.