{"id":1275,"date":"2014-01-21T19:47:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-21T19:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2014-01-21T20:08:25","modified_gmt":"2014-01-21T20:08:25","slug":"subnatures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/newecologies\/subnatures\/","title":{"rendered":"Subnature Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of road sign on Abingdon Road, Oxford, in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Ruins (2010). Reproduced on the cover of The Possibility of Life\u2019s Survival on the Planet (2012). In the film, the narrator notes the striking similarity between the lichen and a 1775 silhouette of Goethe.<\/p><\/div>\n

He believed that he could communicate with a network of\u00a0non-human intelligences that had sought refuge in marginal and hidden locations. They were determined to\u00a0preserve the possibility of life\u2019s survival on\u00a0the planet and enlisted him to work on their behalf. From a nearby car park he surveyed the center of the island on which he was shipwrecked. The location,\u2019 he wrote, \u2018of a Great Malady that I shall dispel in the manner of Turner by making picturesque views on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest.’ (Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Ruins<\/i>, 2010)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A few months after Robinson is released from prison, several film cans and his notebook are discovered in a derelict trailer. These become the basis for Robinson in Ruins<\/i>, the third installment of Patrick Keiller\u2019s Robinson trilogy. <\/i>Fittingly, Robinson\u2019s search for the origins of capitalist catastrophe in the English landscape begins on a traffic median, the island on which he is purportedly shipwrecked.\u00a0It is from here that Keiller’s film sets out, though it is largely a reflection on the militarization of \u00a0landscape.<\/p>\n

The in-between space of a traffic island\u2014a space neither natural nor cultivated, one created by human activity but largely abandoned\u2014is what gardener Gilles Cl\u00e9ment would call The Third Landscape<\/a>. These are the novel environments of a fragmented but rapidly expanding planetary biome that consists of vacant lots and roadsides, abandoned fields and railway embankments. \u201cThird Landscape,\u201d writes Cl\u00e9ment in Manifeste du Tiers Paysage<\/i> (2002), \u201crefers to third estate (and not to third world). Space expressing neither power nor submission to power.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the not the space of nature but rather of subnature<\/i>.<\/p>\n

One year before the release of Robinson in Ruins<\/i>, David Gissen\u2019s Subnature: Architecture\u2019s Other Environments<\/i> (2009) was released to great acclaim. In it, Gissen explores how theorists of architecture and urban design have envisioned \u201cperipheral and often denigrated forms of nature\u201d ranging from smoke to puddles, detritus to dust, weeds to pigeons. Like Robinson, Gissen is concerned with the possibility of the future of life on the planet. Like Robinson, Gissen is biophilic and a liminal peripatetic.<\/p>\n

In the wake of Subnature,\u00a0<\/i>Robinson in Ruins<\/i>, and Manifesto of the Third Landscape<\/em>, New <\/i>Ecologies invites reflection by errant scholars and other ruderals on the novel environments explored in these works. \u00a0Let’s provisionally call it: subnature writing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The opening salvo in this series comes from GinaRae LaCerva of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Her history of dust opens a possibility that Robinson once invoked: \u201cif he looked at the landscape hard enough, it would reveal to him the<\/i> molecular basis<\/i> of historical events.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can read more of GinaRae\u2019s writing at www.disturbancegeography.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

-Jason Groves<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He believed that he could communicate with a network of\u00a0non-human intelligences that had sought refuge in marginal and hidden locations. They were determined to\u00a0preserve the possibility of life\u2019s survival on\u00a0the planet and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-newecologies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1310,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions\/1310"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openhumanitiespress.org\/feedback\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}