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Check My Pulse: the Anthropocene River in Reverse

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Check My Pulse: the Anthropocene River in Reverse Check My Pulse: The Anthropocene River in Reverse BRIAN HOLMES DEEP TIME CHICAGO is an art/research/activism initiative formed in the wake of the Anthropocene Curriculum program at HKW in Berlin, Germany. The initiative’s goal is to explore one core idea: humanity as a geological agency, capable of disrupting the earth system and inscribing present modes of existence into deep time. By knitting together group readings, guided walks, lectures, panels, screenings, performances, publications and exhibitions, we hope to develop a public research trajectory, offering a variety of formats where Chica- go area inhabitants can grapple with the crucial questions of global ecological change. DEEPTIMECHICAGO.ORG Check My Pulse: The Anthropocene River in Reverse Brian Holmes Mama alligator, Lake Martin, Louisiana (photo BH) Mississippi. An Anthropocene River was a continental-scale experiment in distributed perception. All the participants began at a particular place, somewhere with water in a territory. As artists and researchers, we tried to open up the expressivity of those places. You could travel to the differ- ent field stations, and there was also a river journey. Claire Pentecost and I would go to Lake Itasca and paddle the Headwaters, and then after our own field station was complete we would rejoin the river travelers at the conflu- ence of the Ohio and the Mississippi, get in the long voyageur canoes, and follow the currents to a town called New Madrid. Everyone who possibly could was going to meet again at the Human Delta event in New Orleans— or somewhere else downstream. Floating over all this was the idea, or the dream, that we could take one of the central concepts of Earth systems sci- ence, the hydrological cycle, and turn it into something subjective, intimate, and shareable within particular communities. The thing that inspired me most were the swamps, and a scientific paper called “The Flood-Pulse Concept in River-Floodplain Systems.” Here’s the idea: a river is not a linear continuum stretching from source to sea. Instead it’s a fluctuating “aquatic/terrestrial transition zone.” Its ecological significance lies not within its established channel, but in its capacity to overflow its banks according to a seasonal pulse determined by snowmelt, rainfall, and the intrinsic conditions of the floodplain itself. The authors speak of a “moving littoral” or mobile shoreline, offering the image of a dynamic process that does not disrupt, but rather, defines the river. This concept is beautiful to the mind and verifiable with the eye—but you’ll see that the moving littoral immediately runs into walls constructed by human beings. Moving our own bodies between the temporal variability of the flood and the vast, frozen system of engineered levees and dams that attempts to contain it, a group of us tried to touch the pulse of the Anthropocene River. At our field station, called Confluence Ecologies, we held an exhibition devoted to the theme. The hope was that traveling by canoe would provide, Check My Pulse 2 not only a vantage from which to observe these dynamic relations, but also a context in which to discuss them. So what happened? As often, the experience was full of unexpected events, and at times overwhelming. As the entire program reached its close I real- ized there was something involved that I hadn’t understood. What’s more, this was the fundamental thing, the core idea of the Anthropocene. Nature itself is political, not by definition or essence, but because it is everywhere infused with the consequences of power relations between human beings. For sure, all of our field station groups discussed such power relations con- stantly, in conversations that ranged from Black and Indigenous histories to the legacy of synthetic nitrogen or nuclear weapons. The difficulty for me was connecting the conversations to the contours of the territory, which are both cultural and psychic. There are forms of unconscious resistance that are transpersonal, and that act to maintain the paralyzed structures of Anthropocene society. These resistances not only block one’s perception: they block us from really living. They leave us incapable of responding to the tragedy of global ecological destruction. This difficulty is something I want to share in retrospect. I kept thinking back to the refrain of a famous 1959 avant-garde film by Alain Resnais: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima.” Everything goes ahead in advance. In the light of recent street protests for Black lives throughout the world, and in the more intimate light of local realities presented by so many fierce and tender collaborators during the Human Delta program in New Orleans, it seems obvious that the story of the Anthropocene River should be told in reverse. The journey started up north, but the postscript has to begin at river’s end, with a social form of the not-so-distant past: the forced labor camps known as plantations. Their ominous or trivialized remains are preserved behind high levees that now protect, not sugarcane or cotton, but oil and chemical plants, in a place that everyone in America knows as Cancer Alley. The water itself flows differ- ently there. The pulse, not only of the flood, and not only of our own bod- ies, but of the entire planetary metabolism, has been influenced by power relations that took both social and ecological form just upriver from New Orleans. These are race relations. You can see them in yourself, you can see them in the land. The point is to work through them and change their unjust consequences. The history of racism can become a hermeneutic, or process of interpretation, whose application to the past can transform the pres- ent. It can help a collectivity to perceive how a specific struggle has been 3 Brian Holmes inscribed in the landscape, in the flow of the river and in myriad present-day social and natural realities that are increasingly staring us all in the face. Mud Work So the idea is to begin the River Journey in reverse, from its sharpest per- spectives. Stand on top of the looming levees to see the oil refineries, synthetic nitrogen plants, and ethane crackers on the landward side, and the ports in the river. Go down to street level and wander through small towns like LaPlace, where the German Coast slave uprising began in 1811. Everywhere that hasn’t been leveled by industry will reveal to you the property structure of the forced labor camps, which fanned outward in narrow strips from the riverfront where the sugar was shipped to market. Agriculture for profit was impossible here without great earthworks to sep- arate the land from the water, and to protect the crops from the seasonal surge of the floods. The levees were the responsibility of riverfront land- owners, but they were initially built and maintained by enslaved people, brought mostly from Africa on European ships as commodities for sale. We should never forget that Indigenous people were also being enslaved, and dispossessed continuously. Historians now say that this double blow—sei- zure of land plus labor forced by violence—is what made possible the spin- ning industry in both Great Britain and the Northeastern United States, at the moment when industrialization first took hold. Yet there are so many other consequences. The gaze of our roving seminars, under the guidance of the local conveners, focused on the ways this social relation of violence shaped the landscape and society’s relations to nature. The word shaping is literal. The earth-moving tasks that the enslaved people performed were known as “mud work.” In 1731 the French colonial governor Étienne Boucher de Périer explained that “the lands can be drained and freed from water only by those who have negroes, since the work on levees and drainage is difficult and hard.” The sentence, with its core concept of possession and its corollary of imposed suffering, is so repulsive that one hesitates even to continue thinking about what it means. Domination—exactly what a US president recently demanded of the country’s governors—consists of an exercise of force condensed into a threat of death. When pushed to its extreme, it takes the form of a hunt with a weapon, which is exactly what confronted Black people when they escaped. The reality of this threat, concretized by mounted slave patrols and dogs, is what drove the captives to the slow, painful labor of packing Building a levee. By J.O. Davidson, 1884 sand, clay, and soil into continuous hillocks, or digging ditches into watery forests, and then using them to float cleared cypress trees back to the riv- erfront. That’s how the long-term transformation of the flood pulse and the aquatic/terrestrial transition zone got underway. The threat of death is what built the plantation landscape, against the rebellion of the captured Africans. In a text distributed by the seminar on “Un/Bounded Engineering and Evolutionary Stability,” historian John Dean Davis recounts the planters’ avidity for free labor after the Civil War, when the early levee system lay in ruins and cotton production had plummeted. Enslaved labor had been abol- ished, but the planters still expected their Black sharecroppers to rebuild the levees, just as they had been forced to in the past. These landowners, according to Davis, thought that the freedmen simply did not realize how much their own profit as sharecroppers derived from the collective labor of maintenance. “In reality,” Davis writes, “freedpeople were asserting politi- cal power and refusing to do the brutally difficult and dangerous work done previously under threat of the lash, or worse. Across the South freedpeople refused ‘mud work’ of this kind without commensurate wages, causing par- oxysms of rage among the planter class, who obstinately felt entitled to the 5 Brian Holmes labor of black men and women to sustain the precarious landscape they had created and profited from.” Ultimately the sharecropping system collapsed, like the plantation system before it.
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