Synthetic Worlds Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry

Synthetic Worlds Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry Esther Leslie Synthetic Worlds Synthetic Worlds Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry Esther Leslie reaktion books Published by reaktion books ltd www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2005 Copyright © Esther Leslie 2005 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Colour printed by Creative Print and Design Group, Harmondsworth, Middlesex Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, Kings Lynn British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Leslie, Esther, 1964– Synthetic worlds: nature, art and the chemical industry 1.Art and science 2.Chemical industry - Social aspects 3.Nature (Aesthetics) I. Title 7-1'.05 isbn 1 86189 248 9 Contents introduction: Glints, Facets and Essence 7 one Substance and Philosophy, Coal and Poetry 25 two Eyelike Blots and Synthetic Colour 48 three Shimmer and Shine, Waste and Effort in the Exchange Economy 79 four Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality: A Utopian Interlude 95 five Class Struggle in Colour 118 six Nazi Rainbows 167 seven Abstraction and Extraction in the Third Reich 193 eight After Germany: Pollutants, Aura and Colours That Glow 218 conclusion: Nature’s Beautiful Corpse 248 References 254 Select Bibliography 270 Acknowledgements 274 Index 275 introduction Glints, Facets and Essence opposites and origins In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow a character remarks on an exploding missile whose approaching noise is heard only afterwards. The horror that the rocket induces is not just terror at its destructive power, but is a result of its reversal of the natural order of things. The world is upend- ed by science. Such reversal is the general work of science as presented in Pynchon’s paranoid vision of wartime, where ‘ideas of the opposite’ animate technological developments.1 ‘Ideas of the opposite’ are as intrinsic to the science tracked in Gravity’s Rainbow as they are to the science of the great chemical firms that were founded on the production of artificial dyes and later became central to the war effort of the Third Reich. Chemical reactions bring opposites together in an exchange of properties to produce new things. More specifically, the synthetic production of all the colours of the rainbow emerges from its opposite, the blackness of coal. This transformation of blackness into colour is part of another antithetical process: chemistry’s efforts to turn waste matter into value. This pursuit aided a wider effort of inversion: the transformation of all nature into its artificial counterpart, as natural materials are remade synthetically in laboratories. All that exists and can exist is natural, but processes of deriving complex compounds from reactions produce substitutes, analogues, imitations and duplicates, which, because of the synthetic operations that bring them into being, seem to remain forever synthetic. In Gravity’s Rainbow Walter Rathenau, former German foreign minister and ‘prophet and architect of the cartelized state’,speaks from the grave dur- ing a séance to the assembled crowd of Nazis and an ig Farben director.2 He speaks of two stuffs the base materials of the Industrial Revolution that he perceives as qualitative opposites of each other. Consider coal and steel. There is a place where they meet. The interface between coal and steel is coal-tar. Imagine coal, down in the earth, dead black, no light, the very substance of death. Death ancient, prehistoric 7 species we will never see again.Growing older,blacker,deeper,in layers of perpetual night. Above ground, the steel rolls out fiery, bright. But to make steel, the coal-tars, darker and heavier, must be taken from the original coal. Earth’s excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of shining steel. Passed over.3 Dark waste essence of coal was extracted in the process of making shiny steel. This remainder in turn could yield yet more unexpected transforma- tions, such as the first synthetic dye, Perkin’s mauve. Rathenau’s description of activity in the depths of the earth is grandiose, but echoes of its terms can be read in many chemical histories, including those that served as sources for Pynchon.4 For the ghostly Rathenau coal-tar’s significance is mystical: A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung. This is the sign of revealing. Of unfolding. This is one meaning of mauve, the first new color on Earth, leaping to Earth’s light from its grave miles and aeons below.5 Rathenau speaks from the realm of the dead, but he also speaks of death. These thousand different molecules will give from themselves in time a whole range of substitutions. What is revealed by these is the drive of the chemical industry towards ‘the impersonation of life’,‘from death to death transfigured’. Refuse turns into worth in an act worthy of alchemy, but rather than cracking the code of life itself, all that has been achieved, Rathenau cautions, is the poly- merization of a few dead molecules. Rathenau, the son of the industrialist who founded aeg,warns that the ig Farben cartel grows as if it were an organic entity, but it is, in actuality, ‘deep and dead’.6 Death imitates life and reinforces its dominion. It sprouts smokestacks that can survive the latest explosions. It is, or more specifically ig Farben is, a structure that favours death: Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the buried coal grows denser, and overlaid with more strata epoch on top of epoch, city on top of ruined city. This is the sign of Death the impersonator.7 Coal, steel, coal-tar, artifice, synthesis, substitution, power, war, death these elements bond to form chains of connection in the dark science of Pynchon’s chemical cartel. Science is the referent, but magic is the black power invoked. Through coal’s carbon chemistry, and its waste product of coal-tar, a realm of synthetic colours and substances is unlocked from a dense and primitive blackness. The first magic act is coal-tar becoming colour, the first of thousands of substitutions. This magic is a black force. Gravity’s Rainbow lets loose its narrative strands amongst a world of acronyms and neologisms, fictional and actual. spqr, arf, mmpi, soe, spog, 8 cios, bafo, nta, shaef, pwd, cns, pisces, viam, tsagi, niso, bafo, okw, achtung,Kryptosam,Hexeszüchtigung,ctenophile,Oneirine.These clatter like the evil spells from a necromancer’s manual. These clotted words spell out the coordinates of military, economic and technological power. The most important of these cryptic formulae, the acronyms that generate the rainbow and allow the tracing of its arc, are the colour factory ig Farben and the German Second World War rocket weaponry known as v-1, v-2 or a4. Pynchon brings these two industrial-technological forces into proximity with magic, mysticism and alchemy. His perception has something in com- mon with Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s assertion, written as bombs fell on Europe, that the process of enlightenment, its rationalization, its technological rationality, has a dialectical flip-side, that is to say, it is also its opposite. Enlightenment goes under the guise of science, but is, in fact, irrational, magical and trapped within myth.8 This magic that subtends but is repressed in industrial modernity converts, it seems, into a malignant force. The opposites, substitutions, reversals that Synthetic Worlds traces are manifold and the themes accumulate as wilfully and refractedly as in Gravity’s Rainbow.Here too chains ofconnection and flashes ofconjunction are found between the colour wheels of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dreamers such as Goethe and Philipp Otto Runge, the rainbow of synthetic colours and the arc of the v-2 rocket. from coal to colour German chemical dexterity has a long history, from the pans and glass tubes of hobby scientists working with alchemical zeal onwards. The chemical act of producing synthetic colour is the first step in a modern alchemical prac- tice of transmuting rubbish into gold. Just as the alchemist abets a marriage of opposites in the process of turning lead into gold, the chemist concentrates the oppositional and affinitive power of chemical reaction in the test-tube to produce the desired substance. Chemists at the turn of the nineteenth century sought substances such as synthetic colours in red and blue, cheaply coaxed metallic matter and gemstones, or industrially produced soda ash and guano. So began a war on physical reality, outbidding nature’s own produc- tions. Time’s dominion was to be cracked too through the accelerating power of chemical reaction modern magic consists in the short-circuiting of natural process, in speed-up, in the cheapening of materials and processes. In time, technology remakes time itself, removing it from natural rhythms to an abstract universal. On the insistence of the German Railway, on 1 April 1893, discrete spaces were netted into one through the introduction of Central European time. No longer were there local times oriented to the sun, with dis- crepancies across the Reich of up to 60 minutes. There was a single time and a realm of spaces that could be ever more swiftly traversed by new means of transport marshalling the powers of iron and steam. Space was rewoven, dis- 9 mantled and reconnected, and subjected to technologies. But where space or the right space, the right land was lacking, science could step in to com- pensate. Throughout the nineteenth century artificial treasures were chased, to supply burgeoning industries in a land, Germany, that was largely without colonies and lacking the necessary natural resources, except for coal.

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