underhistory (3)

Dietrologia:
DeLillo's archaeological counterhistory

‘[E]verything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does’ (DeLillo 1998: 465).

Like so much of Don DeLillo’s work, his novel Underworld (1998) questions the legitimacy of multinational capitalism, its manipulation of images through saturation media and advertising to construct identity through in-toxic-ating acts of consumption, and its managing of ideological ‘waste’ [1]. In his work DeLillo has often proposed a sort of strategic paranoia about America’s military-industrial complex and restricted access to detailed knowledge of its open secrets – realities known to exist and yet officially denied, covered up. Agent orange/orange juice, baseball/the Bomb - ‘everything is connected’, or seems to be, if only in the ‘underworld’; Pynchon’s phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow is reiterated repeatedly in this novel. 

DeLillo also returns on several occasions here to the notion of dietrologia, the study of what ‘lies behind’ (events, appearances), ‘the science of dark forces’ (ibid: 280) - a word familiar to organized crime investigators and conspiracy theorists in Italy. However DeLillo carefully decentres any singular unifying (conspiracy) theory linking people and events in this dynamic, complex and unpredictable relational matrix. Ultimately, he seems to suggest, some potentially connective thread or tissue is always already there and concealed, and our grasp on what transpires is inevitably partial, compromised. 

DeLillo is drawn back again and again to the blank(ed) spaces on the maps, often in the southwestern desert, that strategically constructed ‘empty space’ in geopolitical cartographies. There, and in the overexposed psychic landscape of the open secret, there’s always an absent presence ‘behind’ (dietro), ‘below’, ‘under’, shadowing the complexities of the day world, ‘the thick lived tenor of things’ (ibid: 827). For prepositional multiplicity, impenetrable causal uncertainty and an ambiguous drive-ridden acquiescence characterize the ontological terrain of the contaminated, anomie-laden Cold War subject living through chemistry: ‘drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed’ (ibid: 826), in barely contained terror amassing possessions ‘against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss’ (ibid: 191-2).

In Underworld as elsewhere in DeLillo, there is a recurrent undercurrent – an ‘atavistic dread’ – related to the apocalyptic ecological threat of capitalism, and the media’s normalizing and rendering invisible of this threat. In a novel structured in part through reiterations of disappearance, loss, and betrayal, DeLillo presents a counterhistory of Cold War America in the shadow of the threat of auto-annihilation: a subterranean ‘underhistory of the Cold War, a curious history of waste which forms an underground stream in this book, waste and weapons’ (DeLillo in DePietro 2005: 146). Remember that Oppenheimer called the bomb ‘merde’, the ob-scene thing beyond words …
 
DeLillo figures wasted lives by describing literal ‘wastelands’, including massive landfills - in particular Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York - that reflect the volume of waste generated in consumer culture, and capitalism’s postmodern solution to the problem of waste: not containment of the growth of waste (an index of business’s success), but a containment of its appearance. In the novel, Nick Shay works in waste management, pursuing the opportunist entrepreneurial restructuring and recycling of waste as commodity in the production of capital. Shay becomes a ‘cosmologist of waste’ (DeLillo 1998: 88), who encounters scenes that are ‘medieval-modern, a city of high-rise garbage, the hell reek of every perishable ever thrown together’ (ibid: 104). At one point, he muses: ‘Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish, and devastate’ (ibid: 120).  

As commodity culture’s allegorical other, waste’s threatening potential is to ‘unmask the symbolic pose of the commodity as a sham’ (Stallabrass 2009: 417) and reveal itself as broken ruin of utopian promise. In the management of waste, therefore, the ideal is to remove all visible traces, disappear it ‘underground’ - as Shay seeks to do with his own contaminated and leaking past. Yet as Viktor Maltsev, one of a number of ‘theorists of waste’ in the novel, suggests, waste is culture’s ‘devil twin’, and its stubborn persistence within its burial grounds stages ‘the secret history, the underhistory’ (ibid: 791) – a repressed history of ‘banned words, the secrets kept in white-washed vaults, the half-forgotten plots’ that Shay imagines ‘out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone’ (ibid: 802-3) [2]

One of DeLillo’s triggers for his title relates to proposals for plutonium and other nuclear waste to be buried in the desert in the South-West of the USA at Yucca Mountain and elsewhere. Within the novel, he uncovers the etymological link to Pluto, ‘god of the dead, ruler of the underworld’: the waste managers ‘took him out to the marshes and wasted him’ (ibid: 106). The novel also explores affiliations with a criminal ‘underworld’, as well as an underclass of homeless people in New York, capitalism’s ‘collateral casualties’ (Bauman 2004: 15), redundant and abjected human ‘waste’. Many of these outcast ‘wastelings of the lost world, the lost country that exists right here in America’ (ibid: 628) are based in the subway (‘underground’). In addition, there are recurrent intertextual echoes here of the ‘valley of ashes’ in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, of the secretive ‘underground’ network WASTE in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and of Dickens’ Thames-side dust-ash-and-waste entrepreneurs in Our Mutual Friend.

DeLillo’s bricolage novel references apocalyptic representations in art of the underworld, notably Breughel’s Triumph of Death: a ‘landscape of visionary havoc and ruin’, against a ‘background of ash skies and burning ships’ (ibid: 41). Furthermore, scattered throughout the novel are instances of waste being critically reappropriated and recycled as cultural intervention in radical ‘underground’ or ‘outsider’ art practices. These include: Klara Sax’s ‘Long Tall Sally’, a land art recuperation of the uncanny and sublime carcasses of decommissioned B52s abandoned in the Arizona desert (in part triggered by a visit to Sabato Rodia’s waste bricolage constructions, the Watts Towers in Los Angeles); subway graffiti artist Ismael Muñoz AKA ‘Moonman 157’ and his later commemorative interventions made collaboratively with ‘runaways and throwaways’ (ibid: 813) in an area of South Bronx wasteland known as ‘The Wall’; as well as a group of anarchist ‘guerrilla’ artists who try to steal J Edgar Hoover’s garbage and use it to make performance art. [3] Historically, Hoover himself had authorised ‘dumpster diving’ as a legitimate means for the FBI to gather evidence.
 
In addition, DeLillo invents a series of Lenny Bruce gigs, improvised jazz-like hipster riffs around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his uncanny channeling of the voices of the powerful and the irradiated ‘wastelings’, the metaphorical ‘downwinders’, with the reiterated catch-phrase: ‘We’re all gonna die!’ Bruce’s junked-up ‘undervoice’ is described as ‘the revolt of the psyche, the id-like wail from the audience’s own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs’ (ibid: 547).

DeLillo also invents a supposedly ‘lost’ Eisenstein silent film called Unterwelt, about institutional power’s failure to contain the ‘mutilate yearning, the inner divisions’ (ibid: 444) of the dispossessed ‘living in the shadows’ (ibid: 424) in the underbelly of the city. In the novel, which resembles this fictional Eisenstein film both thematically and in its montage structure, [4] Klara Sax views it between two other films: Robert Frank’s documentary about the Rolling Stones’ hedonism on tour in America in 1972, Cocksucker Blues; and an art installation video loop of multiple copies of the Zapruder film, a chance document-become-commodity with its flickering traces of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas. Associatively, all three films are concerned with waste and wasting: discarded lives produced by redundancy and repression; the decadence and dereliction of ’junk’/heroin, shot in a melancholic blue light that suggests the ‘nimbus of higher dying’ (ibid: 384); the recycled, infinitely looped trace of horrifying political violence as benumbing ‘snuff movie’ spectacle, alongside the obliterating psychic fission of trashed ambitions, traumatised ideals and atomizing conspiracy-fueled paranoia – the ‘streamy debris of the deep mind’ (ibid: 496).
 
So in Underworld DeLillo constructs a braided archaeological counter-narrative about proliferation and its waste, in both the arms race and consumerism. Through a reverse chronology structure (Nick Shay’s fallen angel trajectory is ‘backwards into the future’), DeLillo traces ‘underground’ logics of another form of history, ‘the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted’ (ibid: 60), provoked by a desire ‘to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life’ (ibid: 77). In so doing, he provides a cognitive mapping or fractal patterning of History’s ‘waste’ – what it ejects, forgets, overlooks, represses: things, people, values and so on – and its status as uncanny memento mori, mirroring our own ephemerality and mortality. The novel proposes a scavenging resistance, an exercise in waste management, a recycling of history’s fall-out, a retrieval from what Marx, Benjamin and others have called the ‘trash heap’ of history. En route, DeLillo employs a range of compound words, some of them bricolaged neologisms: ‘underbreath’, ‘undervoice’, ‘underdream’, ‘undersheet’, ‘underreal’, ‘underhistory’. A term that recurs throughout is ‘understand’ – the uncovering of the cover-up, or at least the impulse to do so, the infinitely compromised desire to stand-under the unsettling glare of knowledge. This desire loops us back to dietrologia, the science of what lies behind, and to Plato’s hyponoia and Hillman’s ’undersense’ in the underworld.

*****

Sea dreams: ‘blink’

In another dream, the Sea has vanished suddenly - and completely - and its exposed bed is dotted with people out walking, inspecting what it has left behind. Out there, where the Sea once was, all sorts of people, bent over inspecting a patch of ground, or a piece of driftwood the size of a small tree. Or a bloated purple jelly-fish, scratching at the sand around it with their feet. I can see laughing kids with buckets and spades making castles and cities, and dads sculpting mermaids with shells in their hair, and writing messages in huge letters for the sky. Huddled figures have gathered beside a pool and they stare into it in silence, as though it is infinitely deep, or the plug-hole through which the Sea has departed. As far as the eye can see, thousands of shiny fish pulse on the sand, clasping and unclasping like fingerless silver hands.

Perched on some rocks is a wreck of a wooden schooner encrusted with barnacles, its cabin draped in fine weed, like Christmas decorations; its tattered sails slap and dance in the breeze. Closer to the shore a blue yacht lies on its side, its mast pointing to the sky at an angle of, say, ten o’clock; it looks like a weird oversized sun-dial. Elsewhere there is a beached whale and its cub, breathing heavily, with a man posing for a photo next to the mother’s soft eye: as the shutter closes, the whale blinks. The air is full of birds …

I stand transfixed on the shore watching all of this activity, too frightened to walk out on to the sea bed and join the other people. For I’m terrified of the possibility of the Sea’s sudden return … Perhaps that low smudgy strip of grey cloud on the horizon is in fact a thundering wall of water hundreds of feet high …

Nobody seems to notice except me, they just carry on regardless. I stand there, trembling like a hobbled racehorse.

*****

Fresh Kills
For more than 30 years, Mierle Laderman Ukeles has been artist-in-residence with the New York City Department of Sanitation, initially unsalaried, self-appointed. Many of her large-scale public projects focus on issues and processes related to waste management, and combine the social-civic-participatory, the environmental, and the political. In Touch Sanitation (1978-84), she documented her meetings and conversations with NY’s sanitation workers, over an 11-month period thanking and shaking hands with over 8,500 ‘garbage’ workers in all 59 municipal districts in the five boroughs of New York. In response to their social marginalization, she was endeavouring to re-value the role of sanitation workers in the accumulation of small respect-ful human encounters: empathetic recognition of ‘the domestic on an urban scale’, and the value of human relations.

Flow City (1983-90) revealed to visitors the scale and material reality of solid waste management in NY City. It included access to the vast marine transfer station in Manhattan on the Hudson River, where the city’s waste is loaded from trucks onto barges for transportation by river to the landfill site. The project involved collaboration with artists, architects, scientists, ecologists; it entailed the construction of viewing platforms, a glass bridge/walkway, and video monitors with live-feed relay of the flows of river, landfill, recycling. The work made these ‘invisible’ processes available and immediate, and invited reflection on our imbrication within these relational circuits and their fragile ecologies.

Since 1989, Ukeles has also been working directly around the Fresh Kills landfill site on the Western shore of the borough of Staten Island. This is the biggest landfill site in the world where, for about 50 years until its closure in March 2001, 25,000 tons of waste from NY City were delivered daily. It was eventually closed because of its size – it had become one of the highest objects on the Eastern seaboard of the US, and threatened to impede air traffic. 2,200 acres, about 3.4 square miles, the equivalent of 2.5 Central Parks.

(Currently, and in the coming years, this vast brown fill site is being transformed into ‘Fresh Kills Park’, a huge public park space: the garbage has been capped, covered in a layer of earth and an impermeable plastic membrane, then topped with clean soil - up to 4 feet deep, native plants, its methane tapped and processed).

On 13th September 2001, one part of Fresh Kills, the largest (Western section 1/9), was re-opened as an emergency site for the FBI and NYPD to sift, sort and dump World Trade Centre debris from the terrorist attacks on September 11th. Dormant marine transfer stations and barges were re-mobilised within days. In an article for Cabinet magazine in 2002, Ukeles asked: ‘What is the meaning of this place now?’ She refers to Fresh Kills as a collectively constructed urban earthwork, ‘a 50-year old social sculpture we have all produced, of four mountains made from 150 million cubic yards of the un-differentiated, un-named, no-value garbage, whose every iota of material identity has been banished’ (Ukeles 2002). However with this dispersal of the ‘flying dust’ from ‘thousands of unfound, incinerated human beings’, and the mingling of human remains and garbage, she suggests: a ‘memorial, or graveyard – or whatever it is – needs to be created out of an utterly opposite kind of social contract. The shattered taboo that enabled this unholy shotgun marriage needs to be restored; a chasm-change in attitude is required, one of very deliberate differentiating, of naming, of attentive reverence for each mote of dust from each lost individual. Thus remembered. This must become a place that returns identity to, not strips identity from, each perished person …” (ibid).

*****

Elsew/here: ‘looking for our lives’
Elsew/here, another kind of sea far inland. The travellers arrive in ones and twos, sometimes a small van arrives in a dust cloud and disgorges an unsteady gaggle of people, shrouded against the sun. They carry light bags for the journey, just the barest of essentials. They have long since said goodbye to their families. Those that stay behind never say their son or daughter or husband ‘left’ or ‘migrated’; they refer to them as ‘the burnt ones’, those that have burnt the law, the past.

At the meeting point in the dunes a man in sunglasses shows them the pre-fabricated kit from which they will build the boat. As he explains the process, he traces lines and swirls in the sand with a stick. Lengths of untreated pine are laid out on the ground; to one side on a white cloth, a variety of bolts, screws, two screwdrivers, a hammer, some bags of plastic ballast. The wood looks like the ruptured rib cage of some extinct beast, bleached by the sun, then buried by the tidal movements of the sand, and only now disinterred.

Many of them have never seen the sea; with diverse images of ‘boat’ in their minds, they start to assemble this mysterious thing in which they will entrust their hopes and their lives. Gradually separate pieces are linked together and the boat’s outline emerges. Their tap-tap-tapping is sometimes interrupted by the low throb of a military plane scouring the dunes; they hide under camouflaged tarpaulins, or lie flat on the sand to try to make themselves invisible, just more fragments of unremarkable desert flotsam.

When the boat is finished, they stand around it with a mixture of astonishment and trepidation. In silence they wait huddled against the cold night until dawn, unable to sleep, then at first light they drag the boat through the sand towards the sea. We go looking for our lives, they say.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Slow burial
‘It is interesting, the debris in the air. A surprising portion of it is spider legs, and bits thereof. Spider legs are flimsy … because they are hollow. They lack muscles; compressed air moves them. Consequently, the snap off easily, and go blowing about. Another unexpected source of aerial detritus is tires. Eroding tires shed latex shreds at a brisk clip, say the folk who train their microscopes on air. Farm dust joins sulfuric acid droplets (from burned fossil fuels) and sand from the Sahara Desert to produce the summer haze that blurs and dims valleys and coasts.

We inhale “many hundreds of particles in each breath we take” … Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as “salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma blown from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires”. These sorts of things can add up.

At dusk, the particles meet rising water vapor, stick together, and fall; that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil’ (Dillard 1999: 123-4).

*****

To be continued ...
__________________________________________

Notes

[1] At one point, DeLillo co-opts a Dupont Corporation slogan as an ironic chapter title: ‘Better Things for Better Living, Through Chemistry’ (Delillo 1998: 499).

[2] It is pertinent to compare this ‘return of the repressed’ with psychoanalysis’s core interest in the ‘secret histories’ contained within the overlooked waste products of psychic life. Like Benjaminian collectors, psychoanalysts endeavour to ‘divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations’ (Freud 1985: 265). In Agnès Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse (2000), one of the elderly grape gleaners Varda interviews is the celebrated psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, although she does not realize who he is until she returns to make a second film Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse – deux ans après (2002). In this later film, Laplanche suggests that both gleaning and psychoanalysis pay particular attention to the overlooked, ‘what falls from speech (discours). What is dropped, what is picked up. Words which are beside usual speech are of special value to psychoanalysts, because things which are picked up or gleaned are more valuable to us than what is harvested’ (Varda 2009).

[3] This narrative thread seems to be based in part on the self-styled ‘non-governmental garbologist’ AJ Weberman, and his notorious pursuit in the 1960s of Bob Dylan (and others) through raiding his trash, an act of muckraking purportedly intended to recuperate traces that would offer a register of Dylan’s ‘real’ identity’. For a more detailed account, see e.g. Scanlan 2005 147-53.

[4] Cf. Walter Benjamin, history’s ‘ragpicker’ scouring the residual dream-worlds of obsolete commodity fetishism, on The Arcades Project method as ‘literary montage’: ‘I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But show the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ (Benjamin 1999: 460).

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt (2004). Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Cambridge: Polity

Benjamin, Walter (1979). ‘Naples’, in One Way Street, and other writings, London: Verso, pp. 167-76

Benjamin, Walter (1992) [1940]. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations (trans.
Harry Zohn), London & New York: Fontana/HarperCollins, pp. 245-55

Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project (trans. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin), Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Biemann, Ursula & Homes, Brian (eds) (2006). The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North Africa, Actar

Calvino, Italo (1974). ‘Continuous Cities 1: Leonia’, Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver), Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, pp. 114-6

Davis, Mike (2006). Planet of Slums, London: Verso

DeLillo, Don (1998). Underworld, London: Picador

DePietro, Thomas (ed.) (2005). Conversations with Don DeLillo, Jackson: U.P. Mississippi

Dillard, Annie (1999). For the Time Being, New York: Vintage

Fonseca, Isabel (1995). Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey, London: Vintage

Hawkins, Gay & Muecke, Stephen (eds) (2003). Culture and Waste: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield

Hillman, James (1979). The Dream and the Underworld, New York: Harper & Row

Lacy, Suzanne (ed.) (1995). Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, Seattle, Washington: Bay Press

Lippard, Lucy R. (1995). ‘The Garbage Girls’, Z Magazine, New York, December 1991: reprinted in The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art, New York: New Press, 1995

Lundstrom, Jan-Erik, Dimitrakaki, Angela (eds) (2008). Ursula Biemann - Mission Reports: Artistic Practice in the Field, Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery

Marx, Ursula, Gudrun Schwarz et al (eds) (2007). Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, London: Verso

Neville, Brian & Villeneuve, Johanne (eds) (2002). Waste-Site Stories: The Recycling of Memory, Albany NY: State University of New York Press

Rathje, William & Murphy, Cullen (1992). Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, New York: Harper Collins

Rogers, Heather (2005). Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, New York: New Press

Saviano, Roberto (2007). Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia (trans. Virginia Jewiss), Basingstoke: Macmillan

Scanlan, John (2005). On Garbage, London: Reaktion

Senior, Kathryn & Mazza, Alfredo (2004). ‘Italian “Triangle of Death” linked to waste crisis’, The Lancet (Oncology), vol. 5, September, pp. 525-7

Sinclair, Iain (2003). London Orbital, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Sinclair, Iain (2009). Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: A Confidential Report, London: Hamish Hamilton

Steedman, Carolyn (2001). Dust, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Strasser, Susan (1999). Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Henry Holt & Co

Ukeles, Mierle Laderman (2002). ‘It’s about time for Fresh Kills’, Cabinet no. 6 (‘Horticulture’), Spring, pp. 17-20. Published online at Cabinet website: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/6/freshkills.php

Websites
For Legambiente, Italy, see here
For Legambiente’s illegal waste archive reports, see here


A version of some of these 'Underhistory' texts, was first presented as ‘Underworld, underground, underhistory: ecomafia landscapes’, part of the 4-day AHRC-funded ‘Landscape and Environment’ conference at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in June 2009. (Coordinators: Mike Pearson and Heike Roms). For further details, see here

underhistory (2)

Undersense 

James Hillman: '[This concern with depth leads us in practice to] pay special attention to whatever is below. This has been so since the beginning of psychoanalysis, and its notions of suppression, subconscious, and shadow. These are terms for what we see in images: burials, the dead, ancestors; workers in refuse, sewers, plumbers; criminals and outcasts; the lower body, its garment and its functions; lower forms of life that we ‘look down upon’, from apes to bugs; the underside of the world, the floor of the sea, the downstairs and cellars, and in fact anything whatsoever that can be turned over in the sense of hyponoia to reveal a deeper significance. The emotions that go with these images of bottoming are reluctance, loathing, sadness, mourning, inhibition, enclosure, lethargy, or that sense of depth that presses on us as depression, oppression, suppression. Our downward imagination has entered the earth' (Hillman 1979:139-40).

Hyponoia - Plato’s notion in the Republic: ‘“undersense”, “deeper meaning”, which is an ancient way of putting Freud’s idea of “latent”. The search for undersense is what we express in common speech as the desire to understand … search for deeper grounding … All these movements of hyponoia, leading towards an understanding that gains ground and makes matter, are work’ (ibid: 137).

*****

Insides white
In her book about the Roma and Sinti peoples of Eastern Europe, Bury Me Standing (1995), Isabel Fonseca describes relations between a marginalized, devalued people ‘outside History’, and their geographies, the landscapes made available to this ‘underground nation’ (277). Part of Fonseca’s project was to register the lives lived in these ‘Black Towns’ across Eastern Europe: communities in locations typically on the town dump, often without a name, or ‘with names like ‘Take-It-Or-Leave-It’, ‘Like-It-Or-Not’, ‘No-Man’s-Land’, ‘Cambodia’, and ‘Bangladesh’’ (305).

She cites an example from before the 2nd World War, in 1936 Berlin. Partly in order to clear the streets of Berlin before the Olympic Games, the chief of police authorized the arrest of all Gypsies in Prussia; 600 Roma and Sinti ‘were corralled under police guard into a sewage dump next to a cemetery at Marzahn, a suburb of Berlin’. As Fonseca points out, the location is doubly punitive for people with ‘elaborate codes of hygiene’ and superstitions about graveyards (257). With only 3 water pumps and 2 toilets for what the Nazis called the ‘Gypsy uncreatures’ or ‘the plague’, ‘lives unworthy of life’ (261), there were inevitable outbreaks of disease with many mortalities. Subsequently these Gypsies and others were sent into forced labour and death in Dachau, then later Auschwitz, in the systematic annihilation Gypsies refer to as porraimos, ‘the devouring’ (253).

Compare this with the Gypsy slums of Slovakia in 1990s. One settlement at Rudnany was dispersed over an abandoned arsenic mine, in ‘post-industrial squalor’; people were living in derelict mining offices, these decaying and often roofless buildings surrounded by corroded containers leaking white powder. An environment surrounded by heavy metal waste: arsenic, antimony, bismuth, mercury. In 1993, Slovakian premier Vladmir Meciar made a speech in which he stated that it was ‘necessary to curtail the extended reproduction of the socially unadaptable and mentally backward population’ (293).

In her book, Fonseca includes an image of a pair of Rom children playing in the river at Copsa Mica, Romania, in the shadow of a vast smoke-belching industrial plant. She explains that in this heavily polluted Transylvanian town ‘all the sheep are black – along with everything and everyone else. The residents drink great quantities of milk in the belief, according to one long-term resident, that it will at least “keep their insides white”’ (93).

She also reiterates Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald’s description of how, in 1940s Britain, “Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish” (248).

In 2008, Silvio Berlusconi’s party ‘Il Popolo della Liberta’ (‘People of Freedom’) proposed to introduce legislation that required all Roma people to be fingerprinted, including children. Berlusconi’s public rationale proposed that this was imperative given the ‘fact’ that Gypsy people ‘have the criminal gene’.

*****

The Angel of History
‘A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistible propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’ (Benjamin [1940] 1992: 249).

*****

Elsew/here: ghost net
Elsew/here a ghost net drifts across the ocean’s surface, a floating island unconsciously gathering its catch. From a distance it looks like a small reef breaching the surface. Close up, it’s another story. Caught in the net’s mesh are seaweed, drift wood, plastic bottles, lengths of blue polymer twine, twisted drinks cans, a paint can half full of toxic sludge, empty crisp packets, an aerosol can, dead fish, various bird carcasses, a dolphin cub, and a fluttering tern, its feet caught in the fine nylon filaments: its wings are the only visible sign of life. This is how it happens. A length of pelagic drift netting, one of the instruments of choice for those barely-legal fishing fleets engaged in a kind of maritime strip-mining, breaks loose and floats free. As it drifts it entraps whatever it encounters, gradually ballooning until its mass of waste and putrefying flesh finally sinks beneath its own weight. Over time, this material then breaks down or falls free to allow the net to rise to the surface once more - and the cycle begins again.

On these journeys, there is time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, the phases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

26 May 2009
‘ A Nepalese Sherpa who holds the world record for climbing Mount Everest said yesterday that rising temperatures were melting snow and turning the slopes barren, making it even harder to scale the world’s tallest peak. Apa Sherpa, back from his 19th successful ascent of Everest last week, said a snow trail to the peak was now just a stretch of bare rocks, as climate change pushed up snowlines and shrank glaciers …

Environmental activists say rising temperatures are rapidly shrinking the Himalayan glaciers from which several Asian rivers originate, threatening the lives of millions of people who depend on them for water.

As well as the impact of climate change, Everest’s environment is also threatened by rubbish left behind by climbers, campaigners say. Apa Sherpa, who first climbed Everest in 1990, said his team had brought down more than 5 tonnes of litter from the mountain, including old tents, ropes, plastic and gas canisters, human waste, and parts of a helicopter that crashed in 1973’ (‘Everest getting harder to climb, says Sherpa’, The Guardian, 26 May 2009).

12 December 2008
‘The government of the Andaman and Nicobar islands is investigating the deaths, over the past three days, of eight members of the Onge tribe who succumbed after drinking a chemical from a brown glass bottle which washed ashore. The Onge already has fewer than 100 members, and Stephen Corry, Survival International's director, said: "This is a calamity for [them]. If any more die, it could put the survival of the entire tribe in serious danger”. The Onge was devastated after the British occupied the islands in the 19th century. Today activists accuse the government of chronic neglect’ (Sanjib Kumar Roy, ‘Bottled chemical on beach kills tribe members’, The Guardian, 12 December 2008).

*****

underhistory (1)

In 2004, the Croatian performance artist DB Indos took me to a vast rubbish tip near Zagreb; he called it ‘the mountain’, ‘an apocalyptic place, as if something terrible has happened’. A chaotic archive of the broken, the unwanted, the redundant, the forgotten, the repressed: a monumental landscape of fragments of the city’s discarded pasts. He told me about methane build-ups within this mass of refuse, how some years ago a huge explosion had scattered rubbish far and wide across the southern suburbs of the city. Then he told me of his desire to make a performance here, and pointed to a spot high on a crest …

Introduction
The following texts emerge from a long-term interest in Italian politics and organized crime: its performative modus operandi, and its imbrication in the circuits and flows of globalization. In addition, and more recently, I have been looking at approaches to waste in environmentalism, cultural studies, archaeology, psychology and psychoanalysis, and certain contemporary art practices. As John Scanlan and others have shown, terms like 'garbage', 'trash', 'refuse', 'waste' and 'rubbish' are complex metaphorical terms employed to organize and legitimize the treatment of parts of life normally desired to be overlooked. So perhaps attention to waste can provide uncanny shadow histories and geographies of ‘things, people or activities that are separated, removed, and devalued’ (Scanlan 2005: 10).

What follows in this sequence of three consecutive blog posts are sections from a longer set of texts – very much unfinished, a work-in-progress. In large part, I am inspired here by the work of particular activists, artists and investigators, and I dedicate this research to them: Dan Gretton and his colleagues at Platform; the artist/activist Ursula Biemann; the investigative journalist Roberto Saviano; the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles; and the Sicilian magistrates Giovanni Falcone & Paolo Borsellino, murdered by the Mafia in the summer of 1992.

I’d like to begin with three prefatory quotations:

First, Iain Sinclair, from his recent book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: ‘We are the rubbish, outmoded and unrequired. Dumped on wet pavings and left there for weeks, in the expectation of becoming art objects, a baleful warning. Nobody pays me to do this. It is my own choice, to identify with detritus in a place that has declared war on unconvinced recyclers while erecting expensive memorials to the absence of memory’ (Sinclair 2009: 7).

Second, Isabel Fonseca in Bury Me Standing, her extraordinary 1996 book about Roma & Sinti people in Eastern Europe. In 1940s Britain, she writes, “Gypsies suffering from pulmonary disease attempted a symbolic transference by breathing three times into the mouth of a live fish, and then throwing it back into the stream from which it had been fetched. The hope was that, confused, death would go for the fish” (Fonseca 1995: 248).

And finally, Walter Benjamin, an incomplete fragment from his ‘First Sketches’ for the Arcades Project: ‘And nothing at all of what we are saying here actually existed. None of it has ever lived – as surely as a skeleton has never lived, but only a man. As surely, however … [broken off]’ (Benjamin 1999: 833).

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Leonia
In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Leonia is a city that ‘refashions itself every day’ – everything is discarded and replaced on a daily basis. It’s uncertain whether Leonia’s ‘true passion’ is ‘the enjoyment of new and different things’, or rather ‘the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity’. Every day the street cleaners, who are ‘welcomed like angels’, remove ‘the residue of yesterday’s existence’, but nobody in the city knows where they take it. Somewhere ‘outside’. However ‘the bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified’, until eventually a ‘fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains’.

‘This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday, and of all its days and years and decades …’

Meanwhile, the other cities are also ‘pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves’. ‘Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia’s boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle’.

As the mountains of refuse grow in height, the danger of a cataclysmic landslide increases. ’A tin can, an old tire, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean …’ The other cities are ready to move into the new territory, flatten it with their bulldozers, and erase all trace of Leonia, freeing a space for their own street cleaners to push ‘still farther out’ (Calvino 1974: 114-6).

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Campania Felix

The last twenty-five years or so has seen the rise of an organized crime phenomenon known as the ‘Ecomafia’, a term that refers to illegal development and construction, and to waste disposal. Since the late 1970s, the waste disposal industry has become a lucrative context in an extreme form of gangster capitalism, in which toxic materials are dispersed illegally and with devastating effects. Bernardo Provenzano, former boss of bosses in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, wrote in one his smuggled notes, with a Midas-related boast: “It’s easy - it goes out shit, and comes back gold”. In Italy, investigators suggest that millions of tons of industrial waste ‘disappear’ every year, of which about 300,000 tons are highly toxic. An estimated 500 tons a day go missing from the province of Milan alone, almost 40% of its daily total.

Campania: Campania Felix, as it used to be known – ‘a land as clear as daylight’ is the advertising strap-line of the Regione Campania tourist board. Their brochures quote Pliny the Elder, writing almost exactly 2,000 years ago: ‘This land is so happy, so delightful, so fortunate that it is obvious it is nature’s favorite. This revitalizing air, the perpetually clear skies, the so fertile land …’ However, in the early part of the 21st century, in a semi-circle to the north of Naples, in the so-called ‘Land of Fires’, Campania contains the greatest concentration of illegal toxic and non-toxic dumping and unregulated incineration in Western Europe, which has poisoned the land and many of its inhabitants; there is an estimated illegal dumping of about a million tons a year in this region alone.

The scale is bewildering, to say the least. According to Lagambiente the Italian environmental NGO (the original inventors of the word ‘Ecomafia’ in the 1990s), “if all the trash that has escaped legal inspection in Italy [since the early 1990s] were collected in one place, it would form a mountain […] rising 47,900 feet from a base of 3 hectares. Mont Blanc rises 15,780 feet, Everest 29,015. So this heap of unregulated and unreported waste would be the highest mountain on earth” (Saviano 2007: 283).

In Italy almost all of this waste travels North to South, contracted out at 40-80% below its legal disposal costs: mostly scattered across Campania, Calabria, Puglia, Sicily. As Roberto Saviano points out, these regions with the greatest number of recorded environmental crimes, also “head the list for the largest criminal associations, the highest unemployment rates, the greatest number of volunteers for the military and the police forces” (ibid: 283).

All sorts of materials have been found: derivatives from incinerators & thermoelectric plants; asbestos; polluted soil from reclamation projects; petrochemical companies’ waste; paint residues; chemical thinners; carcinogenic hydrocarbons; radioactive and other waste from hospitals; old road surfaces with a very elevated tar density; sludge from tanning factories and purification plants; heavy metals – lead, mercury, cadmium – as well as arsenic, chrome, nickel, cobalt; even exhumed body parts from cemeteries when they clear space by moving on the so-called ‘superdead’ (over 40 years old). And in the plumes of illegal incinerations, the release of huge quantities of dioxins that find their way into the water table, and agricultural produce, including most famously into buffalo mozzarella cheese.

Saviano describes a farmer ploughing a newly purchased field, his plough blade becoming jammed and uncovering bales of pulped lire bank notes (285). Also, during the public prosecutor’s 2006 covert operation Madre Terra ('Mother Earth'), the discovery of huge dumps of printer toner (286) leaching carcinogenic hexavalent chromium into the soil.

This dispersal has reconfigured the landscape to create ‘previously non-existent hills and suddenly restored lost mass to mountains devoured by quarries’ (Saviano 285). There is a terrible logic to the cycle. Buy land – create new quarries/tips – get the contract for its reclamation.clean-up – re-disperse these materials, and re-use the old quarry/tip sites again – use the capital to drive out small holders, buy more land, create more space … Anywhere is a potential empty space: underground petrol tanks of disused gas stations, abandoned houses. In the documentary Biutiful Cauntri: construction waste is dumped in a pyramidal pile in the middle of the road on an underpass on the motorway. Another common dispersal technique is through mixing waste with cement or asphalt for use in construction (a technique employed in England by London Waste for the illegal dispersal of fly ash), or cutting waste into fertilizer and compost, distributed nationally and spread widely on agricultural land.

Cumulatively, this activity has generated billions of euros for the Camorra clans. It’s known that organized crime makes a lot more money per annum than Fiat, for example. It has produced spiralling health problems in farm stock & humans in Campania. Including (according to research by the WHO and others) an alarming increase in particular cancers - liver, leukaemia, lymphoma etc. - in Caserta, Acerro and other areas around Naples (see Senior & Mazza 2004).

Evidently this is just one part of widespread illegal dumping elsewhere; one thinks of Trafigura’s astounding criminal recklessness in its dispersal of a highly toxic sludge in Abidjan on the Ivory Coast, or of Shell’s implicatedness in the environmental devastation of the Niger delta. For organized crime in Italy it operates via an international network related to drug trade routes and connections, and easy deals with the 3rd world. Also to Eastern Europe (particularly Romania, where there is documentary evidence of radioactive waste having been dumped in the Black Sea); to Albania, China, Costa Rica – and in particular to Africa (Mozambique, Nigeria, Somalia etc.), on land and in the sea. There has been tipping directly off ships – barrels dumped over the side into the sea, as well as the sinking of ships with holds full of waste, then claim the insurance. It’s now known, for example, that ships containing barrels of radioactive waste have been sunk off Calabria in the Mediterranean, as well as much more widely off the east coast of Africa.

Then in December 2004, the tsunami threw up hundreds of decaying barrels of illegally dumped radioactive and heavy metal waste on to the beaches of Somalia. UN reports and other sources confirm the link with Italian organized crime. Recent statements by some of the Somalian ‘pirates’ taking ships hostage have justified their ransom demands in part as compensation to be used in cleaning up the coastline ‘laid waste’ by Ecomafias in this way over the past 20 years, and in helping to protect their fishing territories. There remains very limited discussion of this in the Western media, with the notable exception of Johann Hari in The Independent, and more recently George Monbiot in The Guardian.

Strange reversals: ‘Waste disposal’ as environmental terrorism - the performance of ‘piracy’ as radical environmentalist intervention.

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shuttle 19: naming

‘The desert could not be claimed or owned – it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before’ 

(Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, London: Picador, 1992) 
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North American deserts  (north to south)

Carcross, Fraser, Thompson Country, Nk’mip; Channeled Scablands, Snake River, Craters of the Moon, Red, Owyhee, Yp, Alvord, Oregon High; Great Basin (Black Rock, Forty Mile, Smoke Creek, Great Salt, San Raphael, Sevier, Escalante, Bisti Badlands, Painted); Mojave (Death Valley, Amargosa); Sonoran (Colorado, Yuha, Yuma, Lechuguilla, Tule, Gran Desertio de Altar, Baja, Vizcaino); Chihuahuan (Trans-Pecos, White Sands)

Some American winds 

Auger (dust devil, sometimes stationary, in California), Black Roller (dust storm), Cat’s Paw (strong enough to ripple a pool), Chinook (a foehn wind also known as 'the snow eater'), Chocolatero, Chubasco, Collada, Cordonazo (‘the lash of St Francis’), Coromell, Diablo, Duster, Kabeyun (‘the father of winds’, Algonquin), Kibibonokka (‘the fierce one’, Algonquin), Maria (fictional), Mato Wamniyomni (‘whirlwind’, Dakota), Mono, Norte, Norther, Papagayos, Pruga, Santa Ana, Shawondasee (‘the lazy wind’, Algonquin), Sonora, Stikine, Sundowner, Surazo, Taku, Tapayagua, Ta Te Kata (chinook, Sioux), Tehuantepecer, Tezcatlipoca (‘the divine wind’, Aztec), Tornado, Virazon, Wabun (‘the morning bringer', Algonquin), Williwaw, Witch, Zonda 

Aeolian processes
- abrasion: the process of physical weathering
- deflation: a process in which the finer grained material is removed, and the level of the land surface is lowered
- desert pavement: forms when wind removes all of the fine-grained sand from a system, leaving only the coarser gravel behind
- desert varnish: the patina of iron and manganese oxides left on rocks after they have undergone long periods of chemical weathering in the desert
- ventifacts - stones that have been sculpted by the wind 

Sonoran Desert plants & animals

Flora: cave primrose, desert Christmas cactus, desert lupine, desert willow, devil’s claw, fairy duster, ghost flower, hedgehog cactus, jimson weed, night blooming cereus, prickly pear cactus, saguaro cactus, showy four o’ clock (Mirabilis multiflora), tumble weed, western wildflower

Fauna: Allen’s big-eared bat, Arizona pocket mouse, Bezy’s night lizard, black-tailed jackrabbit, cactus mouse, California leaf-nosed bat, Chihuahuan striped whiptail lizard, Chuckwalla lizard, common desert centipede, desert bighorn sheep, desert box turtle, desert pupfish, desert recluse spider, desert spiny lizard, desert tortoise, desert woodrat, flat-tail horned lizard, fringe-toed lizard, Gila monster, golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), horned lizard, kangaroo rat, lesser long-nosed bat, little striped whiptail, long-tailed brush lizard, Mearns coyote, Merriam’s kangaroo rat, Mesquite mouse, Mexican grey wolf (el lobo), mountain king snake, mountain lion (cougar or puma), Mexican big-eared bat, Mexican black king snake, Mexican long-tongued bat, Mexican jumping beans (frijoles saltarines), Mexican tree frog, Pacific burrowing wasp, pallid bat, Pinacate beetle, rattlesnakes (genus Crotalus), ring-tailed cat, round-tailed ground squirrel, Sonoran desert toad, Sonoran shovelnose snake, Sonoran sidewinder, spotted bat, tiger centipede, Trans-Pecos striped whiptail lizard, western pipistrelle, white-throated woodrat, Yuma myotis vesper bat, zebra-tailed lizard

Birds: Abert’s towhee, Anna’s hummingbird, Bell’s vireo, Bendire’s thrasher, black-chinned hummingbird, black-chinned sparrow, black rail, black-tailed gnatcatcher, black-throated sparrow, brown-crested flycatcher, burrowing owl, canyon wren, Cassin’s vireo, Chihuahuan raven, collared peccary, Costa’s hummingbird, Crissal thrasher, curve-billd thrasher, desert cardinal, Ferruginous pygmy owl, Gambel’s quail, Gila woodpecker, gilded flicker, greater roadrunner, great horned owl (Bubo virinus), lark bunting, Lawrence’s goldfinch, Le Conte’s thrasher, Lucy’s warbler, mountain plover, mourning dove, phainopepla, Plumbeous vireo, sage sparrow, spotted owl, vermilion flycatcher, yellow-headed blackbird
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Rebecca Solnit: - 

'Naming is a form of claiming. Parents name their children, priests baptise their flock, husbands confer their names upon their wives, explorers name what they come across - whether it's Fremont naming the Humboldt River after another explorer or Martin Heinrich Klaproth naming the element uranium after the god of the underworld. To name a thing is to assert that a new identity has begun ...

In Genesis, Adam wants a helpmeet, but God instead brings forth all the animals for him to name, and only after the fowl of the air and the beasts of the field are named does his Creator get around to making woman out of his rib. According to Robert Graves and Raphael Patai's Hebrew Myths, naming is a euphemism or substitute activity. In the original version Adam couples with all the creatures in quest of a satisfactory mate, and when his experiments with the animals prove unsatisfying Eve arrives for his use ...

The scattering of names across the land is a cipher of its history. As Utah is sprinkled with the Old Testament names that gave resonance to the Mormon emigration there, so California is overlaid with the sanctifying names of the Spanish missionaries, from the sacrament itself in the state's capital to the list of saints trailing down the coast. Other Spanish names are descriptive: Mariposa for the butterflies that menaced Moraga's expedition, the Sierra Nevada for their snow ... The names of the peaks in a western mountain range often sound like the roster of a board of directors. Josiah Whitney, director of the state's Geological Survey, named the tallest peak yet found by his men in the Sierra after himself, then hastened to transfer his name to the taller mountain that turned up afterward, the current Mount Whitney ...

Had the old names been kept, the newcomers would have been emigrants, not discoverers. The great charm of the Belgian gold miner Jean-Nicholas Perlot is that he came to the Sierra foothills as to a foreign country rather than a manifest destiny, came to it as a place in the middle of a story rather than waiting for one to begin, without the sense of himself as a new Adam or the Indians as obstacles to a new Eden. As befits an immigrant, he learned the languages, English, Spanish, and Miwok. Changing the names is a symbolic substitute for wiping out the people, and in looking at the language of the newcomers, particularly in Yosemite, the constant conjunction of the words extermination and aboriginal captures this. Exterminate comes from terminate, to end, ab-original means from the beginning, and so the phrase means to terminate the originals, end the beginning, and begin again in the middle, making Adams out of Europeans in an Eden wrested from some people who didn't fit into the new story'.

Extract from Rebecca Solnit, 'The Name of the Snake', in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999
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Photos (from top): Jan Janssonius, anemographic chart, 1650; USA wind map; Steve Evans - desert cactus flower, Arizona; rattlesnake rattle; Matt - Saguaro cactus; desert cacti, Chelsea Flower Show, London, 2013

For driving music,  'I've been everywhere', performed by Willie Nelson & Hank Snow, listen here
 
For further details of Jean-Nicholas Perlot (and his canine companion Miraud), see his Gold Seeker: Adventures of a Belgian Argonaut during the Gold Rush Years, ed. Howard R Lamar, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985

For a wonderful book about winds - with chapters on wind and earth, time, life, body and mind, and a 'dictionary of winds' - see Lyall Watson, Heaven's Breath: A Natural History of the Wind, London: Hodder & Staughton, 1984 

memory machine

'And when today he lights up a cigarette, he uses a flintstone and a fuse, like everyone else. "In a boat", he says, "that is the best way. The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows" (Walter Benjamin, 'Spain, 1932').

Over the last week or so, I have been in Berlin, then working at the Tanzfabrik in Potsdam with two choreographers and a video artist. Berlin, with its historical layers, its open spaces, slow rhythms and laidback feel, its adventurous contemporary architecture alongside older buildings, is a perfect city for drifting, and S and I walked and walked. The city is ghosted by so much that lingers in collective European psyches: the rise of fascism and the Second World War, its post-war isolation, the wall and its collapse, the reunification of Germany. Then for me there are other layers from German film, from Christiane F and Wings of Desire to The Lives of Others. When I first went there, Berlin seemed melancholic, hovering on the lip of hallucinatory slips and tears in time; turn a corner past the grooviest little gallery you ever did see and there's one of the synagogues that was trashed during Kristallnacht, or the site of book-burnings by Goebbels's henchmen, or the pock-marks of bullets in walls, or Boltanski's golden bricks naming those who lived in the missing building erased by a bomb, or the line where the wall once stood, or the golden angel from where Bruno Ganz's angel surveyed mortal humanity in a divided city. And yet it is full of space and light, and change; there's a sense of optimism, of something beginning. Although officially bankrupt, the city feels dynamic and shifting, its sediments on the move, offering up a kind of archaeological mapping of 20th century histories and the morphing cartographies of the new Europe. It is a graffitied memory machine with an eye on the future, and it has creative juice.

Of the countless new buildings in the city, Daniel Liebeskind's zinc-covered Jewish Museum is perhaps the most astonishing, structured like a zigzagging bolt of lightning or an angular line of fire, with gashes in its blue-grey outer skin. Some commentators have read its form as a fractured and dispersed Star of David. (The photo on the left, from the museum, is a bolt of cloth produced by a German manufacturer and printed with the yellow stars the Nazis forced Jews to wear). During the development of this project, Liebeskind (ever the conceptualist) had drawn straight lines between addresses on a street map of Berlin around the museum's location, land abutting what was the line between East and West Berlin; in this way he traced invisible links between Kleist, Heinrich Heine, Walter Benjamin, Paul Celan and others to produce an 'irrational' matrix or constellation of Jewish culture here in the form of a distorted star. He also employed Benjamin's 'urban apocalypse' One Way Street as a structural model, its 60 sections incorporated into the zigzag. Liebeskind has called the project 'Between the Lines', and in part his conceptual and structural (one might say 'dramaturgical') starting point seems to have been two lines and their shifting relations: 'One of the lines is straight but fragmented, while the other is winding but never-ending ... They move apart, become detached and are perceived as being separated from one another. They thus reveal a void'. The spaces between cultures and their people, the trajectories of shifting historical 'destinies', producing an unstable relational axis of tensions and encounters. The straight line cuts through the zigzag, and creates a number of empty spaces: charged zones of remembering and forgetting, of contemplation and mourning, of potential and disappearance in the aftermath of what Blanchot called the 'utterburn of history'. In particular, the Holocaust Tower and the Garden of Exile, spaces of uncanny embodied affect. In their configurations, materials and relations to light, they do things to you. The 'fuses glow'.

In the vast, cold, concrete wedge of the Holocaust Tower, Liebeskind's 'voided void' with its unnerving door illuminating the passage of people entering or leaving, then shutting with a terrible click, daylight enters through a slit from the outside at the very top of a tightly angled corner (impossible to enter and inhabit this corner, like the bow of an abandoned ship). One looks up for the release of sky, of outside, and fragments of everyday sounds drift into the space - life goes on elsewhere, but one cannot see anything of it here. A kind of blindness. This looking up is a straining as if one is interred underground. A metal ladder runs up a side wall at the other end of space; but it is functionless, little more than an emblem of futile im/possibility, it's much too high to reach. It supports a few tiny, fragile spiders' webs. The walls are chilly. Everything in the field of vision is monochromatic, shades of grey. People's movements are slow, quiet, restrained, private; we look isolated and a little spectral in the shadows, tiny craning figures dwarfed by the monolithic brutal planes of this 80-foot high silo. Space as sculpture, memory as form, architecture as music - but here all decoration is cauterised, erased. A 'writing of the disaster' in bare concrete and light. A dead end.

Elsewhere in the building, there is a staircase that leads nowhere.

At the end of an underground passageway sloping upwards past minimal traces of shattered lives, a minimal selection of personal possessions and mementos of great intimacy: a child's tiny toy monkey, an exquisite typewriter, a sewing machine, letters, photographs - past listings of death camps and diasporic destinations from Sydney to San Francisco - at the end of this gradual ascent, a glass door leads to the Garden of Exile. 49 rectangular concrete pillars 10-12 feet high placed in a grid equidistant from each other with rectlinear passageways between them. The ground is angled, the pillars just off vertical, and one's balance is slightly thrown; it feels out of kilter, not quite 'right'. Oleaster is planted in the tops of each column, its foliage casting moving shadows over the grey surfaces; they soften the pillars somewhat and provide a kind of fragile shelter, a canopy of something displaced still living and moving. Again, a space of slowing down into associative memory and contemplation, its configuration producing palpable effects on perception, orientation, the angle of the spine, rippling movements of emotion around one's slightly altered axis. Body weather.

Liebeskind's garden directly prefigures some of the formal and affective qualities and implications of Peter Eisenman's Holocaust Memorial on Cora Berliner Strasse near Potsdamer Platz, which was opened six years later than the Museum in 2005. There too you move in canyon spaces between concrete slabs on uneven sloping paths the width of a human body, but an explosion in scale as occurred. No longer a garden, for only a few isolated trees are planted in a proliferative field of grey slabs - over 2,500 of them. When you enter the memorial, you disappear into the slabs, as if engulfed in ossified grass or a vast frozen grey wave, and the city recedes. Inside there are shafts of light, shadows, cobbles and gravel, walls of infinitely shifting textures and greys, fleeting glimpses of other people, kids running and playing. In some ways, it seems an anonymous empty environment from which the personal has been erased. Underground, shadowing the memorial on the surface, is an information centre about the Holocaust: the Room of Dimensions, the Room of Families, the Room of Names, the Room of Sites ...

The fifth and final void in Liebeskind's building houses the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman's installation Shalechet ('Fallen Leaves'). More than 10,000 flattened, round, mask-like faces cut from thick sheet steel, frozen into expressions rather like Munch's screamer, or emotionally blanked, lie scattered on the floor of another towering empty space, and we are invited to walk on them. Schematic eyes, nose and mouth, yet somehow individual and vulnerable (much more so than the sheep Kadishman has so often painted). All of them the same, anonymous, and yet slightly different - in expression, shades of autumnal rusting, sheen, scarring. ('The face is only the frozen moment of the rising oars or their dip into the sea' - Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions). One becomes hyper-aware of the implications of one's weight and movement as the negotiation of this uneven, peopled surface inevitably generates sudden metallic groans and clankings amplified by the space. Dissonant, angular trajectories. Some people move imperceptibly slowly, hesitantly, trying to be light, careful, silent - to be attentive to the implications of their actions in this field of ruins, and present to the recognition that their weight, their life rests on the silent screams of others; others scamper in, posing for photos with one of the heavy heads in their hands as if it is laughing with them. Snap. At the far end people disappear under an overhang and dissolve into shadow. It feels like a setting for a piece of expressionist dance, for the terrible beauty and psychic dis-ease of Pina Bausch's tanztheater. I imagine a woman with long hair emerging quietly from the shadows and running, running, then walking, standing still as a tree, waiting, listening to voices, listening eyes open, breathing.

I am reminded of that tone-poem in Beckett, maybe Waiting for Godot: 'All the dead voices. They are like sand, like leaves ...'
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Later, in an old communist apartment block in Potsdam, I watch the exquisite videos Julien made in Japan and South Korea, and a compellingly weird documentary about North Korea. I read Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows: some beautiful perceptions and propositions about the shadowy depths in lacquerware, Japanese architecture, beneath the skin in faces - although at times it reads uncomfortably like the grumblings of a reactionary old man in an imperialist culture that was both fading and on the eve of war. And I take notes from an interview with Tanaka Min, who my collaborators visited on his farm in Japan. Min describes his 'ambition to extend the horizon of a fleeting moment' and his 'sole aim - simply to be a sensitive surface':

In Western dance, they are fascinated by only movements. All the time nice movements. Is this dance? I think that dance is not visible ... I do not dance in the place, I dance the place. Place is where I am able to stare at my own corpse ... We have not yet really been born. We are forever imperfect ... Molecules that produce energy are tempted to dance thanks to the interaction between subterranean magma and life on earth. I am just there, caught in the exchange ... My work, when finished, leaves nothing behind; I stay with ever changing life, and will leave nothing behind ...

And this, from a transcription of a conversation with Tatsumi Hijikata:

Hijikata: Which came first, form or life?
Kazue Kobata: The latest theory says the indispensable condition was the replication of isomorphic genes made possible by micro-particle clay.
Hijikata: Oh, form invites life; life plunges into form.
© David Williams