Prof. Dan Hicks - Event Density

Note: This essay first appeared in The Isle of Rust (Luath Books, 2019)

‘Immobile bulldozers, holed boats, Allegros buried in the dunes.’ The cadaver of a Ford Transit sinking into the bog. The ridge and furrow of land drainage. A shackscape of corrugated iron and raw timber. The towers and turrets of James Matheson’s castellated mansion. The ‘unspiritual’ spirit of the Calanais Standing Stones, a Neolithic monument cut out from the peat in 1857. The thought of undiscovered prehistoric bodies, ligatures perfectly preserved around the neck by the anaerobic acidity of the landscape itself.’

Just what kind of Archaeology is it that runs through Meades’ essay on Harris and Lewis and Rust? And how should we understand its affinity with the sheer humanity of Alex Boyd’s photographs?

Three suggestions.

First, this is some genre of a Visual Archaeology. Text and images share a way of looking, reversing that backward vision with which so much academic writing about the human past fixes itself; not closing the eyes to visualise the future through the past but transforming what we see in the present.

Discovery. Appearance. It feels like we’re a long way from the three most deadening words in academic discourse – critical, heritage, studies. Beyond, perhaps, the influence of that very English prejudice towards honouring, preserving and curating some failed attempts by historians to co-opt the perspectives of Social Anthropology during the 1980s; attempts that were never much more than vain attempts to control relativism; attempts to shore up against the threat of francophone deconstruction by reducing the understanding of the past to mere artifice and say-so. Social construction. Contextual interpretation. The Invention Of Tradition.

It was Eric Hobswbawm and Terry Ranger’s names on the book spine that bore that title when it hit the library shelves in 1983; but it was neither the Marxist nor the Africanist who contributed the ur-example but rather the Borderer Hugh Trevor-Roper whose snooty critique of Scottish nationalism re-described the very idea of Highland and Island culture as nothing but a modern fabrication of bagpipe tartanry misrepresented as ancient custom. Not for nothing did Neal Ascherton call him ‘the Liquidator’

It’s still too close in intellectual history for us yet to have found a name for that Tory po-mo of which the work of Trevor-Roper’s deconstructionist falsifications formed a central motor; but it is clear that it served to reduce the anthropologist’s reflexivity to the historian’s self-regard; it operated, as that historian put it in his valedictory lecture on leaving Christ Church, Oxford to becomeMaster of Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1980 by claiming that, ‘Objective science has its place in historical study, but it is a subordinate place: the heart of the subject is not in the method but in themotor, not in the technique but in the historian’.

It was surely no coincidence was Trevor-Roper’s laissez-faire snobbery towards those duped by The Invention of Tradition published within a few weeks of his authentication of the bogus Hitler Diaries. The parallel visions of Meades and Boyd on Harris and Lewis operate against that Trevor-Roperian liquidating impulse that still, inexplicably, holds so much currency in ‘critical’ ‘heritage’ circles; they lift our view of the past beyond an introspective mode; they decentre the donnish sneer at invention; they refuse to reduce any trace of a vernacular past to mere fanaticism; they do not diminish inventiveness to mere fabrication; they open our eyes to the humanity of what outlasts human lives.

Second, then, there is some kind of shared attitude to the detritus of human life; an attitude that is geographical as well as temporal. Harris-Lewis is remote, at one end of the Antillean-like chain, and somehow two islands in one, like an Outer Hebridean Haiti/Dominican Republic; never mind ‘invented traditions’, it’s a place not of false consciousness but double-consciousness; a place not of invention but transformation and multiplication. The anthropologist Edwin Ardener once began a list of the characteristics of remoteness, in which he included the following axioms and paradoxes:

‘Remote areas are full of innovators’. ‘Remote areas are in constant contact with the world’. ‘Remote areas are full of ruins of the past’. ‘Remote areas are full of rubbish’. For Ardener these facts were connected. He was talking about the Western Isles. It was the mid 1980s and he cited a description by the journalist Derek Cooper of some objects around a crofthouse in Lewis in the mid 1980s:

Five hundredweight van (circa 1950s); Ford tractor minus one wheel; fragment of pre-Great War reaper; upright piano; 37 blue plastic fishboxes; 7 green lemonade crates; 2 chimney pots; a sizeable pyramid of sand; a pile of cement blocks; 7 lobster creels; assorted timber; 2 bales of barbed wire (rusted); broken garden seat; Hercules bicycle frame; piece of unidentified machinery (loom?); a sofa‘ 4

Cooper suggested that there was less rubbish in the 19th century. Sooty thatch became fertilizer. Fishing boats were recycled as roof timbers and furniture. Ropes made of heather and hemp would degrade. Children’s clothes were upcycled from flour sacks. ‘Then came the Galvanised Iron Age, the Brass Bedstead Age and the Plastics Age’; indestructible products of the industrial and consumer society; materials that are impossible to dispose of like fibreglass, plastic, aluminium, rubber; the accelerating obsolescence of what is imported.

The mainstream Trevor-Roperian supply-side critical-heritage imaginary mistakes these landscapes for ruins. Hence, a new generation of self-regarding words and images in proliferate in insouciant and flaneuristic forms of ruin porn, dereliction tourism, Anthropocenes, Chthulucenes, object-oriented ontologies of new vibrant nonhuman materialities, posthuman futurities, capitalist realisms.

Speculative nihilisms. Such a mangling of aura in the face of duration, FFS. But the question of rubbish, which is here a question of the visibility of decay, is also a question of geography. Commodity chains are one-way streets, and so at the end of the road things pile up. There is less waste in remote places, it’s just far more visible than in the metropolis.

The course of obsolescence is less certain since innovation is operating at a different pace, refracted through accumulation. This is how in remote places the double-consciousness of place starts to give way to a double-consciousness of time. Events, Ardener tells us, have a different quality. They have more density.

Third, something about a remoteness of time is shared in the visions of Meades and Boyd, as well as just a remoteness of place. They show us the ongoing density of events. We don’t have to believe that the ineffable gneisses of Callanish were arranged as some kind of astronomical calendar that measured the movement of the moon against the horizon in order to understand that this remote monument serves to measure the passing of time. The environment itself calibrates with rock, machair, sheep. Cambrian, Silurian, Cretaceous, Quaternary. This is a place of remote innovation rather than retrospective invention. A place of making and unmaking ultra-dense events.

It cannot be that the passage from Neolithic to Modern runs from Richard Long to Arthur Tress! Reading Meades alongside Boyd we might think of Robert Smithson’s 1972 lecture on Hotel Palenque, given in 1972 to the architectural faculty at the University of Utah. When Smithson visited this ramshackle Mexican hotel was undergoing a process of renovation that simultaneously involved the dismantling of some of its wings alongside the construction of others, a spirit of simultaneous renovation and decay that he identified both in the ancient Mayan ruins and in the dilapidated contemporary building; the image is one of a de-architecture of decay and potential that rips down and builds up in a single gesture and thereby brings about a form of comparison, through which one remote place or time can come to stand for another that does not resemble it.

Or think of another lecture, John Ruskin’s The World of Iron in Nature, Art and Policy given at Tunbridge Wells in February 1858, on where he denied that rusty iron is spoiled iron, since ‘iron rusted is living; but when pure or polished, dead’, having breathed oxygen it is somehow ‘nobler’ – while gold and silver, which do not rust, has only caused death in the human past. Ruskin’s lecture envisions a horror-filled world where meadows grows not grass but iron wire, and arable land is turned into flat surfaces of steel, images that he contrasts with the inanimate breath that he identifies in the oxygen that makes sand yellow and brick and tile red. In Harris/Lewis it even brings colour even to galvanised steel through the brine in the wind.

Reading Smithson’s anti-ruin against Ruskin’s anti-rust, and reading Meades with Boyd on the scrap-cult of standing stones and Ford Transits, there is more at stake that just reading human life as if it were natural history. There are gaps and absences that leave the same event density; negative traces of evictions and abandonments, negative traces of the grand Malthusian experiment of the clearances, a failed innovation based on a linear, progressive, unnatural vision of time. Force in which the picturesque was complicit, as an ideology, the pretence of island savages.

Against such violence, experiences of belonging and of community are not false consciousness, mere invention, but the double consciousness of memory in a remote place where the density of events must be weighed as well as counted. If the sense of progressive time was always a metropolitan one because it appears that all roads might lead to it, then a sense of accumulated time may be an effect of geographical distance, community size, and the possibilities of the terrain itself.

The landscape becomes a device for collapsing time and space. Not clock-time or biblical time, but something far more alive. Perhaps it is like the image in W.G. Sebald’s commentary on Thomas Browne’s Hydriotaphia (1658), which hints that the antiquary’s melancholic account of the excavation of particles of cremated human bone in earthenware vessels buried shallow in the Norfolk soil might reveal that in the practice of archaeology ‘the more the distance grows, the clearer the view becomes’:

‘You glimpse the tiniest details with the utmost clarity. It is as if you were looking through a reversed telescope and through a microscope at the same time.’

At the end of Meades’ text, the figure of the archaeologist appears, discovering modern remains millennia from now. But this is not a landscape of ruin, past, present or future. The past is neither fixed nor simply made up. And Boyd’s photographs are the very opposite of stills; they are no more fragments of time than the people and the objects in this landscape could ever be. We learn from this book that the Isle of Rust is an ongoing transformation. Not a false consciousness of invented tradition, but a double consciousness that collapses time and space, past and present, through a humanity that is a function of distance.

A remote knowledge. A kind of visual archaeology. In which the event density that’s revealed is not so much what has been, but what appears to have been.