Civilising Grass. Jonathan Cane
Читать онлайн книгу.
of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town (Mogren 2012), the only piece of research that offers a sustained, critical view of the South African lawn is David Bunn’s chapter ‘ “Our Wattled Cot”: Mercantile and Domestic Spaces in Thomas Pringle’s African Landscapes’ (1994). Published in the influential volume Landscape and Power, Bunn’s study of attitudes in the 1820s to landscape in the Cape Colony is important for two reasons. The first is its attention to the colonial lawn landscape and the second is how it works as part of the broader argument Mitchell advanced in Landscape and Power.
While Bunn critiques the naturalisation of settler subjectivity in ways that are familiar, showing how the eighteenth-century English landscape garden was exported to the periphery, he also departs in a fundamental way from the theorisation of the landscape as symbolic or representational. What he argues is that far from landscape being a symbolic expression of human intention or simply an aesthetic appreciation, landscape is, in fact, the (somewhat) independent instrument of cultural power.
Civilising grass
This book presents five introductory theses on the South African lawn, outlined below.
1.The lawn is political
The South African lawn has remained largely invisible in plain sight. Naturalised and treated as the product of common sense, the lawn appears to exist outside of politics and is commonly thought of as ‘neutral in struggles for power, which is tantamount to it being placed outside ideology’ (Fairclough 1989: 92). The ideological dimensions of the lawn are, however, perceptible and the discourse from which it emerges is evident in the archive. The lawn discourse governs, for instance, its colour, shape, texture, height, incline, level, orientation, relationship to buildings and so on. It also exerts control over practices, including those related to ownership and the creation, maintenance, usage, destruction, transfer and movement of the lawn. This discourse displays a strong tendency towards normative and value-based assessments of an individual lawn’s compliance or non-compliance with the ideal lawn. Lawns are seldom the star of the show, even when they are. (This is partly why they remained for so long inoculated against critical inquiry.) Lawns recede into the background and are favoured as backgrounds for the real drama of life. Foregrounding the lawn is a political act of denaturalisation, leading to a reversal of the normative figure-ground relationship.
2.The lawn is moving
Conceptually, aesthetically, materially and ecologically the South African lawn comes from somewhere else. Indeed, it is also on its way somewhere else. Colonialism and imperialism facilitate the lawn’s movement but also attempt to conceal that very movement. While colonial discourse relies on botanical transplantation and exchange, it also depends on the simultaneous impression of stasis to obscure its multidirectional and asymmetrical movements. The colonial landscape must not appear dynamic; it must seem stable, passive and immobile because timelessness and finishedness are fundamental requirements of the imperial landscape (see thesis 5). The lawn moves and grows rhizomatically: supposedly flat, even and soft, the lawn is not so much a surface as it is matter that connects, takes root and advances (down, up and outward). In this sense, the lawn is deep, not only because it tends to obscure what is beneath it but also because it is stubbornly knitted into and grounded in the earth. Following Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, I argue that the lawn is a weed and a ‘vegetable war machine’ (Marks 2010).
3.The lawn is work
Lawns require labour, time and money. In the past, sheep and other animals trimmed the lawn by grazing, and in a science fiction future, ‘mowbots’ (Greene 1970) may well keep the lawn. However, since the eighteenth century, humans have kept the lawn. Which humans – what gender, age, race and sexuality, for what pay or reward, on which day, at what time, in what conditions, with what equipment and inputs – is determined by the lawn discourse. In South Africa, which humans keep the lawn (and under what conditions) has everything to do with race and class. Anxiety about racial idleness and the injunction to conceal labour that does not support claims of land ownership underpin representations of the lawn (Coetzee 1988). Hence, the manner in which work done to the lawn is presented and represented, acknowledged and denied, remembered and ignored is very revealing about the power at work in the landscape. In addition to the work required to keep the lawn, the lawn itself is also at work. To focus on the inner workings of the lawn itself is to accord it a certain vitality and to acknowledge its power to produce certain effects in human and other bodies (Bennett 2010). The lawn’s work involves the complex process of producing subjects and perpetuating itself by extending rhizomatically over time and space – which is to say, colonising – without drawing too much attention to its fragility, its being-in-progress and its underlying aggression.
4.The lawn desires family
In a common-sense way, the lawn is strongly associated with children. For instance, it is quite typical for the literature to sincerely ask: but where would the children play if there was no lawn? Indeed, this question was especially vexing for white planners during the apartheid years, who worried about black children’s safety and cleanliness while at play. The lawn is historically understood to be a hygienic, safe, healthy, clean, modern surface, safe from ticks, snakes, traffic and dust, and exerting a ‘healthful’ influence (Dreher 1997; Mellon 2009). These sanitary discourses are focused on the bodies of children, the poor, the indigent, the disabled, the racially inferior and the sexually deviant in an attempt to reform their unhealthy and unproductive modes of place making. Public parks, sports fields and domestic lawns emphasise the desirability of family, wholesomeness and middle-class respectability. In opposition to this normalising drive, so-called anti-social queer theorists encourage resistance to being incorporated into productive heteropatriarchy. According to this argument, the child is understood to be the embodiment of ‘reproductive futurism’, which ought to be countered by a negative queer oppositionality (Edelman 2004). The embrace of queer negativity is in direct opposition to the lawn’s optimism and future orientation.
5.The lawn is a failure
The depressed, the hopeless, those without a stake are unlikely to make (good) lawns. Keeping a perfectly flat, even, green lawn is difficult and expensive work, easily compromised by extreme weather or low rainfall and so the successful lawn is often elusive, the cause of anxiety and insecurity. While the ideal lawn is understood to be fixed, permanent and durable, the lived lawn is really a mess: it is dying, flowering, rough, brown, bumpy, coarse, scratchy, dry, burnt, green, patchy, uneven and alive. It is an ideological function of the landscape medium to arrest complex processes and rhythms and to present them as stable. As a framing device, the lawn landscape was (and is) one of the tools at the disposal of the colonial and modern eye. And yet, at its heart, there is an internal contradiction because the lawn can, at best, only ever be a temporary victory. Essentially, the lawn is a landscape ‘without final outcome’ (Casid 2011: 103) and it is this open-endedness, this dynamic potential, that must be centred in a discussion of the colonial landscape. By queering the lawn we challenge the notion that it functions by way of injunction – No walking on the lawn! No blacks! No gays! – and that it is the binary opposite of the wilderness. The relation between the lawn and wildness is much more complicated; indeed, the lawn’s relation to human and non-human actors is much more complex. The lawn is strangely suited to misuse and reuse and is constantly and consistently failing even as it persists and even as it is unusually resistant to critique.
Structure of the book
Civilising Grass consists of four chapters, which each deal with a particular aspect of lawns. These lawn moments, part of the larger lawn archive, are all located on the South African highveld, between the late nineteenth century and the present day. There is something discrete and somewhat unique about this geographic and historical selection. The discovery of gold, rapid industrialisation and crass commercialism, the Anglo-Boer War, the South African Union cemented in Pretoria, Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as president of South Africa on the Union Building lawns, all played out in a climatic zone that, compared to the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal,