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[Originally I had planned to summarise this article; then I thought I could copy and paste snippets, like scattering selected pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Finally I realised that the only way for me to preserve the very essence of this statement is to leave it untouched.]

Ten Dispatches About Place

by John Berger

Published in the July/August 2007 issue of Orion magazine

Photos: Anabell Guerrero

(1)
Somebody inquires: are you still a marxist? Never before has the devastation caused by the pursuit of profit, as defined by capitalism, been more extensive than it is today. Almost everybody knows this. How then is it possible not to heed Marx, who prophesied and analyzed the devastation? The answer might be that people, many people, have lost all their political bearings. Mapless, they do not know where they are heading.

(2)
Every day people follow signs pointing to some place that is not their home but a chosen destination. Road signs, airport embarkation signs, terminal signs. Some are making their journeys for pleasure, others for business, many out of loss or despair. On arrival they come to realize they are not in the place indicated by the signs they followed. Where they now find themselves has the correct latitude, longitude, local time, currency, yet it does not have the specific gravity of the destination they chose.

They are beside the place they chose to come to. The distance that separates them from it is incalculable. Maybe it’s only the width of a thoroughfare, maybe it’s a world away. The place has lost what made it a destination. It has lost its territory of experience.

Sometimes a few of these travelers undertake a private journey and find the place they wished to reach, which is often harsher than they foresaw, although they discover it with boundless relief. Many never make it. They accept the signs they follow and it’s as if they don’t travel, as if they always remain where they already are.

(3)
The details in the image on this page were taken by Anabell Guerrero in the Red Cross shelter for refugees and emigrants at Sangatte near Calais and the Channel Tunnel. On orders from the British and French governments, the shelter was recently shut down. Several hundred people were sheltering there, many hoping to make it to Britain. The man in the photographs—Guerrero prefers not to disclose his name—is from Zaire.

Month by month millions leave their homelands. They leave because there is nothing there, except their everything, which does not offer enough to feed their children. Once it did. This is the poverty of the new capitalism.

After long and terrible journeys, after they have experienced the baseness of which others are capable, after they have come to trust their own incomparable and dogged courage, emigrants find themselves waiting on some foreign transit station, and then all they have left of their home continent is themselves: their hands, their eyes, their feet, shoulders, bodies, what they wear, and what they pull over their heads at night to sleep under, wanting a roof.

Thanks to Guerrero’s image we can take account of how a man’s fingers are all that remain of a plot of tilled earth, his palms what remain of some riverbed, and how his eyes are a family gathering he will not attend. Portrait of an emigrant continent.

(4)
“I’m going down the stairs in an underground station to take the B line. Crowded here. Where are you? Really! What’s the weather like? Getting into the train—call you later…”

Of the millions of mobile telephone conversations taking place every hour in the world’s cities and suburbs, most, whether they are private or business, begin with a statement about the caller’s whereabouts. People need straightaway to pinpoint where they are. It is as if they are pursued by doubts suggesting that they may be nowhere. Surrounded by so many abstractions, they have to invent and share their own transient landmarks.

More than thirty years ago Guy Debord prophetically wrote: “the accumulation of mass-produced commodities for the abstract space of the market, just as it has smashed all regional and legal barriers, and all corporate restrictions of the Middle Ages that maintained the quality of artisanal production, has also destroyed the autonomy and quality of places.”

The key term of the present global chaos is de- or relocalization. This does not only refer to the practice of moving production to wherever labor is cheapest and regulations minimal. It also contains the offshore demented dream of the new ongoing power: the dream of undermining the status of and confidence in all previous fixed places, so that the entire world becomes a single fluid market.

The consumer is essentially somebody who feels or is made to feel lost unless he or she is consuming. Brand names and logos become the place names of the Nowhere.

Other signs announcing FREEDOM or DEMOCRACY, terms plundered from earlier historical periods, are also used to confuse. In the past a common tactic employed by those defending their homeland against invaders was to change the road signs so that the one indicating ZARAGOZA pointed in the opposite direction toward BURGOS. Today it is not defenders but invaders who switch signs to confuse local populations, confuse them about who is governing whom, the nature of happiness, the extent of grief, or where eternity is to be found. And the aim of all these misdirections is to persuade people that being a client is the ultimate salvation.

Yet clients are defined by where they check out and pay, not by where they live and die.

(5)
Extensive areas that were once rural places are being turned into zones. The details of the process vary according to the continent—Africa or Central America or Southeast Asia. The initial dismembering, however, always comes from elsewhere and from corporate interests pursuing their appetite for ever more accumulation, which means seizing natural resources (fish in Lake Victoria, wood in the Amazon, petrol wherever it is to be found, uranium in Gabon, etc.), regardless of to whom the land or water belongs.

The ensuing exploitation soon demands airports, military, and paramilitary bases to defend what is being siphoned off, and collaboration with the local mafiosi. Tribal war, famine, and genocide may follow.

People in such zones lose all sense of residence: children become orphans (even when they are not), women become slaves, men desperadoes. Once this has happened, to restore any sense of domesticity takes generations. Each year of such accumulation prolongs the Nowhere in time and space.

(6)
Meanwhile—and political resistance often begins in a meanwhile—the most important thing to grasp and remember is that those who profit from the present chaos, with their embedded commentators in the media, continuously misinform and misdirect. Their declarations and all the plundered terms they are in the habit of using should never be argued with. They have to be rejected outright and abandoned. They will get nobody anywhere.

The information technology developed by the corporations and their armies so they could dominate their Nowhere more speedily is being used by others as a means of communication throughout the Everywhere they are struggling toward.

The Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant puts this very well: “the way to resist globalisation is not to deny globality, but to imagine what is the finite sum of all possible particularities and to get used to the idea that, as long as a single particularity is missing, globality will not be what it should be for us.”

We are establishing our own landmarks, naming places, finding poetry. Yes, in the Meanwhile poetry is to be found.

As the brick of the afternoon stores the rose heat of the journey

as the rose buds a green room to breathe
and blossoms like the wind

as the thin birches whisper their stories of the wind to the urgent
in the trucks

as the leaves of the hedge store the light
the day thought it had lost

as the nest of her wrist beats like the chest of a sparrow in the turning air

as the chorus of the earth find their eyes in the sky
and unwrap them to each other in the teeming dark

hold everything dear

—Gareth Evans

(7)
Their Nowhere generates a strange, because unprecedented, awareness of time. Digital time. It continues forever uninterrupted through day and night, the seasons, birth, and death. As indifferent as money. Yet, although continuous, it is utterly single. It is the time of the present kept apart from the past and future. Within it, only the present is weight-bearing; the other two lack gravity. Time is no longer a colonnade, but a single column of ones and zeros. A vertical time with nothing surrounding it, except absence.

Read a few pages of Emily Dickinson and then go and see Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. In Dickinson’s poetry the presence of the eternal is attendant in every pause. The film, by contrast, remorselessly shows what happens when any trace of the eternal is erased from daily life. What happens is that all words and their entire language are rendered meaningless.

Within a single present, within digital time, no whereabouts can be found or established.

(8)
We will take our bearings within another time-set. The eternal, according to Spinoza (who was Marx’s dearest philosopher) is now. It is not something awaiting us, but something we encounter during those brief yet timeless moments when everything accommodates everything and no exchange is inadequate.

In her urgent book Hope In the Dark, Rebecca Solnit quotes the Sandinista poet Gioconda Belli describing the moment when the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown in Nicaragua: “two days that felt as if a magical, age-old spell had been cast over us, taking us back to Genesis, to the very site of the creation of the world.” The fact that the U.S. and its mercenaries later destroyed the Sandinistas in no way diminishes that moment existing in the past, present, and future.

(9)
A kilometer down the road from where I’m writing, there is a field in which four burros graze, two mares and two foals. They are a particularly small species. The black-bordered ears of the mares, when they prick them, come up to my chin. The foals, only a few weeks old, are the size of large terriers, with the difference that their heads are almost as large as their sides.

I climb over the fence and sit in the field with my back against the trunk of an apple tree. The burros have made their own tracks across the field and some pass under very low branches where I would have to stoop double. They watch me. There are two areas where there is no grass at all, just reddish earth, and it is to one of these rings that they come many times a day to roll on their backs. Mare first, then foal. The foals already have their black stripe across their shoulders.

Now they approach me. They smell of donkeys and bran—not the smell of horses, more discreet. The mares touch the top of my head with their lower jaws. Their muzzles are white. Around their eyes are flies, far more agitated than their own questioning glances.

When they stand in the shade by the edge of the wood the flies go away, and they can stand there almost motionless for half an hour. In the shade at midday, time slows down. When one of the foals suckles (ass’s milk is the closest to human milk), the mare’s ears lie right back and point to her tail.

Surrounded by the four of them in the sunlight, my attention fixes on their legs, all sixteen of them. Their slenderness, their sheerness, their containment of concentration, their surety. (Horses’ legs look hysterical by comparison.) Theirs are legs for crossing mountains no horse could tackle, legs for carrying loads that are unimaginable if one considers only the knees, the shanks, the fetlocks, the hocks, the cannon bones, the pastern joints, the hooves. Donkeys’ legs.

They wander away, heads down, grazing, their ears missing nothing; I watch them, eyes skinned. In our exchanges, such as they are, in the midday company we offer one another, there is a substratum of what I can only describe as gratitude. Four burros in a field, month of June, year 2005.

(10)
Yes, I’m still among other things a marxist.

John Berger was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel G. and a Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He lives in France.

Huangbaiyu is just one of dozens of eco-cities starting to sprout up throughout China

Popular Science has an excellent article on how China currently attempts to ‘clean up’ its image as the world’s worst polluter. McKenzie Funk traveled to various places in China that seem to have become focal points for the emergence of the county’s greener image. He visited Huangbaiyu for example, one of dozens of eco-cities springing up all over China, where Zhao QingHao became the first resident of China’s first eco-village. Zhao, a 58-year-old polio victim and his wife, Yi Shiqin, who is 50, mentally disabled and has a speech impediment, belong to one of the poorest families in a poor community, and their new eco-home has not helped. They have no heat and no water. They have a gas meter but no gas. They have no neighbours on their deserted street, no room to grow corn in their tiny garden, no place in their yard for the cashmere goats that once provided a third of their income. As temperatures dropped last winter, the bio-gasification plant intended to power the village still wasn’t working. When snow piled up waist-deep outside their door, they locked themselves in their bedroom because the rest of the house was too cold. Zhao took a pickax and hacked a hole into the wall to create a makeshift fireplace, where they burned wood from the local forest. Not a good start Zhao and Yi and China’s sustainability journey.

Chongming Island, on the outskirts of Shanghai, is the location of the new eco-city of
Dongtan; the largest green community ever built will accommodate up to 500,000 new
residents.

McKenzie also visited the proposed site for Dongtan on the Yangtze River’s Chongming Island (part of Shanghai), China’s highly hyped eco-megacity project that eventually is supposed to become home to 500.000 people. The project is run by the global design firm Arup with Peter Head at the head of this particular enterprise; Head amongst other things was was behind the City of London’s US$16 congestion charge. The vision for the Dongtan is awe-inspiring; whether its reality will be too, remains to be seen. The current state of the development area seems to ask for a leap of faith: supposedly sustainable McMansion-sized single-family homes with giant living rooms, several garages, balconies, and sculpted yards with rock gardens and bamboo-shaded walkways; an organic farm with no organic farmers and the Dongtan wetland, a bird reserve with not a single bird in sight. Properties are already selling for an inflated $45 a square foot will climb to $70 or more by 2010 when the 24km bridge-and-tunnel complex over and under the Yangtze - the longest in the world - is completed and the World Expo is held in Shanghai. And while the rich move in, the poor are dispossessed, uprooted from their subsistence existence, shoved into row after row of identical gray, four-story, 12- to 24-unit apartment blocks, and forced to work for just over 50 cents an hour in 8- to 10-hour days. The big question marks behind social and ecological sustainability of the project should become even bigger for the potential eco-city dwellers when they consider how much clean air they can expect when Shanghai, one of the world’s most polluted cities is just a stone throw away (and China’s pollution residue can be found as far away as in the US soil); and the next big question will be: what will happen to their grand homes when sea levels rise.

Dongtan, the planned eco-city

Strangely enough though, one of the most promising cleanup examples were found in the most polluted city in the world: Linfen, an ancient Chinese capital in the middle of what is now the country’s richest coal province, Shanxi. Linfen was number one on China’s list of most polluted cities in 2004, 2005 and 2006, ahead of such toxic notables as Chernobyl, Ukraine, and Dzerzhinsk, Russia (site of a Cold War–era chemical-weapons plant). The local authorities though seem to be determined to change their city’s image. At its low point, in 2004, Linfen had only 15 out of 365 days with an acceptable level of air pollution; by 2006, that number had risen to 202 and by May this year, Linfen was already 22 days ahead of last year’s pace. How did it happen? Coal trucks were banned to enter the city, gas-fired central heating has reached more than half of the city’s 4.1 million people, and many large and small coal-fired boilers were knocked down. Perhaps most significant is the crackdown on dirty factories at the fringes of Linfen, many of them forced to close down or made to install sulfur scrubbers. And it also seems that the most resistant ones are simply seeing their assets blown out of existence by local government explosives teams - drastic times, drastic measures .

A truck driver shovels coal at a power plant in Linfen

These are just some of the highlights of a fairly extensive article, which also includes an excellent overview of China’s pollution contribution to the planet - it is not only quite staggering in terms of quantity and quality but also a result of the so-called developed world simply outsourcing its pollution to countries like China or India. The latter of course makes Bush’s argument that these countries should show commitment to cleaning up their act before we do (and do this without our support) quite hypocritical.

As China grows, so too has the pollution in its largest cities—the nation is now
home to seven of the world’s 10 dirtiest metropolises

[Click here to read the full article]

… there are time when I can really understand this feeling

[Source: xkcd]

[Source: xkcd]