Wayfaring stone: Learning to think with stone, as vibrant matter, in the post-extractive urban terrains of the Witwatersrand ridgeline
Date
2023-02
Authors
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Publisher
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
Abstract
Johannesburg is a stony city that exists because of endless interplays between below and above. Johannesburg is a city of earth, rock, rubble and dust. It is a mining city in a state of post-extractive fragmentation. The fragmented wildness troubles all of its materiality. The smooth and inert bubble over exposes the decomposition created by what has been taken/extracted from it. As its infrastructure weathers and fragments, the city is often read as a wasteland or ruin, where human agency has failed to smooth over and rebuilt in ever increasingly short cycles. The local and global environmental implications of such material attitudes are threatening the long-term ability of the earth to sustain human and other life. The issues of the Anthropocene are as much material attitudes as they are issues of extraction, consumption and waste. Suppose shifting perspective: from imagining humans as separate from the terrain toward thinking of ourselves as an aggregation of matter, and stony matter as an independent actant, co-labouring in urban terrain formation. In that case, these weathering, fragmentation and aggregation processes can be viewed as vital agencies of stony matter. This shift in perspective would enable us to remain present within the extractive terrain. It enables us to think of the post-extractive urban terrain not as a ruin, but as a feral urban ecology growing and entangling vital stony agencies with other than human matter and human actions alike in the ongoing process of making the becoming-urban terrain. In many ways, Johannesburg exemplifies the 'Anthrop' in the current Anthropocene age. It is the triumph of culture over nature; testament to the planetary impact of material extraction. The consequences are exemplified in its urban terrain, dotted with urban archipelagos of residue that are toxic to the bodies that inhabit them. These islands span in scale from the small sites of waste dumping in urban parks and open mining lands, to the vast scale of scarification left by gold mining and industrial decay within the city. Unlike many cities, where such industrial ruination and extraction are far removed from the city, the location of the gold-bearing reef acts as the catalyst for the formation of the city. Sites of mining residue and industrial decay are situated in close proximity to the city centre and drove the romanticisation of the northern slopes as urban forest, and the use of southern slopes as wasteland. Besides its extractive material past, the city of Johannesburg is located within one of the oldest sections of the earth's crust, the Kaap-Vaal Craton. The central Witwatersrand ridgeline, which runs east-west within the centre of the city, has outcrops of some of the oldest rocks on earth and forms the continental watershed between the Indian and Atlantic oceans. Its extractive residues and material attitudes have significance within a broader discussion concerning city-making as human geo-writing, and its climatic impact is of interest within the Anthropocene. Despite its deep geological and mineral context, the city of Johannesburg has, within the post-apartheid spatial discourse, often been framed as if its geological and atmospheric terrain did not exist. The language used in writings about the city includes descriptors that frame Johannesburg as an immaterial city composed only of its human inhabitants, such as 'the transient city' 1, uitval-grond (remainder, non-place) 2 , the restless city 3 , necropolis and elusive metropolis 4 . These descriptors stem from a dualist material perspective of urban terrains and take a centrist humanist position suggesting that humans are the only agents for change in an inert material terrain. Spatial discourse applies philosophy to the built environment practices including built form and design in architecture, together with urban, town and regional planning, and urban design. Within the context of Johannesburg, through writing in the post-apartheid space, spatial discourse has become critically entangled with the social sciences. Within such spatial discourses, issues of urban terrains, extraction, degradation and materiality are often relegated to the margins, despite their impact on urban inhabitants and epoch-altering consequences for climate and future geological strata. Research risks becoming increasingly abstracted, and ungrounded in the living and active world in which the city's inhabitants move through and touch. In this work I respond to issues of surface, materiality and our human impact on urban terrains in the age of the Anthropocene, and question how spatial thinking contributes to issues of material denial and the degradation of urban terrains. Given Johannesburg's mining and deep geological context, I have chosen to work with the materiality of stone as a representative of human/material dualisms, which I see present here. Stony matters’ contribution to human societal formation is one of the most complex material alliances of the anthropocentric age, and connects momentary human actions to planet-altering effects produced by the complex web of alliances, traces, and matter flows facilitating modern city-making. In framing humans and stony matter as co-labours in terrain formation, I consider stony matter to be a trans-corporeal material, spanning in scale from granular to geological. The term trans-corporeal derives from feminist posthuman theory that says matter exists in multiple states and scales5 that span between bodies (collectivities) of human and other than human alike. Applied to the materiality of stone within this context, I considered stony matter to include the geological terrain as a biosphere. I imagine an urban, geological and ecological whole that includes wild stone in situ within 'urban archipelagos', which protrude into the city grid, filled with human-made, connective infrastructure, rubble and piles. I suggest that the stony matter present here collaborates as agglomerative agents in the formation of urban terrain. Furthermore, I consider weathering, rubbling and aggregating as agencies of stony matter that act in the ebbing and flowing process - rather than being static, or moving towards an ultimate ruinous end. I consider the process of weathering and gathering as relational processes for knowing stones' agency, accessible to the human temporal range through bodily encounters with the materials. I draw on the field of environmental humanities in this work, as it also incorporates feminist posthuman theory and new material theory. It emerges from a trans-disciplinary discussion that questions the human/matter and nature/culture duality implied within a cartesian understanding of matter. Creating a theoretical divide between living and non-living things. question this duality with their work on the posthuman. These collective theoretical positions critique the centrality of the human to act within the world and to forward a bio-centred egalitarianism that seeks to hold human and non-human social relationships as equally relevant in forming a response to issues of the Anthropocene. Posthuman studies propose a non-dualist understanding of the nature-culture binary and emphasise the self-organist forces of living matter. The defining features of Posthumanism take as their starting point, after Braidotti, that all matter is one (Monism), and that all matter is agentic and self-organising. The subject is not unitary but nomadic, and subjectivity includes relations with non-human others10. This implies that thinking is not the prerogative of humans alone, but includes non-human 'others', including stony matters subjectivity. I use the theory here to frame the relationship between humans, stony materials, and terrain. The focus is the nature and culture of stony materials as a vitalist material agent in city-making. I favour an understanding of stony matter as a social collective or social grouping, so framing city-making as a collective act of ongoing making between human and non-human actors. The idea of matter as a 'social agent' suggests that stone is capable of acting independently of humans. Stones may form alliances with other non-human entities or collectivities without human consent or intervention. Within this research, I pose the following questions: How can Johannesburg's urban terrains be considered post-extractive urban terrains? What are the vital agencies of stone in post-extractive urban terrains? How can creative practitioners learn about them through bodily entangled creative practice? How can stone agencies be used as a creative practice methodology to become co-labourers with the living matter as a tool for troubling anthropocentrism in extractive terrains? I explore these questions through an embodied creative practice approach to research, examining these questions within philosophy, literature and artistic practice. I use these questions to develop tools for thinking and practising with the stony matter as ways of relating that enable us to live well with other than human oddkin within post- extractive urban terrains. Furthermore, I explore possibilities for re-imagining posthuman ways of thinking about cities. The ultimate aim of the work is illustrated in the diagram below. In this research, I aim to thicken the conversation around the post-extractive terrain by thinking, acting and practising in stony ways. The work aims to aggregate multiple approaches to thinking through and with the stony matter found within the central Witwatersrand ridgeline, naturally occurring and human-made alike, along the path to understanding post-extractive urban terrains as vibrant and feral sites of becoming. As such, the work situates itself between histories and theories of architecture, urban and material practice, balanced against a creative practice project, which can be considered iterative.
Description
A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Wits School of Arts, in the Department of Fine Arts, in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of doctor of philosophy, 2023.
Keywords
Wayfaring, Stone, Vital stone, Pposthuman studies, Rubbling, Composting, UCTD
Citation
Stone-Johnson, Bridgitta. (2023). Wayfaring stone: Learning to think with stone, as vibrant matter, in the post-extractive urban terrains of the Witwatersrand ridgeline. [Master's dissertation, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg]. WIReDSpace. https://hdl.handle.net/10539/39871