Towards the great transformation: (4) Agrarian and urban rebellion, the 2008 crisis, art/philosophy/science, and Keiller's ‘Robinson Crusoe’

Abstract

After introducing an informal mapping of some aspects of the contemporary world and relevant notions and artworks, the series has so far concentrated on one of the artworks, Patrick Keiller's film Robinson in Space, exploring it through quotation, textual and visual, summary, interpretation and analysis. One particular life-form plays a dominant part in the film, lichen, with one associated activist image, that of Shakespeare's and Marx's ‘old mole’, as contrasted in the previous episode to Deleuze's alternative of a snake. Keiller's work provides a useful further mapping of this terrain and of its investigation at a particular place and time – an apparently rural rather than urban landscape during the climactic year of 2008 – that, playfully but seriously, trangressively transcends the boundaries of art, philosophy, and science. One major excavation from that landscape is a particular struggle against enclosure in the 1590s which, becoming clearer in the early seventeenth century and yet clearer in the early years of the twenty-first century, was and continues as an urban-and-agrarian struggle. As long as the agrarian component of these urban-and-agrarian struggles continues to be sidelined, the analytic insights, experience and tools of the Renaissance ignored, and praxis taken almost entirely off the map, the acute instabilities of 2008 and consequent savage cutbacks under the name of ‘austerity’ will continue and deepen on a terminal course. Keiller ends his journey with accounts of disaster, a ‘utopian’ solution, and a hint of a way forward. The necessarily minute account of Keiller's journey given here in this series (not, of course, a substitute for familiarity with the project itself) ends, before returning in passing in subsequent episodes to the contexts and works introduced in the initial episode, with a new shipwreck of Keiller's ‘Robinson Crusoe’ where, by the logic of this series, we find ourselves relocated within a unique combination of reptiles and mammals recently identified in contemporary California.