How Not What: Anthropocene Landscapes of St. Louis

Once this place was so easy to know. Before Michael Brown, before Kate Chopin, before Jonathan Franzen, before William Bur­roughs, before David R. Fran­cis, before Leroy Bundy, before Joseph Wingate Folk went after the ​“Big Cinch” cap­i­tal­ist syn­di­cate, before Pon­ti­ac com­mis­er­at­ed with French offi­cers at a tav­ern, before Frankie Free­man was able to whis­per to Lyn­don B. John­son, before Kay Drey and box­es of request­ed gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments, before Shel­ley, and Krae­mer, before Charles Guggen­heim tri­umphal­ized the Gate­way Arch, before Minoru Yamasa­ki gave the city both its cel­e­brat­ed port of entry and its trag­ic mod­ern sym­bol, before Nathaniel Lyon con­tained the Con­fed­er­ate mob, before Har­ry Turn­er drowned him­self on Christ­mas day, before Mary Meachum led run­away slaves across the riv­er, before the wealthy of the city formed a posse and shot strik­ing street­car engi­neers, before Archie Blaine broke on sup­port­ing the bull­doz­ing of his own neigh­bor­hood, before Robert E. Lee manip­u­lat­ed our riv­er to keep St. Louis alive, before St. Louis Car­di­nals fans left their night game to assault black swim­mers at Fair­ground Park, before Joe Edwards built his trol­ley, before Edqar Quee­ny set into motion the com­pa­ny capa­ble of devel­op­ing Agent Orange, before Thomas Stearns Eliot packed his bags, before the Cahokian elite built the pal­isade to keep out the riffraff or the water, before, before, before.

Before pow­er, or empire, ever set upon this place?

Before humans? Which part — the part that has no part? Or the part that claims its inter­ests con­sti­tute the inter­ests of the whole?

The dream of the riv­er that runs through our city may be free­dom from the strange parade of set­tle­ment — the tor­tu­ous, inflict­ed and inflect­ed pres­ences of peo­ple across its high and low lands. But such a con­di­tion is unknow­able, past or future. We are left to dwell in-between. Stay­ing with the trou­ble, as Don­na Har­away coun­sels, seems like no choice, but a preter­nat­ur­al edict.¹ There’s nowhere else to go.

Are we left in the Anthropocene?

If so, we may not be any far­ther along than we have been since Cahokia rose many cen­turies ago. We just now car­ry with us a long Euro­pean her­itage of puri­tanism that has not been expi­at­ed. Some­times it seems that we chron­i­cle the actions of humans here and across the globe to shame our­selves, as if his­to­ry were a fun­da­men­tal­ly moral con­struc­tion. The past doesn’t actu­al­ly give a damn about right and wrong, but it gives any­one who does an arse­nal of evidence.

We look at land­scape as evi­dence with which to explain the present, the Anthro­pocene or when­ev­er this is. And I go with when­ev­er because I don’t think time is as short as a word teth­ered to the accel­er­at­ed nomos and habi­tus of humans.

Per­haps we need to start nam­ing what is about to hap­pen when we look at what has already happened.

Land­scapes seem urgent or pre­car­i­ous now, but they are deceiv­ing us. They want us to think they are one thing when, in fact, they are anoth­er. They nat­u­ral­ize records of pow­er and abuse, send­ing detec­tives track­ing always right back to the present. We call land­scapes unsta­ble in this time, but, in truth, they are one of the most sta­ble sig­ni­fiers that the forces of cap­i­tal­ism, racism, and impe­ri­al­ism have at their dis­pos­al. It’s eas­i­er to shape the land than to change the minds of peo­ple, or kill them off. The new shape arrests time, abridg­ing the moment between the wound and the heal­ing. Instead, the wounds are dis­solved into junk spaces that few ques­tion as evi­dence of what comes next, some ques­tion as evi­dence of what came before, and most peo­ple rec­on­cile with a view of what comes now that ren­ders any hori­zon of action invisible.

The mon­u­ments tell us big lies, so we look close­ly at the ter­rain of every­day life. We hit the park­ing lots, the dying shop­ping malls, the places between fences, the ghet­toes, the slag heaps and the rud­er­al fields. Like Orpheus, for a while, we won’t look behind but ahead, at the mun­dane, fear­ing that we will kill beau­ty (or that beau­ty will kill us, or that beau­ty no longer exists accord­ing to years of pes­simistic the­o­ry). Then, like the Angel of His­to­ry, we turn around, find­ing only more of the mun­dane, but we ren­der it also a mon­u­ment, a frozen and dead thing.

Every coin­ci­dence tempts us with the lure of sig­nif­i­cance. This lure damp­ens time, flat­tens it into a cir­cle, we arrive only where we start.

The dead-end block, near where a famous musi­cian had his first house, in the mid­dle of an urban renew­al project, three blocks from a big This and not far from a That and you know what that has to mean…

But do we know what that has to mean?

Do we know any­thing at all when we make such sur­mis­es, or are we fee­bly lurch­ing toward a pat­tern recog­ni­tion our brains instill because the con­di­tion always worse than death is to be com­plete­ly lost?

Maybe being lost is not so bad after all. Being found seems pret­ty dull. There are Insta­gram feeds devot­ed to so many aspects of ordi­nary land­scapes that the pho­tographs some­times seem to be not images of oth­er places, but oth­er images or at least oth­er influ­ences. Skid­ding by at a split-sec­ond view, they sig­ni­fy only what we can already envi­sion them to sig­ni­fy, because we aren’t inhab­it­ing the images let alone the sub­jects they present. Mass media kills us by mak­ing us tourists.

The words of artist Claire Pen­te­cost are bet­ter than mine here: ​“The tourism of every­day life may include sig­ni­fiers of place, but para­dox­i­cal­ly, the over­all effect is to make us for­get that we live in a place, a place called Earth.”² Affect sub­li­mates what we tru­ly seek to change.

How do we break the flat plane of time, and move past nam­ing it before we actu­al­ly change his­to­ry? Bruno Latour recent­ly direct­ed us, actors in the throes of an epoch we want to call ​“the Anthropocene.”

Latour: ​“What to do? First of all, gen­er­ate alter­na­tive descrip­tions.”³

I pro­pose that we describe what places doin­stead of what they are. Some­where in these new descrip­tions will be antic­i­pa­tions of time when a new set of rela­tions is pos­si­ble or becom­ing. If the agony of our land­scapes is a sense that they record things we don’t want, we must locate the record of things that we do want.

Or we risk dying try­ing. A noble death, of course.

But here are just two of many paths through how and now what.

POL­LU­TION

The Mis­sisip­pi­ans left us a record of shit. The most real source of dis­cov­ery about the dec­li­na­tion of Cahokia may come through fecal stanols that archae­ol­o­gists are now inves­ti­gat­ing. Hard evi­dence may break years of soft spec­u­la­tion against an empir­ic hori­zon. So far, fecal evi­dence sug­gests that Cahokia pop­u­la­tion declined after flood­ing and pos­si­bly events not yet well under­stood, includ­ing cli­mate change.⁴

In Feb­ru­ary 2019, AJ White (a Ph.D. stu­dent in Anthro­pol­o­gy at UC Berke­ley) and oth­ers pub­lished an arti­cle in the Pro­ceed­ings of the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences releas­ing find­ings from a fecal stanol study of Horse­hoe Lake, a large, nat­ur­al lake with­in the Cahokia set­tle­ment area.⁵ The Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans at Cahokia defe­cat­ed out­doors, and their excre­ment often end­ed up drain­ing toward the lake. Decades of exam­in­ing less venal aspects of Cahokia have not been as instruc­tive as fecal research in sug­gest­ing how the first city there died completely.

White and the team found that the stanol den­si­ty rose from 600 until 1100 CE but declined from 1200 until 1400. Five hun­dred years in, two hun­dred years out. St. Louis, by com­par­i­son, had 190 years in and is now either about 70 years out (city pop­u­la­tion) or 70 years flat­lined (city and coun­ty population).

Eight hun­dred years from now, what stuff that we have dumped will show any­one that our city was declining?

We can look back­ward toward St. Louis’s Chouteau Pond, an occlu­sion of the Mill Creek made by a French miller, whose new pond became both the recre­ation­al grounds of a park­less city and a des­ti­na­tion for shunt­ed human waste. That the Euro-Amer­i­cans, who also sent their shit to a body of water, could now judge the Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans or any oth­er North Amer­i­can inhab­i­tants as sav­age is deeply hyp­o­crit­i­cal, per­haps even patho­log­i­cal. (Today we send ours into a riv­er into a gulf into an ocean. Is that what some Marx­ists call accelerationism?)

The waste sent to Chouteau’s Pond ulti­mate­ly killed at least 4,285 peo­ple through cholera in 1849. At that time, the city still lacked munic­i­pal sewage sys­tems, although they soon would be built. The city’s response was to drain the pond, and the drained low­land soon was sold off to the new­ly-cap­i­tal­ized rail­roads need­ing lines through the city.

One hun­dred years lat­er, and civ­i­liza­tion in St. Louis pro­gress­es enough to match the last century’s shit with blood. When the city’s park com­mis­sion­er uni­lat­er­al­ly and hasti­ly decid­ed to inte­grate swim­ming pools to all humans in June 1949, the open­ing day of the pool at Fair­ground Park end­ed in the first and only race riot con­fined to the city lim­its of St. Louis. Anx­i­ety over the future of north St. Louis spurred white peo­ple to attack not only black swim­mers, but also white police offi­cers who attempt­ed to enforce the laws actu­al­ly in place. Blood on the ground, blood on the hands of the white peo­ple who would aban­don the pool and the park and an entire half of the city in short order. Did they take that blood with them?

The riot end­ed with offi­cial blame on both white and black peo­ple, a door closed on the pol­lu­tion of racial vio­lence for a gen­er­a­tion. When we claim that East St. Louis or north St. Louis is pre­car­i­ous, do we mean that Ladue or Clay­ton or St. Charles is now too far gone, past pre­car­i­ty? Because I want to fol­low the blood from those hands, from those lunatic minds, not to bad­ger the descen­dants of the peo­ple who just showed up to swim. Those who showed up to kill both­er me more.

The ulti­mate worm­hole in St. Louis may be the pos­si­bly smol­der­ing iso­topes of the Man­hat­tan Project waste tucked into the West Lake Land­fill. We need a new con­cept of time to even think through what this waste could do to our set­tle­ment. Deep time. Not cheap time. Deep time forces us to think through a future of emer­gency dec­la­ra­tion, forced evac­u­a­tion, and harm­ful con­t­a­m­i­na­tion that could out­live any cur­rent form of gov­ern­ment exist­ing here. If the waste’s worst fate means that our cur­rent men­tal­i­ty is inad­e­quate, its best fate — removal and vol­un­tary relo­ca­tion — makes it some­one else’s prob­lem, in a dif­fer­ent place and on a dif­fer­ent time scale.

Per­haps prop­er­ty is the worst form of pol­lu­tion. Trac­ing the root of prop­er­ty back to Latin, to ​“one’s own,” we may find that the only real real prop­er­ty in the world is our blood or our shit.⁶ Yet, many peo­ple think it’s land that is owned, and we have bent land to accom­mo­date a mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of parcels and hous­es. No one can exon­er­ate any part of the region by pick­ing on anoth­er, either, such as those who exco­ri­ate the sub­urbs or the gen­tri­fy­ing city neigh­bor­hoods for bour­geois excess­es attempt to do. The code of pri­vate prop­er­ty arrived with French colonists, was per­fect­ed in the hands of urban elites, and end­ed up shap­ing New Town and Wild­wood. We can call a part of the sys­tem exot­ic, but that’s like let­ting a snowflake land on your tongue and claim­ing it is the entire weath­er pattern.

St. Louis’s ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­lif­er­a­tion of cap­i­tal­ized land ben­e­fit­ed in part from an import-export rela­tion with the ​“Great South­west”: Texas, Okla­homa, and Arkansas. Fin­ished goods and equi­ty went out, while baux­ite, lead, cot­ton, live­stock, and petro­le­um head­ed north­east on St. Louis-con­trolled rail­road lines for pro­cess­ing in that city. No fin­er memo­r­i­al to this trade exists than the remain­ing chat piles that form a tox­ic heart­land ver­sion of Mon­u­ment Val­ley. Pich­er, Okla­homa, has become an unin­hab­it­able Super­fund site, with each head­wind thick with tail­ings dust. The mines closed as their sur­plus val­ue declined, and the St. Louis investors retreat­ed with­out repa­ra­tion. Much of the chat now forms road pave­ment, which breaks down. More dust.

Why the Riv­er City nev­er learned to revere dust eludes expla­na­tion. The entire cen­tral city was destroyed by dust in 1849, when the metonymic steam­er White Cloud sent aloft a dis­charge of smol­der­ing ash, a com­mon urban atmos­pher­ic aspect of ante­bel­lum St. Louis. The dis­charge set the boat on fire, then flames leapt onto oth­er steam­boats, raw goods, roofs, and wag­ons. Dust to dust. The fire end­ed when vol­un­teer fire­fight­ers used black gun­pow­der to det­o­nate build­ings along a fire­wall. One of the vol­un­teers, Cap­tain Thomas Targee, blew him­self to king­dom come but end­ed the con­fla­gra­tion. The fire proved for­tu­itous and allowed for the cap­i­tal­iza­tion of new cast-iron-faced mod­ern ware­hous­es along the city’s aged water­front. Even­tu­al­ly those would be smashed to dust to build the Jef­fer­son Nation­al Expan­sion Memo­r­i­al at a time when bitu­mi­nous coal dust ban­ished the ris­ing sun from the city for weeks.

Then the city would man­i­cal­ly rush to make entire neigh­bor­hoods dust. Even­tu­al­ly, too, land­lords seek­ing to offload worth­less hous­es in north city dur­ing the white flight era would turn them into dust through fire, and that dust con­vert­ed to cash through insur­ance set­tle­ments. Nowa­days the fires con­tin­ue, but they don’t pro­duce exchange val­ue. They just con­sume. Usu­al­ly noth­ing replaces these build­ings. The dust pre­sum­ably set­tles some­where, much of it in our organs, so that the arti­facts of a long past speak through our ragged breath and altered vocal pitch, when dust exits us.

No land­scape ele­ment is any­thing but an arrow toward anoth­er, usu­al­ly some­where far away. No ele­ment is a sol­id mark except in the now. In the then and the lat­er, it’s liq­uid, it’s tran­si­to­ry, it’s our own blood, the con­sti­tu­tion of which links us to bil­lions of peo­ple var­i­ous­ly dead, alive, and not yet alive.

Land­scape. Land. Shape. How. How. How.

KNOWL­EDGE

Knowl­edge is pow­er. Bacon, Hobbes, Fou­cault, you, me?

Polit­i­cal the­o­rist Jodi Dean reminds us of the out­come of what we con­sid­er knowl­edge: ​“We can and already do make deci­sions about who gets what, who has what, what is reward­ed, what is pun­ished, what is ampli­fied, what is thwart­ed.”⁷

No land has been shaped that has not been known, and rarely has any land been known that has not been shaped. Yet, land­scape has always been pro­duced in mutu­al­i­ty, in which the know­er is shaped by the known. Some­times the know­er doesn’t want to know this. Some­times encounter pro­duces author­i­ty as a pri­ma­ry affect and igno­rance as a sec­ondary affect.

St. Louis emanates from a great epis­temic sys­tem in ser­vice to polit­i­cal pow­er, the urban grid. The grid, sub­ject to much urban­ist ado­ra­tion, instan­ti­ates pow­er and joins land to human con­trol. Our city’s base mod­el is the Roman cas­trum with its ordi­nal fix­i­ty, the infi­nite­ly fun­gi­ble web that could cap­ture the entire planet’s sur­face. (In fact, under the pseu­do­nym of the US Pub­lic Land Sur­vey Sys­tem, it tried.) It’s a drag­net of state­craft, a matrix of tax­able land and gov­ern­able sub­jects. The web is intrin­si­cal­ly a type of pol­lu­tion, because it is a mech­a­nism for mak­ing pri­vate prop­er­ty out of com­mons, which it did after the orig­i­nal vil­lage of St. Louis devoured com­mon fields and con­flict­ing, alter­nate spa­tial plans.

In Gran­ite City, we sit on a grid with dia­grid tran­sects, a merg­er of Roman ide­al­ism and Hauss­mann­ian pomp. Does the flat plan of the city teach us any­thing? Cer­tain­ly. Does it mis­lead us at the same time? Of course. Miss­ing is what activist and crit­ic Bri­an Holmes has termed ​“the car­tog­ra­phy of togeth­er­ness,” a rep­re­sen­ta­tion of sen­so­ry order.⁸ We have the lines of sur­vey­ors and tax col­lec­tors, endorse­ments of pow­er, but not the aura of place, not the sense of place. No record that Gran­ite City was a vicious sun­down town from the moment the sur­vey­ors were hired to draw a line, no rep­re­sen­ta­tion show­ing that, in 1990, only 69 out of 32,862 res­i­dents were black. Ten years lat­er, in 2000, 622 out of 31,301 res­i­dents of Gran­ite City were black. That was just 18 years ago. Out­side of St. Louis. We’re left sense­less by what.

Writer Eduar­do Galeano posit­ed that Euro­peans still do not know where they are in the Amer­i­c­as, that their col­o­niza­tion is a mask hid­ing a deep igno­rance of where they are and with whom they share the con­ti­nent. Per­haps the great uni­ver­si­ty across the riv­er in St. Louis knows some­thing about where it is. With the best minds for miles around and $7.2 bil­lion in endow­ment, this school has no rote excuse for not-know­ing. In fact, it has spent mil­lions — lit­er­al­ly — to uncov­er the spa­tial pol­i­tics of the ​“divid­ed city.” So, when its retir­ing chan­cel­lor aims for a post-col­le­giate, civic com­mit­ment, he choos­es to be the tit­u­lar head and ombuds­man for a city-coun­ty con­sol­i­da­tion draft­ed in a clos­et and fund­ed large­ly by a local oli­garch. Knowl­edge of the land­scape, knowl­edge of the divides, all seems to prof­it some­one oth­er than the inhab­i­tants stud­ied most often at school. Are the schol­ars just spec­tat­ing the trau­ma of oth­ers, study­ing divi­sion but not heal­ing divides? So far, ​“Bet­ter Togeth­er” has held four pub­lic meet­ings with 150 seats each. 600 of the 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple liv­ing across city and coun­ty have been allowed to read the chained man­u­script, to receive com­mu­nion into the chancellor’s cause. They don’t want us not to know what they don’t know. They must fear any­thing but the abstract truth. Maybe they fear them­selves most. (Sum­mon­ing the super­ego, please — the ego is mak­ing the map of the future again!)

But it’s not what; it’s how, again. (And again.) The chan­cel­lor is not a tem­po­ral­ly vac­u­um-packed agent of oppres­sion. He fol­lows cen­turies of the pow­er­ful not-know­ing by know­ing, the ​“dom­i­na­tor cul­ture” that bell hooks has iden­ti­fied.⁹ The ear­ly French colo­nial set­tlers across the riv­er from Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty thought that the mounds of Cahokia had to be the achieve­ments of a white peo­ple, or Toltecs, or maybe Hin­dus, but cer­tain­ly not the ​“sav­age” indige­nous Amer­i­cans that they had encoun­tered. Freud says we tend to aggress most severe­ly against our imme­di­ate neigh­bors, right?

And so it went, until Cyrus Thomas pub­lished in the late 1880s a case that unknown — and, I sub­mit, still unknow­able — peo­ple had built the mounds.¹⁰ Mis­sis­sip­pi­ans. The mounds were no longer nat­u­ral­ized ruins, sub­ject to pro­ject­ed pasts, but some­thing with real incom­plete mate­r­i­al fact. The igno­rance of the truth — the onto­log­i­cal heav­i­ness of Cahokia as some­thing to be known only a lit­tle more than now — has been too much for many white folks. They keep retreat­ing to the safer igno­rance of author­i­ty. They con­vince them­selves that they know the place and they know who lived here, not through their shit, but through some cul­tur­al essence.

If any­one ever thinks that they know your cul­tur­al essence, run. They prob­a­bly want your land or your life.

CON­CLU­SION

Now that we have the word ​“Anthro­pocene,” we may think that we know what time it is. We may think that we have liv­ing proof.

Or we may be fac­ing a new mil­lenar­i­an­ism, where we whis­per a word that we hope will absolve us, resolve our ways, reshape our world, and make the plan­e­tary moment some­thing that fun­da­men­tal­ly is about our capac­i­ty for reform.

Or we may be in denial.

Or we may real­ize that the lie of lib­er­al democ­ra­cy has final­ly over­tak­en its sup­posed truth, a long painful eclipse. Anthro­pocene is not com­men­su­rate with Anthro­pos unless every human had equal pow­er to shape this time, equal wealth and equal cul­pa­bil­i­ty. Which Anthro­pos do we mean? We’ve avoid­ed answer­ing that ques­tion, hop­ing that we die, retire, hide behind a pro­tect­ed gate or get tenure before it gets answered, and mean­while too often silenc­ing those who have dared to ask.

Latour writes that humans aren’t up to the chal­lenge of now because they think that the root cause and root pas­sage through this era revolve around Anthro­pos instead of Plani­tis. We see the signs, detect the waves, and then see our­selves as cen­tral. We are great at aim­ing to know in order to end up not-know­ing in pro­found ways.

Can it be anoth­er way? Does it matter?

Is it pos­si­ble that, when we talk about the Anthro­pocene, when we read the land­scape for evi­dence of cat­a­stroph­ic forces, we are look­ing fun­da­men­tal­ly for a new pol­i­tics? Pol­i­tics will always be a human pur­suit, and with­in pol­i­tics we study land­scapes like St. Louis and the Amer­i­can Bot­tom, and with­in pol­i­tics we either let these places speak us or we choose to speak them in new ways.

But speech is an act, acts come from pow­er, and pow­er is knowl­edge. To act dif­fer­ent­ly, we must know differently.

Yet, pol­i­tics with­out sys­tems con­scious­ness, with­out a ded­i­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the rela­tion­ships that make the things, the how that we’ve man­aged to per­pet­u­ate as we study its affect — that may be no pol­i­tics at all. With­draw­al — anoth­er human thing, tried and true.

Apart. A part. A part of what?

Tourist always found, or human always lost but not alone?

Track your pol­lu­tion, make a log of your know­ing, and map the land­scape that you make every day.

There is the Anthro­pocene. Right there, on the scale that you pro­duce. And that you can undo.

What on that map don’t you like, and how will you change that?

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