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Abstract: This article explores how the suburban front lawn is a special type of space, where society metabolizes with nature. Involved in this exchange are complex relationships between a diverse range of processes.
These processes include the natural process of grass growth, the labour process of ‘improving upon nature’, the aesthetization process of harnessing nature for aesthetic designs and the commoditization process, in which ‘natural’ inputs are bought and brought into the front lawn.

However, it is the social processes, which establishes the determinate form in which the contents of the grass ecosystem operates under. And this crucial insight allows us to critique naturalism as the determinant of the suburban grass lawn.

During the ‘heady’ days of the Celtic Tiger, Ireland globalized. As part of this globalization, Ireland exported its Riverdances and its ‘traditional’ Irish pubs and images of a fun loving people. But these media global icons were giving us a new identity which constructed a feel-good effect for the Irish people back home. And back in Ireland there were also other changes occurring which were less obvious but more fundamental to the everyday lives of the ordinary people. Nearly by stealth and certainly piecemeal, Ireland suburbanised. Fuelled by an astounding increase in car usage, our car dependency allowed us to travel greater distances to achieve our daily tasks. And in this intensified mobility, our suburbs like a slow moving tsunami began to ‘sprawl’ into the rural Ireland. In its wake, the ‘natural’ ecosystems of the agricultural countryside were being substituted for the more refined ecosystems of the suburban world. And these newly established ecosystems were not an afterthought to the necessary construction of the suburban house, but were fundamental to why those housing estates were established there in the first place, ‘betwixt and between’ the worlds of the urban and the rural. Here, in this article, I want to unfold an analysis of one aspect of this suburban ecosystem, – the front lawn. The front lawns of suburbia, although easily identified by their clearly visible presence, but as I am going to argue their very mundaneness conceals a complexity that puts them into the same situation as Marx suggested the commodity was in:

‘A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Analysis shows that it is in reality a very peculiar thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ (Marx, p. ).

And so the presence of the front lawn has become the essential natural icon for suburban Ireland as it is for most other suburbia in our globalizing world, even though grass grows so naturally in Ireland that it has created its own iconic representation of Ireland – the ‘forty shades of green’, or does it?

Marx and Engel’s rejection of ‘Naturalism’ with regard to Irish grass growth

In a preface to a book entitled The Grasses of Ireland, the authors of the preface begin:

‘We owe our international designation of ‘Emerald Isle’ to our grasslands. The Gulf Stream delivers a mildness of climate that is expressed in the greenness of the countryside and the absence of temperature extremes.[….] Our climate is summarised as mild, moist and variable. This gives us the longest season of grass growth in Europe.’ (Feehan, Sheridan and Egan, p.vi).

As a consequence of its geographical location on the westerly perimeter of Europe, Ireland bears the full brunt of ‘the first powerful downpour of the heavy Atlantic rain clouds’ (Engels, p.184). This excessive rainfall is counteracted by the stony limestone substructure which lets the water through without water logging the ground. Arthur Young teased out the implications of these natural conditions (climate and soil structure) for grass growth:

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‘..the rocks here are clothed with verdure; – those of limestone with only a thin covering of mold, have the softest and the most beautiful turf imaginable.’ (Vol. 2, Part 11, pp.3-4).

Taking all of this into account, Ireland appears to be the ideal location to investigate any form of grass growth including the grassed lawn of suburbia. But Marx and Engels have provided us with a cautionary note on the apparent ‘naturalism’ of the Irish environmental conditions as the essential determinant of its domesticated plant ecosystems, including grass. Engels in his opening chapter of his unfinished History of Ireland, on its Natural Conditions, stated that ‘even the facts of nature become points of national controversy between England and Ireland’ (Engels, p.190). This is especially so with regard to the suitability of the Irish soil for growing of cereals against grass. This controversy spanned two periods in the nineteenth century when the Corn Laws came into existence in 1815 and after their Repeal in 1846. When the Corn Laws were passed, Ireland secured the monopoly of the free importation of corn into Great Britain. This artificially encouraged the cultivation of cereals in Ireland but after their abolition cereal production is substituted for cattle production as Marx outlines:

‘With the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846, this monopoly was removed. Apart from all other circumstances, this event alone was sufficient to give a great impulse to turning of Irish arable into pasture land, to the concentration of farms, and to the eviction of small cultivators’ (Marx, 1971, p.115).

But Marx crucially continues:

‘After the fruitfulness of the Irish soil had been praised from 1815 to 1846, and proclaimed loudly as by Nature herself destined for the cultivation of wheat, English agronomists, economists, politicians, discover suddenly that it is good for nothing but to produce forage (grass)’ (Marx, 1971, p.115).

What Marx is drawing attention to here, was to a contemporary debate over the productiveness of Irish agriculture and whether it was determined by its natural conditions (climate and soil structure) alone or by how these ‘natural’ contents were embedded in particular social forms, which were themselves changing over time. But these specific historical forms were being determined by the colonial relationship Ireland had with Great Britain. Engelsi teases out how the apparent ‘naturalism’ of Irish agriculture changes with market conditions which in turn changes the ideological pronouncements of the British elite:

‘It can be seen, however the public opinion of the ruling class in England,…., changes with the fashion and in its own interests. Today England needs grain quickly and dependably – Ireland is just perfect for wheat-growing. Tomorrow England needs meat – Ireland is only fit for cattle pastures!’ (Engels, p.190).

Therefore, in order to uncover the determination of an ecosystem, which is apparently under human control, we do not begin with the actual natural contents of the ecosystem

 

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itself (which is the epistemological trap set by naturalism) but by explicating the social form in which the ecosystem operates under. This is the basis for Marx’s famous statement on the natural laws:

‘No natural laws can be done away with. What can change, in historical circumstances, is the form in which these laws operate’ (Marx, 1868).

If this is true for the Irish grass ecosystems of the nineteenth century it is still true for the twentieth first century and the grass lawns of suburbia.

Unfolding the essential social form of the suburban front lawn from its discrete empirical manifestations

The ontological premise of this article is based upon the following quotation from Marx:

‘The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ (Marx, 1973, 1973, p.101).

Accordingly, what I want to propose is that the suburban front garden is a complex entity determined by a unity of diverse processes, which originate from both the natural and social realms. The latter point is crucial as I attempt to move away from the inherent trend of sociologism (Murphy, 1995) within the vast majority of social and cultural accounts of this particular spatial entity.

In examining several discrete areas of research, much of it seemingly unconnected, it can be revealed that the front lawn is one of the most ‘fundamental and function-filled component of suburban landscape and that social and environmental implications of the lawn are exceptionally important to suburban studies’ (Messia,p.69). Also, as a determinant spatial entity, it can provide us with a crucial insight on how certain social relationships within modern society, especially with regard to identity, have become ‘spatialized’. Equally, it can also throw light on how we attempt to idealize nature within the front garden while at the same time we degrade the immediate environment by applying a vast range of chemicals to it.

The appearance of the suburban front lawn has been conceptualized in many ways: as a consequence of the desire to escape urban congestion and the desire for healthier living in more ‘rural’ setting with cleaner air. In creating this ‘natural’ space, by replacing the concrete of the urbanscape with natural vegetation, the suburban end of this spatial and textural dichotomy, it is the grass plant which provides the ‘natural’ to this new spatial configuration as Ewen suggests in the following:

‘If the metropolis was an overwhelming realm of rock and steel megaliths, the suburbs were defined by small-scale, single family housing, and by grass and land’ (Ewen, p.224).

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Also, in locating this ‘natural’ space in front of the house, the desire to construct a buffer zone between the house and the street was similarly achieved (Ravetz and Turkington, p.180), – a kind of verdant moat (Jackson, p58):

‘There are several reasons for the ‘need’ of the suburban lawn. One reason is a desire to remove one’s family away from the rest of the population. This is exemplified in the fact that the middle class deliberately reshaped the landscape by surrounding single-family homes with yards in their new communities to strengthen the power of the family’(Clarke, p.238).

And this was achieved by spatially reconfiguring the relationship of the domestic house to the public street by constructing a front garden between them:

‘Lawns, fences and distance from the urban core minimised intrusions, allowing the middle-class housewife to exercise control over her domain, safe from threats posed by outsiders. Instead of being situated directly on the street, suburban homes had a front garden and a large strip of lawn as green insulation from the threatening outside world’ (Kleinberg, 1999, p.148).

The attempted insulation of the residents from the street ‘passer-bys’ by creating a buffer zone was only a determinant of the spatial distancing, – it did not follow on that the ground cover would be grass. However, when we bring in the mass production techniques of suburban house building, the grass lawn becomes the ideal solution to the cultural desire of privacy on behalf of the consumer and the fordist producer of suburban house construction. The greatest exponent and originator of this approach to suburban house building was William Levitt, who built more than140,000 houses around the world, but gets his name as the founding father of suburbia with his building of Levittown on New York`s Long Island begun in 1947. Levitt described his enterprise as industrial and Fordist:

‘We are not builders, we are manufacturers. The only difference between Levitt and Sons and General Motors is that we channel labor and materials to a stationary outdoor assembly line instead of bringing them together inside a factory on a mobile line. Just like a factory, we turn out a new house every twenty -four minutes at peak production’ (quoted from Tom Bernard, ‘New Homes for Sixty Dollars a Month’, American Magazine, April, 1948, p105)..

However, even Levitt admitted that no one had discovered how to prefabricate the land (Baxandall and Ewen,p.121). But that does not necessarily imply that the land structure could not be changed to accept more easily the mass building techniques of house construction. Mass building techniques require and promote uniformity in all aspects of its operations including its land base. According to Sennett, this uniformity was achieved by the application of the abstract grid structure to physical space:

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‘The grid can be understood, in these terms, as a weapon to be used against environmental character – beginning with the character of geography. In cities like Chicago the grids were laid over irregular terrain: the rectangular blocks obliterated the natural environment, spreading out relentlessly no matter that hills, rivers, or forest knolls stood in the way’ (R.Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye.p.52).

To build on land it is necessary to clear it and level it. Natural features of the landscape, such as small hillocks, ravines and even small waterways, are eliminated in order to create a uniform base to ‘run’ the assembly type production efficiently. The consequence of this need for land base uniformity was that topsoil and even subsoil was removed at the initial stage of site construction. After construction, some of the topsoil made its way back into the landscape, not as it existed in its natural habitat before house production but into the right angled plots and on leveled surface surrounding the newly erected houses. In this sense, it is impossible for building contractors to restore the land to its former appearance. The natural curves of the former landscape are eternally blighted by the spatial uniformity of the standing house and the necessary leveling of the terrain for the production process. What bits of the natural landscape that make it back into the newly reconstructed land (street) scape are a few trees and some of the original topsoil. The topsoil is now retained and contained in the right -angled plots of suburban homes. The newly and evenly spread top soil becomes the material base for the emergence of the front lawn. Because grass is probably the quickest and cheapest ground cover to plant in comparison to other plant ecosystems, coupled with the desire to have the buffer zone, it is not surprising that a grassed front lawn becomes the spatial form for the suburban household to engage in other social activities using the front lawn as a mediating entity.

According to Veblen, the new suburban classes were also replicating the tendencies of the various types of leisure classes to engage in ‘conspicuous consumption’. (Veblen,p) Here the lawn became a manifestation of the lower classes attempt to emulate the cultural tastes of an elite classii and in particular to show ‘the passer-by that the homeowner was well-to-do and aesthetically advanced’ (Jenkins, p.32). Therefore, front lawn garden appears to ‘have popped a new social soul into its body’ (Marx, 1867) where it functions to reflect the character of the house occupiers.

In ‘constructing’ a status for the inhabitants of the household, the lawn becomes invested with moral as well as aesthetic values. A well-kept lawn reflects positively on the character of the inhabitants and conversely a poor lawn is seen to degrade not only the household but also the neighbourhood. In a 1999 survey conducted by Robert Feagan and Michael Ripmeester discovered that front lawns are symbols of individual and community identities. As one of their respondents stated that ‘people who have nice lawns are nice people, hardworking. They care for their property and for themselves’(Feagan and Ripmeester, p.629). But as another resident exclaimed, ‘If even one person lets their lawn go, it makes the neighborhood look disgraceful’ and ‘an untended lawn shows that people are selfish and don’t care about others in the neighborhood’ (Feagan and Ripmeester, p.629). Here a new physical dimension is achieved where the ‘well-kept’

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and ‘tended’ lawn is constantly mowed to such an extent that a horizontal form emerges over the grass lawn. But, the process of aesthecization can go beyond this particular smooth form to include the actual content that make up the horizontal plane. This potential emerging form is concerned with the tonal consistency of the grass, which produces a monotonal effect, especially with regard to colour and texture. But this particular aesthetic form can be challenged by the physically ‘popping up’ of the demon weed within the lawn structure.

This appearance of the lawn weed can cause moral outrage among neighborhood residents as Fulford comically purports in the following:

‘As the death of a canary announces the presence of gas in a mine, so a dandelion’s appearance on a lawn indicates that Sloth has taken up residence in paradise and is about to spread its evil in every direction. And when a whole lawn comes alive with dandelions – it can happen overnight, as many know to our sorrow – then that property instantly becomes an affront to the street and to the middle-class world of which the street is a part’ (Fulford, p.1).

But the potential invasion of the front lawn is not entirely restricted to uninvited plant species but can also include human beings. This is where the front garden and especially the lawn, encapsulates the social contradiction between being simultaneously a private and public social forms. According to Messia, this aspect of the front lawn ‘presents aninteresting mix of public and private space’:

‘The lawn in and of itself is a piece of land, privately owned and maintained yet is in another way considered communal property whose beauty is to be enjoyed by those who live around the domicile and adds to the social and physical environment that is the neighborhood’ (Messia, p.74).

When there is no fence, wall or hedge between the garden and the public pavements, which is especially a common aspect of American front gardens, this sweep of lawnscape creates a visual sense of openness and unhindered mobility on the spatial dimension. But at the same time it actually hides the continuing presence of social relations associated with private property. Therefore, in a very real sense the immediate appearance of the spatial relationships between the differing private spaces of the individual lawns, which constructs a park-like effect conceals the actual social relations, which constructed that sweeping lawn effect, – private and individualized labour performing on their own respective frontal lots. But the aesthetic of the parklike-lawnscape merely operates at the level of the visual, – any physical movement onto the actual surface of this apparent ‘collective’ lawn may evoke the social and legal strictures associated with private property. Here we have an example of the dialectical relationship between the spatial and social (Goonewardena, p.66) as the lawn aesthetic takes on a moral dimension of collective commitment, where the lawn visually indicates the commitment that a household has for the neighbourhood. But also, the social mediates the spatial as in the existence of private property within the lawnscape. These differing social functions of the lawn, creates not only a distinction between the bodily movements of the feet and eyes

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(Crandell, p.125), but also the contradictory roles they play in the suburban lawn. The eyes can wander through the lawnscape but the feet are constrained by the lawn acting as a physical boundary between private property and public pavements. This ambiguous blurring of the realms of private and public space within the ‘lawnscape’ of a neighborhood community and the status giving function of the front lawn indicates how spatial relations increasingly play a significant social role in modern suburbia.

In our unfolding of these diverse social forms in which the front lawn has become immersed in, which as we have uncovered are often contradictory, we arrive at the essential determining structure, where the lawn is simultaneously a societal object and a naturally growing ecosystem. Fulford captures this essential contradiction:

‘Lawn-making is the art that conceals art; it is, in fact, the only aspect of gardening that hides both the work done and the nature of the plant life itself. A lawn that achieves perfection ceases to look like plant matter and resembles a fake version of itself. It has no bumps, no weeds, and no variations in colour; from a distance, the perfect close-mown is indistinguishable from Astroturf’ (Fulford, 1998, p.1).

It is this essential determining contradiction that we need to analytically uncover.

Socio-ecological metabolism, metabolic rift and exhibition value

In order to unfold these complex relations of nature and society operating in this space we call the front lawn, we need to have a theoretical framework that can transgress that divide without collapsing it. Marx developed such a concept in his socio-ecological metabolism. This concept came about as Marx attempted to understand how society relates to nature and nature to society, as the following indicates:

‘The production of life, both of one’s own labour and of fresh life by procreation, appears at once as a double relationship, on the one hand as natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social is meant the cooperation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what manner or to what end’ (Marx, German Ideology).

As part of this general relationship of the mode of production, society directly engages with the forces of nature, in which there is a necessary exchange (or flow) of materials from nature to ourselves and from ourselves back to nature. Marx used the concept of metabolism to capture this reciprocal exchange of materials between a living entity and its environment. Metabolism includes both the natural and social forms of exchange and this relationship is crucially located at the level of the labour process within a particular mode of production. Marx states this in following with regard to how man engages with nature through a process of metabolism:

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‘Labour process …regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces …in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adopted to his needs’ (Marx, Capital, vol.1, p. 283)

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Therefore, the complex relationships expressed in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism is present in are modes of production but takes on a specific form depended how it is embedded into its particular mode of production. The socio-ecological metabolism is universal to all modes of production, but the metabolic rift is only particular to some. According to Marx, the metabolic rift is found in the capitalist mode of production, especially in large-scale capitalist agriculture. The decline in the natural fertility of the soil was/is due to the disruption of the soil nutrient cycle. As crops and animal products were being produced in agricultural fields, nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium were being removed from these fields and shipped to locations far removed from their points of origin, especially to urban centres. As a consequence, the constituent elements of the soil that made up the products/commodities were also removed and not replaced naturally. The transportation of these nutrients in the form of agricultural commodities had two important consequences. Firstly, they created a rift in the natural soil cycle, which had to be replaced by human intervention or the conditions of reproduction in the soil structure were permanently undermined. Secondly, the excretion of these nutrients in the urban environment tended to cause pollution in the local waterways, eg. the river Thames in London in the nineteenth century.
However, this conceptualisation of the metabolic rift by Marx has taken place on a macro level, between spatial areas such as town and country, between periphery and core regions and between colonialising and colonialised countries. But, we want to use this theoretical insight of the metabolic rift at a more micro level, – the front garden and more specifically the lawn area of the front garden. This concept will give us the methodology to deal with the complex interrelationships between the natural processes of an ecosystem and the social processes that have apparently metabolized in the front lawn garden.

However, the front lawn as a natural entity is not directly embedded in a capitalist labour process (as a commodity with its own exchange value), but it is certainly a social entity, which has a tendency to be an aesthetic object. As an aesthetic object, according to Walter Benjamin, it can have an exhibition value. Exhibition value is about creating an object so that it can be put “on view” and thereby available to be visually appropriated by others than the producers. But, not only is it on public view, it is also an aesthetic object. In ‘designing the garden’, the gardener(s) are composing an aesthetic entity which is determined by cultural conventions of composition and production. Benjamins’ concept of exhibition value simultaneously captures the public aspect of the front lawn as well as its determination as an object of artistic production.

J.S. Stein has argued that the ‘perfect lawn’ is actually a perfect antithesis of an ecological system. A perfect lawn is ‘still’ and ‘silent’’ whereas a prairie or meadow is humming with life (Noah’s Garden,p138). The ‘stillness’ of the lawn as an aesthetic object is counterpoised by it being a natural living ecosystem (modified). It is this contradiction, which is the essential determining feature of the front lawn. I want to

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begin our analysis by looking at a grass ecosystem, with its own the natural laws and tendencies (without human interference).

The natural meadow: grass without a labour process and therefore content without form (social)

The natural process of grass growing is to do so in a naturally occurring ecosystem. An ecosystem is a group of living and nonliving parts within an environment that interact with each other. Since we have been discussing grass, we want to concentrate here on one particular environment, – the natural meadow. Here, every element of nature – animals, insects, plants and soil – all work together to create a natural cycle of events in the meadow. In essence, an ecosystem is a cycle or process, where every part or element, perform different roles in the reproduction of the cycle. Plants feed the animals, the animals manure the land, the manure feed the soil and the soil feed the plants. Therefore, reproduction of the ecosystem in each of its forms and each of its stages is just as continuous as is the metamorphosis of the forms and their successive passage through stages (Marx, Capital, vol. 2 p.180). And since this ecosystem is in a constantly rotating orbit, every point is simultaneously a starting – point and a point of return (Marald, 2002), I want to arbitrarily begin our analysis at the soil structure.

The basic structure of the soil consists of rock particles broken down by frost and thaw action, wind and water flow to produce different textures that produce soil types. Part of the soil make-up is organic matter, – about 5% in mineral agricultural soils, which consists of vegetable and animals remains in various stages of decay – along with water and air. The organic matter provides the home for soil animals, such as insects and earthworms who are crucial in the process of soil functioning. Earthworms in particular mix and restructure soils. Their deep borrows drain the soil and bring air to the recycling bacteria; it pulls down leaves from the surface, macerating and mixing them with earth in its gizzard and the casting them forth as the fine, crumbly particles that best suits the penetration of roots. In an old pasture, earthworms in one hectare can pass about 90,000 kilos of soil through their guts in a year; in an orchard, they can, over the winter, remove 90 per cent of the fallen leaves (Viney, April 20th ,2002). By comminuting litter, soil animals play a catalytic role to the dominant decomposers, – the soil microbes. Agricultural soils commonly contain about 300 million microbe individuals per gram. Some of these microbes use inorganic compounds as energy sources. Several take nitrogen from the air and bind it into molecules so that it becomes available to the plants. However, the vast majority of soil microbes get their energy by breaking down organic matter to release it. In doing this, they also release inorganic nutrients from the organic matter to the plant roots, and so control plant growth. The microbes work to provide just the right conditions for healthy plant growth. The plants in turn feed the animals and the insects, who when they die manure the land and the cycle begins again.

However, unlike the lawn, the natural ecosystem of the meadow is not a mono -culture of grass species. It is a fine balance of differing species, which co-exist without any one specie gaining dominance. Because of plant diversity within the

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ecosystem, nature on its own cannot produce a very abundant harvest of any one particular specie, either in terms of quantity or of quality. In the natural ecosystem, many seeds produced would never germinate, due to adverse conditions caused by competition from other plant specie or animal predators. Competition and its inherent dictum of ‘the survival of the fittest’ within nature eliminates the possibility of a plant monoculture. Consequently, plant monoculture is not a naturally occurring event in nature, it is a product of human intervention into nature. The lawn is a monoculture of grass growth, determined by human labour.

The labour process under grass monoculture: constructing the ‘rift canopy’.

Lawn grass production is a result of human interference in the natural cycle of reproduction in an ecosystem. Labour intervention is determined by the need to allow grass growth to dominate other plant species. Consequently, the natural forces of the ecosystem is now determined by the social forces of the intervening labour process. For example, in order to allow the desired plant monoculture to emerge at its initial stage, it is necessary to eliminate the other plant species as early as possible. This is usually achieved by digging up the existing plants and cleaning the topsoil of non-grass species. And by sowing the grass seeds exclusively on the newly cleared ground, the conditions of grass dominance is created within the reproduction cycle of the newly established ecosystem. Subsequently, the various stages of growth of this particular plant specie become crucial opportunities for the living labour of the labourer to intervene in the cycle to provide continual protection for the ‘chosen’ specie against all the other potential competing species. For example, in the next stage, – of germination, the seed can be protected from seed eating predators by a number of processes, such as, machine sowing, use of netting and top-dressing. These processes allow the seed to geminate and take root. Watering may also be needed in establishing turf grass from seed. This is a delicate balancing act as the soil must be kept moist but not excessively wet until the seeds germinate (McCarty et al.p.26). In certain locations, the new seedlings will need to be fertilized after seeding.

In the initial construction of the lawn, the labourer sets in motion the natural forces of grass growth to respond to the desire to obtain grass dominance over potential competing other plant specie. In doing so the ecosystem has been modified. Modification has been achieved through human intervention. This intervention has merely operated along the horizontal plane in eliminating competition from other plants. It has not impacted on the vertical movement of the grass growth. Therefore, the process of modification is not initially concerned with the natural forces operating within the plant structure itself, it is merely establishing a species monoculture. Each type of turf grass grows at a different rate and at differing levels of fertility, which does not bother the gardener as long as grass dominance is created. This stage of development ends with the first cutting of the grass, as the intervention process moves into the actual physical structure of the grass plant itself. Mowing is the critical intervention into the grass monoculture because it creates the conditions for the emergence of the metabolic rift within this modified ecosystem. As the mowing of the grass occurs, its clippings are accumulated to be disposed of. It is estimated that a half-acre lawn would yield nearly

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three tons of grass clippings a year (Jenkins, p.173). The most immediate effect of the disposal of these grass clippings is the removal of these nutrients in the clippings from the cycle of the ecosystem, as predicted by Marx in his conceptualization of the metabolic rift. However, not only are nutrients removed in the clippings but also the physical structures of the grass above the cut line. Cutting the grass removes not only the upper parts of the plant but also activities, which occur in those upper parts of this ecosystem, such as flowering and wildlife movements. This is the second stage in the modification of the grass ecosystem, where grass maintenance strategies are developed to create an aesthetically pleasing lawn. Accordingly, the cut line of the grass becomes the most visible sign of the presence of the metabolic rift in this newly modified ecosystem. The grass height line is therefore best conceptualized as the rift canopy, where its presence acts as an artificially created barrier which sheers through the natural cycle of this ecosystem. All above this rift canopy, the natural features of the ecosystem are removed by the action of mowing, all below remain but remain stunted in their development by the lack of flow from above the rift canopy. Without the tall grass, animal and bird life is restricted and thereby removing their functions from the ecosystem. Therefore, the rift line/canopy has a chain reaction on the entire ecosystem and its remaining elements. In its essence, the rift canopy is a labour activity, which attempts to ‘reify’ the natural processes of plant growth.

The most dramatic feature of this process of plant life reification is the attempt to transgress the vertical tendencies of grass plant growth by sheering into the plant stems to create the appearance of a flat horizontal surface, through the activity of mowing. And in doing so human labour is constructing a two dimensional representation from a naturally occurring three dimensional characteristics of plant growth. The reification of rift canopy is further maintained by the attempt to preserve the physical integrity of the canopy surface. Anything that penetrates the canopy from above (fallen leaves and other plant debris) or below (worm casts or weeds) are removed. Accordingly, the metabolic rift and its most visible indication of its presence, – the canopy require a huge amount of labour input to continually maintain the grass lawn monoculture. However, this labour input can by lowered somewhat by the use of technology, especially chemical technology.

The ‘chemical’ moments as an attempt to curb the Rift

According to environmental scientists and landscape designers an ‘industrial’ lawn rests on four basic principles of design and management: – composed of grass species only; free from weeds and pests; continuously green; and kept at a low, even height (Borman et al, 1993,62) However, this definition of the ‘industrial’ lawn is essentially confined to its aesthetic appearance rather than on how it came about through a production process. Defined as a production process, it would be determined by a combination of a ‘natural’ ecosystem, a labour process and a technological process. Thelatter two processes should be seen as an attempt by the gardener to overcome the problems, which have emerged with the presence of the metabolic rift in the growth cycle of the grass ecosystem. But ‘righting’ the rift must be achieved within the confines of the

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aesthetization framework, as the strategies adopted need to, at least, maintain the aesthetic appearance of the lawnscape if not to enhance it. But getting the ‘balance right’ has proved to be difficult with a number of unforeseeable consequences, not only for the immediate lawn ecosystem, but also for surrounding and wider ecosystems. The gardener has been ‘helped’ by capital, in providing labour saving devices in the forms of lawn machinery and lawn chemicals.

The chemicals provided by industrial capital intervene in the lawn ecosystem in varying ways and at differing stages of the growth cycle. Even before the grass is sown, knock- down chemicals, in the form of herbicides, can eliminate all vegetation in the soil. After clearing the soil, pre-emergence treatment of chemicals can prevent weed seeds germinating and finally post emergence treatment will kill all weed plants (Jenkins, p.162). In eliminating the competition from other non grass species, the application of these chemicals encourage not only the initial establishment of grass growth but also lower the amount of labour input needed to construct the lawn. However, chemical applications continue beyond the construction stage to become increasingly part of the maintenance strategies of the lawn itself. This occurs to such an extent that the lawn becomes dependent upon the application of chemicals to reproduce itself as a single species of grass ecosystem. Along with herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers can be added to the ‘natural’ process of grass production, with each application performing a particular function in the overall reproduction of this enhanced ecosystem. But the crucial consequence, is that these chemicals become a near determining factor in the life cycle of the lawn, – the aesthetic lawn, as they become increasingly part of the production process, their use may be initially seen as a labour saving device, but in the long run they can actually have the opposite effect. ‘Saving labour’ and keeping the grass short can create further dependency on chemical intervention by increasing the amount of interventions required to keep up the appearance of the ‘perfect’ lawn as Weigert states in thefollowing.

‘The shorter the lawn, the faster it dries and the quicker it changes color, thus the more it needs to be watered; the shortness allows more water to run off; if clippings are removed, the more it must be fertilized to keep it healthy enough to resist the range of threats from pests or weeds. Because they must be watered and fertilized frequently, short lawns grow more rapidly and thus require more mowing. They do not provide cover for a variety of insect life that may keep each other in check. Shortness makes any ‘illness’ immediately visible. Threatening invasions require rapid intervention, typically some kind of ‘cide”, i.e., the suffix from the Latin word ‘to kill’ is used to refer to toxics, such as pesticides. Finally, short grasses never go to flower or seed. Needed seeds must be purchased and spread.’ (Weigert,p.86).

However, the chemical impact on the overall health of the immediate grass ecosystem may have a number of unforeseen consequences. For example, quick release fertilizers (water soluble) become available to plants almost as soon as they are applied to the lawn. However, the overall effects are short-lived and sometimes even harmful to thelawns’ long-term health. Because a quick release fertilizer will produce rapid leaf and

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shoot growth, it can in certain cases cause excessive growth in leaf and shoots and thereby reduce root growth and can cause leaf burn. This makes the grass plants more susceptible to draught and disease. However, even beyond the immediate ecosystem, more damage can occur through the medium of run-off. Soluble fertilizers can easily be washed away by rain. This run-off can enter other ecosystems beyond the physical confines of the lawn. Therefore, the lawn chemicals through run-off creates unknown biochemical links to other organisms in the soil, to birds, to animals and to ourselves. These links may be damaging the health of these other organisms. Having created the problem, the chemical industry has attempted to cure it by producing slow release fertilizers. Slow release fertilizers are an alternative to the soluble fertilizers because nutrients are released at a slower rate throughout the season. This allows the plants to take up most of the nutrients without wasting them through leaching. However, there are some drawbacks associated with their use. Because the rate of release is dependent upon soil moisture and temperature, the availability of nutrients to the plants may not be constant or predictable. In short, nutrients released slowly may not be available when the plants need them. Again, capital comes to the rescue, by providing a new product, – the blended fertilizer, – one that mixes slow-release with soluble fertilizer. In this range of new products, each new product was an attempt to overcome the difficulties created by its predecessors, as they intervened in the natural cycle of the lawn ecosystem. In this way, capital was responding to problems it itself had created in its intervention strategies in the ‘natural’ lawn ecosystem.

However, if capital was unable to overcome the difficulties associated with the rift, it did not stop it trying to solve other problems in the life cycle of the lawn. For example, the problem of thatch is another attempt of chemical penetration into this grass monoculture. Thatch is a layer of dead roots and grass blades that build up just under the lawn surface. It can block water, grass seed and chemicals from reaching the soil. Initially, the problem arose in the early Eighties, lawn owners in the U.S.A. were told that thatch increased the susceptibility of the lawn grass to insect and disease problems. Capital soon set about ‘solving’ this problem for the gardener. However, it was soon realised by the scientific community that the problem of thatch was in fact a problem caused by capital itself rather than the natural processes of the lawn. The increase in thatch in lawns was directly linked to the increase in chemical applications to the lawn. Micro-organisms and earthworms that naturally break down the thatch layer in the lawn were being killed by the chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The solution was simple but not profitable. Stopping the use of chemicals allowed the lawn to recover, but it took a minimum of three years to restore the biological health of the soil (Jenkins,168).

However, the use of chemicals as a form of intervention in the grass monoculture is ideally suited to its task. Chemical intervention has a near magical quality about it as they pass through the rift canopy without damaging its aesthetic appearance. It is at this material intersection that the technological process of chemical application directly interacts with the aestheticization process without seemingly having any detrimental effect on each other. And it is also at this same metabolizing intersection that the rift canopy can take on another social form, – the aesthetic veneer.

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The labour processes under the lawn aesthetic: maintaining the aesthetic veneer

The material structure of the rift canopy is determined by the human activity of mowing the grass. On this rift canopy emerges the aesthetic veneer, which establishes the lawn as an aesthetic object. The veneer impregnates the rift canopy with aesthetic qualities made up of a number of characteristics. With regard to the lawn colour, green is sought in preference to brown or yellow. Its’ desired texture is smooth rather than rough and its density should be thick rather than thin. Its tonality should be monotone rather than mottled and its tactility should be soft rather than harsh. And finally, its height ought to be low rather than high. These qualities and their relationships to each other determine the structure of the aesthetic veneer. And as an aesthetic veneer, it can perform many differing functions in the composition of the garden as a whole, as a foil for the more dramatic planted beds, a green foreground to the dwelling, and creating the illusion of space etc.

A ‘poor’ lawn occurs when the natural ecosystem breaks out of its aesthetic straitjacket, destroys the ‘order’ of the canopy with the ‘chaotic’ movement of nature. The immediate effect is that the rift canopy breaks up as the grass naturally grows into clumps and dykes of differing heights. As a consequence the aesthetic qualities of smooth texture, of thick density and of low height disappear from the now shattered aesthetic veneer. If this situation is allowed to continue and the natural ecosystem re-emerges from its ‘iron cage’ of human intervention. It is a certainty that the grass monoculture will be invaded by native weeds, which will destroy the remaining aesthetic qualities of the aesthetic veneer, of green colour and its monotone characteristics. Therefore, the rift canopy and the aesthetic veneer resting on it, need to be constantly maintained through human intervention. The degree and intensity of human intervention may vary from household to household depending on the subjective desires of the direct labourer(s) and their ability to fulfill their gardening dreams for their lawnscape. For example, a croquet lawn in England needs to be mowed every second day for about forty-five minutes. It may also need to be scarified, – removing the dead grass and moss during the growing season. Watering may also need to be done during a dry period. Weed removal is a constant task and in some seasons aeration is required by solid and hollow tyning. On lawns that are cut very low, worm casts have to be removed in order to discourage weed growth and prevent the blades of the lawn mower being blunted. However, it is possible to maintain the rift canopy and yet abandon the aesthetic veneer, by just cutting the grass/weeds and abandoning the grass monoculture. If any traces of the aesthetic veneer remain, they can only be appreciated from a distance, where the aesthetic qualities of colour and smooth texture are perceived to be maintained but the other qualities are lost. The conclusion to be reached here is that the rift canopy and the aesthetic veneer are the result of two distinct labour processes. The rift canopy can be maintained by mowing alone, while the veneer is composed of many types of labour interventions beyond the mere cutting of the grass. For example, the aesthetic qualities of green colour, monotone appearance, thick density and smooth texture require a variety of labour activities such as weeding, scarification, and aeration. Worm killing, top dressing, overseeding and water irrigation may also be required to maintain the aesthetic veneer. These labour and

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technological interventions into the natural cycle of grass development are determined by the demands of maintaining the lawn aesthetic. Some of interventions will be needed on a constant basis during the growing season, while others will only be required when the need occurs. In drought weather conditions for example, the amount of watering will have to be increased in order to maintain the grass growth and preserve the aesthetic veneer.

However, unlike the mere preservation of the rift canopy, the presence of the aesthetic veneer invites a close inspection of its compositional qualities and thereby creating the conditions for a gaze of long duration. This is so because the aesthetic veneer has a greater propensity to exude the properties of exhibition value than the rift canopy. Therefore, the aesthetic veneer of the front lawn, like any artistic object, encourages contemplation of itself with a connoisseur eye, while the lawn with just a rift canopy attempt to get away with a glance (Slater, 2009, p.100). In short, a lawn canopy needs only to be accepted as adequate, while the lawn veneer needs to be extolled as it seeks status for itself and its author, – the gardener.

The estranged labour of the lawn maintainer: ‘betwixt and between’ the forces of nature and society

The lawn as we have conceptualised it is in a similar situation to Marx’s ‘freshwater fish’ in his work, – German Ideology:

The ‘essence’ of the freshwater fish is the water of the river. But the latter ceases to be the ‘essence’ of the fish and is no longer a suitable medium of existence as soon as the river is made to serve industry, as soon as it is polluted by dyes and other waste products and navigated by steamboats, as soon as its water is diverted into canals where simple drainage can deprive the fish of its medium of existence. (German Ideology, p.58/59)

Both the natural forces within the ‘medium of existence’ of the fish and the lawn have been modified by society. The process of modification in the case of the freshwater fish has been determined by industry and with regard to the lawn by the aesthetic forces that are imposed upon the grass lawn ecosystem.

As we have discovered the process of modification that has occurred in the production of the front lawn has two stages in its development. The first stage is the construction of the lawn as the labourer sets in motion the forces of nature under his/her direction. Here, the social forces of intervention into the natural cycle of the grass ecosystem are dominant as the natural forces are curved to the designs of creating a grass monoculture, – constructing the physical ‘form’, in which the ‘contents’ of the grass ecosystem has to operate within. In the second stage of modification, – the maintenance strategies stage, the natural forces come to the fore as they determine when the labourer can intervene to retain the lawn canopy or/and lawn aesthetic veneer. Although, the natural forces are modified in the ‘medium of existence’ of a monoculture, they crucially maintain the propensity to develop and grow, especially vertically, on a continuous basis. Subsequently, this natural

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tendency of the grass plant to break up the smooth lawn canopy, determines the timing of the social interventions. In this situation, the labourer responds to the growing demands of the lawn ecosystem. The labourer must curb these natural forces in order to maintain the lawn canopy. But in doing so, these modified natural forces and their relationship to the social forces of intervention, become the basis for the ‘externalisation’ of the labourer’s activity in the production of the lawn aesthetic. Marx outlines the nature of externalisation in the following:

The externalisation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him, and begins to confront him as an autonomous power; that the life he has bestowed on the object confronts him as hostile and alien. (Marx,Early Writings, p.324)

In the context of the timing of social interventions, the externalisation of the lawn producer is determined by the natural growing rate of the grass plant. Although, he/she has ‘bestowed’ life to the lawn in creating it, the gardener now has to live with and work with that creation, which with regard to the timing of its growth development does seem to have a life of its own. The externalisation of this labour is determined by the constant need of the labourer to respond to the growth patterns of the grass plant and maintain its aesthetic veneer. Therefore, the estranged labour of the gardener is initially determined by the natural tendency of the forces of nature to move away from not only being a monoculture but also away from being ‘strait-jacketed’ into being a reified object of canopy with an aesthetic veneer. However, there are wider social forces affecting the grass maintainer beyond merely responding to natural time of grass growth, which further heighten this estrangement, and they are determined by the changing nature of society itself.

These wider social forces that impact on the production of the aesthetic lawn revolve around the issue of time. Specifically this is concerned with finding the time to ‘do the lawn’. It is estimated that to maintain a modest home lawn involves 150 hours of labour in a year (Jenkins, p.19). And this time element has to be found within the work-leisure patterns of the gardeners. This relationship is itself determined by the householders position in the labour market. With regard to the USA, work patterns have dramatically changed over the last two decades or so. Juliet Schor in her work, The Overworked American (1991) estimated that the typical American worked approximately 160 hours per year than she or he did twenty years ago. This is equivalent of working 13 months every year. As the amount of time increased at work, less time can be allocated to leisure pursuits such as gardening. But mowing the front lawn has still to be done. With increasing time demands being imposed on the occupiers of the household, the front lawn may become a troublesome burden rather than as an ‘escape’ from the constraints of everyday life. In this new social medium of existence, the front lawn and the necessary work upon it becomes an object which has created a relationship of estrangement for the householders as they become increasingly squeezed ‘betwixt and between’ the forces of nature and the forces of society. However, a number of strategies can be adopted to release one from the ‘iron cage’ of ‘doing the lawn’ and thereby act as countertendencies

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to this process of estrangement. One can hire a gardener to do the gardening for you. Also, one could construct a symbolic lawn garden by paving over the garden area of the front yard. Finally, one could retire from work, where the retirement age sees an increase in people’s enthusiasm for gardening. But the choice of these strategies is very muchdetermined by the lawn maintainers position in their own ‘natural’ life cycle or by their ability to buy in labour and thereby avoid dealing with the combined forces of nature and society on the front lawns of suburbia.

Conclusion: the Front lawn as a complex entity ‘because it is the concentration of many determinations (processes), hence the unity of the diverse’ (Marx)

The apparent paradox of the mowed lawn is that its appearance in the immediacy of viewing creates the impression of it as a reified entity, which belies (and even denies) its ecological essence of being a living process, – a modified ecosystem determined by a metabolized unity of natural and social laws of motion. And further more as an aesthetic object, with its veneer, it tends to be a space of representation , – representing the ideal of perfect harmony between nature and society where the lawn is perceived as the pinnacle of the evolutionary relationship between nature and society, – a social order imposed upon nature’s chaos. The lawn as a medium for representing this utopian union further distracts our attention away from the reality that its production is increasingly determined by chemical inputs and the risk that this trend may be damaging the health of the ‘natural’ entities on both sides of the socio-ecological metabolic divide. Therefore, the front lawn continually extols the highest virtues of nature and art, but is increasingly dependent on the use of more and more artificial means of production, especially chemicals. In this light, the global front lawns of suburbia, to paraphrase Benjamin, could best be summarized as an estranged work of art and nature in this age of chemical reproduction.

Postscript: The determining ‘roots’ of Irish grass: its diverse social forms:

Having completed our conceptual odyssey into the abstract moments of the metabolized processes of the front lawn, and returning to the particular grass growing systems of Ireland we now possess the conceptual tools to challenge the apparent dominance of ‘naturalism’ in interpreting the grass growing abilities of Ireland. In Ireland grass appears ‘natural’ because it is so extensively grown as the following suggests:

‘Grassland covers a multitude of topographical and geographic sites: from acid upland grassland to productive neutral grassland, from flooded callows to turloughs and dry limestone grasslands.[….] Grassland is so commonplace we hardly notice it. Yet it is our most important vegetation type – it covers most of the landmass. Horse racing, football, hurling, golf, tennis, and bowling are all played on grass. We see grass on road and railway verges,…..’

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In short, grass is the physical mantel that covers Ireland and this mantel effect is determined by the dampness of the climate. Engels suggests that Young was one of the first to propose this connection:

‘Arthur Young considers that Ireland is considerably damper than England; this is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil. He speaks of cases when the turnip and stubble-land, left unploughed, produced a rich harvest of hay in the next summer, a thing of which there is no example in England’ (Engels, p.185).

But dampness has to be considered as part of the natural content of the various types of grass systems identified above, in that it determines the propensity at which grass grows but not why and how it grows. This is determined by social form under which the grass content is allowed to grow. Our investigation of the front lawn uncovered how the specific social form of the aesthetic dominated the grass ecosystem of the lawn. However, the other grasslands of the ‘Emerald Isle’ and their specific social forms await to be analyzed.

End Notes

1 Engels reiterated the same essential point but crucially extended the range of ideologues to include Irish landlords and he also pointed out the social implications of this ideological position for the native Irish people:

‘From Mela to Goldwin Smith and up to the present day, how often has this assertion been repeated – since 1846, especially by a noisy chorus of Irish landlords – that Ireland is condemned by her climate to provide not Irishmen with bread but Englishmen with meat and butter, and that the destiny of the Irish people is, to be brought over the ocean to make room in Ireland for cows and sheep!’ (Engels, p.185).

11 With regard to the American emerging suburban middleclass, it was an outgrowth of a desire to achieve the European aristocratic ideal of a tamed and beautiful open space (Teyssot, p.20)as had been obtained by the robber barons of the Gold coast. (Baxandall and Ewen). The grass lawn was introduced into Ireland by the Anglo-Irish landed elite as they create ‘Little Englands’ in their parklands and thus demonstrating thatcolonialism can operate not only on the cultural level but also within the ecological (Slater, 2007).

Works Cited

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Bernard,T 1948, New Homes for Sixty Dollars a Month, American Magazine, (April). 19

Chevalier, S. 1998, From woollen carpet to grass carpet: bridging house and garden in an English suburb, in Material cultures. Why some things matter, edited by D. Miller, London, University of London Press.
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Politics, edited by M. Lindstrom and Hugh Bartling: Lanham, Maryland, Rowan & Littlefield.
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ABSTRACT

In this article, we argue that the physical structure of the front garden and its ecosystem is determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. The essential social form is that of visuality,- an abstract compositional force which provides conventions for assessing objects but also for reshaping their surface countenance and establishing their location within the garden.

Accordingly, the social processes of visuality are materially realised in the labour processes of gardening, while their consumption is mediated through the concrete process of gazing. The identified social processes include the prospect, aesthetic and panoptic dimensions of visuality. Labour conceives and creates them, while the physical structures and the natural processes reproduce and maintain them beyond the production time attributed to gardening. But they are increasingly undermined by the natural tendency of the plant ecosystem to grow. Consequently, the essential contradiction of the front garden is how the laws and tendencies of the plant ecosystem act as a countertendency to the social forms of visuality.

This paper shows that beneath the surface appearance, there exists complex relationships between nature and society in this space we call the suburban front garden.

Introduction

In the social sciences in general and in sociology in particular, gardening and gardens have been a neglected area of research. What does exist is rather eclectic and diverse body of specialized knowledge. Our major criticism of the sociology of the garden is that it has concentrated on discovering the essential social/cultural identity of this physical entity and the subsequent functions it ‘performs’ for the immediate residents of the suburban household and the surrounding neighbourhood. The consequence of this form of sociologism is that not only is nature left out and subsequently needs to be brought back in, but also that the actual diverse physical structures of the garden fail to get discussed. Therefore, the spatial aspect is eliminated from this type of sociological analysis. In order to retrieve the natural and the spatial, we need to investigate the internal dynamics of the garden itself and attempt to explicate the relationships between the social, the natural and the spatial within the physical confines of the front garden. Accordingly we propose that these three aspects of the garden should be seen as processes which can interact with each other to form the essential structure of the garden1. We also suggest that the determining process is the social, which establishes the form in which the other two processes operate under.

And this essential social form of the cultural/social is a process of visuality. The concept of visuality attempts to capture the complex nature of gazing, incorporating the subjective process of seeing and the concrete objects seen. Therefore, the process of visuality is a continuous dialectical relationship between seeing and the seen. And as the

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subjective process of seeing is of a constant factor in gazing, accordingly it is the visible structures of the seen objects which determine the specificity of the process of visuality. We have located three specific forms of visuality which are present within the physical confines of the front garden. They are the prospect, the panoptic and the aesthetic forms ofvisuality. All three of these concrete processes of visuality form the ‘inner’ unity of the general abstract process of visuality which dominates the natural and spatial processes of the front garden. However, the prospect form of visuality is a necessary precondition for the panoptic and aesthetic processes because it creates the physical conditions for ‘depth’ of vision, – an essential requirement for the other two processes of visuality to operate. But, even before a specific process of visuality can occur, it is necessary to have sufficient space to either see through or to see in. This is provided by the crucial spatial relationship between the suburban house and street thoroughfare, where the front garden acts as a buffer zone between these ‘worlds’. We, accordingly begin our analysis at the spatial level and where the garden functions as a buffer zone.

But before we begin, it is necessary to have a brief word on our theoretical process of exposition in which we have engaged with in this paper. As suggested from our above comments, our paper has a definite logical structure to it as we attempt to unfold how the aforementioned processes are linked to each other in complex ways. We follow a precise logical procedure of progressing from one level of analysis to another. This is so because the unfolding of the categories of analysis at one level establishes the form, and thereby the necessary precondition, in which the following structures of next level have to work with (2). Therefore, the spatial level locates the garden as a buffer zone and provides the physical precondition for the emergence of the prospect process. This in turn, leads into

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the physical and social form of the prospect, which is subsequently absorbed into the process of panoptic visuality. Consequently, our sequence of analysis follows this succession where we begin with the garden as a buffer zone and then continue on to explicate the essential structures of the prospect visuality and then the panoptic process. And as the panoptic appropriates the prospect visuality within its framework, it is a more complex process of visuality than the prospect one. Consequently, although these two types of visuality have crucial differences which distinguishes the complex from the simple for instance, they also possess common characteristics. One common element (or moment) in these processes is that they are essentially about structuring the garden in order to see through it. But the aesthetic form of visuality, although it appropriates the distanced span of the prospect process, is essentially about gazing into the garden, specifically at designed focal points, – flower beds, shrubs and tree plantings. In constructing the aesthetic visuality through various labour processes, the gardener is creating a spatial entity which is not just a medium or conduit for the prospect and panoptic gazes but also a focal point of attention in itself for gazing upon. Therefore, our analysis of the aesthetic follows on from the our explication of the determinants of the prospect and the panoptic forms of visuality, as the aesthetic visuality can only exist within the physical confining contours laid down by the dicta of the panoptic process. Having uncovered the essential determinants of the social form of the diverse processes of visuality, we reach a point in which we can begin to assess their impact on the natural process of the garden ecosystem.

The natural process of the garden plants and their natural laws of development and growth operate under the social forms provided by the processes of visuality. The gardening labour processes consequently modify the natural ecosystem according to the

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imposed social forms of visuality. At this point in our analysis we can locate how the garden natural ecosystem and its inherent natural tendency to grow and develop acts as a countertendency to the imposed societal countenance of plants and their idealised physical location in the garden as established by the social forms of visuality. Therefore, crucially the natural process of the plants form a metabolic relationship with the social processes of visuality within the front garden (3). And finally we examine how the contradictory tendencies of the aesthetic and panoptic forms of visuality can manifest themselves on the empirical level when the street passer-bys attempts to gaze into the front garden and are confronted by the dilemma of competing visual focal points as suggested by these social forms of visuality. A compromise is attained, where the potential long duration of the aesthetic gaze and the continuous attempt by the object of the panoptic gaze to avoid detection, the actual gaze which emerges ‘metabolizes’ itself into a mere fleeting glance.

The Empirical and Theoretical Limits to the Sociological Conceptualization of the Front Garden

Many sociologists see gardens as cultural objects which represent a wide range of meanings about ourselves (Bhatti 1999; Groening and Schneider 1999; Hoyles 1991; Weigert 1994). Throughout history gardens have presented opportunities for developing connections to nature (Wilson 1991), for expressing power relations and creating aesthetic representations of nature (Verdi 2004: 360). Domestic front gardens (and gardening within) have been presented as a haven and retreat from public life (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989), but, as others have pointed out, it is carried out in a semi-public space (Constantine 1981; Ravetz and

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Turkington 1995). The distinction between back and front gardens seems particularly relevant here, as they are subjected to different forces and produce different practices. ‘[R]esidents elaborately tend their front yards, while using backyards as utility areas’ (Grampp 1990: 182). Or, in the words of one of the respondents cited in Bhatti and Church’s study (2001) on gardens in the UK:

My garden is my retreat. The front garden, like the rest, is lawned and open plan:it is very plain. This is intentional … I do not want the front to provide any expectations of what the back is like. The public and private image kept separate! (p. 378).

In opposition to the idea of the front garden being just a private affair, it has also been conceptualised as a place designed for the consumption of others (Grampp 1990). A debate has emerged about aesthetic design features of the front garden. Chevalier (1998) and others contend that front gardens are meant for the private gaze of the owners: a view from the front window. Others assert that the front garden is for public consumption and shaped in a way which maximises its impact on passers-by (e.g. Fiske et al. 1987). In modernity, the most dominant trend in the conceptualization of the front garden is to see it as a signifier of social status: a public space to show off social standing and ‘taste’.

In contrast, some have argued that status-seeking through gardening has become an obsession among sociologists rather than a true reflection of what the gardeners themselves think they are doing (Oliver 1981: 191). In the same light of the status-seeking gardener, other sociologists have conceptualised the front garden as a space for facilitating

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neighbourliness which is invested with a moral value and expresses a commitment to the wider community (Chevalier 1998; Robbins and Sharp 2006; Sime 1993; Weigert 1994). If there is any common theme to these accounts, it is that they are essentially concerned with how front gardens as cultural objects help to construct an identity (individual and/or communal) for the domestic inhabitants who live behind these semi-public spaces.

However, the overemphasis of the social aspect of gardening in the above works has eliminated the possibility of seeing the front garden as a natural living entity. As a consequence, it has eclipsed the conceptual divide between socio-cultural practices and nature’s dynamics by collapsing the two into a single, amorphous notion. This reductionism has taken sociology in a misleading direction, – into the excesses of sociologism, according to Murphy:

Sociology has correctly emphasized the importance of the social. But there is a point beyond which the rightful place of the social becomes the exaggerated sense of the social, beyond which the enlightened focus on the social becomes a blindness to the relationship between the processes of nature and social action, beyond which sociology becomes sociologism. The assumed dualism between social action and the processes of nature, with sociology focusing solely on the social as independent variable, has mislead sociology into ignoring the dialectical relationship between the two (1995: 694).

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Sociologism, therefore, tends to exaggerate the autonomy of social processes and ignores the natural components of the garden environment. The garden, as conceptualised by a sociology characterised by sociologism, is merely represented as an aesthetic object, which performs many and often competing cultural functions for its producers (4).

But sociologism tends not only to elide the natural processes but also spatial aspects of the garden – front and back – where architectural structures and design features are crucial determinants in constructing its ‘shape’. To avoid the pitfalls of sociologism, we thus need to develop an analysis that combines the social with the natural and the spatial. We propose that the social processes which operate in this spatial entity are essentially visual in determination. And this visual tendency is captured in the concept of visuality. This general abstract process of visuality both shapes and reflects various gardening labour processes. As a consequence, gardening is about creating the material and spatial conditions in which the general abstract process of visuality operates (5). All of the levels mentioned – the social, the spatial and the natural – provide various moments for the process of visuality to reproduce itself. For example, a hedge can simultaneously be shaped to look pretty (social) and can act as a barrier of entry (spatial) while its physical structure remains a living plant (natural) We will now turn to the presentation and analysis of some empirical material that exemplifies the visual qualities of front gardens and their respective social processes.

Methodology and empirical findings

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To investigate the visuality of front gardens, we used a visual methodology and conducted a photographic survey of gardens in five areas of Dublin – Castleknock, Templeogue, Leixlip, Lucan, and Walkinstown – which were selected according to their socio-economic profile and level of affluence. Ten gardens were drawn from each of the areas.

After receiving permission from the residents, the fifty front gardens were photographed from different angles, yielding more than three hundred photos. They form the empirical basis for the analysis which follows. Ten in-depth interviews were also subsequently conducted.

By engaging in a content analysis of the photographs, we discovered trends in the shapes of the gardens surveyed that suggested differing social processes were operating in the garden. These were not always obvious to immediate observation and on the spot interpretation. By photographing and analysing the spatial orientation of the planting techniques and inorganic structures – their aspects and focal points (6), we were able to compare and contrast the spatial dimensions of the front gardens and uncover trends in their architectural features. For example, Figure 1 shows how the householder has unimpeded view of the street, yet is unable to see their neighbouring house entrance because of the high hedge and tree acting as a screen between the two front gardens.

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1: The ‘funnel’ effect

These spatial orientations were noted and their frequency was counted as we surveyed the photographs. In this way we discovered that 42 gardens (84%) had an uninterrupted view of the street while many had a screen-like structure between neighbouring gardens. Overall, our photographic survey threw up the following empirical and spatial trends:

• All gardens had definite boundaries between themselves and the street;
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• Front gardens were not used for domestic purposes by the householders, with the exception of car parking;
• Most gardens had low boundaries on the street-side and high boundaries between the neighbouring gardens, ‘screening’ them from their immediate neighbours;
• A majority of the houses had a screen or light curtain in their front windows and doors
• All gardens had a strong aesthetic dimension to them which included architectural features as well as natural plantings.In attempting to make sense of these empirical and spatial trends, we can detect a number of contradictions which manifest themselves in or through the spatial entity of the garden. The physical boundaries which surround the garden inhibit physical movement into the front garden, yet the aesthetic display encourages visual engagement. Therefore, privacy is not an issue with regard to the public seeing into the garden from the street-side, yet it is an issue with regard to one’s immediate neighbours as a screen tends to block the adjoining neighbours. While the public are allowed to view the garden they are hindered in seeing into the house itself by the presence of net curtains on the front windows and doors. To unravel the nature of these contradictions we thus need to investigate the essential structure of the front garden and those forces which determine that structure. And as front gardens are designed and constructed by human endeavours, in combination with the forces of nature inherent in natural ecosystems, their visual analysis helps to uncover some of the complex interactions between social and natural processes.

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The suburban front garden as ‘buffer’ zone

In his work, The Decline of Public Man, Richard Sennett distinguishes street and the home as two differing types of living spaces, the street is conceptualised as ‘outer life’ and the domestic house as ‘inner life’. As the street facilitates contact with the threatening ‘others’, this contact must be negotiated: so as a way of interacting with other people on the basis of their differences. The inner life, on the contrary, revolves around what is shared and belongs to the family. It offers order and clarity while the outer space of the city is ever changing, never completed and necessarily ambiguous. In spatial terms, the social process of inner life inhabits the physical confines of the domestic house.

Sennet’s distinction between inner and outer life also ties in with Ravetz and Turkington’s (1995) concept of the garden as ‘buffer zone’ between public and private sphere:

[…] privacy was combined with decorative enclosure and display. Smog- resistant pivet hedging could be trimmed with military precision, iron railings could be defensive but also ornamental. Low walls with railings or fences with hedges could shield the front of the house from both street and side neighbours, and a floral arrangement in the front garden could be enjoyed equally from within and without. […] The primary function of these (front gardens) was to mark the boundary and act as a ‘buffer zone’ between the private home and the public street (p.180).

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From our photographic survey, we discovered that, besides the parking of cars and the storage of garbage bins, front gardens are typically not utilised. Only eight of the fifty randomly selected gardens we surveyed appeared to be used in some way: toys or balls scattered on the lawn; basketball nets installed on the wall; a cosy spot for pets. In contrast, many gardens featured benches which were positioned as a decorative feature, and were used mainly for ornamental purposes – to be seen rather than to see from. This is confirmed in some of the interviews: ‘I am never out in the front’ and ‘the front garden is more of a parking space than a garden’. The front gardens surveyed thus do not fall into the category of ‘inner life’ as they are not really utilised by their owners. Neither do they aspire to being a space determined by the outer life of the street.

Many gardens in our survey had clearly defined, low boundaries between the garden and the public street which facilitated ‘gazing’, though some gardens in the exclusive suburbs of Castleknock and the middle-class suburbs of Templeogue featured high street boundaries. Overall, a reliance on boundaries to protect privacy did not appear to be very widespread and this was confirmed in interviews with some of the residents. Most respondents did not express concern for the privacy of their front garden. The reason for this probably lies in the character of the passer-bys. Because of the way housing estates in Dublin are constructed as ‘cul-de-sacs’, they effectively segregate the various socio- economic categories from each other. As a consequence, rarely do perfect strangers walk past a front garden. Mainly neighbours and other residents in the locality make up the population of passer-bys: they are of ‘the same kind’, known to each other, at least by sight. They do not produce ‘alterity’. For this reason, the front garden and the street represents a

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public space of a particular kind: one which does not require an exercise in civility, in Sennett terms, but activates a sense of neighbourliness rather than face to face interaction with total strangers.

Consequently, because of the presence of low street boundaries and the likelihood that the passer-bys are actually neighbours, the front garden space acts as a buffer zone between domestic sphere and the public realm of the suburban street. Therefore, the front garden does not fall within the spatial realms of the inner or outer lives, as conceptualised by Sennett, but stands ‘betwixt and between’ these two types of living space. This suggests that Sennett`s framework may be applicable to urban street spaces but not necessarily to suburbia.

Visuality and the front garden: Creating physical preconditions for prospect gazing

A prospect describes a spatial relationship where an observer can see across an extended spatial plane without any impediments to his or her vision (Appleton 1996). This sweep of observable landscape can be contrasted with the visual characteristics of a normal urban street, which are inherently ‘close-focused, restricted and canalised’ (Sharp 1946: 65). In contrast to the urban where there is no spatial distance between the households and the street pavements, the suburban garden spatially separates the houses from the street. This process of distancing is a necessary precondition for the emergence of a prospect. With regard to the front garden, the householder or the street observer have an interrupted view through the physical mediation of the garden: the householder can see out and the street passer-by can see in. One respondent in our survey preferred to keep his hedge low on the

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streetside in order to see passers-by when driving out his driveway. Another complained about the increasing dimensions of his garden trees as they ‘screen’ the house and the garden too much from the street and he consequently plans to remove them. Both of these respondents demonstrate their awareness of maintaining a prospect plane through their respective gardens. Therefore, the front garden not only functions as a buffer zone but its physical dimensions are also ‘levelled’ to maintain a prospect. This levelling is achieved by the domestic gardener cutting back hedges and shrubs, or even eliminating obstructing plants in order to have a prospect. Accordingly, a front garden prospect is determined by an observing individual who wishes to see across the garden from any angle and towards any direction.

In general, the view achieved through prospect gazing is one without people: a deserted street or an unoccupied garden. But other times the prospect observed can in actual fact be another viewing subject. Herein, the dynamics of the prospect visuality dramatically change, as this potential social interaction creates the conditions for intervisibility between two subjects which may or may not initiate social interaction. If so, the meandering span of the people less prospect is superseded by the more focused attention of two interacting subjectivities. Most of the interviews conducted in Dublin stress the importance of the garden for neighbourly interaction. They state that neighbours stop to talk as they pass by the garden, and they themselves also stop to talk to neighbours when they pass by their gardens and see the resident pottering around.

However, in the concrete situation of the front garden, the buffer zone’s ability to maintain the mutually inclusive aspect of the process of intervisibility is challenged by the occupant of the ‘inner life’ ability to hide while being able to continue to observe, – ‘to see

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without been seen’. Thus the occupant(s) of the inner life space is able to hide because this particular occupant is usually ‘embedded’ in the built edifice of the house. In this new form, the spatial extremity of the inner life along the buffer zone continuum emerges as a space which has a prospect but also is a physical ‘hide’ embedded in the concrete structure of the house. But at the other extremity of the buffer zone there appears another edifice of a wall or fence which ‘protects’ the buffer zone from intrusion. This is the bulwark!

The social functions of the ‘bulwark’ and the ‘hide’ in the buffer zone.

According to Appleton (1996), the essential feature of an observing subject is to have the protection of a refuge so that the ‘seer’ cannot be seen (p.91). Consequently, in Appleton’s framework, a refuge is diametrically opposite to the idea of prospect as the subject attempts to get out of the line of visibility and hide away from the peering eyes of others. However, we prefer to use the concept of the hide rather than the refuge as the hide in wildlife practices is more about camouflage than seeking security as in a refuge. And with regard to the concrete example of the front garden the hide crucially involves concealing the domestic observer from the passer- bys of the outer life sphere, – the street travellers.

In our analysis of the determinants of the front garden, this is the first opportunity we have to explore the relationship between front garden and house, particularly with regard to the socio-spatial functions of the garden vis-à-vis the house as a place of concealment. In the emergence of American suburbia in the nineteenth century, creating domestic privacy and establishing the home as refuge/hide was a determining factor in the architectural design of suburbia:

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The desire to be insulated from urban chaos prompted new architectural forms. Leading architects built houses which deliberately sheltered the well-to-do from the passer-by and the urban scene. [….] The middle class manipulated and formed its environment as a bulwark against the city (Kleinberg 1999: 147).

And

There are several reasons for the ‘need’ of the suburban lawn. One reason is a desire to remove one’s family away from the rest of the population. This is exemplified in the fact that the middle class deliberately reshaped the landscape by surrounding single-family homes with yards in their new communities to strengthen the power of the family (Clarke 1986: 238).

And this was achieved by spatially reconfiguring the relationship of the domestic house to the public street by constructing a front garden between them:

‘Lawns, fences and distance from the urban core minimised intrusions, allowing the middle-class housewife to exercise control over her domain, safe from threats posed by outsiders. Instead of being situated directly on the street, suburban homes had a front garden and a large strip of lawn as green insulation from the threatening outside world’ (Kleinberg 1999: 148).

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Therefore, what is essential for this type of spatial ‘insulation’ to work is to have real or symbolic boundaries which are clearly defined and which act as a deterrent to the physical intrusion by ‘outsiders’, not only into the house but also towards it. In this spatial relationship, the front garden is bounded by the house at one end of the buffer zone, and a clearly identifiable barrier at the other end. The photographs of front gardens gathered in our survey gave a measure of the extent to which gardens were bounded spatial areas. All of our front gardens displayed clear and definite boundaries with adjacent gardens and the street. Dense hedges, palisades, walls, heavy fencing were used to maintain these boundaries. The great majority of our surveyed front gardens displayed definite boundaries between themselves and the street. Although, the bulwarks of the front garden were generally low, they acted as barriers to the physical movement of outsiders towards the house.

But if the bulwark of the garden impeded physical intrusion at one end of the buffer zone, certain physical features of the house itself restricted visual contact. For example, windows and glassed doors provide not only mediums to see out but also conceal the inner life of the house.

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2. The ‘hide’ of curtains.

This occurs in general on account of the differences in the intensity of light between the exterior and interior spaces of the house. As the major source of natural daylight is the sun, the exterior of building tends to be brighter than the interior space. And as Appleton suggests, light is conducive to seeing and deprivation of light is conducive to being not seen. This tendency to hide in the natural shade of the dwelling can be intensified by the hanging of net curtains or other opaque coverings. In our survey, we discovered that thirty eight out of the fifty investigated houses had a form of screen or light curtain hanging in their front windows, creating an advantage for the insider observer to engage in street gazing:

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The frame of a picture is like the frame of a window, and what better expresses the prospect-refuge complement than the old lady peering out on to the street from the gloom of an interior, veiled perhaps by net curtains, and hiding the greater part of her person behind the walls! By edging sideways beyond the frame of the window, she in a trice, achieve complete concealment. Strategically her situation is superb! (Appleton 1996: 114)

This physically advantageous position of the house for gazing upon the streetscape and its passer-bys, coupled with its inherent social forms of being a prospect and a hide simultaneously, creates the preconditions for the emergence of a novel, more dominating form of gazing – the panoptic gaze. To investigate this social form of the front garden, we need to turn to the theoretical works of Michel Foucault, and specifically his concepts of the panopticon.

The ‘gardened’ house as a panopticon:

Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1977) argued that the emergence of disciplinary forms of power sought to spatially exclude and confine deviants from everyday society within specific institutions. These institutions were a necessary precondition for the emergence of modernity. But crucially the modern institutions were ‘housed’ in newarchitectural designs that allowed maximum surveillance over its inmates. The ultimate

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surveillance building was based upon Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon or Inspection-house design. Foucault described the architectural principles which this design was based upon:

….at the periphery, an annular building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows light to cross the cell from one end to the other….By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery (p.200).

Our analysis shows that some (if not all) of these fundamental principles of the panoptic design are also evident in the spatial relationships between suburban houses, their front gardens and the street thoroughfare.

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3. The ‘panoptic’ garden.

These principles are physically mediated through and embedded in the structures of the front garden. The house ‘plays’ the role of the tower and the peripheric structure is the bulwark between garden and street. The crucial effect of backlighting described by Foucault is achieved in the front garden by the low height of the boundary, which frames passer-bys against the backdrop of neighbouring gardens, especially those that are on the opposite side of the street from the panoptic house/tower. Even though the passer-bys are not incarcerated inmates of the panopticon, they are captive to the powerful visibility of the panoptic mechanism of surveillance. Foucault (1977) expressed this idea in the phrase ‘visibility is a trap’ brought about by:

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The panoptic mechanism [which] arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately…. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the sidewalls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication (p.200).

In the panoptic complex of the suburban house, front garden, and streetscape, the inspector is now the inhabitant of the house and the ‘inmates’ are actually those people who pass by the front boundaries of the garden. Although the hypothetical tower is now flattened and the spatial location of the inmates and inspector are reversed, the same panoptic principles hold. What determines the continuing presence of the panoptic surveillance characteristics in our garden situation are the existence of the spatial boundaries which separate the ‘inspector’ from the ‘inmates’ and the maintenance of the visibility of the street ‘inmates’ by the domestic ‘inspector’ and thereby makes ‘it possible to see constantly and to recognise immediately’. Also, because of the ‘hide-like’ effect of the differing contrasts between the exterior and interior of the house with regard to varying intensity of light, the inspector is generally hidden from view, in order to fulfil the basic requirement of the panoptic gaze, that is, to see without being seen. According to Foucault (1977), this dialectic relationship is expressed in the panopticon’s architectural structures:

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The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen (p.201–202).

In the concrete situation of the front garden, this panoptic ‘dissociation’ is also present, with the ‘panoptic’ house and the ‘distanced’ boundary bulwarks creating the physical conditions for the emergence of the panoptic gaze.

However, not all front gardens have this essential requirement of low boundary walls and fences. Our photographic survey revealed interesting contradictions with regard to the differing heights of the boundary walls and fences. Only in some of the rather exclusive, middle-class areas did we observe high and thick street boundaries, mainly in the form of privet hedge or high concrete walls. High boundaries hardly figured at all in the less exclusive neighbourhoods, and rarely on the street but some did exist between neighbouring gardens. Only eight out of the fifty residences investigated had such high street boundaries. Castleknock and Templeogue displayed the highest number (three each) of such boundaries. Overall, the reliance on high boundaries to protect privacy was not very widespread. More crucially perhaps, such boundaries were used to screen residents more from their neighbours than from the public gaze. High neighbouring boundaries protected the panoptic inspector from receiving similar surveillance to that he/she was engaged in and created a more exclusive form of privacy by preventing people looking in from the street. To use Foucault’s terminology, the sidewalls prevent him (now the panoptic inspector) from coming into contact with his companions (his immediate neighbours). This is especially true when solid gates compliment the high boundaries,

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creating a completely enclosed space which guarantees privacy by excluding all forms of public intrusion while allowing sufficient natural light to reach the house. More importantly, these contrasting functions – eliminating public gazing and getting adequate light – can only be achieved through adequate spatial distance between the house and the front boundary. Our observations show that the necessary space for absolute privacy is hardly ever available in less exclusive neighbourhoods. Instead, high street boundaries are an attribute of the properties of rich suburban dwellers.

The crucial difference between a prospect and panoptic gazing is that in the latter situation the mutual recognition of the viewing subjects across the buffer zone is undermined by the householders’ ability to see and not be seen by the street occupiers. In this situation of restricted intervisibility, the prying householder dominates: (s)he can stand and stare in the ‘comfort and security’ of their home space at the ‘inmates’ of the street without having to recognize the mutual subjectivity that the ‘objects’ of observation also possess. Unhindered by the need to perform ‘civility’, the panoptic gazer is free to ‘observe performances, to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications’(Foucault 1977: 203). Herein, lies the power structure of the panoptic mechanism, where the object of the panoptic gaze has no ability to engage in a similar process of categorization. This occurs because the street passer-by is unable to see his observer and therefore unable to categorize the occupier of the house. As we have already noted Foucault expressed this power relationship in the following way: ‘He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never the subject in communication’ (ibid., p. 200).

In contrast, the street passer-by has no ability to resist both observation and categorisation by the panoptic gazer. Attempts to overcome this dominating surveillance

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relationship and to put a face on the ‘faceless’ gazer are likely to remain unsuccessful. The observer will remain hidden or only appear as a shadowy figure in a window. What the passer-by will definitely see is the physical dimensions of the house. As a result, the abstract social process of panoptic visuality ‘embeds’ itself permanently in the architecturalstructures of the house. This material manifestation of a social process preserves the activity of panoptic surveillance beyond the duration of observing. In a very real sense, the physical reification of panoptic visuality is achieved when the passer-bys become aware of the house and the physical structures of the front garden as the focal point of the panoptic social process (7).

The aesthetic visuality: Its ‘coming into being’ and its specific social form

The front garden contains not only man-made surfaces and architectural structures which mediate and subsequently help to reproduce the various social forms of visuality but is also characterised by a plethora of natural processes and objects which are central to the the relationship between society and its spatial setting. Nature in the front garden both helps and hinders the societal process of visuality while adding an aesthetic dimension. Accordingly, nature is aestheticized in various designed frameworks which present these front gardens for public display. Whiston Spirn (1997) emphasises not only the natural and artificial aspects of gardens but also how they are a consequence of designed forms:

Whether wild or clipped, composed of curved lines or straight, living plants and plastic, every garden is a product of natural phenomena and human artifice. […]

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Landscape architects construct nature both literally and figuratively, but the history of twentieth century landscape architecture has being told as a history of forms rather than a history of ideas and rhetorical expression (p.249–257).

These forms of garden designs are essentially about how plants and built artefacts are arranged in spatial relationships with each other to form a composition. And because gardens are about ‘coaxing and persuading’ nature into prearranged spatial relationships, and ornamental shapes, they take on aspects of social forms. The social construction of plants as ornamental and architectural structures of the garden is put in practice by purposely rearranging the spatial relationships between the plants, by manicuring the surface appearances of the plants, through trimming, pruning or mowing, and finally, by eliminating undesirable plants through mechanical weeding and the use of herbicides. Theresult is a certain ‘pictorial look’ which celebrates an aesthetic rendition (Crandell 1993).

The history of this ‘pictorial look’ goes back to the picturesque parks and landscape gardens of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown whose construction coincided with the modernisation and industrialisation of England in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These gardens were designed to look like painted pictures and were subsequently called the gardens of the picturesque. This picturesque characteristic was essential to designing a natural feel to these gardens. And although the picturesque garden had an ideology of appreciating nature as a ‘soothing retreat from modern urbanism’ (Helmreich 1997: 84), it was a highly artificial creation, relying on horticultural manipulation and technology. As the lawn was dominant spatial entity of the picturesque, its aesthetic ‘look’ was initially

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maintained by animal power. Livestock grazing was the ‘technology’ of lawn production prior to the invention of the lawnmower in 1830 (Lowen 1991: 50).

But behind the pictorial appearance of the garden was the ideology of the rural idyllic and an inherent anti-urbanism (Slater 2007). According to this view, the desired spatial location for human habitation was to be the ‘gardened’ landscapes of the rural countryside rather than urban cities and towns. In consequence, living this ideal meant moving towards the countryside and constructing as much as possible the Brownian landscape, including the essential feature of the grass lawn. As a consequence, the pastoral ideal fuelled an urban exodus, beginning with society’s elite and their landed estates in the eighteenth century, and then moving down to the upper middle classes and the emergence of suburbia in America and Britain in the nineteenth century (Bormann et al. 1993; Jackson 1985). The spatial expansion and subsequent suburbanisation of many Western cities also brought about the diffusion and ‘mainstreaming’ of Brownian design conventions. This trend is reflected in varying attempts to incorporate the essential physical characteristics of the Brownian landscape with decreasing housing lot sizes in the ever expanding suburbia. Water features tended to be eliminated, while the lawn, and to a lesser extent the trees were retained. The pure Brownian landscape was being diluted as it shrunk in physical size, leaving fewer physical icons to represent the romantic rural idyllic. It is from here that the front garden aesthetic comes into being in suburbia (Fishman 1987).

The evolution of the picturesque garden from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, which is rooted in the ‘artful’ cultivation of nature through various types of gardening labour processes, also allows us to chart the changing relationship between human society and physical environment. The apparently ‘natural’ appearance of the

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garden tends to disguise not only its manufactured origins but also those historically embedded social processes of visuality which directed its production. And while plants remain within the realm of the natural ecosystem, they are also ‘culturalised’ and ‘perform’ various types of aesthetic functions within the overall ‘pictorial’ composition of the garden.

One of the crucial aesthetic functions of plants is to soften the hard textures and the break-up the continuous sharp-edged lines of the built artefacts of the front garden including the house. For example, Ingram (1982) proposes that trees not only ‘soften’ the lines of the house but he also identifies particular shapes in the ‘architectural’ structure of trees in order to perform this ‘softening’ role:

Vertical lines of many houses can be effectively softened by small tree planted in conjunction with other plants at a corner. Tree shape is very important. A low- branched, rounded tree softens this line while a slender upright tree only accents the line (p.12).

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4. The ‘softening’ by nature.

Another use of natural entities in the social setting of the garden, according to Ingram (1982), is to help the garden observer to visually appreciate the ‘pictorial look’ presented:

A moderate amount of open area in the front yard can create the feeling of a large expansive area that allows the observer’s eye to move from the street to the planted areas (p.13).

In ‘creating a feeling’ or producing a ‘visual effect’ the gardener is performing an artistic act similar to a painter of landscape. In fact, gardeners use the same artistic conventions in

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producing the ‘effect’ of perspective as landscape painters. Rose (1983) advises his readers to engage in these perspective tricks:

‘To obtain a greater feeling of space, narrow plots may have to be ‘widened’ and short plots ‘lengthened’ artificially by playing perspective tricks, such as leading the eye across the plot to make a narrow area look deceptively wide. Lines leading down the garden away from the eye will give the impression of greater length. This can be heightened by reducing the width of such features as terraces, paths or beds as they run down the garden. [….] These simple perspective tricks work remarkably well and are very easy to contrive’ (p.16).

In covering various types of surfaces within the garden and those of its boundaries, the natural forms of plants not only ‘naturalise’ but also unify the setting by masking over the diverse physical differences of built structures. In summary, garden plants function as an aesthetic veneer and are the most visible concrete form in which a garden becomes an object of display in itself.

Nature within the social forms of visuality

As stated previously, panoptic visuality is maintained through specific spatial relationships between house, garden and street. Consequently, the architectural aspects of the garden, including its plants, must respond to these spatial requirements. Since the panoptic process determines the physical layout of the front garden, at least to some extent, the aesthetic

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form of the gardens tends to operate within particular spatial confines. Consequently, the aesthetic veneer both reflects and reproduces many of the panoptic physical structures. Plants and man-made structures such as paths, paving stones and pots produce and maintain panoptic structures, and at the same time reflect and reproduce aesthetic standards. Plants thus perform social and cultural functions but also retain their natural characteristics. They have their own developmental tendencies and exist independent from their respective social functions. As Marx commented in a letter to Kugelmann, dated 1868:

No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate (Marx and Engels 1934: 246).

In the case of the front garden, the form in which the natural laws operate is determined by the panoptic and aesthetic dimensions of visuality. For example, the lawn is a crucial spatial component for both prospect and panoptic visuality. The inherent ‘flatness’ of the lawn facilitates observation from a distance while its aesthetic form can act as a backdrop or foil for more dramatic displays of shrubs, hedges and tree (Strong 1994:108). But it must be kept mowed:

Lawn is a canvass on which the rest of the plantings are placed. A beautiful lawn will enhance any landscape, while a poor lawn will detract from the overall appearance (McCarty et al. 1995: 3).

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The attractiveness of the lawn ‘canvass’ or canopy is minimally maintained by the continuous labour process of mowing. Mowing creates a new natural form in which the grass ecosystem has to now operate under. This modified ecosystem loses not only the embedded nutrients with the disposal of the grass clippings but also those naturally occurring activities which take place in the upper sections of the grass plant above the cut line. Such activities include the storage of water, the flowering of the plant and the production of seeds. These missing activities within the modified grass ecosystem have subsequently to be replaced by various forms of human intervention, such as irrigation, over-seeding and the application of fertilizer and other forms of chemical inputs (Bormann et al., 1993). Ironically, a ‘natural’ lawn which is imbued with an aesthetic countenance has a tendency to look artificial:

Lawn-making is the art that conceals art: it is, in fact, the only aspect of gardening that hides both the work done and the nature of the plant life itself. A lawn that achieves perfection ceases to look like plant matter and resembles a fake version of itself. It has no bumps, no weeds, and no variations in colour: from a distance, the perfect close-mown lawn is indistinguishable from Astroturf (Fulford 1998: 1)

Accordingly, the labour process of mowing is not just about an attempt to reify the naturally tendencies of the grass to growth vertically towards the sunlight. It is also about human intervention: rendering the grass lawn as an aesthetic object which is ‘constructed’ by the household gardener for its display characteristics (Jenkins 1994). A ‘poor’ lawnoccurs when the natural ecosystem breaks out of its aesthetic straitjacket (Feagan and

34

Ripmeester 1991). The immediate effect is that the lawn canopy breaks up as the grass grows into clumps and dykes of differing heights. As a consequence, the smooth texture of the lawn canopy is lost. It can be restored by mowing and subsequently putting the grass ecosystem back into its ‘iron cage’ of the panoptic and aesthetic forms of human intervention. Therefore, the natural tendency of lawns and other plant ecosystems in the front garden is to counteract the imposed social forms. For example, without human intervention through the labour process of trimming, hedges may take on ‘an unpleasing shape’ that resists panoptic and aesthetic forms:

Left unclipped to grow as it pleases this hedging will develop an unpleasing shape. Radical pruning can be used to remodel it (Rose 1983: 18).

And herein lies the relentless struggle which takes place in both front and back garden and which is symbolic of the ever present contradiction between nature and society. The restless powers of nature, determined by its inherent laws of motion (growth), are pitted against societal forces which manifest themselves in various types of gardening labour processes. These labour processes attempt to give the plant ecosystem a societal countenance within an idealised spatial location which is of necessity at variance to its naturally occurring countenance of the plants within their own organic environment. Nature organically blossoms, while society attempts to reify. Hence in the garden the ‘superstructure’ of nature is humanized while the ‘base’ of humanly built structures is naturalized (Smith 1990: 19). Naturally, these processes do not exist independent of each other but are intertwined through a metabolic relationship (Foster 1999). According to Smith, it was Marx’s concept

35

of a societal metabolism that opened up a completely new understanding of man’s relationship to nature and its connections with the labour process:

Labour process…. regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces…in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adopted to his needs (Marx 1976: 283, in Smith 1990: 19).

The ‘needs’ in our case are adopted to the social forms of visuality which have ‘metabolized’ with the natural forces of the plant ecosystems to produce the phenomenon of the suburban front garden.

The ‘distracted’ glance of the neighbourhood passer-by

A crucial aspect of the front garden, as we have argued in this paper, is its visuality, which shapes its spatial qualities in complex ways. It determines not only the layout of the garden but also many of the activities that take place within it. However, although visuality is a key social determinant of the garden, it also takes on different functional forms which can come into conflict with each other. Contradictions between the aesthetic and the panoptic forms of visualities can manifest themselves in diverse ways. The propensity of the passer- by to look away from the panopticon of the house in order to avoid being identified and categorised constitutes one possible outcome. Attempting to conceal one’s subjectivity is helped by never stopping to stare at the panopticon. ‘Passing by’ in this context becomes a

36

crucial form of resistance to panoptic surveillance. Therefore, whatever type of gaze that the passer-by may engage in, it will have to be one which is done while moving. This inherent reaction to the ‘panopticon surveillance machine’ on behalf of the passer-by is that of continuing mobility. ‘Passing-by’ in this context becomes a crucial form of resistance to the panoptic gaze. However, this situation of the need to continual move is at adherence to the ideal position needed to engage in the aesthetic gaze.

The aesthetic role of the front garden has determined one of its essential characteristics, that is, its exhibition value (Benjamin 1992: 218). Benjamin (1992) has argued that the exhibition value is about creating an object so that it can be put on view and visually appropriated by others than the producers. But this visual form of appropriation is achieved in a state of concentration, where ‘a man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it’ (Benjamin 1992: 241). However, the reception of the front garden as a work of art with exhibition value needs to be achieved not only in a state of mental concentration but one in which the connoisseur is in a physical stationary position. But this desired state of concentration cannot be achieved by our passer-by as the panoptic visuality cuts across the potential aesthetic experience of the garden as he/she is propelled to keep moving in order to avoid the surveillance of the panopticon. Caught ‘betwixt and between’ the aesthetic and the panoptic forms of visuality, the passer-by can only give a fleeting glance at the aesthetic garden display. Savage (2000) has interpreted Benjamin’s conceptualisation of this situation as a state of distraction:

‘Reception of art in a state of distraction, however, does not involve ‘rapt attention [but] noticing the object in an incidental fashion’ (Benjamin, p.242) … Benjamin

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makes it clear that architecture offers the best example of an art from which is perceived in distraction, by passers-by. […] distracted passer-by gaze at buildings only in passing’ (p. 46).

While caught in a state of distraction not caused by ‘habit’ of familiarity (Benjamin 1992: 233) but by the ever-present process of panoptic visuality, our suburban passer-bys can only glance fleetingly at their front garden ‘works of art’.

Conclusions

In our analysis of the determinants of the suburban front garden we discovered that it was determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. These combined metabolic relationships between nature and society is located at many intersections of this metabolic system. The only common aspect of these diverse levels of interaction is that it occurs during gardening labour processes. However, the gardening labour processes are themselves distinguished by the type of social entity they are producing. These social entities or forms in the context of the front garden we conceptualised as forms of visuality, the prospect, the panoptic and the aesthetic. Accordingly, the particular combination between nature and society under the social form of the aesthetic will be quite different from that under the panoptic visuality. The latter moulds the natural structures of the plant ecosystem to enhance the visibility of the street from the house, while the former attempts to construct the natural plantings as an exhibitionary objects, to be neighbourly ‘works of art’. As a consequence, the metabolic relationship between nature and society with regard to the front garden can not be explicated at a general level, such as the garden entity as a

38

whole, but only at the particular level of the social forms of production, which in the case of the front garden are the diverse forms of visuality. Any search for a general definition of this metabolic relationship will be remain within the mists of idealism, or the specific sociological version of this type of idealism, sociologism.

Similarly, with regard to understanding the relationship between the private and the public spheres. ‘Public’ accessibility to the front garden is very much determined by the particular social form of visibility which the outsider attempts to gain access through. For example, the panoptic process of visuality and its crucial physical structure/moment of the boundary bulwark prevents any form of physical intrusion into the garden, while the aesthetic form actually encourages the passing public to gaze within. These contradictions and others which we identified in our introduction we can now explain the actual circumstances they come about and how they are an intrinsic part of the suburban front garden, – a spatial entity determined by diverse social forms of visuality.

Postscript

But in order to get a better understanding of this crucial metabolic relationship between society and nature, we believe that it is necessary to develop our analysis further in two opposing directions, – one empirical, – the other theoretical. With regard to the empirical, we propose that it would be worthwhile to examine other leisure spaces, such as public parks, golf courses and turf playing surfaces, where the social forms are not just visual but also may possess a social form which extols durability and resilience to footfall. The apparent contradiction between the social forms of visuality and durability would be

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interesting to investigate how they impact on the natural process of the plant structures in contradictory ways. The theoretical direction which we also believe is worth pursuing is that which would involve pushing the theoretical apparatus of this paper onto another level (or stage) into the actual internal metabolic structures of the plants themselves in order to uncover how the social forms of visuality of the garden determine the metabolic processes of the plants. Involved in this level of analysis would be to examine how the gardener reconstitutes the metabolic conditions of the plant ecosystem in order to enhance the social form of their visuality. Subsequently, it will be necessary to assess how gardener uses artificial chemicals to realize the ‘visual effect’. To achieve this deeper understanding of the socio-ecological metabolism of the plant ecosystem, we also contend that it is necessary to investigate not only the changing propensity of chemicals both natural and artificial to flow through the metabolic pathways of the plant but crucially also the actual changing structures of the metabolic pathways themselves. The grass lawn looks likely to be the most appropriate plant ecosystem for this type of research as it is the spatially the most dominant plant ecosystem in the front gardens of suburbia.

Eamonn Slater is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has edited two books with his colleague, Prof. Michel Peillon, Encounters with Modern Ireland, (1998) and Memories of the Present, (2000). He has published a range of articles on the Political Economy of nineteenth century Ireland, on Irish landscape, and various aspects of the sociology of Irish culture. He is currently doing research on Marx’s ideas on colonialism of Ireland and its ecological impact on Irish agriculture in the nineteenth century.

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Michel Peillon is Professor of Sociology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has co-edited five volumes of the Irish Sociological Series. His research interests include stratification and class, state and political life, social movements, welfare and immigration. He is currently engaged in the study of urban living, the social appropriation of urban space, collective life in the suburbs and urban social movements.

FOOTNOTES.

1. The authors would like to thank Aine McDonough, who carried out the photographic survey for our Dublin suburban garden project. The project was funded by NIRSA.
2. According to Banaji, Marx best expressed his method of presentation as an ‘expanding curve’ or spiral-movement composed of specific cycles of abstraction. Each cycle of abstraction begins and ends in the realm of appearances while the intervening analysis is concerned with the essential abstract form which determines the specific structure of that particular cycle:‘In the dialectical method of development the movement from the abstract to concrete is not a straight-line process. One returns to the concrete at expanded levels of the total curve, reconstructing the surface of society by ‘stages’, as a structure of several dimensions. Andthis implies, finally, that in Marx’s Capital we shall find a continuous ‘oscillation between essence and appearance ’ (Banaji, 1979,40).
3. Hayward argued that ‘this metabolism is regulated from the side of nature by the natural laws governing the various physical processes involved, and from the side of society by institutionalised norms governing the division of labour and the distribution of wealth etc.(within Capitalism). It is through the labour process that the social processes of society metabolizes with the processes of nature:

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‘Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He sets in motion the natural forces….., in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adopted to his own needs…..He develops the potentialities slumbering within nature, and subjects the play of its forces to his own sovereign power’ (Capital, vol.1:284).

4. The central concerns of the above ‘garden’ sociologists have reflected a general trend in sociology in the 1990s and that has been the emergence of the cultural ‘turn’ in sociology. And as Buttel stresses cultural sociology in particular and conventional sociology in general for the most part of the twentieth century has paid little attention to the biophysical environment (Buttel 1996).

5. 5  It could be argued that the Sociology of the front garden fell into the same theoretical trap as Marx suggested that Political Economy did with regard to private property, in that Political Economy proceeded from the fact of private property. It did not explain how it came into existence. In a similar criticism of Sociology, it could also be suggested that Sociology proceeds from the fact of the visualiness of the front garden. But crucially, it does not explain it.
6. 6  According to Jack Ingels the focalization of interest is the principle of design that selects and positions visually strong items into the landscape composition. Focal points can be created using plants, hardscape items and architectural elements (Ingels, 2004:133).
7. 7  This is becomes apparent when we remember that the passer-bys in their own respective abodes are themselves potential panoptic observers.

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This article explores how a form of visuality—the picturesque—became the essential framework for the emergence of theme parks on the landed estates of Anglo-Irish landlords during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially, the cultural forms of the picturesque evolved from the disciplines of landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics. These forms later became the design principles guiding the English Informal style of gardening. As a result, the original abstract concepts of the picturesque became physically embedded in the Irish landscape ecosystems, establishing these spatial enclaves as a picturesque theme park.

In becoming spatialized, the colonial ideology of the picturesque—designing the Irish landscape to resemble the English landscape—became a colonized space that was inherently hegemonic with regard to the native sense of place. By physically embedding the picturesque visual principles into the local ecosystems, the cultural forms of the picturesque took on ecological dimensions. Here, aesthetic forms of society merged with the natural forms of plants and their metabolic systems.

And in ‘naturalizing’ the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, any portrayal of a scene from the theme park tended to replicate the hegemonic position of the picturesque as the dominant place ideology. Since the portrayal tended to reproduce what the writer or artist actually saw, the problem was that the scenes were already changed and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality. This picturesque visuality fell from its dominant position with the decline of Irish landlordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The capacity for seeing (nature) with the painters’ eye was the Picturesque vision.

(Richard Payne Knight)

Where power was, there beauty shall reside.

(Ann Bermingham)

No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate.

(Karl Marx)

For the house of the planter is known by the trees.

(Austin Clarke)

Introduction: A brief history of the complex cultural forms of the picturesque

This article explores how a new form of visuality—the Picturesque—became the dominant framework through which the Irish landscape was interpreted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Initially consisting of painterly concepts that emerged from Italian landscape painting in the seventeenth century, the picturesque was theoretically developed in the eighteenth-century philosophy of aesthetics. These cultural forms of the picturesque subsequently became an interpretative mechanism through which landscape connoisseurship emerged as an elite cultural activity among Ireland’s landed gentry. Later, these ideological forms of the picturesque became the accepted principles that guided the design dicta of the English informal style of gardening in rural Ireland.

In becoming a gardening design framework, the cultural and ideological forms of the picturesque took on a material structure as these abstract concepts became embedded into the natural structures of the local landscape ecosystems. It is at this point that the gardeners of the informal English style responded to the cultural forms of the picturesque, and crucially where the cultural forms of this ideological circulation process of the picturesque entered into a material production process resulting in the picturesque landscape becoming a theme park. A theme park that not only reflected the contradictory cultural forms of the picturesque but also took on a spatial dimension where the design principles of the English informal garden attempted to transform the material structures of the Irish landscape by creating ‘little Englands’ in Ireland. These spatial enclaves on the landlord’s demesne, protected behind high walls, became a colonised space where the hegemonic picturesque held sway over the native sense of place.

This theme park and its cultural forms of the picturesque closed down when the legal buttress of landlordism fell in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We begin our analysis with a travelogue account of Ireland in the early 1840s.

A ‘picturesque’ travelogue to nineteenth-century Ireland

Travelogue writing on Ireland had its formative period from 1775 to 1850. The greatest travel writers of this period were Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Carter Hall. They undertook several tours of Ireland in the early 1840s, from which they compiled a travelogue published in several editions. Their stated purpose was to induce visits to Ireland, especially from mainland Britain:

“Those who require relaxation from labour, or may be advised to seek health under the influence of a mild climate, or search for sources of novel and rational amusement, or draw from a change of scene a stimulus to wholesome excitement, or covet acquaintance with the charms of nature, or wish to study a people full of original character—cannot project an excursion to any part of Europe that will afford a more ample recompense.”

In this opening statement, the Halls ideologically constructed Ireland as a place of escape, where one can depart from the routines of British everyday life and engage with exotic peoples living in a natural environment. What is strange about this construct is that it could be applied to Ireland at this particular period since the reality for the majority of Irish people was suffering from crushing poverty with no hope of escape. Therefore, the Halls seem to be evading the economic reality of mass poverty by encouraging their travelogue readers to see Ireland as a landscape picture:

“Wicklow is the garden of Ireland; its prominent feature is, indeed, sublimity—wild grandeur, healthful and refreshing; but among its high and bleak mountains there are numerous rich and fertile valleys, luxuriantly wooded and with the most romantic rivers running through them, forming in their course, an endless variety of cataracts. Its natural graces are enhanced in value, because they are invariably encountered after the eye and mind have been wearied from gazing upon the rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat, upon the scanty herbage of which the small sheep can scarcely find pasture… Usually, the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art, and it is impossible to imagine a scene more sublime and beautiful than the one of these ravines, of which there are so many.”

In this description, the pictorial quality of Wicklow’s landscape is structured on the syntax of the sentences. The Halls’ way of proceeding is to follow the description of the ‘high and bleak mountains’ with a description of the ‘rich and fertile valleys’. The syntax is sequenced around the word ‘after’, and this syntactical structure of the passage is not only imitating a viewing process but also a downward glance. The Halls have ‘placed’ their readers in the position of a commanding vantage point, allowing them to ‘see’ a wide sweep of the landscape. According to John Barrell, the main point in ‘constructing’ a textual viewing point is that it creates an imaginary space between the landscape and the spectator (reader), similar in effect to the real space between a picture and whoever is looking at it. This descriptive technique conveys the original sense of the picturesque—that which is capable of being represented in a picture.

However, on closer examination of the Halls’ text, another level in which their narrative celebrates the compositional techniques of the picturesque landscape painting of Claude Lorraine and Nicolas Poussin can be identified. According to Ernst Gombrich, Lorraine and Poussin employed alternating bands of light and darkness to create depth in their paintings to establish a foreground, middle ground, and background to their compositions. Such Claudean compositional techniques can be identified in the Halls’ account of the Irish landscape in the following passage:

“Descending from any one of the hills, the moment the slope commences, the prospect becomes cheering beyond conception; all that wood, rock, and water—infinitely varied—can do to render a scene grand and beautiful, has been wrought in the valley over which the eye wanders; trees of every form and hue, from the lightest and the brightest green, to the sombre brown, or—made so by distance—the deepest purple; rivers, of every possible character, from the small thread of white that trickles down the hill-side, to the broad and deep current that rushes along, furiously, a mass of foam and spray.”

In identifying the differing colour tones of the trees and streams, the Halls locate the spatial characteristics associated with perspective similar to that achieved by the picturesque painters. However, not only do the Halls use the compositional spatial patterns employed by Claude and Poussin, but they also used the same aesthetic categories. These were categories of the beautiful and the sublime, and they formed themselves into a dualism. Following the publication of Edmund Burke’s “The Origin of our Ideas about the Sublime and Beautiful” in 1757, the sublime and the beautiful became identified in the public mind as a pair of binary opposites. On one side of this dichotomy, the notion of the beautiful was held to consist of smooth flowing lines, smoothness of surface, and clear, bright colours. Stuart has even suggested that beneath the veil of Burke’s attempt at the analysis of beauty can be seen the gentle form of a woman’s body. The sublime was altogether an opposing quality that created an awe-inspiring and fearful feeling.

In the second passage from the Halls, the concept of the sublime was applied to the ‘rude and uncultivated districts, covered with peat’ of the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the beautiful was located in the ‘rich and fertile valleys’ where ‘the work of nature has been improved by the skill of Art’. Accordingly, the spatial difference established by the aesthetic dichotomy was further complemented by the new dichotomy of art/nature. This particular dichotomy distinguishes natural wilderness from manmade cultivation. These dichotomies complement each other as they incorporate each other within similar spatial locations. The sublime and natural wilderness is applied to the ‘high and bleak mountains’, while the man-made landscape of the ‘fertile valleys’ is defined as beautiful. All of these techniques of description found within the Halls’ travelogue suggest their overall framework should be described as picturesque. These principles of composition borrowed from the painterly tradition of the picturesque created a new type of visuality, which moved from the medium of painting to that of travelogue writing and the philosophy of aesthetics.

This new visuality of the picturesque was not a passive activity; it was a process that involved reconstructing the landscape in the imagination according to the compositional principles of the picturesque. As a consequence of this mental process of composition, objects in the real landscape and their surface appearances were conceptually structured into new relationships with each other, determined by their visual characteristics within the overall framework of the picturesque. This mediated relationship of the picturesque and its compositional principles had to be learned, and were indeed learned so thoroughly that it became impossible for anyone with an aesthetic interest in landscape to look at the countryside without applying them, whether or not they knew they were doing so.

The Halls did not just provide a guide to Ireland’s picturesque locations; they also created a framework that helped the landscape connoisseur to evaluate the picturesque qualities within identified locations—as the following suggests: “The glen is little more than a mile in length; and midway a small moss-house has been erected; to our minds, the structure—although exceedingly simple—dist

urbed the perfect solitude of the place; where the work of the artificer ought not to be recognized.” The adequacy of the moss-house in the Halls’ text and in the specificity of its picturesque framework was determined not by its use-value, but by its surface appearance within the landscape of the glen. Its subsequent condemnation as an aesthetic object was conditioned by its social form; it was physically constructed, contrasting negatively with the natural forms of the glen. However, an important question emerges from the moss-house quotation: Who is the ‘artificer’ of the condemned moss-house?

‘Planting’ the cultural forms of the picturesque in Ireland

The picturesque artificer in the above quotation was the landlord. Due to the landlords’ ownership of the land, they were the only ones with the power and capital to physically reshape the landscape in a picturesque way. The perilous legal position of the Irish tenantry regarding land occupancy, and the smallness of their holdings, prevented them from redesigning the Irish landscape on the grand scale required by the picturesque. From the middle of the eighteenth century onwards, it was the Anglo-Irish landlords who began to redesign their demesnes according to the dictates of the picturesque. For this to happen, the abstract concept of the picturesque jumped from ideological texts into concrete reality in the form of the English informal style of landscape gardening.

According to Reeves-Smith, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the parkland of the demesnes occupied around 800,000 acres, or 4 percent of Ireland’s landmass, with over 7,000 houses featuring pleasure landscapes of ten acres or more. The English Informal or picturesque garden was itself a rejection of the rigid formality of the Dutch and French styles. The greatest exponent of this English style was Capability Brown. The Brownian landscape was worked in three elements alone: wood, water, and grass. The old formal gardens were ploughed over, avenues left to wander like country lanes; the vista from the window became one of gently rolling greenery, with cunningly placed clumps of trees in natural positions. Although engendering a spirit of simplicity, this picturesque garden created subtle changes to people’s relationship to their landscape. According to Stuart, Brown’s most famous contribution was to create a transition from a landscape seen in two dimensions to a landscape fully integrated in three dimensions: landscape as a sculpture, rather than as a painting. The Brownian landscape was a designed set to be walked through rather than a mere stationary view from the ‘Big House’. As a consequence, the ‘garden’ began to move away from the immediate environs of the house and, in many cases, out of sight of the house itself, creating an even more natural feel to the redesigned landscape.

Although Capability Brown never made it to Ireland, he had his Irish disciples, most notably Dean Swift and the Delanys. The following is a typical informal Brownian ‘garden’ as described by the Halls: ‘In the demesne of Altadore, a small glen called the ‘Hermitage’, for which nature has done much, and art more. And here is another of the magnificent waterfalls for which the country is so famous. It is but one of the many attractions in this delicious spot; the grounds have been laid out with exceeding taste, the walks through it are very varied; and considerable judgment and skill have been exhibited in planting and ‘trimming’—the one being even more necessary than the other where the growth is rapid and luxuriant—as to obtain a new and striking view almost at every step.’

The Halls’ account oscillates between describing the naturally occurring forms of nature and artificial constructions, reflecting their tendencies to interpenetrate each other in the concrete reality of the garden itself. With regard to ‘planting and trimming’, the social process of design is combined with the natural processes of the plants, the ‘rapid and luxuriant growth’. As a consequence, the artificial aspects of ‘this delicious spot’, except for the physical walkways, tend to be disguised—hidden from view because the artificial features of the garden are in its design. In manicuring the surface appearance of the plants and purposely arranging the spatial relationships between the natural entities of the new ecosystem of the English Informal garden to ‘mimic’ the visual characteristics of the picturesque framework, the gardener was ‘redesigning’ nature in an idealistic way.

Thus, the construction of a picturesque ‘spot’, like the Hermitage above, is a result of an intended manipulation of nature to reflect an image and ideology concerning society’s relationship to nature. The ‘natural’ garden of the picturesque is, therefore, in a real concrete sense, an embodied ideology. Gallagher suggests that the emergence of the English informal garden in the middle of the eighteenth century indicated a societal change of perspective towards nature in general. The new perspective of the picturesque saw man’s position as being within nature itself, rather than as an agent to tame and regulate its forces as in the Dutch and French formal gardens. In the picturesque, nature cannot be conquered and at best only certain aspects of it can be manicured by society for its own ends. This tension between nature and society is materially manifested in the spatial difference between the beautiful and sublime aspects of the picturesque landscape as revealed in the following from the Hall’s description of the Crampton estate at Lough Bray:

‘The wall that surrounds these grounds is not, in some places as high as the bank of peat within a few feet of it, and the contrast between the neglect, the desolation, the barrenness that reign without, and the beauty within, is very striking, exhibiting the mastery which science and civilization hold over nature even in her sternest and most rugged domain. The cottage and grounds are here, in this lofty and unreclaimed region, ‘like Tadmor in the wilderness, or an oasis in the desert’.’

The spatial contrast between ‘the neglect and the barrenness’ of the bog outside the walls with the ‘order and cultivation’ of the garden within is further conceptualized in the aesthetic dualism of the beautiful and the sublime. The ‘beautiful’ in the above quotation, which exhibits the application of ‘science and civilization’, is located within the walls of the parkland. On the other hand, the sublime refers to the wilderness of the peat bog without. As a consequence, the sublime aspect of the picturesque could only be appropriated visually into the picturesque landscape as a backdrop to the beautiful within the garden itself. The landscape gardener could only physically reshape the beautiful aspects of the picturesque—those within the walls of the parkland—by constructing water features such as artificial lakes and meandering rivers, and planting alternating bands of grass and trees in the foreground and middle ground of the parkland. The sublime features of the picturesque could not be planted successively in the parkland without losing those characteristics which define them as sublime (i.e., being truly ‘natural’ and ‘awe-inspiring and fearful feeling’). These sublime characteristics can only be achieved by looking into the vast uncultivated wastes of bog land beyond the comfortable confines of the ‘beautiful’ walled gardens.

The ‘politics’ of the picturesque in Ireland: The 5 detached peasantry of the sublime

The landlords of Ireland were pivotal in the picturesque movement, commissioning journeymen painters to depict their demesnes in this style, educating their families in the connoisseurship of romantic, picturesque principles, and constructing picturesque gardens on their estates. The Halls, in their travelogue, explicitly praise the ‘beautiful spots’ of the picturesque, acknowledging the landlords’ gardening endeavors. However, this public appreciation likely had a practical aspect, as permission was needed from the landlords to access these spots. In County Wicklow, the Halls identify twelve owners of sixteen picturesque locations, with villages and towns mentioned only in passing. This perspective reflects the culture of the picturesque adopted by the landowning elite, which proved repressive to the native, peasant population and their sense of place.

By focusing solely on the picturesque aspects of the landed estates, the Halls’ narrative omits the working, productive aspects of these estates, fostering the notion of a socially empty space and ideologically detaching the peasantry from the landscape. This omission mirrors the silences of seventeenth-century cartographers who excluded the cabins of the native Irish from their maps, effectively erasing the peasantry from the picturesque narrative of Ireland.

The picturesque’s definition of certain areas as ‘hovels’ had significant implications for the occupants, suggesting that the nineteenth-century maps imposed a spatial discipline on the rural peasantry similar to the time discipline imposed on industrial workers by the clock. The picturesque introduced an aesthetic discipline, barring the peasantry from accessing land for productive purposes and leading to evictions when their dwellings were deemed unsightly for the picturesque landscape.

Edward Said views this spatial coercion as a form of geographical violence, part of an act of geographical violence through imperialism, where every space is explored, charted, and controlled. The picturesque in Ireland underwent similar stages of cultural imperialism, with picturesque connoisseurs exploring and capturing new spots, and controlling access to conserve them for their enjoyment, effectively barring the local population from these areas.

The picturesque’s transformation of the Irish landscape and the introduction of foreign flora species were part of a broader cultural and ecological expansion that followed the routes of the British Empire. While most introduced species integrated into the Irish ecosystems without much disruption, some, like the rhododendron, proved problematic. Despite the picturesque’s imposed nature, the aesthetic experience it provided was generally pleasing to the strolling connoisseur, masking the reality of its enforced imposition and creating ideological enclaves within the parklands.

The Picturesque Theme Park

The spatial aspect of the picturesque was crucial to the emergence of the picturesque as a theme park. Here, at the concrete level of spatial relationships, the circulation of the cultural picturesque forms allowed the garden design to move through space and time and circulate as commodities. Therefore, this social process of circulation of the picturesque began its life as an ideological perspective in the paintings and texts of its connoisseurs. This had a specific structure to it (its visuality) and a particular history of development over time and space (its cultural connoisseurship in the Romantic Movement). The actual spatial realization of this ideological perspective was achieved in the gardening techniques of the English informal style, where the garden designs of the picturesque consciously reflected the sensibilities of the picturesque in the spatial arrangements between the plants. The ‘planting’ of the picturesque constructed its location as a cultural enclave within a wider landscape of the Irish countryside. According to Crandell:

“This is the pivotal moment in the pictorialization of nature: what is designed (and owned) is composed to give the illusion of being natural, when in fact it is maintained as an enclave. To create the illusion, Brown’s garden used compositional conventions taken from painting. … Increasingly it meant something visual: a forested landscape with serpentine clearings.”

The picturesque enclave was therefore a constructed environment, owned and controlled by the landed gentry. It was their and their advisors’ interpretation of the picturesque that prevailed in the garden. The dominance of the designers/landlords in constructing their own specific version of the picturesque within these spatial enclaves was necessary to prevent the emergence of alternative ‘realities’, thereby disrupting the overall imagineering process. Within the boundary walls and through the gated lodges of the parklands, however, the experience of the picturesque enclave as documented by the travelogue writers and artists was not of domination and constraint imposed by the landlord class upon the connoisseurs, but the opposite: feelings of unrestrained mobility and freedom. Here lies the power of illusion inherent in theme parking, where the necessary form of design domination with its physically embedded aesthetic structure produced by the direct producers was subsumed under the cultural form of how that aesthetic form actually was experienced with its sense of free and unrestrained movement. It was the parks’ constructed topography that connected the embedded design structure to the sense of free spatial movement. As a consequence, the theme park designers found it necessary to distinguish between differing experiences of movement with regard to the body and its eyes, as Crandell suggests in the following:

“In painting, the rise and fall, advance and recess, and convexity and concavity of form has the same effect of creating movement as do hill and dale, foreground and distance, and swelling and sinking, in the landscape. For the spectator in an actual landscape, however, topographic relief does more than affect the eyes; it creates a distinction between eyes and feet and becomes a design principle that mandates that the foot should never travel by the same route as the eye. The eyes can travel quickly, ‘irritated’ by lights and shades, while the feet stroll leisurely over hill and dale.”

In the picturesque landscape, bodily movement was not explicitly determined or directly controlled by physical structures. There was no obvious process of focalization as in the more formal French and Italian gardens. The only exception to this tendency was in the proximity of the ‘big house’, and through wooded areas, where footpaths were constructed. As a consequence, the picturesque stroller was allowed to wander free and unrestrained, and this opportunity for undirected movement was determined by the lack of focalizing straight lines. The dominance of the serpentine design feature had the tendency to encourage the sensation of free, unrestrained bodily movement through this spatial enclave, but eye movements were controlled by the scenic sights provided by the landscape gardener. For example, in Kent’s gardens, the spectator was led from one ‘picture’ to another as “a continued series of new and delightful scenes at every step you take.” The differing physical movement and the differing pace of that movement between the body and the eye allowed the gardener the opportunity to design into the garden a sense of dramatic unfolding as the visual scenes ‘lured’ the body to move through the landscape. However, the visually exciting aesthetic appearance of the ‘scenes’ within the landscape had to be complemented by easy bodily movement through that landscape in order for the stroller to experience a feel-good effect. Any discomfort from any side of this sensory dichotomy would destroy the pleasure of the other.

Theme parking involved complete sensory cocooning from all possible undesirable sensations and for this to happen it had to occur in a controlled environment like picturesque parkland. However, the immediate aesthetic and sensory experiences were usually expressed either in the compositional forms of the picturesque (e.g., beautiful, sublime) or in the conceptual forms of sensory movement (e.g., unrestrained, free) or in both forms of sensory appreciation. When the ‘cocooning’ worked and the aesthetic experience was deemed to be successful, there was a strong temptation to use more allegorical forms of expressions in summarizing the overall experience. These more abstract associational concepts tended to symbolize a moral and spiritual meaning for these picturesque gardens. Concepts such as ‘idyllic’, ‘Arcadian’, ‘Virgilian’, ‘pastoral’, and even ‘utopian’ were appearing in cultural texts summarizing the picturesque experience: “What we are presented with in a Brown park is, apparently, a whole ‘world’. This world is Utopian in concept, offering a kind of perfection to the senses, where every alien or untoward element has been gracefully banished.”

The designed physical structures of the picturesque theme park and the immediate aesthetic categories that mediated and conceptualized the landscape as a ‘feel-good’ experience such as ‘beautiful’, ‘serene’, ‘serpentine’, and so on were appropriated by the allegorical concepts as their ontological conditions of existence. The constructed openness and physically uninterrupted lawns not only evoked feelings of freedom of physical mobility but also more philosophical feelings of political freedom, which could even emerge across the Atlantic:

“This appearance (of uninterrupted openness), however, is the consequence of design and calculated manipulation. The extraordinary appeal of this design in American landscape architecture is surely a result of the fact that the landscape garden’s potential for undirected movement feels like and looks like freedom.”

However, all of these grand allegorical concepts were conditional on the recognition of the aesthetic landscape categories being present in these garden enclaves and never vice-versa. The idea of the landscape garden being a ‘utopian world’ could not emerge unless that particular enclave had met all the aesthetic criteria necessary to fulfill the requirements of the ‘picturesque’ category. It is at this point, where these over-determined idealistic concepts were being applied not only to these spatial enclaves but were also being accepted without criticism, that the picturesque landscape became iconic of the political ideals and aspirations of the landowning class. These ideological categories of the picturesque have moved from the various cultural practices of art, philosophy, and travel writing to become ‘spatialized’ in the design forms of the informal English garden, waiting, like ancient hieroglyphics, to be interpreted by the connoisseur and thereby to emerge again as not just a conceptual expression of an aesthetic experience, but as an ideology reflecting the ideals and social values of the landed elite class. In doing so it provided a meaningless dream of a new ‘world’ beyond the gritty reality of everyday life and, especially, class relationships. Like all theme parks, they were about escape from the physical spaces of mundane reality into a space of idealized nature, and escape from the harsh realities of everyday economic life into an idealized dream world of democracy exclusively for the landowning elite:

“In a more general sense, the landscape garden’s forms were presented as a political challenge to the brash, worldly, and authoritarian attitudes that the English attributed to the axial and geometric French gardens. The English landscape garden was taken to be more natural because it was rooted in a democracy.”

Yet it was only democracy for the few: the ones who controlled the ideological and material production of the picturesque. However, in its own political habitat, the English informal garden may have been accepted as democratic, but such an intellectual flight of fantasy in the context of colonial Ireland came up against a real turbulent political reality, whose inhabitants were ready and willing to disturb the constructed tranquility of the Anglo-Irish landlord’s picturesque gardens. The strength of this particular hegemonic ideology of the picturesque was determined by how it actually became embedded in the physical landscape and how this ideology was continually replicated as these picturesque scenes were reproduced in the paintings/texts of picturesque connoisseurs. The portrayal of a picturesque scene on a landlord’s demesne may have been realistic and authentic of what was physically present to be replicated; the crucial determining factor of the picturesque theme park was that scene was already restructured and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality.

Conclusion: Ending the Tyranny of the Picturesque Theme Park

When the Halls had nearly completed their tour of the picturesque ‘spots’ of Co. Wicklow, they decided to visit one last picturesque location: the ruined monastic city of Glendalough. Unlike the other picturesque locations they visited, however, their attempted picturesque reading of the Glendalough landscape was interrupted by the native Irish guides:

“At Glendalough, guides of all degrees start from beneath the bushes, and from amid the crags—we had almost written, and the lake—and ‘they will do anything in the wide world to serve and oblige yer honours’, except leave you to yourselves.”

These amassing guides, these destroyers ‘of the solemn harmony of the surrounding objects’, were initially paid to stay away from the ‘city’ as the two picturesque connoisseurs toured the ruins by themselves, accompanied only by their picturesque compositional framework. However, the Halls had to promise to hire some of the guides the following morning for a guided tour of the site. This they did. Their guided tour was a non-picturesque interpretation of the landscape. The chosen guides provided an oral interpretation that highlighted the spiritual and symbolic aspects of the landscape mostly associated with St. Kevin’s life. There was no mention of the picturesque qualities, which the Halls had discovered the previous evening. This new oral interpretation of the Irish landscape not only challenged the dominance of the picturesque as a cultural form, but the contestation between the differing landscape interpretations had a class basis to it. The picturesque was a cultural attribute of the landed elite, while the oral interpretation was a crucial ingredient of the local peasant culture. In the spatial area of Glendalough and through the competing perspectives of the Halls and the peasant guides, the landscape of the ruined city became contested. This occurred because Glendalough was not on a landlord’s demesne, but rather was located on old ecclesiastical lands—not a ‘picturesque’ theme park.

The spatial control within the parklands allowed the landlords the conditions to create and continually reproduce the picturesque visibility. When this crucial element of spatial control was lost (i.e., where the picturesque attempted to impose its ideological interpretation beyond the secure boundaries of the parkland and subsequently without the necessary societal force of private property), this hegemonic visuality could and was challenged by the natives and their non-picturesque interpretation of place.

Finally, the theme parks of the picturesque met their own demise with the fall of landlordism in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. In fact, some of the old picturesque grounds, and especially their wooded areas, became the drilling and training grounds for the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the war of independence. Such an occurrence happened on the picturesque demesne of Dunboy Castle, the residence of the Puxley family on the Bere Peninsula. In a very real sense, the political ‘sublime’ forces of the IRA in scaling the walls of the ‘beautiful’ garden closed the chapter on this particular theme park of the picturesque.

Notes on contributor

Eamonn Slater is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the National University
of Ireland, Maynooth. He has edited two books with his colleague, Dr Michel Peillon: Encounters with Modern Ireland (1998) and Memories of the Present (2000). He 10 is currently researching Marx’s ideas on ecology and the Irish Famine, car dependency and suburbia in Ireland.

Notes and references

1. Recently there has been a lot discussion among cultural theorists of theme parks and
   the theming of urban America. Most of this work has been concerned with the ‘Disney- fication’ of modern consumption patterns. See Fjellman, S. (1992) Vinyl Leaves: Walt
   Disney and America, Westview Press, Oxford; Gottdiener, M. (2001) The Theming of 20 America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies and Themed Environments, Westview Press, Oxford; Sorkin, M. (1992) Variations on a Theme Park: The American City and the End ofPublic Space, Noonday Press, New York; Wasko, J. (2001) Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, Polity Press, Oxford; Zukin, S. (1993) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Gottdiener comes closest to the idea that theme parks existed before Disney in his work The Theming of America.
2. Duffy, P. (1994) ‘The landscape artist as witness to the changing rural landscape’, in Art into History, eds B. Kennedy & R. Gillespie, Townhouse Press, Dublin; Somerville-Large, P. (1995) The Irish Country House: A Social History, Sinclair- Stevenson, London. According to Duffy (’The landscape artist’, p. 15), the demesne walls of the Irish landed estate had no equivalent in England. Some of these walls were impressive in both length and height. The Coole estate had all of its 600 acres walled in (Somerville-Large, The Irish Country House, p. 136).
3. Woods, C. J. (1992) ‘Review article: Irish travel writings as source material’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. 110, pp. 171–183.
4. Hall, S. C. (1853) Handbooks for Ireland: Dublin and Wicklow, Dean & Son, London.
5. Mokyr, J. (1983) Why Ireland Starved: A Quantitative and Analytical History of the IrishEconomy, George Allen & Unwin, London.
6. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 99.
7. Barrel, J. (1972) The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840, CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, p. 21.
8. Gombrich, E. R. (1973) The Story of Art, Phaidon Press, London, p. 309.
9. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 100.
10. The dualism of the beautiful and the sublime has a long history of evolution in Aesthet-
    ics (see Le Bris, M. (1981) Romantics and Romanticism, Skira, Geneva, pp. 28–30), but 45 it was not until the 1760s that the first British (and Irish) pictorial representation of
    the sublime was painted. This coincided with the publication of Edmund Burke’s

treatise (Burke, E. (1990 [1757]) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the

Sublime and Beautiful, Oxford University Press, Oxford).

11. Stuart, D. C. (1979) Georgian Garden, Robert Hale, London, p. 83.
12. Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry, p. 36.
13. Barrel, The Idea of Landscape, p. 6.
14. Bell, D. (1993) ‘Framing nature: First steps into the wilderness for the sociologyof the landscape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 22; Barrel, The Idea of Landscape,p. 6.
15. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 157
16. The Trinity College political economist of the 1840s and 1850s, William NeilsonHancock, argued that legal statutes prevented the tenants from investing in improve- ments on their holdings, such as drainage and tree planting in his work (see Hancock, W.N. (1850) Impediments to the Prosperity of Ireland, Simms & McInture, London). With Terrence McDonough, I argued that Irish rural economy was dominated by a feudal mode of production rather than by the capitalist mode of production in the nineteenth century. Because of the way Ireland was colonised by Britain, the Anglo- Irish landlords were ceded an enormous amount of political and legal power, which allowed them to ‘rackrent’ their tenantry in a feudal way (Slater, E. & McDonough, T. (1994) ‘Bulwark of landlordism and capitalism: The dynamics of feudalism in nineteenth-century Ireland’, Research in Political Economy, vol. 14. pp. 63–118).
17. Reeves-Smith, T. (1997) ‘The natural history of demesnes’, in Nature in Ireland: A Scien- tific and Cultural History, eds J. Foster & H. Chesney, Lilliput Press, Dublin, p. 551.
18. McCullagh, N. & Mulvin, V. (1987) A Lost Tradition: The Nature of Architecture in Ireland, Gandon Press, London, p. 67.
19. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
20. McCullagh & Mulvin, A Lost Tradition, p. 67.
21. Stuart, Georgian Garden, p. 42.
22. In 1762, the Duke of Leinster wrote to Capability Brown in England and offered him£1,000 to come to Ireland to create a picturesque garden at his Carton estate, but Brown allegedly refused stating that he had first of all to finish England (see Dooley, T. & Mallaghan, C. (2006) Carton House: An Illustrated History, Costar Associates, Celbridge, p. 58).
23. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 162.
24. Trees had to be planted in specific ‘picturesque’ locations, trimmed and pruned, andthey had to be replaced when damaged. The grass had not only to be cut (by scythes and/or grazing livestock), but also it had to be brushed and swept. Non-picturesque natural entities of the local ecosystem tended to be eliminated in the classical Brown- ian landscape: ‘every irregularity and blemish has to be manicured out of existence.’ A messy line of reeds, brambles, nettles and bushes was never his intention. It was important either to mow or else let the cattle browse right up to the water’s edge (Turner, R. (1985) Capability Brown and the Eighteenth-century English Landscape, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, pp. 81–82).
25. Gallagher, L. (1989) ‘Nature improved and raised by art’, The Shaping of the Ulster Landscape: Ulster Local Studies, vol. 11, p. 34.
26. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 104.
27. Clifford, D. (1962) A History of Garden Design, Faber & Faber, London, p. 173.
28. Bellamy, D. (1986) The ‘Wild’ Boglands: Bellamy’s Ireland, Christopher Helm, London.
29. Somerville, E. & Ross, V. M. (1990) Through Connemara in a Governess Cart, VirgoPress, London, p. 168.

30. MacDonagh, O. (1983) States of Mind: A Study of Anglo-Irish Conflict, 1780–1980, George Allen & Unwin, London, p. 29.
31. Harley, J. B. (1988) ‘Maps, knowledge and power’, in The Iconography of Landscape, eds D. Cosgrove & S. Daniels, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p. 292.
32. Gallagher, ‘Nature improved by art’, p. 42.
33. Said, E. (1993) Culture and Imperialism, Chatto & Windus, London, p. 271.
34. Gibbons suggests that the opening up of the picturesque locations of Ireland to the‘modern’ traveller in the 1740s was one of the founding moments of European Romanticism (Gibbons, L. (1996) ‘Topographies of terror: Killarney and the politics of the sublime’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 25, p. 95).
35. Crandell, G. (1993) Nature Pictorialized: ‘The View’ in Landscape History, Johns Hopkins University Press, London, p. 129.
36. O’Kane suggests that there was a prevalence of peasant resentment at the disposses- sion of their ancestral lands and a firm belief that they might be restored to them one day (O’Kane, F. (2004) Landscape Design in Eighteenth-century Ireland, Cork University Press, Cork, p. 173).
37. Reeves-Smith, ‘The natural history of demesnes’, p. 556.
38. In the first fifty years of the eighteenth century, 61 trees and 91 new shrubs wereintroduced into England. Many of these global plant species were re-routed to the colonies including Ireland (Dixon-Hunt, J. (2003) The Picturesque Garden in Europe, Thames & Hudson, London, p. 45).
39. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 130.
40. Archer, K. (1997) ‘The limits to the imagineered city: Sociospatial polarization inOrlando’, Economic Geography, vol. 73, no. 3, p. 334.
41. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 125.
42. Ingram, D. L. (1991) Basic Principles of Landscape Design, University of Florida, CIR536 25Document, Department of Environmental Horticulture, p. 5.
43. Hussey, C. (1967) The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View, Cass, London, p. 130.
44. Turner, Capability Brown, p. 78.
45. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
46. Crandell, Nature Pictorialized, p. 126.
47. Hall, Handbooks for Ireland, p. 127.
48. Slater, E. (1993) ‘Contested terrain: Differing interpretations of Co. Wicklow’s land-scape’, Irish Journal of Sociology, vol. 3, p. 45.
49. Williams, R. A. (1991) The Berehaven Copper Mines, Northern Mine Research Society,Sheffield, p. 179.
50. In the twentieth century, other ‘chapters’ of the picturesque theme park werereopened as backdrops to the new emerging corporate golf courses in Ireland and the movie industry. Ireland’s most famous film, The Quiet Man, was filmed mostly in the picturesque grounds of Ashford Castle, Co. Mayo.

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Abstract: This article surveys an unpublished piece in which Engels examined the ecological conditions of Ireland in a chapter, entitled the “Natural Conditions” in his unfinished History of Ireland. This is the only time that either Marx or Engels analysed in detail the specific ecological structure of a particular social formation. In interpreting Engels’ findings, dialectically, we are able to explicate a dialectical framework that gives us a greater insight into how Engels understands how the dialectics of nature enfold in a particular bio-region and crucially those same organic processes of nature provide the necessary ecological conditions for society to engage in agricultural cultivation.

The geological system of Ireland and its particular sieve-like structure moderates the climatic condition of excessive rainfall so that cultivation can continue. The stony soil system plays a similar function to the limestone bedrock, in that it channels water through it. This piece of investigation by Engels can be seen as a concrete case study into the dynamic metabolising relationships between the diverse organic processes of Nature as they are appropriated by society in agricultural production. The conceptual trajectory of this dialectical analysis is to emphasise the inherent fluidity, mutual interaction and ‘universal connection’ of the forces of nature. This particular work of Engels on Ireland is a significant contribution to our understanding of not only of the dialectics of nature but also the methodology of dialectics.

Marx and Engels make an extraordinary assertion in their German Ideology about how history should be written:

In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has either been totally disregarded or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard, the real production of life appears as non-historical, while the historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extra-superterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 55).

I believe Marx and Engels are proposing is that in order to overcome the ‘antithesis of nature and history’ it is necessary to bring in the co-evolution of the ‘relation of man to nature’. And fortunately, within the same work they suggest how to begin such a conceptual endeavour:

‘The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modifications in the course of history through the action of man’1. (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 31)

Consequently, Engels in his attempt to write his History of Ireland appears to ground his understanding of Ireland’s history in Ireland’s ecological base: He begins his History of Ireland by engaging in an extensive survey of Ireland’s ecological conditions in a twenty-page chapter entitled ‘Natural Conditions’ (Marx, 1971:171-191). This is the only extensive example of Marx or Engels beginning an analysis of ‘real historical’ development of a society by an examination of its ecological conditions. Thus, it provides us with an ideal opportunity to ascertain how Marx and Engels would engage in such a vitally important form of historical analysis.

However, there is a problem with Engel’s lengthy discussion of these natural conditions of Ireland: the dialectic conceptualization of the piece is at a very early stage within the method of dialectical inquiry2. It is at the point where a vast array of empirical facts is presented and the dialectical interconnections of concrete reality are only beginning to appear in text, which is the essential and necessary point to be reached in the dialectical method of inquiry as Engels suggests in the following:

‘We all agree that in every field of science, in the natural as in historical science, one must proceed from the given facts, in natural science therefore from the various material forms and the various forms of motion of matter; that therefore in theoretical natural science too the interconnections are not to be built into the facts but to be discovered in them, …’ (Engels, Dialectics of Nature:47).

Therefore, in order to ‘discover’ and make explicit these underlying dialectical interconnections of the ecological ‘facts’ presented, I have divided Engels’ account into distinct sections that emphasise the inherent processual aspects of the dialectical relations between the

1 Marx and Engels identify these natural bases in the previous sentence as “geological, oro-hydrographical, and climate and so on”. (Marx and Engels, CW, vol.5, 1976: 31).

2 Marx suggested that dialectics involved two stages and both linked. The preliminary stage is the method of inquiry and subsequently followed by a method of presentation.

‘given fact’s. This allows me to highlight the inherent sense of movement within and between these Irish natural conditions as processes and, it enables me to follow the logical sequence in which these natural conditions are dealt with by Engels – rock structure, soil, climatic conditions, naturally occurring vegetation and finally cultivated crops. This sequence appears to follow a logical hierarchical structure in its’ unfolding. Engel’s indicates this to us where he says:

The earth’s surface, climate, vegetation, fauna, and human beings themselves have definitely changed… (Engels, 1986: 231).

The categorization of these ecological aspects is determined by a logical order where the previous unfolded process provides the necessary preconditions for the emergence of other following on processes which culminate in the final arrival at societal endeavours in the process of cultivation, i.e., ‘human beings themselves’. This is the reason why Engels provided this ecological chapter at the beginning of his book. He did so to explicate the natural (ecological) conditions of the Irish social formation before beginning his analysis of how Irish society and its various social processes metabolize with its organic processes of Nature over time. Accordingly, we begin as Engels did with the natural processes rather than the social processes, specifically, with the physical base of Ireland’s ‘earth surface’ – its geological structure.

Ireland’s geological system

In his chapter entitled ‘Natural Conditions’, Engels adopts an overall conceptual trajectory that is concerned with how these ecological conditions function for agricultural production, including its geological structure. Engels himself was very much aware of the significance of the geological rock structure for soil formation3 and plant growth. Thus, he began his analysis of the Irish ecological conditions by looking at the geological formation of Ireland in which the Carboniferous phase appears to be the determinant period in the geological development of Ireland4:

To understand the nature of the soil of present-day Ireland we have to return to the distance epoch when the so-called Carboniferous System was formed (Engels, 1971:172).

In geological terms Ireland is shaped like a saucer with a central plain encircled by a mountain chain which hugs its coastal perimeter. This plain, ‘the foundation of the whole of Ireland consists of the massive bed of limestone’ was formed during the Carboniferous period. Subsequently, it was then covered mostly with drift left behind by the Ice Age. During this Ice Age, most of Ireland was submerged by the sea except for the mountain tops. And, as the

3 Engels in letter to Marx and in discussing Tremaux:

That the geological structure of the soil is closely related to the ‘soil’ in which everything grows is an old idea, likewise that this soil which is able to support vegetation influences the flora and fauna that subsist on it. It is also true that this influence has as yet been scarcely examined at all (Engels to Marx 5th October, 1866 – MECW Vol. 42, 1987: 322).

4 Engels stated in a footnote ‘Unless stated all the geological data given here is from J. Beete Jukes, The Student’s Manual of Geology, New Edition, Edinburgh, 1862. Jukes was the local superior during the geological survey of Ireland and therefore the prime authority on this territory, which he treats in special detail. (Engels:172).

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submersion slowly proceeded, drift was subsequently deposited. This drift was/is a complex combination of diverse rock components as Engels indicates in the following:

Pieces of rock eroded from the mountain islands and fine fragments of rock scraped away by the glaciers as they pushed their way slowly and powerfully through the valleys – earth, sand, gravel, stones, rocks, worn smooth within the ice but sharp-edged above it – all this was carried out to sea and gradually deposited on the sea-bed by icebergs which were detaching themselves from the shore. The layer formed in this way varies according to circumstances and contains loam (originating from argillaceous slate), sand (originating from quartz and granite), limestone gravel (derived from limestone formations), marl (where finely-crumbled limestone mixes with loam) or mixtures of all these components; but it always contains a mass of stones of all sizes, sometimes rounded, sometimes sharp, ranging up to colossal erratic boulders….During the subsequent re-emergence of the land from the sea, this newly- formed surface was given roughly its present structure. (Engels, 1971:175/6).

This enormous accumulation of rock and rock particles is the mineral basis for formation of the soil structure. But the dominant rock remaining within this geological process is limestone:

The variety of rocks, whose decomposition contributed and is still contributing to this soil, provides it with a corresponding variety of the mineral elements required for vegetable life, and if one of these, say lime, is greatly lacking in the soil, plenty of pieces of limestone of all sizes are to be found everywhere-quite apart from the underlying limestone bed-so it can be added quite easily (Engels, 1971:177).

In this, Engels identifies a crucial aspect of the composition of the soil: He clearly states that the minerals which emerge from the underlying varieties of the bedrock subsequently become vital components of the natural fertility of the soil and the ‘vegetable life’ that are dependent on these ‘mineral elements’. However, there is one species of mineral that is missing from the Irish geological strata and that is coal. Engels highlights the significance of this loss of energy resource for Ireland:

It is obvious that Ireland’s misfortune is of ancient origin; it begins directly after the carboniferous strata were deposited. A country whose coals deposits are eroded, placed near a larger country, rich in coal, is condemned by nature to remain for a long time the farming country for the larger country when the latter is industrialised. That sentence, pronounced millions of years ago, was carried out in this century. We shall see later, moreover, how the English assisted nature by crushing almost every seed of Irish industry as soon as it appeared (Engels, 1971:174).

In this dramatic demonstration of the explanatory power of dialectics, Engels proposed that the geological process has metabolised with the colonial process to leave Ireland deindustrialised – a mere agricultural region feeding Britain.

What is interesting about how Engels unfolds his analysis of the geological system is that his conceptual trajectory is concerned with understanding how diverse rock forms are the material and mineral basis of the Irish soil system i.e. he indicates how the geological process is subsumed under the soil system where it provides the essential physical structure and mineral contents of the soil.

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The soil system5

Engels begins his discussion of the nature of the Irish soil by stating the following:

From an agricultural point of view, Ireland’s soil is almost entirely formed from the drift of the Ice Age, which here, thanks to its slate and limestone origin is …extremely fertile, light loam (Engels, 1971:177).

So, Ireland’s soil is formed from the debris of rocks dropped by the moving glaciers over the lowlands of Ireland. But a large proportion of these lowlands are bog: Where the necessary minerals for normal vegetation growth had been leached out of land then peat bog develops instead of soil (Bellamy, 1986). Even when vital mineral elements are perceived to be missing from the soil, they can be ‘sourced’ near-by and added in ‘quite easily’. The implication of thislatter human intervention is immense. ‘Fertility’ – productive fertility – appears to be relative to the type of ‘vegetable life’ required by society. In this particular case Engels is referring to peat bog – a ‘vegetable life’ (ecosystem) which has very limited usage for society’s agricultural needs, except for turf production and extensive grazing at certain dry periods of the year (Bellamy, 1986). However, this peat bog ecosystem and its deficient ‘natural fertility’ can be ‘repaired’ by digging out from its underlying mostly marl (finely-crumbled limestone mixed with loam) base and adding this to the peat to make a soil suitable for agricultural production. But as Engels states, this type of soil reclamation was rarely done under agricultural production in the 1860s:

Yet, the peat bogs of Ireland are by no means hopelessly lost to agriculture; on the contrary, in time we shall see what rich fruits some of these, and the two million hectares of the “indifferent land” contemptuously mentioned by Lavergne, can produce given correct management (Engels,1871:183).

Here, we uncover why Engels discusses Ireland’s ‘natural conditions’: He apparently does so for the purpose of assessing the potential agricultural capabilities of the soil system and how those capabilities are constrained initially by deficient natural conditions e.g. peat bogs and then crucially by ‘the barbaric manner in which the peasants cultivated it’ (Engels quoting Arthur Young, 1871:177). The apparent trajectory of Engel’s structure of conceptualization is to move the analysis from the physical contents of the natural conditions towards the social form in which these conditions of fertility operate under agricultural production.

With regard to the natural contents of the Irish soil system, they are the foundational components of the overall structure of the Irish ecosystem and are in general considered to offer natural fertility because they produce soil that falls between the infertile extremities of the range of soil composition types:

5 In a letter to Marx, Engels stated the following “Similarly, Darwin and others have never failed to appreciate the effect of soil, and if they did not especially emphasise it, this was because they had no notion of how the soil exerts its influence – other than that fertility has a favourable and infertility an unfavourable effect” (Engels to Marx 5th October, 1866 – MECW Vol. 42, :322).

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We see therefore that all authorities agree that Ireland’s soil contains all the elements of fertility to an extraordinary degree. This, not only in its chemical ingredients but also in its structure. The two extremes of heavy impenetrable clay, completely impermeable, and loose sand, completely permeable, do not occur (Engels, 1971:182).

Consequently, the natural fertility of the Irish soil surpasses that of Britain. as Engels quotes from Arthur Young:

Natural fertility, acre for acre over the two kingdoms, is certainly in favour of Ireland’ (Young, vol.2, part11, p.3).

And also, Engels quotes the French agronomist de Lavergne on the superior quality of the Irish soil in comparison to the English soil “Even the English admit that Ireland, in point of soil, is superior to England”6 . But the soil system and the rock substructure are not in themselves the exclusive determinants of the natural and cultivated ecosystems of Ireland. Instead, they interact with climatic conditions to affect outcomes at this level.

The climate system

Engels suggests that the dominant determinant of the climate of Ireland is its position with regard to the Gulf Stream (Engels, 1971:184). The prevailing south-westerly winds coming off the Atlantic Gulf Stream provides warmth in winter, making weather conditions at that time mild and practically frost free, and in summer, the south-westerly winds tend to provide cool temperatures:

… there are seldom more than two or three consecutive dry days in summer; and in late autumn it is fine again. Very dry summers are rare and dearth never occurs because of draught but mostly because of too much rain. It seldom snows on the plains, so cattle remain in the open all of the year-round (Engels, 1971:186).

In summarizing these climatic conditions Engels compares them to those of London:

… the temperatures are more even, the winters milder and the summers cooler than in London, while on the other hand the air is damper. (Engels, 1971: 186).

And it is so damp that salt, sugar or flour left out in an unheated room will soak the dampness out of the air (Engels, 1971:186/7). However, it is not the amount of rain that falls which is important, but “how and when it falls” (Engels, 1971:185). The “how and when” of the Irish

6 Marx wrote the following to Engels: P.S. In an article in The Fortnightly Review (August issue) on “Our Uncultivated Lands”, I found the following on the soil in Ireland:

‘That her soil is fertile is proved upon the testimony etc. etc. and M. De Laveleye: the latter gentleman says etc. etc (p.204)’

Since the English regard Laveleye as a great authority on agronomy because his books on Belgian and Italian agriculture, the passage may be of use to you (Marx to Engels, 10th August, 1870, MECW, Letters, vol. 44:.40).

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rainfall is apparently determined by ‘the fresh sea-breezes’ of the Atlantic which creates a condition of volatility in comparison to the drabness of the English weather system. Engels contrasts these volatile tendencies of the Irish climate with the English one:

In spite of this the Irish climate is decidedly pleasanter than the English. The leaden sky which often causes days of continual drizzle in England is mostly replaced in Ireland by a continental April sky; the fresh sea-breezes bring on clouds quickly and unexpectedly, but drive them past equally quickly, if they do not come down immediately in sharp showers. The weather, like the inhabitants, has a more acute character, it moves in sharper, more sudden contrasts; …. (Engels, 1971: 184).

As with his analysis of the soil system, Engels explicitly states that the conceptual trajectory of his examination of the Irish climatic system allows him to assess its impact on agriculture7 (Engels, 1871:185). To do this he used many sources, including the Scottish agronomist – James Caird – sent over by Peel to investigate the state of Irish agriculture during the Famine. Engels quotes Caird (1849) on how the excessive humidity of Ireland encourages vegetation growth:

The humidity of the climate causes a very constant vegetation, which has both advantages and disadvantages. It is favourable for grass and green crops but renders it necessary to employ very vigorous and preserving efforts to extirpate weeds’ (Engels, 1971:181).

This identified ‘disadvantage’ is not an aspect of the natural propensity of the climatic dampness to be a catalyst to vegetation growth. Rather, it refers to how that tendency is appropriated for agricultural production. Humidity can impact differently on differing species of plants, including ‘domesticated’ plant ecosystems such as grains. Within the grain ‘family’ itself, Engels uses Wakefield’s research on Irish climate to highlight the difference between its impacts on corn in general and oats in particular:

…, but nowhere does he state that it provides a serious obstacle to the cultivation of corn (Engels, 1871:188).

The Irish climate is more suited for the production of oats because ‘oats can take a considerable amount of rain’ (Engels, 1971:189). In general, the excessive humidity of the Irish climate encourages grass growth:

Arthur Young considers that Ireland is considerably damper than England; this is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil (Engels, 1971:185).

However, the humidity of the climate is just one moment among many that determines the natural fertility of the soil. What appears to be crucial in Engel’s unfolding of Ireland’s natural conditions are how these diverse natural processes combine together to produce the unique fertility conditions of Ireland.

‘Rainy’ climate metabolising with the stony soil and porous bedrock

However, it is not just the presence of a mild climatic system and a good soil system, which creates the conditions of natural fertility, but it is how they are metabolised under specific

7 Engels stated that the “climate only concerns us here insofar as it is important for agriculture” (Engels, 1971:185)

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Irish conditions. Engels is rightly aware of this crucial metabolising relationship in referring to Young’s (Engels, 1971:184) discussion of the relationship between heavy rainfall and the soil structure in Ireland:

At the same time, however, he points out that the soil in Ireland counteracts this dampness of the climate. It is generally stony, and for this reason lets the water through more easily (Engels, 1971:185).

Dampness in this context refers to rainfall and how the physical structure of the soil, determined in part by its stony composition allows the excess water from the heavy rainfall to pass through without water logging. The permeable nature of the soil allows sufficient water to metabolize with the mineral composition of the soil without leaching out the nutrients that maintain natural fertility. Engels uses Young’s comparison of this inherent permeable condition of the Irish soil- which creates its conditions of natural fertility – with the impermeable condition of the English clay soil:

If as much rain fell upon the clays of England (a soil very rarely met with in Ireland, and never without much stone) falls upon the rocks of her sister-island, those lands could not be cultivated. But the rocks clothed with verdure; – those of limestone with only a thin covering of mold, have the softest and the most beautiful turf imaginable (Vol.2, Part11: 3-4).

However, it is not just the permeability of the stony soil structure in itself, which allows for the ‘growth of this most beautiful turf imaginable’ but also the limestone bedrock, which the Irish soil lays upon:

[….] The limestone is known to be full of cracks and fissures which let excess water through quickly (Engels, 1971:185).

As we have already uncovered the Irish climate according to Arthur Young “is the cause of the amazing grass-bearing qualities of the soil” (Engels, 1971: 185), but this is not sufficient in itself as it needs to ‘metabolize’ with the permeable structures of the soil and its limestone bedrock. Although this particular metabolic relationship appears to intensify the growth of grass, it does not hinder the growth of corn:

…., nowhere does he (Wakefield) state that it (climate) provides a serious obstacle to the cultivation of corn. In fact, he finds, as we shall see, that the losses incurred during the wet harvest times are due to entirely different causes, and states so quite explicitly (Engels, 1871:188) (my inclusion in brackets)

Wakefield even identifies three processes that allow Ireland to produce not just a sufficient crop of corn but a yield which he describes as a ‘super-abundance’:

The soil of Ireland is so fertile, and the climate so favourable, under a proper system of agriculture, it will produce not only a sufficiency of corn for its own use, but a superabundance which may be ready at all times to relieve England when she may stand in need of assistance (vol. 2, p.61) (Engels,1971:188).

Of these three processes that metabolize with each other to produce a corn crop of superabundance, the two natural processes of soil and climate we have unfolded, the one

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remaining to be uncovered is the ‘system of agriculture’. It should be noted in Wakefield’s account that the ‘raison d’être’ for this Irish superabundance was to feed England.

Engels documents how differing types of natural fertility are more naturally proficient in producing particular agricultural products than others. The typology of the difference in fertility propensities is itself determined by how the diverse natural processes have metabolised with each other within a particular spatial enclave. Thus the ‘natural fertility’ of a region makes it more or less suited to a particular type of agricultural production Where an agricultural region has a naturally endowed suitability to produce a particular product, there is less need for human intervention to boost fertility artificially. Engels goes through the regions of Ireland assessing their natural productivity for agricultural production. We have already outlined Engel’s extensive discussion of the Irish peat bogs of the central plain and how they are really only suited for rough grazing of sheep and cattle. Beyond the peat bogs Engels continues to assess other regions of Ireland with regard to their natural productivity. For example, he refers to Arthur Young’s summation of the natural productiveness of North Cork, Tipperary and Roscommon:

Friable, sandy loams, dry but fertile, are very common, and they form the best soils in the Kingdom, for tillage and sheep (Engels, 1971:178).

It is interesting to note that differing soil compositions can have differing combinations of product mixes. Again, Young on County Limerick:

…., it is the richest soil I ever saw, and such as is applicable to every purpose you can wish; it will fat the largest bullock, and at the same time do equally well for sheep, for tillage, for turnips, for wheat, for beans, and in a word, for every crop…. (Engels,1871:178).

Here in Limerick, and contrasting with the previously mentioned region where tillage and sheep reigned, the soil is suited for tillage and sheep but, also for cattle production. This has to do with not only differing soil types but also with how they metabolize with the climatic process. Also, the depth of the physical structure of the soil can have a consequence for how the natural productivity can support a particular agricultural activity and not others. In the following account of an area, low soil depth eliminates tillage production, which is generally a feature of loam soil, but here, the conditions determined by the processes of natural fertility allow only for the pasturing of sheep:

If a thinnish layer of heavy loam lies directly on limestone, the land is not suited to tillage and bears only a miserable crop of grain, but it makes excellent sheep-pastures (Engels, 1971:180).

But, it should also be noted that these processes that determine natural fertility can also have a seasonal aspect to them. For example, a turlough can be a lake in winter time and a dry lush pasture location in summer:

Dr Beaufort states that there occur in the west, particularly in Mayo, many turloughs – shallow depressions of different sizes, which fill with water in the winter, although not visibly connected with streams of rivers. In the summer this drains away through underground fissures in the limestone, leaving luxurious firm grazing-ground (Engels, 1971:180).

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But all of these ‘natural conditions’ were essentially moments of metabolised natural processes, which today would be known as an ecosystem. This natural ecosystem was in turn embedded in social processes when society intervened in its pursuit of agricultural products.

The thwarting of the natural fertility of the Irish soil by the social process of the British colonial market

Engels summarises the main natural tendencies of the metabolised soil to produce agricultural products:

If one looks at the matter impartially and without being misled by the cries of the interested parties, …….., one finds that Ireland like all other places, has some parts which because of the soil and climate are more suited to cattle-rearing, and others to tillage, and still others – the vast majority – which are suited for both (Engels, 1971:190).

This quotation succinctly captures the thrust of Engel’s analysis of the metabolised natural processes and how they provide diverse productive conditions for agricultural production. It is crucial that we be aware of the regional diversity of these natural fertility capabilities as their subsumption under particular social forms of production will have a tendency to thwart their natural productive tendencies. For example, an increasing market demand for a particular agricultural product such as cattle, which in the market context would take on the social form of a commodity, would have a tendency to push cattle production beyond its natural productive enclaves into ‘naturally’ endowed tillage areas. Rising prices for cattle products against tillage commodity prices would encourage producers to swing away from tillage production and the natural productive capabilities embedded in that bio-region, so that, these fertility moments would now have to metabolize with the newly imposed product and its necessary ecological requirements. In this situation, the imposed agricultural regime would have more discordant elements within its process of metabolization than the previous regime8. But crucially the subsumption of agricultural terrains with diverse natural productive capabilities under a specific commodity regime will have a tendency to ‘homogenize’ the fertility contents of the ecosystems subsumed. Human intervention will attempt to upgrade the naturally endowed fertility system – the natural ecosystem – to a level that is determined by the productive requirements of the commodity been produced9. Therefore, in any agricultural region or country, one type of

8 As Marx stated:

Finally, fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time. A piece of land may be very fertile for corn growing, and yet the market price may induce the cultivator to turn it into an artificial pastureland and thus render it infertile (Marx and Engels, 1975, CW, 6, 204).

9 In the following Marx suggests that the capital investment in ‘so-called permanent improvements’ appears to be attempting to construct a uniform condition of fertility by overcoming natural deficiencies (or obstacles) that are present either on the land surface or beneath within the soil structure itself:

…. – nearly all amount to giving a particular piece of land in a certain limited locality such properties as are naturally possessed by some other piece of land elsewhere sometimes quite nearby. One piece of land is naturally level, another has to be levelled, one possesses natural drainage, another requires artificial drainage, one is endowed by Nature with a deep layer of top soil, another needs artificial deepening, one clay soil is naturally mixed with the proper amount of sand, another has to be treated to obtain this

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agricultural ecosystem and its appropriate commodity regime will be dominant in land cover dimensions over others as determined by organic sustainability and market forces. But such a position of dominance does not imply that it should spatially invade and metabolically subsume the other agricultural ecosystems that coexist within a particular locality or region. Engels demonstrates his awareness of the dangers in artificially ‘homogenizing’ natural productive capabilities beyond their naturally endowed spatial enclaves in the following:

Compared with England, Ireland is more suited to cattle-rearing on the whole; but if England is compared with France, she too is more suited to cattle-rearing. Are we to conclude that the whole of England should be transformed into cattle pastures, (Engels, 1971:190).

These agroecosystems (the combination of the social forms of agricultural products with the natural contents of the local ecosystems) are not just ecosystems as they also include labour processes in which a class of direct producers produce within. Consequently, a change from one agroecosystem to another would also entail a change in labour input. Engels appears to have this in mind in suggesting that England because of its more natural propensity for grass growth in comparison to France would become a cattle pasture, but for this to happen the resident agricultural population who were employed in tillage operations would have to be cleared off the land:

….and the whole agricultural population be sent into the factory towns of America – except for a few herdsmen – to make room for cattle, which are to be exported to France in exchange for silk and wine? (Engels, 1971:190).

In proposing this strategy of clearing rural England of people for cattle, Engels is not only emphasising the bizarreness of such a proposal but also the idea that it could subsume all the other naturally occurring fertility enclaves that are conductive to producing non-cattle products. But in a dramatic conceptual move, Engels declares that this specific strategy was the one adopted by the Irish landlords and British bourgeois with regard to transforming Ireland into a cattle pasture and he teases out the implications of this proposal for the Irish people – their extermination:

But that is exactly what the Irish landlords who want to put up the rents and the English bourgeois who want to decrease wages demand for Ireland: Goldwin Smith has said so plainly enough. And yet the social revolution inherent in the transformation from tillage to cattle-rearing would be far greater in Ireland than in England. In England, where large scale agriculture and where agricultural labourers have already been replaced by machinery to a large extent, it would mean the transplantation of at most one million; in Ireland, where small and even cottage- farming prevails, it would mean the transplantation of four million: the extermination of the Irish people (Engels, 1971:190).

There is in this ‘social revolution’ many dimensions of the British colonial project in Ireland. But, it also highlights how the elites of both islands could combine their differing trajectories of colonial subsumption under a shared strategy of changing the productive conditions of Ireland.

proportion; one meadow is naturally irrigated or covered with layers of silt, another requires labour to obtain this condition, or, in the language of bourgeois economics, it requires capital (Marx, 1981, 745/6).

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Firstly, the demand for a product change in the case of colonial Ireland meant the clearance of surplus Irish direct producers off the land to make room for livestock. Secondly, this colonial strategy of land clearances was conceptualised by Marx as ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’ which he proposed as the dominant relationship of the post-Famine period, where the economy was determined by its colonial form. Finally, the changing product demands by the colonising core constrained Ireland to be a mere supplier of agricultural commodities and thus spatially Ireland became an agricultural region of Great Britain10.

“Cultivating” Irish Climate as an ideological buttress for the social process of British colonialism

Engels begins the final section of his chapter with a curious assertion:

It can be seen that even the facts of nature become points of national controversy between England and Ireland. It can also be seen, however, how public opinion of the ruling class in England – and it is only this that is generally known (191) on the Continent – changes with the fashion and in its own interests. Today England needs grain quickly and dependably – Ireland is just perfect for wheat-growing. Tomorrow England needs meat – Ireland is only fit for cattle pastures. (Engels, 1971:190/1).

Here Engels appears to be exploring another dimension of Ireland’s natural conditions where the ‘facts of nature’ play a crucial ideological role in the relationship between colonising England and colonised Ireland. The ideological function of these obviously one-sided interpretations of the complex concrete reality of the cultivation practices in Ireland is to convince a public (both domestic and foreign) of the actions that the colonial regime either has taken or is just about to take with regard to guaranteeing that Irish agriculture provides a secure food supply to the core irrespective of the damage that it inflicts on the Irish producers. The changing colonial food requirements of Britain impose market pressures on the Irish peasantry to switch their production from grain to livestock. But this pressure becomes intensified when the initial agroecosystem collapses as its natural contents ruptures. This is discussed by Engels with regard to a case of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth in Cheshire and the potato blight in Ireland. In addition, such a rupture-like occurrence apparently prompts the various ideologues to advocate a necessary product transformation within the agricultural sphere of production whether it is in Cheshire or Ireland:

….; Cheshire carried on mainly cattle-rearing and dairy farming until the last epidemic of cattle- plague, but since most of the cattle perished the climate suddenly became quite admirably suited for wheat-growing. If there had been an epidemic of cattle-plague in Ireland, causing devastation similar to that of Cheshire, instead of preaching that Ireland’s natural occupation is cattle-raising, they would point to the place in Wakefield which says that Ireland is destined to be England’s granary (Engels, 1971:190).

The tragic difference between these two natural ruptures in their respective agroecosystems is that Cheshire lost a food commodity while Ireland lost its immediate food subsistence and two

10Marx stated it in the following way – “But Ireland is at present only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits.” (Marx, 1971:105).

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million producers of that food through death and emigration. But by locating climate as the sole exclusive determinant of what grows ‘naturally’ in Cheshire or in Ireland, the various accounts that use this conceptual strategy are not only ignoring the other moments of the natural process, but even more crucially, they ignore the social process embedded in cultivation. Accordingly, they are ideologically isolating the natural from the social. As a consequence of such conceptual one-sidedness, isolated and independently determined nature does not have a societal input. Instead, the apparent self-regulating form of the climate appears to be immutable, obeying unalterable ‘God-like’ laws whose evolutionary logic can only be accepted. Thus, the product transformation in the cases of Cheshire and Ireland are perceived to be determined by Nature alone. Marx in Capital reproduces a similar argument as the one made by Engels in the above:

Having praised the fruitfulness of the Irish soil between 1815 and 1846, and proclaimed it loudly as destined for the cultivation of wheat by nature alone, English agronomists, economists and politicians suddenly discovered that it was good for nothing but to produce forage (grass pasture) (Marx,1976:115).

The ‘social revolution’ of population change inherent in this apparently technical ‘transformation from tillage to pasture’ remains hidden because the conceptual framework of naturalism (which Marx is making fun of) evokes the natural forms of the agroecosystem while simultaneously evading the social determinants of this enforced movement of people off the land. Blaming the natural exonerates the social!

This policy of advocating a switch in agroecosystems and its inherent but hidden social revolution in the necessary decline in peasant population is essentially another aspect of British colonial domination of Ireland as Engels suggests in the following:

From Mela to Goldwin Smith11 and up to the present day, how often has this assertion been repeated – since 1846, especially by a noisy chorus of Irish landowners – that Ireland is condemned by her climate to provide not Irishmen with bread but English men with meat and butter, and that the destiny of the Irish people is, therefore, to be brought over the ocean to make room in Ireland for cows and sheep! (Engels, 1971:185).

Conclusion

The naturalism of the above arguments is, as pointed out by Engels and Marx, a one- sided account of a many-sided reality12 , which should have included an analysis of both the

11 Engels stated the following in footnote: Goldwin Smith, Irish History and Irish Character, Oxford and London, 1861. – What is more than amazing in this work, which, under the mask of “objectivity”, justifies English policy in Ireland, the ignorance of the professor of history, or the hypocrisy of the liberal bourgeois? We shall touch on both again later.

12 In the following quotation from 1842, Marx is suggesting how we attempt to make sense of the world – a world that is an ‘unorganised mass’ whose contents are in a constant state of flux and movement. To this ‘manifold diversity of the world’, we tend to make one-sided interpretations:

…for one-sidedness can extract the particular from the unorganised mass of the whole and give it shape…By confining each of the contents of the world in a stable definiteness and as it were solidifying the fluid essence of

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natural and the social processes metabolised. The polemical attack by Marx and Engels against the absurdity of Nature alone determining product cultivation is a critique of the specific colonial apologist’s accounts of the Irish situation but it could also be seen as a critique of bourgeois science in general. In the following, Engels highlights this trend within the natural sciences of perceiving the organic processes of Nature as detached and isolated objects:

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and organic objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms – these were the fundamental conditions of gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us with a legacy of the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their isolation, detached from the whole vast interconnection of things, and therefore not in motion but in their repose, not as essentially changing, but as fixed constants; not in their life, but in their death (Engels, 2015, Duhring: Introduction) (my emphasis).

The non-dialectical orientation of the natural sciences occurs because they are embedded in understanding of the entities of concrete reality at the level of discrete surface appearances – detached and isolated13. Consequently, they have an inherent tendency to eclipse not only the complex interconnections of reality but also, they tend to fail to recognise that these concrete entities are in fact manifest moments of underlying processes14.

Accordingly, these non-dialectical accounts cannot conceptualise the causal links between differing entities of the real world, even such ones as nature and society. The reason for this fatal flaw is that they perceive concrete reality as being made up as thing-like substances, permanent in their essential structure, and not as Engels maintains that [t]he whole of nature, from the smallest element to the greatest, from the grains of sands to suns…. has its existence in eternal coming into being and passing away, in ceaseless flux, in unresting motion and change’ (Engels, 1986: 30/31).

the content, understanding brings out the manifold diversity of the world, for the world would not be many- sided without the many one-sidedness’s’ (Marx, Debates on the Thefts of Wood, MECW, vol.1, 1975)

This ontological distinction being highlighted here by Marx is that between the ‘unorganised mass of the whole’ with its ‘fluid essence of the content’, in short – the real world, and the ‘one-sidedness’ of our ‘understanding’ of it, as we ‘confine’ the ‘contents’ of the world in our interpretation.

13 And according to Marx this includes the so-called ‘scientists’ of political economy:

Here it will be shown how the philistines’ and vulgar economists’ manner of conceiving things arises, namely, because the only thing that is ever reflected in their minds is the immediate form of appearances of relations, and not in their inner connections. Incidentally, if the latter was the case, we surely have no need of science at all. (Marx to Engels 27 June 1867, MECW, vol.22, 1985).

14 Ilyenkov argued that Marx perceived any individual entity as essentially a moment within a process:

That means that any individual object, thing, phenomenon, or fact is given a certain concrete form of its existence by the concrete process in the movement of which it happens to be involved; any individual object owes any concrete form of existence to the concrete historically established system of things within which it emerged and of which it forms a part, rather than to itself, its own self-contained individual nature (Ilyenkov, 1982: 118).

  

14

What can be gleamed from our survey of Engel’s work on Ireland is that to explore the ecological base of a social formation involves unravelling a maze of metabolising processes, both natural and societal, and how those processes penetrate with each other. With regard to the organic processes of nature, any one of its processes cannot be investigated independently of the others. The excessive rainy Irish climate makes no sense in itself but only how it relates to the other organic processes of nature. It cannot be conceptually grasped separate from the other natural processes within the Irish organic totality. Also, all of these organic processes provide a diverse range of functions simultaneously for the overall reproduction of this earthy organic totality. For example, the geological rock process is not only the physical base of Nature’s organic processes but also it is the continuing source of the physical components of the soil, especially the nutrients/minerals. With regard to Ireland, the particular sieve-like structure of its geological base modifies the climatic condition of heavy rainfall so that cultivation can continue. The stony soil plays a similar function to the limestone bedrock, in that it channels water through it. However, the most revealing insight is the crucial dynamic ‘engine’ of the whole metabolising system is the climate, even the excessive damp climate of Ireland.

It is only when we have completed our analysis of the ecological conditions of a particular social formation and unearthed its complex matrix of metabolising organic processes that we can begin to investigate how the social forms of cultivation impact on the organic processes of the soil. In Engel’s presentation of Ireland’s ecological conditions of existence, the apparent dominant social form, which dominated the overall structure of Irish organic totality, was that of colonialism. However, Engels only touched upon this subject matter briefly. In fact, Engels fleetingly locates three discrete moments of the colonisation process15, which he identified as the deindustrialisation of Ireland by British acts of intervention, a constantly manipulated market system geared towards supplying changing British demands for agricultural goods, and finally the enforced emigration of the rural population to make way for livestock production. As a consequence, the dialectical analysis of this article provides us with only an adequate conceptual insight into the ‘workings’ of the organic world of Nature prior to their appropriation within social forms of cultivation. However, this is a necessary pre-condition for the latter form of investigation.

Unlike the social forms of production, which Marx assessed against the highest and most developed social form in evolutionary terms, i.e. capitalism, the understanding of the development of the natural process appears to be evaluated from its pure unadulterated form – uncontaminated by human contact – an organic ecosystem. Its development is subsequently tracked by how it is increasingly penetrated by social processes. In our survey of Engels’ work on the Irish soil system we unfolded the sequential levels in which increasingly more complex social forms ‘encase’ the natural contents of the Irish ecosystems adapted to agricultural production. In order to highlight the significance of Engel’s conceptual procedure I summarise this necessary

15 But this analysis of the colonial form is very rudimentary in comparison to Marx and Engels work elsewhere, where they suggest that colonialism is a complex social process which penetrates all aspects of the Irish organic totality including crucially the soil structure (Slater and McDonough, 2008, Slater, 2013).

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dialectical movement by using the modern concepts of ecosystem and agroecosystem to help the contemporary reader in the following:

Engel’s conceptual procedure and its enfolding levels of determination

1. Ecosystem – includes all of the dialectics of nature centred on the soil system and especially climate, which is the dominant determinant of the overall organic process of Nature. These organic processes – the geological structure, the soil process and the climate system constantly metabolise with each other which subsequently become characterised by their dialectical tendencies of inherent fluidity, mutual interaction and ‘universal connection’.

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2. Agroecosystem – a simple abstract concept which allows us to express how the organic ecosystems of Nature become embedded in agricultural production, and crucially where the bio- aspects of this metabolised process retain their dominance over society’s cultivation practices. In short, the concept of agroecosystem is an idealised representation of sustainable agricultural production, without a specific social form16. It is at this level of unfolding that Engels was able to identify the naturally endowed fertility enclaves (bio-regions) through-out Ireland with regard to the production of particular crops or livestock or both without having to account for the impact of the social forms of cultivation.

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3. Commoditized agroecosystem – the bio- agroecosystem as expressed in the previous level becomes concretized with the emergence of a metabolizing relationship between an organic producing agroecosystem and the social process of a market economy. As a result, the bio- dominance of the idealized agroecosystem becomes subverted by the social form of commodity production and its inherent changing demands of its market. What is cultivated and how it is cultivated becomes increasingly determined by profit rather than the innate bio-sustainability of the agroecosystem.

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4. Colonial Commoditized agroecosystem – the dominant determinant moves from a free market system situation in which agricultural commodities circulates away from their fields of production to a situation, where the colonising core economy uses its power (both economic and political) to distort the operation of the market within the colonised economy. In losing, its market autonomy Ireland accordingly becomes a mere agricultural region of Britain (Marx, 1971: 132).

16 As part of Marx’s method of exposition, he would isolate a particular level of analysis in order to explicate the determinants within the level chosen to work upon as he did with regard to the labour process:

We shall therefore, in the first place, have to consider the labour process independently of any specific social formation (Marx, 1976 :283).

16

The above conceptual movement of Engels has only concerned itself with the circulation process, especially at the concrete level of the market. The production process and in particular the cultivation process has been left out, which needs to be tackled in order to take in the full extent of how colonialism penetrates a colonial social formation. However, what we do have from our examination of Engel’s exposition of Ireland’s ‘Natural Conditions’ is a methodology – a dialectical methodology, which has emphasized for us how the organic processes are in a constant state of metabolizing with each other. It is only dialectics, the science of inter- connections (Engels, 1986), that can adequately grasp the dialectics of nature of Ireland and beyond:

In nature, nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things (Engels, 1986: 178).

Although the natural scientists are unable to see a dialectical world as Marx and Engels did, they – Marx and Engels have left us with a dialectical “method for this investigation” (Engels to Werner Sombart, 1895). Engels work on Ireland in particular is a crucial part of this legacy and especially with regard to explicating the dialectics of Nature. The natural scientist’s misinterpretation of reality has cost us dearly and is going to cost us more. In order to turn this about we need to reinterpret the world in order to change it and to do this we need to become scientists of the natural and the social and not just scientists but dialectical scientists so that we can finally write the real history of the “relation of man to nature” in order to save both.

What can be taken from this survey is that the significance of Engel’s pronouncements on the dialectics of the Irish ‘natural conditions’ (the metabolizing organic processes of Nature) is that any dialectical or materialist analysis of the relationship between society and nature has to take on board the idea that Nature is a complex matrix of metabolizing processes. The implications of this insight are profound. Firstly, Nature cannot be perceived to be a thing-like entity, nor can it be investigated in isolation from the rest of concrete reality. Secondly, society’s engagement with these organic processes of Nature is a ‘complex relationship’ which operates on many levels and at many diverse points of interaction between these opposing processes of society and nature. Thirdly and finally, any notion of society being dominant over nature has to be qualified by the knowledge that because nature is essentially a process, the concept of dominance can only be maintained where society is conceptualized as effectively manipulating the inherent forces of nature for its own benefit. It does not imply that all of these forces are fully controlled and mastered by society. The inherent complexity of a dynamic process, and even more so when that process is ‘the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse’ processes of nature, counteracts any attempt of a total masterful control. Even Capitalism cannot produce Nature in a production process, at most it can only appropriate certain aspects of its organic forces, especially in cultivating agricultural products!

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Clodagh O’Malley Gannon and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro for their comments and editorial guidance. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful remarks.

References

Bellamy, David. 1986, The ‘Wild’ Boglands: Bellamy’s Ireland, London, Christopher Helm.
Caird, James, 1850, The Plantation Scheme, or the West of Ireland as a Field for Investment, Edinburgh.

Engels, Frederick, 2015, Anti-Duhring, Herr Eugen Duhring’s Revolution in Science, New York, Wallachia Publishers.

Engels, Frederick, 1986, The Dialectics of Nature, Moscow, Progress Publishers.
Ilenkov, Evald, 1982, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx’s Capital, Progress

Publishers, Moscow.
Lavergne, Leonce de, 1855, The Rural Economy of England, Scotland and Ireland, London.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1975 Collected Works, vol.1-1835-1843, London: Lawrence and Wishart

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1976, Collected Works, vol.5. 1845-47, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1987, Collected Works – Letters, vol.42- 1864-69. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 1985, Collected Works, vol. 42. 1864-68, London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels, 2001, Collected Works, vol.49 -1890-92. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick, 1971, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Marx, Karl, 1976, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Middlesex: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse, Middlesex: Penguin Books.

Slater, Eamonn and Terrence McDonough, 2008, ‘Marx on nineteenth-century Ireland: analyzing colonialism as a dynamic social process’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xxvi, no. 142:153-172.

Slater, Eamonn, 2013, ‘Marx on Ireland: the dialectics of Colonialism’ NIRSA Working Papers Series, no.73.

Young, A. 1780, A tour in Ireland, 2 vols. Cairnes, Dublin.

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Abstract: This article provides a new insight into Marx’s’ understanding of colonialism. In highlighting the method of dialectical inquiry used by Marx in an undelivered speech document (November 1867) it reveals how the essential structure of British colonial domination of Ireland, was not just a condition of existence of economic or political dependency but a constantly evolving social process, which moved through differing phases of development. As a systematic process of colonial repression, it penetrated all aspects of the Irish social formation and to such an extent that thecolonised had to live under ‘abominable conditions of existence’.²

The MEGA (Marx – Engels Gesumtausgahe)

(publication of the entire works of Marx and Engels) is revolutionising our understanding of Marx’s dialectical methodology and thereby our perception of the workings of the real world. In opening a window on Marx’s conceptualising procedures, we finally gain an insight into how Hegel’s work influenced Marx’s development of his dialectical analysis3. The more we uncover the ‘inner workings’ of his dialectical technique, the more we are assured we can move the dialectic beyond Marx and develop it ourselves as an analytical tool that can not only revolutionize our understanding of our contemporary world but also allow us to revolutionize that world.

This article attempts to embrace the same emancipatory spirit of the MEGA project and accordingly to release Marx’s pronouncements on Ireland from its perceived empirical straitjacket4 to reveal not only a dynamic dialectical framework but also a colonial dialectic which determined the Irish organic totality. Accordingly, my task is as much about excavating the underlying conceptual structure as it is about reproducing what Marx stated about colonised Ireland.

Marx’s Perception of Colonial Ireland

In a previous work, I (with Terrence McDonough) suggested that Marx’s (and Engels) perception of colonial Ireland was not to see it as an unchanging condition of existence but an ever-evolving process of domination. This process of colonialism was constantly passing through phases of evolution and its political structure was made up of a number of distinct factions, which were at times competing with each other for dominance within the structure of the colonising regime5.

Dialectical Understanding of Colonized Ireland

Here I want to move the analysis on by proposing that Marx attempted to comprehend this organic totality of a colonised Ireland dialectically and I will attempt to ‘unearth’ this method of procedure. There is more to this conceptual endeavour of Marx than just the application of a dialectical framework, in that the actual empirical object of investigation was outside the confines of his original problematic of the capitalist mode of production and beyond the empirical boundaries of Britain.

Marx’s Mature Social Theory

Recently, Anderson6 (2010) has suggested that the mature Marx was not only working on ‘margins’ of capitalism, – in the sense of those margins were non-western societies – but also that his problematic had moved from a near totally exclusive economic object of investigation as conceptualised in the mode of production to a much more non-reductionist totality, which included a wide range of non-economic aspects:

Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference but also on occasion made those particulars – race, ethnicity, or nationality – determinants for the totality. Such was the case when he held that an Irish national revolution might be the “lever” that would help to overthrow capitalism in Britain 7.

Therefore, as in Anderson’s suggestion, Ireland was one of these non-reductionist totalities that Marx engaged with in his ‘mature social theory’ – those that were at the margins of capitalism. In addition, being at the margin meant not only being ‘non- western’ but also non-capitalist and as was often the case in the nineteenth century, being colonised as well! In Marx’s opinion, Ireland certainly fitted into these latter categories. Ireland was a totality that was determined by not only Anderson’s ‘particulars of race, ethnicity and nationalism’ but also by being non-capitalist and colonised. As we are going to uncover, every totality has a predominant determinant, which ‘shapes’ the overall structure of the totality and the ‘particulars’ within. In the case of Ireland and Marx’s understanding of it, it is colonialism that is the ‘general illumination, which bathes all the other colours, and modifies their particularity’8.

Capitalism and Colonialism

However, if this is so, a crucial question remains to be answered and that is how does Capitalism operate in or penetrate into a totality dominated by colonialism? David Norman Smith in his discussion of Marx’s later writings on ethnology suggests that ‘Capitalism, as Marx had always argued, is an essentially dynamic system, which grows at the expense of the non-capitalist world. The ultimate tendency of this “metabolism” with the outside world is to break down the barriers that keep capital at bay’9.

I hope to prove that the determining ‘barrier’ which, kept capital at bay in the Irish case was colonialism itself. And if this is so the answer to Smith’s following on question becomes crucial to our understanding not only of colonialism but also of capitalism, but especially ‘capitalism’ at the margin – ‘So what, then does capital encounter in its outward spiral?’10

Marx’s View on English Rule in Ireland

Marx introduced this new Irish ‘problematic’ in a short article published in the New-York Daily Tribune on 11th of July 1853, entitled ‘The Indian Question – Irish Tenant Right’. Within, Marx summarised the extent of English rule in Ireland in the following:

England has subverted the conditions of Irish society. At first it confiscated the land then it suppressed the industry by ‘Parliamentary enactments’, and lastly, it broke the active energy11 by armed force. And thus England created thoseabominable ‘conditions of society’ which enable a small caste of rapacious lordlings to dictate to the Irish people the terms on which they shall be allowed to hold the land and live upon it12.

In summarising these ‘abominable’ conditions of subversion, Marx, I want to propose, was in fact highlighting the essential characteristics of the British colonial misrule. What we can take from this succinct synopsis of his understanding of Ireland in the 1850s is that to explicate these colonial ‘conditions of Irish society (including its economy)’, we need to be able to assess the degree of subversion operating throughout the entire structure of the Irish social formation. Even within the above brief quotation, we get a sense that Marx’s object of inquiry is not just confined to a mode of production as it was in his major opus, Capital, but includes other societal levels beyond the economic.

These levels therefore include not only the economic (‘industry’), but also the political (‘Parliamentary enactments’), the repressive state apparatus (‘armed force’(s)), the legal system (‘dictate … terms’), and civil society (‘the active energy’ of ‘the Irish people’). Consequently, Marx is essentially concerned with analysing as he stated in the opening line of the quotation, ‘the conditions of a society’, which were apparently made up of a number of levels. In fact, it is an ‘organic totality’ of a society colonised!

Organic Totality of a Society

Nevertheless, this new theoretical object of investigation is not only multi-layered, it is also moving asindicated by the sequence of events created by the use of ‘at first … then … and lastly’. Furthermore, if it is moving, it is a process, in which its diverse moments enfold themselves into a mediated totality. Marx in the following captures the necessary sense of movement involved in a totality, which is an organic system/process:

This organic system itself, as a totality, has its presuppositions, and its development to its totality consists precisely in subordinating all elements to itself, or creating out of it the organs which it still lacks. This is historically how it becomes a totality.¹³

And in ‘subordinating all elements to itself’ an organic totality becomes an ‘internal law- governed structure’14 in which one essential structure (process) becomes dominant – ‘In all forms of society there is one specific kind of production which predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination, which bathes all the other colours, and modifies their particularity. It is a particular ether which determines the specific gravity of every being which has materialized within it.’15

Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law stated that Marx ‘did not see a thing singly, in itself and for itself, separate from its surroundings; he saw a highly complicated world in continual motion’16. This ontological view of the concrete world is supported by Marx’s own words from 1842 in which he refers to ‘the contents of the world’ as an ‘unorganised mass of the whole’ with a ‘fluid essence of the content’.17 Ilyenkov argued that Marx perceived any individual entity as essentially a moment within a process: ‘That means that any individual object, thing, phenomenon, or fact is given a certain concrete form of its existence by the concrete process in the movement of which it happens to be involved;….’¹⁸.

Unearthing the Inner Essential Determination

Therefore, the implication of this ontological perspective is that in order to interpret reality we cannot remain at the surface/appearance level of a totality, but we must enter the inner ‘workings’ of that totality. For Marx, empirical data as expressed in ‘… empirical correlations as needing to be explained and for him to explain them meant above all to unearth the mechanisms through which they are brought about, and behind them their conditions’¹⁹ (author’s emphasis) and this search for the ‘mechanisms’ and ‘conditions’ entails uncovering of the ‘inner essential determination’ of these empirical entities.²⁰ 

The Problem of Conceptualizing Organic Totalities

However, Arthur warns us that ‘organic totalities’ are difficult entities to enter conceptually – ‘The problem we face is that a totality cannot be presented immediately, its articulation has to be exhibited; in doing that we have to make a start with some aspect of it’.²¹

In a little referred to section in Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2, Marx distinguished between two contrasting approaches to investigating concrete phenomena. Historically, in the development of the science of political economy, the first and necessary stage of investigation ‘takes the external phenomena of life, as they seem and appear and merely describes, catalogues, recounts and arranges them under formal definitions’²². If this is the only method of investigation used it:- ‘leads to erroneous results because it omits some essential links and directly seeks to prove the congruity of the economic categories with one another’²³.

In the development of a science, this empirical ‘method of approach’ has to be superseded by a more analytical form of investigation, which ‘traces the intrinsic connection existing between economic categories or the obscure structure of thebourgeois economic system’²⁴. In short, it ‘penetrate(s) the inner physiology of bourgeois society’²⁵ which ‘extract(s) the quintessence out of the divergency and diversity of the various phenomena’²⁶. Therefore, for Marx the truly scientific endeavour is characterised by the latter approach. In this dialectical approach, Marx actually suggests that there are two necessary conceptual trajectories to follow, in order to analyse an organic totality dialectically:

The presentation of the whole … as a rich totality of many determinations and relations is done by firstly discovering through analysis a small number of determinant abstract, general relations … As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began economic systems. Then begins the second ‘path’, [where] ‘the abstract determination leads towards a reproduction of the concrete – the concrete is concrete because it is the concentrations of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse. It is ‘the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is [the] only way²⁷ (emphasis added).

What we take from these complex assertions concerning the methodological techniques of Marx’s analysis is that there appear to be two diametrically opposing trajectories involved in conceptualising an ‘organic totality’. The initial procedure of analysis, Marx identified as the method of inquiry, which is differentiated from the method of exposition (presentation):

Of course the method of presentation must differ in form from that of inquiry. The latter has to appropriate the material in detail, to analyse its different forms of development, to trace out their inner connexion. Only after this work is done, can the actual movement be adequately described. If this is done successfully, if the life of the subject-matter is ideally reflected as in a mirror, then it may appear as if we had before us a mere a priori construction.

The initial path or trajectory of the method of inquiry involves the ‘descend from the concrete to the abstract’²⁸ is about uncovering ‘a small number of determinant general relations’ (Marx, above quotation) and thus explicating ‘their forms of intercourse’²⁹ within the totality. This is how the dialectical method of inquiry is able to get beneath the surface of an organic totality and to arrive finally at the abstract inner connections of its essential determination. This ‘inner connexion’ of ‘a small number of determinant general relations’ is not a thing-like structural core but a process³⁰, which is an ‘active middle’. Marx in his discussion of how capital is the essential determinant of the capitalist organic totality locates capital as the ‘active middle’ (process) between ground rent and wage labour:

The inner construction of modern society, or, capital in the totality of its relations, is therefore posited in the economic relations of modern landed property, which appears as a process; ground rent – capital – wage labour (the form of the circle can be put the another way; as wage-labour – capital – ground rent; but capital must always appear as the active middle.³¹ (emphasis added).

What Marx is suggesting here is that not only is the relationship between modern rent, capital and wage-labour a process which forms a circle with capital as its core but also this capital-core is itself a process because it is not just a middle but an ‘active middle’. Consequently, the initial trajectory of Marx’s conceptualisation of the organic totality is not only to uncover these ‘internal relations’³² but to explicate them as mediating processes, which has a determining active middle process. Having arrived at this point of being able to reveal the internal law-governed active middle, which we now have identified as the essential moving process of the totality, the trajectory of conceptualising is now reversed and ‘then begins the second “path” ‘of rising from the abstract to the concrete’³³. This final path has been described by Marx as his method of exposition (presentation) where the ‘active middle’ 34 of the totality is a process in which this ‘abstract determinations leads to a reproduction of the concrete’35 conceptually.

We have in our possession two already published works in which Marx attempts to engage in unravelling the colonial conditions, which Britain imposed upon Ireland. These two pieces were originally handwritten in manuscript form – notes on an undelivered speech (26 November 1867) (six printed pages) and a delivered speech (16 December 1867) (fourteen printed pages). Although, these works are short and much of the assertions are in note form, but it should not be forgotten that the documents were not just intended for self-clarification but were composed to be presented to an audience. In this context, Marx must be seen to be attempting to give a consistent and coherent account of this particular subject matter. I believe the coherence of the speech documents is achieved, by his use of an underlying conceptual apparatus, which determine Marx’s methods of inquiry and exposition and the difference between them. It is the method of inquiry, which is embedded in the Undelivered Speech of 26 th November that I want to examine in detail in this article and the explication of the conceptual apparatus of the method of exposition of the Delivered Speech of 16 th December will have to wait for another occasion.

With regard to explicating the dialectics of the Irish colonial organic totality from Marx’s speech documents of November and December of 1867, the analytical structure of the arguments appear to be quite different. The contrasting ordering of the subheadings of the speeches as the following suggests indicates this difference:

In contrasting the sequence of the speech document’s subheadings, it becomes obvious that they are structured along two contrasting paths of conceptual unfolding with regard to investigating the colonial phase of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’. In the Undelivered Speech, Marx begins with the subheading of the ‘Decrease in Population’ and movesthrough various concrete levels to arrive at the penultimate level of ‘Clearing the Estate of Ireland’. This reflects the necessary trajectory of the dialectical method of inquiry of descending from the concrete to the abstract essential process of this colonial organic totality. While, in the Delivered Speech, the ordering of the subheadings is nearlydiametrically the opposite, where Marx begins with the ‘Clearing of the Estate of Ireland’ – the abstract middle process – and then moves through again various concrete levels to

come to the essential concrete form of the ‘consolidation of farms’ in the post-Famine period. Accordingly, the architectural form of the conceptual movement of the Delivered Speech is determined by Marx’s dialectical method of exposition and its determining trajectory of ascending from the abstract to the concrete – ‘of ascent from the abstract to the concrete’ 36

However, in this article I am only explicating dialectical form of investigation/inquiry as in the Undelivered Speech. With regard to his method of inquiry, Kosik has suggested that Marx’s framework involved three stages:

‘1. Appropriating the material in detail, mastering it to the last historically accessible detail.

2. Analysing its different forms of development.
3. Tracing out their internal connections, i.e. determining the unity of different

forms in the development of the material’37.

The first two stages as indicated by Kosik are concerned with the empirical appropriation of data and locating the apparent correlation between them, the final stage is about ‘unearthing’ the ‘very complicated mass of interconnected processes of development mutually interacting and altering forms of their manifestation38. As Marx unfolds these empirical processes as internally connected, their subsequent enfolding suggests that the last process presented engulfs the previous ones and they all form ‘moments’ of an enlarging ‘spiral’ type entity, shaped like an ever ‘expanding curve’ rather than a ‘simple circle’39 Their internal moving interaction implies mutual conditionality, where development assumes a form of a spiral as Ilyenkov proposes:

This dialectics of all real development … in which the condition becomes conditioned, the cause its effect, the universal becomes the particular, is the characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle or, to be more precise of a spiral which extends the scope of its motion all the time, with each new turn.40

Ilyenkov therefore suggests that in his method of inquiry Marx descends from the concrete to the abstract in search of the essential active middle process. This descent is achieved by ‘dissolving’ concrete entities as they appear on the surface of society into moments of processes that unfold from each other and thus create not only an internal network of relationships but also one that is in a state of flux41. Consequently, this general process of unfolding develops into a spiral hierarchy of internally related processes as the emerging processes unfold and encompass all the previous unfolded processes. Therefore, although, the overall movement in this method of inquiry is one from the concrete empirical entities towards the more abstract internally related processes, those abstract processes resurface now and again to incorporate new empirical moments42.

The major technical problem with Marx’s method of presentation in these ‘speech’ pieces is that many of the conceptual formulations are written in note form, – condensed and compressed, as is the norm with speech note constructions. In dealing with the note form difficulty, I propose that we can incorporate the more developed conceptualisations from other published sources, which are dealing with the same subject matter but in a more extended format. Since, both texts come from the pen of Marx, I attempt to bring in to our exposition here, Marx’s own formulations from these other sources – newspaper articles, sections from Capital, (of particular importance is ‘Section 5 (f) Ireland from chapter 25 of vol. 1 (17 pages) and finally Marx’s letter correspondence to various people but especially with Engels (and in certain cases Engels’ own formulations). I also attempt to use those formulations which are closest to the particular timeframe of original texts, – November and December of 1867 and to help the reader, I present the material quoted from the Undelivered Speech in italics

Consequently, I have attempted to follow a sequence of priority insertion of the more extended formulations into the text here, firstly from Marx’s own works, then Engels. I believe I can do this without destroying the explanatory power of Marx’s analytical framework, because within these two speech manuscripts there is an essential architectonic framework that structures the logic of presentation.

As I am attempting to explicate Marx’s theoretical framework from the Undelivered Speech document here, I believe it is necessary to follow the logic of his argument as it unfolds, especially since it is dialectically constructed. Therefore, most of my work is concerned with interpreting what Marx is saying. However, beyond the appearance of the empirical arguments there is an essential abstract conceptual process, which is determining the architectonic structure of the arguments. In order to highlight this ‘hidden’ conceptual movement it is necessary to break off from our interpreting endeavours to discuss in detail the underlying and unfolding theoretical apparatus. To do this, I have divided the paper into three sections. The first section has dealt with the concept of a colonised society being an organic totality. The second section is about interpreting what Marx is saying about the Irish colonial situation. Moreover, the final one attempts to make explicit Marx’s dialectical framework with regard to his method of inquiry into colonial Ireland.

In a letter to Engels dated 30th November 1867, Marx tells his friend that he was relieved that at the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association meeting (26th November) he was not called upon to talk on Fenianism. The reasons he gave for his relief was that he had a ‘troublesome physical condition’, caused by a fever that lasted a fortnight and ‘passed only two days ago’43. And secondly that the subject matter of the meeting, Fenianism, ‘was liable to inflame the passions to such heat that I would be forced to hurl revolutionary thunderbolts instead of soberly analysing the state of affairs and the movement as I had intended’44. However, Marx then goes onto to admit that he was actually ill-prepared – ‘As a matter of fact what I prepared for Tuesday last was not a speech but points of a speech’45.

Just over three weeks later, on December 16, Marx finally gave his ‘Fenian’ speech to the Communist Educational Association of German Workers in London. Accordingly, we now possess copies of his undelivered speech notes for November 26 meeting – Notes and his delivered speech of the December 16 – Outline. By contrasting these nowpublished texts, I believe that we have an opportunity to explore how Marx ‘works up’ his material dialectically. We have evidence from this period that Engels was apparently assessing Marx’s intellectual endeavours for the explanatory effectiveness of his dialectical expositions.46 Here, I will be concentrating on the post-Famine period because Marx dealt with this phase of colonialism in more depth than any of the other identified phases.

We begin with the manuscript of the undelivered speech Notes of November 26, 1867, which is now titled Notes for an undelivered speech on Ireland.

Marx divides his Notes under a number of subheadings, which are Exordium. The Execution (two paragraphs), The Question, What is Fenianisn? (One sentence – ‘What is Fenianism?’), The Land Question. (Three pages), The English People. (Half page) and finally, The Remedy. (Two sentences). The first subheading he entitled 1. Exordium. The Execution, where Marx refers to the recent execution of three Fenians, – Larkin, Allen and O’Brien, as ‘Political Executions’ and this has subsequently politicised the struggle despite the British establishment’s attempt to continue to criminalise the Fenians and their activities:

Since our last meeting the object of our discussion, Fenianism, has entered a new phase. It is baptized in blood by the English Government. [….] They (political executions at Manchester) open a new period in the struggle between Ireland and England. The whole Parliament and liberal press responsible. Gladstone. Reason: to keep up the hypocrisy that this was no political, but a criminal affair47.

Section 2 on Fenianism is blank without any written comments, which supports Marx’s earlier comment that this manuscript was an unfinished outline of a speech. However, Section 3: the Land Question makes up the bulk of the manuscript and is subdivided under the following subheadings:

Decrease in Population, Increase of Livestock from 1855 to 1866, Emigration, How the Process Works, Consolidation and Change of Character of the English Rule in Ireland.

In the first subsection entitled the Decrease of Population, Marx presents a statistical table, which revealed that in the twenty-five-year period, from 1841 to 1866, the population had decreased by 2,650,69348 . Nevertheless, even in the last eleven years of this period, – 1855 to 1866, the population decreased by 1,032,69449. In the following subsections, – Increase of livestock from 1855 to 1866 and Emigration, Marx statistically demonstrated that the continuing decline of the Irish rural population was diametrically contrasted with an increase in livestock – ‘in the same period from 1855 to 1866 the number of livestock… [had a] …total increase of live-stock: 996,877, about one million. Thus 1,032,694 Irish men have been displaced by about one million cattle, pigs, and sheep.’50

And in correlating these ‘movements of population and agricultural produce’51 within this particular time Marx is suggesting that they are connected to each other through a third empirical trend of emigration, as he answers the question, concerning population loss- ‘What has become of them? The emigration list answers. From 1st May 1851 to 31st December 1866:1,730.189.’52

The now revealed relationship between these three concrete movements of human and livestock populations and emigration is that these are now posited as moments in a mediated process and crucially it expands upon being enfolded by two other concrete processes of farm consolidation and the conversion of tillage to pasture:

‘The process has been brought about and is still functioning upon an always enlarging scale by the throwing together or consolidation of farms (eviction) and the simultaneous conversion of tillage to pasture.’53

Having identified the enfolding connection between these empirical processes within in Irish social formation, Marx is not just locating the dominant specific historical trends of this period here he is also initially establishing the empirical dimensions of the organic totality to be analysed.

Marx in a following subsection title sets about uncovering: ‘How the Process works’

This title implies that the mediated process of land consolidation and the increase in pasture is itself being superseded by, as yet an unnamed process which apparently dominates the previously identified processes. We can begin to detect that Marx is unravelling a totalising ensemble of enfolding processes, which are simultaneously constructing an ever-evolving hierarchy of processual levels in a spiral-shaped movement. Marx begins his unravelling of this unnamed process by returning to the empirical areas of population movements and soil productivity. This time he attempts to assess the qualitative decline in the well-being of the majority of the population and the productivity of the Irish soil, which can be summarised in the following:

(a). The People: Deterioration in the overall well-being of the ‘mass of the people’ (near famine conditions and a decline in real wages)54.

(b). The Land: Deterioration in the soil fertility and its average output (dramatic decline in cereals, especially wheat where Ireland has moved from being an exporter to being an importer)55.

Therefore, with a massive exodus of people through continuing emigration, the remaining population and their conditions of production have experienced a deterioration of their conditions of existence in stark contrast to what certain ideologues were advocating for the continuing necessity of more emigration. Marx in an earlier piece of writing (1853) challenged the misconceived optimism of this position:

Like the world in general, we are assured, that Ireland in particular is becoming a paradise for the labourer, in consequence of famine and exodus. Why then, if wages really are so high in Ireland, is it that Irish labourers are flocking in such masses over to England to settle permanently on this side of the ‘pond’, while they formerly used to return after every harvest?56

And with regard to the determination of the apparent loss of soil fertility, Marx again locates the importance of farm consolidation but this time with regard to the subsequent elimination of the cottier class through emigration – ‘Since the exodus, the land has been underfed and overworked, partly by the injudicious consolidation of farms, and partly because under corn-acre the farmer in a great measure trusted to his labourers to manure the land for them’57.

What Marx is referring to here is that the nutrients of the soil that are lost in agricultural production, especially in the production of commodities, are not replaced by nature itself58. They have to be physically put back into the soil in order to restore the ‘natural’ fertility through various types of manuring processes. The cottiers and the small tenants replaced the ‘lost’ soil constituents by manuring the land, but with their exodus, this necessary process of fertilization was stopped, consequently depriving the Irish soil of its ability to sustain its productive fertility59. However, the qualitative deterioration of the land and its immediate toilers is then subsequently contrasted with the increasing financial returns of profit and rent. This is apparently the dominant real contradiction of, the post-famine period, – where the soil and its toilers were being ‘sacrificed’ (expropriated of their respective productive powers) for increased money returns – ‘Rentand profits may increase, although the produce of the soil decreases. The total produce may diminish, but that part of it, which is converted into surplus produce, falling to landlord and greater farmers, instead of the labourer’60.

58 Recently John Bellamy Foster has identified this formulation of Marx as the metabolic rift. Marx even used it in the context of colonial Ireland:

[I]t must not be forgotten that for a century and a half, England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil (Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. p.860).

59This clearing of the smallest farm holdings included the cottiers and their tenurial agreement with the tenants of conacre, – ‘cornacre’. The Pre-Famine cottiers rented small plots of land (size varied from half a rood to two acres) from the tenant-farmer, which the cottier generally paid for in labour, – labour days. These plots were used to grow potatoes, which feed the cottier and his family. However, part of the agreement between the tenant and the cottier was that the cottier would ‘fertilize’ the plot, generally with manure or seaweed.

In Capital, vol.1 Marx gives a clearer rendition of this conceptualisation of the dominant real contradiction of this post famine period:

The depopulation of Ireland has thrown much of the land out of cultivation, greatly diminished the produce of the soil, and in spite of the greater area devoted to cattle breeding, brought about decline in some of its branches, and in others an advance scarcely worth mentioning, and constantly interrupted by retrogressions. Nevertheless, the rents of the land and the profits of the farmers increased along with the fall in population, though not so steadily as the latter. The reason for this will easily be understood. On the one hand, with the throwing together of the smallholdings, and the change from arable to pasture land a larger part of the total product was transformed into a surplus product. The surplus product increased although there was a decrease in the total product of which the surplus product formed only a fraction. On the other hand, the monetary value of this surplus product increased still more rapidly than its actual quantity, owing to the rise in the price of meat, wool, etc., on the English market61.

The financial returns on this type of agricultural production ‘falls’ to the landlords and ‘greater farmers’ because a large proportion of the direct producers are expelled from the immediate production process through emigration, thus allowing more of the production to be given over to being a surplus product, or those that remain are more intensively expropriated of their surplus labour through increases in rent returns and profit taking.

Therefore, the apparent contradictory relationship between the increasing financial returns from production and the loss of soil fertility was intensified by the loss of the potential restorers of that fertility, – the cottiers and small tenants through emigration – ‘So result: gradual expulsion of the natives, gradual deterioration and exhaustion of the source of life, the soil’62.

Marx continues – ‘Process of Consolidation. This process has only begun; it is going on in rapid strides’63.

Here again Marx returns to the empirical level in which statistics on the consolidation of landholding reveal not only an increase in farm sizes but they also allow him to project forward these empirical trends of consolidation to predict that if the rate of consolidation is going to continue in its present propensity and reach the English level then more‘expulsion of the natives’ will be needed – ‘Thus to be cleared off 2,847,220, if we number only the farmers and their families’64.

The ‘clearing off’ of this supposed surplus population of agriculturalists is not only a process but a systematic one – ‘This system [is a] natural offspring of the famine of 1846, accelerated by the abolition of the Corn Laws, the rise in the price of meat and wool, now systematic’65.

Therefore, this new process has very divergent moments in its formation as a systematic process. These moments include not only a natural occurrence (The Famine) but also

economic (price rises) and political (Repeal of the Corn Laws) aspects66. In conceptualising it as systematic Marx is proposing that it was not just an immediate reaction to the famine conditions but having come into existence by that event, it became a structural part of the Irish social formation, as he states in the following from Capital:

Finally, it is a systematic process, which does not simply make a passing gap in the population, but sucks out of it every year more people than are replaced by births, so that the absolute level of the population falls year by year (footnote –Between 1851 and 1874, the total number of emigrants amounted to 2,325,922)67.

Finally, Marx identifies this crucial determining process: ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland…’

It is significant that Marx used the concept of the ‘estate’ in naming the process of land clearance in that it not only ‘equates’ Ireland with being essentially an extended landed estate and simultaneously emphases that it is an industrial wasteland having already been deindustrialised by an earlier phases of colonial oppression. Marx continues the sentence by highlighting the consequence of this ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’ – ‘… transforming

66The Repeal of the Corn Laws was to be assessed, by Marx as the ‘chief factor’ in his delivered speech document. Kinealy suggests that it was a conscious and deliberate decision by the British Parliament to sacrifice the Irish poor in order to provide cheap food for the British industrial workers (C. Kinealy, p.49. ‘Was Ireland a Colony?’ in Was Ireland a Colony; Economics, Politics and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, edited by T. McDonough, (Irish Academic Press, 2005, Dublin) And according to Marx this was the normal orientation of the Westminster Government to Ireland as ‘the management of merely local concerns of Ireland… was altogether immaterial to Great Britain’ (K. Marx, and F. Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. (second reprint, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978). p.177. it into an English agricultural district, minus its resident lords and their retainers, separated from England by a broad water ditch’68.

As the Act of Union was the ‘annihilation of the Irish Legislature’69 the process of estate clearances is the annihilation of Irish civil society and reducing it into being ‘only an agricultural district of England, marked off by a wide channel from the country to which it yields corn, wool, cattle, industrial and military recruits’70. In a letter to Engels (November 30 1867) Marx explicitly links the process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ with the colonising process:

‘Clearing the estate of Ireland! Is now the one purpose of English rule in Ireland’71.

The following and final section unravels the ‘overriding moment’ of the colonising process within this particular organic totality of post-Famine Ireland.

The title of this section ‘Change of Character of English Rule in Ireland’ is extremely significant in that it asserts that ‘English Rule in Ireland’ is itself engaged in an evolutionary movement over time – in fact – as a process. Marx proceeds in his explication of this colonial process by looking initially at the contemporary situation and then moving on to examine how that process unfolded over time. Its style of exposition in dense note form needs a lot of elaboration in order to make sense of Marx’s ideas here. The post-Famine manifestation of this colonial process is captured in the following two lines – ‘State only a tool of the landlords. Evictions also employed as a means of political punishment. (Lord Abercorn. England, Gaels in the Highland of Scotland’72.

The immediate ‘character of English Rule in Ireland’ within this post-Famine period is dramatically revealed in the opening statement – ‘State only tool of the landlords’73. This provocative assertion makes the link between the dominant overall process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ and the political institutions of the state and thereby with the colonial process. Crucially, it is not the obvious institutions of the colonial state that are determining this strategy of clearance but the landlords with the support of the state apparatus. These state institutions included the legal system, the local police force and the army when necessary74. And the crucial colonial ‘moment’ of Irish landlordism in the context of consolidating estate holdings is its ability to use the ultimate form of coercion – eviction – ‘Eviction, also employed as a means of political punishment’75.

It is not possible at this stage to ascertain what concrete instances Marx is referring to here. However, there are numerous examples even after the Famine of ‘political’ evictions. For example, in 1852, a landlord in Mayo evicted 15 tenants because 74As Marx said in 1853 ‘Legislature, magistracy and armed force, are all of them the offspring of improper conditions of society, preventing those arrangements among men which would make useless the compulsory intervention of a third supreme power’ Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question. p.61. of their failure to follow his voting instructions 76. However, what is significant about this type of eviction is that it can legally exist in the Irish social formation, demonstrating how the Irish peasantry had no legal right to defend themselves against such an unfair imposition of ‘abominable’ legal conditions. Next Marx mentions Lord Abercorn without putting him into a context, but if we refer to his letter to Engels on 2nd November 1867 we can gain an insight into why Marx was referring to the Irish Viceroy with regard to evictions – ‘The Irish Viceroy, Lord Abercorn, ‘cleared’ his estate in the last few weeks by forcibly evicting thousands of people. Among them were prosperous tenants whose improvements and investments were thus confiscated!’77.

The Abercorn reference is followed by the word ‘England’. Marx in his discussion of primitive accumulation stated how ‘in England the conversion of arable land into pasture since the decade prior to the middle of the 18th century through the enclosures of the commons, the throwing together of small farms. This is still proceeding’78. Gaels in theHighland Scotland’ is Marx obviously referring to the Highland clearances in Scotland. These short note-like points are subsequently followed by a crucial presentation of the historical development of English rule in Ireland:

Former English policy: displacing the Irish by English (Elizabeth), roundheads (Cromwell). Since Anne, 18th – century politico-economical character only again in the protectionist measures of England against her own colony making religion a proprietary title. After the Union the system of rack-renting and middlemen, but left the Irish, however ground to the dust, holder of their native soil. Present system, quiet business-like extinction, and government only instrument of landlords (and usurers)79.

With regard to the unfolding of empirical categories here there is a definite change in the style of the presentation. Marx obviously switches to a more chronological approach, which deals with a long sweep of Irish history, running from the twelfth century to mid- nineteenth century, within which he appears to locate seven phases in the evolution of the‘character of the English rule in Ireland’. The watersheds of these phases are generally indicated by the name on the throne (or Cromwell) or by an event (which was generally catastrophic to Ireland), followed by a brief description of the characteristic traits ‘of the English rule in Ireland’, i.e., ‘displacing the Irish by English’, ‘protectionist measures’, ‘religion as a proprietary title’, ‘rackrenting and middlemen system’ and finally ‘the present system of extinction’80. This type of historical presentation establishes not only a sense of continuity of purpose in the English governance of Ireland but it also locates the ‘abstract’ process of colonising as the ‘internal’ and dominating process of these identified historical periods, although there are differences in the modus operandi as suggested in the specific historical categories of the strategies adopted.

The concept of the ‘politico-economical character’ used by Marx in this paragraph may be significant in his methodological exploration of colonialism, in that it appears to attempt to combine the political regime with its strategy of subjugating the Irish economy/civil society to its own desired aims. Accordingly, it is an abstract general concept (abstract universal) of colonialism, while its specific concrete manifestation within a particular historical period of English rule of Ireland, e.g., ‘protectionist measures’, ‘rackrenting and middlemen’ appear to take on the forms of the concrete universal within each phase of colonial domination. In a letter to Engels (30th November, 1867) Marx actually identified a change of form of the politico-economical character of the post-Famine period ‘…since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political domination in Ireland has entered an entirely new phase …’81.

Consequently, the diverse range of colonising strategies and their resultant subverted conditions of existence within Irish society can include cultural, religious, racial, military and of course the economic. In the post-Famine period, these other strategies were dominated by the landlord’s strategy of extinction, which therefore emerges as ‘active middle’ of the colonial process in this particular historical phase of its development. This ‘active centre’ of clearing the land can be contrasted with the preceding phase of colonialism, 1800-1846, where the ‘rackrenting and middlemen’ system was the dominant process of the Irish organic totality. This system ‘left the Irish … ground to dust, holder of their native soil’82. Marx suggested that as early as 1853 that part of this super exploitative rental system was its inability to compensate the native tenantry for agricultural improvements. The implication of this moment in the rackrenting process was that the direct producers and their essential condition of production – the soil – were both being ‘pauperised’:

A tenant having incorporated his capital, in one form or another, in the land, and having thus effected an improvement of the soil, either directly by irrigation, drainage, manure, or indirectly by the construction of buildings for agricultural purposes, in steps the landlord with demand for increased rent. If the tenant concede, he has to pay the interest for his own money to the landlord. If he resist, he will be very unceremoniously ejected, and supplanted by a new tenant, the latter being enabled to pay a higher rent by the very expenses incurred by his predecessors, until he also, in his turn, has become an improver of the land, and is replaced in the same way, or put on worst terms. ….. He had, accordingly, noother alternative left but to become a pauper – to pauperise himself by industry, or to pauperise by negligence83.

The consequence of this type of extreme rental appropriation of, not only the surplus labour (and in extreme cases even part of the necessary labour) of the tenant, but also the tenant’s capital invested (mostly through labour) is that there was little to no investment in the improvement of the land. Therefore, even those that ‘earned’ a rental income such as landlords and middlemen in the pre-Famine period did not invest in agriculture as Marx states – ‘Middlemen accumulated fortunes that they would not invest in the improvement of the land, and they could not, under the system which prostrated manufactures, invest in machinery, etc. All their accumulations were sent therefore to England for investment’84.

The crucial point to emphasize from Marx’s analysis here is that all these highlighted moments of the social processes operating in Irish agriculture suggest that the capitalist mode of production is not in existence in this particular colonial social formation. Marx explicitly states this in vol.3 of Capital – ‘[T]he capitalist mode of production itself does not exist, the tenant himself is not an industrial capitalist, and his manner of farming is not a capitalist one. This is how it is in Ireland, for example. Here the tenant is generally a small peasant85.

Marx then articulates those moments that ‘subvert’ the productive conditions of the Irish peasantry and these revolve around how the specific rental form disrupts the ‘normal’ (capitalist) circulation of capital within the overall production process:

What he pays the landowner for his lease often absorbs not only a portion of his profit, i.e. his own surplus labour, which he has a right to as owner of his own instruments of labour, but also a portion of the normal wage, which he would receive for the same amount of labour under other conditions. The landowner, moreover, who does nothing at all here to improve the soil, expropriates from him the small capital, which he incorporates into the soil for the most part by his own labour, just as a usurer would do in similar conditions. Only the usurer would at least risk his own capital in the operation86.

What we apparently have in this phase of Irish development is, according to Marx’s analysis, colonialism without the capitalist mode of production!

The next phase located in this historical exposition is the post-Famine period, where Marx returns to the particular ‘politico-economical character’, which is further expanded upon from the opening assertion of the paragraph – ‘Present system, quiet business-like extinction, and the government only the instrument of the landlords (and usurers) (emphasis added)87’.

The newly added concepts to the ones in the initial formulation at the beginning of the paragraph are the ‘quiet business-like extinction’ and the ‘usurers’ added within brackets. In the latter concept, Marx is probably referring to how the Encumbered Estates Court ‘turned a mass of previously enriched middlemen into landlords’ (Marx to Engels, 30th November, 1867, 148)88. The ‘quiet business-like extinction’ relates to how the Irish landlords were the instigators of this type of forced emigration (through eviction or assisted emigration) and they were applying this strategy of ‘extinction’ on their own individual landed estates. Consequently, the manifestation of this colonial strategy of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ was realising itself not only at the local level, within the confines of the immediate landed estates, but also across most of the landed estates in Ireland89. Therefore, behind these apparent discrete actions of expulsion there was a collective landlord plan to exterminate the native Irish lower classes as Marx revealed in the late 1850s – ‘The landlords of Ireland are confederated for a fiendish war of extermination against the cott(i)ers; or as they call it, they combine for the economical experiment of clearing the land of useless mouths. The small native tenants are disposed of with no more ado than vermin is by the housemaid’ 90.

However, these Irish landlords were ‘quietly’ going about their ‘business’ of extinction without supposedly the formal consent of the British State and, although this being the case, they were actually using the local apparatuses of that state to carry out their ‘war of extermination’. This was especially true with regard to the necessary legal and physical force requirements in the process of eviction, – the ejectment code etc. In this respect, the colonising British state, especially those apparatuses which maintained social order in the midst of civil turmoil, was being hijacked by these Irish landlords in supporting their actual eviction procedures on the ground by physically assisting the landlord’s crowbarbrigade. In referring to this post-Famine colonial strategy of ‘Clearing of the estate of Ireland’, Marx stated in a letter to Engels (November 30, 1867) that ‘The stupid English government in London knows nothing of course itself of this immense change since

89Marx was aware that there was a need to ‘aggregate’ the individual actions of the landlords in order to discover the systematic approach to the extinction of the Irish peasantry:

‘The clearing of estates only shows, as a systematic process applied to whole counties, what occurred everywhere in detail…’ K. Marx and F. Engels MECW, vol. 28, (Lawrence and Wishart, Moscow, 1986). p.258.

1846’91. A dramatic point in the unravelling of the colonial process has been reached, where the most obvious organ of colonising, – the British Government in London – was unaware of what another faction of the colonising regime was actually enacting on the Irish landed estates, – the landlords and their strategy to extinguish the small tenantry and the cottiers.

So the end point of Marx’s first conceptual path has been reached, – the ‘essential determining structure’ (process), in this phase of colonialism, – ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’. Marx now needs to explicate in detail its specific social form. However, in this document Marx does not engage in this process of exploration but leaves it to his later work which he presented in his delivered ‘Fenian’ speech of the 16th December 1867.

‘The English People’ – This section begins with a general point that the Irish Question was [a] ‘cause of humanity and right, but above all a specific English question’92. It is only when Marx discusses the ‘Irish in England’ that his comments on other occasions can give us some insight into these apparent discrete note forms. These note forms are:

‘Influence on wages, etc. Lowering the character of the English and Irish. The Irish Character. Chastity of Irishmen. Attempts at education in Ireland. Diminution of crimes93.

We are fortunate to have longer elaborations of these assertions available to us from Marx and Engel’s discussions of these topics elsewhere in their works and we can present them in the order of they are unfolded in the above. With regard to the Irish lowering the character and wages of the English workers, Marx famously stated the following in 1870:

The revolutionary fire of the Celtic worker does not go well with the nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker, solid, but slow. On the contrary, in all the big industrial centers in England there is profound antagonism between the Irish proletariat and the English proletariat. The average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He regards him somewhat like the poor whites of the Southern States of North America regard their black slaves94.

These contrasting racial forms as they are presented here were manifesting themselves within the industrial working class of nineteenth century Britain. In this context, the racial traits appear to be conceptualised as reified entities, – the contrasting racial characteristics seem to be innate and immutable. However, appearances can be deceptive because these character traits were being determined by societal conditions – a change in these conditions appear to cause these ‘immutable’ traits to also change. In the ever-revelatory technique of Marx’s dialectical method, the apparent ‘immutable’ surface appearances of discrete entities always end up being mere moments of a constantly evolving organic totality. This becomes evident in the case of these racial traits when Marx discussed the ‘chastity of Irishmen’ prior to them emigrating in Capital, vol.1 – ‘Thousands of Irish families, who according to the testimony of the English, eaten up as these are with national prejudice, are notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and purity of their home-life, found themselves suddenly transplanted into hot- beds of vice’95.

The actual movement from ‘moral’ Ireland to foreign ‘hot-beds of vice’ conditions appear to cause the Irish peasant, according to Engels, to become corruptible – ‘The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois. True, this is the case with most peasants. But in Ireland, it is particularly bad’96.

Engels is even more explicit in the following of the moral decay of the Irish as they migrate to English speaking parts of the globe but lays the blame for this decline on colonial oppression – ‘By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation and now, as everyone knows, fulfill the function of supplying England, America, Australia, etc., with prostitutes, casual labourers, pimps, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other rabble’97.

The ever-changing racial constructions of the Irish were not only multi-faceted but differing forms of colonial oppression were also determining them. Consequently, the racial traits of the nineteenth century Irish are very different from those of the sixteenth century and not because they evolved within an exclusive cultural sphere but by their relationship with the ever-changing forms of colonialism. Even the trait of melancholy was a consequence of colonialism, which Engels discovered within Irish songs – ‘The melancholy dominating most of these songs is still the expression of the national disposition today. How could it be otherwise amongst a people whose conquerors are always inventing new, up-to-date methods of oppression?’98

Even the emerging forms of education in nineteenth century Ireland were been determined by colonialism, which either were been imposed by the British, or a specific Irish form was adopted to resist the colonial imposition as Engels reveals to Jenny Longuet (Marx) in 1881:

The Irish, neglected by the English government, had taken the education of their own children into their own hands. At a time when English fathers and mothers insisted upon their right to send their children to the factory to earn money instead of school to learn, at that time in Ireland the peasants vied with each other in forming schools of their own. [….] In 1812 there were 4,600 such hedge-schools in Ireland…. So then, these truly national schools did not suit English purposes. To suppress them, the sham national schools were established. [….] Compare with these Irish peasants the English who howl at compulsory school-attendance to this day!99

And finally, with regard to ‘the diminution of crime’ Marx provided not only a criticism of the English racial stereotyping of the Irish but also crucially a damning critique of racial characteristics as a determinant of behaviour:

Strange to say, the only part of the United Kingdom in which crime has seriously decreased, say by 50, and even by 75 per cent, is Ireland. How can we harmonise this fact with the public-opinion slang of England, according to which Irish nature, instead of British misrule, is responsible for Irish shortcomings? It is, again, no act on the part of the British ruler, but simply the consequence of a famine, an exodus, and a general combination of circumstances favourable to the demand for Irish labour, that has worked this happy change in Irish nature.100

Although, the process of racialisation took on many concrete forms and across an ever- expanding range of institutional contexts, the highlighted diverse character traits of the Irish race were determined in the ‘last instant’ by the process of colonialism. In this sense, the cultural forms of racial oppression were exposed as being determined by changingconditions outside the cultural sphere, when these respective ‘badges of conquest were removed [but] the servitude remained’101. And with the specific process of ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’, the particular ‘badge’ was a cultural form of ethnicity, which manifested itself in the decline of the Celtic trait of the Irish population and the subsequent emergence in its place of the ‘Saxon’ cultural form, Engels describes this transformation:

The country was completely ruined by the English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850 (for in reality both the wars and the state of siege lasted as long as that). [….] The people itself got its peculiar character from this, and for all their national Irish fanaticism the fellows feel they are no longer at home in their own country. Ireland for the Saxon! That is now being realized. The Irishman knows that he cannot compete with the Englishman, who comes equipped with means superior in every respect; emigration will go on until the predominantly, indeed almost exclusively, Celtic character of the population is gone to the dogs. How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed, politically and industrially102.

However, there is an ironic ‘twist’ to this depopulation of the Celtic race in Ireland because as they were cleared from their homeland, which was subsequently made into a ‘Saxon’ stronghold, – the Celtic Irish were reappearing in the heartlands of Britain, – in the industrial and political centers of the colonising. This racial revenge was observed by Marx in 1855 – ‘Ireland has revenged herself upon England, socially – by bestowing an Irish quarter on every English industrial, maritime or commercial town of any size, and politically – by furnishing the English Parliament with an “Irish Brigade”’103.

However, the Celtic Irish were not just invading the Saxon heartlands of Britain they were also crucially emerging on the other side of the Atlantic as a political threat to the old colonial queen herself:

With the accumulation of rents in Ireland, the accumulation of the Irish in America keeps pace. The Irishman, banished by sheep and ox, re-appears on the other side of the ocean as a Fenian, and face to face with the old queen of the seas rises, threatening and more threatening, the young giant Republic104.

As we have discovered there is an obvious sense of conceptual movement inherent in Marx’s work here. He begins by examining the specific historical categories on human and livestock population movements by locating an apparent statistical relationship between them and a third factor, – emigration. In establishing a mediated relationship between these three concrete entities Marx revealed that they formed a process and these concrete entities were subsumed under that process as its essential ‘moments’. This initial process is then subsequently enfolded by another empirical process, – ‘farm consolidation – the switch from tillage to pasture’. These now metabolised processes are in turn engulfed by the emergence of an economic process, which appears to be the dominant economic contradiction of this post-Famine period. Where, unlike the capitalist mode of production, the shedding of direct producers from agriculture would be indicative of an increase in the output of production as expressed in relative surplus value, but in this Irish case the fall in the population of agriculturalists saw simultaneously a decline in the ‘produce of the soil’ but an increase in the financial returns of profit and rent.

Therefore, the misery of the labourers and the soil (as manifested in its depletion) is contrasted by the increasing returns on profit taking and rent. These empirical trends are thus linked to each other as the concrete forms of revenue acquisition was determined by the landlords extracting a ‘surplus’ from the direct producers (the tenantry) and theiressential condition of production – the soil. In a strictly mode of production analysis where the organic totality is generally confined to the economic, this grinding extractive process would probably be the overall dominant relationship, and thereby ‘predominates over the rest’ of the relationships to become the ‘active middle’ process. But Marx does not stop at this point of his conceptual pathway but pushes on to unearth a process that will ultimately become the real ‘active middle’ process of this Irish organic totality.

Marx conceptually unfolding the processes towards the determining colonial phase of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland.

Population decrease – livestock increase – emigration ▼

Farm consolidation – increase in pasture ▼

Deterioration in conditions of production – increase in financial returns ▼

Famine – Repeal of the Corn Laws – rise in the price of meat and wool, entitled ’Clearing the Estate of Ireland’.

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Colonial State dominated by the ‘clearing’ landlords

In conceptually moving through these processes sequentially Marx finally arrives at what he called the ‘systematic’ process, where the Repeal of the Corn Laws instigated a ‘systematic process’ which involved Westminster passing a parliamentary act which in turn devastated the Irish agricultural economy by collapsing the prices for Irish grain. It was at this point that Marx was able to reveal the essential ‘active middle’ process of this entire concrete totality, – ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ – and subsequently declared it to be ‘the one purpose of English rule in Ireland’. Marx appears to have switched from a more synchronic type of analysis to a more diachronic form as he investigates the emergence of this final phase of ‘English rule in Ireland’ – ‘clearing the estate of Ireland’. Thus, this post-Famine form is itself an evolutionary phase of the British colonising process, where the political process of colonialism metabolises with the economic process of civil society to become the overall dominant process of ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’.

Consequently, as Marx ‘descended’ from the concrete to the abstract he arrived at the essential social process of the Irish social formation in its post-Famine phase which was declared to have a specific colonial form to it. Marx therefore has completed his crucial initial path of inquiry and I would presume that he would now turn his attention to the second path of exposition, as he will attempt to retrace his conceptual steps and ascend from the abstract to the concrete. However, on this occasion as we have discovered he did not set out on the second conceptual pathway, – his method of exposition. This failure to continue and move from the abstract to the concrete may be explained by his declared illness when a ‘fever that lasted a fortnight and passed only two days’ 105 before he was scheduled to give the paper on the 26th of November 1867.

It is crucial to highlight that Marx is not describing the features of colonialism in the post-Famine period. He is in fact tracing out the ‘inner connections’ of this organic totality and the precise trajectory of his conceptual movement is determined by how these ‘inner connections’ are structured internally in this real concrete object. We have discovered that Marx in his investigation of this period unravelled a totalising ensemble of enfolding processes, beginning with ‘population loss – emigration – livestock increase’ process at the immediate concrete level to the ‘clearing of the estate of Ireland’ at the ‘abstract’ centre of this particular totality. Nevertheless, crucially it has moved through a number of mediating processes. Therefore, Banaji is right, Marx’s conceptual movement ‘is not a straight-line process’ – ‘One returns to the concrete at expanded levels of the total curve, reconstructing the surface of society in stages, as a structure of several dimensions. And this implies …we find a continuous oscillation between essence and appearance’106.

The latter tendency was obvious in Marx’s work here as he constantly kept referring back to statistics, which identified empirical trends manifesting themselves at the concrete surface level before he uncovered how they were actually mediated moments of underlying processes. The inherent oscillation between appearance and essence and an unfolding of internally mediated processes determines that we perceive the overall structure of this organic totality as ‘expanding curve or spiral-movement composed of specific cycles of abstraction (of processes). Each cycle of abstraction, and thus the curve as a whole, begins and ends with …the realm of appearances …107.

However, there is another crucial determination of the spiral structure to the organic totality and that has to do with understanding movement within a totality and specifically between processes. When Marx initially unfolds these processes, they have a tendency to appear to be mere circles, forming an internal unity and whose elements are mutually conditioning, ‘in which the condition becomes conditioned, the cause becomes the effect, the universal becomes the particular, is a characteristic feature of internal interaction through which actual development assumes the form of a circle’…108. This is an illusion created by the process of abstraction as the real concrete ‘is the concentration of many determinations, hence the unity of the diverse’109. In our case, it is the unity of diverse processes! Therefore, mediating processes smash open the inherent tendencies of an individual process to be self- conditioning and thus taking on a circular form. Therefore, Marx’s initial process of his Notes here, ‘the population loss – emigration – livestock increase’ process forms a such-like circle of self-conditioning. But this process was subsequently engulfed by another process, – ‘the consolidation of farms and the switch from tillage to livestock’, – which not only merged the two processes but they subsequently began to expand ‘upon an always enlarging scale…’110 Marx has conceptualised this type of expanding movement as a change in form from a circular to a spiral form – ‘…. the gradual propagation of capital by reproduction passing it from a circular into a spiral form…’111

Therefore, since the essence of an organic totality is movement as ‘mutual interaction’ takes place between different moments (processes), thus the mediating processes will always form an ever-enlarging and expanding spiral curve in its inner configuration. Therefore, the essential inner determination of an organic totality will be the active middle process like the valorisation process in capitalism. This is also true with regard to what we have uncovered in the post-Famine phase that ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’ is an active middle process of this colonised organic totality112.

Therefore, if Anderson and Smith are right about Marx’s intellectual endeavours in his later years (they both suggest that Marx was attempting to ‘extend his dialectical analysis’ into non-capitalistic social formations, – replicating the real movement of capitalism into these regions), the question arises what type of societal entity was there to be conquered. What I want to suggest from our conceptual odyssey into Marx’s dialectical understanding of the Irish situation is that what was waiting for capitalism at the ‘margins’ were other organic totalities, with their necessary spirals of intermeshing processes and each and every one of these ‘non-western’ totalities having its own specific ‘active middle’ process. Smith grasps the essential and potentially correct trajectory of conceptualisation in his question, – ‘So what, then does capital encounter in its outward spiral?’113 The answer is, – other spirals – of mediating processes that form non- capitalistic organic totalities. In the Irish case, as we have discovered, the indigenous organic totality was dominated by British colonialism, where the normal conditions of a society were transformed into ‘abominable’ conditions.

This process of subversion was imposed on Irish society, as Marx stated in his opening quotation of this article, in order ‘to enable a small caste of rapacious lordlings to dictate to the Irish people the terms on which they shall be allowed to hold the land and live upon it’114. Therefore, capitalism is,to paraphrase Smith, being ‘barred’ by how a particular form of commodity production, which had ‘metabolised’ with an Irish organic totality where colonial landlordism dominated. Marx repeatedly stated that ‘All that the English government succeeded in doing was to plant an aristocracy in Ireland’115. And as a consequence, of this imposed landlordism, it is the rental relationship which was the main driver of accumulation rather than capital as in the capitalist mode of production. This itself, is a consequence of the particular colonial configuration of the Irish organic totality that made commodity production unable to become ‘completed’ in its capitalist form. Marx in his Preface to theGerman edition of Capital brilliantly captures this contradictory relationship between fully developed capitalist production and its ‘incompleted’ form:

In all other spheres, and just like the rest of Continental Western Europe, we suffer not only from the development of capitalist production, but also from the incompleteness of that development. Alongside the modern evils, we are oppressed by a whole series of inherited evils, arising from the passive survival of archaic and outmoded modes of production, with their accompanying train of anachronistic social and political relations. We suffer not only from the living, but from the dead116.

Therefore, commodity producers ‘at the margins’, who produce under non-capitalist conditions of production suffer from both the ‘living … [and] the dead. In the sense that they have to live with market competition from capitalist commodity producers and simultaneously produce those commodities without the more developed capitalist forces of production. These non-existent conditions of production are therefore ‘dead’ to these ‘petty’ commodity producers. In the Irish colonial case, Marx in his discussion of the Irish peasantry outlined the precariousness of such a relationship between the non- capitalist Irish peasant producer and capitalism – ‘They are, one after the other, and with a degree of force unknown before, crushed by the competition of an agriculture managed by capital, and therefore they continually furnish new recruits to the class of wage- labourers117.

However, it needs to be stated that, although they are generally ‘crushed’ by foreign capitalist competition, they do not join the ranks of the Irish industrial wage-labourers because their respective industrial enterprises have already been ‘cleared’ from the Irish landscape in previous crushing bouts of colonial oppression and as a consequence, the ‘ejected’ Irish peasantry become proletariats in foreign locations. Therefore, they are cleared not only from their landed estates also from their homeland!

Accordingly, as we have discovered colonialism, is a multi-faceted process, which has an innate ability to manifest itself throughout a societal organic totality on many levels and within differing and diverse forms. Its omnipotent presence and its constantly changing forms ‘bath’ all in its hue to such an extent that its existence belies direct empirical observation and subsequent description; it is only when we attempt to perceive it through the prism of a dialectical framework that its presence becomes obvious. In holding Marx’s Undelivered Speech document up to the mirror of dialectics, the apparent concrete empirical data presented in its statistical and factual forms melt away to reveal an underlying ensemble of constantly moving internal processes. These levels penetrate each other, – the concrete entities end up as moments within abstract processes and the internal processes are the determination of concrete entities of reality. Both the concrete and the abstract forms thus interact with each other to become an organic totality.

Levine argues that in the 1861-3 workbooks, Marx arrived at a new definition of capitalism. Until the drafts of 1861-3 Marx had remained close to Adam Smith’s definition of capitalism as stored-up labour, this was modified by Marx to mean stored-up surplus labour. In these drafts, he begins to redefine capitalism as a process of valorisation118. Levine suggests that ‘[t]he storing up of labour is quantitative…The valorisation process, on the other hand, refers to the inherent tendencies of a system, the necessary drive of an organic totality to increase surplus-value’119.

What I believe is crucial about this ‘epistemological break’ is that it indicates how Marx is moving away from not only the empiricism of classical political economy but also towards a more Hegelian framework, in which reality is seen as a continuous moving process (or processes). The subsequent analysis replicates this sense of movement in how there is an inherent sense of conceptual movement in Marx’s methods of inquiry and exposition. This crucial attribute of the dialectical approach can cause problems in any attempt to provide a definitive definition of a particular structure or process within the totality under investigation. Again, Chris Arthur highlights this difficulty with regard to the concepts of value and capital within Marx’s dialectical analysis of them:

The upshot is that value cannot be defined in the simple sense of either substance pre-existing exchange or as a mere phenomenal relation, but only as a moment of a totalizing process of development of internally related forms of a complex whole … whose internal moments…are nested within each other and enfold one another in an ever-moving mediatedness … A methodological consequence of this is that the concept of capital …requires not a definition …but a dialectical exposition of its inner self-development120.

If this is so with regard to all organic totalities, it is so with regard to our attempt to explicate Marx’s dialectical presentation of the colonial dialectic within the organic totality of post-Famine Ireland, in which colonialism has to be understood and analytically grasped as process with ‘its inner self-development’.

Peter Hudis is right when he stated that with regard to Marx’s work on colonialism, we ‘still have much to learn from the method and approach that Marx employed in his studies on colonialism,’121.

And especially in the case of colonial Ireland!

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