In this essay I consider different kinds of structures within the agricultural
environment. I approach these structures as kinds of agency, with particular
environmental influences, in space and in time. I address the question of what goes
into an artefact, avoiding the distinction between material and immaterial forces,
between object and subject. Specifically, I consider the structure and design of a stile,
a way for humans to pass over a fence or barrier. Stiles are not directly part of the
agricultural system in which livestock are managed. Although they allow humans to
overcome an obstacle that is impervious to animals, they are indifferent to the
regulation and manipulation of animal action—unlike a system of barbed wire fences,
motor vehicles, dogs and gates. While not essentially play-inducing structures, in an
agricultural context where immediate durability, cost effectiveness and low
maintenance are imperative, stiles open up the possibility of a different engagement.
One of my university lecturers once said, ‘a public forms at the drop of a hat.’ He was
addressing a roundtable gathered to address the question of the contemporary in
relation to Australian poetry. I immediately considered this an instructive and
memorable metaphor: someone losing their hat and one, maybe two people, picking it
up to hand back: that was a public. My lecturer was illustrating the idea that society is
composed of groups, or publics, with continually shifting, interconnected relations.
These relations can be held together and shaped by something as seemingly
inconsequential as a dropped hat. The general public is an abstraction from this
smaller, diverse configuration of minor publics.
In order to make these relations explicit one needs something to follow; one needs to
find a dropped hat, which isn’t difficult because they’re everywhere. My dropped hat
is a stile or stiles. It’s a difficult idea to get across in speech because people initially
think you’re talking about style, as in ‘literary style,’ ‘lifestyle,’ ‘hair style,’ or ‘styles
of scientific reasoning.’ According to my computer dictionary a stile is ‘an
arrangement of steps that allows people but not animals to climb over a wall.’ The
word comes from a Germanic root stigel, meaning ‘to climb.’ Already in this
definition we witness the stile as a screening device, a point of connection for some
and disconnection for others. I’ve also called it an elevated pathway and had success
with this description.
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The poet gardener, Ian Hamilton Finlay, has a stile in his garden, Little Sparta, known
as ‘The Hegelian Stile’: the fence is the thesis, the gate is the antithesis and the stile is
the synthesis. Hamilton Finlay has engraved the path, fence and stile with their
respective Hegelian synonyms. As the synthesis of a fence and a gate, a stile is at
once an opening and a closure. While a gate performs the function of being both open
and closed at different times, a stile is in a permanently composite condition, open to
some, while shut to others. It is in this sense a kind of portal or passage, leading from
the ground, through the air, back to another ground, another paddock. Gates do
something similar, but there is less of an upward elsewhere to travel through.
My interest in stiles began due to a few serendipitous occurrences. Firstly, I’d been
enlisted by my father, who runs a broad acre property in the Central West of NSW, to
plant out a six-hectare tree lot as part of a local Landcare initiative. This also involved
a not insignificant amount of fencing, during which I had the time to ponder the kinds
of boundaries and entrances that compose the farm. There are lots of fences and gates.
In addition to the complex, byzantine and largely hidden watering system, which
includes the standard pipes, tanks, dams, troughs, windmills, bores, pumps and taps.
While researching another project I learnt of the Greek custom of erecting herms on
the roads between cities, as a tribute to the god of travellers, Hermes. A herm is a
small pillar of stone, often engraved with a phallus. The herm has an explicit
performative purpose. It is erected in the name of a non-human, a god whose power or
fortune it invokes. The herm connects the traveller to the gods.
As a further preliminary digression, I’d also like to mention the work of Tobie
Nathan, a French ethnopsychiatrist, former student of George Devereux. Nathan
works with migrants living in France, often from North Africa originally, who haven’t
been able to adjust to the foreign culture. They occasionally suffer from difficult to
diagnose pathologies. Nathan runs what are essentially group psychoanalytic sessions,
often with translators, or an ‘ethno-clinical-mediator’ and members of the patient’s
wider family. Nathan approaches questions to do with displaced identity by asking,
which non-human beings his patients belong to? This is a guiding question that I
return to often in my thinking about rural Australian families and individuals of a
European inheritance, myself among them: which non human beings do we belong to,
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in whose names do we speak? Modernity has been defined by imagining a world
where technology governs nature. What happens when human dominance and control
is problematised by asking to whom—that is, which non-humans—our dominance
answers? In the terms of the French philosopher of science, Bruno Latour, whose
work led me to Nathan, to what are we attached?
Most properly, I suppose the present project is acquainted, in disciplinary terms, with
design—even though most properly I am disciplined as a writer. At least design is
what I tend to emphasise so as to distinguish my concerns from ‘art’ or ‘the artistic.’
The anthropologist Tim Ingold, in his book, Lines: A Brief History, identifies a split
between the handiwork of the craftsman, or technology, and the artistic work of the
artist (2007). Ingold equates this division with a split between writing and drawing,
with drawing becoming an exclusively artistic endeavour, whereas engraving and
typography came to be thought of as the purview of the artisan. According to Ingold,
this dichotomy “dates back no more than three hundred years”: “Until well into the
seventieth century, artists were thought no different from artisans, and their methods
of working were equally described as ‘technical.’ In the early seventeenth century the
word ‘technology’ was coined to denote the systematic treatment of these methods.”
“However,” notes Ingold,
the subsequent growth of industrial capitalism, coupled with concomitant
changes in the division of labour, led in a whole range of fields to the
decomposition of skill in the components of creative intelligence and
imagination on the one hand, and routine or habitual bodily techniques on the
other. The more the concept of art came to be reserved for the former, the
more the latter were reduced to what were now regarded as ‘merely’
technological operations. (127)
So part of my aim here, following Ingold, is to propose a different relationship—
between creativity and habit, intuition and training, the artistic and the artisan—
whereby mundane, day-to-day activities and objects are regarded with the same
aesthetic concern as more conventionally expressive artworks.
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Art, or ‘the artistic,’ is not the antidote to a disconnect between environment, things,
our bodies and our minds, it is rather, part of the problem—at least conceptually. It is
a tactical move on my behalf to appeal here to the wider reach, the less inward facing,
applications of design. A painting in its frame is no more or less a designed thing than
a fence in a paddock or a new kind of sheep drench. Among the peculiar assumptions
made about art in the modern idiom is that it is disconnected from purpose. Art is
thereby considered exclusively as a form of representation, a picture or a model of
something that is absent, rather than the institution of something that connects and
distributes different kinds of agencies, through space, across time, in long chains of
non-human and human mediators. Art in this sense fulfils an emancipatory function,
an escape to an elsewhere. It seems less problematic to suggest that our lives and the
worlds we inhabit, whether guided by imperatives of conservation or production, are
sustained by design. Design is the material world made writing, as long as by writing
we include both syntactical and non-syntactical forms of inscription, ranging from
cutting and punching, to line-making, raking, folding and even gestures like the
displacing and re-placing a stone.
Part of my agenda in this essay is to make explicit what takes place already, such that
it contributes to a more coherent and variable understanding of the things and events
that inhabit a place or provoke an action. It has also been part of a conceit to institute
a different kind of technology or structure on the farm landscape, in the farm
system—keeping in mind the kind of farm I’m talking about here is one that is largely
composed of materials, concepts and systems inherited from European and American
industrial agriculture. The stile is a humble alternative to the glut of farm things and
farm concepts that are designed for the management of livestock, specifically sheep
and cattle. That being said, money from the sales of livestock made the stiles happen;
the farmer, my father, paid for the purchase of the milled red gum (from a nearby
fallen tree), for the expertise of a woodworker, Geoff Tonkin, and the use of his tools
and shed—in addition to leading the way when it came to the design and building of
the stiles.
The stiles we built are a different kind of farm structure implicating a different
mapping of things and events. As I have just mentioned, the farm environment is
composed largely of structures that control the movement of non-humans, of sheep
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and cattle, for the most part. This is primarily achieved through barbed wire fences, as
well as motorised vehicles and dogs, but in terms of visibility and mass, barbed wire
dominates. In Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity (2004), the philosopher of
science Reviel Netz traces the ecological history of modernity by focusing on this
humble but pervasive technology, following its initial invention in, and rapid spread
across, the American West, to its more ghastly, often unfathomable, use as a means of
controlling human movement in the numerous wars that defined the twentieth
century: in the trenches and prisoner of war camps of WW I, and in the concentration
camps that became a defining feature of twentieth century warfare; in SpanishAmerican war, the Russo-Japanese War, the Boer War, the Russian Gulag and
WWII—the Nazi concentration camps in particular. These associations give barbed
wire a particularly grim tint, one that I have to admit did not characterise my
experience with it prior to reading Netz’s book. My own associations involve the
wariness and boredom one feels in constructing barbed wire fences, and instances of
cows rubbing themselves against it to relieve itches, rather than inflicting the violence
with which Netz argues it is synonymous.
Nonetheless, Netz is on unassailable ground in claiming that barbed wire is a
technology of control, through the threat of violence, forged and erected by humans
existing in asymmetrical power relationships with animals.1 It’s nasty stuff, built with
the explicit knowledge that the skin and flesh are pain-feeling zones, capable of being
punctured and penetrated by dense, sharp materials. It has been used to bring large
spaces and the motion of the beings that occupy those spaces under control, both
through exclusion (from another farmer’s farm or particular paddock) and inclusion
(within the farm of the herd owner or within a particular paddock of that farm). It also
represents a topology in which tension and particularly straight variety of linearity is
prized.
I should also point out, following Netz, that it isn’t simply the sharpness and density
of barbed wire that constitutes its historical peculiarity. It is, rather, the speed with
which it can be produced and constructed—without diminishment of its prohibitive
1
Netz is also right to point out—in the context of Russian peasant farming, but the comparison stands
for agriculture generally—that this relationship is “asymmetrical” but not “one-sided”: “in return for
their labor and eventual death, the animals are given, while alive, some food and shelter” (181).
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impact. Barbed wire is light, so it is easy to transport and it can be quickly erected,
when compared with hedges, wood fences and rock walls. In combination with the
railway, it answered to the needs of the farmers of the American west and the growing
appetites of the urban population—and subsequently, to agricultural enterprises all
over the world that dealt with similarly large, difficult to monitor spaces.
*
Stiles are not used in the herding and enclosure of animals. While still enabling
humans to in some sense transcend animal movement, stiles are not proper to the
agricultural system of animal management that involves fences and motor vehicles.
They are for humans on foot; a structure in the farm environment built by humans
targeted explicitly at the way we move and inhabit space.
Humans, children especially, will play with just about anything: a piece of rope, a
mound of earth, a latch or a button. So it is difficult to argue that stiles are the
necessary envoys of play in an environment characterised by contrasting sentiments.
There are plenty of latches, levers and buttons that might soak up and institute just as
much mischief as some steps going over a fence. However, there is something about
climbing that tends to provoke a difficult to ignore giddiness, a fold or alteration in
the stable plane on which we depend for our seriousness, our authority. A stile
prolongs the hop or the leap, converting it into a climb. Perhaps this giddiness has
something to do with the in-betweenness of climbing, at once and neither ground and
air, moving both across and upwards, using feet and hands together. It challenges our
vertical occupation of a horizontal space by slanting things slightly upwards, while
pulling the metaphorical rug out from underneath our feet. A stile is not a technology
of dwelling in this sense. It is a vantage that is designed to be temporary, an elevated
point one passes through, rather than occupies.
A stile is a way to go from paddock to paddock that institutes a pause or a delay in the
occupation of in-betweenness. Although a gate is similarly a space of transition, it is
less apparent because in walking through a gate we ostensibly remain on the same
spatial plane. Sheep, however, despite displaying seeming ignorance of the law of the
fence in many regards, in particular when panicked, do often mark the occasion of
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passing through a gate by leaping into the air, kicking their back legs out as they do.
Although I can only speculate on the exact reasons for this convention, it is a
convention nonetheless: the sheep perceive something and respond to it with an
excitement, the causes of which humans, at least this human, remain ignorant (and it’s
an ignorance I intend to preserve). All I can say with confidence is that sheep perceive
the gate, or the gap of an open gate, between paddocks as a different space and decide
to realise the feeling of this difference through a display of psychical exuberance.
Most of the stile action takes place in Britain, where the public and the private have
historically crossed in far more messy combinations for the foot traveller—and for the
farmer. Here, in Australia, we tend to have farms on the one hand and large national
parks on the other. Searches for ‘stiles’ on the Internet pick out largely UK examples.
A survey of recent local British newspapers reveals the formation of some curious
stile publics. An article in the Farmers Guardian, tells a story of Mary Dale, who
made two stiles, erected in the Peak District, to commemorate the death of her
mother, who “enjoyed walking and searching for wildflowers” (Apr 4, 2003). Dale
now runs a company that specialises in the production and erection of stiles. They
select locations, obtain permission from landowners and build the stiles. Dale is a
trained landscape architect, ecologist and horticulturist, who remarks that The Stile
Company provides work for numerous artists and craftspeople.
In the article, Martin Jennings, a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors,
describes stiles as a “‘useful’ way of commemorating a person of event.” The stiles
are placed in select locations, in special places that the families’ of the dead go and
visit. We routinely make efforts to remember and appease things that are not properly
there; not quite human agencies that take no form other than in the things we make for
them. While we moderns tend not grant the dead any autonomous power in our
decision making—at least explicitly—we do nonetheless value their memory enough
to change the way we think about the land they occupy. We build places for the dead,
such that they may remain, not just dead, but the remembered dead, and certain places
enable us to remember them well, in the right key, as it were.
While a memorial is no guaranteed safeguard against a system of landownership that
regards it singularly as a resource, it is a further obstacle that needs to be overcome.
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In this sense, it seems more than a happy coincidence that bush cemeteries are now
often valued as areas which support ecological diversity—as well as a diversity of
living and non-living human agencies. Places where the past is left to rest, where
human gestures operate according to different frames of reference. We become
different agents in cemeteries, permitted and not permitted to do certain things. Of
course cemeteries are often regarded are areas of neglect, and the diversity they
support might be viewed as a product of forgetting, rather than care. But the
possibility of neglect in some instances is not in itself a small feat. Forgetting, as
psychoanalysis aims to teach, can also be construed as an enabling function—one can
do it badly and one can do it well. Forgetting, in this desired register, is less a matter
of consigning something to oblivion than a deal struck between the past and the
present that promotes perspective. As unpalatable as this might sound within a
paradigm in which the living—especially the living human—and power are
equivalent, the dead in these places do in a sense stand guard.2
This seems a romantic enough notion to commit oneself too: spirits consulted and
enlisted in order to protect biodiversity. It immediately appeals as a conceit for a
narrative. In such instances, albeit in an unacknowledged fashion, a different
relationship between humans and the past has allowed for a different relationship
between humans and the environment. This is worth keeping in mind as we look for
alternative ways to proceed in which culture and nature are seen as part of the same
self-sustaining system. We must include the dead as well as the living in our plans for
action. What would be the consequences, for example, of encouraging people without
a stake in rural, farming properties, to connect with the land through mememtos, and
for landowners to offer parts of their land as residences for the dead, or in less
macabre terms, for the past?3
I’m reminded of an essay by the late W. G. Sebald, in which he commented on the mourning rituals
on the island of Corsica, and the mausolea scattered throughout the countryside where the dead look
over the land and preserve it, and where the elderly women often consult the dead on matters of
importance, speaking to them as though they were there, able to speak back. W. G. Sebald, “A Little
Excurtion to Ajaccio,” Campo Santo, trans. Anthea Bell (London, 2005).
3
In her article, “Landscapes of the Dead: Conversation Burial,” Alexandra Harker notes, with regret,
that despite its historical involvement in the institution of public parks: “The current American Funeral
industry, however, no longer plays a role in community or ecological preservation” (2012: 150).
Harker argues that, “Conservation burial offers a new opportunity to use an old practice to promote
rural conservation and open space. More than returning nutrients to the land, the great potential for
conservation burial is to conserve land, create open space, and restore natural habitats” (153).
2
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An article from The Guardian, on the 29th of April 1996, refers to ‘Spy’ stiles, erected
in the Yorkshire Dales, between Nine Standards Rigg and Ravenseat. The walk was
made famous as part of the Coast-to-Coast Trail, so named by the writer Alfred
Wainwirght, who also offered a free half-pint of beer at the Border Hotel, in Kirk
Yetholm, to anyone who completed it. In the tradition of their more common, urban
cousin, the turnstile, these stiles use infra-red beams to record the number of tourist
ramblers, enabling national park authorities to monitor the probable erosion to which
the route has recently been subject—a characteristically modern combination of
motion and surveillance. The counters are embedded in the stile structure because
“young ramblers have a habit of criss-crossing the infra red beams as often as possible
if they see them”—technology to trick the tricksters. And lastly, an article in the
Western Daily Press of Bristol, corrects the rumour that stiles are being dismantled
due to the nations growing obesity problem. Despite the fact that stiles are often seen
as a relatively unfriendly solution to boundary crossing—when compared with
gates—it is apparently the disabled, the elderly and the canine, rather than the obese,
for whom the dismantling is in aid—and here I am thinking stiles are incentives to
walkers! According to National Park authorities, stiles should only be built in steep
country where swinging a gate is less effective, or when untrusting landowners cite
genuine reasons for maintaining an impervious fence line.
Even this cursory survey of newspaper articles brings together a heterogeneous bunch
of publics, each actor invested in the humble stile. We have mourners, the dead,
troublesome children and dogs. We have companies, national parks, and a transient
pathology—rumoured, but still part of social consciousness nonetheless.
During the building and erecting of the stiles I was required on two, memorable,
occasions to explain the conceit of my project: why did I want to build stiles? Rather
than fashion something more academically palatable, I want to lift an explanation
from the field. This is basically what I said, to my dad in the paddock when we where
lowering one of the Cross Stiles with the front-end loader or ‘scoop mobile,’ and to
Geoff and Colleen, while having lunch in their house:
I’m interested in the relationships between the things we make—our
technologies—and what we perceive as actors within an environment. If you
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think of a farm there are so many things and nearly everything outside the
house and garden is built according to a highly specific, highly limited
conceit, to do with cheapness and efficiency. On a farm you build things that
are cost effective and low maintenance. And to a certain extent, fair enough
too.
That’s roughly what I said, this is what I would now like to add: The stiles we’re
building are not cost effective or low maintenance, but that is not their advantage.
Their advantage is the kinds of interest they invoke and might potentially provoke. A
curious, exploratory form of engagement, operating within a system that usually treats
such forms of engagement as incidental. It is difficult for different kinds of
technologies and gestures to get a foothold in a landscape that is so thoroughly
colonised by industrial agriculture. It’s not unlike the native perennials that don’t get
a chance in paddocks that are relentlessly grazed or sewn down to exotic
monocultures. This isn’t to say farming is the enemy. It is simply to suggest that the
farming gaze, which approaches the land as a resource that is more or less productive,
is a highly particularised way of engaging the environment, with a relatively short
history in Australia. The goal isn’t so much an alternative to agriculture but an
alteration of emphasis within farming such that different kinds of human to place
relations are given a chance to take hold.
Here we approach a partial answer to Nathan’s question: to which non-humans do we
belong? Although the dead are a human kind of non-human, they are perhaps a
gateway to considering other, autonomous agencies as playing an active and explicit
role in the environments we make and inhabit. The dead are the mediators that
connect us to places, that remind us our humanness is dependent on the agencies of
different beings and events: the dead, their graves or memorials, the meeting of
aspects we choose for them to rest. If we go to a place for the specific reason of
remembering someone in it, that place will fast become part of who we are or who we
become. It preoccupies us in moments of distraction. It provokes returns, dreams.
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