Transmetropolitan

I have regressed to age fifteen and started reading legendary comic series Transmetropolitan. Been reading writer Warren Ellis's blog for years, of course, so it's about time I got round to his real stuff. Transmetropolitan tries quite hard to be cool, and of course it's essentially deriative - but this is postmodernity so does that matter? I think I like it. Worth scribbling about it here because Transmetropolitan - as the name suggests - is urban as hell. Urban like ur-city, or at least ur- like originary if your year zero was Bladerunner. There are other urban archetypes in Dickens, Le Corbusier, Ancient Greece - but yes, Transmetropolitan's doing all it can to capture a particular one. So let's take a look at it.



"I hate it here. I hate the way it smells (except when you get into a fully residential quarter where people are predominantly first-gen American: the way people express their culture in their cooking is one of the few good reasons for being alie). I hate the way it looks (except for that weird beauty that hits you in the eye eery other second). I hate the way it thinks (except when it buys this newspaper). I hate the things it does to itself (except when it lets me do them). I hate the way it loes me, and I hate the way it makes me feel. I hate it here... but God help me, I can't imagine liing anywhere else."

(Anti-)hero Spider Jerusalem just refers to it as 'the city', which fits this blog way too perfectly! The series seems to have quite a fixation on prostitution as proiding definitive urban background colour, too, which I need to unpack - that 'Sex and the City' post I promised. Of course it's essentially just romanticised misogyny, but the trope (common enough, think Sin City too) hints at a bigger about urban social relations too, I suspect... But first another trope of Transmetropolitan: drugs.

"You know, when I was a kid, we listened to music that made our parents' eyes bleed and took drugs that made us want to dance and fuck and kill things. That is the way things are supposed to be.
It was, therefore, in the spirit of honest investigation that I internalised a heroic dose of Space, the new social drug enjoyed by the young folk of today as part of the youth culture referred to as Supermodernity.
Supermodernity, apparently, is the experience of being between places; that is, not being in a real place at all, but waiting in transit between one place and the other. This is why SM/Space Culture music appears to us to be utterly silent. You hae to be on Space - slowed down, across places, in the one between ticks of the clock - to be able to hear it.
This is what they do for fun, apparently: suck up appalling volumes of a drug that traps you in an airport waiting lounge of the mind and doesn't let you go for approximately two hundred years while someone plays an antique handheld electronic keyboard in your ear."

First, what the fuck, a reference to the Marc Auge Non-Places: ...Anthropology of Supermodernity that is basically A. getting Terribly Upset about driving on the motorway? Unexpected... But also the suggestion that real cutting-edge spatial theorists ought to be hoovering up ketamine and the other space-time distorters (salvia, perhaps?). The eco actor-network theory of Tim Ingold is essentially based on the acidhead realisations of Gregory Bateson: 'oh shit, man, it's like, all connected! We better be nice to the plants and reindeer now...' So what would the results be for embodiment and architecture if working with disassociatives? Of course architecture students are always already doing these drugs by the bucketload, but is anyone out there integrating it with their practice? I want to know...

HEFTED, or, Thinking Like A Sheep

The best upland sheep in Britain are 'hefted', a phenomenon where they are instinctually attached to a certain area of land. They know this land intimately: where's best to go when a storm hits, where the natural salt lick is found, and how heavily to graze the ground. This territorial knowledge is passed on from mother to lamb, and it's strong - Cumbrian farms may have a "landlord's flock" that has to be sold to stay with the farm, as if moved elsewhere the sheep will just walk over the fells back to their 'heaf'.

I find it interesting that this instinct was man-made - by shepherds in the 18th and 19th centuries. After the Acts of Enclosure, lowland grazing ground was divided into fields all owned by one person or another, but the Cumbrian fells were left as unfenced common-land. This provided a communal grazing resource, with rights given to
farmers to graze their sheep on individual sections. But the sheep could easily stray for miles - so the shepherds taught them to stay put. Through breeding their own flocks, and rearing lambs in exactly the same places year-on-year, farmers have maintained this hefted instinct for hundreds of years. These sheep belong.

This isn't a rural affairs blog, I know! But give me time and I'll explain why it's an interesting way of thinking about the spatial.



1. Foot and mouth disease in 2001 was disastrous for this way of farming. It disrupted traditional patterns of moving sheep between high and low ground, and a couple of seasons of lambs were born un-hefted - making them a liability to keep on the rugged fell-land. Consequences: this is really interesting for thinking about the timescales and durability of tradition. On one hand, hefting produced by shepherds 250 years ago has lasted. On the other, it's so easily disrupted...

I can also see a really good PhD proposal here! About the problems of government intervention into rural life not properly understood, and competing spatial knowledges - hefting versus the language of proximity and contamination of foot & mouth management. (When, in fact, there were other strategies for stopping foot & mouth, such as inoculation...)

2. Really good article in the Independent yesterday about declining rural people and ways of life:
Another country: whatever happened to rural England? - Richard Askwith

I then want to cross-reference it with this one in the Times: Are you hefted? If not, that's a pity - Ben Macintyre

The point of intersection: what about people being hefted? What would that entail?

There are clearly some similarities to the Welsh concept of hiraeth, longing or homesickness - the same instinctual desire to be in a particular place, and feeling rooted there. But hiraeth is a word more often used by sentimental Americans tracing their genealogies - I think 'hefted' is more rigorous. The Independent article mentions a farming woman, 83, who has only ever spent one night off her farm, and never been further than Exeter. Now that is being hefted.

I love and adore the City, and City life and streets and space, and refuse to take any future path that leads away... But that's not being hefted, that's not enough. I wasn't born here (few in the City are: it's a destination aspired to & chosen), my parents and grandparents before me weren't born here, and I keep moving between neighbourhoods of the City in search of a better flat! Perhaps the only heft I can claim is at the scale of England itself, not just in terms of inherited roots, but an instinct that's expressed very much in terms of relations to the landscape (the heath, the birch trees, the moor...) And a great-uncle, the last of the family to farm, who does indeed keep sheep on the the uplands of the Dales...