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ABSTRACT: In the following account we apply a Marxist ‘mode of production’ framework that attempts to create a better understanding of the complex relationships between society and nature. Most of the discussion of the dualism of nature/society has tended to replicate this divide as reflected in the intellectual division between the natural sciences and the social sciences. We hope to cross this analytic divide and provide an analysis that incorporates both natural and social variables. Marx’s work on ecology and ‘mode of production’ provides us with the theoretical framework forour examination into the essential structures of the Irish rundale agrarian commune. His analysis of modes of production includes not only social relations (people to people) but also relations of material appropriation (people to nature) and therefore allows us to combine the social forces of production with the natural forces of production. The latter relations are conceptualized by Marx as mediated through the process of metabolism, which refers to the material and social exchange between human beings and nature and vice-a-versa. However, what is crucial to Marx is how the natural process of metabolism is embedded in its social form – its particular mode of production. Marx suggested that this unity of the social and the natural was to be located within the labour process of the particular mode of production and he expressed this crucial idea in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism. Some modes of production such as capitalism create a rift in the process of metabolism. The metabolic rift is a disruption of the soil nutrient cycle as nutrients are removed from the soil when they pass into the crops and animals and are not returned. Declining soil fertility therefore becomes a social/economic problem for society.

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It is not a question here of definitions, which things must be made to fit. We are dealing here with definite functions, which must be expressed, in definite categories. Karl Marx Capital,
vol. 2.

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. And this implies, finally, that in Marx’s Capital we shall find a continuous ‘oscillation between essence and appearance’. Banaji 1979.

1. Introduction

The rundale system has proven elusive and divisive as a topic of study since the emergence of interest toward the beginning of the twentieth century. Historically, the rundale system occupied a large spatial area in pre-Famine Ireland. For instance, Almquist suggests that 58% of all the land in Co. Mayo in 1845 was held in common by joint tenancies (Almquist 1977: 103). According to McCourt, the rundale system, as indicated by clachan settlements, was concentrated in a crescent that included the north, west, and south-west (McCourt 1971: 136). Freeman estimated that in 1845 on the eve of the Great Famine the rundale system occupied some 2,000,000 acres of land (Freeman 1965: 180). Despite the empirical depth of this interest, much subsequent scholarship has tended toward analyses ranging from empiricist, to idealist, to reductionist. Consequently, we are no closer to a shared consensus on the origins, and internal dynamics of the rundale system as it existed throughout both recorded, and pre-history. This paper is an attempt to incorporate, criticise, and develop the confines of the approaches outlined above, through a re-visitation of the later anthropological readings of Karl Marx on the agrarian commune in European context. Our discussion will attempt to introduce, through a ‘mode of production’ analysis, a theoretical understanding of the internal dynamics, and individual/communal tensions inherent within the rundale, that have determined, at a general level, the specific form of its productive, social and spatial relations. In doing so, we proceed through numerous ideal-typical analytical dimensions, to arrive at an understanding of the dialectical relationship between the rundale [primitive] communal mode of production, and its concomitant ecosystem. This necessary abstraction is an attempt to resolve analytical problems inherent within studies of such empirically elusive subjects, as McCourt has suggested;

to get a proper picture of the Irish open-field system, it is best not to think of a homogeneous population at a given time, but of one exhibiting manifold features of variation inside a framework of broad similarity. (McCourt 1947: 1)

In his introduction to Marx’s Ecology, Foster (2002) stated that ‘…to be truly meaningful, the dialectical conception of a totality in the process of becoming …had to be placed in a practical, materialist context’ (Foster 2002: 5). Contrary to this suggested approach, ‘mainstream’ sociological inquiry concerned with the analysis of human-natural relations has tended to proceed in the opposite direction, maintaining an analytical separation between the social, and the natural.1 The effects of this separation have amounted to what Benton describes as an ‘obstructive dualism’, within which non-social entities remain beyond the remit of sociological inquiry (Benton 1991: 7). Despite notable contributions from the aforementioned authors,2 the state of research from within the social sciences has remained largely conceptual. Consequently, little attempt has been made to reconcile such restrictive dualisms within a particular case study. The case of the rundale agrarian commune, therefore, is presented in an attempt to resolve both deficiencies in our knowledge of the internal dynamics of the system itself within its broader context, and to overcome these separations through a mode of production analysis.

2. The Contrasting Conceptualizations of Academic Scholarship on the Rundale System: either Overculturalized or Overspatialized

To date, the most prolific debates on the rundale system have concerned theories of its origins, most often expressed as a conflict between, on the one hand, documentary and archaeological evidence and, on the other, supposedly epistemologically inferior ethnological work. The nature of this debate has hinged on the widely-contested notion of the antiquity of the rundale system, and its concomitant pattern of nucleated settlement. Institutional Irish scholarship on the rundale system and clachan finds its roots in the Queen’s school of Historical Geography; most notably the contentions raised by Estyn Evans’s 1939 paper ‘Some Survivals of the Irish Openfield System’ and, years later, the work of Desmond McCourt. Evans’s prominence is reflected in Whelan’s description of his rejection many years later by historical geographers as ‘discarding some of the most venerable concepts in Irish geography’ (Whelan 1999: 187). Given the unfortunate scarcity of documentary sources detailing the rundale system in comprehensive detail, and the extent to which the work of the Queen’s geographers3 dominates our empirical knowledge, it is necessary to critically assess their work and the more recent revisiting of the rundale by their later geographer colleagues.

In a comment originally made in 1981, Evans stated that his ‘particular brand of anthropogeography, which is that of H.J. Fleure and Carl O. Sauer, [was] currently out of fashion’ (1992: 1). According to Graham, Evans’s life work remained preoccupied, for the most part, with intent to document the ‘undocumented’, his writings remaining rooted within a holistic regional framework and legitimating a distinctively Darwinian interpretation of ‘regional particularities’.4 McCarthy notes that, methodologically, ‘Evans … felt that the landscape was the best tool for conducting research’ (2002: 543). It was this combination of theoretical influences and methodological diversity that led Evans to conclude that the rundale system and its contemporary survivals, as evidenced in folk accounts of practices remaining in memory, constituted a system of great antiquity with potential origins in the early Iron Age (Evans 1939: 24). Connections between the eighteenth and nineteenth century rundale system and its hypothesized Celtic counterpart were thus established on the basis of extrapolation from contemporary field evidence, incorporating both archaeological and folklore data.5

In a series of papers delivered to the Geographical Society of Ireland, Andrews (1974, 1977) criticized what he saw as the homogenizing effect of studies, such as those of Evans, conducted within a ‘regional personality construct’.6 Buchanan later noted that, despite criticisms to the contrary, such formulations were essential to ‘make connections across great distances of time and space, to stress ecological settings … and to show the relevance of space-relations in the evolution of culture’ (Buchanan 1984: 133). Whelan and Doherty provide potent criticisms of Evans in this respect, by noting that Evans’s work claimed to produce a study of settlement, which offered a direct window to a form of great antiquity, empirically rooted (if limited to a Western-Atlantic fringe context). According to Whelan, Evans’s idealist model engendered a sense of a peasant world as:7

… fundamentally a timeless one, a little tradition which endured through the centuries, and with underlying continuities with remote pre-history … by studying these timeless survivals in the modern world, one could trace the whole sweep of Irish settlement history from its genetic origins in prehistory. (Whelan, 1999: 187)

Citing ‘numerous subtle and political and philosophical differences’, Graham (1994: 194) rejects the notion of a distinctively ‘Evans school’ of geography and suggests that McCourt’s approach departs significantly from that of Evans. Throughout his writings, McCourt maintains a separation between the ‘rundale’ as social practice, as spatial configuration (the clachan), and as a system of infield-outfield cultivation (McCourt 1971, 1955). McCourt’s approach arrives at a dynamic conceptualization of ‘the rundale’: ‘Not [as] a homogeneous population at a given time, but … one exhibiting manifold features of variation inside a framework of broad similarity’ (1947: 1), and in its broader historical context as ‘scattered dwellings and compact farm units … [with the] possibility of the former at any time evolving into or emerging from the latter’ (1971: 127).

McCourt of course is right to emphasize the dynamic nature of the rundale, but we suggest that it involves more than just physical settlement patterns – rotating from scattered dwellings to compact farms. If this is a feature of change within the rundale system, the conditions that allow such a strange pattern to emerge need to be investigated.

Kevin Whelan has developed a perspective on the rundale system in terms of its adaptability to nuances of context (environment), particularly the marginal conditions of the western seaboard within which the rundale system thrived (Whelan 1995, 1999). Whelan’s approach marks a significant departure from previous pronouncements on the emergence, nature and antiquity of the rundale system, by depicting it as a functional adaptation to specific ecological conditions. But this approach is very close to a form of environmental determinism, which has a consequential tendency to underplay the complexity of the social determinisms, especially the social relationships within the rundale.

Countering Whelan’s adaptive determinism is Yager’s culturalism. Writing on the village of Faulmore, Co. Mayo in 1976, Yager commented that ‘… its palpable collective spirit led me to suspect that a more thorough-going communalism lurked in the past’ (Yager 2002: 154), concluding:

It is safe to assume that co-operative work ties were cemented by a strong sense of neighbourly affiliation and a lively evening social life, as I saw myself in Faulmore in the

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1970s. Rundale was more than a technical arrangement; it was a way of life. (Yager 2002: 162)

Yager concludes that a utilitarian ‘group mind’ formed the basis of the rundale system, thereby idealizing communality at the level of interpersonal interaction, and perhaps over-emphasizing the historical permanence of collective sentiment.8 This charge has underpinned much of the debate over the antiquity and subsequent emergences of rundale throughout history, in the issue of the validity of evidence- forms (McCarthy 2002: 534). It has been noted by various authors (Graham 1994: 184; Crossman and McLoughlin 1994: 80, 89; Nash 2005: 52) that critiques themselves are contested knowledge forms, constituted within particular parameters of appropriate academic practice.

In situating the origins and trajectory of the development of the rundale system, therefore, we are left with a body of material situated within a philosophical and methodological debate of polar opposites: those of ‘anthropogeographic’extrapolation from fieldwork on surface features both material and cultural (those associated with the ‘Evans school’), against an adherence to formal (spatial) documentation (Andrews). Consequently, we are left with an idealist-reductionist dichotomy in our literature corresponding to the authors located within the respective opposing positions above: idealist to the extent that the supposed antiquity of the rundale system emerges within a framework of anthropogeographic generalization,9 and reductionist to the extent that its form, function, and origins may only be understood through abstract spatial units,10 and within a deterministic framework of functional adaptation. In this respect, McCourt’s approach held greater promise for reconciling these contested aspects, as his analysis had already moved far beyond Evans’s initial hypotheses and provided for the possibility of a number of context- dependent rundale emergence scenarios, and, as we will see, for a number of mechanisms of decline and re-emergence over time.

Evans employed a particular methodology with the explicit aim of overcoming what he saw as the ‘arid minutia of an elaborate bibliographical apparatus’ (1992: 15). In this respect, and as noted by Graham, subsequent historical-geographical criticisms were notably deficient in their ability to cope with social structures and even more so social processes, through an over-reliance on privileged documentary sources (Graham 1994: 194, Crossman and McLoughlin 1994: 87). Notwithstanding Evans’s own inability to cope with the diversity of social structures in rural Ireland (especially class), his comment that ‘one must admire these scholarly aims so long as curiosity is not stifled by technique, and the scaffolding does not obscure the building’ (Evans 1981: 15) lends further credence to the argument for a theoretical, systemic development of discussion of the rundale and a revision of the conceptual constraints implicit within critiques from an empiricist-spatial tradition.11

More recently, James Anderson identified the contradictory tendencies of the rundale system with regard to the contrasting values of communal and individualistic attitudes:

(Rundale) was based more on communal than on individual enterprise, originally in kinship groups, later on partnership farms. Co-operation and equity were among the guiding principles, though by the nineteenth century … more competitive and individualistic attitudes often prevailed. (Anderson 1995: 448).

We want to argue that these contrasting tendencies do not just operate on the level of the psychological mind-set of the participants but are actually determinants of the

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diverse economic and social structures of this agrarian system. The aforementioned frameworks applied to the rundale have failed to examine the internal processes that have determined how the rundale system has gone through many metamorphoses – it was never a timeless entity. To unlock the unity of these diverse forms, we turn to Marx to provide us with the materialistic key.

3. Marx (and Engels) on the Agrarian Commune

According to John Maguire, Marx proposed a typology of agrarian communal forms in which communal property is combined with private property in varying combinations. These types are identified by Maguire in the works of Marx as the Oriental or Asiatic, the Ancient and the Germanic forms of agrarian communities. These primitive forms of community have evolved from an archaic form in which communal property existed without private property (Maguire 1978: 212). Marx stated this evolutionary tendency in the agrarian communal forms in the following way and suggested that the Russian commune is a variant of the Germanic form:

Primitive communities are not all cut according to the same pattern. On the contrary, they form a series of social groups which, differing in both type and age, make successive phases of evolution. One of the types, conventionally known as agrarian commune, (la commune agricole), also embraces the Russian commune. Its equivalent in the West is the very recent Germanic commune. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 118)

Marx in his unsent letter drafts to Vera Zasulich classified the Russian commune as the latest developed form of communal property – developed from its earlier archaic form. It had three main characteristics:

1. The Russian variant of the agrarian commune was ‘the first social group of free men not bound together by blood ties’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119), while the archaic community was determined by close blood relations between its members.
2. In the agrarian commune the house and garden yard belong to the individual farmer, while in the more ‘archaic’ type of village community there was no private ownership at all.
3. The cultivable land, ‘inalienable and common property’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119), is periodically divided among the communal members, each of whom works his own plot and appropriates its fruits.

Marx suggested that inherent in these three concrete characteristics is a ‘dualism’ which ‘bestows the agrarian commune with a vigorous life’. This dualism is based on the opposing trends of individualism and communality where, in the case of the Germanic/Russian commune, the house and garden yard was the private preserve of the individual family and subsequently ‘fostered individuality’ and the rest of the commune’s land was for communal use. In the third draft of Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich,12 according to Shanin’s re-ordering of their presentation, we have the most theoretically developed conceptualization of the agrarian commune by Marx. In this draft, Marx seems to be attempting to bring out the dialectical moments (and contradictions) inherent in the continuing evolving relationship of communality and individualism and their varying concrete manifestations.13 In attempting to explain these moments he uses a variety of concrete categories to identify the differing relationship that the dualism conveys on the social relations of production. Individualism is expressed through the use of such categories as personal, individual,

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private and property (private). These are contrasted on the communal side of the dualism with categories such as collective, communal, common and co-operative. All of these adjectives are applied across various moments of the social relationships of production.14 Those categories which attempt to conceptualize the impact of individualism on the immediate production process generally suggest a process of disintegration, e.g. fragmented, scattered, petty and parcellized. The tremendous variety of categories used by Marx in these drafts suggests that he had a very deep understanding of the complex nature of the evolution of the agrarian commune from its archaic form of prehistory to its contemporary variant forms – Oriental, Germanic, Russian (and Rundale). The problem as Marx saw it was that their evolution and devolved essential structures varied considerably from location to location.15 What is definite is that Marx sees them emerging from a common archaic form which he identified as primitive communal property:

It (primitive communal property) is (not) a specifically Slavonic, or even an exclusively Russian, phenomenon. It is an early form which can be found among Romans, Teutons and Celts, and of which a whole collection of diverse patterns (though sometimes only remnants survive) is still in existence in India. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 49)

What remnants remain of communal property depended on how the process of individualization had eroded the communal aspects of the commune. Consequently, the dualism of communality and individualism allows the researcher to assess the degree of communal disintegration. And, crucially, the comparative aspect of this procedure of assessment revolves around the concept of property (communal and private) and how it relates to concrete spatial forms which were under the auspices of the agrarian commune. In the original archaic form of the commune, all land was communal; so, emerging from that communal property base meant an increasing integration of private property over the communal lands. Therefore, the concepts of communal and private property are phenomenal forms which operate at the concrete level, while the concepts of communality and individualism are abstract formulations since they are part of a concealed ‘inner dualism’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 104). As part of the hidden essential structure of the commune, they, as abstract concepts, are the initial concepts used by Marx to uncover the determining laws and tendencies of this particular mode of production. In the following, Marx’s draft highlights the concreteness of the property relationships and the analytical role of the ‘inner’ dualism:

It is easy to see that the dualism inherent in the ‘agricultural commune’ may give it a sturdy life: for communal property and all the resulting social relations provide it with a solid foundation, while the privately owned houses, fragmented tillage of the arable land and the private appropriation of its fruits all permit a development of individuality incompatible with conditions in the more primitive communities. It is just as evident that the very same dualism may eventually become a source of disintegration. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 109)

It is crucially important to observe not only how the abstract dualism manifests itself in the concrete forms of the changing property relationships (concrete dualism which we would expect to exist within the spatial plane) but also how that abstract dualism incorporates production and consumption relationships. Therefore, the abstract dualism of communality and individualism merely gets us under the surface of the agrarian commune to uncover a possible structural link between the communal property relationships and production relations; it does not provide us with a dynamic conceptualization which can explain change in this particular mode of production.

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As a consequence, the dualisms of individuality and communality and communal and private properties provide us with simple classification devices that can highlight how far the particular commune under examination has moved on from its archaic origins. These classification procedures operate essentially at the level of the spatial, although the more abstract dualism of communality and individualism appears to be moving towards incorporating production and consumption relationships as well. In the following, Marx discusses how this dualism has had a dissolving effect on the stability of the commune:

It is no less evident, however, that this very dualism could eventually turn into the seeds of disintegration. Apart from all the malignant outside influences, the commune bore within its own breast the elements that were poisoning its life. (Marx 1983: 120)

This was especially so, according to Marx, when labour was engaged on individually- held plots and the subsequent fruits of that private labour were enjoyed by the individual and his immediate family.

It gave rise to the accumulation of movable goods such as livestock (and) money … Such movable property, not subject to communal control, open to individual trading in which there was plenty of scope for trickery and chance, came to weight heavily upon the entire rural economy … It introduced heterogeneous elements into the commune, provoking conflicts of interest and passion liable to erode communal ownership first of the cultivable land, and then of the forests, pastures, waste grounds etc. (Marx, 1983: 120)

What is interesting to observe is that this mobile capital merely erodes – it does not determine its destruction.

Consequently, to conclude this section, it seems that the crucial determining factor of change within the agrarian commune does not reside within the dualisms identified, nor is it the emergence of exchange-value, as this merely ‘undermines’, ‘dissolves’, ‘erodes’ etc.; neither of them ‘causes’ the balance within the dualism to swing one way or the other. However, since the transition involves a property relationship, which in turn is about changing the usufruct of a spatial entity within the communal lands (Marx stated that it ‘leads first to the conversion of the arable into private property’), it must be determined by changes in the customary rights of land- holding through the social mechanism of the communal council or the intervention of an external power to enclose the communal lands (the state or a landlord), or both. However, before we turn to this, we need to explore the nature of ownership both communal and private within the context of the agrarian commune.

4. Marx on the Changing Forms of Property Relationships: Property Form as determined by its Mode of Production

Again, John Maguire provides some useful theoretical insights into Marx’s ideas on communal and private ownership within the draft letters. Maguire suggests that Marx and Engels were always interested in the concept of ownership – private property as the legal cornerstone of capitalism and communal property as the future basis of communism. According to Maguire, Marx throughout his career emphasized the inability of primitive communal ownership to handle the complexity of human development, but:

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The theoretical import of communal property was to illustrate the merely historical necessity of private property, and to back up the abstract theoretical possibility of post-capitalist communism by showing that communal property had once already been the basis of social formations. In this vein, Marx frequently emphasizes the ‘artificial’ nature of private property … (Maguire 1978: 213)

What did Marx mean by the artificial nature of property relationship? Answering this question will hopefully bring us closer to explicating a methodology from Marx’s apparent eclectic work on the agrarian commune.

Marx and Engels in their various works engaged in a constant critique of the speculative philosophy of law and especially how it attempted to put forward idealist analyses of law based on the reification of legal concepts.16 The danger in the speculative philosopher’s approach to understanding law and the legal system was that of treating law as autonomous – a mere working out of its own logic or, as Marx put it, based ‘on a so-called general development of the mind’ without any recognition that the decisive factors shaping law were economic relations (Marx 1977: 20). Consequently, Marx reacted against this idealistic reification by continually demonstrating the dialectical relationship between the economic base of society and its ideological superstructure – including the legal system.17 For example, in Volume 3 of Capital, Marx gives his most explicit statement on the nature of private property in land and in doing so links up its legal form with the economic conditions prevailing at the time – capitalism:

Landed property is based on the monopoly by certain persons over definite portions of the globe, as exclusive spheres of their private will to the exclusion of all others. (Marx 1981: 614)

And:

With the legal power of these persons to use or misuse certain portions of the globe, nothing is decided. The use of this power depends wholly upon economic conditions, which are independent of their will. The legal view itself means that the landowner can do with the land what every owner of commodities can do with his commodities. And this view, this legal view of free private ownership of land, arises in the ancient world only with the dissolution of the organic order of society. (Marx 1981: 618)

Accordingly, following the logic of Marx’s argument, communal property and private property can only be adequately understood by putting them into the economic contexts (conditions of production) of societies, with differing economic contexts producing differing forms of property. Marx makes this point more explicit in the following passage, where he locates the specific forms of property relationships not only in differing types of agrarian communes but also in differing conditions of production:

Property – and this applies to its Asiatic, Slavonic, Ancient Classical and Germanic forms – therefore originally signifies a relation of the working (producing) subject (or a subject reproducing himself) to the conditions of his production or reproduction as his own. Hence, according to the conditions of production, property will take different forms. The object of production itself is to reproduce the producer in and together with these objective conditions of his existence. This behaviour as a proprietor – which is not the result but the precondition of labour, i.e. of production – assumes a specific existence of the individual as part of a tribal or communal entity (whose property he is himself up to a certain point) … (Marx 1964: 95)

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Consequently, in order to uncover the essential structure of the agrarian commune wherever it is located along the evolutionary path, it is necessary to clarify not only the social relations of the commune (its property relationships) but also its production relations with the land. It is crucially a ‘double relationship’ in which the individual is a member of the community, and in which this social relationship mediates his relationship to the land (Sayer 1987). To deal with this type of complexity, Marx developed the framework of the mode of production. In this light, the numerous examples of agrarian communes mentioned by Marx in the drafts and beyond are differing concrete variants of the same mode of production – primitive communism.

5. Marx and Engels on the Irish Rundale

Included in this list of concrete variants was the rundale system. From what sources we have available to us,18 with regard to Marx’s and Engels’s research on the rundale, the first explicit mention of this agrarian commune comes from Engels’s Anti- Duhring (1878).19 Marx’s first published reference to the rundale is in part three of his Ethnological Notebooks (Krader 1974), where Marx is taking excerpts from Maine’s Lectures on the Early History of Institutions. In this reference to the rundale, Marx seems to be reinterpreting Maine’s description of the rundale by challenging his use of the legal term of severalty to explain the relationship of the communal members to their arable land. Marx, in Grundrisse, described this as a form of individual possession (Marx 1973: 492) rather than private property, which the legal term of severalty would suggest. And, crucially, this type of possession was mediated through the agrarian commune and communal property. The next reference to the rundale comes from Engels’s The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State (1884), which was based on Marx’s comment in the Ethnological Notebooks. As the reader can see, it displays a deep understanding of the rundale system:

Forty or fifty years ago village fields were very numerous and even today a few rundales, as they are called, may still be found. The peasants of a rundale, now individual tenants on the soil that had been the common property of the gens till seized by the English conquerors, pay rent for their respective piece of land, but put all their shares in arable and meadowland together, which they divide according to position and quality into gewanne, as they are called on the Moselle, each receiving a share in each gewann; moorland and pasture land are used in common. Only fifty years ago new divisions were still made from time to time, sometimes annually. The field-map of such a village looks exactly like that of a German Gehoershaft (peasant community) on the Moselle or in the Mittelwald. (Engels 1884: 194)

What Engels is suggesting here is that the feudalization of Irish land began with the Plantations, since which all occupiers of Irish land have had to pay a rent to a landlord, thereby becoming tenants. However, such tenancy is only one form of property relationship and it can co-exist with communal property, because the emergence of private property does not imply the demise of the commune, especially since peasants are still ‘putting all their shares in arable and meadowland together’– communally. This idea of a communal property relationship continuing to exist even after the attempted introduction of feudal land-tenure relationships during the Plantations of Ireland reiterates an earlier point made by Engels in his Anti-Duhring, that the rundale as a form of community ownership was able to continue to exist under ‘indirect feudal bondage’ (Engels 1878: 481).

The final reference appears in the revised edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1888, when, in a footnote, Engels changed the famous line ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles’ to ‘all written history’ (Engels 1888: 34). As the footnote discusses, the emergence of class was predicated

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on the dissolution of primitive communities and the rise of private property. This empirical fact was, according to Engels, unknown in 1847 when the first edition of the Communist Manifesto was published, but:

Since then, Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation from which all Teutonic races started in history, and by and by village communities were found to be, or have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland. (Engels 1888: 34)

The theoretical pronouncements, then, that Engels and especially Marx made on the agrarian commune and its variant forms across time and space include the Irish rundale as a concrete manifestation of this particular mode of production of primitive communism.

6. The Rundale Forms of Communality and Individuality

As we have uncovered from Marx’s work on the agrarian commune, communality without individualism has only existed under the archaic form of this mode of production. All the other devolved forms – the Ancient, the Oriental, the Slavonic, the Germanic and the Russian – are penetrated to varying degrees by the element of individuality, to the extent that this integration of the two gives each type of agrarian commune its concrete particularity. Therefore, although communality and individualism are diametrically opposing each other as aspects of the social relations of the devolved agrarian communes, they were essential components of this communal production. What we need to investigate is how they specifically manifested themselves in the rundale form and subsequently impacted on the actual conditions of production – the land. These processes – the social (the property relationships), the economic (production relationships) and the ecological – form a unity within a mode of production which the following testifies:

Now this unity, which in one sense appears as the particular form of property, has its living reality in a specific mode of production itself, and this mode appears equally as the relationship of the individuals to one another and their specific daily behavior towards inorganic nature, their specific mode of labour (which is always family labour and often communal labour). (Marx 1964: 94)

And crucially, because of this essential unity, the reproduction of any one of these processes is simultaneously a reproduction of the other two:

To be a member of the community remains the precondition for the appropriation of land, but in his capacity as member of the community the individual is a private proprietor. His relation to his private property is both a relation to the land and to his existence as a member of the community, and his maintenance as a member is the maintenance of the community, and vice versa, etc. (Marx 1964: 73)

So the interpenetration of these ‘property’, production and ecological (natural) processes determines the essential structure of the primitive communist mode of production. Let us begin our analysis of the rundale agrarian commune with the property relationships, but not forgetting the problems associated with dealing with this level and its inherent tendency to reify property categories. The most identified and controversial category associated with the rundale is gavelkind, which Gibbs suggests is an entity that has evolved from the Brehon Laws:

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What traces did Brehon Law, though abolished by the Judges and the Lord Deputy, Sir Arthur Chichester, leave in the habits and sentiments of the people, and can any of those traces be observed at the present day? Of the custom of Tanistry we hear no more; but the custom of gavelkind long survived, reappearing, under English law, in the form of tenancy common down to the early part of this century; and it may still be traced in the love of holding property in families, in the tendency to subdivide the land, and in an unfavorable shape, in Rundale, where the tenement is made up of a number of scattered patches of each particular quality of the land. (Gibbs 1870: 4–5)

According to De Laveleye, the English word gavelkind comes from the Irish Gabhail- cine, which denotes ‘accepted from the tribe’ (DeLaveleye 1878: 124–25). And this ‘tribal’ social relationship continued to exist under the rundale system in the nineteenth century:

There are, however, very extensive common lands, covered with grass and heath, which serve as pasture for the cattle. Portions of the communal domain are cultivated in turn, according to the practice still in force in many countries, and especially in the Belgian Ardennes; the occupancy is, however, only temporary, and the ownership still remains in the tribe. The system of periodic redistribution, with alternate occupancy, is still maintained under the form of rundale. A great part of the soil was subject to methods of tenure and agrarian customs, strongly impregnated with traditions of the old joint ownership. (De Laveleye 1878: 124–25)

This system of periodic redistribution of land, mentioned by De Laveleye, was described by Arthur Young as ‘change-dale’ (Young 1892: 215–16). Therefore, the concrete social practices of gavelkind and changedale – where ‘occupancy (of land) is only temporary’ in the rundale system – suggest that communal property and private possession co-existed together.20 Gavelkind meant that all members of the rundale commune had a right to access the land and none of them were able to alienate their share of it. And this communal property relationship allowed equality of access for all communal members.21

But gavelkind under the rundale system did not mean access to equal amounts of land but to equal accessibility to communal lands.22 According to Eric Almquist in his work on Co. Mayo, these rights of access were given to both men and women, and in certain instances may have been given to illegitimate children and orphans (Almquist 1977: 95). The most important implication of this devolved form of gavelkind within the rundale context is that this system accommodated the claims of new families and existing family members. All the commune’s members had a claim to both the arable and grazing shares of the communal land by birth (Almquist 1977: 93). And these shares were divided among the members with regard to soil fertility, as William Tighe observed:

The custom of these partners, when the ground is broken for tillage, is to divide it into shares or what they call ‘lochs’ and they are so desirous of making divisions equal in value, that each portion though small, does not always lie together but in scattered fragments according to the quality of the soil, so that a man having two acres of tillage may have two roods in coarse ground, two in deep, two in stony and two in wet, if these varieties happen to occur, when the division is made out … (Tighe 1802: 18)

Therefore, with regard to the procedures of landholding under the rundale communal conditions, the amount of arable land held by an individual member was never quantified by a determinate or definitive measurement system, such as acres, furlongs, roods etc, but was determined by the potential ecological output (or value) of the land area and the sharing out of its ecological output equally among the communal members. A similar method of share allocation was done for the pasture grounds of

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the commune, where the share/unit was known as ‘a cow’s grass’ – the amount of pasturage needed to support a cow.23 Marx suggested that a similar tendency among the Russian communal members to engage in a process of spatial fragmentation was determined by the need to equalize the ‘chances of labour’ and thereby secure the same economic benefits for each of the communal members who possessed individualized usufruct rights.24 Therefore, within the rundale, ‘personal usufruct is thus combined with communal ownership’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 119). Theprocess of ‘changedale’ determined that any possession of communal lands by the individual members was to be of a temporary nature. Otway identified the existence of periodic redistribution among rundale communes in Co. Mayo in 1841:

… in the land appropriate to tillage, each head of the family casts lots every year for the number of ridges he is entitled to …. and moreover the ridges change ownership every third year, a new division taking place. The head of the village … makes the division, requiring each tenant to cast lots for his ridge, one in a good field, another in an inferior, and another in a worse. (Otway 1841: 35)

As a consequence of the existence of gavelkind and changedale within the rundale agrarian commune, there was no private property in the soil, and this determined that the individual member had only possession of continually changing pieces of the communal lands. The only space that may have been permanently occupied by an individual family was the clachan house and its adjoining walled garden and haggard. There is some evidence, though, to suggest that commune members exchanged their clachan cottages in a similar fashion to the changedale operating in the arable infield (Buchanan 1973: 592–93). Marx summarized this social relation to the soil (the conditions of production) thus: ‘What exists is only communal property and private possession’ (Marx 1964: 75).

Accordingly, the essential social form of production of the rundale system was the necessary reproduction of individuals as communal members, as Marx stated with regard to this particular mode of production:

The member of the community reproduces himself not through co-operation in wealth- producing labour, but in co-operation in labour for the (real or imaginary) communal interests aimed at sustaining the union against external and internal stress. (Marx 1964: 74)

In a real sense, then, this particular mode of production was essentially about producing people as its major ‘product’ of production, not just as ‘dot-like’ entities but as communal members of a particular agrarian commune, whose communality valorized itself in the need ‘for the continued existence of the community’ which required ‘maintenance of equality among its free self-sustaining peasants’ (Marx, 1964: 73). However, the valorization (Marx 1964: 72) of communal property requires maintenance not only of the material conditions of the commune in a production process, but also of the ‘possessory rights’ associated with the complex aspects of communal property. To reproduce the latter, it was necessary to have an institutional entity that stood above the everyday activities of the commune in order to maintain the customary codes of communal property relationships – the commune’s council.

7. The Communal Self-Government: The ‘King’, the Council of Elders, and the Supernatural

The customary mechanisms of communal accessibility as manifested through the concrete processes of gavelkind and changedale needed a governing apparatus of

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some sort to oversee the continuation of these particular customs and others concerning the regulation of everyday life of the communal members. There is evidence to suggest that within each commune there was a council of elders, headed by a local ‘King’. Peter Knight, in his survey of Erris in the Irish Highlands in 1836, describes the function of such a King and his council:

There is a headman or King [Raight I had understood to be ‘King’, until Mr. Hardiman, the celebrated antiquarian and author of the History of Galway, told me that it meant ‘Kanfinne’, or ‘head’ of the local tribe, according to the Brehon administration]25 appointed in each village, who is deputed to cast the lots every third year, and to arrange with the community what work is to be done during the year in fencing, or probably reclaiming a new piece [though for obvious reasons, this is rare] or for setting the ‘bin’, as it is called, that is, the number of head of cattle of each kind, and for each man, that is to be put on the farm for the ensuing year, according to its stock of grass or pasture – the appointment of a herdsman, also for the whole village cattle, if each person does not take the office on himself by rotation – a thing not infrequent. The King takes care generally to have the rent collected, applots the proportion of taxes with the other elders of the village; for all is done in a patriarchal way, ‘coram populo’. He is generally the advisor and consultor of the villagers; their spokesman on certain occasions, and a general man of reference on any matters connected with the village. He finds his way to the Kingly station by imperceptible degrees, and by increasing mutual assent, as the old King dies off. (Knight 1836: 47–48)

The various functions that the local king performs in this account underline the importance of the fact that his ‘office’ and the council of elders comprised a form of self-government, which ‘is simply the particular part of the whole social system which deals with general questions’ (Maguire, 1978: 230–31). Maguire continues:

… Marx believes that in primitive communal society there is no in-built antagonism between individual and collective interest … it is a case of genuine self-government, where the members of the commune are not subject to a centre of authority outside them. (Maguire 1978: 229)

Dewar, in his observations of Tory Island, identifies this aspect of self-governance:

… the inhabitants are still unacquainted with any other law than the Brehon code. They choose their chief magistrate from among themselves and to his mandate, issued from his throne of turf, the people yield a cheerful and ready obedience. (Dewar 1812: 166)

There are a number of other references made to the existence of this kingly (and queenly) station in the West of Ireland. Ó Danachair (1981) makes extensive reference to a multitude of kin-based ‘king’ selection methods: in Claddagh, the king survives until the late 19th century (1981: 17); reference is made to a queen in Erris (1981: 20); the ordnance survey letters make reference to a king on Iniskea (1981: 23); and, on Inishmurray, reference is made to a ‘monarch’ (Robinson 1924, cited in Ó Danachair 1981). The king in all instances exhibits a definite set of characteristics attesting to his suitability:

As to the qualities desired in the king, we are not left in any doubt. Stature, strength, comeliness of person are mentioned, as are justice, wisdom and knowledge. Literary attainment is desirable; a good talker, a good storyteller, knowledge of two languages, the ability to read and write, all of these were laudable in the King. A degree of economic well- being or independence was also thought fitting. He had very positive and definite functions. The regulation, division and apportioning of fishing and shore rights and the allotment of tillage and pasture land was left to him, and in some cases, he appointed subsidiary officers such as herdsmen. He was expected to maintain traditional laws … in some instances we are

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told that he specifically punished wrongdoers. He was expected to speak for his community in their relations with the outside authority. (Ó Danachair 1981: 25–26)

It is interesting to note the discrete personal characteristics needed to become the local king, which indicate the diverse roles such a functionary had to play. But what is crucial to emphasize is that the vast majority of the accounts of the communal king stated that it was not a hereditary position; he was chosen from among the communal members, as Lewis testifies in the following:

… the islanders had a resident king chosen by and from among themselves, and an ancient code of laws handed down by tradition, which it was his duty to administer; though the king had neither funds for the maintenance of his dignity, nor officers to enforce his authority, the people generally submitted voluntarily to these laws, and were always ready to carry out his judgements into execution. (Lewis 1837: 250)

The democratic procedure of the kingly election is important to point out, in that it highlighted that this was essentially a form of self-governance, where the decisions were not imposed upon the members from a central authority but from their own king and council. This becomes critical, in light of the fact that disputes were a constant feature in the rundale system of farming on account of the indeterminate nature of land holding26 as the following suggests:

The least trifle is a cause of disagreement. They were formerly perpetually quarrelling about their share of stock, and about what ground should be tilled, and who should occupy the different parts of it. The fences round the cornfields are made in the most temporary manner because the fields would be pastured in common after it was let out in tillage. (McCourt 1947: 233)

Constant disputing meant that they needed a mechanism that stood apart from their own personal needs and adjudicated in these communal disputes. Wakefield comments on this:

… and the elders of the village are the legislators, who established such regulations as may be judged proper for their community, and settle all disputes that arise among them. (Wakefield 1812: 260)

Therefore, the King and the council of elders oversee not only the continuation of customs but also establish regulations for the commune as a whole, and settle all disputes that may arise among the commune members (Sigerson 1871).

Finally, there is another aspect of this style of informal self-governance, which has a supernatural dimension to it. According to Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan in their study of place-names for the townland of Kilgalligan, Co Mayo, where an old clachan existed, there was a high density of ‘supernatural places that were only visible to the local eyes’. Especially important were the connections between the fairies and land boundaries. These boundaries were protected by the fairies, and the local people did not like to work the land too near the boundary in case they would anger the fairies (Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan, 1975: 267). Further:

Such tangible supernatural features … were palpable reminders of the existence of the otherworld, and they were both respected and feared. Their presence in Kilgalligan, as in other parts of Ireland, has frequently served as a determinant governing the arrangement of fields and crops, tracks and ditches, and even the location of dwelling houses and other buildings. (Ó Catháin and O’Flanagan 1975: 268)

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Within the rundale landscape, then, there were certain spatial nodes, which were perceived not only as ‘spiritual’ but as also performing the role of protecting the boundaries of the commune, without the need for on-the-spot surveillance. This form of communal governance is essentially a moral code embedded in the landscape through the medium of oral culture (Slater 1993). The ‘fairies’ patrolled the individual plots and the communal lands while the commune’s members slept. But let us leave the world of the fairies and come down to the mundane – the spatial and temporal aspects of the agrarian commune of the rundale.

8. Simple Communal Production: The Spatial and TemporalConfigurations

In our discussion of the social relationships of this particular mode of production, we highlighted how the dualism of communality and individualism realized itself in the property forms of communal ownership and individual possession over spatial aspects of the commune’s lands. Therefore, it is necessary to outline the physical layout of the rundale communal lands and the activities which occur within these spatial entities.27 Buchanan provides a summary of the diverse aspects of the rundale spatial layout in the following:

Their land lay mainly within a single townland, a territorial unit whose mean size for the country is about 325 acres. If the townland was large, it was sometimes divided among several Rundale groups, each holding its land in lots separate from the others. The system varied greatly in detail, but had five main components: common arable or infield, an outfield used for pasture and periodic cultivation, common meadow, rough grazing which usually included peat-bog, and small enclosures near the farmhouse for gardens and haggards. Finally, the settlement was usually in the form of a loose cluster of dwellings and outbuildings. (Buchanan 1973: 586)

The latter cluster of dwellings or village has been described by the term clachan.28 The infield area of the communal land was the main location for the production of arable crops. According to Buchanan the physical appearance of the infield looked like the following:

The infield was normally held in rectangular strips, varying in length from 50 to 250 yards according to slope and soil conditions, and not more than 20 yards in width. Most were cultivated with the plough, and where the spade was used, the plots were demarcated by low, earthen banks, known by such terms as ‘mearings’, ‘ribs’, ‘roddens’, ‘teelogues’, or bones, and a higher earthen bank frequently bounded the infield. (Buchanan 1973: 586)

The ploughs used were either an ordinary lea-plough, or else a special paring-plough, and both these ploughs broke up the sod to be later shoveled into ridges or lazy-beds (Evans 1967: 144). The spade was the main instrument of production in the arable infield. The importance of the various types of markings in the infield becomes explicit when we realize that the infield was divided up into individual plots – sums or collops, which had a tendency to change hands under changedale. And the constant variability of land-holding under gavelkind and changedale had the effect of leaving much of the arable infield unenclosed or very badly fenced off from the openfield. During winter, the commune’s livestock roamed freely throughout the infield and outfield which also tended to damage the fencing between these two fields.29

The lack of permanent and solid fencing must be seen as an effect of the indeterminacy of landholding under the rundale system. This can be accounted for, firstly, by the need to constantly expand the infield to accommodate the increase in

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the commune’s population and, secondly, by the prevailing custom of allowing the livestock to winter on the arable infield. The Ordnance Surveyors for Co. Donegal were especially observant of the lack of hedgerows and trees as a form of permanent fencing in rundale areas.30 The consequence of the lack of permanent fencing was that the commune’s livestock had to be strictly supervised, either by constant herding or by the tethering of animals. Evans describes this feature:

The old customs of tending [‘herding’] the cattle and tethering or spancelling them also derive from the Rundale phase with its lack of field-divisions and fences. ‘Cattle, sheep and goats’, wrote Arthur Young, ‘are all in bondage, their forelegs tied together with straw … cocks, hens, turkeys and geese all have their legs in thraldom.’ Various devices for limiting the freedom of farm animals are still widely used; even the hen with her chickens around her will be seen tethered by the leg to a stone or iron weight. (Evans 1967: 55)

The lack of hedgerows and subsequent herding or tethering of livestock is caused by the inability of the communal members to grow these types of permanent fences on account of the number of years it takes to grow into effective fencing, a time period never allowed by the indeterminacy of this type of communal land-holding. The outfield tended to complement the infield in the production of livestock – mainly cattle and sheep (Buchanan 1973: 586–87). The outfields, combined with mountain pastures, were the physical areas where livestock production was essentially carried out. The allocation of communal grazing land was calculated by the number of units of infield land allotted to each communal landholder. As with the plot held by the communal member in the arable infield, the amount of pasture land held was not devised by the acre, but by ‘a cow’s grass – a collop’, which again reflected the indeterminate nature of landholding within the rundale system. The outfield was therefore the source of fodder for the livestock and sometimes hay:

Where natural meadows existed along river or lake their use was carefully regulated to give each farmer a share of the infield. Sometimes the land was divided into plots scattered as in the infield, worked in severalty and grazed by herding the animals, each on its own plot. Occasionally the hay was mowed by communal labour and then divided in shares, with common grazing. But most of the grazing had to be found elsewhere in summer, and especially in mountain districts there are traditions of moving livestock long distances to seasonal pasture. (Buchanan 1973: 587)

During the summer period, there was a tendency for the animal stock to be moved from the vicinity of the clachan village to mountain pasture, depending on whether the commune had a right of pasturage on a particular mountain. In the old traditional custom of booleying, the animals were herded to these mountain pastures. This form of transhumance was done communally; again, like the openfield, each individual member was allowed to pasture so many heads of cattle and sheep. In this way, most rundale communes had certain grazing rights to mountain pastures and, at times, other rundale communes may have shared the same mountain pasture (Hill 1887: 18). The process of transhumance or booleying was mainly carried out by the young people of the commune, especially the young girls and women (Graham 1954: 76). The young people of the ‘booley’ not only herded cattle and sheep, they also churned milk into butter, spun the flax and knitted wool. The young men collected these products produced in the mountain booley and brought them back to the clachan on a weekly basis (Graham 1954: 14). At Halloween the livestock returned to the clachan from the summer booleying and between St. Patrick’s Day and Halloween the livestock were either herded in the outfield or on mountain pasture, in order to allow the communal

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crops to be grown in the infield (Evans 1979: 50). Consequently, during the winter months the commune’s livestock was allowed to feed on the stubble of the crops harvested in the infield. Generally, no hay was grown for winter feeding and this lack of winter fodder was made up by allowing the livestock into the infield:

In the Upper portion of the Parish the spade is necessarily used … The tenantry in the high grounds grow no hay and feed their cattle in winter usually on oaten straw, which is shorn very close to the ground, and much grass is consequently in the butts of the sheaves. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Urney, Co. Donegal, 1836: 6)

The arrival and departure of the commune’s livestock to and from the infield during winter had important consequences for the cropping of the infield, as the infield was unsuited for the winter sowing of crops:

… in this parish from the first week in November until the latter end of April, the entire fair of the country resembles a great common, where cows, horses and sheep graze promiscuously, a man’s cabbage garden is not secure from the depredations of his neighbour’s cattle. It is nouncommon thing in winter to see a man drive his cows or sheep to a distance from his own farm, where he thinks the grass is better or the shelter warmer. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Pyemoaghy. Co. Donegal, 1836: 53)

Hence, not only was autumn sowing restricted by winter cattle-feeding practices, the types of crops grown were also extremely limited under the rundale system of crop rotation. From the evidence of the Ordnance Survey memoirs and reports it seems that white crops predominated. Potatoes began the rotation followed by barley (except in mountain areas where it was found to be unsuitable), then oats and flax and back to potatoes again (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Urney, Co. Donegal, 1836: 67). It is interesting to note that within this type of crop rotation there was no fallow or lea allowed. This led to the extraordinary situation that this arable infield was never rested nor rotated with any other spatial location within the agrarian commune. Within the rundale crop rotation system there appear to be two essential crops missing – wheat and green crops. Wheat is not sown because it is sown in autumn and harvested in spring and it therefore would interfere with the winter pasturing of livestock on the stubble of the infield. Green crops are also excluded not only because of the livestock occupation of the arable land in wintertime but also because green crops demand the use of plough technology which did not exist under the rundale system. Spade husbandry was the essential labour process of the rundale commune, as is indicated by the existence of ‘lazy-beds’ or ridges in the commune’s infield.

Finally, with regard to the spatial configuration of communal lands, there was the clachan – a ‘loose cluster of dwellings and outbuildings’. T.C. Foster gave the following description of a clachan:

There is no row of houses … but each cottage is stuck independently by itself, and always at an acute, obtuse or right angle to the next cottage as the case may be. The irregularity is curious; there are no two cottages placed in a line, or of the same size, dimensions or build. As this is the largest village I ever saw, so it is the poorest, the worst built and most irregular and most completely without head or centre, or market or church or school of any village I ever was in. It is an overgrown democracy. No man is better or richer than his neighbour. It is in fact, an Irish Rundale village. (Foster 1846, cited in Buchanan 1973: 594)

As previously stated, there is some evidence to suggest that the commune members interchanged their cottages in a similar fashion to the changedale system operating in

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the arable infield. The clachan was also the physical location for a number of communal activities, as Evans indicates:

Apart from the co-operation implicit in the openfield system there was a good deal of sharing in other ways. Thus there would be a communal corn-kiln for drying the grain before grinding, a knocking stone for pounding barley, and in some districts a corbelled stone sweat-house which took the place of the village doctor in treating rheumatic pains. (Evans 1979: 32)

According to Gailey, the communal kilns were sometimes worked by individuals but mostly by the commune when a larger quantity of grain had to be dried (Gailey 1970: 52). The drying of large quantities of corn is attributed to the malting of corn preparatory to the illicit distillation of poitín (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal, 1836: 25).

What we have discovered in our survey of the spatial configuration of the rundale’s lands and the diverse productive activities within them is that they were essentially determined by the indeterminacy of individual possession of land. And the central hub of the amount of land possessed is determined by the individual’s access to the infield, which in turn determines the amount of livestock allowed on the commune’s pasture land. This indeterminacy of land-holding manifests itself in the concept of collop or sum, which as we have discovered was originally the amount of land necessary to feed a cow – ‘cow’s grass’. Knight suggests the origin of this type of rundale measurement and its extension into the arable infield:

The holdings are by sums or collops, which originally meant the number of heads of cattle the farm could rear by pasture, but, as some tillage became afterwards necessary, they divided the crop-ground into collops as well as the pasture, and each farm then had its number of tillage collops and grazing collops. The tillage collop is supposed to be capable of supporting one family by its produce. (Knight 1836: 46–47)

The concept of the collop is not really a measurement of land area such as the acre, but it is a measurement of the physical output of land, taking in the quality of the land necessary to keep a family or a cow. Consequently, its spatial dimensions may vary from location to location depending on the quality of the land. But probably its most crucial characteristic is its ability to be flexible, not only with regard to soil qualities but also with regard to ensuring an equal standard of living among the rundale members. For example, the incorporation of the potato within the commune’s croprotations would allow the tillage collop to reduce in size, because the potato would produce more yields per unit area than any other crop. The arrangement of both grazing and tillage collops with regard to their redistribution in changedale and the amount of collops held by each individual commune member, therefore, needed a communal organization. This complex set of procedures was provided by the commune’s council of elders, headed by the commune’s ‘king’.

Therefore, the commune’s council had to arrange not only the productive behaviour of its direct producers but also the technical exploitation of the physical means of production. This involved two processes. The first process concerned the actual physical location of the commune’s means of production (i.e. the areas designated for tillage and for pasture) and the distribution of those means of production on an equal basis between the communal direct producers. The second process involved organizing the respective working periods of the individual producer in a coordinated way so that no one individual member could upset the working periods of the other communal members (e.g. vacating the infield after the last day of October). All these complex arrangements had to be based on customary rules and

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laws, where the actual production process of the commune as a whole had to be communally organized to the last detail. Therefore, the inherent tendency of the rundale commune was to reproduce its members as equal members of the commune. It was not primarily concerned with the production of wealth but with the physical reproduction of its members as members of the commune (i.e. use-value production in essence). In order to achieve this aim, it was necessary to attempt to continually maintain and preserve the established equilibrium of shared physical resources between the communal members. But, if the essential social form of communal production is the reproduction of communal members, any increase in their numbers will demand a reallocation of these communal resources, which will in turn undermine the initial equilibrium. Marx stated this in the following way:

If the community as such is to continue in the old way, the reproduction of its members under the objective conditions already assumed as given, is necessary. Production itself, the advance of population (which also falls under the head(ing) of production), in time necessarily eliminates these conditions, destroying instead of reproducing them, etc., and as this occurs the community decays and dies, together with the property relations on which it was based. (Marx 1964: 82–83)

The dynamic of this particular mode of production is population growth, which is ironic. This situation comes about because the essential social form is the reproduction of communal members, yet an increase in the number of members,which is a ‘natural’ consequence of family reproduction practices – especially where agricultural work is done with family labour – causes a realignment of communal resources. Marx highlighted this tendency with regard to the Ancient variant of this mode of production:

For instance, where each individual is supposed to possess so many acres of land, the mere increase in population constitutes an obstacle. If this is to be overcome, colonization will develop … Thus the preservation of the ancient community implies the destruction of the conditions upon which it rests, and turns into its opposite. (Marx 1964: 92–93)

Therefore, in order to accommodate new family members, the rundale agrarian commune had to engage in an expanded form of communal production.

9. Expanded Communal Production

The overall reproduction process of the rundale system concerns not only the physical reproduction of the direct producer, his immediate dependents and the social relations of communality and individualism that ‘rest’ upon those physical conditions of production, but also the financial reproduction of the commune and its members. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all members of Irish society were tied into a monied economy, whether they were from the city of Dublin or Tory Island. The rundale communities of the West were no exception to this trend.31

All of these processes of reproduction, although distinct in their respective determinations within their own processual forms are inherently connected to each other because they mediate each other. A contraction or collapse of one will have a major impact on the other processes of reproduction.

a). Increasing Parcellization of Land and the Subsequent Fragmentation of the Labour Process

The major constraint of the rundale system on its physical reproduction process was the inherent tendency of the system to subdivide the means of production in order to

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accommodate its growing population. An example of such subdivision is the Gweedore estate, Co. Donegal:

By 1851, subdivision had almost reached its physical limits and the arable area per holding had become very small. The average arable per holding had fallen to 2.3 acres, while the average per person was .43 acres. (Douglas 1963: 11)

And this subdivision of the arable land, coupled with the arable land increasingly ‘colonizing’ the pasture lands of the commune, caused a devastating decline in the physical subsistence of the communal members:

To make matters worse, in the early decades of the nineteenth century … the numbers of livestock had to be reduced, with a resultant decline in protein-giving milk and butter in the local diet. Thus in the eighteenth century the diet had included ‘milk, curds, butter, fish, rabbits, potatoes and bread’, in 1802 ‘potatoes, benefits of seashore and a little oaten bread, milk and butter’, but by 1840 ‘potatoes, and peppered water with occasional sprats and salt’ were said to be the main foods. (Douglas 1963: 11–12)

We have already discovered from Marx’s analysis of primitive communism that the essential consequence of attempting to maintain the equality of communal membership was to allow members’ children access to the communal land, but this custom imposed an internal stress in that it was necessary to continually subdivide the commune’s means of production in order to accommodate its growing population of direct producers. Buchanan identifies this trend in the rundale system, specifically in the growth of the clachans:

In Western districts meantime, clachans not only survived but actually grew in number and size. For example, four to eight dwellings were an average size in the early eighteenth century, but by the first decade of the nineteenth century, clachans in Co. Donegal averaged thirty dwellings, rising as high as 120 to 200 in Co. Clare. The chief reason for this increase was rising population, which in the rundale system was accommodated by subdivision of holdings in the customary practice of gavelkind inheritance. Towards the end of the century, pressure of population was so great that even farms formerly held in severalty might become rundale holdings, in this way, the new generation of joint-tenants building their houses alongside the original dwellings to become clachans. (Buchanan 1970: 153)

But the degree of immiseration depended upon the development of communal subdivision, which varied from rundale commune to commune, and was determined by population increase. The rundale system did not posit a surplus population outside the social conditions of reproduction, but attempted to accommodate all its increasing communal membership within its own communal system. As a consequence, not only was there a tendency to encourage population growth, there was also little tendency towards emigration:

The survival of the infield-outfield system of farming in parts of South-east [Derry] until late in the nineteenth century may have been an important factor in limiting emigration from that area, due to the way of life it represented, as well as through its economic effects. The subdivision of land held in common, associated with this form of agriculture, meant that some increase of population could be absorbed, even though there might be a fall in the standard of living of the whole community; in those districts where subdivision had halted, however, the problem of obtaining land for the members of an increasing population could only be solved by emigration. (Johnson 1959: 155)

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So, where there was no barrier of access to land, not only were communal members encouraged to stay, they could also get married without waiting to inherit the leasehold, as occurred where the landlord class determined accessibility to land. In consequence the rundale members tended to marry early. There is some evidence to suggest that they married frequently at the age of sixteen and, in one instance, the combined ages of one couple did not exceed twenty-eight (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1834, Parish of Desertagney Co. Donegal: 11).

Therefore, early marriages, determined by communal access to land, led to massive population increase in rundale areas. But this type of social and sexual reproduction process has inherent dangers as indicated by the increasing immiseration of the rundale’s physical means of subsistence. The lowering of the physical standard of the means of subsistence narrows the ability of the commune to continually reproduce itself. Concretely, this involved the commune subsisting more and more on the potato as its staple crop for subsistence. And any contraction in potato crop yields can force the communal members into a situation where they have no choice but to emigrate. Emigration in this context is the emigration of entire families as they flee starvation, which has come about because of collapse of the physical means of reproduction to maintain itself.

As we have already stated, the arable infield of the rundale system was the hub of the whole system. The infield of the commune was organized through the system of spade husbandry with its inherent structure of ‘lazy beds’ or ridges. And in the system of changedale, not only were the ridges rotated every one or two years, they were also given to new members of the commune. The consequence of the latter tendency was that the arable infield tended to be increasingly ‘parcellized’ into smaller individually- held plots and that it physically began to expand upon the outfield and the pasture lands of the commune. This, coupled with the physical digging of the lazy beds, meant that the arable area expanded every year, as the following passage from the Devon Commission suggests:

A change takes place in occupation every two years, owing to their mode of tillage, which is very singular. They grow their crops in very wide ridges, which are formed into inclined planes: one side of the ridge being two or three feet higher than the other. The seed is spread upon the ridge and it is covered from a furrow always dug from the high side, so that every year the mould of the field is moved by the breadth of the furrow, or about eighteen inches, from one side of the field to the other. Hence the necessity of a change every two years. (McCourt 1947: 56)

Of course this inherent expansion of the arable infield does not necessarily suggest that the actual location of the infield changed. The opposite is true. The arable infield never rotated with the outfield, but was constantly cropped as is indicated in the following account from the landowner J.N. Thompson’s diary, Carndonagh, Co. Donegal:

The system of rundale is still rife and prevails over most of this estate. The ditches are for the most part mere dividing lines over which cattle and sheep can freely pass, even on the best farms well fenced fields are a modern improvement … People too are beginning to understand something of rotations of crops; formerly after potatoes, barley or oats was grown till the land would no longer give corn, then perhaps a wretched crop of flax, then potatoes again. Upland grass was not thought of, and pasture land was quite apart from arable. Some land was always ploughed, other land never, but always kept in pasture. Some of the land I now have I do not think had been rested within living memory. (Thompson, n.d., circa 1801–1833: 237)

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These emerging trends of more intensive cultivation of the arable land (through the process of plot subdivision) and the necessary expansion of the arable out on to the pasture lands of the commune were a direct consequence of the rundale system’s need to engage in expanded reproduction. This inherent and essential tendency of communal production had a major impact on the labour processes of this particular mode of production in the concrete context of the rundale commune. Because of the necessary requirement to accommodate new family members and allow them access to the arable infield, this spatial area becomes increasingly ‘parcellized’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 113) – breaking down into smaller and smaller plots of tillage cultivation. Probably one of the most extreme example of such a process of parcellization, reported by Bell, was the case from Donegal for the 1840s in which ‘one man had his land in 42 different places and gave up in despair, declaring that it would take a very keen man to find it’ (Bell 2008: 55). Marx has suggested that the land is the essential ‘condition of labour’ (Marx 1964: 74); with the increasing partitioning of the commune’s infield, the labour process itself becomes more fragmented with the declining size of the individual plots of cultivation. Fragmentation of the labour process under these dispersed spatial conditions ‘compels a dispersion of strength and time’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122) of the labour power of the individual communal member and his immediate family. And, although these arable ‘tillers’ were to be seen working in the infield and apparently side-by-side with each other, they were actually working not with each other but were engaged in ‘uncoordinated individual activities on scattered means of production, where each follows the logic of his particular situation and nobody has an overall plan of the totality’ (Maguire 1978: 224).

Labouring under these fragmented conditions, the individual commune members appropriated the fruits of their own labour not only from the arable infield but also from the pasturing of livestock on the communal grazing grounds. This surplus product was then sold as a commodity in a market, and thereby the commune entered into simple commodity production.

b). Simple Commodity Production under the Communal Conditions of the Rundale

Marx, in his discussion of the Russian variant of the agrarian commune, suggested that fragmented labour was the key factor in the private appropriation of surplus product and its realization into exchange value. In the case of the rundale commune, the accumulation of money by the individual communal members was necessary for them to reproduce themselves as members of a society beyond the immediate confines of their particular commune. Money was needed to pay the landlord, the priest, the taxman, the merchant trader and the usurer.32

Consequently, the mediation of money within the social relations of production in the rundale commune determined that a certain proportion of the commune’s surplus product had to be produced for exchange value. And although the essential ‘precondition for the continued existence of the community’ was the ‘maintenance of equality among its free-sustaining peasants’, the commune had now become dependent on the accumulation of money to meet these expenses. Whether these necessary expenses were paid by the commune as a whole or by individuals depended upon the degree of individualism developed within each rundale commune.

Besides producing agricultural products as marketable commodities, strategies were developed by the communal members which involved essentially adding more exchange value to the actual agricultural products, by changing ‘primary’ products into more ‘finished’ commodities. These subsidiary activities included brick-making,

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fishing, kelping, knitting, flax spinning, the weaving of linen cloth, and the illicit distillation of alcohol. In the Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal for example, poitín was produced:

Barley and oats are the only descriptions of grain grown in the parish, from the universal practice of illicit distillation. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1836, Parish of Inniskeel Co. Donegal: 25)

The production of poitín was aided by the communality of the rundale system, and the subsequent difficulties that the Revenue officers had in identifying the individuals involved in producing this illicit alcohol was due to the communality of landholding under the rundale system (Bonner 1969: 82–83). But these subsidiary ‘industries’ toagricultural production must be seen as an attempt to counteract not only the diminishing material returns from the rundale’s immediate agricultural production process but also the diminishing financial returns from the traditional agricultural commodities of the rundale system. But, as can be seen from the apparent diversification of these subsidiary products, their production was extremely nonspecialized and consequently undercapitalized with regard to their production techniques. Therefore, the development of this type of commodity production never got beyond the stage of a putting-out system (linen and wool), in which merchant capital dominated rather than industrial capital as under the capitalist mode of production. However, whether a particular rundale community produced these subsidiary commodities depended on its specific historical conditions and locality as the following indicates for the Parish of Inniskeel, Co. Donegal.33

In the districts neighbouring the seashore the females are universally employed in [the] spinning [of] linen yarn – in the mountainous parts of my parish they knit woollen stockings, and on average the knitters earn 5d per day. The neighbouring district of [the] Rosses is celebrated for its knitting of woollen stockings. (Bonner 1969: 69)

In Mayo, for instance, spinning yarn was later substituted by seasonal migration and egg production from rundale areas (Almquist 1977: 253–254). But these subsidiary ‘industries’ and their specific development have more to do with the reproduction of the rundale system as a whole rather than as a determining structure in this particular mode of production. The reason for this is that these industrial activities were never engaged in under communal conditions of production, and the determining structure continued to be the need to reproduce the individual as a communal member. It should be stressed, however, that the development of exchange-value production meant that more of the rundale system became dependent on market relationships, which had the tendency to encourage the accumulation of money capital by individuals rather than by the commune as a whole.

In the previous section, we observed how population increase imposed severe constraints on the rundale’s production process, as it led to increasing fragmentation of the labour processes on the scattered plots. But this tendency had to cope also with the necessary commercialization of production, incorporating both agricultural and ‘domestic’ industries. The combination of these two tendencies called for expanded production. But what was crucial for expanded production was for the commune to attempt to maintain the market/subsistence balance. For example, for Clare Island, Co. Mayo, Whelan argues that, as the potato became the subsistence crop of the villagers, the oat crop was ‘increasingly assigned to the market’ (Whelan 1999: 81). This demarcation became so pronounced that the local island population eliminated oats

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from their diet to the extent that they became overdependent on the potato as their only source of subsistence.

The twin stresses of accommodating the rundale’s increasing population and of the need to engage in commodity production put extreme pressure on the capacity of the existing means of production to produce sufficient products to meet these competing needs. In fact, these production demands for physical subsistence and commodity production were limiting the development of each other. With increasing population, more of the communal land would have to be given over to providing more of the physical means of subsistence. This eventually would limit the area of land for commodity production. But it is interesting to note that it could not happen the other way around, in that, if the area under commodity production grew to the detriment of the commune being able to provide sufficient subsistence for itsmembers, existing and new, the whole raison d’etre for this form of communal production would collapse i.e. the continuing maintenance of equality, if (and unfortunately when) the subsistence crop failed.

a) The Consequences of Restricted Land for Spatial Expansion on the Expanded Communal Reproduction Process

Marx, in his discussion of the reproduction of the agrarian commune, made it clear that an increase in population in the context of maintaining equal possession of land among its members can become an obstacle to that process of reproduction. Equality for the new members cannot be achieved under the existing spatial conditions. ‘If this (obstacle) is to be overcome, colonization will develop …’ (Marx 1964: 92). Here, the agrarian commune in question will need to expand spatially in order to provide the land required to maintain that share equality. With regard to the rundale, this necessary process of spatial colonization ideally meant establishing a new commune on unoccupied lands, with its own infield/outfield and clachan locations, which would halt the process of land parcellization. But in the Irish context, especially from the Plantations onwards, this seemingly necessary process of colonization was limited by the impositions of landlordism and their associated form of land tenure. As a consequence, the rundale communes were themselves colonized and many may have been pushed out of the fertile lands and onto the bogs and mountains by the landlords in search of increased rents.34 Whelan gives an example of this type of external colonization of the rundale communes for the West of Ireland in the early part of the eighteenth century, as cattle grazers, through the power of the landlords, got their hands on the fertile rundale lands, by evicting the members. He quotes an account by Charles O’Hara of this instance of rundale farmers’ removal from the limestone lowlands:

By 1720, the demand for store cattle from the south had reached us (in Connacht) and the breeding business grew more profitable. Many villagers were turned off and the lands which they had occupied were stocked with cattle. Some of these village tenants took mountain farms but many more went away. About 1726, the graziers, encouraged by the markets, first raised the price of land in order to cant all the cottagers out of their farms. (Whelan 1999: 78)

The implications of this expropriation of the rundale communes from the low-lying fertile lands may have been quite profound and impacted on them in various ways. Firstly, it limited their own ability to colonize, as the landlords grabbed a large proportion of the West of Ireland land for the grazing entrepreneurs. Secondly, being left with only bog and mountain to exist upon, the rundale communal members had no choice but to physically colonize these marginal lands. Thirdly, since they were being

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colonized, their essential need to colonize in order to maintain equality could only be met internally – within their own communal lands which they themselves controlled. And since the original arable infield is the essential hub of the established commune, and therefore could not be interfered with without undermining the social and material basis of the communal production, the only alternative left was for the agrarian community members to colonize their own ‘waste land’, in which they had traditionally ‘booleyed’ their livestock. Clachans, as the most visible indicator of the rundale system therefore, began to ‘spring up’ not only in old booley mountain locations but also on so-called compact farms where the original legal tenants were able to undermine the landlord’s resistance to land subdivision by allowing a rundale commune to establish itself upon these previously enclosed tenant farms.35

In certain instances, the landlord attempted to maintain some sort of formal control over this clandestine development by issuing partnership leases to some of the rundale communal members. But, in reality, the landlords in this situation had lost control of access to their estates, and thereby the determination of accessibility had moved from the landlords to the agrarian communes. But this countertendency of the landlord class to maintain its colonial control over ‘legally’ held estates was very much determined by the power relationships between the landlords and the communes – between formal legal state processes and the customary landholding system of the rundale communities. And, crucially, this resistance to the full operation of landlordism on the part of the rundale commune was very much predicated on their respective overall processes of reproduction. A collapse or even a significant contraction in any one of these mediated processes of reproduction would not only weaken the commune but could spell disaster for the commune as the landlords, seeing a weakness in their ability to resist, pounced on them with the full power of the state legal and military apparatus. Consequently, the sustainability of the rundale system was not dependent upon one essential structure but was determined by a diverse unity of its reproduction processes. Not only had the commune members to survive the vicissitudes of the market and the ever-present opportunism of the landlord class to enclose their communal lands, they also needed to sustain the fertility of their lands, which they physically subsisted upon. The land and its inherent ecological systems on which the rundale communes physically maintained themselves on had to be constantly reproduced.

10. The Socio-ecological Metabolism of the Rundale and its emerging Metabolic Rift

Marx has provided us not only with the complex theoretical tool of the mode of production which has allowed us to begin an exploration of the dynamics of the rundale communal system of production, but he also developed a conceptual framework which can help us to understand the role that the ecological system played in the reproduction of this particular agrarian system.36 According to John Bellamy Foster, the theoretical cornerstones of Marx’s materialist understanding of society’s ecological base were his concepts of the socio-ecological metabolism and the metabolic rift (Foster 1999). These ‘ecological’ concepts operated at a particular level within the overall workings of a mode of production. As part of this essential aspect of a 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 living entities such as ourselves and the natural environment. Crucially, this process of metabolism includes both the natural

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and social forms of exchange and this exchange takes place at the level of the labour process within a particular mode of production. Marx states this in the following with regard to how man engages with nature through this process of socio-ecological metabolism:

Labour process … regulates and controls the metabolism between himself [man] 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 adapted to his needs. (Marx 1976: 283)

Therefore, the complex relationships expressed in the concept of socio-ecological metabolism are present in all modes of production, but take on a specific form depending on how they are embedded into a particular mode of production.

Marx, inspired by the work of the German agricultural chemist Von Liebig, developed the concept of metabolic rift to explain the situation when the socio- ecological metabolism becomes disrupted and the nutrients from the soil are not adequately replenished during the agricultural production process. The consequence of this ecological trend is that soil exhaustion emerges as the nutrients continue to be extracted from the soil. The decline in the natural fertility of the soil was 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 would be permanently undermined. Secondly, the excretion of these nutrients in the urban environment tended to cause pollution in the local waterways (The River Thames in London in the nineteenth century, for example).

As we have discovered in our analysis of the expanded form of communal production, the rundale commune was engaging in commodity production, which saw agricultural products, such as various types of livestock and crops, thrown onto the market. These rundale agricultural commodities with their embedded nutrients were similarly searching for exchange value as capitalist commodities and subsequently entered into the diverse circuits of commodity exchange in this global market context. And, like capitalist agricultural products, their nutrients were forever lost to the local rundale eco-system that helped produce them. In this context, it is likely that the local ecosystems of the rundale communes suffered a similar disruption of their nutrient cycle – a metabolic rift.

a) Balancing Livestock with Crops as a way of maintaining an uninterrupted Flow of Nutrients: a ‘leaky’ Ecological Solution to the Metabolic Rift within Simple Communal Production

O’Sullivan and Downey provide a good summary of what was seemingly required to maintain the ecological sustainability of the rundale system of farming:

The sustainability of rundale farming required the effective integration of the crop and tillage dimensions of the system. In particular, a dynamic ecological equilibrium had to be

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maintained between livestock-carrying capacity … and the optimization of crop production. (O’Sullivan and Downey 2008: 23)

And, as we have discovered in our discussion of the simple form of communal production, the arable infield was permanently cultivated and never rested to allow it to restore at least some of its fertility naturally. This endemic metabolic rift was determined not solely by over-cropping but also by use of a poor crop rotation system, which did not allow any possibility of the soil restoring fertility by the application of nutrient replacing crops such as red clover or peas, etc. The exclusion of ‘green crops’ from the rundale crop rotation system meant that white crop rotationdominated the arable infield, which in itself can lead to soil exhaustion. Continuous white crop rotation without fallowing meant that the arable infield could not avoid the emergence of the metabolic rift and its physical manifestation in soil exhaustion. The following Ordnance Survey report from Donegal, where rundale was prevalent, testifies to the determining effects of metabolic rift on local agriculture:

Rotation of crops is badly attended upon here. After they raise their crops of barley, they sow corn after corn, until their land is exhausted before they begin to potato it. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Donagh)

So, in this context, the only means through which the soil could be replenished of its ‘lost’ nutrients were if the rundale members, either collectively or individually, came up with a strategy which ‘sourced’ the required nutrients from the non-arable lands of the commune. And, since no artificial fertilizer existed at this time, any attempt at maintaining the fertility of the infield ‘was fundamentally dependent upon the availability of animal manure, its single most important nutrient component’ (Whelan 1997). Therefore, livestock, especially cattle, performed contradictory roles with regard to the metabolic rift in the rundale system of farming. As potential commodities, the nutrients that they absorbed into their own metabolic system, which became physically part of that system, were to be permanently lost when they were moved off the communal land and sold to cattle buyers. Thus, they were part of the rundales’ metabolic rift – a rift in the nutrient cycle of the communal pasture lands. However, while roaming and grazing on the communal pasture lands and even on the winter stubble of the arable infield, they were ‘harvesting’ the soil’s nutrients, which had been metabolized in the natural grasses and flora of the meadow ecosystem. In processing these nutrients through their digestive system, they were not just ‘deconstructing’ the concrete plant forms of the nutrients but simultaneouslyconcentrating these released nutrients into a more socially useable form of animal manure. In this last stage of the animal phase of the socio-ecological metabolism, the nutrients pass through the body of the beast to finally emerge in a concrete form that can be used by society. Within the animal phase of the metamorphosis, the nutrients get transformed into a transportable form, and in this form they move from their original soil location. When the excrement leaves the body of the animal, it provides the material conditions for the ‘socio’ to be reunited with the ‘ecological’ in this constant metabolic movement of nutrients. But in this stage, society becomes the necessary conduit, as the excrement is gathered up to be later put back into the soil. In the case of the rundale, this transfer of nutrients occurs between the communal pastures of the outfield and commonage (including the infield stubble during the winter months) to the individual arable plots of the infield. But, in order to facilitate the accumulation of animal manure, the livestock of the commune were penned in various kinds of spatial locations for short periods of time. The most dramatic

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example of this was the keeping of livestock, especially milking cows, during the winter nights within the houses of the clachan. At one end of the house, the livestock were penned in by a low partition wall, where they had a littering of straw (Collins 2008: 302). The dung was brought out of the house and piled into individual dung- heaps near the door of the clachan house. Evans has even suggested that the lay-out and location of the clachan on the side of a hill was planned in order to facilitate the movement of the manure downhill and into the infield.37 Another location for the accumulation of useable excrement was when the livestock were moved to their summer booleying grounds on the common mountains. In the evenings, the cows were brought down to a rectangular enclosure beside the booley huts for milking and were kept in over-night (Bell 2008: 53). Again this facilitated the construction of a dung ‘hill’. The removal of the manure from the stockpiling locations was ‘almost entirely the work of the female members of the families’ and it was ‘conveyed in baskets on women’s backs’ (Robertson 2007: 244). With increasing parcellization ofthe land into smaller individual plots and the subsequent scattering of these plots throughout the infield (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122), the work of transporting the dung became more physically demanding as it had to be brought to more and more locations within the infield. The method of removal of the manure by the women population of the individual families further highlights the extent to which individualization was constantly eroding the old communal aspects of the rundale.

Within the infield, the manure was brought to the lazy beds which were being prepared for the potato crop. This was so because the potato crop was the only crop manured in the white crop rotation. The manure was then selectively placed on the potato lazy beds as the following testifies:

He does not spread the manure under the seed, but ribs or prabbrias them. Ribbing is done two ways. The first method was to make a hole in the ground with a stick made for the purpose and drop the seed in it. But a better way is found out – the man digs five shallow marks with a spade in which the dropper deposits the seed, he then digs five more and throws the clay off the spade on the seed already dropped, and so till the Dale is finished. When the fibres of the seed shoot forth [which could not extent so well otherwise] the manure is spread as thin as possible, set sightly dressed, dressed neatly, and by the shovelling heavily a good crop is expected. Some neither set nor rib but prabbin their potatoes. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Donegal, Co. Donegal: 5)

The implication of this selective application of the manure to the lazy beds in the arable infield suggests that the manuring process was inadequate to overcome the loss of nutrients from the tilled soil and thereby unable to repair the damage done to the nutrient recycling process by the metabolic rift. More nutrients apparently leaked from the ecological system than were replaced by the rundale members and this was manifested in the continuing decline in the fertility of the soil. One possible solution to the metabolic rift was to find more nutrients from other sources than the communal livestock – other non-animal fertilizers. But it must be pointed out at this stage in the analysis that, with the continuing presence of the metabolic rift (even after animal manure was used to counteract its effect), the amount of crop production had to keep pace with the population structure of the commune and its necessary financial requirements. The consequence of this is that the arable infield had to logically expand outwards in order to take in new spatial areas which were not as depleted of the soil nutrients as the original infield. The problem was, however, that the new arable plots were on old communal pasturing grounds.

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b) Enclosing the Outfield as the Final Attempt to thwart the Metabolic Rift under the Expanded Communal Production

The direct producers attempted to counteract the natural tendency of white crop production to exhaust the land by using a diverse range of natural fertilizers with the potato crop, such as marl, lime, burnt sod, peat, mud, sea-sand and shells and bones (Collins, 2008: xv). Of course, cattle manure is constantly used when available and, near the seashore, seaweed was the commonly used form of manure.38 However, the ability of manure to recuperate the soil’s condition from the effects of the metabolic rift depended not just on an adequate availability but also on the quality of thenutrients ‘gathered’, and the ‘harvesting’ of the nutrients was determined by the amount of livestock that the commune had. But, with the growth in the commune’s population and the subsequent need to expand arable production for subsistence, the demand for manure increased accordingly. But the supply of dung manure was itself limited by the expansion of the area given over to arable production, since the arable area had to encroach on pasture land; the amount of stock, particularly cattle, had to be restricted accordingly. Therefore, as the demand for manure increased with the expansion of arable, its supply was reduced proportionately. McCourt identifies this problem and the measures taken to overcome it:

… less grazing also meant fewer stock could be kept, thereby reducing the quantity of manure at a time when an increase was necessary to sustain corn yields on the infield where diminishing shares, because of increased population, were expected to produce an expanding cash crop. Two short-term measures helped to postpone the crisis. Enclosed pasture was provided on the outfield; and the intensive application of shell-sand, seaweed and, in some areas like Lecale, marl, allowed continuous cropping of the infield to continue, albeit not indefinitely’. (McCourt 1981:125)

The important general conclusion to be reached from our examination of these tendencies was that the manuring process of the rundale system was totally inadequate in preventing the ever-diminishing crop returns due to soil exhaustion. In fact, the failure of the manuring process to revitalize the soil caused even further expansion of the arable cultivation over the pasture, as the commune tried to make up declining yields through further colonization of the commune’s own pasture lands, even encroaching on the communal bog and mountain commonage. These newly-reclaimed arable areas produced higher crop yields:

There were three large tracks of reclaimed bog, quite flat without any fences which produce superior crops. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1834 Parish of Clonmany Co. Donegal: 25)

Initially these arable plots were allocated according to the amount of collops or sums held in the original infield, but later these plots were given over to individuals on a permanent basis (Buchanan 1973: 595) and probably enclosed on a permanent basis. Consequently, reclamation of land for arable production for expanded reproduction meant that the commune had only two possibilities, as Buchanan stated:

But reclamation of land for cropping led to curtailment of grazing, and a reduction in the number of livestock meant less manure for the infield when animals grazed the stubble. Livestock numbers could be maintained if alternative winter fodder was available and root crops were an obvious solution, used in combination with a green fallow, which in turn would help maintain the fertility of the infield. If this was adopted, however, livestock would have to be denied access to the infield in winter. There were two possibilities: to provide enclosed pasture for the livestock or to enclose the infield strips. The former was often achieved by enclosing the individually owned plots on the outfield, or on the edge of the common grazing;

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but the latter required common agreement since it denied rights of common grazing. This was impossible to achieve where changedale was practised, and it became increasingly difficult as subdivision progressed. (Buchanan 1973: 595–596)

It is interesting to note that there was greater flexibility in the outfield to allow for the development of individualized landholding than in the arable infield. These newly- enclosed fields were thereby capable of overcoming the declining productiveness of the arable production under the rundale system. But this measure came at a price, in the sense that these new cuts allowed for a greater individualization of communal production. Therefore, this practical solution to declining soil fertility was the beginning of the gradual process of disintegration of this form of communality within the pasture lands of commune. This final process began on the fringes of the rundale system rather than in the essential core of the system – the arable infield. The reason for this was that root crops and artificial grasses not only needed to be physically enclosed, they were also winter-sown crops. This could not be done if the rundale commune wanted to maintain its communality within the arable infield. McCourt sees the consequences of such alternatives:

In such circumstances, the ultimate solution lay with the ‘new husbandry’ – the introduction into the rotation of root crops and green fallow, usually clover, which provided alternative fodder in winter and summer, and enhanced soil fertility. However, being winter crops, the stubbles could no longer be thrown open to the stock after harvest in the traditional way. The alternative was to consolidate and enclose the infield, creating compact holdings more attuned to the production of a commercial surplus. (McCourt 1981: 25)

The inability of green fallow to integrate itself into the arable infield was not just determined by the communality of changedale, but also by the customary time restraints of booleying. The booleying of livestock from the infield to the mountain pastures and back again was the determining factor in the timing of sowing and harvesting of the arable crops. There was a dramatic strategy which the rundale commune could take in order to overcome the problem of booleying and crop production. This was to enclose some of the outfield and mountain pastures so that the commune could grow winter-sown potatoes and wheat, which seems to have happened in West Ulster (McCourt 1981: 125), leaving the infield to oats and barley. And it was only a matter of time when the infield would be enclosed, leaving the only remnants of communal land to be mountain commonage and bog. The rundale agrarian commune had now become a patch-work of small enclosed fields which existed beyond the clachan. And becoming such a spatial entity meant that the process of individuality had finally ousted communal property relationship from the infield and the outfield and banished it to the areas of commonage. This all came about because of the inability of the rundale commune to deal with its metabolic rift.

However, the enclosure of the communal pasture lands and the subsequent triumph of individualism over communality were rarely achieved by the communal members themselves, through this process of internal colonialization. What mostly occurred was that the landlords, seeing a very visible decline in the fortunes of the rundale communes, took the opportunity to take back their control of the rundale lands and subsume the members under a rental regime. The Great Famine provided the ideal opportunity for the landlords to send in the crowbar brigade, which Marx dramatically expressed in a headline taken from a Galway newspaper of 1852: ‘The sun that rose on a village sets on a desert’. This recolonizing of their rundale landed estates through enclosure by the landlord class … therefore, is about external stresses on the rundale system and how that communal system was subsumed under a feudal

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mode of production (Slater and McDonough 1994). We have only concentrated on the internal stresses, in order to adress the essential dynamics of the rundale agrarian commune. The external stresses are about the co-existence of the rundale agrarian commune with other modes of production and that is another story!

11. Conclusion: The significance of socio-ecological metabolic system

What we have attempted to uncover in this essay were the internal tendencies and laws of development of the rundale agrarian commune. In this pursuit we discovered that the system of production was very much prone at the ecological level to soil exhaustion. With Marx’s concept of the primitive communist mode of production we were able to account for the emergence in Ireland of a particular socio-ecological metabolism which created a metabolic rift in the agricultural ecosystem of the rundale agrarian commune. And the specific characteristics of this rundale socio-ecological metabolism were the increasing penetration of individualism over the various communal aspects of the rundale system. This itself was ‘fueled’ by the inability of the commune to cope with its own population growth. These levels of determination formed a complex unity, which we needed to unravel in order to discover the internal dynamics of the rundale agrarian commune.

What we believe is significant in the Marxist approach is how the material form of an object metabolizes with the social and natural forms and their respective processes in which the immediate forms are mere moments in a constant state of flux. An agricultural product is not just a physical amalgamation of nutrients it also possesses diverse social forms which can be valorized under various social conditions. For example, an agricultural product can realize itself as a commodity with exchange value in the market place. But that same money form of the agricultural product can be partly used to purchase seed or pay the rent, or even provide a donation to the priest. Accordingly, the exchange form of the original product becomes a moment in the social processes of the rental system, the circulation process of circulating and fixed capitals and the social costs of reproduction. The same physical object simultaneously performs functions for the natural ecosystem and the social processes of production. Crucially the material object of the agricultural product acts as a conduit for the natural and social processes that not only pass through the physical entity but also structure that entity in their metabolizing movements. For example, a potato, if left to natural evolutionary propensities, as a moment in the natural ecosystem, will eventually rot and return its nutrients to the soil. But, when the same potato is metabolized as a mere moment of a social process, it is destined to be physically appropriated by society either as a commodity or a means of human subsistence, and its departure from its immediate ecosystem will create a rift in the soil nutrient cycle – a metabolic rift. In this context crop production under whatever agricultural system will give rise to a metabolic rift with regard to the original ecosystem that ‘produced’ the crop as it is removed from that ecosystem. Therefore, the concept of metabolic rift is very much part of the natural ecosystem, although it is a disruption in the flow of the ecosystem’s nutrients. But, crucially, what determines this metabolic rift in the natural nutrient cycle is the specific social form in which our potato is embedded. For example, if the potato is to be a commodity, its respective nutrients will be lost forever as it gets traded to far-off locations through a market system. However, if it is destined to be consumed locally as a means of subsistence, its encased nutrients may make it back into its ecosystem of origin. But this depends on the manuring practices carried out by the crop cultivators. If the human excrement is actually collected and reapplied to the depleted original ecosystem, then the

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metabolic rift is overcome. But, in reality, nutrients ‘harvested’ from other soil locations is more likely to happen as we discovered when the grazing cattle of the rundale commune were gathering nutrients while grazing from the communal pasture lands and the individual families were spreading them as manure onto their respective tillage plots of the infield. Consequently, it is the socio-ecological metabolic process rather than the metabolic rift that becomes the more significant determination in the overall flow of nutrients out of and into the ecosystem of the farmed lands. It is the specific social conditions under which the direct cultivators work in their labour processes that determine the flow of nutrients. The metabolic rift is therefore a mere consequence of the socio-ecological practices performed by the agricultural producers which are themselves determined by the specific mode of production under which these producers are working. The socio-ecological metabolism of the mode of production becomes the essential level of analysis in which we can explore further our societal relationship with nature. And Marx’s legacy to us of the twenty-first century is that he has provided us with the necessary roadmap to continue such a vital intellectual exploration.

Notes

1 Dunlap (1980) coined the term ‘human exemptionalism’ to describe this academic trend.
2 See also Benton 1994, and Foster 1999.
3 ‘Queens School’, in this sense, refers broadly to subsequent (mainly doctoral) graduates of the Queen’s Institute of Irish Studies, whose work constitutes the most comprehensive body of collated knowledge on the rundale system to date. For a complete bibliography of McCourt, see C. Thomas 1986, Rural Landscapes and Communities: Essays Presented to Desmond McCourt, Irish Academic Press (A bibliography of the writings of Desmond McCourt: 19–21). For a complete bibliography of Estyn Evans, see R.H. Buchanan, E. Jones and D. McCourt 1971, Man and His Habitat: Essays presented to Emyr Estyn Evans, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul (A bibliography of the writings of E. Estyn Evans: 264–276).
4 Doherty’s comments give an interesting insight into the theoretical underpinnings of early 20th century Irish historical scholarship, most notably the broad ‘Darwinian assumptions of unilinear development’ occluding the possibility of nucleation in early Irish settlement patterns (Doherty 1999: 56).
5 According to Evans,

There is no incontrovertible evidence for the existence of the single-farm system in pre- Celtic Ireland, but both literary and archaeological evidence shows that the raths, cashels and crannogs of the Gaels were the isolated homes of chieftains and freemen. Where then did the peasantry live? Neither history nor archaeology furnishes us with much evidence, but working back from the recent past, we can say that the traditional unit of settlement accompanying rundale or infield/outfield system … was the hamlet or kin-cluster. Both clustered settlement and some kind of infield/outfield agriculture have their historical parallels in Highland Celtic Britain, and these cultural traits have accordingly beenlabelled Celtic … (Evans 1992: 53)

6 Andrews points out the distinctions between Evans’s approach and that of the broader established tradition of Historical Geography. His situating anthropogeographic generalization against historical- geographical specialism allows us to glimpse something of the broader paradigmatic debates occurring in geography throughout the 1970s. Notwithstanding, the implications of Evans’s work are of a relatively static and unchanging society of Celtic descent, ‘who live in clustered kin groups and practise something analogous to rundale cultivation, remaining largely unchanged until 18th century market influences begin to undermine the peasant economy’ (Andrews 1974: 1).

7 The ‘peasant model’ that emerged from Evans’s work faced subsequent criticism in the context of T. Jones Hughes’s writings on the diversity of pre-famine Irish class structure:

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The peasant scenario elided class differences by ignoring the intense social stratification of pre-Famine Irish life … he established (long before it became fashionable among historians) that pre-Famine Ireland was not an undifferentiated mass of unrelieved poverty and that class, itself determined by broader economic forces, was the key to understanding Irish settlement history in the post-seventeenth-century period. (T. Jones- Hughes, cited in Whelan 1999: 188)

Kevin Whelan has attempted to overcome the reductionist models of Irish society as expounded by authors such as Evans, developing a pluralist schema of regional archetypes to overcome the epistemological limitations of earlier work – the ‘deceptive homogeneity’ – and, in relation to the archetype of the small farm, he locates the emergence of rundale clearly within a context of functional adaptation (Whelan 1999: 190 and Whelan 1995: 24).

8 Gibbons has placed similar emphasis:

Concern for others in extreme situations was not discretionary, a matter of private charity or philanthropy, but was part of the underlying connective tissue of society. So far from being obsolete in Ireland, moreover, these sentiments formed the basis of the moral economy of the countryside as exemplified by the communalism of the ‘Rundale’ system in Irish agriculture, and the close webs of affiliation through which rural townlands wove their identities. (Gibbons 1997: 253)

9 The extent to which Evans idealized peasant society has been questioned by Crossman and McLoughlin (1994: 90)
10 The debate itself began (and featured prominently in the later works of McCourt) over the accuracy of Seebohm’s, and later Meitzen’s emphasis of the Einzelhof pattern of settlement across Ireland as a seventh-century Celtic continuity, to the exclusion of clustered settlement (McCourt 1971: 127). Subsequent studies and critiques of approaches to the rundale have relied heavily on limiting spatial arguments (Graham 1994: 194).
11 See Doherty (1999: 55–56) and Whelan (1999: 187–188) for a criticism of Evans’s theoretical formulations on peasant society. See Jones-Hughes, ‘Society and Settlement’ (cited in Whelan 1999: 188) for a development of the diversity of class structure; see Graham (1994) for a discussion of the political context of Evans’s writings; see Crossman and McLoughlin (1994: 80) and Graham (1994) for comments on Evans’s noted avoidance of political, religious and class dimensions.
12 Dated February/March, 1881 (Shanin 1983: 117).
13 The problem of interpreting what Marx is attempting to express in the drafts is compounded by his continually eliding the concrete level of analysis with a more abstract level of analysis – the two forms of dualism is an example of this practice.
14 Adjectives applied by Marx across various moments of the social relationships of production. Italics indicate our proposed opposing concept where Marx did not specify one in his original draft.

Property element……………………. collective element
Individual labour……………………..collective labour
Petty/small plot cultivation………….communal cultivation
Individual possession………………..collective possession
Fragmented labour…………………..co-operative and combined/collective labour Personal usufruct…………………….communal usufruct

Private property………………………communal/common/social property Private appropriation……………. ….collective appropriation
Private land…………………………..communal land
Private ownership……………………communal/common ownership Personal labour………………………collective labour

Movable property…………………….fixed property Privately owned house……………….communal house Fragmented tillage/agriculture……….large-scale agriculture Individualist – agriculture…………….collective agriculture Individually owned……………………jointly-owned Augmented labour ……………………co-operative labour Individual production…………………collective production Individual trading……………………..communal trading

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Scattered means of production………. socially concentrated means of production

15 Marx stated this in the following way: ‘The history of the decline of the primitive communities has to be written (it would be wrong to put them all on the same plane; in historical as in geological formations, there is a whole series of primary, secondary, tertiary and other types’ (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 107, footnote C).

16 See M. Cain and A. Hunt (eds), 1979. Marx and Engels on Law. Academic Press.
17 See M. Head, 2008. Pashukanis: A Critical Reappraisal. Oxford: Routledge-Cavendish (p.32).
18 See Anderson (2007) for comments on Irish manuscript material written by Marx and Engels during the 1860s.
19 ‘Among the Celts, Germans and Slavs community ownership can still be traced historically, and among the Slavs, Germans and also the Celts (rundale) it still exists even in the form of direct (Russia) or indirect (Ireland) feudal bondage’ (F. Engels, 1878 – Engels’s preparatory writings for Anti- Duhring. p. 481), while pasture and bog are in common. But only fifty years ago, cases were frequent in which the arable land was divided in farms which shifted among the tenant-families periodically, and sometimes annually.

According to Maine, ‘the Irish holdings “in rundale” are not forms of property, but modes of appropriation’. But the lad himself remarks: ‘archaic kinds of tenancy are constantly evidence of ancient forms of proprietorship … Superior ownership arises through purchase from small allodial proprietors, through colonization of village waste-lands become in time the lord’s waste, or (in an earlier stage) through the sinking of whole communities of peasants into villeinage, and through a consequent transformation of the legal theory of their rights. But even when a chief or lord has come to be recognized as legal owner of the whole tribal domain, or great portions of it, the accustomed methods of occupation and cultivation are not altered’ (Marx 1881: 5).

20 Marx refers to this trend in the following way:

Where property exists only as communal property, the individual member as such is only the possessor of a particular part of it, hereditary or not, for any fraction of property belongs to no member for himself, but only as the direct part of the community, consequently as someone in direct unity with the community and not as distinct from it. The individual is therefore only a possessor. What exists is only communal property and private possession. (Marx 1964: 75)

21 Writing of Tory Island, Fox describes the presence of equal opportunity to access the communal land in the following way:

Every child of a landholder has a right to a portion of his or her land, no matter what happens to the land, all the heirs retain a claim to it … But that every heir has a right, and can make a claim, does not mean that every heir gets a portion. Some will, some will not. Some will press their claims and be denied, others simply will not press them at all. But, in the end, every household will end up with some land … (Fox 1979: 99)

22 In Béaloideas, the Irish Folklore Journal, Seamus Ó Duilearga stated the following:

The principle of rundale was that each legitimate participant in the division should get not an equal amount of land in superficial extent, but an equal amount in value. If the farm lay on a hillside, each person in the division got some of the good land below and some of the poor land high up the hill. (Ó Duilearga 1939: 290)

23 In Mayo, this cow’s grass was called a collop and in Ulster it was known as a sum. These ‘units’ would be broken down further where a sum equals three parts of a horse, four sheep, eight goats or twenty geese. (Evans 1967: 36)
24 In one of his letter drafts to Vera Zasulich, Marx stated this tendency in the following way with regard to the communal arable ground:

The members, without studying the theory of ground-rent, realized that the same amount of labour expended upon fields with a different natural fertility and location would produce different yields. In order to [secure the same economic benefits and] equalize the chances of

35

labour, they therefore divided the land into a number of areas according to natural and economic variations, and then subdivided these areas into as many plots as there were tillers. Finally, everyone received a patch of land in each area. (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: 122)

25 Knight’s original footnote.
26 See Mac Cnáimhsí 1970: 83 for how fighting acted as a bar to improvement through disputes over lot

quality.
27 See Uhlig 1961 for a discussion of the agricultural commune in Western and Central European context. See in particular Uhlig (1961: 291–293) for a discussion of the ‘The clachans of Ireland’ with comparisons to the Germanic form.
28 Evans invokes the term ‘clachan’ to differentiate functional settlement (defined as former nuclei of townlands, containing services such as shops and inns) from those associated with rundale:

Here and there, especially in the west, we see little ‘clusters’ ‘onsets’ or ‘clachans’ of peasant houses, a dozen or so together … the houses were clustered without plan or order (and never strung together end-to-end) generally in some sheltered hollow in the richest part of the townland … the village had neither shop nor inn, and required little besides salt and iron from the market town. These self-sufficing communities were held together by blood ties and by the exchange of services under the Irish open-field or ‘rundale’ system of cultivation. (Evans 1967: 47–50)

29 The following report of the Ordnance Survey for Co. Donegal confirms the lack of fencing, under the Rundale system:

There are large districts totally unenclosed … cattle during the winter being permitted to roam at large, destroying the wretched fences now in use, they must be consequently made a new each successive spring. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Iniskeel, Co. Donegal,

30 Royal Irish Academy, Box 21, ms, p.5)
Ordnance Survey Memoirs, Parish of Desertagney, Co. Donegal, Royal Irish Academy, Box 21,mss:

9–10.
31 Marx identified the financial guns that pounded the walls of the Russian agrarian commune with the following question:

How can the commune resist, pounded by state exactions, plundered by trade, exploited by landowners, and undermined from within by usury! (Marx, cited in Shanin 1983: [p?]).

Similar guns had the rundale communes in their sights. Nixon, for example, attempted to impose poor law tariffs upon his tenants, despite their valuations falling below the £4 threshold (Mac Cnáimhsí, 1970: 193). The practice of ‘taxing’ rundale sub-tenants through increasing rates in accordance with agricultural prices is noted by Cunningham (1981: 30).

32 The mere existence of the rent payments between the rundale commune and the landlord, coupled with payments for governmental taxation such as county cess and poor law, and church tithes would be sufficient in itself to force the rundale commune into commodity production. But, the commune had also to pay a certain amount to cover production costs such as seeds, spades and milking equipment, and like everyone in Ireland at the time they had social costs – marriages, church dues, dress and when necessary purchased food. Although the rundale village lacked elements of a real village, such as an inn and shops, this does not suggest that they did not buy and sell commodities. Evans suggests the following:

Itinerant ‘tinkers and tailors’ paid periodic visits and with the peddlers and beggars brought news of other districts, but the economic and social needs of the hamlet were met by periodic visits to the fairs and by seasonal gatherings of various kinds. (Evans 1979: 31)

33 Knight (1836) also remarked on the extent of illicit distillation in Erris.
34 Such enclosures on the Nixon and Leitrim estates in Donegal, and the resultant stress placed upon the rundale has been discussed by Mac Cnáimhsí (1970) and Mac Aoidh (1990).

36

35 See McCourt: ‘Even when it is evident that fragmentation had occurred through the subdivision of an original group of two, three contiguous farms, these in the beginning were also often held in severalty’ (McCourt 1971: 131). See also Currie on the various circumstances through which rundale emerged in Derry: ‘… (iii) the need for co-operation in clearing, enclosing and draining land which would have been beyond the technical and financial capacity of the individual tenant, despite the fact that contemporary leases lay the responsibility for such work on the lessee and not the landlord; (iv) the abundance of marginal land especially mountain, bog, and natural meadow which was ‘conducive toexploitation by the communal methods of rundale’ (Currie 1986: 100).

36 Downes and Downey explore the concept and dynamics of ‘systems’ in detail (see Downes and Downey 2009).
37 Evans even suggested that:

The Irish clachan was often placed at the infertile apex of a deltaic fan, the slope facilitating the washing and carrying-down of the accumulated manure, human as well as animal. (It is an interesting detail that for this purpose the women went with the cows and the men with the horses). (Evans 1956: 299)

38 However, it should be stressed that, although the use of seaweed as a fertilizer was extremely beneficial to the potato crop, it had detrimental effects on other crops, as the following quotation from the Ordnance Survey Reports from Donegal suggests:

Their land they say does not answer for oats and flax, and this defect they attribute to the constant use of sea manure. (Ordnance Survey Memoirs, 1835, Parish of Clondavaddog, Co. Donegal).

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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).

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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

29

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

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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

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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).

  

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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).

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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.

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