The Imaginary of Emptiness, Newness, and Rural Ontologies: A Reflection After Media Rurality
Contrary to persistent stereotypes of wilderness and countryside, rural locations are media-intensive. What forms of mediation emerge when we foreground the “rural” in the function of media systems and technologies? How do these forms of mediation affect how we think about, inhabit, and relate to rurality?
In June 2022, the Grierson Research Group convened a group of international scholars to discuss these questions, and more, at the intersection of media and emerging forms and practices of rurality. Drawing from a range of humanities and social sciences fields and discourses that foreground rural media technologies and experiences, the Media Rurality project investigates the centrality of rural places and people within the media systems and technologies that shape daily life in and across rural and urban settings alike, in diverse global locations. We are grateful to Heliotrope for the opportunity to share these essays, the first to arise from this exciting collaboration.
Patrick Brodie, University College Dublin
Darin Barney, McGill University
Media Rurality is supported by an SSHRC Connections Grant
BY LATICIA CHAPMAN
On June 16th and 17th, 2022, the Grierson Research Group at McGill hosted Media Rurality, a colloquium of globe-spanning research focusing on rural places, infrastructure, energy, and environments. We sought to understand the materiality of the forces affecting countrysides and shaping the possibilities for rural lives and livelihoods. But we also found ourselves thinking about how the imagination of rural space shapes what can be seen and done in (or to) rural places, and the consequences of a dominant cultural imaginary that sees the countryside as empty.
In 2014 and 2015, I interned on a permaculture-based homestead on an island in the Pacific Northwest. I lived there with eleven other interns, some of whom were new each year and some of whom were returning for a second or third season. Many memories stick with me from my time on the homestead, but I often come back to one particular observation. I noticed that just about every new intern spoke about initiating a big new project, whether building a cabin, replacing the propane ranges in the kitchen with rocket stoves, or installing a WiFi network (at least two of these were real ideas, at least one came to fruition). At the time, I didn’t ask why new interns wanted to transform their temporary home, or why this impulse seemed not to be as strong for seasoned interns. Perhaps it was the opportunity to make a mark, perhaps it was that the homestead allowed us to exercise our imaginations and capacities in ways that are usually curtailed by the outside world. But the observation stayed with me because it made me realize that beginning something new is very different from relating to what already exists. What exists obviously cannot exist without someone having started something new at some point in the past. But building something new very rarely substitutes for the work of attending to what is, using those things that exist day in and day out over the course of years, and repairing their inevitable wear-and-tear. At an extreme, the conviction that a place needs something new implies the belief that there is nothing already there, or at least nothing worth our attention.
Emptiness is a projection that permits us to see rural places as lacking and in need of intervention, often in the form of grand plans that imply the sweeping question “what could we do here?” But one could also ask the question “what is happening here?”, inviting rural infrastructure, technology, practices, histories, and ideas to disclose themselves in their fullness. The flows that are more characteristic of rural life as it is lived emphasize maintenance, repair, and making-do. Perhaps this sounds idealized, if not willfully avoidant of things like the corporate agribusiness which dominates vast swathes of countryside. Maintenance and making-do can, however, be understood as descriptive of an attitude or habit, and thus are not necessarily innocent. We can, and should, ask what is being maintained? If something is being taken care of, does this imply the initial activity that produced the thing was justified? Where does the ability to make do disguise scarcity or fragility? But such practices also indicate the existence of a distinct rural ontology, one attuned to the inexorable influence of time and chance on the lifeworld.
Every new thing introduces a whole web of linked possibilities into the world, only the most obvious of which is its stated purpose. As I write, the ways that new things sometimes create trouble come easiest to my mind: the new cabin located in a picturesque spot over the marsh which fills with mosquitoes at night, the WiFi infrastructure which drains the solar batteries on cloudy days. But one could frame this differently: everything that comes into being creates the conditions for unforeseen contingencies, and requires energy to be maintained in a preferred state. This energy might look like the necessary performance of a chore, or it might look like the chance to perfect a skill, share knowledge between generations, stretch our minds, and exercise care. We only partially imagine this material, social, ethical, intellectual, and temporal ecosystem from the vantage point of the new thing.
During my second spring on the homestead, we were confronted with a problem that seemed to pit our ethic of care against the opportunity, or perhaps need, to try something new. Young tomato plants require extra heat to continue growing after they germinate. Every year, one of the farm owners took the trays of starts into her small greenhouse and kept a camp stove burning day and night for several days until they had grown past this critical stage. That year, some interns expressed concern about this particular use of fossil fuels. Other interns rejoined that we absolutely couldn’t not grow tomatoes. Meanwhile, several hundred tiny plants were already struggling to life, and no one proposed abandoning them. Someone had the idea that we should make a giant compost pile, shaped with a flat top and large enough to support all the seedling trays. Decomposing vegetation gives off heat – a lot of heat – and if we could keep the compost warm enough for long enough, our tomato problem might be solved. There were already several large compost piles on the farm; one more would be nothing extraordinary. It was just a new use for something quite familiar. Our compost pile worked. And our tomatoes grew, despite our having significantly questioned an established practice at a sensitive time. Thinking back, it seems to me that our questioning was a particularly rural form of breaking with tradition. It recognized our responsibility to the plants we had brought to life, and it thought the new in terms of what we could do with materials already in our milieu.
I realized then that inhabitation in a rural place means, in part, becoming sensitive to the sometimes subtle constraints – the already-existing fullness – of an environment. Sometimes the way to think the new is through noticing, and caring for, what is already there.
Laticia Chapman is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Alberta. Her doctoral research on libraries in rural Canada examines the meaning of the public sphere in small communities. When she isn’t conducting interviews or otherwise managing dissertation-related projects, she can be found birdwatching or doing (or dreaming about) something in the garden.
