The Zad and NoTAV. Mauvaise Troupe

The Zad and NoTAV - Mauvaise Troupe


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to my hosts they firmly corrected me – I was not in a swamp, I was in a bocage. Translating this book, the word ‘bocage’ posed a problem, mostly because the bocage is, as far as I can tell, a landscape unknown in the Americas, because of our lack of a feudal history. The problem is not unlike that of Antonio Gramsci, who as a young Sardinian student attending school on the mainland, wrote an essay about a woodland animal from his island, a snake-like creature with legs, but could not find the Italian word to name it. There is no name, his teacher told him, because such an animal does not exist. At first I tried ‘copse’ – obscure to Americans but known to the British – until I finally settled on the English ‘bocage’ – a little-used, long-ago borrowing from the French to mean ‘little woods’. A bocage is actually a mosaic of prairies and cultivated fields of variable shapes and sizes, enclosed and separated by shrubs, hedges and clusters of trees. As Anne Berger points out, it is, by all measures, a modest landscape, one that is on a human scale, or to be less anthropocentric, a scale conducive to humans and smallish animals like rabbits and small deer, or river fish. There is nothing sublime or transcendent about a bocage – the vast vistas needed to unleash soaring sentiments are lacking. The eye is always stopped by a hedge which, even if it limits the gaze, does not block physical entry.9 You can always jump over a hedge or walk through a wood – in the end, the only way to experience the contours of a bocage is really by moving through it. Geographer-novelist Julien Gracq, close witness to the mutation of the French countryside and a great amateur of the bocages of his native region, wrote that nothing had marked his generation more than the unbelievably unchanging nature of the rural and urban landscape in France for more than third of a century – between 1914 and 1950. Everything, it seems, changed at a very rapid pace during the Second Empire, through the Belle Époque, and up until 1914. And everything resumed that chaotic pace again, beginning in the 1950s. In between, though, time was frozen.10 Yet even during that stationary moment, Gracq foresaw the fragility of the bocage and the sad fate awaiting it. In a radio interview in 1977, he commented:

      Anyone who has driven through large swathes of the French countryside in recent years has witnessed, perhaps without realizing it, the forces that destroyed the bocage: a kind of rural reification and aggressive ‘redistricting’ process familiar to urbanists, which in the countryside is called ‘remembrement’. Mobilized most intensively throughout the 1980s and 1990s, ‘remembrement’ occurs when a territory that allowed subsistence is reoriented and restabilized to maximize profits. With the arrival of large farm machinery, hedges and other natural obstructions were leveled to create vast single-owner agribusiness parcels for mono-cultural cultivation, especially in Brittany. Today, there is a growing recognition of the important ecological degradation in the form of water pollution and soil erosion that occurs when water-retaining shrubs and trees are destroyed in this way. But the process continues.

      The making of a territory, as this book narrates the process in two very different regions, is the making of a place that, precisely, cannot be exchanged for any other. If what matters for the airworld is a smooth and seamless transit between substitutable spaces, for the territory what matters has everything to do with a logic of difference and possibility, autonomy and self-determination: the perpetuation of the possibilities of common life that place-based social relations can create, even amidst a striking diversity of beliefs. Where once the territory’s fight was with the airport or the train-line, it is no longer with high-speed transport per se, but with its world: a world of class-division that identifies human progress with economic growth and defines human needs in terms of markets and the submission of all the world’s resources to markets. The high-speed world is one in which the value of any item of earthly life is calculated according to its service to capital. Preventing one’s territory from becoming a mere node in a global capitalist system, a space of pure transit where people do nothing more than pass through, is a way of stabilizing in time – and perhaps


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