The Tyranny of Suburban Front Lawns of the Emerald Isle: A Dialectical Unfolding (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 74.

This article explores how the suburban front lawn is a special type of space, where society engages intensely with nature. Involved in this exchange are complex relationships between diverse networks of metabolizing processes. These processes include the natural process of grass growth, the labour process of ‘improving upon nature’, the process of harnessing nature for aesthetic designs and the commoditization process, in which ‘natural’ inputs are bought and brought into the front lawn. It is Marx’s concept of socio-ecological metabolism that allows the analysis to avoid both naturalism and social constructionism as the sole determinants of the grass lawn. Its actual determinant is how these contrasting processes metabolize with each other within the labour process of gardening. Consequently as much as we attempt to dominate nature in our lawn endeavours all we achieve is to thwart some of the natural tendencies of the grass ecosystem, but it’s essential natural laws continue to exist. Thus thwarting is merely concerned with imposing an aesthetic form on this particular type of grass ecosystem we call the suburban lawn. To uncover these complex relationships it is necessary to engage in a dialectical analysis

Marx on the colonization of Irish soil. (MUSSI Working Paper No. 3)

This paper explores how Marx conceptualised the presence of soil exhaustion within the first half of nineteenth century Ireland. It is a period of Irish history, according to Marx, that was itself divided by two stages of colonial domination. What determined soil depletion in the first period (1800-1846) were the excessive demands of the white crop rotation regime which had to operate under the social process of rackrenting. Moreover, this rental system was itself determined by the dominant position held by the colonial landowning elite. Maintaining the soil condition involved the tenantry, both peasants and cottiers, attempting to replace the traded (and therefore lost) nutrients to the Irish soil without adequate capital investments in improvements of the soil. This colonial rental regime came to its end with the occurrence of the potato blight in 1846 and the subsequent Famine. The new emerging stage of the colonial process (1846-1867 onwards) was what Marx titled ‘Clearing the estate of Ireland’, where the landlords ‘cleared’ their estates of the small peasantry and the cottiers and in eliminating the peasant restorers of the soil’s fertility, soil exhaustion occurred in the Post-famine period. Marx therefore highlights how the soil of the colonised can itself be colonised by that same process

Reconstructing ‘nature’ as a picturesque theme park: the colonial case of Ireland (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No.32

This paper explores how a form of visuality, - the picturesque became the essential framework for the emergence of a theme park on the landed estates of the Anglo-Irish landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The initial cultural forms of the picturesque, which evolved from the disciplines of landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics, later became the design principles that guided the English Informal style of gardening. Accordingly, the original abstract concepts of the picturesque become physically embedded in the Irish landscape ecosystems and subsequently established these spatial enclaves as a picturesque theme park. In becoming spatialized, the colonial ideology of the picturesque, - designing Irish landscape to look like English landscape, -became a colonised space which was inherently hegemonic with regard to the native sense of place. In physically embedding the picturesque visual principles into the local ecosystems, the cultural forms of the picturesque take on ecological dimension to them, where aesthetic forms of society merge with the natural forms of plants and their metabolic systems. And in ‘naturalising’ 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 author actually saw, the problem was that the scenes were already changed and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality. This particular social form of picturesque visuality fell from its dominant position with the fall of Irish landlordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

As ‘Nature Works Dialectically’, Explicating how Engels and Marx Analysed Climate and Climate Change Dialectically. (MUSSI Working Paper No. 1)

The premise of this article is based on the assertion that Engels made which he suggested that ‘nature works dialectically’. Consequently, concrete organic reality is not a solid thing-like entity but a complex matrix of interconnecting processes that form an organic totality. The existence of a dialectical reality has profound implications for how we can conceptualise that reality and even more critically how we physically relate to and eng age with that dialectical reality, especially when that reality is also organic. The organic processes of nature, according to Engels and Marx, are dominated by the climatic process, that ‘life-awakening force’ of soil fertility. However, what determines the form of the local weather system (the local manifestation of the climatic process) is how that system interconnects with the other organic processes of nature – geological structures, vegetation and the soil processes and they all are subsequently moments of that overall climatic process. The presence of interconnecting processes determining concrete reality, questions the validity of linear cause and effect formulation to account for the determination of that dialectical reality. This one-sided form of causation has to be replaced by a many-sided formulation as expressed in Marx’s famous proposal that the ‘concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations. Hence the unity of the diverse’. The new epoch of planning our relation ships with nature, has to include the adoption of the dialectical framework, conceptually within the sciences and practically in the processes of cultivation

The postcolonial landscape aesthetic of the Quiet Man (NIRSA) Working Paper Series No. 45

This paper explores how a cinematic representation of landscape appropriates not just the material objects of the landscape backdrop but can also simultaneously ‘capture’ an ideological framework in which the landscape objects are physically embedded in. This process of embedding an ideological framework is a consequence of society at some historical point intentionally designing the landscape to have a particular affect on the ‘seeing-eye’, - in effect constructing a garden. In choosing a considerable amount of the movie locations from within the grounds of Ashford Castle to represent Irish landscape the collective cinematographers of the Quiet Man appropriated an idealised English looking landscape - a garden which was designed to look ‘natural’. This type of garden is known as the Informal style or the Picturesque which originated in the eighteenth century England and is associated with the endeavours of Capability Brown and his followers. And the Picturesque style of garden was adopted by the large property owning classes of Britain and later by their class peers throughout the British Empire. Therefore, Ashford Castle and the other large landed estates of Ireland created Brownian gardens in the image of ‘little Englands’ in their grounds. Consequently, the landscape aesthetic of the Quiet Man is in designed terms closer to England than Ireland, but when Ford filmed in these idealised grounds he appropriated an English landscape garden to become the best known representation of Irish landscape in the world of the global cinema

The Ecological Dynamics of the Rundale Agrarian Commune (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 51.

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 for our 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 societ

The Suburban Front Garden: A spatial entity determined by social and natural processes (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 41

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

The Ecological Dynamics of the Rundale Agrarian Commune (NIRSA) Working Paper Series. No. 51.

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 for our 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 societ

Bulwark of Landlordism and Capitalism: The Dynamics of Feudalism in Nineteenth Century Ireland

The abstract is included in the article