An ambiguous allegiance is formed wherein industrial residue becomes a political asset in resisting gentrification, an allegiance formed with a variety of subterranean conspirators, with chemical dynamics that remain indifferent to the creative practices of the surface that they nonetheless inform from within. Contrary to the irresolute intersection of nature and consciousness, as in Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the chiasmus as a figure X by which the former is thought relative to the latter, the `rumbling chiasmus’ describes an obscure volcanism that subtends the consciousness it both engenders and destroys, all the while remaining indifferent to it.1 The rumbling chiasmus is seized upon, plugged or routed into the productive desires of an inchoate politico-economic order, informing an occupation, inscription and encoding of the surface to which it nonetheless remains indifferent.
- my thanks to Iain Hamilton Grant (from whom I stole the title of this piece) for his assistance on this point. [↩]