My wife was talking to our neighbour down the road. They had been working for about a year on renovating their front yard. They had built some short faux-stone walls and recently added what looked like plastic hedges and fake foliage all around the space in order to provide themselves with a large, private space for reading and spending time outside. Along the space between the sidewalk and the wall they had rolled out a foot and a half wide length of artificial grass.
Coincidentally, my brother suggested recently that an interesting topic for this newsletter might in fact be artificial grass.
The question I suppose I feel I have to begin with is this: Is there a way to encounter artificial grass as itself a part of creation?
To encounter real grass, say, in the space between a busy road and a walking path (or in the sweep of a public park) is of course not without some kind of mediation. The grasses are not “original” in all likelihood. Rather, they are the product of some kind of urban planning at the very least, construction means and methods that undoubtedly had demolished whatever longstanding “natural” topography had been their before, likely soil carted in from some other locale, and seed taken from who knows where.
Nevertheless, encountering real, live grass seems like a more creaturely experience on the whole.
The experience of encountering artificial grass, by contrast, is to come face to face with a question. Unlike the toaster, which is utterly opaque yet also unique and non-simulative (i.e., there’s nothing like it in “nature”), with artificial grass there is an explicit attempt at simulation going on. The result is that we get the distinct impression that the only valley that this sod could come from is an uncanny one.
There are several videos online that chronicle how artificial grass is made. Plastic pellets of different colours and clarities are mixed together and then melted and pushed through narrow slats to create long, thin strands of plastic. These are dried and carried from machine to machine in an intricately engineered array to ensure that these limp fettuccine-like strands do not become entangled. They are fed into a sophisticated sewing machine, which punches the strands through a wide plastic canvas full of small holes organized into a grid. As the strand is pushed through each hole, a blade on the other side splits the loop that has formed, resulting in two leaves of artificial grass. The lush, vibrant green carpet continues to travel along its predetermined path upside-down so that a thin layer of glue can be applied along the backside of the plastic canvas. This ensures that the grass cannot be uprooted. It then proceeds through a diligent QA/QC process before it is rolled, bagged, and shipped to its penultimate destination: the marketplace.
This is of course only one of the many ways artificial grass can be made. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are many sites of dislocation to be discovered along the way. That is, many points arise in the course of production where we might feel we have lost the plot, or do not have enough information or understanding to perceive this grass as, in fact, having an origin in nature. These sites of dislocation, as I am calling them, are conditions of ambiguity and abstraction--an alienating fog that serves to separate us from our sense of embeddedness in the world.
I look at the artificial grass that my neighbour has purchased somewhere -- Rona? Home Depot? Kijiji? Prior to that, it was (barring the potential that it had been previously purchased and then returned) presumably either with some kind of middle organization (or series of organizations) responsible for acquisition and supply of this product or, much less likely, the manufacturer itself. Yet, even once we have arrived at the manufacturer, the grass’s existence extends still further backwards into an oil refinery somewhere, not to mention the myriad lines of research and development, engineering, material acquisition, and construction that informed the machines that created the grass. The plastic pellets themselves are going to need to be the subject of a post on their own I suspect, but we can broadly trace their history as well ultimately back to the primordial graveyards from which we have harvested crude and other compounds for the last century.
Have we arrived now at creation? Or do we need to take one more step back into the Paleozoic or Mesozoic eras? Oil does not derive from dinosaurs; it is the result of the decomposition of marine organisms that existed millennia prior to dinosaurs. Does attempting to perceive an ancient bloom of plankton through the shiny verde of AstroTurf enable us to witness it as a divinely created thing, albeit a radically mediated one?
This kind of exercise and the questions that it gives rise to are central to this project as a whole, so I am not anticipating answers nor completing the exercise in the space that remains.
Twentieth-century Continental philosophy has reflected extensively upon the question of “origins.” Suffice it to say that it is suspicious about the pursuit of origins, which Jacques Derrida equates with metaphysics itself. Here is what he says in Limited Inc.:
“All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency [i.e., an urgent demand], that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.”
The metaphysical game that Derrida would, I suppose, accuse me of playing is very much in line with any of these binaries.1 In my case, I have given priority to nature over culture: “the created” over “the human-made.” This is hardly something new; however, this assumption is something that I do need to explore further (and only preliminarily here) because behind it looms the question of whether working theologically to understand how things work, where things come from, etc. can ever truly overcome the alienation that we experience in the modern world.
Or maybe that isn’t the goal. If nothing else, I do not think it is possible to overcome our alienation. Even if I was to leave behind this city of asphalt, cars, and artificial grass and find a way to pass through the veil of the built and manufactured environment into an organic space of unmediated “nature,” the story of my exodus would remain with me, an unnatural thorn in my side, keeping me always from arriving at a holistic participation in reality.
There is, in the end, no complete escape from this state of alienation.
Yet, I suspect, if I were somehow to shuffle off at least some of these mediations that separate me, then it is possible that the alienation would be less acute. Derrida always (or should I say, “always already”?) connected metaphysics with violence; prioritizing one thing over another is violent because the act of prioritizing so often draws upon the workings of power. This may be a fair critique, but if anything surely the site of violence is not in so-called nature but in the demonic work of alienation itself -- i.e., our distancing from the given world. It may in fact not be possible to undo this distancing, either through narratives of how things work or through the cultivation of an awareness of origins or even by packing up and heading for the woods; however, I think the attempt is worthwhile.
So what happens the next time I walk past my neighbour’s AstroTurf? Do I attempt to think of tiny plankton from the dawn of time and the infinite number of processes that they have undergone to arrive here, sharp and green beneath my feet? It could be an enjoyable exercise.
I think, though, that what an encounter with artificial grass could be a more immediate trigger for is actually a recognition of my neighbour’s and my shared experience of alienation. We are distanced from creation -- together. Both her attempt to surround herself in swaths of plastic to create a kind of pleasant solitude in the middle of the city and my attempt to chop away at the manufactured world through narrative (and, in my yard, through the wild, organic gardens my brother-in-law and mother-in-law have cultivated) are really expressions of this same yearning to return.
Perhaps the metaphysical venture, which Derrida and others have been so critical of in our post-authoritarian era, can be reconceived within this shared space of yearning. The problem with origins is that they can be used to claim some kind of superiority or power. (The Derridean critique derives, after all, from the witness of the Holocaust). Discovering the divinely created roots of a human-made product requires both a realization that things are not as they should be and also the humility to remain uncertain about what the experience of fullness (to borrow Charles Taylor’s word and set it in apposition to alienation) might be.
Is there a lessening of alienation in the still moment my neighbour experiences sitting in her enclosed yard? Perhaps it is not dissimilar to my own sense of reprieve in mourning plankton I never knew, reprocessed into the turf below me. These similar experiences, though quite different in their methods, emphasize the deeply human significance of making the attempt to face alienation head-on and resist. And it underscores the importance of honouring and validating every place that work of resistance might appear.
This post has not truly wrestled with the many questions raised by artificial grass and the implications of a fake plastic earth (to borrow with gratitude from Thom Yorke and his band). Lawns, tennis courts, football stadiums, and even certain kind of footwear (see below): the yearning for the given world and our inability to get there crop up (literally) in all kinds of surprising places. Alienation may be inevitable; however, perhaps it is still worth making the attempt to overcome, to resist, and to do so with others.
In a perfect example of Freudian slippage, I accidentally wrote that sentence initially as: “the metaphysical game that Derrida would accurse me of playing.” Derrida would have loved that.