Hydroplutonic Kernow - Mackay, Robin; Desilvey, Caitli

© Urbanomic Media Ltd. All rights reserved. Urbanomic Media Ltd, The Old Lemonade Factory, Windsor Quarry, Falmouth TR11 3EX United Kingdom The Hydroplutonic Kernow project was initially developed in response to an invitaiton from The Falmouth Convention in 2010 as part of an event designed to examine ‘particular geographies, histories and narratives in Cornwall’. © Urbanomic Media Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. ISBN (Print Edition): 978-0-9575295-4-0 www.urbanomic.com d_r0

This book is dedicated to all those local historians, many of them exminers, who with enthusiasm and dedication have documented the history of Cornwall’s industries. Without their efforts we should not have been able to concoct this speculative fantasia.

Iron is extracted from loam, copper smelted from ore. He drives back the darkness; perfecting his search, piercing the dark stones and death-shade. A flood breaks out at the newcomer’s side; Lo, he dangles and sways in his descent; far from men, he moves with uncertain step. The earth! it brings forth bread, yet down below it churns like fire; The stones of it are the place of sapphires, and the clods of it are speckled with gold. No eagle knows that hidden path, no vulture’s eye has seen it. Proud beasts have not set foot on it, and no lion has prowled there. Against the flinty rock he sets his hand, and overturns the mountains by the roots. He cuts channels through the rock, that his eye might see every precious treasure. He restrains the streams from weeping, that hidden things might be brought to light. But where shall wisdom be found? Where is the place of understanding? Man knows not its price; neither is it found in the land of the living. The abyss says, ‘It is not in me’; the sea says, ‘It is not with me.’ — Job 28: 2-14

And not only was the rich soil required to furnish corn and due sustenance, but men even descended into the entrails of the earth, and they dug up riches, which the earth had removed to the Stygian shades. Then destructive iron came forth, and gold, more destructive than iron; then war came forth. — Ovid, Metamorphoses (8 CE)

We trace out all the fibres of the earth, and live above the hollows we have made in her, marvelling that occasionally she gapes open or begins to tremble —as if forsooth it were not possible that this may be an expression of the indignation of our holy parent. We penetrate her inner parts and seek for riches in the abode of the spirits of the departed, as though the part where we tread upon her were not sufficiently bounteous and fertile. And amid all this the smallest object of our searching is for the sake of remedies for illness, for with what fraction of mankind is medicine the object of this delving? Although medicines also earth bestows upon us on her surface, as she bestows corn, bountiful and generous as she is in all things for our benefit! The things that she has concealed and hidden underground, those that do not quickly come to birth, are the things that destroy us and drive us to the depths below; so that suddenly the mind soars aloft into the void and ponders what finally will be the end of draining her dry in all the ages, what will be the point to which avarice will penetrate. How innocent, how blissful, nay even how luxurious life might be, if it coveted nothing from any source but the surface of the earth, and, to speak briefly, nothing but what lies ready to her hand! — Pliny the Elder, Natural History (77 CE)

Let us now descend to the earth which we tread upon, and which God has peculiarly given to the children of men. Do the children of men understand this? Suppose the terraqueous globe to be seven or eight thousand miles in diameter, how much of this do we know? Perhaps a mile or two of its surface: So far the art of man has penetrated. But who can inform us, what lies beneath the region of stones, metals, minerals, and other fossils? This is only a thin crust, which bears an exceeding small proportion to the whole. Who can acquaint us with the inner parts of the globe? Whereof do these consist? Is there a central fire, a grand reservoir, which not only supplies the burning mountains, but also ministers (though we know not how) to the ripening of gems and metals; yea, and perhaps to the production of vegetables, and the well-being of animals too? Or is the great deep still contained in the bowels of the earth? A central abyss of waters? Who hath seen? Who can tell? Who can give any solid satisfaction to a rational inquirer? — John Wesley, The Imperfection of Human Knowledge (1784)

The mineral kingdom has nothing pleasant or attractive about it; its riches enclosed in the bosom of the earth seem to have been removed from the regard of men so as not to tempt their cupidity […] He ransacks the entrails of the earth, he searches in its core at the risk of life and at the expense of his health for imaginary benefits […] The wan visages of the unfortunates who languish in the foul vapours of the mines, dark blacksmiths, frightful cyclops, are the spectacle that the vaults of the mines, in the womb of the earth, substitute for that of verdure and flowers, of the azure sky, of amorous shepherds and robust workers on its surface. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (1782)

They are situated in a bleak desert, rendered still more doleful by the unhealthy appearance of its inhabitants. At every step one stumbles upon ladders that lead into utter darkness, or funnels that exhale warm copperous vapours. All around these openings the ore is piled up in heaps ready for purchasers. I saw it drawn reeking out of the mine by the help of a machine called a whim put in motion by mules, which in their turn are stimulated by impish children hanging over the poor brutes and flogging them without respite. This dismal scene of whims, suffering mules and hillocks of cinders extends for miles. Huge iron engines creaking and groaning invented by Watt, and tall chimneys smoking and flaming, that seem to belong to old Nicholas’s abode, diversify the prospect. — William Beckford, reporting on his visit to the Consolidated Mines, Cornwall (1787)

‘What?’ he cried. ‘Would you have me leave the bright, sunny sky that revives and refreshes me, and go down into that dreadful, hell-like abyss, and dig and tunnel like a mole for metals and ores, merely to gain a few wretched ducats? ‘Oh, never!’ ‘The usual thing,’ said the old man. ‘People despise what they have had no chance of knowing anything about! As if all the constant wearing, petty anxieties inseparable from business up here on the surface, were nobler than the miner’s work. To his skill, knowledge, and untiring industry Nature lays bare her most secret treasures. You speak of gain with contempt […] Well, there’s something infinitely higher in question here, perhaps: the mole tunnels the ground from blind instinct; but, it may be, in the deepest depths, by the pale glimmer of the mine candle, men’s eyes get to see clearer, and at length, growing stronger and stronger, acquire the power of reading in the stones, the gems, and the minerals, the mirroring of secrets which are hidden above the clouds….’ — E.T.A. Hoffmann, The Mines at Falun (1819)

Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. — H.P. Lovecraft, ‘The Festival’ (1923)

Caitlin DeSilvey Foreword: On Consciousness and Conspiracy The other day on a drive home from Truro I noticed that the spring tide was only inches from overtopping the edge of the road between Devoran and Perranarworthal. In another eighty years, that stretch of road will be a brackish marsh. The backstory to the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy presented in this book is now our front and future story. We went and turned the world inside out, and look what happened: the water scavenged the metals, which settled in the rock seams; the people pulled the metals out to make machines; the machines consumed the other under-elements, the coal and oil; the excess carbon was cast into the atmosphere; and now the water knows its time has come again. Or, as noted in the epigraph from Pliny the Elder, ‘the things that she has concealed and hidden underground […] are the things that destroy us’. There is a passage in Ben Smith’s 2019 novel Doggerland describing ‘water’s work’ in the replication of fluid patterning in growing plants: This is water turning to solid mass, taking its liquid forms—ripple, eddy, vortex —and translating them to tendril, flower, leaf. This is water reaching skywards, arching and holding its shape. This is water repeating itself. Cells dividing like foam, bark creasing into peaks and troughs.1 Hydroplutonic Kernow traces water’s work not upward, through the movement of cell and sap, but downward, into the stew of stone and seep, the leaching and the scouring, solution and precipitation. Both worlds are unfamiliar to us, and require new habits of mind to sense and represent. If there is a spirit guide to the project documented in this book, it may be Novalis (born Friedrich von Hardenberg in 1792), a German

searcher and sceptic who wrote a series of poems about the fusion of human consciousness into outer worlds, his insight enhanced by his study of Kant and Fichte and his attendance at the Freiberg Mining Academy in his youth. Another contender is Cornwall’s own Humphry Davy (born in 1778 in Penzance), also a geologist-poet, who established his scientific reputation as a chemist with a report on the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide. Davy went on to invent the miner’s safety lamp and to carry out pioneering investigations into volcanism, magnetism, electrolysis, and zoology. With its acknowledgement of such ancestors, Hydroplutonic Kernow can be understood as a return to an older, synthetic sensibility, a resurrection of natural philosophy as practiced in the early eighteenth century. If, as the authors state, ‘[n]ot only does Kernovian Syndrome exacerbate the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; in fact, Cornwall is the site of its becoming self-conscious’, then the project was at its core one of consciousness-raising, focusing radical attention on the possibility that humans are both ‘nature’s way of generating ideas’ and nature’s way of self-destructing. * Ten years ago, we went on a field trip. It was May in Cornwall and the sun shone. The air was one of exploration and instruction. The description of the field trip in the Falmouth Convention2 programme promised that under the guidance of ‘rogue scientists, agrosophists and geophilosophers’ we would go on a ‘journey into a historical process that assembled the powers of geology, mechanics, hydraulics, mineralogy and metallurgy, salvation and combustion, steam and capital into a mighty infernal machine that traumatised the Cornish landscape and kick-started the industrial revolution’. A brown bag lunch was provided. Our guides assumed, rather than solicited, our interest and attention. The tone of deadpan urgency was never broken. This was information we needed, but that we did not always know how to

receive. Reflecting on the field trip now, I’m reminded of one of Novalis’s aphorisms: A man will never achieve anything excellent in the way of representation so long as he wishes to represent nothing more than his own experiences, his own favourite objects, so long as he cannot bring himself to study with diligence and to represent at his leisure an object wholly foreign and wholly uninteresting to him. We were presented with knowledge that had been obtained through diligent study, excavated from obscure sources and assembled into an alt-geography of places that we thought we knew, but apparently didn’t. Much of the information, on first impression, was dull and brittle, fixated on exact historical details—how many, how heavy, how far—which yielded their significance only grudgingly. Shared on location, in the landscape, however, these details set up a sympathetic resonance that slowly drew us in: ‘Here, this happened, but stranger and deeper.’ The guides maintained an air of quizzical narration, the collapse of concept into case, and then expansion out again into ideas. Fact and fabulation were twinned, tightly bound to each other, because to let either have the upper hand would be to risk legibility and abandon speculation. They kept us guessing. The most valuable contribution of Hydroplutonic Kernow may be its design of an experimental methodology for unfolding landscape in multiple dimensions— cultural, chemical, material, mystical (an expanded cartography materialised in the project’s elaborate folded map). The tour took our awareness underground, mapping connections and flows, but also travelled through overlooked ideas and isolated instances of encounter or collapse. In its grounded exploration of matter and meaning, the project aligns with Rose Ferraby’s ‘cultural geology’,3 and with other attempts to excavate local place while simultaneously exploring expansive intellectual territory. *

In June 2018 I was a passenger on Ghost, artist Adam Chodzko’s handcrafted wooden kayak. We met at Point, on Restronguet Creek, just down from Devoran Quay, on water borne out of the leaking adits in the upstream watershed. I climbed into the boat to take my place, recumbent, in the passenger compartment set into the prow. Adam paddled behind me. I felt held, but also propelled, and oddly passive. My view over the gunwales was thinned to a slice of sky and tossing treetops, and glimpses of the passing banks and midstream islands. We pushed against the falling tide on the route the Norwegian ships would have followed to deliver their cargo of shaft-propping timbers. We did not speak, and in the waterborne peace an old poem floated back to me: Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength, as if the banks through which it moves had widened out. Trees and stones seem more like me each day, and the paintings I see seem more seen into: with my senses, as with the birds, I climb into the windy heavens out of the oak, and in the ponds broken off from the blue sky my feeling sinks as if standing on fishes. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote this poem in the early years of the twentieth century and Robert Bly collected it in a 1980 anthology entitled News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness4—the volume where I first encountered Novalis, and where the aphorism cited above appears. The poem meant something to me when I found it in the book three decades ago, but it had become dormant. The journey up the creek returned the poem to me, as if my earlier attachment to it had been in anticipation of that precise moment. Rilke’s words express a peculiar hydropoetics, with water as the carrier of sentience and sentiment, the benign double of the hydroplutonic. Ghost turned back at the place where the TruroFalmouth road cuts close to the river, the place I drove past at the beginning of this essay on a high-tide morning. *

According to the most pessimistic climate change projections, by the end of this century atmospheric carbon could be nearing levels experienced 400 million years ago, when Cornubian tin and copper were still held in a fluid boron-rich solution, yet to find their resting place. Estimates vary widely, but it seems increasingly likely that sea levels will be at least a metre higher than they are today. We have spent the last few centuries conspiring against ourselves, and now we are becoming conscious of this fact just as the irreversibility of our actions becomes clear. ‘Conspire’ and ‘conscious’ share a root, in the Latin com—with, together. To com-spirare is to breathe together; to com-scire is to know together. On that day in May 2010, we did both, and this book records what happened. 1. B. Smith, Doggerland (London: 4th Estate, 2019), 134–5. 2. The Falmouth Convention (20–23 May 2010) and Groundwork (May–September 2018) (which hosted Adam Chodzko’s Ghost, mentioned below) were both directed by Teresa Gleadowe, in association with partners and, for Groundwork, the work of the Cornubian Arts and Science Trust (CAST). See <http://www.thefalmouthconvention.com> and <http://c-a-s-t.org.uk>. 3. R. Ferraby, Stone Exposures: A Cultural Geology of the Jurassic Coast (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2015), <http://hdl.handle.net/10871/18951>. 4. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1980).

Robin Mackay and Thomas Moynihan ‘But It’s Only Late If…’: A Belated Anticipation of Hydroplutonic Kernow Gwennap Pit, 16 October 2019 ROBIN MACKAY: It’s been a decade, and the real question for me in definitively closing the book on this project after so many years— precisely by publishing the book—is that of understanding the peculiar persistence of my commitment to it. It’s always been a landmark for me, a project I consider a great success, not in the sense that it completely achieved its aims—after all, it was put together very quickly, on the fly, in a kind of delirium, by an underresourced and overenthusiastic team—but because it seemed to open up a number of new methodological paths that still deserve to be further followed. In principle as in chronology, it’s right that Hydroplutonic Kernow should appear retrospectively as #1 in the Redactions series, the essential concept of which was that, having allowed events, speech, and ideas to occur in an uncontrolled manner, one could then bring the resulting material back into the space of the book, editing and remixing and smoothing it out, fictionalising it (as this conversation between us has been fictionalised)—a process that yields an intriguing kind of quasi-documentary half-‘live’ text that boasts a unique temporality. Part of the difficulty of ever completing this book was that it would be a test case for how that process of ‘redaction’ works, and specifically for whether the weird energy of this project, the memory of which I’ve repeatedly drawn on over all these years, would survive it. Because Hydroplutonic Kernow was a special case. Firstly there was its staging, as a kind of theory-fictional theatre, travelogue, or teach-in—a plein air dramatisation. What does it mean to do

philosophy in situ, in a particular place, or rather on the move between a number of places? First of all, it alerts you to the fact that it’s usually done in grey rooms under harsh strip lights, and that those locked-down institutional spaces may well have their effects upon what can be thought. THOMAS MOYNIHAN: There is actually an extant scientific literature on the cognitive impairment caused by fluorescent lighting.1 RM: Of course there is…. So that’s part of my trepidation: Can you recapture in a text what it was like to think together out in the sun…? To address a particular place actually in that place, especially when you’re concerned about those aspects of it that can only be pieced together cognitively, not directly perceived, is a very particular experience. Did you ‘have to be there’? Even though we were only there on the ground in order to talk about what the ground conceals from view? And we were there in a group: as Caitlin DeSilvey suggests, this was an experiment in conspiracy and consciousness, a sort of initiation into ‘twofold consciousness’, even. Conceptually it was a moment of emergence, there are multiple concepts in this project in germinal form that would slowly unfold over the ensuing decade. TM: Folding is one of the concepts that seems to run through the whole project—in a philosophical sense, but also in various straightforwardly physical senses. RM: There’s an interview where Deleuze talks about his book The Fold, and the fact that he never got any positive reactions from philosophers about it, but he did get a really nice letter from a surfer and another one from a Japanese origamist, both of whom understood perfectly well what he was trying to do. I’m sure I had that somewhere in mind when we came up with the idea of producing the map as a complex, or implex: the idea of folding as an ontological principle, or at least as a way of understanding the distribution of matter. The notion of making a map to hand out was there from the start, but soon we realised we had to break the map’s

unitary surface so as to index the way we wanted to break through the surface of the landscape itself. Figuring out how it could be done was a crash course in amateur paper engineering. The design of the map and the conception of the tour mutually influenced one another from that point on. A year or two before, I’d visited a pottery in France where a woman was making marbled clay pots, with two different colours of clay layered and then manipulated to produce a geological-looking swirl of twists and folds, an intricate patterning that gave the impression that, while in principle you could reverse the operation, in fact the two surfaces were now irreversibly intricated. It reminded me of the Baker’s Transformation, something Deleuze also refers to: a topological operation where, by repeating a simple action of folding and cutting, two points that were extremely close together can end up very distant from one another, and vice versa, and at totally unpredictable positions. The Baker’s Map is a chaotic mapping of the unit square onto itself, a twisted identity relation. Another image that merged with this was that, while planning the tour, Paul [Chaney] and I often talked about how, essentially, all that humans do on this planet is to scurry across the surface like a swarm of ants, taking things from here and there, pulling stuff out of holes, moving it across the surface and dropping it elsewhere. TM: Or worms. I love the view of human civilisation as just a natural process, which is like Darwin’s description of worms. He was one of the first, that is, to notice that worms are basically a geological force in themselves, by noticing that en masse they reformat the landscape itself on a large scale. A thousand worms is just a machine to turn over the ground. RM: And the human race is just a glorified worm, another mode of churning. Through our actions points on the surface become virtually folded onto one another by virtue of the flows of matter (intensive wormholes) that connect them. Any topography that claims to describe a stable surface ultimately yields to an intensive mapping of the flows that will end up reshaping that surface in slow motion. There are two levels of folding, really: the folding and unfolding of the

Fault-Map indicates a classical philosophical operation—unfolding superficial appearance to uncover a flux of becoming (you can never step in the same tin stream twice), but the movements that operation alludes to involve physical infoldings and outfoldings of the earth. A kind of churning, a cryptography, or, geotraumatically speaking, a ‘Barker’s Transformation’. TM: Picking up on the fold (that figure of recursivity) and linking it to your description of this text being practical in some significant way, I think that HK is a good example of a particular type of text that I am very fond of: texts that do what they are about. The book meticulously evokes and generates a rich sense of place (in the tradition of the travelogue), but it simultaneously and consistently explodes this situatedness in the very act of generating it. And that’s because, in producing the sense of place, the text coterminously lays bare the fact that place is a production. And, as Iain Grant would no doubt agree, a very late production at that: ‘situatedness’ arrives as a latecomer in the exhibition (Schelling’s Darstellung) that led to nervous systems that could orient themselves, or pronounce that they are ‘somewhere’. And in HK situatedness (in space and in time) is peeled apart. Something akin to how comparative anatomy first blew up the animal body into a bunch of relations in a wider morphological and historical possibility space: HK does this same thing to the idea of site-specificity. RM: Site-specificity is a bugbear for me.2 With any project, it’s obviously important, particularly when you don’t expect any other kind of reward, to work with things you love. But it’s also important sometimes to be working against something. And in this instance, this project was based in an art context, it was an event for artists and curators, and we, among other people, were asked to create a field trip to explore the relationship between the local and the global. The notion of ‘site-specificity’ loomed very large, and I was very aware of the fact that images of the Cornish landscape are heavily invested by the tourist and heritage industries, of which the sitespecific art industry is a minor appendage. In the past the marketing

of the Cornish landscape as a self-sufficient singularity has served to cover over an industrial past which, on the contrary, defines the locality of the site in relation to the global—in the sense of the planetary, and the universality of capitalism that produces the planetary. Instead you have the idea of a landscape whose sensory profile just needs to be experienced from within. The mining industry itself has quite comprehensively declined, and yet its relics are everywhere. The engine house has become an integral part of the landscape, in fact. A heritage emblem, a brand monogram emptied of any link to what was actually in these structures, what their function was, where they point to. More recently, the industrial heritage itself is being spruced up and given a public face, successfully folded back into that cosy sense of local specificity, which in turn can be sprinkled with the magic glitter by site-specific artists. I’d worked with the artist Pamela Rosenkranz on her project Our Sun for Venice in 2009, which took the prominence of the idea of light and water in the aesthetics of both tourism and high art in Venice and reinterpreted it in a materialist sense connected to the role played by both in the development of capitalism. This work seemed to me to overstep the comfortable boundaries of ‘sitespecificity’, and I wondered whether one could perform a similar operation in Cornwall, where obviously sun and sea play a similar role in marketing narratives both touristic and artistic (the St Ives school of artists and their obsession with the ‘quality of light’)— always as sheer appearances, cut off from their materiality. Here you have a whole set of—literally—superficialities that are just begging to be unfolded. And what I understood from Rosenkranz’s approach was that one could find a way to address questions of humanenvironment interaction in a materialist way, without that entailing a simple dismissal of the romances we have spun out of those interactions. Instead it was a matter of understanding how they are rooted in the conspiracies of anonymous materials: understanding them as affairs, plutonic seductions. Obviously, then, the question about local and global had to be taken to the most maniacal level. A way to work through the

impositions and expectations about ‘site’. Connect a copper mine to the cosmos; take a stroll through the despoiled remains of a planet wracked with hydroplutonic strife. TM: It’s a travelogue that plots a path out of its own genre. We have here a disquisition on place that is also, by this very act, a detonation of place. And here I mean ‘detonating’ in the sense of some impossible exploded-view drawing: a cutaway diagram of the ongoing process that we call ‘Cornwall’, fanning out all the moments that led from planetary accretion to the modern mining boom, meticulously mapping out the fact that ‘site’ is always concretion and never concrete. ‘Power dwells apart in its tranquillity’,3 and by virtue of this, no site is every truly itself. A cookbook for losing the plot, HK contains recipes for disabusing yourself of the illusion of ever fully being present in time and space, and it is therefore also a rehab plan for victims of topophilia. Pushing mind-wandering to the max (where one’s mind wanders across the aeons), it is rigorously anti-mindful. We are never ‘present’. In doing what it is about, HK yields the strong feeling that there is nowhere that is ‘here’. RM: There’s no local site—or else, every locality is already a highly transformed, heavily processed digest of the global process. TM: It’s already implicated in all these different layers—everywhere is multiscalar. There are all these fine details of the localities, all of these processes on different timescales, but at the same time the conspiracy telescopes all of those scales, these processes that go back to the accretion of the earth. This multiscalar focalisation is actually one of the defining features of ‘modern’ subjectivity. A subject is modern in so far as it is mediated by increasingly delocalised, deracinated horizons. I do not merely inhabit my own sensorium, I know what I know—and I am able to think what I think—only because I am inhabited by various globally-scaled focal layers and optics. My inhabitation of myself is multi-dimensional, dislocated, off-site, ex situ: I, too, am a highly transformed, heavily processed digest.

You can argue about when this really got started (early modern advances in map making and circumnavigation from Mercator to Columbus; the post-Copernican revolution in cosmography and planetary placement; standardisations in chronometry such as the Gregorian calendar, and the attendant time-space compressions; expansionist interests and the ravages of New World colonialism, etc.) but by the latter half of the eighteenth century there is, embodied in the form of an emerging transcontinental news network, a nascent planetary self-consciousness. Relentless rises in press volume, circulation, and connectivity between nations facilitated this early-stage ‘global sensorium’, piggybacking off the catallactic webbing-together of markets and capitalist trade relations across prior centuries, which first provided an arena for humanity to reflect upon itself as a planetary collective. Yet what is important here is that, ever since, our ‘here and now’ has irreversibly been mediated by foci that utterly outstrip any delimitable locale. We all inhabit multiple perspectival layers and are irreversibly focalised by planetary vistas. From this point on, to be a fold was also to be globally unfolded. In so far as I am anything, I am just an implex of the global. Again, individuation is always ex situ. And the more this awareness takes root across modernity, the more it retrospectively becomes apparent that, in a certain sense, it is these off-site frames that produce our inhabitation of our brainbound sensoria, and not the other way around. It is only by realising that we always were a ‘highly-transformed, processed digest of the global’ that we come to ‘inhabit’ ourselves with greater mastery, and thus come to earn the title of ‘inhabitant’ in the first place. (Because an important part of ‘having’ sensations, in the sense of ownership and mastery—rather than merely being an atavistic bundle of sensa and nothing besides—is that sensations do not correct themselves by themselves, and sense-reception alone can bequeath no criteria of wrongness or corrigibility, so an important part of being a subject who owns sensations is being able to upbraid these merely local inputs against somehow non-local standards.) We thus (come to) know ourselves from outside in. This is all just a long-winded way of saying there truly never was any originary or primordial inhabitation

or dwelling. A basic post-Kantian insight: one cannot refer to the utterly particular and topical without already presupposing some nonparticular, referentially opaque, and topic-neutral concepts. In other words, we know the local only by passing first through the global. We absolutely do not begin with some stable locality before telescoping or abstracting outwards and upwards to the global. No, the global somehow comes before the local in knowledge. But we had first to realise this—which took time. That is to say, the universal had to arrive and announce itself through the medium of time and space, articulating itself by way of countless (combined and uneven) somewheres and somewhens. I think a good attempt at a Kantian definition of intelligence is that it is just the capacity to do what is apt (in objective representations as much as in moral comportments), and to do this in spite of the contingencies and biases and parochialisms of one’s upbringing and spatiotemporal placement—so as to drift towards nowhere. (This outward-bound process includes drifting away from contingent and chauvinistic filiations not only to one’s tribe or nation, but also to one’s germline, and perhaps even one’s entire biosphere, alongside the accidents of the planet our species developed upon.) But part of ‘drifting towards nowhere’ entails working through all the contingencies that made you. So, part of announcing the timeless and universal is giving it a properly planetary history. It should come as no surprise that it also was during the period when ‘the global’ really became a genuinely self-conscious focus for thinking that the discipline of ‘geography’ first consolidated into its recognisably modern form—with figures such as Herder, Humboldt, and Ritter—and set about studying how it is that humanity takes the entire world as its habitat. We are inherently a ‘planetising’ species, as Teilhard de Chardin noted. But similarly, it was also during this moment that the first properly geohistorical theories were being produced, those initial reflections on the earth system as shot through with historicity. So just as the ‘global’ was appearing to reach escape velocity from the ‘local’ under the guise of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, part of this very movement brought the whole thing ‘back down to earth’ by

way of a fully naturalised genesis in the form of geohistory and, later, evolutionary theory. (But the battle is not the war, of course.) One of the great things about HK is that it rallies this rich historical backdrop—all these intersecting moments and movements, all these conceptual dramas, past and present—and then extrudes them through the specificities of this place, of a small area of Cornwall, in order to play with the conjecture that ‘planetary focalisation’ can be plotted not just along cosmopolitan lines but also geohistorical ones. Focalisation become genetic, if you will. But, then, how does one go about this focalisation? How do you create an exploded view cross-section of how one’s ‘here and now’—for us, at this moment, Gwennap Pit—relates to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, to the Hadean bombardment, to abiogenesis, etc.? RM: I can think of two alternative ways: a careful tracing of the path between some fine-grained particularity and a universal speculative schema that places it within a global narrative; and a more rhetorical manoeuvre that is something like an abrupt focus pull—like you get in Italo Calvino’s beautiful short story ‘The Petrol Pump’, which repeatedly makes rapid shifts from a strangely libidinised scene of a guy loosing a torrent of petrol into his car at a service station, to the embedding of this local situation and its seductive allure in the deep impersonal material rhythm of accretion and extraction. The story in fact begins with an invocation of time and belatedness that lurches from local to global in this way: I should have thought of it before, it’s too late now. It’s after twelve thirty and I didn’t remember to fill up; the service stations will be closed until three. Every year two million tons of crude are brought up from the earth’s crust where they have been stored for millions of centuries in the folds of rocks buried between layers of sand and clay. If I set off now there’s a danger I’ll run out on the way.4 The rhetorical shift has great impact. A different kind of satisfaction is offered by painstakingly stitching together, mad-scientist style, a syncretic disciplinary patchwork that allows you to actually trace the path from one to the other. But ultimately, they are two complementary narrative operations.

TM: As narrative operations, are they related to the concept of plot? RM: The concept of plot is implicit here as it brings together land or ground, diagram, and narrative—although it’s something I only came to explicitly in later work, initially through Benedict Singleton’s writings. Simply, no given plot of land can be isolated from what’s around it, and ultimately from the planet: it always brings with it germs of the global environment. So whenever you try to render something from it, even a ‘simple experience’, you’re inevitably participating in wider plots and complicities. The concept of the fold, then, is folded inside that of the plot. I would call plot a ‘post-speculative realism’ concept, and HK already belonged to a post-SR moment, I think. It is losing faith in the adequacy or indeed possibility of a thoroughgoing nonanthropocentric view, and asks instead, with some humour, about narrative and writing and navigation and the stitching together of different types of knowledge, rather than presuming one can cast a single satisfyingly all-encompassing philosophical net over the universe, whether it’s saying that everything’s an object, that everything’s meaningless, or that everything’s contingent…. For example, take Quentin Meillassoux’s concept of absolute contingency. Once you go to the level of absolute contingency, you are no longer saying anything very specific about anything. And Meillassoux is happy with this, he doesn’t have a problem with it: he’s not interested in any particular stuff, philosophers should leave that respectfully to the scientists; as a philosopher his object is not any particular thing of this earth since everything’s absolutely contingent—it’s that absolute contingency that is the proper object of a philosopher’s attention. Instead, here we are, ‘on the ground’, getting dirty with the ramified, stratified levels of contingency that fan out between absolute contingency and factical reality. Which maybe is not philosophy any more. Ultimately I relate this contingency question to Deleuze and Guattari’s line: the only possible universal history is a universal history of contingency—and it is a history piloted from its terminus by

the capitalist Thing. Not because capitalism was inevitable, but because it sucks in every possible contingency and establishes itself as a concrete universal. The universal only arrives at the end, and it’s from the end that everything starts to make sense, in an inevitably templexical and paranoid narrative. This DeleuzoGuattarian view of history was crucial in being able to reconfigure the question of local and global, in the sense that the initiation into capitalism by way of the contingent mineral resources bequeathed to it by the process of planetary formation was what introduced Cornwall into the universal, by way of global commerce. This is where the paranoid conspiracy narrative gains its force. So yes, you have the universal process, and you have the local site, and between them a labyrinth of folds. As the quote from Calvino suggests, the question of locality is one that goes for time as much as for space: in the complex folding of material in space, there is also a folding of different temporalities and timescales. One of the important things was to show how the process of industrialisation actually produces portals or sinkholes between these different temporalities: they begin to collapse into one another in a historically unprecedented way. Orderly stratification is not necessarily dominant, but instead you have brecciation, a reconsolidation of shattered materials in new, synthetic matrices. So, added to the ontological proposition here, which is about the folding of the global into the local, the universal into the particular, or the outside into the inside, there’s also a historical thesis about industrialisation and the rise of capitalism as a singular inflection point in the planetary process. And the plot-thread and the focus pull are two ways of rendering these vastnesses tractable to narrative form. However you tell it, though, I admit that this still echoes the concerns of Speculative Realism in so far as it signals a departure from any notion that these are stories about progress, about human will or intention. TM: Yes, the forward-running or unilinear temporality of ‘intention’ won’t do here. We’re only just realising that we’re being dragged

toward something (and we only ever realise this retrospectively: upon entering into the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, ‘intentionality’ becomes an eternally belated kind of vocabulary). In the plot of the book, we are being pulled down into the earth. Human brains click in just the right way with the planet that spawned them so as to kickstart this self-feeding mining compulsion. There’s an interesting loop here: our deep past seems to be determining and conditioning our future in advance. Historically, the more we mine, the more we are compelled to mine (and the better we are able to do so). And things that cause themselves in this way tend to make a mockery of our psychologistic folk vocabulary of intention. The language of ‘conspiracy’, of being caught up in something that exceeds you, is far more appropriate here. Ironically, the first proper steam engine—the Newcomen Engine, which was invented in 1712 and first deployed on a significant scale in the Cornish mining industry—relied on precisely this kind of dynamic: the machine caused itself to continue running. Like the homeostasis of an organism, the action of the engine regulated itself: two valves filled a chamber alternately with pressure and vacuum, by injecting and condensing steam sequentially, thus causing the power strokes of the piston, up and down, in an automated process that required coal alone for its continuation. It can be argued that this was the first time that humanity properly leveraged this kind of loop with industrious aplomb. And it saw its first real beginnings here in Cornwall. Triggering the Industrial Revolution, was this a product of human ingenuity and will or, rather, an inevitable cataract of intensification in the variegation and expansion of energy dispersal pathways that is the co-evolution of life, its planet, and its sun?5 (Which, yes, instantly raises the question: What would this process look like on other life-planet-sun systems elsewhere?) Was it us harnessing the loop, or the loop harnessing us? Put differently, did we penetrate the earth—by burning fossilised sunlight —or did the earth coax us down into it? The steam engine loop is just one eddy nested within many other loopings, telescoping outwards, an upswell of energy dispersal within which not just

humanity but all terrestrial life is revealed, retrospectively, to have always already been entangled. Ultimately, it’s not some forward-planned process where humans are digging deeper and deeper out of ‘greed’. That would be like saying that peacocks have outrageously sized tail feathers because ‘they want them’. It takes more than motivations to explain what built the satanic mills. I guess the point is to see capitalism as a cosmically embedded process rather than as a matter for moral deliberation. Nikola Tesla already realized this by 1900, when he announced that the central problem of all human industry and science was the increasing of the power that humanity can usefully harness from the otherwise wasteful refulgence of the sun. Our civilisation did not ‘decide’ to expand its energy metabolism any more than the first organisms ‘decided’ to variegate their energetic empire over the earth system.6 RM: Yes, the point is precisely to problematise the idea that capitalism is driven primarily by human greed or a spirit of rational mastery or anything that can be easily grasped in terms of human psychological drives. None of these are adequate explanatory mechanisms for this process. The local micronarrative of industrialisation addressed here stands as an exemplary microcosm of the self-intensificatory process you’ve been describing: once you start pulling the tin out of the stream, then you want to go a bit deeper, then you find copper too, and you find yourself having to develop increasingly sophisticated machines to support the operation, which in turn require further materials to be brought to the site, which requires wider trade networks to be established, etc. For us, this all grew out of the simple realisation that there was not ‘an’ industry here—as soon as there was tin and copper mining, there was in fact a whole network of intertwined industrial endeavours dealing with the prerequisites and the byproducts, and a ratcheting process of auto-complication and global implication. TM: This logic of self-intensifying in- and outfolding applies at all levels. Returning to the idea of our becoming multiscalar subjects

across modernity, there is a sense in which globalisation just is selfconsciousness of globalisation: for as soon as one operates under a universal horizon, one cannot but be universalising in one’s ambitions. Or, put in less idealistic terms, trading globally facilitates more global trade. It is self-feeding. This is why, as political thinkers such as Edmund Burke liked to point out in the 1790s, cosmopolitan rationality itself begins to look a lot like a pandemic. Reflecting on the French Revolution (a political unleashing of the powers of the universal that, as Lukács noted, ‘for the first time made history a mass experience’), Burke imagined revolutionary rationality as a kind of self-reinforcing plague that, once unleashed, tends towards erasing ‘every land-mark’ (that is, it eliminates every trace of prior parochiality, particularity, and historicity). Burke described universalising reason as a destructive force, picturing it as a geophysical power—arising from the depths of the earth—that will obsolesce all national ‘somewheres’ through the globalising allure of the raptures of ‘nowhere’. This pandemic of universality, Burke saw, will ‘blow up, at one grand explosion, all examples of antiquity’ and will ‘break up the fountains of the great deep to overwhelm us’. Revolution is figured as a ‘hollow murmuring underground’. Ultimately, he wrote, it will unmoor the Westphalian territories themselves in an ungrounding upsurge, leaving the nation states to be ‘blown about, like the light fragments of a wreck’ on the shifting seas. Here the global and universal is seen as a kind of parasitic birth: ‘nowhere’ must be gestated by ‘somewhere’ but it also inevitably then goes on to murder and devour its parent locality and history. Drifting toward nowhere is destroying where you came from. So, at any rate, there are recurrent narratives of pandemic, plot, and conspiracy running all the way through this stuff. Once you’ve been infected by the universal, you will start moving towards it, but (against the naive optimisms of a Kant or a Fichte) part of this ‘supernal vocation’ and ‘heavenward drift’ actually involves digging underground into the dirty earth-bowels just as much as it unleashes very material forces of historical turbulence and violence and revolution. Moving toward the universal, once again, promotes

greater complicity in the muck of the world: and mining is as mucky as it gets. (Even if such mining, terrestrial or asteroidal, ultimately renders the dark materials needed for outward-bound colonial spaceships—in the form of the ‘technological cancer’ sweeping ‘over a whole galaxy in a few million years’ which Freeman Dyson once envisioned, the ultimate extrapolation of this self-catalysing tumefying tendency.)7 But how could we have helped ourselves? We aren’t the protagonists here—it may well have been the sun and the planetary core leading the dance all along. RM: At this point it becomes a question of competing narratives—and the conspiracy theory of two inanimate entities conspiring to pull humans into the earth and hook them into a self-intensifying addictive loop seems no less credible or more fanciful a narrative than one couched in terms of the explanatory categories of individual human psychology—in fact, it makes more sense in many ways. TM: Guess what? Watt’s first engines incorporated two revolving cogs, whose ‘orbit’ one around the other conspired to convert the vertical motion of the reciprocating beam into the more accessible rotary motion of a flywheel. These cogwheels, appropriately enough, were called the Sun and Planet gears respectively. The Hydroplutonic Conspiracy between the Stellar and the Telluric is itself metallised here, within the very blueprint of the earth-boring mining apparatus that immolates fossilised sunlight, in what the Romantics would later call a ‘tautegory’: a symbol that doesn’t express its target via mediation but, somehow, by manifesting it or recapitulating it. Is noticing synchronicities such as this to be discarded as overcredulous apophenia and conspiracy-thinking, or is there truly no innocent metaphor? Moreover, to talk about the idea of entering the hypogene as some kind of transgression or trespass, this notion is a venerable tradition. There was also always something exceedingly troubling to people about the proposition that there is all of this untapped wealth deep underground, because it messed with the teleological explanations

prevalent within pre-Enlightenment natural philosophy: in so far as the presumption prevailed that ‘to be’ is exhaustively and without exception ‘to be morally justified’, the thought of a subterranean ocean of abundance and exorbitant wealth, well beyond any utile justification, could only be apprehended as annihilating superfluity and obliterating wastage to the very extent that it exists. The richer this storehouse was thought to be, the worse and more troubling it was. A tear in the ligature of physico-theological justification right beneath our feet: a chasm within the fabric of moral creation. Going further back, there’s an interesting story about how we first ‘discovered’ the hypogene—the churning and autonomous geophysical depths leading down to the planet’s core—when we started considering geocosmic space physically rather than morally during the very opening of the Scientific Revolution. This is because, prior to this point, people simply weren’t truly aware of planetary depth as a physically real space (where ‘physically real’ here just means homogeneous and contiguous with the rest of visible ‘nature’). ‘Subterranean’ had to shift from ethical judgement to quantitative measurement; it had to be handed over to the desemantified languages of science. Hades for the Ancients, the region of Hell for mediaeval Christendom’s ‘infernocentrism’ (to borrow a phrase from Sloterdijk), the earth’s core had long been considered metaphysically distinct from ‘mundane’ nature—on the basis, that is, of its interpretation, primarily, as ‘moral opprobrium’, rather than as a physical domain in continuity with the nature we inhabit. Moreover, the ‘underworld’ was deontologically denigrated (Ptolemaic cosmography made it the ‘ethical basement’ of the universe) to such an extent that ontological inquiry concerning its contents would have been considered precisely unjustified on moral grounds. A process instigated by Galileo during the sixteenth century set in motion the chain of events that was to change this, however. Taking the precise physical measurements of Hell supplied by Dante and subsequent scholars, Galileo deployed geometric calculation to model whether these measurements could render a physically

feasible structure.8 They could not. Here, ‘depth’ was denuded of its inherent moral meaningfulness (as locus terribilis) and reformatted as quantitative extension: the ‘Tuscan artist’, as Milton later dubbed Galileo, used an early form of mathematical modelling to evict Satan from Earth’s core, thus triggering the inferno’s admission into immanence with the rest of extended nature. This was the invention of planetary depth, Cthelllogenesis. Modern physics was forged in hell. Indeed, Galileo’s lectures on inferno mark the beginnings of his contribution to Copernicanism, yet the bowels of the planet are often overlooked when retracing the historical pathway of Koyré’s Copernican ‘geometrisation of space’: nonetheless, where Descartes solely advertised the homogeneity of celestial regions with terrestrial space,9 Bacon extended this homogeneity downward to the hypogene regions.10 And yet, despite this incipient desemantification of geocosmic space, it still troubled people that there was all this untapped wealth underground. How can one justify that? And yet, how can one resist it… Already in Milton, you get a kind of speculative dramatisation of the fear of the moral implications of this unreachable subsurface superfluity. He imagines nature’s chthonic abundance somehow tumefying and thus slipping into malignant superfluity. Talking of the wealth of the deep, he forecast that, should this exorbitance continue auto-producing itself without human economistic utilisation, then the world could become ‘quite surcharg’d with her own weight, / And strangl’d with her waste fertility’. Thereafter he imagines the planet kicking into runaway autocatalysis, outstripping all top-down divine justification: nature eventually becomes ‘cumber’d’ with its own inward prodigality and—as ‘the wing’d air’ becomes ‘dark’t with plumes’—ultimately the earth becomes insubordinate to the sun itself by erupting and regurgitating its own internal tenebrous refulgence: The sea o’erfraught would swell, and th’unsought diamonds Would so imblaze the forehead of the deep, And so bestud with stars, that they below

Would grow inur’d to light, and come at last To gaze upon the Sun with shameless brows. For Milton this is no doubt an infernal and demon-catalysed process (reminiscent of his model for demonic revolt), but does it not sound a lot like capital? Isn’t the whole saga of human industrialisation—and all that burning of fossil sunshine—just another channel through which the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy allows our planetary core to extravasate its inner-thermic-affluence and thus ‘gaze again upon the sun with shameless brows’? That is, in the language of the conspiracy, to achieve solar apocatastasis and immanence? Of course, picking up on the idea that mining inevitably dredges up warfare and conflict, it was also Milton who produced the image of Satan’s demons, during the war in heaven, essentially unleashing these repressed chthonic powers by way of summoning weapons and cannons—with which to bombard the godhead’s troops—from the depths of the ground. Interestingly, it is described almost autonomously, as if the imps are merely releasing some kind of indwelling potential that has been dammed up there since the beginning, an armoury in waiting: Which of us who beholds the bright surface Of this etherous mould whereon we stand, This continent of spacious heav’n, adorned With plant, fruit, flower ambrosial, gems and gold, Whose eye so superficially surveys These things, as not to mind from whence they grow Deep under ground, materials dark and crude, Of spiritous and fiery spume, till touched With heaven’s ray, and tempered they shoot forth So beauteous, op’ning to the ambient light. These in their dark nativity deep Shall yield us, pregnant with infernal flame, Which into hollow engines long and round Thick-rammed, at the other bore with touch of fire Dilated and infuriate shall send forth From far with thundering noise among our foes Such implements of mischief as shall dash To pieces, and o’erwhelm whatever stands Adverse.

Again, here, Milton (somehow always ahead of his time, precisely because he was a producer of the times) is expressing the basic Hydroplutonic Conspiracy: that there are these infernal potentials waiting, deep in the ancient earth, that will drastically canalise our long-term future as soon as human industry locks in as their excavator. In the long view, then, ‘human greed’ is a geocosmic pressure-release valve just as much as a volcanic magma vent is. To move from the Satanic to the Romantic (i.e. not far), HK is, as I was saying, a travelogue—but a travelogue that plots a path out of its own genre. And travel writing was, of course, a key mode for the Romantics—from Humboldt to the Lake Poets. RM: This is one of the ur-sources for the notion of a ‘sense of place’, which is a mainstay for the more uncritical varieties of ‘sitespecificity’. And, in the sense that the Romantic is to be set against Enlightenment rationality, we can see that this ‘sixth sense’ contains an appeal to presence within the landscape, and an immediate epiphanic access to its local quiddity—one that sounds like a protest against that ‘drifting toward nowhere’ you talked about just now. TM: Yes, very much so. There’s this ‘topophilia’, or love of situatedness, that you and others have successfully diagnosed as being theoretically and practically insipid (in When Site Lost the Plot and elsewhere). It’s a folk-political longing for a return to the putative honesty and sincerity of the hyperlocal (a rejection of being multiscalar, then, as you suggest). It’s essentially a desire for there to be a cognition so topical, so site-specific, so particularised, that it requires no further justification—that is to say, mediation—by other cognitions concerning elsewheres and elsewhens. (As if ‘particularity’ wasn’t itself already determination by way of negating other things!) You could call this the Myth of the Topical, if you were that way inclined. It lures with the promise that, in the pursuit of pure situatedness, we can become liberated from all mediation (i.e. work) in knowledge. Like any epistemological atomism, however, it is merely a form of radical circumspection (or, to get psychoanalytical, it is ‘ocnophiliac’) because it attempts to insulate some species of

cognition from the risk of its invalidation: for it is only because everything in knowledge demands such justification that we are driven to actually improve our claims when they are shown to be inaccurate; it is by virtue of the fact that no thought is entirely localised that we can correct any of our thoughts. Recoiling from such motility, mythical topicality attempts to deliver us from the toils of having to remain conceptually cursorial. To borrow a metaphor: the topophile runs their ship aground for safety’s sake, reefing it on the hyperlocal, there to let it lie and rot.11 As we have said, there is no contentful cognition, not even of the most situated thing, that is not already a digest of local and global. Unfortunately for Kant, I think it was a misreading of his critical philosophy that sired this topophiliac trend (alongside clear precedents, elsewhere, in radical British empiricism). For, if Kantianism folded all permissible thinking into self-relation (‘what justification do I, the subject, have for this claim about objective affairs?’), then one strand of post-Kantian thought hastily interpreted this ‘self-relation’ as the locus of the ontic particularity and somatic ipseity of the embodied ego (rather than as a form of moral accountability for one’s own thoughts, as Kant himself intended). This, then, was taken to license a circumscription of all permissible knowledge to within the domain of the qualitatively meaningful and intuitively tangible. Hence, ‘what is most immediate’, or the hyperlocal, quickly gained the premium described above. Phenomenology is the unfolding of this stream of thought. As contemporary ecopoetics and ecocriticism (rife with topophilia and hyperlocalism) likes to point out, Romanticism was where this all really became visible. There’s a compendious book on this, by Catherine Rigby, called Topographies of the Sacred.12 The title alone gives the game away. You get this most obviously in Wordsworth: with all those little haecceities and quiddities that he would stumble over and immortalise. He spoke ecstatically of the ‘Dwellers of the Dwelling’—the tautological self-enclosure of being perfectly at home. The poem ‘The Tables Turned’ expresses this well:

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books; Or surely you’ll grow double: Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun above the mountain’s head, A freshening lustre mellow Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife: Come, hear the woodland linnet, How sweet his music! on my life, There’s more of wisdom in it. And hark! how blithe the throstle sings! He, too, is no mean preacher: Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher. She has a world of ready wealth, Our minds and hearts to bless— Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health, Truth breathed by cheerfulness. One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect. Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives. This is basically Black Mirror technoangst for the 1790s. That line, ‘We murder to dissect’, says a lot about the topophiliac compulsion: it is a fear of dissecting the immediacies of the local lest it should reveal how it is, in fact, a digest of the global and genetic. Imagery of dissection is apt (and was conventional) in so far as the whole

topophiliac trend can be explained as a reactionary response to the onward-rolling alienations and abstractions of modern science. RM: The second line—‘or surely you’ll grow double’—also seems to bespeak a dread fear of folding. And not unreasonably: as you’ve already suggested, to apprehend the world as folded and ramified is also to experience oneself as such. The fear is that theoretical complication may end in one reaching a point where it’s impossible to return to the simplicity (or unplicatedness) of an immediate visible relation of presence—and impossible to abide in the present. TM: Exactly—because science turns the entire world to theory: it removes any of the mythical immediacy of pure phenomenal topicality and replaces it instead with the mediations of increasingly multilayered webs of theoretical inference, artefactual models, and unobservable entities. Because of this, we must artificialise in order to naturalise (such that, so too, we must globalise in order to truly localise).13 After modern science, everything becomes a conspiracy with the unobservable (and note that it is not just the unobserved but the unobservable). This was particularly true for geology inasmuch as it is a historical science. Indeed, the nascent geosciences were, around the time Wordsworth was writing, performing exactly this operation (i.e. dissection) on any residually self-enclosed sense of the ‘site’ or ‘locale’. So much for sacred topographies. It should come as no surprise that one of the earliest philosophers and historians of science, a very underrated thinker called William Whewell, took a keen interest in the conceptual foundations of the earth sciences and was also the first to really stress the centrality of ‘theory’ to our experience of the world. This is no coincidence. (Aside from coining terms like ‘uniformitarianism’ and ‘catastrophism’, Whewell also coined the word ‘scientist’ itself.) On the matter of ‘theory’, Whewell wrote that ‘[t]he scene of nature is a picture without depth of substance, no less than the scene of art; and in the one case as in the other, it is the mind which, by an act of its own, discovered that colour and shape denote distance and solidity’. He was the first, that is, to note that everyday empirical observation and

description is utterly theory-laden (a term that would be coined over a century later by Hanson and Kuhn). ‘[T]here is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be theory to infer more than we see’, Whewell declared.14 Even the most basic empirical experience involves unconscious theorisation and inference. Charles Lyell, who is often called the founder of modern geology, ‘discovered’ deep time by looking at Siccar Point in Scotland, and noticing that the features of the rocks couldn’t be explained merely by conscripting the kind of timescales that organic systems like ourselves are accustomed to dealing with. But why hadn’t anyone ‘looked’ at Siccar Point before this and figured this out? Because observation is theory-laden: Lyell was relying on a web of theoretical inferences, hard-won by many years of putting questions to nature, and that was being ‘draped’ over the face of the rock formation in front of him. RM: I find myself compelled, in one way or another, to rescue the Romantic trope of accessing the universal through the particular, and HK takes that very literally—it’s part of the question about an in situ philosophy. But it was important to be wary of any epiphanic shortcut, any kind of sleight of mind that would get you straight to the universal just by contemplating a flower really hard, or whatever. The interest was more in navigation, in how you get from this rather cramped, on the surface rather uninteresting, locality (none of these places we visited are exactly tourist attractions) and make your way, cognitively, through a labyrinth of folds, following a path that takes you back to the formation of the planet, to the universal. Once you’ve done that, you can have a lot of fun doing those Calvinoesque focus pulls, or twisting the kaleidoscope to make these temporal layers and physical scales magically unfurl and recede. But it’s exactly as you describe: even though we were doing it in fairly amateurish, slapdash fashion, what we tried to do was to mobilise a theoretical or theory-fictional speculative apparatus that could hold together a syncretic fabric of scientific theories and historical data, and the whole then ‘draped’ over the sites, cognitively clothing them so that they could be ‘seen’ in a way that is the very

opposite of that illusory vision of unitary quiddity sought after by fetishists for presence and the present. TM: Yet this means that the more objective knowledge you acquire about a locale (be it Siccar Point or Kennall Vale or anywhere else), the more theory you procedurally drape upon it. The more localised you get, the more globalised you become. Perhaps to the point that you get a disorienting (alienating) sense that the theoretic ‘map’ is coming to overwhelm the tangible ‘territory’. Certainly, early geohistory, at the time of Lyell and Whewell, was in the process of eclipsing our intuitive sense of our surroundings (Wordsworth’s ‘vernal wood’ and ‘throstle springs’) with this massively branching web of theoretical inferences concerning what Whewell called ‘palætiological’ events and processes (i.e. the web of counterfactual inferences concerning the utterly unobservable past, against which the observably actual must be placed in relief in order to for the latter to be threaded into a larger chronology and implicated within a wider history). Anyway, this freaked people out. Who could be dwellers of the dwelling if the dwelling is dissected, spilling into countless strings of theoretical and counter-to-fact inference? We murder to dissect, after all. There was, thus, a reaction opposing geohistory’s theory-draping with a return to common-sensical hyperlocalism. One of the best examples comes from the brilliant satirist Thomas Carlyle. At the opening of his masterful and poioumenonal novel Sartor Resartus, he writes sardonically of historical advances in science—from Newton to Lagrange, from gravitation to orbital mechanics—and then turns to the new earth sciences. He exclaims that, owing to the ‘labours’ of ‘Werners and Huttons’, we now similarly ‘know enough’ of ‘Geology and Geognosy’—so much, indeed, that to many a [naturalist], the Creation of a World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a Dumpling.15 A satire of the huge thermal forces that were posited to be at play within what contemporary geologists called the ‘great laboratory of

the mineral regions’, such imagery had become somewhat conventional. Whewell himself had referred to ‘Plutonic cookery’; whilst Lord Byron talked of landmasses ‘[b]aked, fried, or burnt’. Carlyle, in turn, uses this charming imagery in order to render a mock epic deflation of geoscience: treating the entire endeavour as kitchen cosmogony or Lilliputian tectonophysics, he reduces geophysical theorisation to culinary farce. His wider point, however, is that world-formation cannot be reproduced in vitro: one cannot bake a planet in the lab, and his preposterous scenario of scientists manufacturing lithospheres from dough highlights this fact. As a contemporary commentator noted, ‘[w]e have no experience in the formation of worlds’. Lyell similarly wrote that ‘if man could witness the birth [of] worlds, he might reason by induction upon the origins of his own’—but in the prevailing ‘absence’ of such ‘data’, such reasoning is disbarred. The problem was exactly this: geophysics (like astronomy) studies processes much too spatiotemporally large to recreate in the crucible, but (unlike astronomy) these processes long remained stubbornly intractable to numerical reproduction and thus could not be simulated in papryo. (Although the fluid dynamics used today in computerised tectonic modelling can be traced back to differential equations developed in the 1770s by Euler, their relevance to geophysics only became evident much later—after dimensional analysis accounted for how, at scale, rigid crust acts like ductile dough.) And so, in the absence of numerical and laboratory reproducibility, palætiological reasoning had to rely heavily on the manufacture and manipulation of mental models. (Philosophers of science now call this ‘model-based reasoning’.) As Georges Buffon, a towering innovator in the field, once pronounced: ‘the best crucible is the mind’. To render the world artificially—in the form of a mental dumpling that one has manufactured based on tacit scientific know-how—and then to further claim that this theoretical model can provide objective insights superadded to those of raw sense and fieldwork, is simultaneously to concede that there is nothing particularly special or privileged or indubitable about our inbuilt sense of our surroundings;

allowing that the world can be grasped better through ‘artificial’ reason is to admit that there is nothing perspicaciously ‘natural’ about our intuitive picture of the world: it is to realise that it has always been just another manufactured model and is thus revisable and subject to replacement. As Carlyle wrote later in his book, ‘let but a Creation of the World happen twice, and it ceases to be marvellous, to be noteworthy, or noticeable’.16 This applies to our ways of creating a picture of the world as much as to creation itself. As soon as we can know the world better by its recreation through the artifice of simulation and model-building, then our sense-based attachment to the hyperlocal likewise ceases to be so special—in fact, it is revealed to be just another dubitable model. And, as soon as we realised our ‘natural’ connection to the immediate is just a manufactured model, we were summoned to the task of correcting it and revising it. One must artificialise the entire globe: one must make the planet into a dumpling in one’s mind-crucible. But it was precisely this alienation from even the most seemingly encompassing horizon that threatened people so much. Making us denizens of the dumpling is the same as revealing that this world has never really been a ‘dwelling’ or ‘home’ in the sense of something utterly given and self-presenting. Following this line of thought, and corresponding with his friend John Ruskin, Carlyle betrayed his longtime disparagement for geological theorisation: ‘[n]ext to nothing rational could I ever learn of [geological] subject[s]’, what with their unobservable ‘central fire, and molten sea [whereupon] all mountains, continents, and strata are spread floating like so many hides of leather’. Indeed, talking of such items, the geotheorist John Playfair had previously conceded that the ‘greatness’ of such ‘objects […] alarms the imagination’ and that they ‘no doubt [are] a matter of THEORY’, being nodes within ‘invisible chains’ of inference. It was these inferential chains that were destabilising the Myth of the Topical and its longing for an utterly atomised situation or sitespecific cognition. (Geoscience was undermining the Myth in a manner similar to the ‘dreadful Hammers’ that Ruskin imagined chipping away at Genesis’s narratological monopoly: ‘I hear the clink

of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses’, he mourned.) In reaction to this, Carlyle preferred the commonsensical immediacy of the mythically self-enclosed topos, rather than the theoretical reasoning that reveals it to be a highly transformed cosmogenetic digest. Kicking the stone of common sense, Carlyle duly quipped that the ‘real miracle of the phenomenon’ is not geoscience’s purported spatiotemporal magnitudes or palætiological processes, but the ‘length of ear on the part of those’ who entertain such propositions. Cooking miniature worlds was, however, serious business. Summer 1767: Buffon, hiding away in his cellar-laboratory, heated up a series of iron balls—ranging in diameter from 0.5 to 5 inches—and measured their cool-down times, to ascertain, by analogy, the age of our planet. The period saw a whole series of experiments like this: from lodestones used to simulate geomagnetism at laboratory scale to miniature reproductions of volcanic eruptions to pressure cookers used to bake rocks in order to resolve theories about petrogenesis. It was in 1815, however, that the Scottish geochemist Sir James Hall first deployed rudimentary scaling techniques to render miniature models of crustal folding and deformation. Using overlaid layers of cloth (and later clay), Hall attempted to recreate the rheological properties of ductile rock and lateral compression of strata. Whewell, referring to Hall’s analogue modelling experiments, described Sir James as baking and kneading his geophysical ‘cake’: drawing from the experimental ‘oven a marble loaf made of chalk flour’. Even Buffon allegedly stated that geochemistry is nothing but ‘cookery’, and that it placed the ‘toils of the laboratory on a footing with those of the kitchen’. RM: So we’re back to bakers’ transformations again…? TM: Right! Anyway, this kind of experiment shows that the whole world is already a model anyway. We have to make the world first before we encounter it, whether in sensation or simulation, and there is no immediate or unmediated access. We cook up an entire world every time we wake up in the morning. As Thomas Metzinger says ‘[o]ur brain is an ontological engine’. Buffon was right to proclaim that

‘the best crucible is the mind’. It is precisely when we realise this— that the hyperlocal immediacies of sense are a fallible model rather than an indubitable microcosm—that we are drawn to replace this picture with ever better, ever more complicated, models. But all of this goes to show that we only understand the local by alienating ourselves from it, disabusing ourselves of topophilia, and intervening in our inherited and inbuilt modes of world-manufacture. Maybe to understand is always to undermine…. We only know the site, not through heightened immediacy and rejection of the mediate, but through mediating it through these increasingly far-off and nowherecentred layers of explanation (not just in time or space but in the realm of modalities also). As with ourselves and our own inner life, we only truly know ourselves from the outside in, and through constant destitution. One only becomes intimate with the site (whether it be a spatial topos or one’s own subjectivity) by detonating it, exploding it, dissecting it. In a way, I see HK as performing exactly what the mad scientists of Carlyle’s satirical vignette are doing: it is cooking up an entire world in the crucible—messing around with it, manipulating it, seeing how it is composed, being a little bit irresponsible with it, compressing it here, torquing it there. RM: And yet in that case, why would it be necessary to be on-site, what would be the advantage? I want to insist on the nontrivial importance of this. Because there is something deliciously mischievous about seeding in the audience the expectation of immediate Romantic topophilic experience, and then systematically disabusing them of it, navigating from presence and the present to a theoretically disseminated and temporally deranged ‘site’. This historical background on the ‘Myth of the Topical’ helps make sense of that, in hindsight. TM: Topophilia didn’t die with Romanticism, of course—it’s still alive and kicking. RM: I think ‘psychogeography’ is uneasily complicit with it, but it’s ambivalent, since it confronts sites as potential epiphanic portals into

deep history, but often achieves this by decanting huge collations of data into the site, staging and producing the walk ‘on the ground’ as simultaneously a delocalised navigation through concept-space. Psychogeography was another important reference for me, since I really love a lot of that material, but I also find it conceptually and methodologically suspicious. And it often devolves into mere meandering: I set more store by the obsessive pursuit of a mission, the insistence on pulling every step together hyperstitionally. What’s fascinating to me is the way in which a speculative idea can serve as a focal point for the journey, something that serves to organise the empirical site(s) from beyond; the way an idea can absorb everything into its crazed logic. TM: Taking an idea and exacerbating its internal logic is something that I’m drawn to again and again. Creating a book out of something that on the surface is quite nonsensical…but I think that, once you push anything to that limit, it creates its own internal logic and then becomes coherent and persuasive. You can do this with basically anything. RM: Even Pepsi…?! Probably what you and I have in common is that we don’t like stopping halfway, at the point where you feel you’ve learned a few interesting facts…that’s not enough, you have to push it so far that you have a schema that at once explains everything and becomes cognitively intractable—that’s the point at which we’re satisfied that we’ve done enough, right? TM: Yes, the human brain is such a brilliant ‘ontological engine’, but so utterly brilliant—‘in fine frenzy rolling’—that verisimilitude can become meaningless or at the very least a subsidiary concern: we want to make worlds out of everything, it is one of our most basic drives, a drive to coherence. Wordsworth again: ‘Dreams, books, are each a world’. These basic things about the world that empiricists get themselves into trouble with when they presume them to be brute facts (the ideal of coherence, the principle of uniformity, the conviction that every effect has a cause, that all legitimate possibilities are realised, etc.) are in fact deep drives that are part of

our own cognitive world-baking process: we apply them to the dough of experience. Colligation is manifold cooking. This drive-toworldedness applies even to individual ideas and concepts themselves as items. We want to take an idea—even the most seemingly atomised or localised or trivial one—and birth a whole world within it and from it. It is like engaging our chronotope-building drives just for the sake of it, for their own ‘free-play’. Obviously, Kant got this in his writings on aesthetics. Ideas are basically implicatory networks (think yarnwork):17 one knows more about an idea basically just by being more fluent with the implications in the vicinity of said idea, what follows or doesn’t follow from what. So they kind of have their own internal structure. A bit like a Piranesi painting, if you want a pleasing architectural metaphor. Anyway, because they have this somewhat baroque and extravagant internal structure you can kind of make them into a world-unto-themselves. Which is not to say that you make them into a perfectly insular atom or self-standing monad. No, it’s precisely the opposite: it’s precisely because the nature (and inner drive) of every concept is to be utterly holistic, that it can seem to relate to every single other idea in some way, that we can build these utterly cohering worlds or mythoi out of them. You can make each idea into its own chronotope. And then you can see the entire ‘real world’ through it. Every single idea is its own conspiracy, it wants to be ‘about’ everything. I think the whole point of this kind of ‘genre’, if we can call it that, of taking a seemingly niche idea and spinning a whole chronotope out of it, is that it reveals, at a higher level, the mechanics of everyday world-building itself (i.e. that all life-worlds, even the seemingly most immediate and intuitive and natural, are nowt but crucible dumplings). Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the Leibniz-drunk guy who invented ‘aesthetics’ in the modern sense of the term, once described fiction writing as the forging of heterocosms, or, selfsufficient miniature worlds. What Kant, after Baumgarten, called the ‘unity of apperception’ and ‘transcendental affinity’ are all examples of our everyday kneading and baking of such universes from the raw

dough of our afferent neurons. I guess hyperstitional fiction (or whatever you want to taxonomise it as) is, then, a gourmanderie of heterocosms. To conspiricise is to be an epicure and gourmand of our daily world-forging, to push such sustenance beyond its mundane uses—whether these be subsistence or survival—into exquisite exuberance. There is a disinterestedness even in gluttony! Reiterating this realisation obviously has ‘emancipatory’ potential, even if just at the level of ideation or hypothesis generation. RM: A baker’s dumpling-map, a patisserie of heterocosms, a millefeuille of plateaus…. This is a text that (over)does what it is about. Let’s go and get a pasty. 1. See e.g. I. Knez, ‘Affective and Cognitive Reactions to Subliminal Flicker from Fluorescent Lighting’, Consciousness and Cognition 26 (May 2014), 97–104; M. Münch et al., ‘Effects of Prior Light Exposure on Early Evening Performance, Subjective Sleepiness, and Hormonal Secretion’, Behavioral Neuroscience 126:1 (February 2012), 196–203; K. Breanne et al., ‘Effects of Four Workplace Lighting Technologies on Perception, Cognition and Affective State’, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics 42:1 (January 2012), 122–8. 2. See ‘The Barker Topos’, in R. Mackay (ed.), When Site Lost the Plot (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2015). 3. P.B. Shelley, ‘Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni’ (1816). 4. I. Calvino, ‘The Petrol Pump’, in Numbers in the Dark (London: Penguin, 1985), 170. 5. O.P. Judson, ‘The Energy Expansions of Evolution’, Nature: Ecology & Evolution 1 (2017), 1–9. 6. F. Dyson, ‘Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation’, Science 131:3414 (1960), 1667–8. 7. F. Dyson, ‘Letter’, Scientific American 210:4 (1964). 8. L. Fisher, Crashes, Crises and Calamities: How We Can Use Science to Read the Early-Warning Signs (New York: Basic Books, 2011), 25–31.

9. R. Descartes, Philosophical Essays and Correspondence, ed. R. Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 261. 10. F. Bacon, ‘Description of the Intellectual Globe’, in The Works of Francis Bacon, tr. J. Spedding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 14 vols., 2011), vol. 5, 512. 11. To continue our Kantian riff: our goal is rather to give it a pilot who, by means of safe navigational principles drawn from a knowledge of the globe and provided with a complete chart and compass, may steer the ship safely whither they listeth. See I. Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, tr. J.W. Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 6. 12. C. Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004). 13. See L. Floridi, The Logic of Information: A Theory of Philosophy as Conceptual Design (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 14. W. Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (London: J.W. Parker, 2 vols., 1840), vol. 1, 24. 15. T. Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London: Chapman and Hall, 1831), vol.1, 2–3. 16. Ibid., 38. 17. On yarnwork and plot, see R. Mackay, ‘Stages, Plots, and Traumas’, in H. Gunkel, A. Hameed, and S. O’Sullivan (eds.), Futures and Fictions (London: Repeater, 2018).

Introduction The Gwennap mining district in Cornwall, in the southwest of the UK, described in the eighteenth century as the ‘richest square mile in the old world’, was the setting for this journey into an historical process that assembled the powers of geology, mechanics, hydraulics, mineralogy and metallurgy, salvation and combustion, steam and capital into a mighty, infernal machine that traumatised the Cornish landscape and kickstarted the industrial revolution. Visiting lesser-known sites where these components interacted and evolved during the height of the mining trade in Cornwall, we discovered what lies beneath the tourist emblem of the abandoned engine-house. With the guidance of rogue scientists, agrosophists and geophilosophers, we uncovered the complexities of subterranean poetics and aesthetics, and confronted the industrial behemoth that made the earth scream. The deep background to the strange complicities we discovered during our research has begun to fall into place. Read through the ‘geo-cosmic theory of trauma’ espoused by legendary ‘cryptographer’ Dr. Daniel Barker and further developed by Reza Negarestani,1 the question the Convention posed—that of the relation between the regional and the global—transformed itself into a question of the relation between the singular and the universal, when ‘the only universal history is the history of contingency’.2 As suggested by the ‘Fault-Map’ distributed to participants, the trip unfolded the superficial delights of the Cornish landscape to reveal the unique configuration of cosmic and terrestrial forces that created it—a configuration which capitalism has retrospectively endowed with necessity, and which must be designated as Kernovian Syndrome. *

The unconscious of planet Earth is haunted by a primal Hadean trauma. At the birth of the solar system, deviating from the protoplanetary disk that is to become the central body, a tiny, uniform spherical mass emerges from the solar nebula. Within 500 million years, a sudden sinking of matter into a dense metallic core—the ‘Iron Catastrophe’—precipitates the formation of a differentiated, layered planetary structure, its molten inner matter surrounded by a thin rocky mantle and cold crust. At the same time as this brittle surface seals into the depths the repressed secret of Earth’s ‘burning immanence with the sun’,3 the magnetosphere is created, shielding the planet against the coruscating blasts of solar wind that periodically erupt from its massive and irrepressible mother-star, causing the emission of gases that trigger the chemical reactions that will produce water, and gravitationally securing the hydrocycle that will govern the planet’s climate. But the face of Earth does not remain still. Its shifting visage results from the combination of external processes—climatic denudation and deposition—and internal processes—the restless movements of igneous and magmatic fluids. These two groups of processes transform the surface of the earth and shape the destiny of everything upon it. Their energy sources are, respectively, the sun, and the inner core. Thus, the thin crust destined to shield the inhabitants of Earth from its primal trauma, wears on its face the continually-shifting expression of the helio-plutonic bond. Periodically, the pressure of magma in depth impels it to move in the direction of least resistance: repressed energy erupts onto the surface, forming igneous intrusions through the crustal rocks. The terrestrial symptoms that crystallise around these periodic outbreaks of plutonic catharsis are far-reaching and ramified. The purpose of our trip is to explore the group of symptoms known as Kernovian Syndrome, increasingly recognised by geophilosophers and specialists in plutonics to be an important factor in the aetiology of life on Earth. A unique (suspicious?) property of planet Earth is that its temperature and air pressure are perfect to allow water to exist in all

three states—frozen, liquid and gaseous. The polymorphic transitions between the three states facilitate both internal and external geological processes. Water is thus the secondary medium that enables Earth to remain solvent and to ‘work through’ its internalised solar nightmare or primal scene; but it likewise colludes with the sun in its continual epidermal irritation of the planet. If both solar energy, driving external geological processes, and plutonic energy, driving internal geological processes, are mediated and complexified by the presence of water, then every movement of the slowly cracking mask of the earth’s surface, including the movements of biological life, and human industry and culture, can be understood as expressions of this Hydroplutonic Conspiracy. The primary expression of Hydroplutonic Conspiracy specific to Kernovian Syndrome concerns the hydrothermal mechanisms of mineralisation that occur in hot magmatic emanations rich in water. Hydrothermal circulation occurs in the deep crust during the intrusion of granite, as aqueous solutions travel upwards from hotter to cooler rocks. It is this process that leads to the formation of minerals such as tin and copper, whose accretion is an indication of Kernovian Syndrome. The story goes like this: take two major players, plate tectonics and the basaltic rocks widespread in oceanic floors. It was in fact the theory of basaltic rock formation that led, in the mid-twentieth century, to the widespread acceptance of the plate tectonics hypothesis. Mafic magma, rich in magnesium and iron (the primary elements of the inner earth) erupts from mid-ocean ridges to form the basaltic rocks of the ocean crust, which then move away from the ridge axes. It is then returned to the mantle again through the process of subduction. This mechanism of energy-material flow accounts for large-scale crustal movement and continental drift. Around the same time, the so-called granite controversy set at odds ‘granitisers’ and ‘magmatists’. One of the main figures in this debate was petrologist Norman L. Bowen, who provided an account of how basaltic magma undergoes fractional crystallisation during which early-formed crystals are separated from the magma by crystal settling, leaving behind a fluid of slightly different composition.

Bowen’s ‘reaction series’ could thus explain why some minerals (such as tin ore and boron silicate) are found together in certain locations, while others are never found together (e.g., quartz is never found alongside magnesium iron silicate or olivine). Soon, however, geologists realised that correlating the order of mineral crystallisation with the formation of basic to acid series igneous rocks—as Bowen’s reaction series does—only accounted for a small fraction of granite formation. The explanation then shifted to a holistic theory of granite formation, crystallisation of minerals, and their abundance or scarcity in different places—holistic in the sense that it accounted for associations between various thermal regimes, protolith composition, the amount of water presence in the magmatic fluid, and plate tectonic setting. According to this theory, granite is obtained by the partial melting of crustal rocks of various compositions. Ultimately, this holistic theory—the ultimate geological plot—brought all of the rival theories together: magmatism (granites are igneous rocks arising from the crystallisation of magma), metamorphism (granites are the product of dry or wet granitisation processes), and ultra-metamorphism (these processes involve the melting of crustal rocks). At the heart of the processes of ore-formation and ore-partitioning, there lies a mechanism similar to how geysers and seepage springs work. It begins with a strife between crystallising magmatic mineral composition and the magmatic volatile phase. Granite magmas usually contain 3–6 percent water concentration, with a pressure that can reach several hundred bars. Such vapour pressure is responsible for creating the hydrostatic head of the magma. Driven by internal thermal and pressure gradients, the magma head begins to search for areas of low pressure. The search for low pressure areas in turn results in fracturing or the reopening of old fractures. Soon the ore-bearing magmatic fluid begins to escape from domed areas of accumulation, a process that results in the rapid decrease of pressure and upward migration of ore-bearing hydrothermal fluid along fractures. The result is multiphase mineralisation, with richer deposits trapped deeper—producing the tantalising gradient of both

risk and reward that seduces the miner into ever more intense complicities with the earth. You must dig deeper…. Kernovian Syndrome is associated with the intrusion of a granitic batholith across the southwest corner of Britain—plutonic rock formed from cooled magma that squeezed through a fold in the rock running ENE-WSW during the late Carboniferous or early Permian period. As this igneous rock surfaced and cooled, metallic deposits were formed whose presence was to have important consequences —implicating humankind in the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy in a number of remarkable ways. But are there really symptoms so localised and singular as to be designated Kernovian? Consider that the unique complex geochemistry of the granitic batholith is registered by a rare instance of the adoption of a word from the now-dead Cornish language into the scientific geological vocabulary: its mineral veins are vughy, occurring in small cavities in the rock (Cornish ‘vooga’ = cave). This uneven and diverse mineralisation finds expression in a singularly inventive tin and copper industries which have had continually to adapt, and to work deeper and harder, drawn on erratic courses through the living rock by its ‘high grade but notoriously unpredictable’ veins. Mining in Cornwall was already underway in the Bronze Age, and tin was harvested on the surface for centuries before being chased into the outer crust. The surface, ‘alluvial’ deposits derive from the erosion of hydrothermal veins, the transport of the resulting debris and its incorporation into superficial deposits. In retrospect, however, this was just a seductive come-on engineered by solar-climatic processes to tempt humans into the bowels of the earth, there to enter geological time and to deepen the syndrome. When the time was right, knowledge of these deposits conspired with other factors: following the turmoil of the Civil War, with frequent changes of land ownership, the need to exploit land resources became more evident and pressing: no longer satisfied with the steady but small income from tinners’ tithes to collect alluvial deposits, landowners looked to follow the lodes deeper, drawing on a newly-deterritorialised labour force to do so. Prospecting and

evaluation costs rose. Mines begin to demand greater investment, and came under the ownership of syndicates of ‘adventurers’ who demanded greater and greater returns, driving the development of new techniques and technologies, decoupling the production of wealth from its accumulation, and bringing capital into tension with the political bodies of workers. As this self-reinforcing machine escalates, and humans invade the underworld, new and yet more complex aspects of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy become evident, as we shall see during our trip. 1. D. Barker, ‘Barker Speaks: An Interview with Professor Barker’, in Abstract Culture: Digital Hyperstition (London: CCRU, 1999), reprinted in CCRU, Writings 1997–2003 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2017); R. Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Melbourne: Re.press, 2008); R. Negarestani, ‘Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss’, in P. Rosenkranz, Our Sun (Milan: Mousse 2010), reprinted in Abducting the Outside (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2020). 2. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, ‘10000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?’, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. B. Massumi (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). 154. 3. See Negarestani, Cyclonopedia.

The Tour ROBIN MACKAY: This field trip came about as something of an accident: It was, if I’m not mistaken, around five hundred million years ago when the material that would become Earth, having detached itself from the sun, underwent something of a crisis, producing the differentiated planet we know and love, forming the hard crust upon which all of our diverse activities unfold, and which protects us from the inner fire. This moment is recognized by the discipline of geotraumatics as a primal scene whose repressed memories can be divined from the enigmatic yet evidently pained planetary countenance. All of the processes described by geology can be traced either to the influence of the sun—the climatic processes that alternately irritate and sooth the surface of the earth, or that of its repressed runt sibling—the inner sun, the molten core of the earth, trapped beneath yet constantly liable to resurface rudely and protest against its entrapment—only to solidify and crust over once again; the plutonic, or deep earth, processes. What we know of the earth’s formation through this deep astrophysical history has put an end to the great debate that raged at the dawn of geology, that between the neptunists, who insisted that geological phenomena owed solely to the influence of climate and catastrophic floods; and the plutonists, who argued that they found their origin in the great subcrustal abyss. However, we should not believe that Pluto has entirely vanquished his watery foe. For both the climatic processes driven by the sun and the plutonic processes driven by the core of the earth, are lubricated, so to speak, by water. From this, geotraumatics draws the conclusion that all that moves upon the face of the earth, from the lowest forms of life to the highest forms of human thought, are all expressions of what is known as the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy—that is, the strange complicity between water and the burning core of the earth. The validity of this thesis being granted, the special status afforded to so-called Kernovian Syndrome by certain scholars remains disputed, and is a source of

no little tension among geophilosophers, as we saw with the infamous disruption of the twelfth international congress of neoplutonists in 1979 in Moscow. In any case it’s certainly true that in the region we are about to explore, we find some exquisitely perplexing, even extravagant, developments of the cosmically ancient bond between water and the plutonic depths, and as we shall see, the mining industry brought with it manifold peripheral and associated activities all of which boasted watery rapports of one kind or another. But who are we to assess the heady claim that humans, through their actions on or below the surface, merely relay or exacerbate this cosmic drama; that, seduced by the mineral riches of the earth, themselves the product of H2O and magma, they become an active agent in the already vexed relations between water and the infernal depths? Happily we have with us today some experts who will help unfold this drama. Shaun Lewin is a transversal ecologist; James Strongman is a geologist and petrologist of great renown in these parts; and Dr Iain Hamilton Grant a speculative physicist and expert on geotraumatics, having, like myself, studied with professor Daniel Barker in the years before his…unfortunate exit. Kenna Hernly supervises Urbanomic’s Hydroplutonic Archive and the Spryling Bequest. And Paul Chaney you’ll know as a prominent neoagrosophist and Field Club revivalist. Therefore you will have the opportunity to judge for yourselves today the value of this extravagant hypothesis which brings together in an artful if undisciplined manner the resources of geology, mineralogy, philosophy, and exonomics—and to decide whether Cornwall deserves that dubious accolade which Professor Marvin Talisker bestows upon it when he writes that for geotraumatics, Kernovian Syndrome marks the point at which the earth’s endlessly frustrated quest to belch up its internal solar trauma devises its most devious tactic yet: opening up its glittering depths, it beckons to what will become its most glorious instrument yet: those humans who will become the first life form ever to enter geological time in advance of their own extinction.

I am going to ask Ms Hernly now to distribute the Fault-Map we have prepared especially for this occasion and which I am sure will help you to locate and orient yourself during the tour. Subsequently we will depart for our first destination. Please fasten your seatbelts. *** JAMES STRONGMAN: It’s going to be an exciting trip. We’re going to be looking around the mineralisation of the Carnmenellis and Carn Marth batholiths, part of the Cornubian batholith which underlies the whole of Cornwall and parts of North Devon, Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, and Lands End, and we’ll see how fluids and fluid processes are crucial to the mineralisation associated with the Cornish granite. It’s probably best to start with a bit of context about how the granite is formed. Basically, we need to go back about four hundred million years to a time when where we are now would probably have been around the equator; there would have been no Atlantic Ocean; we’d have been on a palaeocontinent known as Avalonia, and that would have been colliding into another continent called Baltica (you can imagine where Baltica is now). There was a sea called Iapetus, and this sea was between Avalonia and a much bigger continent known as Laurentia, which you may have heard of before. A lot of sediment had been deposited in Laurentia, and that would be the source of the later mineralisation. And this is where our metals will be sourced, and more importantly, along with them, some of the fluids that will be crucial to the transportation and deposition of these metals. As Iapetus starts to close up, about three hundred million years ago, Baltica and Avalonia collide progressively with Laurentia. During this collision you get uplift, and lots of faults; you can actually see these faults today, and they are very important to some of the hydrogeology of the area. As this collision takes place, the crust gets thicker and thicker, and it heats up and we get melting, and this is where the granites come in. The intrusion of granite into sedimentary rock and its slow cooling is the engine behind mineralisation. As the granitic magma heats and assimilates the rocks it’s intruding into, it also releases fluids that are driven through the surrounding rocks

into which the granite is intruding, and as these fluids circulate they scavenge the metals, leaching them out of the rocks. The composition of the fluids is quite particular to Cornwall, because the rocks they’re going through are very rich in one element, boron, which we see in a mineral called tourmaline. Boron, which is actually a very stable element, is crucial for scavenging tin, because when you have very high boron, the concentrations in your fluid can dissolve tin. This area is richer in copper than tin, though, and copper is scavenged by chlorine. Rocks that have been deposited in an ocean are very rich in chlorine, and therefore we have very chlorine-rich fluids. So as these fluids move through the rocks, they scavenge and build up a store of metals, resulting in a reservoir of metal-rich fluid. As the granite gets nearer and nearer to the surface, the fluids become more and more concentrated, because the thing that’s keeping the metals in suspension is getting reduced because it’s turning into a mineral. All of these fluids are under a lot of pressure, so they’re looking for weaknesses, and some of the weaknesses they find are some of the old faults from the earlier, mountainbuilding phases. The fluids exploit these faults, and as they move into the fractures, the pressure drops, so the solubility of the metal decreases and the metal starts to precipitate into these fractures, which is what creates the metal veins. We’ll see some of these fractures, and hopefully we’ll see some of the mineralisation, although a lot of it has already been mined out and is long gone now. Obviously, after the metals were deposited, there was a later phase of enrichment, and this is where weather processes come in. In the first stage, chlorine-rich sea water was involved, and now it’s rain and river water. The important thing about cassiterite is that tin is a very stable element. In the form of tin oxide it’s very dense, its density’s six times greater than water, it has a hardness comparable to or slightly harder than quartz—so it’s as hard as all the things around it, and much heavier. When it gets into a stream, then, it will tend to always sink to the bottom. Which means that anywhere where there’s a depression or a river, the tin will always fall out, whereas other, lighter minerals will get washed away, washed into

the sea. Over thousands of years, therefore, this process produces beds which are very rich in tin. These weather processes enrich the tin, which is where Cornish mining began: on the rivers and the alluvial systems. This slow build-up of enriched metal in the riverbeds is lying in wait there to become the target of industry, so this is the first invitation, if you will, for our entanglement in the hydroplutonic plot. RM: A new breed of scavengers now enter onto the scene, sifting tin from the stream, consolidating and concentrating it. Humans are already becoming implicated in the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; but of course, their involvement accelerates when, seduced by what may lie beneath the surface, they can no longer rely on climatic processes, and begin to move into the depths of the earth in search of deeper veins. The thirst for metal that these first tantalising deposits unlocked is what will drive the development of the steam engine, which will enable miners to be dragged ever further into the bowels of the earth…. But as we’ll see in our first location, having long ago assisted in depositng the metals, well before the deployment of steam, water was also exploited as an energy source in their extraction.

1. Kennall Vale: Hydraulic Capitalism Stithians Parish is intersected by the Kennall River, which descends from the granite heights of Stithians through Kennall Vale through Ponsanooth and Perranarworthal, a river whose outlet to the sea we will see later at Devoran, and which was used at Perran Foundry as an energy-source for smelting. Indeed, within the roughly fifteen square miles of the river and its tributaries, its hydraulic resources were heavily employed. We know as early as 1659 of a blowing house in Kennall Vale for smelting tin, with a water wheel to power bellows, and leats, and in a text from 1824 we read: This river from its source to its union runs about five and a half miles, in which short distance it turns thirty-nine water wheels all in active and full employ. It may be doubted, if with the same short distance another such stream can be found in England. The old settlement of Ponsanooth (the Stag Inn was once a hunting lodge for Saxon gentry) was thus a most prosperous place during the pre-industrial mining period because of its dual asset of being near to a sea port (Devoran and Perranarworthal) and having access to this natural source of energy, which was exploited in the many subordinate industries that grew up around mining. And here we are at one of the few remaining sites where this energy supply was exploited to produce gunpowder to loosen the precious ore from its rocky matrix. The gunpowder mills at Kennall Vale were founded in the early nineteenth century by Ben Sampson of Gwennap Churchtown. The works contained a dozen wheels and employed around sixty men at its height. Established between 1812 and 1820, the mills expanded rapidly from 1820 to 1844, with a doubling of the works, and expansion into the adjoining Roches Wood in 1844. An on-site saltpetre refinery was added in 1850, only for the works to fall into rapid decline at end of nineteenth century. They were closed in 1910. The most notable of the remaining buildings are the seven conjoined pairs of incorporating mills, with their wheel pits fed by

stone-lined leats. These leats should be noted as a particular manifestation of the prominence of ‘hydraulic capitalism’ in industrial Cornwall: the waters of the river were routed and rerouted to be used many times by the multiple waterwheels. This use of gravity as natural capital, through the medium of water, seems a clear indication of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy at work. We can also find here some remains of what were once thirty associated structures: offices, carpenters shops, cooperage, packing house, timber shed, sawmills, manager’s house, and so on. The complexity of the process of producing gunpowder can be appreciated by these many structures: Grinding charcoal and sulphur; refining of saltpetre; mixing in rotating wooden barrels in the mixing house to make ‘green charge’; and thence to the incorporating mills to be stone-ground; pressed into cakes in the ‘press house’; broken up in the ‘breaking-down’ or ‘corning house’; dried in the ‘gloom stove’, the dust removed in the ‘dusting house’, graphite added in the ‘glazing mill’, and finally to the ‘packing house’. The remains of these facilities are set in what is now a nature reserve—rather ironically, since most of its trees were planted for the express purpose of buffering the outside from potential explosions. And indeed Kennall Vale was the site of many a celebrated accident: Local legend has it that one explosion decapitated a worker, whose head landed and was later discovered a mile away. This appears to be a conflation of several verifiable accidents, since in the Royal Cornwall Gazette of Feb 25 1826 we read: A melancholy accident occurred at the powder mills near Ponsanooth on Friday last. About half past twelve o clock, on that day, the mixing house, in which were four persons at their usual employment, was blown up. Two of the men escaped without injury, but the woman, named Rutter, died on Friday night. The third man named Weeks, survived until Sunday morning. Although it is generally difficult to account for accidents in powder mills, the present was occasioned by the old woman who had been roasting potatoes at a considerable distance from the works, and had unconsciously carried a spark of fire on her clothes to the mill. This was seen immediately on her entrance, but before it could be prevented, it fell, and the explosion instantly followed. Corroborating the mileage, the West Briton of 18 May 1838 reports:

Five mills blew up in succession, and part of a roof was found a mile from the premises. And, substantiating the tale of a violent decapitation, in the West Briton of 15 Jan 1851: On Saturday last, an inquest was held at Ponsanooth, before J. Carlyon esq., Coroner, on the body, or to speak more correctly, the fragments of the body (for the poor fellow was literally blown to pieces) of John Martin. From the evidence, it appeared that the deceased […] was engaged in removing some powder from the glossing mill [when] the mill was blown up in the air with a tremendous explosion, which was heard for many miles around, and shook the houses a considerable distance off. The head of the deceased was discovered about a quarter of a mile from the spot, and other parts were afterward collected from different places. Verdict, accidental death. SHAUN LEWIN: So we’re standing here in a beautiful forest. How old is it? Perhaps two hundred years at most. Often when we stand in these sorts of places we’re transported into some sort of romantic idea of what nature could be, should be. In fact, this is a postindustrial landscape akin to a car park or a quarry: this is a postmetal forest. I’m going to start off by making a salvo of generalisations about how organisms exist, and then go on to elucidate how transversal ecology makes use of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy to bring into solution discrete entities: economics, plant growth…, and then from that solution precipitate out some crystals that maybe can lead us into an understanding of humans’ interaction with the soil, with the air, and with the core of the planet. There are two primary interactions of organisms with their environment. Firstly, everything that’s alive is engaged in the modulation of rates: we’re attempting to speed things up. I say ‘we’ in the broadest sense—I’m speaking for myself as a human being, but also for a locust, also for this sycamore tree, for all of us…. So for example this tree is slowing down the rate at which nitrogen is released into the atmosphere by locking it into its wood. It’s also drawing carbon dioxide into itself via its leaves, taking it out of the atmosphere at a far higher rate than would be happening in its absence. This whole process, all of these accelerations and

decelerations, have to use energy somewhere. Plants, being nonhuman, tend to use a solar source: they consume the energy from the sun, destroy it, burn it off, and transfer it into matter. Equally within my own body, I am taking energy from…well…in a fundamental sense, still from the sun, but also I’m taking energy from economic actions and increasing the range of calcium accumulation within my body. This is only one half of the actions that we living organisms engage in. This modulation of rates presupposes that we are selecting things for our environment that we’re more interested in. For example, this tree, by its sheer existence, is shading out the ground beneath it, preventing anything from growing there unless it can handle low sunlight. This tree therefore has created a new environment around it. As with a tree, so with the mining activity that took place in this area. Humans came to this area and made use of the flux of water as a source of energy, and they transferred that energy into structures—firstly into the tangible structures we can see around us, into these buildings, but also a more pervasive and intangible structure which I call the business of trading, and of manipulating the environment to create something new and valuable to them. Actually, much of the forest that we see around us isn’t some sort of endogenous response to the soil conditions and the light conditions or even to the availability of seeds in the area. It’s actually a deliberate attempt to make this whole area into some sort of green blast-chamber to prevent explosions from travelling too far in any direction. Of course the most interesting thing about we humans is that we have really taken this whole process of habitat manipulation and rate modification as far as it can possibly go. So, superimposed on factors as blind as the chemical weathering of rocks and the cycling of nitrogen within the soil, we’ve also, through a process of accelerated erosion, taken metals from beneath the surface of the planet and released them into an economic flux which would have first started in maybe the Bronze Age when people in the Middle East recognised that their existing copper supplies would make much better weapons if they could mix them with the tin that was

extracted from the rivers here. This process then became accelerated through the transfer of value, so that what initially would have been a relatively passive process of sifting and selection of things from the environment, ore from the environment which was useful to the endogenous human population, then became accelerated gradually through the use of available energy sources— water power, for example—and it became possible to bring more and more of this material to the surface, to send more and more of this material to the economic centres of the Bronze Age, which would be Mesopotamia, I guess, and the Mediterranean. Finally, with the conceptual leaps that make mankind so powerful on this planet, we transferred our energy sources from water, from things that occur in the environment, through to chemical materials, such as gunpowder, which again accelerated the rate at which materials were released from the subterranean mass of this area. With this acceleration, given the principle of the conservation of energy, there has to be a deceleration somewhere. And this is the net effect of human actions here: we have decelerated the rates of the natural accumulation of matter. This forest, if it had been unperturbed, would have been a temperate rainforest analogous to what we find in Western Canada: a colder version of the Amazon, effectively. However, through the release of materials into the soil, and the constant disruption caused by human activity, we’ve kept it at a level which I would say is equivalent to the forest that would first emerge after the retreat of a glacier. Or alternatively, and more appropriately considering the formation of this area, what we see here are the sorts of plants that we’d expect to see as green life returned to the slopes of a volcano following its eruption. As humans, we want to try and arrest this process, because we always want to derive more energy from the environment and deny that which the forest would take for itself. So, for example, the area surrounding this would probably be engaged in some sort of agricultural production which would be, I would say, the maintenance of an artificial grass ecosystem. Something that would normally be found on the retreat of a glacier, as the tundra started to vegetate, or indeed at the birthplace of mankind on the savannah of Africa.

Interestingly though, with the introduction of the potentials that had been liberated by the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, we have no need anymore for reliance on the sun as source of primary production: the ability of the sun to grow plants is irrelevant, we’ve actually got a better source of value here, which is the metal that we can get out of the ground. The consequence of this is that there’s no real interest in maintaining a viable soil structure here, or a healthy plant community, so we can allow toxins to build up in the surface. Later on we’ll be seeing an arsenic works which has had similar effects, and I’m sure that around here the soils are completely useless to agriculture, partly for topographic reasons, because it’s hard to work them, but also owing to the scattering of contaminants, gunpowder byproducts, and the sheer amount of felling and destruction that must have gone on here. Elsewhere, we would have seen a gridding of the land surface, a separation of the fields into a stratified organisation, a matrix of land ownership. Here, however, owing to the eruption of metal-rich materials, there was no requirement to engage with this sort of division of solar resources. Instead, there is an activity more akin to some sort of hunter-gathering, a scavenging, the pursuit of a prey through a three-dimensional medium, which in this case turns out to be the sub-crust. Interestingly, the only other thing that’s like this in the area is fishing, another activity in which effectively the watery bodies of the earth have been exploited for their riches. It’s now a nature reserve. That’s because this area has low value to economic production and, I would assume, like many other contaminated sites in Britain, has very little attraction to developers —personally I wouldn’t want to build a house on some sort of mineral toxic spoil. Sites like these generally fall out of use, and they develop a sort of negative value in terms of property development. As the economic flux that drove the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy in this area ebbs to a halt, as the potential difference between tin production here and bronze production elsewhere starts to level out, there is less and less interest in the use of these areas for mineral extraction. Gradually, maybe through some enhancing of global consciousness, perhaps simply through some sort of realpolitik, it becomes easier to

designate these areas as nature reserves, and thereby endow them with some sort of surplus value which is still congruent with the conditions that we find here. Critically, it’s a way of using this land without actually spending too much money redeveloping it, once the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy has passed through.

2. Perran Wharf and Foundry: Bringing the Port to the Mine During the eighteenth century Perranarworthal, just outside Falmouth, was developed into the first major port serving the nascent mining industry in the Gwennap area. The Foxes of Falmouth were a wealthy Quaker family who had settled in Cornwall, having come from Wiltshire in the seventeenth century, initially at St Germans. As Quakers they were excluded from pursuing professional careers, consequently became very rich through commerce, and latterly made important contributions to science and natural philosophy. George Croker Fox was already established as a successful shipping agent and merchant in Fowey. He came to Falmouth in 1759 and George Croker Fox and Company began business as consuls, shipping agents, and ship owners. In 1769 Fox took out a 99-year lease on what were at the time wastelands, where the old mediaeval estate of Anworthal had been. He subsequently developed Perran Creek in Kennall Vale into Perran Wharf, an industrial and commercial complex that served the rapidly-growing tin and copper industries of the area (from 1800–1850 Cornish copper production was worth over £13 million, a phenomenal amount for the period—the equivalent of around £7 billion in today’s money). Fox’s idea was to ‘bring the port to the mine’ rather than, as was previously the case, having to use pack mules to carry coal and timber across uneven and steep terrain to the mine sites. His sons George Croker Fox Jnr (1752–1807) and Robert Weir Fox I (1754– 1818) carried on the business after him. Fox was evidently one of the first to realise that there was much money to be made out of the peripheral industries around mining. As early as 1775, there are records of exports via Perran Wharf of copper, and imports of coal and timber—and also guano. PAUL CHANEY: Guano. It’s shit. Bat and seagull and seal shit, mined off the coasts of Peru and brought around the Cape and all the way

here to be used in all sorts of industrial processes, basically as a source of nitrogen—concentrated nitrogen that could then be combined with other chemicals and processed into what we actually need for gunpowder, which is potassium nitrate. So the guano unloaded here would have gone to the gunpowder works at Kennall Vale. The other half of the recipe is wood ash: they used to bring it here and probably left it in huge great big stinking pits to fester and stew and purify and strengthen, quite a mucky business. ROBIN MACKAY: Opposite us, we see the famous Perran Foundry, which opened in 1791, making heavy castings for the beam engines that drew water from Cornwall’s mines. We’ll talk more about the engines later, but for now, note that the number one problem once the mines began to go deeper was getting rid of the underground water. When you see the emblematic Cornish engine house, that’s what most of them were used for, drawing up the water using beam engines. In 1840 Perran Foundry built a famous 85-inch engine for Taylor’s Shaft at United Mines. in 1842 which achieved a ‘duty’ of 107 million (107 million pounds of water raised 1 ft by 1 bushel of coal). These were big machines. The foundry was established by the Fox family and also manufactured parts for the Redruth-Chacewater Railway, which was used to transport ore down to Perran Wharf. So there was a massive complex here of leats, foundry buildings, stores, facilities for transport; by 1860 it was a six-acre site employing 400 men, and it remained in operation until 1849. Perran Foundry drew its energy from the Kennall River, which er already saw running through the gunpowder works. The lords of the manor of Arworthal—which became Perranarworthal later—had used the Kennall River in mediaeval times for the manorial mill. As we’ve already seen, it was not the only industrial enterprise that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, continued to draw on this source of power which flows from the Stithians Reservoir and flows out into the creek here at Perranarworthal. The foundry was also important in the development of the steam engine and the furtherance of Cornish engineering knowledge. When

the aforementioned enlightened George Weir Fox II was in charge, the workers were invited to discuss their suggestions for improvements of the machinery, and it was as an extension of her meetings with the engineers that George Weir’s daughter Anna Maria Fox formed the Cornwall Polytechnic Society, which was bestowed Royal Patronage by William IV in 1835, and played a major role in industrial development throughout the nineteenth century. We’re going to stop briefly at the Norway Inn. Extant since the early nineteenth century, when this road was opened as a turnpike, it takes its name from the Norwegian Ships that brought in the timbers for lining mineshafts and tunnels, at Perran Wharf. At that time the river, which, as we can see across the road from the Norway Inn, is now marshland, was far deeper, and it was even possible for small sailing vessels to discharge upstream from the Inn. At high tide, timber was floated up from the large ships docked at Restronguet Creek and stored in specially constructed timber pits. As our driver is pointing out to us, there was a system of these pits—still visible as marshy areas to the south of the canal cut—where the timber was left in the salt water so it would then have a longer life in the fresh water underground in the mines. PC: Perran Foundry built some of the largest industrial machines of their age, really: the one Robin mentioned, the 85-inch pumping engine—you’re talking about a piston that’s about seven feet across, a piston as big as this bus. Currently the Wharf building is falling to bits and has been under development as a chic housing complex for years, stalled by some strange quango between planning officers…. But the Fox company which developed the site had an even more expansive empire, reaching out along the supply route into South Wales, where they bought up iron ore mines and smelting works and factories. RM: There is speculation among geophilosophers that the Fox family were able to capitalise upon some prior knowledge of the importance of Kernovian Syndrome and its link to the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy.

At least, we know that G. Croker Fox’s grandson Robert Weir Fox II (1789–1877, buried at the Quaker Burial Ground at Budock), who lived at Rosehill (now Falmouth Art School on Wood Lane) was a very early contributor to geophysics, the first scientist to investigate hydrothermal mineralisation. He was a Cornish ‘natural philosopher’ whose research into the internal temperature of the earth—having spent forty years from 1815–1855 observing the temperature in the Gwennap mines—proved for the first time that temperature increased with depth, and led him to hypothesise a source of emanative heat at the core of the planet. This work is detailed in his papers for the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall ‘On the Temperature of Mines’ (1822) and ‘Some Further Observations on the Temperature of Mines’ (1827), and (in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal) ‘Some Remarks on the High Temperatures in the United Mines’ (1847); not to mention his ‘Report on the Temperature of Some Deep Mines in Cornwall’ for the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1858). The first of these papers opens as follows: I believe most persons acquainted with mines are aware that a great degree of warmth is experienced at considerable depths under the surface; but this fact does not appear to have attracted so much notice as it probably deserves. —and concludes that ‘many important operations of nature seem to depend’ upon the emanation of caloric from the interior of the earth. In the second, he records a measurement of the water pumped from the Gwennap mines […] through different branch adits, into a large adit or tunnel. The temperature of this accumulated mine-water, near where it is discharged into Carnon Valley, was 69.25 degrees in 1822, and the quantity discharged was computed at 60,000 tons per day. Not only does Kernovian Syndrome exacerbate the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; in fact, Cornwall is the site of its becoming selfconscious. Iain enters the bus Let’s ask Iain if he’d like to speak a little about the prevailing theories of the earth during this period.

IAIN HAMILTON GRANT: Yes, hello everybody, sorry I’m late—but it’s only ‘late’ if you consider things very very locally in terms of timescales…. Theories of the earth to which the problem of heat responds divide into two classes: neptunist and plutonist. It’s about heat, but it’s also about water. The greatest avatar of neptunism—the theory that water is the cause of the formation of the earth—was a miner named Abraham Gottlob Werner in Saxony at the close of the eighteenth century. Through his mining academy went Novalis, and went also a medical doctor Gottlob Heinrich Schubert who wrote some fantastic reflections entitled Observations from the Night Side of Physics—it’s clear that he was taking various chemicals in order to enhance his ability to write about said night side of physics, this can be easily read, if one consults his documents…. And also the geologist Henrik Steffens, who was Norwegian by origin, and wrote one of the most significant of the Wernerian geological accounts in 1801, entitled Inner Natural History of the Earth. To this day, for some reason, it has never been translated. The only copy I’ve seen is one that was owned by Coleridge and is in the British Library, it’s filled with Coleridge’s excited notes, it’s great to see it, not only to see what one writer, inspired by a miner, should derive therefrom in order to construct a complete theory of the earth; but also what this did to the head of a poet who was otherwise frankly oblivious of the natural world. In any case, that was the neptunist hypothesis: that water was the principal agent in the formation of the globe. The other one, plutonism, concerns the inner heat, the central fire, stating that the earth was in a state of constant igneous fusion. The idea that the earth’s core was in a state of igneous fusion would, of course, account for it getting hotter as one approached nearer to that core. And the observations of Fox as he approached via the mines would have provided evidence at least that there was indeed heat towards the earth’s core. The principal architect of plutonism, James Hutton, was the founder of modern geology and he was a contemporary of Joseph Black, the chemist under whom Humphry Davy, the great Kernovian poet-chemist-geologist, studied in Edinburgh in the 1780s.

Hutton’s account was based on having observed the effects of pressure and heat upon rocks. Notably, he discovered at Siccar Point, a rocky outcrop near Edinburgh, that there was no way the formation of the rocks there could be explained by any means other than their having been thrust out of the earth and buckled into their present shape. That was the theory of heat as the central agent in the formation of the earth. Both of these theories, however, take a crucial hint from a far older theory of the earth promoted by Buffon, whose 1788 Epoch de la Nature hypothesised that it was both a fiery igneous mass and the result of flooding that produced the earth in its current form. He had the idea that the earth as we inhabit it is the result of a giant catastrophe. Basically, an asteroid struck this body, this completed system of nature, and forced the earth into its current position, heating it, melting its ice, and turning it into its current form. The Earth was therefore, according to Buffon, cooling from a state of igneous fusion. Others opposed this view, and insisted that it was heating up—this was a debate going on at the end of the eighteenth century. So fire and water, the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, are etched into the very origins of the theory of the earth.

3. Devoran Quays: Entrepot of the Mines Perran Foundry closed in 1879, although Perran Wharf continued trading until the early twentieth century, when the river silted up. But it can be seen as a kind of prototype for our next location, which was to become what one eighteenth-century writer called ‘the entrepot of the mines of this district, by which, indeed, it was entirely created’— Devoran, a village that owes its existence not to mining itself, but to the enterprise of ‘bringing the port to the mine’. Devoran Quays succeeded Perran Wharf as the principal port serving the Gwennap area. Metal ore headed for South Wales, travelling via the pioneering Redruth-Chacewater railway which ran right to the quayside, was stored in the stone hutches you can still see here, ready for loading onto the one-hundred-tonne vessels that used to dock here, moored to the stone bollards that are still standing. After 1870 the decline of mining brought with it the relative disuse of the port. Then, in 1876, the same fate befell Devoran as had befallen Perran Wharf: the County Adit—of which more later—which drained water from the Gwennap mines, became blocked near its mouth upstream at Twelveheads. The following winter it broke through and so much mining waste was deposited as the cataract gave way that Devoran became silted up to the extent that vessels could no longer reach the quay. KENNA HERNLY: Devoran simply means ‘waters’. This was the busiest port in Cornwall from the 1830s to the 1860s. As you can see on your map, we’re located on the main artery of the circulation system of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, where a panoply of materials went into and out of the local system, serving the many mines of the area. Here the tidal waters swallow up the two rivers that play an important part in our tour, the Carnon and the Kennall, and go on to meet the Fal just around the corner. So this was a really important place. Large ships were able to dock just over there in Restronguet Creek, and then the materials were brought up by tug, or, when the weather

was good, smaller boats were able to sail in to dock here. The railroad came right down along the quay here, and its individual tracks spurred out from the main branch to serve ships that brought the materials in and out. And this was basically all because of the Redruth-Chacewater railway. In the 1820s, a man named John Taylor bought the lease on Consolidated Mines and United Mines at St Day, which we’ll be able to see from Carn Marth later. These mines had been used in the 1750s during the first peak in the copper mining industry in Cornwall, but subsequently closed during the huge depression at the end of the late 1700s. Taylor laid down more money than anyone had ever seen in Cornwall, brought these huge 90-inch engines, reopened these mines. And within a year he had found the largest copper lode anywhere in the world. So he’s up on the hill, and he’s got tonnes of copper ore, but he’s bringing it down to the Fal River by packhorse, as had been done for years, and then taking coal from Wales and timber from Norway back up. And during the winter there are often months when the horses can’t get through. So what does Taylor do? He goes up to London, appeals to parliament, gets a lot of money from his lenders, and builds a railway. It’s the first real railway in Cornwall—there was a small tramway owned by the Foxes and Williams families up in Portreath, but this outshone them by far, and, importantly, unlike most of the infrastructure here, it wasn’t owned by the Fox family—they weren’t even allowed an investment. The railway opened in 1826, and had four branches (although the Chacewater branch was never completed). It served mines all the way from Redruth down to Devoran, through Consolidated Mines, and terminated here. During its peak in the 1830s it was bringing up to 60,000 tonnes of cargo per year. This was still horse-drawn, but the railway lines made it far more efficient and it could operate in all seasons. On your way down you may have noticed on your left these ore bins, that’s where the railway ran, just along the back of them, to tip the rail cars into the ore bins, and then the ore was stored there until it was able to go out—originally, before they had a crane, with men and horses working to transport it out to the ships.

The fact that the coal, which was the main cargo being transported, was coming in from South Wales, eventually led to the decline of Devoran. Tin ore had been brought down to the Fal River from the St Day area right back to the mediaeval period. And John Taylor had just carried on in this tradition, reusing this area as the port. But really, since the coal mines were in South Wales, to dock on the North Coast of Cornwall would make a whole lot more sense, because you wouldn’t have to go around Land’s End and The Lizard, which were really treacherous navigations at that point. Up to fifty boats a year were being lost coming around to these harbours. The Williams and Fox families owned Hayle and Portreath ports, and they started to build a railway to serve them and would entice the copper and coal people to go up there. That competition eventually led to Devoran’s demise. But up until the 1850s there was still enough copper ore coming out of Gwennap to make it practical. Remember, there were something like six hundred mine shafts in this ‘richest square mile in the world’. So, by the 1850s John Taylor could see that he had to make his railway much more efficient, and he introduced steam. He buys a couple of steam engines from Glasgow and within a year has them operating down here. And they completely change the whole thing: you couldn’t have such steep gradients and tight curves with steam engines as you could with horses, so they restructured a lot of the tracks and reinforced the tracks—with iron from Perran Wharf—to be able to carry the engines. The sleepers were granite, which mainly came from the quarry at Carn Marth, which we’ll see later. So this was all part of a tightly integrated local industrial ecosystem. PAUL CHANEY: The road we walked along to get here was very flat, and that was part of the railway, and the road we’ll be driving along to get to the next location is also a part of the remains of the railway bed. Copper was exported to smelt, it was too expensive to smelt here because you needed coal and, since the coal came from Wales, it would have been too expensive to smelt copper in place. So it was

instead exported and smelted elsewhere in places where coal was ready to hand. During the period we’re talking about, they mainly used it to make bronze and other alloys that were essential for any machinery, very hard and corrosion-resistant, a metal you can mill and make into cogs and engine parts. So in that sense this operation was supplying the whole Industrial Revolution. KH: The steam railway did very well until the 1860s, when there was a huge crash in the copper industry owing to mines opening in South America and South Africa. Since the beginning of the century, Cornwall had accounted for fifty percent of the world’s copper, and most of it came from Gwennap. But in the 1860s suddenly the market was flooded and prices plummeted so drastically that many investors who had interests in Cornwall just pulled out. Taylor was left with this railway, and he extended it further into the Redruth area to service more of the tin mines that were still working. This will give you a sense of just how quickly the industry declined: profits in 1869 were about £8000, in 1870 they were £5000, and in 1871, £400. And that was with all the managers taking a pay cut, and not paying any interest on their loans. A drastic decline, which had its effects across the whole area: Carharrack, Gwennap and St Day villages were particularly hard hit by the recession. Once so populous and busy, grass now grew in the half-deserted streets. Thousands of miners emigrated to Australia, to the Americas and to South Africa, tramping to Padstow or Falmouth for passage on an emigrant ship. What few remained had to seek work where they could in the mines that continued working for tin, in Wheal Basset, Wheal Buller, and the other surviving mines around Redruth. The mines here, and in Camborne, turned to the tin that lay beneath the worked-out Copper but in Gwennap no mine was continued long enough to either prove or disprove whether the same state of affairs existed.1 Over the next thirty years, there were a few revivals in tin, but in general the industry was never the same again after the 1830s. The only respite came with the rise of the arsenic industry, as arsenic, or ‘mundic’, formerly thought of as a troublesome waste product,

became increasingly important as a raw material for the chemical industry.

4. Point Mills Arsenic Works: The Sublimation of Mundick In the 1860s, 10,000 tonnes of arsenic per year was passing through Devoran port. The importance of this mineral, if not its toxicity, was recognised early, as we can read in William Pryce’s 1778 Mineralogia Cornubiensis: Mundick: An exceeding ponderous Mineral, whitish, beautiful, and shining, but brittle […] Mundick, whose great emporium is Cornwall […] we find it very plentiful in Lodes of Tin, Copper and Lead; with which it is so intimately mixed, that it commonly impoverishes the value of each of its companions, notwithstanding every known method is used by fire, water, and various manuductions, to separate and cleanse them from it. [...] Mundick is such a mortifying inmate, as by its communication corrupts the goodness of the Metal, and renders it harsh, brittle, and ill coloured. Arsenic was thus frequently found clinging to the lodes of tin and copper. As Pryce says, it was regarded as a nuisance, but equally, a maxim among miners insists that despite its troublesome nature, it also serves as an indicator of a good vein of metal: ‘a large lode of Mundick commonly rides a good horse’. Arsenic has been celebrated as ‘the cinderella of British mining’. Today enough deposits of arsenic have been discovered worldwide for it to be of very low value; but in the nineteenth century the nascent chemical industry saw it in high demand, for use in pigments (the fashionable green of Victorian wallpapers), insecticides, sheep dip, mordants (used to fix colour in fabric), to make shot, and as a decolouriser in glass manufacture. ROBIN MACKAY: In early alluvial stream mining, the arsenic was no problem—weathering simply removed it slowly. It was in proportion to the increasing depth of mining as it sought out the primary lodestuff that the arsenic problem arose. Miners called the substance ‘mundic’, ‘silver mundic’ or ‘mispickel’ and recognised it by the fact

that, when struck, it gave off a ‘stale-onion-like smell’ (which indeed you can still smell here). Arsenic in underground lodes, concentrated because it had not been washed away naturally, had to be removed artificially in order to purify the ore. So miners used to heat the ‘black tin’ that came out of the mines, oxidising the arsenic, which would be carried off in the fumes. As early as the seventeenth century there were wellestablished procedures to burn off mundick: Mundick in our Tin (which spoils it by making it britly hard, and not malleable) […] we are necessitated to burn away this Weed in the Kiln […] While the Mundick burns the flame is blue, afterward yellow. The more black tin was thus relieved of its arsenic, however, the more effect this had on the locale, as the hot gaseous oxide released, cooled, and fell on the surrounding countryside as powder (‘white arsenic’). The removal would be carried out in blowinghouses; but as mines became larger and more commerciallyminded, they preferred to integrate the arsenic removal process themselves since they could then achieve a higher price for the tin. This enterprising spirit belongs to the early nineteenth century’s surge of entrepreneurial activity in the area, to which we also owe the local manufacture of gunpowder, as we have seen at Kennall Vale—a sort of early ‘horizontal integration’. This went even further, as it was realised that in the amounts it was being removed, arsenic could prove a valuable product in itself. And so, in 1817, Dr Richard Edwards of Falmouth set up the first works at Perranwell to prepare refined arsenic from mine waste. He encouraged mines to build collection flues onto their mines—what would become known as ‘lambreths [labyrinths]’, convoluted chimney shafts where the arsenious oxide would collect as clear crystals, which then had to be dug out by hand, with miners being sent in to scrape it out and facing the risk of festering wounds owing to the corrosive effect of the crystals. This product was then delivered to the arsenic works to be further purified through various processes of refinement or ‘sublimation’.

In 1835, this second refinery was built near Bissoe Bridge. And once there were two companies in the area actively seeking arsenic, the mines soon realised they could make money from selling their soot…making the lemon of arsenic into lemonade. In 1826, 83 tonnes of white arsenic were exported from Penryn, West-Country arsenic had a particular reputation for being effective at removing impurities from glass. The recovery of arsenic ran from 1815–1950, after which the value had fallen so far it was no longer worthwhile. However, there were plans as late as 1912 to revive Wheal Busy mine purely for the production of arsenic (a plan never put into effect because of the advent of the First World War). Early on, although the association between mundic and copper was recognised, the exact family relation between them was disputed, as Pryce tells us: we know several instances of very large Mundick Lodes, answering the pursuit of the concerned with abundance of Copper Ore in depth; from whence many writers have maternalised this Mineral for Copper, which is bastardising the daughter, whose real Mother is Gossan [a kind of imperfect iron ore]; and yet Mundick does partly contain the feed or vitrioloick principle of Copper, and therefore it may with propriety be termed the father, and Gossan the mother, or matrix, to fecundate the feed. The organic language here reflects the prevalent view that mineral deposits grew and reproduced in the earth in the same way as other forms of life—that growths in the depths of the earth were formed just like the flora and fauna on the surface. This is something that’s reflected in the practices of alchemy—if you think that tin is basically the same thing as gold but at a different stage of maturity, then the process of alchemy is that of the speeding up of the maturation of the metal. But I’m going to ask Iain to say more about this. IAIN HAMILTON GRANT: The idea that minerals might grow, that any inorganic material might ‘grow’, strikes us as merely a use of a metaphor, an analogy. And far from going in the other direction, and saying that minerals are evidence that the whole earth is living, it points to a problem regarding whether or not things can be conceived as part of a system, as organised in some manner, or

whether things are extraneous to systems and not organised at all. The very idea, for example, that arsenic ‘rides a good horse’, in terms of finding rich ore deposits, tells you that there are systematic relations between things. So the idea that a thing must be of organic matter in order to be a living thing, in order to be organised, in order to grow, develop, in order to perish, etc., all of these ideas are secondary in relation to the question of organisation. And this reflects, I think, a confusion around what sciences around the turn of the nineteenth century regard as organicism, or what is regarded as organicism when these sciences are discussed. This for all sorts of reasons is a significant date for today’s exploration. I’m basing a lot of the material I’m using on materials found in Humphry Davy’s 1805 lectures on geology as well as his 1811 lectures on geology; and the precursors, the sources of those. So around this period we start hearing about the death of Newtonianism, we start hearing about the end of mechanism in natural scientific explanation. The reason for this is quite simply that mechanism posits that there are simple, individual, isolated, asystemic bodies from which everything is composed. How those are composed is not a question that is posed. So you find, for example in Newton—the arch-mechanist, perhaps—a simple dualism: there are two categories of things, one of them force, the other atoms. We explore what happens when atoms combine to make things, and that’s all we are exploring. That’s mechanism. One can see already how phenomena of life, although clearly a part of the natural world, cannot be explained in terms of the mere combination of parts. Shelley’s romance Frankenstein is an illustration of what else is required in order to make inanimate bodies animate—the answer there is electricity. The idea therefore that inorganic matter may be brought to life by means of electricity is already lodged in the dawning consciousness of a world of organisation that starts to appear at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There is a relation between this and questions of alchemy and the development of chemistry, which happens over the same period—Lavoisier’s Elements of Chemistry is published in 1789—the reason that is such an important

date is that chemistry takes over from alchemy, but tries to do exactly the same thing. In other words, it’s a simple dogma of chemical explanation that we do not understand the thing in chemical terms once we have merely broken it down into its constituent parts, its elements or its atoms; we also need to resynthesize those things. The big problem therefore that chemistry investigates is not simply the analysis of the composition of things—what elements make up what bodies—but also the production of things. Chemistry seeks to reveal the secrets of how it is that nature produces stuff. Bodies are no longer the things out of which everything is made, but rather late consequences of the production process that is the earth. In consequence of this, various theories began to emerge that would help explain the relationship between all these various organisations on the earth. On the one hand, geological, on the other hand, biological—and thirdly, we might mention (mixing the means of categorisation, but never mind), human activity. These three ranges of activity, geological activity, biological activity, and human activity, we might refer to as three stages that we are required to relate if we are to produce a systematic theory of nature. And the way this was done was via a theory called ‘recapitulation’. Recapitulation is a fantastic theory. It holds, for example, that everything that we see in late animals—so for example in man—is simply a recapitulation of earlier ones. I will turn to a particular quote here—this is Lorenz Oken, a notorious philosopher of nature from the end of the eighteenth century who wrote a treatise on the philosophy of nature that was some seven hundred pages long, it started with the relationship between mathematics and protoplasm and ended with a prayer for war…so clearly, a complete nutter! But along the route he was one of the people who developed the theory of recapitulation (although not the only one, and the way in which this theory finds its way into what is subsequently known as ‘serious science’ is instructive). 3034. During its development, the animal passes through all stages of the animal kingdom. The foetus is a representation of all animal classes in time. 3035. At first it is a simple vesicle, stomach, or vitelus, as in the Infusoria.

3036. Then the vesical is doubled through the albumen and shell, and obtains an intestine, as in the Corals. 3037. It obtains a vascular system in the vitelline vessels, or absorbents, as in the Acalephae. 3038. With the blood-system, liver, and ovarium, the embryo enters the class of bivalved Mollusca. 3039. With the muscular heart, the testicle, and the penis, into the class of Snails. 3040. With the venous and arteriose hearts, and the urinary apparatus, into the class of Cephalopods or Cuttle-fish. 3041. With the absorption of the integument, into the class of Worms.2 And so on…and at the end of this ‘so on’, we stand. So in other words, Oken says that the reason a human foetus looks like a fish is because it is a fish. It’s becoming a fish at a specific stage in its development. So that latterly it will be born as a human being. But we’ve all been fish. That’s one account of the theory of recapitulation: it posits that between every stage of an animal’s development, it passes through previous stages of all lower animals. The next development of this entire process is the constitution, as I said earlier, of a threefold parallelism between geological or earth history, natural history or phylology, and human culture, civilisation, and thought. This threefold parallelism is the work of Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, who was professor of comparative anatomy in Stuttgart, in the Karlsschule. Among the luminaries who attended that school and were taught by Kielmeyer is Georges Cuvier, who became professor of comparative anatomy at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, a really important character in the science of morphology. So this is the serious side of the same thing. And yet it is not Oken but Kielmeyer who says that if there are parallel developments among living creatures there must also be parallel developments amongst inorganic matter, organic matter, and thought. So everything that’s going on in the earth is recovered in the creature, in the living creature. How is this so? His example was the skeleton. The skeleton is simply the mineral being around which flesh, muscle, and organ are wrapped. We are like earths, we are basically like clothes hung off this great stalactite, we are stony-hearted besoms. So we have, if you like, the recapitulation of earth history in our skeletons.

We have the recapitulation of natural history in our organs. You can see Oken’s declination of the various organs and the creatures those organs would be, in effect, if they were independent of the organism that we constituted. We next then have to work in the problem of thought: What is it that makes the earth become self-conscious? How is it that nature becomes self-conscious? There is only one way that we know of that nature becomes self-conscious (although talking to Shaun about rats and their uses for urine, I’m not sure that this theory holds water any more, so to speak). And that is through us: we are nature’s way of generating ideas. This is Kielmeyer’s great realisation. If Ideas are natural occurrences, brains have ideas, brains put ideas out there, brains are natural products and therefore ideas are natural products. So we get that threefold parallelism already established. Or at least the grounds of that threefold parallelism. Instead therefore of looking for the primitive bodies or elements that lie at the root of things, what we try and do is recover or recapitulate, repeat, literally, the constitution or organisation of all these series in everything we do. In point of fact, we can’t help this. As Novalis said, ‘our forefathers’ thoughts are merely the natural product of a previous age, and whereas the earth’s history is layered in strata, our forefathers’ thought, that element of natural production, is in the leaves of a book’. And there we have it—that’s a replacement account, if you like, for atomism, and at the same time a prologue to understanding what’s happening when you’re having an idea, in relationship to the rest of the planet. JAMES STRONGMAN: Copper and arsenic are very close in the periodic table: copper’s 33, arsenic’s 29. So in terms of size, and their properties, they’re very similar. During the mineralisation process in Cornwall, as we discussed before, you’ve got this big lump of granite which has melted, and many of the rocks that are above it contain fluids rich in boron and chlorine, and these elements are vital for dissolving metals. If you just put metal in a river it won’t dissolve, you need these other elements in the fluid, circulating in and around the granite, into the surrounding rocks, scavenging base

metals from the granite. And as the granite cools they get forced to the top of the granite and concentrated there. As it cools further, the boron forms a mineral called tourmaline which is quite a pure Cornish granite. So you’ve got this mountain-building episode going on, granite underneath scavenging, and building and cooling. And as this mountain-building episode slows down it relaxes, the pressure comes off, and the fluids are always trying to find the easiest way to the surface, and what they usually do is find old fault lines. One of the classic faults was the Kennall Vale valley, which has its roots four hundred million years ago in a really old fracture in the crust. But many of the lodes strike in similar directions because they’re following these pressure-release fractures. So, as the pressure comes off, the first thing to deposit is the tin, because it’s the least soluble and has the lowest mobility. So that’s why you get the tin low down and near the granite. The copper and the arsenic and the zinc carry on because they’re still in solution in chlorides. But as they get closer to the surface and the temperature and pressure drop, they start to precipitate. And they precipitate with another element, sulphur, and sulphur has a atomic number of 16. So the arsenic and the copper form sulphides, first, which is where you get chalcopyri with copper and iron sulphide, you get some sulphides, and arsenopyrite, which is the principal form of arsenic mineral. So when they say you’ve hit a load of arsenic, mundic, you’re on a good horse, it’s because if you follow that, you’ll get back to the tin, which is further down below it. Sulphur is 16, arsenic’s got a value of 33, and together they can form arsenides. So instead of two sulphurs you have one copper and one arsenic, so you can get these minerals. And obviously when you’re mining these, it’s quite hard to separate the arsenic from the copper, which is why it caused problems for the early miners. In the Camborne and Redruth area they actually left a lot of this in the ground until later they figured out the processes to extract it. But here, they didn’t have that problem to begin with, because they were mining near-surface deposits which had been enriched by supergene processes occurring near the surface, where rainwater that has percolated into the ground and

been heated by the rocks below circulates and oxidates the sulphide ores. There are some really beautiful looking minerals, all the blue and green oddball minerals that are famous in this area, they all derive from this supergene enrichment. So the early miners, when they saw their copper, it was almost in the form of copper itself, it was copper oxide. But as they went deeper they found copper sulphide instead, and that’s where the problems of arsenic start to occur, and you release sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, and you’ve got arsenic going up into the air and getting deposited. Obviously it’s not a great thing to be filling the air with. In fact, one of the main uses of arsenic was that it was sent to the cotton fields of America to be used as a pesticide. SHAUN LEWIN: In a way this is like a slow volcano, pumping stuff from the centre of the earth gently into the surrounding landscape. What this means is that all these toxic deposits that are buried in the earth are being, through an immense act of human generosity, brought to the surface. One of the characteristic things about the soil around volcanoes is that they’re dreadful places for life; and what we see around us here is the first riposte of nature to this influx of inorganic toxins. So what do I see? Some birch trees, for example, these are classic species for colonising places that have suffered some kind of immense catastrophe. Gradually these reproducing species are finding any small foothold in the area where they can persist for some length of time. Equally, the yellow flowers of the gorse, that’s one of the plants that is in many ways a signal, saying, this soil is desperately impoverished, we’re going to have to nitrify it ourselves by drawing down nitrifying materials from the atmosphere and locking them in the soil, because the soil’s incapable of supporting plant life. JS: The arsenic is still here now, it’ll always be here, it just depends what form it’s in. In an oxide form, it’s quite mobile. When it’s exposed to the air, when it’s oxidised, it’s quite soluble. In its sulphide form, it’s almost completely insoluble, so it’s not going to do anything. That’s the distinction between organic and inorganic varieties of arsenic: If you ate arsenopyrite, you wouldn’t get arsenic

poisoning, it’d just pass through you. But there’s a lot of water in these mines that will then oxidise any minerals that are brought to the surface. So you have the potential for catastrophe here—like what happened when the County Adit got blocked and the water level rose, and you had all these freshly-oxidised chemicals pouring out and into the water system. 1. D.B. Barton, The Redruth and Chasewater Railway (Truro: D. Bradford Barton Ltd., revised edition 1966), 63. 2. L. Oken, Elements of Physiophilosophy, tr. A. Tulk (London: Ray Society, 1847), 491.

5. Nangiles and the Great County Adit: Underground Miracles and Toxic Overflows As we approached the remaining chimney of the Point Mills Arsenic Works, you will have noticed that the stream running beside the works is orange; you’ll also notice this box, which is monitoring for toxicity—not for arsenic, but for the repercussions of a major pollution incident that occurred not far upstream, and which we’ll discuss later. The river that flows past the arsenic works here is, like ‘the Red River’ that flows between Carn Camborne and Carn Brea, coloured by mineral deposits associated with mining, including ochre, which was another substance recovered from tin and copper mines and exported from Devoran. But this stream has a particular significance. As we walk the track from Bissoe Bridge, we’ll see the remains of Nangiles. This was a mine whose water was said to be so ‘vitriolick’ with what we now know was sulphuric acid, that it ‘would rot a man’s boots off in a day’. In January 1992 the so-called ‘Wheal Jane’ disaster loosed this vitriolic substance into the sea, as 320 million litres of untreated acidic mine water and sludge burst from the Nangiles adit—we’ll see the slope where it ran out—causing an ‘ochre plume of contamination’ that turned Restronguet creek and the waters at Devoran bright orange with ferric oxide—more visible but actually less harmful than the invisible zinc and cadmium that accompanied it. The monitoring equipment we can see near the Arsenic Works is part of a project by the National River Authority, which also at one time (unsuccessfully) attempted to extract the metals organically from the water using reed beds. ROBIN MACKAY: With the development of lode mining as opposed to surface or stream working, the principal problem became that of driving the underground water out of the mines. One of the earliest methods for doing so was the driving of adits—underground tunnels which drain the water from the hillside so that it doesn’t have to be

raised to the surface. However, the ease of making these depends on there being very hilly terrain, so in the west this was not so easy; then there was the use of hand-pumps, then horse-driven pump and ‘whims’; and finally water-engines—machines driven by waterwheels. By the mid-eighteenth century, water power was the principal means by which to deal with the problem of drainage, the primary and most costly problem of mining: Fight Water with Water! PAUL CHANEY: They even had waterwheels under the ground—so you’ve got waterwheels being powered by water running pumps which are pumping water…hydraulic capitalism: you’ve got this positively charged water which you’re using to get rid of the negatively charged water. RM: Water remained the most important energy source until the late eighteenth century and the arrival of that great Cornish invention, the Newcomen engine. But even then coal was such a luxury, and the ‘atmospheric engines’ so costly to build and install, that the waterwheel remained more cost-effective for many years. Mineworks that used the rivers were, however, levied a ‘water rent’—in a memo from a Camborne mine in 1764, a not inconsiderable £210 per year. And the ‘owners’ of the water could of course sell it many times over. On the other hand, if the topography of Cornwall had been different, with more frequent and stronger sources of hydraulic energy, then the development of the steam engine would have been held up for longer; nevertheless, as the mines kept driving deeper and deeper, at a certain point the ‘dewatering problem’ would have inevitably demanded more power. There is thus a ‘tipping point’ parameterised by these multiple factors. In 1829 John Taylor wrote: The expense of drawing the water by steam power in some of the deep mines of Cornwall, with the saving in the quantity of coal in the last twenty years, coupled with the reduced price of the fuel owing to better methods of purchase and conveyance, is now but about one-sixth of what it formerly was. Steam engines themselves are also not only less costly to erect, but they are more certain in their effect, and less liable to those hindrances which are so injurious to the miner.

SHAUN LEWIN: In our last location the impact of mineral production is being expressed on the ground in the production of flora and fauna there due to the arsenic poisoning, the general toxicity of it. Here we have the greatest achievement of the whole project, namely that there is soil here which is just dust, there’s nothing in it to hold plant life. See the heather here, which is just about holding on, there’s nothing in the soil to hold water. I think those conifers there have probably been planted as an attempt to stabilise the soil, because I imagine it’s probably a polluting event in its own right: every time it dries out dust goes into the atmosphere and gets blown about, maybe causing respiratory problems. The sulphuric acid that was mentioned earlier, it’s quite interesting because when it interacts with rain, the acidification of the soil then releases the nutrients that are normally held within soil. The acid creates a situation where the soil has to release its own nutrients, so the whole mess expands and anything that could aid growth is just washed out. So not only is this just a heap of dust, with a few plants desperately trying to survive— maybe there’s some moss, which is clinging to the rocks—but also the area around it will be losing nutrients due to the acid rain. JAMES STRONGMAN: As I was saying earlier, when minerals are exposed to the air they oxidise, they become a much more mobile form. Basically what happened here at Nangiles with the old mine workings was that they had been dry for some time, and everything, as it is now, was draining out of the old workings, and there were no real new minerals, nothing mobile being added to it. When the adit got blocked and the water levels rose up, and all of this flooded, it flushed a huge amount of freshly released minerals in their most toxic form straight out into the river Fal and poisoned everything— basically it was a flash flooding. PC: There are actually multiple catastrophic events. There is the one James was talking about, but also in the 1990s there was the disaster of the Wheal Jane settling tank up on the hill above us, which was like a huge manmade lake holding millions of gallons of sludge that had been pumped out of the mine, and the levee broke.

JS: Yeah, the drain collapsed, and that pushed up the level, until it overflowed over the top. But both events essentially involve the same process, which is that when these minerals are in the ground, no oxidants are getting to them and they’re in their sulphide form, and they’re pretty stable, they’re not toxic. As soon as they begin to oxidise, especially if they’ve been smashed up pretty small, so you’ve got a large surface area, they oxidise very quickly and that’s when they get mobile. The addition of oxygen is the main cause of the problem. PC: Seeing these industrial endeavours in ecological terms, in terms of niches, you can model all sorts of things. This is a good example because this explodes out into the whole Fal estuary, which completely finishes off the oyster fishing, which was an industry that went back hundreds of years. You see them racing all the Falmouth working boats during the summer, they have no reason to exist now except to race, because there are still hardly any oysters left in the Fal. KENNA HERNLY: Just past Nangiles, we’ll also pass the outlet of the Great County Adit, a giant series of tunnels that passes beneath the mines of this area to drain them. Working in tandem with all of the different technologies used for pumping out mines, this network of drainage tunnels, built over a period of decades, deserves to be seen as one of the great invisible engineering miracles of the nineteenth century. Although all the mines served by the Great County Adit have closed and it is unmaintained, this massive system stretching for forty miles in total still drains many of their underground workings today; in the summer of 1980 the flow was 500,000 gallons per day. From the late 1600s miners were driving adits to drain out the mines. Then in the 1700s there were a few changes in the coal laws. The Godolphins, who lived in Cornwall, were very good friends of Queen Anne, and they fought very hard to remove a seaborne coal tax which had prevented the industrial use of coal beyond the immediate areas where it was mined, because it was just too expensive. So in 1710, two sets of laws had this tax removed.

Suddenly the driving of adits was more viable because you could use coal and steam to pump the water out and drain it into an adit. So the adits, throughout Cornwall, and especially in this area, were very important. The Great County Adit, which drained the Poldice Valley mines and here, was completed in 1748 by the London and Williams families, and it drained the largest concentration of copper mines in the world. The first branch runs from Nangiles to the western end of Poldice, its branching network eventually drains around 70 mines to an average of 80–100 meters, and attained a length of around 40 miles in total. In 1859 it discharged around 66 million litres per day, and had more steam engines pumping into its course than were used by the whole of continental Europe and America combined. This made it not only the richest but also the most technologically-advanced square mile in the world. The County Adit drained 40 percent of the infiltrating surface water. And from that point on, the County Adit was a major cooperative endeavour between mine owners and mine adventurers, as the investors were called: a new mine would open and they’d need drainage. So the board that oversaw the adit, which consisted of all the mine-owners, would see that it was extended to that mine, and every time a mine was productive the adit would be extended. You end up with this maze of tunnels going everywhere to all the major mines. Inside the adit you had a complex series of wooden leats leading the water to the right place from different sections of the mine, then it would lead it to the main tunnel, which drains out into the sea. And each mine would pay for the percentage of the adit used. So the more mines that were on your section of adit, the cheaper it was. That then became one of the factors in the decline of copper mining in this area. A reverse network effect: it became more expensive to use the adit the less mines there were.

6. Gwennap Pit: From Subsidence to Sanctification Gwennap Pit, a depression very possibly caused by mining subsidence, was subsequently used as an open-air preaching pit. Shown in nineteenth-century depictions as a vast and impressive arena capable of accommodating thousands, it dates from the mideighteenth century and was a centre of Wesleyanism, whose promise of sanctification ameliorated many a miner’s life. In his account of his travels through Cornwall, gothic novelist William Beckford sardonically portrays its role in maintaining the social position of the ‘sons of darkness’: Two strange-looking beings, dressed in ghostly white, conducted me about and very kindly proposed a descent into the bowels of the earth, but I declined the invitation. These mystagogues occupy a tolerable house with fair sash windows, where the inspectors [adventurers] of the mine hold their meetings and regale upon beef, pudding and brandy. While I was standing at the door of this habitation several woeful figures in tattered garments with pickaxes on their shoulders crawled out of a dark fissure and repaired to a hovel, which I learnt was a gin-shop. There they pass the few hours allotted them above ground and drink, it is to be hoped, in oblivion of their subterranean existence. Piety, as well as gin, helps to fill up their leisure moments, and I was told that Wesley, who came apostolising into Cornwall a few years ago, preached on this very spot to about 7,000 followers. Since this period Methodism has made a very rapid progress and has been of no trifling service in diverting the attention of these sons of darkness from their present condition to the glories of the life to come.1 PAUL CHANEY: Here we are at Gwennap Pit, which is an oratory built in the mid-eighteenth century. There may have been a natural pit here before, there’s a lot of debate about whether this structure was manmade, a result of subsidence due to mining, or something else. We’ve talked a lot about materials, minerals, and movements of materials and machines, but we haven’t yet talked very much about people. To understand the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy fully, it’s important to contextualise the changes in the mindset of the new

industrial human as hydroplutonic trauma was relayed through rural communities, violently reconfiguring them through the physical hardship of industrial extraction and through their increasing subjection to remote control by abstract capital. But this ground had already been prepared in advance. I’m going to begin with the English Civil War. The war lasted longer in Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly than anywhere else, a result of its peninsula topography and its remoteness from the rest of England. Some lost heavily during the struggle, others gained, but the biggest economic change was the transfer of ownership of land between the landed gentry and the newer commercial gentry. This left an overriding sense that land was no longer a permanent asset, and should be used to its fullest extent while one was in possession of it. Before the Civil War the majority of land was in the stable possession of traditional landowning families; land simply got passed down from family member to family member. Mining in Cornwall had previously taken place on a small scale under informal agreements between the landowners and the miners, and had mostly consisted of tin stream mining. The miners’ activities were overseen by the Stannary Laws, which existed only in Cornwall and Devon. If you were an ‘adventurer’ and wanted to extract tin from a piece of land, you had the right to do so anywhere: you just made a pile of rocks in each corner of the piece of land you wanted to work, and then you could work it and you paid a tax, a tin toll, to the landowner. This scenario was always in flux, there wasn’t really any formalised concept of mineral rights in the modern legal sense. The enclosures movement from 1760 to 1820 marked an absolute change from the mediaeval agrarian society that had previously been made up of small communities sharing common land for grazing. The agrarian peasant class didn’t hold any title over land, but land was the resource they relied upon for their entire existence. With the enclosures movement, huge numbers of people no longer had access to the land, generating a huge deterritorialized labour force of peasants looking for work. As we know, this newly-available desperate half-starved labour force willing to do anything to earn a (pasty) crust soon converged

with the explosion of industrialisation facilitated by new technologies and fuelled by new advances in science. In Cornwall, mines began opening up throughout the landscape in previously uninhabitable locations. And the settlements associated with these industrial complexes were able to place themselves outside of the boundaries previously dictated by the agrarian infrastructure, as their inhabitants were no longer reliant on fertile sheltered soils to make a living by farming. In The View from Carn Marth, George Henwood from the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall describes, in terms scarcely less gothic than Beckford’s, the schismatic effect of this resettlement: To one unaccustomed to a mining industry, the view from Carnmarth, which is a rocky eminence of 757 feet, is full of novelty. Over a surface neither mountainous or flat, but diversified from sea to sea by a constant series of low, undulating hills and vales, the farmer and the miner seem to be occupying the country in something like the confusion of warfare. The situations of the Consolidated Mines, the United Mines, the Poldice Mine, etc., are marked out by spots a mile in length by half a mile in breadth, covered with what are termed ‘deads’ of the mine, i.e. slatey, poisonous rubbish, thrown up in ragged heaps, which at a distance give the place the appearance of an encampment of soldiers’ tents. This lifeless mass follows the course of the main lode (usually east and west), and from it, in different directions, minor branches of the same barren rubbish diverge through the fertile country, like the streams of lava from a volcano. The miner, being obliged to have a shaft for air at every hundred yards, and the stannary laws allowing him freely to pursue his game, his hidden path is commonly to be traced by a series of heaps of ‘deads’ which rise up among the green fields and among the grazing cattle like the workings of a mole. The subtle war between farmer and miner described by Henwood unfolded in both physical and moral space. The new human was something of a contradictory entity: these people whose existence was previously agrarian, and who understood the biotic cycles of agricultural life, were now implicated in the extraction of toxicity from inside the earth and its mucky distribution across the surface. While the farmer toils away season by season, working with and through the wonders of a benevolent god’s fecund creation, reliant upon his providence, the miner-mole enters blindly into the abode of Old Nick

himself, dragging the sulphurous hellwaste up to the surface above. This tension inevitably began to play out in new forms of religious belief, developed and consolidated in places just like the one we’re sitting in today. Scattered across this scorched earth, miners developed a new collective identity bound together by common peril, but also fiercely and defiantly individualist and little disposed to be dictated to by the established Church. To the Anglican church, rumours of the wave of religious revivals sweeping Cornwall during the early industrial era would have sounded dangerously like the return of the sectarianism that had splintered the faith for centuries, and which the C of E had only just quelled, having ousted sectarian ‘fanaticisms’ and consolidated a middlebrow, undemonstrative and mild faith wary of any outpouring of spiritual feeling or frenzied fervour. After the extreme violence of the Civil War, the Church of England retreated further to a position of comfort, satisfied with outward conformism in the stable world of agrarian production and traditional trade between the rural and the urban. But in areas throughout Britain where land reform had increased the rate of industrialisation, it was faced with an exponentially growing population of labourers and the middle classes who ran the new industrial endeavours. The Church failed to recognise its potential role in seeking out a reconciliation between these individuals and the new industrial reality that was unfolding before them, and, throughout the nineteenth century, the gap widened further between what the C of E was able to provide and what was appropriate spiritually and pastorally to a newlyindustrialised population interested less in learned theological arguments than in direct individual access to a theodicy and an emotional experience that would make sense of their arduous and hazardous labours. This was also a geographical matter: settlements near mines were often very far from the nearest parish church, with no proper roads between them. In Cornwall there weren’t enough churches or clerics to attend to the spiritual and welfare needs of the population, and often Anglican clergy weren’t interested in doing so. The Church of England was associated with an upper class who benefited from the

existing social order, to whom they catered. The young sons of this ‘academic oligarchy’, attracted to a clerical life of quiet spiritual devotion, were more comfortable ministering to their own in the affluent rural villages and fashionably elegant centres of commerce than among the new dark and dirty reality of rurally dispersed industrial sites. Spiritually speaking, the physical difficulties associated with mining were liable to encourage men to believe that their own labours were enough to win the love of god for conquering nature. Intense activity required an act of faith; luck, fate, and predestination were concepts that no longer made sense to the new industrial human. To them, good fortune no longer relied on appearing virtuous in the eyes of god. In an agrarian system, if the crops failed it meant god in his providence had decreed that it should be so. Operating within the web of life, the peasant farmer was to a large degree entirely at the mercy of things outside of human control. But in the new industrial reality, if a steam engine blew up and the pump stopped, trapping men underground to be slowly drowned by rising flood water, the fault clearly lay not with god, but with the engineer who designed the faulty valve. A new faith would have to accommodate the degree of zeal required in order to surmount these intimidating threats faced every day by miners. In addition, the livelihood of the mines was tied to novel economic forces: fluctuation of prices owing to competition, lobbying of parliament for price controls, constant potential for the discovery of richer lodes elsewhere, and the vicissitudes of speculation. What was required was a creed capable of bonding a community and a traditional regional identity torn asunder from below by deteterritorialization and from above by the forces of capital. Affording spiritual dignity to the labouring poor with its schema of individual spiritual development, Methodism also displaced the function of local folklore and superstition by providing ‘propitiatory rituals which offered hope of safety in a life where death was always very close’2 and a collective theatre which, unlike the C of E, endowed Christianity with some of the immediate and emotional impact appropriate to the populace’s new condition.3

John Wesley and his brother Charles first visited Cornwall in the summer of 1743. Wesley was an ordained Anglican churchman who had embarked on a personal mission to ‘supplement and reinvigorate the life of the church’. He concentrated his efforts on the most highly-populated areas of the new industrial landscape and its ostracised landless workers, conducting open-air services—including here at Gwennap Pit—and small meetings in numerous private houses. He gloried in the salvation of forgotten congregations, many of whom he encouraged to educate themselves in small classes, providing a sense of community lacking in places where economic change had rapidly altered society and created communities disenfranchised from any kind of moral base. Methodism appealed directly to the new industrially self-made man who had been rejected by all other classes of society, and Methodist chapels became gathering places for a new culture that replaced the quasi-paganism of the peasantry, centres of community life. The new industrial reality not only defaced the pastoral idyll, but broke the physical and fiscal limitations it had placed on the lower classes. The human was no longer a dutiful worker bound to being a mere husbandman of god’s bountiful creation, working within a tight network of seasonal biotic cycles to extract a meagre land-based living defined by the economic osmosis between landed and landless. Mineral extraction offered a way out of both the traditional hegemony of land ownership, and the tyranny of biotic interdependency. However, the toxic realities of mineral extraction required a new stairway to heaven no longer dependent on the accolade of being a good husbandman to god’s creation. Wesley espoused the idea of Pneumatology—the claim that one can be close to the true spirit of the sacred through faith alone rather than deed. This offered the new working classes hope for a better existence in the afterlife, enabling them to abstract themselves from their everyday toils, as well as to offload the moral weight of their complicity in the destruction of the creation. If all actions, and passions, and tempers of men are quite independent of their own choice, are governed by a principle exterior to themselves; then none of them is rewardable or punishable, is either praise or blameworthy. The

consequence is undeniable: I cannot praise the sun for warming, nor blame the stone for wounding me; because neither the sun nor the stone acts from choice, but from necessity. Therefore, neither does the latter deserve blame, nor the former deserve praise. Neither is the one capable of reward, nor the other of punishment. And if a man does good as necessarily as the sun, he is no more praiseworthy of that; and is he does evil as necessarily as the stone, he is no more blameworthy.4 Through this doctrine of justification by faith, Wesley lubricated the human components of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy. His theodicy of suffering provided an explanatory framework for what would otherwise seem an infernal engine of creation, resynthesis, and death. His teachings on determination and necessity disconnected the hand of the sacred from the will of the machine, and explained the mass deaths caused by industrial accidents—a particular kind of hard-edged and futile death man had not experienced before his reentry into geological time. Simultaneously, Wesley appropriated the new scientific language of geology into his sermonising, cleverly reframing the geological formations hidden under the earth’s surface not as Hadean horrors from the very lair of Satan himself, but merely as benign fruits that grew naturally in ‘god’s vast underground orchard’. (Indeed, Pryce’s Mineralogia Cornubiensis records that this organicism pervaded popular belief: ‘The most common opinion among the miners in Cornwall is, that certain immature Minerals do nourish and feed the Ores with which they are inter-mixed in the mines’). Thereby his teachings moved against the ancient anathema on plutonic plunder, allowing those involved in the extractive industries to consider themselves to be continuing the work of tending the sacred creation, even as the excreta of the mining industries despoiled the verdant world above. Wesley then was the miner’s advocate, a spiritual leader willing to cast his lot against the authority of the church and to challenge the established theology of the day to save souls that would surely be lost according to institutional doctrine. In doing so, he paved the way for a general disconnection between faith and ecology, ushering in

an era of justified natural desecration, and cracking open the door towards existentialism a tiny bit more by debunking predestination. In 1999, the late and infamous British DJ John Peel was guided to this very spot to conduct an interview with musicians Richard D. James and Luke Vibert—a pair of disaffected Cornish youths who grew up a stone’s throw from here, and whose work often reflects on the desecrated landscape of the region (several of James’s tracks reference Cornish words and place names, including Carn Marth; one of Vibert’s aliases is Kerrier District, referencing a former government district in mid-Cornwall that contains the Gwennap area). 5 Peel speculatively suggests that ‘Wesley was the Aphex Twin of the seventeenth century […] anti-establishment and radical, he also produced some great music in the form of hymns’. At one point, Peel turns to this latter-day Wesley and asks him if he knows the purpose of the stone structure halfway down the pit (which looks very much like a lectern), to which James replies: ‘That’s where you put the decks’. ROBIN MACKAY: It’s interesting how, from the fear of god and reliance on his providence, the situation shifts to the value of labour being subject instead to the obscure and fickle providence of global capital —to new fears of new unknowns. An interesting coda to this is that, from the early nineteenth century, successive waves of popular revivalism swept through the sites where Methodism had implanted itself. Their collective zeal was often so excessive as to threaten local industry rather than offer a functional safety valve for its labourers: Popular revivals generally continued for days and sometimes weeks, disrupted work, and upset commerce. In 1814 in Redruth, ‘for some time all business in the town was suspended, even little was done in the market-days, but the chapels were crowded day and night’. In Ponsanooth [the village where Kennall Vale is located] in 1823–4, ‘for eight weeks successively they never broke up their meetings by day, and seldom by night’. The divergence of these popular revivals from Wesleyan doctrine caused concern for a Methodist establishment increasingly preoccupied with institutionalising the connexion and rebuffing

charges of ‘enthusiasm’. Throughout the nineteenth century the Methodist Conference fought a long battle to bring them back to orthodoxy, moving to suppress the idiosyncrasies of Cornish practices. But it was held back by the remote and scattered nature of the communities, and lack of sufficient numbers of suitably qualified ministers to come and superintend them. Even Methodism, ultimately, found it challenging to satisfy the pneumatological vacuum of the outer circuits of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, that set of traumatic repercussions radiating out from the geological depths to the spiritual heights, and for which the concentric rings of Gwennap Pit perhaps provide an appropriate symbol—or tautegory.

7. Carn Marth: A Bleak Prospect Finally, we stop for a while at the top of Carn Marth Hill to take in the scene, and continue with Beckford’s description: Within a radius of two miles from the spot on which you now stand, more than 20,000,000 pounds—aye, than 30,000,000 pounds—worth of minerals have been raised from the bowels of the earth, and have been wrought for generations. The valley on the south-east was the scene of perhaps some of the earliest endeavours at mining ever practised in this country—the Carnon Stream—once a mighty torrent, hurling a prodigious quantity of tin before its impetuous flood, thus providing an easy mode of procuring it, when man, from his imperfect knowledge of metallurgy and gunpowder, would have been unable to pierce the tremendously hard rocks he even now finds it difficult to explore. Wonderful providence! Striking illustration of order and providence in the works of the Deity! Here, rather than the mineral depths being accursed and forbidden, god’s providence extends to tempting man’s cupidity by giving him a seductive taster of what lies beneath…. Beckford then follows the course of the streams to the port of Devoran, the entrepot of the mines of this district, by which, indeed, it was entirely created. That railway, whose locomotive you may perceive runs to Devoran, is of vast advantage to the neighbourhood—watch it; see how it threads through the different mines with its immense burden! He further describes the vista as follows, giving some impression of the extent and intensity of mining activity in the surrounding area: Seven engines in United Mines—beyond that the Clifford mines; to east Great Baddern, Wheal Jane and East Falmouth. On the north, Great Consolidated Mines, ten engines; on east Nangiles and Wheal Sperries, Wheal Whiddon and West Wheal Jane. Now, if you observe the run of the burrows, you will perceive the lodes of these mines run a little to the south of east and north of west; when we descend I will show you their dip…but look further north; that group is the St. Day United Mines, beyond the Creegbrawse and Penkivel Mines. Still further north, and parallel, are the Wheal Jewel, Wheal Damsel, and West Damsel; that very extensive mine on the still further north is the Great Wheal Busy. The village, whose church you may perceive, is Chacewater; that nearer is St. Day.

The scattered engine-houses you see still further north are in the St. Agnes district, and comprise North and South Ellen, the Great Tywarnhaile, Wheal Towan, etc. Besides these, on the hill you see Polbreen and Polperro. The hill is St. Agnes’ beacon […]. Appropriately for a gothic writer, Beckford does not spare the darkness, leaving the reader in no doubt that what the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy bequeaths to us is an infernal, black planet: […] [These mines] are situated in a bleak desert, rendered still more doleful by the unhealthy appearance of its inhabitants. At every step one stumbles upon ladders that lead into utter darkness, or funnels that exhale warm copperous vapours. All around these openings the ore is piled up in heaps ready for purchasers. I saw it drawn reeking out of the mine by the help of a machine called a whim put in motion by mules, which in their turn are stimulated by impish children hanging over the poor brutes and flogging them without respite. This dismal scene of whims, suffering mules and hillocks of cinders extends for miles. Huge iron engines creaking and groaning invented by Watt, and tall chimneys smoking and flaming, that seem to belong to old Nicholas’s abode, diversify the prospect. 1. W. Beckford, Italy, with Sketches of Spain and Portugal (London: Bentley, 2 vols., 1834), vol. 2, 8. 2 H. McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe 1789–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 39. 3 One writer described the ‘hedgerow religion’ of Cornish Methodism as follows: ‘in making the feelings the test of the spiritual condition, it comes about that conscious spiritual exultation is looked upon as the one manifestation of God’s grace’. ‘All other aspects of religion seemed “to sink into insignificance before the special favour shown to a person in enabling him to feel”’. Told for a Memorial. The Story of Mary Ann (London, 1886), 70–71, cited in D. H. Luker, ‘‘Cornish Methodism, Revivalism, and Popular Belief, c. 1780–1870’, PhD Thesis, Jesus College, Oxford, 1987, 340–41. 4 J. Wesley. ‘Thoughts upon Necessity’, in Works (Bristol: William Pine, 32 vols., 1771–74), vol. 10, 464. 5 James' alias Aphex Twin’s 2018 Collapse EP came accompanied by epileptic videos seemingly evoking a mushroom-addled journey through a digitally scrambled Redruth, and graphics that depict an abyssal four-dimensional

Gwennap Pit: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmsHEYahiDk>, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqayDnQ2wmw>.

Jake Chapman Ode to the Industrial Revolution Beneath Satan’s iron-clad cranium… Cyclops casts a doe-eye o’er his immortal thousands, who strive… with dreadful hearts pumping, and lungful furnaces, hissing flames in subterraneous arteries and subcutaneous caverns… snouts sap like drowning moles, to satiate the infernal furnace with ancient coals; doomed in airless gloom—let them delve! Saved—nay hidden—from frightful sight, whilst on the surface of their toil in joyful Bacchanals our woes we do drown, (like) the litter of cats and dogs, plunged into bags, in river met… misery flows away, on current raisin fruit and nut —an iron bar— clunk…! grim ambassador of Death! And seized within, a damaged landscape’s ample bound the wheels of the bus go ‘round and ‘round, matter, first found, then wrought, wrenched asunder—

there!—manufacture is found—what wonder! Rudely unfolding Satan’s latent wealth and Nature’s stolen worth, diffuse manner torn from the Earth! Hidden beneath rocks, in dormant slumber, in clay, and shallow lodging, sleeps crude iron, filthy interstellar nucleosynthesis, here lies the death-bed of infinite time— Rust In Pieces. Here too blackest bitumen retires, in beady eyes— or polished ball-bearing, future flames flicker, roaring volcanoes deafen the hard of hearing! Superheated gases, owing nothing to the temperature of the sun, belch from the bilious aperture of industry’s bum, with black-ash plus pumice mixed with the bright efflorescence of sulphur. Turbulent clouds coil, the cumulative insistence of a morbid nightmare— curling plus entwining, puffs of mephitic vapour wink indolently… From the earth’s gigantic blowhole, Poison to choke the air, chemicals riot, black soot plus incinerated basaltic rock, gushing into white-hot magma-chamber— the lurid furnace —of obese paroxysm. Heat ripples purple sea, the sum fury of every lightening strike,

ever to have hailed from-sky-to-earth, now polarity reversed, a million years of accumulated wrath— tectonic holocaust rages from earth’s monstrous bowels. The corpse-grinder takes revenge, thrust upwards, into a mortally wounded heaven. Subductive power, sent into the sky, absorbs the onslaught, water draws back, as though aghast, peeling from the obscene protuberance, to reveal, by chance, in the vacated abyss, many legions of sea creatures stuck fast in slime, vast metal mountains, stainless steel valleys, hidden in unplumbed depths… So the sea rises in its turn, dashes mightily against land, overwhelms shoreline, and levels church, engorging the populations of animals plus man in sickening affray. Soon the sun is dimmed, a dark mass now so dense, the cloud to collapse under its weight, a black avalanche, rains from ruined sky… The terrible form, sprouts, filaments,

twist plus turn, twisting inside, and out, of single, and three phase convection currents, twisting and turning, now, a swarm moving en masse, cognisant, with nucleated aim… The air thickens, Nuts, bolts, washers, screws, tooth and nail drop from cloud one-by-one-by-one, a living, breeding, carpet on the ground, plus swathing earth— the noise of industrious insect jaws— gluttonous iron locusts vomit scalding lava, streams and steam, and every particle of substance, prone to relentless mandible gnaw. Before our very eyes, matter now tortured and transformed, matter traded—‘kind for unkind’, until the excrement of toil and rack, tints the blue sea dark brown plus green land black…

Reza Negarestani Revolution Goes Ferric: Notes on the Deeper Traumatic History of the Industrial Revolution To further penetrate the twisted depths of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, it should be pointed out that the iron-richness of the earth—and thus the bustling vibe of the industrial life on the surface of the planet—posits Earth ironically as the Planet of Death rather than the Planet of Life, given the fact that all this metal wealth was inherited and accumulated from iron implosions marking the end of life for massive stars which once outshone the sun in size and glory. When a massive star begins to die, in the process of silicon burning as the result of ferociously consuming all the carbon in its core, the dying star begins to decay from the inside, producing in its core heavy isotopes of metal such as nickel, iron, and zinc. These metal isotopes are spewed forth in the last hours and minutes of the dying star as both its matricidal offspring and post-mortem relics. Since the production of such metals consumes energy without releasing any, these metallic offspring asphyxiate their mother whilst they are inside its womb. The giant star falls into an irreversible process whereby everything that is in its core as well as its last traces of life (oxygen, neon and magnesium) turn into iron. A collapsing iron core is born that mortifies the star like an agency of death whose weight brings down the solar mass in a matter of a day. Right after death, the superficial layers of the dead star explode into space, showering everything in the vicinity with metal-rich asteroids which continue to decay—even after the death of the star—into an isotope of iron, enacting the iron relic as the materialised personification of stellar death par excellence. Just as the sun in its hellish excess is not really the source of terrestrial climates—nor is it a model of unrestricted economy—it is

not the bottom of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy either. The iron wealth of the sun is only evidence of a solar trauma: Just as there is a geotrauma from which the dreams, memories, fictions, realities and nightmares of the earth emerge, there is also a heliotrauma, that is to say, a traumatised and unconscious realm within the solar horizon of the sun itself. The regressions, repressions, fictions and nightmares of the sun surpass those of the earth in magnitude and intensity simply because the sun is far more traumatised in its formation than the earth. The hegemony of the Solar Empire is only a symptom of its traumatic formation, upon which too much psychoanalytical time has been wasted. The richness of iron as the relic of stellar death residing within the earth testifies to the traumatic formation of the sun and the solar system. The richness of metal in planet Earth insinuates that the sun must have formed much later than the other stars in the galaxy. In other words, the profusion of metal in the sun and the solar system and consequently in the earth points to the concentrated and strong presence of alien—and not heliotopically indigenous—cosmic iron isotopes during the formation of the sun and the solar system. This means that the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy extends further than the earth-sun collusion, to a far deeper and darker complicity between the earth and alien depths which predate and postdate the life of the sun and the solar model of emergence (thus bringing about a narrative or psychoanalytical profiling of the earth from the ‘nethermost’ point of view). This is another way to say that the urtrauma of the earth (Otto Rank’s idea of birth as the primal or urtrauma) finds its true expression in yet another trauma which the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi called the pre-primal or archi-trauma (ururtrauma). The archi-trauma is in this case the iron trauma of the sun as a belatedly born star that was exposed to and traumatised by alien cosmic matters and forces during its embryonic development. Therefore we can say that, as far as Kernovian Syndrome is concerned, the unconscious of the earth is haunted by a trauma that precedes even the iron catastrophe and the birthtrauma of the planet—one that takes the earth into the unconscious

of the sun and straight from there to outer nightmares that vex our star and its energetic identity with vistas of alien exteriorities. If iron is the relic of stellar death, the unconscious of the sun which is projected into its formation, models of climate making, energy dissipation, and patterns of emergence is saturated by the memory of stellar deaths. The iron wealth of the sun does not reenact the sun as the centre of all wealth but strips this young hegemon of its glorified position by drawing an explicit connection between its belated galactic birth and the death of its long-lived and formidable predecessors only the iron relics of which have remained to be inherited by the sun. (Although in this stellar dynasty, our sun is not significant enough to stage a super explosive spectacle, over the course of billions of years, it will become a white dwarf, shrunken, cold, humiliated, and shunned by its planetary acolytes.) On the other hand, for planet Earth as an apparent follower of the sun, iron wealth is both a token of this heliotrauma and, if we are unreasonably lucky, a possible lead for ‘terrestrial thinking’ out of the solar economy of thought and its restrictions toward the radical freedom of alien and starless cosmic depths. A question that might be posed here is that of how the ururtrauma of iron accumulation stirred the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy that eventually ushered in the terrestrial cataclysm that we currently know as the Industrial Revolution. The answer to this question involves the intervention of water, as that which not only thickened the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy by extending it into an iron-saturated trauma, but also drove the iron intrusion of stellar death into exceedingly twisted ends. Associated with iron-water reaction at high pressures and temperatures, which is a decisive factor in the evolution of the earth, iron catastrophe can be taken into account as the main factor for the transformation of the earth into a relatively closed hydro-cycle that ensures a prolonged interaction between water and iron on the one hand, and iron and other metals on the other. Whilst theories of the origin of water on the planet are many and diverse, all of these theories can be associated and linked to the ururtrauma of iron intrusion. For example the iron catastrophe— whereby the nickel-iron components sank into the centre of the earth

and constituted the core—is believed to have tremendously increased the temperature of the protoplanet and as a result thawed the solid water inside the protoplanetary components. The interaction between the awakened water and iron turned into a chemical reaction that produced heavier and lighter compounds of iron through the earth. Thus iron became a vehicle for distributing the hydrogen and oxygen elements of water perpendicularly through the body of the earth. Produced by the iron-water reaction, iron hydride carries hydrogen to the core, fuelling it and initiating its churning motion. It is this churning motion of the metal core that accounts for the moderate gravity of the earth which allows water to exist in forms other than solid. The activation of the iron core begins to wrap the earth inside its magnetic cocoon. And now the formation of the atmosphere— brought forth and facilitated by the gravity and the magnetic currents of the iron core—generates the ultimate positive condition for the complicities between water and iron by preventing water from being blown away into space by stellar winds. Accordingly, iron remobilises water at different stages as a fully fledged element of complicity that unfolds the iron-trauma inherent to stellar death within the terrestrial environment. Iron-water complicities probably begin with the transportation of the hydrogen element of water into the iron core, and are completed with the establishment of the planetary atmosphere, a perfect hydro-cycling machine that preserves water and continuously reintroduces it to other elements and components of the earth. The iron-stirred motion and polymorphism of water drive the chemical intimacies of iron and water to new and ever more convoluted extremes. Yet such hydrological activities eventually go beyond the iron-water bonds, as water acts as an intermediate chemical agency between the iron-trauma and other elements in the earth. Ultimately, water begins to mobilise and unearth other metals on its own, expanding the legacy of the stellar death within the earth through all that terrestrially exists. It is in this sense that terrestrial life, both in its green vibrancy and (post-)industrial commotion, is pasted upon the ferric face of death as a perplexedly boisterous mask.

As the Industrial Revolution tapped into the iron-trauma of the earth and the Solar System under the influence of the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy, it elevated the minerals of the earth to the surface and from there melted them into the air. This mineral ascension from the surface of the earth upward was characterised in the form of the smog that became an indisputable marker of civilisation and wealth in the Industrial Age. John Playfair’s interpretation of James Hutton’s plutonic theory of the earth seems to be more than anything a fitting observation of the iron-traumatised human civilisation wherein the Industrial Revolution is reinscribed not as a point in the life of the human race on the planet, but as a twisted apex in the history of the earth and its traumatic reliving of stellar death. The iron-trauma of stellar death is indifferent to the sociopolitical traumas of the Industrial Revolution, its progressions and regressions leave no trace of human traumas. By virtue of being a traumatic regression (or binding) of the pre-primal iron-trauma, or more accurately, the trauma of stellar death, the Industrial Revolution left no trace of humans in the form of new fossils—hence the current postindustrial necropolis whose graves have been emptied of human remains:1 [A]ll the hard substances of the mineral kingdom, when elevated into atmosphere, have a tendency to decay, and are subject to a disintegration and waste, to which no limit can be set but that of their entire destruction; that no provision is made on the surface for repairing this waste, and that there, no new fossil is produced; that the formation of all the varied scenery which the surface of the earth exhibits, depends on the operation of causes, the momentary exertion of which are familiar to us, though we knew not before the effects which their accumulated action was able to produce. — John Playfair, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802) 1. Here the hydro-cyclic efficiency of the earth testifies more than anything to a terrestrial impulse to relive the iron-trauma of stellar death, not only because the cycling motion of water within the planetary atmosphere is conditioned by the iron core of the earth, but also because in its vitality this cycle brings the remains of wasted minerals—smog—back onto the surface of the earth over and over again.

They attack it with iron wedges and the hammer-machines […] When the work is completely finished, beginning with the last, they cut through, at the tops, the supports of the arched roofs. A crack gives warning of a crash, and the only person who notices it is the sentinel on a pinnacle of the mountain. He by shout and gesture gives the order for the workmen to be called out and himself at the same moment flies down from his pinnacle. The fractured mountain falls asunder in a wide gap, with a crash which it is impossible for human imagination to conceive, and likewise with an incredibly violent blast of air. The miners gaze as conquerors upon the collapse of Nature. […] Another equally laborious task involving even greater expense is the incidental operation of previously bringing streams along mountain-heights frequently a distance of 100 miles for the purpose of washing away the debris of this collapse […] the dip of the fall must be steep, to cause a rush rather than a flow of water, and consequently it is brought from very high altitudes. Gorges and crevasses are bridged by aqueducts carried on masonry; at other places impassable rocks are hewn away and compelled to provide a position for hollowed troughs of timber. […] It spoils the operation of washing if the current of the stream carries mud along with it: an earthy sediment of this kind is called urium. Consequently they guide the flow over flint stones and pebbles, and avoid urium. At the head of the waterfall on the brow of the mountains reservoirs are excavated measuring 200 ft. each way and 10 ft. deep. In these there are left five sluices with apertures measuring about a yard each way, in order that when the reservoir is full the stopping-barriers may be struck away and the torrent may burst out with such violence as to sweep forward the broken rock. There is also yet another task to perform on the level ground. Trenches are excavated for the water to flow through—the Greek name for them means ‘leads’; and these, which descend by steps, are floored with gorse—this is a plant resembling rosemary, which is rough and holds back the gold. The sides are closed in with planks, and the channels are carried on arches over steep pitches. Thus the earth carried along in the stream slides down into the sea and the shattered mountain is washed away; and by this time the land of Spain owing to these causes has encroached a long way into the sea. — Pliny, Natural History (77 CE)

We were told to go to the counting-house to present our credentials; and on our road thither, we beheld the buildings and machinery of the mine, literally stretching down the precipitous face of the cliff, from the land at the top, to the sea at the bottom. Here, we beheld a scaffolding perched on a rock that rose out of the waves—there, a steam-pump was at work raising gallons of water from the mine every minute, on a mere ledge of land half way down the steep cliff side. […] The mine is not excavated like other mines under the land, but under the sea! Having communicated these particulars, the miner next tells us to keep strict silence and listen. After listening for a few moments, a distant, unearthly noise becomes faintly audible—a long, low, mysterious moaning, which never changes, which is felt on the ear as well as heard by it—a sound that might proceed from some incalculable distance, from some far invisible height—a sound so unlike anything that is heard on the upper ground, in the free air of heaven; so sublimely mournful and still; so ghostly and impressive when listened to in the subterranean recesses of the earth, that we continue instinctively to hold our peace, as if enchanted by it, and think not of communicating to each other the awe and astonishment which it has inspired in us from the very first. — Wilkie Collins, report on visit to Botallack Mine, West Cornwall, Rambles Beyond Railways or Notes in Cornwall Taken A-Foot

Steve Tarrant Drain Surgery (Interview) Steve Tarrant is a mining engineer who is currently assistant mine manager at South Crofty Mine in Cornwall, responsible for a major dewatering operation that is taking place prior to restoration and reopening of the mine. ROBIN MACKAY: Our trip took in the Great County Adit, which was an early solution for dewatering, and remains quite an effective one to this day. It was an incredible work of engineering for its time. STEVE TARRANT: They started the Adit in the 1700s and it took them fifty-odd years to do it, I think…. It’s long, about forty miles long, and it drains something like eighty or ninety different mines. And obviously it still works today for draining water from the mines. Did you see the portal? I went inside it many years ago. It’s quite big when you go inside, and that’s because back in the eighties, Wheal Jane spent quite a bit of money refurbishing the portal. For a good distance the County Adit is actually two parallel tunnels running next to each other, just to provide the volume to drain all of the mines. So what Wheal Jane did, I think it was in the seventies, was to actually excavate all around the existing portal and make it a proper steel-arched and lagged, lined portal, about 4 x 4 or 3 x 4 metres. So you can go inside it and crawl along the side where there are breeze blocks—I definitely wouldn’t recommend doing it, but you can crawl along, you go in for, I suppose, about 150 metres, and then it goes back to the old twin tunnels, and from that point on the water is up to the roof in those twin tunnels. RM: Nearby we also walked down past Nangiles, where the water overflowed and caused some huge problems. ST: Basically what happened with the Nangiles adit was this: All the adits that were around the main mining areas—so you’ve got the

Dolcoath Deep Adit in Camborne and Pool, around central Cornwall you’ve got the County Adit—they were all put in to drain water from the mines, and they were also used to prevent water making its way from the surface all the way down to the deeper levels of the mines, it’s like a catchment. Now obviously, when the mines were working below adit level, invariably they used to pump everything up to the adit—that way you saved on the costs of pumping it all the way to surface because you didn’t have to do the top fifty or sixty metres. But when the mines close, obviously the pumps get switched off and the water gradually rises back up until it reaches the adit level—and then when it reaches the adit it will flow out. RM: And the adit is still serving that purpose today? ST: All of the adits around here will do that. A good example is where I’m working, Camborne and Redruth: the whole of South Crofty and the whole of Camborne and Pool is all flooded up to adit level. Everything above adit level is water-free, and you can get into all those workings that are still there. RM: What are you doing there? ST: We’re getting ready to dewater, which is a pretty big undertaking, because there’s about eight million cubic meters of water to pump out of Crofty. Going back to Wheal Jane, when they turned the pumps off at Wheal Jane, water gradually rose, and the Nangiles adit was a very small old adit that I don’t think had been used to carry water for a very long time. When adits don’t carry much water they get a build up of ochre, and it just sits there—it’s horrible stuff. And when the water did reach the Nangiles adit, it picked up all that ochre and pushed it out into the river, and that was obviously a massive environmental catastrophe, because Wheal Jane’s water is pretty nasty—about pH2.5 to pH3.5 depending on where you are in the mine, so it’s really bad. RM: And they’re still dealing with the consequences to this day. ST: Yeah, there was carnage at the time, the Fal River’s gone orange, environmental catastrophe, so they immediately got some

pumps down the shaft to lower the water away from that Nangiles adit, and then all the water that was flowing out into the river, they took that back to the tailings dam and added a lot of lime to it, a firstaid, first-pass treatment. And then obviously they realised, we need to do something properly about this. So there’s a water treatment plant at Wheal Jane that has been running since the mid-nineties and is still running now, but what they do is they keep the water just below the level of the Nangiles adit, and once you’ve committed to doing that, you can’t really stop doing it. So they have three or four pumps down the shaft there, by the Nangiles adit. RM: So it’s still a very active operation. ST: I’m not sure how much they actually pump but I know that, when Wheal Jane was mining, about twenty-four million litres a day was flowing into the mine that they had to pump out. So I imagine it’s somewhere in that region, although I’m not 100 per cent sure. And they still have to treat all that water, so there’s a full processing plant there. There’s lime that comes down from Cheshire or somewhere, a truck every day comes down to dose it all up to try to increase the alkalinity of it so they’re not pumping acid…. RM: So industrial mining in Cornwall, over the two hundred years it was developing, created an underground ecosystem that we still have to deal with, it’s produced certain concentrations of minerals in the water. ST: You get heavy metals in the water that comes out of the mines, that links into a multitude of things. The water that flows into the mines quite often has quite high levels of sulphides in it. Especially if you’re in the killas: basically all the mineralisation in Cornwall is either in killas or granite. So if you take Carn Brea as an example, if you were to follow the slope of Carn Brea hill down and into the ground, that granite carries on sloping to the north at a relatively regular gradient. Now, all of the cracks, which are where the mineral lodes are, all of those cracks were formed when the granite was intruded, so those cracks are in both the granite and the overlying rock. That overlying rock is what we call killas—an all-encompassing

term in Cornwall for metamorphosed rock that’s been altered by granite. So the heat of that granite metamorphoses all the host rock on top of it into this type of killas. Now, for whatever reason, when the hot fluids that contained minerals came up into those cooling cracks, the minerals that were deposited depended on the temperature and pressure at the time, that’s what decided which minerals came out where. Generally the first ones to drop out at higher temperatures were tin and tungsten. And as you go up into the killas where the temperature was lower, that’s where your copper drops out, along with more tin and also zinc, lead, etc. And that’s generally why, around the Camborne-Redruth area and many of the mining areas in Cornwall, when the mineral lodes are in the killas they’re polymetallic—so they’re copper, zinc, silver, and obviously some tin as well. Generally, when you go down deeper into the granite, or closer to the source of the mineralisation, those same lodes persist, but metallurgically they change to comprising predominantly high grade tin, with some tungsten in places as well. Now, Wheal Jane was a relatively new mine, in that, although there had been some workings there prior to the 1960s, the bulk was done after the 1960s when they did some exploration relatively close to surface and found all these really good lodes and basically opened up a brand new mine, essentially. And that was all in the killas. Wheal Jane never mined into the granite because the granite is deeper. So everything that Wheal Jane mined was copper, zinc, and tin. Everybody thinks of Wheal Jane as a tin mine, but it actually produced more copper and zinc than tin. Because it was in that killas, that polymetallic area. So, generally in those polymetallic areas of killas, the water is full of sulphides. Which is relatively acidic. Wheal Jane was a really extreme example, like I say, pH2.5 in some places; it’s not usually that bad. The upper levels in Dolcoath Mine in Camborne, which are in the killas, they’re pH5 or 5.5, they’re relatively acidic. And that’s because of sulphides and sulphates that are in the water at that level. At depth—so in some of the deeper levels at South Crofty, where they’re in the granite—the water that comes in the mine there flows

through faults, and those faults come up from deep underground, they contain very hot water, which is where you now get the buzzword for everybody going on about lithium, because there are high concentrations of lithium in that water, as well as other metals— and of course when that goes into the water system of the mine, if eventually, one day, after the mine is closed or whatever, it makes its way up to adit level, obviously it has an effect on the ecosystem on the surface, because all the heavy metals are in that water. RM: If it weren’t for the mining operations, those more dangerous elevated levels wouldn’t have been released onto the surface, then? ST: Eventually, I would surmise—and we’re talking millions and millions of years—a lot of those heavy metals that are in the water would eventually make their way up, but they not in such big concentrations. RM: So it’s more like humans fast-forwarding the earth process? ST: Yeah. RM: What’s the dewatering operation you’re working on? ST: South Crofty is thought of as one mine, which it is and it isn’t. Basically the Camborne-Pool-Redruth area contains dozens of old copper mines, because as I was saying, they all started on the surface and generally they were all set on killas, and all the lodes that were exposed at surface were generally copper producing. So all the mines in that area started as copper mines. Now, in the late 1700s, I think, they discovered copper up in Anglesey, which sent the copper price plummeting. That killed off a lot of small copper mines, and then there was another copper crash in the mid-1800s, which was when they discovered copper in the colonies, and that drove the price down again. so only the bigger mines in the area— those which, by that time, had got quite deep—had gone into the granite and realised that those lodes turn to tin lodes. And some of the bigger or more farsighted mines switched their processing from copper to tin, and went down deeper, and for a time they were very deep. Dolcoath is a good example of that; it was the deepest mine in

the world in the 1800s, I think. It goes down to 910 meters deep, 550 fathoms. (The levels at Dolcoath are measured on what you call the underlie—they’re not truly vertical, they’re measured on the dip of the lode. So a lot of people think it’s more than a kilometre deep, its not, it’s just shy of it.) So Dolcoath was one of those mines, South Crofty was another. South Crofty realised that they had to switch to tin, so they became a tin mine from the late 1800s onwards, they were purely tin. East Pool is another one, and Tincroft—those were notable mines that changed over to tin. RM: So the economics of the industry tempted them to go down deeper? ST: Yeah. After the end of the First World War, the price of tin dropped, there was general economic hardship, so almost all of those mines in the Camborne direction closed. The only one that really kept going was South Crofty. East Pool produced tungsten, so it was kept going by the government during the war, but the day the Second World War ended, that was the end of East Pool. But all of those other mines had closed after the First World War, and South Crofty ended up one by one purchasing the setts—the workings—of those old mines. And so Crofty has expanded out underground. South Crofty itself is quite small, you’ve got lots of other mines around it, but as South Crofty went deeper and other mines closed, it expanded underground, so now its area of working extends for about four kilometres from one side of Camborne to the west side of Redruth. So it’s a massive area. Now, when the mine closed in ’98, all of those workings flooded, and they flooded up to adit level. South Crofty itself is a relatively dry mine, Wheal Jane used to pump out about 24 million litres a day when it was working, South Crofty was only about 6.5 million litres a day, so it was almost a quarter of the volume that Wheal Jane had. And the water isn’t as nasty either, it’s about pH6.5, so it’s relatively neutral. You definitely can’t drink it. So that’s filled up to adit, and that adit now takes 6.5 million litres per day from South Crofty, there’s still that much coming in per day, but now its up to adit, it just tops up the

adit and flows out every day, 6.5 million litres a day, pretty regular, it goes up a bit with the rainfall but that’s the average. RM: Can you see the water coming out at any point? ST: If you go past Duchy College to Rosewarren, there’s a road that goes down through Roscroggan, and it’s down there. RM: There’s just one outlet? ST: Yes, there is. It’s a maze of adits—so while we call it the Dolcoath Deep Adit, it’s actually a lot of branches from all the individual mines, they all have branches that go off into this deep adit branch. When you look at a map of it, it’s just a maze. The bit we’re interested in is where the bulk of all the water flows down, and that’s this deep adit, and that has just one outlet, at Roscroggan. It’s not the easiest portal to see because it’s in the middle of someone’s garden. It’s called Tinstream Cottage, I think! Luckily the guy that lives there is an ex South-Crofty miner so he’s very pragmatic about it. They’ve got a nice garden and right in the middle is a big depression which goes down five metres, probably, and it’s maybe twenty metres in length, and that’s where the portal is, the water all flows out and then goes through a concrete pipe underneath the rest of their garden and into the Red River. A huge amount of tin streaming used to be done there, right up to the eighties and early nineties tin streaming was done there in the Red River, because prior to 1988 South Crofty used to process all their ore at SC, and whereas these days you need to have a tailings dam to take all your processing water and treat it, South Crofty never did any of that, they just pumped it straight into the river; and the recovery rate in their processing plant was only about 70 percent, so between 25 and 30 per cent of the material they mined, they couldn’t capture it and it just ended up being pumped into the river. So I think there were nine separate tin streaming plants along the river that were picking up all the stuff that South Crofty had lost, and were making a living out of it.

RM: So you have the main plant growing progressively more high tech, and the old version of the industry downstream from it, collecting what’s left over. ST: Yes, and they were old-school as well, the rag frames and settling tanks and waterwheels…. But after the tin crash happened, which was ’85, Wheal Jane and South Crofty were owned by the same company, and so to save costs, I think it was ’87 or ’88, they did the logical thing and just kept one processing plant, the one at Wheal Jane, and so from then on all of South Crofty’s ore was brought to Wheal Jane for treatment and the mill at South Crofty was abandoned. By the time they did that, Wheal Jane was a more modern processing plant, I think that captured up to 89 percent of the tin, which is more typical for a modern plant, whereas Crofty had been somewhere in-between modern and not so modern. And obviously the tin streamers had no more tin coming to them from the discharge and so they closed down one by one. So, South Crofty’s workings are all flooded up to adit level. We get the question a lot: Is there any tin left down there? and the answer is yes, there’s a huge amount still down there. The only reason South Crofty shut down was pure economics: the price of tin prior to 1985 was about $10,000 per ton, and it plummeted almost overnight down to $3,500 per ton in ’85. RM: Why was that? ST: Something called the International Tin Council was responsible for setting the tin prices, they had been since the Second World War. Unlike other metals at that time, tin wasn’t traded on the London Metals Exchange. And the big producers of tin around the world—so basically, Cornwall and South America—were worried about low-cost imports coming from Malaysia and Indonesia. So the ITC was formed, and they always bought up or sold regular amounts to keep the price at a stable level. That was all well and good until there was a huge flood of tin onto the market in the eighties, and the ITC ran out of money to buy tin and had to sell all their tin because they were broke—which had the double effect that all the tin they couldn’t buy

came on the market, and all the tin they had been holding and now sold all came on to the market, and it crashed the market almost overnight—the price went down to $3,500/ton. And it stayed that way for a very long time, I think it was 2003 before it started to come back up. Now, all the other Cornish mines were done for with that price, because while the quality of tin in Cornwall is very good, it’s quite expensive to get it out, in comparison to an alluvial deposit, where you just wash it. I mean obviously, it’s deep in Cornwall, so the costs are quite high. So it killed Wheal Concord which was up at Blackwater, almost straight away, Geevor, down the end, that struggled on for a little while, Wheal Pendarves over in Camborne was gone pretty quick, and Wheal Jane stayed dragging on for a little while, but by ’91 they’d all gone and the only one that was left was Crofty. RM: That’s a story I haven’t heard before, that artificial economics played such a part in the end of the industry here, like the bursting of a reservoir…. ST: Yes, it was artificially meddled with, which was the problem really. So yeah, Crofty kept producing up to 1998. RM: Producing only tin? ST: Just tin. And the only reason they kept going for so long was the quality—the grade of the tin that South Crofty has is very high. Even in today’s terms it’s the third highest grade tin deposit in the world. It’s about 1.5 to 1.8 per cent tin, which doesn’t sound very much, but it’s the third highest in the world, and that’s the reason they could keep going for so long. Unfortunately, because the price was so low for so long, South Crofty was running in crisis mode from ’85 to ’98 when they eventually closed, and in crisis mode the first thing that’s knocked on the head is exploration, because it’s not essential to producing tomorrow. So exploration was canned very quickly, then nonessential development, and then modernisation and capitalisation of anything that needed money spent on it. So by the time it closed in ’98 it was pretty run down, and they’d coned themselves into an area

that just got smaller and smaller, deeper and deeper, and they just couldn’t keep going any longer with the price showing no sign of coming back up. And then in 2003, I think, the ruling came in that lead free solder had to be used in commercial products—and tin is a substitute for lead in solder, and the price of tin went up again—it was around $3,500/tonne in the early 2000s and by 2007 or 2008 it had gone up to $32,000/tonne. It had a little bit of a wobble around 2008–9, but since then it’s been stable at around $20,000/tonne, which is well in excess of what it needs to be for South Crofty to be economically productive. However, the big problem is, when the pumps were turned off, it flooded up to adit level. And there have been a few companies that have come through South Crofty and said, we’re going to reopen the mine, it’ll be back up and running in two years—but they’ve not had any way of dewatering the mine, not had a method, so they’ve focused on things close to surface, and you hear these stories coming up about, oh yeah they’re going to go mining gold, or indium—or valium or whatever! And that’s rubbish, basically. The only way you can reopen South Crofty is to pump it out, go down deep, and do the exploration they were meant to be doing but were unable to do from the mid-eighties onward, proper exploration to look for the tin lodes. Because while everything close to surface is absolutely riddled—like I said, you’ve got copper mines all over the place—when you go down below those copper mines, you have limited amounts of workings, relatively, and there’s a huge area under all those old copper mines that hasn’t been explored properly because South Crofty has been unable to explore it. So if you get the capital right to be able to dewater the mine, go down there and do a period of prolonged exploration, then you could get a very good resource out of South Crofty. Of course, the biggest problem is getting the water out. The pumps that are down there are well and truly dead, electricity and water doesn’t mix that well…. So one of the reasons it took them so long to work out what to do is, they had to work out how to process it, and so the company that came in 2016, Strongbow, they’ve done a lot of work on getting a water treatment plant for them to actually process the water that’s pumped out of the mine. There’s a method, a tried

and tested method, that will be used to do that now: you treat the water with hydrogen peroxide, which helps change the arsenic levels in the water, it changes them to something that’s more easy to precipitate out; then you add lime to increase the pH to about 10, which is the level where all the heavy metals in the water, when you add a flocculent, will combine together and drop out as a settled solid; and at the end of all this, you add carbon dioxide to bring the pH from 10 back down to about 6 so you can then pump it out into the adit. And it’s crazy when you see the difference between the water before and after, it’s very impressive. RM: And the solid deposits just get left where they are? ST: It’s just sludge, it’s filter-pressed to take all the water out of it, then it’s sent to Wheal Jane, to the tailings dam, which is designed to handle that kind of stuff. It’s not a huge amount, it’s about twenty tonnes a day that’ll be produced, so two truckloads a day during the dewatering period. Now the actual method for dewatering is quite impressive as well, because it’s not something that’s been done very often, around the world. Usually when you dewater a mine you gradually lower the pumps down the shaft as you go, gradually dewatering. What we’ve got is two huge 950kw pumps, they’re about eight metres long and four tonnes each, and they will be lowered from surface right the way down the main shaft of South Crofty to the halfway point, which is about 350 metres down. And they get lowered all the way down with pipes added on every three metres, those pipes come all the way back up to surface—and then you switch them on. So they only get turned on when they’re halfway down the shaft, at which point they have a huge amount of head above them, which is helping them pump out. And essentially you turn the pump on and away it goes— and about six to nine months later, when all the water has gone from there down to the 350 metre mark, then we have to get back down the shaft, reaccess down the shaft. So there’ll be winding wheels on the headgear that you can see from all of West Cornwall, that’ll be working again, and then you send cages down to where the pumps are at 350 metres, and basically repeat the process again—take the

pump column and pump which is currently going from surface to 350m and lower it from 350m down to about 750m, which is shaft bottom. And then the same process: press the button, turn the pumps on, and then wait another six to nine months until the water has gone all the way down to the bottom, then you refurbish that shaft all the way down, get your access back to the bottom, and then we’ll do approximately a year of exploration drilling. RM: It’s a major operation. ST: It’s a big operation. The pumps are arriving mid-March, we’ve already taken delivery of all the pipes, all the handling equipment for the shafts where we have to handle about 55 tonnes of weight, when the pipes are all connected up, we’ve taken delivery of the variable speed drives—there are some pretty sophisticated electrical control components that power those pumps, because every time you turn the pumps on they draw about 1.2 megawatts of power. So if you don’t have variable speed drives you brown out Camborne every time you turn the pumps on! Those VSDs are about £200,000 each, they’re not cheap. The water treatment plant, we’ve started construction of that, and we are currently waiting to list on the AIM, the Alternative Industries Market, to raise enough money to finance the construction of the water treatment plant, and to operate it and to actually spend the money on the associated rehabilitation costs to reaccess all of those levels underground. Obviously there is a lot of cost associated with that, because the levels underground are going to be in a pretty poor state, covered in ochre and crap. RM: Have you seen the upper levels? ST: Everything that is above the water we have access to and we have the newer levels that have been mined since 2003, as since the mine stopped production in 1998 there has been some waste mining that has gone on above the adit level, about 1.5km of new workings were done in a previous attempt to reopen by the company preceding Strongbow. Everything’s in a reasonably good state, but it will still need a fair bit of replacement and cleaning up before the mine gets back into production.

RM: How will it be worked, what kind of operation will it be? Very different to how it was in its former heyday I imagine. ST: Yes…health and safety is a lot tighter than it was in the eighties and nineties when South Crofty was working previously. If you go back a bit more than a hundred years, all the mining was done by hand drilling: they had a drill steel, a guy holding it, then two other lads hitting it with a sledgehammer to drill a hole, fill it with black powder, then blast it—and everything that was broken was shovelled by hand into wagons and then pushed out by hand on rails to the shaft. They were working just by candlelight. I can’t hit a drill steel in normal light! Prior to 1850, that was generally the way it was done. But from then on you gradually saw the introduction of compressed air rock drills, which essentially resulted in the way South Crofty was worked from the 1950s–’60s onwards. South Crofty was actually pretty old fashioned, and often slow to adopt new techniques; they still had people hand-drilling in Crofty up until the 1930s, which is crazy. But anyhow, when Crofty closed in ’98, everything was done with compressed air. So the drills were on jack legs, everything was drilled by one man holding a jack leg powered by compressed air, they would fill the hole with explosives, and then when the rock was driven and blasted, they used rail-mounted air shovels to pick up the rock and send it back to underground trains that then went to the shaft. Now, the methods they used, they were actually very good in the way they mined it. Basically you have the mineral veins or lodes running down like this, you put in horizontal levels every 25 fathoms, say every 40–45 metres, and you can then track where that lode is going, because you obviously drive them on the lode, and then when you’ve worked out where that particular lode is, whether it’s economic to extract it, you stope out that section in-between. In South Crofty, toward the end, the way they did it in most cases was a method called long hole mining, which is as it sounds: you drill a series of very long holes from this level up or down to the levels above or below, fill the whole thing with explosive and blast the

whole thing out in one. and all the rock falls down to the bottom and you load it up. Basically we would still use that same method, but we would use more modern machines. You can’t use jack legs for long periods anymore, so we’d use something called drilling jumbos, big machines with big arms on the front of them with a drill mounted on the arms that drills your holes, your explosives are often still put in by hand or blown in using compressed air, and then when everything is broken up you used diesel trackless machinery or, as is being developed now, battery-powered, which is better for you because you’re not breathing in diesel fumes—but anyhow, trackless rubbertired machines that come in, much bigger than the old air shovels so you can move more. RM: Even though you’ve got new machinery, you’re still reliant on people being down there. So to what extent is water still a threat to life, in terms of sudden inundations? ST: South Crofty is going to be an unusual one from that aspect: in most mines these days, you don’t have to worry too much about inundation because surveying these days is so good. So unless you do something particularly badly wrong, then you’re not too likely to suffer inundation. Although there was a gypsum mine in Ireland last year that did suffer an inundation because it broke into—well, they didn’t really know what they’d broken into, but there was a hell of a lot of water coming in. So it does still happen. The thing with South Crofty is that, when we’re dewatering, we have to be very careful to make sure we’re not leaving any perched water behind us. So if we go and dewater past this level and, say, there’s an old dam or something that’s been built in there that’s holding back water, we don’t realise it, and we go down to the level below, if that dam that hasn’t been checked for thirty years decides to go then yes, there is a risk. We’re going to have to be very careful at South Crofty that we make sure to do everything properly as we’re dewatering so we don’t leave any perched water. Having said that, I have actually experienced a very large inundation of water in Ireland, where we had a dam that failed, there was about 200 million litres of water that came out of it in about

twelve hours. We were…running! It was pretty terrifying. That was different to the Cornish mines: where the Cornish mines mine mineral lodes that are steeply dipping, and they’re therefore quite deep, the mine I worked on in Ireland was what you call tabular, so generally everything was on one or two main levels, and the levels used to roll with the ore, so you had lots of little hills underground. And that’s what saved us, because it’d take a little while for one of the valleys between those hills to be filled up, and then once it went over the top, it rushed down the other side again. Our main workshops were underground. They were huge, about 10 metres high, lots of bays with full-on cranes and pits and things; that was filled up to the roof in a matter of hours, and it went right the way back to the main control centre of the whole mine, so we nearly lost the whole mine, we were 460 millimetres away from it overtopping the last hill, if it had overtopped that it would have taken out our main electrics for the whole mine, and once that happens, obviously, you can’t pump anything out because you’ve lost your power—and then it’s game over, really. So we were very lucky with that one. RM: It’s like going out fishing: you can have GPS, modern equipment, all the technology, but you’re still dealing with elemental forces. ST: Yeah, you’re only as good as what something is built on or with, and you’re still reliant on people as well. The reason why that dam failed in Ireland was that the people who had built it hadn’t cleaned it down to solid rock, so the pressure of the water pushed out underneath the dam. So, as much as you try to automate mining, with all the modern technology, you’re still reliant on the skill of miners, and you’ll never do away with having miners underground. You find big mines that are called bulk mines, way bigger than South Crofty, and they can automate certain things—the trackless shovel machines, scoops, that load out the ore, in some cases you can automate them, the trucks that go around the mine, you can automate them relatively easily. You’d never do it in Crofty because of the nature of the ore body. But when they break you still need somebody to go down there and fix them, and so you have to make sure everything is supported to allow people to go safely down there,

you have to make sure there’s ventilation, all these things require people to go in and install them or service them or whatever. RM: You’ve worked in different mines all over the world before you came home to Cornwall. ST: Yeah, I went to South Crofty for a year after I left Camborne School of Mines, just for training, I can’t really call myself a miner. Then I went out to Ireland, worked in a really good mine out there, that was a very wet mine, a lead zinc mine, very high grade zinc, one of the highest grades in the world, and we used to make some serious profits. When the price was good we could turn over $10-15 million a month. You can make some serious money when mining goes well—we’d hope to be making good profits for Crofty several years down the line. But yeah, that was a very wet mine. Like I said, Crofty is about 6.5 million litres, Wheal Jane, 24 million litres a day, and Wheal Jane was known as a wet mine. Out at Lisheen in Ireland, in the winter we used to pump 100 million litres of water out every day. Water was the bane of your life down there, because if you ever mined headings or tunnels that were downramp, obviously, water fills up when you mine downhill, it doesn’t run out…so every heading that you blasted had to have a pump at the face, but when you blast obviously you cant leave the pump there because it would get destroyed, so you’d have to take the pump back out, blast, wait twenty minutes for the fumes to clear, and then you’d have to go back in through the smoke to put the pump back in because the water would have come two or three hundred meters back up. It was awful, trying to put in drill holes in water…if it’s too much water it just pushes the explosives out of the holes. Just a nightmare—but really good from an educational point of view. So I was out there doing engineering for a few years, blast engineering, planning, sequencing, and I said look, I’ve only ever done a year underground, I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I want to go underground and do some more hands-on work. And so I was underground then for four years operating the machinery. And when I left Ireland, I was shift boss at the time.

I went out to South Africa and worked out there for a few years on two mines, one of them was very deep, 1.8 kilometres, really very hot, no water at all. Probably the only water we had underground in that mine was what we sent down there: when you’re doing drilling with those big jumbos you have to have water spray, If you don’t then you get a lot of silica dust in the air, which causes silicosis. So really the only water there was the water we took down. Which is crazy coming from Ireland where we were struggling with it. And then another mine, I was section manager out there, where we did long hole mining—that’s the method I’ve specialised in, so I was section manager…. Then I came back to Cornwall because me and the wife got offered two separate jobs, both with mining companies in Cornwall. She works for Paterson & Cooke, who do something called backfilling, which has really caught on over the last ten to fifteen years. So basically, say with South Crofty, you’ve got around 1.5 per cent tin in your ore, which means that 98.5 per cent of the ore you bring to surface is waste. But it’s always very fine because its been processed and chucked out of the processing plant. Now that generally gets sent to a tailings dam like over at Wheal Jane. But what’s becoming more and more commonplace now is that you add some cement to it and send it back underground and it will set underground, so you can fill old voids with it—which is good since with a massive tailings dam, you’re having a significant impact on the surface environment—but it’s also beneficial underground, because the voids, which are at risk of collapse if you make too many of them, you can fill them, and that helps stabilise your active mining areas. We used a hell of a lot of it at Lisheen. So that’s what she specialises in, she does that from Cornwall, there’s a company that goes all round Europe but they’re based at Wheal Jane. And I did a short period of time working for a consultant up at Wheal Jane which just wasn’t really my thing, I like being more hands-on, but I was doing quite a bit of stuff in Russia, so I was in and out of Russia every month or two, doing lots of different types of minerals, potash, iron ore, gold. And then got offered a job at South Crofty and jumped at it.

RM: We know that the County Adit drains almost all of the mines across this area of Cornwall, but otherwise, are each of the different workings entirely separate systems? ST: When we’re dewatering, we’re only taking water from workings that are connected to South Crofty. For instance, Dolcoath is not connected to South Crofty anywhere apart from at the adit level. So when we dewater South Crofty, the water in Dolcoath will still stay flooded. And it’s the same for a dozen mines around us. When we go down, we get to within a hundred or fifty metres of some of Dolcoath’s workings when we’re nearly a kilometre down, and they’ll all be full of water and we’ll be right underneath then, but because the ground is relatively impermeable we’re perfectly safe. Now if you were out somewhere where there’s limestone, when you dewater you draw down a huge cone of depression—if Cornwall was made of limestone, if you dewatered South Crofty you’d dewater half of Cornwall, whereas because the rock is impermeable, you only dewater what is hydrologically connected. So you can get away with doing that. Dolcoath closed in 1920, and since that it’s been flooded. South Crofty worked up close to Dolcoath that whole time, and you never had any water coming in. It’s worth touching on, from an environmental point of view: mining gets a pretty bad rap around the world, and quite rightly in some cases. But if you do it properly it doesn’t need to be like that. Now, with that adit system that flows through Camborne and Pool, that’s taking about 15 million litres of water through it every day at the moment, and 6.5 million litres of that is South Crofty’s water. The rest is from other mines like Dolcoath, Carn Brea, Roskears, and those mines have been closed for a hundred years. Now when you’re down in that adit system, which we are reasonably regularly, the water that comes out of those mines is relatively clear—at least, it looks clear to the naked eye; if you take a bottle out of it and let it settle, there is a fair amount of crap in it, but it looks relatively all right. When you get to where South Crofty’s water is coming up, it’s blood red, and full of crap, and that’s because that mine has only been closed for twenty years, whereas the others have had a

hundred years or more for the water to settle. So from an environmental point of view, we’re taking away the worst polluter when we’re dewatering it, treating it, then putting it back into the adit. So we’re actually going to be reusing the adit for what it was designed for, we’re taking out 25 million litres a day so essentially we’re gaining 18.5 million litres a day on the water that’s flooding into South Crofty—otherwise we wouldn’t need to dewater it, we could just keep it at a level—but that’s 25 million litres a day that we’re putting into the adit that’s treated water, that will mix with the other 9 million litres from the other mines, which is not great but is not the worst water in the world. It means that the water that eventually flows out into the Red River when it comes out of that portal in Roscroggan, the water that comes out of there will be the cleanest water that’s come out of there in two hundred and fifty years—and for that reason the Environment Agency have been really supportive towards this dewatering, which is strange, because you’d think they’d say don’t do it, it’s going to be a disaster like at Wheal Jane; but they’ve realised that we’re actually going to clean it up. But that adit system is so useful to us, and, well, it was mined by Richard Trevithick’s father, so its like 1750 or 1760 or something like that, that’s how old it is, and we’re still going to be using it. In fact we’ll have to do some work in that adit in about two months’ time, which is like going back in time, because the adit’s not very high, half full of water, and we’ve got a two-week job we’ve got to do in those conditions. You’ve got to carry all your gear with you, all your timber, steelwork, tools, got to carry it all with you, down about five hundred metres of adit, and work at that for two weeks with conventional tools because you can’t get electric in there. RM: What are you doing in the adit? ST: There’s a shaft we have to protect from underground, the council are going to build on top of it, and there’s a risk that when they recap it, or when they’re working around the cap, that stuff from the top of the shaft could fall down and block the end of the shaft at adit level which is, what, sixty metres below surface. If it does that, it’ll cause a backup of water and then we don’t have anywhere to send

our water to. So, even these days, you still sometimes need to get stuck in. RM: What are you seeing when you’re in there. Hand-chiselled walls? ST: Yeah, in some cases it was just knocked out with a hammer and gad, because they were quite often mining in cross courses, which is weak rock, easy to dig because they’re so small they’re quite stable. But in quite a lot of cases it was done by hand drilling, fill it with explosives, and shovel it out by hand, in really cramped conditions— people were a lot shorter back then but it still must have been quite cramped. But you can walk for miles underneath Camborne and Pool. We have to do inspections once every six to eight months. So you have to walk the length of the adit, it’s about three kilometres to walk from where we are out to where it comes out at Roscroggan. It’s tiring. It’s miserable. I’ve got a picture of what we looked like when we came out…just completely orange. And we made Gwithian beach quite orange when we did it, because we stirred up a lot of it. That will happen when we dewater too, for the first week whilst we flush all the ochre out, it’ll send everything orange. But that happens every so often now anyway: just last week there was a farmer digging a ditch and he released all that out into the Red River, it turned the sea red at Gwithian, and we got the blame for it, until the Environment Agency found out what it was. RM: When we think about the relation between Cornwall as a locale and the global history of mining and everything that goes with it, it’s almost as if, if these metals hadn’t been in a wet place, there would have been no reason to develop the pumping engine, no engine houses…the whole Industrial Revolution would not have happened, or would have happened differently if the conditions had been more like what you describe in South Africa. ST: Yeah, and I found it amazing when I was out there—it was about 120 kilometres just to get to the nearest town, in the middle of the desert, right on the Namibian border. But there’s so much Cornish influence. There was an engine house there, about 150 kilometres

down the road. It’s a perfectly preserved engine house—not deliberately preserved, just because the climate is so dry. The actual pumping engine is still in it. I asked for the keys to it because I had heard who had them, he went oh yeah sure, in you go, go and have a look. I was wearing a Redruth rugby top, I walked in, and sure enough there’s a big old cast above the thing saying HAWKINS REDRUTH 1865. Crazy, twelve thousand miles from home. And there’s a Cornish graveyard out there too, loads of Cornish surnames: Pearce, Pascoe…. In my first week out there, I was training guys in using a new type of explosive. And one of them, he was a coloured guy—in South Africa they make really clear distinctions, either you’re black, white, or coloured, which is mixed race, and the coloured people have their own culture, their own history—so I was working with this one coloured chap and he just looked like a Cornishman but with a really good tan. And I said, ‘Whereabouts are your family from?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, my mother’s from Springbok—just down the road.’ ‘Oh, right, anyone from abroad?’ ‘Oh yeah, my grandfather was from somewhere in the UK, I don’t know where’. I said, ‘What’s your surname?’ ‘Kernow’!

The Malay Connexion: Notes Toward a Further Delocalisation A massive tin belt is situated in SE Asia: beginning in Indonesia, it stretches across Singapore, West Malaysia, Indochina, SE China, and further. The Malay Peninsula, occupying only a small portion of the earth’s surface, together with Bolivia, supply up to 75% of the world’s tin: the ores are found mainly as stream tin. In 1936, tin extraction was 182,000 tons, Malaya providing 37.2% [67,700].1 Cornish discovery of tin in Malaysia, where the continual flow of the Sungai river and its tributaries has deposited, through the Kinta valley, a cassiterite-rich alluvium, can be dated back as early as the 1830s, when Captain Tremenheere penned his ‘Report on the Tin of the Province of Mergui, in Tnasserim, in the northern part of the Malayan Peninsula’. Tremenheere reports that the streams are rich in tin, and that pits had evidently been dug to catch it. In an experimental assay, he had men collect the equivalent of nineteen ounces of pure tin in one and a half hours. The Royal Geological Society of Cornwall reprinted this report from the Journal of the Asiatic Society. Despite their insistence that ‘its contents are so important in Cornwall’, they were not the only ones to voice a certain foreboding: In the 1820s, while briefly visiting Wheal Von tin mine, Sir Stamford Raffles, founder of British influence in Malaya, said to one of the Bolitho family, ‘You will live to see the day […] when the mines of Banca [Bangka] will eat up the mines of Cornwall.’2 Throughout the nineteenth century a continuing reciprocal see-saw relation between Kernow and Malaya saw the Malaysian industry undergo a series of booms and recessions which found their inverse in the fortunes of the indigenous Cornish tin industry. In the 1860s, Malaya was plunged into chaos by The Larut War, which began in 1961 with a quarrel over the control of watercourses through mines:

From about 1860 onwards, sporadic but serious fighting had occurred in Penang and various other states between the two Chinese secret societies (the Hai San and the Ghee Hin) which strove to rule the tin-workers there […].3 During this particular period, tin prices in Cornwall rocketed to £153/ton, and all of the mines that had found themselves shut down by the Malayan competition now reopened and were working at full capacity: Tin mining is going ahead at a tremendous pace […] New mines, and mines which were abandoned during the long and severe depression, when only very large returns of ore would meet working costs, are being set in motion every week in West Cornwall.4 These two locations thus found themselves connected by a peculiar parallelism of geological accident, compounded by global and local politics. Not only did Cornish miners find their fortunes obscurely tied to the intrigues of Chinese rivals (‘Few people realise the farreaching effects upon Cornwall and its premier industry of […] the feuds of Chinese secret societies in the Malayan states’),5 they would also be profoundly affected by a crucial moment in the interrelation of colonial power and capitalism: In 1874, the Royal Navy intervened in Malaysia and the Pangkor Treaty was signed. The price of tin dropped to £56/ton, and the newly opened Cornish mines closed once again. By 1878 the price was £35/ton;6 and Malaya thrived: The present prosperity of the Federated Malayan States is chiefly due to the wonderful development of the mining industry since the establishment of the residency system [i.e. the Pangkor treaty] about 32 years ago. Mining was also to a large extent responsible for the introduction of that system, as it was mainly the fighting between rival Chinese tribes over the possession of the tinfields in the […] district that caused the intervention of the British.7 While the economic importance of mining was the reason for the colonial intervention of the British, this same readiness to intervene threatened Cornwall with its imminent decline. Imagine, then, these two sets of holes gaping opening and snapping shut repeatedly in an orchestrated inverse rhythm, like the

mouths of hungry baby birds, plutonic sockpuppets, or some less innocent orifice, as the instruments of mineral discovery probe for new veins like a junkie, and ever new tides of subterranean discovery and surface politics suck capital from one side of the planet to the other and back again. Between the 1820s and the 1880s the threat of Malaysian tin waxed and waned, but by the mid-1890s, it had became near-fatal. Superior but more expensively-produced Cornish tin fell into disfavour as Malayan tin production boomed, largely financed by London speculators—but it was not only London money, as a letter (from ‘DEMOCRAT’) to a Cornish newspaper bitterly points out: The Cornish miner of today finds himself thrown out of employment because of the productiveness of the tin mines in the Malay Straits, which enables them to produce tin at a price at which Cornwall under present conditions, cannot compete economically; but the irony of this matter lies in the fact that these mines have been developed for the most part out of capital obtained from the profits of tin mining in Cornwall at a time when the miner working at home, in order to obtain a living for himself and family, had perforce to do what is termed in the vernacular work ‘out of core’ […] It is true […] we have bigger and richer lodes in Cornwall than elsewhere in the whole world, but what is needed is fresh capital […]. James Wickett,8 a Redruth man who was responsible for the opening up of tin mines in the Malay Straits, made continued efforts to support Cornish mining, campaigning tirelessly to keep open Tincroft, for instance: ‘none was more troubled than he that every effort was doomed to failure’.9 This entrepreneur who sought to ameliorate the position of the redundant Cornish workers through the profits he made from his Malaysian mining operations seems a personification of an ill-fitting combination of global and local interests. The primary reason for the economic superiority of Malayan mines, however, was the inherent ease of working the ore: unlike in Cornwall where the tin had to be extracted from solid rock, in Malaysia tropical weathering had left large amounts of alluvial deposits that simply needed to be dredged and filtered.10 Here as in

other cases, the future was unevenly distributed—and being in the past was not necessarily a disadvantage, so long as labour was available. In nineteenth-century Malaysia, mines were effectively doing what Cornish miners had done in pre-industrial times, although gravel pumping and bucket dredging would be increasingly industrialised. The alluvial surface deposits, which derive from the erosion of hydrothermal veins, the transport of the resulting debris and its incorporation into superficial deposits, had long been exhausted in Cornwall, and indeed it was their exhaustion, as we have seen, that led to the inventive industrial culture of Cornwall. Although the 1880-90s saw the introduction of new technologies in Malaysia—hydraulic mining (by sluicing and gravel pumps) and later the tin dredge,11 these operations did not encounter the difficulty in pumping out water from deep mines that made Cornish tin so relatively expensive. A second factor was the cheap labour—in effect, slave labour—of the Chinese in Malaysia.12 But interestingly the decisive, ‘greatest single factor’13 during the nineteenth century was tin’s link to bimetallism. As the decline of Cornish tin was exacerbated by the abolition of silver in European currency, which caused a major drop in the value of that metal, the profitability of the Malayan mines increased dramatically. The Malayan workers were paid in silver, but the mines themselves were paid for their ore in gold.14 The Mining Journal commented on how ‘Straits tin producers got the equivalent in silver of £130 per ton, the Cornish tin producers for the same tin £60 in gold currency’.15 Tin production in Malaya rose from 26,000 tons in 1890 to 47,000 tones in 1894, and in 1936 the country was still providing almost 40% of the world production.16 It was not until the 1930s that, with the threat of impending war, ‘the search for metallic ore of any kind in Britain became desperate and every potential source of tin, tungsten and iron in Cornwall was examined’ anew.17

1. I.R. Selimkhanov ‘On the Question of South East Asian Tin and its use in the Bronze Metallurgy of Ancient Azerbaijan’, in D. Bayard (ed.), Southeast Asian Archaeology at the XV Pacific Science Congress (University of Otago Studies in Prehistoric Anthropology, 1984). 2. A. Buckley, The Story of Mining in Cornwall (Fowey: Cornwall Editions, 2005). 3. D.B. Barton, A History of Tin Mining and Smelting in Cornwall (Truro: D. Bradford Barton, 1967), 136–7. 4. The Times, 2 December 1871. 5. Barton, History of Tin MIning, 12. 6. Buckley, The Story of Mining, 153. 7. A. Wright, Twentieth Century Impressions of British Malaya: Its Histories, People, Commerce, Industries and Resources (London: Lloyd’s, 1908), 505. 8. See ibid., 522. 9. See Wickett’s obituary, Royal Cornwall Gazette, 16 November 1921, p4 col 3. 10. Barton, History of Tin Mining, 214. 11. Ibid., 214n1. 12. See Wong Lin Ken, The Malaya Tin Industry to 1914 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965), the most authoritative volume on this entire topic. 13. Barton, History of Tin Mining, 214. 14. As an aside—but it becomes increasingly difficult to establish what can be regarded as ‘incidental’—we might also remark that the same steam engines that had made possible the intensification of mining in Cornwall, also helped make possible the unmooring of money from metal: ‘The underlying factors affecting the choice of monetary standard were technological change and globalisation. In the early nineteenth century steam engines were harnessed to rolling mills and coining presses. This mechanisation made it possible to produce coins that were virtually uniform in dimension and that had very high definition impressions on their faces. Such coins were much more difficult to counterfeit so that it became feasible to produce coins that were not full-bodied and yet would not be counterfeited. Similarly convertible bank notes became more common as a medium of exchange.

Both factors meant that it was possible to have high and low denomination money without bimetallism. In the early nineteenth century Britain formally rejected bimetallism and fixed the value of the pound in terms of its gold content only.’ A. Redish, ‘Bimetallism’, EH.net, <https://eh.net/encyclopedia/bimetallism/>. 15. Buckley, The Story of Mining, 158. 16. Selimkhanov, ‘On the Question of South East Asian Tin’, 277. 17. Buckley, The Story of Mining, 170–1.

Postscript As research for this project was nearing completion in 2010, southern Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted, meltwater from the volcano’s glacial icecap causing severe local flooding, and the eruption plume covering northern Europe, causing catastrophic disruption of air traffic. To those of a Lovecraftian bent, such stark hydroplutonic revenge merely confirms the moral lesson of all good horror stories: protagonists must avoid digging up the pest; those who expose occult conspiracies mysteriously disappear (or worse). Meanwhile, agrosophers unhesitatingly invoked the mythic ‘Recall of Maphusis’, claiming that global warming has increased tectonic plate movement, leading to increased earthquakes and volcanic activity: ‘The Sun Mother reaches out to stroke her deformed child, who stirs in his nightmare-infested sleep…’ Having succumbed to plutonic seduction, the ruinous outcome of the dalliance has been that ‘by tapping the Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we’ve become a volcano that hasn’t stopped erupting since the 1700s’.1 This isn’t the end of the affair. During revision of the project material in 2019, the editor gained access to the drilling rig for a recently initiated geothermal energy project at United Downs, near Redruth. This offshoot of the 1980s Hot Dry Rock research programme is designed to ‘mine’ heat from granite by circulating water through natural fractures in the Porthtowan fault zone down into the hot rocks beneath, in an uncanny artificial miming of the process that first produced Cornish ore. With the injection well penetrating to a depth of 2500m and the production well intersecting the fault zone at 4500m, there is evident cause for concern that such a device heralds a new and disturbingly explicit episode of extraction that can only further deepen the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy. It is true that effectively all human industry is but a servomechanism of planetary thermo-churn. And yet…

tapping directly into the geothermal gradient, plugging directly into the Cthelll circuit, risks unleashing unprecedented forces of plutonic seduction. Truly, we haven’t seen anything yet. Naturally, none of us must allow all this fevered speculation to spoil the fact that, after all, we continue to trip through Cornwall in order to enjoy the picturesque ruined engine houses, the breathtakingly rugged landscape, and of course that famously beautiful light—the sublime majesty of sunlight on water…. It may be remarked, without judgment, that to this day Kernovian Syndrome finds abject expression—degraded perhaps by its relaying through geological, biological, and cultural spheres—in a tourism whose instruments of seduction include not only sunlight, water and the exposed rock formations of the peninsula, but also the aestheticisation of the ruined remains of Cornish industry. The conspiracy continues…. 1. A. Weisman, The World Without Us (London: Virgin Books, 2008), 39.

Robin Mackay Underground Adventure1 Hydroplutonic Kernow aimed to look below the superficial layer of the rugged and beautiful natural landscape that represents Cornwall to most tourists, and to ask how we can understand the production of that landscape as the result of artificial processes of industrial extraction. The Engine House has now become a picturesque and marketable emblem of Cornwall, and we rarely think about the fact that it is a relic of Cornwall’s implication in a radical and violent process of industrialisation, a century-long intensification of extraction technologies. In the popular imagination the engine house has become merged with the natural landscape. In a sense this is appropriate, but a materialist approach is necessary to appreciate in quite what sense it is appropriate—i.e., not purely aesthetically. What struck us in researching for the Falmouth Convention tour was how tin and copper mining in Cornwall can’t be seen in isolation: it gave rise to a very complex system involving a globalised commercial trade and the extraction of many secondary products: our stops on the tour included the works where arsenic was

extracted from mine waste, and the once-busy port of Devoran, now dormant, where wood came in from Norway to build mine props, coal from Wales to fire the engines, and ore went out in huge quantities. This was a complex interconnected system. The Fault-Map produced for the HK trip literalises the metaphor of ‘unfolding’ the landscape to reveal the complex of natural material flows and manmade processes that remade it during the time of industrialisation. In brief, what we sought to bring to light was not so much a picturesque aesthetic natural landscape as the barely-cooled remains of a massive-scale geo-chemistry experiment. That investigation aimed to explore how the development of industrialisation was determined, in the last instance, by the way in which, since the very formation of the earth, materials had been laid down and the terrestrial surface and depths have been shaped by natural hydroplutonic processes, which were then supplemented, complicated, and participated in by industrial man. If the HK project was a vertical view, through deep time, for one local process of extraction. Here I would like to move horizontally, and to ask whether it’s possible to isolate a general logic of extraction. This will obviously require an interdisciplinary approach; in this interdisciplinary spirit, and to make a first test of just how general this logic of extraction is, I’d like to begin with a quote from Companion Animal, the bible of veterinary surgeons. Complications are a regular feature of extraction. While careful, correct technique minimizes these, it’s important to be aware of the potential damage types, their avoidance and subsequent treatment.2 This is quite exact, when applied to all the various modes of extraction carried out by humans on this planet. Because what is characteristic of humans, of course, is that we do complicate things. We don’t carefully unfold the earth and fold it back how it was. In fact, we make a mess. There are no ‘careful, correct techniques’. Extraction is an irreversible process. In fact, we can call it a kind of ongoing encryption. If the earth is a kind of record, a material record of its own history laid down layer by layer—and this contention is of course the basis of all geology—then what humans tend to do is to

corrupt and reformat this file system. An encryption that our descendants will find it very difficult if not impossible to break. With this in mind, let’s look at the basic components of extraction. To do so I’d like to stay with our local model of mining, but keeping in mind that other forms of extraction will differ in various ways from this basic model. Generically speaking, the process involves three components: Firstly, a void, the empty complement of what has been extracted. Secondly, the quarry—the substance that is sought after, the ore, or whatever it might be. And thirdly, what the extractive industries call slag, or what Cornish miners call deads: the heap of waste that’s left after the quarry has been extracted and refined. As mentioned in relation to HK, following the primary extraction, of course it makes economic sense to develop secondary industries to utilise what is left—to make lemons into lemonade, or deads into quarry. One interesting example of this in Cornwall is the practice, in the first half of the twentieth century, of using compressed mine waste as an concrete aggregate. Many houses in Cornwall were built

from so-called ‘mundic blocks’—‘mundic’ being a general word for mine waste, descended from the word for arsenic. Since it’s impossible to tell a priori what these blocks may contain, and their level of toxicity and radioactivity, mortgage companies now refuse to lend on properties with more than a thirty percent mundic content. Ultimately, whatever is left goes more or less back to where it came from, but in a different order. And later on, no doubt, the quarry itself, manufactured into new objects, also ends up discarded and returned to the earth. So it’s in this sense that humankind becomes a kind of geological force, reprocessing and churning the planet. Shifting materials both in depth and across the surface, man lives not only in his contemporaneous time, but enters geological time. We corrupt the file-system in a way whose result is not dissimilar to a geological fault. What you see in the photograph here is the typical blasted landscape left behind by Cornish mining. I want to show you a weird and intriguing example of the kind of irreversibility and twisted

material processes that occur when the process of extraction continues and is ramified. As you may know, the price of copper has been rising. The suggestion has even been made recently that it may even become economical once more to reopen Cornish copper mines. Now, across the road from this particular dormant mine, near St. Day, there is a scrap metal merchant. These are the plastic sheaths of copper wires that have been stripped off and discarded, so that the copper can be sold for scrap. So, alongside the mine shafts, the voids, and the deads, heaped on top of them, here are the remains of products manufactured from the quarry originally brought to the surface here, in a kind of twisted return to the source.

I would like to address a second, important point: this twisted process of extraction is not just a physical process, a process enacted upon materials by humans. The development of capitalism is the condition for large-scale extraction. It’s the concentration of capital, and the concomitant production of a dispossessed labour force that makes possible extraction on an ever-greater scale. Therefore, an extraction also takes place with regard to humans. At the same time as reformatting the earth, using the hidden deposits of a pre-human past, industrial development also reinvents and reprocesses people, using them as a resource, breaking traditional social bonds and creating new forms of social life. This certainly happened in Cornwall. One of the functions of Methodism, we could say, was precisely to rebind the communities that were taken apart by this new force that tore through the landscape. When we realise that the landscape of Cornwall is the barelycooled remains of a massive geochemical experiment, an artificialisation of the earth, we should also consider that the economic and social conditions of Cornwall today are in large part the result of an extraction and a voiding of people.

It’s interesting that the reports by Beckford and Henwood3 speak not only of an anthropic vulcanism, but also of a state of war reigning over this infernal scene. Because, since ancient times, the extraction of metals has been associated with war, and mining has been spoken of as a sort of transgression against the divine order.4 From the advent of the Industrial Revolution, though, humans put aside these ancient apprehensions, and drilled deeper and deeper into the strata of the earth, extracting mineral wealth and leaving voids in their wake. It is difficult now to think of the human as anything other than homo extractus. With this association of extraction and conflict in mind, let’s finally return to the human aspect of extraction. Capitalism can be understood as a machine that uses problems, disequilibria, as fuel for the production of new surpluses. So it tends to return over and over again to the problems it has created—to the deads and to the voids, material and human—that it has left behind, with new technologies and from new perspectives, to try to extract more and otherwise. For communities reorganised around the exploitation of labour power by Capital, the transformation of the land is doubled by a legacy of social void and residue once the primary extraction process is complete (i.e. is no longer profitable and moves on). But it seems that eventually, a new process of extraction follows. Very little has been written about the logic of this new process of extraction. However, luckily, a member of my family, in his researches, came across a volume that speaks about it with great precision.

I think this text is particularly germane with respect to Cornwall, where there are now more theme parks, art galleries, and coffee shops than there ever were mines.

As human and cultural capital begins to rival mineral wealth as an economic factor, this new extraction process begins to probe other ‘deposits’ laid down in the first stage, exploring the voids and the deads left behind by primary extraction.

Redistributed across the surface of the planet, transmuted and transformed, a part of the surplus profits of production return in a strange new form, and begin to alter the landscape again. This time, capital creates not a chemical but a semiotic landscape, turning it into a series of signs or images to be mined and consumed. In this way, the waste products of the industrial age are reprocessed, extraction begins anew, voids are apparently filled, and deads become undead.

A happy ending, perhaps—it seems that there is always more wealth to be extracted , the land is productive again, and the elves are gainfully employed.

But what happens when capital moves on again—when the EU funding, the subsidies, and the arts grants run out…? Or perhaps there’s a better solution, as suggested by another primary text:

MR WICKLES: I’ve gathered you here today for something big. At last. All these years of careful planning have culminated in this one glorious moment. FRED (Bursting through door): Old Man Wickles, caught red-handed in your foul monstermaking scheme! With your ugly, evil henchmen!

BUSINESSMAN 1: Henchmen? Young man, we’re investors, and we’re listening to his pitch. MR WICKLES: So, as I was saying…. The Old Tyme Mining Town, a summer camp for kids—where they can have an authentic mining experience. They can dig for 18 hours straight, just like in the golden days of yore. They have the time of their lives, and we get free miners! 1. Address given at the Penzance <https://thepenzanceconvention.com/>. Convention, 19 May 2012, 2. A. J. Smithson, ‘Oral Surgery Part 4: Extraction Complications’, Companion Animal 12:4 (May 2007): 74–81, 74. 3. See above, 117–18. 4. See epigraphs to this book, v–xiii.

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Notes on Contributors JAKE CHAPMAN is a British artist known worldwide for his iconoclastic sculpture, prints, and installations, work made together with his brother Dinos. In 2015 Jake directed The Marriage of Reason and Squalor for Sky Arts, a film based on his first novel of the same title (2008) which was followed by Memoirs of My Writer’s Block (2010), and Introspastic: From the Blackened Beyond (2011). PAUL CHANEY is a self-taught artist and horticulturalist exploring agrarian futurism through long-term engagements with land and agricultural process. From 2004 to 2012 he lived entirely disconnected from public utilities in a self-built cabin and attempted to survive on a two-acre field. Since 2016 he has led End of the World Garden, an off-grid artists’ residency and research platform in a perennial forest garden. He is associate artist at Kestle Barton Gallery in Cornwall, where his ongoing project Lizard Exit Plan explores a post-collapse survival plan for the inhabitants of the Lizard Peninsula. CAITLIN DESILVEY is Professor of Cultural Geography at the University of Exeter, where she is associate director of the Environment and Sustainability Institute, with a focus on transdisciplinary research and art-science exchange. Her research explores the cultural significance of material change and transformation; her monograph, Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the 2018 UMW Historic Preservation Book Prize. KENNA HERNLY is an art museum educator and researcher living in Washington, DC. She designs and researches ways to support children and adults in learning through art. She is currently a fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. IAIN HAMILTON GRANT is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England. He has written widely on post-

Kantian European philosophy, and is translator of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Baudrillard’s Symbolic Exchange and Death and author of Philosophies of Nature After Schelling (London: Continuum, 2006). SHAUN LEWIN is a cartographer, conservationist, and soundmaker whose work ranges from spatial models of commercial fishing to audiovisual performances derived from YouTube footage of people visiting neolithic sites. He is currently living in Plymouth earning a stable wage at the University by mucking in with its geospatial research and teaching. ROBIN MACKAY is director of Urbanomic, has written widely on philosophy and contemporary art, and has instigated collaborative projects with numerous artists. He has also translated a number of important works of French philosophy, including Alain Badiou’s Number and Numbers, Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, François Laruelle’s The Concept of Non-Photography and Éric Alliez’s The Brain-Eye and Undoing the Image. THOMAS MOYNIHAN is a historian of ideas. Through his work, he aims to bring the historical drama of human enlightenment together with the grand ambitions of contemporary futurology, so as to update the guiding ideal of a ‘human vocation’ for the billion-year perspectives of modern science. He is the author of Spinal Catastrophism: A Secret History (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019), and X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction (Falmouth: Urbanomic, forthcoming 2020). REZA NEGARESTANI is a philosopher. He has lectured and taught at numerous international universities and institutes. His latest book, Intelligence and Spirit (Falmouth and New York: Urbanomic/Sequence Press, 2018) is focused on philosophy of intelligence at the intersections between cognitive sciences, German idealism, and theoretical computer science. JAMES STRONGMAN is principal mineralogist and director at Petrolab Ltd., a company based in Truro, Cornwall. His specialist

field is metalliferous ores and the application of mineralogy to mineral processing. STEVE TARRANT is a mining engineer who is currently assistant mine manager at South Crofty Mine in Cornwall, responsible for a major dewatering operation that is taking place prior to restoration and reopening of the mine.