Why today is there the familiar rallying cry of 'return to the earth'? Why, when such movements have come up again and again and been defeated by sound logic, ungirded of their false assumptions, made to bathe in their contradictions? Why too the return to folk of all sorts?
There is an easy answer that won't desituate itself even after we've made it less easy—tho make it less easy we must. The big resounding fact is that we live in an age of digital technologies, which continually blur the line between 'real' and virtual words. To the point that the previous sentence cannot go any longer without quotation marks, without internal reference to an open exchange between the 'real' and the virtual. As 'real' as this fact may be—technology has made our experience of the world less stable than our own bodies left alone would tend to do—it is not as interesting as its symptoms. Or, put another way, it is not as interesting as our attending to its symptoms will allow us to see it in its full complexity. And really, the symptoms are what we are interested in here, so let us turn to them now.
The return to folk, a particular sub-culture in the oughts, is marked by its desire to 'do it yourself.' DIY culture has run amok in a particular collusion with technology—but this interesting facet we'll turn to much later. Contemporary folk and DIY represent a radical materiality, an insistent return to the most 'real' and tangible material they can find. Knitting, yarn. But also, metalwork, glassblowing, cobbling.
Yarn. A sort of pun. As material, yarn makes sense. Yarn is ragged with visible tendrils of the 'real.' Yarn exhibits the same chaos as our lives. Yarn, despite the multitude of fly-aways, achieves unity, direction and continuity. Yarn is a strained and straining desire. Endless yearning. Agony of trying. (And now, in a parallel world, we digress to discuss trying and essays—essayer, esssaying...)
Yarn. The pun. The tale that is already the first metaphor. The image of the tale-taler, an old salt, weaving (pun/metaphor) a wry legend with all the ragged bits and straying edges that give onto new worlds at every end. Yet through the digressions, a tale emerges, whole and true—even as we put 'whole' under question (under quotations that question). The same unity, direction and continuity that survives amidst the digressions. That, truth told, is only ever just enough digressive material that it begins to appear as a unity, directed and continuous.
And the metaphors will extend on. So, yarn. To name a movement that understands the fragility of its purpose. That is defined by its ardent desire to tell in full realization of the difficulties attendant on that desire. Of the world's occlusion in the mysteries of markets and technologies. That wants to weave. Never wants to stop or cease. Refuses to deny the ability to render digression and strands into something more solid. Even if unstable, baseless, essentially and always only ever 'virtual'.
And there we hit a conceptual epiphany that we must cease the rhetorical flourishes to attend to. 'Virtual' now relegated to the questioning quotations. Yarn, recognizing that 'real' must be suspended and held aloft in perpetual observation and questioning, takes that questioning to be a proof. Unsure of 'real,' we must be unsure of all. No stable anything. Even the antagonistic 'virtual' must exist under questioning only. No longer can it be the new dominant Truth. The digital and virtual, seeming to erase the boundaries of the 'real,' actually erase the boundaries of themselves. And just enough credence return to the 'real,' now given a more solid name, the material. Just enough credence need not mean Truth. But just enough credence to be open to choice. To choose the material as as 'real' as the 'virtual.' But here we spin perhaps a bit too far into our metaphors—or perhaps too far from the ground materiality of our metaphoric yarn.
Yarn can neither do without its continuity nor its digression. The metaphoric slippage between a yarn and some yarn is instructive. Their relationship is so essential that the language of weaving applies equally to both objects. Which is not to say that this is natural in some gods given way, only that their constructions are essentially linked and co-constitutive. Perhaps the sailor's yarn seems secondary, an easily adaptable metaphor for the realm of metaphoricity. And perhaps in a strictly historical sense this is true. But the use of "yarn" to describe a narrative, gives yarn back to us in its specific materiality. Yarn the material functions on the same dynamics as narrative yarns and makes visible, in part, the relationship between continuity and digression. But this visibility disappears, in part, in its use, utility and functionality. Woven yarn enters into projects that appear as whole and complete. Ragged edges are more concealed in finished sweaters and scarves. Yarn's metaphorical link to narrative, especially of the rambling variety, establishes its difference in thought. That is, yarn maintains its distinction as a ragged thing instead of collapsing into synonymousness with "thread." The distinction should be apparent at the emergence of this term. Thread is that which links as its essential property. Its metaphoric associations are all about continuity and attachment. There is no escaping thread. Thread is that which may be lingering, which may always be picked up. And thus, yarn requires its metaphoric attachment to avoid lapsing into the simple rigors of its function without regard to its real material qualities.
We are dealing here with a real 'back to the earth' phenomenon. Yarn is a tool. And if our only experience of it is as a consumer of pre-produced good made from it, we do not have the experience of it in itself. Those who knit and purl come closer, they experience the material feel of the tool. Yet they still do not produce the tool. And failing to produce the tool they are at a remove from its essence. We are rightfully critical of 'back to the earth' movements. Any game of pure individual production, even as a thought experiment, necessarily butts up against unpassable boundaries. Even if one could strip away all goods and run naked into the woods, the immaterial knowledge of our consumption/production world would tread in after. We are subject to this world in an inextricable way.
And so why yarn? Why the conscious steps backward if we know the way back is built on unstable ground, and untenable tenets? Because we are engaged in a war for consciousness. We are constructing a web of awareness that will not allow us to fall silently back into the drone of pure consumption. (We could, as cynics, divert now into a limitless concern that 'awareness' here becomes an empty move that simply returns us all the more safely and satisfied into the arms of the status quo, relieving the pent up concerns just enough to continue to let the system operate, but as I say, that is a perpetual concern and one that tends to close down discussion rather than allow it to attend its full measure as I would like to do here—regardless in this moment whether the matter we're discussing is effective or not.)
Yarn, and DIY, is a culture of critical awareness. It is a culture whose aesthetic marks itself hyper-visibly with its making. That announces itself as produced, as consumable only under the condition that the consumer admit the production, make visible the constituent elements. This is the 'folk', that has been heretofore synonymous with 'poorly crafted.' The return to the 'folk' as a citation is necessarily elitist and troubled. One cannot escape that. The intention is to escape from the factory-made and it is a desperate escape which clings to another free from that association. 'Folk' then becomes valorized as that which as resisted the systemization of the factory. 'Folk' is an unwitting hero tho, that never intended or desired to stand forth against the machines. All this troubles the movement and rightfully so. As a conscious movement, however, these troubles are not uncritical and can be worked at, transformed.
Yarn, again, is a culture of attempt, of trial. This is its essence and that which, even amidst troubles, it does not (have to) apologize for.
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Photography presents an interesting case here. Early photography—daguerreotypes, pin-hole cameras, tintypes—when technology could still be felt and processed by one's own hands. Understood, more importantly. But interesting still because it is technology, it is the beginning of the mystery. First the chemicals, already terribly mixed up in the trajectories of global trade, already too mysterious to get one's hands on. But palpable none the less, an exposure to the dangers of 'real' science. This approach to the 'real' and dangerous projects a psychological limit. 'Real' enough to feel free of the larger mysterious networks. Like planting seeds in one's own yard and tending them with no idea how the seeds were developed and produced over centuries for your own easy planting. Or worse still, the farmer's market that has faith that 'real,' natural work is happening just adjacent, that you can see and touch and talk to the people who do it. And they too slaves to markets and processes, grown green only as subsidiary markets easing the distaste of the rich and petulant few.
But cameras, film. A return to magic in technology, just enough to not get lost. Steampunk as a genre is all about the return to ownership of technology. A desire to recapture the age of the individual inventor. To escape the multinational and return to the fantasy of individual production. A safe imaginary letting onto a dangerous ignorance of the world itself. Tho related, yarn is a distinct movement and one we will rightly return to now.