Flow and the capacity to exceed form
Rivers as artifacts by Matt Edgeworth
For the most part rivers tend to be regarded as more or less natural features of a landscape or townscape … Yet a river and its flow of water is actually often as culturally re-shaped, used and re-used, as any artifact or building … Are rivers natural or cultural? Rivers defy categorisation as one or the other. If we have to classify, we might call the river a ‘natural artifact’. Whereas the form of most artifacts is more or less fixed, the river has a wildness and fluidity about it that cannot be entirely contained. Unlike things crafted out of stone or other solid material, this artifact can escape the bounds of its culturally applied form … Yet it still makes sense to talk of rivers as objects. Rivers stand (or run) as entities in their own right. What is more, they have cultural affordances just like solid artifacts do. The difference is that their affordances tend to be associated with flow rather than form … There is a sense, indeed, in which rivers were the first artifacts. The great human transformation of the material domain may have started with things that were fluid rather than the fixed. From the moment that hominids placed stones across a stream to step across to the other side, or built a crude dam in order to create a pool for fishing or bathing, they were starting to influence and control the flow of water…
A river, then, is not simply the natural phenomenon we might conceive or describe it to be. It is just as appropriate to study its cultural dimensions as it is to examine its natural aspects - to see it as a material artifact. Indeed, as is the case with all artifacts, whether solid or liquid, it is inevitably a mixture of the natural and the cultural. The two aspects are inextricably intermeshed. The works and designs and projects of human beings are woven into the form and flow of the river, while at the same time the river weaves itself into the very fabric of human existence. It flows through the centre of towns, under bridges, beside parks and gardens, into sluices and culverts and cooling towers. It also runs through dreams, designs, projects, poems, memories and myth. It is a part of the human story. For towns and cities that are built on rivers, those rivers run as continuous threads through their history and development.
I may be biased by my previous life as an archaeologist, but I still don’t know any other disciplinary perspective that so persistently and convincingly troubles stable categories like nature and culture, and I think that Edgeworth’s essay is particularly evocative in its assessment of flow and the capacity to exceed form.
Besides mobile technologies, what other areas of study or practice could benefit from such an approach?
- Anne