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Abstract
In this essay we examine the coil-bound notebooks kept at the summit of Turtlehead Peak in Red Rock Canyon, a recreational hiking trail on the immediate outskirts of Las Vegas. Of the many different sorts of entries, a “nature-culture binary” is the most dominant and unique pattern to be found in the journals. We argue that this nature-culture binary serves as a piece of rhetorical equipment useful for navigating the daunting ecological complexities of everyday life. Invoking culturally familiar tropes of sublimity-and-banality, hikers renew their civic vows by “righting” themselves through the journals. We thus argue that the notebooks ultimately serve as the locus of a “becoming-common” within discourse. At bottom, the nature-culture binary enables hikers to affirm—and in affirming make available, and in making available make possible—the noblest ideals and loftiest hopes of a shared material existence. We conclude by noting a darker implication of this rhetorical performance, namely that the seeds of a more harmonious ecological future are sown alongside a dangerously innocent self-righteousness.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Jeremy Engels, Stephan Hartnett, Greg Dickinson, the anonymous reviewers of CCCS, and Robin Ingraham, Jr., for their exceptional insight and support.
Notes
1. The phrase “improbable metropolis” comes from M. Gottdiener, Claudia C. Collins, and David R. Dickens, Las Vegas: The Social Production of an All-American City (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), 1.
2. Since 1999, southern Nevada has been experiencing the worst drought conditions on record. The gradual slowing of the Colorado River, coupled with the hyperbolic growth of the Las Vegas valley, has reduced Lake Mead's water level over 80 feet since 2000. As a result, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has proposed a 2.5 billion dollar scheme (what many are calling a “grab” reminiscent of Los Angeles’ notorious annexation of Owens Lake in 1913) to construct a 280-mile pipeline that would pull northern Nevada's rich underground reservoirs into the city. For more on the ecological dynamics of this issue, See Randal C. Archibold and Kirk Johnson, “An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain,” The New York Times April 4 (2007); and Mike Davis, Dead Cities and Other Tales (New York: The New Press, 2002), especially chapter four, “Las Vegas Versus Nature” (85–105).
3. Together the Nellis Air Force Range and the Nevada Test Site occupy over 4.2 million acres of land in south central Nevada, which makes up about 17 percent of the entire state territory. For more on the environmental consequences of Nevada Test Site and Yucca Mountain, see David Samuels, “Buried Suns: The Past and Possible Future of America's Nuclear-Testing Program,” Harper's Magazine June (2005): 56–68; and William Kittredge, Harper's Magazine, “In My Backyard: A Visit to the Proposed National Nuclear Waste Repository” Oct. (1988): 59–63.
4. Roger LeB. Hooke, “On the Efficacy of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” GSA Today 4:9 (1994), 217, 224–25; and, “On the History of Humans as Geomorphic Agents,” Geology 28 (2000), 843–46. See also Daniel Dennet's discussion of culture as a “crane-making crane” (338) in Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning's of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 335–400.
5. The patenting of genetic material was first made available to genomic and biotech companies in 1980 when the US Supreme Court overruled the Patent Office's decision to prevent the patenting of biological organisms. The Supreme Court's ruling, in Diamond vs. Chakrabarty (447 US 303), paved the way for biotech companies to claim genetic discoveries as intellectual property.
6. Brian Massumi, A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 54; and Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 11.
7. This refrain can be found in the seminal works on “postmodernity,” including, Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (Columbia: Semiotext(e), 1983), and The Ecstasy of Communication (New York: Semiotext(e), 1988); Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979; Manchester University Press, 1984); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990); and Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism: or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). For an alternative perspective, see Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1995).
8. After discovering the journals during a hike, we wanted to learn if any formal archive for them exists. Questioning the park personnel led us to the local Bureau of Land Management office (BLM). One of the BLM employees had stored a few similar notebooks (approximately four) which he allowed us to borrow and photocopy. There were well over 1000 entries in the journals, which dated from 1996 to 1998 (with some more recent journal entries from 2003 to 2004). Local BLM employees are not sure who initiated the practice of maintaining the Turtlehead journals or, for that matter, if and where the others are permanently stored at all. At least one other park that we know of—Denali National Park, in Alaska—archives and preserves similar journals with loving care. There, as one local BLM employee who had previously worked at Denali told us, the journals are fastidiously collected and maintained. Along the Appalachian Trail, shelters are built for similar such journals and employees are hired to maintain them in addition to their other duties such as trail maintenance. In our attempts to locate an institutional home for these notebooks, we discovered the existence of at least one non-BLM affiliated, “citizen-led” preservation initiative. In 1987, friends and hiking partners Robin Ingraham, Jr. and Mark Hoffman campaigned to preserve hiker journals—they call them “summit registers”—as a way to prevent the destruction and theft of what they regarded as historically valuable artifacts. Having affiliated themselves with California's Sierra Club, their “Sierra Register Committee” found patronage in UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library. Today, Bancroft houses 23 cartons containing “Mountain Registers” that date back to 1875. For more on the effort by Hoffman and Ingraham, R., see Mark Kirby, “Paper Chase: Who's Stealing the Sierra's Historic Summit Registers?” National Geographic Adventure February (2005), 28. The Bancroft archive is the only institutionally formalized catalog of these objects we have found.
9. There are, of course, many different kinds of entries in the pages of the journals. Some are descriptive, or silly, or crude, or promotional, or autobiographical, and so on. We focus on the nature–culture binary for the simple reason that it forms the largest and most vivid pattern in the entries overall.
10. For more on this sense of becoming-common, see Michael Hardt, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
11. Some examples of research on the rhetoric of monuments as commemorative public narratives include Sonja K. Foss, “Ambiguity as Persuasion: The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial,” Communication Quarterly 34, issue 3 (1986): 326–40; Carole Blair, Marsha Jeppeson, and Enrico Pucci, “Public Memorializing in Postmodernity: The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial as Prototype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991): 263–88; Victoria Gallagher, “Remembering Together: Rhetorical Integration and the Case of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial,” Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 109–19; Blair and Neil Michel, “Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial,” At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, Ed., Thomas Rosteck (New York: Guilford, 1999): 29–83; Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303–20; and Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, & Eric Aoki, “Memory and Myth and the Buffalo Bill Museum,” Western Journal of Communication 69, issue 2 (2005): 85–108.
12. For a comprehensive discussion of the public land survey system, see Albert C. White, A History of the Rectangular Survey System (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1982). Also useful is Andro Linklater, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy (New York: Walker & Company, 2002).
13. Here we are drawing on the work of Michel de Certeau, who in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) notes the expressive, rhetorical dimension of the ways bodies move through space. He writes, “It thus seems possible to give a preliminary definition of walking as a space of enunciation” (98); and, “walking. .. creates a mobile organicity in the environment, a sequence of phatic topoi (99). Certeau's primary focus is on the city, but his urban-centrism can easily be extended to include the spaces that circumscribe the city. We thus want to expand his homology between speaking and walking to include also the expressive elements of hiking.
14. Andreas Kitzmann, Saved from oblivion: Documenting the Daily from Diaries to Web Cams (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 3.
15. Thomas de Zengotita, Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in It (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 219.
16. http://www.lnt.org/main.html. Accessed May 10, 2007.
17. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Selected Essays, Larzer Ziff, Ed. (1982; New York: Penguin, 1985), 36.
18. Ibid., 36.
19. In Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Philip Fisher defines the sensation of “wonder” in contrast to that of the sublime. The difference has largely to do with pleasure and delight. According to Fisher, whereas the sublime “could be called the aestheticization of fear” (2), “with wonder, above all else, there is the address to delight, to the bold youthful stroke, to pleasure in the unexpected …” (6). While our analysis maintains that essential to understanding the journal entries is the powerful effect of visual disorientation, which gives rise to expressions of sublimity, it is obvious that sensations of delight, whimsy, and the pleasure of surprise—hence, of wonder—are also an important part of the Turtlehead experience.
20. Jean Baudrillard, America. Chris Turner, trans. (1986; New York: Verso, 1989), paraphrased from pages 29–30.
21. James P. McDaniel, “Fantasm: The Triumph of Form (An Essay on the Democratic Sublime),” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86, issue 1 (2000): 48–66.
22. These numbers come from the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce website, which also states: “For the entire decade of the 1990s and now into the twenty-first century, Las Vegas has been the fastest growing metro area in the nation! Low unemployment, an expanding skilled labor force, an exceptional tax structure, a pro-business environment and a great climate all give Las Vegas the ‘total package.’” See http://www.lvchamber.com/relocation/index.htm (accessed 10 May 2007).
23. In making the connection between socio-economic development and “human desire,” we are drawing on the concept of “desiring-production” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983). They write, “The truth of the matter is that social production is purely and simply desiring-production itself under determinate conditions. We maintain that the social field is immediately invested by desire, that it is the historically determined product of desire, and that libido has no need of any mediation of sublimation, any psychic operation, any transformation, in order to invade and invest the productive forces and the relations of production. There is only desire and the social, and nothing else” (29).
24. A poignant emblem of the city's voracious growth as the socio-economic articulation of desire—particularly as it resonates with the “nature–culture” theme in the journals—is the April, 2006, opening of Station Casino's, Red Rock Station Casino. Costing just under a billion dollars and occupying 70 acres of land (with a second tower to follow) the casino also happens to be located at the very entrance of Red Rock Conservation Area and hence only minutes away from the base of Turtlehead Peak. This is in fact one of the casino's main selling points, as well as the source of considerable frustration amongst area residents and nature-lovers who protested the project from the start.
25. http://www.nv.blm.gov/redrockcanyon/ (accessed 10 May 2007).
26. We approach the sublime as a cultural and symbolic given, a set of commonplace tropes and affects that are always already present within discourse itself. In particular, we are interested in how hikers “cash in” on these tropes; that is, how they attempt to make the very banality of the (rhetoric of the) sublime unbanal and uncommon. This approach is informed by Nathan Stormer's piece, “Addressing the Sublime: Space, Mass Representation, and the Unrepresentable,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21, issue 3 (2004): 212–40.
27. “Stealing back-and-forth” refers to the migration of symbolic “content” (meaning) between different terms. See Kenneth Burke's “Dictionary of Pivotal Terms,” in Attitudes Toward History (1937; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 328.
28. These definitions come from the Oxford English Dictionary online, at http://www.oed.com.
29. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Soverign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 28–29. Italics added.
30. Michael Pollan has some wonderful insights on the dis/connections between Whole Foods’ sentimental rhetoric of the organic—what he calls “supermarket pastoral”—and the political economy of organic food production. See his new book, The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), in particular chapter nine, “Big Organic.” See also the especially rousing analysis of “green” in, Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 32 (2002), 5–28.
31. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 206.
32. Stormer, “Addressing,” 221.
33. Gilles Deleuze, “Literature and Life,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997), 228. Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco.
34. Pollan, 201.