Against the Airport and its World: The ZAD and Frontiers

Abstract

The international airport is the quintessence of globalized free-market capitalism: there, the conquering of distances, fluid circulation of people and goods, advertising and consumption of products, all come together in a continuous globalized spatial network covering the earth. It is the epitome of the built, contained, climatized, homogenized, and controlled environment: at antipodes, then, with ‘nature,’ in the form of organically established ecologies. When farmers and activists stopped the building of a new international airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in France last year, the slogan of their movement was “Against the airport and its world.” In this paper, I will examine and compare recent representations of the ‘counter-world’ the ZAD proposes in place of the airport (world-)system—as we find them in essays published in the anthology Éloge des mauvaises herbes: ce que nous devons à la ZAD (2018, including essays by David Graeber, Bruno Latour, and Virginie Despentes) and graphic novels (Pignocchi, 2019; and Azuélos and Rochepeau, 2019)—in order to evaluate to what extent the experimental ecology of the ZAD can give rise to discourses and aesthetics articulating anything ‘other’ than the ubiquitously reproduced logics of the ‘airport,’ which is to say of globalized capitalism itself.

Keywords:

• ZAD
• Bruno Latour
• Virginie Despentes
• graphic novels
• Pignocchi
• Azuélos and Rochepeau

Notes

1 For a much more exhaustive summary and analysis of this production, see Mathilde Roussigné, “Une littérature offensive. Représentations, gestes et interventions à la zad de Notre-Dame-des-Landes,” Revue critique de fixxion française 20 (2020), pp. 25–38.

2 Lindgaard, a journalist, describes the same phenomenon: “quand je suis là-bas, je ne peux pas me contenter d’être journaliste, observatrice extérieure” (“Contaminations” 76).

3 Damasio’s fungal metaphor reproduces the ecological trope central to Anna Tsing’s influential The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton UP, 2015). Lindgaard also explicitly mentions Tsing in her essay “Contaminations.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Armstrong

Joshua Armstrong is Associate Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on how contemporary French and Francophone literatures and visual cultures engage aesthetically with the pressures of globalized capitalism and the Anthropocene. Recent publications include the monograph Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel (Liverpool UP, 2019), and the articles “Fine Lines: Jacques Réda’s Poetics of Place” (Revue critique de fixxion française 18, 2019) and “Spatial Stream of Consciousness” (SubStance 48.1, 2019).