INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the role of the Planning and Development Department leading up to the reorganisation of local government in 1996, when the BRC and its four constituent district councils were replaced by the Scottish Borders Council (SBC). During the early 1990s, four district-wide local plans were produced to replace the twelve local plans adopted in the 1980s. They were prepared in tandem with the new structure plan, The Scottish Borders 2001: The Way Forward, approved in November 1993. The replacement local plans applied in detail the policies and proposals incorporated in the approved structure plan, in order to provide a basis for co-ordinating public and private investment and for the control of development up to 2001. The procedure for the preparation of the replacement local plans followed a similar path to that adopted for the first local plans. The Berwickshire Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in March 1995. The Roxburgh Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in May 1995. The Ettrick and Lauderdale Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in July 1995. The Tweeddale Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in June 1996. A substantial number of policies in the replacement local plans were unchanged from the previous local plans but new policies reflected the economic, social and environmental changes outlined in the approved structure plan. Many of the proposals in the previous local plans had been implemented and new allocations for housing and industry were required to reflect the strategic proposals in the approved structure plan (Figure 9.1).

The BRC was one of the leading local authorities in Scotland campaigning for a stronger voice for rural communities. For more than two decades, perceived to be at a considerable disadvantage compared with the Highlands and Islands, the regional council, strongly supported by its Members of Parliament, particularly Sir David Steel, had sought more recognition by government of the problems of rural areas like the Borders Region. Under the umbrella of COSLA, the regional council brought the problems of rural areas to the attention of government through the gathering of evidence on the extent of rural disadvantage in Scotland. The regional council and other rural local authorities argued that more coherent and integrated policy making was required at government level.

The complex relationship between the post-secular and the theological turn in philosophy and political theology is the backdrop that inspired the main theme of in this book: to what extent the centrality of theological discourse in originating meanings, symbols and realities has been, and continues to be, relevant in shaping instituted practices in the political realm.

This relevance has historically been shown in the conceptual transfers and mutual borrowings of terms and meanings from one field to another: from the theological to the political and vice versa. Through this hybridisation of theological and political vocabulary, it is shown that some divine traces could be considered embedded in institutionalised political practices. Throughout the various chapters, we have tried to discover the divine marks, the theological signatures or, as we have characterised them here, the figures of the divine embedded in certain instituted political practices. These figures speak of God. In a way, they reveal God by saying something about Him or by representing Him. The five theopolitical figures examined in this book are other names of God found in the political realm. Following the tradition of the apophatic theology, they name God in a negative and symbolic way: in particular, He is the written revelation (scripture); He is the to come (prophecy); He is truthful and faithful (oath); He is mercy and forgiving (charisma); and He is the absolute host (hospitality). These figures refer to symbolic meanings which happen as historical events representing the divine in a negative way. In fact, these theopolitical figures appear in the form of a paradox: while being the necessary conditions for the constitution of any possible community, they always remain unconditional and impossible in their absolute happening.

Hence, this book is intended to be a contribution to the theological turn in political philosophy. It reinscribes contemporary political concepts and experiences in the ‘theological locus’ from which they supposedly come and at the same time looks for alternative semantic derivations for the political theory and practice. The discursive trajectory of the book has engaged with the discussions of different continental philosophers of the twentieth century, including Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, Jean-Luc Marion and Vladimir Jankélévitch among others.

All political communities have an interest in adopting a regime that will ensure the preservation of the community and solve the social and economic problems it faces. Democracy, understood as a scheme of collective self-government, has been defended as a regime-type that is well-suited to these tasks. Part of the way in which it does this is by providing fair conditions for policy contestation and public debate, so that different values and interests held across the society can feed into decision-making. Although often a bumpy road, this process is at least expected to produce the ‘community-integration’ good of peaceful and civil conflict resolution, as well as some of the ‘epistemic’ goods required for well-informed and welljustified policy outcomes.

Not all political communities, however, are created alike. In some cases, certain aspects of the democratic process may be counter-productive when it comes to producing the goods of community integration and policy effectiveness. This is especially true in what have been referred to as ‘deeply divided societies’ (Taylor 1993). Although most democratic societies are diverse, deep diversity refers to societies where different ways of belonging mark out some of the central political fault lines. These lines of division tend to include nationality, language, religion and even ethnicity. Deeply diverse societies are often seen as facing a democratic dilemma when it comes to institutional design: a) adopt a standard model of contestatory democracy and put the goods of community integration and problem-solving effectiveness at greater risk; or b) attenuate some of the more contestatory attributes commonly associated with democratic systems to better preserve these goods. At least part of the reason for the perceived tension at the heart of this dilemma is the tendency for political contestation to run hot in deeply diverse societies as different social segments pursue strategies of maximum extraction for the benefit of their segments at the expense of more optimal outcomes for the whole (Miller 1995: 91–7; Moore et al. 2014: 159). This not only creates obstacles to problem-solving, it also makes it more difficult for citizens from different segments to identify with one another or their common political institutions as constituting an appropriately integrated body politic. As a result, disintegrative demands – from decentralisation or federalisation to complete secession – tend to become forceful in deeply divided societies.

A photograph buried in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France shows eight Indian men, dressed in turbans, digging through the rocky earth (Figure 4.1). The photograph was taken in September 1914, in all likelihood in France, where 138,608 Indians would arrive to fight in the first year of war. More details are hard to come by. While it is unclear what these men were digging – a well, an irrigation ditch, a grave, a trench – their movements appear old and practised. Hailing from the rural northern provinces of Undivided India, as did so many recruits at the time, these eight men had been accustomed to working the land long before they enlisted in the British army, boarded a ship and stepped ashore in France in the midst of a global conflict. The power relations implicit in such a trajectory, and implicit in this scene in the French countryside, are obscured in the photograph, with the British officer overseeing the work and the white photographer taking a picture both positioned just outside the frame. This chapter reads affective moments of contact with the soil in relation to these power imbalances in Mulk Raj Anand's First World War trilogy. In The Village, Across the Black Waters and The Sword and the Sickle, composed in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Anand explores engagements with the land in a literal and abstract sense, moving from scenes of men working the fields in the Punjab, and crawling through the mud of northern France, to men handling the documents, such as land revenue notices and military files, that governed these movements. My argument is that the encounter with the land, and with the documents that determined its ownership, serves as an image in these novels for the loss of agency, thus functioning as an implicit critique of the power structures of empire. In the photograph, too, the backs of these Indian soldiers are turned to the camera, their faces indistinct.

India was Britain's proudest possession in an empire that would be at its largest in the years following the taking of this photograph, after Britain acquired German overseas possessions in the Treaty of Versailles. As an army recruiter in Anand's The Village observes, ‘the sun never sets on the kingdom of George Panjam’.

Under the name of hospitality, we understand the generous opening of our space and time to another who is in principle a stranger. This willingness to welcome the other, both stranger and fellow, is an unconditional duty for anyone who wishes to live as a human being. Levinas and Derrida have written eloquently on this idea. But this is an old ‘Christian trope’. In fact, as Derrida notes in The Gift of Death, the mysterium tremendum of dying for the other is the secret of the historic and political responsibility that engulfs the future of European politics. The ‘weakness’ of a God who dies for the fellow other makes hospitality imaginable in a political context marked by the idea of a community with borders.

Derrida arrives at the idea of hospitality via the ideas of fraternity and friendship. In fact, in Politics of Friendship, Derrida undertakes the deconstruction of several political texts in which the idea of a political community is associated with that of proximity, as if it were an extension of the idea of the brotherhood proper to the family. His aim is to situate the political beyond fraternity and consequently beyond the family schema. The political deals with the distant other who arrives to my side; not with the one who is in my genealogy. Separation is the condition of possibility, and at the same time of impossibility, of the political friend, he says, echoing Schmitt's political concept of the political as friend–enemy relationship.

Indeed, one of the Christian tropes that Derrida takes most seriously is the Judeo-Christian ethos of ‘brotherhood’. He speaks of the Christian semantics of fraternity, specifically of a ‘christianization of fraternization’. In fact, brotherhood was a Christian appropriation of the classical Greco-Latin trope: ‘brother or sister in religion’. According to Derrida, Kant's statement that ‘all men represent themselves as brothers under a universal father’ remains rooted in the need for natural fraternity, and thus refers to the anthropological schema of the family. By deconstructing the elements of ‘natural’ and ‘spatial contiguity’, generally attributed to fraternity, Derrida tries to decentre the Christian trope of fraternity.

We are living in a time when democracy in the West is facing its greatest challenges since the 1960s and perhaps even since the end of the Second World War. The chapters in this book address various challenges confronting European democracy at the national and regional levels. As Niklas Bremberg and Ludvig Norman note in their introduction to the volume ‘The European political order has an ambivalent relationship with democracy. Democratic concerns have been part of the discussions on European [postwar] cooperation since its inception.’ It is now perhaps worth stepping back and reminding ourselves how recent and difficult to achieve stable consolidated democracy actually was in Europe.

During the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, Europe was convulsed by political upheaval; despite myriad attempts since the French Revolution, stable democracy proved elusive. Most tragically, during the interwar period failed democratic experiments led to the rise of the most brutal regime and deadliest war the world had ever experienced. Yet after the Second World War, the western half of the continent was transformed: political stability became the norm. It is against the backdrop of the decades of democracy Western Europe has enjoyed since 1945 that the democratic dilemmas and challenges examined in this volume emerged. Understanding and addressing these dilemmas should, accordingly, be facilitated by an examination of what it took to finally make democracy work in Europe.

There were many reasons, of course, for Western Europe's post-1945 transformation, but essential were changes that occurred at the war's end (Berman 2019). In particular, actors across the political spectrum and on both sides of the Atlantic recognised that stabilising democracy would require more than merely getting rid of existing dictatorships; it would necessitate a new understanding of the relationship among states, markets and societies. As a result, after 1945 Europeans, with the cooperation of the United States, constructed a new order designed to promote peace and democratic consolidation. At the heart of this order was a recognition, as other authors in this volume note, of the tension between capitalism and democracy.

INTRODUCTION

Modernity came to the Borders in various guises: milk bars and tearooms, supermarkets, illuminated advertisements, pedestrian crossings and roundabouts. Architects and builders experimented with new forms of design and construction; new housing schemes, inspired by the innovative New Town designs, sprang up in Galashiels and Hawick. At Church Square, in Galashiels, a scheme designed by architect Peter Womersley for Galashiels Town Council was considered by the Saltire Society to be the best designed housing scheme in Scotland in 1963. Peter Womersley also won awards for his ‘brutal’ concrete design for the Gala Fairydean Football Club stand and for the Bernat Klein Studio, located at High Sunderland, near Selkirk.

The rate of development, as measured by the number of planning applications received across the four counties, fluctuated during the 1960s before increasing from about 1,000 per annum in 1967 to over 1,300 in 1974. The vast majority of applications related to residential development, principally rented housing by the various town councils, supported by the SSHA, and an increasing number of private housing developments. Applications for PFSs and related signage in town and country reflected the growing car usage for leisure, as well as travel to work. The ‘swinging sixties’ also brought with it such diverse proposals as discotheques and youth clubs, bingo halls and a plethora of chewing gum machines outside corner shops in Galashiels and Hawick. The number of applications refused was relatively low; for instance, in 1972, only 7 per cent of the 540 applications received by RCC were refused, reflecting the practice of seeking to achieve a compromise rather than a refusal.

There was a more positive attitude towards urban development with the establishment of technical working parties in Jedburgh, Melrose, Kelso, Hawick and Galashiels. However, most development proceeded by way of amendments to the increasingly out-dated county development plans. Through such formal amendments, land was allocated in all the main towns for both industry and housing in an effort to stem depopulation. Non-statutory plans were prepared for the redevelopment of town centres in Hawick, Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose, Eyemouth and Duns.

Reading Beckett

In the spring of 1989, I was teaching a graduate course on deconstruction, ethics, and literature at Rutgers University, and preparing to fly to California to carry out an interview with Jacques Derrida as part of a new project of collecting, in a single volume, English translations of his most important studies of literary texts. Not long before leaving, I asked the class if anyone had any questions they would like me to put to Derrida – we were studying one of his essays at the time – and I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that the response was, at first, a rather stunned silence. Then one of the students made a suggestion in line with his own particular interests: ‘Can you ask him why he has never written on Beckett?’ (The student was Stephen Dilks, now a respected Beckett scholar.) I did ask the question, and Derrida's answer – later published in Acts of Literature (60–2) – has been quoted and mulled over many times by scholars and critics writing on Beckett. (I think especially of the probing discussions by Asja Szafraniec in Beckett, Derrida and the Event of Literature, Daniel Katz in Saying I No More, and Ewa Ziarek in The Rhetoric of Failure.) Going back to Derrida's comments in preparing this chapter, I was struck by the degree to which they resonated with my thoughts about Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable as we might read them today, no doubt because Derrida's understanding of literature has been highly influential for me. Nevertheless, the implications of his comments have not, I believe, been fully taken on board in Beckett studies (or, for that matter, in literary studies more broadly). Here are a couple of Derrida's remarks in answer to my question: ‘How could I write, sign, countersign performatively texts which “respond” to Beckett? How could I avoid the platitude of a supposed academic metalanguage?’ and ‘The composition, the rhetoric, the construction and the rhythm of his works, even the ones that seems the most “decomposed”, that's what “remains” finally the most “interesting”, that's the work, that's the signature, this remainder which remains when the thematics is exhausted’ (Acts of Literature, 60–1).

Raymond Ruyer's philosophy of biology takes the notion of an organism as its central theme. As George Canguilhem observed in his ‘Note’ (1947), the publication of Ruyer's book Elements de psychobiologie was an important event which helped to overcome the ‘oblivion of life’ in French philosophy. In his two most important books, Neofinalism (2016) and The Genesis of Living Forms (2020), Ruyer defines an organism as a primary consciousness, which has the capacity of self-organisation, self-affection and self-enjoyment. For Ruyer, primary consciousness is a specific phenomenon characteristic both of human beings and all living forms. What defines any living being is the development of forms, or the process of morphogenesis, leading to a certain purpose that is not determined in advance but self-initiated by an organism's ‘mnemic themes’. Like Simondon, Ruyer argues against the notion of bounded entities, understood as pre-formed and pre-given, and asserts that morphogenesis is a self-formative activity, which creates without any pre-ordered idea or plan. Ruyer's morphogenesis, similar to Simondonian ontogenesis, is a process that carries within itself the potential for its transformation. Ruyer criticises contemporary theories of embryogenesis as being built on Newtonian physics, which construes living beings as mechanisms placed in a neutral space. In this sense, Ruyer distinguishes between the extensive space of physical entities and the intensive space of living forms. In contrast to physical entities, Ruyer examines living organisms as self-formative and self-surveying beings, which have the properties of primary consciousness. Each living form, from the most primitive organisms to those having a psychological consciousness and a brain, expresses conscious activity and the capacity of maintaining and transforming its form. This insight allows one to reconceptualise the notion of an organism and also to relocate human consciousness from its exceptional position to its place in the continuum of living beings. In this chapter I will concentrate on some specific aspects of Ruyer's theory of morphogenesis and its tension between preformationism and finalism; then I will discuss the notions of equipotentiality and of self-survey, and finally emphasise the uniqueness of his notion of primary consciousness.

These words are spoken by Brutus in his garden on the eve of the assassination, as he awaits a visit from his co-conspirators. In an attempt to make sense of the inner turmoil caused by the fateful decision to kill ‘his best lover’ (3.2.45), Brutus resorts to a body politic metaphor, whereby the ‘mortal instruments’ overthrow ‘the genius’. It is also, of course, a mise en abyme of the play's main action, involving Caesar's overthrow by a group of senators, Rome's political ‘instruments’. Brutus's internalisation of the events being played out in the main action establishes the link between thought and political action as both causal and analogical, signalling that an allegorical reading of the play's action may offer insights into the main character's psyche. This is supported by the polysemy of ‘acting’, which could mean either ‘doing’ or ‘deciding’. Yet if polysemy tends to reinforce allegorical connections, it also breeds indeterminacy, as appears in editorial footnotes relating to ‘genius’ and ‘mortal instruments’. In the 1998 Arden edition, David Daniell glosses ‘genius’ as ‘guardian spirit’, and the ‘mortal instruments’, as ‘the human functions of mind and body’. These definitions are broad enough to blur the line between material and immaterial agents, consistent with the openness of ‘acting’. Is Brutus, then, referring to the brain and the hand? The soul and the brain? The heart and the will?

Though the exact referents of Brutus's metaphor may be elusive, the speech showcases allegory as a cognitive tool for exploring states of mind and the mechanics of decision-making. While the opacity of Brutus's speech, in keeping with the darkness of the night, suggests that the tool is an imperfect one, it is perhaps no accident that his musings at this juncture are repeatedly inter-rupted by a young servant with the evocative name of ‘Lucius’, who runs around performing errands for him, lets in characters from the outside, and jogs his flagging memory.

Parchman prison, a sweltering Southern landscape, and characters perpetually wrestling their own thirst: these are some of the defining elements of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017), a neo-Gothic odyssey into the barren heart of the Mississippi State Penitentiary. ‘I swallow and my throat seems to catch like Velcro’, says thirteen-year-old Jojo, the novel's lead protagonist whose incarcerated father's release date prompts the road trip (Ward 2017, 64). ‘I think’, he continues, ‘I know what the parched man felt’ (Ward 2017, 64). Jojo's etymological interpretation of Parchman might easily be dismissed as a moment of humour – a reminder of the child narrator's age – but his statement is significant insofar as water deprivation and contamination is an underlying issue at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Following a 2019 state inspection that exposed an array of environmental health issues festering within the prison, activists took to the Rankin County courthouse in protest. Malaika Canada implored attendees at the rally to ‘[i]magine […] being dehydrated for days, afraid to drink water that's brown and smells like sewage within pipes filled with rust and mould’ (Liu 2019). That the characters comprising Sing, Unburied, Sing develop an insuppressible desire for water the closer they get to the penitentiary, teaches Jojo that to fall into the grip of Parchman is to understand what it means to be thirsty.

‘Sometimes I wonder who that parched man was, that man dying for water, that they named the town and jail after’, says Jojo (Ward 2017, 63). ‘Wonder if he looked like Pop, straight up and down, brown skin tinged with red, or me, an in-between color, or Michael, the color of milk. Wonder what that man said before he died of a cracked throat’ (Ward 2017, 63).

In Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel Salvage the Bones, an impending storm threatens to hit the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, where we meet Esch Batiste and her family navigating life as marginalised Black bodies in contemporary America. This novel – part coming-of-age narrative, part climate crisis narrative – resides in the space between waiting and knowing, as Esch's (forced) growth into adulthood is interwoven with the dangers and realities of the coming hurricane. In conversation with environmental theories of embodiment and marginalisation, I consider how Ward's focus on the dynamics of family and kinship relations, gendered labour and violence, and class barriers and racialised economic inequality also examines the disproportionate effect of climate crisis and environmental degradation on marginalised bodies. Through Esch's experiences of impending crisis – motherhood, natural disaster – I seek to explore the interconnections and importance of the natural and the personal in Salvage the Bones. As Kathryn Yusoff notes in their considerations of natural space, geology and Blackness, ‘noticing the meshwork of anti-Blackness and colonial structures of the Anthropocene, which constitute the distinct underbelly to its origin stories, gives visibility to the material and bodily work that coercively carries the Anthropocene into being and challenges the narrative accounts of agency there within’ (Yusoff 2019, 107). In embracing the narrative accounts of marginalised bodies and climate crisis, Ward's text confronts the histories of erasure and apathy towards particular bodies in discussions of climate crisis and environmental impact.

In the novel, Esch's experience is deeply tied to the land, with her understanding of selfhood growing out of the place and space which she inhabits. The connections of Esch's personal experience to natural space are, further, played out within the domestic sphere: as Esch grapples with the legacy of her mother (and mothering), other maternal figures and influences, and the unconventional family dynamics within the Pit. Esch inhabits a space of ‘extreme domesticity’, a term coined by Susan Fraiman which theorises a re-formation of domesticity in the face of dislocation, economic insecurity, queered notions of family and other non-traditional (heterogeneous, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial) family structures. In these formations of the domestic space, homes and families are ‘vulnerable, hybrid, heterogeneous, and dynamic’ attributes that ‘serve to debunk received, naturalized notions of home as inert and one-dimensional’ (Fraiman 2017, 123). Fraiman argues instead that the domestic is ‘a site of change and complexity’ (123).

Introduction

Jesmyn Ward is perhaps the leader of the contemporary Black Southern literary renaissance. Her 2016 Buzzfeed article, ‘This Was the Year America Finally Saw the South’, is the rallying cry for her generation. Ward begins this article by contrasting her grand-mother's life with her ‘grandaunt Jane’, who ‘migrated to Chicago’ in the 1950s. Her grandmother ‘did not accept the invitation’ to join her sister in Chicago: ‘she remained, and she bore and raised all of her seven children’ on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi (Ward 2016). In that article, Ward defines Southern Black literature as a regional genre produced by a people who believed in the power of Southern land, stayed put on that land and forged robust communities that enabled joy and purpose to thrive despite the terrors of Jim Crow. Ward further explains this in her introduction to Best American Short Stories, 2021 (2021), by providing details of her family history. Her ‘great-great-grandfather built a one-room schoolhouse to educate black children in 1940’. He also ‘owned acres of land, granted them in perpetuity’, because he was ‘determined to parcel out all he had to his children so that they might own some piece of this red-sanded, green-fringed, singing earth when he was gone’ (Ward 2021, xiv). Two generations later, her grandmother inherited that legacy and became ‘the first person who taught [her] something of the power of narrative’ (xiv) through her powerful stories at family gatherings (xii–xx). Furthermore, as Ward matured, she was exposed to Southern Black literature produced by women, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston and The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker. Ward ‘read and reread’ those two novels while searching for ‘anything else I could get by the two brilliant Southern women’ (Ward 2016).

Following in Hurston's and Walker's tradition, Ward began to write. She did not see anybody else doing what Hurston and Walker did for her generation, namely, ‘writing about ordinary black Southerners’. She felt compelled to continue in their tradition and ‘write stories that affirmed my existence, that showed black Southerners to the larger American culture. That posited this: We are here. We are human beings.