Abstract

John Kinsella’s poetry returns again and again to the landscape of the Western Australian wheatbelt. The wheatbelt is a region that was suddenly and violently re-made by capital in the service of cereal and fibre production during the course of the twentieth century. Despite this radical repurposing of land and the wholesale eradication of an ancient biome, the new farming zone quickly took on the halo of a natural landscape within state and nationalist ideologies. Against the backdrop of this event, Kinsella’s wheatbelt can be viewed as a comprehensive deconstruction of the forces that have led the wheatbelt to where it is now and which still provide the material conditions of its existence. In this essay, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography (2008) is considered as exemplary of his wheatbelt poetry. The essay explores the basic conceits that animate Kinsella’s poetics of critique. It argues that Kinsella’s poetry offers a strategic intervention into the claims of “capitalist realism,” which is Mark Fisher’s term for the foreclosure of alternatives to profit-driven patterns of production and consumption. Capitalist realism, in the context of the wheatbelt, asserts that whether we like it or not, one cannot argue against the basic entitlement that productive imperatives (and its agents) have to use land as they see fit. This essay attempts to detail the kinds of ways that Kinsella’s poetry tries to fracture this claim to common sense that capitalist production monopolises. What it finds, somewhat counter-intuitively, is that Kinsella’s poetry draws together two things which are traditionally regarded as antinomies – the machine and the organism. In this respect, Kinsella’s poetry is distinctly different from conventional ecopoetry, which tends to uphold the distinction between an authentic nature and a corrupting technology. Kinsella’s Divine Comedy makes use of the tripartite layering of Dante’s eschatology to evolve new topologies of being in the wheatbelt, and indeed, being in the world. Further still, the essay makes the claim that Kinsella delivers us a “cybernetic wheatbelt,” which refigures nature as a communicative machine.

摘要

约翰·金塞拉（John Kinsella）的诗歌一次又一次地回到了澳大利亚西部小麦带的风景中。小麦带是一个在20世纪期间突然被资本重制为谷物和纤维生产服务的地区。尽管对土地进行了彻底的重新利用，并彻底根除了古老的生物群落，但新的耕作区很快在州和民族主义意识形态中占据了自然景观的光环。在这一事件的背景下，金塞拉的小麦带可以被看作是对导致小麦带到现在的位置并仍然提供其存在的物质条件的力量的全面解构。在本文中，金塞拉的《神曲》：地区地理之旅（2008）被认为是他的小麦地带诗歌的典范。本文探讨了使金塞拉的批评诗学充满生气的基本观念。它认为，金塞拉的诗歌为“资本主义现实主义”的主张提供了战略干预，这是马克·费舍尔（Mark Fisher）所称的取消以利润为导向的生产和消费方式的替代品的术语。在小麦地带的背景下，资本主义现实主义断言，无论我们是否喜欢，人们都不能反对生产强制性命令（及其代理人）必须使用其认为合适的土地这一基本权利。本文试图详述金塞拉的诗歌试图打破这种对资本主义生产垄断的常识的主张的方式。它发现的结果有些违反直觉，Kinsella的诗歌将传统上被视为对立的两件事融合在一起：机器和有机体。在这方面，金塞拉的诗歌与传统的生态诗歌截然不同，传统的生态诗歌倾向于坚持真实自然与腐败技术之间的区别。金塞拉的Divine Comedy利用Dante末世论的三重层次发展了出现在麦带中以及确实存在于世界中的新拓扑。更进一步地，这篇文章声称金斯拉为我们提供了一个“ cybernetic小麦带”，它把自然形容为一种交流机器。