Abstract
This chapter emphasizes the reciprocal relationship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens as it draws on the performativity of their material exchange. White marble, the geological matter of Mount Pentelicon, has been persistently called upon to construct the grounds (literally) and the myths of the Athenian metropolis, while the constant quarrying and re-appropriation of the mountain has reinstituted the very ‘materiality’ of that matter. Throughout this chapter, the space between Mount Pentelicon and Athens is re-drawn through marble as a complex historical, social, political, material image-landscape. In re-imaging and re-imagining a (speculative) Attic marble landscape, this chapter moves away from the romantic image of mountain and city to explore the specificity of the Athenian situation—by illustrating an active network of Mount Pentelicon’s marble in Attica that allows for a series of non-linear readings of the relationship between the mountain and the city—and to provide both an elaboration and a testing of Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘ecosophic cartographies’.
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Notes
- 1.
Melville’s poem reads as a kind of traveller’s advisory:
Tourist, spare the avid glance
That greedy roves the sight to see:
Little here of ‘Old Romance’,
Or Picturesque of Tivoli
No flushful tint the sense to warm—
Pure outline pale, a linear charm.
The clear-cut hills carved temples face,
Respond, and share their sculptural grace.
‘Tis Art and Nature lodged together,
Sister by sister, cheek to cheek;
Such Art, such Nature, and such weather
The All-in-All seems here a Greek.
- 2.
Looking at the English landscapes, dating from prehistory to the Industrial Revolution, Hoskins examines the traces left in those landscape as the product of man’s activities; each generation registers on the landscape its own story while simultaneously erasing remnants of earlier economic, political and social forces. ‘[T]o those who know how to read it aright, [the landscape] is the richest historical document we possess’, Hoskins (1955, 14) notes.
- 3.
The zooming user interface of the Prezi software extends beyond the linearity of any specific narration, allowing each viewer to exercise one’s imaginative power to animate further spatial connections of the relationship between Mount Pentelicon and Athens. For the Prezi presentation, see <https://prezi.com/0tnk3igiumoq/attic-marble-places/> (accessed 26 June 2016). The intention is that the Prezi is read alongside this chapter.
- 4.
In the chapter ‘Geophilia, or The Love of Stone’, professor of English Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (2015, 12) employs the term ‘dense agency’ as he writes, ‘Stone holds a dense agency […] [that] figures the real, and figuring is an active process’.
- 5.
The complex of these quarries, named as the adjacent low-density residential suburb of Dionysos, got its name after the excavations of 1888, under the guidance of archaeologist Carl D. Buck, who uncovered ruins of a sanctuary dedicated to the Olympian God Dionysos.
- 6.
The coded ‘graffiti’ inscribed on the marble surfaces of the quarries hold information regarding the local coordinates, from which each extracted block is originated, along with an archiving system of the loose marble units.
- 7.
During the end of the nineteenth century, the first official topographic depiction of the quarried landscape of Mount Pentelicon is realized. This representation is part of a broader mapping entitled Karten von Attica (1895–1903), conducted by the German geographer Johannes A. Kaupert and archaeologist Ernst Curtius. Curtius had already started surveying Athens, focusing on registering the city’s marble ruination through research that had begun in 1875 and that was subsequently published as Atlas von Athens in 1878. Although Kaupert and Curtius’ mappings were originally conceived as a historical and archaeological project, it developed into a national one that was of primary importance at that time, offering the basis for several redrawings of modern Athens.
- 8.
Lithagogia road is the ancient route that connected the quarried landscape of Mount Pentelicon to the Athenian metropolis, and employed for the transport of the material.
- 9.
A complex of Aegean islands (i.e. Paros, Naxos, Tinos) lie on that same Attico-Cycladic geotectonic fault line.
- 10.
For examples of such representations, see Lange, L. 1836. ‘Steinbruch c zu Pentele’ and Ross, L. 1836. ‘Das Pentelikon bei Athen und seine Marmarobrüche’.
- 11.
White City (1968) is Giannis Hristodoulou’s documentary, commissioned by the Greek National Tourism Organization, which emphasizes on marble as the matter to rebrand the Hellenic capital as a ‘bright’ city.
- 12.
Renwick (1909, 52–53) records that the Anglo-Greek company Grecian Marbles (or Marmor) Limited purchased the quarrying rights on Mount Pentelicon with a capital of £350,000 (equivalent to approximately £19,971,000 today, calculated using the ‘Old money to new’ currency converter developed by the British National Archives), and became one of the largest productive units of marble quarrying in Europe.
- 13.
According to topographic depictions, produced by the geologist Scott Pike (1995), at least 172 discrete quarries are now identified as existing on the mountain.
- 14.
According to Cosgrove, ‘[l]andscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world. Landscape is a way of seeing the world’ (1984, 11).
- 15.
Deleuze argues that the rhizomatic diagram ‘is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field. It is an abstract machine. […] a diagram is a map, or rather several superimposed maps. And from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus, there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture’ (1990, 30 and 37).
- 16.
As he quotes from Guattari and Deleuze’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Corner continues: ‘The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. […] The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an “alleged competence”’ (1999, 214).
In a similar manner, Bateson had argued even earlier, ‘Let us go back to the original statement for which Korzybski is most famous – the statement that the map is not the territory. […] We know the territory does not get onto the map. […] What gets onto the map, in fact, is difference, be it a difference in altitude, a difference in vegetation, a difference in population structure, difference in surface, or what-ever. Differences are the things that get onto a map’ (2000, 318).
- 17.
Bateson articulates ecology in the following way: ‘Formerly we thought of a hierarchy of taxa – individual, family line, subspecies, species, etc. – as units of survival. We now see a different hierarchy of units – gene-in-organism, organism-in-environment, ecosystem, etc. Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e., differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits’ (2000, 340).
- 18.
The term ecosophy first appeared in the texts of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. As John Tinnel explains, however, Naess’ definition is rather different to Guattari’s: ‘Naess calls for an expansion of the self via identification’ (‘Self-realization’), whereas Guattari valorizes autopoietic processes that perform a dissolution of the self via disjunction (‘becoming-other’) (2011, 36).
- 19.
Wiszniewski employs the term ‘metropolitan landscape’ in order ‘to give a sense of the urban to questions of landscape and that of landscape to questions of urbanity. […] If we are to accept the ancient formulation that the landscape must feed the city as much as the city feeds the landscape, then, we need to renegotiate the relations based on a deeper understanding of how specific contextual histories and inherent potentiality may inform, and where necessary resist, the territorial claims of cultural and commodity productions driven by the homogenizing national, trans- and supranational forces of what either Félix Guattari calls Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) or what Hardt and Negri call Empire’ (2013, 67). As for the notion of loving, Wiszniewski, following Alain Badiou, promotes ‘the loving process as reciprocal; an enquiry into how one should elicit love and care for the other […] [affecting] both the dynamics of subjectivation and the apparatuses that are implicated in establishing our dispositions’.
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Mitsoula, M. (2018). ‘Ecosophic Cartographies’ of Mount Pentelicon. In: Kakalis, C., Goetsch, E. (eds) Mountains, Mobilities and Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58635-3_5
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