Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry

282 Pages·2006·3.09 MB·English

by  Esther Leslie

Synthetic Worlds
Nature,Art and the Chemical Industry
Esther Leslie

Synthetic Worlds

Synthetic Worlds
Nature,Art and the Chemical Industry
Esther Leslie
reaktion books
Published by reaktion books ltd
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2005
Copyright © Esther Leslie 2005
All rights reserved
No part ofthis publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted,in any form or by any means,electronic,mechanical,
photocopying,recording or otherwise,without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Colour printed by Creative Print and Design Group,
Harmondsworth,Middlesex
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Biddles Ltd,Kings Lynn
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Leslie,Esther,1964–
Synthetic worlds:nature,art and the chemical industry
1.Art and science 2.Chemical industry - Social aspects
3.Nature (Aesthetics)
I.Title
7-1'.05
isbn 1 86189 248 9
Contents
introduction:
Glints,Facets and Essence 7
one
Substance and Philosophy,Coal and Poetry 25
two
Eyelike Blots and Synthetic Colour 48
three
Shimmer and Shine,Waste and Effort
in the Exchange Economy 79
four
Twinkle and Extra-terrestriality:
A Utopian Interlude 95
five
Class Struggle in Colour 118
six
Nazi Rainbows 167
seven
Abstraction and Extraction in the Third Reich 193
eight
After Germany:Pollutants,Aura and
Colours That Glow 218
conclusion:
Nature’s Beautiful Corpse 248
References 254
Select Bibliography 270
Acknowledgements 274
Index 275

introduction
Glints, Facets and Essence
opposites and origins
In Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow a character remarks on an
exploding missile whose approaching noise is heard only afterwards. The
horror that the rocket induces is not just terror at its destructive power,but
is a result ofits reversal ofthe naturalorder ofthings.The world is upend-
ed by science.Such reversal is the general work of science as presented in
Pynchon’s paranoid vision ofwartime,where ‘ideas ofthe opposite’animate
technological developments.1‘Ideas of the opposite’are as intrinsic to the
science tracked in Gravity’s Rainbow as they are to the science of the great
chemical firms that were founded on the production of artificial dyes and
later became central to the war effort ofthe Third Reich.Chemical reactions
bring opposites together in an exchange ofproperties to produce new things.
More specifically,the synthetic production of all the colours of the rain-
bow emerges from its opposite,the blackness ofcoal.This transformation of
blackness into colour is part of another antithetical process: chemistry’s
efforts to turn waste matter into value.This pursuit aided a wider effort of
inversion:the transformation of all nature into its artificial counterpart,as
naturalmaterials are remade syntheticallyin laboratories.All that exists and
can exist is natural, but processes of deriving complex compounds from
reactions produce substitutes,analogues,imitations and duplicates,which,
because of the synthetic operations that bring them into being, seem to
remain forever synthetic.
In Gravity’s RainbowWalter Rathenau,former German foreign minister
and ‘prophet and architect ofthe cartelized state’,speaks from the grave dur-
ing a séance to the assembled crowd ofNazis and an igFarben director.2He
speaks oftwo stuffs (cid:60)the base materials ofthe Industrial Revolution (cid:60)that
he perceives as qualitative opposites ofeach other.
Consider coal and steel.There is a place where they meet.The interface
between coal and steel is coal-tar.Imagine coal,down in the earth,dead
black,no light,the very substance ofdeath.Death ancient,prehistoric
7
species we will never see again.Growing older,blacker,deeper,in layers
ofperpetual night.Above ground,the steel rolls out fiery,bright.But to
make steel,the coal-tars,darker and heavier,must be taken from the
original coal. Earth’s excrement, purged out for the ennoblement of
shining steel.Passed over.3
Dark waste essence of coal was extracted in the process of making shiny
steel.This remainder in turn could yield yet more unexpected transforma-
tions,such as the first synthetic dye,Perkin’s mauve.Rathenau’s description
ofactivity in the depths ofthe earth is grandiose,but echoes ofits terms can
be read in many chemical histories,including those that served as sources for
Pynchon.4For the ghostly Rathenau coal-tar’s significance is mystical:
A thousand different molecules waited in the preterite dung.This is
the sign ofrevealing.Ofunfolding.This is one meaning ofmauve,the
first new color on Earth,leaping to Earth’s light from its grave miles
and aeons below.5
Rathenau speaks from the realm of the dead, but he also speaks of death.
These thousand different molecules will give from themselves in time a whole
range of substitutions.What is revealed by these is the drive of the chemical
industry towards ‘the impersonation oflife’,‘from death to death transfigured’.
Refuse turns into worth in an act worthy ofalchemy,but rather than cracking
the code oflife itself,all that has been achieved,Rathenau cautions,is the poly-
merization ofa few dead molecules.Rathenau,the son ofthe industrialist who
founded aeg,warns that the igFarben cartel grows as if it were an organic
entity,but it is,in actuality,‘deep and dead’.6Death imitates life and reinforces
its dominion.It sprouts smokestacks that can survive the latest explosions.It
is,or more specifically igFarben is,a structure that favours death:
Death converted into more death. Perfecting its reign, just as the
buried coal grows denser,and overlaid with more strata (cid:60) epoch on
top of epoch,city on top of ruined city.This is the sign of Death the
impersonator.7
Coal,steel,coal-tar,artifice,synthesis,substitution,power,war,death (cid:60)these
elements bond to form chains of connection in the dark science of
Pynchon’s chemical cartel. Science is the referent, but magic is the black
power invoked.Through coal’s carbon chemistry,and its waste product of
coal-tar, a realm of synthetic colours and substances is unlocked from a
dense and primitive blackness. The first magic act is coal-tar becoming
colour,the first of thousands of substitutions.This magic is a black force.
Gravity’s Rainbow lets loose its narrative strands amongst a world of
acronyms and neologisms,fictional and actual.spqr,arf,mmpi,soe,spog,
8