Akin to that is the Territory of abstraction, a regionalism of the mind. This Territory originally belonged to philosophers, mathematicians, economists, think tankers, and the like, but now some claims are being staked out in it for literature. At a meeting in honor of The Southern Review, held in the fall of 1985 at Baton Rogue, one of the needs identified, according to the article in the New York Times Book Review, was “to redefine Southernness without resort to geography.” If the participants all agreed on any one thing, the article concluded,
“it is perhaps that accepted definitions of regionalism have been unnecessarily self-limiting up to now. The gradual disappearance of the traditional, material South does not mean that Southernness is disappearing, any more than blackness is threatened by integration, or sacredness by secularization. If anything, these metaregions…, based as they are upon values, achieve distinction in direct proportion to the homogenization of the physical world. By coming to terms with a concept of regionalism that is no longer based on geographical or material considerations,The Southern Review is side-stepping those forces that would organize the world around an unnatural consensus.”
Parts of that statement are not comprehensible. Blackness, I would think, would be threatened by integration, and sacredness by secularization. Dilution, at least, is certainly implied in both instances. We might as well say that fire is a state of mind and thus not threatened by water. And how might blackness and sacredness, which have never been regions, be “metaregions”? And is the natural world subject to limitless homogenization? There are, after all, southern species of plants and animals that will not thrive in the north, and vice versa.
This “metaregion,” this region “without resort to geography,” is a map without a territory, which is to say a map impossible to correct, a map subject to become fantastical and silly like that Southern chivalry-of-the-mind that Mark Twain so properly condemned. How this “metaregion” could resist homogenization and “unnatural consensus” is not clear. At any rate, it abandons the real region to the homogenizers: You just homogenize all you want to, and we will sit here being Southern in our minds.
Wendell Berry, “Writer and Region” in What Are People For?
I think this Territory best connects to Berry’s most well-known subjects: localism and the life of a farmer. The abstraction he describes in this passage is the very state of mind that leads to the collapse and degradation of local culture, culture situated in a particular place and worthy of being conserved on its own merits.
In another essay in this book, he writes, “Our society, on the whole, has forgotten or repudiated the theme of return. Young people still grow up in rural families and go off to the cities, not to return. But now it is felt that this is what they should do. Now the norm is to leave and not return. And this applies as much to urban families as to rural ones.” These are the wages of abstraction, of the desire to homogenize our places, as Berry describes it, and thus to make them forgettable, abstract and replaceable. Its easy to leave a place, to neglect a place, when all the other places look like your place: beige, corporate, disposable, consumerist.
Not to pick on one corporate abstracter in particular, because they are all complicit, but here in Oklahoma you see it in the form these days of Dollar General. It is a 50 mile drive from our home in Tulsa to my in-laws in Cushing, an hour long drive we make quite often. We pass through three small towns on the way (Mannford, Oilton, and Drumright.) On this drive, we pass by at least six Dollar Generals, and I am probably missing a few in Tulsa itself. In Oilton, a small, no-stop light town, a Dollar General opened about two years ago. Last year, the independent grocer in town, JB’s Market, went out of business.
Dollar General, and WalMart before it, are drivers of abstraction. One Dollar General is like all others, and what they all do is destroy local culture, in the name of corporate profits and shareholder value. And so, towns like Oilton, and Drumright, and Cushing, and Mannford, become all alike, and everyone owns the same things, and wears the same clothes, and are all a moveable abstraction, and certainly nothing to return home to. The rural flight began long before Dollar General and WalMart, yes. But they are exemplars of the culture that has always driven that flight.
The Territory of abstraction, as Berry notes, is a Territory where meaning becomes disconnected from the material, and becomes connected to identity and ideology. And identities and ideologies are shifty things, able to be morphed and reshaped and discarded at will. It is impossible to make Truth claims about abstractions, because you can’t see an Abstraction to see if it conforms to the True and the Good and the Beautiful. And when it comes to place, Abstraction makes all the places alike, so that all places are equally “good” to be, and thus we can all move around to where the bottom line needs us to be, and not miss out on the things everyone else is doing.
But, as Berry points out in the last two paragraphs, Abstraction is a myth. Places cannot be abstracted out of themselves, not really. As he points out, things are attached to places, by God in their very nature, and we can only uproot such connection poorly and temporarily. We can leave home. But we still know where it is.
Justin DaMetz 