An Anthropocene Nothing In Stone
Conventionally, the phrase functions as a proposition that human aspirations to attain the permanence of stone are futile, whether they be in the form of contracts or perpetuity or empire or duration in historical/cultural memory. The phrase draws an implicit dichotomy: “written” means human and therefore erasable and subject to erosion, whereas “stone” denotes imperviousness to time and wear; these terms anchor an opposition between temporal human mortality and history and a timeless-seeming abyss of geologic time.
The Anthropocene context complicates the phrase’s meaning, because it is defined by the entanglement of human and geologic timescales. And as human history is decentered by inhuman timescales, the geologic is conversely destabilized: ‘earth’ no longer serves as a ‘ground,’ a given, inert object on which humans act or reference frame to which actions can be refered; instead, the planet is a changing system characterized by tectonic shifts, climate change, and ecological fragility. “Nothing is written in stone,” then, takes on a different sense; one could say that ‘nothing is written in stone, including stone.’
Pierre Jardin’s composition of the proposition expresses human-geologic entanglement by recasting the range of the “written” to include geologic processes—the writes its history in stone, in an archive called the rock record. “Nothing is written in stone” is written in letters formed by pebbles; the pebbles were collected with an eye to their forming a kind of font. The composition contradicts the conventional sense of the aphorism: nothing can ever be written in stone, yet nothing is literally written in stone. More pointedly though, the “written” here extends beyond letters formed by arranging lithic materials: stones bearing round white rings formed by geophysical processes foreground the rock record as a form of writing. Sited in the place of the O’s in nothing and stone, these traces assume a double sense: as zeros, they demonstrate that “nothing is written in stone” in a literal sense—geophysical processes are writing “nothing”; as O’s, they efface the difference between human and lithic inscriptions. Nothing is written in stone in a limited sense, but in an expansive view, everything is written in stone, if “everything” means the history of the planet. “Writing” becomes something that has unfolded for eons, with human writing being only a very recent and differently evolved form of inscription.
This page has paths:
- Nothing in Stone Paul A. Harris
