Lawn subjects

Lawn People Interpellation of a Political and Economic Subject... 

We hope to demonstrate here that it may be the lawn itself Desire and diazi-non are demanded by lawns, if not by the grasses that constitute them. When the lawn needs cutting, when vwld mints or fungi rival its constituent species, when it becomes dry, its signals are apparent to homeowners, whose response is an act of subjection, not only to the lawn, but also to the ideology of community and the international economy of turf maintenance. 

Again however, as in Downing s vision, lawns were to be drivers of a moral urban citizenry and a new type of American subject. Rather than expressing American culture, therefore, lawns were designed to produce it. 

Now the previous normative social goals of engineering an urban American subject through lawns was, for the first time, mixed with the commercial interests of the firms interested in fostering and maintaining urban growth. New homeowners with lawns were not simply moral subjects, therefore, but eco-... 

And at each point, the lawn was as much a vehicle for the creation and maintenance of social systems as it was a product of those systems. In every period it served to mediate broader ideologies of citizenship and property, interpellating urban subjects as it went. In the process, it became normalized into a predictable kind of aesthetic, one that is inherently cultural in that it came to be normal, expected, and desirable. A lawn, distinct simply from a grassy yard, was established specifically as smooth, unbroken, and homogeneous ecology. 

Advertising neither actively creates turfgrass subjects nor passively represents them, but instead creates a discursive connection between people s image of themselves and the industrial image of the lawn, maintaining the flow of chemicals that is essential to the survival of beleaguered formulator and applicator firms. 

Lawn people are anxious. Their worries about over-consuming chemicals and wreaking ecological damage as a result of their choices are directly correlated with their behaviors indeed such worries are fundamental to them. Are these anxieties a vehicle for critical change Or are these concerns instead a necessary and logical product of the system through which lawn people are subjected, rather than external to it ... 

Lawn people are made anxious by the hazards generated in their homes but rarely interrogate the connection of their home to the broader economy Kaika describes. Suzanne connects the lawn to the dogs paws, but not to anything else. Rather, capitalizing on anxiety to resist subjection to things such as the lawn requires some kind of critical apparatus to interpret how we feel. Nor can we accept those interpretations that are ready-made. 

Neither is naming that subjection a straightforward process. This is because our habits of explanation-as citizens, as consumers, and as lawn people—tend to overlook some of the most fundamental players in the process. If I feel I want to apply chemicals and yet am concerned about that fact if I know I am making a choice, but one perhaps not of my own choosing to what actors can I credit this force of desire The most obvious choice, outside of myself, is the industry that depends on my participation. 

This suggests something more general about the problem of modernity, city and suburban living, nature, and culture. That is (as we asserted in Chapter 1), the enforcement of this specific kind of political economic subject—a concerned, active, communitarian, as well as an anxious, landscape producer and consumer— would be impossible without the lawn itself to enforce the daily practice, feeling, and experience of obligation and participation. The lawn interpellates the subject. ... 

Moreover, the lawn teaches the surprising way that new objects and subjects happen all the time, with the encounter between humans, plants, and insects constantly rolling out new landscapes and new sorts of people. We and the lawn... 

Surveys of professional lawn chemical applicators were conducted during the summer and fall of 2004. Subjects recruited included participants in Ohio State University s OARDC (Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center)-sponsored turf care professional educational seminars (Northeast Ohio Lawn Care Seminars). Approximately 300 professionals attended these events (held at the Wooster campus of Ohio State) to inform practitioners of best management practices, new technology, and health and safety issues. Participants included those who own and work in the lawn care industry in Ohio, spanning companies from small, one-person owner operated firms to large franchised national outfits. Professionals attend these seminars for purposes of certification participation in the survey was optional. 

The book concludes then, that whereas the aesthetic of the lawn may be old, indeed ancient, the turfgrass subject is new the urban person who is concerned about nature but uses chemicals, who supports the Kyoto Protocol but drives an SUV, who recycles fervently while constantly wasting more and more. Rather than condescendingly dismissing such inconsistencies as cognitive dissonance as is common to apolitical critique, the book advances an alternative, which emphasizes the range of constraints on our alternatives and that stresses the way the biotechnical machines we make increasingly make us who we are. 

---