Was ist
„obstinat“? — Der kürzeste Weg ist nicht der
möglichst
gerade, sondern der, bei welchem die günstigsten
Winde
unsere Segel schwellen: so sagt die Lehre der Schifffahrer.
Ihr
nicht zu folgen heisst obstinat sein: die Festigkeit des
Charakters
ist da durch Dummheit verunreinigt.
First, the title: Character under
Capitalism: some notes
The first section: character
The second: homo oeconomicus
The third: Marx’s buried notion of
circulation
Eliminate: The fourth: Simmel’s sociology –
the encircling institutions of modernity
The fifth: the clerks of literature
The sixth: simultaneity – the new and the
end of the future
The seventh: the non-totality of totality,
or the exchange matrix
Chapter 5
[In the clerks, I want to explore the
aesthetic dimension, or effect, of the circulation sphere – how it shaped a
certain style of alienation, of writing, and of living. The clerks are, as it
were, at the very nerve ends of a social turn towards utility. The reaction to
this turn is complex, but it does create a counter-literature in which
existence is presented as precisely that which is not useful, and cannot be
used. Yet that refusal of use and being used is bound within an economic sphere
in which exchange value is the pre-eminent concern. This produces a double
nostalgia –on the one hand, for production as a virtue, and on the other hand,
for nature as a way out of the bind of utility.
However, clerk literature finds itself
engaged with other systems of literature as well – below the ‘genres”, we find
the typical literary situations of production and reception. And thus we find
the media and education as the literary situations that differ from and have
both competitive and collaborative relations with the clerical type.]
The scribe and the title
Almost all the titles are lost. That is,
almost all the titles of the ancient Egyptian texts that we now possess are
lost. “The title of the book, a summary of its contents, or the opening words,
were at times written on the reverse side or at the outside of the scroll’s
beginning, with the name of the author (“made by”) immediately after it. As
scrolls generally lost their edges first, few titles have comedown to us. Fewer
authors were identified..Sometimes, however, lists of titltes were written on
the walls of temples or pyramids,though the books themselves have not survived.
Small deeds and other documents at times were provided with titles. Onne book
of the dead was entitled “Book of the Coming into the Day of Osiris Gathesehen,
daughter of Mekheperre.” Long texts were sometimes divided by the chapter
numbers, marked by ht, “house”.” (Leila Avrin, 91)
It has been a long time since Jacques
Derrida published the chapters of On Grammatology concerning Rousseau and
writing in Critique. Since that time, the phonocentric, logocentric
paradigm in anthropology and archaeology has definitely shifted. The latest
researchers on ancient Mesopotamia refer to a “cuneiform culture”, in which,
contrary to the older school that saw writing as a tool captured by a scribal
elite, literacy spread. Or a form of literacy, for literacy as a uniform thing, a single kind of
learned capacity, has been well and truly debunked, as archaeologists have made
sense of the data they possess that show multiple forms of script and signs
within script ‘domains’; they have also come to terms with such discoveries as
that of Nippur and Isin, where the majority of houses so far excavated have
turned up texts. Furthermore, archaeologists are now more interested in the
evolution of script types that went
along with the evolution of materials on which the script could be impressed,
scratched or painted, as cursive, a select number of syllobograms, and lighter
materials that were easier to correct led to the invention of the personal and business letter.
In the sixties and seventies, the
Mesopotamian evidence suggested to some researchers, like Walter Ong and Jack
Goody, that the invention of writing operated to change the very cognitive
style of human beings. Goody’s essay on the list is The Domestication of the
Savage Mind is still a tour de force survey of the effects of the text,
although as he admits, his earlier notion of the text was too tied into the
phonetic alphabet, which is seen as “easier” and more flexible to use, thus
leading to the ability to “write down one’s thoughts.” This may actually be a
property of the material one writes them down on and what one writes with – at
least, the archaeologists coming after Goody have found that qualities he
attributes to alphabetical writing are certainly present in pictographic or
logographic systems.
Here is the central claim, I think, Goody
makes about lists:
“My concern here is to show that these
written forms were not simply by-products of the interaction between writing
and, say, the economy, filling some hitherto hidden “need”, but that they
represented a significant change not only in the nature of transactions, but
also in the ‘modes of thought’ that
accompanied them, at least if we interpret ‘modes of thought’in terms of the
formal, cognitive and linguistic operations which this new technology of the
intellect opened up.”
The idea, here, is not that writing itself
changes modes of thought, but that writing devises do – hence, the importance
of the list, or the written number. Marc Bloch, the most prominent opponent of
Goody’s, has used his fieldwork in Madagascar to construct a case in which
literacy, and in particular listing texts (for instance, genealogies) do not
organize cultural “modes of thought”, but exist as regions within a largely
oral culture. Bloch, in turn, has been attacked for the way he has elevated
certain observations into generalities – that is, the way he has evolved what
Clifford Geertz calls the “deep text.”
The title, I think, has not yet been enough
looked at in this context – or Babel, depending on how you come down on the
importance of ecriture. Certainly in oral contexts there are titles, but they
seem, at least in my experience, to be very loose things. A typical titling
episode would be x telling y to “tell that story about x” – with the title here
being the “story about”. And in as much as this stimulus does hook onto a
story, it does one of the works of calling a name – you call a name and the
named thing comes. So too does the story. Interestingly, though, the “story
about”, while it can tend towards a stereotypic norm (the story about the
priest, the story about Mavis X, etc.) often varies in its composition.
Similarly, titles can occur in oral speech that announce what is coming – not
what has already been circulated. So, for instance, a person can be called into
the office of his or her superior and the latter can say, I’ve called you in to
talk about your tardiness (an example taken from my own life!). The monologue
or dialogue that ensues has, vaguely, the title, “about X’s inability to get to
work on time”.
All of which is merely to say that oral
speech does have self-labeling moments. Thus, when texts get titled, we are not
speaking of a completely different communicative form from that which occurs in
the oral quotidian. But I want to argue that the title is “freed” by the text,
by ecriture. While it fulfills certain labeling functions, it also proceeds
towards something as new, something resembling the name of a person, rather
than the label of a person. When John Stuart Mill claimed that the proper name
was a description, he was conflating label and name. And there is some warrant
for that in names: the smith gets name Smith. But what Mill ignores, as a
philosopher, is what is obvious to the sociologist: the name is enmeshed in
what it means to be familiar with, to know, to love, to hate, etc. The name is
not just used to label. Before children learn to use pronominal shifters, they
often self-label – or so I have been assured by numerous mothers. Robert says,
that chocolate is Robert’s, rather than that chocolate is mine, because “Robert” is taken by the child to be
an extension of himself in a way that “mine” – that code that refers to its
message, to the tie between the individual word and the language system in
which it is located – is not. “Mine” seems to be a communal dish which anyone
can grab between their fingers and bite into
– “Robert’s” is a special snack reserved for Robert.
Textual devises don’t seem to have that
same self-reflexivity. They seem to be labeling all the way down, so to speak.
And yet if this is so, the title would simply be a label.
We know that this isn’t so. I would call
this, the (en)titling instance, the moment in which the scribe enters into
literature, in the broadest sense (visual, aural, scripted). The tradition that
ascribes to the scribe a monopoly of power over the written meets, in this
moment arising thieflike from within the devise itself, an inner movement that
structurally breaks the monopoly.
The sign, the text and the title formed a
devise so powerful that its counterpart, in the end, seemed to be the world
itself. At first the physical world and the heavens, for the cuneiform
cultures, were defined by the boundaries marked out by the gods – there was a
world for the humans and a world for the gods, the latter ruing the former. But both worlds
came into focus as the counterparts of the text. From a very early point in the
history of writing, written signs were compared to the world’s objects: the
stars in the sky to the words on a writing surface, for instance.
So when we speak of the book of the world,
we are speaking of the text’s relation to an object that is defined in relation
to some magical first text. In Genesis 1:14, the relation between the world and
the text is, as it were, sealed in the very act of creation: “And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the
heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for
seasons, and for days, and years.” What is created to be a sign is already on
the way to being the book of the world. There is a long scholarly
tradition in Germany, going from Curtius to Hans Blumenberg, which has excavated the metaphor of this
book, showing how it arose in the various worlds of the Mediterranean. The metaphor has not only a great and
irresistible charm for the scribes – who
copy and scribble - but possesses the baroque virtue that it inscribes itself
within itself – for the book of the world holds the book in which the metaphor
does its transformative work, which in turn holds the world, or at least the
point of view that we, the scribes, have dubbed the world.
The signs are there, as well, in the early
modern era, where there is a question of the type of sign: is the book of the
world composed of an alphabet (Francis Bacon’s favorite metaphor), or of
hieroglyphs (John Dee’s preference) or of mathematical symbols (Galileo’s
choice)? Galileo makes perhaps the most interesting use of the book of the
world metaphor, incorporating it into the weave of natural philosophy just as
the signs were incorporated into the creation story in Genesis, but with a
certain twist: “I truly believe the book of philosophy to be that which stands
perpetually open before our eyes, though since it is written in characters
different from those of our alphabit it cannot be read by everyone; and the
characters of such a book are triangles, squares, circles, spheres, cones,
pyramids and other mathematical figures, most apt for such reading.”
Most apt indeed – so much so that the
problem of why mathematics gives us such a model of the universe took a long
time to present itself in the physics community. Eugen Wigner in 1960 finally
gave definitive form to the problem of why mathematics is “most apt for such
reading” in the physics community. Perhaps a lesser noted problem is the role
that this metaphor played in making possible the presentation of the logic of
substitution, which is unthinkable in a world that wasn’t considered
“readable”.
The scribe, the merchant, the natural
philosopher – these meet in the sort of triple fold in the early modern era,
when an accounting mentality, a sense of nature as an alphabet, and the idea of
research itself – experiment - met together, forming a character that floats
into and out of various institutions: the church, the college, the
countinghouse, the government agency, the courthouse.
The legibility of the world
There is another tradition that has taken
up the theme of the book of the world from the other side – that is, ways of
making the world more like a book, ways of making the human and natural
landscape “legible”. The history of literacy also displays this two-sideness,
as, historically, learning to read does not equal learning – a complication
that has bedeviled historians since the sixties. But before I get to that long,
intricate wallow in models, I’m goint to turn to writing the book of the world.
It is a story – like so many of our folktales – of invisible hands. In this case,
the hand of God is replaced by the hand of the engineer, the administrator, the
bureaucrat.
…der Verstand ist nicht nur einseitig,
sondern es ist sein wesentliches Geschäft, die Welt einseitig zu machen, eine
große und bewunderungswürdige Arbeit, denn nur die Einseitigkeit formiert und
reißt das Besondere aus dem unorganischen Schleim des Ganzen. – Marx
“…Understanding is not only one-sided, but it is its essential business to make
the world one-sided, a great and marvelous labor, because only one-sidedness
forms and rips the particular out of the inorganic slime of the whole.”
James C. Scott begins Seeing Like the State with an emblematic story, a parable
of one-sidedness, concerning the rise of scientific forestry. That rise
occurred in the late eighteenth century, when the Prussian state intervened in
the assessment, preservation, and reproduction of forest properties, all in
order to create a more efficient natural resource. The German forestry service
cleared out many features of the ‘old’ chaotic forests – the ‘weed’ species,
the unnecessary ground cover, the poaching birds, animals and humans. Fire,
too, is a poacher, and must be prevented. Even age forests – much more useful
for lumber, much less volatile in terms of calculating yield – were groomed in
their place. The description of the forest consisting of the same species,
standing in disciplined ranks, row on row of trees, is eerily like the
disciplined classroom or jail described in Foucault’s Surveiller et Punir.
However, Scott considers this not so much a regime of the vision as the reading
eye – the eyeball attached to understanding. This, in Scott’s terms, is what it
means to make the woods – that place of darkness and gloom in which Little Red
Riding Hoods encounter deceitful wolves – into a place of legibility. The book
of the world is not only a matter of reading what God has written, but a matter
of writing what the businessman and the bureaucrat want to read.
“The production forests usually consists off one
monoculture of a tree, followed by another monoculture from another tree
species. Mixed planting in one area you will almost never see, except perhaps
in the "picnic" forests.
The reason for this is simple. It's cheaper to first plant
one tree species, then followed by another tree species somewhere else. As
every forest has to be maintained and thinned from time to time, it's also
cheaper to have the thinnings when all of the trees are of the same size.
That's another good reason to keep trees from every species together, and not miles
apart. Otherwise the foresters would have to thin a few trees in this area and
then move onto the next area to thin a couple more. This is too time consuming
and therefore too expensive.
If you visit a forest in your area, you will undoubtedly
see (for example) a forest of Pine, followed by a forest of Oak and then a
forest with Beech. These are all planted forests and many are planted so that
they can be harvested for timber later on.
Since we at Robinia Invest are not in the business of
making a nature reserve or planting trees so that people can have a nice
picnic, sitting amongst the trees, we plant monocultures of Robinia and
Paulownia. This way we can do the maintenance most effectively and at the
lowest cost. All the trees are planted at the same time, so we can easily see
when we have to start the thinning and when we can harvest the entire area.” –
Robina invest web site
The great monocultured forests that “we can
easily see” produced row upon row of
vulnerable, sickly trees. After the first, healthy generation had used up the
‘accumulated capital’ of soil nutrients laid down by hundreds of years of
undisciplined forest growth and death, the next generation of trees were
excessively prone to insect and fungal infestation, wind damage, and starved,
splintery and miserable growth – at least in human terms, where it was all
dollar signs and lumber. However, the corporate mind set has never gone back on
the reading lesson, and is now developing a monoculture that penetrates into
the very heart of the tree, using genetic modification to produce trees ready
for one brand of insecticide (sold, conveniently enough, by the engineer of the
trees), and with a modified lignin content. Trees need lignin to live out their
whole lifespans; it operates as the connective tissue keeping the tree
together. But in the onesided world of capitalism, lignin presents a cost to
paper manufacturing. In a neat leap from the metaphor of legibility to the
making of legible substances, paper companies want to harvest trees with less
lignin, and have done the R and D to produce them. Since the tree no longer
exists within the rhythm of the seed and the soil, but rather exists in the
rhythm of the lab and the mill, the monoculture now reaches down into the
genetic heart of the tree.
In the nineteenth century, the German forest service had been seen as a model,
and was adopted by the forestry service in the U.S. and the British service in
India. The British even imported a German forester to make sense of India’s
tree growth. To chase Mowgli out of the jungle, and put the stamp of the
one-sided on what grew and creeped there. Who wrote the book of the world? In
part, the Agricultural and Interior Department did, in the West. Even now, that
ominous poacher, the forest fire, is stalking the drought stricken forests of
the Pacific and Southwestern states – as the boring beetle whose larva now
survive the winters in the Rockies, thanks to the fact that the winter have not
been as cold for the past thirty years, has been killing the great conifer
forests all the way up to British Columbia. One side is flipping to the other
side.
“The metaphorical value of this brief account of scientific production forestry
is that it illustrates the dangers of dismembering an exceptionally complex and
poorly understood set of relations and processes in order to isolate a single
element of instrumental value. The instrument, the knife, that carved out the
new, rudimentary forest was the razorsharp interest in the production of a
single commodity. Everything that interfered with the efficient production of
the key commodity was implacably eliminated. Everything that seemed unrelated
to efficient production was ignored. Having come to see the forest as a
commodity, scientific forestry set about refashioning it as a commodity
machine. Utilitarian simplification in the forest was an effective way of
maximizing wood production in the short and intermediate term. Ultimately,
however, its emphasis on yield and paper profits, its relatively short time
horizon, and, above all, the vast array of consequences it had resolutely
bracketed came back to haunt it.”
The Christian and secular books of the
world stand in stark contrast to the Dao, as it is articulated in the classic
Daoist texts. There is no more radical reflection
on uselessness than is found in Daoism. The notion of that being comes from
nothingness and is secondary to it was one that the Daoists shared with
Buddhists. But in the Buddhist system, the consequence of insight into nothing
is compassion for all creatures and a teaching designed to produce an absolute
liberation from the bonds of being. This is the opposite of the Daoist doctrine
of inaction. The insight into the way does not lead us to compassion, but a
certain type of perfection: perfect uselessness. This is the theme pounded over
and over in the Chuang Tzu.
In the chapter entitled Heaven and Earth, Tzu-kung and his disciples
encounter a farmer laboriously lugging pitchers of water to his field from a
well. Stopping, Tzu-kung offers some friendly advice about a machine the farmer
could use to do this work.
"It's a contraption made by shaping a
piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end light and it raises the
water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right
over! It's called a well sweep."
So far, we could be reading a story about a
Yankee peddler. We could be reading any story about modernity.
“The gardener flushed with anger and then
said with a laugh, "I've heard my teacher say, where there are machines,
there are bound to be machine worries; where there are machine worries, there
are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine heart in your breast, you've
spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and simple, the life of
the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the Way
will cease to buoy you up. It's not that I don't know about your machine - I
would be ashamed to use it!"
Here, too, as we know from hundreds of
records of “savages” resisting civilization, we could also be reading a leave
from a field report in development economics. But this is not development
economics. It is a text that begins in praise of uselessness. Instead of taking
the farmer’s words as evidence of his backwardness, Tzu-kung takes them as a response pointing out,clearly, Tzu-kung’s own
lack of enlightenment.
However,
the reader is also involved in this text. He who has ears, let him hear – this
is the fourth wall of the parable. The reader, then, seems to have gained his
lesson in enlightenment rather cheaply in this staging of the sage and the
peasant. So that the end of the story reaffirms the uncertainty of the lesson:
“When
Tzu-kung got back to Lu, he reported the incident to Confucius. Confucius said,
"He is one of those bogus practitioners of the arts of Mr. Chaos." He
knows the first thing but doesn't understand the second. He looks after what is
on the inside but doesn't look after what is on the outside. A man of true
brightness and purity who can enter into simplicity, who can return to the
primitive through inaction, give body to his inborn nature, and embrace his
spirit, and in this way wander through the everyday world - if you had met one
like that, you would have had real cause for astonishment.14 As for the arts of
Mr. Chaos, you and I need not bother to find out about them."
The
self-erasing dialectic of the useless, here, infects the very lesson in which
it is taught. I will set this as a portal through which to view the formation
of the “useful” character in Western capitalism.
A second
and more famous story applies the paradox to the tree.
In the Human
World chapter of the Chuang Tzu, there's a story upon which I've often
reflected:
Carpenter Shih went to
Ch'i and, when he got to Crooked Shaft, he saw a serrate oak standing by
the village shrine. It was broad enough to shelter several thousand oxen and
measured a hundred spans around, towering above the hills. The lowest branches
were eighty feet from the ground, and a dozen or so of them could have been
made into boats. There were so many sightseers that the place looked like a
fair, but the carpenter didn't even glance around and went on his way without
stopping. His apprentice stood staring for a long time and then ran after
Carpenter Shih and said, "Since I first took up my ax and followed you,
Master, I have never seen timber as beautiful as this. But you don't even
bother to look, and go right on without stopping. Why is that?"
"Forget it - say no more!" said the carpenter. "It's a worthless
tree! Make boats out of it and they'd sink; make coffins and they'd rot in no
time; make vessels and they'd break at once. Use it for doors and it would
sweat sap like pine; use it for posts and the worms would eat them up. It's not
a timber tree - there's nothing it can be used for. That's how it got to be
that old!"
After Carpenter Shih had returned home, the oak tree appeared to him in a dream
and said, "What are you comparing me with? Are you comparing me with those
useful trees? The cherry apple, the pear, the orange, the citron, the rest of
those fructiferous trees and shrubs - as soon as their fruit is ripe, they are
torn apart and subjected to abuse. Their big limbs are broken off, their little
limbs are yanked around. Their utility makes life miserable for them, and so
they don't get to finish out the years Heaven gave them, but are cut off in
mid-journey. They bring it on themselves - the pulling and tearing of the
common mob. And it's the same way with all other things.
"As for me, I've been trying a long time to be of no use, and though I
almost died, I've finally got it. This is of great use to me. If I had been of
some use, would I ever have grown this large? Moreover you and I are both of us
things. What's the point of this - things condemning things? You, a worthless
man about to die-how do you know I'm a worthless tree?"
When Carpenter Shih woke up, he reported his dream. His apprentice said,
"If it's so intent on being of no use, what's it doing there at the
village shrine?" 15
"Shhh! Say no more! It's only resting there. If we carp and criticize, it
will merely conclude that we don't understand it. Even if it weren't at the
shrine, do you suppose it would be cut down? It protects itself in a different
way from ordinary people. If you try to judge it by conventional standards,
you'll be way off!"
Again, the assistant lends the needed
needling to the larger point. To achieve uselessness, one must find a way of
leaping over the larger point. And that leap is the extra-ordinary.
That the parable is in the human world is, of course, a
conjunction that should suggest an idea – or at least the approaching ghost of
an idea. An idea is perhaps too poor a thing, too head-bound, for a Daoist.
Every kind of paper is purchased by the "waste-men." One of these
dealers said to me: "I've often in my time 'cleared out' a lawyer's
office. I've bought old briefs, and other law papers, and 'forms' that weren't
the regular forms then, and any d——d thing they had in my line. You'll excuse
me, sir, but I couldn't help thinking what a lot of misery was caused, perhaps,
by the cwts. of waste I've bought at such places. If my father hadn't got mixed
up with law he wouldn't have been ruined, and his children wouldn't have had
such a hard fight of it; so I hate law. All that happened when I was a child,
and I never understood the rights or the wrongs of it, and don't like to think
of people that's so foolish. I gave 1 1/2 d. a pound for all I bought at the
lawyers, and done pretty well with it, but very likely that's the only good
turn such paper ever did any one—unless it were the lawyers themselves."
–Henry Mayhew, Of the street buyers of waste (paper), London Labour
Men no sooner discovered the discovered the admirable art
of communicating their ideas by way of figures than it was necessary to chose
the material for defining those characters. – Encyclopedie, entry under
Papeterie
From the grammatological point of view, few sentences could
sum up the logocentric ideology better than this one from Diderot’s Encyclopedie. It is a history in two
steps: in one of which the “figures” are
discovered, and in the other of which they find a substrate, a material upon
which they could assume their secondary, visible existence. In this story, the
material is already substituted –its existence is laid out under the sign of
substitution - or of supplementation, or of sublimation. The true mark, the
idea, exists before its fall into the world of paper – or papyrus, or clay
tables, or vellum.
In a Sumerian story, the invention of writing and the
material for defining the characters are put in a closer narrative proximity –
one in which that matter exists in a series of symbolically important materials
that form the basis of what Jean Jacques Glassner calls a “duel”. The ur-form
of the story is a competition between two magicians, one of whom transforms
common objects into living beings, the other one of whom transforms common
objects into superior living beings that eat the first magicians tricks – a
stone becomes a snake, for instance, while the leaf of a tree becomes an eagle
that eats the snake. A similar story of the duel of matter is told of Enmerkar,
the ruler of a powerful state, and the Lord of Aratta, a distant state that Enmerkar
wishes to gain tribute. Enmerkar sends messangers threatening Arrata. The first
messenger threatens to have the goddess Inanna drown the city. The Lord of
Aratta sent back a refusal, and a challenge: could Enmerkar send grain to the
city in nets rather than sacks? Enmerkar does so, sending grains that sprout
and provide a layer over the holes in the nets. The second time, Enmerkar sends
his scepter, and the third time a garment. The forth time Enmerkar does
something completely new, and without consulting the gods: he takes a lump of
clay and he wrote upon it. The duel, here, comes to an end with the Lord of
Aratta having to take hold of the clay tablet in order to read it. As in a
children’s game, by touching the object, the Lord of Aratta signals his
submission.
But this moment is less the conclusion of a magical duel than the first unintended result of the
letter – for Enmerkar was not originally intending to send a letter. Here’s how
the passage is translated by Fabienne Huber Vulliet:
“His speech was substantial,and its contents extensive. The
messenger, whose mouth was heavy, was not able to repeat it. Because the
messenger, whose mouth was tired,was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba
patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing
of messages on clay was not established. Now, under the sun and on that day, it
was indeed so. The lord of Kulaba inscribed the massage like a tablet. It was
just like that.”
The message and the clay, here, come together in a narrative
about tricky objects – about metamorphosis – that is enfolded in another
narrative about imperial power. From the point of view of the author of the
lord of Kulaba, the signs and the tablet are two sides of one dated event (Now,
under the sun and on that day…). There is a triangle here between the figures,
the tablet, and the time – for that day is, in a sense, signed and becomes that
day, the object of an act of deixis.
The heavy mouth, the portable clay – it is here that I want
to plant land, survey, plant some stakes.
