Prologue
When Edward Said visited Lebanon, he picked up and threw a stone across the border to Israel. For this act he was barred from attending certain institutions. During the French Revolution stones, frequently the humble cobble, were thrown against the troops and added to the piles of refuse forming the barricades. Again, in England, during the suffragette movement, women wrapped stones in paper, tied a string to and threw them at public offices, drawing the string to retrieve them and throw them again. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada in Palestine it was an iconic image of a young boy throwing stones, later killed by the Israeli army, that attracted the attention of the international media. In a simple protest in Athens against education cuts in 2008, a youth throwing stones was killed by police, causing a general revolt. In Egypt during the latest uprising, stones littered the streets even as the military was sending in tanks.
Must we be satisfied in agreeing with Blanqui that the stone is the principal article in urban battles because it is most ready to hand?1 Or has the stone gathered this reputation for insurgency on account of history’s momentum, resurfacing every time because of its presence in a former revolt? As Lacan said, perhaps the stone has become an objet petit a for the revolutionaries.2
But what if the symbolism of the stone is not limited to these recent acts of historical insurrection? What if the stone itself already marks our responsibility to struggle for what we know to be right? What if the stone actually stands as a testament to what we cannot see in the immediate world around us but presents a most substantial challenge to the status quo exactly because something has been missed, overlooked, or simply lost?
This work undertakes to bring before our gaze an intrinsic relation between stone and human, in a study that is inversely archaeological. It traces the earlier possibilities of the stone’s task in archaic Greece and describes its subsequent modifications, losses, appropriations and occupations during the rise of the historical, political and in utero economic era of the classical world. Oddly enough, the resulting arc does not begin in corybantic times of cultic religious practice where the stone is presumed to be a fetish or animistic token, to find its epistemological culmination in materialism and utilitarianism. In fact, it would appear that, in relation to this base matter, we have been moving in the opposite direction. What began as simple (though not base) stone has gradually become fraught with all sorts of religious, political and economic investments in every aspect of life, that is, except insurrection. For although we employ stones, crushing them and piling them up in the construction of buildings, roads and walls, here the stone, in content and form, is in every way subordinated to the increasingly hostile environment we are building around us, blocking out strangers, ensuring swifter means of progress and limiting in every possible way the direct confrontation and interaction with others, human or otherwise.
We throw stones to bring us back to the matter at hand. As the marker of our graves the stone should be at once a material and metaphysical remainder of the fact that we are all strangers to life, regardless of nations, states and the self-interests of markets, corporations, security and defense. The stone stands as a marker of our ongoing and necessary relation with the more than human world. Although we dismiss stone as inanimate, it is the origin of animation, whether it disintegrates into its more readily available fertile components or erodes into the various formations upon which the diverse play of life is acted out.
It is in this light that the insurrectionary stone-throw should be understood. For it is an act directed against the hubristic violence of the border and the barrier, the wall and property. The stone-throw gestures towards what is common by putting such boundaries into question and by transgressing boundaries with the most solid (though not immutable) material that inevitably takes our place and even substitutes for us. For the stone-throw yet retains the possibility of the dissolution of the militarised border, or the armed aggressor. It is a symbol of friendship winning out over hostility. All who wish it are welcome to join the insurrection. The problem every insurrection faces is, however, how long the people are prepared to fight guns with stones before the injustices they have suffered compel them either to turn inward in despair and accept the terms of the victor or to embrace the same means of violence that are directed against them.
The rune-masters carved their runes in rock, wood or leather and then coloured them with magical ingredients, one of which was likely blood. In order to read the prophecies hidden within these objects the masters dispersed them upon the ground, and it was only those with the letter facing upward that provided the text for interpretation. This book could be said to follow a similar method. Since the text has (in the wake of deconstruction) proved itself exhausted, if not a mere ruin, this is an attempt to remain close to the material foundation of writing about writing. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the plinth upon which this text rests is literally a ruin. The earliest archaeological remains that will be considered here are mere traces of letters, found amongst the rubble, sometimes engraved in stone, other times in a text no less spoliated. They are literal remainders of an earlier, lapidary writing, whose name ‘Horos’ equally binds letter and stone: declarative letters whose stony annunciation would make a belligerent claim of precedence to any writing. Horos is the original material as well as the place-saver of Hermes’ own statue in the Athenian market place. Though ancient, Horos remains throughout the hermetic period and into today when only interpretations and not positions are considered to be safe ground for thought.
There is a lot of talk of boundaries and bonds in the following pages. It is not my intention to wield bolt-cutters or claim to have found a key to dissolve these boundaries and free us of these bonds but rather to trace a path that should foreclose any arrival, such that the question remains. Questioning must begin somewhere. This book discusses the site or place of the question as both a matter of boundaries and definitions, where any question also allows the definition of words and things to remain open to the possibility of asking further questions. Here the boundary of the question is present in the stone as our trace or mark, with or without letters, of the potential distinctions and divisions in the material. In light of this return to the elemental material of stones and of letters it is necessary to ask what has been lost from our relations with the world and one another. Perhaps in what has been lost there is a chance of rediscovering a ground from which to resist and destroy the forces that occupy and with increasing aggression seek to manipulate the archaic frontiers of life.