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ACQU I ESCENCE : FLUID REALITI ES AND PLANNED RETREAT
I Nigel Clark
for the full range of physical forces and dynamics operating in each region. In many cases, it's a wager that looks like it can't be won, making the need for hasty or gradual evacuation likely to emerge as one of the key urban issues of coming decades. Planned retreat, along with its unruly near-relation, unplanned, chaotic or catastrophic flight, I want to argue, raises a whole set of issues for modern life that have until now been bypassed, down played, or treated as exceptions. Modernity, it hardly needs to be said, is about forward momentum, a unidirectional, linear advance. In classic modernity- during it's ''heavy" phase as Zygmunt Bauman refers to it, "all that is solid" might be made to "melt into air", but it was assumed that things solidified again- in a new and improved way.'7 Only in the more recent "light" or "liquid" modernity, he suggests, is there a move away from assumptions of a single trajectory, as extensive advance and unending accretion gives way to more mobile, less enduring, more multidirectional transformations. But liquidness is looking like an unfortunate figuring for an era when one of the most hardcore and intransigent forces we face is rising or surging sea level. The trouble with the narrative about modern individuals and organisations growing ever more fleet and flexible is that it's all about moving across the surface of the earth. Even if it's a decentred story, it still attributes most of the meaningful action to its human protagonists, leaving the ground they operate on out of the picture. Bauman's "capricious and whimsical powers of wind and water" are metaphors rather than substantive and momentous planetary forces.' 8 And this means that his account is still far too heavily invested in the social visions of globalisation, and not conversant enough with the globality of the earth scientists. Those in the humanities who look also to the physical sciences know that flow is primarily a condition of the earth, the ground, the cosmos. As Gilles Deleuze put it some decades ago: "the hardest rocks become soft and fluid matter on the geological scale of millions of years."' 9 It's an idea he and Felix Guattari later began to develop into a fully-fledged "geophilosophy"around the notion of "an earth (which) constantly carries out a movement of deterritorialisation on the spot", 20 though they were unable to complete the planned project. Or as my colleague Doreen Massey explains, looking past the current enthrallment with human migration and interconnectivity- and on to the ancient manoeuvring of life, water, air and rock- this is "a planet that has ever been a global mobility."•' On an earth that does its own deterritorialising, we don't simply skim across the surface, but must go with the flow, move with the rhythms, just to hold our ground. Furnee's Lines ojDejence grasps this newer sense of the inherent flux and contingency of terrain, while also gesturing back at the classic modern adherence to permanence rather than permeability- with its duty to defend territory at all costs. "The erosion also threatens military installations built to repel German