By Rosa Glaessner Novak
A photograph of a long, spotted rock spans page 128 of the Ontario Department of Mines’ 1960 report, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits of Southern Ontario.”[1] The rock is composed of three bands: one white and fibrous, one tinted pink from iron, and the last, a cloudy gray that “in hand specimens” appears almost green.[2] By weight, this rock is 27% nepheline.[3] The text describes where it came from: “the old quarries on the southeast side of the nepheline syenite ridge” on Southern Ontario’s Blue Mountain.[4]
An accompanying map marks the spot in the “old quarries” where the rock was culled: the number “2” circled in bold red, an arrow extending down from its edge. The arrow points to an undulating ticked line that, according to the map’s key, traces the walls of the quarries. A scattering of dots and dashes indicate the presence of nepheline syenite and syenitic gneiss in the ground. Towards the bottom of the map: clusters of small square dots. This was the quarry’s mill and the small town where mine and mill worker’s lived, Nephton. More red dashed lines meander between the map’s text and symbols, showing the mountain’s connective roads and fault lines. The extensive network of red markings that detail the nepheline syenite of Blue Mountain and the infrastructure of extraction built to pull it from the earth is printed on a waxy, transparent overlay. Below is an aerial image of the region made from ten smaller photographs carefully laid atop one another to construct a landscape, its quarries and their roads exposed to a bright white.
The extractive landscape of nepheline syenite we see constructed in the map’s layers of photographs and red markings was produced over many years of parsing, parceling, researching, and blasting the land of Blue Mountain. This story of a mineral entangled in the vampire-like operations of capitalism began in the summers of 1897 and 1898, when the Provincial Geologist of Ontario, Willet G. Miller, scoured the mountain’s ground with particular attention to its pink, red, gray, white and glassy deposits of what he soon deemed to be nepheline syenite.[5] The mineral had been collected from Mount Vesuvius and named “nephelite” for its cloudiness a century prior.[6]Mineralogists, crystallographers, and geologists of the nineteenth century had dug it up at various sites, examined it for its characteristics, and fit it into their growing taxonomy of the earth–a science enabling extraction. Yet as Miller walked the ridges of Blue Mountain, examining their cloudy rock, industry had not yet subsumed that rock into its productive processes. For three decades, the nepheline syenite deposits of Blue Mountain were occasionally visited, and revisited, by geologists and capitalists hoping to mine corundum at one time, alumina at another.[7] The mountain’s land was surveyed and speculated upon for its potential commodities, yet the mass of glassy rock stayed in the ground–without industrial use, it had no value.
It wasn’t until the early 1930s that nepheline syenite was deemed useful, and the rock was suddenly transformed into a vessel for exchange value. The very year the “old quarries” began operations, in 1935, the American ceramic engineer C.J. Koenig published research on the material’s potential use in ceramic practice for the first time. Koenig’s paper, “Syenite in Ceramic Bodies,” proposed using nepheline syenite as a flux, or melting agent.[8] His work was a “cooperative research project” between the Engineering Experiment Station at Ohio State University and the company, Canadian Nepheline Limited, that had just begun culling the material from Blue Mountain’s earth.[9] Over the following years, the quarrying operation grew, pulling more and more rock from the ground, and a portion of the capital it generated was funneled to Koenig, who published extensively on the application of the mineral within specific facets of the ceramic industry. Between 1937 and 1940, Koenig wrote about the use of nepheline syenite in semi-vitreous pottery, sanitary porcelain, “heavy clay products,” and floor and wall tile.[10]Koenig’s work—fabricating use after use for this one rock—ensured that Canadian Nepheline Limited would extract value from the glassy depths of Blue Mountain, and from the labor required to blast it from the earth and grind it to dust.
In 1942, with the invention of new applications and use values in full swing, Koenig began to publish work on vitrified clay bodies that could be fired to a lower temperature than previously thought possible. His proposed clay bodies were composed of over 50% nepheline syenite and only about 40% clay.[11] With this newfound application, nepheline syenite had the potential to become not just any ceramic material, but a technology of utmost efficiency–enabling the extraction of surplus value from the dead labor embodied in fuel used at ceramic factories across North America.[12] A new company plant was soon built in Nephton.[13] By 1947, this plant had the capacity to produce the clay bodies Koenig developed. That year, an advertisement for these “new bodies” in Ceramic Industry marketed them as the patented key to producing low-fired vitreous ceramics.[14] The ad contains an image of “Nephsy,” a hollow-bodied, slip-cast horse.
“Nephsy” is part of the story of Blue Mountain: a ceramic figurine made of its nepheline syenite ground, and likewise, a symbol of the layered landscape of extraction. Nephsy represented both ceramic technology, but also, how those technologies fed into a system of capital accumulation far from the mountain’s rocky ridges. This story of earth mined to become the horse powering a spiraling accumulation of surplus value prompts a revisiting of Henri Lefebvre’s call to revolutionize our relations to space–and within, underneath, and above it–land:
“Turning the world ‘back on its feet,’ according to Marx, implies overturning dominant spaces, placing appropriation over domination, demand over command, and use over exchange.”[15]
[1] D.F. Hewitt, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits of Southern Ontario,” Ontario Geological Survey 69, no. 8 (1960): 128.
[2] Ibid., 127.
[3] Ibid., 126-27.
[4] Ibid., 126.
[5] Ibid., 2.
[6] Albert Huntington Chester, A Dictionary of the Names of Minerals Including Their History and Etymology (New York: J. Wiley & Sons, 1896), 187.
[7] Hewitt, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits,” 2-4.
[8] C.J. Koenig, “Syenite in Ceramic Bodies,” Ceramics Industry 25, no. 6 (June 1935): 338-39.
[9] Hewitt, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits,” 4.
[10] C.J. Koenig, “The Use of Syenites in Semivitreous Ware”, Ohio State University Engineering Experiment Station
Bulletin no. 94 (1937): 1-22; C.J. Koenig, “Nepheline Syenite in Sanitary Porcelain,” Journal of the American Ceramic Society 22, no. 2 (February 1939): 38-46; J.H. Chilcote and C.J. Koenig, “Use of Nepheline Syenite in Heavy Clay Products,” Journal of the Canadian Ceramic Society 8 (1939), 53-58. C.J. Koenig, “Use of Nepheline Syenite in Floor Tile and Wall Tile Bodies,” Journal of the American Ceramic Society 23, no. 3 (March 1940): 86-91.
[11] C.J. Koenig, “Low Temperature Vitreous Bodies,” Journal of the American Ceramic Society 25, no. 9 (1942): 230-36.
[12] Following Marx, “dead labor” refers to the labor embodied in commodities as well as in the means of production. As such, the dead labor of workers involved in natural gas extraction and processing would be contained in the gas that powers kilns in ceramic studios and factories.
[13] Hewitt, “Nepheline Syenite Deposits,” 3.
[14] Advertisement for Lakefield Nepheline Syenite, Ceramic Industry, May 1947, 8.
[15] Henri Lefebvre, “Space: Social Product and Use Value” in State, Space, and World: Selected Essays, eds. Neil Brenner and Stuart Elden (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009 (1979)), 194.